Beyond a boundary

My grad seminar ("postcolonialism') this week was on C.L.R. James's Beyond a boundary. Since none of the students wanted to present on this particular text (too much cricket and for some, not enough feminism), it was my turn as presenter. (This semester we are circulating papers in advance so people come to class prepared to ask questions: it's a new teaching technique for me but it's working well.) And so I needed to write a few pages on the James text.

Here they are:

Beyond a boundary poses certain problems for contemporary humanities scholarship. The most obvious no doubt is the familiarity with the game of cricket which it assumes of its readers. Perhaps the next most obvious concerns the question of genre: does the text belong to the lineage of criticism itself (which would mean that it is available to forms of critique that might seek to diminish it or render it obsolete) or is it, rather, to be treated as a member of a literary, or quasi-literary canon, criticism of which is always in support of the survival, if not the celebration, of its object.
This problem opens out to two others:
1. if Beyond a boundary is to be treated as part of the genealogy of contemporary academic disciplined knowledge, which discipline precisely does it connect to? Postcolonialism? (and is that in fact a discipline?) Cultural studies? Aesthetics? Sport history? It seems somewhat difficult to know what to do with it because it does not easily fall into the divisions or value-assumptions of established academic divisions of knowledge.
2. How will or ought the distance (or rather the various distances) between James and the contemporary, professional white critic touch or shape our (this ‘our’ presupposes that I’m speaking as a white professional critic) reading of him? James was a black anti-colonialist thinker, involved in revolutionary politics through most of his career. Should either his racial, ethnic identity or his revolutionary politics play a role in our relation to his writing or not? (And if we think the answer to this is ‘no’ then we have to be careful to avoid the bad faith of in fact organizing our reading of his work around his identity while denying that that this is indeed what we are doing. And if we think the answer is ‘yes’ then, at least in relation to his politics we are committed to engaging those politics, treating James as a live rather than as a canonized or archivised thinker.)
Let me leave these problems aside for now and try to clarify Beyond the boundary’s project.
James’s key move is to detach questions of cultural/racial/ethnic identity from the realm of cultural politics at the same time that relations between ‘culture’ (in this case, cricket) and politics are very tightly drawn together. More specifically: James regards cultural formations (in this case styles and practices within the history of cricket) and cultural monuments (in this case a relatively small number of outstanding cricketers) as expressions of social totalities thought of, from within the Marxian tradition, as modes of production which organize particular relations of production. But these cultural formations are not mere instruments in the reproduction of hegemonic relations of production, they form terrains which nurture pleasure, knowledge, pride, identity and resistance across communities. That certainly is the case for cricket in the British empire.
One obvious and important implication of this line of thought is that there is no hard division between colonizer and colonized cultures or even, at the level of at least certain cultural formations (cricket, literature) between colonizer and colonized interests and stakes.
The second key move is to undo the division between high and low, or popular and elite culture, not against the concept of the aesthetic but on the basis of (a reformulation of) it. Cricket for James is an art form of similar status to any other. It has a deep and long history in the transmission of ancient Greek athleticism into modern Europe and is linked to more established genres of aesthetic culture: literature and sculpture, even if its primary modern impetus is the working-class leisure enabled by industrialism and labour agitation (the 1847 Factory Act). ‘Literature’ because each game involves heroic narrative, ‘sculpture’ because cricket style contains ‘tactile values’ a la Bernard Berenson (in a line of thought about sculpture and movement and empathy that can be traced back to Lessing and Herder although James does not go there). One of the rather odd features of James’s account of this history and its connections in the mid 19th century to a particular ethos is that he praises or seems to praise Thomas Arnold, the influential Victorian educationalist, who was in fact a key disseminator of British nineteenth-century racism and colonialism, and whose educational practices, including his absorption of sport into official school life, can be seen as an instrument for British global dominance.
Yet cricket also requires modes of social organization that are open to political action. In particular, for Trinidadian cricket the question of whether black players were permitted to captain sides became a key political question, and one which helped enflame legitimate nationalist and anti-colonialist passions, which James as a journalist encouraged. James implies, although he does not explicitly declare, that the social organization of other forms of aesthetic production are also open to political intervention although clearly the more popular an art form is the more effective and important such intervention might be. This is not to say that James is interested in the politics of literary canonicity for instance, since he treats the canon not so much as a domain in which various identities should find themselves represented as a collection of consensually-agreed important works available to all (more like a cricket team than a democratically elected political body).
