The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti 9780804766494

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THE LANDSCAPES OF ALIENATION

Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Celine, and Onetti

The Landscapes of

Alienation IDEOLOGICAL SUBVERSION IN KAFKA, CELINE, AND ONETTI

Jack Murray STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

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Stanford University Press, Stanford, California © 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP data appear at the end of the book

TO MY GOOD FRIEND MICHAEL STRICKLAND

(Where would the world be without him?)

Contents

A Note on Translations

lX

Introduction

I

ONE

Some Historical Considerations

5

TWO

Alienation

THREE

Kafka

47 82

FOUR

celine

I28

FIVE

Onetti Conclusion

I75 2II

Notes

225

Bibliography

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Index

257

A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

Quotations from the three novels discussed in this book are from the following editions: Louis-Ferdinand Celine. journey to the End of the Night. Translated by John H. P. Marks. New York: New Directions, 1960. Franz Kafka. Amerika. Translated by Edwin Muir, Preface by Klaus Mann, Afterword by Max Brod. New York: New Directions, 1946. Juan Carlos Onetti. The Shipyard. Translated by Rachel Caffyn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968.

THE LANDSCAPES OF ALIENATION

Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Celine, and Onetti

INTRODUCTION

This comparative study of Franz Kafka's Amerika, LouisFerdinand Gline's journey to the End of the Night, and Juan Carlos Onetti's The Shipyard actually began with the last of these three authors, specifically with Emir Rodriguez Monegal's statement that Kafka and Celine had had a determining influence upon Onetti. 1 As I then read the first two authors in the context of the third, it became clear that one of the most outstanding features common to all of them was a haunting preoccupation with space-not simply descriptions of space but, even aside from particular textual instances, an ongoing sense of space that never leaves the reader as he reads their works. In particular, the represented worlds of these texts were suffused with a sense of alienation. Most unsettling was the strong impression that what might be called the "alienation effect" of the works proceeded from something that transcended their predominantly realistic mode of representation. In order to uncover what was at stake, my study evolved from a fairly formal narratological analysis of the texts to an ideological one. In the initial narratological scrutiny of the novels, I noted that many descriptive portions were, in fact, disturbingly unsatisfactory as mere representation. Indeed, each novel appeared to have its own distinct way of forsaking canonic realist patterns of depiction. At first, in order to account for this, it seemed enough to invoke the alienaI

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Introduction

tion itself. But this soon proved insufficient, since alienation alone could not generate so unsettling an effect as did the space of these three novels. Finally, I came across Fredric Jameson's descriptive phrase: "cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts." 2 It was clear that the symbolic resonance of the spaces presented in these three novels pointed to a deeply recessed ideological preoccupation. In short, the texts were accomplishing a transcendent purpose. It struck me that the only way I could uncover such a purpose was by joining the formal with the ideological in my analysis. In other words, my object would now be to see how the texts in fact became symbolic acts in the ideological sense. "Ideological," of course, has many meanings. Where literature is concerned, scholars lately have been citing Raymond Williams's three broad readings of the term: "(i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group; (ii) a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas." 3 I shall at various times use "ideological" in all three senses. The first applies principally to the bourgeoisie and, more broadly, to those living under capitalism (or, to put it abstractly, in the context of rational, secular materialism). The second, rather Althusserian sense does not retain-in this study at least-its Marxian counterpoise of "true" knowledge. In the context of the three novels and the literary tradition from which they emerge, it would be better to speak simply of a contrary or reactive ideological outlook that sees the primary one as illusory. One may consider this resistant bias in the old-fashioned way as being simply the author's, or one may regard it as "a representational structure" in the text that unmasks the hegemonic value system. 4 If taken in the latter sense, then "ideological" now assumes Williams's third meaning. And we are able to see why "cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts" take on a significant ideological character. As the reader will see, the author's own personal and historical background retains an importance for me that it often loses in formalistic studies. Here one may quote Jameson's "history . . . as an absent cause," one that narrativizes the political-or, as I prefer it, ideological-unconscious of the one who writes. In modern times the specific content of that unconscious tends to consist of historical

Introduction

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horrors that are-again to quoteJameson-"lived by the contemporary subject as a genuine politico-historical pensee sauvage which necessarily informs all our cultural artifacts." As he goes on to show, ideology thus becomes installed in form itself, where it is "sedimented," often at the expense of the usual message traditionally conveyed by that form. 5 I do not pretend to know by what magic an author's own historical unconscious informs his fictions, although Jameson's idea that he is narrativizing what is essentially political experience is exceptionally useful. 6 The end result is always a subversion of established forms that produces a devastating political effect. If anything, then, my study attempts a highly detailed demonstration of how this effect is produced, and my hope is that its reach is broader than merely a close technical reading of three specific texts. On the one hand, I have never favored critical examinations of literature that are all theory, with only the most cursory and superficial look at the primary texts themselves. On the other, systematic formal analysis that does not produce wide-ranging and useful conclusions becomes arid and tedious. The question of reconciling the two sides is especially critical in the case of the ideological aspect of literature, where the temptation to speak in abstract terms is all too often irresistible. My study, by its close focus on specific passages in specific texts, attempts to achieve a happy balance between the two tendencies and, where the ideological is concerned, to provide a formalist demonstration of how that aspect functions in the broader setting of highly charged political contexts. Finally, and in a totally different vein, I hope that my study will help, in some small way, to promote greater familiarity in the English-speaking world with Juan Carlos Onetti's works. Here, after all, is one of the pioneering figures of the great period of contemporary Latin American fiction and a profoundly important writer whose misfortune, where we are concerned, is to have spent most of his career in a small, Spanish-speaking corner of the world about which we tend to hear very little. His own stature quite transcends the narrow boundaries of his native Uruguay; a reappraisal of this compelling and influential figure is now in order.

ONE

Some Historical Considerations

How does a contemporary novel convey the alienation of modern life in the world it represents in its pages? Obviously the novel cannot simply describe the conditions or effects of alienation in a detached or objective manner but must already be predisposed, from some ideological vantage point, to single out the negative aspects of life, as the author or narrator sees it, and to present them in such a way that the reader too will register the description as negative. In this context, one might say that ideology is knowing the world according to a certain critical set of values brought into play in the mere depiction of the world. If those values are to be communicated to the reader, the depiction cannot be innocent; rather, it must be interpretive-and persuasive as well. In short, some kind of rhetoric is involved. Franz Kafka's Amerika, Louis-Ferdinand Celine'sjourney to the End of the Night, and Juan Carlos Onetti's The Shipyard are remarkable portrayals of the alienated spaces of our twentieth-century world. All three come at the end of a long evolution in the novel that requires some exploration if the individual analyses of these works are to have meaning. Such an exploration must be at once theoretical and his torical, although in a narrowly focused, rather than exhaustive, way; this will be the task of the present chapter. Since the historical aspect does not become evident without some 5

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Some Historical Considerations

theoretical clearing of the ground, it is best to start with that. And I prefer to do so in the framework of the now historic debate between Georg Lukacs and his fellow German Marxists Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Bertolt Brecht on the topic of realism versus modernism. The debate is highly relevant to my own considerations, because Lukacs specifically attacked Kafka for having a negative ideological influence. This opinion became canonic among the oldfashioned, hard-line Marxists who followed Lukacs, all of whom viewed Kafka as decadent. The hard-liners' attack against Kafka was directed, first of all, at the frequently nonrealistic character of his works as well as their patently pessimistic aura. The charge was made that they promoted a sense of despair over man's estranged estate in the modern age, either because Kafka was expressing his own despair in the texts or because the texts offered nothing that would suggest how to amend things. It is in this context that Kafka was reproached for resorting to "modernism," a mode condemned for ideological insufficiency, particularly to the extent that it failed to record or represent the historical circumstances from which alienation had emerged. Boris Suchkov, for example, cited Amerika for totally omitting "the historically concrete causes which make man's existence onerous, difficult, and tortured," while Paul Reimann said, "Against the despair over the capitalist present, to which Kafka succumbed, we oppose our optimistic insight into the happy communist future of our country." 1 Hence, Kafka (and with him, we may presume, Celine and Onetti) was being described as still fumbling in the ideological gloom of late capitalism without knowing how to guide man out to the light. Of course, Lukacs himself went considerably further than this kind of reflexive hard-line cant and posited an antithesis between modernist works and what he called "critical realism," that branch of bourgeois realism coming down from the Romantic era and such writers as Balzac. Such a mode, Lukacs thought, was able to reflect the problematics of man caught in the flux of society and history. Since his conviction was that content determines form, he felt that realism's focus on the sociohistorical was the correct path to follow. In his view, modernism (in the footsteps of Naturalism) had turned its repertory of technical literary devices into a set offormal principles, thus subordinating content to form. Modernism, while attempting to replace

Some Historical Considerations

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the realist mode as inadequate and obsolete, had lost both its dynamics and its relevance in the process and replaced them with a sterile and static quality. 2 In the debate between Lukacs and his fellow Marxists, one particular cause of dispute turned on a comment Lukacs made on Expressionism: "Ifliterature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface." 3 The first assumption of this statement to be contested was that there is such a thing as objective reality and that Lukacs (and the kind of realists he approves of) could know what it is. Here we have a concrete instance of the close relationship between ideology and knowledge. On this point Bloch asked, "But what if Lukacs's reality-a coherent, infinitely mediated totality-is not so objective after all?" He added that the Expressionists, by what Lukacs had qualified as their decadent excesses, instead of preaching despairing resignation, might in fact have been seeking to shatter the capitalist image of the world. 4 Lukacs countered that at best they only depicted a state of mind from which people suffer under imperialism, not the imperialist world itself. 5 It is plain throughout, of course, that Lukacs was not talking about anything so naive as a direct perception of things-as-they-are but rather a correct ideological view-namely, Marxist, or something approximating Marxism's historical scope and omnibus explanatory pretensions. Ifl emphasize this last point, it is because Lukacs always insisted on the ideological grounding of the realist mode. A simple description of surfaces would not suffice; one had to show the ideological underpinnings as well. Hence, he no more believed that literature simply reflects reality than do, say, Roland Barthes, the deconstructionists, or the postmodernists in more recent times. I shall review some of the counterarguments to realism as plain mimesis later in the chapter. What is important to understand at this point is simply Lukacs's view that realism was the only correct mode one could use to reflect reality in its full historical and ideological complexity. Inevitably, this was perceived as a conservative, if not outright reactionary, position by the other Marxist critics in the debate. In his

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Some His tori cal Considerations

own attack on Lukacs and the traditional realist novel, Brecht said, "It is absolutely false, that is to say, it leads nowhere, it is not worth the writer's while, to simplify his problems so much that the immense, complicated, actual life-process of human beings in the age of the final struggle between the bourgeois and the proletarian class, is reduced to a 'plot,' setting, or background for the creation of great individuals." 6 Adorno saw as characteristic of modernist works (of the sort Lukacs condemned) the domination of the subject over the object: "The contradiction between the object reconciled in the subject, i.e., spontaneously absorbed into the subject, and the actual unreconciled object in the outside world, confers on the work of art a vantage-point from which it can criticize actuality. Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world." 7 This was a trend that was present even in the earliest realism, and it is to this topic we now turn. In the debate just reviewed, certain points must be emphasized. When Bloch was attacking Lukacs's belief in reality as "a coherent, infinitely mediated totality," he was, in fact, talking about an ideological conceptualization of reality. In other words, positing a correct way in which to conceive reality and a correct mode in which to represent it (while dismissing other ways as incorrect) soon becomes tantamount to imposing a nionological form of discourse on the novel in the service of an ideological structure out to displace all others. Realism, in this context, is not innocent or neutral at all but is tied to a specific ideological enterprise. Its deceptively objective or materially based representations of reality are ideologically weighted. My argument is that realism has always been so engaged, emerging not simply from capitalism but from the rational materialism on which it is based, in conjunction with a vast political and socioeconomic restructuring of society that began in the eighteenth century. Marxism's contestation of capitalism in literature while still using the realist mode merely made it clear that the mode was, in fact, the vehicle for a macro-ideology transcending both capitalism and Marxism. Here we must return to Adorno's remark about art being "the negative knowledge of the actual world." Amerika, journey to the End of the Night, and The Shipyard explore the sinister ways in which the object is absorbed into the subject while at the same time continuing to stand unreconciled outside the subject. This relationship opens the

Some Historical Considerations

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way to a new form ofBakhtinian dialogism where the negative knowledge, at the discursive level, enters into a dialogue with knowledge presented as positive. In ideological terms, it is not so much one ideology matching itself against another as a monological ideology undergoing some kind of unwitting deconstruction through its absorption by the subject. In formal terms, if realism is the vehicle of a monological order, then antirealist strategies, such as those modernism uses in the novel, perform a critique of that order and lay bare, in the process, its despotically exclusive and autocratic tendencies. Formal practices thereby serve ideological purposes. And in the novels under consideration the process involves the unreconciled subject pursued by the imperious object. In short, against a mode that essentially conveys a monological order, the antirealist mode calls that order into question. And if, following the canonic realist novel, the antirealist novel lapses into plot, setting, and background, it disturbs these different features in an ideologically purposeful way. 8 Such disturbances have a profound significance that I shall be at considerable pains to analyze through much of this study. But the essential question-one that must be investigated at some length before the analysis. either of the alienation theme itself or of the individual authors may take place-is how the critical or ideologically skeptical impulse has worked in Western literature in the modern period. To deal with that question, I shall now turn to the historical aspect of the problem, where I am interested not so much in the whole history of the novel in the modern period as in certain key developments or features that are relevant to a fruitful analysis of the three novels under study.

Relevant Developments in Modern European Literature Since my own training is primarily in French literature, I shall tend to concentrate on pertinent historical changes in that domain, although I am somewhat reassured by the fact that the French novel set many of the prevailing norms for the novel everywhere in the Western world as it evolved toward its present form. Throughout these considerations, of course, I shall be emphasizing the ideological aspect in the representation of the world. The first important development affecting Kafka, Celine, and

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Some Historical Considerations

Onetti goes back to the eighteenth century. Starting with that period, most French literature of lasting significance has been written from a politically disaffected stance regarding whatever regime was in power and has been generally alienated from the predominant ideology of the hegemonic sector of society (at first monarchic and absolutist, but increasingly bourgeois after the Revolution of 1789). 9 Before this change, however various or even contrasting in form it may have appeared, literature nonetheless tended to depict a world that lacked even the appearance of ideological heterogeneity such as we find in modern times. Of the neoclassical period, for example, Juri Lorman says: It was the relationship between truth and the represented world that constituted the artistic point of view. The stability and unambiguousness of these relationships, their striving towards and gathering within a common center, corresponded to the concepts of eternity, unity, and the stability of truth. Truth was conceived as being single and immutable, but hierarchically structured-revealing itself at the same time in different degrees to each individual consciousness. 10 If the literary revolution following the neoclassical era ended a monological order that reflected a political reality, it could not prevent the ongoing effort on the part of dominant forms and modes to attempt their own restoration, since every successful literary form gives up that success reluctantly and resists the upstart out to replace it. But, for a long time and through many changes of political regime, realism has been more obdurate than most and has remained the preferred mode of fiction for a majority of the reading public, presumably because (at least in principle) the relationship between truth and the represented world continues unambiguous and still essentially monological. This would seem to argue against Bakhtin's view of the modern novel as intrinsically dialogical. If dialogue there is, it is more usually in the form of a subtle sapping operation from within the realist mode itself, a process, as will be shown, that partakes of satire and parody. In order to study this kind of subversion, I should like to begin by examining two cases of prerealist or even premodern writers, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. French literature in the eighteenth century expressed its disaffection from the absurdities of the prevailing order by transforming itself into a vehicle for an ideological critique of

