Allegory and Political Representation

339 Pages·2017·2.22 MB·English

by  Tala Mendola

f
o
The Yearbook
Comparative Literature
Allegory and Political Representation
Volume 61
2015
YCL 19 TOC.indd 1 11/4/17 6:37 PM
f
o
The Yearbook
Comparative Literature
Produced under the auspices of The Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana
University - Bloomington and published by University of Toronto Press.
ISSN US 0084-3695 E-ISSN 1947-2978
Copyright © 2017
General Editor Managing Editor Book Review Editor
Eyal Peretz Sally Morrell Akin Adesokan
Editorial Board
Ulrich Baer Ingeborg Hoesterey François Raffoul
Peter Bondanella Bill Johnston Alessia Ricciardi
Cathy Caruth Sumie Jones Emily Sun
Michel Chaouli Eileen Julien Joseph Vogl
Joan Copjec Oscar Kenshur Ulrich Weisstein
Eugene Eoyang Kenneth Gros Louis Alex Woloch
Shoshana Felman Herb Marks
David M. Hertz Karla Oeler
Founded by
Werner P. Friederich
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature
923 Ballantine Hall
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
[email protected]
www.indiana.edu/~ycgl/index.html
Cover Image: “AUX” (2013) by Robert Yarber. All images by Robert Yarber in “The Ugly Baby and the
Beautiful Corpse” are used by permission of the artist.
YCL 19 TOC.indd 2 11/4/17 6:37 PM
f
o
The Yearbook
Comparative Literature
Allegory and Political Representation
Volume 61
Edited by Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
1 Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation
Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
ARTICLES
11 Literary Arendt: The Right to Political Allegory
Munia Bhaumik
35 Ruin Lust and Totalitarian Remnants
Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss
68 Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon
Alberto Moreiras
86 The Object of Allegory (A Polemic)
Jacques Lezra
102 Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity
in Marx and Engels
Deborah Elise White
130 Bakhtin and Gogol, or, The Question of Allegory and the Politics of Carnival
Matthew Walker
156 Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory
Erin Graff Zivin
174 The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History, and Memory in Horacio Castellanos
Moya’s El sueño del retorno
Patrick Dove
INTERPRETATIONS
203 “God is God”: Essay on the Violence of Tautological Propositions / « Dieu est
Dieu » Essai sur la violence des propositions tautologiques
Stanislas Breton (translated by Jacques Lezra)
YCL 19 TOC.indd 3 11/4/17 6:37 PM
218 Fictions of the Return
Daniel Heller-Roazen
235 Radical Empiricism Revisited
Joshua Kates
POLITICAL FICTION: A SYMPOSIUM
287 Political Fiction, Ancient and Modern: From David’s Court to Fabrice’s
Charterhouse
Robert Alter
303 Political Fiction, Anonymous and Pseudonymous (A Response to Robert Alter)
Herbert Marks
315 Response to Robert Alter, “Political Fiction”
Michael Wood
HORST FRENZ PRIZE ESSAYS
320 “Dialogue in Monologue”: Addressing Darwish in Hebrew
Yael Kenan
328 Chamoiseau’s Literary Creolization: The Stylistic Potential of a Vernacular
Mandy Mazur
YCL 19 TOC.indd 4 11/4/17 6:37 PM
Introduction: Allegory and Political
Representation
Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
Allegory is always topical, but the mode seems closer to our experience
of representative politics today than it has in many years. Thirty-five years
after the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s important collection of 1981,
Allegory and Representation, we write in the shadow of elections (in the
United States, in Europe) and referenda (in Greece, in Britain) that have
worked with figures and slogans meant to stand for existing collectivities
or to establish them. Aliquid, the Scholastic maxim reads, stat pro aliquo: this
stands in the place of that. This, a minority of the electorate in the United
States, stands for that, a spectral, archaic figure of a great America to whose
mythological features—Caucasian, orderly, safe—the unruly and disparate
present and an equally unruly and disaggregated electoral majority must
be made to conform.
