The Novelists’ International

Up from Culture in the Age of Three Worlds by Michael Denning

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT

We live in revolutionary times. Last week Jeremy Corbyn’s new social democrat party gained half a million followers by email in merely its first three days of existence which is a list larger than the membership of any political party in England. The party is reformist but a novel development of the left that is attracting a lot of revolutionary zeal.

Meanwhile, in America as elsewhere, the right-wing populists want a fascist revolution (or they think they do) — the progressive populists want a social democrat revolution — the socialists want a socialist revolution — the Greens want a green revolution — the anarchists are always pushing for wholesale change. All these forces have come to a head in America and beyond. If not Bernie and AOC and the progressive populists, then Trump and the right wing populists, and vice versa. The establishment neoliberals in America had a last-gasp (hopefully) with Biden, relying heavily on Bernie and the progressive populists to hold off the reactionaries for a brief moment. Going forward, the establishment — whether Trumpist fascists or conservatives or neoliberals — thumps along by way of its endless money and material resources, while having less and less meaningful popular support.

The plutocracy that rules America (and much of the world) is happy to oblige the fascists and conservatives and the austerity liberals and no one else. This is simply because the plutocracy operates by tyranny and force, the corporate and financial tyranny that hammers a big military-police stick while mobilizing bigotry and ignorance, deceit and anti-intellectualism to divide the people. While the existing plutocracy is comfortably fascist against the needs of the people, in the plutocracy’s more liberal and somewhat less thuggish phase and forms, it goes by the name neoliberal, which is simply austerity politics plus a bit of social welfare — either way you impoverish the masses to enrich the plutocrats. Today’s fascism is the devolution of neoliberal austerity politics to increasingly bigoted and thuggish and impoverishing ends, though both neoliberalism and fascism are bigoted and thuggish.

Sane and knowledgeable people reject it all. With the rise of the people’s media, which is social media at its best, Revolutionary thinking and emoting spreads all over the place, including, seemingly, into some corporate mass culture, especially in graphic and movie form and other types of speculative and fantastical fiction, though this mock liberatory culture is strongly coded as revolution for somewhere far, far away, not for here (wherever you may be).

Corporate fake revolutionary culture is designed to be vague and indirect from the material realities and systems and figures of today, with some exceptions that prove the rule. Establishment culture sanctioned by the plutocracy is desperately pitched to be pervasive and marginally human or inhuman — entertainment and escape that appeals superficially or privately — rather than fully human and truly revolutionary — agitation and engagement that entices wholly and socially.

Meanwhile, contemporary novels continue to largely portray depoliticized “me” and “us” passion plays, also marginally political or apolitical, zooming in on identity of character and audience. Look at this plucky creature, how they persevere. Look at us plucky kin of a kind, how we get through. Look at that evil fellow, how he comes down, stubbornly and miserably so. The problem isn’t with the exploration of identities, the problem is using identity to obscure the scope and depth of the civil war raging through the whole world both without and within the billionaire bubble that has captured, destroyed, and overheated planet Earth and all its peoples and creatures — those more persecuted and vulnerable worse than others.

So what stage of culture and literature are we in today? Necessarily a revolutionary one — which is the only way out of fascism and neoliberalism, the only way out from the extractive iron banks and exploding missiles and bullets of the plutocracy. Green, socialist, and progressive populist forces of democracy must unify and overwhelm to defeat the militant pillaging plutocracy.

That’s where we are politically and in culture. So what tools do we have to work with for creating this new revolutionary culture? It might help to take a look at the cultures the world has been caught up in for the past century — much of that during the cold war. This is what Michael Denning does in “The Novelists’ International,” Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). The three worlds of the cold war era are the Euro-American bloc, the Soviet bloc, and the global South — “decolonized and developing” countries.

In the long excerpts below, Denning focuses on what might be thought of as an increasingly populist social realism morphing into magical realism through and beyond the twentieth century. Picking up after Denning’s overview, only the revolutionary holds promise going forward, and the only way to get there is with the combined energies of the left — the progressive populists, the greens, the socialists and so on, always moving toward a unified popular left international that Denning depicts in struggle for human rights and democracy everywhere.

In the middle of the age of three worlds (1945-1989), the novel looked dead, exhausted. In the capitalist First World, it was reduced to increasingly arid formalisms alongside an industry of formulaic genre fictions. In the Communist Second World, the official conventions of socialist realism were ritualized into a form of didactic popular literature. Into the freeze of this literary cold war erupted Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967), the first international bestseller from Latin America and perhaps the most influential novel of the last third of the twentieth century. In its wake, a new sense of a world novel emerged, with Cien años de soledad as its avatar, the Third World as its home, and a vaguely defined magical realism as its aesthetic rubric.

Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted. There is, however, a historical truth to the sense that there are links between writers who now constitute the emerging canon of the world novel – writers as unalike as García Márquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadime Gordimer, José Saramago, Paule Marshall, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer – for the work of each has roots in the remarkable international literary movement that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century under the slogans of “proletarian literature,” “neorealism,” and “progressive,” “engaged,” or “committed” writing…. And though the novelists of this movement were deeply influenced by the experimental modernisms of the early decades of the century, they rarely fit into the canonical genealogies of Western modernism and postmodernism. Though the royalties were small, the writers not all proletarians, and the audience often more a promise than a reality, the movement transformed the history of the novel. By imagining an international of novelists, it reshaped the geography of the novel. It enfranchised a generation of writers, often of plebeian backgrounds, and it was the first self-conscious attempt to create a world literature. From Maxim Gorky to Gabriel García Márquez, from Lu Xun to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Richard Wright to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, from Patrícia Galvão to Isabel Allende: the novelists’ international spans the globe and the century….

The turning point was the world upheaval of 1917-1921. In the wake of the European slaughter, regimes and empires were challenged: there were revolutions in Czarist Russia and Mexico, brief lived socialist republics in Germany, Hungary and Persia, uprisings against colonialism in Ireland, India, and China, and massive strike waves and factory occupations in Japan, Italy, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and the United States. The “imaginative proximity of social revolution” electrified a generation of young writers who came together in a variety of revolutionary and proletarian writers’ groups….

Their books were experiments in form, attempts to reshape the novel. Several challenges immediately presented themselves: the attempt to represent working-class life in a genre that had developed as the quintessential narrator of bourgeois or middle-class manners, kin structures, and social circles; the attempt to represent a collective subject in a form built around the interior life of the individual; the attempt to create a public, agitational work in a form which, unlike drama, depended on private, often domestic, consumption; and the attempt to create a vision of revolutionary social change in a form almost inherently committed to the solidity of society and history. The early novels are often awkward and un-novelistic….

The worldwide migration from country to city was one of the central historical events of the age of three worlds…“the death of the peasantry”…. Out of the clash of peasant and proletarian worlds came the most powerful new form to emerge from the proletarian literary movements: magical or marvelous realism. Though magical realism is often considered as a successor and antagonist to social realism, its roots lay in the left-wing writers’ movements….

[Magical realism’s] insistence on the specific reality of the colonized world at the moment of liberation in India, Indonesia, and China, a moment that finds its historical precursor not in the French Revolution (as the Bolsheviks did) but in the Haitian Revolution.

If this is true, one can see why the notion of magical realism resonates far beyond the Caribbean islands and coasts where it began. The term comes to represent a larger shift in the aesthetic of the novelists’ international, from the powerful censoring of desire in the early novels (the works of the epoch of worldwide depression are novels of lack and hunger, and the utopian novel is rare) to an unleashing of desire and utopia, foreshadowing the liberation ideologies of the New Left. This is why it is common to see magical realism as the antithesis of an earlier social realism….

Magical realism finds its most celebrated avatar in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. The 1967 novel, part of the celebrated boom in Latin American fiction, came to stand for the moment of Third World hopefulness in the wake of decolonization…[yet] Cien años de soledad stands as both a sign of the crisis in the literary desire to represent workers that had animated a generation of plebian writers and as an attempt to bear witness to that desire. [The results are mixed at best, and] …nearly a century after the first calls for an international proletarian literature and socialist realism, that desire seems not only defeated, but nonexistent and unimaginable. Yet like the strike story in Cien años de soledad, the aspirations and aesthetics of the novelists’ international remain the forgotten, repressed history behind the contemporary globalization of the novel.

As Andrew Seal notes, Denning argues further that:

rather than a “successor and antagonist to social realism,” magical realism is best seen as “a second stage of the proletarian avant-garde: if the first moment in the wake of the upheavals of 1917-1919 was dominated by a paradoxically ahistorical modernism that tried to document the lived experience of radically new factory and tenement… the magical realism of 1949 [the year Alejo Carpentier published El reino de este mundo—The Kingdom of This World, the preface of which introduced the term “lo real maravilloso,” the marvelous real] is the return of the repressed history” of the deeper traumas of “a history of conquest, enslavement, and colonization.”

This half-mythic past’s return unexpectedly resulted in the “unleashing of desire and utopia” most associated with magical realism, although the general interpretation of that release is highly depoliticized and given little or no context, political or otherwise. “World literature” sells best when shorn of its history of radical sympathies and stances. It sells a whole lot better if “the unleashing of desire and utopia” gets re-coded as simple tropical vitality.

Seal asks further:

Finally, whither the Left? Engaged leftist writers are, as Michael Denning among others has shown, considerably more transnational and transnationalizable. The special harmony of pursuing similar projects under vastly different conditions encourages comparative reading and vigorous response. If America produces a vibrant artistic Left in the coming years, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about being read all around the world.

While plutocrat dominance of world markets ensures that tsunamis of status quo and reactionary literature and art continue to deluge the world, more liberatory circles seek left fiction. Outside of left fiction now, outside of revolutionary fiction and culture, works of art often come off as done and dead or strangely ahistorical, mistaking or missing the times, unhistorical, oblivious to the living world — especially when a lot of arevolutionary society and life are included.

The arevolutionary lit of today entirely mistakes — often on purpose when not unwittingly brainwashed or negligent and uncaring — the most vital realities and possibilities of the time and of the human condition. Meanwhile oblivious unrevolutionary lit seems quaint and played out, weak, at best — whether magical realist, social realist, or fantastical and speculative.

Unify, unify, unify, the green and the socialist, the social democratic and the populist into the revolutionary against the predatory fascist and neo-liberal establishment of the plutocracy — that’s the need in art, culture, politics, and society.

We live on a scale of freedom to tyranny — left to right — diversity to bigotry — left to right — resistance to oppression — left to right — the generous to the predatory — left to right — the convivial to the violent — left to right — the people to the plutocrats — left to right — the humane to the monstrous — left to right — the revolutionary to the reactionary — left to right, and on and on. Our literature and culture and society and planet must revolutionize away from the right to the left or perish in increasingly grotesque ways until the ultimate end.

It’s human rights and people versus profiteering and money — left to right — and when so much money and material resources are stolen and weaponized by the right, only a revolution, a series of revolutions can recreate a world in the image of the ideals found on the left and away from the horrors found on the right. Any political scale that fails to range from the ideal to the horrific is deceptive. Any culture and art that thinks it cannot be categorized on a scale of left to right, sometimes in surprising ways, is clueless or mistaken, often willfully so.

If you’re going to write in the veins of classic social realism or magical realism or Utopian speculation and the fantastical, then make it revolutionary for high value and great ambition. And make it materially revolutionary, not vaguely, obliquely, and altogether out of grasp. Bring it on home into the revolutionary international culture of the time. The time demands it. Otherwise, a literature and culture will continue that abides genocide, ecocide, omnicide.

Imagine a flood of revolutionary art, story, and culture through the magazines and presses and websites and other media and spaces of the age, rather than the arevolutionary slices of life and infatuations of living mainly oblivious to the death cult that is society today. The omnicidal Anthropocene threatens and increasingly promises to make this era the final one of all. However big and bold we think we can be as artists or people in general, we need to imagine more, and create it, revolutionary change. We need to do this before everything blows up and collapses even more than we already see, the ongoing needless horrors of history that implicate us as we bear witness.

The left needs to start appealing to people’s hunger for hope and attraction to fantasy life. What’s more, says [NYU media and culture professor] Stephen Duncombe, they have to let go of the belief—“naive at best, arrogant at worst”—that intellectual arguments should be enough to win people over, and that spectacle, as the Bush administration employs it, is something to which they shouldn’t have to resort, a tawdry means to an end.

Anticipating “MAGA” Trump and the Bernie “Revolution,” Duncombe’s perception made during the previous Republican administration, that of 9-11 and the American invasion of Iraq, indicates that culture helps drive and allow policy — whether as mask or revelation — whether in the interests of the pillaging plutocracy and their piles of gold or in the interests of the people’s needs and the planet.

We need a culture and an art full of people’s revolutionaries to displace the endless line of cowboy predators in white empire who make America genocidal ever again. We need to create a revolutionary culture that forces popular and brave but too often limited and mistaken progressive leaders like Bernie and AOC to step up with the most powerful revolutionary forces and fronts needed to change the world, in the most powerful ways, to the most constructive ends. By now and long since these imperative forces and fronts of culture must be necessarily more than reformist, liberal, and populist, they must be revolutionary.

That means rupture, breaking from the old ways of being and doing. Jeremy Corbyn’s new party in England is a start. It needs to go farther than is currently being imagined. Something akin is ripe to occur in American politics too. And in American culture something new must also break through.

POST VIA LIBERATION LIT