. She is also the author of One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels (1983). . if (window.Mobvious === undefined) { Ill Reynolds begins to work through these positions by arguing that the arts receive their 'peculiar character and complexion' from ornaments. If marriage is a 'cause' of national stability, it is also an 'effect' of the nation. 16 On the conflation of the many and the one in Whitman's poetry, see Larzer Ziff, 'Whitman and the crowd', Critical Inquiry, 10 (19834), pp. This is a notion, though not a word, I take from recent work on the history of the novel inspired by Foucault.11 The term names prose writings which provide representations of social existence from the beginning of the eighteenth century through the period of the classic realist and novel and beyond. It's free to sign up and bid on jobs. 20 The chief enemies of the central form are the temporary and the local. Prior to this, mingled with the Slavs in the huge indistinct mass of the Scythians, they did not have their own separate individuality. 17 languages, created with such admirable sagacity by comparative philology, do not coincide with the divisions established by anthropology. 154203) suggests a further way in which Whitman glosses over the questions that might be raised by an admission of the critical implications of agency. 'It is impossible to correctly determine', said the liberator, 'to which human family we belong . I tear the weeds out of your ears. The real or imaginary status of this invasion is in part the topic of the present essay. . Kant too works within the same structure, which he complicates, certainly, but maintains.21 If such a simulacrum were to be achieved, then there would be no question of nation and narration, but only of nature and no narration. But at the outset, since this is addressed to readers outside Australia, two kinds of literary history must be sketched in quickly and, needless to say, positioned (in conscious part at least) from a non Anglo-Celtic perspective. The 'international' theme unfolds. How naive! At another level, Renan's observation reflects his shock at the defeat of France by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, which is expressed in both major and occasional writings. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the. However, the study of language and of history does not lead to What is a nation? In the preface,45 the American editor Stephen Graubard remarks that Australia is a 'cozy' society in which people are loathe to take serious public issue with each other. He explains that 'the colonial novel runs parallel to the rise and fall of western colonialism', as if the colonial cycle had run its course. 66 It is not easy to gain acceptance for attaching notions of the literary to non-Anglo-Celtic writing. Beach beach beach. This is a project that has a certain currency within those forms of critique associated with 'cultural studies'. Oh Lucky Country . Frontiers are articulations, boundaries are, constitutively, crossed or transgressed. Then family would not necessarily assume patriarchy and marriage could mean a non-hierarchical partnership that would exceed the duality Marmol imagined between equally privileged lovers.56 Pretty lies But no matter how attractive Utopian readings may be, nor how necessary if we dare to hope for a better world, the perils of the project to rewrite romance are clear form the populist examples. It seems difficult, in fact, to talk of the books' commonality when the projects they advocate are so varied, ranging from racism to abolitionism, from nostalgia to modernization, from free trade to protectionism. But the novelty is evident from Alejo Carpentier's preface-manifesto to The Kingdom of This World (1949), where he complained that 'magic realism' was everywhere in Latin American history except in its literature.7 And what would account for the tragicomedy of self-defeating repetition in One Hundred Years of Solitude, or for the frustration and shame in The Death of Artemio Cruz, if not the epic assumptions about Latin American history? Acknowledgements The author and publishers would like to thank the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce material in this chapter: Angus and Robertson Publishers/Collins for 'Australia' by A. D. Hope from his Collected Poems 19301970, A. D. Hope, 1966, 69, 72. (function(e){var c=e;var a=c.ue||{};a.main_scope="mainscopecsm";a.q=[];a.t0=c.ue_t0||+new Date();a.d=g;function g(h){return +new Date()-(h?0:a.t0)}function d(h){return function(){a.q.push({n:h,a:arguments,t:a.d()})}}function b(m,l,h,j,i){var k={m:m,f:l,l:h,c:""+j,err:i,fromOnError:1,args:arguments};c.ueLogError(k);return false}b.skipTrace=1;e.onerror=b;function f(){c.uex("ld")}if(e.addEventListener){e.addEventListener("load",f,false)}else{if(e.attachEvent){e.attachEvent("onload",f)}}a.tag=d("tag");a.log=d("log");a.reset=d("rst");c.ue_csm=c;c.ue=a;c.ueLogError=d("err");c.ues=d("ues");c.uet=d("uet");c.uex=d("uex");c.uet("ue")})(window);(function(e,d){var a=e.ue||{};function c(g){if(!g){return}var f=d.head||d.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]||d.documentElement,h=d.createElement("script");h.async="async";h.src=g;f.insertBefore(h,f.firstChild)}function b(){var k=e.ue_cdn||"z-ecx.images-amazon.com",g=e.ue_cdns||"images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com",j="/images/G/01/csminstrumentation/",h=e.ue_file||"ue-full-11e51f253e8ad9d145f4ed644b40f692._V1_.js",f,i;if(h.indexOf("NSTRUMENTATION_FIL")>=0){return}if("ue_https" in e){f=e.ue_https}else{f=e.location&&e.location.protocol=="https:"?1:0}i=f? . 