Novelistic Tradition Research Articles

The Literary World of the North African Taghrība

Abstract The novels by North African novelists Waciny Laredj, Majid Toubia and Abdelrahim Lahbibi that refashioned the traditional Arabic genre of the taghrība inspired by the medieval epic of Taghrība of Banū Hilāl, still a living oral tradition in the region, offer an interesting case study of location in world literature. They circulate both within national (Algerian, Egyptian and Moroccan) literary systems and the pan-Arab literary field while maintaining a distinct aesthetic and political locality. In these novels, the literary life of the North African taghrība takes forms and meanings that are geographically and historically located, and that are shaped by the positionality of the authors. This paper intervenes in the discussion on location in world literature from the perspective of Arabic novelistic traditions by showing that the pan-Arabic literary field itself is far from homogenous but is marked by a diversity of narrative styles and techniques that can be both local/localised and transregional at the same time. Therefore, we need to shift our understanding of world literature beyond macro-models of “world-system” that assume a universally-shared set of literary values and tastes.

사회학의 소설적 전통

사회학의 소설적 전통

Grigoryan , Bella Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (review)

REVIEWS 347 place in all libraries that have a place for books about Jewish life including antisemitism, and the literature and history of Belarus. London Arnold McMillin Grigoryan, Bella. Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762– 1861. Studies of the Harriman Institute. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2018. ix + 189 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 (paperback). Starting with discussion of reflections by the youthful Lev Tolstoi on the Instruction produced by Catherine II for the Legislative Commission she convoked in 1767, Bella Grigoryan considers the evolution of Russian ideas about the relationship between the nobility and the autocratic state over the century between Catherine’s accession to the throne in 1762 and the abolition of serfdom in 1861. She links this evolution to the gradual emergence of the Russian novelistic tradition, aiming in the process to ‘chart and interpret the rise of the Russian novel in relation to the political, legal, and cultural definitions that accrued to the nobility as a social estate’ (p. 4). This endeavour entails study of the interplay, in various cross-pollinating forms of writing, between the notions of subject and citizen and of the search for definitions of noble identity with which, Grigoryan rightly contends, many Russian writers were preoccupied. It is a corollary of the author’s findings that imperial Russia suffered less than has often been supposed from the relative underdevelopment of a civil public sphere. Certain ‘institutional cores’ of Russian civil society (p. 9), such as the press, the gentleman’s club, the noble assembly, voluntary associations and indeed imaginative literature, she maintains, were less at odds with the polity than much historiography on the Russian intelligentsia leads us to believe. Grigoryan provides a dense introductory chapter in which she examines the development of the nobleman’s sense of himself as gentleman farmer as this concept emerged in the pages of Novikov’s satirical journals and in writings by Fedor Rostopchin, Andrei Bolotov, Nikolai Karamzin and others. She also helpfully explores here the use of the letter as both a private genre and a tool for the ‘rhetorical construction of a public’ (p. 17). There follow chapters devoted to unfinished short prose works by Alexander Pushkin, including his novel Dubrovskii, Faddei Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (1829), Nikolai Gogol´’s Dead Souls (especially its incomplete second part), Ivan Goncharov’s three novels, A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859) and The Precipice (1869), and Sergei Aksakov’s nostalgic Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson (1858). A place is SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 348 also found in the conclusion for brief discussion of Anna Karenina (1875–77), where Tolstoi paints, in his character Levin, what is perhaps the definitive portrait of the landowner who retires to the gentry’s private rural world. The diverse texts Grigoryan considers, which range from works of prose fiction to examples of non-fictional prose such as manuals on agriculture, conduct and housekeeping, respond to the insecurity of noble rights and status in autocratic Russia. They reflect the cultural anxieties of the nobleman who does not formally serve the state, after the emancipation of the nobility by Peter III in 1762, but who still feels a patriotic obligation to be of use. This sense of duty finds expression in the landowner’s performance of the role of manager of an ancestral estate. (Grigoryan makes it clear that it is the male landowner she is dealing with, not the noblewoman, who frequently did manage the family estate but whose social identity was not so closely bound up with this role.) The landowner might wonder whether nobility was an innate characteristic or a ‘set of qualities’ that could be ‘acquired, learned and cultivated, or performed’ (p. 48). Up to a point, he was ‘a man created by the public discourse of the epoch’ (p. 66). Thus, in the prose of the period in question, Grigoryan argues, the notion of noble identity in its various ‘iterations’ was ‘novelized’. Given the productivity of Russia’s classical prose writers and the breadth and depth of their engagement with social and political issues, selection of texts to study is bound to present difficulties. Grigoryan’s focus on a small number of...

