Realism and Dialectic: The Speculative Turn and the History of the Nineteenth-Century European Novel

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Realism and Dialectic: The Speculative Turn and the History of the Nineteenth-Century European Novel The Narrative and the Scenic In The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson outlines a dialectical history and theory of realist narrative in which he addresses the problem of literary realism from the standpoint of temporality. In a postmodern revision of Plato’s ancient distinction between diegesis and mimesis, Jameson views the dialectic between two conflicting impulses as responsible for the emergence, development, and dissolution of realism; the dialectic between a narrative impulse and a scenic impulse, each unfolding in a definite temporal dimension. Jameson considers the temporal art of storytelling to be one of the major sources of realism. The disparate materials which, over time, untidily flowed into the novel (all gathered by Jameson under the label of the “tale” [Antinomies 15], such as “epic performance, . . . tribal and mythic storytelling, . . . the Renaissance-art novella and its equivalents in the Romantic period, . . . the ballad,” and melodrama [138–45], as well as “broadsheets, newspaper sketches, memoirs, diaries and letters, . . . and even popular forms like the play or the folk- or fairy-tale” [8]), gave realism its groundedness in events and its narrative drive. The temporality of the narrative impulse is the temporality of the fait divers (18–20), the “unheard-of event,” which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, referred to as the foundation of storytelling (Goethe 131). It is the temporality of “death,” as Walter Benjamin maintains in “The Storyteller” (93–95), or the “irrevocable,” as Jameson more mildly puts it (Antinomies 19). Based on the succession of past, present, and future, and intimately chronological, the temporality of the narrative impulse is that of completed events, that of the preterite (Jameson, Antinomies 18). The scenic impulse of realism, instead, relies on a range of textual devices and bodily investments that counter the sequential logic of the narrative impulse, such as descriptions, dialogues and, chiefly, affect (Jameson, Antinomies 11). By elaborating on the rhetorical and ideological tension between narration and description as discussed by Georg Luka´cs in “Narrate or Describe?,” the theoretical distinction between showing and telling, and affect theory,1 Jameson regards the scenic impulse as the source of the icastic and theatrical attitude of realism, of its marked scenic disposition. The temporality of the scenic impulse is static, a suspension of the temporal progression of storytelling. At a standstill and conflicting with the 1

As inflected by some of its foremost inspirers or proponents like Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Rei Terada, Brian Massumi, Sianne Ngai, and Jonathan Flatley.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 53:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-8309515 Ó 2020 by Novel, Inc.

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STEFANO ERCOLINO

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dynamic temporality of the narrative impulse, it is the temporality of events caught in the “present of consciousness” (24). A classic of realist narrative like Honore´ de Balzac’s Lost Illusions clearly shows the two impulses working agonistically side by side. In Lost Illusions, realism’s narrative impulse is embodied and amplified by the frenzied storytelling of the novel, by the “pure narration” of Balzac’s fiction encoding the feverish traits of early capitalism (Moretti, Way 158). It is the overflowing narrative impulse of Balzacian realism that, following his conversation with E´tienne Lousteau on the work of a journalist and his decision to become a journalist himself, madly accelerates Lucien de Rubempre´’s life. This occurs to the extent that, after Lousteau tells him that Coralie fell for him at first sight, he exclaims half naively and half fatuously: “My friend, more things are happening to me in one evening than ever did in the first eighteen years of my life” (Balzac 297). At the same time, however, realism’s scenic component counterbalances and challenges the propulsive, event-based force of the narrative impulse with a masterfully orchestrated statics of detailed description, dialogue, and affective solicitation that intersperse the narration. The grafting of the description of the private quarters on upper floors of Je´roˆme-Nicolas Se´chard’s printing-house onto the narrative is an eloquent example. This takes place in the first chapter of the first section of the novel, “A Provincial PrintingOffice,” after the narrator has described the small social climb of the illiterate typographer Se´chard pe`re in the aftermath of the Terror. It is introduced by a sudden break in the narrative continuum, marking a sharp shift from the sequentiality of storytelling to the point-like nature of description: “Here perhaps a word about Se´chard’s establishment is needed” (Balzac 8). Consistent with a practice well-established in Balzac’s Human Comedy, for which content and tone of the description of the space inhabited by a character allegorically denote her or his moral qualities and point, metonymically, at the social position he or she occupies (Auerbach 468–92; Luka´cs, Studies 21–84; David), the unadorned squalor of Se´chard’s house hypostatizes his petty-bourgeois avarice. The filthy floor, the bad chairs, the windows and the door black with grease, the leftovers of Se´chard’s meals, the old tapestry, the worm-eaten armchairs, the horrible boiseries, the undecorated living room: everything is intended to embody the “cynical simplicity of commercial greed” (Balzac 9) and trigger affect in the reader, a “nameless and unclassifiable” bodily arousal (Jameson, Antinomies 33). While affect is still under control in Balzac’s work thanks to fiction’s vital link to the social and moral connotations of characters, starting from the 1850s and following the great expansion of the role and extent of descriptions in realist narrative, it became more and more autonomous and emancipated from both the factive and social meaning of the narration. It thus happened that it slowly gained the upper hand over storytelling in the overall rhetorical, temporal, and affective economy of Flaubert’s and, especially, E´mile Zola’s mature works (Jameson, Antinomies 32–77). In Jameson’s view, the history of realism is one rooted in “storytelling and the tale” that leads to the “dissolution [of realism] in the literary representation of affect” (Antinomies 10). It is the history of a temporal dialectic, of the clash of the preterite of storytelling and the present of affect. From the balance of the narrative and the scenic impulse in early nineteenth-century realism (Walter Scott, Stendhal,

