9
Literary: Allegoresis in Postmodernity
Any work that seeks to restore the claims on us of a long dead genre will at once confront demands for a review of contemporaneity and what it includes (or needs). To be sure, if allegoresis simply stands for the conflict of interpretations, its relevance as a problem today will be a good deal more obvious: but the claim here, that allegoresis can itself be grasped structurally in a way that puts the various interpretations and ideologies in their places, is also insufficient. It should be clear that this is not a program and that I am not calling for a wholesale revival of allegory to solve our representational problems today. Rather, this is a historical claim, one that suggests that meaningful narratives today, in late capitalist globalization, tend to find their fulfillment in structures that call for allegorical interpretation. The newer allegorical structures, however, are not genres and could never evolve into a form of that kind, one comparable to Dante or Spenser, let alone Le roman de la rose. Postmodern allegory is comparable, rather, to a one-time event, which even the writers themselves cannot reproduce: a conjunction of factors, a favorable alignment of the stars and the planets not likely to occur again. The genres often play their part in these combinations, but as reminiscence and pastiche of their former selves rather than as living models and paradigms.
As for the secrets of these ephemeral conjunctions, and the causes or preconditions of the obsolescence of the classical allegorical genre (itself never a major or hegemonic form), those all cluster within that complex of developments so often known as modernity and are best studied individually. (I have isolated a few in the preceding chapters.) The disappearance of central or foundational texts that reflect this or that organizational authority is perhaps more symptom than cause; and it is perhaps better explored in terms of the very weakening of centrality itself as a concept and a social fact. As globalization (or the world market, to use Marxist terminology) becomes an existential as well as a systemic reality, one might well wish to approach allegoresis in terms of the three fundamental characteristics that define it: population, reification, and the problem of universals (or that of nominalism, which amounts to the same thing).
But clearly many other extrinsic factors bear on the possibilities of literary form in this period: the construction of subjectivity, in which affect begins to transform named emotions into feelings that challenge language itself; the form of the contradiction as such, whose protean affects disperse the old recognizable ideologies into a host of separate ideational expressions; the deterioration of the literary institution itself under the impact of the media and a culture of informational technology; the dissolution of the so-called central subject into a plurality of subject positions or neo-ethnicities or tribes, as they are now sometimes called; and the standardization of that “second nature” of the commodified object world into what are now so often called simulacra and the proliferation of images.
In what follows it seems best to follow the consequences of all these developments for the fourfold heuristic scheme of allegorical analysis I have been proposing here. It will then be clearer why this scheme and its four levels do not simply vanish under the impact of modernity, but rather persist in more varied forms and hidden combinations. I have explained above why Felix Guattari’s concept of transversality seems useful in naming the dynamics of this transformation, in which the old levels enter on a variety of new and impermanent relationships and complex structural readjustments. These can range from the substitution of this or that level with one another, as when a thematic level momentarily takes the place of a textual one; to the relations of identity and difference among the levels, as when the traditional interpretive identification of moral and anagogical levels gives way to a play between the allegorical key and individual or collective motifs, rather than the classic combination of text and allegorical or mystical sense. These displacements are meanwhile unstable and in contemporary texts in perpetual dissolution and recombination in such a way that durable structures cannot be formed.
All of this is now thematically complicated, insofar as the very concept of a “history,” of a central story or narrative line has been culturally dispersed. (The recognizable narrative lines then become quasi-genres, like the bildungsroman, subject themselves to perpetual rewriting, undermining, and replacement.) Analysis by way of content then becomes exceedingly unreliable; and it is rather the form of certain levels that often offers the unexpected clue. Here, too, however, a given form, taken individually and in isolation, is at once open to forces of social or cultural reification, which work to turn it into an object, to retranslate it back into content. This is why binary oppositions are precious dialectical resources and allow us to identify tendencies otherwise imperceptible in the individual texts. The proposition suggested here, for example, is that literature moves toward the nullification of content, something which used to be characterized as reference to the world (or “the referent”) but which can now be grasped more precisely in a different way. The great anticipatory aesthetic statement was appropriately enough flung out passionately by Flaubert in one of his most famous letters:
What I would like to write, what seems to me the most beautiful, is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air—a book that would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.1
This has so often been taken as an expression of the very ideology of art for art’s sake that it seems only appropriate to revise its meaning radically by shifting its focus to the function of that ideology, which we may now grasp as an attempt to range artistic production among into the innumerable specializations into which capitalist production itself becomes refined. This is not to deny the Romantic crisis of art, the disappearance of feudal (and “cultic”) patronage and the panic occasioned by its abandonment to the marketplace, the moment of the emergence of romantic and artistic individuality, if not the very faint dawn of modernism and modernity itself in the realm of art.
To be sure, like all such alibis for existence, art for art’s sake can also be taken as a market slogan: the launching, as it were, of a new brand of commodity or the rebranding of something only now beginning to grasp its own existence as a commodity. For in the feudal period, art was a social relation to the patron, or to God, and a gift whose countergift was not yet understood as payment. But of course it is all of those things at once—Utopian and ideological alike, material and spiritual, public and private, exchange value and use value, and so forth. Flaubert, at the very fountainhead of this dilemma for prose and for the novel (Balzac did not understand it quite this way), is here attempting to separate his pure craft—that of the jeweler, according to Barthes—from the industrial producer of a saleable object. (Sainte-Beuve’s pronouncement of “industrial literature” is just around the corner.) And so we can also see this in Bourdieusian terms as the production of a certain kind of “distinction,” the attempt to create an activity—the contemplation of this not yet nonworldly yet already celestial form of consumption, distinct from the everyday kind—in order to secure, or rather to regain, for its producer a heightened social status, that of the Poet (rather than, say, that of the journalist, the purveyor of feuilletons for the newspaper, which emerges at this very same moment, or later on, the writer of bestsellers), who can now also obtain that different status in the form of the celebrity or the millionaire.
What I want to underscore here is rather the way in which this ideological effort moves us in the direction of a volatilization of content, a moving of the represented material away from its worldly reference. It is a purification process (here still a tendency) that can also be grasped in terms of contingency and necessity. Barthes’s famous essay on the reality effect is another appropriate reference,2 insofar as he identifies the surplus of contingency, the adding in of meaningless details simply because they exist (somewhere else, in reality), in order to certify the “realism” of the literary document. But in fact, “realism” is an evanescent effect, which vanishes with each new generation; and each realism which succeeds, competes with, and overcomes the preceding one, now unmasked as mere literature and “fiction.” Nominalism is a better category through which to view the matter; for it is the multiplicity of specializations that withdraws their justification—their “necessity”—from each of the social activities in turn. Meanwhile, as the content of “literature” becomes relativized and loses its self-evident significance, its essential reason for being, its status as “die Sache selbst,” the desperate search for an adequate replacement proceeds in three distinct directions: new and as yet uncodified or unformulated content (as in naturalism or in new psychic or marginal realms); pure form (as in the symbolisms or the nascent experimental modernisms); or an ideal of purity that is at one with the nothingness evoked by Flaubert’s prophetic letter. I suggest that faced with an increasingly stereotypical reality, the serious writer’s options become reduced to two antithetical techniques for defamiliarization (the “making strange” of the Russian formalists) which are finally one and the same: minimalism and maximalism. With the gradual exhaustion of the three strategies outlined above, it is at the watershed of World War II that minimalism and maximalism come into their own, not as styles or techniques exactly, but rather as signs and signals, as allegorical messages in their own right.
But this binary opposition should not be understood in any simplistic two-dimensional way: in fact, it should be grasped as an incommensurability, as a tension between two distinct ontologies: the first, the minimalist one, needs to include all the polemics that raged around minimalism in sculpture, as well as in subatomic physics. It is not here a question of the smallest component of the work, such as the sentence or the narrative event; but rather the components of those components, the notes and overtones of a musical phrase, the parts of speech and even their phonemics, the particles and their mysteries and dynamics, which take place below the level of human perception. As for maximalism, its pedigree includes the sublime; witness the stammering enthusiasm of the inventor of the skyscraper (Louis Sullivan):
what is the chief characteristic of a tall office building? And at once we answer: it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artistic nature its thrilling aspect … It must be tall … it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation …3
The binary opposition of the minimal and the maximal can only be productive if it thus unites in a contradictory tension two such radically different realities—subatomic particle and altitudo—in an effort to subsume being as a whole.
The question nonetheless remains, why this particular opposition should offer any privileged key to postmodern aesthetic production, and more specifically why it should be considered in allegorical terms. The second question reopens the matter of allegoresis in an unexpected way: it dramatizes the lack of autonomy of any individual work in a social field now saturated by the aesthetic in general in all its forms. What is allegorical is now that opposition into which the former work necessarily inserts itself as an index of the autonomy of culture as a whole and not the rebellious autonomy of the individual work it enjoyed in the incomplete subsumptions of a nineteenth-century capitalism.
