The “Interstitial Perspective” of Homi Bhabha

Marjorie Perloff

published in Literary Imagination, 1, no. 1 (Spring 99):109-25.

The “interstitial perspective,” as Bhabha calls it (LC 3), replaces “the polarity of a prefigurative self-generating nation ‘in itself’ and extrinsic other nations” with the notion of “cultural liminality within the nation” (LC 148). “The liminal figure of the nation-space would ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves. This is because the subject of cultural discourse—the agency of a people—is split in the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contest of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the performative” (LC 148)—which is to say, between the people’s status as “historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy,” and their ability to perform themselves as “‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary [national] presence” (LC145).
Hybridity, liminality, “interrogatory, interstitial space” (LC 3)—these are the positive values Bhabha opposes to a retrograde historicism that continues to dominate Western critical thinking, a “linear narrative of the nation,” with its claims for the “holism of culture and community” and a “fixed horizontal nation-space” (LC 142). We must, he argues eloquently, undo such thinking with its facile binary oppositions. Rather than emphasizing the opposition between First World and Third World nations, between colonizer and colonized, men and women, black and white, straight and gay, Bhabha would have it, we might more profitably focus on the faultlines themselves, on border situations and thresholds as the sites where identities are performed and contested.

In advancing this revisionist argument, Bhabha draws on an astonishing variety of theoretical, literary, and art texts. From A to Z (Althusser to Zizek), from Marx to Chantal Mouffe to Toni Morrison: citations from these “authorities”—some of them artists, most of them political or cultural theorists as well as philosophers—are woven together so as to constitute what we might call an oratorical collage, in which argument tends to be subordinated to exhortation. Bhabha seems to be most comfortable when he alludes to poststructuralist theory, especially to the writings of Derrida and Lacan. But, as someone trained as a literary scholar (with a doctorate in English), he also cites, throughout The Location of Culture, novels and poems, photographs and art installations that are germane to his argument. It is the treatment of the literary and the artistic vis-à-vis what Bhabha calls the “liminal site of modern society”(LC 146) that I wish to consider here.

Let me begin with the passage, early in “DissemiNation,” in which Bhabha is questioning the “progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion—the many as one—shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community, and by theorists who treat gender, class or race as social totalities that are expressive of unitary collective experiences” (LC142). His example of such cultural holism—of the “founding dictum,” E pluribus unum—is Goethe’s classic travel book Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, as that narrative is seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s critical analysis in his essay “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism.” This essay, composed in the late 1930s and published in English translation in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays (1986), edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, [2] is, according to Holquist, actually a fragment from one of Bakhtin’s several lost books:

Its nonappearance resulted . . . from effects that grew out of the Second World War. . . . Sovetsky pistael (Soviet Writer), the publishing house that was to bring out Bakhtin’s book The Novel of Education and Its Significance in the History of Realism, was blown up in the early months of the German invasion, with the loss of the manuscript on which he had worked for at least two years (1936-38). Bakhtin retained only certain preparatory materials and a prospectus of the book; due to the paper shortage, he had torn them up page by page during the war to make wrappers for his endless chain of cigarettes. He began smoking pages from the conclusion of the manuscript, so what we have is a small portion of its opening section, primarily about Goethe. (MMB xiii)

I mention these awful circumstances because, as we shall note below, it provides an interesting “national” context for Bakhtin’s own literary perspective. In the essay fragment we have, Bakhtin posits that Goethe had the “startling ability to see time in space” and vice-versa, to “visualize time” (MMB 30). For the ordinary observer, for example, “Mountains are the epitome of stasis, the embodiment of immobility and immutability” (MMB 29). But in fact, so the Goethe of the Italian Journey observes, they change internally, become active, and create weather; their appearance contains their history. Conversely, Bakhtin shows, Goethe is only interested in history when it can be visualized, when its imprint on nature and culture can be seen. When it cannot, a curious mental block sets in. When, for example, in a mountain valley south of Palermo, the guide explains “how, long ago, Hannibal had given battle here and what stupendous feats of valour had taken place on this very spot,” Goethe irritatedly rejects what he calls an “odious evocation of defunct ghosts” (IJ 222), there being no trace, in the landscape before him, of past acts of violence and war. For the author of the Italian Journey, Bakhtin shows with a wealth of detail, “the word coincided with the clearest visibility. . . . .The invisible did not exist for him. But at the same time his eyes did not want to (and could not) see that which was ready-made and immobile. His eyes did not recognize simple spatial contiguities or the simple coexistence of things and phenomena. Behind each static multiformity he saw multitemporality (MMB 28). This chronotope—Bakhtin’s famous term for the space-time unit in narrative, is at once representative of a larger shift from Romanticism to Realism at Goethe’s moment but also, as Bakhtin makes clear, curiously idiosyncratic. Goethe’s meteorological theories, for example, were often quite wrong even though they gave him a wealth of metaphors for poetry.

One of Bakhtin’s examples of Goethe’s visualization of time is the following passage from the Italian Journey:

In a country where everyone enjoys the day but the evening even more, sunset is an important moment. All work stops; those who were strolling about return to their homes; the father wants to see his daughter back in the house—the day has ended. We Cimmerians hardly know the real meaning of day. With our perpetual fogs and cloudy skies we do not care if it is day or night, since we are so little given to take walks and enjoy ourselves out of doors. But here, when night falls, the day consisting of evening and morning is definitely over. . . . The bells ring, the rosary is said, the maid enters the room with a lighted lamp and says: “Felicissima notte!” This period of time varies in length according to the season, and people who live here are so full of vitality that this does not confuse them, because the pleasures of their existence are related not to the precise hour, but to the time of day. If one were to force a German clock hand on them, they would be at a loss. . . . (IJ 42; MMB 31)

And Goethe appends a sketch in which he uses concentric circles to give a visually graphic image of the relationship between Italian time and its German counterpart.
Bhabha, who cites this passage in “DissemiNation,” seems to take this relationship quite literally. “Goethe’s realist narrative,” he claims, “produces a national-historical time that makes visible a specifically Italian day in the detail of its passing time. “The recurrent metaphor,” he surmises, is “of landscape as the inscape of national identity”; the passage illustrates “the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression” (LC 143, my italics). And Bhabha calls this “a national vision of emergence.”

As such, Goethe’s narrative is an example of a false holism. “Can this national time-space,” Bhabha asks, “be as fixed or as immediately visible as Bakhtin claims?” (LC143). “Can we accept Bakhtin’s repeated attempt to read the national space as achieved only in the fullness of time” (LC 144)? And he concludes: “We are led to ask whether the emergence of a national perspective—of an élite or subaltern nature—within a culture of social contestation, can ever articulate its ‘representative’ authority in that fullness of narrative time and visual synchrony of the sign that Bakhtin proposes” (LC144).

