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Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism
Paper, 384 pages, 13 illus.
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December, 2011
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Introduction" Imagining Justice
"Modernity is not a concept philosophical or otherwise but a narrative category." —Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity
"Let us define “ethical intention” as aiming at the “good life” with and for others, in just institutions.—Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another
"Justice is always a revision of justice and the expectation of a better justice."—Emmanuel Levinas, “Uniqueness,” Entre Nous
In his first novel, Untouchable (1928), the celebrated Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand follows a day in the life of an untouchable boy named Bakha, whose travails in a small village raise complex questions about the ethical and political dimensions of modernity in late-colonial India. One of the first novels to feature the outcaste as hero, Untouchable documents the conflicts between Bakha’s obligations as a sweeper and his rising ethical awareness, which grows over the course of the novel and infuses its subjective, highly focalized narration. The novel is stunning in its depiction of the corporeality of Bakha’s existence, incorporating the sounds and smells of the village streets and the tactility of untouchable life. At the same time, it invites us to glimpse the complexity of Bakha’s naïve perspective and the challenge it poses to received ideas about caste, class, and colonialism in early-twentieth-century India.
But in the novel’s final pages, politics enters more directly, bringing the ethical dimension of Bakha’s daily life into contact with global issues of colonialism and development while challenging the assumptions we as readers have made about the narrative’s sphere of activity. Bakha stumbles into a crowd waiting for Gandhi to address a political meeting, and the narrative steps out of its narrow, focalized perspective to deliver Gandhi’s speech and several reactions to it, almost verbatim. Bakha listens to Gandhi speak about the problem of untouchability, which he lives day in and day out, thrilled by the fact that the Mahatma “will talk about us,” and he imagines himself rising onto the platform and sharing his woes with Gandhi. When Gandhi tells a story about a sweeper he has known, Bakha seems almost to enter the center of political life, identifying with that sweeper and taking part in his influence on such a powerful man. Yet the Mahatma’s speech confuses him.
“If there are any Untouchables here,” he heard the Mahatma say, “they should realize that they are cleaning Hindu society.” (He felt like shouting to say that he, an Untouchable, was there, but he did not know what the Mahatma meant by “cleaning Hindu society.”) He gave ear to the words . . . “In order to emancipate themselves they have to purify themselves.” . . . But, now the Mahatma is blaming us, Bakha felt. “That is not fair!”
This passage echoes Bakha’s discomfort during an earlier conversation with a missionary whose evocation of original sin also seemed to be blaming him for his condition (“everyone thinks us at fault” [133]). He feels conflicted about how to reconcile his gratitude for Gandhi’s sympathy and his own clear sense, supported by all we have witnessed during this day-in-the-life narrative, that he is not at fault for his situation and cannot possibly “emancipate himself,” as it seems Gandhi is asking him to do. In sorting through this conflict, he employs the language of ethics (“that is not fair!”) and raises the question of Gandhi’s focus on individual virtue as a first step toward political resistance, even as he thrills at Gandhi’s ethical egalitarianism, his willingness to stand next to an untouchable on the platform, and his commitment to justice for those like Bakha.
Immediately following Gandhi, however, a poet in the crowd offers another approach to the problem of untouchability and to India’s status in the world, one that embraces the potential of modern technology and uses the language of political rights rather than ethical responsibilities. Gandhi is wrong to shut India off from the world and from the machine age, he argues. Not only will modern technology help alleviate India’s poverty, it will also help liberate the untouchables from the labor that taints them, thus granting them political rights in civil society.
"When the sweepers change their profession, they will no longer remain Untouchables. And they can do that soon, for the first thing we will do when we accept the machine, will be to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it—the flush system. Then the sweepers can be free from the stigma of untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society."
For the poet, engaging with modernity carries with it potential access to a rational system of political rights, obviating the need for the broad discussion of virtue and personal responsibility proposed by Gandhi and generating a more recognizably political version of justice. For his part, Bakha, who has overheard this speech in the crowd, wonders at the miracle of the machine that can clear away dung and at the potential to improve his status without the ethical stigma of blame. He is attracted both to the strange power of the Mahatma, who has been willing to stand side by side with the untouchables, and by the promise of the flush toilet, which might mean political liberation from the age-old enslavement of sweeping. “Torn between his enthusiasm for Gandhi and the difficulties in his own awkward, naïve self” (157), Bakha dreams of a way to access both ethical and political forms of liberation, to revel in the Mahatma’s wondrous recognition of the untouchables, even while dreaming that someday he will be able to find the miraculous machine that will grant him freedom.
Dropped into the end of Bakha’s story, these episodes are often decried as failures of narrative continuity; surely they represent lacunae of sorts, moments when reported speech about public political issues seems to disrupt the progress of an otherwise personal narration. Yet we can also read them as important moments of textual modernism, where gaps in narrative consistency can signal moments of alternate logic and where defamiliarization works on several levels at once, linking Bakha’s naïve confusion in the crowd to the disruptive power of Indian politics and to the libratory potential of machine-age technology. They insinuate a complex narrative dynamic into the novel, one that unsettles its own temporal structure as the text swings from the static moment of the represented speech back to the progress of Bakha’s day, even while gesturing toward the possible future of Indian modernity. Gandhi tells a story about an untouchable friend from his past, adding another layer of temporal disruption and embedded narration into the novel, which propels Bakha not only into Gandhi’s orbit but also, when he identifies with the protagonist of Gandhi’s story, into the center of a broader conversation about the place of tradition in the future of Indian modernity. The episode of the speech thus disrupts, supplants, and rewrites the action of Untouchable, inscribing into the level of the text a key problematic of modernity, which we might describe as an encounter with “a substantive range of sociohistorical phenomena [including] capitalism, bureaucracy, [and] technological development,” as well as the accompanying “experiences of temporality and historical consciousness”—or what Foucault calls an attitude toward time. At the same time, this day-in-the-life narrative is also infused with the temporal twists and uneven development of economic and political modernization. As we reach the end of the novel, sinking back into Bakha’s point of view, the sweeper’s role has been transformed from naïve to perspicacious and from a position irrevocably bound to the past to one that pivots toward an uncertain future. His ethical perspective has intersected the most pressing matters of modernity and political justice for India even as, at the end of the narrative, he turns toward his family, his village, and the day-to-day challenge of his own untouchable status.
