Rethinking Place through Literary Form (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) 3030964930, 9783030964931

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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Rethinking Place through Literary Form Edited by Rupsa Banerjee Nathaniel Cadle

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15002

Rupsa Banerjee  •  Nathaniel Cadle Editors

Rethinking Place through Literary Form

Editors Rupsa Banerjee St. Xavier’s University Kolkata, India

Nathaniel Cadle Florida International University Miami, FL, USA

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic) Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-96493-1    ISBN 978-3-030-96494-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword: Theorizing Place as World Polis and Multiple Form

In an era of globalization when the forces and forms of geospatial creation and cross-border linkage are all but dominated by the terms and values of capitalist spatiality in all its techno-speed and disruptive fluidity, Rethinking Place through Literary Form, co-edited by Rupsa Banerjee and Nathaniel Cadle, exists to remind readers, in multi-sited and thickly descriptive ways, in twelve chapters, that we dwell, abide, and come into depths of ontological belonging through ties to place and place-based forces and forms in all their multiplicity and complexity. Place and place-based dwelling is what the mighty postwar American poet of “projective form” Charles Olson (1910–1970) meant by his recalcitrant embrace of embodied location in the coastal fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts along the US Atlantic as some maximal oceanic center of cosmos, cosmopolis, and cosmopolitical being moving outward to the world and planet across space and time. As the coeditors affirm in their Introduction to this collection while elaborating on a place-based poem complicating the very notion of “here” by Forest Gander, “Place no longer remains a singular occurrence but becomes a series of concentric identifications that position the individual in an expanding series of displacements: “here / (here (here)).” Worlding of place as such begins in the here and now of place-making as this can be embodied and expressed as discrepant practices of dwelling diversely across globe and planet, from Europe and Africa to Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean.1 1  For more on these ties of “worlding” to place and place-making tactics as theorized in diversely situated ways within and against the Anthropocene, see Chou, Kim, and Wilson.

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Place persists and insists; place at once historicizes and entangles being and identity in a lived totality of action, care, and form. Place thus is not a deficient, bounded, or backward-looking category or affect, but instead reflects and refracts the very ground, field, and foundation of deepened being, embodied poetics, and even geopolitics in all its entangled, moving, and enacted contemporary creativity. “Polis is this,” Olson affirmed and expressed in poem after poem, book by book, as well as influential manifestos from works like Call Me Ishmael (1947) to his essay on projective verse in 1950, looking out from lyric presences as so-called I Maximus or Archaeologist of Morning.2 Independent filmmaker Henry Ferrini’s influential documentary by that suggestive name, Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007), makes this place-making entanglement palpable in small and large ways, verbally and kinetically, as the place of Gloucester gets embodied and manifested in Olson’s palpably sublime energy of form as well as ongoing struggle to preserve this town as valorized landscape/oceanscape: meaning Gloucester as a place constellated and valued in ways kindred to where you live and what came before your community inhabiting anywhere on planet earth with its frontier “borderlands,” or as we might better say nowadays planet-ocean with its archipelagic “borderwaters.”3 This collection helps to enable a coming back to the geography and history of place as prismatic threshold and mappamundi to the world, as embodied worlding in action, change, and being, beginning directly in and as that body-in-place moving forward yet rooting back. “Forever the geography leans in on me…polis is this,” as Olson expresses and proposes this embodied worlding ethos of immersive locality as rooted and routed senses living in Gloucester as (earlier) teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Place also means an open existence more intimately living with death, like those fishermen of Olson’s Gloucester, “setting out now in a box upon the sea.” For SPACE, as Olson expressed this ego-­ shattering expansiveness in vividly American terms of the sublime he grasped from Melville and Emerson, comes “large and without mercy” (Olson, Call Me Ishmael 11).Place means living as center and circumference of both a world and the planet, living in the time of now embodied and expressed in particularity, everywhere threatened by the dominating 2  See Olson, The Maximus Poems; Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson; and Olson, Collected Prose. 3  See Roberts, Borderwaters; and Wilson, Pacific Beneath the Pavements.

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forces megalopolis and atomic bomb, ruination, mediocrity, loss. These are the death-forces, blockages, and devils of military-financial manipulation we nowadays know so well under the cold-warring US and PRC Presidencies of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping across the toxic and spatialized era of global pandemic in a so-called perilous Indo-Pacific world. These days, as Olson had mandated to the contrary of this hegemonic spatiality, whatever you create, you need to “leave the roots on,” so you see the dirt of where it came from as the documentary film portrays so well in image and language. Polis lived in history and place is exactly what Norman O. Brown called and troped as (after Ovid, Jesus, and Nietzsche) “metamorphosis” or what Olson memorably called the lived “automorphosis” of place, self, world, and planet (Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis 8–5, 150–153).4 As the coeditors rightly point to the writing of place occurring variously across the world republic of letters, there are multiple ties and comparative entanglements that open place into world and world into place: “Writing in or about places—characterized by the tangible borders of the home and the neighborhood and the discursive boundaries of the region and the nation—requires a simultaneous tracing of the discourse against plural narratives from around the world making comparativist criticism a necessity, regardless of the chronological timelines to which the texts belong.” This suggests the timely and innovative ways of writing about and theorizing places that this collection would richly circulate, affirm, and enact. The twelve chapters in this timely collection in effect aim to actively participate in foregrounding places as read and written as both personal and social occurrences; places variously shaped by the temporal dictates of narrative and the shifty figurative tactics of literary imagination as reworlding practices that can alter the taken-for-granted terms or stories of place and go beyond economistic or materialist over determinations of place, people, border, nation, and region. Transnational forces in this multiple dialectical grasp of place and form can be read ambivalently as both reflecting the forces and forms of capitalist globalization or, more affirmatively, as activating other forces and forms of translocal, translational, and 4  Brown calls and tropes “automorphosis” as an “auto sacramental” process: meaning sacramentalizing the empirical world via transfigurating tropes of beatitude (“utopian or beatific vision”) and expressive energies of the redemptive poetic imagination he calls “Ovid Christianized” (p. 151). For Brown as cultural theorist of world literature, as for Olson the poet, “redemption is vision” of place, text, and as world (p. 155).See also Brown’s transfigurating vision of poetic imagination as articulated most fully in Love’s Body (pp. 162–266).

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transcultural linkages and certain ties that bind. Places can refigure form, and forms can refigure place; such is the range and risk of this collection in its tracking of various deterritorializing and reterritorializing energies in and beyond place. In Rethinking Place through Literary Form, neighborhoods and homes are variously lost, found again, and fleetingly touched upon as that cherished ground of spirit-being Charles Olson found materialized in oceanic Gloucester even as he warned against its irrevocable loss. This collection thus offers strong literary evidence, across multiple genres and sites central and peripheral, that these works across the discrepant world republic of letters can activate, as the coeditors affirm in their Introduction, “formal changes in language both transforming the significations of locales and removing places from the representative confinements of cartography.”5 Such are the pleasures and challenges this collection embodies. University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Rob Sean Wilson

Works Cited Brown, Norman O. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991. ———. Love’s Body. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1966. Chou, Shiuhhuah Serena, Soyoung Kim, and Rob Sean Wilson, eds. Geo-­spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, July, 2022. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael. 1947. Mansfield, CT: Martino, 2015. ———. The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems. Ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997. ———. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen, Benjamin Friedlander, and Robert Creeley. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997. ———. The Maximus Poems. Ed. George F.  Butterick. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1985. Roberts, Brian Russell. Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

5  On Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters” in its various distortions and evasions as a formal Paris-centered system of consecration and translation, see Wilson, “‘World Gone Wrong.’”

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Wilson, Rob Sean. Pacific Beneath the Pavements: Worlding Poesis, Diasporas, and Oceanic Becoming. University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming. ———. “‘World Gone Wrong’: Thomas Friedman’s World Gone Flat and Pascale Casanova’s World Republic against the Multitudes of Oceania.” Concentric 33:2 (2007): 178–194.

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain xi

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identifiable and well known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Praise for Rethinking Place through Literary Form “Theoretically informed and broad in literary scope, Rethinking Place through Literary Form offers a thoughtful challenge to prevailing models of global literature and hierarchical understandings of the relationship between European and non-European literary forms. Its nuanced theorization of place and local attachment, as well as its attention to the permeable movement of cultural identities across geographic borders, will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, post-colonial studies, and migration.” —Supritha Rajan, Associate Professor of English, University of Rochester, USA “Rethinking Place through Literary Form engages with literature from a range of languages, genres, and places, pushing us to think beyond national or disciplinary borders. The essays draw on materialist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and ecocritical approaches, questioning the very categories in which we construct public and private, global and local, animacy and the inanimate. The result is a substantial contribution to the study of global literature in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.” —Raphael Dalleo, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA “The dazzling essays in this volume map out new coordinates for the dynamic relationship between place, identity and literary writing. From anticolonial Bengal to the barrios of Los Angeles, from anarchist fiction to ecological elegy, these essays range brilliantly across periods, regions, and literary forms. Emphasizing migration and dispersal as much as rootedness, dwelling on translation and networks as much as belonging, this book suggests vital new directions in the criticism of literature and place.” —Timothy P. Watson, Professor of English, University of Miami, USA

Contents

1 Introduction: The Interconnectedness of Place and Literary Form  1 Rupsa Banerjee and Nathaniel Cadle Part I The Influence of Place on Form: Literary Form and the Displacement of Locales  27 2 Othered Places and the Bengali Leftist Female Bildungsroman: Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur and the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday 29 Nandini Dhar 3 Island of Words: The De-Realization of Place in the Writings of George Mackay Brown 57 Nigel Wheale 4 Locating Statelessness: The Multiple Forms of Anarchist Utopia in B. Traven’s The Death Ship 77 Nathaniel Cadle

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Part II The Influence of Place on Form: Neighbourhoods, Homes and Remakings of Form  95 5 “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them 97 Cristina M. Rodriguez 6 “A House with Many Rooms”: Transformed Homes in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names117 Laura Savu Walker Part III Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Regions, Nations, and Formal (Dis)junctions 141 7 “Her Strong Roots Sink Down”: Displacement, Migration, and Form in Jean Toomer’s Cane143 David Sugarman 8 De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and the Dialectics of Revision in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings161 Jennifer Somie Kang 9 “And No One Talks of National Rebirth”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D.J. Enright’s Poetry185 Aaron Deveson Part IV Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Discursive Cities and Transitory Worlds 209 10 “No New Newark”: Rewriting Place through the Failed Form of Family Romance in Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson211 Iven L. Heister

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11 The Invisible City of the Creole Caribbean Takes Shape: A Discourse Between Italo Calvino and Édouard Glissant227 Allyson Ferrante 12 Locating the World in the Prose Poems of Peter Riley251 Rupsa Banerjee Index277

Notes on Contributors

Rupsa Banerjee  is Assistant Professor of English, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India. Her academic essays have been published in Sanglap and The Apollonian. She has translated modern Bengali poetry into English for a collected anthology on partition poetry and is currently working on translating the prose of the Bengali author Manindra Gupta. Her poetry has appeared in journals published by Lady Chaos Press (New York), Chaour (Kolkata), and Earthbound Press (London). Nathaniel Cadle  is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, where he teaches late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. His first book, The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State (2014), won the 2015 SAMLA Studies Book Award. His recent publications have appeared in American Literary History and The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism (2019). His current research has been funded by a Faculty Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Aaron  Deveson is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University and divides his time between Taipei and Milton Keynes in Britain. He has published several articles and book chapters on British and American poetry, with a focus on cosmopolitan, materialist and ethical themes. Recent subjects include Keston Sutherland James Schuyler, John Ashberry, Michael Hofmann, Lynette Roberts, and Alan Brownjohn.

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Nandini Dhar  teaches literature, writing and gender studies at OP Jindal Global University. Her academic essays have appeared in journals such as Ariel, The Comparatist and edited anthologies. At present, she is busy co-editing a book on gender, space and contemporary social movements in India. Nandini is also a poet, and has published full-length anthologies both in English and in her native language Bangla. Allyson Ferrante  is an associate professor of English and the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program at Bridgewater State University. Trained in Comparative Literature, she teaches courses on Postcolonial literature and theory, Caribbean literature, Multiethnic British literature, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her research focuses on representations of creole identity in Pan-­Caribbean literature that challenge colonial frameworks. She was born on St. Thomas, USVI to an Afro-Jamaican mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father, and raised in New York City. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and daughter. Iven  L.  Heister  is a Ph.D. candidate at the University at Buffalo. His dissertation focuses on the intersection of theories of trauma, shame, and witnessing with the autobiographical and historical in the postwar American novel, focusing on the work of Philip Roth. His article “An Ambivalent Nemesis: Philip Roth, Commentary, and the American Jewish Intellectual” is forthcoming in Philip Roth Studies. Jennifer Somie Kang  received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2021. Her dissertation intervenes in the New Modernist Studies by probing the relationship between modernist aesthetics and fascist politics in the work of several early twentieth-century thinkers. Her research interests include American and global modernisms, Marxist aesthetics and politics, and writing center studies. Over the past four years, she has been serving as a reviewer for The Peer Review, an International Writing Centers Association publication. Cristina M. Rodriguez  is an assistant professor of English at Providence College. Her forthcoming book, Barrio Transnational: The Neighborhood in 21st Century Latinx Literature, explores the relationship between place identity, transnationalism, and narrative experimentation in contemporary Chicanx and Latinx literature. Her research, which combines literary analysis, sociology, and human geography, connects literary settings to the real-world neighborhoods they are based on—in cities including New York, Miami, and LA—to build an interdisciplinary map of the contemporary

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U.S. transnational immigrant experience. She has also written on Los Angeles urban space and its role in innovative fiction for Asian American Journal and Latino Studies. David  Sugarman is Associate Faculty at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He received his Ph.D. in English from NYU in 2019. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American studies, intellectual history, and urban theory. He has published academic articles in Textual Practice, and creative nonfiction and fiction in numerous literary journals and magazines. Laura Savu Walker  received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 2006. She has taught as an assistant professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest and is currently an Adjunct instructor at Columbia College, SC and USC Columbia. Her publications include the book Postmodern Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (2009) and an edited collection of essays, The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context (2015). Nigel  Wheale is an independent scholar and poet, now based in Cambridge UK. From 2003 to 2016 he lived and worked on Orkney. His works include: A Brink of the World (prose memoir, forthcoming); The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010); Raw Skies. New & Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005); Writing & Society. Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660 (Routledge 1999); The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) Editor; Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum (Routledge 1991) Edited, with Lesley Aers. He has written articles on Shakespeare and other authors for emagazine—English & Media Centre, and is a Contributing Editor with The Fortnightly Review (online journal).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Interconnectedness of Place and Literary Form Rupsa Banerjee and Nathaniel Cadle

Forrest Gander’s poem “The Sounding” from the collection Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2019, conflates the drive to situate oneself in place through the available resources of language and the simultaneous fact of finding oneself located in a plurality of places. Gander’s entire collection reimagines and reexamines the intimacies between the individual and society, between the US as a nation and its neighboring states. “The Sounding” itself examines the conceptual paradoxes implicit within the act of self-situation—an action that is both physically determined and linguistically enacted. Each of the four stanzas is connected by enjambed lines, linguistically foreshadowing the stanzas’ formal reluctance to be extracted and emplaced elsewhere. Here are the first, second, and third stanzas in their entirety:

R. Banerjee (*) St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India N. Cadle Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_1

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What closes and then luminous? What opens and then dark? And into what do you stumble but this violet extinction? With froth on your lips. 8:16 am. The morning’s sleepy face rolls its million eyes. Migrating flocks of your like same species incandesce into transparency. A birdwatcher lifts her binoculars. The continuous with or without your words situates you here (here (here)) even while you knuckle your eyes in disbelief. Those (30)

The inability to locate meaning or even to situate a signifier at the location of the repeated interrogative pronoun “what” demonstrates the vacuous act of locating oneself in the empty signifier of a singular place. The contrasts between “closes” and “opens” and “luminous” and “then dark” hint at the impossibility of fixing the speaker of the poem to a specific location or drawing conclusions about the speaker’s political allegiances, emotional anxieties, and economic ties based on the speaker’s spatial positioning. These stanzas, and Be With as a whole, present language as both determining and dislocating this tendentious positioning of identity. The poetry collection rethinks the positioning of American identity in its attempt to revisit the questions of gender and race through the perspective of an outsider, with the binoculars fixed on the “Migrating flocks/ of your likesame species.” The poet is an outsider to national identity, and within the historical timeline of the birth, collapse, and reorganization of national territories, all legitimized citizens become migratory intruders.

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The third stanza articulates the intersection of multiple discourses into which the human subject is displaced, calling into question the exceptionalist nature of any political identification. The breakdown of grammar as the line “your words” continues into “situates you here” demonstrates the non-linkage between spoken words and the speaker’s act of self-locating. Each repetition of the word “here” creates and intensifies the ambiguity associated with locating the subject in language. The clustering of the words amounts to an attempt to reclaim the place of the subject, and it suggests that positioning oneself in place gives rise to an endless proliferation of identifications that resist any such locatedness. The repetition of “here” emphasizes place as both the private longing for shelter and the physical basis for having a political and cultural identity. Place no longer remains a singular occurrence but becomes a series of concentric identifications that position the individual in an expanding series of displacements: “here / (here (here)).”1 The title of the poem underscores a particular relationship between the lyric speaker and the reader (or listener) of the poem—one based on intentionality. A shared cultural experience of place emerges as the text is read (or heard) over an interpretative distance that seems to connect author and reader. In other words, an implied possibility of dialogue between author and reader(s) renders the world into aural echoes, variously heard across and through different registers of languages. The world in this case is not a singular phenomenon that requires well- meaning but prosaic acts of translation to 1  In The Fate of Place (1998), Edward S. Casey states that place within philosophy, from the time of Aristotle, is commonly taken as a position that “is a correlate of the physical body— which has its own extension” (135). The world mapped in relation to such an understanding of place “exceeds any body or group of bodies” (135) and in fact becomes a metaphoric container for places. Casey’s work provides a strong argument for bringing the critical attention back to places where they are no longer loci contained within the world, but instead, the world is mapped around the given locatedness of places themselves, “belonging to [their] gradual ontogenesis and implicit in it” (275). Works of speculative realists, such as Levi R.  Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (2011), argue that the impossibility of locating the world as a singular container for diverse places promotes the idea of plural worlds. World literatures is read by critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from this perspective of multiple linguistic worlds where marginality of tongues is the outcome of the ways in which texts are read and critiqued rather than preconditioned by the cartographic organization of the world. Our collection reads literatures written about and from different geographic places as mapping plural worlds around them, expelling insular interiority while retaining a quality of inwardness that communicates accountability to geographically specific histories.

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communicate cultural difference; every single heterogeneous linguistic utterance, as Taylor Eggan writes, enables one “to see how the world is a pluriverse constituted by many overlapping worlds on many scales” (1313). Situating oneself in language involves mapping oneself in plural worlds, where translation builds conceptual bridges between languages and, indeed, reveals the framework of close-knit linguistic interdependencies that promote self-translations of historical inconsistencies within a given geographical locale. Gander’s collection places English and Spanish contiguously in the poems, albeit differentiated by the quantitative number of lines, making recognition of the semiotic borders of languages an essential part of determining the plural nature of the world. In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature (2015), Rebecca Walkowitz studies the various convergences of languages that make English less of a universal mediator of cultural experience and more of an arbitrary map for literature’s correspondence to economic determinations and its various points of departures from a singular history of the world.2 The role of readers within such a non-hierarchical relationality between languages determines local and national borders, “add[ing] circulation to the study of production by asking what constitutes the languages, boundaries, and media of the work” (51). Rethinking Place Through Literary Form approaches the study of literary form at the microscopic scale of the choice of words and at the macroscopic level of aggregating historical differences and readerly receptions across different geographies, and it argues for the influence of “wording” in the “worlding” of texts. Texts do not come located in languages and their corresponding locales but are emplaced through the conventions of reading habits.

2  Walkowitz suggests the process of “close reading at a distance,” expanding the commonly held perception of a text as the expression of an idiolect to include “a narrative’s visual as well as verbal qualities, paratextual materials such as typography and illustration, and aspects of the work that exceed the single monolingual version” (pp. 50–51). Taken in such a way, any given text can be read as a multilingual entity, depending on the modifications to the style of publication. This argument identifies the foreignness of the text in its diegetic and narrative features rather than solely by the nature of its content. The study of literary form makes it possible to locate local divergences from the norm, and literary works start to offer intersections of multiple strands of histories and not simply reflections on and of the geographical territories where they are written.

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Rethinking the Transnational Subjective emplacement—both in language and within the nation-state— is a central concern for this volume, just as it is for Gander’s poem. What makes “The Sounding” such an appropriate starting point for this collection of essays is that, in its preoccupation with defining the self across the border between the United States and Mexico, it questions the too-easy distinctions between the national and foreign territories where the quantifiable use of the English and the Spanish languages comes to demarcate political borders. Place, for Gander, is defined by the poetic exchange of significations across the registers of the languages that determine political borders, so much so that the act of engaging with poetic form allows for revised political identifications. The cross-border linguistic displacement of Spanish into the English poems in Gander’s collection identifies the unceasing overlaps of the self’s linguistic positions with those of others, making place itself a product of the organizational capacity of language. Be With demands a comparativist approach to the study of its own poetry and sets an example for the engagement of the chapters in this collection. The comparativist approach brings an openness toward putative externalities and discloses the reversible and constructed nature of national boundaries, often determined by the zones of use and abandonment of particular languages. In Transnationalism in Practice (2010), Paul Giles writes of the cultural biases that determine linguistic acts of national identification, “Discourses of nationalism rarely declare themselves to be particularist rather than universal models, and it is one of the tasks of comparativist criticism to recover a sense of that latent contingency” (27). It is, then, the work of critics to identify self-positionings across what is vocalized and what is left out in the silences of discourses that present universal descriptions of nations, which in turn reflect a singular image of the globe. In Rethinking Place Through Literary Form, place, as a conceptual category, is approached both as a political territory, indisputably pinned into a cartographic representation, and as an imaginative precondition for thought— characterizing allegories for self-locations and possible utopias for self-displacements. In acknowledging both the material and fictive quality of “place,” the collection questions the efficacy of any form of territorial affiliations based on cultural specificity and, subsequently, writing that presupposes any regional classificatory relations with the individual. The singularity of the globe, and the transformations it exacts on economic

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relations between countries, is replaced by the mutative quality of places whose elasticity is determined both by the circulation of the texts and of literary form’s particularized egress from normative patterns of diegesis and lyrical modes. Writing in or about places—characterized by the tangible borders of the home and the neighborhood and the discursive boundaries of the region and the nation—requires a simultaneous tracing of the discourse against plural narratives from around the world, making comparativist criticism a necessity, regardless of the chronological timelines to which the texts belong.3 One could very well argue that the incommensurability of the literary works with the historical descriptions of and about the political territories that produce them suggest the unmappable quality of public and private places and their resistance to unitary modes of representation. Susan Bassnett states that comparative literary criticism has struggled with a non-recognition of this “historical perspective,” specifically “invasions, colonization, [and] economic deprivation” (37). Rethinking Place Through Literary Form acknowledges this aspect of chronicling and argues that, on numerous occasions, historical documentations fail to account for the contradictions within subjective responses toward places: from thematic variations in plot to the development of mixed-genre narratives to interruptions in narrative continuity. If the particularized accounts of places— from the intimately possessed home to the publicly determined nation—are diverse and disparate, then their organization within a map of the world comes across as arbitrary, unable to account for the ways in which literature resists and counters the cartographic relations between places.4 Places threatened with political erasure become palpable in their literary representations, leaving their marks on the collective consciousness, and other 3  In Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions (1987), Swapan Majumdar claims that regional literatures written within India cannot be contained within the derivative category of the “region” because literatures produced within a multilingual context are creatively oscillating between “collectivity and individuality” (26). 4  In Distant Reading (2013), Franco Moretti suggests that literature’s resistance to accepted cartographic relations is further supported through acts of reading that can make geographic horizons into a “brake” and, alternately, can expand the limits of those horizons, offering “unexpected chances” for inhabiting new realms of thinking (8). The geographic demarcations that distant reading presupposes are, in fact, malleable even while they are charted out within a monolithic sphere. By studying places and their literatures as offering multiple loci for a fragmented globe, reductively framed in the image from space, this collection eschews the hierarchy of scale and explores reading practices as strategic ways of emplacing and dispersing the self.

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places that history has rendered non-inclusive of multiple cultural identities start to disclose their own inconsistencies.5 This impossibility of stretching the particular to include the universal or of fitting the nation into a larger category of the planet or the world, even with the growing networks of relations between nations, is highlighted by Philip Leonard: “[the] schism between affiliation and universality, pointing to a cultural and ethnic particularity that can be encompassed by neither broad and regionalizing classifications nor an inclusive sense of the global” (45). Rethinking Place Through Literary Form explores this very “cultural and ethnic particularity” as being fundamentally displaced from itself by literary form, looking into the ways writing itself identifies the foreignness of the self from its surroundings and of the literary form as more of a remnant of and response to cultural transactions dependent on economic transformations of national borders than an inheritance of an exclusivizing geography. The “global” and the significance of the material signifier of the globe to world literary discourse are continuously debated. In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak puts forward the “planet” to “overwrite the globe” (72); contrasted with the globe, which is overrun with economic determinations, the planet signifies an “alterity [that] remains underived from us” (73). The particularity of places and the reticent nature of literary writings from supposed “peripheries” are both retained and dissipated within such a formulation, as our own alterity “contains us as much as it flings us away” (73). By focusing on narratives of places determining the cartographic mapping of the world rather than the other way around, this collection argues that prose and poetry offer representations of worlds that are plural, where the sense of a unitary spatial whole is already lost in the innate inclinations of texts to remain both disconnected and open to assimilation. However, subjective accounts of places are often incomprehensive and their corpus unreliable. Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011) offers an argument for the incomprehensive nature 5  Focusing on place is an assertion of the discursive nature of geography. In “Questions on Geography,” compiled from an interview given to the journal Hérodote, Michel Foucault maps out the semantic borders of geographic terms, from the “territory” and the “field” to the “domain” and the “region,” among others (68). The essays in this collection examine the refractions in the definitions of these terms and the necessary adjustments to their social significations. The materiality of place, then, comes to be mapped through the position of words on the page, the seemingly arbitrary changes in form, and the drifts of identity enabled through evolving habits of reading.

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of the subjective accounts of place.6 In Topophrenia, Robert T.  Tally Jr. further qualifies the unreliable binary of personal narratives about places and their historical characterizations, as individuated responses to places exceed any particular, singular perspective: “[a] geocritical exploration might well take as its starting point a particular text and its relation to a place, whose almost unavoidable polysemy and heteroglossia will ensure that any reading of the text, place, and relations among them will exceed simple personal or autobiographical experience” (20). It is here that the conceptual limits of place come to be determined by the “reader and the writer” (20): the subjective narratives are by no means taken as replacing the empirical accounts of place, but they are studied to reflect the artificiality of geography as a discourse and, indeed, to allow the seemingly endless corpus of varying responses to place to be bounded by the creative interpretations of the reader and the writer. Modifications to form, such as inserting interludes into prose narratives in order to disrupt conflict and the seeming flow of time or hybridizing the lyric through interactions between Asian and European forms, suggest that factual accounts of places are very often subtended and realized by the conceptualizations of imagined places. The following chapters actively participate in the reconsideration of places as both personal and social occurrences, shaped by the temporal dictates of narrative. In many ways, these blurred distinctions between real and imagined places serve to critique the economically overdetermined character of the globe. In Combined and Uneven Development (2015), the Warwick Research Collective claims that varieties of “numinous narration,” such as “magical realism, irrealism, gothic and fantasy,” through an openness towards the conjunction between real and imagined places, make the “‘semi-peripherality’ of the world-literary system” apparent (57). By focusing primarily on places as offering multiple projections of worlds, and thereby resisting reading habits that attest to localism, the essays in this collection locate the fictive quality of places in the ways narratives both go against and symbolically address the seemingly empiricist accounts of 6  In the chapter “The Multiplication of Centres,” from The Plausible World (2013), published two years after Geocriticism, Westphal argues that places within the medieval imagination are themselves fragmentary and contribute to a lost whole. In his study of several religious texts, he identifies the often blurred boundaries between real and imagined places in the medieval world where the hierarchy between places becomes unstable. This volume contributes to his larger statement on the plurality of extant narratives on a place and the indeterminacy of any given corpus in relation to exacting the accurate qualities of a place.

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history.7 The foreignness of texts, and the subsequent questioning of centers and margins, are present not in the mapping of unknown territories and intractable psychological terrains but in the practices of reading, which unground places from their commonly held “local” attributes. Rethinking Place Through Literary Form takes a comparativist approach toward the study of various literary forms in twentieth and twenty-first century world literatures, examining how literary works both recognize and forget place-specific identities across diverse geographical regions. The readings offered of the texts, in turn, extend beyond the politics of assumptions popular within the national contexts of their production and emphasize a translocational drift of ideas. Giles’ book effectively frames the two distinct approaches to texts across the Atlantic, one of “American transcendence” and the other of “British materialism.” Citing Myra Jehlen’s work in Ideology and Classic American Literature (1986), Giles notes that refusing the materialist method takes one to the “limits of ideology” where “literature may offer a way to look a little beyond” (26).8 In contrast, “British materialism reveals such transcendence to be relative and contingent rather than absolute quality” (26). The transatlantic distinction between the non- materialist, what Giles calls “transcendence,” and the materialist approach is diversified even further in this collection by bringing in literary works written in and about Asia and the Caribbean. Collectively, the eleven critical essays engage in identifying the boundary conditions of situatedness and study the ways forms migrate and, in fact, help shape the political identities of places within a changing global milieu. The chapters in this collection, then, examine ways in which literary writings in and of places challenge, contradict and even reverse the range of semantic associations connected to a geographical territory. Inhabiting 7  The work of the Warwick Research Collective separates engagements with poetry from the considerations of narrative form on the belief that these forms are not as sensitive to the logic of “combined and uneven development” (57). The essays in Rethinking Place Through Literary Form argue that diverse literary forms, including those beyond prose, are just as crucial in mapping the ways in which topographic signifiers—from the neighborhood to the city to the nation—resist a concentric organization of scale. 8  Paul Giles reads Jehlen’s criticism of cultural materialism as written in the same spirit as Sacvan Bercovitch’s recontextualizing of the “American” identity of the writings of the American Renaissance in The Rites of Assent (1992): “by accentuating Emerson’s links to Descartes on the one hand and to Nietzsche on the other, or by replacing the tautologies of exceptionalism with the trans-national categories of gender, class, and race […]” (qtd. in Giles 26). Introducing a cross-geographical approach to the study of migratory ideas presents texts circumventing the very totalizing political borders of nations.

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place is both a personal and a collective experience, and literature has a way of registering the deviations and connections between those two experiencesin its very form. The geographic specificity of places, necessary for materialist criticism, finds itself variously characterized through the radical differences that places hold within themselves: the places represented in the writings are internally displaced, making the local dependent on the locatedness of the individual. Looking a “little beyond” includes the utopic instance of looking at place from a vantage point of observation. As Paul Ricoeur notes, utopia is a “special extraterritoriality,” from whose “‘no place’an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual[.…]” (16). Specifically, as the chapters from the first section of the collection show, the historic determinations of places are never without the hope of allowing for alternative possibilities of arrangement between the center and margin, city and suburbs, place and “no-place.” Commenting on the contemporary dream for utopia in Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), Robert Tally argues that “utopia can be neither an ideal state elsewhere in world geography nor a realization of some ideal future” (x) but becomes a way of providing alternate maps of the world. Referring to works such as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Tally’s work enlarges the literary discourse on utopia to include works of criticism that radically reexamine the relations between the individual and society. Shifting from impossible cartographic delineations, utopia comes to include the transformation of everyday places and identities through mass uprisings, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.9 The places explored in the chapters of the second section of Rethinking Place Through 9  In Topophrenia, Tally differentiates literary cartography from the act of mapmaking: “Literary cartography is not a literal form of mapmaking, after all; rather it involves the ways and means by which a given work of literature functions as a figurative map, serving as an orientating or sense-making form” (116). Drawing from George Lukàcs’s The Theory of the Novel, Tally builds on the idea that narrative form registers the separation between individual experience and objective reality and states that the novel’s projection of utopia is a recognition of “imaginative limits” (122) rather than a realization of them. Focusing on diverse literary forms and their innate contradictions, Rethinking Place Through Literary Form underscores the fallacy of attempting to map personal experiences of places onto their geographical correlates. The challenge of envisioning utopia is, then, studied as a radical zone of incommensurability, which brings with it attendant ways of dislodging representations of places from their historical and factual accounts.

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Literary Form offer a distinctly non- materialist approach to the relation between geography and literature, where the formal representations of places critique and demystify the commonly held characteristics of geographical place. In Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2017), Bill Ashcroft writes, “The issue is not what is imagined, the product of utopia so to speak, the imagined or utopian place, but the process of imagining itself” (67). In many ways, then, the “process of imagining” includes the work of the reader as well as that of the writer in remapping the self into the real and metaphoric landscapes that are both inhabited and visited. In particular, Rethinking Place Through Literary Form studies how literary processes of reimagining the relations between the self and geography allow for a stepping outside of the economically determined hierarchical models of connectivity between various centers of literary production. The economic models of organizing the world proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein start to fall short when used to predict the nature of relations between literatures produced at centers, peripheries, and even semi-peripheries. In Polysystem Studies (1990), Itamar Even-Zohar examines the relations between target (dependent) and source (independent) literatures and argues for the essential asymmetrical relations between such categories.10 The stratification of languages, then, does not reflect the relations of power between political territories but is instead determined by the nature of exchanges and borrowings between the languages. Several translated texts examined in Rethinking Place Through Literary Form, including works written in seemingly prominent national languages such as German and Italian and minor regional languages like Bengali, reflect this sense of asymmetry. The study of these translated texts demands an audience in whose reading practices the places written about and the places where the texts are read find synaptic points of contact in the act of interpretation: the process of imagining places of alterity becomes a bilateral process between the critic and author. The borders between centers and peripheries, and subsequently, those between nations, become contingent on specific and individual ways of interacting with history. Places encompass the material markers of nations and neighborhoods as well as 10  Even-Zohar writes that the literary writings produced in and by geographically subjugated territories may still be able to “participate (in various degrees) in the literature of the majority” displacing the “minor” works from being a “system within a larger polysystem” and instead becoming a “(poly)system in its own right” (56). This volume specifically addresses this nature of literary interactions as giving rise to a structuring of the world, which has negotiable boundaries and edges.

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the more abstract and localized ability to use language, illustrating the slipperiness of language and the networks of communication between the author and the readers. This plural nature of transactions between languages and the subsequent dualistic quality of place shifts the non-materialist and the materialist criticism of texts beyond the transatlantic debate between the United States and Britain. In his article on the “Trans-Americanization” of Hawaii, published in a 2000 issue of American Literature, Rob Wilson examines the literary transformation of the East in the literature of Whitman and Thoreau, which leads to an assimilationist American writing and the defamiliarization of what is taken to be the East. In a similar vein, the representations of the “near East” in the works of Whitman, as Arthur L. Ford argues, help to diversify the experience of the American, demonstrating the longstanding roots of the transnational experience. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), too, argues that the category of the nation emerges as inconsistent and unstable when it starts to include within itself narrative voices that have so far been occluded by history.11 The modern framework of the U.S. nation emerges as increasingly dependent on the new readings of these texts offered by the critics, whose innovative openness has to be retrieved and placed in relation with criticism of other texts; such a convergence makes the condition of deterritorialization of the nation in literature a precondition for all nations. This aspect of the transnational is arguably just as dependent on the reading practice that one adopts when approaching texts as it is an inherent quality of the texts in themselves. These very habits of reading reveal the material erasure of the nation regardless of the exact critical moment when the texts are sampled from an abiding course of seemingly objective history. John Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English (2008) studies this phenomenon in the context of the literatures of the British Isles, written during the seventeenth century, presenting the national quality of literatures as reliant on “the capacity of archipelago to foster fusions and transformations” (89). In other words, the literary interactions between nations 11  Gilroy delocalizes the African American experience by mapping it across “the national political cultures and nation states in America, the Caribbean, and Europe” (19). He writes that, for African American writers, the possibility of movement across continents leads to the gradual dissolution of “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19). The transnational stands out as a cross-historical phenomenon, which in contemporary times has come to be determined solely by changes in the global economy.

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result in devolving and reconstructing national and regional ties such that any claims about a “national” literature require a simultaneous acknowledgement of the indelible borders that structure the present of the nation and hope for “changing the past in the future” (90). This making and remaking of ties between nations and the subsequent ways in which geographic borders are linguistically remodeled and imaginatively shared prove that the material correlate of the nation shares equal affiliations with the privations of creative language and the public nature of political indictments. Responding directly to Giles’ points about the differences between materialist and non- materialist approaches to transnational literary study, and attempting to bring them into more productive dialogue with one another, Rethinking Place Through Literary Form is divided into two primary sections. The first five chapters examine the influence of geographical place on literary form, while the remaining six chapters attend to the ways literary form allows for a redressal of anxieties about spatial dislocation, the erosion of national distinctions, and the difficulty in inhabiting places that offer both real and imaginative sanctuary. The first section, “The Influence of Place on Form,” offers primarily materialist accounts of how literary form can help think through the existing borders of centers and their peripheries and transform the perception of the world as a pre-existent category that allows for the circulation of texts. To a certain extent, the readings of places offered in the first section change the political dynamics between places, in turn allowing places to expand and shrink themselves, depending on the ways in which identities are represented, politicized and made conversant with each other. Such an argument draws its critical impetus from Susan Bassnett’s work Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993), where she claims that approaches to an overarching sense of “European literature” invariably transforms “French, German, and English” literary writings into “sub-national” or “regional” units (37–38). “The Influence of Place on Form” extends the implications of Bassnett’s point and suggests that writings often form and reflect internal peripheries that are at odds with the places in which they are produced. Studying the influence of place on literary form is less an attempt to read historical and economical determinations in the literary representations of places than an effort to see the internal borders of the places as changeable, symbolically reterritorializing themselves in an effort to give greater leeway to the self-expression of the individual.

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The second section, “Formal Reconfigurations of Place,” focuses on the instances where literary form in itself offers ways of determining place as an event that comes into being through the individual’s own openness toward writing. This section thus extends Tim Cresswell’s statement in Place: A Very Short Introduction (2004) that “places are never complete, finished or bounded but are always becoming—in process” (37). This incomplete nature of places further determines the porous relations between literatures, identified through the migration of formal practices, and subsequently characterizes the world as a temporal occurrence. Instead of being a spatial category that exists and is recreated in literature through the processes of diegesis and mimesis, the world is created within the field of world literatures. In What is a World? (2016), Pheng Cheah writes that world literature is an “active space of transaction and interrelation” and “[t]he world is constituted by and, indeed, is nothing but exchange and transaction” (38). This characterization of the world as temporally determined reverses the hierarchies of scale between world and place. As Cheah writes, developing relations between literatures and their resultant cosmopolitanism “remake the world as a place that is open to the emergence of peoples that globalization deprives of world” (19). The essays in “Formal Reconfigurations of Place” examine how the geographical markers of the city, the region, and the nation are only ever presented through imaginative representations that do not correspond to a gradually increasing spatial arrangement of scale. The last chapter in this section caries this logic to its conclusion, examining the category of the world itself as something fleetingly grasped in formal changes made to lyric poetry, which are in themselves a testament to literary form ventilated by the histories of cultural exchange.

The Influence of Place on Form The section titled “The Influence of Place on Form” posits that the empirical accounts of history and customary European chronologizations are partial statements on particularized acts of inhabiting and writing about places that are marginalized, occupied under stress, or even threatened with extinction. Most of these chapters deploy biographical—and even autobiographical—elements in the literary texts being studied in order map modifications to the physical and social aspects of places onto rhetorical changes and synthetic formal mergers of the private and the public; such impressions on formal features by the external world counter the

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destructive ill-effects of a unitary narrative.12 The structural alterations to form in these texts disclose the slipperiness of positioning oneself in language, so much so that language only provides an authentic account of being emplaced insofar as it registers the uncanny ways in which places slip past linguistic representation. In Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhabha addresses this concern when he writes that the “boundary that secures the cohesive limits of the western nation” may transform into an “internal liminality that provides a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal, and the emergent” (300). The insight of that statement is reflected in the chapters gathered here as they examine the enfolding of boundaries within themselves. The simultaneous containment and liberation of place-specific sentiments start to hold true for both non-Western nations and their fractal component parts of homes, neighborhoods, and cities, set apart and overrun by internal peripheries and inversions of borders. The opening subsection, “Literary Form and the Displacement of Locales” brings together Nandini Dhar’s study of Nabankur: The Seedling’s Tale (1956), Nigel Wheale’s considerations of George Mackay Brown’s poetry collection Travellers (1982) and his novel Magnus (1973), and Nathaniel Cadle’s reading of B. Traven’s The Death Ship (1934). Dhar’s chapter examines the changing identity of the Bengali woman in Bengal during the days leading up to India’s independence. Written in the style of the bildungsroman, Sanyal’s novel uses a linear plot structure to relate an uncommon narrative, distinct from those that were popular in the works of Bengali women authors of the time. The novel, with its ideological deviations from the accepted modes of women’s writing, creates its own denaturalized pocket of circulation: accessed and preserved only by the few who share its political sympathies, in this case, a Communist conviction in the gradual transformation of the private sphere. The particular 12  In the chapter “Goethe after Lanzmann: Literature Represents ‘X’,” from In The Place of Language, Claudia Brodsky offers a deeply philosophical inquiry into the ways different artistic mediums “approach the referent and reality of history” (25). Brodsky writes that the attempt to point out spatial referents for history in film, even as the material markers have been eradicated by time, admits the eerie persistence of places that are either removed or displaced from the significatory realms of language. The autobiographical nature of some of the texts studied in this section reveal language’s attempts to make the figurative a transformative cognition of the material place: the jumps in narrative timelines, the displacement of authorial voice amongst anonymous speakers, and the evocation of lyrical pauses in the narrative reveal the vacant gaps in history’s attempts to contain and even embody place.

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focus on the “relief kitchen” and its “othered space” within the context of Bengali society of the 1940s provides the physical counterpart to the novel’s navigation of the intermediary spaces between an extant feudal order and a modernity brought about through the incursion of radical politics. In underlining the contested place of the “relief-kitchen” and its motivation of different social identities toward each other, the form of the novel co-opts itself into the very liminal spaces between the public borders of textual circulation and the interiority of authorial intent. The third chapter offers a close study of the poetic and prose works of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown. The poems from Travellers juxtapose the compact style of the Norse runes and poetic lines with the conciseness of the Chinese poetic language and displace the poems from the very locales that engender them. The poetry, then, retranslates its surroundings and repositions itself in a world that is continually transforming, in keeping with the combinatory axis of syntactical relations between languages. Noting the “impossibility and undesirability of translation” (27), the Warwick Research Collective writes that “to read is already to ‘translate’” (28), for the act of reading demands a self-emplacement within an intentional community of signs. Considered in such a framework, Mackay Brown’s poems and their readings work together to recover an identity of place that is contemporary in its cross- cultural associations, dislodged from yet conversant with accepted history. In addition, Wheale’s discussions of Magnus identify a fundamental difference between individual formal responses to place and the specific ways in which places exist and are reproduced within collective habits and shared faith. Interweaving personal observations on the inhabited place of Orkney along with critical statements on the de-territorialization of the narrative from its surroundings, Wheale’s chapter produces its own fringe locale. The impersonal exploration of the narrative’s close engagement with religious metaphors communicates the translatability of the particular features of place across diverse interpretative regions; in addition, the subjective statements communicate the intense singularity of place as it is both sustained and displaced across divergent and intersecting timelines. The fourth chapter, centering on B. Traven’s The Death Ship, examines the multiple ways Traven’s narrator is displaced across “zones of refuge,” temporarily accessed in a search for a steady occupation of and identification with place. The novel is a response to the failure of state apparatuses to allow for a harmonic conjunction between the political referent of the nation and socially mediated locales. In offering its own political critique,

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Traven’s novel holds its own inner periphery within the governing narratives of gradually hardening structures of nations and the resultant brittle image of Europe. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri write about the text’s “deterritorialization” of the world in its search for finding its own critical and interpretive territory: “the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is a parallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world” (11). With its narrator’s continuous displacement across several locales, The Death Ship re-examines its own positionality in languages (the book being originally published in German in 1926 and in English in 1934), the biographical elements of its author’s life, and the shifting favors of its community of readers. Cadle’s chapter, seen in relation to the collection’s larger considerations of the circulation and reception of literatures in the world, suggests that a narrative search for utopia, not in keeping with the dictates of cartography but with the style of a picaresque narrative, is the only alternative for writing about and imaginatively structuring a world that is fragmented. The second subsection, “Neighborhoods, Homes, and Remakings of Forms,” rethinks the possession of cities, neighborhoods, and homes through the changes in literary forms. The two chapters in this section examine the ownership and loss of places that exist in an essentialized separation from the space of the nation, whether they are in the form of suburbs that provide shelter to marginalized identities or as cities that start to collapse under their inability to admit difference. The interpersonal relations explored between people of different ethnicities and races gradually start to transform and modify these places that exist at the margins: from the interiority of the lives of contested citizens to the resignation to privacy, following the injustices of discrimination. Places come across as modifiable phenomena, participated in and shared by the dialogic exchanges between characters, the production of contrasting perspectives, and the shifts in the narrative timeline. Gloria E. Anzaldúa describes borderlands as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (3). The subsection explores Anzaldúa’s claim and suggests that the representations of caged identities open up nodes of interactions between borderlands, whether politically instated or culturally constituted, and in turn destabilize unitary descriptions of the world.

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Christina M. Rodriguez’s chapter on Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) rethinks the controversial process of urban renewal brought about at the expense of those who live in the affected communities. Rodriguez argues that Viramontes’ writing of the novel creates a literary counterspace populated by individuals whose lives are either threatened or uprooted by the indiscriminate process of expansion. Edward S. Carey’s statement on “place memory” as a stable container for the individual’s experiences makes the site of Viramontes’ novel into a habitat for those who are evicted from their homes. The narrative discontinuities, moving back and forth in time through the rhetorical devices of analepsis and prolepsis, provide a fluidity of movement to the characters as they escape the “containment” imposed on them by the legal authorities. Creating a heterochronous arrangement of seismic separations and convergences, the dilating timeline of the text maps the characters onto the interconnected present of the reader, offering momentary reconciliations between the author’s personal encounter with segregation and the characters’ arcs of self-liberation. The disorientating timelines communicate an interiority of voices that are alienated from themselves and from the larger community of readers. Within and through this self-adjudicated alienation, however, the text precipitates the anguish of losing one’s place of belonging in ghettoized suburbs and in history. In her chapter on All Our Names (2014), written by Ethiopian American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, Laura Savu Walker examines the contiguous incompletions of making oneself at home and containing history within the defined bounds of the nation. Savu Walker’s chapter traces the journey of the narrator as he travels from Uganda to the fictional town of Laurel in the American Midwest, losing the thirteen names given to him by his father along the way and taking the identity and name of his friend Isaac, who takes part of the revolution in the university in Kampala. The inability to possess a name or the site of one’s primary identification foreshadows the larger incapacity to emplace oneself within the terrains of history or fiction. The narrative set in Uganda metachronically places historical dates and creates a productive ground for the contestation of stable identities; on the other hand, the world of Laurel is layered with racial prejudices, closely observed and accurately narrated, which start to crumble the walls of its artifice. The nonlinear narrative styles, alternatively told in the voices of ambiguous narrators, move toward a utopic possession of a space of private belonging, which becomes the shared space of racial sympathy between the characters, and between the author and the reader.

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Home is found, lost, and fleetingly embedded in the assurance of dialogue exchanged between two characters. The narrative transacts itself between history and fiction and reframes the world around a sense of the private that is variously peopled, characterized by the gaps in subjective narratives. Particular references to the works of Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe reveal the confining qualities of places as being shaped by language and the narrator’s, as well as the text’s own, scope for political and cultural mobility, which rests on the adaptability of form.

Formal Reconfigurations of Place The second section, “Formal Reconfigurations of Place,” comprises two subsections that explore the ways in which places are written, varyingly remodeled, and rescued from the labels of geographical and legal terms. When asked about the use of geographical metaphors in his work, Michel Foucault contended that all geographical metaphors convey relations of power: Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-­ political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power. Field is an economic-juridical notion. Displacement: what displaces itself is an army, a squadron, a population. Domain is a juridico-political notion. Soil is a historico-geological notion. Region is a fiscal, administrative, military notion. Horizon is a pictorial, but also a strategic notion. (68) The abundance of spatial metaphors and their accompanying political significations suggest the continuous and ongoing struggle to use language to refer to an external event, place taken to be in temporal flux rather than ossified in geography, which is also the basis of one’s creative and social identity.13 The chapters in this section study the region and the nation as assemblages of ecological, provincial, and cosmopolitan attributes; the city as a layered terrain of aesthetic and socio-political interests; and the world as the hypostatized representational symbol for civilizational interactions and historical fluidity. 13  In “Philosophy, Literature, and the Critique of Spatialization,” Claudia Brodsky writes that the acknowledgement of the spatial is crucial for the Kantian subject to recognize his or her own self: “we can neither perceive nor imagine anything or, for that matter, nothing without conceiving the space to do ‘it’ in” (471). The article goes on to state that, for Kant, the relation between the self and the external world is mediated by the awareness of the self’s temporal existence, which in turn probes at the intersectionality of the personal and the public.

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In the subsection “Regions, Nations, and Formal (Dis)junctions,” chapters by David Sugarman, Jennifer Somie Kang and Aaron Deveson explore how the incomplete natures of places prevent their neat sublation into the larger category of the nation, determined both by the culturally circumspect borders of the region and the internationally controlled relations between literary styles. Reading Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) as a network of writings in multiple genres, bringing together prose and the lyric, Sugarman studies how language variously characterizes the American South and the American North as it follows the migratory routes of displaced African Americans in an ultimately truncated search for stability. Sugarman discusses the root metaphor in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and contends that linguistic representations of places do not always refer back to their physical counterparts in geography. The American soil of the “South,” taken as a whole, is characterized by the memory of violence, and yet the literary works produced in and of the region direct themselves toward a symbolic ripeness and fertility connected with the lives and faces of its women and men. The works in the second section of the novel, located in the American North and its symbolic barrenness, shift their representational interests from the landscape to architecture, while harboring the memory of lost connection to the land as a fundamental semiotic disruption: the failure of language to register and qualify the displacement of the individual and the loss of history. The uprooting of African American identities in Toomer’s text structures a narrative where the voices alternately succeed and fail in communicating their relations to themselves and to the distinct regions. Reading Cane in relation to Toomer’s essay, “The South in Literature,” the chapter forms its own ecosystem of observations by an African American writer who claims the national identity for himself by closely examining the dependence of the “Southern” language on the environment of the South. Against Joshua Schuster’s and Sonya Posmentier’s studies on the popularity of ecological tropes among African American writings, Sugarman posits distinct ways in which the American South and the North, taken as regional wholes, are both dislodged from and underpinned by the significatory processes of language. The next chapter addresses the Italian Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello’s motivations for switching the form of his novel Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904)

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to that of the play Liolà (1916). Arguing that Pirandello’s politicized use of the Sicilian dialect results in the defamiliarization of place, Jennifer Somie Kang points out that, though the play was written in Sicily, it was edited to make it appeal to a larger audience. The changes countered the expectations associated with regional theater, thereby making the play a reaction to rather than a commemoration of the particularities associated with place. Differently represented in the novel and the play, the province of Sicily is written as a rupture in the imaginary of the nation-state rather than collectivized into a continuous narrative of the nation. The revisions made to the play displace the region from its contemporary Christian present towards a more pagan past that does not tie in with the representations of Sicily within the form of the popular dialect theatre. Reading the form of the revised play alongside Antonio Gramsci’s statements in the Prison Notebooks (1926), Somie Kang examines this new “de-provincialism” as variously critiquing and responding to the idea of mapping a stable nation onto the legitimized bounds of regions. In the next chapter, Aaron Deveson reads the poetry of D. J. Enright as responding to and intervening in the cultural context of Japan of the 1950s. Japan as a nation is formally anatomized to reveal identities that are precariously held between international political reforms and indigenous cultural traditions. Formal changes effected by Enright are constitutive and critical of the liberal humanist project of organizing the world around the needs and aspirations of a universal individual; furthermore, the changes acknowledge the necessity of critiquing cultural conventions that are particular to places. References to the poetry of Philip Larkin and Kinsley Amis help characterize the ex-pat poetry written by Enright and unravel the limits of a cosmopolitanism that is distrustful of regional cultural markers and, as a result, of the stability of their borders. The chapter in its own words offers a “dialectically hopeful reading” to recognize irony in Enright’s poetry and its questioning of the hierarchies present within traditional Japanese settings. Studying the adaptations of the Japanese poetic forms the tanka and the haiku into Enright’s poetry, Deveson locates an interventionist poetic practice that transforms the significations attributed to specific Japanese cultural places, specifically the Japanese garden and the hostess bar, and to the female identities associated with those places. Reading the poetry alongside Saba Mahmood and Linda M. G. Zerilli’s criticisms of certain humanitarian programs as revised forms of imperialism, the chapter studies places constrained by both local traditions and international practices, refusing to be summed up in the

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homogenizing spatial imaginary of cosmopolitanism. Rather than drawing the indigenous poetic forms towards an Anglophone literary center, the poetry of Enright marks itself as a fluid space, populated by linguistically diversified identities; as a consequence of such formal practice, and open to the reimagining of the marginalized, the borders of the nation and the world are contingent on formal characterizations of seemingly niche cultural places. The final subsection, “Discursive Cities and Transitory Worlds,” contains three chapters that further the second section’s engagement with the ways in which language pluralizes the associations between linguistic referents and their geographical counterparts. Whereas the preceding section explores the region’s negations of its own tangible borders and its own contested inclusion within the nation, this section investigates the ways language itself resists reference to such places as the intimately inhabited hometown or the temporally conceptualized world. Iven L. Heister’s chapter on Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson (1983) connects the loss of father figures in Roth’s autobiographical novel with the dissociation of the author’s body from the geographic locales that enable the protagonist’s writing. The disintegration of social relations becomes coterminous with the shrinking place through which the writer can travel. This loss of navigable places in the novel becomes synonymous with the inability to write. Place is characterized as both allowing for linguistic practice and being constituted by the motivated use of writing. Heister offers his study of the form of the family romance in parallel with his discussion on the writings of Sigmund Freud: the layered theoretical approach commenting on the removal of the individual from the structure of the family, the dissociation of the self from body parts, and the failed commodification of the narrative as a circulatory artifact. Next, Allyson Ferrante studies the dialectic between the personal, individuated “history” of Caribbean identities and the homogeneous and singular narrative of a Eurocentric chronologization of the History of the world.14 Italo Calvino’s own life bears witness to the ways in which places 14  Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz’s A New Vocabulary (2016) argues explicitly against the chronologization of texts produced around the world against a primarily European standard of modernity. As Venkat Mani states in an essay in Hayot and Walkowitz’s collection: “historical chronology is productively interrupted by a renewed circulation of literary works” (Mani 143). Rethinking Place Through Literary Form eschews particularized historical timelines, studying individualized representations of places as mutually determining and sustaining the imaginary of the world.

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inform our personal histories, even if one is not personally anchored in those places. Introducing a comparativist study that examines the different regions of the Caribbean as reflected in works of criticism by Edouard Glissant and works of fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, the chapter presents the historically disputed boundaries of the region held between the intersections of literary and critical discourse. Ferrante identifies metaphors from the natural world, “lianas” and “spider webs,” that permeate the writings of both Glissant and Calvino to signify the organic layers of personal and political histories, finding expression in the language of both fiction and criticism. Such metaphors help loosen up several dichotomies: between land as self and land as resource and between indigeneity tied to the local landscape and citizenship connected to a uniform sense of the world. In addition, studying the formal style of Italo Calvino against that of Kincaid, Shani Mootoo, and Patricia Powell, the chapter reveals the ways the different narratives complement Glissant’s statements on the compositeness of the Caribbean region. The non-linear narrative style of Calvino’s writing is suggestive of the gaps that exist between personal and political histories. Reading the different voices from the Caribbean alongside each other allows the chapter to form its own web-like connections between plural identities, the landscapes they inhabit, and the specific ways in which they enter into identification with and travel outside the constructedness of the world. The final chapter in the collection reads the prose poems of Peter Riley in Excavations (2004) and Greek Passages (2009) and studies the poetic explorations of particular places to include observations on the spatial category of the world. The prose poem is read as bringing together disparate formal styles and re-arranging the divisions between the lyric and the non-­ lyric. Paying particular attention to Riley’s contributions to The English Intelligencer (1966–1968), a magazine shaped by the discourse across and over transatlantic routes, the chapter argues that the formal variations, the details of orthography, and the specific changes to margins and spacings contribute to a discontinuous and fragmented sense of history and, subsequently, to that of a temporally contingent characterization of the world. Questioning of the permanence of the world is shaped by the alertness with which the encounters of different histories are studied and represented in intertextual formal practices; in turn, the spatial extent of the world reflects the circulation of ideas between different geographies and an expansive concern about the distances dictated by economy. The poems, then, locate the variations in formal practice at the very nodes

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where the past and the present intersect—making the form of the prose poem directly responsive to prosaic factual records of historical determinations that emplace the individual, and to the lyrical meditations on the possibilities of exodus. Deflecting the transatlantic identity across plural utterances, differentially placed in history, the poems resonate with a particular sensitivity to the ways in which economy orders forms of lyric expression. Mapping their ideational pathways between the works of Douglas Oliver and Kelvin Corcoran, the poetic instances of engaging with the local place or the local poem invariably offer ways of circumventing the particular and moving towards a sense of the whole, incomplete and fragmentary in its very signification. Taken together, the chapters contained in Rethinking Place through Literary Form study formal changes in language that both transform the significations of locales and remove places from the representative confinements of cartography. The crises that result from defining places through commonly practiced formal styles and identities that are seemingly specific to the locales indicate a similar reciprocal failure in reading texts representative of intersecting histories and, in relation, geographical affinities. The conceptual transformations effected by language serve to de-map personal and political narratives that are fixed on to places, determining the ways in which texts are read and the relations that are preserved and perpetuated by such reading practices. Instead of being fixed on a map, sclerotic and unresponsive to the re-drawings effected by changing economy, places, as read in these chapters, are laterally mapped into a historical timeline unconstrained by linear chronologization of modernity and the marginalizations of places that it gives rise to. The range of formal modifications studied here in the collection rethink the intimacy and foreignness of places as mapped out in and through the familiarity of dialogic exchange, the ability to read across narrative gaps, and the adaptations of and re-­ morphings between different formal styles.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Ashcroft, Bill. Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2017. Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

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Bercovich, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1992. Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Brodsky, Claudia. In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent. Fordham UP, 2009. ———. “Philosophy, Literature, and the Critique of Spatialization.” PMLA 131.2 (2016): 469–479. Casey, Edward. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. Eggan, Taylor A. “Regionalizing the Planet: Horizon of the Introverted Novel at World Literature’s End.” PMLA 131.5 (2016): 1299–1313. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990). Ford, Arthur L. “The Rose-Gardens of the World: Near East Imagery in the Poetry of Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.1 (1987): 12–20. Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Gander, Forrest. Be With. New York: New Directions, 2018. Giles, Paul. Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and the Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics, 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Leonard, Philip. Literature After Globalization: Textuality, Technology and the Nation-State. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019. Majumdar, Swapan. Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions. Calcutta: Papyrus, 1987. Mani, Venkat. “Libraries.” A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism. Ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. 130–145. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Tally, Robert T., Jr. Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2019. ———. Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation and the World-­ System. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.

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Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Westphal, Bertrand. The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps. Translated by Amy D. Wells. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Wilson, Rob. “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar: The Trans-Americanization of Hawai’i.” American Literature 72.3 (2000): 521–552.

PART I

The Influence of Place on Form: Literary Form and the Displacement of Locales

CHAPTER 2

Othered Places and the Bengali Leftist Female Bildungsroman: Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur and the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday Nandini Dhar

On March 7, 1943, in an article entitled “Women of All Classes Unite to Solve Food Crisis and Demand Gandhiji’s Release,” People’s War, the organ of the undivided Communist Party of India, it was commented that the women of Bengal and Punjab, who had remained “backward” despite the “revolutionary activities of the men of Bengal and the Punjab,” were finally being politicized because of their “realization” that they were “facing utter destruction of family life itself” (12). The article followed a Party meeting in the Howrah district of Bengal, attended by 1500 women from “backward villages” (12). The essay described women’s political subjectivities as “backward,” precisely because they remained tied to the private space: the home, the domestic realm. Their presence in a specific kind of a public space—the Party’s political assembly—thus demanded inscription

N. Dhar (*) OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_2

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and theorization in the Party press. Yet even when they left that private space behind, women’s political subjectivities, the essay concludes, remained tied to domesticity. Domesticity, therefore, in the essay, remains that somewhat intangible category, named as the ubiquitous “family life,” that is essential to the understanding of women’s political subjectivities. In spite of its salient role in providing a reference point to the new, emergent identities of the Bengali women, beginning from nineteenth century, domesticity remained undertheorized and inaccessible to the political language of a World War II-era Marxist/Communist activism, pitted as it was within the genocidal famine of 1943, the everyday realities of imperial governance, and the general crisis-ridden global environment of World War II.1 This chapter focuses on the places generated within the Communist movement in Bengal in the 1940s that often facilitated the transgression of everyday domestic identities predominantly available to elite and middle-­class Bengali women during the years that led to the Independence of India. Domesticity, as many scholars remind us, is a crucial category in Bengali/Indian nationalism, whose hypervisibility lead political scientist and subaltern studies scholar Partha Chatterjee to write, “Anti-colonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains: the material and the spiritual” (217). The material, Chatterjee continues, is the sphere of the state, the economy, the science—the “public” as such. The spiritual remains the “inner” domain—the “private” sphere. Chatterjee concludes, “The colonial state, in other words, is kept out of the “inner” domain of national culture, but it is not as though this so-­ called spiritual domain is left unchanged” (217). There is a significant spatial metaphor at work in Chatterjee’s analysis, which draws our attention to the quotidian, material practices that transform the private sphere—the home, to be precise—into a “spiritual” and “sovereign” realm of the indigenous nationalisms. As a scholar, he is less interested in the 1  The Bengal Famine of 1943 lasted roughly for a year, from 1943 to 1944, during which approximately 2.1 to 3 million people died within the province of Bengal alone. Often described as a “man-made” famine, during which the colonial British government enabled the creation of a black market for grains, rather than an effective system of redistribution and relief, the Famine remains a traumatic event in Bengali history and culture. Much of the leftist cultural productions of the era centered on the famine in direct and indirect ways. For more detailed analyses of the famine, see Mukherjee and Davis.

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micro-­social minutiae of such processes than in the discursive framework wherein the private sphere is made into a central premise within Indian/ Bengali nationalism.2 In this chapter, on the other hand, the focus remains on the radicalized left political places—often interstitial, often in flux— that mark a shift from the interiority of the private sphere toward an ambiguous territory that offers greater spatial mobility and political expression for women. The essay from People’s War, for example, shows that the Communist rhetoric of the 1940s, in its effort to link the economy and the “destruction of the family life,” transformed the private sphere into a material space, thus debunking its purported “spiritual/cultural” status within mainstream nationalist thought. There is also an element in the latter which explicitly associates the private sphere—the “family life”—with the lives of women, thus feminizing it. The ideology of domesticity, like the more mainstream varieties of nationalism, thus comes to occupy an ambivalent and ambiguous quality in Communist thought, as often observed by scholars such as Ania Loomba. Loomba writes, “Communist self-­ fashioning did not take place in an ideological or social space of its own. Especially when it came to questions of gender and sexuality, communists were as deeply influenced by nationalist ideas and practices as they were by Marxist or revolutionary ones; indeed, the former provided the lens through which they viewed and appropriated later” (12). Domestic space, even when conjoined with larger political and economic imperatives, remains a mono-sexual realm, wherein women are seen as “naturally” tied to domesticity, their political subjectivities inspired only when the latter is threatened. Within contemporary popular narrative works written in Bengal, domesticity is explored within the significatory mapping of places that are occupied and frequented by women, whose lives rarely touch upon the political. Writing women’s political expressions, especially as historically articulated through the Communist Party, would therefore bring up a formal necessity to provide materialist analyses of such spaces, connecting them with the subjectivities that are generated within them. What this essay is particularly intent on exploring is the formal characterization of the political subject who intends to transcend the spatial boundaries of such domestic spaces, and the feminine subjectivities historically attached 2  For a scholarly account of such material ways in which women in nineteenth century Bengal grappled with new notions of home and domesticity, see Walsh.

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to them, without necessarily pathologizing the latter, during an era of global political and economic crisis, where the nation is yet to be born. The chapter keeps in mind the fact that the project of the Communist utopia was a global, internationalist project as such, thus invoking complicated and interesting re-conceptualizations of spaces, places and spatial practices, a fuller discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet, the Communist project had historically operated during an era before the diasporic and postcolonialist notion of the “transnational” and the remakings it organized, had come into either material or discursive existence. Consequently, many of the changes it engendered, within the material lives of the people it touched, remain inextricably local, tied to the specific configurations of power within a given place. Thus, without an understanding of Bengal’s feudal social and economic configurations, the specific form of colonial modernity and nationalisms in operation in Bengal, and its literary traditions, much of the gendered resistances documented in Sanyal’s novel, remain beyond the grasp of the reader, as the essay will show. Therefore, this essay also traces a pre-history of the “postcolonial feminisms”, through an exploration of the conflicted placement of a text, excluded from the accessible archives on feminism. Ambivalences in the Bengali and Indian Communist approach to domesticity have been well documented in leftist-communist women’s literary productions, spanning both autobiographies and fiction. Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur (A Seedling’s Tale), a little-known leftist-feminist novel published in 1956 stands out in its characterization of places complicit in the act of mediating identity of women across divisive and often, eruptive, social borders.3 A female bildungsroman that demonstrates that Bengali female Communist selfhood, in the years just prior to India’s 1947 independence, could only be formed through negotiations with the idea of domesticity as an ideology, the novel takes up the complicated and contradictory linkages between the ideology of domesticity and an upper-caste, upper-class female Communist personhood in 1940s Bengal. Such negotiations, the novel shows, involved the evolution of what I call a notion of “public domesticity:” a distinct discursive space that gave the Bengali women access to the public realm of left political radicalism. This chapter examines the extent to which such a discursive space is shaped by 3  These texts include, but are not limited to, such memoirs and autobiographies as Manikuntala Sen’s Shediner Katha, Chhobi Basu’s Phire Dekha and Reba Roychowdhury’s Jiboner Taanne, Shilper Taane, Sabitri Roy’s novels Swaralipi and Paaka Dhaaner Gaan.

