World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time [1st ed.] 9783030416973, 9783030416980

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 1-46
Dislocating Time: Nampally Road and the Politics of Non-synchronism (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 47-73
The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 75-102
Beyond Diaspora and Nostalgia: M.G. Vassanji’s Asynchronous Images (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 103-131
Written Out of History: The Agbekoya Rebellion at Temporal Crossroads (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 133-160
Time, Extinction and Accumulation: Reading Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 161-189
Conclusion: On Skipping History (Filippo Menozzi)....Pages 191-208
Back Matter ....Pages 209-213

Citation preview

NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time

Filippo Menozzi

New Comparisons in World Literature

Series Editors Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Department of English Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK Neil Lazarus University of Warwick Coventry, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. Editorial Board Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067

Filippo Menozzi

World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time

Filippo Menozzi Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-3-030-41697-3 ISBN 978-3-030-41698-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Gina Pricope/Getty Image, Image ID: 636246536 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the series editors, Neil Lazarus and Pablo Mukherjee, for their support and for always being an inspiring guide. Many thanks to colleagues who have supported me with their generosity, friendship and encouragement during the past few years: Alice Ferrebe, James Whitehead, Jo Croft, Glenda Norquay, Kathryn Walchester, Jonathan Cranfield, Michael Morris, Ross Dawson, Patricia Murray, Colin Harrison, Rebecca Bailey, Deaglan O’Donghaile, Jude Piesse, Jo Price, Gerry Smyth, Bella Adams, Joe Moran, Elspeth Graham, Anna Maria Cimitile, Miguel Mellino, Guido Rings, Deepika Bahri, Stephen Morton, Lisa Lau, Chantal Zabus, Pina Piccolo, Nilufer Bharucha, Katharine Cox, Danielle Chavrimootoo, Chiara Zuanni, Michael Birchall, Lee Wright, Alex Miles, Helen Rogers, Emily Cuming, Steven Spittle, Nedim Hassan, Nickianne Moody, David Tyrer and Joe Sim. My students at Liverpool John Moores University, especially Christinna Hobbs and my postcolonial writing and world literature classes. Vicky Bates, Tomas René and Rebecca Hinsley at Palgrave for their work and help. The anonymous peer-reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and the production team. On a personal note, I would like to say thank you to: i Milanesi in Cambridge (Fra and Irving), Yata and Yuriko, Yama and Mami, Vale, Ale and Oscar, Ricky and Manu, Donata and Antonio, Raffo, Simona and Adele, and my family (Luigi, Elena, Gregorio, Francesca, Chiara, Angelo, Carolina, Camillo, Vinicio and Pizzi). Dedicato a Roberta e ad Alessandro.

v

Contents

1

1

Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism

2

Dislocating Time: Nampally Road and the Politics of Non-synchronism

47

The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History

75

3

4

5

6

7

Beyond Diaspora and Nostalgia: M.G. Vassanji’s Asynchronous Images

103

Written Out of History: The Agbekoya Rebellion at Temporal Crossroads

133

Time, Extinction and Accumulation: Reading Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion

161

Conclusion: On Skipping History

191

Index

209

vii

About the Author

Filippo Menozzi (Ph.D., Kent) is lecturer in postcolonial and world literature at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (Routledge, 2014) and guest editor of a special issue of New Formations on Rosa Luxemburg and the postcolonial condition. His work has appeared in journals such as College Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions, ARIEL and Wasafiri. He is section editor of the online journal Postcolonial Text and Exchange Associate at Tate Liverpool. With Deepika Bahri, he is co-editor of Teaching South Asian Women’s Writing for the Publications of the Modern Language Association. In 2019, he was awarded an LJMU Vice-Chancellor’s Medal and Individual Teaching Excellence Award.

ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: World Literature Beyond Synchronism

The introduction situates the concept of non-synchronism in current debates in world literary studies. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of world literature, non-synchronism is presented as a dialectical and materialist way of thinking the temporality of literary expression from peripheral formations of the capitalist world economy. In its aesthetic and social aspects, the temporal dimension analysed in the introduction is affiliated to discourses on a singular modernity, the questions of totality and of peripheral modernism, the antinomies of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy, and debates on culture and politics at the heart of literary criticism after postcolonialism. Non-synchronism opposes both teleological views of history and the relativism of ideologies of multiple modernities, illustrating how heterogeneous temporalities need to be located within the systemic frame of reference imposed by the accumulation of capital.

1

The Antinomies of World Literature

In a recent book titled The Ministry of Nostalgia, writer and journalist Owen Hatherley sketches telling reflections on the resurgence of a wave of nostalgia in contemporary Britain. He observes that the insecurities of the current historical moment have provoked a widespread yearning for the times of post-war Austerity, a “nostalgia for the state of being © The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_1

1

2

F. MENOZZI

repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last thirty years” (21). This nostalgic feeling, Hatherley continues, at the same time “as it evokes a sense of loss over the decline of an idea of Britain and the British, it is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism” (ibid.). Contemporary nostalgia surfaces in the recycling of symbols and maxims of times past as political weapons to address the crisis and impoverishment determined by the rise of the neoliberal economy. Nostalgia feeds on a perception of the present as hopeless, unstable, insecure and puzzling; it nurtures the longing for stable, clear and solid old times. It hence implies a fascination with the past—often an idealised, mythical, never-really-experienced past—as a symptom of discontent in the present, and it is not limited to Britain. In countries as distant and different as India, the USA, Italy and Egypt, for example, the political stage is increasingly dominated by emergent political forces built on explicitly nostalgic agendas, such as “taking back” national borders and the purity of national communities, the ideal of making nations great “again,” the rise of fundamentalist rhetorics, localisms, neo-fascism and religious orthodoxies, accompanied by enduring states of emergency. These trends seem to reveal a quite depressing historical conjuncture in which, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, people had better reject any uplifting narrative and embrace instead the “courage of hopelessness.” Many political movements, today, seem to express hopelessness through a retrospective gaze summoning the past, rather than the future, as blueprint for imagining the present. Thus, anti-immigrant rhetoric in Britain after the Brexit vote, for example, envisions life outside the European Union by turning to a concept of the nation as white and mythical imagined community pre-existing Britain’s joining of the European Union in 1973, but also by threatening the legal status of the so-called Windrush generation which settled in Britain from the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s. The act of looking back towards the past in order to respond to an uncertain present is not, of course, a new thing exclusive to the regressive and conservative populism of twenty-first-century Europe. The return of the past as form of political mobilisation is a very peculiar fact, though, which cannot be explained away by recourse to developmental or teleological concepts of history, whereby these revenants would necessarily be overcome once the entire planet has been rationalised and disenchanted. The re-enchantment of the world seems to occur, today, in non-Western societies as among the wealthiest,

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

3

supposedly most “modern” societies of late capitalism, at the centre of technological advancement and the capital flows of the world economy. Transgressing the binary of West vs Rest, or South vs North, these emergent phenomena suggest that geographical and historical distinctions might not be entirely sufficient to explain how the world is changing today: atavistic social formations pop up everywhere, from Paris to Mumbai, and communication technologies make the drawing of boundaries increasingly difficult; community and society, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft constantly merge and overlap. As Harry Harootunian writes in his compelling analysis of the global expansion of capitalism in Marx After Marx, “the supposed unity of time projected by capital and nation-state is a masquerade that invariably fails to conceal the ceaseless confrontation of different times” (23). Capitalism’s global remit has not resulted in a total synchronisation leading to the disappearance of the past or the full realisation of a homogeneous, empty time. In fact, capitalism’s becoming produces what Harootunian describes as “uneven temporalities” (26): “contretemps, simultaneous nonsimultaneities … contemporaneous noncontemporaneities or uneven times … time’s turmoil, times out of joint, multiple temporalities,” and forms of untimeliness “fully immanent to what constitutes normative social time” (23). The current wave of nostalgia is a symptom of how global capitalism has entailed a reconfiguration of the historical consciousness whereby multiple times are constantly revived, reconstructed and appropriated. For this reason, these returns reveal a specific kind of unevenness at the core of globalisation itself—a social and temporal unevenness affecting structures of feeling within the world economy. Capitalism does not produce homogeneity; instead, it triggers planned obsolescences, externalities, under-development, residual formations and invented traditions that vividly disrupt any linear narrative of betterment. Accordingly, the re-emergence of the past as contemporary political idiom opens crucial questions about the intersections between politics and culture: Are these calls and returns to an imagined past a by-product of modernity or are they survivals of pre- or non-modern societies? Do the expansion and development of capitalism necessarily provoke these returns, or are these symptoms of a possible resistance to capitalism, a new Romanticism set against what Michael Löwy has called the “tide of modernity”? Is the return of the past ideological mystification or does it manifest the

4

F. MENOZZI

critical consciousness of a real social condition? Can the sudden appearance of untimely times inspire progressive change in the present or, as Hatherley observes, when “it comes to treating the past as a weapon, the Conservative Party are, and always have been, the experts” (12)? The main argument of this research is that the appearance of noncontemporaneous elements in the present should not be dismissed as nostalgic survival or retrospective longing, a mere sign of obscurantism and regression. The idioms of nostalgia, Golden Ages and romantic populisms are all expressions of deeper and wider dynamics of historical capitalism. Indeed, the emergence of non-contemporaneous remnants— the conjuncture of diverging temporalities in the present, what in this book will be defined “non-synchronism”—testifies to the way in which the global expansion of capitalism has redefined the very concept and experience of time. What non-synchronic emergences reveal is that, in peripheral zones of global capitalism, the temporal consciousness of the present is inhabited by multiple layers and strata: capitalism produces a sort of political unconscious of time itself, which can be reactivated at any time and in many different guises. Non-synchronism, in other words, would allow to rethink current discourses about nostalgia, the return of the past, the survival of atavism as well as utopian anticipation s of the future in the present. Instead of seeing these aspects as aberrations or deviations from the norm, the concept of non-synchronism allows to grasp that a multi-layered notion of the present is a constitutive dimension of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a productive critical tool that, as it will be shown, avoids either celebrating or condemning any non-contemporaneous element by situating it in an open-ended and dialectical concept of history. As a conjuncture of incommensurable times, non-synchronism captures basic structures common to a wide range of events and phenomena of the present which, in spite of their coevalness and presence, are perceived to belong to another temporal frame. This book explores these themes in relation to the emerging field of world literature and, more precisely, in order to build on central issues opened by an important publication by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015), that is, how the paradigm of world literature affects the very concept of time in the humanities, and the relationship between time and literary representation. In an important passage of their volume Combined and Uneven Development, WReC points out that the concept of world literature is neither a mode of reading nor a

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

5

canon of works but rather a literature that “registers” the modern world system. WReC suggests that “the effectivity of the world-system will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work, since the worldsystem exists unforgoably as the matrix within which all modern literature takes shape and comes into being” (20). Some key elements seem to animate WReC’s formulation: firstly, a concept of modernity understood as the historical regime produced by the global expansion of capitalism as hegemonic mode of production. This historical regime is uneven, incomplete and non-synchronous because it is still expanding, intensively as well as extensively, through the constant activation of the process of the accumulation of capital. Secondly, a vision of literature as archive and record of the social, political and spatio-temporal dimensions of this system from the periphery rather than the centre and, thirdly, the creation of a new critical space addressing a level of experience that is common to all literature of modernity.1 WReC’s definition does not fragment the experience of capitalist modernity in a plurality of modernisms emanating from untranslatable cultural sites. Furthermore, WReC’s perspective on world literature does not restrict the term to a canon of globally circulating and translated works: WReC’s emphasis on peripherality entails a shift from globalism, circulation and exchange to internationalism, labour and production. The systemic dimension creates a structure of commensurability and comparability across difference that is very much needed as helpful alternative to the insistence on break and disjuncture harnessed by a great part of postcolonial theory.2 WReC convincingly follows Fredric Jameson’s statement on the “meaning of modernity” as “worldwide capitalism” (Jameson 2003, 12): a singular modernity rather than “pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order” (13). Moving away from a fetishised idea of “the West” to a politically conscious engagement with concrete realities of exploitation enforced by neoliberal capitalism through imperialism and the international division of labour, world literature allows insight into the narrative shaping of the historical temporality of a global modernity. WReC enriches the idea of a singular modernity by going beyond Euro-American debates on modernism and by examining “the way in which capitalist social relations are ‘lived’ – different in every given instance for the simple reason that no two social instances are the same” (WReC 12). Instead of equating modernity with “the west,” WReC deploys the totalising background of global capitalism as necessary reference to understand the specific inequalities constituting the colonial and

6

F. MENOZZI

postcolonial histories of peripheral societies. Indeed, the idea of “unevenness” not only refers to the question of a spatially and geographically uneven distribution of resources through the circuits of the market, finance capital and the international division of labour. Temporally, unevenness also illuminates what WReC calls the “historically determinate coexistence” (ibid.) of a palimpsest of overlapping moments of history that compose the material conditions of social formations beyond capitalism’s core. WReC points out, the “multiple forms of appearance of unevenness” need to be seen as “being governed by a socio-historical logic of combination, rather than as being contingent and asystematic” (ibid.). The acknowledgement that modernity needs to be seen through the “coexistence” of multiple chronotopical realities opens up a vital question for the study of world literature: How can the paradigm of world literature lead to rethinking the specific historicities of an uneven modernity? How do these experiences actively “combine,” and how does literature register this process of coexistence and combination? Does a singular modernity entail a singular time and a common history, and how to account for the “multiple forms” in which the history of modernity unfolds? This book takes as its point of departure WReC’s suggestion that world literature registers the multiple ways in which global modernity is historically determined. This means moving away, radically, from the culturalist tendencies of postcolonial studies focused on the rubrics of identity and hybridity.3 Instead of treating literature as an emanation of the author’s cultural background, world literature connects the sphere of the literary to the material conditions of existence engendered by the uneven and combined global expansion of capitalism. Yet, through the concept of “registration,” it also avoids labelling literary texts as symptoms and mystifications of the cultural industry of the global economy: literature does not merely “express” or “mirror,” but rather actively “register,” the material history of modernity. WReC’s emphasis on the term registering reveals a firm focus on literature’s entanglement in the blood and fire of worlds of exploitation, marginalisation and class struggle rather than restricting the remit of world literature to literary celebrities, canons and anthologies. As a register, world literature furnishes an idiom and a range through which oppressed peoples can form a historical consciousness of the condition of peripherality. The term register offers a useful starting point for reimagining the aesthetic dimension of world literature. While the term registering aims to signal a commitment to the social reality being represented in fiction,

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

7

it also connotes the fact that fictional works express and convey a multiplicity of layers and dimensions that constitute and coexist in historical reality. A register signals the ability to conjoin disjointed times in the passage from history to story. The musical connotation of the term register may be adopted as a guiding metaphor for addressing literary texts as sort of chromatic “ranges” or sets of tones, a diverse representational spectrum where multiple times appear, combine and interact. From this point of view, considering world literature as register of the global expansion of historical capitalism could mean, as in a musical register, a span of expressive possibilities spread across a wide range of uneven temporalities: the representation of modern history as a range of tones and temporal variations. Following Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the narrative representation of time in Valences of the Dialectic, the aim of an aesthetic of non-synchronism is hence to explore what Jameson calls “the way in which existential and historical times intersect” in literature, “and in particular how a multiplicity of existential times, an opening up of the representational fan to register and include a variety of personal temporalities, might be expected to pick up the vibrations of the more properly historical ones” (521). Jameson’s reference to a multiplicity of times— personal and historical, overlapping and intersecting in fiction—points to a concept of registering that involves an expansion of the time of the narration to include hetero-temporalities and asynchronicities. The active, expressive connotation of the term register demands the awareness that fictional works reframe reality in different guises and, most importantly, that literature captures reality’s non-synchronism primarily by revealing rifts between system and event. Emphasising world literature as register should not be taken for a nominalistic restriction of the literary to the level of form. Practices of registration rather capture an aesthetic and epistemological ground able to connect emplotment and narrative strategy to concrete reality, showing that literary representation is not detached from historical depth. Registration is an active positioning of the labour of narrative as worldly practice and dialectical mediation between artistic form and historical experience. From this point of view, non-synchronism does not merely emerge as a theme of the fiction analysed in this book, such as peasant rebellions or evocations of a Golden Age. Literary works are, by definition, nonsynchronic because the time in which they “take place” is always split between the moment of narratorial composition and the long-term strata of history, framing and embedded narratives, the past being remembered

8

F. MENOZZI

and recuperated, and the anticipation of futures that have not yet taken place. The specifically aesthetic quality of non-synchronism signifies the conjuncture or articulation of these diverging times: following Michael Wayne, my concept of the aesthetic is configured as a “point of mediation” (Wayne 93) between experience and expression, story and history. Rather than being restricted to categories of beauty and the sublime, an expanded and materialist notion of aesthetics can be defined as a dialectical space of articulation between the sensuous and the ethico-political, instead of being a separate sphere, a compartment to be excised from the worldliness of perception and history. An aesthetic of non-synchronism also identifies a specific quality of what Marx, in an influential Nota Bene included in his Grundrisse, qualified as the “uneven development” of cultural and economic forms (see conclusion of this volume). At a certain moment in time, Marx noted, a given society features cultural elements from previous historical formations that survive notwithstanding a changed economic structure. Cultural elements, non-synchronically, are hence able to exceed and survive the era that originated them in the first place. When a cultural element from a different age survives in the present, a non-synchronic reality emerges by the combination of socio-economic conditions and superstructural forms carrying with themselves residual structures of feeling. This dislodgement of cultural and material forms gives rise to a specific experience of time: the aesthetic mediation of non-synchronism inhabits the work of combination of diverging temporal trajectories derived from the uneven development of culture and society. As Georg Lukács writes in a classic essay on Marxist aesthetics, “historical materialism recognizes that ideological development does not move in a mechanical and predetermined parallel with the economic progress of society” (Lukács 1978, 66). In this context, a Marxist aesthetics is an active registration of the uneven development of artistic form as integral part of a social whole, indicating how the literary representation engages with “the reality of the pulsating life of phenomena of which it forms an organic part and out of whose particular experiences it evolves” (78). The logic of uneven development emerges today particularly strongly in the periphery of the world economy, where pre-capitalist structures of feeling combine with the most advanced effects of imperialist, neoliberal and financial capitalism. World literature hence turns the aesthetic into a testimony of the production of uneven temporalities through

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

9

the expanded logic of accumulation. Concretely, the aesthetic of nonsynchronism may appear as a bridge between, on the one hand, textual devices such as prolepsis, digression, embedded narrative, analepsis and peripeteia and, on the other hand, the wider contextual references characterising the onset of capitalism and its modulations of a peripheral historical consciousness. The “aesthetic” quality addressed in this research captures the way in which stylistic or formal elements of narrative are charged with multiple historical, political and social dimensions unravelling aspects of capitalism’s worldwide expansion. In this context, “registration” does not simply equal literary realism or a mirror of nature. Rather than being a nominalistic question about form, the nonsynchronic work of registration captures an epistemological space wherein the temporal order of literary expression is opened up to material entanglements in the concrete worlds of history and politics. Registration is the range of variations of historical experience; it defines the way literary works reframe social reality by revealing deeper temporal structures at the heart of capitalist modernity. WReC’s thought-provoking views suggest a new possibility for reimagining the work of criticism without driving literature into being a mirror of reified cultural essence or just a sign of the commodification of everything. World literature discloses a new ground for analysis that goes beyond the jargon of identity politics and the reduction of literature to global cultural industry or marketplace, refusing to enclose literature in a separate space of circulation parallel to other kinds of determination. Rather, literature is an active, productive way of keeping track of history, a channel of translation and communication athwart a world dominated by the logic of capital. From this point of view, artistic representations of modernity need not be necessarily seen as gesture of resistance of few selected authors, but rather as a creative archive of a global material frame of reference. The value of WReC’s instance lies in their proposal of a notion of world literature as a method and a new critical space: behind any stylistic choices, political manifestoes and sense of cultural belonging, all literature produced in the era of modernity is, to some extent, a record of the expansion of capitalism.4 Methodologically, the ability to register the world system cannot be restricted to a question about formal qualities or techniques, nor does it reflect a merely thematic or documentary aspect: related concepts of peripheral modernism (Parry), peripheral realism (Cleary) and “irrealism” (WReC and Löwy) express in different ways a common aesthetic of non-synchronism. Furthermore, the world

10

F. MENOZZI

system cannot be merely seen as a new “context” for literary works, which would replace canonical ways of situating literature in terms of nation, class, race and gender. All these modes of contextualising can indeed be compatible with the statement concerning world literature’s ability to register the uneven experience of modernity. The question of “registering” cannot be pigeonholed in traditional critical idioms: it is neither a context nor a formal technique; neither a position nor a position-taking; neither a theme nor a form of cultural identification. In its aesthetic dimension, world literature makes possible an experience of time that registers the complex realities of an age of capitalist globalisation. In contrast to the essentialism of identity politics and the ideologies of postcolonial disjuncture, the epistemological space unlocked by the paradigm of world literature emphasises the possibility of formulating a holistic vision of the global effects of capitalism. While modern literary works and authors should not be seen as necessarily opposed to capitalism, the critical project of world literature is unequivocally anti-capitalist and grounded in the Marxist tradition. Indeed, a systemic view of world literature as record of capitalist modernity can be seen as a contemporary way of countering what Marxist critic Georg Lukács, in his important study of the concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness, called the “atomisation” and fragmentation of life proper to the capitalist order of things. In a capitalist society, wrote Lukács, consumer articles “no longer appear as the products of an organic process within a community” but rather “as isolated objects the possession or non-possession of which depends on rational calculation. Only when the whole life of society is thus fragmented into isolated acts of commodity exchange can the ‘free; worker come into being” (Lukács 91). This transition, which amounts to the onset of what Marx defined as the “real” subsumption of life to capitalism, is a tendency inherent to capitalism as an engulfing and totalising system. However, the reality of global capitalism at the peripheries shows that reification remains an ongoing process and tendency rather than a finished state of being. As Sandro Mezzadra (2011b; Mezzadra and Rahola 2006) notes, postcolonial capitalism involves the constant reactivation of so-called primitive accumulation, whereby capitalism clashes with earlier social formations not fully subsumed: financial and neoliberal logics hybridise with feudal remnants, slavery and bonded labour. The systemic orientation of the concept of world literature is an explicit challenge to capitalism’s reifying tendency: it is an attempt to recover a point

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

11

of view encompassing the global workings of the system and the living, social relationships underlying the production of objects and texts. The concept of non-synchronism is an attempt to construct a sense of the dialectical unity and interrelationship of the different times that compose a capitalist modernity, explicitly set against the atomisation, dissonance, anachronism and discontinuity that express symptomatically the reifying tendency of capitalism. As Edward Said commented in his essay, “History, Literature and Geography,” the reification of everything under the rule of capital affects the experience of time as well, introducing a sense of discontinuity and fragmentation, as Said remarks: “in the modern world it is the problem of temporality, that ironic sense of transcendental distance between subject and object lodged at the very heart of existence” (Said 460). Said’s and Lukács’s influential analyses echo Henri Lefebvre’s important essay on modernity, where he also describes the condition of modernity as one characterised by a profound atomisation and discontinuity: “with the new period comes an upsurge of discontinuity, slow but overpowering, influencing knowledge, behaviour, and consciousness … Discontinuous structures and distinct units are found everywhere: atoms, particles, genes, linguistic elements, phonemes and morphemes, and so on” (Lefebvre 179). If literary studies are an expression of the consciousness of material conditions of existence, an atomising and isolating emphasis on disjunctive identities is at risk of replicating the cultural hegemony of capitalism instead of exposing and denouncing it. Yet, at the same time, world literature’s accent on totality and system does not neglect the question of difference and does not result in flattening the history of global modernity into derivation or repetition. Far from reducing everything to a monologic reiteration of the same, the idea of a singular modernity feeding into the discourse on world literature offers a productive tool for assembling, connecting and transmitting different historical experiences. From this point of view, world literature is a mode of cultural representation that builds on the possibility of cultural transmission and translatability in order to grasp the multifarious declinations of the modern and its attendant registration in literary and artistic expression.5 As Benita Parry puts it in an important essay on the fictions produced in the context of peripheral modernity, “by juxtaposing rather than serializing past and present, these fictions reflect empathetically on those memories that animate the capacities of oppressed peoples who … fashion

12

F. MENOZZI

new and historically informed forms of consciousness replete with reverberations of rediscovered histories” (Parry 2006, 21). Beyond disjuncture, difference and hybridity, WReC’s idea of world literature has to do with the question of how different temporalities co-inhabit the unifying time determined by the accumulation of capital, and how literary works define new aesthetic modes that transmit and signify the persistence and constant re-discovery of the past in the global present. On the one hand, world literature offers a salutary critique of the tendency to place peripheral experiences of modernity in temporalities other than the present, as if life beyond the capitalist centre belonged to a different historical phase to be overcome in a pre-given and teleological grand narrative. In this context, world literature’s systemic drive challenges what anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls the “denial of coevalness” proper to epistemic devices of “allochronism” (meaning literally “other time”). In his influential intervention in debates in anthropology, Fabian denounced the ethnographic prejudice distancing the time of the anthropologist (modern, “Western”) from all other non-modern temporalities encountered during ethnographic fieldwork. Fabian defines “denial of coevalness” as follows: By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse. What I am aiming at is covered by the German terms gleichzeitig and Gleichzeitigkeit. The unusual coeval, and especially the noun coevalness, express a need to steer between such closely related notions as synchronous/simultaneous and contemporary. I take synchronous to refere [sic] to events occurring at the same physical time; contemporary asserts co-occurrence … Coeval …covers both (“of the same age, duration or epoch”). (Fabian 31, emphases in the original)

Against the “allochronic” habit of putting other “non-modern” peoples into times different from the present, Fabian encourages an acknowledgement of the fact that the subjects of ethnographic study share the same time with the ethnographer; they are coeval and actively co-produce the same present. On the other hand, this account risks reducing the anthropological encounter to a matter of synchronism, without accounting for the uneven and heterogeneous temporality that informs a global modernity. The recognition of coevalness should not imply a conflation of the diverse

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

13

historical experience of modernity and, most importantly, the inequality that characterises the violent expansion of capitalism on distant corners of the earth. The time of modernity engendered by capitalism is not entirely homogeneous or limited to what Pheng Cheah describes, in his influential book on world literature, as “the synchronisation of clocks … a synecdoche for European colonial domination of the rest of the world … a form of imprisonment that smothers lived local temporalities” (Cheah 1). The temporal order of a capitalist age should include but not be limited to the processes of unification and coordination of clocks described by Jonathan Martineau, Vanessa Ogle and Peter Galison in their important studies (Galison 2000; Martineau 2015; Ogle 2015). The thesis of my project is that capitalism’s time goes beyond the synchronic, empty, homogeneous and tautological time of clocks: rather, the global process of accumulation entails a proliferation of temporalities that are reconfigured through the creation of surplus value and the organic composition of capital.6 The past and the future become non-synchronous heterotemporalities or allochronisms only when they are incorporated in the subsumptive logic of capital. As Perry Anderson shows in his critique of Marshall Berman’s great book on modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, “Marx’s own conception of the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as a whole was … a complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves” (101, emphasis in original). In The Politics of Time, Peter Osborne expands on this but also critiques Anderson for failing to raise the question of modernity as a specific form of historicity. Intriguingly, Osborne notes that modernity involves “the idea of the non-contemporaneousness of geographically diverse, but chronologically simultaneous, times” (16, emphasis in original). Osborne’s remarks help distinguishing the question of historicity and historical time from the problem of periodisation and chronology. Historicity, indeed, involves addressing the social experience of time through the phases of the accumulation of capital rather than establishing a set of dates. As Sami Khatib asks, in an important essay on time: “how are we to historicize capitalism’s own mode of historicization by constructing a materialist concept of time, which is based on a non-relativist, truly universal concept of history devoid of any falsely universal, teleological, or metaphysical concepts?” (47, emphasis in original). The question opened by world literature hence concerns the possibility of keeping multiple historical

14

F. MENOZZI

times together in the continuing reactivation of so-called primitive accumulation, recognising their contemporaneity without reducing them to the experience of the viewer or the critic. World literature frames the issue of modern historicity as coeval and multiple at the same time. Uneven historical experiences constitute the present and simultaneously dislocate it; they cannot be reduced to disjunctions but should not be flattened into a unidirectional flow of development. The concept of multiple historical experiences concurring, at the same time, within the chronology of modernity involves addressing the stakes of world literature through the formulation of a notion of historicity that is neither teleological nor disjunctive.

2

Non-synchronism: Dialectics of Time

In order to address the question of the differential historicity of a singular modernity, WReC refers to the influential and oft-mentioned concept of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” as elaborated by Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. In a pivotal 1932 essay titled “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” Bloch referred to the situation of Germany in the 1930s as the epitome of a “modern” social formation in which multiple times coexist side by side.7 Germany at that time was, according to Bloch, a still incompletely capitalist society in which previous economic and social forms survived. In a vital moment of his essay, Bloch summarises his perspective as follows: Germany in general, which did not accomplish a bourgeois revolution until 1918, is, unlike England, and much less France, the classical land of nonsynchronism, that is, of unsurmounted remnants of older economic being and consciousness. Ground rent, large landed property and their power were rather completely integrated into the capitalistic economy and its political power in England, and in a different way, in France … The “unequal rate of development” … existed here long enough on the material level alone and hindered in this way the clearly dominating influence of capitalist thinking in the hierarchy of economic powers, that is, synchronism. (Bloch 29)

The main argument proposed in Bloch’s essay is that the survival of untimely, non-synchronous elements in German society during the 1930s could offer an explanation for the rise of fascism in Europe. Indeed, these residual elements were channelled into ideologies of a return to

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

15

the past—an imaginary “Golden Age” linked to the myth of the soil and the nation—appealing to sections of society that felt excluded from the benefits of capitalist development.8 Bloch’s essay can be read as a plea to consider the importance of these non-synchronic elements and to re-channel them into a conscious class struggle able to subvert both fascism and capitalism. Bloch’s concept of “non-synchronism” or “non-simultaneity” cannot be detached from the Marxist tradition, especially the concept of “combined and uneven development” elaborated by Leon Trotsky.9 The value of this perspective rests on the ability to consider the articulation of different social forms within the dominant mode of production: not just survival of the past but rather the processes of combination of archaic and current social relationships in the world economy. Non-synchronism occurs when there are “unsurmounted remnants” surviving in the capitalist present. Actually, it is the domination of capitalism that produces the past as “non-synchronism,” by reframing the past in the process of primitive accumulation. Not yet fully sublated—that is, not yet fully appropriated and overcome—these older social formations simultaneously serve and hinder synchronism, which entails the full domination of capital and also the consequent development of a genuine class consciousness. Non-synchronism makes sense from the point of view of a systemic, Marxist perspective in which other temporalities signal the persistence of non-capitalist forms that are not yet erased by the violence of capitalism. The non-synchronous is indeed coeval and contemporary, but only to the extent that it reveals the unevenness and unfinishedness of the present time: non-synchronism signals that the hegemony of capitalism has not resulted in a global homogeneity. Bloch had the context of Germany in mind, but today, the question of non-synchronism can be applied to the peripheries of capitalism: the neocolonised margins of the world system integrated into its global economy and yet excluded from the “centre.”10 Non-synchronism captures those intervals and margins within the modern world system, in which the combination of different times in the present emerges as pressing political, social and economic terrain of struggle and dissent. Following the Marxist critical and philosophical tradition, the following introductory analysis will link the notion of non-synchronism to three sets of issues: the first question concerns how the different times that survive in the capitalist present combine to form a totality. WReC rightly emphasises that the multiple historical experiences captured within the present are articulated one into the other in order to take part in a

16

F. MENOZZI

wider whole. The problem of totality, indeed, was a major contention among Marxist critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in particular, it was at the basis of a dispute between intellectuals Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács. The second point concerns whether the diverging, non-synchronous temporalities that coexist within modernity have a negative—reactionary, fascist, ideological—political potential or not. While critics have developed a perspective inspired by Bloch in relation to the utopian potentials of contemporary fiction, the dialectical quality of non-synchronism includes regressive tendencies such as the reemergence of the past in rhetorics of fascism and hegemonic nationalism, and the hybridisation of slavery and neoliberalism in the Global South. The political reactivation of non-synchronism can either be celebrated for its utopian and subversive value, or condemned as a reactionary form of restoration of the past. This has been a major debate in postcolonial studies. In particular, it animates an inspiring essay by Keya Ganguly on postcolonialism and time, in which she critiques Homi Bhabha’s use of the term “non-synchronous.” I endorse Ganguly’s salutary reminder of the question of class and material conditions of existence that Bhabha’s analysis of historical difference forecloses. However, the value of Bloch’s concept of non-synchronism rests on the “obligation to its dialectics.” It is imperative to see the survival of other times as potentially both progressive and negative, simultaneously essential to realising socialism and global social justice and, yet, at risk of turning into an ideological cover-up of oppression and inequality.11 In an important analysis of Bloch’s Heritage of our Times, Anson Rabinbach notes that the “resurrection of the past” characterising the non-synchronous makes sectors of society vulnerable to fascist propaganda. But, at the same time, it also testifies to a fundamental drive against capitalism. Rabinbach comments that for Bloch, “it is precisely this sedimentation of social experience that creates the intense desire for a resurrection of the past among those groups most susceptible to fascist propaganda” (7). While in orthodox Marxist thought, notes Rabinbach, “the problem is that fascist ideology is not simply instrument of deception but ‘a fragment of an old and romantic antagonism to capitalism’,” for Bloch “the seeds of destruction lie in ignoring the authentic impulse at work here – his book is therefore concerned with the ‘rescue’ this positive heritage” (7).12 The non-synchronous un-subsumed remnants of archaic social formations should not be reduced to either a progressive or a regressive political dimension. By being inherently

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

17

dialectical, they register real contradictions of historical modernity. The non-synchronous quality of the modern experience of time displays the potential to be mobilised as a weapon for social criticism, an uncompromising critique of capitalism as the commodification of everything and a possible space of defiance of the untrammelled process of the accumulation of capital. Alongside the question of totality and political valence, nonsynchronism is also considered in this study as a literary element. How does the non-synchronous reality of the periphery of the world economy affect the concept of literature and the aesthetic dimension of literary works? Is the literary form, in itself, a non-simultaneous mode of cultural transmission? The concluding part of this introduction will hence situate the concept of non-synchronism in relation to the problem of the aesthetic, the possibility of creating a creative tradition and the significance of peripheral modernism for understanding world literature’s politics of time. In literary studies, non-synchronism has the potential to defy both tendencies towards homogenisation and cultural uniformity proper to theories of globalism and global literature and, at the same time, the extreme of differentiation of the fragment and the untranslatable celebrated by culturalist perspectives on postcoloniality and postmodernity. As space of retrieval, survival and transmission, the aesthetic of nonsynchronism is key to definitions of world literature both singular and specific, both systemic and particular.

3

Synchronism as Reification

“Non-synchronism” or “non-simultaneity” is a translation of a German term, ungleichzeitigkeit, which has divided translators and commentators since its first appearances in the translation of Bloch’s writings in English in the 1970s. Thus, in a pivotal essay on Bloch, David Durst makes an important observation in endnote. Durst remarks that the concept of “Ungleichzeitigkeit ” has not found a unitary rendering in English, “something that unfortunately only makes more difficult a systematic study of Bloch’s theory” (192). Thus, in Heritage of Our Times, writes Durst, “Ungleichzeitigkeit is translated as ‘noncontemporaneity,’ whereas in The Spirit of Utopia as ‘nonsynchronism’” (192). Durst opts for “nonsimultaneity,” because to him, this is “the most literal translation of the German term” (192). The concept is not so much untranslatable as over-translated and overdetermined in its politics of translation:

18

F. MENOZZI

the choice between simultaneity and synchronism seems to implicate different ways to understand the term itself and its critical value.13 Thus, Durst opts for “nonsimultaneity,” following Fredric Jameson’s usage in an influential chapter of Postmodernism, where Jameson mentions Bloch in passing. Jameson observes that modernism needs to be seen “as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous,’ the ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous’ (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen),” which means “the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance” (307). Jameson did not exclude the possibility of rendering the term as both non-simultaneity and non-synchronous, and the matter has not entirely been settled. Mark Ritter’s translation of the most important essay on the concept, Bloch’s “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics,” does not follow the same principle endorsed by David Durst. Indeed, Ritter explains in the translator’s note included in the essay that he follows his previous practice “of translating (un)gleichzeitig as ‘(non)synchronous,’” because to him “it is certainly less confusing than ‘simultaneous’” (22). In a more recent essay, Peter Osborne (2015) suggests “nonsametimeliness” in order to give a sense of the act of producing a “same time.” The doubts and debates among translators and commentators reveal the complexity and the problematic nature of the term. Non-synchronous, non-simultaneous, non-contemporary, nonsametimeliness: the choice between these renderings does not merely reflect a stylistic preference. While sametimeliness, contemporaneity and simultaneity indicate important aspects of this problematic, in this volume I will propose to adopt “non-synchronous”/ “non-synchronism” because the reference to “synchronism” maintains crucial undertones. Indeed, the term “synchronisation” may suggest a resonance, which had a crucial significance in the context of Bloch’s essay on non-synchronism, in Germany, during the 1930s. As Massimiliano Tomba notes, “‘synchronization’ is the English translation of the Nazi term Gleichschaltung, which means ‘switching onto the same track’” (Tomba 364). Tomba draws on the work of historian Richard J. Evans and mentions Evans’s remark that “Gleichschaltung was a metaphor drawn from the world of electricity, meaning that all the switches were being put onto the same circuit, as it were, so that they could all be activated by throwing a single master switch at the centre” (Evans 381).14

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

19

In this context, synchronisation can be an image for the rise of a totalitarian system in its genocidal drive. Being what is not captured by the forces of synchronisation, non-synchronism maintains a reference to what is “switched off” or out-of-sync with the act of synchronising. Accordingly, non-synchronism emphasises that the fact of being or happening at the same time is not a given but the product of a process, a politics and a system. Synchronism is not natural but a constituent power with cultural, artificial and mechanical determinations. In the context of Nazi Germany, the term had genocidal effects: “synchronising” came to involve the extermination of all non-synchronised elements in society. But the term also involves another undertone relating the concept of “synchronism” to what Massimiliano Tomba calls the “forces of synchronisation” (355) of contemporary capitalism.15 As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, capitalism involves an “annihilation of space by time” (539) and the subsumption of multiple temporalities within the smooth process of accumulation and reproduction of capital. This is what Marx called the “universalising tendency of capital” (540), which distinguishes it from all other modes of production. Marx writes: While capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. (539)

In a capitalist order, space becomes time: what matters is not the physical place where commodities come from, but how long they take to move from one point to another in an immanent, interconnected system. The measurement of distance is in terms of temporal duration, and space only appears as a “barrier” to the smooth circulation of materials, objects and money. The global expansion of capital, from this point of view, should not merely be seen as spatial or geographical. Capitalism appropriates and colonises time as well: by accelerating the circulation of commodities and what E.P. Thompson famously described as the “synchronisation of labour” (70), the process of accumulation annihilates distance and specificity in the march towards its own growth and self-realisation. Capitalism

20

F. MENOZZI

has the tendency to become universal by metabolising space within its own temporal regime. Within this logic, everything that resists capitalist temporality appears as an obstacle to be wiped away, or a slower, archaic, non-synchronous residue waiting to be annihilated. The non-synchronous is not just something from the past that resists assimilation into the synchronisation of the capitalist order. Rather, it is the rise of capitalism as universal mode of production and “totalising” form of economic regime that produces and qualifies the residues of archaic formations as nonsynchronic. It is, paradoxically, the systemic nature of capitalism that produces non-synchronism, retrospectively, as its negative remainder and excess. Accordingly, the stakes of the debates on non-synchronism cannot be detached from the question of capitalism’s universalising tendency, that is, the problem of the historical totality generated by the world domination of capitalism as a mode of production. For this reason, Bloch’s concept needs to be placed in the debates on totality and the significance of dialectics as Marxist method of analysis that concerned intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. As Nicholas Brown notes in his pivotal study Utopian Generations, the concept of totality should not be confused with totalitarianism or be seen as a mere bypassing of difference or complexity. Rather, Brown notes, totality “should be confused neither with unity nor with simple identity, but rather with the famous Hegelian ‘identity of identity and difference’ … we are not talking about a reduction of difference to identity (difference remains part of the formulation), but rather the explicit placing of difference into a frame where it is made comprehensible” (10). The heuristic value of the concept of totality, notes Brown, is that it gives us “access to the radical incompleteness of what appears spontaneously as solid and whole. Complete, self-evident things (say, a commodity, a democracy, a novel) are in fact incomplete and always derive their being from something else (the production cycle, the world economy, the concept and institution of literature)” (10).16 Within early twentieth-century debates on the idea of totality, Bloch’s theory of nonsynchronism should be contextualised within his prolonged conversation with Georg Lukács, and especially Bloch’s response to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which was published some years before Bloch’s essay on the non-synchronous and contained a critique of Bloch’s earlier work on utopia. In his influential work, Lukács argued for a renewed attention to the material conditions of existence engendered by capitalism as a totality. According to Lukács it is, indeed, the point of view of

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

21

totality that characterises the core of Marxism as a method. But for Lukács “totality” only means the totality of a fully subsumed capitalist society, as it emerges from an influential passage of History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács writes: It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxist and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel … The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals … must all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of capitalism. (27)

While Lukács and Bloch agreed on opposing reification, that is, the atomisation, alienation and fragmentation of life imposed by capitalism, the perspective of totality advocated by Lukács is profoundly different from the kind of systemic view presented in Bloch’s essay on non-synchronism. While Lukács remains within the standpoint of synchronicity, the commodification of everything and what Marx defined as the “real” subsumption of social relationships to capitalist domination, Bloch reopens the category of totality to a multiple, polyphonic, multi-directional analysis able to explore the survival of pre-capitalist times and residues as emissions and voices that have a role to play within the present.17 As Durst explains, “Bloch was wary of what he termed ‘the homogenizing tendency’ in Lukács’s concept of totality … such an overly ‘homogenizing’ understanding of the concept is too abstract and illegitimately omits ‘what does not fit’ into its bourgeois frame of reference” (181–184). Indeed, one of the key theses of Bloch’s pivotal essay “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics” regards the formulation of a “critical and non-contemplative” totality: a perspective on the overall development of capitalism able to account for the uneven experience of modernity at the peripheries of the global economy. The problem of totality has an intense methodological value for Bloch. As a critical concept, totality needs to be maintained because without it the forces, contradictions and tensions of the capitalist system would become meaningless. A critique unable to keep the point of view of the whole as

22

F. MENOZZI

a constant horizon of analysis would merely replicate the atomisation that capitalism imposes on producers and commodities. Bloch drew on Hegel and Marx in adopting the dialectical method in order to grasp the systemic, universalising tendency of capital, but he also radically questioned the idea of dialectics as a closed, predetermined and teleological system.18 Bloch’s dialectical method does not neglect the fact that capitalism creates a global enclosure, a systemic appropriation of the earth through the logic of endless accumulation. Yet, he also represents the place of unevenness or non-synchronicity as a potential site of subversion, openness and unpredictability within the system. Bloch adopts the metaphor of a polyphonic ensemble as a way of describing the dialectical method that informs his analysis. He describes capitalism—and the “synchronic” class struggle determined by capitalist social relationships—as a “dominant voice” that needs to remain as constant reference point in the retrieval of archaic forms: Having everything that is past, in infinite polyphony as it were, without a dominant voice, is mere historicism. Applying typically identical, at least formally identical “forms” and “laws” to all that is past is mere sociologism. Marxism … does not find its dialectics to be the same everywhere as they appear in capitalism. It varies them concretely according to individual social conditions, and above all, it tries to maintain for its dialectics, even with the continuingly effective past in capitalism, that totality which is proper to the dialectical tendency of development. (Bloch 1977, 37)

In this passage, Bloch makes a crucial intervention into Marxist debates over the dialectical method and the concept of totality. The very “totality” that Marxism adopts as object of analysis should not only encompass the development and history of capitalism but also the dialectical combination of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms that are still effective in the present. In this way, Marxism is able to avoid falling into “historicism,” compared by Bloch to a polyphony without a dominant voice. In Bloch’s discourse, historicism would be a perspective that separates neatly capitalism from all other modes of production and social relationships, holding that capitalism is only one form among many others, in a historical level playing field. The celebration of multiple modernities would fall into this “historicist” trap, unlike Jameson’s concept of a “singular modernity,” which keeps the tension engendered by capitalism as

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

23

the dominant horizon of contemporary cultural experience. These questions emerge in the debate between Susan Friedman and Fredric Jameson on the concept of modernity. Friedman suggests that “Jameson’s notion of singularity impoverishes what needs to be a complex approach to the overdeterminations of history and the enmeshments of different systems of power in understanding modernity” (480). In contrast to Jameson’s and WReC’s insistence that modernity cannot be understood but with reference to the global expansion of capital, Friedman objects to “the way such terms as alternative, other, peripheral, and even divergent reinstate Western modernity as the center, with all the ‘other’ modernities as marginal or derivative,” preferring “terms that suggest the fluidity and multiplicity of modernities, terms that refuse to use one modernity as the measure of all others” (481). While Friedman’s important intervention raises the crucial question of not treating peripheral modernity as merely derivative, the problem with any celebration of fluidity and multiplicity is that these metaphors do not fully account for the fact that today, capitalism is unequivocally the only globally dominant mode of production, affecting social relationships worldwide (Dirlik 2003). Any fluidity is always contained within the apparatus of capture of the accumulation of capital. As Adorno notes in an essay on class theory, fluidity and “dynamism” is “merely one side of dialectic … because constant change is the best way to conceal the old untruth. The other, less popular aspect of dialectic is its static side” (Adorno 2003, 94–95). The levelling and fragmentation of modernity into a fluid and dynamic series of multiple derivations are rather a symptom of capitalism’s atomising and alienating influence, more than a diagnostic tool. Furthermore, a concept of “Western modernity,” rather than capitalist modernity, could end up replicating what Neil Lazarus aptly calls the “fetish of the West” in postcolonial studies.19 The accent on a singular modernity does not entail the expansion of “the West” to “the rest,” but rather capitalism’s universalising tendency in its historical and geographical colonisation of the earth. Modernity is singular because it is overdetermined by capital, though this does not imply the reiteration of a “Western” pattern worldwide, a lack of attention to local specificity or a stagist concept of history. As WReC points out, Jameson’s perspective “emphasises modernity’s singularity and global simultaneity, while insisting that singularity here does not obviate internal heterogeneity and that simultaneity does not preclude unevenness or marked difference” (14).20

24

F. MENOZZI

On the other hand, however, Marxism should avoid projecting the history and social arrangement determined by capitalism onto different social formations. The kind of totality grasped by Marxism should place capitalism and hence the class struggle determined by it as the “dominant voice” of history, its guide and main development. But it should not reduce the “totality” to it. For this reason, Marxist dialectics should be “multi-spatial” and “multi-temporal” (Bloch 1977, 37), inclusive and differentiated rather than homogenising. Instead of staging the past as a closed object of contemplation, a truly dialectical method needs to reopen the unfinished past and engage with it critically in order to change the present.21 The conclusion of Bloch’s essay is, for this reason, a reflection on the necessity of a polyphonic and multi-temporal dialectical method. Bloch observes: The proletarian voice of synchronous dialectics remains decidedly the leading one; but both above and below this cantus firmus (fixed hymn) run disorderly emissions which can only be related to the cantus firmus (fixed hymn) by its relating itself to them – in a critical and non-contemplative totality. And multispatial dialectics proves itself above all in the dialectization of still “irrational” contents which are, in terms of their still critical positivum, the “nebulae” of the nonsynchronous contradictions. (38)

Bloch’s point concerns the need to enrich “synchronous dialectics”— that is, the analysis of class struggle as determined by the current, most advanced, stage of capitalism—with the inclusion of other “disorderly emissions” that mark the coexistence of residues from pre-capitalist pasts. According to Bloch, this is necessary in order to understand what a merely synchronous dialectics would only grasp as irrational content, as incomprehensible survival that would automatically disappear with the progress of the stages of world history. A first aspect of the concept of the “non-synchronous,” hence, is the fact that non-synchronic elements are in fact elements of a totality, which is determined by the universalising tendency of the capitalist world system, and yet cannot be reduced to the impositions of the present stage of this dominant mode of production. Non-synchronicity is the awareness that the systemic perspective, in order to be truly dialectical and truly “systemic,” needs to incorporate emissions, experiences, times and voices that are not completely encompassed by the current economic formation. This means that Bloch can be aligned with Lukács’s History and Class

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

25

Consciousness from the point of view of denouncing the inhumanity of capitalism, the suffering produced by inequality, the division of labour and the alienation of the producer from the whole process of production. Yet, Bloch’s multi-temporal dialectics recaptures elements external to late capitalism that survive within the global economy in order to formulate a more complex, open-ended and diverse dialectical method. As Slavoj Zizek writes in his preface to The Privatization of Hope, the “wager of a dialectical approach is not to adopt toward the present the ‘point of view of finality,’ viewing it as if it were already past, but precisely to reintroduce the openness of future into the past, to grasp that-what-was in its process of becoming, to see the contingent process that generated existing necessity” (xviii, emphasis in original). This leads directly to a second problematic knot in the category of non-synchronism: its potential political value, which is a component centrally addressed by Bloch in his essay.