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The Speculative Impulse Like the narrative and the scenic impulses, the speculative impulse also molded the dialectic of realism in a decisive way, at least from a certain moment in its history. Curiously, when Jameson has to single out a textual device that might be able to oppose the event-based logic of the narrative impulse, before picking description, “the most inveterate alternative to narrative as such” (Antinomies 8), as one of the driving forces of the scenic impulse—along with affect and dialogue—he mentions something else: “What could then constitute the opposite of the narrative impulse as such? Taken thus abstractly and speculatively we could surely think of any number of non-narrative sentence types: judgments, for example, such as the moral a storyteller might want to add on at the end, or a bit of the folk wisdom with which George Eliot liked to regale her readers” (8; emphasis added). “Non-narrative

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and Balzac), to privileging the scenic impulse over the narrative one (Flaubert, Zola, and James), this clash was radicalized and led to the dissolution of the dialectic of realism with modernism’s inward turn. Partly in line with classic Marxist theories of realism (Luka´cs, Studies) and partly writing a new, eclectic chapter in the history of Marxist literary criticism, Jameson argues that the evolution of realism paradoxically resulted in its weakening and decline. Aesthetic refinement, the advancement of technical expertise, and realism’s increasingly stubborn clinging to characterization through “unessential details” (Jakobson, “On Realism” 22) caused a progressive erosion of the narrative glue linking the dynamic and fully meaningful connection between the individual and the social body in Balzac’s Human Comedy. This led to the atomization and compartmentalization of social totality in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart and, later, to the subjective dissolution and temporal presentification of the world in the modernist fiction of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. In The Antinomies of Realism Jameson’s most effective theoretical and methodological tool for reconsidering realism and its history is the option to think of them in convincing dialectical and temporal terms. Unlike most established reflections on realism and its developments (Auerbach; Watt; McKeon; Brooks; Pavel, Lives), this allows us to grasp the inner dynamic and conflicted character of the realist aesthetic at qualitatively and temporally distinct levels (rhetoric and affect), and to understand how the dialectical entanglement and disentanglement of these had a deep impact in directing realism’s history. In other words, what Jameson defends is a powerful temporally based, inside-out reconstruction of one of the literary facts, realism, that counted the most in shaping the nineteenth-century European novel. Nevertheless, framing the whole history of realism in the dialectical tension between a narrative and a scenic impulse overshadows a crucial clue to realist narrative in the second half of the nineteenth century. The speculative turn that occurred with different intensities and modalities in the European novel from the 1860s (see Mazzoni 317–18) requires reconsideration of the dialectic of realism as inflected by Jameson. To this end, I will call into question Jameson’s view of realism and embed it within a broader dialectical layout including an additional impulse: the speculative impulse.

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For instance: “The saintly creature [Lucien] little knew that when ambition comes it puts an end to natural feeling” (Balzac 49); “Youth, when it has not yet fallen from grace, may show no pity for others’ faults, but it also credits them with its own magnificent ideals” (Balzac 72); “It’s often just when young people are most in despair about their future that their luck turns” (Balzac 638); “Who wants all must dare all” (Balzac 648).

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Such as the long narratorial aside on the history of papermaking on the occasion of David Se´chard’s marriage proposal to Eve Chardon (Balzac 108–12), or the detailed glosses on the mode of operation of promissory notes (Balzac 523–33).

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Daniel d’Arthez’s many statements of poetics such as, talking of the importance of representing human passions in literary works of art, his criticism of Scott (Balzac 212–14); the “dialogic essays” (essays taking the form of a dialog between two or more characters; Berger 42) on the power and hypocrisy of the press (Balzac 313–17), and the youths’ temperament in France after Napoleon (Balzac 641–44); or the narrator’s reflections on suicide and its typologies (Balzac 633).

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sentence types” like judgments—be they the moral of a story or the “folk wisdom” tirelessly handed out by the narrator of Eliot’s Middlemarch—are possible candidates to dialectically oppose the past-present-future chain of storytelling. However, Jameson does not consider them strong enough to oust the classic alternative to narration, description, and does not assign them any specific function in the dialectic of realism. What I will argue here, instead, is that nonnarrative elements did have an essential role—such a weighty one that, at a certain point in the history of realism, they ended up undermining the dialectic between the narrative and the scenic impulse. Our classic work of realist fiction, Lost Illusions, swarms with nonnarrative elements. These act as a subtle time-zero counterpoint for the overwhelming storytelling of the novel and its scenic component, and contribute to the overall reality effect (Barthes) of the narration. In particular, the frequent aphorisms and maxims,2 encyclopedic digressions,3 and essayistic inserts4 infuse Lost Illusions with another kind of discourse: a nonliterary and explicitly conceptual one. It is a nonnarrative and nontemporal discourse that opposes the temporal logic of both realism’s storytelling and scenic attitude; and which yet plays a part in the cognitive and rhetorical construction of realism. The devilish, gnomic teaching addressed by Abbot Carlos Herrera (Vautrin) to Lucien does help Herrera’s wounded humanity and psychological depth to shine during the nocturnal visit to the Rastignacs’ estate—the childhood home of his previous beloved Euge`ne de Rastignac. The encyclopedic excursuses on promissory notes and the account of expenses of protest and return do show the relentlessness of debt law in France under the Bourbon Restoration, and thus the gravity of David and Eve’s financial troubles caused by Lucien’s selfishness. D’Arthez’s moralizing disquisitions on art and the nature of the work of the artist are not only indirect declarations of poetics by Balzac but are also meant to repeatedly mark D’Arthez’s intellectual and moral superiority to Lucien, that is, the aesthetic and axiological supremacy of the bourgeois culture of work over any other work ethos in post-revolutionary France (see Moretti, Bourgeois 2013). In realist narrative, conceptual forms like aphorisms, maxims, encyclopedic and essayistic inserts (Danto 55) are generally functional to mimesis. Realism uses them to support representation, which gives reflective substance or explanatory

