Abstract
Taken to be the essential feature of all literature, irony is actually quite problematic. Inseparable from the invention of the West by way of the Oriental society of Greece (above all, in Plato), irony enters the modern literary scene at the confluence of forms of labour, vestigial notions of medieval craft, an ethics of dissimulation, and an attack on dialectical thought. Indeed, there is a largely neglected tradition of hostility towards irony within dialectical thought, which leads to an aesthetic outlook on the world that, for a variety of historical reasons, has been most prominent in the global periphery. Irony is understood here as much more than a literary figure — as being, rather, a “standpoint” or position. It is impossible to decouple our largely uncritical reception of irony from the triumph of literary modernism, and so any attempt (as in this article) to question forms of “peripheral modernism” requires a critical revision of our welcome to irony itself, which is not essential to literature, and has in fact colonized it.
Four asymmetries stand in the way of understanding irony — assumed as it is to be literature’s very mode of being, a force of nature, and not something one could ever be “against”. To trace out its career in world literature is to be led first to the Western reception of the Oriental society known as Greece. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena is not unique in arguing that Greek theology and science were pilfered from Egypt and Phoenicia, that its civilizational ambitions fell under the imposing shadow of neighbouring Persia, that its celebrated tragedies owed their mysteries to itinerant Eastern Mediterranean fertility cults devoted to the worship of Isis and Osiris, and that what is now known as Europe had no attractions for the ancients whatsoever (except, perhaps, as a reservoir of slaves). All of these positions were common knowledge to philologists in the nineteenth century.
Conventionally, if inaccurately, the “West”, Greek antiquity gives us, among other things, the protagonist of the dramas of Plato — Socrates, the central figure in any philosophy that presents itself (as Plato’s does) as a form of creative writing. Apart from the fact that the Platonic dialogue is, whatever else it is, a fictionalized dramatic encounter, it is the work of a philosopher who famously condemns poetry and fiction in the name of philosophical truth. At the origins of “Western” philosophy, in other words, there is a performative contradiction. That is the first irony of irony’s literary history, its first asymmetry.
Next, in the inaugural work of the proto-modernist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Socrates is portrayed as the emblem of a world historical, “eternally valid” irony (1841/1965: 276). Here irony is taken to be the subjective attitude as such, the beginning of the notion that truth reveals itself only by way of a subjective poiesis, which is to say an internality, a willed otherness, and projective role-playing. In Kierkegaard’s Socrates, all thought is conceived as a dialogue that never ends: that continually expresses both the statement and counter-statement of a perpetually unfolding inconclusion. “It is in Socrates”, he proclaimed in his Master’s thesis, “that the concept of irony has its inception in the world” (1965: 47), that irony is a “world historical turning point” (1965: 278), a “mastered moment” (1965: 340): “no true philosophy is possible without doubt, so by the same token one may claim that no authentic human life is possible without irony” (1965: 338).
The terminology and outlook of Kierkegaard’s study are, nevertheless, emphatically Hegelian. He defers throughout the study repeatedly to Hegel’s Aesthetics, whose authority was acute in northern Europe throughout the 1840s of the book’s composition. Even while ridiculing Hegel for one-sidedly conflating Socratic irony with its post-Fichtean forms, he praises Hegel for correcting “what was deceptive in irony”, and specifically for trying to halt “the prodigal sons of speculation on their way to damnation” (1965: 282). And yet, at the same time, he mocks Hegel’s sarcasm towards post-Fichtean ironists, his “harsh” and “pedantic” judgements, and sneers at one point, that Hegel is “too aware of his role as commanding general in world history to have time for anything more than the regal glance he lets sweep over them” (1965: 244). Kierkegaard fully approves of Hegel’s concise rendering of irony as “infinite absolute negativity” (1965: 271), but thinks this negativity redemptive:
It is by means of irony that the subject emancipates himself from the constraint imposed upon him by the continuity of life, whence it may be said of the ironist that he “cuts loose.” To this must be added that dissemblance, insofar as one wishes to relate it to the subject, has a purpose, an external purpose foreign to dissemblance itself. Irony […] has no purpose, its purpose is immanent in itself. (1965: 273)
Irony, in short, is freedom — the subject’s freedom from meaning, conviction, and the negation of untruth. Thus saving irony from mere dissembling (although it importantly is dissembling among other things), he finds in its Socratic variant nothing less than the founding of the modern attitude: not irony as a mere trope or figure, but as a philosophical point of view — irony “as a standpoint” (1965: 270). Hegelian anti-Hegelian parody: asymmetry two.
