Category: _b20_blockhover

by Tom Eyers

C. Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

In his Literature and Revolution of 1924, Trotsky commented of the then-influential Russian formalism as follows: “The formalists are followers of St. John. They believe that ‘In the beginning was the Word’. But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed as its phonetic shadow”.[1] A more direct statement of the materialist suspicion of formalist abstraction it would be hard to find. For their part, the individual formalists held significantly different attitudes towards their Marxist rivals, although the following from Viktor Shklovsky reveals in all of its enjoyable snark the contempt that threatened always to leak to the surface: “We are not Marxists, but, if we ever happen to be in need of this utensil…we will not eat with our hands out of sheer spite”.[2] If one group charged the other with a bloodless idealism, the other was as likely to level accusations of vulgar economic reductionism, to be resorted to only when every other method at the feast had been picked over.

Needless to say, debates as to the relative merits of formalist approaches to literature in comparison to those apparently more attuned to the social and political are hardly new. My decision to begin this essay with Russian formalism was more or less arbitrary; one could, after all, go as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics for the putative origin of what has threatened to become an ossified and intractable stalemate; a gloss of the Lukács-Brecht debates would have been just as apropos. Since 2000, questions of form have reappeared with some urgency in literary studies. By 2007, the ‘new formalism’ was enough of a phenomenon that it merited a comprehensive survey by Marjorie Levinson, published in PMLA.[3] Moreover, recent calls for a return to form have often been couched in a critique of prevailing historicisms. Since the dawn of the ‘new historicism’, itself a reaction against the hyper-formalist attention to paradox that defined deconstruction, obscure parliamentary debates have been as likely to be invoked as explanatory of a text as its use of metaphor or metonymy.

But are our options truly so limited? Hasn’t the very best of literary theory always combined an attention to trope and figure with a concern for social, political and historical pressures? Perhaps, although there is always a danger that such a surface eclecticism may shade into an alibi for the avoidance of any confrontation with what is specific about literary form, as compared to other forms, as much as it may also encourage a swerve away from asking precisely how, and why, literature is impacted by, and impacts upon, processes that are nonetheless irreducible to it. To say that literature is always-already political surely makes sense on one level, insofar as no instance of cultural production escapes being enabled or disabled by prevailing historical, social and political conditions. But from a different angle of approach, one that I’ll be concerned to flesh out a little in what follows, this apparent commensurability between literary and social forms may well be the result of a prior incommensurability, one that exists as a condition of possibility for the very distinctiveness of the forms in question, no matter how much they be said to intertwine all the way down. To preview, it is these latter, knotty, theoretical problems that the book under review doesn’t quite get to grips with, as deeply impressive as it otherwise is.

There are many different ways in which one might go about rethinking form in literature, not least because there are numerous distinct ways in which ‘form’ itself might be defined. Despite it being a general category, and heedless of its long and storied philosophical history, ‘form’ in literary studies most often names particular devices: meter, allegory, metaphor, metonymy, voice, diction, and so on. This nominalism results, despite itself, in the production of the most general of general categories, namely ‘literature’ itself, for despite the reigning historicisms of the last few decades, it is still the relative density of a text’s tropic texture that allows us to distinguish it as literary or non-literary in the first place, and this despite the numerous indeterminate cases that one may invoke. Of course, to propose any definition of form is to inevitably produce an account of content, and the resulting dichotomy threatens, in its inflexibility, to obscure as much as it enlightens. As Wellek and Warren had it, way back in the 1940s, “’Content’ and ‘form’ are terms used in too widely different senses for them to be, merely juxtaposed, helpful; indeed, even after careful definition, they too simply dichotomize the work of art. A modern analysis of the work of art has to begin with more complex questions: its mode of existence, its system of strata”.[4]

It is questionable whether the problem is solved by the mere replacement of one set of ambiguous terms – form, content – with another – ‘system’, ‘strata’. And the problems multiply when one seeks a positive, rather than simply negative, purpose for the reiteration of formalist dilemmas. The negative motives are easy enough to list: most importantly, history, instead of being a question to be answered, has threatened to become a catch-all explanans to be passively assumed, bringing with it an obfuscation of what makes literature, literature. But what of positive motives? What is to be gained by foregrounding form once again, if indeed we can agree on a definition of what ‘form’ is? An avenue to be staunchly avoided, I think, is what could be characterized as a ‘retreat’ into form. Such an impulse, while masquerading as positive – ‘form is where the literary in literature is to be found, and thus it should be the focus of our attention’ – is in fact just one more jerk of the knee, in this instance in response to the supposed politicization of the critical humanities in the last few decades.

Such a politicization, itself concomitant with the rise of the various historicisms, is to the contrary to be celebrated, not least for giving us a much more capacious sense of the varieties of literatures, and the uneven contexts of their production and reception. In some of the ‘new formalist’ literature[5], it is argued that Marxist criticism in particular has been deaf to form. And yet, anyone who were to seriously study the formalist-Marxist debates in Russia referenced at the outset, or who were to conduct even a cursory reading of the back and forth between Brecht, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno, who were to immerse themselves in the brief efflorescence of Althusserian criticism, or who were to read just one of Fredric Jameson’s rapidly proliferating books, would find extraordinarily subtle dialectical articulations of form and history, form and politics, form understood to be always-already embedded in multiple precincts of influence, the social awkwardly intercalated with the literary, the historical itself, in its Althusserian reformulation, an already-formal arrangement of overdetermined and contingent boundaries and limits. There are significant drawbacks to all of these approaches, for sure, but a convenient forgetting of their fecundity should hardly serve us well.

One way forward, one already to be found in nascent form in some of Althusser’s scattered reflections on art and literature[6], would be to insist not only on the historicization of form, but also on the formalization of history. This would involve a simultaneous attention to how particular formal devices have their own, politically-inflected histories – think, for instance, of the political stakes of the debates over the alexandrine in French poetics in the late nineteenth century[7] – and a scrutiny of how those devices performed their own reconfiguration of those historical determinants, making of what might otherwise have been a one-way direction of causal travel an unpredictable and always-singular feedback loop, one that results not in the ‘democratic’ mirage of social and literary forms singing in harmony, but rather in a kind of productive, material dissonance. Sticking with our example from French prosody, consider how, in his ‘Crisis of Verse’, Mallarmé was able to diagnose the apparent stubbornness of French traditionalists’ retaining aspects of the standard sonnet form, while sneaking in aspects of the poetical freedom pursued across the Channel, as itself a kind of radicalism, exploiting the electric tension thus conducted on the page between Racinean restrictions and vers libre.[8] What Mallarmé doesn’t say, but what our putative method might be able to pick up on, is how such impure admixtures of form are themselves capable of arguing for newly sophisticated and ultimately extra-poetic historical and political positions. In this instance, we might speculate that such a commitment to poetic unevenness in the face of the call to absolute experimentation, far from being an instance of Anglophone-like moderation and compromise, was in fact the sign of a much-needed skepticism as to the ability of the lifting of literary restrictions to immediately conjure equivalent freedoms at the level of the social or political; Wordsworth, it could be argued, reached a similar conclusion by the end of his career, albeit with rather more quietist implications, and much, of course, to the dismay of the second generation of British romantics.[9] In some of what follows, I’ll argue that one particular kind of poetic formality, the curious constructedness of poetry, its habits of self-reference, rather than resulting simply in solipsism, produces instead the very transport of poetic form outwards into the nonetheless distinct domains of the social and political.

Caroline Levine plots a different course, albeit with comparable motives, one widely deserving of praise, if also some not insubstantial criticism. I will begin with a treatment of the theoretical opening pages of the book in question, before turning to her case studies in order to see her method in action. At the very opening of her highly suggestive Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine lays out what a standard formalist analysis of Jane Eyre might look like. A critic embarking on such a reading would attend to “literary techniques both large and small, including the marriage plot, first-person narration, description, free indirect speech, suspense, metaphor, and syntax”.[10] Such an analysis would, it is implied, be likely to exclude social and historical questions. By contrast, Levine’s new formalism would rather trace the often-agonistic parity between those forms seemingly enclosed within the bounds of the literary text, and the forms and structures into which social life sediments. Levine draws our attention to the following passage in Jane Eyre, the action taking place after the ringing of a school bell at Lowood School. The girls “all formed in file, two and two, and in that order descended the stairs”. Responding to a verbal command, the children arrange themselves into “four semicircles, before four chairs, placed at the four tables; all held books in their hands”.[11] Critics, Levine writes, are used to “reading Lowood’s disciplinary order as part of the novel’s content and context…But what are Lowood’s shapes and arrangements – its semicircles, timed durations, and ladders of achievement – if not themselves kinds of form?”.[12]

This is only an initial example of the methodology employed across the book as a whole, meant perhaps only to set the scene, and Levine meets the first obvious objection rather well. “One might object’, she writes, “that it is a category mistake to use the aesthetic term form to describe the daily routines of a nineteenth century school.”[13] And yet as she rightly points out, ‘form’ as a term has hardly been restricted to aesthetics. Rather, in its very generality, ‘form’ has traveled through politics, through philosophy, through innumerable other domains, and it may nominate a particular object or describe a general property of a class of things. But does this historical usage justify treating with the same analytical brush Brontë’s use of metaphor, say, and her description of the spatial outlines of a social institution? Levine argues her case forcefully, noting that: “it is the work of form to make order. And this means that forms are the stuff of politics”.[14] Thus, Levine’s new formalism, far from shutting out questions of social and political import, will rather widen their pertinence, to include the rhyming couplet as much as the disciplinary enclosure of space or the distribution of self-regulating bodies. As a consequence, “[t]he traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere”.[15]

But hasn’t a crucial question been elided here? Even as Levine celebrates the ‘dissolving’ of the barrier between text and context, she presumably wouldn’t wish to claim that there is, as a result, absolutely no distinction to be made between the words that make up Brontë’s narrative, and the arrangements of space that are her referent. Presuming this much, we are still to learn how it is that these two very different things are to be explained according to the same, now highly capacious, perhaps too capacious, definition of ‘form’. Even more importantly, how do these different forms come to relate to one another at all? To use a now unfashionable parlance, what is the theory of reference that underpins Levine’s account? One thing is clear: for Levine, there is no unidirectional line of causality from context to text, as in the less reflective of historicist readings; indeed, there is an even more radical argument about causality here that I will come to shortly. We get something of a more positive answer with Levine’s borrowing of the term ‘affordance’ from design theory. Affordances, we’re told, “describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs”. Thus: “[a] fork affords stabbing and scooping. A door-knob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing, and pulling”[16], and so on. Forms, on such a reading, are not merely reflective of a prior cause, content, or context; rather, they are active agents in their own right. Even literary forms, in their very abstraction, have affordances, one infers. But one wants to ask again how, precisely, one specific class of forms – literary forms – gain purchase on those other forms that jostle for attention? Or, in Levine’s terms, what are the particular affordances that literature possesses, over and above the material and action-oriented uses to which other forms may be put to use – which is not to say that literature itself may not have its own, specific material and action-oriented consequences? I will return to this question in much of what follows, it being, I would wager, a problem rather often avoided in much recent literary theory.

The reader may have noticed the distinctly Latourian cast of Levine’s analytical language, and it is a surprise that Bruno Latour is mentioned only twice in the main body of the text. Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’ has made much for decades now of how human and non-human ‘actants’ enroll and resist one another in a great tangle of moves and counter-moves. What I will come to call Levine’s liberal-ecumenical vision of formal complexity shares some of the same limitations inherent to Latour’s anthropologically-inflected social theory. One encounters an especially Latourian inflection when Levine raises the question of causality:

The first major goal of this book is to show that forms are everywhere structuring and patterning experience, and that this carries serious implications for understanding political communities…In theory, political forms impose their order on our lives, putting us in our places. But in practice, we encounter so many forms that even in the most ordinary daily experience they add up to a complex environment composed of multiple and conflicting modes of organization – forms arranging and containing us, yes, but also competing and colliding and rerouting each other. I will make the case here that no form, however seemingly powerful, causes, dominates, or organizes all others.[17]

I wonder whether the appeal to the theory/practice dichotomy here is more telling than it might initially appear. Latour has been especially critical of the legacy of theoretical critique, of what we can refer to by shorthand as ‘critical theory’.[18] In Latour’s case, one surmises that this is, in large part, a distaste for Marxism especially, and while Althusser, Gramsci, Jameson, Roberto Schwarz and numerous others have done much to complicate the model of causality inherited in the tradition, it would still be fair to say that doing without a theory of causality at all, as I think is implied by the final sentence above, would be unthinkable for every but the most ‘post’ of ‘post-Marxists’. And for all the usefulness of the language of overdetermination and structural causality, it is hard to imagine a major Marxist work of criticism in the last 50 years or so, from Raymond Williams onwards, that could have gained much analytical purchase without this most central plank of truly critical writing. And one also wishes to ask who, including Marx himself, ever argued for a theory of literature or society that privileged one form apparently able to ‘cause, dominate, or organize all others’?

Levine’s skepticism goes further. As well as lamenting the reductions of causal analysis, she also draws on Roberto Mangabeira Unger to lament any emphasis on deep structures or hidden ideological causes, ranging herself implicitly in solidarity with the trend for ‘surface reading’ first announced by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus.[19] Such a structural focus, Levine laments, “limits our attention and our targets to a small number of the most intractable factors, factors so difficult to unsettle that most people abandon the attempt altogether. What if we were to see social life instead as composed of ‘loosely and unevenly collected’ arrangements…?”.[20] Just as Marcus and Best rather crudely mischaracterize the ‘depth reading’ that they wish to contest, so Levine risks recourse to the straw man here. After all, the best of structuralist reading, in both its formalist and Marxist manifestations, understands structure not in monolithic terms, but rather as, precisely, multiply caused and complex. But where structuralism would still, nonetheless, wish to maintain a nuanced but firm rubric of causality, Levine’s ecumenicism – or, to be less generous, eclecticism – threatens, I think, to replace analysis with sophisticated description. The condition of a globalized capitalism is much as she intimates: hyper-sophisticated, hyper-mobile, making little of previously intractable barriers to temporal and spatial transport. But these are also, yes, surface features that frequently obscure the  division of labor that conditions their existence. And what is to be gained by recoding our oppositional languages of analysis in the terms of those phenomena we wish to challenge? Might we further lose what little critical edge literary theory may still, potentially, possess by glossing it in the same, quasi-Deleuzian terms, as the site of what Levine calls “collision” – “the strange encounter between two or more forms that sometimes reroutes intention and ideology”?[21]

Thus far, I have concentrated only on the opening, general theoretical vision offered in the book. My task now is to test my excitement at Levine’s bold vision and my skepticism as to signal aspects of that vision by reference to her case studies, organized around the central ‘forms’ of wholeness, rhythm, hierarchy and network. Along the way, I will sketch an alternative emphasis, one that may adopt the best of the Marxist tradition while not losing sight of literature’s capacity to absorb and reroute those variables that impinge on it from without.

Wholes 

It is fair to say that wholes and totalities have been held in some suspicion in recent theory. One of the strengths of deconstruction, but also surely one of its weaknesses, was its almost-exclusive attention to how seeming unities are, in fact, unstable masks for difference. Levine’s chapter on wholes, the first of her book, is one of its strongest. She acknowledges the usefulness of deconstructing wholes when such unities exclude more than they include, but also observes how “we cannot do without bounded wholes: their power to hold things together is what makes some of the most valuable kinds of political action possible”.[22] I wonder, though, whether this insightful observation, one that would presumably make a virtue of types of more or less hierarchical political organization that have otherwise been unfashionable on the Left for some time, is in tension with Levine’s theoretical commitment to the decentered tessellation of mutually enrolling formal actors. Presumably, Levine would wish to acknowledge and celebrate both possibilities, although it is at this point, at this moment of an all-emcompassing inclusiveness, that the harder, properly political job of decision – of choosing one form or tactic over another – becomes all the more pressing.

Of particular use in this first chapter, at any rate, is Levine’s demonstration of how a consummate anti-formalism, Mary Poovey’s in this case, must in fact rely upon a tacit commitment to form to ever get off the ground. Poovey has made much of the claim that even post-structuralism had to rely upon forms of totalization and boundedness that it rhetorically set itself against. It is, then, something of a scholarly coup to prove, as Levine decisively does here, that the rather pious historicism that Poovey sometimes risks purveying is as formalist as any other analytical procedure must be. The argument is obvious, for sure, but striking for all that: “It is important to note that Poovey’s book [Making a Social Body] is itself organized by the single containing form that she criticizes: the concept of the social body” and “her central terms – cultural formation, body, domain, economy – are…containers, unifying concepts that can gather together disparate objects and traverse historical periods and contexts”.[23] In some of the more severe historicist criticisms of theory, one sometimes gets the sense that conceptuality itself may be dissolved in the acid bath of the tantalizing historical anecdote or glinting detail; it is useful to be reminded that these accouterments would not be legible without the affordances of form, or, in a more Kantian register that Levine flirts with but never quite commits to, without language’s structural conditions of possibility.

The positive examples offered by Levine of the affordances of bounded wholes are equally interesting. Taking as her source Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian state of the nation novel North and South, Levine contests those critics who have read in the novel’s ending a quintessential example of the suturing function of ideology. Endings are here read as that which cements the novel form as a whole; Levine quotes Terry Eagleton, for instance, who famously located in the neat endings of canonical nineteenth century realism the imposition of artificial bourgeois unity.[24] But as Levine notes, the ‘ending’ or ‘closure’ of the novel’s form is also a beginning and an opening: “what the novel imagines in its conclusion is really not an enclosure at all, but a beginning  – the launching of a series of social and political relationships…that have significance as a model for the nation precisely because they will endure beyond the narrative’s end”.[25] There are, admittedly, a whole host of philosophical problems around the status of fiction that are glossed over here; what does it truly mean, after all, to say that fictional relationships carry on after the conclusion of a novel? It may well be that Levine means to evoke those real social and political relationships that North and South fictionalizes, but this would require a finer theory of fictional reference than is provided here.

