Global Special Delivery, (Review) Contemporary Literature

*OREDO6SHFLDO'HOLYHU\ Christopher Holmes

Contemporary Literature, Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 182-191 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI:LVFRQVLQ3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/cli.2014.0006

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v055/55.1.holmes.html

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CHRISTOPHER HOLMES

Global Special Delivery

David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 226 pp. $23.95.

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nce upon a time, world literature was quite easy to identify, even at a distance. As a generalizing term for virtually anything non-Western, or anything translated, the designation “world literature” made distinguishing one’s literary others a rather transparent enterprise. Despite Marx’s and Goethe’s idealism in describing the nineteenth century as the end of national literatures, world literature began its life as a thinly veiled stand-in for the colonial epistemology of legible, digestible difference. The influence of postcolonial studies on departments of literature helped to replace the naı¨vete´ that once epitomized the organizing principles of world literature with increasingly rigorous, if still problematic, methodologies for reading and classifying narratives that cross the borders of language, culture, and geography. With the return of the world to respectability in literary studies has come a protean lexicon for describing the objects and processes of a world system. Texts become cosmopolitan, trans- and international, and global under rubrics ranging from David Damrosch’s “mode of circulation” in the world to Franco Moretti’s admonition that the literature “around us is now unmistakably a planetary system” and Emily Apter’s “translation zones.”1 1. See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003) 5;

Contemporary Literature 55, 1 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/14/0001-0182 䉷 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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This fluidity of vocabulary is symptomatic, in part, of the continual need for new modes of describing encounters and relations with others, needs unfulfilled by any single approach to a text or critical practice. David Palumbo-Liu’s The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age reads in contemporary Anglophone literature a methodology for exceeding the limitations of terminology and reframing the way we constitute otherness in our global moment. “To conceive of literature in a global context,” as Stefan Helgesson reminds us, “is no natural or neutral operation.”2 Indeed, the works that have given birth to a lineage of so-called global literature are most often defined as such by their engagement with the constructedness of these new forms of relationality. Palumbo-Liu’s incisive study of the contemporary novel speaks to this burgeoning field. With rich and persuasive readings of contemporary Anglophone literature, Palumbo-Liu cuts through the arbitrary dividing lines that have for so long separated aesthetic and ethical responses to otherness to ask what he calls the fundamental question for contemporary literature: “if literary narratives can still help us imagine others across global discourses . . . can they also exceed the ways those specific modes determine the shape and form of understanding?” (26). Rather than feeling derivative of the many other “global age” books newly in press, Deliverance reconfigures our perspective on contemporary literature more broadly to ask whether an attention to the discourses that give rise to the very category of otherness might allow one to see novels as “thinking through being together in the world.” Implicit in Deliverance’s subtitle, “Reading Literature in a Global Age,” is Palumbo-Liu’s theory of reading, what he calls “another optics” for understanding how novels go about their global thinking (123). Building upon recent work by Derek Attridge, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Berthold Schoene, and Paul Jay, Palumbo-Liu delineates the work of the novel as uniquely positioned to understand community under globalization, thus charging our reading practices Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2000) 54; and Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005). 2. See Stefan Helgesson, “Introduction,” Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, ed. Anders Pettersen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006) 318.

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with the ethical dilemma of how to interpret the presence of radical otherness within explicitly global literature.3 Deliverance shifts focus away from what Palumbo-Liu calls the “abysmal task” of “codify[ing] and set[ting] conventions for encounters with others” and looks instead at “how literature engenders a space for imagining our relation to others and thinking through why and how that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically” (14). His thesis goes straight at what he terms the philosophical, literary, affective, and economic “delivery systems” (29) that bring otherness into legible form by way of certain assumptions of commonality. These systems operate discursively, setting the terms via which one encounters otherness, and in the case of Palumbo-Liu’s literary objects, these include rationality, political solidarity, biopolitics, and affect. Literature, and particularly the novel, is the critical platform for interrogating the work of these delivery systems because it stages and mediates relations between self and other while simultaneously interrogating the tacit assumptions that such encounters rely on. Palumbo-Liu’s study of delivery systems in the contemporary novel makes transparent the paradox of assuming that otherness challenges the status quo in literary performances of politics, history, and ethics when the defining quality of radical otherness is its refusal to be assimilated into such discourses. The question driving this necessary work is how, exactly, does otherness become “comprehensible” in the linguistic arts, and to what extent (13)? In its attention to the discursive tools employed to bring about encounters with others, Deliverance follows in the tradition of Edward Said’s Orientalism, examining “not only how others are represented in fiction, but how the very designation of other (and same) is produced via specific instruments and discourses” (83). The underlying premise of Palumbo-Liu’s work is that “[a]t some point in literary history we were instructed to read the lives of those different from us in order to obtain a broader, richer, and more real and indeed more global sense of life,” but that few critics have dared to ask “how 3. See Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004); Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ed., Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization, spec. issue of Contemporary Literature 47.4 (2006); Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009); and Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010).

