Utopian Generations by Brown Nicholas;

Utopian Generations by Brown Nicholas;

Author:Brown, Nicholas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


PART THREE

Politics

CHAPTER SIX

The Childermass: Revolution and Reaction

In the works we have examined thus far, the absence of a concrete mediation between the subject and history has undermined the utopian impulses of the texts. In our introduction we theorized this mediation as politics, and in the novels of Wyndham Lewis (and in the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Pepetela in the next chapter) politics is the stuff of which narrative is made. For this reason the relationship to the modernist sublime—which, as we saw in the introduction, tends to be antipolitical—is attenuated, though it does reappear in what we will be calling the “embodied clichés” from which Lewis constructs his narratives. To say that Lewis’s work is explicitly political does not of course imply that the political building blocks from which these narratives are assembled or the messages that they are presumably meant to convey do not undergo unexpected transformations, reversals, and deformations as they pass into narrative. But while with Joyce or Achebe the canon of immanence is rigorously obeyed, and while the intrusion of partisan perspective into narrative (for example, in some of Ford’s less accomplished works) is generally felt to be in violation of that canon, here the narrative and thematic content is explicitly political. Lewis and Ngugi are each concerned with the construction of a political subject, a concrete mediation between the individual subject and history. In Lewis’s case, this subject is to be the so-called class of individuals, which turns out to name Lewis’s own class fraction, while Ngugi’s theater experiments are made in the name of a peasant class consciousness. Surprisingly, Lewis’s project in a certain way presupposes Ngugi’s—at least, Lewis’s own class consciousness is predicated on a reaction to the political subjectivity emerging from the working class, from racial and ethnic minorities, and from the colonies.

With Lewis we face a particularly intense version of the paradox that for Adorno was constitutive for art as such. On one hand, we know very well that an artwork is not a replica of the subject and that art escapes intention the moment it enters history. On the other, the artwork does emerge out of a subjectivity whose individuation and position within social space is given a priori and cannot simply be overleapt at will by the artist. “The situation therefore compels art . . . to undergo subjective mediation in its objective constitution. The share of subjectivity in the artwork is itself a piece of objectivity.”1 This is, of course, no solution to the paradox but only an affirmation of its constitutive character. In the case of Lewis this seeming paradox is all the more fundamental in that it is not unusual to find obvious similarities between Lewis’s published political opinions and those of his characters. Indeed, somewhat bizarrely, some of the fictional dialogue spoken by the proto-fascist Hyperidians in early drafts of The Childermass2 finds its way back into Lewis’s mouth in his nonfiction treatise Timeand Western Man.3 The objectivity of Lewis’s fiction cannot be



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