Communities in Anonymity: The Remarkable Confidence of Modern Nations Ágnes Györke _______________________________________________________HJEAS The assumption that nation-states are the products of modernity has become, as Caren Kaplan notes, “a commonplace of our time” (1). Though historians may differ over the exact moment of nationalism’s birth, it has become a widely held conviction that nation-states were formed in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the American and the French revolutions (Smith, Nationalism 1). Influenced by the Enlightenment and Western liberalism, nationalism is claimed to have appeared as an inclusive and liberating force: as Anthony D. Smith argues, for instance, contrary to the violent outbursts of national sentiment since about the mid-nineteenth century, which already signal the decline of the modern nation, nationalism proclaimed the right of people to determine their destinies (Nationalism 1). The nation-state was “intrinsic to the nature of the modern world” (3), as Smith points out: conceived as a rational, inclusive, and democratic entity, it embodied the ideals of Western modernity.
A number of social scientists and literary critics, however, challenged this belief by calling our attention to the inequalities based on gender and race, for instance, which remain unaddressed in the historical discourse of nationalism. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s critics argued that “the Western nation” is yet another highly problematic grand narrative, one of the central sites of hegemonic masculinities. As Kaplan claims, for example, “[f]rom its very inception . . . as excentric subjects, women have had a problematic relationship to the modern nation-state and its construction of subjectivity” (1). Issues such as citizenship for women, the position of racialized ethnicities, and nonheteronormative sexualities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western societies question the narrative of the modern nation as an inclusive and democratic ideal. Critics who take a postmodernist stance, such as Kaplan and Homi K. Bhabha, for instance, argue that the modern nation has never been a seamlessly inclusive entity, which later disintegrated due to its blending “with the darker forces of fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism” (Smith, Nationalism 2). Relying on the theories of Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey, among others, these scholars claim that the lack that was hidden by national master narratives was contained within the contradictory logic of modernity (Kaplan 2).
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This article investigates this contradictory logic by exploring the discourse of nationalism studies, primarily Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking Imagined Communities, in the context of Walter Benjamin’s writings. Besides the discussion of the various meanings implied by “modernity” and “modernism,” I also explore Benjamin’s impact on the historical discourse of the modern nation, claiming that though he has been a significant inspiration for historians and social scientists such as Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Bhabha, his concepts are often misread. Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (fig. 1), for instance, which depicts a creature of ambiguous gender, are transformed into an affirmative vision of progress in Anderson’s text. One of the reasons why the historical discourse of nationalism studies is unable to do justice to Benjamin’s terms lies in the fact that modernist historians do not take the conceptual difference between modernity and modernism into account. This very same lack of differentiation explains why Anderson endows novels produced between the eighteenth century and World War II with the capacity to evoke a ubiquitous sense of communal feeling.
It is my contention that Anderson’s appropriation of Benjamin’s key terms reveals him to be a universalist thinker rather than a postmodernist or a transnationalist critic. My reading problematizes the arguments of Bhabha and Marc Redfield who claim that despite the fact that Anderson regards himself a modernist historian, his language is profoundly postmodern. I also challenge Helen McMurran’s argument concerning the transnational framework of his theory. In my view, Anderson’s reading of Benjamin suggests that even though Imagined Communities is a profoundly open text, it relies on a predominantly universalistic rhetoric and image of the self.
Modernity, modernism, and the nation
The first thing that strikes the literary scholar when reading the works of Smith and Gellner, for instance, is that historians use the term modernism as the synonym of modernity. Unaffected by the literary and artistic movement called modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, historians are, on the one hand, concerned with modernity as a historical age, which is claimed to have emerged either in the eighteenth century if we regard the French and the American revolutions as starting points, or at the time of the Reformation in sixteenth-century Western Europe. The term is primarily used to denote a historical period and, secondarily, a theory concerning the rise of nationalism: “the modernist approach” to the emergence of nation states, influenced primarily by Marx, Weber, and
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Durkheim (Smith, Nationalism 11), refers to the hypothesis of historians regarding the birth of the nation.
Furthermore, historians seldom regard the postmodern as a period that is radically different from the modern and quite often claim that it is nothing but a fleeting fashion. Ernest Gellner, for instance, one of the founding fathers of modernist nationalism studies, observes that “[p]ostmodernism is a contemporary movement. It is strong and fashionable. Over and above this, it is not altogether clear what the devil it is” (Postmodernism 22). Less sarcastic than Gellner, though equally critical, Smith claims that “post-modernism is a movement of cultural eclecticism and ambivalence or a pastiche of localized particulars married to a standardized and streamlined scientific technology,” which, in fact, inherits the rational, technical, and scientific language of modernity (Nations 19, 20). Although literary critics also often claim that there is no substantial difference between the modern and the postmodern, their argument is rather different: Homi Bhabha, for instance, maintains that the postmodern is not a radically new period since, despite the lucid grand narratives that modernity produced, similarly to the postmodern, it had “always already” been marked by lack and absences (140). Modernist historians, on the other hand, suggest that postmodernity brings no paradigm shift since this period is still defined by the modern scientific revolution, and postmodern analyses of nationalism simply question established paradigms without offering a viable alternative (Smith, Nationalism 218). Thus, despite the intersections between historical and philosophical approaches to the modern, we need to take these differences into account when reading across the disciplines.
In literary and philosophical writings, modernity is most often defined as the age of reason and progress, which emerged in the late seventeenth century. However, similarly to the historical discourse, there is no agreement as regards the exact date of its birth. As Lawrence Cahoone points out, “any century from the sixteenth through the nineteenth could be, and has been, named as the first ‘modern’ century. The Copernican system, for example, arguably a cornerstone of modernity, dates from the sixteenth century, while democratic government, which can claim to be the essence of modern politics, did not become the dominant Western political form until very recently” (qtd. in Felski 12). In an attempt to distinguish between these theories, Rita Felski uses four terms that shed light on the different meanings attached to the modern: “modernization,” which appeared in the context of Western development and denotes industrialization and urbanization; “modernism,” which serves as an
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umbrella term for the artistic schools and styles that emerged in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America; “modernité,” which refers to the social background of modernism, denoting the more general experience of ephemerality and the transitory qualities of urban culture in the late nineteenth century; and “modernity,” the epochal term I am interested in, which “includes a general philosophical distinction between traditional societies, structured around the omnipresence of divine authority, and a modern secularized universe predicated upon an individual and self-conscious subjectivity” (13). The first and the fourth terms overlap with the way modernity is used in the historical discourse: considered as the product of modernization, that is, a shift from agrarian to industrial society,1 the nation-state is regarded as an entity that marks the modern age. The second and the third terms, modernism and modernité, however, denote specifically literary and aesthetic notions which seem to have no relevance for modernist historians.
Another major difference between the literary and the historical discourse is that historians are less concerned with the kind of subjectivity Felski is interested in. They often refer to the notion of the “autonomous individual,” which is claimed to have emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution, yet their argument relies on a profoundly different concept of self. For instance, John Hutchinson claims that modernity transforms “passive subjects” into “active citizens” (1),2 while Gellner believes that there is a parallel between Kantian self-determination and the self-determination practiced by nations (Nationalism 133). According to Elie Kedourie, nationalism is itself “largely a doctrine of national self-determination” (23), since “[i]t is only when he and the state are one that the individual realizes his freedom” (30). The subject of the modern nation seems to be a genderless Cartesian cogito in these discourses, akin to the individual imagined by major philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Immanuel Kant.
The reception of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities shows the contradictions between approaches to nationalism very clearly. Anderson has inspired a number of critics to rethink the concept of the modern nation, such as Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, and Marc Redfield, and his book has also had a considerable impact on theories of the novel (see, for instance, the works of Jonathan Culler and Helen McMurran). It is impossible to do justice to all these insightful readings here. While Chatterjee, for instance, claims that Anderson regards the Western world as the only true subject of history, and his theory is rooted in a specifically
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Western concept of self, Redfield argues that he critiques these very same terms: despite the fact that Anderson positions himself as a modernist historian,3 Redfield considers him a quasi-postmodern scholar and claims that Imagined Communities, by encouraging “us to think that the nation is produced by a systematic misrecognition of its origins” (54), has postmodern overtones. Similarly, Bhabha regards Anderson’s recognition that the arbitrary sign disturbs the visual imaginary of the medieval world as an unmistakable sign of his postmodern bias. Reading Imagined Communities with the linguistic turn in mind, he points out that nations are particular grand narratives of modernity, which hide more ambivalent and uncontainable counter-narratives that “continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries” (Bhabha 149).
In other words, both Redfield and Bhabha regard Imagined Communities as a milestone in the critique of Western master narratives of modernity. I believe, however, that the subject of the nation in Anderson’s discourse is more akin to the Cartesian cogito, which appears in Gellner’s and Kedourie’s writings, than to a postmodern sense of the self. Despite the fact that his book inspired a number of outstanding deconstructive readings, Anderson relies on the notion of the omnipotent cogito as well as on the concept of teleology, which explain the universalizing overtones of his argument.
The contradictions that describe theories of the modern nation, then, result not only from the disagreement between historians concerning the emergence of nations and nationalism; they also spring from the multidisciplinary nature of the discourse. Terms such as “the modern” and “the individual” are used in ways that overlap with cultural and literary theories, yet the meanings implied are often different. This crossdisciplinary interest makes Anderson’s book inspiring for literary scholars, yet it also explains why, as presented in the next section, Imagined Communities transforms Benjamin’s key terms in ways that supports his own view of historical modernity.
Walter Benjamin and the discourse of the modern nation
A number of critics argue that Anderson misunderstands Benjamin’s concept of “homogeneous, empty time” in Imagined Communities, which he believes to be the time of the modern nation. Redfield, for instance, claims that he “homogenizes” Benjamin’s concept of “homogeneous, empty time” by suggesting that “the time of capitalism, modern technology and modernity is fundamentally homogeneous” (Imagined 52, emphasis in the
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original). He points out that Anderson elides Benjamin’s account of the shock experience, which characterizes the age of mechanical reproduction, marked by fracture and rupture. Similarly, John D. Kelly believes that Anderson seriously misunderstands Benjamin: he points out that imperial nations fantasized about hierarchical self-assertion, not horizontal comradeship (839), as Anderson presumes. Speaking from the perspective of transnationalism and globalization theories, Kelly claims that the asymmetries in global time were made real by colonial practices. Furthermore, he also argues that though the peculiarity of the nation in Anderson’s theory depends on Benjamin’s notion of “homogeneous, empty time,” “Anderson insists on the acceptance of the reality of this chronotope, which to Benjamin was precisely the image of history that had to be refused” (Kelly 846). That is, Benjamin, in fact, criticizes the “homogeneous, empty time” of slow progress and believes, instead, in “class-based, anti-evolutionary Messianic moments” (Kelly 849).
We need to take a look at the context of Benjamin’s argument in order to see what might have caused these misunderstandings. First, it is important to note that Benjamin’s primary subject of research was not the period in which modern nation-states emerged. Though he was a restless intellectual and had an interest in all historical epochs ranging from the Romans to the mid-twentieth century, his most extensive research project is based on the culture of the early twentieth century and on nineteenth-century texts. To use Rita Felski’s terms, it is modernité, the transitory urban culture of the second half of the nineteenth century shaped by consumerism and innovation, and modernism, the artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which inspired him to work on his grand unfinished arcades project. This research preoccupied him since the late twenties until his death in 1940, and this was the period in which he wrote “The Storyteller” (1936), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), as well as “The Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1941), which are the pieces most often referred to by modernist historians. In other words, though it is true that Anderson erases the ambivalence involved in Benjamin’s discourse, in “The Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is the text that Anderson quotes, what Benjamin explores is not modernity per se, but the very crisis of the modern.
Another Benjaminian trope that Anderson relies on is the “Angel of History,” which, as Tom Nairn puts it, has become the single most extraordinary image of the Frankfurt School’s worldview (359). It appears in
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the ninth thesis of “The Theses,” Benjamin’s last major work, which was published posthumously in 1941:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Illuminations 257-58) In this thesis, Benjamin reads Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (fig. 1), a
modernist painting that dates from 1920, as an allegorical vision of history, which, according to O. K. Werckmeister, has become “a composite literary icon for left-wing intellectuals” (242). In Benjamin’s interpretation Klee’s startled angel is moving away from something he is staring at: his face is turned towards the past, yet he is forced to move towards the future. It is this uncanny vision of “progress” that Anderson appropriates, who refers to Benjamin’s image at the end of the chapter titled “The Angel of History.” For Anderson, the angel seems to illustrate the spread of nationalism all over the world, which is the much criticized presumption that the formation of nation-states in the third world is the direct result of colonialism. Instead of commenting on Benjamin’s image, however, Anderson adds an enigmatic note: “But the Angel is immortal, and our faces are turned towards the obscurity ahead” (Imagined 162). This is Anderson’s conclusion,4 which seems to suggest that nationalism is a pervasive force, and “our” task is to face this fact. Thus, in his reading the backward-facing angel of history becomes a courageous historian who turns towards the future with open eyes. Similarly to the notion of “homogeneous, empty time,” Benjamin’s Angel of History becomes a less ambiguous trope in Anderson’s book: in both cases the uncertainty of Benjamin’s image is erased for the sake of a more affirmative vision.
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Fig. 1. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.
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The Angel of History appears in a similar context in Nairn’s Break-up of Britain, published in 1977. Just like Anderson, he associates the image with the spread of nationalism and reads Benjamin’s storm propelling the angel into the future as a “storm that has blown into the most remote areas of the world,” arousing, beyond the wreckage, “the great counter-force of anti-imperialist struggle” (Break-up 360). Unlike in Imagined Communities, however, in Nairn’s book the angel remains an ambiguous trope: it becomes associated with another image, Janus, the Roman animistic spirit of doorways and archways, who is represented by a double-faced head in art (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Nairn’s main point is that nationalism is Janus-faced: on the one hand, it has remained a “progressive” force in the sense that it enables third-world people “to appropriate the powers and benefits of modernity for their own use” (Faces 71), yet it also relies on an atavistic language and cult of the past. Thus in his reading, the temporal confusion that the angel allegorizes is akin to the ambiguities of nationalism, defined as a Janus-faced, curiously progressive and regressive phenomenon.
Nevertheless, the reading of Benjamin’s “storm” as an affirmative vision of any kind of progress is highly problematic. First, similarly to other commentators, neither Anderson nor Nairn seem to take the context of Benjamin’s tropes into account. Both the “Angel of History” and the concept of “homogeneous, empty time” appear in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940, when Benjamin was fleeing from Nazi persecution. As Werckmeister notes, the “Angel of History” is an “absolute verdict . . . about the catastrophic course of history and the powerlessness of its witnesses” (242). Though Werckmeister does not comment on Anderson’s and Nairn’s interpretation of Benjamin, he also claims that a number of critiques read “the angel’s flight over the landscape of unfolding catastrophes as a straightforward allegory of historical experience per se” (243) and offers interpretations fully detached from Benjamin’s situation in 1940. Focusing on the genealogy of the angel in Benjamin’s texts, he reveals that Klee’s image becomes invested with destructive traits absent in the original painting (Werckmeister 245), which becomes the critique of any kind of historical progress. Second, Benjamin’s ninth thesis is based on Klee’s modernist painting, while the aim of the thesis, as Werckmeister claims, was to clarify the philosophical assumptions on which Benjamin intended to proceed with the writing of a sequel to his essay titled “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (245), the iconic modernist writer. It is neither modernity, the period in which nation-states emerged, nor the time when Anderson and Nairn were writing their books that
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Benjamin is concerned with; it is the modernist material he investigates and the historical context of fascism that explain the significance of his terms.
Though a number of critics have written about Anderson’s misreading of Benjamin, Bhabha’s appropriation of his theories has not yet been put under scrutiny. In an interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, he claims that the influence of Benjamin was formative on his work:
His [Benjamin’s] meditations on the disjunctive temporalities of the historical “event” are quite indispensable to thinking the cultural problems of late modernity. His vision of the Angel of History haunts my work as I attempt to grasp, for the purposes of cultural analysis, what he describes as the condition of translation: the “continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity.” His work has led me to speculate on differential temporal movements within the process of dialectical thinking and the supplementary or interstitial “conditionality” that opens up alongside the transcendent tendency of dialectical tradition—I have called this a “third space, or a “time lag.” (Mitchell) Bhabha reads Benjamin’s angel from the perspective of
deconstruction, influenced by Derrida, though he refuses to situate his theory within postmodern discourses and prefers the term “late modernity.” The angel haunting his works, totally detached from its context in Benjamin’s writings, becomes associated with the idea of perpetual transformation and the lack of fixity. He also claims that Benjamin inspired him to challenge the dialectical tradition of Western metaphysics and discover a supplementary “third space,” which is, again, an argument that readers of Derrida are familiar with. Though it is easy to see how Benjamin’s complex images have inspired Bhabha’s speculations, the references to his works in The Location of Culture seem to be somewhat arbitrary and contingent.
As for his theory of the modern nation, Bhabha claims that Anderson “misses that profound ambivalence that Benjamin places deep within the utterance of the narrative of modernity” (161). Based on a short passage from Benjamin’s “Storyteller,” included in Illuminations, which comments on the rise of the novel at the beginning of modernity, Bhabha argues that “Benjamin introduces a non-synchronous, incommensurable gap in the midst of storytelling” (161), which he reads as a gap in the narration of modern society. As Benjamin argues,
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The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of living.
(Illuminations 87) The passage discusses “the rise of the novel at the beginning of
modern times” (87), though the piece itself is about the works of Nikolai Leskov, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist. Benjamin regards Leskov as a storyteller, a rare example in the nineteenth century when, as he argues, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end” (83). Thus his primary interest in the culture and literature of the nineteenth century is evident again; he mourns the loss of the value of shared experiences, which have been replaced by a sense of alienation associated with the novel, and suggests that the art of Leskov needs to be appreciated since it carries the traces of this lost “fullness.”
Bhabha seems to have been inspired by Benjamin’s notion of alienation, but the significance he attributes to his remarks is certainly too great. “The Storyteller” does not explore the cultural changes that took place at the time when the novel emerged;5 it is concerned neither with the birth of the nation, nor with the rise of the novel. Furthermore, Bhabha appropriates Benjamin’s terms regardless of the context in which they occur in his text. One of his favorite words, for instance, “incommensurability,” which Benjamin mentions when describing the gap between the textual and the extratextual (that is, experience), is used to delineate the “place” from which “the nation speaks its disjunctive narrative” (161) in Bhabha’s argument. Similarly, the “perplexity” of life, displayed by the novel according to Benjamin, refers to cultural difference in the chapter “DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation” from The Location of Culture: “From the margins of modernity, at the insurmountable extremes of storytelling, we encounter the question of cultural difference as the perplexity of living and writing the nation” (161). Just like Derrida’s supplement, cultural difference as the “perplexity” of writing the nation reveals that no national narrative is complete in itself.
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The passage that Bhabha comments on, regardless of Benjamin’s argument, supports his theory of the modern nation as a split and disjunctive entity.
Though in different ways, Anderson, Nairn, and Bhabha endow Benjamin’s key terms with astonishingly diverse connotations. While Anderson and Nairn, commenting on the spread of nationalism, transform “the Angel of History” into a fairly optimistic trope, Bhabha focuses on the ambivalence in his theory, which supports his deconstructive reading of “the” modern Western nation. None of these critics take the context of Benjamin’s argument into account; his writings seem to have served as an inspiration for these very different theories, yet the way his terms are used depend on the theoretical and disciplinary background of his commentators. As I have claimed in this section, these appropriations, to a great extent, result from the confusion that surrounds the definitions of modernity.
Nations, novels, and the problem of periodization
A closer look at the role Anderson attributes to literature in imagining the modern nation reveals that novels and newspapers contributed to the emergence of modern nations in the eighteenth century since they “provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (Imagined 25). As was argued in the previous section, Anderson also claims that a new concept of time emerged in this period, which is supposed to be akin to Benjamin’s notion of “homogeneous, empty time.” He discusses the role of novels in the context of this new temporality, claiming that the “structure of the old-fashioned novel” became “a device for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’” (25). Print capitalism, the emergence of novels, and this complex new temporality, as well as the decline of religious communities and the dynastic realm, are the prerequisites for imagining modern nations.
Anderson, nevertheless, disregards a number of important details for the sake of his theory’s consistency. First, it is not clear whether the change in apprehending the world took place in the Renaissance or in the Enlightenment. The new temporality is claimed to have replaced the “medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time” (24), yet, in fact, it is also related to the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century: the novel provided the technical means for representing this new temporality. Second, Anderson, again, seems to have misunderstood Benjamin’s concept of Messianic time, defined as “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (24). He argues that Messianic temporality was
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replaced by “homogeneous, empty time” after the decline of religious communities and dynastic realms, which made it possible to think the nation. However, for Benjamin, “Messianic time” is not the opposite of “homogeneous, empty time.” In the eighteenth thesis, for instance, he writes that “the historian establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Illuminations 263). The simultaneous intersection of past and future in the instantaneous present is one of Benjamin’s key insights, but what he explores here is not the time of the Middle Ages; these temporalities intersect in the moment when the historical materialist, such as Benjamin himself, grasps the significance of past events.
Susan Buck-Morss wrote extensively about Benjamin’s concept of time, claiming that for Benjamin, modernity has a secret desire to restore the past, which is evident in the fact that new technologies took forms that “imitated precisely the old forms they were destined to overcome” (111). Benjamin’s fourteenth thesis addresses this issue explicitly: “to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past” (Illuminations 261). Benjamin refers to the present moment, the French Revolution, and the Roman Empire in a single sentence which, in fact, explains why it is easy to misinterpret his thesis. However, as Buck-Morss argues, it was his work in the Parisian arcades that inspired these claims about the temporality of modernity. The Arcades Project is full of evidence of the fusion of old and new; when Baudelaire, for instance, searched for the words to describe the specifically modern struggles of the urban poet, he revived the “archaic image of the fencer” (Buck-Morss 110). Benjamin’s interest in and research of modernité is in the background of these assumptions, as well as the threat of Nazism, which is the period in which he wrote “the Theses,” suggesting that the split temporality he elaborated on has more to do with the crisis of modernity than with any other historical epoch.
Third, though Anderson refers to Richardson, Defoe, and Fielding when he explores the changes that took place in the eighteenth century, he does not analyze a single eighteenth-century text. It is the very fact that the novel emerged as a distinct genre in this period that Anderson exploits, regardless of the content and the narrative strategies of eighteenth-century novels. As Jonathan Culler puts it, Anderson regards the novel as “a formal condition of imagining the nation—a structural condition of possibility”
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(37). The experience of reading, he points out, contributes to the conceptualization of the time of modernity, since novels are devices “for the presentation of simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time’” (Anderson, Imagined 25). As an analogue of the nation, the novel invites its reader to imagine a community he (or she?) belongs to by envisaging some kind of connection between the characters who may, in fact, never meet. This connection, which allows readers to imagine communities composed of people largely unknown to one another, creates “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36).
Literary scholars, of course, welcomed the idea that novels play a significant cultural and political role in producing the modern nation; Anderson’s theory justifies the importance of literature in an age when it is frequently questioned. Franco Moretti, for instance, relies on Anderson’s assumptions when elaborating on the role nineteenth-century European fiction played in imagining the nation. Analyzing a number of maps based on the journeys characters make across national space and time, Moretti claims that literary geographies contributed to conceptualizing the nation-state (13). Though he quotes Anderson at the beginning of his book, the role he attributes to novels is very different: while for Anderson any kind of novel that has a non-participant narrator allows its readers to imagine a community in anonymity (Culler 23), Moretti looks at the specific national geographies literary texts produce, arguing that, in fact, Jane Austen was the first writer whose novels provided a form that represented the nation-state (Moretti 20).