As for minimalism and maximalism as such, they demonstrate the absence at the heart of modern late-capitalist social reality, a hollowness that cannot be the object any longer of mimesis but must now be sought either by the micrological search for the ultimate elements and atomic building blocks of being itself or by the Hegelian bad infinity of a piling on of parts that reaches to the cosmos itself. Both searches are vain, and they mark a profoundly historical opposition that must be read alongside the parallel declarations of simulation and the derealization of the image as yet another variant on our current “peu de realité.”
Camus’s L’Étranger, presumably some kind of minimalist landmark, was written a few years before the war; and monstrosities like Gravity’s Rainbow and The Tin Drum a good deal later (although oddly enough they both hearken back to that same cataclysmic event). In film, the two have seemed to have been combined, interminable movies like those of Bela Tarr or Lav Diaz moving through time with a truly minimalist deliberation in which you can virtually count the ticking of the clock as the moments pass. But if maximalism, or the mega-novel, is to count as a mode, length cannot be its constitutive feature. Nineteenth-century serial novels, like those of Dickens or Victor Hugo; twentieth-century French romans fleuves, often centering on a family or dynasty but not always (as in Jules Romains’s Hommes de bonne volonté, which might then send us back to Dos Passos and USA); complex scenarios made up of intricate and interwoven plots, as in Doderer’s postwar Dämonen—all are certainly long enough to qualify but would seem to have little enough in common otherwise will genuine maximalism.
The length of these otherwise heterogeneous products is probably best explored materialistically, by way of the institutions of publishing as such: it is clear enough in the case of serialization that the newspapers play a central role here, while the vogue of the three-decker novel, with its historical origins in class habits and taste, must also be evoked. Today, in the era of airport literature, one can note a decided shift from the two-hundred-page entertainment novel to the more substantial four-hundred-page requirements, a generic reminder that so-called entertainment sells time as such, the time of distraction (the Kindle machines, indeed, tell you how many reading hours you have left in a given text); and this social demand certainly needs to be noted in any assessment of the determinants of mass culture. As for art novels, we may assume that their public consists largely of university students, whose seminars exercise their own subtle shaping power on the aspirations of their authors and publishers: here the sheer length of experimental novels like House of Leaves becomes an aggressive challenge and a badge of nonconformism (“because it is there!”), if that urge has not already migrated into video games and invested its residual avant-garde energies in new media.
That there is a properly American genre of the long novel is, however, demonstrable. I believe that it finds its roots and ancestry in the confessional rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe and the more ostentatious “boundless sentences” of Faulkner, a veritable “Nile of language, which here overflows and fructifies the plains of truth.”4 This is not to say that it is from the content of Wolfe or Faulkner that the modern American “long novel” derives. (“All I ever learned from Faulkner,” the East German writer Uwe Johnson once told me, “is that you could put pages and pages of a novel into italics.”)
Rather, it is the interminable stream of “style indirect libre” which here replaces any classical stream of consciousness as such and allows you to put pages and pages of your main character’s “thoughts” into narrative prose. If I credit Joyce Carol Oates with the prize for this sort of production, it does not mean that most of modern American fiction does not indulge in one way or another in this kind of linguistic and narrative “productivity.”
I suppose that, in order to achieve some plausible definition of the mega-novel capable of including Wallace and Pynchon but excluding most of these other characteristically American effusions, one would have to be able to insert it into a new generic system, in the sense in which the classical genres of epic, dramatic, and lyric defined each other by a relationship in which the novel, forlorn in its lonely formal isolation, never quite achieved theoretical status.
But with the mega-novel, the system is already given in its name, where maximalism struggles productively with minimalism, each one celebrating its triumphs in relationship to the other. This is to say that you do not have a mega-novel unless it somehow explicitly defines itself against and in dialectical and allegorical relationship with minimalism. It must already have made the contingent fact of its length into a meaningful theme and a constituent part of its content; and it seems to me that this happens primarily in those specific historical moments in which the exemplarity—indeed, the very typicality or normalcy—of the narrator or central protagonist is discredited and in one way or another tainted and rendered suspect. Such is, for example, the case of The Tin Drum (1959), where no ordinary German, compromised in advance by the Hitlerian regime, can any longer be accepted as a reliable witness (or even an unreliable one, as far as that goes, in the sense in which the unreliable narrator is designed to be exposed as such and to return us to the conventional value standards of “reliability”). The witness must therefore be a freak, by definition outside of history, where he is relegated by virtue of his arrested growth, his vocal capacity, and indeed his geographical origins (in an anomalous Danzig at the forgotten “Kashubian” margins of the European nation-system).
As for Midnight’s Children (1981), Kashmir is certainly just such another place of origin as well; along with the problematic status of the New Indian (the first born into an independent nation-state), confronted by the stark alternatives of Hinduism and Islam (and by virtue of uncertain paternity and family affiliation including both), Rushdie’s protagonist, saddled with any number of other physical abnormalities, is sufficiently overdetermined to constitute a reliably unreliable witness, in a social and historical situation in which not objectivity but rather the most absolute marginality is required from the outset. Indeed, one may say in general about the increasingly corporatized and institutionalized postwar situation, from which the older forms of individuality, including eccentricities, deviations, and exclusions have disappeared, that only some exceptional and supremely unclassifiable characteristic (even this word is unsatisfactory) can serve as a satisfactory qualification, an unassailably Archimedean point of observation, for narrative registration.
The American situation is to be sure rather different from these traditionally national ones, insofar as the superstate already includes a hodgepodge of state categories and group affiliations: our mega-novels therefore seem to require a greater excess in the matter of either physical or moral norms: Slothrop’s abnormality is sufficiently complex as to require an experimental prehistory, which removes it from “nature” altogether, while Hal’s talented ordinariness—high school plus tennis genius—both historicizes him as a Holden Caulfield avatar and lifts him altogether out of the seamless drug-and-conspiracy world of his surroundings by way of Wallace’s untimely moralism and puritanism. Hal is a historical freak of nature rather than a physical or experimental one. But only by virtue of such virtuoso nonrepresentativity can Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Infinite Jest (1996) lift themselves by their own bootstraps out of the conventional category of the merely long (or excessively long) novel and stand as maximalist monuments and challenges to a minimalism they dare to come into being—a challenge mostly acknowledged only by the tired pathos of the short story of the loser, already, unfortunately, a familiar and fully institutionalized American category.
Whatever the fate of such categories, however, it is instructive to examine their origins, and in particular the seemingly privileged position of World War II in the generic changes we have been examining (and not only in those). It is thus instructive to return to that moment in Gilles Deleuze’s film books in which the philosopher finds himself obliged to deal with the contingencies of empirical history in order to ground his narrative of the great transitional event, the shift from the movement-image (filmic realism) to the time-image (a new freedom to experiment and play with the older forms in which realistic narrative consisted). Scanning the Platonic Idea of this shift in the real world, he locates the strategic interaction of these two dimensions in Italian neorealism and offers five factors in the transition, factors as historical as they are formal: the dispersion of what had been felt as a unified situation; the weakening of the sensory–motor links or in other words, of the unity of the body as actor or agent; the emergence of the balade or the wandering through space as an alternative to action; the increasing sense of the clichés and media images that interpose themselves between us and the world; and finally, the sense that everything has become narrative, that what we took to be a static reality was in fact a conspiracy.5
Clearly, these changes, these new features, presuppose a narrative of which they are the consequences (even if Deleuze does not want to call it History). It should be noted, for example, that following a characteristic French version of modern literary history, Deleuze does not distinguish between a modernist and a realist moment, but rather seems to locate the interruption of both with some more decisive break in World War II. Clearly in France, where Proust was a passionate reader of Balzac, and Barthes (no novelist, to be sure) of Zola, the realist and modernist sequences separated in other national cultures were fused together in the moment of Baudelaire and Flaubert; the more global break with that continuity which he posits can therefore not be designated by the term postmodern (a break which in other cultures in any case takes place much later, around 1980). Still, even his story could be told differently (in the spirit of his own identification of an increasingly omnipresent narrative consciousness, a consciousness, indeed, of the relativity of narratives). Thus, where he sees a movement from the perceptual to the temporal, it might also be possible to frame the same movement as one from a temporal conception of action and reality to a spatial one. But these are merely different codings, or aspectualities, of the same fundamental break, in a situation where discontinuity has become more fundamental than continuity.
And inasmuch as we are here directed to the postwar period in general, a period Hobsbawm characterizes as involving the most radical changes of experience in human history,6 it would obviously be possible to narrate that change in a variety of other ways—technological, informational, interactional, and so forth—any one of which, incidentally, could be expected to make an impact on the way we tell the more purely formal or literary–historical narrative that is our focus here. (Nor do we feel it particularly necessary to follow Deleuze’s theorization of the results of such changes in terms of what he calls the time image.)