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the material places that allow for these negotiations of identities and practices. This public domesticity can best be described as a state of being, an ideology, a descriptive category that is “of the home,” but not necessarily confined to the home, and can very well be transplanted into the places of public production, activism, operations of left political identities and organizations. In Nabankur, as in many of the other literary productions by leftist women of the time, such negotiations and practices were often spatial in nature, and linked specific ideological and political struggles with quotidian struggles over alternative places of belonging that were neither within the realm of the family nor that of the unmediated public. Nabankur shows how domesticity within the Communist movement functioned as an amorphous idea that was simultaneously rejected, embodied, and practiced—an exercise that had an immense effect on the sense of personhood of the women. Domestic ideology in Sanyal’s novel appears as a form of affective gendered belonging. Put simply, Nabankur demonstrates there are two different kinds of domesticities—a “bad domesticity” and a “good domesticity,” the former embodied in the relationships the young, rebellious protagonist shares with her family, and the latter in the relationships generated within the realms and spaces of the Communist Party structures. It is through her presence within the material places of the latter—the leftist organizing—that Chhobi, the protagonist, reinstates within them the values closely associated with the home and the homely, thus gendering the former in specific ways. What is of specific significance is the cultural translation of the discursive phenomena of domesticity in a novel whose embracing of the form of the bildungsroman is at odds with the other coming-of-age narratives written at the time within its own regional-­ linguistic orbit. Franco Moretti’s statement in Distant Reading about the need for expanding data on the literary production of a given period demonstrates in this case a productive dissonance in the form of the novel. In formally breaking ties with its immediate regional literary community, the novel opens up an interpretative field that stretches across the boundaries of place-bound linguistic traditions. Whereas Ania Loomba has argued that Nabankur “foregrounds her [Chhobi’s] battles within the fold of the family” while “de-centering” the female protagonist’s political struggles in the world outside (26), I argue that the politics of both the “home” and the “world” are inextricably interrelated in the novel. The word “home,” within postcolonial and

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transnational thought, almost always connotes a reference to one’s native place of belonging, one’s originary culture or nation. Concomitantly, the word “world” connotes migration, a move away from one’s originary place of belonging, including but not limited to the nation—which is the ultimate foundation of the diaspora. “Home,” in such discussions, often becomes a metaphorical space, rooted as it is, in certain assumed notions about the politics of domesticity. Relatively little attention has been paid to the material politics of the familial home—the place that situates domesticity—as the key unit of mundane dwelling, laboring, and belonging, which ultimately demands a much more complicated, intertwined discussion between “home as a site of quotidian dwelling” and “home as a site of abstract national-political belonging.” Nabankur demands a reorientation of the significances of both “home” and “world” within the area of postcolonial studies, foregrounding as it does the everyday politics of familial relationships, rooted within places associated with domesticity, but also possessing enormous consequences for the representation of the nation within the prevalent anti-colonial strands of thought. Reading the novel in the present, with transnational networks blurring the binary divisions between the home and the world and the private and the public, discloses forms of belonging as historical events: informed by the ways in which places are often constructed by specific interplay of social, economic and political forces, and bring together contrasting temporalities. In the language of social and cultural geographers, the female protagonist of Nabankur makes use of Communist Party spaces strategically, constructing and interpreting them as spaces that, while independent of her own personal struggles, are also interwoven with the latter. Such place-­ making activities were integral elements of activist women’s claims to the public, political spaces of the left, the novel shows. But they were also constituted by women’s everyday spatial practices and resistances, which attempted to determine in what terms women participated within these places, often understood to be almost exclusively male. Place-making thus operated as a significant element of a Communist woman’s political agency. Nabankur’s careful attention to the politics of such makings defamiliarizes the often-prevalent notion that the Communist subjectivity of the era was gender-neutral.

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The Methodological Problems Scholars have commented on how “much conventional historiography has ignored the role of women and even communist movement histories have blurred the distinctive attempts women members have made to create a gendered space for themselves by creating a discourse of class that is blind to patriarchy” (Marik81). Ania Loomba notes, “The significant contributions of communist activists have not been accorded appropriate space in accounts of Indian feminism” (24). Loomba astutely observes that scholars of the subcontinental radical past have often tended to avoid the crucial material, ideological, and discursive spaces of the Communist Party, focusing instead on individual non-party Marxists. She claims this is so “partly because of their [the Party’s]declining political fortunes in recent years and partly because they are associated with sorry narratives of political compromise as well as an unimaginative, and at times outright hostile, approach to questions of feminist agency and sexuality” (25). Indeed, many studies of modern South Asian literature have employed the theoretical lens of “postcolonial studies,” wherein little attention was paid to categories of class, class-based mobilizations, and the cultural productions they produced. Texts with close associations with organized communist politics remain especially understudied, precisely because they do not fit neatly into the paradigms of traditional studies of transnationalism, diaspora, or identity politics prevalent in institutional postcolonial studies. In its descriptions of places that figure in the intermediary spaces between a feudal patriarchy and imaginations of a social modernity brought about through the introduction of left-radical political beliefs, Sanyal’s novel thus rethinks the commonly-held significations around place in postcolonial and transnational studies. In the process, it rethinks the distances that exist between centers and marginalized places. There are certain problems that are attached to studying the cultural productions of the literary left in Bengal. If, for historians, studying the role of women in left movements in Bengal poses a problem of what Soma Marik terms as “double invisibility” (45), for literary scholars working on the literary productions of leftist women writers poses further archival challenges. How does one critique the literary outputs of those who often resisted the category of literary in favor of the political, choosing to publish their narratives exclusively in party journals and little magazines published by party members and sympathizers, many of which remain obscure and

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difficult to trace in official archives? Working on these texts is not a simple unilinear process of emphasizing the “vernacular” against the “Anglophone,” which has begun to gain some traction in recent years in US-based postcolonial studies. This is even more the case when the literary locates itself outside of the mainstream. For example, the absence of texts by Sabitri Roy and Gopal Haldar from Bengal’s otherwise quite extensive literary marketplace, in spite of a left government holding political power in the state of West Bengal for thirty-four years (1977–2011), reflects that a process of an increasing mainstreaming of a certain kind of the left, did not always result in ideological inclusion of these left-oriented texts. Prior to the newfound critical interest, Sanyal’s works, thus, were housed almost exclusively either with her family or in private collections of individual left-leaning readers, writers, and intellectuals. As such, women were often cast by the popular left-cultural imaginary as performers: the voice in the chorus, the untrained young middle-class woman who became a skilled dancer within the confines of left cultural movements, the skilled actress who delivered lines written by others on stage. The places that they navigated, in turn, were very decidedly within the public sphere. Without trivializing what these performances meant both for the women’s movements in India and leftist movements at large, the theoretical-literary imagination of the Indian/Bengali left has retained a default masculine image. This gendered nature is reflected in the paucity of critical discussions of the literary productions of the women on the left, an absence also apparent in academic literary criticism, where thorough analyses and studies of progressive women writers are rare. While a few writers, such as Ismat Chughtai, who wrote in Urdu, have received considerable attention within South Asian literary studies (see Jalil; Khanna; Arondekar; Gopal), more exhaustive studies of leftist women writers from the subcontinent still need to be undertaken. It is indeed challenging, therefore, in the context of such an absence, to map literary representations of geographical places in the writings of these women writers that offered freedom of movement to the female identities. Paula Rabinowitz discusses that the purported gender-neutral rhetoric of Communist and/or leftist personhood has often erased women’s specific experiences from the symbolic boundaries of discussions of Communist subjectivity. The rhetoric of what Rabinowitz terms the “gender-neutral subjectivity” of the left emerged from the utopian egalitarianism embodied in figures such as the “Communist,” the “socialist,” the “committed”

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artist, and so on.4 The figure of the “leftist” and/or “committed” writer was almost always associated with a masculine selfhood, even though discursive and political labor were undertaken to claim the former as a category that transcends gender. At the same time, the lived experiences of many men and women revealed that left organizations could not do away with gender, class, caste or other forms of inequalities within their everyday practices. These structures re-inscribed hierarchies between the sexes, even as serious efforts were made to resist them. For women writers who operated mostly inside the cultural spaces generated by the left, this impulse of overcoming the hierarchies while writing from within places determined by the sanctity of such power relations, often contributed to their erasure from both the left public sphere and the larger literary public. The most prominent leftist-feminist writer who continues to enjoy a celebrated status in literary circles of the Bengali left is Mahasweta Debi. That Mahasweta Debi could have literary predecessors did not often have a place in discussions about her, leading to a critical erasure of the complex history of Bengali leftist women’s cultural productions. Yet, Sanyal’s memory was kept alive—often in fragmentary forms—in feminist anthologies. I first encountered excerpts from Sanyal’s novel Nabankur in the pages of the anthology Women’s Writing in India, almost immediately after it was published. In 2007, a medium-sized publisher from Kolkata republished Nabankur, along with Sanyal’s multiple short stories, another novel, and three unfinished novels. Signaling Sanyal’s potential canonization, this republication provides an occasion to rethink the circulation of hitherto unrecognized leftist women’s texts both within activist sub-­ cultures as well as among the larger reading public. There is, then, a sub-­ text at work here. In foregrounding places that fall outside the territory of the familial home, and yet are not strictly within that of the most hegemonic spaces of the public sphere, the novel implicitly accounts for its own belonging at the margins of favored practices of reading and writing. The novel, thus, underlines the importance of “othered” places—places crucial for the participants as such, but existing outside of the realms of the society and state’s hegemonic spheres of influence. The “famine kitchen”, which occupies such a central role in the novel’s depiction of its protagonist’s burgeoning political subjectivity, is such an “othered” place.

4  For the second-wave’s problematization of Marxism, see Hartmann and Rubin. For overviews of the domestic labor debate within Marxist-Feminisms, see Oakley and Federici.

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Existing outside of the realm of the influence of family, mainstream political institutions such as the judiciary and parliament, economic institutions such as factories and offices, yet occupying a central place in the political imagination of the Communist activists of a certain era, the famine kitchen nonetheless also becomes a space of material sustenance for the impoverished peasants, thus transforming itself into a space where economic precarity can be redressed, to a certain extent. The latter half of this essay will pay more close attention to the “famine kitchen”, then, demonstrating that such “othered” places can indeed gain momentous dimension in women’s radical political expressions.

Locating Nabankur The plot of Nabankur is linear and episodic, documenting the life-story of Chhobi, the protagonist, as she grows up from an unkempt yet articulate little girl into a rebellious young woman. Its main characters typify the major socio-political developments of early twentieth-century Bengali history, spanning from the 1920s to the 1940s. Chhobi is born into a family of impoverished zamindars (rural landlords). One of her uncles is imprisoned by the British because he is a “revolutionary terrorist,” and when he leaves prison, he becomes a Communist. Chhobi receives her first political lessons from him and continues to do so until his death from tuberculosis. There are also her grandmothers, great-aunts, and aunts, who represent the generational evolution of feudal femininity and who lead claustrophobic, traumatic, and victimized lives. For a few years, Chhobi leaves the village with an aunt and her husband so that she can receive a proper education. Living in a nearby town with her aunt and uncle, Chhobi experiences the Gandhian form of the freedom struggle, witnesses urban poverty, and discovers that her aunt and uncle suffer from the trials and tribulations of an unhappy marriage. As the wartime crisis intensifies, Chhobi is sent back to the village, where she becomes absorbed in the relief efforts undertaken by the Communist Party of India. While living in the village, Chhobi refuses to be arm-twisted into an arranged marriage and eventually becomes an activist. She passes her school-leaving exam and leaves for Kolkata for higher education to join her brother, who is already there, training to be an artist. Written often in an episodic way, the novel also involves other themes– Chhobi’s persistent fights with her family-members, her developing romance with Tamal, another young activist, the ways in which wartime

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crises affect her family, the “condition” of the other women in the village, the peasant rebellions brewing in the background. Such episodes almost bleed seamlessly into the linear plot, offering a complicated picture of the landscapes of the social history of modern Bengal, spanning from 1920s to 1940s. In other words, within a seemingly simple narrative framework, the novel writes a complicated interlacing of both private and public spaces, juxtaposed as they are between a rural “periphery” and urban “centers” that are themselves spawned by colonial modernity. The novel sits uncomfortably within the oeuvre of non-leftist, more mainstream Bengali women’s writing. There is, for example, no obsessive narrativization of how the protagonist feels claustrophobic inside of the space of a home as was the case with most popular women’s fiction of the time. Take for instance, Pratibha Basu’s novel Moner Mayur (The Peacock of My Heart), published only two years before Nabankur in 1954. Basu’s novel was widely read during the time and centers around a young female protagonist, who also happens to be born in a decaying feudal family. Basu’s novel touches upon many things that were popular in the Bengali women’s domestic fiction of the time—a well-meaning but fumbling schoolteacher father who takes an interest in women’s education; a convoluted, villainous uncle, who casts himself as the custodian of “traditional” morality within the family; a transgressive inter-caste love; elopement of the protagonist with her lover; the protagonist’s being forcefully brought back home; and her ultimate marriage to the same lover with the consent of the family, when the lover comes back after many years as a successful entrepreneur. In very specific ways, Basu’s novel, too, becomes a documentation of a new Bengali middle-class womanhood, and the complicated web of desires and aspirations that such a subjectivity is often accompanied by. In Basu’s novel, the fulcrum of such desires and aspirations rests primarily on the inter-caste romance, and then on the marriage itself. Crucially, the novel draws upon a notion of transgressive, new educated femininity, which must be enacted within the novel through transgressive love, which changes her relationship to her natal family and home, eventually making her leave the latter. In this act of leaving, there is a mediated work of rendering the home unhomely—unable to accommodate the women’s desires. Yet, this leaving of home, tied ultimately to the protagonist’s quest for a companionate marriage, as against the arranged marriage organized by her family, also accomplishes the crucial work of tying sexuality and domesticity together within the boundaries of the novel. The protagonist,

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after all, leaves home so that she can reinstitute herself within the spaces of a new and better home, attained through her inter-caste (and inter-class) marriage. Dreams of a better domesticity form the center of Basu’s novel, which get thwarted by the actions of the villainous uncle, and a spineless father who can never stand up to his slimy, conniving brother. Sanyal intervenes within the field of Bengali women’s domestic fiction through two interrelated strategies. First, she moves away from the trope of the suffering, violated female protagonist, who is ultimately rescued by a male lover and marital heteronormativity. Second, instead of narrativizing the domestic claustrophobia of the female protagonist, as was the norm in such fiction, she writes obsessively of the moments of Chhobi’s leaving, none of which are tied to romantic love or marriage. The space of the nuclear family is critiqued in the novel in the form of Chhobi witnessing her aunt and uncle’s unhappy marriage. In other words, like most domestic fiction written by women of her time, Sanyal turns the “home,” that crucial category of Bengali nationalism, into a concrete, material space characterized by numerous everyday cultural practices and labor. Yet, unlike such domestic fiction, she does so, with an eye towards a radical critique of home-based domesticity, rather than through an ultimate valorization of the latter, as is often embodied in the search of the female protagonist’s search for the “perfect” domesticity in such fiction. It would be incorrect to state that Nabankur is devoid of representations of women feeling claustrophobic within domestic spaces. Rather, Chhobi observes and critically reflects on the impact of this claustrophobia on the women around her, creating a spatial and ideological distance between herself and the kind of domestic subjectivity that creates such distress. However, unlike the conventional female bildungsroman’s writing of the marriage as the ultimate climax of the female protagonist’s journey (see Fraiman; Lazzaro-Weis; and Abel, Hirsch, and Langland), Chhobi’s quest centers on something much more nebulous and abstract: a political selfhood. It is upon this seemingly abstract site that the novel predicates its feminist politics, charting the making of the female Communist selfhood in terms of quotidian material political practices.

Critical Domestic Geography and the Crumbling Feudal Home In its efforts to write a critical geography of Chhobi’s ancestral home, Nabankur depicts the feudal household as a site of affect that is simultaneously political and personal. The home is represented as a conglomeration

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of broken structures, literally on the verge of collapse. It inspires complicated emotions in Chhobi: “A kind of shiver ran down her spine whenever she peeped through the broken panes of those derelict rooms and saw the huge wooden chest, the clotheshorse hanging by thick ropes from the rafters, the termite-eaten stools, the heaps of rubble all over the floor and the rusty lock hanging on the door” (4). As she would watch this dilapidated structure, Chhobi would think to herself, “Thakuma said the house was a hundred years old. How could such an old house survive? Surely the whole house would come crashing down one day. Not just one or two bricks here and there, but all of it, at one go. Then only a few broken bricks would remain, scattered around the spot, like that kuthibari over there” (5). The ancestral home remains an important element of Chhobi’s own spatial, political and emotional landscape. It is precisely in observing this haphazard conglomeration of objects and structures on the edge of ruin, barely held together by what French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau calls “spatial practices” (91–93)—everyday practices through which material places are translated into language, representation, and ideology—that Chhobi learns to “read” meaning into what is seemingly a neutral entity. These readings transform the home into an unhomely entity: an uncomfortable and uncanny assemblage of broken structures and objects. This place of fragmented interiority, experienced as a disorienting assemblage, disrupts and disturbs the consciousness. What was supposed to house nationalism’s much-mythologized “inner” and “spiritual” realm is a pile of wreckage—a broken allegory, so to say—so quotidian and mundane that nobody even thinks to clean it up. Chhobi is thus displaced from the very locale that promises to preserve her identity, and a search for her own subjectivity, must necessarily take her away from this structural dereliction. By presenting this assemblage of ruins through Chhobi’s eyes, the novel, in turn, critiques a decaying Bengali feudalism as well as nationalism’s failure to generate a gender politics beyond feudal nostalgia. In addition, the novel underlines how the feudal, zamindari household forms a spatial fulcrum in Bengali literature in general, where movement beyond its boundaries signals a grappling of nationalism’s complicated materialities and legalities, however askew they maybe. Most notable is Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Ghare-Baire (Home and the World), where one of the protagonists, Bimala, leaves the threshold of the ontohpur (the domestic sphere), prodded by her liberal husband Nikhilesh, who is himself a zamindar. Homi Bhabha, in an essay whose title plays with that

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of Tagore’s novel, “The World and the Home,” states that the defamiliarizing representation of houses in postcolonial fiction often symbolizes the dislocation of the self from itself. As Sanyal’s novel shows, literary form records the uncanniness of places even before the postcolonial self is politically legitimized, through the acquisition of the spatial structure of the nation. The form can no longer contain and constitute the structure of the house, as the latter itself is turned inside out, rebuilt with the emotions of the subject: “It is not simply what the house of fiction contains or ‘controls’ as content. What is just as important is the metaphoricity of the houses […]” (147). The realization of an “unhomely stirring,” therefore, becomes a central trope in the novel, alienating the protagonist from the borders of a supposedly intimate place, while transforming the novel itself into an unfamiliar entity, whose entry into the space of popular regional literary production can never be smooth (147). Nabankur records a double crisis of domesticity: that of a Bengali, rural landowning feudalism that colonial capitalism has rendered unviable and that of a nationalism unable to reach beyond a modernized semi-­feudalism. Neither can grant autonomous political subjectivity to Chhobi. It is through this double crisis that a left-Communist possibility is hinted at in the novel. That possibility, abstract as it is, is what constitutes Chhobi’s present. Cultural theorist of space Edward Soja writes, “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideologies” (6). In Nabankur, women experience the home not as the idealized and romanticized “inner” realm of Bengali/Indian nationalism, but as a space of compulsory belonging. Taken as the primary place of shelter for the women, the home comes to be associated with memories of intense violence and violation. Through such representation, the novel critiques the gendered assumptions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali nationalist rhetoric; the microcosm of the home no longer holds the center around which the anti-colonial politics of the region could be framed. The novel identifies domesticity as violence, removing home from the traditional qualities of being a haven or sanctuary. In doing so, it offers a close and moving account of the position of the region within the large-scale integrative, yet homogenizing nationalistic movement. In defamiliarizing the home, Sanyal makes the discursive space of belonging into an active and dynamic entity. As feminist cultural

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geographer Doreen Massey comments, “Space is not absolute, it is relational” (152), thus implicating the former in an integral relationship to time. Chhobi’s present is constituted by what happens inside the crumbling mansion: the stifled cries of the aunt who is beaten by her husband every day; the gossip about that aunt’s fate the next morning between her mother, other aunts, and her grandmother; and her grandmother’s retort that “[m]en are always a bit like that, it is only natural” (5). Thus, for Chhobi, the present enactment of her gendered identity is tied to memories of domestic violence, and their corresponding brutalized realms of self-censure, internalized patriarchy and diminutive subjectivities. Domesticity is also the quantifiable labor that women perform inside their homes, as is evident in the regimes of work Chhobi’s mother performs in the kitchen, which makes it impossible for her children to have emotional access to her during the day. As Sanyal writes, “Ma hardly spoke all day long, she was so busy. She would be getting up any time now, to go to the ghat for a bath, then into the kitchen. They wouldn’t see her again until late at night. She went to bed very late” (3). The kitchen as the place of labor, specifically culinary labor, dominates the women’s domestic calendar, making their experience of time solely subject to their ability to navigate, and remain bound to, enclosed surroundings that correspond to enclosed routines of labor, described effectively as “drudgery” in much of activist Marxist literature (see Zetkin). Domesticity also becomes tangible in the marks it leaves on women’s bodies: Chhobi’s mother’s darkening skin; the rows of red heat rashes on her back, accrued from spending too much time inside a tiny kitchen; the scars on her grandmother’s feet, acquired from hot rice-pots spilling on her feet when she was barely a young bride of nine; and the headaches her great-aunts and aunts suffer from. Almost all of the women’s bodies, then, are as broken as the house where Chhobi lives. Additionally, domesticity is constituted in the unquantifiable pain of being confined to the restricted world of the feudal home, causing women and girls to lead shrunken emotional-­intellectual lives, leaving them incapable of thinking of themselves as independent subjects. There are innumerable examples of such material, spiritual, and intellectual shrinkage throughout the novel: girls’ educations cut short, forced marriages, bad marriages, and the nameless, inchoate discontent internalized and normalized by the women themselves. To be a woman, the novel shows, irrespective of class, is to lead a damaged existence inside the locus of

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the home that has been discursively repurposed within the narrative of national liberation. In many ways, then, the contrived introduction of the place of home within nationalist discourse leaves the material realities of women’s identities unnoticed and invisible. In such a context, Nabankur becomes an instance of a dissenting literary form performing a rehabilitative function, presenting women’s lives as often traumatizing, yet multi-layered and forever evolving—situated as they are within the cross-currents of larger social-structural forces—distinctly different from any politics of aestheticized and romanticized gendered allegories. Consequently, Sanyal’s novel presents both—the damages and the discontents of domesticity, tied to each other through an unavoidable dialectic. Thus, in response to such damaged experiences of domesticity, listed above, Sanyal highlights Chhobi’s life-journey—as a crowding of multiple moments of exit from the place of home. One such key locale of exit, which plays an enormously formative role in Chhobi’s developing political subjectivity, as I have mentioned before, is the relief-kitchen organized by the frontal organizations of the Communist Party.

“Ghastly Spectacle” of the Famine: Contextualizing the Relief-Kitchen During the 1943 Bengal famine, the Communist Party undertook a campaign to open relief kitchens, led mostly by middle-class women activists, who worked under the aegis of Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (see Hore). Peasant women were also encouraged to agitate against exorbitant rice prices and for fair-price ration shops. Such actions led to the opening of sixteen fair price shops. Ania Loomba writes, “It was out of such political efforts that communist women had the idea of setting up a women’s organization that would not be limited to educated or rich women, as was the case with the All India Women’s Congress, the first major women’s organization in India in which communist women also worked. Hence the Mahila AtmaRakshaSamiti (MARS) was born” (202). Through a writing of Chhobi’s participation within this politicized place, Nabankur documents the everyday realities and materialities of the places that MARS built, the relief kitchen being the most prominent example. The novel shows how the Party-led relief kitchen becomes a political place wherein differently classed bodies experience personal frictions, friendships,

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solidarities, and intimacies. Within the context of the social geography of the famine, the relief-kitchen performs the task of bringing together people from distinct classes, engendering a fertile cross-pollination of politicized social identities that contrasts with the drought-time barrenness of the surrounding landscape. Thus, this very “othered” place becomes the focalizing point through which a sense of both regional and a distinctly political-ideological community is built, separate from that within the larger narrative of a nation moving towards a political process of carving out its transfer of power—the crucial political Independence. The “ghastly spectacle” of the famine comes suddenly to Chhobi one afternoon. As soon as she sits down for lunch with her mother and aunt, a crowd of famished peasants gathers in the family courtyard begging for rice gruel (phaan). Chhobi, unable to eat, think, or read afterwards, holds back her tears and leaves the threshold of the household. Sanyal writes this moment of departure employing spatial metaphors, which become implicated within Chhobi’s nascent understanding of class inequalities and class politics. In her quest to find the Communist activists of the village, whom she already knows through her uncle and thinks will be able to provide her with solutions, she has to “walk through the village in full view of the people in order to get to them, and that she would not be allowed to do” (192). Inevitably, her desire for a political resolution clashes with the spatial restrictions of her life at home. When she walks out of the home, “through the mango grove, beyond the pond” onto the open fields stretching to the horizon, Chhobi creates her own transgressive geography5 that uncannily intersects with the landscape of the famine. She sees dry and cracked fields, over which “crawled hordes of humans. They moved about, ducking their heads, now up, now down. Were they searching for something? […] Then she realized what those people were doing. They were scrounging the banks for roots and leaves” (192). It is transgressive precisely because the affective, totalizing landscape of famine intersects with the particularized emotional framework of gendered discontent over domestic confinement. Chhobi’s movement outside of the domestic threshold towards the relief-kitchen suggests that political exchange 5  Following cultural geographers like Timothy Creswell, I define the term “transgressive geography” as the creation of an alternative sense of spatiality that enables acts of moving beyond what Creswell terms “normative geography,” those spaces and places that maintain and reinforce relations of power; “transgressive geographies” are ultimately related to questioning power and attempt to move beyond specific constellations of power within a given context (pp. 9–10).

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between classed communities can only be occasioned by a deliberate positioning of the privileged, elite self within marginal, “othered” places, accompanied, often times, by a violent tearing away of oneself from spaces deemed socially fit and “normal” for one to belong to. In other words, the novel becomes an unabashed celebration of one’s out-of-place-ness. The form of the novel is conscientiously shaped by this willingness to forego boundaries and places that have been constituted through the socially normative ideals of both class and femininity. At the same time, the novel problematizes Chhobi’s own locatedness within a political movement that was led largely by the men. Tamal, one of the young Communist organizers, arrives along with a procession of peasants to inform Chhobi that they are going to the administrative office to demand a relief kitchen. He recognizes that Chhobi will be punished by her family for leaving the boundaries of her home and asks her to deliver a message to her uncle that “we’ve been able to rally most of the villagers for the march” (194). Significantly, he does not invite her to join the march: “Chhobi nodded but remained where she was, still looking at the marchers moving on. No one had asked her to join in—all she was good for was carrying messages” (194). This moment is one of the constitutive moments in the novel, wherein Chhobi attempts to create her own transgressive geography by refusing to adhere to the domestic spatial organization of the feudal patriarchal family, but also by foregrounding the incapacity of the male Communist organizers to make discussions and transgressions of that gendered domestic geography an integral element of their politics. Tamal sympathizes with Chhobi’s predicament of not being allowed to join the march but does not know how to devise a plan enabling her to bypass or confront her family. Neither does he inspire her to do so. When Chhobi does join the rally, she creates a notion of spatial belonging for herself, which does not depend upon the approval of the Party’s male leadership. This is the moment that gives birth to an evolving gendered Communist subjectivity, within which class and gender interact in complex and complementary ways. But there is also an excess in the spatiality Chhobi creates for herself, an excess that cannot be accommodated within the Party’s male leadership’s understanding of the roles assigned to women in the movement. This is especially evident in her discontent in the role assigned to her as a mere messenger, which remains, until this very moment, the role commonly assigned to women within the militant resistance movements. In putting domesticity and its

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commonly associated places under the critical lens, the novel provides alternative histories of Bengal’s long and complicated traditions of left movements, and their complicated interfaces with nationalist thought, of course. The ambivalent discursive space of the erstwhile lost and ignored text that Nabankur has occupied for a long time within the canon of Bengali literature, and continues to do so, even now, corresponds to the politically crucial, yet, ironically, trivialized roles women have undertaken within these “othered” places that worked towards bringing about key social transformation. The true significance of Chhobi’s fluidity of movement is revealed when she walks back home to find her father waiting for her with a cane in his hand: When she had joined the procession in the morning, shouting slogans, she had noticed the startled looks of the spectators and the women whispering to one another, but the possible consequences of her actions hadn’t even occurred to her. But now, seeing her father and grandfather waiting there, boiling with rage, unbathed and unfed still, it struck her suddenly like a hammer in her heart, that she must have done something quite extraordinary indeed. (195)

The “extraordinary” thing that Chhobi has accomplished is to break through the notion of familial honor or izzat, which remains tied to both class and gender and is predicated upon a naturalized, spatial association between femininity and compulsory domesticity. There is, then, an essential political subtext in Sanyal’s writing of Chhobi and her transgressions. For a woman of a feudal family, she must engage with class as a category to claim her liberation as a woman. By underlining how she places herself within the ongoing demands of the class struggle, the novel ultimately claims, the act of building and locating the self, cannot be a purely private act. Especially in the context of the 1940s Bengal, the act of self-building and self-placement for a woman intent on political expression, must also align itself with the often competing demands of the colonial state and its program of social reforms, the more mainstream variety of nationalist organizations and the spaces of the left radical activism. As Chhobi finds refuge within the places created expressly by the Communist Party, the form of the Bengali female bildungsroman of the era is transformed and diversified by interrogating, and ultimately upturning the existing dynamics between the public and private spheres.

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The Relief Kitchen: Locus of Chhobi’s Political Labor The relief kitchen is more than just a place where food is served to the famished. An old and derelict house at the edge of the village has been cleaned up for the purpose, and within that house, two rooms are used as a hospital, one as a classroom, one as a political workshop for villagers, and only one as a kitchen. The labor of place-making that happens in the relief kitchens is undertaken primarily by women activists like Chhobi, and consists of cooking the gruel for the famished, organizing them politically, and nursing the ailing. The activist labor of the relief kitchen thus involves forms of affective labor that are inextricably linked to building up places that can serve both as loci of political mobilization and material refuge for famine-affected peasants. Tamal notes the work of cooking the gruel in the relief kitchen in huge clay ovens has made Chhobi’s eyes excessively red. Chhobi herself notes the pain in her eyes makes it impossible for her to sleep for many successive nights. In other words, if the labor in her family’s kitchen has transformed the bodies of Chhobi’s mother and aunts, the culinary labor in the Party’s relief kitchen transforms Chhobi’s body in a similar fashion. The Party’s relief kitchen does not so much transform the nature of the labor for women, as transport feminized domestic labor into the public sphere, thus giving birth to what I would call an unstable cult of leftactivist “public domesticity,” which interpellates class and gender in complicated ways. To the impoverished peasants who come to the relief kitchen for food, this space signifies more than just food. “They all came to the relief kitchen,” Chhobi observes, “as though it was an island in the midst of floods. They sat down to eat there every day, leaving a part of themselves back home. It was as though they had torn their hearts out and left them there, under the sagging roofs, the broken walls and in the dark corners of their huts with lamps unlit for want of oil”(201). The famine arrives in the peasants’ life as a form of negation of their sense of place. The relief kitchen, on the other hand, enables a relative recuperation of that negated sense of place. The work that Chhobi and the other women activists perform here is “restless” emotional labor.

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It is “restless” because, as Chhobi recognizes, the relief kitchen is acutely inadequate in face of the enormity of the famine, or her own problems, and even as she keeps doing the work, she is not sure what it will yield for herself. Yet she keeps doing it because of the urgency of the catastrophe. “She did not have,” the narrative tells us, “the time to think of all that these days” (201). In other words, Chhobi’s own struggle for individuality pales next to the enormity of the famine and the need to keep the kitchen going. By meticulously documenting Chhobi’s work in the relief kitchen, the novel directs our attention to the fact that the same work that had earlier seemed to Chhobi as the kind that dwarfs women, becomes radical political work within the spaces of the relief kitchen. As Tamal remarks to Chhobi, “Now why this sudden love for the kitchen?”(203). Uttered as a joke, Tamal’s retort, nonetheless, reverberates as a larger political subtext for the left politics of the era. Historically, this was the moment the kitchen emerged as an important trope in the Party’s rhetoric. A 1943 article published in the Party organ, People’s War, states, “Just as ‘National Crisis is a crisis in the Kitchen,’ so is National unity yet in embryo, a unity in and for the Kitchen” (13). The family becomes a political trope, whose destruction is imminent due to the wartime food crisis. The kitchen—that crucial site of domestic food production—becomes the place where the destruction materializes. In contrast to nationalist politics, which represents the home as an abstract, idyllic space, the home within this discourse emerges as a material space, with the kitchen as the site of intersecting practices of sustenance and domestic labor. Yet there is also a larger political issue the article invokes: the political unity of the warring “nationalist” political organizations such as Congress, the Muslim League, and other stakeholders. Ania Loomba comments, “Here ‘Kitchen’ does not refer to a space within the home but rather, the food committees, the political actions for food, and the public kitchens in which starving people were fed” (203). While the kitchen in this article has been de-privatized, and thus politicized, its public politics is interpreted in terms of a simultaneous “national crisis” and “national unity”—a political rhetoric which betrays an uncanny affinity with the nationalist politics of familializing the nation and nationalizing the family. This ambivalence between “crisis” and “unity”—both predicated upon the abstract body of the nation—also renders invisible women’s culinary labor within the privatized kitchen of the home and the public relief kitchens of the food committees. While Nabankur implicitly critiques such Party theorizations by making women’s labor within both spaces visible,

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an overt critique of the gender politics of such “public domesticity” remains absent. Part of this absence can be attributed to the fact that the relief kitchens—the space where public domesticity is predominantly housed and performed—confront the more traditional notions of family and domesticity in crucial ways. As the police officer points out to Tamal, “And how about her? I am referring to Miss Ray. She comes from such a prestigious family. Is it wise for her to go about the villages?” (201). There is a collusion between the colonial state and the family here, a collusion founded on the intersection of classed authority, respectability, and gendered honor, which is, in turn, predicated on the naturalized and compulsive association of femininity and domestic space. Consider the scene where Chhobi’s grandfather comes to the relief kitchen to take her back home: Suddenly, in the midst of that silence a very unpleasant thing happened. Dakshinaranjan himself came to take Chhobi home. Ray Karta’s servant, Manik, had brought him over in their boat. Dakshina carried a thin whip in his hand, but he said in a quiet voice, “Come home with me. You’ve had enough fussing with these riffraff. No more. Show me other respectable woman who comes here the way you do!” “So what if no one else comes to the kitchen? Does that mean I can’t either?”Chhobi replied. “Women should not get involved in all this. Besides, you must think of your family honour. This is unheard of in our family. All this nonsense may be all right in the towns.” “I was studying in the town, but you didn’t allow me to continue.” Dakshinaranjan had planned to take Chhobi home by treating her gently. He didn’t want to lose his temper and make an angry scene, so he had first taken Chhobi aside, and begun speaking to her in a low tone. But now his patience was running out, and anger crept into his voice, “A woman’s work is to tend the household, she has no business with scholarship, nor with politics. Do you know what a bad name our family has got because of you? Do you realize how this might affect your father’s business?” Chhobi knew all this—so she kept quiet. Dakshina said, “Aren’t you coming?” Suddenly Chhobi decided to speak up, “No, I am not going. I still have a lot of work to do.” (204)

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When Dashinaranjan walks into the relief kitchen to take his granddaughter Chhobi back home, the sub-text of the confrontation is class, something named obliquely through the term “riff-raff.” Class, much like the police officer’s retort, is a category that exists in intersection with ideologies of ideal feudal rurality, respectability, familial honor, and femininity. Sexuality, like class, is only hinted at, never enunciated. The fact that, in the relief kitchen, Chhobi cooks (a job that often has been associated intricately with femininity), does not take away the edge from the paradigm of honor advanced by the police officer and her grandfather. For Chhobi’s grandfather, the public spaces of the left movement are dangerous precisely because they facilitate a form of cross-class intimacy beyond the classed interactions of the master-servant relationship of a feudal household. He expresses the dominant view of the contemporary society of the time, which often dubbed Communist women “licentious” or “sexually promiscuous.” As Loomba writes, “It is easy to overlook the hostility or sheer incomprehension communist women encountered in the 1940s and 1950s. When they went out trying to recruit middle-class women, they were told, ‘This is a respectable family. Our women won’t talk to you’” (133). Loomba continues, “Although communist women shared many of the culturally dominant notions about appropriate modes of gendered behavior, they also fought hard to dismantle such attitudes and to carve out a new political space for themselves and other women” (133). In Nabankur, the relief-kitchen is the fulcrum of Chhobi’s efforts in political place-making. Her refusal to accompany her grandfather becomes a key moment in this effort. The “public domesticity” espoused by the Party, steeped as it was in bringing women’s domestic roles onto the public, provided strategic material and discursive space from which to construct this transgressive geography. By participating in this public domesticity, Chhobi constructed her own version of a disobedient femininity, predicated critically upon a radical disavowal of and distancing from traditional domesticity. Place-making labor and disobedient femininity are thus inextricably linked to each other. Such linkages are signaled in the novel’s structuring of the relief-kitchen episodes as almost seamlessly leading from Chhobi’s life before them and bleeding into Chhobi’s life after them. In doing so, the

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novel establishes their centrality in enabling Chhobi’s break from both the spatial and affective-intellectual limits of traditional domesticity. This defiance of traditional domesticity comes with its own challenges. For example, Chhobi’s political work involves a cost for her family. Because of her political convictions, her father’s business suffers. Chhobi is uncomfortably aware of this reality, yet she refuses to quit her political activism. Chhobi’s self-fashioning is a form of political ethicalism that prioritizes something other than the self-interest—financial or otherwise—of her biological family. This prioritization is, of course, an attempt to break free of the normalized identification of women with family. But there is also a yearning for a political, ethical subjectivity that transcends gendered familialism, while acknowledging its structural importance in women’s lives. This complex yearning, I argue, is what the novel names as a female Communist subjectivity. Soma Marik points out that one of the challenges of working on the gender politics of the 1940s Bengali left is the fact that for many political autobiographies and accounts, even those written by women, “so-called personal issues were filtered out and patriarchy entirely subsumed under feudalism” (81). Nabankur avoids this precisely because the form of the novel demands an employment of the language of the personal and individual, brought into being by the regimes of liberal capital. For example, in the confrontation between Chhobi and her grandfather, Dakshinaranjan’s views represent an “old world” feudal certainty that encompasses familial relationships, gender, class, and political history. By contrast, Chhobi does not provide any full-blown arguments. Instead, her utterances are fragmented and brief and her tone accusatory, couched in questions and absolute rejections. Yet, what is noteworthy, is that, as against her grandfather’s feudal collectivism, Chhobi codes such brief responses often in the language of liberal individualism, thus opening up a space for a much complicated discussion of the dialectical relationship between collectivism, individualism, and Communist selfhood. At the same time, by and large, while rejecting her grandfather’s demands, Chhobi’s response embodies the symbolic silences of a subjectivity in flux, in the process of finding a form for itself yet unable to lay out a completely enunciated narrative. In contrast to her grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins, and friends, Chhobi—the “seedling” of the novel’s title—creates a new femininity that can only find expression in the left movement of the time. This new femininity does not yet have a definitive form or its own language. It knows how to ask questions, but the answers

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to its own questions remain unformed. The space Chhobi inhabits is that of a utopian possibility yet to be realized. Bengal’s colonial modernity, as many scholars have shown, restructured the feudal model of womanhood. Often described as the bhadramahila (genteel lady) and nabina (the new woman), this new womanhood enshrined the bourgeois ideals of femininity. Often defined against prachina (the old woman), the figure of the bhadramahila has been a contentious one in nationalist discourse. Consequently, many of the conversations within the twentieth-century Bengali literary public sphere, as well as academic studies that have focused on the gendered formation of nationalism in Bengal, have been preoccupied with the binary oppositions between “prachina” and “nabina” (see Chowdhury; Sarkar; and Sarkar and Sarkar). Nabankur debunks such a dichotomy and suggests a womanhood that cannot be reduced to that of theprachina or the bhadramahila. As Marik reminds us, “the women in Bengal made an effort to break out of their bhadramahila roles. The way in which these women participated in the CPI and in mass activism broke most bhadralok codes of conduct for women. […] For the communist women, the family ceased to be the sole or even the necessary site within which their political work could be structured”(115). Nabankur dramatizes that process. In doing so, the novel registers the double burden of the self-fashioning of the Communist women of the era: the tension between the search for one’s own dignity as a woman and one’s political work toward a broader liberatory agenda. Establishing personal dignity as a woman requires impressing upon one’s social world one’s identity as an individual, whereas left political work requires a conscious relinquishment of one’s status as an individual. For Chhobi, the relief kitchen is the space where these two contradictory political impulses temporarily converge. As a result, the relief kitchen engenders a new form of femininity and becomes the material counterpart of a nation-space whose significances for the radical gender movements of India and Bengal have yet to be fully grappled with.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, 1983. Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Basu, Chabi. PhireDekha: EktiJibonerKichhuChitra. Calcutta: Stree, 2004.

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“Bengal’s Women Organize Atma Raksha Samitis.” People’s War. 23 May 1943. Basu, Pratibha. Moner Mayur. Kolkata: Navana, 1952 Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home.” Social Text, No. 31/32, ‘Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992),’ pp. 141–153. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?” In Mapping the Nation. Edited by Gopal Balakrishnan. London: Verso, 2012. Chowdhury, Indira. The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Creswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2017. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: PM Press, 2012. Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Woman: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University, 1994. Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. New York: Routledge, 2005. Hartmann, Heidi. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Ed. Carole McCann and Seung-Kyung Kin. New  York: Routledge, 2013. Hore, Bratati. Women’s Participation in Communist Frontal Movements: A Case Study of Bengal, 1942–1947. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Jadavpur University, 2003. Jalil, Rakshanda, ed. An Uncivil Woman: Writings on IsmatChughtai. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017. Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol. “The Female ‘Bildungsroman’: Calling It into Question.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990: 16–34. Loomba, Ania. Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India. London: Routledge, 2018. Marik, Soma. “Breaking Through a Double Invisibility: The Communist Women of Bengal, 1939–1948.” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013: 79–118. Massey, Doreen. “Politics and Space/Time.” In Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013 Mukherjee, Janam. Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. New Delhi: Harper India, 2015.

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Oakley, Ann. The Sociology of Housework. London: Policy Press, 2018. Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991. Roy, Sabitri. Swaralipi. Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1952. ———. PakaDhanerGaan. Calcutta: Mitralaya, 1958. Roychoudhury, Reba. JibanerTaane, ShilperTaane. Calcutta: Thema, 1999. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Sanyal, Sulekha. Nabankur.In SulekhaSanyalRochonasamagra, ProthomKhondo. Kolkata: Katharup, 2008. Sarkar, Tanika. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2003. Sarkar, Sumit, and Tanika Sarkar, eds. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Sen, Manikuntala. Shediner Katha. Calcutta: NabapatraPrakasan, 1983. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1989. Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. New Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2005. Tharu, Susie J., and K.  Lalita, eds. Women’s Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. Vols. I–II. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Walsh, Judith. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. “Women of All Classes Unite to Solve Food Crisis and Demand Gandhiji’s Release.” People’s War. 7 March 1943. Zetkin, Klara. “From My Memorandum Book.” In My Recollections of Lenin. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1956. 53–86.

CHAPTER 3

Island of Words: The De-Realization of Place in the Writings of George Mackay Brown Nigel Wheale

Orkney is an archipelago of seventy scattered islands and islets, of which the largest is Mainland, inhabited by approximately 22,000 souls, only an hour’s sailing from the northern Scottish coast, but it has a very distinct character. Orcadians have always been concerned to establish their own, independent identity. There is an endless appetite across the islands for “Orkney books,” and the history of the archipelago has been minutely explored, recorded. “Brand Orkney” is the latest version of the islands’ self-definition, now ruthlessly promoted to capitalize on contemporary mass tourism. This chapter explores interactions between language and writing, place and identity, within the landscape of the islands, and examines how geographical place determines the ways in which literary form resituates identity within the ties of metaphor, beyond the geographical boundaries of the place. Reading the “Orkney books,” even for the residents of the islands, becomes more of an act of self-dislocation rather than a re- situation within the landscape.

N. Wheale (*) Independent Scholar, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_3

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Across the world, we de-realize the localities we wish to experience authentically through the over-exploitation of mass tourism. This loss of particularity of geographical places corresponds to the ways in which literatures are “denationalized” into the universalizing term, “Literature” (Saussy 11). The tourists offer ways of disconnecting the geographical surroundings from the vestiges of modern life, thereby dissolving any kind of local particularity. Kirkwall’s cathedral, the most northerly in the British Isles, is dwarfed by huge cruise ships that dock and discharge thousands of visitors, who overwhelm the narrow main street in Kirkwall and the frail remnants of Neolithic archaeological sites across the islands. This chapter studies the writings of George Mackay Brown, centered around the Orkney islands, as a literary response to the process of de-realization: they refer to the history of the landscape, yet at the same time, they are outside of history due to the universalizing scope of religious metaphors. The author who has been systematically co-opted in this process of monetization of the Orkneys is George Mackay Brown. A gifted writer of numerous novels, poems, plays, and short stories, Brown was a devout convert to Catholicism and a fierce opponent of materialist culture. Reading the choice quotations from his poems that decorate the lounge bar area of the £28- million-pound ferry, Hamnavoe, bringing hundreds of tourists daily from Scrabster, on the Scottish coast, to Stromness, would doubtless make him appalled. A care-worker for thirteen years on the islands, I visited remote farms and got to know many elderly Orcadians; l felt this as a rare privilege, which afforded me an at least partial insight into so many local families and their histories. And it provoked my intense interest in every aspect of the islands’ history and society. Care work only occupied three or four days each week, leaving time to explore as much of the landscape and coastline of Mainland and the outer isles as I could manage. The islands are very evenly settled, and it is difficult to find truly isolated places, but I loved to walk along the tops of the hills that separate East and West Mainland, meeting no one else for hours at a time, and with views that survey landscape and coastline to either side. Even this apparent remoteness is marked by human experience. In the most exposed area at the top of the hills, you come across a line of seven roughly cut slabs, now sunk in the heather. Famines were not infrequent in pre-modern Orkney, several occurring during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The story passed on from those times—there is no contemporary written account—was that the Harray men, desperate to feed their families, had crossed the hill and gone

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down to the foreshore at Rendall to collect “ebb maet,” shellfish. On their return, they were caught in a severe snowstorm, and already weak, they died from exposure. Their bodies were buried where they were found, perhaps their families not strong enough to carry them back down the rough hillside. Among all the books covering so many aspects of the history and people of Orkney, there is no survey of the names given to hills and features of the island coastline. The register would be a poem of rare and beautiful nouns, each with a complicated story: Akla, Blotchnie Fiold, Cuilags, DwarfieHamars Knap, Gyran, Hammars Hill, Knapp of Trowieglen, Rysa Little, Sule Stack, The Ignatius, The Ward, The Wart, VestraFiold, Wyre, to name just a few…. I began to make some desultory notes: “The geology of the Orcadian archipelago consists of a great depth of the Old Red Sandstone, so evident in the red cliffs of Hoy as you approach Stromness by sea. The sandstone then runs under the Atlantic, to resurface in America as the darker outcrops in Central Park, New York, and elsewhere…” My notes, here, pattern a memory of the landscape, such that narrating the experience of geography becomes an unraveling of identity, in much the same way as Brown’s documentation of the land offers insight into the enduring human desire to read meaning in the landscapes. In other words, the influence of place on Brown’s writings reaches beyond the objective authority of the local towards a more intricate collusion between literary form and the progression of myth. Two world wars left many marks on the Orkney Islands. Scapa Flow was an ideal base for the British fleet, and the flat plain of central Mainland was a perfect site for airfields. The wars were good to Orkney, when as many as 20,000 service men and women flooded the islands, bringing excitement, and occasionally romance, to otherwise lonely farmworkers. The price of butter and cheese inflated, and farmers did very well out of the wartime occupations. Now, remains of gun batteries, command centers, cinemas, and officers’ toilet blocks are mute testimony to these martial invasions. One curious feature was a building, clearly from the wartime, by the side of a very remote road toward the top of the island. I asked about it and was told that it had been the control center for a fake airstrip constructed on a nearby hilltop, complete with landing lights and orientation beacons. This was intended to draw fire from the actual airstrip, HMS Tern, a couple of miles to the south. There was always talk of local spies on the island; I heard of several individuals who were accused of having been collaborators or informers, and sure enough, the fake airbase was

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denounced. The Irish-American traitor, William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting from Germany, mocked the bogus airfield, which must have been chilling to hear at the time—he was credited with a frighteningly detailed knowledge of British military bases and intentions. All these wartime remains, however, are ephemeral when compared to the much more dramatic shaping of the islands that date from the Neolithic period. Brown’s writings inherently appear to connect the continuous mythic past of the islands with the changing and mutable present of nationalistic histories. In examining how Brown’s writings register the geographical past of Orkney, this chapter also brings in a personal narrative of how places are structured by memory.

Neolithic Writing Mainland Orkney was first written into meaning over three thousand years ago, long before the construction of the pyramids. Neolithic society on the island must have been a very vigorous culture, also predating the activities south at Stonehenge and Avebury. There are arguments that the henge structure itself, a bank and ditch ring, was first constructed on the Brodgar peninsula, the narrow landstrip between Stenness and Harray lochs. It appears to command the hills of the island around it. The series of rings and stone circles organize the whole landscape and entire year into a complex text, the meaning long lost, but which was surely somehow calendrical. As George Mackay Brown writes in his novel, Magnus, “It is on certain days, and at certain times of the year, the solstices of light and dark and the equinoxes for example, that the god and the tribe and the animals come together in especial intimacy” (166). The construction of the stone circles, a major investment of time and labor, may also have united no doubt fractious groupings from different areas of Mainland into at least one peaceful communal activity. Did each group contribute a specific stone to the monument? Geologically, they derive from areas across the island. Judging by the functions of standing stones in premodern societies of more recent times—New Guinea and Easter Island, for example—these stones almost certainly commemorated specific ancestors. Neil Oliver, the Scots archaeologist and TV presenter, is fascinated by the entire complex at Brodgar and argues that one powerful, charismatic individual must have dominated the island to be able to impose his vision for the structure. But this is a too focused view that ignores the wider

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development of Neolithic society across Europe and the Mediterranean. Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe argues for a coastally based Atlantic Neolithic culture, exchanging goods and cultural practices from as far away as Malta, where the Ggantija and Tarxian megalithic temple sites may be some of the oldest known sacred structures anywhere. This sea-borne shared culture would then include Bruna Boinne in County Meath, Ireland, where Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth passage graves predate Maeshowe on Orkney Mainland, and which influenced its construction. The Brodgar complex, just over a mile away, is visible from the coast outside Stromness. I was very conscious of the seasonal changes, and of the shortening and lengthening of the days, that far north. To move from summer solstice, when you can read through the night during the pale glow of the hours, to midwinter solstice, when the sun barely rises above the horizon, is to experience the systole and diastole of the year very dramatically. Brodgar and its related structures orchestrate the entire landscape into an occult text that could be read by those who created it. Even today, the circles and henges are so compelling precisely because we can speculate so freely about their “meaning” and origins. Within the passage grave at Maeshowe, there is writing, or at least signs, that may be contemporary with the period of construction. Entering the passage, you bend low, forced to make obeisance, and make your awkward way to the center of the mound, where it is a relief to stand, and you take in the astonishing construction of the corbelled stone roof above you. The knowledgeable local guide may then direct your group to look for the runes, carved by Norse— Viking—raiders. The writings on the passage mark a revisitation of the past in the very manner in which the writing of Brown’s texts allows for a carrying forward of the past into the present. The Orkneyinga Saga tells that Earl Harald and his guard, at Jule (Christmas) 1152/3, journeying from Stromness to Firth, were caught in a ferocious blizzard. They sought shelter inside the mound they called Orkahaugr (Maeshowe). Two of the warriors were driven insane, anticipating a haugbui, mound dweller, but the others carved graffiti on the ancient walls. Crusaders, either on their way to Jerusalem or returning, also left their marks, like Halfdan and Arni, who carved their names on a parapet in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. The rune graffiti inside Maeshowe are varied but read like the kind of remark any squaddie might spray paint on a wall today: This mound was raised before Ragnarr Lothbrock (the Viking equivalent of King Arthur); These runes were carved by the man most skilled

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in runes in the western ocean; Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up; Benedikt made this cross; Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women (next to the sketch of a slavering dog); and a grumpy one, Thorni fucked [while] Helgi carved (not usually literally translated by the local guide). The runes are fascinating, but beneath them, thousands of years beyond them, are carvings that are even more compelling. These are lozenges and triangles that seem purely geometric, non-figurative, and so interesting precisely because they are utterly mysterious. They are comparable to marks found on other Neolithic sites, for example some discovered in recent seasons at the ongoing excavation of the Ness of Brodgar. There was a petroglyphic language in the Neolithic that was widely distributed and eloquent in ways that are completely mysterious to us now. Cup-and-­ ring marks are found on outcrops and boulders and in passage graves located in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and Europe. A friend in Sutherland showed me an isolated boulder, now in no relation to any other stones, so far as we could see. Cup-and-ring marks were scored deeply all over the top surface. We speculated: Could they have been used for mixing colors, a kind of Neolithic palette? But the more we looked at them, the stranger they appeared, their function over three thousand years old, so beguiling precisely because so enigmatic. Were they way-markers, guiding travelers from stone to stone; or were they art produced by drugs, representing phosphenes as we see them in hallucination; or were they Neolithic baptismal fonts, retaining water, associated with streams nearby? The most potent of the Neolithic stone marks, often found in association with cup-and- ring engravings, is the spiral. This cutting is found in a variety of forms, many now difficult to read, on surfaces worn smooth through weathering over thousands of years. Spirals are less common in the east of Scotland, where rings predominate. One student of the stones speculates that rings were associated with particular individuals, spirals associated with communal monuments where ceremonies were performed. The spiral images are hypnotic, they involve you, they are abstract, but they suggest movement, labyrinthine seduction. They were surely colored; I see them stained red ochre. On my care round, 600 miles and more each week, I would drive past Maeshowe half a dozen times daily. I saw it through all the seasons, from early morning until late evening. Fascinating as the henge and mound are, it was the empty spaces near them that most intrigued me. The Vikings were said to have held “Things,” communal discussions, to the south of

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the mound. This was a tradition brought across from Scandinavia, to hold assemblies close to ancient structures, usually burial mounds, so as to draw inspiration, collaboration from the ancestors close by. A detailed description of this can be found in M. A. M. van Hoek’s writing on rock art. To the east of the Brodgar circle, there is a large mound, only a heap of earth; excavation found nothing within, and then a large flat area, several hundred meters square, featureless. I fancied an observation platform and then a performance space; “ritual” is the category anthropologists default to when all other explanations fail. Inside the circle of the Brodgar stones, the central area has not been excavated. You are requested to walk around the inner edge of the circle, not take a short cut across the heather and gorse in the middle. At one visit, I saw a New Age, Spiral Tribe follower sitting in the center of the ring, vibing, maybe powerfully, at the central focus of Neolithic stone force and feeling, what Brown calls, “the old friendship between stone and man” (Travellers 128). But at the time, this might have been a forbidden space, closed to all but initiates; the bank of the henge structure was thought to be much higher, and the ditch much deeper, steep-sided, when they were first cut, with just two narrow points for entrance and exit. All those excluded would be in awe and reverence of the mysterious rites that they could only hear within: the Neolithic apse separated from the commonplace nave. The relation between stone and man is ancient because stone is used both for tilling the land and, at the same time, serves as the marker of passage into the interior landscape of death. Reference to the stones harnesses a symbolic conjoining of spirituality and economy. The shortness of the lines paradoxically conveys continuity between the past and the present: the reference to the stones is both a metaphor for the extraction of value from the landscape and a transposing of the self on the landscape, through the specific positioning of the stones. Discoveries continue: today, 22 June 2020, archaeologists reveal the largest Neolithic structure yet found in Britain, 1.2 miles in diameter, a series of huge shafts that may have formed a boundary around the henge at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire, located at the center of the circle. The structure would have called for precise measurement over great distances, and considerable planning. Professor Vincent Gaffney argues that these shafts demonstrate “the capacity and the desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we have never previously anticipated” (qtd. in “Stonehenge”). I would make

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the same argument for the Brodgar complex, which implicates a huge area of central Mainland in its design. One of my regular visits that took me past Maeshowe was to a farm several miles beyond Brodgar and to a very elderly gentleman, whom we helped through his day. George—I will call him—came to represent so many aspects of the island, to me. His decrepit house was at the virtual center of Mainland, and I “vibed” the spirit of the place to be strong. He told me of many Neolithic burials and sites in the immediate vicinity, which the farmers never revealed to the archaeological authorities: “They chist maak trouble for yu, ken [you know].” In a part of the house I never visited, George said that when you walked over the stone flags, you could hear the echo of a hollow space below.“Anither Skara Brae, fae sure,” he said. Skara Brae is the world- famous huddle of eight Neolithic stone houses, just a few miles to the east. In Magnus, Mackay Brown describes Mans—Mansie—ploughing his field: Once the plough got wedged between two stones, and when Mans pulled them up he saw a well of darkness beneath—not the rich earth darkness but the uncanny hollow darkness of a troll’s house. He peered inside, and saw an underground chamber of large crude stones. These troll’s houses were common in this part of Orkney. If you were brave enough to explore deeper you might find a few human skeletons, with cairngorms and pearls and silver brooches. But only a few of the young Vikings had the courage to go after such terrible treasure. (14)

I was full of my own theorizings about Maeshowe and its related structures, and holding forth to George and his family, when he said, in his nearly inaudible Orcadian murmur, weakened by Parkinson’s, “At the end of the waar, ken, thir waas a big hollow behind Maeshowe and they filled it with waar rubbish, jeeps, spitfires, tank traps and aall.” Now, when I drove past the mound, that anonymous space at the edge of a field became eloquent in a different way, the twin merlin engines of the “Spits” that had been based all over the island, now silenced, but calling still.

George Mackay Brown, Travellers Orcadian self-definition is a vigorous contemporary debate on the islands, with “incomers” changing the nature of the culture and economy. As throughout the world, there is a growing interest in asserting local values

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and identity, in Orkney partly through the independence movement of “Scottish” nationalism, though Orcadian identity politics are a complicated variant on that nationalist project.1 Throughout the twentieth century, a group of writers in Orkney was concerned to produce writing that genuinely reflected the nature of the islands: the historian and folklorist Ernest Marwick, the naturalist Robert Rendall, and Edwin Muir, the poet who became George Mackay Brown’s mentor, among others. They left an influential body of work and example, and the Orkney writing scene could never have been livelier than now, along with its thriving music culture. Everything I have written so far has been social history, but George Mackay Brown was neither a social realist nor a social historian. In his prose, at least, he was a fabulist. “You can’t write for three hours every day, six days a week, without having something to show for it!” This was Brown’s working routine, in the sitting room of his council flat in Mayburn Court, halfway along the Street in Stromness, with a view out to the harbor. Twelve collections of poetry, three volumes of plays, six novels, nine collections of short stories, four books of essays, three collections for children, and an autobiography resulted. For twenty-five years, he also wrote a weekly column, “Under Brinkie’s Brae,” in local papers, and attracted an enthusiastic readership; he felt that this was his major connection to, and service for, his community. Visiting as many houses as I did, all over Stromness and its surroundings, I often came across copies of his work, among all the other “island books” that are so avidly collected by Orcadians. In one house, there was a complete collection of immaculate, signed first editions—Brown had been a friend of the family—and for a few moments, I entertained some very inappropriate thoughts. One tough and cynical old fisherman, whom I had to assist at the end of the day, would demand, when he had finally managed to struggle into his bed, “Pass me an island book, beuy.” He had a shelf of them next to his bed, and sure enough, several George Mackay Browns. The hold that Brown’s writing has over the residents of the island is similar to the hold that the landscape has over my telling of my personal narratives situated in Orkney. For Brown, writing about Orkney was an escape from the contingency of everyday history and the arbitrary meanings surrounding daily objects and a move toward the certainty of myth and the transformative quality of substances. Writing on Brown’s works, 1  Further discussion in Nigel Wheale’s “Scottish independence—As Seen from Orkney,” The Fortnightly Review.

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then, is incomplete without re- telling the significance of his writings on the everyday lives of the islanders: a continued engagement that allows one to speak the history of the land rather than nostalgically substitute the present for the past. Travellers is a selection of eighty-three poems put together by Brown’s close friends, Archie Bevan and Brian Murray, all except one previously unpublished; over half are from his final ten years. He maintained his inspiration to the end. The collection demonstrates Brown’s versatility, and his sureness of line. Poems celebrate writers, poets and an artist who were important to him, including Edwin Muir, Modigliani, Tolstoy, Norman MacCaig, and significant individuals: Mhari his mother, John L. Broom (who established the excellent Stromness Book Shop, still an essential place to visit), St Magnus, and Earl Rognvald, of course. Of Peter Maxwell Davies, Brown writes, “Orpheus in his cottage / Near the crag edge / Ponders / The mystery of being and time” (Travellers 59). The poem for Norman MacCaig vividly captures Milne’s Bar in Rose Street, Edinburgh, which for a time in the mid-1950s was a crucible of poetry: “Sitting here and there about the unlovely tables, / Sydney Goodsir Smith, Tom Scott, Norman MacCaig, / Robert Garioch, George Campbell Hay, Alexander Scott…” Brown describes himself sitting alone and looking on, “too shy—as yet—to visit the bards’ table.” All of the poets listed are interesting, and three of them are superb; the longer I stayed in Orkney, reading as widely as I could in Orcadian and Scots writing, the more it struck me that there is so little interchange between Scots and English poetry, and writing in general. Jackie Kay, Liz Lockhead and Carol Ann Duffy have since done so much to bridge this divide, but returning to England, I was also surprised by how many people said they had never visited Scotland and did not have much interest in doing so. Another two countries, divided by (nearly) the same language. The non-circulation of literary material between the two geographic regions reveals a withholding, resulting from a mistrust of the links between form and content. Although the poetic utterance is the same, the experiences of the poets are deemed as provincial, somehow specific to the areas demarcated by geographic and political borders. Many of the poems in Travellers explore timeless themes, drawing on the 6000-year presence of people in the islands: the seasons, the solstices, the tides. Others are topical and utterly contemporary, including ones for Tibetan refugees, the Balkans conflict, and the National Schizophrenia Newsletter, and two about uranium. Many readers will know Peter Maxwell

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Davies’ lovely, simple piano piece, “Farewell to Stromness”—I find it hard to listen to, sometimes—and assume that it is about fishermen, or perhaps visitors, leaving the harbor for the crossing to Scrabster. In fact, it was intended as an elegy for the town, which in the early 1970s was threatened by a proposal to rip up the landscape from Stromness across to Yesnaby, in order to extract uranium ore to power Dounreay nuclear power station across the Firth. A concerted local campaign was successful in halting the scheme, but ominously it remains in abeyance, having never been definitively canceled by the Secretary of State for Scotland. Brown’s poems “Uranium 1” and “Uranium 2” present a longing to preserve the memory of the landscape, within a language of metaphor, that shields its symbolic significance from the processes of mineral harvestings that threaten to disfigure the land. The titles of the poems are disconnected from the content, and the particular-effacing language of metaphor displaces the concerns of the commercialization of the Orkney landscapes into a universal concern for the erosion of symbolic value of land through the processes of industrialization. The language of both poems is abstract and the only reference to the mineral in the poems is through a mention of the color “green”: the adjective cuts through the language and points toward disabling economic relations in and through the process of remembering rituals performed in the landscape, where “the ceremony of bread begins again” (Travellers 130). Brown’s faith is represented in many poems, several about Christmas, Shrove Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday, but then there are also three “in a Chinese style” and “Chinoiseries.”The concision of Chinese poetics must have appealed to him, so analogous to the sparse compactness of rune-­ writing and Norse lines. Ian Crockatt’s translations of Earl Rognvaldr’s Old Norse skaldic meter, in Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw, make for fascinating comparison with Brown’s Orcadian compression. Crockatt describes Rognvaldr’s dróttkvœtt [“verse suitable for reciting at court”] form as “impossibly difficult” and considers that Brown’s lyric imitations of Old Norse poetic convention are “exquisite, but entirely un-skaldic” (18).2 Crockatt argues that only William Morris came close to successful imitation of Norse idiom, in his aureate translations of the sagas. Old Norse was a “highly-inflected” language, so it cannot carry over into “sparsely- inflected English” at all precisely (19). It had no future tense, to speak of, which is somehow true to the realms of Yggdrasill and Ragnarok. 2  For a detailed discussion see Nigel Wheale’s “Why is the Sea Salt” published in The Fortnightly Review.

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Writing in the Chinese poetic style turns the poems into artifacts: actively developing an incongruity of form through an objectivist movement away from the use of metaphoric language. The poems appear disconnected from the land, due to the sparseness of form yet offer an immediacy associated with an image or photograph. This builds a layered observation on the relations between place and form: the sparseness of the poems written in the Chinese style remembers and responds to the language that is historically native to the islands.