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, edited by Waïl Hassan

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, edited by Waïl Hassan

Volksepos und Geheimwissen in V. Odoevskijs ErzählungSalamandra

SummaryVladimir Odoevsky’s storySalamandracombines the knowledge of sources from two different traditions—Finnish mythology (the Kalevala) and alchemical treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They meet in the motif of the Sampo that is interpreted by Odoevsky as a mythological version of the alchemical vessel. Odoevsky thus perceives the mythological text as a source for spiritual knowledge. He connects the mythological sources with the literary tradition of novels and short stories on elementaries.

History’s Flagstones: Nuruddin Farah and Other Literary Responses to Italian Imperialism in East Africa

In this essay I revisit Nuruddin Farah and argue for the importance of reading his work in conversation with the work of so-called second-generation Italian migrant writers like Igiaba Scego, Ubax Ali Cristina Farah, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, and Gabriella Ghermandi. I present an argument for viewing these writers as part of a transnational and translinguistic tradition of novel writing which responds to Italian imperialism in the Horn of Africa both during the colonial and neo-colonial periods. Nuruddin Farah's internationally acclaimed voice is part of a multilingual diasporic postcolonial tradition with an urgent ethic of remembrance and redress focused on Italian colonial discourses and the history and stories of the victims of Italian imperialism. This is an element of his work which has been seen as peripheral in Farah scholarship in the English-speaking Academy, while Italian scholars have noticed Farah's links with Italy but failed to recognize their importance or draw his work in a meaningful way into studies of Italian postcolonial literature. This state of affairs arises out of a failure to take a transnational and translinguistic view of what is essentially a novelistic tradition born in exile. This essay cannot pretend to be a comprehensive comparative reading of these writers; instead, it presents an argument for the urgency of such a reading. I show that Nuruddin Farah, despite his choice to write in English, is one of the most important contributors to the tradition of postcolonial Italian literature. I understand this to be not a national literature that is necessarily written in Italian, as has traditionally been the case, but rather as literature that contributes towards, to use Ato Quayson's terms, postcolonializing the Italian cultural sphere.

Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee

Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee

Narrative and Lyrical Elements in International Investment Agreements: Towards an Imagination-Inspired Understanding of International Legal Obligations

This article applies literary analysis to the unconventional subject of International Investment Agreements (IIAs), treating these sources of international law as if they were works of fiction with a view to uncovering insights into how they might be received by their readers. It proposes that IIAs may be imaginatively appreciated both for their narrative features (their capacity to tell stories in the tradition of novels or plays) as well as their lyrical ones (their poetic or figurative elements). Rather than leading to any concrete conclusions concerning how IIAs may have been misunderstood because of readers’ neglect of these instruments’ literariness or how they should thereby be construed going forward, the article calls upon readers of IIAs to be more aware of the feelings which these instruments might inspire, much as we would expect from novels or poems. This could in turn enhance our understanding of these treaties are be viewed by the legal practitioners who draft and interpret them as well as the people whose rights they affect.

