The Return of Political Fiction? An Analysis of Howard Jacobson’s Pussy (2017) and Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) as First Reactions to the Phenomena ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Brexit’ in Contemporary British Literature Johannes Wally Donald Trump‟s electoral victory and the Brexit vote in the UK are said to have led to a politicization of the literary world. This essay deals with two recent novels in the light of this claim. Howard Jacobson‟s Pussy (2017), a satirical broadside fired at Donald Trump, and Ali Smith‟s Autumn (2016), focusing on the UK as a country divided by the Brexit vote, are analysed with regard to the political and cultural values underlying each novel. The analysis demonstrates that, despite being markedly different in terms of conception and topic, both novels deploy similar linguistic and literary devices. These devices serve a specific extra-fictional, political purpose: they help establish a bond between author and reader, who, in order to engage in this type of literary communication, must have similar social and educational backgrounds. Consequently, both novels can be read as acts establishing an identity which is not primarily based on political or economic power but on cultural knowledge. They thus document the identity crisis of those who, arguably, feel jeopardised by the current political situation - the educated middle class. 1. A Recent “Politicization of the Literary World” The average news consumer might be forgiven for thinking that the world is a very different place from what it used to be only a few years ago. In 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously diagnosed “the end of history”, arguing that the last few years of the twentieth cen- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 43 (2018) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Johannes Wally 64 tury saw the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” (Fukuyama 1989/ 2006: 421). This, his argument went, put an end to the ideological and political competition between Communism and Capitalism, which characterised the twentieth century. For many, this diagnosis might have rung true throughout the 1990s, a decade which was famously described as “a holiday from history” (Krauthammer 2003: online). 1 However, it lost credibility after the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11 and the ensuing „war on terror‟, and perhaps even more so with the financial crisis beginning in 2007/ 2008. Today, Fukuyama‟s diagnosis seems, if at all, only partially correct: what really seems to have happened is a spread of some sort of economic liberalism rather than of political liberalism. This has been argued by Slavoj Žižek, who claimed that “[n]o longer wedded to western cultural values, [market-based economics] is arguably divorced from them” (Žižek 2015: online). Žižek bases his claim on observations referring to the socio-political situation in India. While one could only with difficulty transfer his observations onto the „West‟, one might find it equally difficult to deny that illiberal tendencies have emerged in Europe and the United States over the past few years (cf. Malik 2017: online). For the English-speaking world, the two most unpredictable and thus unsettling events documenting the aforementioned change in the political climate may well have been the UK‟s withdrawal from the European Union - the so called „Brexit‟ - and Donald Trump‟s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. As different as these two events may be, they have both been analysed in terms of a return of nationalistic and antiintellectual populism. Especially the anti-intellectual thrust of this populism might have initiated a return of politically engaged fiction in British literature. This, at least, has been a recurring diagnosis in the feature pages of various quality newspapers. In an article, published in the New York Times, the British novelist Tim Parks (2017: online) notices an “intensifying politicization of the literary world”; taking the same line, the journalist Alex Clark (2017: online) goes as far as to proclaim “[t]he Return of the Protest Novel” in The Guardian. 2 1 This was certainly not the case. The 1990s saw enormously brutal genocides in Africa (Rwanda) as well as in Europe (Ex-Yugoslavia), witnessed fascinating technological advances (i.e. the internet) and scientific discoveries (i.e. the decoding of the genome) that would profoundly change the way human beings interact with each other or think of themselves. 2 A similar claim has been made about the return of poetry as a form of artistic protest against Donald Trump: “Like virtually everything else in the Trump era, poetry has gotten sharply political these days. Writers are responding to this turbulent moment in the country‟s history with a tsunami of poems that address issues like immigration, global warming, the Syrian refugee crisis, institutionalized racism, equal rights for transgender people, Islamophobia and health care” (Alter 2017: A1). The Return of Political Fiction? 65 Proclamations of this kind are difficult to either verify or falsify. It would be next to impossible to statistically evaluate Clark‟s return of the protest novel by, for instance, comparing all novels published in 2012 with those published in 2016. The sheer amount of yearly publications would doom such an enterprise. Yet, there is another, more important obstacle to such an undertaking: what exactly would one be looking for if one were to register all protest novels? Obviously, a protest novel is a political novel of some kind, but this realization is of little help. As Milan Kundera (2007: passim) argued in his poetological reflections, a novel is not one, but many things and while a given novel may not directly deal with politics, it is likely to be perceived as a political entity. Similarly, George Orwell (1954: 11) famously maintained that “no book is genuinely free from political bias”. In other words, whether or not a text can be considered „political‟ has as much to do with the text as with the circumstances determining its reception. This objection does not render Clark‟s or Park‟s observation invalid. The claim that there is a rising interest in politically motivated literature seems to be backed by the fact that George Orwell‟s 1984 leapt to the top of Amazon bestsellers shortly after Trump‟s inauguration (cf. Rossman 2017: online). Still, for the reasons mentioned above, it seems pointless to examine the truth of Clark‟s claim and in the following sections no attempt will be made at doing so. Rather, Clark‟s article will be used as a guide to recently published political fiction and representatives of this category will be subjected to narratological scrutiny. However, before doing so, it seems nonetheless indispensable to delimit our object of research. I will thus begin my discussion with a few classificatory considerations 3 and then move on to analysing two novels - one focusing on Donald Trump, one on Brexit - both published in the highly politicized atmosphere of the years 2016 and 2017. 