But Levine’s intention is not just to find openness where others have found closure, or to expose open-ended forms where others see only oppressive boundedness. In line with her ecumenicism, openings and closures are allowed to coexist on the page. Of more moment is Levine’s interest in instances where different forms collide. In line with a number of recent critics, North and Soutb is read here as a novel impacted by transatlantic political pressures, etched into the very geographical distribution of the novel’s action. The industrial traffic between the North and the South of England relied in part on the flow of cotton from the antebellum southern US; while Southern England generally supported abolition, as did Gaskell, the North supported the status quo, a geographical inversion that prevents Gaskell, so we’re told, from resolving the different forms that make up her novel. But why?:

[t]here are at least three forms at work…: the form of the novel’s ending, which offers a set of contracts and agreements that are intended to organize relationships into the future, and the forms of two split nations, each seeking to create unity across differences…there is no way for Gaskell to resolve the bounded shapes of North and South into a satisfying conclusion…In the end, she opts for the unity of her own nation [via the marriage between a Northerner and Southerner at the novel’s conclusion], but she is distressed to find that she has necessarily sacrificed both her own abolitionist commitments and her desire for another nation’s unity along the way.[26]

It’s an intriguing argument, albeit one made almost entirely with a fairly conventionally imagined notion of historical and social context. Levine’s broader intention to expand our definition of form beyond narrative shape or poetical meter is well taken, but one wishes that she had been more explicit about the specificity of the relationships between the forms she is so keen to trace, whether or not some minimal notion of causality might have helped in the process. Presuming that the geographical arrangement of the United Kingdom is not literally reproduced on the pages of Gaskell’s novel, what happens to such a geography’s political valences when they are filtered, mediated, formalized, through the various micro-displacements of literary language? To answer such a question would require a closer reading than Levine often seems willing to pursue, at least here, perhaps in the fear that doing so would reproduce the ahistoricism of formalisms past. But I wonder whether a sufficiently close reading might, to the contrary, find at moments of apparent formal insularity, of the most solipsistic points of a literary structure, the place at which apparently ‘external’ social or historical variables are transformed, are rendered literary. This, at least, was the intimation of Paul de Man, whose late essays came close to identifying the dihesences of literary form as an especially salutary source from which to trace what the critic explicitly called the ‘materialist’ interruptions of history. Suffice to say, the full consequences of this late turn toward history as a formal instance were muted by de Man’s premature death.[27]

 

Rhythm

Something of this possibility is, nonetheless, explored by Levine in one of the more impressive close readings of the book, a treatment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry that concludes the chapter on ‘rhythm’. The republican Barrett Browning’s ‘The Young Queen’ (1837) makes use of the occasion of a royal succession to explore various kinds of temporal passing, or what Levine calls “the organization of temporal experience” in this “national event”.[28] The poem explores how one moment of passing away – in this case a literal one, the king’s death – must be rudely interrupted by another transfer, the passing of power to a new monarch. Multiple rhythms come together in these stanzas: “the moment of death, the ceremonial time of the funeral, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the abrupt transfer of state power”.[29] But Levine’s attention here is not simply on the social times and spaces evoked by the poem – a focus that threatens to seem one of content, not of form – but it also falls on the formal metrical means by which those phenomena are transformed and refigured on the page. There is no clear cut means by which the meter of the poem supports or undermines its content; as Levine notes, “Barrett Browning opts neither for a highly regular, standardized rhythm, as might celebrate the peaceful transmission of power, nor a jerky and abrupt one, such as might point to the shock of death as an integral part of the institution of the monarchy”.[30]

Instead, the poet chooses an imperfect but nonetheless regular rhythm, one both redolent of traditional prosody and productively distant from it. This is not, Levine insists, a mere symptom of Barrett Browning’s liberal gradualism, her choice of political reform over revolution, but is rather an attempt to give each distinct social and political tempo evoked by the poem its own space and emphasis, while insisting upon their inextricable intercalation. “We cannot have the peaceful transmission of power without death”, Levine writes; “we cannot bury the measured and respectful ceremony while also waiting for the young queen to feel ready for her new responsibility…The social situation…demands the coexistence of multiple tempos – the simultaneous workings of diverse speeds.”[31] Predictably, perhaps, we’re back to the teeming agon of forms that is the book’s signal motif, almost its theoretical tic. But Levine makes another, more original claim, namely that the awkwardness of the meter renders it “notably incommensurable with the forms of the social world”. “This”, Levine writes, “is a poetry that proclaims the independence of prosody, its refusal to be read as merely epiphenomenal”.[32] But the surprising implication of this is, for Levine, a democracy of forms, each unable to fully dominate the other: “like other rhythms, poetry can impose order on time only in a social context constantly organized and reorganized by other tempos”.[33] Somehow incommensurability shades imperceptibly here into a network of easily commensurable but distinct entities in polite conflict with one another. After all, if this poetic form was truly incommensurable, how could it be ‘reorganized’ by other tempos? Isn’t part of what makes something incommensurable its resistance to influence from those things with which it cannot be made congruent?

But why should this universalization of agonistic formal interaction result from one form’s bid to assert its contingent independence, its relative autonomy, to coin a phrase? Doesn’t poetic form instead have an unfair advantage over the other forms in question, given that it is, after all, a poem that we’re reading, and not a report or work of journalism? And might this not be a good thing, given that, as readers who have, at least at this putative moment in time, chosen to read a poem rather than, say, a work of political theory, we may wish for something particular, even special, from poetry’s specific capacities? This may be as true for relatively conventional verse such as Barrett Browning’s as it is for poems whose formal properties are more clearly experimental or out of the ordinary. Consider the final, rather overwrought stanza of Barrett Browning’s ‘Cry of the Children’:

“Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna;” 
    [[Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children.]]—Medea.

They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,

      And their look is dread to see,

For they think you see their angels in their places,

      With eyes meant for Deity ;—

“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,

   Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart, —

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,

   And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ?

Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants,

      And your purple shews your path ;

But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence

      Than the strong man in his wrath![34]

If, instead of assuming that the poem’s forms mix seamlessly if agonistically with its social referents, we remain faithful instead to Levine’s initial thesis of incommensurability, where might we locate its effects in this concluding stanza? The poem is, clearly enough, a sentimental, state of the nation address, indicting widespread child labor. It is not, on the whole, a poem that has found favor with modern critics, who have, needless to say, preferred irony, indirection, indecision. Dorothy Mermin has called the poem’s meter “awkward” and has lamented the poem’s “appeal to our feelings” as “inartistically explicit”.[35] More recently, Victorianists, Levine included, have sought to redirect attention to the powerful ethical claims that make of the poem a forceful social actor. The poem’s detractors, in other words, make reference to the poem’s form, while its defenders focus on its content. But what if we were to combine the insights of both camps, while stripping Mermin’s commentary of its negative tone? For the meter is, indeed, awkward; the poem resists a lilting or mellifluous rhythm, one that might heighten the poem’s sentimentality while perhaps smoothing off its rather overbearing religiosity, and neither does it adopt a martial thrust, one that may underscore its attempt to rouse action. As Levine rightly notes, the meter is neither here nor there, neither regular nor exactly inconsistent. More technically, the poem is arranged in two lines of iambic pentameter, followed by a line of seven iambic feet, a combination not unlike the ‘poulter’s measure’ identified by the 16^th Century poet George Gascoigne, where lines of 12 and 14 syllables alternate.[36]

The effect of all this, however, is, I think, rather different than that identified by Levine. Where for her, the slight departure from expected form supports the poem’s ecumenical arranging of ‘multiple tempos’ (although I’m not sure one ever quite receives a precise argument as to how this form of mutual support occurs), I would instead argue that the poem’s rhythm grants a distinct sense of artificiality to proceedings. By pointing to itself, even if only subtly, the slightly ungainly tempo of the verse underscores a constructed domain, a domain in-process, the literary itself, which is distinct from, perhaps even incommensurable with, the social forms that the poem pictures and that its defenders, Levine included, tend to dwell on. This doesn’t undermine the punch of its social message; in a strange way, by drawing a trained eye’s attention to the distinction between two kinds of form, Barrett Browning sharpens our sense of both. The very distance between poetic artificiality and the social referent is, I would suggest, what makes us aware of each. This is another way of saying that poetic form isn’t necessarily intended to mean anything, or to support a poem’s themes, whether we think of those themes as its ‘content’ or just as other forms to be traced.[37] To suggest, to the contrary, that the poem merely holds tessellating forms together is, I think, to risk blunting this capacity of the constructedness of poetic form to heighten our apprehension of the difference, even incommensurability, between forms, between the limp of a marginally askew meter, say, and the squalid social spaces of Victorian Britain.

There is another way to read this inbetweenness of the poem’s form – neither conventional nor quite unconventional – that would locate, in the poem’s avoidance of any ostentatious break with convention, the source of its formal power. Just 50 or so years after the publication of Barrett Browning’s poem, Stephane Mallarmé, in his aforementioned ‘Crisis of Verse’ essay, recommended that poets maintain significant aspects of prior verse forms, only gradually tweaking their tempos in order to accentuate the awkwardness of fit that results. As we’ve already noted, this is for Mallarmé a more radical gesture than an absolute embrace of vers libre, which, by leaving behind any conventional ‘other’ from which to distance itself from, paradoxically deflates its own sense of distinctiveness. By holding the two in nervous tension, Mallarmé implies, one makes of poetry its own distinctive praxis, albeit one not thereby entirely cut off from its referential potential. It is interesting to entertain the thought that, previously and in an apparently much less experimental milieu in England, a Victorian poet might have, consciously or unconsciously, inched along the path to a similar strategy, and quite aside from Manley Hopkins’ own late-Victorian commitment to that other famous eccentric bridge between regular and irregular verse, sprung rhythm.

Network

Levine’s tracing of these different forms culminates in a concluding chapter on The Wire, David Simon’s recent and much lauded television series, chronicling overlapping formal and informal economies in Baltimore. The series has been much talked about in academic circles, with various conferences, symposia and articles focusing on its intricate plotting of the consequences of neoliberal urban restructuring, or on its complex relationship to canonical forms of narrative realism.[38] If, as is Levine’s ambition, cultural studies must “take account of what happens when a great many social, political, natural, and aesthetic forms encounter one another”[39], the multilayered character of The Wire, with its aggregation of multiple, internally heterogeneous institutions, scores of characters, and numerous distinct social spaces, would seem an ideal object for such a project. The series emphasizes both the grip that multiple institutional structures have on modern urban experience, and the scandalously uneven distribution of resources that such (post)modern cityscapes afford. Even as the series gleefully adopts and celebrates genre conventions, not least those associated with the cop show, Levine also sees in the series something of an updating of the best of nineteenth century realism; “Not unlike Bleak House”, she writes, “The Wire expands the usual affordances of its medium by intertwining over 100 characters in multiple intricate sequences that overlap and reshape one another”.[40]

As in the other readings that populate the book, Levine attempts to chart the ways in which forms both enable and frustrate each other’s claims to autonomy. Its status as fiction, far from being a hindrance, in fact allows the construction of a social theory close to the original roots of theoria, to the ambition to extract from a spectacle generalizable knowledge of the world. With an eagle eye, Levine digs deep into the multiple localities or ‘wholes’ that make up the space of The Wire; she is attentive, for instance, to events in the series’ third season, where a police chief creates ‘Hamsterdam’, an unofficial zone of drug legalization that shifts drug sales from their usual spots on street corners into a strictly bounded series of locales. But this apparently isolated and largely hidden social experiment soon rebounds on other enclosed wholes depicted in the series. As Levine writes, “Mayor Clarence Royce is momentarily impressed by the success of the zones, and his delay in shutting them down helps to bring about his defeat in the election, catapulting Tommy Carcetti into leadership of the city and eventually the state”.[41] And thus, multiple intertwined structures – a spatial enclosure licensed illegally by a policeman operating outside his jurisdiction, the official police bureaucracy, the media, interlaced local and extra-local political hierarchies – collide, with effects as complex as the original interaction of the forms in question.

Here, a specified and local space – the free drug zone – fans outwards in influence, with the other forms it interacts with responding in turn. All of this one would concede, but in order to pass from sophisticated description to analysis, at least some recognition of underlying impetus, of causal push, is surely necessary. Levine makes passing reference to those scholars who have read The Wire, even in its commitment to local particularity, as an allegory of contemporary hyper-capitalist deracination, but she implies that such a reading would necessarily mute those multiple other forms, those shapes or rhythms not entirely reducible to the economy, that populate the series. But why? To invoke a category such as capitalism is certainly not to deny the ‘affordances’ of local forms, but it is to recognize the dialectical interaction of those forms with an absent totality that, partially but powerfully, structures them in perpetuity. To insist on such interaction as ‘dialectical’ is already to agree with Levine’s insistence that such particularities are capable of resisting, even displacing, their animating frames, but it also pushes us towards asking bigger questions, questions as big as the spaces that The Wire pictures. A theory of causation must, I think, underpin Levine’s account, whether rendered explicit or not, not least because the language of forms ‘colliding’ and ‘intermixing’ already presumes a set of conditions within which such events could occur. My hope is that the details of this account will become clearer in subsequent work.

It may well be that Levine’s analytical framework is too general to deal with the local causal interactions that she insists are too complex to ‘reduce’. By this I mean that, in approaching any local object of analysis, the language of entanglement and affordance tends, not always but often enough, to obscure the very differences that it sets out to celebrate; the particular threatens to be lost by virtue of a paradoxically static language of generalized difference, one that turns around a few linked adjectives and nouns: ‘complex’, ‘collision’, ‘entangled’, and so on. Consider the following passage, a remark on The Wire’s fourth season, the year that focused in particular on the school system: “Each child’s story emerges out of a complex collision of social forms that can never be limited to one or two dominant social principles – race, economics, the city, the family, politics, the law, or education – but takes shape amid the pressures of all these and their constantly colliding patterns”.[42] Of course, there is never any fixed trajectory to social phenomena, no absolute pattern set in advance that would make the mapping process a foregone conclusion. But in practice, social forms, indeed aesthetic forms, are limited in their trajectories; retrospectively, one is often able to identify dominant factors that caused a particular event or made one thing more likely than another. To insist otherwise is potentially to blunt theory, and disable political action.[43]

In the penultimate chapter on ‘Networks’, Levine seems to admit as much, as when she writes: “it is clarifying and practical to isolate a single network and pursue its impact, since when networks are thrown together they can seem messy or incoherent. But it is also misleading to treat them as separate”.[44] I would insist that isolating a single or even a small sample of networks and interpreting their causal interaction is not necessarily to risk ‘treating them as separate’. To the contrary, analytical self-selection, even a certain blindness, is foundational to any project of inquiry, and it seems a fair assumption that, with all the constraints of the social and material world, such limitations are inherent there too. For all that, such a disciplined gaze does not require ignorance of the fact that, beyond the borders of one’s analysis, there may well be further connections to be pursued, or latent links to be activated upon the irruption of another social event. And it doesn’t seem overly reductive to claim that the one thing that all the forms delineated in all their messiness in The Wire have in common is their being impacted, for the worst, by the effects of a feral capitalism, one whose contemporary surface complexity should not become an alibi for our losing sight of its increasing definition of, and disproportionately adverse impact upon, the contemporary human condition.

One final brief comment on The Wire before I conclude. In my take on Levine’s analysis of Barrett Browning’s poetry, I argued that the very separation of poetic form from its referents – in that case, the degraded social spaces of Victorian London – had the effect, far from undermining the poem’s active effect in the world, of instead drawing an ever greater attention to the latter; through a kind of negative mutual constitution, the very disengagement between the two is the key to the sharpness of each. Levine is fairly quick to pass over the generic status of The Wire[45], arguing that a more directly sociological attention to its treatment of political form better gets at its relevance as a cultural object. But might we not expect a similar process of formal disengagement in a television serial that, after all, and in contrast with those who have insisted upon its realism, makes quite the show of its generic borrowings? While I have no space to pursue this claim in any depth, I would suggest here only that the amplified, often absurd, nature of those generic appropriations – think of the exaggerated, cartoonish aspects to lead detective Jimmy McNulty’s self-destruction, a trope of the cop show if ever there was one – only makes the social ‘content’ that much more compelling; as the Russian Formalists who I began with may have put it, these two impulses – formal artifice and social realism – are mutually estranging in The Wire, but this separateness, so warded against in Levine’s analysis, is precisely what makes it such an accomplished televisual reflection on the deformations of capital. Somehow, even the show’s generic investments are warped by its subject matter, becoming outsized, even absurd, absorbing the excesses of the political phenomena in question even at points of apparent generic self-reference and pastiche. But those same generic investments are what inoculates the show against the ‘state of the nation’ piety that afflicts Barrett Browning’s ‘Cry of the Children’.

Conclusion

For all of my quibbles with the details of Levine’s new formalism, this impeccably well- written and always provocative book should initiate a serious and sustained debate in the Humanities. For too long, previously critical forms of historicism have threatened to repeat the errors of older historical methods, and one way of clawing back that criticality may be to reacquaint ourselves with the potential of formal analysis, in the process reinventing it anew. The temptation to be avoided, as I suggested at the outset, is a retreat into form, the foregrounding of reassuringly abstract figures or techniques at the expense of political salience and social relevance. But equally troublesome would be the assumption that abstraction and formality are inherently apolitical and ahistorical. One of this book’s many virtues is its activist insistence on the political effectivity of forms, of how we are conditioned, limited and enabled by multiple formal shapes and rhythms. But there is further work to be done, not least on tracing with a keen theoretical eye the ways and means by which different forms interact, in inherently uneven spaces of political, historical and aesthetic action and inaction. I remain unconvinced that assuming this interaction a priori is quite enough, and it may as a consequence be necessary to resurrect that most unfashionable of things, a theory of reference. Caroline Levine has made some crucial first steps in that direction here, and one hopes that this volume’s ambition won’t remain an exception to the regrettable over-specialization of contemporary Humanities scholarship.

Notes

[1] L. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 153. Quoted in V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 104.

[2] Viktor Shklovsky quoted in V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 109.

[3] M. Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’ in PMLA, 122.2, March 2007, 558-569.

[4] R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature, (Orlando: Harcourt, 1956), 28.

[5] A special edition of Representations entitled ‘Surface Reading’, edited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, pursued this line of argument. See Representations, 108.1, Fall 2009.

[6] See, in particular, L. Althusser, ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, (London: Verso, 2005), 129-153 and L. Althusser, ‘A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, (London: New Left Books, 1971), 221-229.

[7] See S. Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’ in S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (London: Routledge, 1992), 1-57.

[8] S. Mallarmé, ‘Crisis of Verse’ in V. Leitch (ed.), Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, (New York: Norton, 2001), 841-851.

[9] I pursue the implications of these ideas in my Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017), and in a forthcoming book with the title Romantic Abstractions: Materiality, Figurality, Historical Time.

[10] C. Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 2.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 6.

[17] Ibid., 16.

[18] B. Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30, Winter 2004, 225-248.

[19] S. Best and S. Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1, Fall 2009, 1-21. It is noteworthy that Best and Marcus attribute a quote in this article to Freud, when it is in fact to be found in the work of Carlo Ginzburg. It would be unkind to suggest that such a lapse might be an immediate consequence of rejecting critical practices of reading, but the danger at least should be registered.

[20] C. Levine, Forms, 17.

[21] Ibid., 18.

[22] Ibid., 27.

[23] Ibid., 33-34.

[24] T. Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; reprint), 32.

[25] C. Levine, Forms, 41.

[26] Ibid., 42.

[27] See, in particular, the essays collected in P. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For work that extends these insights in productive directions, see A. Warminski, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Theory and Practice, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

[28] C. Levine, Forms, 75.

[29] Ibid., 77.

[30] Ibid., 78.

[31] Ibid., 79.

[32] Ibid., 79.

[33] Ibid., 80.

[34] The poem was originally published in the August 1843 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh magazine. The full poem is available to read at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172981.

[35] D. Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 96. Quoted in P. Henry, ‘The Sentimental Artistry of Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children”’, Victorian Poetry, 49.4, Winter 2011, 535.

[36] C. Levine, Forms, 78.

[37] Jonathan Culler has recently reaffirmed how “rhythm, repetition, sound patterning [are] independent elements that need not be subordinated to meaning and whose significance may even lie in a resistance to semantic recuperation”. See J. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8.

[38] See in particular the special edition of Criticism devoted to The Wire. Criticism, 52.3-4, Summer/Fall 2010.

[39] C. Levine, Forms, 132.

[40] Ibid., 134.

[41] Ibid., 137.

[42] Ibid., 133.

[43] This is partly the argument of Carolyn Lesjak’s ‘Reading Dialectically’, a crucial article that takes up the argument of Levine’s original article on form ‘Strategic Formalism’; the latter is cited in note 5. A more sustained attention to Lesjak’s argument in this subsequent book would, I think, have been helpful, although one imagines that the appearance of Lesjak’s argument only two years before the publication of Levine’s book set practical limits to Levine’s engagement here. Nonetheless, Lesjak does receive passing mention. See C. Lesjak, ‘Reading Dialectically’, Criticism, 55.2, 2013, Article 3 and C. Levine, Forms, 18.