Some His tori cal Considerations

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the principles on which that order was based. It did so, not through a narrowly focused political assault, as we well know, but through an attack on a whole mentality that had been transformed into an ideology in the deep sense: a conditioned way of perceiving the world and all that goes on in it through biases so naturalized or so sacred as not to be subject to criticism at all. We may find, on the one hand, patently satirical texts such as Voltaire's Candide or, on the other, texts that invite the reader to try alternate ways ofliving in, and looking at, the world, such as the revolutionary fictions of Rousseau. Whatever its character, this literature signaled the demise of the monological order of the sort Lotman describes, with its attendant literature in appropriate thralldom. While it had become easy for many to see what was at fault in the old ways, it was not always so simple to see what would make things right in the coming era, and at times there was even a nostalgia, not necessarily for the ideological security of the monological era now past, but for a time, a society, and, for that matter, a world that seemed out of reach. Even Candide, so sure in its scathing lampoons, has the characteristic undertone of sadness suggesting times that are ideologically adrift. The die had been cast. Literary texts in the tradition now being established would stand forever afterwards in a critical relationship with the world with which they dealt, often expressing dissatisfaction with it and always imbued with the kind of ideological skepticism that, once set in motion, could not be reversed. One might well say that, so constituted, the World ofLetters was now to become a kind of appendage, if not an actual vanguard, of the Fourth Estate, a gadfly, even adopting an outright adversarial position that so marks off modern Western literature from what has been written in other times or places. As already stated, one means of contesting the world was satire, a mode Voltaire used in his Candide. But before we pass to a brief consideration of this work, we must sketch the chief or relevant characteristics of the mode, since I shall refer to it many times in the course of this study. 11 One must first understand that satire originates in rage, although it is rage that has been mastered and secreted under a deceptively innocent surface, so that we may say that a kind of ironic inversion of the animating impulse takes place. In traditional satire, the rage shows up in the text in the distorted, caricatural, or plainly ludicrous presentation of places, activities, or characters under attack,

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Some Historical Considerations

a presentation that frequently turns the normal view of them upside down. The places chosen, ones that the average reader might find unthreatening parts of his ordinary world, are depicted as antiutopias, the activities frenetic and mad, the characters perverse or dehumanized, their pursuits desperate, idiotic, and grotesque. What good people there are are fighting a rearguard action against the unscrupulous barbarians that seem to prevail everywhere. The protagonist, through whose eyes we view this lunatic version of the world, is nearly always grossly naive and is often called the "boobyhero." He usually comes into the represented world of the fiction from the outside and views it from his own peculiar perspective as fragmented, absurd, disorderly, corrupt, and murderous. No one there is to be trusted. His vantage point, of course, has been elaborated by the author to serve as a structuring principle for unmasking the absurdities of the world through which the character passes. 12 As with Candide's El Dorado, a satire may also depict a counterrealm to serve as utopia, but its description serves mostly to degrade even further, by contrast, the principal world represented in the text. An important detail to note is the contrast between the protagonist's ignorance and the narrative's ideological mastery of the world whose representation its discourse controls. At stake is a device for valorizing the familiar by adopting a totally unfamiliar anglethe simpletons-and thereby deftly offering a countervision that is at the same time a critique and a revalorization. M. M. Bakhtin has pointed out that representing reality from an uncomprehending viewpoint inevitably politicizes it, the unintelligibility itself transforming for the reader, in a polemical way, an accustomed world he understands only too well. 13 In this way, the familiar ideological views that constitute a form of conventional knowledge are seen from above, from a superior ideological angle, and are relativized to the point where their hegemonic status is nullified. Returning to Candide, we may now understand why any world represented in the satiric mode is inevitably an ideological comment on the present one and at the same time the evocation, perhaps tinged with melancholy, of a far better one. It is in this sense that it enacts an inversion, and thereby a subversion, of existing values. Voltaire's text, of course, exploits satire in its more traditional form, particularly through the character of Candide himself, who follows the pattern of

Some Historical Considerations

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the dunce who cannot understand the world into which he has been unexpectedly thrust after his expulsion from the earthly paradise of Baron Thunder-ten-tronkh's domain. Candide distorts the depiction of the world in an ideologically meaningful way by confronting two extremes-Candide's innocent vision of a benign and unthreatening world with the contrastive picture of a wicked and dangerous one that the text so emphatically offers us. We have in no sense a mimetic depiction of a real world, but rather an overstatement of two conflicting ideological construals of the same world. It is well to keep in mind this kind of radicalizing method, since it is deeply important to an understanding of the ideological workings of the three novels studied in this book. In Candide the satirical impulse at work in conjunction with a still evident classicism means that space descriptions, in any modern sense, are virtually absent. 14 Since the novel frequently parodies the traditional adventure romance, there is continual travel and the mention of many different lands and climes, but it is what Bakhtin would call "abstract space," which serves either narrative or ideological ends and has no interest in itself. 15 On a more general level, the space the reader posits for the novel, while officially placed in the "real" or geographical world of the eighteenth century, might be broadly qualified as a dystopia (even Candide's lamented Westphalia). An extraordinary number of highly various negative conditions prevail that serve to discredit Pangloss's unrelenting optimism and stand as testimony to the existence of abuses in need of drastic reform. Against this dystopia El Dorado is arrayed. El Dorado is not in the real or geographical world but, instead, in its particulars exemplifies an ideal society that contains those features (bourgeois in outline) that would make up an ideal world for an unrepentant capitalist like Voltaire. In conclusion, then, the double game of traditional satire has been made to serve a deeply political and ideological purpose. When we turn to a text by Rousseau, we meet a similar opposition of dystopia and utopia, again in the service of ideological convictions, but here we find particular sites described in rich detail. As example I would cite the following passage from La Nouvelle Heloise, found in a letter from Saint-Preux to Lord Edward: Upon approaching and recognizing this spot once so familiar to me, I was almost faint, but I regained control, I hid my distress, and we arrived.

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Some Historical Considerations

This lonely place consisted of a wild and barren refuge but full of the sort of beauties that appeal only to sensitive souls and appear repellent to the rest. A mountain stream formed from melting snow bore its muddy waters only twenty feet from where we were, and noisily conveyed loam, sand, and stone. Behind us a string of inaccessible rocks separated the natural platform where we stood from that part of the Alps called the Glaciers because of the enormous peaks of ice growing unceasingly that have covered them since the beginning of the world. On the right a forest of black fir spread a sad shade over us. A large wood of oaks was to our left on the other side of the torrent. And below us that vast watery plain formed by the lake in the heart of the Alps separated us from the rich hillsides of the Vaud country, the very picture of which was crowned by the peaks of the majestic Jura. 16 Two aspects of this passage are particularly striking. The first is its obviously unwitting respect for a realist code that requires an exactitude in detail such that a reader would suppose that, if he were to go to the actual physical site on which this description is based, he would recognize it immediately-the mimetic or denotative rule, one might say. The second aspect is the heavy ideological connotations evoked by the physical features of the place portrayed, connotations that quite transcend Saint-Preux's own sentimental associations of it with his ever thwarted and ever bittersweet love for Julie. In an early essay, "Rhetoric of the Image," Roland Barthes speaks of a collective ideological realm whose various elements could be signified by "connotators" -that is, details in an image (he is speaking of pictorial ones) that could be recognized as referring back to commonly shared ideological notions. Specifically, he described this ideology as "one and the same for a given history and society, whatever the signifiers of connotation to which it resorts." 17 At certain historical moments, of course, this ideology (which in Barthes's description sounds rather monological) is being contested, and even displaced, by another. In the description of the landscape from Rousseau, the connotators themselves-the loam in the stream's muddy water, the black fir or oaks, the geological features-become the discontinuous or erratic features that Barthes mentions as being "naturalized" through the syntagmatic role played here by realist denotation and transformed from isolated, nonspecific symbols into functioning, even pointed, elements in the production of (ideological) meaning. 18 As stated, Rousseau arrives at a point of ideological transition,

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playing a critical role in the changes occurring, so that Barthes's description of ideology must be expanded to include such inversions of common ideological meaning as Rousseau enacts here. He does so primarily by a material description of a landscape that in itself contains few explicit verbal indicators of its ideological import. For example, he merely states that the "beauties" he details in his description would be "repellent" to the ordinary run of people. In short, its connotations would be dysphoric to them. The remarkable achievement of Rousseau's description is to have turned the connotation process upside down so that these same particulars come to promote not only a euphoric but a positive ideological response. Hence, the connotations of the random physical features of the site described, emphasizing as they do the beneficent features of Nature herself, were to have deep meaning not only for the first generation of readers of his novel but for countless generations since. 19 In this way we see how the detailed enumeration of landscape features arranged rhetorically as connotators in Rousseau's text are transformed into the articles of an ideological faith. And, since this description of a place enters into a rhetorical relationship with other connotators, also tied to places described in the novel (e.g., households of exemplary simplicity and functionality), a broader faith comes to be proposed by the novel that-again as in the case of Candide-is arrayed against the hegemonic outlook and provides a probing critique of it. The passage from La Nouvelle Heloise therefore works an inversion and even subversion of established values, just like Voltaire's satire. But by seeking to alter people's ideological response to the basic material features of the world around them, to say nothing of the political and economic conditions in which they live, Rousseau's text is calling the reader to participate in a revolution far more fundamental than is Voltaire's. He does so against what he patently presents as "conventional wisdom," which he counters with knowledge of a different and-to him-superior kind. The omniscience of the hegemonic order has met its match and been outdone. These two examples-one of sociopolitical satire and the other of a didactic ideological narrative-open possibilities for the novel that had not existed before, because of the now special relationship between the serious work of fiction and the surrounding society. Above all, we now have a literature of ideas or, to put it another way, a

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Some Historical Considerations

literature that was transformed by the shaping role ideas played in its elaboration. This was a permanent gain for the novel in the modern period. By its active attempt to criticize and transform the world, serious literature would from now on be distinguished from lesser fictional forms that only sought to keep readers amused. Both Voltaire's and Rousseau's novels accomplished this purpose by placing two spatial realms in dialectical opposition, each alien to the other, with the result that ideological meaning was produced.

The Imperium After the eighteenth century the society, or "historical object," that the novel depicts is essentially that of expanding capitalism, which drastically transformed the separate national societies of Europe, gradually bringing them all under the same socioeconomic (though not political) system, with its attendant ideological outlooks. Indeed,]. M. Bernstein is no doubt correct in asserting that the history of this development and the history of the novel are inseparably tied. 20 Since our three novels deal, respectively, with the denaturing of man through the code of the entrepreneurial capitalist in Amerika, the colonization of all mankind through monopoly capital in journey, and the collapse of the entrepreneurial capitalist model in one of the areas colonized, the New World, in The Shipyard, it would be well to investigate, at least in some detail, the macrocosm that this new system brought into being. Since this is a field so often tilled and since the three novels make it the target of their satire, I should prefer to discuss the object of representation in a radicalized form-namely, in terms of the Marxist analysis of the modern capitalist world, specifically through a drastically revisionist critique of Freud through Marx and Marx through Freud, offered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their AntiOedipus. Precisely because their model is at once so fiercely oversimplified and so unapologetically reductionist, it lends itself admirably, on an admittedly heuristic level, to the requirements of an analysis of literary texts involving a satirical unmasking of the world of Western capitalism. I shall designate the resultant social organism the "imperium." While, from their French standpoint, Deleuze and Guattari recog-

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nize that the Revolution in France in 1789 and the subsequent capitalist order that was installed in its wake constituted a break with previous history, they are at pains to insist that "there has never been but one State, the Urstaat, the Asiatic despotic formation," so that whatever political systems have come into being-"democracy, fascism, or socialism" (and, spreading things out to the general European framework, we might add constitutional monarchy, Napoleonic or Hapsburg imperialism, etc.)-are simply reincarnations of that primordial state (p. 26r). What took place was that the despotic order ceased to be the visible and unapologetic political one and, instead, became immanent-that is, invisible, diffuse, but detectable through the infinite pressures felt by the individual subject as he attempted to advance through his own life and world. 21 This is the form that the imperium was to take. As the authors put it, capitalism simply "decoded" and "deterritorialized" the codes and territories of the despotic state, creating new mythical elements to take their place, most notably "production in the form of money-capital" and the myth of the worker free to sell his labor. Since there was a basic gap left between these two recoded territories, it was conveniently negotiated with money (p. 33). The ideological effect of both recodings should be obvious. Deleuze and Guattari specifically put the bourgeoisie at the center of all these developments, without, at the same time, conceding to that class a position of mastery, a vitally important point for the three novels under study. In a world where the despotic force of the primordial U rstaat has become immanent, the bourgeois is as much a slave to the new order as those who work under him. "The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends that, taken as a whole, have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital, internalization of the infinite debt" (p. 254). The fictions of Kafka, Gline, and Onetti, each in its own way, demonstrate the truth of this grim assertion. For our present purposes, we note that even the sovereign class is alienated from the domain over which it has seeming mastery, a development that compounds the sense of alienation for all those living under the imperium. Deleuze and Guattari's most radical concept, of course, is what

I

8

Some Historical Considerations

they call Oedipalization, one of the most canny forms of repression recoded from the U rstaat. Primarily elaborated in terms of the male of the species, Oedipalization consists of planting in one's head the illusion of having harbored reprehensible patricidal impulses toward the father and incestuous ones toward the mother with a consequent psychopolitical effect: each man perceives himself as a shameful pariah for having felt such urges and is kept in (sociopolitical) check by paralyzing guilt. 22 In this way whatever revolutionary instincts he may feel against the imperium that holds him down will not only be constrained but turned back in on him. Of this whole process the authors say, "Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony" (p. qo). Oedipalization thus delegates to the family the process of social repression through psychic inhibition, and what Deleuze and Guattari call "desiring-production" thereby becomes "disfigured" (p. I I9). Such a delegation places the whole family outside the social field (it is now "privatized"), so that the individual members lose the notion of their social function and are restricted to their roles in the family locus: father, mother, child. The "alliances and filiations" that once had woven the family into the very fabric of the social field no longer pass through people but through money. Needless to say, the family's sense that it is outside the social field with all its "economic, political, and cultural" ramifications is an illusion. "But in another sense everything has changed, because the family, instead of constituting and developing the dominant factors of social reproduction, is content to apply and envelop these factors in its own mode of reproduction. Father, mother, and child thus become the simulacrum of the images of capital ('Mister Capital, Madame Earth,' and their child the Worker)" (p. 264). Other social historians have emphasized the patriarchal structure of the capitalist family as it evolved during the nineteenth century, with its attendant demotion of women and relegation of both them and children, at least in the bourgeoisie, to the protected precinct of the home. Such a demotion, however, suggests an ongoing struggle between the parties involved, so that the family institution is not a stable and peaceful one but the theater of frequently wavering repression in response to periodic, if unsuccessful, revolts.