But this is the same Socrates who, after all, in the Nietzsche that Kierkegaard’s confessional style and autobiographical iconoclasm anticipates, is the villain of Greek philosophy: the one who, we recall, Nietzsche condemns in The Birth of Tragedy for fatally severing poeisis from philosophical truth, for timidly and puritanically failing to see that lying is the only way to truth, and for purging art as dissembling from the necessary invention of the real. Plato for him kills tragedy in the name of truth. So how can Nietzsche, the master of Kierkegaardian irony and the creative writer as philosopher — the first true theorist of modernism — reject Plato of all people? Asymmetry three.
Finally, Socrates is the philosopher who in the original sense of the term “dialectic” finds his position in the form of a dialogue in which he negates others’ ignorance, inadequacy, and illogic. His philosophy is dialectical to the degree that he conceives truth as the result of an encounter with an opposed position, denying that truth can be derived whole and complete either from the observation of nature or deduced from a prior rationalist analytics. But then, how can he be ironic in Kierkegaard’s sense, whose general negativity mocks not only others but the time and place of the human itself? How is it that the same philosopher could have been responsible for both irony and dialectics, as though the two were different aspects of the same thing? Asymmetry four.
My interest is to suggest just the opposite — that each asymmetry above derives from an antagonism between irony and dialectics. They operate, in my view, according to different principles, producing different aesthetic values, and that this difference, in fact, marks a neglected division within world literature. As above, I am using “irony” in Kierkegaard’s sense of the subjective freedom from meaning, conviction, or opposition rather than as a purely literary mode. It is important that we regard irony here as “a standpoint” (or, to appeal to Lukács’s preemptively anti-Adornian insight, as modernism’s “ideology”). Only by keeping this in mind will we be able to escape dismissing out of hand any general claim that modernism as an aesthetic tendency (from roughly 1840 to the present) operates in the arena of irony. For the temptation to reject any overall characterization of modernism is overwhelming today. And it is surprisingly easy to find exceptions to general claims by looking at individual artists conventionally called, with varying degrees of exactness, “modernist”. One is in this way forced, though, to ignore the fully institutionalized modernist common sense that has made the aesthetic values of the margin, the fragment, novelty, complexity, innovation, and irony absolutes. These are, by any measure, the values that unquestioningly govern the metropolitan concert hall, museum, and seminar room.
I am speaking for the moment of tendencies rather than hardened categories, although I will explore specific texts below. There is no warrant for adopting the strategy of the object one is investigating — that is, for theorizing modernism in a modernist way, which would, of course, be to rule out the universal on the grounds that it violates the thingliness of the individual, the integrity of the fragment. What modernism historically displaces (this is explicit in Nietzsche, Mallarme, Beckett, Platonov, and others) is a set of vernacular counter-values that heuristically we might index as (among others) repetition, sincerity, personality, and voice. Although as formally experimental as their modernist counterparts, these counter-values are based on a different logic. And that is what this essay is about: the antagonism between the standpoint of contradiction or asymmetry, on the one hand, and irony, on the other.
We return, then, to the problem of periphery which is already implicit in one aspect of Socrates’ legacy, and not only for the reasons with which I began (Greece as the West of the East). Dialogue is a joint or mutual encounter or exchange; it betokens a negotiation with what before had been strange or hostile. It is usually oral, takes place in the presence of another, where bodies, intonations, and gestures all take part in meaning. Since Socrates never wrote, his philosophy is oral, and so it is this relationship of irony/dialectics to the oral that must interest us — an aspect of the oral not treated in Jacques Derrida’s famous reproach against the “metaphysics of presence” at the founding of Western philosophy. For at this juncture, it is hard to see the “oral” as being unrelated to the under-technologized regions of the world — the expressive orality of societies not yet deprived by modernity of the rituals of communal gatherings and the communicative allure of immediate bodily presence in political speeches, demonstrations, festivals, parks, religious ceremonies, and conversation over tea. In the digital environments of entertainment capitalism, personal encounters of bodies directly talking is, in some ways, the very sign of the non- or pre-modern.
In regard to the story of irony with which we began, it matters, then, that Socrates, the supposed paradigm of the authentically oral in philosophy, is actually the emblem of the disingenuously written — a point that Derrida misrecognizes. Far from being plagued by the illusion of the immediacy of speech, “Western” philosophy is really founded on something else entirely: the wiles of writing that feigns speech to claim the ambiguity of text. This contemptuous, but also dependent, appropriation of orality lies at the centre of postwar theory, and points to its relationship to the encounter of Western and non-Western in theory itself, which is to say, to the aesthetic response to world literature narrowly conceived as the literature of the non-West with its reliance on notions of irony superimposed on a variety of alien aesthetic strategies. Plato’s dialectic, after all, is a literary manipulation written in the form of a dialogue. But it is not actually a dialogue. The supposedly positionless position of Socrates is, in fact, an empty space into which Plato’s dissimulation of dialogue is inserted. It is a rigged system that performs an exchange between supposedly free subjects whose victorious outcome is prescribed. The preordained failure of one’s opponents will appear, in this controlled setting, to be the result not only of the weakness of their arguments but of their flawed character. I take this dissimulation of the positionless position, for reasons I will explain immediately below, to be a lesson that literary modernism taught theory.