Magnus The Neolithic shaping of the central plain on Mainland is not the only physical text that organizes the ancient landscape through stone, myth, and ritual. The martyrdom of St Magnus in the twelfth century is an all-­ pervasive presence on the islands. As everywhere, school playgrounds echo to kids shouting and calling to each other, but in Orkney you often hear “Magnus” among the babel of names. This is a recent development; before the 1960s, Orcadian males were given more conventional names, though “Mansie” was local to the island. The recent popularity of Magnus and Erland is another small indication of the desire to affirm a local identity. The wonderful twelfth-century cathedral in Kirkwall, built by master masons who are thought to have trained at Durham cathedral, is dedicated to the saint. Bones discovered in the early twentieth century, during restoration work on columns near the altar, almost certainly belonged to Magnus. The preoccupation with giving an identity to the bones is similar to the metaphoric drive to perform an imaginative transfer of quality. The novel’s own narrative style, lifted out of the linear sequence of a chronological timeline and put together with the narrations of three voices in differing points of time, reveals an attempt to move beyond the de-­ realization, brought about through the uneasy adaptation of modernity. To this extent, then, the form is not only a response to place but also a reconstruction of the symbolic order associated with place. On the high altar, there is the replica of a Viking longship, which always caused comment when I showed visitors the cathedral. The Hamnavoe ferry has a cute “Viking” logo painted along its hull, complete with pointy hat and horns (a Victorian conceit—the Norse invaders wore no such things). If, around the turn of the first millennium, you saw a dragon prow purposefully gliding towards your beach, you would have rounded everyone up sharpish and taken deep cover. If captured, males would be

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slaughtered, women and children of age taken back across the North Sea. Brown’s novel describes these terrifying raids vividly, and his Vikings talk with the clipped economy of their poems and runes. They tie Nord the blacksmith to his forge fire: “Roar, ox … we must cook you well, you are such a big ox” (Magnus 90). Nord survives. The site of Magnus’s martyrdom, on the small island of Egilsay, is where he had gone at Easter to negotiate the division of the islands between himself and his cousin Haakon—“high son.” They intended to meet with no weapons or followers. In the novel, Haakon proposes that Magnus should adopt the religious life and become a monk in Normandy or Ireland, but there are different accounts of this event. Here is another version. Haakon came fully armed and gave his cousin three choices: banishment, blinding, or execution. Magnus chose the last, but none of Haakon’s warriors would agree to murder him. The lowliest man, Lifolf the cook, was ordered to behead Magnus, which he did with extreme reluctance, begging for the Earl’s mercy. The corpse was buried among the rocks of Egilsay, but the space miraculously turned into a fertile field. Magnus’s mother, Thora, implored that he should be buried in consecrated ground, so the corpse was taken to Mainland and processed around the island, such was his following and repute. Miracles began to occur; touching the coffin brought sight to the blind and cured the halt and the lame. Magnus was finally buried at Christchurch, Birsay, at the top western corner of Mainland. In the rigorous genetic examinations of the native island population—there have been many of these, an ideal data set that has been stable across centuries—the Birsay area has a higher concentration of Norse genes than elsewhere. It is a beautiful, exposed area, with ferocious reefs and seas offshore. When Magnus had been buried, a spring emerged next to the kirk, and the waters proved healing, miraculous. It flows today, and I have drunk from it. On the mantelpieces of many of the homes that I visited for care work, I would see a bottle of cloudy water in pride of place—often an old “Scapa” whiskey bottle, the excellent local spirit, clearer, purer, and smoother than all the other Scots and Irish whiskies, though not sanctified, like the spring water. Brown’s Magnus is one of those singular works, a poet’s novel. The prose has many of the virtues of Brown’s poetry: aphoristic, studded with imagery, laconic and humorous, with moments—so Orcadian—of great understated pathos. Elements of the story had first appeared in An Orkney

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Tapestry (1969) and in his play The Loom of Light, written to raise contributions for restoration of St Magnus Cathedral in 1972. The composer Peter Maxwell Davis became a close friend and eventual collaborator with Brown, and his opera The Martyrdom of St Magnus was performed in 1977, as the centerpiece of the first St Magnus Festival, in Kirkwall Cathedral. Chapter titles in the novel encapsulate the action like the names of poems: “The Plough,” “Song of Battle,” “Prelude to the Invocation of the Dove,” “The Killing,” and “The Harvest.” The penultimate chapter, “The Killing,” is written in a striking variety of styles and registers. The central action, the murder/martyrdom of Magnus, is not described as such but implied, reported in a distancing range of styles. Perhaps Brown was influenced here by James Joyce’s varieties of writing in Ulysses, a work that he and Maxwell Davies both admired. “The Killing” opens with this sentence: “When that the holy season of pasch was overpast, the jarls busked them both for the tryst.… Was meikle marvel in the two dove-ships anent that token”(123). Was Mackay Brown here recalling the pastiche literary styles of “The Cyclops,” the twelfth episode in Ulysses, where Bloom is assaulted by the drunken, anti-­ Semitic“Citizen,” who hurls a tin of Jacob’s biscuits after him (Jacob’s being a Jewish enterprise, though the Citizen would not know that). In Joyce, the parodic styles are all satirical, mocking the delusive self-­ importance of the Citizen and of all nationalisms. In Brown’s Magnus, there is no satire in the clashing of literary styles, but an attempt to convey the resonance of St Magnus’s martyrdom across the ages. The retelling of the myth in this fashion of linguistically disparate styles translates the local itself into the language of miracles. That is to say, the non-linear narrative structure and the style of writing complement the experience of the religious, and descriptions of ploughing the land—in the opening chapter of the book, for instance—offer a way of joining the repetitiveness of labor with the routine utterance of the prayer. After the opening paragraph, written in a mannered, saga fashion—“A death-lust on listening faces above the mast, a weaving of warped words” (123)—the second sequence is more naturalistic: Earl Magnus’s approach to the island where he will be martyred. He has some premonition of this in a recurring dream, where he is summoned to appear “at the nuptial table of the great lord” (126). A “lump” of sea nearly oversets the long ship; these huge waves coming out of nowhere are just one of the dangers in the tidal waters around Mainland. Magnus takes it for an ill omen; his

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men urge him to turn back, but his vision tells him that he must continue. His crew despair of him: “God help the people of Orkney who have an incompetent like this in charge of their affairs” (129). The next section is written in the register of news report (Brown loved his TV, news and football especially), recounting “dramatic developments in the peace confrontation between the Paulson faction and the Erlendson faction.… There is a black-out of news.” Various islanders are interviewed, and they report strangers scanning the island with binoculars, “like them bird-­ watchers” (133). The next section describes Magnus attending mass in the kirk, and the language is hieratic, liturgical. The first paragraph is a single sentence: “The time then that this priest was at the altar, below the crucifix, between two lighted candles … and now the time had come for the old priest to say the Gloria, the twilight within had a wavering garment of richness flung upon it” (136). Brown said that his conversion to Catholicism made very little outward difference to his life; in truth, he was no saint, and it did not redeem him. He took most pleasure from the liturgical aspects of Mass, and these are evident in this section, as Magnus tries to draw comfort from the single priest officiating the service in the small stone kirk. These pages are surely a powerful statement of faith on the part of the author, using the free indirect register, as if it is Magnus reflecting. The mass is time’s purest essence, gathering all human history and experience into its sacral moment. The labors of the peasant farmers and the sacrifice of the beast creation to their needs—our needs—are all caught up in the sacrament of bread, perhaps in this instance an Orkney bannock: “Out of earth darkness men set the bread on their everyday tables. It is the seal and substance of all their work; their very nature is kneaded into the substance of the bread; it is, in an ultimate sense, their life” (169). This meditation is recapitulated at the climax of the narrative (203). Magnus is able to see all. He has a brief intuition, from far in the future; he imagines he sees a man walking down a long white corridor to a small room flooded with pitiless light. The religious metaphor—instituting a renewable exchange of essence between the animate and the inanimate—universalizes local history and its record of cultural practices on the island. The local, then, comes to be characterized by its very translatability into the realm of the universal, and form becomes the medium through which places cut across their particularity even as they leave their indelible mark in collecting together the disparate features of place, “contrast of enduring stone with spindrift & blossom & breath” (Brown The Orcadian Poet).

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In the middle of the penultimate chapter, the fiction is completely suspended, and the text becomes an essay on the nature of ritual and sacrifice. Brown is summoning the kind of mysterious events that were celebrated within the ring at Brodgar: “I speak of priests, a solemn sacred ritual, lustrations, sacrifice” (164). These pagan ceremonies for Brown must also have foreshadowed the ultimate act of sacrifice of his Savior: “That was the one only central sacrifice of history. I am the bread of life. All previous rituals had been a foreshadowing of this; all subsequent rituals a re-enactment. The fires at the centre of the earth, the sun above, all divine essences and ecstasies, come to this silence at last –a circle of bread [bannocks are circular] and a cup of wine on an altar”(169). The final nine pages of “The Killing” are the most audacious, and the most shocking, in terms of narrative development. Owing to his poor health, hospitalized for six months in 1940 with pulmonary tuberculosis— then incurable—Brown was exempted from active service during the war. But he took the atrocities of the conflicts deeply to heart. The Lutheran pastor and anti- Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer becomes Brown’s (unnamed) twentieth-century martyr, a contemporary embodiment of Magnus’s example and sanctity. The simple narrator of this sequence is another, explicit connection across the centuries: the chef to the administrative section of Flossenburg concentration camp. His name is Lifolf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was educated at the University of Tubingen, and gained his doctorate in theology from Berlin, summa cum laude. He went on to New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, where he was taught by Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most influential theologians and public intellectuals of his time. Here he also became involved with religious life in Harlem, where he taught at the Sunday school of the Abyssinian Baptist Church: “The Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision” (qtd. in Eaton 84). From this time, Bonhoeffer more and more took on the perspective of the persecuted and oppressed in society. He returned to Germany in 1931 and was ordained in 1932. Bonhoeffer was fiercely criticizing Hitler and the Nazi movement from the first days of their taking office in January 1933. In April, Bonhoeffer was the first to denounce Nazi persecution of the Jews openly, urging the church to active opposition. However, in his essay “The Church and the Jewish Question,” where he argued for active resistance to Nazism, he maintained the traditional attitude of “Christian supersessionism” towards Judaism: that Christianity had superseded the Old Covenant, which would result in “the conversion of Israel to Christ” (Barnett). Stromness parish

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church was a welcoming congregation when I occasionally visited. I heard a terrific reading from the Epistles in broad Glaswegian there; you really felt the conviction in the speaker. On the way into the church, above the table where you collected your hymnbook, were slots in the wall for collections, towards upkeep of the church, for the local parishes, and, one that struck me, “For the Jews.” There is hardly any Jewish presence in Orkney, either historical or contemporary. David Daiches’ Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood is a touching account of the small Jewish community in the capital city, but beyond Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee, there seems to be very little Jewish society in Scotland. They do figure briefly in Brown’s “The Young Men at the Hamnavoe Lammas Market”: as “Six Jews with their shooting booths (china teapots for prizes)” (Travellers 86). But there was the old prejudice, which I heard occasionally in Orkney: if someone was thought to be parsimonious, the remark was, “He’s kinda jewy that way.” So the collection point “For the Jews” was to raise funds for their conversion, to facilitate that Christian supersessionism to which Bonhoeffer subscribed. Toward the end of my time in Orkney, I paid a last visit to the parish church and noticed that the sign had been covered over; I felt mixed about this. It was certainly offensive, but it was also a part of the Church of Scotland’s history, a church that had a powerful influence in the evangelization of large parts of Africa and elsewhere. Obliterating the three words raised the same issues about historical revisionism that has become so controversial recently, over statues commemorating Confederate heroes in the southern states of the US or of the statues of Rhodes in Oxford and Edward Colston in Bristol. Throughout the 1930s, Bonhoeffer continued organizing resistance to Nazi suppression of what he took to be the true faith in Germany and beyond, maintaining a clandestine network of like-minded students and pastors. As a member of the German underground, he would also have known of the plots to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. He was arrested and imprisoned 5 April 1943. He was hanged at dawn, 9 April 1945, two weeks before Flossenburg was liberated by soldiers of the United States infantry divisions. Lifolf, the camp butcher, tells his story like a simple soul. He knows he is involved in the perpetration of terrible crimes, but he chooses to turn away, deny himself any knowledge of the mass murders around him. He likes his work well enough; the SS “were all decent to me” (171). He has a girlfriend, Lotte, who visits, and he has his second-class certificate as a

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butcher. He describes dispassionately those events whose images we have all seen: “The little railway station in the village had never been so busy.… They arrived in cattle trucks, men, women and children, thousands of them. Of course it had nothing to do with me.” In his minor capacity, Lifolf works as an efficient functionary, exactly the attitude that so appalled Hannah Arendt when she heard Adolf Eichmann defending himself at his trial in Jerusalem as simply a bureaucrat doing a job like any other, as too many others would be willing to do. A banal individual with no imagination and no conscience, he represents, in Arendt’s celebrated phrase, the banality of evil. Brown estranges the process of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s murder by “Herr Lifolf,” in the cruel games that the camp officers play with him and in Lifolf’s desperate attempts to avoid acknowledging how he is being coerced. This is the moment that Magnus had envisioned, eight centuries earlier on Egilsay. Lifolf records, “The room l stood in finally was a whitewashed cube. There was a single electric bulb in the ceiling. Into one wall about eight feet from the floor three steel butchers’ hooks had been screwed. A short noose hung from the right-hand hook.” He remembers nothing of the moment of Bonhoeffer’s murder. The archetypal characters of Lifolf and Bonhoeffer suggest the circulatory potential of myth across different timelines. The plurality of narrative styles—from one that moves away from standardized speech to a Biblical prose style to one that uses a journalistic approach for presenting the myth in retellings—makes the myth modern; this form, in itself, suggests an expansive interpretative commerce of myth across civilizational timelines, making the geographic region of Orkney spatially fixed, and yet, changing across time. The carrying over of the myth reveals the influence of place over literary form, and yet the narrative, non-linearly moving in and out of different temporal zones, suggests that places are also fictional tracts etched in memory. The narrative does not conclude here. There is a final, twenty-two page section, “Harvest,” that returns to the twelfth century, as two “tinkers,” Jock and Mary, walk from outside Hamnavoe, across Mainland, and to the kirk on Birsay. The peasants, Mans and Hild, who began the narrative, offer beer, a bannock, and cheese to sustain them on the way. Mary is blind and curses her man for making her walk so far without telling her why. Hoping for a miracle, he has come to make a poor, votive offering at the tomb of Magnus, a whale tallow candle: “Light for light, Magnus. Ask the Lord God to put a glimmer back in her skull” (197). The bishop reproves Jock, telling him there is no “Saint Magnus,” only the tomb of

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an earl murdered on Egilsay. He complains about all the desperate visitors—pilgrims—arriving, some from as far away as Iceland and St Kilda, and pleading to be cured of harelip, scab, or consumption. But Jock’s offering has summoned a “fragrant vivid ghost,” “pure essence in another intensity, a hoarder of the treasures of charity and prayer, a guardian” (204). And Mary sees again, her man now looking like a scarecrow, not the youth with black hair she had last seen in her girlhood: “I’m supposed to be grateful, am l? Well, I’m not. Can l get the dark years back again? There’s one place I do want to see though, more than any other place, and that’s the Birsay ale-house.” George Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He visited England once, a traumatic trip to London, where the scale of the city appalled him, and he only left Scotland again to stay with his friend Seamus Heaney in Ireland. He travelled widely in his imagination and through his reading: Tolstoy and Thomas Mann were particular favorites, The Magic Mountain perhaps close to his own experience of debilitating illness. In his later years, he rarely went very far from his flat; his habitual route was up the hill behind the town to The Braes hotel and bar, where he became a fixture, next to the window with a wide view across Stromness and out to Orphir, Hoy. For Brown, Hamnavoe—his Stromness—and Orkney were all he needed to create his impressive range of work. He was by no means uncritical of Orcadians. At one time, he had bitterly denounced them as ignorant and complacent, and some of them in turn saw him as a disillusioned layabout with a drinking problem: “This place is boring, like most places. There’s nothing I feel inclined to say about it.… There are stones, piers, windows, chimneys, children of light and water that once he saw in a good dream— long forgotten: a poem (“Four Kinds of Poet,”Travellers 106). However paradoxical George Mackay Brown’s feelings for the place, he said that if he lived another 500 years, he would never be short of stories to tell about Orkney and its people.

Works Cited Barnett, Victoria. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘The Church and the Jewish Question.’” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. www.ushmm.org/information/ exhibitions/online-­e xhibitions/special-­f ocus/dietrich-­b onhoef fer/ church-­and-­jewish-­question. Brown, George Mackay. Magnus. 1973. Glasgow: Richard Drew, 1987.

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———. Travellers: Poems. Ed. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray. London: John Murray, 2001. ———. The Orcadian poet GMB reads his poems and a story (LP). Eire: Cladday Records, 1971. Crockatt, Ian, trans. Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw: The Viking Poems of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney. Todmorden: Arc, 2014. Daiches, David. Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood. London: Macmillan, 1957. Eaton, Mark. Religion and American Literature Since 1950. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Joyce, James, Ulysses. 1922. London: Penguin, 1986. Orkneyinga Saga. Trans. Jon A. Hjaltalin and Gilbert Goudie. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57723/57723-­h/57723-­h.htm. Saussy, Haun. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. “Stonehenge: Neolithic Monument Found Near Sacred Site.” BBC News, 22 June 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­england-­wiltshire-­53132567. van Hoek, Maarten A. M. “The Spiral in British and Irish Neolithic Rock Art.” Glasgow Archaeological Journal, vol. 18, no 1, 1993, 11–32. https://doi. org/10.3366/gas.1993.18.18.11. Wheale, Nigel. “Scottish independence—As Seen from Orkney.” The Fortnightly Review, 2014. https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/08/scottish­independence/. ———. “Why Is the Sea Salt: The Skaldic Verse of Earl Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson.”The Fortnightly Review, 2020. https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2020/08/ crockatt/.

CHAPTER 4

Locating Statelessness: The Multiple Forms of Anarchist Utopia in B. Traven’s The Death Ship Nathaniel Cadle

In their classic 1979 survey Utopian Thought in the Western World, Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel identify the central paradox of anarchist political theory: any utopian vision of a community organizing itself on anarchist principles is self-contradictory because the inherent prescriptiveness of such a vision works against the supposedly organic, non-directed formation of that community. “There is no significant utopian novel or full-­ bodied description of a future utopian society whose author would identify himself as an anarchist,” they argue. Virtually all versions of the doctrine […] condemn detailed depictions of the anarchist society of the future as a heresy, since the world of anarchy following upon the imminent revolution, the abolition of government, the destruction of capitalism, and the outlawing of property in the bourgeois

N. Cadle (*) Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_4

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sense of private monopolistic ownership would be a spontaneous creation of the free, untrammeled spirit of the men of that fortunate time, not fettered to any previously formulated plans or dogmas. A utopian blueprint of ­anarchy would be self-congratulatory, internally inconsistent, and anathema to anarchists. (737)

Just as paradoxically, Manuel and Manuel immediately note, “anarchist writers or theoreticians have inevitably been seduced, as Marx himself was, into utterances about what an ideal world should be like after the great outburst of destruction that would bring the new man into being” (737). Anarchists’ enthusiasm for their own object of desire, a free and equal society that emerges organically and spontaneously out of local conditions on the ground, has led some of them to abandon core principles—at least occasionally and temporarily—in order to imagine what conditions might provoke the formation of an anarchist society and what that formation might look like. This essay examines what is perhaps the most formally inventive artistic response to these twin paradoxes of anarchist utopian thinking: B. Traven’s novel The Death Ship (published in German as Das Totenschiff in 1926 and in English in 1934). Arguably the most significant anarchist novelist of the second quarter of the twentieth century, Traven offers a solution that is radical in both its political content and its narrative form. The Death Ship alternates between, on the one hand, blistering satire of the bureaucratic state institutions that produce and then expel stateless persons and of the corporate entities that subsequently exploit those stateless persons and, on the other hand, subversively playful celebration of the communities that stateless persons—and people who live without bureaucratic state institutions—organize themselves. That is, The Death Ship enacts a critique of existing conditions, thereby implicitly calling for utopian alternatives to those conditions, and proffers at least two different utopian visions of anarchist community, one historically grounded in interwar Spain and the other located in the fictional, albeit theoretically plausible, non-state space of the open sea. Traven’s novel thus incorporates its author’s anarchist principles into its very form, giving readers multiple ways of imagining utopian alternatives and allowing them to choose which they prefer or find most useful. In a sense, then, the occasionally baffling unwillingness of Gerard Gales, the American sailor who functions as the protagonist and narrator of The Death Ship, to stay put when he arrives in places he himself recognizes as utopian merely exemplifies Peter Marshall’s point that

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anarchist utopias “tend to be dynamic, fluid, organic and open-ended, delighting in change and endless experimentation. There is no revolutionary closure; they offer a process, not an end” (xv–xvi). That fluidity in anarchist utopian thinking finds creative expression in the fluidity of Traven’s approach to prose fiction, ranging from the novel’s picaresque narrative structure to the author’s efforts to conceal his own national and linguistic identity. Literary scholars have long acknowledged the utopian aspects present throughout Traven’s fiction (Lűbbe 149, Seibert 157, Spencer 100), but a recent critical trend to read The Death Ship through the lens of biopolitics has tended to obscure the more positive and concrete aspects of Traven’s anarchism. Since the early 2010s, multiple critics have invoked Giorgio Agamben, Jane Caplan, and John Torpey in order to highlight the novel’s attentiveness to the real-life plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees following the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and a steep rise in autarkic state practices (Larsen 46, Gulddal 294–300, Dougherty 330–339, Payne and Struck 128–129). This focus on biopower serves as an important corrective to earlier criticism that tended to ignore The Death Ship’s historical and geographical contexts and to approach it as an exercise in Kafkaesque absurdism (Chankin 17, Baumann 59). Nevertheless, these recent interpretations of Traven’s novel never seem to account adequately for its surprising tendency to cast in a positive light what Agamben famously calls “the state of exception” (12), which serves as the very foundation of the state and its claims to power in Agamben’s political philosophy. Agamben, of course, explicitly presents his theory of the state of exception and bare life as an explanation for the “weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State[, which] have not caught sight of this structure. […] But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand” (12). The biopolitical readings of The Death Ship that critics have produced in the last decade disprove Agamben’s claim that anarchists, at least, lacked an understanding of the state of exception, yet they leave unchallenged the parallel implication that the anarchist Traven ends up “identifying with [his] enemy,” the state. In allowing its characters to find meaning and a sense of community in their exclusion from the juridico-political order, does The Death Ship inadvertently reaffirm the state’s power to suspend the rule of law? A more appropriate frame of reference for understanding the statelessness that The Death Ship frequently renders as utopian is James C. Scott’s

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concept of “zones of refuge.” In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott essentially turns Agamben’s logic on its head. Instead of figuring statelessness as a condition of exclusion enacted by the state itself—what Agamben calls “the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested” (9)—Scott depicts it as the result of “strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length” (x). For Scott, zones of refuge, which he describes as “runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-­ making projects,” constitute a form of “deliberate and reactive statelessness” (ix, x). In other words, zones of refuge emerge through the agency, conscious decisions, and radically free associations of stateless persons themselves. Throughout The Death Ship, even when he seems most ruthlessly exploited by various state institutions or corporate entities, Gerard Gales repeatedly finds sanctuary—whether escape from state discipline or a sense of solidarity with others—in communities that exhibit what Scott calls the “diagnostic characteristics” of zones of refuge: “ethnic and linguistic complexity and fluidity,” “remote, marginal areas that are difficult to access,” “social structure […] that offers no obvious institutional point of entry for would-be projects of unified rule,” and “strong, even fierce, traditions of egalitarianism and autonomy” (329). Indeed, the bulk of The Death Ship’s narrative takes place at sea, those “watery regions of refuge” that Scott expresses regret at mentioning “only in passing” in The Art of Not Being Governed (xiv). Far from falling into the trap of misidentification with the state Agamben attributes to anarchists, Traven actually supplements the global history of anarchism toward which Scott’s study gestures. What is most remarkable about The Death Ship, then, is the sheer scope and sophistication of its interrogation of statelessness, both as a product of the state’s power, as Agamben claims, and as an object of anarchist desire, as Scott argues. That scope and sophistication shape the novel’s form, resulting first in an anarchist critique of those nations whose state apparatuses had ballooned during the First World War and turned repressive afterwards and then, against this line of critique, in two very different responses to the condition of statelessness, as Traven’s protagonist eventually reaches communities that accept him. The first community is Spain, which had remained neutral during the war (and thus had not experienced the radical expansion of its state apparatuses) and which shortly after the English-language publication of Traven’s novel would undergo an anarcho-­syndicalist revolution and collectivization of its economy. The

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second community crystalizes in a ship’s engine room, where the protagonist unexpectedly finds freedom and meaning in solidarity with his fellow, mostly stateless, laboring seamen. Those narrative contours likewise inform the remainder of this essay, which examines the critique of state power that dominates The Death Ship’s early chapters and then turns to the two alternative models of social organization Traven’s anarchist novel imagines. Ranging from the concrete to the abstract, Traven’s utopianism remains consistent in its commitment to representing functional communities that deliberately resist incorporation or reincorporation into the state.

The Death Ship’s Critique of the Interchangeable State The first quarter of The Death Ship offers one of the most scathing critiques of the state in twentieth-century literature. It begins with Gerard Gales finding himself stranded in Antwerp without official documentation when his ship, the S.S. Tuscaloosa, leaves him behind. Unable to prove his identity or citizenship, he is rebuffed by the U.S. consul, who assumes that the penniless Gales is one of “the undesirables, the criminals, the anarchists, the communists, the pacifists and all the other trouble-makers whom the government is anxious to refuse re-entry into the country” (67–68). The rest of the novel describes the constant condition of circulation in which Gales, as a stateless person, now finds himself trapped. For the first fifteen chapters, police officials and petty bureaucrats, who have neither the facilities nor the inclination to assist stateless persons, comically shuffle Gales back and forth across the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. In these early chapters, Traven’s novel reveals its anarchist utopian sentiments indirectly by protesting against the inhumane logic of these state functionaries and the various institutions—and states—they represent. Regardless of which state is being represented, however, Gales’ encounters with these functionaries exhibit a notable sameness. Gales himself underscores this point when the Belgian police pack him off to the Netherlands without giving him the resources he needs to improve his prospects: “Rotterdam is a beautiful city. If you have money. […] I hadn’t any money. So I found Rotterdam just a city like all others” (27). In so doing, The Death Ship draws attention to the interchangeability of the state, “that soulless beast” that “cannot make use of

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human beings” because “human beings only make trouble” (32–33). It is precisely this interchangeability—and the attending implications—that recent critics lose sight of when they ignore the more utopian aspects of The Death Ship’s anarchist politics and focus primarily on its treatment of biopower. At the risk of repeating some of the analysis those critics have performed, this section briefly reexamines Traven’s novel in light of Agamben’s and Torpey’s work in order to extrapolate from their work an anarchist notion of the state’s interchangeability. While Gales’ attempts to come to terms with the logic of the bureaucracy he encounters is inherently absurd, the existence of stateless persons was a very real problem in the 1920s and 1930s. According to sociologist John Torpey, the modern passport system, “in which documentary attestation of identity is generally required for the legal traversal of state boundaries,” emerged “during and after World War I—as nationalist fervor reached its height, opportunities for mass travel expanded, and nation-­ states sought to consolidate their control over territories and populations” (257). In contrast to the more open borders of the late-nineteenth century, which Torpey attributes to the economic liberalism of that era, “the rise of the ‘protectionist state’ out of the fires of World War I [resulted in] the countries of the North Atlantic world [becoming] caught up in a trend toward nationalist self-defense against foreigners” (269). Especially in postwar Europe, with its drastically redrawn borders, individuals who could not provide legal proof of their citizenship could no longer rely on old assumptions about national identity. As Torpey puts it, “In the absence of telltale markers such as language or skin color—which are themselves inconclusive as indicators of one’s national identity, of course, but which nonetheless frequently have been taken as such—a person’s nationality simply cannot be determined without recourse to documents” (269). In the early chapters of The Death Ship, Gales finds himself in exactly the predicament Torpey describes. Having lost all of his official proofs of identity, Gales gets no help from the U.S. consul, who replies: “Your statement that you claim American citizenship is no proof. Personally, I believe that you are American. However, the Department of Labor in Washington, to which I am responsible for making out passports and other identifications, does not wish to know what I believe. […] How can you prove that you are American, that I am obliged to spend my time on your case?” [Gales:] “You can hear that, sir.” “How? By your language? That is no proof.” (66)

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What is striking in this exchange is the way that Traven undermines the nativist logic of nationalism. The U.S. consul agrees that Gales is American, going so far as to admit that Gales possesses the “telltale markers” of nationality that Torpey mentions (“You belong with us. You are the right blood.”), but he reminds Gales that such nativist perceptions exert no claim on the state: “I would deny vehemently your claim to American citizenship” (70). Here, Traven seems to decouple the nation from the state, even suggesting that the state will always trump the nation. The U.S. consul’s acknowledgement that the relationship between supposedly self-apparent national identity and more strictly regulated state citizenship is unstable prefigures an important tension between the nation and the state that structures Agamben’s political philosophy. Building off of the writings of Carl Schmitt, Agamben refers to this tension as “a juridical and a territorial ordering” or “an Ordnung and an Ortung” (19). For Agamben, “the state of exception is […] the principle of every juridical localization, since only the state of exception opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order and particular territory first becomes possible. As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)” (19). Unlike the nation, the state is unlocalizable and therefore, as Agamben puts it, “unrepresentable” (24). By implication, every state is “the state,” a paradox that suggests that individual states are interchangeable insofar as each derives its sovereignty from the same shared principle: the “inclusive exclusion” of the state itself in relation to its own citizens and the rule of law (7). The Death Ship literalizes this interchangeability not only in the similar treatment Gales receives at the hands of different state functionaries regardless of which state they represent, but also in the similar experiences of other characters Gales meets later in the novel. Officially designated as stateless persons, these secondary characters share his plight, thereby demonstrating the pervasiveness of a model of statehood that exerts its power through denying the rights of citizenship to certain persons. Gales’ friend Stanislav, for instance, was born in Germany and is ethnically Polish, yet his claims of citizenship are rejected by both countries because he missed a deadline while at sea. Likewise, Gales’ predecessor on board the ship where he meets Stanislav was born in Alsace, a strip of land that had changed hands between France and Germany multiple times, but that character is refused citizenship by both nations because of his leftist politics. Stanislav’s experiences with the Polish government in particular lead Gales to observe:

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Now look how quickly those new-born countries have acquired Prussian officialdom. Some of those countries did not even have a complete civilized language of their own yesterday, and today they are doing even better than the big powers. You may be sure that these new countries that, so far, are not even sure of their own names, will go a long way to make bureaucracy their one and only state religion. […] All the world over, in consequence of the war for democracy, and for fear of communistic ideas, the bureaucrat has become the new czar who rules with more omnipotence than God the Almighty ever had, denying the birth of a living person if the birth-­certificate cannot be produced, and then making it impossible for a human being to move freely without a permit properly stamped and signed. (258)

These developments in international relations Traven’s novel denounces in no uncertain terms. The Death Ship protests against a model of control that paradoxically exploits the rhetoric of nationalism, nativism, and protectionism in order to empower state institutions and to replicate the same injustices across all borders. Traven’s goal in these early chapters is to lay bare and condemn the interchangeable state in the sense that I have extrapolated from Agamben. It is through their being labeled stateless that Gales, Stanislav, and others like them offer physical evidence of the state’s power. They have become Agamben’s homo sacer, “the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban [who] preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted” (83). At one point, Gales is told, “Your native country cannot be determined, since your consul does not accept you as a citizen. […] We cannot shoot you like a dog with a disease, or drown you in the sea, although I am not so sure but that sooner or later such a law will be passed in every country” (44). Or as Gales says of Stanislav, “He was no longer afraid of anything on earth or in hell. He was in a state where he could not be punished by anybody or anything” (194). Despite the quasi-religious overtones of the latter passage, the “state” that Stanislav occupies operates within political reality: it is the state of exception.

Interlude among the Spanish Anarchists Eventually, Gales makes his way to the south of France and crosses the border into Spain. “It was the turning-point of my life,” Gales declares (93). Given his propensity for hyperbole, it is difficult to know just how

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seriously to take this claim. On a practical level, Gales’ entry into Spain ends the bureaucratic nightmare he has been experiencing. When told that Gales “has no papers,” the Spanish customs officers simply say, “‘Bienvenido,’ […] which is the same as our ‘Be welcome.’ We, of course, seldom mean it, but Spaniards really mean it and they act accordingly” (93). The customs officers even feed Gales and give him fresh clothes before sending him on his way. Thereafter, instead of being subjected to constant surveillance and control by agents of the state, he moves about Spain freely. “When I had no money to buy me a bed for the night,” he notes, “I slept anywhere I found to stretch my bones. The morning found me lying there peacefully. The cop on the beat had passed by a hundred times, but he respected my slumber and took good care that nobody should kidnap me. Here homelessness and poverty aren’t crimes like at home, where they put a man in jail if he hasn’t got a place to sleep” (97). The fact that official documentation matters less in Spain than elsewhere also means that Gales can return to the sea several chapters later. On a conceptual level, however, the seven-chapter interlude that covers Gales’ time in Spain constitutes The Death Ship’s least ambiguous representation of utopia. Significantly, that utopia’s chief characteristic is its libertarian quality, not some contrived assurance of plenitude: Life was beautiful. The sun was so golden and so warm. The country was lovely. People were friendly, always smiling, singing; and there was music in the streets, in the gardens, on the shore. The people who sang and made music and made love were mostly in rags, but they were smiling and friendly and lovely. Above all, there was so much freedom. Do as you like, dress as you can afford, don’t molest me, and to hell with everything. […] In Spain no one speaks of liberty, because people have it. Perhaps their political liberty is not much compared with that of other nations; but no one butts into the private lives of the people; no one tries to tell them what they must drink or eat, or with whom they have to spend the night. (97–98)

Anticipating Torpey’s claim that the modern passport system and the growth in importance of official documentation coincided with the rise of rabid nationalism among the combatants of the First World War, Gales attributes Spain’s freer society to its neutrality during that war. “The Spaniards did not fight for liberty,” he quips, “and that’s why they still have it” (95).

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As extravagant as Gales’ utopian depiction of Spain might seem, it remains grounded in a specific historical context, which is to say that the novel’s utopianism here is “concrete” rather than “abstract,” in philosopher Ernst Bloch’s terms (145–147). The anarchist tradition in Spain was long, rich, and in contrast to most other European countries both socially and politically effective. In his history of the anarchist movement leading up to the Spanish Civil War, Murray Bookchin traces its roots to the late-­ 1860s and demonstrates that its influence gradually extended throughout much of the country, including in both urban and rural communities. Calling it “the largest organized Anarchist movement” of the twentieth century, Bookchin notes that, by 1936, “approximately a million people”—roughly one out of every twenty-four Spaniards at the time—“were members of the Anarchosyndicalist [labor union] CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or National Confederation of Labor)” (2, 1). Despite occasional periods of political repression, members of the CNT would have numbered in the hundreds of thousands when Gales was sojourning in Spain. Traven almost certainly would have known that fact. If he was the former German anarchist Ret Marut, as most critics now believe (Guthke 109–165, Goldwasser 133–142), Traven likely shared the high regard in which his German associates held their Spanish counterparts. Gustav Landauer, who along with Marut was one of the leaders of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, wrote in protest of the 1909 arrest and execution of the Spanish anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer, “He challenged death with life, stagnancy with movement, and narrow-mindedness with openness” (“Ferrer” 288). The ethos of mutual aid from which Gales continually benefits while he travels, unemployed, throughout the country—“they knew that jobs were scarce—but they knew that men must eat to keep the world going” (97)—was deep-seated in Spain and, for Traven, would have embodied the spontaneous praxis of anarchism. In other words, the “turning-point” that his entry into Spain represents for Gales is the recognition that there are functioning communities organized along the libertarian principles he espouses. Just as importantly, he learns that these communities also exhibit a strong sense of solidarity. Within the context of the novel, then, Spain offers a concrete model of the utopian possibilities of anarchist social organization, which the anarchosyndicalist revolution and collectivization of much of Spain’s economy in 1936, just two years after The Death Ship’s English-language publication, dramatically underscored. Gales may not choose to remain in this

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particular utopia or work toward its full realization, but his experiences there demonstrate to him the importance of solidarity and mark a shift in the novel away from mere critique of the state and toward Gales’ active participation in constructing alternative social formations. It is worth noting that Gales’ utopian idyll in Spain likely occurs against the backdrop of the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, who established martial law there from 1923 until 1925. The exact dates of The Death Ship’s action are unclear, but Gales’ reference to “Fascists in Italy” indicates that it takes place after October 1922 (99). Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in September 1923. According to Edward N. Treverton, Traven initially wrote the novel in English in 1923 or 1924 before translating it into German for its first publication in 1926 (19). Gales’ characterization of Spain’s “political liberty” as “not much” is therefore historically accurate. Shortly after he makes that observation, Gales engages in a two-page conversation with a Barcelonan outside a military prison, where he learns communists “are beaten up by the sergeants, and they are tortured. […] We don’t want them here. That’s why they are beaten until they die” (98). While this discovery at first casts “a cloud over sunny Spain,” as Gales feels pity for the imprisoned communists, his attitude changes when the Barcelonan explains, “Those silly people want the state to do everything, regulate everything, so we should be only slaves of the state. We don’t want this. […] But the communists want to interfere with everything, with our private lives, with our occupations, with our marriages, and they say the state should command and order everything and leave nothing for us to worry about” (99). Since Primo de Rivera’s government targeted anarchists as well as communists, a degree of wishful thinking informs this episode, yet events following publication of The Death Ship give the Barcelonan’s speech a sharper edge. Considering the Soviet Union’s problematic involvement in the Spanish Civil War, to the point of executing anarchists and other leftwing opponents of the Communist Party of Spain, the Barcelonan’s antipathy toward statist forms of socialism is prescient. In response, Gales merely muses, “Why should I condemn Spain because of what I had heard?” (99) Clearly, he finds this anarchist critique of communism convincing. Ultimately, despite his contentment in Spain, Gales decides to move on. A member of the crew of a passing ship offers him a job. “A job,” Gales reacts. “Exactly the question I have been afraid of for months and months” (115). In utopian Spain, Gales has managed to survive without

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selling his labor, yet he is “superstitious, like all sailors. […] It is this superstitious character that makes me answer yes when I am asked if I want a job” (115). Of course, Gales’ decision enables the plot to resume, but it also reinforces the anarchist’s belief in process. As Traven’s former colleague Gustav Landauer puts it in Revolution, “Utopia is a combination of ambitions that will never reach their goals; they will always create but a new topia. […] Revolution is hence the way from one topia, or from one state of relative social stability, to the next” (113). As an anarchist novel, The Death Ship requires Gales to continue his picaresque adventures. Stasis would imply that utopia is fully achievable rather than an ongoing project. What the novel requires of its protagonist, in short, is for him to participate in the construction of his own utopia.

The Open Sea as a Zone of Refuge In an obvious allusion to Yorick’s skull, the memento mori in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the name of the ship Gales boards is the Yorikke. Along with a Dante-like inscription Gales imagines appearing above the crew’s quarters—“He who enters here will no longer have existence!” (118)—this allusion suggests that the Yorikke is the death ship of the novel’s title. Gales claims otherwise, though: “This was no death ship. May the Lord forgive me for this sin of mistaking the Yorikke for a death ship! They were pirates hunted for a year by all the battle-ships of all nations” (113). In fact, the Yorikke is a gunrunner, and Gales’ reference to piracy, though made partly in jest, underscores its extranational status. Even the flag that flies over its stern is “so pale, so flimsy, so shredded, that it might have represented any flag of any country in the world” (106)—or none at all, for that matter. Gales’ fellow crewmembers are similarly bereft of national identity: “Without a country. Without nationality. Without birth-­ certificates with which to prove that they had been born of a mother belonging to the human race. Men without passports by which to prove that they were citizens of the earth, given by the Lord to all animals and insects and all human beings” (182). Paradoxically, however, the Yorikke gives these displaced, stateless persons a place: “The man [who has made a trip on a ship] is now actually considered a resident of the country under whose flag the ship sails. But it does not give the man a country, or a nationality, or the right to claim a passport” (144). For Gales, whose job is to carry the coal that feeds the ship’s engines, the Yorikke becomes both a fiery purgatory and a precarious sanctuary.

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In contrast to Gales’ unambiguously utopian experiences in Spain, the depiction of his time aboard the Yorikke is frequently ambivalent. Traven acknowledges the economic exploitation to which Gales and his comrades are subject due to their abject political position: “A good capitalist system does not know waste. This system cannot allow these tens of thousands of men without papers to roam about the world. Why are insurance premiums paid? For pleasure? Everything must produce its profit” (216). Gales and other stateless persons are not allowed to become human detritus because their labor remains useful. In the novel, various ships’ captains, the representatives of the corporations owning those ships, find themselves at odds with state bureaucrats precisely because nationalism and autarky work against the logic of capitalism. In response to one such bureaucrat’s objection that Stanislav “is without a country,” Stanislav’s former captain retorts, “What do I care? […] I know what he is worth. So that’s why I want to have him. I need men like him” (262). Ultimately, however, only ships operating just within or entirely outside international law can offer Gales and Stanislav havens. Even then, Gales’ rhetorical question about “insurance premiums” indicates how unsafe those havens may be. Death ships get their label from the practice of “send[ing] down to the bottom a ship when it is time to do so for cold cash”; otherwise, many companies “would go broke overnight” (289). The Yorikke is therefore utopian primarily because its owners can extract more value from its crew’s labor than from simply sinking the ship and claiming the insurance money. Despite the fundamental uncertainty over how long the Yorikke can sustain its utility for the company that owns it, the fact that it operates outside the rule of law—or at least ignores the questions state bureaucrats ask—explains why Gales develops genuine affection for the ship and a sense of solidarity with its crew. For Gales, the Yorikke offers “proof that people can live without laws and do well. The fire gang had built up among themselves rules which were never mentioned, but, nevertheless, kept religiously. No one was there to command, no one to obey” (213). The Yorikke’s motley crew, representing “as many nationalities […] as there were men aboard,” exposes the constructedness of nationality itself: “Here nobody pushes down your throat your nationality. Because nobody has any to play” (233, 304). Indeed, “The Yorikke was a nation all by herself. She had her own language, her own established morals and customs, her own tradition” (234). All these features emerge organically and spontaneously in response to conditions aboard ship, illustrating Traven’s faith in

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the viability of alternative, non-directed social formations. Moreover, this community embraces the fluidity that Scott identifies as a defining characteristic of zones of refuge. Gales asserts that his name is Pippip and that he is Egyptian, and the rest of the Yorikke’s crew accepts him as such because, “[w]hen a newcomer joined the crew and was asked what nationality he had, he gave one in answer; and hence he was called as he had answered and was believed by everybody. Rarely if ever did anybody on the Yorikke reveal his real name” (238–239). The Yorikke becomes a zone of refuge not because it is the only place left for stateless persons, but rather because its social bonds take shape in active opposition to coercive forms of state power. According to American studies scholar Donald E.  Pease, the sort of transnationalism that Gales celebrates here plays an important role in “challenging the state as the core governance apparatus” (38). In their statelessness, Gales and other members of the Yorikke’s crew simultaneously expose the arbitrariness of state power and present disturbing figures of dissent: “Ordinary men have their birth-certificates and passports and pay-books in fine shape. They never make any trouble for a bureaucrat. […] Really good people believe what is told them, and they feel satisfied with the explanation. Therefore [they] can be at ease in Nicaragua, and cross the ocean to lick the Germans, and make the bankers the emperors of a republic” (306). In contrast to “ordinary men,” Gales and others occupying zones of refuge accuse, question, and “make trouble for” the state. Thus, within the context of an anarchist novel, Gales’ statelessness represents not merely the state’s expression of its power to exclude him, but also a position from which to rebuke that power. Unfortunately for Gales, the utopia he helps build on the Yorikke proves as fleeting as the one he enjoyed more passively in Spain—and perhaps as fleeting as all anarchist utopias. While on shore leave in Dakar, he and Stanislav are shanghaied and placed aboard the real death ship of the novel, the new but defective Empress of Madagascar. Hoping to recoup their investment, the owners of this expensive ship sink it for its insurance. For a time, Gales and Stanislav manage to survive alone on the resulting shipwreck, perched precariously “between two rocks” (347). Reckoning themselves salvagers and therefore the ship’s new owners, they even create another short-lived utopia. “We have here everything we want,” Stanislav points out. “We may eat and drink what we wish, even caviar and Chablis,

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or a good English smoked herring washed down with two quarts of stout. Nobody butts in here and cranks about what we are doing or talking” (351).  Eventually, however, the wreckage washes away, and Gales and Stanislav drift helplessly and begin to hallucinate. The Death Ship ends with Stanislav, convinced the Yorikke has returned to rescue them, slipping off their makeshift raft and disappearing beneath the waves. As for Gales, readers are left to believe he is doomed to a more drawn-out death. Only Gales apparently does not die because he returns in later novels and stories Traven set in Mexico, including The Cotton-Pickers (German serialization 1925, first English edition 1956), The Bridge in the Jungle (German serialization 1927, first English edition 1938), and “The Night Visitor” (first German publication 1928, first English publication 1953). On a purely biographical level, it is difficult not to read the gaps in Gales’ story—how does he survive the ending of The Death Ship?—as meaningful personally to the author, who famously obscured his own identity and past once he emerged as B. Traven in Mexico in the mid-1920s. Like Gales, Traven found a home in post-revolutionary Mexico, where perhaps the legacy of the Flores Magon brothers and Emiliano Zapata appealed to him in much the same way that the legacy of Francisco Ferrer made Spain so appealing to Gales in The Death Ship. Moreover, just as the stateless American sailor Gales transformed himself into an Egyptian named Pippip, Traven, almost certainly the political refugee Ret Marut, claimed to have been born in Chicago and wrote some of his fiction in English, despite it usually being published in German first and despite living in Mexico for forty-five years. Eventually becoming a Mexican citizen in 1951, Traven seems to have acted out the story Gales narrates, demonstrating in strategically practical terms the interchangeability of the state and displaying a personal aesthetics of deracination entirely consistent with his political philosophy. Such close correspondence between a picaresque hero and his peripatetic author makes closure almost impossible to imagine. On a formal level, however, Traven’s unwillingness to close Gales’ story makes even more sense in view of Gales’ status as the protagonist and narrator of an anarchist novel. His return in subsequent fiction and in new locations suggests both the ongoing work and continuing possibilities of anarchism globally. It is to The Death Ship’s credit that it makes statelessness and the freedoms—and contingent uncertainties—associated with it utopian objects of desire.

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Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1995. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Baumann, Michael L. B.  Traven: An Introduction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1976. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol 1. 1959. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. Bookchin, Murray. The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936. New York: Free Life, 1977. Chankin, Donald O. Anonymity and Death: The Fiction of B. Traven. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1975. Dougherty, Stephen. “Vagabonds, The Death Ship, and Denationalization.” Papers on Language and Literature 53.4 (Fall 2017): 323–346. Goldwasser, James. “Ret Marut: The Early B. Traven.” The Germanic Review 68.3 (1993): 133–142. Gulddal, Jesper. “Passport Plots: B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff and the Chronotope of Movement Control.” German Life and Letters 66.3 (July 2013): 292–307. Guthke, Karl S. B.  Traven: The Life behind the Legends. 1989. Trans. Robert C. Sprung. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1991. Landauer, Gustav. “Ferrer.” 1909. In Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader. Ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010a. 286–290. ———. Revolution. 1907. In Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader. Ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010b. 110–185. Larsen, Ernest. “Traven Hypotheses from The Death Ship.” In Arena 2: Anarchists in Fiction. Ed. Stuart Christie. Hastings, UK and Oakland, CA: Christie Books/PM Press, 2011. 41–48. Lűbbe, Peter. “Utopian Elements in the Novels of B. Traven.” In B. Traven: Life and Work. Ed. Ernst Schűrer and Philip Jenkins. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1987. 149–155. Manuel, Frank, and Fritzie Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1979. Marshall, Peter. “Preface.” In Anarchism and Utopianism. Ed. Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. xiii–xvi. Payne, Charlton, and Wolfgang Struck. “Somewhere Else: Legal Fictions, Capitalism, and Deterritoriality in B.  Traven’s The Death Ship.” Symploke ̄ 25.1–2 (2017): 125–140. Pease, Donald E. “Introduction: Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn.” In Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E.  Pease, and John Carlos Rowe. Hannover, NH: UP of New England, 2011.

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Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009. Seibert, Peter. “Traven’s White Rose: Regressive Idyll or Social Utopia?” In B.  Traven: Life and Work. Ed. Ernst Schűrer and Philip Jenkins. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1987. 156–180. Spencer, Nicholas. “Anarchist Powers: B. Traven, Pierre Clastres, and the Question of Utopia.” In Anarchism and Utopianism. Ed. Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 99–117. Torpey, John. “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System.” In Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Traven, B. The Death Ship. 1934. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1991. Treverton, Edward N. B. Traven: A Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999.

PART II

The Influence of Place on Form: Neighbourhoods, Homes and Remakings of Form

CHAPTER 5

“Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them Cristina M. Rodriguez

Helena María Viramontes’ 1960s Mexican American East Los Angeles is a barrio at war with the greater city of which it forms part.1 Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) describes a neighborhood under siege by earthmovers, 1  In Spanish, barrio simply refers to a neighborhood, especially a distinct section of a city. In English the term refers explicitly to an insulated Latinx neighborhood (not necessarily part of a city). In East Los Angeles (among other U.S. barrios), residents often adopt the term colonia to refer to their neighborhood. According to the Diccionario Real de la Academia Española, in Spanish this term primarily means “colony,” but in Mexican Spanish it refers to distinct sections of a city (the way barrio is used elsewhere in Latin America). The word keeps the connotation of a colony however—evoking a group of people somewhat stranded in a foreign land—adding linguistic richness in its new context. 

C. M. Rodriguez (*) Providence College, Providence, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_5

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freeway construction, the removal of open spaces, and government quarantine. In the face of destruction and erasure, Viramontes offers up her novel as a container for place memories, delineating the irreplaceable yet replaced streets, stores, houses, and neighbors of the Eastside as a literary counterspace. Ironically, Viramontes must use the very medium of the barrio’s domination—paper. Papers prove legality and citizenship, map the streets, determine freeway paths, and variously alienate Eastside residents. Through her use of multiple interlinking perspectives to imitate events experienced by an entire neighborhood, non-linear narration to mimic oral storytelling and the processes of remembering, and the consistent metaphorical yoking of characters to places and both of these to memory, Their Dogs Came with Them preserves a neighborhood about to be forever changed by the unspooling of six freeways. Viramontes captures the intimacy between place and identity for Mexican Americans  in the Eastside barrio, and she combats the relentless destruction of their spaces and, by extension, their community by building a paper version of a barrio that is rapidly disappearing under the concrete.

Mexican American East L.A. East Los Angeles’ history is part of Los Angeles’ history, and both have been profoundly intertwined with the evolution of transportation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally a majority Mexican town, Los Angeles’ demographics radically changed with the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s, as companies outdid one another offering inexpensive one-way fares from the Midwest to the city (Hutchinson 22). The population of the town doubled within a decade, and by 1910, Mexicans had become a minority in their former pueblo (Romo 5). Extraordinary sustained growth characterized Los Angeles in the early twentieth century; this rapid industrialization depended, however, on Mexican labor (Sánchez 71), as railroads and interurban railway companies recruited Mexican immigrants and provided them with company housing, usually along the track lines in labor camps on the outskirts of towns (Romo 69). Thus, despite being moved from the center of town, Mexican residents continued to form a crucial part of the city’s economy (Romo 7). The railways Mexicans helped build furthered their own isolation: former labor camps would transform into barrios  in many cases, dotting suburban enclaves east of L.A.; meanwhile improved urban transportation sped the decentralization of the city, as the extended interurban railway line to Boyle Heights helped

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spark “the massive exodus of Mexicans from the Plaza to the east side” (Romo 68). According to Ricardo Romo, by 1930, the East Los Angeles barrio was the largest “Mexican city” in the U.S., rivaling in size many major U.S. cities (61). The rapid increases in migration from Mexico between 1910 and 1920 (during Mexico’s revolutionary war and WWI), the booming industry and commerce in the old Mexican plaza that pushed out residential areas, the decentralizing effects of interurban transportation, and a rise in racial tension and subsequent efforts to segregate Mexican residents, which prevented immigrants from moving into the north or west sections of the city,  all contributed to the making of East Los Angeles (61–62). Romo writes that the move to the Eastside gave the Mexican colonia more cohesiveness—and insulation—than it had experienced downtown. What Sikivu Hutchinson calls a “sea change” in American city planning in the 1930s and 1940s solidified the Eastside’s isolation (121). In the wake of downtown traffic congestion, dwindling support for public transportation initiatives, and the growing integration of the automobile, urban planners turned towards the “horizontal city of the future” (122). Los Angeles planners decided to avoid costly, time consuming “core-city problems” by focusing their resources on suburban expansion, abandoning the inner city in favor of developing freeway access to spaces further afield. The creation of the planning commission, composed of land developers, real estate agents, and bankers who had no ties to the communities that would be effected, and the institutionalization of zoning laws, which segregated residential space from retail and manufacturing spaces and increased the need for the automobile, “helped solidify the model of the decentered, auto-dependent, racially segregated antiurban city” (122). The implementation of this new model inordinately affected the East L.A. barrio, as freeways began being built upon their community. Their Dogs Came with Them is set during this phase of aggressive freeway expansion by the California Department of Transportation. George Sánchez tells us that by 1970 the Eastside was unrecognizable, after a series of construction projects assaulted the barrio in the 1950s and1960s: In the late 1950s the massive construction of freeways linking the Anglo suburban communities with the central business core began. High overpasses and expansive six- lane freeways crisscrossed the east side. Thousands of residents from Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, City Terrace, and surrounding neighborhoods were relocated. The freeways divided the neigh-

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borhoods without consideration for the residents’ loyalties to churches, schools, businesses, or family. (170)

Mike Davis calls the clearing out of L.A. urban spaces for freeways “a traumatic removal of housing and restriction of neighborhood ties that was the equivalent of a natural disaster” (298). Once redevelopment of downtown began in earnest, “Chicano neighborhoods were losing several thousand [housing] units a year to freeway construction” (Davis 168). “Urban renewal” by the 1980s consumed over twelve percent of East L.A. land and displaced over ten percent of its residential population (Villa 82). Half a dozen freeways now run through East Los Angeles, with several interchanges literally occurring on top of the neighborhood. This “four-­freeway exchange,” as Viramontes describes it, “reroute[s] 547,300 cars a day through the Eastside,” making it “the busiest in the city” (169). The hyper-connectivity of this section of road for freeway travelers ironically— or tragically—results in a bifurcated and hyper-unconnected Eastside barrio.

No one in the Eastside believed in paper The novel opens in 1960, with the eviction of Chavela, Ermila’s neighbor, from her house on First Street: like many Eastside residents, Chavela is displaced by multiple imminent freeway construction projects that consume neighborhood land. After the opening the novel remains largely in the mid to late 1960s, with frequent flashbacks to this earlier period. We follow half a dozen characters, chief among them Ermila Zumaya, Turtle Gamboa, and Tranquilina Tomás. Ermila, Turtle, and Tranquilina are natives to the Eastside; Turtle and Ermila are next-door neighbors on First Street, who as children witnessed the destruction of that street just to the east of their homes in the face of freeway construction of the on-ramps for the 710 Interstate and the Pomona Freeway (Highway 60). The novel opens by introducing the importance of writing to remembrance, especially as a response to dislocation. In the scene, a very young Ermila Zumaya—whose family owns the house across the street—listens to Chavela as she packs up for her eviction. Chavela tries to warn the child about the dangers of displacement,  herself a victim of an earthquake in “mi tierra firme, mi país” (“tierra firme” (“solid ground”) used somewhat ironically). Chavela connects that catastrophe to the one she is currently victim to: “Pay attention, Chavela demanded. Because displacement will always come down to two things: earthquakes or earthmovers” (8). The

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parallel continues between Chavela’s earthquake—“the earthquake’s rubble of wood and clay and water yielded only what was missing; shoes without shoelaces, flowered curtains without windows, a baby rattle without seeds in its hollow belly” (7)—and First Street’s earthmovers: “The rows of vacant houses were missing things. Without hinged doors, the doorframes invited games” (9). Things left in the wake of earthmoving become characterized by the absences they point to: shoes without shoelaces, curtains without windows, doorframes without doors. This opening scene introduces both what is being lost, and plants the possibility for how it can be kept, in the face of erasure and change. As we watch Chavela frantically smoke and pack her things, all the while warning Ermila of the dangers of earthmovers, the narrator scans the house and reports its contents: The old woman had taped scribbled instructions all over the walls of the house. Leve massage for Josie. Basura on Wetsday. J work # AN 54389. I need to remember, Chavela had told the child when the child pointed a matchbox at the torn pieces of paper clinging on the walls. Water flours. Pepto Bismo. Chek gas off. It’s important to remember my name, my address, where I put my cigarillo down Call Josie. Chavela Luz Ibarra de Cortez. SS #010-56-8336. 4356 East 1st or how the earthquake cracked mi tierra firme, my país, now as far away as my youth, a big boom-crack. The dogs and gente went crazy from having the earth pulled out right from under them. Cal Mr…Lencho’s tio sobre apartment. Shut off luz. (7)

Chavela has written her full name, social security number, and address on scraps of paper on her walls, among other reminders and important data. The written words are in bold in the text, and the narrator intersperses the notes throughout the scene, at times mid-sentence, introducing phrases that at first seem random (“Cobijas, one note said; Cosa de baño, said another. No good dreses. Josie’s tipewriter. Fotos” (5)), but eventually make sense in Chavela’s monologue: the memory of the smell of charred flesh after an earthquake precedes the scribbled directive to “Smoke outside” (7); when she explains she needs to remember her name and address, they follow in bold. These paper scraps serve as Chavela’s memory.  The scene delivers two prophecies, one fictional and one metafictional. Chavela’s warning of how “the dogs and gente went crazy from having the earth pulled out right from under them” augurs imminent catastrophe, as several years later in the novel East L.A. becomes subject to a

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barrio-wide quarantine for rabid dogs and its gente too go “crazy” in various ways. The next line hints at the second prophecy and drives home the tie between paper and memory: “But the child heard it, a long rip of paper” (7). Chavela is clearly illiterate; without the narrator to tell the story, her notes are lost. Like Chavela’s strips of reminders, or Ermila’s memory of ripping paper to recall something, Viramontes’ text itself is serving as the Eastside’s memory, giving voice to Mexican immigrants like Chavela, as well as Chicano/as like Ermila, and writing it down because “it’s important to remember”(7). Viramontes must justify her use of paper, as throughout the novel papers are used to restrict and coerce Eastside residents. By 1970, the ostensible present of the novel, the construction that kills the “dead side” of First Street is complete: “Four freeways crossing and interchanging, looping and stacking in the Eastside, but if you didn’t own a car, you were fucked. Many were, and this is something Ermila always said in her head: You’re fucked” (176). By this time, the characters now face a new form of exclusion and isolation. The Quarantine Authority, or QA, a shadowy governmental force that declares an alleged rabies outbreak in the barrio, and decrees that access in and out of the affected area—a map which contains the Eastside—be restricted, imposing a curfew on its residents, enforced by police, and operating nightly helicopter sweeps and shootings of all “undomesticated mammals.” For the neighborhood, the QA is but a continuation of the assault that began with the freeways: the barrio’s residents “will recognize the invading engines of the Quarantine Authority helicopters because their whir of blades above the roof of her home, their earth-rattling explosive motors, will surpass in volume the combustion of engines driving the bulldozer tractors, slowly, methodically unspooling the six freeways” (12). All of Viramontes’ characters exist inside the QA’s ominous map of exclusion: The girlfriends lived within the shaded boundaries of the map printed in English only and distributed by the city. From First Street to Boyle to Whittier and back to Pacific Boulevard, the roadblocks enforced a quarantine to contain a potential outbreak of rabies. Back in early February, a pamphlet delivered by the postman read: Rising cases of rabies reported in the neighborhood (see shaded area) have forced Health officials to approve, for limited time only, the aerial observation and shooting of undomesticated mammals. Unchained and/or unlicensed mammals will not be exempt. (54)

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The quarantine boundaries neatly demarcate the borders of the Eastside barrio. The pamphlet’s printing in English only and its distribution by “the city” doubly indicate that this authority is imposed from the outside. The absence of any medical aspect to the quarantine, such as checking entering and exiting patients for symptoms of rabies, suggest that the residents themselves present a danger to the city, and that the “undomesticated,” “unchained,” and “unlicensed” mammals cited here as easily refer to the neighbors as to the barrio’s stray dogs. The complete irony of shooting undomesticated or unlicensed mammals without exemption is not revealed until the final scene, when Turtle is gunned down by the QA. The roadblocks of the quarantine stymie characters throughout the novel. Ermila is caught waiting in lines at First Street multiple times after curfew; Ana tries to evade them by taking the 60 Freeway, and hits gridlock instead; Turtle goes to great lengths on foot to avoid them. The roadblocks and quarantine, however, do not affect the freeways, which run above the barrio. The QA controls barrio residents through the use of blockaded checkpoints and a curfew, requiring residents to carry proof of identification to get in and out of the neighborhood after sunset: “waiting in lines longer than the devil’s tail only to be interrogated by the culeros for valid government documentation” (55). Ermila waits in line behind a frantic woman without identification who wants access to her house to get rent receipts for the QA. As she waits, Ermila considers the absurdity of the checkpoints: The city officials demanded paper so thin and weightless, it resisted the possibility of upholding legal import to people like herself [Ermila], her cousin Nacho, her girlfriends and all the other neighbors with or without children who had the misfortunate of living within the shaded designated areas. Didn’t the QA know that in the Eastside getting a valid ID was more complicated than a twelve-year-old purchasing a six-pack […]? A neighbor’s idea of validity was totally incongruent with the QA’s norms or anyone else’s, for that matter. Business was done differently on the Eastside. In need of a dentist? Wait for Dr. Padilla from Tijuana the first of each month, home visits with a leather bag full of clanging metal tools […]. What about a loan? The lending was done between two men, one of which had a reputation for breaking bones. Need legal status? For those without papers, legal status became a shift in perspective, a matter of dubious demarcation, depending on who the border belonged to.

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No one in the Eastside believed in paper. Most of the Eastside stores didn’t even give paper receipts. Ray, the Japanese owner of the Friendly Shop, calculated sums on paper bags. La Bootie had an adding machine that she punched and cranked with amazing precision. No one questioned the calculations as long as all agreed that the poor didn’t cheat the poorer, and, of course, your word was your word. (63, emphasis mine)

The neighborhood’s notion of identity and validity differs starkly from the city officials. The thinness and lightness of paper defies the common sense of the barrio, which “resists the possibility” that objects so frivolous could uphold “legal import.” “Legal status” in particular is “a matter of dubious demarcation” on the Eastside. Viramontes extends the disbelief in paper to everyday financial transactions on the Eastside, as even store receipts are not used. Instead of paper proof of transaction, in the Eastside proofs are oral: calculations are considered valid because “your word was your word.” The checkpoints become fraught with residents, wary and incredulous of the power of paper, who lack the proper pieces of it necessary to gain entry into their own neighborhood. The disdain for paper turns into a fear of its fragility in the roadblock line: “They fisted gas company bills, birth certificates, bogus driver’s licenses, anything to get themselves home. The longer the wait, the larger the nervous obsession with the handled paper” (63, emphasis mine). “Fisted” tightly like talismans against the QA, the neighbors’ documents, forged and real, are trusted as the only key for entry. The nervousness provoked by the “handled paper” makes the neighbors seem like undocumented immigrants attempting to cross an international border. Yet while some of the documents are bogus, these residents are not alien to the barrio: they have cluttered kitchens and beds waiting for them inside the neighborhood (63). Natives treated as foreigners, those in line recognize through their anxiousness that their own proof of belonging is a too-thin and too-­ light piece of paper: “hours passing, backs aching, only to be told certain papers were unacceptable as proof of residency” (63). The elision of two kinds of legality—are the neighbors undocumented aliens to the barrio or undocumented immigrants to the country, or both?—returns later in the story when Ermila watches the women of uncertain nationality waiting for the bus outside her house: “They sat on the bus bench, canvas bags beside them, filled with the day’s essentials: fearlessness scrambled with huevos con chorizo and wrapped in a tortilla as thin as the documents they carried to prove legality” (176, emphasis mine).

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This view of paper as a tool of Eastside oppression external to the barrio is both upheld and challenged throughout the text. In terms of legal or financial documents, yes:  the Eastside does not believe in paper. However, paper elsewhere in the text carries a lot of meaning: Chavela’s scribbled notes; the ripped paper Ermila hears when Chavela speaks; Ermila’s dream of becoming “an empty wine bottle being jammed with a note […] rolling on the spume of the sea until someone discovered her” (66); or Obdulio the butcher’s tender regard for the letters from his wife in Mexico, which he rereads so often the paper grows thinner (“Obdulio felt the fold of the letter in his back pocket and it was as thin as his wallet” (137)). The thinness or fragility of the documents is always emphasized, in the QA line, in the women’s bags, in Obdulio’s wallet. But the thinness of Obdulio’s letter indicates its high value. These other kinds of paper, which use writing to communicate and remember, are believed in by the Eastside. As an author writing about the barrio, Viramontes evokes the neighborhood’s wariness of paper as an implement from the outside used to control and confine, but as an author writing about her own barrio, she demonstrates how the written can become a positive medium, when the residents themselves utilize it. Their Dog Came with Them  uses the power of place memory to produce this other type of paper: paper as precious tie to distant places or persons, paper as a hopeful  note in a bottle, paper honoring Chavela’s directive that “it’s important to remember.”

The Neighbors Itched Like Phantom Limbs In her 1995 book The Power of Place, Dolores Hayden’s study of urban landscapes and the preservation of underrepresented histories, she introduces philosopher Edward S. Carey’s definition of “place memory”: “it is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability. […] We might even say that memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported” (46). Hayden advocates for the preservation of not just architectural monuments, but the buildings that “have housed working people’s everyday lives,” such as tenements, factories, meeting halls, and churches: “Restoring significant shared meanings for many neglected urban places first involves claiming the entire urban cultural landscape as an important part of American history” (11). Attendant on this re-conception of what is worthy of preservation is the recognition that public spaces house memories and that places also house both personal and social identities: “Identity is

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intimately tied to memory: both our personal memories (where we have come from and where we have dwelt) and the collective or social memories interconnected with the histories of our families, neighbors, fellow workers, and ethnic communities. Urban landscapes are storehouses for these social memories” (Hayden 9, emphasis mine). However, if places are storehouses for our memories, and the memories of our community, what happens when those places are erased? Taking up Hayden’s formulation of “place memory” as “the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences,” and working from the argument that identity is tied to memory, we can see how Their Dogs Came with Them embodies a barrio’s memory through its neighbors’ experiences of the places that have come to define them. Hayden highlights the stakes of urban development and massive demolition: the potential loss of those storehouses of social memories and stabilizing containers for shared experience. Viramontes’ characters face the disorientation and sadness of watching parts of the neighborhood be destroyed, and with them the memories that had been housed there. To counteract this loss, the novel attempts to become its own place container. Most literary criticism of Their Dogs Came with Them addresses its depiction of space, and analyzes how Viramontes captures the social injustice terrorizing the Eastside. Yet the novel does more than describe the barrio; it becomes the barrio.  By incessantly telling and retelling place stories, by walking the streets and recording all its details, and by transforming the reader into an honorary barrio resident, Viramontes is creating a new place, on the page, for barrio memories to persist in. For Eastside residents, who are part of a colonia that has been isolated from the outside and that has come to identify itself as its own separate community, being of the place is who you are: place identity and identity itself become inextricable. Thus, neighbors are connected to their homes or stores as though they only constitute an entire self, not susceptible to disappearance or erasure, when they are located together.2 We see the Eastside equation of people and places through Ermila and Turtle’s childhood memories of First Street, as the residents on one side are evicted and 2  Alicia Muñoz and Sarah D.  Wald both note that Viramontes connects disappearing houses or streets to disappearing neighbors. Muñoz observes that “these metaphorical statements” “humanize[s] the landscape and permit[s] apprehension of the space” (p.  27). Muñoz also explores the relation between memory and erasure, but she does not connect memory to writing, or the role of reader as rememberer.