Bhabha does make the qualification that the “fullness of time” in Italian Journey is not achieved without a “narrative struggle.” “From the beginning . . . ,” he remarks, “the Realist and Romantic conceptions of time coexist in Goethe’s work, but the ghostly (Gespenstermässiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches), and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes) are consistently surmounted by the structuring process of the visualization of time” (LC143). Given this willed suppression of what Freud was to call the uncanny (daß Unheimliche), the Italian Journey, or at least Bakhtin’s reading of it, is compared unfavorably to later “accounts of the emergence of national narratives”—John Barrell’s “splendid analysis of the rhetorical and perspectival status of the ‘English gentleman’ within the social diversity of the eighteenth-century novel; and . . . Houston Baker’s innovative reading of the ‘new national modes of sounding, interpreting and speaking the Negro in the Harlem Renaissance’.” [3] A triumph, it seems, of contemporary theory over the merely literary text (Goethe’s) as well as its mere critical elucidation (Bakhtin’s).

Does the fact that Bakhtin’s fragmentary text was written in the 1930s, Barrell’s and Baker’s fifty years later in the eighties (1983 and 1987 respectively) make any difference? Chronology—or, for that matter—history in general–seem to be of little interest to Bhabha, as is evident from his repeated assumption that the “fullness of narrative time and visual synchrony of the sign” are somehow equivalent to nationhood. Neither in the Bildungsroman fragment nor in related essays is nation a critical category; on the contrary, as a self-designated “philosophical anthropologist,” Bakhtin looked for categories that transcend specific nation and culture: he moves easily across space and time from Goethe to Rabelais to Dostoievsky. Perhaps this was the case because, for an exile, if not to say prisoner, in his own nation, the Soviet Union, throughout his precarious and tragic life, questions of nationhood or ethnicity naturally took the back-seat to larger issues of speech patterning and literary structure, to narrative mode and generic choice.

As for Goethe, it is helpful to remember that the Italienische Reise was written between 1786-88, almost a hundred years before Italy actually was a unified nation. In the pre-Napoleonic, pre-nationalist culture within which Goethe operated, neither what Bhabha calls the pedagogical imperative–the people’s status as “historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy— nor the performative–the people’s ability to perform themselves as “‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary [national] presence” (LC145)— would seem to be especially relevant. In the context of Goethe’s narrative, the comparison of “German” to “Italian weather” cited above is little more than a comparison of Northern and Southern life styles, a comparison of a locale in which the greyness of daylight gradually modulates in the black of night with one where the bright day suddenly ends when the sun sets. The commentary might apply to Boston and Barcelona as easily as to “the German” and the “Italian,” although Goethe’s weather and time maps would then have to be adjusted.

Indeed an actual reading of the Italian Journey would have shown Bhabha that this particular travel book, far from treating everyday life in Italy as a “progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion” (LC 142), is fixated on difference, otherness, and transformation—the very hybridity he takes it to deny. Goethe’s visually-minded narrator is aware of every new flower, every rock formation, the course of every mountain stream. “Having taken this journey in order to escape the inclemencies I had suffered on the fifty-first parallel,” he writes of the passage through the Tyrolean Alps, “I had hoped, I must confess, to enter a true Goshen on the forty-eighth. I found myself disappointed, as I should have known beforehand, because latitude by itself does not make a climate but mountain ranges do, especially those which cross countries from east to west” (IJ 14). And a few days later from Bolzano, “Can I learn to look at things with clear, fresh eyes? . . . . Can the grooves of old mental habits be effaced? This is what I am trying to discover. The fact that I have to look after myself keeps me mentally alert all the time and I find that I am developing a new elasticity of mind” (IJ 21). Arriving in Roverto en route to Verona, he notes that here “the language changes abruptly. North of this point it had wavered between German and Italian. Now, for the first time I had a pure-bred Italian as a postilion. The innkeeper speaks no German and I must put my linguistic talents to the test” (24). And soon, on the shores of Lake Garda, he finds himself (latitude 45 degrees and 50 minutes) in “a totally unfamiliar environment” (IJ 25):

The people lead the careless life of a fool’s paradise. To begin with, the doors have no locks, though the innkeeper assures me that I would not have to worry if all my belongings were made of diamonds. Then the windows are closed with oil paper instead of glass. Finally, a highly necessary convenience is lacking, so that one is almost reduced to a state of nature. When I asked the servant for a certain place, he pointed down into the courtyard. “Qui abasso può servirsi! ” “Dove? ” I asked. “Da per tutto, dove vuol! ” was his friendly answer” (IJ 25).

A definitive difference between nations? Rather, a difference between the rural and the urban, where bathroom arrangements will be quite different. Goethe’s main thrust is to differentiate Venice from Florence, Florence from Rome, and later from Naples and Palermo. Florence, for example, is a town that doesn’t speak to Goethe and which he passes through quickly, the art and culture of the Quattrocento being quite unfamiliar to him. Rome, by contrast, is, for Goethe, as Bakhtin says, the “great chronotope of human history” (MMB 40), in that it bears witness to the complex strata of its past:

Here is an entity which has suffered so many drastic changes in the course of two thousand years, yet it is still the same soil, the same hill, often even the same column or the same wall, and in its people one still finds traces of their ancient character. Contemplating this, the observer becomes, as it were, a contemporary of the great decrees of destiny, and this makes it difficult for him to follow the evolution of the city, to grasp not only how Modern Rome follows Ancient, but also how, within both, one epoch follows another (IJ 120).
This is an instance of what Bakhtin calls the “fullness and clarity of the visibility of the time in space.” But the charms of Einfühlung don’t always work: sometimes, as I remarked earlier, the visible remains impenetrable. Consider the following entry from Ferrara dated October 16, 1786:

For the first time on my trip I am in low spirits and feel utterly indifferent to this beautiful, depopulated city in the middle of a flat plain. Once upon a time these same streets were animated by a brilliant court. Here Ariosto lived disappointed and Tasso unhappy, and we persuade ourselves that we are edified by visiting their shrines. The mausoleum of Ariosto contains a great deal of badly distributed marble. Instead of Tasso’s prison we are shown a woodshed or coal cellar in which he was certainly not confined. At first nobody in the house knows what one wants to see. After a while they remember, but not before they have been tipped. I was reminded of Dr. Luther’s famous ink stain which is touched up from time to time by the custodian of the castle. There must be something of an itinerant journeyman about most travellers to make them want to look for such signs. (IJ 91-92).