[44] C. Levine, Forms, 114.

[45] The most accomplished genre analysis to date, one referenced briefly if largely negatively by Levine, is F. Jameson, ‘Realism and Utopia in The Wire’, Criticism, 52.4, 2010, 359-372.

by Brian Meeks

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is part of a dossier on Stuart Hall. 

A Lost Moment

There is an intriguing quote in Kuan-Hsing Chen’s 1996 interview with Stuart Hall, in which Stuart, in response to Chen’s question/comment “But you never tried to exercise your intellectual power back home”,  responds:

There have been moments when I have intervened in my home parts. At a certain point, before 1968, I was engaged with dialogue with the people I knew in that generation, principally to try to resolve the difference between a black Marxist grouping and a black nationalist tendency. I said, you ought to be talking to one another. The black Marxists were looking for the Jamaican proletariat, but there were no heavy industries in Jamaica; and they were not listening to the cultural revolutionary thrust of the black nationalists and Rastafarians, who were developing a more persuasive cultural, or subjective language. But essentially, I never tried to play a major political role there. (Morley and Chen 1996:501-2; see also MacCabe 2008:17)

He explains this through his recognition that he had found both a personal space – marriage to Catherine – and a political space, as a collaborator in the British New Left and that Jamaica herself, in the transition to independence, had become a somewhat different society, breaking with the past, making it somewhat easier for him to leave and that these were coincident with the domestic and political changes in his own life.

This conscious sense of not seeking to intervene in a changed political space with which he no longer felt intimately familiar was captured when both Tony Bogues (Bogues 2015: 177-193) and I met with Stuart separately in 2003 to encourage him to attend the Centre for Caribbean Thought’s conference that we were planning in his honor the following year.  His response to both of us was that, yes, he was born in Jamaica, but it would be difficult to describe himself as a ‘Caribbean intellectual’ and therefore, was it appropriate to include him in a series of conferences honoring key contributors to Caribbean thought?  In the end we managed to convince him to attend and that being from the Caribbean and with much of his critical formation occurring here, he was very much a Caribbean intellectual. The 2004 conference turned out to be a remarkable event (see Meeks 2007) in which Hall ‘came home’ and found, as it were, not only his Jamaican and Caribbean audience, but that there was already some younger scholars who were drawn to his work. On balance though, beyond the cognoscenti, Hall’s work was in the period after 1968 to which he referred – the period of the popular upsurge of radical politics in the region – right up until the moment of our conference, still largely unknown. I knew of  Stuart as a brilliant Jamaican because he had been my Dad’s classmate at Jamaica College and as one of the School’s Rhodes Scholars, I recognized his name inscribed along with that of Norman Manley and others on the long blackboards outside the neo-gothic Simms building at school. But it was not until the mid-Eighties that I had heard anything about his work and I read my first Hall article long after finishing my PhD thesis in 1988.

Thus, aside from the tantalizing intervention quoted above, his name and more so his thinking, were largely unknown to the generation of Sixty-Eight, those who were tossed into politics after the infamous exclusion of Walter Rodney on his return home to Kingston from the 1968 Montreal Congress of Black Writers (see Austin 2013:22).  The intense, one-day Black Power riots which followed the police tear-gassing of the student protest in support of Rodney, signaled the beginning of a decade and a half process of radicalization which led to the 1970 ‘Black Power Revolution’ in Trinidad and Tobago, the election of the Michael Manley government in Jamaica in 1972 and the Grenada Revolution of 1979-1983. (See Ryan and Stewart 1995; Quinn 2014)

The Generation of Sixty-Eight

Another famous Anglo-Caribbean expatriate thinker of the Left – C.L.R. James – was certainly better known and influenced a generation of Caribbean scholars, (Meeks and Girvan 2010:4) but in terms of a substantial impact on the theoretical orientation, form, strategy and tactics of the burgeoning movement, Jamesian ideas were, at best, marginal.[1] (Mars 1998:31-61) There was the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM) in Antigua, under the leadership of the Jamesian Tim Hector and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, where Rodney himself, before his assassination (in 1980), Rupert Roopnarine, Eusi Kwayana and others, sought to build a more independent left.  Other Jamesian tendencies included the Revolutionary Marxist Collective (RMC) in Jamaica, the New Beginning Movement (NBM) in Trinidad and the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP) in Grenada. Only MAP would emerge to play a central role in the evolving political landscape, but only after its merger with JEWEL (Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation) to form the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement (NJM), later to become the vanguard party of the Grenadian Revolution.

Thus, by the mid-Seventies, most of the independent, radical trends had either been eclipsed by or converted to one or another variant of what I refer to here as ‘Caribbean Marxism-Leninism’. I use this notion in order both to avoid a simplistic reductionism of compressing all Marxist trends and simultaneously to tease out and identify the specific characteristics of the parties and movements which came to dominate the Caribbean Left. These parties included the Cheddi Jagan-led People’s Progressive Party (PPP) of Guyana, which had held office and been excluded from power twice by the British, but remained bedeviled by the ethnic question and its partisan rootedness in the East Indian bloc; (see Palmer, 2010) the Movement for National Liberation (MONALI) in Barbados; the Youlou Liberation Movement (YULIMO) in St Vincent; the Workers Revolutionary Movement (WRM) in St Lucia and the Dominica Liberation Movement (DLM). However, the two most significant, aside from the PPP, were the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) and the NJM.

The WPJ, despite dominating what constituted the Jamaican Left outside of Manley’s governing People’s National Party (PNP), failed to gain any significant electoral support in the elections-driven Jamaican political system. It nonetheless accumulated significant influence through its almost hegemonic control over a generation of activist students and scholars at the University of the West Indies Mona campus, its informal linkages to the left in the PNP regime and most importantly and in the end most damagingly, its close connections and influence within the NJM.  The NJM for its part, not only became part of the opposition alliance following the 1976 elections, but the leader of the Party, Maurice Bishop became the constitutional Leader of the Opposition. Three years later, with the successful overthrow of the Eric Gairy regime, Bishop would become Prime Minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Grenada for the next four and a half years. The Grenadian Revolution ended tragically with open divisions surrounding questions of leadership in the Party leading to the October 1983 arrest of Bishop, his release by an incensed crowd of supporters, his attempt to wrest control of the military fort, a clash with the military which remained loyal to the Party and his execution along with some of his closest supporters, at the hands of his own soldiers. (See Meeks 1993; Lewis 1987; Marable 1987; Puri 2011 and Scott 2014)

This tragic and unprecedented end to the Grenadian Revolution which also signaled the demise of an organized and vibrant Caribbean left, has led to heated, often recriminatory interventions seeking to explain and understand how it could have happened.  Most analyses, including, I admit, my own, focus more on personalities, leadership, structures and the supporting or denying of purported conspiracies. Thus, Bobby Clarke, not untypically, blames Bernard Coard, Bishop’s Deputy Prime Minister, whom he argues, without further elaboration of this emotive notion and its applicability in this context, had been influenced by the ‘Stalinist’ Trevor Munroe (Meeks 2014:113). In one of the more thoughtful attempts to come to terms with the tragic sequence of events, G.K. Lewis, however, along with recognizing the dangers inherent in military overthrows and ‘the mixture of revolution and armed force’ (Lewis 1987:162) also raises warnings about the danger of mechanically applying Leninist approaches to party organization in entirely different historical contexts to that of Russia in 1917. (167)

It is in the spirit of Lewis’s attempt to understand the theoretical weaknesses and lacunae in the NJM and by implication in Caribbean Marxism-Leninism[2]  that I want to proceed with the following hypothetical exercise, by counterpoising critical features of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism with Stuart Hall’s career-long and profoundly humanist engagement with Marxism through the avenue of the conjuncture.  I want to suggest that it was precisely a perspective like Hall’s that might have provided an effective counterpoint to the damaging, authoritarian features of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism. An approach like his was missing in Jamaica and this absence contributed to the de facto emergence of particularly wooden and dogmatic theories that came to dominate the Jamaican and other critical components of the Caribbean Left and contributed in no small measure to the tragedy of the Grenada Revolution.

Hall’s Core

I begin by suggesting that unlike positions taken by Rojek and certainly Mills in his critique of Hall’s approach to race (see Rojek 2003; Meeks 2007:120-148) and despite recognizing an evolution, particularly a shift from an earlier more Gramscian inflection to a later, more discursive approach, there is an evident and consistent[3] core to Hall’s oeuvre that includes the following elements:

1. Unlike some post-Marxian perspectives, Hall throughout his mature writing continues to place critical importance on capital and of ‘material conditions’ generally, in the shaping of the contemporary world. Thus in his 1988 essay “The Toad in the Garden; Thatcherism Among the Theorists”, while recognizing that there is no “univocal” way in which class interests are expressed, he nonetheless underlines that “…class interest, class position, and material factors are useful, even necessary, starting points in the analysis of any ideological formation.” (Hall 1998: 45) And in his 2007 interview with Colin MacCabe, he reminds him of the importance of the tendencies in capital to concentrate wealth and shape intellectual expression: “…global capitalism is an incredibly dynamic system. And it’s capable of destroying one whole set of industries in order to create another set. Incredible. This is capitalism in its most global, dynamic form, but it is not all that secure. It’s standing on the top of huge debt and financial problems. And I can’t believe those problems won’t come eventually to find their political, critical, countercultural, intellectual expression. We’re just in the bad half of the Kondratiev cycle!” (MacCabe 2008:42)
2. Nonetheless, he discounts the mechanical notion of any direct cause and effect relationship between material conditions and so-called superstructural spheres. Social and cultural life, Hall has consistently argued, is not only mediated and articulated away from the ‘forces of production’, but particularly in the contemporary era of intensified media engagement, the internet and the image, this autonomy is even more enhanced. “This approach replaces the notion of fixed ideological meanings and class-ascribed ideologies with the concepts of ideological terrains of struggle and the task of ideological transformation. It is the general movement in this direction, away from an abstract general theory of ideology, and towards the more concrete analysis of how, in particular historical situations, ideas ‘organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle etc.” (Hall 1996: 41)
3. Specifically, in relation to classes and organized systems of domination, he opposes the mechanical approach inherent in certain Marxisms, which assume an automatic connection, for instance, between working classes and socialist ideas, or ruling classes and ruling ideas. Hegemony, Hall insists, emerge through complex processes of articulation and interpellation: “Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces. In that sense, ideological struggle is part of the general social struggle for mastery and leadership – in short for hegemony. But ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci’s sense requires, not the simple escalation of a whole class to power, with its fully formed ‘philosophy’, but the process by which a historical bloc is constructed and the ascendancy of that bloc is secured. So the way we conceptualize the relationship between ‘ruling ideas’ and ‘ruling classes’ is best thought in terms of the processes of ‘hegemonic domination’. (43-4)
4. He is fully appreciative of and utilizes effectively Gramsci’s notion of organic philosophy as the contradictory yet critically important way of thinking utilized by ‘ordinary’ people. This philosophy or common sense, he asserts, has within it elements of conservatism and of progress towards something new, and by implication must be engaged with from an approach of critical respect. “But what exactly is common sense? It is a form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas…It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical…” (Hall and O’Shea 2013:8) This approach, I suggest, is at the heart of Hall’s outlook, because it not only suggests his deep respect for ordinary people and their perspectives, but underwrites his open, non-hierarchical approach to politics.
5. Closely wedded to this and elaborated in more detail in his iconic essay ‘What is this Black in Black Popular culture’ is a consistent anti-essentialist grain. The essay is itself a paean against the elevating of racial or cultural blackness as a bulwark against racism. Hall first argues that we need to deconstruct racism itself and appreciate that it is not static in order to also appreciate that anti-racist thinking cannot afford to become a victim of the same essentialist thinking that makes racism abhorrent: “The moment the signifier ‘black’ is torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct”. (Morley and Chen 1996: 472)
6. Hall’s perspective is always elaborated through an approach that can be called ‘thinking through the conjuncture’. Again, he usefully adopts Gramsci’s notion of the social conjuncture as the array of articulated social forces, ideas and culturally tendencies in a given moment, as a particularly effective and robust lens with which to view and understand contemporary reality. It allowed him, captured most famously with Martin Jacques in his characterization of ‘New Times’ to appreciate the changing social relations in Britain in the Eighties and to theorize and predict the rise of Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism: “If ‘post-Fordism’ exists then it is as much a description of cultural as of economic change. Indeed, that distinction is now quite useless. Culture has ceased (if ever it was-which I doubt) to be a decorative addendum to the ‘hard world’ of production and things, the icing on the cake of the material world. The word is now as ‘material’ as the world. Through design, technology and styling, ‘aesthetics’ has already penetrated the world of modern production. Through marketing, layout and style, the ‘image’ provides the mode of representation and fictional narrativization of the body on which so much of modern consumption depends. Modern culture is relentlessly material in its practices and modes of production. (233)
7. I end with Hall’s far less referenced perspectives on international politics, which are critically important for our purposes. These were forged at the time of the crushing by the Soviet Army of the Hungarian Revolution (see Blackburn 2014: 77; Derbyshire, 2012) and the Khrushchev revelations concerning the brutal, authoritarian nature of Stalin’s rule. These I suggest, inoculated him against any romantic view of the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of ‘really existing socialism’ and any illusion that the USSR was the automatic bulwark of defense against imperialism for the newly independent countries. It also forced him, along with many of his generation who formed the British New Left, on to the back foot in order to rethink Marxism from the ground up, without a set of already successful prescriptions just waiting to be applied and with a willing and able physician standing ready in the wings.

We can best summarize the heart and essence of Hall’s work through the words of one of his critics. Despite his expressed reservations as to whether his academic preoccupations could ever be converted into a genuine praxis, Chris Rojek nonetheless generously proposes that “Hall’s politics favors widening access, exercising compassion, encouraging collaboration and achieving social inclusion”. (Rojek 2003: 193) Many of these features were either absent or incorporated into hierarchies of authority and exclusion in both the theoretical approaches and application of 1970s Caribbean Marxism-Leninism.

Caribbean Marxism-Leninism

To begin with Hall’s international perspectives first, it is fair to say that Caribbean Marxism-Leninism, if nothing else, held a remarkably un-historic view of the Soviet Union, leaping across time from the glory moments of the 1917 October Revolution, via the Red Army’s heroic defense and victories against Nazi Germany to the contemporary (1970s-80s) period. Elided entirely is mention of the brutality of collectivization, the Stalin show trials, Trotsky’s assassination or any reference to Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin after his death. No mention, of course, is made of the Hungarian events or of the much more contemporary Czechoslovakian Spring and Soviet invasion of 1968. Two quotes from Trevor Munroe’s booklet Social Classes and National Liberation, derived from a series of ‘socialism lectures’ given to students in the early Seventies, suggests the tone and tenor of the times. In relation to the significance of the Soviet Union:

The Russian Revolution, therefore, did these three things: mash down the colonial system, mash down feudal exploitation and mash down capitalist exploitation in one-sixth of the world in October of 1917; and on those foundations began to build a new life, a new society in which no class lived on the backs of the labor of any other class…The great October Socialist Revolution broke forever and ever the monopoly of the capitalist class on power and when I say power, I mean every kind of power. (Munroe 1983: 29-30)

And on the relationship between ‘socialism’ (i.e. the Soviet Union and its allied countries) and the National Liberation Movement:

The very existence of socialism is the biggest help to the National Liberation Movement, even when the leaders of particular countries under imperialism completely reject and are totally against socialism, it is still the biggest help to the whole area of National Liberation…Therefore, we say that the alliance between socialism and National Liberation is a natural thing because socialism is the biggest force against imperialism and imperialism is the block to National Liberation. (33)

Looking back now on this simplistic, severely edited version of history to which many young, otherwise thoughtful students and young people in the Caribbean were so easily won, the search for the reasons as to why is not easily answered, but among them I suggest:

1. The decisive defeat of the Left in Jamaica in the Fifties with the expulsion of the four leaders of that tendency (the Four H’s) from the PNP. This effectively silenced debates around Marxism and its role in national liberation for two decades (see Bertram 2016:231-240) and particularly at a moment in the fifties when Hall and many others were forging their radical perspective, but in the full glare of Hungary and of Khrushchev’s famous speech.
2. The banning of Left-Wing literature in Jamaica in the Sixties, which made virtually all radical literature contraband, along with the emerging Black Power literature (and tragi-comically, Anna Sewell’s novel ‘Black Beauty’ among them!)
3. The re-emergence of legal Marxist literature in the Seventies, following the election of Manley to power in 1972, but with titles and ideas drawn almost exclusively from the Soviet presses, Novosti and Progress. Thus, works by Brutents, Ulyanovsky and others on national liberation and the role of the Socialist countries, which were written precisely to eliminate swathes of contemporary history, were the only easily available literature and became the dominant sources of information for this eager and thirsty generation.
4. The example of neighboring Cuba in which the Soviet Union had given generous support was interpreted as an exemplary instance of ‘proletarian internationalism’ and in which it was assumed that the Soviet Union would replicate this assistance in each and every instance in which there was a revolution against imperialism.
5. The stance of Maoist China particularly in its attitude to liberation movements in this period is also relevant. As the potential alternative pole of “really existing socialism”, China might have provided an option for radically oriented youth to coalesce around. However, on almost all the touchstone questions, whether support for North Vietnam, choice of allies in the liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism, or solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese supported positions and movements which seemed to place them on the wrong side of history. The default position was support for the Soviets, who were solidly behind Vietnam, the Cubans, the MPLA, FRELIMO, the PAIGC and others.

The overall effect of this was the emergence of an intellectual mindset which was less concerned with the fine-grained understanding of the local situation, the broad terrains of ideological struggle and how these interacted with the international, (indeed, a Hallian, conjunctural approach,) as it was convinced that the arrow of history had already been launched and was on its straight and accurate flight.  From such a vantage point, events were already overdetermined by the revealing truths of Marxism-Leninism and the social and political leaps and advances of really existing socialism. All that was required was to make the local revolution, if a revolutionary situation emerged and join the stream of the victorious worldwide socialist and national liberation movements.

In contrast to Hall’s conception of organic philosophy and the need to respectfully engage in a conversation, with the inevitable elements of give and take, Caribbean Marxism-Leninism overtly adopted the notion that the majority of the working class was backward, both culturally and ideologically and thus needed to be taught and guided by the advanced elements. So, in the WPJ booklet The Working Class Party: Principles and Standards the conclusion is drawn that:

So the first thing we need to understand about the position of the working class in capitalist society and the effects of capitalism on the working class and on the working people is that the system itself makes the vast sections of the working class backward at the same time as it makes a small section advanced. (Munroe 1983: 15)

This led inevitably to the corollary that the party, the vanguard, had to be the instrument to bring consciousness to the majority of backward workers, best exemplified in Maurice Bishop’s oft-quoted 1982 “Line of March for the Party” speech to NJM cadres:

And the fifth point, the building of the Party, because again it is the Party that has to be at the head of the process, acting as representatives of the working people and in particular, the working class. That is the only way it can be because the working class does not have the ideological development or experience to build socialism on its own. The Party has to be there to ensure that the necessary steps and measures are taken. And it is our primary responsibility to prepare and train the working class for what their historic mission will be later on down the road. That is why the Party has to be built and built rapidly, through the bringing in the first sons and daughters of the working class. (Seabury and McDougall 1984: 73)

Reading this speech again after many years, its deeply patronizing essence is even more evident. Indeed, Bishop’s invocation here goes beyond the typical vanguardist argument, in the suggestion that the party in this instance is not just the vehicle of the advanced workers, but a substitute for them, until such time as they can be brought into the organization and educated up to the required advanced standing. If there is any central feature then of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism that might be teased out for closer scrutiny, it is this hierarchical structuring of levels of consciousness with its implications of the necessity for tutelage and guidance, not only from the advanced workers – the more ‘Leninist’ formulation – but in the absence altogether of ‘advanced workers’ from the party, that is the undisguised tutelage of the intellectual stratum. Surely, this leads as night follows day, to the Grenada crisis of 1983. The Party derogated the right to modify its leadership structure at will, including the effective demoting of the leader and Prime Minister to joint leader, without any reference to the population and to what it might think. This led to a series of events which have been adequately discussed elsewhere and need not be repeated, marching in lockstep fashion, to Bishop’s death, the US-led invasion and the end of radical Caribbean politics for a generation.

