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339 Pages·2017·2.22 MB·English
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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

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.