Is it the perspective of a novel that makes it a national narrative, then? Or the specific national spaces it portrays? Does the novel’s content need to be nationalistic to evoke a sense of community? Anderson does not really give an answer to these questions. As Culler argues, there are at least three elements we could examine if we are to take his theory seriously: the narrative point of view, the content, and the construction of the reader in national fictions (22). Curiously, Anderson mentions eighteenth-century writers only when he elaborates on the connection the reader imagines between characters, which is the result of the novels’ point of view, and when analyzing specific examples and the content of fictions, he relies on nineteenth-century texts from the Philippines, Mexico, and Indonesia. Furthermore, as Culler points out, while the unnamed eighteenth-century novels act as analogues of the nation, the novels he actually reads (José Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere [1887]; Francisco Balagtas Baltazar’s The Story of
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Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania [1861]; José Joaquín Fernandez de Lizardi’s The Itching Parrot [1816]; and Mas Marco Kartodikromo’s Black Semarang [1924]) represent its social space (Culler 23). Thus it is the very novels that define the period in which the modern nation is claimed to have emerged that Anderson ignores.
Imagined Communities, nevertheless, suggests that eighteenth-century novels have the unconditional ability to evoke a sense of communal feeling. Apart from the obvious questions, however, such as how many people could read at that time, Anderson’s theory is problematic for a number of other reasons: to what extent do novels imagine a national community of readers, for instance? What happens if we read translations? Mary Helen McMurran addresses some of these questions in her article that explores the origin of the novel in the context of transnational theories, arguing that critics commenting on Anderson’s theory overlooked the cross-cultural aspects of eighteenth-century fiction. McMurran is certainly right claiming that “the nation-novel formation co-instantiated transnationalism with the novel,” yet her belief that Anderson himself “is always thinking transnationally” (532) is debatable. She refers to the controversial reception of Richardson’s Pamela in Britain and France, which shows that the eighteenth-century novel became “bundled with the nation,” yet also claims that this association was enabled by translation and transnational circulation (534).6 Defining transnationalism as a cross-cultural transport, or transfer, McMurran argues that this theoretical framework is best to conceptualize both the reception of eighteenth-century fiction and Anderson’s theory (532).
Anderson, however, is a universalist thinker rather than a transnational critic. The transnational perspective does not only emphasize transport and transfer, as McMurran claims, but it also involves the awareness of power and imperial authority. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri contend, for instance, transnationalism primarily refers to power relations that shape the new global world order: “Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order . . .” (20). Though it is true that there is no single paradigmatic nation in Anderson’s theory, as McMurran points out, but rather a multiplicity of nations and novels, his conceptual framework, despite its openness towards deconstructive readings, is influenced by a concept of modernity that remains blind to its own complicity with the imperial power.
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The fact that Anderson does not take any nation or novel as a paradigmatic example rather reflects the universalizing logic of his argument than a supposedly pluralistic standpoint. In Imagined Communities, he claims that “the structure of the old-fashioned novel” (25), which is the device for the presentation of “homogeneous, empty time,” is “typical not only of Balzac but also of any contemporary dollar-dreadful” (25). The literary critic, of course, wonders whether modernist novels, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses, can be regarded as national narratives in this theoretical framework. In The Spectre of Comparisons, published in 1998, Anderson compiles an even more eclectic list of writers: the novels of Proust, Musil, and Dostoyevsky, despite their experimentation with narrative technique, are claimed to be able to represent the nation the way Balzac’s, Zola’s, and Dickens’ novels did, for instance (334-35).7 To what extent can we call Proust’s novels “old-fashioned” (Imagined 25)? Or Dostoyevsky’s? Does the appearance of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique change the way we imagine nations? How are we to deal with postmodern novels, which question their very ability to represent extratextual reality?
One of the reasons behind this confusion is, again, the problem of periodization: relying on the concept of “the modern,” Anderson puts sentimental, realist, and modernist novels into the very same category, claiming that any of these texts has the “capacity to represent” a “bounded, intrahistorical society-with-a-future” (Spectre 334). He believes that it is only the second half of the twentieth century when these affinities between the novel and the nation became strained:
The older, rather unified world of the novel has been breaking down through a vast process of niche-marketing: the gothic novel, the crime novel, the spy novel, the pornographic novel, the science-fiction novel, the “airport” novel, and the strictly historical novel, each with its own formal conventions and audiences, which are by no means necessarily the fellow nationals of the author. (335) Anderson presumes that World War II initiated these changes;
comparing Vargas Llosa’s El Hablador (1987) to nineteenth-century “canonical novels,” he claims that the main difference between these novels lies in the fact that prior to WWII the cultural memory of violence did not have such a great impact on fiction: “There was as yet no conception that every document of civilization is at the same time a document of violence”
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(359). The source of this quotation is Benjamin’s thesis number seven, which Anderson believes Llosa’s novel exemplifies:
El Hablador . . . considers the truth of Benjamin’s paradox, taking all its terms together. One could say that it “performs” the impossibility of transcending it, as well as of escaping from it. This is, perhaps, the only way in our time that the national novel, the narrative of the nation, can properly be written, and rewritten, and rewritten. (359)
Though Anderson never draws this conclusion, his comments seem to imply that El Hablador as well as other contemporary national narratives (unlike Proust’s, Eliot’s, and Dostoyevsky’s writings) witness the crisis of modernity.