4

The Politics of the Untimely

Is non-synchronism the site of ideological mystification or is it the place of a possible subversion of capitalism? Is it utopian or restorative? How to make sense of the inherently contradictory aspect of non-synchronism from a political point of view? In postcolonial studies, non-synchronous politics has been seen from two opposing standpoints: either as resistance and celebration of the deconstruction of the history of anti-colonial national liberation or, on the other hand, as regressive blockage to social mobilisation. The most influential critic who places non-synchronism on the side of resistance has undoubtedly been Homi K. Bhabha who emphasises the disruptive role of the non-synchronous in performances of cultural difference. In Bhabha’s view, non-synchronicity opens up a space of contestation that splits the subject claiming identity or difference and hence prevents the establishment of a stable sense of belonging. According to Bhabha, the political potential of the non-synchronous would rest on its introduction of a sense of untimeliness and temporal disorientation that does not allow the sedimentation of fixed narratives. Thus, Bhabha remarks how cultural difference “introduces into the process of cultural judgement and interpretation that sudden shock of the successive, non-synchronic time of signification” and how the “splitting of the subject of enunciation destroys the logics of synchronicity and evolution that traditionally authorize the subject of cultural knowledge”

26

F. MENOZZI

(Bhabha 53, 312). In Bhabha’s work, the “non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space – a third space – where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences” (ibid.). As these passages from Bhabha’s Location of Culture show, non-synchronism is constantly celebrated for its disruptive potential. It is described as a form of shock, interruption, split and tension. In its deconstructive tone, Bhabha’s discourse on non-synchronism prevents a clear confrontation between oppositional discourses. The real paradox of Bhabha’s understanding of non-synchronism derives from the fact that, to him, non-synchronism’s radical potential involves its power to disrupt any discourse, including the very discourse of opposition and resistance. The non-synchronous would hence trigger a short circuit in possible formulations of resistance and would make any coherent narrative of contestation impossible, concealing the material conditions of exploitation and oppression behind a celebration of endless deconstruction. Concepts of untimeliness or nonsynchronicity as a challenge to anti-colonial nationalism have continued to be celebrated in other important works. Gary Wilder’s remarkable research on decolonisation, for example, also frames non-synchronism as deconstruction of coherent “grand-narratives” of resistance and emancipation—in Wilder’s case, the narrative of anti-colonial independence struggle. Wilder follows the path initiated by anthropologist David Scott’s book Conscripts of Modernity: a revisionist project aiming “to move beyond the historiography of revolutionary nationalism” (Wilder 103) and to retell decolonisation while abandoning the emphasis on anticolonial struggles for national emancipation. Wilder retrieves a notion of the untimely as part of a different historical consciousness animating past forms of “nonnational colonial emancipation” (103, emphasis in original). The untimely corresponds to unrealised forms of “(colonial) freedom” (104) that Wilder rediscovers as alternative modes of decolonisation. Within this project, the concept of untimeliness is addressed as follows: By untimely I mean out of sync with the corresponding historical period. Such actions and events are the kind of phenomena that Ernst Bloch refers to as “nonsynchronous” and Koselleck as “the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” … This is not only a matter of something being outmoded or ahead of its time, of merely moving against the historical current. Nor do I use the term to refer only to the phenomenon of

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

27

uneven historical development. Rather, untimely here indexes processes and practices of temporal refraction whereby people act “as if” they inhabit a different historical moment, whether intentionally, as part of a political strategy, or unconsciously, as symptom of a syndrome. Untimeliness here also refers to instances when conventional distinctions among past, present, and future become blurred. (106, emphasis in original)

Wilder’s comments are highly valuable as they capture a central dimension of Bloch’s idea of non-synchronism: the reactivation of the past is both an objective and a subjective process, simultaneously a symptom and a strategy, or what Bloch portrayed as the cold and warm streams of Marxism. In this passage, however, Wilder also mentions the work of historian Reinhart Koselleck, who was a member of Hitler Youth and served in the German army during the 1930s, in order to propose an idea of the untimely that corresponds to the mobilisation of the out-of-sync, or “processes and practices of temporal refraction” whereby historical reality shifts into the realm of potentiality and the “as if.”22 According to Wilder, revolutionary acts embed a utopian dimension which is by its very nature out-of-sync with the present as well as defiant of nationalist narratives of liberation and resistance. Thus, in his analysis of Haitian anti-colonial leader Toussaint Louverture, Wilder suggests that the radical untimeliness of Loverture’s political imagination embodies the ideal of emancipation from colonialism without national independence. Wilder writes that such model of shared sovereignty of “colonial emancipation without national independence” was “out of sync on the one hand with French national and imperial norms and on the other with the separatist wishes of his own militant soldiers and slave rebels, who distrusted his willingness to collaborate with white planters and officials” (121). Wilder captures an important aspect of non-synchronism as political strategy and retrieval of unrealised potentialities of the past, and for this reason, his analysis shows important aspects of the question.23 However, the kind of politics suggested by non-national emancipation is very different from Bloch’s Marxist dialectics. The concept of nonsynchronism formulated by the latter involves a firm focus on the class struggle, dialectical contradiction and the deep awareness of regressive and reactionary forms of untimeliness. Non-synchronous elements are both objective aspects of society and subjective acts of political involvement, highly variable and always at risk of turning into ideological concealment of oppression and into fascist mystification of the past.

28

F. MENOZZI

In their objective side, non-synchronous elements are, as Massimiliano Tomba writes in Marx’s Temporalities, “traditional and unwaged forms of production, which are not specifically capitalist, and are inserted into the capitalist market in hybrid-forms of subsumption” (168). The nonsynchronous, from this point of view, can indicate the fact that, under global capitalism, “patriarchal forms of exploitation and new forms of slavery not only coexist with high-tech production, but also combine with it. Different temporalities are tied to each other, marking the rhythm of global production … What emerges is a scenario where global space is completely temporalised” (ibid.). Non-synchronism can be defined as the dialectical intimacy of temporal contradictions that can drive diverging political outcomes in the present: both a symptom and a strategy, subjective and objective feature of the present, non-synchronism can be reactionary as well as progressive. In her excellent analysis of the objective side of non-synchronism, Keya Ganguly discusses Bhabha’s celebration of the untimely and offers a salutary reminder of the problematic value of this concept. Ganguly writes: If, in Bhabha’s writing, non-synchronousness is seen as a matter of the “temporal split” that purportedly characterizes postcolonial subjectivity in opposition to what he regards as the homogeneity of national culture, the problem of non-synchronism or non-simultaneity is formulated in completely different, even opposing terms in Bloch … Bhabha (mis-)reads non-synchronousness as an argument about agency, making it appear oppositional, even subversive, whereas Bloch’s point was that it represented a blockage against social mobilization … The problem is to figure out how to eliminate non-simultaneity so that people can be wrested away from the grip of the past … The hypostatisation of cultural identity in Bhabha’s work … comes at the expense of the analysis of class and class consciousness. (174)

Ganguly points out the crucial limits of the celebration of the untimely inspired by Bhabha’s work. She rightly distinguishes Bloch from Bhabha as two incompatible views on the non-synchronous and correctly reminds readers of the importance of material conditions, class analysis and class consciousness. Ganguly’s critique continues to be relevant in relation to influential works such as Pheng Cheah’s important interventions in the world literature debate, especially Cheah’s engagement with the question of time in What is a World? Cheah’s analysis is based on a juxtaposition

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

29

between the empty time of capitalism and what he calls the “heterotemporality” of survivals of the past in the present, “wild temporalities” which “recall an even older time, prior to the time of colonial capital, that has left its mark on the postcolonial present as a resource for resistance and the projection of a future, alternative modernity” (232). External to capital and inherently revolutionary, Cheah’s notion of heterotemporality needs to be complemented by the analysis of how imperialism produces these temporalities through uneven and combined development, and how the emerging other times are not always necessarily progressive, revolutionary or resistant. Non-synchronism must need to be seen dialectically, both subjectively and objectively, as an element that can assume different roles in specific historical conjunctures. While not necessarily progressive or liberating, however, the non-synchronous can suggest a way of looking at history from the point of view of unrealised potentialities, futures yet not conscious that might reveal, in some specific conjunctures, hidden possibilities of social transformation. Keya Ganguly offers a compelling analysis of these dynamics in her work on Satyajit Ray, in which she expands on the temporal dislocations of the postcolonial condition. Ganguly writes, in her book on Ray, how “the present is not only given by what came before; it also enables any prospect of what is to come … from the standpoint of the past two centuries, all history is a history of the future” (36–37). These reflections lead Ganguly to articulate a “reflexive consciousness about temporality” (38) which reintroduces the time of interpretation within the temporal articulations of past, present and future. Ganguly’s reflections extend the concept of non-synchronism to introduce the dimension of the future past, or the possibility of formulating a predictive sense of history by binding anticipations of the future and reactivations of the past to the making of the present. This is an aspect that Bloch explored in the volumes of The Principle of Hope, where he developed the notion of an “anticipatory consciousness” of the “Not Yet.” In this work, Bloch challenged the idea of reducing history to the past and all that is the case, and attempted a rewriting of history from the point of view of what never took place: the Not Yet Conscious, a form of unconscious that does not derive from repression or forgetfulness, but from “a content of consciousness which has not yet become wholly manifest, and is still dawning from the future” (116). In The Principle of Hope, Bloch reflected on the human ability to anticipate the future, a “mode of consciousness of something coming closer”

30

F. MENOZZI

(116) that does not fall into an idea of history as what has taken place or will take place, but rather aims to set free unrealised struggles for human liberation. Bloch’s concept of anticipatory consciousness was part of his attempt to think Marxism as a “militant optimism” (199) that would be capable of making the Not Yet Conscious possible and concrete. It captures an important aspect through which non-synchronism itself needs to be thought and complicated. The dislocation of the present, indeed, does not merely correspond to the awareness of past survivals and remnants, but also to a consciousness of the “Not Yet,” an anticipation of the future in the past which, however, is not always necessarily liberating or resistant. Seeing the Not Yet through the lens of non-synchronism allows for a dialectical understanding of the overlap of past and future within the present, avoiding any simplistic reduction of the irruption of other temporalities to liberating utopias or regressive mythologies. Caroline Edwards notes, in this regard, that the Blochean notion of the “Not Yet” is grounded in the simultaneity of “latent, residual and emergent potentialities” offering a “vehicle in which the future and the past are articulated in the present, collapsing linear notions of chronology through an understanding of time as subjective, utopianly mediated, and suffused with hope” (Edwards 2013, 188).24 The crux is not so much whether non-synchronism is merely disruptive or potentially useful to political transformation. The question posed by Bloch was precisely about the kind of politics and the kind of transformation that the non-synchronous can exert. Not all transformations, unrealised utopias or disruptions are inherently good. The non-synchronous can be but does not always represent a blockage against social mobilisation. On the contrary, non-synchronism can hold a powerful grip on the masses and turn into collective agency. It was, precisely, the capture of non-synchronous elements into a form of genocidal synchronisation that, according to Bloch, led to the rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1930s. Seen as inherently dialectical concept, non-synchronicity shows, on the one hand, what Bloch called the “objectively nonsynchronous … that which is far from and alien to the present; it includes both declining remnants and, above all, uncompleted past, which has not yet been ‘sublated’ by capitalism” (31, emphasis in original). Alongside an objective non-synchronous contradiction, however, there exists a “subjectively non-synchronous contradiction,” which “activates this objectively nonsynchronous one” (31). Bloch describes phenomenologically the subjective activation of the objectively non-synchronous as pent-up anger

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

31

and resentment towards the present. However, Bloch’s analysis of the subjective non-synchronous should not be reduced to a feeling of anger and disappointment. The subjective non-synchronous has, undoubtedly, a political aspect, being what turns an objective situation into a political strategy. The subjective non-synchronous sets to work the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity and becomes a crucial element of how the untimely is activated in the present. Accordingly, Ben Etherington emphasises the centrality of “Bloch’s distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ nonsynchronicity. He develops these concepts when considering the conditions that enabled the success of Nazism … At the same time, the remnants … of technologies, social relations and practices from the past served as objective reminders of previous social realities … The fascists, he argues, successfully had steered nonsynchronous discontent with the current capitalist crisis toward an irrational affirmation of the remnants of the surpassed social reality” (9). The point made by Bloch, as the title of his important essay suggests, is that there is an “obligation” to the dialectics of the non-synchronous. Bloch’s method is deeply rooted in the Marxist tradition of dialectical thinking, whereby dialectics is not a merely contemplative or teleological process, but rather “the relationship of subject and object … subjectivity working its way forward, again and again overtaking the objectivation and objectivity it has attained, and seeking to explode them” (Bloch 1980, 4). The concept of nonsynchronism needs to be approached dialectically, as a constant striving of subjectivity to break through the forms of objectivity and reification it constantly produces. The real issue at stake is that non-synchronic residues that survive in the present, when turning from objective condition into a political strategy or subjective action, can have either revolutionary or reactionary qualities. Thus, the non-synchronous can incorporate revolutionary elements because by its very existence it represents a critique of the commodification of everything. Indeed, non-synchronous forces represent what in society has not been fully integrated into the alienating, dispossessing and atomising system of capitalism. Bloch points out: The forms and contents of the past naturally do not attract the classconscious worker at all … And yet, the relatively more lively and intact nature of earlier human relationships do become clear to him. These relationships were still relatively more immediate than those in capitalism … To be sure, this immediacy was only seemingly closer in earlier forms, only

32

F. MENOZZI

relatively better determined. And yet, this “relative” not only serves, in a reactionary way, to hold up against the present a past as something which in part is genuinely not dead. It also positively delivers in places a part of that matter which seeks a life not destroyed by capital, indeed, which, leading in a proletarian way … rebels as the alienation (Entausserung ) of “human beings,” as the tearing up “of life.” (34)

The non-synchronous can have a progressive political function, but only as awareness of the inhumanity of capitalism and the reclamation of a more immediate—whole, fuller, non-alienated—material condition of existence. At its best, the sense of wholeness projected through survivals of the past can envisage social relationships not subjugated by alienation from the means, resources and products of labour. As denunciation of capitalism’s alienation and utopian drive towards a form of existence not based on the division of labour and the continuous exploitation of workers, the non-synchronous offers a way to express discontent with the status quo and a powerful challenge to capitalism. However, by shifting from critique of the commodification of everything into a nostalgic longing for a Golden Age, a pure cultural essence or the myth of an uncontaminated past to be retrieved, the non-synchronous ends up offering the material for fascism and cultural essentialism, moving from the universal ideals of emancipation and communism to the enclosure and factionalism of community. As Oskar Negt points out, Bloch understood that “in intensified crisis situations, when the solution of the contradictions within the logic of capital is limited and the legitimating facade of the bourgeois state breaks up, fascism in its manifold forms inherits all these things and reinterprets them in the interest of reestablishing old master-slave relationships” (48). Bloch’s radical message is that Marxism, instead of merely dismissing non-synchronism as a regressive cultural element to be wiped away by class struggle, needs to channel the residual, non-synchronic, untimely aspects of society towards class struggle.25 A perspective inspired by Bloch does not celebrate the non-synchronous per se. The disruptive force of the non-synchronous can be, in fact, extremely harmful and act as a mythical cover-up of really existing relationships of exploitation. However, Bloch did not dismiss the political value of non-synchronism. The resentment, discontent and unreconciled element of the past embodied by the term “non-synchronism” need to be channelled into the struggle for the emancipation of the oppressed classes and the creation of socialism.26

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

33

Bloch’s project to examine non-synchronicity needs to be understood as an attempt to contribute to Marxist theory and revolutionary practice; similarly, the very notion of “non-synchronism” needs to be seen as a keyword of an open-ended, anti-teleological dialectical materialism. An important legacy of Bloch’s analysis is the open question of how non-synchronism can become helpful to class struggle, that is, how to wrest non-synchronic forms away from mythology, ideology and fascism. The channelling of non-synchronic elements within progressive politics— rather than just politics per se—involves the problem of reconceptualising the relation between culture and the material conditions of existence of the oppressed classes today. In this context, the concept of world literature becomes a way of registering the political derivations of non-synchronism in different sites of social struggle and inequality. World literature, indeed, offers a record of non-synchronism as both objective, material situation and “subjective” activation of objective conditions for various political ends. This perspective does not involve reducing non-synchronism to either revolution or mystification, but illustrates a more nuanced, dialectically informed understanding of this notion as key component of the global dimension of capitalist modernity.

5

Non-synchronism as Creative Tradition

The aesthetic and literary expression of the subjective and objective logics of non-synchronism emerges from WReC’s concept of “peripheral modernism.” In a pivotal essay on the term, Benita Parry refers to peripheral modernisms as the “aesthetic forms generated beyond capitalism’s cores” (Parry 2009, 31). These forms express historical, economic and social unevenness through the combination of differing formal strategies and elements. In representing the history of “capitalist modernization in the peripheries,” Parry writes, peripheral modernism captures a situation in which “the disruption of the old … left swathes of long-established conditions in place. Here the bourgeois epoch was slow in arriving and incomplete in its arrival; here economic conditions and social formations pertaining to pre-, nascent and ‘classical’ capitalism were contiguous” (ibid.). One of the most compelling issues opened by peripheral modernism concerns the fact that this aesthetic mode mirrors, in literary form, what Parry calls the “persistence” of earlier social formations alongside the dominant mode of production. Through the ideas of persistence, combination and contiguity, the notion of peripheral modernism

34

F. MENOZZI

poses crucial questions about the temporal experience of the literature of the modern world system. The aesthetic dimension of non-synchronism, its point of mediation between uneven temporalities, emerges in works of literature in which the manipulation of time through narrative technique is endowed with wider political and historical significance, in particular with the task of representing the material condition of peripherality. Literary dislodgements of the chronological order of narrative are not simply experiments with form. Technical devices such as anachronism, metanarrative, digression, parataxis, peripeteia, ekphrasis, focalisation, flashback, flash-forward, framing and embedded narrative become true registers of a complex historical experience in which capitalism encounters non-synchronous remnants. The conjuncture of disjointed times cannot be explained away by reference to fractured selfhoods or sisiphean quests for stable cultural belonging, but rather needs to be rooted in material conditions of existence of a non-synchronic nature. The aesthetic of non-synchronism is always a kind of totalisation, a conjuncture of incommensurable experiences within a common temporal frame. Accordingly, the aesthetic of non-synchronism cannot be reduced to either achronic stylistic device (the disruption of narrative chronological orders) or thematic concern (the representation of elements of the past or the future inhabiting the present). The specifically aesthetic quality of non-synchronism emerges in texts where stylistic devices and thematic concerns intersect to reveal wider dynamics at work in global capitalism, where times interact with each other and scattered social experiences are reattached, dialectically, within what could be called a multiversal literary space. The concept of peripheral modernism intimates and discloses a wider aesthetic and epistemological space for examining how the situation of the periphery entails a reframing of the very meaning of historical temporality, bridging the gap between historical tendency and the constituent power of subject production. It also enables a notion of literary and cultural transmission that goes beyond the fragmentary aspects of literary form typical of modernist aesthetics. The concept of peripheral modernism implies the epistemological ground of an aesthetic of non-synchronism able to move beyond fragment and disjuncture: accordingly, it reframes the concept of literary tradition through the idea of the persistence of archaic forms in dialectical relationship with the emergence of modernity. While the concept of “modernism” (as well as “realism”) operates on the level of form, the concept of “non-synchronism” aims to reveal a deeper

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

35

level of knowledge and representation affecting the social construction and perception of time. While elaborating on the idea of peripheral modernism/realism, the aesthetic of non-synchronism situates world literature in relation to the epistemic level of what François Hartog would call a “regime of historicity” proper to capitalist modernity. From this point of view, the problematic of the non-synchronous does not only adopt Ernst Bloch’s multi-spatial dialectical method, along with the paradigm of “combined and uneven development,” as proposed by Leon Trotsky during the 1930s. The aesthetic of non-synchronism can also be affiliated to Trotsky’s reflections on the relationship between literature and politics and, more specifically, literature and class struggle. In an important passage of a 1923 essay titled “Communist Policy towards Art,” which is included in Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky meditates on the importance of creating a new art and a new culture through the political struggle against capitalism and the bourgeois world. Yet, Trotsky observes that the struggle of the oppressed classes against capitalism “cannot begin the construction of a new culture without absorbing and assimilating the elements of the old cultures … The proletariat also needs a continuity of creative tradition” (185–186). Trotsky challenged a concept of “revolutionary art” limited to the art produced by revolutionary workers and suggested that even the outmoded, residual forms of (bourgeois) past artistic expression could help the development and realisation of communism in the realm of culture. Non-synchronism can offer a latent repository of anticipations of the Not Yet, a reservoir of future pasts that can, in some instances, become tools in the struggle for social justice and equality. The cultural work of a politically progressive project should not only consider texts that are explicitly tuned to anti-capitalist struggle. Rather, world literature indicates the possibility of constructing a sense of the aesthetic as creative tradition registering the survivals of non-synchronic traces, sometimes against the grain of writers’ explicit ideologies and political affiliations. This book does not suggest that the aesthetic of non-synchronism should identify a specific canon. The location of the aesthetic of nonsynchronism from the standpoint of WReC’s notion of world literature implies that the books encompassed in this research neither form a canon—a would-be “great tradition”—nor is this aesthetic simply a matter of close reading. Neither a canon nor a way of reading, nonsynchronism indicates a mode of literary production to be found in works

36

F. MENOZZI

from different eras, contexts and literary movements, where the representational space acts as a conjuncture of uneven temporalities. The works selected in this book have been chosen because they reveal different aspects and modes in which non-synchronism can work as a register of multiple historical experiences, such as the reappearance of pre-colonial tradition in colonial or postcolonial times, the nostalgic return to the past in political mobilisation or the traces of the Not Yet in future past. The selection proposed in this book, for this reason, needs to be seen as a starting point and a beginning, an aperture rather than a closure. By analysing how different authors from different peripheral locations have adopted non-synchronism as aesthetic ground in their fiction, it calls for newer terms of comparison and new ways of connecting literary production, comparatively, across different geographical and historical locations. All texts analysed in this book represent untimely returns of the past or anticipations of the future in a chronologically non-linear sequence. Historically, the primary texts cover a wide temporal range that could be defined as contemporary and postcolonial, situated between 1989 and 2015. All texts included in this book witness the period coming after the wave of decolonisation and national independence in Africa and South Asia. A late imperialist and neoliberal age, the contemporary moment represented in these novels coincides with the historical realisation that what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “interior world of capital” had been extended to the entirety of the planet: in its systemic remit, capitalism is the singular horizon of the contemporary world. Fictional works from the periphery show, however, how the total domination of capital has entailed a proliferation, rather than standardisation, of uneven times and historical experiences. Geographically, the texts address various locations spread across Africa and South Asia. Undoubtedly, the aesthetic of non-synchronism could be extended to interpreting many other works of fiction written in different languages, historical eras and geographical contexts. The choice of these five books was guided by the fact that these novels illustrate key aspects of non-synchronism as an aesthetic, historical and political phenomenon. The aesthetic of non-synchronism captures the way in which these works are grounded in and simultaneously express the temporal consciousness of the peripheral condition. Hence, it is a discourse about the worldliness of the text as much as it focuses on style and form.

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

37

The use of Trotsky’s term “creative tradition” can also be seen as a de-commodifying practice of cultural transmission which aims to preserve the dreams and unrealised hopes of past generations of the oppressed alongside the record of defeat, oppression and exploitation. Trotsky’s creative tradition, along with Bloch’s notion of anticipatory consciousness, shows, as Enzo Traverso notes, a cultural transmission aimed at “transforming the dream of emancipation that had haunted human societies since Antiquity into a philosophical vision of the future” (70). An aesthetic of non-synchronism offers a way of connecting, from this point of view, memory and utopia, working as a point of mediation between the record of suffering and the unfulfilled potential of past struggles, redefining a multiversal, dialectical and open-ended sense of time. As Harry Harootunian has shown, capitalism’s logic of subsumption involves a commodification of history based on appropriation and forgetfulness—a move from capitalism as “becoming” to capitalism as a “being,” positing “the eternality and natural character of capitalism, its ahistoricity” (28). Against the commodification of history, an aesthetic of non-synchronism aims to interrogate and to illuminate the historicity of the contemporary world and to contribute to understanding the effects of capital accumulation beyond Europe and North America. The aesthetic of non-synchronism, indeed, appears through figures of discordance, asymmetry, anachronism and disjointedness, but it does not limit itself to exhibiting disconnected narrations. Rather, this research aims to show that the dialectical quality of non-synchronism also involves the ability to recapture the fragments of time, personal and communal memory and everyday life, into a wider and deeper sense of history as a unifying and meaningful process. If capitalist modernity is grasped as a totality in which multiple times coexist and combine, world literature offers an archive of this temporal heterogeneity both as an objective, material condition of existence and as a production of peripheral political subjectivities. These aspects articulate an aesthetic space that does not merely offer an imaginary solution to real contradiction and an ideological escape from objectivity. Rather, the aesthetic discourse offered in this book aims to capture the fact that the formation of a peripheral creative tradition entails a point of mediation between form and history and a politicisation of the experience of time: residues from archaic societies are constantly mobilised for varying political purposes, and non-synchronism’s resistance to the reification of life is constantly channelled in opposing political projects. The

38

F. MENOZZI

aesthetic of non-synchronism, to conclude, of mediation and transmission connecting and expression, culture and politics, while as a conjuncture of incommensurable times expansion of capitalism as a system.

offers a contradictory space past and future, experience reframing non-synchronism produced by the worldwide

Notes 1. WReC’s concept of world literature is thoughtfully distinguished from other uses of the term “world literature” diffused through the works of Pheng Cheah, Emily Apter, David Damrosch and Pascale Casanova. In particular, WReC follows Franco Moretti’s insistence on the term “system” as a way of situating literature within the modern (capitalist) world system, while challenging Moretti’s uni-directional vision of the relation between central and peripheral regions and emphasising the overdetermined and “multi-scalar” processes of cultural interaction across the system (WReC 55). 2. Works from the late twentieth century like Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, among others, emphasise the disjunctive quality of the postcolonial condition (for a critical reading of such ideologies of postcolonialism, see Lazarus 2004). 3. Culturalism is used to indicate the attitude “to think of people as the creation of culture, rather than the reverse. The activity which produces and reproduces culture appears merely as one of the many ways in which people act according to their culture” (Dirlik 14). Culturalism means commodification in the realm of culture. 4. Immanuel Wallerstein traces the origins of capitalist modernity in sixteenth-century Europe. He writes: “the world in which we are now living, the modern world-system, had its origin in the sixteenth century. This world-system was then located in only a part of the globe … It expanded over time to cover the whole globe. It is and has always been a world-economy. It is and has always been a capitalist world economy” (23, emphasis in original). 5. The notion of cultural transmission underlying this concept of world literature registers what John McCole describes, in his seminal study on Walter Benjamin, as the “paradoxical conjoining of continuity and discontinuity” (300). Simultaneously utopian and regressive, the non-synchronous concept of literary and cultural tradition required by a materialist concept of world literature is necessarily dialectical. 6. Stavros Tombazos’s pivotal Time in Marx addresses the “organic composition of capital,” which includes the linear temporality of production

1

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

39

and the cyclical temporality of circulation. See Bracaletti (2018) for a discussion of Tombazos’s research on time in Marx. The essay was published as a chapter of Bloch’s 1935 book Heritage of Our Times. In the 1991 English translation of the book, the essay is titled “Non-contemporaneity and Obligation to its Dialectics.” In my analysis, I will refer to Ritter’s 1977 translation of the essay for the journal New German Critique. I adopt “residual” following Raymond Williams, that is, a notion indicating that “experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social formation” (40). Trotsky formulated his theory of combined and uneven development in the first volume of The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), where he formulated “the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” (Trotsky 5). Trotsky’s 1932 definition moves beyond the idea of a simply “uneven” development by emphasising that unevenness is also “combined”: multiple times do not merely coexist, but rather assemble, co-produce and interact with the present. As I revise this introduction, I note the publication of Caroline Edwards’s excellent book on utopia in British fiction (Edwards 2019), where this concept is mentioned alongside Bloch’s non-contemporaneity. Samir Amin examines the logic of exploitation of the periphery in Imperialism and Uneven Development. The references to the term “peripheral” suggest that the question of imperialism and the formation of a worldwide class struggle are at the heart of the concept of non-synchronism. Benita Parry remarks that the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous “was structural to colonized societies and continues to be so in post-independence nation-states” (Parry 2006, 13). As Vittorio Morfino notes, Bloch’s reflections on progress, as he developed them in a 1955 essay on the topic, show that “Bloch considers the colonial manipulation of progress just as reactionary as its ahistorical negation. Progress must be thought instead as a chariot with many horses” (130). This allowed Bloch to go beyond “both the schema of the continuous line and the schema of epochs understood as islands … history can therefore be thought through the concept of a plural temporality, represented by the metaphor of the multiversum” (131). Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have further elaborated on the links between romanticism and anti-capitalist sentiment in their work Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, where they analyse romanticism’s

40

F. MENOZZI

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

“fabulously contradictory character” (1) as both revolutionary and reactionary, progressive and regressive resistance to capitalist modernity. Löwy and Sayre explain that “Bloch highlights the critical, subversive, anticapitalist, and potentially revolutionary dimension of various cultural manifestations that stem from Romanticism … At the same time, he subjects the reactionary and fascistic manifestations of that same culture … to a merciless critique” (177). This is further complicated by Bloch’s work on Thomas Münzer and the theology of revolution in which non-synchronism also indicated, as Peter Thompson remarks, that “the desire for human liberation can crop up at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways. The peasants uprising in 1525 … are seen as early attempts to achieve communism based in collectivized property relations and social egalitarianism but whose time came far too soon” (15). Claudia Koonz explains that the “word adapted by the Nazis to describe this unique process, Gleichschaltung, has no equivalent in other languages. ‘Nazification,’ ‘coordination,’ ‘integration,’ and ‘bringing into line’ all come close … Gleich means both ‘equal’ and ‘the same.’ Schalten means ‘to shift’ … The conversion of A/C to D/C electrical current is a Gleichschaltung. The removal of anyone who ‘stained’ or ‘soiled’ the nation was ‘switching them off’” (Koonz 72). In a recent essay on the concept of “synchronism,” Elizabeth Freeman explores the “sense of engroupment” produced by the act of synchronisation proper to industrial modernity: synchronisation “creates the social,” writes Freeman, “implanting the affects and movements that make a person feel connected to something larger than him- or herself” (133). Tomba proposes a thought-provoking analysis of capitalism’s forces of synchronisation as the rule of an “economic temporality” that is incompatible with the time of democracy, “the temporality of the state and the slowness of the participatory process of decision making” (355). Sharae Deckard has recently engaged with the concept of a “counterhegemonic perception of capitalist temporality” (97) capable of opposing an idea of “totality” that would reify human agency and articulating instead a dialectical totalisation, a “narrative form capable of assembling a multiplicity of times” (89). Joel Evans engages with the concept of totality in his recent book Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern. See Chapter 3 for the notions of “real” and “formal” subsumption. In Marxism and Totality, Martin Jay notes that for Bloch “the present totality, the latitudinal whole, was irreducible to a homologous set of relationships and functions … However homogeneous it may appear on the surface … it also contained explosive intimation of the future, figural traces … of the ‘not-yet,’ which undermine the dominant trends of the

1

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

41

present” (187). Non-synchronicity introduces a concept of time as copresence of a multitude of chronologies. Bloch’s idea of totality was opposed, as Jay observes, to the “evolutionary view of certain orthodox Marxists who relied on the inexorable transition from one historical stage to another” (190). As Cat Moir notes, “Bloch maintains the radical incompleteness and openness of the world toward an as yet indeterminate future. He identifies real contradictions in the world which are not yet dialectically resolved: in particular, what he calls the ‘aporia’ of the being-consciousness relation. However, Bloch … holds open the ultimate possibility of positive identity and maintains that its very possibility appears to us in anticipatory consciousness, in aesthetic form” (Moir 340). The privileging of “the west” as reference point in postcolonial critique has led, as Lazarus convincingly argues, to neglect “the unprecedentedness, the difference of (capitalist) modernity from all previous universalising projects” (Lazarus 2002, 63). WReC challenges any uni-directional, Eurocentric notion of singular modernity noting that “the combinatory effect of capitalist development is uneven, yes; but its energy does not flow in one direction only … in the literary and cultural spheres, at least, ‘incorporation’ of foreign forms – accommodation, assimilation, even indigenisation – is altogether routine in ‘core’ sectors also” (56). This corresponds to Michael Löwy’s notion of an “open dialectics.” As Löwy notes, one can find in Marxism “another ‘dialectic of progress’ which is critical, non-teleological, and fundamentally open. It entails considering history simultaneously as progress and as catastrophe, without favoring one or other of these aspects, inasmuch as the outcome of the historical process is not predetermined” (Löwy 2000, 37). An open, anti-teleological dialectics accounts for the coexistence of multiple times combining with capitalism’s forces of synchronisation. Koselleck locates the concept of “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” within the history of the expansion of Europe and the construction of an ideal of “world history” since the eighteenth century (246). This is different from Bloch’s Marxist concept of nonsynchronism: unlike the former, the latter is part of an open-ended and anti-teleological dialectical materialism and an explicitly Marxist politics aimed at recovering residual formations within the current phase of class struggle. Another perspective that emphasises the non-synchronous time of postcolonial contexts is Partha Chatterjee’s “heterogeneous time,” opposed to what Chatterjee describes as the “utopian” and “empty homogeneous” time of capital (Chatterjee 402). Jatin Wagle (2016) offers a critical reading of Chatterjee.

42

F. MENOZZI

24. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan’s pivotal 1997 edited collection of essays provides an excellent discussion of these aspects of Bloch’s philosophy. Jack Zipes’s essay, in particular, applies the category of “nonsynchronicity” to the transmission of Bloch’s philosophy today (Zipes 1997). 25. In the preface to the 1935 edition of Heritage of Our Times, Bloch writes that in the context of Nazi Germany, the older “romantic contradiction to capitalism … exclusively serve[s] the forces of reaction; but in this almost undisturbed usability there lies a particular Marxist problem at the same time. The position of the ‘Irratio’ within the inadequate capitalist ‘Ratio’ has been all too abstractly cordoned off, instead of being examined and … concretely occupied” (2). Peter Thompson notes that “Bloch got into a lot of trouble with his fellow Marxists in the 1930s for taking fascism seriously, rather than dismissing it as a simple capitalist aberration or a delusion” (16). 26. The notion of “oppressed classes” should, of course, include racialised, ethnic, migrant and gendered forms of oppression along with the class division determined by the international division of labour. However, as Etienne Balibar points out in Race, Nation, Class: “class struggle remains a principle of intelligibility of social transformation – that is, if not as the sole ‘fundamental determination’ or ‘motor’ of historical movement, at least as a universal, irreconcilable antagonism from which no politics can abstract itself” (156).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 2003. Reflections on Class Theory. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others. In Rolf Tiedemann, ed. Can One Live After Auschwitz? Stanford: Stanford University Press, 93–110. Amin, Samir. 1977. Imperialism and Unequal Development. New York: Monthly Review. Anderson, Perry. 1984. Modernity and Revolution. New Left Review I/144: 96–113. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 2012. AntiSystemic Movements. London: Verso. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1991. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Berman, Marshall. 1988. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

43

Bloch, Ernst. 1969. Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1976. Dialectics and Hope. Trans. Mark Ritter New German Critique 9: 3–10. ———. 1977. Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics. Trans. Mark Ritter New German Critique 11: 22–38. ———. 1986. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT. ———. 1991. Heritage of Our Times. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice. Cambridge: Polity. Bracaletti, Stefano. 2017. Temporality in Capital. In Vittorio Morfino and Peter Thomas, eds. The Government of Time. Leiden: Brill, 78–116. Brown, Nicholas. 2009. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of TwentiethCentury Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 2001. The Nation in Heterogeneous Time. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 38.4: 399–418. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. Cleary, Joe. 2012. Realism After Modernism and the Literary World-System. Modern Language Quarterly 73.3: 255–268. Daniel, Jamie Owen, and Tom Moylan, eds. 1997. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso. Deckard, Sharae. 2017. Capitalism’s Long Spiral: Periodicity, Temporality and the Global Contemporary in World Literature. In Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges, and Emilio Sauri, eds. Literature and the Global Contemporary. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 83–102. Dirlik, Arif. 1987. Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice. Cultural Critique 6: 13–50. ———. 2003. Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory 6.3: 275–292. Durst, David. 2002. Ernst Bloch’s Theory of Nonsimultaneity. The Germanic Review 77.3: 171–194. Edwards, Caroline. 2013. Uncovering the “Gold-Bearing Rubble”: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism. In Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, eds. Utopianism, Modernism and Literature in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 182–203. ———. 2019. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etherington, Ben. 2017. Literary Primitivism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Evans, Joel. 2019. Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

44

F. MENOZZI

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2016. Synchronic/Anachronic. In Amy Elias and Joel Burges, eds. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. New York: NYU Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2010. Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies. Modernism/modernity 17.3: 471–499. Galison, Peter. 2000. Einstein’s Clocks: The Place of Time. Critical Inquiry 26.2: 355–389. Ganguly, Keya. 2004. Temporality and Postcolonial Critique. In Neil Lazarus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162–181. ———. 2010. Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Harootunian, Harry. 2015. Marx After Marx. New York: Columbia University Press. Hartog, François. 2016. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time. Trans. Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Hatherley, Owen. 2016. The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 1983. The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge. ———. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. ———. 2002. A Singular Modernity. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jay, Martin. 1984. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Khatib, Sami. 2012. The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time. Marx with Benjamin. Social & Political Thought 20: 46–69. Koonz, Claudia. 2003. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2003. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Lazarus, Neil. 2002. The Fetish of the “West” in Postcolonial Theory. In Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds. Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43–64. ———. 2004. Introduction. In Neil Lazarus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–18. Lefebvre, Henri. 1995. Introduction to Modernity. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso. Löwy, Michael. 2000. Marx’s Dialectic of Progress: Closed or Open? Socialism and Democracy 14.1: 35–44. ———. 2010. The Current of Critical Irrealism. In Matthew Beaumont, ed. A Concise Companion to Realism. Chichester: Wiley, 211–224.

1

INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE BEYOND SYNCHRONISM

45

Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2002. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Trans. Catherine Porter. Durham: Duke University Press. Lukács. Georg. 1972. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin. ———. 1978. Writer and Critic. Trans. Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin. Martineau, Jonathan. 2015. Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time. Leiden: Brill. Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics. McCole, John. 1993. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of “So-called Primitive Accumulation”. Rethinking Marxism 23.3: 302–321. ———. 2011b. How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism. Postcolonial Studies 14.2: 151–170. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Federico Rahola. 2006. The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present. Postcolonial Text 2.1. Moir, Cat. 2016. Beyond the Turn: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Speculative Materialism. Poetics Today 37.2: 327–351. Morfino, Vittorio. 2017. On Non-contemporaneity: Marx, Bloch, Althusser. In Vittorio Morfino and Peter Thomas, eds. The Government of Time. Leiden: Brill, 117–147. Negt, Oskar. 1976. The Non-synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda. New German Critique 9: 46–70. Ogle, Vanessa. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-garde. London: Verso. ———. 2015. Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-Layered Temporal Dialectic. Historical Materialism 23.4: 39–48. Parry, Benita. 2006. The Presence of the Past in Peripheral Modernities. In Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, eds. Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology. New York: Routledge, 13–28. ———. 2009. Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 40.1: 27–55. Rabinbach, Anson. 1977. Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism. New German Critique 11: 5–21. Said, Edward. 2000. History, Literature, and Geography. In Reflections on Exile. London: Granta, 453–473. Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press.

46

F. MENOZZI

Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the Interior World of Capital. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, Edward P. 1967. Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present 38: 56–97. Thompson, Peter. 2013. The Privatization of Hope and the Crisis of Negation. In Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–20. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2013. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2014. Clash of Temporalities: Capital, Democracy, and Squares. South Atlantic Quarterly 113.2: 353–366. Tombazos, Stavros. 2015. Time in Marx. Leiden: Brill. Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Trotsky, Leon. 1932. The History of the Russian Revolution. Trans. Max Eastman. London: Penguin. ———. 2005. Literature and Revolution. Trans. Rose Strunsky. Chicago: Haymarket. Wagle, Jatin. 2016. The Heterogeneous Time of the Postcolonial. In Gerd Sebald and Jatin Wagle, eds. Theorizing Social Memories. Abingdon: Routledge, 98– 106. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Wayne, Michael. 2014. Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. London: Bloomsbury. Wilder, Gary. 2009. Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia. Public Culture 21.1: 101–140. Williams, Raymond. 1980. Culture and Materialism. London: Verso. WReC. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Zipes, Jack. 1997. Traces of Hope: The Non-synchronicity of Ernst Bloch. In Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, eds. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso, 1–14. Zizek, Slavoj. 2013. Bloch’s Ontology of Not-Yet-Being. In Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Privatization of Hope:Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia. Durham: Duke University Press, xv–xx. ———. 2018. The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously. New York: Melville House.

CHAPTER 2

Dislocating Time: Nampally Road and the Politics of Non-synchronism

This chapter offers a reading of Meena Alexander’s novel Nampally Road from the point of view of the dialectic of non-synchronism. Set during the times of the Indian Emergency in the 1970s, Alexander’s work shows the conflicting valences of nostalgic returns of the past in political struggle: non-synchronism as activation of unsubsumed remnants in the constitution of subjective agency. While, on the one hand, nonsynchronism appears as resurgence of mythological manipulations of history in the service of authoritarian populism, on the other hand, the non-synchronous dislocation of time at the heart of the novel also reveals potentialities of social resistance and transformation. Shuttling between the anamnestic level of individual story and the representation of historical tendencies, Nampally Road captures the non-synchronous politics of mythological revival and collective unrest in a peripheral formation caught between decolonisation and neoliberalism.

1

On Dislocation

In an essay titled “On the Present in Literature,” philosopher Ernst Bloch addresses the difficulty of representing what he calls the “darkness of the moment,” that is, the immediate experience of the historical period one inhabits. As Bloch observes, without “distance, right within, you cannot even experience something, less represent it … all nearness makes © The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_2

47

48

F. MENOZZI

matters difficult, and if it is too close, then one is blinded, at least made mute” (Bloch 1998, 120). This is true, writes Bloch, “for the immediate moment that is as a dark ‘right now’ lacking all distance to itself. But this darkness of the moment, in its unique directness, is not true for an already more mediated right-now” (ibid.). By expanding the immediacy of the moment, the construction of a historical present involves some kind of mediation. Nevertheless, Bloch continues, “something of the darkness of the immediate nearness is conveyed … to the more mediated, more widespread present by necessity” (ibid.). In order to provide a grasp of historical circumstances, literary and artistic forms need to step beyond the immediacy of a punctual and self-enclosed temporality. Representation involves, by necessity, some kind of temporal dislocation and mediation, which gives literary expression a specifically non-synchronic quality. The concept of non-synchronism can capture, as regards the mechanics and dynamics of literary representation, this constitutive distance, mediation and stepping away from the closure of the present, which also opens up a space for re-plotting given historical narratives, as it involves the insertion of divergent temporal layers in the time of the story. The dislocation of the present can anticipate not-yet existing futures and illuminate long-term social and economic tendencies silently at work in the historical present. The non-synchronic aperture constitutive of the work of representation, however, can result in ambivalent and unsettling political outcomes. While non-synchronism blasts open the continuum of chronology, the dislocation of history and story can give rise to possibilities of social transformations but also ideological mystification and the concealment of historical truth. Meena Alexander’s 1991 novel Nampally Road might be interpreted as a vivid registration of these ambivalent tendencies at the core of nonsynchronism. The main historical background of the story is, indeed, a specific moment in Indian history, the infamous period of “Emergency” declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. This historical frame, however, is recounted by Meena Alexander through a specific kind of distance: the protagonist, Mira Kannadical, finds herself living the period of the Emergency upon her return to India after completing her studies in Britain. The story is not just told from a perspective fully absorbed and immersed in the course of the events. The reader can see the unfolding of the political drama of the Emergency from the standpoint of a character who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider. Both participant and observer, the distance inhabited by the short novel’s

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

49

protagonist opens up a non-synchronous temporality connecting the immediacy of action to deeper historical processes. The dislocation of the present, for this reason, is not limited to mirroring the trajectory of an individual life story but also reflects the décalage of the different temporalities that combine in the historical present of global capitalism.1 The distance from the moment allows Alexander to unearth political and economic tendencies at work in India in the 1970s. Most specifically, the novel uncovers the rise of a nostalgic and chauvinistic religious far-right populism that deeply resonates with the conjuncture when this chapter is being written, just a few weeks after Narendra Modi’s re-election as Indian Prime Minister in the 2019 general elections. The specific historical conjuncture captured in Nampally Road, accordingly, concerns the shift from a Congress-dominated post-Independence India to a new kind of hegemony eliciting religious extremism, aggressive foreign policy and armament, Hindutva ideology and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Published one year before the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Alexander’s novel shows how the rise of the far-right after the Emergency coincided with the abandonment of previous state-oriented economic policies and the emergence of a new, brutally neoliberal, capitalist India open to foreign investment and an increasingly destructive exploitation of labour and resources. In summary, the historical background of the novel captures the transition from decolonisation to neoliberalism in the 1970s. In this context, a politics of non-synchronism is marked by deep contradictions, both objective and subjective: the explosion of the present into a multitude of times represents both the rise of dominant trends and formations and offering possibilities for struggles against the repressive regime typical of contemporary capitalism at the peripheries. But the dislocation of the present is also at work in those political reinforcements of tradition, religion and community that marked the crisis of secularism in Indian politics in the subsequent decades.2 The mixture of advanced capitalism and returns of archaic ideals of community typical of a non-synchronous conjuncture can be a way of blasting the present with possibilities of social change but can also give rise to fascist ideologies aligned with capital, as Harry Harootunian notes: “we must be cautious not to take this ‘frictional’ pairing of archaic and contemporary (capitalism) too far since it can also lead to fascism … in twentieth-century fascism, communal ownership was replaced by the organic national community and the timeless culture it represented … the national space occupied by the body of an organic

50

F. MENOZZI

ethnic community dedicated to preserving private property (capitalism)” (72). Reading Nampally Road from the point of view of non-synchronism entails an engagement with the contradictory emergent tendencies and forces of anticipation at work in the text: the dislocation of the present allows an interpretative act that puts the 1970s, when the story is set, and the 1990s, when it was published, in contact with both the long-term history of the subcontinent and the time of reading the text in the 2010s. In one passage of the novel, these dynamics of temporal expansion are signified by references to the Musi River in Hyderabad, which acquires a symbolic dimension, as protagonist Mira reflects: Between the dark hills and the high road the river was faintly visible, a gray line, a fluidity that separated land from land. The river had been there for a thousand, two thousand years. Kingdoms had risen and fallen about those banks … In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the water was thick with silver sails. Then came a terrible carnage … Then a hundred years passed, two hundred, shorter spans of time … Time slipped. A knot in a river’s throat. Rocks, guns, grenades. At nightfall boats docked at the Pakeezah steps. It was the freedom struggle. (96)

The river becomes, in this evocative scene, a point of contact between the turbulent present of the action, the struggle for Independence, and the immemorial times of ancient kingdoms. Through personification, time is reimagined here as a “knot in a river’s throat”: the fluidity of the historical continuum is inhabited by sudden bumps, halts and contractions. The present emerges, from this point of view, as this “knot” altering the smooth course of time. Rather than self-enclosed “event,” however, Mira’s reflections on the river as metaphor of Indian history suggest a dialectical interplay of fluidity and interruption, flow and immobility. This imagery resonates with the meditations on time proposed by Alexander in Poetics of Dislocation, a miscellaneous collection of writing published after Nampally Road. In a fragment included in this collection, Alexander builds on the image of time as an alternate current of stillness and fluidity. She writes: Time works in us the way water works at the edge of the sea: there are ripples and eddies and the slow sedimentation of earth rounded off by water, sudden slips and plunges where waves crash, and sometimes underwater faults that suck the seawater out and send it soaring into a

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

51

wall that comes crashing down … Time sucks and blows through us and sends us reeling. Our bodies become living markers of time … Still, the present is always with us, and our poems transfigure place by marking time. (Alexander 2009, 180)

Time is compared to a liquid force that marks, “sucks and blows through” living subjects. Like water, it is imagined as a force of erosion, unevenness and sedimentation that inhabits the present, turning the act of literary registration into a “marker” of time. As a process of erosion and sedimentation at work within the human subject, time opens up living immediacy to the presence of a multitude of currents and countercurrents that reveal the depths of historicity. The historical present needs to be located, from this point of view, as dialectical opening of the right now to this multiplication of times, reactivations, anticipations and returns of historical referents. This chapter explores these dynamics by positioning, firstly, Alexander’s fiction within historical and fictional representations of the Emergency. The following section, therefore, will connect historiographical context to one of the two sides of the non-synchronous ambivalence explored in the novel: non-synchronism will be shown as a regressive, nostalgic and reactionary recycling of the past in a new breed of authoritarian populism that finds many worrying parallels with the situation in India (and worldwide) in the summer of 2019. The third part, however, will show that the explosion of the present into a multitude of interconnected and overlapping times is not doomed to being appropriated by regressive politics. Non-synchronism also involves, more optimistically, the recovery of unfinished utopias and not-yet existing futures of a much more progressive and emancipatory nature. Torn between what Svetlana Boym would call “restorative nostalgia” and utopian emancipation, the politics of non-synchronism staged in Nampally Road certainly complicates any historiographical account of the Emergency as a singular “event” or a concluded chapter in the history of India. Alexander’s work shows instead how the 1970s were a pivotal turning point towards a violent and ruthless authoritarian neoliberalism wherein financial capital is increasingly convergent with communalism and oppressive mobilisations of religious idiom in politics.

