A Narrative Theory for the October Revolution (From Maugham to Benjamin and Back)

Abstract

Taking Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden as the point of departure, I analyze how the October Revolution fails to consolidate in the discourses of history and philosophy. Instead, its intellectual consolidation seems to hinge on narrative theory—a proposition implicit to Maugham’s account of the October Revolution, but also to Carl Schmitt, who suggests in Hamlet or Hecuba that explaining political modernity may be premised on a relation forged between narration and revolution. Tellingly, Walter Benjamin identifies a similar configuration in Maugham and Ashenden, with a tacit invitation to examine it against his own narrative theory (of modernity), in The Storyteller. Rather than revealing the October Revolution to be a somewhat disappointing heiress to The French Revolution and to its dazzling effect on modern history and philosophy, this examination shows that the October Revolution confronts twentieth-century modernity with the prerogatives of the English Revolution, as expounded by Schmitt, and possibly exhausts the logic of modernity and of revolution.