Some Historical Considerations

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9

Where women are concerned, Julia Kristeva, among others, has imagined an archeological tableau in which, at a remote and speculative time, the male principle of Authority and Law had prevailed over a counter female principle. In the context of social fears of defilement and prohibitions marshaled against it, woman, particularly in her maternal guise, would be segregated, since her latent identity would be one of a wily threat to male supremacy, a threat that could be checked but never suppressed. This would be the evil that she bore. She would thus represent a matrilinear power always waiting in the wings, ready to step in at the patriarch's first stumble. 23 Idealized by the male when remaining passive, docile, and harmless or eroticized in her very physicality and potential for evil, alternately pure or soiled, woman could expect no more identity than this in the patriarchal domain. Hence, while relegated to certain quarters in real space, she would be at the same time segregated within certain ideological archetypes that she could vary from only at great personal peril. At her most successful, she would turn her subordinate place and function into a seat of frightening power, particularly through the goading effect she could have on the conscience of husband or child. Sacrificial martyr, this is the compensation she would have to be paid. In this same setting, children, too, became a separate human caste, but now in an Oedipal framework. Philippe Aries, among others, has insisted on this institutionalization of childhood. Retention within the ideological space of childhood would be a means of checking the danger children symbolize for both father and mother, prolonging not so much their innocence as their lack of rights for as long as possible; childhood came to be a long period indeed in the nineteenth century. Kristeva has insisted on the peculiar position of the child in the Oedipal triangle: if it is a (potential) violator of the law, it is not the maker of the law. Indeed, it is estranged from the law and, in violating it, learns the existence of the power that belongs to the Other. Its fate can only be punishment and death. 24 Since man, particularly the patriarch in his bourgeois male embodiment, is himself thrall to the immanent and diffuse power of the imperium, his place of authority within the family is precarious at best and constantly subject to sapping operations from his restive female partner and offspring. Hence, he may frequently lapse into

20

Some Historical Considerations

exasperated self-pity as he sees himself caught between pressures exerted from outside the family and strains coming from within. It is within this power struggle in the family triangle that we come at last to the issue most crucial for a study of alienationlegitimation. By what compact is an uneasy truce or peace brought about among the contending parties? Each one seeks not merely to establish its own legitimacy but does so either for itself against the others or for the others against itself. If Amerika, journey, or The Shipyard are any indication, no satisfactory resolution is possible because of the very form the contention takes: one power must prevail over the other two. And, hovering over them, there stands an even greater power whose interest it is that the contest remain unresolved. In conformity with Deleuze and Guattari's Oedipalization theory, that greater power maintains social control by distracting the family members from itself. In our three novels, of course, the protagonists have been expelled from the family precinct and have come face to face with that power. In Chapter 3, on Kafka, I shall speak further on the father's way of carrying on the repressive function delegated to him by the greater society. But it is well to pause briefly on the particular problem posed by women, who are either idealized in the process of removal from any broad social role or turned into shameful and vile instruments of sexual pleasure. All three novels I am dealing with are focused from the male viewpoint, and all three betray extremely troubled visions of the female, generated in great part by the protagonist's inability to become the patriarch in turn or to find an alternative social role that exploits the power devolving upon the male. Because the individual's inner state is experienced as guilt, his social behavior, which consists of various patterns that disguise it or evade it, will be characterized by bad faith, hence cynicism. According to Deleuze and Guattari, such cynicism leads to "the hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the hatred oflife and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death instinct; depression and guilt used as a means of contagion"and their list goes on (p. 268). The result is the lax permissiveness of the capitalist world, where passing the blame promotes the abusive treatment of others in the form of exploitation, robbery, racism, lasciviousness, and, of course, routine and often murderous violence

Some Historical Considerations

2 I

(p. 269). Yet ultimately this whole side of man is covered over by a bland exterior that is the result of historical conditioning. "Marx often alluded," the authors say, "to the Golden Age of the capitalist, when the latter didn't hide his own cynicism: in the beginning, at least, he could not be unaware of the harm he was doing, extorting surplus value. But now this cynicism has grown-to the point where he is able to declare: no, nobody is being robbed!" (p. 238). In such a situation true systems of belief (or codes) are replaced by what Deleuze and Guattari call an "axiomatic," or empty language, that sounds something like a code but that has to be decoded by those in the know before its true meaning, if there is any, is actually ascertained (p. 250). 25 The cynicism and the axiomatic that attempts to hide it correspond to schizophrenia-a schizophrenia that bears witness to capitalism's successful social and psychological repression of the individual as well as the group. This cynical attitude contaminates the very atmosphere of the world under capitalism, transforming space into a suffocating dystopia. Individuals defined by abstract quantities are at the same time consigned by the imperium to "all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities" in this dystopic realm and are thus rechanneled (p. 34). A case in point would be Uncle Jacob in Kafka's Amerika, who has broken with his family, left the Old Country for the New World, changed his name, acquired great wealth according to "principles" reminding one of the axiomatic, and finally become a "Senator." Capitalism continually reterritorializes the denizens of its realm in this way, frequently on a grand bureaucratic scale (as would be the case of the multitudes passing through Ellis Island in journey) or in the vast movements of individuals from country and farm to city and factory or office or even from one continent to another. On the one hand, they peel away their old identity; on the other, they are never over their sense of being strangers in the new space where they try to make their fortunes. Deleuze and Guattari also see a social division, not between classes, but rather between those inside the capitalist class and those outside, those who serve the vast capitalist machine and those who would subvert it (p. 2 55). This, of course, is still another formula for alienation. Needless to say, there are varying kinds and degrees of alienation in the group that stands outside, a matter that will be of major

2 2

Some Historical Considerations

importance throughout this study and that I will deal with at greater length in Chapter 2. But for present purposes I am particularly interested in the writing establishment, which in great part would figure in the margins of this social division. Turning now to another matter, Deleuze and Guattari also include in the axiomatic the various external attributes or "quantities" by which the individual identifies himself under capitalism (as in the case of Uncle Jacob). "It is these quantities that are marked, no longer the persons themselves: your capital or your labor capacity, the rest is not important" (pp. 250-51). In the social sphere, of course, this becomes the fetishization or commodification of values where a vast array of material tokens or markers, already endowed with something like human attributes, signify the individual to himself and to others. 26 Here the individual is clearly divorced from his own primordial nature. Indeed, in this context one may cite Kristeva, who stresses the fear that marks one who cleaves to the fetish. 27 It has generally been conceded that, in a period of great social mobility and economic self-betterment such as the nineteenth century surely was, this very movement could be stressful and, even in the midst of exhilaration, rather frightening to the beneficiaries. In the literary domain, this whole aspect of life under capitalism was extremely important to the growth and preservation of the realist mode, since vast reading publics acquired the art of attributing meanings or values to such tokens and thus learned to "read" material details, even while turning them into objects of imaginary desire. In the fiction they read, a frequent narrative theme would be the hero setting out to make his fortune by accumulating great riches and all the tokens that signify his success and worth. In more serious fiction, this enterprise generally failed or, if it succeeded, was followed by disillusionment and a sense of emptiness. The hero might find himself being repudiated by his friends or corrupted by success, or he might become victim of some irony of fate. In short, a thematic questioning of capitalist notions of success was present from the very outset. To summarize briefly, starting with Romantic realism the world represented in fiction becomes the alien space of capitalism, the imperium. Most works will indeed reflect its diffuse tyranny, which survives under all different types of political regimes and enslaves even its

Some His tori cal Considerations

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3

masters, particularly by robbing them of some authentic inner nature. Fiction will accurately record the displacement of social repression to the family in the process Deleuze and Guattari have described as Oedipalization and will reflect the patriarchal character of the power exercised. 'Most serious works will depict unsparingly the cynicism and corruption of values in the capitalist world, the belief statements that are like pious axioms but mean nothing. They will study the transformation of individuals in this corrupting process, their "schizophrenia," and even the permissive exploitation and the murderous violence of the new socioeconomic world that surrounds them. As I have emphasized, realism of all kinds highlights and catalogs the material world of objects and the values they are meant to convey. Indeed, modern materialism, generally, has brought this aspect of our common existence into particular prominence. Finally, the capitalist world will be portrayed above all as one that is divided between those on the inside and those on the outside.

Omniscient and Subjective Realism What is especially striking, in the context of the present study, is how realism becomes installed in the evolution of literature at this point and quite obviously finds itself the preeminent mode for novels written during the settling-in process of the capitalist era. 28 As a mode, realism was made to order for this world, being rigorously secular, historically and socially conscious, grounded in material fact (as the sciences), pruned, for the sake of a sober and even staid sense of plausibility, of most supernatural or fantastic elements, and selfentitled to the rank of "serious" literature-that is, literature that sought to educate and transform the reading public. 29 In its earliest historical setting, of course, the insistence upon realist detail had a clear-cut polemical value that has faded since. 30 We must keep this polemical aspect in mind when we reflect that never before in any period of literature had the concrete world, in all its detail, figured so prominently, represented not only by exhaustive descriptions of landscapes but by itemized inventories of human dwellings, minute scrutiny of characters' external appearances, even the exact amount of change in their pockets. In literary terms, then, this sudden surge in the cataloging of the external world signaled the

Some Historical Considerations

important ideological shift I have already described where material objects became charged with ideological value and now had social meanings that it was up to the writer to suggest and the reader to divine. 31 One of the obvious implications here, of course, is that the reification of values through fetishized objects produced this promotion in importance of the material accessories and surroundings of human existence. The focalization of realist discourse was therefore by its very essence disposed toward omniscience. Fredric Jameson has noted that "the originality of realism" lay in "its claim to cognitive as well as aesthetic status." He adds that realism's ideal "presupposes a form of aesthetic experience which yet lays claim to a binding relationship to the real itself, that is to say, to those realms of knowledge and praxis which had traditionally been differentiated from the realm of the aesthetic, with its disinterested judgements and its construction as sheer appearance." 32 Thus, canonic realist fiction would not simply be serious in intent but monological in ideological form. What is most interesting, as we shall see, is the realist and postrealist fiction that varies from this principle, usually by subverting it. In the history of realism, Balzac's fictions are the first to be placed squarely in the material and historical world, and this explains Lukacs's predilection for them. Lukacs was especially impressed by the way Balzac's works capture the flavor of a turbulent historical period with ideological sensitivity. Their realism, he claimed, translates the contradictions both in society and in the individual "in the context of a dialectical unity." 33 Man is above all a social and historical animal seen in his social and historical environment. This image of man was repeatedly represented by Lukacs as superior to the "modernists'" image of a solitary and asocial creature whose state is nonetheless supposed to reflect a universal human condition. Lukacs admired the skill with which Balzac's works capture both the individual and the typical. This reflects a command of the broad historical sweep of the times, even while the author himself remains loyal to what for Lukacs is a dubious ideological perspective. Put differently, a reader of Balzac has the impression the author knows what the value of everything is, an echo of the fundamental omniscience of traditionally drawn realism. On the one hand, assertion of the typical involves a kind of assured essentialism to which the Baiza-

Some Historical Considerations

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5

cian text claims to have access. On the other, the pursuit of the typical in the represented world expresses what Jonathan Culler has seen as an underlying assumption that there is a kind of "compact" between writer and his audience that all agree almost instinctively on what reality is, that all believe the meaning of things is a readily accessible and common property, and that even the surprising or unusual may be brought over into the realm of plausibility, thanks to shared modes of explanation. 34 Specifically, the innumerable descriptions in Balzac's narratives, however humble, rely on precise values the text at least tries to allege we all share. Balzac's case illustrates the many problems that realism, as the favored mode of representing the capitalist world, faced from the very beginning. Since capitalism was still an historical novelty in his time, his texts could portray it from the outside, just as Stendhal's acerbically did. Balzac was perfectly able to show the delusions of those who took its promises too seriously. At the same time, his works conveyed the vast recoding and reterritorialization process at work. But because the imperium now in the process of(re-)formation was an immanent, despotic system that worked unseen on the value systems of those falling under its sway, the penchant Balzac had for realism indicates that the author himself was already more than partially absorbed by the world he sought to depict. Hence, one might say that, even for this now most classic of realists, there had to be at least a subconscious resistance against such domination in order for the kind of critical stance inaugurated in the eighteenth century to persevere. If even Balzac felt this need, one may conclude that, from the very beginning, any author using the realist mode had to do battle with, and-yes-subvert, the very discourse at his disposal. And in the process he would do battle with its ideology as well. Ifhe did neither, he would simply become a mouthpiece for the monological order and thereby invalidate literature's independence and claim to critical senousness. The first breach in the monological pretensions of realism was its subjective variant that at least offered the narrower viewpoint of the individual character. Harry Levin sees subjective realism born with Stendhal, chronologically a predecessor of Balzac's but, in principle, closer in time to the spirit of the novels with which I shall be dealing. This variant is still realism to the extent that it gives the appearance of

Some Historical Considerations an exhaustive documentation on the world or (pseudo)historical episode being depicted and therefore appears to discount the imaginary. 35 But the ideological perception of that world or episode no longer frames the novel as in the omniscient form but passes through the ideological prism of a certain human witness, a witness frequently alienated from the various locales described from his viewpoint or bias. The now classic instance of subjective realism, of course, is Stendhal's rendition of Fabrice passing through the Battle of Waterloo at the opening of The Charterhouse of Parma: an individual sees history from the jumbled and confused perspective of ground level. 36 Lukacs would castigate this perspective for employing an abstract (i.e., a disjunctive) immediacy without any penetration into historical meaning. Stendhal, in this context, could be said to have replaced Balzac's global vision with a fragmented picture of the flux of historical events in which it is impossible to assign values to anything. In the battle description Stendhal is showing how, in the historical eddy, it is difficult for the individual to see the historical import of what is happening around him. The gap of signification between bewildered observer and the action into which he is unwittingly thrust has first of all the effect of a lively immediacy that is an extremely important ingredient of successful realism (pace Lukacs). But on another level this kind of disruption of narrative sense produces an effect not unlike that achieved in satire where established forms and meanings are turned on their heads by the simple expedient of representing conventional activities or events from a totally extraneous viewpoint that cannot see things as ordinary people do. In short, a skeptical or satirical technique is brought into play that tests established values, as in the case of a similar battle scene in Candide, where the hero is suddenly conscripted into war. Voltaire's satirical effect suggests the way in which Stendhal's text could be considered to insert the worm of doubt into the apple of pristine (and unexamined) values. It does so in a way that was to produce a rich vein for later disaffected realists: the oblique ironies of the satirist had an uncanny family resemblance to the later realist's detached impersonality. 37 As Paul de Man has stressed, a far younger Lukacs, long before the more doctrinaire views of his later works, seems to have understood this aspect of the novel genre and in his Theory ofthe Novel saw irony as

Some Historical Considerations

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"the determining and organizing principle" of its form. De Man interprets this as meaning that Lukacs was "freeing himself from preconceived notions about the novel as an imitation of reality," where irony would undermine such a claim and substitute in its place "a conscious, interpreted awareness of the distance that separates an actual experience from the understanding of this experience." Specifically, irony mediates the ideal and the real "within the complex paradox of the form." De Man quotes Lukacs's statement from this early work that cautions that he is speaking of a conceptual, not a truly organic, relationship. 38 Though we know Lukacs changed directions radically later on, still the remarks quoted here have a distinct and relevant bearing on Stendhal's novels and, as I hope to show, those realist texts following his that also split the ideological field in the world they represented. This kind of split is well illustrated by what occurs in The Red and the Black: the viewpoint character, Julien Sorel, approaches the successive realms of the world represented in the novel from an adversary stance, sizes them up so as to seize the advantage, and generally "sees through" the behavior of those he encounters. The matter of ironic focus is now complicated, however, by a narrative viewpoint that is frequently at odds with Julien's, that sees on to the end of things in a way Julien cannot, and that is therefore able to assign values serving as corrective to his. While this contrast in focus recalls the omniscient stance of Balzac's works, even the most cursory reading of Stendhal's text reveals that it is still intensely satirical (e.g., the description of Monsieur de Renal on the promenade in the opening pages), and the split in the ideological field helps bring this about. Stendhal's fictions, far more than Balzac's, follow the pattern I have already set down of adopting a predominantly alienated stance before the society and historical period for which they are written, and are specifically antibourgeois in outlook. There is no need to review their often discussed contempt for the pedestrian bourgeois mind in this regard. But such disaffection is not directed simply at a class but at a whole way of looking at things that a Stendhalian text alleges is contaminating an entire age. As Erich Auerbach puts it, "Stendhal's realistic writing grew out of his discomfort in the post-Napoleonic world and his consciousness that he did not belong to it and had no place in it." 39 Auerbach has shown that this consciousness was pre-

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Some Historical Considerations

dominantly ideological in nature, to the extent that Stendhal, at least as an author, was uncannily alert to the exact ideological resonance of his times, his negative critical perspective only strengthening his perceptions. Plainly such an attitude not only enriches the satire but enhances, with greater complexity, the ideological role literature is going to play in society. Despite the differences in outlook, ideological position, and literary mode, there are important similarities between Balzac's and Stendhal's works. The works of both, by their adherence to realism, demonstrated a shared registering of the profound historical change that had taken place during their own lifetimes and that had brought about a crucial ideological transformation. In addition, the novels stood in a critical, rather than conformist, relationship with the society and world they represented so realistically. Specifically, they expressed strong reservations about the ideology motivating the bourgeois characters they depicted. But, while in the texts both authors registered these reservations in the mode of representation (realist), they left nothing to chance and indulged in direct commentary on the represented world through the narrative voice or else by irony of a fairly conventional, hence obvious, kind. This suggests a deeper common ground where there was at least intellectual obeisance to the notion that knowledge of the essential truth of the universe was possible in principle. Such a conviction would begin disappearing with Flaubert. Another, and far more obvious, expedient used by both authors was through narrative action itself: the depiction of someone who comes to grief in the (capitalist or bourgeois) world represented in the novel. This is the "problematic individual" of whom Bernstein speaks, who becomes an outsider by failing in his effort to "reinvent" himself through a successful narrative program. In the process, his case helps bring out the problematization of coherent selfhood for all those living under the new order. 40 Richard Terdiman has devised a synopsis of the ideal romantic realist novel and its successors that has continued to be used right down to the present day: "In these novels, the self is a young protagonist endowed with talent and sensitivity-in Stendhal's phrase, an 'etre d'exception.' The world outside resists his efforts to force its recognition of his quality. Simultaneously he dis-

Some His tori cal Considerations

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covers deep conflict in himself as he attempts to maintain his own purity. Eventually, things end badly for him, but even at the last the century seems unmoved by his tragedy." 4 ' Heroism would be merely one of many noble qualities that the basic cynicism of the capitalist order can only sneer.at and push aside. Stendhal's works, and to a lesser extent Balzac's, stress the great range of"noble" or spontaneously human qualities that became disprized or rejected as the bourgeoisie assumed social hegemony. But the basic technique of concentrating on a character whose outlook, nature, and ideology make him unfit to survive in the world represented in the text at once recalls satire and shows a dialectic emerging between plot and space. Realism, with the addition of a little irony, remains adequate to the task, however, a reflection of the unspoken assumption that the basic thought processes supporting it were sufficient as well.