‘Half Sign, Half Ad’: Literary and Commercial Functions of Paratextual and In-Text Titles in the Novels of Pietro Chiari

This article builds on studies by Claude Duchet and Franco Moretti on the function of novel titles as literary and commercial signifiers, but argues that the scope needs to be extended further, to what we may call paratextual and in-text titles: book titles that appear in prefaces and within novel texts. The article examines a set of novels written by Pietro Chiari (1712-1785) that makes use of such title references. In the early stages of his novel production, Chiari mobilised French and British novel titles in an appropriation of these novelistic traditions. The Brescian writer then gradually abandoned the project of appropriation and began to reference only his own titles. Thus, the use of paratextual and in-text titles primarily took on an advertisement function. The article argues that these title references are embedded into a marketing strategy based on establishing a serial aspect to Chiari’s novels.

Political Topicality and Literary Aesthetics in Wale Okediran’s Novels

The prolificity, contemporaneity, and topicality of Wale Okediran’s themes are irrefutable indices to his claim to a place in the Nigerian literary canon. His engagement with and exposé of Nigeria’s intractable neurotic leadership disorders are timely and highly commendable. Also worthy of note are the promotion and popularity that the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) has given his latest novel, Tenants of the House, as it fills a significant gap and promises a positive turn in the development of Nigerian literature. This essay examines Okediran’s topical themes in relation to his craftsmanship; it investigates his deployment of aesthetic devices in the realization of his artistic vision. It fundamentally asks: what constitutes literariness in Okediran’s novels? Where does this belong in the Nigerian tradition of the novel? If it marks a shift from the conventional novelistic tradition, in what ways does it advance it? Considering that Okediran is one of Nigeria’s most prolific contemporary writers, it is important to determine his place in the Nigerian canon and also to analyse critically the factors responsible for that position.

Utopian Passport Control

The argument presented in this article addresses a conflict that is fundamental to the eighteenth‐century transformation of the novel namely that between the mobility restrictions imposed by the modern state and the novel's traditional dependency on the free mobility of its characters. J. G. Schnabel's Insel Felsenburg is a striking literary manifestation of this conflict. As I argue, the narrative logic of this voluminous and somewhat bizarre novel can only be fully appreciated when taking into account its complex negotiations of mobility and movement control. Marking the confluence of two novelistic traditions, the utopian novel and the adventure novel, it is equally reliant on the settledness and the nomadism of its central characters, the former being the precondition for social order, the latter the basis for the novel's narrative momentum. The structure of the novel results from an attempt to resolve this conflict by channelling mobility into politically and morally acceptable paths – that is, by inventing a literary movement control regime.

Ideas and embodied souls: Platonic and Christian intertexts in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and The Childhood of Jesus

Both J.M. Coetzee’s latest narrative work, The Childhood of Jesus, and his collection of fictionalised lectures Elizabeth Costello have been described as philosophical debates staged in fiction. Along with references to various novelistic traditions, these works do in fact display more or less explicit Platonic intertexts that criticism does not often take into account. Platonic dialogism intertwines blatantly with Christian references from the Gospels in The Childhood of Jesus; a closer look at Elizabeth Costello reveals similar features. The author’s analysis aims at exploring this intertextual intersection between novelistic traditions, Christian references and echoes of Plato from different theoretical points of view – most notably, recent ‘Bakhtinian’ developments in Plato studies.

