The novel of ruined life

Is there a genre that we can call the ruined-life novel? It would be the genre that describes those whose live hope-and redemption-forsaken lives of fragmentation and pain, usually from close up.
It's a twentieth-century genre, and women write it about women (for obvious reasons) more often than men write it about men. It works especially well in the first person. Some examples: Jean Rhys's fictions; Joan Didion's Play it as it lays; Mary Robison's fictions; Anne Enright's recent The Gathering.
Examples by men? I will try to think of some (Beckett in a modernist mode? not really, the metaphysical and ethical intentions of the writing itself are too apparent). Men seem to be too addicted to hope and the possibility of retrieving a redeeming heroic gloss even from the most destroyed of existences.
Why does this genre (if we allow it to exist) emerge in the middle of the 20th century? Perhaps because that's when hegemonic urbanising capitalism prised hierarchised gender relations apart not just because the economy needed more labour or because of the liberating technologisation of domestic work, but by shifting the relation between public and private lives for the bourgeoisie. Women begin to occupy the public sphere differently, including the workplace. In the logic of democratisation, they were called upon to participate in the polity; in the logic of the market, they were called upon to consume. At least after about 1956, the paradigmatic ruined life is a woman who is alienated from and stranded in domesticity under this regime.

Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders

I have been reading Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders, a very rewarding novel about England's northern cities, anglicanism and New Labour. It's set in Newcastle's lost, violent, housing projects in 1996, the year that Tony Blair's New Labour comes to power. Stylistically, it binds a thinned-out version of the classic realism of the Arnold Bennett kind to the modern thriller: its turn, increasingly as it goes on, to genre-fiction conventions and excitements provide it with formal constraint (and perhaps a readership) in lieu of more experimental or literary devices. Like many social-realist novels it needs to deal with the problem of how to represent characters and a social sector with little or no connection to the literary and intellectual world that the novel and its readers belong to. The thriller plot helps solve that problem. But the novel also belongs to the more recent genre of political novel (e.g. Alan Hollinghurst's The line of beauty) which relate the lived-in world to recent shifts in government and policy.

So Kelly is basically interested in juxtaposing Labour party policy and discourse with the lives of both the poor and the well-intentioned. It mounts a hard critique of the false promises of New Labour's simultaneous embrace of a certain christianity (even of 'christian socialism') and neo-liberalism/MBA-style managerialism. It does so by telling the (based on fact) story of an Anglican minister who sets out to establish a new Anglican church on a very run-down and demoralized state housing estate and his relation to various locals: the Labour MP, an thuggish enforcer for a local gangster; a young woman working in a massage parlour; Church volunteers. The novel is especially insightful about black-market/crim capitalism and its deep connections into the economic life of poor communities. At the end, it becomes clear that neither New Labour nor the Church have the capacity to reach into communities such as this. For these highly centralised and bureaucratised institutions poverty offers, at best, an opportunity for their own aggrandizement.

Perhaps this is not one of the great literary novels, although its dialogue is stunning and its characterization wonderfully unsentimental and finely tuned to its major argument (it's a novel which does have an argument). But then to write a great literary novel about the lives of the poor has not so far been possible in the capitalist epoch.

This novel is not available in Australian bookshops I think. A great pity.

Hope

Is it possible to have an utterly hopeless memory of hope?

Four adjectives which best describe Australia

crude, clean, stupid, democratic

Singapore

Singapore is very different than it was even six or so years ago. It has become very confident: the leading city state in a region that it is to inherit the earth.