What If?

As this short essay began, somewhere during the Nineteen Sixties, Stuart Hall took a decision to lay his bed permanently in the United Kingdom, where he helped to build the formidable discipline of cultural studies at Birmingham, thereby influencing a generation of scholars in the UK and contributing immeasurably to critical global political and cultural discourse in Britain, Europe, the USA and beyond. The enigmatic question of course, which can never be answered, is what would have been the outcome had he brought his formidable intellect and his remarkably fluid and democratic theoretical approaches to bear on his own Jamaica of the 1960s, the very country in which a popular upheaval with region-wide consequences was ignited in 1968. What would the radical movement of the Seventies have looked like with a Stuart Hall contending with some of the more dogmatic, hierarchical and wooden perspectives that came to dominate in the radical Jamaican space? Perhaps it might have made little difference, (as indeed was the case with CLR James and his supporters across the Anglophone Caribbean) as the international environment may well have weighed decisively in favor of the rise of pro-Soviet, Marxist-Leninist tendencies that did, in fact briefly gain momentum and enjoyed their moment in the sun. But perhaps with his prestige and fluency and his possessing the undoubted, if ironic cachet of being a Rhodes Scholar, Stuart Hall, returning from the United Kingdom, might have been taken seriously and might have influenced the emergence of a more flexible, open, radical and popular movement in Jamaica. What would this have meant for the course of events in that country and more so, for the entire Caribbean, including, most of all Grenada, where the Gairy regime had created a political opening and the groundwork had already been laid for more insurrectionary forms? History evidently didn’t follow this course, but it is worthwhile to muse about the far-reaching consequences if it had.

Brian Meeks is professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He has published many books and edited collections on Caribbean Revolutions, Caribbean thought and questions of hegemony and power in contemporary Caribbean politics. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus for many years.

References

Austin, David. 2010. “Vanguards and Masses: Global lessons from the Grenadian Revolution.” In Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, 173-189. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Austin, David. 2013. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Bertram, Arnold. 2016. N.W. Manley and the Making of Modern Jamaica. Kingston. Arawak Publications.

Bishop, Maurice. 1984. “Line of March for the Party.” In The Grenada Papers, edited by Paul Seabury and Walter A. McDougall, 59-88. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

Blackburn, Robin. 2014. “Stuart Hall: 1932-2014.” New Left Review 86, March-April 75-93.

Bogues, Anthony. 2015. “Stuart Hall and the World We Live In.” Social and Economic Studies 64:2, 177-193.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 1996. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 501-2. London and New York: Routledge.

Clarke, Robert. 2014. “Statement on Grenada by Robert “Bobby” Clarke October 14, 2009.” Cited in Brian Meeks Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory, 113. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi.

Derbyshire, Jonathan. 2012. “Stuart Hall: We Need to Talk About Englishness.” New Statesman August 23 www.newstatesman.com

Girvan, Norman. 2010. “New World and its Critics.” In The Thought of New World: The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks and Norman Girvan. Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston and Miami.

Hall, Stuart and Allan O’Shea. 2013. “Common Sense Neoliberalism.” Soundings, 55, Winter. 8-24.

Hall, Stuart. 1988. “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists”. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Carey Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 35-73. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Meaning of New Times.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues. Morley and Chen eds. 225-237.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 25-46. London and New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “What is this Black in Black Popular Culture?” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues. Morley and Chen eds. 465-475.

Lewis, Gordon K. 1987. Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

MacCabe, Colin. 2008. “An Interview with Stuart Hall: December 2007.” Critical Quarterly 50 nos. 1-2.

Marable, Manning. 1987. African and Caribbean Politics: from Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop. London: Verso.

Mars, Perry. 1998. Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.

Meeks, Brian ed. 2007. Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers and London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Meeks, Brian. 1993. Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbean.

Meeks, Brian. 1996. Radical Caribbean: from Black Power to Abu Bakr. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.

Mills, Charles. 2007. “Stuart Hall’s Changing Representation of “Race.” In Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, 120-148, Kingston: Ian Randle publishers.

Munroe, Trevor. 1983. Social Classes and National Liberation in Jamaica. Kingston: Workers Party of Jamaica.

Puri, Shalini. 2014. The Grenadian Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Quinn, Kate ed. 2014. Black Power in the Caribbean. Gainesville Fl. The University Press of Florida.

Rojek, Chris. 2003. Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ryan, Selwyn and Taimoon Stewart eds. 1995. The Black Power Revolution 1970: A Retrospective. Trinidad: ISER.

Scott, David. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Notes

[1] James’s notions of a non-vanguardist, spontaneous movement of the people had some initial influence particularly through the Antiguan, Grenadian and Trinidadian movements, but as I have argued elsewhere, James had no developed strategy for insurrection, beyond the advocacy of popular spontaneous uprising. When an insurrectionary situation arose, as in Grenada between 1974 and 1979, the NJM therefore turned to the old playbook of the underground vanguard, which turned out to be an effective tool for overthrowing the Gairy regime, but not for popular rule in the aftermath. The other factor was the clearly compelling international situation, in which, in the seventies Cuba, based on booming sugar prices seemed to be thriving, the Vietnamese had liberated their country and the liberation movements had achieved independence through guerrilla warfare in Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique. All were led by Marxist-Leninist parties, raising significantly the cachet of this trend. See Meeks 1996: 72 ;1993: 178 and Austin 2010: 173-189)

[2] I want to nuance Perry Mars’s argument in which he suggests that the weaknesses that led to the demise of the Caribbean Left lay more in questions of leadership, than ideology. There is much truth and indeed, I am invested in the argument that it was the leadership and its failures which contributed immeasurably to the crisis in Grenada with its debilitating impact on the Left in general. However, the role of ideology has been underplayed, or presented as a stock word or phrase, such as ‘Leninism’ or sometimes even ‘Pol Potism’ which unfortunately is a lazy alternative to more careful analysis. Ideology in the end informed the leadership and shaped the framework and boundaries of their decision-making. It thus needs far more careful scrutiny in the new round of scholarship that will eventually appear on this period. (Mars 1998: 162)

[3] Both Chris Rojek and Charles Mills can be considered as among Hall’s more respectful critics, acknowledging what they consider his important theoretical advances yet remaining weary as to whether, in the case of Rojek, his emphases on difference and anti-essentialism have not undercut the ability of his project to have an impact on real political life. Rojek asks, “Can difference be the basis for effective political agency?” (Rojek 2003:187) Charles Mills’ misgivings include the suggestion that Hall’s fabled eclecticism, in seeking, for instance, to utilize both Gramscian notions of hegemony with its implications of a dominant class/bloc and Foucauldian notions of dispersed power, may in the end be incompatible. He pleads “How could it be possible to test and verify or falsify a theoretical mélange with so many conflicting components?” (Meeks 2007: 141) the detailed exploration of these genuine questions certainly remains legitimate, but go somewhat beyond the purposes of this short engagement.

by Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is the first entry in a dossier on Stuart Hall. 

As an itinerant Caribbean scholar, I have been profoundly shaped by Stuart Hall. Much of this is legible to me, but so much is not; Hall’s mode of intellectual practice (conjuncture, strategy, contingency, articulation) imprinted on many of us as if by osmosis. My generation of anglophone Caribbean children were taught literature of the Caribbean for O’Levels; we were introduced to Shakespeare through The Tempest, encouraged to read it from our postcolonial, national situation. Kamau Brathwaite’s nation-language informed our literary education; C. L. R. James’s “literary history” of the Haitian Revolution shaped our engagement with West Indian History; and Hall’s notion of what he has called the “cultural question” permeated our social studies. These were not the only intellectuals who shaped my generation’s schooling in the 1990s, but I name them to give some sense of the difference between the anglophone Caribbean schoolroom of my own generation from those of previous generations. We were at least a decade into independence.^[i] If nothing else, Hall should live in the pantheon of anglophone Caribbean (West Indian) intellectual-activists I was taught to revere as child. When C. L. R. James passed away in 1989 I was not yet a teenager, but I remember the nation^[ii] mourning. Pride seemed to burst forth from every chest about how far one of our bright boys^[iii] had gone. There was a sadness that he was no longer amongst us, even if many of my generation struggled to reconcile the image of the frail man we saw on Trinidad and Tobago Television^[iv] (TTT) with Pan-African revolt or the vigor of West Indian cricket at its revolutionary zenith. This kind of celebration of a local boy (or girl) who makes it overseas is not uncommon in small places, island spaces, “Caribbean Spaces” (Kincaid 1988; Boyce Davies 2013). As calypsonian David Rudder told us in his Windies anthem for the 1987 Cricket World Cup, “Rally Round the West Indies,” we live in “a divided world that don’t need islands no more”; so asserting Caribbean identity and filiality is about claiming intellectual, metaphysical, and geographic space as it shifts, translocates or erodes in our present. But if in 1989 there seemed to be ample space allotted for mourning James as a Caribbean intellectual, in 2014 the scene of mourning for Hall, a great island scholarship boy himself, was more subdued.

At the 2013 Callaloo conference (held at Oxford University, where Hall was a Rhodes Scholar in 1951) the question was posed if another C. L. R. James were possible.^[v] The question, I think, was about the conditions of possibility in the Caribbean (at home and in diaspora?) for such another intellectual to emerge. The reply was no. I wondered why not. Was Stuart Hall not such a one? I remembered the Channel Four interview Hall did of James; it could be read as a kind of passing of the torch from one to the next, James to Hall. It was clearly born of more than a desire to ask a few questions of the man for a curious British public. If that imperative was there, there was also what can be understood to be the desire to talk to another son of the (anglophone) Caribbean soil, familiar with that terrain before independence and the nation-state. A profoundly, uniquely Caribbean moment.^[vi] Hall after all was a radical Caribbean intellectual who was arguably Jamesian in a way—deeply knowledgeable on a range of subjects but whose breadth of inquiry is born of a “particular” Caribbean time and place.^[vii] Without making this about some kind of closed monarchy with the crown passing from James to Hall to Sylvia Wynter to … I want to think about what figures such as they, but namely Hall and James, mean to the region, and the ways in which they seemed unable to find room for themselves in their island homelands, especially as intellectuals. If these island-spaces incubated their curiosity and promiscuous reading, they were also not the spaces in which they seemed to think that their radical and black radical politics could be sustained. Often this has been understood to say something about the UK and the US in the case of James, and the UK in the case of Hall. Not wrongly so; there were British anti-immigrant policies that resulted in case of the Mangrove Nine in 1970—in which nine West Indian immigrants were charged for protesting police brutality and the targeting of the West Indian restaurant, Mangrove—or the Brixton Riots of the 1980s, 1990s and most recently 2011. As part of the Windrush generation—the West Indian immigrants who moved the UK in the 1950s and ‘60s—Hall came comfortably into himself as a racialized subject alongside many of his fellow windrushers. It is not that he was unaware of racial difference before, but Hall himself acknowledged, he could not easily have been a radical black man in Jamaica. There he was brown, even if too dark for his own mother’s comfort.

Unlike Hall, Wynter and James attempted return; that is, they traveled back to the (anglophone) Caribbean to make lives for themselves, not only to visit family and friends. Born in 1901, James left Trinidad for England in 1932. Between 1958 to 1962 James resettled in Trinidad at the invitation of his then friend and former student at Queen’s Royal College (QRC), Eric Eustace Williams, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and the first prime minister of independent Trinidad.^[viii] he left shortly before Trinidad and Tobago gained independence as a result of their falling out, largely over the collapse of the West Indian Federation (Williams having withdrawn his support with the infamous line that primary school children of my generation had to memorize: “one from ten leaves nought”).^[ix] In spite of this, James remained active in Trinidad politics until 1968 and continued to hold a place in the hearts of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, returning for a year in 1980. In the 1980s the people of Trinidad campaigned for the government to honor James with a house, and in 1989 his remains were returned to Trinidad and he was laid to rest in state in Tunapuna, the eastern corridor town where he had been born (Cudjoe 1992: 124).

Wynter and Hall are born within a few years of each other, in 1928 and 1932 respectively. In 1963, Wynter was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona; she stayed until 1974, when she leaves for a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Diego and then a permanent post at Stanford University in Afro-American Studies and Spanish Literature from 1977. For Wynter, the growing chasm between her intellectual interest and the curricula in Spanish at UWI  made staying untenable; in the US she could teach to the intellectual questions uppermost on her mind (Wynter 2000: 172 – 3).

I want use the occasion of this dossier commemorating Stuart Hall to think about his place in what we might call the canon of Caribbean thought. As I use the word “canon” in relation to Hall my mind’s eye conjures an image of the great man somewhat discomforted by the supposition that that term could have anything to do with him or his work. Though he began as a literary scholar, Hall left literary studies as a formal home for his intellectual work quite early on in his career—with something like the English literary “canon” at least one of the impetuses of such a change of course. Here I mean canon not in terms of content but a structure of relations. The word “canon” confers authority, power, hierarchy; it deems some texts valuable and worthy of scholarship (those within its borders) and others less valuable (those without its borders). In fact, it is to Hall as one of the progenitors of Cultural Studies, of course, that many of us in literary studies interested in cultural production (not accommodated by the canon, whatever that may be) are indebted. The rise of Cultural Studies helped open up space in most humanities’ disciplines to cross-pollinate our objects of study and challenge our conditions of knowledge production; one could contemplate new media and urban, street culture from literature and sociology. Without question Hall’s stint as editor of New Left Review (1960 – 1962) and authoring and editing texts such s Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972 – 79 (1980), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1980), and others cemented his place at the heart of the global re-imagining of the university and the humanities from the 1960s – 1980s and gave us new vocabularies for social and cultural critique. Certainly there are many perspectives from which to think through Hall’s body of work and his legacy for the scholars, activists, and every-folk who read him or simply inhabit a world in which terms like “cultural identity, race, and ethnicity” are givens. That these are categories with which we work in today’s humanities, that there is something under the rubric of “cultural studies,” owes much to Hall’s labor. Yet as “cultural studies” itself seems embattled and work on identity, increasingly is denigrated as “identity politics” and even passé, I wonder what the future of such scholarship is. With Hall there was always the assumption of the incomplete work; the article, the radio interview, sites of the unfinished and the urgent, of contingency.

I am not sure it is fair of me to push the two—Hall with his commitment to the conjuncture, the contingent or “without guarantees” and canon—together. I persevere with canon though, mindful of Hall’s own claim that before Marx hated capitalism “he admired it and respected it”; it was his admiration and respect for it that got him beyond capitalism as it were (Hall 1983: 39). Hall’s admiration, love even, of canonical English literature and literary studies is central to his move beyond it into sociology of literature and cultural studies, maintaining a commitment to the “cultural questions” (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 146).  I do so because at the heart of this, I think, is question of what is considered valuable to thinking Caribbean or uniquely Caribbean thought as opposed to that of an elsewhere. In other words, “to think something like ‘Caribbean studies’ is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with … what the Caribbean supposedly is, supposedly was” (Scott 2013: 1)^[x] My simple premise here is that Hall is not always understood “to be inside…in conversation with” the Caribbean as such. Even when deemed “an extension of” James, Hall is never quite read as Caribbean as much or unquestioningly as the former (Hall 1997).^[xi] The question I want to ask then is: what “is…was” the Caribbean of Hall’s work? In asking this question I am taking Hall at his word “that the interest never goes away, the interest in the Caribbean and the interest in race” never dissipated for him, even if it was not always “the most prominent and visible part of [his] work” (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 155). In my attempt to grapple with Hall’s Caribbean I want to explore two moments that bring the toe together. First, his participation in the conference for Rex Nettleford held in Jamaica in 1996 and his interview in the first issue of Small Axe, to which I have just referred, and immediately after his passing.

I

In March 1996 the first Conference on Caribbean Culture was hosted by the faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the university’s Mona Campus. The conference was held in honor of the choreographer, historian, and then pro vice-chancellor of UWI, Rex Nettleford.^[xii] Supposedly eight leading intellectuals were invited to give plenaries, though the program only lists Kamau Brathwaite, Stuart Hall, and George Lamming. The others were: Rex Nettleford himself, Lloyd Best, Erna Brodber, Edward Seaga, and George Rohlehr (Chevannes 1997: iii; see Figure 1. “Draft Program”).

Michael Manley was to open the conference. The Caribbean Quarterly published their addresses in its March-June 1997 issue as “The Plenaries: Conference On Caribbean Culture In Honour Of Professor Rex Nettleford,”^[xiii] with Gordon Rohlehr’s piece replaced by Michael Manley’s (Chevannes 1997: vi). Along with Barry Chevannes’s introduction are the following essays: George Lamming’s opening address, in which Lamming gave an overview of Caribbean/Antillean thought and letters and thanked Nettleford for his contribution to thinking Caribbean culture and making space for a “roots”-derived Caribbean culture; Lloyd Best’s “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later”; Stuart Hall’s “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends”; Kamau Brathwaite’s “Rex Nettleford and the Renaissance of Caribbean Culture”; Erna Brodber’s “Re-engineering Blackspace”; Edward Seaga’s “The Significance of Folk Culture in the Development of National Identity”; Rex Nettleford’s “The Continuing Battle for Space—the Caribbean Challenge Final Session”; and, Michael Manley’s “Rex Nettleford: A Revolutionary Spirit.” Thus by the special issue, if not at the conference, two former prime ministers of Jamaica—Edward Seaga and Michael Manley—come together with the poet Brathwaite, the novelists Lamming and Brodber, the literary and cultural critic Rohlehr, Nettleford himself, and Hall. Who is Hall here in this milieu?

The plenary papers, as they appear in Caribbean Quarterly, make it is clear that not only was Nettleford the person that the gathering was meant to celebrate, but that “culture,” the question of culture, the Caribbean cultural question was also the star. It was the return of culture as a worthy object of study and site of intellectual discourse in the region. That unique gathering of intellectual stars each in their own right:

represented a powerful symbol of culture coming (back) in from the cold where it had been thrown out by a social science that had lost its bearing and wandered far afield in realms of vanguardism and name-calling; represented, in the thoughtful pronouncement of the Griot Kamau Brathwaite, a healing. (Chevannes 1997: iii)

The “healing” to which Chevannes referred can be understood as the denigration of the arts and culture—whether highbrow (novels, poetry, art, drama, dance not too identifiable with the laboring classes) or low (kaiso, reggae, steel drums, tassa etc)—and the concomitant valorization of economics, history (of a certain kind) and social sciences meant to credentialize the civil service. Of the eight essays only three do not specifically speak to this moment of reconciliation—Brodber’s, Seaga’s and Manley’s (iii). Seaga seems to have received a different brief from the others. Barry Chevannes, then head of sociology and the main organizer of the conference, explains in his introduction that everyone, except Seaga, was asked to speak to “any issue they felt to be of importance.” Seaga was given a strict brief as “an anthropologist” and “a promoter of native art forms…to address the question of the role of the folk in the formation of national identity” (iii). Seaga, as such, makes no reference to Nettleford or what others seem to view as the rebirth of the cultural in the Caribbean context, at least of the anglophone Caribbean context. Brodber tackles the question of completing the emancipation begun in 1834/8; so that while her interest is in the “Caribbean cultural” as it were, it is less in the study of culture in the Caribbean and the social sciences as much as the place of culture in liberating black people (Brodber 1997: 70 – 81). Manley speaks of the two groups (social scientists and cultural practioners/critics) coming together for the conference, but never mentions that they were ever divided (Manley 1997: 96 – 100); the split between the two groups features in all other submissions.