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their houses destroyed to make way for the new freeway interchange. Ermila notes that those neighbors become as condemned as their homes: “In a few weeks, Chavela’s side of the neighborhood, the dead side of the street, would disappear forever. […] In a few weeks the blue house and all the other houses would vanish just like Chavela” (12, emphasis mine). As a child in the same timeframe, Turtle feels a similar connection between house and neighbor. She observes “the blue house like all the other houses disappearing inch by inch just like Chavela and all the other neighbors” (169). The neighbors and houses are linked: if the houses vanish, so must their residents. the neighbors in the houses must vanish, too. The notion that the neighbors will disappear “inch by inch” just like their houses is absurd—that’s not really how humans exit a scene—but Turtle’s sentiment is that both animate and inanimate objects are being methodically removed in measured increments from her landscape. However, another characteristic of this barrio perspective is to use the power of place memory to keep both houses and neighbors from disappearing forever. Throughout the text, mentions of First Street are qualified as referring either to “the living side”/“saved side” or the “the dead side”. Although by 1960 the “dead” side of First Street is gone, ten years later these terms still reference the displacement and eviction of those neighbors on the un-saved side. Each of the characters who lives or has lived on First Street consistently posits the “dead side” that has supposedly vanished. Like the continued presence of the dead side of First Street in linguistic memory, Ermila,  Turtle, and the Zumaya  Grandparents keep Chavela and the other side of First Street from being forgotten, carrying them into the present through habitual remembering. The living side of First Street itself serves as a cue for the memories, bringing back to mind for the characters pieces of the neighborhood past When Turtle hides out in the Chinese cemetery on First Street—across from her old house—she is forced to remember her street memories by the overwhelming physical reminders. The cemetery itself brings up unwanted past moments: “Wasn’t this the spot where she was jumped senseless, here, to be initiated into McBride? She […] tried to get the hell out of the memory” (220). She refers to the memory as physical, something to be gotten out of, but ultimately the pull of place memory is too strong: [D]espite herself, she stared through the diamond wire fence at their old house. […] their old house was hardly recognizable. […] Diapers hung on

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the old laundry line between the T-poles in the backyard where she and Luis used to build their tent. […] It had been years since, and no, Turtle didn’t want to remember how careless they were to the house and each other. Broken windows veined with duct tape, Amá’s broken bones, tiles eroded and fallen to the ground like teeth, Luis’s locura, paint peeled, Frank’s explosive temper and the stink of a thousand regrets like an old discarded refrigerator lingered in their rented house. (221)

In spite of the changes to the house—rasquache front yard décor in place of Turtle’s mother’s thriving nopales, diapers hanging instead of a makeshift tent—the old house brings with it a series of unpleasant recollections for Turtle. Echoing the barrio perspective of persons as places, Turtle’s memories conflate the house and its inhabitants, juxtaposing broken windows with her mother’s broken bones, carelessness towards the place and towards each other, and emotions like anger and regret palpable and stinking like an abandoned refrigerator. The inanimate objects become human, as tiles turn into teeth and windows are veined like appendages. Indeed, Turtle seems incapable of unbraiding her memories of family and house: “The walls had absorbed so many years of disappointments, bad plumbing, strife, arguments, electrical shorts and temper outages that the wallpaper became unglued. […] Amá was part of the house, carelessly repaired with cardboard and duct tape like her cracked windows. Frank was part of the house, a loose, exposed wire” (161). Viramontes ties the neighbors to the place with adjectival pairings just shy of zeugma: Turtle’s house is worn down by both electrical and emotional shorts (“temper outages”), and its wallpaper is undone by bad plumbing and disappointment. Turtle’s mother and the house are both “carelessly repaired” with makeshift stopgaps. Mother and father literally, concretely become “part of the house.” The ability to remember at the site of a place memory even in spite of fundamental changes to the location is one powerful way that the characters maintain their sense of community. Tranquilina and Mama, who have returned after several years away, find themselves getting lost on their way back to the church: The two women struggled through the rain in a maze of unfamiliar streets. Whole residential blocks had been gutted since their departure, and they soon discovered that Kern Street abruptly dead-ended. […] The streets Mamá remembered had once connected to other arteries of the city. […] But now the freeways amputated the streets into stumped dead ends, and the lives of the neighbors itched like phantom limbs in Mama’s memory: La

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Señora Ybarra’s tobacco smell and deep raspy voice; the Gómez father’s garden of tomatoes; Old Refugia, who had two goats living in her cluttered backyard and who took the goats to graze at the edge of the Chinese cemetery before opening hours. The city of Tranquilina’s birth was hardly recognizable. (33)

The freeways “amputated the streets” that had formerly served as the barrio’s arteries, both literally and figuratively, resulting in the stumped and dead-ended lives of neighbors that “itched like phantom limbs in Mama’s memory.” However, while the freeways do isolate the Eastside, Mama can still conjure the memories of the neighbors: Señora Ybarra’s smell and Gómez’s tomato garden and Old Refugia’s goat grazing practices are brought to mind by their streets, even though those streets have been amputated. The simile of a phantom limb is apt, as Mama has a memory tied to a location that she continues to feel even after that specific location marker (the limb itself) is gone. This passage simultaneously demonstrates Dolores Hayden’s notion that memory is “place oriented” and “place supported,” while showing that even in the absence of a specific place support—the street, the garden—the memories remain in the landscape. The synthesis of both place memory and writing as depositories of social identity is exemplified in Their Dogs Came with Them by the use of graffiti.  Turtle and her former gang, the McBride Boys, combat erasure through written words rather than spoken ones, by “searching out the freshly laid cement […] to record their names, solidify their bond, to proclaim eternal allegiance to one another so that in twenty, thirty years from tonight, their dried cemented names would harden like sentimental fossils of a former time” (164). Not only do they assert their own name and their own territory; they also assert themselves against the encroachment of the freeways and Caltrans’ (the California Department of Transportation) construction, seeking out lasting physical monuments to counter the “freshly-laid” cementing over of their history. In the following paragraph, for perhaps the only time in the text, Viramontes breaks with the chronology she has established, indicating that the narrator is in the present of the author, not the 1960s: “The boys would never know that in thirty years from tonight, the tags would crack from earthquakes, the weight of vehicles, […] become as faded as ancient engravings, as old as the concrete itself” (164). She fast-forwards to “thirty years later” (she will repeat the phrase) to highlight the change and the loss of these boys’ names—and by extension the boys themselves. “Faded […] ancient engravings”

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immediately conjures the image of old tombstones in an older graveyard. The conversion of the tag to a tombstone epitaph “in thirty years” foreshadows the contracted life spans of the gang members: Luis Lil Lizard dies in Vietnam still in his teens; Turtle will be shot down in the closing scene of the novel. Perhaps it also alludes to the six cemeteries that dot the McBride Boys’ territory, whose outer walls are today still popular sites for graffiti tags. The metaphorical yoking of tag to tombstone continues in the next lines: “And in those thirty years the cracks would be repaired […] making the boys’ eternal bonds look worn and forgotten. Not even concrete engravings would guarantee immortality” (164). “Eternal” and “immortality” call up Catholic rhetoric of immortal souls and eternal rest. Like a gravestone, these tags are meant to confer a life for the departed after death, offering a form of immortality. The import of the tags can thus apparently not be overstated. Yet the threat of Caltrans, who systematically remove Eastside graffiti, or rival gangs, who will cross out and deface the tags, instill a constant fear of erasure for the characters, and Viramontes indicates here that such fear is warranted. The novel’s surprising telescoping to the future demonstrates that a more concrete (pun intended) form of engraving will be necessary to keep the memories of these boys alive. Viramontes shares the gang’s reverence for the written word and its power to solidify identity, suggesting that her own writing project offers a more permanent solution.

Text as Barrio, Barrio as Text: Their Dogs Came with Them as Place Memory Their Dogs Came with Them builds a paper barrio, and invites the reader to become a citizen of its literary counterspace. Viramontes utilizes two specific stylistic techniques to turn the reader into a neighbor: one spatial and the other temporal.3 Through repetition and detailed description of the character of the location we feel like the streets and space are our own. By moving memories out of chronological order and introducing characters and events without context, the narrative manipulates time, creating the 3  These are only a few of Viramontes’ literary devices. Alicia Muñoz delineates the novel’s use of metaphor to convey the effects of displacement and dislocation; Hsuan Hsu focuses on how Viramontes utilizes metonymy to capture the contiguity of the spatial transformation impacting the Eastside.

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effect of remembering for the reader. Along with the characters, we recall images or stories or other characters that have been remembered before in the narrative from other points of view, or that will soon be mentioned again when we least expect it. Even though Their Dogs Came with Them is a work of fiction, the setting’s physical, built environment is factual: the streets, stores, houses, and cemeteries of the novel are all actual. Furthermore, the narrator traces the paths of its characters with remarkable precision. Street names, storefront names, which bus routes are taken where, which freeways are taken in the rare event of a car scene, all are minutely detailed. The reader is constantly located in a specific part of the barrio, and Viramontes always tells us which direction we are headed and what houses, landmarks, landscapes, or persons are there. The author keeps the reader moored to the barrio by painstakingly tracking the movements of her characters. By learning those street names, landmarks, paths in and out of roadblocks, journeys on foot, by bus, and very occasionally by car, we come to recognize the streets and to remember them as they reappear in the narrative.4 After following multiple characters on multiple trajectories as they return to First Street, we start to know the Zumaya front porch, its avocado tree, and its unhappy residents. We even feel like we know Chavela’s old blue house, long since demolished, across the street. The barrio becomes familiar. This anchoring offsets the disorientation of the narrative structure, which moves around in time without warning and which oscillates among the perspectives of over a dozen characters. The maddening displacement in time functions to evoke the process of remembering for the reader, which ultimately complements our experience of becoming experts on Eastside space. Viramontes shapes her narrative so that we remember moments and encounter characters before we realize who those characters are or what those moments mean. Then the narrative will return to the moment, or introduce a character, often from the perspective of a different character, and we will suddenly realize that we remember already meeting that person or already having that memory of an event told earlier and out of context. This experience of reading mimics the nonlinear and 4  Sarah Wald argues that the novel critiques the injustice of differential access to transportation through consistent reference to the characters’ frustrations moving around the barrio. Yet the descriptions of waiting at bus stops, transferring, walking, and variously attempting to navigate streets without a car also provide the reader with the atmosphere of claustrophobia and entrapment that plague the characters.

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decontextualized nature of memory. Traveling streets we now know, encountering characters we have met before, and returning to memories of events we now feel like we have lived through, the neighborhood becomes the reader’s own. Their Dogs Came with Them achieves a strange prestidigitation, transforming the reader into a member of the East Los Angeles community it is remembering. To achieve this effect, Viramontes uses what I call literary prolepsis and analepsis. For example, in the first chapter, Chavela warns Ermila that earthmovers, like earthquakes, will make the gente and dogs crazy. Ten years later, Chavela’s prophecy rings true: “She [Ermila Zumaya] will be a young woman […] watching the QA helicopters burst out of the midnight sky to shoot dogs not chained up by curfew. Qué locura, she thinks. The world is going crazy” (12). So far, this is not too strange: Ermila is looking out the window, thinking that the world has gone crazy, and this reminds her of her conversation with Chavela. However, we return to this exact moment in Chap. 4, with Ermila looking out the window: “Ermila watched the Quarantine Authority helicopters burst out of the midnight sky to shoot dogs not chained up by curfew. Qué locura, she thought. The world is going crazy. […] The wheeling copter blades over the power lines rose louder and louder […], just like the unrelenting engines of bulldozers ten years earlier when Ermila was a child” (77). The two scenes form a chiasmus. The narrator prophesizes forward, from the kitchen scene to “ten years later,” and then the character/narrator looks back, “ten years earlier.” This structure transforms the earlier vignette into a memory for the reader: we have a nagging suspicion that we know what Ermila is thinking before she says it, because we have a vague recollection of this very brief moment that we read several chapters and dozens of pages ago. This move ties the extreme policing of impoverished Chicanx communities to the negligent urban development that provokes their impoverishment (the authority’s copter blades “just like” the bulldozers), and it ties us as readers to Ermila’s place memory. Another instance of literary prolepsis and analepsis involves Turtle. In Chap. 8 Turtle, as a teenage tomboy still named Antonia, begins to “go bad.” In the kitchen, she thinks of her old neighbor Chavela, who we have already met and thus can also recall. We learn much later that Chavela cared for Turtle and would tweak her chin and give her lemonade (235). Turtle is reminded of Chavela’s dangling cigarettes by her Tío Angel, who is smoking in the kitchen with Aunt Mercy and Turtle’s mom Amá. Viramontes foreshadows the final scene of the novel, but of course as

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readers we don’t know that. Aunt Mercy is critiquing the teenage Turtle’s new, freshly shaven head: You remember Chuy’s daughter? ’Member her, Angel baby? Mercy asked. From Humphrey Street? La malflora who did her old man in, ‘member? […] Chuy was a drunk, Tío Angel said […] Drunk or no, he didn’t deserve to die like some pinche perro on the street. […] La pinche malflora stabbed him cold, man. I ‘member you could see the police chalk marks where he just laid there like a dog. Dead. The malflora was bad news all around. Bottom-line it, Tío Angel replied. Get to the point of your chisme. Bottom line is la malflora shaved her head. That was the start of going bad. (167)

The story, and especially its words, sits uncomfortably with Turtle: “The word ‘malflora’ sounded so sad to Turtle, it was a word you shouldn’t be left alone with” (168). Aunt Mercy’s veiled warning that Turtle is on her way to “going bad” is passed over and not mentioned for several chapters. Finally, in Chap. 11, when Turtle is wandering the streets homeless, she stuffs dead flowers into her jacket for warmth in the Evergreen cemetery. The dead flowers bring the word “malflora” (literally, “bad flower”) back to her memory, but at first it is not stated explicitly: “Turtle sat dead tired on a marble bench to rest and thought about how hurtful bad flowers can be and then she thought of Chavela and the potted ferns and her hibiscus flowers” (235). As readers, we dimly recollect something about bad flowers being mentioned earlier. Eventually, she makes the mental connection, and because her introduction to the word “malflora” happens when she is in her old kitchen thinking of Chavela, she unconsciously connects the two: “But let’s face it, if Turtle knocked on Chavela’s door right now, a Grade-A cold-blooded malflora with studded ears,” “would Chavela welcome her?” (236). This brief conversation between Aunt Mercy and Amá is perhaps far in the back of our minds in the final scene of the novel when Turtle, high on angel dust, stabs Nacho—a total stranger to her, but known to us the readers—outside the bus depot, leaving him to die like a “pinche perro on the street” at the end of the story. Aunt Mercy’s words make Turtle’s act a fulfillment of prophecy and allow us to reread Turtle’s homicide as la malflora symbolically killing her terrible father. As part of the neighborhood and privy to its chisme or gossip, we remember the earlier story, and

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the excessive violence of Turtle’s father, not to mention Turtle’s ongoing struggles identifying as a man in a woman’s body, and these memories soften our interpretation of Turtle’s seemingly senseless violence. After the stabbing, when we are told that “except for Tranquilina, no one […] knew who the victims were, who the perpetrators were” (325), we know that Tranquilina knows the truth because she is from the barrio and knows her neighbors, having encountered both Nacho and Turtle before. However, the narrator omits another witness who also knows: the reader. The reader has been made aware of the dubious notion of what it means to be a victim or perpetrator for a person like Turtle, who cannot understand the question of “why” she did it: “‘Why’ was not a word that meant something to Turtle. […] Why? Because a tall girl named Antonia never existed, because her history held no memory. Why? Go ask another” (324). Between Turtle’s memories, barrio chisme, and our own accumulated memories of walking the neighborhood with Turtle, we recognize that the motivation for this violence begins over ten years ago with the aggression of the freeways upon First Street.5 Viramontes creates this literary prolepsis and analepsis throughout the story in myriad small details. She has characters encounter other characters before we know who they are, and then later, when we see the scene from a different character’s point of view, the reader feels as if she is remembering the encounter. Turtle sees and describes Ben before we know who Ben is. The homeless “ubiquitous woman” sees Turtle on the Third Street Bridge before we know where she is and who see is; Turtle does not see the woman back until several chapters later (217). We meet Tranquilina through Turtle’s eyes before we meet her, and we meet Ermila’s girlfriends through Tranquilina’s eyes before we meet them. We are introduced to Obdulio the butcher through the Eastside reporter in Ben’s hospital room (113). Turtle sees the fruit crate Nacho stacks by the bathroom to peep at Ermila (221) after Nacho tells us of it and before Ermila uses it to escape. These foreshadowings and flashbacks not only place us in the community as rememberers; they also suggest that knowledge of the neighborhood is relative: everything depends on one’s point of view and where one stands. The neighbors are all inscribed in each other’s memories and get stitched between them, but we never get an objective, outside perspective on any of them. Furthermore, our perspective as readers long 5  Wald aptly connects the social, and more importantly spatial, displacement of the characters by urban planning schemata to the street violence that closes the novel (p. 77).

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ceases to be objective, as this literary legerdemain stitches our memories to that of the neighbors as well. Their Dogs Came with Them is a difficult text. The novel overwhelms the reader with numerous characters, shifting time frames, and plot encounters that can only be understood with foresight, in hindsight, upon rereading, or all three. To track the characters and their timelines requires mooring them in space: Their Dogs Came with Them encourages the drawing of maps, the recalling of street names, and the recognition of landmarks,  rewarding such attention to place by revealing other meetings among characters or other vectors of meaning based in the place memories of each location. In short, Viramontes crafts a text that must be occupied by the reader. Their Dogs Came with Them is inhabited, experienced not by reading front to back, but rather by going back and forth within it, inside the text and outside of it, drawing connections between places and persons, memories both real and fictitious. Readers who stay become residents of Viramontes’ literary barrio, which stands as a protection, in paper, against the ongoing threat of the Eastside’s erasure.

Works Cited Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. London: Verso, 1990. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Hsu, Hsuan L. “Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice.” New Literary History, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2011: 147–168. Hutchinson, Sikivu. Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation in Los Angeles. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Muñoz, Alicia. “Articulating a Geography of Pain: Metaphor, Memory, and Movement in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them.” MELUS, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2013: 24–38. Romo, Ricardo. East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in ChicanoLos Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Viramontes, Helena María. Their Dogs Came with Them. New York: Washington Square Press, 2007. Wald, Sarah D. “‘Refusing to Halt’: Mobility and the Quest for Spatial Justice in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange.” Western American Literature, Vol. 48, No. 1/2, 2013: 70–89.

CHAPTER 6

“A House with Many Rooms”: Transformed Homes in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names Laura Savu Walker

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. —Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

In 1979, James Baldwin envisioned traveling back to the American South to write about the legacy of three leaders of the civil rights movement: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. A decade after their deaths, “he wondered how they and their cause appeared to their children’s generation” (Jansma). He would soon take on an ambitious book project, tentatively titled Remember This House, which involved “facing those children and the memories he held of their fathers. It meant facing the question of whether or not the equality they had fought and died for was any closer at the dawn of 1980” (Jansma). Neither the

L. Savu Walker (*) Columbia College, Columbia, SC, USA University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_6

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journey back nor the book Baldwin had planned was completed. On the title page of the thirty-page manuscript for Remember This House, Baldwin apparently wrote the first word as “Re/member,” which to his assistant, David Leeming, suggested a desire to “put a broken ‘house’ together again. To not just recall, but to reassemble the ‘house’ of the fallen heroes.” According to Leeming, during the 1980s, Baldwin’s former optimism had given way to a “general pessimism” about the “unlikelihood of the white world’s changing its ways.”1 The desire to “re/member” America is both an acknowledgment of the originary violence that went into the creation of the new land as well as a reimagining of place that thrives on harmony in difference. As a spatial and social metaphor, the house stands for a site of democratic inclusion founded on mutually constitutive pillars of transnational identity. Similar questions about the possibility of social transformation motivate the Ethiopian American novelist Dinaw Mengestu’s poignant engagement with post-Civil Rights era discourses of identity, community, and national belonging in All Our Names (2014). In addition to the house symbolism, in which private dreams and public ideals converge, the equally suggestive title of Mengestu’s novel points to naming and renaming as tropes of identity that are pivotal to “America’s inherent heteronomy” (Moraru 24) and to self-other interdependence more generally. All Our Names follows two young African men, both referred to as Isaac, bound by a violent past as student “revolutionaries” in early 1970s Uganda, and Helen, a social worker from the American Midwest, who experiences her own “private little blast” (95) when she becomes romantically involved with the “Isaac” that emigrates to America. Since the latter narrates the chapters set in Uganda, I will refer to him as the narrator or, alternatively, as D-, which, we learn with Helen much later, is what his father named him when he was born (253) and which links him to his other creator, Mengestu, whose first name starts with the same letter.2 The betrayal of the “ecstatic promise of a socialist pan- African dream” ten years after Uganda’s independence is paralleled, in Helen’s narrative, by the sense that, a decade after segregation legally ended, racial prejudices remain deeply ingrained in American 1  Filmmaker Raoul Peck’s critically acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) weaves together excerpts from the thirty-page manuscript of Remember This House and from Baldwin’s letters and interviews to create a rich social tapestry of then and now. In so doing, he takes the journey that Baldwin “had once found so impossible.” (Jansma) 2  To Helen, however, the narrator introduces him as Isaac, so in the context of their relationship, it makes sense to call him Isaac.

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society. The parallels have a historical basis, for the writers and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles throughout the African continent— among them Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire—inspired the generation engaged in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. The narrative structure of the novel maps dissimilar geographies but similar political concerns and reveals a subjectively perceived reality transcending all geopolitical distinctions. Drawing on the elements of home put forward by social theorist Jan Willem Duyvendak in The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States (2011), I argue that, while foregrounding the complexities of identities forged under conditions of war and dislocation, the novel interrogates the material and symbolic value of home in order to project a vision of a “necessarily hybrid” public sphere that is “neither a haven nor a heaven, but a place one has to share with many others”(Duyvendak 121). The fundamentals of home that Duyvendak has culled from several sources, especially Porteous and Smith’s book Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home (2001), are familiarity, haven (safety, intimacy, and domesticity), and heaven (a public place where one can “be” oneself, express oneself freely, and where one feels accepted) (38–39). Ideally, he points out, “the nation-state should include all of its citizens. If we want to retain the idea of the nation-as-home, it needs to be a house with many rooms” (121). Seeking to redefine the terms of who belongs and on what grounds, Mengestu imagines a metonymic bond between the home and the nation that emphasizes the need for familiarity and individuality in an intimately-populated place. For the most part, Mengestu puts this possibility out of reach by showing the obstacles Helen and D- face as an interracial couple: “What we didn’t have, for all the space, were many places where Isaac and I could publicly rest without fear of who was watching us” (224). But the symbolism of the urban setting, the “affective attunement” suggested by the characters’ body language (Pedwell 146), and the promises they make to each other in the novel’s last chapter revive the hope that Americans will finally realize that “the right to feel at home comes with a corresponding duty: to help others to feel at home as well” (Duyvendak 121). Since this moral obligation entails an affective investment in voluntary relationships, such as friendship and love, which make one feel welcome, the novel allows us to think through the ways that the “politics of home” is shaped by what cultural critic Carolyn Pedwell has called “the transnational politics of empathy.” More specifically, the relationship between “Isaac” and

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Helen can be interpreted as symbolic of other “transnational modes of relating” that, according to Pedwell, “take conflict and lack of full commensurability as central to affective politics, rather than what needs to be eliminated or neutralized by empathy, and [approach] empathetic ‘failures’ or ‘mis-translations’ as opportunities for discovery and transformation” (10). Thus understood, the protagonists’ sense of belonging, while premised on relationality and connection, does not exclude interpersonal, social, and geopolitical conflict resulting from empathetic failure. Following Duyvnedak, my reading of All Our Names assumes a “hybrid conceptualization” of home (121). Home is a place as well as a feeling experienced in networks of social relations, not only at the level of an individual household (home-as-haven), but also in the larger, associational sphere of the community and in the political and cultural sphere of the nation-state, where shared ideas concerning “the good life,” such as the American Dream, are nourished (home-as-heaven). Attuned to those wider structural and historical forces that influence feelings of home, Mengestu foregrounds the ways they can function as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion: despotic political regimes, racial and sexual norms, and de facto segregation. It is by brushing against these forces that the novel’s protagonists alternatively inhabit, abandon, or are dispossessed of “home.” The challenges they face are intricately interwoven in the textual whole, creating the sense that they are fighting the same fight, albeit on different warfronts and from different (i.e., more or less privileged) positions. Thus, we are constantly reminded that their life-­ stories are always preceded by and embedded within other, layered (hi) stories through which their identity is already at least partially created. Home within such a narrative becomes a place that joins the condition of belonging to one another and to the nation, while enabling the dispersal of identity through the medium of shared language.

Roots and Rootlessness: A Tale of Two Continents ‘Isaac’ was [his parents’] legacy to him, and when his revolutionary dreams came to an end, and he had to choose between leaving and staying, that name became his last and most precious gift to me. (Mengestu 5)

All Our Names tells two interrelated stories that follow the intertwined destines of three individuals searching for some version of home: a story of friendship between two young African men and an interracial love story

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between one of these men (born in Ethiopia, like Mengestu) and a white woman from the American Midwest (where Mengestu grew up, in Peoria, Illinois). While conceding that his “experience and understanding of America” have been “shaped by having immigrant parents,” Mengestu rejects the essentialist reductionism of identity politics—being pigeonholed as an immigrant writer and “spun off because of [his] ethnicity.” Instead, he considers himself as “American and African at all points and times” (“Dinaw Mengestu”).Thus, his first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, has Ethiopian characters, but it is “very much about America.” Setting his second novel, How to Read the Air, in the Midwest was “deliberate; I was staking its claim in America. I wanted Jonas, the narrator, not to be an immigrant but to be someone who was undeniably born in America” (“Dinaw Mengestu”).In All Our Names, Mengestu departs from conventional depictions of immigrant experiences insofar as it reveals, through Helen’s first-person account of her relationship with Isaac, how Americans welcome (or not) immigrants into their towns, homes, and communities. As Mengestu pointed out in an interview for PBS, both Isaac’s lack of choice in immigrating and the natives’ perspectives on him break with the tradition of more “populist” immigrant narratives centered on characters searching for the American dream (“All Our Names”). Thus, Isaac comes to America not because he chooses to, but because he has to. The choice is forced on him by circumstances over which he has little to no control, as related in the chapters that bear the name he comes to share with his friend back in Africa. The latter is the absent protagonist of the “Helen” chapters, but otherwise very much present, for his life and death shape everything that occurs afterwards. The thematic threads that run through these alternating chapters illuminate the instability underlying constructions of personal, cultural, national identity. Specifically, the narrator’s reinvention as “Isaac” suggests that it is possible to negotiate the boundaries of one’s identity apart from biological roots, namely, through the multiple “routes” he either is forced or chooses to follow. At the same time, he can make himself up only to a point, given the constraints enforced by the racial state. The dual structure of the narrative mirrors the divisions between and within the characters, as well as the parallels between the hope-filled historical moments in which their stories unfold: the post-colonial years in Uganda and the post-segregation era in America. In both contexts, dreams of substantive change are deferred due to political instability and violence or to deeply ingrained fears and prejudices. In Uganda, many revolutionary

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leaders went on to become autocrats and dictators, making D- a witness to the rise of tyranny rather than the creation of a pan-African identity. In America, for all the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the problem of race continues to persist, making it difficult for couples like Isaac and Helen to envision a future together. The figurative delineation of places and their attendant political concerns suggest the narrative’s tendency toward making both individual and geopolitical identity a question of imaginative speculation and interpretation. Thanks to Mengestu’s sensitive description of social and psychological detail, this narrative construction does not seem forced; instead, it serves to reinforce the meaning of the title by expanding the possibilities of who these characters are and whom they can become. The title phrase “all our names” affirms this ontological debt, which the characters honor by caring for each other, whether as friends or lovers. In the narrator’s case, this process of self-definition through encounters with significant others is complicated by a process of dislocation from his place of birth and all the socio-cultural qualifiers that come with it. In turn, this contingent set of connections reflects a dynamic process of attaching himself or being attached to different places, people, and histories. What the narrative style achieves is the creation of a place that, in its very act of situating the characters, opens up other possibilities of belonging. In a bid for personal autonomy, the narrator seeks to escape the grips of family around which he is supposed to order his life (45); as he later tells Helen, each of the thirteen names he had when he was born was “from a different generation, beginning with my father and going back from him” (177). This “overdetermination of the social at the site of the name,” or the fact that “we are always already named by others,” means that “the name signifies a certain dispossession from the start” (Butler 138). By the same token, all the names the narrator gives himself while still living with his family and those that others give him after he leaves home represent “ways to be transported beyond oneself” (Butler 138), showing the influence of horizontal heritage in the narrator’s perception of himself and of the world around him. In the absence of traditional sources of bonding associated with family and homeland, identity becomes a matter of performance and reinvention. All Our Names begins with one person (the narrator) in one place (Kampala in the early 1970s), but as the novel progresses, other places and people, as well as wider social forces, go into the making of his

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identity—and, as we have seen above, in the case of his creator, for whom D- functions as an alter-ego. On crossing the border into Uganda, Dshed “all the names” his parents had given him and imagined Kampala as “the capital,” a nameless city with no allegiances to a specific country: “Like me, it belonged to no one, and anyone could claim it” (4). Since “there was still hope in the brighter future to come,” the narrator and Isaac, a fellow student he befriends at university, “were there like everyone else to claim [their] share” (3). Both start as would-be revolutionaries, “fueled by ecstatic promises of a socialist, Pan-African dream” (3), but by the time they arrived on campus, this dream “had proven rotten and was cast to the side” (24). After staging the first coup, the president who took power claimed the country was “the first African socialist republic.” Mengestu alludes here to Uganda’s third president, Idi Amin Dada, who cultivated the image of a popular leader by speaking “the right language, grand, pompous, and humble merged into the same breath” (23). His true colors were revealed in a brutal reign lasting from 1971 to 1979. Far from portraying Uganda as an unproblematic example of otherness or anticolonial resistance, Mengestu foregrounds the traumas of the postcolonial world: military coups, civil wars, despotic regimes, and the corruption of those in power who masquerade as liberators. He eschews oversimplification by showing that there are no neat divisions between victims and victimizers in the country’s civil war. The narrator admits that, insofar as the young revolutionaries believed that “the city, this country, Africa” were “there for the taking,” their approach to the future was “no different from that of the Englishmen who preceded [them]. Many of the young boys who were students at the university would later prove the point as they stuffed themselves with their country’s wealth” (8), which makes them immediate targets of Isaac’s “paper revolution” but also objects of envy as he cannot help being drawn to the way “[p]rivilege lifted the head, focused the eye” (25). The first time he and the narrator go to the expensive café Flamingo, Isaac proclaims, “That’s where we belong, not in a poor village” (42). The brutal beating he endures in order to “earn” the privilege of associating with the elite of the time shows the high price exacted by the fantasy of upward mobility, a fantasy as fragile as the revolutionary dream in Uganda’s fraught political context, or as the American Dream in a recently desegregated society. The narrator’s ambitions, however, lie elsewhere, for having read about “an important gathering of African writers and scholars at the university”

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a decade earlier (4), he has always dreamed of joining their ranks, which is why, at Isaac’s suggestion, he adopts the name of a poet, Langston, who had attended that conference: “I felt instantly attached to his name” (41). While attuned to the cultural ferment on the continent, the narrator is also drawn to Victorian novels that, he assumes, model how proper English is spoken (51).3 The fact that, due to his reading background, D- speaks “like a character from Dickens” and his verbal restraint, especially when it comes to expressing his feelings for Helen, suggest a lack of confidence in his own voice (52). These features are symptomatic of what Chinua Achebe called, with regard to the dispossessed, their “nervous confusion, the fragility of their awareness and self-esteem” (72).4 Yet the narrator’s reading interests and his appropriation of the idiom of the metropolis could also be taken as his—and implicitly Mengestu’s—way of staking out a claim to a cultural heritage that includes the great literary achievements of the West. The choice of language with which one expresses oneself at once maps the individual’s personal anxieties and political struggles in a larger linguistic cartography, while the implicit irony running through the novel reveals the uncomfortable nature of the linguistic position chosen for oneself. To Isaac, the narrator looked “more like a professor than a fighter, and in the beginning that was what he called me: Professor, or the Professor, the first but not the last name he christened me” (4–5; emphasis mine). By contrast, Isaac “had the build but not the face and demeanor of a soldier,” and his roots meant the most to him: “‘Isaac’ was the name his parents had given him and, until it was necessary for us to flee the capital, the only name he wanted. His parents had died, in the last round of fighting that 3  Because of his formal way of speaking, Isaac strikes Helen as “someone out of an old English novel.” His nickname at her office is “Dickens,” and Helen gives him a copy of A Tale of Two Cities—yet another subtle hint that All Our Names tells the troubling tale of two continents. Another suggestive intertext is Great Expectations, a book the narrator knows by heart and which he “rewrites” by imagining that “London was now Kampala; Pip, a poor African orphan wandering the streets of the capital” (p. 164). 4  Achebe’s choice of phrase, “nervous confusion,” brings to mind what Frantz Fanon identified as the “nervous condition” of the colonized, by which he meant a susceptibility to the “essential qualities of the West” (p. 36). When it comes to “those beleaguered African writers struggling at home to tell the story of their land,” Achebe points out, the desire to emulate Western writers can be justified on psychological grounds as yet another effect of the trauma of dispossession. “The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening,” Achebe claims, and “the range of aberrations and abnormalities fostered by this existence can be truly astounding” (pp. 74, 72).

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came just before independence. ‘Isaac’ was their legacy to him, and when his revolutionary dreams came to an end, and he had to choose between leaving and staying, that name became his last and most precious gift to me” (5; emphasis mine). This passage foreshadows a turning point in the narrative, when the narrator is forced to leave Uganda for America and assume his friend’s name, while an essential part of his identity—embodied by the real Isaac—stays behind. “Certain characters,” Mengestu has said in an interview for Paris Review, “have great failings because of their inability to move outside of their own damaged terrain, and it’s only until they do that they become fuller, more meaningful people” (“Dinaw Mengestu”). While the first part of this statement poignantly applies to the real Isaac, the second part applies to his namesake, who manages to flee the violence and corruption that have damaged his friend. Their nominal bond suggests a homology, not an identity, as it preserves the distinctiveness of self and other. Unlike Isaac, who found his place easily in Kampala, “ris[ing] to the top of whatever circle he found himself in” (6), the narrator remains, for the most part, aloof and adrift. Vulnerable to the power exuded by Isaac, he falls “victim to his maneuvers from the beginning, instantly folded into his reality, which, for the first time since I came to the capital, gave me the feeling there was at least one place I belonged” (8). In Duyvendak’s terms, the naïve and impressionable narrator experiences home as “heaven,” a place where he feels “special” (8) and connected to others (Isaac and his followers) with whom he shares, or rather is “seduced” (9) by, Isaac’s “version of history,” itself “half fact, half myth” (8). In Africa, Isaac tells him, the only thing to study is “Politics,” so he too needs the narrator as “a witness rather than a mere spectator” of the performative politics that, at least initially, casts him as a victim of gratuitous violence: “He was pushed, threatened, laughed, spat at, and regardless, he returned to me with only a slightly dampened version of the confident glare he wore when he left. He could do so in part because he knew I was there watching, a witness rather than a mere spectator” (26). Not only does one fight and the other write; their grasp of events is fundamentally different, driving a wedge between them, while also exposing the gap between dreams and reality, hope and history. What the text reveals is the fallacy of using a language that documents historical events while being simultaneously implicated in the excesses of such history. Acceptance of his role as a witness inscribes the narrator’s experiences in a linguistic network that fashions

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history from the rubbles and simultaneously complicates the determination of agency with respect to historical events.

Dreaming Close to Home The distance between what we had and what we wanted was too obvious if we dreamed close to home. (Mengestu31)

Around the same time, America was also going through a period of social and political turmoil, when antiwar, feminist, and civil rights activists started questioning the assumptions underlying systems of domination and oppression. To better understand the shifts occurring on the African and North American continents, Mengestu dramatizes them on an intersubjective scale, taking the principle of revolution into more personal territory. Thus, the second chapter introduces us to Helen, a social worker whose divorced mother calls her “a woman of a certain age,” and who lives in Laurel, “a quiet, semirural Midwestern town” (11). Unlike her mother, who has “always been a cautious woman” (126), Helen throws caution to the wind when she takes “Isaac” on as a client and they become romantically involved. Whereas her mother, for whom decorum is everything, tries to cover up “the cracks” that came with their family, Helen likes her voice “too much” to keep quiet about things that matter to her, from the stories she reads aloud to the real-life stories of strangers, of all stripes, she encounters as part of her job. References to such narratives reflexively reinforce literature’s potential to bind together places and individuals beyond any positive claims of the text’s relations to multiple histories. In the chapters told from Helen’s point of view, the observer becomes the observed—the one scrutinized, romanticized, even exoticized, but also loved for who he is, not for whom Helen imagines him to be. Before they meet, the little she knows about “Isaac” comes from her boss, David, whose friend arranged a student visa for him. When she first sees him, Helen becomes aware of two assumptions that “Isaac” proves wrong: “first that Africans were short, and the second that even the ones who flew all the way to a small college town in the middle of America would probably show signs of illness or malnutrition” (14). As their relationship develops, Helen confronts other previously unacknowledged assumptions, along with some uncomfortable truths about the racially driven social and sexual norms operating in her “quaint town,” which only a decade earlier

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had stopped segregating its public places and “still didn’t look kindly upon seeing its races mix” (17). Racism, then, operates not only through spatial exclusion—similar to the Manichean segregation of colonial space referenced by Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth5—but also through affective attachments that reflect historically specific cultural beliefs and ideological values. Racial prejudices force “Isaac” and Helen to keep their relationship private, confined to a precarious “haven”: with “no outside world to ground us … I understood how easily the tiny world Isaac and I were slowly building could vanish” (21). Neither thinks they have a future together: “The distance between what we had and what we wanted was too obvious if we dreamed close to home” (31). Helen is determined to “at least try to make the most of our present” (32), but no sooner does she consider what “normal couples” (32) do than she remembers what she and “Isaac” are up against in Laurel: “We were exactly what geography had made us: middle of the road, never bitterly segregated, but with lines dividing black from white all over town, whether in neighborhoods, churches, schools, or parks. We lived semipeacefully apart, like a married couple in separate wings of a large house” (33). Here, as throughout the novel, the house imagery takes on a symbolic significance, “precisely because ‘home feelings’ [can] no longer [be] limited to the private and individual sphere.” The “large house” Helen longs for evokes Duyvendak’s idea(l) of a “house with many rooms”: “In a democratic and diverse society, the ‘home’ of the public sphere is necessarily hybrid; neither a haven nor a heaven, but a place one has to share with many others” (121). Building such a house requires a commitment to an other beyond the self but intimately bound up with it, for this mutual indebtedness grounds identity. That the novel discloses a possibility and not a model for building such a house is evident from the fictional site of Laurel. Unlike the transfer of names between the main protagonists, the narrative precludes the exchange of names between actual lived spaces and the American place in the novel, thereby challenging the comfort with which globalization “brings home” the alterity of places and identities. The personal becomes intensely political for Helen and “Isaac,” whose romance functions as a site of difference, on both an individual and 5  Describing the racialized production of space, Fanon writes, “The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel.” The colonized sector, in contrast, is “a world with no space, people are piled up on top of each other, the shacks squeezed tightly together” (p. 4).

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cultural level. Echoing the narrator’s belief that “Kampala was too small for what I imagined” (4), Helen whispers to herself, “This town isn’t big enough for the both of us,” as she looks in the classified section of the newspaper for an apartment in a different town (50). Since change “seemed to be everywhere except Laurel,” Helen resolves to become an agent of change, to “do something different,” or rather continue the fight she and “Isaac” have, in a sense, already “picked up” (33). In so doing, Helen, too, is crossing a border, a racial and cultural one, beyond which she sees her life gaining meaning, direction, and purpose. She measures their small victories according to a “crude value system” that includes shopping together and showing “obvious signs of affection” in public, but she has to concede that they “never touched except by accident” (35). Helen hopes to deal a more important “blow against segregation” when she invites “Isaac” out to lunch at the same diner she and her father used to go to on Saturday afternoons. Although she wants to think they have “every right” to be there (36), her worst fears are confirmed. The hostile stares from and whispers among the other patrons, the waiter’s reluctance to serve them, and her suggestion that they take the food with them—all remind her that “Isaac” is not welcome there. Yet he refuses to leave and insists on finishing his lunch; his defiance, Helen realizes, is meant to awaken her to the dangers of their romance, if not punish her for subjecting him to this humiliating treatment: “Now you know. This is how they break you, slowly, in pieces” (40). Later, when they pull up at a motel outside of Laurel, “Isaac” scrunches up in his seat: “Even if they don’t know you, they still might not like what they see” (150). Helen can only agree that he understands “this about America more intimately” than she does (150, emphasis mine). The narrative’s negation of places where the characters can co-habit and, indeed, share each other’s company signals history’s refusal to include and document places and interactions at the seeming margins of a society. Mengestu’s portrayal of “Isaac”/D- eschews emotional equivalence, inviting instead what Dominick LaCapra terms “empathetic unsettlement” (qtd. in Pedwell 41–42), that is, a mode of secondary witness-­ bearing that insists on the crucial distinction between a privileged self and a suffering other, hence refusing to assume the other’s rightful place of enunciation and testimony. “Isaac” challenges Helen to see (and feel) the world differently, as well as “to accept that not everything is penetrable to [her] Western empathetic gaze, that there are emotional experiences and ways of knowing that resist domesticating forms of translation, remaining

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defiant in their ‘foreignness’” (Pedwell146). Mengestu uses the metaphor of “a private little blast” to describe the extent to which Isaac upends not only Helen’s private life, her middle-of-the-road world, but her professional life as well, restoring her confidence that she can do more than “dispens[ing] bandages to bleeding souls and broken hearts” (95, 74). The narrative then parallels the narrator’s act of being a witness to the events unfolding in Kampala with Helen’s act of bearing witness to lives that both resist and are shaped by her presence. A similar longing for connection inspires Helen to think of her job as a caretaker differently. “I’m going to start making homes” (77), she tells herself the next day she goes to work. The “genuinely heartfelt speech” her boss made on her first day at the job sounds the same hopeful note we “hear” in the novel’s first chapter, when the narrator arrives in Kampala. “We are here to change people’s lives,” he said. “I firmly believe that, after everything we went through in the last decade, we are on the verge of making a great society” (75).6 While definitely unsettling and eye-­opening, Helen’s relationship with “Isaac” complicates not only the assumption that one can imaginatively put oneself in the (non-Western) other’s shoes, but also that by doing so social ills, differences, and antagonisms can be overcome. Helen’s limited capacity to acquire complete or accurate knowledge of “Isaac” and to enter his mind and world imaginatively exposes the limits of empathic encounters as catalysts for self and social transformation.7 At the same time, Helen’s openness to being affected by what she cannot know or feel carries the potential to produce the radical change that Pedwell attributes to “affective translation,” a complex process that stops short of a “faithful reproduction of feeling,” involving instead the recognition “that there will always be a trace, a remainder, which translation 6  At a later point in the narrative, David makes another telling comment when he shares what his father told him about why black people did not leave Mississippi to escape the Jim Crow laws: “He said maybe they didn’t believe anything would change, or maybe they were waiting for the world to change around them and they wanted to be home when it did.” David found both reasons to be “equally true”—which is how we are asked to interpret the protagonists’ hoping against hope in the book (p. 191). 7  A similar critical awareness of the limitations of empathy as a guide to ethical action informs Mengestu’s response to the activist campaign launched by the Invisible Children organization through their “Kony 2012” video, which, he argues, “traffics in a sentimental and infantilizing version of Africa that is so prevalent that we don’t even notice it” (“Not a Click Away”).

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leaves opaque or unknowable” (149). Although their first moment of intimacy feels “so ordinary” (20), as if they had been together for a long time, “Isaac” remains elusive and evasive: “Compared with others, Isaac was made of almost nothing, not a ghost, but a sketch of a man I was trying hard to fill in” (21). The brevity of his official records—his “single-page life-story” (98)—belies the emotional baggage that weighs so heavily on him. Until he opens up about his traumatic past, Helen cannot help romanticizing him or suspecting there is “something fraudulent” about him (149). She thinks that the only “solid fact” about him is his name, Isaac Mabira, which tells her nothing, whereas to him it means everything. Difficult as her questions about “Isaac” are, they demand answers, which she eventually gets and readers can glean from the narrator’s account of Isaac’s misguided idealism. Although initially fired up by the revolutionary dream, the narrator ultimately forgoes the illusion that he belongs to a place that will never have him. Just as the text is not a mere indicator of Mengestu’s own encounters with the politics of the countries he has lived in, the romantic encounter between Helen and “Isaac” similarly resists an assimilation into a pre-determined system of significations specific to contemporary society.

Dashed Dreams, Reconfigured Realities There will never be a house with enough rooms for us to live in. (Mengestu 250)

The narrator’s initial reluctance to share his story with Helen has to do with the difficulty, if not impossibility, of distinguishing between his role as a bystander and as an accomplice to the senseless violence unleashed by the “revolution” in which he became involved with Isaac. The fact that, as the narrator observes, Isaac slips so easily from his role as a revolutionary hero of sorts into that of a warlord’s henchman carries a warning about the ease with which people submit to authority, how quickly “civilized” people can slide into barbarism, and how the will to love can be horribly perverted by the will to power. The scene in which “Isaac” is “assaulted by racist interpellations” (Butler 80) at the diner mirrors the scene showing the real Isaac being physically assaulted at Café Flamingo, run by the “loyal friends and followers of a young man,” identified as Joseph. Educated in England, Joseph speaks with a British accent but hates the British: “It’s better to be killed by your own devil than by someone else’s”

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(123). Like Helen, who insists on her right to dine with Isaac in public only to fail miserably, Isaac claims his right to dine with students who “were in proximity to some form of power” (42) only to be attacked by two of them. When Joseph orders the beating to stop, the narrator is not sure whether to describe him as a friend—the man who “saved” Isaac from being beaten to death—or foe—the man who “watched for several minutes as those boys nearly beat [Isaac] to death” (121). This confusion over intention and identity also comes to characterize the narrator’s own relationship to Isaac, whom Joseph teaches to act as if he “always believed [he] didn’t know who anyone was” because it made it easier to kill them (123). The mirroring of the two scenes of violence—one happening in America and the other in Uganda—invites the reader to set multiple histories alongside each other and reflect on their brutal consequences. The text, in its distinctive style, prevents the reader from settling into comfortable binaries of “war-torn” Africa and “peaceful” America. Upon hearing of the massacres committed by Joseph’s army in northern Uganda, the narrator is not surprised: “I thought at times that our lives were worthless,” he later tells Helen. Just as “[a]ll Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” to recall Marlow’s famous remark from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (50), so the British had taught Joseph not only how to kill but also “that it meant nothing to do so” (177). In his turn, Joseph becomes the master who teaches Isaac the same lesson by exploiting the latter’s desire for power and recognition. Furthermore, Helen’s realization, triggered by the lunch episode, that “we were no longer, if ever, on the same side” is also felt by the narrator in the later stages of his relationship with Isaac (38). In both cases, there comes a point when it seems “impossible” for these individuals to “move forward” (49), whether because of their different moral choices or because of their different subject positions within racial and transnational structures of power. The novel foregrounds the sense of rootlessness as not exclusive to those who are from the economic margins but also for those who hail from economic centers. For despite their fond memories of their fathers, both Helen and D- are estranged from their homes, and both pay the same price: an anguished sense of the meaninglessness of their existence, which prompts their search for someone or something that can give their lives the grounding it lacks. Simon May, in Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, sees this promise of “ontological rootedness” as the defining characteristic of a person, place, or belief, which inspires love by offering us “a home … in a particular world that we supremely value”

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(xiii). Thus, Isaac’s absence from campus reminds the narrator, who craves to be a part of something larger than himself, that, without his friend, he “made an impact on no one” (45–46). The place that the narrator carves out for himself in society is thus linked to the presence of his friend. Similarly, Helen realizes, upon “Isaac’s” sudden disappearance from the apartment, that she cannot “start making homes” without him. This reliance upon the individual for attributing meaning to place recalls the metaphor of a pluralistic “home” constituted through the co-existence of individuals. Just as important, the visitation of places becomes a way of keeping alive the memory of the individual, as the trip “Isaac” takes across the U.S. allows him to live out Isaac’s dream of traveling, which the latter shared with him when they stayed in Joseph’s house. Their conversation, to which I will return in the last section of this essay, marks one of the few moments of beauty the two men snatched from the chaos of war: a place of habitation created through the force of utterance. After the beating at Joseph’s café, Isaac uses his limping and injuries to draw attention, and following that, he becomes a hero of sorts on the university campus. What starts off as a harmless “paper revolution” based on the assumption that “everyone has a crime to confess” gradually turns deadly serious, as its instigator (Isaac)soon becomes complicit with and even goes on to commit “crimes against the country” (55). Both the allusions to the campus unrest during the Vietnam War era—which Helen witnessed as a student—and the vivid account of the Isaacs’ involvement in the student protests at the University in Kampala—lend historical specificity to these characters’ dreams and dramas. Just as Helen sees herself an agent of change in her small, still-segregated town, so, too, the two Isaacs want to be “more than just idle spectators of campus life” by redrawing the limits within which society attempts to define and confine them (41). Marshall Berman notes that, for many young people, the social movements of the 1960s revealed an ironic relationship to the idea of home: “We were working to help other people, and other peoples—blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, Vietnamese—to fight for their homes, even as we fled our own” (157). To a great extent, this is also true of the narrator, who leaves his natal home to take part in the pan-African revolution. His restlessness, like that of Americans, is an important step in becoming an adult, as is his later decision to “light out for the territories” when the situation demands it in America. The narrator’s nightmare begins once he stumbles into Joseph’s war against the government and, at Isaac’s behest, joins it. Tired of being

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“aimless,” he is “ready to follow orders” (169, 182). “I was part of the ‘we’ now” (166), he thinks when Joseph entrusts him with his first mission: disguised as a fruit vendor, he delivers a wheelbarrow of firearms to a house located in a neighborhood whose map he has memorized so that he can make a quick escape before the curfew goes into effect. After he makes his delivery, though, he is seized by seven boys waiting for him inside before being rescued by Isaac.8 Together, they take shelter in the house of an elderly couple whose silence speaks volumes about the terror under which they live: “There’s no honest measure for the toll that sort of knowledge takes, whether the scale is the breadth of a single room or an entire city” (172). At several points thereafter, the narrator considers abandoning the fight into which Isaac has dragged him, but both his loyalty to his friend and his responsibility as a witness to atrocities committed or condoned by the latter prevent him from leaving his side. If, as a student, he could “gaze upon the world without being injured” (83), as a soldier, he is both responsible for and vulnerable to injury. The devastation he witnesses cures the narrator of the naïve illusions that animated Isaac’s “mock revolution” and compels him to question how much “truth” his friend can handle. Rather than talk about the war and how many innocent people he has killed—too many to count, anyway—Isaac urges D- to “write something nice” in the notebook he has given him: “Something that will make people happy. No one needs to read this” (233). Beset by guilt and shame, he turns self-destructive, so when two armed men deny him entry into Joseph’s house, Isaac dares them to shoot him: “And why shouldn’t they? Many others have died because of us that morning, and here we were, unscathed. How else to deal with that?” (184). The narrator’s way of coping with the toll of war is to record his experiences in the very notebook that Isaac has given him. Having lost his innocence, he would not lose his grip on reality, no matter how unbearable. Herein, Mengestu implies, lies the writer’s ethical responsibility: to be a reflective witness of history and its effects on both self and society. In a poignant scene, as the narrator tries to walk away from the carnage left behind by Joseph’s army, he is ordered to help bury the dead bodies 8  Both the reference to child soldiers and the first name of the man who has recruited them are allusions to the warlord Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) guerilla group that terrorized northern Uganda for more than two decades. Mengestu ponders that legacy in his essay “Not a Click Away.”

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stacked one on top of the other in a truck parked in front of the ironically named the Life Hotel. After unloading several bodies, D- decides to think of them “as a single body named Adam” (229)—a poignant phrase that captures the recognition, also implicit in the title phrase “all our names,” of the common end that binds the living and the dead. The novel, then, reflexively questions the act of writing as providing entrance into worlds and that of reading as situating oneself in those worlds. Rather than the language becoming merely a distilling vessel for the events in society, Mengestu offers the text as opening the space for crucial forms of inquiry: how does the individual project oneself into a politics of difference and how does one occupy place without being representative of a cultural totality?

“A House with Many Rooms” It was built for a larger family, for multiple generations to live together at the same time, and perhaps someday it would fulfill that design…. (Mengestu 207)

If Isaac is the novel’s beating heart, the narrator is its historical consciousness, providing a critical perspective on the nexus of home and identity. An embattled soul whose uncertain future in America also depends on a moral reckoning with his recent past, the narrator processes loss through silence, memories, and stories. Only by opening up to Helen and writing the story down can he come to terms with his traumatic experience and manage the guilty feelings that it produced. When he receives the news of his friend’s death, Helen can see his grief “splayed across his face,” even though the loss he has suffered feels “remote” to her (136, 137). Following his painful revelation about Isaac, D- and Helen enter “the golden phase” of their relationship (151)—a winter and then a spring when “loving and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart,” giving her “the strength to endure others’ misery, to bear some of it on my own so they wouldn’t have to” (154, 155). Love, as motivated by “the promise of ontological rootedness” (May xiv), plays a central role in the moral and affective economy of the book. It is the only force that can offer individuals an “ethical home” (May xiv), by helping them become the best versions of themselves, and that can spur the transformation envisioned by Mengestu on a larger scale. Knowing that “the end is near” (203), since his visa is about to expire, Helen proposes that they take a trip together to Chicago.

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Before they leave Laurel, Helen makes two stops—at her mother’s house and then Rose’s house—an elderly woman for whom Helen had been a companion. Seen through “Isaac’s” eyes, Helen’s house emerges as a metonymy, or objective correlative, for the “house with many rooms” both have been dreaming of. “It was built for a larger family, for multiple generations to live together at the same time, and perhaps someday it would fulfill that design, but never with me,” Helen believes (207). Since Helen feels that an important part of her life has come to an end, she wants Rose, “with her photo albums and stories, to show her the brightest possible version of what the end might look like—not now, but twenty, thirty, fifty years in the future” (217). But when they reach Rose’s house, they find it empty, the windows boarded over and a “for sale” sign in front of it. Whereas Rose’s file has been closed, the road opening up for Helen and Isaac is filled, at least for the latter, with the sense or range of possibility that has always drawn immigrants to America. “This country,” Isaac says. “What don’t you have?” (224). To Helen, this is not a rhetorical question, but a painful reminder that “[w]hat we didn’t have, for all the space, were many places where Isaac and I could publicly rest without fear of who was watching us” (224). In a poignant reprise of the lunch scene described earlier, the couple stop at a restaurant where they have to confront again “the hostile glares of many men” dining there: “They were deaf and blind to the world until we entered” (224–225). This time, however, Helen and Isaac decide to laugh off the negative vibe; laughing together feels “like genuine delight,” not only because it is the closest they come to hugging without touching but also because it allows them to preserve their humanity: “We left with the better part of ourselves intact” (225). The chapter where we learn of Helen’s plan to take “Isaac” to Chicago, the destination Rose suggested the last time they saw each other, mirrors the narrator’s fantasy of escaping, together with Isaac, their “life of war” (209) by driving away to the smallest village possible—an idyllic, forgotten hamlet, “like the ones we had passed in the foothills, but near a river, or better yet, within earshot of a waterfall. There was so much vast, empty space across the continent that I had no reason to believe it wasn’t possible. We just had to find one of the dozens, or maybe even hundreds of hidden pockets where no one cared about borders” (210). Likewise, the narrator wants to tell Isaac that this is “not the fight he expected” and that there are “other things” they could do with their lives only if they got out. Though Isaac himself no longer sees Joseph as a liberator—“Joseph has

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other villages he wants to conquer” (211, emphasis mine), he says—and although he has the opportunity to extricate himself from his grip, he refuses to do so, for reasons that reveal the trace of humanity the narrator has been desperately looking for in his friend. Thus, while giving the narrator a tour of Joseph’s house, Isaac explains that its many rooms have been “assigned different functions” corresponding to different parts of Joseph’s life (work, friends, guests, privacy, etc.) and that Joseph has promised him “the brightest of all rooms” after the latter’s return from a year of study in America. Joseph believed that the British will make the war end and that he will become president, which Isaac doubts will happen: “He will never be president. There will never be a house with enough rooms for us to live in” (250). Besides pointing to the loss of Isaac’s illusions—“my revolution [is] over,” he admits—this talk about the layout of Joseph’s house, like Helen and “Isaac’s” conversation about her mother’s house and the vastness of America, takes on a symbolic meaning—one having to do with the architecture of the society they aspire to live in. Only now can we grasp the full meaning of “Isaac’s” deliberate choice of words when he wonders if it is hard for Helen’s mom to live in “a house with so many rooms, as if it wasn’t the scale that mattered but the way the space had been divided” (216). For Isaac, the dream ends even before Joseph is shot dead by a disgruntled officer who utters “a list of crimes” against him (253). Addressing the narrator as D- for the first time, he hands him a Kenyan passport with the name Isaac Mabira on it and makes it clear that he does not belong in America: “This is my country. I don’t know who I am if I leave it” (254). Both men know they will never see each other again, despite the promises they make to each other. Emotionally, however, D- never leaves Isaac, and in taking his name, the bond between them becomes even stronger. In the notebook Isaac gave him, D- finds a list with everything he needs to know about going to America, as well as an updated list of “Crimes Against the Country, the last one of which reads, ‘It is a Crime Against the Country to forget this happened’” (255). The last thing Isaac wrote, “No one will have ever loved each other more than we did” (256), captures the ethos driving Mengestu’s vision of the nation-home. As the cure to the social-­ political ills he has diagnosed, love encompasses both “the principle of giving and mutual regard,” which defines Aristotle’s notion of philia (Sullivan 198), and agape, the principle of forgiveness and redemptive goodwill that lies at the center of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence. Having shown how fragile human beings are, how

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susceptible to fear and coercion, Mengestu ultimately restores our faith in their capacity for compassion and change. Over and against the desolation of war-torn Uganda, Mengestu pits the radiant beauty of Chicago’s skyline, which enthralls “Isaac,” who sees the “great possibilities” buildings like the Hancock Center promised, “especially to men like him, who had no idea what it meant to scale them” (235). “All this time,” Helen thinks, “we’ve been at best only half of what was possible” (237). The best of what is possible is for “Isaac” to feel just like she does, “a natural part of the background, entitled to all the privileges that came with ownership” (236). The future in which this sense of belonging can materialize remains uncertain, though. As they head to Lake Michigan, “the view ahead was blurred” (237). When a crowd forms around them at an intersection, Helen stares back at the curious onlookers trying to read their expressions: “I knew what was there—anger, pity, contempt, maybe even envy—but I was convinced that there must have also been a touch of wonder, maybe even awe at the sight of us” (237). Here, as in Laurel, Helen is “testing out certain private truths to see how they held up in public” (238) only to be reminded that they do not—or not yet—unless people “invent new rules, phrases, and axioms to live by” (243). To the extent that Helen remains open to revising both private and public “truths,” she exemplifies a revolutionary transformation in her own subjectivity, which Mengestu shows taking place at the level of individual perception. This transformation can pave the way for new spaces of relationality and belonging. Thus, whereas at first Helen thought that the city “ended abruptly, rather than trailing off into open fields like Laurel” (235), she later sees that it actually runs alongside the lake for many miles. Fittingly enough, the novel ends with the couple walking on the beach and swinging their arms high over their heads, “like birds” ready to take off and finally becoming “ungrounded” (244). Realizing that there was “an alternate ending” that she has been “too afraid to consider,” Helen decides to stand by “Isaac”: “I won’t leave you here alone” (243). The ending eschews narrative closure, leaving the two lovers “grounded” in the realm of the possible, where small gestures matter because they can lead to thinking big. Existence not only precedes utopia, to update Sartre’s philosophical creed, but also propels it, and the passage from the actual to the possible is enabled by aesthetic experience. Mengestu’s imagination constructs this door for his characters—and for us readers—through the romance between a black man and a white woman, whose commitment to

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each other embodies the promise of change, the transformative and disruptive potential at the heart of American democracy. In leaving the protagonists’ fate open-ended, Mengestu projects a vision of a social body that is not a homogeneous unity, but an irreducible plurality of relational beings and bodies. All Our Names reconfigures home from being a stable and concrete place that grounds the immigrant identity to a constant negotiation between roots and routes, past and present, collective history and individual memory. Even though Helen’s past, including material traces of old clothes and family photographs, has been tucked away in the basement of her mother’s Victorian house, it remains a part of her, despite her claim to the contrary (209). Likewise, “Isaac” cannot—and as a writer, he would not—bury his past within the depths of his subconscious. Mengestu’s effective threading together of Isaac’s death story and the narrator’s life story is his way of bearing witness at once to the failures of “Negro history” and to the faith in something better—in “the perpetual achievement of the impossible” (Baldwin 88). This double-edged sentiment is echoed by Nadine Gordimer: “There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal” (“Living”). Isaac may have lost his way in Africa, but the narrative holds out hope that he will discover a discovery of home for him in America. The process of building a home for oneself, Mengestu ultimately suggests, should enable others to feel at home too, just as the act of writing allows for the radical suspension of the coordinates for self-situation, even as it probes the foundational roots of one’s existence.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1992. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin, 1982. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2018. Duyvendak, Jan Willem. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

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Gordimer, Nadine. “Living in the Interregnum.” The New York Times. 20 January 1983. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/01/20/living-­in-­the-­ interregnum/. Accessed 2 August 2018. Jansma, Kristopher. “The Book James Baldwin Couldn’t Bring Himself to Write.” Electric Literature. 12 Dec 2017. https://electricliterature.com/ the-­book-­james-­baldwin-­couldnt-­bring-­himself-­to-­write-­a51c3ac57625. May, Simon. Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Mengestu, Dinaw. All Our Names. New York: Vintage, 2015. ———. “All Our Names Tells Story of War, Love and Identity across Two Continents.” Interview with Jeffrey Brown. PBS News Hour. 14 May 2014. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dinaw-­mengestu-­new-­novel-­names. Accessed 25 March 2019. ———. “Dinaw Mengestu.” Interview with Thessaly La Force. Paris Review. 28 October 2010. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/28/dinaw-­ mengestu/. Accessed 23 May 2018. ———. “Not a Click Away: Joseph Kony in the Real World.” Warscapes. 12 March 2012. http://www.warscapes.com/reportage/not-­click-­away-­joseph-­kony-­ real-­world. Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pedwell, Carolyn. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.” 1961. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm. Sullivan, Andrew. Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival. New York: Vintage, 1999.

PART III

Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Regions, Nations, and Formal (Dis)junctions

CHAPTER 7

“Her Strong Roots Sink Down”: Displacement, Migration, and Form in Jean Toomer’s Cane David Sugarman

The narrator of Jean Toomer’s “Fern,” a young man visiting Georgia from up north, notices a young woman on a porch. Transfixed, he addresses the reader: I ask you, friend (it makes no difference if you sit in the Pullman or the Jim Crow as the train crosses her road), what thoughts would come to you. […] Would you have got off at the next station and come back for her to take her where? Would you have completely forgotten her as soon as you reached Macon, Atlanta, Augusta, Pasadena, Madison, Chicago, Boston, or New Orleans? Would you tell your wife or sweetheart about a girl you saw? Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know. Something I would do for her… (24)

D. Sugarman (*) New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_7

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Throughout Toomer’s Cane, a series of prose, poetry, and visual art works, the reader is put in such positions of indeterminacy. Two of the most persistent puzzles we encounter in the collection occur in this moment of direct second-person address: the surprising aesthetic forms this mixed-­ genre work adopts, and the role of these overdetermined representations of women. Why this sudden deployment of the second person? Why the constant appearance, in Cane, of the symbol-laden female figure? These two topics have received a great deal of analysis in discussions of Cane. Citing Darwin Turner’s conviction that Cane “inspires critical rhapsodies rather than analysis,” Donald M. Shaffer, Jr. suggests that this is a byproduct of “the critical challenges that Cane poses”—particularly because of its formal complexity. Ultimately, “there is no consensus regarding Cane’s formal structure,” which makes questions regarding the work’s form central within the critical literature (Shaffer 111). Toomer’s representation of women has also been a central subject within that critical literature—particularly in the wake of Alice Walker’s 1974 essay on Toomer, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” (1974). Since the publication of that essay, which argues that Toomer’s women are consistently under-imagined and underdeveloped, the question of what kind of metaphorical meaning female figures might have has been an important debate in studies of Cane. These debates revolve around whether women function “either as signifiers of Toomer’s quest for an authentic, even primitive, black identity, or as objectified and oppressed victims who portend doom for the folk culture of the South” (Arbour 309), and whether such symbols are reductive. Cane’s form and Cane’s representation of women are typically treated as two separate subjects of inquiry, but they are in fact inextricably linked. The form of this work and the meaning of its metaphors cannot be untangled, and in the case of Cane, an understanding of the work’s form illuminates its metaphorical meanings and vice versa. This essay teases out the connection between these two aspects of the work by arguing that they can best be understood in relation not to a single form or coherent metaphorical system but rather to a set of “aesthetic systems” that unify the different forms and metaphors that fill this mixed-genre work. I term these aesthetic systems a root system and uproot system, arguing that the work must be approached with an interpretive model grounded in the material reality of displacement, alienation, and migration—of seeking to root but uprooting—that Cane dramatizes. These concepts of root systems and uproot systems, which I develop by setting Gilles Deleuze and Félix

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Guattari’s theory of “root-books” in dialogue with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unheimlich and overdetermined signifier, suggest that the formal and metaphorical coherence of Cane is not unified by a single, coherent style or symbolic vocabulary but rather—and precisely to the contrary—by a shifting aesthetic approach that deploys and manipulates forms and metaphors in a loosely interconnected system of signification. Such a reading ultimately offers an approach to these longstanding questions that is grounded within the material history of migration represented and the aesthetic strategies deployed within the work itself.

