From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. There are three major areas where Benjamin's account seems contradicted by many novels of the contemporary Third World. What then of the period following the Second World War? This argument is a conventional one in the criticism of art, and is derived, indeed, from a conventional defence of the moral character of the arts as a whole, as compared with the sterner character of moral philosophy. The tradition probably originated with Dr Johnson's definition of romance as 'a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry'. We can deduce, for example, that 'positive' reality was traditionally opposed to magic; otherwise the proto-Boom style of magic realism would represent no new departure. And despite important parallels, North American writers who were establishing a national literature often assumed a political distance that allowed for an apparently unfettered critique of society. To reveal such a margin is, in the first instance, to contest claims to cultural supremacy, whether these are made from the 'old' post-imperialist metropolitan nations, or on behalf of the 'new' independent nations of the periphery. Couani is a third-generation Australian who writes from a selfconsciously GreekPolish cultural background. the dead . 6 Whether or not it is possible for writers who are not divinely inspired Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art 159 to strip their style of local and temporary ornaments is not made clear; but it is clear that, if it is not possible, then they cannot avoid, but painters can, a style which betrays their national origins. 39 Jacques Lacan calls the ideal harmony between mother and child, self and ideal mirror image, the Imaginary realm; it is where love coincides with its object, before love becomes a desire that always falls- short of satisfaction. 14, no. We are now prepared to understand their iconoclasm Irresistible romance 91 as an attack on romanticized history. But the myth presence is an indication of something real.2 Debray, of course, witnessed the vitality of nationalism as a younger 52 Timothy Brennan man in revolutionary Cuba, an experience (like that of Algeria and Vietnam for the generations of the 1950s and the 1960s) that sharply modified Marxist and liberal theories of nationalism, and gave way to what has been called 'Third Worldism': an endorsement of antiimperialist liberation movements that amounted to a panacea.29 This background of spirituality and permanence is never lost, even in the historically specific cultural expressions of the national form. Bruce King, The New English Literatures (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 42. But if that nation is England, the case is entirely altered, and the indulgence may be difficult to withhold, for it involves the very survival of English liberty. The intellectual division of labor had swung a literary pendulum away from the affairs of state towards a realm of 'pure' art, where writers tended to be relieved of, or exiled from, political responsibilities, and free to develop the preciousness of modernismo.u But by 1941, when Pedro Henriquez Ureha delivered his now classic Harvard lectures on 'Literary currents in Hispanic America', it was obvious that the pendulum had swung back to engagement for many of the continent's writers. Such writers are perceived as mediating the 'migrant experience', or, in the case of the Aboriginal writers in English, of communicating the outcast experience. For all its good intentions this is clearly signalled in J. Zubrzycki, Multiculturalism for All Australians (Canberra: Australian Council on Population and Ethnic Affairs, 1982). 396425. More than an esthetic deficiency, this signals social and political immaturity, because, he observes, good novels represent the highest achievement in any nation (The Iliad figures in his list of greats). The crucial result of all this was that, in spite of the extreme violence of the customs of the German invaders, the mould which they imposed became, with the passing centuries, the actual mould of the nation. 26 'Slang in America', North-American Review, 141 (1885), pp. Ethical representations are immediate to the degree that they trace themselves on the consciousness of an observer either invisible and omniscient like Mr Spectator, or a historian like Fielding's narrative voice, or a character with a personality and a lingering debt to the old rogue tales like Moll. For an observer like Marx, these values were destroyed forever in the black farce of 1848. What is known philologically and historically as the Germanic race is no doubt a quite distinct family within the human species, but is it a family in the anthropological sense of the term? . At particular moments, especially between 1867 and 1914, it can re-enter the art novel with Meredith for instance. ibid., p. 11. They're stoics, the Aussies. [CDATA[ Yet Isaacs dwells nostalgically on what seemed to be some promising amalgams. ), Australian Literary Criticism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 11. 60 The ruling party of Mexico since the end of the revolution is the Partido Revolucionario Institucionalizado (PRI)- 6 Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of 'Australia' Sneja Gunew Canon 1. . It is not political (it relies on what Habermas has called the modern split Literature Nationalism's other? But the distinction is not by any means as complete as the apparent change in style might suggest. What she conceives then is a hatred for 92 Doris Sommer men and a need to revenge herself on them. And publicly to circulate representations of the workings of the legal, medical, and military institutions (as even Fielding and Smollett do) is to provide grounds for certain reforms, that is, once again, for the transfer to modern power. [CDATA[ . 4968. The persecutions unleashed by Antiochus Epiphanes 18 Ernest Renan in order win the east for the cult of Jupiter Olympus, those of the Roman Empire designed to maintain a supposed state religion were mistaken, criminal, and absurd. Hazlitt's fragment 'Patriotism' from which my motto comes is one of its last flickers. a false reciprocity, which disguises a twin narcissism'. This essay asks when, and in terms of what discourse, it first became possible to suggest that English paintings might have distinctive qualities of their own, which might contribute to, rather than detract from, their value; and it considers why it came to seem important to make that suggestion. Compared to his predecessors, Whitman spends hardly any time worrying over how much of the American speech will be latently British. My argument requires me to indicate one last thread in this story of the relations between certain literary and nationalist zones. 