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much otherness is required for this lesson to be learned . . . and how much ‘excessive’ otherness has to be jettisoned?” (97). Sensitive to this gap in the critical literature, Palumbo-Liu ventures a seemingly self-evident and yet deeply elusive question about the status of the literary in representing otherness: how much is too much? Deliverance traces its argument through works by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki. These novels, and the short films of Ruth Ozeki, are for Palumbo-Liu evocative of contemporary literature’s dedication to experimenting with the representation of otherness and, in the process, dismantling and disabling, formally and narratively, the very “delivery systems” that we count on to make those representations legible, comprehensible, knowable. Each chapter focuses on a single discursive mode for engaging otherness—rational empathy, coalition politics, biomedical ethics, and shared affective life—in order to illustrate how that system is challenged and reconstituted by the “friction, resistance, [and] autonomy that otherness still insinuates into the ‘same’” (5). Radical otherness instantiated in contemporary literature, PalumboLiu tells us, unseats the tacit assumptions we make about the comprehensibility of the other and asks us to reevaluate the foundational tools of reading and criticism. As a nexus of comparison, the delivery-system model draws together novels from South Africa, England, and the United States, claiming a commonality based upon the shared discursive modes that undergird the examination of radical otherness. In this rubric, the cultural difference separating Gordimer’s late-apartheid novel from a British boarding-school dystopia is considerably less important to this study than the ways in which those particular novels think through and out-think the discourses that allow them to delimit otherness within the boundaries of a single text. Drawn taut between representation and its breakdown, these novels work as double agents: “The paradox,” Palumbo-Liu writes, “is how literature can both present radical otherness and simultaneously be disarmed by it” (22). The first chapter, “When Otherness Overcomes Reason,” seeks to unwed the realist novel from a nineteenth-century concept of rationalism that wants to recognize and assimilate difference. The discourse of rationalism, Palumbo-Liu argues, presupposes a “commonality of behavior” that can predict “how different people might

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act in concert with others” (27). The implications of this assumed commonality persist through the twentieth century and the era of postcolonial literatures, where a ferocious debate over the capabilities of realism to ethically engage histories of violence and oppression has run for a half century. Palumbo-Liu refashions the history of the realist novel as having been, from the first, forced “to grapple with a great diversity of newly recognized actors who tested the cohesiveness of norms and institutions” (36). Coetzee’s arch metafiction Elizabeth Costello might seem an odd choice for a discussion of realism, but Palumbo-Liu’s reading of the novel alongside rational-choice theory locates a genre of realism in which “[t]he bottom has dropped out” (Palumbo-Liu quoting Coetzee [52]). The form of rational thinking that both the eponymous Costello and the novel depend on operates in a self-destruct mode, alerting us to its insufficiency in accounting for excessive otherness. Deliverance prepares a critique of “the very notion that commonality can be formulated” as rational “in the first place” (47). The novel, in PalumboLiu’s hands, becomes a model for how reason imagines a capacity for engagement with the other, and subsequently how that engagement reveals alternative subject positions that in turn challenge the universality of reason. Elizabeth Costello “is about nothing,” he writes, “if not the inventory of possible modes of belief: in reason . . . in our capacity to imagine lives other than our own, and in the reasonableness of choices we ourselves would perhaps not have made” (57). Palumbo-Liu’s claim about the novel’s ambitions is not a small one. As a self-annihilating delivery system, Elizabeth Costello lays bare the foundational system of logic via which realism claims to be able to imagine a “plausible world” within which the other might exist (51). It’s not simply a realist aesthetic up for evaluation, but the whole of the novel’s project of composing imaginary landscapes onto which otherness and sameness might be drawn into empathetic relation with one another. Rather than a rehashing of the realism/postmodernism debates, Palumbo-Liu vividly captures “the dissolution of the rational” in Elizabeth Costello, which “occurs within a systematic meltdown that takes along with it the ethical and political” (62). Like its protagonist, Coetzee’s novel locates in realist form not the promised delivery of clear-sighted representa-