Howards End

I read E.M. Forster's Howards End on the plane on the way back from Singapore. It's probably the third time I've read it, though the last time would be thirty or so years ago and I had lost much of my sense of it.
I found it utterly engrossing. Ultimately because it is about democratization across a triple axis: as a political, a cultural, and as an ethical process and ideal. By which I mean it is about how egalitarianism is to be lived, socially and personally (and especially between men and women).
But it is also a social allegory in which two kinds of bourgeois styles are set against one another: that of the business world (the Wilcox's) and that of the aesthetic liberal intellectuals (so to say) (the Schlegels).
In the end the liberal intellectuals (Bloomsbury) wins, and in the end egalitarianism merely shores them up.
And it is also about London's relation to the rest of England in a period in which rural England was increasingly becoming a network of transport nodes (the motor car is important to this novel) and, in many counties, a leisure resource for London.
The wonderful final sentence brings together the novel's main concerns: Helen Schlegel, the most committed of the novel's liberal free spirits, pregnant with the bank clerk Lionel Bast's child, and who with her sister Margaret has managed to tame the millionaire businessman Wilcox, runs into the country house, Howard's End, excited about the new season's hay crop being harvested in the fields.
Not much hitherto has led us to think that Helen is interested in hay. Clearly her excitement expresses her motherhood to come. But more than that: it is a turn away from the struggle for equality and the fight for the soul of the bourgeoisie to the secular (in the oldest sense) rhythms of nature. A kind of retreat into the natural mundane.

Neoliberalism

One of the more noteworthy features of neoliberalism is the way that it has de-democraticised all other spheres than formal politics (and perhaps the family?). It is not just that it leads to re-oligarichisation: it's that business enterprises and bureaucracies (including universities) become increasingly inegalitarian and administered from above. There's no real ideological support for this even from within neoliberalism itself it seems to me.

Notes from Ritter on Hegel and the French Revolution

Ritter argues that in Philosophy of Right Hegel deals with civil society as such for the first time. Hegel is inspired by reading English political economy for which he had enormous respect: he believed that writers like Adam Smith inductively demonstrated the philosophical and generalized principles that regulate the "mass of accidents" that constitute society. In effect, for Hegel, Smith is to civil society what Kepler was to astronomy. (70) And the way in which political economy can aid philosophy becomes especially apparent in Hegel's remarks on globalisation and the sea (paras 243-246 of Philosophy of Right; in the footnote Ritter also refers admiringly to Carl Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde (1950)).
More generally, according to Ritter, 77ff , Hegel argues that the civil society which produces the modern opposition between enlightenment (objectivity) and romanticism (subjectivity) also produces the pre-conditions for man as such to emerge out of a system designed to satisfy mere needs, ie. out of civil considerations of individual and communal welfare. Out of the history of civil society, "abstract" man appears: a being who is not merely a Jew, Catholic, German, Italian etc. And this abstract man does not belong to history: he has been emancipated from it. But this abstract man is merely abstract, he exists in a certain sense nowhere.
Which is why Hegel cannot think of the division between romanticism and enlightened rationality as surpassable. Ritter 78, “Existing reason reveals itself in the present not in the inner preservation of subjectivity in its antithetical relation to social and political revolution, but in the dichotomy making it possible.” This means that there is also a ‘continuance of the substantial order of tradition within the realm of the modern world.” (78) In my own words: it seems to be the case that the human liberation which evolves mechanically from out of civil society/political economy, requires an appeal to, as well as the continuation of, the history of philosophy and of the religious passions (i.e. longing for transcendence) to be recognised as liberation.
But, more practically, philosophy also “has the methodological task of validating the historical substance of modern society, and of grasping in their concept those determinations which cannot be won from their abstract natural and emancipatory principle, without connection to the historical substance.” (80-1). Philosophy in other words judges what is emergent and what is residual
Furthermore a revolutionary materialism comes into existence in modernity that refuses to recognise the importance of the history of tradition to liberation. It is dangerous both in its social power and in its blindness to the fact that human liberation sublates rather than overcomes the dichotomy between the tradition of the (religious) spirit and welfarism (or the dynamics of needful man in civil society.)

