The opening scene in Saša Stanišić's latest work, Where You Come From, places the reader back in Višegrad, a storied town in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina and the site where his first semi-autobiographical novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, ended. We see the narrator's grandmother Kristina as an elderly lady, shouting from the balcony down to her younger self on the street: ‘I'll come get you. Don’t move!’1 Living up to her promise, Kristina drags herself down three flights of stairs, without shoes, her feet covered by thin black stockings only. Cars hit the brakes. Traffic comes to an abrupt halt. In her effort to rescue her adolescent self, Kristina succeeds at stopping the steady flow of the world for a moment. The evocative opening places Kristina front and centre in the text while introducing a split in time: we are simultaneously in the years 2018 and 1943, as well as in some Yugoslav moment in-between, when the street on which the impossible encounter was to play out still bore the name of Josip Broz Tito.2 The formidable storyteller Stanišić tempts his audience in this vignette-like opening with a reassurance of sorts: where you come from – Herkunft (‘origin’) – can, indeed, be found at some mythic confluence of time and place. Origins are not only localisable; they can also be projected back in time, with kinship serving as a well-established narrative and ideological ploy for staking out historical claims to belonging. The very first scene thus appears to preempt the text that follows by giving a rather firm answer to the question that the book's title vividly raises. The answer – the Romantic idea of origins – seems to be reinforced when Stanišić takes his readers from Višegrad to the village of Oskoruša, and with that, deeper into the past. At Oskoruša's cemetery, many of the tombstones bear the narrator's last name: Stanišić. What could possibly be more affirming in a tale of origins than a mountain village, where even the ground is inscribed with proof of one's ancestry?3 Stanišić proves to be a formidable storyteller because he involves his readership in something like a theatre of origins, presenting us with the essential trappings of a ‘filiative’ form of belonging – a term we borrow from Edward Said and Timothy Brennan to designate communities predicated on inheritance, descent, and circumstances of birth – only to then reject the premise and ontological primacy ascribed to these ‘natural’ social bonds.4 Expressed in the well-known terms of National Socialist ideology, Blut (‘blood’) and Boden (‘soil’) not only merge here but become inseparable, with their union counteracting – that is, stabilising – the purportedly modern volatility of origins.5 From the perspective that this special issue of Critical Quarterly adopts, a striking moment comes to the fore: Stanišić's spectacle of origins plays out in what is commonly considered part of Europe's periphery, a tiny village ‘in the Bosnian mountains, in the farthest eas
{"title":"From Hard Slavic Endings to Making Things Possible: The Political in Saša Stanišić's Prose","authors":"Lilla Balint, Djordje Popović","doi":"10.1111/criq.12744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12744","url":null,"abstract":"The opening scene in Saša Stanišić's latest work, Where You Come From, places the reader back in Višegrad, a storied town in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina and the site where his first semi-autobiographical novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, ended. We see the narrator's grandmother Kristina as an elderly lady, shouting from the balcony down to her younger self on the street: ‘I'll come get you. Don’t move!’1 Living up to her promise, Kristina drags herself down three flights of stairs, without shoes, her feet covered by thin black stockings only. Cars hit the brakes. Traffic comes to an abrupt halt. In her effort to rescue her adolescent self, Kristina succeeds at stopping the steady flow of the world for a moment. The evocative opening places Kristina front and centre in the text while introducing a split in time: we are simultaneously in the years 2018 and 1943, as well as in some Yugoslav moment in-between, when the street on which the impossible encounter was to play out still bore the name of Josip Broz Tito.2 The formidable storyteller Stanišić tempts his audience in this vignette-like opening with a reassurance of sorts: where you come from – Herkunft (‘origin’) – can, indeed, be found at some mythic confluence of time and place. Origins are not only localisable; they can also be projected back in time, with kinship serving as a well-established narrative and ideological ploy for staking out historical claims to belonging. The very first scene thus appears to preempt the text that follows by giving a rather firm answer to the question that the book's title vividly raises. The answer – the Romantic idea of origins – seems to be reinforced when Stanišić takes his readers from Višegrad to the village of Oskoruša, and with that, deeper into the past. At Oskoruša's cemetery, many of the tombstones bear the narrator's last name: Stanišić. What could possibly be more affirming in a tale of origins than a mountain village, where even the ground is inscribed with proof of one's ancestry?3 Stanišić proves to be a formidable storyteller because he involves his readership in something like a theatre of origins, presenting us with the essential trappings of a ‘filiative’ form of belonging – a term we borrow from Edward Said and Timothy Brennan to designate communities predicated on inheritance, descent, and circumstances of birth – only to then reject the premise and ontological primacy ascribed to these ‘natural’ social bonds.4 Expressed in the well-known terms of National Socialist ideology, Blut (‘blood’) and Boden (‘soil’) not only merge here but become inseparable, with their union counteracting – that is, stabilising – the purportedly modern volatility of origins.5 From the perspective that this