Deleuze, however, stages his version under the sign of an organic unity—that of an action—which is in the process of dispersal. This is at one and the same time a unity of the situation and a unity of the agent of action in that situation. (The rather Greek identification of that action with movement as such seems to me to have been forced upon him by the nature of the medium in question, namely film.) Thus, he proposes on the one hand a dispersal of agency, a body gradually fragmenting into its various senses, and thereby enabling sight to emerge as a dominant; the agent losing the sense of a unified action, which weakens into an aimless displacement in space (the balade) and becoming a flâneur, whose former purpose is gradually undermined by the awareness of the mediation of clichés and stereotypes and the relativity of narrative. Meanwhile, the situation itself, in which agent, action, and setting have hitherto formed a kind of symbiotic unity, disintegrates into an anonymous spatial background, an anyplace,7 in a loss of any of the intentions or projects that would have entitled it to have been grasped as a scene or articulated field for actions, let alone a move in that larger intelligible totality we call history, or even in the personal strategies of a biographical unity, a career, a life, a romance, an adventure, or whatever other “minor epic forms” (Lukács) are still available in postmodern life.
For Deleuze, it is through the dispersal of all these features that one suddenly glimpses that unnamable and incomprehensible existential reality we call time. But one can imagine other ways of trying to put this collection of features back together, either on the level of the body, in what a Benjamin or a Williams chose to call experience, or on the level of space or of a “crisis” situation. These reunifications or “totalizations” are all in some sense choices, but they are no doubt “forced choices,” based on the availability of whatever raw materials this or that reunification requires.
I suggest that it is the concept of the episode that governs the solutions we have in mind here, offering the possibility of transforming what might otherwise simply be called fragments, parts, the illusions of a lost unity, and so forth, into forms at least aesthetically intelligible. The emergence of the episode constitutes one such possibility, as a dialectical unity of fragment and infinite extension. Still, what one notices above all is that the terms of the form-problem have been modified: quantity now takes precedence over quality, so that even a writer like Günther Grass, as he piles episode upon episode with no clear sense of innate proportions, can still count as a miniaturist, albeit a maximalist one. Meanwhile, The Tin Drum is actually radically foreshortened in its post–World War II coverage, as though the contingent date of the writing of the thing governs its breaking off—Salman Rushdie at least gave us a date, the protagonist’s age, to work with. As for Oskar, the fact that he reappears in a later book as an aged pornographer only demonstrates that quantity has its own advantages, which are distinct from those of quality.
Quality itself, however, can scarcely be said to disappear altogether; rather, it undergoes the sea change of reification. From being the stylistic spirit of a work as a whole, it becomes a kind of tangible thing in its own right, like a theme or a feature, thereby refashioned in such a way as to serve as an allegorical sign: so that the sequence of qualities or styles, as their variety governs each separate episode, becomes in itself a kind of narrative structure opened up to some properly allegorical investment. Just as a name outfits a reality for reification, so also this reification of styles makes pastiche into a vehicle for meaning. I stress this insofar as some readers have taken my account of the role of pastiche in postmodernism to be a purely negative judgment, something best refuted by an extended digression.
At this point it becomes desirable to furnish the reader with a transitional example, in which what looks like an older plot is subtly refashioned into a montage of qualities, into a series of pastiches that are themselves, unsurprisingly, an allegory of the metamorphosis of named emotions into affects. It is a metamorphosis of events into their own images or simulacra, which can most dramatically be grasped as a superposition of music upon words (recalling the predictions of Nietzsche and Benjamin alike, that tragedy or Trauerspiel would find their futures, their sublimations and dissolutions alike, in melos, the very language of affect).
The Threepenny Opera (1928), saluted by Adorno himself of all people as the greatest musical event since Berg’s Wozzek, is a splendid example of the self-multiplication of the pastiche as such, the pastiche as palimpsest, in which Brecht’s text is superimposed on John Gay’s eighteenth-century original, while Weill’s score is superimposed on Brecht in turn, each layer preserving a distance from the earlier one by way of its relationship to it. The structure is then itself something like a parody of a series of Hegelian Aufhebungen, in which the truth of the earlier layer is both canceled and preserved.
Weill’s music does more than express the spirit of Brecht’s verse; it separates the songs into distinct genres and at the same time reunifies the episodic form of the Brechtian epic drama (avant la lettre) into a quintessentially Weimar “jazz” style. So it is that each musical episode knots drama and melody together in an indissociability of Identity and Difference, which makes for a unique montage of attractions and lifts this work beyond the humdrum generic categories of satire or musical, or of didactic or thesis drama either (the appropriate “lessons” being delivered by Peachum in the form of yet another distinct genre, namely the sermon, reminiscent of James Joyce or Herman Melville or indeed of Abraham a Sancta Clara).
The Threepenny Opera, technically an earlier stage in Brecht’s evolution than the full-blown theorizing of so-called epic theater, nonetheless most surely yields its secrets in the domain of acting. For while the named actor’s body and recognizable features lend a continuity to his movement through the play, his professional versatility as a performer and player demands that—now in his capacity as “character actor”—he takes on a multiplicity not only of expressions but even of personalities and character types. (It is at these that his stage presence from scene to scene—larvatus prodeo—will point in epic theater, ostentatiously designating them as acting and as gestus.)
This is why one always feels a certain malaise in the performance of this music drama, and in particular with the inconsistencies of the character of the protagonist: a malaise swiftly dispatched and swept on beyond itself by the irrepressible and irreversible music. The Gay original constructed a now only too familiar romantic criminal and made a hero out of an antisocial marginal. It is too simple to say that Brecht makes a bourgeois out of this romantic hero without including in this representational reappropriation the whole critique of the bourgeoisie’s criminality as well: clearly the motto and ultimate morale of the piece is the grand riddle: What kind of crime is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
But MacHeath is a far more intricate figure when it comes to scene-by-scene performativity. The famous opening ballad offers him as a serial killer, the bogeyman of domestic nightmare, a highwayman no longer of the open road and long-distance coach travel but rather of the lower depths of the big city, indeed the quintessentially imperial metropolis. But this is not the MacHeath we see on stage. He first comes before us as the house-proud groom of an improvised bourgeois wedding and a chief among the band of henchmen, furnishing the borrowed theater of his festivities with all the best in stolen bourgeois luxuries. But with the arrival of his old army comrade the Chief of Police, he acquires a past, revealed as the imperial warrior and colonial occupier, mercilessly mowing down all the “new races” he meets in his path: shades of Brecht’s great model Kipling! But now the plot shifts: he has made the mistake of stealing his new bride from a great family—an aristocracy of organized crime, that is, namely the Peachums, bosses of an elaborate mafia of beggars (or of a kind of corrupt labor union, if you prefer)—he, MacHeath, little more than a petty crook with a few insignificant robberies to his name! So our protagonist is now precipitated into the altogether different plot of the young commoner daring to elope with an heiress. But each of these distinct generic paradigms is conveyed by way of a parody of itself: the aura it leaves behind is not the emotion itself but rather the latter’s memory.
We should be in our right to expect a drama of flight and persecution: but no, it is yet another and different MacHeath, a bourgeois rentier secure in his habits, who, despite the peril, repairs, as is his wont every Thursday, to the whorehouse where he is a valued and familiar patron and lovingly catered to, the routine and domestic comfort being strangely doubled and overshadowed by the persona of the sex addict ominously evoked by Mrs. Peachum’s immortal “Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”
Now, however, a new layer of the past is revealed, to demonstrate how useful this character is for bearing different kinds of unrelated content in turn (a veritable “montage of attractions” as it were): for at this point Mac and his favorite doxy indulge in nostalgia and reminisce lyrically over that idyllic past in which the great MacHeath was little more than her pimp and lived together in a rather different kind of domestic comfort, where “I was the bodyguard and she the breadwinner”: those were the days, now sadly long gone. Yet in the spirit of this aesthetic of radical discontinuity and the episodic, suddenly another note breaks through, the sublimest music of true love, which for an instant lifts these two sorry figures and their asinine words into eternity:
Die Liebe dauert, oder dauert nicht,
In dem oder jenem Ort.
(The words foreshadow the great romantic “song of the cranes” from Mahagonny.)
We may pause for a moment to reflect formally on this sequence, which must in no case be psychologized. If allegory there be here, it is not that of the postmodern multiplicity of subject positions, nor even the thematics of multiple identities, as when Peter Stein uses two different actors to embody two different aspects of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the one wallowing in Faust’s own desires and projects, the other coldly manipulating them with a view toward the downfall.
