Authorship, Activism and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature 9781501392337, 9781501392368, 9781501392351

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword Meena Kandasamy
1 Introduction: The Idea of the Author Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie
2 ‘Let’s Deal with the People Oppressing All of Us’: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation Benjamin Zephaniah and Malachi McIntosh
Part 1 Art as Activism
3 Clearing a Space for Multiple, Marginal Voices: The Writers’ Activism of PEN Peter D. McDonald, Margie Orford, Rachel Potter, Carles Torner and Laetitia Zecchini
4 Live at the Polari Salon: Literary Performance as Activism Ellen Wiles
5 ‘Bugger Universality’: An Exchange with Antjie Krog Antjie Krog and Peter D. McDonald
Part 2 Activism and the Literary Industry
6 Moving between Worlds: A Writer and a Publisher in Conversation Kirsty Gunn and David Graham
7 Resisting Stereotypes: Art, Activism and the Literature Industry Elleke Boehmer, Alice Guthrie, Daniel Medin, Charlotte Ryland and Alan Taylor
8 Fanny Fern and Nellie Bly: Unstable I’s Eva Sage Gordon
Part 3 The Invention of the Public Intellectual
9 The Critical Pedagogy of Fiction in Democratic Public Spheres Odile Heynders
10 A ‘Passive Spectactress’? Frances Burney and the Eighteenth-Century Writer as Social Activist Anna Paluchowska-Messing
11 ‘The Indian Cobbett’: Radicalism, Empire and Literary Celebrity in the Life of James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855) Kieran Hazzard
12 ‘Literary Criticism Only’: Jeyamohan and the Author as Conservative Activist in ‘Aram’ (2011) Divya A.
Part 4 Writing Europe
13 European Connections: Literary Networks, Political Authorship and the Future of Europe Debate Benedict Schofield
14 Vernon Lee: Transnational Activism and Protest Literature for Art and Peace Elisa Bizzotto
15 On Behalf of the Nation: Knut Hamsun and the Politics of Authorship Tore Rem
16 Looking On … Kirsty Gunn
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Authorship, Activism and Celebrity

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity Art and Action in Global Literature Edited by Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie, 2023 Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Mike South Photography (www.mikesouthphotography.com) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mayer, Sandra, editor. | Scobie, Ruth, editor. Title: Authorship, activism and celebrity : art and action in global literature / edited by Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022056244 (print) | LCCN 2022056243 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501392337 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392375 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501392351 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501392344 (eBook) | ISBN 9781501392368 (eBook other) | ISBN 9781501392368 (eBook other) | ISBN 9781501392337 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392351 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501392344 (eBook) | ISBN 9781501392375 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Authors–Political and social views. | Authorship–Political aspects. | Celebrities–Political activity. | Fame–Political aspects. | Politics and literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PN151 .A87 2023 (ebook) | LCC PN151 (print) | DDC 809 23/eng/20230–dc20 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056244 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-9233-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-9235-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-9234-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword  Meena Kandasamy 1

Introduction: The Idea of the Author  Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie

2

‘Let’s Deal with the People Oppressing All of Us’: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation  Benjamin Zephaniah and Malachi McIntosh

vii xiii xiv 1

17

Part 1  Art as Activism 3

Clearing a Space for Multiple, Marginal Voices: The Writers’ Activism of PEN  Peter D. McDonald, Margie Orford, Rachel Potter, Carles Torner and Laetitia Zecchini

31

4

Live at the Polari Salon: Literary Performance as Activism  Ellen Wiles

45

5

‘Bugger Universality’: An Exchange with Antjie Krog  Antjie Krog and Peter D. McDonald

57

Part 2  Activism and the Literary Industry 6 7

8

Moving between Worlds: A Writer and a Publisher in Conversation  Kirsty Gunn and David Graham

73

Resisting Stereotypes: Art, Activism and the Literature Industry  Elleke Boehmer, Alice Guthrie, Daniel Medin, Charlotte Ryland and Alan Taylor

82

Fanny Fern and Nellie Bly: Unstable I’s  Eva Sage Gordon

94

Part 3  The Invention of the Public Intellectual 9

The Critical Pedagogy of Fiction in Democratic Public Spheres  Odile Heynders

111

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Contents

10 A ‘Passive Spectactress’? Frances Burney and the Eighteenth-Century Writer as Social Activist  Anna Paluchowska-Messing

124

11 ‘The Indian Cobbett’: Radicalism, Empire and Literary Celebrity in the Life of James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855)  Kieran Hazzard

136

12 ‘Literary Criticism Only’: Jeyamohan and the Author as Conservative Activist in ‘Aram’ (2011)  Divya A.

150

Part 4  Writing Europe 13 European Connections: Literary Networks, Political Authorship and the Future of Europe Debate  Benedict Schofield

165

14 Vernon Lee: Transnational Activism and Protest Literature for Art and Peace  Elisa Bizzotto

182

15 On Behalf of the Nation: Knut Hamsun and the Politics of Authorship  Tore Rem

194

16 Looking On …  Kirsty Gunn

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Bibliography Index

211 236

Contributors Elisa Bizzotto is Associate Professor of English Literature at Iuav University of Venice. Her research interests lie in the fields of fin-de-siècle, decadent and pre-Modernist literature and culture, and include transcultural perspectives. She has published books on the imaginary portrait genre, the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ and Walter Pater, and has (co-)edited volumes on Pater, Vernon Lee, Arthur Symons and Mario Praz. Her Italian translations of G. B. Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses and Caesar and Cleopatra have recently been published with Bompiani. She is on the editorial boards of English Literature, RSV. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism and Volupté. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. She has authored and edited over twenty books, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals 1870–1915 (2015), Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and a biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the award-winning author of five novels, including Bloodlines (2000) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), and two collections of short stories. Boehmer is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and principal investigator of Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds. Divya A. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. Her research interests are in the fields of gender and culture in literature and Tamil cinema. She has published on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, the Pre-Raphaelites, the AngloIndians and Tamil cinema. Eva Sage Gordon is a PhD Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work has appeared in journals including The Louisville Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, New Plains Review, New Southerner and Life Writing. She is co-author of The Everything Guide to Writing Children’s Books, Second Edition and has a chapter in the recent Routledge essay collection Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections. She has an essay forthcoming in a special issue of Pedagogy on teaching during Covid-19. David Graham is Managing Director of illustrated book publisher BT Batsford Ltd. He has managed a number of independent publishing companies for over twenty years, including six years at Canongate Books and three at Granta and Portobello. Kirsty Gunn writes novels, short stories and essays and is published by Faber & Faber and internationally. She is Research Professor at the University of Dundee and

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Associate Member of Merton College, Oxford. With Gail Low she directs ‘Imagined Spaces’, a publishing and education venture dedicated to thinking about new ways of writing about literature, the arts and the world. More information on Gunn’s work can be found at: www.kirsty-gunn.com. Alice Guthrie is a translator, editor, researcher and curator specializing in contemporary Arabic writing. Her work has often focused on subaltern voices and queering (winning her the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize 2019). Her translation of the short stories of Moroccan gender activist Malika Moustadraf was published in 2022, and she is compiling the first ever anthology of LGBTQIA+ Arab(ic) literature, in parallel Arabic and English editions. Alice programmes the literary strand of London’s Shubbak Festival and has curated Arab arts events for Edinburgh International Book Festival, Outburst International Arts Festival and Arts Canteen. She teaches ArabicEnglish translation at various universities. Kieran Hazzard is Early Career Fellow at TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and India, specializing in British politics, the East India Company and material culture. Since completing his PhD on nineteenth-century British Radicalism at King’s College London in 2018, his research projects have included Quill, a digital humanities project on the writing of the US Constitution at Pembroke College, Oxford. More recently, as Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, he worked with the National Trust to research the Clive Collection at Powis Castle. Odile Heynders is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University. She has published several books and many articles on European literature, authorship and strategies of reading, as well as on how literary fiction intervenes in democratic public spheres. Her book Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (2016) appeared with Palgrave Macmillan. Her current book project is Fictions of Migration, which focuses on how literary texts can offer knowledge within the interdisciplinary context of migration studies. Heynders is a member of the NWO (Dutch Research Council) Board: Social Sciences and Humanities. Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, academic and writer. Her works include the poetry collection Ms. Militancy (2010); the novels The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019); and the non-fiction The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle (2021). She has translated many Tamil political and literary works, and is widely published as a journalist and political commentator. In 2022 she was awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize, given annually in recognition of ‘outstanding efforts in support of persecuted writers’. Antjie Krog is a poet, translator and Professor in the Arts at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She has published fourteen volumes of poetry in

Contributors

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Afrikaans and her prose writings in English include Country of My Skull (1998) and A Change of Tongue (2003). She has won numerous prizes for poetry, prose, translation and journalism as well as the Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture and the Open Society Prize from the Central European University. Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences). Her research focuses on life writing, authorship and celebrity, transnational encounters and reception processes. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna (2018) and has (co-)edited books and special issues on ‘Literary Celebrity and Politics’ (2016), ‘The Author in the Popular Imagination’ (2018), Life Writing and Celebrity (2019) and ‘Life Writing and the Transnational’ (2022). In her current book project, she explores the intersections of literary celebrity and political activism in and through autobiographical narrative. Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state and freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the promise of creative criticism. His publications include The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (2009, theliteraturepolice.com) and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017, artefactsofwriting.com). Malachi McIntosh was the editor and publishing director of Wasafiri magazine from 2019 to 2022. He is currently an Associate Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford and Barbara Pym Tutorial Fellow at St. Hilda’s College. His works include Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015), Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016) and the forthcoming short story collection Parables, Fables, Nightmares (2023). Daniel Medin is an editor and a professor at the American University of Paris (AUP), where he teaches contemporary world literature and editorial practice. His research is concerned with modern fiction from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with an emphasis on Franz Kafka. He is Associate Director of AUP’s Center for Writers and Translators, and one of the editors of its Cahiers Series. He is also co-editor of Music & Literature magazine and advises The White Review, Edit and other journals on contemporary international fiction. He has judged leading translation prizes in the United States, the UK and Germany. Margie Orford is the author of the internationally acclaimed Clare Hart novels. She is a Fulbright scholar with an MA in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York and a PhD from the University of East Anglia. She is an honorary fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, was a judge for the AKO Caine Prize for African Literature, was president of PEN South Africa and on the board of PEN International, and is a

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co-author of the PEN International Women’s Manifesto. Her latest novel is The Eye of the Beholder (2022). You can find her on Twitter: @MargieOrford. Anna Paluchowska-Messing teaches literature at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and specializes in eighteenthcentury English literature. She is the author of Frances Burney and Her Readers: The Negotiated Image (2020) and co-editor (with Monika Coghen) of Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives (2020). Her most recent project traces intercultural transfers involving English literature of the long eighteenth century. Rachel Potter is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. She writes on literature and censorship, free expression and writers’ organizations, modernist literature and early twentieth-century culture. She has been exploring the early history of International PEN for a number of years. Her published books include Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900–1940 (2013), The Edinburgh Guide to Modernist Literature (2012) and Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (2006). She has recently co-edited, with Christos Hadjiyiannis, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics (2022). Tore Rem is a professor of English literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, and director of UiO:Democracy, an interdisciplinary initiative. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Scandinavian literature, and his book Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler (The Journey to Hitler, 2014) won the Norwegian Critics Prize for nonfiction. Rem is the general editor of the new Penguin Classics edition of Henrik Ibsen, and his most recent monograph in English is Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (2018), co-authored with Narve Fulsås. Charlotte Ryland is Director of the Stephen Spender Trust and founding Director of The Queen’s College Translation Exchange, an initiative based at the University of Oxford. Through both organizations she aims to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in literary translation, to promote language-learning and to bring creative translation activities into UK schools. Until 2019 she ran New Books in German, an international project promoting German-language literature, and was lecturer in German at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Benedict Schofield is Associate Professor in German at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the transnational representation of German-speaking countries and Europe, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cultural Studies, German theatre/ performance and German-US cultural relations. Publications include Private Lives and Collective Destinies: Class, Nation and the Folk in the Works of Gustav Freytag, and the co-edited volumes The German Bestseller in the Late 19th Century, German in the World and Transnational German Studies. He is series co-editor for Transnational

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Approaches to Culture, Transnational Modern Languages and Studies in Modern German & Austrian Literature, and co-editor for Modern Languages Open. Ruth Scobie has taught English literature at the universities of York, Sheffield and Oxford. She is the author of Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania in Britain 1770–1823 (2019). Her research traces the links between British culture and ideas of race and difference in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century empire, most recently focusing on fictional representations of celebrity. Alan Taylor has been editor and board member of the Scottish Review of Books since 2004. He was deputy and managing editor at The Scotsman, and Associate Editor of the Sunday Herald. A former Booker judge, he has edited several acclaimed anthologies, including The Assassin’s Cloak (2011), The Country Diaries (2011) and Glasgow: The Autobiography (2016). His most recent book is Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark (2017), and he is the editor of the centenary editions of the Collected Novels of Muriel Spark. Most recently, he has edited Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries (2022). Eugenie Theuer is a film curator and scholar based in Glasgow. Her research and teaching have been concerned with self-reflexive forms of cinema, cinema in the wake of the digital revolution, Hollywood history and the representation of women in front of and behind the camera. She has co-edited a special issue on ‘Women’s Lives on Screen’ published by the European Journal of Life Writing in 2021. As a film curator, she is trying to create a platform for marginalized voices and stories, working with various film festivals in Scotland, including Africa in Motion, IberoDocs and the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. Carles Torner, a leading Catalan writer and human rights activist, was Executive Director of PEN International 2014–20 and director of the PEN Centenary in 2021. He has participated in several missions for imprisoned writers and has published essays and poems about PEN’s defence of freedom of expression across the world. He was director of the Literature and Humanities Department at the Ramon Llull Institute, where he was in charge of the presence of Catalan literature at international book fairs. He holds a PhD from the University of Paris VIII and is a lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities of the Pompeu Fabra University. Ellen Wiles is a novelist, anthropologist, curator, soundwalk maker and lecturer in Creative Writing at Exeter University. She previously worked as a human rights barrister and as a musician. She is the author of three books: Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar under Censorship and in Transition (2015), The Invisible Crowd (2017) and Live Literature: The Experience and Cultural Value of Literary Performance Events from Salons to Festivals (2021). She lives in Devon with her husband and small children. Her website is: www.ellenwiles.com.

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Laetitia Zecchini is a senior research fellow at the CNRS in Paris. Her research interests focus on contemporary Indian poetry, postcolonial modernisms and print cultures, and the politics of literature. She is the author of Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014), has translated Kolatkar into French and has co-authored or co-edited eight other volumes, including the special issue ‘The Locations of (World) Literature: Perspectives from Africa and South Asia’ (2019) and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures (2022). She is currently working on a monograph on literary activism in India. Benjamin Zephaniah is a poet, novelist, actor, musician and political activist. Born in Birmingham, UK, he was voted Britain’s third favourite poet of all time in 2009. He was the first person to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, and his other musical collaborations include Tim Simenon, Sinead O’Connor, Peter Gabriel and The Imagined Village. His 2020 TV poetry show Life & Rhymes won a BAFTA, and his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. He is visiting professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and Professor of Poetry at Brunel University, London.

Acknowledgements The project from which this book emerges was funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund and supported by Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. It developed over many years of conversations on authorship, literary celebrity and political activism, beginning with a symposium on the theme of ‘Art & Action’ organized by the editors in March 2016, and hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). We planned to follow this event with ‘Art & Action: Literary Authorship, Politics and Celebrity Culture’, a two-day international conference that would extend our previous discussions beyond the Anglosphere and across global literatures. Scheduled for March 2020, and once more hosted by TORCH, the conference was cancelled when the Covid-19 pandemic stopped the world in its tracks. It was reborn as a series of live webinars, videos and blog entries, released online over the summer of 2020. We are grateful to TORCH and its fabulous team for offering us a virtual home base and for providing guidance and support while we were navigating this unfamiliar territory. At an impossible time, the unbroken enthusiasm of our speakers for this project and their readiness to come on board (once more) kept this project alive, allowed us to open our discussions virtually to a global audience, and eventually led to this volume. Authorship, Activism and Celebrity has benefitted at various stages from stimulating exchanges with colleagues, friends and students, including Ros Ballaster, Elleke Boehmer, Charlotte Boyce, Philip Bullock, Ho Lung Chan, Ipsita Chakravarty, Sophie Coulombeau, Caroline Davis, Foteini Dimirouli, Olivier Driessens, Shantel Edwards, Stefano Evangelista, Pelagia Goulimari, Julia Lajta-Novak, Matthew Lecznar, Mary Luckhurst, Greg Jenner, Michelle Kelly, Hyei Jin Kim, Justine McConnell, Peter D. McDonald, Kate McLoughlin, Michèle Mendelssohn, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Tom Mole, Simon Morgan, Adam Perchard, Asha Rogers, Kate De Rycker, Margaret Scarborough, Anna Senkiw, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Barbara Straumann, Hannah Yelin and Lorraine York. We would also like to thank the editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially Amy Martin and Hali Han, for expertly guiding us through the publication process; the anonymous readers for their valuable feedback and constructive comments on our book proposal; and the experts who agreed, often on short notice, during a pandemic, to act as reviewers. Above all, we are indebted to the tireless commitment and professionalism of our editorial assistant Eugenie Theuer.

Foreword Meena Kandasamy

I started reading the many essays which make up this volume, Authorship, Activism and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, with a mixture of great trepidation and curious excitement. Initially hesitant that this would be a jargon-filled academic exercise, I was ashamed of my own prejudice after reading a single page. The questions that are taken up and discussed in these pages invite the reader to think deeply for themselves, and to gain a better appreciation of the world of arts, activism and celebrity. For a writer, however, this book is guaranteed to cause a churning within yourself. Even if you are the most self-aware artist, this book will make you feel the urgent need to reflect on your creative practice, reassess your celebrity status, look at the market and the political world as invasive structures into our work. As with all forewords, mine is also going to suffer from the obvious drawback – I will not be able to comment on every single essay or article in this volume. I wish to compensate for these lacunae by writing a personal introduction drawing attention not only to which works here have moved me, but why. Reading the South African poet, writer and activist Antjie Krog in conversation with Peter McDonald, I am stunned when I come across her blunt refusal of any invitation to appear on television at a particular point in her career. She details her ‘definite steps to resist becoming a celebrity’ – efforts taken to ‘preserve the core of who we are and what we stand for’. In some way, this resonated with me. I took a similar decision eight or nine years ago when I was being ferried from one television studio in my city to another because different channels wanted me to be a panel discussant; they wanted my sound bites. I was just entering my thirties then, and as much as the primetime television audience in India is massive, I realized that I was sought after because I was spontaneous, fearless and articulate. Instead of revelling in the fame, I was deeply frightened. The biggest news anchors wanted me on their show because I could pack a punch into a thirty-second sound bite while being feminist, Tamil, rebellious, communist. My fear came from a place that was unfamiliar to me. I was afraid: how does this method of self-expression affect my thinking? What if I lose the ability to deliberate at length, to experiment with form, what if I lose all the legroom which a writer has to be herself? This talent would have been a great fit if I was the spokesperson of any left-leaning political party, but it did not feel like something I wanted to do with my own life. I was living the dream, but this was not for me. I  wanted to learn, to think deeply, to engage with an audience not in those few climactic seconds, but at leisure, with a give-and-take. I retreated. In many ways, I had preserved myself from succumbing to constant exposure and (even greater) celebrity.

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However, none of us could have foreseen the apocalypse that awaited the world of media in India. In 2014, the right-wing Hindu majoritarian BJP under Narendra Modi swept to power  –  and the clampdown on the media was ruthless. Indian television would never be the same again, and little did I realize when I quit that what I had enjoyed was the last oxygen left for the freedom of expression. There is a corollary: even if I had not quit of my own accord, I would have been kept out. After Modi’s victories in 2014 and 2019, many voices critical of the regime were sidelined and banished from newsrooms. Nowadays, when the media calls upon me to make a television appearance, I go because dissident voices rarely get any space. And I want to share this experience because as much as I agree with Krog, I also believe that flexibility and recalibration are essential to our lives as writer-activists. The second point I want to make unravels in another direction. When we look at the title of this volume, everyone is fine with authorship but a lot of writers show discomfort with the idea of activism. (Social justice warriors, they call us. Wokes, in shorthand.) Even more uncomfortable in the literary world is the idea of celebrity, especially because it is almost always invoked in a pejorative way among your own peers. For me, a celebrity is someone who is celebrated, someone who has a recall value outside their own circle, someone who has a platform. That is the idealist version of the word for me. But when I see that word used on me or on other women writers – the misogyny makes my skin crawl. Because the subtext to that word is a sexualization, an objectification, a slut-shaming. I have been told by jealous men that I am famous because I have a beautiful face, or that I am famous because of the ‘packaging’, or because I display ‘cleavage’, or because I ‘pander to the west’. The last accusation is the most dangerous of them all because it sounds progressive and decolonial, but the political framing is only a smokescreen to justify why your own society wants to deny you the space to be a public intellectual, or cannot digest the fact that you are seen as one. I reject all these accusations – what has made me gain notoriety is precisely such a set of hostile stereotypes. These petty, reductionist, misogynist tropes forget that in order to get heard I have had to grow a spine and a sharp tongue. Nothing less, nothing more. ‘Celebrity is a trap’, ‘celebrity contaminates’, says Krog and calls it a combination of ‘fame and numbers’. I agree as much as I vehemently disagree with this revulsion. When your friends are being sent to prison, and when you are required to urgently galvanize signatures for a protest petition, these numbers matter. The hashtags that quickly climb to Twitter trends matter. The social media following matters. Our quantification can sometimes be our strength if it can cause the smallest rattle against the oppressive state, against the status quo. If we reject celebrity completely, we become islands. This may have quaint, cosy tones in peacetime. Under state oppression, it is escapism. This is where I want to cite the engaging conversation between Benjamin Zephaniah and Malachi McIntosh in this book. Speaking about the Nicaraguan revolution, Zephaniah describes how in the end they installed a ‘government of poets’. He says it is ‘about finding the right gang’ and in so many ways, even as our work is produced individually, the change that we can galvanize in society almost always remains a collective effort.

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When culture becomes the site and foundation of mobilization, the writer’s responsibility is amplified manifold. In Tore Rem’s paper on Knut Hamsun, we are privy to the dangers of co-optation of a famous writer by fascist ideology, and the irreparable consequences that arise. That paper encloses heartbreak and tragedy, Rem’s work providing the perfect foil to reading the rest of the essays. Every single essay in this collection made me meditate on writing and activism and celebrity. Every essay pushed me to challenge my own assumptions. Kirsty Gunn’s essay ‘Looking On …’ captures the truth of what it means to make art under neoliberalism. She writes, So in the last thirty years, just as with our economy, we have seen a sort of stripping process set in, to create a culture of winners and losers whereby the same kinds of books are read and praised, with the same kinds of authors appearing over and over again – the ‘big hitters’, the ‘big stories’, the ‘big sales’ … This is the pattern of activity that seems to dominate our ideas now of literary publishing, of the novel. For the other kind of work, that isn’t or doesn’t want to be part of that culture, we must hunt hard now, and deep.

This task of looking beyond the noise and glitz of big prizes and bigger publicity is essential if we are to maintain any claims to integrity. Likewise, Odile Heynders’ work on Valeria Luiselli, especially the transition between her political essay Tell Me How It Ends and her documentary novel Lost Children Archive, points us towards the necessity of being everything at once, creating art as assemblage and creating written works that embrace and combine fact and fiction. I send my admiration, solidarity and love to Ruth and Sandra for envisioning such a project, and for putting this book out into the world.

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Introduction: The Idea of the Author Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie

A few days after her novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize in the summer of 2020, the author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga stood with one other activist on a quiet road in Harare, holding a placard on which she had written the words ‘We want better/ Reform our institutions’. She was almost immediately arrested, prompting a flurry of protests around the world: from individuals including Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Stoppard, Eimear McBride and Thandiwe Newton, and from the global publishing industry and literary organizations. Since her arrest, Dangarembga has been given a PEN International Award for Freedom of Expression (2021), the PEN Pinter Prize (2021) and a £120,000 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. She has also, after a prolonged legal battle with the Zimbabwean state, been convicted of inciting public violence, a verdict that PEN International called ‘a travesty of justice’.1 Dangarembga’s international literary stature did not prevent her arrest or prosecution. But her fame did encourage the world press  –  though briefly  –  to report on a wider political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe that it had previously largely ignored. Her trial, the opposition journalist Hopewell Chin’ono comments, ‘put a magnificent spotlight back on Zimbabwe, something Zimbabwe needed!’2 Clearly, the intensity of this ‘magnificent spotlight’ is to some extent a function of Dangarembga’s artistic renown: her first novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), is a staple of the postcolonial feminist canon, her film Neria (1991) one of the most successful ever made in Zimbabwe. Yet, as Dangarembga told the New York Times, she had only found a publisher for This Mournable Body by sharing parts of the novel on social media to build up an interested readership.3 Dangarembga’s personal Twitter account, a platform she uses for sharing news and commentary, has around 99,000 followers ‘Zimbabwe: Conviction of Tsitsi Dangarembga a Mockery of Justice’, PEN International statement, 29 September 2022, pen-international.org/news/zimbabwe-conviction-of-tsitsi-dangarembga-amockery-of-justice. 2 @daddyhope (Hopewell Chin’ono), ‘The conviction of Tsitsi Dangarembga @EfieZethu for holding a placard is one of the biggest blunders ever made by Mnangagwa’s repressive regime’, Twitter, 29 September 2022, 3.52 pm, twitter.com/daddyhope/status/1575498840576167938. 3 Wadzanai Mhute, ‘After a Writing Break, She Returned as a Booker Finalist’, New York Times, 15 November 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/books/tsitsi-dangarembga-this-mournablebody.html. 1

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and is a major target for pro-government trolls. In October 2020, she commented on an article posted on Twitter by Chin’ono about the political power of celebrity in Africa. ‘Zimbabwe’, she wrote, ‘doesn’t really have any celebrities.’4 In the discussion that followed, some posters suggested that Dangarembga herself should claim that status: ‘We have celebrities in Zimbabwe … one of them is Tsitsi Dangarembga!’5 Dangarembga’s bemused resistance to this praise – shrugging ‘Thank you, but we shall have to agree to differ’ in further exchanges – epitomizes the historically uneasy relationship between literature, celebrity and politics which is the subject of this book. While the artist and activist rejects the negative implications of the label ‘celebrity’ (likely to include some combination of narcissism, commodification, triviality and artificiality), her fans invoke a more positive concept of stars as potential ethical guides or national voices. Literary celebrity, in particular, tends to be a source of unease to those to whom it is attributed. In their contributions to this volume, the writers Antjie Krog and Kirsty Gunn vigorously reject what they see as celebrity’s commodification of the artist and their work as branded consumer goods. In a literary environment driven by commercial viability, political ‘relevance’ (or its absence) might become one more selling point or marketing weakness, subject to media demands and audience tastes, and often made visible in the prize and festival circuit. Despite this perception of celebrity as compromising and disempowering, however, fame can also provide material conditions which amplify, protect and legitimize vulnerable political voices. Dangarembga’s visibility on social media (moderate though it is compared to ‘big names’ like Stephen King, Rupi Kaur or Margaret Atwood), her receipt of prizes and her presence in the news media all help to promote her work. The economic and cultural capital thus generated can be especially important for writers with otherwise marginalized identities. Dangarembga notes that ‘writing while black and female’ has always restricted her ‘access to publication opportunities, and … avenues to reputable, professional publishing houses and lucrative contracts’.6 Her global name recognition may help to redress this, as well as proving a lightning rod for political attacks. At the same time, the perception that a writer welcomes, promotes or even acknowledges their own celebrity can weaken their claims to artistic or political authenticity. Literary history is littered with accusations of authors selling out, limiting or contaminating their art and political commitments in search of money, adulation or institutional approval: from the ‘Epic Renegade’ Poet Laureate Robert Southey,7 to James Baldwin, whose ‘voice as a writer was compromised’, for some readers, when he

@EfieZethu (Tsitsi Dangarembga), ‘Zimbabwe doesn’t really have any celebrities’, Twitter, 22 October 2020, 8.43 am, twitter.com/efie41209591/status/1319182678957096961. 5 @MakomboreroH (Makomborero Haruzivishe), ‘We have celebrities in Zimbabwe … one of them is Tsitsi Dangarembga!’, Twitter, 22 October 2020, 9.24 am, twitter.com/MakomboreroH/ status/1319192892934684672. 6 Tsitsi Dangarembga, Black and Female (London: Faber & Faber, 2022), 59. 7 George Gordon, Lord Byron, dedication to Don Juan (1819) in Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 373–879, 373, l. 5. 4

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became ‘the official voice of black America’.8 Historically, authors have responded to such criticism, real and anticipated, with everything from gleeful defiance to radical retreat from public life. Most often, they have negotiated between the potential costs and benefits of fame in complex and even self-contradictory ways, some of which are outlined in the biographical case studies in this book. Some writers, on the other hand, are vocal about what they see as the artist’s obligation to harness her celebrity persona for public good. Bernardine Evaristo, for example, makes a point of embracing celebrity’s power to effect change and ‘uplift communities’ by way of its convertibility into other forms of influence. ‘Winning the Booker Prize has increased my cultural capital’, she explains in Manifesto (2021), ‘so that when I have things to say, my audience is much more substantial.’ Celebrity opens doors, and may enable the ‘rebel without’ to become the ‘negotiator within’ – a position Evaristo has exploited in her campaign to increase the visibility of Black and Asian writers.9 Similarly, in his 2018 autobiography, which interweaves a deeply personal story with a larger account of the struggle for racial equality in Britain since the 1970s, poet-performer and activist Benjamin Zephaniah emphasizes the writer’s responsibility to wield celebrity as a weapon for political activism. His ‘bottom line’, he declares, ‘is that you can’t just be a poet or writer and say your activism is simply writing about these things; you have to do something as well, especially if your public profile can be put to good use’.10 A fierce critic of the establishment, who famously refused an OBE in 2003, Zephaniah reiterates, in an interview in this volume, the role of the writer as a visible, politically engaged guide who helps his audience to think for themselves and see the world as it really is. Zephaniah’s bold and programmatic statements underline the complex entanglements of celebrity, artistic integrity and political agency, three concepts which are historically and culturally contingent and unstable in their own right. Although the authors discussed in this volume span countries and periods, from eighteenthcentury England to twenty-first-century Tamil Nadu, this diversity should not be taken as suggesting that the tensions between literary celebrity and political activism to which they are subject are timeless or universal. Our contention is, instead, that the broad ideas and systems which produce these tensions – essentially, a capitalist literary marketplace and a post-Romantic conception of literary authorship  –  are loosely common to the contexts in which all these authors write and publish, and so shape their careers in ways which can productively be compared. Scholars broadly accept that Western literature has been, from at least the nineteenth century, shaped by the modern capitalist mechanisms and impulses which Hilton Als, ‘The Enemy Within: The Making and Unmaking of James Baldwin’, The New Yorker, 16 February 1998, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/02/16/the-enemy-within-hilton-als. 9 Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2021), 189, 176, 183. See Rachel Hall, ‘Bernardine Evaristo Fears Publishers May Lose Interest in Black Authors’, Guardian, 4 June 2022, www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/04/bernardine-evaristo-fearspublishers-may-lose-interest-in-black-authors. 10 Benjamin Zephaniah, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 78–9. 8

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generate celebrity.11 Less unanimously echoed, but nevertheless well established, is Tom Mole’s argument that the ‘material and discursive conditions of possibility that produced a recognisably modern celebrity culture’ first emerged in the late eighteenthcentury British imperial metropolis, with the development of a commercialized culture industry, mass media technology and ‘an intense fascination with a radically privatised subjectivity’. British culture in this period, Mole argues, saw a radical ‘epistemic break, … between earlier kinds of fame and modern celebrity culture’.12 Always closely entwined with nascent colonialism,13 celebrity’s ‘material and discursive conditions’ promptly circulated globally via the channels of empire as well as trade and cultural exchange, and established overlapping and interrelated forms of literary celebrity in different places and cultural contexts. At its most extreme, we might see this process culminating in the instant worldwide readerships generated by global corporate publishing, BookTok and the international literary prize and festival circuit. Yet, as Arjun Appadurai reminds us, ‘globalization is not the story of cultural homogenization’.14 Although aspects of the relationship between celebrity and politics can be read across global literary cultures and time periods, its specific dynamics and outcomes are not identical in each case, but depend on specific cultural, political and personal circumstances. This volume explores a few of these points of commonality and difference. First, though, this introduction will sketch the history of a broad Romantic idea of authorship as it relates to celebrity and political agency, in the context of British colonial expansion and the development of modern ‘world literature’. ***** In his 1821 Defence of Poetry, the poet and radical activist Percy Bysshe Shelley reworked the axiom that ‘no living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame … belonging as he does to all time’, to construct a new concept of authorship as radically autonomous. Art, Shelley wrote, transcends not just the petty external forces of manners and economics, but even the author’s own life, personality and politics.15 That is, the author’s living

See Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Loren Glass, Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Eric Eisner, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (London: Palgrave, 2009); Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011); Gaston Franssen and Rick Honings, eds., Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 12 Tom Mole, ‘Introduction’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–6. 13 See Ruth Scobie, Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania in Britain, 1770–1823 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019). 14 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 11. 15 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 674–701, 680. 11

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presence, in private or in the contemporary public sphere, is irrelevant to the value or meaning of their literary work. Furthermore, Shelley dismisses the overt political or moral message of a literary work as ephemeral compared to its fundamental power to initiate a revolution of the social unconscious over many generations. ‘That Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate’ – all these details are ‘dust in the balance’, in terms of the writer’s impact on the world.16 As such, Shelley, and Romanticism more widely, has offered to later writers an enduringly capacious model for engagement with politics. While the author in the abstract is canonized as an invisible ‘nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude’, the living human who embodied that ‘unseen musician’17 might write in obscurity like John Clare or a blaze of publicity like Byron, might carefully disavow politics like Mary Shelley, engage in radical activism like Percy himself, or turn to reactionary conservatism like William Wordsworth. A Romantic reader’s sense of the intrinsic political importance of these writers’ art qua art is, at least theoretically, unaltered by these particular personal quirks. Although Shelley’s conclusion, styling writers ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the World’,18 has been variously interpreted, and the phrase repudiated by modernists such as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, it has been embraced as a rallying cry by such politically engaged writers as Salman Rushdie, Kenneth Rexroth, Seamus Heaney, Christopher Hitchens, Adrienne Rich and Fred Moten.19 Zephaniah, in a recent radio documentary marking the bicentenary of Shelley’s death, traces the enduring influence of Shelley’s poetry and poetics on his own and other writers’ sense of the author as an inherently revolutionary agent.20 This Romantic conception of literary authorship is, then, deeply rooted in global literary culture. In practice, the idea, often vaguely understood, can flatten writers’ agency into the banally ‘glamorous status which bourgeois society liberally grants its spiritual representatives (so long as they remain harmless)’, as Roland Barthes explains in ‘The Writer on Holiday’.21 But it can also grant them particularly explosive forms of

Shelley, ‘Defence of Poetry’, 699. Shelley, ‘Defence of Poetry’, 680. 18 Shelley, ‘Defence of Poetry’, 701. 19 See Salman Rushdie, ‘The Pen and the Sword: The International PEN Congress of 1986’, in Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2021), 220–4, 223; Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Unacknowledged Legislators and Art Pour Art’, in Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (New York: New Directions, 1959), 3–18; Seamus Heaney, ‘The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream’, in North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975); Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000); Adrienne Rich, Poetry and Commitment: An Essay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Fred Moten, ‘Barbara Lee’, in B Jenkins (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 84–7. 20 Benjamin Zephaniah, Percy Shelley, Radical and Reformer, BBC Radio 4, July 2022. 21 Roland Barthes, ‘The Writer on Holiday’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 29–32, 29. 16 17

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political and ethical authority, fostering readers’ faith in an author’s ultimate ability, however distracted he might be by momentary trivia, to communicate essential truths. As Wenche Ommundsen outlines, literary celebrity is a ‘distinct brand of fame’ often understood as a kind of anti-celebrity, ‘unsullied by the manipulations of commercial or popular culture’.22 Gisèle Sapiro has shown in her work on politics and authorship in the French literary field that the image of the writer as a kind of sage or prophet became gradually more prominent in the nineteenth century with the increasing liberalization and secularization of society.23 The author’s cultural capital today continues to derive, in part, from the idea that their ‘political prophesying’ transcends temporary delusions.24 Writers thus occupy a privileged position in a discourse of celebrity which is, in Nahuel Ribke’s terms, ‘hierarchically structured according to the prestige of the genres with which they are associated’. As such, their ‘field migrations’ from literature to politics can be smoothed.25 British playwright and outspoken social commentator David Hare observes that ‘because I’m a writer it’s assumed I’m speaking the truth’.26 Yet this role of literary truth-teller is itself a textual and extra-textual pose: Hare performs the authorial self of the inspired creator-genius and artist-propagandist.27 Like other authors, he draws on, and thus continues, a cultural repertoire of what Jérôme Meizoz calls ‘postures’,28 including that of the Shelleyean poet-legislator – allowing him to claim allegiance with a model of authorship which both valorizes his political interventions and insists that the specifics of these interventions cannot undermine his status as a sage ‘belonging to all time’. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this authorial posture of ‘anti-celebrity’ and timelessness is its historical entanglement with commodification and the marketing of personality. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a traceably modern concept of literary celebrity originated in Britain as a product of the widespread commercialization of literature. This developed from earlier changes to the dynamics and perception of fame, which cultural historians have traced back to the seventeenth-century lapsing of

Wenche Ommundsen, ‘From the Altar to the Market-Place and Back Again: Understanding Literary Celebrity’, in Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader, ed. Sean Redmond and Su Holmes (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 244–55, 245. 23 Gisèle Sapiro, ‘Forms of Politicization in the French Literary Field’, Theory and Society 32, no. 5/6 (2003): 633–52. 24 Sapiro, ‘Forms of Politicization in the French Literary Field’, 638. 25 Nahuel Ribke, A Genre Approach to Celebrity Politics: Global Patterns of Passage from Media to Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 172. 26 Quoted in Kate Kellaway, ‘State of Play: David Hare and James Graham Talk Drama and Politics’, Observer, 6 May 2018, www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/may/06/david-hare-james-grahamdrama-politics-labour-party. 27 See Chris Megson and Dan Rebellato, ‘“Theatre and Anti-Theatre”: David Hare and Public Speaking’, in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare, ed. Richard Boon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 236–49; Sandra Mayer, ‘Making Mischief: David Hare and the Celebrity Playwright’s Political Persona’, Persona Studies 5, no. 2 (2019): 38–52. 28 See Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur (Geneva: Slatkine Érudition, 2007). 22

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print censorship and the post-Restoration reform of London theatres.29 The gradual expansion of the consumer reading public which accompanied (among other things) the expansion of British global trade, including colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, prompted the growth of a competitive, inventive and largely unregulated print marketplace, especially after a surge in literacy rates from the 1790s.30 Critics have discussed in some detail this marketplace’s reshaping of authorship, with particular reference to innovations in intellectual property rights, literary reviews and the professionalization of criticism, and the development of literary periodicals, as well as to the careers of individual authors, most prominently Byron and Walter Scott.31 Recent scholarship has turned its attention to the channels by which this peculiar combination of commercialization and Romantic authorship reached and crosspollinated with, or was imposed upon, other cultural and public spheres. Of course, British Romanticism emerged and was defined in active interrelation with European Romanticism more broadly;32 the work of Antoine Lilti and others has also begun to explore the ways in which the ‘epistemic break’ of celebrity took place concurrently in different ways and at different times across Europe.33 Beyond Europe, colonialism and economic globalization have, over two centuries, circulated both celebrity and the Romantic author worldwide. The printing press carried by the ‘First Fleet’ of convictsettlers travelling to New South Wales may have been used primarily for bureaucracy, but its symbolism was unmistakable in a settlement which saw itself as an exiled outpost of Britain, and where British books – especially by Scott and Byron – were valuable

See Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule, eds., Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018); Scobie, Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania, 1–26; Cheryl Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview’, Literature Compass 8, no. 6 (2011): 351–62. 30 See Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 31 See Michael Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1996); David Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge, 2005); Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Robert Mayer, Walter Scott and Fame: Authors and Readers in the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Matthew Sangster gives a more detailed account of the long and complex life of post-Romantic ideas of authorship, and particularly ‘the conflicted twin developments of Romantic ideologies and technologies of mass production and circulation’ in the preface to Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2021), 1–12, 10. 32 For a brief overview, see Patrick Vincent, ‘British Romantics Abroad’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 707–22, 717–20. See also Steve Clark and Tristanne Connolly, eds., British Romanticism in European Perspective: Into the Eurozone (Basingstoke: Palgrave: 2015). 33 Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 3. See Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity 1750–1850 [Figures publiques. L’invention de la célébrité. 1750–1850, 2015], trans. Lynn Jeffress (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Anaïs Pédron and Clare Siviter, eds., Celebrity across the Channel, 1750–1850 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2021). 29

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and in high demand.34 Robert Mayer points out that Scott’s enormous correspondence includes letters from readers in France, Germany and America, but also British writers with colonial roles in South Africa and India  –  one of whom enthuses that Scott’s books ‘have spread the renown of the “author of Waverley” from the dreary Forests of Canada to the burning Jungles of the Bhirmese frontier’.35 As Manu Samriti Chander shows, the ‘Romantic figure of the poet as legislator took root throughout the British Empire in the nineteenth century, in cultural arenas as diverse as Calcutta, Georgetown, and Sydney’.36 Since, Chander explains, ‘for writers across the empire, … Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley provided paradigms of literariness itself ’, later colonial poets ‘struggled to achieve the status of legislators in their own right in order to challenge the dominance of English poets, mobilizing Romanticism against Romanticism’.37 The tensions of this double-edged dynamic were sharpened by anti-colonial and postcolonial drives to assert local authors as national voices and leaders in the Romantic mode, even as Western markets and cultural institutions retained power. One result is the apparent paradox by which the activist writer, in many cultural contexts, has been exceptionally authoritative and prominent as the ambassador and mediator of a specific cultural or national identity, but also exceptionally vulnerable to accusations of deculturation or selling out. Even the contemporary postcolonial literary field, Graham Huggan points out, tends to ‘privilege a handful of famous writers (Achebe, Naipaul, Rushdie)’ in its ‘spiralling commodification of cultural difference’.38 Viewed another way, literary celebrity carries both the political force and the political risks of both the local and the cosmopolitan, of particular lived experience and the apparently universal. As another product of post-Romantic commercialization and globalization, modern literary studies has also inherited a complex set of assumptions about authorship. On the one hand, academic theorizations of the real-world function of literature  –  its potential to legislate – have tended, with Shelley, to bracket questions of the author’s extratextual persona (let alone their celebrity brand) as reductive or worse. Martin Puchner’s recent lecture-manifesto on literature’s capacity to fight climate change, for See Elizabeth Webby, ‘The Beginnings of Literature in Colonial America’, in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed., Peter Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 34–51. 35 Mayer, Walter Scott and Fame, 5. Anonymous to Walter Scott (1827), quoted in Mayer, Walter Scott and Fame, 144. 36 Manu Samriti Chander, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 2. See also Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989; New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Alex Watson and Laurence Williams, eds., British Romanticism in Asia: The Reception, Translation, and Transformation of Romantic Literature in India and East Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019); Suh-Reen Han, ‘Keats via Kim Yeong-Nang, or How the Romantics Have Never Been Western’, European Romantic Review 31 (2020): 301–11; Olivia Loksing Moy and Marco Ramirez Rojas, eds., Latin American Afterlives of the British Romantics (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2020), romanticcircles.org/praxis/latinam; Mark Sandy, Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 37 Chander, Brown Romantics, 7, 3. 38 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 30, 76. 34

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example, concluded with a call for scholars ‘to get away from another figure that has held a lot of thinking about literature in its thrall: the individual author’.39 On the other hand, scholars interested in analysing authorial personae are often influenced by a social science-inflected characterization of celebrity as a form of agency which, almost by definition, circumvents political participation traditionally understood. ‘Celebrities are not powerful in any overt political sense’, P. David Marshall asserts, and so ‘to understand the power of the celebrity requires a different set of tools and a different sense of how power is organised in society’.40 In other words, scholars of literary politics have in general disavowed the subject of celebrity, while scholars of literary celebrity (while often politically informed) have rarely addressed the subject of political agency. This has tended to limit attention to the links between the two, and to promote an unspoken, often unhelpful, sense of literary celebrity and ‘authentic’ political action as somehow mutually exclusive. Literary biographers and critics are left with a set of mythologized templates – the committed activist who sacrifices personal publicity and commercial success; the solitary genius who is both apolitical and anti-celebrity; the literary sell-out who abandons politics for the pursuit of fame  –  inadequate to the complexities either of individual literary careers or of the interconnected workings of literature and the world. ‘The celebrity author’, as Lorraine York notes, is frequently assumed to be incapable of taking any stand outside the globalized marketplace with which they are complicit, and thus incapable of genuinely provoking or endorsing change, at most producing elaborate assertions endlessly decoded by the critic as being ‘in full or even hypocritical denial of his or her role in commodity capitalism’.41 Some recent literary scholarship, perhaps stimulated by a post-Trump focus in other disciplines on the relationship between political institutions and celebrity,42 especially an emerging sense of the importance of celebrity in political history,43 has begun to answer York’s challenge to go beyond this false dilemma and construct ‘a new model of the modern and contemporary author’ – not least York’s own work on Marlene NourbeSe Philip.44 Other author-focused studies have begun to unpick the ways in which celebrity has been productively, as well as paradoxically, mobilized in the

Martin Puchner, Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 105. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (1997; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xlvii. 41 Lorraine York, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 38. 42 See, for example, Heather E. Yates and Timothy G. Hill, eds., The Hollywood Connection: The Influence of Fictional Media and Celebrity Politics on American Public Opinion (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018); David Zeglen and Neil Ewen, eds., ‘National Populists: Right-Wing Celebrity Politicians in Contemporary Europe’, special issue of Celebrity Studies 11, no. 3 (2020); Samantha Majic, Daniel O’Neill and Michael Bernhard, eds., ‘Celebrity and Politics’, special issue of Perspectives on Politics 18, no. 1 (2020). 43 See David Higgins, ‘Celebrity, Politics and the Rhetoric of Genius’, in Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 41–59; Simon Morgan, Celebrities, Heroes and Champions: Popular Politicians in the Age of Reform, 1810–67 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 44 York, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, 38. York, ‘“Unembedded, Disappeared”: Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Hyper/In/Visible Literary Celebrity’, Authorship 10, no. 1 (2021). 39 40

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service of political action by writers such as Wole Soyinka, Arundhati Roy and Warsan Shire.45 Arthur Rose, for instance, offers a detailed reading of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee’s textual struggles with their own literary fame.46 In her work on the contemporary European public intellectual, Odile Heynders reports – without lamenting – that ‘strategies of celebrity behaviour and the subsequent responses of the public are transforming the traditions and modes of intellectual thinking and writing’,47 while Shola Adenekan recognizes a comparably ‘monumental paradigm shift’ in the emergence of a cosmopolitan digital elite of African writers, whose ‘crossover appeal enables [them] to perform the role of agenda-setters, with the power to frame and determine their society’s cultural values’.48 Modern celebrity authorship’s political agency has also been historicized, although as yet partially and unevenly. Bonnie Carr O’Neill, for example, charts the interconnections between the nineteenth-century democratization of the American public sphere and the celebrity of literary figures including Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.49 New scholarly perspectives on Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli, such as the work of Sandra Mayer, have emphasized the close interrelations in his life and work between literature and politics.50 Taking a longer view, a 2017 special issue of the ‘Forum’ section of Celebrity Studies on ‘Authorship, Politics and Celebrity’, edited by Mayer, explores the long history of writers traversing the spheres of literature and political engagement via vignettes spanning from sixteenth-century political pamphlets to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.51 This followed a previous issue of the same journal on literary celebrity more generally, in which the editors, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers, suggested that analysing literary celebrity ‘permits the study of literature to go beyond itself and to ask how ideas of literary value intersect with other predominant notions of social and economic value’.52 The contributors to this volume make a point, with Braun and Spiers, of ‘think[ing] literature back into the

See Karin Berkman, ‘Literary Celebrity and Political Activism: Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize Lecture and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle’, Critical Arts 34, no. 1 (2020): 73–86; Pramod K. Nayar, ‘Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy’, Open Cultural Studies (2017): 46–54; Devleena Ghosh, ‘Arundhati Roy versus the State of India: The Politics of Celebrity Philanthropy’, in Celebrity Philanthropy, ed. Elaine Jeffreys and Paul Allatson (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2015); Elisa Ronzheimer, ‘The Poem as Meme? Pop Video Poetry in the Digital Age (Warsan Shire/ Beyoncé)’, Word & Image 37, no. 2 (2021): 152–9. 46 Arthur Rose, Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 47 Odile Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 2. 48 Shola Adenekan, African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2021), 5–6. 49 Bonnie Carr O’Neill, Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). 50 See, for instance, Sandra Mayer, ‘Portraits of the Artist as Politician, the Politician as Artist: Commemorating the Disraeli Phenomenon’, Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 3 (2016): 281–300. 51 Sandra Mayer, ed., ‘Authorship, Politics and Celebrity’, special ‘Forum’ issue of Celebrity Studies 8, no. 1 (2017). 52 Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers, ‘Introduction: Re-viewing Literary Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies 7, no. 4 (2016): 449–56, 449. 45

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bigger picture of society’.53 They present the author as a powerful agent in the public sphere, whose political interventions are vital in the creation of authorial identities. At the same time, they draw attention to the manifold ways in which this agency is ‘situated’ and ‘operates alongside and even within structural forces and constraints’, as celebrity theorists such as Joe Moran and Lorraine York have argued.54 The first part of the volume, ‘Art as Activism’, asks how the author’s activities outside the literary text relate to, and might reinforce or undermine, the political potential of the creative act. The section opens with a discussion between five renowned scholars and writer-activists (including internationally acclaimed crime writer and former president of PEN South Africa Margie Orford, and Catalan poet Carles Torner, then Executive Director of PEN International) on the work of PEN International, the first worldwide non-governmental writers’ organization. Focusing on a series of historical documents, this panel offers insights into this influential organization and its advocacy of human rights, freedom of expression and linguistic diversity, as well as its role in shaping public ideas of the writer’s responsibilities and privileges. Next, the activist potential of literary networks and organizations on a smaller-scale community level is explored by Ellen Wiles in her chapter on the London-based LGBTQ+ literary salon Polari, which describes how the experience of literary performance shapes not only participants’ literary tastes and values, but also their sense of identity and community. A sharp reconceptualization of art and action as art as, or in, action, is at the heart of an email exchange between South African poet, translator and scholar-activist Antjie Krog and academic Peter D. McDonald. In this correspondence, Krog violently rejects the idea of literary celebrity, pushing instead for a concept of ‘publicness’, a term which ‘maintains the notion of being public, but keeps the space open for risk, failure and disgrace’.55 Covering episodes from Krog’s own literary and activist career before and after the end of apartheid, the conversation offers a reminder of the ideological power of language, the importance of translation as a form of activism and thus the deeply political relationship between literature, medium, location and audience. The concerns raised by Krog about the celebritization of the writer form part of a lively debate in the next part, on ‘Activism and the Literary Industry’. This begins with two conversations between writers, publishers, critics, editors, translators and literary prize judges on the often fraught relationship, drawn out influentially by Amit Chaudhuri, between ‘market activism’ and ‘literary activism’.56 First, awardwinning novelist and essayist Kirsty Gunn and publisher David Graham engage in a candid exchange of viewpoints on literature and its place within the wider economic and political world. Drawing on their personal experience of working with major independent publishers, Gunn and Graham describe the problems arising from the growing importance of the author’s marketability and celebrity profile, and the Braun and Spiers, ‘Introduction’, 449. Moran, Star Authors, 10; Lorraine York, ‘Star Turn: The Challenges of Theorizing Celebrity Agency’, Journal of Popular Culture 46, no. 6 (2013): 1330–47, 1339. 55 Antjie Krog, ‘“Bugger Universality”: An Exchange with Antjie Krog’ in this volume, 59. 56 See Amit Chaudhuri, ed., Literary Activism: A Symposium (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2016). 53 54

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increasingly blurred lines between creator and promoter. In ‘Resisting Stereotypes: Art, Activism and the Literature Industry’, scholars, translators and editors consider how their work might be conceived of as a form of political activism, and how this is affected by the promise and pitfalls of digital media, literary prize and festival culture and the economics of selling books. Finally in this section, Eva Sage Gordon provides a case study of two nineteenth-century American writers, Fanny Fern and Nellie Bly, who balanced their textual activism  –  both explicit support for causes such as asylum reform, and more-or-less covert feminism – with strategies to maintain their commercial appeal to a new mass market of readers. The work of Odile Heynders provides the pivotal concept as well as the opening chapter for our third part, ‘The Invention of the Public Intellectual’. In her gamechanging book Writers as Public Intellectuals, Heynders identifies modern public intellectuals as figures ‘with a certain artistic prestige and writing career, who by selffashioning try to convince an audience and in so doing intentionally appear on various media platforms a specific style and voice’.57 In her chapter for this volume, Heynders turns to writers’ textual explorations of knowledge, perception and reality, arguing that the practitioners of literary fiction are uniquely equipped to guide readers through a ‘post-truth’ political world in which – in the words of an essay by Peter Pomerantsev which Heynders examines – ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’. Readers and writers of fiction have a particular power, she suggests, to defend not just the practice but the epistemic foundations of democracy. The noun ‘intellectual’ as a concrete category or profession, like the same use of the noun ‘celebrity’, is a product of the early nineteenth century. In one of the earliest instances listed by the Oxford English Dictionary, Lord Byron uses the word ‘intellectuals’ in his journal to describe a group of critics, scholars and satirists with whom he had been invited to dine in 1813.58 In the same journal entry, Byron laments that a different group of Romantic ‘rhymers’, including Scott and Thomas Moore, have neglected social and political activism for professional authorship, and now, though they ‘might all have been agents and leaders, [are] now mere spectators’.59 In contrast, Byron’s ‘intellectuals’ remain active and influential in politics – indeed one of them, George Canning, would later become British prime minister. In a period of growing specialization and professionalization, then, the emergence of both the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘celebrity’ as distinguishable identities is of a piece with the development of a new sense of the author as (at least potentially) cloistered from the world of politics and commerce. ‘Intellectuals’, for Byron, are writers who do not resist the real-world agency offered by their literary status but ‘negotiat[e]’, as Heynders writes of their twenty-first-century counterparts, ‘a visible outspokenness’.60 Chapters in this part

Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals, 15. ‘Intellectual’, Oxford English Dictionary online (September 2022); for the word ‘celebrity’, see Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, xi–xii. 59 George Gordon, Lord Byron (23 November 1813) in Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore (London: John Murray, 1830), 2, 447. 60 Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals, 15. 57 58

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by Anna Paluchowska-Messing and Kieran Hazzard on Frances Burney and James Silk Buckingham, both contemporaries of Byron, provide contrasting examples of the role of ‘public intellectual’ at this early, transitional stage in its history. Burney, as Paluchowska-Messing outlines in her chapter, was only reluctantly persuaded to use the moral authority generated by her novels in order to appeal in print for a single, precisely defined cause: clergy fleeing the French Revolution in the early 1790s. As Paluchowska-Messing demonstrates, Burney’s anxiety about the possible backlash to a middle-class woman claiming the status of ‘public intellectual’ manifests in her careful self-presentation as a modest, domestic and conservative activist, even as her novel The Wanderer makes a more radical, though less overt, call for sympathy towards refugees. Buckingham’s celebrity, on the other hand, was characterized by reckless extravagance, both in his prolific, multi-genre, sensational and often dubious writing career, and in a radical political activism which embraced an abundance of ambitious global causes and included large-scale meetings and lecture tours, provocative public stunts and occasional moments of physical and legal danger. The striking contrasts between these two figures suggest that the restrictive gender norms emerging in this period did not merely inflect the perception of individual ‘public intellectuals’, but were fundamental to the origination of ‘public intellectualism’ itself. A final perspective on literature’s gendered role in the public sphere is presented by Divya A. Her subject, the prolific contemporary Tamil author B. Jeyamohan, might be seen, in Heynders’ terms, as a quintessential writer-as-public-intellectual: the autofictions of his short-story collection Aram intervene in current political debates, paralleling the more direct  –  and controversial  –  statements of his blog. Yet as the chapter shows, Jeyamohan weaponizes fictionalization to dramatize and defend a concept of literary authority as exclusively the property of higher-caste men, embodied in the protagonist of the collection’s title story. The three chapters in our final part, ‘Writing Europe’, examine the role of public intellectuals in the textual construction of Europe. Benedict Schofield opens by discussing the responses to Brexit of several contemporary authors, particularly A. L. Kennedy and Kathrin Röggla, within literary-political networks. These networks, Schofield demonstrates, are manifest in anthologies, institutions and live events, and sustain, disseminate and protect literary-political voices, while providing space for reflections on the authority and responsibilities of writers. Comparable questions about literature as a force shaping ideas of modern Europe recur in the two historical case studies which follow, recounting the very different transnational interventions of Vernon Lee and Knut Hamsun into struggles over national identity, heritage and government. Lee’s cosmopolitan celebrity allowed her to participate in fin-de-siècle public debates on urban planning and conservation in her adopted country, Italy, as Elisa Bizzotto shows. Tore Rem’s chapter narrates the process by which Hamsun’s early disavowal of the Scandinavian ‘poetocracy’ gave way to his notorious support for National Socialism before, during and after the German occupation of Norway. Despite the obvious differences between Lee and Hamsun, in both instances a reputation built on literary achievement was deployed to amplify a political message across national boundaries. Additionally, in both instances later literary works (Lee’s radically pacifist

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Satan the Waster and Hamsun’s memoir On Overgrown Paths) were shaped in form as well as content by their authors’ defiant responses to the ensuing political controversy. Any temptation to idealize what Schofield calls literature’s power to ‘establish … consensus’61 may be disturbed by Lee’s complacent self-appointment as a civilizer of Italian society, and, more dramatically, by Hamsun’s fascism. The story of the Nobel Prize-winning Hamsun tests the limits of the Romantic idea of literature as an autonomous and transcendent form of legislation. If the post-Romantic readers of global literature believe, with Shelley, that the particular facts ‘that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate’ do not affect the ultimate political outcome of their work, do they also believe in the irrelevance of the fact that Hamsun was a supporter of Nazism? Rem’s account of the attempts to whitewash Hamsun’s reputation – and the continuing tussles over it – suggests that, on the contrary, many readers may feel equal instinctive sympathy with George Orwell’s view (expressed in a 1943 note on W. B. Yeats’ fascist sympathies) that ‘a writer’s political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work’.62 The volume begins and ends with the voice of the writer. In ‘Looking On …’, Kirsty Gunn reflects on what it means to be a novelist in contemporary literary culture and how her work relates to lived, day-to-day experience. Gunn’s essay makes a forceful claim for authorial autonomy, but also an important statement about the political power of form and genre. Gunn’s conclusion – ‘Art becomes political, then, when we so engage’ – draws together some of the volume’s central themes and concerns and, once more, points towards the richness of its debates on literature’s power to change the world. ***** When Salman Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a New York State literary festival in August 2022, thirty-three years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s declaration of a fatwa in retaliation for the novel The Satanic Verses (1988), the power and danger of the author’s splintered persona were made instantly and insistently visible. He is known as a major literary celebrity, as a minor show-business celebrity (‘Padma Lakshmi’s Ex-Husband’, as Hollywoodlife.com explained63) and as a canonical postcolonial writer, but also – despite his attempts to step out of the shadow of ‘the Rushdie affair’ – as an icon of free speech and secularism, and, in much of the Muslim world, as a sinister archenemy of Islam. ‘I’m not a geopolitical entity’, he said in a 2021 interview, ‘I’m Benedict Schofield, ‘European Connections: Literary Networks, Political Authorship and the Future of Europe Debate’ in this volume, 172. 62 George Orwell, review of The Development of William Butler Yeats by V. K. Narayana Menon, Horizon, January 1943. In Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), 279–83, 283. 63 Jason Brow, ‘Padma Lakshmi’s Ex-Husband: Everything to Know about Salman Rushdie after Stabbing Attack’, Hollywood Life, 12 August 2022, hollywoodlife.com/feature/padma-lakshmihusband-4471282/. 61

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someone writing in a room.’64 A scroll through the hashtag #salmanrushdie on social media in the days after the attack demonstrated that the two could not be separated: reverently anxious and outraged reactions from writers (King, Atwood, Roy), world leaders (Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron) and celebrities (including the talkshow host Bill Maher and the Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut) were brutally interspersed with Islamic extremist celebrations and white supremacist calls for retribution against Muslims. More subtly, the early reports which accompanied photographs and videos of the writer receiving emergency treatment tended to emphasize the setting of the attack, suggesting that the spectacle of political violence was intensified by its incongruity with the scene of a self-consciously ‘civilized’ Romantic literary culture in which horrors and oppressions become transcendent words and performance: ostensibly apolitical, embattled, but ultimately world-changing. The lecture which Rushdie was due to give, journalists noted, was on threats to writers around the world. In line with his long-standing commitment to the work of PEN International and PEN America, he has persistently declared his belief in writers’ status as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ – defining the phrase explicitly in relation to his faith in ‘literary art as the proper counterweight to power, and … literature as a lofty, transnational, transcultural force’.65 Appropriately, then, his friend Bernard-Henri Lévy’s tribute to ‘the immortal Salman Rushdie’, written just a few days later, alluded to John Keats in its labelling of the attack as ‘an outrage’ not just against ‘someone writing in a room’ but ‘against truth and beauty themselves’.66 Other commentators, less poetically, insisted that Rushdie’s more controversial personal opinions – his support for the American invasion of Iraq, criticism of Indira Gandhi, perceived dismissiveness towards Indian writing not in English – should be ranked with other aspects of his ‘tawdry celebrity’, as irrelevant to the significance of the violence against him, which was ‘the institutionalisation of hatred and the complete negation of the idea of freedom of expression’.67 Rushdie, then, was made to represent most perfectly the abstract authority of great literature at the precise moment which most glaringly drew attention to his vulnerable embodiment as a human individual. Rushdie’s celebrity and self-fashioning have long been the subject of academic analysis, especially after the 2012 publication of his memoir, Joseph Anton, which in its adulation of writerly authority clearly represents an attempt to regain control of his

Quoted in Hadley Freeman, ‘Salman Rushdie: “I Am Stupidly Optimistic – It Got Me through Those Bad Years”’, Guardian, 15 May 2021, www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/15/salman-rushdie-iam-stupidly-optimistic-it-got-me-through-those-bad-years. 65 Rushdie, ‘The Pen and the Sword’, 223. 66 Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘The Immortal Salman Rushdie’, Atlantic, 17 August 2022, www.theatlantic. com/ideas/archive/2022/08/salman-rushdie-the-satanic-verses-legacy/671149/. 67 Kapil Komireddi, ‘Salman Rushdie Trapped by Alliance of Implacably Regressive and Insufferably Progressive’, ThePrint India, 14 August 2022, theprint.in/opinion/salman-rushdie-trapped-byalliance-of-implacably-regressive-and-insufferably-progressive/1082087/; Rajesh Ramachandran, ‘Haunting Silence on Rushdie’, Tribune, 20 August 2022, www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/ haunting-silence-on-rushdie-423361. 64

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authorial persona. The best scholarly work has illuminated both his published fiction and the dynamics of contemporary postcolonial literary celebrity.68 Nevertheless, accounts of Rushdie and his work have to some extent reproduced the schisms by which the authorial self is split into conflicting realities. At their most extreme, political accounts of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ dismiss as trivia his celebrity and the specifics of his fiction; literary criticism reflexively treats his extratextual personae as irrelevant, and analyses of Rushdie’s celebrity reduce both literary and political stakes to rhetorical devices in an ‘ongoing articulation of an ostensibly subversive authorial persona within the competitive multinational literary market’.69 For Carey Mickalites, for example, Rushdie’s political statements and actions are ‘self-promotional’, marking him only as ‘a global celebrity posing as a subversive writer’.70 To be sure, notoriety and controversy, self-fashioned or imposed, have always been among the most powerful catalysts of celebrity and its wider economic ramifications: in a cynical twist, the attempt on Rushdie’s life immediately fuelled sales of The Satanic Verses.71 Yet, as this and the case studies in this book show, neither literature nor celebrity is a game played outside the real world, untouched by its increasingly all-invasive threats and horrors or its increasingly urgent calls to action. Opening up the conversation to include scholars, writer-activists and industry stakeholders, this volume interprets literature as a social and cultural practice fusing politics and economics, art and entertainment, lofty ideals of genius and shrewd self-publicity. In this way, it illustrates the complexity of literature’s historically and culturally situated relationship with the world outside the book, and shows that concepts of celebrity and political agency can help give a clearer answer to long-fought questions about whether, and how, literature makes anything happen.