Editor's Introduction: Archives and Alchemical Wills

Editor’s Introduction:Archives and Alchemical Wills Robert L. Caserio As I arranged the sequence of this issue’s table of contents, it struck me that Eric Keenaghan’s review essay sounded a keynote for all the items in the collection. I have adapted his title in order to suggest an underlying unity in jml 39.3. “The archive” represents for Keenaghan the historical site and the source material out of which an artist’s creative vision grows; and “the alchemical will” denominates an artist’s means of transforming and transcending that origin. In the scholarship that Keenaghan assesses, he finds evidence of the fit between art’s sources and their creative outcomes, and he also finds evidence of the lack of fit. The result is a tension in art and in criticism that our essayists repeatedly reveal. This tension is revealed in Greg Barnhisel’s study of James Laughlin, which reminds us that earlier writers’ works — Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s in Laughlin’s case — become archives for their successors. Laughlin (and John Berryman and Randal Jarrell), according to Barnhisel, respected his inspirational origins yet also willed a creative break from them. He and the others wanted to knock modernism off its stilts. In the case of Laughlin’s poetry, the will to change did not succeed — although it found, and founded, an archive of its own: New Directions and its publication list. John Berryman achieved success with his poetry, Ben Rogerson shows, but he ran up against a newly inhibiting historical site: academic employment and the academic writing program. The constraints imposed on Berryman by university patronage inhibited the creativity that the academy promised to promote. Can the alchemical will come to terms with its archive, and liberate itself simultaneously? The question presses itself forward here, with diverse answers. In Nick Levey’s study of Thomas Pynchon, novelistic tradition is the archive, and so is the Internet. Levey reads Inherent Vice as uneasy in relation to both (“there is more uneasiness than joy accompanying the hardening of technological power”). Allison E. Fagan’s essay on glossaries in Latina/o literature evokes an alchemical will inherent in translation. The will flouts the proximity of a translation to an archive: its language of origin. Levey and Fagan clearly emphasize art’s distance from its sources. In contrast, Michaela Bronstein’s theory of “first [End Page v] reading” proposes that, instead of establishing a distance between a text and a considered review of it, we should keep faith with the process we undergo in a page by page flow of reading response. Bronstein, one might say, wants to reduce, even to eliminate, the tension between source and outcome, especially if the latter is said to be explained by the former. “Explanation” might be only a factitious way of attaching creative phenomena to where they supposedly originate — another mode of archiving, in effect. Johanna Winant’s reading of Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” points out that Stein sees contingency resisting our impulses to know what the archive of facts only apparently tells. Still, we need to read on, searching for better ways to bridge the distance between founts of inspiration and their effects. Colleen Kropp’s review of J. Hillis Miller’s criticism reminds us of a powerful model of reading. Is Hillis Miller’s mode a complement to Michaela Bronstein’s, or a contrast? Future criticism might answer. It is to that prospective dimension — the alchemy of prospective scholarship — that the other reviewers address themselves. If Don James McLaughlin’s review of T.S. Eliot’s collected prose turns back to a powerful body of source texts, the source is, nevertheless, a new archive awaiting metamorphic scrutiny from newer comprehensions of modernism. Michael Dowdy’s review of Urayoán Noel’s “archiving” of Nuyorican poetry notes, along with Noel, that the poetry and performance at issue resists “reproduction and transcription,” and challenges “representational and documentary forms.” It’s a paradoxical archive, then, but one that “cleverly sets the stage for future scholars,” who will have to be clever to find a fit with the paradox. Christian Moraru’s review of Jean-Michel Rabate’s Crimes of the Future...

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

John Malalas and the Origins of the Allegorical and Novelistic Traditions of the Trojan War in Byzantium

In the sixth century, the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas composed a history of the world from the Biblical story of creation to the author’s own day. The largest narrative unit within this Chronicle was a retelling of the Trojan War. For the most part, Malalas narrated his account within the generic constraints of traditional Byzantine historiography. He also, however, adopted styles from other more literary genres: the allegory and the novel. He thus introduced into the Byzantine tradition of the Trojan War new modes of narration which would be more fully developed by subsequent authors. With Malalas as his source, the twelfth-century grammarian John Tzetzes, for instance, wrote his Allegories of the Iliad, which rendered the story entirely as allegory, while Tzetzes’ contemporary Constantine Manasses and the later anonymous author of The Byzantine Iliad narrated the Trojan War as a novel or medieval romance. Comparing the later works to their sources and examining the contexts in which they were produced demonstrates how the mutability of genre and aesthetics made the Trojan War a subject that could be continuously reshaped to suit the ideology of the times.

