Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English, Film Studies, and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. His books include Imaginary States (2003), Oscillate Wildly (1999), and Dialogics of the Oppressed (1993).

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THE LONG SPACE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................xiAbbreviations of Frequently Cited Titles of Works.....................xiii1. The Long Space.....................................................12. The Language of Form...............................................443. The Exotopy of Place...............................................904. Meanwhile, on Buru.................................................1405. This Quartet Which Is Not One......................................207Notes.................................................................257Index.................................................................291

Chapter One

Time has more than one writing system. —Henri Lefebvre

In a poignant sequence in Jalan Raya Pos (The Great Post Road, 1996), a documentary about Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the writer lights a kretek cigarette and takes out the trash. It is refuse that contains sheets of manuscript, testimony to the scourge of writer's block. Pramoedya goes into his backyard and over to a pile of rubbish. He empties out the bin, then delicately arranges the papers before setting light to them. It is another day in the life of Indonesia's most celebrated writer, then under a form of urban arrest—a time and place seemingly outside the busy intensity of interpretation and yet a chronotope deeply inscribed in the contemporary world (of letters, of globalization, of intellectual engagement, of postcoloniality as an open parenthesis on decolonization). For what is this scene if not one that passes by while what has passed by has an obtuse purchase on the present, one that allows this tableau to drift while hermeneutics remains secure in its operative logic, concrete or abstract, anglophone or at least European, translating time into space when the former fosters someone else's agency? The author watches the manuscript burn in the knowledge that he too has been part of this delenda, but survived.

Such living on (sur-vivre in the Derridean sense) offers a vital polemic: it is a measure of persistence, determination, endurance, and the meaning of a specific time/space in transnational literature. It is out of place and time, perhaps, to invoke time as significant for postcolonial writing within globalization. Yet however we choose to ground transnational cultural relations, it remains the arena in which one hails writers, including Pramoedya, within the reach of circulation on "this Earth of mankind" (or what Erich Auerbach once provocatively termed irdischen Welt). Asserting that Pramoedya and three other writers—Wilson Harris, Nuruddin Farah, and Assia Djebar, the focus of this study—are largely out of step with a postmodern global episteme is not the point, for they are equally if not more discontinuous with each other, and deliberately so from my perspective. The persistence relates to an alternative understanding of narration, a logic of form not simply outside world literature, the world republic of letters, global comparatism, or normative transnationalism. If this argument partakes of a current time of crisis, it is through a crisis in time, material contradictions embedded in the unfinished business of ending empire. Writing takes time, but in transnational trilogies and tetralogies, duration in dynamic place is a crucial chronotope of decolonization, one that must claim time differently to narrate the fraught space between more obvious signposts like Bretton Woods and Bandung. Reading takes time too, and these extended narratives accentuate time's purchase on their comprehension. All extended narrative does this, but the long space is bound to the concrete predicaments of postcolonial narration as transnational critique.

I locate the long space in the extended novel of postcoloniality beside itself. A relatively narrow approach—and one that often relies on theoretically inspired close reading—it will, however, substantiate some broad materialist claims. If they are not a horizon of the literary and the social, or culture and society, these claims yet form an almacantar by which their current constellation may be judged. The polemic is occasioned primarily by the event of reading inspiring fiction, but also by the manner in which they speak to several key issues of cultural debate: world literature and how it may be determined; the links and breaks between the terms postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalism; the noncoincidence between literary institutions and the literary; the meaning of form for postcolonialism; the at-once vexed relationship of the novel to nation formation in postcolonial states; postcolonialism as other than the luxury of Western or Westernized cultural elites; critical transnationalism as an interruption of the logic of information retrieval in global circuits of knowledge and power; and the event of colonialism as not historically settled. This is not just a list but an itinerary, and one that cannot rest easy with the mantra that culture is the preeminent form of politics in our time and that when we feel global we participate ineluctably in wresting freedom from the crushing realm of necessity. One cannot negotiate these challenges as if yet another Western critic, by checking off a list, is freed from the privileges of power that produce that subject position. The measure of the itinerary is the polemic it fosters that will deploy the long space as the organizing trope for disputation among them. Indeed, the complex register of the long space is the means to argue beyond the realm of propositional faith that Wilson Harris extravagantly terms "numinous inexactitudes." I cannot leave the long space there, although Harris is most at home in shamanic indeterminacy.