3 Genre criticism is a highly complex and controversial area of literary criticism. More recent approaches have stressed the reception side of literary communication and argued that genres are essentially “social contracts” between a writer and a given public which guide the perception of literary works (cf. Jameson 1981: 106). A very good example of this approach is Lejeune‟s autobiographical contract (cf. Lejeune 1973/ 75). According to Lejeune, there is no linguistic strategy typical of either novelistic or of autobiographical discourse. Hence, the only way to distinguish between these two genres, whose referential aesthetics are usually thought to be fundamentally different, is an extra-textual phenomenon, namely the autobiographer‟s promise to the reader that the text is not fictitious but refers to something that „really happened‟. In a sense, such a reader-oriented approach also underlies my own reflections on the political novel, as I am basing my thoughts on a term that has recently been used in various media in order to depict current literary trends to readers - in other words, in order to guide readers‟ expectations. Given the scope of this article, however, a thorough genre discussion will not be attempted. Rather, central ideas about the political novel will be discussed and a preliminary tool for orientation will be suggested. Johannes Wally 66 2. Basic Definitions: The Political Novel vs. Politics in a Novel As was established above, the political novel is notoriously hard to define. Stout (2012: 410f.) even goes as far as to complain that “the political novel is in fact an entity still begging for critical definition.” While this claim is certainly an exaggeration, it is indeed true that many definitions which have been offered are - at least at first sight - of little value. They seem either too inclusive or too exclusive. For example, how is one to apply a definition as loose as the one given in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines the political novel as “a novel with a political narrative, or concerned with politics or political themes”? (cf. https: / / en.oxforddictionaries.com/ , s.v. „political novel‟). This, it can be argued, applies to most novels in one way or another, provided one has a wide enough understanding of the words politics and political. As a result of this difficulty, researchers investigating the political novel have either discarded the entire business of defining the political novel or have treated it with a certain ironic distance (cf. Kemme 1987: 3). For instance, Harvie (1991: 8f.), in lieu of a definition, simply contrasts Balzac‟s Le Debuté d’Arcis (1854) with Disraeli‟s Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) in order to illustrate the diversity of topics, styles and narrative strategies which might be subsumed under the term „political novel‟. While Balzac adheres to the conventions of literary realism, Disraeli deploys melodrama in order to drive his point home. This approach might work perfectly well for Harvie‟s historical survey; however, it is of little help if one wants to systematically reflect on contemporary forms of the political novel. A more widely applicable approach is taken by Howe in his seminal study Politics and the Novel. Howe (1957/ 2006: 443) suggests locating the political novel on a continuum which stretches from individual and “concrete experience” to ideological 4 or political abstraction. The novel, his argument goes, always deals with “concrete experience” (ibid.); in contrast, ideology is concerned with generalisations. Consequently, the defining element of a political novel is the conflict generated by the clash of these two opposing modes of thinking about the world. In a nutshell, one way of determining whether a given novel can be classified as a political novel is to analyze the novel‟s bias and see whether it leans towards concrete experience or towards ideological abstractions. This, it seems, is a very good method. However, there is a hitch: unless a novel contains many essayistic passages or auctorial comments, ideological abstraction will necessarily be translated into something con- 4 The term „ideology‟ is often used derogatively; however, not so in this article. Here, it is used neutrally, similar to the term „worldview‟ or the German term Weltanschauung, in the sense of one definition of „ideology‟ which Terry Eagleton lists in his book Ideology: “a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class” (Eagleton 1991/ 2007: 1). The Return of Political Fiction? 67 crete such as story elements, individual characters and, say, specific settings. Thus, the trick is to establish to what degree politics is overtly present in these elements, in other words, to what degree political or politically motivated action has come to dominate the novel in its entire conception. As Howe (1957/ 2006: 442) argues, there are books such as Orwell‟s 1984 in which “politics has achieved an almost total dominion”, while there are other novels such as Dostoyevsky‟s Demons 5 (1872) or Stendhal‟s La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), which might be intuitively perceived as political novels, although politics are dealt with in a less obvious way. I will take the notion of a continuum as a basis for my analysis. On the one end, I suggest placing the „pure‟ political novel, which Kemme (1987: 5) circumspectly defines as a work of prose fiction which primarily focuses upon the exercise of political power within the body politic and where political ambition, political plans, and political acts permeate and unify the novel through both plot and character. On the other end of the continuum, I propose placing something we might call, perhaps a little vaguely, „politics in a novel‟. This category - different from „politics of a novel‟, which I suggest using as a receptionoriented category dealing with the socio-political effect the publication of a given novel might have 6 - attempts to do justice to novels in which political action plays a role without being the central topic. In other words, novels belonging to this category might share elements which are typical of a „pure‟ political novel. However, these elements are fewer and less pronounced. As a contemporary example of „politics in a novel‟, we might turn to Ian McEwan‟s A Child in Time. Although the novel‟s major themes are childhood and time as a post-Newtonian category (cf. Wally 2015: 76-87), aspects of the exercise of political power are incorporated in the novel, as Stephen Lewis, the novel‟s protagonist, acts as a member of a governmental subcommittee. Through the political function of its protagonist and the subplot connected to it, the novel condenses and reveals what is otherwise present only in a more elusive fashion: namely, the novel‟s biting critique of Thatcherism, especially of its onedimensional, pseudo-Darwinian conception of the conditio humana. Finally, some thoughts on Clark‟s use of the term „protest novel‟, which started these reflections. The term „protest novel‟ or „social protest novel‟ is commonly used to refer to narrative fiction attacking social evils such as the deplorable working and living conditions of factory workers 5 Howie cites the title of the older translation, namely The Possessed. 