Ruptura y continuidad de la novela histórica contemporánea en la tradición narrativa mexicana e hispanoamericana

En este ensayo se propone la interpretación de la novela histórica contemporánea en México e Hispanoamérica como resultado de la evolución lógica de la tradición novelesca propia, en un ejercicio integrado y diacrónico que explique la presencia del subgénero en nuestro contexto literario y cultural actual.

The Omnicompetent Narrator from George Eliot to Jonathan Franzen

In April of 1873, four months after publication of final volume of Middlemarch, a glowing appraisal of George Eliot appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Whether her latest novel was a success or a failure, reviewer, Arthur George Sedgwick, hesitated to say. Rosamond and Mr. Brooke, he thought, were less memorable than Becky Sharpe or members of Pickwick Club, and Eliot's portrait of a provincial society was less beautiful than her portrait of sibling dynamics in The Mill Floss. Still, Middlemarch established Eliot as a novelist whose erudition was unprecedented: History, science, art, literature, language, she is mistress of' (493). Along with her keen moral insight, one of Eliot's great gifts as a novelist, according to Sedgwick, was sheer range of her knowledge. It is often said that realist novel, relative to other literary modes (epic or romance) and genres (poetry or drama), orients itself toward empirical realm, studding its plots with information about natural and social world. (1) But certain realist novelists repeatedly get singled out for much they seem to know. (2) Reviewers have praised, for instance, Goethe, Balzac, or Melville in terms that Sedgwick applied to Eliot--whereas those terms are rarely applied to, say, Austen, Flaubert, or James. This holds true of contemporary fiction as well: novelists like Marilynne Robinson or Joseph O'Neill are hailed for their taut prose or control of mood, while Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen are more often championed for their encyclopedic intellects. One 2002 reviewer of The Corrections marveled that novel's author seemed to know everything, from the names of flowers chosen by corporate gardeners (mums, begonias, liriope) to the wear and tear--both natural and malign--suffered by signalling systems of branch railway lines in rural Midwest to the depredations suffered by Brezhnev-era power generators in Soviet satellite countries (Lezard). (3) Of course, not all critics find such praiseworthy. In 2001, James Wood famously denounced what he called hysterical realism infecting contemporary fiction, exemplified by novelists such as David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, who showcase a wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge by peppering their plots with information about everything from the sonics of volcanoes to how to make a fish curry in Fiji to terrorist cults in Kilbum! And about New Physics! And so on (n.p.). While Wood credits (or rather faults) Don DeLillo for this trend in its recent iteration, hyper-informed narrator is part of a long novelistic tradition, one that was crucially shaped, I argue, by George Eliot. By end of her career, Eliot had become associated with a certain type of omniscient narrator--I will call it omnicompetent narrator--that would be adopted by several novelists in her immediate wake (including Trollope, Flowells, and Dreiser), and would be revitalized by Smith, Franzen, and their peers. One factor that provoked Eliot to experiment with omnicompetent narrator, I claim, was her fear that a specializing division of labor was leading to extinction of generalist. Some of Eliot's contemporaries attributed rapid pace of specialization, in late nineteenth century, to an accelerating pace of production: Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind, remarked William Dean Flowells in 1891, but now man who hopes to become great or useful in science must himself to a single department (144). But specialization, Eliot recognized, was not simply an organic effect of there suddenly being more to know. The notion that an individual needed to devote himself' to a single field in order to be credible was also an ideological product of professionalization. Striving to establish monopolies of competence (Larson 15) over fields of knowledge, nineteenth-century professional organizations needed to persuade public to distrust nonprofessionals: to distrust, that is, practitioners who had not been through their systems of training and credentialing. …

“But It Should Begin in El Paso”: Civil Identities, Immigrant “World”-Traveling, and Pilgrimage Form in John Rechy’s City of Night

