The Dream of Social Restoration

In a broad sense, indigenismo is a literature about the rural Indian written by the urban mestizo, describing the particularities of their native traditions and critically addressing the history of their subjugation since colonial times. In this general sense, indigenismo is an urban production written with an urban audience in mind, shaped by and responding to the political debates that transpired among city intellectuals and activists. Its origins can be dated back, at least, to Narciso Aréstegui’s 1848 novel El padre Horán, which narrates the abuses of religious and state authorities in the Peruvian republic since the mid-nineteenth century, tracing the origins of the social division between the rural Indian and the mestizo to the cultural clash unleashed by the colonial experience. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, how-ever, indigenismo was more commonly dated to the publication of Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin Nido in 1889. In this sense, the incipient indigenista literature formed part of a new social realist aesthetic that moved away from the tenets of Ricardo Palma’s costumbrismo, inspired by Manuel González Prada’s endorsement of urban modernization and education to overcome the exploitation of the Indian by coastal and rural oligarchies.

In its more narrow and technical uses, the term “indigenismo” designates different periodizations and genealogies through which intellectuals, artists and activists thematized the situation of the rural Indian in the nation, guided by different philosophical ideals, aesthetic styles and political orien-tations. Since its definition by José Carlos Mariátegui (1928), indigenismo has been understood thus in various ways: as the “cosmopolitan” period in Peruvian history in which the representations of the Indian by the mestizo break with colonial forms and sterile idealizations, acquiring a higher degree of authenticity (Mariátegui); as a literature that depicts processes of “transcul-turation” between Western and pre-Hispanic forms of cultural production (Ángel Rama); as a utopian provincialist archaism guided by a dangerous tendency to fetishize the precolonial Amerindian past, confusing fiction and reality (Vargas Llosa); as a process in which irreducibly heterogeneous social, economic and cultural contexts interact (Cornejo Polar), and so on. This rich polysemy suggests to us that any assessment of indigenismo must be understood relative to the scope and aims that each author assigns to the term, and to its place within a specific methodological framework and narratives guided by both theoretical principles and political ideals.

Johnson’s Conservatives and the ‘Kickstart’ Back to Prosperity

In a Parliamentary response to the ongoing Coronavirus (C0VID-19) crisis of 2020, Rishi Sunak – the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer – announced (in his Summer Economic Update) that the Government was going to ‘kickstart’ the economy by protecting, supporting and creating jobs. The Government, he argued, had a clear goal to ‘give businesses the confidence to retain and hire, to create jobs in every part of our country, to give young people a better start and to give people everywhere the opportunity of a fresh start’ (Sunak 8 July 2020: column 973).

To do this, the Government pushed through a financial package designed to help 16–24 year olds (BBC 8 July 2020; Gov.UK 8 July 2020; Kimber 8 July 2020) who are the most affected cohort by virtue of being ‘two and a half times as likely to work in a sector that has been closed’ (Sunak 8 July 2020: column 975). Support – starting in August 2020 – involved a predicted expenditure of £2 billion (Kuenssberg 7 July 2020; Parliament 8 July 2020; Partington 8 July 2020; Wilson and Shah 10 July 2020). Indeed for each ‘kickstart’ job, the Government pledged to cover the cost of at least ‘25 hours’ work a week at the National Minimum Wage of £4.55 …[per hour] for under 18s, £6.45 for 18 to 20-year-olds, and £8.20 for 21 to 24-year-olds’ (BBC, 8 July 2020: no page).

Moreover, Sunak (8 July 2020) also allocated £9 billion of support (by paying a £1,000 bonus per employee) to bring back all 9 million people who have been furloughed during the pandemic (Kimber 8 July 2020; Parliament 8 July 2020). However, for businesses to get the bonus each employee must be paid at least an average of £520 per month from November to January (Sunak 8 July 2020: column 974). In sum, this was the equivalent of the lower earnings limit in National Insurance. Sunak (8 July 2020) continued with these themes when he addressed traineeships and apprenticeships. Both, he voiced, would be the subject of further subsidised incentives to increase skill levels and create more work possibilities.