Wolf Solent

Just back to Brisbane from a week in Auckland, where, along the line, I finished reading John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent. The novel was something of a success when first published in 1929 and Cowper Powys still has a smallish cult following, but no real place in literary history, especially academic literary history. I read this book first when I was about fifteen and it had a visceral impact on me then: I found its grandiloquence, its intermingling of the cosmic/spiritual with the psychological/erotic imaginatively invasive, queasy making. It doesn't work like that on me anymore, but I can see why it did. It's about a youngish man, Wolf Solent, who is almost wholly committed to his interior life, which is based on his personalised and melodramatised mysticism. He has the capacity to fantasize himself as an agent in a cosmic battle between forces of good and evil. That's where the real of Wolf's life finally is: it matters more to him than relationships and experiences. But the book is about the tension between Wolf's dime-novel mysticism and his relationships with his mother and two women whom he loves, one of whom he is married to. And it turns out that the good-evil mysticism is one one level, something of a mask for a battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and on another an expression of Wolf's sensitivity to landscape, nature and place. At the end, he comes to recognise his spiritual interior life as a form of resistance to settling down with a woman, where women represent, both for author and character, the conventional, the petty, the materialistic but not wholly negatively. What's strong about the novel is the way in which its provisional commitment to the mystical, even though it takes a pulpy narrativised form, allows the novel access to modes of characterization where personalities remain undefined, mysterious, suggestive, driven by forces beyond the merely social and even beyond the sexual. A lot has been learned from Lawrence here, and it would be possible to think of the novel as a cross between Women in Love and Charles Williams (another thirties mystical-melodramatic fictionalist, and one who was unbelievably successful in the market place), but it's better than that, just because it can rescue from its critique of mysticism, mysticism's power to enrich experience.

Religion

Is religion a useless concept? Would we be better off without it?
The point is: once we subtract actual faiths or religious practices (Christianity, animism, Judaism....) from it, what's left?
The problem with maintaining the notion 'religion' outside of such institutions of religious practice is that the term becomes available too widely, meaning leaks from it. Pantheism, socialism etc can become thought of as 'religions' in some sense that is stranded between the metaphoric and the literal, and which obsfucates rather than clarifies thought.

Aidan Higgins and the sixties

Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, may be an unusual novel, and not a wholly successful one, but it is revealing about the sixties, and, not less to the point, is an intriguing sign of a literary-historical moment. It's mainly set in beach-culture Spain circa 1968 (just before the onslaught upon those beaches of the Northern European mass leisure industry), and describes a relatively brief affair between an Irish painter (a version of Higgins himself one assumes) and a young American Jewish woman who is married to a slightly older American writer. It's haunted by and dependent on a slew of masculinist modernist texts: Joyce's Portrait of an Artist most obviously, but also Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Hemingway, Paul Bowles and so on.
It's beautifully written, and the modernist sentence here begins to move towards autonomy in the direction later taken by Iain Sinclair. That is, the style (the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter) has become detached from any clear cut character-based project: the novel's characters don't come to life as they say, there's no real sense of what kind of person the hero (Dan Ruttles) is, and not much more of Charlotte his sexy, charismatic love object.
Yet it's not as if the gist of an authorial intention isn't apparent: the novel wants to represent this affair against the backdrop of European history (especially the Holocaust and the Cold War under US hegemony) as a kind of passive resistance to the horrors of the twentieth century. And that is where it reveals a mood we can call sixties, since the characters, all somewhat rootless international bohemians, seem to live in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, a lack of regard for questions of money and career and respectability, which is at least superficially is bequeathed to them by the cultural modernisms that inhabits them and that they ceaselessly discuss. They have turned an aesthetic commitment to cultural modernism as a form of resistance to bourgeois orthodoxies and norms into hedonistic, self-exploratory adventures in the private sphere (mainly sex but also alcohol and drugs), that is, into lifestyle. They exist, so to say, historically between Le Bateau-Lavoir and Benidorm.
And it's lifestyle's alienation from literary aesthetics that means that the sentence in particular breaks free from meaning and intent at the level of the text itself and that wonderfully crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters barely invoke the fictional world they purport to describe. So, from another literary-historical perspective, this is écriture produced spontaneously, outside the world of literary theory, and perhaps all the more revealing of the historical forces that tended towards the text-fetish because of that.