special issue of Critical Quarterly adopts, a striking moment comes to the fore: Stanišić's spectacle of origins plays out in what is commonly considered part of Europe's periphery, a tiny village ‘in the Bosnian mountains, in the farthest eas","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135925154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In an early scene of the second season of the HBO TV series The Wire, the Baltimore police are confronted with the dead bodies of thirteen women who were found suffocated inside a shipping container. As they attempt to identify the Jane Does, the police interpret every object found on the women, and, by a seeming stroke of luck, recover a passport that reveals at least one of the women as a citizen of Magyarország. Yet this discovery does not even begin to unravel the mystery of the women's origin: indeed, in the shot where we briefly glimpse the name of the country, we also see the police officer in a continued state of disorientation, none the wiser about who the women are. Magyarország, Hungary, remains unreadable – a cipher signalling merely the absence of an identity, even in the act of naming that very identity. I take this figure as a guiding metaphor for the positionality of Eastern Europe in the contemporary imagination as neither properly East nor properly West, an in-between space that ultimately slips out of signification. More specifically, I argue that Eastern Europe as a region and as a conceptual entity reveals the East-West binary to be so strongly operative in contemporary popular and academic geopolitical imaginaries that any liminal position risks wholesale discursive erasure. This is how Eastern Europe falls between the cracks: while popular discourse avowedly admits the region into the community of Europe, at the same time it is also seen as somehow not really European. In academic geopolitical imaginaries, too, postcolonial theory leaves the region no space for representation: while it is certainly excluded from conceptualisations of the colonised ‘East’, its inclusion in general notions of the colonising ‘West’ is never more than implicit, since the referents to terms such as ‘the West’, ‘coloniser’, ‘metropole’, or ‘colonial centre’ are rarely, if ever, Eastern European. Indeed, Eastern Europe's colonial history, which involves both colonising enterprises and colonisation by various empires, is far more complicated than the binary admits, but this has seldom brought about sustained efforts to re-examine the binary itself. Instead, being neither clearly coloniser or colonised, Eastern Europe simply drops out of consideration altogether. This article looks into the binary thinking that leads to the ultimate erasure of Eastern Europe both from popular discourse and from academic, specifically postcolonial, imaginations. I argue that Eastern European histories and contemporary identifications disallow the binarisms of West and East, centre and periphery, metropole and province, Global North and Global South. Therefore, Eastern Europe presents us with a powerful opportunity to rethink these binaries and challenge the effects they have on constructing our social world. Of course, in saying that, it is important to recognise that there is no such thing as ‘the’ – singular – imagination. Yet, there are trends both within academia
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<p>My topic is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the poetics and politics of a famous collaboration between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth, by no means the only outcome of which was the publication in 1798 of the era-defining <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>.<sup>1</sup> One of the reasons why that collaboration has possessed an especial and enduring resonance within and beyond British literary culture is that it's so hard to tell poetics and politics apart in some of the work it made possible. Wordsworth's Muse is a ‘levelling one’, William Hazlitt declared in 1825. ‘His style is vernacular; he delivers household truths.’<sup>2</sup> A century later, T. S. Eliot was left wondering what all the fuss was about. Poets had been delivering household truths long before Wordsworth and Coleridge began to read their poems aloud to each other in the mid-1790s. Like Hazlitt, however, Eliot was prepared fully to acknowledge the levelling effect of attempts at a vernacular style. Political allegiance might not in itself have made for the poetic ‘revolution’ culminating in <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>. But it could not easily be ‘disentangled’ from the ‘motives’ of many of the poems we have come to regard as integral to that revolution.<sup>3</sup> This entanglement has attracted a very substantial scholarship.<sup>4</sup> My aim here is to identify, contextualise, and celebrate a motive unique, as far as I'm aware, to Coleridge. I will argue that Coleridge was radical not only in his capacity in think in terms of what we would now call ‘media’, but also in his conviction that such thinking might make it possible to articulate and sustain political dissent during a period of severe and widespread repression. Romantic poets (and not only those writing in English) are generally thought to have specialised in ecstasies of one kind or another: sensuous, perceptual, meditative, moral, political, spiritual. I'm going to add a further item to that list. Coleridge, I want to suggest, knew a little – as we now have no choice but to do – about the ecstasy of messaging.</p><p>My approach to a familiar topic will at once be narrower than is customary and more wide-ranging. I will concentrate primarily not just on a particular text, Coleridge's ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, but on the actual circumstances (the time and place) of that text's composition; while at the same time summoning up a context – the history of modern telecommunications technologies – absent from the vast majority of discussions of the poetry of the period. In combining deliberate narrowness with deliberate width, I mean to emulate the critical approach once adopted by J. H. Prynne, the <i>éminence grise</i> of post-war British avant-garde poetry, who a long time ago first taught me how to read Romantic lyrics, starting with another famous poem by Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’. <i>Field Notes</i>, Prynne's pamphlet-length critique of Wordsworth's ‘The Solitary Reaper’, incorpor
