Those interested in literary realism should consider Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism for two reasons. First, you receive a dialectical reading of some of the classic literary works of the 19th century. The core chapters of the book’s first part deal with Zola, Tolstoy, Galdós, and George Eliot, and, for those of us who aren’t necessarily specialists in 19th century European literature, Jameson’s readings are a refreshing reintroduction to these authors. They’re also a compelling argument for an approach to literary realism that, rather than negatively defining the realist novel against another category of novels (the Anglo-American modernist novels of James Joyce, Faulkner, etc. commonly fill this role), works from an opposition internal to realist works. Simply put, this opposition—the antinomy of the book’s title— is between narrative and affect, and their corresponding temporalities: the past-present-future time structure of storytelling versus the “eternal affective present,” associated here with bodily experience and the presentation of scenes that momentarily suspend the chronological movement of the novel’s plot. Jameson illustrates how realist writers employed affect to chip away at the ossified narrative structures of neoclassical melodrama, characterized by sensationalism and overwrought moralizing. He then concludes with a panoramic view of how this narrative-affect interaction recurs throughout literary history: the realist tradition eventually coalesces into new narrative paradigms such as the bildungsroman or the historical novel, which are in turn broken down in modernist novels through the use of increasingly fragmented narrative forms and aesthetic techniques that defamiliarize, or make strange, the world represented in the text. The second part of The Antinomies of Realism includes a series of essays written over the course of the past decade that relate tangentially to Jameson’s work on realism. Of particular interest is his study of the historical novel from Walter Scott to the present, which charts a series of shifts in style and emphasis and concludes —rather surprisingly—with a reading of David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas as an example of the possibilities that the genre continues to offer in the present.
The second reason for reading this book is that it gives you an idea of how the concept of affect, which can be thought of as the biological portion of emotion, or as a domain of experience that falls outside cognitive processes and resists reduction to the machinations of language, can be used in the study of realist texts. 19th century realism is often regarded in terms of a proliferation of description, where the objects of the surrounding world are represented in all their (often exhausting) detail. Jameson uses affect to compellingly make sense of all that description. For example, his reading of a scene from Zola’s Le ventre de Paris, set in a musty storeroom in a dairy shop where the odors of dozens of different cheeses compete with one another, shows that it’s not just the physical presence of those objects that’s being described, but also the highly nuanced way they affect the individual who describes their presence. Jameson associates this emphasis on affective experience with the historical emergence of the bourgeois as the dominant social class in 19th century Europe, and the concomitant task of representing, in literary works, the bourgeois body and its interaction with the surrounding world. This affective turn is associated not only with literature but also with music and painting, where, respectively, the use of chromaticism, which allowed composers to creatively slip up and down an increasingly malleable continuum of tones, and the impressionist emphasis on material color and the interplay between light and objects at specific moments of the day (as in Monet’s haystacks), represent parallel attempts to capture the specific temporality of affect, where “each infinitesimal moment differentiates itself from the last by a modification of tone and an increase or diminution of intensity” (42).
I sometimes think of Fredric Jameson as the Honoré de Balzac of late 20th century cultural theory, due to both his intimidatingly voluminous textual corpus and his last-of-a-dying-breed image (replace Balzac’s conservative royalism during the July Monarchy with Jameson’s Marxism during the years leading up to, and following, the fall of the Berlin Wall). Balzac died relatively young, at 51, and one can only dream about what direction his work might have taken had he lived as long as Jameson, who will turn 80 this year. Compared to some of Jameson’s other works, this book is quite accessible: no hundred-page programmatic chapters, and a straightforward style that will make this book an enjoyable read for all of us who keep returning to the classic novels of the 19th century, both because we enjoy them and because we keep thinking about how they paved the way for the literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Matt Johnson.
Jorge Volpi ha dicho que los libros de Mario Bellatin son composiciones fotográficas o piezas para ser exhibidas en museos. Textos como Perros héroes, Las flores o Canon perpetuo así lo confirman. En sus relatos, Bellatin parece ocultar una realidad distinta y desconcertante a la que presenta en la superficie de su narrativa. En El libro uruguayo de los muertos, este impulso es llevado a su extremo. El narrador, Bellatin, pretende representar al conocido escritor Mario Bellatin. Sin decir nunca su nombre, el narrador se atribuye la autoría de Salón de Belleza (entre otros textos), la fundación de la Escuela Dinámica de Escritores y viajes por América Latina en compañía de Sergio Pitol. Estos hechos coinciden con datos biográficos del escritor mexicano-peruano, pero que se entrecruzan con otros que corresponden a la imaginación y al delirio. Mitad novela epistolar, mitad farsa literaria, el texto desciende al absurdo de la ensoñación y la mutación de personajes y sucesos. Cada anécdota es contada y recontada desde distintos puntos temporales y desde identidades cambiantes. Pero el absurdo no se desborda, se muestra tímido y contenido ante una realidad que se niega a desaparecer. Las calles, las ciudades, las personas están donde se las encuentra en la realidad pero también en la imaginación: el sueño disparatado de un niño recién convertido al Islam repite la propia experiencia del narrador como hijo, como padre y como distante observador. La trama vuelve sobre sí misma, pero ya no es trama, es un ejercicio de signos, significantes que aluden a otros significados cada vez más ambiguos. Las metáforas llevan a alegorías y éstas a analogías que señalan paradojas pero no las responden con claridad. También encontramos personajes que sueñan a otros soñando anécdotas ya contadas, viñetas tenuemente conectadas consigo mismas, copias deslavadas de recuerdos inventados.
La novela presiona el lenguaje y sus posibilidades pero no para hacerlos estallar sino para probar sus límites y con ello probar los límites del lector, interrogando así al lenguaje y dejándonos una serie de preguntas. ¿Qué clase de profesión es la de cuidador de ratas? ¿Hay un gremio de ciegos en el metro de la ciudad de México cuyo líder es también masajista-bañador de personas? ¿Cómo es que un hermano gordo rueda en lugar de caminar? ¿Por qué buscaba Sergio Pitol muñecos mecánicos en Cuba? ¿Vive Frida Kahlo vendiendo comida en un pueblo de Oaxaca? ¿Fueron los Bellatin partidarios de Mussolini autoexiliados en México? Preguntas como estas envuelven al lector. Las respuestas en su mayoría son contradictorias y se abren a la imaginación.
Las imágenes siguen siendo el lenguaje primordial de Bellatin, pero con esta publicación además intenta revertir la relación fotografía-literatura: “Pretendo, mirando las imágenes, inducir cierta escritura”. Un tono de ligereza absurda y de profunda ansiedad enmarca cada línea escrita y cada línea narrativa llevando al lector a otra dimensión del lenguaje que tanto ocupa los textos de Bellatin: el de las deformaciones y las mutilaciones físicas. Tumores, sufrimiento físico y mental, intervenciones quirúrgicas y búsquedas de alivio obligan al lector no sólo a atestiguar la crueldad y la violencia sino a acercarse al dolor humano, al consuelo que dan la amistad, el trabajo, la memoria y a las posibilidades de la imaginación.
Cristóbal Garza González.