“But It Should Begin in El Paso”:Civil Identities, Immigrant “World”-Traveling, and Pilgrimage Form in John Rechy’s City of Night Marcelle Maese-Cohen (bio) I know things older than Freud, older than gender. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza My hometown exists now for me as two cities, the one I wrote about and the one I see when I return periodically, adding new memories. John Rechy, Postscript, “El Paso del Norte” With gender as the central concept in feminist thinking, epistemology is flattened out in such a way that we lose sight of the complex and multiple ways in which the subject and object of possible experiences are constituted. The flattening effect is multiplied when one considers that gender is often solely related to white men. There’s no inquiry into the knowing subject beyond the fact of being a “woman.” But what is “woman” or a “man” for that matter? Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back” Much of the initial polemics surrounding the relationship between John Rechy’s identity and the publication of his first novel, City of Night (1963), have undoubtedly been resolved. For example, we no longer need to question if City of Night is a Chicano novel or, more alarmingly, whether Rechy is a real person.1 We have, moreover, moved well beyond Juan Bruce-Novoa’s early complaint that the Chicano canon rejected writers such as Rechy because “he revealed [End Page 85] the irony of homosexuality’s close link with machismo, undermining the chauvinistic stalwart of the male dominated Movement” (121–22). As early as 1997, leading Chicano literary critic José David Saldívar cited City of Night as an example of a hemispheric text in his foundational work on literature of the Américas, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.2 Rechy is now routinely canonized as a Chicano, Latino, and gay writer.3 In contrast to the unnamed protagonist in City of Night (whose most secret identity is, ironically, not that of being a male prostitute nor of being from a poor, Mexican family, but of being an avid reader and author), the real John Rechy has been publishing for the past sixty years and has enjoyed numerous literary awards and steady employment as a creative-writing instructor at various universities.4 Written in the early seventies, however, James R. Giles’s essay on the confessional form in City of Night represents an anachronistic reading of the text that admirably circumvents the either-Chicano-or-queer polemic that characterizes the early reception of Rechy’s first novel. As one of Rechy’s earliest literary critics, Giles accomplishes this circumvention by displacing the primacy of the author’s identity when reading City of Night without forgoing the political and aesthetic importance of recognizing a queer of color novelistic tradition. In other words, Giles does not attribute the problematic reception of City of Night to the invalidity of sexuality and ethnicity as analytical categories. Instead, he reconsiders the polemical response to City of Night as one operating within, and meaningfully opening the critical parameters of, an American literary history. For example, Giles compares Rechy to John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, novelists who, in Giles’s literary moment, faced similar critical challenges given that their aesthetic experimentation was often overshadowed or misunderstood in relation to their use of “reportage.” Giles also places City of Night’s confessional form in dialogue with its pre-Stonewall interlocutor, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953).5 Giles’s comparative reading of Baldwin and Rechy marks an early consideration of a queer of color novelistic tradition, although, of course, Giles does not use the term “queer of color.” As Giles was writing in a moment prior to the canonization of Chicano literature—a literary moment that was also without the benefits of queer studies (and, hence, had yet to register the historical significance of the term pre-Stonewall)—I attribute Giles’s ability to bypass the either-Chicano-or-queer critical impasse of his moment to his implicit [End Page 86] yet undertheorized thesis concerning the relation between processes of racialization, sexuality...

Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

In famous and haunting scene at center of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Gabriel Garcia Marquez re-imagines 1928 United Fruit Company Massacre in Cienaga, Colombia, from perspective of fictional character Jose Arcadio Segundo Buendia. Having miraculously survived massacre of banana company workers, Jose Ar- cadio Segundo awakens to find himself on a train full of man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown in like rejected bananas (312). Haunted by what he witnesses and justifiably traumatized by state's subsequent erasure of massacre from public memory and from history books with the official version that nothing had happened, Jose Arcadio Segundo is brought back from brink of insan- ity by befriending Aureliano Babilionia Buendia to whom he imparts his knowledge of massacre (354). Jose Arcadio Segundo spends his dying breath entreating Aureliano Babilonia not to forget events: Always remember that they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into sea (359). Aureliano Babilonia follows injunction, sharing account with his friend Gabriel who, symbolic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, embodies possibility that an oral storytelling chain can function as an alterna- tive archive to hegemonic history. Garcia Marquez inscribes this memory into his fictional novel, for before publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, United Fruit Massacre was largely absent from written histories of region and school textbooks, surviving predominately in local oral accounts. Subsequently, Garcia Marquez's representation of massacre has come to occupy a prominent place in Colombian national historical imaginary and has stimulated important recuperative historical work. I bring up case of One Hundred Years of Solitude because its intervention into historical archive exem- plifies how fictional representations of historical events can function as powerful forms of testimony that critique state violence and mass disappearances. Edwidge Danticat's 1998 novel The Farming of Bones follows in a long tradition of novels in Americas that, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, echo Jose Arcadio Segundo's plea to Always remember, using medium of fiction and novelization of memory to testify against state violence. The Farming of Bones functions as a testimonio or testimony against genocidal atrocities perpetrated by dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo against ethnic Haitians in Dominican Republic during 1937 Parsley Massacre. In this es- say, I argue that novel's aesthetic interweaving of imaginative, documentary, oral, and corporeal modes enriches testimonial project and stakes a claim for novel as a testimonial archive.

The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos: Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution

This monograph is an important and compelling account of a novelistic tradition that stretches from Georges Bernanos back to Balzac, by way of Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Barbey d'Aurevilly. Depending on a master plot that evokes Maistrean themes of blood, sacrifice, and redemption, working in a feverish female body, this canon combines Romantic freneticism and anti-Enlightenment religion to create a compound that Francesco Manzini calls ‘frenetic Catholicism’. The theme of fever, Manzini tells us, was commented on by Huysmans in writing about Barbey d'Aurevilly. When André Gide read Bernanos's Sous le soleil de Satan, he dismissed it as a rehash of Bloy and Barbey. In this present work Manzini aims to make us aware once more of the gradually intensifying themacity of fever in writings more usually classed in theologo-literary categories. His analysis encompasses (though is not restricted to) Balzac's Ursule Mirouët, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Un prêtre marié, Huysmans's En rade, Bloy's Le Désespéré and La Femme pauvre, and Bernanos's Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette. Thus, as Manzini argues in his conclusion, between the freneticism of the Romantics and that of the surrealists this corpus represents an intermediary wave of freneticism, foregrounding fever, hyperconsciousness, dreamlike episodes, and female automatism. Manzini's knowledge of, and ease amidst, the sources is constantly impressive. Much like Richard Griffiths before him (The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966)), he has read both the bad novels and the good ones. For that we are in his debt. His commentary thrives on the oddities of his subjects. He points quite rightly to the peculiar hubris of writers whose contempt for the secular excesses of scientism leads them down a cul-de-sac of primitive medical quackery. Likewise, he underlines how Zola's attempt to unwrite Barbey — exorcising the former's anti-Romantic animus, as much as scratching his anticlerical itch — leads him to recapitulate Barbey's religious authoritarianism in the secular vernacular of patriarchy. Les espèces qui se rapprochent se mangent, to paraphrase Bernanos (Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune). In spite of all Manzini's tightly organized analysis, however, this reader wonders whether the fevered novel ‘best allowed contemporaries — and now […] literary critics and historians — to imagine the issues at stake in the amorphous scientistic, religious, and political debates’ of the period (p. 17). Below the ideological clashes of nineteenth-century science and religion, the two contending dynamics of anthropocentrism and theocentrism are attested and, it can be argued, even more perfectly dramatized in other Catholic literature (Charles Péguy's poetry, for example). In these terms, what distinguishes the Catholic frenetics from their Romantic or surrealist counterparts is that their fevered subject represents an attempt to build a road out of what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘buffered’ individuality, and back towards the theocentric porous subject who is open to divine influence. By way of minor corrections, nuns do not take holy orders (p. 94) but make religious profession by taking vows. Also, the last Eucharistic host is not extreme unction (p. 119) but viaticum.