Images of Haitians being herded and threatened with a whipping by horse reins as they exit the Rio Grande River, of vast camps of political refugees, of bodies floating to the shores of Greek islands, of caravans on the move, of victims of gang violence, drought, famine and displacement from major weather events in too many places in the world to name, are all spectacles of suffering journalists bring to the Global North civic spheres. Why these globally distributed images and not where these bodies began their voyages? How many decisions do journalists make about these subjects when addressing their implied audience and how many other understandings of the subjects’ own experience are not able to pass through the narrow opening of the scenes that are presented? Meanwhile, other ghosts of undecidables in acts of journalism haunt the reported speech of unhoused have-nots and the have-less working poor in wealthy cities as they find their way into local dialogue about their place in the urban commons without being recognized as the implied audiences of stories about them. In this chapter, I focus on this topic as a second example of how journalism covers stories of social exclusion and how inequality is misrecognized in the way mainstream acts of journalism write the emotional, moral and rational orientations of haves toward have-nots in a selection of US and Canadian cities.

According to Boltanski (1999) reports of suffering from far-away or up-close are both experienced as distant forms of suffering in acts of journalism. Following Hannah Arendt’s argument that, unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution focused less on liberty and more on equality means that a general emphasis is on resolving the contradiction between those who have more and those who have less.

Introduction

This chapter will treat a work originally written in Norwegian and its critical reception in English translation. It will focus on debates relating to categorization of Knausgaard’s work, taking account of the writer’s stated aims and ambitions in producing his multivolume work, Min Kamp (2009–2011), published subsequently in English as My Struggle (2012–2018), as well as critical responses to it. In discussing a work in translation, analysis will inevitably remain at the structural and macro-level, rather than engaging in a detailed analysis of style at the micro-level. However, in navigating critical responses to the work’s potentially controversial substance, its structural and thematic concerns, and in treating issues of genre in the light of authorial aims and ambitions, the chapter will set the scene for further discussion of trends in contemporary writing in terms of its autofictional tendencies and its apparent scepticism about the value of ‘pure’ fiction at a time when so-called real-world problems and issues are taking centre stage.

As the Introduction to the book has made clear, the choice of works under study has been motivated by a desire to understand an observable contemporary phenomenon which sees interrogation of generic conventions in relation to notions of so-called fact and fiction and a kind of ‘deep dive’ by a number of writers into the affordances and limitations of novelistic resources in facilitating exploration and articulation of the self and its manifestation in auto/biographically focussed narratives. Inclusion of Karl Ove Knausgaard with a focus on his My Struggle series has been motivated by a variety of factors, including the sheer scale of the work and the ambition of a writer who, having already enjoyed novelistic success at an early age, seemed to turn his back on fiction and move in the direction of writing from life. Indeed, much of the controversy relating to the work’s reception has had to do with the very detailed account of the life, not just of narrator and central protagonist Karl Ove, but of the lives of other people close to him who might be said to have shaped and formed him (his father in particular; his brother) as well as those with whom he, in turn, created a home and family (his wife Linda and his children).

Purpose and Scope

The introductory chapter set the scene in terms of the scope and substance of the monograph, sketching out the literary contexts in relation to which analysis and discussion of the work of the four writers selected will proceed. Against this contextual backdrop, it drew attention to the fact that some of their works have raised classificatory and generic questions and garnered strong critical reactions, both positive and negative, as they push against narrative conventions and seek forms of expression and literary modes which they deem to be more attuned to their creative and critical purposes. While the chapters which follow will be devoted to detailed discussion of the work of each of the writers selected, namely Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jeanette Winterson, Xiaolu Guo and Rachel Cusk, the purpose of the current chapter is to put f lesh on the bones of the theoretical and critical concerns of the book and to provide some further definition of the key terms and elements of what is a complex and nuanced argument as it relates to the specifics of the production of the different writers under consideration.