Realism After r848 By the time of Stendhal the Fourth-Estate nature of the writer's place in society had been enriched by those authors who appointed themselves a kind of elite that looked down upon the new bourgeois world with disdainful condescension. Yet this did not prevent them from seeking to play a social and political role in France. The Romantics did so with perhaps even more daring and commitment than their predecessors had. However, the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1848 virtually everywhere in Europe compounded the spirit of disaffection in the literary profession and exasperated the authors' sense of reviled superiority. For the younger generation, which included such later luminaries as Flaubert and Baudelaire, the failed revolution was plainly a cruel lesson in history, an ideological one to the extent that it revealed where power came from, how it worked, and which particular spots it chafed on the body of the political individual. In short, the imperium had made its presence known in all its sinister pervasiveness and cynicism. Nowadays we tend to see the works written by the authors who survived the cataclysm as reflecting a turning away from history. But, of course, there is no turning away from history. Therefore, the more open social criticism in texts by the Romantics was to be re-

Some Historical Considerations

placed in the period to follow by a far more subtle, and perhaps discreet, critique of the existing order through a subversion of the mimetic process itself. In France the failed Revolution of 1848 sharpened in many authors, though inevitably bourgeois themselves, the antibourgeois stance already in place and heightened the sense of the contemporary world as a dystopia, a sense perceptible in the works they wrote. In the political realm, for instance, the bourgeois had shown that they were ready to compromise with any party or form of government in power that let them hold on to their riches and go on increasing them. This was as true for German burghers living under the imperialist regimes in Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the century as it was for the French under Napoleon III after 1850. In consonance with the general cynicism of the capitalist order, such a social group, to the extent it holds the upper hand on things, does not ask to be understood, least of all ethically. And it tends to use the Deleuzian axiomatic, or bad faith arguments for self-justification: the world is a jungle, life is harsh, man's basic nature is selfish, etc. More dismaying to many French writers, however, was witnessing the support brought to the Third Empire that followed 1848 not only by the bourgeoisie but by the masses as well, themselves victims of new popular ideological images and propaganda. This only exacerbated the alienation and satirical fury of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Of these two elements, the first has been more frequently observed and understood than the second, which all too often has tended to pass unnoticed. The illusive turning away ofliterature from the historical realm was reflected in poetry by a withdrawal into an ivory-tower aesthetic and in fiction by the retreat of a visible authorly presence, as in Flaubert. Inevitably, this was to affect the canonic omniscience of the realist stance, since the diffusion of narratorial authority, its conflation with straightforward exegetic or descriptive discourse, removed those explicit ideological cues to be found in texts by Rousseau, Balzac, or Stendhal. It was in this way that a full-scale subversion of realism began, even while it was in spirited development as the dominant mode for the novel. In what ways was realism subverted? Richard Terdiman points out an important break taking place in the mode around 1850, when a distinction grows up between what he calls the active and synthetic

Some Historical Considerations

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modes. The active concentrates on what happens in a story, brings to light its logic, develops its motivation, as was the case in earlier realist texts. The synthetic, by contrast, creates "representative atmospheres," suppresses chronology, focuses on mental landscapes, saps the individual character (or narrative agent) of the energy necessary for the active mode-in short, undermines the conventional principles of ordinary narrative. 42 Terdiman sheds some light on what ideological factors prompt this kind of literary behavior when he says that the synthetic is used by authors who do not expect their characters' hopes to be realized in the world as it is. As noted, he sees the shift from active to synthetic taking place in the nineteenth century around the time of Flaubert, when the dialectic between the individual and society (needless to say, of a hostile nature) becomes completely internalized: a set of universals is arrayed against the individual protagonist that accounts for his endless defeats. Kafka would be the end product of this trend. In his works any space described points to a bleak anti-Leibnizian world where a hostile or malevolent power is likely to burst out at any moment. One of Terdiman's important points is that the synthetic mode ultimately produces, in the case of texts by Flaubert and those who follow him, an "ideology of omniscience" where, so far as ideological content is concerned, failure and collapse define existence, defeat is "totalized" at all times in every aspect of life. The universe itself becomes a disaster machine. 43 While the critical term "omniscience" reappears, we are no longer dealing with the Balzacian type, one that in practice takes on the form of an infinite discrimination of values in a world posited as an available object. Now it simply becomes the knowledge that everything ends up being pretty much the same in a world where any object at all points back to the same grim truth. A text by Balzac suggests the capitalist's view of the world as a boundless market to exploit and master, while in a text by Flaubert or many of his contemporaries and successors that world becomes hostile and distant and already taken over by an unspeakable horde. Balzac's omniscience revels in the expansive power of burgeoning capitalism, whatever its ills and abuses, while the more rigid realists dispassionately survey a reality they have totally mastered in a detached and negatively ideological way. The seeming monological quality of

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2

Some Historical Considerations

their depiction of that reality is now complicated by an antithetical, hence dialectical, relationship with the world they describe. When we look at how Terdiman's two modes operate on the narratologicallevel, plainly the synthetic mode pertains more to descriptive techniques that convey the world represented in the text, while the active mode relates to the plot or narrative. Louis Marin contrasts the discursive and diachronic nature of the narrative mode, with its succession of interconnected revelations that lead the reader on, and the descriptive mode, which shows its object all at once and replaces succession with redundancy or repetition so that the atemporal present of the object is established in a way suggesting it was always there. 44 This sets up an opposition, even a contention, between the two that indicates narrative space is more than inert background. In the case of Terdiman's story synopsis, the contest between the two sides has a curious result. Not only is the narrative subject unable to carry out his narrative program in the world represented in the text, but that world has actually become adversarial, a virtual actor in the plot. We may speak now of an intersection between narrative and setting where setting takes on narratively active qualities. 45 Earlier we noted that fictions by Balzac and Stendhal enacted their criticisms of the bourgeois order either through explicit commentary, often ironic, or through what happens to their characters in the bourgeois world (i.e., plot) but that they continued to represent the world itself in a fairly straightforward realist fashion. In the new context, on the other hand, the dialectic between narrative and represented world comes much more clearly to the fore and in what is best described as a much more formalistic way. It must be added, in the narratological context, that totalization in the description of settings is answered, on the narrative level, by the intrusion of a kind of counterstory beneath the explicit one. In the pages ahead I shall liken this to a conflict between the character's narrative program, the substance of the apparent plot, and a primordial myth that contradicts and undoes it. The introduction of myth in this way deepens the narrative and gives it ambiguous overtones that verge on the allegorical. On the more general level, Terdiman's definition of the synthetic mode insists on its ideological motivation. And it is my thesis that a description in that mode is ideologically weighted, just as plot fre-

Some Historical Considerations

33

quently is, and may even be said to accomplish an ideological purpose. Hence, the so-called impersonality or ideological neutrality of realism as used by Flaubert could be perceived as a subterfuge. When a court found Madame Bovary immoral and fined the author, it was confusedly registering its awareness of the deeply subversive tendencies animating the novel that called the very order the court stood for into question. It is against this background that we must consider the radical disappearance, starting with Flaubert, of the explicit commentary on space and settings that one finds in Balzac or Stendhal. As Auerbach has put it, "In Flaubert realism becomes impartial, impersonal, and objective." 46 Spaces continue to be described in extraordinary detail, however. In appearance, the invention of an apparently neutral form of realist representation would bear witness to the adoption of an updated variety of omniscience: now an extreme, almost positivistic, attitude that declared the world accessible as a transparently clear and available object to scientists, thinkers, and practical bourgeois readers alike. This involved privileging the first element in each of the following binary pairs: objective over subjective, fact over impression, real over imaginary, detachment over involvement, impersonal over personal, universally accessible over private. In the represented world of the text, dreams would not come true, ghosts would not rise from their graves and dance up into the sky, uncanny coincidences would not take place, let alone strange disorders in the laws of nature. On the narratological level, it would always be scrupulously clear who was "saying," who was "seeing. " 47 In narrative, of course, this string of characteristics appears to carry out the most monological type of omniscience, since it describes a reliable narrator whose fictions, and the world represented in them, are guaranteed as "accurate" and "real." His discourse therefore becomes authoritative in the same way that scientific or practical discourse is, and he is in complete mastery of its content. Indeed, there appears to be an authority behind the discourse that at once guarantees and even upholds the order it presents as something of which it disposes and upon which, as authority, it rests. Hence, the text looks as if it conveys not only an already existing world bur, to put it in a disaffected or even unsympathetic way, a world subjected to a peremptory kind of ideological closure whose interpretation is unambiguous.

34

Some Historical Considerations

This is the world of a radical version of classical realist fiction in its ongoing bourgeois setting, a fiction created after Balzac, of course, whose own works had to be ideologically placed in a more complex and conflict-ridden historical setting than that which followed. By the mid-nineteenth century Western Europe had already been swept by a single hegemonic view of things that attempted to prevail (and even seemed to prevail) at every ideological level. This view, privileging, as it did, those qualities enumerated above, displayed both its force and its self-assurance by a rigid depersonalization of discourse that was in sharp contrast to the personally biased one associated with the Romantic era. 48 It remained omniscient, but no longer in an interventionist way as in Balzac. Instead, there was a conscious abdication of such powers to intervene, so that the narrative voice became unplaceable, disembodied. The story almost sounded as if it were telling itself. 49 Flaubert is recognized as an adept of this kind of depersonalized realism, but Bernstein encourages us to read him dialectically-that is, to perceive an ironic understructure in the seemingly impersonal discourse. 5°For example, our review of the active and synthetic modes shows that the omniscience of the latter could actually be considered a kind of "counteromniscience": it ironically disproves the assured omniscience of the hegemonic ideology of the world it must perforce represent. How does a text by Flaubert produce such an effect? A good place to start would be those seemingly unfocalized or even purely mimetic descriptions in his works that, on closer inspection, turn out to be pregnant with oblique ideological meaning-often of a tellingly ironic kind. Specifically, on the formal level Flaubert's realism becomes so rigorous that the rigor itself comes to have a selfparodying, and hence an ideological, resonance. The authoritativeness of the discourse has no place to go and thereby calls the authority of realism itself into question. 51 To offer an example, Jonathan Culler, in his study of Flaubert, analyzes the following passage from a patently ironic work, Bouvard

and Pecuchet: In front of them were fields, to the right a barn as well as the church tower, and to the left a screen of poplars. Two main walks, forming a cross, divided the garden into four. The vegetables were edged with borders, where dwarf cypresses and cordons rose at intervals. On one

Some Historical Considerations

35

side, an arbour led to an ornamental mound; on the other, a wall supported the espaliers; and at the bottom a lattice gave on to the country. The other side of the wall there was an orchard; beyond the hedge a shrubbery; and behind the lattice a lane. 52 Here we have a seemingly harmless and totally objective description of the view over a garden seen by the two heroes when they awaken on their first morning in a "castle" they have just purchased. Culler notes that the systematic presentation of the view, right to left, with an exhaustive inventory of each of its quadrants, "becomes closed in on itself in an autonomous system which offers the reader no hold." 53 This is at a considerable distance from the community of shared meaning on which Balzac's fictional world rests. And, unlike the counterideology proposed by Rousseau's Alpine description, the denotated items, by failing to produce connotation through some "rhetorical" process, are unable to transcend the dry denotative level. Culler goes on to say, "The readers attempting to motivate signs and produce a natural meaning from the text will find they have been made fools of, and those who are more wary will be, perhaps, 'demoralized' by the emptiness of signs and arbitrariness of their meanings." 54 This, in effect, is the ultimate consequence of a conscious effort by the author to subvert his own descriptive mode. Approaching matters from another angle, Barthes, in his essay ''L'effet de reel" ("The Reality Effect"), has pointed out how such passages, or even isolated details, in a Flaubertian text serve no narrative function and, instead, become pure sign. Using his earlier argument from "Rhetoric of the Image," we might speak here of the failure of denotation to engage a rhetoric of connotation. At any rate, a kind of disintegration of the relationship between the signifier and the signified now takes place. It is here that we have an anticipation of the total disjunction-particularly in referentiality-of the modernist text. (Kafka is particularly apposite in this context.) Barthes specifically mentions the barometer placed in an enumeration of the objects to be found in the household where Felicite works in Flaubert's story "A Simple Heart." It plays no function in the narrative and connotes nothing. Or, rather, it connotes something perhaps, but what that is remains unspecified and therefore unavailable to the reader. 55 (The almost hyperreal device of the uncommunicative and even inert or neutral object will provide a rich vein for those out to

Some Historical Considerations subvert realism as time goes by, culminating, of course, with the writers of the New Novel school.) But one might also speak of the ideological effect of a representation that seemingly cannot organize its elements according to some syntax of ideological connotation in order to convey an unambiguous ideological message to the reader. The description of the scene in Bouvard and Pecuchet is focalized from the viewpoint of the two narrative subjects, although the descriptive discourse is narratorial and patently realist. Hence, one might conclude the conventional reliability of the narrative voice in that mode. Here, however, we are dealing with something obviously more complex, since the object of focalization is so unambiguous and even so indisputable that Culler's wary reader can only suspect mystification. It is my own conviction that realist focalization used in this way is ironical. This irony deserves to be looked at in some detail, since the passage from Flaubert is directly relevant to one in Kafka to which we must now briefly turn. In Amerika, as Karl Rossmann trudges down the road toward Butterworth with his companions Delamarche and Robinson, he is represented as surveying the following panorama: The mist had already vanished; in the distance gleamed a high mountain, which receded in wave-like ridges towards a still more distant summit, veiled in sunlit haze. By the side of the road were badly tilled fields clustered round big factories which rose up blacked with smoke in the open country. Isolated blocks of tenements were set down at random, and their countless windows quivered with manifold movement and light, while on all the flimsy little balconies women and children were busy in numberless ways, half concealed and half revealed by washing of all kinds, hung up or spread out to dry, which fluttered around them in the morning wind and billowed mightily. If one's eyes strayed from the houses one saw larks high in the heavens and lower down the swallows, darting not very far above the heads of the wayfarers. (pp. I IO- I I) As with Flaubert's text, Kafka's falls apart into disconnected fragments, and, as the reader tries to come to grips with so decentered a description, he finds his efforts at some kind of conceptualization even more impeded. 56 Certainly, the exact ideological value of each detail described is not conveyed with anything like the explicitness characterizing the description from Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise cited earlier. In Kafka's tableau, the mountain vista, while potentially euphoric in

Some His tori cal Considerations

37

connotation, is put aside to be replaced by a much more detailed consideration of a scene that is basically dysphoric: the factories and the jumbled tenements with their untidy inhabitants. And this, in turn, is forgotten in the distraction caused by the birds, a diversion clearly invited by "If one's eyes strayed from the houses." When we speculate on possible ideological connotations at work in this passage, we find that a potentially Romantic panorama of mountains is almost immediately eclipsed by a grimy Naturalist tableau of factories and tenements, enhanced by the vulgar detail of laundry being hung out to dry. Nothing in the description, however, suggests that it is ideologically motivated to depict anything so specific (and obvious) as, say, capitalism's defilement of natural landscapes with its inevitable architectural abominations. Such a lack of ideological pointedness is reinforced, after the initial distraction of the multiple reflections of quivering light in the tenement windows, by the reader's attention being drawn back up into the sky by mention of birds. Hence, when the denotative process, so intrinsic a part of realism, fails to order the denoted in a syntax or rhetoric of connotation, the very process of generating ideological meaning on the denotative level comes to a complete halt. It would be obtuse, of course, to suppose that Kafka simply is not writing very well here (let alone that Flaubert was not). The ideological is still very much at work. But now it no longer resides in the representation itself but in the very process of representation-that is, at the formal or "entry" level of writing itself. This will require a further analysis. In both the Flaubert and the Kafka examples we are dealing with cases where characters are simply looking at what is before themcases, then, ideally suited for the use of the realist mode in all the impersonal neutrality we have indicated. But, as both Culler and Barthes show, the resultant descriptions fail to offer the reader any kind of hold, ideological or otherwise, on what is described. One has only an enumeration of detail that threatens to fall into chaotic meaninglessness. The result is that the mode itself ceases to convey anything that serves an ideological, let alone narrative, purpose. Bernstein, borrowing from his own construing oflukacs's Theory of the Novel, interprets what is happening here as reflecting a world in which God has died and which is therefore bereft of a unifying framework that would allow disconnected fragments to meet together

Some Historical Considerations

in a binding meaning. Without it the fragments remain meaningless, and the witnessing subject stands in unredeemed isolation before them. It is up to him to give them signification. 57 But Karl or Bouvard and Pecuchet as focalizers lack that kind of knowledge or authority. But perhaps things are not so hopeless as that. Another way to describe what is taking place here is simply to construe Culler's statement quoted earlier as describing a reader who is being led down the garden path. This, of course, recalls the satirical technique of elaborate mystifications that force one to awaken to the ironic intentions hidden underneath. The Flaubert description is orderly to the point of absurdity, while Kafka's is disordered until it lapses into outright confusion. In either instance, however, the realist code, strictly conceived, has been dutifully followed. A similar "dislocated topography" is to be found on a different level in Celine where such key places in the novel as the Bioduret Joseph Institute and Raney keep shifting their relative locations in Paris as one would find it on a map. 58 That is, real referents perform the realist task of seeming to set the imaginary places within verifiably real settings, but, if these referents keep changing from one descriptive instance to the next, what becomes of realism? Again, we may not speak of the author's lack of skill (or even absentmindedness). Rather, a kind of deadpan mystification is at work. It is my contention that such wayward uses of realism subvert the mode itself by interrupting its communication of a certain ideological way of looking at the world, a way that little by little had become totally naturalized. And this subversion, in turn, acts like satire that is directed at the whole order of the world such as Deleuze and Guattari have described it. The formal mode of depiction-selfreflexive to such a degree that it is all the more successful ideologically to the extent that it fails as a mode of representation-brings us to the ultimate expression of"landscapes of alienation." The reader, instead of entering a recognizable world grounded in familiar values through the descriptions in the text, finds himself estranged from what he reads and left to fend for himself ideologically. From this point on, then, we may consider that realism will be subverted in just this manner by the many authors who are hostile to the same social order, at once because the mode epitomizes it and

Some Historical Considerations

39

because it reflects its ideological values. Important members of this group, of course, are Kafka, Celine, and Onetti.

