Bruce Robbins

INFORMATION AND EMOTION: ON THE AMBITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION

“Information has become the new character.” James Wood, “Hysterical Realism”

ritic James Wood, in a review of ’s novel White Teeth, objects Cto such features as “a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) . . . a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time.” These are among the signs, he says, that “a genre is hardening,” the genre of “the big ambitious novel.” I quote: “A parody would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. “To be or not to be”—ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deforma- tion, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since.” He then asks: “Is this a caricature, really?” It is quite a good caricature, I think—so good that I would like to claim it as a piece of perhaps unintended intertextuality, in other words as an applica- tion for membership in the genre it caricatures. (This is hardly an outlandish claim given that Wood names Dickens as the “parent” of this genre and adds that “Dickens makes caricature respectable in an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character.” In other words, Wood knows that in offering a caricature he himself is doing what he accuses the genre of doing.) When Wood complains that this kind of writing is incompatible with “tragedy or anguish,” that it does not do “scenes,” that it is awkward in its representation of “character,” that its stories are “inhuman stories,” one feels a certain formal and moral banality in the criticism, and one might be tempted

The Romanic Review Volume 100 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 94 Bruce Robbins to dismiss it as a banal anti-modernism that has not been new or enlightening since it frst scoffed at Woolf and Joyce. What distinguishes it, and provokes me to think of Wood as keeping company with his targets, is the common ground of realism. It is within what he calls “the conventions of realism” that Wood places his targets, whom he accuses not of “abolishing” those conven- tions but merely of “overworking” them. And it’s within the conventions of realism that we would have to place his own criteria. Wood is not merely rant- ing in a familiar way about modernism or postmodernism; he is talking about the requirements of realism to novelists who clearly intend to do realism. As he notes, these realists are trying to do something that is usually considered mor- ally impeccable: trying to follow Forster’s dictum “only connect.” For Wood, it just doesn’t work. To summarize a long argument: we get information about how we are all connected, but we don’t get to feel those connections. Is it simply too ambitious to aim at investing a reader’s feelings in connec- tions between people who are separated by half a planet? Is this an ambition that novelists should renounce as beyond their technical means? The same argument is of course made not just about the novel but about cosmopolitan- ism itself, which is judged to be an impossible and misguided ideal. It is dif- fcult enough to function as the citizen of a given nation, it is often repeated; no one can be a citizen of the world. The feeling of connectedness will not stretch so far. And yet it is unclear that one can be even a half-decent citizen of a nation like the United States if one does not make some effort to be more than a US citizen. And I would propose that the same holds for the novel. I gave my frst lecture on the novel at Columbia on the 12th of September, 2001. The events of the previous day were of course very much on everyone’s mind and in everyone’s feelings. I asked the class whether they wanted to talk about the attack on the World Trade Center or to try for business as usual. By a very large majority, they opted for business as usual. But some sort of segue seemed unavoidable. The text on our syllabus for that day was a dramatically intertextual novel from Sudan called Season of Migration to the North. Season of Migration to the North rewrites Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a geo- graphical reversal: an Arabic-speaking North African travels up the Thames to London, and in that northern heart of darkness he commits a series of violent acts against white women, women who end up dead although they are very explicitly described as well-intentioned, non-racist, having done nothing to deserve such treatment. This came a bit too close to the events of September 11th to pass unremarked. So I invited the students to imagine a secretary in the frm of Cantor Fitzgerald who was at her desk in the World Trade Cen- ter bright and early the day before and who therefore lost her life in a way that could hardly be described as anything but meaningless. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center had nothing to do with her life, with On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction 95 her personal relationships, with her character. I asked them to imagine that nothing in her life, nothing of the stuff that novels are ordinarily made out of, would seem to connect in any way with the event that ended her life. And then I told the students that one reason for paying attention to the novels we were going to be reading, beginning with Season of Migration to the North, was that at their best, this is precisely the challenge they set themselves: making the sort of meaning that novels make, but making it out of historical materials or situations that, like the planes that attacked the World Trade Center, seem to come from nowhere, seem to defy the whole project of novel writing. The fact that I told the students this doesn’t make it so. Still, I quote myself because my unrehearsed, somewhat desperate gambit on September 12, 2001 suggests a line of argument that might answer Wood in a vocabulary that he could be expected to recognize. The challenge of producing emotively-charged meaning out of encounters that seem arbitrary and indeed stretch the sense of connection, but are not utterly arbitrary: this is a more sympathetic way of describing the ambition of the “big ambitious novel” that Wood sees hard- ening into a contemporary genre.1 To frame the argument in this way is to think of the conventions of realism as formal resources that realism has at its disposal, resources that may be stretched thin or overworked by the extreme social conditions to which they are applied, even to the point of parody, but that are the self-conscious tools of a self-conscious community of writers. I think these people are reading each other—not in exactly the same spirit in which Wood reads them, but while asking some of the kinds of questions he is asking. Ironically, Wood’s parody isolates a number of tropes which are like signature devices of a club of novelists, internally self-conscious, binding these writers both to the outside world of social information and, at the same time, to each other, and thus making possible (or so I hope) an internal literary his- tory of literature. Realists are not supposed to look at other realists; realism is supposed to be a mirror on a path, an unmediated look at the world itself. But here is a new mini-tradition of writers clearly looking at each other, recipro- cally self-quoting, joined together by common borrowings—yet joined in the common purpose, one might say, of a better representation of today’s global, strenuous social connectedness. There is both internal and external evidence for the kind of self-conscious intertextuality I’m proposing here. I am going to leave aside the external evi- dence—Garcia Marquez paying his debts to Faulkner, Rushdie paying his