See, for example, Ana Cristina Mendes, Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (London: Routledge, 2013); Tawnya Ravy, ‘“The Man Who Would Be Popular”: An Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Twitter Feed’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, no. 3 (2017): 551–62; Jaclyn Partyka, ‘Joseph Anton’s Digital Doppelganger: Salman Rushdie and the Rhetoric of Self-Fashioning’, Contemporary Literature 58, no. 2 (2017): 204–32. 69 Carey Mickalites, Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism: Fictions of Celebrity (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 81–2. 70 Mickalites, Fictions of Celebrity, 100. 71 See, for example, ‘Salman Rushdies “Satanische Verse” wieder lieferbar’ (Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses Available Again), Stern, 30 August 2022, www.stern.de/kultur/schriftsteller–salmanrushdies–satanische-verse–wieder-lieferbar-32677098.htm. 68

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‘Let’s Deal with the People Oppressing All of Us’: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation Benjamin Zephaniah and Malachi McIntosh

Benjamin Zephaniah is a leading British poet, as well as an activist for human and animal rights, actor, TV presenter, musician, playwright, novelist and children’s writer. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah, was published in 2018. This conversation with Malachi McIntosh, writer and academic, and then-editor and publishing director of Wasafiri, was live-streamed from the Story Museum in Oxford on 24 June 2021.1 Malachi McIntosh: In the last year there’s been a huge amount of turmoil, including and especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, in particular, the political turmoil feels reminiscent of the time when your career launched in the eighties. I  wonder what your thoughts have been as all these recent things were unrolling: Boris Johnson, Brexit, the ‘culture wars’. Benjamin Zephaniah: Where do I start? Brexit was interesting, is interesting. Because with Brexit I began to suffer the kind of racism that I experienced in the eighties. I wasn’t beaten up by any racists, but I had four or five experiences on the street. I love jogging, but people shouted racist things at me as I was jogging and even threatened me once. When it comes to politics generally – and when I say politics I mean issues of race and gender and stuff like that – I came to all this in the seventies, really. And then the eighties were the real years of struggle, and in the nineties I thought, ‘That’s it! We’ve dealt with sexism and racism!’ We were all making music together! It was Soul II Soul; it was all getting together and jamming and mixed-race children and everything else. If you would have said to me then, ‘Could you imagine an organization like the EDL?’,2 I would have said, ‘Absolutely not! Look at the direction we’re going in.’ But look where we are. This conversation was chaired by Elleke Boehmer and Wes Williams and hosted by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH). It has been edited for length and clarity. A full video recording can be watched at ‘Art & Action: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), 24 June 2021, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/art-andaction-benjamin-zephaniah-in-conversation. 2 The English Defence League, a far-right organization formed in 2009. 1

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity I think that one of the problems with the state of the world right now is that the people who rule are the sexists and racists. And this is not just me theorizing. They’ve said it. When you’ve got leaders of big countries, leaders of the ‘Free World’ boasting about how you can grope women, saying this is a perk of the job, and you’ve got people like that guy in Brazil saying that Covid is just not that bad and let the people suffer, the important thing is chopping down the rainforest and having a party, whatever.3 I’m an anarchist, I don’t really like any of them. But when you’ve got them at the top saying that, what do we say to our kids in Tottenham and Handsworth and Oxford? We used to say, ‘Look at society. This is the way we’re going.’ Now you can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to say, ‘Actually, ignore society. We’ve got to do better than that.’ That’s weird. That’s very sad. As you know, I didn’t really go to school. I didn’t go to university. I didn’t go to college. I ended up in academia. So, when I start my term in university, I usually say to my students that on paper you’re all more educated than me. It’s quite a strange thing to say to your students at the start of the term: ‘You are all more educated than me on paper, but I’m your professor and how did I get here? With my help, you guys are going to get a good degree or whatever. But you know what? If you have a good degree and you don’t have compassion, you don’t have love, and you don’t have empathy, it’s worth nothing.’ So that’s, I think, where it is at the moment: really going back to grassroots and educating people at grassroots. Because really, a lot of very powerful people in the educated classes are not leading by example. We really don’t want to follow them. So, that’s what I think about the state of the world at the moment.

MM: It almost seems like you’re saying things are worse now than they were in the seventies and eighties. BZ: I remember once I was talking on radio about fighting the National Front in the East End of London. And I got home, and a couple of weeks later somebody wrote me a letter, and said, ‘I used to fight you. I was a National Front skinhead thug, but I’m now a Buddhist monk.’ You could literally see the tears on the page. He said in the letter that his violence was wrong, and that people are just people, and that he was a thug. Well, now you have intellectuals that are racist. Are we saying they shouldn’t go together? But, you know, you have racist academics. I’ve been doing television programmes where I’m going on to talk about my experience, and they say, ‘For balance, we’re going to have a racist.’ So, in one sense, things have got worse. I could meet that guy on the street, and I could fight him. And I could say, ‘You’re wrong. Leave me alone. Because I’m Black, you shouldn’t be hitting me.’ And he can go away and, I don’t know, smoke a spliff or whatever and get a conversion and turn into a monk. But when you’ve got people that say that they have a canon of literature that backs them up, they’ve got science that backs them up, and they teach in the academy – I mean, it is worse. It’s a bit like References to comments made by the US and Brazilian presidents, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

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Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation

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some women saying, ‘I’ve been beaten by a partner, but the mental abuse was worse.’ Of course, the physical stuff hurts, but the mental abuse is, can be, worse. So, yeah, it could be worse. MM: But weren’t there always racist academics? Are you saying they’ve been empowered in a way that they weren’t before? BZ: There were, I guess, but they were really in the margins, and now they are on primetime television. Now they have parties. I remember doing a TV programme with a well-known xenophobe: very respectable, you know, he’s got a legal political party. But then I saw his security behind him. And I thought, I recognize these guys. It was the guys that I was fighting in the seventies and eighties. They put on suits now, and they’ve got jobs as security. It’s a very difficult question to answer: have things got better or worse? Things have changed. Things have changed. I wrote a poem called ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’ in 1978.4 After the murder of George Floyd and a light being shone on deaths in custody of people in Britain, that poem became popular; people started reading it and listening to it again. It’s a sign of the times. We can go back to old stuff about our struggle, and it’s still relevant. MM: There’s a documentary about your first performances called Pen Rhythm Poet, which is now on YouTube.5 BZ: I hate it. MM: I know the word on the street is that you hate it! But there are some really amazing scenes in it, and one of them is you reading, I think it might be that same poem, in Trafalgar Square, in front of National Front people who were doing the Nazi salute. BZ: Yeah, and that’s really interesting because it films me doing this poem – actually, it was ‘Fight Dem Not Me’ – and in that poem, all I’m saying is that when I hear some of these racists talking about why they’re angry, I agree with them. What I’m saying to them is it’s not my fault. So, If you’re getting uptight and you want to fight fight dem, not me. If you check out de scene and things ain’t right see dem, not me. I came, I saw, I live here and I have my tribulation to bear. If you’re getting uptight and you really want to fight

‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death (Lord Scarman Dub)’, on Rasta (London: Upright Records, 1981). Available on YouTube, 29 June 2022, youtu.be/XSs3MlXqQmg. 5 Pen Rhythm Poet, directed and produced by Simon Heaven, performed by Benjamin Zephaniah (Compass Films for Channel Four Television, 1983). Posted on YouTube, 28 August 2018, youtu.be/ qQzSWF9Al_w. 4

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity fight dem, not me. If you live in a kitchen and you can’t afford chicken blame dem, not me.6 I’m pleading with them, I’m saying yeah, I agree with you. So, let me and you get together, and deal with the people who are oppressing all of us. That’s all I’m saying in that poem. So, anyway, I’m doing it in Trafalgar Square. And the cameraman is filming, and I come to the end of the poem. And I think he wanted a clapperboard or something, but he didn’t get one, so he kind of went like that [makes a circular gesture]. Because you see the camera goes like that. And then it just catches two people ‘Sieg Heil’-ing. Broad daylight, Trafalgar Square, skinhead thugs. And that’s what it was like then. In the middle of the day, walking around Trafalgar Square, doing Nazi salutes, and nobody did a thing. And they came to my gig.

MM: Your autobiography gives us a very detailed picture of that point in time  –  the seventies, eighties, when you’re coming up, when your career started, which we don’t really get often. There’s more and more focus on the Windrush generation: your parents, my grandparents. There’s a lot of focus, I think, in good ways and bad ways, on the contemporary generation, of young Londoners in particular – artists and musicians, especially. But that moment in time, particularly the experience of Black Britons outside of London, as you were in Birmingham, I feel like the spotlight doesn’t get shone on that very much. BZ: Well, when I was doing my autobiography – I really didn’t want to do one. But I thought, if I was going to do one, it had to be not just about me. I really wanted it to be kind of a documentation of what was going on politically and culturally. I don’t claim to be an expert, but it’s from what I saw, and what affected me, and how it affected my writing. And it’s really interesting because if we came across any writing like that, it was always American. You know, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, that’s what we were reading. After my autobiography was published, I got letters from America saying, ‘At last!’ They weren’t comparing me to Malcolm X, but they were saying, ‘Black British experience is being documented’. And I think it was right around that time Akala’s book came out, and Kehinde Andrews’ book came out,7 and a few other things came out, which I thought was just really good. We are now creating a canon of work that represents us. We’re not just reading American stuff and thinking that we have nothing to offer. It’s important that we document our history, and we do it truthfully. One of my obsessions has been, in writing my autobiography or in interviews, as I said to you There are multiple versions of this performance poem. See, for instance, ‘Fight Dem Not Me’, in The Dread Affair: Collected Poems (London: Arena, 1985), 13–15. 7 Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018); Kehinde Andrews, Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century (London: Zed, 2018). 6

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before we started, there’s no no-go areas. I believe in absolute honesty. I like being liked, but I think it’s important to be honest about your mistakes, because that’s how we learn. There’s a line in one of my poems that says, ‘I pass thru University/ I pass thru Sociology/ An den I got a Dread degree/ In Dreadfull Ghettology’.8 I learn by meeting people, by making mistakes. I learn from the streets. I don’t want it to boil down to a conversation about men and race, but it’s true especially for Black men. There’s no other way to put this: I grew up really sexist. All the men around me were really sexist. And I remember my sisters had a doll once, or they had many dolls, and I started combing their hair. And my dad got me, and he put me in a room, and he said, ‘Stop that now!’ I didn’t realize at the time he was worried that I ‘got gay’ or something, but he was like, ‘You stop that now, and here’s a gun. You play with that.’ That’s a light-hearted example of the attitude to women, but there’s lots of other things that I could tell you about, which was really horrible. You may know that my mother was really beaten by my father. So, I grew up really sexist and with really strange attitudes to lots of things, but I learned that from other people. Then I started to think for myself, and that’s when the change happened. So, I think it’s important, if you want to understand me, to understand how I got here and the journey and the mistakes I made. And that’s why I’m so open. People in my family say, ‘Stop talking about these things. Stop talking about them.’ Even exgirlfriends say, ‘Why do you keep talking about it?’ I can’t help it. I could attempt to sit here and lie and say that, ‘Well, what happened was, I started to love literature and I grew up with literature and I grew up in a house of books.’ I didn’t. When my dad caught me with a book reading one day, he slapped it out of my hand and said, ‘What you boy, you’ve got nothing to do?’ And he found something for me to do. He thought you read when you’ve got nothing to do. So, yeah, it’s important that we are really honest about ourselves, about our journey, and, as Black men, about our relationship with our mothers and with our partners, because we have to grow as a people. MM: And as individuals, too. BZ: And as individuals. MM: On that, there was a particular part of the autobiography that I wanted to talk about, which is almost the scene of your conversion, effectively: One summer night in 1978, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling, wondering what life was all about. The ceiling (with its adjoining walls) seemed to represent the limits of my ambitions, but these ambitions were related to the circumstances I found myself in, some of the bad choices I made, and some of the bad people I followed. It was time to really think for myself. I recalled the teacher at Broadway Comprehensive telling me I was a born failure, and that I would soon be dead or

‘Dis Poetry’, in City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1992), 12–13.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity doing a life sentence in prison. I didn’t have to be a mastermind to see that if things carried on the way they were going the teacher would be proved right. When I was eight, I told everyone, even the big moustache in the Boy’s Brigade, that I wanted to be a poet when I grew up, and there I was looking at a ceiling that belonged to Birmingham Council, with a gun under my pillow, thinking I was some kind of triad gang master don or ghetto godfather. Just as the eight-yearold me had done, I spoke the words out: ‘I want to be a poet. I want to prove that teacher wrong.’9

BZ: That whole piece is why, when I’m in schools talking to small children and they say, ‘Can you tell us the most important thing you ever did?’ I say: ‘Think for myself. Learn to think for myself ’. When I was being the ghetto godfather, the Rastafarian Peaky Blinder, I wasn’t really thinking for myself. You had to get status by being big, by being bad, by putting people down, and I could do it really well. But I wasn’t really being true to myself. I can remember doing a burglary in Birmingham (again I say this with a smile on my face, and when I’m performing, especially when I’m performing around Birmingham, I go on stage and one of the first things I do is apologize to the audience just in case I robbed one of their houses. Sometimes they put their hand up and go, yeah) and going in the house and just looking at the bookshelves and thinking, these people read. And memorizing the smell of the house and having it in my mind kind of in a literary way, describing the feel of the carpet underneath my feet and everything. And then we got out and the watch guy said, ‘What was it like?’, and I started to explain as if I was writing a novel. I said, ‘There was a great wall of literature!’ And they went, ‘Where’s the fucking money? Stop talking like that.’ There was a part of me that always wanted to be a writer. But when I got a teacher, somebody who is educated, telling me that I’m going to end up dead or doing a life sentence, I thought, ‘She knows more about the world than me. So maybe she’s right.’ And in that one night I said to myself, ‘I am going to end up dead or doing a life sentence if I stay here.’ So, I got in a car, and I just drove to London. The car wasn’t even roadworthy, and I drove to London. When I tell this story to schoolchildren, I tell them that I was involved in gangs, I was doing all these bad things. And then I went to London, and guess what, boys and girls, I got involved in another gang, and the kids go, oh! Yeah, but it was a gang of poets and musicians and writers. And then you can see all the kids start smiling. Because that’s what it is. We all need gangs. I said to an academic the other day that we are pack animals. And he corrected me and said, ‘No, no, no, we are social animals.’ I understand there’s a slight difference. I understand the difference. But we all like gangs. So, if you’re a writer, you tend to know people who are writers. If you’re a thief, you tend to know people who are thieves. Politicians are gangs. You have politicians on opposing sides who go on holiday together. Trust me, I’ve seen that. The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah: The Autobiography (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 124.

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What it is about is finding company. And I was really lucky I came to London, and the Alternative Cabaret movement started with Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French, and those people. After years and years of racist and sexist comedy and poetry, we said, ‘We’re going to do something different.’ So, yeah, it’s about finding the right gang. And thinking for yourself is to me – it’s the most important thing that people can do. Be really honest. Trust me, just ask people what they think about a certain issue and then dig down, because usually they’ll start to answer as a British person or as a Black man or something. But what do you really think? And sometimes it takes time to really dig down, and you can find a completely different answer to the one they started with. Because we all have this front, which is all fakery, actually. Nationality, or even race, is a construct. When you ask people what they really think, sometimes you can take time to dig down, but you can be surprised by the answers. MM: You’ve been on so many platforms. Your work, and now your life, is so widely known. Do you feel like a celebrity? BZ: No, I don’t feel anybody celebrating me, but I do realize … I mean, at one point in the mid-nineties, somebody said that I was the most photographed and filmed poet in the world. And I could understand why they said that, because if you’d have said the Poet Laureate, most people wouldn’t know what he looked like. You knew names, but you didn’t know people. I mean, I was probably the first poet that was on primetime television, that was on Top of the Pops, and that was also involved in political debates and stuff like that, so people would know me for different reasons. But I don’t feel like a celebrity. I tend to shy away from doing things on the media that have the word ‘celebrity’ tacked onto them. I have done some, and I’ll be doing some in the future – I did Mastermind, which I made a complete fool of myself, and I’ve done Celebrity Antiques Roadshow – but that’s just for the laugh and just for raising money for charities. They tried to get me to go into Big Brother. They offered me a lot of money; I won’t tell you how much they offered me. I wouldn’t do it. They tried to get me to go in the jungle.10 I wouldn’t do it. I just can’t do that. But I think it’s important, if you are a writer that says something about the conditions we live in and the way that we can be oppressed by certain systems etc., etc., then you should be able to show your face and get involved in public debates. I would never call myself a public intellectual, I’m not sure if I call myself an intellectual. If an intellectual means a curious mind and trying to build a point of view on all these things, yes, maybe. But when I hear real intellectuals – I mean, I’m close to worshipping Noam Chomsky and people like that. Christopher Hitchens, he was a friend of mine who I disagreed with sometimes, but I just loved the way he would dig down and analyse things. Even when I disagreed with him, I could see the logic of where he was coming from. When I think of myself against people like that, I think, no way.

For the British ITV reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, first screened in 2002.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity But one of the things that I have that a lot of those cats don’t have is real experience. They may have ideas about policing in Britain or whatever. I’ve lost teeth and lost dreadlocks because of policing in Britain. They may have theories about domestic violence and stuff like that. Well, I’ve seen my mother almost killed. I had to stab my father to save her life. That’s what I have which a lot of those guys don’t have.

MM: And all of that is missing, I think, from a lot of public debates in Britain. BZ: Yeah. When I teach poetry at Brunel [University London], one of the things I tell the students is to use your experience. So, what happens usually: the girls start writing boyfriend poems, and I say, ‘Come on now, dig deeper!’ And then, after a few weeks, they get it. And I say to people, if you’ve had experiences, especially if they’ve been negative, here you can turn it into a positive. You’re not studying Shakespeare or Shelley. This is you. Study your life. And the ones who find it difficult are the people that are born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They’ve had no experience. And I remember talking to a student about this, and he just went, ‘Yeah, that’s me!’ He said, ‘Every time I’ve got a problem, daddy sends a helicopter and rescues me.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s no reason why you can’t find solidarity with people.’ Don’t fake it, but you can still have solidarity with people who are suffering. I think there’s an importance in all our experiences, even if they are privileged, to be honest about them. MM: There’s a generation of folks who are coming up somewhat in your mould. I’m thinking of someone you mentioned before, the rapper Lowkey, and other folks who straddle that divide between politics, music, art. I’m curious how you feel about that movement. Do you feel inspired by these folks coming up? Do you feel that you had a role to play creating space for them? BZ: When I did Life & Rhymes, almost every poet would come to me and say, ‘I studied your poems. I read your poems when I was a kid. And you inspired me to do …’ And it’s great. I feel like the grandfather, the godfather if you like, of this form, of what we used to call dub poetry but now is generally performance poetry. And I think it’s brilliant. Once upon a time, it was like Black and white. And Asians were seen as Black. It was a political term. Now you got Jamaicans, and then you’ve got Nigerians. And within the Asian community, you’ve got the Hindus and the Sikhs. And everybody has got a separate identity. It’s amazing how it kind of pulls apart. In one sense, it was a lot easier back in the day, but I enjoy listening to the complexity of it all and how they’re doing their negotiations. And sometimes it gets angry. Sometimes it gets tense. I’ve seen it with my own students. I used to think that all the LGBTQ+ people would be in the same boat. I was amazed, one day in my class, when a massive argument broke out because somebody said they were gender fluid and a gay person said, ‘Stop sitting on the fence!’ For us, it was a lot more black-and-white. Now it’s a lot more complex. And I think this new generation deserves that. Because I knew people when I was growing up who were gay, who wanted to be trans, but they couldn’t do it, because of the way

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our communities were. When I listen to young poets now speaking about all kinds of things, it really does fascinate me. Linton Kwesi Johnson said the other day in an interview that he’s slightly going into retirement, and he doesn’t really feel inspired or the need to write new poetry anymore. I do. I feel completely inspired. But when the murder of George Floyd happened, I kind of sat back and thought, ‘I’m not going to get involved in this. This is the new generation of activists coming forward.’ But that new generation of activists, they called upon me, and I was happy to step up. But I am inspired. And the other thing that really inspires me is the fact that even five, four years ago, when I was on a Black Lives Matter march, it was mainly Black people. Now there’s white people, there’s all kinds of people on the marches. And gay pride marches were always gay people, and now there’s all kinds of people on them. I just love this kind of intersectionality that is going on. People connecting things – I find that really, really fascinating, and inspiring. MM: And this black-and-whiteness you spoke about, it was simpler, but maybe it was making something complex less complex, if that makes sense? BZ: I think what it was – we really didn’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Well, I’m Jamaican, and I’m Bajan, and I’m Trinidadian’, because as far as the racists were concerned, we were all – I’m tempted to use the n-word. I’m not going to. But, you know, we were all the n-word, and we were all the p-word. They wouldn’t beat you a little less because you were a bit lighter-skinned than me. And if somebody was gay and being beaten because they were gay, there wasn’t somebody analysing and saying, ‘Do we beat them hard because they’re gay, or is this person trans?’ No, they hated us all equally. So, we were much more united, and we weren’t kind of breaking off into little groups. I think people have more space to do that now. But I still say that when you look at our main oppressor worldwide, they are the same people, and they know how to divide and rule us. So it’s okay me saying, ‘I come from a Jamaican background, and I’m from Birmingham, and I support Aston Villa.’ And somebody might be saying, ‘I’m Nigerian, or Indian, and I support Tottenham’ or whatever. But when it comes to fighting the racists, we must be united. A few years ago, I would talk about taking to the streets and stuff like that, but they’re trying their best to stop that. Young people now, activism online and stuff, I’m just not clued into. I’m still old-fashioned in that I do a bit on Twitter, but I don’t really have political debates there. I don’t engage with it much. My old-fashioned way of going to the streets is becoming more and more illegal.11 MM: I think we do need to get different groups of people together, and I think younger folks who are organizing now very much need to learn their history and go back and see what was effective in the past. At times it seems like that might not be happening, The draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, proposed by the Conservative government and greeted by ‘Kill the Bill’ demonstrations in 2021, gives police forces in England and Wales powers to criminalize protests which they regard as causing ‘nuisance’. The Bill became law in April 2022.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity but maybe that’s because I’m old. But I do think there is more space for getting together and coordinating and collaborating. Any kind of advocacy or activism work that I’ve done, I’ve never, ever had an idea what to do. I’ve just been in situations, as I’m sure you have, where you feel something has to be done. And you try to get the right people at the table to talk about what can we do about this? So, yeah, I think everything begins with conversation and planning collectively. I feel that the folks who are running things, that’s exactly what they don’t want.

BZ: That’s what they fear. They actually fear it. And that’s why they’re so desperate. That’s why they want to stop us coming out on the streets. They are – I was going to say paranoid, but they are scared. MM: Petrified. And I feel like the new rhetoric around the white working class is very much in this line. In England, the powers-that-be have absolutely nothing to say to white people who are working class; have absolutely nothing in common with them. And in my opinion, they don’t care about them at all. But the only way to shore up their power is to do what they can to try to disconnect those individuals from the very people who live in their neighbourhoods, who know their lives. BZ: I’m a revolutionary. Karl Marx said that capitalism will eat itself, you know, will bite away at itself, but that’s no reason for us to sit back. I believe we’ve got to stand up. And the future that I want to see: I actually don’t know what it is yet. In other words, I’m not going to dictate. I’m not going to say, ‘Well, I’ve got this point of view. I think the old ideas of Marxism …’ You talk to young people about that, and they call us old. The idea that workers are going to be in the factory and they’re going to put the tools down – no, people are behind laptops now. And this is one of the problems. This is the problem that all us anarchists have with people who are not anarchists. They say, ‘Well, what’s this world that you imagine?’ Well, we need to have a conversation about it. We need to do it together. It’s not about me imagining it and then putting it on you. That’s the point of it. And if you look at all the leading anarchist intellectuals in the world, people like Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy – what have they got in common? They don’t want to be leaders. I’m a revolutionary, and like Bob Marley said, it takes a revolution to make a solution. There’s too much confusion, and there’s just so much frustration.12 I have absolutely no doubt about the power of music and poetry, on a small level and on a bigger level. I remember being in a pub in Dublin and talking about the importance of creativity in education. Thatcher at the time was trying to focus on the reading, writing and arithmetic, and not literature and arts and plays and stuff like that. So, I did a gig, and I did this talk about it afterwards. Many, many years later, Nelson Mandela comes out of prison. I’m in South Africa. This guy comes up to me, and he says, ‘I remember that talk you did in Dublin about the importance of arts and creativity in education.’ And he said, ‘I’ve taken that with me to my new job.’ And I said, ‘What’s your job?’ He said, ‘I’m the Minister of Education.’ You know, there was Bob Marley and the Wailers, ‘Revolution’, on Natty Dread (New York: Island Records, 1974).

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me talking in a pub in Dublin, and I didn’t know I was talking to the future Minister of Education for South Africa. I’m sure you don’t remember the Nicaraguan revolution. This is a revolution in Nicaragua by the Sandinistas where at the end they won power and saw that most of their leaders were dead. But the people who were alive that really inspired the revolution were the writers and the poets and the musicians. And they all ended up in government. A friend of mine, Carlos Rigby, ended up being the Mayor of Bluefields. You know, this is the government of poets. I mean, it changed, and some things went wrong, but the reason why they were able to do that was because the poets and musicians with their sounds and vibrations and their music and everything inspired the people. And within the Palestinian struggle  –  he is not alive anymore, but Mahmoud Darwish was a great poet, and at one point he said, ‘I’m going to join the PLO.’ And everybody went, ‘No, no, no, no, there’s enough people joining the PLO. We need you to write to inspire us.’ I know the importance of literature and music and poetry. In Jamaica, no politician would go to elections without having a particular poet or musician on their side. That’s why they shot Bob Marley. Because he refused to take sides. We have to be hopeful. What our oppressors want us to do is give up. They want us to be hopeless. And this is something I’ve said before, and I don’t mind repeating it. I have no scientific evidence to back this up. I read no papers to prove what I’m going to say now, but I just believe in the victory of good over evil. I believe we must overcome them. We just have to. If we can’t struggle on and see victory and work towards it in whatever field we’re doing, whether that is decolonizing the academy or libraries or whatever, then we might as well just give up. We might as well just give up, we might as well listen to the racists, and I don’t know – I was going to say, we’ll go back to Africa, but I’ll go back to Birmingham. That’s what they want us to do. The thing with the seventies and eighties, when universities could get away with promoting racist intellectuals, all kinds of things like that, is that there wasn’t all these forces. I remember reading about Cecil Rhodes and just thinking, why does everybody respect his name so much? It was almost like, sshh. I remember talking to an African person about it, and he went, ‘But you know, I got a Rhodes scholarship. I’ve got to be grateful, I’ve got to be grateful.’ I thought, ‘No, no, we can say there’s another way of getting a scholarship, if you want to.’ There’s alternatives, or we can change it. I’m just so glad we’re having that debate. And it’s not just about the debate. I feel a bit lazy sometimes. I think it is lazy sometimes when we just talk about the debate. We want action. And the young people who are fired up now want action. That’s why they tear statues down. And not only that: I did a piece the other day for TV about how Black people are putting statues up that represent us, all of us. Not just Black people, but all of us. I’ve got hope. It may not happen in my lifetime, but there are some great people, much better than me, who have done much greater things than me that didn’t see the change in their lifetime. But we still appreciate what they did.

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Part One

Art as Activism

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3

Clearing a Space for Multiple, Marginal Voices: The Writers’ Activism of PEN Peter D. McDonald, Margie Orford, Rachel Potter, Carles Torner and Laetitia Zecchini

This public panel discussion originally took place on 18 September 2020.1 It featured contributions by academics Peter D. McDonald, Laetitia Zecchini and Rachel Potter (co- and lead investigators on the AHRC-funded project ‘Writers and Free Expression’ (2017–21), which explored the history of writers’ activism since 1921, with a specific focus on PEN and its activities in different geo-political areas); poet, human rights activist and academic Carles Torner (PEN International Executive Director 2014–20); and novelist, journalist and scholar Margie Orford (President of PEN South Africa 2014–17). Sandra Mayer: We are here today to discuss the activist interventions of PEN, the first worldwide non-governmental writers’ organization, whose work is based on the complex interplay of literature and politics. For nearly a century now,2 PEN has been one of the most influential players in human rights advocacy and the protection of freedom of expression and linguistic and cultural diversity. It has also been influential in shaping the public notion of the writer as a politically engaged individual who has a very clear social responsibility. Our speakers – scholars, writers and activists who have been working on and with PEN for many years – will zoom in on some of the defining moments in the organization’s history, each of which reflect the most decisive historical and political developments of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Peter McDonald: I would like to start by focusing briefly on two key documents in the history of PEN. The first is a letter that the British novelist and founding president of This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A full video recording can be watched at ‘Panel Discussion: The Writers’ Activism of PEN’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), posted 18 September 2020, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/art-action-a-webinar-series-onliterary-authorship-politics-and-celebrity-4. 2 PEN International was founded in London in October 1921. On the one hundred-year history of the organization, see Carles Torner and Jan Martens, eds., PEN International: An Illustrated History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021). 1

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity PEN, John Galsworthy,3 sent to the London Times on 24 April 1923, two years after the foundation of PEN. This letter is the first major public articulation of PEN’s stated aims and objectives. The second is a photograph of the dinner held for the inaugural PEN Congress in London on 1 May 1923, an elaborate black-tie affair, all cut glass, silver and formal seating plans. It looks more like a royal banquet, or a Nobel Prize award dinner, than a gathering of writers. The letter is essentially an advertisement for the congress, which took place one week later. Galsworthy is anticipating that event and using the Times as a platform to articulate PEN’s views. This is what Galsworthy has to say in his letter: ‘[PEN’s] aim is simply the fostering of good feeling, hospitality, and understanding among the writers of the world – poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, novelists – whence the name P. E. N. It meddles not with politics. The meeting ground is that of “Letters.”’ He comes back to this key issue of politics at the end and says: ‘People who see politics behind everything must for once be disappointed. When we say we are not political, we mean it.’4 From this distance, it is not difficult to look back at these words with some scepticism, even scorn. We could easily dismiss them as airy 1920s aestheticism or perhaps as Euro-American bourgeois idealism in its worst form. It is not just that PEN is going to be apolitical but often it is going to be anti-political. If we read the letter alongside the dinner photograph, this reading looks even more plausible. Yet, I would like to suggest two reasons why we shouldn’t be too quick to judge. The first is that Galsworthy’s view – though widely shared with members of PEN, especially by the English and the Americans – was, in fact, contested at the time, most notably by the German avant-garde left, especially figures like Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. The second reason is that, seen in the long history of PEN’s internal debates, this articulation of the letters/politics divide marks the beginning of PEN’s sustained effort to create a supra-political space for critique and action, putting PEN, at least from the 1930s, at the vanguard of a new articulation of human rights. So, if we think about this genealogically over the course of a century, what we see emerging is the groundwork for a new kind of discourse. To trace that development, from this letter to the present, is what we might do in this conversation.

Laetitia Zecchini: I will discuss the writers’ activism of PEN from a colonial or postcolonial perspective, looking at the example of PEN in India, founded in 1933 in then Bombay, with Rabindranath Tagore as its first president.5 The Indian centre, like other branches of International PEN, both was shaped by internationalist ideals and cleared a space for very specific Indian struggles and concerns. The first issue of the centre’s journal opened with a question: ‘Why a P. E. N. Club in India?’ The answer was defiant: ‘Why not? Are Indian writers not good enough to John Galsworthy (1867–1933), 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, was President of PEN International from 1921 to 1933. 4 John Galsworthy, ‘The P. E. N. Club’, The Times, 24 April 1923. 5 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was President of the PEN All-India Center from 1934 until his death in 1941. 3

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take their place in the fellowship of the world’s creative minds?’6 This set the tone for Indian PEN’s activism. One of its aims was to redress the asymmetric exchange of nations and literatures on the world stage – and especially, to redress India’s invisibility. A few months earlier, at PEN’s International Congress in Barcelona, Sophia Wadia, the founder of Indian PEN, insisted that ‘the East’ must not be excluded if PEN was to be truly international and that India must not be seen as a ‘beautiful museum of antiquities’, but as a living and vigorous nation.7 Exalting the value of India through the value of Indian literature was meant to serve the cause of political independence, and freedom from colonial servitude was foremost on Indian PEN’s agenda. But let me focus on an editorial of The Indian P. E. N. from 1940 that carries the title ‘The P. E. N. Stands for Free Speech’.8 It is interesting on different grounds. First, because there is this repeated assertion, which brings us back to what Peter was saying, that PEN is not concerned with political issues. The case that is made here, in support of free speech, should not be interpreted as taking sides in a political, East versus West, or even colonial versus anti-colonial battle. It is a matter of principle, universal in so far as it is, precisely, above state or party politics, and free from contingent or particular considerations. Second, it is interesting because it shows that India’s freedom is seen as tied to the world’s freedom; that you cannot dissociate one from the other. Third, that the enemies of freedom – or what Mulk Raj Anand, who was a prominent Indian author, and also an important member of PEN, called ‘the ugly face of fascism’9 – take different guises. To register its protest against the sentencing of Nehru (who was to become the Vice President of Indian PEN) by the British to four years’ imprisonment,10 this text starts with a reminder of PEN’s many international resolutions in support of free speech. But it also points to the hypocrisy, or the duplicity, of an organization that seems to stay mute about encroachments on liberty in non-Western parts of the world. The other reminder in that text is that India itself is engaged in the war against ‘Hitlerism’, which is also waged in the name of Hitlerism’s ‘total annihilation of Free Speech’. If, the text continues, it is legitimate to fight Hitlerism through special wartime legislation, to use it against ‘enemies of Hitlerism … who are fighting their own battles of Liberty, is … injurious’: ‘and who can blame those who point to such unfair action as being a species of Hitlerism?’ Fascist and colonial repression here are synonymous and they command the same resistance. The fight for liberty in India appears as worthy and as imperative as the one being waged in Europe against Nazi rule. The Indian P. E. N., March 1934, 1. Reprinted in The Indian P. E. N., November 1935, 4. ‘The P. E. N. Stands for Free Speech’, The Indian P. E. N., December 1940, 1. Mulk Raj Anand, ‘On the Progressive Writers’ Movement’, in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–1947), ed. Sudhi Pradhan (1939; Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979), 17. 10 In 1940, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), who became the first prime minister of independent India, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for the part he played in Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign. He became the Vice-President of Indian PEN from 1944 until his death in 1964. 8 9 6 7

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity Again, Indian PEN is careful to show that its protest is not motivated by specific political or nationalist considerations. India is not fighting for itself alone. If PEN truly stands for free speech, then the duty of its members is to fight on behalf of the ‘Principle of Freedom’, wherever it is attacked, and defend all writers who combat tyranny. This also connects to PEN’s ideal of an interdependent world community of writers: ‘The weakening of Liberty in one place weakens it in every corner of the world.’11 Let me perhaps make a final point on the question of activism. I was thinking of Amit Chaudhuri’s definition of literary activism as the opposite of market activism, which, he argues, has hijacked and standardized the idea and value of literature, telling us, for instance, what a good novel is or isn’t. He mostly focuses on literary activism as activism on behalf of literature rather than the more politically straightforward activism through literature.12 But perhaps, and that is what PEN shows, it actually is both at the same time: activism on behalf of, and through, literature; clearing a space for multiple, different, marginal or critical voices and stories; making sure they continue to be seen or heard. In the case of Indian PEN, this has meant making room for India, Indian literatures and Indian freedom struggles on the world stage; making sure everyone has a right to a voice, even if these voices are considered ‘insignificant’. This is something that Wadia makes very clear in another text, published in 1948: ‘Numerically, we are small, we are insignificant. … Financially we are poor and therefore we are insignificant from the worldly point of view. We are, therefore, unknown and unrecognised. But, friends, we do not feel small or weak; we are powerful.’13

Rachel Potter: I am going to focus on a fraught moment in PEN’s history, which I see as exposing most dramatically what is at stake in art’s actions. At the first PEN Congress after the ending of the Second World War, in Stockholm in 1946, writers debated what kinds of action PEN should take to deal with Nazi and fascist collaborators who wanted to return to the organization, and whether there should be limits on fascist speech. Members were deeply divided on the issue. Although the problem of fascist PEN members and their speech had troubled PEN throughout the 1930s, PEN had tended to defend the individual writer’s right to free speech. However, in this post-war moment, the implications of free speech were subjected to a new kind of fierce scrutiny. The Dutch PEN centre issued a resolution that called for centres to create a list of writer-collaborators to be circulated to other centres so that they would not occupy any function in the public, literary or journalistic life of their country or take up PEN membership elsewhere.14 Some, including International PEN Secretary Hermon Ould, ‘The P. E. N. Stands for Free Speech’, 1. See Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Manifesto: On Literary Activism’, Literary Activism: A Series of Presentations and Interventions, 2014, www.literaryactivism.com/mission-statement/. 13 Sophia Wadia, ‘PEN’s Aims and Ideals, 1947’, The Indian P. E. N., January 1948, 3. 14 Proceedings of the 18th PEN Congress, Stockholm, Sweden, 2–6 June 1946, 7. PEN Records, PEN Congresses, 1923–65, Folder 4, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. All subsequent direct and indirect quotations from the Stockholm Congress are taken from this document. 11 12

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insisted that the creation of such a list was similar to the secretive and censorious activities of the Gestapo. He opposed the motion as not only illegal but also dangerous and contrary to the spirit of PEN, as he put it.15 It would involve, he said, members arrogating to themselves the roles of inquisitors. Another delegate argued that PEN was not a legal body, that writers should not set themselves up as judges, and that literature was beyond the moral categories of right and wrong. They should think as artists, not propagandists or politicians. More numerous, however, were the members who held the opposite view. Many spoke of the impossibility of including Nazi collaborators within PEN. They might join in order to spread fascist propaganda, some said. Belgian writer Louis Piérard argued that as writers they must take a position for the principle which was the basis of the association, suggesting the extent to which the debate was not simply about the creation of lists, but about the identity or values of PEN as it moved into a future in which the status of democracy, the Cold War, the continued existence of Francoist Spain and PEN’s consultative status to the UN were all in sight. In a debate about whether there should be limits on fascist speech, delegates questioned whether free expression was a key egalitarian value tied to democratic politics and fundamentally opposed to Nazism, or whether it was an individual right irrespective of content  –  based on what we would call in contemporary legal language ‘content neutrality’, or, in a very different sense, what the PEN organization had long insisted was art’s disconnection from politics. Some members argued that fascists used free-speech arguments selectively because they thought, as one delegate put it, that liberty can be abused. As another delegate said, the PEN Club Charter called for total liberty but giving liberty to those who wanted to destroy liberty was a kind of suicide. Others worried about tolerating the free expression of beliefs the evil consequences of which they had bitterly experienced themselves. The Dutch centre identified these evil consequences as the Nazi principles that, as they put it, had found acceptance because of propaganda. The propaganda problem was amplified by new technologies, most prominently the radio, allowing for the mass and transnational dissemination of speech. At the Stockholm Congress, the US PEN centre proposed a new resolution on free expression, which became known as ‘the American Resolution’. It specifically called for ‘voluntary restraint’ in relation to the evils of a free press, of what they called ‘mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends’.16 PEN had long argued that writers wielded powerful forms of cultural capital and that they should use this power to defend writers’ rights against imprisonment and exile. But here, writers’ ability to influence others by allowing ideas to find communal acceptance and spread inhumane language that degrades the dignity of persons was precisely the problem – a reason for the organization to be vigilant in policing its membership.

Proceedings, 6. Proceedings, 2.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity When it came to the vote on the Dutch resolution, writers lined up largely on national lines, depending on whether their country had been occupied. The result was seventeen in favour of the Dutch resolution, seven against and three abstentions. It is not hard to fathom why the issue of Nazi collaborators and the impact of their speech was so fraught in 1946. But looking back at this moment in PEN’s history, I am struck by the similarities between these debates and contemporary debates about hate speech and what is now called ‘fake news’. There are similar urgent questions amongst contemporary free-speech advocates and PEN centres about the consequences of speech and whether egalitarian principles are furthered or curtailed by placing limits on some kinds of speech. What strikes me is that the left-liberal desire to shore up strong anti-fascist liberties in 1946 emerged because of an urgent sense of a crisis in democracy, in both the recently lived past and an uncertain future.

Carles Torner: I want to talk about a picture that shows a group of writers and publishers in a field of snow.17 This is the kind of picture where what you don’t see is more important than what you see. In the centre, there is Jennifer Clement, then President of PEN International.18 There are two other past presidents of PEN in the picture: Per Wästberg, who is also the Chair of the Literature Nobel committee, and John Ralston Saul.19 There are also: Norwegian writer and PEN International Vice President Eugene Schoulgin; Eva Bonnier, William Nygaard and Ronald Bluden, important publishers from Sweden and from France; members of the board and delegates from different PEN centres; and Burhan Sönmez, a Turkish human rights lawyer, novelist and current President of PEN International, who had organized this mission in January 2017 that led us to Silivri Prison, a one-hour drive from Istanbul. In this prison, there are more than 17,000 prisoners at present. What you don’t see is that in front of the writers and publishers, there is a military truck, a bus with anti-riot police and the cameras of Norwegian TV. Because as soon as we tried to read our statement in front of the cameras, with the prison behind us, the military truck and the anti-riot bus appeared, and they forced us to take the pictures and to read our statement just with this field of snow behind us. This was a moment of very acute repression of freedom of expression in Turkey. Publishers and writers had been asking PEN International to organize this mission, which is PEN’s largest mission to date to support freedom of expression in a country. We were very moved to know that when we were taking this picture and when we were reading our statement, inside Silivri Prison word had spread, and everyone knew that we were there defending the writers and journalists, 150 of whom were imprisoned there at the time. PEN has been running these missions in many countries – in Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Yemen, Russia, Venezuela and South Korea  –  since the Writers in

See Carles Torner, Twitter post, 26 January 2017, 11.46 am, twitter.com/carles_torner/ status/824569153008832512. 18 Mexican-American writer Jennifer Clement was President of PEN International from 2015 to 2021. 19 Swedish writer Per Wästberg, President of PEN International 1979–86 and 1989–90; Canadian novelist John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International 2009–15. 17

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Prison Committee was created in 1960 to articulate PEN’s defence of our colleagues who are imprisoned or persecuted. A second image points towards another aspect of PEN’s activism. It was taken in 2013, on International Translation Day in London, with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o presenting a translation in dialogue with Amanda Hopkinson, who at the time was the Chair of the English PEN Translation committee.20 Ngũgĩ represents PEN’s efforts to support all literatures, in all languages, in equality. When Ngũgĩ was imprisoned in 1978, PEN launched an important campaign for his liberation. In prison, Ngũgĩ realized that he had been imprisoned because of the language in which his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) was written, and he decided that from that moment on he would write all his novels in the Kikuyu language. He has since become a symbol of African writers writing in the African national languages. In 1928, at a congress in Oslo, PEN decided that PEN centres would be based not on state boundaries but on literary and cultural ground. This has been the driving force to create a network of close to 150 PEN centres around the world, including Tibetan PEN, Uyghur PEN, Kurdish PEN, Catalan and Basque PEN, and the recently created PEN Quechua and the multicultural Chiapas PEN centre, gathering writers in nine Maya languages and in Zoque languages. Ngũgĩ represents this diversity and equality of literatures in the perspective of PEN; but, on the other side, Amanda Hopkinson represents the efforts of English translators, English writers and the English writing community to increase the number of publications in translation. English PEN, PEN America and the Australian PEN centres know that English is one of the languages that translates the least in comparison with other literatures.21 The PEN Translates award, launched by English PEN in 2012; the PEN World Voices Festival; and the PEN Translation Prize by PEN America have all been promoting this exchange of literatures and this effort of the PEN International community to make sure all writers from all literatures are considered equal. Margie Orford: I am going to talk about the PEN International Women’s Manifesto. For me, its last paragraph sums up what PEN is: an activist organization which defends writers and saves them and their words. It says: ‘PEN believes that the act of silencing a person is to deny their existence. It is a kind of death. Humanity is both wanting and bereft without the full and free expression of women’s creativity and knowledge.’22 The Women’s Manifesto was initiated by Jennifer Clement, the first woman to head PEN International in nearly a century of existence, and was being collectively drafted See Free Word, ‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Conversation with Amanda Hopkinson’, YouTube, 18 October 2013, youtu.be/ZefcWzh6B0k. 21 See ‘To Be Translated or Not to Be: Part I’, Three Percent: A Resource for International Literature at the University of Rochester, 12 February 2008, www.rochester.edu/College/translation/ threepercent/2008/02/12/to-be-translated-or-not-to-be-part-i/; Esther Allen, ed., To Be Translated or Not to Be: PEN / IRL Report on the International Situation of Literary Translation (Barcelona: Institut Ramon Llull, 2007). 22 ‘The PEN International Women’s Manifesto’, PEN International, 21 September 2017, peninternational.org/who-we-are/manifestos/the-pen-international-womens-manifesto. 20

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity as Donald Trump swept into power in the United States in 2016. At the Women’s March in Washington to protest the inauguration of Trump in January 2017, an elderly woman held up a sign saying, ‘I can’t believe I am still protesting this shit.’ I had the same feeling then, and I have it now. Why am I protesting it? Given the current politics of Putin, Erdoğan, Johnson and the resurgent Taliban – the list is actually too long to name them all – the answer, I think, is obvious. These are men who centralize power around themselves. That power is premised on the most lethal binaries of race, religion and, above all, gender. This resurgence of patriarchal power goes hand in hand with the curtailment of women’s freedoms. The attacks on the free speech of women – often with a weaponizing of a libertarian and highly masculinized concept of ‘free speech’ employed by the far right and the alt-right – attempt to restrict us and assign us to the domestic sphere, with all its bodily policing, coercion and violence. The Greeks called this female-gendered domestic and reproductive sphere the oikos. It was the binary opposite to the male-gendered sphere of the doxa, which is the public realm, the realm of free speech, of politics, decision and of authority. That architecture of gender, power and speech endures, and it is this that the Women’s Manifesto addresses. The particular remit of PEN International and the global network of centres that make up its membership is, of course, literature. So, let us turn to Homer’s Odyssey to see how this works. Let us focus on one particular scene, when Penelope comes down from her quarters to the public part of her own home to address her adolescent son and the returning warriors. Telemachus is both threatened and threatening. He reprimands his mother and tells her that, because she is a woman, she has no right to what he calls muthos, the ancient Greek word that meant ‘public speech’. He orders her to return to the women’s quarters, and she obeys. Why? Put yourself in Penelope’s place. She is in a room filled with armed men. In front of her is a son whose very authority, whose honour, depends on his ability to silence a woman, to expel her from the public sphere, to defend with violence, if necessary, the doxa as a domain for men only. It is a dangerous moment, and Penelope falls silent, censured and censored, a woman speaking in public out of turn. It is the silence of half of history, of half of humanity. Our notions of free speech and human rights come out of the Enlightenment and the tumults of the French Revolution. In August 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly passed The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Free speech was fundamental to this declaration. However, ‘Man and Citizen’ meant men. These were men’s rights; not women’s. This was contested immediately by the abolitionist, philosopher and writer Olympe de Gouges. In 1791 she published The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, and I quote her: ‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold,’ she wrote, ‘she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum.’23 However, the Enlightenment presumption of the natural rights of the citizen was in direct contradiction to the equally firmly held belief in natural sexual

Olympe de Gouges, ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791)’, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: Exploring the French Revolution, accessed 19 September 2022, revolution.chnm. org/d/293.

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difference. Two years later, De Gouges did, indeed, mount the scaffold. She was one of three women to be executed during the Reign of Terror and the only woman to be executed for sedition – accusations that stemmed primarily from her insistence on women’s rights, particularly the right to free speech. Susan B. Anthony, the American civil rights campaigner, would write in 1900 that ‘no advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonised.’24 To speak publicly is to speak with authority; to claim an authority that has been, and in many quarters still is, fiercely defended as a masculine domain. These asymmetries of power are reflected in, and made through, speech and writing. The PEN Charter states that literature knows no frontiers. These frontiers were thought of as borders between countries and nations. The Women’s Manifesto, however, makes clear that for many women in the world – for almost all women until relatively recently – the first and the last and perhaps the most powerful frontier was the front door of the house she lived in. Until recently, that was either her father’s or her husband’s house. This is an internal border whose guards and injunctions need to be considered as a wall that is not always physical. These are intimate prisons that work to great effect. Women, in order to have free speech, the right to read, the right to write, need the right to roam both physically and intellectually. But there are few, if any, social systems that do not look with hostility at a woman who walks by herself. Imagining how different the course of both history and literature might have been is at the heart of the Women’s Manifesto, as is our imagination of the future. The political activism required is evident in the political aims that follow that more poetic preamble of the Manifesto. These aims, which shape the activist work of PEN, are: non-violence, safety, education, equality, access and parity. There is no literature without that political framing. So, we must reimagine, rewrite, rethink the work of women’s free speech. How to do this? I want to return, if I may, once more to that scene of Homer’s and that confrontation between Penelope and Telemachus. Let us imagine that when this boy ordered her back to her quarters, when he denied her the right to public speech, that she refused to go. Let us imagine that she insisted on speaking and that when she spoke, she was not alone. Let us imagine that the wiser, more confident men intervened and instructed Telemachus thus: ‘You’, they said, ‘be silent. Listen to the words of this woman. This space, this doxa, is one that should be shared. She is wise and will have good counsel, for she has experienced the pointless slaughter of the Trojan Wars too. Let us listen to her and see that there is another way.’ History teaches us that freedom, equality and respect are brought about through collective action and solidarity. A number of world leaders and organizations have endorsed this Manifesto: the United Nations, for example, and Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland. There have been many others. The Manifesto is widely Anthony quoted in Rebecca Solnit, ‘From Lying to Leering’, London Review of Books 39, no. 2 (19 January 2017).

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity translated, and it has been adopted and used by PEN centres all over the world to change things structurally and to defend the rights of women who have been incarcerated or threatened because of their free speech. This public work, this framing, I think, is key to making sure that the aspirations of women’s free speech are made something real.

SM: One of the many things that has come up again and again in your contributions is the issue of visibility, in tandem with cultural capital: from the strong social element in the origins of the club to making literatures, communities and political issues visible through, for instance, the media attention commanded by the big names in literature. The elephant in the room here is probably celebrity, and I think it is significant that none of you actually mentioned that term. I am becoming quite self-conscious about linking up the notion of celebrity with literature, because so many authors feel uncomfortable about being branded a ‘literary celebrity’ and being traded as such in the literary marketplace. And yet, there is this striking passage in a 2017 interview with Jennifer Clement, conducted by Peter, in which she says, ‘I think that we’re in the time of celebrity’, and stresses the importance for organizations like PEN of capitalizing on the celebrity status of individual writers.25 Her claim is that celebrity capital can be converted, for instance, into media visibility, creating a sense that ‘the world is watching’. As we all know, celebrity is a double-edged sword: it may lend visibility, but it may also detract from the political issues that are being advocated. What do you think is the specific political potential of literary celebrity, and how does it affect, positively or negatively, the work of PEN? MO: I think we should perhaps be less worried about the term ‘celebrity’. Certain writers have always had moral authority and weight, and their renown, which is perhaps a less anxiety-inducing word, is of great value. In the work I did as President of PEN in South Africa, where all literature is highly politicized, there were a number of cases in which I could call on writers – J. M. Coetzee, for instance – who would lend their authority and access to a global audience to a particular issue. Salman Rushdie is another writer who has done that. A writer’s public status can therefore be a very useful tool in the political strategy that you are using as a literary activist. PMcD: Maybe I could throw in a historical point, and also make a general one about PEN and this issue. PEN has mobilized literary celebrity from the beginning. Its first letterhead included all the Nobel Prize winners who had been made honorary members. It was constantly using writers’ visibility to help its own initiatives. That is one side of it. The other side of it is that PEN as a human rights organization does an enormous amount behind the scenes – as a matter of deliberate policy, I think. So, within PEN, there is a constant choice between ‘Do we go the route of mobilizing renown and Nobel Prize winners and people standing in front of a prison?’ or ‘Do we go the quiet Jennifer Clement and Peter D. McDonald, ‘Interview with PEN International President’, Writers and Free Expression, 13 March 2017, writersandfreeexpression.com/2017/03/13/first-blog-post/.

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route?’, which is at the heart of so much work that PEN does behind the scenes. There is a choice, and it is often a strategic one. CT: That is absolutely true. In our defence of writers who are in prison or at risk, we always make it our priority to defend the writer. If we need to go silent, we go silent. Let me give you one example of how famous writers are supporting PEN. In 2014, we were celebrating a congress in Kyrgyzstan, and in that country there had for a long time been a writer in prison, Azimzhan Askarov. We had been trying our best, but there was no way of obtaining important meetings with key ministers. We asked for a meeting with the country’s president, and there was no answer. Instead of creating a scandal, we tried again, announcing that Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, would be part of the delegation. We were aware that he knew the works of Martel well, and he received us immediately. It was one of the most memorable meetings. He shouted at all of us, and he was enraged when he saw that Martel and the entire delegation from different countries were insisting that he needed to liberate Askarov. We had succeeded in reaching the head of state, and of course we realized that it was a quite desperate situation because the regime wanted revenge on Askarov. In fact, Azimzhan Askarov died in prison just one month ago, and we have been in mourning.26 But we use this strategy all the time. Naomi Klein was invited to a conference in Valletta, Malta. We contacted her and gave her all the information about Daphne Caruana Galizia, the investigative journalist who denounced the corruption in her country and was killed by a car bomb in 2017. Klein subsequently changed the topic of her speech and spoke to the whole cultural community and community of authorities about Caruana Galizia. PEN is a community where writers are willing to use their celebrity in defence of the most persecuted and most deprived writers in the world. LZ: In the case of Indian PEN, the Indian members and founders of the organization were extremely conscious of the fact that having celebrities like Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Sarojini Naidu, who were also the leaders of India’s freedom struggles and political leaders, was absolutely crucial for other, less visible or unrecognized voices to be heard. One of the most important aims of Indian PEN was to help recognize voices and literatures that were not written in English; to make sure that the world would know of Indian voices and Indian writers who wrote in languages that were not accessible to larger audiences, and were often not considered significant or worthy enough to make it to the world stage. Hence, translation was, and is, an extremely important issue for PEN: all languages, all literatures, however ‘minor’ or marginalized, are of equal value. SM: There is a line in Peter’s email exchange with Antjie Krog which is to the point. She writes: ‘Any issue is more than often better served by writers writing, than by writers talking and making statements.’27 How do you  –  as writers, activists, Journalist and political activist Azimzhan Askarov died in prison in July 2020. Antjie Krog, ‘”Bugger Universality”: An Exchange with Antjie Krog’ in this volume, 65.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity scholars – feel about this comment? Is it even possible to uphold such a categorical distinction as implied by Krog?

MO: In my view, the idea that in a highly politicized, fascist country like South Africa under apartheid writers could somehow step daintily outside politics was unsustainable; a bit like Queen Elizabeth, when Walter Raleigh puts his coat down so she can step over the puddle. In my view, that was the approach. It was a very interesting phenomenon and it reveals this faultline that runs through PEN’s history and through the present, this idea that literature can somehow be separate. In my work on the Women’s Manifesto, a woman speaking in public is always political. If you are a woman or a person of colour speaking in public, your body is visible. Therefore, what you say is in relation to this body, which is not the one that is the norm, the citizen, the man. This is a conceptualization of somatic politics. The politics of Black consciousness and feminism, which said that the personal is political, have brought to an end this notion that there can be an apolitical writer who will dispense high words of wisdom. It is morally indefensible and politically impossible. That said, there is a very interesting part of PEN called Writers for Peace, founded in 1984, when Soviet Cold War politics created a particularly repressive climate for writers. So, sometimes there is a way in which you can be seemingly and strategically apolitical in very repressive countries, which, for me, is a more interesting kind of politics. I have no patience with writers in a free country who say they are not political. But, strategically, you can at times use your capacity and your public voice in a seemingly apolitical way to speak up for people. CT: I would answer that there doesn’t need to be a distinction between writers writing and writers making statements. Let me take Anna Politkovskaya28 as an example. Of course, what remains of Politkovskaya is her incredible amount of investigative journalism and how she revealed the darkest sides of Putin’s regime and the massive crimes – the genocide, as she called it – in Chechnya. So, Politkovskaya was doing both: she was writing  –  a work which is of immense and universal value  –  and she was coming to our congresses to prepare statements and participate in our activities. Another example is Svetlana Alexievich,29 whose work has really enlightened us in so many areas  –  about Russian women participating as soldiers in the Second World War, the catastrophe in Chernobyl or the corpses of the soldiers coming back from the war in Afghanistan. Alexievich, who has served the values of PEN with her writing, finds herself now, today, in the same position as so many dissenters, from Václav Havel to Anna Politkovskaya. She is not attacked by the regime in Belarus for Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006), Russian journalist and human rights activist, whose murder remains unsolved. 29 Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is one of the Vice Presidents of PEN International. 28

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her public statements these days, but this is mainly because she has this body of work behind her, and she has decided to be on the side of her people. The writer still has, in today’s world, this role of enlightening, of revealing reality and of bearing witness to the need to support freedom and democracy. I think that both things are important: as writers we need to defend freedom, we need to defend our colleagues who are experiencing repression; and we need to develop our body of work, which is freedom in itself for any reader who wants to open the pages of our books. SM: After looking back on the eventful history of PEN, let’s end this conversation by looking ahead. How do you envisage PEN’s future? How will it transform in the age of global social media and the manifold threats to free speech that it poses? What are your thoughts on how PEN should respond to Karl Popper’s provocation that in order to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance?30 MO: We have had a rapid changeover in how information works and how speech is circulated. For me, the right to free speech implies the obligation to listen, and this is something that PEN has done very effectively. The quickest way of looking at the alt-right’s weaponizing of free speech that has happened in sections of the American media is that free speech has come to be understood as the right to bellow in everybody’s ear anything you wish. That is a false understanding, I think, of how free speech works. It is a reciprocal thing. One of PEN’s strengths has been to provide a non-partisan political space in which the foundational activities of human society, which are speech and listening, can take place. PMcD: My own guess is that we are going to see an ongoing transformation of all these debates because of the rise of non-state actors – whether we talk about censorship, or various kinds of social conformity or groupthink, or the power that social media have, sometimes with violent consequences or at least violent intent. Looking back to the past for the future, I think one of the key lessons I get personally from the PEN archive  –  in terms of both pragmatic decisions and the principled articulations of PEN’s views, collectively formulated in things like the Charter  –  is that whenever we are talking about freedom of expression, we are never talking about freedom of expression only. We are actually talking about a constant set of balancing acts with mendacious publication, fake news, hate speech, etc. always being there too. There are responsibilities to keep that down as much as there are responsibilities to build things up. There is no straightforward, categorical or absolutist answer outside of the world of lived experience that can be articulated, and the PEN archive tells that story all the time, from the 1920s to the present. CT: My belief is that one of the key elements for the next hundred years is the different world map that PEN represents: the fact that PEN welcomes all voices. This principle See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945; London: Routledge, 2012).

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity of hospitality, there from the very beginning, means that today in PEN we have Tibetan writers abroad, we have Uyghur writers abroad; we have the Kurdish PEN centre, we have the Maya writing community, the Quechua writing community. And we have writers in Kikuyu, in Chichewa, Bambara and Wolof. We have the Eritrean, the North Korean, the Cuban, the Iranian writers in exile. We represent another understanding of internationality. This is what I think is going to be a key element, and all those voices are going to make our mission very much relevant in every decade of the next century.

4

Live at the Polari Salon: Literary Performance as Activism Ellen Wiles

‘Welcome! I’m your host for this evening. Now, are there any Polari virgins in the house?’ Scattered hands ascend as members of the audience ‘come out’ as such. The host tips his sparkly top hat to one side and regards them with a lopsided smile for a moment, before semi-reassuring them: ‘We’ll try to be gentle with you.’ In that spirit, this chapter offers a gentle introduction to the Polari Salon and reveals the remarkable ways in which it has become a small-but-fierce force of literary activism among and on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. It all began in a dark, sweaty corner of a Soho gay bar back in 2007, when writer Paul Burston needed to find an outlet for his frustration and anger.1 As an openly gay author, engaging with themes of gay sexuality in his work, he had three published novels to his name by that point; and yet was rarely invited to literary festivals and kept on being rejected by established publishers. Other gay writers he knew seemed to be having similar experiences, and they felt this was caused by a prevailing culture of discrimination in the literary industry, in the context of a wider lack of diversity, representation and inclusion. If they could not find mainstream platforms for their work, Burston decided, he would just have to make one himself. Polari was born, and quickly thrived, attracting lots of gay writers and readers who wanted to engage with books by and about the gay community, but felt themselves to be inadequately represented in literary culture. The name of the salon is significant: Polari is a coded language that was taken up by the gay community in London when homosexuality was illegal, as a means of disguising their activities. It became a core part of the burgeoning gay scene after the Second World War, before dying out when homosexuality was legalized and began to become socially acceptable among the cultural mainstream. Fittingly, from a live literature perspective, the word ‘polari’ derives from the Italian parlare (to talk); it was always intended to refer to language as spoken, not written. Polari can be

An acknowledgement: I would like to thank Paul Burston for generously facilitating this research at Polari between 2015 and 2018.

1

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traced back to the sixteenth century, when it was used among travelling circuses and then spread as sailor slang2 – a lineage that speaks to the performative, cabaret-style aesthetic that Burston seeks to cultivate. After two years, Burston was approached by London’s Southbank Centre offering support, which prompted Polari to move across the river, away from the heartland of the gay community, to a larger, airier venue in a much more prominent building.3 This move inevitably raised its public profile. It also prompted an increase in the inclusivity of its identity: Polari now defines itself as an LGBTQ+ literary salon. That change has been substantive in that the salon is open to submissions from any author-performer either identifying as LGBTQ+ or engaging with LGBTQ+ identities in their work, including through their fictional characters. The original camp, gay aesthetic of the salon is still very much evident in Burston’s approach to hosting; but, from my research observations (which I will discuss in more depth), gay men no longer dominate at its Southbank home. After this move, Burston went on to create a series of literary prizes attached to the salon, the Polari Prizes, which celebrate and promote literary writing from and about the LGBTQ+ community. The salon typically takes place in a function room up towards the top of the Southbank Centre, with the Millennium Wheel glittering outside. On a big screen behind the stage, a ‘cover image’ is projected: a photo of Burston wearing a purplesequined Wonka-esque tie, surrounded by sparkle dust and books fluttering like butterflies. A full house of about 150 people take their seats or queue for drinks at the little bar, accompanied by a funky soundtrack, and a lot of people chat and joke with other, apparently regulars. The audience tends to be a mix of men, women and people deliberately not performing a binary gender, ranging in age from twenties to sixties. The programme usually features six author-performers, each taking to the stage in turn for a fifteen-minute performance slot, with an interval in the middle of the night. The line-up sequence is roughly organized from ‘low’ to ‘high’ in terms of literary experience and/or public profile. All performers are introduced by Burston, who comperes in a jocular and enthusiastic fashion and is always dressed up in a suit, usually with a splash of sequins or glitter. The performers are not briefed on what to wear, giving them freedom to express their individuality, in a way that reflects the inclusive scope of the salon; some like to dress up a little, and to factor in a bit of glitter, and others take to the stage in jeans and trainers. They are briefed in advance to give a short introduction to themselves and their work, but to spend the majority of their slot on stage performing from the text. The final performer is thanked by Burston, who brings all the performers on stage again at the end for a final round of applause. Those readers wondering about the audience Q&A, which is standard at most literary festival events, may be surprised to learn that there is no Q&A at Polari; the

For a history of Polari, see Paul Baker, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men (London: Routledge, 2002). 3 See the Polari Salon, official website, accessed 10 June 2022, www.polarisalon.com/. 2

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focus is on the text in performance – and, as my research revealed, it is this focus that gives the salon its distinct value as a form of activism. To give you the flavour of a typical Polari event, I will outline a sample line-up from a night I attended in 2015.4 Burston bounced onto the stage to give the audience his signature bubbly welcome and introduced Persia West, a trans woman writer. She performed an extract from her newly self-published romantic novel, describing a woman coming out as a lesbian at her wedding and falling in love with her cousin.5 Next came a male novelist, John R. Gordon, who also works as a publisher and co-founded Team Angelica, an imprint which aims to celebrate queer writing; he performed a section from his new novel about a former Liberian child soldier in the UK exploring a new trans identity.6 The final act of the night – the slot Burston reserves for the best-known author  –  was Stella Duffy: a lesbian writer well-known in the publishing mainstream. She originally trained as an actor and performed, with verve and dynamism, a piece of short fiction that had been broadcast on BBC Radio: a dramatic story set in a tunnel under the Thames river.7 She introduced the story in a way that demonstrated her familiarity and comfort with the Polari audience, as a regular presence on the Polari stage. As this glimpse suggests, the tone and genre of the literary texts performed at Polari can vary considerably, from humour to horror, and from misery memoir to polyphonic literary fiction. Despite that – and perhaps in part because of the variety – the atmosphere at Polari, in between performances, always seems relaxed and jovial. I first came across Polari in 2013 as part of a project to research live literature and its role in literary culture. ‘Live literature’ is a wide umbrella term; it can include events from folkloric storytelling to poetry slams. I focused on events in which literary prose texts are performed to live embodied audiences in shared physical spaces in order to enable a more concentrated interrogation of the relationship between book culture and literary performance events, a subject that was astonishingly under-explored. Even literary festivals, which had become centrally important to twenty-first-century literary culture, had not yet been the subject of much published research.8 Part of the reason for this deficit seemed to be the long-term focus on the text in the field of literary

6 7

The event described took place in January 2015 at the Southbank Centre, London. Persia West, I Am Alessia (self-pub., 2014). John R. Gordon, Souljah (London: Team Angelica, 2014). Stella Duffy, ‘From the River’s Mouth’, performed by Samantha Bond, BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 28 July 2011. 8 The phenomenon of authors performing at live events from literary prose texts composed on the page is of course not new. Dickens is the most famous example in the history of Western printed literature, but he is a unique case in terms of the popularity and prominence of his solo performances. For an analysis of Dickens’ performances, and the historical tradition in which they stand, see David W. Thompson ed., Performance of Literature in Historical Perspectives (London: University Press of America, 1983); Ellen Wiles, Live Literature: The Experience and Cultural Value of Literary Performance Events from Salons to Festivals (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 50–8. Performance and orality has long been connected more closely with poetry. See Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Tríona Ní Shíocháin, Singing Ideas: Performance, Politics, and Oral Poetry (New York: Berghahn, 2018). 4 5

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studies – at least in relation to Western cultures – at the expense of orality, or indeed other aspects of literary culture, such as publishing, production and performance.9 As part of my interrogation of live literature, and of the interrelationship between text and performance at live literature events, I coined the hybrid terms ‘reader-audience’ and ‘author-performer’ to refer to the two key categories of participant, which I will use in this chapter. These hybrid terms seemed to better reflect participant experiences than the more commonly used terms ‘author’ or ‘speaker’ and ‘audience’. They point to the complex ways in which the collective experience of performance at events becomes deeply intertwined with the usually solitary experience of writing and reading. Even if reader-audiences do not go on to read all the texts that are performed at any given live literature event, my research suggests that they still tend to connect the performance experience to their potential experience of reading the text, and more broadly to reflect on their own reading practices, and what they value about literary writing. On the spectrum of live literature events, Polari is more performance-oriented than most. Burston describes it as ‘a literary showcase with a cabaret feel’: a catchphrase that accurately reflects the salon’s function, form and aesthetic.10 It is very different from the standard event format at literary festivals, in which a chairperson and two writers sit on chairs on a stage, discuss their new books, sometimes read a very short passage from the books and then take questions from the audience. This literary festival format emphasizes the author’s ideas and, to a lesser extent, the texts. As I spent time researching Polari, I found that its emphasis on literary performance, and its deliberate avoidance of Q&A, staged discussion or debate about political ideas contributes to its effectiveness as a form of activism, in ways that I will explore further in this chapter. In order to understand Polari’s activist role in relation to the literary mainstream, it is useful to contextualize it in relation to the long historical tradition of the literary salon. The term is primarily associated with the historical phenomenon that sprang up in Europe in the seventeenth century and reached its peak in eighteenth-century Paris and London.11 These literary salons mostly took place in the private rooms of aristocrats’ houses, giving them a genteel and elite quality in one sense, and yet they often created a unique, protected space for free intellectual discussion of new and progressive ideas. Salonnières tended to invite the most interesting writers of the day, allowing for free-ranging discussions among salon participants, who were protected from the potentially censorious gaze of those in power. As such, historical salons have been credited, notably by Jürgen Habermas, as materially contributing to the rise of the public sphere by operating as a testbed for the democratization of culture.12 The Roland Barthes’ pronouncement of the ‘death of the author’ narrowed that textual focus still further. See Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen 5–6, no. 3 (1967), www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/ threeEssays.html#barthes. 10 Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 271. 11 For a historical perspective on the salon, see Susanna Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (London: Palgrave, 2013), and Amy Prendergast, Literary Salons across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2015). 12 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1962; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 9

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salon was thought to have died out by the end of the nineteenth century, but it has seen a revival in the twenty-first century – and also a metamorphosis. Today, the literary salon remains an inherently intimate and small-scale genre of event, in contrast to the literary festival, which is usually larger and more commercialized; but is generally less intimate in terms of size and situation than the historic salon. It tends not to take place in the domestic sphere, or to be restricted to an invitation-only audience; instead it tends to be ticketed and open to the public, increasing its inclusivity  –  at least when ticket prices are kept deliberately low, as they are for Polari. Like its historic counterpart, the literary salon today features new writing, including work in progress, and as such it still functions as a fertile testbed for new and sometimes radical stories and ideas, which may be less likely to be accepted or featured in the mainstream. On one level, Polari functions as a form of activism simply by existing as an LGBTQ+ salon, thereby pitting itself against more mainstream literary festivals and events as an event foregrounding the writing of a historically overlooked minority group. But as I researched Polari further, I found that its activism ran much deeper; that there are specific aspects of how the salon works, and how it is experienced and valued by its participants, that make it particularly powerful and distinctive as a form of activism on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. In order to interrogate its experiential value more fully, I needed to find a way to research and write about participant experience in a meaningful way. As I mentioned earlier, literary studies as a discipline has traditionally been focused on the text, but over the last decade the academic gaze has begun to expand beyond the page. The field of publishing studies has grown, and with it there has been a surge of interest in live literature events, particularly the literary festival.13 Most of that research to date has had a sociological orientation, focused on festivals’ structural relationship with the publishing industry. In order fully to interrogate and understand the value for participants of experiencing a live literature event – particularly an event like Polari which does not function to the same extent as a vehicle for the publishing industry14 – I needed to find a way to research participant experience that took into account its multifaceted qualities, including its aesthetic and emotional elements, as well as the measurable impacts of participation, such as follow-on book sales. The research needed to reflect the diversity and nuance of individuals’ experiences, but it also needed to enable significant patterns to be gleaned and interrogated.