How do I make this claim? Doing so adequately would involve showing the way that theorists (Bataille, Blanchot, Kristeva, and many others) refined their gestures, and formulated their concepts by directly drawing on early modernists such as Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Beckett, Bulgakov, and others. There is no space to do so here. Instead, I would look at the drift of the last decade — in, for example, political ecology, animal studies, neo-religious challenges to secularism, the philosophy of the subaltern in postcolonial studies, and other trends. These all represent what we might call a neo-Socratic position. Precisely to demonstrate their superior knowing, critics profess to know nothing; the guarantee of their philosophical rectitude is to express their doubts about meaning (I explore the prevalence of this at length in Brennan, 2010). As I have said, this is not actually a Socratic view, since it confuses Plato’s rhetorical device for his position, which is if anything firmly convinced, dismissive of its opponents, and eager to mock them. But more importantly, to this superficial Socratism has been added a still more formidable set of weapons: an ethics of reading opposed to all literary interpretation. As one recent critic puts it:
Instead of constituting the meaning that an absent author wanted to convey, we then concentrate on the sensual qualities of the text as a materially present object. We can touch, caress, and perhaps even eat the fragment in its material presence; we can even try to further destroy it. (Gumbrecht, 2003: 15)
This position arrives logically from the asymmetries with which I began — above all the hypocrisy of the extremism of writing in the disguise of orality — and has its own peculiar inflections in the body of thought that is, if not exclusively then at least significantly, drawn from academic and journalistic critics as part of a “modernist common sense”. Here modernism would be seen to represent not so much the welcome disruption of creative form as simply duplicity. But to grasp that point, let’s try to see modernist craft from a different angle.
Craft, the pun
The phrase “crafts of world literature” guiding this issue can be seen in more mottled light. At first it seems to push us towards form, wanting us to make sure that writing from Asia, Latin America, and Africa is not always foreclosed by the urgency of contents: slavery, oil fields, coming-of-age stories, the chador, landlords, partition, the occult power of subaltern life. “Craft” would then be a gesture towards the art of writing overlooked by the urgency of vital experience. This is, in fact, one of its meanings, although I see its deployment here as being cleverer, exceeding this first impression. A craft is not merely a set of talents for making things; it is specifically artisanal. It evokes a non-industrial setting of labour before mass production, non-technological and as manual as so much of the labour from the periphery is when it comes to building roads and temples, ploughing fields, making tapestries, rugs, carvings, devotional sculpture, clothing, and electronics.
To call labour-intensive work such as this “craft” is to say that it is not mere drudgery, that it is often highly skilled, involving forms of apprenticeship, job-trusting, guilds, or, in some cases, occupations passed down by inheritance through clans. The concept — to continue this conceit — connotes a meeting-place of manual and specialized labour: where it is not depreciated for being brute, even though it often is; and where it cannot be confused with the deadening repetitive toil associated with the factory projects of high colonialism: peonage, corvée, prison labour, sharecropping, ditch-digging, the large landworks of the “Asiatic mode of production” (canals, irrigation projects, the Great Wall) or the militarized imperial labour of the encomienda system, American railroads, the Panama Canal. It is a term, in other words, that emphasizes the maker, the artist; a term that brings tactically to the fore the imprint of the artist on raw material shaped to a concept.
For those reasons, it is an antinomian term, taking us back to personalized, creatively devised forms of specific works of art rather than the intensively macro kinds of analysis now so popular in world literature circles: sociological studies of book markets, statistical studies of geographical patterns or genres based on distant reading, histories of the book, world-system mappings, and neo-Derridean pronunciamentos questioning the ability of translation to capture the content of the original language. 1 It is about form, in short, although given the above, especially in the sense of the forms appropriate to insufficiently (or resistantly) capitalized zones of the world economy, where productive labour is thought of positively, where people who labour are respected for their labour or not considered losers for being labourers; where there is a shared sense that making things with one’s hands is an essential aspect of social life, and a common task of the majority; where form is not separable from the maker of art and where biography is part of the meaning of form.
Hence, the “world” of world literature in this formulation does not surreptitiously refer only to the non-Western world as distinct from the European or North American. It refers to an artistic strategy alien to the over-developed, post-industrial conventions of metropolitan modernity in the name of labour and form. This position rather than (racial or geographic) location can exist either within or outside the global periphery — it is not, in any identitarian sense, a colonial or postcolonial prerogative. But neither is it indifferent to the reality of upended peoples, coerced labour, and exploited resources lurking in the image of the periphery, from which it often draws its passions.