Nor does it really act out the profound and constructivist message of Brecht’s preceding play, Mann ist Mann, which demonstrated on stage the experimental possibility of taking any human being apart and reconstructing him, in this case turning the mild native fish-peddler Galy Gay into a bloodthirsty vehicle of British imperialism. Mann ist Mann argued the postmodern case against personal identity avant la lettre; here, however, I think the lesson serves as the precondition for a different kind of demonstration, the experimental deconstruction of the representations of action and experience as such, and the reduction of the reality of “real feeling” and its genres into the sheer images that are their simulacra and their affects. A row of distinct MacHeaths here conjures up an agent’s handbook of great character-actors.
And so on to the predictable ideological climaxes of this bourgeois entertainment. On the one hand, existentialism: the ultimate Mac will then be the sweaty inhabitant of the death cell, whose anguish is so vividly expressed in Villon’s terrible ballad, altered only by the characteristic Brechtian exception, the omission from this plea for mercy of the police, whose faces he earnestly prays to have battered in by iron hammers.
But the homo duplex of capitalist civilization is able to think two distinct and antithetical prognoses simultaneously; and at the same time as the individual fear and trembling of the death anxiety, there springs eternal the joyous and life-enhancing energies of the happy end: MacHeath is spared by the “messenger on horseback” bearing the King’s pardon, and everyone lives happily ever after, the characters of this particular plot subsequently reunited in the vaster and more profitable conspiracies of The Threepenny Novel.
So it is that Brecht succeeds in his contradictory venture. His great watchword was “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommit die Moral!” Hold the sermons until we have enough to eat! Only his own sermon (this moral itself!) is smuggled into the autonomous work by way of Peachum and his own hypocrisy, which is less a psychological trait than a structural feature of bourgeois capitalism, the sermon delivered by way of the parody of a sermon.
Formally at any rate, we may here salute the emergence (the reemergence from ancient literary practice, perhaps one should say) of the episode, as the synthesis between maximalism and minimalism: the smallest analytical unit, which can nonetheless be multiplied indefinitely in a kind of aesthetic version of Hegel’s bad infinity, pointing toward an imaginary totality in the same way that the minimal solution designated an imaginary nothingness as its end term.
The philosophical problem that poses seemingly intractable problems for an interpretation of this kind is the triangular relationship between episodism, allegory, and affect. Each of these poles works against the others and speaks against any coherent theoretical and historical combination of the three. The tendency toward episodic fragmentation, in either minimal or maximal mode, would seem to undercut any reading that seeks an intelligible sequence or series in the work in question: allegory is to be sure a unique and second-degree kind of sequence, in which the unity of the work’s moments is secured by a seemingly external structure, a narrative form like that of the journey, or some more abstract notion like that of redemption. On the side of the episode, then, it is always a question to what degree it can be ranged under such a more unified organizational structure without forfeiting its autonomy.
But from the perspective of affect, it is the identification of the episodes as components of any kind of identifiable whole that is called into question. The historical emergence of affect, as well as its conceptualization as a phenomenon in its own right, had as its driving force the resistance to and negation of those very abstractions and their names, designations in which the named emotions were perceived as substances and which allowed them to be organized into systems of various kinds. Affect then acts as a kind of nominalism in opposition to the universals of the named emotions, and any attempt, however vague and general, to distinguish the various affects with a view toward arranging them in a sequence (positive–negative, tragic–triumphant, calm–agitated, bored–manic) compromises the existential uniqueness of the unnameable experience and stands in contradiction with the very spirit of the new feeling, itself the motor force in the reduction of a general action into so many unique and incomparable moments. In this sense, the presence of affect can only be identified as such by way of the opposition to the traditional named emotion it undermines; and is thus itself intelligible only as an allegorical phenomenon, a pole of a merely symbolic opposition.
These philosophical dilemmas (or contradictions) explain why there can never be a truly coherent and satisfying structural account of the new affective allegory, but only unique realizations that are unclassifiable and come into being as the result of a contingent conjunction of features, unrepeatable and incapable of generic classification. The works that thus come into being can at best derive momentum from the memory of genre, from pastiche, and not from any preexisting form. Their content becomes the simulacrum of content rather than any objective social reality. Here, for example, it is the association of class and history—a raw and undeveloped bourgeoisie, a unique political conjuncture—which meet in the cultural stereotype of “Weimar” and lend The Threepenny Opera its ephemeral unity as a picture-book of stereotypical scenes and situations from the “life” of this period, guaranteed by the allusive of this eighteenth-century prototype (just as Ulysses is legitimized by its Odyssey parallel), which supplies all the working unity the play requires.
Thus, minimalism and maximalism can be seen to work two sides of the same street, dutifully knocking on the doors of formal and material possibility: it is probably on the poetic level of words and syntax that they become more starkly irreconcilable, the isolated syllables of a Celan or an Ungaretti contrasting sharply with the deeply held breaths of the pseudosentences of an Ashbery or a Prynne, with their delight in syntax for its own sake, producing innumerable montages of incoherent messages and pastiches of speech. Silence has been something of a fetish in contemporary discussions (the equivalent of “death” in humanist criticism?), but the idea of silence is most often a pretentious theme and as it were a mere Barthesian sign of the theoretical and the literary-critical; the reification of language would seem to offer a more productive clue for further exploration.
At any rate this particular dialectical opposition between the minute and the interminable offers at least one possibility for allegorical analysis in the postmodern age, where the belief in the literal level, or indeed any form of literality, truth, reality, empirical existence, and the like is subject to the variety of corrosive doubts expressed in Deleuze’s factors, which at once set in to undermine and “disperse” its certainties, rendering the term fictional, among other things, derisive and inoperative.
In that spirit, let me examine a novelistic contradiction that has less often been taken as seriously as it deserves: I mean the incommensurability of the individual sentence and the overall plot. The former is supposed to be the execution of the latter, as the shooting of an episode might realize the indications of the storyboard, or the performance of a play its text or scenario; but I think that this particular opposition has deeper philosophical consequences and implications. One might restage it as the gap between the perceptually empirical and the ideal totality, if it is a question of hermeneutics; and I think that this is also the case, and that the antinomies of reading are only one example of the disintegration of simple traditional realism today and probably of the opposition between materialism and idealism as well—none of them any longer offering any clear-cut ideological alternative in a historical situation in which they have come to be understood as the linked dialectical opposites of a single ideological dilemma in its own right. Indeed, we might return this omnipresent duality to its place in the political as such, and recode or re-identify it as the incommensurability of daily life—the existential experience of the individual subject—and the immense invisible totalities of the capitalist world system, the network of finances or of informational mechanisms, of military alliances or even warring partners that depend on one another to keep military investment going, to perpetuate the competitions which are themselves the very logic of a unified system (which is to say, a contradiction in terms). The political form such incommensurabilities have taken is always the attempt to coordinate a local social issue, with its own recognizable cast of characters, of heroes, allies, villains, and the like, and the ideological stakes of some global anti-capitalist or pro-American strategy as it gets fought out on other levels, sometimes with an altogether different and incompatible set of personnel.
At any rate it is something more than a matter of mere attention or concentration when one reads the individual sentences each one for its own sake, or on the other hand, uses them as stepping stones, as rapidly as possible, to come to the narrative payoff, like Eliza crossing the ice. I have often used the example of Flaubert and how reading speed determines the very nature of the object to which his name is attached: at one rhythm offering the very prototype of a modern realism, at another the appreciation of a multiply savorous nascent modernism, and at its slowest pace that postmodernity Sartre discerned when he spoke of the immense gaps between each sentence (those fateful silences again!).
But Kafka will be an even more relevant example here, in a context in which it is time to assess the ideological import of the minimalist–maximalist tension. For what a standard realist reading of The Trial or The Castle identifies as this or that form of the suffocating or existential nightmare, a far slower attention to the sentences themselves reveals, not only to be Kafka’s Chaplinesque humor (something only Thomas Mann was willing publicly to acknowledge), but also a line of hyperlogical ratiocination in which alternative narrative possibilities are weighed and tried out in succession (a stylistic peculiarity I have analyzed else-where)8: a hyperrationality utterly at odds with the oneiric progression of events at the narrative-realist level.
On this choice the profoundly allegorical nature of Kafka’s novels depends. Everyone knows the conventional “conflict of interpretations” in which Kafka commentary has been immobilized virtually from the first discovery of his works. This conflict opposes interpretations of a religious bent—the rulers of The Castle, the supreme instance of the tribunal in The Trial, as figures of the unknowable divine—to politico-historical fans who see these fables, the one urban, the other rural, as a commentary on the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or, if you should wish to amalgamate both of these views to some more generalized sense of oppression and faceless domination, there remains the individual or existential reading, in which they express the angst of the human condition or even the neuroses of the individual Kafka himself (tubercular like Albert Camus), living his life out as a bureaucrat (he worked for the state insurance company) under a death sentence.
All of these “interpretations”—and I hasten to add that they are not arbitrary but rather that the text solicits all of them and that we cannot not interpret it globally and figuratively in any single interpretive code—are to be ranged on the final levels of our allegorical system: clearly enough the traditional ones fall into the categories of the “moral” or individual, or else the “anagogical” or collective, levels. They are in other words secondary projections of the first two levels, which designate the text and its allegorical key, respectively.
No doubt there is some sense that these works of Kafka, along with any number of the canonized texts of modern literature, are for us in some sense “sacred texts.” Their literary evaluations (as “great works” or masterpieces) is only the crudest symptom of our deeper feeling that they somehow remain privileged expressions of a modern reality that would be radically impoverished if we lost them as formal testimonies, as precious fever charts, of a disease as yet unidentifiable (let alone curable).
But what is the textual level of such sacred texts? And what can be the allegorical key of texts produced in a secular society, which can know only the most arbitrarily imposed ideological consensus? I suggest that it is precisely the opposition between the minimal and the maximal that can provide a way of disambiguating these seeming undecidables. The literal level will vary depending on whether you assign to it the individual sentences themselves (the minimalist dimension) or the narrative as such (the maximalist version). At that point the other alternative will become the allegorical key to the literal choice; and the edifice of your system will evolve either into the politico–existential duality I have sketched out above, or into the literary history of the form problems posed to modernism by a secular raw material as such and the problems of the contradictions of capitalism. I would like, therefore, to suggest that the first of these alternatives—the seemingly more historical and biographical one—is in reality a humanist construction of an idealist type, not terribly different from the interpretive structure demanded by Camus’s The Plague: a secretly tripartite one, owing to the subsumption of both moral and anagogical levels into this or that version of the so-called human condition. That it is the second, seemingly formalist and formalizing alternative that is the truly “materialist” or “scientific” or at least concretely political one I obviously enough believe; but it will be enough if their differences have been convincingly articulated.
This has so far been as it were a vertical analysis of the present-day practice of interpretation, whose allegorical structure is meant to confront secular relativism only in the sense in which it allows us to dismiss sham ideological conflicts as so many dialectically related oppositions and to replace interpretive decisions in the concrete space of genuine political choice. In this sense, the analysis need not be limited to literary objects but holds for a wide range of issues and realities in the social sphere in general.
But I have not yet dealt with the more specific and contemporary issue of postmodern interpretation, where the seemingly postideological mood of cynical reason and radical depoliticization encourages the conclusion that interpretation is no longer possible, or that it is no longer desirable, or, finally, that it is so democratically widespread as to be utterly devalued and in the long run politically worthless. Let the text be its own interpretation, runs this conclusion in areas where texts still exist and are read; and this is precisely my position here, namely that we do not impose allegorical interpretations on texts but that they rather today tend to allegorize themselves.
How to form a narrative out of a sequence of qualities or affects? I have already alluded to the golden idea of Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie. But other musical analogies are available if we want to use them. There is Sibelius’s enigmatic Seventh Symphony, for example, with which he deliberately terminated his career and spent the last thirty years of his life in a (perhaps none too symbolic) compositional silence. Its single movement assembles whole blocks of separate thematic developments, any one of which might have been unfolded into a whole sonata-type “development,” but which are here foreshortened, tantalizingly incomplete and unsatisfying, following each other like waves of the sea, each one of them leaving luminous debris and gleaming froth behind them to be projected into future riptides to which they are alien, an incomprehensible momentum promising climaxes and returns on which it never delivers, arising to some fever pitch of an undiagnosed restless malaise only to be broken off by an inconclusive ending, a mere stopping point, as if, like Nielsen’s analogous Inextinguishable (his Fourth Symphony), it were a mere drought of the sea, drawn up at random and then poured back again.
But it may be better to come at all this more analytically, by way of number and its seemingly rational properties. Indeed, I have often been asked whether it is not some numerological obsession that drives me to frequent use of two distinct fourfold systems that seem to have no relationship with one another: the Greimas square and the present fourfold system of levels. There is an answer to this, and it has to do with two shifts in postmodernity that seem to me both interesting and fundamental: difference and spatiality.
The latter has to do with visual schemata and what Deleuze calls “diagrammatism,” something abundantly visible in structuralist (or French) thinkers and a good deal less common in dialectical (or German) ones. I see this tendency as part and parcel of the replacement of a preoccupation with and experience of temporality in modernism proper by a wholesale spatialization of which “writing” is only one version. It has to do with a supersession of synchrony over diachrony, a development Fernand Braudel explained by the enormous proliferation of specialized theories and disciplines, which turn the search for a simple linear cause, a simple linear narrative of causality, into a conjuncture or meeting place of multiple “factors” (including the temporal ones) in an atemporal present of thinking9: at that point, then, the relationship of the factors to each other needs to be visualized and not surcharged in time, where, as in Chinese “black letter” characters, they become illegible. Space then becomes a kind of multitude of synonymies, ambiguously translatable or substitutable, which one has to articulate and which form the hinges of the Greimassian rectangle, the mediators that enable passages from one logical context or relationship to a different one and thereby bring a whole system into emergence and legibility. Much more could clearly be said about this kind of diagrammatic practice that prospers in theory, but to which an old-fashioned philosophy prefers the logical argument or reasoning, the propositional steps in time.
This does not yet, however, account for the emergent primacy of difference over identity in the postwar years; for that we need to go back to Hegel and that crucial moment in the dialectic in which identity gives way to difference and difference turns out to be identity scarcely disguised (identity defining itself by what it is not, differences requiring a certain identity to be more than mere distinctions, oppositions and contradictions being the next steps, and finally the return to ground).10 The problem with the fourfold levels lies just there: they are correlations of difference, which seem to offer thinking only the most mechanical and arbitrary mediations from level to level: visual parallelisms which scarcely speak for themselves or make their own case.
Returning to the polemics that still swirl around the difference between the symbol and allegory—but which return strengthened by the prestige of metaphor as the inner logic of the symbol—one notes that it rests on purely psychological arguments (arguments, in other words, which somehow presuppose a human nature as their basis), and that their persuasiveness is dependent on a logic of similarity: metaphor is, indeed, a temporal act of identification where difference turns out to be similarity.
Allegory, however, turns initially on difference; and the Greimas square, as a bundle of distinct negations, is an apt vehicle for its analysis. For it is the garish differences between the very modes of the levels—subjectivity or collectivity, narrative and ideology—which then turns into an exploration of their more secret identities and affiliations. Allegory is a scan, mobilized by a search for differences and negations; while metaphor is a flash grenade that blinds you for an instant out of time. In metaphor you go no further; whereas an allegorical bent follows each identification on to the next level of its difference, and, as in the Greimas square, the difference of its difference; its narrative is that of differential consequences, and transversality scrambles the levels of those, leaving us in unexpected places, and in particular in that missing fourth place, the negation of the negation, of which I have spoken elsewhere (see Appendix A).
But the square, and allegory in general, depend on another principle altogether different from the rather visual one of similarity—that of undisambiguated synonymity, a place in which the multiple words throng like so many shadows or souls of the dead, their differences elbowing each other and seeking possession of the central signifier (which does not have to be a word, but of which words are the easiest versions). Movement then, like ritual possession, takes place within the multiple personalities of the signifier itself and articulates its capacity to annex radically different contexts. Far from the empty signifier of Laclau and Mouffe, this is a vessel of excess, its associations pouring out in all directions, which allegorical structure is there to organize and to channel. This is what Benjamin called “the violence of the dialectical movement within the allegorical depths”; it is the logic of multiple publics, in which each group, from preteens to genders, takes something away for itself. I would use the word universality if it did not simultaneously carry with it the twin overtones of stuffiness and stigma: but surely universality is allegorical and not just some univocal pronouncement. Yet the final word of allegory is political in any case, with the reassertion of the demands of collectivity in its ultimate, anagogical, instance.
Still, these two diagrams seem to have little in common and to have been constructed for utterly different purposes, which a visual combination will hardly suffice to reconcile. I think we must here adjust the Greimas square to a different kind of negation, which I will call aesthetic or generic. What one term denies of the other—whether absolutely or in some very specifically antagonistic and antithetical way—is not its logical meaning, but rather its generic consonance. We may evoke that fine and strong word incommensurability here, for it is rather the unrelatability of wholly different dimensions to one another that is affirmed. But this very unrelatability itself creates a new kind of coherence, one that I have tried to express with the slogan, “Difference relates!” It is this teasing out of the radical inconsistency which creates a new relationship, as when we affirm the incommensurability of a biblical chronicle of events having to do with the Hebrew people with the biographical and hagiographic genre of the life of Jesus. One must avoid drawing artificial similarities here to that of Moses, the revolutionary protagonist of the first narrative; that would be another kind of fulfillment allegory. Here what is essential is that collective history and an individual life, even one of supernatural properties, have nothing formally in common with one another and that it is this very radical difference that makes their intersection here so piquant.
Negation thus here designates what distinguishes the levels from one another qualitatively rather than logically, what causes a shift in the reading process and foregrounds an attention to the multiply generic rather than to the content and its coherence. Thus, the historical chronicle of the destiny of the Hebrews is quite different in its allure and categorical reception than the hagiographic biography of a local faith healer and his disciples; but at the same time the chronicle has little enough to do with inner life and the states of the soul. Yet the life of Jesus also has a generic opposite: it is the fate of mankind as a whole, the last judgment as a concealed fourth place. This is then the sense in which the four levels are sharply enough distinguished from one another in quality for their interpretive and allegorical reunion and superposition to form a complex stamp or surcharge, a world-historical statement:
A longevity (owed as much to late capitalist pharmacology as to Shavian will power and the life force?), which ought to have made me a more receptive registering apparatus for the historical than those with less exposure, has on the contrary begun increasingly to convince me of the phenomenological, the experiential relevance of Althusser’s famous sentence, “The lonely moment of the last instance never comes.” It is traditionally read as the evocation of a kind of raw epiphany in which production and the base would suddenly open up before us as before an abyss. I now think it means that we never have any direct or immediate experience of History, and that the moments in which it seems nearest or most dramatic—that moment in a Viennese hotel in 1956 when a child, peeking around a column timidly asked me, “Magyar?”; or when in June 1959 I passed among bearded men in the Havana airport and failed to find the Revolution in the crowds of its downtown streets and shops—reduce themselves to empirical detail, their objectivity quickly swallowed up in the subjective and assimilated to autobiographical anecdote. Memory doesn’t exist. Later on, of course, society at large will know this confiscation of the real by means of an overdeveloping media, only too ready and willing to turn even that glimpse of History into an image and drawing us all with it into what we learned was the simulacrum (or the society of the spectacle). Change—what Baudelaire famously regretted in Haussmann’s (truly historical) rebuilding of Paris—slowly turns into the memory of nostalgia films about the 1950s and the detestable Eisenhower era, now as alien to us as the habits and customs of the ancient Greeks, or of Weimar, themselves also, however, safely out of reach in the sheltering arms of cliché and stereotype. The youthful Marx, so touchingly portrayed in Raoul Peck’s admirable film, turns out to be a genre portrait from the old-fashioned storytelling of historicist novels and Hollywood biopics: you are there! A shout in the street! Panicky crowds fleeing the police in the distance, across a deserted avenue!
It is a situation in which no scrutiny of the famous “trace”—of the potsherds or of those surviving buildings Edward Yang searched for in his film of a still Japanese Taipei, the “monuments” so many people wanted to build (and then theorize!) to commemorate a past they could no longer find anywhere—none of these desperate measures and searches ended up detecting the carbon dating or the faint atomic signature of historical radiation anywhere.
This is, I will claim, a crisis of symptomatology: and I conclude, at least for myself, that the only adequate symptoms are to be found in the surviving works of art the past has left behind it. But not in their content: in the forms themselves and their slow mutation, emergence, or decay, a process in which their approach to the Real or retreat from it requires us to come to terms with representation as reality and to adjust such unwieldy apparatuses as the one I proposed here to detect the significance of its inevitable failures.
I conclude with two novels that exemplify the internal process of allegorization within postmodernity and which do so on the alternate yet complementary modes of maximalism and minimalism by way of generic signals and pastiche. I wish to avoid calling them postmodern novels, as this adjective has currently taken on a more specific and generic meaning today (just as “postmodern” philosophy has come to designate a distinctive new cynical and relativistic philosophy in its own right, quite different from theories which address and respond in their various ways to the historical situation of postmodernity). I understand the postmodern novel as naming a specific type of avantgarde or experimental book that designates itself and its own process of production and has as its content a play of narrativities not terribly distinct from the “relativisms” allegedly affirmed in so-called postmodern philosophy, and stemming, according to the latter’s critics, from the omission of categories of truth, or in the case of the novel, of the fictional. These specific genres (of novelistic or philosophical discourse) themselves claim the ideological positions associated with the modifications of reality associated with a new universe of global media: they are aesthetic manifestos or philosophical ethics or ethical programs in their own right and can therefore be considered as ideologies.
The novels I have in mind, however, are not merely symptoms of postmodernity, they are also instruments designed to explore this unparalleled new universe of late capitalism; and as such they constitute one-time experiments, uniquely constructed laboratory situations, which cannot be replicated in their author’s work, nor can they serve as paradigms for the formation of new genres.
I have characterized the revival of extinct traditional forms in the postmodern as a practice of pastiche; and have tried to show how that practice echoes and in many ways replicates the preoccupation with a relativity of multiple narratives in so-called postmodern philosophy. But in my first illustration, the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell,11 this transformation of older narrative forms into a pastiche of their former selves, this practice of a kind of foregrounding of style in such a way that it is itself an object of representation, becomes itself a content and a formal reflexivity: the six episodes that make up this work are indeed imitations of six distinct styles, six distinct historical genres, thereby transforming the novel of which they are constituent parts into a new kind of metanovel whose narrative is the sequence of the genres and styles themselves, rather than a playful and nonbinding work within any one of them (as when, for example, a contemporary film imitates classical film noir canons, or a novel pretends to offer the satisfactions of a latter-day bildungsroman).
It may seem paradoxical to classify what nowadays seems a relatively short book of some three or four hundred pages as an exercise in maximalism, when the foundational works in that tendency offer a dialectical shift from quality to quantity and confront us with the well-nigh indecent demands made on our attention by thousand-page-long “baggy monsters” (as Henry James rather unreasonably described the Russian masterpieces of his era).
But Cloud Atlas offers us, after all, a journey that begins on sailing ships virtually redolent of the era of Captain Cook and takes us forward to an unimaginably distant future populated by dystopias and postapocalyptic tribal villages in a time span which it might have taken a James Michener thousands of pages to navigate, and compared to which the relatively restricted chronologies of Infinite Jest or even the biographical dimensions of The Tin Drum or Midnight’s Children pale in comparison. Meanwhile, it will be noted that all of these last and more properly maximalist works are unified (if that is the right word) by genealogy and can still claim to be mutant reversions to the older family novel. This is, to be sure, precluded by the deployment in Cloud Atlas of breaks rather than continuities as the narrative medium of historical time and change; and its eschewal of the invention of a single bombastic style production in favor of a curatorial juxtaposition of various period styles and forms in succession.
These may now be enumerated, passing from the initial travel diary or log to the fin-de-siècle epistolatory narrative of the first two chapters, which represent our past. It is to be sure a relatively recent past (the voyage from New Zealand to San Francisco, as ancient as it seems and suggestive of the eighteenth century, is in fact a nineteenth-century event; while the young composer’s letters from Bruges also evoke a symboliste era long since over and done with, even though rather recent as the crow flies): this effect of distance, however, very much corroborates Hobsbawm’s sense of the changes wrought in world history by World War II, which are so radical as to consign everything that preceded them, even in the twentieth century, to a distant, increasingly alien and incomprehensible past. It should also be noted that the two genres imitated in these first two chapters are relatively marginal ones and stage their historical moment not in the way it liked to see itself—the realist novel, the symphony—but rather from its own not yet mass-cultural minor forms. Kant loved to read travel books, a taste consistent with a life lived entirely within one city; but this very taste confirms the as-yet-undeveloped spaces of the life of earlier periods, without airplanes or automobiles, with poor roads and cumbersome vehicles, where even an eventful sea voyage à la Melville is the epitome of extreme spatial restriction. As for the music of Delius and the master–apprentice situation evoked in the second episode, the unique atmosphere of Bruges, the rather Balzacian drama of the undiscovered young genius and his Werther-like suicide—all this also seems to concentrate and distill a variety of Romantic and post-Romantic or symbolist aesthetics with picturesque places and situations far enough from contemporary life and culture and only unified by the theme of cruelty and exploitation that runs, virtually unnoticed, throughout the harried chapters of this seemingly episodic work (“the strong do eat/the weak as meat”).12 One may also be reminded of that Faulknerian work in which the author combined two unrelated and unsalable novellas into what we might call an “assemblage” that the publishers, duly impressed, at once brought out in book form. Is it possible, then, that David Mitchell has here simply pasted together a batch of unsuccessful juvenilia, arranged together and stitched up in some more or less acceptable consecutive order? If so, they were certainly very talented efforts indeed; but the emergence of such formations as installation art in present-day curatorial practice testifies to a historical development in which the quality of the part has little enough to do with the value of the assemblage as a whole and of that one-time unique ideal form that arises from the idea of such juxtapositions. In any case, Faulkner did not write a pastiche (save perhaps of his own style in later years), while Proust’s extraordinary collection of such performances (in Pastiches et Melanges) consisted in the virtuoso imitation of famous and identifiable masters, such as Balzac or Madame de Sévigné.
The marginality of these first two “historical” chapters then gives way to the outright acknowledgment of the dominance of mass culture in the second pair, in which a lurid American tale of corporate malfeasance and conspiracy is followed by a scurrilous plot to sequester and institutionalize an aged and failing, embittered English publisher for his money. The two backgrounds are distinguished by the characteristic paranoia of the first and the class acrimony and nationalist passions of the second; and they represent the discourses of investigative journalism and popular thrillers, respectively, in their accounts of the two modes of domination of our period, big business and wealthy dynastic families. They can be said to find their realism in the depiction, not so much of our realistic social situations (although they are not, in that sense, unrealistic) as rather in our fantasies about those situations, in which the faceless corporate enemy and the fears of the powerlessness of old age—the anagogical and moral levels so to speak—paradigmatically evoke our deepest and most widespread anxieties.
But this is the moment to underscore another less visible system of continuities in this ingenious novel: for by definition a pastiche necessarily evokes period fantasy and activates the kinds of fears and anxieties proper to the age it expresses as a cultural dominant. But such associations and subjective experiences also necessarily demand transmission and a material vehicle of communication; and so it is that Cloud Atlas is also a novel about media as such. Its deeper continuities lie in the relatively unobtrusive way in which each episode is linked to the next by way of a well-nigh material vehicle of communication. Thus, the young composer of the second chapter avidly reads the bound volume in which the travel narrative of the first has been printed. The heroine of the third or conspiracy chapter has inherited the packet of letters in which the drama of the second is conveyed. Her story, meanwhile, is given us in the form of a manuscript submitted for publication to the elderly publisher victimized in the sequel, while his own sad tale is filmed in a lively Guy Ritchie fashion, boisterous with UK accents of all kinds and surviving in a film-bank passed on down to the North Korean–type inhabitants of a far-future dystopia of obviously science fictional character (but having more in common with Soylent Green than with 1984) and transmitted by way of a judicial interrogation reminiscent of that most ancient of all dramatic genres, the trial.
Here we approach the tipping point at which a great historical turnover sends us chapter by chapter back in time to finish each of these stories in what can only be called happy endings (despite the deaths of some of their protagonists). For the dystopian future tale of the unhappy Sonmi—conveyed by way of the archaic genre of the trial and the interrogation—is unexpectedly transmitted through a three-dimensional holographic capsule (à la Star Wars), which becomes the basis for a new religion of suffering and redemption.
It is this religion that is transmitted to the postapocalyptic reversion to primitivism and barbarism of the “final” episode, told in a dialect reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn and describing the rescue of a peaceful tribe of human survivors, threatened by a warlike neighboring tribe, by advanced scientists who have also survived in some secret pocket of the remaining earth and who contemplate the fate of their fellow humans with the sympathy of an alien race from another planet. History ends here, in this final oral tale (where it will have to begin again, if at all), abandoning us to make our way back down, through history, overshooting our own present and landing as it were in a San Francisco halfway between Melville and Norris (and in American rather than British or world literature, as befits an expatriate author who has spent his life in Japan and Ireland).
We can now map out the allegorical levels navigated by this unique work where the very notion of history itself is at stake. The moral and anagogical levels are clearly enough articulated by the ambiguity of the theme of persecution and domination, which can be read either as a representation of collective agency—imperialism, the great corporations, bloodthirsty tribes, and the like—or as an inventory of all the personal and individual forms of suffering such domination can take, from fear to filial resentment, from physical danger to virtual confinement, and so forth. The articulation of the common situation into its subjective and objective forms then offers an alternative focus in which the work can be read. But it is in the initial choice of the allegorical and literal levels that the most interesting and decisive choices must be read. For the work gives itself alternately as a history of styles and a history of media, which might well be read as a subjective or idealistic and an objective or materialistic version of the same history. Indeed, history will emerge as the raw material and also the very subject of this work in any case, but which version of that history emerges is dependent on our determination of the literal level: which is the more real, subject or object? And it is the very transversality of this choice, which one constantly reverse in reading, that certifies the allegorical principle of this “historical novel.”
The levels in Cloud Atlas might then provisionally be schematized as follows:
ANAGOGICAL: the cruelty of the various historical regimes
MORAL: the crushing of the weak or the rescue (tragic or happy endings)
ALLEGORICAL: the development of the media
LITERAL OR HISTORICAL: the sequence of styles (pastiche)
One may then use this scheme to demonstrate the operations and effects of that discovered transversality. For everything depends on the relative positioning of the allegorical and literal levels. If I take the literal level as the historicist sequence of styles or pastiche with which Cloud Atlas furnishes, then the interpretive level—the allegorical one—becomes a materialist reminder of the formative role of the media in just such an ideal sequence. If, on the other hand, it is the development of the media that is taken as the essential story this novel has to convey, then style becomes the cultural correction of a mechanical materialism that proves itself to have been an intellectual, that is to say, an idealist construction in its own right. (Sartre once powerfully reminded us of the not-so-secret idealism of vulgar or mechanical materialist interpretations.)13 Meanwhile, the humanist or moralizing interpretation with which the book tempts us is also put in its place as itself a kind of reflex or overtone of a wholly different kind of structure; while the vision of history—itself deriving from a subgenre of Science Fiction—is reabsorbed into the series of pastiches of a lower level of the text.
Given such displacements, it is nonetheless important to point out that nowhere here do we touch History as such, or the Real. Pastiche is not historical, it is historicist; it projects the relativism of the historical periods and not their inexorable and infrastructural logic. This is why artistic work with pastiche needs to be confronted with a very different type of production more closely approximating what Barthes long ago prophetically termed “writing degree zero.” This will be, as the reader already guesses, the place for some narrative minimalism, of a rather different type than that displayed in the evolution of lyric poetry.
I will suggest that one place to look is Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder.14 It is not an “experimental” work (let alone an avant-garde or “postmodern” one), but rather the sober description of an experiment and of the process of constructivism insofar as that can be represented by way of a series of events. For in a sense, the maximalist passively receives the flood of simulacra and records it in the release of unconquerable linguistic debris; the minimalist, however, proceeds from the other direction and patiently seeks to reconstruct these empty events, these unpeopled stage sets that claim to be the real, all the while discrediting themselves as what philosophy calls semblance or sheer appearance (Schein). But it remains a question whether they once existed or whether they were always simply the phantom member of imaginary bodies: that peu de réalité of which the Surrealists were once willing to speak.
In other words, one is entitled to wonder whether amnesia is a satisfactory narrative excuse. McCarthy’s hero begins with that, indeed—not merely an accident that wipes out his previous life, but also that insurance claim which mysteriously endows him with the money to outfit and launch his great Experiment, which is something like the artificial creation of Life itself. This thereby with one mighty Gordian stroke solves two fundamental form problems, namely (a) how to begin when there are no beginnings (a problem literature shares with philosophy) and (b) how to elude the historical form-and-ideology critique which searches for its clues and symptoms in the raw material, in the contingency of the situation which makes this particular narrative possible. How, in other words, in the context of bourgeois literature does the hero or heroine get enough money to live whatever interesting drama the novel thinks worth showing us? In art, however, artfulness consists in arranging matters in such a way that these damaging questions do not arise in the first place. Here, McCarthy confronts them in the crudest, boldest, most admirable way, and simply cuts the famous knot. There was a settlement: I don’t remember when, where, how, and what.
The narrator then, like any good theater manager, will begin to shop around for the raw materials his author no longer needs to supply in advance. He will reconstruct a scene, a particular event, which he supposes to have happened on the strength of a crack in the wall that seems to stimulate his nonexistent memory. That crack is the famous “silence” I denounced a few pages ago: it is the hole in the world, the secret emptiness, the geological fissure that is the legendary path to the underworld (maybe that at least is real!). Locate the right building with the right southern exposure, the right windows, the right courtyard; hire actors who are also somehow and unaccountably the right ones and in the right number. Assess the weather at the right time of day. Have an eye to the most minute gestures (construction is also an analytic method, breaking the larger unities up into their most insignificant parts). When everything is right … At that point the demands of everyday realism set in again: what do we do with our new event (for this society, at its technological level, the instinctive answer might be, record it for all time!), and better still, what do we do after it, and finally, how do we break this off and this constitutes the antithesis to our first form problem or better still, its return as its own opposite—the problem of endings (sometimes pompously baptized closure).