In Kamau Brathwaite’s own words, the conference was a Caribbean first:

[The] first time in our 500 yrs of post Columbian history that we have such a happenin—there was P R in 1958, Carifesta 72 in Guyana & these are LANDMARKS too, but        mainly as PERFORMANCES—distillations & enactments—of the culture. This is the first time we have a concentrated comprehensive reflexion on it. Put together, the two streams strands events begin create an IMAGE of ourselves.(Brathwaithe 1997: 36)

If the conference were a ritual undertaken for healing, it was not to heal the rift between disciplines, but actual persons, namely “Nettleford & the social scientists, who, as this Conference indicates, have come the long road backround to a recognition—i hope—of the centrality of culture to our functional reality & where how why we are ourselves in the world” (50).

George Lamming explained it thus:

the West Indian historian is not an active and informing influence in the popular consciousness. The language of economic advisers conveys little or no meaning to people outside their immediate circle of colleagues. Novelists function without a substantial and      continuing reading class—even among the certified graduates of the region’s university. This literature has hardly aroused the active interest of many who make up the political intelligentsia. (Lamming 1997: 12)

Social science (economists) and culture (historians or novelists) suffer from a split; the economists are incomprehensible to though who are not economists and the novelists rarely write for those at home in the region as they do not provide a reliable and regular readership.

In “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later,”^[xiv] Lloyd Best argued that what was needed was a turn to the creative arts, for only they “will here open up the philosophical as well as the scientific questions” (Best 1997: 24). He submitted that the crisis that beset the social sciences as the twenty-first century was to emerge was:

a failure at the bottom of which is the epistemological question. How do the Caribbean people learn about themselves and for their own purposes with the resources they now have? How does a community,a tribe, a race, a State, a nation, a people, save itself from impending damnation? How does a culture escape from itself? How does a system generate its own fertility?

The first thing would be to plumb the dimensions of our own predicament. In the  case of the social sciences, had we fixed the manifestations of dislocated personality, plantation economy, segmented multi-ethnic society and submerged subversive culture in their common historical matrix, I doubt we would have had to follow the disciplinary specializations of the European tradition, multiplied the overheads, and confused the heads of the students in the bargain—by compelling them to add Marshallian or Keynesian economics to Parsonian, Weberian or Marxian sociology, to Malinovskyesque anthropology and to the Westminster political science of Mill, all of which are premised on a different set of institutions—all of which are set in a different landscape. You can see why I am advocating an extra-disciplinary approach, a Caribbean approach. (Best 1997: 24)

Best’s contention seems to be that such a split between the social sciences and the arts in the Caribbean occurred because the model of the university and knowledge production was simply transplanted from the UK, with no real consideration as to how to grow a Caribbean derived model. Attention and genuine incorporation of the creative arts and the humanities across (higher) education was his proposed solution.

But if Nettleford, culture, and a new moment of significance for cultural in the Caribbean are the chief, named protagonists, Hall seems an implied one. Lloyd Best names Hall as one of his predecessor, declaring that though

[t]he whole world knows my great teachers…to have been Gocking, Demas, Brathwaite and James…What even Stuart Hall may not know is that it all began at Richmond Road in Oxford where Demas was his [Hall’s] housemate and where Stuart’s New Left Review … I make bold to say we need other conferences mounted on the work of both William Demas and Stuart Hall … (17)

Best makes known the hitherto little known fact that his own thought is indebted to Hall. Best is, of course, one of the most widely read anglophone Caribbean scholars as knowing the Caribbean condition; and there he stood, during this quintessentially, uniquely moment in the study of culture from/in the Caribbean paying homage to Hall, calling for a similar (conference on Caribbean Culture?) in honor of Hall’s work.

Yet in his essay, “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends,” perhaps fittingly, meant to gesture at the next frontier, the next conjuncture, he seems to refuse that potential moment of canonization. By the time Hall gave his plenary, Best had already given his; this is evidenced by Hall’s assertion that he “think[s] about these questions in the context of rereading that marve[l]ous essay to which interestingly Lloyd Best referred this morning” (Hall 1997: 25). After thanking Nettleford for the invitation and his scholarship, Hall commences, telling his audience that he was “asked to say something about the future and in that context it has to be something about how Caribbean culture travels, it being itself the product of an enforced travelling, but also well travelled” (25). He stages his distance from that Caribbean scene, perhaps reminding the audience of what Best may have made them forget for the time:

I have got to figure out how to talk about that because I have lived out of the region for most of my adult life and therefore what I have observed at close hand and worked amongst our people from the Caribbean, from the African Caribbean Diaspora, especially, who helped undertake a second migration, a ‘double diasporization’, I would call it. (25)

He will not make mention of his time on Caribbean Voices, the BBC program that gave most of the writers now considered synonymous with (modern) anglophone Caribbean literature—V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, George Lamming—work for Caribbean periodicals such as Bim or Savacou. Erased are the frequent trips he made to Jamaica (home?) from the 1970s onward (after the cultural revolution of the 1960s makes brown, middle class existence no longer easy or tenable).^[xv] The documentaries on the Caribbean expunged. His participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM, 1966 – 1972) unmentioned (See Walmsley 1992). In fact, according to Anne Walmsley’s account of the second CAM conference (August 31 – September 2, 1968), Hall’s contribution shaped much of the rest of the conference. At least two of these show Hall thinking the Caribbean with diaspora. The first being that, “[t]he Afro-West Indian has had a kind of clarification of experience in the last decade in Britain that the West Indian at home, with the neocolonial regimes, has not had.” Secondly, his contention, following John La Rose, that “the West Indian had been obliged to define himself in global terms, in terms of movements of black peoples throughout the world” (164). Thus in 1968 we begin to hear the outlines of engagement with diaspora, race, and articulation in relation to the anglophone Caribbean community(ies) in the UK, years before Policing the Crisis or “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.”^[xvi]

But in 1996, Hall refuses any of these enunciations that would give his audience definitive and consistent confirmation of his investment in the Caribbean. Instead he wants to use diaspora to problematize theorizations of Caribbean “roots” and “routes” (Hall 1997: 27). It is the “discrepancy between some of the ways in which we still think about culture and in which we still live and practise it” that Hall chooses, “want[s],” to address in his plenary (27).

He ends, provocatively, informing us that only through “retranscription (by resignification)” can diasporic culture occur and sustain itself (33). He urges his audience to hold on to

… a notion of the diasporic which lives with the notion of dissemination, of the        scattering. The seed has gone out. It is not going to come back to its original ecology. It now has to learn to live in new climates in other soils. It has to learn to resist pests that it never resisted before.

The one thing you do not get in nature is a clone. It’s not given to repeat itself as it   was, because to repeat itself would be to die. It’s going to use its new ecology to construct a culture of a different kind. It is going to live with dissemination. It knows that unless we have made the return to our symbolic home in our hearts and minds we will never know who we are, but it knows at the same time that you can’t go home again. (33; italics mine)

What does it mean that one “can’t go home again?” And how to apply that to the discussion of Caribbean culture that is its scene of presentation?

II

I don’t want to psychologize Hall, but I want to put in conversation his notion of being unable to “go home again” and his interview for the first issue of Small Axe that Hall would have given shortly after this address.^[xvii] The interview stages a much more explicit set of interventions about the Caribbean as a formative space for Hall and an object of his study. It is possible that this is more function of genre. It allows for another kind of engagement it is by definition dialogic, two people looking for each other; the plenary on Caribbean Culture calls for a kind of declaration of a self and subjectivity that is less provisional.  In another 1997 interview, Caryl Phillips asks him how he feels about the Caribbean, and Hall speaks of “home” in less definitive terms than the final lines of “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends.” “No,” he says to Phillips:

I don’t feel detachment from [the Caribbean]. I maintain that terrible ambiguity about home. I never know it. I never know what question I’m being asked when I’m asked about home. On the other hand, when I go home I know it’s not my home. And I know it’s not my home principally because it’s a small place and all the people that I was at school with are still there, and all have had a different life from mine, I can literally see the divergence. I can’t possibly recapitulate the way in which they have lived the first 30 years of independence. I didn’t live them like that. It’s not an odd question of whether you can be friends or not, it just, it’s formed us differently. (Hall 1997)

Hall here is ambiguous about the Caribbean, Jamaica, as his home. It is not simply that he is unsure of his answer; he is uncertain of what he is being asked when asked of the Caribbean as “home.”

As far as Caribbean scholarship the Small Axe interview ushers in a moment. Hall’s is the first interview of a series of interviews of Caribbean intellectuals born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that Scott undertakes.^[xviii] It appears in the first issue of a journal that has forged a frontier zone in the field over the last while (in two years it will be twenty). At its inception, this moment of birth of which Hall is made a part, the journal was meant to “fashio[n] a vernacular idiom of criticism,” taking up the charge from older outfits such as Lloyd Best’s New World Quarterly and Kamau Brathwaite’s Savacou. Interestingly, Hall was a part of each—Best claims his in this 1996 moment as a kind of third (if silent) parent; Hall attended the conferences of the Caribbean Artists Movement and wrote for Savacou; and he is chosen as the first Caribbean intellectual to be interviewed for Small Axe.

There is a fascinating elliptical moment in the interview; allow me to quote from it at length:

David Scott (DS): … Clearly there you are thinking about the Caribbean. This is     the middle to late ‘70s, yes. What is prompting that rethinking of the Caribbean?

Stuart Hall (SH): Well I suppose what is prompting it is the sense that ll that was   bubbling up in the ‘60s has had a very profound impact on Caribbean societies. It’s a very different place. And its a place that I can re-ground in my o[w]n mind in a way that I’d sort of decided that I couldn’t re-ground the old Caribbean like that. By the ‘70s I start to come back more often. Mainly to visit family. I don’t come back for official purposes. There is a long period in the ‘60s when having taken the decision I don’t come very much.

DS: Do you lecture here when you come back in the ‘70s?

SH: Hardly ever.

DS: Is your work known among intellectuals here?

SH: No, no. Not very much. And it doesn’t feel relevant to me to tell them about it.

DS: No, sure, that I can understand. But certainly the way . . . .

SH: They still don’t . . . .

DS: I know they still don’t . . . .

SH: I’m not complaining about it.

DS: Yes, but I am. (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 155)

Here is Hall, interviewed for the first issue of Small Axe, a journal committed to a critical tradition in Caribbean studies, largely concerned with Caribbean thought. This set of exchanges between Hall and Scott is riddled with the unsaid. Scott keeps the question of the (anglophone) Caribbean ever present; Hall seems to want this. If Hall’s address of the future of study of Caribbean Culture does not disavow that “[i]t is perhaps too little remembered … that Stuart Hall is a Jamaican and a West Indian whose work has been informed by some of the journeys and debates that constitute this region as a zone of history, culture, and politics,” he does do so in the interview (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 141). Yet much as the interview tells us about Hall’s development as a (anglophone) Caribbean intellectual and his sustained interest in the region, the ellipses perform a withholding that makes the answer to our very question of Hall’s place in the canon of Caribbean thought, most especially the “why” of it, elusive. And, perhaps, even an acceptance of his lot as a kind of second-class citizen in the pecking order of the home-based academy. What was intended to follow “the way”? Don’t they still do? Is it the way that Hall is marginalized in the region, or the way that he is celebrated elsewhere? Is it that “intellectuals here” still don’t read him, or acknowledge him? The first suggests lack of awareness, knowledge of Hall and his work, his theoretical interventions; the latter suggests a refusal that articulates critique either of scholarly practice (either in terms of concepts or the general eclecticism of Hall’s oeuvre) or geographic location (that he never settles and works from back home and in this way in strong contrast to Lloyd Best, Rex Nettleford, Barry Chevannes and even Brathwaite and Lamming who work from ‘home’ for periods).

III

Let us leave the 1996 conference and interview for a moment and look at the ways in which Hall has been memorialized since his passing. By now it should go without saying that I am interested in the ways in which he has, or has not been, honored from the Caribbean or Caribbean-centered spaces and platforms.

In her review for the Caribbean Review of Books of John Akomfrah’s documentary, The Stuart Hall Project, Annie Paul writes:

It never fails to astonish me how little Hall and his path-breaking work are known back here in the Caribbean, where he comes from—in Jamaica, where he was born and raised, for instance, he’s a complete nonentity. For those not in the know: Hall is a globally renowned intellectual (an “intellectual rock star,” as one publication has referred to him), a founding editor of New Left Review, and more famously the main progenitor of the influential field of cultural studies. Arising in the 1960s, this interdisciplinary juggernaut that signalled the advent of postmodern scholarship rapidly gained popularity, dealing a body-blow to traditional academic disciplines from sociology to political science to literature, and completely rewriting the scope of intellectual work worldwide. That it only arrived at the University of the West Indies in the 1990s is a measure of what a well-kept secret Hall remains in these parts. (Paul 2013)

Paul, of course, is correct: Hall’s scholarship so profoundly influenced the ways in which we study human experience globally—in terms of subjectivity, power, identity formation, home and diaspora to name but a few—yet continues to be “a well-kept secret in [the Caribbean]”; and this persistent secrecy around Hall is a barometer of something. The paucity of elegies, eulogies or memorials in Caribbean or Caribbean-centric outlets since his passing continues the occlusion of Hall from the region and tells us something not only about Hall’s own sense of who he was, and where he belonged in relation to the island of his birth, but also speaks to his Caribbean legacy, his place in Caribbean thought, and what exactly the Caribbean is now, maybe what it is becoming.

By my count five pieces emerged from the Caribbean or Caribbean-focused sources after Hall’s homegoing. These were: two obituaries; an announcement by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival as well as a free screening of The Stuart Hall Project (the Tuesday after he passed);^[xix] a moving, searing letter from the editor of Small Axe (Scott 2014) and a special section of that same journal titled “The Gift of Stuart Hall”; and a tribute from the Centre for Caribbean Thought. I want to focus on those that speak explicitly to Hall and the Caribbean.

In their tribute from the Centre for Caribbean Thought, Brian Meeks, Anthony Bogues and Rupert Lewis, assert:

that Hall did not  return “home” like … George Lamming, or Sylvia Wynter (who returned for a while) and others did not mean that he was not Caribbean. What it meant was that the Caribbean was now working through a different geographical and cultural location. (Bogues, Lewis & Meeks 2014: 128)

This was preceded by Meeks’s singular celebration of Hall almost a week before in the Jamaica Gleaner, “Rediscovering Stuart Hall” (Meeks 2014). He tries to attend to the relatively subdued nature of the local response, or lack thereof, in the week of Hall’s passing. Meeks explains that it “should not, maybe, be surprising” that there is such quiet (it took local newspaper several days to pick up the news) as Hall had not lived in Jamaica in over six decades (Meeks 2014). But, for Meeks, Hall’s diasporic existence has little to do with Jamaicans’ ignorance of him, rather such lack of awareness “says more of national inattention to ideas and the people who generate them.” He ends with an invitation to the Hall’s alma mater, Jamaica College, or the government to honor Hall.

But in “Stuart Hall Roots an Legacy” Carolyn Cooper, professor of literary and cultural studies at UWI, Mona, goes directly to the question of Hall having never returned home. Writing in Jamaican patois, in Chaka-Chaka Spelling and again in Prapa-Prapa Spellin, she brings the question of Hall’s place of domicile to the fore. She asks:

So wa mek Stuart Hall never come back a yard? Im did visit. But im live out im life a Inglan. Inna 1997, im do one interview wid Caryl Phillips, one next Oxford man weh     born a St Kitts an go a England when im a four month ‘old’. Phillips aks Hall di said same question: “The time you were leaving Oxford—1957—was exactly the same time that there was a potential for great change in the Caribbean. It was the beginning of the short-lived federation among the islands. Why did you choose not to go back?” Hall gi two answer: “There was no need to hurry back, because by then federation was a dead idea.” Dead fi true. An CARICOM no hearty to dat … See di next answer ya: “But there’s a second reason which is more personal. You see, I came from this peculiar coloured middle class in Jamaica which was oriented toward Britain … I didn’t want to go back to that. To have a job as a lawyer with my family close at hand, watching over me, I couldn’t bear it. I’d always meant to go home, but I’d always had reservations about becoming a member of that class.”

Di problem a no so-so class. Plenty colour did mix up inna it. Hall do one next interview inna 2007 wid one journalist, Tim Adams. Hear wa im seh: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born. My sister said: ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ Not black baby, you will note, but low-class Indian.” Seet deh now! Good ting Stuart Hall never bodder come back ya so. Im might as well tan a England.^[xx]

For Cooper Hall’s legacy is haunted by the incomplete return. It is not that Hall’s ideas were too big for ‘home’ as Meeks hints, but rather there it is color and class questions that disrupt Hall’s return at least in 1957. In this way his not a Caribbean existence simply in another geographic location, but a flight from the color politics of Jamaica, an escape.

For his part Hall does offer several, varied reasons for his decision to settle in the UK. If Caryl Phillips is told that it had everything to do with the death of the West Indian Federation, Hall makes plain his unwillingness (like Claude McKay’s Bita Plant^[xxi]) to be sucked into brown, respectable middle class society. He also speaks of the ‘problem’ of his own skin color—decidedly darker than other members of his family—in terms of having easy relations with his family (most of whom were of lighter skin color). In other words Hall might not disagree with Cooper that the question was not only one of class, but profoundly of color.

Yet it seems to me that there is also something of a discomfort, a worry in that earlier moment of the 1996 conference that may add another dimension. In other words, I want to take Hall at his word that the interest, his interest, in the Caribbean never goes away. And, if so, the seeming finality of his “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends” suggests that he can never be a Caribbean intellectual, he can never really be part of that canon. At the same time I think there is a desire (expressed in the dialogic spaces of the interviews) to suture, to make a return.

As editor of Caribbean Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall and one of the organizers of the third Caribbean Reasonings conference held in 2004 in honor of Hall out of that collection emerged, Meeks has been integral in plotting Hall’s return to the intellectual terrain of contemporary Jamaica and the Caribbean academy. In his introduction to that collection, Meeks contends that it was only after giving the keynote for the conference, and receiving a standing ovation, that, Meeks writes in his introduction to the text, “Hall, after more than half a century, had at last, come home” (Meeks 2007).