“Who will speak for England?” asked a headline in the Daily Mail in
February of 2016, before the Brexit vote, borrowing, the tabloid said, a phrase
used once before, in Parliament, to force Neville Chamberlain to “bow[] to
the mood of the House” and declare war on Germany. Imagine: the native
citizens of a sceptered isle, assaulted by what the Daily Mail’s editors call
“mass migration,” prey to “a statist, unelected bureaucracy,” “unaccountable
judges,” “a sclerotic Europe.” In the United States, the heartland is assailed
by the twin specters of the illegal alien and the Islamic terrorist, each
frequently a figure for the other, their hazy propinquity painting economic
anxiety with the colors of post-9/11 national and religious terrors, and vice
versa. And then there is a newly elected administration ciphering the bodies
of those displaced, deported, dead as a figure for the shambling chimera
of “America First,” in a farcical echo of Lindbergh’s 1941 rallying cry to
isolationism, anti-Semitism, blood libel. Political allegory, then, operates
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature
61 2015 p. 1–9 doi: 10.3138/ycl.61.1
61_Intro_1.indd 1 11/17/17 10:02 AM
2 Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
now more than ever in a mode of closure—the closed loop of interpretation
echoing closed borders, great and magnificent walls between us and the
other, between us and horizontal, polysemous modes of interpretation.
Such a mode does not represent a mythical return to older, even medieval,
systems of signification; the recursive loop we find ourselves in rests on the
self-conception of the modern subject. That subject’s imagined, medieval
past functions as the ground for both the terrorist-as-invader and the white
supremacist-as-Crusader (the latter substitution, implicit until recently, has
become an acceptable explicit political position: Deus vult!). That is to say
that allegory today is the mode of the alternative we are meant to desire. It
offers us what we should want, standing in place of what is the case. Take,
for instance, the numerology that captured the imagination of voters in the
United States and Britain: polling results, offered as uncompromising and
unimpeachable fact, coded for science-writ-large; they took the place of
proper analysis; they tranquilized; they veiled; they displaced.
Allegory is the mode of alt-news.
In dire times, the critic assumes the function of de-allegorization: “See?”
he or she explains; “behind the fetching clothes of nationalist nostalgia, under
the cloak of that ‘America’ that Donald Trump would make ‘great’ again, in
the breast of that same ‘England’ for which the Daily Mail claims to speak,
beats the clumsy heart of oligarchy and racism on which ‘America’ and
‘Britain’ were literally built.” Other action—what we more conventionally
call political action—may then follow: forms of resistance that range from
Antifa-direct action, through the classic instruments of liberal-democratic
opposition, to economic pressure (boycotts, shareholder democracy,
divestments), to mobilization in the name of religious and spiritual claims,
institutional or not.
The limits to this form of critical heroism are palpable.
The articles collected in this volume of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature
flow from an American Comparative Literature Association convention seminar
imagined well before Brexit and the US election. The organizers—now the
coeditors—had in mind to mark an academic event, or rather, two events:
the publication, thirty-five and thirty years ago, of two works that proved
decisive to academic thought regarding the relation between allegory and
representation. The first of these, as above, is Greenblatt’s edited collection
Allegory and Representation; the second is Fredric Jameson’s still controversial
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015
61_Intro_1.indd 2 11/17/17 10:02 AM
Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation 3
essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” of
1986. We take the eclipse of studies of allegory since the late 1980s to follow
logics that these works and their reception helped to articulate.
On one hand, the turn away from studies of allegory accompanies a general
disciplinary turn away from linguistically driven criticism, and toward ways
of writing about culture broadly understood as political in the academy today,
whether based in identitarian paradigms, versions of hegemony theory, or
critical philosophy. On the other, we take allegory to have replaced realism
as an explicitly, even vulgarly, political mode—often to be rejected for just
this reason. In the period since the mid-1980s, allegory has become, for the
first-world critic, the mode in which the subaltern is permitted, or made, to
represent; it is the mode that makes available, to the attentive eye, otherwise
obscured social totalities; to the critical ear, it is the voice of the cosmopolis
that hums below any local expression, or vice versa. The subaltern represents
allegorically, whether he or she knows it or not. When the critic reads for
what is thus represented allegorically, she confirms the legitimacy and the
value of her professional, disciplinary identity: the de-allegorizing function
we claim in such times is never, in this way, innocent. The writerly resistance
to allegorical representation should be understood as a critique of the self-
confirming practices of metropolitan academic criticism.