52

F. MENOZZI

2 Cardboard Histories: Non-synchronism as Regression On a first level of reading, Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road can be approached as taking part in what anthropologist Emma Tarlo has described as a “post-Emergency” discourse diffused in the decades after the end of the Emergency, a controversial period of modern Indian history. Common elements of this discourse are denunciations of the violence of Indira Gandhi’s imposed state of exception between 1975 and 1977 as well as showing how that historical span was so important in affecting the course of the following decades. As Gyan Prakash notes in a recent book on this complex historical moment, on the 25th of June 1975, then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency in response to increasing popular unrest against her regime, “claiming the existence of a threat to the internal security of the nation. The declaration suspended the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly, imposed censorship on the press, limited the power of the judiciary … and ordered the arrest of opposition leaders” (Prakash 2019, 1). Prakash connects the turmoil of the 1970s to the current situation in India, especially to the weave of populist mobilisation that coincided with worldwide anti-government protests in 2011, and the rise of Hindu far-right epitomised in the ascent of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India. Prakash notes, as regards remembering the Emergency today: It is no wonder that the Emergency is remembered emotively in India. But its onset is also seen as a sudden irruption of authoritarian darkness and gloom. Indira’s suspension of constitutional rights appears as an abrupt disavowal of the liberal-democratic spirit that animated Jawaharlal Nehru and other nationalist leaders … This view sequesters the twentyone months of the Emergency regime from the period before and the time after. It remembers the constitutional crisis as an isolated phenomenon. (8)

Narrating the Emergency today should oppose any view of this historical moment as an isolated event and, as Prakash rightly suggests, historical narration should rather reconnect this temporal span to the period before and the time after. This expansion of the historical present of the Emergency does not simply rely on similitudes and parallelisms between then and now: the Emergency was, indeed, a turning point in Indian history, which paved the way for the rise of Hindutva and the BJP

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

53

as dominant formations in mainstream politics, as well as favouring an increasing influence of global capitalism on the national economy. As Thomas Crowley notes in a recent essay on the continuing relevance of Indira’s legacy, India’s dependence on the international economy “accelerated under Indira’s rule, leaving it vulnerable when the global crisis hit in the 1970s … Faced with economic turmoil, Indira tacked to the right, cutting government expenditures, seeking assistance from the IMF … the Emergency had generated space for a right-wing populist reaction to Congress’s failures, first in the form of the Bhartiya Jana Sangh, and then the BJP” (Crowley, n.p.). This turn paved the way for a rightward turn, “taking increasingly large loans from the IMF and loosening industrial regulations. Her son Rajiv then deepened those measures, laying the foundation for the massive neoliberal reforms introduced after his death” (ibid.). The Emergency may be described as a pivotal moment in postcolonial history in which the failures of the promises of decolonisation and democratic rule gave way to authoritarian neoliberalism. This coincided, globally, with the transition to what John Bellamy Foster describes as the period of “late imperialism” initiated during the 1970s: “the present period of monopoly-finance capital and stagnation, declining U.S. hegemony and rising world conflict, accompanied by growing threats to the ecological bases of civilization and life itself,” reinforcing “the extreme, hierarchical relations governing the capitalist world economy in the twenty-first century, which is increasingly dominated by megamultinational corporations and a handful of states at the center of the world system” (n.p.). The period shows, indeed, the constitution of India as an economy fully integrated into global capitalism in its late imperialist and neoliberal stage, coinciding with an anti-democratic turn, extreme inequality, suppression of dissent and the rise of the far-right as dominant force in institutionalised politics. As Sumanta Banerjee notes, the Emergency could be characterised as a “tightly-knit organisation with emphasis on loyalty to a supreme authority, ruthless and violent methods to suppress or eliminate those who did not agree with them, and centralisation of crime and corruption” (2205). According to Banerjee, these features remained after the Emergency and posed the grounds for the subsequent rise of the Hindu far-right in the subsequent decades. The Emergency, concluded Banerjee in 2000, “is not something to be remembered as a distant past, but as a spreading canker the germs of which were implanted in our society 25 years ago” (2206). Sudipta Kaviraj also notes

54

F. MENOZZI

that the Emergency did represent a shift towards “economic liberalisation” in Indian economy, moving away from a Nehruvian commitment to reforms “in favour of a different policy with less emphasis on the public sector, import substitution, administrative planning, with an accordingly greater reliance on market forces, price mechanisms, a strategy of export-led economic growth” (1705). A summary of the plot of Nampally Road can situate the novel as a fictionalised representation of key features of post-Emergency discourse. Indeed, the novel stages the political awakening of Mira, an English literature teacher who, in 1976, returns to Hyderabad after her postgraduate studies in the North of England. In Hyderabad, Mira starts a relationship with Ramu, a local political activist, and witnesses events of violence in the city. The novel opens with the brutal repression of a workers’ protest and narrates the sexual violence inflicted by the police on a Muslim woman, the subsequent burning of the local police station, the authoritarian rule of a local politician, and the inner dilemmas of Mira when faced with the increasing regime of dictatorship and repression in the city during the 1970s. As Emma Tarlo points out in her study of the memories of the Emergency in a slum of Delhi, in post-Emergency discourse, the Emergency “features as a device through which Indira Gandhi obtains access to the basic tools of dictatorship: the ability to ban all meetings, processions and agitations that did not work in her favour; the ability to arrest and detain people without trial and the ability to gag the press and to use it as an agent of personal propaganda” (Tarlo 35). While Alexander does not explicitly refer to Indira Gandhi, the literary alter ego of Hyderabad’s Chief Minister is pictured as an emanation of the authoritarian regime of the 1970s. The contextualisation of the novel also needs to account for the disclaimer that any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons is entirely coincidental, placed at the top of the copyright information page of the book. Of course, any reading of the text needs to keep this act of defiance and distancing in mind when situating the book within post-Emergency discourse. But the disclaimer also stands in, ironically, as a mark of its exact opposite: the need to distance the fiction from the fact also implies that historical reality is alive and active in the narrated events. The novel, indeed, offers a vivid portrait of the restriction to civil liberties, democratic rights, workers’ rights and the repression of any form of dissent typical of Indira Gandhi’s regime. In its fictional remaking of a historical period, the novel could seem to fit into Emma Tarlo’s identification of a post-Emergency discourse

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

55

that has been popularised in fiction and non-fiction soon after the end of the event in 1977. Tarlo observes how the Emergency “has been much mythologised but little studied” (Tarlo 2). Meena Alexander’s novel is valuable in that it challenges the “mythologising” of the Emergency by providing a critical representation of attempts to turn history into myth: through the dilemmas and testimonies of the narrator, Alexander is able to reintroduce history within literature, making the very position of the witness visible in its complexity and precarity. Yet, even this kind of narrative of the Emergency has, according to Tarlo, a sort of remythologising effect, because it feeds into an imaginary of violence and repression diffused through texts rather than documented through firsthand accounts of witnesses. Tarlo claims that while “literary writers have been keen to evoke and, at times, embellish the horror of such atrocities, politicians and dominant political parties have been equally keen to deny their reality and suppress their memory. The silence that surrounds the Emergency ‘as fact’ is not entirely accidental” (ibid.). Would Nampally Road be able to escape such criticism, eschewing the reduction of factual reality to “fertile food” for storytelling and offering instead a more accurate and objective record of the Emergency? Writing from a point of view rooted in the social sciences, anthropologist Emma Tarlo dismisses fictionalised accounts of the Emergency as evocative and embellishing rather than real and objective. Tarlo’s critique of fictional accounts— which would include texts such as Nampally Road—emerges in her study of the memory of the Emergency, where she emphasises the class basis of post-Emergency discourse, its elitism and populism and lack of real interest for the experience of the lower classes. Tarlo makes an important observation: That Indian history was, until the 1980s, dominated by an elitist perspective is nowhere more apparent that in the post-Emergency narrative itself with its facile concept of “the people,” conceived as “a nation of sheep” one minute and the valiant “soldiers of democracy” the next, with very little evidence to support either perspective. What comes across very strongly from this narrative is the elite’s “ignorance” of ordinary people’s lives and opinions … There is a level of “us” and “themness” in their accounts which is shocking to the contemporary reader. (Tarlo 218–219)

Does Nampally Road fall into the elitist and populist trap typical of much post-Emergency discourse? Tarlo’s analysis offers at least two points for

56

F. MENOZZI

reflection: on the one hand, Tarlo poses the problem of literature’s ability to represent historical events objectively, without turning into another kind of ideological concealment, re-mythologising the Emergency instead of fully understanding it. On the other hand, Tarlo questions the position of the writer and the gap between the middle-class intellectual and “the people,” a frequent object of representation and evocation but always represented by the elite rather than emerging as a proper subject of representation. Nampally Road directly addresses—in a way anticipates—objections and issues such as those raised by Emma Tarlo. Alexander’s work, however, does not stop at examining the two related questions of how not to mythologise the past and whether literary representations can do justice to grassroots experiences and feelings. Nampally Road is also an intense meditation on the historical significance of the Emergency as a period when the curtail of democracy coincided with the emergence of a new phase in the accumulation of capital, a new, neoliberal phase that triggered authoritarian policies against dissent, social justice and freedom of speech as precondition for synchronising India into the economic regime of the world economy. This shifting regime of historicity is perceived in the novel, on a personal and symptomatic level, as a sense of alienation and, most importantly, exclusion from the present. A sense of temporal dislocation and the inability to formulate a coherent narrative of one’s own life become, for this reason, possible bridges between story and history. Historical time seems to be fractured, giving rise to the onset of what philosopher Ernst Bloch (1991, 113) describes as the objectively and subjectively “contradiction” of non-synchronism or non-simultaneity: the survival of the past takes the form of a destruction of the present, both in the form of the rise of fascist, mystifying myths of a “Golden Age” useful to the regime of the Emergency and, at the same time, as a potential of resistance to authoritarian populism. Through two main characters, Hyderabad’s fictional Chief Minister Limca and narrator-protagonist Mira, Nampally Road is a complex registration of the significance of the Emergency as a bundle of historical contradictions that still inhabit the present as political and economic tendencies in the twenty-first century. These dynamics can be addressed by narrowing down on specific passages from Alexander’s novel. Thus, an important moment from Nampally Road includes the description of the screening of a documentary. Two of the main characters, English literature Mira and

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

57

her friend Little Mother, go to see the film at a cinema near their residence. The film is described as a “documentary to promote good habits in Hyderabad” (49), and it is sponsored by the local government. The episode is described as follows: So one evening after a light supper we walked down the road together and sat in the red rexine seats watching the show. Small bits of common sense shot through the script. Little commands peppered it. Do not stand near an exposed light switch during a thunderstorm. Do not pick up a poisonous snake in your bare hands (this always provoked great laughter) …each command had a little episode that illustrated the implicit moral. But there was nothing subtle about the film. (49–50)

The ekphrasis of this documentary indicates important features of the political mood of the time: the film features a set of commands and assumes a docile and uneducated audience. The purpose of the film is to instruct the residents of Hyderabad to behave in a “modern,” safe and polite way. The narrator, Mira, immediately distances herself from the purpose of the documentary. The audience laughs at the idea of not touching poisonous snakes with bare hands and there is no sort of suspense or subtlety in the educational sketches. But the commands are only a frame meant to pave the way for a further development of the show. Indeed, the screening suddenly acquires an unexpected turn and reveals a central motif in the novel. The description of the screening continues: At the end of the documentary came a film clip of Gandhi just before the Salt March started, the wind blowing on his taut figure, the sun in his eyes, the specter of the British troops massed against the satyagrahis filling us all, so that the earlier common-sense dicta faded into the sepia of his figure and the frame of our lives seemed momentarily continuous with the past in a longed-for myth. We were magnified in our own eyes and forgot the peeling theater, the crowds leaning forward in their hot seats, the small children chewing toffees. (50)

The sudden appearance of the figure of Gandhi at the end of the documentary places the little commands into a different plane of meaning and prepares the real conclusion, in a sort of climactic build-up. From didactic episodes of everyday life meant to instruct the public, the show shifts to the production of a sense of national togetherness and belonging. The narrator herself adopts the first-person plural subject:

58

F. MENOZZI

“we were magnified…” The purpose of the film seems to move from a mere government-sponsored didacticism to the making of an imagined community. Yet, this sense of belonging to India, achieved through the projection of the figure of Gandhi, is based on an illusion, a cover-up and a forgetfulness. The illusion created by the appearance of Gandhi is the simulacrum of continuity: the anti-colonial past and reference to tradition embodied by the image of Gandhi are continuous with the present and live on without interruption instead of being placed into historical distance. When Gandhi appears on-screen, the didacticism and the references to a grim and prosaic everyday life of the preceding shots fade away. The public is carried away from the immediacy of the present, into an illusory and artificial return to a mythical past predicated upon a forgetfulness of the present. Everyone is awed and enthralled, appearing to escape from the physical environment and the decadence and misery of the now— signalled by the “peeling theater”—and transported into a mythical order of things, the majestic level of historical narration in which all become one and diversity becomes unity. The sense of fatality produced by the show expresses the naturalising vision of what Perry Anderson has described as the “Indian ideology”: “a nationalist discourse in a time when there is no longer a national liberation struggle” (3). But the scene does not end with this illusion and this forgetfulness. This is only a preparation for the real coup de theatre, the climatic appearance of the show, described in the novel: Then, in a quick cut, came images of Limca Gowda, Chief Minister of Hyderabad, so startling that we held our breath. His large figure was dressed in khadi, and he was standing at the edge of the post office in Hyderabad, or was it by the river? The background was so blurred that it was hard to tell … “Father of Hyderabad,” shouted some voices, which were picked up and heightened so that the sound track resembled the confusions of a morchas, of the kind where hundreds of peasants were driven in from miles away in the terrible heat of noonday. (50)

The real twist to this spectacle happens when Limca, a local politician, appears in the video, in a quick succession to Gandhi. The description of the documentary follows a regressive temporal logic: from the grimness of the present, the show leads the audience to the colonial past, before linking the colonial past to an eternal, quasi-divine atemporal register which frames the sudden appearance of the ruler of the city.

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

59

From moralising didacticism meant to modernise and to indoctrinate the inhabitants of Hyderabad, the film shifts into the making of a mythological continuum between past and present, and concludes by celebrating and legitimising the present political order as a direct emanation from the past. History is being naturalised, the past becomes myth, and politics is endowed with an almost-divine, irresistible strength sourced from the legacy of Gandhi. The figure of the Chief Minister is placed in a confused background. Spatial coordinates are blurred as the chronological regression fades familiar locations into a symbolic order of greatness and myth. The conclusion entails a climactic celebration of the local politician, his elevation to the stature of Gandhi as a “Father of the Nation.” The documentary is described as puzzling and low-quality propagandistic production, but it reveals a central issue at the core of Meena Alexander’s novel: the survival of an incomplete past as a way of legitimising the present and of concealing social inequality and economic exploitation. The protagonist of the novel is not indifferent to this kind of propaganda and offers a brief analysis of it to her students. The narrator reports that the next day in her class, “in a discussion of Romantic myths of the Golden Age I mentioned Limca’s public relations film” (50), to which a student replies that she is already discussing the film in her study group. The student claims: “He’s making myth of himself. You know that, don’t you?” She challenged me. “In some way its tied up to all this Wordsworthian stuff you’re teaching us, Miss, I’m sure it is” (51). This scene offers a privileged entry-point into Meena Alexander’s novel because it shows the role of myth and fictionalised references to the past as a way of legitimising power in the present. The reference to a Golden Age—in this case to the Golden Age of Gandhian resistance to colonial rule—serves the cause of a local politician and is used as an attempt to conceal the reality of violence, exploitation, populism and authoritarianism that characterised the Emergency. The politician’s appropriation of the past as a tool of personal legitimation indicates a wider theme: the disillusionment of the democratic promises of decolonisation and the transition to a new, authoritarian era in Indian politics.3 In historical reality, the Emergency involved a disconnection between the era of anti-colonial struggle and the period following Partition, and the decades of intensive neoliberal policies and far-right populism that followed the 1970s. Nampally Road was published, indeed, just a year before a mob of Hindu extremists destroyed brick by brick a mosque in the city of

60

F. MENOZZI

Ayodhya, triggering one of the most dramatic episodes of communal violence and a resurgence of social tensions in the history of India.4 Against the ideological illusion of national unity, the political background of Meena Alexander’s novel registers a society deeply troubled and divided. From Gandhi to Limca, there could be no continuity, according to the narrator: the promises of liberation and independence are betrayed by a corrupt regime in which society is plagued by everyday violence and an economy increasingly dependent on “black money.” An already fragmented social fabric is tore apart by what is described in the text as “illegal money. It was the currency of smugglers and businessmen from the Gulf. It poured into the country. Secreted underground, it wrecked the economy. No deals could be tied up without it. It ran the world of the rich, it chocked the rest of us” (17–18). In a context of rising inequality, civil unrest, communal violence, decadence and corruption, the anti-colonial past survives only as a myth, an illusion emptied of any positive or actual content. The figure of Gandhi recurs in the novel as the sign of a past that is irremediably lost to the present, the emblem of a mythological Golden Age functioning as an ideological concealment of the reality of the present. From this point of view, the novel goes beyond the tropes of post-Emergency discourse because alongside a description of the repressive regime of the 1970s, it articulates a reflection on the role of fiction—film, literature, art—as mythologising gesture meant to naturalise history. The novel aptly concludes with the celebration of Limca’s birthday, in which a whole cardboard city is being recreated and episodes of the life of Limca—directly compared to the life of the Mahatma— are the subject of a theatrical representation. As a protester explains in a passage of the text: Did everyone know that the Chief Minister was planning a huge birthday celebration, complete with a cardboard city, replica of the ancient inner city? Did everyone know that Limca’s birthplace in the city was to be picked out in red lights in the cardboard replica? That a small child had been chosen to be Sri Krishna come dancing to Limca’s birthplace? (88)

Non-synchronism appears in the novel as a temporal dislocation and a substitution of genuine historical consciousness with mythological reconstruction. Limca’s authoritarian populism locates the figure of the Chief Minister into an eternal, atemporal register detached from history: Limca is elevated to a semi-divine status, merged with the mythologised figure

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

61

of Gandhi and supposed to be worshipped as a local deity. The religious idiom is reactivated as a reactionary force in the present: the cardboard city legitimises and naturalises a theocratic and authoritarian nationalism based on repression of dissent and economic inequality. The last chapter of the novel further represents the manipulation of symbols of the past by describing the concluding celebration. Meena Alexander writes: After each phase of Limca’s life there were patriotic songs sung by a chorus from the local schools. The soldiers on guard at the edge of the platform raised their guns in salute. … Later, the film stars of Isak Katha, accompanied by a small Sri Krishna, were scheduled to descend the great stairway that ran down the three-story city. They would approach Limca and song his praises. (105)

The cardboard theatre epitomises a non-synchronous appropriation of the past to serve as an ideological weapon: concealing factual historical reality, the appropriation of archaic forms helps establish a new political regime. The people attending the event are mainly peasants forced to attend the celebration, members of the army and Limca’s personal guard. The broken promises of decolonisation and an artefact sense of national unity give way, in the non-synchronic re-emergence of myth, to a new stage in the history of India: a state of economic corruption, inequality and repression is embellished by the rise of Hindu religious populism. However, the politics of non-synchronism expressed in Alexander’s text does not stop at showing how the reactivation of a mythologised past plays a regressive and reactionary role. The cardboard history epitomised by Limca is, in the end, challenged by other events and characters in the story.

3 Exploding the Present: Valences of Non-synchronism The reopening of the present to non-synchronous revivals does not end with a cardboard history and the authoritarian appropriation of the past. Nampally Road, indeed, reveals that the fascistic and regressive tendencies that appeared and became consolidated during the Emergency could also, in their contradictory aspects, suggest possibilities for a more positive social transformation. Non-synchronism reveals here what Fredric Jameson would call a concept of historical tendency understood as the

62

F. MENOZZI

“seeds of time” being at work in the objective conditions of the present. As Jameson notes, in this regard, this type of consciousness enables “a conception of historical dynamics in which it is posited that the whole new world is also objectively in emergence all around us, without our necessarily at once perceiving it” (416). This “emergence” of possibilities of emancipation can be detected in forms of collective praxis and interpretation revealing “the allegorical stirrings of a different state of things, the imperceptible and even immemorial ripening of the seeds of time” (ibid.). According to Jameson, the properly emergent nature of the revolutionary new can also be understood as utopia, reconceived as the ability to turn what is negative in the present into something positive: The operation [of utopian thinking] itself …consists in a prodigious effort to change the valences on phenomena which so far exist only in our own present; and experimentally to declare positive things which are clearly negative in our own world, to affirm that dystopia is in reality Utopia if examined more closely, to isolate specific features in our empirical present so as to read them as components of a different system … This kind of prospective hermeneutic is a political act only in one specific sense: as a contribution to the reawakening of the imagination of possible and alternate futures, a reawakening of that historicity which our system - offering itself as the very end of history - necessarily represses and paralyzes. (434)

Meena Alexander’s novel could be said to offer such “reawakening of the imagination” to the possibility of alternate futures. Instead of trapping non-synchronism into a regressive reactivation of the past to legitimise existing power formations, the scene of non-synchronism becomes the site of utopian potentials. The very conclusion of the story stages the destruction of Limca’s mythologising symbols. The novel concludes with the destruction of the cardboard by a group of dissenters of which Ramu, Mira’s boyfriend, is part. An underground movement of protest guided by Ramu manages to set fire to the cardboards forming the stage of the celebrations and to wreak havoc in a heavily guarded public ceremony. The description of the event is as follows: There was a great cry a something exploded inside the cardboard city and a thousand sheets of paper and wire and bulbs all held together by immense human labour started to burn … There was scuffling, screams, moans from human beings who were being trampled by others, gunshots, sharp cries,

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

63

sirens, and the bark of police dogs suddenly unleashed. I was being pushed by the great crowd. (106)

In contrast to the sense of unity and belonging that the propaganda attempts to construct, the demolition of the cardboard city at the end of the novel suggests another form of community: a crowd being united by the destruction of Limca’s ideological representations and taking part, as a mobilised multitude, in the chaotic dismantling of his power. The narrator, for the first time in the novel, feels a sense of being part of the city of Hyderabad, being caught in the making of a new communion formed in the chaos. The narrative continues: All around me I saw men, women, children, society matrons, soldiers, sailors, peasants, princes of state, poor sweepers of latrines, children who lived off the droppings they found in the street. There was no distinction of class, creed, or caste as we shoved in a mass of arms and legs, mouths and bellies. (106)

The destruction of myth forms the basis for the making of a multitude. The revolt shows the characters of what Furio Jesi describes as the “suspension of historical time” proper to experiences of revolt: “revolt suspends historical time. It suddenly institutes a time in which everything that is done has a value in itself, independently of its consequences and of its relations with the transitory or perennial complex that constitutes history” (46). As Jesi notes, the suspension and explosion of historical time proper to the revolt also involve a reappropriation of the city: “only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt as your own city – your own because it belongs to the I but at the same time to the ‘others’; your own because it is a battlefield that you have chosen and the collectivity too has chosen; your own because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended” (54).5 On this occasion, it is not the hegemonic ideological narrative of postcolonial national unity but rather the demolition of the mythologised past that ignites a sense of being together. While Nampally Road cannot be read as a factual account of the Emergency, it does not simply adopt the events of the 1970s as a pretext for embellishing the past. Rather, the novel suggests that the role of literature should be to demolish ideological myths about the past and to denounce the concrete reality of history. Precisely because it is literary fiction, revolving around the figure of Mira, a literary scholar, Nampally

64

F. MENOZZI

Road enacts what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “interruption of myth” (52) proper to the emergence of the literary. The power of incantation produced by the non-synchronous returns of a mythological past is suspended, not only by a focus on social injustice, politics and the economy during the Emergency, but also by the irruption of a self-conscious form of literary representation able to explode the eternal present of myth. The teacher of English literature finds herself caught in a political mobilisation of resistance against an authoritarian rule held up by the ideological appropriation of the past. Yet, in the critique of myth that runs throughout the novel, a second important element appears. The destruction of Limca’s mythology is accompanied by a growing awareness of the detachment between past and present and a sense of being left over, of not being fully part of the present that is widespread in the city and finally pervades the protagonist and narrator of the novel. This second element relates Nampally Road to the problematic of historical time that is at the core of world literature as a critical concept. The critique of myth is accompanied, indeed, by the subjective activation of an untimely, non-synchronous historical experience that charges historical narration with utopian valences. The concluding scene of the novel does not only stage the demolition of Limca’s mythology but also Mira’s consciousness of the gap dividing her present life from the future as well as from the past. The location of Limca’s birthday celebration triggers an involuntary memory in Mira. She suddenly remembers that she visited the place with her parents during her childhood. The stark contrast between past and present is vividly portrayed in the text. Meena Alexander writes: I recalled with a small shock that mother had once brought me here when I was five years old. We were visiting Hyderabad. There were booths crowded onto the stubble, black awnings, cascades of balloons, tinsel and torches lighting the faces of countless children and their parents … I searched for the two chalk cliffs near the river. But they were long gone, blasted out for chalk. The land near the river was flat now, a dull beige color, pocked with small huts. And there was no booth near me. The field ahead was almost bare. (103)

This involuntary memory follows a sense of nausea caused by the narrator’s realisation that Limca’s representations “were remaking history, tampering with the ordinary truth, distorting things as they actually were.

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

65

An unreal thing was being clamped onto us that could choke us to death” (103). The scene shows an intense experience of unease and growing anger. Limca’s distortions of reality are interpreted as a destructive force: the river seems to have been spoiled of its past life and to survive now bare and impoverished. The people in the city live in a state of fear, poverty and dispossession. The mythological appropriation of the past corresponds to an increasing annihilation of life: the explosion of the cardboard city opens a new vista and enables a growing awareness of dispossession in the protagonist herself. The narrator feels that her own life has been taken from her. Mira reflects on the fact that she, unlike her own mother, will never be able to raise a family and have a peaceful and fulfilling life. In the midst of political violence, struggle and oppression, life seems to slip away. Mira meditates upon the image of a mother with her daughter and the memories of her visit to the place during her infancy: I stood there and watched the clear picture of life, with an ache I could not help. It hurt. They were figures of flesh and water and light. I felt thrust out, evicted from joy. My own family were strangers to me. And the thought of bringing children into this world seemed too hard. I lacked a natural life. What did I have but this confusion and rage? (104)

The sense of “confusion and rage” builds on a situation of oppression and dispossession. The narrator eventually is placed on the side of those who are “evicted from joy” and enraged by the injustice of the system in which they live. While there is, in a way, a reference to the good old days of her personal memory (her childhood and previous visit to Hyderabad), like the Golden Age depicted in Limca’s mythology, the two are substantially different. While Limca’s non-synchronous narrative results in authoritarian populism and the cover-up of real relationships of exploitation, Mira’s involuntary memory captures the potentially progressive aspects of the non-synchronous element, its rebellion against the alienation and commodification of the present. The diffuse sentiment of rage makes the sense of being left over a real political weapon to be used in the struggle against Limca, as Mira herself becomes, indeed, the chronicler of the (fictional) events. Nampally Road becomes, on the very last pages of the text, a story about a teacher of literature turning into politics and perhaps becoming an activist herself. While there is no clear indication of whether Mira will join Ramu’s anti-Emergency political movement, there are clear signs that she cannot retreat into an atomised

66

F. MENOZZI

life detached from the surrounding political turmoil: being part of the collective uprising allows Mira to overcome her indecision and sense of detachment and isolation. Political praxis, in the end, breaks through the myth in order to turn the valence of non-synchronism: the reactionary sense of the past triggered by Limca is challenged by the explosion of the present of the protesters. Mira’s sense of temporal dislocation is eventually absorbed into a temporality of the multitude, which philosopher Vittorio Morfino thoughtfully describes as an “impossible contemporaneity.” As Morfino remarks, the “temporality of the multitude must be conceived as the locus of the non contemporaneous, of an impossible contemporaneity, precisely because the individual itself is a multitude: the individual is not contemporaneous with itself” (143). Nampally Road shows the complexities of this “impossible contemporaneity” as at work both inside the individual and in society. When Mira finds herself reminiscing about her past during the protest, the non-synchronic time intimated in her involuntary memory reveals what Morfino would characterise as “a complex, articulated temporality which is never reducible to the transparency of an essence that can synthesise the plurality of matter into the principle of contemporaneity” (153). Individual and society, as well as intimate memory and material history, are in a state of dialectical friction and permanently unsolved antagonism. The concluding destruction of the ideologised past and reopening the present to possibilities of change not only allows Mira to reconnect to life in the city. The destruction of myth also emerges as the factor enabling the writing of the story in the first place. The conclusion of the novel is, from this point of view, its very precondition. Indeed, in a previous moment of the novel, Mira reveals her intention to write her own story. Yet, meeting Ramu and witnessing the events of the city makes her realise the difficulty, if not impossibility, of composing fiction in such violent historical situation. Her inability to piece together a sense of her own life, connecting past, present and future, is caused by the wider circumstances which she inhabits. The conclusion of the novel is the awareness that what impedes the writing of her own story are the breaks between past and present. But these ruptures are only the symptom of a wider historical transition of society as a whole. The theme is anticipated in an earlier passage of the novel, in which Mira reflects: Though I tried I could not really write my story. Each time I tried to write, everything splintered into little bits … The life that made sense was

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

67

all around me… No one needed my writing. It could make no difference. I had seen the same policemen who beat the orange sellers over the head, riding bicycles in a general strike a year ago, their right fists raised. Many of them were desperately poor. (28)

The inability to write one’s story is linked to the ineffectiveness of literary and autobiographical writing in a situation of dramatic poverty, repression, violence and inequality during the 1970s. The sense of fragmentation and inability to write does not have a merely individual or intimate dimension. It mirrors a social condition that is registered by the writer. This has also an effect on the wider sense of history that Mira perceives in that specific conjuncture. She observes: As for the Indian past, what was it to me? Sometimes I felt it was a motley collection of events that rose in my mind … I had no clear picture of what unified it all, what our history might mean. We were in it, all together, that’s all I knew. And there was no way out. (28)

The sense of history recorded by Mira entails loss and dislocation. Historical time is unable to turn into a coherent narrative. Mira’s development, through the novel, consists in her ability to turn this sense of loss and fragmentation into anger and political involvement. The feeling of historical dislocation gets political in the end, with the scene of the involuntary memory and the realisation that she is “evicted from joy”: the atomised individual and chronicler is situated into a protesting multitude. This consciousness moves from the demolition of myth to the reactivation of unrealised but still active historical potentialities. As Meena Alexander notes in her introduction to a collection of short stories by Indian women writers, in contemporary India, “where ancient cultures, hierarchical and exclusive, exist in a tension with a rapidly changing society, the place prescribed for women becomes a fault line, a site of potential rupture. As such it bears revolutionary potential” (11).6 In Nampally Road, Mira finally incarnates this revolutionary potential by inhabiting the fault lines of her personal and historical situation in a more conscious and critical way. Mira’s sense of loss and resentment derives from a renewed temporal consciousness of non-synchronic dislocation: disconnected from the past—both personal and historical memory—and unable to imagine a future, Mira’s present is fragmented, disjointed and scattered. The impossibility of writing, however, turns into possibility through Mira’s

68

F. MENOZZI

involvement in the actual making of the present through collective action. The sense of temporal dislocation that characterises Mira’s experience of India, in other words, becomes the very precondition for reimagining the present. Disconnected from past and future, Nampally Road is the tale of an exploded present rich of transformative possibilities: confusion, anger, violence and dissent are the driving forces that bridge the gap between history and story, turning the dislocation of time into a non-synchronous narrative line.

4

Conclusion: Breaching Time

The dialectic of non-synchronism opens up a question about literature as point of mediation between fiction and history, dislocation and linearity, discordance and concordance. From this point of view, Alexander’s novel does not simply represent the underlying contradictions inhabiting the historical dimension of Mira’s vicissitudes in Hyderabad. The novel also features a metafictional reflection on the role of literary writing as such mediation between the materialities of history and the experience of the subject, what Ernst Bloch would define objectively and subjectively non-synchronism. In a chapter of the novel titled “Wordsworth in Hyderabad,” the protagonist Mira is portrayed during her everyday job as an English literature teacher. Drawing undoubtedly from Meena Alexander’s own academic specialism in Romanticism, Mira tries to engage her classroom in discussing the defining qualities of Romantic poetry. Mira hence addresses her students by offering a diagram, a “rough triangle with arrows running from top to bottom and left to right. ‘World Out There’ I put on the right-hand side. ‘Inner Self’ I wrote on the left, and at the top, where the arrows met in a slightly smeared point, I put ‘Romantic Object’” (51). What follows is a growing set of digressions and detours, leading climactically to the conclusion of the chapter, when the lesson is abruptly stopped. What happens through the scene, however, is an increasing deconstruction of the border between the space of the self, the literary object, and the outside space of the city—the political turmoil, violence and unrest engulfing the lives of both students and teacher. In order to explain the “Romantic Object,” indeed, Mira attempts to link the question of Romanticism to the everyday experience of her pupils. The first example she makes is an optical store in Nampally Road, which is described as follows:

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

69

There are literally hundreds of spectacles, and they twist and turn on their little wires catching all that’s to be seen, a multitude of images, all fractions of our world: the pavement, the seller of mangoes with his twisted knee, the edge of the Gandhi statue, the poor orange seller, the fat liquor merchant, even the blind beggar who stands there … If caught and fixed for an instant, would those hundreds of lenses capture the world? Would they tell the truth about Nampally Road? (52)

The question of Romanticism becomes, through the example of the optical store, the question about literature’s ability to portray reality in a truthful way. This problem insinuates itself in Mira’s reasoning, leading her to raise the problem of how the world affects human beings: “Of course the world exists. The question is, how does it form us? How does history make us?” (ibid.). This question diverts Mira’s lesson on Romanticism into a direct statement about current politics in the city, where she reveals that she is troubled: “There is trouble in our streets. Two days go some innocent orange sellers were struck on the head as they were trying to organise a peaceful protest … the Wye Valley poem. Try to bring it closer to home. The orange sellers, the woman raped and beaten” (53). Digressing from Romantic poetry to current politics causes Mira to feel “the old chocking sensation” preventing her from conveying her words (ibid.). Mira is eventually interrupted by Ramu, who enters the classroom and tells Mira to dismiss her class in order to run to the police station, where a witness of police brutality is at risk of being killed. The lesson on Romanticism is abruptly halted by the irruption of the real world. Somehow, the irruption of Ramu answers the question concerning how history makes us posed by Mira during her lecture. The reality of Nampally Road does not seem to rely so much on the gaze or the inner feeling of poets, but rather on the direct engagement with political praxis in the present. As Alpana Sharma has remarked in her reading of Nampally Road, while “one may argue that the author merely advances a suspect politics of victimisation (women and the poor against the dominant regime of power),” what is evident is that “Alexander exhibits a critically engaged social conscience that at once acknowledges the agency of oppressed peoples and the function of writing to provide the space for a meaningful intervention” (211). This resonates with Meena Alexander’s own reflection on the role of literary expression as social commitment, as she reveals the strong inspiration exerted on her by sixteenth-century Indian

70

F. MENOZZI

mystic poet Mirabai and the tradition of bhakti poetry Mirabai gave rise to: a devotional, ecstatic form of utopianism challenging social stratification and hegemony. Alexander remarks that poetry is for her, “a place that human beings go when they cannot do anything else, utterance of the dumb, the silenced the hidden” (Poetics 197). She continues in her reflections on the meaning of poetry: It is what comes out from both kinds of silence, the transcendent, the visionary which so often finds no habitation in words and that other, that which is crossed out, not permitted to remain, cannot even be retained in memory because it is traumatic, emerging only in flashes of time, breaches of time if you wish. Yes, poetry is what breaches time, and allows for song. (ibid.)

If poetry is what “breaches time,” this is because it reveals, on the one hand, possible futures and alternative social orders that cannot yet be fully pictured and expressed in the present. From this point of view, the breach of time would be visionary and anticipatory. But poetry breaches time, on the other hand, also because it is what gives voice to the silenced, traumatic and repressed, what is other than the present. Both memory and anticipation, the non-synchronous breaches of time taking place through literary writing and poetry dislodge the domination of the present. Like Mirabai, Nampally Road’ s protagonist Mira is a deeply poetic voice that inhabits the present but also contests the closure and irreversibility of history, keeping “our human measure in the face of the inhuman, the degradation, the tearing apart …that is what poetry does for us, it makes the present come alive, flash up for us, not cut loose from the past but not darkened by it either” (197–198). Turning history into a plural multiversum, a living present rich in possibilities of alternative orders and political transformations, it is in the end in the threshold figure of Mira that the non-synchronous element of Nampally Road emerges simultaneously as a past that continues in the present and a future that glimmers through collective political praxis. In this, Alexander’s 1991 novel anticipates the waves of protest that has kept mobilising many countries since the first revolutionary movements in North Africa in 2011. As Vijay Prashad notes in his study on the “poorer nations,” the Global South is today “a world of protest, a whirlwind of creative activity. These protests have produced an opening that has no easily definable political direction. Some of them turn backwards, taking refuge in imagined unities of the

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

71

past or in the divine realm … And yet others find the present intolerable, and nudge us into the future” (9). The non-synchronous politics emerging through myth and protest in Nampally Road shows the interconnection of these different possibilities in the process of reopening time to temporalities other than the present.

Notes 1. The term décalage or dislocation is taken from Louis Althusser’s reflections on historical time in Reading Capital, where he addresses “the type of intertwining of the different times … the type of dislocation (décalage) and torsion of the different temporalities produced by the different levels of the structure, the complex combination of which constitutes the peculiar time of the process’s development” (116, emphasis in original). This dislocation can also be seen as the time of a “differentially articulated” totality (120) wherein different temporalities combine and interact. 2. Romila Thapar has shown how the BJP government has entailed an authoritarian manipulation of history aiming to “establish the Hindu version of history as the only version” (203). This version of history involves seeing the Hindu period in the history of South Asia as the “golden age, the Muslim period the dark age of tyranny and oppression, and there is a relative neutrality about the colonial period” (194). The focus on a Hindu golden age allows what Thapar describes as a “political projection of the religious nationalisms” (ibid.). 3. Critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Sumit Sarkar have described the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s as a new form of fascism. As Sarkar notes, the fascist dimension of the Hindutva ideology entails the development of an image of the Muslim “enemy” by “appropriating stray elements from past prejudices, combining them with new ones skilfully dressed up as old verities, and broadcasting the resultant compound through the most upto-date media techniques” (Sarkar 165). The regressive and authoritarian recuperation and reinvention of the past in the service of genocidal politics contributes to the non-synchronous dimension of Hindutva. In an essay on the Hindutva ideology, Reddy discusses the complexities surrounding the use of the term “fascism” in contemporary India. 4. The political mobilisation that led to the destruction of Babri Masjid involved, as Nandini Rao and C. Rammanohar Reddy remark, not just “building a Hindu temple at the site of a mosque. Ayodhya was at the centre of the campaign, but the movement was about a new Hindu nationalism and assertiveness. It was about Hindutva, a movement towards building an essentially Hindu society in India” (139). Bacchetta and Ludden provide analyses of the circumstances and discourses surrounding

72

F. MENOZZI

the events. The movement leading to the destruction of the mosque was heavily criticised by contemporary historians (Gopal et al.) as a political “abuse of history” in which fictitious and mythologised references to the past were marshalled to drive violent communal politics. 5. The reappropriation of the city during revolutionary moments is also at the heart of Ahdaf Soueif’s chronicle of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, while David Harvey discusses urban space as key to contemporary class struggle in his Rebel Cities. 6. Fault Lines is also the title of Alexander’s memoir, where she mentions her experience of the Emergency in Hyderabad during the 1970s, explaining that there was a police station behind her college office during those times (127). While Alexander reveals that the novel was composed in Chail, “at the foot of the Himalayas,” before she migrated to America (161), the novel certainly offers autobiographical resonances. But in this chapter, Nampally Road has been approached as fictional work registering wider historical tendencies rather than autobiography.

Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. 1993. Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva. Social Scientist 21.3/4: 32–68. Alexander, Meena. 1990. Introduction. In Kali for Women, ed. Truth Tales: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers from India. New York: Feminist Press, 11–24. ———. 1991. Nampally Road. San Francisco: Mercury House. ———. 1993. Fault Lines: A Memoir. New York: Feminist Press. ———. 2009. Poetics of Dislocation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. 2009. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso. Anderson, Perry. 2012. The Indian Ideology. London: Verso. Bacchetta, Paola. 2000. Sacred Space in Conflict in India: The Babri Masjid Affair. Growth and Change 31.2: 255–284. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2000. Serenading the Emergency. Economic and Political Weekly 35.26: 2205–2206. Bloch, Ernst. 1991. Heritage of Our Times. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 1998. Literary Essays. Trans. Andrew Joron and Others. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Crowley, Thomas. 2016. India Is (Still) Indira. Jacobin. https://www.jac obinmag.com/2016/03/indira-gandhi-congress-bjp-modi-emergency/. Accessed 1 June 2019.

2

DISLOCATING TIME: NAMPALLY ROAD AND THE POLITICS …

73

Foster, John Bellamy. 2019. Late Imperialism. Monthly Review 71.3 https://mon thlyreview.org/2019/07/01/late-imperialism/. Accessed 13 August 2019. Gopal, Sarvepalli, et al. 1990. The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid-Rama Janmabhumi Dispute. Social Scientist 18.1/2: 76–81. Harootunian, Harry. 2015. Piercing the Present with the Past. Historical Materialism 23.4: 60–74. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Jesi, Furio. 2014. Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Seagull. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1986. Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics. Economic and Political Weekly 21.38–39: 1697–1708. Ludden, David, ed. 2006. Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morfino, Vittorio. 2014. Plural Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser. Leiden: Brill. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor and Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prakash, Gyan. 2019. Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2012. The Poorer Nations. London: Verso. Rao, Nandini, and C. Rammanohar Reddy. 2001. Ayodhya, the Print Media and Communalism. In Robert Layton, Peter Stone, and Julian Thomas, eds. Destruction and Conservation of Cultural Property. London: Routledge, 139– 156. Reddy, Deepa. 2011. Capturing Hindutva: Rhetorics and Strategies. Religion Compass 5.8: 427–438. Sarkar, Sumit. 1993. The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar. Economic and Political Weekly 28.5: 163–167. Sharma, Alpana Knippling. 2014. “Sharp Contrasts of All Colours”: The Legacy of Toru Dutt. In Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds. Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers. Abingdon: Routledge [2012], 209–228. Soueif, Ahdaf. 2012. Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. London: Bloomsbury. Tarlo, Emma. 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Thapar, Romila. 2007. Secularism, History, and Contemporary Politics in India. In Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds. The Crisis of Secularism in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 191–207.

CHAPTER 3

The Author as Digger: The Gypsy Goddess and the Strata of History

Meena Kandasamy’s 2014 novel The Gypsy Goddess offers a highly reflexive narration of the Kilvenmani massacre: the brutal repression of agricultural labourers on strike in South India, December 1968. The novel does not provide a linear account of the events, but rather interrogates the very act of representing such historical reality in fictional form. Accordingly, Kandasamy’s text articulates a non-synchronous aesthetic whereby the chronological order of things is replaced by a stratigraphic process: the novelist is reimagined as a digger excavating overlapping grounds of history and reassembling them in a metafictional, multidimensional narrative composition. The anti-chronological aesthetic adopted by Kandasamy, however, does not end up in a postmodern fragmentation of the story of Kilvenmani. On the contrary, the novelist’s play with time emerges as a mirroring of objective conditions of peripheral capitalism in the narrative dialectic of story and history. The manipulation of chronology in the novel testifies to the tension between a plurality of voices and the imperative of crafting a single story helpful to the continuing tradition of resistance of Dalit labourers in postcolonial India. From the point of view of non-synchronism, the novel goes beyond a mere critique of unilinear narration and offers instead a dialectical totalisation of Dalit historical experiences, turning literary work into a mediated solidarity with the workers on strike.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_3

75

76

F. MENOZZI

1

Literature and Formal Subsumption

A central question at the heart of world-literary studies concerns how literature can reveal social realities of exploitation and resistance that define the condition of peripherality. In order to tackle this question, the notion of formal subsumption can offer a helpful heuristic tool to explore the relationship between literature and periphery. The global history of capitalism does not entail an empty, homogeneous time underpinning a simple transition from a stage of so-called primitive accumulation to what Marx described as the real subsumption of capital, coinciding with the emergence of the “specifically capitalist mode of production” (Marx 1019).1 Global capitalism still features what Marx described as formal subsumption: a specific historical configuration in which capitalism has not reached the scenario of total commodification typical of central economies of the world system. Formal subsumption involves “absolute” surplus value, that is, what Marx described in the sixteenth chapter of the first volume of Capital as the emergence of a situation in which human beings do not simply work for their subsistence, but rather for capital. Independent artisans or farmers are, through formal subsumption, forced to work for the capitalist. As Marx comments, the “only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorisation of capital” (Marx 644). Thus, for example, when “a peasant who has always produced enough for his needs becomes a day labourer working for a farmer … production processes of varying social provenance have transformed into capitalist production ” (Marx 1020). Instead of producing “an equivalent for the value of his labour-power” (Marx 645), the foundation of the capitalist system entails a prolongation of the working day and a subjection of the worker to the process of value production; labour power is turned into a marketable commodity. This process is the starting point for the onset of a fully developed capitalist mode of production and hence “relative surplus-value,” which occurs when “the working-day is already divided into two parts, necessary labour, and surplus-labour. In order to prolong the surplus-labour, the necessary labour is shortened by methods for producing the equivalent of the wage of labour in a shorter time” (ibid.). In the scenario of real subsumption, capitalism moves from absolute to relative surplus value, and the production process turns into the mystifying semblance of a “productive power of capital”: the social character of labour is hence alienated, “objectified and

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

77

personified in capital” (Marx 1025). While real subsumption requires the existence of so-called free waged labourers, who are totally inserted into the mechanism of accumulation, formal subsumption operates on the edge between capitalism and non-capitalist residual economies, turning independent workers and pre-capitalist societies into cogs in the capitalist machine. Formal subsumption is the recurrent process forcing workers to become “free”—that is, deprived of any means of subsistence or commons and hence compelled to sell their time in order to work and create surplus value for the capitalist. The social unevenness of the global economy shows that multiple times inhabit capitalism: alongside real subsumption, the earlier, more “primitive” logics of what Marx called absolute surplus value and formal subsumption coexist in a coeval temporal stratification. Against the teleological narrative of a passage from formal to real subsumption, which Marx himself called into question in his late writing (Shanin 1983), the multilinear and diverse temporality of global capitalism shows the continuing reality of formal subsumption, concisely defined by Harry Harootunian as “the making of history the moment capitalism encountered older economic practices” (Harootunian 63). The geographical expansion of capitalism has not resulted in a total and irreversible colonisation of time. As economies in the Global South are constantly inserted into the circuits of global capital, different moments of the history of capitalism appear side by side: financial flows and special economic zones coexist with modern-day slavery and bonded labour; hyper-exploitation of workers in the South is combined with neoliberal policies and growing inequality. Formal subsumption means the “capacity to situate practices from earlier modes alongside newer ones under the command of capital to constitute the force of temporal interruption, unevenness, fracturing, and heterogeneity” (Harootunian 64). This objectively non-synchronous situation is key to the functioning of capitalism and is at the heart of the condition of peripherality. The extractive operations of capital at the margins require and reproduce the survival of archaic forms of oppression such as slavery, casteism and bonded labour, which teleological concepts of history relegate to a previous phase to be replaced by “free” wage labour and bound to vanish through the total commodification of society on a planetary scale. Through formal subsumption, capitalism engulfs everything as a system: but not all strata and societies are incorporated in the same way.

78

F. MENOZZI

In the periphery, modernity reveals what a unilinear vision can only code as incompleteness: the archaic combines with the modern. The violence of neoliberal regimes and financial capitalism merges with the resurgence of myth and the setting to work of pre-capitalist informal economies. As Sandro Mezzadra notes, from “the perspective of longterm historical development and the world system, capitalism is structurally characterized by the coexistence of formal and real subsumption, of absolute and relative surplus value” (Mezzadra 314). Global capitalism needs the survival of pre-capitalist forms that are actively combined with the more technologically “developed” modes of exploitation and creation of value. The combination of these forms produces a stratigraphic temporality in which multiple historical forms, past and present, survive—what Mezzadra calls the continuing existence of “pre-history” within the multifarious history of imperialism and postcolonial capitalism (Mezzadra 2011a, 314; see also Mezzadra 2011b).2 Postcolonial capitalism creates an open temporality of overlapping histories within the long-term, systemic frame of a global modernity. In his important research on what he calls “strata of time,” Massimiliano Tomba identifies a vital issue in discussing the condition of peripherality. The crux of the matter, Tomba notes, is not so much to recognise the heterogeneous regime of historicity of contemporary capitalism, placing traditional alongside modern forms of exploitation. The key issue, rather, is to understand how these different temporalities unite, combine and work together, as Tomba remarks: the world market requires a historiographical paradigm which is able to comprehend the combination of a plurality of temporal strata in the violent synchronising dimension of modernity. The post-modern juxtaposition of a plurality of historical times, in which slavery is contiguous with hightech production in the overcoming of the dualism of centre and periphery, doesn’t explain anything and is even concealing. The post-modern mosaic of temporalities and forms of exploitation, even though it represents them as interconnected, poses the different times in a state of indifference to each other, while the very problem is their combination through the mechanisms of synchronisation in the world market. (Tomba 367)

Tomba’s reflections shed light on the continuing existence of a multiversum of structures of feeling belonging to different epochs and violently synchronised into the capitalist present.3 What needs to be understood, according to Tomba, is the combination, and not just the juxtaposition, of

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

79

these different temporalities in the making of a global modernity in which, as George Caffentzis remarks, “the computer requires the sweatshop and the existence of the cyborg is based on the slave” (Caffentzis 34). The central question of this chapter concerns how forms of literary expression could convey the combination and togetherness of these different strata of time. Literary writing can be perceived as integral part of those more “advanced” production processes typical of the scenario of real subsumption: intellectual work or what Maurizio Lazzarato calls “immaterial labour” fully subsumed into mechanisms of relative surplus value. In a situation in which, as Lazzarato notes, peasants and rural populations have disappeared, narratives become “signifying semiotics” inserted into the productive process of capitalism, apparatuses for the production of subjectivity and the management of the asignifying “semiotic operators” of capital (Lazzarato 2014, 135–159). From the point of view of nonsynchronism, the key issue concerns how a form of immaterial labour such as literary writing can combine and connect with other kinds of material labour existing in different modes of historical temporality: forms of exploitation such as bonded agricultural labour, sweatshops and contemporary slavery. The question concerns, to sum up, how literary writing contributes to a class composition determined by discordant regimes of temporality and value production. World literature could be redefined, from this point of view, as textual product of the dialectical combination of the different modes of material and immaterial labour proper to the combined historical regimes of real and formal subsumption. Meena Kandasamy’s 2014 novel The Gypsy Goddess offers an interesting literary intervention into these dynamics because it deals, explicitly, with the problem of “mirroring” the temporal plane of novelistic composition with the consciousness of Dalit agricultural workers in South India. Kandasamy’s novel revolves around the story of a specific event in the history of peasant revolt: the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre of insurgent agricultural labourers. The inauguration of a memorial of the massacre in 2014, the year Kandasamy’s novel was published, testifies to the fact that the Kilvenmani massacre is not just an episode in the long history of peasant insurgency. In postcolonial India, the event is charged with wider significance by highlighting the enduring violence of caste oppression, the struggle for land redistribution and the disastrous effects of economic development policies such as the “Green Revolution,” a state-driven plan to industrialise agriculture implemented by the Indian government in the 1960s.