In this way, Untouchable brings to the fore the intertwined problems of untouchability and modernity while demonstrating the role of narrative in linking ethics and politics. The situation of Bakha, our naïve hero, is from the beginning of the novel one that entails him in ethical encounters, raises questions about his obligations to others (and of others toward him), and discloses the narrative dimension of the ethical problem of untouchability, even as it prompts us as readers to respond to that problem. E. M. Forster’s classic preface to the novel puts the claim succinctly: “The sweeper is worse off than a slave,” but over the course of his day that slave is nonetheless plagued by concern about his duty to do his job as sweeper and about his obligations to his father, his sister, and his neighbors. A key event in the novel concerns Bakha’s attempt to help an injured high-caste boy whose mother reviles the sweeper’s touch more than she cares about her son’s welfare and berates Bakha for having picked up her stricken child and brought him to her. “What had he done to deserve such treatment?” Bakha asks himself, in outrage, pointing out his ethical obligation: “He loved the child . . . it was impossible not to pick him up” (116). This statement becomes an ethical pivot in the narrative, drawing a stark contrast between Bakha’s thoughtful but naive perspective and the callousness of the townspeople, who feel no obligation, ethical or otherwise, toward an untouchable.
From this moment on, “untouchability” in this novel stands for not only ethical responsibility and its primordial obligations but also for its motivating position in the narrative of (a) modern Indian life. When, in the scene that follows, the missionary tells Bakha “we are all sinners” (130) or Gandhi asks the untouchables to purify themselves, the text highlights the disjunction between the public discourse surrounding the problem of untouchabilty and Bakha’s ethical subjectivity, which throws the future into doubt. We might say that the untouchable boy represents the very principle of ethical obligation to an other—or, as Simon Critchley puts it (reading Derrida), the “infinite responsibility of unconditional hospitality”—and marks this obligation as a structuring principle of narrative, both fictional and national-historical. The dilemma the novel seems to address, then, in both its content and its form, is how to place the ethical potential of the sweeper boy at the center of the story of untouchability and build from it new narratives of justice for India.
This episode also clearly foregrounds the political problem that arises from the complex temporalities of modernity in late-colonial India, where matters of independence and nation building gesture toward both the power of India’s pre-British, agricultural past and also the new social models made possible by commerce, modernity, and the machine. Gandhi’s political program of Swadeshi (self-reliance) is linked to the past and can seem in many ways antimodern. It encouraged Indians to throw off their colonial status by refusing to play their assigned role as consumers of British goods and by turning to previous modes of production and technologies, such as the traditional spinning wheel, that would help them become independent of British commodity capitalism and its commercial technology. At the same time, the legacy of Swadeshi, as scholars from Sumit Sarkar to Dipesh Chakrabarty have made clear, is not wholly antimodern. If Ashis Nandy calls Gandhi’s position “critical traditionalism,” Chakrabarty will argue that the examination of the self (and its virtues) within an inexorably public realm, which accompanies the program of Swadeshi in India, creates a new version of subjectivity we might call the “Gandhian modern.” Bakha’s dilemma—how to access a Gandhian modern subjectivity without relinquishing the liberating elements of technology and commerce or the access they might provide to political freedoms—represents the often-paradoxical dimensions of political modernity in late-colonial India.
In this way, Untouchable also brings to the fore one of the central arguments of this book: that narrative can play a crucial role in bridging the gap between ethics and politics, connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities—ideas about what we ought to be and do—to active creation of political relationships and just conduct—what is right and possible within the power structures and discourses of our social life and institutions. In narrative we put ethics into play and begin to imagine justice, acting to generate and respond to the social relationships and obligations that shape the future of our common world. The ethical demands of alterity infuse the narrative situation and the process by which we attempt to respond to it even as the narrative itself takes place as an ethical event between writers and readers that responds to, intervenes in, and changes its rhetorical and social situation. As Derek Attridge puts it, “The distinctiveness of the ethical in literature . . . is that it occurs as an event in the process of reading, not a theme to be registered, a thesis to be grasped, or an imperative to be followed or ignored.” Problems of chronology, emplotment, voice, and structures of address all extend the question of how we narrate our ethical responsibility to others and foreground not only the “ethical consequences” of narration but also the “reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader” and the actions that arise from them. Yet if we consider how narratives come into being, take up the matter of who narrates and from what location, or examine the rhetorical exigence within which a narrative is situated, we immediately verge on worldly questions of history and politics.
Our political being-in-common and the structures of justice to which it gives rise develop out of our understanding of our responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and others within both the moral and social realms, and they emerge in the ways that we account for ourselves to others in narration. Hannah Arendt makes clear that this act of narration, which goes on between and among people, constitutes a “web of human relations” in which political action takes place. As a genre or mode, narrative arises in conjunction with particular rhetorical situations or exigences that call forth its action in the world. At the same time, by reordering, recasting, and reconfiguring events, characters, and stories, narrative functions as the site of innovation and re-creation of the world, the intersection of the aesthetic and epistemological in the creation of new “facts” or ways of viewing them, the construction of a new narrative world as an object of knowledge and sensation, and the work of language and the imagination to figure and transform this world. “Such a position . . . does not imply that the universe is merely the product of our interpretations,” to quote Kenneth Burke, but rather emphasizes the inescapable situatedness of the narrative text, whose “‘discoveries’ are nothing other than revisions made necessary by the nature of the world itself.” In arguing this point, I do not claim that imaginative narratives always intervene directly in the public sphere (though they may) or inevitably carry real-world political power. Rather, I recognize, along with Gayatri Spivak, that in order to have such power, the event of narration, which takes place “as an indeterminate sharing between writers and readers,” would need a public arena and an audience predisposed to attend to it. Yet, like Dipesh Chakrabarty, I want to “contemplate narrative . . . as a form of political intervention.” Our imaginative narratives, whether in the form of memoir, reportage, fiction, or essay, create what Paul Ricoeur calls a realm of “as if,” where the world can be both described and redescribed and where new possible worlds make ethical and political claims upon our understanding of this one. When the imaginative re-creation of the world takes place within the narrative web of human situations and relationships, narrative engages with politics and the possibilities of future justice.