Let’s return to certain of the questions I began by making. Where does James fit into the methods of contemporary academic thought? It seems to me that he belongs most closely to those forms of cultural studies that emerged out the 1968 revolutions, and in particular to Communist dissident figures like Jacques Ranciere who attempt to combine a materialist analysist with a populist argument that the wide distribution of aesthetic and sensory pleasures (Ranciere calls this ‘the distribution of the sensible’) can form a grounds for a genuinely egalatarian (if not formally democratic) political practice. (It is worth noting that James did influence Cornelius Castoriadis, the social/political theorist and founder of the sixties PCF left-break-away ‘Socialism or Babarism’ group which played an important role in the 1968 May revolution and with which Lyotard, for instance, was associated.)
But James offers a particularly concrete and detailed account of the dynamic interaction between popular aesthetics and politics through his thick autobiographical relation to cricket. Beyond a boundary is only secondarily a postcolonial text: it’s true that the politics that it describes are those of anti-racism and anti-colonialism but what it is ultimately more interested in at the level of theory is a generalisable relation between sport aesthetics and community political action and will. It would not be hard to imagine a similar articulation between sport and politics concerning not race and cricket but class and football in a Raymond Williams-ish Welsh border town, for instance.
If then we are to regard James here as providing a case for a more general account of relations between politics and art then what (at the level of theory once more) are the problems he faces? The most obvious one is, I think, that he is still operating within the terms of a Luckacian model of (what Althusser called) expressive totality. That is to say, cricket expresses the totality of social relations in which it is embedded. It has no politically significant autonomy within that totality (which, if it had, would become an assemblage rather than a totality) even if it does possess aesthetic autonomy (its own specific rules, styles, skills, grace and so on). It is in these terms that, for James, the post 1929 ruin of cricket as a British and colonial ethos and, more concretely, of the styles of play pioneered by W.G. Grace is an expression of the crisis and expansion of capitalism at that time, while 1950s risk-averse cricket instantiates the welfare state. My sense is that even if this is illuminating about cricket but it is not a generalisable method of cultural analysis. (It is also worth noting that James expresses some nostalgia for the period of immediate post 1789 British radicalism in his praise of Hazlitt and of the contemporary (imaginary?) organic community which he thinks nurtured W.G. Grace and enabled Grace to bridge one epoch (pre-Victorian Britian) with another (industrial Victorian Britain).)
Perhaps the other most obvious difficulty posed by the text is its displacement of the question of difference from theory into the reading experience itself. Beyond a boundary finds and invests its own specificity in its detailed account of cricket, an account which is precisely ‘other to’ all of its readers who don’t know and love the game. Almost every page defies readers to come to terms with James’s cricket obsession as the text’s detailed descriptions of particular cricketers (Learie Constantine and W.G. Grace) and of specific games and series are used to adduce cricket’s charm. The cramming of cricket detail challenges readers not just to take the game seriously as a form of aestheticised, politicisable culture but to learn more about it. That detail ceases to pose an insuperable barrier to readers who know little or nothing about cricket to the degree that the text’s mix of autobiography, history and theory simultaneously engages their literary and intellectual interests (that is, an interest in the narrator’s account of himself and his world and an interest in conceptual questions like those I have just been outlining). These different classes of interest are not separable here—this one of the text’s triumphs. More particularly, Beyond a boundary’s very artful formal organization (in particular the order in which it sequences its sections) is, I’d suggest, designed to test a culturally distant readership’s resistance to massed cricket lore against that readership’s engagement with politics and theory as well as its seduction by the memoirs of a man who is constructing himself—not without good reason— as a cultural/national hero within anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle.
In terms of poscolonialism: the book offers (at least in hindsight) a rebuke to what we might call ‘vulgar postcolonialism’’s politics of identity and rejection of cultural transmissions from metropole to colony as well as (perhaps) of the thematics of subalterneity, since James’s cricket gives a vocabulary to everyone or at least to all men. (We might want to think harder about James’s treatment of gender.) However the question of whether his account from below of Trinidadian society and culture (so different from Forster and Kipling’s India and Conrad’s Costaguana) is too critical of hard localisms and the incommensurability of colonizer/colonized cultures, remains a live one.