1. One could say that the principle of harm experienced as coming from nowhere, yet not totally random, takes a not unfamiliar form in Smith’s White Teeth when a fellow waiter tells a Bangladeshi man who’s having trouble with an English woman: “it ain’t you she’s angry with”—it’s history (169). This is a version of the World Trade Center experience. 96 Bruce Robbins debt to Garcia Marquez, and so on.2 To show how these ambitious writers are looking at each other, and to what end, I’d like to focus on connection-making at the level of the sentence. A certain kind of sentence. “Many years later, as he faced the fring squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” You will have recognized the famous frst sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now consider on the hero’s grandfather early in Midnight’s Children: “Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifce himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up” (5). Or the frst sentence of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000): “In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Among the many things that can be said about the “many years later” tem- plate sentence is that it represents large gesture of narratorial wilfulness: the narrator disregards the unity of the scene as well as the unity of the character’s consciousness in order to jump forward in time. The jump forward in time is to a moment when the character will look backward in time; it’s not the character himself whose mind is jumping forward. But this jump forward in time is also a jump outward to another place. Ice has to be “discovered” by the inhabitants of Macondo because on the Caribbean coast where they live, it’s too hot for ice. Among other things, this sentence is a way of getting into the narrative places that are alien to the experience of the characters: places where there is ice or where ice is known about. In both senses, a critical sensibility like Wood’s might well see a sort of violation of the novel’s implicit pact to stay close to the consciousness of the characters—close in time and close in space. Here, of course, the ambition to escape from proximity in search of connection is an obviously logical one: frst, because ice stands for those foreign intru- sions which are offered as possible reasons for the Fall from Paradise that this novel recounts, the very fall that puts Colonel Aureliano Buendia in front of the fring squad; and second, because by jumping forward to the fring squad, the presumed moment of the character’s death, the narrator would be telling us something so very indispensable to the meaning of the character’s life that