80

F. MENOZZI

Kathleen Gough summarises the 1968 event by recounting how “a group of Harijan [untouchable] landless labourers, influenced by the CPI(M) [Communist Party], struck for higher wages in view of the increased production and price inflation brought about by the ‘green revolution.’ Goons hired by their landlords arrived on their street at night, imprisoned 42 men, women and children in a hut and burnt these people to ashes” (1931). Susan Bayly remarks that the event was “one of the first such incidents to be reported in the pan-Indian news media in terms which cited caste as the decisive factor in the defining of both allies and opponents … the Kilvenmani victims were all rural labourers of exuntouchable or Harijan descent; the perpetrators were allegedly agents of local ‘caste Hindu’ landowners” (Bayly 343–344). However, in a recent essay, Kanak Yadav notes that the original reports published in major papers such as The Hindu at the time of the event “understated the role played by the landlords and also overlooked the caste dimension to the massacre,” in that all “deceased labourers were Dalits” (113). Focusing on both the caste and class dimension of the event, Kandasamy’s novel offers a vivid illustration of how capitalism works at the periphery: concealed from the televised spotlight of the metropolitan centre, workers are kept in a state of de facto slavery and bondage, living in extremely harsh conditions of hunger and poverty, and in a state of hyper-exploitation at the hands of the local rural elite. Any attempt to improve the living and working condition is confronted with extreme violence and repression, and contemporary forms of subjugation and expropriation are legitimised with the time-honoured code of religion and caste. In 1968, the local Communist Party mobilised an entire village to go on strike to demand an increase in salary and better working conditions. The killing of a Party leader prompted the continuation of the strike, which was finally quelled when local landlords unleashed a gang of thugs, with the complicity of the police and the local authorities, to burn alive more than forty people in the village, including women and children, committing all sort of atrocities against the population in order to crush the rebellion. Kandasamy’s novel, however, defies the aim of providing a factual, naturalistic account of the incident and opts instead for a highly reflexive composition in which the representation of the massacre is accompanied by a constant meditation on the role of the writer in doing justice to the experience of peasants: their agency as well as their suffering. Following Massimiliano Tomba’s critique of any “postmodern” approach to the question of the uneven temporality of global capitalism, I would

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

81

like to read Kandasamy’s novel as a critical use of metafictional literary devices in order to counter such postmodern fragmentation of time in literature. Rather than example of postmodern play with signifiers and deconstruction, her novel focuses instead on how the temporality of literary writing intersects the temporality of peasant labour struggle, linking the activity of the writer to the toil of the enslaved agricultural labourer or “coolie.” The aesthetic dimension of Kandasamy’s novel introduces, indeed, an important exploration of the dialectical quality of non-synchronism understood as the mutually necessary antagonism of temporalities: the really subsumed work of the writer and the formally subsumed work of Dalit labourers. What matters is the dialectical combination and intersection of these layers of time and experience rather than their simple juxtaposition. This chapter is organised in two parts: in the first part, I offer a reading of Kandasamy’s literary techniques, focusing in particular on tools such as parataxis, irony, bathos, authorial intrusion, metafiction, anaphora and address to the reader. An accomplished poet, Meena Kandasamy translates some poetic tropes into the language of prose in order to situate her own writing as form of meaning-production. But these tropes are not treated as an end in themselves. Accordingly, the second part of this chapter will engage with the historical and political dimension of Kandasamy’s novel, especially her ability to ground these literary techniques into an intersectional Dalit and Marxist politics that tackles the material realities of peasant exploitation and resistance in South India. In the conclusion, I will go back to the initial question about linking the temporality of writing with the temporality of enslaved labour as a literary register of the non-synchronic aspects of the uneven economy determined by the global expansion of capitalism.

2

Chronology and Stratigraphy: Grounding Representation

The Gypsy Goddess may unsettle readers’ expectations because it punctuates the narration with long digressive authorial intrusions that interrogate the very process of novelistic composition. The text does not follow a linear chronological order, as it appears from the organisation of its parts: rather than being articulated in chapters, it is layered as a sequence of geological levels. Indeed, apart from a prologue and an epilogue, the main sections of the novel are imagined as different strata or “grounds” that the reader needs to excavate and piece together in order to get a full picture:

82

F. MENOZZI

Background, Breeding Ground, Battleground and Burial Ground. The organisation of the novel into different “grounds” opens an archaeological dimension within the text. The metaphor of “grounds” is important because it seems to capture a wider aim of the novel, which firmly locates fictional representation into the long-term history of oppression, suffering and resistance of Dalits in South India. As a politically committed novel, The Gypsy Goddess refuses to translate history into story seamlessly; it offers instead a relentless critique of representation and a never-ending interrogation of the responsibilities of the writer. Meena Kandasamy herself assumes the role of a “comrade” of the workers, without, however, claiming a total identification with her characters. The gaps and lacunae of real history are presented to the reader as an integral feature of the text, avoiding any illusion of proximity or omniscience but without renouncing a deeper commitment to historical truth. Throughout the novel, the narration of the events at Kilvenmani is interspersed with a set of narrative techniques that interrupt and reframe the stream of narration and add multiple temporal spheres to the continuum of the plot. The main rationale for adopting this kind of literary style emerges in a passage of the text, in which Kandasamy introduces an imagined Q&A about her novel. This fictional questioning takes part in the highly reflexive and metafictional “background” of the text but also offers a meta-metafictional occasion for situating the authorial intrusions and temporal dislocations that punctuate the novel. During this interrogation on the use of reflexivity to depict a dramatic episode in the history of postcolonial India, Kandasamy writes: Why can’t you fucking follow chronology? I can. If you observe carefully, you will not fail to note that everyone gets fucked in the due course of time. Why can’t you follow a standard narrative format? If the reader wanted a straight, humourless version of the events that surrounded the single biggest caste atrocity in India, she would read a research paper in the Economic and Political Weekly or a balanced press report. If the reader wants to understand the myriad landowning patterns in the Tanjore District, she will read an academic treatise … For all my shortcomings, I will not force you to follow any linear or non-linear logic where hate travels along a lattice-bridge and arrives a predestined location. (68–71, emphasis in original)

Thus, the bathetic effect of the answer about not following chronology places the fictional frame of the imagined Q&A into perspective: the

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

83

author displaces her own reframing of the novel within a wider discourse on novelistic writing. As this extract makes clear, The Gypsy Goddess is not presented as historiographical account of the event, or even, more widely, as an explanatory or pedagogical novel about the history of caste oppression in South India. The novel rather frames historical events into a discourse on the work of the novelist, addressing the reader, intruding into the narration and anticipating possible objections to her writing. The call-and-response structure of the quoted passage also shows the ironic, angry and irreverent tone that permeates Kandasamy’s work, a true aesthetic mode that characterises some of her most compelling poetry too (Kandasamy 2010). Kandasamy adopts many strategies to disrupt, not only the chronological order of the story, but also any attempt to reduce her writing, on the one hand, to a purely postmodern play with signifiers or, on the other hand, a transparent account of the Kilvenmani massacre. The specific literary form assembled in The Gypsy Goddess eschews naturalism and postmodernism at the same time. Thus, the novel starts with a “prologue”: the letter of a local landowner to the Chief Minister of Madras, requesting help to fight the communist threat to established hierarchies in the constituency. In this letter, Gopalakrishna Naidu, a historical character and one of the main perpetrators of the massacre, laments the effects of the ongoing protest by agricultural workers, expresses fears concerning his personal safety and explains the risks involved in the erosion of landowning rights. The prologue lists the grievances of the landowner and anticipates another scene concerning Gopalakrishna Naidu, which will be presented later in the novel. The second time, however, it is not so much the content of the letter to the minister that will be shown to the reader, but the very act by which the writer herself composed the letter under dictation. The novel, hence, first reveals the finalised fiction, only in order to go back to the background scene of its making 129 pages later, where the writer narrates an uncomfortable meeting with the landowner and discloses her role as the scribe imaginatively charged with the task of drafting his complaint. This technique involves two simultaneous processes. Firstly, it subverts the temporal order, splitting mimesis from diegesis: real time and diegetic time are in constant friction and disarticulation. Secondly, the flat surface of the text is animated by the tridimensional space of the scene of textual creation. The novel takes the reader from textual representation to the literary workshop: it shows the concrete work necessary to the

84

F. MENOZZI

production of fiction, preventing the reader from stopping at the written page itself. The sense of chronological dislocation is produced by techniques involving the reversal of temporal order as well as by turning the “background” of the novel into its actual foreground, anticipating and reframing the plot. Thus, after the prologue, the novel offers a first “ground”—background—where the reader is, more broadly, guided into the backstage of the novel. Meena Kandasamy reflects on her use of prose rather than poetry and her adoption of the English language to represent Tamil structures of feeling. The sense of chronological dislocation is achieved, not only by disrupting the timeline, but also by poetic strategies such as anaphora, which start to appear from the beginning of the text: Once upon a time, in one tiny village, there lived an old woman. Writing in the summer of the Spring Revolution, I anticipate everybody to be let down by an opening line that does not contain one oblique reference to a grenade, or a crusade … Once upon a time, in another tiny village, there lived another old woman. This transplantation falls flat on its face, the fatal forehead first … From what I have heard, place is always a good place to start. Nagapattinam, the theatre of the Old Woman’s teary, fiery story. Tharangambadi, the village of her birth, land of the singing waves. Kilvenmani, the village into which she married, the village that married itself to communism. To handle that kind of an overloaded opener, I need to dig up a lot of history. (13–15, emphasis in original)

Thought-provokingly, this passage situates the Kilvenmani massacre in relation to the time of writing: partly composed during a residence at the University of Kent in 2011, the novel gestures at the historical events going on in those years, the “Spring Revolution” that started in Tunisia and Egypt before spreading to a worldwide sense of unrest. The narrator imaginatively addresses the expectations of an implied reader approaching the book during those years. The repetition of “once upon a time” at the start of multiple paragraphs is here meant to problematise the very beginning of the story. The narrator does not know where to start from and hence questions the very act of starting a story, the original moment or its incipit, by repeating a set line and finally introducing her subject. “Once upon a time,” furthermore, adds a nebulous fairy-tale, mythical temporality to the two temporal dimensions of the passage, the time of writing and the narrated time. The “old woman” mentioned here also foreshadows a character that will only be introduced much later in the text.

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

85

In addition to this multi-layered structure that weaves future events, mythical time, time of narration and diegetic time together, this passage seems to indicate a central aspect of the text by making the narrator visible as someone who will need to “dig up a lot of history.” The disruption of linearity in The Gypsy Goddess stems from constant metafictional authorial intrusions where prose is complicated by poetic devices such as anaphora and alliteration. Kandasamy’s reflective use of the genre of the novel shifts her account from a chronological order of events into a stratigraphic digging of the multiple narrative layers covering the real history of the Kilvenmani rebellion. Kandasamy continues her metafictional reflections with a digression about Nagapattinam, the main coastal town in Kilvenmani’s region, a place that only appeared in history through the accounts of the “white man,” featuring in books by Western travellers since Ptolemy: “Hurtled into history in this desperate fashion, Nagapattinam would patiently wait until a Tamil woman came along and decided to write a half-decent novel set in its surroundings” (15). In this way, the novel highlights the process of excavation and remembrance that makes possible the transmission of the events in the first place. As Walter Benjamin writes in a relevant fragment on excavation and memory, “genuine memory” yields an image of the person who remembers, “in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through” (Benjamin 1999, 576). Kandasamy’s novel operates this kind of archaeological record: not only does it inform the reader about the events, it also makes visible the traces and strata of time through which the recipient must pass in the quest for recovering historical truth. Kandasamy’s metafictional temporal dislocations and repetitions indicate that the novel does not allow the story of Kilvenmani to be safely locked in the past: 1968 is closely tied up with the present of the narration and the future, anticipated present in which the reader will approach the text. A first meaning of a non-synchronous poetic of the novel hence involves the dispersal of the time of the narrated event into an expanded historical field able to keep a channel of communication open between the mythological beginnings of the history of oppression in the region and the not-yet foreseen future of readers taking up the text after its completion and publication. Accordingly, the unsettled temporal register of the events of Kilvenmani is signalled by many techniques used by Kandasamy, especially her use of parataxis and her constant address to the reader. The

86

F. MENOZZI

use of parataxis emerges, in particular, in the statement of a witness and survivor of the massacre. A villager called Ramalingan recounts his experience in a chapter included in the “Battleground” section. The narrator, once again, features as a character; this time she is personified as the addressee of the survivor: It is not that night’s incidents alone, madam, you see this problem has been raging for three months and more, they were asking us to remove the [Communist Party] flag, replace our red flag with their yellow flag, and you know this was not just polite please-do-it or can-you-do it … (167)

Ramalingam’s deposition goes on for a lengthy 15-page sentence dominated by the use of parataxis: a unique sequence of short utterances followed by commas, without any full stop or paragraph break. Ramalingam’s account is fast-paced, continuous and uninterrupted. The witness gives an account of the events, denouncing the violence of the landlords, the complicity of the police and the unspeakable atrocities committed against women and children. The long concatenation of clauses is concluded, at the end of the chapter, by a full stop followed by a brief commentary on the testimony itself: I don’t know what you feel, or whose side you are on but I have told you my story, sister, I haven’t lied to you, a man cannot lie when he has the taste of death on his tongue, I want you to write this all down and put it in the papers and tell the truth to the whole world. Let everyone read about what happened here and let them burn with anger. (182)

Ramalingam “speaks non-stop, his sentences sprout without an end in sight” (268), the narrator comments towards the end of the novel. The testimony is guided by a sense of urgency, the strong need to tell the story in order for it not to be forgotten. This passage anticipates another central element of the novel. The mixture of letters, statements, documents, digressions, novelistic narration and metafictional intrusions that compose the text is here aimed at involving both the writer and the reader into the transmission of the story of the massacre. Digging up the story, the narrator is here apostrophised by a witness, who asks that she retell his story, conveying “the truth to the whole world” (182). Both writer and reader become full characters in the novel, in the same way in which the scope of the novel itself proliferates beyond the closure of the text,

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

87

expanding the frame of the story both back in time and forwards into the future. Indeed, the events at Kilvenmani are linked with a long-term history of caste oppression and slavery in South India, dating centuries back before the narrated occurrence. In the concluding “epilogue,” the writer also imagines addressing the story to a journalist attempting to gather information from survivors in the village years after the event, in 1980 (before Kandasamy’s birth and hence before her writing of the novel in 2011). Being positioned backwards and afterwards, the reader of the novel is in the end repeatedly located both in the past and in the future, playing with the possibility that the text could have been already read before being written. Kandasamy encourages the reader to move “ahead and march forward, dear reader. You are wanted in so many places. You haven’t even met the men yet” (265). Through these strategies, the epilogue concludes the story by situating the narration in another temporal frame, a moment that has not occurred yet—an event of the past that still has to take place. Moving towards the future, the narrator hence points out to the reader: Dear reader, they [the inhabitants of Kilvenmani] also understand – given the timing of your visit … that this is one of those “anniversary special” stories that you are working on, that, twelve years on, Kilvenmani is a season-ticket for journalists who want to make a pilgrimage into people’s memory … Back to you, dear reader, dear reader. Back in the village of Kilvenmani, back on the fourteenth day of December 1980, back on that lazy Sunday, when you express your intent to meet Gopalakrishna Naidu with the most honourable of motives. (271–272)

The novel finishes by telling the reader about the killing of the landlord and how “you”—reader—“join the people of Kilvenmani” as they “rejoice in the revenge” (273). The conclusion hence refers to a future moment in time when the reader—who is also described as the one who will narrate the story in a journalistic report—will meet the witnesses and survivors at Kilvenmani, testifying to the final revenge and killing of the landlord. As Hugo Gorringe notes, within Dalit activism in Tamil Nadu, Kilvenmani “became a movement refrain, however, when the culprit [Gopalakrishna Naidu] was waylaid after his release and reportedly carved into forty-four pieces” (Gorringe 2006, 124, emphasis in original). The ending of the novel captures the conclusive moment when the episode of 1968 turns into a legendary narrative of resistance that reinforces, with

88

F. MENOZZI

almost mythological valence, the possibility of agency and regained pride of Dalit workers. The final introduction of a historical past in the guise of a future that has not yet taken place is hence aiming, not at disjuncture and fragment, but rather at weaving together different phases of Dalit history. If the temporal frame of the composition of the novel is 2011, the year of the “Spring Revolution,” while revolving around the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre, the conclusion situates the future reader, who has not “yet” met the inhabitants of the village, in 1980: the future reader of the novel is, in fact, a journalist of the past who is about to visit the village and to write on the commemoration of the event. Beyond linearity and temporal order, Kandasamy reimagines her role as committed narrator of the complexities of postcolonial history; the author becomes a digger and excavator of history: the narrator and the reader join the unfinished history of Kilvenmani by becoming stratigraphic collectors of the multiple layers of time through which any meaningful retelling of the story becomes possible. The temporal disruption of linearity, however, does not end into a postmodern play with signifiers or an absolute and irreversible dominance of fictionality against the possibility of telling the truth. Rather, Meena Kandasamy’s engagement with literary technique contributes to the aim of doing justice to the reality of suffering and of denouncing the concrete situation of Dalit workers. While the novel has been read as example of the “ethical undecidability” typical of the postmodern novel (Herrero 2019), The Gypsy Goddess, in my view, can also be read as other than a postmodern novel; the text can also be interpreted as a critical denunciation of the political deadlock of reflexive metafiction unable to go beyond a mere play with textuality. As the narrator herself vividly points out at the end of the first section: “Fuck these postmodern writers ” (46, emphasis in original). While the text certainly mobilises literary devices typical of postmodern prose, its strong commitment to historical truth, justice and Dalit activism problematises the full pigeonholing of The Gypsy Goddess within postmodernist aesthetics. Against fragmentation and deconstruction, there is what Jean-Paul Sartre would call a “synthetic labour” at work in the novel: a process of totalisation, that is, a “developing unification” (Sartre 46) of multiple stories into a unified and intelligible unity which does not, however, become an inert and enclosed totality. Only a process of totalisation and unification allows a reflexive moment through which history becomes intelligible; otherwise, the truth of the Kilvenmani massacre

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

89

would simply be lost into a multitude of textual levels that deconstruct themselves.

3

Combining Times: A Single Story

By focusing on the novel’s temporal complexities, I argue that this engaged novel can be aligned with the Marxist politics underlying nonsynchronism as an interpretative lens in literary criticism. Kandasamy’s insertion of Dalit struggle within a larger history of struggle of oppressed workers, as well as her critical references to postmodernism, can lead to understanding the novel’s politics within the tradition of literary forms contributing to the struggle for socialism and social justice worldwide. Even though the novel does not collapse caste and class, and Kandasamy herself has vocally denounced the casteism persisting among Marxists in India, the novel constantly emphasises that the Dalit workers on strike at Kilvenmani were supported, organised and directed by the Communist Party. The fact that the revolt was primarily along caste lines shows that class consciousness needs to be inserted, intersectionally, in a longer tradition of struggle for social justice, end of casteism and women’s rights, rather than overshadowing other sites of combat. Marxism needs to be placed into the overdetermined struggle of Dalits and adivasi, a move central to grassroots Maoist movements in India such as the Naxalite (Roy 2013; Sundar 2019). As Kandasamy explains in a recent interview: “what is more important is to see the revolutionary aspects of Dalit politics, the struggle that Dalits were fighting … even before The Communist Manifesto came into being or the Russian revolution happened” (Venkatesan 146–147). While the Communist Party of India (Marxist) still seems to lack an “adequate dalit leadership,” Karthikeyan, Rajangam and Gorringe note that the Party “has worked with dalits since the outset on a class basis,” founding the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front in order to respond to autonomous Dalit mobilisation (30–32). The historical consciousness underlying The Gypsy Goddess, in its dislocation of chronology and arrangement of a stratigraphic temporality, needs to be seen as a dialectical interplay of story and history engaging with both Dalit and Marxist politics. Kandasamy reinserts Marxism into a longer tradition of the oppressed, which needs to expand the focus on class struggle in order to include different, pre-Marxist traditions of resistance as well as movements for emancipation of Dalits and indigenous peoples in the Global South. Kandasamy’s novel, indeed, constructs an intersectional

90

F. MENOZZI

and polyphonic account of peasant insurrection able to link the individual to wider dynamics of caste, class, race, gender and the accumulation of capital. The rebels are not victims in that they are not atomised individuals: the defeated are first of all Dalit workers acting collectively, building a consciousness of oppression and joining a long history of peasant unrest dating back to pre-colonial times. Accordingly, the political dimension of the novel’s reframing of time emerges in a few asides that Meena Kandasamy directs at an influential Nigeria-American contemporary writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who famously discussed, during a popular TED Talk, the “dangers of a single story” and the need to pluralise voices and perspectives in literary and political writing. While Kandasamy’s work certainly shares Adichie’s central commitment to denouncing enduring patriarchal oppression and violence against women, the politics that may emerge from her novel should not be, in my view, conflated with a liberal multiculturalism detaching gender issues from other important sites of material oppression and exploitation, especially the situation of workers in the Global South. Meena Kandasamy does not seem to argue that a liberal multicultural sensibility is the solution to the evils of casteism. On the contrary, her work seems to be committed to both recognition and redistribution. The novel, indeed, denounces the collusion of archaic and modern forms of exploitation and oppression: the authoritarian merging of capitalism and the neoliberal state with the hierarchical order of caste and continuing discrimination along race and gender lines. In consonance with Dalit activism in South India, Kandasamy’s politics too seems to “combine identity-based demands with a more equitable distribution of resources” (Karthikeyan, Rajangam, Gorringe 31). Ironically, Kandasamy mentions Adichie in one passage of the novel, where she writes: “Is there a single story? No. Of course. I’ve consulted Chimamanda on this too. Can every story be told? Yes. I could do it if you were in the mood to read about how every landlord screwed the life of every labourer. Right now, I am concentrating on one story” (70, emphasis in original). Beyond any simple fragmentation of the memory of Kilvenmani through metafiction, this aside shows a central tension, within the novel, between the aim to tell more than one story, possibly every story and the imperative to write one story only. The reference to telling “every story” might also echo, in passing, another important Indian novel revolving around caste oppression and violence: Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel The God of Small Things, which opens with an epigraph

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

91

by John Berger: “never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” Meena Kandasamy, however, seems to reclaim the importance of writing a single story. Indeed, while pluralising narratives and including every perspective can avoid the risk of silencing marginal experiences, however, a narrative trapped into total plurality, heteroglossia and fragmentation would also be incapable of contributing to righting wrongs and to social justice. The Gypsy Goddess seems to indicate that, while temporally dislocated, uneven and disordered, a narrative aiming to contribute to Dalit struggle needs to follow the political and ethical imperative to compose the multiplicity of memories into a single story. As the narrator explains in a later passage of the text: We told our stories to the court and to the commission. We testified on their terms. We were examined and cross-examined … However, the Special Additional First-Class Magistrate was not very pleased with our versions. Perhaps he wanted a single story: uniform, end to end to end. The “Once upon a time, there lived an old lady in a tiny village” story. Sadly, we are not able to tell such a story. A story told in many voices is seen as unreliable … We were bound to lose. Because we do not know how to tell our story. (234–235, emphasis in original)

After the event, the landlords responsible for the massacre are acquitted or only accused of minor offences. No one is prosecuted for the massacre. The multiple juries that examine the case, indeed, defend their decision by stressing that the stories and testimonies of the survivors of Kilvenmani did not compose a unifying, reliable, coherent narrative. The jury found “everything we said to be faulty, unreliable, contradictory, smacking of falsehood, lacking in credibility” (254). Kandasamy’s temporal dislocation of her own narrative, for this reason, does not end up celebrating a postmodern fragmentation of meaning and an endless juxtaposition of signifiers. The aim of her project seems to be the exact opposite: while showing the contradictions, dislocations and incongruences that a novel about and after Kilvenmani entails, after all, her writing also identifies the imperative to provide the much-needed single story that is the only means capable of continuing the fight for justice of the Dalit community, legally as well as fictionally. The combination of times in the frame of a single story, however, does not merely suggest that the multiple and dissonant voices of the

92

F. MENOZZI

survivors need to merge into a unified narrative line. The political significance of the combination of times also emerges through Kandasamy’s questioning of the 1968 massacre as an “event” or, as she evocatively writes, a “flashpoint” in history. The single story that is being transmitted, in other words, should not be restricted to the one and only episode and refrain at the centre of the narrative. Kandasamy shows how the massacre is nothing but part and parcel of a long-term continuum of oppression against untouchable labourers that has continued uninterrupted for centuries. While non-synchronically dislocated, Kilvenmani needs to be situated within a wider diachronic dimension. The isolated episode will hence be better understood, as Kandasamy explains: Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy’s murder on the day of the district-level agriculture strike proved to be a flashpoint for all the tragedy that followed. They [those writing on the massacre] will not begin their story with the arrival of the various Europeans, or the story of rice cultivation in this delta district, or the local kings’ largesse and land grants to the Brahmins … or the origins of untouchability that set apart and put aside some men and some women, or the succour offered by the slave trade of the brown peoples … because it would be easy to get caught up in this multi-dimensional mess of events … Unlike this jumble that is beyond disambiguation, the selection of a key incident … removes the creases from the timeline. Like a lullaby, it transports us to a safe zone in time. (101–102)

This passage shows the dialectical contradiction between time of the event and temporality of history. A single story is needed in order to remove “the creases from the timeline” and to make sure the struggle for justice is supported by a coherent, linear, unambiguous narrative. However, the single story of the “event” risks sanitising the episode from the long-term, multidimensional history of oppression and exploitation that is necessary to understand the event in the first place. As Kandasamy reveals in the novel, an unsettled tension between the fictional and the historiographical animates her project: “Should we go to the tiny village to learn its story? Or, should we stay here and continue study history instead?” (22). This dialectical interplay of single story and long-term history is never abandoned by Kandasamy, but rather productively set to work in order to address two central questions: the concrete situation of labour at the periphery of capitalism—the tradition of the oppressed featuring dramatic defeats and enduring violence, but also milestone victories and

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

93

successful rebellions—and the non-synchronic relationship between the time of agricultural labour and the time of literary writing. One chapter of the “breeding ground” section consists of a “Marxist Party Pamphlet” where the temporal span of the events—between 15 November and 25 December 1968—is inserted into the tradition of communist struggle in India. The Marxist pamphleteer lists a set of achievements won by the Communist Party in their struggle alongside the enslaved labourers: the Kalappal Agreement fixing a daily wage and stopping the “cruel practice of whipping” (88); the Mannargudi Agreement, ensuring a raise in the workers’ daily wage and forcing landlords to use standardised measures to pay labourers; the other victories of organised struggle including securing holiday and the six-day working week. The list concludes by emphasising the need to continue the struggle, expanding the significance of the 1968 strike at Kilvenmani backwards and forwards in time: The Mannargudi Agreement was signed on 25th December 1944, but nearly a quarter-century later, what have we achieved? Though we have a rich history … We will still continue to sign agreements with the landlords. We still have not achieved our dream of land redistribution. (88)

The oppression of peasants in Kilvenmani, indeed, is explained as the result of a socially sanctioned caste hierarchy coinciding with the grabbing of common land and the expropriation of the Dalits. The roots of the conflict are to be located within a wider history in which feudalism survives in the capitalist state of postcolonial India as remnant of a precedent, pre-capitalist form of exploitation kept alive and totally reframed as tools of “modern” structures such as the police, judiciary power, the state and forcible economic development plans such as the “Green Revolution,” which caused local agriculture’s dependence on imported crops and pesticide, and man-made famine voluntarily planned in order to crush any dissidence against the landlords. In her historical study, Susan Bayly notes that during the time of the Kilvenmani massacre, “deep hostilities were generated out of the adoption of high-yield ‘Green Revolution’ crop strains and the resulting commercialisation of smallholder grain production. As in other parts of India, better-off proprietors responded to the high cost of new cultivation inputs by mechanising their production, or by importing cheaper labourers from elsewhere” (344). The “Green Revolution,” as the work of critic such as Vandana Shiva (2016) and Harry

94

F. MENOZZI

Cleaver (1972) shows, needs to be understood as an imperialist technoscientific programme of agricultural “development” aimed at ensuring the process of accumulation of capital by appropriating nature and by creating economic dependency “assisted by foreign capitals and planned by foreign experts” (Shiva 15). As the author of the pamphlet in The Gypsy Goddess continues: “we have been swindled in the name of gods, in the name of religion, in the name of caste. Now, we are being swindled in the name of development” (93). Kandasamy’s novel mirrors the Dalit movement’s turning of Kilvenmani into a “chosen trauma” that encapsulates continuing “grievances and demands” (Gorringe 2005, 135). Meena Kandasamy endows literary technique with a highly politicised drive to reinsert socially committed writing into the long chain of resistance to oppression and the scenario of incomplete modernisation proper to peripheral zones of the capitalist system. The coexistence of pre-capitalist caste hierarchy and modern forms of enslavement, indeed, is narrated through a literary form that adopts techniques of temporal estrangement to mirror these wider economic processes on the plane of narration. In a pivotal passage of the novel, the imagined communist pamphleteer makes a suggestive revelation by declaring the aim to uncover “the true people’s history,” a history not available “in the police records or the newspapers. It is not a history that textbooks will teach … But it is a history that we must learn, a history that will set us free, a history that we can harvest” (85). The metaphor of a “history that we can harvest” is by no means marginal to the story, as it emerges when Kandasamy reinterprets the work of the writer-excavator as a mirroring of the manual labour of the agricultural worker: the novel does not merely represent, but rather re-enacts, on the level of literary technique, agricultural labour. In a way that could remind one of Walter Benjamin’s reflections in his 1934 essay on the “author as producer,” Meena Kandasamy seems to suggest a form of what Benjamin described as “mediated solidarity” in her attempt to reconnect the literary author-producer to the hyper-exploited labourer in India. This also appears as significant leitmotiv in the novel, as Kandasamy writes: Everyone could, at some point, object to this narrative because it alternates between leading the characters and leading the audience. The story, working hard to break the stranglehold of narrative, does not dabble in anything beyond agriculture. All of fiction’s artefacts used in this

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

95

novel – lining, holing, filling, mixing, planting, staking, topping, weeding, watering, manuring, threshing, winnowing – are borrowed from a peasant’s paradise. (24–25)

Writing is compared to the manual labour of the Dalits: the story “dabbles” in agriculture, and literary devices reflect concrete working techniques. These statements introduce the question of production in the novel and could be tied up with Walter Benjamin’s question regarding the relationship between literature and production: before the problem of how a “literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a period,” Benjamin observes, “I would like to ask: how does it stand in them? This question aims directly at the function that the work has within the literary relationships of production of a period. In other words, it aims directly at a work’s literary technique” (Benjamin 770). Literary technique can be used to transform the relationships of production in a certain period. A reading of The Gypsy Goddess from the point of view of non-synchronism, understood as a dialectical register of the material conditions of peripherality, enables a revisiting of Benjamin’s question. Kandasamy’s situates her work into an economic context marked by formal subsumption, a mix of archaic and modern historicities; her prose turns the commodification of world literature into the labour of a “peripheral” intellectual. Kandasamy’s agricultural metaphors challenge the reduction of the activity of the writer to a kind of “immaterial” work totally subsumed by the commodifying process of late capitalism. This also entails going beyond an idea of The Gypsy Goddess as partaking of a notion of world literature constituted as a circulating good in a global literary marketplace, which would reduce literature to the commodifying logics of capitalism at the centre, rather than locating the very act of literary production as integral part of the scenario of formal and real subsumption proper to the periphery of the capitalist system. A totally commodified vision of literary expression stems from the immaterial and cognitive kind of capitalism that determines it in the first place. As Maurizio Lazzarato remarks in his study of immaterial labour, the author, in a (fully subsumed) capitalist world, has lost any “individual dimension” and is rather “transformed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth) … organized according to the imperatives of profitability” (Lazzarato 144). Immaterial labour means the real subsumption of literature to the logics of capital: “In this process of

96

F. MENOZZI

socialization and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the ‘ideological’ product tends to assume the form of a commodity” (144). Kandasamy’s novel reopens this logic of real subsumption to a scenario of incomplete modernity, whereby the labour of the writer and the labour of the Dalit “coolie” mirror each other in a non-synchronous process in which multiple historical layers combine. Kandasamy’s novel cannot be easily incorporated into hegemonic ideals of world literature because her metafictional devices situate the persona of the writer in a non-synchronous historical field of exploitation and resistance that registers the material situation of the characters she represents. In this complex and multi-layered novel, solidarity replaces commodification. Beyond any postmodern poetics typical of late capitalist writers from Anglo-American locations, Meena Kandasamy formulates what Benjamin would call a “mediated solidarity” with Dalit labour in the Global South: while the writer does not claim to be one of the agricultural workers, her literary technique takes part in the production process by transforming the methods of (literary) production themselves and reflecting on the role of scribes and writers within Dalit struggle. Kandasamy’s use of figures of speech in the texture of her composition is rethought as literary equivalent of manual labour in literature. This parallel does not collapse the distance between writer and Dalit agricultural worker, but rather gives a new significance to novelistic play with time. The constant alternation between the time of narration and the time of narrated events becomes a stand-in for the way formal and real processes of subsumption operate at the margins of capitalism. In the same way as peripheral economies feature the combination of high-tech, intellectual and immaterial production with pre-modern forms of enslavement and manual labour, thus Kandasamy’s novel translates this scenario into a metafictional interpolation of the process of literary production.

4

Conclusion: Creasing the Timeline

While critical of narrative coherence and linearity, Kandasamy’s novel does not offer a disjunctive deconstruction of overlapping layers of time; rather, it shows how metafictional literary techniques can be used against the grain in order to offer a politically committed and dialectical location of the labour of the novelist within a production process that is not detached from the experience of the Dalit worker. For this reason, her novel can be aligned with contemporary reflections on the survivals of the archaic in a

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

97

global modernity marked by unevenness and formal subsumption, exemplified by processes of exploitation in which caste and class combine to oppress landless agricultural workers. In a recent essay on contemporary forms of unfree labour, Yann Moulier Boutang reflects on the “persistence of numerous and recurring exceptions to free wage-labor in the contemporary world” (no pag.). He asks, as regards these “exceptions”: “are they anachronistic vestiges of a feudal past or ‘traditional societies,’ or are they a mode of the ‘normal’ functioning of a capitalism that is otherwise firmly a part of modernity? Can we speak of modern slavery?” (ibid.). In his response to these pressing issues, Boutang suggests that we need to think the coexistence, at the same time, of forms of free and unfree labour combining within a global capitalism signed by the continuity of the process of primitive accumulation. Slavery is still required by capitalism at the periphery. The concept of non-synchronism allows to think through the simultaneity and contemporaneity of these forms, showing that these are not exceptions or marginal vestiges but rather vital aspects constantly reproduced by capitalism. Forms of authoritarian exploitation such as slavery and bonded labour are indeed, at the same time, both anachronistic survivals and by-products of modernity. The dialectic of time captured by non-synchronism illustrates how archaic forms are constantly retranslated and combined with modern temporal structures: caste hierarchy and religious belief mix with the exploitation of labour and the use of state violence and the police to reinstate social inequality. The Gypsy Goddess shows how the idiom of caste is both a vestige of feudal modes of oppression and a way of formulating a consciousness of this non-synchronous dimension of oppression in the present. The aim of the novel, in the end, is to prevent, not only the suffering, but also the struggle of workers at Kilvenmani from being reduced to anomaly or exception, showing instead how the exploitation and suppression of rural workers are central to India’s politics and economy. As the narrator remarks: While our village burned and smouldered … [the Chief Minister] summoned up some energy and he said: “This incident is so savage and sadistic that words falter and fail to express my agony and anguish.” And when asked for more, he added, craning his neck: “People should forget this as they forget a feverish nightmare or a flash of lightning” … We were forgotten. That was all. This was it. (216–217)

98

F. MENOZZI

Kandasamy’s novel aims to counter this amnesiac repression of realities of peasant oppression. The atrocities committed against men, women and children protesting for better life conditions are again, in the words of the minister, compared to an episodic occurrence such as a “nightmare” or a “flash of lightning.” Against the eventual, unspeakable, singular nature of Kilvenmani, Meena Kandasamy shows the continuum of forgetfulness along with the enduring history of resistance, what Kathleen Gould calls the “strong tradition of rebellion” of Indian peasants (Gough 1391). The non-synchronous dimension of her novel captures this dialectic of event and duration, synchrony and diachrony, inscribed in the concrete historical realities she describes. But this non-synchronous aspect of the novel also concerns the ability to forge forms of resistance that go beyond the single event, keeping the plurality of voices together with the sense of solidarity produced by the single story of Dalit expropriation. The very title of the novel, declared to be completely detached from the novel itself, in reality vividly captures how the non-synchronous reality of exploitation turns into myth, legend, story and eventually consciousness of the oppressed. The myth of the “gypsy goddess,” indeed, derives from a legend in which seven gypsy women, once upon a time, were murdered along with their children because they had spent the night away from the village, being lost on their way home the previous day. After hearing the story, a fictional double of the author turns the victims into local divinity: The novelist, ill at ease, wants to teach a lesson to the village. In one stroke, he elevates the seven condemned women and their children into one cult goddess. He divines that unless these dead women are worshipped, the village shall suffer ceaselessly. (44)

The kind of consciousness raised by the novel does not merely involve a rational grasp of the economic conditions of exploitation of labourers. In addition to fighting for improved living conditions, the myth of the gypsy goddess, requiring “six measures of paddy that are paid to her on every important occasion” (45), becomes a metaphor for the dream and hope of justice and the redistribution of land and wealth. While the insurrection was defeated, the rebellious drive keeps the continuum of history open, challenging any religious sense of predetermination. From this point of view, The Gypsy Goddess could be portrayed as literary example of what Enzo Traverso defines as “left-wing melancholia.” While permeated by a “culture of defeat,” the novel does not surrender to the tragic destiny

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

99

of the Kilvenmani rebels, but rather reanimates their defeat as a way of continuing their struggle for an upright walk of dignity and justice. As Traverso writes, such melancholic mood “does not mean lamenting a lost utopia, but rather rethinking a revolutionary project in a nonrevolutionary age” (20). By refusing to treat the Dalit rebels as victims, Kandasamy reopens the past to a Not Yet in which real possibility of social transformation still inhabits the present. The novel does not deny the defeat: all that remains of the Kilvenmani protest may be, as it appears in a description of the ruins after the wrecking of the village, “a few bones” and few other objects surviving the fire, “almost as if they were the remnants of a long-ago civilisation” (190). However, the defeat enters into the historical consciousness of the Dalits, triggering forms of mediated solidarity in the reader, and kept alive as unsettled score: the future past of the novel’s temporal register signals that not everything has been done in vain. If the writer should not be conflated with the labourers, she certainly takes part, from a mediated distance, in their efforts to mobilise the past, as the Communist agitators proclaim in the novel: “let the working class unite! … The past is a dream, the future is a new epoch! These times are ours, comrades ” (127, emphasis in original). The Communist leaders sing the reappropriation of the present, keeping the struggle alive for land redistribution. The expropriation of the expropriators will go back, in the future, to a pre-historical past that will continue to oppose the untrammelled process of primitive accumulation.

Notes 1. In The Accumulation of Capital , Rosa Luxemburg rethought Marx’s concept of so-called primitive accumulation, consisting of “the process of appropriating non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of the peasants into a capitalist proletariat” (345). While for Marx this process was incidental and only useful to illustrate the “genesis of capital,” Luxemburg introduced the theory that “capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it” (ibid.). On the sense of history in Luxemburg’s work and on accumulation in a postcolonial world, see my essay on Luxemburg as well as Benita Parry’s “Perspective on Rosa Luxemburg.” Silvia Federici explores the concept of primitive accumulation from a feminist perspective in her important book Caliban and the Witch, while Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, and Anup Dhar (2017) critically discuss contemporary theories of the concept.

100

F. MENOZZI

2. S. Charusheela offers a thought-provoking response to Mezzadra concerning what Mezzadra describes as a “nostalgic” tendency to romanticise pre-capitalist formations. Charusheela asks: “Can subaltern subjects whose commons resources are being bloodily expropriated by capitalist theft and state-sanctioned violence become, in their struggles against expropriation, subjective bearers of our revolutionary future?” (Charusheela 324). The concept of non-synchronism reveals the dialectical contradiction that such important question highlights: the pre-capitalist past is not revolutionary in itself, but there is potentially utopian and revolutionary element in it that can be recovered in the struggle, as Mezzadra (318) notes, for the production—and not merely preservation—of the common, a society without exploitation. 3. Peter Osborne (2015), Cinzia Arruzza (2015), and Harry Harootunian (2015b) provide thoughtful responses to Tomba’s work in a special issue of the journal Historical Materialism.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_s ingle_story?language=en. Accessed 1 May 2019. Arruzza, Cinzia. 2015. Marx’s Gendered Temporalities. Historical Materialism 23.4: 49–59. Bayly, Susan. 2001. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Selected Writings 1931–1934, vol. 2, Part 2. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boutang, Yann Moulier. 2018. Forms of Unfree Labour, History or Pre-History of Capitalism? Trans. Patrick King Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.vie wpointmag.com/2018/02/01/forms-unfree-labor-primitive-accumulationhistory-prehistory-capitalism/. Accessed 20 September 2018. Caffentzis, George. 1999. The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri. Common Sense 24: 20–38. Chakrabarti, Anjan, Stephen Cullenberg, and Anup Dhar. 2017. Primitive Accumulation and Historical Inevitability. In Theodore A. Burczak, Robert F. Garnett Jr., and Richard McIntyre, eds. Knowledge, Class, and Economics. Abingdon: Routledge, Charusheela, S. 2011. Response: History, Historiography, and Communal Subjectivity. Rethinking Marxism 23.3: 322–327. Cleaver, Harry M. 1972. The Contradictions of the Green Revolution. The American Economic Review 62.1/2: 177–186.

3

THE AUTHOR AS DIGGER: THE GYPSY GODDESS …

101

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia. Gorringe, Hugo. 2005. Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sage. ———. 2006. Which Is Violence? Reflections on Collective Violence and Dalit Movements in South India. Social Movement Studies 5.2: 117–136. Gough, Kathleen. 1974. Indian Peasant Uprisings. Economic and Political Weekly 9.32/34: 1391–1412. Harootunian, Harry. 2015a. Marx After Marx. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2015b. Piercing the Present with the Past. Historical Materialism 23.4: 60–74. Herrero, Dolores. 2019. Postmodernism and Politics in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54.1: 70–83. Kandasamy, Meena. 2010. Ms Militancy. New Delhi: Navayana. ———. 2014. The Gypsy Goddess. London: Atlantic. Karthikeyan, D., Stalin Rajangam, and Hugo Gorringe. 2012. Dalit Political Imagination and Replication in Contemporary Tamil Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly 47.36: 30–34. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. Immaterial Labor. In Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds. Radical Thought in Italy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 133–147. ———. 2014. Signs and Machines. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild. Abingdon: Routledge [1913]. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Menozzi, Filippo. 2018. Think Another Time: Rosa Luxemburg and the Concept of History. New Formations 94: 17–22. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2011a. The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So- called Primitive Accumulation’. Rethinking Marxism 23.3: 302–321. ———. 2011b. How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism. Postcolonial Studies 14.2: 151–170. Osborne, Peter. 2015. Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a MultiLayered Temporal Dialectic. Historical Materialism 23.4: 39–48. Parry, Benita. 2018. Perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg. New Formations 94: 49– 61. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. ———. 2013. Broken Republic. London: Penguin. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: Verso. Shanin, Theodor. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York: Monthly Review.

102

F. MENOZZI

Shiva, Vandana. 2016. The Violence of Green Revolution. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Sundar, Nandini. 2019. The Burning Forest: India’s War Against the Maoists. London: Verso. Tomba, Massimiliano. 2013. Marx’s Temporalities. Leiden: Brill. Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, and Rajesh James. 2018. Mapping the Margins: An Interview with Meena Kandasamy: Conducted at Sacred Heart College in Kochi, India on 12 November 2015. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 49.1: 143–154. Yadav, Kanak. 2017. Gentlemen Killers: The Politics of Remembering in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess. Contemporary Voice of Dalit 9.1: 113–120.

CHAPTER 4

Beyond Diaspora and Nostalgia: M.G. Vassanji’s Asynchronous Images

This chapter provides a reading of M.G. Vassanji’s 1989 novel The Gunny Sack. By focusing on the temporal dimension of the text, my reading aims to rethink the novel beyond the rubrics of diasporic identity and nostalgic feeling. Instead, the novel’s anti-teleological narrative strategies reveal a commitment to place and politics, which reframes the experience of modernity in East Africa as an uneven and violent process of incomplete synchronisation. Vassanji’s poetics is hence related to the wider political and historical background that connects his novel to the history of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance in East Africa, and the re-emergence of non-synchronic times within colonial modernity. The representation of the Maji Maji rebellion, in particular, represents one of the knots where archaic survivals disturb the transition to the colonial era. This chapter aims to show that Vassanji moves away from a sense of history as interruption, anachronism or disjuncture, in order to show a more complex perception of time as a non-synchronic dialectical interlocking. The essay concludes with a reflection on the role of the narrator, Salim, as intergenerational unifying force able to link individual experience to historical time.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_4

103

104

F. MENOZZI

1

Reading Contretemps

In a telling passage of Moyez Vassanji’s 1989 novel The Gunny Sack, the narrator suspends the chronicle of the events in order to meditate on the particular sense of time that informs the story. Salim, The Gunny Sack’s first-person storyteller, compares “wisps of memory” to cotton balls “gliding from the gunny sack, each a window to a world … Asynchronous images projected on multiple cinema screens … Time here is not the continuous coordinates … but a collection of blots like Uncle Jim drew in the Sunday Herald for the children” (Vassanji 1989, 138). But “Uncle Jim numbered the blots for you so you traced the picture of a dog or a horse when you followed them with a pencil … here you number your own blots and there is no end to them, and each lies in wait for you like a black hole from which you could never return” (ibid.). As this passage reveals, The Gunny Sack formulates a remarkable sense of time through the deus ex machina which gives the novel its title: a gunny sack, given to Salim by defunct Ji Bai, Salim’s great-uncle’s wife, out of which come objects and memories that help the narrator, Salim, assemble the story of his family across four generations. The way in which the gunny sack enables the narration to unify, however, entails a concept of time vividly captured by the image, first, of “asynchronous images projected on multiple cinema screens” and then of “blots” on a newspaper page, with no pre-given image to be finally revealed. Time is not a succession of events or the simple sequential continuum from before to after. In the novel, time is rather imagined as a set of images or blots that coexist, at the same time, inside the gunny sack, lying in wait for the narrator to extract them and recover them, at the risk of becoming “black holes” from which there is no return. As Salim explains in the conclusion of the novel, “I can put it all back and shake it and churn it and sift it and start again, re-order memory, draw a new set of lines through those blots, except that each of them is like a black hole, a doorway to a universe” (326). The novel stages a non-chronological multiverse that can be reassembled and re-ordered, as revealed by Vassanji’s own reflections about the novel. In an interview with Shane Rhodes, Vassanji observes: “If a person were to construct a history at two different times in his life, he would end up with two totally different books … History is a play between … the created and the creating, the real and the imagined” (Rhodes 108). The novel displays this tension between “the created and the creating”

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

105

through the device of the gunny sack, which constantly points the reader’s attention to the fictional narrative frame, the act of creating the story. Objects from the sack are envisioned as windows to multiple worlds, images not in line with the chronology of the story and rifts between the time of narration and what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “narrated time,” that is, the time of the story, as it is reconfigured through narration (Ricoeur 83). In The Gunny Sack, narrated time is dislodged, unsettled and asynchronous. The specific asynchronism of the novel derives, as the above passage makes clear, from the coexistence of multiple layers of time, multiple “cinema screens” that do not simply inhabit a stable position in a linear chronology. This specific temporal quality partly stems from the very act of reconstruction underlying the novel. As Vassanji remarks in a later essay: The Gunny Sack was ostensibly about memories—those of the narrator, the family, the community, and the nation. This oral history went back two generations, to our forebears who emigrated from India. But memory by itself is not enough to recreate the past; for actual historical detail, where memory failed or was nonexistent, I had to go to the written accounts of the colonial civil servants, the travellers, and the nineteenth-century explorers of East Africa. (Vassanji 2016, 34)

Vassanji’s narrative technique enacts a multi-layering of personal memories, family history, oral history and written accounts. He adopts devices such as digression, focalisation, flash-forward and flashback, which constantly tinge the recovery of memories with anticipation of events which, at the moment of being introduced, are still unknown to the reader and yet to happen in the story. Following Fredric Jameson, my reading will attempt to show that what matters in the representation of multiple times is not only the dislodgement of teleology or linearity, but the way in which these asynchronous storylines and images intersect and work together in order to reframe a non-synchronous sense of time. As Jameson comments, “the various temporalities determine a reading imperative we may compare to the obligatory raverse or crossing through of all of them, as the narrative constructs multiple paths and varied trajectories, the working through, in time, of the various dimensions of time it projects” (543). Thus, if Vassanji constructs a multiplicity of temporal laminae, it is the systemic assemblage, the fact that these strata appear together in the totalisation of the story that makes their difference

106

F. MENOZZI

meaningful. As Jameson continues to explain in his analysis of time in narrative: “the appearance of Time or History as such depends not on the multiplicity and variety of these trajectories, but rather on their interference with each other” (543).1 The dialectical assemblage of temporalities, however, is not a value in itself or a merely formal component. Temporal interference rather mirrors the material realities of peripheral modernity or what will be described as a scenario of incomplete synchronisation. This chapter will focus on Vassanji’s manipulations of time in The Gunny Sack in order to engage with key formal strategies and material realities that constitute this novel’s specific aesthetic of non-synchronism. This way of reading aims to go beyond two important themes that have been adopted to give meaning to this complex text: diaspora and nostalgia. The novel is mainly set in East Africa, in a temporal span running across colonial and postcolonial times, and details the life stories of four generations of Indian migrants to East Africa and their relocations across Zanzibar, Kenya, Tanganyika and North America. The novel’s political message has been interpreted as deeply problematic, as Vassanji does not seem to offer, on a discursive level, any explicit message against colonialism. His critique of the postcolonial condition even seems to be permeated by a sense of nostalgia for the relative freedom granted to Asian minorities in East Africa during the colonial era. This nostalgic quality is hence affiliated to the novel’s—and Vassanji’s—most widely debated and interpreted theme: the question of migration and diasporic belonging. Vassanji himself, a diasporic writer of Indian origin born and raised in East Africa, now living in Canada after a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in USA, has emphasised the centrality of diasporic concerns in interviews and essays, and the theme of migration certainly plays an important part in The Gunny Sack, his first novel, published in the Heinemann series and “the first African novel written by an African of Asian descent” (Maja-Pearce 131). The novel cannot be detached from the position of Moyez Vassanji as a diasporic writer, whose sense of location is deeply affected by migrant trajectories: the author has been promoted and marketed as a quintessentially “hybrid” writer of displacement and migration, “a transnational figure who explores the complexities of global movements and local histories” (Moss 68). As a writer, Vassanji is animated by a problematic stance towards roots and stationary forms of belonging, preventing any easy placement within African political history and any unproblematic sense of being either “Indian” or “African.” Vassanji’s poetics has been linked,

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

107

for this reason, to discourses on postcolonialism as diasporic consciousness, a critique of pure identities and of history as a totality, and the post-national imaginary. In Dan Ojwang’s important study, for example, Vassanji’s ability to give space “to a myriad of voice, as a defence against the freezing of the past by any metanarratives” coincides with the idea that “the central target in Vassanji’s deconstruction of history is the notion of totality, the attempt to grasp and explain history in one clean sweep as a single whole” (Ojwang 175). Similarly, in an essay on the Asian “quest/ion” in East Africa, Peter Simatei refers, in passing, to the “asynchronous images” of the gunny sack as reflecting “the very migratory life of the people represented” (Simatei 2000, 30). My reading of this complex novel, though, will move beyond the reduction of the novel to colonial nostalgia or fragmentary diasporic selfhood. Indeed, the heuristic value of an aesthetic of non-synchronism lies in the possibility to complicate and to revisit fictional representation by analysing how the reframing of temporality in the narrative can reveal the material conditions of peripherality, which are at the heart of world literature as a paradigm. In contrast to a limitation of the novel to a nostalgic celebration of colonial times or the fragmentations of the self through displacement, my interpretation will suggest that some aspects of the novel could be seen as rewriting the concept of postcolonial history as a non-synchronous assemblage of temporal layers that overlap in a single present. Following Peter Killaney, I will expand on the idea that, unlike postcolonial criticism’s accent on search for identity and longing for the past, “this novel is very unusual in that it reserves little nostalgia for either India or East Africa as a place of origin. Furthermore, the narrative makes a conscious effort not to insulate the story of East Africa’s Asians from their participation in the region’s history of violence and exploitation” (8). In its representation of material conditions of existence and political struggle, indeed, the novel challenges any easy transition between precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, portraying residual and anticipatory strata of time that articulate a peripheral historical consciousness at the margins of global modernity. A central aspect of the novel, indeed, concerns the linkage of personal memory and historical account, as it emerges from its representation of events such as a peasant rebellion known as the Maji Maji revolt, which took place in East Africa at the start of the twentieth century, and which represents one of the first organised political movements against colonial domination in Africa. The novel’s representation of events such as the

108

F. MENOZZI

Maji Maji expresses a sort of temporal unconscious at work in the text, a level of meaning-making that is not easily captured by readings of the novel as reiteration of the postcolonial rubrics of hybridity, identity, diaspora and nostalgia. Events such as the 1905 Maji Maji rebellion against the Germans are described in a non-synchronic way, as reappearance of pre-colonial traditions mobilised in the colonial present, but also as prefiguration and anticipation of the subsequent struggle for national liberation in East Africa, especially the Mau Mau rebellion which took place in the 1950s against the British in Kenya.2 Non-synchronism captures Vassanji’s complex writing as a signpost for the combined temporalities that inhabit capitalist modernity at the periphery. In sum, Vassanji’s novel, from the standpoint of non-synchronism, does not appear as a nostalgic or backward-looking novel, but as a literary representation of colonial domination as an experience marked by historical heterogeneity and what Saurabh Dube has described as the “enchantments of modernity.” The most interesting aspect of Vassanji’s play with time in the novel, indeed, is the way in which he intersects the family memories and personal reminiscences of Salim, the narrator, with wider historical events and processes whereby magic, tradition and belief in supernatural beings are woven into the making of a colonial modernity in East Africa. The intersection of personal and historical time, however, results neither in a simple mirroring of history in personal memory nor in a disjointed narration where the experiential and the political are kept apart. The temporal discordance represented by Vassanji does not result in fragment, loss or dispersal: the value of the “gunny sack,” the guiding metaphor at the heart of the novel, is the creation of a fictional frame capable of keeping all different times together within a single storyline. The gunny sack and the objects it contains, as Ariel Bookman observes, “reappear cyclically throughout a person’s life and in doing so elicit memories of the earlier times and spaces in which they featured” (Bookman 4). Through the device of the gunny sack, the novel articulates what Ashok Mohapatra describes as an “inexhaustible narrative power” deriving from the juxtaposition of “secrets from the past” and “intimations” that cannot be fully appropriated: “Vassanji’s fictional craft primarily consists in fabricating multiple provisional narrative webs around an object that is retrieved from the past and vested with infinite magical power to generate stories” (Mohapatra 18). The novel, from this point of view, challenges narratives of loss and disjuncture by addressing fiction’s ability to unify and connect divergent histories in the present of the narration.