1303, 14560; M. le Comte de Montlosier, De La Monarchic Francaise depuis son etablissement jusqu'a nos jours, 4 vols (Paris, 1814). This zero point or starting point is what allows ritual repetition, the ritualization of memory, celebration, commemoration in short, all those forms of magical behaviour signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time. That power is also an effect of the linguistic vehicle which carries the civil Imaginary. 12 ibid., pp. googletag.pubads().setTargeting("tags", ["467","128","510","5","10011","384","1514","923","610","285"]); In portraiture, this form is compromised by the need to embody a likeness, and in comic or genre painting, by the desire to represent deformity. Still heavily indebted to Roman historians rather than to contemporary Jesuit missionaries for their conception of a primitive society,14 these thinkers often regarded the ancient German tribes, on the other side of the Rhine, not just as a threat to the Rome of Tacitus's day but as an emblem of the nomadic hordes that threatened the settlements, agriculture, lawcourts and assemblies of all civil orders. '[A] hegemonic class has been able to articulate the interests of other social Irresistible romance 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 95 groups to its own by means of ideological struggle. 29 Oeuvres completes, vol. Thus the phrase 'local customs' would have been recognized as a legal phrase, used to apply to the particular legal customs of a locality within a national community, which should, according to Blackstone, be 'sacrificed' to the general customs of the nation, in the interest of arriving at 'one uniform and universal system of common law'. '55 Whereas The Ancient City had been designed to break the hold of republican virtue upon the European imagination by replacing one key notion (civic republicanism) with another (ancestor worship), Fustel's later studies were aimed at a whole series of Germanist myths and he was therefore not able to identify a single guiding principle for ancient German society. 50 Secondly, the introduction of references to classical India may have served to demolish Jacobinism as an ideal but, by the same token, it constructed a prehistory that rested upon religion, the family, and private property. googletag.pubads().setTargeting("grsession", "osid.df6b0b5c26ac5df8389e605eb2cb0f08"); What, though, was meant by opposing Germanic (or modern) to Roman (or classical) liberty? } Swinton (and/or Whitman) goes on to argue that: The immense diversity of race, temperament, character the copious streams of humanity constantly flowing hither must reappear in free, rich growths of speech. At another level, Renan's observation reflects his shock at the defeat of France by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, which is expressed in both major and occasional writings. These remarks leave many gaps open. Whereas, in the 1870s and 1880s, a French student of society had little detailed knowledge of any cultures more distant than those of the Maghreb, suddenly the social existence of Plains Indians or 40 Martin Thorn of Australian Aborigines was as vividly present as was that of the ancient Greeks or Romans. Despite the similarities of foundational fictions as family romances, the novels offer a variety of options in theorizing the family as a microcosm of the state. This form of primary and 'placeable' bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. The same thing took place after almost all the Norman conquests. 23 If the novel for Bakhtin tended to parody other genres, the epic was that genre the novel parodied in its nation-forming role. Renan, La Monarchie Constitutionelle, p. 486. However, E.J. 6, p. 112. But since the 1960s, since Latin America's post-Borgesian Boom in narrative and France's self-critical ebullience in philosophy and literary studies, we have tended to fix on the ways that literature undoes its own projects. These are not messages sent by mail or mechanical reproduction (like documentaries for instance), they are sent within the punctured, already marginalized forms of representation available to the contemporary novel. the word winds with chutes it rolls a stream three thousand miles long. O Pioneers!' In the prose as in the poetry, Whitman's favourite mode of punctuation is the string of stops (. Hobsbawm, op. The difficult postwar question of the often-perceived threat of free labour to the interests of northern workers is not addressed directly; but it must be said that Whitman certainly does not endorse this threat either. 117-19, 112. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. 'It is impossible to correctly determine', said the liberator, 'to which human family we belong . Thus it was that the boldest operation ever yet put into effect in history was brought to completion, an operation which one might compare with the attempt, in physiology, to restore to its original identity a body from which one had removed the brain and the heart. Less assertively but with similar priorities, Quentin Anderson later identified Whitman as making 'a big leap forward in our imaginative deserialization', and his poems as nostalgic mementoes of a time 'before the world became hopelessly plural'. The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. Without the Irresistible romance 89 concept of nationhood the alliances and the stability they brought would be beside the point. The poet wonders about these questions. Thus for a visual art to be 'ornamental' is for it to remain merely a visual art, incapable of the transparency which enables its meanings to be more than merely sensual and superficial. 