Bibliographic note
For reasons that should by now be apparent, James has not been carefully absorbed by contemporary postcolonialism. His legacy is of more account in radical, not always academic Marxist and post-Marxist circles. Despite that and leaving aside the Tim Brennan essay in At Home in the world, I would recommend Ian Baucom’s chapter “Put a little English on it: C.L.R. James and the field of play,’ in Out of place (Princeton 1999). You might also look at Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and cultural practice in the postcolonial world which mentions James throughout and has an excellent brief account of Beyond a boundary. Grant Farred has an essay on James’s major work his history of slave rebellion, The Black Jacobins in The politics of culture in the shadow of capital, eds Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Duke 1997 might also be worth looking into.

WW2 versus WW1

It is beginning to seem to me that WW2 had greater impact on British society and culture than WW1. In the end, fifties Britain was less like twenties or thirties Britain than twenties Britain was like 1890s Britain: at least for the population at large. This isn’t how it is usually seen, of course. Is the same true for the US, Australia and NZ??

Kipling's Kim

These comments come from my teaching note for a graduate seminar on Kipling's Kim that I taught yesterday. Didn't actually get to say any of this (these kind of summary and ambitious position-taking declarations aren't actually appropriate to a grad seminar), but they push in a direction I want to consider further.

For me ‘interpretation’ and close reading not the focus of professional literary studies in regard to individual texts. Nor taking philosophical or political meanings from them, nor primarily assessing them morally or politically. I'm interested, rather, in describing a text’s project from within the thickness of its historical moment, which includes the terms on which it chooses genre and form, attaches to (the history of) the literary world, and the ways it relates to a writer’s life and career. (After all, the larger interest of literature, looked at backwards, consists largely of that last.) And then, if possible, relating that project to a contemporary problematic: thus for instance, Conrad's Nostromo in relation to finance capitalism as a motor of contemporary globalization.

The vehicle for this kind of criticism is usually the paratactical essay: doesn’t involve a centralized argument necessarily.

And so more particularly to Kim
1. the novel represents a quite specific fantasy of India (a rich, magical, free, cross-cultural everyday life crammed with ‘sentimental journeys’) basically to resist liberal utilitarian modernity on one side; Schopenhaurian ‘pessimism’ on another, missionary imperialism on yet another (it’s a secular and effectively anti-Christian novel) and various forms of native anti-colonialist stuggle on the last. The space that remains for Kipling is the secular and sacrifical ‘white man’s burden’ (really the British burden with racist underpinnings) and a metaphysico-literary engagement with empire, that is to say, empire as a theme and setting for questionings about Being enabling and enabled by experiments and triumphs of literary style and form.
2. At one level, the novel's problematic is the limitations that racism entails for sympathetic imagination. At another level it is the politico-cultural predicament of the Indian settler colonial, understood and invested in from within.
3. The Orient for Kipling is both eternally deceitful and undisciplined (which is why it requires the white man’s burden) but it also provides a strengthening riposte to Western state-formation. One of the novel’s lessons is that to govern India in British terms requires law breaking, going native etc simultaneously to the utmost respect for the law and for whiteness.
4. Empire also a theatre of intelligence to which, in end, the novel belongs alongside the surveying, ethnography, and spying that it describes. It is in these terms that the ethnographer and spymaster, Creighton is closest to ‘us’ and yet almost absent from the narrative.
5. The novel is written in a particular moment in book history, namely the globalizing of the peripheries through thickly descriptive forms of journalism and short fiction mainly designed for periodicals, often to be read in new kinds of times and spaces (especially the rail trip). This involves a masculinising of the fiction reader (decline of the marriage plot). Hart Crane, Brett Hart, Mark Twain, Henry Lawson, Rolf Boldrewood, Blackwoods Magazine. Clearly Kipling is not writing ‘art-literature’ like James Joyce or Henry James, or Flaubert, or Virginia Woolf , and this allows him to amalgamate genres: Bildungsroman, imperial romance, sentimental journey, spiritual quest story, even naturalism (relation between characters and narration is ‘naturalistic’ in so far as no real possibilities for emulation by readers of characters). And certainly not written for the anti and now postcolonial ‘native’ reader, that is doesn’t imply that reader.
6. For all that Kim has a short story’s ‘gimmicky’ closure. What its famous, unresolved (or partly resolved) ending means is that Kim is finally sacrificable. He wont necessarily become an agent; he will never grow into ‘one of us’, he is too marked by his origins.
7. And yet in his capacity to lose identity, to go with the flow, he is a mimesis of a form of modern literary subjectivity. After all, his lived relation to India is the reader’s to the fiction.