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tion but instead a cover-up of brutal violence and unethical treatment of others. If Elizabeth Costello acts as an accelerant to the destabilizing of rationalism, Gordimer’s My Son’s Story allows Palumbo-Liu to frame political solidarity in the antiapartheid movement in terms of the delivery system responsible for knowledge-claims within a novel. The image of Gordimer as a composite of her antiapartheid politics and her politically committed literary work presides over much of the reception of her oeuvre, with her politics and fiction treated as nearly indistinguishable from one another. Palumbo-Liu challenges this fusion of Gordimer’s work and political life, framing it as its own form of delivery system, equally dependent on questions of reading and imagination as on political circumstance. He considers “whether the literary imagination, and literary art, can envision a set of new historical conditions under which that emergence of solidarity between self and other might take place” (69). With its reading of the novel’s imaginary spaces of apartheid politics, Deliverance is intervening in a tradition of anti- or post-Enlightenment consideration of the status of knowledge, following on from the work of early postcolonial thinkers in detaching empiricism from knowledge gathered about the colonial other. By asking what it means for a writer to know something via a space of literary struggle in her work, Palumbo-Liu marginalizes Gordimer’s own theory of the “essential gesture” (borrowed from Chekhov to describe the work of realism as a description of “truth”), focusing instead on the liminal space of her art where the delivery of knowledge is constantly being evaluated, contested, and reimagined by the novel’s characters. The epistemological question of how we know becomes, in Palumbo-Liu’s hands, indistinguishable from the ethical-political question “what kind of responsibility comes with this so-called knowledge?” (93). Palumbo-Liu’s attention to a literary delivery of knowledge offers one possible answer to the problem of responsibility: Gordimer’s characters are not merely interacting within the narrative frame; rather, they are constructing spaces for different modes of relationality. “We see that the connections, real and imagined, between characters,” Palumbo-Liu writes, “are in fact different ways of knowing, and acting, with regard to their imagined rela-

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tionships with the other” (89). He then proposes that what literature actually formulates is not objective knowledge as such but “circuits of knowledge” (89), a “blend[ing]” of “art and politics” that “builds a bridge between self and other, or, more precisely, discloses the delivery systems that situate both, in sameness and difference” (95). In the theoretically rich third chapter, “Art: A Foreign Exchange,” Palumbo-Liu addresses the global implications of Jean-Luc Nancy’s now familiar theory of “inoperative communities.” The “inoperative” is expanded to include both the physical body (Nancy’s theorization of his own transplant operation), and the theoretical body (the “singular-plural” of Nancy’s formulation of community), as a way of destabilizing the systematizing impulse of globalization. More directly than the first two chapters, the concept of the delivery system here takes on a literal meaning: Nancy’s heart transplant and the organs of cloned schoolchildren in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) are offered as part of a system of exchange that represents a new and problematic form of community—otherness shared in pieces, excised from the whole. Both forms of organ delivery recall the inequalities of economic globalization, and as with his readings of Coetzee and Gordimer, Palumbo-Liu is interested in how the literary disturbs and reconstitutes these systems, unsettling the discursive modes we depend on to locate difference as exterior to the self. Using Nancy’s theorization of community as that which paradoxically defines and disrupts the nature of the sovereign individual, he reads the clones of Hailsham school not merely as an allegory for our present but as a revaluation of community itself. Ishiguro, who in interviews speaks quite directly to matters of style and inspiration in his work, makes an equivalence between the fate of the Hailsham school clones who are raised to donate their organs to the nonclone population and “what we all do in the real world” (qtd. in Palumbo-Liu 115). For Palumbo-Liu, this “alibi” of equivalence “side-step[s] the central conceit of the novel, the exchange system” (116). He argues that if we accept Ishiguro’s framing of art as redemptive for the clones, and by extension for us as well, then we have arrived at an irresolvable dilemma: “are they really like us” and are we thus relieved of our responsibilities (129)? Palumbo-Liu’s “compromise,” or his provocatively termed “evasive strategy,” asks us to ease into the inequality of the exchange, rather