The dialectic of irony with which I began the essay enters the story at this point because “craft” also means artifice, cunning, and deception. Cicero’s definition of irony — “saying one thing while meaning another” — is by Western aesthetics betrayed by the notion of literary sophistication, a word that means, among other things, to be sophistical, to appeal to the barrier of hierarchical taste cultures in order to ensure that the artifice of complexity renders difficulty purer and truer, even in those cases when it is only more dodgy, ill-conceived, and confused. This is not to demote complexity as such, which at times arises in the artistic consciousness precisely as a protest against a labour degraded and voided of any quality of independence and subsistence — precisely, that is, a protest against reification. And it does not take Adorno to tell us that this very gesture underlies some of the layeredness and mental agility of modernist art. My emphasis lies elsewhere, on the sophistical deployment of a reified complexity acting to arrest opposition and to ambiguate earnestness. Plato, in this light, would be the paradigmatic Sophist, in fact. In intellectual/historical terms, craft takes us directly to the conceptual collision between Thorstein Veblen’s “instinct of workmanship” and Martin Heidegger’s techne. I am suggesting that the violent disharmony between these two notions of craft (more intense in that the two thinkers operated without mutual reference, travelling in entirely different intellectual worlds) bears forcefully on the arts of the periphery as well as on our understanding of world literature.
Veblen observed that economists of his day simply assumed that people wanted to avoid productive labour if they could. This aversion to useful labour, while desiring as many of its products as possible, was considered by them an instinct of the species rather than an outlook some might have and others not. He countered that, by contrast, people
like to see others spend their life to some purpose, and they like to reflect that their own life is of some use. All men have this quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit, and to this sense of economic merit futility and inefficiency are distasteful. (Veblen, 1898–99: par. 7; emphasis added).
Heidegger stands as Veblen’s complementary opposite, almost as though he were directly responding to him. He draws on the Greek word techne — meaning art, craft, a practical way of doing things — to offer his own, subtle critique of Technik, the German word for technology, engineering, and “technique”. Techne was used by the Greeks to refer to what was made rather than known; it was meant to suggest the opposite of science as theoretical knowing. Heidegger’s jest is in part to embrace, in part to reverse, this meaning. In the former sense, he wishes philosophy to be less about conceptual thought and more about a post-critical, post-intellectual experience of being; in the latter sense, by suggesting that the making of something reveals the being of the material that went into its making. It is not science, but philosophy and art that are scientific in this view since they reveal the meaning of being, and do so in part by way of Machenschaft (machinations, intrigues), another pun — playing on Macht (power) and Maschine (machine). His is an aesthetic/philosophical reaction, in short, against an over-technologized modernity in which the productive labour embraced by Veblen is obsessively referred to in order to be rendered irrelevant. He intently desires it to be irrelevant because he fears the dynamism of organized labour and the demands of labourers. The authenticity of craft as I discussed it above — the very thing that alienated factory labour can perhaps be said most to miss — is here in Heidegger, with intentional duplicity, the atavistic demand to efface the power and centrality of labour by returning to a rarefied image of its earlier, now superseded form. His move is a kind of culture-jamming that invokes the pride of workmanship in order to make it the guild possession of philosophy and so that it stays within its Ge-stell (its firmly placed framing).
Irony is a concept
There is, then, a politics of irony related, historically, to notions of intrigue, cunning, and deception as philosophical positions that acquired their form in the specific contexts of labour, Hegelian dialectics, and the (very dissimilar) responses to “machine culture” by different modern tendencies. I explicitly noted above that the “world” of world literature must be conceived as simultaneously notional, political, and geo-ethnic: that it did not necessarily imply other lands, per se, or the culture of the racial “other”, or the formerly colonized — although it does imply them as well — but also the marginal, the oppositional, the theoretically antinomian. My argument, then, resists the tendency to see the relevance of theory for non-Western aesthetics as being undermined when it sets out from the geographical place, and cultural terrain, of Europe. Whether it is relevant or not will have to do with criteria that exceed its place of origin, in part because one’s accidents of birth, or current location, exclude considerations of long-distance contacts, communications, or sensibilities, as well as the fact that the world has been deeply interconnected, and interdependent for many centuries. The history of colonialism surely dictates that our discourses, whatever they may be, or whatever positions are taken within them, will be touched by European theory if not solely reliant on them, just as Fanon’s Hegelianism, or Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s debt to Comte are matters of fact, and diminish not at all the anticolonial significance of their theories and movements. That said, let me lay out a short genealogy of anti-irony that puts down lines of communication between a tradition of thought and a modern literary practice.