The absence of connection here recalls the Hannibal-in-Sicily passage I cited earlier. And there are many such disconnects—moments when the spatial and temporal fail to intersect producing the psychic pain Bakhtin refers to in his discussion of “the ghostly (Gespentermässiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches), and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes), which were strong in his initial feeling of a merged past and present” (MMB 36).

Bhabha, who wants to see this “narrative struggle” as the “repression of a ‘cultural’ unconscious; a liminal, uncertain state of cultural belief when the archaic emerges in the midst of margins of modernity” (LC 143), makes a curious clinamen that somewhat gives his game away. Bakhtin, let us note, talks about the ghostly, the terrifying, and the unaccountable as elements of Goethe’s “initial,” that is, youthful failure of assimilating the past, the reference being to the psychological difficulties of the poet’s postgraduate days, as recounted by the late Goethe in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (see MMB 35). It is there, not in the Italian Journey, that Goethe uses the three German nouns quoted above. Bhabha who follows Bakhtin in citing the original German is merely copying his source. We know this because Bakhtin has curiously and quite uncharacteristically made a mistake that Bhabha repeats. Two of the nouns are correctly translated, but Unerfreuliches is quite wrongly translated as “the terrifying.” The adjective Unerfreulich from which the noun is formed is a fairly mild epithet; it means “unpleasant,” “displeasing,” “tiresome,” “unsatisfactory.” The sentence “Daß ist Unerfreulich” is rather like saying, “That’s not good news.”

But why does Bhabha cite the German to begin with? The reversion to the original is a practice he may have derived from Derrida and Lacan exegetes, who regularly cite the foreign word (e.g., graphein, differance, pharmakos, jouissance, imaginaire) in parentheses so as to indicate that (1) they have direct access to the original, and (2) that the word in question is untranslatable and hence must be referred to in its original or “true” state. But since Bhabha is not concerned, as is, say, Gayatri Spivak in her Introduction to Grammatology, with teasing out the etymologies and semantic values of a given author’s more difficult terms, his practice here and elsewhere in The Location of Culture serves no function except to guarantee some sort of authenticity to the original –an odd phenomenon, given Bhabha’s declared distrust of the authentic, the organic, the true. [4]

The gesture toward origins, in any case, remains suspended, for the Italian Journey functions for Bhabha only as example, as illustration for the larger theoretical and ideological statements the cultural critic wishes to make. The citation of examples, preferably cited in their original language or from an original source and reproduced from an original manuscript, is, of course, a legacy of the New Historicism. But whereas a critic like Stephen Greenblatt gives the literary text, culturally constructed or not, equal time with the non-literary texts under consideration, the more recent “Cultural Studies” trend, exemplified by The Location of Culture, is to reduce the primary text to mere counter or commodity. Thus Goethe’s Italian Journey is read as conveying a particular message—E pluribus unum—even though it deals with the confrontation of a “strange” and alien culture on the part of an extraordinary late eighteenth-century European poet, a poet who is also a novelist, dramatist, and autobiographer as well as a more-than-amateur chemist, geologist, meteorologist, and botanist. Whereas Bhabha’s cultural model is characterized by its hybridities and liminalities — the nation, we are told again and again, is an arena of contestation and rival performativities–the artwork has, evidently, no more than instrumental value, illustrating and exemplifying the political and ideological thesis of the critic who happens to find it of use.

The same thing is likely to occur—and I turn now a quite different example — when Bhabha deals with contemporary art works. In the Introduction to The Location of Culture, Bhabha talks of “the borderline work of culture” as one that “demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present,” one that “creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (LC 7). “Such art,” he suggests, “renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present” (LC 7). A primary instance is the work of Los Angeles photographer Allan Sekula:

. . . it is in the photographic art of Alan [sic] Sekula that takes the borderline condition of cultural translation to its global limit in Fish Story, his photographic project on harbours: ‘the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange.’ The harbour and the stockmarket become the paysage moralisé of a containerized, computerized world of global trade. Yet, the non-synchronous time-space of transnational ‘exchange’, and exploitation, is embodied in a navigational allegory.” (LC

And Bhabba cites Sekula’s own comment in the Preface to Fish Story:

Things are more confused now. A scratchy recording of the Norwegian national anthem blares out from a loudspeaker at the Sailor’s Home on the bluff above the channel. The container ship being greeted flies a Bahamian flag of convenience. It was built by Koreans working long hours in the giant shipyards of Ulsan. The underpaid and the understaffed crew could be Salvadorean or Filipino. Only the Captain hears a familiar melody. [5]

Bhabha seems to take this as a confirmation of his own program for the “articulation of cultural differences . . .that initiate . . . innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation” (LC 1-2). As he explains it: “Norway’s nationalist nostalgia cannot drown out the babel on the bluff. Transnational capitalism and the impoverishment of the Third World certainly create the chains of circumstance that incarcerate the Salvadorean or the Filipino/a. In their cultural passage, hither and thither, as migrant workers, part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world, they embody the Benjaminian ‘present’: that moment blasted out of the continuum of history” (LC 8).

But does Fish Story in fact embody this “babel on the bluff”? Sekula’s 1995 traveling exhibition, reproduced in book form by October (MIT) Books, with its sequence of hundreds of color photographs, slide sequences, and text panels that comment on the project, ironizes not only the picturesque harbor scenes that are a staple of Impressionist and modernist painting, but also those dramatic pictures of oil spills, boat people, and burning aircraft carriers that flood the media. By contrast, in Fish Story nothing is “readily visible,” to use Bakhtin’s term. The sequential photographic frames display, by means of bright colors and their seemingly “objective” view of ships’ interior, longshoremen, and other struggling workers [figures 1 & 2], a shipping industry that has been stripped of the colorful role it once played in cultural life. As the curator for the Witte de With exhibition in Rotterdam, put it:
Former harbors have been transformed into palatial residential districts, while far beyond the horizon line of the city and out of view of its inhabitants, barren and inhospitable terrains have risen where cargoes packed into huge, standardized containers are loaded and unloaded by automatic means. The very identity of the world of shipping has been obscured through the forces of industrialization and a concomitant increase in magnitude; its traditionally close ties with the population have been undermined. . . . labor conditions are deteriorating, jobs are becoming scarce and those who are employed have to work harder and harder just to keep their heads above water. [6]

Sekula’s is a straightforwardly Marxist interpretation of the damage global capitalism has inflicted on the workers—in this case, sailors, dock workers, and longshoremen– of the world. As such, it ironically reproduces the very discourse of class and ethnicity Bhabha has been at such pains to oppose. Fish Story posits the classic Marxist binary between rich and poor, capitalist and worker, colonizer and colonized. The fact that a given ship from the Bahamas was built by Koreans, has a crew made up of Salvadoreans and Filipinos, even as its captain is Norwegian, is not, I would argue, a sign of the hybridity or the liminality of the waterfront system. On the contrary, the captain is First World, the crew from the Third, the Captain is white, crew and work force, people of color, and so on. The order of this world is one of extreme stratification.