2. Some of the more obvious kinds of internal debts include Zadie Smith rewriting E.M. Forster and in citing “Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant” from The Waste Land. On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction 97 the temporal leap is, as it were, naturalized in advance. As Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller,” “The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in the statement” a man “who died at 35 will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of 35” (100). Note that this extra thematic content also carries over to the Rushdie example, which doesn’t merely look forward to a moment of looking backward, but looks forward to the moment of the character’s death, which accompanies his looking backward. If the temporal distance here resembles the distance in space that Wood was complaining about, the sentence answers the complaint, denies the arbitrari- ness of the interruption by revealing a hidden relationship between the two places, a sort of rhyme. And this rhyme/ relationship is signifcant enough to justify the interruption. Death, for example, is important enough to justify a leap forward. And like Garcia Marquez, both Rushdie and Chabon fll the third temporal slot—not the present of narration, or the future of remembrance, but the past moment that is remembered, which is never quite identical with the present of narration. They fll this past with an analogue of Garcia Marquez’s discovery of ice, with something like a force or motive that will help explain the action to come: the fascination with Houdini in Chabon, the collision of unspoiled valley with secular nationalism in Rushdie.3 In all three cases, note that the triangular relationship is a site of relatively strong emotion. At the risk of reductiveness, I would say that emotion is the fnal criterion of James Wood’s argument—emotion of a certain sort, but as is so often the case with emotion, a sort that Wood refrains from specifying. At its core, he suggests, the novel is an organization of emotion. “Character” is not a good in itself, for him; character is a sort of machinery for the production of feel- ing. Hence the goal of readerly feeling trumps the goal of realistic accuracy. “Mr Micawber may be a caricature . . . but he feels, and he makes us feel” (185). The charge to which Wood seems most committed is that the new genre, though inspired by Dickens, gives us information but does not make us feel— that all its connecting is intellectually informative, perhaps, but not effectively emotional. In this context of argument, it is interesting to consider how often

3. I offer this point as a pre-emptive answer to the objection I imagine (perhaps falsely) Wood might offer: that the “many years later” not only makes us care less about the character by removing suspense about his ending, but also does so by the intrusiveness of the narrator. Since it’s not the character who thinks forward but the narrator who does it for him, thereby departing from what the character might himself be thinking, one doesn’t get the temporal thickening of the character’s subjectivity one might expect. It’s only the whole sentence, which is the possession of the narrator and reader but not of the character, that gives us a narrative image of the fullness of humanity, which looks both forward and backward. 98 Bruce Robbins the “many years later” formula is associated with the very strongest emotions. Instead of talking about its interesting temporality or its equally interesting modality (the degree of certainty or uncertainty coded into the formula “was to” in “was to remember”), one could as easily talk about its relation to nostalgia and to sentimentality, or to what is seen even within the novel as a possibly excessive degree of emotion. More precisely still, I think one has to underline a repeated and organic link between the “many years later” sentence and representations of atrocity. Garcia Marquez uses the “many years later/was to remember” locution sparingly. One of the moments when he brings it back is the narratively crucial moment about 2∕3 of the way through the novel, arguably one of the two foci on which the whole novel turns, when the striking banana workers are mas- sacred. It is the novel’s single biggest “scene,” as well as its single most direct and memorable reference to a “history” outside itself: its biggest moment of “information,” if you like. It is also a moment in which, to put this as quietly as possible, emotion has to be managed. The shooting of the unarmed crowd has begun, and the Buendia of the next generation who is to be its sole adult survivor picks up a child: “Many years later that child would still tell, in spite of people thinking that he was a crazy old man, how Jose Arcadio Buendia had lifted him over his head and hauled him, almost in the air, as if foating on the terror of the crowd, toward a nearby street” (328). Thinking back to Wood on Zadie Smith, I note that this too is an “end of the world” scene. The massacre description ends as follows: “before the colossal troop wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, drought-stricken sky, and the whorish world where Ursula Iguaran had sold so many little candy animals.” With this connection to atrocity in mind, one notices that Rushdie also calls on the “many years later” formula again in the midst of his own mas- sacre description, again tying it to the consciousness of a survivor and witness (34). Everything is narrated in the present, with victims falling around and on top of the doctor-grandfather, and then suddenly this present is interrupted by another leap into the future: “The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inficting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e- Sulaiman.” In both cases the look into the future is also a look away from an unbearable present, and one’s frst intuition is that it is there simply in order to make that present more bearable, to manage the emotion that a massacre of large numbers of unarmed men, women, and children is likely to elicit. Be that as it may, it’s still important that emotion, linked to impersonal causal forces, is the issue. Emotion linked to information and causal explanation: Rushdie’s narrator is not simply looking forward or looking away, he is also looking at a hill that has two names, one Hindu and one Muslim. In other On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction 99 words, he is looking away from a scene suggesting, in its emotional power, that we will be able to take our emotional and moral bearings from the confronta- tion between colonizer and colonized, and he is telling us that we cannot take our bearings from that confrontation after all, because in spite of this scene, the history of modern India has at least as much to do with a confrontation between Hindu and Muslim, a confrontation that is not here, in this massacre, but is no less potent a historical force for all that. Had I more time, I would want to dot my i’s and cross my t’s in terms of the intensity of emotion that Wood fnds so lacking in this fction, even the possibilities of Micawberish sentimentality, which the large-scale murder of civilians will certainly raise as a narrative issue. I would want to talk about the word “cartoon,” which is both one of the terms of dismissal Wood most favors in his essay and a word that seems perversely indispensable to the most emotional moments of atrocity description in Rushdie and Garcia Marquez.4 Talking about cartoon and character in the context of atrocity would be a way of talking about emotion and information as they imply each other: about these scenes, and the place of the “many years later” sentence in them, as a management of emotion at one of the most emotionally signifcant moments, just as it’s a management of information at the novel’s intersection with a landscape of historical events verifable outside the novel. Instead, moving toward a conclusion, I will offer evidence from one more contemporary American novel, less for its conclusiveness than as a provoca- tion to further thought. A similar though not identical narrative leap appears, again in the midst of an atrocity description, in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex. As a Turkish army convoy passes through Smyrna in 1922, the event that the Greeks refer to as the “Great Catastrophe,” when hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, we are given a glimpse of Kemal Ataturk, sitting in the convoy’s last car, and as we get this glimpse we again leap forward to the moment of his death: “Kemal, champion of Westerniza- tion and the secular Turkish state, would remain true to those principles to the end, dying at ffty-seven of cirrhosis of the liver” (53). Again this is a means of looking away from the information about the atrocity that is also being transmitted. Again it seems related to the question of how much information the writer is responsible for. How much is too much?