The fault line between these two logics—and the two disavowals of
the allegorical mode and its study to which they give rise—runs deep and
offers, among other things, new ways of understanding each of the terms in
play—“allegory,” “politics,” “representation,” and even the conjunction “and.”
This contradiction is the (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) subject
of the essays collected in Allegory and Political Representation.
The articles span less a representative survey of time periods than a
set of approaches to the topic. We begin with twin essays, both concerned
with Marx, but also, and more importantly, concerned with the ephemeral
political concepts gained from reading him. Deborah Elise White’s “Allegory
and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx
and Engels” threads revolutionary Marxism through the “aporia that allegory
both unfolds and obscures” in revolution and history. Jacques Lezra, first
historically, then undoing that historicity, theoretically, reads Freud with
Marx to tack this aporia through what he terms “melancholic allegory” and
identifies the tension between such allegorical pathology and the grief of object
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015
61_Intro_1.indd 3 11/17/17 10:02 AM
4 Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
loss as what allows humans to enter into coalitions and create institutions
(likenesses); it is what permits us to found “weak republican institutions.”
From here, a trio of essays excavate what Munia Bhaumik calls “the
status of the literary,” and hence, inevitably, the allegorical, “in the text of
political philosophy,” and vice versa: the trace of philosophy in the literary. In
“Literary Arendt: The ‘Right to Have Rights’ as Political Allegory,” Bhaumik
traces Hannah Arendt’s use of literary allusion and analysis throughout her
oeuvre. She concludes that only through the literary—specifically, Billy
Budd—in Arendt’s work may we fully understand her account of political
exclusion. Next, with “Bakhtin and Gogol, or, The Question of Allegory and
the Politics of Carnival,” Matthew Walker takes on a key figure for literary
studies—Mikhail Bhaktin—and recovers the relationship between Gogol
and Bakhtin, long ignored in the Western academy. Reimagining allegory
out from under the shadow of de Man, Bhaktin’s writing gives us a “sober
alternative” to de Manian visions of allegory. Allegory here is a “weapon
in a struggle,” the figure “of (or as) a machine.” Last of this trio, Yelizaveta
Goldfarb Moss takes us from the carnival to the ruin, Bhaktin to Nabokov.
“Ruin Lust and Totalitarian Remnants” invites an uncommon understanding
of the temporality of totalitarianism: of the Nabokovian ruin as a figure that
“resist[s] the pseudo-event.”
The allegorical machine comes back, melancholic, in the last group
of essays. Both Erin Graff Zivin, in “Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of
Allegory,” and Patrick Dove, in “The Allegorical Machine: Politics, History,
and Memory in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El sueño del retorno,” work at the
nexus of Jameson and de Man, tracing a new path through Latin American
studies. Graff Zivin recoups Jameson to read allegory as a political mode,
opening up the possibility of reading Latin American literature through a
“politics […] of allegory based in the impossibility of reading.” Dove, for his
part, tracks the “technological artifact” at the heart of the subject through
allegory in Castellanos Moya’s novel; ultimately, this artifact, which we
might call an allegorical construction, stands not “as the purity of a proper
space but as an opening to what will later become its outside—an opening
to others prior to any possibility of distinguishing between self and other.”
Bookending the Marxian duo with which the collection began, Alberto
Moreiras’s “Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon” turns to Hegel and Heidegger,
attempting to square the need for narrative deconstruction—which, in
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015
61_Intro_1.indd 4 11/17/17 10:02 AM
Introduction: Allegory and Political Representation 5
his description, entails the destruction of allegorical thinking—first into a
“horizonless nihilism.” At the last, though, he turns—mythically—to suggest
that we may understand literature as a sustained engagement with “unused
grace, unreceived grace.”