If that conference was the coming to fruition of what Lloyd Best suggested in 1996, that Hall and his work be the subject of a conference meant to honor him, it was also a retake on that earlier moment in which Hall’s name was placed on the roll under Caribbean intellectual and he stayed clear of answering too loudly in the affirmative. In his talk to the 2004 conference in his honor he tells the crowd that he nearly back out; what business did he have at that point in his career to claim “to be a Caribbean intellectual?” (Hall 2007). But rather than attempt to shake off the label like so many participles of dust, Hall took hold of it, laid claim to it. I would not say that he did so at last, because I suspect in his quieter more private moments he may have accepted the label (remember his time with the Caribbean Artists Movement?). Instead I will say that this talk is the occasion for him to do so publicly, in the haloed halls of the University of the West Indies. Here Hall revises the origin myths about how Cultural Studies started; in essence he leaves literature and turns to Cultural Studies because he “had to confront the problem of trying to understand what Caribbean culture was and what my relationship” (Hall 2007). He may not have a deep investment in the postcolonial project of “nation-building,” but in that regard he is not alone—many of his generation bemoaned the nation state. It is not only that Hall becomes black in there, but he forges community with fellow West Indians he may never have doon amongst other West Indians:

London streets — one more turn in the story of the Middle Passage and a critical moment in the formation of another displaced black diaspora — I resolved to go back, to read, read about, try to understand and to make a part of me the culture which had made me and from which I could never — and no longer wished — to escape. (Hall 2007)

He speaks of himself as one of many other Jamaicans and anglophone Caribbean folk making their way in that work, rather than an isolated, rare individual. Diaspora becomes a kind of double-bind that ties on to home and the world, here and there. Diaspora here is not only that state which induces and produces a kind of homelessness, it also makes home. Diaspora not a way to disavow one home as one tries, if never succeeding valiant in the effort, to make another one’s new home. It is an uneven and imbalanced dance between the locations. It is in this understanding of diaspora Hall finds his Caribbean. Or rather lets the rest of us see it; he has been wrestling with it all the while, the interest always there. His entire career becoming in some ways “[his] very long way of trying to answer the question, in what sense can [he] be ‘a Caribbean intellectual’?” (Hall 2007).

Travel well.

Contributor’s Note

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is lecturer of African Diaspora and African literature and theory in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. Her current book project is Empire, Nation, Diaspora: The Making of Modern Black Intellectual Culture.

References

Best, Lloyd. 1997. “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor          Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 16 – 24.

^__________.. 1997. “The Vocation of a Caribbean Intellectual: An Interview with Lloyd Best,”             interview by David Scott. Small Axe 1: 119 – 139.

^__________.. 1967. “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom,” New World Quarterly      (Croptime): 13 – 35.

Bogues, Anthony, Rupert Lewis and Brian Meeks. 2014. “Stuart Hall, Caribbean Thought and the World We Live in.” Caribbean Quarterly, 60, no. 1: 128.

^__________.. 2002. “Michael Manley, Equality and the Jamaican Labour Movement,” in special           issue” Michael Manley: A Voice at the Workplace,” Caribbean Quarterly, 48, no. 1: 77 – 93.

Brathwaite, Kamau. 1997. “Rex Nettleford and the Renaissance of Caribbean Culture,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 34 – 69.

Brodber, Erna. 1997. “Re-engineering Blackspace,” “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford,” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 70 – 81.

Chevannes, Barry. 1997. “Introduction” to special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on       Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford,” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no.1/2: iii – vi.

Cooper, Carolyn. “Stuart Hall Roots an Legacy.” Jamaica Gleaner, jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140216/cleisure/cleisure3.html, accessed December 20, 2014.

Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 1992. “C. L. R. James Misbound.” Transition, no. 58: 124 – 136.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” in Caribbean        Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. Kindle ebook.

_________.  1997. “Politics, Strategy, Contingency: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” by David       Scott. Small Axe, no. 1: 141 – 159.

_________. 1997. “Caribbean a Culture: Future Trends,” in special issue “The Plenaries:    Conference On Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean    Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 25 – 33.

_________. 1997. Interview with Caryl Phillips. Bomb: A Quarterly Arts and Culture Magazine   58, http://bombmagazine.org/article/2030/stuart-hall, accessed August 28, 2015.

_________. 1983. “For a Marxism without Guarantees.” Australian Left Review 83: 38 – 43.

_________. 1980. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological      Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, 16–60.

Lamming, George. 1997. “Opening Address,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 1 – 15.

Manley, Michael. 1997. “Rex Nettleford: A Revolutionary Spirit,” in special issue “The      Plenaries: Conference On Caribbean Culture In Honour Of Professor Rex Nettleford.”            Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 96 – 100.

Meeks, Brian. February 12, 2014. “Rediscovering Stuart Hall.” Jamaica Gleaner, jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140212/cleisure/cleisure1.html, accessed December 20, 2014.

_________. 2007. “Introduction: Return of a Native Sun,” in Caribbean Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, . Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. Kindle ebook.

Paul, Annie. 2013. “Towards the Next Conjuncture.” Caribbean Review of Books,   caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/30-november-2013/towards-the-next-           conjecture/, accessed May 20, 2015.

Walmsey, Anne. 1992. Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966 –1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2000. “The Re-enactment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” interview by David Scott. Small Axe, no. 8: 119 – 207.

Seaga, Edward. 1997. “The Significance of Folk Culture in the Development of National     Identity,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 82 – 89.

Scott, David. 2014. “The Last Conjuncture.” Small Axe, 18, no. 2 44: vii – x.

_________. 2013. “On the Question of Caribbean Studies,” introduction to special issue on “What is Caribbean Studies?” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 2 41: 1 – 7.

_________. 2005. Interview with Stuart Hall. Bomb: A Quarterly Arts and Culture Magazine 90,   http://bombmagazine.org/article/2711/david-scott, accessed July 10, 2015.

“Draft Program.” 1996. Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.

“Film Festival Hosts Free Tribute Screening of The Stuart Hall Project.” 2014. http:// www.ttfilmfestival.com/2014/02/festival-hosts-free-tribute-screening-stuart-hall-project/ .

Notes

^[i] The island nation-states of the Caribbean gained independence between 1962 (Jamaica and Trinidad andTobago) and 1983 (St. Kitts and Nevis).

^[ii] The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

^[iii] James did not win a scholarship to study in the UK as Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Stuart Hall, or many others would, but I include him in this number because he was one of those students (and then teacher) of the prestigious island schools who would have been expected to win one of the island scholarship—a middle-class/lower middle-class boy, as he describes himself in the BBC Channel Four interview he did with Stuart Hall (See James, “C. L. R. James in conversation with Stuart Hall,” Channel 4, 1983-85).

^[iv] The only television station in Trinidad and Tobago until 1991.

^[v] Hortense Spillers asked this of Anthony ‘Tony’ Bogues during his keynote.

^[vi] They spoke of George Padmore and the work he and James did together in the African Bureau.

^[vii] I use “particular” thinking of James’s invocation of the word in his history of the first Pan-African Conference of 1900 in reference to the actions and history of Henry Sylvester Williams as convenor of the conference and a Caribbean intellectual. See James 1984: 236-250.

^[viii] At QRC James also taught V. S. Naipaul.

^[ix] Eric E. Williams says this after Jamaica pulls out of the West Indian Federation in order to justify Trinidad and Tobago’s withdrawal thereafter.

^[x] Scott’s term of choice (represented by the ellipsis in my citation above) is “archive”; he refers to an “archive of thinking” around what Caribbean means. He writes:

I mean to press the idea, in other words, that to think something like “Caribbean studies” is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with, one dimension or another of the archive of thinking about what the Caribbean supposedly is, supposedly was. (2013: 1)

Archive, I think, does not quite get at what interests me on the question of Stuart Hall and the Caribbean because as much as archives are products of power, there is some sense that within an archive traces might exist, the archive might hold sources the value of which change over time. The canon on the other hand may change content over time, but that which is within is that which is authorized in particular ways; the archive can contain within its borders items that are not deemed valuable, but that sit there as if waiting to be discovered. In other words, Hall’s work may sit within a Caribbean archive, but it is not considered canonical in Caribbean scholarship.

^[xi] In this essay, to distinguish between the two 1997 interviews I cite Hall’s interview in Small Axe as Hall, “Politics” 1997 and his interview Bomb with Caryl Phillips as Hall 1997.

^[xii] Nettleford remained would become vice-chancellor of UWI (its first graduate to do so) just two years later in 1998 until 2004.

^[xiii] Selected literature papers were also compiled for another special issue of Caribbean Quarterly from the conference. See Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 43, Number 4, Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford The Literature Papers: A Selection (December 1997).

^[xiv] This is Best’s return to his 1967 piece in the New World Quarterly, “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom.” See Lloyd Best, “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom.” New World Quarterly (Croptime 1967): 13 – 35.

^[xv] Brown here refers to the mulatto elite. See Anthony Bogues, “Michael Manley, Equality and the Jamaican Labour Movement,” in special issue” Michael Manley: A Voice at the Workplace,” Caribbean Quarterly, 48, no. 1, (2002): 77–93.

^[xvi] See Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980), reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–60.

^[xvii] The interview is dated March 6, 1996. The draft program for the conference show three plenaries scheduled on: Monday, March 4; Tuesday, March 5; and Wednesday March 6 (See “Conference on Caribbean Culture Registration Brochure,” National Library of Jamaica). Hall would have given his plenary on on of those days, those most likely not in the morning slot as scheduled in the draft program since he refers to Best’s paper having been given in morning before his own.

^[xviii] Lloyd Best’s interview also features in the first issue of the journal, and before Hall’s in pagination, but in conversation with Hall again in 2005, Scott says that this was the first interview he did of Hall’s generation of intellectuals for Small Axe. See David Scott, interview with Stuart Hall, Bomb: A Quarterly Arts and Culture Magazine 90 (Winter 2005), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2711/david-scott, accessed July 10, 2015.

^[xix] See http://www.ttfilmfestival.com/2014/02/festival-hosts-free-tribute-screening-stuart-hall-project/ . The documentary has yet to be screened in Jamaica.

^[xx] Translation:

So what made Stuart Hall never come back home? He visited. But he lived out his life in England. In 1997, he did an interview with Caryl Phillips, another Oxford man who was born in St. Kitts and went to England when he was four months ‘old.’ Phillips asked Hall the same question: “The time you were leaving Oxford—1957—was exactly the same time that there was a potential for great change in the Caribbean. It was the beginning of the short-lived federation among the islands. Why did you choose not to go back?” Hall gave two answers: “There was no need to hurry back, because by then federation was a dead idea.” Dead in truth. An CARICOM is no better … Look at the next answer:  “But there’s a second reason       which is more personal.  You see, I came from this peculiar coloured middle class in Jamaica which was oriented toward Britain … I didn’t want to go back to that. To have a job as a lawyer with my family close at hand, watching over me, I couldn’t bear it. I’d always meant to go home, but I’d always had reservations about becoming a member of that class.”

The problem is not so much class. Plenty color issues are mixed in. Hall did another interview in 2007 with another journalist, Tim Adams. Listen to what he said: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born. My sister said: ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ Not black baby, you will note, but low-class Indian.” See there now! Good thing Stuart Hall never bothered to come back here so. He might as well tan in England.

^[xxi] See Claude McKay. Banana Bottom. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933.

by Jimmy Fazzino

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

 

A Tale of Two Whales

Call Me Burroughs: A Life, Barry Miles’s landmark biography of William S. Burroughs, takes its name from a 1965 spoken word album, the first of many Burroughs would record over the course of his long and prolific life. Miles, then a co-owner of London’s Indica Bookshop, was in charge of the album’s UK distribution. “He made more records than most rock groups,” writes Miles (2013: 629). And later in life this “literary outlaw”[1] would become a rock star of sorts. Returning to the United States in 1974 after a quarter century of living abroad, he followed Allen Ginsberg’s example and began a “new career” of public readings (514). These engagements helped solidify Burroughs’s status as a countercultural icon; they also showcased the performative dimensions of his work. For those familiar with Burroughs’s singular drawl, which became even more pronounced onstage, it is impossible to read him without hearing that voice. It haunts the page. Burroughs is a master ventriloquist, inhabited by many personae, whose voice is best understood as a construction and, at times, a put-on. Establishing a sense of critical distance between author and performance, not easy to do when Burroughs’s performances are so incredibly convincing, is crucial for grasping his project as a writer. In a 1974 interview with David Bowie for Rolling Stone, he indicates the ultimate stakes of this project while gesturing toward a deeper performativity of writing when he says, “Writing is seeing how close you can come to making it happen, that’s the object of all art,” adding, “I think the most important thing in the world is that the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen.”^[2]

It is fitting that Miles should borrow his book’s title from Burroughs, repurposing what was already an adaptation of the most famous opening line in all of US literature. This nod to the détournement of Burroughs’s writing practices, epitomized by the “cut-up” experiments of the 1960s, is also an implicit argument for Burroughs’s place in literary history. When Beat Generation writers—and the question of whether Burroughs was a “Beat” inevitably arises—get talked about at all in relation to literary history, they are usually confined to a distinctly American tradition stemming from nineteenth-century American Renaissance writers like Melville. (Burroughs did share an appreciation for Melville with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and when the latter two were students at Columbia, the English faculty happened to include Raymond Weaver, who had discovered the unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd and helped restore Melville’s reputation.) Beat writing continues mainly to be read and studied “domestically”—that is to say, as a latter-day manifestation of Emersonian individualism, Whitmanian populism and frankness, and Thoreau’s anti-materialist gospel.

Burroughs himself consistently rejected the Beat label, but if public disavowal were enough, then one would have to exclude Kerouac and many others besides. Miles’s biography in no way privileges or gives prominence to the Beat years, treating them as one phase among many in the long, strange trajectory of Burroughs’s life. Miles does trace an evolution in the author’s thoughts regarding the Beat movement, writing that while “previously he had always distanced himself from the Beat Generation,” upon his return to the States, “He now claimed Kerouac as a friend, even though they had been estranged for the last decade of Kerouac’s life. He recognized Ginsberg’s role in shaping his career and helped him to rehabilitate the Beat Generation and give it its rightful place—as Allen saw it—in the pantheon of American letters.” Burroughs had by this time become an “elder statesman” (Miles 2013: 513) of the whole counterculture that the Beats helped launch.

One of Burroughs’s earliest sustained attempts at writing, the 1945 novella And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, he cowrote with Kerouac, and his eventual career as a writer is practically unthinkable without the support of Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs’s first agent and his most vociferous booster. In fact, most of the early work (classics like Junky and Naked Lunch) has its origins in letters to Ginsberg. Ultimately, such questions as “was Burroughs a Beat?” should be a secondary concern, although I happen to think that he can be productively read alongside Kerouac and Ginsberg, Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, and a host of writers and artists called, however equivocally, “Beat.” In my own work this has meant a more careful reckoning of the transnational sources and contexts of the Beat movement as a whole.

The Beats traveled widely and produced some of their most important works abroad. (Ginsberg: Kaddish, Kerouac: Mexico City Blues, Gregory Corso: Happy Birthday of Death, which includes the epochal poem “Bomb,” Burroughs: Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch, the Nova trilogy, just to name a few). This distance from home is precisely what opens up a space for all sorts of unexpected connections and crossings to arise in their work. And it turns out that Beat writers were profoundly engaged with the world at large, particularly colonial, postcolonial, and third world. Living and writing in places like Morocco, Mali, India, and Latin America (and centers of imperial power like Paris and London) at the great moment of decolonization across the globe, the Beats were more than just tourists. They could be very attuned to the immediate and usually fraught political situations unfolding around them, although it takes a certain kind of worlded reading practice to unearth these subterranean concerns in their work. For Burroughs in particular, it seems that his calling as a writer is predicated on leaving the United States behind. He turns out to be Ahab, not Ishmael, and the quest for his white whale—the “final fix,” as he first calls it in Junky (1953)—leads him all over the world.

Accordingly, some of the best recent scholarship on writers in the Beat orbit has taken a transnationalist approach of one kind or another. This includes Timothy Gray’s (2006) Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim and Rachel Adams’s (2009) Continental Divides. Adams argues that Kerouac is a quintessentially “continental” writer, while Hassan Melehy (2016) figures Kerouac as a Deleuzian nomad of the Québécois diaspora in Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. Todd Tietchen’s (2010) Cubalogues examines the impact that Castro’s Cuba had on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom visited the island in the years just following the revolution, and Brian Edwards’s (2005) Morocco Bound addresses the topic of Cold War orientalism in part by locating Burroughs’s Tangier writing within a persistent set of tropes surrounding Arab North Africa and demonstrating the ways in which Burroughs both exceeds and gets “trapped” by orientalist discourse. A number of related currents in Beat studies have converged in the volume The Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (2012), and collectively they lead to these conclusions: the Beats represent a transnational literary and cultural movement par excellence, and the study of Beat writing can shed new light not just on the transnationalism of US literary history but on the meaning of the transnational itself.

So Miles’s title might turn out to be a red herring altogether. What if the whale in question isn’t the one who destroyed the Pequod but the one who swallowed up the prophet Jonah—the same one George Orwell invokes in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”? Chiefly a meditation on the proper relationship between art and politics in an age of totalitarianism, Orwell’s essay singles out for praise the work of American expatriate writer Henry Miller, who stands in sharp contrast to the “committed” writers of the day. In both spirit and style, Miller is a forerunner of the Beat Generation. Fans of Kerouac’s Big Sur (where Miller lived for two decades) are likely to regard their missed dinner date (Kerouac got drunk that night and never made it out of San Francisco) as one of the great lost opportunities of American letters. Along with Howl and Naked Lunch, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer became another milestone in the fight against censorship in the United States when the US Supreme Court declared it not obscene in 1964. Because of their affinities, Miller gets read in similar, and similarly reductive, ways as the Beats, and Orwell’s essay sets the tone for these later readings. It also points beyond them, offering by extension a fresh way to look at Beat writing in general and Burroughs’s work in particular. Finally, Orwell’s whale suggests an idiosyncratic image of transnationalism as worlding and a means of navigating some of the impasses that have grown up around the so-called “transnational turn” in the humanities.

Like Miller, Orwell had lived dead broke in Paris in the early 1930s, but his description of the experience in Down and Out in Paris and London is more akin to the reportage of Orwell’s own Road to Wigan Pier than to anything in Tropic of Cancer. That notwithstanding, he admired Miller’s work and championed it at a time when Miller was known only to a cognoscenti, who, like T. S. Eliot, had gotten hold of a copy printed in France by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. (After the war, his son Maurice Girodias changed the name to Olympia Press and would go on to publish The Naked Lunch, as the 1959 first edition of Burroughs’s novel was called.) In his essay on Miller, Orwell frames his discussion of Miller with the story of their first meeting. It was 1936, and Orwell was on his way to Spain to serve the Republican cause, which Miller bluntly told him was “the act of an idiot.” Orwell recounts, “He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity” (2009: 129-30).

After Spain, where Orwell was branded a Trotskyite and a fascist and forced to flee, he comes to agree, or at least sympathize, with Miller’s basic position. Moreover, he concludes that a literature of utter passivity and complete acceptance is far preferable, and more honest, than high-minded and resolutely political writing from the likes of Auden and Spender. In a world of such turmoil and flux, any art attaching itself to a cause, or worse yet a party, is doomed to failure. To capture the full extent of Miller’s detachment, Orwell borrows an image that Miller himself once used to describe good friend Anaïs Nin: he compares her “to Jonah in the whale’s belly.” Orwell writes:

And however it may be with Anaïs Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.

“Short of death,” Orwell calls this “the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility” (132), but the implication is that sometimes irresponsibility is more principled than its opposite. The complexity of Orwell’s figuration lies in the dialectical twist whereby Miller is trapped in the belly of the whale, but the whale is transparent. I want to formulate things slightly differently and instead say that he is inside the whale, but the whale happens to contain the entire world. Read against the grain of its original intent, the whale becomes an image not of separation but of worlded connectedness. It points to an alternative, monist strain of worlded thought that appears everywhere in Beat writing and runs counter to the Beats’ supposed isolationism and indifference to the wider world.