13 It isn't my purpose to comment here on Pevsner's general account of 158 John Barrell national character, or on his application of that account in his analysis of English art. It had finally begun to overcome economic dependency by naming it, and to formulate a cultural independence by cannibalizing the range of European traditions, turning them into mere raw material in purposefully naive American hands. Multiculturalism becomes too often an effective process of recuperation whereby diverse cultures are returned homogenized as folkloric spectacle. . if (window.csa) { Hence Whitman supplanted the love of woman (difference) by the comradely appreciation of men (sameness), and eventually subsumed the love of everything into an extended hymn to death, the true egalitarian. Art should create, instead, a customary community of taste, to develop in a people a sense of its nationhood, of belonging to one nation rather than another, and to provide the justification of social and political privilege which the civic discourse could no longer be relied upon to supply. 10 Germanic elements are not more considerable in the United Kingdom than when they were in France, when she had possession of Alsace and Metz. As he says a little earlier in this same essay: 'a simple and natural conduct can just as easily lead to the aims of government as a more devious one' (p. 173). My subject is 'myths of the nation'. 19 See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], ed. Here one senses both the passivity of those touched they cannot pull away even if they want to and the violent genesis of that passivity in the war itself. Thus, Thierry's earlier historical writings, the first series of letters on the history of France (181820), seek to justify the Third Estate through a staunchly 'Romanist' interpretation of early French history. This is a position all the easier to take in Australia, because here, unlike many Third World countries, nationalism is not used against large minority racial/tribal groups. In this function of national history as Entstellung, the forces of social antagonism or contradiction cannot be transcended or dialectically surmounted. The Boom tried to demolish or trivialize the 'mythic' subtext of national development, letting it peek through the discursive debris as risible simulacra. By declaring the conquest to be benevolent and synthesizing, he can maintain the identity of two positions that an inspection of the events of the nineteenth century must suggest as effectively very different. Sept.Oct. The core of this language is its ability to absorb, but there is a clear hierarchy that organizes this process of inclusion: 'its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead which is all good enough, and indeed must be' (p. 30). Whiggish, too, is their susceptibility to the sheer glamour of the process of social representation, the drawing of the new into the recognizable, and their blindness as to the consequences of their exclusion of the 'vulgar'. El perriquilb sarniento (1816, completed 1830), by Mexico's Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi, is picaresque in genre and enlightened in spirit, a book that seems to come at the end of a literary tradition that runs from Lazarrillo to Lesage rather than to initiate a new one. These are not the representations of the civil Imaginary, which are based on the circulation of mimetic images, on the dissemination and ranking of social differences, but non-mimetic emblems ('allegoric shapes' Wordsworth called them)17 intended, as Abbe Gregoire put it, to penetrate the soul and mould the national character.18 With the birth of the new French nation, other European nationalisms shudder and change. This returns us to our point of departure. Furthermore, much has been made of the linguistic qualities of the Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn by Louis and Charles to each other's armies, in Old French and Old High German respectively. Similarly, in modern times the flourishing of the novel is always connected with the decomposition of stable verbal and ideological systems, and, on the other hand, to the reinforcement of linguistic heterology and to its impregnation by intentions, within the literary dialect as well as outside of it.34 Is it not natural to assume that the novel itself would assume new forms The national longing for form 55 following the institution of another closed system with its accompanying universal language, whose disintegration (the system and the language) we are now witnessing? . But, he figures the nation in institutions which resist the appeal of enlightened nationalism, turning to the family, the church, civil society, a hatred of theory rather than to common law, the state, freedom, language, reason. In other words, the zoological origins of humanity are massively prior to the origins of culture, civilization, and language. 80 By 1912, however, Durkheim and his pupils had, as Levi-Strauss observes, 'rallied' to ethnography and spoke of the observation of phenomena as being at the same time 'historical and ethnographic'. My argument requires me to indicate one last thread in this story of the relations between certain literary and nationalist zones. Similarly, in one of the many conversations between Galileo Gall and the stoical landowner, the Baron Canabrava, the image-making of the other side is discussed: 'As is the case with many idealists, [General Moreira Cesar] is implacable when it comes to realizing his dreams . I shall adopt an absolutely cool and impartial attitude. 20 Discourses, p. 44. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. We touch and hear only a few things at a time; sight surveys a much larger range, one that can pretend to totality. will be challenged.73 Multiculturalism will only function as a useful expression of difference when it is seen as including Anglo-Celts. 1, 1789-1923 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974), p. xix. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new 'people' in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for political representation. After some 500 lines, a name appears: 'Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a cosmos'. And, in turn, such voices from afar give attention to the volatile cultural pluralism at home. If the Germans seemed to Tacitus to enjoy a freedom which Rome had lost centuries before, it was because, in his day, 'the Germans were still in that social condition through which the ancient Greeks had passed before their cities had become highly organised. The national is what enables us to transcend the merely personal, and it may then itself be transcended in our progress towards the fully civic. 12, p. 292. 4757; Rebecca Coy, 'A study of Whitman's diction', University of Texas Studies in English, 16 (1936), pp. At the same time he was opposing white to dark skin, a privileged intelligentsia to the untutored masses who supported the Federalist dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Michael Oakeshott's 'Character of a modern European state' is perhaps the most brilliant conservative account of the equivocal nature of the modern nation. . British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-415-01483-2 Contents Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: narrating the nation Homi K. Bhabha 1 2 What is a nation? The ChinesePortuguese Australian writer Brian Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms 115 Castro referred to the need for literature to function as dissidence and in the face of the national histories of literature and culture which I have been analysing it certainly seems possible for non-Anglo-Celtic writings to operate as dissident and not simply to be recuperated.71 The dangers of recuperation surfaced when various Anglo-Celtic speakers invoked the totalizing piety that 'we are all migrants' but this was picked up, for example, by Jacques Delaruelle who warned of the logic which ran: "There was a problem, there is no more problem, there has never been any problem.' Nothing [purely] material suffices for it. ibid., p. 65. We can deduce, for example, that 'positive' reality was traditionally opposed to magic; otherwise the proto-Boom style of magic realism would represent no new departure. 6 See Foucault, op. Another element in this marginalization of migrant writing is that, together with other aspects of migrant cultures, it provides what could be dubbed a European charter myth of origins. Its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation. II, pp. I see how they are being preserved. . A particular technical device stands as their precondition: Scott's texts are not motivated. This means that nationalism may operate for a wide variety of different groups within the nation though it need not imply 'multiculturahsm', a concept which 140 Simon During retains ties both to liberal pluralism and to culturalism. In other words, we may wonder if general equality would be the norm in a natural society. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 108. The story of (the institution of) the nation will be irremediably complicated by this situation. The shock value of this format is clear and undoubted, and in this respect we might rank Leaves of Grass along with Blake's prophetic books and Finnegans Wake as radically subversive of the conventions of ordinary literary language. After a while, the rabble becomes a well-drilled, paramilitary cult defending the 'New Jerusalem' of Canudos, which has become, both in their own minds and in that of the government, a counter-base of power, fiercely Catholic (although they practice free love), and unwilling to recognize the new constitution, the national census, or the concept of using money as a unit of exchange. This attempt to turn writing into speech, the absent into the present, is enhanced by the vocalic markers and incantatory rhythms of the text, which thus seeks constantly to express itself as voice. 21820). The delicacy with which such an operation had to be conducted, by an immigrant from central Europe writing only ten years after 1945, can easily be imagined. ), Pensamiento Politico de la Emancipation (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), p. 114. The writer chosen is Patrick White who is described as drawing the paradigmatic 'contours of the Australian psyche'. in J. Derrida, V. Descombes et al.. La Faculte de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. return true; First, there are the rhetorical flourishes. This is not surprising: Allen's work is crucial in the development of modern communication systems, in the homogenizing of Britain. 34. Religion, which, fiftytwo years ago, played so substantial a part in the formation of Belgium, preserves all of its [former] importance in the inner tribunal of each; but it has ceased almost entirely to be one of the elements which serve to define the frontiers of peoples. It is true that Thierry was one of Renan's mentors, but in certain crucial respects his interpretation of French history was opposed, as we shall see, to that of Chateaubriand and Renan. for(var i=0; i
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