Kafka, Celine, and Onetti as Minor Writers Hence, we may say that Amerika, journey to the End oftheNight, and The Shipyard are part of the subversive enterprise I have been describing in this chapter. Only one matter remains to be covered to complete the outline of the basic problematics: that of the "minor writer." Although this concept preserves the tendentious notion of the work as product, the author as producer, or even the author as expressing his own thoughts figuratively in the work, which in such a case is relegated to being a vehicle of personal expression, still its chief characteristics are useful to review if we are to uncover the subversive process at work. Deleuze and Guattari developed the model for the minor writer in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and, pertinently for the present endeavor, extended the model to Celine as well. While Kafka may, of course, be defined by his Jewish minority status within an only slightly larger minority, a German-speaking one, in the overwhelming majority of a Slavic, Czech-speaking nation, Deleuze and Guattari prefer to define him as a minor writer because of his separation within this alien cultural milieu from the greater German-speaking (and -writing) community. To reconstrue this situation in a spatial construct, we may see Kafka as caught in the lines of force of an imperial political structure as it is laid out in space, a situation that is bound to have a profound effect on his works. An imperial structure considers itself the center and views its domains as on the periphery. The subject peoples of the periphery, by being remote from the center, become generalized or deindividualized until they assume a variety of tributary guises: the child, the inferior, or simply the Other. The justice they receive, the political rights they are granted reflect this subordinate status. Even representatives of the imperial center sent out to the periphery, if they have lived in such a milieu long enough, take on a subject coloration. Their naturalization process within the milieu is never complete. At the same time, their cultural or political relationship with the center gives them an often unwanted special status at the periphery, so that

Some Historical Considerations

their alienation from the tributary milieu is only reinforced. Moreover, in either realm their political legitimacy is clouded. This situation would actually be compounded in Kafka's case, because in Bohemia Jews were culturally German in only a highly idiosyncratic sense. Their emancipation had been comparatively recent, and social attitudes toward them hardly encouraged the sense of having been assimilated or integrated within the greater German mass. Moreover, in Kafka's time the Hapsburg empire was in full disintegration, and vast recodings and reterritorializations were in progress. Indeed, this situation would apply, as we shall see later in greater detail, in Celine and Onetti's case as well, since France and Uruguay were, from the viewpoint of these two authors, in precipitous decline during their own formative years. The France Celine believed in had passed out of history, while Uruguay, a nation of European immigrants naturalized in the New World, had fallen from a prosperous and progressive state to one of economic and political stalemate. Deleuze and Guattari single out three characteristics of minor literature: "the deterritorialization oflanguage, the connection of the individual to political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation." 59 I shall examine each of these in turn. Regarding language, and specifically Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari remind us of his difficulties with German, reduced to a plain, even poverty-stricken, medium in the Prague setting and made even more inaccessible in the case ofJews. In a letter written to Max Brod toward the end of his life, Kafka, while mentioning another Jewish writer, the great satirist Karl Kraus, spoke of Yiddish-German as a kind of mauscheln ("Yiddish jabber"), consisting of "a bumptious, tacit, or self-pitying appropriation of someone else's property [in this case, the German language}, something not earned, but stolen by means of a relatively casual gesture." Writing in pure German, on the other hand, only increased the difficulties, particularly for one who, like Kafka, had trouble writing in any event. 60 Here, then, we have a concrete instance of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the deterritorialization of language. 61 Kristeva stresses the phobic type of fear lying behind writing in any event, a fear unlike that desire for simple communication that animates most discourse. The discourse offear, she says, is encountered "in our dreams, or when death brushes

Some Historical Considerations

4

I

us by, depriving us of the assurance mechanical use of speech ordinarily gives us, the assurance of being ourselves, that is, untouchable, unchangeable, immortal." 62 This confirms not only the minor writer's unstable identity but also the deeper psychological effects of deterri torialization. Transferred to Celine, the concept of the minor writer denotes not a physical or cultural separation in the literal sense as with the GermanCzech writer but writings that consciously remove themselves from the cultural and political mainstream. Here again we may speak of an imperial center, in this case disguised as a liberal democracy that nonetheless evinced clear signs of imperialist militarism (at least in Celine's eyes) and maintained colonies like other European powers that did not pretend to be democracies. Moreover, the democratic political structure was simply a screen for the hidden capitalist imperium. Celine's own literary language, itself a subversive vehicle where the greater French culture is concerned, creates a countervoice that acts destructively upon the older one. 63 As we shall see, it is not an imitation of proletarian language, as some have mistakenly thought, but a genuine literary dialect the author is inventing for profoundly ideological purposes, themselves the outcome of a sense of alienation from the cultural establishment. 64 Onetti's case shares aspects of both Kafka's and Celine's minor writer status but with troublesome complexities. Uruguay, like all nations of the Western hemisphere, is a European imperialist creation and, as such, has had to struggle with the problem of going from a cultural entity that was located at the periphery but represented the center to one that became naturalized in the new locale (though Uruguay has an almost exclusively European population, as opposed to the Andean countries whose European population is installed within, if not actually intermixed with, a larger aboriginal mass). Hence, it could never quite achieve the status of equal partner in the Western economic and culture community. (Only the United States seems to have been able to achieve such a status, and this change has taken place relatively recently.) In such a setting, Onetti's works would be part of a major efforthugely successful, to judge by the Latin American boom of the 196o's-to recreate a literary language and a concomitant novel form in the region of the River Plate that are not simply slavish copies of

Some Historical Considerations

Castilian models but totally new and appropriate to the new locale. Regional language will no longer consist of patois that is quoted in a Castilian linguistic setting in novels written from the viewpoint of Castilian readers at the imperial center for whom it would offer a sense of quaint local flavor or the picturesque out on the periphery. The medium is to be a full-blooded literary language anchored in its own locale with forms of its own, a goal that sheds light on Celine's own efforts (Celine having had a particularly strong influence on Onetti). As we shall see, in a region where historical vicissitudes and calamitous political or economic setbacks are the norm rather than the exception, the effort at both cultural autonomy and cultural representativeness is continually called into question. But Deleuze and Guattari's formula still holds: the works have a direct political relationship with the situation in which they are written and a spontaneous political kinship even with those who would not deign (or be able) to read them. To approach matters from still another angle, the literature created must contend with an ongoing and endemic problem. South America, and particularly an axis formed by southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, constitutes one of the more prosperous zones of what nonetheless must be considered an area on the periphery of European and North American-based capitalism. To the extent that capitalism is installed there, it is still in a blatantly imperialist form, hence dismayingly subject to the whims of the market located far off across the seas. 65 The Shipyard deals with this situation directly and, by doing so, illustrates how the minor writer's works immediately enter into a political dialectic with the enclave from which they emerge. Suffice it to say, then, that the linguistic homelessness of all three authors would entail, as Bakhtin has put it, "a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world," for the texts come into being not in the setting of a single national language and culture but in a language and culture surrounded by others that relativize the texts and call them into question. 66 Thus, they are politicized in the most elementary sense, since the language and culture they represent may have hegemony over the others, as was the case for Kafka's German when Bohemia (later Czechoslovakia) was still part of the Austrian Empire, or else may seek to revolutionize the language and culture imposed (not altogether successfully) by the imperium.

Some Historical Considerations

43

The matter of political immediacy becomes apparent when we move to the texts themselves. Using Kafka as an example, Deleuze and Guattari show how short the distance is between what would to most seem private matters and the public arena. 67 Specifically, they cite Kafka's Oedipal conflict with his father, a matter that will be extensively analyzed in Chapter 3· In the texts, however, the father as persona recedes, to be replaced by imaginary worlds of tremendous political complexity (although fashioned on the patriarchal model), worlds with which the Kafka protagonist is always in conflict. Here we have an instance of how problematical the Oedipal area becomes for a minor writer, if only because it is not displaced to the family triangle but remains entangled in the political structure of the imperium itself, where quite frequently the father's own subordination to higher power is as evident as the son's to his. This is especially true of Celine's works, where a common paranoia afflicts father and son figures. In Onetti's fiction, alienation settles upon all the figures of the Oedipal triangle like an ineradicable blight, a situation that reflects, in a very direct way, the political paralysis of which I have spoken. As for the collective voice contained in the minor writer's texts, Deleuze and Guattari note the cramped space in which Kafka lived and insist on the paradox that the work written by a minor writer cannot help standing for his entire group, even when its ideology or moral outlook may not, at first glance, be consonant with the general outlook of his community. In this way, what is written necessarily becomes further politicized and even revolutionary within the metropolitan culture. The writer himself experiences his political relationship with the group necessarily in a very immediate way. And, oddly enough, it is this very political quality that assures the broadest possible resonance for his work in the world at large, since the political relationship is spontaneous and natural for an author like Kafka. 68 One may even say that the works by minor authors have come to speak for all mankind in a way no longer available to writers comfortably installed within the boundaries of their own cultures. In the framework of the present chapter, Kafka, Celine, and Onetti enter Western literature, and specifically the novel, from the angle of minor writer. The cultural models handed down to them become odd in their alien surroundings, so that their own renditions of them become odd as well. This is partly what is at stake in the mountain

44

Some Historical Considerations

and tenement tableau from Kafka analyzed earlier. Inevitably, the texts of minor writers lapse easily into parody. But it is parody of content as well as form, the imperium itself being subjected to wild deflation through the distortions present in the representation. This explains why minor writers readily become satirists and thus cannot help falling into that Fourth-Estate posture I earlier attributed to authors writing since the eighteenth century. Satire is particularly likely to result when the imperial ideology is shown as insufficient to account for the world depicted in the text or to explain what happens to the protagonist who passes through it. Kafka, Celine, and Onetti are all three in the tradition of Candide. In this setting, the realist mode offers particular difficulty, especially when considered as the expression of the macro-ideology cited earlier. The universal principles associated with it-for example, the materialist and rational order of the world, nature, human nature, the ethical values connected with these, even history itself-are seen as ideologically weighted, if not downright delusional, concepts. Hence, even when minor writers attempt to use the realist mode without parodic intentions, the end is the same. Their own wavering identity would never allow them to achieve that omniscient stance associated with the older form of the mode, and the phenomenal world is too bizarre to be allowed to speak for itself in some variant of impersonal realism. Even the narrative voice is so problematized that Deleuze and Guattari speak of an "assemblage" taking the place of the narrating subject. 69 While they are thinking of Kafka, of course, their observation would certainly apply to Onetti too, whose narrators, in the course of his works, are increasingly at a loss before the stories they must tell and appear to divide, even as they disappear. In this same context, the three authors unwittingly confirm the formula that an anticapitalist attitude produces antirealism. Indeed, much of the present study will be devoted to showing how the subversion of realism in their works leads to a subversion of the ideology behind it. On the narrative level this involves the additional subversion of capitalist ideological myths, while on the level of representation there is a parallel subversion of capitalist values. As in Candide, moreover, there are depictions of other possible spaces and communities that permit the reader to look at his own (capitalist) world from a novel critical bias. 70 Above all, minor writers see through the commonly accepted idea

Some Historical Considerations

45

of realism as an ideologically neutral mode (e.g., mere mimesis). In this respect, they are closer to the subjective realists from whom they inherit a critical irony about the world represented and to those realists who employed the synthetic mode in that representation. And their peculiar angle of vision, as I pointed our in my discussion of the subjective realists, makes them see conventional matters from an idiosyncratic and even extraneous viewpoint. The result of this is a trend toward formalism when minor writers employ realism, since they cannot help being self-conscious about that medium. On the one hand, we are dealing with a deeper disturbance, because the minor writer's uncertain identity creates an uncertain boundary between subject and object. This is reflected in the formal way the narrative is disrupted or the style itself becomes hypertrophied. 71 On the other, the relationship between what the minor writer writes and the greater culture to which his works are addressed is affected. I have already said that the works often appear as parodies of basic cultural models. This simply confirms the fact that the writings produced can only intensify the subversive tendencies already observed in nineteenth-century fiction. All that remains to be pointed out is that the subculture, by using the language and forms of the larger culture, has a dissemination, hence an ideological effect, denied to works written in a truly minority language and culture.

Conclusion In conclusion, I have tried to stress in this chapter that, while realism as a mode developed in a situation where capitalism became the dominant socioeconomic system and the bourgeoisie the ruling class, writers using it have tended to stand in a critical relationship with both the system and the class. Moreover, the mentality of the reader who found (or has found) realism the most convincing way of depicting life and the world around him created a public that was best appealed to through that mode. As a mode for "serious" literature, realism was able to take up the Fourth-Estate stance of works written at the end of the ancien regime. And one might almost say that the mode was virtually ideal for a socially critical role. This is certainly the later Lukacs's opinion, one that has generally prevailed in the communist world. But the more the writer felt disaffected from both the system and

Some Historical Considerations

the class, the more he would modify the mode in his works, if he did not actually subvert it. We saw it modified in Stendhal's novels through the use of the subjective bias of individual characters for focalization on what was occurring in the action or in the represented world of the text. With Flaubert's works matters went much further, and we may begin to speak of the kind of formalism that anticipates modernism, even as Lukacs, in scolding terms, declared it did. As I insisted, Flaubert's writings registered the full flowering of the immanent and universal intrusion of capitalism and its concomitant ideological outlook into every aspect oflife. Its presence now seemed far more hopelessly irresistible than before. The synthetic mode was able to communicate this grim pervasiveness in a singularly effective way. The totalization of despair and defeat in every object described, every vista surveyed, expressed the ineradicable installation of an order that was plainly devastating mankind. In the long run, the world depicted turned out to be a place where the protagonist, ever the idealist, could only find defeat. The works analyzed in the present study reap the various formal transformations that result from this evolution. Chief among the changes, for my own concerns, is the interference of setting in narrative plot. In the chapters ahead I shall especially emphasize the dialectic arising between setting and plot, since so much depends on this tension-ridden relationship. Kafka, Celine, and Onetti each appear at a moment when this tension has produced a radicalization on the formal level. This formal change is the reflection of an ideological perspective: that of the "minor writer" whose works seem to be produced almost in a cultural vacuum yet with a heightened sensitivity to the ideological struggles of the times. Indeed, they register those struggles in a way that conveys the experience of an unusually large number of disaffected readers in the modern world. The basic condition of this world furnishes the thematic center of my study-alienation-a topic that provides an important means of focusing a critique that rings with the satirical tone going back to the eighteenth century, while at the same time providing a means of carrying out an ideological dissection of the modern world.