Ahab’s white whale as blank screen or “empty cipher” is akin to what some critics fear has become the transcendent sameness of the transnational. The prominent Americanist Donald Pease speaks for them when he remarks that in its rise to become a dominant paradigm transnationalism writ large has “exercised a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations—including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, and postcolonial American studies—within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge” (2011: 1). Worse yet, this shift toward the “unmarked” space of the transnational mirrors and recapitulates the same global flows of capital and corporate power that transnationalist critics want to interrogate (10).[3] Transnationalism as worlding, however, with its counter-hegemonic animus, its emphasis on materiality, on local histories and lived experience, and its attention to the always uneven encounter between the local and the global, is particularly well-suited to retain the lessons of older critical formations, especially postcolonial theory. With roots in Spivak’s planetarity and Said’s global-materialist outlook, worlding privileges precisely those “peripheralized geographies and diasporic populations” that, for Pease, have been marked and marginalized by the transnational (10).

Miller’s whale is more like worlding’s messy immanence—its belly a subterranean space that supplies what Ginsberg has called “the bottom-up vision of society” (in Raskin 2004: xiv), or what cultural historian David Pike characterizes as “the view from below” (2005: 8-12). The world as such is an oppositional term that upholds the local and the contingent in the face of the deracinating transcendence of global space. At its core, worlding entails a dialectic of near and far; it adopts the in-between-ness of James Clifford’s “translocal” sense of cultural adaptation (see in particular 1997) and Rob Wilson’s global/local (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996; Wilson 2000). Lawrence Buell (2007) associates these shifting spatial scales with the planetary “ecoglobalism” of environmental writers and activists, for the world/planet is fundamentally an ecological vision of a world-organism: earth as ecos (“home”) and lived space. Via the Beat ecopoetics of Gary Snyder, the etymology of “eco-” as oikos (house, family) is made worldly and worlded in Earth House Hold, Snyder’s 1969 collection of “Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries.” That is to say, the lived, material experience of the near-at-hand (one’s “household”) is, in Snyder’s conception, the necessary ground upon which one might imagine communal ties that run much deeper than the nation (oikos as earth/planet). The world, then, becomes a necessary “third term,” as Christopher Connery has labeled it (2007: 3), preserving the local within the global as it confronts the relentless logic of East-West, colonialism-nationalism, communist-capitalist, self-other.

Along with Spivak and Said, Immanuel Wallerstein and his pathbreaking “world-systems analysis” are part of a recognizable and increasingly consolidated canon of worlded thought. I want to hold on to their classic formulations of the worlded world even as I open up to a more expansive genealogy that comprises poetry, philosophy, and the sciences in addition to literary and cultural theory and criticism. Wallerstein makes a crucial distinction when defining “world-system.” He writes that “a world-system not is the system of the world, but a system that is a world and that can be, most often had been, located in an area less than the entire globe” (2004: 98). The world indicated by Wallerstein’s world-system is neither identical to nor coterminous with the world as empirical object (Wallerstein uses “globe” to mean the latter). It is thus a non-totalizing totality, a totality in the Marxian sense: that is to say, a critical concept that functions descriptively but also works to denaturalize what it describes. Just as our “species-being” is determined by, yet exceeds, the “totality of social relations” under the prevailing economic system. As Lukács points out, for Marx the totality itself is dialectical; it is precisely the universality of capitalism that sets the stage for the universal liberation of proletarian revolution. (Transferring things from base to superstructure, Peter Bürger will make an analogous argument when he writes that it is only after the Aestheticists declare the supremacy of “art for art’s sake” that avant-garde movements like Dada can come along and attempt to negate any distinction between art and life.) Wallerstein’s differentiation between a conceptual world and an empirical globe points to the dual nature of world as both physical and figural, topological and tropological. And the space opened up by this distinction is what makes the worlded imaginary possible.

The Marxian world-system as non-totalizing totality means that civilization progresses in dialectical fashion from one world to the next (e.g., from the feudal world to the capitalist world). But what if multiple worlds, an infinite number of worlds, can exist simultaneously? This is the conclusion to draw from the work of biologist and proto-posthumanist Jakob von Uexküll, whose concept of Umwelt (environment, life-world) posits that each species’s sensorium is fundamentally unique and constitutes a world unto itself. In Uexküll’s most enduring work, A Foray into the Worlds (Umwelten) of Animals and Humans (1934), he asks readers to take an imaginary stroll with him:

We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one such bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble. (2010: 43 [emphasis added])

The author will emphasize the salutary estrangement involved in such a pursuit when he writes, “Only when we can vividly imagine this fact [of the “bubbles”] will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides” (70). Uexküll’s perspective, which radically decenters human consciousness and imagines a dense, rhizomic web of inputs and interactions among all life forms, is picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and has come back to the fore in the field of animal studies and among today’s theorists of a posthuman biopolitics.

This talk of worlds and bubbles is strangely reminiscent of Leibniz even, whose rationalist abstractions seem miles away from Uexküll’s empiricist phenomenology. Yet Leibniz’s “monad” is but the metaphysical counterpart to Uexküll’s model of ecological interdependence. On the surface, the self-sufficient monad—a substance without windows or doors, as Leibniz puts it—seems to be an image of extreme isolation, but the exact opposite is true. His “monadology” only works because we live in a universe where everything is connected to everything else and everything affects everything else; transculturally speaking, it is a version of Indra’s net. The philosopher writes, “This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance [i.e., monad] has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe” (1989: 220). Leibniz also plays on the tension between singularity and multiplicity inherent in the monad, and like Uexküll he is interested in perspective, writing, “Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad” (221).

In “Inside the Whale,” Orwell ponders the idea of “books that ‘create a world of their own,’ as the saying goes”—books that, like Tropic of Cancer, “open up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar” (2009: 11). Burroughs’s Junky presents itself as exposé of the junk world (where there are not only junky habits and junky lingo but junk time and “junk cells” with their own “junk metabolism”). Ginsberg plays up this junk world in an early preface he wrote for the novel, which he promises will reveal a “vast underground life” and a “world of horrors.” The final pages of Junky prepare readers for the yagé world, which will soon become the world of Interzone in Naked Lunch, and so on. These are all instantiations of a “world-horizon come near” that Rob Wilson writes about in The Worlding Project (2007: 212). The zero degree formulation of the world-horizon in Beat writing is Dean Moriarty’s ecstatic “It’s the world! My God! It’s the world!” near the end of Kerouac’s On the Road, uttered after Sal and Dean cross the Mexican border. Such sweeping gestures always run the risk of erasing difference in the name of an essential oneness across time and space, but their sublime expansiveness is what also leads Beat writers to a more grounded or “situated” understanding of their world-historical moment of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics. This is especially true for Burroughs, whose worlded imaginary gives rise to complex textual geographies.

Worlding Burroughs

Barry Miles has been a prolific chronicler of the counterculture. I first encountered his work when I read The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 (2000). His still authoritative account of the Beats in Paris, much of which gets reprised in the “City of Light” section of Call Me Burroughs, has proven indispensable to understanding those years of fertile experiment at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, especially Burroughs’s intense collaboration with painter and writer Brion Gysin, whom he had met in Tangier but didn’t really connect with until Paris. Despite the earlier book’s strengths, in Beat Hotel Miles makes a key claim that seems to me to encapsulate the most reductive tendencies of so much Beat scholarship. Describing Burroughs’s experience of Paris and his refusal to humor Ginsberg by joining him on trips to museums and sightseeing excursions, Miles writes that “his was more a landscape of ideas, and in many ways he could have been living anywhere” (2000: 160). A theme running through Beat Hotel figures Paris as a missed opportunity for Burroughs and the other Beat writers living there. It turns out, for example, that Burroughs was oblivious to the presence of the Lettrist/Situationist group who also made the Latin Quarter their base of operations and were engaging in similarly provocative textual experiments. The parallel evolution of the cut-up method alongside the Situationist practice of détournement is really quite remarkable, evidence that the Beats were soaking up similar energies and looking to common ancestors in Dada and Surrealism.

The “landscape of ideas” thesis becomes more problematic when applied to Burroughs’s oeuvre. It means that a prominent setting like the Interzone of Naked Lunch gets read as a nightmarish abstraction or drug-induced hallucination rather than the satirical depiction of Tangier in the years immediately preceding and following Moroccan independence that it is. Since Miles’s Beat Hotel was first published, scholarship on Burroughs has made a spatial turn mirroring the “transnational turn” in literary and cultural studies more broadly. Brian Edwards, Oliver Harris, Allen Hibbard, and others have recently sought to restore a sense of place to the study of Burroughs’s work. These developments are echoed in the structure of Call Me Burroughs, which suggests a spatial turn in Miles’s thinking as well. His biography is organized chiefly by locale, with discrete sections on St. Louis (where Burroughs was born and raised), Mexico, New York, Tangier, London, and Lawrence, Kansas (where he lived for sixteen years before his death there in 1997), making Call Me Burroughs an itinerary as much as a chronology of the author’s life and work.

Call Me Burroughs is not the first biography of the author that Miles has written. That would be William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, a slimmer volume published in 1992 that serves as a blueprint for the later book. (Miles inherited the project to write a follow-up from Burroughs’s longtime agent and partner James Grauerholz, who had compiled a vast archive but could not complete the undertaking.) The moniker refers to the persona Burroughs acquired while strung out on opiates in Tangier. In Call Me Burroughs, Miles writes:

He was famously known as el hombre invisible to the Spanish boys in Tangier; this came from a conscious effort on his part to blend in so well that people would not see him, as well as the fact that, in his junk phase, he was gray and spectral-looking. … Bill practiced getting from the Villa Muniria to the place de France without being seen. He walked down the street, his eyes swiveling, checking everybody out. … Sometimes he could get through a whole line of guides without anyone seeing him, which in Tangier is a very good test. (2013: 296)

The invisible Burroughs is unattached, non-aligned, and where Miles might have used the image to show how it gives the author’s work from and about Tangier a greater critical purchase, which it certainly does, Miles uses it instead to paper over the complexities of Burroughs’s attitude toward the momentous events that were unfolding around him. It is odd that in a book that assumes a kind of politics on Burroughs’s part—tied to a critique of power and language (its “viral” carrier) and a sincere belief in the potential of transgressive writing practices like the cut-up method “to do something about it” (335)—mostly sidesteps the much-debated question of the author’s “Moroccan politics.” In the pages just preceding the description of Burroughs cited above, Miles quotes a long passage from Naked Lunch dealing with the rise of nationalism in Morocco; he also quotes from the complicated and richly performative “Jihad Jitters” letter to Ginsberg (dated October 29, 1956, also the date of Tangier’s integration into Morocco—i.e., the end of the International Zone). But rather than follow this up with an acknowledgement of the difficult issues being raised in these texts, Miles cuts to el hombre invisible and thus performs a disappearing act of his own.

Readers of Naked Lunch are vexed by what seems like the author’s inability or unwillingness to confront the realities of Moroccan independence and the end of the International Zone. Those who read Naked Lunch through the earlier Yage Letters, as the palimpsestic nature of both texts demands, may instead see a complex engagement with colonial legacies in the Maghreb and around the world. Initially conceived as “Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” (Junky and Queer were books I and II), Burroughs’s epistolary account details his 1953 trek through the upper Amazon in search of the mythical hallucinogen ayahuasca, or yagé.[4] He arrived in Bogotá in the midst of Colombia’s long-simmering civil war, and Yage Letters is full of barely concealed political content. The centerpiece of Yage is Burroughs’s expansive, even utopian, ayahuasca vision of a great Composite City “where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market” (2006: 50). Language and imagery from the Composite City sequence will reappear throughout his later works, notably in Naked Lunch, where the passage is reproduced nearly verbatim; the Composite City becomes the Interzone while still retaining its earlier referents and resonances from Yage. South America becomes North Africa, and similar examples proliferate across an oeuvre that, as Burroughs once told an interviewer, is “all one book” (1989: 86). Recognizing these resonances and mapping the composite geographies and composite texts they produce just might be the key to answering some persistently thorny questions that surround Burroughs’s work.

Burroughs’s Moroccan politics are equivocal, to be sure, but in Yage Letters he displays no such ambiguity. Through Lee, his epistolary alter ego, Burroughs repeatedly expresses his solidarity with the Liberals against the Conservatives, whom he aligns with the “dead weight of Spain” (2006: 10). The predation described throughout Yage is characteristically, for Burroughs, set in sexual terms but represents world-historical forces, which appear as the not-so-hidden underbelly of Wallerstein’s world-system, or a sinister variation on Wai Chee Dimock’s “deep time.” After his first, failed trek into Colombia’s Putumayo region, Burroughs recounts:

On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria. (16)

Not only have the power relations between predator and prey been inverted in Burroughs’s getting ripped off by the “local hustler,” but in one long parenthetical aside he lays bare the entire colonial and postcolonial history of oppression and exploitation in the Americas: economic, political, religious, and otherwise. And by including the “Swedish Botanist” and “Dutch Ethnographer” in his litany, he even foregrounds the notion of scientific knowledge as an epistemological violence that his own narrative is attempting to circumvent. It should come as no surprise that he recasts this history in terms of sexual violation. Both as an individual—“I thought I was getting that sweet backwoods ass”—and as an American citizen, Burroughs, through the persona (Lee) that emerges in his narration of Yage, writes himself into this chronicle of domination and abuse. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives in equal measure from his complicity and from the critical distance provided by his status as an “exile.”

At one point in the narrative, prevented from leaving the town of Puerto Asís while his tourist card is set in order, Lee muses, “If I was an active Liberal what could I do … aside from taking the place over at gun point? (2006: 22-23), implying that he is one in spirit or sympathy and that it wouldn’t take much to force him over the line. Later on in Yage Burroughs writes, “What we need is a new Bolivar who will really get the job done” (38). Burroughs’s statement is echoed in a (real) letter written to Ginsberg from South America: “Wouldn’t surprise me if I ended up with the Liberal guerillas” (1994: 159) which also anticipates his “Jihad Jitters” routine. Reflecting on the possibility of rioting and revolution in the streets of Tangier in a letter to Ginsberg dated October 29, 1956, Burroughs writes, “If they stage a jihad I’m gonna wrap myself in a dirty sheet and rush out to do some jihading of my own” (339).^[5] He tells him earlier in the letter, “The possibility of an all-out riot is like a tonic, like ozone in the air. … I have no nostalgia for the old days in Morocco, which I never saw. Right now is for me” (337), and in a subsequent dispatch meant to allay Kerouac’s fears about his upcoming trip to Morocco, he presses, “I will say it again and say it slow: TANGER IS AS SAFE AS ANY TOWN I EVER LIVE IN. … ARABS ARE NOT VIOLENT. … Riots are the accumulated, just resentment of a people subjected to outrageous brutalities by the French cops used to strew blood and teeth over a city block in the Southern Zone” (349). At moments like these Burroughs is clearly sympathetic to the Moroccans’ anticolonial aspirations and their right to self-determination, but he can also be cynical and mocking. In Naked Lunch he portrays imagined riots as grotesque orgies of violence, yet even here Burroughs’s kaleidoscope of obscene violence is meant, as it was for Beat hero Antonin Artaud, to shock his audience out of its moral complacency and to confront the West with its original sin of imperialism.

Thinking transnationally means thinking about and beyond borders of all kinds, and Burroughs’s work keeps transgression front and center. Transnationalism as worlding is interested in transgressive acts; at the same time, it seeks to be transgressive: counterhegemonic, reading against the grain, writing against Empire and globalization transcendent. These last are tricky business, as Pease and others have noted, and a worlded critique needs to account for its own entanglements. Where transgression is concerned, one must ask who has the privilege, authority, and power to transgress—who gets denied passage, is the crossing undertaken willingly, and to what ends? Derrida claims in Rogues that transgression and sovereignty are always linked, and Beat writers, primarily though by no means exclusively white and male and carrying US passports, were at liberty to move about in the world in a way that most others are not. But it turns out that by and large the Beats were hip to these dynamics as well, making strategic use of their privilege in order to thematize cultural difference and comment incisively on Cold War geopolitics.

The performance of transgression is a productive way to read Burroughs because for him crossing physical borders always seems to precipitate other kinds of breakthroughs. In particular, Burroughs’s “travel writing” throws into sharp relief legacies of western imperialism and the United States’ expanding postwar footprint abroad: every travelogue is also about home. Travel writing in the West came into its own during the age of discovery and is closely linked to colonialism and the modern world-system.[6] In Yage Letters, the author describes being mistaken for “a representative of the Texas Oil Company traveling incognito” and thus “treated like visiting royalty.” He explains that the “Texas Oil Company surveyed the area a few years ago, found no oil and pulled out. But everyone in the Putumayo believes the Texas Company will return. Like the second coming of Christ” (2006: 24). What reads as a statement mocking the childlike faith of the locals is in fact directed against a long history of exploitation and oppression, an unbroken chain from the Spanish missionaries to United Fruit. And while he doesn’t seem to mind the benefits his mistaken identity afford him—he fails to correct anyone, after all—he uses these instances of misprision to launch a critique of US military and economic policy in Latin America.

In Burroughs’s writing, the author’s own privilege is consistently figured in the recurring type of the “ugly American,” a stock character who first appears in the routines of Queer and manifests a particularly virulent form in Naked Lunch with the characters Clem and Jody. But even where they appear identical with the author himself, the ugly American remains a textual construction on Burroughs’s part. As Oliver Harris argues, Burroughs is playing the ugly American. It may come off all too naturally, but it is a performance nonetheless. In Call Me Burroughs Miles writes about Burroughs’s long-held belief that he was inhabited by what he called the “ugly spirit,” a malevolent force that pursued him like a ghost. Miles’s biography opens, in fact, with a sweat lodge ceremony performed late in Burroughs’s life to try to rid him of the spirit once and for all. Burroughs felt that his was an especially difficult case, as Miles recounts:

Burroughs had warned the shaman of the challenge before the ceremony: He “had to face the whole of American capitalism, Rockefeller, the CIA … all of those, particularly Hearst.” Afterward he told Ginsberg, “It’s very much related to the American Tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.” (2013: 2)

The ugly spirit corresponds on a psychic level to an ugly nation rapaciously at work in the world. “Particularly Hearst” indicates a theme Burroughs often sounds (Henry Luce a common variation): a news monopoly made all the more insidious by his conviction that to control information is to shape reality. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives from the fact that he doesn’t hesitate to implicate himself along the way. A scion of the Burroughs family (his grandfather invented the adding machine), his monthly allowance meant that he was at liberty to pursue writing as a career. Burroughs’s maternal uncle Ivy Lee is “considered to be the founder of public relations” and counted John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Joseph Goebbels among his clients and advisees (12-13). Coming to terms with these personal histories meant grappling with the cause and effect of American power in an American century.

The most profound forms of transgression in Burroughs are textual and have to do with the denaturing of form and genre. Yage Letters is exemplary here as well: although its epistolary presentation promises a direct, unvarnished account of the author’s ordeal in the Amazon, those reading Yage for vicarious drug kicks are likely to be disappointed. The book is about much more, and the “letters” mask a fiction. Large portions of the text did originate in real missives sent to Allen Ginsberg, as did much of Burroughs’s early work—he once notably told Ginsberg, referring to Naked Lunch, “Maybe the real novel is letters to you” (1994: 217)—but by the time Yage is finally published by City Lights in 1963, the text has been thoroughly cut-up and rearranged and redacted. Like so much of the author’s corpus, it has also been marked by a good deal of contingency. Burroughs settled on the epistolary after trying out other forms and genres. One early draft resembled an ethnographic report, and the “final” version of Yage still bears the traces of ethnography, which he lampoons to great effect.