我的主题是塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治、威廉·华兹华斯和多萝西·华兹华斯之间的一次著名合作的诗学和政治的一个迄今未被研究的方面，这种合作的唯一结果绝不是1798年出版的划时代的《抒情歌谣》。这种合作之所以在英国文学文化内外引起特别持久的共鸣，原因之一是，在一些它促成的作品中，很难将诗学和政治区分开来。1825年，威廉·黑兹利特宣称，华兹华斯笔下的缪斯是一位“平起平坐的女神”。他的风格是白话;他讲的是家常事。一个世纪之后，t·s·艾略特(T. S. Eliot)对所有这些大惊小怪的事情感到困惑。早在华兹华斯和柯勒律治在18世纪90年代中期开始互相大声朗读他们的诗歌之前，诗人就已经在传递家喻户晓的真理了。然而，和黑兹利特一样，艾略特也完全准备好了承认尝试白话风格的平衡效应。政治忠诚本身可能并不能促成以抒情歌谣为高潮的诗歌“革命”。但是，要把它从我们认为是这场革命的组成部分的许多诗歌的“动机”中“解脱出来”是不容易的这种纠缠吸引了大量的学者我在这里的目的是要识别，背景化，并颂扬一个独特的动机，据我所知，柯勒律治。我想说的是，柯勒律治的激进之处不仅在于他对我们现在所说的“媒体”的思考能力，还在于他相信，在一个严重而广泛的镇压时期，这种思维可能使表达和维持政治异见成为可能。浪漫主义诗人(不仅仅是那些用英语写作的诗人)通常被认为擅长于一种或另一种狂喜:感官的，知觉的，沉思的，道德的，政治的，精神的。我要在清单上再加一项。我想说的是，柯勒律治(Coleridge)对短信带来的狂喜略知一二——我们现在别无选择，只能这么做。对于一个熟悉的话题，我的处理方法会比通常的更狭窄，更广泛。我将主要关注的不是某一篇文章，比如柯勒律治的《这酸橙树的凉亭我的监狱》，而是这篇文章写作的实际环境(时间和地点);与此同时，它唤起了一种背景——现代电信技术的历史——这是绝大多数关于这一时期诗歌的讨论所缺乏的。把有意的窄和有意的宽结合起来，我是想模仿j·h·普林(J. H.白兰)曾经采用的批评方法，他是战后英国前卫诗歌的先驱，很久以前，他第一次教我如何阅读浪漫主义歌词，从柯勒律治的另一首著名诗歌《午夜霜》(Frost at Midnight)开始。《田野笔记》是白兰对华兹华斯《孤独的收割者》的小册子式评论，除了对这首诗的逐行解读外，还收录了当代和近期作品的选集，这些选集与表面上的场合截然不同，比如《19世纪奴隶贸易的血腥商业调查》和Rainer Maria Rilke的文章Über den Dichter，《孤独的收割者》写于1912年2月的杜伊诺，创作灵感来自1803年夏末华兹华斯和妹妹在苏格兰旅行时看到或想象的一个场景。柯勒律治本来也参加了这次聚会，但他病倒了，很可能是因为他吸食鸦片上瘾，于是独自回家了。他在白兰的小册子中一直存在，作为一个像其他人一样理解华兹华斯所尝试的范围和意义的人，但却无法在自己的诗歌中找到与之匹敌的东西。华兹华斯更大的名气继续掩盖了他在18世纪90年代中期发现的诗歌的激进主义。本文的另一个目的是探讨柯勒律治未能成为华兹华斯所带来的机遇。1797年1月，柯勒律治把他年轻的家庭安顿在一间寒冷、潮湿、老鼠出没的农舍里，那是在quantockk山脚下的Nether Stowey的萨默塞特村。6 7月，威廉和多萝西·华兹华斯被这一地区的美景和柯勒律治公司的前景所吸引，在几英里外的阿克斯登一个古老的公园里租了一栋豪宅，住得更舒适一些。于是开始了决定性的合作，创作一首新诗。《古水手咏》是柯勒律治对抒情歌谣最著名的贡献，是一首关于超自然主题的长篇叙事诗。但他已经开始尝试一种非常不同形式的短无韵诗冥想产生于对当下环境的强烈吸收演讲者很容易被识别为诗人。根据其中一首《致夜莺》的副标题，这些实验后来被称为“对话”诗。 当他从山顶俯视斯托威时，原先在那里休息时所经历的一切又一次涌上心头。在这一点上，他似乎接受了他在给华兹华斯的信中谴责的一种"近乎享乐主义的"自私，伪装成"家庭依恋"的心态。但他知道自己在做什么。这首诗早先跨越了感叹号和撇号，诗歌和演讲的界限，现在不能撤消，然而缓和了它最后对“自然的宁静”的感激之情，因为它软化了一颗激动的心。229 - 31)。它毅然决然地面对外界，将自己重新定位为一种狭隘的媒介:电报，尽管不是一种自然的媒介。本杰明·弗劳尔和亚历山大·克鲁梅尔当然是这样理解的。《孤独中的恐惧》与《这棵酸橙树的凉亭——我的监狱》有着不同的来生。但可以说，它是由其不那么直言不讳、但同样富有远见的先驱产生的。比如，黑兹利特就明白，在这首早期诗歌的最后乐章中，发生了一些不同寻常的事情。在评价柯勒律治智慧的广泛性时，他引用了一个比喻，这个比喻奇妙地激发了他的思想运动:“我们可以补充一句(与其说是夸大其词，不如说是表面上的夸大其辞)，几乎没有一个思想能从人的头脑中掠过，但它的声音曾在某个时候像沙沙作响的羽翼一样掠过他的头顶。《这酸橙树的凉亭我的监狱》的成就在于想象了通过电报或其他新方法发送的文字的能力，将爱与美的福音源源不断地传到遥远的地方;甚至，在某种程度上的加密，自由的福音。值得一提的是，在一个夏天的傍晚，那只白头鸦从匡托克山顶笔直地飞到椴树凉亭的极乐世界，直接飞过汤姆·普尔的制铁场，用翅膀的吱吱声把塔塔罗斯擦得干干净。 《This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison》是新兴子类型的一个早期且复杂的例子。1797年7月，华兹华斯一家在阿福克斯登定居后不久，柯勒律治在伦敦基督医院的校友查尔斯·兰姆作为他的客人在斯托威呆了一个星期。一天晚上，华兹华斯夫妇带兰姆散步，其中包括从霍福德峡谷爬上匡托克的陡坡，很可能是在丹斯伯勒山上的铁器时代的堡垒;而柯勒律治因家庭事故而无法行动，被留在了酸橙凉亭里(图1)。这首诗的第一个简短的乐章是用一种令人愉快的偶然的悲伤来定位诗人:“好了，他们走了，我必须留在这里，/这酸橙凉亭是我的监狱。”正如黑兹利特可能会说的那样，这的确是家常便饭。它的第二个更精致的动作在情绪和语气上与步行者一起上升，就像“可怜的黄叶”和“细长的杂草”的略带哥特式的细节一样。(13-20)他们觉得有义务到没有太阳的霍福德格伦去视察，从昆托克山顶俯瞰沿海平原的全景引起了狂喜。这首诗的第三乐章将我们带回到暮色中的椴树凉亭，以及柯勒律治独特的困境。在想象中进行的旅行已经把一个愁眉苦脸的病人变成了一个观察者，能够对眼前的事物进行温和的欢欣鼓舞的描述:古老的常春藤上的“深邃的光辉”(第52章)，在豆花中歌唱的“孤独的谦卑的蜜蜂”(第11章)。58-9)。应该是这样。在对话诗中——或“更浪漫的抒情诗”，正如它们有时被称为——说话者以对当前环境的准确描述开始，但随后无论出于何种原因，都会唤起人们对另一个时间或地点的热情回忆或期待。因此，这首诗被提升到狂喜之中，“在它开始的地方，在外部的场景中，以一种改变的情绪和更深的理解结束，这是介入冥想的结果”两首最伟大的对话诗，柯勒律治的《午夜霜》和华兹华斯的《丁丁寺》，都是对另一首的回应，都是在开头的地方结束的;但不是“这棵菩提树的凉亭”，它超越了描述和记忆或期待的辩证法，在它的三个冥想结构之外增加了第四乐章，也是最后乐章。它本身的超越——亚类需求——将构成我分析的重点。我的目的是展
{"title":"The Ecstasy of Messaging: Coleridge's Natural Telegraphy","authors":"David Trotter","doi":"10.1111/criq.12740","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12740","url":null,"abstract":"<p>My topic is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the poetics and politics of a famous collaboration between Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth, by no means the only outcome of which was the publication in 1798 of the era-defining <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>.<sup>1</sup> One of the reasons why that collaboration has possessed an especial and enduring resonance within and beyond British literary culture is that it's so hard to tell poetics and politics apart in some of the work it made possible. Wordsworth's Muse is a ‘levelling one’, William Hazlitt declared in 1825. ‘His style is vernacular; he delivers household truths.’<sup>2</sup> A century later, T. S. Eliot was left wondering what all the fuss was about. Poets had been delivering household truths long before Wordsworth and Coleridge began to read their poems aloud to each other in the mid-1790s. Like Hazlitt, however, Eliot was prepared fully to acknowledge the levelling effect of attempts at a vernacular style. Political allegiance might not in itself have made for the poetic ‘revolution’ culminating in <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>. But it could not easily be ‘disentangled’ from the ‘motives’ of many of the poems we have come to regard as integral to that revolution.<sup>3</sup> This entanglement has attracted a very substantial scholarship.<sup>4</sup> My aim here is to identify, contextualise, and celebrate a motive unique, as far as I'm aware, to Coleridge. I will argue that Coleridge was radical not only in his capacity in think in terms of what we would now call ‘media’, but also in his conviction that such thinking might make it possible to articulate and sustain political dissent during a period of severe and widespread repression. Romantic poets (and not only those writing in English) are generally thought to have specialised in ecstasies of one kind or another: sensuous, perceptual, meditative, moral, political, spiritual. I'm going to add a further item to that list. Coleridge, I want to suggest, knew a little – as we now have no choice but to do – about the ecstasy of messaging.