See, for example, Cori Stewart, ‘We Call upon the Author to Explain: Theorising Writers’ Festivals as Sites of Contemporary Public Culture’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 10 (2010): 1–14; Beth Driscoll, ‘The Middlebrow Pleasures of Literary Festivals’, in The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave, 2014); Angela Bartie, The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-War Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Millicent Weber, Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018); Claire Squires and David Finkelstein, ‘Book Events, Book Environments’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond, ed. Andrew Nash, Claire Squires and I. R. Willison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 668–78. 14 See Wiles, Live Literature, 41–138, for an ethnography of the Hay Festival and an interrogation of how the literary festival model connects with the publishing industry. 13

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The solution I devised was an approach to writing and qualitative research that I call experiential literary ethnography.15 In a nutshell, this involves embarking on an ethnographic research process, whereby the researcher immerses themselves as much as possible in the event being explored and initiates conversations with multiple participants.16 An ethnographic narrative is then crafted, using creative writing techniques in order to evoke participants’ collective experience of the event, while also examining that experience through critical analysis. Each narrative weaves together ‘thick’, multi-sensory descriptions from the ethnographer’s observations,17 together with other elements: extracts from conversations with a range of participants, including reader-audiences and author-performers; extracts of texts performed; and wider-lens reflections and analysis. An experiential literary ethnography of a live literature event should make the reader feel like they have been brought along to the event with the ethnographer, so that they too become immersed in it as a co-participant, but they also gain a polyphonic range of insights from other participants. This multi-layered narrative allows the ethnographer to reveal emergent themes and patterns, illuminating the event’s distinctive nature and value within a wider literary-cultural context, without negating the value of individual experiences. Although it is not considered to be standard practice to use creative writing techniques in scholarly research, this approach to ethnographic writing is not radical; it is rooted in a long literary-anthropological tradition of drawing upon literary writing techniques to elicit, interrogate and communicate distinctive aspects of a culture or practice.18 Experiential literary ethnography also reflects a growing awareness of the cognitive importance of embodied experience for decision-making and questions of value, and of the specific cognitive and physiological impacts of being part of a live audience. A raft of cognitive science research over the last few years has offered new insights about the power of embodied audience experience in a shared physical space. A process of synchronization occurs among embodied audiences whereby people’s hearts beat together and their brains ‘tick together’, including in the regions that process emotion

See Wiles, Live Literature, 7–40. I have resisted calling these conversations ‘interviews’, as I found that allowing conversations to proceed naturally, without pre-prepared questions, led to far more nuanced and interesting responses that better reflected individuals’ distinct perspectives. 17 See Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 18 This tradition dates back to Bronisław Malinowski, one of the pioneers of anthropology in the 1920s, and was electrified by Zora Neale Hurston in her output of both ethnographic research and literary fiction in the 1930s. Key examples of Hurston’s work in this regard are Mules and Men (1935; New York: Harper Perennial, 2009) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; London: Virago, 1986). The tradition has since been developed by anthropologists including Geertz, Paul Stoller, Ruth Behar and others into a rich skein of literary-anthropological enquiry. See Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); and Helena Wulff, The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016). 15 16

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and appear to activate empathy.19 Similarly, cognitive science has shed light on the ways in which author-performers can benefit from the experience of live literature events: in situations where a performer shares information with a live audience and perceives positive responses via a feedback loop process, reward mechanisms are triggered in the performer’s brain.20 There is evidence that the immersive quality of an embodied performance experience has, for all participants, a heightened impact in this digital age, when we are all bombarded with information and find it ever harder to focus our attention.21 While experience is a multifaceted and complex thing, and no two people’s experience of any one event will be the same, patterns of experience can be elicited with revealing results, while divergent experiences can be just as interesting. My ethnographic research across different genres of live literature event revealed in qualitative detail that the experience of participation can have multiple and sometimes profound impacts, including on participants’ interpretations of texts performed, the sense of connection between authors and readers, the sense of involvement in literary culture and the ways in which literary writing is valued.22 In Polari’s case, I became fascinated by the extent to which participant experiences revealed the salon’s activist value. I attended Polari regularly for my research over a period of four years, between 2014 and 2018. During that time I initiated many open-ended conversations with readeraudience members.23 I found that they came from varied backgrounds, many  –  but by no means all – identifying as LGBTQ+. Gay men did not seem to be the dominant community represented: lesbian women and people with non-binary identities were present too. One lesbian woman I spoke to came from South London and told me that she comes to every Polari salon, primarily for the literature – ‘obviously’ because it is ‘gay and lesbian’ – and also for the social side.24 She talked about how the writing performed at Polari usually touches on gay and lesbian issues, and even if that is sometimes ‘quite indirect’, that was fine with her: ‘really it’s just interesting to hear

Tali Sharot, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals about Our Power to Change Others (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 2017), 39. For more on the processes of audience synchronization, see Martina Ardizzi et al., ‘Audience Spontaneous Entrainment during the Collective Enjoyment of Live Performances: Physiological and Behavioral Measurements’, Scientific Reports 10, no. 3813 (2020). 20 For a useful elaboration of the notion of the feedback loop in a performance studies context, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 36. See also Sharot, The Influential Mind, 6. 21 Sharot, The Influential Mind, 7. 22 Wiles, Live Literature, 462. 23 As with ethnographic research at all live performance events, the ability to be immersed as an ethnographer and to hold conversations is limited by the timeframe of the performance. My conversations took place before an event, during the interval and at the end. As mentioned above, I kept conversations deliberately open-ended and flexible, in order to give people the chance to share nuanced and individualistic aspects of their experience. There were ethical considerations and processes involved in designing this approach. Participants always gave their consent for these conversations to be recorded and used for my live literature research. 24 Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 285. 19

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whatever the story might be about, from a lesbian or gay perspective’.25 The quality of writing at Polari was often mixed, in her opinion, but she did not see that as a problem; she liked its range and diversity, and she appreciated the way in which the event provided a platform for under-represented writers who identify as LGBTQ+, as well as more established writers. This had been a key facet of the activist motivation behind the salon’s inception, and still remained nearly a decade later. A lesbian couple, Jo and Sal, also regulars, reflected on the tonal variation of a typical Polari salon: a lot of the performances were funny, but many were deeply moving. To them, this variety reflected the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community more widely. ‘With the gay community, and how we can be treated’, Sal said, ‘there’s something about that shared experience of rejection and prejudice … when someone comes up and speaks to that from their writing, it really resonates throughout the whole room. And you really feel like a community, together, understanding that.’26 Jo agreed, nodding vociferously. ‘Compared to other queer arts events’, she said, ‘Polari is special. There’s something about this setting, the fact that it’s live and that there’s an interval where people chat and we get to know one another … There is a real sense of community here.’27 This illustrates how Polari works as a potent and meaningful space for ‘emotional community’.28 Sal wanted to talk about the role of performed readings at Polari and how that contributed to the sense of community they felt: there was ‘something immediate’ about a live literary reading that was just not present in other places, she explained, and Polari’s relaxed atmosphere contributed to that sense of immediacy. ‘When the authors are reading here’, she said, ‘it’s less of a formal performance – it’s almost like it’s their turn to speak in a conversation or something – it’s so much closer.’29 Again, that quality of informal intimacy in the experience contributes to its power as an activist force, strengthening the community through shared connection. These members of Polari’s reader-audience, and many others, particularly liked that the whole event revolves around performances from the books, and that there is no Q&A. This leads me to one of the key reasons why Burston’s decision to make the salon a cabaret-style performance event ultimately increases its power as a form of activism. That decision was initially made, Burston admitted, in part because he usually found Q&A’s boring when he was in the audience at literary festivals. It was also because he wanted Polari to be more of a ‘showcase’ for writers.30 An important consequence of his decision is that the focus on literary performance allows the literary texts to speak for themselves, voiced by the author-performers who created them. This foregrounds the

Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 285. Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 294–5. 27 Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 296. 28 In the context of what he calls ‘urban tribes’, Michel Maffesoli describes such events as a form of ‘glue’ binding members of an emotional community together. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. Don Smith (London: Sage, 1996), 23. 29 Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 296. 30 Wiles, Live Literature, 271. 25 26

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writing and enables the nuance and variety of the individual texts, and the authorial voices and individuals that produced them, to come through. There is a distinctively literary-activist power in that: the experiences of individual characters with LGBTQ+ identities are not reduced to soundbites through Q&A, and nor do the debates around discrimination, equality and identity have to become reductionist or combative. This enables the harmonious and good-natured cabaret atmosphere to prevail in the room, and people with diverse opinions to feel included. Despite the cabaret-style aesthetic of Polari, the salon’s programming is not just focused on entertainment. As has already been suggested, literary variety is actively encouraged, in form, tone, style, voice and aesthetics as well as content  –  even if that means lengthy performances from texts that may not be easily accessible to all readers, or from author-performers who have never been published by a mainstream imprint, or indeed any imprint. Literary texts include published fiction and workin-progress, stories, poetry, memoir and non-fiction. They range from observational comedy about awkward sexual situations to moving confessional memoirs about the discovery or exploration of gender identity. Burston always strives to include both novice and experienced writers. He also takes care to include not only writers who identify as LGBTQ+, but also those who identify as straight and whose work engages with LGBTQ+ experiences, a generous approach to inclusivity that enables a breadth of valuable perspectives. Burston’s mission for Polari has always gone beyond the literary sphere: he wants to champion diverse LGBTQ+ social spaces. The salon does indeed attract a diverse crowd, certainly in terms of age, gender and class, in comparison to many other literary events that I have researched or attended. There appears to be less diverse representation of race and ethnicity, but Polari is by no means a white-dominated space. A particularly memorable performance, for example, was given by Diriye Osman, a Somali-British short-story writer, whose fiction explores transgressive sexuality and the challenges faced by individuals in African societies where homosexuality is illegal. In the performance I witnessed in 2014, he performed in a flamboyant style wearing metallic lipstick and jewellery, and had the audience rapt. Burston supported Osman while his work was still unpublished by inviting him to perform at Polari, and his short-story collection Fairytales for Lost Children went on to be published in 2013 by Team Angelica Press. Osman went on to win the Polari First Book Prize in 2014, bringing his work further publicity. This sequence of events is evidence of the powerful connections made between author-performers at Polari and the network it has produced. It also speaks to the impact of the Polari Prizes, which have grown in number and prominence since 2011, when the Polari First Book Prize was inaugurated. In 2019 a new Polari Prize was introduced to recognize non-debut work; and in 2022 the Polari Children’s and YA Book Prize were added to the portfolio. The Polari Prizes now have been covered in a wide range of media publications, creating a conceptual space beyond the salon walls to celebrate writing engaging with LGBTQ+ experiences. Most regular reader-audience members I spoke to at Polari during the course of my research told me that they came equally for the writing and the community aspect of

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the salon. The writing was centrally important and yet many of them would not define themselves as particularly ‘literary’. Several said that they viewed literary festivals, in contrast to Polari, as spaces where ‘literariness’ was expected and performed, along with other manifestations of white, middle-class, heterosexual social conformity.31 One woman told me that she loved reading, studied English at university, and had had a great time at the salon that evening – her first-ever live literature event – but that she ‘still wouldn’t want to go to a literary festival with grass and marquees and falafels on sale’.32 This speaks volumes about perceptions of literary festivals which continue to limit their perceived inclusivity, despite efforts to diversify, such as the Edinburgh Book Festival’s 2022 ‘Black Joy’ programme. It also speaks to the power of smaller, more grassroots events, like literary salons, to bypass the structural dynamics of the publishing industry, including its established and historically heteronormative power relations. Of course, Polari has (mostly) moved away from its own grassroots in the gay bars of Soho by migrating to the more mainstream venue of the Southbank Centre, but it has also increased its inclusivity, while remaining true to its initial mission to provide a platform for writers who explore non-mainstream sexual and gender identities, and who may have been overlooked by the mainstream publishing industry for that reason. Polari has also, crucially, continued to include up-and-coming writers alongside writers who have been successful in the publishing mainstream. This is in marked contrast to the big literary festivals, which usually prefer to provide a stage for the ‘top’ writers, according to mainstream literary culture  –  in other words, the writers who have commanded the biggest financial advances, and who are either already or are likely to become bestsellers, sometimes because of an existing media profile. For a publisher, negotiating an author’s appearance on a big literary festival stage is a way to help guarantee a return on the investment of a big advance. Conversely, at Polari it is clearly understood by all participants, including reader-audiences, that the salon functions partly as a platform for those emerging writers who would not otherwise have an opportunity to perform on a literary festival stage, and that they need and deserve support. The creative impact upon author-performers of witnessing their peers perform at Polari is not only ‘bottom-up’, for the benefit of novices; the impact goes both ways. One Polari ‘headliner’, the thriller writer Christopher Fowler, admitted to me that he was once so inspired by an emerging writer he saw at the salon that he wrote a new text in a similarly experimental form to perform at a later edition of Polari.33 The experience of participating in Polari affects many reader-audiences’ reading practices beyond the event. Many told me that they had gone on to buy books by author-performers they witnessed at Polari, and that these were not limited to the texts performed at the salon; the event led them to read more and different books than they would otherwise have done.34 Wiles, Live Literature, 334. Quoted in Wiles, Live Literature, 290. 33 See Wiles, Live Literature, 322. 34 See Wiles, Live Literature, 166. 31 32

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Most of the texts performed at Polari are prose fiction, and this appears to have a particular activist value; it allows vital conceptual space for imagination and for invention. Fiction illuminates the dynamic creativity of the LGBTQ+ community, and enables a sense of the visceral potential that lies in the realm of imagination. Imaginative possibilities for change enable hope for a better and meaningfully different future, and that sense of hope is necessary for effective activism. Among other forms of art, writing and media, fiction arguably has an unparalleled capacity to engender empathy by activating what cognitive scientists refer to as the theory of mind.35 The craft of characterization and storytelling that is integral to fiction enables its audiences to immerse themselves in the multi-sensory worlds of its characters, including a rich complexity  –  or even a contradictory array  –  of experiences, emotions and perspectives. The foregrounding of fictional narratives offers a contrast to the reductive representations of LGBTQ+-identifying people and their experiences that are common in other forms of art and media, and offers a sense of rich possibility. Crucially, being able to perform literary fiction at Polari without any ensuing Q&A or discussion means that any author-performer is not compelled to articulate or represent a defined personal position on the issues or experiences that emerge in their texts. Neither are they required to make personal or autobiographical admissions on stage, unless they choose to do so. They do not therefore feel pressured, at least as a direct consequence of their participation in the salon, to enter into linked highoctane socio-political debates: an activity that increasingly brings with it the risk of lighting social media wildfire, particularly in relation to trans rights. By their nature, literary texts, particularly fiction, are not intended simply to articulate one side of any political argument. Cognitive science has shown that the experience of listening attentively to a story in audio form is more cognitively and emotionally engaging than watching a video of an equivalent story, and that impact is only heightened by the physiological stimulation created by an embodied live performance.36 From my observations, the experience of sharing literary texts among an embodied reader-audience at Polari regularly creates a palpable sense of shared emotion and bonding among participants, both on and off stage, through laughter, applause, silences and other physical responses and reactions. As the philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey put it over a century ago: ‘There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.’37 At Polari, the experience of performed literary texts seems to tighten that knot. This chapter has demonstrated how Polari Salon functions as a small-scale yet powerful forum for activism. As a live performance event, it works to strengthen the See Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 36 See Daniel C. Richardson et al., ‘Engagement in Video and Audio Narratives: Contrasting SelfReport and Physiological Measures’, Scientific Reports 10, no. 11298 (2020); Sharot, The Influential Mind, 39. 37 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 5. 35

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LGBTQ+ community through an inclusive experience of participation, primarily through the activity of performing literary prose that engages with the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community from multiple points of view, and in multiple different tones and genres; but also by increasing the community’s recognition within mainstream culture. It thus embodies a distinctly literary and performative species of activism. But Polari’s value is not solely about using live literature for activist purposes. Vitally, it also fosters the creation of new activist literature by nurturing and giving a platform to more diverse, interesting and socially representative new writing that engages with LGBTQ+ experiences, from inside and out: an aspect of its work that is enhanced by the Polari Prizes. In a world increasingly dominated by divisive and hostile debates over identity politics, Polari is a rare example of an in-person forum that is designed to support LGBTQ+-identifying people, but that also welcomes participants who identify otherwise. In its own small-but-fierce way, the salon engenders hope for a more peaceful, empathetic and inclusive future.

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‘Bugger Universality’: An Exchange with Antjie Krog Antjie Krog and Peter D. McDonald

Antjie Krog is a South African poet, translator and academic. Professor in the Arts at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, she has published widely in Afrikaans and English, including the poetry books Jerusalemgangers (1985) and Lady Anne (1989), and the prose works Country of My Skull (1998) and Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2013). ’n Vry vrou: Gedigte van Antjie Krog, a collection of her poems edited by Karen de Wet, was published in 2020. This email exchange with Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford, took place in August 2020.1 Peter McDonald: Antjie, I am very grateful to you for agreeing to this email exchange, which replaces the conversation we planned for the Art & Action conference in Oxford, fatefully booked for 20 and 21 March 2020, in what has now become our ‘plague year’. You have lived at ‘the intersections of authorship, politics, activism, and literary celebrity’, as the conference organizers put it,2 over the course of a tumultuous half century in South Africa’s history, but I know you are uneasy about the idea of celebrity. Antjie Krog: My whole being revolts mentally and physically at the word ‘celebrity’, not to mention the phrase: ‘literary celebrity’. I want to use Afrikaans expletives like kots (vomit) and walg (retch/disgust) when I see that word linked to literature and art. Even the thought that I have to try and explain it, sickens me.

The interview has been edited for length; an uncut version is available on the website Artefacts of Writing, artefactsofwriting.com/2020/09/01/art-action-an-exchange-with-antjie-krog/, posted 1 September 2020. 2 Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie, ‘Call for Papers: Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture 20–21 March 2020’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), 20 December 2019, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/call-for-papers-art-and-action-literary-authorshippolitics-and-celebrity-culture. 1

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity Should I begin by how poetry festivals changed from the 1990s (where some of the most powerful poets of that century read their work dressed in dreadful clothes, with unkempt hair, bad teeth, terrible eyesight, physical features distorted with fear, eccentricity and loneliness) to what it has become now: young poetesses with perfect faces, big hair, daily Facebook entries, dressed in breathtaking evening gowns performing their work with electronic sounds? Or should I tell how Random House, when approached to publish a book of mine, asked: how marketable is she? I became aware of all of this when Time magazine published their list of best statesmen, great leaders of the twentieth century. I assumed Nelson Mandela would be there. But no, he was under icons. To my horror I realized that that was a castration of his powerful message. It no longer mattered what he said, he was simply the kind handsome Black old man everybody likes to celebrate. The deep challenging values he held were of no importance. His celebrity status disempowered his life’s work. Or should I tell that I often assist prospective poets? While going through a poem discussing lapses, unclarities, clichés, etc., one once angrily said: But I already received over a hundred likes for this! Or the day I found students filing at the door after class to take selfies with me … a question here and there proved that they didn’t know my work at all. How do I stop this?, I wondered. Or how book signings have also become major selfie opportunities with people not even embarrassed that they haven’t bought a book. So, suddenly I have to worry about my hair, my ageing teeth, my wrinkles, my pulled up shoulders, the face spasm that distorts my face when I am stressed. Really? It was about ten years ago that I decided to take definite steps to resist becoming a celebrity. I refuse bluntly any invitation to appear on television, or in the press for any other reason than having published a new book. I only answer questions about my work and will NOT be on any programme about my life or, even worse, answer those standard questions: what is your worst nightmare? What is your favourite recipe? South Africa loves doing series about icons, role models, and of course the whole visual industry depends on celebrities. I refuse all of these requests. But as it became too complex even for me to explain the difference between being a writer and being a celebrity, I have learned to say: I don’t think I should be on your show because I still want to commit a terrible, disgraceful scandal. This works like magic. It’s understood immediately: she will not be good for our show/magazine/image. The problem with the term celebrity perhaps lies in its etymology. The Latin word celebritas means ‘multitude, fame’, from celeber, ‘frequented, populous’. It is a combination of fame and numbers, which more and more has nothing to do with the reason for the fame, but only the numbers around the fame. One of the best descriptions I could find for a celebrity comes from the introduction to the historian Greg Jenner’s Dead Famous (2020): ‘A unique persona made widely known to the public via media coverage, and whose life is publicly

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consumed as dramatic entertainment, and whose commercial brand is made profitable for those who exploit their popularity, and perhaps also for themselves.’3 What I am trying to describe here is that the term celebrity contaminates, no! deeply corrupts, the hard, courageous, lonely work writers do. Celebrity is a trap. It disturbs the focus of doing what has to be done, to consider physical and social mores, demands and yardsticks. Trying to please an audience is the beginning of the rot for a serious artist. PMcD: Many writers share your feelings about ‘literary celebrity’, I think. We could look back to Henry James, who deplored the rise of the intrusive personal interview in the 1890s, or sideways to the contemporary Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri, who campaigns against what he calls the ‘market activism’ of today’s corporate publishers. Perhaps we could shift the terms of the discussion from celebrity to publicness more generally. AK: Publicness! What an excellent word. It maintains the notion of being public, but keeps the space open for risk, failure and disgrace. Should every creative act not be a fall/jump down a waterfall – never sure that one will come up breathing? I would like to return to the 1980s, but am concerned that it all may sound too self-servingly autobiographical … Let us try … As the apartheid state grew in harshness during the 1980s, one felt driven to respond. But how? The oppression was so crushing, so fully destructive that to write a political poem, no matter how good, in Afrikaans and to publish it with an Afrikaner publishing house became shamefully inadequate, even dastardly cowardly. So, I thought: well, I have a daily life as an ordinary human being and I have a life as a poet. With the poems I will follow Nadine Gordimer’s dictum: a revolutionary’s duty is to write as well as s/he can. But my daily life is something else and will be involved with the struggle. At first that brought major ethical relief and changes. I started teaching at a college in the townships, became involved with COSAW [Congress of South African Writers] and ANC activities, participated in marches and tried to live as activistically as possible, experiencing how my privileged and public whiteness (more than my literary publicness) was used brazenly by the local activists in the small rural town where I lived [Kroonstad]. I also began assisting younger township poets with their work. But of course, this ‘new’ life inevitably influenced my writing. I began working on a poetry volume where the whole foundation, and not only part of the volume, was political, choosing a political theme to encompass everything and link it to politics. The volume Jerusalemgangers (1985) has poems about the disruption of bourgeois suburban life by angry Blackness interspersed with Black mythological figures. I also drenched my theme and style in the concept of ‘haplography’ – so this was my first book with a complete political foundation. Greg Jenner, Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020), 9.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity But again, in the avalanche of assassinations, anger, fear and retaliation, it felt pathetically inadequate. So, I decided to move away from a successful, important Afrikaner publishing house [Human & Rousseau] to a small but struggling publisher [Taurus] who published mainly banned texts, giving up any royalty I might earn. I was hoping this shift would set me free to write what I wanted and not what I felt I should write. In vain. My next volume, Lady Anne (1989), deals with the specific challenge of the poet confronted by severe injustice. The poet’s senses should wean the cries of outrage from the leaves, the blood from the barricades of groceries and pick up the murders from the blockades near her desk. But how to write effectively without falling into propaganda and crude rhetoric? Can I split my poetry as well? Write cruder poems with well-known slogans only to be read in front of agitated rally-audiences, while writing others for publication to a small poetry-loving but elite audience? And yet, despite all this, I haven’t figured out how to write a political poem (for that matter, any poem) that will visibly change things. At the same time, I do believe that poetry can bring human beings into what Heidegger in Being and Time calls ‘the open clearing of truth’.4 All I know is that one should never move from unstable shaking ground to safe steady ground. One should always be harassed by the various contexts within which one writes and have an acute sense of context, yet the bravery to dare to imagine. The moment one moves from publicness to celebrity, one exchanges the flagellation of the conscience and the risk to dare, for the caressing of a fickle onedimensional popularity.

PMcD: Are there other ways in which the changes in the publicness of the literary life have affected your own ‘hard, courageous, lonely work’ as a writer? Since you made your debut in the early 1970s, the publishing industry, for instance, has undergone a dramatic transformation. I am thinking not only of the digital revolution, but, in your case, of the move from a world of relatively small Afrikaans literary publishers like Human & Rousseau and Taurus to multinational and multilingual conglomerates like Random House Struik (now Penguin Random House South Africa), to say nothing of the change from an era of draconian state censorship to one in which you have a Constitution explicitly committed to upholding the ‘freedom of artistic creativity’ and linguistic rights in a democracy with eleven official languages. AK: In 1970 six copies of my first poetry volume were sent by post. And that was that. Nowadays I have to fill in a form in which I make suggestions of how to market my book, who its potential readers might be, suggest publicity events, etc. Special photo sessions are organized. Interviews – often by journalists who have not read the book, but have a lot of googled questions about your previous interviews. I also became aware of agents and creative writing schools. I watch in shock how young ambitious students who have not written more than 5,000 words have to write Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1971; New York: Harper & Row, 2001), xii. See Antjie Krog, ‘To Write Liberty’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 30, no. 1 (2018): 77–84.

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a proposal for a book that must include the literary theory behind their story, the other texts it follows and competes with, as well as ethical clearance. And before the book is even finished the student has an agent … PMcD: I liked your earlier description of the creative act as a ‘fall/jump down a waterfall’ in part because the pointed equivocation about intentionality opens up some big questions about poetry and politics. Given what you say about the challenge of writing political poems, I wonder if you think there is any merit in seeing every poem as political simply because it is inescapably a fall/jump in the medium of language. I say this not because all language is ideological but because all language is public and therefore entangled in structures of power, struggles over ownership and correctness, the nightmares of history and injustice, etc. At the same time, language is intimately and democratically private in so far as it permeates (shapes?) every speaker’s way of being with herself, with others and with the world. On this account every creative fall/jump, even one with no ostensibly political content, could be a politically charged ‘change of tongue’5 in form as well as potential effect. I’ll leave the question of actual effects on real audiences open for now. AK: Of course you are right. I wrote ‘My Mooi Land’ (‘My Beautiful/Pretty Land/ Country’, published in Sechaba in 1971) and was completely thrown to learn that it was read on Robben Island and that the political inmates said: if an Afrikaner girl is saying this, we will be free in our life-time. So yes, in terms of ‘changing’ things, the very first poems perhaps already did that. But at the same time it was a kind of easy attack on one’s own people, with hardly any knowledge of who it was that one was reaching out to. One became aware of the absence, the not-knowing, then of the anger, the real murderous intent and Black writers asking: where are the Afrikaner writers when the country is burning? So, the framework within which Afrikaans poetry was written during the 1980s complicated any nuanced way of thinking about the political. With the exception of Breyten Breytenbach, most poets, backed by the literary establishment, thought that poetry should be universal, and that universality was the opposite of writing against apartheid  –  the latter being too localized to bring forth great literature and politics the death of any art. At the same time, there was from the English and Black literary establishment the demand to write ‘effectively’; to be part of the movement to bring the apartheid regime to its knees  –  remember the criticism of Nadine Gordimer of Coetzee’s Michael K (1983)? To hide in a hole feeding a pumpkin plant with a teaspoon full of water, was not ‘effective’; driving away with the freedom fighters, or understanding or celebrating them, that was ‘effective’.6 So, where I previously battled to find a way, a style, a metaphor, a theme to express the injustice and the weight of it, Jerusalemgangers enabled me to universalize apartheid politics through history and everyday life. Whether you have a suburban A reference to Antjie Krog, A Change of Tongue (Johannesburg: Random House, 2003). Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, The New York Review, 2 February 1984.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity affair, or attend a party, or stretch out a hand to Adamastor,7 or Shaka’s Sangoma,8 all was political in its foundation of unjustness. So, my involved ordinary public self allowed me to obey my conscience; that in turn challenged my writing, enabling the poet to make peace with what and how she writes. So, if the art changes nothing, one could hold on to the notion that one’s life (as an ordinary white woman in a march of Black people) does make a difference; when one lands in muddy and compromising political waters, one can still hold on to the clarity of the poems. (The other day I heard one of the Afrikaans writers who wrote ‘universal’ literature snottily say that he did not ‘jump on the bandwagon of politics in the 1980s’ … I could just shake my head. He was so safe, he was so lauded by the literary establishment, while Breytenbach sat in jail and I received death threats and my family harassment.) Nowadays of course, everything is political. It has become nearly impossible to write anything without being political in the way you don’t want to be political. Today one is suddenly exposed, without a personal past or a body of writing, in front of everybody who has access to the internet in English. To write a poem about, say Nelson Mandela, or a Black rape victim, is high risk. To end a poem with: ‘only black lives taken by whites seem to matter HERE’ is total suicide. So, one thinks: I don’t want to be political in that way. At the same time, the idea of criticizing the government of the day (as I did before 1994) has also become highly problematic. I find that more and more, I can only write strong political poems when outside the country, and then trim, cut, soften and hone once I get back.

PMcD: As I understand it, you spent the first two decades of your public writing life essentially as an Afrikaans poet of the page. Then you began to explore new media, new forms, new languages and new locations. How important or formative have these various transitions been to you? And what bearing have they had/are they having on the sense you have of your own publicness as a writer? AK: Although I deeply believe that the essence of poetry is oral/aural, when I was younger, it felt extremely narcissistic to read one’s own work in public. But Black South Africa literally pushed me through an initiation from page to stage. During the 1980s I was invited to ‘perform’ at a local Free Nelson Mandela rally. I was in a sweat. Perform? Although my work has always had a political slant, an assignment to stage something illegal and dangerous in public about a banned man was something completely different. I frantically started looking for good examples of liberation Adamastor is a mythological character created by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in his epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), as a personification of the Cape of Good Hope. He is supposed to have been one of the Giants of Greek mythology, banished to the Cape of Good Hope for falling in love with the seagoddess’s daughter, Tethis. Adamastor manifests itself as a hideous phantom out of a storm. 8 Queen Ntombazi was a sangoma (diviner) and acknowledged to be one of the politically most influential women of the pre-Shakan and Shakan eras. She infamously collected skulls of kings conquered by her son Zwide. Shaka, founder of the Zulu kingdom in the early nineteenth century, had her locked in a hut with a hyena to test her power. 7

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rhetoric, by Bertolt Brecht, Paul Éluard, Mao Zedong. Finally, I come across Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (1956): ‘I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree …’.9 Yes! I want to say Mandela. I ask around. I consult students and activists. But it is clear: Mandela is simply a symbol. Nobody knows what he looks like, nobody knows what exactly he said. We only know that he is in jail on Robben Island for the freedom of us all. When I arrive at the rally in the township where literally thousands of people are waiting, I realize three things at once. First, hundreds of policemen with rifles are looking over the boundary wall. Secondly, the pages on which the poem is neatly typed in Sesotho, Afrikaans and English are going to flutter so much in the wind that I will not be able to read from them. And thirdly, I am not properly dressed. Ghangha, the chief poet, is dressed in feather-tassels in the colours of the ANC. ‘You poets on paper’, he shook his head when he saw my effort and immediately arranged for the pages to be neatly pasted on the plank of a tomato box with the first-aid kit bandaid – three little sheets under each other. When I took the megaphone that day it was in a kind of disbelief. I stammered the first line. The main poet came and stood next to me, he shouted my first line loudly and repeated it. I got the idea and yelled the first line into the megaphone, my voice felt from another planet. There was cheering. The chief poet repeated and I repeated. The cheering doubled. By the third time the crowd joined me rhythmically in Afrikaans: Die vuis is Mandéla! Mandéla in Máokeng (This fist is Mandela! Mandela is in our township Maokeng [Kroonstad, Free State]). From there the poem took on a life of its own. Mandela was among us. Mandela in a coat  –  we saw him, we heard him stirring in the sirens, we sat with him behind the school desks, we saw his tracks in the dusty streets of the township, Mandela breathed among us, he ate in the outbuildings, he raised his fist in the prisons. From the dusty winds blowing across the plains, he would come to us and set us free. People jumped: Thaaa! Tha-thaa!: Die vuis is Mandéla! a mixture of Afrikaans and Sesotho. People furiously toyi-toyied, which then turned into an angry thumping dance where everyone aimed imaginary AK-47s at the faces of the policemen, who, not to be outdone, were brandishing their own weapons across the fence. That day taught me: you have to respect your audience – the trouble they went to come to hear you, their own situation, their desires and anguishes, their languages and their furies – if a poem manages to put a temporary band-aid on one wound in that audience, the poem was not in vain. Bugger universality. Secondly, one can crush and turn a poem in any way to assist the performance; the poem on your page and the poem in your performance have nothing to do with each other. So, I keep one copy of each volume with a big V on the cover: Voorlees (Read aloud). Inside the poems are cut, things are added, parts are linked to other parts, all for a specific reading. I would also often make changes while reading. And I began to write poems with a stronger

Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock (1956; New York: Archipelago, 1969/2013), 23.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity sense of aurality like ‘Paternoster’.10 While reading this poem to a Dutch audience in Utrecht with translation screened behind me, something happened and I felt myself transported into a fiery angry sound. The next poem was quieter and I read it in a whisper and became aware of the absolute silence in that big hall. Even when I walked off the stage, it was so totally quiet. The reviews of that reading established me in the Netherlands and since then, over time my audience has become Dutch. I sell more books there and my poetry readings have become quite legendary. I steadfastly try not to think why that is, or who my readers are. But wherever I read in the world, at home or elsewhere, the moment there is a Black person in the audience I feel my whole stomach constrict. I feel in the wrong. I feel I am offending. Am taking up too much space. Sometimes I can scarcely breathe and find that I am reading only for that one Black person. My eyes are searching to find those of that one Black person. I read to reach, to find forgiveness, to mend …

PMcD: Talk about art and action tends to focus on individual writers and their creative integrity. But writers have often worked collectively, forming professional and other groups to defend their interests, campaign for various causes and more. This was especially true in South Africa during the apartheid era. How did the possibility of collective action affect your sense of your own publicness, integrity and/or activism as a writer? And do you see any viable avenues for such action today? AK: The Afrikaans novelist Etienne le Roux once said: a writer only joins a guild, or a representing body, in order to resign dramatically. In a way this rings true, as all these kinds of bodies need exactly that in which writers are not good. They desire uniformity of opinion, simplicity in expressing the banal, commitment to stick uncreatively to the issue at all times; they need a constitution, the dry routine of organization, of boring tailor-made-for-news declarations and statements, while writers can only produce the opposite: a creative variety around a theme, encompassing many opposing views, individual, unusual language and expression, a deep sense of undermining, a resentment of bureaucracy, etc. (Therefore it is not strange how clumsily writers often express themselves when they do ‘issue’ a statement as a group. Take, for example, the ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’ recently signed by, among others, Salman Rushdie and J. K. Rowling and published in Harper’s Magazine.11 One cannot believe so many writers signed it: it is so flat and full of holes, so embarrassingly opaque in its argumentation that one doesn’t know what to make of it.) Writers and poets write because they cannot talk (metaphorically speaking!), because their true medium not only fits, but enhances their expression. They find the form of the literature they engage in: nuanced, subtle, multi-vibratory, multi-voiced, daring, rule-breaking, incoherent in a purposeful way – in other words, adequate to sufficiently express the complexity of what they want to express with clarity. What I Antjie Krog, ‘Paternoster’, in Gedigte 1989–1995 (Groenkloof: Hond, 1995), 66. Translated into English in Krog, Skinned: Selected Poems (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013). 11 ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, Harper’s Magazine, 7 July 2020. 10

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am saying is that any issue is more than often better served by writers writing, than by writers talking and making statements. Looking back, I find every participation in a writer society or every petition signed a complete waste of time, except perhaps joining COSAW during the 1980s. Not because it did anything for me as a writer or even for writing per se, but because it brought a group of people together across the apartheid boundaries, assisting one in experiencing for short moments the country as it should/could have been. Having said that so vehemently – supporting a cause at certain junctures in history is very important, and fortunately, there have often been people involved in writer societies who could effectively guide and lead. Locally, the Afrikaans Skrywersgilde (Afrikaans Writers Guild) presented an important anti-censorship stance under apartheid, while the Swart Afrikaanse Skrywers (Black Afrikaans Writers) held three symposia that are still being studied for the invaluable input they made around thinking about Afrikaans literature. Today I personally practise activism in various ways that are solely literary: I assist young poets who do not have access to any assistance. My work at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) fortunately entails that I assist anybody from the community with their manuscripts, whether they are students or not, and we have published an impressive list of books and some of the most important young poets in Afrikaans today have come through UWC. I also found that I have a talent for assessing and placing quite accurately a text within the broader history of South African literature. I can point out: this is new in a shout or a reader’s report. The second kind of activism is an obsession with translation. I found funding to translate a relevant selection of poems from indigenous languages into Afrikaans;12 then started to re-evaluate the work of Thomas Mofolo, an African writer who wrote the first novel ever written in an indigenous language in Africa.13 And more recently I coordinated one of the largest translations of a variety of African language classical literary texts into English for Oxford University Press’s Africa Pulse series. The project is continuing with two students who are translating three major epics written in Sesotho and Sepedi. Another way is perhaps simply the wishful thinking of an old poet: the poems by pre-internet poets like me have no monetary value. Nobody can put a price on any of my poems. Poems push back the notion that you can pay for art. Poems make a mockery of the ridiculous prices people pay for visual art. Maybe poets my age, as Geert van Istendael suggests, are the last true heretics of the world?14 PMcD: There is one particularly charged moment in your career when many of the issues we have been discussing came to a head: the moment you won the Hertzog Prize

Antjie Krog, Met woorde soos met kerse (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002). See Chris Dunton and Antjie Krog, ‘Re-animating the Works of Thomas Mofolo by Engaging with the Original Sesotho Texts’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 53, no. 2 (2016): 5–14. 14 See Geert van Istendael, ‘Over het belang van poëzie. Nu.’, MO Mondiaal Nieuws, 30 March 2015, www.mo.be/column/over-het-belang-van-po-zie-nu. 12 13

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity in 1990 for Lady Anne, arguably your most sustained poetic reflection on art and action. Established in 1916, the Hertzog, which honours poetry every three years, is the most prestigious Afrikaans literary accolade. Reflecting some of the complexities of the time, the list of winners has you flanked on both sides by T. T. Cloete, who was both a leading poet and a censor. He won the Hertzog in 1987 and 1993. You won it again for Mede-wete in 2017. On the first occasion, the award rules required you to give a short acceptance speech. The poem-speech you read takes issue with the prize, raises questions about your relationship to the literary establishment of the time and to Afrikaans, and concludes with a public expression of solidarity with COSAW and anti-apartheid publishers. Could you comment on the public symbolism of the Hertzog in 1990 and in 2017?

AK: The Hertzog of 1990 was given by people I deeply resented: the Afrikaner establishment. I knew all too well they had given it to signal to the new-powers-tobe that the Afrikaner establishment is changing, see how it embraces critical voices, see they are with everybody in the new South Africa. Some years before, Breyten Breytenbach had refused the prize. I thought to take the prize and give the money where it should have been in the first place  –  with the marginalized. The people who gave the Hertzog in 2017 are a shadow of the previous lot. They are hanging shivering by their anxious white nails onto a literature the context of which has radically and irretrievably changed and they smell their own redundancy. So, I took it in 2017 as one powerless one from another powerless one. I firmly believe that the context in which the poetry that I write makes any sense is disappearing like a sheet in the dark … About the poem-speech in 1990: I was angry, young and strong, and fundamentally understood the cruel, false, powerful context into which I was writing. Now I am angry, old and weak with a pathetic grasp on the Black context into which I am writing. At the same time, being initiated into compassion by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I’m filled with despair about the dire, dehumanizing poverty drowning our country, yet have compassion for the corrupt, inept and insecure establishment that has to deal with the mess of colonialism and apartheid. Standing on an over-elaborate stage a few years ago, receiving literary acknowledgement from the Black government among young Black celebrities in the arts, with the knowledge that the food and drink and evening gowns could keep a rural town in electricity for a month, I had nothing to say. I took the award and said Kea Leboha (Thank you). I was stumm – as I should be … a coward, I think. PMcD: In the conference brief, the organizers framed this discussion as a tension (or contest?) between literary writing and activism. AK: It is a tension, and a healthy one I believe. At the same time, it becomes problematic when celebrity status is regarded as a condition for real activism. PMcD: They used phrases like ‘politics and poetics’, ‘authorial and activist selves’, ‘literary/political border-crossings’, etc. Responding in part to this oppositional logic,

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the Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri has in recent years been a leading proponent of what he calls ‘literary activism’.15 At a time when, as he sees it, questions of value have either been abandoned (notably by academic literary studies) or co-opted (especially by the ‘market activism’ of a corporate publishing world), he has been calling for a public activism focussed on the literary as such. AK: We have to pause at the word ‘value’. The kind of value that the Nobel Prize is seeking is worth exploring: the worthy candidate should bestow ‘the greatest benefit on mankind’ delivering ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.16 Therefore the work should be ‘outstanding’, aesthetically I gather, while what it says should point in an ‘ideal direction’. There is clearly a very broad yet very precise expectation of influencing humankind in a progressive way here. Should this not be the essence of literary activism? Should we not try to find works often extinguished by the loud noise of market activism or those un-mainstream works in smaller languages falling soundlessly into a dark hole of nothingness? Should we not elucidate the direction in these works and generate discourses around that, especially also those empty ones ramped up by market activism? I think academia is doing it, but I ask myself why have I stopped reading the winners of the Booker or Pulitzer, even the T. S. Eliot poetry prize – why do I often find nothing there, nothing new, nothing related, nothing shifting one? The names of writers I find worth reading are passed on by friends like a secret treasure. I remember a PEN conference in Germany where there was a special session for agents. I asked them whether they do research or go out into non-European countries and unknown languages to look for works to represent. One man responded with the utmost confidence and conviction: ‘No, we don’t need to. The good works find us’. PMcD: Chaudhuri’s kind of project carries a number of predictable risks. It can all too easily be dismissed as reactionary (revivalist aestheticism?), quixotic (nostalgic universalism?) or, worse still, cast as a desperate rear-guard effort on behalf of an old elite to postpone their inevitable redundancy. AK: Chaudhuri’s literary activism seems to me in the first place a reaction to, and against, a particular market activism. His examples refer to publishers who pursued really good writers whom they then actively marketed for a deservedly larger audience. Nobody would have a problem with any publisher who is active: rather publish with someone flying somewhere because he is reading, than a bank-manager-publisher – not staying longer than four years before moving on to a higher bean-counting position. I share, however, a restlessness with another kind of market activism: books and authors published because they are fashionable merchandise often based on a popular blog, in other words, its ‘value’ lies in its sales. Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Manifesto: On Literary Activism’, Literary Activism: A Series of Presentations and Interventions, 2014, www.literaryactivism.com/mission-statement/. 16 In the original Swedish, this reads: ‘menskligheten den största nytta’ / ‘det utmärktaste i idealisk rigtning’. See ‘Alfred Nobels testamente’ (Alfred Nobel’s will), 27 November 1895, on the Nobel Prize website: www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/. 15

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity At the same time, one does understand that publishing houses were to an extent forced to revert to this activism for various reasons. One is that so many newspapers, television and radio stations do not carry one second or iota about books or a discussion on the content of books, be they literary or popular. Interviews with ‘marketable’ writers yes, stories about their lives on the celebrity pages yes, their houses, their recipes, their heart-opening-ups yes, their scandals, fights, accusations of plagiarism or plundering, appropriation, yes, but no engagement with the works themselves. So, because a good book can no longer reverberate enough publicness that rewards publishers, they have to publish the work of those who already reverberate through their own efforts ranging from a scandalous life to a popular blog. Perhaps the most crucial reason is the technology of our times. The soul of the internet is short and fast and infinite. If you are not on that jet, you do not exist, so fewer and fewer are educated into the slow grip of a piece of writing and how it can forever transform your innermost being.

PMcD: At the same time, as you have already pointed out, talk of literary value is inherently risky, so a value-centred literary activism is inevitably fraught in fact and in principle. Seen in this way, Chaudhuri’s project looks necessary and opportune from your point of view. AK: I would think the project crucial precisely because the backbone of the literary lies mainly in academia: that which is being prescribed, studied, researched and written about is what will outlast trendy one-day-sparrows. We have seen in South Africa how particular writers have come to the fore only through the slow painstaking work of academic studies (take Zoë Wicomb, for instance), how the work of generations of students studying a great poet finally engages a wider public. Even new fashionable themes like identity, or the animal, send scholars back to both older and new work. This activity and knowledge has always spilled over into more accessible spaces like book reviews, book discussions, newspapers and electronic media. But academia seems in trouble. For me the problem arose the moment scholars pulled themselves back into small subthemes, picking a seed here and one there (either because they felt overwhelmed by the sheer forceful volume of publications in English or because they had been terrified by cause-fighters into submission to minor themes), without keeping abreast of the values and issues of contemporary literature. It becomes very difficult to determine where and how ‘new’ ground is being broken in terms of, say, the novel. Who is changing the format into something new? What are the main themes and who and how are they transgressing? In South Africa things have become even more dire: the ‘made’ or ‘imagined’ gulf between Black and white or feminist writing is causing the death of much literary activism. Some academics now prefer to stick to ‘their’ field, others sow destruction in every text they touch, others are so busy championing that there is hardly time for in-depth analysis. The moment somebody touches an overview on South African literature the critics mercilessly slaughter the person – and often rightly so because

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so little is known about the literature being written in nine of South Africa’s official languages. Scholars also seem reluctant to write book reviews for a more popular audience. The mainstays of Afrikaans writing are leeskringe (reading circles). Spread across the country, these groups decide on their reading list for the year and often get a scholar to discuss the book with them. Afrikaans newspapers still offer some solid space for book reviews. Then there are various awards where academics often serve as judges  –  reading circles then often select the books of prize-winners to discuss. So, the potential for a rewarding integration of literary activism is (still?) there in the Afrikaans literary world. But I think it is different for English literature in South Africa. To me it seems that because nobody wants to be caught ‘on the wrong side’, the newspapers have effectively stopped reviewing literature. Extracts are published by publishers, but no solid reviewing. English writers have mentioned to me that their works sink like stones in South Africa, that they could just as well have published only the blurbs as nobody seemed to have read more than that. Some of the literary prizes for poetry and fiction have quietly fallen away, perhaps because the tensions between white and Black judges, white and Black publishers, the issue of white editors, western standards, etc. became too explosive to touch. Our two most important prizes, the Alan Paton and Barry Ronge prizes, were simply stopped for a year or two, and really, it seemed nobody cared. When the prizes were initiated, the winners were front page news, books displayed in shop fronts. Lately, the event and writers hardly get a small news article on the arts page. Literary activism should be a response to the distortion of market activism and should work in conjunction with and in addition to the market. PMcD: What of the Afrikaans poetry to come? AK: A poet finds and forges her voice among the voices that came before her – in my case Afrikaans poets writing in an Afrikaans with its tight grid of Dutch and German intact. Until about ten years ago, almost all the Afrikaans poets were schooled in a literature that was mainly western and white. In the meantime the majority of speakers in Afrikaans are no longer white, but of colour and still suffering the total destruction of apartheid. This means that poets from this group are writing about their surroundings, their anger, the consequences of the devastation, breaking new ground writing about poverty in a literature that existed on middle-class longings, sense of beauty, notions around poetry, and a solid sense of how ‘style’ in poetry has developed from naïve rhymes to complicated layered structures to the avant garde (e.g. I love simile, the swiftness and surprise of it, but find very few young poets using simile. I can write endlessly about landscape, but realize now that nature is a pure middle-class and ownership passion). The coloured poets have their own version of Afrikaans: they create their own vocabulary and style, quote their own heroes (Tupac Shakur and no longer Paul Celan), make a whole set of new audiences and bring in innovative themes of injustice

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity and suffering which make the middle-class poetry look like indulgent candyfloss. They are therefore contributing very effectively in an ‘ideal direction’. But there is also the younger internet generation of poets  –  who thrive on publishing on the internet with immediate gratification of making an impact. They don’t work with poetry volumes with titles feeding and broadening the themes, or the coherent gathering, shaping and cutting of something that cannot be said. With videos and other electronic material, they have vast influences on their audiences. It is within these kinds of contexts that my poems, despite dealing with injustice and humaneness, would make less and less sense. I do not begrudge anybody for it. It is, for me at least, the biggest challenge for literary activism – how do these contribute to a more progressive and just society? So, great changes lie ahead.

Part Two

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Moving between Worlds: A Writer and a Publisher in Conversation Kirsty Gunn and David Graham

Kirsty Gunn is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels, short stories and essays, and Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee. Her husband, David Graham, has spent his professional career in independent publishing, working for Phaidon, Canongate, Granta, Quarto and Pavilion Books. This exchange, conducted over a series of three filmed conversations, took place in July 2020.1 Kirsty Gunn: We are together here to explore the kind of considerations and impact our work as writer and publisher has (or doesn’t have) on the wider economic and political world. The writer and the publisher are going to have very different opinions about some things. But David, I wonder if we might begin by talking about the extent to which that wider economic environment influences and challenges your decision to publish various titles or not. David Graham: Well, it is a component of every publishing decision that’s ever made. If one ignored the economic environment, one wouldn’t be alive to publish anything for very long, I think. Sometimes publishers knowingly embrace a project that they know won’t have economic success, but there are other motivations for it. But if you ignore the economic environment, as a publisher, you’ll fail. KG: And, when you are thinking about that economic environment, to what extent does this idea of celebrity, some kind of status that sits outwith the finished, published book, come to bear? Quite recently, I was party to David brokering a deal with an author who shall remain nameless, obviously. And in all the discussions, what was being put about was her viability as a name, as having TV, radio, media capabilities. She was very young, so she was very marketable. And this seemed to be influencing the decision to spend quite a lot of money on her book – or not, as the case may be. To what extent does that play out?

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A full video recording can be watched at ‘Literature, Politics, and the Publishing Industry’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), 26 August 2020, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/literature-politics-and-the-publishing-industry.

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DG: To an increasing extent, regrettably. Still second, but perhaps only just, to the quality of the content is the media profile of the author, in terms of how a publisher reviews and assesses the commercial viability of a work. Some of the first questions that are asked in any publishing meeting are: What’s their social media profile like? Are they on Twitter? Are they on Instagram? What is their following like? Because that audience drives sales. KG: At this point, I wonder if I might interject, because the kind of writer I am and the kind of writing I make could not be less interested in these kinds of things. In fact, I cause my own publishers a degree of concern about the fact that I don’t do Twitter and tweet, and I don’t really have a proper website. More and more I find myself unwilling to participate in what I see as the media circus that increasingly seems to surround the publication of so-called literary fiction, that we are set up and made to perform. To what extent do you think that the way you go about doing things – which, as you said in the beginning, is very market-driven, and you wouldn’t be around if that wasn’t the case – sets the temperature for the world of publishing altogether? DG: I don’t know. I don’t think we are setting the temperature. I think we are being dictated to by the changes in the marketplace. Those are changes that we may regret, but we have to confront the fact that traditional media’s influence on book sales is declining – and has been declining sharply through this pandemic as newspaper sales fall off a cliff. And Amazon is a repository of everything, but there is no one there to bring work of merit to the attention of people who are seeking it. That responsibility falls more and more heavily on the author, as social media channels seem to thrive on what is termed ‘authenticity’, which is getting it from the horse’s mouth, if you excuse the comparison. And publishers, however active they may be, cannot supplant an audience that is created and generated and communicated to directly by the author of the work. I don’t know that I can speak for other publishers, but certainly, in the field of illustrated publishing that I am in, that is absolutely what works. The authors who are gaining success are more often than not authors who are very adept at media management. KG: Your response is not just being informed by your current role, but by the kind of experience you had when you published, say, the Booker-Prize-winning Yann Martel,2 and your involvement in promoting and promulgating not only his work, but also a kind of profile of him. In his case, it was very much a personality-driven profile. Everyone was fascinated to hear the story of this individual writer whose manuscript had been turned down by gazillions of publishers, and then you found it and you picked it up. DG: Well, that was a narrative created around the story that helped it reach a wider audience. If you only present the story as a work of literature, then your exposure is confined to the book review pages. So, the publisher’s job is to try and get their author and their work talked about in other circles. I don’t know whether we actually created Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002) won the Booker Prize in 2002.

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that narrative or whether that narrative was imposed upon it, because it was one that the media was then, and will always remain, fascinated by. The story of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing also became part of the novel’s success.3 It was eight years waiting for it to be published and eventually came out with Galley Beggar  –  a tiny Norwich publisher. And that became a story that was written up almost more than the story of what the book was about and the merits of the book. People love the stories behind creations of works of art of any kind. I think people like to know the autobiographical, or rather biographical details in them, and to ignore that is to fail as a publisher, because our job is to attract an audience. And by being literary purists and focusing only on the words on the page, we would not be doing our job and we would fail. KG: I think this is quite interesting, because we are now starting to tease out this idea of the role of the producer of the book – I mean, not only the publisher, but the writer as well. So, we are considering this factor of celebrity; this kind of mega status with perhaps some kind of political function as well. But I am also thinking that there is perhaps more nuance to this, too, because, as David has just suggested, everyone has always been interested in the background or the context of the book. Although I have just confessed that I have no interest in participating in this kind of media activity, nevertheless I am involved in a suite of activities around my work as a professor and within the academy, and also within certain cultural circles that may revolve around magazines or certain kinds of literary gatherings to promote and talk about my own work. So, it may not be happening at glamorous, hyper-spectacle type of events, but in this nuanced way I am, too, involved in activities around my work as a writer. DG: As soon as you participate in any event surrounding your book, the only answer to any question thrown at an author at a reading or an event is ‘Read my book’, because the answers are in the book that they have written. As soon as an author stands up on their hind legs in front of an audience, they are engaging in an act of marketing that goes beyond the words on the page – because people can access the words on the page without going to Charlotte Square in Edinburgh on a wet night in the middle of summer for a book festival reading. They go there to see the person. Anyone who has read the book goes to see if they match up to their imagination, to hear what they have to say and maybe to ask a question – which is usually about their own book that they are writing. So, as soon as you do that, you’re participating in that world. KG: The moment the writer starts putting her pen on the paper, to create that text, she is signing, too, a contract wherein she agrees to participate in some kind of media activity. DG: You don’t have to, but your publisher will be disappointed, and your book will probably sell less, unless you’ve got to the very fortunate position of creating an allure around yourself by being a recluse. But that can only happen to, perhaps, one writer Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013).

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity in every generation, and if you’re not, say, David Foster Wallace or Harper Lee, if that booth has been occupied, you can’t be the one recluse in the book marketing world. You find that most do participate. Even the grandest authors do participate. A lot of authors really like doing it, of course, but those that don’t are reluctantly dragged towards it because they feel it is a responsibility to get their word out.

***** DG: Leading on from this conversation about the inevitable obligation of the author to participate in the marketing of their work, I want to ask Kirsty if she is resentful or sceptical of this obligation. KG: I spent many years going backwards and forwards, thinking about the extent of my participation – whether that meant attending book festivals or doing lots of journalism to support a new title: somehow being available. I would prevaricate and be uncertain as to whether I wanted to join in with that kind of activity, or take a backseat. DG: Can I ask you a further question? Was that because you disagreed with it in principle, or because you felt that you put in a lot of effort and could see no measurable impact coming from that effort? KG: I didn’t disagree with it in principle, and yes, to an extent I wasn’t seeing that kind of measurable impact. Although my publishers, Faber & Faber, were always very keen to tell me that my presence was indeed valued and it made a difference. No, for me, it was more that I could see the literary publicity machine gearing up and increasing in pitch, and I guess I could see literary appearances becoming a different kind of affair. Whereas at the beginning, I might have expected to be in a group of like-minded authors at an event that was generally well-scaled according to the ambition and the kinds of writing we were making, instead I was finding these events to be less curated and more as though I was being hurled into an overall theme of ‘the book festival’ – less a literary festival and more of an extended bookshop, a way of selling books. DG: Well, there has been an industrialization of book festivals. KG: Can you talk a bit more about that? DG: I’m not taking an expert’s view, but one can see it in the proliferation of the number of authors that are being processed through the tents of Charlotte Square and the tents of Hay-on-Wye,4 and travel the length and breadth of the country being interviewed by people who have scanned, maybe read the flyleaf of the book, for an audience that generally is following celebrity rather than any particular interest in the work. It’s a social gathering rather than anything much to do with literature. The Edinburgh International Book Festival, usually located in Charlotte Square Gardens, and the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, are two of Britain’s biggest literature events.

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KG: And actually, too, a kind of performance. I remember having an altercation with a writer who will remain nameless at the Edinburgh Book Festival, when we were chatting in the yurt beforehand. I then looked at my watch and said, ‘Oh, we have still got time to slip into such and such an event.’ And this writer turned to me and said, with no sense of irony, ‘Now, you mustn’t do that, the performance has already started.’ So yes, there has definitely been a change. It has become this professionalized apparatus, for all kinds of reasons. So, to that extent, my view has shifted, and I now find that the events I want to go to are discussions and colloquia, often generated by university groups or through particular magazines, where I know there is going to be some kind of affinity and where I know that there is going to be a discussion that is going to be generative. DG: Looping back to our earlier discussion and reflecting on that, I do agree – and I’ve said in the past – that the shift, or the continual drift, towards the weight of promotion resting on the shoulders of the author is unfortunate, unwelcome and unfair to the author. You know, to be able to lock yourself in a room with a laptop and create a work of fiction almost predisposes one to not be the sort of person who is particularly adept at, or who enjoys performing and promoting and talking about your work. And that has become more and more of a key element of book promotion. So, I understand your resentment and your disquiet with it, because it blurs the lines between the creator and the promoter. But publishers do that not because they are lazy or unwilling to lift that burden, but because that is what makes the difference. And that is what audiences – any kind of mass-market audience, even the mass-market audience for literary fiction – respond to. That is what works. KG: Can you tell me whether that kind of thinking informs publishing? Would a publisher make a decision about taking on this author or that author based on their ‘relevance’, I mean, notwithstanding their ability to perform, their relevance to contemporary cultural or political activity? For example, we are just coming out of a lockdown, we have been part of a pandemic. Are writers who are going to be stepping into that arena and talking about it and writing about it going to be more attractive to publishers than those who want to stay in their room, as you put it, and just write? DG: Well, all those factors are considered by publishers. Nothing is ever ruled in or ruled out. You could get a terrible novel about the Covid pandemic that wouldn’t be bought by anyone because the novel is poor. You could have a fabulous novel that has got absolutely nothing to do with current affairs that would be bought, and it would be successful because it is fabulous. But all things being equal, the opportunity for there to be discussions beyond the literary merit of the book adds arrows to the publishers’ quiver. You will get authors interviewed on the Today programme if there is current affairs relevance, and a lot of readers listen to the Today programme.5 That doesn’t necessarily mean that you are prostituting yourself or that the publishers are Today, a morning radio programme, has been the BBC’s current-affairs flagship since its launch in 1957.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity denigrating the work, but it gives another opportunity for promotion, which is really what the publishers’ job is.

KG: Yes, quite. And with that in mind, I am guessing that that is also how prizes work – as an opportunity to broaden that kind of discussion, so that you can talk  about the book in terms of a prize culture, before you even talk about the book itself. I am always intrigued by the way that every time a fresh tranche of prize-winning novels or poetry collections are announced, there seems to be more of a discussion about how this book fits or does not fit with the prize winners who have come before than an intellectual discussion about its actual merits. DG: There is no question that prizes have become more influenced by external agendas in recent years, I would say. KG: I would agree with that. David, could you talk just briefly about the extent to which digital culture has transformed publishing and literary activity generally? Has it changed the kinds of books that we want to read as it has given us a different kind of attention span? DG: Well, there is a general consensus that the e-book revolution did not wipe out print books. We are in our second or third year of growth in print sales. The print book is here to stay. I think all those that thought that the e-book would destroy it are keeping pretty quiet now about their previous Armageddon-like statements. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people I know who read a lot of e-books for work, as I used to, that their recall of what they have read on an e-book is far poorer than it is on a print book. Generally, the two coexist very happily together. It means that anyone can publish a book without having to have access to a publisher, if they have a burning desire to do so. Entry barriers, which are not necessarily a good thing in any market or industry, are dropping to almost zero. It costs you nothing to make an e-book and get it up and available for sale. If you believe it is the great work of modern fiction that no one else can see but you, you have that option, which you didn’t have before. So, that must be a good thing. It does mean that the e-book retailers are absolutely jammed with piles and piles and miles and miles of books of questionable quality. But it’s not hurting anyone. And there are e-book authors who have cut the publisher entirely out of their lives and are incredibly successful at what they do. As far as I am aware, most of those that are successful are commercial genre-fiction writers in romance, crime or horror. And they have looked at the numbers and decided to take all the money rather than a small proportion. Their take is, Well, what is a publisher actually going to do for me that I can’t do myself? And they have realized that the answer is, really: Not much. And they are selling. That is probably not really the subject for a literary symposium, but it is the industry. KG: I could also add the story of a friend of mine who writes literary fiction and has made the decision quite recently that she is going to go down that path, simply because her sales have remained at a kind of level. She feels quite certain that she has her

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community around her and that she can reach those people. She is very technically able and very visual, and she is thinking, Why do I have this middleman when I can do without? Why should she have the middleman interrupt that process between her work and getting it to her readers? So, that is interesting, too.