Further, as I will argue, whether written in the metropolitan centers of Europe, the long-marginalized spaces of late-colonial India, Civil War Spain, or the proletarian neighborhoods of the American Midwest, modernism brings to the fore narrative’s role in helping us imagine justice. Modernism, I will claim, stands for a dynamic set of relationships, practices, problematics, and cultural engagements with modernity rather than a static canon of works, a given set of formal devices, or a specific range of beliefs. As Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, it escapes nominal definition, even as a plurality, and exceeds our efforts to describe it through its difference from what came before or after. Even where modernism seems to exhibit certain formal preoccupations, such as textual defamiliarization, refusal of strict verisimilitude, or play with the vagaries of space and time, it is clear that these are neither necessary nor ubiquitous conditions but rather signs or symptoms of a particular attitude toward a specific literary horizon of expectations. Nor can we pretend that such a list of preoccupations stands in for the practices, relationships, or problematics that motivate the great variety of modernisms as they emerge worldwide.
Rather, I would argue, modernist narrative might best be seen as a constellation of rhetorical actions, attitudes, or aesthetic occasions, motivated by the particular and varied situations of economic, social, and cultural modernity worldwide and shaped by the ethical and political demands of those situations. Its rhetorical activity exists in constant and perpetual relationship to the complex, various, and often vexing demands of the social practices, political discourses, and historical circumstances of modernity and the challenges they pose to systems of representation—even as its forms and attitudes sometimes hide this fact. Further, the aesthetic dimensions of modernist narrative enlist the play of imagination in creating possible worlds that emerge from, correct, revise, and re-create these social and political situations and do so through their “vigorous and persistent attempts to multiply and disturb modes of representation.” The very term “modernity” seems to inaugurate an aesthetic attitude of contingency that privileges the present, like Baudelaire’s perpetual search for the “transitory, fleeting beauty of our present life.” Yet its investment in the “new” also gestures toward the possibility of a (political) future, even while remaining suspicious of historical teleologies, thereby opening a potential sphere of activity for even the most experimental or disruptive modernist texts.
Emerging in a multiplicity of languages, locations, cultures, and social temporalities, as Spivak, Arjun Appardurai, and Chakrabarty remind us, modernism’s local situations and commitments modulate the possible global meanings of modernism and modernity even as they remind us of the political challenges to which they respond. To be sure, when we move beyond the European centers that are the source for most common Euro-American definitions of modernism, we will find a wider range of formal preoccupations as well as a broader set of attitudes toward modernity than those we are used to recognizing. Many of the texts I will take up in this book, for example, test the boundaries between reportage and fiction or between memoir and bildungsroman as a means of rewriting the experience of reality under the pressure of economic and social modernization. They often foreground folkways and the marks of the vernacular as part of their encounter with the public discourses of modernity, and they experiment with narrative modes like skaz (or the sketch) as a means of unsettling the linear temporalities and narrative expectations of representative prose fiction. They sometimes begin from an intimate, embodied sensibility, which may exist in contact and concert with cosmopolitan attitudes toward ethics and justice, thus creating a fiction both intimate and global.
In other words, in ways often more dramatic than in the canonical modernisms of metropolitan Europe and the United States, the texts I will explore over the course of this book destabilize the division between partisanship and aesthetics — indeed, often challenging the distinction between these two terms, using narrative experimentation as a force of social activity and grounding their formal resistance to consensus-based realism in their oppositional political engagement. In this way, as I will argue, reading modernism transnationally shifts our perspective on the forms and commitments of modernism, asking us to recognize the rhetorical action its forms undertake and the continuum of political engagement that undergirds its worldwide emergence. In particular, this book will look to explicitly political writing in several global locations in an effort to challenge the distinction usually drawn between politically engaged writing and self-consciously aesthetic or experimental modernism; to resist the segregation of so-called thirties or overtly political writing from what was once called “high” modernism; and to emphasize situated political commitment as a narrative concern central to the many varieties of transnational modernism.
Scholars of postcolonialism have described how the “links between writings in different parts of the Empire, and at different times in the colonized or ex-colonized world” bring into play the problematics of empire in varied locations. In a similar way, this book argues that the specific ethical and political imperatives of worldwide modernisms link works to one another, forming nodes of interconnection that, in turn, help to extend and illuminate modernism’s political commitments and its varied roles in imagining justice around the globe. We have long taught ourselves to see the formal lines of influence that tie modernist texts to one another, linking Joyce or Proust to Woolf and (more recently) Ocampo, much as the gossamer webs link characters across London in Mrs. Dalloway. Jahan Ramazani has reminded us that modernist writers rarely fit neatly into national paradigms, and he argues for an alternate literary history in which “transnational creolization, hybridization, and interculturation become almost as basic to our understanding of modernism as they are of the postcolonial.” But rarely do we recognize that the social and political situations of modernism create alternative global lines of contact and association, which are equally important, unusual, and complex, such as the links between Joyce and Anand that I will explore in chapter 2. Frederic Jameson argues that modernism “must be seen as a project that re-emerges over and over again with the various national situations as a specific and unique national-literary task or imperative, whose cross cultural kinship with its neighbors is not always evident.” This book seeks to make that kinship visible, even when lines of direct influence or formal affinity are absent. Transnationalism, in my use of the term, becomes not just an adjective describing a particular cosmopolitan attitude among a specific set of texts or authors (though it is that, too)—it describes a web of social and textual interrelationships linking modernisms worldwide as well as an optic through which to see these links.
In this way my use of the term “transnational” bears some affinities with Ramazani’s “transnational poetics” even as it also hopes to extend the term beyond the specific travels, influences, or allegiances of writers and their texts, focusing instead on the ethical, social, and political domains in which texts arise and circulate. Ramazani argues convincingly that, “modernists translated their frequent geographic displacement and transcultural alienation into a poetics of bricolage and translocation, dissonance and defamiliarization.” Yet if Mulk Raj Anand devises Untouchable somewhere in the hybrid spaces between London, England, and Sabarmati, India, it is not this fact that creates his work as transnational. Rather, Anand’s very literary practice, in which the category of “untouchability” becomes the nexus not only of narrative and linguistic innovation but also of deep engagement with the specific social, historical, and political problematics of Indian modernity, links his novel to modernisms engaged with similar problematics elsewhere. In this sense he participates in the spaces of “exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur . . . without necessary mediation by the center” that Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih attibute to “minor Transnationalism.” The interconnection of narrative experimentation with commitment to the representations of subaltern experience that we see in Anand’s work, as much as his use of irony, defamiliarization, or internal points of view, ties Anand to Joyce and, in more oblique ways, to Woolf and the other modernists I consider in this book. Indeed, Anand foregrounds this connection in his Conversations in Bloomsbury, remembering that it was in recognizing, during the General Strike of 1926, the similarities between London’s workers and India’s downtrodden that he became able to imagine a politically committed modernism for India. In other words, the text need not be explicitly preoccupied with themes of dislocation, hybridity, or transculturation, nor the author an exile or itinerant, for a narrative to function transnationally. Even when resolutely local in its concerns or national in its literary ambitions, a narrative may also illuminate and engage the many nodes of interconnection, both literary and political, that interlink modernisms worldwide.
I also employ the term “transnational” as a critical optic that shares the oppositional valence of the prefix “trans-” in such words as “transgress” and “transform.” In addition to simply meaning “across, over, and beyond,” the prefix “trans-” can imply “on the other side of,” representing not only a crossing of boundaries but also a challenge to the normative dimension of the original entity or space. Most prominently, the prefix has this valence in contemporary transgender and transsexual theory, where, as scholars like Judith Halberstam and Susan Stryker employ it, “trans-” has come to stand not only for gender or sexual identities that have crossed from one side of a binary field to the other but also for “anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates and makes visible” the links we assume to exist between a sexual body and the social roles it is expected to play. Transgender studies thus engages with the ethical and moral dimensions of the fact that “people experience and express their gender in fundamentally different ways” and concerns itself with combating the political “injustices and violence that often attend the perception of gender nonnormativity.” In a similar way, the “trans-” dimension of the transnational critical optic I employ in this book seeks to denaturalize the connection between modernist narrative and its Euro-metropolitan contexts as, more generally, between the nation-state and literary forms; to raise the ethical dimensions of texts that operate both within and across national horizons of expectations; and to highlight the political implications of this nonnormative movement on both local and global levels. This book thus seeks not simply to accommodate modernism’s less-explored Spanish, Indian, or Caribbean versions, or to illuminate the sometimes oblique or effaced lines of contact between and among them, but also to mark their importance to a reconceived transnational model of modernism and a revised critical practice. By examining the forms, attitudes, and commitments of a variety of transnational modernist narratives, whether memoir, reportage, fiction, or essay, I hope to discover the extraordinary engagement with matters of public justice that infuses global literary modernism and the nodes of contact and interconnection that generate its commitments.
From Ethics to Politics
Contemporary critics rarely mention ethics and politics in the same breath. Levinas is notoriously reticent on matters of politics while contemporary democratic theorists from John Rawls to Amartya Sen avoid bringing ethics into the conversations about modern, liberal notions of justice. Yet the connection between ethics and politics extends back to Aristotle, who defined ethics as “knowledge of the Good” and politics as a corollary of ethics: “instances of morally fine and just conduct” and the social systems that encourage them. For Aristotle, ethics seems to be preliminary to politics, concerned as it is with the development of virtues among individuals, while justice becomes the exercise of virtue “in relation to somebody else,” and political justice in particular “obtains between those who share a life for the satisfaction of their needs as persons free and equal”—in other words, as citizens.
Philosophers have made many attempts since Aristotle to calibrate the relationship between ethics and politics and the status of justice between them, which often hinges on epistemology and the matter of experience in the world. Hume, for example, begins by arguing for a clear distinction between morality, which arises from “passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts” and comes to us by way of our “impressions or sentiments,” and matters of material fact that can be “discovered by the understanding” or experienced directly. The importance of morality is not diminished by this fact/value split; for Hume, impressions, sentiments, and passions are crucial to the way that we apprehend and make sense of the world. However, Hume objects to accounts that attempt to derive the matter of “ought,” or ethics, from propositions about matters of fact (3.1.1 469), and this objection has become something like a law (called Hume’s Guillotine) for philosophy: there can be no ethical conclusions that arise from premises of fact—no “ought” follows from any discussion of what “is.” Hume considers justice to be an artificial “social virtue,” an aspect of morality that develops from human experience of the world and that primarily concerns conduct among individuals in society. Since it is governed by the principle of “utility” rather than some innate moral quality, justice depends “on the particular state and condition, in which men are placed,” with its merit being its “usefulness to the public.” Justice, therefore, may be seen in Hume to connect what “is” to what “ought to be” in society, belonging both to the realm of morals and to the domain of politics, war, and peace.
Kant clearly distinguishes ethics from politics, defining ethics as “the totality of unconditionally mandatory laws according to which we ought to act” and politics as “the art of using [the] mechanism [of nature] for ruling men,” seen primarily through deeds and actions. Since ethics responds to universal or a priori principles while politics concerns practical rules based on “mere experience,” only laws that move beyond experience to accord with universal principles may be termed ethical. Yet Kant argues for the compatibility of ethics and politics and the integration of theory with practice. It would “be absurd” to propose a theory of ethics without supposing that it is possible to act among men in the sphere of politics in accord with our ethical duty. Rather, we might hope for a moral politician, bound by the demands of the categorical imperative and the universal law of right and able to bring those principles to bear on his response to experiences in the world. Further, Kant will claim in “On Perpetual Peace” that “true politics can never take a step without rendering homage to morality. . . . All politics must bend its knee before the right.” The goal in politics, then, must be to develop actions that accord with the principles of ethical duty and instantiate what we might call justice. Clearly, for Kant, ethics takes priority over politics and determines the very possibility of justice, which in turn guides our experiences of the world.
Many theorists since Kant, however, separate ethics from politics more definitively, arguing, on the one hand, that ethics need not concern itself with the practical power relations of politics and, on the other, that political justice should not be bound by a normative morality. For example, the early-twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, whose system of aesthetics was deeply influential in Bloomsbury, developed an analytical metaethics concerned primarily with understanding the nature of ethical statements and judgments. His Principia Ethica distinguishes the matter of ethics from that of politics (and from other metaphysical questions) by claiming that ethics is a science concerned with the question of defining the “good” and distinguished from inquiry into the more complex notion of “good conduct.” Moore calls the “good” a “simple” notion that cannot be further broken down or explained; “just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.” It is a particular sort of fact in the world that cannot be proven with reference to scientific principles and has no necessary connection to motivations, actions, or individual virtues. Thus Moore and other analytic philosophers who followed him would argue that their reflections on the status of moral reasoning or the nature of the good have few immediate consequences for our practical understanding of conduct in society or for politics.
In a different way, the contemporary ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas notoriously avoids describing the relationship between ethics and politics and clearly “favors” ethics over politics. For Levinas, ethical responsibility for an other predates the individual’s consciousness of self and freedom. Rather than explore the ontology of being or its conduct in the world, Levinas argues that the “first and final question” is not “how being justifies itself” but how it responds to a preexisting ethical responsibility to another. In other words, for Levinas ethics “does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very mode of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.” His writing insists upon the other as “infinitely foreign”—the responsibility one feels in the face of the other must arise from beyond the call of the known. This is the radical challenge that Levinas’s thought poses to philosophy—the refusal not just of a primary ontology, preceding ethics, but of a philosophy where the other is understood with reference to what is the same. It inheres in the very definition Levinas gives to ethics: “A calling into question of the same . . . brought about by the presence of the other.” Politics does not intercede at this level and must be considered secondary.
On the other side of the question, for contemporary liberal political theorists such as John Rawls—whose Theory of Justice has been immensely influential over the past forty years—politics is also a second-order formation, but one entered into by self-complete and primarily self-interested individuals. An individualized ethics serves as the background for politics and as a means of generating a political conception of justice concerned with individual rights and freedoms. Rawls’s important 1985 essay “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” argues that “a political conception of justice is, of course, a moral conception, it is a moral conception worked out for a specific kind of subject, namely for political, social and economic institutions.” Because Rawls’s liberalism presumes deep pluralism on matters of religion and morality within the private sphere, he argues that “no general moral conception can provide a publicly recognized basis for a conception of justice in a modern democratic state.” Justice concerns the “assignment of rights and duties” and the regulation of “social and economic advantages” within the social structure that is set up in order to provide equality of opportunity and citizenship to individuals.
Yet Rawls’s model of justice depends on the assumption that rational self-interest will lead toward broad consensus around the mutually advantageous principle of fairness in the public sphere. He argues that despite the fact that people may harbor different notions of the good, which may raise competing demands, they will nonetheless recognize that “to pursue their own different conceptions of the good they need the same . . . basic rights, liberties and opportunities.” He also claims that from an original, position-blind standpoint, these citizens will agree that all goods be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution benefits the least advantaged. As Amartya Sen points out, Rawls’s notion of the principle of fairness seems to ignore the fact that a number of ethical choices about how and when to apply the distributive principle are central to its implementation. I would add that it is grounded on assumptions about the commensurability of persons that have deep ethical implications. Rawlsian liberalism remains a resolutely political system, based on a contractual notion of justice that separates itself from the matter of ethical subjectivity and that sidesteps important questions about the status of individuals and their differential positioning that affects the matter of fairness among them.
This critical disjunction between ethics and politics makes a rapprochement not only more difficult but also, I would argue, more crucial. It is this rapprochement that we can see nascent in Untouchable and that will be the subject of this book. If ethics along either analytical or Levinasian lines steps away from the pragmatic, political situation of subject-citizens, it nonetheless carries implications for the conceptions of justice and the political structures that arise from that situation. As several contemporary feminists have pointed out, there are many reasons to regard the intimate, ethical domain as also important for the political development of matters of justice, community, and citizenship. The citizen’s extension of care to a neighbor, the child’s response to a filial demand, even the lover’s welcoming gesture toward her partner can raise matters of ethical awareness that carry with them not only the kinds of concerns of self and other, responsibility and obligation, that Levinas assigns to ethics but also implications for the surrounding relationships that undergird our notions of political community. This is what Derrida alludes to in his work on the reciprocity of the guest and host; each is caught up in a relationship of ethical responsibility, made no less complex or politically demanding (or perhaps more so) for being outside the existing domain of public laws or institutions.
Indeed, we might argue that the Levinasian ethical subject, pre-engaged by the experience of the call of the other, opens the way toward a social notion of subjectivity that has clear implications for the matter of justice defined as the exercise of virtue “in relation to somebody else.” Jean-Luc Nancy elaborates just such a vision, arguing for a “between us as first philosophy” that might be seen as a parallel to Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” within the political domain. Rather than presuppose some sort of original social antagonism, or a responsibility to an other who remains outside the self, Nancy posits plurality as a primary condition of being, or “being singular plural.” In a challenge to the “virile subject”—that is, the contained punctual self at the core of most conceptions of individual rights within Western political theory (Rawls included), Nancy describes a self that coexists with those around it in a primordial situation of being-with that Nancy calls community and that marks the beginning of justice. As a consequence, for Nancy justice must always be cognizant of the ethical obligations between and among individuals and is dependent on the political communities they form. It cannot be separated out as belonging either to ethics or politics. Kelly Oliver makes a similar claim, arguing that if we understand the subject to be eminently social rather than isolated or punctual, then human relationships become the core of both ethical and judicial decision making.
Thus, I would claim, the ways we describe our political being-in-common, or community and the rights and privileges we grant within it grow inexorably out of our understanding of our responsibilities and obligations to ourselves and others within a moral realm even as they respond to the situations, experiences, actions, and forms of our being among others in the world. Our commitment to fairness or justice begins with our attitudes toward being among others and our understanding of the ethical demands of plurality. Anthony Appiah reminds us that “the ethical task each of us has—our life making—is inevitably bound up with the ethical life of others.” Ethics as an attitude or activity within the sphere of community, rather than a set of common principles or a normative domain, becomes essential to the ordering of our lives together, and to the “ensemble of human relations in their real, social structure” that we might call politics.
But when it privileges the practical sphere of publicly recognized, legal conceptions of justice, contemporary political theory often avoids grappling with the ethical assumptions about identity, community, and citizenship that lie at its core. Clearly, the conception of the free and equal citizen at the heart of liberal thought grows out of assumptions about individuality, the moral commensurability of persons, and the secondary nature of the political contract that carry implications for the definition of justice. But the assumption of sameness or commensurability as the basis for equality can be deeply problematic for women and others marginalized by the construction of the citizen in the Western political tradition while the problem of who counts as a member with standing within any political community raises questions, in the context of a globalizing world, that challenge liberal assumptions about the distribution of goods and benefits within the bounded polity of a nation-state.
This problem has been of particular concern to feminists, who point out that in the past women’s experiences have rarely figured into the ethical scenarios of philosophers (Levinas included) or into the construction of the universal citizen-subject of Western thought. Hegel’s reading of Antigone is a case in point here, as Irigaray makes clear, for Antigone serves Hegel not only as the “the other of reason, ethics, and knowledge” but also, in both her commitment to family and her marginalization, as a measure of the incompatibility of the activity of caring with public ethics or justice. For Hegel, Antigone’s actions represent the woman’s “intuitive awareness of what is ethical” but do not pass “over into the consciousness of universality” that is required for participation in the realm of law and justice. Clearly, as David Harvey puts it, “like space, time and nature, ‘justice’ is . . . socially constituted” and “expressive of social relations and contested configurations of power.” There cannot be a position-blind, universal position, except as an experiment in thought, nor can we assume that justice flows without regard to the variable positions of its subjects or sweeps them into a common body of consensus.
The challenge for current theory, liberal or otherwise, is to understand the moral and political implications of what Charles Taylor calls our “modern social imaginaries,” which organize “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” These social imaginaries provide the grounds for our construction of communities, as well as our understanding of our situation in the world, among others. Rather than being simply normative or constitutive of a common morality, social imaginaries should be understood, I would argue, as spheres of moral activity and attitudes toward justice that guide our actions in the world and generate rhetorical situations and narrative exigence. At the same time, the notions of being-in-common or community at the heart of any social imaginary carry implications for regimes of justice and of power, as well as for the constitution of publicly recognized structures of political society. The possibility of a radical democratic politics understood as based on contingent identities and dispersed antagonisms and allegiances depends upon just such a model of the social imaginary, one that understands community as primordial and inescapable but not derived from a single universalized experience, predicated on normative unity, or dependent on a singular consensus for its model of justice.
Further, I would argue, imagination and the aesthetic lie at the heart of this socially constitutive activity. The imaginary domain takes us beyond the given, beyond the situation of our political being-in-common and its demands, and toward a realm of “as if” that can move towards greater freedom and justice. This is not simply a matter of creating an imaginative realm parallel or analogous to the political, without connection to the world or transformative potential. The philosopher Hans Vaihinger points out that fictive activity undergirds many of our most important insights “in all branches of thought,” helping the scientist or the philosopher construct knowledge about the world by way of arguments and scenarios. The fictionalizing process of positing an “as if” thus becomes a means of making claims about the world rather than some sort of escape from it. Similarly, I’d argue, the social imaginary can be the place where the demands of the world become configured, contested, and reconfigured and where new situations, relationships, and attitudes are created, tested, and put into play. We can approach this notion from a number of different directions—from Drucilla Cornell’s assertion that only in the “as if” space of the imaginary domain can we demand a reorientation of the public construction of justice; from Alan Badiou’s insistence that only when we think beyond specific social and political circumstances can we hope to “invent a new way of being and acting in the situation;” from Nancy Fraser’s focus on the imagination as crucial to the process of realigning political space beyond the borders of the nation-state in a globalizing world; or simply from Jacques Rancière’s definition of politics as a “cluster of perceptions and practices that shape [our] common world.” “Imagination” as the overarching name for these perceptions, practices, and expectations can carry the power to revise and reconfigure the world.
And narrative is at the heart of this constitutive process of imagination. In narrative we open the reciprocal process of accounting for ourselves to others by asking and answering the question “who are you?” which unites teller and listener in a mutual relationship of responsibility, though not necessarily in similarity, normativity, or consensus. As we read, we are invited to respond to the challenge of each narrative and to its singularity in a way that acknowledges not only its otherness and its claims on us but also how the narrative asks us to understand it as acting in the world and its implications for how we imagine structures of social and political responsibility. Chantal Mouffe has argued that within a democracy the variety of discourses of justice will emerge as articulated “nodal points” around which we attempt to fix our social relations, however provisionally. Narratives, I’d argue, can operate as just such nodal points, generating models of association and accountability that order our social and political relationships in connection with surrounding (and perhaps competing) discourses and in response to the demands of historical and political situations. The encounter between reader and text thus becomes a politically situated one, where the reader is responsible not only to the narration proper, or to its narrator, but also to the rhetorical demands of the time/space of its creation and the political imperatives that set the reading in action, which are invariably social. In other words, through narration the social imaginary moves irrevocably beyond the bounds of the individual ethical encounter to play an active role in the imaginative construction of a common justice within the political domain.
Narrative Action
This kind of situated understanding of narration relies upon the connection between word and deed, which gives rise to action and, according to Hannah Arendt, becomes the basis of both ethics and politics. As a process rather than a substantive thing, action (or acting) expresses the intersubjective identity of people who always exist in the realm of company or politics. These relationships inform our process of ethical judgment: “We judge and tell right from wrong by having present in our mind some incident and some person . . . that have become examples . . . our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company, of those with whom we wish to spend our lives.” From this notion of profound intersubjectivity Arendt develops what she calls “enlarged thinking” or the “enlarged mentality,” a mentality that acknowledges the perspectives and voices of those around us and is derived from the web of stories in which we are situated. It is this mentality that creates our profound sensus communis, or “common sense,” and that begins the movement toward politics.
But Arendt closely links enlarged thinking and action to speech, discourse, stories, and narrative. Acting and speaking become paired activities that present human identity through the creation of stories. We can think of these stories as human life stories; as she puts it, “Every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story.” Human history is made out of a myriad of these stories, which are generated through human utterance and action. But they may also become part of the aesthetic realm of narrative. “It is because of this already existing web of human relationships . . . in which action alone is real, that it ‘produces’ stories with or without intention. . . . These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works, they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material.” Thus, for Arendt action and the process of creating stories, including those stories found in artworks, are not only irretrievably linked but also crucial for the human sphere of politics.
These human stories, I would add, also have the constitutive power to generate an ethical relation within the web of human interaction. The self that is produced in and through life stories and narration—what Adriana Cavarero calls the “narratable self”—exists always in relation to others, in response to their questioning gaze and our attempts to account for ourselves to others in narrative. As Cavarero puts it, “One always appears to someone. One cannot appear if there is no one else there.” Or, in the context of narration, it is clear that one always tells one’s story to an audience, real or imagined, which is irrevocably other from oneself yet crucial to the possibility of the story. “The altruistic ethics of relation does not support empathy, identifications, or confusions. . . . No matter how much you are similar and consonant, says this ethic, your story is never my story.” At the same time, each story intersects with other stories, and we can see that Arendt’s web of relationships can also be described as a web of stories, each contingent on the others, none self-complete, all in irrevocable ethical relationship to one another.
But as soon as we are situated within a plurality—that community or company whose perspectives or stories we consider when we reason or judge, or that web of stories that surrounds the narratable self—we are in the realm of politics. As Arendt makes clear, “I am only with my own self or the self of another when I am thinking, whereas I am in the company of the many when I start to act. Power for human beings . . . can only reside in one of the many forms of plurality.” We can describe the transition from ethics to politics in this way: We begin to reason morally by entering into company with others, expanding the realm of our thinking from the self or other to the several. We judge by imagining the positions of others, interacting with them, as in a community. We act by disclosing ourselves to others in speech and narration—“in sheer human togetherness”—and we act politically when we imagine that human togetherness to be a polity, however ephemeral. The transition to politics and action from ethics is thus one of degree rather than of kind, moving from the one to the several and finally into the realm of a potential polity. Arendt’s theory helps us understand that in order to exert power in the world, or to move from ethics to politics, one would not only strive toward being otherwise, as Levinas suggests, or, following Nancy, acknowledge the primacy of being-with, but one would also seek to create in the world a version of ethical company or community. Thus Kant’s sensus communis—the “sense that fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it, and enables us to communicate things”—becomes a call to political action, a call to create communities, however provisional, where we can communicate our ethical positions and where they matter
But we can also take Arendt’s notion of the interconnection of action and story further into the realm of the imagination, which exists in tandem with action in the world. On the one hand, we might say that imaginative narrative provides a laboratory of action where we “try out” our ability to act. On the other hand, as I have claimed, it may be understood as a form of action whose power is predicated on its very distinction from life and the impossibility of a one-to-one referentiality or direct mimesis. It is just this sort of active power that modernism explores and expands and that flows directly from its narrative experimentation. According to Paul Ricoeur, fiction has “a double valence with respect to reference: it is directed elsewhere, even nowhere; but because it designated the nonplace in relation to all reality, it can directly sight this reality . . . this new reference-effect is nothing but the power of fiction to redescribe reality.” In other words, by creating an imaginative version of characters, relationships, stories, and events within the realm of human affairs, the narrative text becomes a laboratory for action in the world, committed not to mirroring reality but to redescribing and reworking it.
Thus, along with Arendt, Cavarero, and Ricoeur, I will argue that imaginative prose narrative offers a place where selves can account for their being among others in the world and where the process of acting in the world may be recorded, instantiated, and reimagined. If the stories people tell are the ways that they create and communicate their being in the world, then narrating becomes a crucial form of activity, one that expresses subjectivity as it unfolds over time, among and to others, in the human sphere or social imaginary, and in active response to rhetorical and social exigence. In the guise of a “laboratory,” or the realm of “as if,” narrative can provide the space for the exercise of ethical and imaginative freedom and, by virtue of its social situatedness, can also anticipate or rework relationships in the world.
Because of its position “at the crossroads” of theories of rhetoric, action, ethics, and politics, narrative becomes the place where matters of responsibility and ethical encounter intersect with the imaginative refiguring of the world. The narrative text, like any example of a genre or mode, acts in response to “situational ‘demands’” and presents a recognizable fusion of motive and narrative “action.” The singularity of the literary text puts in play a set of actions, readings, and relationships conditioned in many ways by regimes of conduct and power. Yet if we understand the singularity of the text as exceeding “pre-existing determinations” or moving beyond “the possibilities pre-programmed by a culture’s norms,” then the actions and relationships invited by the text also have the potential to exceed predetermined expectations of conduct or ideologies and to generate alternate patterns of political community and justice.
To return to the example of Untouchable: it is clear at the end of the novel that Bakha’s ethical subjectivity and his political situation are at odds. While the text highlights the ethical dimension of Bakha’s relationships and behavior toward others, it emphasizes the absolute disenfranchisement he faces and the disappearance of his everyday concerns from the political debates that dominate the end of the novel. If Gandhi’s ethical egalitarianism and the uprising that we glimpse among the “millions of faces” in the crowd seem to offer Bakha little hope for change (at least for the time being), what does the poet’s version of politics offer him? As his speech makes clear, laws alone will not change Bakha’s untouchable status. But at the end of the novel the socialist vision of “a casteless and classless society” also seems unreachable, a dream of a future world, perhaps, but not one that will liberate Bakha in the near term. Still, the text makes clear that the problem of untouchability is both an ethical and a political concern, imbricated in complex ways with the matter of India’s colonial status and its modernity and concerned with the “socially constituted set of beliefs, discourses, and institutionalizations expressive of social relations and contested configurations of power” that, according to David Harvey, marks the terrain of justice.
Further, as we have seen, the novel generates this ethicopolitical connection at the textual level, weaving modernity’s uneven development into Bakha’s oscillation between Gandhi and the machine and generating the possibility of justice from the combined naïveté and perspicacity of Bakha’s meandering point of view. The novel’s innovative narrative voice and its multiplication of styles, voices, and perspectives help unsettle the consensus view of untouchability and to disperse responsibility for Bakha’s condition, and for the condition of India at large, throughout the text. Derek Attridge claims that “there is a sense in which the formally innovative work, the one that most estranges itself from the reader makes the most sharply challenging . . . ethical demand.” While I do not believe that formal experimentation in and of itself generates ethical or political engagement, or that less innovative narratives make fewer claims on our moral sensibilities, I will argue that the experimentalism of Untouchable and the other narratives I will take up in this book is crucial to their ethicopolitical power, exhibiting the incommensurate experiences, uneven relationships, disrupted perspectives, and political uncertainties that characterize Bakha’s modernity. I will not dwell longer on this complex and deeply moving novel here; chapter 2 will return to Anand and to the dimensions of his modernism. Still, the end of the novel hints at the way that narrative focalization, defamiliarization, refusal of closure, and play with the boundaries of fact and fiction both participate in the novel’s response to the challenge of caste behavior, the geopolitics of colonialism, and the politicization of everyday life that marks Indian modernity and also help generate an Indian modernism that is at once formally innovative and deeply politically engaged.
Modernist Commitments
This is not to claim that we must remake the modern novel into a vehicle for narrative morality or describe it as providing “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s famous phrase. Nor need we claim that modernist narrative always exhibits the direct political communication that Sartre, for example, describes in committed writing. For Sartre, prose writing is essentially communicative and utilitarian in that it displays the world for its audience and asks the audience to respond. The prose writer (as opposed to the poet or painter) acts through his or her language; “he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates” in a manner that can provoke political indignation or enthusiasm. The focus then is on the position or, to use existential language, the “choice” of the writer, which is communicated through words to the reader. While the poet makes words into objects, the prose writer uses words to signify or indicate his commitment in relation to a condition of the world. Thus for Sartre, prose seems irrevocably tied to the mimetic function of realism, its political activity linked to the communication or disclosure of the writer’s political position vis-à-vis the world. This disclosure or unveiling of the world with the purpose of changing it, of course, requires the writer to develop new modes and techniques. Sartre does not suggest that only the most direct or most straightforward prose serves this purpose. But in distinguishing prose from poetry (at least modernist poetry), Sartre indicates his allegiance to transparency of form in literature, to meaning as such: “The writer deals with meanings.” Anything that gets in the way of meaning or the communication of the author’s action, including the creation of aesthetic objects or the manipulation of form, is therefore suspect.
But certainly the author does not only deal with meanings. This is the central point of Adorno’s celebrated critique of Sartre: “Although no word that enters into a work of literature divests itself fully of the meanings it possesses in communicative speech, still, in no work, not even the traditional novel, does this meaning remain untransformed.” Sartre’s theory of the committed writer does not fully take into account the political ramifications of the transformations of form—the ramifications that I have been exploring throughout this chapter and that will be the focus of this book. Contra Sartre, Adorno claims that “there is no content, no formal category of the literary work that does not, however transformed and however unawarely, derive from the empirical reality from which it has escaped. It is through this relationship, and though the process of regrouping its moments in terms of its formal law, that literature relates to reality.” From this perspective, only in rejecting transparency and direct relationship to reality can art become politically engaged.
It is not surprising that Adorno will turn to modernism to find examples of the kind of political resistance through form that he calls “engagement.” It bears stopping for a minute, then, to consider the implications of his aesthetics for understanding the political potential of modernist narrative. For Adorno, what matters most in considering the literary text’s engagement is understanding the dialectical relationship between world and artwork. Rather than existing in some sort of complementary or mirroring relationship, art is defined by its essentia