A sequel to Fish Story called Freeway to China has recently been exhibited at the Getty Center for the Humanities,where I have had the good fortune to see it. [7] These new consecutive-frame images of the Los Angeles port at San Pedro “are immediately readable,” according to the exhibition’s curator Moira Kenney, “as a coherent sociological exploration of the port’s political and economic realities, although the narrative emphasizes its distinctions and disruptions. At the center of the group, formalistic images of cranes, ships, and piers under construction (see figure 3) suggest the vitality of the expanding economy”; but, Kenney adds:

Against this backdrop, images of Russian, German and American workers complicate this expansionist argument. . . . Working on a Belgian ship sailing from Abu Dhabi with cranes built by Filipino laborers, the Russians represent a new migrant workforce, disenfranchised by the collapse of the Soviet Union. An even stronger irony is suggested in the portrait of Mason Davis [see figure 3], an African American welder who represents the local labor pool that has worked only sporadically since the recent federal cuts in defense spending.

This artful photographic discourse, defining, as it does, “the growing inequity of a multinational economic transformation that has not trickled into lived Los Angeles” (Kenney) present us with stark and often powerful images, reminiscent in their bright red and black posters of the late Rodchenko, but here the bright colors and idealized figures are designedly parodic, pinpointing as they do the bleak life of the actual workers –welders, machinists, shop stewards– dwarfed by the girders, cranes, and other varieties of huge and strangely beautiful machinery—machinery that hardly needs human participation. The message about the destruction of the social fabric on the part of global capital is clear enough, [8] but it is a message that seems curiously at odds with Bhabha’s own liminality model. True, the San Pedro labor pool may include poor black locals and Filipino migrant workers as well as recent Russian immigrants, but in Sekula’s poster-like photographs, they wear the same uniform and hence look very much alike [figure 4]. Indeed, Sekula’s thrust seems to be that, whatever the background and ethnicity of the workers, labor is the victim of an eerily depersonalized capital.

Why, then, does Bhabha use Sekula’s art work as illustrative of hybridity and “border discourse,” of “the [workers’] ‘right’ to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege” (LC 2)? Perhaps because, in his eagerness to find supporting evidence for what is, after all, a theoretical rather than an empirical construct, Bhabha bases his reading on Sekula’s own commentary on the multinational status of shipyard workers and owners rather than on what is actually there in the artist’s images. [9] Perhaps Sekula struck him as a kindred spirit—a fellow-Contributing Editor to October and fellow academic[10] —and he evidently admired the artist’s mise en question of the grand narrative of pre-Industrial culture, the “Fish Story” of European maritime progress.

That this narrative is itself romantic, that it reinscribes, moreover, the very binary opposition of past and present, tradition and modernity, oppressor and oppressed that Bhabha has been at such pains to contest (see LC 35), is curiously elided in the critic’s drive to establish his theoretical credentials and parameters and hence to let the art and literary chips fall where they may. Indeed, the secondariness of the art construct vis-à-vis the critic’s theoretical discourse affects even the discussion of a novel Bhabha does seem to have read—Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the Introduction to The Location of Culture, he discusses the role of Beloved herself in Morrison’s novel and produces the following hyperbolic catechistic sequence:

Who is Beloved?
Now we understand: she is the daughter that returns to Sethe so that her mind will be homeless no more.
Who is Beloved?
Now we may say: she is the sister that returns to Denver, and brings hope of her father’s return, the fugitive who died in his escape.
Who is Beloved?
Now we know: she is the daughter made of murderous love who returns to love and hate and free herself. Her words are broken, like the lynched people with broken necks; disembodied like the dead children who lost their ribbons. But there is no mistaking what her words say as they rise from the dead despite their lost syntax and their fragmented presence. (LC 17)

Now we understand, now we may say, now we know. What is a novel that it can so readily and melodramatically be explained away? More important for our purposes here: what is the marginal, the liminal, the interstitial, if the “affirmative” message that “the slave mother regain[s] through the presence of the child, the property of her own person” (LC 17) can be stated thus baldly? And third—and here I turn in conclusion from literary meaning to literary history, that other large area occluded by the cultural-theory paradigm before us—how does the generic slave narrative cum ghost story of the late 1980s, produced by a middle-class urban, college-educated African-American novelist, compare with actual slave narrative? And what about the modes of production and reception of Beloved? How do bestsellerdom and the Nobel Prize relate to marginality and hybridity in our culture? To Toni Morrison’s own place in that culture?

These, I suspect, are not questions that would interest Homi Bhabha, his being more manifesto than reasoned argument, more pathos than dianoia. Perhaps it is the epideictic mode, the ceremonial oratory of display, that has won Bhabha such enthusiastic readers and prevented us from asking too many hard questions. In the meantime, his liminality model is not without some astonishing ironies. Think, for example, of Bakhtin, writing from those very interstices of society (and, for that matter, of Western Europe) that Bhabha finds so appealing, a Bakhtin who was powerless, marginalized, and thus unable to invent himself as a “performative subject” or to contest the various dominant discourses of Stalinist Russia. Bakhtin, whose exile, subalternity, and suppression, his resort to writing paper for the making of cigarette wrappers, does not prevent him from being seen, in “DissemiNation,” as one of the purveyors of the “plenitudinous present and eternal visibility of a past” (LC151). But then, in Bahbha’s scheme of things, the moment of writing is not germane to the larger argument, any more than it matters that the word Italian, in Goethe’s day, could hardly refer to a nation-state, there being no unified Italy, only a loose assemblage of geographically and linguistically related city-states and provinces.

We must not overstate the case. In its general outlines, Bhabha’s hybridity paradigm has enormous appeal: we want to believe, after all, that the postcolonial location is one where the binary opposition of oppressor and oppressed, male and female, master and victim, has become irrelevant, that the new playing field is one of performative contestation rather than ethnic or national separation and rivalry. But the commodification of literature and art—the treatment of complex novels, poems, and art works as so much illustrative material for the “larger” goal of making profound ethical and epistemological generalizations, may well destroy the paradigm from within. For long after Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” has disappeared from the library shelves, long after even Bakhtin’s brilliant analyses of chronotopes and dialogism have been qualified by newer theoretical and critical models, Goethe’s Italian Journey will still be read, even as it has already been read for more than two hundred years.