Anderson also suggests, however, that El Hablador is a narrative that is nostalgic of premodern modes of address. Comparing the main character, Saúl Zuratas, to Benjamin’s storyteller (“el hablador” literally means “the storyteller”), he argues that “[t]here is little doubt that what the author [Llosa] has in mind is the figure of the Erzahler, whom Walter Benjamin so famously counterposed to the novelist and journalist (Vargas Llosa’s two primary avocations)” (Spectre 351). Storytelling enables Saúl Zuratas to be rooted in his culture: “Becoming a hablador meant, in words that are not far from Benjamin’s, to ‘have reached the point of feeling and living the very heart of that culture; of submerging oneself in its mysteries; of penetrating to the marrow of its history and mythology, giving body to its ancestral taboos, images, desires, and terrors’” (352). Anderson believes storytelling to be related to “unofficial nationalisms” as opposed to nationalistic ideologies disseminated by states and empires and reads Saúl’s character as the embodiment of pre-modern rootedness. In other words, he regards speaking and orality as authentic and trustworthy modes of conduct, as opposed to “contaminated” cosmopolitan discourses.8 The novel itself, nevertheless, cannot live up to these expectations; it gradually becomes obvious for the reader that Saúl cannot leave the Western discourses behind on which his sense of self depends. What Anderson’s reading suggests, then, is that he has a profound nostalgia for uncontaminated expressions of national feeling, which is yet another optimistic aspect of his discourse.
Benedict Anderson’s theory of the modern nation offers an optimistic view of literature and the self, endowing both with the capacity to imagine the nation as a “bounded, intrahistorical society-with-a-future” (334). His appropriation of Benjamin’s terms is primarily due to this
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teleological world view. Since neither Anderson nor other modernist historians such as Smith and Nairn distinguish between modernity, modernité, and modernism, their writings are unable to do justice to Benjamin’s theses, which are written in, and engage with, a period that is very different from the times when the modern nation-state emerged. This does not mean, of course, that Anderson’s celebrated book did not deserve the attention it has received; I rather see these shortcomings as inevitable concomitants of truly ground-breaking cross-disciplinary research.
University of Debrecen
Notes
This research was supported by the European Union and the State of Hungary, co-financed by the European Social Fund in the framework of TÁMOP 4.2.4. A/2-11-1-2012-0001 “National Excellence Program.” The TÁMOP 4.2.1./B-09/1/KONV-2010-0007 project, implemented between September 2010 and October 2012, is related to this publication as antecedent. I am also grateful to Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study for providing access to resources while I was writing the article.
1 “Just as some groups of hunters and gatherers gave rise to agrarian society, some agrarian societies gave rise to industrial society. The shift toward modernity took place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and it originated in the countries of northwestern Europe—especially England, the Netherlands, northern France, and northern Germany” (“Modernization,” Encyclopaedia Britannica).
2 “Many historians date the rise of nations to the time of the French Revolution, which, in supplanting dynastic loyalties with the idea of popular sovereignty, transformed passive subject into active, self-governing citizens” (Hutchinson 1).
3 Similarly to Gellner, Anderson argues that nation-ness and nationalism are cultural artefacts that were created at the end of the eighteenth century: “[the nation] is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (Imagined 7).
4 This was, in fact, the conclusion of the first edition of Imagined Communities before Anderson added the chapters that reconsidered his argument concerning the modular nature of nationalism.
5 Nicholas Paige, for instance, suggests that Benjamin’s sweeping arguments are often imprecise. He points out that it is not true that the novel simply replaced earlier forms of storytelling: Dickens’s, Henry James’s, and Conrad’s writings, for instance, embed oral tales (143), while storytellers even before the advent of printing, such as Chaucer’s pilgrims, often rely on a thoroughly bookish culture and simply fail to represent authentic oral practices (145).
6 McMurran claims that Richardson insisted on Pamela’s difference from European fiction by glorifying its portrayal of the private sphere and Englishness, yet continental readers subjected the novel to satire and parody, forcing it “back into the cosmopolitan field of novels” (533). She argues that the Richardson translation crisis nonetheless shows
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the emergence of transnationality, since both “Pamela factions” were fostering the idea that the novel might be bundled up with the nation, yet this “nationness” was enabled by the relation among other nations (534).
7 “Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (which is indeed La Comédie Française), the huge oeuvre of Zola, and even that of Proust, provide us with incomparable accounts of the France of their times; the same can be said of Melville and Twain in America, Dickens, Eliot, and Lawrence in England, Mann and Musil in Germany and Austria, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Goncharov in Russia, Tanziki in Japan. This capability is still quite visible in some recent decolonized parts of Asia and Africa” (Anderson, Spectre 334-35).
8 For the discussion of orality versus print capitalism in Imagined Communities see Peter Wogan’s “Imagined Communities Reconsidered.”