</p><p>My approach to a familiar topic will at once be narrower than is customary and more wide-ranging. I will concentrate primarily not just on a particular text, Coleridge's ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, but on the actual circumstances (the time and place) of that text's composition; while at the same time summoning up a context – the history of modern telecommunications technologies – absent from the vast majority of discussions of the poetry of the period. In combining deliberate narrowness with deliberate width, I mean to emulate the critical approach once adopted by J. H. Prynne, the <i>éminence grise</i> of post-war British avant-garde poetry, who a long time ago first taught me how to read Romantic lyrics, starting with another famous poem by Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’. <i>Field Notes</i>, Prynne's pamphlet-length critique of Wordsworth's ‘The Solitary Reaper’, incorpor","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"4-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12740","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41736933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institutionalised in the universities, has been hostile to the novel of ideas. Jeanne Marie-Jackson's <i>The African Novel of Ideas</i> (2021) follows Lessing in seeking to defend the form (a key one in African writing) against what she calls ‘Eurocentric literary standards, often limitedly rooted in psychological depth to demonstrate character development’.<sup>2</sup> In this article, I will briefly anatomise the academic hostility to the novel of ideas, then look at what Lessing's work, and her archive, can contribute to our understanding of the form. These are rich resources that prompt a rethinking of the tradition of the novel of ideas and may help us to overcome some of the parochialism of which Lessing accuses us.</p><p>Novels of ideas give a central position to staged debates between characters about political, social, religious or philosophical ideas. Such debates were a normal feature of Victorian novels by the likes of George Eliot, Samuel Butler and George Meredith, but the modernist generation (and perhaps above all Henry James) rejected it. James accused George Eliot's novels of being ‘too clever by half’ and set out to write ‘some little exemplary works of art’ that would have ‘less “brain” than <i>Middlemarch</i>’ but ‘more <i>form</i>’.<sup>3</sup> Novelists of ideas like H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and Rose Macaulay were cast aside, as were the great Russian novelists of ideas, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (James called their books ‘fluid puddings’). Henry James, abetted by F.R. Leavis and others, established an agenda for the novel that prioritised psychological realism, rich characterisation, and the romantic and financial doings of the upper-middle class.</p><p>What is remarkable is the extent to which the animosity towards the novel of ideas persists in the contemporary academy, even while the marketplace proves more forgiving: writers including Zadie Smith, Kamila Shamsie and Ian McEwan have found popular success this century with novels of ideas. Sianne Ngai's recent <i>Theory of the Gimmick</i> (2020) takes on the form, arguing that novels of ideas are gimmicky because of the awkward way in which they incorporate ‘readymade’ ideas into the text, which operate as a ‘“transportable intellectual unit,” a <i>deja là</i> or self-standing proposition’.<sup>4</sup> For Ngai, many of the characteristic formal devices of the novel of ideas – she lists ‘Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters’ – are in fact ‘ancient didactic devices’ that work to ‘distance the novel from its métier – narration – and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play’.<sup>5</sup></p><p>The generic hybridity that Ngai finds gimmicky raises important questions about the relationship between a writer's archive and their fictional work. As readers of novels of ideas, w
{"title":"Politics, Letters and the Novel of Ideas: Doris Lessing's Archive","authors":"Matthew Taunton","doi":"10.1111/criq.12741","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12741","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institutionalised in the universities, has been hostile to the novel of ideas. Jeanne Marie-Jackson's <i>The African Novel of Ideas</i> (2021) follows Lessing in seeking to defend the form (a key one in African writing) against what she calls ‘Eurocentric literary standards, often limitedly rooted in psychological depth to demonstrate character development’.<sup>2</sup> In this article, I will briefly anatomise the academic hostility to the novel of ideas, then look at what Lessing's work, and her archive, can contribute to our understanding of the form. These are rich resources that prompt a rethinking of the tradition of the novel of ideas and may help us to overcome some of the parochialism of which Lessing accuses us.</p><p>Novels of ideas give a central position to staged debates between characters about political, social, religious or philosophical ideas. Such debates were a normal feature of Victorian novels by the likes of George Eliot, Samuel Butler and George Meredith, but the modernist generation (and perhaps above all Henry James) rejected it. James accused George Eliot's novels of being ‘too clever by half’ and set out to write ‘some little exemplary works of art’ that would have ‘less “brain” than <i>Middlemarch</i>’ but ‘more <i>form</i>’.<sup>3</sup> Novelists of ideas like H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and Rose Macaulay were cast aside, as were the great Russian novelists of ideas, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (James called their books ‘fluid puddings’). Henry James, abetted by F.R. Leavis and others, established an agenda for the novel that prioritised psychological realism, rich characterisation, and the romantic and financial doings of the upper-middle class.</p><p>What is remarkable is the extent to which the animosity towards the novel of ideas persists in the contemporary academy, even while the marketplace proves more forgiving: writers including Zadie Smith, Kamila Shamsie and Ian McEwan have found popular success this century with novels of ideas. Sianne Ngai's recent <i>Theory of the Gimmick</i> (2020) takes on the form, arguing that novels of ideas are gimmicky because of the awkward way in which they incorporate ‘readymade’ ideas into the text, which operate as a ‘“transportable intellectual unit,” a <i>deja là</i> or self-standing proposition’.<sup>4</sup> For Ngai, many of the characteristic formal devices of the novel of ideas – she lists ‘Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters’ – are in fact ‘ancient didactic devices’ that work to ‘distance the novel from its métier – narration – and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play’.<sup>5</sup></p><p>The generic hybridity that Ngai finds gimmicky raises important questions about the relationship between a writer's archive and their fictional work. As readers of novels of ideas, w","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"70-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12741","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47033735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poland's Other Pope: Re‐appreciating Maria Janion","authors":"Marta Figlerowicz","doi":"10.1111/criq.12738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12738","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43101540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>In 1998, having just published the second volume of her autobiography, ‘Walking in the Shade,’ Doris Lessing appeared at the University of East Anglia's Literary Festival for the third time in a decade. At the end of the interview while still on mic, following audience questions and during rapturous applause, her interviewer and friend, Professor Christopher Bigsby, asked Lessing if he could announce what they had just been discussing regarding her papers. Lessing gave a firm no in response.<sup>1</sup> Privately, Lessing had told Bigsby that she had decided to bequeath her personal correspondence and working papers to the University of East Anglia (UEA). Bigsby had known Lessing since 1980 when he first interviewed her at the BBC. They had formed a friendship, and Lessing had already made several trips to UEA campus to work with students. Bigsby, who had researched the embargoed Arthur Miller Archive at the Harry Ransom Center during the writing of his two-volume biography, understood the incredible generosity and magnitude of this surprising gift. Literary archives of preeminent writers can command vast sums. Lessing had already sold her manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center and could have sold her correspondence. This generosity is entirely in keeping with Lessing the benefactor who, it is clear from her archived private correspondence, quietly made a very large number of generous charitable gifts during her lifetime, giving regular sums of money to friends, associates and organisations, even paying for several children's school fees throughout their education.</p><p>However, the news of Lessing's planned donation was not universally celebrated at UEA. The announcement caused considerable anxiety within the university library, with the then Librarian rightly concerned that UEA's modest infrastructure would not do justice to such a high-profile deposit. While Faculty staff lobbied for the proposed gift to be acknowledged as soon as possible, Lessing confirmed the arrangement in her will. The Librarian of the day was overruled by stealth. The infrastructure was upgraded in 2005 and officially opened by the novelist, Rose Tremain, in 2006.</p><p>In November 2007, Francis Fitzgibbon, the stepson of Lessing's lover, John Whitehorn, deposited the first Lessing material at UEA - 110 love letters written by Lessing in her mid to late 20s to Whitehorn and his friend, Col McDonald between 1945 and 1949, mostly from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with the final few written from London shortly after her arrival. The letters, often thousands of words in length, are an extraordinary account of Lessing's writing, politics and motherhood. Both correspondents were RAF officers. At the time of the deposit in 2007, Lessing remarked on her decision not to re-read them: ‘There is a good deal of pain in those long ago far-away things’.<sup>2</sup> Correspondence to a third RAF officer, Leonard Smith, was sold by Smith to Sussex University in the mid-1990s. Th
1998年，多丽丝·莱辛(Doris Lessing)刚刚出版了自传的第二卷《在阴影中行走》(Walking In the Shade)，这是她十年来第三次出现在东安格利亚大学的文学节上。采访结束时，莱辛还拿着麦克风，在观众的提问和热烈的掌声中，她的采访者兼朋友克里斯托弗·毕格斯比(Christopher Bigsby)教授问莱辛是否可以宣布他们刚刚讨论的有关她论文的内容。莱辛断然拒绝了莱辛私下告诉比格斯比，她决定把她的私人信件和工作文件留给东安格利亚大学(UEA)。1980年，毕格斯比第一次在BBC采访莱辛时就认识她了。他们已经建立了友谊，莱辛已经多次前往东英吉利大学校园与学生们一起工作。毕格斯比在撰写他的两卷传记时，研究了哈利·兰森中心被禁的阿瑟·米勒档案，他理解这份令人惊讶的礼物是多么慷慨和巨大。杰出作家的文学档案价值不菲。莱辛已经把她的手稿卖给了哈里·兰森中心，也可以卖掉她的信件。这种慷慨完全符合莱辛的风格。从她的私人信件档案中可以清楚地看出，莱辛在她的一生中悄悄地捐出了大量慷慨的慈善礼物，定期向朋友、同事和组织捐款，甚至为几个孩子的教育支付学费。然而，莱辛计划捐款的消息并没有在东安格利亚大学得到普遍认可。这一消息在大学图书馆引起了相当大的焦虑，当时的图书管理员担心东英吉利大学简陋的基础设施无法容纳如此高知名度的存款。当教职员工游说该提议尽快得到认可时，莱辛在遗嘱中确认了这一安排。那一天的图书管理员被秘密控制了。基础设施于2005年升级，并于2006年由小说家罗斯·特雷米(Rose Tremain)正式开放。2007年11月，莱辛情人约翰·怀特霍恩的继子弗朗西斯·菲茨吉本在东安尼亚大学存放了莱辛的第一批资料——1945年至1949年间，莱辛在20多岁至30岁之间写给怀特霍恩和他的朋友麦克唐纳上校的110封情书，其中大部分是在南罗得西亚(现在的津巴布韦)写的，最后几封是在莱辛到达伦敦后不久写的。这些信件通常长达数千字，是对莱辛写作、政治和母性的非凡描述。两位记者都是英国皇家空军军官。在2007年存款的时候，莱辛谈到了她不再重读它们的决定:“在那些很久以前遥远的事情中有很多痛苦。与第三位英国皇家空军军官伦纳德·史密斯(Leonard Smith)的通信，在20世纪90年代中期被史密斯卖给了苏塞克斯大学。三十年后的2008年2月13日，也就是她最后一次出现在东英吉利大学和获得诺贝尔文学奖的一年之后，莱辛写信给比格斯比，告诉他她心脏病发作，希望他派一辆车来收集她的一些论文。她存放了第一批材料，包括29个盒子(7米长)，来自1100多名记者，包括萨尔曼·拉什迪、丽贝卡·韦斯特、克兰西·西格尔、纳迪娜·戈迪默和穆里尔·斯帕克等等。这个收藏的特别之处在于，莱辛保留了大量她外出通信的副本，因此，与实物文学档案不同的是，谈话的双方都被保存在一起。2009年，玛格丽特·德拉布尔寄存了莱辛的信件。这些信件揭示了两个女人之间温暖而亲密的友谊，并包含了她们对写作和文学的讨论。这三件藏品共31个盒子(7.5米长)，提供了对莱辛的生活和她所生活的时代的迷人见解。但这并不是档案的全部。莱辛于2013年11月17日去世，享年94岁。不久之后，她的剩余档案被转移到大学。这些材料已经完全编目，但仍处于禁运状态，等待莱辛的授权传记出版，已故的帕特里克·弗兰奇在2023年3月16日去世时正在撰写这本传记。根据莱辛的遗嘱，弗朗奇有权查阅这些材料，并获准查阅莱辛长达40年的个人日记，否则将被禁止查阅，直到2043年。这部分档案材料由另外109个盒子或27米组成，如果算上莱辛的个人日记，就是31米。 那么，除了她的私人日记，莱辛还保留了什么作为她的遗属呢?它包括更亲密的信件，反映了亲密的个人友谊和关系。