Perry Anderson

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 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 would say that that hasn't been reproduced much in universities (and to an extent elsewhere in the UK) since, say, the 1980s -- English Studies is very much a post-New-Left formation in which the default is liberal or left. In fact in a way, people like Larkin and Powell are *not* that respected in universities, and PA may be writing against that to a degree.

Whether other nations have remained more conservative, or been similar, etc, I don't know - but there have been very conservative (critical) traditions in France / Germany. My understanding is that Barthes and Derrida for instance were writing against much more rigid formations than existed in the UK, which partly explains why they didn't entirely fit our frameworks.

Yes, those are totally fair points and I prob should have made a distinction b/w fascist and conservative reactionaries which, together with their audiences, are very different from one another.

Also, yes it doesn't seem to be something that has continued among younger generations - at least, I think most younger(ish) conservative/reactionary writers in the English speaking world seem to be, to use an Andersonism, "of little moment." Perhaps in the UK itself, this is in part due to or reflects the waning influence of high Tory culture over the course of the second half of the 20th century? I'll admit to being a bit out of my depth here - not being English and observing from abroad - so should probably stop making these somewhat sweeping generalizing speculations :)

Where are you now Federico?

I agree about the waning of high Con culture. In a way this connects to the cultural change often described by old-time ilx poster Robin Carmody.

Australia's most respected poet, Les Murray, is a tedious reactionary in his politics. (My contribution from a tiny country nobody cares about)

I'm in Toronto where - curious if this is also the case in Australia - we've inherited some legacy of high Con culture too (though not nearly as strong).

To go back to PA's essay, I'm surprised they didn't inspire a larger response in the Letters pages. The journalist/critic Jeet Heer managed to have a successful Twitter poll on it, though.

Anthony Powell is:

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 17, 2018

I know the poll is presumably a light-hearted jape, but its two options are not really alternatives.

Is Anthony Powell:

a) inferior to Samuel Beckett,
or
b) superior to Doris Lessing?

Think carefully before you answer.

do i have to read any of their books tho

re letters: Yes, just one response so far in the LRB? Which made an OK point about retrospective insight into a body of work but was itself ultimately unconvincing. I mean this is literally laughable:

"Without the relation to Balzac, Proust’s project is both unintelligible and, to some extent, pointless."

We might as well all write in, one per issue, saying things like:

"We have forgotten Flaubert. He remains, of course, the master - and Proust's"

"Well and good. But the true wellspring of the Proustian ethos is, of course, Stendhal"

"That Proust is fundamentally unreadable without an expert knowledge of the Goncourts used to be well understood. No longer, to judge from the recent pages of the London Review"

this entire exercise is perry dodging the 91 balzac novels he knows he ought to have read (bcz marx) but hasn't

My game plan: read a million words of Powell, a million words of Proust, then some biographies & criticism. Eventually compose 8 or 9 tweets refuting Perry Anderson's views of both. Never say I don't work for you people.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 15, 2018

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