6 Cf., for instance, the enormous political impact Salman Rushdie‟s Satanic Verses made. Johannes Wally 68 or - in the context of North American literature - racism and apartheid (cf. Drake 2011: 5f.). The protest novel overlaps, at least partly, with the proletarian novel and is often inspired by Marxism or Socialism of some kind. As the political message is foregrounded, the protest novel has often been attacked for lacking artistic quality (cf. for instance Baldwin 1949/ 1955) - an attack which has also been directed against the political novel in general. While it is true that politically committed writers might rank political message over aesthetic refinement, 7 it is probably also fair to view such reproaches - at least partly - as defence mechanism deployed by those who are irritated by a specific political message. However, there is a more important reason why such reproaches need to be viewed critically: they imply an understanding of literary works which is highly questionable. By pitting a novel‟s political message against its artistic achievement, they presuppose a simple dichotomy of form and content. This simple, binary opposition has, among others, been refuted by Juri Lotman. In the course of developing his theory of the secondary world-modelling function of literary texts, Lotman (1970/ 1972: 27) argues that there is no such thing as a „form vs. content-dichotomy‟ in a piece of art. Rather, form and content are dialectically tied to one another; they determine each other. If we alter a single formal element of a literary text, we alter its content. This notion of the interdependency of form and content is central to the analyses offered in the next section. As we will see, rather than enclosing some kind of political message, the specific aesthetic techniques used determine the novels‟ political implications. I will begin by analysing Howard Jacobson‟s novel Pussy, before turning to Ali Smith‟s novel Autumn. Both novels were selected for analysis, as they have been merchandised as the first literary works by major contemporary British authors reacting to the phenomena „Donald Trump‟ and „Brexit‟, respectively. In a final section, both novels will be compared and analysed with regard to the genre definition offered in this section. 3. Literary Reactions to Donald Trump’s electoral victory and to Brexit 3.1. Pussy by Howard Jacobson The British booker prize winning author Howard Jacobson published the novel Pussy in April 2017, only a few months after he had begun writing 7 In his famous article “Why I write”, George Orwell (1954/ 1957: 11) points out that his book Homage to Catalonia (1938) might have been a greater artistic achievement if he had deleted a long, journalistic chapter on the Trotskyists. Yet, he chose to include the chapter, as he would otherwise have lost the very reason to write the book in the first place. The Return of Political Fiction? 69 it in a “fury of disbelief”, when hearing of the result of the American presidential election (Kean 2017: online). The novel is a satirical broadside fired at the 45 th president of the United States, and takes its title from one of Donald Trump‟s infamously sexist remarks concerning the art of initiating a sexual relationship with women (cf. Fahrenthold 2016: online). Jacobson wrote Pussy as a “pastiche of 18 th century satire novel” such a Swift‟s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire‟s Candide (1759) (Anthony 2017: online), which, as we will see in the course of this discussion, has implications with regard to how Pussy can be read fruitfully. That it can, in fact, be read fruitfully seems to have been doubted by most reviewers: Jacobson‟s satire received mostly lukewarm commentaries. The essence of most negative reviews was that, firstly, no satire could match the fact that Trump had been elected president of the United States (cf. Scholes 2017: online) and, secondly, that an attempt at satirizing Trump would necessarily be a futile, „a-preaching-to-the-choir‟-kind of achievement (cf. Cummings 2017: online). And indeed, one could ask, what is a satire directed at Donald Trump going to achieve, but “add to the noise” (Scholes 2017: online)? Not only is Pussy unlikely to swing anybody‟s opinion on Donald Trump, it will most certainly not change Trump himself. Furthermore, the proverbial saying that “a poet may satirise a man to death” has only meaning in a shame-based society (Knight 1980: 26), hence a society with a coherent ethical code which is binding for everybody and violation of which is avenged publically. These cultural features, however, do not apply to the United States of the 21 st century, at least not to a sufficient degree. Hence, why bother writing Pussy in the first place and why bother reading it? The reason why Howard‟s satire merits a more thorough analysis lies not so much in what is satirised but in how it is satirised. By taking a closer look at the rhetorical and narrative strategies the satire deploys, the tacit assumptions on which Pussy rests can be identified. In other words, one can reveal what has been called “the implied worldview” of a literary text (cf. Wolf 2008, and also Wally 2015: 34-41). In the context of satire, determining such an implied worldview might, of course, be a particularly thorny undertaking. After all, readers of satire find themselves confronted with a highly complex communicative situation, which might well be characterised by what Mahler (1992: 43) calls “eine Konversationsmaximen absichtlich verletzende, unaufrichtige […] Sprechhandlung.” Hence, textual elements are even less likely to be reliable indicators of an implied worldview than those of a non-satirical text. Although satirising a certain political situation presupposes a positive counter-image to what is being satirised, there is no simple and evident relation between what is satirised and the values which underlie the satirical attack (cf. Preisendanz 1976: 414). And yet, such an analysis seems rewarding, as it can have broader implications: it might help us under- Johannes Wally 70 stand some of the larger cultural and political dynamics we are currently witnessing. A first step towards such an understanding can be gained by taking a closer look at the prologue of Pussy. It focuses on Kolskeggur Probrius, a former professor of “Phonoethics, a university research program looking into the importance of language to ethical thinking” (P 6). Probrius is on his way to a job interview, which provides the omniscient narrator with an opportunity to describe the world we are confronted with: the walled republic of Urbs-Ludus, whose political and cultural foundations seem to be appearances and denial of unpleasant facts. Exquisite coiffeurs as well as huge ziggurats are signs of social respectability and oppressive heat is no reason to turn down the heating or take off one‟s coat. In fact, heat is repeatedly treated as if it were freezing cold, which is, of course, nothing but the satire‟s blunt nod towards Donald Trump‟s economically and politically motivated denial of climate change as well as his continuous twisting of facts. Urbs-Ludus itself is run by a financial aristocracy, the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess, who have summoned Professor Probrius, as they hope that he is capable of boosting their self-reliant and backward son‟s education. Professor Probrius is thinking of accepting their job offer, as he has been fired by his university for committing the crime of “cognitive condescension” (P 6), hence of knowing more than those around him. When he arrives at the “Palace of the Golden Gates” (ibid.), where the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess live, he passes a demonstration of angered migrant workers, whom the republic‟s highly specialised economy - for a long time, the only professional activity in the republic has been the erection of towers - has attracted but failed to treat fairly. As this brief list of details reveals, Pussy tosses barbs at the world of the super-rich, who make obscene amounts of money by indulging in business activities which are of no use to the general public and who like to project an image of themselves as reliable, self-made men, despite the obvious falsehood of this projection. 