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Whether in explicit connection with Plato or not, this is visible in the fascinating and impossible attempt by the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus to argue for the compatibility of mimesis with philosophy in Platonic thought itself in his Commentary on Plato’s “Republic” (Proclus 1.178.6– 196.13; see Halliwell 323–34); in the later heated debate, fueled by European and American modernist writers, on the opportuneness of letting overtly speculative elements enter literary works (Ercolino, Novel-Essay 96–103); or in the relatively recent academic recognition of the interdisciplinary field of philosophical and literary inquiry labeled “philosophy and literature,” between philosophy of art and literary theory.

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background to the characterization and narrative situations, and helps readers to infer meaning. In realist literary works, conceptual components foster a speculative impulse that, because of its nonnarrative nature, is temporally anarchic compared to the narrative and scenic impulses. Unlike these, the speculative impulse is intrinsically nonmimetic and nontemporal; it is a rhetorical and symbolic compound of the abstracting and anti-individualizing stance typical of philosophical discourse. In Theory of the Novel, Guido Mazzoni points out that it was roughly in the fifth century BCE that a set of texts and particular cognitive positioning, which slowly came to be referred to as “philosophy,” attained a certain degree of autonomy from the texts and cognitive positioning of epic poetry. Plato famously institutionalized such distancing in books 2, 3, and 10 of the Republic, through one of the foundational acts of Western aesthetics: the distinction between the rational and truthful discourses of philosophers and the irrational and false discourses of poets; the distinction between philosophy and mimesis (Plato 10.603a–b; Mazzoni 25–30). Aristotle reconceptualized mimesis in his Poetics as the imitation of human actions according to verisimilitude and necessity. His effort to overturn Plato’s generally derogatory understanding of mimesis (Halliwell 44–71) by claiming a more universal and philosophical scope for it than history (Aristotle 1451a37–b26) was revolutionary and gained new resonance following the rediscovery of Poetics in the sixteenth century. Yet, the Platonic anathema against mimesis expressed discomfort in the relationship between literary and philosophical discourse that persisted for philosophers, literary scholars, and artists as inquisitive perplexity.5 Elaborating on Plato, when mimesis gives way even briefly to reflection in literary works there is a slip toward another kind of discourse. The sphere of mimesis is left for reflection; a sphere endowed with a universalizing cognitive pretension. In literary practice, the two domains Plato established in the Republic for the representational arts and philosophy, the domains of particularity and universality, respectively (Mazzoni 47–48), have rarely been kept strictly separate. As far as we are concerned, realist literature has often resorted to concepts to account for human actions and phenomenal appearances (see Pavel, “Raconter,” “Reflecting”; Ercolino, “Philosophical,” “Forme”), provided the generalizing movement of reflection was subordinated to mimesis. In other words, it did so as long as discourse maintained a mimetic dominant, in the sense given to the expression by Russian formalists Yury Tynianov and Roman Jakobson. That happened in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, as we saw, and in most realist fiction.

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When in Anatomy of Criticism, thinking of Jane Austen and Henry James, Northrop Frye holds that the “interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper” and that the most pressing “technical problem” in the novel is to “dissolve all theory into personal relationships” (308), he is right in a sense. In book 2 of Middlemarch, “Old and Young,” Eliot’s writing would seem to lend him support. Before portraying Tertius Lydgate, chapter 15 starts with a metaliterary reflection on digressions in novels. Looking with irony and indulgence at the long, sometimes pompous, digressions upon which the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—a self-proclaimed “historia[n],” a person of “genius,” a “universal” expert of the characters of men, and a goodhearted individual (Fielding 437–39)—prides himself, Eliot stresses the centrality of the anthropic element in re-creating the imaginary community of Middlemarch: “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (Middlemarch 91). The limited presence of extended speculative digressions in the novel stems from the volume of narrative material Eliot deals with and its priority over every other component. The narrator has “so much to do in unraveling certain human lots” and figuring out how they are “woven and interwoven” that she has to make the most of the little time she has: she is not living in Fielding’s times when “days were longer” (Middlemarch 91). There is no space for frequent or weighty theoretical digressions that could divert the narrator’s attention from the “web” (91) of destinies and relations she is patiently weaving. The masterpieces of realist narratives that, like Middlemarch, took the supposed commitment of the novel to “dissolve all theory into personal relationships” so seriously are few in number. Nevertheless, Eliot’s polemical stance against digressions is a digression in and of itself. In addition to the numerous mild maxims and aphorisms scattered across the entire narrative (see Allison), conceptual elements like essayistic excursuses are not infrequent in the novel. Often placed in the first paragraph of a chapter, essayistic digressions neither interfere with the unfolding story nor introduce ideas on which the reader will dwell afterward. They generally have an anticipatory and explanatory function in Middlemarch: they supply discreet conceptual support to Eliot’s storytelling, suggesting a perspective from which to read the next lines. This applies, for instance, to the historic commentary at the beginning of chapter 19 in book 2. It describes the early Romanticism of German painters living in Rome, the Nazarenes, at the time of Dorothea Brooke’s honeymoon in Italy, and its appeal to young cosmopolitan idlers and artists—thus preparing the return to the scene of the passionate and inconclusive character of Will Ladislaw (Middlemarch 120). Another example is the excursus on the latest political developments connected to the Reform Bill and their echo in Middlemarch’s local press at the beginning of chapter 37 in book 4. This forms a backdrop to Mr. Brooke’s machinations, and openly addresses the important theme in the novel of the twisted connections between provincial and national life (Middlemarch 222–23). Yet despite the number and role of conceptual elements in Middlemarch, one cannot doubt that the dominant of Eliot’s novel is mimetic and not speculative.