TWO

Alienation

Alienation is not only the thematic continuum of Amerika, journey, and The Shipyard but also shapes the worlds represented in them. To the extent that these works derive from the realist tradition, it is proper to discuss the topic as an object of representation in a fairly conventional sense, the texts reflecting, in an almost mimetic way, conditions and states of mind that are commonly associated in the general understanding with the term alienation. These matters I shall review in the first half of this chapter. But since the novels also undermine realism and its ideological foundations according to the patterns reviewed in Chapter I , I shall also investigate the presence of frustrated longings of the protagonists for utopian realms, often only suggested by euphoric locales or counterspaces that they happen upon from time to time. Such settings, on the critical level, reflect negatively on the dominant space in the works. Finally, I shall take up a more strictly applied narratological approach, showing how alienation works on the structural level of the texts. In short, I shall lay the groundwork for the coming chapters, where I investigate the meeting of the thematic content of the works with their structural aspect.

47

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Alienation

Alienation as a Theme It is not practicable here to broach the topic of alienation itself in more than a minimal way, but it will be useful, before analyzing it as a theme in the three works under study, to review some of the key aspects that are relevant to my own considerations. The alienation depicted in the three novels is primarily social, stressing, on the one hand, both work itself and the workplace and, on the other, the world in which one must live as predominantly determined by a recognizable economic model, the capitalist one. Because of this, I feel bound to invoke a Marxist outlook on these matters. Indeed, these features clearly determine the ideological character of the texts. But since alienation is dealt with from the subjective viewpoint-whether in a first-person account or told in the third person from the protagonist's viewpoint-we must also deal with it in the more general sense as an existential, if not a psychologically aberrant, condition. In religious terms, the Fall has often been cited as producing the aboriginal case of alienation. The lapsed state of man is particularly pertinent to narratives involving, as these three all do, the loss of happiness, or even of the place of happiness, and disconsolate wanderings through a hostile world as a fateful consequence. 1 I shall discuss the Fall at greater length in Chapter 3 and so shall not develop the matter here. A particularly important aspect of the tale, however, is the search for a return to paradise or, at the very least, a deliverance from the wretched world of the present. One may well compare this search (as indeed I shall) to a search for salvation. In "On the Jewish Question'' Marx pointed out that in a Christian political democracy man may be considered a sovereign being, but it is man in his fallen state, now lost to himself and under "the domination of inhuman conditions and elements-in a word, man who is no longer a real species-being." His primordial alienation is now reproduced in his political status. 2 In a less spiritual context, we may also invoke Rousseau's concept of the natural man "denatured" by social life, particularly to the extent that (to lapse into a somewhat banal humanism) he has lost contact with the core of his own being and become a crippled figure. On the one hand, this recalls the young Marx's notion of loss of communion with a species-nature where work, for example, would be an expres-

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sion of one's inner sel£.3 On the other, it invokes the more general notion of work as creative and even liberating for the individual. Kafka once said to Gustav Janouch, "Every really active purposeful life, which completely fulfils a man, has the force and splendour of a flame." 4 When such outlets are taken from man, his life and his world turn bleak and hollow. This alienation from nature itself is a crucial point for the represented worlds of the three novels, particularly where their ideological import is concerned. 5 While Marx acknowledged these and other forms of estrangement as possible ways to understand alienation, he emphasized the divorce between man and the product of his labor, to say nothing of the means of production (and, I would add, the place of production as well). In fact, he saw this primary condition as generating all the other aspects of alienation reviewed, particularly alienation from self. 6 Some see all of Marx's subsequent work as an effort to seek a radical remedy for this condition. 7 Though I do not agree with those Marxists who see alienation as an exclusively capitalist ill, it is the general consensus that alienation is much more agonizing and severe in its devastation not only of the individual but of the body politic as a whole under the capitalist system. And such a view is consonant with what I see Kafka, Celine, and Onetti saying in their novels when these are read from the political viewpoint. The ideological substance of their works is scathingly anticapitalist.

Alienation in the Represented Worlds of the Novels Since in all three novels we have extensive depictions of men at work or in the work place, inevitably alienation is a prominent feature. The protagonist of each novel is unremittingly concerned with survival through types of work often analyzed by economists and sociologists studying the modern era. Of the three protagonists, only Karl is not portrayed as working in a factory, although his described prowess at manipulating the elevator at the Hotel Occidental recalls work in an assembly line, and other figures in Amerika are represented in brutalizing assembly-line-type labor. Hence, all the protagonists have direct exposure to the situation described by Marx where, if the worker "relates to the product of his labour, his objectified labour, as

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to an object that is alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him, this relationship implies that another man is the alien, hostile, powerful and independent master of this object. If he relates to his own activity as something unfree, it is a relationship to an activity that is under the domination, oppression and yoke of another man." 8 All three authors insist on the replaceability of those who work at the machines that grind out profits for the owners-one of the effects of work being transformed into a commodity. 9 They are simply their functions in the work place and do not count as human individuals. On the few occasions when the bourgeois owners meet their own workers, they do not treat them as persons. 10 About Petrus, his employer, Larsen complains, "He doesn't care a damn about anybody, and I am not I to him, not even body number thirty or forty who tonight happens to be occupying the unchanging post of general manager of the shipyard" (Shipyard, p. 97). Since the tools of production are machines or work activities whose organization follows the patterns of rationalization modeled after the machine, it is not surprising that we see the devastating effects on the laboring men or women who are caught in the environment created. 11 Indeed, commenting to Janouch on the efficiency methods of Taylorism, Kafka said, "Such a violent outrage can only end in enslavement to evil. It is inevitable. Time, the noblest and most essential element in all creative work, is conscripted into the net of corrupt business interests. Thereby not only creative work, but man himself, who is its essential part, is polluted and humiliated. A Taylorized life is a terrible curse which will give rise only to hunger and misery instead of the intended wealth and profit." 12 In Amerika Kafka gives us several instances of the mechanization of man-particularly the telephone order-takers in the offices of Uncle Jacob's firm, the information dispensers at the Hotel Occidental, and the hotel elevator boys. The telephone order-takers are described as working "with inhuman regularity and speed" (p. 47), their individual skill or expertise undermined by the presence of two monitors who countercheck their copy. The information dispensers are just as pathetically mechanized, looking straight ahead, rather than at their endlessly advancing questioners, and issuing their replies in a rapid drone (p. 196). This rushing sense of dehumanization sets the general tone of the whole dispatch office that Uncle Jacob owns: "Through the hall there

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I

was a perpetual tumult of people rushing hither and thither. Nobody said good day, greetings were omitted, each man fell into step behind anyone who was going the same way, keeping his eyes on the floor, over which he was set on advancing as quickly as he could" (p. 48). 13 Karl is directly exposed to dehumanization when he is fitted for a uniform as elevator boy in the Hotel Occidental. Though delighted with the gold braid and buttons, he notices, when he slips his arms into the jacket sleeves, that the armpits are "incurably damp with the sweat of the many boys who had worn it before him" (p. 143). Symptomatically, the jacket fits Karl's chest so tightly, even after several alterations, that he is unable to breathe. When at last he takes up operating the elevator, he is disappointed to find that he has nothing to do with the machinery but simply sets it into motion by pressing a button. All repairs are performed by the hotel's mechanics. By this detail Kafka gives us a concrete example of how the worker is not given a creative role in the operation of the machine he helps to run. All three novels make the sharp distinction between rich and poor typical of the capitalist world. But nearly always the wealthy and powerful are invisible. Bardamu gives the best expression of the situation when he depicts that society as a kind of galley: But, after all, we are all in the same boat, we are all galley slaves together, rowing like the devil-you certainly can't deny that. Sitting on nails to it, too. And what do we get out of it? Not a thing. A big stick across our backs, that's all, and a great deal of misery, and a hell of a lot of stinking lies poured into our ears! 'A fellow must work,' is what they say. It's the lousiest part of the whole business, this work of theirs. You're stuck down in the hold huffing, puffing, and panting, all of a muck-sweat and stinking like polecats ... And up on the bridge, not giving a damn, the masters of the ship are enjoying God's fresh air with lovely pink ladies drenched in perfume sitting on their knees. Uourney, p. 5) The three novels, in this framework, concentrate on the alienation of "the little man" faced with what Soviet critic Evgenia Knipovich has described as "the omnipotence of strong capitalism, ruin, and proletarianization," a social presence that has been "mystified" until it becomes something invisible and menacing. 14 This corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari's immanent power structure of the capitalist world as described in Chapter I. Those who wield the power are invisible. (Bardamu's fellow galley slaves assure him he will never set

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eyes on a real millionaire in America.) They certainly have nothing to do with those who labor. Hence, from the workers' viewpoint, we have not simply the absurdity that prevents any common esprit from growing up between them and the owners but also the sense of being adrift at some uolocatable point in a vast system whose ultimate purpose is totally unfathomable. One East German Marxist critic has seen in this image of invisible power an illustration of the capitalist social order where "power relationships operate not directly, but in concealed and primarily reified forms." 15 Surprisingly enough, however, the lack of contact with any sort of purposefulness in all this activity or suffering is brought out in the three novels-particularly in Kafka-by the depiction of the few capitalists we do see rather than by the workers. 16 Kafka emphasizes this by his description of Uncle Jacob's dispatch house as a kind of Zwischenhandel: "the business did not consist in the transference of wares from the producer to the consumer or to the dealer, but in the handling of all the necessary goods and raw materials going to and between the great manufacturing trusts" (Amerika, p. 47). Hence, Uncle Jacob and all those who work for him at the management level may be considered "middlemen." The firm does not produce the raw materials, it does not manufacture the finished product, it does not sell directly to the consumer. Obviously, then, men at this level are just as alienated from the creation and exchange of concrete goods as those who toil in the factories that produce them, an example of how alienation spreads to the whole society from the level of production. 17 Marx would see them as totally remote from even the very purpose of their activity. 18 They are dehumanized even further, however, by the neutrality they try to maintain in the production and exchange process, a point illuminated by remarks by louis Mario for another context. Ideally, Uncle Jacob and his henchmen would simply be mediating among contraries, balancing them off, and, in the process, asserting themselves as an unmoving center around which everything turns. In this way, they would emulate the immanent and omnipresent power of capitalism. 19 This self-transformation into mere instruments of totally abstract forces is a particularly sinister form of self-alienation and demonstrates the surprising passivity that characterizes the capitalist in his relations with labor, labor's products, and the uses to which these products are put. 20

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Theodor Adorno points out, however, that Uncle Jacob's firm must be seen for what it is: a "monopolistic apparatus of distribution'' that destroys open trade. Like everything in Kafka, its form of power is primarily bureaucratic: the huge office staffs, the communication network, the voluminous and repetitive paperwork. 21 According to Adorno, this power through monopoly is disguised, as is only fitting for an organization that pays pious lip service to the "myth . . . of blind force endlessly reproducing itself" -namely, the market. 22 The market, which Lukacs excoriated as reified illusion, is credited with true power and control: men of business are under its sway. As an abstraction, of course, the market has no form. This is why in Kafka it assumes the guise of a vast and invisible bureaucracy. 23 We shall develop this idea much further in Chapter 5, on Onetti, where the illusions promoted by market capitalism receive their ultimate satirical put-down. Returning to Uncle Jacob and his fellow middlemen, to be in the middle is a singularly indeterminate place. This situation is reflected in a variety of ways, as far as space is concerned. The puzzling and nervously unstable hierarchies support the indeterminacy-for example, Mr. Green and Mr. Pollunder's uncertain relations with each other and with Uncle Jacob, or Mr. Pollunder's with Mr. Mack. Mr. Pollunder's mansion turns out not to belong to him but to Mr. Mack, who exercises a curious "droit du seigneur" over Mr. Pollunder's daughter Clara. All of this confirms Kafka's global impression of capitalism, as he once conveyed it to Janouch, that it was a system of dependencies. 24 As for the firm itself, its very reliance on telephones suggests its remoteness from a solid place in the worldan illumination, perhaps, of Kafka's general view of capitalism. The offices are lost in one of the myriad skyscrapers crowding the busy commercial street on which they are located. In Chapter r, we noted how Uncle Jacob "recoded" his identity in the new land. This too amounts to a kind of depersonalization and submission before a dominant ideology, a result, according to Louis Althusser, that need not be the grim fate of the worker alone but involves the capitalist as well. 25 Uncle Jacob is a painful instance of a kind of spiritual or ethical self-mutilation for acceptance in his new locale. Unlike the worker's case, of course, such self-effacement and transformation are voluntary. Moreover, although submitting to self-

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alienation, Uncle Jacob, unlike the worker, apparently feels quite at home. This is illustrated by nothing so well as the stern code whereby he lives his life. Here again we find it is the capitalist illustrating a point Marx once made about the worker-in this instance, the worker becoming increasingly depleted in his inner life and robbed of anything he could call his own, the more he externalizes himself in work as an alien object. 26 Uncle Jacob's rules are strict about how time is to be used: it is to be spent on self-improvement, self-discipline, and self-advancement, all in the context of business success. Here we have a particular instance of the axiomatic of which Deleuze and Guattari speak. There is no time for pleasure, relaxation, or self-indulgence-that is, either joy in work itself as a creative outlet or enjoyment of those moments and activities one gives to oneself as reward for one's labors or, more simply, to the discovery of life and the world around one. 27 As Uncle Jacob says to Karl in his letter casting him out, he is a man of principle (p. 94). By this he means that those stern rules by which he has made himself into the success he is may not be bent or violated, however he might be tempted to do so. He must deny his human side, even though this part of him would be only too happy to forgive Karl for the offense against him, even take him up in his arms. But those principles, he asserts, are now his fundamental self, and not even his dear nephew can ask him to violate that. Thus, in Uncle Jacob not only do we find the typical polarity between, on the one hand, human feeling identified with weakness and, on the other, coldness and indifference identified with strength-a polarity commonly associated with the commercial, bourgeois mind-but we also see that split between the personal warmth reserved for the hearth and the inhuman calculation adopted for survival in the marketplace outside. Uncle Jacob is the stereotype of the self-made man, the commercial success. One might say-again to revert to the spatial context-that he has conquered his territory and must now keep possession of it. At one point or other in all three novels the protagonists aspire to be successes in this mold. The self-made man bent on success looks on the world about him as one that must be won over, converted into his territory. But such a view already suggests an initial alienation, even an exclusion, from the territory to be conquered. One must gain pos-

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session over it by strategies that range from self-ingratiation through infectious charm (domain of the confidence man) to outright aggression. Since the place one is out to conquer does not in fact exist (or, to put matters in terms of the valorization of space, one has transferred to the inert rudiments of one's surroundings the value-laden configurations of a longing imagination), there can be no true method of conquest. Good or bad luck seems to have a larger role than in other areas of human experience. Uncle Jacob's code boils down to a kind of ruthlessly severe set of compulsions that he is convinced will bring him success. According to his own code, then, he has succeeded. So far we have dealt with alienation in settings that are easily retranscribed in ideological terms. But alienation, as previously indicated, also has a psychological resonance. Since Amerika, Journey, and The Shipyard employ the protagonist's viewpoint in the narrative, it is best to start with a form of alienation that begins as a status before becoming a psychological conditionwhen the protagonist finds himself, as he does in all three novels, either in a foreign country or a place from which he has been excluded. He is literally an alien. Kafka's Karl Rossmann and Celine's Bardamu are depicted as Europeans freshly arrived in America. Onetti's Larsen, on the other hand, is an outsider in Santa Maria in the sense that he was originally a pimp from Buenos Aires and, having been run out of town five years before for operating a brothel, is under the wariest of sufferances upon his return. Because all three figures are outsiders, their perspectives on their new haunts are always based elsewhere: Karl tends to see everything from the outlook of the Old Country, Bardamu's perspective is that of the popular quarter around the Place Clichy in Paris, and Larsen's the low-life quarters of Buenos Aires. M. M. Bakhtin, tracing such a standpoint back to ancient narrative, says that it converts the hero into one who is "governed by his sociopolitical, philosophical and utopian interests" -that is, those he acquired in his place of origin. 28 Karl, of course, has been sent away from home by his parents after a . pregnancy scandal involving their cook. Bardamu and Larsen have no particularly discernible roots and are in search of their fortunes: they are only too ready to shed their old skins. To all intents and purposes, they have simply disappeared from the place of their beginnings, a