8 Although seemingly adhering to the values of liberal democracies - e.g. free markets and free elections -, the political system which Urbs-Ludus is a part of resembles that of the feudal 8 “We‟re self-made - well, at least I am” (P 97), the Grand Duke says at one point in the narrative. If the Grand Duke is meant to function as a fictional stand-in for Fredrick Christ Trump, Donald Trump‟s father, then this utterance is a satiric broadside at one of the many instances of self-mythologizing which the Trump family has enjoyed. Fredrick Christ Trump was not self-made, at least not in the sense that he started his business from scratch without any financial support. In 1918, he inherited from his father an estate worth 30,000$, which, converted into today‟s standards, would roughly equal 500,000$. What is even more interesting in the light of the self-stylisation as a pioneering business man is the fact that the estate business, which would later be taken to a totally new level by his son Donald Trump, was in fact started by Fredrick Christ Trump‟s mother (cf. Dean 2016: online). The Return of Political Fiction? 71 city states of Renaissance Italy, where a few families distributed power and wealth among themselves. The Grand Duke admits this openly, when he calls the political system he heads “[a] benign commercial plutocracy”, which, as he explains, “cannot be run on democratic lines” (P 44). In Pussy’s world - and by implications in the USA of the year 2017 - a threat of which economists and philosophers such as the former German State Minister for Culture and Media Julian Nida-Rümelin have warned has become a reality: a historical regression is taking place and capitalism is dipping over into a new feudalism (cf. Nida Rümelin 2016: 423). This is, however, not the most depressing fact. What is really unnerving, as Jacobson‟s satire makes clear time and again, is that „the people‟ not only seem not to mind, but in fact contribute to this development by their mindless use of their democratic rights: “The people exercised their rights to vote and whatever it was what they‟d voted for was forgotten in the euphoria of their exercising it” (P 67). However, as much as Pussy is concerned with commenting on current political developments, its major focus lies, at least superficially, elsewhere. It lies with the story of Fracassus, the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess‟ son and heir, who is no other than the satire‟s version of Donald Trump. In twenty-eight chapters the novel traces Fracassus‟ development, or rather the lack thereof. Pussy thus can be classified as a crossbreed of an anti-Bildungsroman and a roman à clef, whose plot rests on details of Donald Trump‟s s biography: from Donald Trump‟s repudiated elder brother Freddy Trump (in Pussy appropriately called Iago) over Donald Trump‟s work as host of the game show The Apprentice to his - meanwhile much changed - relationship with Vladimir Putin, who is called Vozzek Spravchik in the novel and rules over the republic Cholm - a reference to the Russian town of Kholm, where the first encirclement of the German army by the Red Army took place in 1942 (cf. Althaus 2017: online). The pivotal point on which the entire satire rests is language use, or abuse respectively. At the level of histoire, this concern is most prominently realised through Fracassus‟ inability to master the English language. Repeatedly, Fracassus is shown to be linguistically challenged. Professor Probrius and his colleague Dr Cobald‟s main task is to expand Fracassus‟ vocabulary, among others by practicing finding synonyms. This exercise gives away Fracassus sexist self-centredness: he can find more synonyms for the word prostitute than for the word woman. When Dr Cobald points out the strong connection between the concept of woman and the concept of prostitute in his mind, little Fracassus points his finger at her - a gesture typical of an irritated Donald Trump - and accuses her of being unfair (cf. P 29f). Other examples of Fracassus‟ struggle with words are his tweets, which arguably belong to the most hilarious parts of the book. At one point of the narrative, Fracassus meets Sojjourner Heminway, a “Metro- Johannes Wally 72 polian Liberal Elitists” (P 97), whom he falls in love with, much to his parents‟ distress. Sojjourner, whose first name references the Afro- American abolitionist and women‟s right activist Sojourner Truth (1797- 1883), has been interpreted as “a proxy for Hillary Clinton” (cf. Lawson 2017: online), as she eventually becomes Fracassus‟ political opponent. Nevertheless, immediately after meeting her for the first time, an enchanted Fracassus tweets: “Met a bitch called two js. Great piece of ass with two as. Moved on her, not close” (P 99). The two chapters in which this episode is narrated are entitled “When my love swears she is made of truth…” (Chapter 14) and “… I do believe her though I know she lies” (Chapter 15). The chapter titles, which are taken from the first two lines of Shakespearian Sonnet 138, form a strong contrast with Fracassus‟ linguistically and intellectually reductive tweet, thereby reinforcing the notion of Fracassus‟ linguistic and intellectual limitedness. The narrative offers an explanation of Fracassus‟ linguistic inability. This analysis adapts the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage (cf. Lacan 1949/ 2001). According to this concept, a toddler‟s recognition of him or herself in the mirror roughly coincides with his or her first attempts at using language. The mirror stage thus constitutes the intersection between the pre-linguistic stage (the imaginary) and the stage after the acquisition of language (the symbolic). In a nutshell, Lacan reinterprets Freud‟s oedipal phase and argues that the conflict the child experiences at this developmental stage is not so much one of loyalties and jealousies but one of identity and separation. The child realises that he or she is not one with his or her environment and therefore experiences a gap between wanting something and having that want fulfilled. This gap is bridged by language, however, only insufficiently: The enormity of the shock, for any child, of having to go from pointing to naming cannot be exaggerated. But for Fracassus, for whom to wish was to be given, it was as catastrophic as birth. To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you. Fracassus knew of no such difference. The world had been his, to eat, to tear, to kick. He hadn‟t had to name it. The world was him. Fracassus. (P 21) The notion that childish narcissism is the key to understanding Fracassus mirrors psychological explanations which have been offered in order to understand the motivations of Donald Trump (cf., for instance, Allens 2017: online). In Pussy, this notion is reinforced through the infantile game culture in which all political and economic activities in Urbs-Ludus, whose Latin name translates to game city, are embedded. For instance, in his first interview with Fracassus‟ parents, Professor Probrius is led to a dining room which abounds with “children‟s party food” (P 10), and when explaining his business activities, the Grand Duke compares them to the game Monopoly (P 11). It is the compelling result of these regres- The Return of Political Fiction? 