Rancière's Hatred of Democracy

A quick one from Brisbane (where we're still not properly settled, though over the last day or so we have acquired a fridge, a car and broadband in that order of importance).
The last chapter of Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy is interesting because it connects neo-liberalism to the old term oligarchy, and because it seeks persistantly to defend democracy.
If I understand the argument correctly (and it's hard to pay it sufficient attention among this moving chaos), for Ranciere democracy is to be thought of the persistant demand for participation and agency by those who have 'no place' in any particular socio-political structure. We don't currently have democracy, though there is enormous pressure to imagine that we do: we have 'States of oligarchic law.' (This is not to say that democracy is attainable: it is not. There will always be those who have 'no place' and their demands will always maintain the deficit which defines democracy.)
Contemporary oligarchies direct peoples' attention "towards private pleasures" and away from the public sphere. Governing becomes adminstration by experts. (Here a certain Trotskyism/Maoism becomes apparent). And that form of government, though formally divided into opposing poltical parties, is based on a consensus: that the most important function of government is to take care of the "economy" and, more specifically, the expansion of capital. Wealth has acquired 'unlimited power'. But this does not avoid 'democratic supplementation', i.e. a division of those who who manage or own capital and those who do not (the people for Rancière). The politics of the latter, which take both left and right forms, are denounced by the former as 'populism'.
Some of the old 'new left', of May 1968, blame the whole new system of neo-liberalism on the popular consumer. This is a new form of anti-democraticism: 'democratic man' takes the guise of the 'idiotic consumer', even consumers of 'alterglobalist' illusions and who may be linked to identity politics. From this point of view it is this figure (the consumer into the politics of difference) who signals the end of the Enlightenment. This 'antidemocratic discourse of today's intellectuals adds the finishing touches to the consensual forgetting of democracy that both state and economic oligarchies strive toward." But democracy can never be forgotten, not because it exists as a potential equal society to be born out of this unequal one, but because egalitarian relations can be traced through singular and precarious acts within all unequal societies, including this current form of neo-liberal oligarchy.

Enlightenment and doublethink

What if the early-modern public/private split required esoteric practices? That is, one can only have a strong distinction between the public and the private if, in the interests of social stability, it is legitimate to say one thing publicly and think another privately.
The concept of hypocrisy is the harbinger of an Arendtean fracture of the public/private distinction in enlightened modernity.

Religious kitsch

Note the importance to religious kitsch to the late nineteenth centuries two most powerful anti-Anglican texts, Samuel Butler's The Way of all Flesh and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In the first, the Pontifax money is made in religious publishing of a kitschy kind; in the second Sue works in a kind of religious gift shop.

After the new left

Key concepts.
The failure of Raymond Williams's detailed policy document, May Day Manifesto (1966) represents the end of the British New Left as a movement committed to a revitalized state socialism. After this the movement becomes wholly academic.
Within that academicism, 1968 marks the both the moment of the turn to theory and the transposition of the tiny Maoist movement into the kind of cultural populism that will come to dominate cultural studies. To understand this few texts are more important than Rancière's La leçon d'Althusser (1974). Its argument is that Althusser's theoretical return to Marx and anti-humanism in his hey day was a means of accomodating the PCF to an anti-colonialism that the Party had not embraced, but that, in a profound and unintended shift, after 1968 Althusserian theory came to represent the power of the academic hierarchy against the students inside of new kind of youth/student politics that May 1968 represented. It is at this level, that Althusserianism will move seamlessly into Foucauldianism.
The other side of post 1968 academic critique movement moves into identity politics: and in the global context, that move needs to be thought of as an alliance between the intellectual outcome of both the civil rights movement and feminism with the marxist anti-imperialism, not supported by the Comintern and the European communist parties, but of which Maoism was a component.
The collapse of state socialism is the condition for cultural studies' political-intellectual rudderlessness:
1. Stuart Hall: joining the trends.
2. The trajectory of the British Althusserians: Paul Hirst back into pluralism.
3. Perry Anderson

LIfe of the mind

The life of the mind is a good but it is not universalizable: it is not for everyone. Nor is it "better" than the various other available ethical orientations: the musical life, the sporting life, the business life etc. The life of the mind too is becoming increasingly professionalised, specialised, of course, and in the process, esoteric. This is true even though, paradoxically, it is largely funded through educational systems designed to disseminate it.
History plays a particular role in this life of the mind. History is not especially useful for understanding or dealing with the present. But it does lend heft to the life of the mind: it is what makes it solid, capable of drawing commitment from a few who are no longer to be conceived an elite.

Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State

Coleridge's interesting idea that the National Church provided a space for liberty and upward mobility, and thus for manageable hope. Hope an important concept in Coleridge since it is necessary for social stability. It is the ground upon which it possible to balance the various competing social forces.
How should we think about this in relation to the loss of hope in endgame capitalism?

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

Some notes for a response to this book that I have agreed to write.

Taylor's key concepts:
Does not propose a 'subtractive' account of secularization but rather a transformative and additive one. Nor an intentional one: religious projects unexpectedly aid secularization (but not vice versa?). Three kinds of secularity:
1. the displacement of God from social life (i.e. the emergence of godless institutions and relations)
2. the loss of belief in God (partly as a result of scientific truth regimes)
3. an immanentizing of moral life (of belief, experience and search)(4) and here the recovery of 'benevolence' as a merely human capacity in the eighteenth century is key: the 'charter of modern unbelief' (257). Science and Reason don't dethrone God, humanism does.
He is most interested in the third.
In this regard he tells a not unfamiliar story.
In the pre-axial age, the world was enchanted because people were triply "embedded". They were totally embedded in social, cosmic and in the practices and terms of human flourishing (i.e. Aristotlian eudaimonia). Here no possibility for conversion, no alternatives and also no salvation.
Then the 'great disembedding' which is a slow process with certain key stages.
1. axial religions which create a distant transcendent order defined as the good and with a good will to the world
2. the Christian history in which the life of the saintly becomes massified through discipline
3. an overturning of the relation between the world and the transcendent in the process of this discipline (the cancellation of festival) as rationalization takes over and grace departs. Prime movers of this a mix of ne0-Stoicism (Lipsius) and Protestant Augustianianism. Now selves become "buffered": that is they can make autonomous decisions within an array of choices of faith, vocation, location etc, which implies a distantiation between self and society.

This against the classic enlightened account of secularization. That is: there is in fact no knowable transcendent order nor any God. Beliefs in God are false beliefs. This has been increasingly apparent and sayable, but for a long period many knew the truth but could not publicly articulate it, sometimes using beliefs in God to empower themselves (double think, esotericism). Leo Strauss. And those who now profess anti-secularism from the academy are in fact in bad faith: they tend to be secularist anti-secularists. Arguments such as secularism has been just as violent and murderous as religion are of this type since they are in effect utilitiarian.
And against the classic alternative (Edmund Law): modern truth regimes based on scepticism, rationality, empiricism and pragmatism, refine religion. They allow faith to strip off its secular baggage. There is not necessarily more religion in the world but secularization is actually an intensification and purification of faith. (E.g. Edmund Law, Pitcock on Duns Scotus)

Problems:
Leaving aside its Eurocentrism.
Leaving aside its lack of materialism: the absence of markets, classes etc as explanatory concepts.
There's a method problem: Taylor habitually classifies process and formations into discrete categories (usually in threes). These processes dont interact, don't join or mutually constitute themselves by contestation. Is reason really separable from humanism.
Also the question of omission: 'brute ease' (Wollstonecraft), distraction, fiction, culture....
The underplaying of anti-clericism, and the political and economic role of the church.
were non-axial societies in fact embedded in the way supposed: Polynesia for instance? different iwi, possibity of moving into other iwi through 'slavery'; ambiguities about magical powers of prophets;
Homer?
can one talk about a triple embeddment except nostalgically: these societies had no distinction between religion, the social, the ethical after all. (But that does not mean they were enchanted and embedded). The ultimate logic is that a wholly enchanted society is not enchanted at all at least for itself since no outside to transcendental participation. Does such a society exist? Does not this show all the signs of myth?
What is enchantment for Taylor? Not so much a matter of belief, but a particular 'cosmic imaginary': time and space and events are connected to the transcendent.
the process by which the mass sanctification/disciplining of the social order loses touch with grace and becomes immanent is actually contestatory
the importance of anti-clericism to Enlightenment.
It is also dotted with accommodation and double think. E.g. Mary Wollstonecraft's use of the concept of the divine in The Rights of Women. It is because God and virtue is universal than women have as much right to pursue virtue as men for God and immortality. But does she mean God and salvation, or immortality in the sense of contributing to a progressivist perfectioning of human history. Double talk here. This not at all embarrassing to Taylor: it describes the mechanism through which the process works.