它还包含了更多关于她的政治生活的细节，她的激进主义，例如，在阿富汗，她对苏菲主义的研究和她的研究。还有梦日记、旅行日记和笔记本，这些都是莱辛创作过程的一部分，东安格利亚大学多丽丝·莱辛档案馆的学术策展人诺尼娅·威廉姆斯(Nonia Williams)在百年庆典期间策划了其中的一段摘录。2019年，东英吉利大学举办了多丽丝·莱辛100周年纪念活动，包括85名代表参加的国际会议和在塞恩斯伯里视觉艺术中心举办的展览，吸引了3835名参观者。还有一系列公开活动，演讲者包括玛格丽特·德拉布尔、罗伯塔·鲁宾斯坦、雷切尔·库斯克、劳拉·菲格尔和艾玛·克莱尔·斯威尼。2016年底，与塞恩斯伯里中心的对话开始了。最初的展览空间被指定为3平方米，在2017年被转移到29米× 13米的夹层空间。这一举动改变了展览的性质，从大约20件的展示变成了几百件。展览还将开票，以收回部分成本。负责从档案中挑选材料的项目团队都是文学专家，因此对莱辛的信件非常着迷。但正如塞恩斯伯里中心的馆长一直坚持的那样:“你不能把书放在墙上。”展览提出了几个挑战:莱辛的一生跨越了20世纪的重大全球事件。她的文学作品广泛而多样，她对政治、激进主义和苏菲主义研究的参与坦率地说令人生畏。展览将需要一个来自大学内外的跨学科团队来解释材料并将其背景化。东英吉利大学希望从被禁运的矿床中选择一些材料，这需要与莱辛受托人进行微妙的谈判。只有两名工作人员被允许完整地查阅被禁材料——作为档案保管员的我，和助理馆长兼博士生保罗·库珀，他在保密协议下工作。材料的广度如此丰富，规模如此之大，以至于选择过程极具挑战性，超出了我们的专业范围。我们通过记录材料量最大的主题类别，确定了莱辛生活中的主要主题和主要关注点。然后，我们将这种理解与传记作者的理解进行了对比。最初决定排除与莱辛1962年的小说《金色笔记本》有关的材料，并将重点放在“未知的莱辛”上，但后来放弃了这一决定，因为这篇文章对莱辛的生活和档案至关重要。对视觉材料的要求是再现莱辛生活中不同主题和时间阶段的背景，这是一个进一步的挑战。虽然项目团队只想选择Lessing自己经历过或收集过的视觉材料，但这是不可能的。她的档案中没有足够的材料，大部分都是文字。我们博物馆和画廊的同事们知道，如果一种视觉效果把参观者吸引到一个特定的历史时刻或风景中，一些参观者会更多地关注文字。他们让我们研究与莱辛无关的视觉材料，这些材料会让人联想到莱辛生活中的关键接触点。最后的展览包括从大英博物馆借出的苏菲派物品私人收藏家奥利文·霍尔(Olive Hoare)，他借给莱辛一幅描绘卡巴拉的古代苏菲派卷轴，莱辛曾经画过草图。马格南公司提供了莱辛的照片，也提供了美国国家航空航天局(NASA)的照片，莱辛曾经访问过美国国家航空航天局，这是她为火星上的生命做准备的研究的一部分，还有非洲和阿富汗的照片。其他借来的物品确实与莱辛有直接关系:国家档案馆关于军情五处在20世纪50年代监视莱辛的记录，国家肖像画廊悬挂的莱辛素描。莱辛的朋友和受托人克洛伊·迪斯基(Chloe Diski)是珍妮·迪斯基(Jenny Diski)的女儿，她在20世纪60年代和70年代与莱辛一起生活在青春期和年轻时期，她借给莱辛一些最喜欢的物品，包括:一个地球仪、衣服、一个最喜欢的水壶和茶杯、一台缝纫机和录音机、一些珠宝和一些来自非洲的雕刻品。这些材料给莱辛带来了一种不同的亲密感，不像信件和其他文本那样揭示了莱辛的智慧，她
{"title":"Lessing's Legacy Explored Through Her Personal Archive","authors":"Justine Mann","doi":"10.1111/criq.12739","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12739","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 1998, having just published the second volume of her autobiography, ‘Walking in the Shade,’ Doris Lessing appeared at the University of East Anglia's Literary Festival for the third time in a decade. At the end of the interview while still on mic, following audience questions and during rapturous applause, her interviewer and friend, Professor Christopher Bigsby, asked Lessing if he could announce what they had just been discussing regarding her papers. Lessing gave a firm no in response.<sup>1</sup> Privately, Lessing had told Bigsby that she had decided to bequeath her personal correspondence and working papers to the University of East Anglia (UEA). Bigsby had known Lessing since 1980 when he first interviewed her at the BBC. They had formed a friendship, and Lessing had already made several trips to UEA campus to work with students. Bigsby, who had researched the embargoed Arthur Miller Archive at the Harry Ransom Center during the writing of his two-volume biography, understood the incredible generosity and magnitude of this surprising gift. Literary archives of preeminent writers can command vast sums. Lessing had already sold her manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center and could have sold her correspondence. This generosity is entirely in keeping with Lessing the benefactor who, it is clear from her archived private correspondence, quietly made a very large number of generous charitable gifts during her lifetime, giving regular sums of money to friends, associates and organisations, even paying for several children's school fees throughout their education.</p><p>However, the news of Lessing's planned donation was not universally celebrated at UEA. The announcement caused considerable anxiety within the university library, with the then Librarian rightly concerned that UEA's modest infrastructure would not do justice to such a high-profile deposit. While Faculty staff lobbied for the proposed gift to be acknowledged as soon as possible, Lessing confirmed the arrangement in her will. The Librarian of the day was overruled by stealth. The infrastructure was upgraded in 2005 and officially opened by the novelist, Rose Tremain, in 2006.</p><p>In November 2007, Francis Fitzgibbon, the stepson of Lessing's lover, John Whitehorn, deposited the first Lessing material at UEA - 110 love letters written by Lessing in her mid to late 20s to Whitehorn and his friend, Col McDonald between 1945 and 1949, mostly from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with the final few written from London shortly after her arrival. The letters, often thousands of words in length, are an extraordinary account of Lessing's writing, politics and motherhood. Both correspondents were RAF officers. At the time of the deposit in 2007, Lessing remarked on her decision not to re-read them: ‘There is a good deal of pain in those long ago far-away things’.<sup>2</sup> Correspondence to a third RAF officer, Leonard Smith, was sold by Smith to Sussex University in the mid-1990s. Th","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"56-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12739","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42028981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theorising from the European South: Italy, Racial Evaporations, and the Black Mediterranean","authors":"Gabriele Lazzari","doi":"10.1111/criq.12737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12737","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43694503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Doris Lessing was a prolific letter writer. Her personal archive in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at UEA includes a huge range and volume of material: 130 boxes amounting to thousands of pages of letters, faxes, notebooks, postcards, notebooks, dream diaries and other personal papers. There is more correspondence (as well as a significant number of literary manuscripts) at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and a small but significant tranche at The Keep, University of Sussex, not to mention letters from Lessing held in several of her correspondents' archives. These letters present a complex and fascinating resource of paratextual material which enriches and challenges our reading of her published works.