73 sive dynamics that the grown-up Fracassus becomes a game show host, in which he tells “wrongdoers - wife-beaters, drug-takers, rapists, alcoholics, pickpockets, body snatchers, arsonists, forgers, cat burglars, paedophiles” to “[j]ust Stoppit” (P, 165, original emphasis). For Fracassus, as the narrator acidly comments, the show has the great advantage that Fracassus needs to remember only “two words” [! ], and if he forgets them, “there [is] always autocue” (ibid.). In comparison, Donald Trump became famous for saying three words on the show The Apprentice, namely: “you are fired.” If the motif of linguistic and cultural poverty pervades Pussy at the level of histoire, linguistic and cultural playfulness abounds at the level of discourse. The narrator‟s vocabulary is rich and varied, with the odd rhetorical figure such as anaphoric 9 or epiphoric 10 repetition and alliteration 11 worked into the discourse. As initially mentioned, the plot is characterised by a number of intertextual references, as it mirrors, among others, that of Gulliver’s Travels or that of Candide: like Gulliver or Candide, Fracassus, too, goes on an extended educational tour. A further prominent intertextual reference can be found at the beginning of the book. The actual narrative is preceded by an ironic reworking of a section of the Book of Revelation. As is the case in Revelation 13.1, a speaker also observes a beast rising from the sea; however, in Jacobson‟s version the beast has “the feet of a clown” and “face of a spoilt child” (P 3). Regarding the linguistic material that Pussy consists of, the names given to the various characters and places are of particular interest. Arguably, characters and places rather belong to the level of histoire than discourse, but as these names show a strong resemblance with the stylistic features of Pussy, we might as well discuss them here. In Pussy, prominent names - regardless whether they are names of persons or places - are often taken from Latin or Latin-based languages. I have already mentioned the Latin name of the walled Republic of Urbs Ludus, but there is more. The protagonist‟s name Fracassus refers to the Italian noun fracasso, which means noise or rumpus as well as to the French adjective fracassant, which means sensational but also thunderous. 12 Similarly, the last name of Fracassus‟ teacher Probrius could be read as a malapropism of either the Latin word proprius, which, among other things, can mean essential or typical, or the Latin word probus, which means excellent. 9 “It was situated on an artificial beach whose sands were of surpassing softness, sands the colour of his wife‟s hair […]” (P 62) 10 “A hunger for change. A dread of change.” (P 158) 11 E.g. “Another plebiscite, presumably. The Grand Duke held himself aloof from people politics.” (P 67) 12 Also the Renaissance Author François Rablais is said to have listed a certain Fracassus as the name of a mythical giant (cf. Bane 2016: 71). Johannes Wally 74 Latin or Italian, however, are not the only languages that Pussy draws on in order to create telling names. On his educational tour, Fracassus meets Phonocrates, the leader of the Republic of Gnossia, whose name clearly contains a reference to the Greek philosopher Socrates. Furthermore, the name of the republic Gnossia constitutes a pun on the Neo- Greek term „gnosia‟ - a psychiatric term which denotes “[t]he perceptive faculty enabling one to recognise the form and the nature of persons and things” (www.medical-dictionary.com, s.v. „gnosia‟) - but also on the term gnosis, which could either mean “immediate knowledge of spiritual truth” or refer to knowledge “as professed by the ancient Gnostics” (Webster’s Third International Dictionary, s.v. „gnosis‟). These allusions to philosophy and knowledge are, of course, rhetorical devices in order to create a satiric contrast to the wisdom Phonocrates actually divulges: “Don‟t keep your promises” (P 110), he advises young Fracassus, when he reveals to him “the whole secret of good government” (P 109). A similarly biting, though more complex joke is made with regard to Vozzek Spravchik, the satire‟s proxy for Vladimir Putin. The politician and game show host Vozzek Spravchik runs a show, in which the word spravnos is a term of abuse, whereas the term spravchik is a term of approval (P 115ff.). The irony here is that spravnos is reminiscent of the adverbs správně (Czech) or správne (Slovakian), both of which mean right or correct. Hence, one is probably not stretching this scene when reading it as reinforcing the idea that contemporary politics has come to equal an inversion if not negation of ethics. Considering these elaborate and polyglot puns, one question arises: Why all the effort? Why create such a complex and highly refined web of cultural and linguistic allusions if the satire‟s only aim was to illuminate how uncultured Donald Trump is? The explanation that Pussy is a satire and that satire often rests on a disproportion between what is told and how it is told is certainly correct. However, it does not go far enough. In fact, the discrepancy between histoire and discourse implies something else, namely an unexpected value judgement. Borrowing from Bourdieu‟s terminology (cf. Bourdieu 1986), this judgement could be summarised as follows: cultural capital is equal if not superior to economic/ political capital. This notion finds its expression most obviously in the character of Kolskeggur Probrius, as his research in Phonoethics supports the idea that “bad grammar leads to bad men” (P 6). The notion behind Probrius‟ research is that of linguistic relativity, better known as Sapir-Whorfhypothesis, which argues that linguistic structures determine our worldview. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, linguistic limitations might well lead to cognitive limitations. After all, you are likely not to know what you cannot name. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been contested for a variety of reasons. The idea, however, that language shapes our thoughts has not been discarded and has recently been applied The Return of Political Fiction? 75 to examining the relationship between political preferences and language use (cf. among others Lakoff 2009 or Wehling 2016). 13 The fact that Professor Probrius contributes to Fracassus‟ success might well cast a negative light on the role which intellectuals played in the rise of Donald Trump. It does, however, not weaken the aforementioned value judgement, which proves Pussy to be the product of a Bildungsbürger’s perspective on contemporary politics. It is this perspective, then, which ultimately changes Pussy‟s status from a literary weapon to a document of helplessness: what the novel cleverly identifies as the source of Fracassus‟ linguistic inaptitude becomes, in this light, a depressing meta-referential statement: “To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you” (P 21). The fact that Pussy exists is an admission that the values it sets out to support are not dominant anymore. Donald Trump was elected president, in spite of the many election forecasts that said otherwise and in spite of the many public intellectuals who warned against his time in office. Pussy can thus be seen as an attempt at putting right symbolically what went wrong in reality. Reminiscent of the Rambo movies, which regularly presented the audience with an outgunned and outnumbered American soldier who prevailed against the Viet Cong in the jungle (which is an exact inversion of what really happened), Pussy enacts a symbolic victory of cultural education and political liberalism over economic and political power. It is, thus, a telling document of the political changes which I referred to at the beginning of this essay. 