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ABSTRACTS Masculinity and Nation in the Popular Fiction of the Spanish-American War: Kirk Munroe’s Forward, March! (1899) Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet In an article on early American citizenship, historian Linda Kerber points out the long-standing European tradition of linking citizenship to military service and quotes a curious toast proposed by one of the Founding Fathers’ wives in 1783: “May all our citizens be soldiers, and all our soldiers citizens.” While the immediate reference would be to the institution of a civil militia as opposed to a standing army, the conflation of citizenship with soldiering throws light on the contradictory and problematic relationship of women to national identity in an era of nation-founding and nation-building. As a number of American historians have shown (Kaplan, McClintock, Romero), this relationship continued to be fractured by contradiction and incoherence throughout the nineteenth century. The essay focuses on American nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, as it converged with issues of masculine definition and the emergent heterosexual/homosexual axis, the women’s movement, the closing of the Western frontier, and a surge of racialist and militarist enthusiasm which led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Munroe’s novel offers a useful portrait of the dynamics linking patriotism (critically related to nationalism), gender definition, and military service in this unfinished history of American imperialism. (ASM) Communities in Anonymity: The Remarkable Confidence of Modern Nations Ágnes Györke The essay explores the concept of modernity vis-a-vis the discourse of nationalism studies, primarily Benedict Anderson’s ground-breaking Imagined Communities. It discusses the various meanings implied by “modernity” and “modernism,” and investigates Walter Benjamin’s impact on the historical discourse of the modern nation, claiming that though he has been a significant inspiration for historians and social scientists, his terms are often misread. Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, for instance, which depicts a creature of ambiguous
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gender, are transformed into an affirmative vision of progress in Anderson’s text. One of the reasons, the essay contends, why the historical discourse of nationalism studies is unable to do justice to Benjamin’s terms lies in the fact that modernist historians do not take the conceptual difference between modernity and modernism into account. This very same lack of differentiation explains why Anderson endows novels produced between the eighteenth century and World War II with the capacity to evoke a ubiquitous sense of communal feeling. (ÁGY) Describing Ourselves: Identity Overlap and Fault Lines Regarding How Southerners Would Describe the South to Non-Southerners Scott H. Huffmon, Christopher N. Lawrence, and Allie Briggs Southern identity has been a topic of confusion, legend, or derision since shortly after the establishment of the original American colonies. Originally, the culture and identity of the South were defined not by southerners themselves, but by the people of the region we now describe as the “Northeast” (Cobb 2005). As history progressed, the views of the South by outsiders would range from the romantic to the gothic to the horrified. During the Civil Rights Era, southerners became especially sensitive to the perceptions of their region by outsiders. As recent research by Cooper and Knotts demonstrates perceptions of the South among non-southerners, however, has improved, and southerners often view themselves from the standpoint of conflicting identities. Miller’s findings prove that this phenomenon is especially prevalent when examining differences between blacks and whites in the South. Using a unique data set generated from a survey of one Deep South state, South Carolina, the essay explores how those living in the South would describe the South to someone who had never visited. In so doing, this research illuminates some of the overlap and schisms among groups residing in the South regarding how they view their region. (SHH, CNL, AB)
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translation, several articles of his have appeared on these authors, including “Lizards and Butterflies: Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as a Dubious Utopia” and “Cukormentes Gépnarancs: Egy disztópia három nézetben” [“A Clockwork Orange Unsweetened: Three Ways of Looking at a Dystopia”], the latter addressing the knotty issue of interpretive authority in film adaptation. He is founding member of the Hungarian James Joyce Society as well as the Hungarian Yeats Society and the Hungarian Shakespeare Committee. [[email protected]] Péter Gaál-Szabó Péter Gaál-Szabó, Associate Professor, Debrecen Reformed Theological University, published “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cultural Spaces in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (2011) and is currently working on another book concerning African American religio-cultural projection (including topoi such as co-cultural discourse, cultural memory and trauma, interculturation, as well as the sacred as cultural space). His main academic interests include the anthropology of space and place, African American literature and culture, and intercultural communication. [[email protected]] Ágnes Györke Ágnes Györke, Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, teaches courses on twentieth-century British literature, contemporary fiction, transnationalism, as well as gender and urban studies. Her research focuses on contemporary British and postcolonial literature, gender studies, theories of urban space, and migration studies. Her publications include Rushdie’s Postmodern Nations: Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses (2012) and scholarly articles on Rushdie, Martin Amis, Tibor Fischer, Monica Ali, Buchi Emecheta, and Géza Gárdonyi, theories of the (post)modern nation, and cultural studies. She has been a visiting scholar at Indiana University, a member of the doctoral support program at Central European University’s Department of Gender Studies, a Fellow at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study (2012-13), and a Zoltán Magyary Postdoctoral Fellow (2013-14). In May 2015 she became head of a research group investigating gender, migration, and urban space in transnational literature and visual culture after 1945. [[email protected]]
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