First, though, we should clarify again what we mean by “irony”, not only as a standpoint, but as a literary figure as well. Do we mean verbal irony (saying other than one means for effect), dramatic irony (the unwitting utterance of a truth that only the hearers know is true), or situational irony (poetic justice)? Is Socratic irony (feigning ignorance to elicit answers to questions one knows in advance are false) the same as Romantic irony (the arbitrariness of language as mirror of the welcome chaos of existence). Are either related to the insistence by post-Fichtean ironists like K.W.F. Solger (whose views are repeated by New Criticism and deconstruction) that irony is the one necessary feature of all literature […] that to be literary is to engage in irony? The stakes of these questions were noticed by Paul de Man (who subscribes to this last view) in “The Concept of Irony” when he declares emphatically that irony “is not a concept” (1996: 163). It is, he argues, rather a “trope”. This matters, since there would then be no underlying unity to irony in the avatars above, no philosophy that grounds it in these various forms, as I have been implying there is. But there are those, after Kierkegaard, who understand it to be primarily a standpoint.
It has gone completely unremarked, for example, at least in the sense that I mean it here, that there is a consistent hostility in the modern dialectical tradition towards irony — not only Romantic irony, as is well known, but irony as a concept. And it has gone equally unnoticed that Hegel’s antipathy to irony precedes him in the great scholar of classical rhetoric and its tropes, Giambattista Vico, whose denunciation of irony was every bit as severe, and from whom Hegel takes a great deal in this area as in many others. “Irony is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth”, writes Vico in his New Science (1744/1948: 131). In his Autobiography, he makes the aesthetic sensibility behind the objection still clearer, when he casually remarks that he “take[s] no pleasure in verbal cleverness or falsehood” of the sort irony demands, for to do so lacks “depth”, and he would rather aspire to the “candor proper to a historian” (1725/1944: 111; 113; emphasis added).
My observation at the beginning that dialectics and irony are, in the view of some, intertwined seems highly endangered in this setting; and the mutual hostility of the two has direct aesthetic ramifications for the literatures of the global periphery that seem so poorly represented in contemporary accounts of world literature. For even though Hegel’s rejection of irony arises at precisely the point that he is elaborating the inadequacies and poses of the literary theories of Friedrich Schlegel, it would be wrong to limit his critique to Schlegel’s brand of fragmentary indecisionism, his taste for the cancellation of every positive value for a negative one, and then back again, his reflexive Pyrrhonism. (There is nothing in postmodernism not found in Schlegel.) What is at stake for Hegel, rather, is something much larger: the stylistic lure of secrecy, of private communications among devotés, of a labourious sophistication that intentionally displaces intention and meaning in a game of solidarities among literary elites. Latent in Hegel’s (and Vico’s) recoil from the ironic gesture is a proleptic enunciation of vernacular realism based on earnestness and candour — values both saw in civic terms, not only ethical or stylistic ones, as symbolic expressions of the conflicts of social hierarchy.
Responding to Schlegel’s Lucinde, Hegel discusses irony when considering a specific philosophical dilemma: can subjective attempts to establish what is good be successful, or do we need to look for an objective standard? This is the spirit with which he investigates four types of subjective good: “Representational Thought”, hypocrisy, probabilism, and irony. His point about the last is that it is based on the subject setting him- or herself up as supreme. He shows that Plato never set up dialectic, let alone irony, as the Idea itself. He “ended the to and fro of thought, and particularly of subjective opinion by submerging it in the substantiality of the Idea” (1820/1991: 180). Modern writers, though, employing irony are basically positioning themselves within its “to and fro” as though this itself were the metaphysical point of arrival. They are “enjoy[ing] themselves”. He speaks of the subjective emptiness of this position, and then makes a key move. The ironist “knows itself as this emptiness of all [ethical] content and, in this knowledge, knows itself as absolute” (1820/1991: 182; emphasis in original). It is the implicit claim to a universal condition that is the supreme arrogance of the manoeuvre, professing a modest lack of claim where there is actually one larger than any other imaginable: the prerequisite that there be no truth.
We will not be surprised, then, to find also in the work of Antonio Gramsci a similar developing antipathy to irony in literature perceived as a necessary and redemptive lack of candour, as a purification through doubt, and as the moment of the subject in a conversation without purpose. To understand the spirit — or maybe we should say the aesthetic foundation — of the polemical attitude that often accompanies critique within the Vichian lineages of Marxism, we would have to look at what Gramsci counterposes to irony — “passionate sarcasm”. Hungry for subversion in a rotten world, Gramsci contends that literature registers a “passion” whose “historicism” creates a “new taste and a new language” (1992: 118). Aesthetics itself now assumes the contours of a divergent worldview based on the rejection of an unacceptable present, and on an ethical superiority expressed as satirical defiance and critical exposure rather than exegetical legerdemain. Its politics is not immanent but contingent: only in transitional eras might the new aesthetics of satire “acquir[e] the force of popular convictions” (1992: 118).
