Perry Anderson

His essays on India (which unusually I am not sure I read!!) became a book.

And so did US FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS after ALREADY occupying an ENTIRE issue of NEW LEFT REVIEW a few months previously.

we shd post him a print-out of this thread so he can rewrite where necessary (e.g. concerning uncle adolphe and also omitting any discussion of john bayley's opinions on anything)

I read all his essays on EU states (incl his essay on Cyprus!) back in the day, and I think that became a book too.

Yes that became a big book.

I didn't read the Cyprus material because it was so vast and I couldn't find any personal interest in Cyprus. There are these rare cases where I can't get excited about PA's work.

The Germany essay in the book appeared in the NLR under the heading 'Land of Ideas?'.

I'd second the recommendations for The New Old World (that big book w/ the EU essays and Cyprus) and Spectrum. I didn't have much personal interest in Cyprus before but found it a v gripping and fascinating read. Perhaps because I knew least about Cyprus and Turkey, those two chapters were the best parts of the book, though his essays on France and Italy are among his best (imo).

I interned at Verso five years ago and asked about what his next colossal one would be - I was told it was likely going to be a collection of the essays on Russia, Brazil, China and a longer theoretical intro/conclusion synthesizing views on the BRICs, although who knows, I could easily see him having switched gears and put out an 600 page book on the 20th century novel.

I haven't gotten to the second part of the essay yet (picked up the print copy of the LRB yesterday) so will withhold judgment on it as a whole for now. Had been a pretty big PA stan before (while not always agreeing with particular points) so am always pleased to find others (and to notice this thread!).

Federico, that is most interesting. Are you a long-time ILB poster? We have a FAP tomorrow.

xp Anderson has written at length about those three countries in the LRB, IIRC

"at length" sort of goes without saying with PAnderson of course

i was disappointed by Spectrum, felt i was lacking background on some of the thinkers (esp on the right) that was assumed

Been on a long holiday, read through the last nine of A Dance to the Music of Time for the first time.
I liked it well enough, but Anderson seems to overestimate it/Powell massively in the two articles. Keeps taking midweight literary basics as some kind of mastery - allusion is catnip to him.
Still on holiday, but will try to get round to saying more about Powell and/or this chunk of Anderson when I get back.

Hey pinefox, I'm a (fairly?) long-time lurker and (very) occasional poster. I'm trying to get in the habit of posting more regularly, though my schedule's been a bit crazy the last while. Unfortunately, I'm not in London, otherwise I'd happily join.

I read elsewhere (on another thread?) that the overestimation is part of PA's "bid" to elevate Powell to a more respectable, if not canonical, status, and using (abusing?) Proust in the process. It seems somewhat plausible, whether it's something he deliberately set out to do or not. Still haven't read pt 2 yet, but look forward to getting to it tmw or this weekend.

That seems about right - the Tariq Ali article on Powell makes it clear that PA has been reading and rereading and laughing aloud at Dance for an age, so I suspect the article is the eruption of a forty year internal monologue where he’s arguing with himself that this is better than Proust. Writes it as a late-life treat.

(I think mark s suggests something like canonising AP for a bet in one of the other threads which I also like)

He’s an unpersuasive critic though imo.

I don't remember Ali on Powell - I don't like Ali but I like it when he drops in anecdotes about PA.

Yesterday I read a Fredric Jameson book which referred to something like 'PA's definitive study of the historical novel', which meant a 2 or 3 page LRB article.

Here, p.259:

https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fredric-Jameson-The-Antinomies-of-Realism-2015.pdf

- actually it was 'landmark survey', not quite the same thing.