4. The “many years later” template reappears in relation to one of Michael Chabon’s cartoonists, who asks the protagonist for a drawing of a young woman they have both seen naked in bed: “When, ffty-three years later, he died, the drawing of Rosa Saks naked and asleep was found among his effects, in a Barracini’s candy box, with a souvenir yarmulke from his eldest son’s bar mitzvah and a Norman Thomas button, and was erroneously exhibited, in a retrospective at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, as the work of the young Julius Glovsky” (117). 100 Bruce Robbins

As the Turkish troops move through Smyrna, an Armenian doctor picks up his doctor’s bag and, in direct reference to the massacre at Amritsar in Mid- night’s Children, goes out to tend the wounded. Soon after, his son answers a knock at the door: “he sees nothing. Then there’s a soft hiss, followed by a ripping noise. The noise sounds as though it has nothing to do with him until suddenly a shirt button pops off and clatters against the door. Karekin looks down as all at once his mouth flls with a warm fuid. He feels himself being lifted off his feet, the sensation bringing back to him childhood memories of being whisked into the air by his father, and he says, ‘Dad, my button,’ before he is lifted high enough to make out the steel bayonet puncturing his sternum.” The child lifted off his feet is a direct and savagely ironic reference to the mas- sacre scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when a child is saved by being lifted and carried. The childhood memories of his father are another reference to Garcia Marquez, though (to get back to intertextuality) almost everything else in this novel is borrowed directly from Midnight’s Children. The painlessness of this character’s death for him has something cartoonish about it, as does Rushdie’s description of the Amritsar massacre. In neither case is the absence of representation of the character’s pain a way of ensuring that the experience of the reader is painless. I hope you will agree that for us readers, the result is not painless at all, though it’s not easy to say exactly how our pain is managed, how our emotion is managed. At a minimum, we can agree that there is a disparity between the character’s consciousness at a moment of atrocity and the reader’s consciousness, and that this disparity constitutes a moment in which the possibilities of too much emotion and too much information are managed. I will not go into the ethical reasons in favor of such management, which cannot be reduced to avoiding the sentimental. Looking forward at a moment of looking backward, considered as a moment of looking away from atrocity: this complicated formula for contemporary fction also means not encouraging a hyper-responsibility (which may result in backlash) or a misguided vengefulness. It does not to allow anyone to forget how old wrongs made present can become the motives for new wrongs that are just as bad. The representation of atrocity seems to have been the unfortunate privilege of the twentieth century novel. Novelists of the nineteenth century say noth- ing about it. They do battles and battlefelds, the occasional unruly crowd or strike, even an anarchist’s bomb. But they don’t do genocide in the Congo, or famine in India, or for that matter even world-historical famine across a few miles of water in Ireland. As Raymond Williams was obliged to confess under interrogation, the novel’s “structure of feeling” in the 1840s did not demand or facilitate such representation. Today’s practitioners of James Wood’s “big ambitious novel” do not offer this criticism of their nineteenth-century pre- decessors, whose infuence seems to leave them less anxious than grateful. On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction 101