It savours form, but flees from formalism, enthusiastically employs satire but despises irony, warmly greets the vulgar, but only as Dante did the “eloquence of the vulgate” (Alighieri, 1302–05/1996). I am not interested in a fixed definition, only the concession of a mood that captures the logic of a feeling and a philosophical style. This abreaction to irony is the first element of the realism we see so active in the early twentieth century that, for political and historical reasons, became so influential in the writing of the periphery. Achebe captures it in his judgement on Conrad:
When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents, and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. (1977/1988: 251–61)
In this company — which emphasizes, as I said, earnestness, personality, and voice — we might place the otherwise dissimilar work of César Vallejo, Jacques Roumain, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Mahasweta Devi, Sembène Ousmane, Larissa Reissner, Roque Dalton, Ana Lydia Vega, W. E. B. du Bois, Mulk Raj Anand, Kamala Markandaya, Otto Rene Castillo, Nayantara Saghal, Chen Duxiu, and many others. To see it in practice, let us read a text.
Crafted, crafty
I take issue with the host of efforts lately to revive high modernism as a politically engaged and even anticolonial venture. Several contemporary studies testily refute the suggestion by postcolonial studies, say, that the modernism of Eliot, Woolf, Conrad, Kafka, Stevens, and Beckett was quiescently imperial, apolitical, and on occasion racist (see Berman, 2012; James, 2011; 2012; Mahaffey, 2008; Mao and Walkowitz, 2006). 2 Instead of reclaiming modernism for the periphery, my view is that we should be finding a way to express the aesthetic strategies that explicitly depart from it. With our earlier discussion of irony in mind, take this stanza from Mourid Barghouti’s “Midnight”:
Why is it that whenever I see a man who has been murdered
I mistake him for a person lost in thought?
Here you are, collapsed on the earth
And the earth is in good health.
Your heart has stopped
Yet the earth beneath you pulses.
Your blood now circulates
Outside the confines of your body.
You were two: you and your demands,
You went out together and fought together, only you did not come back alive. (2008: Part I)
Although the problem of translation has achieved a new saliency in world literary studies, the political recalibrations that make Barghouti’s aesthetic strategy compelling represent a more difficult translation than that which is occurring here in the passage from Arabic to English. Translation in this case is an ideological more than a linguistic obligation, so that although the sensitivity to diction, pacing, enjambment and other features of the prosody are pronounced even in its English rendering, the poet sends us not in the direction of the concrete verbal “thing” (language encased as a rhythmic or imagistic problem, a theme in its own right to be analysed in any interpretation of the poem) but towards a different kind of problem entirely, one with which we are not used to dealing given our training: that of attitude or emotional tenor. These are conveyed to us by way of vernacular language that wants more or less to get out of the way rather than draw attention to itself. Its logic is similar to that of conversational speech, where the verbal thing is unconscious (or simply impertinent) in order to leave more room for the illusion of a direct intake of feeling and meaning. This is, to put it another way, and as in so much of the art of the so-called periphery, an emphasis on the very physical presence of the bodies of a collectivity in speech that has been so consistently discredited in our circles.
There is a playfulness to Barghouti’s language (his soft appeal to our outrage when seeing the murdered as “lost in thought”), but one that is curiously beyond play, superseding the mere gamesmanship of craft while adopting the register of the second person as though one could dialogue with a dead man. Can we imagine that the “murdered” has nothing to do with the many slain under the occupation, the children with slingshots dodging tanks, the unlucky remnants of the latest strafing run in Gaza? He does not say, but how could the equanimity of the voice here not be the result of a certain unwanted familiarity with the routine violence of a permanent state of siege, and so capable of prompting an attitude we call “philosophical” (“lost in thought”)? And so the insouciance of his tone, the attitude of calm observational detachment, begs to be filled in by the anguish he will not provide.
What we have here aesthetically is an inversion of the writing in extremis where the poet amplifies his/her voice by use of nonsense languages, manifestos, transports to African incantations in order to shatter the eerie calm of a malevolent normality. Here, by contrast, we have just the opposite: the bizarre realism of an endemic brutality, where the extreme conditions of a well-armed invasion are altogether normal. Barghouti meets it with a beautifully controlled nonchalance intentionally inappropriate to the outrage he records. Staged drama gives way to historical drama; the urge to shock gives way to a mitigation of shock by means of determination; the death of subjects gives way to a multiplicity of subjects who recognize their individuality in the now disembodied demands that survive the sacrificed in a re-embodied community.