Migration and Meaning Cane describes the journey from the American South to the American North that hundreds of thousands of African Americans made between 1916 and the 1970s.1 The collection begins in an easily identifiable space: the hills of Georgia along the Dixie Turnpike, the first paved road to run from the U.S.’s southern border to northern border.2 The setting then shifts, for its second section, to the largely black sections of segregated Washington D.C. It concludes in a basement back in Georgia. In Cane’s opening story, “Karintha,” migration is present but peripheral, situated at the town’s—and story’s—outer limits. “Karintha” describes a beautiful young woman in a small Georgia town who is pregnant. The piece is divided into sections, each separated by a stanza of song, the first of which sets the tone for the story: Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon …When the sun goes down. (5)

 Much of the historical context in this chapter is drawn from Wilkerson.  The Dixie Pike (later renamed the Dixie Highway) was built between 1915 and 1926 and was the first interstate road to travel the continental United States from north to south. As Tammy Ingram describes, the road’s significance in the region was enormous: it “constituted a crucial linchpin in the transition to the modern South, a transition that shaped the region’s political institutions as much as its infrastructure” (p. 2). Largely built by chain gangs—the paradigmatic form of Jim Crow labor—the road also served as a main route for people during the Great Migration traveling from Georgia and its environs up to the North and Northeast. 1 2

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This verse likens Karintha to the landscape itself, a notion that is reiterated throughout the story as she is called “a growing thing” that “ripens” too soon because of the attention (and harassment, or even rape) of the men in the town. Karintha is consistently compared to the landscape; the men, meanwhile, live about her or leave the region—old men who “remind her that a few years back they rode her hobby-horse upon their knees” or “young men” who “go to the big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money.” These men leave a landscape they love, and precisely for the sake of earning that landscape’s reward: “Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon. They will bring their money; they will die not having found out” (5). This, Toomer suggests, is the psychic rupture at the heart of the Great Migration: these refugees leave something they love, and that sustains them, and that they cannot—and will not ever—understand or recover. “Karintha” thus sets up several of Cane’s key tropes, and introduces a vocabulary of symbols and metaphors that will be deployed throughout the collection: the landscape as a comforting and hostile entity; the femininity of the earth; the unknowable, maternal, and erotic nature of the Southern soil for the men who leave it; the profound mystery contained in the faces of the Southern women; the “contempt[uous]” sexuality of the men. The whole first portion of the collection relies upon and reiterates this vocabulary—particularly as it applies to the metaphorical use of women. “In Cane,” Maria Farland writes, “rural life is linked to the feminine.” Farland situates Toomer’s use of women within a broader history of such symbols. “The book’s sex typing of the land as feminine employs the standard ‘metaphor of land as woman’” (18). Such readings have been common in Cane criticism, flagging Toomer’s frequent flattening of female figures. Men, meanwhile, are agents—and often agents of violence upon the feminized earth. “Reapers” and “November Cotton Flowers,” the two short poems following “Karintha,” reinforce these critical readings of Cane’s gendered metaphors. “Reapers” does so by describing the workers’ scythes unwittingly slicing a field rat. “I see them place the hones / In their hip pockets as a thing that’s done […] / And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds” (6). Similarly, in “November Cotton Flower,” the unyielding drought-dry earth yields cotton flowers that become “Something [the townspeople] had never seen before: / Brown eyes that

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loved without a trace of fear, / Beauty so sudden for that time of year” (7). In these first three pieces, women are repeatedly equated with the landscape as images that are at once maternal—“[a] child fell out of [Karintha’s] womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest” (5)—and barren—the men’s scythes reveal an animal that “squealing bleeds.”3 Violent men act upon the fertile or barren feminine earth. This complex and ambiguous visual vocabulary—the female characters (Karintha, Becky, Esther) as embodying the ecology of the South, which, via the cane, cotton, and lumber industry, is defined by the same dynamics of vibrancy and depletion (see Foley)—persists throughout the first section of the collection. Those men who are not violent—either to women to or to the feminized soil—are often poets or writers who return to this motherland to find poetic inspiration (Wardi 26). A key example of this is “Song of the Son,” which begins with the speaker decrying: O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree. […] O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums, Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air, Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes An everlasting song, a singing tree. (17–18)

3  Anissa Janine Wardi reframes this reading of Toomer’s work—specifically in response to Alice Walker’s critiques of Cane’s women as under-imagined—not as an oversight but rather as a central aspect of Toomer’s depiction of the South. Wardi reads the maternality of these female figures and their relationship to the landscape as constituting the collection’s complex depiction of the violence afflicted upon black women in the South, as well as the complicated role of the southern landscape and ecology: “The natural world is enmeshed with female bodies in Cane, both seemingly carrying the DNA of the other” (p. 22). Wardi reads “the assemblage of the agrarian South, African American women, and scenes of violence” as “construct[ing],” in Cane, “a narrative of violated fertility and mothering” (p. 22). Toomer does not deny Karintha or Becky interiority, in Wardi’s reading, but rather, by aligning them with the landscape, renders these characters deep and rich, fertile and barren. Wardi’s argument that Toomer focuses “on the mother-body not only to showcase maternal desecration but also to recognize the myriad ways in which the African American community in the post-­ Reconstruction South is violated and fragmented” improves upon those critiques of Toomer’s reductive gaze, but still leaves (as Toomer does) few roles for women. The maternalism might be complicated, but it remains the only possibility for the women in Cane. Wardi’s reading remains generative, however, in its illumination of the ecological tropes that fill Cane—an aspect of Wardi’s argument that is central to my own.

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The speaker likens the slaves to fruit associated with bruises that are, in the now of the poem, being crushed by violence. Yet something left behind by that violence is, for the poet, the seed of the “everlasting song” of the son. Toomer thus relates his poetic project to an ecological dynamic of ripeness and devastation that is repeated across the collection. He does not do so by merely coding the South as a space of ruin but rather one of complex fertility and barrenness.4 These ambivalent ecological metaphors lead Farland to read these purple fruit—and the ecological lyricism of Cane more generally—as disrupted by the legacy of slavery. “If there is degeneration and damnation in Cane’s rural landscapes,” she argues, “it can be traced not to innate moral or sexual depravity, but to the damaging social legacy of the slave past” (22). Yet here it is precisely the fruit—the plum purple slaves, the victims of lynchings, their songs—that Toomer’s speaker seeks to gather and harvest for his art. This is the fruit he finds in his return to the South, signaling the deep ambivalence that structures this collection more generally: the soil is tortured by violence but saturated with sustaining poetry and song.5 4  This poem also signals the violence that codes the typically male and Northern protagonists’ perception of the soil of the South as dangerous and physically brutal. Barbara Foley has argued that Toomer, in going south to write these stories, would have been aware of the increase in lynchings during this time. 1921, the year he was visiting, had seen a steep increase in lynchings—the most in the region since 1909. Georgia in particular had seen more lynchings in 1921 than any other state. “Song of the Son,” in describing these slave men as purple fruit on the trees, conjures up this terror, which Toomer codes as a masculine aspect of the landscape and even as a history that is “ripe” with poetic possibilities (Foley, p. 160). 5  Toomer captures this ambivalence through his use of ecological tropes, which is a common feature of both Modernist literature and the Black literary tradition. As Joshua Schuster has argued, a host of “modernist American artists sought to try out new ways of representing environments, experimenting with new kinds of framings, which made environments legible in new ways” (p. x). This is what Toomer is doing in his use of ecological language: aiming to capture an environment that contains an overwhelming abundance of life and of death—a space that is dankly ripe, its fertility bordering upon decay. Sonya Posmentier, meanwhile, has illuminated the important role of ecology in African American aesthetics—a product of a history of forced geographical displacement, agricultural labor, and environmental catastrophe: “Black literary accounts of historical rupture and cultural continuity have long constituted an important response to environmental experience and ecological change. In turn, the imperative to account for environmental experience, far from being a curious nostalgic throwback to the plantation, forms one basis for black modernity in the twentieth century” (p.  3). Cane belongs to this Modernist, African American literary tradition, tapping into these traditions’ shared concern with the ecological.

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In contrast to Farland’s concept of temporal “disruption,” Mia Alafaireet reads the ambivalent relationship to the past as a result of the “transplantation” that defines African American experience (and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in particular), with works featuring “restless protagonists routinely figured as plant life, uprooted from one pot of soil and replanted in another” (Alafaireet). In the case of Cane, these “images of roots” tend to “cast migration” as a “potential risk to African American survival” (Alafaireet), the ecological language underlining the physical danger contained in a peoples’ movement from one ecology to another. The ecological symbols in Cane are thus directly linked to the traumas associated with the Great Migration’s transplantation.

Root Systems Drawing upon Alafaireet’s reading, I call the assemblage of symbols adumbrated above—the feminized, maternalized, sexualized Southern landscape full of ferns, fertile growth, and bruised, over-ripe, fruit, and the violent or nostalgic men who variously destroy or seek sustenance in this earth—a root system. This terminology borrows from Alafaireet’s ecological reading of Cane as well as from Delueze and Guattari’s theorization of root systems and rhizomes, which are defined by principles of “connection and heterogeneity,” “multiplicity,” “asignifying rupture,” and “experimentation in contact with the real” (Deleuze and Guattari 10–13). As I have argued above, Cane—a network of interconnected, mixed-genre works—is full of ambiguous and tortured symbols that either—like the fruit in “Song of the Son”—no longer signify as they once had, or (as with many of the symbol-heavy female figures in Cane) are so heavy with meaning that they seem not to signify at all. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly call such mixed-genre writings full of ambiguous or overdetermined symbols root systems that should be approached not as coherent or consistent aesthetic entities but as multiplicities or fragments. Cane exemplifies such a work, “made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds” (Deleuze and Guattari 3). All books possess temporal and perspectival ambiguity—the time(s) of the writing or narration for instance, or in the perspective of the narrator (i.e. “Karintha”). Cane, however, is concerned with such multiplicities. Rather than deploying the language, images, metaphors, or symbols of multiplicity or fragmentation as end points in the production of meaning, Toomer manipulates the symbols that fill Cane as an evolving

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system of meaning that is intimately linked—is depicted as an ambiguous product of—the Southern soil. The narrators of these stories and the speakers of these poems never use symbols to signify some content in a clear or direct fashion—a highway heading north neatly signifying escape or freedom, for instance—but are always involved in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to generate a multiplicity of connections to these images, and to the Southern soil more generally. Like the speaker of “Song of the Son,” these men have arrived belatedly—have come “from the North down into the South,” in Toomer’s description—and thus yearn for an organic connection to the soil. They hope to find that connection in these asignifying or overwhelming symbols, to which they cling. They turn to this constellation of metaphors, forms, and traditions—this symbolic root system—that proliferates meanings in the hope that some of these might tie them to the fullness they believe is buried beneath the Southern soil. It is not simply the “plum” in “Song of the Son” that the speaker is after, but rather a whole root system—a terrible history of slavery and violence that is tethered to the landscape—that he traces from the plum to the tree and out to the roots and soil. In “The South in Literature,” an essay published in The Call in 1923, Toomer considers the role of “the region” of the South in the literary imagination. He lists several other regions with their own literary traditions—New England or the Mid-West—before considering new developments he sees taking place in the South—an especially promising region, he claims, “[f]or surely no other section is so rich in the crude materials and experiences prerequisite for art.” He goes on, “Factories, main streets, and survivals of the old plantations roughly chart these degrees. It has the stark theme of white and black races. But above all, the South is a land of the great passions: hate, fear, cruelty, courage, love, and aspiration. And it possesses a tradition of leisure by means of which these attributes might find their way into a significant culture” (Selected Essays 10–12). This leads Toomer to a consideration of his own work. Speaking specifically of the first section of Cane, he writes: The materials of Part One are those of middle Georgia. Poem and short story themes arise from a symphony of red soil, pine trees, canebrakes and cotton fields, swamps, saw mills, old Negro cabins, and hills and valleys saturate with the blood and toil, the songs and sufferings of the slave regime. The themes themselves weave about young Negro girls whose dusky loveli-

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ness flowers for a moment, yields to the insistent claims of love, then fades, as all natural beauty must, to the inconspicuous monotone of surrounding landscape. (Selected Essays, 10–12)

The “materials” of his work are the materials of the region, his fiction being described as a material product of the soil itself. The trees and fields are the materials of the south; they constitute the materials of his stories; they speak to the history and experience of African Americans living in Dixie; they produce and fill the faces of the female characters and come up like the “bubbling sap” that fills Fern before “fading, as all natural beauty must,” back into the natural order. History, identity, song, and suffering all “saturate” the soil, as they do these poems and stories. The narrators and speakers seek to root down and pull up life and sustenance; instead, they encounter confusion, frustration, and finally failure: “Shortly after, I came back North” (Cane, 25). This is Toomer’s root system of symbols, an assemblage that is not meant to be read as neatly representative (i.e., “the symbol of the tree represents the idea of organic connection to the landscape”) so much as processual, with narrators seeking, in the soil and its growths, a connection to the lost past or to some authentic history. Whether a narrator is considering plums from a tree linked to slave labor or the cotton fields or the groves of trees, a surplus of significance—a “bubbling sap”—always overwhelms the effort.6 Cane, as a literary root system, reflects the two forms of “root-books” Deleuze and Guattari discuss. “A first type of book is the root-book,” they write (5). This is a book that is believed to draw from a deep and stable cultural history—a native soil. But roots, Deleuze and Guattari argue, do not work in this idealized and stable way: “In nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification” (5). They propose, instead of this fantasy of the root-book, “the radicle-­system, or fascicular root, [a]s the second figure of the book.” This second sense of the root-book is defined by multiplicity and heterogeneity: “This time, the principal root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, 6  A root-book—and root system—is believed to be stable, grounded, consistent, and deep— to draw from a deep and stable soil, comparable to Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s Shoes. Heidegger interprets these shoes to be those of a peasant woman and considers the way they seem to be rooted and grounded in the soil itself. “In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth,” he writes. “This equipment belongs to the earth” (34). The shoes seem rooted to, and growing from, the earth.

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indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development” (5). Toomer’s work presents both of these roots, beginning with depictions of characters seeking to situate and connect themselves to what they believe to be a stable history and culture— root systems—before concluding with depictions of that stable history and culture as transplanted and fissuring into new and unpredictable bundles and growths—an uproot system. Approaching the visual vocabulary in the first section of Cane as a root system is thus particularly useful in helping delineate the way Toomer is using this root system ultimately to analyze the impact of migration on these symbols and metaphors. Cane’s root system of symbols functions differently in the collection’s second section (set in the North) as it morphs into an uproot system, no longer defined by a search for lost origins in the symbol-heavy soil but rather defined by fractures, fissures and stunted or displaced growth as the tropes of ripeness and rottenness, productivity and barrenness, life and death, are relocated and reinscribed into the foreign concrete of the North. What Toomer is interested in is not recalling these images for their common meaning or emotional power, but rather analyzing these symbols that are native to one social world or landscape and tracking them as they are uprooted and transplanted into another. This transition from a root system to an uproot system can be clarified by Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, “that class of the terrifying that leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud 1–2). The unheimlich, for Freud, is precisely that which had once been familiar and safe but has become, on account of time or distance, something alienated, estranged, and upsetting. Cane is full of such unheimlich tropes—of doppelgängers, of lifelessness in the living or vitality in the dead, of repeated words and images, of the sense that a familiar yet mysterious entity is threatening—yet it is in Toomer’s treatment of symbolic language (which Freud makes “special mention” of in his discussion of the unheimlich) that we see the deep resonance of this concept in Cane. Freud writes, “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes” (14). This illuminates the consistent displacement, in Cane, of semiotic, emotional, or spiritual meaning by the symbols or signifiers that cue that very content. In “Fern,” for instance, the inscrutable female at the story’s

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center is imbued with symbolic value that puzzles the narrator, but not because he seeks to understand Fern as a person; rather, he struggles to understand what she represents. Things “flow into her face” like the landscape, God, or history; these occlude the face itself, but also rely on that face to signify. The story, then, is less about understanding Fern, and more about understanding the narrator’s frustrated attempts at understanding what Fern might mean for him—understanding the symbol(s) that he has created and projected onto her face, which is reduced to a vehicle for his meaning-making. This form of the unheimlich—that a female face should overwhelm any sense of her interior, that a signifier should displace or crowd out the signified—is a central feature of Toomer’s root system. Just as Freud sees such a displacement or crowding-out as linked to an inability to understand a thing that was once homey and comforting, so Cane’s Northern men seek to root themselves down into the soil via symbols of Southern history and ecology, but are unable to grasp what meaning they believe these symbols carry. Cane’s characters constantly see what appear to be significant symbols, yet they cannot make sense of what they are seeing, encountering instead a surplus of significance in the hills, trees, and female faces of the South—a surplus they cannot comprehend. What becomes of this surplus of meaning that resides behind these unheimlich symbols and makes them, in Cane, variously puzzling, grotesque, tragic, or terrifying? The unheimlich is the product of displacement—of what had once been homely becoming unfamiliar. There are two ways this can take place. Either the object changes beyond recognition or the subject does—leaves the area, for instance, and is thus haunted by the tokens of home that have been made strange by distance. This second form of unheimlich displacement—of the subject leaving home only to discover the unheimlich totems elsewhere as alien, hostile, and inscrutable symbols—is one of the central features of Toomer’s depiction of the North. Describing Washington, D.C. in “Seventh Street,” the first piece in the collection’s second section, Toomer depicts black life in the capitol as a “crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington” (53). The poem describes changes brought about by the Great Migration, as D.C. is described as wood splintered apart by a new wedge; it describes Southern culture “wedging” its way into that “whitewashed” Northern world. But returning, once more, to the language of the South deployed

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in “Fern,” the poem’s speaker asks, of Washington, D.C.: “Who set you flowing? White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets?” (53).7 A process is set in motion as the Great Migration repaints the previously “whitewashed” wood of the north with “black reddish blood.” Washington in the wake of the Great Migration is both fluid (“flowing”) and fragmented, with jagged edges and wedged slices cutting through it. Toomer’s language here recalls his descriptions of the overdetermined Southern landscape (and female figure), where the narrator, studying Fern’s face, thinks that “the countryside flow[ed] in” (24). There is a “flow” from the Southern soil into the female faces and into the Northern city. We thus see, in the first piece in the second section of Cane, set in what Toomer describes, in “The South in Literature,” as “Washington, but still southern and still Negro,” the social impact of this displacement and migration (Selected Essays 14). We see the way metaphors and symbols have seemed to flow into the north and then fragment and fissure. If the ecology of the South—the land, trees, hills, and cabins—are central in the first section, Toomer draws from a different ecology in the second—of back alleys, gridded streets, jazz halls, theaters, parks, parties, and, perhaps above all, houses and homes.8 This shift is best captured in “Box Seat,” a story about Dan Moore who, though we meet him as he wanders the streets of Washington, D.C., “was born in a canefield” (77). That Dan is an outsider—a transplant from the South—is constantly reiterated, and he feels ill at ease in the milieu of middle-class Black Washington: “Dan sings. His voice is a little hoarse. It cracks. He strains to produce tones in keeping with the houses’ loveliness. Cant be done” (78). Dan’s song is at odds with the tree-lined streets and well-kept houses. But Muriel, his love interest, is able to sing not only of the loveliness of these houses but of something greater, deeper: “Dan thinks of the house he’s going to. Of the girl. Lips, flesh-notes of a forgotten song, plead with 7  Addressing the city, and the wedge inserted into it, he cites Seventh Street, which was a main north-south thoroughfare that ran through Washington, D.C. It was the main area that Black Americans from the south moved to during the Great Migration because of earlier black settlement in the Reconstruction and post-reconstruction period and because of restrictive covenants in the city that limited where Blacks could rent or buy homes. 8  Architecture more generally plays a crucial role throughout the stories in this section: the apartment houses in “Avey” and the theater in “Theater,” for instance.

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him” (76). The houses, like the faces in the first section, speak of a “forgotten song” and thus overwhelm Dan. This forgotten song is the same one the narrator of “Fern” misidentifies as a “cantor’s song,” but now this song is not merely hidden behind a face and foreign cultural lexicon but beneath the surface of the unfamiliar geography of the Northern cityscape. Dan listens, or tries to hear, this forgotten song—a song of the unknowable past or forgotten heritage that he cannot recall, identify, or understand—wherever he goes. He struggles, throughout the story, to grasp it—an effort best exemplified by his attempts to “listen” to the vibrations he believes to be coming from below ground: “[S]omething vibrant from the earth sends a rumble to him. That rumble comes from the earth’s deep core” (78). His attempts to hear this sound, however, are frustrated; he cannot make them out. There are two sounds that are important for him to hear: those from the “core” of the earth and those from the lips of Muriel. These sounds are part of the same sonic landscape—the feminine face, the feminized soil—that conjure his home and history. They are in marked contrast to the other noises that fill the story—of jazz or of the songs at the theater. Dan believes that these sounds are those of the Southern soil, now buried behind the walls of the city’s dense architecture: “Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your liver lips to the lean, white spring. Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses and teach them to dream” (76). The faces of women alluded, in the first section, to some no longer knowable history—to some sense of the heimlich that the South had once possessed, to some root system that might tie the alienated men to their native soil. This image is reworked in “Box Seat,” as houses and the cityscape—those “eyes of houses” that “faintly touch him as he passes” (76), those “endless rows of metallic houses” (78)—are linked to Toomer’s image of the inscrutable female face. “Houses are shy girls,” Dan thinks (76). The houses embody a beautiful and mysterious and tragic history, much as the faces had, but while the faces in the South relate to roots and then to flight—to a “flowing” migration—the houses in the north relate to being stuck. They “bolt” Dan in place. “The house contracts about him,” Dan feels, and he is overwhelmed by “the pressure of the house.” This feeling grows worse at the theater: “The seats are slots. The seats are bolted houses” (84). The houses thus embody not only that which cannot

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be grasped—those elements of Southern experience that seem lost—but also the repressive elements Dan discovers in Northern middle class existence. The relationship between architectural space and female form as dual symbols of the unheimlich is made clear in the climactic scene of “Box Seat,” which takes place at the Howard Theater, a storied black venue in Washington. Dan feels unnerved by the people in the audience that evening—by those African Americans who suffer, in Dan’s view, from an inability to hear the songs and rhythms from the soil below where their roots might be found. Dan, disheartened by their disconnect from their Southern heritage, sinks into his seat: He shrivels close beside a portly Negress whose huge rolls of flesh meat about the bones of the seat-arms. A soil-soaked fragrance comes from her. Through the cement floor her strong roots sink down. They spread under the asphalt streets. Dreaming, the streets roll over on their bellies, and suck their glossy health from them. Her strong roots sink down and spread under the river and disappear in blood-lines that waver south. Her foots shoot down. Dan’s hands follow them. (85)

This moment links the tropes of architecture, femininity, and cultural heritage that define Cane’s depictions of the North. The woman seated beside Dan unwittingly connects to the life-source that is the South, but the soil here is linked to alienation and madness. In the stories and poems set in the south, the soil—the dying landscape of a lost history—still flowed into the faces of the women who lived there. In these stories and poems set in the north, however, the soil is covered in concrete, and the female faces are distorted and grotesque. Dan seeks a root system by which he might understand this present, but finds, instead, that old root system transformed, mutilated, and giving rise to new growth. He reaches past the concrete and, desperate, grabs hold of “[h]er strong roots [that] sink down and spread under the river and disappear in blood-lines that waver south,” but these yield nothing. He finds himself back outside, wandering the streets alone.

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Uproot Systems Dan is searching for roots—for the first section’s root system—but finds roots that have been choked off and replanted, finds roots in a process of “transplantation” that have produced an uproot system. In any transplantation, there is a process when the roots must be suspended in the air, still a coherent system but not drawing from the living soil. This is the condition of Toomer’s Northern characters, with some of the old roots broken and dead and others finding new and surprising life-sources to draw from. An uproot system is defined by its distance from the fantasy of that original, fulsome soil or earth. It is instead defined by what Deleuze and Guattari call the fascicular root system: “[A]n immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto [our original root system which] undergoes a flourishing development”(5). Still linked to the South, but no longer drawing from its soil, the uproot system establishes new connections while shedding old ones. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler analyzes the relationships among the unheimlich, literature, and architecture. He charts the rise of the uncanny in the late nineteenth century, and its consistent transplantation into architectural spaces: “[I]n each moment of the history of the representation of the uncanny, and at certain moments in its psychological analysis, the buildings and spaces that have acted as the sites for uncanny experiences have been invested with recognizable characteristics” (11). These spaces and spatial descriptions—Gothic castles, for instance, or haunted houses—come to be seen as “emblematic” of a period’s architectural uncanny; writers, artists, and architects then seek to “chart the underground reverberations of the city” as a means of comprehending the psychic significance attributed to or experience within such spaces (Vidler xiii).Such “reverberations” are precisely what Dan experiences as he, a child of the “cane fields,” navigates the northeast. He accordingly experiences those objects that might otherwise symbolize “home” as unnerving. They are infused with a psychic terror linked to migration and displacement. Nonetheless, he searches for them and, when he finds them, clings to them. Vidler links the ubiquity of the experience to modernity’s broader patterns of migration, movement, and displacement: [T]he uncanny might be understood as a significant psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the real shock of the modern, a trauma that,

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c­ ompounded by its unthinkable repetition on an even more terrible scale during World War II, has not been exorcised from the contemporary imaginary. Estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as the intellectual watchwords of our century, given periodic material and political force by the resurgence of homelessness itself, a homelessness generated sometimes by war, sometimes by the unequal distribution of wealth. (9)

The unheimlich, Vidler argues (and as I outline above), is a product of the changes that take place as people and/or their surroundings are upended. The unheimlich is a global phenomenon expressed in local languages. It is not a property of a place, but rather a combinatory process produced by the material of the lost home, the new setting, and the psyche of the individual: “The ‘uncanny’ is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precise elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming” (Vidler 11). The “materials” the unheimlich uses to communicate will necessarily change depending upon where the unheimlich appears. Thus, those “materials” in the first section of Cane will necessarily be reworked as the setting shifts, for the second section, to a new region. In the beginning of Cane, the inscrutable face of the female figure is tied directly to the specifics of the Georgia landscape—to the pines, cabins, sugarcanes, and fields. In the North, however, that vast landscape and its many symbols morph into the dim vibrations buried beneath the city. Cane thus represents the process of the “materials” of “the South”—a Southern root system—becoming both immensely large in psychic space while being lost in physical space. If, as Toomer says, the materials of Southern black consciousness “arise from a symphony of red soil, pine trees, cane-brakes and cotton fields, swamps, saw mills, old Negro cabins, and hills and valleys saturate with the blood and toil, the songs and sufferings of the slave regime” (Selected Essays 14), then what becomes of these entities when that consciousness encounters a completely different kind of space—when that old symbolic language must be applied to a new spatial configuration, a new ecology? This process leads to that previously discussed form of the unheimlich that Freud believes deserves “special mention”: “when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes.” This process, Freud argues—“the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with physical reality”—is, like all

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elements of the unheimlich, a psychic response to the loss of that which “was once heimisch, homelike, familiar” (14). We thus see, in the second section of Cane, the emergence of the uproot system. Characters are estranged from the very language that might help them create a sense of place in their new environments. This crisis of symbolic meaning is, in Cane, irreconcilable. It leads characters to a state of either psychosis, as in a story like “Box Seat,” or incapacitation, as in “Kabnis,” whose titular protagonist is from the North and returns to the South in a nostalgic attempt at recovering his lost heritage: “Kabnis, a promise mom a soil-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (132). It also, however, attests to Cane’s use of a particular aesthetic strategy that unites the work’s many genres, subjects, forms, and moods. Root systems and uproot systems can be understood as a collection of interrelated “materials”—images, symbols, metaphors, forms—in a process of transplantation. These aesthetic systems capture the complexity of the movement of a culture across time and space, emphasizing the simultaneous coherence and mutability of symbolic systems as they change and evolve, die and grow.

Works Cited Alafaireet, Mia. “From Transplantation to Survival: The Great Migration’s Afterlife in Contemporary Movements for Black Lives.” MLA 2019. Hyatt, Chicago. January 05, 2019. Conference Presentation. Arbour, Robert. “Figuring and Reconfiguring the Folk: Women and Metaphor in Part 1 of Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 55, no. 3, 2013: 307–327. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43280260. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Farland, Maria. “Modernist Versions of Pastoral: Poetic Inspiration, Scientific Expertise, and the ‘Degenerate’ Farmer.” American Literary History, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007: 905–936. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4497017. Foley, Barbara. Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Imago, Bd. V., 1919. Trans. Alix Strachey. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 1935. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013. 15–86.

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Ingram, Tammy. Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900–1930. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2014. Posmentier, Sonya. Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Schuster, Joshua. The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-­ Garde Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Shaffer, Donald M., Jr. “‘When the Sun Goes Down’: The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 2012: 111–128. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright. 2011. ———. Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New  York: Mariner Press, 2004. Wardi, Anissa Janine. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2003. Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage, 2011.

CHAPTER 8

De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and the Dialectics of Revision in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings Jennifer Somie Kang

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), a leading avant-garde playwright in early twentieth-century Italy, occupies an important place in the writings of his contemporary Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). From his theatre reviews between 1916 and 1920, as a critic for the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti!, to his famous Prison Notebooks written during his incarceration by Mussolini between 1929 and 1935, Gramsci expressed a consistent interest in Pirandello. In his well-known letter of 19 March 1927 to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, he even listed a “study of Pirandello’s theatre and of the transformation of Italian theatrical taste that Pirandello represented and helped form” as one of the four interrelated subjects that he wished to investigate from that moment onward (Letters from Prison 84). Characterizing himself as a forerunner in the work of popularizing Pirandello’s theatre, Gramsci also noted with pride

J. S. Kang (*) Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_8

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that “from 1915 to 1920,” he had already written “enough to put together a book of 200 pages” and that his “judgements were original and without precedent” at the time (84). Over the course of his writings, Gramsci’s initial thoughts on Pirandello’s plays, as articulated in his ten theatre columns, not only evolved into his later, more informed, critique of Pirandello’s body of work but also coalesced into his critique of Futurism, the Italian avant-garde movement. This progression in Gramsci’s thinking, made more obvious with the publication of the Gerratana edition of Quaderni del carcere in 1975, illuminates the positive legacies of Futurism that continued to inspire him as an ideal even after he recanted the movement, exemplified by his disillusionment at how it “completely lost its character after the war” in a 1922 letter to Trotsky (CW 52–54).1 By the early 1930s, Gramsci had solidified his thoughts on Pirandello to the point where he stated, Pirandello “has done much more than the futurists towards ‘deprovincializing’ the ‘Italian man’ and arousing a modern ‘critical’ attitude in opposition to the traditional, nineteenth-century ‘melodramatic’ attitude” (Q9 §134; CW 139). Beginning as early as 1913 and persisting at least until the interaction between the Futurists and the Turin communists came to a close, Gramsci’s early enthusiasm for Futurism paved the way for his later statements, such as the one quoted above, where Pirandello’s role in Italian culture is assessed by way of a comparison and contrast with the Futurists. Given Futurism’s celebration of the dynamic forces of modernity that transgress national boundaries, along with its aesthetic vision emphasizing the shortening of geographical and temporal distances, it would seem incongruous, on the surface, to connect Futurism with Pirandello, many of whose early works are in the form of geographically and dialectally provincial plays. However, the connection that Gramsci persistently draws between them, beyond their surface disparities, helps show how Pirandello rethinks the provincial play from within, imbuing it with a questioning of place as a geographic entity and locator of cultural identity, a questioning 1  In line with the international standard for citing Gramsci’s work, references to his notes written in prison are provided by the number of Notebook (Q) and the note (§). Other citations are accompanied by the corresponding page number in one of the following three sources: Selections from Cultural Writings (henceforth CW), Volume 1 of Prison Notebooks, or Selections from Prison Notebooks (henceforth SPN). Citations of Gramsci’s essays about Pirandello’s dialect plays, including Liolà (both the Avanti! columns and his notes on Pirandello from 1930–1935), are from CW, except for one occasion where I rely on Tony Mitchell’s translation (see footnote 2).

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that mirrors the Futurist program of aesthetic renovation. This essay studies the values put forth in the provincial play as deriving less from the contemporary cultural practices of the province and more from the pagan beliefs and rituals that existed when Italy was a collective of provinces. Such a study then engages with literary form not as the cultural product of geographical place but as an active participant in the concrete experiences that shape the individual’s relation to place. Liolà (1916), Pirandello’s last play composed in the Sicilian dialect and the focus of this essay, captures what I consider to be the progressive—or even “futurist,” as Gramsci later recalls—potential of such de-­ provincializing. Although neither Liolà nor Pirandello’s other plays contemporaneous to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra’s “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre” (1915) display direct traces of a Futurist theatre, Pirandello and Gramsci converged in their broader recognition of the need for enlarging the public’s aesthetic and moral sensibilities—a need that also drove the Futurists during their heyday. The choice of the dialect form allows Pirandello to locate his political critique of Italian society geographically while preventing the play’s language from being inundated with the overused linguistic relics of propagandist cultural homogeneity. I thus bring Liolà to the foreground of the much longer legacy of the de-provincializing line of analysis, which was later epitomized by the post-WWII neorealist directors, such as Luchino Visconti, with his use of dialect as the language of the dispossessed Sicilians in his film La Terra Trema [The Earth Trembles] (1948). Here, it would be useful to look into the etymological history of the word province. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that province derives from the Latin “vincĕre,” meaning to conquer, and signifies “a country or territory outside Italy, under Roman dominion, and administered by a governor sent from Rome” (“Province”). Stuart Elden in The Birth of Territory (2013) writes that, within the Roman Empire, provinces “were not homogeneous spaces of absolute Roman control. Along with the borders being imprecise, there were overlapping jurisdictions, and enclaves of other rulers” (Elden 83). The freedom accorded to the province in terms of political identity was cut short with the onset of modern rules of governance and the attendant practice of cartography. In his interview for the journal Hérodote, Michel Foucault notes the gradual identification of the province with that of a “conquered territory” and states that knowledge of diverse discourses allows for an examination of the varying senses of domination signified by terms such as region and territory (Foucault 69). Such

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a historical outlook reveals that the political significance attributed to a particular geographical region is not proper to it, but is in fact a result of ideological devising. What Gramsci’s quotation above about Pirandello’s role in “‘deprovincializing’ the ‘Italian man’” hints at is Pirandello’s desire to reassert the unique identity of the province by presenting its occupants not as the disinherited residue of prevalent cultural norms, but rather as the legitimate bearers of a composite cultural distinctiveness. Liolà offers an apt platform for this examination, especially because of the play’s relationship to Ilfu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal] (1904), Pirandello’s third novel, from which the play derives major plot points and characters, although the ideological premises of the play are different from those in the novel. “[A]ll too often,” Gramsci writes, “the intuition of his [Pirandello’s] works is submerged in a rhetorical swamp of unconsciously sermonizing morality and pointless verbosity” (CW 79). Then he hastens to add, “Liolà, too, went through this stage” (79). Gramsci’s language implies an understanding of the play’s critical potential as coming from having sublated (aufheben), as opposed to simply transcending or shifting aside, the problems of its antecedent. As I will show, Pirandello was able in Liolà to sublate Mattia’s existential uncertainty, expressed as a universally human condition, by grounding it in a struggle against the regressive elements of the Italian culture of the time. Provincialism, in particular, is treated as evidence of the reactionary cosmopolitan intellectual climate of Italy, which had become the locus of the Catholic cultural hegemony by Gramsci’s time. In 1929, the same year he started writing his prison notebooks, this hegemony had reasserted itself by achieving a Concordat with the fascist regime. In his reading of Liolà, this cultural milieu is counterposed to the pagan traditions that survive in Southern Italy or, as Gramsci references, Magna Grecia, the name that the Romans gave to the Greek settlements in these regions in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. The play derives its critical provenance from being rooted in a cultural tradition that traces itself back to an organization of space that predates the category of the nation. In the first section of this essay, I lay out the cultural provincialism of the Italian theatre, wherein the dialect plays acquired the fake universalism of a standard morality story, and I show how Liolà stands opposite to this trend. In the second and third sections, I illustrate how Pirandello’s vision in the creation of Liolà approximates the spirit of Futurism. Tracing the differences between the novel and the play makes it possible to uncover his intent in subverting the kind of universalism that emanates from the novel.

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I view this process as that of sublation, not only to acknowledge Pirandello’s indebtedness to German idealism, but also because I see in Pirandello’s revision a tenacious gaze into the contradictions within the traditions and schemas that give way to farce. The comparison between these two visions leads me to the final section, where I relate Pirandello’s dialectical method of de-provincializing the Sicilian-ness of Liolà to the Futurist project of remaking the Italian man, as well as expound on what is particularly avant-­ garde in this de-provincializing. This dialectical method resonates beyond the Italian theatre scene because it reveals the regressiveness of the traditional intellectuals. Liolà helps Gramsci reveal how their identification as European, at the expense of national and regional affiliations, perpetuates the problem of provincialism, falsely relegated to the South.

The Mobility of Liolà, Against the Sicilies Manufactured for Export Liolà holds a unique position in Gramsci’s developing insight on Futurism. Originally written in the dialect of Agrigento, a city in southwestern Sicily, Liolà underwent several translations by Pirandello after its first appearance on stage. These revisions were intended to dilute its regional identity and increase its appeal to a broader audience outside of Sicily (De Francisci 223). While Pirandello felt it necessary to revise Liolà to make the language less provincial and more standard, Gramsci praised the play, even in its earliest, least standardized incarnation, for its difference from The Late Mattia Pascal, as well as his other plays. “In it Pirandello has managed to shed his rhetorical habits,” ridding himself of the “moralizing and factitiously humoristic trappings” that weighed the novel down, Gramsci says (CW 79). This reconfiguration, which Gramsci recognized as a central component of the play upon its premiere, makes room for a poetics that counters the expectations of the conventional theatre with “its catholic, positivistic mentality rotting away under its mouldy provincialism and flat, abjectly banal bourgeois settings” (“Gramsci on Theatre” 262).2 The novelty of the play’s linguistic features—its ability to transact meaning across 2  For this particular quotation, I rely on Tony Mitchell’s translation, due to its apt introduction of the word “provincialism,” which captures the complexity of what Gramsci meant by vita regionale (Q14 §15). William Boelhower translates it into “regional life” which, while literally correct, does not reflect its complicity with the dominant hegemony in generating cultural consensus and conditioning the public taste.

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the boundaries between the province and the nation—offers the means for questioning the accepted, rigorously enacted differences between the shared particulars of a geographical place and the assumed universals belonging to an abstract nation. During the first half of the 1930s, Gramsci revisited the problematic ideology of the conventional theatre that resulted in the temporary ban of the performance of Liolà in Italy on the grounds of its unorthodox storyline. By integrating Liolà’s tumultuous performance history into his critique of the current state of Italian culture industry, Gramsci deepens the diagnoses from his Avanti! reviews, which were then confined to the theatre industry’s investment of capital according to the rule of profit (representatively, the Chiarella monopoly of the Turin theatre industry); the dominance of cheaper and “low-grade” entertainments; and, interconnectedly, the public’s favoring of “the inferior, indecorous show to one which represents a positive need for the spirit” (CW 59). Gramsci rejects the idea that the countryside itself could become the infallible register of the national-popular. He continually observes how, far from breeding a uniform progressive force, it is already fraught with the static sayings of the Catholic Church, the second-rate intellectuals, and backward economic groups. Provincialism, as a national problem ideologically displaced onto the rural—especially Southern—regions, is thus not to be confused with the messages Pirandello seeks to impart through his descent into provincial Sicily and its vernacular. For Gramsci, Pirandello’s “futurism” lies in his ability to inscribe this difference within his portrayal of rural life, advancing, in the process, an understanding of provincialism as a societal problem that works in tandem with other elements from the “cultural” realm that diminish the potential of the theatre as a political form. Provincial Sicily then emerges as a geographical accident in the play: the play is less a declaration of the province’s concrete features and more of an excavation of the immediate and experiential tendencies that grant place its specificity. Invoking the same Hegelian process of sublation notable in his prior description of Liolà in Avanti!, Gramsci reflects on Pirandello’s Sicilian plays in another note: “In Pirandello we have a ‘Sicilian’ writer who manages to conceive rural life in ‘dialectal’ and folklore terms (even if his folklore is not the one influenced by Catholicism, but one which has remained ‘pagan’ and anti-Catholic under the superstitious Catholic husk), and who is at the same time an ‘Italian’ and a ‘European’ writer” (Q14 §15; CW 141–42). Here, Gramsci illustrates Pirandello’s way of presenting the

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anti-­Catholic elements as they exist under the “husk” of Catholicism. This manner of critique resonates with Gramsci’s reference elsewhere to “passionate sarcasm” (Q1§29; Prison Notebooks 117). Unlike irony, Gramsci explains, passionate sarcasm probes deeply into the “popular ‘illusions’” of society, neither to be skeptical of their appearance, nor to be merely “negative” and “destructive” (as right-wing sarcasm is), but rather to illuminate the “contingent forms” that these illusions assume as the “popular convictions” shift. Just as Gramsci seeks to detect “the cadaverous smell” hiding underneath their “painted façade,” Pirandello presents the pagan and anti-Catholic elements that exert their influence underneath the shell of Catholicism, exposing it as no more than a façade of Sicily. Thus interpreted, Pirandello’s Sicilian theatre additionally constitutes a critique of the dialect theatre in currency, where a rich folklore is turned into a figment of bourgeois stereotypes and even pagan tales risk becoming repetitions of standard morality stories. As Pirandello himself deplores, “[o]utside Sicily the only success it [a dialect theatre] could have would be through some manifestations that are well known, that have now become typical,” resulting in performances that simply “manufacture a Sicily for export” (“Sicilian Theatre?” 37). Where Pirandello struggles to create plays that are not merely repetitions of themes already old, Gramsci sees a struggle to move beyond a present defined by the lack of a “steering apparatus,” a position anachronistically filled by provincialism. He sees this position as the place for a potential superstructure, which would guide Italy toward “a new, more secure and stable ‘hegemony’” (Q1 §76; Prison Notebooks 181). This structural dimension is precisely what is lacking in the duplicate images of a fabricated Sicily, circulated and sold outside of the region. These duplicate images, combined with fascism’s intolerance of dialects and dialect theatre, eventually resulted in a linguistic autarchy that not only forbade the use of dialect in all types of communication but also exploited language’s complicity in perpetuating the empire. Other critics have recognized this move, albeit not in terms of dialect theatre. For example, when writing of how Ezra Pound’s writing style changed during his ardent support of fascism, Catherine E. Paul illustrates that this change was conditioned by his perception of the modern fascist state of Italy as a reflection of the Roman Empire. According to Paul, Pound made the empire of Augustus Caesar and the fascist Italian state of Mussolini analogous in his writing, in a manner that resembles the Monstra Augusteadella Romanità (1937–1938), an archaeological exhibition that marked the

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bimillennium of the birth of Augustus. Paul demonstrates that, in celebrating the Roman Empire, this exhibition simultaneously celebrated Mussolini’s vision of an imperial Italy by “gestur[ing] to the universality and continuity of the ideals they represented” (207). This appeal to universalism turns both empires into duplicate images of each other and, in order to make them interchangeable, suppresses the “reality of the colonized bodies,” a reality that Pirandello acknowledges and seeks to represent (218). Given the stakes of such culture-made-portable, it necessarily follows that the de-provincializing intent of Pirandello and Gramsci also intervenes—albeit implicitly—in the question of what turns an engagement with form into formalism, what turns culture as embedded in place into mere analogy.

The Late Mattia Pascal: The Regularity of the Novel Form and the Contingency of Place The revision from The Late Mattia Pascal to Liolà reveals how Pirandello achieved the mobility of a work that is not a mere flight to abstraction or a compromise with the formulas in currency. In his Avanti! review, Gramsci highlights that, as a consequence of shedding the narrative of its rhetorical complexities, the play has attained two major changes in character and plot. The “melancholic modern man” of The Late Mattia Pascal is turned into a “man of pagan life,” and the “plot is renewed, it becomes life, it becomes truth. It also becomes simple” (CW 80). As Gramsci points out, Liolà gains a few distinct features that make it more grounded than the episodes from chapter four of the novel, on which the play is based. Organized around a string of events that transpire in a provincial town, the relative unboundedness of this chapter stands out even more for its contrast with subsequent chapters where Mattia’s whereabouts are given more clearly. In Liolà, this sense of unspecificity persists, but Pirandello utilizes it to de-provincialize his work from the kinds of universalism promulgated in the standard morality stories of the bourgeois theatre, as well as in the cosmopolitan embrace of supra-national cultural dimensions. In a sense, then, both the novel and the play engage the question of whether or not, in order to gain greater access to the category of the universal, one must sever ties with the province, a question adopted by many prominent modernists and, as Gramsci points out, by southern-Italy thinkers like Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. As primarily an

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account of moral and existential predicament, the novel remains at best indeterminate in its response. As I will show, not only are the geographical specifics of the province missing from the narrative, but Mattia’s committing of his experience to the province is consolidated in the end only linguistically and at a level removed from Italian indigenous traditions and expressions, as signified by the burial of his manuscript in an antiquated provincial library. The story that becomes Liolà is permeated with a sense of statelessness. Like his father who “never had a permanent headquarters for his dealings,” Mattia is a traveler unanchored on any single place (5). What is more, he is deprived of the investments that his father had made “in land and houses here, in his own village” during his lifetime and passed on to his family. Batta Malagna, the executor of the estate left to the Pascals, betrays their trust by encroaching on their wealth and propelling Mattia’s life to a catastrophe, until the possibility of his self-fulfillment as a family man in this town is uprooted. The events leading up to this catastrophe, which Pirandello later shifts into a farce in Liolà, are lined up as the repercussions of the uncertainty of his father’s past. Even Malagna’s wealth and social position, which drive Marianna Pescatore, Romilda’s mother, to devise a dishonorable scheme to marry her daughter off to Malagna, are traced back to his earlier relationship with the Pascals, whose money and status he uses to heighten his own. These series of intertwined causes and effects give voice to the worldview of the novel: the loss of a place to which one can be anchored leads to disastrous outcomes. As Mattia hurtles into his fate over the course of the novel, this worldview is subsumed into a cliché or standard morality story, that is, a truth universally acknowledged but within bourgeois cultural terms. It is as if the subsequent plot embodies at face value the sarcastic comment with which Mattia leaves the reader as he succumbs to an unwanted marriage at the end of chapter four: “in the midst of all these fine people, I was the one who had caused the damage. And therefore I was the one who had to pay” (31). As he records in retrospect, little did he foresee then that, when he attempted to escape his miserable family life, he would be entrapped in an existential loop: a life with neither a legally recognized identity, nor the possibility of settling down in one place, nor any chance to marry the person he loved. Later, as Pirandello turns this chapter into a play, he finds in it a fertile ground for a farce, one that exposes the absurdities of reality that surface as individuals try to come to terms with—or manipulate—the moral or

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behavioral standards indoctrinated by society. In other words, Liolà hypostatizes what Pirandello explains as the fictionality of life in his essay “A Warning on the Scruples of the Imagination,” which he added as the Appendix to the 1921 (Mondadori) Edition of Il fu Mattia Pascal. The “universally human import” that Pirandello wanted to make transpire through the fictionality of his plots and characters in the novel is productively sublated within the realism of Liolà—in the same manner that the conventions of narrative realism are sublated within the novel through the uncertainty of the protagonist’s place in life (248). While formal features of realism failed to offer any certitude to the protagonist in the novel, the dramatization of concrete events in the play presents a way out of the universality of experiences sheltered under the concept of the nation. The dialogue between Mattia and Don Eligio in chapter two, regarding which style Mattia’s narrative should emulate, amounts to an immanent critique of the non-localized character of the novel, in terms of both Mattia’s existential confusion and his use of narrative detail. In the middle of the conversation, Mattia and Don Eligio have a brief but loaded exchange about the writers’ growing attention to the details. To Don Eligio’s observation that “books have become more and more detailed, filled with the most intimate particulars,” Mattia retorts, “Oh, I know! The Count rose betimes, at exactly half past eight … his wife, Madame la Comtesse, wore a lilac-colored dress, richly adorned with laces at her throat … Teresina was dying of hunger … love was breaking Lucrezia’s heart … For heaven’s sake! What do I care about any of that?” (The Late Mattia Pascal 3). Here, Mattia names the types of details that are favored and reproduced in popular discourse. What enriches their discussion is its context, taking place in a deconsecrated church that currently functions as a library of books bequeathed by a certain Monsignor Boccamazza to his native town upon his death in 1803. The sense of obsoleteness gleaned from this detail is substantiated as the two individuals continue their search for a model of narrative style among the dust-ridden and deserted books. This instance of self-referentiality in the novel—the inability to select from or, indeed, locate in preexisting writing styles a form suitable for conveying contemporary dilemma of self-identification—points to the larger problematic of being located in a particular place. These books clutter in the absence of any attempt to historicize them, which results in nonsensical juxtapositions between, say, “the three volumes of an extremely licentious treatise, Concerning the Art of Loving Women, written in 1571 by Anton Muzio

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Porro” and “a Life and death of Faustino Materucci, Benedictine of Polirone, Known to Many as ‘Blessed,’ a biography published in Mantua in 1625” (1). They are also divorced from the lived experiences of the people and incapable of “kindl[ing] a love of reading in their spirit” (1). The extraneousness of the library, both as an addition to this provincial town and as a narrative detail, serves as an embodiment of the problems that Mattia, as the mouth of Pirandello, is unable to resolve through the novel. In deciding to add his own manuscript to its collection, forbidding it to be opened “until fifty years after [his] third, last, and definitive death,” Mattia in effect denies its place in the literature as a contribution of, in Gramsci’s words, a potentially national-popular element. From the perspective of Liolà, Mattia’s narrative offers a glimpse, only in hindsight, of an aspiration for large systematic change that works toward the de-provincialization of the public’s taste, the advent of a new man, and a reconstruction of society. Having unfolded the inquiry but within the parameters of the naturalistic, melodramatic, and moralistic formulas, it is perhaps inherently unavoidable that Pirandello’s vision in The Late Mattia Pascal does not exceed the limits of “bourgeois subversivism,” an epistemological framework that falls short even though it is useful, as Gramsci admits, as an instrument for “attaining proletarian hegemony—the final act of moral truth” (San Juan 38–39). Just like Mattia’s manuscript that is destined to stay buried in an unnamed Sicilian town, the potential of The Late Mattia Pascal represents a hiatus until 1916, when it finds a new outlet in the form of a play.

Liolà: The Language of the Play and the Paradoxes of Provincial Identity On the surface, many of the novel’s key elements are present in the play, from the major character relations to the hints of a morality tale—or, to repeat Gramsci’s words, a “parable” that fails to “descend to the concreteness of life.” These aspects are critiqued from within, however, as Pirandello turns Mattia into a pagan Sicilian man and utilizes his maneuvers in life to expose the stakes of the de-historicized memoir. Chapter four of the novel, which ends with Mattia being exhorted into an unhappy marriage by his mother, becomes rejuvenated as the story of Liolà, a free- spirited wanderer—a “bird on the wing,” as he calls himself—who sees through the rules of society and beats it at its own game (Liolà 41). The pagan energy

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of Sicily, enlivened and embodied by Liolà, not only gives the play the force of a farce but also serves against the superficially integrative gestures of those contemporary intellectuals who, in speaking for the entire “southern” region, elide specific local realities of Italy and, as Gramsci argues, have formed an intellectual basis of imperial interests since the time of the Roman Empire (Q12 §1; SPN 17). More specifically, Pirandello sublates the moralistic appearance of the play by taking the cage of parable that traps Mattia and turning it into a platform for Liolà to sing and dance on. Not only is the narrative rid of the financial entanglements that, in the novel, pressed Mattia into a life restricted by moral codes; Liolà uses his understanding of these moral codes, and the pagan perspective that allows him to see beyond them, to mock and manipulate those still living in the parable. Gramsci’s description of Pirandello’s Così è (se vi pare) [Right You Are if You Think You Are] (1917), another play of his that is a recreation of an earlier story, “La signora Frolae il signor Ponza, suogenero” [“Signora Frola and Her Son-­ in-­Law, Signor Ponza”], resonates in this respect because, unlike Liolà, it remains a parable. Gramsci castigates the play in a language that echoes Pirandello’s own criticism of the dialect theatre that simply “manufacture[s] a Sicily for export”— plays that rely on popularly circulated cultural attributes and render Sicily a certain transcendental place outside of history— beginning with the comment that it is “purely a mechanical accumulation of words that create neither a truth nor an image,” and then describing the resulting elusiveness as a character of the parable: It [Parable] can be an effective means of persuasion in practical life, but it is a monster in the theatre because in the theatre allusions are not enough. In the theatre a demonstration is embodied, living people and allusions no longer suffice. Metaphorical suspensions must descend to the concreteness of life. What is necessary is the complex construction of deep inner intuitions of feeling that lead to a collision, a struggle, that unravel into action. (CW 81)

By functioning primarily as a farce, Liolà counteracts the aspects that Gramsci associates with the label of “parable,” as well as the reductive didacticism of the parable as a genre. The moralizing gestures, with which the novel is replete, diminish in Liolà, including the insinuation at the end of chapter four that what made Mattia finally give in to an unwanted marriage was the idea that, by taking responsibility for his own deeds, he

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“might somehow be saved” (The Late Mattia Pascal 31). Any appearance of moralism present in the play functions like the deconsecrated church from the novel, which preserves the structure of the Catholic society it is set in but, due to the loss of its meaning, only reveals the empty husk for what it is. Not surprisingly, Liolà drew much anger from the Catholic audience at its premiere; the entire play assumes Catholic rigor only as a form of superstition. This dimension of the play solicits an understanding of the province on a national historical plane, that is, an understanding of the province as a site of tension with the imposed hegemony. I will return to this point when I discuss the imperial cosmopolitanism of Catholicism as well as other problems that concerned Gramsci, who himself was from a southern provincial region of Italy (Sardinia). Under the “husk” of Catholicism, Liolà is explicitly “anti-Catholic in a way that the ‘humanitarian’ and positive conception of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois verismo of traditional theatre was not” (Q14 §15; CW 140). As Gramsci further suggests, Pirandello’s worldview is best defined in relation to what it is against, which explains not only the hostility with which he would be met by the Catholic audience but also why those who read him favorably struggle so much with understanding the positions he advances. Knowing this, Gramsci differentiates Pirandello’s own ideas from Pirandellism, which in most cases he regards as no more than an abstracted inventory of his recurring themes and motifs.3 Moreover, he sees this construction as participating in the culture of provincialism by functioning as “a convenient formula that often hides tendentious cultural and ideological interests which they do not want to admit explicitly” (Q14 §15; CW 140). Liolà indeed serves as an antidote to these disembodied ideas by juxtaposing them with a concrete object of critique. When, for example, Liolà 3  As the name suggests, Pirandellism (Pirandellismo) primarily refers to Pirandello’s body of work, with a particular focus on his later work where his “play within the play” technique and philosophical themes become more pronounced. After the publication of Adriano Tilgher’s 1923 study of Pirandello in his Studi sul teatro contemporaneo (Studies in Contemporary Theatre), these features came to be known in Italian literary circles as “Pirandellism” and were adopted even beyond Italy between the twenties and the sixties. Some of the themes that appear repeatedly in his plays, “the relativity of truth, the multiplicity of personality, the art-life opposition, and the overwhelming absurdity of life,” are especially notable (Bishop 146). As Pirandellism gained popularity, especially among the French and German playwrights, cases were present where writers were declarably Pirandellians without even being familiar with his work.

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accuses Mita of passively accepting the situation into which she is unjustly thrust, their dialogue provides a glimpse into the unique way Catholicism, as a cultural institution, penetrates the everyday discourses of the Italian populace: MITA:

We can’t all be shrewd like you, Liolà. It means that God will have to look after me. LIOLÀ: God, oh yes! He should. He did it once. But no matter how good you might be, how devout, how observing of all his commandments, you surely don’t dare to compare yourself with the Virgin Mary! MITA: Me? You’re blaspheming! LIOLÀ: Pardon me, if you say that God must look after you! How? Through the power of the Holy Spirit? MITA: Go away, go. It’s better that I retire for the night. I can’t stay here to hear such irreverent talk. (Liolà 52–53) Liolà is able to persuade Mita out of her logic by engaging in the dialogue on her terms, taking it to the extreme. While Mita refuses to pay respect to his sarcasm, his “irreverent talk” reveals to the audience the subversive potential within her rhetoric, providing Liolà the ground for holding on to it, for turning her around. As Umberto Mariani records, “He [Liolà] knows the way things are in this world; he knows the value of the hypocritical conventions of society; and he acts accordingly—he exploits them” (15). In fact, the first sight that the audience has of Liolà is of him grotesquely dressed in “a green velvet suit with a short jacket and bell-bottom trousers, a sailor’s cap, English style, on his head, with two ribbons dangling from the back,” which he claims he did in homage to his upcoming marriage but in reality only accentuates the absurdity and arbitrariness of the arrangement (Liolà 34). Moments like this, which in other plays of Pirandello risk turning his characters into allegorical figures detached from the contingencies of life, generate an occasion of “passionate sarcasm.” Pirandello isolates the protagonist from the influences of his surroundings and, through this, shifts the protagonist’s place in life from having to define himself constantly in relation to the institutional norms to being able to fathom his seemingly existential impasse as a creation of the institution. Through Liolà’s eyes, the play can shed light on folk superstitions masked under the language of Catholicism, revealing that, even as these

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superstitions assist the workings of religion as reactionary blinders to institutional injustices, they retain a counter-normative vision of another way to live. Against the “spontaneous” consent of the people, a process through which hegemony, religious or secular, becomes normalized, Liolà gives voice to another type of spontaneity that is rooted in their everyday practices of faith, and this voice acquires a rhetorical force precisely because of its tie to the elementary passions of the people. As if to make fun of the people who confuse saving appearances by adhering to the rules of society with their own sense of conscience, Liolà tells Simone of a “new law” that would give him a way to obtain a child safely without violating the marriage institution: LIOLÀ: They’ve passed a new law, just the thing for us. I mean, to thin out our population. Listen. If you’ve got a sow that give you twenty piglets, you’re rich, right? I mean, if you sell them, the more piglets she makes you, the richer you are. The same for a cow, the more calves she produces. Now think of a poor man, with these women of ours who, God help us, no sooner you touch them, right away they’ve got morning sickness. A real problem, right? Well, the government has thought it all out. It passed a law that from now on the children may be sold. They can be bought and sold, Zio Simone. And me, look (showing him the three children), I can set up the shop. Do you want a child? I can sell one to you. Here, this one (getting hold of one). Look how sleek he looks! Well fed! Must weigh forty pounds! All muscle! Take him, take him! Feel how heavy he is! I’ll sell him to you for nothing: for a barrel of concord wine! (The women laugh, while the old man, offended, draws back.) (36) In hyperbole almost Swiftian in its satirical implications, Liolà critiques the productive potential of place. The distorted valuation of fertility and of animal husbandry implicit in the offer of selling one’s children is a critique of the traditional values associated with place. Liolà thus exposes the hypocrisy not only of Simone as an individual but also of society at large, which, in Mariani’s words, claims to be based on “absolute moral principles” but in fact practices only “relativistic morality” (18). In the face of Simone’s contrivances for the “public recognition of his legitimate fatherhood,” Liolà’s “simplicity and paternal love” for his “nestful of illegitimate children” seems more grounded and relatable (Mariani 15, 22).

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As the existential angst of Mattia turns into the adaptability of Liolà, the narrative focus also widens from a look into an individual’s journey of self-discovery to the unmasking of the societal myths that standardize this process. Fiora A. Bassanese, in her extensive study of Pirandello’s life and works, likens The Late Mattia Pascal to a “modernist bildungsroman” that traces the psychological processes of the protagonist as he travels through Europe (32). The broadened outlook of Liolà enables Pirandello to observe this kind of subversion as limited, as providing a basis for conformism by functioning only as a variation or difference. Through the changed status of the protagonist, Pirandello is able to repurpose what he previously narrowed into “a humorous epiphany of a diminutive Ulysses” as an exposé of how society functions (32). In sum, Liolà is universal in a sense that The Late Mattia Pascal is not, because its universality is predicated on a different kind of specificity, one that arises from the clarity of the object of its critique, what it is against. In his Avanti! review of 1917, Gramsci traces the spirit of this opposition back to the ancient pagan traditions of Magna Grecia, which had been obscured by the Catholicism of the contemporary Italian stage. From this perspective, Liolà expresses its own sense of rootedness by embodying the elements that survive in the rural tradition of this historical region, “with its buffoons, its pastoral idylls, its country life full of Dionysian frenzy” (CW 79–80). Thus traced, the historicity of the play liberates its interpretive implications from the constraints posed by its geographic setting or the notion of the untranslatable core of dialect. While resonating with a broader heritage of Italian—and European—culture not confined to Sicily, paganism in Liolà communicates such generality in the way “a historically and regionally real Sicilian people … think and act” as “common people and Sicilians” (Q14 §15; CW 141). The implications of such temporal and geographic generality are historicized in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, where he develops his notion of the national-popular as an antidote to reactionary cosmopolitanism. In contrast to the pan-European pursuits of the traditional intellectuals, who contrive a universalization of their ideas by stripping them of their “geographical seats in Italy” (Q10II §61; SPN 117), Gramsci posits the national-popular. The locus of a collective will is capable of both popular mobilization and intellectual reorganization precisely because of its connectedness to the “organic functions of the people themselves” and to “feel[ing] tied to them” and “know[ing] and sens[ing] their needs, aspirations and feelings” (Q21 §5; CW 209). Against the backdrop of the

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international situation, conditioned by capitalism and fascism, it is perhaps natural that the national-popular gradually gained significance in Gramsci’s thinking as more than a category of literature. In the late twenties and early thirties, Gramsci places increasing emphasis on the political dimension of the national-popular, recognizing it as a strategic principle that the communist party of each nation would need for responding to the European crisis as an international popular force (McNally 62). For seeing how Gramsci’s “international” vision stands apart from the universal outlook of the traditional intellectuals, we need look no further than his critique of cosmopolitan southern intellectuals, such as Benedetto Croce. In “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926), Gramsci observes their failure to relate with the specific cultural and socio-­economic concerns of the peasant masses. While admitting the part Croce served in forging a “new conception of the world … transcending Catholicism and every other form of religion based on myth,” Gramsci locates in this practice of transcendence a systematic neglect of the specific local and national contexts that provide hegemonic expressions to such overarching apparatuses, as well as neglect of the ways in which these expressions are contested in everyday practices of the people. Instead of attending to hegemony as it exists in an organic relation with popular culture, down to the precepts of folk wisdom or common sense (senso comune), Croce contributed to the detachment of even “the radical intellectuals of the South from the peasant masses” and facilitated their “absorption” by “the national bourgeoisie and hence by the agrarian bloc” (334). In Notebook 10 of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci takes this critique even further by measuring the stakes of Crocean thought and revealing it to be the “cultural and ideological embodiment of an ‘alta’ or a ‘grande politica’ whose effects are to maintain and to stabilize the prevailing system” (Fontana 61). In this intellectual enterprise, Gramsci sees the “elite tendency” characteristic of cosmopolitanism, that is, a tendency to “assume oneself (like the leaders of the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire) to be a citizen of a ‘universal’ (kosmo-) ‘polity’ (polis-)” (McNally 62). One of the most pressing conditions of the nation, cosmopolitanism is also seen in Gramsci’s analysis as endemic to Italy’s ancient past, going as far back in time as the Roman Empire (Q12 §1; SPN 17). Seen in this light, his earlier celebration of Pirandello’s use of Magna Grecian paganism acquires substantially more critical power as a tradition that predates the Roman Empire and supersedes the long-standing cosmopolitan hegemony of Italy.

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When Gramsci reflects on the potential and limits of Pirandello’s dialect theatre, he furthers this earlier observation by describing Pirandello’s position as “simultaneously ‘Sicilian,’ ‘Italian’ and European,’” identifying both Pirandello’s key paradox as a writer of dialect plays and the presence of a dialectic in Pirandello’s thinking that undoes this paradox (Q14 §15; CW 142, my emphasis). As Gramsci implies in hindsight, many attempts to de-provincialize are predicated on a view of provincialism as an Italian problem, not exclusively Southern. These include both Pirandello’s revision of Liolà to appeal beyond Sicily and the national task of achieving a cross-regional solidarity between northern workers and southern peasants. Coupled with his diagnosis of the traditional intellectuals, who might be “European” in their outlook but not in the sense of promoting a more integrative view of the Italian or Southern situation, Gramsci’s critique of provincialism helps contextualize the theatre of pagan Magna Grecia, which Pirandello evokes in Liolà, as a counter-response to the prevailing cultural milieu of Italy in this period, rather than as a decadent hankering for a remote past that bears no living connection to contemporary existence. Against the “tradition of the Empire and the Church,” Pirandello’s attempt to apply a distinctively “Italian,” more specifically “Sicilian,” perspective over the broadly “European” plot of the earlier novel communicates his refusal to align with the lineage of ideas that have consolidated into the cosmopolitan ideology of Italy’s intellectual classes (Q10II §61; SPN 117). In other words, what makes Pirandello an “‘innovator’ of the intellectual climate,” surpassing the Futurists, is how he hints at a possibility of “a conception of the world” as rooted in, and thus reclaiming, historical experiences of people who have thus far been objects of aesthetic sublimation (Q9 §134; CW 139). In this regard, Pirandello overcame provincialism as manifest in various universalizing, or de-historicizing, gestures of the traditional intelligentsia. As Robert Dombroski points out in his famous essay “On Gramsci’s Theatre Criticism” (1986), the Italian theatre scene was not exempt from the influence of provincialism, with the historical drama continuing its popularity despite its degeneration, in the hands of “second-rate imitators,” into a “melodramatic tale of the good and the bad” (101). In what appears to be Pirandello’s paradox between writing in dialect and a desire to de-provincialize, Gramsci sees a more fundamental distinction between the historically “backward” elements of provincial life and those that are framed as such within the reactionary current of cosmopolitanism. Pirandello’s work of undoing his own paradox in

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his dialect plays, most notably Liolà, represents an alternative vision of universality based on the collective interests of the people, inclusive of those in rural localities of the South. Instead of presenting the people as the sum of the cultural attributes of a geographical place, the play presents them as active participants whose ways of living allow for a remembering of the histories of place.

The Dialectics of Luigi Pirandello Ultimately, Pirandello’s work of de-provincializing his representation of Sicily, particularly in Liolà, follows what Gramsci views as the imperative of progressive art. For Gramsci, progressive art moves beyond mere abstraction or formalist detachment by broadening its perspective in search of a heritage that will help ground it more solidly and progressively in an Italian context. As if to foreground the aesthetic concerns integral to his political thinking, Gramsci at times uses the term “philology” interchangeably with the philosophy of praxis. This philology, which he calls “living philology,” locates meaning in the way “signs” are arranged “within language,” not because this philology seeks to sever it from its “social context” but because it sees this context as “constitut[ing] linguistic praxis” (Ives 99). He even integrates “the virtues of style” into the task of forming a proletarian subject (in his early theatre criticism), a task which later blends into the formation of the national-popular culture (in his prison writings) (CW 81). Taking into account the contemporary rise of fascism that lessened the possibility of any fundamental cultural or linguistic changes and weakened the ties between artists and the people, Sascha Bru highlights Gramsci’s desperate “need for a language that could somehow still be familiar and simultaneously convey a spontaneity unheard of, a language that could somehow generate a radically new outlook on the social without fully alienating its addresses” (249). This need becomes pronounced in Prison Notebooks with his “frequent use of quotation marks”—Caporalii (« »)— and other various attempts to “redefine individual words and push their semantic limits” (249). It also provides a ground for tracing his interest in Futurism back to his time in Turin when he celebrated the novelty of its linguistic experimentalism. In the Corriere Universitario, Gramsci wrote, “So far, the Futurists have had no intelligent critic: that is why no one has paid attention to them. If a few Crocean journalists had written a couple of articles on the subject, who knows how many discoverers of America

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there would now be!” (CW 47). Needless to say, the working-class support of the movement must have increased his assurance of Futurist experimentation as a form of newness that was innovative without being alienating, at least until it became coopted, reactionary, and split into different factions. If the Futurist poetics of Marinetti served for Gramsci as an example of a language radical in its outlook but familiar in its groundedness in civil society, Pirandello’s dialect theatre presented to Gramsci the possibility of a form that resists dominant modes of thinking without becoming insular or self-marginalizing. By the early thirties, Gramsci came to see Pirandello in distinction from other writers, in particular those that he labels Brescianists,4 saying that [Pirandello] has tried to introduce into popular culture the “dialectic” of modern philosophy, in opposition to the Aristotelian-Catholic way of conceiving the “objectivity of the real.” He has done it as it can be done in the theatre and in the way Pirandello himself is able to do it. This dialectical conception of objectivity appears acceptable to the audience because it is acted out by exceptional characters and thus has a romantic form, that of a paradoxical struggle against common sense and good sense. (Q6 §26; CW 138)

As an inherent part of this dialectical approach, a mode of critique emerges in Liolà that proceeds through a series of sublations. The problem of Pirandellism is that, when it functions for the traditional intellectuals, it often misses this “dialectical conception of objectivity” at the heart of Pirandello’s realism, thus effacing the way Pirandello repeats ideas that have come to pass as “common sense,” not to assert them but to disrupt them. Against the pitfalls of Pirandellism, his dialect plays validate the “historically and regionally real Sicilian people” as they are, not sublimated into “‘intellectuals’ disguised as common people” (Q14 §15; CW 141). In Liolà, these “ways of thinking” are integrated into the form of a farce. 4  Named after Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), a reactionary Jesuit writer, Brescianism is a term coined by Gramsci to highlight the reactionary tendencies of many post-war intellectuals, most of whom were affiliated with Jesuitism to varying degrees and supported the repressive measures of the fascist regime, which sought to use the Concordat to tighten ideological control over the people. After his imprisonment, Gramsci examined the phenomenon of Brescianism as an important part of many ideological coalitions that were taking place in literary culture, religion, and the dominant class at this time.

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As that happens, various expressions of provincialism are exposed as they operate in conflict with the popular beliefs and superstitious that thrived in the lives of the Sicilians long before the rise of the discourses that condemn the Southern regions, especially Mezzogiorno (including Sicily and Sardinia), to a uniform destiny of backwardness. Indeed, Pirandello’s fantastical rendering of Sicily makes him vulnerable to various shortcomings. Even the statement quoted above, in which Gramsci acknowledges Pirandello’s contribution to the popular culture, is qualified right after, as Gramsci points out Pirandello’s “sophistry” in carrying out the dialectical approach (CW 138). Nonetheless, Pirandello’s intellectualism is distinguished from, say, that of Giovanni Ansaldo, a “Brescianist” criticized for his “need to ‘be few in number,’ to constitute an ‘aristocracy’” (Q23 §23; CW 323). Taken together, the so-called Brescianists reveal to Gramsci the “aristocratic” attitude behind their formalism, whereas Pirandello, by being attentive to form but not formalist in intent, can get closer to the early vision of Futurism. For Gramsci, this distinction is as solid and deeply entrenched as the structural divide between the urban, industrialized north and rural south in Italy: The city-country relation between North and South can be studied in different cultural forms.  Benedetto Croce and Giustino Fortunato, at the beginning of this century, were at the head of a cultural movement that counterposed itself to the cultural movement of the North (futurism). It is noteworthy that Sicily detaches itself from the South in many respects: Crispi is the man of Northern industry; Pirandello is by and large closer to futurism; Gentile and his actual idealism are also closer to the futurist movement, understood in a broad sense, as an opposition to traditional classicism and as a form of contemporary “romanticism.” (Q1 §43; Prison Notebooks 130–1)

As Pirandello rescues Sicily from the label of backwardness by writing Liolà with his self-awareness as a Sicilian, Italian, and European, Gramsci does so by naming Sicilian writers, including Pirandello, who got “closer to futurism” by separating themselves from the cosmopolitanism of the reactionary intellectuals, such as Croce and Fortunato, whose support was limited to the agrarian block in the South. In spirit and methodology, at least, it is doubtless that Pirandello’s vision in turning the “ironic” novel into a “farce” approaches Gramsci’s vision of the avant-garde (CW 79). Pirandello rejects the cultural provincialism of early twentieth-century

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Italy by turning to another heritage that predates the types of familiarities that dominate the scene of the contemporary theatre, and through this critical turn, the play gains a mobility and applicability broader than where it is set. The avant-garde, as Gramsci sees it, needs to be “universalist” in the sense that the philosophy of praxis (his covering term for Western Marxism) is, especially if it is to sublate and not simply replicate ethnic or regional differences. Just as the philosophy of praxis seeks to surpass all fragmentary ideas that have come to transpire as “common sense,” the avant-garde has an imperative to expose the passive, noncritical relationship that we have with these fragments, knowing them only in a collage-like manner. Needless to say, the transcendent relation that the  philosophy of praxis builds with all forms of thought—be it common sense, folklore, or high culture—is not to be confused with any process of abstraction that fails to respond to the real feelings of groups and individuals. In Liolà, Pirandello has given voice to this vision as “can be done in the theatre and in the way Pirandello himself is able to do it,” by laying bare the discrepancy between these real feelings and the feelings that sociological laws suggest exist, a discrepancy that he brings out even more starkly with a comical spin. If the realism of Liolà resides in Pirandello’s tenacious gaze into this discrepancy, the phantasm of Liolà would reside in the idea that if unmasked, the feelings and passi+1ons of the Sicilians can be accessed somehow in their unmediated authenticity. In the end, Pirandello’s mask, like Gramsci’s image of a husk, is a metaphor that approximates but never quite aligns with the ways of modern society, where material, organizational, and discursive forces all combine to create power. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Gramsci, faced with the need for a new language, had to summon the whole history of Futurism to figure out Pirandello’s place in Italian modernism, just as it was not a coincidence that Pirandello, like Marinetti, resorted to the power of the fascist state to extend his.

Works Cited Bassanese, Fiora A. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Bishop, Thomas. Pirandello and the French Theater. New  York: New  York University Press, 1960. Bru, Sascha. “The Untameables: Language and Politics in Gramsci and Marinetti.” Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and Its Legacy. Ed. Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 243–54.

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De Francisci, Enza. “Translating sicilianità in Pirandello’s dialect play Liolà.” Adapting Translation for the Stage. Ed. Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole. New York: Routledge, 2017. 223–35. Dombroski, Robert S. “On Gramsci’s Theater Criticism.” The Legacy of Antonio Gramsci, special issue of Boundary 2, vol. 14, no. 3, Spring 1986: 91–119. Elden, Stuart. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 53–97. Fontana, Benedetto. “Intellectuals and Masses: Agency and Knowledge in Gramsci.” Antonio Gramsci. Ed. Mark McNally. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 55–75. Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1977. 63–77. Gramsci, Antonio. “Gramsci on Theatre.” Ed. and trans. Tony Mitchell. New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 47, 1996: 259–65. ———. Letters from Prison. Ed. Frank Rosengarten. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994a. ———. Prison Notebooks. Ed. Joseph A. Buttgieg. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. ———. Selections from Cultural Writings. Ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Trans. William Boelhower. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International, 1971. ———. “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings. Ed. Richard Bellamy. Trans. Virginia Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994b. 313–37. Ives, Peter. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Mariani, Umberto. “Liolà: Beyond Naturalism.” Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 13–25. Marinetti, F. T. et al. “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre.” Futurism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 204–9. McNally, Mark. “Gramsci’s Internationalism, the National-Popular and the Alternative Globalisation Movement.” Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance. Ed. Mark McNally and John Schwarzmantel. New  York: Routledge, 2009. 58–75. Paul, Catherine E. Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016. Pirandello, Luigi. The Late Mattia Pascal. 1904. Trans. William Weaver. New York: New York Review Books, 1964a.

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———. Liolà. 1916. Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays. Trans. Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 27–68. ———. “Sicilian Theatre?” 1909. Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record. Ed. Susan Bassnett and Jennifer Lorch. Philadelphia: Harwood, 1993. 35–37. ———. “A Warning on the Scruples of the Imagination.” The Late Mattia Pascal. Trans. William Weaver. New York: New York Review Books, 1964b. 245–50. “Province.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. https:// www-­oed-­com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/oed2/00191085. Accessed 14 June 2019. San Juan, E., Jr. “Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013: 31–45. Tilgher, Adriano. Studi sul teatro contemporaneo. Rome: Libreria di Scienze e lettere, 1923.

CHAPTER 9

“And No One Talks of National Rebirth”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D.J. Enright’s Poetry Aaron Deveson

To the nineteenth-century internationalists … the future conjured up a new dispensation for mankind, a dispensation they looked forward to with a confidence based upon their control over a universe of facts: […] Governing institutions today have lost sight of the principles of politics rooted in the collective values of a res publica [state or commonwealth], even as they continue to defend the ‘civilization of capital.’ … The idea of governing the world is becoming yesterday’s dream. —Mazower (426–27)

The discreetly elegiac sentences above are taken from Mark Mazower’s 2012 book Governing the World: The History of an Idea, where the Columbia University historian analyzes the rise and fall of the belief in A. Deveson (*) National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_9

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Western-led international institutions promising “the vision of a better future for mankind” (xiii). Mazower’s book traces the “Enlightenment” roots of such organizations as the League of Nations and the United Nations, showing the way in which the simultaneously self-interested and humanitarian Anglo-American projects of the post-World War II era developed out of tensions in European political philosophy and policy between morality and realism, and between rationalist liberalism and colonialism. Mazower narrates how, despite “the Victorian idea of the supremacy of European civilization” being shaken by the colossal aerial bombing of World War II (81), Eurocentric cosmopolitan humanitarianism flourished again after the Cold War “through an unprecedented expansion of the UN’s responsibilities and powers” (379), which included attempts to impose versions of market democracy, human rights and other liberal norms through post-conflict reconstruction and state-building, development aid, and charity in Angola, Cambodia, Liberia, and Somalia, as well as Kofi Annan’s authorization of military force, on humanitarian grounds, against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Four years after that deployment came NATO’s controversial bombing of Serbia without Security Council authorization—an event which Mazower suggests inaugurated the present era of alienation in which Russia, China and especially the United States have exempted themselves from “otherwise universally binding international commitments and obligations” (423). The present essay is focused on the work of a British poet and cultural commentator, D.J. Enright, whose writings place us in a world in which the hope of extending a res publica based on internationalist humanitarianism and the humanistic liberalism underpinning it has not—at least not initially—been lost. I hope this is more than just an exercise in nostalgia. Enright should matter to us now, I believe, because, in his poetic responsiveness to the foreign countries in which he lived between the late 1940s and 1970, he embodied an instructively critical mode of engagement with the space of the cultural Other—a form of cosmopolitanism that deserves not to be dismissed tout court, even as its self-interested and even quasiimperialist aspects have to be acknowledged. In several significant respects, his poetry formally and discursively enacts the unstable nature of internationalist liberalism and interventionism described in Mazower’s book. Despite his consistencies, Enright’s writing career merits our attention for the way it can be read as a quiet allegory of changing historical approaches within rich Western countries to foreign space—from a broadly (though not straightforwardly) hopeful liberal humanist internationalism in his earlier

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work to a more pessimistic and self-protective attitude in his writing from the mid-1960s onwards. The present essay offers a case study from the earlier, pre-disillusioned phase when Enright was living and writing in postWorld War II Japan. The aim here is not to argue that either one of the two approaches is inherently superior to the other. Instead, both the initial optimism and the ultimate shrinking of that optimism relate to a tendency on the part of Western liberal humanist political actors after World War II to extend an overly determined yet compelling version of their ideology across non-Western cultural-political spaces. Exploring the first of these approaches to foreign space in relation to the second may therefore help us to reflect productively on what it means to be living in an era in which belief in legitimate internationalist intervention has been at a low ebb. Dennis Joseph Enright, who was born in 1920 into a working-class family in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, England, first came to prominence in Britain as a poet and Leavisite critic associated with the so-called “Movement” writers, including Philip Larkin. But Enright’s early work distinguished itself from the ostensibly non-cosmopolitan poetry of Larkin and Kingsley Amis through its engagement, in The Laughing Hyena (1953), with the landscapes, street life, and some of the cultural tensions of Egypt in the last few years of King Farouk’s reign. His emergence on the British literary scene occurred near the beginning of a highly creative period that he spent largely abroad as a professor of literature, first in Egypt (1947–1950) and then in Japan (1953–1956), West Germany (1956–1957), Thailand (1957–1960), and Singapore (1960–1970)—the settings for many of his poems and prose. The several poetry volumes he produced during this phase are often structured around a combination of documentary-style and historically informed observations and more explicitly personal ruminations issuing from the consciousness of a British expatriate onlooker. They can be seen to belong to a twentieth-century travel writing poetic tradition that includes W.H. Auden’s In Time of War (later called Sonnets from China) (1938), the 1940s and 1950s work of Bernard Spencer and Lawrence Durrell dealing with Alexandria and other places, and Anthony Thwaite’s later annotations on Japan. Enright won the highly prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981 and, later in that decade, Seamus Heaney, looking back to poetic developments in the 1950s, named him among the prominent “inheritors of the Empson/Auden line, who pointed the way for much of what happened over the next twenty years” (41). On the other hand, the critic Martin Dodsworth rightly mentions Enright as one of those post-Second

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World War writers who are “still waiting for their due” (108). So far, there has been only one full-length study of Enright—William Walsh’s D.J.  Enright: Poet of Humanism (1974)—though this was followed in 1990 by Life by Other Means (edited by Jacqueline Simms), a loquacious collection of essays on Enright’s life and work by friends and critics, including A.S. Byatt, Douglas Dunn, Koh Tai Ann, P.N. Furbank, Peter Porter, Paul Theroux, Anthony Thwaite, and Walsh. Although Enright’s humanist and liberal tendencies are explicitly mentioned in these books, the relationship between those tendencies is not explored, nor is there adequate critical discussion of the wider historical and theoretical context in which Enright’s internationalist liberal humanism came to be expressed. This may not be surprising, since, as many historians of intellectual history have pointed out, liberalism and humanism are multi-faceted “family” terms that are notoriously difficult to pin down. On occasions, humanism has even been seen in opposition to liberalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, Irving Babbitt and other conservative New Humanists marked out the restrained ethical imagination of classicism as a desirable model and center for human nature, while making clear their objections to what they saw as the irresponsibly expansive individualism and moral and aesthetic pluralism of the liberal-­bourgeois tradition as it had come to be manifested in romanticism. But in the readings that follow, Enright’s liberal humanism will be shown to place an ethically non-classical emphasis on the goal of “the liberation of the individual from the collective mind” (Good 94), to quote Graham Good in his summing up of a near-contemporary of Enright’s, the liberal humanist literary critic Northrop Frye. Equally, though, Enright never loses sight of the social duty—internationalized by his poetics—to “contribute to the goal of making it possible for men and women to live free of fear, fetters, oppression and destitution” (Tallis 23). As the modern humanist philosopher Raymond Tallis, whose words these are, admits, such language risks reducing humanism to “a set of pious wishes and platitudes” (23). But like Tallis, Enright is also committed, through what could be called his liberal humanist realism, to the attempt to “see human life in all its strangeness, sorrow, and glory” (Tallis 23). Somewhat in the manner of the great Italian humanistic liberal philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century Benedetto Croce, Enright’s interventions in the ways that he found life—and especially female life—being organized in Japan (as well as other countries) after the end of World War II points to an idea of progress based on a dialectical estimation of what is beneficial “to man [sic] in his force and dignity as

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man,” while dispensing with the perfectionist aim of ‘tak[ing] from man his human faculty of erring and sinning” (Croce 151, 117). Enright’s early mature poetry offers many occasions for thinking about the human errors, along with the insights, of those like himself who are drawn irresistibly to intervene in a cultural space with which they are only beginning to be acquainted.

After MacArthur In his attempt to illustrate what he called Enright’s liberal imagination, the poet and critic Douglas Dunn turned to the poems Enright wrote out of his experience of living in the Middle East and Asia, especially Japan in the 1950s, since, as Dunn explained, “they are so good. They are close to the thing itself as the fright of the world was in the 1950s” (81), adding at the end of his chapter: They stand among the best poems of their time. […] [H]e perfects a style that is equal to dramatizing the emotional and intellectual experiences of witnessed poverty, hardship, authoritarian governments, unprincipled manoeuvres of one kind or another, and the dismal fates which people are prone to have imposed upon them. All this, too, is conducted by a personality that is attracted to life’s enjoyments. Perhaps his poetry is best read as testimony on how to stay sane in the world as it was, and as it is. “Things aren’t what they were, of course: they never were.” (87)

There is plenty of wise exactitude in Dunn’s evaluations of the poems with Japanese settings that Enright published in Bread Rather Than Blossoms (1956) and Some Men Are Brothers (1960). But as I hope to show in my reading of the earlier of these books, Dunn’s picture of a mentally stabilizing and pleasurable consolation in the face of immutable human corruption rather obscures the symbolically interventionist aspect of Enright’s poetics and thus its relation to wider Western liberal policy in Japan and elsewhere. In the years 1953 to 1956, when Enright worked as visiting professor at the private Kōnan University in Kobe, Japan was the recently defeated prosecutor of war in pursuit of its own brutal version of empire in Asia. Having been occupied by the United States until April 28, 1952, it was a stable independent country but one in which, as the historian Kenneth Henshall points out, some of the nationalist and feudalistic ideas of the imperial Meiji period were reasserting themselves in opposition to

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“American-style democracy and human rights” (164). These American reforms to Japanese society had been imposed by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, through what amounted to an entirely new constitution, which the Japanese government promulgated in November 1946. Along with “a long and comprehensive list of civil liberties” provided in the constitution, new laws and civil codes introduced by MacArthur had given workers the right to organize in protection of their working conditions and “the principle of legal equality between husband and wife was established” (Fukui 156, 157). Here and in other places, the SCAP constitution anticipated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the recentlyfounded United Nations on December 10, 1948, and which set out, in the interests of international peace, the rights and freedoms to which all the world’s individuals should be entitled—including the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law (Article 6) and equal rights during marriage (Article 16)—regardless of their race, sex, political opinion, property, and so on (Article 2). Among the earliest of MacArthur’s reforms to be abandoned was Japan’s demilitarization, due to the build-up of Cold War tensions from the Korean War onwards. By June 1954, the liberal objectives of the American Occupation had been reversed to the extent that workers’ strike actions could once again be punished as subversive activities and centralized control had returned to schools and the police. However, as Haruhiro Fukui, writing in volume six of The Cambridge History of Japan, makes clear, the country’s impoverished and numerically swollen post-war rural population benefitted directly and permanently from a project of land reform that had its origins in Japanese bureaucratic changes in the 1920s but that, under the direct influence of SCAP, led to the Owner-Farmer Establishment Special Measures Law of October 1945. The latter, given permanence in 1952 by the Agricultural Land Law, made it possible for government to redistribute all agricultural land owned by absentee landlords while capping rent charges, thereby helping to prevent what would otherwise have been enormous hardship and probably major social and political revolt in rural areas (see Fukui 171–74). No less significant was the SCAP’s policy of female emancipation and enfranchisement. After initially low levels of interest in it among the Japanese public, “Japanese women began to take advantage of their new legal status and rights to change not only their personal lives but increasingly to influence large issues of national and local politics as well. SCAP’s direct and indirect

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support of the profeminist reform no doubt won the Occupation many appreciative friends, if not immediately, then in the long run” (Fukui 170–71). Enright’s commitment to what he calls the “humane” Occupation (The World of Dew 20) and its “war-repudiating constitution” (55) emerges clearly, despite some criticisms of the project, in The World of Dew (1955) (hereafter Dew), his fascinatingly irascible but engaged (mainly prose) guide to the culture and society of Japan. His attitude to SCAP can be summed up by a few statements in the book’s first chapter: “The ensuing military occupation surely did more good than harm”; the new “ideas of democracy, liberty of choice and personal responsibility” brought to the country by the American victors were “largely welcome” (20, 21). These judgments emerge in the context of a wholesale consideration of how Japan might be improved, one that ranges from arguments about childrearing (“little boys should be treated with less sentimentality and slapped as often as seems advisable” [214]) to questions of national historical progress: “The Japanese have had Shintō, the Way of the Gods; and Bushidō, the Way of the Warrior; and Kōdō, the Way of the Emperor. What they might try now is the Way of the Human” (215). While Enright’s sometimes rhetorically inflated interventons in Japan’s cultural destiny mirror or even extend aspects of the MacArthuran project, he acknowledges that the proliferation of interpretations made possible by Westernled democratization had been destabilizing for the country. Writing in the voice of an educator as well as a cultural commentator, he suggests that Japanese students and other young people have every reason to feel bewildered when the country’s traditionally aggressive warrior instincts—seen by MacArthur as a threat to world peace—are now romantically and cynically praised by those inside and outside Japan attempting to make it the “main bulwark against Communism in the east” (22) and when their own teachers are “torn between schadenfreude and dismay” in their response to the resurgence of patriarchal authority and to the defeat of the “proAmerican Liberal Party” and the “American policy of democratization” precisely in those rural areas where such policy previously held sway (22). But passive acceptance of this “tragic irony” is not appropriate, Enright suggests (22). His argument is that, instead of “prais[ing] their country for the wrong things”—“traditions of insular culture, the valour and selfsacrifice of the warrior ideal, the convenient ability to exist in apparent peace at a little above starvation level” (21)—“while preparing to forget [the Japanese],” as “the great powers of the world” have recently done

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(23), the world should fix its attention on what “[t]he Japanese student knows,” namely that even though “the Americans soon pulled down the blind, the people have seen what was displayed in the shop window” (such as “western conceptions of moral equality, personal responsibility and social conscience”) “and they want some of it” (58). Yet however much belief Enright might have had in the Japanese people’s—or at least Japanese young people’s—MacArthuran commitment to forging a democratic res publica based on “the dignity of the individual” (Dew 57), he rarely presented his hopes in a straightforwardly optimistic way when he came to address them in his poetry. Japan emerges there, instead, as a space of cultural-political potentiality. Some of the potential is negative and regressive from his point of view, as is the case in “A Moment of Happiness,” one of a handful of his own poems that he placed within the pages of Dew and that also appeared in his poetry collection of the following year, Bread Rather Than Blossoms (hereafter Bread). “A Moment of Happiness” may reflect Enright’s awareness of the geographical character of Japan’s shifting cultural politics, for it seems to be set in one of the traditionally impoverished agricultural parts of Japan that benefitted from SCAP-sponsored land reform but whose liberal democratic allegiances could not be taken for granted. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that Bread is dedicated “To / those who farm the waste land” (Bread 5). The poem’s opening stanzas provide images of a wasted human landscape that is made to evoke both the country’s recent military defeats— “The sober banners lie in stacks, like fallen leaves”—and a historically sedimented system of inequality based on the people’s “convenient ability to exist in apparent peace at a little above starvation level,” as he mordantly put it in Dew: “The river-bed is dry. And dry the flesh / Of the long-dead cat” (Bread 93). A rural setting is strongly implied in these images and by the emphasis placed on the described scene’s relation to the Japanese ritual calendar. We are in “early autumn,” a period of “Waiting between two festivals”—a suspended, eviscerated time in which the only fan is provided by “the drained fur” and which will continue until “the frugal women, the little aunts bent double / With dry aches, shall suck the heated saké / From their brittle claws” (93). Read in one way, the poem’s anticipation of returning festivity—of the moment when “The feast will come. The candle flare / In the paper skull … / / plump fingers ring the cups” (Bread 93)—promotes the hope that what Enright, in Dew, quotes his student calling “communal co-operation” has emerged (Dew 57), possibly through Western prompting, to

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put an end to the centuries of inequality. This reading makes it possible to interpret the slightly shocking interjection by the poem’s non-Japanese speaker at the beginning of the poem’s final stanza—“This bareness pleases me” (93)—as a form of dialectical thinking that identifies transformative political potential in the scene of culturally specified hardship. The problem with this reading is that it ignores the ironic and deflationary effect of suddenly turning the scene into a self-consciously estheticized and somewhat perversely hedonic space. In any case, the dialectically hopeful reading has to do a lot of work to offset the strong implication in Enright’s suggestive description that the metonymic “plump fingers” are but one brief phase in an immutable cycle underpinned by hierarchical values—a cycle that always returns the lower-class person to her frugality: the paper skull that “will grow rosy / And warm” from festive candles will be cold again soon enough (93). It is only when we get to the poem’s tonally surprising and somewhat Brechtian topical ending that we can see how “[t]his bareness” refers not only to an oddly pleasurable impression of adversity in the cross-cultural encounter but also to the temporary absence of a particular type of homegrown Japanese cultural politics as the latter appears to the foreign commentator-poet: “And meanwhile no one talks of national rebirth / and no one talks of literary renaissances” (93). The poem’s original placing at the end of Dew makes it possible to appreciate the way these closing lines hover between contingent gratitude, sardonic criticism, and unease. That is because the keywords “national rebirth” and “literary renaissances” point toward Enright’s concern in the cultural guidebook with what he saw as the failure of Japanese poets to react to changing circumstances. He associates that failure with the writers’ general lack of interest in either society or personal individuality (see Dew 62) and with an obstinate identification of “‘serious’ art with the ‘aristocratic’ … even though the mass of the people (including the intellectuals) are living in a genteel poverty or worse” (75). Taking aim at an article by the Japanese poet Sumako Fukao (printed in the English Mainichi in 1954) suggesting that Japanese poetry had recently undergone a “poetic revolution” because poets had turned their attention from the “natural” imagery of the traditional tanka and haiku to representations of nuclear war (Dew 206), Enright, writing in the purposively down-to-earth British register of the liberal humanist Leavisite (or Orwellian) critic, argues that any genuine (and urgently needed) poetic revolution in the country would need to begin with an interest in “that great and important stretch of common experience that lies between the

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two extremes of cicada and bomb” (206). Japan’s poets “would be better occupied in pursuing their own humanity and in trying to say something significant both of and for secular humanity” (207). In other words, according to Enright, any claims Japanese writers and intellectuals might make about “literary renaissances” or “national rebirth” in the post-MacArthur era ought to be regarded as spurious and even dangerously continuous with the socially unequal imperial and martial cultures that he will later tell the reader should be superseded by the SCAPsponsored “Way of the Human.” If, in the festively-inclined world of “A Moment of Happiness,” nobody is talking about national rebirth and literary renaissance, that is because Enright, the non-Japanese observer, has purposely fashioned a highly rhetorical descriptive space in which Japan’s contemporary literary and other elite cultural discourses have been conspicuously excluded for the moment. The emergent message is that it is still now possible to fend off the claims of these apparently complacent and insular “national” discourses to be truthfully representing the existential present in the totalizing terms of either “nature” or atomic catastrophe, but soon it may not be possible. Liberal humanist values are under threat even in the (agricultural) places that need them most. It is into that space of emergency temporally disguised as a space of blessed relief from simplifying cultural sloganeering that Enright’s poetry quietly utters its putatively more inclusive and more reactive bid to vocalize a “stretch of common human experience.” In this case, that experience includes the marginalized rituals of poverty as well as the non-Japanese poet’s own morally equivocal spectating of part of that normalized temporal cycle. As will be seen, the strategy of pointed exclusion in the interests of specific types of inclusion is central to the liberal humanist symbolic intervention undertaken by Enright in Japan’s post-war cultural affairs. Where “A Moment of Happiness” releases its critique of Japanese society gradually in the manner of a subtle infusion, another poem included in both Dew and Bread, “Tea Ceremony,” brings a more explicit accusation against the Japanese cultural elite. It does so in a way that makes a bolder bid to wrest power symbolically from that group under the aegis of an experiential—that is, empirically-based—liberal humanist politics. Once again, the issue of poetic form is an important element in the political intervention. “Tea Ceremony” originally appeared at the end of a chapter of Dew in which Enright expressed his dissatisfaction with “that curious ‘mystique,’ that aura of sanctity, which has come to surround the tanka and haiku” (69), whose “closed system” he places alongside what he refers

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to as the “‘feudalism’ … in personal relations” of Japanese society as a whole (69). Its first stanza presents a series of two-part statements, with the second statement occurring partly or completely within a five-syllable or seven-syllable line in satirical accordance with the tanka or haiku forms. The poem is designed to satirize the Japanese cultural elite’s otherworldly dereliction of civic and social duty and what in Dew Enright calls “the confusion between religion (Buddhism, that is) and various form of art (poetry, painting, tea-ceremony, flower-arrangement and landscape gardening for instance) [which] has led to the obscuration of the first and the enfeeblement of the second” (Dew 69–70): “The garden is not a garden, it is an / expression of Zen”; “And this tea has nothing to do with thirst: / It says the unsayable” (15). The critical and ironic intention behind these and the other statements becomes clear, if it has not already, once we encounter the impassioned salvos that make up the second stanza: Beyond the bamboo fence are life-size people, Rooted in precious little, without benefit of philosophy, Who grow the rice, who deliver the goods, who Sometimes bear the unbearable. They to drink tea, without much ceremony. (Bread 15)

The sardonic anger underlying this stanza is apparent in the way the phrase “Rooted in precious little” pointedly answers the first stanza’s paraphrase of “aristocratic” Japanese indifference to materialist reality—“The trees are not rooted in earth, then: / they are rooted in Zen” (15)—and the empathetic word “unbearable” implies evidence of a suffering subjectbody. Here, then, is a voice to supplant the satirized one of privilege that has been defined by its apparently complacent preference for the “the unsayable” and what in Dew Enright calls Japanese poetry’s “bondage of artifice” (Dew 62) (in the poem’s terms, “ceremony”) over the common or garden slaking of thirst. Moreover, the accusatory range of the phrase “life-size people” increases when it is read together with Enright’s complaints about the “insufficiently concealed feeling” in the ever-popular haiku genre “that the little is per se superior to the big” (Dew 69).1 1  In Dew, Enright quotes the publisher of the magazine Haiku Kenkyu ̄ estimating the number of poets writing haiku at “easily four million” (69).

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The political implication of this cultural critique—that the “mystique”addled, hierarchical outlook of the Japanese cultured and ruling class makes it unfit to govern in the interests of the mass of working people—is shored up by other poems in the poetry collection. One called “Oriental Politics” begins, “The only enigma that I saw / Was the plump sayings of the politicians / Against the thin faces of the poor” (Bread 27). But to understand the extent of the symbolic intervention in Japanese affairs Enright was making with “Tea Ceremony,” we need to see how his empirically- minded criticism of the Japanese elite’s supposed “Oriental” obscuration of material reality exposes the Japanese polity in discursive terms to some deeply-rooted Western internationalist conceptions of administration and legislation in which the legitimacy of a government is seen as relying upon its effective “control over a universe of facts” (Mazower 426). In Mazower’s account of this supranational realist tradition in Western political thought, a clear continuity can be seen. Jeremy Bentham makes the utilitarian arguments, in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780 [first published in 1789]) and afterwards, that pain and pleasure are measurable and so ameliorable for the individual and for the policymaker whose ultimate goal should be “the common and equal utility of all nations” (quoted in Mazower 21). Auguste Comte’s 1822 Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the Reorganization of Society places statistical emphasis on “the study of laws which guided men [sic] in the aggregate” (Mazower 100) and espouses the “Saint-Simonian” view that “all nationalities should meet ‘under the direction of a homogenous speculative class’” (100). The United Nations founds the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945 and the World Health Organization the following year, for “[s]uch bodies still embody the old nineteenth-century idea … that policy is best left to the technical experts who know no nationality but that of humanity” (115). Although empathy and idiosyncrasy are typically given more value than homogeneity and quantifiability in Enright’s liberal humanist social vision, his ironic denunciation of Japanese “aristocratic” aesthetic indifference to the equal distribution of material “goods”— expressed in the volume’s title and its Japanese epigraph, “hana yori dango”: “dumplings before flowers” (Bread 5)—strongly implies the need to find utilitarian solutions to individual lives “in the aggregate.” As for the internationalist dimension of Enright’s symbolic political intervention with “Tea Ceremony,” it is implicit in its satirical references to “Zen” and other relatively localized cultural practices, but it develops

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very interestingly in the third and fourth stanzas. Here, the poet-­speaker turns to address some of the individuals who are “Rooted in precious little” and to consider some of those with even less at their disposal: So pour the small beer, Sumichan. And girls, permit yourselves a hiccup, the thunder Of humanity. The helpless alley is held by sleeping beggars under Their stirring beards. (Bread 15)

The “girls,” as anyone familiar with Japanese urban nightlife will know, are “bar-girls,” or “hostesses,” young women whose job it is to serve alcohol to male customers in a bar while keeping the latter entertained with small talk. In Dew, Enright reports that women in the 1950s bearing this title “may make more by sleeping with the customers after the bar has closed” (123). Their presence in the poem can be explained partly by the fact that as figures occupying “vulgar and undignified situations” (67) they would be necessarily be excluded from the symbolic space of the haiku or tanka. Subverting this “aristocratic, sequestered” (74) Japanese poetic space and thereby (re)claiming the political space which it metonymically upholds is precisely what Enright is up to here. There is a Japanese precedent for this subversion. In Dew, Enright approvingly informs us that the more clearly defined figure of the prostitute did appear in “senryu ̄, an unedifying, earthy and satirical little poem, identical in form with the haiku” that originated in the eighteenth century (66). But the bid to modify and speak for a recorporealized, vulgar and democratized version of the Japanese public sphere can be seen as internationalist in its design when we consider the supranational connotations in the phrase “thunder of humanity” and, especially, the directive role played in the poem by the ironically detached non-Japanese poet-speaker figure. Having poured scorn on the local ruling elite’s sublimating “philosophy,” that figure now extends his liberal permission by diktat to the beer-­girls to hiccup without restraint and join him in a newly inclusive and exclusive community of “We”: We too have our precedents. Like those who invented this ceremony, We drink to keep awake. What matter If we find ourselves beyond the pale, the pale bamboo. (Bread 15)

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These punning closing lines reinforce our sense of the extent to which Enright’s cultural and political intervention has been a matter of spatial reorganization and regrouping. In this symbolically emergent res publica, the high-culture pictorialism of poetry can play out in an urban hostess bar and in a way that conjoins the place of ritual with the pressing realism of the impoverished alley “held by / sleeping beggars,” as if the latter were part of a defending or invading military force in opposition to a diminished and displaced elite. The confident, indeed somewhat imperious, rhetoric coordinating these material relations—“They too”; “So pour”; “permit yourselves”; “We too”; “What matter / If”—points to the optimism of Enright’s uncompromisingly secularist interventionist project at this stage of his overseas career: the “Way of the Human” is there for the winning.

“Repressed Dreams of Impossible Feudal Beauties” For more sense of the context in which the command to pour alcohol and the permission to hiccup are being given, the reader can consult Chapters Seven to Nine of Dew. These constitute an astonishingly detailed amateur anthropology of the “rigid hierarchy” of “[t]he entertainment world of Japan” (Dew 115), one which reflects the contested post-MacArthuran humanitarian space into which the poet-critic had arrived by offering its own analyses and prescriptions in the manner of a would-be administrator of the territory. Enright’s attention in these pages hovers around a MacArthuran concern for gender equality, but other sorts of liberal humanist notes may also be detected. In the first part of the triptych, a chapter on geisha, Enright weighs both interventionist and more libertarian forms of liberalism in his outsider’s view of this particular practice. He ultimately sides with the libertarian: “It is not likely that the institution of geisha will yield before anything other than outside pressure [since] public opinion is still in its kindergarden stage of education in Japan. The question is obviously bound up with the ‘emancipation’ of women. … But I must confess to a lack of missionary spirit where geisha are concerned” (111, 113). In the second part, Enright analyzes the typical pay and experience of various classes of Japanese sex-worker before going on, in the third, to consider the more ambiguous “hostess” or “bar-girl.” While ironically praising the “domestic virtues” exhibited by all these groups of serving women, as well as the rather surprising lack of guilt and violence in this environment, Enright ends the three-part section by reflecting, in a

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more critical spirit, on the “wastage of human lives, of valuable human gifts” in the “entertainment” industry and on the materialist humanist principle that “[w]hen there is so much flesh available, then flesh will sell cheaply—unless there exists a strong sense of human dignity at all levels” (128, 131, 133). It is ostensibly this fragile sense of human dignity on which Enright concentrates in his group of seven poems, section IV of Bread, about Japanese women of the “entertainment world.” These poems make a significant contribution to what can be seen as Enright’s highly political decentering of patriarchal Japanese society—a sort of poetic regime change in broad sympathy with MacArthur’s reforms of the previous decade whereby the marginalized or taken-for-granted parts of society attain the foreground. The form of the poetry volume is highly amenable to Enright’s purposes in this regard because he can use the boundaries of sections within the sequence of the book to highlight particular types of marginalization and to create the utopian impression of an empathetically inclusive res publica expanding in opposition to a resurgence of formally closed Japanese systems. The last of the group, “Traffic Regulations,” meaningfully borders a poem in the next section called “The Fight against Illiteracy,” which satirizes the self-indulgence of Japanese literary “gentlemen” in the face of an “ancient” farming woman’s essential labor (Bread 63). Enright invites an amalgamation of the reader, the user of sex-workers/bar-girls, and the sex-worker/bar-girl herself to advance imaginatively upon the latter’s wasted potential, the blame for which is laid unequivocally at the door of male-dominated Japanese society: Soothingly, soothingly go in the grease mud, where there is lurking the big skid demon. Softly, into the bar slip softly, for there the corpses stand and lie Slowly, go with the maidens slowly, for they are human, Though they smile, whose only reason is to cry— For crippled husbands, useless virtues, ruined fathers, vain diplomas. Gently, when your dancing partners gently fall and fall asleep upon their feet. Yet you surely serve them, surely, since your whiskey breath and garlic rumours Mean for them a meal, who might not eat.

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Before that, the poem “Akiko San” risks sentimentality in its humanist conjuring of a counterfactual (after-)life of personal agency for the eponymous geisha—“a modest Jerusalem” where she shall be “without / Any patron with a taste to consult” and “She shall smile / When she wants and be sad if she likes”—while maintaining a focus on the current historical reality, where in abject self-defense “She tries to look vicious, but merely seems worried, / And pleads with the drunk like a long-lost sister” (Bread 58). Because of Enright’s inclusive emphasis, in Dew and his poems of the period, on female vulnerability, dignity, and potential, his work can be seen as an idiosyncratic anticipation of the gender-based humanitarian internationalism that would emerge later in the twentieth century. As the scholars of humanitarian aid and development Dorothea Hilhorst, Holly Porter, and Rachel Gordon recount in a recent issue of the journal Disasters, the United Nations first formally declared its intention to respond to women’s specific needs in 1975. Its “Women in Development” approach “accorded prominence to the issues of women and girls with the double aim of enabling women’s economic empowerment and tapping into the productive resources of women” (Hilhorst et  al. 4). But these scholars also report a concern from within the modern humanitarian field about how “the framing and representation of ‘women’ on the U.N. agenda may have the troubling effect of entrenching the very gender binaries that feminist scholarship sees as the root causes of injustice and violence” (4). Quoting from the work of Saba Mahmood, these authors relay the related warning that some gender-based humanitarian programs can be seen to express the “spurious logic through which Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the ‘liberator’ of indigenous women from patriarchal cultures” (qtd. in Hilhorst et al. 8). Although his language and even some of his assumptions differ from what we often find in modern post-colonialist and feminist approaches to development, Enright is alive to some of the potentially destabilizing contradictions within liberal humanitarianism. In Dew, he comments on the irony of “foreigners, with all the right and creditable ideas about social reform … busily encouraging the Japanese in all sorts of artistic and even social habits which are incompatible with that social reform” as a result of “their repressed dreams of impossible feudal beauties” (149). The example he provides is that of rich Americans employing geisha to serve at a business dinner that he had himself attended: “There were twelve of us and the cost came to £10 per head. Reading afterwards how a fifteen-­year-­ old girl had been sold into prostitution for £2 … it struck me that … we

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had each consumed part of the youth of five girls at that dinner” (150). For Enright the liberal humanist, the moral crime with which he had made himself complicit was that of failing to support Japan in its essential task: “Democracy—I could not define the word myself, but I am convinced that what Japan must somehow achieve is a greater respect for the individual as an individual” (149). In this way, Enright’s treatment of postWorld War Two Japan can be seen to belong to an emergent dialectical and self-critical branch of liberalism that includes the positions of such feminists as Susan Moller Okin, Linda C. McClain, and Linda M.G. Zerilli. Zerilli supports the key liberal concepts of liberalism—“rights, autonomy, equality, fairness and justice”—while striving to untether these concepts from a traditional liberal view of (male) individuals as “atomistic, unencumbered by obligations to others, and unaccountable to public scrutiny” (365). As we have seen, there is also a more libertarian side to Enright’s dealings with the culture of geisha, and at moments in his work the concern for the vulnerability of Japanese women comes close to reproducing the essentializing picking of “forbidden fruit” that he criticizes among some of the American exponents of human rights (Dew 150). In the geisha chapter of Dew, our guide announces, with unblinking pseudo-objectivity, that “the maiko, or ‘dancing girl’” (103) is “generally pretty … because young Japanese girls generally are pretty” (106). Elaborating Enright’s account of this figure, the speaker of the poem “Dancing Girl (Expense Account)” observes “a little painted face” (Bread 52) and allows the non-Japanese reader to revel in his intimate perceptions of a semi-comic foreign mysteriousness (“to say / Precisely how you work is harder than to chase / the strangling rhythms of your tune”) (52). The speaker then appears to congratulate himself in an indirect way on his gentlemanly forbearance before such a decorative exhibition of diminutive helplessness: It is as if the Venus de Milo should serve behind a bar, Making a virtue of her armlessness. So I confess That I remain yours respectfully, like a village tough Gaping at a foreign fashion magazine, I admire, but I do not know enough Even to be virtuously indignant. I can only hope not to slop My hot soup over you. Your obi wraps you round like a chocolate box. A chocolate box in a butcher's shop. (Bread 53)

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It would be unfair simply to dismiss these lines as sexual binary-reinforcing exoticism, although that is partly what they are. On one level, they can be admired for their realistic—and indeed sensitive—apprehension of the latent violence of a metonymic scene in which a society’s women exist primarily as carnal entertainment. But while the British male consciousness ordering the poem is part of the realism of the scene—for how else in 1956 could “we” be reading about such a scene without the mediation of that consciousness?—we certainly need not, as later readers, receive its cues unquestioningly. Unlike William Walsh and some of Enright’s other twentieth-century critics, we can, for instance, take a skeptical view of the self-deprecating way this poem’s foreign speaker tries to prove himself a neutral and mostly harmless spectator in this “butcher’s shop” through his incompetent execution of local Japanese practices. For the effortless consumption of (miso?) soup, the poem tells us, read the quotidian destruction of a woman’s human dignity for which Japanese men are essentially to blame. We can see how this combination of moral critique and self-exoneration is operating in parallel with a morally pluralist mode of liberalism (“but I do not know enough”). It helps to give the reader the libidinal license to enjoy the poem’s rhymed juxtaposition of aggressive masculine physicality (“slop / My hot soup over you,” “butcher’s shop”) and dainty child-like collocations and triplet-rhythms (“A chocolate box in a butcher’s shop”). In these turbulently muddied ethical waters, the unnamed maiko’s admired body appears to be the property of an international system of moral governance that is struggling to distinguish its cosmopolitan values from the local practices it condemns. These proprietorial effects are amplified through accumulation in the poetry volume—for instance, in the exposed furtiveness of the next poem in the sequence, “The Tourist and the Geisha”: Sixteen! Oh dear me, yes—you are young, Indeed too young. A thousand apologies. Drunken beast That I am to force wine on a minor … Sad embarrassed noises, immediate forgiveness. I drink the wine Myself (another rule infringed) and hold out the cup for you to fill (Always the gent, even if it makes me ill). Do ̄zo. Kirei— Kimono kirei, I mean to say. (One does not call a girl of sixteen beautiful to her face. White face, red eyes, the slightest of slightly benign expressions.) Dōzo. Very small cups, ne? Of course saké is not very strong, ne?

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The quasi-imperialistic character of these serial encounters comes into focus when they are read in the wider context of Western representations of geisha. In her cultural history of this phenomenon, Yoko Kawaguchi points out that in popular American novels, plays and films of the early 1950s depicting geisha—including the multiply-adapted novel The Teahouse of the August Moon (1951)—these women “stood for an idealised traditional Japan, suggesting that the Japanese were not such a threat to the west as long as they did not try to rival—or imitate—western nations” or, somewhat paradoxically, as long as they maintained their new status as “amenable, if childlike, students of the democratic way of life as well as of laissez-faire economics” (8, 232). While Enright never explicitly espouses unchecked market capitalism in his poems with Japanese settings, “Dancing Girl (Expense Account)” creates an association between the objectifying processes of economic liberalism and his own ambiguous spectatorship in the parenthetical part of the title and when he compares himself to “a village tough / Gaping at a foreign fashion magazine.” More generally, though, in the ambivalently hedonistic and reifying aspects of his reformist engagement with Japanese girls and women, he gives us powerfully enduring images through which to reflect on the tensions within liberal internationalism between rational humanitarianism and a more libidinal system of self-interest.2

Turning Away Despite the conspicuously self-interested and therefore potentially destabilizing nature of Western influence in the country, the case of post-­World War II Japan is, as Beate Jahn reminds us in her otherwise sobering account of liberal internationalism, still cited alongside that of Germany “in support of the notion that democracy can successfully be promoted by foreign actors” (78). Enright’s poetry and prose treatment of Japan stands near the beginning of that relatively self-confident seam of liberal humanist 2  For a considerably more extensive treatment of the tensions within liberalism, see Jahn. Developing her position on the Lockean suggestion that “the democratization of liberalism is only possible once the majority of the population has acquired a positive stake in upholding liberal institutions,” Jahn argues that, “far from being ‘illiberal,’ self-interest based on private property constitutes the core foundation of liberalism in general and a matter of survival for democratic liberal states in particular” (pp.  95, 97). For this reason, she argues, liberal humanitarian and other normative projects will inevitably be frustrated and the liberal world order is always doomed to fall apart again.

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history: his writing passionately attempts to show—and to some extent it succeeds in showing—that Japanese society had much to gain from a morally imperfect yet bracingly skeptical approach from the outside toward the country’s traditions. But if that narrative seam has lost much of its luster since the end of the liberal internationalist revival in the 1990s, it was already under considerable duress by the time Enright left Asia for good in 1970. In the poetry Enright wrote in the 1960s during his time as Jahore Professor of English at the University of Malaya in Singapore, the developing mood is one of a gradual shadowing-over of the earlier atmosphere of relative humanitarian optimism and self-confidence. For instance, in the wryly, melancholically allegorical “A Liberal Lost” from Enright’s 1965 collection The Old Adam, the poet self-accusingly addresses a “you” who, noticing a lizard about to kill a moth in more blithely interventionist times, was wont “To race to the scene, / Usefully or not” (Collected Poems 113). But now, “no longer / Turning away” (114) and instead reflecting that the predator “needs his rations” (114), the addressee seems to be paralyzed into disingenuous compliance with a localized tyranny and surveillance apparatus (“that dragon / Watching you with jaws open” [114]). The volume and Enright’s 1960s work as a whole leave little doubt that the cold-blooded reptile in its mythically aggrandized form stands for the increasingly totalitarian Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and his ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), with which Enright had already had one notably unsettling encounter.3 “[T]he thing that nettles you”—the dragon’s “Jeering at your liberal notions”—refers to the impotent condition of the would-be humanitarian interventionist teacher-poet confronted by the waning of democratic freedoms as a by-product of a specific sort of postcolonial movement (114). “A Liberal Lost” can be read as a mordantly ironic registering of the shift that had begun to occur at a global level in 1955 at the Asian-­African Conference at Bandung. As Mazower describes it, “delegates charged that the Universal Declaration was a neocolonial weapon that used the language of universality and individual rights to undermine the cultural integrity of nations. In the face of Western resistance, the General Assembly 3  For Enright’s own account of the anti-nationalist and anti-authoritarian intervention in Singaporean affairs, which he made in his inaugural lecture at the University of Malaya in Singapore on November 17, 1960, and the furious government response that followed it, see Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, pp. 124–42.

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ordered that the right of national self-determination be incorporated in the planning of the UN human rights covenant that was to succeed and give force to the Universal Declaration” (318). Enright’s later poetry of his period abroad is consonant with a world in which post-­World War II internationalist ideas of humanitarian moral governance increasingly lost ground to more narrowly materialist visions of nationalist self-determination (“He needs his rations”). The ideological way had therefore been prepared for a new “civilization of capital,” as Mazower calls the international economic order established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in response to the oil shocks and British sterling crisis of the 1970s (427). This was also an era in which the nineteenth-­ century Benthamite internationalist spirit that had produced MacArthur’s constitution in Japan and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being whittled away by America’s decision to use the veto in the UN Security Council—something it had previously criticized the USSR for doing—in its support for “the white settler regime in Rhodesia” and, in a different though no less controversial way, for Israel (270). Moral universalism, like more traditional types of imperial governance, had started to look “too expensive”—to quote from “Goodbye Empire,” a poem in Enright’s 1972 collection Daughters of Earth; the quietly jaded farewell is both to (British) Western governance in Singapore and to a historical moment in which the anti-authoritarian and anti-nationalist (as well as ostensibly anti-imperialist) views of a European poet and academic might have had some traction in the country: “It had to go / So many wounded feelings / And some killings” (Collected Poems 147). Whatever the precise relationship between the changing global ideological context and Enright’s poetics, by 1973 the poet had largely retreated from his earlier habit of challenging foreign patriarchal authoritarianism in the name of “liberal notions.” That was the year he published the powerfully autobiographical sequence The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood, which established the more inward-­looking, less cosmopolitan character of his later writing. In fact, the poetry he would write from the mid-1970s until his death in 2002 was mostly of a safely ironic, literary, and British sort. With some honorable exceptions, Enright’s hopeful universe of facts was shrinking into imaginative isolationism. Looking back to the high point of Enright’s engagé poetic cosmopolitanism in the 1950s from the perspective of the world in 2020—a world of resurgent anti-liberal nationalism and patriarchal leadership in Central

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Europe and elsewhere, democracy failing to take hold in invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and an increasingly bypassed United Nations—we may be struck by the implicit fragility of his appeals to unifying “human” values in his intermittently neo-imperialist dealings with the sovereign nation of Japan.4 We may also be more conscious than were Enright’s original readers of the hypocritical manner in which the subordinate and vulnerable position of women in this country—so often the focus of his emancipatory vision—sometimes becomes the material for a fetishizing and essentializing eroticism in his work. Yet there is an important sense in which Enright’s critical liberal humanism is built to withstand its own failures and inconsistencies. His most enduring poetry asks the reader to linger at the revealing border where enhanced engagement with the marginalized other turns into something “beyond the pale.” By dramatizing, even unwillingly, his own all-toohuman complicity with self-interested patriarchal power, he indicates, from an intimate perspective, what must always be overcome if the world’s sum of freedom and dignity is to be increased. The spatial and conversational forms of Enright’s poetry volumes may have been intended to enact a demystifying and decentering process of symbolic regime change in the anti-cosmopolitan top-down societies he worked in, but they also point, through a probing of the skeptical and potentially disengaged reader, to the endlessly reforming dialogue liberalism must have with itself if it is to speak with any authority about “the respect for the individual as an individual.” To put it another way, Enright’s writings continue to intervene in the privileged space of readers who may wonder what human rights are owed to those who currently have very few.

4  Most of this essay was written before the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. At the time of adding this footnote in the spring of 2020, it is not difficult to find examples of Western commentators and leaders—including UN Secretary- General António Guterres—appealing to 1948-style humanitarian principles of international cooperation and emphasizing the need to protect the human rights of people living in countries most vulnerable to the crisis. Some of these statements especially emphasize the moral obligation to protect women who are vulnerable to domestic abuse in the new internationally adopted condition of lockdown. But it is not clear how, if at all, these ideas will be put into practice. And the news of the ultranationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s having granted himself, through the Coronavirus (or Enabling) Act of March 30, the right to rule indefinitely currently seems as predictive of the medium-term future as anything else we have seen in the first few months of the year.

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Works Cited Bentham, Jeremy. Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Comte, Auguste. Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. Ed. H.S. Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Croce, Benedetto. Politics and Morals. Trans. Salvatore J. Castiglione. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1945. Dodsworth, Martin. “The Movement: Never and Always.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Ed. Peter Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 94–110. Dunn, Douglas. “‘The Thunder of Humanity’: D.J. Enright’s Liberal Imagination.” In Life by Other Means: Essays on D.J. Enright. Ed. Jacqueline Simms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Enright, D.J. Bread Rather Than Blossoms. London: Secker & Warburg, 1956. ———. Collected Poems 1948–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. ———. Some Men Are Brothers. London: Chatto and Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1960. ———. The World of Dew: Aspects of Living in Japan. London: Secker & Warburg, 1955. Fukui, Haruhiro. “Postwar Politics, 1945–1973.” In The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. Eds. John W. Hall, Marius B. Jansen, Madora Kanai, and Denis Twitchet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 154–213. Good, Graham. Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Heaney, Seamus. The 1986 T.S.  Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber, 1988. Henshall, Kenneth. A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower. New York: Palgrave, 1999. Hilhorst, Dorothea, Holly Porter, and Rachel Gordon. “Gender, Sexuality, and Violence in Humanitarian Crises,” Disasters, vol. 42, no. S1, 2018. https:// doi.org/10.1111/disa.12276 Jahn, Beate. Liberal Internationalism: Theory, History, Practice. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kawaguchi, Yoko. Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Mahmood, Saba. “Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror.” In Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities. Eds. Prina Steinberg, Hanna Herzog, and Ann Braude. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 193–216.

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Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Simms, Jacqueline, ed. Life by Other Means: Essays on D.J. Enright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Tallis, Raymond. The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS. Widworthy Barton Honiton, Devon, UK: Notting Hill Editions, 2016. Walsh, William. D.J.  Enright: Poet of Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Zerilli, Linda M.G. “Feminist Critiques of Liberalism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism. Ed. Steven Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 355–380.

PART IV

Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Discursive Cities and Transitory Worlds

CHAPTER 10

“No New Newark”: Rewriting Place through the Failed Form of Family Romance in Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson Iven L. Heister

In a 1983 article assessing Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound trilogy, Barbara Koenig Quart rightly observes that the novelist’s fiction, to that point, had focused on rebellious Jewish sons in conflict with fathers whose boundaries are inextricably tied to, and manifest, “the good Jewish virtues” (“Rapacity” 590). Throughout Zuckerman Bound, the lawgiving and enforcing function of fathers determines the boundaries of a place, and these fathers’ disappearance effaces the meaning of location. In The Ghost Writer, the first novel of Zuckerman Bound, this rebellion takes the form of young novelist Nathan Zuckerman’s desire to be associated no longer with his father or his home: Newark, New Jersey. While, in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is attempting to replace what I am calling a  social father with an aesthetic father, in 1983’s The Anatomy Lesson, he suspects the absence of social fathers has, somehow, effected the effacement of his

I. L. Heister (*) University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_10

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home and has undermined the structural authority of aesthetic fathers. The struggle of social and aesthetic fathers uncovers a truth about the entanglement of the social and the aesthetic, calling into question the aesthetics of place. The social father can be likened to the authority figure Sigmund Freud, in his classic essay “Family Romances,” says must be opposed for an “individual” to reach a “normal state,” to be “liberat[ed]” (Standard Edition 9: 237). For Zuckerman, this attempt to establish liberation appears in the pursuit of becoming an artist, a writer. He seeks an aesthetic father to replace his social father. This rejection of the social father is also a rejection of a place associated with him and an attempt to relocate in a place of seclusion, making the abandoned place, the secluded author’s former homeland, the subject of his art. Zuckerman seeks an aesthetic father in the novelist E.I. Lonoff, to become the reclusive writer’s “spiritual son” (Ghost 7). In Freud’s family romance, a child imagines the possibility of replacing his parents, in particular his father, with other parents “in some respects preferable” to his own, particularly another father (Standard Edition 9: 237–238). Another way to put it is that the child tries to write a new text, a new autobiography or origins. In Zuckerman’s case, the replacement father is an artist, but regardless of the replacement father’s station in life, there is an art to replacing the social father. Freud’s account of the family romance is, in effect, an aesthetic production on the part of the child who fictionalizes his paternal relation (Standard Edition 9: 239–240). It roots significant portions of aesthetic production (if not all) in the disappointment of family relations. In Freud’s configuration, Zuckerman’s attempt to replace his father with Lonoff is a disguised attempt to restore a previous idealization of his father, the aesthetic father being a reimagined social father. The child attempting to author a new text rewrites an Ur-text as a traumatic repetition. As I read it, the notion of the family romance is also attendant to a notion of traumatic knowledge and non-knowledge of the threat of castration that invests the social father’s law with coercive power. Considering the social father as the one who inscribes boundaries and a sense of place, the artist’s replacement of the social father with the aesthetic father, in effect, also, reclaims a place lost with the effaced social father, and this cycle can repeat, ad infinitum, throughout the course of a life.

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Some readers of Roth, such as his famous polemical, feminist reader Vivian Gornick, would claim that Roth stays in this repetitive cycle, a cycle that has misogynist implications. Gornick, in 2008, damningly wrote, “The misogyny in Roth’s work seemed less and less a function of character, and more and more an indication of the author’s own swamped being. In Portnoy[‘s Complaint] the reader could believe that the women are monstrous because Portnoy experiences them as monstrous. In all the books that followed over the next thirty years, the women are monstrous because for Philip Roth women are monstrous” (76). Of course, problematically, the family romance model of aesthetic production emphasizes the young boy’s creativity, the young boy having a feeling of being unloved by his parents but, unexplainably, a greater hostility towards, and desire to separate from, his father (Standard Edition 9: 237–238). In Freud’s thinking, there is an “asexual” version of this hostility towards the father and not towards the mother that, after attaining knowledge of sexual difference, is revised into a fantasy of becoming romantically involved with the mother and opposed to the father as a rival (Standard Edition 9: 239). In this sense, the dynamic of the family romance is often associated with a Freudianism defined by phallic sexuality, placing Freud and Freudian thinking in a category of misogynist thinking. As critic Debra Shostak claims, Roth’s early texts, most exemplified by Portnoy’s Complaint, exhibited a masculinized tension between sexual “desire and repression,” reflecting what Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis call the choice “to be or not to be the phallus, and to have it or not to have it” (116). Possessing the phallus, in Roth’s early work, took the form of an aesthetics of transgression against what I would refer to as the laws of the social father, laws that, as Shostak observes, “regulate the Jewish male body” (116). Gornick’s feminist critique sees Roth as never advancing from this tension. However, Shostak, subscribing to the notion of there being different Freudianisms, sees a shift in the structure of tension in Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater. It is a tension that can be found in the Freud who wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where, ShostakShostak, Debra emphasizes, the tension has shifted from desire and repression (or between possession of the phallus or succumbing to castration) and, as I additionally highlight, its attendant notion of trauma to a trauma of the tension between “the erotic and death drives.” Shostak sees this in Sabbath’s exploration of the title character’s confrontation with the “essentialism of the body” while “persistently ignor[ing] the fact of decay” (“Roth and Gender” 121).

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While the phallic sexuality of Portnoy presents a dialectic of having or not having the phallus, that duality is recast as a sub-polarity in a dialectic tension with the fact of the body as the limit. This shift can be seen twelve years before Sabbath in 1983s The Anatomy Lesson. This shift is seen in a reorientation of how Roth’s Newark is conceptualized: from a place structured by the limits of paternal law, or, as Shostak would explain, the regulation of the Jewish male body, to a place structured by the limits of the body on a trajectory toward an unimaginable death. This shift would grow in intensity as Roth grew closer to retirement and produced writing that often meditated on the breakdown of the body, famously writing in 2006’s Everyman, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre” (Everyman 156).

The Social Father’s Ur-Text Roth’s Zuckerman Bound dramatizes how a cycle of the family romance begins and breaks down. It shows how early attempts at aesthetic autonomy merely rewrite an Ur-text authored by the social father and how that text is disrupted, complicating its earlier power to write and repeat a version of Newark as supposedly fixed. The cycle begins in the first novel in the series, The Ghost Writer (1979), when the young writer from Newark, New Jersey, Nathan Zuckerman, is visiting the reclusive novelist he admires, E. I. Lonoff, in the novelist’s secluded farmhouse in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. Speaking with Lonoff, whom Zuckerman would like to make his “spiritual…moral” father, Zuckerman is embarrassed by his “unliterary origins” in Newark with his podiatrist father (Ghost 7, 3). He misses that there is a hidden literariness underlying the supposed unliterary appearance of Newark and its fathers. Zuckerman had experienced friction with his apparently unliterary father who had been “bewildered” (62)  by his son’s writing about American Jewish family life in Newark (fictionalizing “an old family feud” [51]), turning his son over to “his moral mentor,” Judge Leopold Wapter, to render a social judgment of Zuckerman’s aesthetic text (Ghost 7, original emphasis). Zuckerman’s father turns to “his moral mentor,” the text pointing to the status of Judge Wapter as someone whom Zuckerman’s father looked to as a social father replacing his own father, to reinforce the Ur-text, not aware of his son’s text as already caught in that cycle. Wapter invokes the specter of antiSemitism, asking, “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” (Ghost 66). This judgment of Zuckerman’s art bypasses aesthetics and interprets the work as socially

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irresponsible.1 This dynamic creates a mistaken impression that the work of the artist is obstructed by the judgment of the social father, that the artist reacting to the social father is producing a different account of place. Zuckerman seeks to replace social fathers, such as his biological father and Judge Wapter, with an aesthetic father, such as Lonoff. Zuckerman claims a father associated with a secluded place away from unliterary Newark and the father whose “moral mentor” judges Zuckerman’s art based on its social effect. In the company of the New York literary scene, Lonoff and his writing from the Berkshires is read as uncharacteristic of a Jewish writer (“the goyish wilderness” [3]). It would seem that choosing the aesthetic father would involve Zuckerman’s leaving New York to write in seclusion, much like his creator, Philip Roth, who famously moved from New York to a farmhouse in Connecticut in 1972, where he would continue to write until he retired after the publication of Nemesis in 2010.2 Roth once said Zuckerman “should have done” what he did (Reading 135).3 In a sense, it would seem that Roth followed the path of Lonoff in a way that Zuckerman did not, that he successfully replaced the social father with the aesthetic father, writing from a place posited as “goyish,” outside of the place bound by “good Jewish virtues.” The third novel in Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson (1983) reexamines the desire to replace the social father with an aesthetic father and, by implication, Newark as an inhabited place for the secluded place of the writer subjecting his old place to aesthetic treatment. It shows how the problem with aesthetic fathers is their reliance on social fathers. The Anatomy Lesson is set in 1973, just after, autobiographically, Roth had moved to his Connecticut farmhouse. The novel starts with the absence of social fathers and a parallel absence of place. In the novel that followed Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Zuckerman’s father dies and, in effect, ostracizes his son (calling him “Bastard” on his death bed [217])  When Gershom Scholem faced opposition from literary critics for judging Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) as “the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” he clarified that he was doing social criticism, not literary criticism” (57). Scholem’s comments originally appeared in Hebrew in Haaretz in May, 1969. 2  He announced retirement two years later in a Le Monde interview. 3  The tension between Roth and his creation, Zuckerman, continues to be a theme in later fictions and autobiographical writings. Famously, Roth’s “Novelist’s Autobiography,” The Facts (1988), opens with Roth writing to Zuckerman, and it ends with Zuckerman’s critique of the intervening autobiographical account. 1

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for recently publishing Carnovsky, a fabricated novel meant to evoke Roth’s own controversial Portnoy, the novel Debra Shostak points to as an exemplar of Roth’s phallic sexuality phase and its misogynist associations. (Both Portnoy and Carnovsky are released in 1969.) Anatomy Lesson considers the absence of the social father’s boundaries and taboos: the consequence of being “Unbound.” The novel follows a middle-aged Zuckerman in the wake of pursuing a compromised seclusion in New York, but the optimum surroundings (“enough silence even to satisfy Proust” [Anatomy 9]) he has cultivated for writing without distraction have been disrupted by his body. An undiagnosed back pain has him seeking various ineffectual treatments and unsatisfying maternal substitutes as well as intensely reflecting on his loss of social fathers and the place that they defined. Where, before, social fathers, such as Judge Wapter or Zuckerman’s own father, played the role of questioning his aesthetic production, which, actually, reinforced their Ur-text status, now he confronts his body as a limit and has to negotiate a new way to write. In the second chapter, “Gone,” the narrator, inconclusively implied to be Zuckerman,4 catalogues examples of loss that further illustrate the role of social fathers in shaping the boundaries of the place the writer desires to escape while treating that same place as his fictional subject. Zuckerman has lost his “health, his hair, and his subject” (Anatomy 39, my emphasis). He considers “his birthplace,” his “subject” as defined by social fathers, to be “gone,” along with “the people who’d been giants to him,” now “dead” (Anatomy 39). The people he mourns are inseparable from the lost place because of their role in defining the place: he aches for the loss of “pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos” and being one of their “sons boiling with temptations” (Anatomy 39–40). Without a sense of boundaries and taboos, the role of obedient, rebellious, or repentant son is rendered meaningless. There are “no loyalties, no rebellions, no capitulations, no clashes,” no “desire to escape” (Anatomy 40). This loss of social fathers and the place that they defined empties Zuckerman as a writer: “Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist”; “No longer a son,” he is also “no longer a writer” (Anatomy 4  The novel’s opening lines reappear, in a slightly variant form, towards the end of the novel, written by Zuckerman. If Roth is not positing that Zuckerman wrote the novel, he is at least suggesting Zuckerman wrote something that resembles Roth’s novel. From this point on, I will refer to the narrator as Zuckerman, acknowledging the ambivalence in that designation.

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40). Knowing that these social fathers are now gone and cannot define boundaries, he sees that he has lost the place he used to write about. He does not see the possibility of restoring that subject. “No new Newark was going to spring up again” for him, “not like the first one” (Anatomy 39). While Zuckerman Unbound culminates with the loss of the social father who defines boundaries through death of body, Anatomy Lesson examines the effects of this loss as well as the loss of the mother’s body rendered by the obstruction of Zuckerman’s aging body.

The Unwritten Maternal Part of the myth of the family romance is the certainty of the mother as a point of origin: the mother’s body. The fictionalization the child engages in to invent and rewrite his father seems to bypass the maternal. Freud notes how the young boy growing alienated from his parents develops increasing hostility to the father as he learns about sexual difference. Due to the logistics of conception and birth, paternity can be doubted, but maternity is “something unalterable” (Standard Edition 9: 239). The father, as a concept, becomes more abstract, but the maternal comes to stand in for a mistaken certainty, a certainty that has a stable relationship to language. In the writing of the social father’s Ur-text is a limited rendering of the maternal as static while the father is protean and dynamic. The disappearance of the social fathers makes the maternal, once again, permeable and resistant to representation in language. In Zuckerman’s formulation, the disappearance of the social fathers corresponds with a disappearance of the mother and his sense of home: “Without a father and a mother and a homeland” (Anatomy 40). He evaluates the situation in terms of the boy who has once again a conception of parents without a sense of sexual difference. The breakdown of the family romance, however, forces a different conception of the maternal that is not structured by the law of the social father, reducing or effacing the boundary that had separated him from her and that coincides with his undiagnosed pain that makes his body an obstruction to writing. He experiences a disorienting closeness to the maternal that will, eventually, point to an understanding of trauma coincident with Freud’s revision of the concept that bypasses the phallic sexuality of the functioning family romance. The Anatomy Lesson immediately casts into question the structure of the family romance by exposing the frayed ends of substitution. The notion of substitution is crucial to the function of the family romance,

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where the child recreates the ideal parental unit and represses a desire for the certainty, the place, of the maternal body. The novel opens with a line that will be almost repeated in the last chapter (as written by Zuckerman): “When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do” (Anatomy 3).5 Zuckerman has found other women as substitutes for his mother, but there is a crack in the structure of the replacement. The corollary that the substitutes “must do” suggests that the replacement is incomplete. Their ability to seamlessly substitute for the mother’s body depends on the law of the social father. In the social father’s absence, the maternal is no longer able to be subsumed in language, and this fracture in the order of things parallels the status of place. The maternal that was certain in the Ur-text of the social father and was formative for Zuckerman’s approach to writing about Newark as similarly certain and static has, like the undiagnosed pain that obstructs his writing, become a different point resistant to representation in writing. As she is conceptualized within the structure of the social father’s law, written in his Ur-text, Zuckerman’s mother is gone, and her body has been physically buried. She died a year after his father, 1970, three years prior to the events of the novel. Zuckerman experiences a sense of loss at the “body” he “had learned to live on,” a body “now in a box underground” (Anatomy 65). Though death involves a literal inhabiting of a space of burial, there is a sense of spiritual dislocation that baffles the one who mourns. Zuckerman marvels at the loss of his mother’s body, and he thinks of the loss in terms of mysterious dislocation that happens in death: his “little mother, five feet two, had disappeared” into a  location that escapes comprehension and expression: “the enormity of death” (Anatomy 45, my emphasis). Zuckerman comically reflects on the contrast of the unnamable with the mundane, noting how “the biggest thing she’d ever entered before was L. Bamberger’s department store on Market Street in Newark” (Anatomy 45). Though her body has “disappeared,” Zuckerman experiences her as “Not gone; beyond gone”; close but linguistically alienated from him, “She murmured into his dreams, but no matter how hard he strained to hear, he could not understand” (Anatomy 45). These

5  The version that appears written by Zuckerman varies slightly: “WHEN HE IS SICK EVERY MAN NEEDS A MOTHER” (Anatomy, p. 270). In the version that appears in the opening of the novel, presumably written by Zuckerman, the emphasis is on want instead of need, and there is a possessive pronoun, personalizing the relation.

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visitations seem to suggest her return, but he cannot understand what her haunting presence says. This perception of bodily proximity is marked by an “inch” that “separated them” while, simultaneously, “nothing separated them” (Anatomy 45). Here we see the breakdown of the dynamics of the traditional family romance and the notion of maternal certainty it implies and how that certainty fixes a place like Newark. There is no law of the social father to separate Zuckerman and his mother. This proximity to the mother disrupts a sense of meaning thought crucial to writing and the sense of location that a sense of meaning rests upon. Zuckerman and his mother were now “indivisible—yet no message could make it through” (Anatomy 45). Zuckerman experiences a haunting, dreamed nearness but physical isolation. He traces his gradual separation from his mother’s body, even in life. He recognizes her as “A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice” (Anatomy 47). He conveys an increasingly symbolic relation to his mother: the breast being the point of oral contact and physical nourishment, the lap being a meaningful and comforting physical proximity, and the voice being an embodied source of spoken language that can be physically separate. The distance increases past Zuckerman’s field of vision, as she becomes an “invisible somebody…reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey” (Anatomy 47). In a sense, her voice on the phone both reinscribes the social father’s Ur-text, fixing the maternal body and the place of Newark for Zuckerman, but it also, formally, defies that structure, being spoken, oral, embodied. Like his undiagnosed pain making him all too aware of his body, this appearance and disappearance of Zuckerman’s mother resists the kind of writing a fixed sense of the maternal made possible as a precursor to an understanding of place. This appearance and disappearance and difficulty of categorizing the mother with the collapse of the family romance focuses Zuckerman on the phenomenon Freud observed in a child’s relation to his mother and how that observation recasts his conception of trauma. The chapter’s title, “Gone,” followed by repetitions and emphases on how Zuckerman’s mother is both “Not gone” and “beyond gone,” culminates in what he stumbles on as the unanswerable “cradle-question,” asking, reduced to the diction of a child, where “Mama had gone”(Anatomy 66). When Freud, renegotiating the concept of trauma outside of the confines of the family romance in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, observes a child playfully taking small objects and hiding them, he notes how the child strives to utter the German word, “fort,” for “gone” (Standard Edition 18: 14–15).

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What Freud observes removes trauma out of the realm of deferred or masked pleasure, the confines of the family romance. As Freud interprets the child’s game, it is a repetition of the unpleasant experience of his mother’s departure, not the pleasure implicit in the expectation of the mother’s return (Standard Edition 18: 15). Zuckerman is, in a sense, playing this game with his mother’s simultaneous presence and absence. She is “gone,” and she returns in his dreams and in his psychic life. In the life that he had before his father’s and mother’s deaths, the place of the mother was defined, associated with the stability of home and of Newark as a “subject” to write about. This stability was reinforced by the changing relationship he had with his mother, transitioning from the basic necessity of the maternal body as a source of nourishment to her seemingly disembodied voice on the phone reinforcing Zuckerman’s bond to the Newark he wrote about. There is a presence and absence effected within the framework of the family romance, dependent on the social father’s law idealized in the process of substitution and the corollary threat of castration: this threat repressed but effecting a separation of the child from the mother. It is a separation but also a fictionalization of the mother as a more substantial place of origin, indisputable. With the collapse of the social father’s law, the mother written by the child’s imagination is effaced and a notion of the maternal that is unwritten returns. Though the emergence of the unwritten maternal in Zuckerman’s psychic life begins his process of rearticulating an aesthetics of place, it is not until attempting to rewrite the law of the father that he better sees the social father’s Ur-text, revealing the aesthetic father to have a secret pact with the social father and necessitating a new writing based on the productive resistance of the unwritten maternal.

Failing to Rewrite the Social Father’s Law The collapse of the repetition of the family romance has revealed a different relation to the maternal that points to the possibility of a “new Newark” that emerges from a new aesthetics bypassing the idealization of the dead father. Seeming to preclude this possibility, Zuckerman attempts to resurrect an aesthetic father who has done him injury. The aesthetic father Zuckerman sought in his twenties in Lonoff reemerges as the literary critic Milton Appel. Appel was an early agent bestowing legitimacy on Zuckerman’s aesthetic project, praising his first story collection Higher Education in 1959 and writing that the book was ‘“fresh, authoritative,

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exact’” (Anatomy 68). However, Appel’s 1973 piece in “Inquiry, the Jewish cultural monthly,” eviscerates Zuckerman’s career, as it had developed in the intervening years, describing his work as a “species of sub-­ literature for the newly ‘liberated’ middle class, for an ‘audience,’ as distinguished from serious readers” (Anatomy 69). Appel is attempting to establish a dividing point between culture consumers and “serious readers,” naming Zuckerman’s work as something middlebrow, without literary merit. It would seem that Appel’s form of critique as an aesthetic father stands on its own as distinct from a social critic like Judge Wapter who stands in for Zuckerman’s father, judging the social danger of Nathan Zuckerman’s writing. It would seem that Appel’s judgment, at first, is on the merits of Zuckerman’s success as an artist, or his ability to create the illusion of authoring his own origin, that his form of critique would not, as Judge Wapter’s, perform the role of paternal obstruction to aesthetic production because of its social effect, reinforcing the law of the social father and the family romance. Appel emerges in Zuckerman’s life as an aesthetic father, but his aesthetic judgment, like Wapter’s in Ghost Writer, has a social dimension, which lays bare the dependence of the aesthetic on the social. Like Wapter’s social critique, Appel uses legal language, announcing his intention to evaluate Zuckerman’s “case” (Anatomy 69). Zuckerman compares Appel’s article to an act of excessive violence that “made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical” (Anatomy 68). Referring to Shakespeare’s hubristic tragic hero’s decapitation, Zuckerman surmises, “A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb” (Anatomy 68). The praise that Appel had given Higher Education and its focus on suburban, American Jewish life, fourteen years later, has shriveled into literary belittlement, dismissing the same work as a “twisted” representation of American Jews, the product of a “willful vulgar imagination” (Anatomy 69). Appel’s use of “vulgar” is deployed as a social critique, implying an inaccurate representation of Jews in a manner comparable to Wapter’s more explicit charge of anti-Semitism. Where, before, Appel saw Zuckerman’s writing as perhaps not sufficiently a “work of art,” rather “more like social documentation,” now Appel claims Zuckerman is “indifferent to social accuracy” (Anatomy 69). Shifting from pure aesthetic judgment, Appel, engaging in social criticism, rules that Zuckerman, “Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite,” was “certainly no friend of the Jews” (Anatomy 69). Though Appel seems to stop short of Judge Wapter’s more pointed insinuation of anti-Semitism, it, in fact, goes

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further, declaring Zuckerman “no friend of the Jews.” By contrast, Wapter’s charge can be read as a warning to someone still part of the community, needing to make good. Stewing in his sense of defeat and loss, Zuckerman finds a purpose in the idea of confronting Appel, and this eventual, comical confrontation seems to yield knowledge of the aesthetic father’s pact with the social father. Zuckerman comes to see Appel as a stand-in for an approach to art that is wedded to social responsibility and a veneration for what has been constructed as “the Western tradition.” Over the phone, Zuckerman rages, sarcastically deriding Appel as “the Defender of the Faith! Western Civilization! The Great Tradition! The Serious Viewpoint!” (Anatomy 166). These designations point to an understanding of art that is wedded to the social in the form of implicit political projects. Part of Zuckerman’s motivation for confronting Appel is the critic’s appeal to Zuckerman to write an op-ed in support of Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War to reach the “kinds of people” Appel “can’t” (Anatomy 166). This designation echoes Appel’s aesthetic judgment, classifying Zuckerman as appealing to an “audience,” as opposed to “serious readers.” Zuckerman takes this designation to suggest his supposed affinity with people “like [him] who don’t like Jews,” thereby pointing to a social judgment, and he then calls back to Appel’s aesthetic judgment, dismissing Zuckerman’s readers as an “audience” (Anatomy 166). By attempting to resurrect the aesthetic father, as Freud’s family romance structure suggests, Zuckerman is attempting to rescue the ideal of the social father. His confrontation with Appel is an attempt to reestablish the ideal of the social father and its aesthetics of the mother and place. This idealization, as I discussed earlier, is an aesthetic project, a narrativization rescuing the image of the social father, but rather than elevating a new social father in the aesthetic father, Zuckerman resists the aesthetic father’s social critique and attempts to assume the position of the social father. This attempt is foiled by the limit of the body and knowledge of the body that also suggests a lack of knowledge about place.

Writing the Body Throughout the novel, Zuckerman has been entertaining the idea of quitting writing and returning to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to connect with his college friend and doctor Bobby and apply for medical school. He looks to transfer locations from New  York to Chicago to

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transition smoothly from not being able to write about the place he lost, Newark, to master the place an undiagnosed pain and the emergence of his mother, uncoded by the paternal law, has brought to his unescapable attention: the body. He looks to “escape…never-ending retrospection” as well as the “quarrels he’d provoked by drawing his last novel [Carnovsky] from the original quarrel” (Anatomy 180). Reminiscing on the role of Chicago in his earlier life, he muses that “Chicago had sprung him from Jewish New Jersey” (Anatomy 180). On the plane, his neighbor (whom he imagines to resemble his lover’s father) chats him up, and Zuckerman introduces himself as Milton Appel. Unlike the real Appel, Zuckerman’s performance as his aesthetic father is not the arbiter of “The Serious Viewpoint!” Instead, this version of Appel is a disreputable pornographer who caters to an “audience” (to borrow the real Appel’s differentiation of Zuckerman’s readers from “serious readers”) that is put off by Hugh Hefner’s “respectability” (Anatomy 173). He is ideologically motivated to pursue pornography that is unprofitable, with the sole aim of letting its audience fulfil sexual desire without the trappings of high culture “mak[ing] it legit” (Anatomy 182). He articulates a liberated sexuality that exists within the confines of normative institutions, such as heterosexual marriage: “Sex is changing in America—people are swinging, eating pussy, women are fucking more, married men suck cocks,” and his publication “reflects that” reality (Anatomy 182). Continuing to play the role of Appel for his limo driver, an austere Lutheran woman, he claims to be the father of a child named “Nathan,” suggesting that this activity is meant to rewrite himself as a son within a paternal order, to once again be a “novelist” (Anatomy 224, 40). About to take Bobby’s father to see the father’s recently deceased wife’s grave, Zuckerman downs Percodan with a mix of vodka and coffee (Anatomy 233). Zuckerman compares the burial places of his mother and Bobby’s mother; Zuckerman’s mother is buried in Florida, the “sunny South,” while Bobby’s mother is buried in Chicago, facing being “bur[ied]…anew” in upcoming winter snows (Anatomy 237). As the driver is making her way to Bobby’s house, Zuckerman, continuing to take more Percodan, enters an increasingly altered state (Anatomy 247). As he greets Bobby’s father, he lays aside the performance of Appel, the relationship with Bobby’s father forcing him to assume the role of son again (Anatomy 249). Before he can convince Bobby’s father to come to the car, the father has Zuckerman come into Bobby’s house to wait for his rebellious grandson. The father recalls his awareness of being on the precipice of losing his

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wife when she, normally so orderly as a housekeeper, allowed urine to come “out of her” and “[o]nto her living room rug,” letting the father know “it was over” (Anatomy 253). Her body becomes something spilling out of the confines of the maternal orderliness defined by paternal law. As they arrive at the cemetery, the father lets loose a torrent of criticisms of his deceased brother, his rebellious grandson, the wife Bobby divorced, and Bobby, his son, Zuckerman’s college friend (Anatomy 259–261). Most of all he complains about the loss of “feelings” his generation had (Anatomy 261, original emphasis). This critique of his grandson’s feelings leads to a eugenic argument, questioning the grandson’s paternity. It is as if the father is reversing the son’s fantasy in Freud’s family romance, preserving a vision of his son, Bobby, as having “all that brilliance locked in his genes!” (Anatomy 261). The father says he will “kill that little bastard,” triggering Zuckerman’s memory of his father calling him “Bastard” (Anatomy 261, Unbound 217). Zuckerman enacts physical violence, “pounc[ing] upon the old man’s neck” (Anatomy 261). He has come to see Bobby’s father as the personification of the social father, calling him “Forbidder!” and announcing his intention to “murder” the social father (Anatomy 263). After being stopped by the driver whom the father called for help, Zuckerman wakes up as a patient in the hospital having seriously injured his jaw (Anatomy 263–264). His jaw injured, Bobby, now his doctor, warns him to avoid speaking, encouraging Zuckerman to write down his diagnosis from previous practitioners. He is asking Zuckerman to write his body (Anatomy 266). Writing becomes a matter of practical need, articulating to the person now treating him the diagnostic location of his body. Not having a diagnosis for that pain, he writes: “NONE” (Anatomy 267). After this communication with Bobby, Zuckerman writes: “WHEN HE IS SICK EVERY MAN NEEDS A MOTHER,” a line that resembles The Anatomy Lesson’s first line: “When he is sick, every man wants his mother” (Anatomy 270, 3). This final attempt to rewrite the aesthetic father and the Ur- text of the social father underlying the aesthetic father’s replacement of the social father leads to a bodily confrontation with a friend’s father. This confrontation lands Zuckerman in a subordinate position in relation to the mastery of medicine he was attempting to accomplish as an escape from his previous attempts to replace his father. In this position, Zuckerman is forced to write to communicate and to produce writing

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about something that has been resistant to diagnosis. This failed writing leads to his first steps to writing a novel. Rather than once again producing writing that re-writes the social father’s Ur-text, he has begun a writing toward an object, a location, that resists representation. The struggles between fathers and sons in Philip Roth’s work reached a crucial turning point with the completion of the Zuckerman Bound trilogy in 1983. This turning point helped to redefine how Roth would write about place: in his case, often Newark, New Jersey, his hometown. The old Newark was defined and shaped by paternal prohibitions that also shaped how sons conceived of their mothers. This dynamic of paternal prohibitions and definitions of place and the maternal are aesthetic productions constitutive of a repeated pattern of male children attempting to replace their fathers and thereby preserve idealistic parental units, as theorized in Freud’s “Family Romances.” At one point, Zuckerman laments that there will be “No new Newark,” suggesting that his capacity for repeating this pattern has been compromised. This repeated pattern that has been disrupted is the problem Vivian Gornick sees permeating Roth’s oeuvre, mainly the construction of women according to the idealization of the father’s law, and this affects his rendering of place. Roth scholar Debra Schostak, on the other hand, sees a shift in the novelist’s oeuvre fully formed in his 1995 Sabbath’s Theater, and her reading sees this shift as a turn from a narratology of phallic sexuality to a narrative concern for inter-­ subjective and intra-subjective relations obstructed by the “essentialism of the body” and the “fact of decay,” which she sees as more commensurate with the Freud of the death drive. I highlight that Shostak’s argument implies a shift in definitions of trauma in Freud’s work, and that that shift she sees in 1995 is fully present in 1983  in the conclusion of the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, The Anatomy Lesson. Crucial to Freud’s redefined trauma theory is the removal of repetition from the realm of pleasure seeking, and, as Shostak sees in Sabbath, Anatomy Lesson ends with a renewed ability to write about place that is focused on the body and on decay’s resistance to representation, rather than on an idealized notion of the father’s law and the maternal that aesthetic defines. There is still “No new Newark,” but there is a different Newark, which takes shape in the failure to represent the body, nevertheless to write.

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Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 7–66. ———. “Family Romances.” 1909. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 9. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1959. 235–241. Gornick, Vivian. “Radiant Poison: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and the End of the Jew as Metaphor.” Harper’s Magazine Sep. 2008: 69–76. Roth, Philip. The Anatomy Lesson. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1996. ———. Everyman. 2006. New York: Vintage, 2007a. ———. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New  York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988. ———. Reading Myself and Others. Vintage, 2001. ———. The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman Bound: 1979–1985. New York: Library of America, 2007b. 1–116. ———. Zuckerman Unbound. 1981. New York: Vintage, 1995. Scholem, Gershom. “Portnoy’s Complaint.” 1969. Trans. E.E.  Siskin. Central Conference of American Rabbis Journal, June 1970, 56–58. Shostak, Debra. “Roth and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 111–126. Quart, Barbara Koenig. “The Rapacity of One Nearly Burned Alive.” Massachusetts Review, vol. 24, no. 3, 1983: 590–608.

CHAPTER 11

The Invisible City of the Creole Caribbean Takes Shape: A Discourse Between Italo Calvino and Édouard Glissant Allyson Ferrante

What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands—. —Édouard Glissant (Caribbean Discourse 139)

In his well-known collection of essays Caribbean Discourse, Édouard Glissant explores the dialectical relationship between how the West both recognizes and refuses the Caribbean, and consequently how the Caribbean recognizes and refuses itself. He argues that the region has been the victim of History, which cannot account for or validate the nature of its

A. Ferrante (*) Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_11

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multiplicity, or in other words its shared reality of creolization.1 For example, in 2012 Jamaica celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence and the New York Times published a short reflection by Carolyn Cooper titled “Who is Jamaica?” The piece calls for a reconsideration of the national motto, “out of many, one people, “asserting that even fifty years after breaking free from colonial status, Jamaica still struggles with recognizing and celebrating itself as it is. Cooper contends that the motto maintains a homogenizing myth of multicultural assimilation that excuses the preference for white and mixed-race Jamaican representation and the continued rejection of the African heritage of ninety percent of the population. Consider also Patricia Mohammed’s 2009 article responding to the vandalism of one of Trinidad’s Hindu mandirs or temples, in which she argues that, based on their religious and ethnic difference, Trinidadians of South Asian descent are continually excluded from laying claim to the Creole national project. Both scholars note their societies’ contractions and contradictions in clinging to limited visions of their culture and identity. These conceptions of nationality deny the contributions of a majority of their people while celebrating a theoretical multiculturalism. As Glissant explains, Europe’s competing colonization divided a region by way of race, color, language, class, and nationality, whose inhabitants nevertheless share unrecorded and unarticulated experiences, “making strangers out of people who are not” (5). Adopting the Western perspective of a single, transparent, universal system to identify and classify the world, Caribbean spaces such as Glissant’s native Martinique, Cooper’s Jamaica, and Mohammed’s Trinidad reduce themselves to fit into an ideal system that 1  Glissant distinguishes between the hypervisibility of the West’s identified [H]istory and the invisibility of the Caribbean’s histories that are excluded by imperial systems of identification claiming a single, universal system to classify the world: “At this stage, History is written with a capital H. It is a totality that excludes other histories that do not fit into that of the West” (p. 75).Glissant defines creolization as a cross-cultural process that the West has always tried to deny or disguise because it negates the unnatural system of categories intending to separate and divide peoples, and prioritizes the natural coming together of composite peoples. Unable to be categorized and therefore recognizable, but not known, creolization cannot be frozen and maintained by a single example to qualify all: “creolization is the unceasing process of transformation” (p.  142). I would add that Caribbean creolization confirms a Caribbean identity that extends beyond racial distinctions and marks the experience of living and participating in the local Caribbean cultures and histories, which are a composite of African, Asian, Arab, Jewish, South American, Amerindian, and European. Therefore, it is inclusive of all Caribbean people who identify with the region by way of their experience, regardless of their ethnicity, race, religion, or lineage.

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can account for neither their Creole difference nor their Caribbean reality.2 The practice of clinging to a colonial system of identification that sought to fragment and demean Caribbean creolization not only perpetuates colonial white supremacy, but also a foreign ontology that reduces and demeans the Creole self. When it comes to representations of Caribbean national and cultural identity in accordance with the West’s classifications of History, “[p]ieces of the puzzle are still missing” (Glissant 116). As evidenced by this essay’s epigraph, even if it goes unnamed, suppressed, and ignored, the commonality of Caribbean experience endures against claims that the region has no history and no collective identity of its own. The “sea that exists within us” reveals a series of relationships connecting Caribbean people across Western distinctions as they are recorded by History, shaping the invisible force that is Glissant’s fragile but persistent “Caribbean nation” (235). But how can one make these hidden, twisted, and often denied relationships that cross race, religion, and nationality visible? Glissant argues that in crafting a new discourse, a new way of seeing, and in validating the Caribbean’s endless forms of self-­ expression, those silenced voices and nameless entities will be included in the recognition of a Caribbean Creole collective, unbound by History and fully reflective of its beautifully and uniquely composite people. This essay seeks to discern more clearly Glissant’s proposed tactics for breaking free from the trap of colonial perspectives by connecting his essays with a seemingly unrelated Italian novel, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), and by demonstrating how these tactics play out in Caribbean novels by Shani Mootoo, Jamaica Kincaid, and Patricia Powell. Calvino’s oft-named postmodern text illustrates that there are multiple histories and truths that exist beyond the grasp or purview of epistemological empire or Glissant’s identified History. This essay will argue that the Historically unrecorded and unclassifiable community of the Creole Caribbean is such an invisible city. Without any Historical ties to the Caribbean, besides the author’s 1923 birth in Cuba, Calvino’s novel echoes many of the same conditions of multiplicity, ideological entrapment, and imaginative escape the Caribbean experiences. When Calvino’s birthplace is considered as more than mere accident, however, his historical Caribbeanness becomes clearer: that which is felt 2  Glissant credits Hegel with this demand for universal transparency and, therefore, with the Caribbean’s subordinance to the West and exclusion from History (pp. 64, 75).

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but has yet to be named by any Western system of knowledge. Calvino chose Santiago as his code name when he fought in the resistance against Italian fascism (honoring the city of Santiago de las Vega, where he was born). He chose to marry his wife Esther in Cuba in 1964, and while there, he not only met Che Guevara but also accepted an invitation to serve on the jury for the Casa de las Américas prize, an award recognizing up-and-coming authors from Latin America. Upon his return to Italy, he founded the Associazione Nazionale di Amicizia Italia-Cuba (National Association for Italian-Cuban Friendship). While Calvino never published anything about his relationship to Cuba, nor anything about life with his wife or daughter, Cuba is proudly demonstrative of its historical relationship to him. After his 1985 death, Cuba erected a tombstone in Santiago de Las Vegas in his honor and with his daughter Giovanna’s permission. In a nearby municipal museum, there is a “Sala Calvino” (Calvino room) dedicated to the writer, who is identified as having been not only Italian, but also Cuban. In 2000, Cuban musicologist, poet, and filmmaker Helio Orovio, also born in Santiago de Las Vegas, published Las dos mitades de Calvino (The Two Halves of Calvino), suggesting an Italian half and a Cuban half to the postmodern writer. Being open to Calvino’s Caribbeanness requires the same will as recognizing how the Caribbean is one region, regardless of colonial claims and linguistic divisions. Polo’s imaginative tales make visible man’s relationships to a world unmanufactured by the fantasy of knowledge as possession and thereby point to an escape from Glissant’s identified “web of nothingness” that has ensnared places like Martinique (2). Invisible Cities illuminates how, through the Caribbean’s creation of a discourse that reflects its peoples’ Creole nature, the region can free itself from the tangle of colonial identifications. In articulating its experience of reality in a commonly shared vision, the Caribbean can then independently recognize its own unity and legitimacy by way of its people defining themselves with regard to their experiences, re-housed in inclusive forms of their own making. In his essay “The Quarrel with History,” published in the 1989 text Caribbean Discourse, Glissant distinguishes between Hegelian assumptions about“[H]istory”—that it assumes a total and incontrovertible record of all of human experience and “histories”—and the many experiences of humanity silenced, reduced, or ignored by History. In response to Edward Baugh’s “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” Glissant argues that the accumulation of Caribbean culture does not coincide with its given (colonial) languages by which to recognize its

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own relationships to its Caribbean surroundings, its nature. History thus will suffer from “a serious epistemological deficiency: it will not know how to make the link” between nature and culture (61). European languages reflect and confirm European cultures, which depend upon European experiences and perspectives, often silencing Caribbean differences. When an individual is without language for an experience she knows to be real and integral to her identity, she is alienated by her own culture. Her experience is made invalid in its lack of linguistic representation and cultural recognition; thus, part of her identity, her perspective, and her history is discounted. The result can only be a cultural melancholia, a constant longing to be made whole. Since the Caribbean can never become European, that feeling of inadequacy, of emptiness can never be filled. Glissant suggests that the solution for Caribbean communities is a “creative approach” (61). Demanding the participation of both the author and the reader, literature is a creative approach to recording histories that both shapes and is shaped by human experience. It can withstand multiple, even contradictory narrations and endless interpretations, demonstrating how multiple histories are more accurate than a singular and totalizing History. Additionally, literature requires readers to use their imaginations and senses to envision the worlds reflected in the text and those beyond it. Glissant argues for the responsibility and power of the writer to record Caribbean histories: “[b]ecause the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed non-history, the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology; that is, to reveal the creative energy of a dialectic reestablished between nature and culture in the Caribbean” (65). Literature can serve as a starting ground to return light to what History has eclipsed and give expression to an otherwise silenced Creole Caribbean reality as whole, legitimate, and multiple. Literature makes a community out of readers, drawing them into intimate relationships with characters and helping develop empathy with characters. Imagined relationships render visible both existing and potential relationships beyond the literary. Through literature, Creole Caribbean communities become visible and readers are trained to recognize them beyond the text. Open to the unrecorded experiences and sensations of Caribbean community, the literary works of Italo Calvino, Édouard Glissant, Patricia Powell, Shani Mootoo, and Jamaica Kincaid emerge as connected by invisible bridges across imperial designations of language and national possession, making up an invisible Creole city of the Caribbean.

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Invisible Cities explores the limits of overarching systems of knowledge and imperialism through the fictionalized historical conversations between the emperor of the Tartars, Kublai Khan, and his prized emissary, Marco Polo. In an effort to possess his expanding dominion more fully by way of categorical knowledge, the Khan relies on Polo’s reports on newly acquired cities.3 What the Venetian explorer returns with instead are fantastical tales of cities in trees, cities in the sky, travelling cities, and all of them without the firmaments of mapped coordinates, populations, or measurements from any imperial system of order. However, the emperor continues listening to the explorer’s stories because of their imaginative qualities, which reveal more evanescent truths about the plurality of human experience than any chart or system could. Through the literary discourse of storytelling, Kublai Khan learns to recognize what was previously invisible to him: that the promise of total imperial possession is an illusion, that systematized structures of identification are never stable, and that ultimately the only stability is the continuous change of identity in an endless series of relationships. Despite the many divisive claims that Martinique is isolated from the rest of the non-Francophone Caribbean and nothing more than a French department, its relation to a Caribbean collective remains. Like so many postcolonial spaces, the Caribbean continues to struggle in relying upon its own sensations to confirm its existence and its own inclusive language to communicate its experiences. The region cannot trust the languages of others(especially its colonizers),which serve to confirm only others’ sensations and existence. Instead of relying on colonialism’s monuments, such as the plantation, slavery, and economic dependence, Caribbean people must look to those monuments that can withstand the weight of empire and learn to recognize the non-visible: “Our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on its underside. It is all history” (Glissant 11). In order to envision Martinique’s identity as whole and apart from France’s colonial and Historical determination, Glissant relies on visceral memories of the natural world made accessible through the imagination to provide a link to a Caribbean collective beyond History. 3  As Carter contends, cities are possibly “the largest and most social of human constructs,” and they “seem to comprehend the whole of human experience in encyclopedic fashion” (web). Consciously designed and ordered for human travelling and dominion over space, cities enter into a dialectic with humanity, shaped by their inhabitants and in turn shaping them.

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Towards the end of the introduction to Caribbean Discourse, he describes Martinique’s landscape as “what you can oppose to the facts of history,” distinguishing between French colonization’s attempts to know and define the land and what has remained unknown and thus intact (10). In the North, a “knotted mass of somber greens” defies History in its protection of maroon communities, those Africans who escaped Caribbean slavery to create their own independent societies as indigenous Creole cultures, and has never been penetrated by the marked conquest of roads (10).With its “dense network of ferns,” “primordial mud,” roots and acoma trees that “disappear from view, “nature serves to harbor the Historically unrecorded and thus unreduced histories of Martinique’s diversity of slighted people, “coolies and blacks, all Martinicans” (10).4 In the center of the island, the mountains of the North become hills textured with cane fields and dotted with the crumbling relics of imperial rule: “Ruins of factories lurk there as a witness to the old order of the plantations” (10). Glissant’s description of what was once the center of Martinique’s colonial life speaks directly to Calvino’s opening to Invisible Cities. The novel begins where Glissant’s introduction ends, recognizing the ruins of empire: “It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless formless ruin” (Calvino 5). Despite their visual appearance of eternal order and domination, imperial structures like Kublai Khan’s military forts and Martinique’s Château Dubuc eventually deteriorate, revealing their temporality. The former sugar plantation great house, Château Dubuc, is now part of a nature reserve managed by the Regional Natural Park, demonstrating nature’s reclamation of Martinique from colonialism. One’s eyes must readjust to see what lingers in the darkness, what empire could not blot out: the common experiences and will to survive of oppressed peoples of the Caribbean. Both Calvino’s and Glissant’s texts argue that all empires fall inevitably and, conversely, inspire a kind of hope that, despite imperial claims to 4  “Acoma” is the Creole word for a tree whose hard wood is ideal for construction. In French the name is bois de fer, or ironwood (Rézeau 67). I find Glissant’s inclusion of this particular tree named in Creole to be a significant argument that Martinique’s landscape has outmatched the might of France’s colonization to protect the island’s histories of resistance, and also that a Caribbean construction theoretically made from this wood has withstood and outlived French imperial constructions. “Coolie” is a pejorative term for the Asian (mainly Indian and Chinese) indentured servants who came to work the plantations in the Caribbean and replace the free labor after the abolition of slavery.

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History, what remains behind escapes its possession and subsequent destruction. Glissant ends his tour of Martinique’s landscape along the shores of the South with the coconut trees once climbed by the island’s people reaching out toward Toussaint Louverture’s resistance in Haiti, signifying their invisible relation to an extended community across the sea.5 Now, he argues, Martinicans stop at the beach and hesitate, uncertain if they can still identify with a Caribbean collective instead of only France and if they even have claim to the beach at all, littered with legions of foreign tourists. Glissant suggests that, to locate Martinique’s histories, its people must look beneath the hypervisibility of colonial History to find them preserved in their entirety. Likewise, Invisible Cities points to a non-­ visible method of engaging with what outlives the claims of empire: “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing” (6). Despite Polo’s not speaking the language of the Tartars and the emperor always speculating as to the veracity of his tales, the Venetian explorer is the Khan’s favorite emissary because his stories provide access to what remains after the fall of empire. Calvino aligns the reader with Kublai Khan in revealing how the quest to claim knowledge is a form of imperial possession: “In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them” (Calvino 5, emphasis mine). Like Glissant’s noted ruins of sugar plantations on Martinique, Calvino describes a feeling of emptiness that evinces the false promise of possession by way of knowledge: “a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed” (Calvino 5). Despite the supposed majesty and irrefutable fact-making of imperial definition and classification, when the system reveals its seams, its monuments falter and crumble to dust. Thus, both Glissant and Calvino speak to how highly visible identifications of imperialism, such as racial distinctions and social hierarchies, are unstable and fleeting. Classification systems grow outdated, but the 5  Once called the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” the colony of Haiti won its independence from France in 1804 after a bloody six-year war. It was then cut off from the world as it posed a threat to all other European colonies who feared that, if their slaves learned what happened in Haiti, they would unify across divided plantations, collectively revolt, and win. Martinique is today a territory of France, or a twenty-first-century colony.

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experiences and identities they sought to identify remain. In order to connect with what makes up a people’s identity and culture, one must be willing to re-appropriate the power of the imagination to see things independent from any inherited system. In perceiving how things are related to each other and studying their connections, the unfiltered truth of their Creole collectivity is made visible. The Caribbean’s people and cultures are determined by multiple histories that can be traced in the relationships between them, like the will of Martinicans to stretch across the sea to a newly independent Haiti. The result is an invisible bridge, in their imaginations, that has withstood the weight of empire. From the myth of Antillia in the 700 s AD, the archipelago and coastal spaces that make up the region have wrestled against other people’s possessive definitions and borne the burden of History’s misidentifications.6 Caribbean Discourse begins with several anecdotes demonstrating how the French Antilles have suffered from false identifications, isolation, invalidation, and a crippling perception of inferiority, leading to their dead-end pursuit of mimicking former colonial rulers in an effort to attain a wholeness legitimized by the West. The West’s claim that History identifies every living experience is itself an imagined system. Glissant calls it “a highly functional fantasy,” designed to keep its own social hierarchy in place (64). Therefore, if History has no lexicon for Caribbean Creole reality, with its religious perspectives of Obeah and Vodou, its variety of races, its multiplicity of cultural origins and expressions, then that which is experienced in the Caribbean cannot legitimately exist (see Cobham). Caribbean people who abide by the boundaries put in place for them are caught in a labyrinth from which they cannot escape. Glissant refers to the anxiety generated by this clinging to colonial ideologies as “an inability to escape the present impasse,” a refusal to claim one’s own experience as real, thereby falling prey to the erasure of a people by way of classified illegitimacy and cultural assimilation (1).The system that classifies the Caribbean as illegitimate compared to Europe, however, is itself an imagined construction, a fantasy legitimized by empire but a fantasy nonetheless. More enduring than chains, colonial ideologies can better enslave Caribbean peoples into discounting the truths of their own experience and ignoring their own collectivity, so that they remain vulnerable to the 6  Antillia, said to be an uninhabited island in the Atlantic blessed with temperate rains, appeared on maps beginning in the Medieval period. After 1492, Antillia’s presence shrank and disappeared completely after 1587, becoming another invisible city.

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possession and fragmentation of the West. Glissant argues that the Francophone Caribbean has suffered from an inability to recognize itself apart from colonial classifications: “From the persistent myth of the paradise islands to the deceptive appearance of overseas departments, it seemed that the French West Indies were destined to be always in an unstable relationship with their own reality” (5). I propose that this Du Boisian double vision of “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” is experienced by all postcolonial Caribbean spaces regardless of their specific former colonizers (DuBois 2). In Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a group of children on Dominica witness the drowning of their classmate at the hands of the transnational Creole deity Mami Wata. Their shared experience fails to empower them as a community because they have been discouraged from identifying with each other by their colonial-minded parents who still count on the stability of colonial hierarchies of class and color to claim privilege. The children remain divided, “increasingly uncertain of the truth of their experience,” and go so far as to discredit what they have seen as if it never happened because it doesn’t correspond to what they have been taught in school: “If our schooling was successful, most of us would not have believed we had witnessed such a thing” (Kincaid 208, 49). Not only has a British colonial education taught Caribbean children to discredit their own experiences, but also those of their community. The father of protagonist Xuela instructs her not to trust “these people,” which she believes is the same demand all parents make to their children: “[t]hat ‘these people’ were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others— that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other” (Kincaid 48). This story illustrates the colonial oppression the Caribbean continues to suffer: the fragmentation of individuals, communities, and an entire region as a legacy of colonialism. Momentarily escaping the constructed system that separates them from each other, the children share in a discourse that recognizes their experiences as real: “It was only after we had left the immediate confines of our village and were out of the sight of our parents that we drew close to each other. We would talk” (Kincaid 48).Unfortunately, the children’s indoctrination is too successful: “they no longer believe what they saw with their own eyes, or in their own reality. … Everything about us is held in doubt and we the defeated define all that is unreal, all that is not human,

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all that is without love, all that is without mercy. Our experience cannot be interpreted by us; we do not know the truth of it” (37). In her reflection on internalized colonization, Xuela reveals a community that collectively suffers at the hands of colonialism in her repeated references to “we.” Xuela’s first-person account of her life persists in making connections between herself and others that refuse any superiority she might claim by way of race, class, or privilege.7 It is in this same way of grasping onto colonial privilege that the French departments of the Caribbean have become reliant upon France for their economy, their legitimacy, and their identity: “French Caribbean people are thus encouraged to deny themselves as a collectivity, in order to achieve an illusory individual equality” with their former colonial rulers (Glissant 7). But the colonial system is designed to keep Caribbean people inferior, so clinging to its classifications and methodologies will forever keep them disempowered and divided from each other. Additionally, failing to recognize the legitimacy of the Caribbean’s own leaders of independence keeps the region from being able to recognize its collective histories or legitimize itself without colonial determination: “Our drama (which is not tragedy) is that we have collectively denied or forgotten the hero who in our true history has taken unto himself the cause of our resistance: the maroon” (220).The maroons are never celebrated in colonial History because they defied European domination and successfully crafted their own communities of free men and women in accordance with the natural landscape. Glissant argues that, if the Caribbean were to create its own discourse by which to name its own experiences and claim its own legitimacy, it would free its people from the trap of History and enable them to see themselves as a collective who are empowered to name their own reality. The maroons, a living international community, must be celebrated as Caribbean heroes. To make Caribbean people recognizable to themselves as their own invisible city, “a reality so often hidden from view,” requires a renewed sensitivity to see the connections between people that mark a community (Glissant 2). Whether it has been misnamed, misidentified, or repressed, 7  Instead of falling prey to the trap of the would-be colonizer, Xuela elects to know the world, and thus herself, by way of her own experience of it without seeking to possess anyone or anything. Refusing a colonial system of possession altogether, she gains herself: “[t]he impulse to possess is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; I chose to possess myself” (p. 174).

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Caribbean reality indelibly impresses itself upon its people, shaping their experiences and perspectives. Despite continued denial by History, that reality cannot be undone. Glissant proposes that studying the discourse of marginalized communities, “those shadowy threads of meaning where their silence is voiced,” will bring to light the endless examples and multiple forms of those belonging to the Caribbean collective, reconnecting them with their community (2). Patricia Powell’s novel The Pagoda (1999) illustrates how an invisible Creole community exists and has always existed in the Caribbean, testing the veracity of recorded History. The novel opens with a Chinese immigrant to Jamaica and shopkeeper, Lowe (neé Lau A-Yin),writing a letter to his estranged daughter Elizabeth. It is Lowe’s hope that the construction of a pagoda, celebrating the five thousand Chinese people who immigrated to and made their homes in Jamaica, will be a tangible legacy he can leave to his daughter and grandchildren he has never met. When Lowe’s shop is mysteriously burned down with English former sea captain and shop owner Cecil inside it, the many secrets that have held Lowe’s life in place start to unravel. As it turns out, society’s identification of Lowe as a husband and father was actually a long and carefully crafted performance covering up much suffering, exclusion, and pain on the part of Lowe, Cecil, and Lowe’s wife, Miss Sylvie. The opening scenes describe the highly visible markers of Lowe’s protective marriage: “the faded portraits on the wall … Victoria, the old Queen … glinting enamel eyes of the Last Manchu emperor … wedding picture of Lowe and Miss Sylvie, his mustache then a black and shiny contraption” and pictures of “dead politicians, plantation owners, ministers” (Powell 7). Living under the false mustache he has donned for years, Lowe’s identity has been hidden to everyone, including himself. He looks at his well-decorated living room and begins writing a confession to his estranged daughter, sharing his undocumented experiences and truths: “[t]here isn’t a record of any of this. Of what I am in truth. No certificates. No registration.…Nothing was written down” (Powell 8). Everyone has something to hide (Lowe, his wife, and Cecil) and has successfully done so by playing upon people’s expectations of colonially designated privileges, such as race, gender, sexuality, and wealth. Once his convenience shop burns down, Lowe’s Creole belonging to a mostly black neighborhood is threatened. People return to the societal structures put in place by the plantation system, and the neighbors and customers Lowe thought accepted him as part of their Caribbean

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community begin to other him, chastising anyone who doesn’t recognize his colonial advantages as predatory: “She don’t see how the Chinaman take advantage of we. How the backra put them between we. All the hell we set at they tail, now they bringing in Coolie and Chinee” (Powell 15).8 Instead of relying upon their own experiences with Lowe, the villagers are quick to discount their experiences with him and instead believe the more visible designations of race and class, excluding Lowe from rightfully belonging anywhere after living in Jamaica for forty years. He worries for the safety and belonging of his mixed-race daughter Liz, “with no real family, no future, no guidance, no homeland, no country, no people, nothing” (Powell 108). Of course, Liz can claim all of these inheritances, but she can only access them once the veil of colonial legitimacy is lifted and Lowe begins to learn and explore who he really is by way of his experiential relations to people over his colonial identifications as “Chinee” merchant, husband to a “white” woman, and positional superiority, in the Englishman’s view, over local black people. The novel ends with Lowe’s finishing his letter to his daughter and inviting her to meet him in order to claim him and all of the unrecorded histories that are hers. The Chinese community center has been built, and he hopes Elizabeth and her children will join him at its opening ceremony. He built it for them, “so you all wouldn’t forget. So you all wouldn’t end up like me” now that he is “just being me for the first time in my whole entire life” (240). The Pagoda exposes how living by a colonial system’s identification of value, dependent upon the erasure and disregard of one’s own experienced history, offers only an illusion of security; it can all burn down, crumble away. Eventually what is left is an invisible community that has always been there. Like Glissant’s notion of History, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities illustrates the false claims and limitations of imperial systems of identification. Of course, Calvino had access to Marco Polo’s published journals on his voyage to the east, but the novel has nothing of trade routes, records of spices, profit margins, or the physical details of travel. Rather, Invisible Cities explores man’s desire to know as well as the very problem of determining what is knowable, nameable, and communicable. Albert Howard Carter writes that “Calvino’s greatest contribution lies in his ability to use the generally contrafactual realm of hypothesis, speculation, imagination, as a way to explore what is possible in literature” (2). What makes the 8  “Backra” is a pejorative name for a white planter, and “Chinee” refers to a Chinese indentured servant or immigrant to the Caribbean.

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most sense in Calvino’s fiction is that which goes against what can be recorded and named as fact. Instead, Calvino’s truth is found in feeling, much like Glissant’s Caribbean collective. To be able to see what History has left out of its records, one needs imagination to fill in the gaps. Literature is therefore an ideal method of not only communicating Glissant’s creative approach but also fostering a community of liberated readers in the process. Those readers are empowered to recognize the invisible in the world, the Creole, without seeking legitimation from more visibly established systems. Free from the conventions of plot or character development, Invisible Cities has a nonlinear structure, which immediately challenges the reader’s own frustrated determination to make sense of the world through classification. Angela M. Jeannet identifies the emperor’s shared search with the reader as “hunting for the food that feeds another human hunger, the need to make sense out of the world” (34). In regards to the Caribbean person clinging to colonial ideologies, one must question whose world an imperial classification system can make sense of and affirm. It quickly becomes apparent that names and all other tangible forms of knowledge cannot be trusted to tell the whole story. Thus, in its reading, Calvino’s novel enacts its lesson on the impossibility of a singular and transparent system to know the world. Like the emperor, if the reader insists on locating a system of knowledge to order and explain the novel, all he finds are numerical patterns that dissolve into nothingness. The table of contents separates the text into nine classifications of cities, separated by italicized conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Each city is listed not by its name, but by its classification and number of entries, for instance: Trading cities. 5. Cities and eyes. 4. Cities and names. 3. Cities and the dead. 2. Cities and the sky. 1. Each conversation between the emperor and his emissary is represented by an ellipsis signifying the existence of something that cannot or refuses to be made accessible. The ninth and last section is numbered as follows: 5.4.3.2.5.4.3.5.4.5. …, prohibiting any satisfaction of having learned or mastered the novel by way of an imposed system. Glissant writes of a similar defensive impulse against the colonizer of the Creole language: “You wish to reduce me to a childish babble, I will make this babble systematic, we shall see if you can make sense of it” (20, emphasis mine).The reader as colonizer is confounded by the visible classification system of Calvino’s table of contents, which forces him to question his world, not reaffirm it. The systems of knowledge man builds to classify, order, and dominate the world are mere constructions, like

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Calvino’s “walls and towers destined to crumble,” because they only offer the appearance of fact, the illusion of complete stability in a world in flux (3).What Marco Polo eventually teaches Kublai Khan through his descriptions of cities that inevitably evade the emperor’s imperial grasp, is that the imagination can enable one to make connections beyond the reach of empire’s possessive identifications. If one acknowledges the illusion of History, one is then empowered to see beyond its reach and imaginatively bridge the gaps it cannot account for. Glissant laments how Martinique has yet to bridge the gaps between itself and a greater Caribbean community. Denying themselves as a Creole people, they have fallen prey to one of the greatest weapons of Western imperialism in a post-colonial state, assimilation, “one of the most pernicious forms of colonization” (5).They have gone so far as to be employed as officers in France’s colonization of Africa, believing themselves to be “‘not really so black’” and as lower-level officials, “part of the Great Motherland” (Glissant 7, 6). Marco Polo describes a similar longing that characterizes one of the invisible cities he visits: “This belief is handed down in Beersheeba: that, suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheeba, where the city’s most elevated virtues and sentiments are poised, and that if the terrestrial Beersheeba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one” (Calvino 111). Like Glissant’s description of Martinicans modeling themselves after their former colonizers, the people of Beersheeba imagine their celestial city to represent everything noble, bejeweled in diamonds and gold. They also believe there is another version of their city below them, “the receptacle of everything base and unworthy that happens to them,” and endeavor to erase any trace of relation, like Martinicans (or Jamaicans) taking insult at having their African origins recognized or finding shame in the Middle Passage and their history of slavery and oppression instead of pride in their survival (Calvino 111). The people of Beersheeba are correct in identifying their two counterparts, but in their mistaken evaluation of those counterparts, they have lost sight of their true nature, becoming as insecure and greedy as Martinique’s pseudo-elite, gluttonous for French honors and titles: “Beersheeba takes for virtue what is now a grim mania to fill the empty vessel of itself” (Calvino 112). It turns out that the subterranean Beersheeba has been designed by the most learned architects and constructed with the most expensive materials, while the celestial Beersheeba is a treasury of garbage: “potato peels, broken umbrellas, old socks, candy

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wrappings, paved with tram tickets, fingernail-cuttings and pared calluses, eggshells” (Calvino 112). Polo explains that the city of Beersheeba only escapes being miserly and calculating when it momentarily abandons its self-conscious and supposedly noble mimicry of the celestial city, literally “when it shits” (Calvino 113). When a Caribbean space like Martinique momentarily abandons its project of becoming even more French than the French, it is free in just submitting to its own nature. Glissant’s argument that the Caribbean’s submarine unity is a hidden reality, “forever denied, often deferred, yet a strange, stubborn presence” (221), is clarified in Beersheeba’s inability to recognize and accept its diversity instead of discounting its own experiences and pining after some ethereal version of what its people perceive to be the best of themselves in a purified form. To believe in a kind of social identification’s purity is to believe in a system over accepting the reality it seeks to order. As Glissant argues, once one recognizes his own creoleness, one no longer needs to cling to the myth of pure origins: “henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify ‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs (Glissant 140). Hence, the Caribbean has yet to fully recognize its own creolization because History cannot name it without destroying its own system: “To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the ‘category’ of creolized that is considered as halfway between two ‘pure’ extremes” (140). In accordance with the observations of Glissant, Cooper, and Mohammed, the Caribbean has yet to break free. When a city denies facets of itself (its multiplicity) and contracts to fit into another’s system of legitimacy, it willingly enters a labyrinth from which there is no exit. The city of Valdrada offers an example of Glissant’s suggestion that “[w]e can be the victims of History when we submit passively to it” (70). Valdrada was built on a lake. When a traveler approaches, he sees two identical cities, one standing erect and the other reflected upside down. Believing in the “special dignity of images,” what matters in Valdrada is not the events and choices of its inhabitants’ lives, but rather their representation in the lake (Calvino 53). Although the reflection is meant to record everything about the lives of the city’s inhabitants, just as History is meant to record and identify everything in the world, “at times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it”(Calvino 54). Calvino’s description of Valdrada is reminiscent of the many Maroon heroes and silent histories of the Caribbean that have gone unrecorded. The relationship between the mirrored cities suggests the one between Caribbean spaces and the colonial ideologies that profess to represent

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them: “The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes locked; but there is no love between them” (Calvino 54). The West depends upon the Caribbean to measure its own superiority and the Caribbean willingly submits itself to Western measurements of legitimacy. Neither engages in this relationship out of love; rather, it is an unacknowledged necessity for one and a learned habit for the other. That which History fails to reflect, however, reveals the irrepressible diversity of the Caribbean, and it is here where the monuments of History crack and begin to crumble. All History can record is that which it has previously encountered and dominated; therefore, the Creole reality of the Caribbean is a novel existence that challenges the omniscience of Western identification. Glissant writes that “humanity is perhaps not the ‘image of man’ but today the ever-growing network of recognized opaque structures” (133), suggesting that, by relying on an established system of identification, like the study of man, one cannot learn about one’s ever-changing self. Instead, one learns a series of recognized symbols in an often stifling or even violent substitution. He refers to the Caribbean reality of diversity and multiplicity as a liberating force that History has failed to capture because History is a system that only recognizes other systems, and not living exceptions (Glissant 71). Calvino’s city of Tamara demonstrates how people can learn the familiar identifications of a thing but fail to see beyond its labels. In a city of signs, a traveler sees only what he has learned the signs for, engaging not with the thing itself but what it represents. Therefore, “[h]owever the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it” (Calvino 71). Marco Polo explains that the traveler who only records the names by which the city defines itself leaves Tamara already intent on recognizing familiar shapes in the clouds overhead. Tamara illustrates Glissant’s argument that “Man, the chosen one, knows himself and knows the world, not because he is part of it but because he establishes a sequence and measures it according to his own time scale, which is determined by his affiliation” (73, original emphasis).Therefore, we see the world by way of signs, like race and color, established by an imperial system of “an ordering knowledge” in order to maintain our position within said system and persist in believing ourselves to be a stagnant unchangeable identity, when in actuality we are always changing (Glissant 73). One cannot rely on understanding the world through the knowledge of signs and symbols alone. Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo the following question: if one day he should learn all the signs and symbols accurately,

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would he possess his empire at last? Polo responds, “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems” (Calvino 23). If the emperor were to memorize all of the codes signifying everything in the world, he would enter the system himself; to lose the continual possibility of experience and the invisibility of reality would be to lose one’s humanity and enter into a static state of nothingness. Whole truth evades the classification of knowledge. It can only be gestured toward, never captured. Closed definitions depend upon stasis and therefore can never communicate the totality of experience. While representation is necessary to communicate living experiences, no system of symbols or construct of knowledge can ever tell the whole story. Thus, as Calvino scholar John Welsh points out, “representation contains its own inherent violence” in its inevitability to replace an invisible living experience with fixed tangible identifications (web). Glissant argues for the Caribbean’s right to obscurity in order to avoid the violence of representation (Glissant 2), which echoes Marco Polo’s discourse on his native Venice. Polo refuses to describe Venice in order to distinguish her from his invisible city descriptions for the Khan: “Memory’s images once they are fixed in words are erased. … Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once. Or perhaps speaking of other cities, I have already lost it little by little” (Calvino 87). Welsh takes up this exact fear of Polo’s, noting Calvino’s recognition of the violence of representation and his loss of “faith in the ability of words and symbols to function as reliable vehicles of thought and experience” (web). It is in the substitution where the violence occurs because the recognition of a fixed symbol usurps the recognition of the living thing it is meant to symbolize, causing a death to what Welsh defines as the “inexpressible flux of the totality of experience.” I would add that the same idea applies to the reality of creolization. Glissant’s demand for a shared obscurity protects the Caribbean collective from the violence of representation and from dominion by the imperial system of History. In order to express a constantly changing reality, one must rely upon multiple and evolving relationships rather than a single identification or perspective. Perhaps most representative of the Caribbean’s multiplicity is when Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of his visit to Ersilia. Polo illustrates the temporality of systems of knowledge and how easily those systems can be dismantled and remade, revealing a potential escape from the Caribbean’s Historical entrapment. In Ersilia, different colored strings are tied between buildings to mark relationships of trade, authority, or blood. Thus, a building would be connected by many strings to others marking

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its multiple relationships. Eventually, the strings become so numerous that it becomes impossible for people to traverse the city freely anymore. The inhabitants are forced to dismantle their structures, move on, and begin rebuilding another Ersilia elsewhere. They leave behind them a tangled web of colored strings, marking an outdated system of knowledge by which they used to identify themselves and their experiences. The city’s former inhabitants look back to see Ersilia, an abandoned city of poles and taut strings, and know that the city they have yet to build will also be Ersilia: “Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form” (Calvino 76). Polo’s description of Ersilia suggests that a place can exist simultaneously in memory and actuality, in the past and the future, from multiple vantage points and contradictory perspectives, and yet all identifications can be equally legitimate and true. The identity of Ersilia can travel unbound by systems of knowledge because it is made up of the multiple experiences, or better yet the histories of its inhabitants. Like the Caribbean, Ersilia exists in multiplicity.9 What binds her formulations together other than a geographically ambiguous name is the inhabitants’ will to identify with each other, and thus the shared experience of continually rebuilding and denoting relationships within Ersilia. The definitive and self-identifying multiplicity of the city demonstrates Glissant’s argument for the endurance of histories over History: “History is fissured by histories; they relentlessly toss aside those who have not had the time to see themselves through a tangle of lianas” (230).The people of Ersilia continually endeavor to see themselves through the tangles of temporal identification systems and exist beyond their parameters, independent of how they are known. Ersilians recreate new forms for themselves indefinitely without risking self-obliteration; their strength is in their creativity, their endurance, and their will to coalesce. Like Ersilia, the colonial system of knowledge erected to subjugate the people of the Caribbean no longer houses the region’s Creole reality, and so it must see itself through a tangle of lianas (finger-like vines) and 9  In The Repeating Islands, Antonio Benitez-Rojo explores the unity of the Caribbean’s multiplicity via chaos theory. He argues that from the region’s visible disorder emerges a paradoxical “island” that repeats itself and gives shape not only to a geographical, but also to a socio-cultural archipelago.

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abandon the system that sought to define it. The Caribbean must develop alternative systems of identification, aesthetics, and value to house its intricate spider-webs of relationships, while always giving preference to the experience of a thing over its identification and recognizing that all forms are temporal. Racial, religious, ethnic, and class distinctions are the bones of the dead that the wind blows away. The plantation system that appeared as the center of Caribbean life is now physically in ruins. What remains are the relationships among the people of the Caribbean, their unnamed heroes, their silenced experiences, and their unclassified realities—all seeking communicable forms, all seeking a discourse. A city, like a person or a community, is composed of a multiplicity of overlapping and contradicting relationships whose evolution continually exceeds the parameters of its identifications.10 Calvino’s novel illustrates again and again how cities are living and cannot be accurately identified without multiplicity. Knowledge of reality is therefore a mere approximation, a gesture in the void of inexpressible experiences, past, present, and future. The city of Andria, which, rather than knowing itself by the constellation of its stars, shifts its stars to match the city’s changes (Calvino 150). If the Caribbean is to learn to see itself as it is, with its multiple histories intact, then it must alter how it listens in order to create and recognize its own discourse. Like Marco Polo’s lesson to Kublai Khan, “[i]t is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear” (Calvino 135). Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) illustrates how an invisible city of the Creole Caribbean exists at all times, even when there are no official records of it, History denies it, and people in power choose not to see it. Should the reader be willing to believe in what is invisible, like the mysterious cereus cactus, which blooms only one night a year, then the story will reveal itself. The novel goes so far as to imbue the reader with the responsibility of passing on its story and extending the shores of its invisible city. Unlike Lowe in The Pagoda, who spends the majority of his life hiding the truth of his identity and protected by false identifications that eventually crumble, the narrator of Cereus Blooms at Night, Nurse Tyler, refuses to eclipse himself in his role as narrator. Already in a vulnerable position as an unconfirmed but recognizably queer man in 10  Kublai Khan’s vast atlas identifies not only cities that have already been discovered and recorded, such as Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cuzco, and Paris. It also gives form to cities that have yet to find a form or be known by name: “The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born” (139).

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a traditionally women’s profession, Tyler puts aside any possible protection of authority and forms an intimate friendship with the aged Mala Ramchandin, who has been deemed psychologically unfit to stand trial for the murder of her father. In telling her story he admits that he “cannot escape myself, and being a narrator who also existed on the periphery of the events, I am bound to be present” (2). Tyler will not exclude himself from the story he is about to tell because to erase those moments of his relation to her world would be to erase himself, which he refuses to do. Mootoo’s novel shares the same symbol of spider-webs from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and they function as powerful indicators of otherwise invisible relationships searching for communicable forms. When Mala and her lover Ambrose are young, he brings her an empty aquarium and teaches her about spider silk. Ironically, the man who speaks more words with a larger vocabulary than anyone else in the text cannot express his feelings to the woman he loves, evincing the inadequacy of words to replace experiences. Protected from her father’s violent invasions, the young lovers explore Mala’s backyard for spider-webs.11 Ambrose demonstrates the strength of their connective abilities by taking a web and stretching it between himself and a mudra pole beneath the house. He walks across the yard to prove that the web will not break: “‘Imagine!’ he whispered, ‘imagine a finely woven curtain miles high in the sky, hung between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. A curtain that would not deny light, yet could contain and halt a hurricane!’” (Mootoo 213) Terrified that her father might discover her romantic relationship, Mala is comforted by Ambrose’s illustration of an invisible tie that could connect her to him forever, even against the brutality of her father. Ambrose shares how, when he was cold and lonely studying in the Shivering Northern Wetlands (a stand-in for Trinidad’s colonizer, Great Britain), he discovered the properties of spider silk. Threatened all winter by the weight of an icicle, Ambrose witnessed how a spider web outside his window remained long after the icicle had “succumbed to its watery demise” and appeared just as taut as if it had just been spun (215). Like Calvino’s walls destined to crumble, the relationships of experience symbolized by the 11  After her mother escapes the island of Lantanacamara with her lesbian lover, Mala and her younger sister Asha are held hostage by their father Chandin, who cuts the family off from society and repeatedly rapes his daughters. Asha escapes, and imploring the reader to share the story with Asha wherever she may be, the novel constitutes an attempt to find her and reconnect her with her sister Mala.

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spider-web’s connections withstand the passage of time no matter how heavy and foreboding a more visible structure weighs upon it. Relation is a bridge that connects individuals beyond documentation in Cereus Blooms at Night. Mala deciphers Ambrose’s romantic intentions behind his jumble of speech. She proclaims that a bridge could be made with spider threads, and the bridge linking her to Ambrose remains intact despite the ravages of time. Long after Chandin Ramchandin attacks the young couple and Mala kills him, after Ambrose abandons her out of fear and marries another woman, after Mala is sentenced to the Paradise Alms House with all evidence of her family’s house and father’s murder burned down, Mala and Ambrose still identify themselves by their unrecorded love for each other. The relationship drawn between them with invisible spider-webs demonstrates their tenacity to maintain a connection that was never successfully confirmed by a social identification, either name or marriage. The novel illustrates the dangers of relying on History when Mala as a child (nicknamed Pohpoh) demonstrates to her just bullied sister Asha how easy it is to exclude on the basis of identification. Mala separates an ant from its colony and marks a circle in plain white chalk around it. Panicked at first, the ants attempt to bring the isolated one back into their fold without crossing the line that has become hyper-visible in separating them. Eventually, the colony continues on its path, leaving the encircled ant alone despite being confined by nothing more than a little girl’s arbitrary scribbling. At the end of the novel, a traumatized colonial family, clearly identifiable by Historical markers, is replaced by an unconventional, but loving, Creole one. Mala and Chandin serve as mother and father to a young couple discovering who they are beyond societal restrictions, and the invisible city of the Creole Caribbean blooms visibly. Marco Polo is not the only one who has access to the invisible cities; Kublai Khan is empowered by way of his own imaginative interpretation of the stories, which means that every individual has agency to interpret and make meaning of the world around him. The self-named Creole individual recognizes multiple parts of himself without excluding any because he refuses to choose among them to legitimize another’s perception of reality while betraying his own. In speaking of the French Caribbean person as a Creole, Glissant writes, “He can conceive that synthesis is not a process of bastardization as he used to be told, but a productive activity through which each element is enriched. He has become Caribbean” (8). While History may exclude the Creole reality of the Caribbean experience, Caribbean individuals are empowered by their own imaginations to become emperors of their own invisible cities: “Parochialism is reassuring

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to one who has not found his center in himself, and in my mind we must construct our metropoles in ourselves” (Glissant 146). Almost as if in response to Glissant’s identified Caribbean impasse, which involves being caught in a tangle of History that refuses to recognize either its collectivity or its Creole reality, Calvino addresses how one can escape suffering the “inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together” (165). Marco Polo consoles a despondent Kublai Khan, convinced that the last landing place of his empire can only be “the infernal city,” which is in narrowing circles drawing him closer and closer. The explorer assures the sovereign that, if there is an inferno, it is already here where we live and that we have given form to it with our own hands. The inferno happens because, in living together, we are dependent upon a definitively incomplete language of approximation. At best, language refers to an entity but cannot capture that entity in its entirety. As a result, there will always be interpretations and misinterpretations. When we as a society depend too heavily upon identifications to substitute for identities, when we relieve ourselves from the work of personal engagement to know instead only assumptions and others’ identifications, we perpetuate the violent erasure of peoples’ histories and experiences. Polo explains, “There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space” (165). Polo’s advice to Kublai Khan echoes the Creolistes in their essay “In Praise of Creoleness.” Extending many of Glissant’s arguments about washing from one’s eyes the film of colonial exteriority and proclaiming the Caribbean’s right to obscurity, the three Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant define Creoleness as an “open specificity,” “a question to be lived” (892). They outline Creoleness as celebrating its composite heritage of Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, India, and pre-Columbian America and as refusing the colonial demand for transparency. To live one’s Creoleness in totality requires intuition, poetic knowledge, and an active resistance to colonial [H]istory: “Let live (and let us live!) the red glow of this magma” (892). To continue working to see the invisible, the unnamed, and the spaces where identity and identification do not meet offers both Caribbean spaces and individuals an exit from the labyrinth of History, creating a hole—and an opening—in a system that alleges to govern everything. To escape the labyrinth and recognize that which language fails to, one must accept that

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identifications are always incomplete, and one must utilize one’s senses and experiences to engage with oneself, one another, and the world. The Caribbean community Glissant calls a nation has never been recognized as legitimate by History, but it is evident in the multiple relationships between the people, events, and cultures of the region. These spider-webs of historical relationships trace an invisible city that could be revealed through a shared discourse and the will to hear it.