***** KG: At the end of the day, the artist, the writer, will make her own decisions about the extent to which she wants to enter into the world. How does this position of the artist making a decision to go her own way and not to participate in the kind of market culture we have been talking about tie in with our plans to set up our own publishing company? DG: We feel there is a need for such an initiative, which you would see as a literary need, and I might see as a gap in the market, and they can both be the same. And that is because of the changes we have been talking about. The very large publishers have been getting larger and more secure and more profitable and are really very successful global businesses now. What was a thriving independent sector still is thriving, but the compromises that the independents – or at least the independents with overhead to pay for – have to make in order to survive increasingly dilute the ‘purity’ of their lists. Unless you are funded by a wealthy benefactor, you have to go out into the marketplace and perhaps publish books that aren’t consistent with the literary values that you set out with. And I wouldn’t shame people, but you can look around at very prestigious names and wonder: What the hell are they doing that for? And I can tell you – they’re doing it to make some money to fund their perhaps more highbrow but less commercially remunerative titles. So, there is an opportunity, I think, for what I have termed ‘micro publishers’,6 which are very, very small publishers who basically have no overhead at all, who have the relatively luxurious position of not requiring a significant income from this, and are not hiring any permanent staff. As we said earlier, the ability to self-publish is now available to absolutely anyone, either in e-book or in print, and the ability to print very, very small volumes at reasonably economic cost has never been better. And so, if you are smart and have good taste and know what you want to publish and know how to go out and find that talent, which is the biggest challenge, then you can publish very esoteric books that are very small, with a potentially very small audience, quite successfully. And if one or two of them break out and work, then the business can also be profitable, because you have no costs other than the variable costs relating to the creation of the work. KG: Can I ask about the ethical element of such an enterprise? As a writer, I talk a great deal with friends and colleagues about the kind of paradigm where a writer may have See David Graham, ‘“Market Activism”: A Publisher’s Perspective’, in Literary Activism: A Symposium, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (Norwich: Boiler House Press, 2016), 99.

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity elected to be published by a small publisher, such as the one you describe, and for all kinds of reasons achieve a degree of success with that publisher, at which point the larger houses circle about and, with larger advances and with all of the extra weight that they can pull in, snap up those writers and then take them on to the next stage of their career.

DG: Throughout my career authors have done that. It is simply a fact of life. Authors are badly paid, and if they get an opportunity to cash in and get a decent pay-cheque for once, then they should do it. All I want them to do is go in with their eyes open and know that whatever they are being paid, it is highly likely that someone else will be being paid an awful lot more and will be attracting all the attention of the marketing and sales department at their expense. But that can still be the right decision for an author to take, although it can also kill a career. KG: There is another paradigm, isn’t there, which is the notion of a relationship between writer and publisher. Historically, when we look back through major canonical works, we can see that so many of them were published through a relationship with a publisher that wasn’t necessarily an economic one or a professional one. DG: Well, as you know from your experience at Faber & Faber, and as I know from my experience at Canongate, two very good, very successful independent publishing houses, they have maintained relationships with their authors that aren’t entirely conditioned by the economics of the transaction. Both have managed to retain authors who, following prize winning and/or commercial success, have been wooed by conglomerates offering unrealistically large advances. It points to another strange illogicality of the publishing business: an author’s market value is never higher than when they have just won a major prize or had a break-out success. This is when they can command eye-wateringly high advances; this is when independent publishers, however successful, may lose their ‘star’ author to a major conglomerate. And this is despite the fact that any analysis of the commercial success of second or third books after a best-seller show that they, almost without fail, significantly underperform the original prize-winning or break-out success and will rarely, if ever, earn out that huge advance. Having never worked at a major conglomerate, I can’t explain why they knowingly make huge bets on an author striking gold twice or three times in a row – it’s not like they don’t know the facts; believe me, these same conglomerates obsessively analyse all the vast amounts of sales data available. And indeed, having spoken with friends who do work, in pretty senior positions, in those big multinationals, none of them have ever provided me with a reason that stands up to any kind of rational scrutiny. KG: To me, this seems to be a nice thing to bring forward out of these deliberations. That even though the market is out there, setting the terms and setting the temperature, there are these other stories that describe something much more akin to a relationship. And in part, too, that relationship is about establishing some kind of cultural narrative. DG: Yes. But I also think that your resistance to ‘the market’ and your disparagement of the market is ignoring the dynamics of a market. It’s called a market. What happens in

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a market? Well, relationships form in a market, and transactions happen, and through those transactions relationships are developed. The two things are not mutually exclusive – relationships over here and market over there. They are actually bound together. And my only argument is: be aware and alive to the economics of it, don’t be a slave to the economics of it. If you don’t pay attention to the economics, you are not going to be in business for very long. You’re out of the game, so you’re not going to be able to achieve your aims. And so, I think, economic awareness is what I am advocating. Not necessarily: If this book doesn’t turn a buck, we mustn’t make it. That is not the case. Economic awareness is simply part of a much more nuanced approach to publishing. KG: That word, ‘nuance’, is perhaps a lovely way to finish because it is occurring to me, David, that you are kind of Hermes. Because in his wonderful book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde talks about Hermes being the god of the marketplace: he is outside society, but he also has currency with the gods themselves.7 As we know, he moves between worlds. And I think what you have just described is a publishing idea that sits facing, for all kinds of practical reasons, the marketplace as it exists, but that is also mindful of the artist sitting to one side. DG: I’ll fly off, then, shall I?

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983).

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Resisting Stereotypes: Art, Activism and the Literature Industry Elleke Boehmer, Alice Guthrie, Daniel Medin, Charlotte Ryland and Alan Taylor

This public panel discussion took place via Zoom on 4 September 2020.1 It featured contributions by postcolonial scholar, novelist, short-story writer and 2015 Man Booker International Prize judge Elleke Boehmer; independent translator, scholar and curator Alice Guthrie; academic, literary editor and 2016 Man Booker International Prize judge Daniel Medin; lecturer, translator and cultural activist Charlotte Ryland; and editor, literary critic and 1994 Booker Prize judge Alan Taylor. Elleke Boehmer: The topic of this discussion, literary celebrity, activism and the ‘industry’  –  the publishing industry, the book industry, perhaps even the celebrity industry – is one that is very close to my heart. In my work on Nelson Mandela, the question of politics and the political capital of celebrity are central,2 and I look forward to addressing these issues with a fabulous panel of writers, translators, scholars and activists. The really big questions that we are facing are: How do authors’ political interventions relate to the market activism of industry stakeholders? And then, also, to what extent do literary work and literary activism condition each other? How does the political life of authors impact on their literary life? Alice Guthrie: One of the prompts that we were offered for this discussion was to look at the relationship between literature and politics, and how that relationship shapes our work, and, more specifically, the question of whether I conceive of my work as a form of political activism. Given that my work focuses on Arabic and increasingly on queer work, queerness and queering, inevitably there is an activist dynamic to it. I would argue actually that there is a political aspect to the way that all Arabic literature and all Arab ‘culture’ is consumed, presented and platformed (or not). Also, I think it is This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A full video recording can be watched at ‘Panel Discussion: Literary Celebrity, Activism, and the “Industry”’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), 17 September 2020, www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/art-action-a-webinarseries-on-literary-authorship-politics-and-celebrity-3. 2 Elleke Boehmer, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 1

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useful to note that Arabic literature and indeed Arab ‘culture’ have been co-opted by myriad different parties and sides along the way. Actually, over the years, for me, activist sensibility, or advocacy  –  whether it is Palestine or Syrian revolutionary work or refugee work – has always informed what I have tried to do. But, of course, as an independent scholar and artist working outside of academia (although I now teach a little bit at a couple of universities), the economy of the way that artists in the UK, like many places, are looked after or not means that there is a limit to how much pro-bono activism we can do. I know that some people see the very act of intercultural dialogue, or ‘translation of culture’, as activism in its own right, but I think my definition of activism is probably a bit narrower than that. The activist element of my work has condensed and crystalized into two main themes in recent years: one is that I am programming, curating and platforming a lot of queer Arabic work now, and the other is my work around decolonizing Arabic to English literary translation. And these intersect, of course, in various important ways, and of course it’s important to problematize my doing this as a white, cisgender British woman, middle-class, with a host of other privileges. I want to flag that because I think it is an interesting factor for this discussion. Broadly speaking, one of the ways in which literature and politics intersect is that queerness  –  queering and platforming queer work, queer voices or queer experiences  –  is an act of resistance to normative systems. It is a call for equality and liberation, and it seeks to amplify the silenced. Those aspects in their broadest sense really strike at the heart of white supremacy and western imperialism. So, I see queerness as part of the anti-colonial or decolonizing mission or struggle. But to zoom in more on literature and language, I think that queer is inclusive, it is collaborative, it interrogates previously fixed assumptions, and it helps language to evolve. It looks at nuance, it really asks questions, and it is open to change. That is the queer approach to things, and I think it has massive value for translation, and literary translation in particular. What do I mean by decolonizing Arabic-to-English literary translation? What are the key issues that need addressing? One very entrenched issue that many people will be aware of is the culture of the ‘mysterious East’, the othering of the Orient: this idea that the East is an inherently unknowable place and that Arabic as a language of the East is essentially unintelligible, and that therefore only approximations can really ever be found and are acceptable. So, expectations are very low around literary translation from Arabic in general, but specifically things like convincing slang, intimate language, nuance, precision, register, sociolects – they are often not expected or demanded. The second major factor, I think, in why we need to decolonize Arabic-to-English translation is the culture of the white expert above all else. I want to flag that this is where it gets problematic, especially around curation, cultural capital and moral credit, but also because I am a white person trying to speak as an expert. One of the ways in which this culture of the white expert manifests is, for example, that non-Arabicspeaking people are in very senior positions of power. You often get folks who once spent a few months in an Arabic-majority-speaking country becoming career-long

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity experts on the so-called Middle East, as opposed to people from those countries. Obviously, we can problematize that and not make blanket binary statements, but there is a widely noted tendency for this to happen. The third, really important, factor in this need for decolonizing is the culture of translators having traditionally come from the ‘officer class’, with elite, private-school backgrounds, and often from families with colonial roles. This is changing now, but because of other factors, the old paradigm stays quite entrenched. A key element of this legacy is the elite private school notion or training that one must never admit one doesn’t understand something, or ask for help, and that is just fatal for a good translation. As a result of all this, we have monolingual editing, we have monolingual assessment of translation for prizes, and low translation standards. And I don’t want to get bogged down in that or in dissing the whole sector because there is so much wonderful stuff that happens, but I want to flag that there is a growing movement working towards change. Bringing queer Arabic work to the forefront is one way of resisting this legacy, which is very much connected with a Western legacy of homophobia and transphobia that has been imported into South-West Asia and North Africa during the colonial period. That is where I see platforming queerness as a part of decolonizing.

Daniel Medin: My professional work has hovered between several different chairs. I am active at a university, where I teach and chair the department of comparative literature while co-directing its Center for Writers and Translators.3 But I think politics, both as an issue and as a theme, as an influence itself, feels most pertinent to the work I do as an editor for different literary journals and to the work I do and have done as a judge of various literary prizes – most of them for fiction in translation, but also for international fiction in English. It is equally relevant for the role of advising literary festivals, since your recommendations help determine the line-up. Politics is also pertinent to my role as board member of a series with a publisher. So, for example, I work with the Margellos series at Yale University Press,4 which means that I am one of the people who make proposals to suggest that a specific writer ought to appear in this series. And then when they do, that means that they have an English-language publication in the United Kingdom as well as the United States, since Yale University Press is located in London and in New York. Obviously, these activities – which I think of as forms of literary activism – can never take place in a vacuum. You can’t say ‘X, not Y’ without it having some kind of social repercussion or social influence. I think there are two different ways to view politics within this sphere. On the one hand, you have the larger question of how politics  –  whether it is at the micro or macro level; regional, national or international  –  influences your thinking or activity in any of these tasks. To what extent do non-aesthetic, extra-literary considerations shape your decisions, and to

The Center for Writers and Translators, based at the American University of Paris. The Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters series is dedicated to spotlighting the work of contemporary authors previously unavailable in English translation.

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what extent do you want to engage in those? On the other hand, there is the question of to what extent do people desire or actually want to influence politics, or the external world, through their activity. And I suppose this would be what we call political activism. So, those are two different sides of it, and I have felt both in different ways in the past few years. There is one other thing that I would like to mention here, because it is very specific to the literary activity I engage in, namely, that it is predominantly non-commercial: Music & Literature is registered as a not-for-profit; The White Review is registered as a charity.5 I do not receive a dime for my work with the Center for Writers and Translators. On rare occasions, there have been benefits to this kind of activity. For example, when you work for the Booker Prize, you are compensated for your labour, but for the most part, when it comes to, let’s say, promoting an author I would like to see translated into another language, the effort is self-motivated, it is on my own time and it is voluntary. It is driven by passion, a labour of love. Of course, virtue is a double-edged sword. This is editorial work that occurs after five pm. In most cases, it is not remunerated. However, from my point of view, the great advantage here – beyond getting to see my literary preferences appear in the larger literary landscape, when I’m lucky – is that I am not required, like most people who are in this business, to make decisions on the basis of whether something is sufficiently profitable or not. I’d like to conclude with a couple of observations about prize juries. Different members of a jury prioritize different aspects of a literary work. For some people, political causes take priority. For others, aesthetics or formal innovation do. In the worst cases, people try to promote their friends. This question of what to prioritize arises again and again during jury meetings. Why award the prize and its purse and its publicity to this particular author? What’s the symbolism of doing so? Many jurors wish to leave a curatorial footprint. Anointing a debut novel with a major award, as in the case of the new International Booker Prize-winner by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, can launch a career.6 Whereas if you choose an established author who has been around for decades, the result may add up to a boost in sales, another article in the Guardian and one additional feather in the cap – but will have done little to influence the reading of others. Charlotte Ryland: Like Daniel and Alice, I have thought about the various hats that I have been wearing career-wise over the past few years and will try to home in on where politics and political activism have played a role. As a linguist, and having worked

Music & Literature is a print and online journal as well as a cultural project promoting the work of ‘underrepresented artists from around the world’. Music & Literature, accessed 21 July 2022, www. musicandliterature.org/; The White Review is an English-language arts and literature magazine. 6 Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison were awarded the 2020 International Booker Prize for Rijneveld’s debut novel The Discomfort of Evening (London: Faber & Faber, 2020). 5

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity with literary translation for several years, it is the concepts of internationalism, of empathy and of hospitality that come through most strongly to me. Of course, reading literatures from other languages and cultures enables us to cross borders, to see the world through others’ eyes and to gain new perspectives on that world and our relationship to it. I would like to talk about three points that have come out of the work that I have done over the past ten years or so. The first one relates to this broad question: Why is it important that we as a society read literature and translation and why is advocating for it, therefore, a political act? This very much relates to what Alice was saying, but I think probably zooms out where Alice zoomed into the Arabic context. Secondly, what is particularly at stake when advocating for German-language literature, which I did for a number of years at New Books in German?7 And thirdly, I would like to talk about my current role with the Stephen Spender Trust and the Translation Exchange, getting young people in the UK to read literature in other languages and in translation. The first point relates to my time at New Books in German, which was a wonderful ten years until 2019. The experience of reading all of those books that came out of Germany, Austria and Switzerland was a lot more diverse than I had expected initially, because Germany, of course, experienced a lot of migration during the second half of the twentieth century and a lot of the really good books are written by authors with a migration background. So, a book is written in German, but it might be about the former Yugoslavia, for example. The best book I read in German while I was at New Books in German was The Eighth Life by a Georgian-German author called Nino Haratischvili.8 It depicts the long twentieth century through the lives of eight women from the same family from Georgia. There are many wonderful things about this book, but I think, in this context, what is so great about it is that it shows that century that is so familiar to us and the continent that is familiar to us from a perspective that is very unfamiliar to an English or American reader. The UK appears at one point, and Berlin features quite heavily, which is a city I know very well. But the experience of reading meant seeing those familiar places from a new angle, rethinking our view of them, rethinking our relationships to those places. To be honest, that aspect of literature and of literature in translation seemed to me fairly banal and almost not worth mentioning during my first years at New Books in German. Then 2016 came, and it became clear what culture it was we were living through and that there was what appeared to be a massive lack of empathy and hospitality in my home culture in the UK.9 Suddenly, for me that cast a whole new

New Books in German (www.new-books-in-german.com/) is an international project promoting literature in German and facilitating translation into English. 8 Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life (for Brilka), trans. Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (London: Scribe, 2020). 9 In 2015/16, Europe experienced a new peak of refugee arrivals from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The so-called European refugee crisis became a major issue in the campaigns leading up to the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, held on 23 June 2016, which resulted in 51.9 per cent of votes in favour of leaving the European Union. 7

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light on my work with literary translation. It made advocating for it seem a lot more urgent and more political than it ever had been. To move on to the second point I wanted to raise: working with German-language literature in the UK and in America becomes particularly political because of the apparently insatiable appetite of Anglo-Saxon readers for stories about the Second World War. If we just saw our role as promoting German-language literature, it would be very easy to do that because we could just promote books that told and retold those stories. But at New Books in German, we also had a political mission to diversify the message and the image of Germany that are being consumed in the United Kingdom and the United States. So, we were constantly pushing back against those stereotypes, against what the market appeared to be demanding of a ‘German book’. And that was a real focus of our work for a number of years. However, again what became interesting around 2016 was that the Brexit referendum and what ensued really made me rethink that approach to German literature and backtrack a little. Suddenly, it felt necessary to tell those stories again, of 1930s Germany in particular, because it felt like any lessons that might have been learnt in the past had been forgotten; that they weren’t part of the public discourse anymore. And that felt like a dangerous position to be in. I also felt that literature could help move things in a more positive direction. So, towards the end of my time at New Books in German, I actually found myself advocating much more for those stories than I had done initially. The third point I wanted to raise relates to what I am doing now. Since 2018, I have been director of the Stephen Spender Trust. In 2018 I also founded a centre at The Queen’s College in Oxford, called the Translation Exchange. They both have very similar missions of getting people of all ages, but especially young people, to engage with international literature. We mainly do that through translation. My interest in all of this came through teaching German at universities, and occasionally at schools, for a number of years, and becoming really concerned about declining language learning and about the insularity of the literary culture that young people were being exposed to. The Stephen Spender Trust runs a prize for poetry translation; both organizations run translation workshops in schools that get young people to interact with, to share stories and poems from, other cultures, including their own heritage cultures. Again, this has become much more explicitly political in recent years, and that is partly because of this tacit hierarchy of languages that there appears to be in the UK. So, to state it quite starkly and provocatively, if you are a bilingual French-English child, you are an expat with a great skill under your belt. If you are a bilingual ArabicEnglish speaker in a UK school, you might be seen instead as a migrant with a deficit in your learning that needs addressing. This work has also become much more urgent because the opportunities for language learning for young people are shrinking and the creative opportunities within that language learning are very limited as well. So, the work we do focuses a lot on raising the profile of all languages, trying to break down those hierarchies, celebrating all language skills in the classroom, regardless of which language it is and how good you are at it, whether you just know one word or all the words. With the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation, we

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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity are focusing on opening that up to a broader range of languages. This year, we have had a thousand entries from under-18s in the UK, and the entries came from a total of eighty languages, which is more languages than I could list. To go back to what I said earlier about hospitality, empathy and access to other voices, that feels like a very positive step, and I am really looking forward to seeing how we can continue to develop in that direction. To sum up, advocating for literature in translation is a political act; it is reflected in the role that German literature can play in informing the public discourse, and the urgency of reimagining language learning, literary translation and international culture for young people.

Alan Taylor: I don’t really regard myself as a literary activist. I think of myself, I guess, as a literary advocate. Looking back, I have realized that most of my career has been trying to encourage people in every sphere of life I have worked in to read good books and to promote good books. Having said that, it is always difficult to define what a good book is. First of all, I would like to talk about the Booker Prize, because it has come up among a few of us. It is worth remembering that the Booker Prize was started in 1969 by a company called Booker McConnell, which had its interest mainly in the Caribbean and the sugar trade, which wouldn’t be acceptable these days. The reason why the prize was founded was that booksellers and publishers realized that the literary novel was in the doldrums. Nobody was buying it, very few people were reading it, sales were very low. Publishers and booksellers got together to start a new prize, which they hoped would promote it. And it has, of course, been very successful, as we have seen, as it flourished and added new prizes to its portfolio. In the late 1980s, I became a member of the Booker management committee, and I saw the Booker operating from within. Our role was to amend the rules, to decide on the prize money – and there really was no limit to the prize money – and, very crucially, to select the judges. So, here were five or so middle-aged white guys – what you might call part of the ‘chatterati’, if not the literati – selecting judges, and I was a fairly naïve person in those days when it came to this. We did realize at that point that politicians made good chairpersons of judges, because they were used to chairing committees and used to getting decisions out of people. We had people like Michael Foot, the ex-Labour leader, who was an exceptional chairman, because he not only read books, but he was very good at getting committees to come to a decision.10 We move on to 1993. This is when I began to realize the political angle to the Booker, but also that not everybody might share everybody’s sense of ‘Let’s find a book!’ This was the Booker’s cause: let’s find a book that is the best novel of that year but which might also be read twenty-five, thirty, forty years from that point. In 1993, a couple of judges said that they would walk out if Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s novel, made it onto the Booker shortlist.11 Suddenly, here was this realization that a group

Michael Foot (1913–2010), leader of the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983, was chair of judges for the 1988 Booker Prize. 11 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993). 10

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of judges based in a London-centric bubble were confronted with a novel which they hadn’t a clue what it was all about. And so, Trainspotting didn’t make it. The following year, I became a judge, and James Kelman won the Booker Prize – the only time a Scot has won the Booker Prize.12 But one of our judges, having tried to read the book on three separate attempts, thought that this decision was terrible. She thought that there was no way that a book in which there were twenty-six uses of the f-word per page could possibly be a literary novel, and she literally did walk out. I had very great sympathy for that judge, because try as she might to understand what was going on in Kelman’s novel, she couldn’t because she was outside that culture. Charlotte said that books introduce us to new cultures, new places, new languages. Yes, they do, but we need to be open to these ideas and thoughts. When we open a book, we must try to open ourselves up to what the author is trying to say. When Kelman won the Booker, the backlash from the so-called literati of the metropolitan classes was absolutely ferocious. He was denounced in both racist and classist terms. He was called a noble savage and an illiterate. We remembered in Scotland the put-down of Robert Burns as a heaven-taught ploughman, and that was the way James Kelman seemed to be regarded despite the fact that prior to 1994 he had been shortlisted for another of his novels.13 I think, if you were to ask him now whether winning the Booker Prize was a good thing, he would be ambivalent at best. I don’t think he feels it did him a great service. Literary prizes are a double-edged sword. They often lead to literary celebrity, and I think the Booker was the beginning of true literary celebrity culture in the twentieth century. I would like to say a final thing about book festivals. Daniel mentioned that one of his roles is to select people to attend at particular festivals. This is a very powerful position to be in. The modern book festival was invented in Edinburgh in 1983.14 It was a very modest literary festival at that time. It had some very good names, some fantastic writers. It was very international in scope, even back then. But I don’t know how many writers were there. Maybe a hundred at that time. This year, if the Edinburgh International Book Festival had gone ahead, there would have been 800 to 900 writers there. But it has been remarked, among people looking at the Festival’s programme, that there is a great homogeneity of views. They tend to be left-leaning, liberal, anti-Brexit, etc. While those may be my views or the views I find myself sympathetic towards, they are not covering the whole spectrum. Young writers entering their careers want to appear at these festivals, because they are their equivalent of the rock festival. As I’ve heard one publisher say, ‘They are printing the T-shirt before we have actually got the book out.’ This is a modern phenomenon in the literary world, and one I personally, slightly old-fashionedly, bemoan.

James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994) won the 1994 Booker Prize. 13 James Kelman, A Disaffection (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989). 14 The Edinburgh International Book Festival, taking place every year in the last three weeks of August, is one of the largest literary festivals worldwide. 12

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EB: You all made some very interesting points: about translation itself as literary activism; about prize cultures and the culture of literary festivals; the industry around book publishing as a form of activism. What was threaded through everyone’s commentaries was this idea of activism as a resisting of stereotypes. It was there in what Alice was saying about Arabic writers. It was there in what Charlotte was saying about how German literature is perceived. It was there in Daniel’s remarks and also in Alan’s remarks about book prizes. So, I just wanted to pick up on that idea of resisting stereotypes as a form of activism, one that literature in all its forms can promote. CR: This idea of resisting stereotypes is absolutely central. It is one of the reasons why I am currently so obsessed with this work that we are doing with young people, getting diverse literature to them and giving them the opportunity to engage with it in an interactive way. Because that is what translation is. It is always interactive and collaborative. And I think that this gets a diverse set of images and ideas to the children, hopefully before the stereotypes kick in. We only have anecdotal evidence at the moment, but I think it would be really interesting to see what impact this has on the formation of stereotypes as they get older. The hope is that it cuts in before what they hear from their parents, from the media, starts to solidify in their minds and results in these very fixed ideas about what a certain culture is like. We have done some workshops with primary school kids with Polish poetry where, at the beginning of the session, we talk to them about Poland and Polish. In some cases, there are some Polish speakers, but in most cases, they haven’t had direct experience of the language. So, what we give them and what they get through that workshop is this rich and exciting creative experience of Poland and Polish, which, I hope, then becomes a bedrock for how they might view that culture. DM: It’s true that we share the desire to shatter insular models of literary culture. In my case, it is for formal reasons. I aspire to promote intrepid and unfamiliar approaches to writing, which in turn may help  –  at least if you are thinking in terms of the fiction  –  expand the possibilities of the novel. It’s useful to remember that most ground-breaking innovations in the form have been transmitted or inspired by its translation from one culture and language into another. I find it interesting, given what Alan has brought up, that you can have the same problems, which is to say, literary and linguistic complacency, in the same language. Kelman’s case is a fascinating one – I consider the anointment of How Late It Was a triumph for prize-judging, not least because it resonates with my own aesthetic orientation, which is largely continental, modernist and non-commercial. I am constantly hunting for angles I have never seen before. Kelman’s was a Booker with a long shadow, and deservedly so. What a terrific decision this was, not least because of his book’s healthy disregard for the status quo. EB: I think we could spend a whole hour talking about last year’s Booker Prize decision, which was clearly – even though very little has been published about how this decision was reached – a political decision, with the award of effectively two prizes to Margaret

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Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.15 Both are fantastic writers, and both are very deserving books. It would have been fascinating to be part of that discussion, which was undoubtedly very political and would also have touched upon the whole question of literary celebrity, because I can think of few more successful literary celebrities than Margaret Atwood. Of course, something that keeps coming up in connection with literary celebrity is the issue of money and economics. To what extent do you think financial and commercial concerns influence not only which writers get published but also what they say? AT: Well, the economic side of things has a huge impact, because publishers now have access to data and statistics the like of which they never had before. They adopt and discard writers based on their annual statistics and how their sales are going. James Kelman was originally published by the student publishing wing of Edinburgh University. I am so old, I can remember reading his first collection of stories, because it came in a manuscript to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant. None of us had a clue what he was doing. So, we felt: well we’d better give it a grant then, because we had never seen anything like it. The other thing to say is that James Kelman  –  for all his reputation, and it is huge  –  does not live ‘high on the hog’. He lives in very modest circumstances in Glasgow, and I still see him from time to time. He is still working very hard. He is still angry about a lot of things. And he is still writing brilliantly. But I don’t know who would take that risk with him nowadays. But we see anyway – certainly in Scotland – a fair number of young writers who are clearly influenced by Jim Kelman. So, he has had quite a wide influence. I think a certain breed of Scottish writers  –  Ali Smith, Kirsty Gunn and some others – would all acknowledge that Jim Kelman was quite an influence on them, and they have huge admiration for him. AG: I will say something about money, going back to my quite specific context of Arabic literature in translation. There is something self-perpetuating that happens whereby Arabic literature is not really commercially viable in translation, so it has to be translated for very low fees (and the literary translation sector is badly remunerated in general, of course). In the main, this means that the people who can afford to translate it tend to subsidize it through another income stream, whether intergenerational wealth, a partner’s salary, an academic day job, a pension or whatever. So, certain subaltern voices won’t necessarily be chosen by this demographic or brought through in all their nuance. It is this question of gatekeeping: there is gatekeeping upstream at publisher level, but there is also a certain amount of gatekeeping in terms of who can afford to take on translation work and how they do it. To answer the question about money: yes, it is really very intimately influencing what we get to read and in what kind of version. Margaret Atwood with The Testaments (London: Chatto & Windus, 2019), and Bernardine Evaristo with Girl, Woman, Other (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019) were joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize.

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CR: I would second that, and I am really glad that the question of money has come up. Alice, you talked about pro-bono activism, and Daniel, you talked about doing your editing work in the evenings. These are all privileged positions that we are in, to be able to do our activism out of office hours, but it is clearly a problem. It clearly does define the demographic in a certain way, and it is something that has been troubling me for a long time, especially over the last couple of years since I have been involved more in the charity sector. The Stephen Spender Trust is a charity, and this is the first time that I have worked for a literary charity and seen things from the inside, grappling with funding issues, for instance. So, I don’t have an answer apart from reiterating what Alice has identified as being so central and so problematic. And I think there is lots to be done, which would need another form of activism. EB: Turning back to Daniel’s and Alan’s remarks on festivals and who gets invited and who doesn’t: I have done some work with a couple of literary festivals in the past ten to fifteen years, and it is always the case that according to the organizers, you need to build a spinal column of big names before you can risk festival funding on the smaller names who may only pull in a small audience. In that sense, money and the capital that different writers represent – through their name, their reputation, their celebrity – are again key. Speaking of prizes again, it is interesting how to have won a prize – or even to be shortlisted, but increasingly less so – changes everything. There was this fascinating conversation between Nicola Sturgeon and Bernardine Evaristo at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in which Evaristo talks about the difference that the Booker Prize has made for her.16 She worked for twenty-five years – a bit like Kelman – as a theatre activist, as a performance poet and also, of course, as a literary writer. None of that went recognized in the right way until the award of the Booker Prize. DM: That has something to do with the resources of the Prize and the imprint that it leaves, which benefits from financial resources, yes, but especially thanks to its administration, that is, the decisions they make year after year concerning how best to achieve the greatest possible impact. Over the past few years, as commercial constraints suffocate creativity among the corporate publishing houses, I think a source of hope for many people in the UK and the United States has been smaller publishers and independent presses. They are publishing fascinating, adventurous books translated from all kinds of languages. Although they are working on a much smaller scale and budget, prizes like the Booker have helped magnify them. Fitzcarraldo in London has only been in existence for a few years, but they have always had one to two titles on the shortlist of the International Booker, and now two Nobel Prize in Literature laureates can be counted among their authors.17 The Edinburgh International Book Festival, ‘Bernardine Evaristo with Nicola Sturgeon: The Triumph of Girl, Woman, Other’, YouTube, 22 August 2020, www.youtube.com/live/O3C4EHdt7Rc. 17 Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent press, founded in 2014, which publishes the works of Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk, winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 and 2018 respectively, in English translation. It also publishes the works of Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022, two years after this conversation took place. 16

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That has something to do with savvy, fortune and the responsiveness of individual publishers and editors to a constantly changing environment. Possessing an awareness of the market, of the purchasing environment, and of how something is advertised plays a much greater role for an editor or writer than it did twenty years ago. There are dozens of excellent small presses out there; they won’t all receive the same amount of attention for merely having published a work of quality or been awarded a subvention. These things help, but critical and financial success often comes down to specific decisions and the way some mediator is capable of making various individuals in the ecosystem – journalists, festivals, jurors, etc. – more receptive to a particular text. EB: I think we have generated a number of questions to take away with us, as we ponder some more on how literary celebrity, activism and the ‘industry’ condition each other. And as we turn back to the work of James Kelman. I remember jumping and leaping and yelling through the living room when he won, because I was a big fan back then and remain so now.

8

Fanny Fern and Nellie Bly: Unstable I’s Eva Sage Gordon

What is an author’s name? How does it function? I proceed to explain why I cannot tell whether ‘I be I’.

(Michel Foucault)1 (Fanny Fern)2

Mary Kelley’s classic work Private Woman, Public Stage argues that the common practice of writing under pseudonyms represented a tacit acceptance by nineteenthcentury women of the private sphere doctrine, which sought to contain women tightly within the domestic realm. While this doctrine never existed on the plane of physical reality  –  women always left the house both in daily life and in matters of public influence – it was a powerful social ideology. This notion is taken up by Robert Gunn, who cites and supports Kelley’s argument. Pseudonymity, in Gunn’s words, ‘represented a secret type of denial for women’: an assertion, in Kelley’s words, ‘that they were not writers at all’.3 Virginia Woolf seems to agree when she writes, in A Room of One’s Own, that eminent women of the previous century had engaged in a culture of shame when they hid behind pseudonyms because they had been led to believe, falsely, that ‘publicity for women is detestable’.4 This assertion that pseudonymous publication signalled nineteenth-century female writers’ acceptance of the gendered public sphere illuminates a cultural framework in which female invisibility was not only the norm but the ideal. However, it obscures the individual stories of women writers trying to survive in their cultural moment – one in which hostility towards female excellence in all areas outside the home could be felt daily, as this casual dismissal of women’s novels in an 1857 New York Times book review suggests: ‘Courtship and marriage, servants and children, these are the great objects of Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, trans. Josué V. Harari, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (1969; London: Penguin, 2000), 205–22; 209. 2 Fanny Fern, ‘How I Look’, New York Ledger, 9 April 1870. 3 Robert Gunn, ‘“How I Look”: Fanny Fern and the Strategy of Pseudonymity’, Legacy 27, no. 1 (2010): 26; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2002), 128. 4 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 65. 1

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a woman’s thoughts, and they necessarily form the staple topics of their writings and their conversation. We have no right to expect anything else in a woman’s book.’5 I will argue in this chapter that the use of pseudonyms by two intrepid female newspaper writers of the late nineteenth century, Sara Payson Willis (‘Fanny Fern’, 1811–72) and Elizabeth Cochran (‘Nellie Bly’, 1864–1922), functioned within a complex interplay of public and private zones. The burgeoning phenomenon of literary celebrity worked in concert with these bold female writers to destabilize and exploit what Barbara Welter termed ‘the cult of true womanhood … by which a woman judged herself and was judged’.6 On the surface, this framework of ‘four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity’  –  left no room for an existence outside the home,7 but many nineteenth-century women used these four virtues as the basis for writing publicly. Yes, they seemed to say, writing is outside the female domain, but we have no choice – as guardians of the nation’s morality, we must intervene when we see injustice, thus creating space for the female author-activist. First Fern and later Bly asserted their authorial voices and activist leanings using first-person perspectives, injecting their work with distinct affective rhetorical styles. Both hid behind pen names for sound reasons. Their anonymous I’s were unmistakable, leading to celebrity status and affording each of them the chance to quietly subvert the era’s gender expectations. In a study of the use of female pseudonyms by male writers in the nineteenth century, Heather Anne Hannah states, ‘Our names not only identify us but they are us: announcing, advertising, and embodying us. By changing our names we take on a different persona or an additional identity that can separate our public and private lives … Sometimes social or political demands may leave no choice.’8 In the cases of Fern and Bly, all of these were true: their large-print bylines announced and advertised them loudly to readers, while the space their pseudonyms created between the private woman and public writer offered additional personae. The women I write about used pseudonyms to separate their private lives from the scrutiny attached to the work of a writer, especially a female writer. Their obviously false names (‘Fanny Fern’ followed a convention of alliteration and references to flowers or other plants in pen names, while ‘Nelly Bly’ was the name of a popular song by Stephen Foster, a Pittsburgh native like Cochran herself) gave them licence to write in ways their legal names would have limited – in Fern’s case by inhibiting her observations of people she encountered around New York, who would likely have recognized her as her column’s and novels’ popularity grew, and in Bly’s by obstructing her ability to perform the undercover investigations that established her career. Fern and Bly thus represent two case studies of popular female writers navigating the collision of reform movements, restrictive gender ideologies and the rise of celebrity culture in late nineteenth-century New York. Quoted in Fanny Fern, ‘Male Criticism on Ladies’ Books’, New York Ledger, 23 May 1857. Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860’, American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 152. 7 Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860’, 152. 8 Heather Anne Hannah, ‘Male Use of a Female Pseudonym in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature’ (PhD diss., Murdoch University, 2018), 38. 5 6

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Female Literacy and Legal Personhood The writing strategies of Fern and Bly, as white, native-born American women, were shaped by two major contextual factors: the legal status of women in this period, and the increase in female literacy. Women had lived under the legal status of coverture (the French term feme covert was used in early American courts to refer to married women) since it had been passed down from British common law in the earliest days of the republic.9 Robert Yusef Rabiee notes that the use of English common law was formalized in the United States after the American legal theorist Tapping Reeve published The Law of Baron and Femme in 1816.10 Under this system, a woman lost all rights to property upon marriage and lost custody of her own children upon the death of her husband. While generations of women came of age, perhaps worked, perhaps bore children, as they lived as friends and daughters and mothers, many of their rights went unnoticed and unacknowledged by the state. Legally, a woman was subsumed by her husband upon their marriage; she ceased to exist under the law. As Rabiee explains: Women in the nineteenth century were required to exist in two worlds and to serve two purposes. Law undergirded this double status. Laws pertaining to the contracts between masters and slaves, employers and employees, and husbands and wives were all classified as ‘domestic relations’ and were therefore the domain of local courts and the common law, not the legislature.11

Fanny Fern experienced the ragged edges of this common-law tradition when she lost her first husband to illness and hastily married a man who turned out to be abusive, in part to retain custody of her children. Although no one single law overturned coverture in the United States, state-level decisions eroded it from the 1830s, with the Married Women’s Property Acts weakening its hold.12 Nevertheless, in the absence of modern legislation protecting spousal inheritance, many women were impoverished by widowhood. Even as coverture slowly diminished and was no longer law by the last decade of the nineteenth century, its bitter remnants lingered. At six years old, Bly saw her mother, for example, forced suddenly to support her family on the death of her husband, with no experience of earning money. In the context of these longstanding legal shadows, pseudonyms begin to take on a different appearance. Far from accepting obsolescence, by taking on a pen name a woman might be seen as escaping marital non-existence and asserting an independent voice in print. The argument Kelley and Gunn make, that female writers veiled their accomplishments by changing their names, overlooks the fact that women had been living largely hidden lives for centuries. Whether they used their legal names or adopted pseudonyms, their voices were often obscured, in daily life and as femes covert under the law. See Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 10 Robert Yusef Rabiee, Medieval America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020), 99. 11 Rabiee, Medieval America, 99. 12 Rabiee, Medieval America, 99. 9

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The period between 1820 and 1850 also saw an unprecedented rise in literacy and readership among the public, especially among women. As Kelley explains, a lack of transportation, an unpredictable market, inefficient distribution and a lack of money stood in the way of national publishing before the 1820s, but between 1825 and 1850 improved printing technologies enabled the printing and distribution of massive quantities of cheaply printed books and periodicals. And as printed material proliferated, literacy jumped up.13 This provided new possibilities for women to publish, and so, at the height of the ‘separate spheres’ doctrine in the mid-nineteenthcentury United States, writing for or editing a magazine or newspaper became a door through which some women escaped the domestic realm unseen. As print culture permeated private homes at an ever-increasing rate, another, more intimate public realm developed  –  what Bonnie Carr O’Neill and others call the personal public sphere, in opposition to the Enlightenment ideal of the impersonal public sphere of ideas.14 Public figures in this new celebrity culture were understood on a physical level, with the person, not simply their ideas, the object of fascination for an audience craving ‘proximity and presence’.15 In this realm, the politics of invisibility took on new dimensions: women might lean into gendered tropes, such as the right of women to exert moral pressure by working on behalf of reform movements, thus quietly transgressing the domestic boundary.

Nineteenth-Century Literary Celebrity To be famous, you must be a ‘public figure’, a term implying movement out of doors, facing strangers and promoting yourself and what you have accomplished. It is crucial for the collaborative transformation of a person into a celebrity that audiences have an intimate sense of knowing the subject. As O’Neill puts it, ‘interest in the character of public figures, the effort to personalize them, is a defining element of celebrity culture’.16 The celebrity’s own sense of self is personal and private, and may be in tension with her more unsettled public identity, perceived by the masses of fans or observers. This instability is often uncomfortable for the celebrity figure, who must submit her character and appearance (not to mention her work) to constant evaluation and critique from strangers. But without it, fame recedes. This requirement of visibility as a condition for celebrity was a problem for women writers. Alexis Easley notes of nineteenth-century women writers that ‘too little exposure could mean invisibility in a fiercely competitive literary marketplace, yet too much exposure could mean being cast aside as the latest vulgar literary fad’.17 If cultural Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage, 11. Bonnie Carr O’Neill, Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 4. 15 O’Neill, Literary Celebrity and Public Life, 8. 16 O’Neill, Literary Celebrity and Public Life, 2. 17 Alexis Easley, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship 1850–1914 (Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 12. 13 14

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authority demanded an embodied self, but cultural norms rejected female publicity (or authority), what avenues remained for women who wanted to write and publish their work and be known? As I have suggested, participation in reform movements, which relied heavily on the gendered concept of women as moral leaders, offered a side door out of domesticity. As Brenda Weber explains of the century’s most famous female novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe was ‘an agent in her own separation’ between public and private self, walking a fine line in her literary career between upholding the gender norms of the day and boldly defying them by living as a famous novelist and agent of social change.18 Simon Morgan notes that with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe became the bestselling novelist of the decade, and an overnight literary celebrity.19 Uncle Tom’s Cabin fit neatly into the sentimental, moralistic novel conventions of the era, which helped the novel sell while also, as Morgan points out, leading to backlash from critics who accused her of overly sentimentalizing the experiences of slaves in order to promote herself.20 When the author appeared in lecture halls, she sat demurely to the side while her husband or brother spoke on her behalf, but her actions – writing books, meeting President Lincoln, travelling the country and across Europe publicizing her work – tell another story altogether. Stowe was from a prominent family, and as the daughter of Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher and sibling of the well-known Henry Ward Beecher and Catherine Beecher, she may have felt that using her legal name in her writings would advance her chances at publication. Whatever her reasons for using her real name, writing and appearing as her named self placed a greater burden on her than the one placed on her anonymous sister writers like Fern and Bly to fulfill gendered social expectations in both their writing and their public actions. While all three women used the new cultural power of celebrity to harness the restrictions of femininity to their own ends, then, pseudonymity allowed Fern and Bly a wider scope for subversion and defiance.

Fanny Fern’s Affective Social Commentary Sarah Payson Willis was born to an upper-class Boston family, one of nine children. Her father Nathaniel owned and operated a press focused on religious texts, including The Boston Recorder, the nation’s first religious newspaper, as well as a newspaper for children, Youth’s Companion. Her elder brother, Nathaniel Parker, was sent to Harvard, after which he became a successful poet, critic and editor, but these educational and creative pursuits were not encouraged by Nathaniel Willis in his daughters, and Sarah was instead urged to marry early. She did so, but found herself widowed in her twenties with two young daughters and no means of support. Receiving no help from her birth Brenda R. Weber, Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 8, 94–6. 19 Simon Morgan, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Harriet Beecher Stowe as Literary Celebrity and Anti-Slavery Campaigner’, Celebrity Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 162–3. 20 Morgan, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, 163. 18

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family or her husband’s family, and in fear of losing custody of her children with no male head of the household, she resorted to a rushed and, it turned out, violent second marriage. She ran away and sought a divorce and in the meantime began earning money writing for Boston newspapers under the pseudonym ‘Fanny Fern’. With an early life filled with books, newspapers and the family printing press, Fern was primed to grow up and join the family’s ranks of writers and editors, but the nineteenth century’s gender biases tied her hands. When she did finally make it as a writer, it was after two marriages and with no support from any of the men in her life. Her proto-feminist perspective as a columnist for the remainder of her life would reflect this social position as someone adjacent to power as the daughter, then sister, then wife of respected white males, but without any claims to security or property herself. She saw clearly the danger of the paternal culture of her age and used wry humour, sentimental tropes and double-coded rhetoric to persuade readers of her side of a social argument. She would come to use her mediums, the newspaper and the novel, her pseudonym and her tone to play with the public/private divide, as well as to casually subvert gender norms. Scholars in the past thirty years or so have been quick to note that in 1855 Fern was the highest-paid newspaper writer in the United States, a title she held for some time, earning a hundred dollars per column in the New York Ledger.21 This dramatic commercial success may seem surprising, given the received wisdom that celebrity, now and in the nineteenth century, depends on the illusion of close relationships with ‘intimate strangers’, in Richard Schickel’s words.22 Fern kept secret her appearance and her legal name, and even when her name was revealed by a bitter former editor, avoided being seen by her readers, passing up opportunities to speak in New York’s lecture halls and to go on speaking tours. This striking insistence on her own privacy certainly restricted her avenues for earning money and could also be seen as pushing against the central desire of nineteenth-century readers for intimacy with the text and, by extension, the author. As Gillian Silverman asserts, ‘readers described individual authors and their fellow readers in intimate and exclusive terms; they likened the experience of engaging a common text to Holy Communion, involving both shared consciousness and bodily merger’.23 Thomas Baker refers to the ‘growing capacity of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century entrepreneurs of print to capitalize on psychic bonds and links of desire forged between the reading public and the objects of its fascination’.24 It might be thought that Fern’s active withholding of personal information from her readers broke the contract required for these forms of literary celebrity. See for example Joyce W. Warren, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 146; Gunn, ‘“How I Look”’, 23. 22 Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). 23 Gillian D. Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in NineteenthCentury America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ix–xiv. 24 Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 21

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However, Fern enacted a careful dance between public and private in her columns. Despite the inherent transgression of the situation (Chris Rojek notes that celebrity is always a transgressive condition since it ‘divides the individual from ordinary social life’25), she counterpoised an acceptable version of female public performance against writing that, at least on the surface, upheld the social mores of her time. In particular, Fern formed her own brand of what I call affective social commentary – a commentary based on empathy for the experiences of many kinds of people, with a focus on the domestic sphere women were expected to inhabit. By writing in a sentimental style, Fern performed the emotional supportiveness expected of a woman while still managing to question many of the social norms of mid-nineteenth-century society and to make her readers laugh. The need delicately to balance the expression of her own ideas of progressive change with the demands of public scrutiny of a woman writer led to a finely tuned double-coding, in which she presented one patriarchyfriendly message on the surface while slyly forwarding more subversive messages to her female readers. In an 1856 column called ‘Foolish Fashions’, for example, Fern admonished wives for focusing too much on keeping up with the latest fashions while their husbands worked to support them: Dress is horribly overdone in New York. Can’t some pretty, distinguished, and sensible woman have mercy on us, and head a reform? I defy her to walk Broadway, on a sunshiny day, between one and four, in a shilling de laine, three shilling straw bonnet, and woolen shawl! I dare her to go to the springs, in ‘the height of the season,’ with no jewels but the diamonds in her eyes, and but two dresses, and those of the aforementioned de laine or calico. Heavens! how the upstart, overdressed, and liveried-equipage descendants of cobblers and butchers would stare! What a rebuke to their vulgar, ostentatious display of dry goods and diamonds!26

Many men would have responded favourably to this message, but hidden within the critique was a subtly feminist message that women should be allowed to wear sensible, functional clothes instead of mindlessly chasing restrictive fashion trends. The same article, then, could appeal to women looking for support for wearing more loose-fitting, comfortable clothes, and to their conservative husbands, who would see the piece as recommending a tradition of thrift passed down through puritan generations, and picked up by the male transcendentalist writers of Fern’s day, Thoreau and Emerson.27 Fern’s message was egalitarian (men shouldn’t bear all the weight of supporting their families  –  meaning women must be allowed to work and paid fair wages) as well as anti-materialist, but it held onto enough of the language of the traditionalists to, generally, skate under the radar of those wishing to demonize a radical female writer. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 177. Fanny Fern, ‘Foolish Fashions’, New York Ledger, 27 December 1856. 27 See Carole Moses, ‘The Domestic Transcendentalism of Fanny Fern’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 1 (2007): 90–119. 25 26

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When she was demonized, her relative anonymity gave her enough distance from her work to avoid threats to her physical person. Well aware of the double standard by which successful women were evaluated solely in terms of gender, Fern occasionally spoke out more forcefully. In one Ledger column in 1861, she addressed patriarchal views of female businesswomen: There are few people who speak approbatively of a woman who has a smart business talent or capability. No matter how isolated or destitute her condition, the majority would consider it more ‘feminine’ would she unobtrusively gather up her thimble, and, retiring into some out of-the-way place, gradually scoop out her coffin with it, than to develop that smart turn for business which would lift her at once out of her troubles; and which, in a man so situated, would be applauded as exceedingly praiseworthy.28

This passage is more directly confrontational than most of the Fanny Fern columns, though it also employs a touch of humour to remove the sting of her critique. Keeping her audience in mind, she wrote in a conversational, plain-spoken voice, avoiding complex allusions, metaphors or even vocabulary that might turn off less educated readers, and often upheld traditional views of domesticity and religion while introducing progressive, at times radical, ideas to weekly subscribers of the New York Ledger. Fern was well aware of the domestic sphere she entered with her columns, and of the places where her work might be shared – columns would be read at the breakfast table, or after the evening meal, often by more than one member of a family. In this awareness of community, she differed from the transcendentalists with whom she shared the ideals of nature, anti-materialism and self-reliance. Fern found ways to exploit the dominant conventions of white femininity and domesticity in order to shield herself from the watchful eyes of patriarchy and celebrity culture while still gaining financial independence from men and making her voice heard in newspapers.

Nellie Bly and the New Woman More than thirty years after Fanny Fern moved to New York to write for the Ledger, another young female journalist broke into the New York publishing scene using an intoxicating combination of sentiment and publicity. Elizabeth Cochran, or ‘Nellie Bly’ as she came to be known, appeared in print from 1887 in Joseph Pulitzer’s splashy new-journalism-laden daily newspaper, the New York World, with a willingness either to traverse gender boundaries or to lean on female stereotypes of sentimentality, depending on which would serve her most in the moment. Her electric career writing for the World provides an example of publicity’s power to open male spaces Fanny Fern, ‘A Bit of Injustice’, New York Ledger, 8 June 1861.

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to female journalists in the late nineteenth century, allowing for transgressive gender performances by removing the journalist from the quotidian world and placing her in an imaginative realm of shared identity construction. Bly was born during the US Civil War in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, a town named for her father, a wealthy landowner and judge who died when Bly was six. Because of the unprotected legal status of widows, Bly’s mother found herself in straitened circumstances when her much older husband died intestate, leaving her without the resources to support herself and her five children. Bly grew up helping her mother run a boarding house to pay the bills. Before she was a full-fledged adult, she had seen the results of the paternalistic system of coverture on her own mother. In 1885 she wrote an angry response to a Pittsburg Dispatch article on women’s role as ‘a helpmeet to man’29 and so impressed the editor, George A. Madden, that he offered her a columnist job, and a pseudonym to go with it. The atmosphere in which Bly began her work as an investigative reporter in New York was the product of several merging phenomena. The first was a substantial increase in newspapers in the latter half of the nineteenth century – between 1860 and 1890, annual newspaper subscriptions in the United States increased by 1.85 million on average every year, while the number of newspapers rose from 1,525 in 1860 to 6,261 by the end of 1890.30 This time also saw growing reform movements, often led by women’s clubs, a reluctant opening of the profession of journalism to women and the rise of American celebrity writers. Jean Marie Lutes remarks that, ‘no matter how well she knew her stuff, the front-page girl could not escape those garish lights; the best she could do was to function under them. Newspaper women thus crafted a journalistic legacy by subjecting both themselves and their news reports to the stark glare of publicity’.31 Bly embraced this spotlight from the beginning of her career, centring her personal perspective on the events on which she reported, and focusing on the sensational and the scandalous – and in doing so, performed the work of an activist for improved conditions for women in factories, mental asylums and more. Finding herself boxed in by society-page assignments at her first reporting job at the Pittsburg Dispatch, she escaped in 1885 by travelling to Mexico, accompanied by her mother for propriety (the last time she would bother with such efforts), and sending back dispatches to her editor in Pittsburgh. This months-long trip yielded Bly’s first travel writing (later published as Six Months in Mexico in 1888) and established the straightforward first-person style she would later become known for in her New York City-based newspaper writing. Bly’s technique in this early work, mirrored later in Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890), was to position herself as equal to the reader, not as an expert but an approachable young woman who could take you along on her adventures. She sold the image (at least Erasmus Wilson [‘Quiet Observer’], ‘What Woman Was Made For’, Pittsburg Dispatch, 24 January 1885. 30 William A. Dill, ‘Growth of Newspapers in the United States’ (MA diss., University of Oregon, 1928), 18. 31 Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1–2. 29

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in this initial project) of a respectable, funny, daring person who did not aggressively threaten dominant ideas of a woman’s place but gently pushed the boundaries in order to assert her independence. In chapter one of Six Months in Mexico, Bly describes riding the train south and west from Pennsylvania to Mexico and the farmers she sees at work along the way. She comments: And the cowboys! I shall never forget the first real, live cowboy I saw on the plains … They wore immense sombreros, huge spurs, and had lassos hanging to the side of their saddles. I knew they were cowboys, so, jerking off a red scarf I waved it to them. I was not quite sure how they would respond. From the thrilling and wicked stories I had read, I fancied they might begin shooting at me as quickly as anything else. However, I was surprised and delighted to see them lift their sombreros … and urge their horses into a mad run after us.32

Stacey Gaines Parham argues that in her Mexico dispatches Bly ‘sought to dispel the stereotypes that she thought unjustly characterized the Mexican culture and people. She represented the country in a factual manner, sharing narratives about the people’s habits, values, customs, and politics.’33 To modern ears, Bly’s descriptions of Mexico and its people may sound romantic and stereotypical, but they crucially avoid the racist overtones present in so much of the writing of Bly’s contemporaries. While her trip can be seen as part of a wider American expansionist project, her columns also pushed against the more typical satirical perspective of American travel writers, such as Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad (1869). By referring to ‘the thrilling and wicked stories’ she had read about cowboys, Bly establishes a connection with her audience built on common ideas of the cowboy in the public imagination. Her brief interaction with the men is described from the position of a friend relaying a believable, though exciting, story. Although Bly was not a household name when her dispatches from Mexico were printed, the trip established her voice as the kind of friendly guide the newspaper-reading public of the time desired. She thus entered the territory of what Richard Schickel calls ‘favored symbolic figures’, giving readers what Leo Braudy refers to as the ‘new quality of psychic connection’ with their object of fascination.34 Bly’s dispatches forged a bond of friendship between her and her readers, a key step in developing the perception of intimacy so important to nineteenth-century readers. While she had not yet risen to fame, her candour and vulnerability in print formed the basis for her coming popularity. As Schickel writes of the growth of celebrity figures in the late nineteenth century, ‘People began to Nellie Bly, Six Months in Mexico (New York: American Publishers Corporation, 1888), 6. Stacey Gaines Parham, ‘Nellie Bly, “the Best Reporter in America”: One Woman’s Rhetorical Legacy’ (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2010), 46. 34 Schickel, Intimate Strangers, 31; Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 380. 32 33

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need familiar figures they could carry about in their minds as they moved out and moved up, a sort of portable community as it were, containing representations of good values, interesting traits, a certain amount of within-bounds attractiveness, glamour, even deviltry.’35 Six Months in Mexico began to establish the space in the public imagination Bly would fully occupy four years later when, after a brief but illustrious career as an undercover investigative reporter in New York, she would return to travel writing in the form of a race around the world for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World  –  this time with a well-known byline and accompanying photographs. The years between the Mexico trip and the round-the-world race saw Bly build her reputation through exposés of derelict city institutions and illegal businesses. Most notable was her first set of articles for Pulitzer, which later became her second book, Ten Days in a MadHouse. This chronicled Bly’s undercover experiences in a mental asylum for women. It accomplished several ends at once: it demonstrated the journalistic necessity of Bly’s body – no man could have gotten himself admitted to the Blackwell Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum – and communicated to editors that intrepid female reporters were not only acceptable, but essential. Bly’s genuinely brave effort challenged ideas that women needed men’s protection or that women’s journalism meant reporting on society luncheons and fashion trends. It also fell under the umbrella of women’s reform projects, giving Bly a gender-based justification for undergoing the ordeal in the call to moral superiority made by the lingering doctrine of ‘true womanhood’. The series also illustrated Bly’s willingness to put herself in harm’s way for a story, providing readers with a thrilling perspective that no one who merely conducted interviews could have offered, and thus generated hunger for more articles with her byline. In chapter eight from her Mad-House series, ‘Inside the Mad-House’, Bly describes waiting to see the doctor responsible for diagnosing women as insane and sentencing them to the asylum.36 She overhears several perfectly sane-sounding women sentenced for crimes such as not speaking English or having suffered a recent illness. Before even being officially committed, Bly has identified a form of abuse against women, and she enters the asylum with her eyes open for more examples, dozens of which she soon spots and records. The Mad-House series led to real changes in the management of the asylum after a grand jury opened an investigation in response to her articles, evidence that female journalists could be agents of social change. This publication marked the start of Bly’s careful flirtation with publicity. It was crucial to her success that her pseudonymous byline be front and centre in all her articles, preferably in the titles themselves, but it was just as crucial that her face remain unknown, since her undercover work required her to enter buildings unrecognized. Only if she performed her role impeccably would the ruse succeed, and with it, the resulting article. The combination of verbal visibility and visual obscurity was a difficult balancing act but one that forcefully chipped away at gendered expectations. Schickel, Intimate Strangers, 31. Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House; or, Nellie Bly’s Experience on Blackwell’s Island (New York: Norman L. Munro, 1887), 49–53.

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Her commitment to authorial activism is evident in her continued choice of subject matter, and the effectiveness of her work is clear when one observes the very real social reforms sometimes implemented in the wake of her reporting. At the same time, Bly’s personal approach, focus on her physical experience and frequent use of ‘I’, as well as the pathos inherent in her subject matter, pull readers into her narratives. Between 1887 and 1889 Bly interviewed a murderer, went undercover as a human trafficker and exposed a matrimonial agency and dozens of contradictory doctors offering to cure her recurring headaches. Karen Roggenkamp argues that Bly’s emphasis on her own subjectivity in her writing, along with her sentimental reformist style, indicates that her aims had more to do with enhancing her own publicity than with furthering social causes.37 For example, in an 1887 piece in the World entitled ‘What Becomes of Babies?’, Bly reports on the business of selling unwanted infants. Considering the pathos inherent in the subject, it is difficult to ignore the eight references to herself that Bly makes in her account of a visit to a doctor rumoured to sell infants: Dr. Hawker, of No. 21 West Thirteenth street, has a suggestive advertisement. I thought from that he might know something on the subject I wished to investigate, so I called on him. The door opened in response to my knock, and a well-dressed, short man, with a bald head, looked out over his glasses at me. I saw a young man in the office, so I said, with a blush not at all assumed: ‘I want to speak with you privately, please.’38

Rather than focusing on the fate of the unfortunate infants, the reader turns her attention to the reporter’s vulnerability in speaking to this unknown man. As Roggenkamp points out, while previous female journalists had relied upon sentimental tropes to justify their roles in newspaper writing (the logic being that women connected emotionally with their subjects and therefore were well equipped to conduct interviews with and report on the downtrodden), Bly used it to elicit ‘a sympathy of the marketplace’ for herself as the intrepid feminine reporter, thus enhancing her own notoriety with each article she wrote on a daring or off-limits subject.39 However, I see in Bly’s work a further strategy. Writing under a pseudonym meant that she was already one step removed from her audience; by using an intimate first-person rhetorical style, she drew her readers in close, inviting them to see themselves in her experiences, inviting them to care. Gunn writes of Fern that she ‘works to promote the experience of publicity as an antidote to the fiction of idealized and always limited models of selfhood’.40 Bly, on the other hand, works to promote her own writerly persona to the same ends. Bly’s Karen Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2016), 73–101. 38 Nellie Bly, ‘What Becomes of Babies?’, New York World, 6 November 1887. 39 Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, and Crime, 101. 40 Gunn, ‘“How I Look”’, 25. 37

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journalism was self-referential and heavily reliant on pathos, but her work also led to material improvements in women’s lives – those she wrote about, but also those she wrote for. Her example as a daring female journalist who appeared to go everywhere and cover everything, danger and propriety be damned, put into the world the idea that a woman not only could venture into the public sphere, but that one had, and that the sun had kept on rising. In late 1889, two years after her Mad-House series ran, Bly accepted an assignment from Pulitzer, whose newspaper sales were lagging, to travel around the world as a stunt to see if she could beat Jules Verne’s fictional Phineas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). She accepted, spending a single day preparing her luggage (a single handbag) and clothing (one plaid travel suit which would soon become her trademark look) before setting off for England to begin her trek. This project saw Bly make her most daring breach of gender norms yet, circumnavigating the globe unchaperoned. While Bly’s pen name had been well-known for two years (unlike most female journalists of the day, her byline appeared at the top of her articles in the World), her face had remained anonymous, which had facilitated her continued undercover reporting. Now Bly achieved face recognition, elevating her celebrity even as it undid her future as an undercover reporter. In taking on a high-profile round-the-world adventure, Bly, knowingly or not, stepped out of her former role of notorious intrepid stunt reporter and into a brighter and less stable celebrity identity which would exist in the consciousness of those who imagined her.

Conclusion The use of pseudonyms was not restricted to female writers in the nineteenth century. Hannah details dozens of examples of pseudonymous male writers of the time, suggesting a range of reasons why men would choose to publish under alternative names, including women’s names.41 What, we might ask, was the legacy of female writers’ liberal use of pseudonyms in the same period? Scholars may consider whether there was a broader result of dozens of women publishing under pseudonyms, and if the trend contributed in some way to their historical literary erasure. For Fern and Bly, their pen names allowed them to work more freely: Fern was able to escape oppressive treatment from family members and store away earnings, while Bly was able to expose myriad instances of exploitation and abuse – essential affordances for their lives, certainly, but perhaps not free of cost. Both writers were able to exert influence in the public sphere by writing in recognizable, affective first-person rhetorical styles which connected powerfully with their readers; both gained enormous popularity, transcending the bounds of ‘woman’ to reach the multivalent, unstable zone of ‘celebrity’, and in doing so broadening the possibilities for

Hannah, ‘Male Use of a Female Pseudonym’.

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future women’s lives by troubling gender codes. Even as hegemonic forces worked to further restrict the rights of women, Black people, Native Americans and immigrants, new destabilizing cultural forces like the rising phenomenon of celebrity also emerged. The nineteenth century opened up new modes of technology and transportation, and with them new modes of thinking and new modes of feeling. In that tempest, female writers subverted the ‘cult of true womanhood’ by appearing to embrace it while stretching its terms near to breaking.

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9

The Critical Pedagogy of Fiction in Democratic Public Spheres Odile Heynders

Several arguments underline democracy’s current fatigue: former right- and left-wing discourses have blurred since the 1990s; voters lack the competence to make complex (trans)national political decisions; politicians are deliberately lying or declaring that they ‘have no active memory’ of recent decisions;1 governments are not always capable of designing good laws; and the fundamental practice of democracy – prescribing norms for legitimate disagreement – is not functioning well.2 In one of the most staggering examples of democracy in decline, in early 2021 supporters of Donald Trump attacked the Capitol Building in Washington DC, stimulated by Trump’s own tweets. The rioters tried to overturn the outcome of democratic presidential elections. In response, historian Timothy Snyder argues that social media ‘supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true’; Trump has created an ‘electoral fiction’.3 Democracy only works when citizens accept different points of view, and are free and willing to understand the divergences. For Snyder, Trump is ‘post-truth’ in provoking an overwhelming spectacle that disturbs civil society. He warns that ‘if we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions’.4

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared this in parliament. See Jon Henley, ‘Dutch Government Resigns Over Child Benefits Scandal’, Guardian, 15 January 2021, www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/jan/15/dutch-government-resigns-over-child-benefits-scandal. 2 See Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Cass R. Sunstein, #republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Yascha Mounk, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018); Shany Mor, ‘Nobody Understands Democracy Anymore’, Tablet Magazine, 13 August 2019, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/ articles/nobody-understands-democracy-anymore. 3 Timothy Snyder, ‘The American Abyss: A Historian of Fascism and Political Atrocity on Trump and What Comes Next’, New York Times Magazine, January 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/ magazine/trump-coup.html. 4 Snyder, ‘The American Abyss’. 1

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‘Abstractions and fictions’ are related to ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’, widespread terms now used by commentators, activists and politicians alike to scold critical news organizations.5 Both terms reveal distrust, and mark specific belief systems. Fake news is based on dis- or misinformation and on claiming ‘alternative facts’.6 As Silvio Waisbord claims, today ‘certain belief communities seem pretty content upholding fictions, refusing to engage with other epistemologies, and/or endorsing politics aimed at purging difference’.7 Since writers of fiction are interested in constructing and disentangling truths and untruths, this chapter approaches fake news via literary fiction, while demonstrating the perspectives and modes of narrative description and the a/effectivity of imaginary thinking. Knowledge of the distinctive epistemology of fiction, I argue, can help citizens in democratic societies to prepare better for manipulation and the feigning of information. After a short conceptualization of fiction and fake news, I will work out this argument by focusing on two case studies: first the writing of Valeria Luiselli (b. 1983), whose work illustrates that strategies of realist description and imaginary thinking relate to the context of political truths and responsibilities. Second, I will analyse two essays by Peter Pomerantsev (b. 1977), a British journalist and scholar who uses fictional modes in documentary texts in order to make sense of disinformation and propaganda in the current media world.

Fiction as Genre and Medium Fiction, as it has been understood since the eighteenth century, is both a narrative genre and a medium. It entails a ‘nonreferential narrative text’, something ‘invented’,8 and aims to represent the world, but also embraces ‘fabulation’ or ‘partiality’.9 Fiction connects the real to an ‘as if ’ world, while using, in Antoine Compagnon’s words, ‘the same referential mechanisms as the nonfictional uses of language’.10 It is simultaneously supposed to represent and invent  –  as Darstellung and Vorstellung11  –  to evoke and comprehend the world with all the cognitive operations involved.