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The Conceptual Silencing of Realism Flaubert wrote more than 160 letters to Louise Colet, in which he lamented the aesthetic cruxes and difficulties he faced when writing Madame Bovary. In his letter of February 1, 1852, he reiterated a concept that dominates his correspondence with Colet, that is, the centrality of style in artistic expression. Compared to his former works, Flaubert was following a “geometrically straight line” in Madame Bovary: “[N]o lyricism, no comments, the author’s personality absent” (Flaubert, Selected 127). For Flaubert the realist writer, the author of Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and “A Simple Heart” (but not for Flaubert the Orientalist novelist of Salammboˆ, Flaubert the visionary decadent of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, or Flaubert the encyclopedic ironist of Bouvard and Pe´cuchet), the labors of style meant mostly subtraction. Being stylistically impeccable implied expunging everything he perceived as not essential to mimesis, so as to “almost physically feel the things” he wrote of (Flaubert, Selected 126), without the unnecessary mediations of the author’s subjectivity or concepts. As he famously stated in his letter of January 16, 1852, to Colet on the dream of writing a “book about nothing”—a “book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style” (126)—it was Flaubert’s conviction that “[t]he finest works are those that contain the least matter” (126). Consistent with his poetics of withdrawal, Flaubert assumed that with technical advancement comes the etherealization of artistic form. Form attenuates as it emancipates itself “from matter” and is fully “mastered” (126), that is, it spectralizes upon reaching rhetorical and symbolic maturation and becoming free. In thinking of the dialectic of realism, Jameson adopts the same (dialectical) conceptual framework and, precisely as in Flaubert’s fiction, individuates a breaking point. This is the moment during realism’s wearying process of aesthetic perfection when the dialectic between the narrative and the scenic impulse first lost its balance in favor of the scenic impulse, before fatally disarticulating in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (Jameson, Antinomies 32–77). Flaubert’s realist narrative not only upstaged the narrative impulse with the scenic. It also discarded one feature of former realist narrative, the intrusiveness of

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Unlike statements in philosophical works like Plato’s Phaedrus or Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, which on their part rely heavily on literary rhetoric, most statements in Middlemarch address the destinies of individuals in time and space, and not general issues or ideas. This happens because, in the representational regime of realist narrative, the speculative impulse generally occupies an ancillary position. Especially in the early and late phases of realism’s history, the speculative impulse did not impact the dialectic between the narrative and the scenic impulse, while contributing to the overall mimetic goal of the representation. For a number of reasons, in the second half of the nineteenth century, this balance within the dialectic of realism started to change. It particularly changed in France in the 1880s, after influential attempts by Flaubert and Zola to stifle the speculative impulse in realist narrative. In Russia, this happened in the 1860s, specifically in the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

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The Speculative Turn Breaking Through the Glass House In France, the speculative turn took shape as a reaction against Zola’s naturalism. Zola had made the mimetic transparency of naturalist novels a pivotal metaphor of the naturalist aesthetic. The idea of translucence referred to the literary work of art descended from an ancient, Platonic (Tortonese) “optical” framing of mimesis’s truth discourse (Brooks 7–8) and had already found significant inflections in realist narrative—in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black6 and Eliot’s Adam Bede,7 for instance. In Les romanciers naturalistes, Zola reiterates this in one of his most famous statements on the naturalist aesthetic: “I really liked a simple composition, a clear 6

“[A] novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quagmires on the road” (Stendhal 371).

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“[M]y strongest effort is to . . . give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (Eliot, Adam 150).

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the narrator, which had typically manifested itself in the form of commentaries of the most varied type. More generally, with few exceptions, Flaubert silenced the speculative impulse that we recognized as a vital, albeit subordinate, component of Balzacian realism. In his Souvenirs litte´raires, Maxime Du Camp reports an assertion he attributes to Flaubert according to which “[w]hat one says is nothing, the way one says it is everything; a work of art that seeks to demonstrate something is worthless in virtue of that something alone; a beautiful verse signifying nothing is superior to a less beautiful verse signifying something: outside form, no salvation” (Du Camp 229–30). Flaubert’s silencing of the speculative impulse in his realist works was momentous in the history of realist writing, amounting to a sort of prohibition against explicit conceptual elements in narration, and fueling the misunderstanding concerning the supposedly intrinsic anti-conceptual bias of the novel theorized by Frye in Anatomy of Criticism. It was appropriated by Zola in the making of the naturalist aesthetic and stretched deep into modernism. In Time Regained, Proust states (paradoxically, given the vigor and pervasiveness of the speculative impulse throughout In Search of Lost Time) that “the temptation for the writer to write intellectual works” is a “gross impropriety,” and that “[a] work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it” (Proust 279). In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway claims, instead, that for an author to lend literary characters her or his own “intellectual musings . . . is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature” (153). This is one of the reasons why the speculative turn in French and Russian narrative in the 1880s and 1860s represented a decisive rift in the history of realism, one within the tradition of realist writing, which then went beyond it.