at a level of general theory:
There never was enchantment (and if there was neither the sacred nor the secular existed for it). What is there is more secularity and more refined religion. It is addititve all the way: there are various distances between them (the myth of disenchantment marks out a large distance) but also various intimate exchanges.
secularization as a process names itself and something larger than itself, because the forces that oppose it belong to it. This is basic dialectic theory. But these forces do not disappear and are not subsumed: they may continue and become refined. Religion is itself a secularized concept as is enchantment: religion itself helped by secularization, depends on it, but there is no terminus to this process and impossible to predict winners and losers.
Religion will give up on salvation, give up 'flourishing', become a kind of worship of the mystery, with no utility, no rational legitimation, no representational or narrative content.
Particularly important:
mysticism, death, charity/sensibility/scarcity, aesthetics/secular magic/popular culture in the contemporary sense.

There never was an enchanted world or, if there was, the modern secularised world is just as enchanted if differently. What we lose in a diminishing of interactivity supernature/nature, we regain in complexity and engagement in second nature. Among the richness of contemporary second nature are (false) memories of enchantment: the bequeathing of rich experiences by the desert fathers (Helen Waddell).
The real social problems that face us are not existential but political and biopolitical: the failure of endgame capitalism to provide for hope.
Transcendental appeals did not provide "meaning" outside particular forms of social power which after about 1500 rapidly came to seem restrictive.

Some drivers of secularization he does not attend to:
the aristocratic-military distance from the church: this lies behind libertinism, which is important to secularization.

I delight in my status of cosmic and social disembededness. It offers me a lightness of being, a freedom and makes experiences, thoughts, powers and pleasures available to me that no cosmic embededness could match. For all that my disembeddness is not chosen by me: it is enjoined upon me by truth. For it is true that no knowable God exists, that supernatural agencies are not at work in the world. This is not, in any important way, a matter of belief, it is a matter of evidence (and rational thought).

Civic republicanism and Victorian character

In his Whigs and Liberals, John Burrow draws some analogies between 18th century neo-Harringtonism and the Victorian idea of character. Key to this the notion of masculinity that lies implicit in the concept of virtue. The 18thc Country Party militia member, armed, owning landed property segues into the Henleyesque imperialist. See pps 97 ff

Political history and the history of the novel

Notes towards a future essay on Fenelon, Goldsmith and Godwin, or rather Telemachus, The Vicar of Wakefield and Caleb Williams, texts which share a genealogy.

Burchell in The Vicar is a version of Fenelon's Telemachus and Mentor, a patriot king wandering around his kingdom in disguise to avoid the corrupting power of flattery and deference and court culture. Their virtues are similar, christianized civic humanism.

But The Vicar is a fictional rewriting of a life of a martyr. It is not unimportant that Goldsmith was translating The Lives of the Fathers and Martyrs for Newbery just before writing the novel. (Probably in response to the success of Alban Butler's book on the topic.) Primrose's ordeals (from the affluent domestic republic to prison) purify his Christianity, culminating in his sermon in prison, in which he rejects the world in submission to God and accepts Origen's universalism.

But this speech also has a political meaning: it makes the case that salvation evens up the division between rich and poor and compensates for the injustice of the social order.

Another important moment on this road is his Tory speech to the butler (who is impersonating his master). But that speech is odd since it presents a compact between sacred sovereignty and the people where the people are the middle ranks, or rather the independent sector within them. Much less populist than Fielding say.

And another important momement is his passive obedience speech to his flock who object to his being taken to prison.

At the end Burchall, the patriot king, puts all to rights, ambiguating the religious rejection of the world. This tension is not ironizing: it is the sign of a structural tension in the Tory theopolitics where a particular social model (a compact between a sacred sovereign and the people against the corruptive forces of oligarchism and international trade) is fused with the doctrine of passive obedience.

Caleb Williams also tells of the discrepancy between law and justice under the rule of the landed oligarchy. And Caleb is another Job figure, who at a certain point of despair is able to trigger his salvation. But this time there is no outside the corrupt system: Falkland must undo the injustice himself.