3.2. Autumn by Ali Smith As predicted, a flood of Brexit literature hit the market at the end of 2017 (cf. Spencer 2017: online). This inundation constituted an anomaly in British literature. Up to that point, the European Union and its predecessors, respectively, seem to have had little impact on the UK‟s cultural production. This impression is not only supported by the research conducted for this essay, it also coincides with the verdict of the experimental author and literary scholar Gabriel Josipovici: in the course of a pre- Brexit Times Literary Supplement-symposium, Josipovici (2016: online) stated that the UK‟s cultural life was more European in the 1960s than it is today. 13 Lakoff (2009: 15), for instance, argues that language activates certain frames and metaphors and the more we are exposed to a certain type of language the more our thoughts will be shaped by the frames and metaphors activated by this specific language use. It is thus not irrelevant how a certain fact is expressed; rather, phrasing, itself is a political action open to ethical scrutiny. This is not a new insight. What is, however, new is that what was formerly argued intuitively can meanwhile be proven through cognitive research. Johannes Wally 76 It is perhaps no coincidence that the - to my knowledge - first and also only better known example of non-genre fiction in the English language 14 which foregrounds the European institutions and their policies was not written by a British author but by the Irish writer Gillman Noonan. His much anthologised short story “Dear Parents, I‟m Working for the EEC! ”, published in 1976, only three years after Ireland - and incidentally Great Britain - joined the European Economic Community, focuses on an Irish translator who works for the European Commission. If one is to trust Powell‟s verdict that euroscepticism is a hobby horse of politically conservative authors, Noonan‟s short story is the exception that proves the rule (cf. Powell 2013: 12f.): “Dear Parents, I‟m Working for the EEC” scrutinises the relationship between personal happiness and welfare, ultimately opposing a seemingly mad anarchist campaigner with the Belgian police force. The anarchist campaigner is arrested for indecent behaviour, as he performs a striptease in the middle of the Schuman roundabout vis-à-vis the European Commission building. In his striptease, the campaigner uses a jacket which has been pieced together from stolen dog coats as a prop. The fact that dogs are groomed and clothed like human beings in Brussels has come to “symbolise for him all that [is] wrong in the world” (DP 75). The striptease is observed by the Irish translator, whose love life has fallen apart since he began to work for the EEC. This narrative detail references the Marxist notion informing the short story that the type of material welfare fostered by a Capitalist institution such as the European Economic Community will ultimately lead to alienation. In other words, an economic community of this kind will damage if not destroy interpersonal communities of all kinds. Alienation, especially the alienating power of bureaucracy, is also a focal point of Ali Smith‟s novel Autumn. Published in October 2016, it was “hailed as the first Brexit novel” and as an extraordinary literary achievement (Clark 2017: online). In The Financial Times, the author and journalist Alex Preston (2017: online) epitomised the general thrust of the reviews of Autumn when he marvelled how “writing this good could have come so fast.” Ali Smith‟s novel is indeed a highly intriguing text. The classification „first Brexit novel‟, however, does not follow quite as readily as one might think from Smith‟s prose. In contrast to Julian Barnes‟ England, England (1998), which anticipated Brexit by effectively staging the extraction of the fictitious entity „Old England‟ from the European Union (cf. EE 253), 15 14 The EU as a corrupt agent threatening British national identity has played a certain role in crime and/ or spy fiction such as Andrew Robert‟s The Aachen Memorundum (1995), Graham Ison‟s Division (1996) and, more contemporary, Michael Dobbs‟ A Sentimental Traitor (2011) (cf. Powell 2013: 12f. and Powell 2014: online). 15 The situation as envisaged by Barnes is indeed eerily prophetic: “New political leaders proclaimed a new self-sufficiency. They extracted the country from the The Return of Political Fiction? 77 Brexit as a topic is alluded to, rather than addressed directly, in Autumn. In terms of narrative technique, this is often done through the inclusion of news snippets (e.g. A 58 and A 111); the term „Brexit‟, 16 however, is not used in the entire book. This should not come as a surprise, since Ali Smith‟s work is known for its polyphony and ambiguity, both of which stem from “discursive features such as dispersion and fragmentation of discourses and points of view” (Garcia 2012: 111). With regard to Autumn, Ali Smith has pointed out that she is specifically interested in “asking structural questions about the [novel]” (Smith and Anderson 2016: online), which, as a literary genre, is always concerned with time, regardless what else it is concerned with. This has caused many reviewers to place Autumn in the tradition of high modernism, relating the novel to works such as Marcel Proust‟s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) or Thomas Mann‟s Der Zauberberg (1924) (cf. Kavenna 2016: online). Although this is a valuable classification, which, to boot, is supported by the narrative techniques used in Autumn, it might not do the novel‟s thematic focus full justice. Like all art forms that concern themselves with the fundamental categories of human sense making, Autumn is ultimately a meditation on human identity. 17 More specifically, it is a meditation on political identity which branches out into three subtopics: (i) national identity; (ii) personal identity; and (iii) - connecting the first two subtopics - nostalgia as defence mechanism. All three topics are introduced in the opening chapter, which in a dream-like scene shows the character of Daniel Gluck regaining his consciousness after having been washed up on a shore. In the course of this brief chapter, Daniel Gluck metamorphoses from an old man to a young man to a boy and back to “his respectable self again” (A 11). These changes indicate how much Autumn will be concerned with the fluidness and, perhaps, contingency of personal identity. Yet, there is more to it. In the year 2016, beginning a book with someone who is washed up on a shore is not simply a literalisiation of Heidegger‟s Geworfenheit of human existence or a learned allusion to great literary works such as Shakespeare‟s The Tempest (1611), Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Donne‟s Meditation XVII (1624): it has political implications. The covert reference to Donne‟s verse line “If a clod be washed away, Europe is the less” can be seen as pointing to the Brexit vote, while the section where Daniel European Union - negotiating with such obstinate irrationality that they were eventually paid to depart […]” (EE 253). 