Burroughs had studied anthropology as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s and later took classes in Mesoamerican archaeology at Mexico City College. While in South America he even accompanied renowned Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Schultes on one of his Amazon expeditions. It was with Schultes that Burroughs records his first experience taking yagé, and an early, non-epistolary draft of the Yage manuscript looks very much like ethnography. Through this lens, Junky begins to read like ethnography as well (from a participant observer, no less), this one dealing with the heroin subcultures of New York and New Orleans. And readers will recognize something of the anthropological in Burroughs’s later depictions of Interzone, in “The Mayan Caper” episode from The Soft Machine (1966) and in his catalog of The Cities of the Red Night in that later novel.

Like Junky, whose prologue declares, “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you,” Yage reveals and withholds simultaneously; Burroughs “scientific” account of ayahuasca and the rituals surrounding it may be as much a fiction as the letters themselves. Its opening lines suggest as much: Lee begins, “I stopped off here [Panamá] to have my piles out. Wouldn’t do to go back among the Indians with piles I figured” (2006, 3). With this frank admission, suggests Harris, the narrator immediately relinquishes any claim to objective distance or impartiality in what follows (2006a: xxv). At a deeper level, what this too-personal tale calls into question is the entire notion of scientific objectivity and transparent ethnographic knowledge. With Yage Burroughs anticipates the breakthroughs of poststructuralist anthropology by some years, whose practitioners (e.g., James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) would seek to account for the power differential inherent in the relationship between observer and subject, questioning the ideological assumptions that shape all knowledge of the Other.[7]

For many, “Beat politics” means Allen Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna at a Vietnam War demonstration. In this context Burroughs’s ethos appears as a non-politics of absolute rejection or disciplined disavowal—the “Absolute ZERO” ([1960] 2001: 208) of the junky that Deleuze fixates on. But, as Deleuze knows, the greatest so-called nihilists (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche come to mind) are the most profoundly affirmative, and Burroughs does not share Ahab’s will to death. His affirmation lies in the performative creation of transgressive communities like the whole “wild boys” mythology of the late 1960s and the queer utopias imagined in Cities of the Red Night (1981). In Miles’s biography, Burroughs’s project extends well beyond the written word and emerges as a transformational politics of the everyday. His remark to Bowie that “the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen” is a version of Bürger’s “integration of art into the praxis of life”—the avant-garde attempt to redefine both art and politics simultaneously.

At the heart of Burroughs’s work is a constant vigilance against “Control” in all its aspects. Significantly, these are often figured by Burroughs as a kind of colonization, whether it be the parasite of language (his famous “word virus”), possession by the “ugly spirit,” or a more historically situated encounter. Cities of the Red Night, a beautiful and important book that Burroughs worked on through much of the 1970s, tells the story a loose confederation of sixteenth-century outlaws bent on toppling Spanish and British rule in the Americas. The novel’s layered plot unfolds in the present as well, where a shadowy organization plots world domination from its South American headquarters, and I am again reminded of Artaud, who envisioned a first production of the Theatre of Cruelty to be called The Conquest of Mexico and justified it by writing, “Ce sujet a été choisi … à cause de son actualité” (This subject has been chosen … because it is of the present moment” ([1938] 1964: 196). Poised upon the world-historical moment of decolonization—the constant “present” of Burroughs’s writing—Burroughs is perfectly positioned to launch a postcolonial critique of Empire’s new hegemony.

Miles’s biography came at a propitious moment in Burroughs and Beat studies. In 2014 Burroughs’s centennial year was marked with museum and gallery exhibitions, readings, performances, film screenings, and several major conferences, all proof of his continued relevance not just in the literary world but also among visual and performance artists, musicians, filmmakers, and troublemakers of all kinds. For scholars of Burroughs’s work, the past decade has seen a flowering of historically minded, materially grounded, and theoretically capacious criticism. This has in large measure been made possible by the assiduous research and recovery work of editors, archivists, and critics including Miles, James Grauerholz, Bill Morgan, and especially Oliver Harris, whose recent string of “redux” editions is making legible the labyrinthine textual histories of so much of what Burroughs wrote. Amid these developments, and despite some missed opportunities, Call Me Burroughs will deservedly become the standard reference on the author’s life for scholars and fans alike. Its greatest contribution lies in uncovering the experiences and above all the places that animated a body of work as significant as that of anyone writing in the latter half of the twentieth century.

*          *          *          *          *

Notes

[1] The epithet refers to Ted Morgan’s early biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, first published in 1988.

[2] Bowie, who based his Ziggy Stardust aesthetic in part on Burroughs’s 1969 novel The Wild Boys, is among the many musicians inspired by Burroughs.

[3] Whether one agrees with Pease’s basic contention—and more is at stake, after all, than disciplinary boundaries—probably has something to do with whether one agrees with Hardt and Negri that globalization and Empire’s new order are in fact liberatory because diffuse power engenders proliferating sites and modes of resistance while the totalizing pressure of capital’s global reach brings us that much closer to universal emancipation.

[4] “Naked Lunch, Book III” is the title Burroughs gave when he published the “Composite City” letter in Black Mountain Review in 1953. See Oliver Harris 2006b for a complete textual history.

[5] October 29, 1956, also happened to be the date of Tangier’s official reintegration into a newly independent Morocco and the end of the International Zone.

[6] It was during the Enlightenment that Denis Diderot and the philosophes began to see the critical potential of the travelogue: Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) purports to “supplement” the just-published Voyage autour du monde by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe.

[7] James Clifford has written about “ethnographic surrealism,” particularly in relation to Georges Bataille and the Documents group.

References

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Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1964. Le théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard.

Buell, Lawrence. 2007. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of US Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Burroughs, William. (1960) 2001. “Postscript … Wouldn’t You?” In Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 207-10. New York: Grove.

——. 1994. Letters, Vol. 1: 1945-1959. Edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin.

——. 1989. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Edited by Allen Hibbard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Burroughs, William, and David Bowie. 1974. “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman.” Interview by Craig Copetas, Rolling Stone, February 28. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beat-godfather-meets-glitter-mainman-19740228.

Burroughs, William, and Allen Ginsberg. 2006. The Yage Letters Redux. Edited by Oliver Harris.

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Connery, Christopher L. 2007. “Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz.” Introduction to The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher L. Connery, 1-11. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific.

Edwards, Brian. 2005. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Grace, Nancy M., and Jennie Skerl, eds. 2012. The Transnational Beat Generation. New York: Palgrave.

Gray, Timothy. 2006. Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Harris, Oliver. 2006a. Introduction to Burroughs and Ginsberg, Yage Letters, ix-lii.

——. 2006b. “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters,” Postmodern Culture 16, no. 2. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v016/16.2harris.html.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989. “The Principles of Philosophy, or, the Monadology.” In Philosophical Essays, translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, 213-25. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Melehy, Hassan. 2016. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. London: Bloomsbury.

Miles, Barry. 2000. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove.

——. 2013. Call Me Burroughs. New York: Twelve.

Orwell, George. 2009. All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays. Boston: Mariner.

Pease, Donald E. 2011. “Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn.” In Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, edited by Winfred Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, 1-47. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Pike, David. 2005. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Raskin, Jonah. 2004. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Snyder, Gary. 1969. Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries. New York: New Directions.

Tietchen, Todd. 2010. The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wilson, Rob. 2000. Reimagining the American Pacific, from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

——. 2007. “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher L. Connery, 209-23. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific.

Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (Princeton UP, 2017)

Reviewed by Daniel T. O’Hara

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography combines with minor revisions, as its author notes in the new preface, the two earlier separate volumes published eighteen years apart in 1981 and 1999, respectively. Of specific revisions, the most important is the addition of a postscript about Auden’s “secret life.” This does not consist of sensational or lurid adventures, but of Auden’s selfless, quiet giving and other acts of unannounced and otherwise unremembered charity. However, although updating scholarship where needed, including references to a recently discovered journal (2004) from August-November 1939 and eliminating as much repetition as possible, this one volume edition contains the earlier ones pretty much as they were. This includes introductions overviewing each volume to come, hefty numbered parts delineating and subdividing periods into chapters in Auden’s life and career of his English and then American affiliations. Auden spent his summers after World War II first in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, and then beginning in 1958 in Kirchstetten, a village that is forty kilometers from Vienna. He would winter usually in New York City, unless he was teaching around the USA at different universities and colleges for a term or two (one up to three years), from the University of Michigan to Swarthmore College. For five years in the second half of the 1950s he was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, for three-week periods in the fall semesters. Oxford made allowances for Auden’s needing to be in New York to make money with his many and diverse prose projects of reviews, articles, prefaces, essays, editorial and anthology work. Mendelson’s separate biographies ended with epilogues wrapping up each of the original installments, and as the reader notes, they remain in place here. This all makes for a monumental, not to say magisterial 895-page tome by the literary executor of the Auden estate.

Of Mendelson’s many remarkable accomplishments, it is the shift he makes in how we view and value the divide in the career between early English and later American Auden that stands out. When in 1981 the first volume appeared, it was the early English modernist Auden who was still loudly celebrated, with the later American Auden as progressively never quite measuring up, whether seen as a Christian existentialist humanist or postmodernist poet. To be sure, there were recognized rare virtuoso exceptions in the later work, such as a handful of lyrics (“The Shield of Achilles” [1955] being one famous instance) and perhaps Caliban’s final prose poetry address to the audience in “The Sea and the Mirror” (1944), done in the late most baroque style of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl and The American Scene. But also, then the later Auden was seen as progressively becoming lost both in the quixotic quest for creating a truly modern epic poem (his “For the Time Being” and “the Age of Anxiety” being viewed at that time as being wholly abstract and prolix failures); and in the la-la-land of Californian or more generally American popular culture, with all those lax poetic lines in the loose verse of the final five years of his life so filled with obviously narcissistic self-references. Mendelson, ever the smart partisan of the later Auden, has now won the battle, and reading this one-volume compilation makes the reader feel its rightness even more. Just as he had demonstrated in Early Auden (1981) that the English modernist “masterpieces,” however delightful or provocative at the time, such as “The Watershed” (as later named by Auden), were in fact more gamesmanship and puzzles than they needed to be, conflating Conradian spies and “secret sharers” with cruising gay lovers in Laura Riding/Thomas Hardy-like lines and enjambments; so, too, he revealed in Later Auden (1999) that the American Auden contained not only some of his greatest poetry, in original innovations in traditional styles of the canzone, the sestina, and the Italian sonnet, but simply some of the greatest poetry created in the twentieth-century, concerned like no other poets in the West were at the time with the worldly history and possible global future of the city, of citizenship, and of civilization itself.  This is not to say that Mendelson presents his critical perspective polemically, but in fact, he presents it as modulating, in response to the process of reading the poems themselves, so that he can say in his new Preface honestly: “If I were to rewrite the two books today, they would be even more admiring of their subject than they already are” ( ix).

To see his achievement on behalf of the later “American” Auden, we must turn to “The Murderous Birth,” Chapter VIII in Part One “Vision and After” of the “Later Auden,” which is largely an elaborate original reading of “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (1944). I realize some of the irony using the nationalizing descriptors, of course, but as I hope to show, in tweaking a bit Mendelson’s reading of Caliban as Jamesian, the American label holds even truer than it at first appears.

The kernel of Mendelson’s reading arises amid summarizing what Auden did for himself in writing “The Sea and the Mirror”:

By writing “The Sea and the Mirror” as a series of monologues for fictional characters borrowed from Shakespeare, Auden could write autobiographically in a deeper and more comprehensive way than ni his first-person lyrics. He expressed a different aspect of himself in each character, without masking that aspect behind a self-consciously public face. . . . To think his death I thought myself alive. The murder that never quite occurs in “The Sea and the Mirror” [as Sebastian notes], was [really not in the play but] a murder that repeatedly did not quite occur in the thirty-five years of Auden’s life (534; author’s italics).

What Mendelson means, and he supports this nugget of evidence by a prior step-by-step presentation and elucidation of supporting imagery from other poems, criticism, letters, notes, and so on, is suddenly and finally revealed in a brief rather blurted out note of intended consolation to Beata Wachstein, one of Elizabeth Mayer’s two daughters, who had recently suffered a miscarriage. Mendelson describes the note as “commiserating on her miscarriage in a blithe tone that concealed the private depths of his theme” (534). He then cites the note itself, linking it to one of Caliban’s most diabolic formulations addressed to the audience for this imagined performance of Shakespeare’s play, after which we the readers listen to the actors still apparently in character making sense of their magical experiences:

“‘Just a note to say how sorry I am about your misfortune, and to wish you better luck next time. My mother had a miscarriage before me, for which I cannot be sorry, because if she hadn’t, perhaps I shouldn’t exist.’ Or, as he has Caliban say [as Mendelson interpolates here]: ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed . . . unless there were others who are not here . . . others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage’” (535).

For Mendelson, Auden confesses in this note to the final piece of the fateful nightmare scenario in which, somehow even before his conception, Auden, as Sebastian does with his living brother in the play, thought his unborn sibling’s death in order “to think myself alive.” This murderous cogito explains, Mendelson concludes, the presence of the life-long phantasm of obsessive guilt and ironic self-consciousness haunting the life and the work, taking the form in “The Sea and the Mirror” as Prospero’s cursed slave, Caliban. Auden’s own original sin is then this murderous birth because his very conception required the displacement into a miscarriage of the lost completely innocent child that was thus not to have been born.

This bizarre paradox of repressed unconscious thinking is actually a now rare but once more familiar rhetorical figure, that of metalepsis or transumption. Harold Bloom brought it to critical attention in his theory of the anxiety of influence more than forty years ago, but it has now largely faded from discussion. Basically, it is the revisionary trope of displacing a prior reality, even as a later reality thereby may assume the imaginary position of creating and revising this prior reality. Just as Auden by giving Shakespeare’s Caliban the image of the late James’ voice, his style of speaking in his writing, so, too, Auden would displace both James thereby and at least Shakespeare’s original invention in this instance, albeit not Shakespeare himself, though certainly surpassing Browning’s revision in “Caliban on Setebos.”

The cost of such flagrant lying against time is guilt primarily at the strongly violent, transgressive, even homicidal wishes involved in such post-romantic or modern revisionism in which the belated poet imprisons the precursor in the former’s chosen invention, thereby making the precursor over into the later poet’s creature. Mendelson sees such guilt in terms of the consequences of these transgressive or murderous wishes, following Auden’s lead, even as he recognizes it as delusional in actuality, except when it comes to Auden’s ambivalence about his own homosexuality. Mendelson concludes that Auden’s negative feelings about being gay arise from and compound the guilt he assumes for his impossible murder of his miscarried potential sibling, as if this extreme negativity proved he was divine or demonic, after all:

In his darkest imaginings about himself, [Auden] connected his illusory sense of guilt about his own birth with his inescapable sense of guilt about his homosexuality, his sense of it as criminal and isolating. The crime was that his sexuality was itself a punishment for an earlier crime. The obscure offense against childbirth that he had committed by being born was now punished . . . by another obscure offense against childbirth. (535)

Caliban, of course, becomes Auden’s revisionary vehicle for this transumptive metaphoric transformation. He is an instance of what I would more specifically call the revisionary phantasm. This is the autobiographical fiction representing the wish for divine power vis a vis others, known and unknown, in everyone, anyone. This mega-personification or giant form and the scenario accompanying it stands for the power of art to influence and determine the identities of others, those known personally or otherwise.

Whether Mendelson’s reading is entirely fair to Auden—is the revisionary autobiographical phantasm and its scenario throughout the critical commentary Auden’s or Mendelson’s?–it does point (on the poet’s part) to a system of belief in daemons (a la Yeats and Goethe—or Plutarch?), spirits of genius with feelings for or, more likely against, the poet, as in “There Will Be No Peace” (1956):

     Though mild clear weather

                               Smile again on the shore of your esteem

                               And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:

                               You will not forget, ever,

                               The darkness blotting out hope, the gale

                               Prophesying your downfall.

 

                               You must live with your knowledge.

                               Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,

                               In moonless absences you never heard of,

                               Who have certainly heard of you,

                               Beings of unknown number and gender:

                               And they do not like you.

 

                               What have you done to them?

                               Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:

                               You will come to believe – how can you help it? –

                               That you did, you did do something;

                               You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,

                               You will long for their friendship.

 

                               There will be no peace.

                               Fight back, then, with such courage as you have

                               And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,

                               Clear on your conscience on this:

                               Their cause, if they had one, is no thing to them now;

                               They hate for hate’s sake (Auden: Collected Poems [1991], 617).

This is a remarkably lucid presentation of the nameless, faceless sources of guilt that so often in the poet’s life—or even prior to his birth–can be given something of a local habitation and a name, an embryonic figuration of personhood (at least), which then serves repeatedly as stand-in for the driven nature of the career. When we combine this belief in the daemonic, in daemons—as part of whichever psychologizing system or allegorizing psychomachia we follow Auden into reformulating this visionary belief in genius—we just may begin to hear another more familiar American voice than James’ reverberating now on Auden’s moonless night—rather than under the original “pale sagging moon”—that is flooding the shore with reiterations of “the sea”:

Delaying not, hurrying not, 

Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break, 

Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death, 

And again death, death, death, death, 

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart, 

But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, 

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, 

Death, death, death, death, death. 

Which I do not forget, 

But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother, 

That he sang to me . . . on Paumanok’s gray beach, 

With the thousand responsive songs at random, 

My own songs awaked from that hour, 

And with them the key, the word up from the waves, 

The word of the sweetest song and all songs, 

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, 

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,) 

The sea whisper’d me (Whitman [2002]: 253).

Auden, as a radical anti-romantic modernist, was to be sure no fan of Whitman’s, just as he was not fond of the other romantics (American or British); but then, given Whitman’s large embrace of his “brother” Death, whose proper name or “word,” Whitman eagerly speaks as himself, and Auden’s dread of the specter of the potential sibling he “murdered” so he could be born originally–if one credits Mendelson’s argument fully—how could one expect otherwise? In the land of the id, Mendelson shows us learning so well from Freud and some of his most maverick followers, all contradictions are possible, equally true or false, at any one time.

Beyond this familiar point (to Auden), however, there is a more salient one. Auden, seventy or more years before our time with its post-colonialist sensitivities, underscores via Caliban’s address to the audience–to the readers—how the liberal minded benefactors of those impoverished and sacrificed in wars and other preventable events must be held publicly accountable as any rabid imperialist, is also guilty up to the hilt: “We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who have not here; our liveliness and good humour, such as they are, are those of survivors, conscious that there are others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage . . . .” (Auden, Collected Poems 1991, p. 428). Why? Perhaps, as we have learned, thanks to Mendelson’s monumental achievement, because there is no peace. Or, so Antonio, Prospero’s Iago-like brother, would confirm as he sings to himself at the end of the speeches of the other characters, who don’t know they are actors right before Caliban, who does know, begins his address to the imagined audience of actual readers (us):

One link is missing, Prospero,

My magic is my own;

Happy Miranda does not know

The figure that Antonio,

The Only One, Creation’s O

Dances for Death alone

(Auden [1991]: 422)

Condescending mercy ever breeds no justice, as Prospero will ever discover, it appears, and no justice means for sure no peace can be forthcoming from any of our demons.

References

Auden, W. H. 1991. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber.

Mendelson, Edward. 2017.Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography.  New Preface.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Whitman, Walt. 2002. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Norton Critical Editions. Ed.

Michael Moon. New York: W.W. Norton.