Semi-Peripheral Realism

Semi-Peripheral Realism: Nation and Form on the Borders of Europe By Christinna Hazzard October 2019 A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Abstract Despite its crucial function within the global capitalist system, the semi-periphery has received relatively little critical attention within the burgeoning field of world literature. As a transitional space between the core and the periphery, the semi-periphery is particularly sensitive to the economic, social and cultural uneveness of the world-system, making it invaluable for understanding the transformations and crises of capitalism. This thesis therefore explores the form and aesthetics of semi-peripheral literature by comparing a selection of novels from the borders of Europe. The study is structured around two case studies, both located on Europe’s continental fringes: the North Atlantic island nations, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and Turkey; a set of very different social and cultural landscapes, which each illustrate a different historical transition to semi-peripherality. Starting in the North Atlantic, the first part of the thesis will explore the form and structures of colonial domination in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and will consider how the systematic underdevelopment of both nations has impacted the peripheral nationalist aesthetics in the works of Halldór Laxness and William Heinesen. Expanding the project’s comparative scope to Turkey, the second part considers how the history of imperial decline and nation-building in the twentieth century are reflected in Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin’s semi-peripheral city- and borderscapes. Together the two sections cover different, but overlapping aspects of semi- peripherality, including the overdetermination of historical consciousness; the thematisation of language and translation; and the dialectical tension between ‘local’ and ‘global’ perspectives, which in different ways shape the particular aesthetics of semi-peripheral literature. Through comparative analysis of how each text mediates the distinct political, economic, cultural and social relations of the semi-periphery, this thesis argues that the conflicts and contradictions of the capitalist system are registered with particular intensity in the spaces that make up the semi-periphery, resulting in an antinomic literary aesthetic which testifies both to the unevenness of the capitalist world-system and to the radical potential of the semi-periphery as a space for political and social transformation. This project thereby engages in current debates about the intersections of postcolonial, comparative and world-literature and contributes to mapping literary registrations of the capitalist world-system. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Deaglán Ó Donghaile and Dr Filippo Menozzi for their guidance and support throughout my doctoral studies. I am immensely grateful for our many conversations over coffee and for your generosity and enthusiasm for this project. Thanks also to Dr Kate Houlden for supporting me through the initial stages of research and to Dr Sorcha Gunne for sending me funding opportunities and encouragement when I was applying for PhD programmes. Thank you, Krystina, Jennie, James, Dan, Dean, Sam, and Jan, for your friendship and for patiently listening to me talk about theory in the postgraduate office. I also want to thank my family, my mum and dad, and my sisters, Ditte and Caroline, for always believing in me, and, finally, my husband, Sam, who has been a source of love, laughter, encouragement, and support throughout. Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………….….. 5 Chapter 1……………………………………………………………………… 32 ‘A History-with-Holes’?: Magical Realism and National Allegory in Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell and William Heinesen’s The Good Hope Chapter 2 ………………………………………………………………….….. 69 Between Nation and World: Peripheral Nationalism and Global Capitalism in Halldór Laxness’s The Atom Station and William Heinesen’s The Black Cauldron Chapter 3………………………………………………………….………….. 113 The Semi-Peripheral City: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death Chapter 4 ……………………………………………………………………. 151 Semi-Peripheral Borderscapes: Latife Tekin’s Swords of Ice and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………… 175 Works Cited…………………………………………………………….……. 181 Introduction I would like to maintain and strengthen the word margins: not as the “useless eaters” who have been rejected by society, or as the spatial deserts in which no production is to be done or money to be made – but rather as “weak links in the chain,” where the Real may appear without warning, and disappear again if we are not alert to catch it. (Jameson 2012: 480) The aim of this thesis is to examine the formal and aesthetic characteristics of semi-peripheral literature and to consider what this under-theorised space might contribute to the study of world literature. In this introduction, I will outline the central theoretical and methodological concerns of this study, including its place in the current world literature debates, the relationship between the nation, nationalism, and literary form, and the cultural significance of the semi-periphery. I will also propose a definition of semi-peripheral realism, which will be expanded and explored in more detail in each of the chapters that follow. I start by exploring the idea of world literature, from its origins in the nineteenth century, to its recent iterations in comparative and postcolonial literary studies. I discuss key conceptualisations of world literature by notable critics such as Fredric Jameson, David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), and situate my own understanding of world literature amongst the current debates. In the second section, I discuss the function of the semi-periphery in the capitalist world- system and suggest that comparing literary texts produced in this crucial space constitutes a valuable contribution to the materialist world-literature paradigm. I then address the question of peripheral aesthetics, with close reference to Fredric Jameson’s controversial essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” which I consider vital for understanding the dialectical engagement with the nation and cultural nationalism in peripheral and semi-peripheral literatures. In the final part of this introduction, I respond to Joe Cleary’s call for new ‘theories and historical atlases of twentieth-century realism’ (2012: 255) and position the texts selected for study, Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell and The Atom Station, William Heinesen’s The Good Hope and The Black Cauldron, Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death and Swords of Ice, and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Snow, as examples of semi-peripheral realism. The Ambition of World Literature Writing in the mid-1980s, the American cultural critic, Fredric Jameson, suggested that as the twentieth-century was drawing to an end ‘the old question of a properly world literature’ was Introduction beginning to reassert itself once again (1986b: 67). In a footnote to the essay, Jameson expanded on what such a field might look like, stating that it would demand ‘a literary and cultural comparatism of a new type’ (1986b: 86), one that would focus not on ‘individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other’ but rather on ‘the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses’ (1986b: 86). It would necessarily include such features as the inter-relationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the configuration of traditional forms, the relationship to western influences, the development of urban experience and money, and so forth. (1986b: 87) Jameson’s central motivation in the essay was to raise questions about how to incorporate non- canonical and non-western texts into the study of literature, ‘to convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly neglected literatures for people formed by the values and stereotypes of a first-world culture’ (1986b: 68). However, Jameson did not just put forward an argument for including these texts, but in relating the question of canonicity to the issue of ‘first-world cultural imperialism’ (1986b: 68), he made a link between uneven literary and cultural production and the uneven and unequal capitalist world-system. Jameson thus provided the starting point for a materialist theory of world literature in which texts from disparate cultural situations could be compared without losing sight of the specific local contexts from which they had arisen. The essay set in motion a heated debate within literary studies that has intensified rather than abated in recent years. Indeed, since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a surge in debates that advocate or contest the idea of world literature. These debates have been carried out with most vigour in the disciplines of comparative literature and postcolonial studies, as a response, in part, to questions about the cultural implications of globalisation, but also to a so-called ‘epistemological crisis’ at the heart of both fields, which has been belatedly acknowledged in recent years (Graham, Niblett and Deckard 2012: 465). I. Comparative Literature As Jameson suggests, the idea of world literature is not a novel one, but dates back to the nineteenth

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