Perhaps, then, instead of doing a Bhabhian reading of Goethe we might do a Goethean reading of Bhabha. Why, for example, does this widely travelled critic (“DissemiNation,” we read in the dedication to Paul Moritz Strimpel, bears the imprint of Pforzheim — Paris — Zurich — Ahmedabad— Bombay— Milan—Lugano”), [11] have nothing to say about urban geography or about the relation of city to the natural environment? Why no rivers and mountains in Bhahba’s essays, no references to latitude or longitude? When did weather cease to play a part in constructing human consciousness, and why? Goethe, I suspect, would have interesting things to say on these and similar questions.

Footnotes

“Living in the Same Place”:

The Old Mono-Nationalism and the New Comparative Literature

Marjorie Perloff

published in World Literature Today, 69, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 249-255. Translated into Serbo-Croat, in Transkatalog, 6/7 (1998): 76-84.

–A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

–By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

–Or also living in different places.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Leopold Bloom’s definition of nationhood is not as foolish as his fellow Dubliners in Kiernan’s Pub took it to be. As citizens of the United States we are, after all, “the same people living in the same place.” And when we travel or go abroad, thus living in different places,” we retain a good measure of our “Americanness.” Whenever I watch the bleary-eyed plane travellers divide into those two passport lines–U.S. and “Foreign” –at Kennedy Airport or LAX, I am aware that national identity still plays a marked role in one’s sense of self.

In his much cited essay “DissemiNation,” Homi K. Bhabha speaks eloquently of the inherent “porosity” of modern nation states, what he calls the “intermittent time, and intersticial space, that emerges as a structure of undecidablity at the frontiers of cultural hybridity.” [1] But when Bhabha adds that we are entering an era in which “The liminal figure of the nation space [will] ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves” (HKB 299), he is, I think, engaging in wishful thinking. The “nation space”–pace Chechnya and Serbia, pace the People’s Republic of China–shows no signs of opening itself up to the sort of dissolution Bhabha and like-minded critics desire. What is the case, however, is that the nation as we know it today can no longer be understood according to the nineteenth-century paradigm which continues to be regarded as normative, at least in the academy[2] We still, for example, divide literary study into such areas as “Modern British Fiction,” “Victorian Poetry,” “French Renaissance Literature,” “the German Enlightenment,” and so on. And the most powerful literary subgroup in the academy, American Literature, together with its more socio-historical sibling American Studies, acts on the premise that our first (and often our last) obligation is to know those works that, however diverse the race, ethnicity, and gender of their author, have been made in the U.S.A. Hence the emphasis on Chicano rather than Latin American literature, on James Baldwin and Toni Morrison rather than on Aimé Césaire, and the exclusion of Canadian (both Anglo- and Francophile), or Australian literature from the canon.

This, I shall argue here, is where Comparative Literature can–indeed must– play a central role. For, given the migrations and emigrations, the exiles (sometimes voluntary, more often forced) that have created U.S. citizenry in the late twentieth century, how can we continue to take “American literature,” as it continues to be called in survey courses and textbooks, as a mono-national entity? And what about an earlier period like the Renaissance? Given the movement from nation to nation in that period, coupled with the exploration of the New World, is it meaningful to study, say, English Renaissance lyric in isolation?

I am thinking not so much about comparisons between national literatures–the old Comparative Literature, which was, in many ways, a natural response to nineteenth-century national paradigms– as about the simple reality that today the national literatures are themselves assemblages of many “other-national” strands, sedimentations where different national and hence linguistic elements won’t separate out, compost heaps, so to speak, in which nations of origin become curiously conflated. To understand this new situation, we must begin by looking at the nineteenth-century model of a “nation-space.”

Take a book all of us have come across, at one time or another, no matter what our speciality: the standard-bearing Norton Anthology of American Literature, used in freshman and sophomore courses from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Anchorage, Alaska as well as in nations around the globe. The Third Edition of the Norton (1989) includes forty-five writers in the nineteenth century (1822-1914) sections, writers whose names alone are revealing: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allen Poe, Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Harris, T. B. Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hopper, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Ambroce Bierce, Henry James, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Booker T. Washington, Charles W. Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Adams, Edith Wharton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), and Henry Adams.

The Norton editors were, of course, making every effort to include women and minority groups: this edition has eleven women, one of whom is a Native American, and five African-American men. No doubt newer editions will feel called upon to include an even larger percentage of women and minority writers, [3] but this is not the issue that concerns me here. For what is fascinating, from the perspective of the Comparatist, is the national, cultural, and religious uniformity of the writers who really were the leading writers of the U.S. nineteenth century. Of the forty-five (so many of them Boston bred and Harvard educated), all but three were born and died in the U. S. Henry James and Edith Wharton lived their later lives abroad (London and Paris respectively) but their careers were very much formed in their native country as was that of Ambrose Bierce, who died in Mexico. And further: whether these writers were male or female, white or black, all but two (Kate Chopin who was Catholic and the Sioux Indian Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) were Protestant [Bonnin, for that matter, was brought up in a Quaker Missionary School]. Again, almost all the white writers here included were of English descent–an ancestry, by the way, that, judging from their middle names, includes both sides of the family. Theodore Dreiser, whose parents were impoverished German immigrants, is a grand exception.

A similar mono-nationalism characterizes English, French, and German writers of the nineteenth century. From William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Felicia Hemans down to Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, English writers were, well, English writers. There are, of course, certain class and regional differences: Byron was aristocratic, Keats lower middle-class, Dickens a child of urban poverty. But ethnically and religiously, English writers of the nineteenth-century are an astonishly uniform English Protestant lot: when Gerard Manley Hopkins, following John Henry Newman, converted to Catholicism in the late 1860s, it was considered a major event.

There are three basic ways for literary critics and historians to respond to this situation. The first, and perhaps the most common in the age of multiculturalism, is to deny special status to, say, the six great Romantic poets in England or the American Renaissance writers in the U.S. and elevate to equal (or superior) status the work of “forgotten” women and African-American writers, to insist that these writers are “just as important” or “valuable” as are Blake and Byron, Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville. There are two difficulties here. First, the typical “forgotten” writer–say, Susan Warner– is often just as “authentically” Anglo-American as her canonical counterpart–say, Harriet Beecher Stowe. And second, sooner or later readers discover for themselves that Melville’s Moby Dick is, after all, a more interesting novel than Wide, Wide World.