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condition underscored by Kafka's own preferred title for his uncompleted novel- Der Verschollene or "The Missing Person." In the case of Celine, Andre Smith has noted that moving on, in]ourney, is tantamount to disappearing from the face of the earth. 29 As for Onetti, we have no idea what has become of Larsen in his five years' absence from Santa Maria. In short, these aliens in strange lands arrive from a place where they are no longer looked for. Thus, one may say that in all three novels alienation begins on a very concrete level. Moreover, the condition seems to possess a bizarre circularity as we see it depicted: the protagonist is an alien in a strange land among unsympathetic strangers; his status causes him to feel estranged from himself, and as a result he loses his dignity and even his identity. In terms of perspective, this debased view of self infects his outlook on things so that it is projected back into the surrounding world as he sees it, even if it is the familiar one of his own native land. In particular, he feels that people are looking down on him. Karl, for example, is constantly concerned about what others are thinking of him-for example, when he arrives at the Hotel Occidental followed by the disgracefully unkempt Robinson and Delamarche. Bardamu all too frequently feels both literally and figuratively out of place and even in physical danger (as on the Admiral Bragueton as it steams into equatorial waters). Larsen, whenever he is outside his room, feels himself the object of contemptuous glances. The protagonists' focus on things cannot help being disorganized and fraught with conflict in such conditions. Whether on home territory or in alien lands, the protagonists appear to have a natural impulse to move to the margins of society, so that the represented world is seen not only from an outside perspective but from a marginal angle as well. Of the three protagonists Karl is perhaps the only one who is not predisposed to be an outsider. But his brief good fortune during his stay with his uncle and his abortive sojourn with Mr. Pollunder are marred by the way he distances himself from these glittering realms, not merely in his alien status, but even because of a fussy petit bourgeois reserve. It is not too long before he is on the road, drifting from one unpromising job to another. In the process, he falls in with the aforementioned Delamarche and Robinson, two Lumpen from whom he finds it next to impossible to escape. Celine's Bardamu, on the other hand, whether at home or abroad,

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seems actively to seek out fellow marginal types and feels comfortable among them as a cynic among cynics. This suggests a strategy on Celine's part most in tune with the satirical thrust of journey. Bardamu knows how to share his alienation with his own kind. The war has left him marked as an outsider for good. While in America, he cannot really believe he will share the American dream and, in fact, falls into so comfortable an existence being kept by a prostitute in Detroit that he is forced to flee the New World lest he become too much at home in so easy a life. Even though back once more in his native land, Bardamu's profession as doctor in the poor suburb of Raney assures his continued status as a declasse. In the context of marginality, Larsen is a special case. His game is to pass himself off as a respectable citizen in the social mainstream when he becomes general manager of Petrus's ruined shipyard. Unfortunately, everyone in Santa Maria knows who and what he is. Moreover, even as he plays his part as a shrewd administrator, everything about him gives him away: his silk shirts, his slicked-down hair, his unwholesome obesity, and even the click of his heels. He cannot hide the fact that he is a pimp from the seedy, gangster-ridden quarters of the metropolis. Two important points about marginality must be noted. The first is the protagonist's invariably petit bourgeois perspective: one that leaves him somewhere between the proletariat and the capitalist ruling class (a matter I shall investigate in greater detail in the case of Celine). Such a stance finds him alienated from both extremes of the social ladder. The second is the gap between him and others who are alienated from his world, including the other marginals. In]ourney, Robinson is almost Bardamu's double, yet still Bardamu feels a terrible social chasm between them. The total isolation in which the protagonists exist, then, is of decisive importance in the treatment of the ideological dilemma in which they are placed in their represented worlds. Alienation, in this situation, leads the three protagonists to see everything across a gap of uncertainty, unable to connect with the life around them. In America Karl runs afoul of regulations it is assumed he would know. Bardamu cannot quite believe that the war into which he is thrown is completely serious. And Larsen must go through the surrealist motions of pretending that the wasted shipyard is still a going concern. The ultimate effect is that the victim feels ill-

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defined or undefined, provisional, insubstantial, and, above all, vulnerable. The world, as he sees it, risks collapsing into total absurdity. The feeling of lack of inner definition, as Sidney Finkelstein has pointed out, seems to the alienated more than just estrangement from what is outside. 30 They also become alienated from a part of themselves. Indeed, to many alienation may appear not to come from outside at all-that is, from the social conditions of the surrounding environment-but rather seems to be a product of mind, a fate, a tragic human state. In the context of Chapter I, this would be the origin of totalization, in so far as it is a vision of the world where everything everywhere is charged with the same depressing meaning. Another aspect of the divorce from self is temporal: a protagonist's wariness toward the present is often complicated by a feeling of regret over the past. Karl gives us one of the most elementary examples when he says to the Stoker, looking back on the life he has left behind in Europe, "I would have become an engineer in time, that's certain, if I hadn't had to go to America" (p. 6). An idealized self the young man had projected before him has floated off forever into the insubstantial realm of the conditional perfect. Bardamu and Larsen, who are farther along in life than Karl, have an even more baleful view of vanished possibilities and a self forever lost to them. Both men see these lost or missed chances as a kind of decay of even the possibility of self, a gradual, though irreversible, sort of dying. Already at the beginning of The Shipyard, for example, Larsen is able to see himself, almost like a double, across time: It was as though he were spying on himself, seeing himself from afar and from many years before, fat, obsessed, spending the morning in a ruined, incredible office, playing at reading dramatic stories of shipwrecks avoided and millions to be gained . . . He was able to see himself for a few seconds at one particular point of time; at one particular age, in one particular place, with one past. It was as though he had just died, as if the rest could be nothing but memory, experience, astuteness, pale curiosity. (p. 52) The inner fragmentation, or even effacement, of self that these passages reveal is behind that lack of an ideological filter, noted in Chapter I, through which the protagonist can focus the perceptions of the alienating world. As we saw, his views of the surrounding world frequently lack any organizing set of values, and the views themselves

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come across as skewed or fragmented. Moreover, we see that these views are suffused with various complex emotions (we have mentioned reluctance, regret) that serve as further impediments to ideological understanding. The presentation of this frustrated view of the world is further enhanced by various radical techniques of distortion used by the three authors in their descriptions of space. The protagonists' motivation for pursuing the enterprise of their own tales is always to achieve deliverance from their fragmented and alienated state-in other words, to attain salvation, a theme that connects back to the Fall. This may simply be the resumption of a former state that now appears ideal in comparison with present circumstances. Karl, for example, occasionally imagines himself in the bosom of a loving and supportive family (by now a totally false picture of a grim and contrary truth). Needless to say, one only needs salvation in a world where one's state is hopeless otherwise and where the conditions are unbearable. 31 This is the tragedy of Larsen's bootless quest for a fortune through marriage tO the mad daughter of Petrus, owner of the ruined and bankrupt shipyard. Only Bardamu is able to enter a socially useful career, medicine, but it cannot offer fulfillment, let alone bring wealth, in so alienated a society, particularly as observed by Bardamu in Raney, a workers' suburb on the festering edge of Paris. In contrast to the dreary and estranged spaces of the real world, the three novels occasionally offer quite different spaces that range from the simple euphoric to the outright utopian. Louis Marin has stressed that utopias are always represented places, here conveyed in language, that propose imaginary solutions for the real problems of the real world, and hence may be considered critiques of the dominant ideology of that world. While fictional characters may enter utopia in an imaginary account, it remains a place not of this world and has no relationship with it (best illustrated, perhaps, by the almost insuperable difficulties Candide has getting into and out of El Dorado). Utopias within themselves contain no contradictions, hence no dialectic, but are in infinite contradiction with the real sphere. Above all, they are places where one is never alienated. 32 In spatial terms, then, the protagonists suffer out their existences in what is plainly a dystopia. Yet at times there seems to be the hint of

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another realm somewhere on this earth whose every feature is the obverse of the grim vision they see before them. Here we enter the counterrealm of utopia, a place nowhere present in any one of the novels but nonetheless secreted in the recesses of the protagonists' minds. Something like a utopian dream happens for the three protagonists when they suddenly come upon the occasional pockets of space in which they experience momentary surcease from the anxiety, deprivation, and humiliation of the predominant sphere around them. During the war, for example, Bardamu finds "certain corners of a road or a wood that were bearable to us . . . You could imagine that things were almost all right; you might be able, say, to get through a tin of fruit with your bread and not be too harassed by a presentiment that it would be your last" (journey, p. 29). In this instance, one notes that it is more the imagination than a sense of reason that is at work, since the war is indeed omnipresent. Hence, one might say that such pockets of tranquillity are more the result of pretending, even play, than of a factual assessment of the true state of things. One notes the elementary ease, symbolized by tins of food and some bread, and an impression, however illusory, of a release from the anxiety and torments of the world. On a more abstract level, one might also speak of a release from history. When Larsen finds himself thinking one day, in the forlorn and rotting setting of the shipyard offices, of how nice it would be to have a table spread with a clean cloth and good food and to be surrounded by convivial company (Shipyard, p. 44), we can see that this pocket of space epitomizes a basic need that goes beyond the simple satisfaction of mere hunger. The momentary tranquillity Bardamu shares with his fellow soldiers during the war finds a reflection in Larsen's desire for pleasant fraternity with his fellow man. This sharing of food in friendly communion is in stark contrast to the general mood prevailing in the novel and again suggests a near utopian situation-even an agape. Such a feeling of communion may promote a great sense of happiness. This is what Karl feels when he is in the Stoker's cabin (Amerika, p. 8). It is a feeling of being at home-that is, in a place belonging to him. But we also note that such an impression derives not so much from within as from someone else's aura: in this case, the Stoker's. Hence, it is an "inner" peace that has been borrowed from

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another person or from a space that is not one's own and so suggests a certain precariousness, since one may always be evicted. On a more diminished level, Bardamu feels wonderfully at peace with the fishermen on the banks of the Seine one day on his way back home to oppressive Raney. Similarly, Larsen is attracted to Galvez's shack, despite its totally depressing forlornness, if only because of the presence of Galvez's wife. In these instances the sense of peace or being at home is itself derived from alien surroundings and might almost be viewed as a kind of gift that has been bestowed upon the protagonist. Perhaps the best examples are certain bedrooms that Karl is offered in his journey through America. The first one, of course, is at his uncle's. The next is at Mr. Poll under's, one which he never gets to enjoy. There is even the sitting room the Manageress offers him for the night in the Hotel Occidental that seems rather inviting. In this context, one must also keep in mind how little sleep Karl is actually allowed. Hence, among other utopian desiderata present here, one might put down ease, tranquillity, and rest-perhaps in its most fundamental form as sleep. A particular place accorded Karl that suggests further utopian attributes is his bathroom at Uncle Jacob's. Over the length and breadth of the bath stretched the spray-which of his schoolmates at home, no matter how rich, had anything equal to it and for his own use alone?-and there Karl could be outstretched-this bath was wide enough to let him spread out his arms-and let the stream of luke-warm, hot, and again luke-warm and finally ice-cold water pour over any part of him at pleasure, or over his whole body at once. He lay there as if in a still faintly surviving enjoyment of sleep and loved to catch with his closed eyelids the last separately falling drops, which as they broke flowed down over his face. (pp. 45-46) In Karl's enjoyment of this luxurious bath not only is theremomentarily at least-a release from care (namely, the harrowing schedule Karl's uncle has imposed upon him) but even an element of play. In effect, while playing in the spray, Karl is indulging in the type of dawdling of which his uncle so heartily disapproves. But such playfulness also suggests a kind of full enjoyment of one's own being (and body) that is consistently frowned upon in the regimented existence of life under a despotic social system.

Alienation Of our three protagonists none perhaps has more encompassing an experience of such euphoria in space as Bardamu when he is aboard the pleasure barge in the river near Toulouse. His happiness there verges on the millenarian joy that some associate with the coming of a utopian reign. We lay there, clinging to our last words and the cushions, completely dazed by our joint efforts to make each other happy, more deeply, more warmly happy, and even yet a little happier still, body replete, in spirit only, doing absolutely all we could to pack into the present moment all the possible contentment of this world, all the marvelous things that one knew in one's heart, and about everything in general, so that one's nextdoor neighbour should profit by it too and might confess that that was exactly the admirable mystery he himself had been looking for, and lacking, these many years, in order to be perfectly happy himself, at last and forever after. One would have managed to reveal to him one's own real reason for existing. And he, then, would have had to tell the world at large that he too had found the key to his existence. And we'd have had just one more drink together to celebrate this delectable discovery and it would stay forever thus. (pp. 404-5) So far the places we have considered that help to generate euphoria and anticipate utopian space are found in the real world. But we must also speak of places the protagonists simply imagine. Both Karl and Bardamu have imaginary visions of America at times, Bardamu before arriving there, Karl as he looks out of windows at distant American vistas. Larsen imagines himself some day presiding over the household in Petrus's mansion (the old man now dead but prevailing still in his portrait looking down from the wall) while Angelica Ines hovers over an imprecise number of children. All these places have the glowing aura of utopian visions, Oz-like lands that float up in the heavens far above the care-laden realm here below. These are places of limitless possibility, of hope in some future, of deliverance from the poverty and eternal despair of the present realm. Again this anticipates the utopian framework, since a radical transformation of one's condition for the better, of despair into hope, of grim pessimism into optimism, expresses the basic longings that inspire utopian visions. Moreover, in this same context, one might also speak of the religious transformation through conversion or deliverance and going off into the Promised Land, the kind of radical change all three protagonists

Alienation may be seeking as they continue their ongoing journey through the world. While they toil on toward so happy a place, they are content at times to pause in special resorts that promote a utopian illusion, particularly as the sites allow for play or simple removal from the hurly-burly of the ordinary world. I am thinking of such locales as taverns, amusement parks, brothels, and theaters (where the protagonists are not in the audience but actually involved in the production or performance). 33 In such settings we may again speak of the change of status that is undergone by all who enter there. Once inside, people drop their professional or even private identity and assume a kind of topical personality often displayed only in the one particular locale. 34 Of the brothel that he comes to frequent in Detroit Bardamu says, "It was the first place I'd been to in America where I was received without brutality, even kindly, for my five dollars" (p. 226). His sincere enjoyment of the welcome he receives in so contrived and meretricious an environment is typical of the alienated: so appalling is the regular world that even a patently artificial, or staged, setting is entered with a sense of relief. The strong play element, or factor of make-believe, is an important aspect of such artificiality, for it permits the patrons to achieve a sense of release. The most astonishing example of this is offered by Celine: the electric cars in which working-class people smash happily into each other in a street fair. But people get much more fun out of electric cars, a recent invention, because of the pseudo-accidents you keep having in them and the terrible jolts they give your head and your insides. More yelling cretins came pouring in every minute to crash into each other and be flung about, making mincemeat of their kidneys. Nothing would stop them. They never gave in, never seemed to have been happy enough ... Some of them actually raved. They had to be dragged away from this destruction. You could have thrown death in as well for their franc, they'd have hurled themselves on the thing just the same. (p. 310) Louis Marin, among others, has insisted on how much such places and activities actually reinforce the prevailing order of repression by permitting anarchy or even dissolute behavior to go on in a highly segregated, ritualized, and supervised environment. 35 The theater, of course, is one of the most effective places in which

Alienation to remove oneself from the brutal assaults of the regular world. To the extent that it permits a kind of collective experience that suspends individual separateness, it breaks down the barriers between the solitary person and those who seem indifferent to him or reject him. 36 Again it is Bardamu who expresses this kind of release most aptly as he describes his feelings in a cinema in New York: It was pleasant inside the movie house, warm and comfortable. Immense organs, as gentle as those in a cathedral, but a warm cathedral, as rich as thighs. Not a moment lost. You plunge straight into an atmosphere of forgiveness. You only had to let yourself go to feel that the world had at last become indulgent. Already you almost did think that. (pp. 200-201) The difficulty with all these places is that the environments they manage to contrive are almost overspecialized. They are directed to the release of specific passions, the satisfaction of selected needs. Hence, there is a set design to them that controls what goes on inside and, as in the case of the electric cars, cordons off their setting from the surrounding world. The electric cars allow for a revolution in miniature that goes on for a set time, then (much to the reluctance of some of the customers) stops. One carries out one's fantasies in a controlled but also unresistant, apocentric, and unhistorical place. Of those South American writers who have influenced Onetti, one might cite the case of Roberto Arlt in whose Siete locos one finds the mad dream of an Argentina turned into a utopian paradise through a social and political revolution financed by a vast network of state-run brothels. (And Larsen himself once ran such a place in Santa Marfa.) Actual performance in a theatrical spectacle is perhaps the most nearly perfect expression of controlled happiness: everything is staged, hence artificial; all is planned out, so that one has no inventing to do; one's text is memorized, so one has no obligation to contrive things to say; one knows the ultimate outcome of one's acts. Bardamu, in the Tarapout cinema, for example, has only to go out on the stage in a pasha outfit and loll about in a splendid decor while English showgirls writhe and sway worshipfully all around him. His entrance into the backstage area is described in all its euphoria: I made my way into the beautiful, upholstered underground precincts of the Tarapout movie palace: an absolute scented hive of little dressing