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language, something like a glass house that reveals the ideas in the inside; I even dreamed of the disdain of rhetoric, the human documents given in their severe bareness” (92). The metaphor of the naturalist work as a “glass house” (see Hamon 53–93; Pellini, In una casa), a “simple composition” with a “clear language” that shows the bare truth of the “ideas” or the “human documents” inside, matches the naturalist credo of the “exact reproduction of life” (Zola, Œuvres critiques II 97) formulated by Zola in The Experimental Novel and Les romanciers naturalistes. The metaphor was already there in his letter to Antony Valabre`gue of August 18, 1864, in which Zola set out his theory of the “three screens”—the classic, the romantic, and the realist (Zola, Chroniques et pole´miques II 1312–13). According to this, unlike the classic and the romantic screens, the realist screen is “[a] simple window glass, very thin, very clear, that has the ambition of being so perfectly transparent that images go through it and are reproduced in their truth. No changes thereby in lines and colors: an exact, straightforward, genuine, reproduction” (1313). For Zola, the realist (and naturalist) screen is ultimately a non-screen. It is so perfectly transparent that it does not alter the images that pass through it, allowing for their truthful representation. Naturalist fiction had to be made of “crystal-clear sentence[s], so clear and simple that the ingenuous eyes of a child could penetrate [them], delight in [them], and remember [them]”; it had to be a fiction in which ideas are “so true and bare, that [they themselves] appear to be transparent as well as solid like diamonds in the crystal of the sentence” (725). In a fiction that pursued the impersonal and objective representation of reality at least theoretically, there was no room for burdensome conceptual intrusions. By questioning conventional plot dynamics and the romanesque (Œuvres critiques II 97– 99), Zola’s austere pursuit of the naturalist compositional praxis of the tranches de vie sacrificed much of the previous tradition of realist writing to the positivistic utopia of mimetic transparency. Considering the preceptual framework of the naturalist aesthetic, with the partial exception of the last novel of the series, Doctor Pascal, the conceptual silencing of realism—initiated by Flaubert—necessarily became programmatic in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart. It was not the case, then, that the revolt against naturalism also targeted the suppression of the speculative impulse in Zolian realism. Naturalism came under attack in France in the late nineteenth century. In 1887, in the Manifeste des Cinq, several formerly naturalist writers rebelled against Zola and declared naturalism’s pretensions to truth to be baseless. Public proclamations followed sounding the alarm that a veritable debacle over naturalism had broken out (examples include Ferdinand Brunetie`re’s 1887 “La Banqueroute du naturalisme” and Le´on Bloy’s 1891 Les Fune´railles du naturalisme) (see Pellini, Naturalismo 16; Bertoni 233–34). Influential nonnaturalist writers such as Alexandre Dumas fils, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barre`s, and Jules-Ame´de´e Barbey d’Aurevilly often criticized naturalism. Novelists such as Bourget and Barre`s successfully experimented—in Le Disciple and Les De´racine´s, respectively— with a form of speculative narrative far removed from naturalist fiction’s original epistemological premises: the roman a` the`se (see Suleiman). However, it was a

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in the first place, the compulsion I felt to open windows, to escape from an atmosphere in which I was stifling; then, the urge that seized me to shake off prejudices, to break the boundaries of the novel, to introduce into it art, and science, and history, in a word to no longer use this form except as a frame in which one could incorporate work of a more serious nature. As for me, what seemed to me especially important at that period was to get rid of the traditional plot, to get rid even of love, of woman, to concentrate the beam of light on one single character, to do something new regardless of the cost. (Against 193–94) In Against Nature, Huysmans’s desire to “incorporate work of a more serious nature” in the novel resulted in a multifaceted and open reckoning with that speculative impulse that had always been present in realist narrative as a minor component and had been silenced by Flaubert and Zola. This reckoning, though, turned out to be a sort of unconditional surrender of realism and naturalism to the speculative impulse, and a partial departure of the novelistic form from the traditional mimetic concerns of realism. Against Nature’s renewed engagement with the speculative impulse caused a massive break in the narration of a conceptual form: the essay, a form that takes on Jean Floressas des Esseintes’s endless speculations on the most diverse subjects. In Against Nature, the hybridization of the novel and the essay is so systematic and symbolically relevant that it led to the emergence of a new genre of the novel, the novel-essay, one of the most notable outcomes of the speculative turn in 1880s French narrative. This was the organic fusion of two distinct forms, the novel and the essay (Ercolino, Novel-Essay); a genre that emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its greatest formal complexity in Germany and Austria during the interwar period, especially in modernist fiction by Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch (Ercolino, Novel-Essay; Haas; Harrison; de Obaldia; Pavel, Lives 282–86). The speculative detonation we witness in Against Nature culminates in long and refined essayistic inserts like des Esseintes’s lucubration on Gustave Moreau’s Salomes (Against 44–50) or the fourteen-page essay in free-indirect style on contemporary French Catholic narrative (119–33). This acquires special significance from appearing in the work of one of Zola’s acolytes. Huysmans’s attempt to

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former practitioner of naturalism, Joris-Karl Huysmans, who offered the most convincing refutation of the naturalist aesthetic and its mimetic regime. In 1884, the publication of Huysmans’s Against Nature caused a great sensation by marking a break between French narrative and naturalism. The disciple had repudiated his master and published a book that inflicted a “terrible blow” on naturalism (Huysmans, Against 193). In the 1903 preface to Against Nature, Huysmans recalls an afternoon in Me´dan almost twenty years earlier, shortly after the publication of his novel. Zola apparently said that, with Against Nature, Huysmans had “exhausted the genre in one volume and so made further literary works of that kind impossible” (193). He then exhorted his disciple to retrace his steps and research manners. For the latter, however, “[t]here were many things that Zola could not understand”:

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“get rid of the traditional plot” was nothing but the radicalization or full implementation of one of the hinges of the naturalist aesthetic, the attack on the plot and the romanesque. Nevertheless, Against Nature’s giving in to the speculative impulse and its one-way filtering through the mind of a unique character rejected a key point of the naturalist agenda, the death of the hero. Zola believed, indeed, that the naturalist novelist inevitably “kills his heroes, if he only accepts the ordinary course of common existence”; in particular, the novelist kills the characters “enlarged beyond measure, the puppets turned into colossi” (Œuvres critiques II 98). By creating the prototype of the character of the extravagant, nihilistic, and perverse decadent aesthete, in Against Nature Huysmans refused exactly the “ordinary course of common existence” and placed a character “enlarged beyond measure” at center stage (Œuvres critiques II 98). He gave such a character a strong ideological and critical function entrusted to an overflowing narratorial essayism in freeindirect style; one so pervasive that it shattered the “glass house” of naturalist fiction. In a letter that suggests a milder reaction to the novel than that outlined by Huysmans in the 1903 preface (Lettres ine´dites 105–7), Zola decried the confusion and lack of logic in Against Nature, which contradicted his ideal of naturalist fiction as a “simple composition” with “clear language.” In Against Nature, the wide essayistic turbulence caused by the strengthening and foregrounding of the long minor component of realism constituted by the speculative impulse muddies the ideal transparency of the naturalist work of art. This occurs to the point of reconfiguring the dialectic of realism between the narrative and the speculative impulse, and pushing Against Nature somewhat away from the tradition of realist writing—a partial departure from realism that would become more extreme in La`-Bas, Huysmans’s novel-essay on Satanism and the “occult revival” in French intellectual circles in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Webb 1; see Burrow). The intensification of the speculative impulse in Against Nature eroded the narrative impulse of the dialectic of realism described by Jameson. Against Nature is a novel in which nearly nothing happens; its narration coincides with the stages of des Esseintes’s tragic performance of aesthetic seclusion in his retreat in Fontenayaux-Roses. The breaking through of the conceptual, nonmimetic form of the essay challenges the temporal, event-based logic of its realist framework, undermining the phenomenological and symbolic order of realist storytelling (see Prendergast 5) at its base. Of Jameson’s dialectic of realism, only the scenic impulse remains a vital force in Against Nature, albeit a downsized one. In a novel that lacks dialogue, the many and detailed descriptions alone of the bizarre objects with which des Esseintes surrounds himself (like his “mouth organ” [Against 39–41], to mention one of the most famous), and the unvarying affective investment they elicit, keep the scenic impulse alive. The late nineteenth-century speculative turn in French fiction was one of the most powerful attacks on realist narrative from within that tradition. Attacks had already started in Russia and, in the same period and in a very similar manner, were also occurring in England, in Walter Pater’s sophisticated historical and philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean; in Italy, in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s rarefied

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psychological novel Pleasure; and in Sweden, in August Strindberg’s dark, semiautobiographical novel-essay Inferno. These attacks would transform the rhetoric of mimesis in modernism, permanently integrating the speculative impulse into the dialectic of realism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The historical and cultural conditions of Russia in the 1860s were deeply different from those in France in the 1880s; therefore, the speculative turn in the field of realist writing did not manifest itself there as a reaction against a positivistic mind-set—which could not be widespread in the Russian public debate in those days—or through the emergence of a new novelistic genre like the novel-essay— which in 1880s and 1890s France, England, Italy, and Sweden was specific and somehow homogeneous aesthetic response to the crisis of a fading European modernity. In 1860s Russia, especially in Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels, the speculative turn was an answer to other crises spreading through the Russian social and cultural fabric, one that took peculiar forms—forms that were compatible with the configuration of the literary system and the symbolic needs of the society of that time. Dostoyevsky’s ambiguous stance toward realism is well known. He was aware that the powerful speculative thrust that shaped the conflicts of his narrative and directed the restless moral quest of its characters made his fiction different from Russian standard realist writing. With a touch of irritation, Dostoyevsky wrote in his diary: “They call me a psychologist: it’s not true, I am a realist in a higher sense, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul” (Dostoyevsky, Polnoe 65). In a letter of December 11, 1868, to Apollon Maikov, he further explained: “I have a totally different conception of truth and realism from that of our ‘realists’ and critics. My God! If one could but tell categorically all that we Russians have gone through during the last ten years in the way of spiritual development, all the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! And yet it would be pure realism! It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial” (Complete Letters 150–51). From Dostoyevsky’s viewpoint, his realism “in a higher sense” was the consequence of the need to depict Russia’s intense “spiritual development” after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and the increasingly violent clash, Erich Auerbach argued in Mimesis (523), with those “modern European and especially. . . German and French forms of life and thought” to which Russia had been repeatedly exposed for decades. In Dostoyevsky’s tragic universe, traditional mimesis cannot account for Rodion Raskolnikov’s, Nikolai Stavrogin’s, or Ivan Karamazov’s moral lacerations resulting from the dramatic encounter between European “nihilistic” philosophies and the crumbling of Russia’s old religious substratum under secularization. The mighty amplification of the speculative impulse which, in novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, or The Brothers Karamazov, mostly manifests itself in the form of pervasive and long dialogic essays (like the famous “Menippea[n]” conversation [Bakhtin 156] between Ivan and Alyosha at the Metropolis tavern in The Brothers Karamazov [Dostoyevsky 210–45]), engulfs mimesis and gives