A second response to the mono-nationalism of the nineteenth century is to retain the existing canon, as, say, Edward Said does in his 1993 Culture and Imperialism, but to reread Austen and Dickens and Thackeray for the light they shed on imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. This approach has generated a whole growth industry of nineteenth-century studies: I note that the prospective sessions listed in the most recent MLA Newsletter lists have a high preponderance of titles like “Race, Travel and Imperalism in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” “Imperial Fantasies in German Nineteenth-Century Literature,” and so on.

But the Imperialist-Colonialist paradigm is already showing signs of strain as everything written has to be ground through its mill. And the irony for Comparatists, as the above titles suggest, is that these studies continue to be conducted along strictly national lines: those expert in British imperialism seem to know little about the German situation and vice-versa. A third –and to my mind more satisfactory–approach would be to recognize that our current drive to discover national porosity, hybridity, difference, dissolution, intersticial space, and all those other positives Homi K. Bhabha and like-minded critics speak of, stems, not from some kind of new and definitive theoretical paradigm, a new canon law, but from the simple and practical reality that the writers, artists, and composers of our own time who are “living in the same place,” no longer represent the mononationalism that really was the norm in the nineteenth century, and which hence inevitably influenced historians and theoreticians of the period. “Philosophy,” as Wittgenstein reminds us, “does not attempt to deal with questions which do not really arise” (LEC 1 74).

“The discipline of comparative literature,” writes Emily Apter in her essay responding to the Bernheimer Report, “is unthinkable without the historical circumstances of exile. . . . the psychic legacy of dislocation[4] Apter is referring, of course, to the first wave of Comparative Literature in this country, the European refugee culture of what she calls the “founding fathers”– Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek, Wolfgang Kaiser– and she argues that the American “converts to the field” in the fifties and sixties — Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Neil Hertz– suffered from “Euro-envy,” an “ethic of linguistic estrangement, a secessionism from mainstream American culture” (EA 89). By contrast, Apter suggests, the “current generation of exilic critics–the generation of postcolonialists whom she regards as normative for the “new” Comparative Literature– “is often . . . deeply antithetical to their Eurocentric counterparts: non-German speaking, nonmetropolitan, nonwhite, antipatriarchal, and, in varying degrees, hostile to elite literariness.” (EA 90). And she cites Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, Anthony Appiah and Sara Suleri, V. I. Mudimbe, Edward Said and Rey Chow as examples (EA 94). The contemporary situation thus becomes, in Apter’s words, “a border war, an academic version of the legal battles and political disputes over the status of ‘undocumented workers,’ ‘illegal aliens,’ and ‘permanent residents” (EA 94).

This now-fashionable formulation is not without its ironies. For one thing, all the theorists mentioned above were themselves educated in elitist Western institutions and, in the case of Spivak and Bhabba, are the direct heirs of those European, which is to say, French and German, fathers (especially Derrida) Apter now takes to be so retro. But more important, the teleology proposed here (the “old” Comparative Literature must be succeeded by the “new” postcolonialism) replicates precisely the blind spot of the earlier model: it demands an exotic other (Pakistan or Nigeria replace France and Italy) in place of the literature close to home, the literature, that is to say, actually written in the United States today.

It is a commonplace that English literature on the eve of World War I was largely the creation of a few Irishmen (Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw), two Americans (Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), a Pole, who knew no English before he was twenty (Joseph Conrad), and a second-generation German who changed his last name from Hueffer to (Ford Madox) Ford. And it is a second commonplace that after the War, dozens of American writers lived in Paris as expatriates, even as, in the World War II years, the flow was reversed, New York becoming the home for Andre Breton and Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Mondrian, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffmann, not to mention an entire colony of German exile writers and British expatriates like Auden and Isherwood living in New York and Los Angeles. But what is less well understood is that, by mid-century, the language of American poetry, to take just one example, had become something quite different, not only from its English model, but also from the Emerson-Whitman-Dickinson poetics which was its more immediate source. And here, I want to argue, a Comparatist approach is needed in order to locate the peculiar momentum of the work.

By 1910, according to the census, it is estimated that roughly one person in four in the continental U.S. learned English as a second language. Five years earlier, Henry James warned the graduating class at Bryn Mawr, that the new immigrants were destroying the “ancestral circle” of the American language, turning it into “a mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises,” an “easy and ignoble minimum,” barely distinguishable from “the grunting, the squealing, the barking, or the roaring of animals.” [5] “The forces of looseness,” James warned, “are in possession of the field,” and they “dump their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundations” of the language itself (QS 43).

One such immigrant, herself to come under the influence of Henry James, as of his philosopher brother, was Gertrude Stein. Born in Allegheny, PA., to an affluent Jewish-German but wholly secularized immigrant family, she was eight months old when her German-speaking family moved to Vienna and stayed there until she was four and a half, when they moved to Paris (which they left when Stein was five). She grew up in Oakland, California (of “no there there” fame), attended Radcliffe where she studied with a great Anglo-Saxon Protestant American, William James, and then enrolled as one of the first women in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. But she did not matriculate and soon moved to Paris where she lived the now legendary life recounted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, returning to the U.S. only once in 1934, on a very successful lecture tour.

How did Gertrude Stein respond to the “force of looseness” of immigrant, and then emigrant language? Criticism has been largely silent on this question. For all the discussions of her friendship with Picasso, her debt to Cubism, her place in the Paris art world and in the lesbian salon of Natalie Barney, and for all the talk of gender definition in her work, the actual determination of Stein’s language field remains largely misunderstood. The headnote in the recent Norton Anthology, which includes only Stein’s early and accessible “The Good Anna” along with the Introduction to The Making of Americans, informs us that, because of her Cubist connection, “[Stein] came to think of words as they were thinking of brush strokes on canvas, as tangible entities in themselves rather than vehicles conveying meaning or representing reality.” And again, “she treated words as things, carefully ignoring or defying the connection between words and meanings[6] In other words, her texts don’t really “mean” anything; they engage in what various scholars have called “non-referential play.”

Interestingly, French poets and critics from Jacques Roubaud to Emmanuel Hocquard have taken Stein’s meanings more seriously. In an essay called “L’Ecriture sans rature,” Françoise Collin remarks:

She has accomplished her depaysement once and for all by the age of twenty, taking up residence in a country where her language isn’t spoken. This is her only exoticism but it is a radical one. . . . Living in a foreign environment, Gertrude Stein distances herself from the language that she hears all around her–French–which is not her own, and which is for her an object of fascination to the point where she appropriates any number of its elements and formulae. But she is also distancing herself from her own language, American, which is not spoken around her, which has become the language of the other, even if it is the language of intimacy. The writing of Gertrude Stein is ex-centric with respect to two languages, according to different formulae: it is a third language. [7]

Once we become aware of the element of appropriation, many of Stein’s so-called impenetrabilities open up. Take “Ladies Voices: Curtain Raiser,” written in 1916 in Mallorca, where Gertrude and Alice had retreated from the war and were living the hotel life of the international set. Here is “Act IV”:

What are ladies voices.