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rooms where the English girls, waiting for the show to start, pranced curiously about and swore. Overjoyed at having lighted on my bread and butter again, I instantly made the acquaintance of these care-free young colleagues of mine. They welcomed me into their circle really most charmingly. Angelic they were. Discreetly angelic. (p. 35 3) In the wings he enjoys the opulent appeal to all his senses, not only to his stomach but to other interested body parts as well. The Near Eastern stage setting into which he steps adds the further, and indispensable, element of play. My role was essential, though summary. Loaded with raiment of silver and gold, I experienced some difficulty at first in installing myself amid so many properties and flimsy-looking lamps, but I got the hang of it and once I was set, beautifully in evidence, all I had to do was to sit there daydreaming under the opaline spotlights. (pp. 353-54) This role completes the perfect picture of utopian ease that the theater setting provides: Bardamu is totally protected, fed, bathed in sensory, if not sensual, delights, and, in the bargain, removed from the dreary struggle for life in the brutal city streets outside. The utopian element in all three novels is, however, a problematical one. One of the most fundamental difficulties raised by the whole notion of utopia is that it is not a private but a social place: in other words, one may not have a utopia for one. Our three protagonists' dreams of future happiness fail to take into account this essential condition. We also note that their basic needs or aspirations in a utopian setting are primarily self-centered: they want a safe, warm place to stay (provided by someone else), food to eat, sensual gratification, and a removal from the hurly-burly of human history with its perils and catastrophes. The broader matters associated with utopia as a social concept-namely, rationality, harmony, utility, and orderplay no part in their considerations. This alone is enough to indicate that alienation colors even their images of utopia. 37 The Oklahoma Theatre offers something like a utopia to Karl, although the unfinished status of this portion of the novel makes it difficult to perceive all the ideas, let alone the conceptual intent, Kafka wished to carry out. 38 Nonetheless, it is the most utopian setting of any offered by the three novels. As with the other theatrical settings mentioned, entrance into the theater entails a change of

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status (as new spaces always seem to in Kafka). The theater's systematic review of each applicant for a job suggests a controlled environment and a custodial overstructure that takes immediate care out of the hands of those who volunteer to enroll. The whole focus of the final chapter of Amerika is on the future, and this in turn reflects on the new direction Karl expects to find when he arrives in Oklahoma. Of particular importance to him is that everyone is welcomed into the organization and guaranteed a job. As in proper utopian communities, the theater places applicants according to their previous experience (which answers the criterion of utility) and to their desires (hence, offering the utopian goal of personal self-fulfillment). What is especially striking is the ready reception given to artists. Karl's experience in being placed indicates that, in a certain way at least, others are showing interest in him as no one seems to have before. True, he recognizes how far down in the scale of things he is, even in this new setting, but the opportunity is offered him to rise considerably. Moreover, even before being examined by the various officials in the theater, he is given a chance to try out one of the trumpets being played by an old American acquaintance, Fanny, who is among the figures dressed as angels on a platform separating the new arrivals from the recruitment tents on the side. (The site of the recruiting, by the way, is a racetrack.) Karl began to blow into the trumpet; he had imagined it was a roughlyfashioned trumpet intended merely to make a noise, but now he discovered that it was an instrument capable of almost any refinement of expression. If all the instruments were of the same quality, they were being very ill-used. Paying no attention to the blaring of the others he played with all the power of his lungs an air which he had once heard in some tavern or other. He felt happy at having found an old friend, and at being allowed to play a trumpet as a special privilege, and at the thought that he might likely get a good post very soon. (pp. 277-79) This passage suggests that the harmony one associates with the utopian ideal is quite literally not being attained. And it is typical that Karl's own playing, while very expert and accompanied by a liberating release of breath, is idiosyncratic and not in tune with the others, an unpromising detail for one who would like to believe the young man has found a utopian environment. The utopian notion is further complicated by millenarian associa-

Alienation tions. For example, as in some religious solicitations, the posters urging passersby to join up with the Theatre declare that they have just one chance to sign up and must seize it before a midnight deadline. This suggests the climactic overtones of the millenarian experience, the separation of the eternally blessed from the foolish who have forsaken their only opportunity for unending joy. The angels with their trumpets blaring at the "gates" underscore this religious tonality, and Fanny even reports that there are sometimes devils on the platform. The necessity of gathering up one's courage to cross the platform enhances the idea that each applicant must make something like a profound life-and-death decision before "crossing over." But the most arresting millenarian development is the suggestion in this uncompleted chapter, confirmed by Max Brod himself, that Kafka intended to have Karl reunited with everyone from his past, including his parents and his old home. 39 This development certainly encourages those who are puzzled by the break in tone between this final chapter and the rest of the novel and so believe that the Oklahoma Theatre section describes a time after Karl has died and entered some world beyond death. If such were the case, we would have a curious alliance between utopia and the afterlife. 40 But, as already indicated, both the utopian and the millenarian elements are themselves undermined by disquieting details. For instance, there is the almost crude hucksterism at work in the signs and leaflets that have drawn Karl to the theater. We note, on this matter, that others more blase or less impressionable than Karl greet the promise of the signs with considerable skepticism. 41 Moreover, the presence of the ersatz angels adds to this impression of advertising hyperbole, and all the crude, earthbound details of their costumes, the ladders they stand on, the cacophony of their playing are pointedly mentioned. As for the organization of the recruiting operation, it appears not only excessive but on the brink of disorganization. There is no sign indicating to the applicants that they are to cross over the platform to find their way to the recruiting booths. This seems to be one of those oversights committed by governing bodies that think of everything but the obvious. There are also overtones of bureaucratic crabbiness that imply an organization beginning to be strained by its own complexity. Furthermore, a whole hierarchical order appears to exist

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which fills Karl with some distrust. The dreamy and absent-minded impersonality of some of the higher officials-the custodians, one might say-is noted. This quality anticipates the theater's exhaustively described presidential box by whose picture Karl is so impressed: it is empty. 42 Another troublesome element is the very size of the theater (one notes how easily Karl and Fanny lose track of each other despite their pledge to try to remain together). It is not so reassuring, after all, to be guaranteed a job when one must be enveloped in so vast an organization. One can hardly be encouraged by the ragged and probably long-unemployed fellow applicants who surround Karl: they all appear to be the refuse of the earth who have lost out in the battle to achieve success in the American setting. The jobs do not seem really so glamorous or fulfilling after all: Giacomo will be a lift-boy in the theater just as he has been before, Karl a technician, a designation that sounds like a euphemism for stagehand. Finally, one notes Karl's doubts about himself as he enlists in the enterprise, his shame over his recent past, expressed by his giving "Negro" as his name, his sense of unworthiness (even though he claims to the officials that he is an engineer). These ongoing symptoms of alienation are not entirely assuaged by this new locale in which there are too many alienating features recalling the world outside. 43 Hence, despite the many utopian overtones in Kafka's depiction of the Oklahoma Theatre, Karl's own sense of inauthenticity, coupled with the seeming inauthenticity of this paste-and-cardboard Promised Land, leaves the reader in considerable doubt. Even Karl, at one point, murmurs with some skepticism: "But it's a theatre" (p. 283). Such hesitation, coupled with occasional niggling complaints on his part, also bring the utopian element into question, since utopian discourse, by its nature, cannot be critical of itself. 44 On the whole, the Oklahoma Theatre seems to be more of a Gesellschaft (i.e., an association built on contractual relations) than a Gemeinschaft (i.e., a genuine community), to use Ferdinand Ti:innies's classic distinction. 45 In short, while we cannot say what Kafka's intentions were in representing the theater, it has a vexingly inconclusive quality about it that seems to promise the same sort of failure that has characterized Karl's other enterprises in the course of the novel. America has an especially important place in the now troubled

Alienation utopian context. In two of the novels, the United States figures prominently. In The Shipyard, the mythological symbolism of the whole hemisphere is subjected to radical destruction. Always a European construct, America, as a fabled land in the west, had an ideological function from the very beginning. It was the land of marvels, of the undiscovered, the fount of riches (or, even better, youth) which contrasted entirely with the orderly and predictable prosaicness of European life. It held the promise of deliverance, even of salvation. But, like any ideological notion, it could easily shift to its opposite: a continent that was young, hence primitive, dangerous, and even unhealthy, for the European imprudent enough to hazard his fate there. 46 This dialectic meant that America, at least for the visitor from the Old Continent, would always be seen through ideologically critical eyes, whether positively or negatively. Invariably then, the visitor would have blinders on, either to the bad or to the good. Of all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, of course, the United States, whether as a political or an economic model, was more liable than any other to concentrated ideological analysis. In the nineteenth century in particular, the United States was frequently spoken of in the utopian context. Originally a bold political experiment setting an example for the entire world, the land attracted large numbers of settlers from Europe in search of peace, security, freedom, and the opportunity to try their luck in a place of seemingly infinite bounty. Kafka had this image of America in mind when he said of pictures of Constructivist paintings that Janouch had shown him, "They are merely dreams of a marvelous America, of a wonderland of unlimited possibilities. That is perfectly understandable, because Europe is becoming more and more a land of impossible limitations." 47 All three novels insist on the heterogeneous origins of their predominantly immigrant characters. It is no accident that the United States and other areas of the Western Hemisphere were the site of nineteenth-century utopian experiments conducted concurrently with other social (and religious) experiments. (The Swiss Colony, always in a highly recessed background in Onetti's works, is an echo of this.) At the same time, however, the picture of America began to cloud. By the end of the nineteenth century the very democratic element of American society seemed to have produced an uncouth, uncultured,

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and grasping populace that boded ill for the rest of the world, if, in fact, American developments anticipated the wave of the future. Moreover, the incredible technological and industrial progress had produced, on the one hand, phenomenally wealthy people who had usually started out with nothing and, on the other, a vast proletarian underclass, much like its European counterpart, that lived at the bare survival level and in the utmost insecurity. In particular, neither Kafka early in the twentieth century nor Celine later on seems the least bit taken in by the myth of America as a Land of Opportunity. As alienated authors, they are not persuaded by-if they are even interested in-the many remedies in American political society against abuses so prevalent elsewhere in the world. Instead, what they seem particularly to dwell on is the murderous materialism of the American scene. In addition to being horrified by the effects of various efforts to rationalize work for the underclass, a matter already reviewed, both authors seem also to realize that American insistence on personal initiative and self-advancement (practically always at another's expense) easily becomes venality, and this, in turn, contaminates the whole social environment. The almost routine indifference that both authors note in the American setting would certainly be an example of a disruptive side effect of self-interested materialism. A person wholly focused on his own material advancement with little social conscience, let alone consciousness, who expels from his life all that will interfere with that single-minded purpose (e.g., Uncle Jacob), is a degraded creature. Needless to say, neither Kafka nor Celine (nor Onetti, for that matter) would agree with the principle that the pursuit of individual interests automatically promotes the general good, a principle enshrined in capitalism in any case but carried to an extreme in America. 48 Thus, from the point of view of all three authors, the rationality, utility, harmony, and order associated with utopian communities are absent in America. Instead, rationality here tends unwittingly to promote the dehumanization found in such social modes of organization as Taylorism. As for utility, this concept rests on the idea that there is a place for everyone in society, according to his aptitudes and his desires for fulfillment. In the America depicted by our three authors anyone who goes out looking for his place in the overall

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I

scheme is quickly overwhelmed by the inhuman rationality that prevails over everything, to say nothing of the cutthroat environment where only the most brutal and self-interested (and perhaps only the luckiest) actually succeed. We have merely to look at what happens to the protagonists, but we may equally note the general atmosphere of failure that surrounds them and affects so many of those they meet. Kafka, in particular, seems to mock the ideas of rationality and utility through Karl's continual and stubborn belief that some menial and hopelessly dead-end position is simply the bottom rung of the sure ladder to success. Celine also takes delight in making fun of such a mentality (though the best example uses Africa, not America, for its locale). Harmony is obviously impossible in an environment of every man for himself. On this matter, of course, we have the twentieth-century survival of Malthusian and Darwinian concepts, simply updated to include the human disasters to be expected in the modern industrial world. But under these specific concepts there lurks a more general pessimism at odds with the basic optimism necessary to be able to endure the brutalities of modern life. Finally, the notion of order is severely tested as a utopian ideal. In Kafka especially, we get the impression that, beneath the rational surface of American life as he depicts it, there is a disturbing undercurrent of anarchy or at least restiveness. This shows up in the uneasy relationship between Uncle Jacob and his lieutenants, but also in the signs of labor unrest (the Stoker's individual case at the beginning, later the protest marches in the streets of New York), the rough and tumble of the election viewed from Brunelda's balcony as played out down below in the street. Equivalent signs of dissatisfaction and unrest could be found in our other two authors as well. All the sources of alienation in modern life seem to become magnified in New York. The crass worship of materialism, or just simply money, is noted when Celine, for example, speaks of"the Dollar ... a veritable Holy Ghost, more precious than blood itself." 49 He offers the image of a bank as a church: "They communicate with Dollar, murmuring to Him through a little grille; in fact, they make their confession . . . . They do not swallow the Host. They lay it against their heart"-that is, their wallets (p. 192). The city's very size helps the process of magnifying alienating elements. Again, Celine, who

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likes to people his space, empties the New York streets of vehicular traffic and has only crowds of pedestrians moving along in vast throngs that spread from curb to curb. Kafka also insists on the size of the city and mentions the endless truck traffic moving towards it, thus adding that depersonalizing element afforded by machines. He speaks of Karl, Delamarche, and Robinson walking along the road and how "they began to meet columns of vehicles bringing provisions to New York, which streamed past in five rows taking up the whole breadth of the road and so continuously that no one could have got across to the other side" (p. ro8). New York's monumental indifference, stressed by both authors, would obviously run counter to the utopian expectation that one will be accepted into the new community as a brother and there live in glad harmony with others. Instead, the indifference promotes a sense of insecurity, because one feels one does not belong, is even out of step. Nature, so integral a part of the concept of America, is traditionally thought of not only as a source of its grandeur (especially the imposing size of things) but of endless bounty. But in none of our three authors does there seem to be any appreciation of this aspect of the New World. The only description in all three novels that gives some notion of the awesome magnitude of American nature is the final paragraph of Kafka's novel (a description that might well have been inspired not by America at all but by his rail journeys down through the mountains to northern Italy): The first day they travelled through a high range of mountains. Masses of blue-black rock rose in sheer wedges to the railway line; even craning one's neck out of the window, one could not see their summits; narrow, gloomy, jagged valleys opened out and one tried to follow with a pointing finger the direction in which they lost themselves; broad mountain streams appeared, rolling in great waves down on to the foothills and drawing with them a thousand foaming wavelets, plunging underneath the bridges over which the train rushed; and they were so near that the breath of coldness rising from them chilled the skin of one's face. (pp. 297-98) Although there is some exhilaration in this description because Karl, along with his companion Giacomo, is heading for a kind of utopia in Oklahoma, we note overtones of gloom, menace, cold, the overpowering force of nature (particularly in its expression of tur-

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bulent waters), and the sense of being at the bottom and about to be crushed by all the massiveness above. This is not one of those vast Romantic landscapes that takes the tiny human beholder to its wide, spiritual bosom. The vague sense of danger here is symptomatic of a deeper problem. This is not a loving, harmonious, and accommodating nature to which one has only to yield or adapt in order to achieve the utopian order. The nature we perceive in all three authors (and this, of course, includes the American locales depicted) is inimical to man, causing his works to rot and collapse. It first infiltrates through decay, weeds, dribbling rainwater, wind, and cold until it attains the magnitude of a sweeping force of devastation. True, human nature, according to the three authors, is in compliance with this dark version of nature: it is anarchic, aggressive, selfish, and hostile. 50 It eats away at the fa