The novel is not the story of the solutions to those problems (which might have taken the more truly postmodern form of a filming that preserves and reifies the constructed simulacrum for all eternity), it is the story of the problems themselves; and the rented plane in which we circle interminably over Heathrow, waiting for the gas to run out—this plane is the novel itself; in a later novel, McCarthy will cunningly suggest that it does intervene in the real, at least by interrupting the flight plan of all of Europe and putting any number of scheduled takeoffs on hold—perhaps in itself a worthy enough achievement, for did not Benjamin himself claim that revolution was not acceleration but rather pulling the emergency brake? So it is that constructivism leads to nihilism, and we would prefer to believe in natural processes, however imperceptible. It is the human age, the world of commodities, the eclipse of nature by this second nature of construction, that is meaningless; we would prefer to think that what it ended up universally displacing, concealing, repressing, occulting, maybe even stifling and destroying—namely nature, or the world of needs—used to be the real one. But that is no longer believable, that is to say, the prehistory to which it nostalgically appeals is available only in the past–present–future dimension of temporality, which has been abolished. The phenomenological present is the problem: it is an empty mailbox, a dead phone, an agenda without appointments.
I suppose, however, that even nothingness might mean something, might have its own inner allegorical structure; and so, without too much conviction, I offer this representation (it is nothing but a reconstruction):
ANAGOGICAL: the simulacrum
MORAL: amnesia
ALLEGORICAL: producing and directing
LITERAL: the empty present
At least one feature is clear: if nihilism there is (or minimalist silence, if you prefer), at least it incites to activity. This is not pessimism, or melancholy, or depression: it is what Faust saw at the beginning of biblical creation: the act, die Tat. This is a joyous novel, full of people doing things, however incomprehensible; it is far from the modernist gloom, the modernist dejection of unemployment and inaction or even of the ecstatic high of drugs and rock-n-roll. But perhaps, as some contemporary philosophers affirm, it is aesthetic rather than epistemological or ontological; and maybe praxis is still poesis. But ontological aesthetication does not exactly seem the right treatment for an already overly aestheticized age. Still, perhaps existentialism was aesthetic after all, in its insistence on the choice and the deed? And is not a making a form of production?
To be sure, the formal tendencies I have been calling maximal and minimal are themselves from one thematic perspective simply those of the dual temporality on which we have come to insist in these books, namely the increasingly abstract idea of a past–present–future temporal continuity (the totality of world time) and that of the living instant which each individual subjectivity is given to live as best it can. These temporalities—abstract and concrete, if you like, or philosophical and phenomenological—are to be sure inseparable; but it is only by their distinct and separate formal developments and expressions in the two artistic traditions that one can begin to perceive a difference that turns out to be an identity.
It would be tempting to invoke the long-standing figure of matter and antimatter and to suggest that these two representations simply cancel one another out. But for one thing, that would be to ignore the double sense of negation as such, which suggests that alongside antimatter there also exists a logical space for nonmatter. But it would also ignore the dialectical position according to which these two negatives—the maximalist and the minimalist—are in fact simply one and the same: two antithetical perspectives, so to speak, on the single unrepresentable reality which is reality today.
But perhaps, in this era of globalization, the question of national allegory ought to kick in here, for our juxtaposition would have lacked all legitimacy without the shared nationality—the commonality of a national situation—that authorized my choice of these two emblematic works. That both are in one way or another British—so that the maximalist and minimalist visions might somehow reflect the unique coexistence of Imperial and isolated or insular self-identifications—merely reflects the unique content of the multiple nationalisms and national traditions today, for which collectivity is always a lost object if not simply an affair of mobs and conspiracies. I suspect that the maximal and the minimal are to be found, conjoined, in different forms, in all the national literatures of the world market, inflected, in equally different ways (as these two novels are), in an uncanny science-fictional cast, by the half-light cast by some unknown future. Utopian allegory is presumably one of the jumbled mutterings emanating from that future, but we still have much work to do on our speech recognition technologies to identify, let alone to represent it.
This book began life as a methodological proposal that gradually developed into a formal history. It may not come as any great surprise to find that its story also developed into an allegory in its own right, whose political consequences it is not inappropriate to draw as a provisional conclusion.
Modernity—setting aside all the problems loosed by this suspicious word—began with differentiation, or so Luhmann teaches us; this emergence of Difference characterizes the great historical transitions from what Weber called traditional societies into those powered by the emergence of all kinds of new specializations; new mental faculties; new zones of reality; and new projects, ambitions, productive activities, subjectivities, and varieties of human flora and fauna.
Allegory turns out to be one way of sorting through these multiplicities and finding analogies between the differentiations, identities among the differences: the “levels” relate fully as much as they separate. The Greeks, in their small and ferocious communities, discovered abstraction and the universals as a way of organizing their language and ordering the chaos of an older “pensée sauvage”: this was a philosophical path and a logical one, and indeed ended up in the establishment of both philosophy and logic—born not out of the spirit of music but rather of mathematics, itself a supreme exercise in the dialectic of identity and difference.
But it turns out that another force is at work in the emergence of Greek philosophy, even from its pre-Socratic origins: and that is the category of substance, one that derives from the visual practice and experience of separating one object from another. Today we have a philosophical word for this force: it is reification, and perhaps it is time to pay a brief tribute to this much maligned phenomenon, whose spirit is after all that of the production of objects as such, or, put another way, of that supreme activity that makes us human and that defines activity itself. (Recent theory has had a field day demonstrating how much of human life is taken up with the production of what can now be seen as new objects: new desires, new kinds of thinking, new forms of social relations, new feelings, new sins and virtues, and so on down the line to new gadgets and new technologies: these demonstrations indeed ground that new philosophy or ideology we call constructivism.) It was all very well for Marx to insist on a fundamental distinction between two kinds of production or reification, that between externalization and alienation. This fundamental political reminder (how an object can become private property; how the very category of objecthood encouraged another and less admirable human potentiality) did not, except for Nietzsche, sufficiently underscore the seeming entanglement and inseparability between the notion of the object and the philosophical category of the substance (a commonsense Aristotelianism against which the modern notion of process will struggle interminably!).
This is the point at which to reintroduce one of the key players in the present book, namely personification. For personification is itself the allegorical figure of reification; I have posited it at work in its virtual form in the name itself and the act of nomination, but the name itself is surely the form reification takes in language, and personification unites both name and objecthood. Names are the very heartland of dogma, and their baleful power extends from the sacred exaltation of the tyrant all the way to medicalization, the -isms, and the brand names of both commodification and the pathologies of the self and its mirror images.
In a sense, then, we have staged our story of the allegorical impulse as a struggle against personification, struggle between personification and a certain modernity (or process), a desperate attempt to de-reify what differentiation has brought about in the way of “fixed ideas” and named concepts. To be sure, this struggle has been successful to the degree to which it has destroyed traditional allegory itself, replacing it (when necessary) with symbols on the one hand and empirical realism on the other. I have tried to chart this movement in a discussion of the shift from what I called named emotions to what is now widely termed affect: a shift that fully as much constitutes a new construction of subjectivity as it marks a date in the history of ideas.
So to put in a good word for personification at this stage would seem to involve a reversal and a defense of reification from a new and hopefully political perspective. Here and there throughout these chapters, we have hinted at the way in which the interrelationship between the various levels of allegory invents connections between dimensions or reality otherwise imperceptible in the complexities of modern social life. Never have such complexities become so impenetrable in the global class society now emerging across so many different kinds of barriers. To mention only the most obvious of the interrelationships everywhere lacking today, we may affirm that political action and effectiveness is only possible when great collective projects find their allegorical resonance—their identity as well as their differences—with the existential experience of individuals in an atomized society. Meanwhile, our fourfold scheme has shown that such resonance, as complex as musical overtones, always includes transformed subjectivities, narratives and their interpretations, the Event, vertical crises and transversal horizontalities, and a sudden opening onto the perception of the totality as well as of the radical differences whose identities make it into a conjuncture.
The flash of a social map of this kind, however, demands the legible points of a constellation, a new kind of reification, which must replace the sense of drift and tendency with the identifiable space of a cast of characters, a personification of friend and foe, a movement of social classes in conflict and in alliance: classes in formation, perhaps, where everything static about traditional personification is replaced with the process of personifying and of identifying agencies to come. This is to set the allegorical machinery in motion and to grasp it as an instrument of political perception, if not, indeed, a precondition of great prophecy, whose current absence leaves only a desolate landscape of dystopian simulacra on the frozen screen of history. The far future, however, the ending of Wells’s Time Machine, life extinct, the sun burning out—these are certainties the remedy for which can only be found in Mallarmé’s magnificent consolation—que c’est d’un astre en fête allumé le génie. But they are imaginary certainties, which Freud posited as concealing the more real worries of the present. The human animal is an essentially incompetent species, finding its heroes in specimens who, like Napoléon, exceed the norm only by a degree or two. The glory of the Anthropocene, however, has been to show us that we can really change the world. Now it would be intelligent to terraform it. But symptoms of the future are far less reliable than symptoms of the present.