Extended novels are coterminous with the history of the novel, and merely to note extension would require an analysis no less voluminous, a critique that would include the novelization of epic, the consonance of seriality with the commodification of the publishing industry, the related phenomenon of the emergence of the leisured reading class, and an irrepressible will to universalism requiring a dedication to expanded capacity in order to scale its desire. No formula can capture the difference of Remembrance of Things Past, The Lord of the Rings, The Pallisers, Cities of Salt, USA, Journey to the West, Don Quixote, Clarissa, and so on and so forth, although a few formulas, such as the one which says that narration might cheat the brutish brevity of being human, are as unsurprising as they are insufficient. That the philosophy of the novel so often suspends engagement with the extended narrative form acknowledges such pervasiveness only to underline that elemental persistence is as everyday as it is a bar on substantive theorization.

Because this argument is about a logic of form for which the long space is a shorthand, I wish the following to refract the nature of the extended transnational narration to be discussed later. Provisionally, I offer three propositions gathered by a fourth. These concern institution, world literature, nation, and chronotope. I will explain each one briefly in terms of the itinerary, then in more detail around the meaning of the long space for the project as a whole. While accepting Jameson's admonition to always historicize, that historicity now must face the prospect—also marked by Jameson—of an end to temporality, one that would truncate the continuing work of decolonization. Fortunately, at the macropolitical level the supposed inevitabilities of globalization are being sharply rethought, and important questions are challenging the forms of socialization on offer in the neoliberal world beyond Cold War inertia. None of these oppositional discourses carry guarantees or deadlines, and in that spirit the long in my title refers also to future persistence, a mode of engagement more extensive than the exigencies of the present and a level of commitment consonant with the task of facing the enduring facility for exploitation in global integration. The formation of form is that which is most protracted and conjures all kinds of mixed temporalities, aesthetic registers, sharp contradictions, and poignant revisions like this comment by Jameson: "the momentous event of decolonization ... is a fundamental determinant of postmodernity." To fathom the time of form I offer the following.

First, if we can accept Mikhail Bakhtin's sense that chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied, is this specific to postcolonial writing and how? Chronotope is not any old coordinate of time and space but that figural semantic process allowing narration to proceed to form. In every space of postcoloniality, marked by nation or locale, movement or embeddedness, inscription or orality, culture refracts duration: not just that colonialism was endured, but that its figures of time did not absolutely displace or dismantle local forms of temporality. The transnational chronotope does not contend that time's arrow, a dubious chronologism of "post" as "after" in postcolonialism, confirms the end of colonialism, but rather accentuates the distillation of specific coordinates in its moment (or a process of moments for which I use the term eventness). The transnational aspect is a level of interdependency, and indeed in correlating colonialism and postcolonialism the long space is interdependency as extension. Since there is little uniformity in colonialism or decolonization, one should mark this difference by writing chronotopes, a multiplicity more accurately reflecting the contrasts between say, the decolonizing expressions of Somalia and Guyana, Algeria and Indonesia, and indeed between writers and the nations by which they are "tagged" (Farah currently lives in South Africa, Harris in England, Djebar in France and the United States; Pramoedya lived most of his life in Indonesia). Yet it is possible to acknowledge the uniqueness of event that specifies the break from colonial dominion in each instance, while positing a logic of chronotope for all. The weakness of Bakhtin's formulation emerges from the tendency to read "knots" as content markers sui generis rather than as abstractions on the means of time/space at stake. The lure of content is unavoidable and I succumb to it without apology. The aim, however, is something more ambitious, which is to take chronotope as a constitutive problem of transnational narration, a knot that is a key to the ways through which postcoloniality can be expressed. While the long space is not exactly a writing system of time in Lefebvre's sense, it nevertheless takes time seriously enough to elaborate its purchase on being in the world. One must be able to imagine history in order to change it.