From that too-brief overview, let us return to the two critical events
that lie behind our collection. The central, symptomatic knot in Stephen
Greenblatt’s volume is signaled in Greenblatt’s response to the famous
question with which Paul de Man opens his striking contribution to Allegory
and Representation, the essay “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” “Why is it,” de
Man asks about allegory, “that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves
and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect
mode?” (2). Greenblatt’s preface “restates” in this way, de Man’s question:
Paul de Man’s question with which we began […] is thus restated as a
question about the politics of representation, and an answer is sought not in
the logic of the sign or in the universal psychogenesis of the subject, but in
the particular social circumstances that both shape and inhibit representation
in a given culture. For, if I may add my own terms here, all discourse is
improvisation, both an entry into and a deflection of existing strategies of
representation. The improviser never encounters the theoretical origins
of signification, whether they lie in pure presence or absence. All artists
enter into representations that are already under way and make a place
for themselves in relation to these representations which are, we might
add, never fully coordinated. Even in the most oppressive or, alternatively,
the most happily unified of cultures, there are always conflicts of interest,
strategy, and desire, so that the artist’s task includes a substantial element of
choice or tact or struggle. This task is shaped by the fact that the improviser
is himself in part the product of these prior representations. But only in
part, for were there a perfect fit, there would no longer be that craving for
reality that forever generates ironic submission and disguised revolt. (xii–xiii)
Greenblatt proceeds in two steps: a first one that translates de Man’s
phrase into “a question about the politics of representation,” and then a
second that places “the politics of representation” in the irreducible struggle
occasioned by the improvising artist’s simultaneous freedom and debt to
“existing strategies of representation” and the “particular social circumstances
that both shape and inhibit representation in a given culture.” The artist is
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015
61_Intro_1.indd 5 11/17/17 10:02 AM
6 Tara Mendola and Jacques Lezra
partly, but never entirely, the product of these strategies; she is agent as well as
patient with regard to the constraints of existing regimes of representation,
which are her medium, as well as the incoherent object her work will
displace, sometimes directly, sometimes through “ironic submission and
disguised revolt.”
The circumstances shaping strategies of representation vary wildly over
time and across cultures and languages. It’s not only that “what,” which can
or does stand for (aliquid) something else, is forged in the struggle that
Greenblatt describes, or that what can be stood-for, aliquo, must be forged there
too, but that standing-for is a way of exercising the sorts of power involved
in correlating terms and objects, or in producing relations more broadly, in
specific cultures and under particular circumstances. Just how this three-
way struggle is conformed, represented, and thought at a moment—say
the moment when Allegory and Representation is published, or Jameson’s
“Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” or this
volume on Allegory and Political Representation—is itself overdetermined by
“prior representations,” “cultures,” and histories.
For Jameson, an explicitly dialectical thinker, the postcolonial condition
is definitive of this three-way struggle and its higher-order representation
in the era of late capitalism, though in markedly different ways in cultures
and societies existing and operating at different and discontinuous levels of
development. The conceptual devices that Jameson turns to so as to bring
order to these struggles are taken, he tells his readers, from Hegel and from
Lukács’s “epistemology in History and Class Consciousness according to which
‘mapping’ or the grasping of social totality is structurally available to the
dominated rather than the dominating classes” (87–88). The dominated
“improviser,” to return to Greenblatt’s lexicon, working with the master’s
tools and given culture, provides maps of social totality, in the form (in “Third
World Literature”) of national allegories.
The essays collected in Greenblatt’s Allegory and Representation take
rather different approaches—from each other and from the approach that
Jameson would advocate some five years later—to understanding this three-
way struggle at the core of allegory’s structure, as well as the historical
shape in which it came before their authors. What proved decisive about
the collection was Greenblatt’s elegant conforming of these disparate tacks
into a strong, critical narrative—a narrative that gave allegorical shape
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature Volume 61, 2015
61_Intro_1.indd 6 11/17/17 10:02 AM