NOVELS OF DISPLACEMENT NOVELS OF DISPLACEMENT FICTION IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL MARCO CODEBÒ THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Codebò, Marco, 1952– author. Title: Novels of displacement : fiction in the age of global capital / Marco Codebò. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Analyzes how contemporary novels—specifically Bernardo Carvalho’s Nove noites, Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Mathias Énard’s Zone—resist displacement and offer a redemptive vision for the place of the novel for the future”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010473 | ISBN 9780814214473 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214479 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814278413 (ebook) | ISBN 0814278418 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Displacement (Psychology) in literature. | Globalization in literature. | Fiction—History and criticism—20th century. | Fiction—History and criticism—21st century. Classification: LCC PN3352.G56 C63 2020 | DDC 808.3/9353—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010473 Cover design by Derek Thornton Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. To the memory of my teachers: Alessandro Bima, Adriano Guerrini, and Edoardo Sanguineti CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 De- and Reterritorialization in the Age of Global Capital 29 CHAPTER 2 The Novel between the Cloud and the Earth 47 CHAPTER 3 Epistemic Displacement in Bernardo Carvalho’s Nove noites 73 CHAPTER 4 On Places, Hyper-places, and Agency 91 CHAPTER 5 Lost in Space: Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 115 CHAPTER 6 Symptoms: Mathias Énard’s Zone 149 POSTSCRIPT On Records and Errors 171 Works Cited 181 Index 193 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not exist had it not been for the many conversations I have had the pleasure to entertain with colleagues and friends over the course of the last five years. I would like to thank them all for their contributions: Nando Fasce, Manlio Calegari, Vittorio Coletti, Jorge Rosario- Velez, Sandy Waters, Lugi Ballerini, Beppe Cavatorta, Fran- cesco Ciabattoni, Carol Viers, Alessandro Carrera, Tom Harrison, and Catherine Nesci. I am particularly thankful to the first scholar who read my manuscript, my elder daughter Agnese, who has been an enthusias- tic proponent of this project from the outset. My warmest thanks go to my younger daughter Carlotta for sharing her remarkable knowledge of popular culture with me. I am deeply grateful to Václav Paris, my son- in-law and a gifted scholar of Modernism, who kindly read the manu- script and assisted me with a precious note on James Joyce. My prose would never have met the standards required for a schol- arly publication in English without the invaluable professional assis- tance of Bridget Pupillo, who edited every single line of every single draft of this study; I warmly thank her for her skills and dedication to bringing forth this work. I am greatly thankful to Claudette Allegrezza, the accomplished librarian in charge of the Interlibrary Loan at the Davis Schwartz ix x • ACKNOWledgments Library, Long Island University, Post Campus, who found and deliv- ered all the books and articles that my insatiable research required. The Ohio State University Press provided me with the ideal envi- ronment for turning my essay into a published work. I am profoundly grateful to Ana María Jimenez-Moreno, who strongly supported my project throughout all the stages of publication and made an extremely helpful revision of the manuscript. For years, my wife Giulietta had to cope with my desire for seclu- sion and frequent bouts of absentmindedness. For her uninterrupted love and support, despite these circumstances, I thank her from the bottom of my heart. INTRODUCTION In this book, I investigate a cluster of contemporary novels that I shall describe as “novels of displacement.” Displacement belongs to the cat- egory of moods or frames of mind that shape the manner in which things matter to us.1 Moods determine the way we open up to the out- side: they are “essential to a sense of the kinds of significant possibil- ity that the world can offer up for us” (Ratcliffe 158). Displacement, in particular, is one of those moods (like its opposite, emplacement) that inform our attitude toward the territories we inhabit and, in so doing, decisively affect the development of our subjectivity. Indeed, if living means experiencing things, then our disposition toward the sites where we meet with things, aka places, structures the way we project ourselves onto the world. Displacement becomes our mood, thus taking control of this disposition, when external, superior powers gain control of the places in which we live and work. As our own agency is overwhelmed, we fail to establish meaningful relationships with our surroundings. Indeed, displacement consists of a diminishment of our agency and a correlative loss in meaning affecting the objects that coexist with us. I 1. Moods constitute “specifications of affectedness, the ontological existential condition that things always already matter” (Dreyfus 169). 1 2 • Introduction believe that displacement represents the prevailing mood of our time, the age of global capital. As described in this book, the era of global capital began in the early 1980s with the progressive liberalization of capital movements, finan- cial transactions, and stock markets in the wealthy countries of the Western hemisphere as well as in East Asia, Australia, and New Zea- land. Four decades ago, certain capabilities, tools, and institutions that had been built in the years following the conference of Bretton Woods (1944) reached a “tipping point” and “became part of a new emergent organizing logic leading toward the constituting of a novel assemblage of key components” (Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights 18).2 While in previous stages of capitalistic growth, “that logic was geared toward building national states,” but today it is “geared toward building global systems inside national states” (Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights 17). The current phase of capitalism differs from other international expan- sions of capital in that it is the first globalization in history tailored to downsize the role and prerogatives of the nation-state as a player in the market. In 1977, roughly at the same time in which the age of global capital began, a new technology started to take shape. In that year, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg published a paper, “Personal Dynamic Media,” which can be considered the harbinger of the technological develop- ments that have informed our time. In their essay, Kay and Goldberg outlined their vision of “a personal dynamic medium of the size of a notebook” that could function as a metamedium, able to integrate “all other media” (393, emphasis in the original). In the following decades, the development of computer software turned Kay and Goldberg’s vision into reality. It is indeed software that transforms computers into metamedia, by encoding the analog language of traditional media into the digital code of computers and then recoding the latter into an analog signal compatible with the human user’s sensory apparatus 2. In Sassen’s book, the entire fourth chapter, “The Tipping Point: Toward New Organizing Logic,” displays her deep insight into the dynamics of globalization. Sas- sen discusses how certain foundational realignments inside the State, in particular the United States, were instrumental in establishing capital’s global organizing logic. Her discussion helpfully illuminates the evolution of nation-states, supranational organizations, and finance in the period of time spanning between the end of WWII and the 1980s. Introduction • 3 (Manovich, ch. 2). As the invisible, operational layer that makes the computer-human interaction possible, software constitutes an indis- pensable component of the capital-driven machine that is presently running the planet. In the age of global, software-enabled capital, significant innova- tions affect the political, epistemic, and technological environment in which individuals operate and societies are built. These transfor- mations comprise, but cannot be limited to, the rise of international financial institutions (e.g., International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization) and nongovernmental organizations to the status of competitors with the nation-state on the planetary stage; the establishment of a small cluster of supranational financial corporations as the directional center of global capitalism; the advent of the digital, relational database as a storage system for public and private records; and the development of software-based technologies for executing an incredibly vast array of operations related in some manner to the pro- duction of culture, such as writing, drawing, watching films, calculat- ing, mapping, mailing, as well as making, recording, and listening to music, to name just a few. As a consequence of these world-historical processes, the inhabit- ants of our planet, as well as the artifacts of their material and intellec- tual production, undergo a type of mobilization the likes