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

109

In a pivotal reading of The Gunny Sack, Peter Simatei situates the novel within central debates in postcolonial criticism by making a thoughtprovoking point about the novel’s engagement with decolonisation and anti-colonial nationalism. Simatei suggests that Vassanji’s novel represents a critique of anti-colonial nationalism, but of a very different nature from the critique of the postcolonial nation-state offered by writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nuruddin Farah. While writers such as Ngugi and Farah attack the postcolonial state in Africa for its failure to break free of colonial structures of power, hence for its betrayal of the promise of anti-colonial national liberation, Vassanji’s novels seem to be permeated by a much more conservative, politically regressive outlook. Indeed, Simatei notes that Vassanji portrays African nationalism “as an assault on the Asian spaces of freedom guaranteed under colonialism”: Simatei remarks that Vassanji’s “nostalgia for the ‘order’ and territorial open-endedness once ordained and sustained by the empire … turns the quest for empowerment in a postnational space into desire for British subjecthood” (Simatei 2011, 59). Vassanji’s anti-nationalism, from this point of view, is “shaped by the lures of a more hegemonic form of nationalism, i.e., British imperialism” (ibid.). From the point of view of non-synchronism, however, imperial longing is only half of the story. Vassanji’s dealings with the past, indeed, are not exhausted by colonial nostalgia. Non-synchronic revivals are always embedded in a dialectical logic whereby regressive yearning combines with potentials of anti-colonial social transformation embodied in experiences of loss and defeat. The term non-synchronism captures the material and narrative contradictions that endow appeals to times other than the present with simultaneously restorative and utopian valences. Narrated by a member of the family, Salim, the novel mainly recounts the vicissitudes of the family across Zanzibar, Tanganyika and Kenya, covering a historical range spanning from the early to the late twentieth century. Handed over as an inheritance to the narrator, the gunny sack contains traces of the saga of Salim’s ancestors and allows a form of storytelling in which the private and the historical constantly intersect. The story of Dhanji Govindji’s migration to East Africa, indeed, is entangled in the wider historical dynamics of the region, especially the establishment of German colonial rule and the subsequent onset of British domination in the 1920s: “Govindji arrives in Africa shortly after the Berlin Conference … which signalled the start of ‘the scramble for Africa’ (Dar es Salaam, the haven of peace, was occupied by German forces on the 25th of May

110

F. MENOZZI

1887)” (Sarvan 514). In this context, the Indian family sees itself as opposed, on the one hand, to the African peoples inhabiting the continent and, on the other hand, to the Europeans. The novel documents the selfunderstanding of Asian communities as superior, marked by political and cultural “ambivalence” (Malak 279) and socially “aloof” (Simatei 2000, 34), in stark opposition to both coloniser and colonised, as well as politically ambivalent towards anti-colonial insurgency and African nationalism. “Black ancestry,” the narrator tells at one point, “was not something you advertised … A whiff of African blood from the family tree would be like an Arctic blast” (Gunny Sack 184). Often qualified as collaborators with the colonial rulers, Indian families of merchants in East Africa did not always take sides with the struggle for national independence. There are aspects of The Gunny Sack, however, which do not allow to conclude the question of the novel’s political stance with a straightforward and unproblematic inward-looking detachment from African colonial history. One of these aspects is a character of the book, Bibi Taratibu, an African slave who is given to the founding father of the family, Dhanji Govindji, as first wife upon his arrival in Africa. Bibi Taratibu embodies an uncomfortable side of the family’s settlement in Africa, its complicity with the slave trade, and represents a part of family history that undergoes a work of repression by subsequent generations. After having a relationship and a child with Bibi Taratibu, Dhanji Govindji remarries to an Indian lady and sends Bibi Taratibu away from his household, disavowing his relationship with her. Dhanji Govindji and Bibi Taratibu’s child, Huseni, stays with the father, but keeps seeing his mother and nurtures a deeply conflictual relation with him because of the father’s disavowal of Bibi Taratibu. One day, Huseni disappears from the family because of his father’s refusal to keep contact with Bibi Taratibu, testifying to Huseni’s divided loyalties and “half-caste” belonging to both African and Asian heritage, which sets him apart from the rest of the family. As a character, Bibi Taratibu not only expresses the repressed side of the family’s links to Africa and shameful partaking in the history of the slave trade. Isaac Ndlovu is correct in pointing out that Vassanji “is not interested in developing Bibi Taratibu as a fully-fledged character but is content to use her as a metaphor” (90); Ndlovu also notes that Vassanji’s “major female characters are silenced by, and metaphorically effaced from, the narrative at the very point of the excavation of their histories and at the moment of attempts to give them a voice” (Ndlovu 85). Furthermore, as Rosemary Marangoly George notes, the

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

111

romantic relationships between Indian heritage and African characters are always “instances of failed endeavour or desire” (George 182). Even the narrator, Salim, is ultimately “subject to the same myths as the rest of his community.” Thus, when it comes to envisaging a relationship with an African woman, Salim “cannot imagine doing so other than in ways that would violate the pattern of relationships that have his community’s sanction” (182). But not fully developed characters such as Bibi Taratibu and impossible or transgressive relationships do have a role in the story. These elements reveal, against the grain of the mainstream narrative plot, unrealised potentials of change, politics of representation in their power to silence voices, as well as the attempt to reinsert marginal experience in the historical record. While the character of Bibi Taratibu does not fully regain a voice through the narrative, Vassanji’s representational strategies should not be merely dismissed as a failed work of characterisation. Indeed, Bibi Taratibu is also the narrator’s great-grandmother and an epitome of the family’s African roots. If Dhanji Govindji’s second marriage splits the genealogy by giving rise to a branch of the family tree which is purely “Indian,” descending from his second, “Indian” wife Fatima, Bibi Taratibu’s side of the family is defined as “half-caste,” African and impure, marked by the “imagined diabolical capacity of black Africans to contaminate Indian society” (Ojwang 119). Huseni’s son Juma, for example, will be forever marked by this inheritance and treated with disregard by his adoptive family, later in the novel. As the narrator explains, Bibi Taratibu’s heritage will not be forgotten even by subsequent generations, as knowledge of Juma’s pedigree “followed him to the capital. And so Juma … was given a room in the courtyard, next to the servants’ quarters and the outhouse” (Vassanji 1989, 77). Juma hence “grew up, a second-class citizen, nothing more than a glorified servant; whom the family sent away on pretexts when important guests arrived” (ibid.). Bibi Taratibu, Huseni and Juma reveal a crucial aspect of The Gunny Sack: the novel is not told from the point of view of Fatima’s side of the family, or the purely “Indian” branch of the expatriate community, but rather from the point of view of Bibi Taratibu’s descendants: Salim, the narrator, is Juma’s son, Huseni’s grandson and hence Bibi Taratibu’s great-grandson. Salim embodies African ancestry, as his nickname “Kala” (black) testifies. As Peter Nazareth remarks, Salim’s narrative is an attempt to trace a genealogy that would reinsert the African side in the story: “Salim is doing the truer study. Who was the African great-grandmother? What was the relationship of the great-grandfather to her? Was she just a

112

F. MENOZZI

freed slave? Did he turn to her for mere physical release? Or did he love her? Why was he so concerned with tracking down his half-caste son …?” (Nazareth 131). As Simatei points out, “the story of Bibi Taratibu is at the same time the narrative of the unsettling of Indian quest for racial purity. As staged in the novel, Taratibu’s disappearance becomes a disturbing re-appearance, an interruption, to use Bhabha’s term, to the colonially aligned Asian narratives of racial purity and superiority” (Simatei 2011, 61). The presence of Bibi Taratibu and her role as ancestor of the narrator plays an important role in giving the novel a different meaning, which Simatei sums up in an excellent way, by saying that the novel develops “from a regressive diasporic formation organised around essentialist myths of racial purity to a dynamic one premised on shifting and discontinuous sense of history” (ibid.). The role of Bibi Taratibu challenges any paraphrasing of the novel’s significance as celebration of dispersal and uprooting. Bibi Taratibu, the African ancestor, not only interrupts the “regressive diasporic formation” but also testifies to the rootedness of the family in the African continent: a genealogical line, the side to which the narrator belongs, is partly African and hence does not simply inhabit the unstable space of nonbelonging or the mythologised narrative of essentialist identity fostered by discourses on diasporic community. Bibi Taratibu’s lineage anchors the family to Africa, working as a contretemps, an unexpected occurrence that disturbs and complicates the work of cultural transmission. This disturbance and repression join diasporic memory to African history, outlining a lineage inscribed in the heritage—cultural and genetic—of the narrator himself. Building on but also going beyond the important questions opened by postcolonial readings of the novel, a world-literature perspective can enable a reframing and rethinking of the political and aesthetic dimensions of the text. In particular, can Vassanji’s narrative techniques and thematic engagements suggest different possibilities of meaning? Is the novel’s significance exhausted by critical preoccupations with the failed search for cultural roots and nostalgic poetics? As a novel, The Gunny Sack shuttles across multiple voices, standpoints and positions and, in spite of being the first-person narration of a member of the family, the device of the gunny sack shows that this is not just the story of a single individual, but rather an assemblage of traces where the personal and the historical intertwine. From this point of view, Vassanji’s novel stages a non-synchronic poetics that epitomises the unreconciled regime of historicity proper to peripheral locations of the global economy. This poetics emerges through Vassanji’s manipulation of time in the narrative.

4

2

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

113

Time Markers: Form and History

The novel’s framing of history is mediated by Vassanji’s highly complex literary form, especially his rearrangement of narrative time. The Gunny Sack has been described, intriguingly, as “a work of multiple realities, multiple stories, a polysemy told by a storyteller whose telling is nurtured in the convergences of East African, Indian, Arabian and English narratorial nuance” (Itwaru 115). Dan Ojwang, among others, has emphasised the stylistic complexity of the novel by underlining the various techniques adopted by Vassanji, including a focus on “the provisionality of statements about history; a challenge to the notion of referentiality; a pervasive ironising and relativisation of truth-claims; an intertextuality that draws attention to the nature of fiction and history as artifice … a rejection of linearity and teleology in the unfolding of narrative” (176). From a world-literary perspective, these techniques should be seen as a register of realities of incomplete and peripheral modernisation in which different layers of historical experience coexist and combine. Thus, a passage that will be analysed in this section is a short interpolation and a digression, in the first part of the novel, that signals an interruption of the narrative offered in the first fifty pages or so. This passage reveals the wider significance of Vassanji’s play with time and offers the springboard for linking the novel to the historical reality of peripheral modernity. The passage referred to is a short chapter titled “The Spirits of Times Past.” This intermezzo offers a temporal break from the preceding chapters. While the previous sections of the novel address the story of Dhanji Govindji and his sons, Huseni and Gulam, the short chapter anticipates the experience of Salim, the narrator himself, which will be developed in a subsequent part of the novel. The short chapter starts with a description of Matamu, the village in Tanganyika where the story of the family in the African continent began—the place where Dhanji Govindji first settled and started his family with Bibi Taratibu first, and Fatima afterwards. The narrator’s interruption of the story to describe Matamu is hence interpreted as emblematic of the narrator’s unfulfilled and impossible search for roots in Africa, an inability to find in memories of Matamu any static sense of belonging to a native land. However, the short chapter included by Vassanji as interruption of the main storyline does not merely reveal that the beginnings of the family in East Africa are uncertain and unstable. “The Spirits of Times Past” offers a profound meditation on the concept of history and time informing the novel as a

114

F. MENOZZI

whole. The digressive dimension of “The Spirits of Times Past” needs to be seen, following Samuel Fredrick’s comments on the use of digression, neither as an utter deconstruction of narrative continuity, nor as a simple delay that would be an indispensable moment in the novel’s teleological trajectory to its end. Moving beyond Peter Brooks’s theory of digression as necessary narrative delay, Frederick shows instead how digression resists the “teleological imperative” (18) of narrative and intimates the possibility of a plotless kind of storytelling. In digression, the dialectical tension between temporal linearity and rupture vividly emerges, giving rise to multiple possibilities of interpretation and meaning. In “The Spirits of Times Past,” Salim goes back to Matamu, the village where the story of his family began, in order to reattach the first “embedded” narrative line introduced in the novel—the story of Dhanji Govindji—to the framing narrative, in which Salim has received the gunny sack as inheritance after the death of Ji Bai, the wife of Huseni’s brother, Gulam.3 The gunny sack is the literary device that allows to link framing and embedded narrative while keeping the two sides of the family together: the side of Fatima, which includes Fatima’s son Gulam and his wife Ji Bai—the Asian side—and the genealogical tree of the narrator, Bibi Taratibu’s or the African side. The chapter interpolated by Vassanji at this stage of the novel acts as a sort of zooming out, a reattachment to the larger narrative frame through which the novel is structured. This chapter does not merely disconnect, but also reconnects the two sides of the family and the different times of the story. Indeed, the point where all stories converge, the time of the act of narration, is presented as a non-synchronic conjuncture where multiple times meet. The stories that compose the novel are connected in a non-chronological way, in a nonsynchronous totality that interweaves diverging threads of memory and experience. Key stylistic devices at work in this passage are flashback and flashforward, or analepsis and prolepsis. As Mark Currie notes, prolepsis “might be regarded as a kind of instruction in the significance of events in light of later events or outcomes … a generalised future orientation such that the understanding of the present becomes increasingly focused on the question of what it will come to mean” (Currie 22). The passage flattens out the temporalities of the novel by going simultaneously forwards and backwards in time: through flashback, by going back to the original and native place where the story of the family began; through flash-forward by getting closer to the present act of storytelling. The passage begins:

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

115

How I came to see Matamu. The green lorry races southwards along the coast. On the left, the early morning sun bearing down, already hot, the ocean pounding heavily on the shore in an early tide … The road, a thin grey ribbon hugging the coastline at this point, is devoid of life save for the occasional cyclist pedalling away patiently in droll sysiphian rhythm, and this noisy lorry filling the air with its rattling, backfiring and excited voices. (46)

The visual index of this scene, which begins with “how I came to see,” signals the concordant discordance between the temporalities of storytelling and of perspective, or focalisation. The perception of the place is at the same time concurrent with the narration and situated on a different temporal plane. The narration takes the reader forwards in time—moving from embedded to framing narrative—while the perception takes the reader backwards in time, through Salim’s reminiscence. The non-synchronous dimension of Vassanji’s novel implies a discrepant simultaneity at the heart of the character who sees and speaks: Salim’s visual memory and Salim’s narrative act do not inhabit the same temporal level; voice and focalisation are in a state of tension, and they express the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous proper to the act of remembrance, as the narrative jumps across different points in time.4 This discrepant focalisation also reveals the ideological dimension of the novel: behind the narrative layer of colonial and diasporic nostalgia, the nonsynchronous time that disturbs the regressive linearity of anamnestic recollection reveals the historical contradictions captured in the text, especially the tension between African and Asian belonging as well as between pre-colonial cultures and colonial modernity. The passage breaks the narration of the preceding chapter, which ended with the hanging of a local priest involved in the Maji Maji rebellion, and moves abruptly to the time when the narrator first arrived in Matamu. This event takes the reader forwards in time because it rejoins the framing narrative of the story, but also gestures towards the past, recounting the narrator’s reminiscence of his first visit to the village. The logic at work in such passage is what James Phelan has called an “analeptic prolepsis,” that is, “a moving forward to a temporal point from which the character recalls the present moment of the unfolding primary narrative” (Phelan 2016, 248). The intermezzo which this chapter constitutes is not so much a spatial as a temporal interval: a connecting movement taking place between narrated time and time of narration. The chapter,

116

F. MENOZZI

from this point of view, reveals a literary mechanism at work everywhere in the novel: the narrative constantly shifts between flash-forward and flashback, prolepsis and analepsis, anticipating events yet to come and survivals suddenly reappearing in the present. This mechanism may indicate what Keya Ganguly has called, in her study of Satyajit Ray, the “retroactivity of the past”: “its influence on the present, to be sure, but also its recalcitrance as a ‘former future’” (Ganguly 46). The first part of the short chapter titled “The Spirits of Times Past” describes Salim’s first day in Matamu, but intersperses the narration of this event, located some time between the time of Dhanji Govindji and the time when the story is being told, with references to other times. After describing the route of the lorry and its arrival at the secondary school, the narration is interrupted by reflections on Matamu and its history. Salim’s account of his first day in Matamu is hence complemented by a reflection on the name of the place, which “always had a tart sound to it, an aftertaste to the sweetness, a far off echo that spoke of a distant, primeval time, the year zero. An epoch that cast a dim but sombre shadow on the present” (48). The day of the arrival is hence linked to this “primeval time,” the “year zero” when the story began. After this mention of the primeval time, the narration goes back to Salim’s own first day in Matamu during his youth, in order to return, in an alternate, seesawing way, to the past history of Matamu just a couple of pages later, where Salim recounts how at “one time, there used to live and trade here nine Shamsi and seven Bhatia families, the two rival communities on either side of the swamp” (50). There is a constant oscillation in the temporal coordinates of the story, which is further explored in the description of a local landmark. Vassanji writes: Perhaps the only visible signs of that period are the ruins of a building, away from the main village … It is the part of the village no one ever goes to; there is at least one ghost resident there. An eerie feeling descends upon the whole town as grey twilight, grim maghrab, approaches … It is a time that invokes fear in the young and inspires prayer from the old. Mbuyu trees abound in that area. And who doesn’t know the mbuyu, the huge mbuyu with its shade like a cool room under the burning sun …? You would not dare to pass under it at maghrab, lest you step on the sensitive shadow of the ethereal one and are turned into an albino … The wrath of such a defiled djinn is terrible. Sometimes at night, at exactly midnight, it was said that you could hear the footsteps of someone walking on the road in that village. No mortal is around at that ungodly hour. (51)

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

117

The main narrative line constantly swings from the time of Salim’s arrival at Matamu to the “primeval time” when the story of the family began, and time markers complicate the structure of the passage. The account of the history of Asian communities in Matamu, taking place in an unspecified time in the past (“at one time”), is in its turn interrupted by the account of ruins in the village testifying to the remnants of those past times, but also to specific moments of the day: the twilight—maghrab; midday— when the sun burns; and midnight—when no “mortal is around” and only ghosts and djinns walk around the village. Moments of the day interrupt the narrative of moments of history, complicating the temporal framework of the story and introducing a qualitatively different time in which moments of the day are inhabited by ghosts and supernatural beings. The chapter centres on an important event: the death of Dhanji Govindji, the founding father of the whole family, who was murdered by unknown assailants in Matamu at a very precise point in time: in “1912, one December morning at five-thirty” (51). This exact time point, however, is presented as the only fixed chronological signpost in an account that constantly moves away from the event, referring to what happened before, next to anticipations of episodes yet to take place. Later in the chapter, for example, Vassanji shows this logic quite literally, as he writes: A few years before, the Shamsi community in India had been torn apart by strife. Various parties had sprung up, with diverging fundamentalist positions, each taking some thread of the complex and sometimes contradictory set of traditional beliefs … Faced with this situation, Dhanji Govindji had simply stopped sending the money on to any of the big centres … A few days later, the widow’s daughter started disposing of her husband’s belongings. (52)

This passage moves from a reference to events that took place before the death of Dhanji Govindji, “a few years before,” to the moment after the death, “a few days after” the burial and mourning of the founder of the family in Africa. Vassanji’s narration shuttles from flashback to flash-forward continuously and alternates references to specific events with vague references to undefined moments. Thus, December 1912 is preceded by “a few years” and followed by “few days,” as if the key event

118

F. MENOZZI

of the story was the only bit clearly illuminated, with surrounding times dissipating at the edges of Salim’s account. Vassanji not only highlights moments in history when episodes occur, but also describes significant moments of the day: Dhanji Govindji is killed early morning at five-thirty. The chapter, furthermore, begins with the memory of arriving in Matamu in the morning, capturing the “early morning sun” and the “early tide” (46); it then goes back to a primeval time when the Asian communities settled in the village; it moves back to Salim’s first day in Matamu, this time during the “hot Sunday afternoon” (49); it goes back again to the past, almost mythical times when the communities lived in the area, then onwards again to describing specific moments of the day, especially twilight and midnight, then the morning of a day in December 1912 when Dhanji Govindji was killed, and concludes by locating the event between “a few years before” and “a few days after,” linking the murder to the time of the narration, especially through the reference to Ji Bai and the gunny sack. The mention of Ji Bai and her inheritance leads the narrator back to the opening of the novel, the time of the narration, by concluding the chapter with a fictional epistolary exchange between Salim and his brother, a university student, to which Salim has sent some books left by Ji Bai, and more precisely a letter where the two brothers discuss one of the relics found in the gunny sack, Dhanji Govindji’s record of the community funds, of which he was in charge as mukhi and village elder. The final reference to Dhanji Govindji’s book, kept by Ji Bai and handed on to Salim and then to Salim’s brother, anticipates the real cause of Dhanji Govindji’s murder, which will be explained to the reader only some chapters on, in a chapter called “The Suffering Mukhi.” Vassanji’s complication of temporal markers through the mixing of analepsis and prolepsis, a discordant focalisation, embedded narratives and the juxtaposition of different layers of time (times of the day, time of narration and historical event) has a very important function in the story. Through this overlap, swinging and alternation of different temporal strata, the narrator is able to keep disparate historical and personal memories together at the same time. Through a very specific use of time markers, Vassanji avoids any narrative structured around a simple “going back” to the origin or “going forwards” from the past to the future. All different times, from the primeval times when Matamu was founded to the arrival of Dhanji Govindji and Salim’s life, coexist in a singular temporal sequence inside the gunny sack. These techniques certainly

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

119

disrupt linearity and chronology, introducing a non-synchronic element into the narrative. The interplay of voice and focalisation, as well as framing and embedded narratives that punctuate the novel, prevents a stationary idea of time as sequence of enclosed instants or eras. The temporal closure of anamnesis is reopened by non-synchronic aperture, what Ernst Bloch would describe as a process “unclosed both backwards and forwards,” as he remarks in The Principle of Hope: The rigid divisions between future and past thus themselves collapse, unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediated and fulfilled past in the future. Past that is grasped in isolation and clung to in this way is a mere commodity category … But true action in the present itself occurs solely in the totality of this process which is unclosed both backwards and forwards. (8–9)5

The Gunny Sack reveals such an open, anti-teleological, discordant temporality. If this sense of time is not merely a sign of a diasporic sense of uprooting and a failed search for stationary identities, how else could Vassanji’s novel be interpreted? If non-synchronism is not to be seen as a value in itself, how does it appear in the novel as a key aspect of the historical consciousness of world literature?

3

Incomplete Synchronisation: On Magic and Modernity

In contrast to portrayals of The Gunny Sack as a nostalgic longing for the colonial era or as a diasporic tale of non-belonging, Vassanji’s aesthetic of non-synchronism could suggest that the novel be seen from a different political angle. Against a mere critique of nationalism and disillusionment with postcolonial politics, the novel can indicate how the regime of historicity of the periphery of the world system is radically open-ended and uneven, the place of what may be called an incomplete synchronisation into the capitalist system and the structures of feeling of colonial modernity. As an expression of this incomplete synchronisation, world literature reactivates, in the present, unrealised historical potentialities for as yet non-existing futures, reframing tradition as a site of oppression but also potential subversion. Non-synchronism is not a value in itself but rather a marker of the open-ended dialectic of oppression and liberation, exploitation and emancipation, which links defeated struggles of

120

F. MENOZZI

the past to political tension in the present. A key element, already anticipated in the introduction of this chapter, revolves around Bibi Taratibu and her progeny, which includes her son Huseni and the narrator of the novel, Salim. The character of Bibi Taratibu’s son Huseni, however, does not only represent the repressed African root that complicates any narrative of diasporic identity; it also testifies to a transgression of the family’s detachment from African politics, especially anti-colonial struggle. Huseni, indeed, is involved in an important episode of anti-colonial African history, the Maji Maji revolt. The novel’s representation of the Maji Maji captures an important dimension of colonialism as a process of domination signed by the violent encounter between colonial infrastructure, capital and state power, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, archaic and traditional social forms such as the African “medicine man.” The novel reframes modernity itself, from a peripheral standpoint, as a clash between historical and temporal layers through the synchronising violence of colonialism. In this context, as Peter Pels notes in his introduction to a milestone collection on magic and modernity, the sense of temporal novelty and discontinuity that modernity entails is complicated by the appearance of magic (traditional beliefs, witchcraft, medicine men) both as a supplement and necessary antithesis of modernity and as a byproduct of modernity itself. Thus, Pels observes, “if modern discourse reconstructs magic in terms that distinguish it from the modern, this at the same time creates the correspondences and nostalgias by which magic can come to haunt modernity” (4–5). In an early passage of the novel, the reader is told about the marriage between Huseni and Moti, Salim’s grandparents. This marriage was arranged by their respective families after an important event in Huseni’s life, when he was fugitive for three days in order to escape prosecution for his involvement in the Maji Maji rebellion. Vassanji offers an interesting literary representation of the rebellion: on the one hand, the Maji Maji was triggered by the rise to prominence of a local magician or “mchawi,” who had mobilised sections of the population against the Germans by claiming the invention of a “medicine” that would turn bullets into water. On the other hand, this failed attempt to subvert colonial rule is represented by Vassanji as an anticipation of future revolts, in particular the Mau Mau rebellion, which played a pivotal role in anti-colonial struggle and the liberation of Kenya from British rule in the 1950s. The Maji Maji, hence, is presented as a non-synchronic event in that it recuperates and reactivates elements from the past, and in that it anticipates, in

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

121

an open-ended temporality, future episodes of struggle. In the novel, the Maji Maji is presented as an event belonging to “the days of magic and spells, of Bantu medicines, Arab djinns and Indian bhuts … you could find them all on trees, in graveyards, or under one roof running their nocturnal rounds, doing good or evil at their master’s bidding … It is still a world of magic and spells” (30). There is a deep ambivalence in how this passage refers to the precolonial past, an ambivalence that mirrors the contradiction of the objectively and subjectively non-synchronous remnant. The reference to the “days of magic and spells,” indeed, could be perceived as a nostalgic, primitivist representation of the African past, seen as a merely irrational, superstitious and anti-modern residue that will be eventually wiped away by the modernising force of colonial rule. This description, however, should not be merely taken as a sort of primitivist account of the past. It rather indicates the survival of non-modern beliefs through colonial times—“still” enduring in the postcolonial present—and illuminates the significance of remnants from the past to influence contemporary politics. Vassanji narrates the onset of the Maji Maji revolt as follows: One morning, news arrived of trouble in the interior. A mchawi had appeared who had found a medicine to drive away the Germans. All you had to do, it was said, was to go to a meeting and drink the medicine, take an oath and the German would be powerless against you … As soon as you chanted the words “Maji maji maji maji …” his bullet would turn into water … Late one afternoon a rumour spread that the mchawi’s followers were in the vicinity to recruit and at nightfall a nervous silence spread over the village like a blanket … The medicine men were dreaded as much as the Germans. (20)

This initial description of the Maji Maji shows the revolt as a distant, almost hostile occurrence, of which the family, even the entire village, is profoundly sceptical and suspicious. While Vassanji describes the violence of German rule, including the utter cruelty of German settlers towards the colonised, the narrative also portrays the rebels as nameless, brutal and fanatic fighters who are only viewed from a distance, with whom the reader is not supposed to identify. Temporal markers, however, charge the narrative with possibilities of meaning going beyond the family’s distancing from the Maji Maji, revealing another possible standpoint in the narration. The irruption of the Maji Maji in the story occurs in the

122

F. MENOZZI

span of a day: in the morning, people hear news of the revolt and its arrival in the region. “Late one afternoon” the Maji Maji arrive near the village, and “at nightfall” the entire community shuts down, in fear and hostility. The community fears them because they know that, if they had refused to join the revolt, they would have been killed, and if they had decided to join in, they would have been hanged by the Germans once the revolt was over. There is no hint, at this stage of the novel, of the fact that anti-colonial resistance could be successful against the much better armed Europeans. From the start, the revolt seems to be doomed, and the only viable response to the Maji Maji seems to be distance and refusal. However, the story continues: That night the village did not sleep. And when in the early hours of the morning, just as the brave muezzin began his “Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar …,” a frantic knocking sounded on the courtyard door and a chill went through Dhanji Govindji’s household as it prepared for prayer. On tiptoes Dhanji Govindji went outside to see or hear what was up. “Baba, it’s I,” came the half-caste’s urgent voice, quickly, let me in, upesi! (20)

The representation of the eruption of the Maji Maji revolt unfolds through a climactic build-up, as tension escalates during the night. But the climax is not reached at nightfall, when the entire village shuts down; it occurs in the early morning, when Huseni comes home and tries to find help after joining the Maji Maji. The temporal closure signalled by “nightfalls” is reopened with the irruption of Huseni in the early morning. The “half-caste,” as he is named in the passage, does not stand by the family’s decision to lock out the rebels. Huseni is a transgressive character, as he subverts the boundaries of community. But Huseni’s betrayals are, in this particular conjuncture, political transgressions, locating him along with the rebels, even if the significance of his political involvement is dismissed, and it is indeed, soon over. However, Huseni assumes, on that occasion, the role of sympathiser, militant and also witness of the Maji Maji, testifying to the violence of colonial counter-insurgency, as he reports that the colonial army “began shooting peu, peu, and some men fell. Then all started running, scattering everywhere … many fell. Many will hang, I tell you” (21). The account of the Maji Maji in the novel, however, does not conclude with Huseni’s return home and subsequent marriage. References to the

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

123

rebellion reappear later in the novel, even after Huseni’s hiding, and after the following “show of strength” of the Germans (21), which involved violent retaliations against the colonised. The part of the novel centring on the vicissitudes of the family’s founder, Dhanji Govindji, indeed, ends with the story of a minor character in the novel, Bwana Khalfaan, a magician or witchdoctor who had moved into Matamu at the time of the Maji Maji. Bwana Khalfaan is linked to the rebellion and the medicine men who triggered the riot, but is also endowed with supernatural powers and plays an important role in the community. He had “predicted the arrival of the Europeans, and had talked of an iron boat which would run on land from the coast all the way up to Ujiji, well before the Central Railway Line came into existence” (31). Bwana Khalfaan plays a marginal, but interesting part in the story of Dhanji Govindji’s family too. Bwana Khalfaan is summoned one day to hold a traditional medicine ritual in order to help find Huseni, who had vanished after a quarrel with Dhanji Govindji, fruitlessly. The role of Bwana Khalfaan is not central in the novel, as he appears a few times and does not belong to the family. However, this character is a sort of trickster, helping the attempt to reunite the family, hence to break the divide between the Asian lineage and its African roots. As a local magician, Bwana Khalfaan also incorporates traditional elements surviving in the present and their mobilisation in times of political unrest. In a passage of the novel, it emerges that Bwana Khalfaan played a part in mobilising local people, including Huseni, to join the rebellion, and he is eventually hanged by the Germans for this. The figure of this magician, at the edges of the family yet intimately linked to it via Huseni, also works as a kind of anticipatory consciousness which gives Vassanji’s nonsynchronic use of time a possible meaning, beyond a simple nostalgic or diasporic understanding of the novel. The climactic appearance of Bwana Khalfaan is at the moment of his death. The Germans capture him and stage a trial in the centre of the village. Bwana Khalfaan is interrogated after a witness recounts how he instigated people to join the revolt and then, before a crowd gathered around the makeshift trial, Bwana has to give an account of his actions. In the final scene of confession and execution, Bwana Khalfaan faces the executioners with pride and strength. He admits he made people take the Maji Maji oath and accept responsibility for the subsequent deaths. As the text reveals, Bwana Khalfaan admits he convinced people to join the Maji Maji. He confesses:

124

F. MENOZZI

“And so took them to their deaths at the hands of mnyamas [beasts] like this one who shot them and hanged them and cut open their women and burnt their farms.” Bwana Khalfaan’s eyes were fixed on Daudi Amin. The crowd stirred, a murmur of “Salaaaalé” went up, and the askaris stood up … The crowd stood back and moved back … They watched the mchawi [witchdoctor] hanging from the old scarred mango tree, opposite the house where Bibi Taratibu used to live, under which Huseni and his gang used to loiter. “Truly,” they said, “these Mdachis [Germans] are powerful, to vanquish a mchawi like that one. But perhaps some day they will meet one to match their strength. Then we shall see.” (45)

The magician is hanged near Bibi Taratibu’s place, a highly symbolic location epitomising the repressed African side of Salim’s family. While the family distances itself from African nationalism, a discrepant narratorial focalisation discloses a multitude of dissonant perspectives, embodied by characters such as Bwana Khalfaan. The last words of the crowd, acting here as a sort of chorus and offering a meta-commentary on the episode, reopen the temporal closure of the scene to an undefined future, an event yet to come when the coloniser will find an enemy able to vanquish them. The temporality of the event, in this passage, is opened to intimate the time of long-term historical process: the figure of Bwana Khalfaan incarnates and illuminates the interplay between past and future, event (the failed Maji Maji) and the ongoing history of decolonisation. The death of Bwana Khalfaan enriches his prophetic abilities with a precursory consciousness of a future liberation from colonialism. It anticipates the future revolts that will give the region freedom from imperialism, especially the Mau Mau rebellion mentioned later in the text. But Vassanji’s representation of the Maji Maji has further implications for thinking the political and historical valences of the novel. As Felicitas Becker shows in an overview of historiographical research on the Maji Maji, this episode in East African history has been subject to differing interpretations across generations of African historians. The Maji Maji, indeed, was the first peasant rebellion to go beyond local affiliations and to assume an organisation, scope and duration that were unlike other isolated anti-colonial riots. Contemporary observers were amazed “at the unity of purpose and persistence in struggle displayed by the rebels, many of whom belonged to peoples considered ‘unwarlike’ and parochial” (Becker 1). Following interpretations of the revolt, accordingly, “centred on yearning for political independence as a central motive and the unifying role of the ‘Maji’ medicine cult and its messengers”

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

125

(ibid.). The first wave of scholarship on the rebellion, especially studies by Terence Ranger in 1968 and John Iliffe in 1967, emphasised a protonationalist drive behind the protest, interpreting it as an anticipation of the subsequent struggles for national unity. A second wave of scholarship (Sunseri) questioned whether the Maji rebellion could be really seen as anticipating national liberation, emphasising internal conflicts, divisions and domestic grievances rather than a unified front against colonialism as the root of the protest. In particular, second-wave historians emphasised how the people living on the coast (which would include Salim’s family in Vassanji’s fiction) were not fully sympathetic to the anti-colonial sentiment of the populations from the interior. Becker, though, shows that claims made by the first wave of scholars in the 1960s are indeed valuable, notwithstanding the reservations of the second wave of historians. As she concludes, the Maji Maji rebellion is important because it “has been connected to the struggle for independence as well as to precolonial, domestic and symbolic struggles … It was so forceful because all sides in it, rebels and loyalists, leaders and commoners, had long been involved in networks of control that connected the coast and the interior” (Becker 22). Becker also emphasises the role of “local leaders,” especially “big men” and medicine men, epitomised in Vassanji’s novel in the figure of Bwana Khalfaan. Becker points out that the rebellion did not take place “simply because the stateless people of the interior were born rebels or because social tensions ran high. It took the Maji to transform manifold tensions and discontent into action” (22). Becker continues: Once started, the rebellion polarized the networks through which the big men had exercised their personal control over their followers, forcing them to take sides. In effect, the Maji Maji rebellion ended the era of independent big men. Still, it did not do away with all the elements of precolonial big man politics, such as the disdain for dynastic authority and the importance of personal networks. This was part of the heritage that this region carried over into the colonial period. (22)

Building on Becker’s observations, Vassanji’s portrayal of Bwana Khalfaan offers a fictional counter-narrative that resonates with historiographical accounts of the rebellion. While the Maji Maji testifies to a pre-colonial heritage “carried over” into the colonial period, the hanging of the witchdoctor also presents an anticipation, a prefiguration of the future

126

F. MENOZZI

struggle for national liberation and a marker of the moment of transition from the pre-colonial era of “big man” politics to modern/colonial rule. This transition, however, is not a sharp break because elements of pre-colonial history remain active substances in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Bwana Khalfaan emerges as a non-synchronic figure that does not fully belong to the ensuing modern regime of colonial governmentality but rather opens it up to different times, acting as a convergence of multiple historical layers and the process of incomplete synchronisation proper to peripheral social formations. The medicine man incarnates traces of a pre-colonial, African past that survive, in spite of his death, in the present of anti-colonial resistance. Yet, it also points to a future liberation from colonialism, indicated by Vassanji’s time marker to signal Bwana Khalfaan’s powers of anticipation: “perhaps one day …” This marker emphasises a quality of indetermination and open-endedness that connects non-synchronically a disappearing pre-colonial past to a yet-to-come postcolonial future.

4

Conclusion: The Accretion of Stories

Interpreting The Gunny Sack requires a close engagement with the novel’s reframing of time through the use of multiple time markers and stylistic devices, especially references to a vanishing past and anticipations of a future to come. The asynchronous logic at work in the novel is the place where possible layers of meaning could be excavated and proposed as different ways of interpreting the text. The focus on Vassanji’s manipulation of time, what could be called his specific mode of non-synchronous narration, reveals an interplay of times that go beyond a thematic understanding of the text as nostalgic longing for colonial times, a celebration of Asian communities’ apartness and purity, or a refusal of roots through the dislocations of a diasporic consciousness. The novel complicates these readings by inserting characters and episodes that show multiple ways of connecting memory and history, families and communities, diasporic and native. Historically, Vassanji’s temporal markers express the incomplete synchronisation characterising the onset of colonial modernity, wherein pre-colonial elements survive non-synchronically as unsettling political force. Ultimately, the novel is not narrated by Vassanji, but by Salim, a character who belongs to the “half-caste” side of the family, a descendant of Huseni and inheritor of the secret communication at work across communities throughout three generations of history. From this point of

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

127

view, Salim’s own reflections on his position as narrator can acquire a new meaning, from the standpoint of non-synchronism. In one passage of the novel, indeed, he reflects on his story and the echoes between his life and the life of his ancestors. Salim meditates: Running away. Wanderlust. Having come to this theme yet once again, memory plays a trick on me. From her corner Sherhu [the gunny sack] throws a wink at me … I too have run away, absconded. And reaching this grim basement, I stopped to examine the collective memory – this spongy, disconnected, often incoherent accretion of stories over generations. Like the karma a soul acquires, over many incarnations, the sins and merits, until in its final stages it lumbers along top-heavy with its accumulations, desperately seeking absolution. (80)

Salim claims the role of storyteller, the one who gathers the collective memory of families and communities. He assumes the role of a generational link across disparate threads and, interestingly, defines a sense of time which is not the time of dispersal, the time of diaspora or the time of nostalgia but rather the time of “absolution” through the “accumulations” and “accretion of stories” that he now transmits to the reader. As Vassanji reveals in an interview about The Gunny Sack, “I was imposing a pattern and then I imposed another structure on that which divided into three parts, although the three parts are interlinked, and go back and forth … the narrator is a unifying force and his interaction with his memories is also a unifying force” (Nasta 21). From such passage, Vassanji outlines a sense of history which is neither backward-looking nor simply broken into disjuncture and dislocation. Rather, non-synchronism is revealed here as a coexistence of times, a “unifying force” epitomised by the narrator’s ability to link past and future and to assume the role of a mediator between disconnected bits of time. Salim’s position, as narrator and link of different temporalities, can be affiliated with what Daniel Bensaïd has described as the ability to draw a “constellation of eras and events,” as he writes in Marx for Our Times: “every past is reborn in the present-becoming-past. Every present fades in the futurebecoming-present. In the constellation of eras and events, the present indefinitely appeals to another present, in a discontinuous interplay of echoes and resonances” (88). In this “dialectical concept of historical time,” writes Bensaïd, “the present of the past responds to the present of the future, memory to expectation” (ibid.). By remaking time, Vassanji’s

128

F. MENOZZI

novel displays an openness to meaning which is also a temporal indetermination through which different histories echo, call and respond to each other in a non-synchronic constellation of which the gunny sack remains ultimate source and metaphor.

Notes 1. In his review of Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, Nicholas Brown comments that “the question is one of totalization: the assembly of multiple and in themselves disparate temporalities … into a followable narrative … the conflict between temporalities has to be narrativized, and this requires a process of totalization to put them into determinate relations with each other” (161). 2. In an important volume on the Maji Maji, James Leonard Giblin and Jamie Monson introduce the event by noting that “the Maji Maji war of 1905-7 is one of the most familiar stories in African history … societies scattered across a large portion of southern Tanzania took up arms against German colonizers … despite many differences of language and culture” (1). While the revolt was unsuccessful, it became a very significant event in postindependence historiography as an anticipation of anti-colonial nationalism and one of the first instances in which African populations united against colonialism in spite of cultural, linguistic and religious differences. 3. Mieke Bal defines the criteria of narrative embedding as insertion, subordination and homogeneity (43). Bal’s definition, interestingly, opposes embeddedness to both complete implication and simple juxtaposition or heterogeneity. The temporality of an embedded narrative, from this point of view, unfolds as a dialectical tension between concordance and discordance, framing narrative and embedded story. 4. The distinction between voice and focalisation, or the character who speaks and the character who sees, was originally outlined in a controversial and influential work by Gerard Genette. As James Phelan notes in his intervention in the debate on focalisation, a narrator cannot report a sequence of events without revealing how he or she perceives it. For this reason, “any path marked by the narrator’s perspective … will be not only a report on the story world but also a reflection of how the narrator perceives that world” (Phelan 2003, 57). This “reflection” can introduce an element of non-synchronicity in the narration: while narration and perception coincide, they can coincide as simultaneity of non-simultaneous elements, positioning the narrator at the same time in the past and in the future. Uri Margolin adopts the term “discordant focalisation” when “individual ingredients of any simultaneous composite vision … fail to coincide” (55).

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

129

5. In Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson connects Bloch’s critique of “the tradition of anamnesis and of the model of past-oriented time” (130) to the question of artistic and literary form. Literary forms that do justice to the openness of the present do not take a sense of direction from the past, but rather “reveal the essential movement of human reality towards the future” (ibid.).

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. 1981. Notes on Narrative Embedding. Trans. Eve Tavor Poetics Today 2.2: 41–59. Becker, Felicitas. 2004. Traders, “Big Men” and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania. The Journal of African History 45.1: 1–22. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2002. Marx for Our Times. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bookman, Ariel. 2014. “Since When Has Paper Any Value?” Reading, Materiality, and Meaning in MG Vassanji’s Fiction. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49.2: 189–201. Brown, Nicholas. 2009. It’s Dialectical! Mediations 24.2: 150–163. Currie, Mark. 2010. About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press. Desai, Gaurav. 2011. “Ambiguity Is the Driving Force or the Nuclear Reaction Behind My Creativity”: An E-conversation with MG Vassanji. Research in African literatures 42.3: 187–197. Dube, Saurabh. 2002. Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4: 729–755. Frederick, Samuel. 2011. Re-reading Digression: Towards a Theory of Plotless Narrativity. In Rhian Atkin, ed. Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression. Abingdon: Legenda, 15–26. Ganguly, Keya. 2010. Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 1999. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Giblin, James Leonard, and Jamie Monson, eds. 2010. Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War. Leiden: Brill.

130

F. MENOZZI

Iliffe, John. 1967. The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion. The Journal of African History 8.3: 495–512. Itwaru, Arnold Harichand. 1991. Fiction in History in Fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 31.1: 114–116. Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Kalliney, Peter J. 2008. East African Literature and the Politics of Global Reading. Research in African Literatures 39.1: 1–23. Maja-Pearce, Adewale. 1992. In Pursuit of Excellence: Thirty Years of the Heinemann African Writers’ Series. Research in African Literatures 23.4: 125–132. Malak, Amin. 1993. Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of MG Vassanji. World Literature Today 67.2: 277–282. Margolin, Uri. 2009. Focalization: Where Do We Go from Here? In Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, eds. Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Berlin: De Gruyter, 41–59. Mohapatra, Ashok K. 2006. The Paradox of Return: Origins, Home and Identity in MG Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack. Postcolonial Text 2.4: 2–21. Moss, Laura. 2013. The Multinational’s Song: The Global Reception of MG Vassanji. In Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, ed. Postliberalization Indian Novels in English. London: Anthem, 67–76. Nasta, Susheila. 1991. Interview: Moyez Vassanji. Wasafiri: 19–21. Nazareth, Peter. 1990. The First Tanzan/Asian Novel. Research in African Literatures 21.4: 129–133. Ndlovu, Isaac. 2013. Gender, the Subaltern and the “Construction of Silence” in MG Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. English Studies in Africa 56.2: 84–97. Ojwang, Dan. 2012. Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Pels, Peter. 2003. Introduction. In Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds. Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford University Press, 1–38. Phelan, James. 2003. Dual Focalization, Retrospective Fictional Autobiography, and the Ethics of Lolita. In Gary Fireman, Ted McVay, and Owen Flanagan, eds. Narrative and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 129–145. ———. 2016. Analepsis/Prolepsis. In Joel Burges and Amy Elias, eds. Time. New York: NYU Press, 240–254. Ranger, Terence O. 1968. The Connection Between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa. Journal of African History 9: 437–53.

4

BEYOND DIASPORA AND NOSTALGIA …

131

Rhodes, Shane. 1997. MG Vassanji: An Interview. Studies in Canadian Literature 22.2: 105–117. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sarvan, Charles Ponnuthurai. 1991. MG Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack: A Reflection on History and the Novel. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 37.3: 511–518. Simatei, Peter. 2000. Voyaging on the Mists of Memory: MG Vassanji and the Asian Quest/ion in East Africa. English studies in Africa 43.1: 29–42. ———. 2011. Diasporic Memories and National Histories in East African Asian Writing. Research in African Literatures 42.3: 56–67. Sunseri, Thaddeus. 2000. Statist Narratives and Maji Maji Ellipses. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 33.3: 567–584. Vassanji, M.G. 1989. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann. ———. 1996. Life at the Margins: In the Thick of Multiplicity. In Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, eds. Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 111–120. ———. 2016. Looking at Them: The View Across the Street. Transition 119.1: 22–36.