Under the net

Taught Iris Murdoch's Under the Net in my undergraduate class on postwar British literary culture. As far as I am concerned at least, it worked surprisingly well. I was a little apprehensive since I'd never taught it (or any other Murdoch novel) before, and had no idea how her sensibility and style would strike 20 something young Americans. But they liked it. And from a teacherly point of view what's great about teaching this book is that it's not so much a novel of ideas as a novel about theory in something like the current sense. It sets into play the choice: Wittgenstein or the New Left (before that term was current of course).

As I have said elsewhere, Murdoch is the new-left intellectual who first makes the call for 'theory' to invigorate socialism in the mid-fifties but I hadn't realised that the background for that call is spelled out in her first novel. In a sense Under the net is a novel which argues for theory against spectacle (which it sees like the Situationists as colonising public life). But this only pushes the problem away a remove since Murdoch also recognises that politics are always involved in spectacle and that to enter politics requires a certain break with theory. The novel does begin to make the case for 'theoretical practice' (that is, the binding of politics to theory) but the hero doesn't abide by it. In the end what's celebrated here is literary practice: writing, living, reading literature.

The difficulty with Murdoch (of this period) is that she's a light novelist of serious intent. Like most of her contemporaries, who were formed in the depression and the war, she turns her back on modernism and the Bloomsbury cult of aestheticism, sensitivity and 'personal relationships'. Her optimism about Britain and its promise after 1945 means that she wants to connect to the population at large, which prevents her from any kind of hermeticism. But hermeticism is the lifeblood of academicisable literature, and she loses out. Certainly she does not offer the same kind of literary pleasures as does Elizabeth Bowen for instance (at her best), of a slightly different generation, and a much more traditional, Jamesian fictionalist as well as a more challenging or at least suprising one.

Then too Murdoch's own writing practices change from the late fifties taking something of a 'Shakespearean' or baroque turn (this is a topic I should explore since I really don't know her oeuvre well at all) and she becomes (regarded as) as a serious and overly established middlebrow writer, outside the currents of cultural politics or the development of novel form and style.

An idea: perhaps the modern concept of the aesthetic predates and forms the precondition for the modern concept of culture. Let us assume that Lessing's Laocoon is a foundational text for modern aestheticism with its argument that each sense takes its own autonomous pleasure and finds its own capacity for cognition in different and heteronomous forms of art linked to the body through that sense (sculpture, painting, poetry, music). (Winkelmann is important here too no doubt especially his then famous description of the Apollo Belvedere, dripping with gayness). Then it is clear that Lessing's argument is analagous to the culturalist argument that each society has its own not wholly comensurable meaning system in and through which it expresses itself, that is, its own culture. The key text which joins these two modes of thought might be Herder's essay on Sculpture. (And behind Lessing's move ultimately lies Locke and the Molyneaux debate?)

Another idea: literature in 18thc Britain undergoes a transformation in its social functions. The most important moments or expressions of this transformation can be taken to be: Richardson's Pamela, Sterne's Tristam Shandy and Lyrical Ballads. What 'literature' means for a figure like John Nichols or to the Gentleman's Magazine comes to an end by about 1800: literature by then is predominantly 'interesting', increasingly fictional and involved in disseminating and taking advantage of the power of sympathetic imagination and a certain democratisation both of reception and topoi (Ranciere). It would be usual to connect this transformation to the increasing exposure of literature to the market over the period but that isn't the whole story. It is also a response to the legitimation crisis involved in the separation of church from state after 1688, a separation which involves some separation of the economy from society more generally (though this is really a post-1815 development). But at any rate the new literary function is based in the new formal social state relations of the post 1745 era. The real difficulty, though, is that the old literary formation also develops during the eighteenth-century: producing new kinds of literary knowedge and new literary forms, notably the Magazine itself. It might be possible to argue, I think, that the developed form of literary knowledge and the new post-sentimental literature join in poets like Keats and Browning.