48 Juan Bautista Alberdi, Las 'Bases' de Alberdi, ed. Thus, Thierry's earlier historical writings, the first series of letters on the history of France (181820), seek to justify the Third Estate through a staunchly 'Romanist' interpretation of early French history. And a whole range of symbolic practices enter the public sphere: the wearing of liberty caps, planting of liberty trees, images of the republic as Marianne, the tricolour, carnivals . Indeed, later complaints against Scott's being just entertaining and the comparative neglect of Austen are part of a Victorian forgetting of the modernist, aesthetic impulse which surprisingly given conventional accounts of these matters is a byproduct of Burkean counter-revolution. (Melbourne: Rigmarole Books, 1982), pp. 1878. It seems that by considering Scott to be exemplary, Lukacs himself has followed Marx's example in Capital, where a discursive slippage begins by claiming merely to describe the case of England and then moves on to using Irresistible romance 97 that description as a normative model for other countries. 3, p. 391: "There is still in Europe a country capable of legislation; the Island of Corsica. Yet for Fustel de Coulanges, the historian responsible for demolishing the myth of Germanism in the 1860s and 1870s, Tacitus's antinomies were merely analytic in intent, and not moralistic. Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial.2 This impatience with the apparently divisive and warlike character of 'nation-statism' is very common among European critics in the postwar period, who work either within a Marxist tradition of 'internationalism' or a liberal tradition of sensible 'patriotism', perhaps most of all in England and the United States where even Left social critics (until very recently) have ritually denounced 'imperialism' while withdrawing their support from the oppositional forces that imperial legacy has inevitably unleashed. In the phantasmagoria of the dream-work, the coach becomes a crocodile, de Quincy and the dead girl travel into fantasy colonial islands, the road becomes a cathedral (or a railway station?) Social ills were allegedly being cured. 85 See Ruskin's famous chapter, 'The nature of Gothic'. Page size 437.76 x 657.6 pts It excludes living painters, although its author claims that to have included them would have 'enlarged and adorned our Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art 155 school so much, that neither the Roman nor the Venetian would have had cause to be ashamed of its company'. Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center, at Harvard University. window.csa("Config", { See also my chapter, 'Homeland: nostalgia in migrant and non-Anglo/Celtic writing', in P. Foss (ed. 74 D. Carter, 'The natives are getting restless: nationalism, multiculturalism and migrant writing', Island, 25/6 (1986), p. 3. For the reassurance offers Reynolds the opportunity to claim that the main danger to the establishment of a civic republic of taste is the attempt create it too soon, without paying sufficient attention to the frailty of human nature, and its attachment to the local and the familiar: Whoever would reform a nation, supposing a bad taste to prevail in it, will not accomplish his purpose by going directly against the stream of their prejudices. ay Mevwesr Cealeite a BL hye, Uo t Introduction: narrating the nution Homi K. hans [sions ke narratives, lose thir origin in the ste of te a Sy rea tii ei ge te ste Tes fom chore scons of pli thoogh ant 'san emerge powerkl hire es 'hove celtrl compulsion fer Sythe posable ney uf he 'EXtowerspoeiney to pre the esate ne cons irae mca rey thea gan te 'atonal oe even "ae capa vet . After reading Longfellow and Whittier, it seems to me that one would not want to deny Whitman a certain stylistic distinction! Let us consider nationalism first. The Abbe Dubos also insisted that the Champs de Mars, which had been claimed by the old French aristocracy as the precursor of the Estates General and by the noblesse de robe as the 28 Martin Thorn precursor of the parlements, had been nothing more than a rallying place for troops for the spring campaign. The novel 'wakens profound meditation and healthy criticisms';22 it will teach people about their history, about their barely formulated customs, and about ideas and feelings that have been modified by still unsung political and social events. '24 while, from the other side, the radical Hazlitt said of Burke's writing that 'it has the solidity, the sparkling effect of a Diamond; all other fine writing is like French paste or Bristol stones in comparison'. .' Nation Branding Concepts, Issues, Practice One has only to observe that Indian and mestiza lovers appear in books like O guarani and Enriquillo in order to redefine Brazilian 82 Doris Sommer and Dominican peoples as indigenous, not Black, to see prejudice at work. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence. Neither did the truth: it was not true that he had gone into that Sinaloan pueblo just as he had gone into so many others, ready to grab the first woman who incautiously ventured outside. 45 If one were to draw, for the sake of argument, a contrast between two traditions of European philology, an earlier, humanist approach to the study of text and context, and a later, comparative philology, associated in most cases with Romanticism,46 the temptation would be to range 32 Martin Thorn Fustel de Coulanges in the former category rather than in the latter, but in fact his work runs awkwardly across both of them. 7 The House of Savoy owes its royal title to its acquisition of Sardinia (1720). After three unsuccessful military expeditions, the army, by then thoroughly bedraggled and demoralized, finally crushes the commune in a genocidal fury in the novel's closing chapter. Can there be life for local artists in a scene always taken up by weak or repugnant foreign creations? Suddenly the paranoid system of 'English reading' stands revealed. Can you be sure that the Germans, who have raised the banner of ethnography so high, will not see the Slavs in their turn analyse the names of villages in Saxony and Lusatia, search for any traces of the Wiltzes or of the Obotrites, and demand recompense for the massacres and the wholesale enslavements that the Ottoss inflicted upon their ancestors? I am indebted to Professor Marilyn Butler for drawing my attention to this important paper. Born all of the same mother, our fathers of different origins and blood'. Notes 1 E. Gellner, 'Nationalism and cohesion in complex societies', in Culture, Identity and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 8. Wordsworth is actually writing about advertisements. cit., p. 58. //
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