Do you mean to believe me.

Have you caught the sun.

Dear me have you caught the sun.

In French (the lingua franca in Mallorca), to take the sun or sunbathe is “prendre le soleil.” Now one of the most common meanings of “prendre” is “to catch” as in “prendre un voleur” (“to catch a thief”). So “Have you caught the sun. Dear me have you caught the sun,” is simply Stein’s way of showing, as realistically as possible, what “ladies’ voices,” overheard in a beach resort, sound like and what they say. “Dear me, have you caught the sun” also contains a double entendre: when re-translated into English, it sounds as if the “you” has “caught” a disease. “Dear me, “have you caught the flu? Have you caught sunstroke?” and so on.

There is, in any case, nothing meaningless about Stein’s locution. At the same time, we find, in Stein’s “French-English, traces of childhood German as well: for example, in her predilection for “this one” (“dieser / diese”) and “one” (“Einer”).

But the larger question would be to explore why Stein felt so compelled to write in a “third language,” why the very fabric of language–its syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and semantic possibilities–became such an obsession for her. The case of William Carlos Williams is similar. The son of an English father and a Catholic, Puerto Rican mother who had both French Basque and Dutch Jewish blood, Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. Spanish was the predominant language in the house when Williams was a small child; his mother, who shifted easily from Spanish to French, learned English only reluctantly. In Rutherford, the Williamses, who wanted very much to “belong,” joined the Unitarian Church and, although they were not affluent, they sent their son to an expensive private school (Horace Mann) in New York, even though the commute, which the poet has described lovingly in his Autobiography, took hours. One year, he attended a French boarding school at Anneçy, and later he did postdoctoral work in Leipzig. But in contrast to Stein, as to Eliot and Pound, Williams is always cited as the poet who “stayed home,” who practiced medicine in his New Jersey home town for the rest of his life.

Like Stein, Williams was aggressively American: In The American Grain, reconstructs American history as a kind of contest between redskin and paleface, and his long poem Paterson purports to tell the story of the quintessential American polis. But, again like Stein, Williams invents a language (though not as deconstructionist as hers), highly self-conscious in its representations of “authentic” speech idiom, as in the “retarded” language of the “Billy” section of Paterson 1, the stilted flowery language of “Cress” in 1 and 2, and the medical case histories throughout. Thus, whereas Americanists have emphasized Williams’s debt to Emerson and Whitman, his relationship with Ezra Pound and H.D., his close bonds with the art world of the Arensberg circle, comparatist critics have paid more attention to the “Carlos” strain and have read the love poetry against its Petrarchan and Dantean models. Not that Williams “translated” French or Spanish into English equivalents as did Stein, or that he relied heavily on foreign phrases and locutions as did Ezra Pound. But when Williams explains that his poetic practice is informed by prosodic adjustments, for example, the transformation of the five-line stanza

My shoes as I lean

unlacing them

stand out upon

flat worsted flowers

under my feet.

to a four-line one by eliminating the last line (“See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better it looks[8] one has the sense, as in Stein, of a peculiar linguistic self-consciousness, a struggle that would not take this particular form in the native speaker.

A third and especially striking example of the multinationalism of the interwar period is that of Mina Loy. Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London in 1882 to Sigmund Lowy, a Hungarian Jew, and Julia Brian, she left England when she was seventeen to study art in Munich. At nineteen, she married a fellow artist and they moved to Paris where she changed her name to Loy and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne. In 1906, they moved on to Italy, where her children were born, her marriage dissolved, and she came under the spell of Futurism, having an affair first with Marinetti and then with the writer Papini. In 1916, when war was declared, she moved to New York, where she immediately became the center of New York Dada and had her fabled meeting with Arthur Cravan. By now she was writing poetry as well as producing art work; Eliot praised her in The Egoist and Pound chose her poetry as an example of the term logopoeia, the “dance of the intellect among words.” After the war, when Cravan disappeared mysteriously in Mexico, she returned to Paris and again became a “figure” in the literary and art world. But the last thirty years of her life (1926-53) were spent back in the U.S.; in these “silent years,” she more or less vanished from public view.

What nationality was Mina Loy and under what rubric should her work be studied? She wrote under so many anagrammaticaly and numerologically derived pseudonyms, and misdated so many of her paintings that in the twenties a rumor circulated around Paris that Mina Loy was not a real person at all, but some sort of hoax. Upon hearing this,” her editor Roger Conover tells us, Mina Loy turned up at Natalie Barney’s salon and declared: “I assure you I am indeed a live being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown. . . . To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was–poet.” [9] This is, I think, an exemplary tale, for the title “poet” is always something of an incognito; in Loy’s case, especially so since she was fluent in English, French, Italian, and German. But–what is most curious–the English of her poems, as the “Love Songs” and her long poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” attest, is neither quite British nor yet American but a curious hybrid, a kind of café society overlay on an English “school-girl” base. And that hybrid– phrases like “conundrums of finance / to which unlettered immigrants are instantly / initiate” (LLB 115) — is now receiving the recognition it has long deserved, even though much U.S. scholarship has been stymied by its inability to read Loy’s work in its French and Italian contexts.

What we might call the “thick” nationalism of Loy, Stein, and Williams has become almost the norm today. In London, at this very moment, one might be able to see a play by Samuel Beckett (whose French / English bilingualism is now understood as a form –but a very individual form–of Irish speech), by Harold Pinter, born and raised in the East End in a Jewish household, or by Tom Stoppard, whose adopted Anglo name belies his Jewish Czech ancestry. Last season the West End had a production of Death and the Maiden by the Chilean Jewish writer Ariel Dorfman, who, incidentally, has been on the faculty at Duke University. And there is the further irony that Beckett’s later plays and his works for radio like Eh Joe and Quad have been more frequently produced in Germany and in Japan than in London or Dublin. Some forms of exile exact a price: at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, some years ago, I heard a well-known Irish professor declare that Beckett wasn’t nearly as good as the American poet John Berryman. What linguistic and thematic qualities, one wonders, create this kind of transatlantic flow?