And this is why philosophy can be said by Barghouti to arise from death, and why a dialogue can take place with the dead, since the speaker sees in the murdered a figure of her or his own thought prompted by the murder itself. The blood seeping out of the victim “circulates”, as though it were the earth that was the body politic, and we the organs. The physicality of the image — never cheaply corporeal — reverts forcefully to the spiritual which supersedes “spirit” understood, as it often is, to be a mere dumb staging ground of thought. To the poet, by contrast, the earth rather lives and is “vibrant”, but only by way of the “demands” that continue to live in the world the dead left behind. These are her/his half of the conversation, and the only beauty of her/his speech: the Idea rather than the linguistic thing in English as in the original Arabic. The foreignness of the poetry, again, has much less to do with the language of its origin than with its unapologetic casting of the immediate facts of a contemporary imperialism in epic-heroic terms. To see these terms as beautiful, that is, to locate in the wry genius of his indirection the reassertion of an epic attitude, deemed obsolete in the modernist revolt in form, is to understand what might be political about aesthetics.
In place of the values ascribed to the modernist impulse, we find another set: directness, sincerity, understatement, the longings of memory, compassion, emotional nakedness, contradiction, vulgarity, ideological reversal, satirical inversion. The contrast is simply no longer expressed adequately by the dichotomies of realism/modernism or realism/expressionism in which criticism is still largely embroiled.
Even richer resources for the points I have been making can be found in Mahmoud Darwish. For although it is true that one would need to know Arabic to appreciate certain stylistic dimensions of Darwish’s poetry, or to appreciate his reliance on the literary sources of the Eastern Mediterranean (among them, Egyptian book of the dead, Gilgamesh, Jeremiah, Canaanite hymns to Anan the Moon Goddess, Sumerian love poetry, and other sources that he makes elaborate use of throughout his poems), his poetry is equally illegible without a political translation. One would simply have to understand, for example, why he was drawn to the politics of Pablo Neruda (one of his models), his systematic analogies between the fate of Palestinians and American Indians, his early apprenticeship in political economy in Moscow, his antipathy to the Oslo accords and his rejection of a two-state solution in Palestine, and so on. It takes a profound effort to learn Arabic, but the “culture” of Darwish is expressed as much in this latter set of references as in the linguistic ones, and learning them requires a great deal of effort as well.
Let me carry on the discussion, then, by turning to Neruda himself, which has the advantage of moving us to an entirely different social context and time (although firmly within the self-conscious lineage of Vichian anticolonial sentiment) in the name of the idea’s general applicability:
“The Beggars”
By the cathedrals, bunched up like knots
against the wall, they dragged
their feet along, lugging their bundles, their black looks,
their livid bumps and bulges like gargoyles,
their jagged cans of food.
And from there, from that punishing
saintliness of the stone walls
they turned into street flowers, wandering
flowers of an authorized plague.
The park has its beggars
just as it has its trees of tortured
branches and roots:
At the foot of the garden lives a slave
like the end of man, pure garbage.
He takes his impure symmetry as natural,
waits for death’s broom.
Charity buries him
in its pit of leprous earth:
a cautionary tale for the people of my time.
We have to learn how to trample this species under foot, make it sink
deep into the swamp of our contempt,
drive a boot into the face
of this creature who wears its defeat like a uniform.
Or at least we ought to understand him
as a product of nature.
American beggar, child of the year
1948, grandchild
of the cathedrals, I do not worship you,
I am not going to cast you in antique marble,
or inscribe on your noble figure the beard of a king,
the way they justify you in books.
I am going to erase you with hope.
You will not come into my organized love.
I won’t let you inside my head along with those
who, like you, were created by the world spitting you out
as a degraded form.
I separate out your clay from the rest of the earth
And keep it that way until the metals of the rock remake you,
And you set out again shining like a blade. (1955: 241–2; my translation)
The craft of the poem yields nothing to those for whom semantic reversals, double-entendres, and figurative tours-de-force exemplify the vaunted experimentalism of literary modernism, and are more often than not confused with it. There are, first of all, the extravagant borrowings from the genre of horror (in the apparent spirit of Baudelaire, Hoffmann, or Poe), “pour epater les bourgeois” — cathedral gargoyles that climb down from their parapets to walk the streets, hideous flowers without roots (errantes flores) that monstrously wander the streets spreading infection, tree roots not merely tortuous but “tortured”. The imagery is anything but denotative: beggars are “knotted to walls” (anudados al muro), the food, not only the cans that contain it, is “jagged”; death lacks its scythe, carrying instead the “broom” of a menial labourer (escoba de la muerte); the earth for burying lepers is itself “leprous”, even “symmetry” of all things is “impure”. The electrifying risks of such imagery, its hyperbolic quality, seems, in fact, very much a part of the “hotel abyss” (as Lukács put it) of literary modernism — life out of joint, nature defiled, the normality of the fantastic, the redemption of oblivion. There is a consistent deflection of voice throughout the poem, a constantly shifting perspective that we associate with the impersonality or decentredness of the subject. The poet, in other words, who refers to the vagrants in the park as “pure garbage”, is not the “I” that speaks shortly afterwards.