Pinefox:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/fiction4
PA turns up halfway through.

i don't really have a problem with taking proust down a peg or three -- and i certainly don't have a problem with firing what woof calls "midweight literary basics" into the revered sludge of its rep to do this: if they are a thing powell does well which by comparison does badly or not at all, this is a useful dimension to explore

i feel -- long as it is -- that he really only half-explores the thing he's uncovered though: on the lethem thread PF and i had a mild disagreement abt the rightness of the usage of e.g. description-at--first-meet which too much "raises the stakes" (by manipulating seemingly small realist items overtly to foreshadow larger future events). Unlike MP, AP -- with PA's stated approval -- is not among these stylists: PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction", and PA devotes a half column (pt 1, 19.7.18, p.,17, col.1) to the comparison. OK: MP comes off badly in this comparison by this measure: his descriptions seem to aim to lodge the characters as exemplars of his (tiresome?) overarching apothegms: no one gets anyone else, pain is all -- except for art, which is all-er (PA's caricature via my memory: it's mostly on p.14 same issue but i can't be arsed to redigest it for this point). But late in part 2 (2.8.18, p.32. col.3), AP writes thus

"Powell’s imagination was deeply historical, as Proust’s was not. He was also much more deeply conservative. That could easily have led to a threnody of time past, not individual as in A la recherche, but political and cultural. What checked any such move was the other side of his conservatism, conviction of the constancy of human nature, which he shared with Proust. In the tension spanning those two sides lay the difference between them, which cascades down the last page of A Dance."

This is some of what I mean (on the lethem thread) by the politics of this "raising the stakes" -- powell's refusal tightly imbricated into his beliefs in unchanging human nature across changing history (vs proust who thinks history is -- acc.AP -- just stuck). the figure of "dance" that overlays the entire 12-volume massif actually does the work that any given stakes-raising encounter-description might, in lethem or pynchon or proust or whoever: it points a bony finger to the structural prison of the belief system, which in powell the narrator and characters can have no inkling of… other authors (viz these three) would disagree, tho the character-inkling might be religious, or moulded dream- or fantasy-work, or the underpinning of their political engagement in the story or etc). foreshadowing and prophecy come in many forms in ordinary (=as per realism's nostra) life also. anyway this is an element i'd like much more on, tho i think you have to bring in other authors and styles of authoring to do it justice maybe

lastly, while the bet is a likeable version of PA's project, what i fear he's actually done is decided something along the following line:
1: powell is my fave and i wub him
2: all artistic material that i like must be important and world historical not like those yukky post modernists seem to think
2a: pop is by definition bad and its fans -- the "people" apparently -- shd feel bad)
3: er anyway in what way is AP important and world historical, compared for example to proust who everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees is important and world historical
4: so if i compare them and prove AP > MP qed, then i win and my taste R0X0R snubs to you

(^^^new breakthroughs in the rendering of interior monologue here IMO)

lol what i'm writing myself towards is 80,00 words by me on why pynchon is better not worse than powell OR proust: "a gallumph to the kazoo of space" if you will

jeezus fvck i have actual serious work to do today

hah great post, thanks mark!

I think I agree about the 4-5 stage process of PA's submerged thought / motives here.

Clarification: 'PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction"' -- only in that I was grouping PA's version of AP, as far as I remembered it, with this, after you had reminded me of it (so it was your classification in fact, which I was just citing!). I have never read a word of AP outside what PA quotes, so don't truly know whether he is dogged, quiet and realistic or not.

Also: the specific criticism I made of Lethem in that post applied to one of Lethem's later novels, but does not at all apply across his whole career - which has transformed quite a bit. So the problem, as I see it, is possibly characteristic of late Lethem, but not early Lethem, at all. Whereas to my eyes (and Lethem's, in fact, as per review of BLEEDING EDGE) early Pynchon and late Pynchon do not look very qualitatively different from each other.

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

There is a consistent supernatural element to Dance that breaks the confines of dogged realism - haunted houses, spiritualism, a character based on Crowley. See also Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence, which again dabbles in the uncanny while presenting a largely realistic portrait of English society.

yes sorry i'm doing a lot of cutting to the chase on my side of the argument (always easier when you've read nearly none of the authors under discussion): i think all i'm doing actually is trying to throw a wrinkle of complexity and reservation into this specific judgment of yours (re lethem's first description of miriam):

It seems to me that in reality, we don't draw this kind of symbolic conclusion from an item of clothing someone wears. And the fact that we wouldn't do it in life makes it risky for the novelist to do it - it's his imposition on the action - without getting anything valuable in return.