CHAPTER 5

Written Out of History: The Agbekoya Rebellion at Temporal Crossroads

This chapter engages with Toyin Falola’s 2014 memoir Counting the Tiger’s Teeth, which revolves around the author’s participation in the 1968–1970 Agbekoya rebellion. The Agbekoya was a peasant revolt driven by the impoverishment, high taxation and violence suffered by cocoa farmers in west Nigeria, which led to a violent upheaval against the postcolonial government. Falola’s memoir, however, refuses to reduce living history to historiographical document. Drawing on the author’s personal involvement in the rebellion as a young boy, Falola’s book presents a non-synchronous logic wherein different temporal orders coexist in dialectical antagonism: the time of history, the time of memory and the time of myth. The intersection between these different temporal registers vividly emerges through a recurrent figure of speech: peripeteia, which is adopted as important stylistic device in the memoir. A turning point in the plot or dramatic reversal of fortune, peripeteia reveals a crossroads of temporalities that animate the memoir’s explicit refusal to reduce the living temporality of the rebels to inert historiographical knowledge. Falola’s complex narrative layering ultimately illustrates how the Agbekoya rebellion needs to be transmitted through a mode of retelling that opposes a deterministic sense of history and shows instead the open-ended and multi-layered temporality typical of postcolonial social formations at the periphery of capitalism.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_5

133

134

F. MENOZZI

1 Temporal Crossroads: The Dialectic of Peripeteia Toyin Falola’s 2014 memoir Counting the Tiger’s Teeth revolves around the author’s personal experience as he joined the Agbekoya rebellion in 1968. Written by a prominent Nigerian historian now based in North America, the memoir is a compelling narration that connects Falola’s reminiscence of his adolescence to the unfolding of the Agbekoya, a major peasant insurgency against the government that shook Western Nigeria in the late 1960s. The memoir does not offer a merely factual description of the events, but rather weaves a first-person retelling of the revolt with personal recollection and an introduction to the mythologies and rituality of the Yoruba people, to which the author belongs. For this reason, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth stands at the intersection of three competing temporal orders: the order of individual anamnesis, the order of historical narration and the order of Yoruba cosmogony and mythology. The specific way in which these layers of time interact in the text gives rise to the specifically non-synchronous dimension of the book, as well as revealing how the postcolonial nation-state is composed of a combination of experiences of time registering the simultaneous coexistence of economic and social structures belonging to pre-colonial as well as postcolonial times. Subtitled “An African Teenager’s Story,” Falola’s memoir eschews the linearity of the bildungsroman and rather offers a dramatic, discontinuous work of reminiscence; the temporal span of covered in the plot dates from 1968 to 1970, but these temporal coordinates are constantly breached by the influx of an expanded historical field encompassing anecdotes about the Yoruba myth about the origin of the universe and concluding, in the acknowledgement, with a mention of the loss of the full manuscript during a trip to Argentina. The time frame of the Agbekoya, as it will be shown in this chapter, is located into a wider historical continuum that goes beyond an isolated and episodic event in the history of postcolonial Nigeria. Throughout the book, a dominant figure of speech determines the emplotment of the story: peripeteia, which drives the way the time of mnemonic recollection, historical event and myth are dialectically interconnected. The term peripeteia originates from Aristotle’s Poetics, where it was defined as key emotional element in tragedy, consisting of a reversal of destiny or unexpected change in the plot. Usually, peripeteia involves a change that turns what seems to be a happy ending into misfortune and

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

135

downfall, for example, following the acquisition of new knowledge or a moment of recognition. However, the trope should not necessarily be restricted to tragic downfall: more generally, peripeteia indicates a basic change, reversal or turning point in a character’s situation. Peripeteia gives mimesis its momentum and unfolding. In his work Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson further clarifies some implications of peripeteia as a key trope to determine the temporality of narrative configuration. Jameson draws on Paul Ricoeur who, in Time and Narrative, had defined the occurrences of peripeteia as “those contingencies and reversals of fortune that solicit horror and pity,” linking peripeteia to those forms of “concordant discordance” that upset any linear temporality of narration (Ricoeur 73). Fredric Jameson notes that peripeteia “can be semically reduced to change as such, the fundamental temporal structure of the mimetic process,” opening the question about “the very nature of the New, of what emerges when something changes” (507). As a reversal of fortune or turning point in the story, the logic of peripeteia reveals an important narrative mechanism, wherein time appears in the guise of unexpected events that set the plot to work. However, Jameson also offers some reflections on a possible ideological and political dimension of peripeteia. He explores the dialectical quality of peripeteia in relation to the way the trope challenges the temporality of the genre of the epic, which is contained by what Erich Auerbach, in his influential book Mimesis, described as an eternal foreground, “a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present” (Auerbach 7), which for Jameson represents “the time of the victors, and the temporality of their history and their worldview” (Jameson 556). In his influential Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács noted how the epic “can never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth, the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically given” (46): it is for this reason that any attempt “at a properly utopian epic must fail because it is bound, subjectively or objectively, to transcend the empirical” (ibid.). The present of the epic coincides with a deterministic sense of time that precludes genuine historical change. In contrast to the linear, empirical, eternal, factual and victorious temporality of the epic, the unsettling time of peripeteia can indicate an episodic, anti-epic tendency signalling “the experience of defeat, a shattering experience that annuls historical teleology” (Jameson 556). But peripeteia does not simply punctuate and dislodge the temporality of epic, success story and happy ending with defeat, downturn and unpredictable misfortune. Peripeteia can indicate both the turning of success into defeat

136

F. MENOZZI

as well as its opposite: a basic mechanism of subversion of temporal linearity, peripeteia shows in its ambivalence its truly dialectical character, what Jameson explains as “the unity of opposites, which is to say, a structure in which the two forms of peripeteia would be overlaid, or better still, profoundly identified with one another” (554). Jameson continues: For the dialectic is not to be understood merely as a success story, nor either as the experience of defeat: it consists in that difficult wisdom in which these two outcomes become one and the same, in which defeat becomes success, and success becomes defeat … Peripeteia thereby becomes a dialectic wherein the deeper ambivalence of the negative and positive is registered; wherein the triumph of the victors is undermined … In this transformation of peripeteia into dialectic (or its unveiling as dialectic) we may detect the emergence of historical time within the existential and its temporality. (554–561)

Jameson’s reflections on peripeteia offer a productive lens through which Toyin Falola’s memoir can be interpreted from the standpoint of nonsynchronism. Indeed, the trope registers, as Jameson highlights, a dialectical quality concerning at least two aspects central to Counting the Tiger’s Teeth: firstly, the intersection between an historical and an existential temporal register, which is at the heart of the memoir as a genre. Falola’s text is neither limited to individual recollection or family memory nor to presenting an objective stance on the postcolonial history of Nigeria. Rather, the specificity of the memoir as a genre involves capturing the way the former encounters the latter, personal experience meets historical process. Peripeteia operates, from this point of view, as the rhetorical mechanism allowing multiple temporalities to emerge in their dialectical interplay. Secondly, Jameson’s reflections on the relationship between victory and defeat points to a central dimension of Falola’s book: the causes, developments and outcomes of the Agbekoya rebellion. While on many accounts, the insurgency was victorious, Falola points out, especially in the conclusion of his book, how the success was in truth a defeat, in that the revolt did not lead to a deeper change in Nigerian society. While the government eventually gave in to the Agbekoya’s demands for lowering taxation and improving the farmers’ living and working conditions, eventually the state reverted back to a state of violence and corruption, what Jean-Francois Bayart (2009) would call the politique du

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

137

ventre or “politics of the belly” marking the culture of greed of postcolonial nation-states as soon as the peasant leaders became established and powerful figures in mainstream politics. The peripeteia hence connects the “event” of the rebellion to wider historical tendencies of postcolonial Nigeria, showing the unsettled antagonisms between rural and urban populations, peasants and elites, foreign capital and local economies.1 In this way, the memoir reveals a tension between history as subjective praxis and history as objective condition, or project and destiny. The tension is not solved but rather non-synchronically played out as a disturbance in the teleological order of the narrative plot, which cannot be exhaustively pinned down to being a fictionalised retelling of a successful peasant revolt. Peripeteia impedes a total identification of existential and historical time and, on another level, of political praxis and social determination: these two orders of time rather coexist in a state of reciprocal antagonism, showing that the concordance of the story is punctuated by a deeper temporal discordance. Falola’s memoir could be aligned here with Achille Mbembe’s reflections on the African experience of time as he presented it in On the Postcolony. As Mbembe writes, “African existence is neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it … This time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures” (16). The experience of time in postcolonial Africa, Mbembe remarks, is “made up of disturbances, of a bundle of unforeseen events,” composing a pattern of “ebbs and flows” showing that “this time is not irreversible … it cannot be forced into any simplistic model and calls into question the hypothesis of stability and rupture” (ibid., emphasis in original). Rethinking time, non-synchronically, as such interlocking of possibilities radically interrogates, at the same time, both ideals of seamless continuity and of absolute separation between capitalist modernity and its pre-histories. Rather, it shows how, at the peripheries of the postcolonial capitalist system, bundles of trajectories are constantly reactivated in political and social praxis thanks to the survivals of overlapping strata of time. It is for this reason that African social formations “harbor the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent but interlocked, paradoxical” (ibid.). The logic of peripeteia is a highly effective literary device to represent the complexity of these interlocking temporalities proper to postcolonial African societies.

138

F. MENOZZI

Accordingly, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth reframes the teleology of the epic and the sequentiality of history with a set of temporal crossroads, real possibilities and dialectical divergences embodied in the logic of peripeteia. The memoir shows the concordant discordance of existential, mythological and historical temporalities. In order to explore the full significance of Falola’s representation of a postcolonial African experience of time, the first part of this chapter will focus on the non-synchronous dimension linking the personal to the historical, starting from one of the most important events described in the book: the turning of the narrator from armed militia into militant intellectual and chronicler of the movement. The second part of the chapter will address the final steps of the narration: the storming of the infamous Agodi prison, which signed a real turning point in the unfolding of the events and played a pivotal part in the success of the Agbekoya. The victory is immediately followed by an account of the ultimate defeat of the movement and an invocation of a Yoruba deity, Esu, the god of crossroads, unexpected turns and bifurcations. Merging historical events into the mythical temporality of Yoruba cosmogony, Counting the Tiger Teeth offers a cosmological and etiological discourse in order to explain the reversal of fortune of the rebellion and the regression of Nigeria back to the scenario of exploitation, violence and corruption that preceded the turmoil. In the conclusion, the chapter will go back to the question about the dialectical quality of peripeteia and will offer an interpretation of Falola’s memoir as narrative example of non-synchronism.

2 History and Experience: The Turning Point of Narrative Toyin Falola’s use of autobiographical writing is by no means insignificant to understanding how his volume engages with a non-synchronous politics of time. Indeed, as Janet Gunn has shown in her pivotal research on “Third World autobiography,” this genre defies both the conventions of academic writing and of Western autobiography. As she remarks in a 1992 essay on the testimonial considered as a subgenre of Third World autobiography, this kind of writing is “oriented toward creating a future rather than recovering a past” (Gunn 1992, 164). Gunn continues to explain the Third World testimonial as follows:

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

139

It is a form of Utopian literature that contributes to the realization of a liberated society based on distributive justice. A form of resistance literature as well as Utopian literature, the testimonial resists not only economic and political oppression, but also any nostalgic pull towards an idealized past. (ibid.)

Being simultaneously collective, utopian, politically driven and antinostalgic, Falola’s memoir seems to illustrate very cogently the features of a form of representation half-way between the personal and the political, in which the present of the narration is inhabited by a multitude of resistant trajectories. The tension between personal and political can also echo, as Isidore Okpewho notes in an essay on storytelling in African cultures, a feature of traditional tales, which involve a mixture of political alongside personal issues (113). Accordingly, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth is not organised chronologically as a nostalgic recovery of the past or simply limited to defining the development of the narrator’s individual sense of identity. The memoir challenges anamnestic teleology. The narrative is rather presented as a set of turning points that move the flow of the action in unexpected directions, interspersing an existential level of individual recollection with embattled temporalities of collective upheaval, utopia and organised struggle. The book starts with the description of a Yoruba ritual to ingratiate the god of war, Ogun, and ends circularly by returning to the moment of that opening ritual in 1968. Between the incipit and the ending, the story alternates between the personal and the historical. Indeed, it shifts between, on the one hand, accounts of the underlying causes, economic reasons, strategic and tactical organisations and political machinations that surrounded the Agbekoya rebellion and, on the other hand, the contingency of personal anecdotes. A first question that a reader could pose, hence, concerns the way these two aspects, the experiential and the historical, are interrelated. In order to address this issue, the figure of peripeteia offers a revealing moment in the narrative because it shows a moment of reflexivity, where the narrative folds into itself to show how these temporal registers engage with each other. On the level of personal story, the memoir recounts the narrator’s adolescence in Akanran, a village in Western Nigeria that was one of the epicentres of the revolt, where he was fostered by his grandfather, Pasitor, a Christian priest who worked closely with the rebel farmers and had a leading role in the Agbekoya movement. Since early age, the narrator undertakes assignments for Pasitor and is involved in intelligence

140

F. MENOZZI

tasks, aiming to become a full militant and to engage in actual warfare. In 1968, however, the narrator is a teenage boy who cannot fully take part in the armed section of the movement, as this is restricted to adults, but whose work nonetheless plays a highly significant part in the revolt and grants him direct access and insider’s knowledge into the unfolding of the operations. From the start, the Agbekoya is not represented as a chaotic mob storming cities and government buildings, but as a highly organised, disciplined peasant movement aiming for social justice.2 This counters official portrayals of the insurgency, which did not do justice to the level of strategic planning, logistical complexity and coordinated effort that the successful operation required. Against the grain of mainstream and government-authorised knowledge, the question of being part of the movement rather than providing a factual record based on archival sources is a dominant leitmotif of the book, and it starts to appear from the preface, where Falola writes: In 1968, I dropped out of high school to join a peasant rebellion, known as the Agbekoya, that continued to 1970. By the end of December 1969, I was no longer a member, but I followed its activities in 1970 … This memoir is neither a complete historical account of this period nor a full account of the rebellion itself. It is just about my own specific experience, a tiny slice of a bigger historical moment of which I was a part. It is certainly the first account from an insider, far different from all the research monographs and articles that are based on public records. (xiii)

This passage sets the scope and expectations of the volume and, so to speak, intimates a narrative pact between writer and reader. The memoir should not be read as historical account, yet it manifests a determination to challenge false and inaccurate reports on the events gathered by outsiders through archival research. Falola continues by explaining that the reader should approach the memoir as a sort of counter-narrative opposing official narratives of the rebellion, as he knows where “the records are dead wrong” and where they are “fabrications by state officials who were reporting what they knew nothing or little about” (ibid.). From this point of view, it could be argued that one of the main objectives of the memoir is to oppose the misleading narratives based on official records and archival research. The experience of the individual involved in the struggle, the participant, is in sheer opposition to the

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

141

record of the observer detached from the events. One of the most important occurrences of the trope of peripeteia in the memoir sheds further light into how the individual recollection of militancy opposes the abstract temporality of the archive. The first peripeteia to be considered occurs mid-way in the narrative, when the narrator describes an incident that will affect his overall involvement in the Agbekoya. As the movement gains momentum and the farmers start to prepare coordinated attacks against state buildings and a public protest in Ibadan, the capital of the region, the narrator explains the origins of the movement and the organisation of peasants into a highly centralised, disciplined and incredibly effective militia. As a young boy, he is not expected to take fully part into the armed struggle, thus he does not undergo the training for using the dane guns that were available to the farmers at the time. He is nonetheless involved in side activities that complement the armed struggle, which was mainly conducted by adults. In November 1968, his team joins a group of combatants in the village of Idi Ayunre, where the narrator is part of a section of militants awaiting for instructions from the higher levels of the organisation. As the farmers prepare for the revolt and organise the inhabitants of the villages to contribute to a heavily and carefully planned strategic activity for attacking the city, however, an unexpected turning point occurs, marking the narrator’s role in the struggle. As Falola narrates: I ran out of luck on November 8, changing the course of my participation and, probably, my history. A dane gun was on the floor. Not mine: I never had one, as Pasitor had insisted that I must not carry one or be given one … Everybody in my age bracket was prevented from carrying guns. It was what the elders agreed on. We had our own roles, very useful roles, as spies, running errands, carrying secret messages … Our best job was actually to run. (143)

The peripeteia involves, in these circumstances, a very unlucky event for which the narrator is responsible and, as he writes, something that will change the course of his participation and his “history” within the movement. The narrator continues by explaining the dynamics of the incident: In mid-afternoon on November 8, I picked up this gun. I stood up. I aimed at a tree. I pulled the trigger. A loud noise was released: o tun ku.

142

F. MENOZZI

So loud that the entire battalion was thrown into panic … Each warrior reached for his gun thinking that someone had shot at him. Mr. No Worries [the nickname of a section leader] sprang into action, taken by surprise. He issued the commands in place, moving soldiers to cover all four corners of the camp. Then came the revelation: It was Iwin [the spiritual name of the narrator] who had pulled the trigger … In anger that could lead to murder, Mr. No Worries asked that my hands be tied with a rope to my back, like a noose on the neck of a goat being led to the slaughter house. (144)

The consequences of the young boy’s transgression are dramatic: he is severely beaten up, handcuffed with a rope and sent back to the headquarters, being henceforth expelled from the armed section of the guerrilla. His involvement among the armed men ends with this episode and, with shame, he is turned into being an example of the fact that boys of his age “left behind were frightened to death” (145). Being sent back from the guerrilla, however, does not prevent the narrator from taking part in the Agbekoya, but rather opens new possibilities for him by radically changing his role. As he anticipates in the conclusion of the episode, this did not signal the end of his mission, but rather gives the narrator the space to tell the reader “what the fight was all about. I appreciate your patience thus far. This is the least I can do to recover from my humiliation and disgrace. You have been fast asleep; it is now time to dream. My stomach is ready to vomit both the food it failed to digest and my mouth the words it hates the most” (145). Comparing the story to a dream and the act of narrating it to a food being “vomited,” the narrator hence explains how the two orders of time—history and experience— manage not only to oppose each other, but also to intersect: the narrator becomes the chronicler of the Agbekoya. A central point that emerges from the first turn of events considered so far is that Counting the Tiger’s Teeth is predicated upon the metafictional narration of the process through which Falola himself becomes a storyteller: the peripeteia allows the narrator to exceed his role as someone who is a simple participant in the historical events. Thus, as a militant in the Agbekoya, Toyin Falola is close to the grassroots operations and is able to share first-hand insider knowledge. But the fact of being rejected by the armed group also opens up the immanence of history to another temporal level, which is the level of the narrative representation itself, signalled by the turning of the young boy from militant into chronicler

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

143

of the Agbekoya. The time of history is, for this reason, accompanied by the time of personal memory as an integral part of the structure of the memoir, allowing the narrator to emerge as the meeting point and the mediation between the chronological order of history and the anamnestic exercise of autobiography. As he explains later in the story: “And what about me? I had become an integral part of the Agbekoya movement, serving in its intellectual wing, in the courier outfit, in the rear to organize supplies, and in the attack units” (239). Being excluded from the armed body permits the narrator to join the movement as what Daniel Bensaïd (2014) would call a “rearguard” intellectual: someone who plays a tactical role in the intelligence work of the organisation, but is also endowed with the task of transmitting its memory in writing, assuming the role of chronicler of the struggle. Turning from militant to militant intellectual plays a crucial role in offering the ideological legitimation, discursive articulation, historical consciousness and wider resonance of the movement: the farmers “lacked the resources to manipulate the media or to purchase any influence … As low as my educational qualification was, I was the star, actually a superstar, sometimes called akowe (the lettered one). It was Pasitor and my akowe credentials that fully inserted me into the movement, as well as my deep commitment” (201). The peripeteia that impels the narrator to be removed from an armed section of the guerrilla hence turns the defeat into victory: a story of supposed failure provides the reason for justifying the narrator’s involvement with an ever stronger significance. Toyin Falola becomes the storyteller that articulates the historical consciousness of the Agbekoya. This role is very important because, Falola reveals later in the memoir, the government had begun “to write its own history of the movement and the rebellion, the history that you now find in its archives based at Ibadan” (258). These papers, the narrator remarks, are not truthful accounts but rather ideological mystifications that attempt to reduce the Agbekoya to a spontaneous, primitive, chaotic flow of violence conducted by non-educated people incapable of thinking or even understanding governmental or organisational issues. Against the propagandistic stereotyping of the peasants, the role of the narrator as akowe is crucial to demonstrate that the rebels had the capacity to organise a highly sophisticated war machine against the state. Furthermore, the militants were endorsing social values and had a clear idea in mind about the redistribution of resources, improvement of working conditions, end to

144

F. MENOZZI

hyper-exploitation, unsustainable taxation, governmental corruption and social justice they were fighting for. Falola’s mode of narration, however, is not only predicated upon a personal involvement that is opposed to official account and outsider’s knowledge. Counting the Tiger’s Teeth also offers a reflection on the alternative mode of historical consciousness produced by the peripeteia that turns participant into chronicler. This mode of writing history is neither reducible to personal reminiscence nor to objective historical account. Rather, Falola, as storyteller, draws on Yoruba mythologies and cosmogonies to formulate a way of turning the discordant opposition between history and experience into a concordant narration. A key element that is presented, in this regard, as a frame of reference to fully grasp the intersection of living memory and factual history in Falola’s memoir, is captured by the Yoruba word itan, which the narrator explains in the first chapter: The Yoruba have a way of presenting historical narratives, itan … Anybody who wants to know can collect itan, not from archives located far away in secluded places but from the immediate environment … Universitybased historians quibble a lot, and it is very hard to find two of them who agree on any interpretation. The historians are imposing themselves on the past, which is the source of their problem. Itan is imposing itself on the collectors, which is the source of its power … itan has the capacity to metamorphose into aroba, which is the ability of a narrator to combine philosophy with history, to present the past as a living present, to convert events into memory. (15–16)

Unlike academic historiography or Western autobiography, itan involves a close connection with the collective experience of the living environment and, most importantly, it is conceived of as an enchanting force that guides the historian, rather than being a dead object of knowledge on which historians can project their interpretation. As O . labiyi Babalo.la Yai notes in an essay on Yoruba concepts of cultural transmission, itan cannot be satisfactorily translated with “history,” in that the concept of itan is much more complex. Derived from the word tan that means “spread, reach, to open up, to illuminate, to shine” (30), the word includes at least three dimensions: a chronological aspect indicating the transmission of memory across the generations, a geographical aspect linking cultural transmission to territorial dispersal of Yoruba people beyond their original place of provenance, and a “reflexive and discursive” dimension whereby tan means to “illuminate, to enlighten, to discern, to disentangle” (Yai

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

145

31). Itan adds an important element of philosophical discussion and “deriddling” to historical narration. What matters, in other words, is not so much to recover the past as knowledge, to report the facts or simply to disclose the narrator’s sense of self in the process of becoming an adult. Itan involves the ability to present the past as a living present and acts as a mediation between the historical occurrence and the frame of meaning that guided the Agbekoya: the key question, in this context, does not just concern telling what happened, but rather explaining the dreams, struggles, desires and collective aspirations of the rebels and their way of interpreting the story of the upheaval. Itan signifies, from this point of view, a dialectical mediation between factual history and living memory, in which the figure of the narrator emerges as an operator of temporal concordance between the orders of experiential reminiscence and objective historical consciousness. The first peripeteia addressed in this chapter, accordingly, opens up the narrated time to the time of narration, shifting from the representation of the events to the actual moment of transmitting them to an audience— conveying them through the act of producing the memoir itself. As Meir Sternberg notes, the effects of peripeteia on the reader cannot stem from “those acts as experienced by the characters within the narrated world … because here lurks their surprise, not necessarily ours. The two may, but need not, run parallel: theirs derives from the living, ours from the telling about their living” (508). It is for this reason that, according to Sternberg, whatever the “dynamics of happening in the world – the shifts from one represented state to the next – all narrative effects as such attach to the dynamics of its communication in the text, as given, read, processed” (508). Peripeteia is firstly, a narrative device affecting the relationship between the writer and the reader: the turning point of narrative affects the experience of reading the unfolding of the Agbekoya through the eyes of an “African teenager,” as the book subtitle indicates. Itan involves this capacity to transmit how the actors that participated in the revolt experienced history and how they made the events meaningful. It tells as much about politics and economy as the unfinished and unrealised hopes that guided the struggle. Peripeteia amounts here to uncovering the dynamic, provisional state of flux and becoming of the revolt rather than its static and posthumous being. Drawing on Janet Dunn’s concept of a “temporal depth” of the autobiographic genre, it could be suggested that the historical mode of itan captures what Dunn describes as a “simultaneity of

146

F. MENOZZI

temporal layers of experience … a thickness made possible by the immediacy of the present moment but only as it is pressed on and by the past” (Gunn 1977, 197). Anyway, the logic of peripeteia should not be limited to being an effect of the temporal layers of the story and the abilities of the narrator to collect and assemble itan. This unsettling figure is also at work within historical time itself, disturbing linear chronology as well as social praxis. It is history itself that is punctuated by sudden reversals and unexpected turns through the influence, not only of personal memories, but also of Yoruba mythological time.

3

Dramatic Reversal: Mythology in the Present

In further occurrences of the figure of peripeteia, the victory of the Agbekoya is represented as a sudden change in the course of the events, a series of “dramatic reversals” which connect the order of narrative time to historical time. There is a concluding occurrence of peripeteia at the very end of the novel: “disaster struck on September 23. We were awoken by heavy gunfire in the morning, around 7 a.m. It was totally unexpected” (289). After the narrator and his sub-section relocate to the village of Akufo, the police and the military carry out a surprise attack killing more than a hundred people including the narrator’s grandfather and mentor, Pasitor, to whom the book is dedicated. Pasitor’s death remains at first unmourned, as the narrator has to escape from the village in order not to be killed. When he returns to Akufo, the narrator manages to arrange the funeral rites for Pasitor even though he is too shattered to fully take part in them. The sudden death of Pasitor plays a crucial role in the narrator’s experience of the times and remains one of the most dramatic moments in his retelling of the events. The loss cannot be mourned, not only because of the fostering role of Pasitor on the narrator, but also because the way it happens is totally unexpected and unprepared. But the death of Pasitor is only the first one of a series of dramatic reversals that punctuate the concluding climax of the story. It is not just Counting the Tiger’s Teeth as a memoir that adopts peripeteia to disrupt the temporality of the historical record by interspersing it with the anamnestic recollection of the narrator. Historical time itself, in its non-synchronous objectivity, is guided by peripeteia as pertaining to the unfolding of the events. The victory-cum-defeat of the rebellion is revived as unexpected turn of fortune occurring after the storming of a notorious Nigerian prison where political prisoners belonging to the movement

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

147

were being held. After an apparently unsolvable deadlock and increasing violence of the government against the rebels, the narrator reports an unforeseen change of fortune: By mid-October, fearing that more troubles were around the corner, the government changed its views and tactics. It ordered the release of hundreds of people who had been charged with unlawful assembly. In Moniya alone, a village that had known no peace for months, over two hundred were released; so also were all those arrested at Akanran for “riot offences,” and another four hundred fourteen at Abeokuta. The collection of taxes was suspended. In a dramatic reversal, the government did what it had been asked to do a year earlier. On October 14, it began to change the way it spoke, using kinder words, and announcing new rules on taxes and fees. (293)

This dramatic reversal is followed by an account of all the victories of the revolt, which is in turn followed by a more pessimistic conclusion about the aftermath of the Agbekoya. While the rebellion was successful, in the following years the legacy was lost and the pre-existing situation of widespread corruption, violence and exploitation resumed. The “dramatic reversal” and the subsequent defeat, however, is not limited to the factual outcome of the historical events. Once again, Yoruba cosmogony and mythology appear as a way of making history meaningful. In particular, the concluding chapter of the memoir turns to a Yoruba god, Esu, in order to explain the sudden turns of the events that had characterised the Agbekoya. The memoir is guided by the imperative not to tell the story of the rebellion through a linear, objective and detached historical account—distorted by tendentious and mystifying official records and disengaged from the living history of the Yoruba. The temporality in which the peasants lived and struggled was of a different order. The non-synchronous temporality underlying the memoir as itan, indeed, is animated by mythological references and turns of fortune and destiny that can be explained with reference to the influence of Yoruba gods on human endeavours. If the victory of the rebellion was a “dramatic reversal” of the course of history, subsequently followed by other unexpected reversals, this is because historical time needs to be recoded as a mythical temporality at the same time predetermined and unpredictable. This is the temporality incarnated by Esu, the god of crossroads that is invoked at the end of the narration, to frame the story in the idiom of traditional belief:

148

F. MENOZZI

If the beginning starts with Ogun, the god of iron, it now must end with Esu, the god of the crossroads. Esu requires no introduction, the mighty trickster god who is both short and tall, black and red, kind and cruel, wise and foolish, generous and stingy. Esu is the fierce god who can hit a rock until it breaks open and bleeds. Esu can support or disturb order and plans: He allows you to make all your plans, which he can then sabotage as you are boasting that everything is set and fixed … Esu may rupture your destiny and change your fate, as he chose to change mine. (296)

The narration concludes under the influence of Esu, who is said to govern the outcomes and aftermath of the rebellion in 1970 and who seems to have been forgotten in the initial rituals to Ogun, the god of war in the opening scene of the memoir. While Ogun may favour human intention, will and praxis, Esu incarnates the incontrollable influence of destiny and the unpredictable course of things that may help or thwart human projects. Esu is, indeed, a mediator and messenger god allowing human sacrifices to reach the intended gods: without the help of Esu, all projects are doomed to fail. This grave omission led, the narrator tells the reader as the story draws to an end, to a reversal of the fortunes of the revolt. The same people who fought for justice and emancipation become newfound oppressors of their own people. While the government had been previously the ultimate enemy, after 1970 “Esu was breaking his pact with Ogun … Esu began to enter many villages and market centers, telling them not to fight anymore, that their sacrifices to Ogun were being wasted. The people began to erect small poles carrying white flags in their main entrances” (298). The victorious revolt of impoverished farmers seemed, in the long term, to have occurred in vain, as surrender, compromise and a return of taxation and the expropriation of the poorest continue after the end of the turbulent years of the Agbekoya: “By 1970, the stories that circulated were no longer about evil tax collectors but about corrupt farmers who were collecting taxes from their fellow farmers and small traders” (299). Reinterpreting peripeteia as the influence of unpredictable Esu introduces an open-ended temporality, always provisional and subject to turns and bifurcations, that guides the temporal consciousness at work in the memoir. The temporal order of personal reminiscence is not only in non-synchronous dialectical discordance with the time of history. Anamnesis also intersects the time of what is repeatedly dubbed as “paganism” in the book, which in truth indicates the Yoruba mythology the rebels make reference to in order to construct an

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

149

explanatory frame for history. While the farmers had a perfectly rational and materialist consciousness of their deprivation and the injustice they suffered, the temporality of the revolt followed the crossroads, rhythms and deeds of Esu. The narrator explains that, alongside the rational and economic motivation for the revolt, the success of the project could only be explained in terms proper to paganism: “There was much talk of ogun or juju (charms). The successes of the rebellion, it was believed, were made possible by charms. Charms represent a belief system, and one cannot prove or disprove this belief with evidence of efficacy” (231). Weapons are “soaked in charms” (203), testifying, as Falola writes in one of his academic pieces of research on African cultures, to the fact that material cultures in Africa “are invested with a lot of meaning derived from traditional sources. Even modern science and technology have not escaped being understood in some mythical and religious way” (Falola 2008, 220). It is for this reason that the memoir starts by recounting the episode of a sacrifice to Ogun, the god of war, that is necessary to ensure the success of the rebellion. Charms, enchantments and recurrent ritualistic practices give the rebels an idiom allowing them to formulate a coherent and cohesive narrative of the rebellion and its meaning. In this way, the narrator reveals, paganism is not merely dead letter but a living heritage of the past surviving non-synchronously into the present: Ogun was no longer an anonymous figure, but someone I could identify with at that very hour. I saw a spirit in human flesh, in the faces of those in a trance, the possessed, those about to be possessed, the interpreters relaying messages, the faces of believers, the still trees, the tamed air. Various myths of Ogun crept into my mental universe, not as I had previously regarded them— as folklore, anonymous memory— but now as a combination of truth and magic … Mythologies of the past are the performance of the present. The mythologies of anger shaped the minds of men, not in centuries long gone but in 1968. Ogun the mythological was a reality. And the reality was that he could explode in anger. (24–26)

Throughout the memoir, pagan figures and mythologies are neither dismissed as irrational beliefs to be overcome or replaced by a more “rational” worldview, nor are they seen as totally incompatible with a materialist, modern and economically driven approach to the peasants’ situation. As Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders note, “contemporary witchcraft, occult practices, magics and enchantments are neither a return

150

F. MENOZZI

to ‘traditional’ practices nor a sign of backwardness or lack of progress; they are instead thoroughly modern manifestations of uncertainties, moral disquiet and unequal rewards and aspirations” (3). Far from being “a set of irrational beliefs,” Moore and Sanders note, enchantments, witchcraft and paganism “are a form of historical consciousness, a sort of social diagnostics” (20).3 The non-synchronous logics of Falola’s memoir epitomise the activation of pagan beliefs and vernacular traditions as a core aspects of contemporaneity. The narrator insists that mythology is real, but this does not exclude the fact that the level of reality on which Ogun exists can complement the values, technologies and economy of a modern, postcolonial capitalist state such as Nigeria. The reactivation of the past as living present during the rebellion shows a more complex vision of reality, in which historical consciousness and mythology coexist, dialectically united in their discordance. Thus, in order to attain “a high level of efficiency and outsmart the authorities, it was necessary to create a cult and to use cult leaders to mobilize noncult members to fight the government” (120). Ogun, and along with him the full array of pagan cosmology the god belongs to, is an objective element of a non-synchronous reality in which modern and archaic coexist. The god also becomes a political force in the present, being simultaneously objectively and subjectively inherent to the popular mobilisation that enabled the Agbekoya rebellion. As the narrator explains, “spiritual and magical preparations were an integral part of the military” (129). The presence of Ogun plays a vital role in the movement: Ogun inspired these foot soldiers as well as the leaders: The instruments they wielded affirmed Ogun’s might and role. The belief in Ogun inspired acts of courage. Ogun gave them the courage to challenge the authority of chiefs, kings, politicians, and soldiers … Salvation and earthly work should not be confused. Rebellion was work, a notion based on the worth of self, the conscience of justice, the relevance of virtue. Fair play must be central to politics; equality must underpin the very process of the distribution of the public resources collected from the public. Ogun had now inspired a movement from the discussion of god to the discussion of man. (126)

This passage shows the coexistence of two kinds of consciousness within the rebellion: faith in Yoruba mythology does not substitute a clear sense of the rebellion as “work” and the “conscience of justice.” The pagan god Ogun gives the rebels courage and strength while the social and

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

151

political reasons for the social movement animate the struggle against the government. This sort of double non-synchronous consciousness—pagan and modern at the same time—exemplifies a key element in the history of peasant insurgency, as analysed by Ernst Bloch in his pivotal book on Thomas Münzer, a sixteenth-century German preacher who emerged as leader of the Peasant Wars in sixteenth-century Germany.4 Both the 1525 peasant war and the Agbekoya rebellion show the coexistence of chiliastic, pagan and mythological elements alongside a clear economic consciousness of material conditions of exploitation. This coexistence of myth and history is also present in another important fictional representation of the Agbekoya, Femi Osofisan’s play Morountodun. In some reflections on his play, Osofisan notes that the aim of his work was to foreground “the question of illusion and reality, by continuously juxtaposing scenes from myth and history; from the present and the past; and from the play’s present, and the real present, such that the audience is made aware all the time of the options available, and those chosen” (9). In Falola’s memoir, it is not just a matter of juxtaposition: the divergent coexistence of times gives rise to a process of intersection and combination. Myth and history, chiliastic and economic reason work together as complementary layers of time that do not match or parallel each other but nonetheless compose a recognisable narrative unity marked by contrast and antagonism. The sense of time underlying the Agbekoya also needs to account for the fact that the rebellion was not simply an isolated “event” but rather an integral part of a long history of peasant resistance in Nigeria. Thus, Abubakar Momoh points out that the Agbekoya revolt “was in several ways inspired and indeed was a logical continuation of the Maigegun revolt of February 1948 in which the Akanran farmers in Ibadan division resisted the compulsory cutting down of their cocoa trees that had been affected by the swollen shoot disease” (161). Mythology is not merely a way of keeping vernacular culture alive. The non-chronological, experientially dense temporality of Yoruba cosmology also involves creating a living, collective memory from below: a true tradition of the oppressed that interrupts and challenges the historical continuum of the ruling classes. Mythology is, from this point of view, at the same time a form of historical consciousness and a counter-history, an anti-historical sense of time whereby past, present and future coexist in the multiverse of the present rather than composing a linear sequence of actions. Thus, in one passage of the memoir, Falola reflects on a general aspect that underlies

152

F. MENOZZI

the historical sense of the rebellion, as he writes: “We began to notice that they were writing us out of history. Nigeria was created without us … When those with Western education fought the British to grant us independence to become a new country called Nigeria, we were not to be found” (175). This passage is highly significant not only because it reinforces a critique of the postcolonial nation-state and the fact that the legacy of decolonisation had been appropriated by Western-educated elites, maintaining class inequality and silencing the experience and agency of peasants and workers. The idea of being written “out of history” could be read, in this passage, as an expression charged with more empowering possibilities: “out of” could suggest at the same time erasure as well as independence and defiance, the negative act of exclusion as well as the politically vibrant condition of being made “out of” the historical elements of postcolonial Nigeria. If history equals the continuum of oppression and structural inequality, it is precisely the fact of being written “out of” history that gives the peasant temporal consciousness a non-synchronous dimension full of political possibilities, contradictions and utopian trajectories. Keeping these open-ended contradictions alive, Falola’s memoir offers a compelling way of narrating postcolonial Nigeria without succumbing to the empty time of an official historical account reproducing continuities between colonial and postcolonial rule. The anti-historical uchronia of the Agbekoya is a mark of oppression but also a sign of the political agency of the revolt, which mobilised mythology in order to impact government policies on taxation, corruption and the distribution of wealth. The memoir, being close to the system of beliefs of the Yoruba as well as providing an individual narrative, clearly indicates the more concrete historical tendencies that drove the revolt. These are elements typical of the regime of accumulation at the periphery of capitalism, where traditional modes of oppression such as tribal kingdoms and hierarchies are incorporated into the structures of modern governmentality. This is why the two main symbolic places targeted by the rebellion were government offices and the residences of local Yoruba kings. Both modernity and tradition are mobilised in the revolt: the upheaval, from this point of view, entailed a reformulation of the way archaic and modern combine in postcolonial Nigeria. Against the corrupt local kings that always collude with the government, peasant consciousness involves a movement backwards to the source of tradition in order to create a new, not-yet-existing society freed from exploitation, inequality

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

153

and oppressive hierarchies. This is why, alongside prison, police and military premises, the palace of local kings are also assaulted. The revolt, in fact, “started with those who should have been our staunchest allies: chiefs and kings,” those “traditional sources of control” that enforced a submission to authority and “the collection of land rents and tribute” (208). The rebellion cut off the sources of traditional authority that were ensuring the extraction of surplus value on behalf of the government. Thus, the king of Isara in the Ijebu province, Oba Samuel Akinsanya, a symbol of this traditional authority, is attacked in November 1968. The palace is burnt down and the king himself flees, leaving the crown and all symbols of power behind. The destruction of traditional hierarchies is here explained through the fact that modern kings had lost their traditional role. As Falola also explains in his previous memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, “the modern chiefs were agents of the government” (256), having replaced the power of gods with the secular authority of the state in order to expropriate the farmers and collect rents and revenues from the farmers’ work. The non-synchronous dimension of Counting the Tiger’s Teeth captures two ways in which myth as a force of historical change rather than reinforcement of tradition appears in the text: first, myth is reactivated in order to drive the revolt, combining with concrete consciousness of material conditions of exploitation affecting the farmers. Secondly, the reactivation of myth destroys traditional sources of authority in order to anticipate a new social order based on justice, equality and redistribution. The time of the memoir moves simultaneously backwards and forwards, linking primeval cosmogonies to unforeseen utopias. There is a tension between these two aspects of non-synchronism which involves at the same time a reconstructive and a destructive process, or what Michael Löwy would define as the restorative/utopian function of messianic time, the mingling of “two tendencies that are at once intimately linked and contradictory: a restorative current focusing on the re-establishment of a past ideal state … and a utopian current which aspires to a radically new future, to a state of things that has never existed before” (16, emphasis in original). The struggle against the dominant order of the present involves striving for a not-yet-existing utopian future. But this future is only found in a redemption of the past, even in mythological form, and a reformulation of myth as alternative reality. This kind of restorative/utopian non-synchronism is pitted against the non-synchronic survival of traditional sources of authority such as kings and chiefs, who assume the role

154

F. MENOZZI

of reinforcing the accumulation of capital and appropriation of resources in the postcolonial nation. This dialectical tension is symbolised by the initial ceremony to propitiate the god of war Ogun. As the officiant reminds the crowd during the ritual in the opening scene of the volume, the ultimate aim of the revolt—and the ritual—is “for atunse, that is, to ‘repair’ the world, to achieve a renewal but with a cost” (14). The word atunse epitomises the combination of historical and mythological temporalities that drives the peasant movement. Indeed, atunse does not mean to return to a Golden Age “when men and women knew their rights, when children were respectful of their parents, and when anybody could eat whatever fruits and grains they wanted” (15). According to Ogundele, the tribal leader and officiant of the ritual to Ogun, a return to that Golden Age would be too ambitious and is in fact precluded. For the moment, it was enough to “repair” the current world. The imagery of atunse draws on the metaphor of the world being a pot made of clay, which is currently broken and scattered into a multitude of fragments. In this metaphoric logic, the aim of the Agbekoya coincides with the project of putting all fragments back together, in order to restore the clay pot. If accomplished, this work of reparation would never be a perfect job, “since the lines and crevices would be obvious, but the restored pot should be able to serve as a temporary container” (15). The reassembled item would not be a full return to the original seamless pot but only a temporary compromise, showing the marks of time, crevices and lines, but still able to keep the cosmological order in place, preventing the reality of chaos and an “angry cosmos” (15) to rule unchallenged. This ritual shows, as Wole Soyinka notes in his influential work on myth and African literature, that “Yoruba myth is a recurrent exercise in the experience of disintegration … experienced in depth, a statement of man’s penetrating insight into the final resolution of things and the constant evidence of harmony” (151). Toyin Falola’s remaking of a Yoruba myth as narrative reminiscence of the Agbekoya keeps the depth of experience alive in the tension between disintegration and harmony that characterises the temporality of the memoir. The logic of peripeteia shows that neither the former nor the latter is final: chaos and harmony, destruction and reconstruction, defeat and victory, utopia and redemption, past and future are united in a restless antagonism showing their mutual necessity.

5

4

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

155

Conclusion: Memory, History and Myth

Toyin Falola’s memoir does not follow a chronological order and does not aim to provide a merely factual account of the history of the Agbekoya. The book articulates, instead, an overlapping temporality in which memory, history and myth intersect to construct a dialectical unity marked by non-synchronic discrepancy and antagonism. The dialectical antagonism between these temporal layers is expressed by the logic of peripeteia, narrative reversal or “turning point.” This is a recurrent figure of speech in Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. The occurrences of peripeteia reveal moments of narrative intersection and a dialectical unity of clashing temporalities: the first peripeteia considered in this chapter shows how a sudden change of luck turned the narrator from active participant into militant intellectual and chronicler of the Agbekoya. The immediate chronology of the span of the events is hence placed in a dialectical tension with the time of remembering and retelling which frames the memoir. The second set of peripeteias explored in the second part of this chapter linked the historical outcome of the rebellion, a victory-cumdefeat encompassing the immediate success but the long-term failure of the Agbekoya, to the mythological time of Esu, the Yoruba god of crossroads. While Ogun, god of war, drives human praxis and the aim to change the world through action, Esu situates political praxis into the unpredictable and uncontrollable course of destiny. The tension between Ogun and Esu gives a mythological frame to the historical unfolding of the events. The non-synchronous temporality expressed in Falola’s memoir, in the end, captures the relationship between the time of narrating and the real time experienced by the farmers mobilised in the struggle. The set of reversals and turning points that animate the plot operates a concordant discordance between the time of memory, the time of myth and the time of history. In a revealing moment of the memoir, the narrator questions the very order of chronological presentation of the events and critiques any attempt to translate the living time of the Agbekoya into dead historiographical knowledge. In his attacks against academic historians, Falola observes: It is only historians in universities who tell full stories, with one endnote on page one and two footnotes on page story. The “full story” is then divided into chapters, one following another … While not associating absolute time

156

F. MENOZZI

and date with their tales and narratives – histories, memories, reflections, refractions – the farmers piled one historical era on top of another, and it may take your understanding of a later era to make sense of the previous one. The year 1940 did not have to follow 1939, and 1970 could come well before 1895. I now know the historical timeline as academic historians have studied it, but this was not my world in 1968. Neither is the format of the university historian and his chapterisation doing justice to what happened. (151)

In his critique of the colonising temporality of historiography, Falola can be aligned here with Ashis Nandy’s notion of “principled forgetfulness” at the heart of societies whose sense of the past is organised through a mythological, rather than historical consciousness. Similarly, Falola’s autobiography does not aim to subject mythological reason to an historiographical order of things. Following Ashis Nandy, it could be argued that there are differences between the out-of-joint mythological temporality of the Yoruba farmers and the homogeneous, sequential and linear time of the historian. As Nandy observes, myth “involves a refusal to separate the remembered past from its ethical meaning in the present,” meaning that “it is often important not to remember the past, objectively, clearly, or in its entirety” (47). Toyin Falola’s memoir seems to pose, in dialectical antagonism, the two tendencies towards myth discussed by Akaeke Onwueme in a discussion of Nigerian drama: the mythopoetic and the revolutionary attitude to myth. Onwueme remarks that the mythopoetic author “approaches the legacy with a certain degree of deference and awe, as one would approach a benevolent ghost,” while the revolutionary dramatist approaches it with “determination to grip it, strip it, and refashion it” (60). Both the mythopoetic and the revolutionary dimension are present in Falola’s writing: myth is simultaneously a “benevolent ghost” and a material for revolutionary change. As indicated by the Yoruba tradition of itan, what matters is the meaningful, experientially dense and living, qualitatively different temporality of myth, what Francis Nyamjoh (2017) has recently described as the “incompleteness” and openness of historical reality as opposed to the amoral and objectifying time of historiography. These contradictions inhabit the concrete economic conditions at the periphery, where archaic and contemporaneous modes of exploitation coexist—as kings and chiefs cooperate with the structures of the postcolonial state—and the peasant consciousness of material conditions of existence is reframed through the idiom of myth.

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

157

This complex temporal layering, however, does not merely capture the living conditions of the disenfranchised in postcolonial Nigeria. The intellectual-historian trying to do justice to the postcolonial condition needs to face these issues too. As Falola himself observes in an essay on global and national history, the African historian is caught in difficult dilemmas between modernity and tradition, locality and the global, dominated and dominant: “The writing and research on national history reflects the conflicted minds of the intellectuals: should they stress aspects of globalisation and modernisation? Should they defend the ethnic origins and the aspirations of their local constituencies? As elite, have they become removed from the reality on the ground, using the privileges of Western education to distance themselves from the masses?” (Falola 2005b, 504–505). These questions amount to asking, after all, “whose history” one is writing. Through the literary genre of the memoir, Falola seems to have dug deeper into these dilemmas, offering a vivid representation of the temporal dynamics linking the work of the intellectual to the life of the Yoruba farmers. While kept together in a unifying narrative, the existential, mythological and historical temporalities that inhabit the memoir highlight the conflicting and antagonistic sense of time proper to the social experience of postcolonial nations. In conclusion, in Counting the Tiger’s Teeth non-synchronicity becomes an ethical imperative: the only way of doing justice to the rebellion is by keeping its memory alive in the rebels’ own sense of time, capturing bundles of pulsating pasts and futures in the present, and defying date and chronology. If Ogun guides the activity of humans engaged in struggle, ultimately, it is unpredictable Esu, god of crossroads, bifurcations and turning points, that helps the scribe re-assemble the pot of the Agbekoya cosmogony into a fractured whole, marked by scars but effectively countering forgetfulness and unredeemable defeat. Falola’s challenge to historiographical power, in the end, leads to rethinking the very concept of history as an endless process of emancipation, always mediated by material circumstances and unexpected turning points not chosen by human beings. As Giorgio Agamben writes, “history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man’s servitude to continuous linear time, but man’s liberation from it: the time of history and the cairos [opportune moment] in which man, by his initiative, grasps favourable opportunity and chooses his own freedom in the moment” (104). In its emphasis on collective struggle for liberation, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth presents a non-synchronous temporality that reframes history as

158

F. MENOZZI

overlapping temporal layers, endless becoming and reactivation of the struggle for decolonisation. Non-synchronism becomes, accordingly, both the consciousness of how traditional authority is reinforced by modern forms of government and power, and the irruption of myth as historical force of emancipation and meaningful idiom in the tradition of the oppressed.

Notes 1. Pade Badru (1998) provides an extensive analysis of the economic and social situation in Nigeria in the 1960s. 2. Falola’s memoir challenges stereotypical representations of peasant rebellion as mobs unable of discipline and organisation, and prey to irrational feelings. Antonio Gramsci rethought the role of peasants in less industrially developed regions by denouncing the pervasive racist stereotypes against farmers as well as the necessity of a strategic alliance between factory workers and peasants in his 1926 milestone work on the Southern Question (Gramsci 2005). Harry Harootunian writes that “Gramsci’s call for an alliance was possible because he recognized that the present is never identical with and transparent to itself but rather always an ensemble of heterogeneous mixing of encounters between different temporalities, synchronous nonsynchronicities” (120). Allen Isaacson provides an overview of debates on the category of the peasant in Africa, while Christopher Lee discusses the influence of Subaltern Studies in African studies. 3. Classic works in cultural anthropology such as Peter Geschiere (1997) and Jean and Jon Comaroff (1993) discuss the question of the “modernity” of pagan, ritual, traditional and mythological forms in Africa, countering evolutionary views that would relegate these forms to backward remnants. 4. As Bloch (1969) notes, the chiliastic nature of peasant rebellions cannot be simply explained away by economic reason and a rational defence of one’s own interests. Peasant rebellions show the force of chiliastic anticipations as powerful political forces in the present. The non-synchronous quality of the 1525 peasant revolts in Germany also occurred, as Engels noted in his work on the subject, because the epoch “was not ripe for the realisation of the ideas for which he [Thomas Münzer] himself had only begun to grope. The class which he represented … was not developed enough and incapable of subduing and transforming the whole of society” (Engels n.p.).

5

WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: THE AGBEKOYA REBELLION …

159

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso. Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Badru, Pade. 1998. Imperialism and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria. Trenton: Africa World Press. Bayart, Jean-François. 2009. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Cambridge: Polity. Bensa¨id, Daniel. 2014. Rearguard Seasonals. In Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx. Leiden: Brill, xix–xxiv. Bloch, Ernst. 1969. Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, eds. 1993. Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Engels, Frederick. 1850. The Peasant War in Germany. https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm. Accessed 1 May 2019. Falola, Toyin. 2005a. A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2005b. Writing and Teaching National History in Africa in an Era of Global History. Africa Spectrum 40.3: 499–519. ———. 2008. The Power of African Cultures. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. ———. 2014. Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft. Trans. Peter Geschiere and Janet Rotiman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 2005. The Southern Question. Trans. Pasquale Verdicchio. Toronto: Guernica. Gunn, Janet Varner. 1977. Autobiography and the Narrative Experience of Temporality as Depth. Soundings 60.2: 194–209. ———. 1992. “A Window of Opportunity”: An Ethics of Reading Third World Autobiography. College Literature 19.3/1: 162–169. Harootunian, Harry. 2015. Marx After Marx. New York: Columbia University Press. Isaacman, Allen. 1990. Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa. African Studies Review 33.2: 1–120. Jameson, Fredric. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Lee, Christopher J. 2005. Subaltern Studies and African Studies. History Compass 3.162: 1–13.