But they make this chapter in our literary history visible. They do so, oddly enough, by looking away from violence, and by looking away from violence in a shared form of sentence that reveals them to be looking at each other. The distinguishing mark of a shared literary project, a shared literariness, this look away also belongs to a larger history, one that takes in the atrocities of 1919 and 1922 and 1928, but also September 11, 2001, and for that matter colonialism and globalization generally, these being the referents of Zadie Smith’s earthquakes and her twins on opposite sides of the globe with identi- cal broken noses. This is not just a point about the representation of atrocity. It’s a point about how the novel seeks to do a wider connectedness, how it makes us feel that character is not destiny, yet does so by both undermining and supplementing our local, everyday sense of causality. The literary history I’ve been trying to sketch here, one in which novelists self-consciously look at and re-use each other’s tropes, is also part of history in the largest and most ambitious sense: history as engagement with the state of the world.

Columbia University

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

SENGHOR ET LA RÉVOLUTION DE 1889

Quand la mémoire va chercher du bois mort, elle rapporte le fagot qui lui plaît. Birago Diop

’est Léopold Sédar Senghor lui-même qui établit la généalogie de son Cœuvre philosophique et littéraire en la faisant flle de ce qu’il a appelé “la Révolution de 1889”. Cette révolution est celle qui fut réalisée par Henri Bergson et cela tombe bien que 1889 soit, en effet, la date de publication du premier ouvrage du philosophe (ce fut sa thèse): l’Essai sur les données immé- diates de la conscience. Autour de cette date, d’autres événements littéraires et philosophiques se sont produits qui participent de cette même révolution, de ce même « esprit 89 », selon Senghor, et qui donc entrent dans la généalogie qu’il construit. C’est ainsi qu’au gré de ses textes et des circonstances dans lesquelles il les présente, de cette révolution, il arrive à Senghor de multiplier les fgures tutélaires. Il en est après tout des révolutions comme des victoires : elles ont plusieurs pères. En voici trois, tels qu’ils apparaissent dans le texte d’une conférence donnée par le poète sénégalais lors d’un colloque à Paris en 1983, intitulé « la culture face à la crise »1 : « L’année 1889 est [. . .] une date importante dans l’histoire de la philosophie, des lettres, mais aussi des arts. C’est celle de deux œuvres majeures : l’Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience d’Henri Bergson et Tête d’or de Paul Claudel, auxquelles j’ajouterai l’œuvre d’Arthur Rimbaud, intitulée Une Saison en enfer, qui les annonçait, pour ainsi dire, dès 1873. » Trois noms donc, Bergson, Claudel et Rimbaud, et peut-être quatre. Car il arrivera aussi à L.S. Senghor d’évoquer Nietzsche non pas vraiment comme une fgure, mais comme une sorte de précurseur, de pressentiment, de la Révo- lution de 1889. C’est ainsi qu’il écrit que «pour [Nietzsche], la vocation de l’homme, son accomplissement est moins dans la vérité que dans la vie : dans la volonté libre de l’homme qui se fait surhomme, en inventant de nouvelles valeurs, puisées dans la volonté, certes, mais, profondément, dans les intui- tions, la sensibilité. Lui aussi prêche ‘l’éternel retour’ à la symbiose de l’es- prit apollinien et de l’âme dionysiaque, mais avec l’accent mis sur celle-ci. La

1. Repris dans Liberté V. Le dialogue des cultures, Paris : Seuil, 1993 ; pp. 192–198.

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