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than to dismiss the delivery system entirely as a remnant of latelate capitalism. According to this logic, we must “imagine that redemption nonetheless takes place,” even as the major characters forfeit their lives for reasons that remain outside of their understanding. Palumbo-Liu reads closely the highly metaphoric scenes of the loss and recovery of the eponymous cassette single “Never Let Me Go.” Ruth’s replacement of Kathy’s lost tape with a completely different cassette is for Palumbo-Liu “absolutely wrong, and perfectly right” (131). While “[t]he music is meaningless, the gesture is everything,” and, as such, the exchange is reconceived as something more than a metonym for nonequivalence and loss. The mistaken gift of a tape that “wasn’t the right music anyway” militates against the unredeemed sacrifice of Ruth’s organs to an anonymous beneficiary (131). Thus an implied “trace” of Ruth persists in the unequal exchange of the gift, something perhaps transcendent of her bodily form. This argument, to my mind, lays too heavy a burden on the negative capability of Ruth’s flawed exchange. The argument acknowledges that, like Kathy’s original tape, “everything in the novel . . . is taken from her” (130), and yet it continues to value the gesture alone, undermining the ethical imperative to recognize the radical otherness abjected in the novel. Ruth’s bodily sacrifice resolves into the “gesture of pure giving without expectation,” the de facto expectation of all “inexact exchange[s]” (131). In the world of Never Let Me Go, where bodies are fair currency, it is too easy to become opiated into complacency—or worse, contentment—with the aesthetics of sacrifice to institutions that demand our very essence with nothing offered in return. The fourth chapter takes up affect, Palumbo-Liu’s delivery system par excellence, as the “otherness that touches all” in the form of an “oceanic feeling” (134). Building upon a classical definition of affect as described in Spinoza, Palumbo-Liu traces a line between the contemporary affect theory of Teresa Brennan and Catherine Gallagher and the commodified affect of “new global markets” that “tap into an assumed base of common emotional and affective registers” in order to sell things (151). As with Deliverance’s earlier delivery systems, affect is revealed to be a double-sided discourse: its potential to provide common ground—a fellow feeling—is what ironically allows it to be wielded as part of the arsenal of capitalist groupthink,

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seducing us into purchasing as a transcendent replacement for the “oceanic feeling” of community. For if affect is a “common ground” or “mediating space for . . . the registering of otherness” (143), it is equally a tool wielded to modify “human . . . behavior across cultures—the assumption being that certain affective chords can be struck and have resonance despite cultural and racial difference” (138–39). In Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—a clarion call regarding the threat of bovine hormones to human bodies—Palumbo-Liu has a text that is constantly mediating between the possibility of a “pacific oceanic feeling,” a solidarity between East and West, and the global media’s employment of affect to assimilate radical otherness. Palumbo-Liu’s argument plays on the tension produced from the slippage between the text’s two framing devices for understanding how we encounter otherness. On the one hand, mediating systems of global media deliver otherness to us assuming “a degree of sameness,” and on the other, “modern notions of literature” require “a degree of otherness . . . in order that the ethical, self-bettering, imagination-enhancing function of literature . . . [can be] realized” (180– 81). In his final analysis, this conflict produces not polarization but a productive leakage between discourses of otherness. Deliverance derives much of its significant critical force from the idea that the singularity of literary discourse resides in its ability to hold in balance these tensions in opposition to the monolithic “sameness that is supposed to inform and enable global ‘delivery systems’” (181). This is a work of timely importance, but one that sometimes avoids definitions of its most crucial terms. Such is the definitional history of “otherness.” Having it both ways—desiring radical otherness as a destabilizing force, while at the same moment needing to limit and comprehend the overwhelming nature of that otherness—is perhaps the most lasting chimera of our global moment in literary studies. For if otherness stands in for cultural difference or subalternity, this bargain is made at the expense of those who rarely get a say in the delivery systems that traffic in, at the very least, the commerce of otherness. Rey Chow asks the question that implicitly drives Palumbo-Liu’s inquiry, and which persists unanswered in this and so many otherwise excellent books about global literatures: “Why is it such a good thing to transcend national boundaries? Is

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not such a transcending . . . always part of a power dynamic, with those who can apparently transcend the boundaries (the ones who can talk about the novel, for instance) setting the criteria for evaluation?”4 Scholars will find in The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age a new methodology for broaching the problem of how otherness is read in a literary text, one that does needed work in separating the evaluative criteria from discursive sites of privilege. More importantly, they will find an affirming argument for literature “to mean something a particular way that lets it reside in the space in between” (178). Ithaca College 4. Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006) 80.