</p><p>I came to Lessing's letters through her correspondence with Muriel Spark, in which they articulate and negotiate experiences of being ageing women writers. I was struck by the clarity and immediacy of Lessing's letter-writing voice and by the capacious inclusivity of the form. My interest in the scholarly possibilities of her personal archive was deepened by subsequent work on the Centenary Exhibition of her archive materials in 2019. This exhibition, curated together with Matthew Taunton and Justine Mann, was key in opening up Lessing's personal archive to scholars and members of the public. It revealed Lessing's extraordinary creative and intellectual journey, which saw her move to London from Southern Rhodesia, travel to communist Russia, visit refugee camps in Afghanistan, grapple with Sufism and feminism and meet with NASA scientists. Since then, convinced of the material, historical and literary importance of letters as a specific mode of writing, I have begun the daunting task of collecting, editing, transcribing and annotating Lessing's letters.</p><p>As Edwina Preston's recent ‘Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting “the full catastrophe of life”’ rightly notes, letters are particularly revealing of women's writing, enabling us to see the ‘unspooling of self onto the page in real time’ as well as their writers' networks and their engagement with the world around them. Preston celebrates the democratic, responsive and eclectic nature of the letter-writing form, where ‘hierarchies of value don't prevail’, and she laments the ‘disappearance of letter-writing from Western cultural life’ in a digital age, reminding us that this context sharpens the ‘disarmingly tangible’ qualities of letters.<sup>1</sup> I too am intrigued by the material tangibility of letters, by what these documents reveal about a writer's inner life, and by how in them writing and life are negotiated through intimate engagement and dialogue with others and with the world.</p><p>In this short essay, I offer early reflections on working with Lessing's letters towards a four-volume Collected Letters edition, give a very brief overview of the project – the first volume in particular – share some
{"title":"Lessing's Early Letters: A Prolific Personal Voice","authors":"Nonia Williams","doi":"10.1111/criq.12735","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12735","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Doris Lessing was a prolific letter writer. Her personal archive in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at UEA includes a huge range and volume of material: 130 boxes amounting to thousands of pages of letters, faxes, notebooks, postcards, notebooks, dream diaries and other personal papers. There is more correspondence (as well as a significant number of literary manuscripts) at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and a small but significant tranche at The Keep, University of Sussex, not to mention letters from Lessing held in several of her correspondents' archives. These letters present a complex and fascinating resource of paratextual material which enriches and challenges our reading of her published works.</p><p>I came to Lessing's letters through her correspondence with Muriel Spark, in which they articulate and negotiate experiences of being ageing women writers. I was struck by the clarity and immediacy of Lessing's letter-writing voice and by the capacious inclusivity of the form. My interest in the scholarly possibilities of her personal archive was deepened by subsequent work on the Centenary Exhibition of her archive materials in 2019. This exhibition, curated together with Matthew Taunton and Justine Mann, was key in opening up Lessing's personal archive to scholars and members of the public. It revealed Lessing's extraordinary creative and intellectual journey, which saw her move to London from Southern Rhodesia, travel to communist Russia, visit refugee camps in Afghanistan, grapple with Sufism and feminism and meet with NASA scientists. Since then, convinced of the material, historical and literary importance of letters as a specific mode of writing, I have begun the daunting task of collecting, editing, transcribing and annotating Lessing's letters.</p><p>As Edwina Preston's recent ‘Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting “the full catastrophe of life”’ rightly notes, letters are particularly revealing of women's writing, enabling us to see the ‘unspooling of self onto the page in real time’ as well as their writers' networks and their engagement with the world around them. Preston celebrates the democratic, responsive and eclectic nature of the letter-writing form, where ‘hierarchies of value don't prevail’, and she laments the ‘disappearance of letter-writing from Western cultural life’ in a digital age, reminding us that this context sharpens the ‘disarmingly tangible’ qualities of letters.<sup>1</sup> I too am intrigued by the material tangibility of letters, by what these documents reveal about a writer's inner life, and by how in them writing and life are negotiated through intimate engagement and dialogue with others and with the world.</p><p>In this short essay, I offer early reflections on working with Lessing's letters towards a four-volume Collected Letters edition, give a very brief overview of the project – the first volume in particular – share some","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"62-69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12735","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48437993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>The <i>Daily Mail</i> rather likes announcing that something or other has happened ‘at last’. At last Boris Johnson has ditched green dogma on energy; at last we have a political leader who knows what a woman is; at last the police are prioritising the victims in their approach to crime; at last we have a true Tory budget.