Works Cited Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, “In Praise of Creoleness.” Trans. Mohamed B.  TalebKhyar, Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 4, 1990, 886–909. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. 1972. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Carter, Alberto Howard, III. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I., 1987. Cobham, Rhonda. “‘Mwennarien, msieu’: Jamaica Kincaid and the Problem of Creole Gnosis.” Callaloo, vol. 25, no. 3, 2002, 868–884. Cooper, Carolyn. “Who is Jamaica?” New York Times, 5 Aug. 2012, www.nytimes. com/2012/08/06/opinion/who-­is-­jamaica. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. 1989. Trans. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991. Jeannet, Angela M. “Italo Calvino’s Invisible City.” Italo Calvino. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. 25–36. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Penguin, 1996. Mohammed, Patricia. “The Asian Other in the Caribbean.” Small Axe, vol. 13, no. 2, 2009, 57–71. Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. New York: Avon, 1996. Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda. Orlando: Harvest, 1999. Rézeau, Pierre. “Lexical Aspects of French and Creole in Saint-Domingue at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” History, Society and Variation: In Honour of Albert Valdman. Ed. J.  Clancy Clements. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. 47–76. Welsh, John. “Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the Violence of Representation.” Working Papers in Romance Languages, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, https://repository.upenn.edu/wproml/vol1/iss2/2/.

CHAPTER 12

Locating the World in the Prose Poems of Peter Riley Rupsa Banerjee

The English Intelligencer (hereafter TEI), which was launched in January1966 and continued until 1968, modified the contemporary British lyric of the 1960s and, consequently, questioned the dimensions of available spatial categories, such as the “nation” and the “world.” The first editorial of TEI, published in Collected Prose of The English Intelligencer (hereafter CPTEI unless individual essays and poems of authors are cited by name), announced the critical project for the magazine: to “circulate as quickly as needs be” even as the spatial scope of the magazine is limited to the “island” (CPTEI 3). In emphasizing the importance of the swift distribution of the magazine among a select group of readers locally present on the island, the magazine, according to Peter Armstrong, made the “world-picture” a product of exchange between readers and authors (CPTEI 11). Although the spatial dimensions of the “world” are still largely constituted by the editorial activities of Britain and America, the work of TEI produced the organizing principle for a formal reconstitution

R. Banerjee (*) St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_12

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of the lyric. Modifications to the lyric form indicate the varying subjective intimacies with and alienations from the world. Changes to the use of the English language in America and Britain start to move beyond the desire for a nationally distinctive form toward a more assimilative poetic practice. Writing in an early issue of the magazine, Peter Riley remarks on these dissolving distinctions between the poetic practices of America and Britain: “the poets in The English Intelligencer do not of course write English as she is spoke, no more than do the new American poets, I should imagine, reproduce the spoken dialect” (CPTEI 8).With poetic language becoming increasingly nomadic, dislodged from national territories, Riley insists on the “usefulness” of the magazine as “propagating a real exchange,” even if that is limited to “fewer readers” (CPTEI 30).The whole sense of the world, then, starts to be partially characterized by places whose borders are remade by the frequency of lyric exchange. TEI was not circulated in America during the time of its production, despite the evolving friendship between the British contributors Gael Turnbull, Elaine Feinstein and J.  H. Prynne and the American poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Ed Dorn. The linguistic migration of formal practice was further facilitated by the transatlantic spatial displacements of the poets. The controlled exchange of poetry, organized around certain literary production centers, characterizes the world as transitory and selectively mapped. The impossible singular concept of the world is marked by an emptiness determined by the linguistically necessitated practice of exclusivity rather than by a unifying illusion of a community, thriving on the shared use of a single language. Keith Tuma, writing on the Anglo-American poetic relations of the 1950s, states that the opposite of fashioning an “‘other’ national poetry” is an “idealized ‘international’ tradition in which local worlds are ignored” (Fishing 42). The personalized voice of the lyric shows a close acquaintance with the local. Yet constituted as the currency of exchange between nations, the lyric maps the individual’s alternating relation and non-relation with a fragmentary whole and begins to share blurred boundaries with prose. In the lyric “The Antiquary,” published in the first series of TEI, Riley’s search for archetypal figures that persist across civilizations results in the adaptation of the Projective Verse of Charles Olson, breaking down the stanzaic form without interrupting the progression of syntax. Olson’s works are important to the poets writing in TEI, not least because the lines map the body’s interactions with physical space and perform a re-­inhabiting of language:

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First, to know you live in a world, 2nd, to aim at no centre by any indirect route, 3rd to find language where it is, in the throats of men, and last, as you walk the usual streets, to glance at your ridiculous feet and grin. (Riley, “Antiquary” 93)

The poem in its hunt for cultural symbols inflates and collapses the lines in keeping with the mechanisms of breath and traces the language back to the site of utterance. Although the poem acknowledges the self-situation of the subject in the objectively available category of the world, the routes of language relativize the presence of centers, literary and symbolic, creating a “makeshift structure” (Riley, “Antiquary” 93). Riley is suggesting that his poem angles away from the existing patterns of negotiating the particular with the universal of the “world.” The slow blending of poem and prose gathers the spaces of the margins into the text, reinterpreting the containment of the poem on the blank of the page and of the narrative in the absences of memory. The poem’s negotiation with margins provides the paradigm for rethinking the boundaries of the present and the withdrawals from the past. In other words, building up and negating the spatial limits of the poem question the emplacement of events in history. Reflecting on margins as an essential part of the 1974 text in Douglas Oliver’s In the Cave Suicession (hereafter ITCOS), a long poem which repeatedly breaks out of the very container of the cave into which it linguistically descends, Riley states, “I.T.C.O.S. has fine white margins like the thickness of limestone round a variegated corridor into which the print recedes towards its end, the library exit in the seedcase. Being a complete thing, it begs no intrusive clarifications, no disruption of its borders by anyone else’s pickings” (Riley, “Some Notes” 162). Riley states the question of totality as “self, world, nature” is left at the borders that are gradually approached and abjured with continuous prose breaking down into the short lines of the poem (163). The dialogic exchange in Oliver’s text, between the inquirer Q and the various ventriloquized voices, makes prose touch the lyric form at the edges where complete sentences break off to evoke the structure of the lyric. The language sets the different speaking voices apart, mapping the distances between the sentimental projections of selfhood and the places explored, both physically and imaginatively.

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The ending to “The Antiquary” is a cascade of words, held at both ends by the sign for the ellipsis “…” that spreads rather than compressing the poem in the pervasive exchange between words and typographic particularities. The flux of boundaries characterizes the poet’s discursive emplacements in landscapes that “anyone of us managed to create or not” (Riley, “Some Notes” 163). The alternate ending to “The Antiquary,” however, retracts its confidence from the scattering and rebounding of words on the page as a revision and rewriting of the positionality of the self in language and cultural history. In stating, “from the wrong place from/ over the sea where I’ve/ never set foot” (Riley, “Antiquary” 202), Riley figures an anxiety concerning the linguistic dispersals of identity. Engaging with a world with “no centre” arranges the structure of the poem in the terrain of prose: “The fiction I gave them/ breaks down, as does/ my own” (TEI 203). Margins of the page are cancelled and sustained as the lines expand and trim themselves. Dividing the sentence into three lines throws the lyric utterance off-center. The relation of the individual to the world is linguistically graphed in the typographic distances between the phrases, tending towards prose, rather than in the finite reaches of a defined form. The lines, separating out on the page, make the tension between prose and poem less about the singularity of a metaphysical whole and more about the disrupted materiality of any such concept. He writes: Strange that the boundaries I gave to my world assumed shapes and trouble me. (Riley, “Antiquary” 202)

The lines imply that the total signifier of the world exists in the poem as subjective memory of particularized wholes—history and finished statement. The fragmented singularity of the personal world is dependent on meeting several plural worlds that are similarly splintered and nontotalizable. Toward the end of the poem, the sentence breaks off into a partial aposiopesis, “So now who will believe/ that,” with only a shadowy connection between “that” and the demonstrative pronoun that follows, “there, yes, the” (Riley, “Antiquary” 203). The interrupted sentence locates the world as the possibility of omission rather than a permanent entity, characterized by syntactic non-relation and asymptotic convergence of the lines at the nodes of the zigzagging structure of the poem. In an issue from the first series of the magazine, Riley offers his take on the magazine’s goals: “This need to share is something more than private

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correspondence can cope with. The language we can use has to be worked out in common, among however many will allow themselves to trust, respond, risk, REACT, move outside of their private worlds” (CPTEI 37). The poem makes this movement beyond interiority result in syntactic discontinuity and the meaningful incorporation of blank spaces. Exchange is only viable so long as it takes place between worlds that are attuned to their fundamentally fragmented nature. Within the poem, the world is referenced through the very act of non- reference and in the instances where the formal containers of prose and lyric bleed into each other. The shortening of “yourself” to “yrself” and “could” to “cd” (Riley, “Antiquary” 201, 202) gestures to the alterity of language to itself, the limits where a language situates itself in plural worlds. As Riley states in the letter quoted above, “a lot of spoken English nowadays would look like American if written down, tho it doesn’t sound like American” (CPTEI 8).The appearance of the poem on the page and the modification of morphological units point to a communicative exchange that depends upon confidence in the significatory function of language. “This is Personal,” a collection of anonymous notes on the Sparty Lea festival, situates this trust on the continuity of dialogue between unnamed individuals rather than on the attestable role of proper nouns. Identifying authors from the material features of typewriter print and characteristic use of syntax establishes the sense of the whole in the very transmission of language rather than in the coherent structuring of individual arguments. For Riley, the shape and arrangement of words on the page play a significant role in splitting up the singular character of national identity and formal practice. In “Routes 2,” published in the first series of TEI, John Hall braids blank spaces into the formal structure, making history evolve at “the edge / & not the end, of drift” of landmass and sentence (Hall, “Routes 2” 223).The loss of empire is characterized by the scattering of sentence fragments as much as by the failure to hold on to a unitary narrative of history. J. H. Prynne observes that the separation of “Eng from Land” to create the anonymous “this land” makes the poem entirely about “history,” as noted by Hall (Prynne, “First Notes” 226). The dissociation or compression of words, for Riley, points toward a reorganization of available history. He writes, “Most forms of exchange, such as verse-epistle in the C18 sense, cut themselves off strongly from other areas of the word, and our duplicated epistles do this too” (CPTEI 73). Any form of exchange implies a common ground for epistemic convergence, which further shapes the spatial metaphor facilitating the development of dialogue. Prynne in an

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earlier issue of TEI writes that the exchange implies “some initial measure of trust, so that the community of risk could hold up the idea of the possible world” (CPTEI 44–45, emphasis mine). The “possible world” alluded to here is largely shaped by the “Atlanticist consensus” around what Keith Tuma calls the “‘Western’ world” (Fishing 90). Yetas Keston Sutherland points out, Riley’s writing diverts “insight away from any located fact” (Sutherland, “The Accomplishment” 137), similarly to Hall’s poem, and prevents the mapping of a historically conceived situatedness onto an available signifier of the world, Western or otherwise. History, shaped through the evolving encounters between the past and the present, acknowledges the varying materiality of words, which translates into the larger compounding of formal genres. In the introductory note to the second series of TEI, Riley dissociates the meaning of poetry from description or the “patterning” of words, moving toward “finding, knowing, making” truth (CPTEI 97). The logos of truth is approached as a communal phenomenon: a “partaking of the whole condition as ground to stand on” (CPTEI 96). Significantly enough, it is this very “patterning” of the words that allows for accessing the “whole condition” as more than just the sum of its parts. The word “pattern,” from the Greek paradeigma, foreshadows this paradigm shift in reconceptualizing the world by changing the formal structure of the poem. Riley’s insistence on doing away with the extant body of work produced by TEI discloses his view of the “whole” as transitory, constituted through the urgency of communication rather than its permanence. In a letter to Andrew Crozier in the first series of TEI, Riley writes, “A magazine is by its printed nature more or less precluded from such an activity. By its permanence. The work in these sheets should be what’s in progress now, gestures in the right direction, not any arrived complacency. Last month’s sheets of TEI should be almost as dead as yesterday’s papers. The whole thing should move forward with each bundle” (CPTEI 36). The gaps instituted between past and present communication are spaces to be filled in imaginatively by memory: the discontinuity producing an effective patchwork of political statement and poetic reflection. Within such a practice of exchange, the “whole” modifies itself with respect to the individual’s situatedness in language and history, which is invariably at the edge of an emptied-out center. This fringe emplacement is essential, as Riley states in his interview with Tuma: “only from the edge does any wholeness become contemplatable and achieve reverberation” (Tuma, “An Interview with Peter Riley” 25). The textual “ground” that accompanies such a projection of the whole is conditional on selective lyric intertextuality, typographic spacing, and the material particularities of print.

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“Voices Lost in the Falling Edge” In both Excavations (hereafter cited as E), composed between 1995 and 2004, and Greek Passages (hereafter cited as GP), written between 2002 and 2005, the form of the prose poem offers a perspective on the fragmented whole of the world. Discontinuous memory restructures itself with the evolving relations of the individual to changing cultural centers and their peripheries. The poem welcomes lyric voices and narrative habits that do not fit snugly into definitions of either form. The fragmentary sense of the whole, represented by gaps in the stone circles, characterizes this uncomfortable settlement within any epistemic definition. Commenting on the stone circle, Riley writes that it is to be “broken at one or two points […] where the individual enters and escapes” (qtd. in Bordell 6).The points of entry and departure of the individual, as both lyric orator and lyric reader, are at those very instances where the form is punctuated with voices from external texts. Excavations recalls the incursions of several strands of histories, even as the text locates itself among the civilizational residue of Britain entombed in the Yorkshire Wolds, intertextually present in the quotations from J.  R. Mortimer’s Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds (1905). In “excavations 35,” the excerpt from Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), present in the beginning of the text, distinguishes burial practices that enclose cremated remains in urns from the more integrated funerary rites of ancient Greece: “to be neighbours in the grave, to lie Urne by Urne, and touch but in their names” (E 45, bold in original text). Remembering distinctions between habits of interring the dead ensures a continuity of narrative between fragments of history. Removed from the memory of the physical places, the ancestral community of inhumed bodies enfolds the text into its own visceral enclosure and opening, “a door open on the / world” (E 45). The sequence continues to transact itself between the tokens of a Hellenic past and the symbolic relics of the present: (“Passing sailors could hear Achilles and Helen at night, singing the story of their lives in the verses of Homer.”) squaring the circle the mortal right-lined Circle must conclude and shut up all. (E 45, bold in original text)

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The quotation from Peter Levi’s notes to his translation of Pausanias (1979) recounts the voices of Achilles and Helen. The celebrated song of antiquated Greece curves down to the dirge-like epitaph in the excerpt from Browne’s text, included in bold font. The lyric voice is muted, swept under history, into the objective statement “squaring / the circle.” The compression of the lyric voice into disjointed phrases renders the sequence a mosaic of utterances. The performative command that alters the circle shifts the easy demarcations of the peripheral when engaging with the whole. The sonic flow of the alveolar lateral approximant in the /l/ sound of the words, “circle,” “mortal,” and “all,” interrupted by the voiced alveolar stops in “lined,” and “conclude,” situates an aural circularity that intermittently halts, reproducing the disconnect between the intertextual material. Tom Lowenstein, writing on the first two parts, states that “the uninhibited movement of thought” exacts a suspended association between “places, landscapes and encounters, of the passage, strata and character of time, human and nonhuman” (189). This inability to access the cultural and spatial milieu of the text is aurally subtended. The whole, arranged through the presence of gaps, precludes the possibility of a fixed sense of the world. The collection questions settlement in “ground”—of both language and place—through a meditation on death. Typographic particularities, from the use of forward strokes, parenthesis, bold font, and italics, construct an uneven surface in print that complements the collage-like assimilation of voices in the text. The strokes mark an ironic endorsement of beginnings and endings, indicating an inter-translatability of form: of lyric into prose, of life into death, and of the island into the world. For instance, “excavations 18” makes use of two pairs of such strokes. Here is the opening section of the sequence: A bowl, a northern sky ring flickering at the rim, a dish of nascent matter behind the comfort-seeking face, the agreeable body, a stewpan of/ a circular hollow ten inches deep was cut into the edge of the grave behind the man’s head, full of dark earth mingled with animal teeth and bones, ox horn-cores and ribs, three flint splinters, a broken bowl and a palm of red deer antler with four tines globe of hunger and waste, god-food/. (E 28, italics in original)

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The sequence locates circular, everyday objects, “a bowl,” “a dish,” and “a stewpan,” that have been hollowed out in favor of a meaningful form. The quotation in italics, taken from Mortimer’s text, is further enclosed within strokes, demonstrating the text’s own retreat from unmediated exchange. The “circular hollow” in the earth parallels the form of the containers, such that the dug-up mounds are instances of the emptied-out earth reclaiming meaning: what is excavated is simultaneously artefacts of a buried culture and generalized “sentences of terrestrial mass” (E 102) that prevent the tracing of cultural roots to any particularized, sedimented strata of history. The quotation included within the second pair of strokes aligns a remembered lyric utterance, “/where flowers [/]fade Be not afrayde/,”1 with Mortimer’s prose (E 28). Disconnect between the two voices, sporadically appearing alongside Riley’s own prose, registers as an intertwining silence rather than abrupt scattering. The text arranges itself around this structure of emptiness and depletion, making the form a productive incompletion and literary counterpart to a world with shifting centers. The globe, formally understood as possessing a unitary center, is characterized by “hunger and waste” (E 28). Gathered around a spatial category marked with degeneration and the primal loss of life, the prose poem uneasily settles itself around the assimilated excerpts, instances of “pitted earth” (E 28), disregarding the centrality of narrative and the hermeneutically sealed layers of history. In Oliver’s text, the descent into earth, a metaphor for death, and language communicate meaning between speakers, however imaginary. The poem seemingly attests to the arrival at a summary, as language multiplies in a ground where the speakers are in hearing distance of each other. Communicability is, however, a farce in Oliver’s text, with the self-reflexive critique of entrapment in the material structure of a totality or a word: “few wouldn’t rather have themselves in their totality than anything else […] (Every character I type here appears almost double because its future partner ghosts the gap after it on the page)” (ITCOS 17). The blurring of the boundaries of the typed word underlines this very loose yet enabling conjunction of form and content. In Excavations, meaning is not realizable in the neat fitting in of sentences into a total structure because the utterances, paradoxically, resound across interstanzaic space compressed between forward strokes. The strokes are tendentious and slippery edges, 1  Line breaks in the prose poem following diagonal strokes in the text are indicated throughout with brackets.

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occasionally typed as leaning forward and vertically upright: “Voices lost in the fading edge, national verbs houses that leave but little trace finance companies that suddenly vanish from the screen |” (E 104). The consecutive positioning of “verbs” and “houses” stalls the progression of syntax without erasing it into a blank. The modified continuance marks the dance over dug-out textual matter and lyric quotations. The strokes loosely fit the combinatory style within its own pattern, underlining the structure’s own release from an ineffectual interiority. The fragments are temporally arranged across large distances even as the spaces between are collapsed through syntactic trimming: “Distance joins us by the third person” (E 16).The voice of the “third person” intermittently emerges as lyric, singing “that the heart may break” (E 16)—both uniting and alienating the reader and the writer. The lyric voice also “explodes space,” as John Wilkinson notes in his essay in Poets on Writing, which makes the assumption of a national location across a relational axis impossible (168). Stepping out of subjective interiorities demands a ventriloquizing of the community through the voice of the other, present at the “convocal edge” (E 16) of a disjointed world.

“/frustration and anger/a world emotion/” Displacement into the voice of the third person restructures the relation between the singular and the whole in Excavations and moves the text along through the varying distances between voices. Textual movement in Greek Passages is propelled by the poet’s travels in Greece. In the collection, the structure of the world is approached from the very distances that are intertextually emplaced in the earlier text. The framework of the “world” remains an important signifier in both the collections, but with Greek Passages, the poet attempts to escape the sense of interiority within a structure altogether. The sentences are split into diurnal fragments, separated by the movement of daylight and the intractable blankness of the pages. The Shearsman edition of 2009 makes directionality of the lines and, by extension, the situatedness of the reader in relation to that of the intertextual references contingent on the position of diagonal strokes. The strokes are removed from the revised version, published in Collected Poems, Vol. 2 in 2018, and designate a conclusive articulation of the limits of the form. This essay reads the diagonal strokes as the chiasmi where definitive endings reverse into the full potential of beginnings, structuring an interiority that, in repeating itself, negates itself.

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The referential ambit of Greek Passages moves beyond the two places visited in Greece, ExoMáni and Argolid, to include places in the northwest of England and beyond. In an interview with Keith Tuma, Riley states, “the constant displacement to an elsewhere in modern poetry” is marked by an entrenchment in “poetry’s ecstasis” to the extent that the form “might as well not exist” (Tuma, “An Interview with Peter Riley” 9). Resisting reference to a known locale is to question the limits of form. The compounded form, characterized by syntactic continuity interrupted by diagonal strokes, challenges the linear displacement of text into context, and the island into the world. The reterritorialization of the poems in Greece attenuates national difference, smudging out the specificity of the local. The sequences are catalogued under the names of the places visited even as the specific sentences conflate the near with the places recalled. Sutherland remarks that Riley’s poetry, in moving out of particular “locations,” renegotiates what it means to be “within and as part of a State” (“The Accomplishment” 134). In merging two formal styles, Riley underlines the constantly displaced yet pervasive boundaries of the “whole” as world: “Distance itself, /welcoming itself to the heart from somewhere, nobody / knows where, from Asia” (GP 98). The form contains history only insofar as the narrative is rendered anonymous: the specificity of a probable “somewhere” placed relative to the ambiguity of a peripheral “Asia.” In other words, the prose poem suggests that the structure of the State holds only insofar as locations can be transcended, both physically and linguistically. John Hall discerns the expanding limits of the transcendental singular concept of the whole in the first series of TEI: “What really happens to the land in this, the money we made in the city, the country lived in: the garden, the contracted Arcadia” (CPTEI 16). In Greek Passages, Riley reconstitutes interiority from the alienated edges, exhuming history from local soil and, likewise, creating it at the shifting frontiers. In the sequence “Arkadia,” the prose sentences deplore the seemingly innocuous event of an originally “family-run” Greek hotel being bought by an international “outfit” of hotels: “Cheapest available [/] room in October 130 euros! A disaster. / So then in / [/] whose Arcadia? Whose justice?” (GP 81). The sequence offers a subjective emotion, is introverted, yet frames itself around the transactional systems that differentiate the ideal of Arcadia from the commonplace state. The interiority of the sentiment sustains the nostalgia for the utopic, beyond the dialectic of the internal and the external, and collapses the borders between the center and the periphery. The

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limits of the ideal locale double up with those of the commercialized place—the singularity of the world rendered blurry by the overlapping boundaries of multiple interiorities. The materiality of the text supports this very conflation of borders and circular exchange of significations between the particularized locale and the world. In the essay “Archaeological Guesswork,” published in the first series of TEI, Riley anticipates this very reciprocity where “the singular contain[s] the whole as much as the whole the singular” (Riley, “Archaeological Guesswork” 57). In form, the essay spills out of the particularities of genre even as it geographically limits itself to “this island” (Riley, “Archaeological Guesswork” 47). Arranged with excerpts from texts and notes to self, the writing distributes itself across blocks of prose as it tries to anchor communal history to a specific landmass. This formal practice, working between the lines of meaning-resistant poetic practice and narrative prose, still attempts to make form inseparable from content. The poetry of many of the contributors to TEI, including the early poetry of J. H. Prynne, fashioned a syntactic disconnect for mapping the reaches of a discursively expanding world. Prynne extolls this creative principle by quoting the first century CE Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius in one of the early issues and argues for the spread of poetic form encompassing the drift of nations. While poetic practice is subject to change and reconstitution, Riley in Dawn Songs (2017) argues that poetry, “where words flee from each other in terror,” necessarily performs “a bid for immense and impossible regions” (20). In Greek Passages, syntactic linearity, which progresses without developing narrative continuity between the sequences, displaces the impossible singular signifier of the world into selfcontained lexical units that renew themselves with the regular syncopations of the circadian pattern. In a from “Argolid 2004,” Riley writes: Ghost nation, your delicate air, world hidden in world, concordance of ear and eye. / One word, shouted in the night, whispered along the arm, restores the nation of sense, word out of word / The bay below, cloud on the sea at dawn, the hills emerging like islands, the sea hidden in the sea. (GP 99)

The placement of the diagonal strokes at the beginning of the sentences does not disambiguate directionality even with the linearity of progression

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contributing to a sense of stasis or non- movement. Underlining the concentric arrangement of a world within another world suggests a solipsism that differs from resistance towards reference. The difficulty here is constituted by the willful limitation of form to the truth of one’s emotion: “For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world” (Wittgenstein 68). The circularity of the world is perceptually compressed in fractal patterns within syntactic circuitousness: “world hidden in world,” “word out of word,” and “the sea hidden in the sea.” The self-contained phrases, arriving where they begin, provide the linguistic paradigm for a world with plural centers that continually overlap and dismiss any claims towards geographical and linguistic introversions. The agreement of “ear” and “eye” simultaneously signals this overlap of interiorities and the sensorial complicities involved in imagining a singular world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in the essay “l’oeil et l’esprit” [“Eye and Mind”] that the “resemblance” of the concept with the image is the result of perception: things do not doubly belong “to the big world and to a little private world” (361). Progressing through phrasal constructions that are at once visually closed and aurally linked, the form asserts the indeterminacy of relations between centers and peripheries, whether discerned across the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. What is undisclosed in Riley’s work, seemingly welcoming the readers to relativized interiorities, is this very absence of a narrative that establishes communicability. The form, orbiting plural perspectives, resists shaping an immanent world through the linked absences between syntax, the elliptical gaps and the momentary conciliations between adjacent words. Instead, the world is mapped through the vacuousness of familiarity shaped by a progression of phrasal units that circumlocute themselves. The peripheral region is emptied of particularity like the center. Setting the poem in a “recognizable world of time/ place/ thought” requires a divesting of the “autobiographical or even factual,” mentions Riley in his interview with Tuma (Tuma, “An Interview with Peter Riley” 9). In “The Island That is All the World,” from Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), Oliver establishes this sense of nearness between perceived centers and peripheries: “The island centre is a darkness through which all the islands are linked together. I call it a centre but also it’s everywhere and without location: it is the immediacy itself” (53). The locus of place encompasses the subjective account of the visited locale and the diffused memory of England, “[a]waiting a return” (GP 99). The shrinking and dilation of conceptual

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distances is determined as much by the structurally enclosed phrasal units as by the range of differences in auditory perceptions, “shouted in the night” and “whispered along the arm.” Remeasuring the singular against the world within a solipsistic form shifts the national standard from the iambic into the less popular trochaic meter: “will return and try again.’ / Ghost nation, your delicate/ air. […]” The contrapuntal voices collected from different sources in Excavations return here in the play of stresses, sounding history within a “theatre of closure” (E 101, bold in original text). The linearly mapped timeline of proper historical artefacts is displaced into the anonymity of varying stress patterns, further unfastening history from the fixity of a “sunk and scored name” (E 104). The practice of exchange that characterizes TEI loosens poetic writing from the fixed linguistic limits that determine the “national standard” (CPTEI 19). The sequence asserts that linguistic and physical displacements from the category of the nation develop the chimera of the spectral nation with obscure boundaries and hollowed interiority. Any singular imaginary of the world that constitutes the dialectic for such a nation is similarly traced and retraced into a nonrealizable whole. Excavations exhumes history by tracing words that mimic the bodies forming the strata of history. Riley includes the particularities of the spatial arrangements of the bodies in Mortimer’s text: “If the object is a human body the position of the head is given first. NE/ SE or NE> SE indicates a body lying with head to north-east, facing south-east […]” (E “Preface”). Such specific arrangements contrast with the speedy scattering of lyric fragments and personal observations in the text. In “excavations 94,” Riley writes, “Body /echoing body, inverse to body, stretching away, your/ eyes upside down in front of mine, stare at each other/ and don’t we see then such a world of hurt petitioned?” (E 106). The dance of words over the remains of the proper, as person and national history, in Excavations “sinks into its own history,” into the transformative silence of death (E 101). The partial circularity of phrasal construction in “echoing body, inverse to body” anticipates the style of Greek Passages and disintegrates the specificity of historical relics into the substantive generality of the “body.” Riley’s own physical distance from the Yorkshire Wolds suggests that the assimilation of lyric fragments, such as “Thus under sylens I do endure” (E 106, bold in original text) eschews any sense of integration between singular notions of the individual and the world. What can be assimilated is “the sum of privacies” (E 106), arranged with various

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directionalities, neither conforming to nor opposing any singular world at large. In Excavations, the interiority of individual utterance collapses into the multiplicity of the social, subtended by the generalizing act of the “person becom[ing] a substance” (E 101). Yet, as Nandini Ramesh Sankar emphasizes, “the social is neither fact nor its opposite” in the text, loosening the linguistic debris from the geographical limits of the nation (12). In Greek Passages, physical displacement into another political territory requires a collective discussion across borders for determining the topography of the nation. From section “2a” of “Gulf of Korinth”: The discussion on the Syphnian Frieze: what must be said, passionately and immediately, for the nation depends on it / bodies signalling like letters on a page, the arm strikes a line between the organs of perception, back and forth. (74)

The carved bodies on the frieze, likened to the syntactically prompted flow of letters, makes material place an active participant in the telling of history. The particularity of the Gulf of Korinth, preserved in the sculpture, is included in the dance over history. Place becomes both an enactment and a record of cultural exchange. In section “4” from the same sequence, Riley qualifies this speech that articulates itself through an inter-translatable exchange of form and substance: “The/ speech which springs directly from the earth’s width, / which creates its own usage […] The speech/ that actually speaks, in words, pitches, arms, numbers, / things” (GP 76). Locating stressed velar /l/ sounds in “passionately,” “immediately,” and “signalling” near the low stress /l/ sounds in “letters” and “line,” which come before the vowels, regrafts the sensuousness of bodily movement into the sound of speech. The quick succession of the /l/ sounds in the words aurally performs the doubling up of limits, of “Body/ echoing body” (E 106). The text is solipsistic in its performance of integrating the particular and the universal—a quality that Riley declares is “not so much an error as a fantasy” because the lyric voice “includes the view from the outside in its very substance” (Riley, “Two Letters to British Poets”). Invoking “/a world emotion/” (GP 45) necessitates a multiplication of interiorities across ekphrastic transactions between letter and sculpture, which, in turn, negates assimilation of the nation into a homogeneous world.

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The peripheral form corresponds to the viewing of the world from the edge. In his interview with Tuma, Riley conflates the distances between places into the singular, anonymous “anywhere” of the writing: “But England isn’t a line it’s a place, and that’s all you’re entitled to love really, a sense of settlement, which could be anywhere” (19). An entitlement to a poetic line that is also its object of representation rethinks the relation between the lyric and the inflated signifier of the world. In a letter to the author of this essay, Riley states that the form evolves through a momentary familiarity with the places visited: “the poet/ self is a visitor, a stranger, who therefore sees everything for the first time–not only the landscape but the whole relationship between the foreign place and the ‘home’ the poet/ stranger carries round with him. Sometimes the terms and demands of that ‘home’ (and that self) emerge through the travelogue.” The redoubled interiorities of the “home” and the “self” suggest the nonmimetic correlation between form and content, lyrically apprehended through the diversification of the familiar. The locus of the prose poem in conjunction with the “anywhere” of a world, with centers that are innately unstable and cracking, articulates a structure that disrupts and spins outside of itself through the duplication of phrasal constructions and reiteration of sound units. The prose poem, through the very intransigence of its form, emplaces itself within a territory that resists the demarcations of cartographic control. The world is partially bracketed, as the lyric steps out of obligations to a particularized subjectivity and toward offering reference points in history that are geographically displaced.2

“close bracket, close life, close episode” The lyric fragments in Excavations resist linking back to an identifiable past, with some of them even being “feigned” (E “Preface”). The “excavations” themselves, taken as a whole, do not offer present meditations on death, with the structure paradoxically posed between lyric flashbacks and factual dispensations. Navigating between the two engenders a narrative movement that conflates the spatial divide between the writer in the past 2  Riley’s documentation of Transylvanian lyric traditions in Dawn Songs seeks out new compositional strategies or linguistic “settlements” that are extraneous to territories marked by “State-enforced collectivization” (p. 34). Instead of affirming a distinct cultural estate of the lyric, the alternate modes of lyric expression, working with shifting relations between text and tune, reveal acts of “collaborative extemporization” (p. 35), which transpose national identities into the nameless locations of the poet and the reader.

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and the reader in the future. From “excavations 52”: “A disposal of strange and hated stillness which mocks/ movement. false world the fall of consonants as speech/ closes, scattered heaps to rest, sunk in white walls” (E 62). The clustering of “strange and hated” stillness into the common of “disposal” interiorizes the suspension of the infinitive at the end of sentence, “mocks/ movement.” The spread of utterance, stitching the lyric lament in bold with the objective note in italics, is “closed on itself” (E 62). The stuttered assonance, through the repetition of consonant sounds in “world,” “consonants,” and “scattered,” is encircled by the allophones “false” and “fall” in the beginning and “white” and “wall” at the end of the sentence. The aural interruptions in the lines urge against this scaffolding of circularity. The world is “false” only insofar as fixed relations are instituted between text and non-text, prose and poem. In What is a World? (2016), Pheng Cheah remarks that the world is the possibility of relationality rather than being determined by the relations instituted within it: “the whole cannot be another handy being in the world, it is nothing other than the world itself as the condition of possibility of being with and relating to other being” (102).The seemingly conclusive halt at the end of the sequence, “There is no life at all, “stretches itself over the soft repetition of the /r/ alveolar approximant into “excavations 118,” “life after life after life” (E 126). It establishes a circularity between sequences, which in impeding narrative progression “mocks movement.” Regression along a linear historic timeline is rejected with the whole sense of the text communicated through gaps rather than syntactic certitudes. The circularity of the structure co-opts itself into a renewable commerce between the past and the present, the reliability of text and the uncertainty of memory. Riley uses mixed metaphor to join the finality of the land with the flux of time: “It’s all about purpose and direction and ultimate ends, embodied on the ground, in a history, and in compositional strategies (as always)” (qtd. in Bordell 15). The spatial metaphor that characterizes history is located through variations in the choice of notational symbols and the tonal stresses on the words. From “excavations 157”: desire were once (powers of the land/ Close then, close bracket, close life, close episode, and yet it means on: this curve, and that angle, in the light, as a precipitate in the glass a falling and fallen substance a thing that settles (finally) to a pictograph, to an intricate

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sentence, the arrow through the crescent (a Pictish grapheme) were once meanings/ And the world like a chaconne returns again and again [….]. (E 179)

The half-crescent of the parenthesis at the start of the passage is only partially closed by the diagonal stroke at the end, making communion between the past and the present an incomplete enfolding into history. The repetition of “close” across the lines suggests a repeated folding in of the language on itself, even as the halting progression of complete phrasal units actually “means on[wards].” Evoking shapes of “this curve” and “that angle,” the language moves towards a corporeal assertion of meaning, held by the visual misalignment of the concave bracket and the edgy stroke. The inconclusive bracket signals the circuitous path where the parenthetical structure breaks only to enter itself in “(finally).” The bounded limits of the singular are thus abstracted by the whole, continuing beyond the finality of the brackets. It is this very halting rhythm, which Riley calls “occulted,” where “the land evades the nation” (E 47). The ground of history, mapped onto such a rhythm, spreads beyond the cartographic expanse of the political entity. The world characterized as a “chaconne,” a baroque musical genre that includes many variations on a theme, marks the phenomenologically expansive category as one that constantly dissolves the individual into the social. The use of parallelism qualifies the dance as one that “returns again and again” (E 179), making the ends of history a continuous state of movement and advancing towards a shifting state of plurality. Paul Valèry in “l’âme et la danse” [“The Philosophy of the Dance” (1976)] writes on the mutually constitutive relation between the body and the ground where the dance is enacted: “from which [the place] it breaks free, to which it returns, but only to gather the wherewithal for another flight” (70). The lyric instances included in the form, then, occasion a devolution of the proper into the social, even as the utterances retrieve the past into pockets of facticity. The repetition of “again” characterizes a defunct circularity, colliding with the incomplete parenthesis. The circular image of the world, variously constructed across discourses, sustains itself through the departure and return of the lyric voice. The compounded formal structure, sustaining and reconstituting the circularity of the whole, gains its lyric quality in joining language and symbol in the “pictograph.” Oliver’s poetry, similarly preoccupied with the borders of the particular and the universal, establishes a “two-way traffic

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between poems and diagrams” (Barnett 160). The Diagram Poems provides an example of language abstracting itself into shapes, placing syntactic cohesion against the affective swirl of lines. The spatial preoccupation in Oliver’s poetry extends beyond the metaphysical reconfiguration of centers and their peripheries to an optical assimilation of the diagrammatically bare and the lyrically personal. The conceptual whole emerges through this transactional process. Excavations develops this to the extent that the two-way route between poem and pictograph is subject to dismemberment and remaking. At the start of “excavations 53,” the shape of the mound is sketched in words: “As if held in pale hands, circled or entrenched and the hands open enough to let out a small bird” (E 63). The factual description transforms into a dirge with the singular mention of a bird’s movement. The lyric note, unlinked to any recollected fragment, reappears at the end, taking in tow the introductory image of freedom: “In peace/ one might say, morphemes fluttering out to the vast/ resonant O, and the shapely snow” (E 63). The single, meaningful, syllabic units, both before and after the line break, are held in the circularity of the vowel, even as their multiplicity “shapes” the amorphous mass of snow. This very pattern of signifying beyond the limits of a self-imposed structure, only to return to the balance of morphological shapes in “shapely snow,” establishes the sequence as its own “patron” (E 39). The world, a relativized whole, is approached at the borders of aural compression of the lyric in the vowel sound and the structural capaciousness of the form. The form is not so much an aggregate of the subsets of sound and shapes as is the world never simply a sum of plural interiorities. In “excavations 18,” “each vowel” translates into its own “field of thrift,” heard across “a caul of/ opening throats” (E 28). The allophonic resemblance between “call” and “caul” stretches the singular lyric voice into a network of utterances, distinguished by the multiplicity of spellings, “where flowers / fade Be not afrayde” (E 28, bold in original text), and particularities of font. The past shifts from enclosure in the annotative instance of the proper into the common of shapes and orthographic habits. The prose poem, mediating between and reconstructing historical pigeonholes, expands into a “field” of linked units instead of simply containing lyric fragments. In Shades of the Planet (2007), Wai Chee Dimock theorizes the field as a corrective to the delimited nation: “with no tangible edges, its circumference being continually negotiated, its criss-crossing pathways continually modified by local input, local inflections” (3). In “excavations 147”, Riley maps the field of sounds into the distance

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between words: “of abandonment within which a (clearing in […]” (E 167). The binary of Britain and America, instituted by the ideational exchange route of TEI, registers as inconclusive, intersected at the very nodes where historical anxiety surrounds the nation and widening linguistic communities diversify the political subjects. The blended echoes and the interrupted circularity of the sequences underlines the nontotalizable whole of the world—abruptly scattered in typographic spacings and gathered into brackets. The world as a partial substantiveness demonstrates the practice of exchange guiding the distribution of TEI. In the first series, Hall concludes this to be “something much more proper, […] the nomadic purity of ‘who we are,’ all flags left outside” (CPTEI 19). For Riley, this formation materializes in the possibility of assuming varied subjective positions. From Section “b” of the opening sequence of Excavations, Part Two: “Reader and writer [we] lie on an East-/ West axis in the council chamber wrapped in earth” (E 119). The pronoun “we,” within parenthesis, characterizes an ending and a continuation of communication. This “final pronoun” (E 135)taken as the affirmative outcome of communication, is characterized as a “featureless grapheme” (E 135), which both masks and discloses the mediations that invest history with centers and cultures with geographical limits. Drew Milne writes that identifying who “‘we’ are now” in a “precariously privatized situation” determines how the lyric transacts itself within a community, through an increasing depersonalization of the lyric utterance (Milne). The lyric moment in the prose poem constellates a sense of community through the interchangeability of subjective positions. The private worlds, held by this possibility of lyric exchange, arrange themselves around a center, “cracked with worth” (E 176). The community of the world republic replaces the “Anglo” and “American” positions around the hyphen, to mark a “nomad wedding” (E 119) between the “reader” and “writer,” resting on asymptotic proximity of grammar and productive fractures within memory.

“a stone turns/ a tone returns” The epigraph to Greek Passages cites a Kelvin Corcoran poem from My Life With Byron (2000): there must have been children sleeping in sweet abandonment

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as the unknown sailed into the harbour and the world stopped. (Corcoran 78)

The poem, “The Objects Were Not Paid for a Fixed Price (Elgin),” brings together three-line and four-line stanzas with a free-verse pattern, both deflecting and holding onto the binds of formal practice. The syllabic count alternately increases and decreases in the lines, reaching the least number in “and the world stopped.” The line cuts short any formal expectation of movement even with the absence of punctuation directing a progression into the next sequence. The collection provides the vantage from which Riley measures the essential heteroglossia, which collects the whole sense of the world into the archive of history. Corcoran’s poetry carries with itself the “sea music” from Act Three, Scene Two of The Tempest (Corcoran 68) and refracts Byron’s call of the dead in “The Isles of Greece,” “we come, we come!” (Byron 630) into the banal utterance of the living, repeated thrice: “here we go, here we go, here we go” (Corcoran 70). In recognizing a steady intertextuality, the poetry moves toward a definitive end and shapes a fixed correspondence between verse and territory: “the song we sang was—a nation to be made” (Corcoran 69). The sequences in Greek Passages, however, work with absences in accessible history. Allusions persist with “whitechapelled sea” and “sea noise” (GP 13), but they also gradually start to break free from rhetorical remembrance. History and contemporaneity are confined to the proper of name, conflating the mythic and the real; the text recalls Helen and Paris ratifying “their love, in an arch- [/] shaped discourse” (GP 107) and has Roy Fisher listen in to its diurnal performance, “up in the northern hills” (GP 44). The sequences embrace the alterity of the text from itself, including a range of utterances, from Antonio Machado’s in “yaestamas solos mi corazón y el mar” (GP 71) to Byzantine chants, “‘Christ is risen’…?” (GP 43). The polyphony that results from such nomadic inclusions of voices both institutes and resists the division between the declarative authority of the state, “‘A democracy to silver the land’” (GP 96), and the “lyric of the everyday.” The sequences are self-reflexive in voicing a layered history, skeptical of the institutional bias of religious sentiment: “‘Christ is risen’ / But risen as what [….] A [/] justice, a redemption, an umbrella, an aerial?” (GP 90). The text, through the refractions of humor, removes itself from the convictions of Corcoran’s poetry: “Capital tips off the edge of the world/ to strike the old deal still in place” (Corcoran 70). The space of Riley’s poem is broken and regularized in giving up authorial control

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over history. Affective ties towards religious faith and nationalistic commitments are left in the wake of the circadian renewals of the sequences. The world, in the temporality of its occurrence, is shaped as a “harmony, between particulars,” remembered through “the slowness/ of the light rising/ in memory” (GP 26). In looking for the attributes of the mythic in the Greek landscape— “Here Oedipus killed his father” (GP 72)—the sequences intertwine the location of lyric deixis with the assertions of national narratives. As Jonathan Culler writes, the lyric utterance is innately displaced from the particular to the general: “the deictic center, the I here now, is also that of the reader” (166). The sequences follow the rhythms of daylight and traverse the real and metaphoric spaces of a democracy: “a concave auditorium, / inverse of theatre /” (GP 96). The voices in the sequences oppose the intent that governs intertextual scattering within the confines of form and make room for the implications of the unuttered—“Dead voices, responding. Denying everything/ I say”—and the inadmissible—“to speak of ‘democracy’ and to keep secrets/ from your people” (GP 88). The spaces of utterances enfold absences that exhort readers to “look for it somewhere else” (GP 97). The indefinite pronoun slips past the binary structures of state and location, and prose and poem. The places that Riley visits in ExoMáni and Argolid are split into pockets of verse held within the blanks of pages, which further spread the limits of the poem to include the extensions of the margins. Instead of an emplacement within the referential expanse of a foreign landscape, the sequences radiate outwards, “(f)ollowing the old streets out of the world” (GP 77), both denying and reconciling with space as the record of history. In accommodating the spaces of their negation, “the edge of nothing” (GP 113), the sequences map themselves against the signifier of a world that is neither located at the limits of language nor subsumed by the form in a critique of certainty. The second sequence of “Gulf of Korinth” states, “And thousands of people each day from/ all over the world, aware to a greater or lesser extent/ where they are […]” (GP 73). The world as a temporal phenomenon shrinks and dilates while observed from multiple locations, within the measure of a given day. In “First Notes on Daylight,” published in the first series of TEI, Prynne maps the expanse of the world with the extent of the day: “The common world, how far we/ go, the practical limits of daylight” (Prynne 233). Yet the “strophic muscular pattern” of the poem makes the history of the individual commensurate with the “entire condition of landscape” (Prynne 233) and brings together

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“the visible horizon and the horizon of my [the poet’s] knowledge” (Sutherland, “X L Prynne” 117). With the individual and the world commensurable, the early poetry of Prynne resists the alternating expansion and shrinkage of the world. As early as the introductory note to the second series of TEI, Riley is skeptical of this convergence of the centers of the individual and the world. Characterizing migration as “necessary movement on no given patterning,” Riley discredits the notion of migration as a “matter of return,” whether to a predestined center or one mapped against the stature of the individual (CPTEI 96). The narrative discontinuity between the sequences in Greek Passages persists as a symptom of this failure to map the poetic self against the signifier of the world. Riley’s sequence ends with an exhortation, impersonal in its evocation of universality: “and we wouldn’t want anyone to/ be hurt, would we. Anyone in the world” (GP 73). The largesse of the sentiment makes demands of the anonymous “anyone,” such that the limits of the world are mapped by varying diurnal observations: the individual “participat[ing] in a larger noun” (Riley, “Two Letters”). The pattern of exchange that Riley envisioned for TEI, communicating in bursts and operating outside of the sense of the past as an archive, characterizes the world both as a product of reflection and invention. The lyric instances within the prosaic observations and evocations of sentiment, cobbled from memory and guised as solipsistic empathy, cancel geographic and temporal limitations. Divested of lyric particularity and narrative interaction, the form is ungrounded and makes the world visible at the conceptual edges. In “Two Letters,” Riley suspects the transmission of meaning through poetry that obstructs intimacy with the reader: “In the exhibited world which is where I (choose to) operate, it lacks necessity.” The form of the prose poem, sustained through non-relation with history and landscape, is constantly at odds with being an autonomous and finished artifact as it extends itself into the next sequence. Communication, uninterrupted and reliant on enabling conceptual and auditory distances, strikes a hopeful note in Oliver’s writing: “I cannot extend the burden of conviction much beyond this present moment … but, as far as possible, to contain past and future selves and to fuse them into circadian potential” (ITCOS 17). In mapping the world against the self-­renewing journey of daylight, Riley projects communication as momentarily achieved through the intertranslatability of subjective positions and not as the precondition of utterance.

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Works Cited Barnett, Anthony. “Innocence in the Heart.” Grosseteste Review, vol. 12, 1979: 159–161. Bordell, Will. “Buried Affect: The Lyric ‘Moment’ in Peter Riley’s Excavations.” Textual Practice, vol. 34, no. 2, 2020: 255–282. Byron, Lord. Selected Poems. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Cheah, Pheng. “The Pope’s Blowgun.” What is a World? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 78–109. Corcoran, Kelvin. New and Selected Poems. Swindon: Shearsman, 2004. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Introduction.” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 1–16. Hall, John. “Routes 2.” The English Intelligencer, January/February 1966– March/April 1967, 226. Lowenstein, Tom. “Excavation and Contemplation: Peter Riley’s Distant Points.” In The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley. Ed. Nate Dorward. Toronto: Coach House, 1999. 185–195. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 351–378. Milne, Drew. “Agoraphobia and the Embarrassment of Manifestos: Notes Towards a Community of Risk.” Jacket 20, December 2002. http://jacketmagazine. com/20/pt-­dm-­agora.html. Oliver, Douglas. In the Cave of Succession. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1974. ———. “An Island That is All the World.” In Three Variations on the Theme of Harm. London: Paladin, 1990. 38–109. Pattison, Neil, Reitha Pattison, and Luke Roberts. Collected Prose of the English Intelligencer. Cambridge: Mountain, 2012. Prynne, J.  H. “First Notes on Daylight.” The English Intelligencer, January/ February 1966–March/April 1967, 232–233. Riley, Peter. “The Antiquary.” The English Intelligencer, January/February 1966– March/April 1967, 87–94 and 201–203. ———. Greek Passages (2002–2005). Swindon: Shearsman, 2009. ———. Excavations. Sussex: Reality Street, 2004. ———. Dawn Songs. Swindon: Shearsman, 2017. ———. “Some Notes Marginal to Douglas Oliver’s In the Cave of Suicession.” Grosseteste Review, vol. 12, 1979, 162–190. ———. “Two Letters to British Poets,” Quid 6, 2000. Sankar, Nandini Ramesh. “Complicity and Cambridge Poetry.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 4, 2017, 805–21.

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Sutherland, Keston. “The Accomplishment of Knowing One’s Place.” In The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley. Ed. Nate Dorward. Toronto: Coach House, 1999. 133–138. Tuma, Keith. Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. ———. “An Interview with Peter Riley.” The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley. Ed. Nate Dorward. Coach House Press, 1999, 7–27. Valèry, Paul. “Philosophy of the Dance.” Dance, no. 33/34, Spring–Summer 1976, 65–75. Wilkinson, John. “Imperfect Pitch.” In Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970–1991. Ed. Denise Riley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 154–172. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.  F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 2008.

Index1

A Abel, Elizabeth, 40 Achebe, Chinua, 19, 124, 124n4 Affective gendered belonging, 33 Agamben, Giorgio, 79, 80, 82–84 Alafaireet, Mia, 149 Amis, Kingsley, 187 Anarchism, 79, 80, 86, 91 anarchist utopian thinking, 78, 79 Anglophone, 22, 36 Ann, Koh Tai, 188 Anti-colonial nationalism, 30 Anzaldúa, Gloria E., Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 17 Arbour, Robert, 144 Arendt, Hannah, 74 Aristotle, 136 philia and agape, 136 Arondekar, Anjali, 36

Ashcroft, Bill, Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures, 11 Auden, W. H., 187 In Time of War, 187 B Babbitt, Irving, 188 Baldwin, James, 117, 118, 118n1, 138 Barnett, Antony, 269 Barnett, Victoria, 73 Bassanese, Fiora A., 176 Bassnett, Susan, Comparative Literatures: A Critical Introduction, 6, 13 Basu, Chhobi, 32n3 Basu, Pratibha, 39, 40 Baumann, Michael L., 79 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 245n9

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Banerjee, N. Cadle (eds.), Rethinking Place through Literary Form, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8

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278 

INDEX

Bentham, Jeremy, 196, 205 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 196 Bercovich, Sacvan, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, 9n8 Berman, Marshall, 132 Bernabé, Jean, 249 Bhabha, Homi K. biopolitics, 79 Nation and Narration, 15 “The World and the Home,” 42 Bishop, Thomas, 173n3 Bloch, Ernst, 86 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 72–74 The Church and the Jewish Question, 72 Bookchin, Murray, 86 Bordell, Will, 257, 267 Bourgeois subversivism, 171 Bresciani, Antonio, 180n4 Brodsky, Claudia In the Place of Language, 15n12 “Philosophy, Literature and the Critique of Spatialization,” 19n13 Brown, George Mackay, 15–16, 57–75 The Loom of Light, 70 Magnus, 15, 16, 60, 64, 68–73 The Orcadian Poet, 71 An Orkney Tapestry, 69–70 Travellers, 15, 16, 63–68, 73, 75 Brown, Norman O., vii, vii Bru, Sascha, 179 Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects, 3n1 Butler, Judith, 122, 130 Byatt, A. S., 188 Byron, Lord, 271

C Calvino, Italo, 22, 23, 227–250 Caplan, Jane, 79 Carey, Edward S., 18, 105 Carter, Alberto Howard, III, 232n3, 239 Casey, Edward, 3n1 Certeau, Michel de, 41 Césaire, Aime, 119 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 249 Chankin, Donald O., 79 Chatterjee, Partha, 30 Cheah, Pheng, What is a World?, 14, 267 Chou, Shiuhhuah Serena, vn1 Chowdhury, Indira, 53 Chughtai, Ismat, 36 Cobham, Rhonda, 235 Collected Prose of The English Intelligencer, 251–273 Communist Party, 29, 31, 33–35, 38, 44, 47, 87, 177 Comte, August, 196 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, and Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the Reorganization of Society, 196 Confiant, Raphaël, 249 Conrad, Joseph, 131 Heart of Darkness, 131 Cooper, Carolyn, 228, 242 Corcoran, Kelvin, 24 My Life with Byron, 270–272 Corra, Bruno, 163 Creeley, Robert, 252 Creswell, Tim In Place/ Out of Place, 45n5 Place: A Short Introduction, 14 Croce, Benedetto, 168, 177, 179–182, 188, 189 Crockatt, Ian, 67

 INDEX 

D Daiches, David Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood, 73 Davis, Mike City of Quartz, 100 Late Victorian Holocausts, 30n1 Davis, Peter Maxwell, 70 Debi, Mahasweta, 37 De Francisci, Enza, 165 Deleuze, Gilles, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 17, 20, 144–145, 149, 151, 157 Denationalized, 58 Deprovincialization, 162, 164, 168 De-realization of localities, 58 de Rivera, Miguel Primo, 87 Dimock, Wai Chee, Shades of the Planet, 269 Dodsworth, Martin, 187 Dombroski, Robert S., 178 Domestic spaces, 31, 40, 50 Dorn, Ed, 252 Double invisibility, 35 Dougherty, Stephen, 79 DuBois, W. E. B., 236 Dunn, Douglas, 188, 189 Durrell, Lawrence, 187 Duyvendak, Jan Willem, 119, 125, 127 The Politics of Home, 119 E Eastside barrio, 100, 103 Eaton, Mark, 72 Eggan, Taylor A., 4 Elden, Stuart, 163 The Birth of Territory, 163 Empathetic unsettlement, 128 The English Intelligencer, 23, 251–273

279

Enright, D. J. Bread rather than Blossoms, 189, 192–202 Collected Poems, 204, 205 Daughters of Earth, 205 Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, 204n3 The Old Adam, 204 Some Men are Brothers, 189 The World of Dew, 191–201 Even-Zohar, Itamar, Polysystem Studies, 11–12 Evers, Medgar, 117 F Fabulist writing, 65 Family romance, 22, 212–214, 217, 219–225 ‘’Family Romances,” 212 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 213 Famine kitchen, 37, 38 Fanon, Franz, 19, 119, 124n4, 127, 127n5 Farland, Maria, 146, 148, 149 Federici, Silvia, 37n4 Feinstein, Elaine, 252 Female bildungsroman, 32, 40, 47 Ferrer, Francisco, 86, 91 Foley, Barbara, 147, 148n4 Fontana, Benedetto, 177 Ford, Arthur L., 12 Foucault, Michel, Hérodote, 7n5, 19, 163–164 Fraiman, Susan, 40 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 145, 152, 153, 158, 212, 213, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225 Fukui, Haruhiro, 190–191 Furbank, P. N., 188

280 

INDEX

G Gaffney, Vincent, 63 Gander, Forrest, 1, 4, 5 Be With, 1, 2, 5 “The Sounding,” 1, 5 Gender-neutral subjectivity, 36 Gentile, Giovanni, 168 Giles, Paul Transnationalism in Practice, 5, 9 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic, 12 Glissant, Edouard, 23, 227–235, 228n1, 229n2, 233n4, 237–245, 248–250 Caribbean Discourse, 227, 230, 233, 235 ‘’In Praise of Creoleness,” 249 Invisible Cities, 229, 230, 232, 233, 239, 240, 247 “The Quarrel with History,” 230 Goldwasser, James, 86 Good, Graham, 188 Gopal, Priyamvada, 36 Gordimer, Nadine, 138 Gordon, Rachel, 200 Gornick, Vivian, 213, 225 Gramsci, Antonio, 161–182 Avanti!, 162n1, 166–168, 176 Corriere Universitario, 179 Letters from Prison, 161 Prison Notebooks, 167, 177, 181 Selections from Cultural Writings, 162n1, 164–168, 172–182 Selections from Prison Notebooks, 172, 176–182 “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 177 Guattari, Félix, 17, 20, 145, 149, 151, 157 Gulddal, Jesper, 79 Guthke, Karl S., 86

H Haiku, 21, 193–195, 197 Hall, John, 255, 256, 261 Hamlet, 88 Hartmann, Heidi, 37n4 Hayden, Dolores, 105, 106, 109 Hayot, Eric, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, 22n14 Heaney, Seamus, 75, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 151n6 Henshall, Kenneth, 189 Hilhorst, Dorothea, 200 Hirsch, Marianne, 40 Homo sacer, 84 Hore, Bratati, 44 Hsu, Hsuan L., 110n3 Hutchinson, Sikivu, 98, 99 I Ideology of domesticity, 31, 32 Inclusive exclusion of the state, 83 Indigenous nationalisms, 30 Ingram, Tammy, 145n2 Inter-caste romance, 39 Interchangeability of state, 81–84, 91 Ives, Peter, 179 J Jahn, Beate, 203 Jalil, Rakshanda, 36 Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the Future, 10 Jansma, Kristopher, 117, 118n1 Jeannet, Angela M., 240 Jehlen, Myra, Ideology and Classic American Literature, 9 Joyce, James, 70 Joyce, William, 60

 INDEX 

K Kafkaesque absurdism, 79 Kawaguchi, Yoko, 203 Kerrigan, John, Archipelagic English, 12 Khanna, Neetu, 36 Kim, Soyoung, vn1 Kincaid, Jamaica, 23, 229, 231, 236 The Autobiography of my Mother, 236 King, Martin Luther Jr., 117 L LaCapra, Dominick, 128 Lalita, K., 37 Landauer, Gustav, 86, 88 Langland, Elizabeth, 40 Larkin, Philip, 187 Larsen, Ernest, 79 Lazzarro-Weis, Carol, 40 Liberal humanist internationalism, 186 Liberal individualism, 52 Linguistic memory, 107 Literary prolepsis and analepsis, 112, 114 Loomba, Ania, 31, 33–35, 44, 49, 51 Lowenstein, Tom, 258 Lűbbe, Peter, 79 Lukàcs, George The Theory of the Novel, 10n9 M MacCaig, Norman, 66 Mahmood, Saba, 21, 200 Majumdar, Swapan Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions, 6n3 Malcolm X, 117

281

Mani, Venkat, 22n14 Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain, 75 Manuel, Frank, 77, 78 Manuel, Fritzie, 77, 78 Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization, 10 Mariani, Umberto, 174, 175 Marinetti, F. T. et al, 163, 180, 182 “The Futurist Synthetic Theatre,” 163 Marshall, Peter, 78 May, Simon, 131 Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, 131 Mazower, Mark, 196, 204, 205 McClain, Linda C., 201 McNally, Mark, 176–177 Mengestu, Dinaw, 117–138 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 263 Mexican-American identity, 98 Milne, Drew, 270 Mixed-genre work, 6, 144, 149 Modigliani, Amedeo, 66 Mohammed, Patricia, 228, 242 Mootoo, Shani, 23, 229, 231, 246, 247 Cereus Blooms at Night, 246, 248 Moraru, Christian, 118 Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading, 6n4, 33 Muir, Edwin, 65, 66 Muñoz, Alicia, 106n2, 110n3 N National Schizophrenia Newsletter, 66 Neolithic society, 60, 61 neolithic burials, 64 Normative geography, 45n5 Norse runes, 16, 61, 67–69

282 

INDEX

O Okin, Susan Moller, 201 Oliver, Douglas, 24, 253, 259, 263, 268, 269 The Diagram Poems, 269 In the Cave of Suicession, 253, 259, 273 “The Island that is all the World,” 263 Olson, Charles, vi, vii, 252 Ontohpur (the domestic sphere), 41 Orkneyinga saga, 61 “Othered” places, 37, 38, 45–47

Postcolonial feminisms, 32 Pound, Ezra, 167 Powell, Patricia, 23, 229, 231, 238, 239 The Pagoda, 238 Private sphere, 15, 30–31 Protectivist state, 82 Provinces, 163 Provincialism, 165, 166 Prynne, J. H., 252, 255, 262, 272, 273 Public domesticity, 32, 33 Pueblo, 98

P Parable, 172 Paris Review, 125 Paul, Catherine E., 167, 168 Payne, Charlton, 79 Pease, Donald E., 90 Peck, Raoul, 118n1 Pedwell, Carolyn, 119, 120, 128, 129 People’s War, 29, 31, 49 Petroglyphic language, 62 Pirandello, Luigi, 161–182 Così è (se vi pare), 172 The Late Mattia Pascal, 165–182 Liolà, 21, 161–182 Sicilian theatre, 167 Place memory, 105–108, 112 Porro, Anton Muzio, 170 Concerning the Art of Loving Women, 170 “a Life and death of Faustino Materucci […],” 171 Porteous, John Douglas, 119 Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, 119 Porter, Holly, 200 Porter, Peter, 188 Posmentier, Sonya, 148n5

Q Quaderni del carcere, 162 Quart, Barbara Koenig, 211 R Rabinowitz, Paula, 36 Relief kitchen, 16, 44, 45, 48–51, 53 Ricoeur, Paul, 10 Riley, Peter, 23, 251 “The Antiquary,” 252–255 “Archaeological Guesswork,” 262 Dawn Songs, 262 Excavations, 23, 257, 259, 264–266, 269, 270 Greek Passages, 23, 257, 260–262, 264, 265, 270, 271, 273 “Two Letters to British Poets,” 265, 273 Roberts, Brian Russell, vin3 Rognvaldr, Earl Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw, 67 Romo, Ricardo, 98, 99 Root systems, 144, 149–153, 155–159 Roth, Philip, 211–225 The Anatomy Lesson, 22, 211, 214–217, 224–225

 INDEX 

Everyman, 214 The Facts, 215n3 The Ghost Writer, 211–222 Portnoy’s Complaint, 213, 214 Sabbath’s Theatre, 213–214 Zuckerman Bound trilogy, 211, 214, 215, 225 Roy, Sabitri, 32n3, 36 Roychowdhury, Reba, 32n3 Rubin, Gayle, 37n4 S Saint Magnus, 66, 68–75 San Juan, E., Jr., 171 Sankar, Nandini Ramesh, 265 Sanyal, Sulekha, 15, 29, 32–37, 40–47 Nabankur, 15, 32–34, 37–40, 42, 44, 47, 49, 51–53 Sarkar, Sumit, 53 Sarkar, Tanika, 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 137 Saussy, Haun, 58 Schmitt, Carl, 83 Scholem, Gershom, 215n1 Schuster, Joshua, 20, 148n5 Scott, James C., 79, 80, 90 The Art of not Being Governed, 80 Scottish nationalism, 65 Seibert, Peter, 79 Sen, Manikuntala, 32n3 Settimelli, Emilio, 163 Shaffer, Donald M., Jr., 144 Shostak, Debra, 213, 214, 216, 225 Simms, Jacqueline, 188 Skaldic verse, 67 Smith, Sandra, 119 Soja, Edward, 42 Spanish Civil War, 86, 87 Spencer, Bernard, 187 Spencer, Nicholas, 79

283

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 3n1 Death of a Discipline, 7 Statelessness, 79, 80, 90, 91, 169 Struck, Wolfgang, 79 Suburban expansion, 99 Sullivan, Andrew, 136 Sutherland, Keston, 256, 261, 273 T Tagore, Rabindranath, The Home and the World, 41, 42 Tallis, Raymond, 188–189 Tally, Robert T., Jr. Topophrenia, 8, 10n9 Utopia in the Age of Globalization, 10 Tanka, 21, 193–197 Tharu, Susie J., 37 Thwaite, Anthony, 188 Tilgher, Adriano, 173n3 Tolstoy, Leo, 66 Toomer, Jean, 20, 143–159 The South in Literature, 150, 154 Torpey, John, 79, 82, 83, 85 Transgressive geography, 45–46, 51 Transnational, 12, 13, 32–35, 90, 118–120, 131, 236 Traven, B. The Bridge in the Jungle, 91 The Cotton-Pickers, 91 The Death Ship, 15–17, 77–91 “The Night Visitor,” 91 Treverton, Edward N., 87 Tuma, Keith, 252, 256, 261, 263, 266 Turnbull, Gael, 252 U Unheimlich, 145, 152, 153, 156–159 Uproot systems, 144, 152, 157, 159 Urban renewal, 18, 100

284 

INDEX

V Valéry, Paul, 268 van Hoek, Maarten A. M., 63 Vernacular, 36, 166 Vidler, Anthony, 157, 158 The Architectural Uncanny, 157 Villa, Raúl Homero, 100 Viramontes, Helena María, 18, 97–115 W Wald, Sarah D., 106n2, 111n4, 114n5 Walker, Alice, 144, 147n3 In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, 144 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature, 4 A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, 22n14 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 11 Walsh, Judith, 31n2 Walsh, William, 188, 202 Wardi, Anissa Janine, 147

Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, 8, 9n7 Welsh, John, 244 Westphal, Bertrand Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, 7, 8n6 The Plausible World, 8n6 Wilkerson, Isabel, 145n1 Wilkinson, John, 260 Wilson, Rob Sean “Exporting Christian Transcendentalism, Importing Hawaiian Sugar,” 12 Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture, vn1 Pacific Beneath the Pavements, vin3 “World Gone Wrong,” viiin5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 263 Z Zerilli, Linda M.G., 21, 201 Zetkin, Klara, 43 Zeugma, 108 Zones of refuge, 16, 80, 90