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Realism in Another Sense

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What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. Such a declaration of the author’s disregard of the conventional forms of artistic prose works might seem presumptuous, if it were premeditated and if it had no previous examples. The history of Russian literature since Pushkin’s time not only provides many examples of such departure from European forms, but does not offer even one example to the contrary. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoyevsky’s Dead House, there is not a single work of artistic prose in the modern period of Russian literature, rising slightly above mediocrity, that would fit perfectly into the form of the novel, the epic, or the story. (1217) Tolstoy saw the indeterminate genre of War and Peace as a feature shared with the greatest masterpieces of Russian literature. Such claim to a specificity of Russian literature compared to Western and Central European literature is certainly justifiable but it does not fully account for the novel’s uniqueness in the landscape of realist narrative. In addition to the overt hybridization of the traditionally private and individual concerns of the novel with the eminently community-oriented discourse of the epic, something particular catalyzed criticism of War and Peace. In an 1868 article published in the Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, Mikhail De Poulet affirms that Tolstoy had broken the novelistic code by means of introducing “theoretical treatises in his work, which is a terrible thing for a literary work. It is like saying: clay and bricks beside marble and bronze” (qtd. in Shklovsky, Material 223). Tolstoy’s choice of including massive speculative components in his novel opposed that Flaubertian conceptual prohibition that was often observed in the 8

If one recognizes the dominant of Dostoyevsky’s fiction as tragic rather than polyphonic (in a Bakhtinian sense), giving thus credit to a noble interpretive line that includes philosophers and literary scholars like Vyacheslav Ivanov, Luka´cs (Dostojewski), Auerbach, John Orr, and Joseph Frank (Stir; Mantle).

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philosophical substance to Dostoyevsky’s realism. This is a tragic realism8 that distances the Russian writer’s fiction from the traditional mimetic paths traced by the interplay between the narrative and the scenic impulse in realist fiction (Ercolino, Novel-Essay 61–73). For Tolstoy, things are different. In the early 1860s, Tolstoy was a solid realist writer who had proved himself in masterpieces like Sevastopol Sketches and The Cossacks. Yet, from 1863 to 1869, he created one of the showiest morphological anomalies in the history of realist narrative: War and Peace. This historical novel mediated the conservative symbolic need to foster Russian national identity after defeat in the Crimean War (Shklovsky, Material 239), and the call to defuse the political apprehension undermining Russian society after the failed Decembrist Revolt and emancipation of the serfs (Luka´cs, Historical Novel 85). As a monumental national epic, War and Peace immediately struck Tolstoy’s contemporaries for its structural singularity; this was so marked that critical reception was quick to emerge, along with Tolstoy’s reply. In “A Few Words apropos of the Book War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes:

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The Dialectic of Realism, Reconfigured We might wonder about the reasons behind the speculative turn in European realist narrative from the 1860s and 1880s. We may want to ascribe it to the ideological crises that shook the epistemological and symbolic apparatus of the European arts following the clash of traditional culture in Russia with modern European thought, and the questioning of positivism in France (see Mannheim). We might think of the reception of Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophies (see Gide; Baillot; Colin; Smith; Le Rider; Oei), the success of Richard Wagner’s music (see Baudelaire; Hartman; Fauser and Schwartz), and the occult revival in France as major agents of the irrationalist shift in intellectual life that caused the rejection of naturalism’s scientism. We might speculate about the impact and extent of the mediation role played by vicomte Euge`ne-Melchior de Vogu¨e´’s The Russian Novel in introducing French writers to the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, in which the two Russian writers had successfully experimented with philosophically oriented prose. Likewise we could reflect on the dynamics between French, English, Italian, and Swedish fin-de-sie`cle literatures to account for the simultaneous appearance of similar attempts to break the realist code in the works of Pater, D’Annunzio, Strindberg, and Wilde (see Praz)—works privileging the speculative impulse over the narrative one. Or we might focus on the contradictions of what Stephen Kern named the “crisis of abundance” of 1880–1918 (9) (see Schleifer): an era of extraordinary material and cultural growth that overlapped with the first broad modern economic crisis, the Great Depression of 1873–96 (a crisis of overproduction), which transformed capitalism. We might consider the amplification of realism’s speculative impulse as an answer to those contradictions, while regarding 1848 and the traumas of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune in France, the Decembrist Revolt, the loss of the Crimean War, and the liberation of the serfs in Russia as historical events that prompted multifarious restructurings in the aesthetic sphere. We might also highlight the part played by the multiple epistemological reversals at the turn of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth

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realist narrative from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essayistic form bursts into Tolstoy’s novel, taking root progressively in volumes 3 and 4 until seizing all of part 2 of the epilogue—a twelve-chapter essay on the philosophy of history. In the finale of War and Peace, mimesis fades to reflection; the narrative and scenic impulses of the dialectic of realism, powerful and masterfully intertwined until the beginning of volume 3, are overruled by the speculative impulse (Ercolino, Novel-Essay 124–28). Such a radical hybridization of mimesis with reflection showed extraordinary intuition by Tolstoy, who anticipated the speculative turn in French narrative by about fifteen years—a speculative turn that later merged with the broader, radical cognitive turn of most avant-garde and modernist art as theorized by Theodor W. Adorno, and that in the history of the novel, in works like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, presented itself in some of its most convincing and experimental forms.