So it may well be risky for this novelist at this moment in this book: in the sense of "getting nothing valuable in return" and in the sense of annoying well disposed reader mr p fox late of this fandom. (And no one on that thread has stepped in to defend the description at issue…) But there are other kinds of novels where there is a useful return -- my claim is that this return functions at the level of overarching belief systems, mostly, either the author's or those of the world being sketched (or both), rather than locally and empirically. There will sometimes be good reason to raise the stakes, even if there isn't here -- it's not just a matter or good or bad taste.

the (to me) rather laboured section at the start of pt 2 is PA talking through the relative popularity of the two authors less in units sold than in reception theory terms i guess (books about and industry surrounding; translations of etc). his argument that proust is proto-pop bcz proto-pomo is both snide and flimsy

everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees genuinely is the move that underpins it, and any extended discussion threatens to bog down in a quasi-political argument abt who "the people" actually ever are

re previous post about JL:

I don't think I can judge these claims, for my part, without seeing another example, ie: of an instance where you think an author does this successfully.

Again for me a relatively extreme example of the aesthetic would be Rushdie, which for me would ring alarm bells about it as a tendency.

I think that 'belief systems' are sometimes relevant but also that authors (like JL in that case) can fall into an 'aesthetic' that doesn't really have much belief attached to it - maybe an 'attitude' or 'stance' in the external, posing sense, more than a belief.

PA seems to be suspicious about Proust being popularized because popularizable. (PoMo, I think, would just be a spin-off of that -- he doesn't actually think Proust is aesthetically PoMo himself, surely.)

I quite like the way that, as this discussion reminds me, PA's discussion is so entertainingly rangy and manifold in theme and approach.

nice tart letter* also in the current lrb on anderson being wrong abt balzac: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n16/letters

(one of the things going on here, i suspect, is that PA has read and reread powell quite a lot bcz he enjoys doing so -- but has read the various other Vast Oeuvres** bcz as a High-Level Savant he felt he Ought To Have: it's not that he has nothing valuable to say as a consequence, he is a learned and an intelligent reader, but that there's just a trace of duty-based ressentiment to the critique?)

*(from a prof specialising in balzac*** and proust)
**(some of them, half-finished red chamber klaxon is that you i feel beating soundless but imperative on my mind's ear?)
***(i have actually read some balzac! old goriot aka pere goriot)

Christopher Prendergast is also the editor of the newer translation of Proust (and the one I read).

btw i am reading all these posts as if everyone itt rhymes proust with frowst, the only correct way to say it

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 23 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I see there was an adaptation of Dance.. for TV in 1997 (four parts). Anyone here watch it?

yes, I've seen it. Simon Russell Beale is excellent as Widmerpool from youth to bloviating Lord and there are lots of other familiar faces, but it doesn't get anywhere near capturing the scope of the novels, and it's all a bit Downton Abbey

Also two different radio adaptations (neither of which I've heard)

yes i watched some of the TV version, i wasn't very taken by it: four parts is the opposite of soap, it totally needs to be tackled reina del sur-style IMO: can i really be the only person watching LA REINA DEL SUR?

as does recherche, with a very boyish kate del castillo as albertine

every time i think of engaging with powell i can feel an #istandwithwidmerpool position rising, a bubble of challops frozen into the glaciated mammoth like a dormant pliocene megavirus

albertine:
https://68.media.tumblr.com/a92ef861f1c2056ae6a16aa7e8adc7ec/tumblr_inline_mlxzsjMhxw1qz4rgp.gif

Anderson must be commissioned to do LA REINA DEL SUR next.

as you say he is good on the global south, what can possibly go wrong

The judge in Dublin who ran the trial in which Samuel Beckett was a witness in the 1930s called Proust 'Mr Prowst'. This is supposed to be one of the things that made SB despair of Ireland and never want to return.