It will do this, not in a vacuum, but by grounding terminology in the literary and critical contexts that give rise to it and will preview key elements of the argument through reference to the work of the writers under scrutiny. This performs two key functions: to ensure that statements made are illustrated with reference to actual literary production and to the contexts out of which that production emerges; it will also provide validation of the views of writers as well as those of theorists and critics, since often it is writers, rather than critics, who are in the vanguard of what might be considered ‘theoretical’ developments by virtue of disrupting the status quo in their work.

The monograph is essentially concerned with a twenty-first century literary context in which questions are being asked by many writers about the value of the novel and of the role and extent of fiction and fabrication in writing.

To recap the look of the political landscape that fake news, the new conspiracism and post-truth attitudes have helped create since 2016: The flight from liberal democracy spread out from the unexpected results of the 2016 American presidential elections that brought in a reactionary fake populism. The right politicizes basic science on sanitary measures for the pandemic and officially denies climate change. Culture wars on race, immigration, women’s reproductive rights, universal health care and globalism centered the 2016 and 2020 campaigns by promising to improve the lives of those who have been forgotten and looked down upon. Once in power, the first achievement was not to revive the coal industry as promised but to lower taxes for the most well-off. The regime quickly showed itself to be open to white supremacy on numerous occasions and eventually signaled the approval of militias with paramilitary training to position the insurrection. Following the 2021 change in government, the strategy follows the accusation that the election was fraudulent and organizes voter suppression and purge of non-believers from electoral districts at the state levels. While more than a hundred election deniers won lower level positions in 2022, only a handful of the most belligerent politicians from the hard right won reelection to the house. It is widely assumed by democrats this could be a way to manipulate the electoral college should the right lose the next presidential election. Accelerating the culture wars into polemics against cancel culture and wokism, the overall attitude is carried forward and made even more anti-illegal alien, anti-refugee, anti #metoo, DACA, LGBTI, Black Lives Matter and against many other vulnerable groups. The fake populist push against the fragility of democracy is built from a steady stretching out of liberal democratic principles (separation of powers, rule of law, fair elections, a free press) that resembles the new despotism without the military support but also with a freezing out of democratically preferred legitimation operations through deliberation.

Lying about voter fraud since the 2020 election, ensuing state voter suppression laws, an armed insurgence and the obstructionist strategies that gridlock the US Congress press the democratic regime to its limits.

A NUMBER OF PASSAGES in Court and Country explore dimensions of relationships— between men and women, husbands and wives, masters and slaves, fathers and daughters, and even the impact that fetishes have upon relationships. Compiled by a court official and a talented literatus, Zhang Zhuo’s work exudes, at times, a pungent androcentric Confucian fetor. Society in early and medieval China was, to quote Yang Lien-sheng, “predominantly patriarchal and patrilineal.” In general terms, men were conceptualized largely as creatures composed of yang energy—associated with the sun, light, an active nature, Heaven, and the public domain; women were understood to be wrought primarily of yin, linked to the moon, cold, darkness, passivity, Earth, and the inner, domestic sphere. But these are not discrete polar spheres. To an extent, there were “correlative,” interdependent, and complementary aspects to yin and yang, inner (nei 內) and outer (wai 外), providing discursive space for a wider range of possibilities and opportunities in the construction of gender. Yenna Wu observes, “The patriarchal system that affirmed male supremacy actually provided [women] with openings for obtaining domestic power— especially if she were a principal wife of the gentry class.” Similarly, Richard Guisso observes that, “If the Five Classics fostered the subordination of woman to man, they fostered even more the subordination of youth to age. Thus, in every age of Chinese history where Confucianism was exalted, the woman who survived, the woman who had age and the wisdom and experience that accompanied it, was revered, obeyed and respected […] even if her son were an emperor.” Wu Zhao availed herself of this discursive space to amplify her authority as grand dowager, a mother of state. Nonetheless, there were well-established cultural norms and expectations: In the “Domestic Rules” (Neize 內則) chapter of the early canonical Book of Rites, it is recorded that “men do not speak of the inner, women do not speak of the outer.”