<sup>1</sup></p><p>The phrase is a little ambivalent. Certainly it is supportive: the reported action or statement is being welcomed. But it also expresses a sort of sarcastic patience, as if to say ‘hooray, the penny has finally dropped’; and this means that the writing, even as it congratulates the politician, adopts for its own part an attitude of weary superiority. <i>You</i> seem to have just got it, but it is what <i>we</i> have been thinking for ages. This vantage point is not explicitly marked; it has to be inferred, and then that act of sympathetic interpretation is the means of constructing a warm commonality between the paper and its readers. ‘At last!’ we all sigh at once, having waited so long together for common sense to prevail that we have no need to explain our feelings to each other.</p><p>Of course none of my examples really is a simple matter of common sense. All four encapsulate propositions which are politically contentious. That government energy policy should be less green; that the boundaries of gender are unambiguous; that the point of view of the householder should be the prime consideration when a burglar is prosecuted; that a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer should cut taxes regardless of the macroeconomic context – all these are right-wing views which are by no means universally shared. The simplest account of the formula, then, is that it is a way of making a partisan opinion sound as if everyone already agrees with it. If the proposition really were as consensual as it pretends, the phrase would be pointless. It is a polemical trick.</p><p>Perhaps more interesting than its intended effect, though, is what might be called its structure. ‘At last’ has, obviously, a time dimension. <i>Now</i> a truth has been articulated – ‘Tories cut taxes’, ‘British people resent rules made in Brussels’ – but <i>until now</i>, nobody was saying it. The reported event is not merely a statement; it is the breaking of a silence. With relief, we shake off the inhibition which has kept our lips sealed for so long.</p><p>This rudimentary narrative does not depend on any actual history of suppression; its logic is mythic rather than empirical. One myth to which it is affiliated is that of the silent majority, a spectral constituency with a long tradition in US politics. Calvin Coolidge, himself famously taciturn, was credited in 1919 with an understanding of ‘the great <i>silent majority</i>’ who appeared to have no spokesman.<sup>2</sup> More influentially, the phrase was put into circulation by Richard Nixon in November 1969, in a televised appeal for national unity over Vietnam; his implication was that, although op
{"title":"At Last Someone is Saying It","authors":"Peter Womack","doi":"10.1111/criq.12733","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12733","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The <i>Daily Mail</i> rather likes announcing that something or other has happened ‘at last’. At last Boris Johnson has ditched green dogma on energy; at last we have a political leader who knows what a woman is; at last the police are prioritising the victims in their approach to crime; at last we have a true Tory budget.<sup>1</sup></p><p>The phrase is a little ambivalent. Certainly it is supportive: the reported action or statement is being welcomed. But it also expresses a sort of sarcastic patience, as if to say ‘hooray, the penny has finally dropped’; and this means that the writing, even as it congratulates the politician, adopts for its own part an attitude of weary superiority. <i>You</i> seem to have just got it, but it is what <i>we</i> have been thinking for ages. This vantage point is not explicitly marked; it has to be inferred, and then that act of sympathetic interpretation is the means of constructing a warm commonality between the paper and its readers. ‘At last!’ we all sigh at once, having waited so long together for common sense to prevail that we have no need to explain our feelings to each other.</p><p>Of course none of my examples really is a simple matter of common sense. All four encapsulate propositions which are politically contentious. That government energy policy should be less green; that the boundaries of gender are unambiguous; that the point of view of the householder should be the prime consideration when a burglar is prosecuted; that a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer should cut taxes regardless of the macroeconomic context – all these are right-wing views which are by no means universally shared. The simplest account of the formula, then, is that it is a way of making a partisan opinion sound as if everyone already agrees with it. If the proposition really were as consensual as it pretends, the phrase would be pointless. It is a polemical trick.</p><p>Perhaps more interesting than its intended effect, though, is what might be called its structure. ‘At last’ has, obviously, a time dimension. <i>Now</i> a truth has been articulated – ‘Tories cut taxes’, ‘British people resent rules made in Brussels’ – but <i>until now</i>, nobody was saying it. The reported event is not merely a statement; it is the breaking of a silence. With relief, we shake off the inhibition which has kept our lips sealed for so long.</p><p>This rudimentary narrative does not depend on any actual history of suppression; its logic is mythic rather than empirical. One myth to which it is affiliated is that of the silent majority, a spectral constituency with a long tradition in US politics. Calvin Coolidge, himself famously taciturn, was credited in 1919 with an understanding of ‘the great <i>silent majority</i>’ who appeared to have no spokesman.<sup>2</sup> More influentially, the phrase was put into circulation by Richard Nixon in November 1969, in a televised appeal for national unity over Vietnam; his implication was that, although op","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 3","pages":"117-120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12733","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44186922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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