160

F. MENOZZI

Löwy, Michael. 2017. Redemption and Utopia. Trans. Hope Heaney. London: Verso. Lukács, Georg. 1971. Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Momoh, Abubakar. 1996. Popular Struggles in Nigeria 1960–1982. African Journal of Political Science/Revue Africaine de Science Politique 1.2: 154–175. Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. 2001. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: An Introduction. In Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, eds. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, 1–27. Nandy, Ashis. 1995. History’s Forgotten Doubles. History and Theory 34.2: 44– 66. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2017. Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality. Journal of Asian and African Studies 52.3: 253–270. Okpewho, Isidore. 2009. Storytelling in the African World. Journal of the African Literature Association 3.2: 110–122. Osofisan, Femi. 1999. Theater and the Rites of “Post-Negritude” Remembering. Research in African Literatures 30.1: 1–11. Onwueme, Tess Akaeke. 1991. Visions of Myth in Nigerian Drama: Femi Osofisan Versus Wole Soyinka. Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines 25.1: 58–69. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1990. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, Meir. 1992. Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity. Poetics Today 13.3: 463–541. Yai, Olabiyi Babalola. 1993. In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘Tradition’ and ‘Creativity’ in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space. Research in African Literatures 24.4: 29–37.

CHAPTER 6

Time, Extinction and Accumulation: Reading Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion

This chapter offers a reading of Green Lion, a novel by contemporary South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes. The novel deals with pressing issues in world-ecology, revealing dialectical interconnections between historical processes of extinction, conservation and the commodification of natural forms. The story revolves around the project to revive an extinct native species, the dark-maned Cape lion, through a breeding programme in Cape Town zoo. The project, however, is destined to fail and living lions are in the end replaced by a taxidermy collection. The failures of conservation, however, do not exhaust Rose-Innes’s narrative, which also presents non-synchronic temporalities—anticipatory, utopian and mystical—driving the clandestine activities of the Green Lion, a secret society of animal lovers. The non-synchronic dimension is explored through the juxtaposition of two different temporal registers at work in the novel: the alienating and commodifying time of market-oriented policies of conservation versus the utopian restoration of unrealised hopes proper to the Green Lion’s mystical experience of nature. While the temporal order of conservation as accumulation reinforces the destructive operations of capitalism on the environment, the expectant temporalities inhabiting the novel hint at the prefiguration of non-alienated relationships between humans and nature.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_6

161

162

F. MENOZZI

1

Trespassing Times

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s 2015 novel Green Lion revolves around a failed conservation project in a zoo in contemporary Cape Town, South Africa: the attempt to reintroduce the black-maned lion, native to region and now almost extinct. Amina, the manager of the zoo, has travelled throughout Europe and Africa to find a couple of living exemplars showing phenotypical attributes of the dark-maned lion. Breeding back from extinction of this feline species is immediately connected to the survival of the zoo, which is going through grave financial difficulties. The story begins with an unsettling episode that will trigger a set of events leading the de-extinction plan to a dismal end: the male lion, Dmitri, attacks and almost kills Mark, a volunteer working in the enclosure, who had become very fond of the animal. The attack compels the zookeepers to put the lion to sleep, hence preventing any possibility for the two lions to reproduce. After the death of the first lion and the hospitalisation of Mark, who goes into a coma, the volunteer is replaced in his role by Constantine (Con) Marais, a close friend of Mark’s. The story of the project reaches a climactic end when, one night, the female lion, Sekhmet, is liberated and let free in the wild. The female lion vanishes without leaving trace, apart from apparently killing a young girl, and subsequently disappearing in the natural reserve in Lion’s Head, a zone that is part of the Table Mountain natural park in Cape Town. Throughout the novel, the lion, which had been reintroduced in the city in order to counter the loss of native biodiversity, remains a very elusive creature, repeatedly defying the human gaze by never appearing during opening times, to the disappointment of the public, unable to catch a glimpse of the wild animal. As recounted during a visit of important stakeholders to the zoo in a passage of the novel, the visitors are always too early or too late. Rose-Innes expresses this in an exchange between the zoo manager and Con, where the lion is always “just missed”: “These gentlemen are here to have a look around. We were hoping to catch feeding time.” “Just missed it” (126). Eventually, the de-extinction project will be abandoned with the disappearance of both lions, but the zoo will manage to survive through a radical operation of rebranding. Rose-Innes’s Green Lion can be approached as a fictional representation of a pressing world-ecological and social problem in the twenty-first century: the historical context of the novel might be defined as the era of the “sixth extinction,” a term made famous by Elizabeth Kolbert. This

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

163

is an epoch in which not only megafauna or rare animals and plants, but numerous forms of natural life are undergoing an often undocumented annihilation at unprecedented rate, also due to the destruction of their habitats. While Green Lion can be contextualised as Sixth Extinction novel, the text should not be simply be approached as a nostalgic elegy lamenting the untrammelled disappearance of living organisms in the twenty-first century. Arguably, the complex figuration of the feline in Rose-Innes’s work rather indicates, in a fictional way, what critic Sharae Deckard formulates as a “dialectical understandings of ‘ecology’ as comprising the whole of socio-ecological relations within the capitalist world-ecology” (148). The failure of the zookeeper’s attempt to reintroduce the dark-maned lion in captivity can be read as the symptom of a wider attitude towards nature that informs conservationism in an era of capitalism: the real motive behind the de-extinction ideology is economic, as lions work as main touristic attraction and source of profit-making for the breeding park. The failure of conservation, hence, derives from the fact that ecological protection often leaves untouched the capitalist system that is responsible for environmental destruction. Even worst, conservation becomes a way of keeping the ecological conditions for capitalist reproduction going, turning into the process described by Bram Büscher as “accumulation by conservation.” Accordingly, the entrapment of the living lions in a cage is paralleled, in the novel, by the narration of the fencing of Lion’s Head, a natural commons expropriated in order to be turned into a protected area inaccessible to local inhabitants and restricted to wealthy patrons and tourists. The narrative of species loss and market-driven conservation gives rise to a sharp critique of the zookeeper’s attempts to reintroduce the extinct type of feline by reactivating genetic transmission. From this point of view, deextinction works, in a literal way, as restoration of genetic heritage based on the thing-ification of the lion as a bundle of genotypical and phenotypical information. For this reason, the failure of breeding, in the end, will be seamlessly and productively replaced by corpses, stuffed animals: the zoo will be repackaged as an entertainment centre where actors use dead specimen to perform plays about wildlife for kids and families during weekends. The conservationist attempt to bring dead animals back to life succeeds only through the reintroduction of dead specimen, taxidermic items, as source of attraction and embellished reminder of the vanished species. There is no contradiction between extinction and conservation because both ideals assume the irreversibility of the dominant economic

164

F. MENOZZI

system: genetic heritage or stuffed corpse, conservation is predicated upon the reduction of life to commodity. Both conservation and taxidermy are revealed as unsuccessful ways of turning the past into the present. These nostalgic restorations only reiterate the destructive nature of what Jason W. Moore calls, within his world-ecological perspective, the “Capitalocene” or the Age of Capital. The Capitalocene is a term revealing the hidden ideological assumption of the widespread notion of “Anthropocene” because, Moore writes, the “Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalised inequalities, alienation and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production” (Moore 170). Re-historicising the long-term impact, not so much of human beings at large, but rather of global capitalism on the environment shows, as Pablo Mukherjee has written, that capitalism “does not only operate as an economic system; it entails a readjustment of global ecological relations based on the ‘alienation of the labourer from his or her environmental conditions’” (66). Conservation and taxidermy, as fictionalised modes of dealing with species loss in the novel, are a symptom of the destructive logic of capitalism as both economic and ecological system. Indeed, in his pivotal work on the concept, Ashley Dawson shows that extinction “is the product of a global attack on the commons: the great trove of air, water, plants, and collectively created cultural forms such as language that have been traditionally regarded as the inheritance of humanity as a whole … Nature … is essentially a free pool of goods and labour that capital can draw on” (7). But, Dawson continues, as “capitalism expands, however, it commodifies more and more of the planet, stripping the world of its diversity and fecundity … Indeed, there is no clearer example of the tendency of capital accumulation to destroy its own conditions of reproduction than the sixth extinction” (7–8). Capitalism turns nature into what Jason Moore calls “Cheap Nature” (Moore 118–119), a free resource to be consumed in order to produce commodities and set the system of expanded accumulation to work, destroying the very conditions that made the rise of capitalism possible in the first place. Conservation and taxidermy are merely symptomatic responses to a scenario of irreversibility created by the unchallenged dominance of capitalism. As Justin McBrien observes, the accumulation of capital “is not only productive; it is necrotic, unfolding a slow violence, occupying and producing overlapping historical, biological, and geological temporalities. Capital is the Sixth Extinction personified: it feasts on the dead” (116).

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

165

However, the necrotic teleologies of conservation and taxidermy do not exhaust the temporal complexity of the novel. Green Lion should not be reduced to a story of irreversibility and the failures of conservation, hence a hopeless commentary on the inexorable destruction of the environment witnessed in an era of capitalist globalisation. Against the fencing and walling of natural and animal forms, Rose-Innes seems to express here the logics of deterritorialisation, becoming-animal and border-crossing she also explored in her previous work, especially her 2011 novel Nineveh and her 2010 collection of short stories, Homing.1 In the same way as the dark-maned lions defy the human gaze in the zoo, thus the seclusion of Lion’s Head is constantly transgressed by the main characters of the novel, and in the end it will be shown to be an utterly unsuccessful programme to revive the Cape region and its native fauna. Indeed, the novel offers a multi-layered narrative centred on the figure of the dark-maned feline, which is located within a chain of allegorical and symbolic transfigurations, interspersing the narrative of conservation with a multitude of subtexts and lines of flight. Green Lion offers a narrative of temporal trespassing, pointing at anticipatory, mystical and utopian potentials of historical reversibility. If de-extinction fails, this is because it does not go to the roots of the problem: de-extinction accepts the systemic irreversibility of capitalism’s temporality, while the only way to revert the course of history is by dismantling the reifying logic at the heart of contemporary approaches to nature. While the main temporal structure of the novel may seem to indicate the inevitability of extinction and the finality of death and species loss, the figurative complexity of representations of the lion charges Green Lion with a deeply non-synchronic temporal plot. In particular, the novel opens the present of extinction to a diverse temporal register of contrasting undercurrents, dialectically interrelated in the story. The temporal dynamic at work in the novel abolishes the continuum of conservation and taxidermy: the novel shows that the reintroduction of the lion as the stuffed animal and spectacle for paying audiences does not constitute an authentic survival of the past within the present. Other times inhabit the text, appearing through a stylistic strategy recurrently adopted by Rose-Innes in the novel, ekphrasis: the description of works of art in a literary text. Mark, volunteer zookeeper and one of the main characters of the novel, indeed, carries with himself pictures of lions that interrupt the smooth sequence of species loss. Against the irreversible time of ecological destruction and extinction, Green Lion stages narrative pauses

166

F. MENOZZI

in which possibilities of temporal reversal appear. While de-extinction and conservation are trapped into an endless present, Rose-Innes’s ekphrasis excavates the temporal layers of the story in order to reveal unrealised hopes of social change that go against the subsumption of life to the logic of accumulation and alienation proper to capitalism. While conservation aims to bring the past into the present, the non-synchronic anticipations of the past revealed through the time of ekphrasis challenge presentism and reactivate possibilities of historical change. This chapter will hence explore the complex temporal dimensions at work in the novel. Firstly, I will propose a reading of the main conservation story as epitome of the temporality of capital accumulation. Secondly, this chapter will engage with the different temporal orders represented by ekphrasis: the interruption of the narrative will disclose non-synchronous temporalities charged with transformative potentials. In the conclusion, I will go back to the question of extinction and will suggest how the novel’s complex play with time can indicate non-synchronic forms of ecological restoration that do not accept capitalism as the overarching second-nature of our times, but rather as a contingent system of inequality that needs to be abolished in order to recover a non-alienated relationship between humans and nature.

2 Enclosing the Present: “Species Loss, with a Positive Spin” The main narrative strand of Green Lion, while completely fictional, seems to be inspired by the story of John Spence, former director of the Tygerberg Zoo in Cape Town, who in 2000 travelled to Siberia in the hope of reintroducing the Cape Lion in South Africa, a “distinct subspecies of the large, darkly coloured lion that was exterminated by man in the middle of the 19th century” (Christiansen 58). As Sara Evans explains, after seeing images of the lion living in a Siberian zoo, Spence managed to acquire a couple of cubs in order to breed the animal in captivity, as he had had “a lifelong fascination with Cape Lions … especially the exciting accounts of enormous Cape lions scaling the walls of a Cape Town military fort built in the 1600s” (Evans). However, the project never took off because Spence passed away in 2010 and the zoo closed down in 2012. Many elements of this story are transposed in the novel, including a reference to the lions’ siege of the fort and the fact that one character is named Lorraine, as Spence’s wife, who had accompanied the zoo director in his travels to bring the lion back to Africa. In the “author’s note” included

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

167

in the novel, Henrietta Rose-Innes mentions John Spence’s story, adding that “nothing in this book is very far removed from the truth, or perhaps very far in our future … And it is the sad truth that every day our planet grows a little lonelier, as we lose more and more members of this community of astonishing creatures” (Rose-Innes 291). While the novel certainly shows a commitment to truth, especially in the context of the Sixth Extinction, reading Green Lion reveals a much more complex and imaginative reformulation of the story of extinction rather than a simple retelling of factual truth. The significance of this novel lays in its ability to illustrate some deeper tendencies at work in the era of global capitalism, especially the dialectical links between the loss of biodiversity, the enclosure of the commons, and the possibility of countering instrumental approaches to nature. If nature emerges as a commons, this is not so much in the sense of resource to be appropriated but, rather, as Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie (2014) note, the commons need to be seen as the site of struggle between antagonistic systems of value. Inspired by the quest of zookeeper John Spence, the enclosure of the two black-maned Cape lions, Dmitri and Sekhmet, is hence one of the main focal points and a primary chronotope of the novel.2 The compound where the surviving lioness is kept after the death of Dmitri embodies an ideal of conservation as the protection and maintenance of extinct animals in captivity. The logic underlying this conservation project is spelled out by the director of the zoo, Amina, on the occasion of Con’s first visit to the zoo, after which Con decides to replace Mark as volunteer zookeeper. Amina explains in clear terms the aims of the project to Con: You know about these lions? They’re very rare, the ones that have the ancestral features. The size, the black mane, the ruff going down the belly.” “I thought they were extinct.” “Oh, they are, but you know there were Cape lions all over Europe, even after they were shot out here. In zoos, circuses.” … “The genes are still circulating out there, but diluted. The idea is to find individual specimens that have the black-maned traits, breed them back. Like they did with quaggas. We got our boy in a Russian circus. (21)

This passage encapsulates the main motive driving the ecological project at the heart of the novel. Amina’s aim is to revive an extinct species in conditions of captivity. The guiding idea is seemingly strictly biological: reintroducing the native species involves breeding it back, finding

168

F. MENOZZI

the right genetic heritage in order to revert the inexorable process of extinction. But the idea of bringing the lions back for purely ecological reasons is constantly belied by the revelation of the true motive behind the initiative. Amina makes clear that influential people and stakeholders “have spent a lot of money on this place. Parks Department, government high-ups – it’s a big deal. They don’t want us to turn away the tourists” (21). As the zoo is on the brink of financial collapse after the incident with Mark, Amina suggests turning the place into an entertainment park through animatronics and robots, or even selling the lioness for the safari industry, as Amina explains: “She’s no good if she doesn’t reproduce. And she cost us a helluva lot. Some of these operations will pay good money for a special animal” (133). Throughout the novel, the core objective of de-extinction is upheld in terms of the economic rationale behind the zoo as a tourist attraction and a source of profit. The survival of the lions determines the survival of the zoo as an institution and is hence immediately inserted in the circuits of the tourist industry and the commodification of the landscape of the Cape region, which constitutes an important leitmotif of the novel. In a later passage of the novel Con, now appointed “Head of Large Mammal Management,” absorbs the commodifying logics of the conservation project by making a very eloquent case for supporting the zoo to a representative of a large financial institution and two higher tiers of the government. In a telling exchange with stakeholders assessing the possibility of financial investments, Con further elaborates on Amina’s vision of bringing the species back from extinction. The exchange illustrates the ideological dimension of a conservation closely tied up with the accumulation of capital: Con found himself speaking, fluently and persuasively, about Panthera leo melanochaitus. How magnificent the original lions had been, how famously large and ferocious. The thick dark manes that grew over their shoulders … He talked about the quagga, how white-rumped specimens – on view on the slopes just next door! – had been successfully bred back from the brink using zebra populations. Amina’s line: species loss, with a positive spin. (126–127)

The whole zoological project is guided by the imperative to restore lost species in order to attract visitors and investments. The conservation agenda, throughout the novel, is exposed as being the façade for a much

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

169

deeper economic instrumental reason turning the lost species into objects for consumption and the realisation of value. Indeed, when further interrogated by the government representatives during their visit to the zoo, Con is unable to provide an exhaustive justification regarding the reason for reintroducing these lions in the zoo. The exchange between Con and one of the government officials reaches its climactic end: “Why should we care about these demons?” Con shook his head and laughed politely. “Demons?” “Demons. Many used to believe that lions were demons. In the old days, they attacked people, terrified villages … They were destroyed, here in the Cape, because they were killing people … Why on earth would we want them back?” Con just kept shaking his head and smiling … “Because they’re precious,” he said. “Because once something is extinct, it’s lost forever. You can’t bring it back.” (128)

Con’s tautological response reveals an important aspect at work in the project: the conservation of species is a good in itself because the lion is “precious.” The fact of describing the lion as “precious” here is marked by deep ambivalence: on the one hand, the “value” of the lion could be understood, in capitalist terms, as profit-generating. The lion becomes source of value when inserted into the tourist industry: the labour of the zookeepers who maintain the non-human animal in the enclosure generates a surplus value offering returns to the investors and stakeholders. But Con, in this passage, also seems to suggest another kind of “value,” which does not necessarily imply market-driven valorisation. As Douglas McCauley writes in a short piece on the question about the value of nature: “Are there other socially viable paths for conservationists besides the commodification of nature? Yes. Nature has an intrinsic value that makes it priceless, and this is reason enough to protect it” (28). This ambivalence will reappear in Con’s discovery of his friend Mark’s pictures of the feline, in which the priceless significance of the lion does not increase, but rather subverts economic worth.3 The intrinsic rather than instrumental appreciation of nature corresponds to a different approach to extinction and implies a critique of the capitalist system: even if in utopian, mystical or romanticised form, nature’s pricelessness opens up possibilities of historical reversibility. The time of this kind of value is hence not reducible to the abstract measure of necessary labour described by Marx. Indeed, as Marx writes in Grundrisse, nature can acquire value only through the mediation of human labour: “purely natural material

170

F. MENOZZI

in which no human labour is objectified, to the extent that it is merely a material that exists independently of labour, has no value, since only objectified labour is value” (366, emphasis in original). From the point of view of accumulation, an intrinsically “priceless” nature has no value unless it is turned into objectified labour able to generate surplus value. The intrinsic worth intimated in Rose-Innes’s work opens up another kind of ideal of value and another temporality, opposed to the quantitative logic underlying capitalist value.4 If reduced a commodity, the lion is not salvaged from extinction because of its intrinsic worth or ecological role, but merely because it is inserted, as fixed capital and raw material for the tourism industry, in the process of profit-making: the black-maned lion is precious because, through the mediation of the labour of the zookeepers, it is reduced to the quantitative logic ensuring returns on public and private investments that keep the zoo up and running. The commodification of the lion reaches a climactic end in the concluding scene of the novel, when the survival of the zoo is guaranteed by the replacement of living lions with a different kind of entertainment and a repackaging of the centre as lifeless spectacle. The loss of the second lion, mysteriously liberated by an animal activist one night and irreparably disappeared in the wilderness, is substituted by a sophisticated coup de theatre. In place of the real, living dark-maned lions, Con eventually manages to introduce into the zoo a very special collection of items: the hunting trophies and stuffed animals owned by Mark, his childhood friend and former volunteer in the zoo. Mark’s father had spent his life hoarding such trophies in the rooms of his large house. In a visit to Mark’s mother after the lion’s attack against Mark, Con reminisces about the influence of these stuffed animals on his childhood, and their presence in his friend’s home: The passage was wall-to-wall furred, feathered, clawed and winged. Bristling with the horns of a dozen different kinds of antelope. In one glass case was a tableau of a leaping caracal with a guinea fowl in its paws. The taxidermy was aged, the animals rigid and worn in patches. (Rose-Innes 2015, 44)

A centrepiece of the collection, Con also rediscovers a small stuffed lion that was Mark’s favourite item, and is now kept in his friend’s bedroom. The stuffed lion has been poorly conserved and wears the sign of time and neglect: one eye missing, fur “streaked with bilious green” (46), and

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

171

a tennis ball in its mouth. The taxidermic collection reveals a concept of time as preservation of dead specimen, silent archive and museum display. The decaying collection that will replace genetic transmission illustrates the dominant form of collecting in the age of the Sixth Extinction: as Peter Sloterdijk writes, preservation becomes a process of waste management. In a controversial piece on the contemporary role of the museum as “school of alienation,” Sloterdijk remarks that today’s museums “are establishments for the processing of cultural waste-management problems—waste-disposal sites for the hazardous waste of civilization … While the garbage tips anonymously dispose of the material detritus of life underground, the museum performs a disposal process that is vertical and retained in the memory” (447). While the zoological project of breeding extinct animals back to life seems to be originally in stark contrast with the taxidermic muteness and decay of the stuffed objects, in the end conservation and taxidermy are revealed as two sides of the same coin. Capitalist conservation reduces nature to a waste product of accumulation, subjected to a simultaneous process of commodification and crystallisation. In the end, the “ Lion House” at the heart of the zoo is rebranded as “Green Lion Centre, devoted to the interdisciplinary conjunction of Arts and Natural Sciences, under the joint auspices of the Departments of Environment, Recreation and Culture” (283). The rebranding is a great success and described as an imaginative way of repackaging the institution. The “stuffy old trophies” donated by Mark are rejuvenated with a lick of paint and turned into “more appealing, kid-friendly shape” (284). Apart from the young decaying stuffed lion, which Con keeps in his office, all animals from the collection are turned into props for theatrical performances for children. Economically viable, popular and productive, the rebranded zoo showcases a puppet lion for the delight of families and tourists. The lion’s remains are sanitised and made safe for consumption. The past is revived, but only within the fiction of theatrical performance. The conservation strategies of the zoo demonstrate an underlying concept of history and time as accumulation of goods. Indeed, if the breeding project was animated by the commodification of the species as profit-making machine—touristic attraction and form of life guaranteeing returns on investments—the taxidermic display operates the same function, even though it implies a shift from the biological to the theatrical. Behind these interplays of conservation and taxidermic revival, the novel offers a possible unifying concept of history as drive to “preserve” the past

172

F. MENOZZI

as object of consumption and display within the present. Taxidermy and conservation aim to keep the past alive, but only in order to turn life into petrified spectacle, synchronising it into a still present. The bodies of the lion incorporate, from this standpoint, the process of the accumulation of capital: the living, elusive creature turns into dead object, its “priceless” and intrinsic value undergoes the process of abstraction and expropriation that transforms it into capital and source of profit. The passage from genetic de-extinction to taxidermy inscribes this transition directly onto the skin of the wild animal. This model of de-extinction corresponds to the pivotal notion of “accumulation by conservation” proposed by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, who remark that “the increasingly acknowledged reality of a certain finiteness to natural resources means that environmental conservation must become more central to a renewed stable phase of capitalist accumulation,” leading to the “transition to a new ‘phase’ of capitalist accumulation based on a conservation model – one that takes into account the need for environmental sustainability” (274). This concept of conservation as accumulation can be related to the unilinear course of extinction engendered by what John Bellamy Foster describes as the “metabolic rift,” a process indicating that “the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction” (Foster 2007, 9). The metabolic rift shows that the global expansion of capitalism entails an unsustainable, destructive level of exploitation of natural resources that prevents the ordinary course of natural metabolism, or cyclical reintroduction of extracted vital resources (such as water or nutrients) into their original landscapes. Metabolism, Foster notes, “constitutes the basis on which life is sustained and growth and reproduction become possible” (Foster 1999, 383). In its drive to capture all possible wealth from land, labour and water, capitalist production operates a “rift,” or a break in the metabolic process, because it does not reinsert the extracted natural elements within the landscape after the production process, but rather disperses them as waste product. Building on observations presented by Marx in the first volume of Capital, Foster notes that Marx “employed the concept of metabolic rift to capture the material estrangement of human beings in capitalist society from the natural conditions of their existence” (Foster 1999, 383). The unsustainable process of capital accumulation destroys the ecosystem necessary for the reproduction of life. Within this process, the only possibility of survival of extinct

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

173

species is as dead object and commodified specimen: the systemic material conditions and ecological habitats enabling the continuing life of these species have been irreparably destroyed. The unidirectional and irreversible temporality produced by the metabolic rift emerges in a vivid form in the flashbacks recounting Con’s life in London, where he went to live for some years before returning to South Africa. In London, Con finds employment in a palaeontology museum, a space that is heavily connoted with references to the colonial and capitalist dimensions of modernity. During his stay in Europe, Con reflects on the wider meaning of hoarding specimens and keeping them on display. Con’s description is revelatory: But up north he was overpowered by the vast accumulation of things. Ordinary and extraordinary objects, plucked from the maelstrom and kept forever, just exactly as they were, in these quiet, guarded rooms, varnished by the regard of a million eyes. Paintings, jewels, broken clay pipes or hand bones from the scene of some ancient calamity. All these objects, rescued from the milling entropy of time: such riches, a treasure hoard. (Rose-Innes 2015, 57)

While in South Africa the process of accumulation is still incomplete, contested and precarious, “up north” the commodification of life is exhaustive and totalising. The saturated space of the museum signals the total subjection of the living past to mute specimen guarded and showcased under window panes. In the museum, the revival of the past within the present is reduced to tangible wealth, hoarding, and spectacle of dead things. Con is particularly enthralled by the preservation of dead animals and their remains, as he recollects the encounter with a prehistoric creature when, one day, he walks into the palaeontology museum: Con was alone when he wandered into a dim alcove where, all on its own in a gold-lit vitrine, lay an icon: Archaeopteryx lithographica. “Ancient wind, printed in stone.” He’d never seen such delicate bones. The spotlighting was cleverly done: each claw was gilded; each slender rib thrown into relief … You could see it died a sorry death: feathers clogged, the sinews wresting back the neck. Time had purified the body, though. The antic pose … was stately, a dance saluting death. (ibid.)

Con’s memories of his time in London introduce an important element animating the conservationist and taxidermic preservation of the past.

174

F. MENOZZI

The impulse to accumulate objects or dead animals is also an element linking South Africa to Europe, a tendency visible in its full realisation in the former centre of imperial power, and still in progress in the peripheral zone of the world economy. The conservation of life through accumulation operates a sort of “purification” that eliminates any trace of life from the preserved object. In the drive to accumulate, the past is turned into the snapshot of an endless present, trapped in a static and lifeless moment. While “every second of one hundred and fifty million years” (57) separates Con from the dead prehistoric bird in the vitrine in the London museum, the two creatures—human and non-human— are trapped in the same instant. Accumulation results in a dead time of simultaneity in which temporal differences are conflated in an eternal present without history. From this point of view, Green Lion can be read as a fictionalised critique of the temporal logics of conservation, taxidermy and accumulation. Bringing back species from extinction, what zoo director Amina calls species loss with a “positive spin” (69) in the end means subjecting life to the immortalising logic of commodification and spectacle. But the novel does not stop at showing the lifeless preservation of life through accumulation. Through the use of literary devices, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s reopens the closure of the present to a nonsynchronic dimension revealing the unfinished temporality of modernity in post-Apartheid South Africa.

3

Reopening the Past: Expectant Temporalities

Non-synchronic elements show that the temporal dynamics determined by capital accumulation is inhabited by a stratigraphic plurality of histories. In Rose-Innes’s novel Green Lion, the non-synchronous material appears through recurrences of a figure of speech, ekphrasis. These elements interrupt the flow of the narration while remaining immanent to it: non-synchronism is not merely the survival of the past in the atemporal immobility of collection display, but rather the dialectical animation of the time of capitalist modernity though a set of resistances, residues, bifurcations and anticipations that intersect and combine with each other in non-teleological ways. The functioning of non-synchronic time can be shown by going back to the passage of the novel, already mentioned in this chapter, where Con explains the reasons for breeding the lions back from extinction to some

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

175

governmental and private stakeholders. The passage reveals that the ultimate reason for the conservation project is that the dark-maned lion is “precious,” suggesting an ambivalent re-coding of the pricelessness of nature into the monetary value of the animal as zoological spectacle. The conservation of the species, in this context, equals its commodification. The scene of Con’s exchange with the stakeholders, however, does not run smoothly. A marginal, elusive presence appears in the scene, embodying what might be called an aside: a lateral, almost insignificant incident concerning the sudden appearance, unnoticed by the stakeholders but powerfully perceived by Con, of a minor character of the novel: Mossie, a local young woman who is part of a sect of animal activists, or rather animal “nutters,” as they are known by the zoo staff, and with whom both Con and Mark engage in relationship. Mossie represents a way of appreciating the “pricelessness” of extinct animals that strongly subverts the instrumental reason of the stakeholders and the tourists consuming the spectacle of wilderness in captivity. The antagonism between these two views enlivens the scene. After explaining the “species loss, with a positive spin” mentality informing the project, Con suddenly is shaken by the ghostly irruption of Mossie in the enclosure: As he spoke, he felt more than saw a shadow slipping out the half-open door behind the men’s backs. The girl, caught in a silver of light, raised the tear-crumpled paper napkin to him in a curious greeting … And then she was gone. He found himself blushing. Something about the face turned into the light when she slipped away. (127)

The uncanny entry of Mossie introduces an alternative temporality that disrupts the objectification of nature. Mossie, indeed, is part of the “Green Lion Club,” a sect of animal lovers that arrange clandestine meetings where members spend time in close proximity to wild animals. Mossie had been involved with Mark in her attempt to convince him to let her and the other members of the group get closer to the lion in the zoo. After Mark’s attack and subsequent near-death condition and hospitalisation, Mossie gets in touch with Con to persuade him to let her approach the lioness. The presence of Mossie in the scene signals a different standpoint on the question of reviving the past that antagonises the accumulation of specimen through taxidermy and conservation. Mossie reveals, alongside Mark and the Green Lion secret society, a non-synchronous temporality of hope, mysticism and eccentricity. The

176

F. MENOZZI

content of this non-synchronous temporality is revealed in the passage of the novel where conservationism and economic reason are contrasted with Mark and the Green Lion’s “mystical” attitude towards the past. In an exchange between Con and Thandiswa, a university student who also volunteers at the zoo, the scientific, instrumental attitude to conservation is portrayed as normal and rational versus the “weirdness” of Mark, Mossie and the members of the group. As Thandiswa explains: Your friend was a weird one … Ancient symbols and stuff. A bit hippy dippy if you ask me … Animals are animals. I love them, yes. But me, I am a human being … You can’t let yourself get too involved in this game … It gets too sad. You can’t get too attached to this one, that one. Or too … mystical. I’m a conservationist. I want to find ways to do what we can with what we have left. (106–107)

The eccentric, improper and irrational way of dealing with extinction is what Thandiswa defines as the “mystical” attitude of the group of “weirdos” to which Mossie belongs. The content of this “mystical” experience of de-extinction is a recurrent aspect of the novel, embodied in names and symbols emerging throughout the narration. In the same way as the dark-maned lioness is named “Sekhmet” after the Egyptian goddess of war and destruction, so Mark’s approach to species preservation has nothing rational or scientific to it. Against thing-ification and spectacle, Mark and Mossie’s relationship with the lions is secretive, clandestine, nocturnal, transgressive and emotional. The non-synchronic reanimation of the past takes place at particular points in the novels, where Henrietta Rose-Innes describes Con’s encounter with two objects left over by his friend Mark as emblems of his attachments to the feline world. Mark’s mystical sense of time is first represented through a postcard found by Con among Mark’s belongings recovered soon after his hospitalisation, and a poster that Mark had created for the educational space of the zoo. The objects are described through ekphrasis, a figure of speech involving the description of an artwork within literary language. As a trope, ekphrasis involves a suspension of time and a pause in the narration, the act of turning away from the plot in order to reframe the space of the narrative around a visual element. Following Georg Lukács’s distinction between the acts of narrating and of describing, D. P. Fowler notes in this regard that “narrative is about people, description deals with things” (Fowler 26). Ekphrasis may be said to be entirely on the side

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

177

of description of objects, hence a symptom of the alienation imposed by the capitalist system on narrative form itself. Yet, the set of temporal strata illuminated by the use of ekphrasis in Green Lion complicates any reduction of ekphrasis to a mere symptom of the reification of life. As James Heffernan notes in an important essay on the term, ekphrasis is the verbal representation of graphic representation (Heffernan 299), a literary mode which “delivers from the pregnant moment of graphic art its embryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit the story that graphic art tells only by implication” (301, emphasis in original). Ekphrasis does not simply suspend the time of narration by reference to the still moment of a described image. At the same time, this trope reinserts the temporal stillness of pictorial representation into the sequential time of the story. The specifically non-synchronous quality of ekphrasis derives from the dialectical interplay of these two movements: suspension of narrative time through pictorial stillness and reinsertion of atemporality within the stream of the plot. Ekphrasis is a non-synchronic form because it requires the writer to assume the temporality of verbal language to explain, present and describe a visual object that a real-life viewer would grasp in a single instant. The trope deals, most interestingly, with the attempt to translate into words something that the reader is unable to behold. From this point of view, ekphrasis rests on the impossibility of subjecting the world to the grasp and power of the gaze in the mediation of narrative form. The immediacy and enclosure of graphic representation have to be reopened, reimagined and transmitted through the sequence of words: the stillness of the image takes time. However, ekphrasis simultaneously involves a temporal dislocation that situates the time of narration within a wider frame: describing an image may trigger an alternation of narrative pause and restart, adding the temporal dimension of graphic stillness to the story. Ekphrasis signals the non-synchronic dialectic of narration and description, the fact that “just as description in fiction cannot be cordoned off from narration, so technical language need not entail a ‘radical departure from life,’ and a focus on things need not signal hubris or irrelevance” (Schmitt 109). Ekphrasis can be seen as a dialectical interplay of narrative pause and the time of storytelling and should not be confused with a way of aestheticising language, a pure abstraction or formalistic reduction whereby there is no escape from the prison-house of signification. A dialectical materialist notion of ekphrasis would stress the ability of this trope to reconnect the complexity of literary language to social and historical realities by

178

F. MENOZZI

opening up the discrepant times of the represented image and of the representing narration to non-synchronic apertures. Thus, in Green Lion, occurrences of ekphrasis resist the flow of accumulation and taxidermic hoarding by pointing to a completely different way of reviving the past, aimed at reopening the past’s field of possibility rather than trapping it within an eternalised stillness. An important ekphrastic moment occurs when Con brings Mark’s belongings to his mother. A postcard suddenly slips out of the rucksack and Mark’s mother explains its meaning to Con. This is a picture of Saint Jerome, an early Christian theologian and historian who was a popular subject of representation in the Italian Renaissance. The postcard described in the novel is a reproduction of Antonello da Messina’s fifteenth-century painting “Saint Jerome in His Study,” which shows the Saint at work in an iconographically dense architectural space. Since the Renaissance, Saint Jerome has been known in popular culture because of a legend attached to him, in which the Saint saves a lion by removing a thorn from its paw, hence becoming life-long friends with the lion, which always accompanies him in the paintings and the icons. The legend, in fact, should not be taken literally, as the lion was a highly symbolic religious element of Christian art during the Renaissance. In Green Lion, Mark’s mother offers a revealing interpretation of the icon kept by his son: “… A strange fable, isn’t it? Doesn’t seem quite Christian. Like something from an older time. Animals speaking and repaying debts and remembering kindnesses. From Androcles, of course, originally. Can you see the lion in the painting?” He didn’t at first; and then he did. There were many small details, a clutter of objects. As well as books, he could make out a hat, a porcelain jar, a little cat, a peacock. But there, in the background, almost unnoticed, in the shadowy nave behind Jerome, a silhouette coming over the tiles: lionlike but diminutive, the size of a lapdog. Limping, it would have been … A shy annunciation. (43)

The ekphrastic description of the postcard locates the legend of the Saint in an “older time”: the legend of Jerome’s removal of the thorn from the paw of a lion is a Christian retelling of a pre-Christian folktale dating back to the second century AD. Mark’s mother refers to Androcles, the protagonist of the version of the story retold in Aesiod’s fables, showing that the full significance of the painting and what it represents cannot

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

179

be enclosed in the frame of time of its composition, but goes back to a more ancient past. Furthermore, the legend of Jerome and the lion, as Penny Jolly shows in her iconographic study of Antonello da Messina’s painting, can also be said to transgress the temporal frame of the painting by moving forward in the future. Antonello da Messina’s reinterpretation of the legend, indeed, emphasises the eschatological figure of Jerome as “healer of mankind,” which is prefigured in his ability to heal the lion he encountered in the desert: “the story of the thorn removal was moralized in the Gesta Romanorum, a Latin text compiled in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century … There a hunting knight cures the lion by removing the thorn. The commentator explains that it is baptism that draws out the ‘thorn’ of original sin” (251). The legend of Jerome and the lion recalls “the triumphant Resurrection of Christ from the tomb … Thus in the early fifteenth century Jerome’s removal of the thorn from the lion is visually associated with the cleansing and healing power of the Fountain of Life” (251). The appearance of Jerome and the lion disrupts the present of narration both towards the past and towards the future: both archaic and messianic, Jerome’s lion projects the temporal dimension of the story in a wider historical context of resonances and constellations. The multi-layered temporality of the painting, furthermore, is described not so much as inert list of externalised features and objects. In the scene, ekphrasis rather focuses on Con’s—the character who is looking—active search for the lateral, elusive creature in the picture. Ekphrasis enables a discourse about the viewer’s subjective journey across the inert world of objects in order to find something at first unnoticed and unexpected, rather than a simple account of the objects reproduced in the painting. Con’s search for the lion has to traverse the objects stored in the painted room: books, jars, hats etcetera. Beyond the “clutter” of these objects, almost invisible, finally the lion appears in sight. Mark’s mother observes that “you’re never expecting the lion” when you look at the picture: the creature rather appears like “something coming up in the rear-view mirror. Much closer than it appears” (44). The ekphrasis of “Saint Jerome in His Study” captures the allegorical valence of the lion in the novel: the lion is a stand-in for a temporality of anticipation and a “shy annunciation” (43). Rose-Innes’s use of ekphrasis to describe Jerome’s lion might also point to what might be called the utopian function of ekphrasis, a specific quality of a trope that remains fraught with ambivalence, as W. J. T. Mitchell notes:

180

F. MENOZZI

All the utopian aspirations of ekphrasis – that the mute image be endowed with a voice, or made dynamic and active, or actually come into view … all these aspirations begin to look idolatrous and fetishistic. And the utopian figures of the image and its textual rendering as transparent windows onto reality are supplanted by the notion of the image as a deceitful illusion, a magical technique that threatens to fixate the poet and the listener. (Mitchell 156)

What Mitchell describes as central elements of the fear of ekphrasis in the history of literary criticism are also potential sites of hope and the utopian dimension of the trope. The risk of fetishism, illusory magics and idolatry comes together with the drive to give voice to what has been silenced: fetishism is reframed as dialectical image containing aspects of reality that are annihilated by the dominant order of things. The dialectical combination of narrative time and pictorial pause can suggest a moment of illumination, a utopian anticipation of hopes and struggles of the past that have never become part of the historical reality of the present. Thus, the lion, in the novel, can signify the regenerative potential of life itself. The chapters of the novel, indeed, are titled with different animal names, starting with “lion.” From Chapter 1, “lion” is transfigured in a multitude of living beings: wolf, cub, baboon, sheep, dassie, virus, rooikat, human being, chicken and so on, concluding the last chapter with “lioness.” The decision to title the novel’s chapters with animal names could indicate the transformative plane on which the representation of the lion should be read: the feline is not simply a physical thing to be taken on a literal level. The lion, rather, becomes the site of a constant transfiguration and transmutation, part of a chain of constantly regenerated meanings that connect living creatures into a unified story. The lion anticipates the recovery of a past that has not yet happened: it announces a future which still lingers in the realm of the Not Yet and refuses to acquire the status of tangible property. The eschatological, anticipatory force of this mystical and non-synchronous reappearance of the past also emerges through the ekphrasis of a poster designed by Mark for the educational space of the zoo. Rose-Innes writes: Hand-painted, nicely framed, and actually quite beautiful: a good way with line and colour, after all. A large lion standing up on its hind legs like a dog doing a trick. A golden sun caught in its jaws, bleeding golden blood. The lion’s coat and mane were mossy green. Con recognised the image: it

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

181

was copied off the cover of the little alchemical book that Mark had had in his rucksack. Something out of a medieval manuscript. (111)

Beneath the description of the image Rose-Innes reproduces verse from a seventeenth-century English alchemic poem, “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon, Written by the Viccar of Malden.” From extinct species, the lion is transfigured into ancient alchemical symbol. In Mark’s mysticism, the lion “devours the sun” and is endowed with supernatural powers, including the power to revive the dead. Mark’s poster interrupts the accumulative logics of the conservation project by charging the survival of the lion with a completely different plane of meaning. The survival of the lion is not meant to be fixated in the present as dead spectacle or enclosed specimen, but to act as an agent for changing the course of the past. Looking at the image of the lion and the accompanying alchemic verse, Con immediately understands that “Mark had not meant to make a horror, after all; perhaps it had been done in hope” (112). The mystical re-appropriation of the lion on the ekphrastic level of non-synchronic reanimation of the past is interpreted as a sign of “hope.” The hope this revival of the past incorporates, in this case, concerns the possibility of finding Mark’s sister alive. Years before, indeed, during a trip to Lion’s Head, Mark’s little sister mysteriously vanished in the fenced zone of the natural reserve and was never to be found again. Unconsoled, Mark’s family never recovered from the loss, while Con understands that turning to alchemical symbols helped Mark keep his hope alive. His fascination with the dark-maned lion, for this reason, does not concern so much the genetic reintroduction of the lost species, but rather the impossible hope of changing a traumatic past. The survival of the lion, accordingly, should not be taken on a literal level, as transmission of genetic inheritance. Rather, the feline imagery indicates a non-synchronic temporality in which the recovery of the past always means the recovery of unrealised desires and hopes. Mark’s mystical experience of the feline is animated by what philosopher Ernst Bloch described as an “expectant emotion” of hope: emotions “whose drive-intention is long-term, whose drive-object does not yet lie ready, not just in respective individual attainability, but also in the already available world” (Bloch 74). The expectant emotion of hope implies the “Not Yet” of a real future that already exists as possibility, even if not as an objective and factual reality. According to Bloch, hope reveals the full “utopian function” (144) of anticipatory consciousness:

182

F. MENOZZI

the construction of imaginative ideas of a real possibility that extends, “in an anticipating way, existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better” (144). The mystical, alchemic temporality of the lion devouring the sun acts as a stand-in for Mark’s expectant hope that his sister could still be alive, expressing a way of inhabiting the present constantly projected towards a Not Yet of possibility and anticipation.5 The non-synchronic reactivation of the hope of the past, however, does not stop at the level of Mark’s personal story of trauma and loss. The personal is deeply connected to the ecological and the socio-political. In particular, the utopian possibilities of restoring and retrieving what has been annihilated are part of a wider question concerning the relationship between the ideals of conservation and social justice in post-Apartheid society. The novel links the ideal of conservation to the making of enclosures and the commodification of the commons: Mark’s sister, indeed, disappeared during a trip to Table Mountain, near the fenced areas around Lion’s Head. Following Con, Mark’s sister had learned how to trespass the fence, and Con feels partly responsible for the disappearance of the little girl, as he had shown her how to transgress the fence in order to elude parental control and explore the wilderness. Mark’s loss is hence closely linked to another fictional event mentioned in the novel: the fencing of Lion’s Head. In a childhood recollection included in the novel, Con takes part, along with his mother, in a demonstration against the fencing of the area and the forcible removal of squatters and communities living in the region. The project is described as a conservation plan through which the Parks Department declares to “do great things, up there on the sensitive tabletop. Stock it up with antelope, zebra, baboons, breeding pairs of eagles, all kinds of rare and endangered creatures. The fence would keep all animals safe from harm” (94–95). Con’s mother strongly opposes the plan because she feels fencing the area would expropriate local inhabitants of a public space, restricting access to the protected area only through authorised and costly guided tours. The novel presents the dilemma between conservation for its own sake and the safeguard of citizens’ rights to the commons. As Con, his mother and her partner Clive prepare for the demonstration against the fencing of the commons, a debate unfolds between Con and Clive: “But what about the animals?” He asked shyly. “Con thinks it’s nice that they’re saving the animals,” said his mother … Clive barked a laugh. “We’ll

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

183

never see those animals. They’re going to sell permits to the rich fuckers. What good is an animal you never even see?” “Besides, what do you care more about, the animals or the people?” (96)

This question is never truly answered in the novel and remains somehow suspended. But the novel denounces the failure of conservation projects detached from social justice and aligned with the enclosure and commodification of the city and its wildlife. This process shows what Ursula K. Heise describes as the “conceptual paradoxes” of programmes of de-extinction or “rewilding” animated by a nostalgia for restoring an uncontaminated nature, while “what emerges from this nostalgia might be quite different from a reconstruction of the past” (210). If deextinctions are oriented towards the future, in the case of the conservation projects described in Green Lion the outcome of these projects is not so much the impossible reconstruction of a primeval nature, but the social expropriation of the landscape as resource to be exploited for making profit. The predicament of conservation ideologies explored in the novel, ultimately, shows what John Bellamy Foster defines as “the sheer incompatibility of a system of capital accumulation with human existence and the Earth System” (Foster 2018, 133). Even if the dilemma between ecology and social justice is not explicitly settled in the novel, later in the story Con will clearly show the failure of any natural-conservation project based on commodification of the landscape to the detriment of marginal sections of the population: the fencing fails as illegal hunting continues undisturbed and no native wild fauna seems to repopulate the area even after it is turned into a reserve. Most importantly, however, the fencing of Lion’s Head seems to embody the continuation of policies of land grabbing and colonisation in the contemporary moment, what The Midnight Notes Collective (1990) describes as the “new enclosures” of neoliberal capitalism: the continuing capitalist appropriation of common resources and land and the rights attached to it. As a friend’s of Con’s mother remarks, as they prepare for the demonstration: “‘But the shacks – Hout Bay, Woodstock, there by the quarry – they just slicing through it all. Taking the people’s land.’ ‘Just like old times, hey’” (96). The references to the fencing of Lion’s Head, the expropriation of the people living in shacks in the area and their forcible relocation, hints at some underlying continuities between post-Apartheid conservation policies and reservations and land grabbing during colonial times and the Apartheid era. Indeed, as Daniel Bromley shows in a study of the

184

F. MENOZZI

question of enclosure in South Africa, the term “enclosure” echoes the Apartheid-era creation of “homelands” partitioning African populations and enforcing regimes of immobility. Enclosure, Bromley remarks, “must be regarded not as something that was done to land, but as something that was done to people” (358). The struggle for the commons is, from this point of view, inseparable from the opposition to racialised politics of space in post-Apartheid society. In the novel, the anti-enclosure demonstration is eventually quelled, while Con and his mother barely manage to escape the stampede triggered by the violent police response. At home, when they saw what happened on the TV – the homes flattened, the rubber bullets, a man with his arm torn by a police dog, a woman crushed against the fence – his mother wept … Demonstration, what kind of word was that – a TV word. Something out of their textbooks, from history. (100–102)

The brutality of police response, the failure of government plans, and the destructive effects of the fence ultimately show the unsustainable impact of conservation as accumulation. Mark’s recovery of a mystical experience of the feline through the symbol of the “Green Lion” indicates a clandestine temporality based on the reactivation of hope and the opposition to the constant estrangement and expropriation of the landscape of Cape Town and its fauna. In the expectant temporalities that challenge conservation as accumulation, de-extinction turns into a multiplication of meanings around the image of the lion, which becomes a sign of ancient times surviving in the present, expectant hope kept alive in the face of trauma and loss, and the transgression of the enclosure and commodification of the landscape. Even if the demonstration is defeated and the fence finally built, the vanquished protesters’ hope continues is revived in acts of transgression and trespass of the newly-built fence. Thus, in a later moment in the novel, Con attempts in vain to find the vanished lioness by entering the fenced natural reserve through a hole: The fence ran down again into a little dip where the bush had grown close against it … He tugged at the branches and they came loose in his hand … Revealed was a gap below the fence where a small stream passed. A weakness in the fortifications: where the water cut a path, the bars didn’t meet the ground. The soil had been dug away further to allow a large body or bodies to pass. (246)

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

185

The acts of temporal and spatial transgression that constellate the novel embody a resistance to the expropriating logics of capitalism. Every kind of fortification, enclosure, spectacle and reification is met with acts of defiance that oppose the irreversible process of extinction as well as the unidirectional process of commodification of life. Against the ideology of market-driven conservation, Green Lion suggests transgressive temporalities that refuse to take the presentism of capital as the only horizon of possibility.