Second, because this study draws on transnational literature from Guyana, Somalia, Indonesia, and Algeria, I am attempting to ask some questions of the resurgent category of "world literature." The paradigm of the long space indicates unfinished business in decolonization that constitutes a problem in resuscitating Goethe's original declaration to Eckermann in 1827: "National literature is no longer of importance, it is the time for world literature, and all must aid in bringing it about." What concept of time is at stake in world literature's effulgence and, indeed, what sense of "world" that accompanies it? Does not world literature return on the wings of globalization and is it freely interpreted at the very moment when temporality is drained from its inclusive magnanimity? "World" offers the imprimatur of transnationalism as that which is beyond nation and its suffocating prescriptions. It is the passport with copious stamps and extra pages; the ward of book covers with exotic names and palm fronds; the impress of a massive translation machine sufficient to convert there to here in hardback, paperback, or digital download; the substantive component that, once grasped, relieves one from the agony of parochial discernment. And, most important, the world in world literature is studiously neutral and requires no further qualification: it is the twenty-first-century ghost of nineteenth-century aestheticism that at once announces the best that has been thought and said. Indeed, for all the assumed neutrality, world literature has the drab hierarchization of petty-bourgeois desire. At the very least it allows one to consume postcolonialism without that nasty taste of social struggle in which a reader's own cosmopolitanism may be at stake. If all of Goethe's pronouncements were mysteriously lost, the term world literature would still have to be invented for it is dialectically bound to the inevitabilities of commodification in which all that is solid not only melts into air but is globally circulated.

Franco Moretti has rightly emphasized that "world literature is not an object, it's a problem" and one that he has approached, somewhat controversially, through world systems analysis, geometric design, and statistical chunking. He favors a notion of long as distance (as in distant reading) rather than as duration, a novel solution to the forbidding difficulty, and quantity, of worlds of difference that tends to suspend the issue of strife in accumulation on a world scale for, well, accumulation on a world scale. This is a simplification of the nuance Moretti provides, although perhaps no more reductive than the tabulations of Graphs, Maps, and Trees. The long space is not just "a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures" in the manner of Moretti's world literature, but a specific world of time that does not exclude the strategic value of nation in global endeavors, negatively in nationalism's role in territorial expansion and positively in national delinking from a world of imperial inclusivity. World literature is set as a task not as a statistical formula, a thorn that is the oneiric function of the long space in a transnationalism otherwise eliding postcoloniality.

Our third keyword and corresponding thesis concerns nation. Nation seems like the anachronism of anachronisms: it parades its habitual out-of-timeness by raising flags in the face of transnationalism, regionalism, economic and political blocs, and continental integrity. But it does this in both senses of the phrase "raising flags"; it celebrates its longevity in the ritual of nationalistic display while also serving as a warning to all those who believe its fictive assemblage somehow negates the material substance of its collectivity. It is ironic that Renan's 1882 lecture "What Is a Nation?" carries a pointed admonition on the necessity of forgetting to achieve national polity when this amnesia is artfully produced by postnational arguments. Assia Djebar, while wary of any nation idea, particularly as it writes Algerian woman, uses anamnesis to rethink nation rather than fold it back into its prechoate possibility in colonialism. The ambivalence of nation trembles in postcolonial writing, a flag of eventness that must be studied for its unique process and not simply as the failed-state syndrome ideologically serving state dependency or neocolonialism. Rather than jettison the nation idea, it is more useful to consider its ideologies and strategic interests on a case-by-case basis, particularly when specific nation formations have clearly stood for liberation from colonial subjugation. The fictive corollary in Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" thesis is not a measure of truth versus falsehood but imagination's claims on collectivity, whose fungibility is understood from Anderson's readings of Asian politics and literature, through the Philippines and José Rizal, and Indonesia and Pramoedya. In the conceptual oscillation between Anderson's insights on the nation/colonial nexus and the "spectral comparison," a paradigm of transnationalism can be articulated, one whose coordinates trace nation narration as possibility in the trilogies and tetralogies I consider. Literary criticism's major flaw in reading Anderson is to offer him as a literary critic and thereby freely indulge in constructing literary homologies from his grammar of nations. Anderson's facility in languages certainly informs a literariness, but the criticism itself concerns nations and formations of state however deft his choice of literary examples. The result has been an aestheticizing of government structures and histories at some distance from the politics of reading Anderson employs. No doubt I am guilty of this "translation," but on the whole my invocation of nation begins from its fully material manifestation in decolonization and its determinate facility for the long space. The long space says that nations need time ("generations" says Balibar), and even if the novel, or the seriality of novels, cannot tell time in quite the same way, extended postcolonial fiction comes closest to figuring the nation's abstract expression: it is coextensive with nation ontology as an abstraction.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE LONG SPACEby Peter Hitchcock Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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