What was the trial about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Was_Going_Down_Sackville_Street#Libel_lawsuit

Mentioned this on the pub last night and was just scrolling thru now - two left-wingers and their love for a reactionary (in this case Naipaul):

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-painful-sum-of-things/

Thanks for sharing, I'd like to give that a read as well this weekend.

I've been thinking more of the "painful admiration" one of them cites and the ambivalence of that relation between a left-wing/progressive reader/critic and a reactionary author (Tariq Ali also wrote an obit of Naipaul - it appears they were friendly?).

It struck me as curious that - with some notable exceptions - this appears to be much more common in English literature than in other countries/regions/traditions? There's Naipaul and Powell, but also the love of Waugh, Larkin, Amis, Kipling, etc. I had assumed it was perhaps in large part due to "high Tory" culture and its reproduction in the cultural institutions/universities in the UK?

I finished the Anderson essay last night and was disappointed he hadn't gone a bit further in exploring this peculiarity of English culture but this afternoon happened to remember he dedicated a typically lengthy essay on more or less this question 50 years ago (!).

It's paywalled on their site, but I believe can be found elsewhere online (or in his book English Questions) https://newleftreview.org/I/50/perry-anderson-components-of-the-national-culture

I was also left unsatisfied by the second part of the essay, I feel like quite a bit was left unresolved. That said, it does make me want to read Powell (as well as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Malcolm Bowie on Proust), so there is that.

Good to be reminded of n+1. I should read more of it. Like this excellent reply from Wood:

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-3/essays/a-reply-to-the-editors/

Wouldn't we need to know more about how other countries, et al, handle it before we could say England was distinctive?

Or: Flaubert is in some ways reactionary. He's revered in France (by liberals and leftists, by Barthes, et al). So such traditions perhaps have their own versions of this?

In Germany, one or two of the big modern names have been on the left - Brecht, Grass, Wolf? - which does present a different scenario.

Yes, that's true but I always was under the impression in these other countries/literary traditions that they were more of an exceptional character?

I'll admit, I haven't fully thought this through at length, but I have had trouble coming up with other analogous examples where capital R reactionary authors are still held in the same esteem from other countries (there's Flaubert, Celine in France; Heidegger in the Continental Philosophy tradition). I definitely acknowledge more familiarity with Anglo-American literature than others, but still...! That said, I may be totally missing some obvious examples.

I would have thought that in France for instance, it could be shown that half the canon was conservative or reactionary in some way. It's an old canard that Marx loved Balzac 'despite' his royalism.

The difference you're pointing to, I think, is not about the historic canon but a more recent field - say, post-WWII. That would be a clearer, because more limited point of comparison.

Then there's also a difference between 'fascist modernism' and 'conservative English', ie / eg: between Pound and Larkin - very different sets of reactions and audiences involved.

i think just click on the sound bar (the triangle-arrow) below the faintly coy photo of perry and make sure yr volume is up

You're right !

Poster Map on another thread mentioned Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. I wish to reply so I bring it to this slightly more appropriate thread:

...

Davis was a major figure, and certainly commands respect. So my personal irritation with one phrase isn't at all meant to belittle him in general, as if I could.

I was aware that he had written a reply to FJ on PoMo - it's collected, as I recall, in an old volume called JAMESON/POSTMODERNISM/CRITIQUE (1990?) - where I think, possibly, FJ acknowledges him more generously in a reply to critics (though may be fabricating this notion). I am fairly sure that FJ here and there in his work cites CITY OF QUARTZ, if not other works, favourably.

Davis's critique of FJ is surely valid - I have no criticism of it as such.