The poem turns on inversion. It is not above play, but only in the open sense of registering a voice that it pretends to adopt, with a pretence that is not designed to fool its readers, or leave them in doubt about its intentions. Beggars are a “species”; their condition an act of nature, amelioration is pointless. With this same ventriloquized voice (the voice of a social type that the poem wants satirically to dispatch) we are urged to kick them in the face, erase them from existence: the literal attitude of the police, the wealthy, the upper middle classes of Venezuela, the limpieza social programmes of Colombia where street urchins were quite literally exterminated by plan in order to salve the sensitivities of those who preferred not to see social garbage in their midst. But everything is turned around. It is not the beggars who are to be trampled upon in the poet’s real (rather than staged) voice, but beggardom; “love” is not the charity that punishes them with its unctuous saintliness under the counsel of the stone-hearted church walls, but “organized love” — that is, socially planned, politically regnant, communist. It will turn natural victims into historical agents, reversing the connotations of “nature” and making the beggar less like the gnarled vegetation of a city park, rooted in his or her uprootedness, than the reconstituted revolutionary blade forged in metals mined from the earth. This is not irony, but a contradiction transformed by figurative language into an upending of “nature”. It is the impassioned ridicule, publicly shared, of those who shamefully and intolerably consign the social outrage of beggardom to nature.
Irony itself is plastic and changing, of course, and I am not suggesting either that these poets or I intend to proscribe it. And yet, as I have been discussing it, it signifies a dividing line between two worlds of world literature that, in one of its halves, brings the aesthetic strategies of anticolonial writing in the periphery together with a critique of irony as a concept. We can appreciate what is being opposed by looking at the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’ “A High-Tone Old Christian Woman” (1923):
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets.
. . .
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
A poem in the second person, and so one half of a dialogue. But (as in Socrates) not. A set-up, really, where the “Madame” — already adduced in the title (“high-tone”) as offensively genteel, an old woman of scolding Christian tastes (one of whose offences is, in fact, to be a woman, or to be old) — is coaxed by the knavish immoralist persona to forego the law since its “opposite” exists (in a cosmic sense) in absolute equivalence with it, cancelling each other out. The glorious absence of law is required for the “jovial hullabloo” of the dead beyond the stars, giving the lie to their solemn epitaphs, which portray them as upstanding citizens. The very real, and of course also standard, hypocrisy of well-heeled, judgemental puritans pretending to mortify their excessive flesh is not satisfied here with its exposure. That would be social satire. It becomes rather here the warrant for jettisoning “conscience” and seeing planetary harmony in a joyful chaos of spirited mockery. All of the self-reflexive textuality of modernism is worn on the sleeve. The poem is not simply a message about the immoral cosmos, after all, but about a poetry concretized in heavy-handed punning and a studied linguistic opacity helped along by its archaic diction constantly drawing attention to itself (knave/nave; peristyle/style, palms/prayer, windy citherns that as objects call forth the very music they play). The relentless assonance and alliteration are so clotted that syntax can hardly budge (“May, merely may, Madame”, “wink as they will”, “widows wince”). The literary cleverness of Stevens’ prosody is the emblem of the immorality praised at the stellar level in a conspiracy with those of comparable mind, intentionally omitting those without.
Modernism is also many things, of course. Not all fall under the category of what Edward Said, in the Lukácsian mode that he often adopted, calls “the irony of a form that draws attention to itself as substituting art and its creations for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires” (1993: 189). One can admire Kafka’s penetrating mood of disaffection in the face of the ominous “power” that hovers over him while tiring of his supercilious disparagement of sentiments and his pretentious solemnity in the face of the meaningless of any cause. This is not to say, for instance, that epic myth was beyond Ezra Pound, or that Georges Perec is incapable of political satire, or that Trinh Minh-ha never displayed earnestness in her photo-text collages, or that Conrad, Khatibi, or (Wyndham) Lewis never expressed sympathy for the poor. It does mean that there are political–aesthetic sensibilities — in every sense marginal — for which Beckett’s Texts for Nothing or Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild seem ludicrous.
What is not found in any of the modernism above is the “civic”. By that I do not mean only a narrow focus on the virtues of citizenship, but a grounded sense of the vitality of a position in, and the uncertainty of the outcome of, a world of conflicting social forces. What there is (also) not is the impulse, at once political and aesthetic, to recover the logic which modernism had earlier countered with its exaggerated concern with form; its elevation of the monadic, occasional, or temporary over anything monumental; its preference for sense data over ideas; its ontological view of the human as solitary and asocial; its phenomenological clichés; and as Said remarks, again emulating Lukács, its “extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive irony” (1993: 188; emphasis added).
Does the periphery appear more valuable when we locate in its artists a peripheral modernism? I am suggesting not. World literature, which is always local, finds even in countries or situations rich in vernacular, anticolonial invective, that when modernism enters the scene, it tends to do so at moments of despair, collapse, and disillusionment.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.