Before one can make generalizations about British literary culture based on the theatre, one must come to terms with the fact that the poetry situation is, for various reasons, antithetical. After Pound, after Eliot, the English Establishment turned back to its own roots, Donald Davie memorably declaring in the seventies that the tradition of English poetry was not that of the Americans (Pound and Eliot, and certainly not “Carlos Williams,” as Davie dismissively called him) but of Thomas Hardy. Hardyesque poetry from Philip Larkin and Donald Davie himself to Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison seems all but incomprehensible to, say, U. S. as to French readers–incomprehensible not because it is difficult but because we have difficulty in seeing what its importance is. And surely this again has to do with the Englishness (old style) of these poets, an Englishness self-consciously assumed in imitation of the nineteenth-century model, vis-à-vis our own polyglot, multinational, multi-dialect poetry. And it explains why “Contemporary British Poetry” is not a popular subject in U.S. universities.

The opposite situation–and it is the one with which I want to close–is that of the French movement of the 1970s and 80s called

Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), whose leading figure is the late novelist Georges Perec. I say French movement, but how French is it? In his W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975, English translation by David Bellos, 1988), Perec gives us two alternating narratives–the two V’s of the double-V (W). The first is an allegorical adventure story about a sports Utopia, “a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal’; the second an autobiography, “a fragmentary tale of a wartime childhood.” [10] The latter takes its point of departure from Perec’s own history: his Polish Jewish father, who had emigrated from Warsaw to Paris in 1926 and worked as a hairdresser, was killed in the War when Perec was four, his mother, née Cyrla (then Cecile) Shulevitz, died at Auschwitz when her son was six. The double text traces the complexities of postmodern identity, using, as is typical of this novelist, the most seemingly scrupulous factual documentation only to make us more aware of the wide gap between fact and meaning. In Chapter 8, footnote 8, for example, we find this etymology of the name Perec.

My family name is Peretz. It is in the Bible. In Hebrew it means “hole,” in Russian it means “pepper”, in Hungarian (in Budapest, to more precise) it is the word used for what in French we call “pretzel” (“pretzel” or “bretzel” in in fact merely a diminutive form [Beretzele] of Beretz and Beretz, like Baruch or Barek, is formed from the same roots as Peretz–in Arabic, if not in Hebrew, B and P are one and the same letter). The Peretzes like to think they are descended from Spanish Jews exiled by the Inquisition (the Perez are thought to be Marranos, or converted Jews who stayed in Spain), whose migrations can be traced to Provence (Peiresc), then to the Papal States, and finally to central Europe, principally Poland and econdarily Romania and Bulgaria. One of the central figures of the family is the Polish Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz, to whom every self-respecting Peretz is related even if it occasionally requires a feat of genealogical juggling. As for me, I am supposed to be Isaac Leib Peretz’s great-great-nephew. Apparently he was my grandfther’s uncle.

My grandfather was called David Peretz and lived in Lubartow. He had three children: the eldest was called Esther Chaja Perec; the second, Eliezer Peretz; and the last-born, Icek Judko perec. In the period between the first and third births, that is to say, between 1896 and 1909, Lubartow was, in succession, Russian, then Polish, then Russian again. An official hearing in Russian and writing in Polish, it has been explained to me, will hear Peretz and write Perec. But it is not impossible that the opposite is also true: according to my aunt, the Russians are supposed to be the ones who wrote “tz”, and it was the Poles who wrote “c”. This explanation signals but by no means exhausts the complex fantasies, connected to the concealment of my Jewish background through my patronym, which I elaborated around the name I bear, a name which is distinguished, moreover, by a minute discrepancy between the way it is spelled and the way it is pronounced in French: it should be written Pérec or Perrec (and that’s how it always is written spontaneously, either with an acute accent or with a double “r”0; but it is Perec, despite the fact that it is not pronounced Peurec. (W 36).

On the following page (footnote 12), the narrator recalls that in 1955 or ‘56, he made the pilgrimage to his father’s grave: “seeing the words PEREC ICEK JUDKO followed by a regimental number, stencilled on the wooden cross and still perfectly legible, gave me a feeling that is hard to describe. The most enduring impression was that I was playing a role, acting in a private play: fifteen years after, the son comes to meditate on his father’s grave. But beneath the role-playing there were other things” (W 37-38), and the narrator goes on to extricate the complex feelings engaged in finally “put[ting] a boundary around that death which I had never learnt of, never experienced or known or acknowledged, but which for years and years I had had to deduce hypocritically from the commiserating whispers and sighing kisses of the ladies” (W 38).

Here, I want to suggest, is a Comparatist paradigm of our times. For if Georges Perec is a “French” author, his Frenchness must be read as the sedimentation of complex strata of Eastern European and Near Eastern cultural, national, and linguistic layers. When, for example, in the other narrative, the nameless narrator, having been mysteriously summoned to a meeting with the unknown Otto Apfelstahl at the Berghof Hotel in Hamburg, the following exchange takes place:

“Do you want some pretzels?”

“Excuse me?” I said not grasping.

“Pretzels. pretzels to eat with your beer.”

“No thank you. I never eat pretzels. Give me a newspaper instead. (W 16)

This takes place in Chapter V, before we have learned that the name Perec-Peretz is the same word as “pretzel.” Only when we reread W does the connection between “never eating pretzels” and the question of Perec’s origins become apparent. And indeed, the whole text is a language-game where clues are distributed in this fashion.

So far as I know, neither Derrida nor Lyotard nor Deleuze have ever written a word on Georges Perec, their “French” deconstructionist contemporary, and neither have the postcolonial theorists whom Emily Apter takes to be the Comparatists today. Nor is Perec’s work taught in courses in the contemporary American novel. Theory, the wisdom here goes, may–indeed must–be read in translation, but when it comes to literature, the line continues to be drawn in the sand. American means American, even as it did in the nineteenth century, right? And this despite the simple fact that nationally, culturally, and ethnically, Perec may well be closer to many contemporary Americans than he is to “the French tradition” and to the language in which he writes.

But the irony is that for U.S. fiction writers and to their students, Perec is now a kind of cult figure, that those “pretzels” constitute something of a hidden signifier, rather like the missing e in Perec’s La Disparition, just translated into English. And the ACLA thus has its work cut out for it. For if we are to place and understand literature as it is being composed at the end of the twentieth century, we must rediscover the simple truth that the U.S.A. is not an island and that its writing is not only ethnically and racially diverse but always already bears the imprint of the nations, not only of the exotic Third World, but, closer to home, of the nations in the neighborhood. To put it another way, in the age of the information highway, it is American Literature that must begin to “comparatize” itself.
Footnotes