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century, and World War I, in radicalizing the ideological crises of fin-de-sie`cle Europe and forcing the entire system of the arts to provide new, critical responses. Even if we consider all of this, we would only have identified a few of the causes behind one of the most significant metamorphoses of European narrative: the reconfiguring, with its varied paths and timings, of the dialectic of realism in the 1860s and 1880s. The aesthetic and cognitive meaning of such reorganization was momentous. The conceptual elements like aphorisms, maxims, encyclopedic digressions, or essayistic inserts fostering the speculative impulse in the novels we mentioned so far are the bearers of a special performative input: they openly ask the reader to think, more or less momentarily breaking the sequential, temporal logic of realist storytelling. As original philosophical forms or literary inflections of them—when in the realist narrative from the second half of the nineteenth century they proliferated and gained ever-increasing space and importance—they ended up cracking realism’s event-based grammar. This projected realism toward broader intellectual horizons, and caused a speculative turn in the history of the European novel. Such a speculative turn blended cognitive orientations belonging to different discourses (literature and philosophy)—cognitive orientations that, traditionally, had made specific claims to truth and, in principle, had been kept distinct within the system of Western episteme since Plato’s time. That is, the speculative turn in 1860s Russian and 1880s French narrative sought to achieve, in diverse forms (i.e., novel-essays, romans a` the`se, novels of ideas, speculative historical or psychological novels, etc.), a daring and totalizing aesthetic and cognitive utopia: bringing together the particular of narration with the universal of reflection, the literary discourse on life with the philosophical discourse on truth. The years that saw the restyling of realism were years of intense historical and cultural changes that would reach well into the twentieth century. In keeping with the “law” of the so-called “canonization of the junior branch” (Erlich 227), Viktor Shklovsky believed that when the weight of historical and cultural changes reached a critical mass, minor elements of literary works could radicalize and come to the foreground (Literature; Theory; see also Eikhenbaum). They would then be able to exert the function of “constructive principles” or “dominants”—as Tynianov (“Literary Fact”; “Literary Evolution”) and Jakobson (“Dominant”) would later say, respectively. The speculative impulse had always been a component of realism but one too minor and peripheral to threaten the unity of the dialectic between the narrative and the scenic impulse. From the 1860s, it strengthened and took center stage. This altered the dialectic of realism. In Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson discusses the different possible configurations dialectical oppositions can take and describes a dialectical relationship that seems particularly interesting, one based on the neutralization of oppositions (Valences 32; Archaeologies 170–81). After recalling the binary nature of the antagonisms that fueled some of the most heated aesthetic disputes in the history of painting, Jameson writes that, when faced with the alternative between, say, line and color, only a limited set of options is logically available. Those options consist of either choosing one of the opposing poles, pursuing some sort of synthesis of the two alternatives, or “destroy[ing]” and “neutralizing [the] tension” between them

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altogether (Valences 33–34). And so when, in his 1944 unfinished painting Victory Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian created straight lines of pieces of colored tape, he thereby neutralized the opposition and tension between line and color. In doing so, however, he kept that opposition and that tension visible since, in order to count as dialectical, the neutralization of an aesthetic opposition has to in a sense keep alive precisely the opposition and tension that it neutralizes (Valences 35). We might then say that the reinforcement of the temporally neuter and nonnarrative speculative impulse of realism attained a neutralization and mobilization of the dialectic of realism as pictured by Jameson. A sort of a counteractive answer to the new pressure of historical time and the perceived inadequacy of the traditional realist paradigm as an aesthetic response to that pressure, the amplification of the nontemporal and nonrepresentational speculative impulse neutralized the opposition between the two temporal and representational impulses of the dialectic of realism, the narrative and the scenic impulse. The speculative impulse thus became something with which the narrative and speculative impulses experienced natural temporal and discursive contradictions. A new dialectic of realism emerged, in which the narrative and the scenic impulse regrouped and entered together, but on the same side of the opposition this time, a dialectical relationship with the nontemporal and nonmimetic speculative impulse. The dialectic of realism, which had been the dialectic between the narrative and the scenic, the past of storytelling and the present of affect and the scene, was thus reconfigured as the dialectic between the temporal and the nontemporal, the mimetic and the conceptual. This resulted in a restructuring of realist narrative in the second half of the nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. From the 1860s onwards, the realist aesthetic had to change to survive. Realism then started to hybridize and enter multiple dialectical relationships with something else. Settling for a compromise with the philosophical discourse was only one such example of hybridizations and dialectical repositionings. But it was an especially successful and diversified one, considering that it ranged from Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s historical and philosophical novels, as well as the emergence of the novel-essay, to the revival of the roman a` the`se in the second half of the nineteenth century and, later, the rise of the maximalist novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Ercolino, Maximalist). Other metamorphoses of realism were occurring at the same time and, sometimes, even in the same texts in which realism came to terms with the speculative impulse. One of these was the opening of realism to the tragic, which led to the appearance and spread of the “noveltragedy” (Ivanov 7) in the narrative of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Theodor Fontane, and Thomas Hardy—novel-tragedy that would be revitalized in modernist and twentyfirst-century fiction by Faulkner, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Jonathan Littell. Nevertheless, while seeking to survive in hybrid formations, realism sloughed so much that it gradually weakened, losing touch with social totality, to the point of becoming a tame or inert part of the literary repertoire—in the case of European and American “highbrow” modernist and postmodernist literature—or an inertially recurring feature of “middlebrow” and “lowbrow” narrative. Thus, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the global territory of postcolonial and

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stefano ercolino is assistant professor of comparative literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He taught at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College and has been a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universita¨t Berlin, and Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University. He is the author of The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947 and The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolan˜o’s “2666.”

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postmodern cultures (see Cleary, Esty, and Lye; Goodlad)—a much broader one than that of modern Europe in which realism flourished—realism was used as one of the poles of a contradiction that demanded dialectical overcoming, as in magical realism. Otherwise it was replaced by radically hybrid novelistic aesthetics that, following alternative paths, aimed to keep realism’s pretension to truth alive as in the nonfiction novel. The realism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a history, though, to address in another investigation.

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