As long as the modern nation-states of France and the United States have existed, people have constructed families across their borders. For example, in 1782, Elizabeth Livingston of New York married the Comte de Mosloy, attaché to the French Minister. During the French Revolution, Edmond- Charles Genêt, French ambassador to the United States, married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of New York Governor George Clinton (1794), and soon after, Betsy Patterson of Baltimore married Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of Emperor Napoleon I (1803). In the early nineteenth century, Maria Bingham of Philadelphia first married Jacques Alexandre, Comte de Tilly and later wed the Marquis de Blaizel (1826); whereas Prince Napoleon Lucien Charles Murat married Caroline Georgina Fraser of Charleston (1831). While these early marriages likely occurred by chance and in relatively small numbers, as the nineteenth century continued—a century marked by growing nationalism and heightened boundary-making—a noticeable pattern of transnational marriages began to emerge between wealthy American women and European aristocrats. According to contemporary American commentator Gustavus Meyers, by 1909, five hundred American heiresses had married titled nobility and had taken nearly $220 million out of the United States to Europe. While these women entered into matrimonial contracts with nobility from all over Europe, an overwhelming majority of these marriage contracts were established with men from Great Britain and France.

Even though these mixed marriages were not entirely exceptional, they remained (and in many ways continue to remain) exceptional in public discourse as contemporaries and historians struggled to explain their occurrence. For example, in January of 1887 the American newspaper Town Topics: Journal of Society published the following story:

Direct from the banks of the Seine: M. le Duc de Charenton is a nobleman of the type common in the palmy days of the Second Empire. Paris laughed at his eccentricities then, and Paris is laughing still […] This gay old dog of Napoleon’s court has been living for years “au troisième,” apparently dead broke, in a slum at Montmartre. He has been seen at odd intervals late at night on the Boulevards, evidently on the prowl: but he has always dodged old acquaintances and was generally written off by society as a bad debt.

Historical Background and Approach

This volume contributes to the growing literature on global (in)justice and (in)equality, seeking in its own unique way to highlight that we are on a dangerous path when we ignore the plight of those who are the weakest, most oppressed and disenfranchised among us; and that we risk even more when we are complicit in the intransigent and profound injustices they experience. As Blunt (2020) powerfully argued, while those for whom this volume is dedicated will possibly not be its readers, it is those in positions of power and affluence who need to be reminded and, if appropriate, held responsible for their actions and the subsequent consequences. The obvious moral grounds for fighting against injustice are not always enough to make a difference. Sometimes, only the fear of personal consequences can compel those in power to action. Blunt puts it thus: ‘Complicity exposes one to risks. The slave-owning plantation class in the United States knew this. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the fear of being murdered in one’s bed by the next Nat Turner was a palpable concern’.

By way of a parable, the Prophet Muhammad also described this dynamic. The likeness of the one who does not stand for justice is as a group of people who have boarded a ship. The privileged among them take the upper deck while the poor occupy the lower deck. After a while at sea, those from the lower deck go to the upper deck, requesting water and a chance to breathe fresh air. Those of the upper deck become irritated by both their request and their presence. Therefore, they compel them back to the lower deck without their needs fulfilled. But in their desperation, the people of the lower deck begin to bore holes into the bottom of the ship’s hull, seeking water. As the hull begins to fill with water, the people at the upper deck scream out, ‘What have you done?’, to which those at the lower deck reply, ‘We did not want to disturb you but at the same time we are dying of thirst!’ (Hadith 2540)

In both the case of the slave-owning plantation class and the case of the privileged passengers of the upper deck, there was no insulation from their complicity in injustice.