Silvio Waisbord, ‘Truth Is What Happens to News: On Journalism, Fake News, and Post-Truth’, Journalism Studies 19, no. 13 (2018): 1867. 6 The term ‘alternative facts’ was used by US Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a press meeting on 22 January 2017. See Colin Burrow, ‘Fiction and the Age of Lies’, London Review of Books, 9 February 2020. 7 Waisbord, ‘Truth Is What Happens to News’, 1875. 8 Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1. 9 Ivan Jablonka, History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences, trans. Nathan J. Bracher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 183. 10 Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 99–100. 11 Christopher Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 4. 5

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As Raymond Williams makes clear, fiction is rooted in modern bourgeois culture, from which ideas of aesthetic and imaginative truth emerged. A new concept of literature was developed: imaginative and emotive fiction was an answer to the objectivity of industrial capitalism.12 In fiction, events and characters are elucidated in descriptions that contextualize and symbolize at the same time. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels praised the social and historical critique that could be found in the novels of Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’.13 That the narrative was invented did not limit its capacity for truth. In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn argues that fiction has two ‘interrelated distinguishing features: (1) its references to the world outside the text are not bound to accuracy; and (2) it does not refer exclusively to the real world outside the text.’ While fiction might represent the actual world, and offer imaginative manipulation of more or less well-known facts, it should not be subjected to simple ‘judgments of truth and falsity’.14 ‘The principal process by which fiction alters the actual world’, Cohn continues, is by ‘implanting within it’ made-up characters. Indeed, it is ‘fiction’s unique potential for presenting characters’ that dissolves ‘its connections with the real world outside the text’, providing readers with insight into certain realities. Indeed, fiction, for Cohn, involves a ‘distinctive epistemology that allows a narrator to know what cannot be known in the real world and in narratives that target representations of the real world: the inner life of his figures’.15 The boundaries between fictional, historical, (auto)biographical and referential writing have always been permeable and have been investigated and challenged by authors from Gustave Flaubert to Michel Houellebecq, from Virginia Woolf to Rachel Cusk. Fiction, then, is a genre concept as well as a medium of representation, developed over the past two hundred years from Balzac’s realist description to Karl Ove Knausgård’s hyperrealist self-reflection. During this development, the aesthetic principle of representation aiming at verisimilitude has been fundamentally transformed. As Roland Barthes underlines, fiction produces reality effects but does not aim to reproduce the real, concrete or objective world.16 Fiction and reality must be distinguished but are interrelated as well, since aesthetic satisfaction lies in the acknowledgement of the imagination as intelligible and poly-interpretable. Writers of fiction know how to create realist description  –  think of the exquisite details in Flaubert – but while they are consciously creating and evoking, they know that they are not imitating things as they are.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 48–51, 54. 13 Quoted in Williams, Marxism and Literature, 201. 14 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 15. 15 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 16. 16 Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, ed. Francois Wahl, trans. Richard Howard (1969; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148. 12

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In the bourgeois sphere in which modern fiction emerged, readers were trained to reflect on it critically. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous phrase ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is often brought up in this context and can be understood as a recommendation to readers to suspend distrust and go along in their imaginations with expressed judgements and doctrines from which they would dissent in the ‘ordinary’ world.17 The invitation is for readers to follow the writer, and to try to comprehend her as far as possible, without immediately rejecting the world she presents or evokes.

Fake News in Current Public Spheres While fiction is an established cultural genre and medium, fake news is a trendy term from the last decade. Since the 2016 American elections, fake news has been identified as a global phenomenon, as it is related to disinformation in public spheres, particularly online. Spreading false or misleading information is as old as human society, but today’s digital world has proven a fertile ground for the circulation of intentionally false and disturbing news. While philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote suggests abandoning the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, since they are ‘linguistically defective: they do not have stable public meanings’,18 Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou emphasize that the discursive use of the terms is important. Inspired by Ernesto Laclau, they describe fake news as a ‘floating signifier’: ‘a signifier used by fundamentally different and in many ways deeply opposing political projects as a means of constructing political identities, conflicts and antagonisms.’19 Fake news is based on the manipulation of facts, on implementing disinformation and provoking ressentiment in certain groups of people. Radical-right politicians, such as Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands or Éric Zemmour in France, use fake news, fake history or fake science to influence their followers, attack the core values of journalistic practice and ethics and communicate an anti-democratic ideology. In particular in the context of Covid-19, faking news and denying facts was a way to get media attention. The status of fake news as floating signifier enables it to articulate different hegemonic projects: as Sander van der Linden et al. have shown, ‘well-known liberal outlets (e.g. CNN) are described as “fake news” by conservatives and, in turn, well-known conservative outlets (e.g. Fox News) are described as “fake news” by liberals.’20 Fake news resonates with and reproduces pre-existing fears and doubts.21 See Michael Tomko, ‘Politics, Performance, and Coleridge’s “Suspension of Disbelief ”’, Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 241–9. 18 Joshua Habgood-Coote, ‘Stop Talking about Fake News!’, Inquiry 62, no. 9–10 (2019): 1033–65, 1034. 19 Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, ‘Fake News as Floating Signifier: Hegemony, Antagonism and the Politics of Falsehood’, Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 25, no. 3 (2018): 298–314, 300; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 20 Sander van der Linden et al., ‘You Are Fake News: Political Bias in Perceptions of Fake News’, Media, Culture & Society 42, no. 3 (2020): 460–70. 21 Farkas and Schou, ‘Fake News as Floating Signifier’, 309. 17

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A possible question to ask now is this: what are the differences and similarities between fake news and fiction? The answer brings some further clarification. First, the intention of fiction is to create a plausible worldview, while the intention of spreading fake news is deception. The difference between Vorstellung and deception is absolute. Second, fiction is framed in a certain way: there is always the paratext, signalling that the literary novel should not be read as a true story.22 Readers have learned to register the paratextual signals and to be aware of real or referential issues discussed in the narrative. The writer has a contract with the reader, so to speak: ‘this is my creation of the world’. Around fake news, however, there is no paratext framing the text as fabricated and thus warning the recipient to be aware of counterfactual representation and fantasy. Fake news is deliberately misleading. The producer of fake news intends to lie, while the producer of fiction intends to create a specific perspective on the world. The spreader of fake news, however, does not always know that it is misleading, while the reader of fiction is aware of the narrative, made-up frame. Third, fiction is a textual artefact; fake news is either a specific statement shared online or just an indicative term articulated in a discursive context to evoke hassle and emotion. Take, for instance, Thierry Baudet’s claim that the eight o’clock news on Dutch public television is ‘fake news’,23 or Donald Trump’s tweet on 25 April 2020: ‘What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!’24 Fiction and fake news thus differ in intention, paratext and textual nature but are similar in the presentation of an unreal perspective. In a positive sense, both fiction and fake news stimulate reflection on how the world is represented, imagined and evoked. In a negative sense, both build up a barrier that asserts: ‘this is not the real world’. In fiction this barrier is an invitation to cross over; in fake news it is a closing door blocking other perspectives. According to Cass Sunstein, the remedy for people who too easily believe in the feigning of facts is pluriformity in media reports and more information about how other people are living and thinking.25 I would add that a remedy can be found in literary education, by which people are made aware that fictional stories, while potentially critical and subversive, offer reality effects and imaginary scenarios, and that the reader should be an active respondent instead of a passive follower. Educated

The term ‘paratext’ was coined by Gérard Genette and refers to the material outside of a narrative: preface, title, blurbs on the book cover, etc. Paratexts have the capacity to inflect the way we interpret a narrative; they are also used in the context of cultural artefacts such as films, games or plays. 23 See Menno van Dongen, ‘NOS boos op WNL over “fake news-Journaal”-opmerking van Baudet’ (NOS angry at WNL about ‘fake news’ statement by Baudet), deVolkskrant, 3 March 2021, www. volkskrant.nl/cs-baed950f. 24 See Lieven Goes et al., ‘“America first, build the wall en fake news”: dit was vier jaar president Trump, samengevat in acht thema’s’ (‘America first, build the wall and fake news’: this was four years of President Trump, summarized in eight themes), VRT, 24 October 2020, www.vrt.be/vrtnws/ nl/2020/10/19/overzicht-4-jaar-trump/. 25 Sunstein, #republic, 1–58. 22

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readers are capable of recognizing the permeability of factual and fictional elements in a narrative. Knowing how fiction works is important in a democracy. Therefore, in what follows, I will take a step towards a pedagogy of fiction, by describing and analysing works of fiction by two contemporary authors.

Fiction Encapsulating Non-Fiction Valeria Luiselli’s oeuvre entails a fascinating complex of referential description and fictionalized characters, a dynamic of documentation and imagination. The author was born in Mexico City, brought up in several countries, accompanying her father on his diplomatic posts, and currently lives in New York City. She wrote the auto-fictional novel Faces in the Crowd (2011), the absurdist novel The Story of My Teeth (2013), an urban essay, Sidewalks (2010), and a political essay on the US federal immigration court, Tell Me How It Ends (2017), which, two years later, was rewritten into the novel Lost Children Archive (2019). The rewriting of an essay into a novel is an intriguing practice in the context of an investigation into fiction and fake: what is Luiselli, who has achieved a superstar status in the United States but is less celebrated in Mexico,26 doing exactly when reworking the political essay, and why does she choose the fictional novel format to recreate what she has documented before? Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is based on Luiselli’s experiences as an assistant to immigration lawyers, interviewing undocumented child migrants crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. ‘Between April 2014 and August 2015’, she writes, ‘more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the [US] border.’27 In her essay, Luiselli describes the injustices done to these children, framing this first-person account with the narrative of a journey she made with her family in the summer of 2014 to the southwest of the United States, while positioning herself as interpreter, mother and ‘non-resident alien’ waiting for a green card in New York. It is her young daughter who keeps asking the question ‘tell me how it ends’, providing the essay with its title.28 The problem, obviously, is that there is no end to migratory movements. The essay is constructed around the forty questions used in the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied youth migrants in the New York federal immigration court, where Luiselli started working as a volunteer in 2015, helping children to fill in the form and translating their stories from Spanish into English. The stories are broken and do not follow a narrative order, as Luiselli points out: most have ‘no beginning, no middle, and no end.’29 The forty questions addressing minor migrants ‘reveal … a colder, more

Cheyla Rose Samuelson, ‘Towards a Transnational Criticism: Bridging the Mexico-US Divide on Valeria Luiselli’, Chasqui 49, no. 2 (2020): 180. 27 Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (London: Fourth Estate, 2017), 38. 28 Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 8. 29 Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 7. 26

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cynical and brutal reality’, from the first question. ‘Why did you come to the United States?’,30 to the last, ‘Who would take care of you if you were to return to your home country?’31 Luiselli writes all the questions down and reports the individual narratives of the young detainees she interviews. Most of them do not have documents and come from ‘poor and violent towns in three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras’. One boy has an aunt in Hempstead, New York, which is why he came to the United States. He grew up with his grandmother and his two cousins, but had to escape from the gangs. Luiselli asks him question thirty-four, ‘Did you ever have trouble with gangs or crime in your home country?’, and receives an affirmative answer: he had to run from the gangs when his close friend was murdered. He is now enrolled in high school, but even there members of the gang ‘beat him up’: ‘Hempstead is a shithole full of pandilleros, just like Tegucigalpa’.32 Luiselli uses the experiences of real children and youths to build up her essay as an ‘achievement of activism’.33 ‘The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the US border’, she asserts, ‘are not “immigrants”, not “illegals”, not merely “undocumented minors” [but] refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum’.34 Their shared real-life stories are about trauma, exhaustion and mistrust, and all Luiselli can do is fill in the intake questionnaires and help the young people to build a defence against deportation. Tell Me How It Ends was characterized by critics as non-fiction and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Two years later, Luiselli published a reworking of the essay’s material in the road novel Lost Children Archive. This novel – her first in English – reshapes and fictionalizes the story of the family trip to Arizona. The forty questions are not mentioned in the novel, but much of the material is reused in the narrative context. Lost Children Archive is a hybrid artwork, in which the essay is reassembled into an extensive work, not only a travelogue and a family saga, but also a reflection on the reading of other works.35 The novel combines fictional and documentary forms in a composition of four ‘parts’ (divided into subsections and many short paragraphs) and seven ‘boxes’ of material from notebooks (loose ideas, reading notes, maps, photographs, etc.). Every paragraph has an indicative title (‘Archive’, ‘Alone Together’, ‘Airplane’, ‘Light’, ‘Foundational Myths’, etc.). Three narrative threads are woven through this composition. First, there is autofiction, the story of a summer journey to Arizona, told from the point of view of an unnamed mother, who evidently replicates Luiselli as the author of the essay. She and her husband travel by car with their children, planning to make documentary sound recordings. She collects stories of migrant children stranded at detainee centres

Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 10, 7. Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 8. 32 Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 82–4. 33 James Wood, ‘Writing about Writing about the Border Crisis’, The New Yorker, 4 February 2019. 34 Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends, 90. 35 See Alexandra Kingston-Reese, ‘The Individual Reader’, Critique 62, no. 4 (2021): 428–43. 30 31

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at the Texas border, while her husband aims at recording the sounds (of cemeteries, wind and birds) of the last Apaches in the Chiricahua Mountains. The details of family life en route to the south evoke an unpretentious happiness: they go to restaurants, visit places like Graceland and listen to audiobooks. The mother figure constantly ponders her documentary project on the lost children. In her free hours she reads Walt Whitman, Nathalie Léger, Susan Sontag and many others, while reflecting on writing and family life. The second narrative is the fictional story of the ten-year-old boy and his fiveyear-old sister – told from the perspective of the boy – when they start travelling on their own to find lost children. The two child characters, escaping their parents and their increasingly unhappy marriage, become lost like the migrant minors. The fiction resonates with real-life experiences. On a third level of narration, there are the ‘Elegies for Lost Children’: fifteen passages of a novel-within-the-novel ‘quoted’ from the Italian writer Ella Camposanto. This author is invented by Luiselli, with the quotations presented as lost pieces of text read by the mother of the family. Again, this fictional strategy adds to the complexity of the narrative. A final compositional manoeuvre is that the novel ends, in a Sebaldian way, with ‘Box VII’, in which there are twentyfour polaroids of the journey taken by the young boy. These randomly combined ‘real’ photographs emphasize that the narrative is driven by the act of bearing witness, even when witnessing will not lead to immediate representation and understanding. The father works on his recording of Apache sounds, the mother collects the individual stories of migrants and the boy captures pictures with his camera to bring the story finally to an end – even if there is not a clear beginning, middle and conclusion – and so refers back to the essay title Tell Me How It Ends.36 The layering of the novel reveals a process of rewriting that complicates the referential and political claims of the text. Various critics have underlined the novel’s intriguing play with fiction and reality: Lost Children Archive ‘endeavors to find a new way to “document” the present’37 and is ‘supremely aware of its limitations, even hesitant of blending fact and fiction’,38 while ‘evidenc[ing] an impatience with traditional realist artifice and convention’ and demonstrating that ‘such formal radicalism is inevitably in search of its own realism’.39 Another reviewer argues that the novel ‘resists the idea that fiction must be instrumentally useful, must be able to affect political change’.40 Constructing a novel on the foundation of a political essay, I argue, results in writing that reflects purposefully on the potential of fiction, the interconnection of writing and reading, and the politics of literature.41 In an explicit metafictional passage

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (London: Fourth Estate, 2017). Claire Messud, ‘At the Border of the Novel’, New York Review of Books, 21 March 2019. 38 Dennis Zhou, review of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, The White Review, May 2019, www. thewhitereview.org/reviews/valeria-luisellis-lost-children-archive/. 39 Wood, ‘Writing about Writing about the Border Crisis’. 40 Kingston-Reese, ‘The Individual Reader’, 440. 41 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010). 36 37

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in the first part of the novel, ‘Narrative Arc’, the mother writes about her sound project, a deliberation which can be taken as contemplating Luiselli’s own project: Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again: isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolute ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in the radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward.42

This raises various concerns: while reflecting on the conditions of her project, the narrator thinks about the world beyond the fiction, on the consequences the fiction could have for the world. The inside and outside of the literary text become permeable: there is no end to the story of migration but there is an end to the literary narrative, while, conversely, migration ‘ends’ in a fictional story of the boy and girl found by their parents. The connections between reality and imagination are dynamic. Everything that the mother thinks and reads informs rumination by Luiselli herself, experimenting with writing practices to tell stories of loss and displacement. The novel is a mixture of genres: autofiction, travelogue, documentary and an account of intellectual reading. As such it offers, as Luiselli suggested, ‘a strategy to help readers identify with the action’ or political responsibility it invokes,43 while simultaneously questioning its own value as activist writing by a privileged author gathering the stories of disadvantaged others. What is at stake in Luiselli’s work is that this is not a fictional novel ‘about immigration but a novel with immigration’, as the writer explains in an interview.44 What we can learn from her oeuvre is that we, in order to understand the world, should not construct a dichotomy of fiction versus realism, or art versus politics, but open ourselves to an assemblage of facts and fiction. Luiselli, Lost Children Archive, 79. Emma Brockes, interview with Valeria Luiselli, ‘Children Chase after Life, Even If It Ends Up Killing Them’, Guardian, 8 March 2019. 44 Valeria Luiselli and Scott Simon, ‘Valeria Luiselli on the “Lost Children Archive”’, NPR, 9 March 2019, www.npr.org/2019/03/09/701838156/valeria-luiselli-on-the-lost-children-archive. 42 43

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Unreal Realities: Peter Pomerantsev’s Cultural Analyses The second case study, offering a further reflection on the mechanisms of fiction, involves Peter Pomerantsev’s essays on Russia and the war of information, entitled Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (2015) and This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019). The author combines memoir, interviews and documentary description, pursuing an understanding of the complexities of reality and truth in the current media world. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an essayistic account of the mediascape – more precisely the television industry – in Russia, where Pomerantsev worked from 2006 to the 2010s. Born in the UK to Russian émigré parents, Pomerantsev was educated in the UK and Germany and, from 2006, spent several years in Russia as a producer of television documentaries. In his essay, based on interviews for his television work, he gauges social changes in Russia and people’s perspectives on the future. Just as in Luiselli’s work, a view on social transformations and consequences is given via the stories of others. Beginning as an observer looking in at Russia, Pomerantsev gradually becomes immersed in the country and perceives a growing unrest: in Russia ‘reality [is] somehow malleable’.45 Many people he meets seem to live in a world that they do not take seriously. The huge difference between the Soviet past and the Russian present makes people aware of the carnivalesque nature of the real. Describing young women working as prostitutes in expensive clubs in Moscow, Pomerantsev makes clear how money has transformed Russian society over the last decades, how prosperity is insecure and unreal. Many suddenly wealthy Russians continue to imitate the lives of ordinary people, creating a world of illusion and performance. Reality is not real but resembles the ultimate TV show: people act and happily change roles and costumes. This is demonstrated in a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin adviser. ‘Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show’, Pomerantsev notes, having inherited ‘a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of coopting anti-state actors … all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR’.46 Surkov is a ‘Kremlin demiurge’ but also ‘an aesthete who pens essays on modern art, an aficionado of gangsta rap’, who writes novels and rock lyrics. He ‘seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching modernisation to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out wilfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy”, “conservative modernisation”’.47 When the regime changed, the people in wealthy positions had to change as well and did not have scruples about exploiting others and becoming extremely rich. The heroes of today accept ‘that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position of belief is mutable’.48 Pomerantsev’s description of Russia is chilling, but the Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 7. 46 Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True, 77–8. 47 Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True, 87. 48 Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True, 4. 45

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nihilism and disinterest of many are countered by others who know exactly how to cope and survive. Where Luiselli reforms the novel to ponder the political realities of migrant children, Pomerantsev uses the essay to investigate the illusory atmosphere of Russia’s reality and to demonstrate people’s shifting roles and uses of ultimately meaningless discursive formats. This uncomfortable portrait of a country and its people was followed four years later by a second essay, in which Pomerantsev describes the new reality of a world dominated by online algorithms. This Is Not Propaganda is part autobiography and part political and societal analysis. Pomerantsev starts with an imagined description of the KGB’s arrest of his father in the 1970s. Igor Pomerantsev was a Ukrainian poet and novelist, writing works of fiction as a defence against the dangerous dictatorial reality. Forty years after his father’s detention, Pomerantsev follows in his footsteps by writing and taking a critical perspective while researching online propaganda mechanisms and disinformation. His research leads him not only to Russia, but also to Manila, Mexico City and China. In the text, analyses of the functioning of new media technologies establishing new realities interweave with his parents’ story as Soviet dissidents. Pomerantsev connects the digital era of mass manipulation to the life of a politically engaged literary writer in the Soviet Union. The Cold War past thus sharpens his observations of the present. Today’s information war has parallels with the use of disinformation in the Soviet Union. Personal information is hacked, gathered and archived, and no one knows exactly when, where, how or who can be trusted. People cannot see how algorithms shape their sense of reality or how data is used to manipulate them. Information cannot be distinguished from disinformation. Political ideologies are make-believe systems to which individuals adapt constantly. In both texts, Pomerantsev combines autobiography, ethnography and journalism. The main aim is to understand how people perceive the reality they live in, and how they are (un)aware of ideological systems and framing. Whose reality is it? In 2019, in conversation with Joanna Kavenna, Pomerantsev talked explicitly about the interconnection of reality and fiction. ‘How to do non-fiction’, he asked, ‘when we simultaneously struggle to agree on a shared reality, while reality is so easily recorded with all types of digital tools, from data collection to Instagram?’ It is difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, and Pomerantsev therefore searches for a different type of writing: Let’s show the fragmentary nature of the knowledge we have collected, put our own relationship with the protagonists in the middle of the material, declare our biases … [by] showing the vulnerability and sketchiness of collecting reality, so much more reality emerges. … There is no one genre (memoir, first-person reportage, data crunching, academic analysis etc.) that represents reality. But by colliding different ones, reality will emerge in the friction between.49 Joanna Kavenna and Peter Pomerantsev, ‘In Conversation’, Granta, 5 August 2019, granta.com/ joanna-kavenna-and-peter-pomerantsev-in-conversation/.

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Here, Luiselli and Pomerantsev meet. Both try to establish a form of writing on the raw edge of fiction and non-fiction, to respond to political, professional, aesthetic and realist concerns. Both blend various genres, mixing several writing styles, in order to free themselves from traditional conventions of storytelling. The self-reflective narratives that they create provide critical observations of today’s world while constantly questioning the representative regime. Both writers ask the questions: how do we recognize reality today? Whose realities, post-truths and fake perspectives do we acknowledge or deny?

Concluding Remarks: A Pedagogy of Fiction The description and analysis of works by contemporary authors demonstrate that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is not easily articulated. In our late modern society, fabulating and reporting, imagining and representing are part of the cultural ‘structure of feeling’ or Zeitgeist.50 In other words, both Luiselli and Pomerantsev are deeply engaged in thinking about the nature and implication of fiction in a global and political context that invites responsible and active responses. Cohn emphasizes that in literary fiction ‘references to the world outside the text are not bound to accuracy’ and that fiction does not ‘refer exclusively to the real world’, arguing that fiction and reality are interconnected and that it is in the creation of characters as ‘imaginary beings’ that ‘fiction alters the actual world.’51 Luiselli and Pomerantsev, each in their own writing, point to an even more dynamic relationship between fiction and referentiality, in which fiction becomes part of reality and encapsulates reality. The narrative world is presented as a ‘multidimensional human problem rather than as a place where people are reduced to types’.52 The stories told are connected to a complex world in which truth and imagination, reality and fake circulate rapidly. In today’s media-saturated public sphere, it is often difficult to distinguish between fact, fake, fiction, reality, perspective and (personal or group) beliefs. Democracy is in peril because politicians and voters do not agree on what is shared in reality, on what is the shared reality. It has become easy to lie and, more importantly, it does not matter ‘if I lie’, as (not only populist) politicians argue, since it is unclear ‘what’s the “real ground” from which you can argue back at me’.53 If there is no shared reality, if lies are accepted, if fake news and electoral fictions are spreading, then we are moving away from truth, even if truth is considered a social construct. But then, as both authors demonstrate, we have to agree on some – what I call – ‘truth of fiction’ principle, the idea that in fiction a truthful perspective on the world is evoked.

Williams, Marxism and Literature. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, 15–16. 52 Burrow, ‘Fiction and the Age of Lies’. 53 Pomerantsev in Kavenna and Pomerantsev, ‘In Conversation’. 50 51

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One of the remedies to counter post-truth cynicism, this chapter argues, is an education in literature, in which it becomes clear that fiction and reality are intertwined but not blurred. Fiction can ‘educate its readers to question their grounds for wanting to believe things’, as Colin Burrow proposes; fiction exhibits the idiosyncrasy of the plausible and the difference between the imaginary scenario and what actually happened.54 In contemporary writing, as both Luiselli and Pomerantsev confirm, the potential of fiction is to relate imagination and reflection explicitly to writing about real phenomena.55 Luiselli’s novel evokes the political complexity of child migration at the border to the United States in an imaginary world of two kids on the move. Pomerantsev’s journalistic non-fiction underlines imaginative strategies that we need to understand the complexity of media realities and the dominance of algorithmic power. The aim of both writers discussed here, I would argue, is to demonstrate that the flexibility of fiction is crucial to an understanding of today’s media societies. Fiction invites and nurtures a responsible and active (or activist) readership. There is fiction beyond literature (Pomerantsev), and there is political reality in fiction (Luiselli). What a literary education could establish in today’s information-overload society, in which untruths are disseminated fluidly, is attention to meaning which can be constructed and temporarily accepted as truth. Readers of fiction know how to postpone disbelief and how to stay or dwell in the world that the author constructs, how to interpret its meaning and how to leave – or go back to their own beliefs – when the book is closed. The point is that the reader of fiction makes a deliberate decision to go along with the narrative and to accept its plausible perspectives and imaginary scenarios.56 Experiencing fiction implies something other than being trained in ‘media literacy’ focused on the diversity of media formats, platforms and participatory roles. Experiencing the conceptual complexity of fiction trains the reader in something else: the recognition of narrative flexibility and multiperspectivity. Indeed, attention to different narrative perceptions and representations – connected to various character positions – could help to acknowledge and understand fake news activities. The fake message, then, could be accepted as long as the ‘contract’ between producer and recipient is made clearer: this fake perspective is a Vorstellung, to invite ‘you’ to be critical and aware of ‘my’ point of view. Fiction can help us to become more aware of the fluid edges between truth and reality, or truthfulness and lie. Fake news – indeed as floating signifier – should be exposed to knowledge of this fluidity. A pedagogy of fiction is needed to counter the cynicism of faking the news.

Burrow, ‘Fiction and the Age of Lies’. See Odile Heynders, ‘Dissensus in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet’, Frame 34, no. 1 (2021): 35–51. 56 See Odile Heynders and Sander Bax, ‘Imaginary Scenarios: Literature and Democracy in Europe’, Pivot 5, no. 1 (2016): 247–76. 54 55

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A ‘Passive Spectactress’? Frances Burney and the Eighteenth-Century Writer as Social Activist Anna Paluchowska-Messing

In 1793, Frances Burney, by then already an acclaimed novelist, published a pamphlet entitled Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy.1 The purpose of the publication was to raise funds for French Catholic émigrés to Britain in the aftermath of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Charitable though the undertaking undoubtedly was, when Burney later wrote about the circumstances surrounding it, she made it very clear that the initiative for the project was not hers and that she only agreed to participate after much persuasion from the organizers, and explicit approval from her father and husband. These disclaimers may appear excessive, but the publication of Brief Reflections may have indeed felt for Burney like a bold step out of her usual comfort zone of prescribed femininity. By openly engaging in activism, she was acknowledging her own celebrity status, the authority it generated and her willingness to use it if required. This was scarcely in harmony with the model of retired respectability she generally followed in public. Therefore, in order to preserve the image of a ‘proper’ lady, Burney performed in the pamphlet and its preface a considerable feat of rhetorical acrobatics. In the process, she redefined the acceptable boundaries of feminine interest in public matters, without appearing to question them. As a result, the women she envisaged in the Reflections were no ‘mere passive spectactresses of the moral as well as of the political oeconomy of human life’,2 and yet retained their female delicacy intact. This chapter explores Burney’s Brief Reflections, the circumstances surrounding its composition and her later representation of these circumstances, to offer an analysis of the position to which an eighteenth-century woman writer may have aspired as an authority figure and of the weight of moral capital which she may have accumulated. The chapter also examines Burney’s novels to show the extent to which literature could serve as a means of political and social activism. The claim here is that

Frances Burney, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy: Earnestly Submitted to the Humane Consideration of the Ladies of Great Britain (London: Thomas Cadell, 1793). 2 Burney, Brief Reflections, iii. 1

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Burney in her literary texts conducted experiments with narrative mode which are strikingly similar to those carried out by women writers today. Thus, she can be seen as a precursor of the subtle political activism performed today in the novels of Olga Tokarczuk or Elif Shafak. ***** The so-called ‘long eighteenth century’, stretching from the Restoration and encompassing Romanticism, has recently been explored for its contribution to the modern understanding of celebrity and the cultural implications of fame.3 In his influential It, Joseph Roach anatomizes the intangible fascination exuded by ‘abnormally interesting people’, to use his phrase, and eagerly absorbed by their entranced audiences. Roach points to aspects of the appearance of star performers, such as Sarah Siddons or Clara Bow, which fuse to transform a person into an icon that can be owned and cherished by many admirers at the same time.4 Literary celebrity, by contrast, emerges from the allure of the writer’s mind rather than their body, and is triggered less by portraits, photographs or even live events than by the illusion of an intimate connection between the author and their audience forged during the act of reading. Such a mixture of intellectual affiliation and mutual understanding has been well summed up recently by the actor Tom Hollander in his comments on Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Intimations:5 ‘Zadie Smith is a marvel  –  her soulfulness, her sensitivity, her ability to write beautiful sentences. … She … just leaves you with the sense that you’re in the company of someone who can help you feel things deeply.’6 The notion that the writer and reader engage in conversations on deeply felt matters is by no means new, but ‘percolates’,7 to borrow Roach’s phrase again, from the depths of the eighteenth century. In 1743, Anne Dutton, poet and religious writer, argued: Communicating ones [sic] Mind in Print, is as private … as if one did it particularly unto everyone by himself in ones own House. There is only this Difference: The one is communicating ones Mind by Speech, in ones own private House: The other is doing it by Writing, in the private House of another Person. Both are still

See, for instance, Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Laura Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011); Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Polity, 2017); Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule, eds., Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 4 Roach, It, 45–81. 5 Zadie Smith, Intimations (London: Penguin Books, 2020). 6 Michael Hogan, ‘On My Radar: Tom Hollander’s Cultural Highlights’, Guardian, 19 September 2020, www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/sep/19/on-my-radar-tom-hollander-cultural-highlights. 7 Roach, It, 13. Roach, in turn, borrows the phrase from Michel Serres and Bruno Latour’s Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 3

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private  …  That which is exhibited in Books, can never be prov’d to be publick Teaching, unless Books were design’d for the Instruction of Publick Assemblies, and are accordingly read in them.8

Both Dutton’s and Hollander’s accounts, though given nearly 300 years apart and written from the author’s and reader’s points of view respectively, describe an uncanny communion that comes into effect through the act of reading. Both also demonstrate that in this relationship the reader assumes the position of willing disciple, ready to benefit from the instructive presence of the author. The author thus becomes an authority. Nowadays, it is relatively easy to credit a favourite woman novelist with a particularly acute sense and understanding of reality. That is perhaps why, in the strange times of both stasis and havoc brought about by the Covid pandemic, so many readers have reached for collections of essays authored by renowned novelists. It may be that Zadie Smith’s Intimations or Olga Tokarczuk’s Czuły Narrator,9 both published in 2020, are expected to offer the guidance that other authorities have failed to provide. By contrast, the authority of a woman writer in Anne Dutton’s time was yet to be forged. This is strikingly attested to by the title of the essay from which Dutton’s words above are taken: A Letter to such of the Servants of Christ, Who May Have Any Scruple about the Lawfulness of PRINTING Any Thing Written by a Woman. In the Letter, Dutton refutes the charges laid against her aspiration to a position of authority and her presumption in offering moral advice in print. Dutton, a Calvinist Baptist, does not dispute the scriptural precept: ‘I suffer not a Woman to Teach, nor to usurp Authority over the Man, but to be in Silence’,10 but she offers an interpretation. The Bible, she insists, only says that ‘it is Publick Authoritative Teaching in the Church, that is here forbidden unto Women … And Printing is a Thing of a very different Consideration’.11 For Dutton, as we saw, reading a printed page at home is no different to having an edifying conversation with a friend, hence her insistence on the difference between public and private discourse, and her classification of books in the latter category. The need Anne Dutton felt to legitimize her writing shows that there was much resistance to a woman’s authority in print. But her argument demonstrates, too, that at least as far as moral tracts were concerned there was space for a woman writer to erect her own pulpit. The authority of a woman novelist, however, would not Anne Dutton, A Letter to Such of the Servants of Christ, Who May Have Any Scruple about the Lawfulness of PRINTING Any Thing Written by a Woman (1743), in Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed. Vivien Jones (London: Routledge, 1990), 159. 9 Olga Tokarczuk, Czuły Narrator (The Tender Narrator) (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2020). The title is the same as that of her Nobel Prize lecture, accessed 20 September 2020, www.nobelprize. org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/. Tokarczuk’s essays became an instant bestseller in Poland. The collection sold 120,000 copies in three months, according to Natalia Szostak, ‘“Czuły Narrator” bestsellerem’ (The Tender Narrator Becomes a Bestseller), Gazeta Wyborcza, 17 February 2021, wyborcza.pl/7,75517,26795180,czuly-narrator-bestsellerem-pierwsza-ksiazkatokarczuk-po.html. 10 Dutton, A Letter, 158. 11 Dutton, A Letter, 158. 8

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be widely recognized for another 100 years. It was in 1843 that Thomas Babington Macaulay summed up the career of Frances Burney, who had died three years earlier, and explicitly lauded her as the first serious woman novelist. Burney’s debut novel, Evelina, features in this account as the first novel by a woman to hold out against the tides of time: Her [Burney’s] appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. Evelina was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. … Indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded Evelina were such as no lady would have written; and many of them were such as no lady could without confusion own that she had read. The very name of novel was held in horror among religious people. … Miss Burney … first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humor, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. … She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters.12

The universal horror that novels apparently excited prior to the publication of Evelina in 1778 is, of course, vastly exaggerated here.13 But the position of a woman novelist as an authority figure on a par with a male writer was arguably first gained by Burney, and this was by both her literary craft and her skilled negotiation of her public image. Both aspects have been critically explored on many levels and are by now well documented,14 but my discussion here will focus on the combination of art with authority. While Burney certainly charmed her audience with Evelina, the height of her career was achieved with the publication of her second novel, Cecilia (1782). The most striking difference between the two was in their narrative mode, and the significant increase in the moral capital of their author. The epistolary Evelina skilfully conflated the innocent yet intelligent heroine with her creator, so much so that when Burney was revealed to Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay’, The Edinburgh Review 76, no. 154 (January 1843): 569. 13 See, for instance, Jan Fergus, ‘Women Readers: A Case Study’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155–76. 14 For an overview which traces Burney’s literary achievement against the background of her life story, see especially the two biographies which offer diametrically opposed assessments: Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Claire Harman, Fanny Burney: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2000). For a study of Burney’s narrative technique, see especially Francesca Saggini, Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). For analyses of how Burney negotiated her public image, see, for instance, Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987); Gina Campbell, ‘How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney’s Instructions to Her Critics in Evelina’, ELH 57, no. 3 (1990): 557–83; Jennie Batchelor, ‘“[T]o Strike a Little Out of a Road Already So Much Beaten”: Gender, Genre, and the Mid-Century Novel’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 84–101; Anna Paluchowska-Messing, Frances Burney and Her Readers: The Negotiated Image (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020). 12

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be the author of the novel, readers expected to find in her a sweet girl of Evelina’s exact age.15 In Cecilia, Burney took up the challenge of third-person narration and began the process with which she would experiment in all her later novels, namely that of distancing the narratorial voice ever further from the voices of her main characters. The effect she achieved, as Julie Choi observes, was the conflation of the author with the disembodied voice of common sense, with the voice of authority.16 To illustrate this effect, it is useful to compare the third-person narration in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones with that in Burney’s novels. Both Burney’s and Fielding’s narrative voices fall into Gerard Genette’s category of heterodiegetic narrators, that is, narrators who are not characters in the story.17 There is, however, as Choi shows, a significant difference between them. While Fielding’s narrator is obviously a man and his voice so prominent that Choi calls him ‘a star character in his own right’, Burney’s narration is far more detached and also carefully gender-free.18 Clear and straightforward intrusions of the narratorial voice in her novels are very rare, and where they do occur, it is usually in the form of proverb-like statements, such as this exclamation from The Wanderer: ‘Small are the circumstances which reverse all our wishes! And one hour still less resembles another in our feelings, than in our actions.’19 Although such passages offer no less subjective perceptions of human experience than Fielding’s attacks on Colley Cibber in Joseph Andrews,20 they do successfully create an illusion of objectivity and appear free from the author’s personal bias. Choi argues that by ostensibly shedding body and gender specificity, Burney’s narrator may be more easily accepted as tapping into pure reason and common sense; that is, the narrator’s voice can be recognized as a voice of authority.21 The credit gained by the authority of the narrator can then be transferred to bolster the position of the author. For most readers, as Margaret Anne Doody once observed, the distinction between the author and the narrator is often a question of mere ‘critical nicety’,22 so that, in practice, the authority of the narrator becomes the authority of the author. This process appears to have worked to Burney’s advantage, and its final effect

For the confusion surrounding Burney’s age, see Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney, 378. Expectations concerning Burney’s character are recorded by the novelist herself. See Frances Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 89. 16 Julie Choi, ‘Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel’, New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 641–62. 17 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 212–62. 18 Choi, ‘Feminine Authority?’, 651–5. 19 Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69. 20 Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams and an Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (1742; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15–16. 21 Choi, ‘Feminine Authority?’, 641–62. 22 Margaret Anne Doody, ‘George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 3 (1980): 284. 15

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was picturesquely rendered by Macaulay at the beginning of his 1843 essay: ‘All those whom we had been accustomed to revere as intellectual patriarchs seemed children when compared with her; for Burke had sat up all night to read her writings, and Johnson had pronounced her superior to Fielding.’23 Burney would probably have revelled in this picture of her dwarfing the pundits of her times. She certainly delighted in recalling the way that Frances Anne Crewe, a fashionable hostess of the eighteenth-century London beau monde, expressed her deference to Burney’s authority when, in 1793, she asked the novelist to write a pamphlet which would ‘throw a good colouring’ on a scheme of collecting financial aid for the immigrant French clergy who had sought refuge from Revolutionary France.24 The plan had been conceived by a group of aristocratic women headed by Crewe and the Marchioness of Buckingham. It followed the initiative of John Wilmot, who, in 1792, had set up the Committee for the Relief of the French Refugee Clergy, which initially supplied the basic needs of around 7,400 clergymen and nuns who had arrived in Britain by December 1792.25 Still, before Parliament organized a more institutionalized form of aid, Crewe proposed to exploit the resources of her fashionable social connections. It was in this endeavour that she needed Burney’s supportive pen, and to ensure her acquiescence in the scheme, she wrote to her lifelong friend, Dr Charles Burney, the novelist’s father. Years later, in her memoir of her father, published in 1832, Burney extensively quoted from the letter, in which Crewe flatteringly trusts in the novelist’s ability to teach her audience ‘genuine elegance’ in acts of charity. Crewe proposes the scene in Cecilia where the main heroine ‘burst[s] from the shackles of common forms … to save the life of Harrel’ as one of the ‘true pictures of taste and perfection in the moral world’ to be found in Burney’s novels.26 Burney’s earlier heroine, Evelina, had responded in a similar way when she saved Mr Macartney from suicide, or when she was the only person who attempted to help an elderly woman during the infamous footrace arranged by two dissolute rakes. A woman obeying the impulse to aid a person in distress performs – both in the novels and in Crewe’s representation – an act of courage and defiance of conventional decorum; such behaviour contrasts the reaction prompted by nature with that required by custom. Significantly, these spontaneous impulses of a sympathetic heart are interpreted by Crewe (and the interpretation is readily repeated by Burney) as resulting from the heroines’ appropriate use of ‘reason and common sense’, uninhibited by false

Macaulay, Diary and Letters, 331. Frances Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, Arranged from His Own Manuscripts, from Family Papers and from Personal Recollections, vol. 3. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), 186. 25 Juliette Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3. 26 Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 186. Burney’s biography of her father was also in many ways her own autobiography. For a detailed analysis of the complex negotiations of Burney’s authorial image conducted in the Memoirs, see especially Cassandra Ulph, ‘Authoring the “Author of My Being” in Memoirs of Doctor Burney’, Eighteenth-Century Life 42, no. 2 (2018): 152-69, and PaluchowskaMessing, Frances Burney and Her Readers, 105–46. 23 24

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refinements.27 Crewe certainly shows here her skills of persuasion: while enlisting the novelist’s authority to combat readers’ hesitations about spending their pin money on immigrant French Catholic priests, she also targets any objections Burney herself may have. Further, to make it clear that the ‘reason and common sense’ which Burney so admirably employs in her novels are no sign of any reprehensibly progressive views, Crewe links them usefully to ‘the age of chivalry’, suggesting that, in her writing, Burney follows the traditions which spring from a mythical golden age, when ‘our ancestors’ were able to differentiate between truly humane behaviour and a mere affectation of it.28 Crewe’s allusions to the ‘age of chivalry’ clearly echo Edmund Burke’s lament for the loss of chivalric ideals in Europe in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). But while Burke deplores there that ‘[t]he age of chivalry is gone … and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’, Crewe proposes to resuscitate the ‘noble’ ideals by replacing the knights who, when the Queen of France was assaulted, evidently failed to draw ‘ten thousand swords … from their scabbards’,29 with a woman writer much better equipped to help those suffering with her pen. She would be joining the very respectable company, too, of Burke and Hannah More, who had already published pamphlets in support of the same cause.30 It is easy to see how useful Burney must have found Crewe’s letter in 1832, fifty years after the publication of Cecilia, for the purposes of advertising her earlier novels to new audiences. Burney recalled in the Memoirs that, in addition to Crewe’s flattery, an ‘earnestly encouraging exhortation from the Doctor [Burney]’ and ‘the full concurrence’ of Burney’s husband were necessary to obtain her ‘fearful compliance’ in the scheme.31 So why would Burney still hesitate? First, as Caroline Shaw observes, ‘[i]t was not a foregone conclusion that John Wilmot and his committee would be successful in efforts to nationalize concern for foreign refugees, French Catholics especially’. The general atmosphere was that of worry and suspicion, and Parliament had just passed the first Aliens Bill, in 1792, to scrutinize incoming foreigners more thoroughly.32 Burney, meanwhile, certainly did not wish to be seen as stepping out of line. The two novels on which her reputation then rested had been published more than ten years earlier, and by 1793 she may have felt that she needed public approval and royal patronage for her latest plan to revive her writing career. The difficulty of securing either lay in the rather daring personal choices she had recently made. In 1791, on a plea of ill health, she left her post at court, which she had held for five years. Although the reason given was

Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 187. Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 186. 29 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (1790; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 170. 30 See The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow, Patricia Boutilier and Althea Douglas, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 14–15. 31 Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, 187. 32 Caroline Shaw, ‘The Fate of Foreign Refugees, Past and Present’, OUP Blog: Academic Insights for the Thinking World, 18 December 2015, blog.oup.com/2015/12/foreign-refugees-1790s-britain/. 27 28

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socially acceptable, in the eyes of many it seemed ungrateful to excuse oneself from the honour of royal service. Burney felt she had disappointed her father especially.33 She was then thirty-nine, and with few prospects for marriage and independence, she had to return to Charles Burney’s household. The Queen had granted her an annual pension of 100 pounds, which, though welcome, made her dependent on royal favour and fearful of losing it by any step in her life or writing. Soon Burney made a choice in her personal life that displeased her father further and may have surprised her royal patrons. In July 1793, she married Alexandre d’Arblay, an impoverished French Catholic officer, who had escaped from persecution in Revolutionary France. D’Arblay, to some, may have seemed tainted by his position as the second-in-command to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had backed the Americans in the War of Independence. In her journals, Burney often mentions her various acquaintances’ disapprobation of the match and their belief that she had been ‘taken in by an artful French avanturier’,34 but the ‘World’ at large, as Doody suggests, could lay even more severe charges against the novelist: ‘[i]t would be thought that Frances Burney herself was getting too soft on Catholicism and might have been perverted to popery’.35 Burney’s participation in a scheme whose beneficiaries were to be French Catholic priests could be construed very differently now she had become Madame d’Arblay. ‘What in the World can the public think of it?’36 was a question which certainly troubled her much throughout her career, but especially at that time. The extent of Burney’s sensitivity to any possible smudges on her public image is perhaps most evident in her reactions during an adventure she had in the summer of 1792 in the company of Crewe. Both women became victims of a prank by the actress Mary Wells, and in a dispute which followed, Crewe proposed using her own and Burney’s name to make sure Wells would be prevented from repeating her joke on others. Burney responded with panic: ‘“Oh no!” cried I, in a horrid fright, “I beseech I may not be named! –”’.37 The thought of her name being unfavourably paired in public imagination was, for Burney, alarming. Naming was crucial to eighteenth-century women writers,38 and anxiety about it surfaces early in Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, the pamphlet Burney eventually produced for Crewe. Burney points out that ‘[t]he ladies who have instituted this scheme desire not to be named; and those who are the principal agents for putting it in execution, join in the same wish’. Burney approves of the ‘delicacy’ of

For Charles Burney’s hopes for a court position, see Roger Lonsdale, Dr. Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 292–346. 34 Burney, Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 3, 8. 35 Doody, Frances Burney, 205. 36 Burney, The Early Journals and Letters, 62. 37 Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 352. 38 See, for instance, Jennie Batchelor, ‘Anon, Pseud and “By a Lady”: The Spectre of Anonymity in Women’s Literary History’, in Women’s Writing, 1660–1830: Feminisms and Futures, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 79–96. 33

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such a decision.39 Her own name does not appear on the title page either, and instead the pamphlet is advertised as written ‘by the author of Evelina and Cecilia’ – although, of course, most readers would know who that was. This inscription effects a separation between the public persona of the author and that of the individual woman Frances Burney d’Arblay. By consistently signing herself in her publications only as the author of other publications, Burney was deliberately honing the image of their author as a textual entity, quite separate from the person of the writer, who could then more effectively speak with the disembodied voice of pure reason and common sense.40 Thus, Burney’s practice of not naming herself may have been a strategy for securing her authority with the readers. To explain this apparent paradox, it is useful to look at Burney’s reasoning in the ‘Apology’, the direct authorial address to the reader which opens Brief Reflections. There, in an attempt to persuade her women readers to take action, she performs a veritable stunt in rhetoric, namely, she presents retired femininity as a unique springboard which may propel women into the position of being more than ‘mere passive spectactresses of the moral as well as of the political oeconomy of human life’.41 Burney begins by asserting that ‘all interference in public matters’ is quite out of the ‘allotted boundaries’ of feminine behaviour: ‘The distinct ties of [women’s] prescriptive duties, which, pointed out by Nature, have been recognised by reason, and established by custom, remove, indeed, from their view and knowledge all materials for forming public characters.’42 This social arrangement effectively deprives women of any power of becoming figures of political importance, but, Burney insists, may empower them in different ways. ‘[T]he retirement’, she writes, ‘which divests them of practical skills for public purposes, guards them, at the same time, from the heart-hardening effects of general worldly commerce’.43 Women, therefore, should be seen as disinterested observers of this commerce: since they can gain nothing from it personally, they may be viewed as more clear-sighted arbiters of its transactions. ‘In the doctrine of morality’, Burney explains, ‘feminine deficiencies are … changed into advantages’.44 The advantage is that of the moral superiority obtained from the lofty position of retired femininity. As Claire Harman observes of this passage, ‘we can see the emergence of the “Victorian” ideal of womanhood …, which found its most famous expression in the idea of “the Angel in the House”’.45

Burney, Brief Reflections, 5. Tom Mole explains that in the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literary marketplace proper names, pseudonyms and terms such as ‘the Author of …’ served the same purpose, namely, that of creating an ‘authorial brand’, which could be seen as quite separate from the individual who actually authored literary texts. See Mole, ‘Celebrity and Anonymity’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 10. 41 Burney, Brief Reflections, iii. 42 Burney, Brief Reflections, iii. 43 Burney, Brief Reflections, iv. 44 Burney, Brief Reflections, iv. 45 Harman, Fanny Burney, 257. 39 40

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This logic may be equally useful for constructing the authority of narrators in relation to the worlds of their novels and, by extension, the authority of authors in relation to their audiences. Thus, for Burney, to keep separate the persona of the author and that of the actual woman writing may have seemed vital for a successful representation of the former as an authority figure. The less was known about Frances Burney D’Arblay’s personal commerce in the ‘oeconomy of human life’, and the less she was perceived as entangled in this ‘oeconomy’ herself, the more trust the reader could repose in the ‘author of Evelina and Cecilia’. Burney employed this authorial prerogative of moral guidance in Brief Reflections to produce a pamphlet-sermon, a mode of writing well suited to give immediate answers to the questions it poses. The text suggests to the reader the response of opening their purse, and the reason for doing so is exhibited with the clarity of a black-and-white distinction between good and bad French citizens: ‘the living contrast of virtue and guilt exhibited by the natives of one and the same country’.46 The public at the time found the argument convincing, and of all the reviewers, only one in the Critical Review expressed doubt about the accuracy of depicting the French clergy as completely innocent of any political machinations.47 Whatever Burney’s own private opinion, for the dramatic appeal of the pamphlet, it was certainly effective to maintain the contrast between evil perpetrators of Revolutionary crimes and the holy martyrs who had become their victims. By highlighting one distinction she evidently wished to blur another, that between Catholics and Protestants. In fact, the word ‘Catholic’ is not used in the text at all, and ‘Christianity’ is consistently supplied in its stead. This establishes a useful opposition between ‘us’, Christians, and ‘them’, barbarous unbelievers. Burney finishes her sermon with a moving vignette of the 1792 massacres of the clergy in French prisons. The emotional image is the final thrust to prod the reader into action: Oh, could they have been rescued! … Our nation would have been honoured by affording refuge to such perfection; every family would have been blessed with whom such pilgrims associated; … our children would have relinquished some enjoyment to have fed them.48

Thus, Burney closes Brief Reflections with a utopian vision of British hospitality. Many years later, in her last novel, The Wanderer, she appears to reflect more realistically on this point. Among the inhabitants of a typical English seaside town, instead of clergymen, she interposes a woman who has escaped Revolutionary France, and who insists that she cannot reveal her identity because she may be pursued. As the nameless ‘Incognita’, the heroine elicits a variety of reactions rather different to those envisioned in Brief Reflections. It is through readers’ responses to the plight of the heroine and to

Burney, Brief Reflections, 2. Burney, The Early Journals and Letters, 40. 48 Burney, Brief Reflections, 25. 46 47

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other characters’ reactions that Burney appears to use the authorial prerogative for moral guidance in The Wanderer. In the preface, she promotes the novel as a genre particularly suited to didactic purposes, asking ‘What is the species of writing that offers fairer opportunities for conveying useful precepts?’49 The key is, however, the way of conveying those precepts. In contrast to Brief Reflections, in Burney’s fiction the author-narrator is not there to provide answers and point out correct conduct for readers, but rather to question the answers that readers may feel they already have about their conduct. In doing so, Burney can be said to have experimented with literary techniques which have only been named by twenty-first-century writers. In her 2019 Nobel Prize speech, Olga Tokarczuk proposed the category of the ‘tender narrator’, whose ‘[t]enderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, … common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering.’50 Another term which Tokarczuk uses to explain how such ‘tenderness’ in story-telling can be effected is that of the ‘fourthperson narrator’, who is neither an unfeeling omniscient voice telling the story nor the sympathetic but personal voice of the author or character. This ‘fourth-person narrator’ is rather akin to the narrative voices in Burney’s novels. The characters depicted by this voice are neither entirely reprehensible nor fully commendable, like those to be found in Brief Reflections or in many explicitly didactic novels of that time. Instead, they testify to the words of a narrator created by another modern writer, Elif Shafak, who, in the opening pages of 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, explains that things are ‘not clear-cut like that’, and that there are ‘countless of shades between jet black and brilliant white’.51 One such ‘tenderly’ depicted character in The Wanderer is Elinor Joddrell, the epitome of what Burney viewed as ‘that amazing assemblage of all possible contrarieties’: a human heart.52 Elinor is both intelligent and thoughtless, compassionate and vindictive, in love and unfeeling, emancipated and caught up in her habits. In other novels of the period, such feminist, breeches-wearing characters, some of whose features she shares, were usually ridiculed and roundly condemned.53 Burney, on the other hand, appears to approach Elinor’s emotional outbursts, her intellectual harangues and her repeated suicide attempts with ‘tenderness’, as defined by Tokarczuk, noting and appreciating Elinor’s drives as well as her ‘fragility’ and her ‘lack of immunity to suffering’.54

Burney, The Wanderer, 7. Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’. 51 Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (London: Viking, 2019), 3. 52 Frances Burney, Camilla, or A Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (1796; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7. 53 Elinor pursues a man with whom she is in love but who does not return her feelings. Burney appears much more sympathetic to Elinor’s predicament than Elizabeth Hamilton, whose character Brigetina Botherim’s very name suggests ridicule in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Elinor also professes many feminist views, which, for instance, in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) are caricatured by Harriet Freke, whose name also suggests that the character is an object of derision. 54 Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’. 49 50

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The didactic capacity of a novel thus ‘tenderly’ unfolded lies in depicting and embracing diversity in the world around the reader. As Tokarczuk explains, ‘[t]enderness perceives the bonds that connect us. … It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, … and codependent on itself. Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.’55 The Wanderer, which thus ‘tenderly’ depicts its characters, which refuses to distinguish them according to categories of black and white, and which assigns to none the role of the infallible moral compass, is seen by some scholars today as the most ambitious of Burney’s novels.56 In the author’s lifetime, it was also the book that suffered the most virulent attacks from anti-feminist critics.57 Today, women writers of stature, such as Olga Tokarczuk, Elif Shafak, Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, can openly use their celebrity position to engage with political questions and discuss the problems faced by their nations and by humanity. In Burney’s time, it was more prudent to disclaim any involvement of the kind. In the preface to The Wanderer, the most political of her novels, Burney insists: ‘I have felt, indeed, no disposition, – I ought rather, perhaps, to say talent, – for venturing upon the stormy sea of politics.’58 And yet, to us, who have also experienced in our lifetime images of refugees ready to risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea, the opening pages of the novel proclaim its engagement in politics: when a desperate appeal to the passengers on a boat casting off from the shore begs them to wait and allow another traveller to join them. Perhaps such techniques of suggesting a message and disclaiming that any has been conveyed, authoring texts and yet refusing to let them bear the author’s name, are the precautions that an eighteenth-century woman writer had to take in order to approach uneasy questions with ‘tenderness’: to engage in subtle activism through her work. Perhaps Burney’s career could thus be seen as a conscious endeavour to preserve her own position as an ostensibly ‘passive spectactress’ because she viewed this position as the most advantageous to combine successfully art and action.

Tokarczuk, ‘The Tender Narrator’. For instance, Doody, Frances Burney, 313–68. 57 Especially John Wilson Croker in Quarterly Review 21 (1814) and William Hazlitt in The Edinburgh Review 24 (1815). 58 Burney, The Wanderer, 4. 55 56

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‘The Indian Cobbett’: Radicalism, Empire and Literary Celebrity in the Life of James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855) Kieran Hazzard

Adventurer, travel writer, self-publicist, journalist, lecturer, social reformer, town planner, teetotaller, West India merchant, abolitionist and political radical: James Silk Buckingham was all these things. Despite his current obscurity, ‘celebrity’ should also be added to this list. The cultivation and continued development of celebrity tied the varied career of James Silk Buckingham together, allowing him to transform his fortunes and advance his political campaigns over the course of several decades in the early nineteenth century. Recent work by Simon Morgan has explored the complex relationship between British political Radicalism and celebrity in this period,1 but Buckingham remains an overlooked figure. He had an astonishingly mobile career, which carried him from the West Indies to Calcutta and Palestine, to the British House of Commons and on a lecture tour of America. He was also a prolific and inventive author, whose flamboyant self-mythologizations took place largely in print, borrowing from literary convention to promote himself as the hero of a real-life Jacobin novel or Romantic Orientalist tale, to both commercial and political ends. This chapter offers a sketch of Buckingham’s progress as a case study illustrating the possible global and colonial dimensions of emergent forms of British Radicalism and literary celebrity. It demonstrates that publicity – especially publicity generated by the evocation of the exotic – was essential to Buckingham’s political campaigns, but also provided the tools with which his opponents sought to undermine his activism.

Radical Tales Little reliable information is available about Buckingham’s life before his rise to public prominence in his mid-thirties. The only surviving narrative covering these early years is Buckingham’s autobiography, the first two volumes of which were published in 1855 Simon James Morgan, Celebrities, Heroes and Champions: Popular Politicians in the Age of Reform, 1810–67 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

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and cover the period from his birth in 1786 until 1815. Buckingham had planned several further volumes, but died before they could be completed. The accuracy of the autobiography is often questionable: while many of the facts can be corroborated, the dates are often wrong, and Buckingham’s presence or participation in the events described is not easily verified. Buckingham was always a self-publicist, and it seems probable that in writing his own life story he embellished reality. His picaresque narrative tells the story of a self-educated country boy from a modest background, who faces adversity with virtue and integrity, and who is drawn naturally to political liberty. When taken together, the autobiography’s tales and reminiscences take on a fantastical appearance, resembling the Jacobin novels from which, the autobiography claims, a school-hating young Buckingham had drawn his political and social education.2 Buckingham’s autobiography, then, is a necessary if unreliable source of information about his early life, but can also be analysed in terms of its careful construction of a public persona. According to this text, Buckingham was the youngest child of a moderately prosperous Cornish farming family who had expanded into mining and fisheries. Following his father’s death, as a nine-year-old with dreams of the sea, he joined the Post Office Packet Service carrying government communications from Falmouth across the globe. Buckingham received much of his early education on board ship, filling his spare time by reading. However, the war with Revolutionary France made the sea a dangerous workplace, and after several successful voyages, his ship was captured by a French privateer in the late 1790s. The crew were taken as prisoners to Spain, where Buckingham claims to have attracted the romantic attention of the prison governor’s daughter. He explains that ‘even in England I was considered to be a very handsome boy, and the charm of a clear complexion, rosy cheeks, light blue eyes, and light brown curly hair, so unusual in Spain, made me appear, it would seem, a perfect Adonis in her love-seeing eyes.’3 Resembling the gaoler’s daughter who ‘conceived some partiality for [the hero’s] person’ and tries to help him escape in William Godwin’s Jacobin novel Caleb Williams (1794),4 the governor’s daughter, we are told, would sneak him extra food and devised an escape plan for them both, only abandoning it on Buckingham’s insistence.5 Eventually the crew became part of a prisoner exchange and Buckingham describes the pathetic scene as the romantic young couple were separated. He writes that he and the crew were then marched from A Coruña to Lisbon, a journey of nearly 400 miles. In the autobiography, Buckingham’s account of youthful imprisonment and forced marching is light-hearted, although he could rely on a readership primed James Silk Buckingham, Autobiography of James Silk Buckingham (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 1:42. For the history of the Jacobin novel, see Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Jon Mee, ‘The Novel Wars of 1790–1804’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 2: English and British Fiction 1750–1820, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199–215. 3 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:103. 4 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (1794; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000), 281. 5 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:103–6. 2

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to recognize his implied suffering and heroism by contemporary, more directly sensational, narratives published by British former prisoners of war.6 On his return home, Buckingham continues, his mother understandably forbade him from going to sea again. Nonetheless, at sixteen he volunteered for the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman, only to desert soon afterwards, shaken by the brutality he encountered, including witnessing a particularly horrific incident of flogging. The autobiography depicts this experience as foundational to Buckingham’s later career in politics, which included strong advocacy for improvements to the working conditions of sailors. Although his epiphany may well have been genuine, the radicalizing effect of a spell in the navy is another trope Buckingham may have drawn from his reading, as it features in political fiction such as the anonymous Henry Willoughby, in which the press-ganged protagonist suffers for years under despotic and incompetent officers.7 A substantial inheritance on his mother’s death in 1804 should have secured Buckingham’s future but was embezzled by a trustee and lost in a smuggling venture. He narrates an impoverished and restless adolescence spent working in a variety of occupations: clerk to a local lawyer, bookseller and print compositor at the Clarendon Press, the forerunner to today’s Oxford University Press. At nineteen, he married Elizabeth Jennings, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, and they had a daughter, Virginia Sappho Buckingham.8 Returning to the sea with the aim of providing for his young family, he became chief officer to one of Elizabeth’s brothers, who was the captain of a transatlantic cargo ship, and rose through what he depicts as his own diligence to become a merchant captain  –  a firm but benevolent one, who prohibited the drinking of spirits at a time when rum was almost ubiquitous at sea – in his own right. Buckingham is careful to show that he carried goods such as cloth and tools across the Atlantic, but by trading to the southern states of the United States and to British colonies in the West Indies, he was profiting from plantation slavery.9 By the time of writing in the 1850s, Buckingham had become a campaigning abolitionist, and was clearly uncomfortable with his previous career. On arrival in Trinidad after one crossing, Buckingham tells his readers, he was appalled by the cruelty he witnessed: In my youthful enthusiasm for liberty, and with more zeal than prudence perhaps, I took frequent occasion to express my abhorrence of this state of degradation in which the negroes were kept … my convictions were as strong on this subject as at any subsequent period of my life; and I could not refrain from pressing this conviction on others.10

Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:62–131; see, for example, William Story, A Journal Kept in France, during a Captivity of More Than Nine Years (Sunderland: George Garbutt, 1815). 7 Anonymous, Henry Willoughby (London: G. Kearsley, 1798), 1:160–72. 8 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:152–90. 9 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:215, 271–3. 10 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:221–2. 6

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Here again, Buckingham echoes an aspect of a Jacobin novel: in this instance the hero’s protests in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) at the slavery he witnesses in fictionalized Port-au-Prince, such that he is accused of being an ‘ami des noirs’.11 Buckingham’s account of these early anti-slavery sympathies is impossible to verify, but soon afterwards he began captaining voyages into the Mediterranean instead of the Caribbean. In 1813 he travelled to Cairo, where he used his contacts to become a mercantile agent for the reforming ruler, Muhammad Ali, who was hoping to open a regular trade with the East India Company. From Egypt, Buckingham set off overland for India in 1814, adopting Ottoman and Arab dress on the journey and using the opportunity to keep a diary, which he would later shape into a series of travelogues: Travels in Palestine (1821), Travels among the Arab Tribes (1825), Travels in Mesopotamia (1827) and Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (1829). The merchants Buckingham met in Bombay were unreceptive, so he abandoned the trading scheme and eventually, in 1818, sailed to Calcutta. From this time Buckingham’s life becomes more verifiable as he is mentioned in the British and Indian press and Company records. He became popular in Calcutta through the literary merits of his as-yet unpublished travel journal from Palestine, which was circulated in the British community, and through his public refusal to captain a slaving voyage to Madagascar.12 Buckingham’s public profile encouraged the leading British merchant in India, John Palmer, to propose the joint venture of a newspaper, intended to act as the voice of independent British and Anglo-Indian merchants in opposition to the East India Company authorities.13 As the editor of the Calcutta Journal (1818–23), Buckingham became notorious for attacking the Company’s corruption, despotism and misrule, leading to regular confrontations with Company officials.14 As a result, in 1823 he was banished by the Company from its territories in India, returning to Britain penniless but in a blaze of self-generated publicity which portrayed him as a martyred champion of press freedom.15 His need for funds and determination to get revenge drove him into a furious campaign against the Company in the courts, at shareholder meetings and in the press, transforming Buckingham into a celebrity in Britain almost overnight, with the press pouring out repeated articles and pamphlets

John Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption, ed. Michael Scrivener, Yasmin Solomonescu and Judith Thompson (1801; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2013), 132, 137. 12 Leicester Stanhope, ‘Proposed Fund for a General Eastern Voyage’, in Sketch of a Voyage to the India and China Seas, ed. James Silk Buckingham (London: [n. pub.], 1830), 5. 13 Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767–1836 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 33–4. 14 See ‘Restrictions on the Press in India, 1795–1834’, India Office Records, British Library, IOR/H/533-4. 15 See, for example, James Silk Buckingham, Mr Buckingham’s Correspondence with the East India Company and Board of Control (London: [n. pub.], 1824); James Silk Buckingham, ‘Examination of the Arguments against a Free Press in India’, Oriental Herald, no. 2, February 1824, 197–224; ‘Liberty of the Press in India – Petition of Mr. Buckingham’, Hansard, HC Deb. (New Series), 25 May 1824, vol. 11, 858–90. 11

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defending or condemning him.16 Whether or not this had been his original intention, it quickly became clear to Buckingham that personal celebrity could be both profitable and a potential source of opportunities for political activism in support of a range of Radical causes. Buckingham was a skilled and prolific writer, but he was also chronically incapable of sticking to a single venture or making good business decisions. In London he founded and edited the monthly Oriental Herald and Colonial Review (1824–9), which focused on Indian topics; the Sphynx (1827–9), publishing weekly on politics and literature; the Argus (1828), a daily evening newspaper which lasted four weeks; and the twice-weekly Athenaeum (1828–1921), which went on to be celebrated, but with Buckingham as editor only for the first few weeks.17 Only the Oriental Herald managed a prolonged run, and it was in its pages that Buckingham continued his campaign against the East India Company and promoted schemes for increased colonial self-government. These included the creation of colonial legislatures, the establishment of a free press and the inclusion of Indians on juries.18 The Companysponsored Asiatic Journal greeted the publication of the Oriental Herald by declaring ‘literary warfare’ between the two periodicals. They charged Buckingham with fortune-hunting, ungentlemanly conduct and feigned martyrdom. This might have stung, but Buckingham was no doubt pleased to see that they also compared him to the prominent Radicals William Cobbett, Richard Carlile, William Hone and Leigh Hunt, especially as the Asiatic Journal asserted that ‘with the exception of Cobbett, he excels those we have named in literary attainments’.19 As this list suggests, Buckingham was stepping onto a new path in popular politics, but one with some precedent. Political campaigners who relied on a popular platform were increasingly using improvements in communications and travel as well as growing imperial trade and expansion to engage with what Simon Morgan calls a ‘transnational public culture’ while simultaneously participating in highly localized politics.20 British Radicalism, having developed in the eighteenth century and faced suppression during the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, had reemerged as a political force after Waterloo. The early-nineteenth-century Radicals with whom Buckingham aligned himself were a loose collection of groups and individuals as opposed to an organized association or political party, but they shared an opposition to aristocratic privilege and elite corruption and a desire radically to reform Britain to improve the economic and social condition of the labouring classes. Some campaigned

See, for example, Leicester Stanhope, Sketch of the History and Influence of the Press in British India (London: C. Chapple, 1823); ‘Mr. Buckingham’, Asiatic Journal, no. 16, August 1823, 131–5. 17 G. F. R. Barker and Felix Driver, ‘Buckingham, James Silk (1786–1855)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 30 September 2022, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3855. 18 See, for example, ‘Means of Improving the Conditions of the Natives of India’, Oriental Herald, no. 6, June 1824, 195–205; ‘Benefits of a Free Press to the Natives of India’, Oriental Herald, no. 8, August 1824, 518–52; ‘Admission of the Natives of India to Sit on Juries’, Oriental Herald, no. 42, June 1827, 598–608. 19 ‘Mr. Buckingham’, Asiatic Journal, no. 94, October 1823, 317–25. 20 Morgan, Celebrities, Heroes and Champions, 2. 16

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for democracy, others for industrial co-operatives or agrarian utopias; still others took up Benthamite utilitarianism or attacked placemen and patronage in Parliament, while the rallying call of electoral reform united nearly all early-nineteenth-century Radicals, at least prior to the 1832 Reform Act. Though only a small fraction of the British population could vote and the number of Radicals in Parliament was always small, through popular politics and the press they forged an energetic movement.21 As Morgan outlines, celebrity was crucial to the mobilization of public support for figures like Buckingham. The increasing availability of print allowed popular politicians to spread not only their message but also their image and persona, while building new forms of political organization and fundraising which eventually led to the modern political campaign.22

Radical Orientalist One thing that differentiated Buckingham from contemporary Radicals was the centrality of Orientalism and empire, especially India, to his political and literary career and the construction of his celebrity. The preface of Travels in Palestine had provided an introduction to the author, describing his passion for exploration, with a frontispiece engraving of Buckingham in Arab dress, including a turban and khanjar (dagger), ‘aided by the gravity of a full and flowing beard’.23 His comments on the image suggest an awareness of its capacity to engage the reader, but also the potentially suspect nature of its appeal to visual curiosity: The introduction of a miniature portrait may seem to display an ostentatious desire of being known by the figure of one’s person, as well as by one’s labours … There are few persons, I believe, who in reading the travels of any man, have not desired to know more minutely what were the leading features of his person, and what was the description of dress in which he performed his journey.24

Despite these protestations, it seems clear that Buckingham wished to impress his audience not just with his first-hand expertise of the Middle East, but also with the glamour and exoticism of his persona. For his later travelogues, Buckingham commissioned a new hand-coloured frontispiece portrait of himself in Arab costume

See J. R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London: Hambledon Press, 1992); Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially 206–9; William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980). 22 Morgan, Celebrities, Heroes and Champions, 5. 23 James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Palestine (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1821), xvi. 24 Buckingham, Travels in Palestine, xx–xxi. 21

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riding a horse across the desert, suggesting that any hostile reactions to the first image were outweighed by its positive impact.25 By depicting himself in this way, Buckingham placed himself in a long tradition of European travellers wearing Asian clothing. There were often practical reasons for adopting local dress, but as Tara Mayer explains, in portraiture it was very often a public performance for European audiences, as a means of asserting the sitter’s mastery of ‘the Orient’ and providing visual proof of their having entered what viewers would understand as the culture of the East.26 In colonial India, however, the adoption of Asian dress carried additional meanings. From the start of the East India Company’s presence in India in the seventeenth century, its servants had sought to integrate with Mughal power structures and engage with courtly culture. The Mughal polity was in part maintained by the giving of khil’ats (robes of honour) by the emperor to his subordinates; wearing one was a sign of material inclusion in the Mughal Empire. This practice had been embraced by the earliest arrivals from the Company, and the image of Company men in varieties of Indian dress became familiar in eighteenth-century paintings. However, this had changed with the ascent of the Company to rule over ever-larger swathes of the subcontinent. The adoption of Indian dress and culture was increasingly frowned upon as Britain exerted its political and cultural dominance, and by the nineteenth century no British official would have freely worn the symbolic khil’at.27 In this climate, Buckingham’s publicizing of his adoption of Asian dress might also have been intended as a provocative signifier of his political sympathies at home and in British India. Buckingham’s desire for notoriety is also evident in his invocation of Lord Byron as a crucial influence on his own lifelong veneration of the classical world and desire to travel. He explains in Travels in Palestine that ‘though it belongs only to a genius like [Byron’s] to express those feelings well, yet men of humbler talents may and do experience them with equal force’.28 Likening his own writing to Byron’s was not the only way in which Buckingham sought to draw a comparison and perhaps borrow some of the attributes which had made Byron probably the greatest British celebrity of the period. Byron had, after all, also been painted in Oriental costume by Thomas Phillips in 1813 following his Mediterranean travels.29 That portrait had been widely

Robert Havell Jn., after William Henry Brooke, ‘Portrait of the Author J.S. Buckingham in the Costume Worn on his Travels’, hand-coloured aquatint and etching. James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), frontispiece. 26 Tara Mayer, ‘Cultural Cross-Dressing: Posing and Performance in Orientalist Portraits’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012): 281–98. 27 See Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘The English East India Company and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in Late Mughal Bengal’, in Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: Sources, Itinéraires, Langues (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), ed. Corinne Lefèvre, Ines G. Županov and Jorge Flores (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2015), 293–305; Natasha Eaton, ‘Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art, Gift, and Diplomacy in Colonial India, 1770–1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 4 (2004): 816–19; Margot C. Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780–1820’, Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 1 (2006), 205–7. 28 Buckingham, Travels in Palestine, vii. 29 Thomas Phillips, George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron in Albanian Dress. Oil on canvas, 1813. 1976, Government Art Collection, British Embassy, Athens. 25

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celebrated, and Buckingham had his own grand portrait painted by Henry William Pickersgill on his return to London in 1825.30 The year before, Pickersgill had exhibited The Oriental Love Letter, a figure piece of a young woman in Ottoman dress, at the Royal Academy to considerable acclaim.31 In sitting for the up-and-coming Pickersgill, Buckingham clearly wished to replicate the Romantic Orientalism of the artist’s earlier painting and thereby grab the attention of London society. In this portrait, with its background minaret, Buckingham shares a sofa with his wife Elizabeth, holding her hand and looking fondly at her while she glances out at the viewer. On Buckingham’s arms and draped across the sofa are two Kashmir shawls, a fashionable and recognisable connection to India. They both wear striking Asian dress. Buckingham’s attire mostly appears to be the same as that he had worn on his travels, but Elizabeth had remained in Britain throughout his adventures. Despite this, she is shown dressed in the style of a high-ranking Ottoman woman, with an expression suggesting satisfaction at her husband’s return. The image thus daringly combines sentimental domesticity with exoticism and invites the viewer into the private lives of the sitters. Buckingham would also address his relationship with his wife in his autobiography, describing their marriage at a young age as the result of a passionate love match.32 Though it had the potential to undermine him, Buckingham’s association with the Oriental was essential to his Radical politics. For much of early-nineteenth-century Britain, Asia was defined by ‘Oriental despotism’, a concept taken up by Radical politicians as a powerful imaginary with which to critique British state repression.33 Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud has shown how, ‘by portraying British statecraft as barbarously foreign, reformist writers in the Romantic period solicited public support for changes to parliamentary representation, taxation, and the penal system, among other policy matters.’34 The celebrity of James Silk Buckingham – who is not mentioned in Cohen-Vrignaud’s study – perhaps offers a more complex picture of the relationship between Orientalism and British Radical politics in this period: despite his enthusiastic participation in stereotypical literary and artistic Orientalism, for Buckingham India was not simply an imaginary vehicle for domestic political discussion, but a real location and subject to be discussed in its own right, and was the victim of, rather than an allegory for, British despotism.

