I think my project – and this is a VERY long story, that can’t be told in a comment box – is and has been in a sense a contra-Adornian one. Huge amount of respect for him, of course – once taught a graduate seminar, a really intense one, in which we read a few chapters of AT a week in addition to the primary texts. But I’m trying to get at modernism from a direction other than autonomy… As I find it a rather weak way to stake the claim, a sort of negative theology. I’m more interested in modernism as a series of, um, ads… Suggestions about alternative ways of seeing things like time and change, rather than simply indirect assertions of what’s left of autonomy / autonomy as it fades away / heroic, impossible autonomy / autonomy ridden with symptoms, poxy from modernity.

I’ll most definitely say more about this as the summer progresses.

The (perverse) history that you trace in the last paragraph is right and very good. Helpful… And I’m definitely going to think more about the relationship of positivism to all this – that’s very helpful too!

“Immanent critique” was probably the wrong term for me to use. What I was really talking about were Adorno’s “autonomous” works of art, whose method, I suppose, is what immanent critique reveals. Here, though, is a definition of it from Gebhardt and Arato’s Frankfurt School Reader (p. 203):
“… in an epoch that threatens all realms of consciousness with subsumption and one-dimensional reduction, immanent criticism, immersion in the internal form and structure of cultural objects plays a redeeming, protective function.”

The idea, as I guess you know, is that autonomous works expose the reified nature of the social world by revealing the “truth” of its forms of consciousness – what Zizek calls the “fantasy at work in the midst of the social reality itself”. So, with Kafka’s Trial, this could be the nightmare world of bureaucracy; with Beckett’s Trilogy, the obsessive-compulsive narrator’s paranoid fear (the corollary of the Cartesian cogito) that “if I stop thinking I’ll cease to exist”.

So maybe it would be useful to see Bovary as an early instance of autonomous art. And if so, the truth it reveals might be – among other things – the empty, monotonous, homogenous time of what Flaubert attributes to the “socialists’… materialistic preachings”. I think of this as a time of the eternal same, into which nothing miraculous, whether divine (the Messiah) or secular (revolution) can ever again enter, and before which human longings and desires for something else are rendered futile, impotent and absurd. It’s probably no coincidence that there’s a parallel to be drawn here with the historical victors’ time, the time of “human progress”, described in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Now, if we try to give a name to this kind of time, or rather a provenance (which would inevitably be bound up with an emerging “dominant ideology” of late nineteenth century capitalist society), then I think a good contender would be “positivism” (and interestingly enough, Comte’s Systeme de politique positive came out just a few years before Bovary). I also think there’s an argument to be made – although it would admittedly take an awful lot of work – that modernism as an artistic movement was a critique (or rather, a whole variety of critiques, many of them contradictory of each other) of positivism. Again, this might be a useful way of seeing Flaubert as the father of literary modernism.

As for the father of socialist literary modernism… I can see that may be a bit harder to argue. I suppose you can always say that all autonomous works are “left-wing” in so far as they implicitly critique their conditions of production, even when their authors are decidedly reactionary. Maybe it would be more useful to come back to the specific question of why the right was quicker to react against the new temporality than the left, and find an answer to that. Here, for what it’s worth, is mine.

Basically , I think it was lot easier for the right of later nineteenth century to formulate critiques of positivism than the left. Positivism was, after all, part of the Enlightenment tradition (it privileged reason and science, it opposed the mystifications of religion), and many of the left had a great deal of ideological investment in it. You might say that they rejected industrial capitalism but accepted much of what was, in effect, the philosophical expression of its ideology. The reformism of the Second International is generally seen as a positivistic reading of Marx’s economic theories, and Zola, for example, described himself as a positivist. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Flaubert would have seen socialism as a form of positivism.

The right, by contrast, had no ideological investment in the philosophy, and consequently few difficulties in identifying it as a political enemy from the start. I suspect the eventlessness of capitalist temporality was easier to perceive if you believed in a transcendent realm outside it where things could go on happening. It might also have been easier to make art about it. To take an example: the central – arguably the only – event of Huysmans’ A Rebords is a religious conversion, that is, a recognition of world beyond time. But without this, its “plotless” narrative – the thing, that it, that makes the work so “modernist” for us – wouldn’t have been possible. The left wasn’t really able to do anything like this in the novel (I think poetry and visual art are different stories) until it had formed a proper critique of positivism, which didn’t really come until after the First World War.

The antithesis that you’ve forged here between style / narrative is quite good, helpful. I’m not sure that GF ever quite got to thinking of it that way, even as he was forging just such a distinction. Interesting in itself.

what needs explaining is why the right registered the “eventlessness” of capitalist temporality first.

Exactly right.

I wish you’d say more about this: It could have something to do with a dawning realisation on the left of the potentialities of “immanent critique”. But I’m probably going beyond myself here.

Roussel, yes. Good idea….

Thanks for this. Going to cut and paste it into my notes. Extremely helpful…. Don’t usually do this, but I wonder who you are, actually.

Maybe it would be worth looking at this from the point of view of Bovary as a turning point in the development of the French novel (and not only the French…)

On the one hand it is clearly part of the earlier tradition of Balzac and Stendahl and the post-revolutionary novel, where a narrative of seduction and adultery is simultaneously one of social advancement, in which a series of young bourgeois men of varoius political stripe (Legitimist, Orleanist, Bonapartist) compete for the affections of a woman-nation.

On the other it obviously draws this tradition to a close. Put simply, the nation-woman no longer finds her affections being fought over, but on the contrary finds she must actively search for a lover. It is not so much that Bovary is eventless as that its events never seem to acqure the narrative significance it seems they ought – they never become the key causal events of a wider story, they never amount to more than the mere sum of themselves.

The correlative of this “narrative collapse” is that style acquires a new and self-conscious importance, and it is an importance that seems oddly incommensurate with narrative, as if you could now have one or the other, but not both.

After Bovary you get a bifurcation in the novel, between a line of works in which style is subordinate to narrative, and a line in which narrative is subordinate to style. The latter seem at first to be pretty right-wing: think of the “plotless novels” of Huysmans, or the weird, static visions of Lautreamont (whose Chants de Maldoror I’m inclined to think of more as a work of prose than poetry); while the former – let’s call them novelistic melodramas – more generally progressive (think of Zola). But later on the two strands undergo a political realignment: Lautreamont gets rediscovered by Breton and incorporated into Surrealism, while Zola gets taken up by, among others, the Stalinists, and turned into the socialist realist novel.

What relevance does any of this have to Flaubert as the father of socialist literary modernism? Only that there seems to be a clear genealogy linking the two; what needs explaining is why the right registered the “eventlessness” of capitalist temporality first. It could have something to do with a dawning realisation on the left of the potentialities of “immanent critique”. But I’m probably going beyond myself here.

Incidentally, an interesting figure in all this, who stands outside mainstream modernism to the extent that some people wonder whether he belongs in it at all is Roussel. – a direct literary descendant of Huysmans, and in my opinion the ne plus ultra of infra-interesting. He isn’t exactly left-wing, but he did later become a major inspiration for that consummate movement of the algebraification of art, the Oulipo.

This is going to take more to explain than I can go here – maybe a full post to come when I’m near my books – but the temporal logic that goes like “OMG! I’ve just won the lottery of life, work, sex, unhappiness, happiness, health, sickness” seems to me an endemic form. And fictional contingency, the fiction event, is a lot like this too, no? More than just “like” it…. Thus (long leap – here is where the work goes) modernism’s wrestling with the event, attempt to erode or cancel it, to imagine a literature that works without it.

Hmmm…. More soon….

hmm, explain this further?

Unfortunately, you’ll none of you see that if I do.

Mwahahahaha some of us can find you! There’s nowhere for you to hide! Ha!