Davis might well have been justified in some kind of frustration with the English NLR crowd, and specifically the Old Etonians among them (unsure how many that is, maybe just 3, or more). My one substantial, small comment was that this could not logically include FJ, who never had anything to do with English public schools. FJ probably met Anderson et al in the 1970s (just a guess) - say, after MARXISM & FORM and THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE. Terry Eagleton (also no kind of Etonian, though he became an Oxonian) went and taught with FJ for a term in California in the late 1970s. But FJ - to my surprise - seems never to have published a word in the NLR till 1984, when the most famous essay of his whole career appeared there. He was already 50. He has contributed frequently since, but I don't suppose he has been on the editorial board; don't think he has ever resided at length in the UK.

So in sum:
1: yes, Davis in general was good
2: Davis's critique of some affluent leftists could possibly be valid
3: but Davis couldn't literally have been referring to FJ in the specific comment that was cited.

I like Mike Davis and read Victorian Holocausts back in the summer, loved it apart from sections of the book where he goes way too deep into the science of the El Nino phenomenon, which was a bit too much for my brane. And I started City of Quartz last week, it's good stuff - never knew about Llano del Rio the socialist city, which at the time the book was written - the ruins of it still existed.

I meant colony obv.. "city" is a bit of a stretch!

That's a good reminder Calzino - had read about that place and TBH forgotten that Davis discussed it. Apparently a library in CA has a big archive of documentation about it. And I seem to recall that it eventually relocated to another state!?

up to where I'd read he was visiting the ruins and bumped into 2 refugees from El Salvador seemingly living rough there, who he describes as like "hobo heroes from a Jack London novel". When he told them about its socialist history one of them asked did the rich people come and bomb them with planes? No he replies, their credit failed!

thanks for the clarifying information the pinefox, i stand corrected.

Thanks Map - I appreciate your civility here. I have a couple of follow-ups.

1: to support your and Calzino's appreciation of Davis, I remembered that what I admired about Davis was that after every US election - including midterms! - he would write a long, detailed analysis of the results for NLR, in terms of individual states, psephology, demographics. It was extraordinary work; I marvelled at the expertise and data. Marxists are not always thought to be interested in 'bourgeois democracy' - here was a contradiction of that view.

2: I don't have POSTMODERNISM / JAMESON / CRITIQUE here and couldn't find references to Davis in the other FJ I have to end. Finally I looked in POSTMODERNISM itself and found the endnote that the critic you cited had cited. And I'm afraid that here FJ, indeed, doesn't come out so well. What he praises in Davis, he immediately takes away, in a very uncomradely way. His tone is not well judged. He could engage much more with the substance of Davis's critique, and at least in this particular case, he doesn't.

As noted before, this can't have anything to do with a UK background (which frustrated Davis in the UK); it may have something to do with a US academic turf war which is opaque at this distance.

I still have the feeling that in later work, FJ acknowledged Davis more generously, but I may be imagining that. I have 10 of FJ's books to hand but don't think any of them provide such evidence.

Perry Anderson in THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY (1998) cites Davis (p.78) as 'Jameson's earliest critic [re PoMo] on the Left', and implies that he had made a valid point about FJ's periodisation.

as much as i can appreciate the need to deflate arrogant, vacant intellectualism, i do find that davis's shtick can sometimes lapse into into fetishization, especially when he starts calling people "effete". philosophy and theory were a refuge for me, and helped me to name the false consciousness that had made my own midwestern, blue collar milieu so hostile to creativity and intellect. these qualities are important too, and, to keep things short, i guess i think it's okay that some of our leftists are more about wit or playfulness than they are about centering labor. we need a bit of the former aspect, too.

of course, ideally you'd have somebody like e.p. thompson, who seems to embody the best aspects of both worlds.

Well said.

He only reads the intro to them

At the party last night talked to someone who used to check out books for Perry Anderson as an undergrad. Terrifying. Said he'd bring a trundle and load it up with 40 books every 3-4 days.

— jq di zuppa🥫 (@outsidadgitator) December 30, 2023