Henry William Pickersgill, James Silk Buckingham and Elizabeth Buckingham in Arab Dress. Oil on canvas, 1825. RGS700255, Royal Geographical Society, London. 31 Henry William Pickersgill, The Oriental Love Letter. Oil on canvas, 1824. 03/1364, Royal Academy of Arts, London. 32 Buckingham, Autobiography, 1:181. 33 See Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s ‘The History of British India’ and Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 34 Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 30

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Radical Politics Buckingham’s growing notoriety as an activist and writer led to invitations from reformist civil society organizations across Britain to dinners and public meetings, and to give speeches and lectures. In particular, with the East India Company’s royal charter due for renewal in Parliament in 1833, the free trade lobby was determined to end the Company’s remaining monopolies and Buckingham was a willing and popular ally.35 Recognizing an eager audience, by 1829 he had developed a repertoire of lecture series on his travels and political topics such as the abolition of the East India Company. The major industrial and mercantile centres of Britain and Ireland were particularly receptive, and Buckingham found himself with many repeat bookings, including in Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. His popularity as a speaker was such that by 1848 he could boast of having given over 3,500 lectures in 300 different towns and cities in Britain and North America (although, characteristically, this number may be exaggerated).36 It is evident that a large part of the draw for audiences was Buckingham’s celebrity: the chance to be in the presence of and listen to the man himself. Fans, including Elizabeth Stanhope, Countess of Harrington, a salonnière and patron, collected lecture tickets and autographs.37 In Buckingham’s 1830 published ‘Syllabus’ publicizing a forthcoming lecture series, only the last seven out of seventyfive pages list the proposed lectures; the rest of the brochure is filled with an account of Buckingham’s adventures and struggles, transcripts of his speeches and previous lectures, and reports of the welcome and praise he had received across the country.38 The obvious next step for Buckingham was to become an MP. However, despite his public profile and growing experience of confrontations with adversaries in the courts, at East India House and Westminster, election to the unreformed House of Commons was an expensive and uncertain prospect. Audaciously, Buckingham first stood as a candidate in 1831 in New Woodstock, a seat under the control of the Duke of Marlborough, in direct opposition to the duke’s second son. At the turn of the 1830s, reform of the House of Commons had become the overriding issue in domestic politics, with Whigs and Radicals demanding the extension of the franchise beyond the tiny number of property owners in most constituencies, and the end of ‘rotten boroughs’ whose handful of voters were under the control of local aristocrats. The

For more on campaigns against the Company’s monopoly, see Huw Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially 260–99; Yukihisa Kumagai, Breaking into the Monopoly: Provincial Merchants and Manufacturers’ Campaigns for Access to the Asian Market, 1790–1833 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 36 James Silk Buckingham, Outline Sketch of the Voyages, Travels, Writing and Public Lectures of James Silk Buckingham (London: Peter Jackson, 1848), 154. 37 Album of Martha S. Browne, Western Manuscript Collection, British Library, Add. MS. 73082, f. 75; Collection of autographs, in franks and letters, of eminent persons of England and the United States, Western Manuscript Collection, British Library, Add. MS. 27952, f. 126; Stanhope (Harrington) Papers, Western Manuscript Collection, British Library, Add. MS. 82731, vol. 1. 38 James Silk Buckingham, Improved Syllabus of Mr. Buckingham’s Lectures on the Oriental World (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1830). 35

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Tories had blocked several attempts at reform, sparking national unrest. In the middle of this, Buckingham’s candidacy in Woodstock may have been more of a publicity stunt than a genuine attempt at winning a seat in Parliament. At the hustings Buckingham argued, in opposition to the accepted electoral practice, that the borough franchise was open to all male householders, not just the freemen (holders of privileged citizenship gained by birth, apprenticeship, gift or purchase), and attempted to have the votes of 123 New Woodstock householders counted.39 Although his predictable lack of success left him with only sixteen legitimate votes against the two Marlborough candidates’ shared 155, the election was a propaganda coup both for Buckingham personally and for the wider Reform movement. After the Reform Act was passed the next year, Buckingham was an obvious candidate to stand on a Radical platform in the newly reformed electoral system. Connections in Sheffield, an industrial city which had been granted representation for the first time by the Act, approached him to run for the seat, and he was elected to the House of Commons in 1832.40 He joined a small group of Radicals in a House still dominated by Whigs and Tories, who drowned out one of his earliest speeches with heckling and laughter. Nevertheless, he was an active and outspoken MP, voting against the Corn Laws and the Irish Coercion Act, and in favour of Jewish emancipation, the secret ballot, a free press in India, the provision of parks, museums and libraries for the working classes and the abolition of the press gang and flogging in the military. He also promoted two causes to which he would become dedicated in later life: temperance and the abolition of slavery.41 In his first year in Parliament, Buckingham’s main efforts were concentrated on India, having been elected just in time to oppose the renewal of the Company’s charter. In debates he spoke at length against the ‘poverty and wretchedness’ which Company rule had brought to a previously prosperous India and lamented ‘the vast accessions of territory which they had made by plundering the native princes of their lawful dominions’.42 He argued that the first course of remedial action ought to be the end of Company rule, with Britain taking direct control, but should it turn out that ‘the Ministers were incompetent to govern India, or unwilling to incur the trouble’, then, he declared, ‘let the possession be given back to its rightful owners’.43 His vision for a reformed government of British India centred on the empowerment of the Indian middle classes, the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community and British expatriates. Buckingham was not completely opposed to empire. Rather, he suggested a variety of constitutional arrangements over the course of his campaigns, all aimed at replacing

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 7 May 1831, 3; David R. Fisher, ‘New Woodstock’, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820–1832, accessed 2 August 2022, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ volume/1820-1832/constituencies/new-woodstock. 40 Ralph Edmund Turner, James Silk Buckingham: A Social Biography (London: Williams and Norgate, 1934), 246. 41 Turner, James Silk Buckingham, 271–308. 42 ‘East-India Company’s Charter’, Hansard, HC Deb. (3rd Series), 13 June 1833, vol. 18, 783, 759. 43 ‘East-India Company’s Charter’, Hansard, c. 776. 39

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the contemporary colonial system with more participatory models. With his circle of Radicals, he advocated passionately, if vaguely, for extending ‘British rights’ to Indians, though precisely what this meant was rarely spelled out. He and his allies were much more certain about what they opposed: a corrupt, militaristic and despotic system which subjected millions to repression and poverty.44 Buckingham left Parliament in 1837, having decided not to stand at the next general election, but his personal celebrity remained a powerful political force. In 1826 Buckingham had given up alcohol on medical advice and had long disliked drunkenness. While in Parliament he was chair of the select committee on intoxication and devoted much of his post-parliamentary career to campaigning for temperance.45 This cause was founded on a paternalist belief in the need for sobriety among the working classes. Buckingham argued that alcohol was ‘the chief cause of the pauperism, prostitution, and crime’ in Britain, that it stunted the growth and education of the young, and that it made labouring people susceptible to disease and malnutrition and thereby weakened the nation and its economy.46 In the 1850s he established and became president of the London Temperance League, organizing fetes, parades, publications and meetings. Here again, Buckingham the celebrity and gifted public speaker played an essential part in its early success and growth. The Illustrated London News reported that one of the league’s meetings was attended by over 6,500 people, and that ‘Buckingham on his arrival was received by a hearty burst of cheering’.47 Buckingham had unusually sided with the Company and Tories on the question of slavery in India, arguing that it was largely domestic and confined to the upper strata, and that any attempt to ban the practice would result in the alienation and potential rebellion of the elite upon whose collaboration British rule was built.48 However, he had long been an opponent of Atlantic slavery. Following abolition in the British colonies in 1833, abolitionist attention turned elsewhere. Societies sprang up across Britain, most prominently the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1839 with the mission of bringing about global abolition, with a major emphasis on the US South. After leaving Parliament, Buckingham undertook a four-year tour of North America, delivering public lectures and giving speeches at temperance rallies, where he found a new eager audience. He arrived in Washington in 1838, at the time of a fatal rifle duel between two congressmen, William J. Graves and Jonathan Cilley, and arranged for the printing of a public anti-duelling address based on a bill he had previously presented to Parliament. The effect of his controversial intervention was such that he was invited to address a joint session of the US Congress and attend an

See Kieran Hazzard, ‘From Conquest to Consent: British Political Thought and India, 1818–1833’ (PhD diss., King’s College London, 2018). 45 Report from the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness, 1834 (559), VIII.315. 46 James Silk Buckingham, An Earnest Plea for the Reign of Temperance and Peace (London: Peter Jackson, 1851), xix–xxi. 47 Illustrated London News, 21 February 1852, 165. 48 Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 3–6. 44

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audience with the new President, Martin Van Buren.49 Alongside other tales from his American travels, this incident was reported in his next book, America: Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive (1841). Buckingham sought to contribute to abolitionist campaigns through his travel writing from America, which developed several political ideas, including abolition. Describing Washington D.C., he deplored that ‘the seat of legislation for this free republic, is a well known and well frequented mart for the purchase of slaves’ where ‘buyers and sellers of their fellow-creatures come to traffic in human flesh’.50 He explained to his British readers that these forthright anti-slavery views had resulted in unwanted attention, including a letter from ‘An American’ warning him against public support for abolition. His subsequent book, The Slave States of America (1842), described a rice plantation in Savannah, Georgia, including the routine and conditions of slaves, who were ‘insufficiently fed, most wretchedly clad, and miserably accommodated in their dwellings’, faced ‘continued toil, from morning to night’, with the ever-present threat of the whip, and ‘whose only crime was that they were of a darker colour than the race that held them in bondage’.51 Buckingham’s American tour was probably the height of his professional success and cemented his reputation as a campaigning author and orator. The liberal free trade campaigner Richard Cobden was induced to put aside his previous opinion of Buckingham as an ‘arch-charlatan’ and now eagerly recruited him as a lecturer for the Anti-Corn Law League, writing to Buckingham across the Atlantic before he had even returned.52 Despite continued ridicule in the right-wing press, Buckingham’s influence had increased to the point that in 1844 he could open the British and Foreign Institute, under the patronage of Prince Albert, as a social club for literary and scientific men visiting London.53 Between 1847 and 1848, in his sixties, Buckingham went on one last great journey, travelling extensively through western Europe, and published an account in two volumes under the collective title An Autumnal Tour (1848). At the end of the last volume, he included an advertisement for a revised series of sixty lectures, and an attack on the Government and East India Company for having failed to compensate him for his banishment twenty-five years earlier.54 In 1851 he was finally granted a civil list pension of 200 pounds a year, though he continued to campaign, publish and organize around a range of causes until his death in 1855.

James Silk Buckingham, America: Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive (London: Fisher, Son, and Co., 1841), 1:272–90. 50 Buckingham, America, 1:282, 358. 51 James Silk Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London: Fisher, Son, and Co., 1842), 1:132–4. 52 Richard Cobden to Richard Ware Cole, 24 April 1835; Richard Cobden to Francis Place, 17 September 1840; Richard Cobden to Charles Villiers, 4 December 1842; in The Letters of Richard Cobden, Vol. 1: 1815–1847, ed. Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 54, 201, 306. 53 Barker and Driver, ‘Buckingham, James Silk (1786–1855)’. 54 James Silk Buckingham, Belgium, the Rhine, Switzerland, and Holland: An Autumnal Tour, Volume 2 (London: Peter Jackson, 1848), appendix. 49

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Radical Celebrity Morgan defines three types of popular politician: ‘gentlemen radicals’, like Francis Burdett or Henry Hunt; ‘radical artisans’, like Samuel Bamford; and ‘professional agitators’, such as George Thompson, who were drawn from the middle classes. Buckingham clearly fits within this last category and, like his contemporaries, made his ‘living from journalism or lecturing in reform causes, paid either from ticket receipts or retainers provided by extra-parliamentary organisations’.55 Morgan explains the reputational risks of this: Financial dependence led to accusations that Thompson and his ilk were ‘hired guns’, whose political convictions hinged on the next payment. Given such disadvantages, the ability of such men to enthuse audiences, and even build up a core of adoring fans, testified powerfully to their charismatic authority and powers of persuasion.

This was clearly true of Buckingham, whose critics also showed the suspicion and disdain often attracted by celebrities. The Tory monthly periodical Fraser’s Magazine was particularly scathing: For ten years no individual has kept himself so constantly before the public as this gentleman. In quarto or octavo, in magazine and newspaper, in placard and pamphlet, in every conceivable form and combination of type and paper, in brazen advertisement and sly paragraph … Public meeting, private committee, court of justice, Leadenhall Street [East India House], St. Stephen’s [House of Commons], have rung with his misfortunes … Buckingham is a quack of the first order … There is nothing that the man has attempted that is not redolent of money.56

The Company-controlled Asiatic Journal also published numerous personal attacks, describing him as one of Britain’s most dangerous ‘half-educated and licentious demagogues’.57 He was also savaged by Sandford Arnot, his former deputy editor, who had received compensation from the Company for his own hardships due to the forced closure of the Calcutta Journal. Arnot published a series of pamphlets which stated that ‘the character of public men is public property’ before proceeding to an eighty-page character assassination of his former employer. The most damaging sections accused Buckingham of being a ‘needy adventurer’ who had defrauded his investors in India and returned to Britain where ‘his remarkable plausibility of manner and fluency of speech’ had allowed him to tour as a lecturer, with the aim of, in Arnot’s words, ‘putting five shillings into his pocket for every fool he can find throughout the country’.58 Morgan, Celebrities, Heroes and Champions, 4. ‘East India Company. – No. 1’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1, no. 3 (April 1830): 260–7. 57 ‘Review – Statement of Facts Relative to Mr. Buckingham’, Asiatic Journal, no. 97, January 1824, 44. 58 Sandford Arnot, Sketch of the History of the Indian Press, 2nd Edn. (London: William Low, 1830), 1, 59, 81–2. 55 56

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Buckingham’s Orientalist self-fashioning made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from political opponents, in a political culture in which ‘the East’ was associated with treachery, deceit and the corruptions of luxury. The punning possibilities of his middle name – silk was a major import from Asia – offered an additional target for attacks, such as an 1833 caricature depicting him as an untrustworthy, turbaned pedlar, captioned ‘An East Indian Silk Sale’. A bearded Buckingham, in Eastern dress recognizable from his own portraits, kneels in front of the chairman of the East India Company, asking for a reward for defrauding the Company’s ‘Radical opponents’. Behind him are listed the sums he has supposedly raised from fraudulent schemes and ‘calumny’. The Company chairman rejects Buckingham’s plea, declaring that his ‘silk seems nothing but worsted’.59 Celebrity, of course, was always a precarious and suspect route to public prominence. As Antoine Lilti has argued, one of the fundamental building blocks of mass-media celebrity is that celebrities attract a lively interest in their private lives, creating an illusion of a personal and emotional connection between fan and celebrity. Key to the existence of an individual’s celebrity is their ability to capture and maintain the curiosity of their audience.60 ‘Gossip’, poet John Clare sniffed in 1825, ‘is a mighty spell in the literary world’ and could propel its subject into the public sphere.61 The story of Buckingham’s dramatic expulsion from India, his personal charisma in performance, his numerous court trials, the rumours of financial troubles and the aura of glamour created by his provocative portraits created enough gossip to keep him before the public and draw his audience into his private life. This combination of scandal and personal magnetism, attested to by his critics, were the building blocks of a new career for Buckingham. The volatile perception of celebrity, in Buckingham’s case, was intensified by the showmanlike, overtly literary qualities of his writing – which prioritized energy and entertainment over the plain-speaking or sharp-edged critiques offered by other Radicals – but also by his appropriation of Orientalist imagery in the creation of his public persona. Morgan shows that celebrity was essential to Radical popular politics as a result of the exclusivity of the electoral franchise in the early nineteenth century. The same was true for Buckingham, whose embrace of the exotic and claims to wisdom and knowledge based on wide travel especially in Asia and India were the foundation of both celebrity and a career as a political Radical. This path led to many obstacles and opponents, but Buckingham had been an adventurer all his life. Throughout his varied career, he harnessed his celebrity, personal charisma and literary writings to prompt the British public into examining the inequities of slavery and empire and to urge reform. A greater understanding of Buckingham’s life is critical to our understanding of the history of Radicalism and the politics of empire.

H. Fores, An East India Silk Sale; or, Mr Sleek Hum-Bugging ’em, i.e. the Trading Patriot Turned Merchant. Etching, 1833. 1868,0808.9166, British Museum. 60 Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 6–8. 61 John Clare, ‘Popularity in Authorship’, European Magazine 1, no. 3 (November 1825): 300; quoted in David Higgins, ‘Celebrity, Politics and the Rhetoric of Genius’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49. 59

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‘Literary Criticism Only’: Jeyamohan and the Author as Conservative Activist in ‘Aram’ (2011) Divya A.

B. Jeyamohan’s hit Tamil short story ‘Aram’ (2011) – the title of which can be translated as ‘Virtue’, ‘Righteousness’ or ‘Ethics’ – is a tale of justice meted out to a man of letters in Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, India, in the post-independence period.1 The collection in which this story is published, also called Aram, is premised as a series of biofictions about ‘real-life figures’ – its recently published English translation was given the title Stories of the True.2 As such, the book also presents itself as politically and socially active: K. V. Shylaja, its publisher, asserts that ‘this work will lead the Tamil mind in a noble direction’, exhorting the people to live their lives with ‘at least a little bit of integrity’.3 In Tamil Nadu, Jeyamohan is one of the most famous and bestselling living writers and has made his presence felt in multiple cultural domains. The winner of the Canada-based Tamil Literary Garden’s Iyal Award in 2014, hailed as an ‘Asuran [Demon] in Writing’,4 Jeyamohan works across genres and forms, writing novels, an epic, short-story collections, literary criticism, memoirs, travel writing and films. His most notable literary works include Vishnupuram (Place called Vishnupuram; 1997), Pin Thodarum Nizhalin Kural (Following Shadow’s Voice; 1999), Kaadu (Forest; 2003), Kottravai (Goddess Kaali; 2005), Aram (2011) and most famously Venmurasu (White Drum), a work in twenty-six volumes (2014–2020). A very active blogger, he has also built for himself the role of contemporary philosopher and public intellectual, writing on such diverse subjects as spirituality, politics, culture, child-rearing, feminism and Tamil education. To this personal cultural authority, the fame of Jeyamohan’s biofictionalized subjects is a supplement as well as a theme for exploration. In ‘Aram’, in particular, All translations from Tamil are my own unless otherwise stated. B. Jeyamohan, Aram (Tiruvannamalai: Vamsi Books, 2011), 10; Jeyamohan, Stories of the True, trans. Priyamvada (Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2022). Jeyamohan states that the central significance of all the stories in Aram is that they are based on real-life figures. Jeyamohan, Aram, 385. 3 Jeyamohan, Aram, 10. 4 A. Muttulingam, ‘Jeyamohan Wins Iyal Award’, Writer A Muttulingam, 21 December 2014, amuttu.net/2014/12/21. 1 2

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he implicitly ventriloquizes an older Tamil writer, M. V. Venkatram (1920–2000). This character is referred to in the story as ‘Periyavar’ (literally ‘the elder male’ in Tamil) with no proper name. However, it is quite evident that the Periyavar in ‘Aram’ is M. V. Venkatram (hereafter alluded to by his popular name M.V.V.). Bava Chelladurai, a writer and well-known storyteller in Tamil Nadu, for example, used the name ‘M.V.V.’ instead of ‘Periyavar’ when narrating a key incident in ‘Aram’ at a literary seminar.5 In Jeyamohan’s story, Periyavar/M.V.V. gives the reader glimpses into his personal past as well as the literary culture centred in Kumbakonam, a southern town, in the midtwentieth century. Periyavar/M.V.V. is forced to choose writing as his profession when his family’s lucrative business in silk zari (border cloth) collapses with the introduction of imitation zari from north India. To survive, he enters into an exploitative writing contract with a publishing house run by the Meiyappan brothers, rewriting books on freedom fighters to cater to the huge demand from local schools and libraries. Complications arise when Periyavar/M.V.V. writes a hundred books at the cost of fifty rupees each, adding up to five thousand rupees. As is customary, the Meiyappan brothers pay the writer in small instalments, and when Periyavar/M.V.V. requests the rest of his payment in order to make arrangements for his daughter’s wedding, the publishers refuse and abuse him brutally. Vexed, he tells the older brother’s wife, Aachi, to intercede for him. A traditional woman of great dignity, cherished by her husband as the guardian spirit of his home, Aachi has a high regard for the writer. Periyavar/ M.V.V. passionately threatens her family and writes a poem warning of dire divine consequences for her kith and kin if the Meiyappan brothers fail to pay him. Aghast, she forces her husband’s hand by sitting in the street under the glare of the summer sun in protest, prompting him quickly to collect the necessary funds to repay the writer, and all ends happily. In this chapter I discuss how Jeyamohan fashions the ‘real-life’ story of ‘Aram’ to perform the regressive ideological work of asserting the innate socio-cultural supremacy of the highest-caste male, through the deft deployment of particular orchestrations of caste and gender roles. The chapter will outline Jeyamohan’s controversial assessments of female authors in India and discuss some wider discourses of caste and gender, before analysing the biofictional truth claims and manipulations of ‘Aram’ in the light of this political context, as well as the literary principle of ‘the sheer truth (uṇmai) of emotion’ propounded by the quintessential Tamil short story exponent Pudhumaipithan (1908–48).6

See Bava Chelladurai, ‘Jeyamohan Aram: Come and Listen to a Story’, YouTube, 18 December 2018, youtu.be/T4nO1jk0u1w. Chelladurai, a close associate of Jeyamohan and husband of K. V. Shylaja, who owns Vamsi Publications, asserts that all the stories in the collection are based on real-life incidents and characters to which fiction has been ‘added’. 6 Preetha Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation: How Pudumaippittan Gave Pre-Eminence to the Tamil Short Story’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2020): 929. 5

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Jeyamohan and the Caste-Gender Nexus Jeyamohan’s conservative cultural stance is manifest in his judgement of Tamil women writers. In a sarcastic 2008 piece on Tamil feminism, he mocked all women students, accusing them of forgetting years of higher education in the humanities in half a day. Jeyamohan denigrates the notion of educating women and ridicules the reality of women’s historical exploitation through unpaid domestic labour as recorded and discussed in C. S. Lakshmi (Ambai)’s fiction.7 Further, in his blog on 9 June 2014, he sneered: Many women, having written nothing of merit, through their many tactics have become media creations. … Today men have to establish themselves as writers only by their fine writing. Women writers just have to put forward their female identity to get their recognition as writers. Even if slight feminist tendencies surface in their writing, many would hesitate to criticise the nature of their work, worrying, ‘why should one get into trouble, in these difficult times?’8

A joint statement against the ‘blatant misogyny’ of Jeyamohan soon had a hundred signatures from both male and female activists and writers.9 Female signatories against Jeyamohan’s derogatory remarks included writers such as Ambai, who received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2021; the 2020 Puthumaipithan Memorial Award-winning Sukirtharani;10 Salma, who writes against the conservative oppression of Muslim women, and whose Irandam Jamankalin Kathai (The Hours Past Midnight) was longlisted for the Man Asian Prize 2010;11 poet-politician Thamizhachi Thangapandian; journalist Kavitha Muralidharan and academician and writer Kalpana Karunakaran. Jeyamohan, as Sudha G. Tilak points out, disregarded even the ‘powerful female voice’ of the award-winning Dalit feminist author Bama, who ‘has a considerable following’.12 The joint statement declared that ‘his vicious statements against women stem from a deeply rooted patriarchal mindset that believes men are superior’.13 Although Jeyamohan immediately issued a statement of ‘apology’, he also ironically insisted that B. Jeyamohan, ‘Tamil Feminism – A Short History’, Jeyamohan, 21 August 2008, www.jeyamohan. in/276/. 8 B. Jeyamohan, ‘Nanjil Nadan’s List’, Jeyamohan, 9 June 2014, www.jeyamohan.in/56339/. 9 Sudha G. Tilak, ‘Tamil Writer Jeyamohan Rubbishes Women Colleagues, Reveals Wider Misogyny’, Scroll.in, 27 June 2014, scroll.in/article/668281/tamil-writer-jeyamoh8an-rubbishes-womencolleagues-reveals-wider-misogyny. 10 The Hindu, ‘Stalin Rajangam, Poet Sukirtharani to Get Award’, 1 November 2021, www.thehindu. com/news/national/tamil-nadu/stalin-rajangam-poet-sukirtharani-to-get-award/article37276642. ece. 11 Stanley Carvalho, ‘“These Days, I Do Not Write with the Same Degree of Frankness as Before”: Salma’, The Hindu, 5 July 2021, www.thehindu.com/books/these-days-i-do-not-write-with-thesame-degree-of-frankness-as-before-salma/article35148840.ece. 12 Tilak, ‘Tamil Writer Jeyamohan Rubbishes Women Colleagues’. 13 M.A.S.E.S (Movement Against Sexual Exploitation and Sexism), ‘Joint Statement against Writer Jeyamohan’s Sexist and Women Hatred Post on His Website’, M.A.S.E.S Say No To Sexism, 18 June 2014, masessaynotosexism.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/joint-statement-against-writer-jeyamohanssexist-and-women-hatred-post-on-his-website/. 7

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he had only heard of four or five of the women signatories, and that none of them had written anything great, labelling the group of women who publicly objected as ‘simpletons’ and ‘petty’, akin to those shrill women who squabble at the common water taps.14 Moreover, Jeyamohan’s assessment of a veteran Indian writer, Kamala Das (1934–2009), also reflects sustained sexism. Das won several awards, including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (1969), the National Sahitya Akademi Award (1985) and the Asian World Prize for Literature (1985). Her works are characterized by explorations into female loneliness, nostalgia for the maternal home, female liberty through sexual freedom and, in Shahnaz Habib’s words, ‘the unfair privileges of caste and wealth; and the contradictions of motherhood’.15 Her autobiography My Story (1976) has been translated into fifteen languages.16 Jeyamohan, writing after the death of Das, assessed her as dramatic, unbalanced, attention-seeking and driven by a sexual need apparently propelled by her physical ugliness: ‘Kamala’s problems have the same root. She was not good-looking. She was fat, dark and almost ugly. She had an insatiable thirst for publicity and kept promoting herself … because of her ugly looks and consequent inferiority complex, Kamala Das became a nymphomaniac.’17 Jeyamohan classifies his remarks on Das as ‘literary criticism only’.18 But such a brutal and subjective attack reveals the extent of Jeyamohan’s misogynist interpretation of women’s writing as predicated purely on their physical appearance. He reduces Das’s discourse of sexuality and female liberation to a sense of disappointment over her lack of beauty and thus characterizes such writing as the distorted over-compensation of ‘ugly women’. K. Satchidanandan’s perceptive characterization of Das’s female figures in her works is more productive: ‘her urban women are mostly schizophrenic, torn by conflicts and desperate for real love while her rural women, mostly drawn from the lower classes, are less inhibited and openly critical of the master-race and patriarchal interventions’.19 Jeyamohan’s disparagement and marginalization of this outspoken and ‘openly critical’ feminist voice indicate a deeply misogynistic and patriarchal perspective. In this context, it is unsurprising that Aram depicts women via extreme stereotypes of villainy and victimhood: the lower-caste witless beast-divinity Naayadi Mother and the pseudo-progressive, parasitic upper-caste wife Suba in the story ‘Nooru Naarkaligal’ (A Hundred Armchairs); the traitorous English-educated lover (‘Matharu Thayir’/ Whisked Curd); the step-motherly, stingy Mami/Aunt and the unkind mother who resents her own son (‘Sotrukkanaku’/Food Account); the corrupt female magistrate

B. Jeyamohan, ‘Women’s Statement’, Jeyamohan, 19 June 2014, www.jeyamohan.in/56732/. Shahnaz Habib, ‘Kamala Das’, Guardian, 18 June 2009, www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/18/ obituary-kamala-das. 16 Soma Das, ‘My Story by Kamala Das’, Purple Pencil Project, 8 May 2019, www.purplepencilproject. com/about-purple-pencil-project/my-story-by-kamala-das/. 17 M.A.S.E.S, ‘Joint Statement’. 18 B. Jeyamohan, ‘Kamala Suraiya Discussion’, Jeyamohan, 12 June 2009, www.jeyamohan.in/2920/. 19 K. Satchidanandan, ‘Redefining the Genre: Kamala Das’, Indian Literature 53, no. 3 (2009): 52. 14 15

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and the cruel nurse in ‘Kotti’ (Madness); and the English-speaking artist-prostitute in ‘Mayil Kazhuthu’ (Peacock Neck). In the Indian social system of caste, ‘the Shudra and Ati-Shudra … [are] the two lowest groups in the hierarchy of the varna caste system’.20 Above them in increasing order of social privilege and entitlement are the Vaishyas and Kshatriyas, with Brahmins at the top of the pyramid. ‘Shudras’ and those below them in the hierarchy ‘are not permitted to perform the upanayana, the initiatory rite into the study of the Vedas (earliest sacred literature of India)’.21 In Tamil Nadu, the caste system has ‘neither Kshatriyas nor Vaishyas’ and is largely divided into Brahmins, Shudras (including the ‘high-ranking Sudras’ such as the generally wealthy Chettiars) and the Ati-Shudras.22 As the ardent anti-caste writer and activist V. Geetha has explained of her own inheritance of Brahmin caste heritage, caste acts as a form of ‘capital’. Despite her own and her father’s relative poverty, she notes, she had ‘a house to live, opportunity to pursue education; the entitlements that this caste had already accumulated in society has greatly amplified [her] status in life’.23 The cultural capital of education is historically a particular privilege of the highest caste. Nevertheless, women occupy a secondary place to the men in every caste. Karin Kapadia writes that ‘women are considered inferior to men in all the castes, though in differing degree. The social status of women is equal to that of the men in their caste only in dealings outside their caste.’24 Furthermore, women are invested with the crucial function of sustaining caste purity, identity and manhood.25 Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran argue that ‘demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the “manhood” of those castes’, a template that is put to use in ‘Aram’ through the Brahmin writer’s control of Aachi, a woman from the Nagarathar/Nattukottai Chettiar community, an elite Shudra caste.26 Uma Chakravarti writes that ‘patriarchal codes’ and ‘brahmanical codes’ ensure the reproduction of ‘the hierarchical order of closed endogamous circles’, incorporating ‘both an ideology of chaste wives and pativrata women who are valorised, and a structure of rules and institutions by which caste hierarchy and gender inequality are maintained’.27 The structural function of the figure of Aachi in the plot of ‘Aram’ is to Suraj Yengde, ‘Dalit Cinema’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 3 (2018): 503. ‘Shudra’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2022, www.britannica.com/topic/Shudra. 22 Gautam K. Jha, ‘Thaipusam in Malaysia: A Hindu Festival in the Tamil Diaspora by Carl Vadivella Belle’, Diaspora Studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 100. 23 V. Geetha, ‘Interview’, Neelam (8 April 2021), 74. theneelam.com/ambedkars-position-ondemocracy-encloses-caste-and-gender-differences-says-v-geetha/. 24 Karin Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 14. 25 For the relation between gender and caste, see Sharmila Rege, ‘A Dalit Feminist Standpoint’, Seminar 471 (November 1998), www.india-seminar.com/2018/710/710_sharmila_rege.htm; S. Anandhi, ‘Caste and Gender in Colonial South India’, Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 15 (2005); V. Geetha, ‘Politics and Culture in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6 February 2021, www.epw.in/ journal/2021/6/book-reviews/politics-and-culture-tamil-nadu.html; Hugo Gorringe, ‘Afterword: Gendering Caste: Honor, Patriarchy and Violence’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 19 (2018): journals.openedition.org/samaj/4685. 26 Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Caste and Gender: Understanding Dynamics of Power and Violence’, Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 37 (1991): 2131. 27 Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (2003; New Delhi: Sage, 2018), 33. 20 21

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affirm the cultural supremacy of the Brahmin writer, thus reiterating the varna order, as well as restoring the secondary position of, and thereby bringing ‘glory’ to, the woman and her caste clan despite their superior wealth in the story.

‘Aram’, Biofiction and uṇmai The claims ‘Aram’ makes to biofictional credibility underpin its assertion of moral credibility. They also enable Jeyamohan to marshal and manipulate the cultural history around Periyavar/M.V.V. – a productive novelist, poet, dramatist, short-story writer, translator, editor, biographer and essayist who won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 – as well as other significant Tamil writers associated with Manikodi, a Kumbakonam journal that launched Tamil modernist literature.28 In the story, the fictional name ‘Meiyappan Brothers’ is given to the publishers, possibly because the actual publishers, the Palaniappa Brothers, for whom M.V.V. wrote about ‘sixty short biographies’, are still in business.29 While M.V.V. was never a mass celebrity in his own time, he was nevertheless esteemed among his own coterie, a group instrumental in consolidating the twentiethcentury Tamil literary landscape. In contrast, in the character of Periyavar, Jeyamohan portrays M.V.V. as a writer who essentially abridged, translated and rewrote works by others for a pittance; his specific writerly persona is not important for the narrative. M.V.V. himself records in an interview that he lost his wealth due to financial losses in running the literary magazine Thenee (Bee) in 1948.30 This is elided by Jeyamohan in ‘Aram’, which attributes Periyavar’s/M.V.V.’s pauperization to the introduction of industrial silk imports from the north of India. That is, Jeyamohan diminishes M.V.V.’s writerly stature in ‘Aram’ in order to accentuate his Brahmin identity through his characterization of Periyavar. M.V.V. belonged to a Saurashtra family.31 Distinct from Tamil Brahmins32 and known as ‘Patunulkarar’ or ‘silk thread people’, Saurashtrians were historically

B. Kolappan, ‘Of Idyllic Times and Literary Fame in Temple Town’, The Hindu, 18 February 2016, www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/of-idyllic-times-and-literary-fame-in-temple-town/ article8250516.ece. 29 ‘M. V. Venkatram’, Viruba, www.viruba.com/atotalbooks.aspx?id=780. See also Sahitya Akademi [Indian National Academy of Letters], ‘Meet the Author: M. V. Venkataram’, Sahitya Akademi, 1995, sahitya-akademi.gov.in/library/meettheauthor/m_v_venkataram.pdf. A book blogger mentions these real-life figures in ‘Aram’: M.V.V., Jeyamohan and the Palaniappa brothers. R. V., ‘Jeyamohan’s Recent Short Story Series’, Silicon Shelf, 15 March 2011, siliconshelf.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/. 30 Azhiya Sudargal/ Undying Flames, 2011, accessed 10 June 2022, azhiyasudargal.blogspot. com/2011/07/blog-post_17.html. 31 François Gros, ‘Tamil Short Stories: An Introduction’, in Gros, Deep Rivers: Selected Writings on Tamil Literature, ed. Kannan M. and Jennifer Clare, trans. Mary Premila Boseman (Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2009), 65, footnote 27. 32 Though Saurashtra Brahmins were ‘[l]isted as a backward caste from 1892’ and ordered by the Madras government to ‘stop calling themselves Brahmins’, they continue to be culturally identified as Brahmins. S. N. Sadasivan, A Social History of India (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 2000), 282. 28

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perceived as a Brahmin community whose forte was silk weaving.33 Although the literary significance of M.V.V. is not established in ‘Aram’, Jeyamohan displays his Brahmin markers clearly. A Tamil reader would immediately notice the difference between the language spoken by the character Jeyamohan in ‘Aram’  –  who does not speak the Brahmin Tamil dialect – and Periyavar’s/M.V.V.’s Brahmin Tamil. The second key signal of Periyavar’s/M.V.V.’s unique cultural identity is the silk business. He proudly declares: ‘We were running four or five weaving looms at home. Silk border cloth was brought from the north … The others do not know how to work with this type. On our woven silk bloomed Goddess Mahalakshmi.’34 Jeyamohan thus makes Periyavar/M.V.V. express in a complex rhetoric the notion that the silk woven by his clan is superior because of the blessing of the goddess of wealth, as well as the technical expertise innate to their caste identity. Heavy consumption of coffee by Periyavar/M.V.V. is another significant ‘cultural marker of the Tamil, especially brahmin’; Venkatachalapathy asserts that coffee denoted ‘higher’ and tea ‘lower’ cultural status in Tamil society.35 At the same time, Jeyamohan’s modification of the facts of M.V.V.’s career – which actually included his voluntary abandonment of the silk-weaving business to professionally write, edit and publish a literary magazine – positions the Meiyappan brothers, from the Nagarathar/Nattukottai Chettiar community, as the sole representatives of the book trade or publishing business, thereby neatly assigning specific work to specific castes in the story’s imaginary. As Jeyamohan’s Periyavar/ M.V.V. quips philosophically, ‘every life has been created for a particular labour’.36 Jeyamohan consistently makes Periyavar/M.V.V. employ the caste term ‘Chettiar’37 to refer to the Meiyappan brothers, and this reiteration implicitly accentuates and sharpens the ideology of caste hierarchy. Further, the story’s depiction of the Meiyappan brothers as narrowly commercial and unintelligent businessmen is at odds with the history of the real Palaniappa brothers. The publisher published extensively across domains ranging from spirituality and fiction to the Tamil language, Dravidian linguistics, history and the Indian freedom struggle, winning the Bal Sahitya Puraskar Award from the Government of India for best children’s literature three times, and historically developing a close bond with writers, which, Suganthy Krishnamachari writes, ‘went beyond business … and was almost like family’.38 In particular, the publisher’s series Nattukku Uzhaitha Nallavar (The Good Who Worked for the Country), for which M.V.V. wrote biographies,

See Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Mapping Migrations of South Indian Weavers before, during and after the Vijayanagar Period: Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Globalising Migration History, ed. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 8. 34 Jeyamohan, Aram, 15. 35 A. R. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), 24–5. 36 Jeyamohan, Aram, 16. 37 Jeyamohan, Aram, 15, 16, 18. 38 Suganthy Krishnamachari, ‘A School Guide Becomes an Icon’, The Hindu, 5 October 2017, www. thehindu.com/books/books-authors/the-success-story-of-konar-publications/article19801756.ece. 33

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included accounts of social reformers, political leaders and freedom fighters, such as Mahatma Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and Periyar (E. V. Ramasamy). Nevertheless, in ‘Aram’ Jeyamohan makes Periyavar/M.V.V. refer to an older story by Pudhumaipithan, ‘Nisamum Ninaippum’ (Truth and Thoughts), in order to deceptively establish the Meiyappan/Palaniappa brothers’ low intellect and lack of literary discernment: in this story, two cousins who run a publishing house compare the merits of books and vegetables as saleable commodities, with one preferring the longer shelf life of books.39 However, Pudhumaipithan makes no reference to the Palaniappa brothers. In fact, one of the publishers in ‘Nisamum Ninaippum’ is called ‘Padhmanaba Iyer’, a Brahmin. Jeyamohan has his fictionalized M.V.V. misrepresent ‘Nisamum Ninaippum’ to reinforce the idea that the Meiyappan/Palaniappa brothers are not connoisseurs of literary taste. Tamil literary tradition understands the short story as a genre which makes political and social interventions through its capacity for heightened emotional realism. Formally, as Viorica Patea points out, the short story inherently tends to ‘render … perception in a mode close to the way in which we experience and know the world: occasionally, in fragments’.40 More specifically, in Preetha Mani’s analysis, ‘the doyen of the Tamil short story’, Pudhumaipithan, ‘articulated his vision for how the Tamil community should evolve as Indian independence became more possible’ in stories which ‘pushed back’ from ‘a social realist concern with social reform to a modernist emphasis on individual turmoil’ in their figuration of gender.41 This notion of ‘individual turmoil’ connects the form with truth. Pudhumaipithan explores the function of literature: What is the place of literature in life (vaḻkkai)? … Literature is the elaboration (virivu) of the self (uḷḷam), the awakening (eḻucci) of the self, its blossoming (malarcci). A writer examines life with all its complexities and problems (cikkalkaḷ), subtleties (nuṇukkam), and twists (piṉṉalkaḷ). These produce an emotion (uṇarcci) deep within him … The pulse of literature is emotion (uṇarcci) …. The sheer truth (uṇmai) of emotion leads to a new consciousness (viḻippu); [this] truth itself is the secret (rakaciyam) of life.42

For Pudhumaipithan the writer is defined by ‘the eyes of emotion’.43 Jeyamohan’s ‘Aram’ is also shaped by such a logic of intense emotion. In fact, the prologue to Aram Pudhumaipithan, ‘Nisamum Ninaippum’ (1945), Dinamani, 12 July 2020, www.dinamani.com/ literature/pudhumaipithan-story/2020/jul/12/nisamum-ninaippum-puthumaippitthan-shortstory-3435274.html. 40 Viorica Patea, ‘The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre’, in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. Viorica Patea (New York: Rodopi, 2012), 19. 41 Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation’, 926–8. 42 Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation’, 929. The translation of Pudhumaipithan’s ideas is by Mani unless otherwise stated. The original source of Pudhumaipithan’s discourse used by Mani is in Pudumaipithan,‘Ilakkiyattiṉ Irakaciyam (The Secret of Literature)’, in Putumaippittaṉ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (Pudumaippittan’s Essays), ed. A. R. Venkatachalapathy (1934; Chennai: Kalachuvadu, 2002). 43 Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation’, 929. 39

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discloses that the collection of stories is the outcome of a ‘heightened’ fervour that rose from the inmost recesses of his mind; Jeyamohan divulges that this profound passion revolving around the question of aram/ethics continued ‘to chase him for forty days’, offering him spiritual glimpses of humanity’s victories.44 At the climax of ‘Aram’, Periyavar/M.V.V. passionately berates Aachi. Jeyamohan depicts him in a ‘heightened’ emotional state,45 with the writer declaring himself ‘the favourite of Goddess Saraswathi’, the goddess of learning: I was whipped into frenzy as I spoke those words. My voice rose up. … ‘If you ruin my life, do you think you and your progeny would prosper? If you did indeed prosper, then it means Saraswathi is a Devadiyaal (Devadasi).’46

Only through intense uṇarcci could a writer draw the sacrilegious parallel between a goddess and a ‘Devadiyaal’. This invocation of the term Devadiyaal, a ‘dancing-girl devoted to temple service, commonly a prostitute; harlot, whore’,47 demonstrates the sannatham (oracular fury) of Jeyamohan’s narrator.48 His reference is to the tradition condemned by Gandhi as a ‘double crime’, by which women were exploited ‘for our lust and in the name of god’,49 and abolished by the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 on the grounds that the system dedicating ‘women as “devadasis” to Hindu deities, idols, objects of worship, temples and other religious institutions’, ‘however ancient and pure in its origin, leads many of the women so dedicated to a life of prostitution’.50 Approaching Jeyamohan’s characterization of Periyavar/M.V.V. through Pudhumaipithan’s literary theory, it is obvious that heightened uṇarcci fuels the story’s wronged writer, leading to the production of a ‘new consciousness (viḻippu)’51 in Aachi who intervenes to force her husband to return Periyavar’s/M.V.V.’s dues at once. The narrator’s enraged rhetoric about the goddess is the fulcrum on which the story’s ideology operates; it is, at the same time, Jeyamohan’s own biofictional invention, since it is to be emphasized that there is no evidence suggesting that the historical M.V.V. spoke in such a conceited and derogatory manner about Saraswathi to the publisher’s wife. Similarly, it is vital to note that payment of writers’ commissions in a single instalment was not usual or expected at the time in which the story is set. The acknowledged norm of paying writers in instalments is broken in Periyavar’s/

Jeyamohan, Aram, 5. Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation’, 929. 46 Jeyamohan, Aram, 23. 47 Tamil Lexicon (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1982), 1825. 48 Jeyamohan, Aram, 23. 49 Priyadarshini Vijaisri, ‘Contending Identities: Sacred Prostitution and Reform in Colonial South India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (2005): 397. 50 Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act. Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, 1947. Appendix 2 in Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 51 Jeyamohan, Aram, 23. 44 45

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M.V.V.’s case through the catalytic interaction Jeyamohan sets up between the identities of the writer and Aachi, thus resolving the crisis of the intersecting money and caste plots. The irate Brahmin writer flashes his identification with, and authority over, the goddess Saraswathi, reminding Aachi that his writerly identity is in itself a clear mark of his blessed status, and delivering his ultimatum that if he does not triumph in his battle with the publishers then the reputation of the female divinity herself will be in moral jeopardy. The threat works because Aachi is designed by Jeyamohan to subscribe to the varna system wherein the word of the Brahmin holds hegemony. Aachi’s idealized submission functions within what Jeyamohan expects his reader to understand as the context of the elite Shudra caste of Chettiar in Tamil Nadu in the early twentieth century. Kapadia describes the Chettiar caste as ‘anti-Brahmin’ and endorsing Dravidian political parties.52 This antagonism was politically manifested in the formation of the non-Brahmin Justice Party in 1916, whose founding members included a woman, Alamelu Mangai Thayarammal, and in the rise from 1926 of the Self-Respect Movement, headed by E. V. Ramasamy a.k.a. Periyar (1879–1973)  –  which K. Srilata calls ‘a radical critique of Brahmin supremacy in Tamil society’.53 Periyar also became the head of the Justice Party in 1938. The Chettiar community, then, was associated with the early Dravidian movement, established by Periyar, that rejected superstition, religion and Brahminism and advocated inter-caste marriages. This association with Dravidian politics does not imply a comprehensive rejection of religion on the part of the elite Shudra caste: Kapadia highlights that, in certain parts of Tamil Nadu, the Chettiars are credited with ‘having more “true” piety than the Brahmins’.54 On the other hand, the political mobilization of women through conferences organized by women from various castes in the Self-Respect Movement is recorded by its leading activist, Singaravelu (Chettiar): Women who have been confined to the kitchen are speaking today from public platforms; they are debating about public issues; they are involved in social work as equals of men. … It is rare to find women in other movements who are as skilled in public oratory as they are in this movement … demonstrating equality with men.55

In fact, women scholars and activists jointly bestowed the title of Periyar on E. V. Ramasamy in 1938 for ‘his unparalleled activism to transform South Indian Society’ at the Progressive Women’s Association conference.56

Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters, 11. K. Srilata, ed., The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003). 54 Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters, 9. 55 S. Anandhi, ‘Women’s Question in the Dravidian Movement c. 1925–1948’, Social Scientist 19, no. 5/6 (1991): 31, 40. See also Kudi Arasu, 20 October 1940. 56 Anandhi, ‘Women’s Question in the Dravidian Movement’, 32. 52 53

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‘Aram’ thus stages a conceptual battle between the signification of two nearhomophones: ‘Periyar’, associated with the subversion of caste and gender hierarchies, and ‘Periyavar’, a term used to refer to M.V.V. in the story, a protagonist fashioned to represent and promote an unequal caste and gender order. Another Aachi, a real-life female figure and the mother of Palaniappa the publisher, showed her agency by gifting her son the massive sum of four thousand Indian rupees as capital to start his first stationery store in 1941 in Tiruchirappalli, as he wanted to do business in Tamil Nadu instead of migrating to Malaysia as per the wishes of his father.57 The stationery store evolved into a large publishing business called Palaniappa Brothers. In this context, it can be argued that Jeyamohan’s rendering of Aachi as under the utter suzerainty of the varna order does not transparently reflect the ideological stance of men and women of those turbulent times, who rather resisted their Shudra status of inferiority to the Brahmins. Jeyamohan moulds Periyavar/M.V.V. to assert his gender and caste sovereignty over Aachi. The writer in his religio-poetic unarcci promises genocide to Aachi’s community – ‘Slaying the clan of Chetti to build red mounds / Leaping ascends my Right’ – and it frightens her into headlong action.58 The enormously disproportionate and bloody nature of the potential punishment is worrying, and Jeyamohan’s rendering of Periyavar/M.V.V. suggests an angered god. More disturbing is the fact that Jeyamohan envisions the figure as threatening to extend the wrongs of the Meiyappan brothers to that of their entire ‘Chetti’/Chettiar community. Further, it is evident that Jeyamohan is also implicitly casting himself in the shared role of inspired kindler of emotions and visions which uphold gender and caste hierarchy. So, this scene  –  despite the story’s downplaying of Periyavar’s/M.V.V.’s actual literary output – dramatizes what Jeyamohan sees as the ideal interaction between the story-writer and the world, and is a metatextual model of the effect he aims at in Aram. The Meiyappan brothers, the story suggests, had failed to recognize and sustain the cultural authority of Periyavar/M.V.V. They instead believe in the social mobility of rampant capitalism, until Aachi intercedes on behalf of the divinely empowered writer. Yet the publishers’ attempted escape from varna caste hierarchy is offset by the sacred status that they accord to Aachi, the senior Meiyappan’s wife, referred to by her husband as the ‘beacon of her clan’.59 Jeyamohan sketches her along the lines of an indigenous Tamil goddess: She was very dark in complexion, and nicely rotund in build. She was gargantuan. She had applied turmeric thickly on her face. On her forehead was a quarter-sized fiery kumkum. A thick golden cord of a thaali branching into a rich yield of gold

‘Se. Me. Palniappa Chettiar’, Badri Seshadri, accessed 15 July 2022, www.badriseshadri.in/2005/09/152-1920-1-9-2005.html. 58 Jeyamohan, Aram, 24. 59 Jeyamohan, Aram, 25. 57

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ornaments spread around her neck. Her grandeur was like that of the Amman seated in the temple in the corner of the street. Had a word been uttered against her wish she would have pounced on the jugular to drink blood.60

Aachi stages a grim protest by sitting on the road under the hot sun the entire day until the writer’s payment is settled by her husband. Her fierce physical demeanour is compared to Amman, the regional goddess for whom blood sacrifices are offered. Aachi commands the complete obedience of her husband, who tries to appease her as a humble devotee would a god. For the Meiyappan brothers, the goddess at home  –  Aachi  –  is more forceful than the pan-Indian varna order which has the Brahmin at the top of the pyramid. However, while Aachi/Amman commands the elder Meiyappan, Jeyamohan’s Periyavar/M.V.V. finally controls the Hindu woman/ goddesses both regional (Amman) and pan-Indian (Saraswathi), thus ultimately superseding everyone. The woman who seeks forgiveness and blessing from the Brahmin writer is the only one with ‘aram’ in the entire society. The writer hails Aachi as a ‘dharmapathini’: a wife who upholds ‘dharma’, or the moral order, by bringing her men into the fold of caste-ethics.61 Periyavar/M.V.V. in his ultimate estimation bestows the title of possessor of ‘aram’ onto the traditional wife, the custodian of caste, implicitly excluding himself because as the highest-caste male, he is the authoritative appraiser of ‘aram’, who also judges the character of the goddess Saraswathi. In ‘Aram’, then, Jeyamohan employs literary strategies to establish the sovereignty of the Brahmin writer. He dexterously plots the triumph of a literary figure by operationalizing the character’s highest-caste identity and its attendant prestige. The construct of a traditional woman is used to endorse the cultural reign of the Brahmin, thereby implicitly demanding subservience from the rest of the castes below. Jeyamohan enacts a conservative political activism that contributes to sustaining and solidifying existing hierarchical relationships in society through his regressive literary renderings of women and his cultural ‘activism’ of misogyny, palpable in his disparagement of women writers who have emerged despite immense patriarchal restraints. Jeyamohan bestows on his writer figure Periyavar/M.V.V. the role of guarding conservative cultural laws in relation to caste and gender.

Jeyamohan, Aram, 24. Jeyamohan, Aram, 26.

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13

European Connections: Literary Networks, Political Authorship and the Future of Europe Debate Benedict Schofield

In April 2017, authors, translators, booksellers and publishers gathered at the British Library in London for the annual European Literature Night (ELN). Bringing together ‘the brightest literary talent from Europe … with audiences and professionals’, the event was designed to showcase new European literary voices in translation and to provide a transnational platform for a public ‘exchange … about literature and Europe’.1 The ELN thus fulfilled two core functions of the live ‘literary event’ as identified by Gisèle Sapiro: first, the ‘economic’ (as a site ‘of promotion and book sales for both publishers and authors’), and second, the ‘political’ (as a site ‘of critical debate on questions about society’).2 Taking place just ten months after the UK voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, triggering the process known as Brexit, it was perhaps inevitable that the 2017 edition of the ELN would be dominated by political debates on the future of Europe. In response to Brexit, for instance, the event itself had been re-envisaged as part of a wider network: as the first stop in a European Writers’ Tour, which would bring European authors to literary festivals across the UK, promoting the cultural connections that Brexit was threatening and thus marking a form of literary resistance to the referendum result. In turn, to launch the tour, the ELN commissioned a keynote at the British Library by the Scottish author A. L. Kennedy, who was specifically tasked with ‘reflecting on the future of European authorship in a post-Brexit context’.3 I would like to express my thanks for the support and community of all the members of the DDGC (Diversity and Decolonization of the German Curriculum) Writing Support Group, hosted by Dr Nicole Coleman, Dr Hannah Eldridge and Dr Ervin Malakaj, and the DDGC Remote Writeon-Site Groups, hosted by Marisol Bayona Roman, Dr Nicole Coleman and Professor Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, within which this article was written. My thanks, too, to Professor Tobias Boes and Professor Rebecca Braun for discussions and feedback on material considered in this chapter. ‘European Literature Night’, EUNIC London, accessed 7 March 2022, eunic-old.europe.org.uk/ european-literature-night.html. 2 Gisèle Sapiro, ‘Festivals’, in World Authorship, ed. Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 153. 3 ‘Welcome to the European Writers Tour 2017’, European Writers’ Tour, accessed 7 March 2022, eepurl.com/cKI0Ff. 1

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Kennedy’s selection as the keynote reflects her wider fame as a literary author: named in 1993 and 2003 on the highly influential Best Young British Novelists list, produced just once a decade by the literary magazine Granta, Kennedy would go on to win multiple literary prizes, including the Costa Book Award in 2007. Her literary fame, however, also has an explicitly European dimension, which made her a particularly appropriate choice for the ELN: in 2007 she received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, awarded ‘for the complete literary works of a European author that has received particular attention internationally’,4 and, in 2015, the German Heine Prize, presented to an author ‘who, through their intellectual work … promotes social or political progress, serves international understanding, or disseminates awareness of the unity of all peoples’.5 The Heine Prize also indicates the ways in which Kennedy is increasingly seen not just as a literary author, but as a ‘public intellectual’  –  as belonging, on the one hand, ‘to an autonomous intellectual field’ (in this case, that of her literary work), ‘while at the same time investing [that] competence and authority in political action that is carried out outside that field’, following Odile Heynders’ model of public intellectualism.6 Kennedy undertakes this political action across many genres, not least in her journalism, including a year-long series of articles in 2020 – ‘Brexit-Kolumne “Affentheater”’ (Brexit column: complete farce) – for a leading German-language newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung.7 Famously, too, Kennedy’s politics are reflected in her stand-up comedy and on Twitter8  –  activities which further reflect Heynders’ model, which precisely requires the ‘aesthetic performance’ of politically engaged authors to take place across multiple ‘mediated context[s] of production and reception’.9 In her keynote, Kennedy posed a direct challenge to the politics of Brexit, but also to her fellow authors: ‘This [Brexit] is stupid. This is our loss. This is dangerous. We have to say this, we writers. We have to give up being embarrassed about what we do, apologising for thinking too much, understanding. Writers after Brexit will have this responsibility.’10 Kennedy’s keynote simultaneously advocated for greater political engagement by authors, while modelling how that engagement might look in practice – in other words, literally performing on the stage of the British Library

‘Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur’, Bundesministerium Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport, accessed 7 March 2022, www.bmkoes.gv.at/Kunst-und-Kultur/preise/ oester-staatspreis-fuer-europaeische-literatur0.html. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German are by the author. 5 ‘Der Heine-Preis der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf ’, Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, accessed 7 March 2022, www.duesseldorf.de/kunst-und-kultur/heine-preis.html. 6 Odile Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), ch. 1, Kindle. 7 Kennedy’s articles, which ran from January to December 2020, can be searched for at www. sueddeutsche.de. 8 Kennedy’s Twitter handle is @writerer. 9 Heynders, Writers, ch. 1. 10 A. L. Kennedy, ‘News from Nowhere’, The Royal Society of Literature, accessed 7 March 2022, rsliterature.org/lm-hub-post/news-from-nowhere/. 4

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her very subject (literary-political advocacy for Europe), and thus embodying a specific idea (or even ideal) of the author as ‘a powerful agent in the public sphere’, as Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie put it in the introduction to this volume.11 In this way, Kennedy’s speech is also an example of how such literary lectures – nominally rooted in a specifically aesthetic sphere – often act as a ‘bridge between literature and the public sphere; between literature and political participation’, as Katharina Meiser has argued.12 Kennedy’s call is primarily for the political participation of her peers, something she reinforces by addressing her fellow writers ‘as a class’ and with a common ‘we’.13 At the same time, though, she addresses the need for authors to reach new audiences beyond the literary establishment. Invoking a somewhat utopian requirement for authors to write for ‘humanity in general’, she thus does not only ask her fellow authors to advocate for the value of human connection as a means of resisting the fragmentation and isolationism of Brexit and other populist movements. She also encourages them to embrace even more directly the ‘job of trying to speak to any and every person who might come across our work’, regardless of background or political persuasion.14 While Kennedy’s performance at the ELN placed her own literary and political authority centre stage, it was not solely the product of her individual authorial agency. Rather, a wider network of ‘actors’ were involved – human, social and institutional – each influencing the other and ‘made to act by many others’,15 as Bruno Latour puts it in his conceptualization of networks as dynamic forms through which ‘groups are made, [and] agencies are explored’ in ‘ever-changing … shapes’.16 In the case of Kennedy and the ELN, these other actors lend both their economic capital to enable the evening, and their considerable cultural and political authority. The ELN was, for instance, a flagship event for the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC) London Office, part of EUNIC Global, which ‘advocates [for] a prominent role of culture in international relations and is a strategic partner of the EU, actively involved in the further definition of European cultural policy’.17 Alongside the British Library, both the Instituto Camões and the Royal Society of Literature acted as primary sponsors of the night and tour, which also received the support of the European Commission Representation in the UK, the Czech Centre, English PEN, Flanders House, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut Français, the Italian Cultural Institute and the Romanian

Sandra Mayer and Ruth Scobie, ‘Introduction: The Idea of the Author’ in this volume, 11. Katharina Meiser, ‘Dimensionen des Politischen in Poetikvorlesungen’, in Das Politische in der Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. Stefan Neuhaus and Immanuel Rover (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), part 3, Kindle. 13 Kennedy, ‘News from Nowhere’. 14 Kennedy, ‘News from Nowhere’. 15 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64. 16 Latour, Reassembling, 87. 17 ‘European Union National Institutes for Culture’, EUNIC Global, accessed 7 March 2022, www. eunicglobal.eu/about. 11 12

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Cultural Institute.18 Such a constellation of actors demonstrates that ‘authorship as a process of making meaning in and for the world’ always ‘expands beyond the actions of the single biographical individual’, as Rebecca Braun has argued,19 and that, while this can be highly visible, it is equally often the product of less visible networks. Seen in this light, events such as Kennedy’s speech at the ELN encourage us to consider the extent to which literary-political engagement resides in individual agency, and how this might be embedded in, and the product of, networks of multiple figures, institutions, locations and genres. This chapter thus explores three projects in which authors have addressed the political state of Europe from within literarypolitical networks, often drawing on their literary authority to advocate for alternative European futures. It turns first to another project involving Kennedy, which paired authors from across Europe in order to address its current and future state, and in which Kennedy collaborated with the Austrian author Kathrin Röggla. Here I assess how Kennedy and Röggla use this network as a stage on which to debate, self-reflexively, their understanding of political authorship. I then turn to a further form of network, frequently used to disseminate the political voice of authors: the European anthology. This literary form actively networks authors around political themes and foregrounds, once again, the question of the location of political agency: whether in the individual voice or in the collective voice of the network. Through these case studies, the chapter assesses the extent to which such networks enable and sustain politically engaged authorship – by amplifying the political reach and fame of authors, providing a stage for debating the very notion of authorial activism, or modelling new political futures for Europe.

Staging the Debate: Literary Authority and Political Engagement In the same year as her speech at the ELN, another project involving Kennedy came to fruition: Fragile: Europäische Korrespondenzen (Fragile: European correspondences; 2017). This network brought together fourteen pairs of authors to exchange letters on the significance of the European project, and on ‘the double meaning of the word “fragile”. What is so precious in Europe that it must be protected?’, the authors were asked, and ‘what is threatening to break apart?’20 The titular ‘correspondences’ were thus twofold: first, taking the form of the literal correspondence by letter between the writers; and second, foregrounding the wider political aim of the project to construct

‘European Literature Night with A. L. Kennedy and Guests’, British Library, accessed 7 March 2022, www.bl.uk/events/european-literature-night-with-a-l-kennedy-and-guests. 19 Rebecca Braun, ‘Celebrity’, in World Authorship, ed. Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 41. 20 Stephanie Stegmann, ‘Fragile: Europäische Korrespondenzen: Auf ein Wort’, in ‘Fragile: Europäische Korrespondenzen’, ed. Netzwerk der Literaturhäuser (Network of Literary Houses), special issue, die horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 62, no. 265 (2017): 2. 18

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pan-European correspondences (in the sense of connections and commonalities) between authors, deploying their literary authority to imagine a new ‘transnational model of community’ for Europe.21 While the project perhaps speaks primarily to those already engaged in European politics and European literature, its commitment to a sustained form of debate between authors on European themes is in many respects a manifestation of Kennedy’s demand that authors undertake such culturalpolitical work free of ‘embarrass[ment]’ and free of ‘apolog[y]’, demonstrating in their literary activity their ‘understanding’ of the gravity of what could be lost should Europe unravel.22 Fragile also exemplifies how a diverse set of actors, both human and institutional, shape and leave ‘trails’ (as Latour puts it) through a network.23 The project was instigated, for instance, by the Network of Literary Houses. The Literary House is a significant phenomenon in the contemporary German-language cultural landscape: physical locations in city centres, they are designed to act as ‘indispensable institutions … in the cultural life of their cities … synonymous with a contemporary, versatile promotion and facilitation of German-language and international contemporary literature’.24 In 2008, fourteen such locations came together as literaturhaus.net, in a digital extension of their physical network of buildings; one designed to enable new virtual collaborations that could generate ‘far-reaching cultural impulses for the cultural industry and the general public’,25 supported in turn by a collaboration with a major media partner, Arte (a Franco-German, pan-European television service focused on culture). Fragile marks one of the most ambitious of their collaborations and serves many of the goals of the literaturhaus.net network. It provides authors with a transnational platform: first online (the letters appeared in real time on the website fragile-europe. net), then through a series of live literary events at each Literary House and ultimately in print, with the letters anthologized in the journal die horen (the Horae). In addressing the future of Europe, it also demonstrated the contemporary significance of literature and authorship for political questions and was supported by a grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation, a funder that generally only supports cultural projects when they address wider social and political issues, such as ‘healthcare’, ‘education’ or, in the case of Fragile, ‘global questions’ such as ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’.26 In turn, the project raised the network’s own profile  –  it is the Network of Literary Houses, for instance, that is named on the front cover of the anthology as editor, in the place usually reserved for an individual or individuals, thus displacing human actors and Stegmann, ‘Fragile’, 3. There is also a potential third dimension to these correspondences, since in some German dialects Korrespondenz can also mean report, which further suggests that the exchanges come together to form a report on the state of Europe. 22 Kennedy, ‘News from Nowhere’. 23 Latour, Reassembling, 203. 24 ‘Das Netzwerk der Literaturhäuser’, literaturhaus.net, accessed 7 March 2022, www.literaturhaus. net/netzwerk. 25 ‘Das Netzwerk der Literaturhäuser’. 26 ‘Woran wir arbeiten’ (What We Are Working On), Robert Bosch Stiftung, accessed 7 March 2022, www.bosch-stiftung.de/de/woran-wir-arbeiten. 21

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establishing the network itself in the position of author function. This was the wider network, then, to which Kennedy and her correspondent Röggla were contributing, and which formed a stage for their discussions exploring the value and impact of politically engaged authorship. Röggla joined the project first, bringing her own substantial literary authority, rooted, like Kennedy’s, in her prize-winning work: Röggla’s website notes eighteen awards in the period up to 2017.27 As with Kennedy, these prizes also mark Röggla’s movement towards the status of public intellectual. Röggla won, for example, the 2006 Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book, which awards a work that ‘advocates for freedom, equality, social justice, solidarity, democracy and social cohesion, tolerance and the freedom of art’, and took on the major institutional role of Vice President of the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 2015.28 When Röggla was then asked to invite a further author to correspond with, she turned to Kennedy, primarily because of Kennedy’s multi-modal authorship ‘as novelist, stand-up comedian, theatre practitioner, teacher, [and] author for the Guardian’, and her ‘highly impactful’ political work as a ‘feminist, left-wing author’ writing ‘in this accursed Brexit situation’.29 In her letters to Röggla, which begin in August 2016, Kennedy outlines ideas that anticipate those in her keynote at the British Library eight months later. As in that speech, Kennedy proposes to Röggla that authors must no longer be shy or apologetic about their political role. Instead, with the world facing not only Brexit, but also the potential election of Donald Trump as US President, and the concomitant rise of fake news, alternative facts and populist discourse, this political role for authors has become ‘a social necessity. The proper, full-strength practice of art as a unifying, challenging, vital force – that’s now not an indulgence or something for which we have to apologise’, Kennedy argues, stressing: ‘we have a power. We can use it.’30 Röggla’s response is initially more cautious. For one, she questions the reach of such literarypolitical authority and power: ‘But how do we get out of what we call, in both German and English, “preaching to the own crowd”’, and the ‘tiny implication of elitism’ inherent in that notion?31 In turn, she outlines a further challenge in connecting her literary authority to political activism so directly: its suggestion of a shift in the role of the author; a conversion of sorts from the literary author to something more akin to a literary commentator on the present. Responding to Kennedy, she asks: ‘Since when are we authors, to all intents and purposes, primarily agents of contemporaneity?’32 She notes how at ‘so-called cultural panels’ she often finds that she is asked to discuss not only literature, but political issues: for example, to collaborate with other authors ‘biobib’, website kathrin röggla, accessed 7 March 2022, www.kathrin-roeggla.de/biobib. ‘Bruno-Kreisky-Preis’, Renner Institut, accessed 7 March 2022, renner-institut.at/angebote/brunokreisky-preis. 29 Kathrin Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, in ‘Fragile: Europäische Korrespondenzen’, ed. Netzwerk der Literaturhäuser, special issue, die horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 62, no. 265 (2017): 66. 30 Kennedy, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 72. 31 Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 75. 32 Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 75. 27 28

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on a new ‘European narrative’ to counter the broken European story of the present. Röggla explains: ‘even though I’m convinced to my very core that Europe is the only solution … I immediately feel sick; invariably hardly anything then springs to mind in response to this call for an instant European narrative’.33 It is in this demand for speed from authors – less than in the demand for a political stance  –  that Röggla’s concern lies. She rejects the expectation that authors should produce instant political narratives, since, for Röggla, this potentially renders the author no different from a political pundit, or media figure, who similarly must peddle instantaneous stories and platitudes: ‘political narratives always make me nervous, because they contain so little reflexivity’, she writes to Kennedy.34 Further, she argues, if authors take on this role as ‘agents of contemporaneity’, then the literary work too might take on a form closer to reportage.35 Here Röggla again emphasizes the issue of speed; having to write for ‘a just-in-time world’ can lead to the problem that ‘in the same moment something becomes topical, it’s already yesterday’s news’.36 Röggla instead proposes a different model of authorship: ‘perhaps as an author one should produce slow fiction or very slow fiction’.37 Here we can hear echoes of what Jon Day has called literature’s ‘uneasy relationship with the granular reality of the news cycle’.38 For Day, ‘novels about contemporary events written before the political ink has dried can feel like barely padded polemics, clothing in fictional form what would be better expressed in an essay or newspaper column’.39 Two issues appear to sit behind Day’s concern: first, that such ‘real-time novelistic responses to political upheavals’ compromise literary quality (through a tendency towards polemic rather than nuance, and, one senses, the possibility that the work has been ‘rushed’); and, second, that the longevity of the literary work is undermined (by rapidly becoming out-of-date, and thus lacking in some supposed timeless quality).40 Röggla’s concept of slow fiction, however, is less motivated by questions of quality and longevity than by issues of language and discourse: an emphasis on the need for a productive slowness in thinking and an embrace of ambiguity over speedy resolution. As Áine McMurtry persuasively argues in her assessment of Röggla’s wider writing and its political stance, this insistence is rooted in an understanding of political fiction as ‘offer[ing] more complex alternatives to ideology and dialectical modes of resolution’, and thus rejects the notion of the author as the source of any easy answers to the political questions of the day.41

Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 68. Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 68. 35 Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 75. 36 Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 92. 37 Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 76. 38 Jon Day, ‘Brexlit: The New Landscape of British Fiction’, Financial Times, 28 July 2017. 39 Day, ‘Brexit’. 40 Day, ‘Brexit’. 41 Áine McMurtry, ‘Literary Interventions and Texts in Transit in the Work of Kathrin Röggla’, in ‘Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation State’, ed. Deborah Holmes and Áine McMurtry, special issue, Austrian Studies 26 (2018): 73. 33 34

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Through their exchange, Röggla and Kennedy do ultimately find a form of consensus. Kennedy agrees that literature’s power lies in its ‘ability to transform, to produce flexibility from rigidity, to turn the easy-to-hate mass into individuals. … If we can move forward with imagination and, as artists, a skill with narrative, we can remind humanity of its humanity.’ Kennedy’s confidence that authors have a role to play in this work stands on one crucial fact: if political futures rely on new narratives, then ‘we are being handed a battle on our home ground’.42 On this, Röggla can also agree: ‘sometimes one simply has to alter reality. As authors, we must find this new reality in our ideas, and in language, and in narratives.’43 This process of establishing consensus is enabled directly by the project’s form: the exchange of letters allowing the two authors (in the words of Röggla) to ‘establish a dialogue, just us two, a dialogue that does justice to our European colleagues and yet finds its way out of the maelstrom’ of contemporary political rhetoric.44 This dialogic form thus bridges Kennedy’s more activist demands for intervention and Röggla’s insistence on slow writing (and reading) as a counter to the reductive nature of European political discourse. Stephanie Stegmann has noted how these sorts of exchanges in Fragile ‘establish a sometimes surprising proximity and familiarity’ between the reader and the authors, particularly due to the use of the letter form and the sense we have as a reader of straying across a private correspondence.45 Yet, of course, this is only a simulation of familiarity: it was always known that these letters would be public. While they occupy at first sight a form of third space between the entirely private and explicitly public, they are, ultimately – like Kennedy’s keynote at the British Library – a form of performance. They undertake a double gesture of drawing audiences closer to the supposedly authentic voice of each author (a motion inwards, of intimacy), while also granting those authors ever-greater visibility (a motion outwards, of amplification). This performance is enabled by the network of institutions, funders and partners, which points in turn to a further double gesture: in being selected to participate in the wider network, Kennedy and Röggla are singled out as exemplary (celebrated for their literary excellence, political insight and fame), while also placed within a collective (as part of a group of similarly significant peers). If, as Bo G. Ekelund has argued, ‘[l]iterary authority … exists only when it is recognised’, the network thus plays a crucial role in giving audiences a rationale to pay attention to this specific set of voices above others.46 The network acts as a means of selection and gatekeeping, and of support, amplification and legitimization; allowing readers the sensation of evergreater access to authors, while also providing those authors with a stage for political engagement that enhances their status as public intellectuals.

44 45 46 42 43

Kennedy, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 85. Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 89. Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 77. Stegmann, ‘Fragile’, 2. Bo G. Ekelund, ‘Authority and the Social Logic of Recognition: Poetics, Politics and Social Theory’, in Authority Matters: Rethinking the Theory and Practice of Authorship, ed. Stephen Donovan, Danuta Fjellestad and Rolf Lundén (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 89.

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Locating Agency: The Anthology as Network In her introduction to the final output of the Fragile project  –  the physical journal issue of die horen – Stegmann notes that the Network of Literary Houses has ‘compiled a selection’ of the originally digitally presented exchanges: a further process of amplification and legitimization.47 The anthology form itself is a type of a network: formally, an anthology brings together individual voices as nodes within a larger network, and in the case of the European anthology (i.e. one that addresses cultural, social and/or political questions about Europe), they are often, like Fragile, the product of wider transnational and trans-institutional partnerships. In this act of defining and crystallizing a network of authors around a specific European theme, these anthologies also undertake a similar double gesture to that described above: exemplifying and collectivizing their selected authors and enabling both a plurality of voices and a sense of shared purpose. As Barbara Benedict has put it, ‘anthologies are more than one work, at the same time as they also are one work’.48 Anthologies are of particular significance for a consideration of political authorship, since the stage they provide for the performance of this political engagement foregrounds the interplay of individual and collective agency. They require us to consider where the individual voice ends and the collective voice begins, and how the requisite political and cultural authority is generated to authorize such interventions into political questions. Two anthologies with differing approaches to the networking of politically engaged authorship were published in the UK in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum: Goodbye Europe: Writers and Artists Say Farewell by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) in 2017 and Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe by Comma Press in 2020. Both are examples of what Lyn Marven calls the ‘synchronic snapshot anthology’, that is, a form of anthology that ‘presents texts that are contemporary to the time of publication’ and which ‘contain previously unpublished (and commissioned) texts’, in contrast to a more traditional definition of anthology as collating works that had been previously published elsewhere.49 Goodbye Europe brings together forty-eight short contributions in its synchronic snapshot of the UK in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. In the announcement of its forthcoming publication in the Rights pages of the Bookseller (a core trade paper for the publishing industry in the UK), publishing editors Jenny Lord (for W&N) and Emad Akhtar (for Orion, W&N’s parent company) pitched the volume as a ‘carefully curated collection’50 which intends to ‘catalogue this time of change in our country’ by ‘housing a range of opinions … suitable for readers of different political persuasions’.51 Presented in this way, the volume at first appears to eschew any specific Stegmann, ‘Fragile’, 2. Barbara Benedict, ‘The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Difference in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, New Literary History 34, no. 2 (2003): 232. 49 Lyn Marven, ‘The City Anthology: Definition of a Type’, Modern Languages Open (2020): 17. 50 Jenny Lord, in Katherine Cowdrey, ‘W&N to Publish Essay Collection Goodbye, Europe’, Bookseller, 27 June 2017, www.thebookseller.com/rights/wn-publish-essay-collection-goodbye-europe-574406. 51 Emad Akhtar, in Cowdrey, ‘W&N to Publish’. 47 48

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political stance on Brexit (supporting neither the Remain nor Leave camps), with Lord and Akhtar embracing instead the capacity of the anthology to bring together, in a form of dynamic assemblage, a multiplicity of voices and divergent political views (and thus a multiplicity of readers too, potentially ensuring a wide market for the volume). At the same time, Akhtar in particular suggests that the anthology can provide a form of political solace, perhaps even healing: ‘It’s been a divisive year or two, and the political landscape remains polarised, but we hope that this book can offer a focal point where readers from different persuasions and perspectives can coalesce.’52 This in itself is a political gesture – not for Leave or Remain, but for a form of political rapprochement, coalescence and perhaps even consensus, enabled by the networked structure of the anthology itself  –  a feature of the anthology form also identified by Benedict: ‘even while anthologies advertise difference, they paradoxically assert similarity’.53 To achieve this coalescence, Goodbye Europe includes both pro-European and Eurosceptic contributors – from novelist Ian McEwan, vocal in favour of remaining in the EU, to Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative Member of the UK Parliament, and one of the most divisive figures of the Leave campaign. Across the contributions, however, Eurosceptic voices such as Rees-Mogg’s remain in the significant minority, despite Akhtar’s aim of presenting ‘different persuasions and perspectives’.54 This is unsurprising, given that many cultural figures, and almost every major UK arts sector institution (such as the Society of Authors), repeatedly warned of the consequences of Brexit,55 while major literary events, such as the London Book Fair, regularly became platforms from which authors stressed the ‘national tragedy’ of leaving the EU.56 Akhtar’s goal of coalescence was thus perhaps something of a chimera from the outset, and readers of Goodbye Europe do not even need to engage with its content in order to grasp its primarily pro-European stance: this perspective is already made clear in its title and peritextual features. A blue cover, with gold stars surrounding the title, is reminiscent of a night sky, but evidently plays primarily on the iconography of the EU flag. Beneath this, the names of twenty of the forty-eight contributors are written in calligraphy, curved so as to approximate a rolling landscape of hills  –  evoking everything from William Blake’s ‘England’s mountains green’,57 to G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Rolling English Road’  –  above which the European sun appears to have just set. Of these twenty authors, only one  –  Lionel Shriver  –  firmly supported leaving the EU.58 Eurosceptic voices are thus largely elided from view, foregrounding instead

Akhtar, in Cowdrey, ‘W&N to Publish’. Benedict, ‘The Paradox’, 242. 54 Akhtar, in Cowdrey, ‘W&N to Publish’. 55 Society of Authors, ‘The Impact of Brexit: Submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’, accessed 7 March 2022, www2.societyofauthors.org/where-we-stand/brexit/. 56 Neill Denny, ‘London Book Fair 2019: Ian McEwan Leads Writers against Brexit’, Publishers Weekly, 13 March 2019, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/london-book-fair/ article/79512-london-book-fair-2019-ian-mcewan-leads-writers-against-brexit.html. 57 William Blake, Milton, in Selected Poems, ed. G. E. Bentley (London: Penguin, 2005), 240, l. 2. 58 James Kidd, ‘Lionel Shriver on the EU, Immigration, Society and Her New Novel The Mandibles’, i, 11 May 2016, inews.co.uk/culture/arts/need-talk-immigration-says-lionel-shriver-james-kidd-6430. 52 53

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a pro-European ‘own crowd’ (to use Röggla’s phrase).59 In gold foil relief, and thus particularly eye-catching, is the subtitle ‘Writers and artists say farewell’, highlighting the overall tone of the anthology: on the one hand, mourning what will be lost culturally and politically with the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and, on the other, the sense of extending well wishes (fare-you-well) to Europe.60 The volume is thus ultimately designed for and marketed at those in favour of ‘Remain’. The back cover, meanwhile, lists all the contributors, declaring them to be ‘our most treasured writers and artists’, thus stressing their significance and fame, and suggesting that it is also on this basis that they were selected for the anthology.61 These features are of particular significance for Goodbye Europe since, unusually for an anthology, the volume does not contain a preface as a primary peritextual threshold into the work. As readers, then, we are not given any further detail in the book itself on the process of selection, on the ordering principle of the chapters, or any other guidance on the anthology’s aims or political stance. In turn, there is no named editor, either on the cover or in the bibliographic information – not even, as with Fragile, an institution (like the Network of Literary Houses) coming to stand in for this author function. Sondra Bacharach has noted how editorial work is often elided in this way, with editors ‘giving up [their] own voice and agency’ in order to ‘fulfil[…] the interest of the primary author’.62 Yet in the case of Goodbye Europe, the elision of the ‘secondary agency’ of the editor does not shift immediately that agency back to the primary author, since, of course, there is not just one primary author, but rather forty-eight.63 Here, then, what Nora Ramtke and Seán Williams have identified as the important ‘artistic or quasi-artistic function’ of editors for anthologies is fully obscured.64 Only if one knows of the volume’s announcement in the Bookseller, would one be aware of Akhtar’s and Lord’s involvement as commissioning editors, and their apparent initial vision for the volume as one that would bring together authors (and also readers) of contrasting political stances on Europe in an act of coalescence. In the place of a named editor, other features conceivably come to stand in for the author function. The non-human actor of the publishing house, W&N, might be read, for instance, as taking the place of the human editor. For those with knowledge of the history of W&N, its production of a primarily pro-European anthology would not come as a surprise. As George Weidenfeld explained during the sixtieth anniversary of the company in 2009, it was born ‘at the end of the war [the Second World War] to project Röggla, ‘Kathrin Röggla-A. L. Kennedy’, 77. Goodbye Europe: Writers and Artists Say Farewell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), dust jacket, front. 61 Goodbye Europe, dust jacket, back. 62 Sondra Bacharach, ‘Collaboration’, in World Authorship, ed. Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 65. 63 Bacharach, ‘Collaboration’, 64. 64 Nora Ramtke and Seán Williams, ‘Approaching the German Anthology, 1700–1850: An Introduction’, in ‘Das Erblühen der Blumenlesen. German Anthologies, 1700–1850’, ed. Nora Ramtke and Seán Williams, special issue, German Life and Letters, 70, no. 1 (2017): 11. 59 60

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the cultural, political and business rebuilding of Europe’.65 Such knowledge might even extend to Weidenfeld’s flight from Austria as a Jewish refugee during the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany) of 1938, or to the profound impact the company later had on shaping European and World Literature in translation. But this knowledge is not the preserve of a general readership. In this way, the lack of editor, or a suitable non-human stand-in, does throw attention back on the individual authors, each of whom is provided with a prominent biography in the text. For Marven, these biographies play a particularly crucial role in anthologies, acting as ‘epitextual adverts’ which ‘situate new work within a wider context of related publications’, thus placing the anthology itself as just one node in a wider literary network.66 Marven further argues that ‘one notable effect of these corpuscular references is a renewed focus on the authors rather than subject matter’ – in other words, our attention is drawn more to why these authors have been selected, rather than what it is they actually say.67 The biographies refer to features that legitimize the authors’ selection, frequently citing markers of literary fame: they are ‘award-winning’ or a ‘number one bestselling author’, their work has been ‘adapted as a TV series’ or has become an ‘international bestseller published in thirty languages’ etc.68 These biographies are even structurally privileged in Goodbye Europe, each chapter opening with the author biography: the author’s literary authority and fame thus act as the threshold into each contribution, rather than as a supplement (either at the end of each chapter or, as is more often the case, collated together in the ‘back matter’ of the entire book).69 Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe is in many respects the inverse of Goodbye Europe. For one, it states its political aims clearly. These do not entail Goodbye Europe’s approach of rapprochement, but rather the re-envisaging of Europe from an expressly feminist perspective, bringing together twenty-eight women, one from each EU member state, ‘in order to write a different kind of future’ for Europe – one that ‘can unlock hearts and minds and lay bare the shared humanity of all’ (here echoing Kennedy’s stance on the power of literary narratives to change political narratives, noted above).70 In turn, the anthology has clearly identifiable editors and highlights directly the networks that enabled its fruition and grant it cultural and political authority. Published by Comma Press in 2020, it was jointly edited by Sophie Hughes, an International Man Booker Prize-nominated translator, and Sarah Cleave, the press’s publishing manager and editor of similar anthologies responding to political events through new literary commissions, including 2017’s Banthology (which brought

George Weidenfeld, ‘Weidenfeld & Nicolson @ 60’, accessed 7 March 2022, www.envoy.uk.net/ wn60/wn60/WandNat60_GW.pdf. 66 Marven, ‘City Anthology’, 16. 67 Marven, ‘City Anthology’, 16. 68 Goodbye Europe, 2, 20, 62, 70. 69 ‘1.64: List of Contributors’, Chicago Manual of Style, accessed 7 March 2022, www. chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed17/part1/ch01/psec064.html. 70 Annelies Beck, ‘Staging Europe’, in Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe, ed. Sophie Hughes and Sarah Cleave (Manchester: Comma Press, 2020), 12. 65

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together responses to US President Trump’s immigration ban). Ra Page, the editor-inchief of Comma Press, has argued that the anthology is a particularly appropriate form for such politically engaged work, since its ‘simple pluralism, demanded by the form … in and of itself, resists and redresses the idea that [any concept] can be summed up by one narrative’  –  a stance that reflects Röggla’s view, in her correspondence with Kennedy, that politically engaged forms of authorial and literary engagement should disrupt simplistic, hegemonic or binary narratives.71 In this way, Comma Press lends the project its own reputation – within the publishing industry, at least – as a home for anthologies and commissions that seek to bridge the literary and political. A further prominent node in the network that enabled Europa28 is the Hay-onWye Festival of Literature and the Arts, which, from its origins as a poetry festival in the late 1980s, has grown into one of the largest literary festivals in the world, attracting paying audiences in the hundreds of thousands each year. It is also a festival that, during Brexit, deliberately conceptualized itself as ‘embedded in the European artistic, cultural and social reality’, applying for (and being awarded) the Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE) label, Europe’s ‘quality stamp for remarkable arts festivals showing their engagement in the field of the arts, community involvement and international openness’.72 With this label, Hay could demonstrate not just its cultural authority, but also its commitment to a European political agenda, providing (as Sapiro has argued more generally about festivals) a ‘stage for voices … [to] express critical views on current events’, with ‘writers appear[ing] in this space as modern prophets … reinforc[ing] their authority as public intellectuals’.73 Hay is prominently highlighted in the peritextual features of Europa28: the phrase ‘A HAY FESTIVAL PROJECT’ is placed directly above the title on its cover, in the position usually reserved for the author’s name, and thus displacing, as with Fragile, the human author function with an institutional one.74 Meanwhile, at the very back of the volume, where an individual author biography would usually stand,75 we find instead a section entitled ‘About the Project’, which focuses explicitly on Hay’s role.76 The anthology’s bibliographic information further showcases the national and transnational networks that supported Europa28. Displayed alongside the logo of Hay are those of Arts Council England (ACE), Creative Europe and WOM@RTS. ACE is an English ‘state funder’ for Comma Press that enables the publisher to work on a ‘non-profit’ basis,77 while Creative Europe is the EU’s primary source of support for

Ra Page, ‘Commissions’, in World Authorship, ed. Tobias Boes, Rebecca Braun and Emily Spiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 84. 72 ‘Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe’, Hay Festival, accessed 7 March 2022, www.hayfestival. com/festivals-for-europe. 73 Sapiro, ‘Festivals’, 151. 74 Sophie Hughes and Sarah Cleave, eds., Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe (Manchester: Comma Press, 2020), front cover. 75 ‘1.66: Biographical Note’, Chicago Manual of Style, accessed 7 March 2022, www.chicagomanualofstyle. org/book/ed17/part1/ch01/psec066.html. 76 Hughes and Cleave, Europa28, 237. 77 Page, ‘Commissions’, 84. 71

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the cultural sector, with a dual ideological and market imperative, supporting projects that both ‘promote European cultural and linguistic diversity’ and ‘increase the competitiveness and economic potential of the cultural and creative sectors’.78 To serve these ends, Creative Europe funds independent cultural projects and networks, and leads the flagship transnational initiatives of EU cultural policy, such as the EU Prize for Literature and the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme. Europa28 crossed both these strands of Creative Europe’s work, Hay staging, for instance, live literary events ‘around the world, including Hay Festival Europa28 in Rijeka’, the Croatian ECoC in 2020.79 At the same time, it was part of the output of WOM@RTS, an independent network funded by Creative Europe to promote ‘women’s equal share presence in the Arts, in terms of visibility, promotion and access to the market’, and to ‘support transnational policy cooperation in order to foster policy development, innovation, [and] audience building’.80 By showcasing the impact of women’s voices from across all twenty-eight member states of the EU in the construction of a new narrative for Europe, Europa28 met both these goals. The political aims for Europa28 are further reflected in a peritextual feature lacking in Goodbye Europe: an introduction. In it, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, pitches the anthology as a form of constructive criticism of Europe – one which aims ‘to come to [Europe] afresh in all its fractured, fragile, compromised, contoured parts’ and, more explicitly, rejects ‘our default setting … to see [Europe] through men’s eyes’.81 In this way, the power of this specific anthology resides particularly in its collective force: the network of women’s voices in the volume displacing the network of androcentric discourse in the political sphere (Bates noting, for example, that ninety per cent of UK parliamentary debate about Brexit had been voiced by men). Europa28 is thus an example of how anthologies can enable what Bacharach has called ‘collective authorship’. Though distinct from the ‘collaborative authorship’ of a single text (for example, the production of a political manifesto), ‘collective authorship’, for Bacharach, nevertheless brings individual voices together around a shared ‘ideological platform’ – here, the authors’ shared quest to produce a new narrative for Europe.82 In articulating these new narratives, the authors in Europa28 are also provided with a platform to enhance their status as public intellectuals, outlining ‘alternative scenarios in regard to topics of political, social and ethical nature’, which Heynders sees as a central feature of public intellectualism.83 The diversity of genres they use also

‘Culture and Creativity’, European Commission, accessed 7 March 2022, culture.ec.europa.eu/ creative-europe/about-the-creative-europe-programme. 79 Hughes and Cleave, Europa28, 237. 80 ‘Project’, WOM@RTS, accessed 7 March 2022, www.womarts.eu/project/. 81 Laura Bates, ‘Introduction’, in Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe, ed. Sophie Hughes and Sarah Cleave (Manchester: Comma Press, 2020), ix–x. Founded by Bates in 2012, the Everyday Sexism project collects testimonies of sexism and gender inequality, in twenty-five languages, through the website everydaysexism.com. The project also led to Bates’s 2014 book, Everyday Sexism (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 82 Bacharach, ‘Collaboration’, 70. 83 Heynders, Writers, ch. 1. 78

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mirrors Heynders’ model, in which she stresses that ‘the intentional meaning of being an intellectual is [to cite Zygmunt Bauman] “to rise above the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession or artistic genre and engage with global issues” … No public intellectual today sticks to just one genre.’84 This generic diversity is evident in Goodbye Europe and Europa28, both on an individual level (for example, when authors known primarily for their literary works choose to write something other than fiction, as is the case with Julya Rabinowich, representing Austria in Europa28, or with Sarah Perry in Goodbye Europe), and as a wider structuring principle core to the anthology form itself. Goodbye Europe, for instance, brings together a very wide range of genres, including writing by artists, broadcasters, critics, comedy writers, cookery writers, historians, journalists, musicians, nature writers, philosophers, poets, politicians, and writers of fiction and non-fiction, while Europa28 contains work by academics, activists, artists, essayists, fiction and non-fiction writers, performers, poets and journalists. Within this generic diversity, it is particularly striking how rarely the literary authors in either volume chose to contribute in their usual medium – in other words, in the genre of literary fiction. In Goodbye Europe, for instance, despite its peritextual cover blurb promising ‘poetry … and brand new fiction’, only four of the forty-eight chapters are poetry or fiction – those by Hari Kunzru, Jonathan Lynn, Hollie McNish and Lionel Shriver; around eight per cent of the entire volume.85 In Europa28 the proportion of literary material is higher  –  including speculative fiction and drama, and with two stories, ‘In Human Form’ by Asja Bakić (representing Croatia) and ‘The Bull’s Bride’ by Nora Ikstena (representing Latvia) playing creatively with one of Europe’s foundation myths, that of Europa and the bull. Yet these are still in the minority, with only eight of the twenty-eight pieces being fiction or drama (around twenty-nine per cent of the anthology). Rather than writing fiction, the literary authors often turn instead to the personal essay. Prize-winning crime writer Val McDermid thus outlines her ‘incomprehension … and rage’ at the Brexit referendum result, and explores the steps by which these emotions metamorphosed into grief, establishing an affective connection with her reader, inviting us, like her, to ‘griev[e] at the hardwon affinities that are coming under threat, the bonds that look likely to be severed, the understanding that will buckle and bend into something deeply unpleasant’.86 Booker Prize-winner McEwan similarly addresses the emotions that powered Brexit, on both sides of the vote: ‘I don’t accept this near mystical, emotionally charged decision to leave the EU. I don’t, I can’t, believe it. I reject it.’ He ends, like Kennedy, with a call for resistance.87 These personal essays are a self-reflexive form for these literary authors (and, for figures such as McDermid and McEwan, mark a clearly

Heynders, Writers, ch. 1. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters. On Modernity, Postmodernity, and Intellectuals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 2. 85 Goodbye Europe, dust jacket, front, inside flap. 86 Val McDermid, ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Poirot’, in Goodbye Europe: Authors and Artists Say Farewell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), 218. 87 Ian McEwan, ‘Speech at the Convention on Brexit’, in Goodbye Europe: Authors and Artists Say Farewell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), 329. 84

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productive diversification of their authorial role and use of aesthetic form) in which they (supposedly) step out from behind their fiction, and speak as themselves, with the effect of granting readers apparently direct access to their thoughts and feelings. This is similar to the effect generated by witnessing the exchange of letters between Kennedy and Röggla, discussed above. But just as in that case, this is only a simulation of intimacy and, in fact, is a form of political performance; the personal essay acting as a medium for what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have described, in their work on life-writing, as ‘performative self-narrating’.88 This is not an anomaly of Goodbye Europe and Europa28. As Astrid Kaminski has noted in her introduction to an earlier, pre-Brexit European anthology, Ein literarischer Rettungschirm für Europa (A literary emergency-umbrella for Europe; 2012), the request made by the editors of that volume for literary authors to write a piece in response to the theme of Europe ‘was responded to, almost universally and without prior coordination, with the use of one specific genre: that of autobiographical narration’.89 For Kaminski, one potential reason for this aversion of literary authors to writing fiction is that ‘the explicit fulfilment of commissions on political states of affairs is not necessarily the key to good literature’90  –  a point also made by Day in his critique of literature written in rapid response to political events, discussed above. Sandra Mayer has convincingly argued, though, that this hesitancy by literary authors to engage in political activism should also be seen as a question of literary autonomy, rather than literary quality; in other words, a response to the fact that ‘authors engaging in political activism potentially face loss of prestige, charges of dilettantism and a precarious balancing act between artistic autonomy and meeting the demands of media, industries, institutions and audiences’.91 As I have argued in this chapter, in many ways the network is vital in precisely the context outlined by Mayer: providing forms of legitimization for authors as they move from literary to more political forms of writing and public engagement, and thus also establishing a firmer (rather than precarious) basis for their journey to becoming politically engaged public intellectuals in Heynders’ sense.

Conclusion: Networks, Authors and Authority The authors considered in this chapter have all explored how they might use their literary authority to draw attention to European issues: addressing the political and intellectual crises of the present, debating the function of politically engaged authorship Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 131. 89 Astrid Kaminski, ‘Auf der Suche nach einer Sprache Europas’, in Ein literarischer Rettungsschirm für Europa: Berliner Anthologie, ed. Thomas Böhm, Robert Geselle and Ulrich Schreiber (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk, 2013), 7. 90 Kaminski, ‘Auf der Suche’, 7. 91 Sandra Mayer, ‘Introduction: Art and Action: Authorship, Politics and Celebrity’, in ‘Authorship, Politics and Celebrity’, ed. Sandra Mayer, special ‘Forum’ issue of Celebrity Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 153. 88

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and, in some cases, even advocating for and authoring alternative European futures. All were also nodes within much larger networks – institutional (across cultural and political organizations), intimate and interpersonal (between authors, activists and public intellectuals) and formal (through the collective force of anthology) – mapping what Mayer and Scobie, in their introduction to this volume, describe as ‘the complexity of literature’s historically and culturally situated relationship with the world outside the book’.92 A figure such as Kennedy, with whom this chapter opened, confidently advocates for politically engaged authorship, embracing (and relying on) a network of cultural and political partners, such as EUNIC and the British Library, in order to disseminate her pro-European position. Closely following Heynders’ model of the public intellectual, Kennedy’s performance at the ELN deploys her ‘cultural authority’ in a specific ‘social and cultural context … which provides a narrative frame that is used as well as criticised’ – in this case, the politics of Brexit.93 Drawing on forms of ‘aesthetic performance’ through her speech, Kennedy ‘consciously creates a persona’ beyond the literary text, through which to voice her political advocacy for Europe.94 Her debate with Röggla in Fragile over the nature of political authorship might at first appear more personal and intimate; a bilateral exchange as part of a wider European network of authors seeking European correspondences. Yet their exploration of the relationship between authorship and activism crossed countries (Austria, Germany and the UK), languages (English and German), media (online, in person and in print) and institutions (the Network of Literary Houses, the Robert Bosch Foundation). The letters, I argue, must thus be read as a form of performance, resting on a series of double gestures: simulating intimacy for the reader, while also amplifying the authors’ voices to new readerships; and singling them out as exemplary, while legitimizing their literary-political discussions by including them in a wider network of similarly engaged authors. Like Fragile, the European anthology Europa28 was the result of a network of institutional connections, online exchange and live events: a network foregrounded by the project as a means (once again) to amplify and legitimize the voices of its authors. Goodbye Europe, on the other hand, obscured the networks that led to its creation; its political voice precariously balanced between that of its individual contributors and the wider synthetic force of the collection, drawing our attention to the ways that both anthologies ultimately blur any easy distinction between individual and collective political agency, the form of the anthology becoming ‘material expressions of a kind of community’, as Benedict has argued.95 Across all the case studies considered in this chapter, the network has been shown as an essential structure for the enabling and debating of politically engaged work, and as a crucial stage on which authors can rehearse, perform and enact their visions of Europe and its future. Mayer and Scobie, ‘Introduction: The Idea of the Author’ in this volume, 16. Heynders, Writers, ch. 1. 94 Heynders, Writers, ch. 1. 95 Benedict, ‘The Paradox’, 242. 92 93

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Vernon Lee: Transnational Activism and Protest Literature for Art and Peace Elisa Bizzotto

A brilliant and assertive British citizen, born in France and living in Florence for most of her life, Vernon Lee (1856–1935) was a cosmopolitan author and intellectual who mainly wrote in English. She easily adapted to the popularity bestowed on her by her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) – a groundbreaking study of the Italian literature, music and theatre of the previous century seen from the perspective of a foreign specialist – by taking advantage of the fame and publicity deriving from the book, which allowed her to play a prominent part in intercultural discourses for the rest of her life. This, in particular, pertained to the AngloItalian exchanges explored in that early publication. Lee soon became engaged in various ambits of cross-cultural intersectionality, both in her writings, especially her abundant essayistic production, and in her actions, which took the form of her participation in the intellectual and civic initiatives of the Anglo-Florentine community. She was thus often involved in social and political causes that spanned the local and the global. This chapter examines a case study typical of Lee’s activism: her 1898 call to action against the planned demolition of the medieval centre of Florence. Influenced by ideas and actions coming from English culture – in particular from John Ruskin, but also from William Morris and Philip Webb, as will be shown – Lee undertook a series of public actions which included the voicing of her dissent in the press and eventually affected a much larger circle than the Florentine community. I will consider how, on this occasion, Lee successfully adopted the ‘letter to the editor’ genre to raise both local and international awareness of the destruction of Italian cultural heritage. I will also, and especially, claim that the channels she then used to disseminate her activist positions would later be reactivated, becoming important in defining her role as a social agitator outside Italy. More specifically, during the First World War, whilst living in England and becoming increasingly present in international political debates, she similarly wrote letters to the editor in support of global pacifist campaigns. Finally, I will outline how these later texts re-enacted certain strategies of socio-political commitment with which the author had experimented in her 1898 activist intervention. By doing so, she

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paved the way for developments in her own work towards a much more elaborate, creative and original form of protest literature.1 It all began in December 1898, when Lee decided that it was high time for her to act against the ongoing urban planning of the city in which she had been resident for decades. Not only was she angered by the demolition of the medieval centre of Florence in the previous years, she was also concerned about a prospective urban renovation that would destroy what was termed ‘Old Florence’ (Firenze antica in Italian), the historical area of the city in and around the central Piazza San Biagio.2 Both projects were part of the profound changes ensuing from Italy’s national unification in 1861. Since 1864, the year before Florence became the temporary capital of the nation, the city had undergone a radical urban regeneration programme aimed at improvement and modernization in view of its new status. This regeneration  –  risanamento in Italian  –  was, however, designed to continue well beyond 1871, when the capital was transferred to Rome. The situation, with its acritical cancellation of history and disastrous consequences for many residents, is summarized by D. Medina Lasansky: Once Florence was designated the capital of the new Italy, … city officials began the controversial destruction of a large portion of the old city center. … [T]he city walls were torn down to accommodate a multilane viale, or avenue, that … provided easy access to the new neighborhoods. … Palaces dating to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries were reconfigured, moved, and even demolished. More than 350 (predominantly poor and powerless) families were evacuated from the neighborhood commonly known as the ghetto.3

Although this model of urban grandeur was only conceived for the city’s short stint as capital, as Francesca Billiani and Stefano Evangelista explain in the passage below, the urban planning project did not stop in the following years: When, in 1865, Florence replaced Turin as the capital city of the Kingdom of Italy, a major project of reconstruction started to take place: areas of the old city, such as the market square, were demolished, while newly built, modern ones started to emerge, so that some of the medieval parts of the city, with their intricate alleys,

For critical assessments of protest literature, see Trine Syvertsen, Media Resistance: Protest, Dislike, Abstention (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Eric Leuschner, ‘The Literature of Protest and the Consumption of Activism’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 52, no. 2 (2019): 71–94. 2 See Sara Benzi and Luca Bertuzzi, Il palagio di parte Guelfa a Firenze (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2006), 189–91. Lee herself provided a more detailed definition of the zone by borrowing the words of historian Guido Carocci in his Firenze scomparsa (1897) and translating them as ‘“the buildings of the region which lies between Piazza S. Biagio and Ponte Vecchio”’. Vernon Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 15 December 1898, 8. 3 D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 27–9. 1

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were replaced by large Parisian-like boulevards. In 1871, however, the capital city moved again from Florence to Rome with a loss of some 30,000 diplomats, politicians and businessmen and the pressing need for urban modernization. By the 1880s the city was left with a population of about 120,000 people, compared to Rome’s 300,000 and Milan’s over 200,000.4

Hence came Lee’s indignation. Unfortunately, only a few Italians could understand the consequences of these ventures, since they were either blinded by feelings of nationalist and regional pride, enticed by entrepreneurial opportunities, or  –  more often – too caught up in a hand-to-mouth existence to care. Yet Lee, who always proved hypersensitive to the lure of the past, especially in its Italian manifestations, saw all the tragic implications of the project. Familiar with the work of John Ruskin since her teenage years,5 though disagreeing with his views on art and morality, she identified him as a paragon of intellectual pluralism. Whereas in the essay ‘Ruskinism’ (1881) and the volume Euphorion (1884) Lee positioned herself in antithesis to Ruskin’s moralizing views on art and consequent condemnation of the Italian Renaissance, some of her other writings point to a more ambivalent and balanced reception of Ruskin. Within such a complex response, Lee seems to have found some space for an endorsement of the critic’s views on heritage preservation, as did, in fact, contemporary intellectuals in Italy, and Florence in particular.6 Accordingly, she might have countersigned Ruskin’s tirade against contemporary disrespect towards Italian art and urban history in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843): A day does not now pass in Italy without the destruction of some mighty monument; the streets of all her cities echo to the hammer, half of her fair buildings lie in separate stones about the places of their foundation; would not time be better spent in telling us the truth about these perishing remnants of majestic thought, than in perpetuating the ill-digested fancies of idle hours? It is, I repeat, treason to the cause of art for any man to invent, unless he invents something better than has been invented before, or something differing in kind.7

Lee’s indebtedness to these ideas was evident in her later essay ‘Ruskin as a Reformer’ (1908), in which she admitted that the author had ‘opened to us many and various fields of aesthetic and imaginative enjoyment’ while showing Francesca Billiani and Stefano Evangelista, ‘Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Florence’, Comparative Critical Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 145–6. 5 See Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–1935, vol. 1, 1865–1884, ed. Amanda Gagel (London: Routledge, 2017), 193. 6 See Laura Cerasi, ‘Tra nostalgia preindustriale, ghildismo e rinascita nazionale. Il pensiero sociale di Ruskin nel dibattito culturale italiano’, in John Ruskin’s Europe: A Collection of Cross-Cultural Essays, ed. Emma Sdegno, Martina Frank, Myriam Pilutti Namer and Pierre-Henry Frangne (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020), 370–1. 7 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1 (London: John Allen, 1904), 124. 4

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equal abhorrence for what is the very reverse of modern and of progress, the brutish neglect of the beautiful work of the past, the disrespect for Nature’s fruitfulness and cleanness resulting from centuries of sloth and barbarism, such as he saw it in Italy, in France, and in the Canton Valais. The diseased newness of Leeds or Manchester and the diseased decay of Venice or Verona affected him, equally, as the desecration of the soul’s sanctuary.8

In this passage, Lee subscribes to Ruskin’s vision of both past and future, which equally need to be preserved and cherished. She also emphasizes his view of Italy as a paradigm of what should not be done with cultural heritage, and describes such disregard of history by using religious language, specifically a biblical metaphor. Her reference to ‘the desecration of the soul’s sanctuary’ – a rephrasing of a recurrent trope in the Psalms9 – to express concerns about heritage preservation is characteristic of a tendency to use religious imagery and lexis in her activist writings to stress her point. In addition to Ruskin, another possible influence on Lee’s awareness of cultural heritage came from contemporary groups advocating the preservation of historic environments in England, France and Germany.10 ‘Most notable among these’, Lasansky maintains, ‘were the British Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded by William Morris and Philip Webb in 1877, and the Municipal Commission of Old Paris, established in 1897 to protect the remains of medieval Paris’.11 Responsive to both these theoretical and practical lines of action, Lee became a leading voice among the incensed residents of Florence, mainly drawn from the expat community, who opposed the demolition of the city’s historical centre.12 After a series of local actions to support this cause, she decided that a more impactful step needed to be taken and wrote a letter to the editor of the Times, published on 15 December 1898.13 Lee’s letter had been preceded by the foundation of the Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica (Society for the Protection of Old Florence) on 15 May 1898. Lee was involved in the Society from the start, along with such other combative Florentines as the former mayor Tommaso Corsini – the Society’s president – and English collector Herbert Horne, who shared her determination to voice outrage at the destruction of the city’s heritage assets.14 The Associazione raised public awareness through the Vernon Lee, ‘Ruskin as a Reformer’, in Gospels of Anarchy (New York: Brentano’s, 1909), 304–5. See Steven Dunn, The Sanctuary in the Psalms: Exploring the Paradox of God’s Transcendence and Immanence (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016), 1–18. 10 See Thomas Renard, ‘“Mémoires monumentales”: Restaurations à Florence pour le sixième centenaire de la mort de Dante en 1921’, Bulletin de l’association des historiens de l’art itelienne 17 (2011): 46. 11 Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, 34. 12 Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, 33–7. 13 See Catherine Maxwell, ‘Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy’, in Unfolding the South: NineteenthCentury Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 211–12; and Daniela Lamberini, ‘“The Divine Country”: Vernon Lee in difesa di Firenze antica’, in Dalla stanza accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze Settant’anni dopo, ed. Serena Cenni and Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Regione Toscana, 2006), 40. 14 A list of the Society’s members at the time of Lee’s letter can be found in Bollettino dell’Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica 1, no. 1 (April 1900): 13–15. 8 9

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publication of a bulletin, the Bollettino dell’Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica, and debates with the city authorities. Lee was soon ready to take advantage of her transnational reputation and cosmopolitan outlook to disseminate the principles of the Society well beyond Florence and Italy. Her letter to the Times was a long piece – at more than 3,000 words, almost an article – in which she described both the recent and impending urban regeneration projects in Florence. She also reported parts of an interview she had had with the city’s mayor, Pietro Torrigiani, whose words had been meant to assuage her fears, but had finally convinced her that the plans could only be stopped by international mobilization.15 A translation of the letter was published in the first issue of the Bollettino dell’Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica in April 1900, thus further contributing to the intercultural dialogue she had triggered.16 A close reading of Lee’s text leaves little doubt as to its being a carefully crafted piece, based on rhetorical strategies specifically meant to capture the attention of a broad transatlantic readership. As will be seen, the same strategies would become part of Lee’s repertoire and were leveraged on other occasions to express her opposition to social and political situations beyond Italy. These strategies include a first-hand description of the issue that, in her view, needed addressing, as well as the use of didacticism and admonition, often on the verge of oracularity, as in a preacher’s sermon. Both features – the pragmatic and empirical perspective on the one hand, and the homiletic style reminiscent of puritanical speech on the other – belonged to the English culture Lee was most familiar with and were thus effective in captivating Anglo-American readers.17 What the Florentine officials had been carrying out, Lee denounced from her informed position, was no less than a ‘self-mutilation’ in ‘a spirit of destruction’, while she envisaged the possibility of ‘the very worst vandalisms’ in the future renovation of the city.18 As can be seen in the quotation below, to take her point even further, she appropriated Christian vocabulary and tropes, explaining that hers was an ‘active crusade’ and that international ‘zeal’ was needed to preserve Florence’s urban heritage. A verb often appearing in her letter is ‘to enlighten’, as, for example, when she admits that ‘the public opinion of the townsfolk was not sufficiently enlightened for such a task; and the authorities elected by them were unable either to enlighten or restrain it sufficiently’, or when she says, with reference to Torrigiani’s vision, that ‘a new Syndic may be less enlightened than he’.19 Whereas the immediate meaning of the verb is connected to reason, and more

Vernon Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Times, 15 December 1898, 8. Vernon Lee, ‘Lettera di Miss Paget (Vernon Lee) al Times del 15 dicembre 1898’, Bollettino dell’Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica 1, no. 1 (1900), 35. 17 On the presence of Puritan influences in Lee’s work – an aspect Walter Pater was among the first to notice in his anonymous review of Lee’s collection Juvenilia (1887)  –  see Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee. Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 146; and Vineta Colby, ‘The Puritan Aesthete: Vernon Lee’, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 235–304. 18 Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, 8. 19 Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, 8. 15 16

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specifically to the Age of Reason, it also calls to mind the Christian ‘light of the world’ metaphor by which Jesus described his disciples’ mission of converting the masses: You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.20

In the Gospel of John 8.12 and 9.5, it is Jesus who describes himself as ‘the light of the World’, a metaphor visualized by Holman Hunt in his famous eponymous painting (1853–4), and part of the Victorian transmedial imagery evoked by Lee to make her plea more powerful. Like Christ’s disciples, Lee seems to imply, she has been called to ‘enlighten’ the local population and envision precise proselytizing actions to convert the Florentines to the religion of their historical past: an active crusade should be initiated, not to act upon the municipal authorities, but to enlighten the town’s folk sufficiently to prevent the present or any future town council being forced into or abetted in projects of useless destruction. … A crusade to stir up public interest in the preservation of Old Florence would certainly be successful if conducted with tact, energy, and continuity. … If, therefore, those who love Old Florence will continue to show the same zeal, it may be foretold with certainty that Old Florence, or rather, alas! what still remains of it, will be handed down intact to centuries less destructive, because more civilized, than our own.21

Though exemplifying Lee’s earnest activism in defence of Florentine urban heritage, the passage also conveys the sense of cultural superiority that underlies her battle. This is probably what made her ‘crusade’ more successful abroad than in Italy. A similar sense of superiority would also characterize her future attempts at social action, as will be shown later in this chapter. Herself a member of the international élite addressed in her sermon-like tirade, Lee claimed the right to interpret and express the Florentines’ desires, with something akin to a pedagogic mission lurking behind her commitment. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Maurizio Naldini, a journalist and expert in Florentine history, has acerbically commented that Lee ‘treated the Florentines as real savages, as a population to be educated, after having colonized them both culturally and economically’.22 Such passages as the following confirm Naldini’s reading of Lee’s self-appointed pedagogic role towards the locals: New International Version Bible (1978), Matthew 5.14–16. Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, 8. 22 ‘trattava i fiorentini come autentici selvaggi, un popolo da educare dopo averlo in qualche modo colonizzato sotto l’aspetto economico e culturale’. Maurizio Naldini, ‘Vernon Lee negli archivi de La Nazione’, in Dalla stanza accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze Settant’anni dopo, ed. Serena Cenni and Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Regione Toscana, 2006), 31. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Italian are the author’s. 20 21

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Every means should be taken to educate the taste and historic spirit of the small bourgeoisie and working people by lectures, newspaper articles, tracts, pamphlets, and such public events as the proposed congress of art history. Moreover, it ought, by every similar method, to be made clear to the hotel and shop keepers, to the owners of lodgings, to jobmasters and cabowners, and to every class directly or indirectly interested in the presence of foreigners that one of the chief attractions of this city is its well preserved medieval character.23

Naldini’s opinion counters the notion – common in criticism of Lee – of the author’s actions simply being evidence of her commitment to the city that had become her home. Thus, for example, Catherine Maxwell emphasizes Lee’s ‘pragmatism’ in wishing to improve the city through the education of its inhabitants,24 while Lasansky never challenges Lee’s good intentions as a conscience-stirrer in matters of urban preservation.25 However, despite the author’s public persona as a spokesperson for the locals, it cannot be denied that Lee’s text shared in, and appealed to, the civilizing urge in her AngloAmerican readers towards certain countries. Apparently, these feelings were widespread, for between the letter’s publication and March 1899, more than 11,000 subscribers signed a petition in favour of the Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica and the preservation of the Florentine built environment. The destruction of the old city came to a halt at last.26 For all its sense of entitlement, Lee’s letter was a remarkable achievement from an Italian perspective too. Not only did it give unprecedented relevance to urban heritage, but it also represented an efficacious means of protest in itself. Although common to English literary culture since the birth of the periodical press in the eighteenth century, letters to the editor were still in the process of becoming a fully established way of expressing social resistance in Italy at the time.27 As Gabrina Pounds explains, ‘The first publication of readers’ letters in a dedicated correspondence section in the paper goes back to 1620 in England, a time when the country was already playing a leading role in the development of the early press in Europe, from the early newsletters to the first dailies’.28 By contrast, Pounds explains, The first noteworthy correspondence sections appeared in Italy around 1874 in the form of letters asking for expert advice, mainly in women’s magazines and, not uncommonly, manufactured by the editors. It was not until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century that one could come across genuine opinion letters. These dealt with political topics and were written by influential writers.29 Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, 8. Maxwell, ‘Vernon Lee’, 202. 25 Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, 34–5. 26 Lamberini, ‘“The Divine Country”’, 42. 27 Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘Foreword’, in Letters to the Editor: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, ed. Alison Cavanagh and John Stevens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), vi. 28 Gabrina Pounds, ‘Democratic Participation and Letters to the Editor in Britain and Italy’, Discourse & Society 17, no. 1 (2006): 29–63, 31. 29 Pounds, ‘Democratic Participation’, 34. 23 24

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Highly conversant in both English and Italian culture, in many respects Lee acted as a mediator between the two and certainly played a role in Italy in heightening the perception of letters to the editor as means to discuss serious socio-political topics and trigger public debates. There may be little doubt that she belonged to the turnof-the-century ‘influential writers’ to whom Pounds refers in the quotation above, but does not specifically name,30 who contributed to the canonization of the genre in the country.31 As a matter of fact, although her letter was published in an English newspaper, the popularity and authoritativeness of the Times, along with the subject of her text, ensured that her protest would get the attention of advanced Italian readers: those who could access, and were interested in, debates in the foreign press. Such multiple, cosmopolitan addressees, and the consequent necessity to cater to cultural diversity, were probably at the heart of Lee’s adoption of different rhetorical strategies in different parts of her text. In particular, the parts reporting her interview with Torrigiani are characterized by more controlled tones than those giving vent to her personal indignation. She displays an awareness that Italian culture requires greater diplomacy and obliqueness, as well as deference, especially when dealing with authority. Hence her formal and magniloquent style in reporting Torrigiani’s phrases: Nothing could exceed the kindness and courtesy of Marchese Torrigiani in placing before me the plans of new streets and the photographs of the Old Centre and in answering my long and tiresome interrogations. … [The Syndic] desired me to inform the readers of The Times that for the moment such works have been suspended… . The Syndic assured me there had never been any idea of pulling down the side on the river, nor would such a thing be allowed.32

Despite its tact, however, Lee’s letter became the subject of local debates on 18 December 1898, when another letter to the editor, signed by Torrigiani himself and written as a response to a letter by Corsini, appeared in the city’s leading newspaper La Nazione. Torrigiani blamed his predecessor for involving foreigners in his antirenovation campaign whereas, as Torrigiani put it, ‘dirty laundry should be washed at home’.33 An explicit reference to the culprit came soon afterwards, with the mention of ‘a famous English woman writer … who goes under the name of Vernon Lee’, and

General mention of authoritative letters to the editor in fin-de-siècle Italy can also be found in Eugenio Ambrosi and Mariselda Tessarolo, Dalla parte del lettore. Ricerca sulla posta dei quotidiani italiani (Roma: Edizioni lavoro, 1991), 66–7. 31 The definition easily applies, for example, to poet, politician and Nobel Prize winner Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) and to his circle of supporters and detractors. On Carducci and his epistolary interactions with other Italian intellectuals through the press in the 1890s, see Andrea Brambilla, ‘Tra guerra e pace. Appunti su De Amicis e Carducci’, in Profeti inascoltati. Il pacifismo alla prova della Grande Guerra, ed. Fulvio Senardi (Trieste: Istituto Giuliano di Storia Cultura Documentazione, 2015), 149–53. 32 Lee, ‘Letter to the Editor’, 8. Lee uses the word ‘syndic’ to translate the Italian ‘sindaco’, which refers to a city’s or town’s mayor. 33 ‘I panni sporchi si lavano in casa’, quoted in Naldini, ‘Vernon Lee’, 30. 30

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who was guilty of having brought local issues to unwanted international attention.34 Yet despite Torrigiani’s hostility, she had succeeded not only in broadening the scope of the Florentine debate on heritage well beyond national borders, but also in canonizing the editorial letter, a privileged channel for her activism and ideological dissemination, within Italian culture. Lee’s letter had significant afterlives within her own corpus, especially during the First World War, when she resorted to the genre to discuss more global issues. The war had broken out during one of her sojourns in England, leaving her unable to get back to Italy – then an enemy country – until the end of the conflict. Grievous though they were, these years of forced exile had the positive side effect of offering Lee greater international visibility, due to both the wider possibilities for publication England could offer and the more extensive range of topics suggesting themselves by historical circumstances. They also enabled her to write and argue, from a more cosmopolitan perspective, against what she considered as blind socio-political prejudice. A staunch pacifist, Lee was considered by many Britons to be anti-nationalist, whereas she saw herself as simply a global anti-war campaigner. This perception of herself as antinationalist made her the subject of criticism and suspicion, but also set her even more at the centre of large-scale debates, and she finally became one of the main voices disputing the pervasive jingoism.35 Among her letters to the editor of the Nation, the leftist and pacifist periodical that became the main platform for her protest, the one titled ‘“Vernon Lee’s” message to Americans’, published on 17 September 1914, is particularly significant. The typically long piece was meant as an answer to H. G. Wells’ ‘Appeal to the American People’, which had appeared in the London Daily Chronicle on 24 August 1914 and urged Americans not ‘to facilitate by special legislation [the German ships’] transfer to [the American] flag, and then load them with food and war material’.36 In her reply, Lee accused her fellow author and (soon-to-be-ex-)friend37 of ‘self-righteousness’ in demanding that ‘America … deprive Germany of food for the speediest coming of the kingdom of peace and good will upon earth’.38 Analogies with her 1898 letter to La Nazione are apparent even from these scant quotations. To begin with, Lee again employs Christian lexis and imagery to underpin

‘una nota scrittrice inglese che si fa chiamare Vernon Lee’, quoted in Naldini, ‘Vernon Lee’, 30. On Lee’s anti-war activism, see Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 300; and Grace Brockington, ‘Performing Pacifism: The Battle between Artist and Author in The Ballet of the Nations’, in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 147–8. 36 H. G. Wells, ‘Appeal to the American People’, rpt. in H. G. Wells, The War that Will End War (New York: Duffield & Company, 1914), 86. On the Lee-Wells debate in the press, see Carl J. Weber, ‘Mr. Wells and Vernon Lee’, Colby Library Quarterly 3, no. 8 (1952): 130. 37 Lee’s relationship with Wells is analysed by Amanda Gagel in her chapter ‘Vernon Lee and H. G. Wells: A Literary and Critical Camaraderie’, in Violet del Palmerino. Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita nel salotto di Vernon Lee: 1889–1935, ed. Serena Cenni, Sophie Geoffroy and Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Regione Toscana, 2012), 89–108. 38 Vernon Lee, ‘“Vernon Lee’s” Message to Americans’, The Nation, 17 September 1914, 346. 34 35

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her dissenting points. The phrasing ‘kingdom of peace and good will upon earth’39 is a recognizable formula from the religious hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo, whose ecumenical spirit Lee appropriated in her appeal to world peace and with which her early-twentieth-century readership would have been familiar. As in her 1898 letter, moreover, Lee’s words suggest entitlement as she interprets the thoughts of the silent majority, which are not only reported, but also dramatized and exaggerated when claiming to be giving voice to ‘thousands of English men and women who feel only shame and disgust at the proposal Mr. Wells has made in their name’.40 Lee here employs again the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterized her 1898 letter, although with an increasingly sarcastic bent. Her style is prophetic when portraying herself as an enlightening presence in contemporary chaos; it turns apocalyptic when expressing her superiority in terms of intercultural experience. These strategies are most patent in a passage where Lee recounts how the present situation brings to her mind dreadful memories of the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath:41 ‘Let America use and show her neutrality by starving Germany; by reducing, if possible, its inhabitants to the scurvy-stricken and anaemia-undermined creatures I remember still seeing in the streets and shops of Paris in the summer of 1871.’42 As in her letter to the Times, Lee resorts to first-hand experiences to strengthen her point: what she envisions as the consequences of absurd wartime decisions remind her of the tragic scenes she witnessed as a girl of fourteen. Having experienced war trauma herself, she implies, makes her a trustworthy narrator. This can only be done by underpinning her narration with imagery of famine, illness and blight, reminiscent once again of biblical epics. The testamentary subtext is underscored by Lee’s prophetic tones, here exacerbated by an unprecedented sarcasm: ‘I know too much of France to believe that she can establish in other countries the free and orderly government which she has been unable, despite all her genius and her “principles”, to obtain for herself.’43 On this occasion, however, Lee’s public action did not have any immediate positive outcomes. Instead she was criticized on both sides of the Atlantic for a text that, as an American reader put it, ‘surely abuses the wit that has made her famous’.44 An English reader made an even blunter point by warning Americans to ‘rest assured that [Lee] represents no section of English opinion whatever, least of all English Liberalism’.45 Eventually, in another letter to the editor, Wells himself addressed the readers of the Nation by ridiculing Lee’s hyperbolic tones. ‘She declares’, he explained, ‘that I want America to “starve” the German people’ but ‘there was no suggestion of that in my

Lee, ‘“Vernon Lee’s” Message’, 346. Lee, ‘“Vernon Lee’s” Message’, 345. 41 Phyllis Mannocchi, ‘From Victorian Highbrow to Anti-War Activist: The Political Education of Vernon Lee, Woman of Letters’, in Dalla stanza accanto: Vernon Lee e Firenze Settant’anni dopo, ed. Serena Cenni and Elisa Bizzotto (Firenze: Regione Toscana, 2006), 74–5. 42 Lee, ‘“Vernon Lee’s” Message to Americans’, 345. 43 Lee, ‘“Vernon Lee’s” Message to Americans’, 346. 44 Quoted in Weber, ‘Mr. Wells and Vernon Lee’, 130. 45 Quoted in Weber, ‘Mr. Wells and Vernon Lee’, 130. 39 40

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article’. And, Wells concluded, ‘As for the “thousands of English men and women” who share my former friend’s “shame and disgust” at my proposals I ask you not to believe in their existence.’46 Despite such scathing remarks, Lee continued to engage in similar forms of literary activism throughout the war, by means of other fierce public letters that proclaimed her uncompromising neutrality. One of these, ‘The Policy of the Allies: Letter to the Editor of The Nation’, published on 14 February 1915, envisaged ways of guiding Britain’s allies through the process of post-war peace. She saw her country as the sole democratic nation, whereas ‘there is at present in France little or no liberty of democratic discussion. There is probably not much more, despite all the promised reforms, in still autocratic Russia.’47 In its own way, this letter clearly establishes connections with its 1898 antecedent in terms of a sense of entitlement. England,48 in Lee’s vision, is a model for its allies, whose actions, intentions and claims it must control both during and after the war by showing them what a modern democratic nation should expect from history. She observes that Britons should ‘make our Allies understand betimes, and have leisure inwardly to digest, that British democracy does not intend to permit’ any acts of revenge and violence after the war is won.49 It seems evident that, as in 1898, she felt qualified to speak for the majority – of British subjects, in this case – although now the wider international reading public who were the recipients of her protest, as well as the huge issues at stake, prevented her actions from proving effective, at least in the short run. Undeterred by the failure of her campaigns in the press, Lee continued to fight relentlessly for peace and democracy throughout the war and after. The activism formerly expressed in her letters to the press eventually found a much more elaborate manifestation in her creative output with the drama Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction (1920). Satan the Waster is a complex experimental piece that incorporates a previous drama by the author – The Ballet of the Nations (1915), a pacifist morality play which ‘constitutes the nucleus’50 of this later work – along with criticism, first-person memoirs, and preacher-like admonitions, all expressed in a long introduction and extensive notes. Satan the Waster is, moreover, pervaded by the biblical and Christian quotations, language, imagery and tropes that characterized Lee’s previous non-fictional activist writings. Like them, it displays ample evidence of her entitled, almost pedagogic, tendency to discern right from wrong on behalf of her audience – an attitude often conveyed through homiletic and prophetic vocabulary, tones and rhetoric. H. G. Wells, The Correspondence of H.G. Wells: Volume 2 1904–1918, ed. David C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2021), 387. 47 Vernon Lee, ‘The Policy of the Allies. Letter to the Editor of The Nation’, The Nation, 14 February 1915, 649. 48 It should be noted that Lee uses the terms ‘English/England’ and ‘British/Britain’ interchangeably throughout the article. 49 Lee, ‘The Policy of the Allies’, 649. 50 Vernon Lee, Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction (New York: John Lane at the Bodley Head, 1920), vii. 46

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Since its composition began around 1914, the play clearly originated in the same spirit as Lee’s expressions of anti-bellicism in her letters to periodicals. It is therefore plausible that, during the extended writing process of Satan the Waster, the model of the editorial letter morphed into an extremely sophisticated artistic creation, the most modern and modernist of Lee’s works. To the present day, Satan the Waster remains a unique specimen in the history of literary genres, a text that defies generic definitions. By no means, however, can its quintessential nature as protest literature be disputed.

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On Behalf of the Nation: Knut Hamsun and the Politics of Authorship Tore Rem

Authorial Roles Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) is often considered a pioneer of literary modernism, due mostly to Hunger (1890), but also to other novels of the 1890s, such as Mysteries (1893) and Pan (1894). Because of these works the Norwegian novelist acquired European fame and huge popularity, particularly in Germany and Russia. After the turn of the century, there was a marked change in Hamsun’s writing, however, towards a more conventional epic and realist style. For one of his novels from this later period, Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil; 1917), he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920, and the prize clearly helped to increase both his literary prestige and his celebrity status. Hamsun’s career is characterized by rupture. In the 1930s he became a vocal supporter of Hitler’s Germany, and in April 1940 he sided with the Nazi occupiers of his own country. Hamsun’s political notoriety rests on characteristically spectacular gestures and events. In 1943 he visited both Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, and on 7 May 1945, at the moment of defeat, he published a glowing obituary of Hitler, calling him ‘a warrior, a warrior for humanity and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations’.1 Hitler, Hamsun argued, had fallen victim to the most unparalleled brutality. This article is concerned with the uses and abuses of literary authority. I will argue that two radically different views on the role of the artist played themselves out in the life and career of Hamsun, both ideals of how a writer should act and behave, both with implications for politics and the engagement of writers in the public sphere. These two views appeared in chronological order, and the connection between the one and the other was nationalism. The second role Hamsun took up, the one that led to his disgrace and downfall, was also strengthened by the dynamics of celebrity. Knut Hamsun, ‘Adolf Hitler’, Aftenposten, 7 May 1945. All translations from the Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and German are mine, unless otherwise noted. Warm thanks to the editors, the anonymous reviewer and Bart van Es for perceptive comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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This historical role highlights the risks involved in excessive cultural and political investments in the authority of authors.2 My purpose is to consider the significance of Hamsun’s cultural position, how he inherited a quite specific Norwegian authorial role, how this was affirmed and how it evolved within the framework of celebrity as well as fascism.

Anonymity At the age of twenty-nine, in the early autumn of 1888, an unknown Norwegian writer turned up in Copenhagen, set on making his own way in the world of literature. He was an autodidact with a total of 252 days of schooling, but he had had literary ambitions since his early teenage years. Along the way he had done odd jobs and had travelled restlessly. He was despairing, he had brought a manuscript and he went straight for the top. On 17 September he wrote to the influential critic and newspaper editor Edvard Brandes, whose brother, Georg, was the leading figure of the so-called ‘Modern Breakthrough’ movement. In that letter, the young man confessed his concerns. Georg Brandes had argued that a writer had first to succeed within his own nation before he could achieve anything in literary terms in the larger world, but ‘The book I’m working on is so desperately un-Norwegian’, the young writer noted. ‘I had not wanted to write for Norwegians.’ He informed Edvard Brandes that he had travelled from the age of fourteen, at home and abroad. ‘How “national” can you then be at the age of 30?’3 Later that autumn this overtly un-national writer created a literary sensation in Scandinavia with the publication of a fragment called ‘Hunger, A Story’. It was published anonymously, but it did not take long before the press had figured out the author’s identity. When Hunger appeared in book form in 1890, it was attributed to ‘Knut Hamsun’, the name of a man formerly known as Knud Pedersen from a small farm, Hamsund, in Hamarøy, Northern Norway. He had originally also wanted to publish this text, an anti-novel, anonymously, but his publisher had refused to let him. Hamsun’s idea when writing, and the way he had wanted to continue, was to ‘turn up anonymously, unexpectedly, with sudden effect’.4 In short, what he wanted was to reject outward authority.

In Norwegian the designation for ‘author’ is not as directly associated with ‘authority’ as in English. Author is forfatter, related to the German Verfasser, or, in Hamsun’s time, the generic digter (in current usage restricted to ‘poet’), related to the German Dichter. In line with a Norwegian tradition, Hamsun was referred to as Digterhøvding (poet chief), however. 3 Knut Hamsun to Edvard Brandes, 17 September 1888, in Knut Hamsuns brev 1879–1895 (Knut Hamsun’s Letters), ed. Harald S. Næss (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1994), 80–1. 4 Knut Hamsun to Bolette Pavels Larsen, 10 September [?] 1890, in Knut Hamsuns brev 1879–1895, 202. 2

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Author and Nation Hamsun made his entry into a national literature in its heyday. Out of next to nothing  –  a meagre domestic literary output  –  Norwegian, and more generally Scandinavian, literature was becoming a focus of interest all over Europe.5 But Henrik Ibsen’s extraordinary position at home may remind us of Franz Kafka’s remarks on minor literatures, and on the advantages of writing in a small, peripheral language. Among what he calls the general benefits of literature, Kafka mentions ‘the pride which a nation gains from a literature of its own and the support it is afforded in the face of a hostile surrounding world’, and ‘the acknowledgement of literary events as objects of political solicitude’.6 Kafka’s formulations capture the literary situation in Norway in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Norwegian writers who spent time abroad reported that the status of writers and interest in literature in large nations were nowhere near what they were at home.7 But in the 1890s, the decade in which the term ‘poetocracy’ first came to be used in and about Norway, Hamsun constantly satirized the position and role of his nation’s authors.8 In a lecture called ‘Against the Overestimation of Writers and Writing’ in 1897, he mocked the ‘modern worship of writers’: For twenty years now our consciousness has contained no greater men than our writers; for ten years they have been our gods. We decorate the windows in our city with their images, we turn around to look at them in the street and whisper that there they are, we speak quietly when close to them. Some of them have achieved a high degree of inimitability in the way they dress, in the way they behave. They are strange men within whom the spirit now and then curls up and expresses itself in extravagant ways. But then their heads are clearly full of great things!9

All this reverence was, Hamsun concluded, ‘humbug’, and he expressed his disbelief at this ‘unreasonable overestimation’ of himself and his colleagues. A true writer was ‘a rootless man’, he argued, a ‘traveller without a passport’.10 Hamsun’s notion of the writer was an antithesis to the kind of writer he claimed to observe in his native country, one with an official role within the state and the public sphere. Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), x, 7. 6 Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 148–50; see also Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama, 137. 7 Jonas Lie to Olivia Hansen, 11 June 1879, in Jonas Lie, Brev 1851–1908, vol. 1, ed. Anne Grete HolmOlsen (Oslo: Novus, 2009), 478–9. 8 The term ‘poetocracy’ was first explicitly thematized in historian J. E. Sars’ ‘Bjørnsons Plads i Norges politiske Historie’ (Bjørnson’s Place in the Political History of Norway, 1902), in Samlede Værker (Collected Works), vol. 4 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912), 263–85. 9 Hamsun, ‘Mot overvurdering av diktere og diktning’ (Against the Overestimation of Writers and Writing), in Knut Hamsun, På turné, in Samlede verker (Collected Works), vol. 25, ed. Lars Frode Larsen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2009), 143–56, 152, 156. 10 Hamsun, ‘Mot overvurdering av diktere og diktning’, 155–6. 5

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As late as 1910, the German critic Carl Morburger, Hamsun’s first biographer, identified a particular authorial role as one of the Norwegian literary field’s most conspicuous features. ‘There is no country in the world in which such a cult surrounds the writers and art’, Morburger claimed. This idea that the nation’s major writers were ‘leaders’ had been attacked with ‘exceeding vehemence’ by Hamsun, his biographer concluded.11 But already in 1899, during a stay in neighbouring Finland, Hamsun had started rearticulating his position, slightly but significantly. He still spoke about the importance of writers being free from social pressures and about the need for complete artistic autonomy, but now, as his own nation moved towards independence, he had found an exception.12 The ‘love of their fatherland’ was slumbering in the masses, Hamsun asserted in a lecture in Helsinki, and it had to be woken up. The writer, he continued, knew the true meaning of nationhood and was able to articulate it ‘with such words that you will never forget it for your entire life’.13 When Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the leading writer of the national movement and by far the greatest cultural authority in Norwegian political life, died, Hamsun was fifty years old, and hesitantly let himself be anointed. Thus was the writerly line of WergelandBjørnson-Hamsun created, and Hamsun would soon, perhaps only half ironically, call himself ‘“Leader” (Fører) after Bjørnson’.14 Around the same time, he published his first oracular statements on politics, not least on the need for his fellow countrymen to turn back to the soil, to reject tourism and avoid emigration.15 In the decades that followed, he expressed anti-democratic, anti-capitalist and anti-industrialist views, in addition to engaging in debates on other issues, from infanticide to the First World War. Hamsun had, albeit initially with considerable ambivalence, taken up the role of truth-teller, particularly on questions of nationhood and nationalism. Soon new levels of fame helped to make him even more of a prophet figure at home: a political and ethical guide to his nation, a privileged voice, someone who would not let himself be corrected.

Nobel Celebrity ‘Never do I think that it has been awarded to anyone more worthy’, Thomas Mann wrote in 1922, with reference to ‘the glory of world fame’ that the Nobel Prize in Literature had thrown upon Knut Hamsun’s name two years previously.16 It had perhaps not been a great surprise when the Norwegian novelist was awarded the prize – he had been Carl Morburger, Knut Hamsun: En studie (Knut Hamsun: A Study) (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910), 57. 12 Norway declared itself independent from Sweden on 7 June 1905. 13 ‘Dikterliv’ (The Life of Authors), in Hamsun, På turné, 174. 14 Knut Hamsun to J. M. Køhler Olsen, 13 August [1910?], in Knut Hamsuns brev 1908–1914, ed. Harald S. Næss (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1996), 326. 15 See for example ‘Et ord til os’ (A Word for Us; 1910), in Samlede verker, vol. 27, ed. Lars Frode Larsen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2009), 77–85. 16 Thomas Mann, review of Konerne ved Vandposten (The Women at the Pump; 1922), Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden (Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes), vol. 10, ed. Hans Bürger and Peter de Mendelsohn (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 619. 11

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nominated previously – but it had not been uncontroversial. The problem for the Nobel committee had been a particular formulation in Alfred Nobel’s will, that the prize must go to someone who had written literature ‘in an idealist direction’.17 Hamsun’s literature of the 1890s was hardly of an idealist kind, nor were his satirical novels from after the turn of the century, with one exception, the Swedish Academy found: his hymn to agriculture and the soil, Growth of the Soil. This one work was therefore singled out as making the author worthy of the prize. The Nobel Prize meant a strengthening of Hamsun’s already considerable fame. In the years that followed, writers as different as the Mann brothers, Herman Hesse, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Martin Heidegger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Maxim Gorki, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells and Katherine Mansfield would express their admiration of Hamsun. The praise heaped on the novelist on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1929 documents his contemporary status. ‘Hamsun’ was the name of an entire age, a literary epoch, the Soviet diplomat and politician Alexandra Kollontai wrote in the Norwegian Festschrift for Hamsun. While Dostoevsky was now being read by ‘a narrow circle of readers and admirers in the new Russia’, Hamsun continued to reach ‘the remotest provinces’. André Gide also found Hamsun a subtler writer than the great Russian novelist, while Gerhart Hauptmann thought that Pan was ‘the greatest love poem’ of all time, and Stefan Zweig thanked Hamsun again and again for his knowledge of human nature, his sensitivity, his ‘soul’s music’.18 In 1929 the main Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), had joined in the chorus, printing a large tribute. The paper struggled to reconcile the seeming disharmony and scepticism of Hamsun’s literary works with its own values, but the Norwegian writer was, it claimed, in the depth of his soul ‘a content, powerful and healthy human being’, a noble man whom the Germans loved ‘as blood of our blood’. Hamsun belonged among the great men who had understood the tragedy of the age, like Nietzsche, Hitler, Ludendorff and Mussolini.19

On Behalf of Culture Joseph Goebbels was one of several ardent admirers of Hamsun in the Nazi leadership, alongside Walter von Darré, Alfred Rosenberg, Otto Dietrich and the first leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, who had claimed that Growth of the Soil was

Nobelpriset i litteratur: Part 1, 1901–1920 (The Nobel Prize in Literature) (Stockholm: Svenska Akademien, 2001), ix, 430–2. 18 See for example Knut Hamsun. Festskrift til 70 aarsdagen 4. august 1929 (Knut Hamsun: Festschrift to his Seventieth Birthday 4 August 1929), ed. Francis Bull, Sigurd Hoel and Carl Nærup (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1929), unnumbered pages, and the Hamsun issue of Die literarische Welt (The Literary World), 2 August 1929. 19 ‘Knut Hamsun zum 70. Geburtstag’ (Knut Hamsun on His Seventieth Birthday), Völkischer Beobachter, 4–5 August 1929; see also Gabriele Schulte, Hamsun im Spiegel der deutschen Literaturkritik 1890 bis 1975 (Hamsun in German Literary Criticism 1890 to 1975) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 122–3. 17

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‘a new gospel for Germany’s youth’.20 Celebrating the Norwegian novelist’s seventyfifth birthday in 1934, the Nazi minister of propaganda went on to hail Hamsun in extravagant terms. The Norwegian was working at a time when he was of particular significance, Goebbels claimed: ‘We who stand at the beginning of a great renewal know that life in the most general sense needs such creative forces as those hidden in Hamsun’s works, in order that life does not stiffen into formulas and habits, that the stream of events does not cease, that “life lives”.’21 The expression in quotation marks was an allusion to Hamsun’s novel Men livet lever (But Life Lives; 1933), but was also in line with a certain Nazi version of vitalism. The Goebbels connection led to a series of events marking the culmination of the ideological uses of Hamsun’s celebrity and authority, as well as illustrating the interconnections between aesthetics and politics. These events began with Hamsun and his wife Marie’s visit to the minister of propaganda in Berlin on 18 May 1943. On this occasion Goebbels told Hamsun that he would order a new edition of his works in a print run of 100,000 copies, in the midst of paper shortages and rationing. He wanted Frontbuchausgaben of the Norwegian writer, special editions meant to inspire the soldiers in the trenches.22 Goebbels called this encounter ‘one of the most valuable events’ of his entire life.23 On his return home, Hamsun responded in typically extravagant fashion, by sending his Nobel prize medal and diploma to the German minister of propaganda.24 The draft of Hamsun’s letter documents his attitude and the connections he had long since begun to make between the worlds of literature and politics: Nobel established his prize as a reward for last year’s ‘idealist’ writing. I know of no one who so untiringly, year in, year out, has written and spoken for the cause of Europe and humanity as idealistically as you, Herr Reichsminister. I ask you to forgive me for sending you my medal. It is a completely useless thing to you, but I have nothing else to send.25

Goebbels declared himself ‘deeply moved’ by what he called Hamsun’s ‘beautiful gesture’, and told Hitler about it just before the Norwegian writer was about to appear at a large Nazi journalist conference in Vienna.26 It seems to have helped persuade

See Sven König, Die Rolle Knut Hamsuns in der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda (Knut Hamsun’s Role in National Socialist Propaganda) (MA thesis, University of Hamburg, 1998), 63. 21 ‘Goebbels om Hamsun. En uttalelse til Tidens Tegn’ (Goebbels about Hamsun. A Statement to Tidens Tegn), Tidens Tegn, 4 August 1934. 22 Joseph Goebbels, 19 May 1943, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente (The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels: Complete Fragments), vol. 6, ed. Elke Frölich (München: Saur, 1987– 1997), 327. 23 Joseph Goebbels, 19 May 1943, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. 6, 328. 24 Joseph Goebbels, 23 June 1943, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. 6, 515–16. 25 Knut Hamsun to Joseph Goebbels, 17 June 1943, Knut Hamsuns brev 1934–1950, ed. Harald S. Næss (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2000), 352. 26 Joseph Goebbels, 23 June 1943, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. 6, p. 515. 20

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the Führer to receive the famous author at Berghof on 26 June 1943.27 The meeting between the two great authorities, one in the field of literature, the other in the field of politics, ended disastrously, with Hitler furious at Hamsun’s obstinacy and insistent advocacy of Norwegian Nazi interests. What was planned as a propagandist occasion ended up being tellingly ignored in the Nazi press. The less-studied Vienna visit was a great propaganda success, however, and it demonstrates Hamsun’s political importance, the status he had in Nazi Germany, and the role he played for the Nazi cause. The Union nationaler Journalistenverbände (UNJ), the Union of National Journalists’ Organizations, was founded in 1941, with the aims of demonstrating the important role played by journalists in the war and of strengthening the coordination of Nazi and Fascist media in Germany, Italy and the occupied territories. During a UNJ board meeting in Munich in early February 1943, only one suggestion of the kind of personality who would do as main speaker at the union’s forthcoming conference in Vienna came up: the eighty-three-year-old Knut Hamsun. Hamsun accepted the invitation.28 The official opening of this huge propaganda event, with some 380 representatives from twenty-one countries, took place on 21 June 1943.29 The main speech on the first day was given by Alfred Rosenberg, who had hailed Growth of the Soil as capturing true Nordicness, the very dream of Aryan purity, in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century; 1930).30 The conference was presented as a collective response to the Jewish world press, and Rosenberg, now Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, stressed the ongoing ‘world struggle’, the need to prevent a ‘Jewish world republic’ and the task of saving culture and Europe from the forces of the ‘netherworld’.31 The defence of what Nazis considered to be true European culture against Jewish and Slavic barbarism became the conference’s central propaganda message, and here the world-famous writer from the far north turned out to be exceedingly useful. The Nazi press described Hamsun’s arrival in the afternoon of 23 June as a sensation. In his speech, read out for him by the editor of Fritt Folk (Free People), the main Norwegian Nazi newspaper, Hamsun primarily attacked England and the English.32 Along the König, Die Rolle Knut Hamsuns in der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda, 48–9; Tore Rem, Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler (The Journey to Hitler) (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2014), 269–88. 28 See Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 263–7; Rem, Knut Hamsun, 176–7. 29 Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order, 263. The figures in the Nazi press vary between 350 and 500. 30 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Assessment of the SpiritualIntellectual Struggles of Our Time) (Munich: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1930), 27, 414. 31 ‘Weltkampf und Weltrevolution’ (World Struggle and World Revolution), Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 23 June 1943. 32 Knut Hamsun, ‘England må i kne’ (England Must Be Brought to Its Knees), in Knut Hamsun, Samlede verker, vol. 25, 149–55; see also ‘Knut Hamsun retter kraftig anti-britisk budskap til pressekongressen i Wien’ (Knut Hamsun Formulates a Strong Anti-British Message to the Press Conference in Vienna), Nationen, 24 June 1943; ‘Knut Hamsuns tale på journalistkongressen har gjort et mektig inntrykk’ (Knut Hamsun’s Speech at the Journalists’ Conference Has Made a Powerful Impression), Fritt Folk, 25 June 1943; ‘Knut Hamsun: England muss auf die Knie’ (England Must Be Brought to Its Knees), Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 25 June 1943. 27

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way he conveyed the Nazi version of history, that ‘foreign elements infected and weakened the German spirit in the people’, and that ‘un-Germanic peoples and races’ had exploited the German people after the First World War. Everyone listening would understand this code for Jews and Jewishness. Hamsun also went on to praise National Socialism, ‘a revelation, a miracle of will and German power’, as well as Hitler, ‘this strange man who has come to raise the whole world on the edge – and now tips it over on the other side!’ He concluded forcefully: ‘England must be brought to its knees!’ The audience celebrated Hamsun as he left the stage, ‘as if he were a sort of saint of Germanism, or rather of the new Europe’, one Italian journalist remarked.33 The speech became front-page news throughout the Axis alliance and the occupied territories. The Times in London also covered ‘Hamsun’s tirade’ under the heading ‘England the “Eternal Enemy”’. The paper briefly noted that the conference so far had worked under the motto ‘Save Europe’s culture from the attacks from barbarians and Bolsheviks’, a motif that came straight out of Goebbels’ speeches, and that it had now been the octogenarian Hamsun’s turn to contribute.34 The day after Hamsun’s speech, Otto Dietrich, Chief Press Officer of the Nazi regime and host, gave this strong political intervention an explicit framing. Dietrich began his speech, one of the most aggressively antisemitic he ever gave, by berating Churchill and Roosevelt for their ‘monstrous attacks on human culture’. He then listed the greatest names of European culture, first the scientists, from Euclid to Copernicus and Galilei, then the philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, then the great explorers and inventors. After this he went on to list art form after art form, before coming to literature: ‘And Europe’s poets? What treasures of wonderful works have they given humanity?’ Dietrich began with Homer, went on to Cervantes and Goethe, and then came to the final name on the list, the climax of European culture: ‘We bend down before Knut Hamsun’s quiet power, he who today lets the gods reside within us.’35 The context for Hamsun’s appearance on this occasion was particular and urgent. In the weeks leading up to the conference, Goebbels and Dietrich had, as never before, mobilized culture as the foundation of German Nazi values and the justification for war. The discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest in Poland in April 1943, the bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Italy, and the destruction of cultural heritage were all used by Nazi propaganda to paint a picture of Allied barbarism. ‘World culture’ was dependent on Europe, the continent of Nazism and Fascism. The situation was dramatic, and it was amidst these circumstances that Hamsun became so important for the Nazi propagandists. Meanwhile, it should be noted, Nazi atrocities continued, not least in the Jewish ghettos in Poland, and in the concentration camps and extermination centres.36

Quoted in Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order, 264. ‘England the “Eternal Enemy”’, The Times, 28 June 1943. 35 ‘Die Sendung der europäischen Presse: Reichspressechef Dr. Dietrich vor den internationalen Journalisten’ (The Mission of the European Press: Reichs Chief Press Officer Dr. Dietrich before International Journalists), Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 25 June 1943. 36 Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order, 263. 33 34

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During the conference, just when the ‘Master’ finally appeared in ‘his powerful figure’, the German author Edwin Dwinger tried to capture Hamsun’s unsurpassed importance. ‘How many authors who have been mediated to the world via Germany have not left us during war times, have always left us?’ Dwinger asked rhetorically. ‘Hamsun stands as the only one by our side, in storms raging from all directions.’ Dwinger thanked the Norwegian writer not only for his art but also for his ‘unshakable attitude’ that gave Germans as much strength as his works. Nothing could be more encouraging than knowing that ‘the greatest living writer’ was on Germany’s side.37 Dwinger was not far off. In the coverage of culture in Völkischer Beobachter, Hamsun was the only contemporary writer energetically promoted by the Nazis whose name is still recognized today.38 Among the greats of literature, he can only be compared with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with his vehement anti-semitism, and Ezra Pound, with his hectic propaganda for Mussolini and Fascism. But neither of these was put to the same uses by the Nazis as Hamsun. Germany’s strongest literary voices did not serve the Nazi regime; they had become part of a new Exilliteratur. In short, no writer of similar prestige and celebrity was at Goebbels’ service.39 In joining the ranks of Nazi propagandists, Hamsun was motivated by his views of the author’s special role. Although he had initially rebelled against his nation’s cultural, social and political investments in its authors, he later came to accept that they could speak on behalf of the nation. His Nazism was, furthermore, in part driven by a concern for his own nation’s place within a future Germanic Reich. While much had happened between Hamsun’s change of views at the very end of the 1890s and the arrival of war in Norway on 9 April 1940, and while the author in the meantime had assumed authority in several fields, there was also a clear continuity. Warning against confusing writers with thinkers, in 1899 Hamsun had nevertheless been convinced that an exception had to be made in relation to their responsibility to the nation. No one, he had insisted, was more suited to awakening and maintaining the ‘love of the fatherland’ than the writer.40 Under police investigation after the war, Hamsun communicated his unchanged views to a friend and supporter. With reference to his propaganda articles during the occupation, he contended that ‘it was for Norway that I wrote’. Those who now passed judgement on him had never heard ‘the godly voice of the Fatherland in their souls, they had deaf souls’, Hamsun insisted, referring to the special capabilities and responsibilities of writers.41

Quoted in Dag Skogheim, ‘Hamsun skred forbi’ (Hamsun Passed By), in De røde jærn (The Red Irons), ed. Nils M. Knutsen (Hamarøy: Hamsun-Selskapet, 1997), 107–19, 118. 38 David B. Dennis, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 393. Karl May is a possible exception but hardly in terms of literary quality. 39 König, Die Rolle Knut Hamsuns in der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda, 2. 40 ‘Dikterliv’, in Hamsun, På turné, 157–79, 174. 41 Knut Hamsun to Christian Gierløff, 19 February 1946, in Knut Hamsuns brev 1934–1950, ed. Harald S. Næss (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2000), 411. 37

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Negotiations and Renegotiations The case of Hamsun demonstrates the pitfalls of literary authority, the risks of privileging the author’s voice in the life of the nation and the public sphere. Much might have been different had Hamsun stuck to his original ideas about authors and their role in society. The fact that he in the end embraced the idea of the writer as prophet, as unique authority, no doubt contributed to his downfall. Once upon a time Hamsun had argued that Norwegian writers had too much of a say, and that they made pronouncements on the wrong kinds of things, on issues outside their domain. In an article called ‘Authorities’, he argued that Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had made literature moral, and that he had thus placed himself outside it.42 Invoking authority in this way was deeply un-literary, a younger Hamsun had claimed. ‘Authority is power’, he had written around the age of fifty, with an insight he later rejected. Both authority and power, he then noted, ‘are sweets and candy for the old one wherever he may be in the world’.43 Is it possible to appear without authority? Perhaps only to a degree. The elderly and famous Nobel laureate could not escape his own signature. A new book appearing with Hamsun’s name on the cover would not be an innocent text, a point zero. But he might have drawn more or less attention to it; he did not have to become obsessed with his own name, and he did not have to take on the role of prophet, of Digterhøvding. Commenting on the related Sartrean role of the engaged author, the one who ‘writes for one’s age’ and wants to change it, Jacques Derrida points out that this is ‘a model that I have since judged to be ill-fated and catastrophic, but one I still love’.44 ‘It is dangerous to start playing a game,’ Hamsun had written about Ibsen and Tolstoy, just after the turn of the century. He had referred to how these two ‘philosopherdilettantes’ had become fixed in their authorial roles. Ibsen had started playing the ‘sphinx’, and had to continue doing so, because ‘the people expected it’, and Tolstoy had become a religious prophet. The generation of the 1870s had started behaving as ‘leaders of the people’ and ‘people with opinions on everything’. Perhaps writers like Ibsen and Tolstoy would have shown even more greatness if they had been able to stop in time, Hamsun had speculated.45 Hamsun must carry a heavy responsibility for his role in the brutal Nazi regime’s propaganda, in its literary system and its attempts at creating a new order. He both eagerly promoted the cause of Nazism and let his works be appropriated for the same ideological purposes. But his case would still have mattered less and felt less urgent if it were not for the literary merit of his works. There are numerous mediocre blood-andsoil-writers, some of whom clearly tried to play political roles, who no longer concern Knut Hamsun, ‘Autoriteter’ (Authorities), in Hamsun, Taler på torvet I (Speeches in the Square), Samlede verker, vol. 26, 251–6, 255–6. 43 Knut Hamsun, ‘Ærer de unge’ (Honour the Young!), in Hamsun, På turné, 199–234, 229–31. 44 Quoted in Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 11. 45 Knut Hamsun, I eventyrland (In fairy-tale land), in Hamsun, Samlede verker, vol. 23, 7–182, 133–5; see also ‘Dikterliv’ (The Life of Authors), in Hamsun, På turné, 172. 42

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us. But Hamsun continues to be read, and to engage, and he continues to trouble us and challenge our thinking about literature, politics and history, about the relationship between author and work and about the authority and ethical responsibility of writers. Hamsun’s case continues to lead to ever new negotiations and renegotiations, to vague, sometimes pathetic and desperate, apologias, as well as to fierce, sometimes overly ideological, criticism. In his native country, regular Hamsun debates have become something close to a cultural ritual.46

On Overgrown Paths There is one particularly fascinating postscript to Knut Hamsun’s fall. After the war, Norwegian authorities struggled with how to deal with their most famous writer. In the end, Hamsun was subjected to a psychiatric assessment that concluded with a diagnosis of ‘permanently (varig) reduced mental abilities’.47 In addition, the Norwegian Supreme Court on 23 June 1948 sentenced Hamsun to a large fine, stressing his position as ‘world renowned author’ and ‘one of the leaders (høvdingene) of Norway’s spiritual life’. The court was concerned with the damage the author had done to his country because of the ‘authority residing in Hamsun’s words’.48 Hamsun responded by way of literature, namely the memoir On Overgrown Paths (1949). In this work he, in part, returned to a fragmented, subjective and famously indeterminate, wavering style, now in the voice of an aged, frail man. The text focuses on details rather than the big picture, and revolves around aesthetics rather than politics. It is something of a stoical masterpiece, and it created identification with and sympathy for the persecuted writer, the great old man, resigned to his fate. ‘In a hundred years all is forgotten’, Hamsun famously wrote.49 All is nothingness. Nothing really matters. Even celebrity has its time. The text’s readerly pact is no doubt that of autobiography, but the work is nevertheless part factual, part fictional, and it has tended to charm and persuade its During the spring of 2021 a particularly vehement version of such a debate played itself out after the publication of Ståle Dingstad’s Knut Hamsun og det norske Holocaust (Knut Hamsun and the Norwegian Holocaust) (Oslo: Dreyer, 2021). In connection with the book launch, Dingstad suggested, among other things, that the Hamsun Centre in Northern Norway ought to be closed (see ‘Exit Hamsun’, Morgenbladet, 16–22 April, 20–21). Dingstad was accused of being part of ‘cancel culture’, and his clearly polemical stance was even compared to Nazi book burning: see for example Cathrine Krøger, ‘Ny Hamsun-bok: Ganske vilt’ (New Hamsun Book: Quite Far Out), Dagbladet, 21 April 2021. 47 The term varig has triggered much debate. It can mean ‘permanently’, but was, according to the psychiatrists, used in the sense of ‘of a certain duration’ rather than ‘for life’. Gabriel Langfeldt and Ørnulv Ødegård, ‘Forord’ (Introduction), Den rettspsykiatriske erklæring om Knut Hamsun (The Forensic Psychiatric Assessment of Knut Hamsun) (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978), 1–11, 9. 48 Quoted in Sigrid Stray, Min klient Knut Hamsun (My Client Knut Hamsun) (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1979), 188. 49 See for example Knut Hamsun, Den siste glede (The Last Joy), in Hamsun, Samlede verker, vol. 7, 300; repeated in a slightly different form in På gjengrodde stier (On Overgrown Paths) in Hamsun, Samlede verker, vol. 23, ed. Lars Frode Larsen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2009), 200. 46

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readers. Both the first and later receptions make On Overgrown Paths an extraordinary autobiographical intervention in a writer’s reputation. Not only did Hamsun prove that his mental abilities were not reduced, but he also seems to have convinced many readers that he had done nothing wrong. On Overgrown Paths reveals that its author is unrepentant. In the long and rich tradition of Hamsun apologetics, this complex autobiographical work has even often been taken as evidence of the writer’s relative innocence. It has evoked admiration, often in a Romantic vein, at the very least for Hamsun’s sheer contrariness. One notable contemporary writer who has written approvingly of Hamsun’s final stance is Karl Ove Knausgård. In the title essay of Sjelens America (The America of the Soul), Knausgård ends by praising the man who in the end, after Hitler’s obituary, after the reckoning, kept on writing in ‘the light of life’, with an ‘inner dignity that no one can disturb’. To Knausgård, post-war Hamsun, as he reveals himself in On Overgrown Paths, is a demonstration of ‘the unconquerable human being as author’. Hamsun, Knausgård contends with a vitalist flourish, is ‘a man who needs no other human beings, other than as expressions of life, the living’.50 While the cases of Céline and Pound may still be matters of discussion in their native countries, the case of Hamsun has caused something of a Norwegian national trauma. The results were, among others, vigorous attempts at separating the man from his works – attempts that had already been initiated by left-wing critics in the 1930s, but which were strengthened by On Overgrown Paths and reactivated following Hamsun’s death in 1952.51 Some apologists even went further, questioning whether Hamsun was a Nazi at all, or, more commonly, absolving him of all accusations of antisemitism. I cannot go into all the ways in which On Overgrown Paths possibly addresses literary authority, but, finally, I would like to give one example of how Hamsun gently and almost imperceptibly revises his own past. It is a matter of a short, fleeting allusion to an earlier meeting between a great writer and a great politician in the German city of Erfurt in 1808: Napoleon appeared before Goethe. Did a bolt shoot through the world at that moment? No. The two men spoke but Napoleon had but little time. When he came out again, he is supposed to have said in acknowledgement of Goethe: What a man! That was all. It was as if they had never met. But they too, dead.52

Hamsun does not explicitly mention his own encounter with Hitler, but that is the obvious subtext, at least according to the book’s first reception. The comparison had been made as soon as the unsuccessful meeting was over on 26 June 1943. Hamsun, wrote Ernst Züchner, who worked for Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Public Karl Ove Knausgård, ‘Sjelens Amerika’, in Sjelens Amerika: Tekster 1996–2013 (Oslo: Oktober, 2014), 85–128, 127–8. 51 For a recent reflection on the topic of author and work from a literary-sociological point of view, see Gisèle Sapiro, Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur? (Can We Separate the Work from the Author?) (Paris: Seuil, 2020). 52 Hamsun, På gjengrodde stier, 303. 50

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Enlightenment and was present at the meeting between Hamsun and Hitler, deserved more praise than Goethe, who had after all behaved like a ‘subordinate royal servant’ when he met Napoleon.53 Hamsun’s covert description of the meeting may also tell us something about his own retrospective on the event, as well as of his views on the relationship between art and politics and on the role of the artist. In the disgraced, if still world-famous, novelist’s account, it was Napoleon who presented himself to Goethe, not the other way around. It was the artist who gracefully received the politician, not vice versa. Art, in Hamsun’s vision, remained above politics. And the artist retained a privileged position, as an authority who did not have his equal in the realm of petty politics.

Idar Melandsø, ‘Notat over samtaler med Regierungsrat Zuchner [sic]’ (Notes from conversations with [Ernst] Züchner), September 1943, Nasjonal Samling Utenriksorganisasjon (National Union’s Organization for Foreign Affairs), Lars Frode Larsen’s private archive.

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Looking On … Kirsty Gunn

I found myself saying to a fellow novelist the other day: ‘Right now I can’t imagine a world where the kind of thing I write will be of interest at all. I’ve never felt less “relevant”.’ I wanted to use that word in particular  –  ‘relevant’  –  with all its associations of mainstream media and Quality Metrics and academic ‘Impact’ and all the rest of it … I wanted to describe how outside that loop my own writing was, but I also used the word because it lurks there, at the back of any novelist’s mind, I think, for the simple reason that, surely, being relevant is what novels have always been about. Jane Austen’s women in their sprigged muslins were relevant for her readers in a way that Emily Dickinson, in her own sprigged muslin, with her poems, was not. So, the novelist here was speaking as a novelist – the kind of writer who, from the outset, because of the genre she has selected and chosen to practise, has opted for a relationship with what I will call the worldliness of the world. ‘Oh, now’, my friend replied. He writes novels, but is also known as a critic, scholar and essayist. ‘You and I don’t write to be “relevant”’, he said. ‘We write because we want to, we need to, we have things to say …’ And off he went, one well-argued point after another, all the good reasons there are for making art … for art’s sake. It’s a concept I have tussled with all my writing life, though: the relationship my work might have not only with other works of art but with society, community and the lived, domestic experience of the day-to-day. As I say, I chose fiction over poetry, over book reviewing, over academic critique, and – though I write them as though they were short stories, only longer, one story here, another there – yes, I write novels. That art form rising up directly from, that is supposed to be a mirror of, life; that means of conveying interiority while presenting on its surfaces the familiar and the strange, that might show us how to live, even … is my writing home. And, in the same way novels come out into the world, into the bookshops  –  as they have since they were first written1  –  in the expectation that they will be quite See Michael Schmidt, The Novel: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). This is an indispensable guide for anyone needing to check in on the status of long-form fiction over the years: the history and sensibility of a genre that has always been held in relation to a perceived ‘readership’.

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generally read, so do I bear some kind of bond to that wider society, then, the world. In the way that novels belong to the general reader, Virginia Woolf ’s ‘common reader’, who roams about in her tastes and priorities, who changes her mind, or follows this writer or the next, so do novels begin from the premise that a whole range of people might engage with them. They are outward-facing that way; according to their position in our culture. The reader who shares her ideas about this novel with another, who in turn takes on their advice, is not the same as the reader of poetry, or critique, or literary essay or academic paper for whom choice and taste and preference are dictated by a specific skill set and level of expertise. In fact, by contrast, she is capricious and capacious and protean in her habits, catholic in taste. Because of this, the books she selects for her attention enter the communities they describe relatively easily – it takes no more than a general non-specialized interest in a subject for this kind of work to be taken up and celebrated by specialist markets and a general readership in equal measure – and, often, the novels become part of those places they reflect in their pages; their inhabitants spokespeople for their worlds and points of view and sensibilities. In turn, this most open-facing reader – prompted in her taste by media coverage and publicity – helps the novelist extend the significance of what she writes about, bringing that subject forward for general attention. Volume of readership, as it were, underwrites ideas of value. She might be inclined to write about the same sort of subject again, as a result of that attention, and again. And again. And yes, compared to the poem or philosophical treatise all this generation of interest and the maintenance of it is relatively easy to achieve: the open-ness of the novel to global trade, its availability as a consumer product in the marketplace, makes it so. So, for sure, that expectation of reach, of an interested crowd out there in the world who might be interested in what we write, and a willingness to engage with that market, is there in the writing and publishing life of the novelist from the start. From my first ‘novel’ that actually developed out of a series of short stories – ‘We love the stories, but when you’re ready to send us a novel, that’s what we’ll be interested in publishing’, my own publishers said to me, many, many years ago when I was starting out as a writer – I believed that the readers were there and that my book could and would find them. I believed in the reviews process, in the general coverage in papers and magazines that would help the book on its way; I believed in the prize culture that existed to bring certain works of fiction out into the light that may otherwise not have been noticed. In short, I believed that novels – because they are of and for the world – would find their way in it. Now, nearly thirty years later, I don’t believe any of those things. Well, I believe it for some novels – novels that pick up on the zeitgeist, that seem to track the mood and fashions of the age, that have an ear for a sort of gossip and popular interest or the big political stories and preoccupations of the day – but in general I now worry for this apparently ‘popular’ form. For though the novel belongs to the world, so it is also tentatively, riskingly, well, novel – innovative and experimental, wonderful and terrible and finished but also ‘starred with imperfection’, to paraphrase Woolf in another context, an erratic and exciting source of energy that lives within our lives. Again, my idea of worldliness applies here – the novel as expression of dasein; its ‘relevance’ various and

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organic and mysterious and always changing – not worldliness as the world knows it but something else, something provocative and difficult, even, and strange. Yet, more and more it seems to be the case that the form has become instead defined by those other familiar ideas of consumer product, hardened into a kind of economic rationale; become a mannerism, actually: novels as easy-to-describe content-delivering machines for the entertainment industry, for book fairs and promotions, for the sake of driving certain political or ethical agendas, for headlines. So, in the last thirty years, just as with our economy, we have seen a sort of stripping process set in, to create a culture of winners and losers whereby the same kinds of books are read and praised, with the same kinds of authors appearing over and over again – the ‘big hitters’, the ‘big stories’, the ‘big sales’ … This is the pattern of activity that seems to dominate our ideas now of literary publishing, of the novel. For the other kind of work, that isn’t or doesn’t want to be part of that culture, we must hunt hard now, and deep. Certainly, in my own case, all the books I love and read and buy – new titles, recent works as well as established publications  –  are those I have come to be interested in through my life as a writer and teacher and essayist. My selections are based on the culture I have inhabited over the years and continue to restock with the arrival of fresh knowledge and new ideas  –  via a community of like-minded readers and writers and colleagues, along with the magazines and journals they support, which also often publish them … And this, for the most part, is a reciprocal arrangement based on long-term association and intellectual and aesthetic shared context that is at far remove from mainstream review pages and the blogs and tweets of popular culture where ‘the next big thing’, along with trending tastes and current fashions and ideas of literary celebrity, dominates the decision-making process. So, then, these books of mine and their authors speak to particular remits that are, on the whole, at a goodly remove from the razzamatazz of prize circuits, big book festivals and the whirligig of maintaining a profile in the popular press. They are nourishing in a way I can’t hope to find nourishing most of the offerings of contemporary literary culture – fixed as it is on the trends and fashions and politics of the moment. And what all this means is that I have realized that though I am as much a reader as ever I was, alas, I can call myself no longer a ‘common reader’. What’s more, I know too that that constituency from which I find myself expelled, moulded as it has been by economics and popular culture, will be no more interested in my opinions and novels than I am in its trends and savvies. We’ve both lost out. This is not to say those aspects of publishing – prevailing taste, what’s hot and what’s not, etc. – are not interesting: the events taking place now, the current thinking and debate around gender and race and the rhetoric of class, criminality and economics … Our current literary and publishing world is often quite rightly powered by the media and influenced by its target issues. Part of the very reason we have journalism and reportage and debate in the first place is not only to review the world as it is but to help ignite change, and, as I have suggested, novels have always been receptive to the competition and activities of cultural hierarchies that are an expression of our economic and communal lives. There are times when the pen indeed may be mightier than the sword, when old certainties can be transformed by a new language; that’s

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the ‘Action’ that becomes engendered by ‘Art’: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an example, a crafting of vocabularies and invented syntax and ordinary talk, a making of language that speaks back, in another tongue, to the prevailing sound-centre of culture and power. So, of course, we can always say that there’s an ‘art’ to being political, to being able to make one’s work be part of that deliberate action which is the work and resistance to the power of the state upon the individual. But Finnegans Wake, as we know, found its way to us not by being ‘newsworthy’ or ‘topical’ but by being particular. It is by idiosyncratic and individually imaginative means that it has arrived and lives with us – not via the bestseller lists but through the academy, and through specialized scholarship and critique and cultural study. It’s here as part of our culture, as vividly important as ever, not because it was written with a ‘customer’ in mind but, rather, an interested individual; a ‘reader’  –  not a ‘readership’ – who would puzzle over and question and marvel at and be exhilarated by Joyce’s endlessly frustrating and life-enhancing project. Art becomes political, then, when we so engage; in the same way that we recognize that we can’t help but live politically, whether we want to write about politics or not, the minute we think for ourselves and challenge prevailing norms. And so, after many years of backwards-and-forwards thinking – to be relevant, or not to be relevant, to be of the world or outside it; mindful of Seamus Heaney’s phrase, in his Nobel Prize speech, ‘I straightened up’, having been, for years, ‘like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative’, as he describes his decision to enter into the realm of the political through the doorway of his personal experience as a poet – I have decided to make my peace with the clamour of the marketplace and our current version of civic life, and have set up camp here, somewhere else. Here, my influences are not drawn from that other busy place but still perhaps I can be attached, somehow, to it. And might I call it the sidelines? My position here? No, I think not, for that would be to infer I was only looking on at all that’s going on … When what I am doing, though on my terms and in my own way, is participating in this beautiful, confused, ugly and revelatory and shimmering and mysterious world of ours by making the novels I want to make, for my own reasons that have nothing to do with being popular yet everything to do with the wish to be connected, not to be an island, ever, but part of the main. Relevance … then. Maybe I need to turn the word inside out and ask: instead of relevant where, how and to whom, rather, what and who might I find, I wonder, in this writing adventure of mine that may be relevant to me?

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Index abolitionism 98, 138–9, 145–7 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 10, 135 aestheticism 32, 53, 90, 113, 166–7, 180–1, 199, 204 Afrikaans Skrywersgilde (Afrikaans Writers Guild) 65 agency 3–5, 9–12, 16, 167–8, 173–81 Akhtar, Emad 173–5 Alexievich, Svetlana 42, 42 n.29, 92 n.17 anthology 13, 168, 173–81 Anthony, Susan B. 39 anti-colonial 1, 8, 33, 83. See also colonial/ colonialism; postcolonial anti-racist 19, 27, 103. See also race/ racism/racist apartheid 11, 42, 59, 61, 64–5, 66, 69 Appadurai, Arjun 4 Askarov, Azimzhan 41, 41 n.26 Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica (Society for the Protection of Old Florence) 185, 188 Atwood, Margaret 2, 15, 91 Auden, W. H. 5 authentic/authenticity 2, 9, 74, 172 authority 6, 13, 15, 38–41, 98, 124, 126–30, 132–3, 150, 166, 168–70, 172–3, 176–7, 180, 186, 194–5, 195 n.2, 197, 199, 203–6 author-performer 46, 48, 50–5 autofiction 13, 117–19. See also biofiction Baldwin, James 2, 20 Balzac, Honoré de 113 Barthes, Roland 113 ‘The Death of the Author’ 48 n.9 ‘The Writer on Holiday’ 5 Bates, Laura 178, 178 n.81 Baudet, Thierry 114, 115 n.23 Benedict, Barbara 173–4, 181 biofiction 150–1, 155–61. See also autofiction

Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne 197, 203 Black British history 3, 18, 20–1, 23–5, 27, 59, 61–6, 68 Black Lives Matter 25 Bly, Nellie 12, 95–6, 98, 101–6 Around the World in Seventy-Two Days 102 Six Months in Mexico 102–4 Ten Days in a Mad-House; or, Nellie Bly’s Experience on Blackwell’s Island 102, 104, 106 Bollettino dell’Associazione per la difesa di Firenze antica 186 Booker Prize 1, 3, 67, 74, 80, 91–2, 85, 88–90. See also literary prizes Braun, Rebecca 10, 165 n.1, 168 Brecht, Bertolt 32, 63 Brexit 13, 17, 87, 165–7, 170, 173–4, 177–9, 181 Breytenbach, Breyten 61–2, 66 British Library 166–7, 170, 172, 181 Buckingham, James Silk 13 autobiography 136–8, 143 East India Company 139–40, 144–5, 147 Orientalism/Orientalist 141–3, 149 Radicals/British Radicalism 140–9 The Slave States of America 147 ‘Syllabus’ 144 travelogues 139, 141–2, 144, 147 Burke, Edmund 129–30 Burney, Charles 129, 131 Burney, Frances 127–33, 128 n.15 Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy 124, 131–4 Cecilia 127–30, 132–3 Evelina 127–9, 132–3 literary achievements of 127 n.14 Memoirs of Doctor Burney 129, 129 n.26 The Wanderer 13, 128, 133–5

Index Burston, Paul 45–8, 45 n.1, 52–3 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 5, 7–8, 12–13, 142 cabaret 46, 48, 52–3 Canning, George 12 capitalism 3, 6–7, 9, 26, 74, 80–1, 113, 160, 197 Carducci, Giosuè 189 n.31 Caruana Galizia, Daphne 41 caste (system) in Tamil Nadu, India 13, 151–61, 155 n.32 celebrity culture 4, 89, 95, 97, 101 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 202, 205 censorship 7, 35, 38, 43, 48, 60 Chander, Manu Samriti 8 Chaudhuri, Amit 11, 34, 59, 67. See also literary activism; market activism Chelladurai, Bava 151, 151 n.5 Chin’ono, Hopewell 1–2, 1 n.2 Choi, Julie 128 Chomsky, Noam 23, 26 Christian/Christianity 133, 186–7, 190, 192 Clare, John 5, 149 Clement, Jennifer 36–7, 36 n.18, 40 Cloete, T. T. 66 Cochran, Elizabeth. See Bly, Nellie Coetzee, J. M. 10, 40 Michael K 61 cognitive science 50–1, 55 Cohen-Vrignaud, Gerard 143 Cohn, Dorrit 113, 122 The Distinction of Fiction 113, 122 collaborative authorship 178 colonial/colonialism 4, 7–8, 32–3, 66, 84, 140–2, 146, 149. See also anticolonial; postcolonial commerce/commercial 2, 4, 6–9, 12, 40, 59, 88, 91–2, 132, 136, 139–40, 144, 147, 156–7, 173, 208 Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) 59, 65–6 Conway, Kellyanne 112 n.6 Corsini, Tommaso 185, 189 cosmopolitanism 8, 10, 13, 182, 186, 189–90 Covid-19 pandemic 17–18, 74, 77, 114, 126 Creative Europe 177–8

237

Crewe, Frances Anne 129–31 cultural capital 2–3, 6, 35, 40, 83, 154 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 1–2, 2 n.4 Neria 1 Nervous Conditions 1 This Mournable Body 1 d’Arblay, Alexandre 131 Darwish, Mahmoud 27 Das, Kamala 153 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 38 democracy 12, 35–6, 43, 60, 111–12, 116, 120, 122, 141, 169, 170, 192 Derrida, Jacques 203 Devadasis 158 Dewey, John 55 Dickens, Charles 47 n.8, 113 Dietrich, Otto 198, 201 Disraeli, Benjamin 10 diversity 3, 8, 11, 31, 37, 45, 49, 52, 54, 123, 135, 178–9, 189 domestic sphere 38, 49, 100–1 Doody, Margaret Anne 128, 131 doxa 38–9 Duffy, Stella 47 Dutton, Anne 125–6 Dwinger, Edwin 202 economy/economics 2, 4, 7, 16, 73, 79–81, 83, 91, 140, 146, 165, 167, 178, 209 The Edinburgh International Book Festival 76 n.4, 77, 89, 89 n.14, 92. See also literary festivals Ein literarischer Rettungschirm für Europa (A literary emergency-umbrella for Europe) 180 electronic publishing 78–9 Eliot, T. S. 5, 67 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10, 100 Engels, Friedrich 113 England 3, 25 n.11, 26, 137, 185, 188, 190, 192, 200–1 Enlightenment 38, 97, 206 Ernaux, Annie 92 n.17 ethnography 49 n.14, 50, 121 Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe 173, 176–9, 181

238

Index

Europe 7, 13, 33, 48, 98, 130, 165–9, 188, 196, 201 European anthology 168, 173–81 European refugee crisis 86 n.9 European Literature Night (ELN) 165–8, 181 European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC) 167, 181 European Writers’ Tour 165 Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE) 177. See also literary festivals Evaristo, Bernardine 91–2 Manifesto: On Never Giving Up 3 fake news 20, 36, 43, 112, 112 n.6, 114–16, 123, 170 far-right politics 17 n.2, 18–20, 111, 114 fascism/fascist 13–14, 19–20, 33–6, 42, 195, 198–203 feminine/femininity 98, 101, 105, 124, 132 feminism/feminist 12, 42, 68, 99–100, 134, 150, 152–3, 170, 176 Fern, Fanny 12, 95–6, 98–101, 105–6 ‘Foolish Fashions’ 100 fiction 12, 55, 112–16, 122–3, 134–5, 157–9, 171, 207–8. See also specific fictions Fielding, Henry 128–9 First World War 182, 190, 197, 201 Fitzcarraldo Editions 92, 92 n.17 Flaubert, Gustave 113 Floyd, George murder of 19, 25 Foot, Michael 88, 88 n.10 Fowler, Christopher 54 Fragile: Europäische Korrespondenzen (Fragile: European correspondences) project 168–9, 169 n.21, 172–3, 175, 177, 181 freedom of speech 1, 11, 14–15, 31, 33–40, 43, 46, 60, 139, 153, 170 French Revolution 13, 38 Galsworthy, John 32, 32 n.3 Gandhi, Indira 15 gender 13, 17, 24, 38, 46, 53–4, 94–5, 98–101, 104–7, 209

coverture (feme covert/married women) 96, 102 female literacy 96–7 freedom and rights of women 38–40, 96 sexism/sexist 17–18, 21, 23, 153, 178 n.81 Genette, Gérard 115 n.22, 128 globalization 4, 7–8 Goebbels, Joseph 194, 198–9, 201–2, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 201, 205–6 Goodbye Europe: Writers and Artists Say Farewell 173–6, 178–9, 181 Gordimer, Nadine 59, 61 Gouges, Olympe de 39 The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen 38 Habermas, Jürgen 48 Hamsun, Knut 13, 194, 195 n.2 ‘Against the Overestimation of Writers and Writing’ 196 ‘Authorities’ 203 and Dwinger 202 and Goebbels 198–9 Hunger 194–5 ‘Hunger, A Story’ 195 Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) 194, 198, 200 Men livet lever (But Life Lives) 199 Mysteries 194 and Nazism 194, 198–203, 205 Nobel Prize 197–8 On Overgrown Paths 14, 204–6 Pan 194, 198 Hare, David 6 hate speech 36, 43 The Hay Festival of Literature and Arts 76 n.4, 177–8. See also literary festivals Heaney, Seamus 5, 210 Heidegger, Martin 198 Being and Time 60 Hertzog Prize 66. See also literary prizes Heynders, Odile 166, 179–81 Writers as Public Intellectuals 12 Hitchens, Christopher 5, 23 Hitler, Adolf 33, 194, 198–201, 205–6 Homer 201 Odyssey 38–9

Index Hopkinson, Amanda 37 Huggan, Graham 8 human rights 11, 31–2, 38, 40 Hurston, Zora Neale 50 n.18 Ibsen, Henrik 196, 203 inclusivity 46, 49, 53–4 India 8, 33–4 caste (system) in Tamil Nadu 152–61, 155 n.32 Indian independence movement 33 Indian PEN 32–4, 41 The Indian P. E. N. 33 Islam/Islamic 14–15 Italy 13–14, 183–90, 200–1 Jamaica/Jamaicans 24–5, 27 Jenner, Greg Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen 58–9 Jeyamohan, B. Aram (Stories of the True) 13, 150–1, 150 n.2, 153–61 on Das 153 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 25 Joyce, James Finnegans Wake 210 Kafka, Franz 196 Kaur, Rupi 2 Keats, John 15 Kelley, Mary 94, 96–7 Kelman, James 89–93, 89 n.12 Kennedy, A. L. 13, 165–70, 172, 176–7, 180–1 King, Stephen 2, 15 Klein, Naomi 41 Knausgård, Karl Ove 113 Sjelens America (The America of the Soul) 205 Lakshmi. C. S. (Ambai) 152 Lasansky, D. Medina 183, 185, 188 Latour, Bruno 167, 169 leeskringe (reading circles) 69 Lee, Vernon 13, 182–4, 183 n.2 Christian vocabulary/lexis 186–7, 190

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on destruction of cultural heritage 182–90 Euphorion 184 letter to La Nazione 190 letter to Times (‘Letter to the Editor’) 182, 185–6, 188–9, 189 n.32, 191 Puritan influences of 186 n.17 ‘Ruskin as a Reformer’ 184–5 ‘Ruskinism’ 184 Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction 14, 192–3 Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy 182 and Wells, H. G. 190 n.37, 191–2 le Roux, Etienne 64 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 15 LGBTQ+ community 11, 24, 45–6, 49, 51–3, 55–6, 83–4 Lilti, Antoine 7, 149 literacy 7, 96–7, 123 literary activism 11, 34, 45, 65–70, 82, 84, 90, 93, 169, 192. See also market activism literary celebrity 2–4, 6, 8–10, 14, 40, 57–64, 82, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97–9, 101, 124, 136, 209 literary criticism 7, 16, 150, 153 literary festivals 14, 45–9, 49 n.14, 52, 54, 58, 75–7, 76 n.4, 84, 89–90, 89 n.14, 92, 165, 169, 174, 177, 209. See also specific festivals literary fiction 12, 47, 53, 55, 74, 77–9, 84, 88–9, 115, 122, 179 literary marketplace/industry 3, 7, 16, 40, 45, 60–1, 74–82, 93, 97, 132 n.40 literary prizes 4, 11–12, 46, 67, 69, 78, 84–5, 87–90, 91 n.15, 92, 166, 170, 194, 197–8 judges/juries 11, 69, 82, 85, 88–90, 140 literaturhaus.net network 169, 173, 175, 181 live literature 45, 47–51, 51 n.23, 54–6 London Book Fair 174 Lord, Jenny 173–5 Luiselli, Valeria 112, 116–23 Faces in the Crowd 116 Lost Children Archive 116–18 Sidewalks 116

240 The Story of My Teeth 116 Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions 116–18 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 127, 129 Malcolm X 20 Mandela, Nelson 26, 58, 62–3, 82 Mann, Thomas 197–8 market activism 11, 34, 59, 67, 69, 82. See also literary activism Marley, Bob 26–7 Married Women’s Property Acts 96 Marshall, P. David 9 Martel, Yann 74 Life of Pi 41 Marven, Lyn 173, 176 Marx, Karl 26, 113 McBride, Eimear 1, 75 n.3 McDermid, Val 179 McEwan, Ian 174, 179 Meizoz, Jérôme Postures littéraires 6 Mickalites, Carey 16 migration 107, 116–19, 123, 177 misogyny 152–3, 161 Mole, Tom 4, 132 n.40 Moran, Joe 11 Morburger, Carl 197 More, Hannah 130 Morgan, Simon 98, 136, 141, 148–9 Morris, William 182, 185 Moten, Fred 5 Mughal Empire 142 Music & Literature magazine 85, 85 n.5 music/musicians 17, 20, 22, 24, 26–7 Naldini, Maurizio 187–8 Napoleon 205–6 Nehru, Jawaharlal 33, 33 n.10, 41, 157 New Books in German 86–7, 86 n.7 Newton, Thandiwe 1 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) 37 Nicaraguan revolution 27 Nobel Prize 67, 92, 92 n.17, 194, 197–8. See also literary prizes

Index oikos 38 Ommundsen, Wenche 6 O’Neill, Bonnie Carr 10, 97 Orientalism 83–4, 141–3, 149 Orwell, George 14 Osman, Diriye Fairytales for Lost Children 53 Ould, Hermon 34–5 Palmer, John 139 paratext 115, 115 n.22 patriarchy/patriarchal 38, 100–1, 129, 152–4, 161 Pedersen, Knud. See Hamsun, Knut PEN Congress in Barcelona 33 in London 32 in Oslo 37 in Stockholm 34–5, 34 n.14 PEN International 1, 1 n.1, 15, 31 n.2, 67 Dutch PEN centre 34–5 English PEN 37 Indian PEN 32–4, 41 membership 34–5, 38 PEN America 15, 35, 37 PEN archive 43 PEN Club Charter 35, 39, 43 Women’s Manifesto 37–40, 42 Writers for Peace 42 Writers in Prison Committee 36–7 performance 11, 15, 19, 24, 47–8, 47 n.8, 51–3, 51 n.20, 51 n.23, 55, 63, 77, 120, 142, 166–7, 172–3, 180–1 persona 3, 8, 14, 16, 58, 95, 105, 132–3, 137, 141, 149, 181, 188 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe 9 Pickersgill, Henry William 143 Piérard, Louis 35 poet-legislators 5–6, 8–9, 15 poetocracy 13, 196, 196 n.8 poetry 5, 23–7, 47, 47 n.8, 53, 57–66, 69–70, 87, 90, 179, 207 Polari Prizes 46, 53, 56. See also literary prizes Polari Salon 45–9, 51–6 Politkovskaya, Anna 42, 42 n.28 Pomerantsev, Igor 121

Index Pomerantsev, Peter 12, 112, 120–3 Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia 120 This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality 120–1 Popper, Karl 43 popular culture 6, 209 postcolonial 1, 8, 14, 16, 32. See also anticolonial; colonial/colonialism post-Romantic 3, 7 n.31, 8, 14. See also Romantic/Romanticism post-truth 12, 111–12, 114, 122–3 Pound, Ezra 202, 205 pseudonyms 94–6, 98–9, 104–6 public intellectuals/intellectualism 10, 12–13, 23, 150, 166, 170, 172, 177–81 publicness 11, 59–64, 68, 76 public sphere 5, 7, 10–11, 13, 38, 48, 94, 97, 106, 122, 149, 167, 194, 196, 203 fake news in 114–16 Puchner, Martin 8 Pudhumaipithan 151, 157 n.42, 158 ‘Nisamum Ninaippum’ (Truth and Thoughts) 157 race/racism/racist 17–18, 21, 23, 25, 27, 38, 53, 89, 104, 147, 209. See also anti-racist Ramasamy, E. V. (Periyar) 157, 159–60 reader-audience 48, 50–5 reality/realities 12, 16, 43, 94, 113, 115, 117–23, 126, 136–7, 150–1, 171–2 Rees-Mogg, Jacob 174 Reeve, Tapping The Law of Baron and Femme 96 Reform Act 1832 141, 145 Rexroth, Kenneth 5 Rhodes, Cecil 27 Ribke, Nahuel 6 Rich, Adrienne 5 Rigby, Carlos 27 Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas 85, 85 n.6 Roach, Joseph It 125

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Robert Bosch Foundation 169, 181 Roggenkamp, Karen 105 Röggla, Kathrin 13, 168, 170–2, 175, 177, 180–1 Romantic/Romanticism 4–5, 7–8, 7 n.31, 12, 14–15, 125. See also post-Romantic Rose, Arthur 10 Rosenberg, Alfred 198, 200 Roy, Arundhati 10, 15, 26, 135 Rushdie, Salman 5, 8, 16, 40, 64 attack on 14–15 Joseph Anton: A Memoir 15 The Satanic Verses 14, 16 Ruskin, John 182 Modern Painters 184 Rutte, Mark 111 Sapiro, Gisèle 6, 165 Saul, John Ralston 36 Schickel, Richard 99, 103 Schirach, Baldur von 198 Schmidt, Michael The Novel: A Biography 207 n.1 Scott, Walter 7–8, 12 Second World War 34, 42, 45, 87, 175 Self-Respect Movement (1926) 159 Shafak, Elif 125, 135 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World 134 Shelley, Mary 5 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 5–6, 8, 14–15 Defence of Poetry 4–5 Shire, Warsan 10 Shriver, Lionel 174, 179 Shylaja, K. V. 150 Silivri Prison, Istanbul 36 Smith, Zadie 135 Intimations 125–6 Snyder, Timothy 111 social media 1–2, 1 n.2, 2 nn.4–5, 15, 25, 43, 55, 74–5, 111, 121, 166 Sönmez, Burhan 36 South Africa 8, 42, 57–8, 62, 64–6, 68–9 Soyinka, Wole 10 Spiers, Emily 10 Stephen Spender Trust 86–7, 92

242 Stoppard, Tom 1 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 10, 98 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 98 Sturgeon, Nicola 39, 92 Surkov, Vladislav 120 Swart Afrikaanse Skrywers (Black Afrikaans Writers) 65 Tagore, Rabindranath 32, 32 n.5, 41 Team Angelica 47, 53 Today radio programme 77, 77 n.5 Tokarczuk, Olga 92 n.17, 125, 126 n.9, 135 Czuły Narrator 126 Nobel Prize speech of 134 tenderness 134–5 Toller, Ernst 32 Tolstoy, Leo 203 Torrigiani, Pietro 186, 189–90 transatlantic slave trade 7 translation 11, 37, 41, 64–5, 82–92, 176, 186, 187 n.22, 189 n.32, 194 n.1 transnational 13, 15, 35, 111, 165, 169–70, 173, 177–8, 186 Trump, Donald 9, 18 n.3, 38, 111, 115, 170, 177 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 66 Twain, Mark The Innocents Abroad 103 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum 86 n.9. See also Brexit The United Nations 39

Index Verne, Jules Around the World in Eighty Days 106 Wadia, Sophia 33–4 Wästberg, Per 36 Webb, Philip 182, 185 Weidenfeld, George 175–6 Wells, H. G. ‘Appeal to the American People’ 190 and Lee 190 n.37, 191–2 Wells, Mary 131 Welsh, Irvine 88–9 West, Persia 47 The White Review magazine 85, 85 n.5 Whitman, Walt 10 Willis, Sara Payson. See Fern, Fanny Wilmot, John 129–30 WOM@RTS 177 Woolf, Virginia 94, 113, 208 Wordsworth, William 5, 8 York, Lorraine 9, 11 Zemmour, Éric 114 Zephaniah, Benjamin 3 ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’ 19 ‘Fight Dem Not Me’ 19–20, 20 n.6 The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah: The Autobiography 17, 20–1, 24 Pen Rhythm Poet 19, 19 n.5 on role of writer 3 on Shelley 5 Zimbabwe 1–2

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