4

Conclusion: Non-synchronism as Metabolic Restoration

From a world-ecological perspective, the concept of non-synchronism can refer to two opposing processes: on the one hand, the preservation of an uncontaminated nature as genetic information, commodity or dead spectacle; on the other hand, it can indicate resistances to the alienating and destructive process of irreversible objectification of nature proper to capitalism. While the return of the past is alive in ideologies of preservation and de-extinction of nature in commodity-form, non-synchronism also illustrates a politics of temporal reversibility emerging from attempts to resist the expropriation and commodification of nature and the annihilation of life. In this regard, a world-ecological reading of the novel could be aligned with discourses on commoning6 and sustainability that emphasise the need to abolish capitalism in order to safeguard nature while also ensuring equality and social justice. As John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett write: Songbirds are dying off because their habitats are being destroyed by the historical expansion of the system—not simply because they are considered “valueless” from the standpoint of the market. Whales are killed to be sold directly as a market commodity, while they are also being annihilated as a side effect of the expansion of the system through the destruction of their ecosystems. All of this suggests that sustainable human development requires not the incorporation of nature into the system of value, but the abolition of commodity value itself. (Foster and Burkett 15)

Sustainable ecology does not mean to attach some kind of monetary “value” to nature in order to salvage it from the destruction produced by the system itself: valuable or valueless, nature under capitalism is meant

186

F. MENOZZI

to undergo destruction. Sustainability involves opposition to inequality, expropriation and commodification, that is, countering the metabolic rifts that turn animals, plants, living organisms and landscapes into capitalist value. Turning life into commodity means both expropriation and extinction: unless the system of global accumulation is abolished, there is no hope that the reintroduction or conservation of endangered species will revert the destructive process. Against the destructive effects of accumulation, John Bellamy Foster proposes a concept of “metabolic restoration” (Foster 2007, 11). Metabolic restoration involves revolutionary political actions aimed at countering the effects of capitalism and at reinstating the severed links between nature and society, linking social justice to the reactivation of what Marx called the metabolism of human beings and nature that ensures sustainability. Metabolic restoration unavoidably involves a Marxist commitment to opposing capitalism in its ideological, social and economic aspects. The act of “restoration,” however, is endowed with a strongly non-synchronic dimension. Indeed, there is no interruption of the violent temporality of accumulation without a concept of time as possibility of reversal and recovery of the unrealised potentialities of the past. Restoration, from this point of view, means both going back and moving forward, retrieving the future in the past and opposing the teleological naturalisation of capitalism. The central literary element of Rose-Innes’s novel is represented by the image of the lion, which escapes the reduction of natural life to dead specimen and object of genetic transmission. The novel revolves around sets of oppositions that complicate the temporality of capitalist modernity in its ecological dimension. Modern regimes of musealisation, conservation and taxidermy are inhabited by pre-modern, spectral temporalities pointing to alchemic, mystical and allegorical temporal registers charging objects with the unfinished hopes of the past. Rose-Innes signals these different temporal registers through uses of ekphrasis that interrupt the flow of the narration as enigmatic ciphers. These ciphers challenge the finality of extinction, but also those attempts to counter extinction through expropriation and commodification. Thus, in a scene towards the end of the novel, Con walks alone in the restricted area of Lion’s Head, noting how it was “all dead, dead, dead. There were no lions here. Not for three hundred years. The mountain was finished, cleaned out, used up, shot out … Again, time slowed and dissolved” (260). The apparent death and dissolution of time produced by the regime of fencing, immortalising, enclosing and commodifying life, however, is not all that

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

187

remains. The narration continues: “There was life here, but slow: secret, green beings holding their leaves completely still, and the immeasurably ancient lichens” (260). Against the destructive side of the time of accumulation, the novel invites the reader to rediscover marginal, vanishing, minute subtexts located on altogether different temporal planes, slowmotion and often imperceptible. The life that survives, like the older times incarnated in Saint Jerome’s painting and Mark’s hopeful reimagining of the green lion, cannot be reduced to the present of extinction. In the end, Henrietta Rose-Innes formulates a literary poetic aimed at recovering those silent and evasive traces of multiple pasts that continue to survive. In her description of forms of life resisting enclosure and accumulation, Green Lion points to non-synchronism as both nostalgic objectification of the past and potential space for recovering the possibilities of a temporal commons: an open temporality constantly regenerating sites of survivals and resistance to expropriation.

Notes 1. See my 2013 essay on Nineveh as well as recent essays on Rose-Innes by Daniel Williams and Graham Riach. 2. The term chronotope is taken from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory. Bakhtin (22) notes that the chronotope is “the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied”: the chronotope is the narrative locus where time becomes flesh, “functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space” (ibid.). 3. In a recent work on value, Brian Massumi indicates how a “postcapitalist” reappropriation of value needs to start by uncoupling value from quantification, constructing a qualitative notion of value opposed to accumulation. 4. In his 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx put forward the concept that “labour is the source of value. The measure of labour is time. The relative value of products is determined by the labour time required for their production” (34). Value, hence, presupposes that “labour has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labour … Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase” (41). István Mészáros provides thoughtful reflections on this passage in discussing the tyranny of capitalism’s “time imperative” (46–49), which subjects everything to the time accountancy of capital. Emancipation hence needs to involve, according to Mészáros, a liberation of time from the closure of history.

188

F. MENOZZI

5. Jack Zipes’s excellent introduction to Bloch offers a compelling defence of Bloch’s idea of hope against Terry Eagleaton’s dismissal of the philosopher in his Hope Without Optimism (Eagleton 2015; Zipes 2019). 6. Peter Linebaugh (13–14) defines “commoning” as a form of human solidarity and labour antithetical to capitalist appropriation.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2002. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics. In Brian Richardson, ed. Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 15–24. Bloch, Ernst. 1959. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Bromley, Daniel W. 1994. The Enclosure Movement Revisited: The South African Commons. Journal of Economic Issues 28.2: 357–365. Büscher, Bram, and Robert Fletcher. 2015. Accumulation by Conservation. New Political Economy 20.2: 273–298. Christiansen, Per. 2008. On the Distinctiveness of the Cape Lion (Panthera leo melanochaita Smith, 1842), and a Possible New Specimen from the Zoological Museum, Copenhagen. Mammalian Biology 73: 58–65. Dawson, Ashley. 2016. Extinction: A Radical History. New York: OR Books. De Angelis, Massimo, and David Harvie. 2014. The Commons. In M. Parker, G. Cheney, V. Fournier, and C. Land, eds. The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organizations. Abington: Routledge, 280–294. Deckard, Sharae. 2016. World-Ecology and Ireland. Journal of World-Systems Research 22.1: 145–176. Eagleton, Terry. 2015. Hope Without Optimism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Evans, Sara. 2018. When the Last Lion Roars: The Rise and Fall of the King of the Beasts. London: Bloomsbury. Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology. AJS 105.2: 366–405. ———. 2007. The Ecology of Destruction. Monthly Review 58.9: 1–14. ———. 2018. Marx, Value, and Nature. Monthly Review 70.3: 122–136. ———, and Paul Burkett. 2018. Value Isn’t Everything. Monthly Review 70.6: 1–17. Fowler, Don P. 1991. Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis. The Journal of Roman Studies 81: 25–35. Heffernan, James A.W. 1991. Ekphrasis and Representation. New Literary History 22.2: 297–316.

6

TIME, EXTINCTION AND ACCUMULATION …

189

Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jolly, Penny H. 1983. Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study: An Iconographic Analysis. The Art Bulletin 65.2: 238–253. Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury. Linebaugh, Peter. 2014. Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press. Lukács, Georg. 1970. The Writer and the Critic. Trans. Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin. Marx, Karl. 1963. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers. ———. 1993. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin. Massumi, Brian. 2018. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McBrien, Justin. 2016. Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene. In Jason W. Moore, ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press, 116–137. McCauley, Douglas J. 2006. Selling Out on Nature. Nature 443.7107: 27–28. Menozzi, Filippo. 2013. Invasive Species and the Territorial Machine: Shifting Interfaces Between Ecology and the Postcolonial. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44.4: 181–204. Mészáros, István. 2008. The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time. New York: Monthly Review Press. Midnight Notes Collective. 1990. Introduction to the New Enclosures. http:// www.midnightnotes.org/pdfnewenc1.pdf/. Accessed 1 August 2019. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, Jason W. 2017. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. Mukherjee, Pablo. 2010. Postcolonial Environments. Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Riach, Graham. 2018. Henrietta Rose-Innes and the Politics of Space. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Rose-Innes, Henrietta. 2010. Homing. Cape Town: Penguin Random House. ———. 2011. Nineveh. Cape Town: Penguin Random House. ———. 2015. Green Lion. London: Aardvark Bureau. Schmitt, Cannon. 2016. Interpret or Describe? Representations 135.1: 102–118. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2014. Museum—School of Alienation. Trans. Iain Boyd Whyte. Art in Translation 6.4: 437–448. Williams, Daniel. 2018. Life Among the Vermin: Nineveh and Ecological Relocation. Studies in the Novel 50.3: 419–440. Zipes, Jack. 2019. Ernst Bloch: The Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: On Skipping History

The conclusion provides a summary of main aspects of non-synchronism as a critical concept. After reinstating the materialist and political valences of the term, the conclusion connects the term to a constellation of related and overlapping notions: anachronism, unequal development, longue durée, kairos and the permanent revolution, drawing on a wide range of authors including Georges Didi-Huberman, Fernand Braudel, Antonio Negri and Leon Trotsky. In contrast to anachronism, non-synchronism involves an emphasis on dialectical unity and combination. In contrast to the concept of kairos, the opportune moment or here-and-now constitutive of political action, non-synchronism indicates the unevenness of the social whole in the late imperialist scenario of capitalist globalisation. A non-synchronous politics stresses the necessity to translate the singularity of kairos into the untimely temporality of continuing struggle and the renewed possibilities of “skipping” a stagist view of history opened by Trotsky’s notion of the permanent revolution.

1

From Anachronism to Unequal Development

The reflections proposed in this book emphasise, from different perspectives, two essential qualities of the concept of non-synchronism. The first quality is what might be called a “dialectical” dimension of the forms of temporality explored in this research. As a dialectic, non-synchronism © The Author(s) 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0_7

191

192

F. MENOZZI

indicates a mutually antagonistic necessity and interconnection of the heterogeneous temporalities and tendencies that compose the present of a capitalist modernity. As Fredric Jameson writes, the dialectic “is an injunction to think the negative and the positive together at one and the same time, in the unity of a single thought” (Jameson 2009, 421). Similarly, the dialectic of non-synchronism means to situate in a conflicted and plural totality the residual and emergent, restorative and utopian, progressive and regressive tendencies at work in what eludes a concept of the present time as enclosed and self-sufficient monad. Non-synchronism does not simply disrupt the ideological illusion of an empty and homogeneous time. Rather, the non-synchronous quality of the present displays the divergent convergence of contrasting times— including what Stavros Tombazos describes as the linear and cyclical times of the organic composition of capital—within a broader, more complex, dynamic and multi-layered whole. For this reason, the political, cultural and historical valences of non-synchronism can only be grasped dialectically. The second feature of non-synchronism concerns the fact that it belongs to the Marxist tradition in critical thought. The notion proposed in this book cannot be detached from a concrete politics striving for social justice, equality and the international solidarity of workers across centre and periphery. Accordingly, the politics of non-synchronism captures the bundle of relationships between the sphere of cultural and literary expression and the economic, political and social grounds in which literature is always entangled and embedded. Non-synchronism is not a nominalistic, passive and static category of interpretation but rather a way of imagining change in the world, starting from the radically uneven development of different sectors of culture and society, particularly in the peripheral locations of the world economy. In the conclusion, I will offer a further summary of the aesthetic and political valences of the concept of nonsynchronism. Hopefully, this notion will prove a heuristic toolbox for thinking the temporal dimension of world literature: not simply its historical or chronological span, but the temporal consciousness underlying a dialectical materialist paradigm of world literature. In order to sum up these aesthetic and political valences, non-synchronism will hence be differentiated from two concepts whose remit partly overlaps with the field analysed in this book: anachronism and kairos. As it will be shown in the concluding remarks of this work, non-synchronism could be, in many ways, radically opposed to both anachronism and kairos, even if it

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

193

partakes of some of the aspects, concerns and phenomena that the other two concepts can identify. One of the most compelling and productive theories of anachronism in the past decades is the work of art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who recuperated the idea of anachronism, mostly in a 2000 volume titled Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images [Before Time: Art History and the Anachronism of Images]. The significance of Didi-Huberman’s work is, arguably, epistemological and methodological: he attempts to retrieve a concept of anachronism that could become a helpful heuristic lens for art-historical research. From this point of view, Didi-Huberman’s perspective eschews a mere celebration of anachronism for its own sake and rather problematises the idea of anachronism as a possibility for better understanding artworks in their historical as well as aesthetic dimensions. In his work on the topic, hence, Didi-Huberman stresses what he calls the “necessity of anachronism as something positive” (2003, 37). Anachronism is not merely an aberration or a mistake that should be corrected. Rather, an anachronistic component “seems to be internal to the objects themselves – the images – whose history we are trying to reconstruct. In a first approximation, then, anachronism would be the temporal way of expressing the exuberance, complexity, and overdetermination of images” (ibid.). Anachronism would, first of all, have heuristic value because the objects of study themselves have an internal anachronistic character, what DidiHuberman calls the “exuberance, complexity and overdetermination” of images. The key point concerns the fact that any cultural object cannot be fully contained in what traditional art historians used to describe “its times.” The meaning of art constantly exceeds the moment of its composition and production, both backwards and forwards in time. Artworks explode their own epoch—the social, artistic, economic historical context of their time—and express, therefore, a “complex, impure temporality: an extraordinary montage of heterogeneous times forming anachronisms” (38). As Didi-Huberman (2003) further explains: In the dynamic and complexity of this montage, historical notions as fundamental as those of “style” or “epoch” suddenly take on a dangerous plasticity … therefore, it is not enough to practice art history from the perspective of euchronism, that is to say, from the conventional perspective of “the artist and his time.” What such a visuality demands is that it be envisaged from the perspective of its memory, that is, its manipulations

194

F. MENOZZI

of time. It is in tracing them that we discover an anachronistic artist, an “artist against his time.” (40)

Didi-Huberman connects this challenge to the “euchronism” of art history—a supposedly perfect and fully contained match between work and context—to Benjamin’s notion of dialectical image1 and remarks that art historians need a method able to do justice to the anachronism of images. In order to gain access to the “stratified multiple, times, to the survivals, to the longues durées of the more-than-past of memory,” writes Didi-Huberman, “we need the more-than-present of an act of reminiscence: a shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption or appearance of time, what Proust and Benjamin have described so eloquently under the category of ‘involuntary memory’” (41, emphasis in original). While non-synchronism also entails an emphasis on a plural, multilayered temporality marked by anachronisms and going beyond the reduction to cultural objects to the euchronic frame of “their times,” however, my usage of the term non-synchronism is aimed at underlying an aspect that goes beyond the mere disruption of linear and “proper” time operated by anachronistic irruptions. As a dialectical category, non-synchronism also involves recognising the fundamental concordance, cohesive recuperation and antagonistic intimacy of the different times that inhabit the present.2 From the point of view of anachronism, this would entail stretching one of the most interesting aspects of Didi-Huberman’s concept of anachronism: beyond the recognition of overdetermination and plurality, methodologically the concept seems to suggest—as unconscious counterpart and accursed share of discordance and the explosion of times—the necessity of a deeper concordance or parallelism between the temporality of the art historian and the temporality of the image. In other words, the emphasis of anachronism as a method seems to suggest that an empty, linear, progressive and homogeneous temporality would not do justice to the heterogeneous, plural and overdetermined time of the image: this is the reason why anachronism has, according to DidiHuberman, a deeply heuristic value, and perhaps this is also the reason underlying the fortune of anachronism as a methodological tool in art history and cultural studies, as it has been adopted in the work of critics such as Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Iain Chambers, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood.

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

195

The concept of non-synchronism, accordingly, aims to capture the interplay of discordance and concordance, episodic rupture and longterm continuity that a stronger emphasis on anachronism does not fully represent in its foregrounding of temporal anomaly and inconsistency. Non-synchronism keeps, dialectically, both the negative and the affirmative: a constant and visible negation of the “syn-” (togetherness) of synchronism, the term keeps the unifying and the disjunctive together as complementary moments of a multiverse. This dialectical unity, furthermore, goes beyond a purely methodological value meant to facilitate academic research in the humanities: it also attempts to reconnect the study of literary and artistic forms to an objective situation produced by the global expansion of a capitalist modernity. Non-synchronism links the study of the past to the material conditions of existence, struggle and exploitation of the present. This is a time that cannot be detached from the effects of global capitalism on the production of culture and the reception and transmission of pre-capitalist heritage in a capitalist age. Non-synchronism, in other words, reframes and relocates anachronism within the dialectical materialist paradigm of what Marx described as the unequal development of cultural and social forms. Marx commented on this in an influential Nota Bene included in the introduction of his 1857– 1858 Grundrisse, where he offers some sketches of an aesthetic theory based on the idea that seeing society as a coherent whole does not mean that every aspect of society needs to follow the same temporal logic. Thus, the “unequal development” of art and society pertains to the overdetermined, plural and fundamentally non-synchronic conflict between forces and relationships of production, as well as between economic conditions and the consciousness of these conditions.3 The development of forces of production, in other words, does not follow the same temporality and order as the development of the relations of production. Accordingly, ideological forms such as the law, art and literature exist in a state of uneven development with the economic and social context in which they originate. As regards the arts, Marx wrote how certain periods of “flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organisation” (Marx 1993, 110).4 The unequal development of art and the economy indicated by Marx implies a rejection of any unilinear and determinist view of society: society needs to be seen from the point of view of totality, but as a plural, dislocated and unreconciled whole rather than a synchronic sequence of self-enclosed stages. Marx’s idea

196

F. MENOZZI

of uneven development shows how the capitalist process of synchronisation is always accompanied by non-synchronous remainders, returns, survivals and revivals: history is a multi-temporal dialectics united by antagonism and discordance. Marx’s notion of uneven development raises the problem concerning the survival of artistic forms when the economic conditions that made them possible in the first place have disappeared. The real problem, therefore, does not concern so much the vanishing of archaic and pre-capitalist forms at the onset of capitalism, but, more urgently, the opposite: the real issue would be understanding how it is possible that pre-modern cultural forms do survive and are indeed transmitted in the present, the disappearance of their original context, of what historians would call “their times” notwithstanding. Precisely for this reason, non-synchronism does not so much involve a celebration of what disturbs the present, but rather the consciousness of the many constellations in which the present is entangled through the permanence of untimely survivals, utopian anticipations and nostalgic re-enactments. The real stakes of non-synchronism concern the possibilities of constructing a non-hegemonic, non-teleological and heterogeneous concept of tradition and cultural continuity keeping temporal reversals visible and alive. For this reason, non-synchronism adds a reconstructive, dialectical and materialist quality to anachronism, moving beyond a simple celebration of discontinuity. It could be argued that the dialectic of non-synchronism places anachronistic interruption close to what French historian Fernand Braudel remarked about his concept of the longue durée—or long term— in historical studies. Indeed, in his rethinking of historical time, which led him to propose some of the most influential contributions to the historiography of the Mediterranean, Braudel insisted on the necessity to combine three different temporal orders: the episodic time of the event, the medium-range temporality of economic and social cycles, and the long-term, often unconscious, history of secular length. Braudel did not simply argue for a renewed attention to the slow processes of a long-term, deep temporality to the detriment of the short-term. Rather, Braudel’s project aims at reconnecting these different temporal registers. As he writes, “history is the sum of all possible histories – a set of multiple skills and points of view, those of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The only mistake, in my view, would be to choose one of these histories to the exclusion of all the others” (182). The perspective of long-term history is aimed at offering a more complex historical explanation that would keep different temporalities together: “Each ‘current reality’ is the

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

197

conjoining of movements with different origins and rhythms. The time of today is composed simultaneously of the time of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, and of bygone days” (ibid.). Braudel’s critique of short-term history also entails a wider epistemological resonance, as he emphasises that perceptions of both the present and the past are reconstructions. Grasping the present means, accordingly, to refuse to accept at face value the reality one experiences and to try to reconstruct it as if it were from a different time. Braudel draws on a work by Philippe Ariès in order to stress “the importance of unfamiliarity, of the unexpected in historical explanation. In studying the sixteenth century, one comes up against something strange, strange to you, a man of the twentieth century. The question before you is how to explain this difference” (185). However, it is not just encountering the past that opens up the present to unfamiliarity and non-synchronism. As Braudel continues, “surprise, unfamiliarity, remoteness … are no less necessary to understand that which surrounds you, that which is so close that you cannot perceive it clearly … the past is the unfamiliar by means of which one can understand the present” (ibid.). Non-synchronism highlights the way in which the temporal estrangement of the present troubles any simple dichotomy between euchronia and anachronism. In order to understand a moment in time—a short-term occurrence or process, the appearance of a literary work or an image—one has to embed it in a wider constellation of times that link it to the present of the interpreter, as integral part of the object of study. By delving into the different ways literary and social forms assemble to form an unevenly developed present, non-synchronism de-familiarises the past, the present and the future by showing the mutual reciprocity and anti-chronological layering they constitute.

2

From Kairos5 to the Permanent Revolution

The dialectical element of non-synchronism does not stop at interpreting history in a different way. It also suggests a possible way of rethinking possibilities for political praxis. As explored in this book, non-synchronous appearances can operate as a very ambivalent political force: the return of the past, for example, can either be an anticipatory and utopian drive in the struggle for social justice, or it can be a reactionary and nostalgic appeal to primeval ideals of community or Golden Ages typical of authoritarian populisms. In the conclusion of this project, I will suggest some possibilities for thinking non-synchronism as a progressive, emancipatory

198

F. MENOZZI

political element. From the point of view of politics, non-synchronism might partake of some of the qualities of a concept of time that is usually opposed to the sequential dimension of linearity and duration proper to time as chronos: the anti-chronological notion of kairos. In her authoritative overview of concepts of time in political theory, Kimberly Hutchings summarises the origin of the distinction between kairos and chronos: the chronos/kairos distinction is often traced back to ancient Greek thought. In this context, a contrast was drawn between time as quantitatively measurable duration, associated with the inevitable birth-death life cycle of individuals (chronos ), and time as a transformational time of action, in which the certainty of death and decay is challenged (kairos ) (Hutchings 5)

In contrast to the linear temporality of chronos, John Smith notes in an important study of the origins of the term in Greek rhetoric, “kairos points to a qualitative character of time, to the special position an event or action occupies in a series, to a season when something appropriately happens that cannot happen just at ‘any time’” (Smith 48). Interestingly, Smith notes that the idea of the “right time” for something to occur proper to kairos points “to the idea that there are constellations of events pregnant with a possibility (or possibilities) not to be met with at other times and under different circumstances” (ibid.). Like non-synchronism, kairos implies the opening up of time to possibility, action and the event. As Antonio Negri writes in his writings on time, kairos is the instant, that is, “the moment of rupture and opening of temporality … the modality of time through which being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time … If so kairòs will, in the first place, represent that modality of time, that hic temporis, that point which excludes from its definition both the flux and the catastrophe of time” (156). Kairos becomes, in Negri’s reflections, what he describes as a “restlessness of temporality” (ibid.): a constant defiance, in the here and now, of any concept of time as an envelope extrinsic to knowledge and being. Kairos means an escape from any reduction of time to transcendental essence or empty duration, either “positively: a vital thrust, a creative force; or negatively: a destiny, an excrement, a corruption” (155). In Negri’s thought, kairos is an opening of temporality which eschews two polar opposites, vitalism and determinism, either the reduction of the opening of time to mere continuity and linearity of duration (as an instant

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

199

structured according to a logic of before and after), or, on the other hand, as a pure and transcendent order completely removed from the living matter of history, subtracted from time altogether. In his book The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben similarly notes that kairos is not a timeless outside-of-time, but rather a seized chronos: kairos does not have “another time at its disposal … the messianic world is not another world, but the secular world itself, with a slight adjustment” (Agamben 69).6 The term kairos also appears in Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, where it identifies an idea of fulfilled time or a “kindling place of inspiration” (Bloch 124) derived from a “meeting of subject and object, from the meeting of its tendency with the objective tendency of the time, and is the flash with which this concordance begins” (125). A seized chronos, fulfilled time, meeting point of subject and object, or immanent opening of time, kairos subverts both the instant and duration, while it also involves a radical reimagining of time beyond the linear succession of past, present and future. As soon as “we begin to look at time from the point of view of the temporality of kairòs, past and future are anything but obvious” (Negri 165). Kairos reorganises time by producing an immeasurable opening where past, future and present coexist within a unique—though plural and multiple—constitutive process of production of temporality. This temporality is not so much a perception of the world so much as a production of the present, an ontological opening that subverts any idea of the present as an inert prolongation of the past. In Negri’s philosophy, a genuinely liberated time is immanent, productive, collective and constitutive (123–125): an effectively emancipatory politics of time can only consist of an immanent convergence of knowledge and politics within the field of social praxis. Negri’s concept of kairos, Ernst Bloch’s non-synchronism and, as it will be explained in a moment, Leon Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” emphasise that the time for revolution is, in the end, a multifarious and divergent present. As Bloch writes in a rethinking of Benjamin’s notion of “now-time,” if the tradition of the oppressed aims to explode the continuum of history through a scattering of messianic “splinters,” this explosion of historical continuum can only happen because of a deeper concordance and “constellation” of past, present and future. Bloch remarks: If the aim is to explode the continuum of history, then it certainly does not mean also to explode the context, which is called the “current,” the “tendency” of history, and which is interrupted and yet, time and again,

200

F. MENOZZI

keeps going. For only within this tendency of the course, which time and again makes itself felt, cracks the crust, the corresponding points of the now sparkle and transmit each other. (Bloch 130)

Bloch includes the notion of “kairos,” understood as time “that was fulfilled” (131), as one of those chiliastic, utopian and revolutionary times that do not merely represent a historical break or scattering of continuity. A now-time can turn into revolutionary kairos when it is congenial to “past openings” (128), turning the point in time into a deeper temporal concordance with “the repressed, the interrupted, the undischarged on which we can in one and the same act fall back upon while it reaches forward to us” (129). Kairos is not a self-transparent immediacy or a self-sufficient event, but rather a dialectical convergence of unfinished futures in the past, of ontology and praxis. The real point of an antihistoricist, dialectical materialist notion of the present moment is that the revolutionary kairos is not reduced to a “now-time” of scattering and fragmentation, but rather reimagined as a “connecting corridor that has been prepared again, much better prepared, or even as the first stop of a time that has to be fulfilled” (130–131). The explosion of history revealed in the kairos, indeed, is a “liberating act that frees all essentially related, utopian moments from before and after within the respective dawning of now-time” (130). Above and beyond the solitude of the present and the infinite belatedness of weak messianism, non-synchronism needs to be seen as a present of political praxis, resistance and struggle that does not delay action by envisaging an empty messianic arrival. Rather, it aims to construct a field of objective possibilities by keeping unrealised utopian projects and historical avenues open within the current historical situation. In a pivotal essay, John Smith suggests an affinity between the idea of kairos and those moments described in Hegel’s concept “of the ‘transition from quantity to quality,’ where the temporal aspect of the development sets the critical time apart from ‘any time’ or the utter indifference of the temporal units in measurement” (Smith 51). This shows that kairos is not only dependent upon human action, but it also embodies an ontological and objective dimension. Interestingly, Hegel’s formula was reinterpreted by Marx in the first volume of Capital, in a passage where Marx discusses the transition from the Middle Ages to capitalism: The guilds of the middle ages therefore tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

201

of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum. The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes. (Marx 1990, 423)

In sum, kairos is a seizing of chronos that captures a ripe or opportune moment where historical change can occur as a constellation of events and open possibilities. From this point of view, the politics of non-synchronism can be aligned with the breaking of chronological order proper to kairos understood as political praxis of an unsettled present. Thinking the political implications of non-synchronism means, therefore, to move from a concept of time as domination of chronos and capitalism’s abstract time towards the restless, collective, emancipatory and anti-chronological temporality opened by the ontology of kairos.7 Interestingly, Negri ultimately defines the specific temporality of kairos as the time of political praxis. As he remarks, the power of kairos is the power of praxis, “as production of being on the edge of time … It is possible to transform the world at the same time as it is interpreted. Here episteme and ethics are recomposed once again” (162). Kairos challenges the division between interpreting the world and changing it by pointing to a materialist concept of praxis dependent on a temporal order where knowing and producing coincide. This is, according to Negri, the time of “living labour” set against the dead temporality of capitalism. Kairos redefines a materialist field that starts from “recognising that the capitalist process has subsumed the world, turning it into a dead creature, and that on the other hand living labour is kairòs, the restless creator of the to-come” (179). If capitalism relies on the accumulation of what Marx called “constant capital” as the basis of expropriation and the commodification of everything, living labour rests in what Marx defined as “variable capital,” the productive forces that are set to work and exploited by the capitalist.8 While chronos could be said to epitomise the time of accumulation, kairos is the time of labour, resistance and life, the active construction of the commons. The dialectical quality of non-synchronism, however, goes beyond the singularity of kairos and introduces further elements that complement the immanence and the breaking of linear temporality proper to kairos.

202

F. MENOZZI

This concept, indeed, truly represents a break with chronological order, but it still recuperates the opening of time to an ideal of “ripeness” and a pre-existing order, harmony and authority. As Roland Boer writes, “kairós appears initially as a temporal term, designating the right, critical and proper time or season … kairós indicates the right season for planting or reaping, with a particular emphasis on the time the fruit is ripe, so much so that kairós also bears the sense of fruitfulness and advantage” (122). If the term indicates something happening at the right moment—the productive and immanent temporality of an event breaking the continuum of past, present and future—the original Ancient Greek meaning of the concept also implies the idea of a right, proper temporality that ultimately does not disturb the established social order: “A kairological social order has everything in its proper place – aristocratic elites, exploited peasants, driven slaves, women, and so on. Such a proportioned and fit society, one characterized by ‘eugenia’, ensures the ruling elite remains precisely where it is” (126). For this reason, Boer remarks that the opposite of kairòs is not chronos but rather a set of expressions such as “ektos t¯on kair¯on (without or far from kairós, or simply wrong) … apó kairoû (away or far from kairós); parà kairón (to the side of or contrary to kairós); pró kairoû (before kairós or prematurely); kairoû péra (beyond measure, out of proportion and unfit)” (124), which oppose a fundamental achronia and absence of kairos to the harmonious reconciliation that the term still implies. The true revolutionary time would be, from this point of view, not so much kairos as the temporality of something happening prematurely, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, suggested by the expressions indicating absence of kairos. As Boer explains: These senses all bear the weight of what is outside the zone of kairós, untimely, out of place, unbalanced and non-harmonious. And all of them may be gathered under ákairos. If kairós designates the well-timed, wellplaced and harmonious, then ákairos means the ill-timed, displaced and non-harmonious … Over against measure we have beyond measure; timely versus untimely; in the right place versus the wrong place. One who is ákairos is in the wrong place at the wrong time. (ibid., emphasis in original)

But the fact of happening at the wrong time, prematurely, untimely, in a non-reconciled dialectical relationship with the present is precisely

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

203

what can be defined as the politics of non-synchronism. The transformative and political time of praxis opposed to order and harmony, set against ideals of historical “ripeness” and wait for the opportune moment of full maturity, however, does have a name in the history of revolutionary thought: Leon Trotsky famously defined it, drawing on Marx, as “permanent revolution.” While kairos and permanent revolution share a common destruction of chronological authority, the latter also gives the field of praxis determined by kairos a non-synchronous historical and political content, mobilising the effects of combined and uneven development explored throughout this book. In the age of capital, kairos, indeed, rests on the assumption of a total commodification and total alienation of the world—what Negri describes as the scenario of “real subsumption” that works as historical assumption of his theory of temporality. Trotsky’s permanent revolution might translate some of the aspects of kairos into a historical condition determined by formal, rather than real, subsumption, which is particularly relevant to the peripheral nations of the capitalist world economy that form the historical background of the concept of world literature. The theory of permanent revolution was formulated by Trotsky in a historical conjuncture in which the struggle for socialism in Russia had to confront a challenging situation. The struggle for socialism in an economically “backward” country like Russia—still ruled by feudalism and lacking the consolidated working class proper to the “really subsumed” countries of Western Europe—could not take the same historical path as in more “advanced” capitalist societies. The question hence concerned whether Russia should have directly moved forward—from feudalism to socialism, without passing through the stage of a fully formed bourgeois state— or rather forged an alliance with the bourgeoisie and hence operated a democratic-bourgeois revolution before struggling for socialism in a subsequent phase. While Stalinist rule was predicated upon a concept of history as different “stages,” Trotsky’s notion of permanent revolution captured the possibility of moving directly to socialism in those peripheral countries in which capitalism had not yet engulfed every aspect of life as in more advanced countries. Permanent revolution, indeed, entails a concept of time that Trotsky himself described as a process of “skipping of the historical stages” (217) that would lead to socialism worldwide. Skipping the historical stages of revolution meant, accordingly, to reject a stagist idea of history based on the continuum of past, present and future,

204

F. MENOZZI

and to reopen the present to a multitude of real possibilities. As Michael Löwy writes in his pivotal study of the concept of permanent revolution: Unquestionably the most general historical-theoretical foundation of the theory of permanent revolution was the law of uneven and combined development … A new understanding of human history is the point of departure for the formulation of the law: with the appearance of capitalism as a world system, world history becomes a (contradictory) concrete totality … This more complex perspective enabled Trotsky to transcend the evolutionist conception of history as a succession of rigidly predetermined stages, and to develop a dialectical view of historical development through sudden leaps and contradictory fusions. (Löwy 1981, 87, emphasis in original)

The permanent revolution turns the economic situation of the periphery of the world economy into a hothouse for anti-capitalist rebellion and the dismantling of the system from below. If combined and uneven development means opposing the stagist and evolutionary concept of history as succession of different phases, this is because in the periphery, a nonsynchronous reality presents unexpected opportunities to divert the flux of capitalist history. As Löwy continues, this is given by “the articulation of modern industry with traditional (pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist) rural conditions, creating the objective possibility for the leading role of the proletariat at the head of the rebellious peasant masses” (88). What Löwy describes as an “amalgam of backward and advanced socio-economic conditions,” then, “becomes the structural foundation for the fusion or combination of democratic and socialist tasks in a process of permanent revolution” (ibid.). The situation of the periphery allows to mobilise the law of combined and uneven development in order to bypass the establishment of a full capitalist order mirroring and derivative of the history of the centre. Trotsky’s notion of permanent revolution, however, also relates to the notion of non-synchronism because it is intimately related to Marx’s concept of the unequal relationship between different sectors of society. As Trotsky writes: For an indefinitely long time and in constant internal struggle, all social relations undergo transformation. Society keeps on changing its skin … This process necessarily … develops through collisions between various groups in the society which is in transformation … Revolutions in economy, technique, science, the family, morals and everyday life develop

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

205

in complex reciprocal action and do not allow society to achieve equilibrium. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such. (119)

The uneven, non-synchronous dimension of society at the periphery of capitalism is what gives the term “permanent” revolution one of its key qualities. The revolution, indeed, cannot accomplish a “total” transformation in one go. If society is multiplied along a set of different temporalities in constant transformation and disequilibrium, then revolutionary activity will necessarily be endless. Permanent revolution, from this point of view, opposes a politics of non-synchronism to the synchronising power of capitalism. This gives rise to what Michael Löwy describes as a “dialectical concept of objective possibility” (Löwy 2007, 13). In contrast to determinist and teleological visions of history, Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution discloses an open temporality wherein every historical conjuncture is presented as a bundle of possibilities articulated by overdetermined, non-synchronic relationships between overlapping layers of history. Building on authors such as Marx, Bloch and Trotsky, the concept of non-synchronism explored in this research ultimately turns anachronism and uneven development into historical consciousness and possibilities of political engagement.

Notes 1. As Max Pensky notes, Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image is both a method and an “alternative temporality” set “against the predominant version of continuous, chronological time, as interruptions, discontinuities, unassimilable moments, repetitions, lags, or disturbances” (Pensky 192). The dialectical image is an object that encapsulates “in monadic form both the mythic history of capitalism and the tradition of the oppressed that hides beneath it” (193). 2. In a thoughtful intervention in debates on world literature, Bruce Robbins puts forward the idea that the sense of history needed by world literature cannot “shy away from linearity” (205) in order to register “material causality,” even if this linearity should be seen as “multiple, intersecting, overlapping” (ibid.). 3. Marcello Musto writes that the value of “Marx’s statements on aesthetics” in the Introduction to Grundrisse lie “in his anti-dogmatic approach as to how the forms of material production are related to intellectual creations

206

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

F. MENOZZI

and behaviour. His awareness of their ‘uneven development’ involved rejection of any schematic procedure that posited a uniform relationship among the various spheres of the social totality” (24). In his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx addressed the fact that at a certain “stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters” (Marx 1975, 425). This realisation leads Marx to stress the necessity to distinguish between “the material transformation of the economic conditions of production” and the “ideological forms in which men become conscious” of the conflicts between forces and relations of production (426). Fredric Jameson (1981, 327) comments on this passage in order to discuss the non-synchronous relation between literary form and historical content. My spelling of this term follows usage in English. I have kept original spelling in quoted passages. Sami Khatib builds on Agamben’s concept of kairos and notes: “The messianic seizure of chronological time subtracts the ‘productive flux of becoming’ from capital-time. It thereby designates a deactivating or inoperative ‘operation’ that cannot be translated into productive time at all” (62). On Agamben’s concept of time and revolution, see also Cesare Casarino (2003). In an important study of the concept of time in Marx, Moishe Postone explores how capitalism imposes the norm of socially necessary labour time (Postone 191), leading to a reorganisation of social time as the dominance of abstract time (206). As Postone explains in a conversation with Harry Harootunian, abstract time should not be seen merely as a normative and decontextualised temporality. Rather, Postone notes that capitalist “modernity is characterized by an ongoing, accelerating, directional dynamic. One of the tasks of a critical analysis of the modern world is to explain the basis of this dynamic in historically specific terms in ways that avoid either projecting this dynamic onto all societies and histories or denying its very existence” (Liu et al. 2012, 10). Peter Osborne (2008) offers a sustained critique of Negri’s opposition between the temporality of capital and of living labour. The scenario of continuing primitive accumulation, formal subsumption and peripherality further complicates the constitutive and immanent logic of Negri’s concept of time.

7

CONCLUSION: ON SKIPPING HISTORY

207

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press. Boer, Roland. 2013. Revolution in the Event: The Problem of Kairos. Theory, Culture & Society 30.2: 116–134. Braudel, Fernand. 2009. History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée. Trans. Immanuel Wallerstein. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.2: 171– 203. Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. 2016. Art in the Time of Colony. London: Routledge. Casarino, Cesare. 2003. Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal. Strategies 16.2: 185–206. Chambers, Iain. 2017. Art as Anachronism. http://thirdtext.org/carroll-cha mbers-review/. Accessed 30 July 2019. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2000. Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Minuit. ———. 2003. Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism. In Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, eds. Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and Out of History. University of Minnesota Press, 31–44. Hutchings, Kimberly. 2008. Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Liu, Joyce, et al. 2012. Exigency of Time: A Conversation with Harry Harootunian and Moishe Postone. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 38.2: 7–43. Löwy, Michael. 1981. Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: Theory of Permanent Revolution. London: Verso. ———. 2007. The Marxism of Trotsky’s “Results and Prospects.” In Leon Trotsky, ed. The Permanent Revolution cit., 7–14. Marx, Karl. 1975. Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Penguin. ———. 1990. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. ———. 1993. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin. Musto, Marcello. 2008. History, Production and Method in the 1857 ‘Introduction.’ In Marcello Musto, ed. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later. New York: Routledge, 3–32. Nagel, Alexander and Christopher Wood. 2005. Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism. The Art Bulletin 87.3: 403–415.

208

F. MENOZZI

Negri, Antonio. 2003. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. London: Bloomsbury. Osborne, Peter. 2008. Marx and the Philosophy of Time. Radical Philosophy, 147. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marx-and-the-philos ophy-of-time/. Accessed 15 January 2019. Pensky, Max. 2004. Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images. In David Ferris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 177–198. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 2018. What World History Does World Literature Need? In May Hawas, ed. The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History. London and New York: Routledge, 194–206. Smith, John E. 2002. Time and Qualitative Time. In Phillip Sipiora and James Baumlin, eds. Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: SUNY Press, 46–57. Tombazos, Stavros. 2015. Time in Marx. Leiden: Brill. Trotsky, Leon. 2007. The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects. London: Socialist Resistance.

Index

A Absolute surplus value, 76–78 Accumulation of capital, 1, 5, 12, 13, 17, 23, 56, 90, 94, 99, 154, 164, 168, 172 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 90 Adorno, Theodor, 23 Aesthetics, 1, 6–10, 12, 17, 33–38, 41, 75, 81, 83, 88, 106, 107, 112, 119, 192, 193, 195 Agamben, Giorgio, 157, 199, 206 Ahmad, Aijaz, 71 Alexander, Meena, 47–52, 54–56, 59–62, 64, 67–70, 72 Allochronism, 12, 13 Anachronism, 11, 34, 37, 103, 191–197, 205 Anamnesis, 119, 129, 134, 148 Anticipation/anticipatory consciousness (Bloch), 4, 8, 29, 30, 35–37, 41, 50, 51, 70, 105, 108, 117, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 158, 166, 174, 179–182, 196

Apartheid, 183 Auerbach, Erich, 135 Author, 6, 9, 10, 36, 69, 83, 88, 94, 95, 98, 106, 133, 134, 156, 166, 191, 205

B Babri Masjid demolition, 49, 71 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 187 Benjamin, Walter, 38, 85, 94–96, 194, 199, 205 Bensaïd, Daniel, 127, 143 Bhabha, Homi K., 16, 25, 26, 28, 38, 112 Bloch, Ernst, 1, 14–18, 20–22, 24–33, 35, 37, 39–42, 47, 48, 56, 68, 119, 129, 151, 158, 181, 188, 199, 200, 205 Boer, Roland, 202 Braudel, Fernand, 191, 196, 197

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Menozzi, World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41698-0

209

210

INDEX

C Canon, 5, 6, 35 Capitalism, 3–7, 9–11, 13, 15–17, 19–25, 28–38, 40–42, 49, 53, 75–81, 90, 92, 95–97, 99, 133, 152, 161, 163–167, 172, 183, 185–187, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203–206 Capitalocene, 164 Colonialism, 27, 103, 106, 109, 120, 124–126, 128 Combined and uneven development, 15, 35, 39, 203, 204 Commodification, 9, 17, 21, 31, 32, 37, 38, 65, 76, 77, 95, 96, 161, 168–171, 173–175, 182–186, 201, 203 Commoning, 185, 188 Commons, 77, 100, 163, 164, 167, 182, 184, 187, 201 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 80, 89 Conservation – conservation as accumulation, 161, 172, 184

D Dalits, 80, 82, 89, 93, 95, 99 Deckard, Sharae, 40, 163 Decolonisation, 26, 36, 47, 49, 53, 59, 61, 109, 124, 152, 158 Development, economic, 79, 93, 195 Dialectical image (Walter Benjamin), 180, 194, 205 Dialectics, 18, 20, 22–25, 27, 31, 41, 47, 68, 75, 97, 98, 119, 136, 177, 191, 192, 196 Diaspora, 106, 108, 127 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 191, 193, 194 Digression, 9, 34, 68, 85, 86, 105, 113, 114

Dislocation, 29, 30, 47–50, 56, 60, 66–68, 71, 82, 84, 85, 89, 91, 126, 127, 177 E Edwards, Caroline, 16, 30, 39 Ekphrasis, 34, 57, 165, 166, 174, 176–180, 186 Embedded narrative, 7, 9, 34, 114, 118, 119, 128 Emergency (India), 47 Enclosure, 22, 32, 162, 167, 169, 175, 177, 182–185, 187 Engels, Frederick, 158 Epic, 135, 138 Excavation, and memory (Benjamin), 85 Exploitation, 5, 6, 26, 28, 32, 37, 39, 49, 59, 65, 76, 78, 79, 81, 90, 92, 93, 96–98, 100, 107, 119, 138, 147, 151–153, 156, 172, 195 Extinction, 161–170, 172, 174, 176, 185–187 F Fabian, Johannes, 12 Falola, Toyin, 133, 134, 136–144, 149–158 Fascism, 14–16, 32, 33, 42, 49, 71 Federici, Silvia, 99 Financial capitalism, 8, 78 Flashback, 34, 105, 114, 116, 117, 173 Formal subsumption, 76, 77, 79, 95, 97, 206 Foster, John Bellamy, 53, 172, 183, 185, 186 Framing narrative, 114, 115, 128 Future, 2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 29, 30, 34–38, 40, 41, 48, 51, 62, 64,

INDEX

66–68, 70, 71, 85, 87, 88, 99, 114, 118–121, 124–129, 137, 138, 151, 153, 154, 157, 167, 179–183, 186, 197, 199, 200, 202, 203

G Ganguly, Keya, 16, 28, 29, 116 Golden Ages, 4, 7, 15, 32, 56, 59, 60, 65, 71, 154, 197 Gramsci, Antonio, 158 Green Revolution (India), 79, 80, 93 Grundrisse (Marx), 8, 19, 169, 195, 205

H Harootunian, Harry, 3, 37, 49, 77, 100, 158, 206 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 21, 22, 200, 201 Hindutva, 49, 52, 71

I Ideology, 16, 33, 49, 71, 157, 163, 185 Imperialism, 5, 29, 39, 78, 109, 124 India, 2, 48, 49, 51–53, 56, 58, 60, 61, 67, 68, 71, 75, 79, 81–83, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 105, 107, 117 Intellectuals, 16, 20, 56, 79, 95, 96, 138, 143, 155, 157, 205

J Jameson, Fredric, 5, 7, 18, 22, 23, 61, 62, 105, 106, 128, 129, 135, 136, 192, 206

211

K Kairos, 191, 192, 198–203, 206 Kandasamy, Meena, 75, 79–85, 87–92, 94–96, 98, 99 Khatib, Sami, 13, 206 Kilvenmani massacre (India), 75, 79, 83, 84, 88, 93 Koselleck, Reinhart, 26, 27, 41 L Labour, 5–7, 10, 19, 21, 25, 32, 42, 49, 76, 77, 79, 81, 88, 92–97, 164, 169, 170, 172, 187, 188, 201, 206 Late imperialism (John Bellamy Foster), 53 Lazarus, Neil, 23, 38, 41 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 79, 95 Longue durée (long-term history), 191, 194, 196 Löwy, Michael, 3, 9, 39–41, 153, 204, 205 Lukács, Georg, 8, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 24, 135, 176 Luxemburg, Rosa, 99 M Magic, 108, 120, 121, 149, 180 Maji Maji rebellion, 103, 108, 115, 120–125, 128 Marxism, 21, 22, 24, 27, 30, 32, 41, 89 Marx, Karl, 8, 10, 13, 19, 21, 22, 39, 76, 77, 99, 169, 172, 186, 187, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203–206 Mbembe, Achille, 137 Memory, 37, 55, 64–67, 70, 85, 90, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 118, 126, 127, 133, 136, 143–145, 149, 151, 155, 157, 171, 193, 194

212

INDEX

Mészáros, István, 187 Metabolic rift, 172, 173, 186 Mezzadra, Sandro, 10, 78, 100 Migration, 106, 109 Modernity, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9–14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 29, 33–35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 78, 79, 96, 97, 103, 106–108, 113, 115, 119, 120, 126, 137, 152, 157, 158, 164, 173, 174, 186, 192, 206 Moir, Cat, 41 Moore, Jason W., 164 Moretti, Franco, 38 Morfino, Vittorio, 39, 66 Mukherjee, Pablo, 164 Münzer, Thomas, 40, 151, 158 Myth, 15, 32, 55, 56, 59–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 71, 78, 98, 111, 112, 133, 134, 149, 151, 153–156, 158 N Nature, 9, 18, 20, 27, 31, 34, 51, 62, 94, 98, 109, 113, 135, 158, 161, 163–167, 169–172, 175, 183, 185, 186 Naxalite Rebellion, 89 Nazism, 30, 31 Negri, Antonio, 191, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206 Neoliberalism, 16, 47, 49, 51, 53 Nigeria, 90, 133, 134, 136–139, 150–152, 157, 158 Non-synchronism, definition of, 7, 17 Nostalgia, 1–4, 51, 106–109, 115, 120, 127, 183 Not Yet (Bloch), 29, 30, 35, 36, 99, 180–182 O Osborne, Peter, 13, 18, 100, 206

Osofisan, Femi, 151

P Parataxis, 34, 81, 85, 86 Parry, Benita, 11, 12, 33, 39, 99 Peasant insurgency, 79, 134, 151 Peripeteia, 9, 34, 133–139, 141–146, 148, 154, 155 Peripheral modernism, 1, 9, 17, 33–35 Periphery, 5, 8, 17, 34, 36, 39, 76, 78, 80, 92, 95, 97, 108, 119, 133, 152, 156, 192, 204, 205 Permanent revolution (Trotsky), 191, 199, 203–205 Populism, 2, 4, 47, 49, 51, 55, 56, 59–61, 65, 197 Postcolonial capitalism, 10, 78 Postcolonial studies, 6, 16, 23, 25 Postmodernism, 18, 83, 89 Prakash, Gyan, 52 Progress, 4, 8, 16, 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 39–41, 51, 65, 150, 174, 192, 194, 197 Prolepsis, 9, 114, 116, 118

R Realism, 9, 34, 35 Real possibility (Ernst Bloch), 99, 182 Real subsumption, 76–79, 95, 96, 203 Regimes of historicity, 35, 56, 78, 112, 119 Register (world literature), 5–7, 10, 36, 96 Regression, 4, 59, 138 Reification, 10, 11, 21, 31, 37, 177, 185 Relative surplus value, 76, 78, 79 Religion, 49, 80, 94

INDEX

Resistance against colonialism, 29, 103 Romanticism, 3, 39, 40, 68, 69 Rose-Innes, Henrietta, 161–163, 165–167, 170, 173, 174, 176, 179–181, 186, 187 Roy, Arundhati, 89, 90

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88 Simultaneity, 14, 18, 23, 30, 39, 97, 115, 128, 145, 174 Single story, 75, 90–92, 98 Sixth extinction, 162–164, 167, 171 Slavery, 10, 16, 28, 77–80, 87, 97 Sloterdijk, Peter, 36, 171 Socialism, 16, 32, 89, 203 Social justice, 16, 35, 56, 89, 91, 140, 144, 182, 183, 185, 186, 192, 197 Solidarity, 75, 94, 96, 98, 99, 188, 192 South Africa, 161, 162, 166, 173, 174, 184 Soyinka, Wole, 154 Synchronisation, 3, 13, 18–20, 30, 40, 41, 78, 103, 106, 119, 126, 196

T Teleological concept of history, 2, 77 Time, 2–4, 6–8, 10–19, 25, 26, 28–31, 34, 35, 37, 47, 48, 50–52, 56–58, 62–64, 66–68, 70, 71, 75–88, 90, 92, 93, 96–98, 103–108, 112–120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 133–135, 137, 138, 141–143, 145–148, 151–157, 161, 162, 165, 166,

213

169–171, 173–177, 179, 180, 186, 187, 192–204 Tomba, Massimiliano, 18, 19, 28, 78, 80 Totalisation, 34, 40, 75, 88, 105 Totality, 1, 11, 15–17, 20–22, 24, 37, 40, 41, 71, 88, 107, 114, 192, 195 Tradition, 3, 10, 15, 17, 31, 34–38, 49, 58, 70, 75, 89, 92, 93, 98, 108, 119, 129, 150–153, 156–158, 192, 196, 199, 205 Trotsky, Leon, 15, 35, 37, 39, 191, 199, 203–205 U Uneven development, 8, 192, 195, 196, 205, 206 Utopia, 4, 16, 20, 25, 27, 30, 32, 37–39, 41, 51, 62, 64, 99, 100, 109, 139, 152–154, 161, 165, 169, 180, 182, 192, 196, 197, 200 V Value, 9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 32, 39, 63, 76–79, 106–108, 119, 143, 150, 153, 167, 169, 170, 172, 175, 185–187, 193–195, 197, 205 Vassanji, Moyez, 103–121, 123–127 W Warwick Research Collective, 1, 4 Williams, Raymond, 39 World-ecology, 161, 163 World literature, 1, 4–14, 17, 28, 33, 35, 37, 38, 64, 79, 95, 96, 107, 119, 192, 203, 205