16 The chapter tackling the state of the nation after the Brexit referendum only speaks of “the vote” without further specifying which vote (A 53). 17 This claim is based on McHale‟s observation that there is an intricate connection between epistemology and ontology (cf. McHale 1987: 11). Most obviously, this claim can be exemplified by the following question, variations of which are often asked in introductory lectures to philosophy: if I am standing with my back to a tree so that I can‟t see the tree, can I be sure that the tree exists? Johannes Wally 78 Gluck “looks along the shore at the dark line of the tide-dumped dead” (A 12) evokes the contemporary refugee crisis, whose death toll had already passed 1,000 in April 2017 (Dearden 2017: online). 18 Finally, Daniel‟s continuous craving for being young again anticipates the nostalgic bias of the novel, which, as we will see in our discussion, emerges specifically as desire for and appreciation of British art of various epochs, especially of the 1960s. The three subtopics are fully developed in the ensuing chapters. Although not less allusive, these are less lyrical and more narrative in nature. Alternatingly, they centre on the everyday life of “thirty two years old, no fixed hours casual contract junior lecturer at a university in London” (A 15) and on episodes telling of her friendship with Daniel Gluck, who, more than 100 years old, lies in a coma. The dreamlike opening scene we have just analysed thus turns out to be the product of a dying man‟s subconscious. In her discussion of political and personal identity, Smith resorts to the (post-)structuralist notion that identity is a relational category: hence, identity is not something that exists per se, but is established through relations, in other words, “we can say what something is by dint of what it is not” (Childs 2000/ 2001: 2). This thought is fleshed out more fully in the episode when Elisabeth Demand tries to obtain a new passport, hence when she tries to obtain a symbol in which individual and national identity interlock. Her first attempt at doing so fails, as the photograph she attaches to the application form does not comply with the norms: “HEAD INCORRECT SIZE” (A 25, original emphasis), the post office clerk writes in “the box next to the word Other” (ibid., original emphasis). This episode not only shows how much, in late modernity, personal identity has come to mean state-administered identity (cf. for example, Horkheimer 1970), it also literalises the aforementioned notion of identity being a relational category: by trying to obtain a passport, Elisabeth attempts at establishing an identity in relation to a superordinate entity such as the nation state. This mirrors Britain‟s need to establish an identity with relation to a superordinate entity, namely the European Union. In autumn 2016, some two months after the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, creating a British identity is a difficult enterprise. The major reason for this is that the nation itself is divided. Therefore it cannot simply develop an identity by demarcating itself as a whole from a larger unit: All across the country, the country split in pieces. All across the country, the countries cut adrift. 18 As Daniel Gluck is a German Jew, this scene also alludes to the National-Socialist genocide of six million Jews. The Return of Political Fiction? 79 All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there, a line you don‟t cross here, a line you better not cross there, a line of beauty here, a line dance there, a line you don‟t even know exists here a line you can‟t afford there a whole new line of fire, line of battle, end of the line here/ there. (A 61) The answer to this existential crisis which Autumn proposes is a nostalgic evocation of the „good old days‟. In terms of discourse, this longing for the past finds its expression in the achronological design of the narrative. The regular analepses focusing on Elisabeth‟s friendship with Daniel Gluck - often set in early 1990s - suggest that the present can only be endured in small doses; not before long the past has to be conjured up as a site of relief. In terms of story, the nostalgic bias of the novel manifests itself predominately in the evocation of the paintings and life of the only female British Pop art painter Pauline Boty, on whom Elisabeth Demand wrote her dissertation. Pauline Boty was a “proto-feminist pop-art pioneer” (Laing 2016: online), who died of cancer aged only 28. Her art work was long forgotten but regained public attention in 2013, when three exhibitions made her paintings available to the general public (Stummer 2013: online). Autumn’s reference to Boty is of significance since Boty‟s work is directly connected to one of the major political scandals of the 1960s, namely the so called, „Profumo affair‟. In 1963, Boty was commissioned to paint Christine Keeler, English model and call girl, who had had affairs with John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan‟s government, and Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché (cf. Schmidt 2011: 165ff.). The painting called Scandal ‘63, which has disappeared since the year of its creation, places Christine Keeler at the centre, while showing the male protagonists of the affair at the top of the canvass (Stummer 2013: online). The Profumo affair subsequently brought the conservative Macmillan government down, and Ali Smith has argued that one reason for including Pauline Boty in Autumn is the fact that through her art, Boty documented the politically charged year 1963. This year, however, can be seen as anticipating the year 2016, as in both cases a political lie “had dramatic consequences for the society at large” (Laing 2016: online). Johannes Wally 80 Smith‟s explanation is comprehensible. However, the political implications of this reference seem more complex. After all, they place Autumn in a specific literary and ideological tradition, which has political implications in itself: with its nostalgic evocation of the art of a bygone decade, Autumn is a prototypical postmodern novel. 19 As Jameson (1992: 166) has argued, one defining feature of postmodernism is a certain fascination with the past, which can be linked to a lost faith in individualism. Artists perceive themselves as no longer capable of creating something original; rather they turn to a (mythologised) past, “as though, for some reason, we were unable to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience” (ibid. 171). However, nostalgia might not only be interpreted as a sign of artistic self-doubt. It can also be viewed as a form of escapism. The nostalgic evocation of the past indicates a profound dissatisfaction with the present, and ultimately, the political inability to change the present. Conjuring up the year 1963 - the “anus mirabilis” (A 251), as the novel puns drawing on Philip Larkin‟s famous poem annus mirabilis (1974) and Boty‟s painting Bum (1966), which shows a nude female behind - becomes a defence mechanism, in other words, a tool which is meant to help ignore what seems unchangeable. And yet, Smith‟s Autumn might not be quite as pessimistic a book as Jacobson‟s Pussy, which ends with a note of gloomy foreboding. This has to do with the character of Daniel Gluck, a German Jew, who at one point of the book is tellingly referred to as “European” (A 77). In the episodes centring on Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand‟s friendship, Gluck, whose name is meant to echo the German word for happiness (i.e. Glück), comes across as the personification of wisdom, combining emo- 19 This classification might come as a surprise, especially when we remember the aforementioned connection between Autumn and high modernist texts. And indeed, especially in terms of discourse, the novel could be classified as modernist, since the narrative mode freely switches between omniscient comments and character focalisation, using techniques such as free indirect discourse and inner monologue. However, what looks like a modernist novel really is a conscious quote of the modernist originals such as Virginia Woolf‟s Mrs Dalloway (1925), to which Autumn bears a slight resemblance also thematically, as both novels show the female protagonist running everyday errands. What further corroborates this classification of Autumn as a postmodernist novel is the fact that we do not only find an abundance of references to touchstones of high modernist culture - e.g. William Butler Yeats‟ poem “The Second Coming” (1920) (cf. A 15), Aldous Huxely‟s novel Brave New World (1932) (cf. A 17) or James Joyce‟s‟ short story “The Dead” (1914) (cf. A 97) -, we also find a verbatim quote of a cornerstone of literary realism, namely Charles Dickens‟ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) (cf. A 15 and A 201), evoking the tradition of „the condition of England novels‟. Hence, Autumn is a collage of highly meta-referential quotes (i.e. meta-referential, as the collage foregrounds the novel‟s literariness), combining references of at least two literary traditions that can be seen as opposing one another. This syncretism can be seen as another indicator of the novel‟s postmodernist leaning. The Return of Political Fiction? 81 tional warmth with an enlightened worldview. After having been in a coma for the better part of the book, Gluck regains consciousness at the end of the novel and asks Elisabeth the question which she has anticipated throughout the book: “What are you reading? ” (A 258). This scene sets off an entire train of questions: Are we to infer from it that in a world full of radicalisation and simplifying messages, literature is reason‟s last refuge? And what are we to make of Daniel Gluck‟s nationality? Might it be a hint that the novel supports the view, ironically put forth by the German historian Philipp Felsch, that Hegel‟s Weltgeist must be acting in utter confusion, since Germany and the UK seem to have swapped the political roles typically assigned to them? Whereas the UK seems to be retreating into some kind of blinkered nationalism, German foreign policy has come to epitomise a reasonable and postideological pragmatism (cf. Felsch 2017: 14f.). Hence, could Autumn be read as subtly supporting a political agenda as pursued, for instance, by Angela Merkel? And, finally, does Daniel Gluck‟s „resurrection‟ imply that the „voice of reason‟ could make itself heard again in the UK? There is no way to ultimately settle these questions. Still, all three might be answered in the affirmative, albeit tentatively. Autumn might be too hazy to overtly put forth a political message, but it certainly conveys a deep appreciation of art and literature and also expresses a deep dissatisfaction with the UK‟s current political situation. Moreover, through the inclusion of story details such as the negative depiction of discrimination against migrants (cf. A 53), criticism of Thatcherism (cf. A 111) and a positive depiction of homosexual love (cf. A 221), Autumn can be interpreted as leaning towards some kind of social and cultural liberalism, which is often associated with support of international institutions such as the European Union and which, at the global political scene, has recently been pursued by the German government. Hence, in spite of the fact that Autumn refrains from returning open verdicts on current political affairs, it is a deeply political book (if not exactly a political novel). In contrast to Howard Jacobson‟s Pussy it does not foreclose the possibility of a better future. It does, however, not hint at any possible way forward either. 4. Types of Contemporary Political Fiction: Classifying and Comparing Pussy and Autumn I have just argued that Autumn is not a representative of the political novel, at least not if we apply Kemme‟s view that the political novel is “a work of prose fiction which primarily focuses upon the exercise of political power within the body politic” (Kemme 1987: 5). Rather, Autumn is a representative of what one might call „politics in a novel‟. In other words, it is a novel whose thematic focus lies elsewhere, at least at first sight, in Johannes Wally 82 this case on the relationship between a young woman and her geriatric friend. Autumn does not depict political actions in the narrow sense such as the act of voting or the plotting and scheming of political elite. Rather, politics - especially Brexit - serves as a backdrop against which the plot unfolds. Pussy sits on the other end of the continuum we postulated in section 2. It can be classified as a political novel, albeit an atypical one. Following Fracassus‟ development from a spoilt child to a statesman of sorts, the novel depicts political actions and also explores aspects of political philosophy. What makes Pussy an atypical representative of the political novel is the fact that it is, at least overtly, not concerned with the political events of a real state. As a satire in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels, it traces the political events in a fictitious country and only those in the know - in this case probably all persons with access to the daily news - are able to decode the setting and relate it to the political scene of the USA in 2017. Despite these differences, there is much common ground between Pussy and Autumn. This common ground is established by the way both novels tell their stories. As Knight (1980: 4) has argued, “form is crucial” in producing the ideological substratum of a literary text, and this is particularly obvious with the two novels under scrutiny here. Both heavily deploy intertextuality, thereby placing their stories in a frame of reference which, arguably, is decipherable specifically for members of a certain social stratum, namely the educated middle class. 20 Referencing an entire literary canon can be interpreted as a means of establishing a bond between the author and knowledgeable readers. It enacts a set of values which, with reference to Pussy, I have condensed in the slogan that cultural capital is superior to economic/ political capital. Thus, both novels perform extra-fictionally what Autumn stages intra-fictionally: they act out the identity crisis of those who might feel especially jeopardised by the rise of an anti-intellectual nationalism. In this sense, both novels can be viewed as documents of the current political crisis. In particular, they bear witness to the identity crisis of the liberal, educated middleclass, who perhaps feel that they are no longer the cultural and political backbone of western societies. 21 20 It seems noteworthy that both novels assign central roles to characters who are scholars. And indeed, Autumn was read as a document of the educated middleclass. 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Johannes Wally Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz