Against Allegory

More than ten years on from the 2008 financial crisis, two trends of global statism remain dominant: Beijing-led “exceptional neoliberalism” and the emerging “illiberal democracy” topped by Trumponomics, with racist populism looming at the back of both. Even though these persistent programs are remnants of the ideological, national, and economic wars of the previous century, the boundary separating them is permeable. Jiang Rong 姜 戎’s prizewinning novel, Wolf Totem 《狼图腾》, helps us see this porosity. Wolf Totem is the first “Chinese Cultural Revolution” (fictional) memoir written explicitly for Chinese nationals and yet goes on to engage the sensibility of readers from a Western historical and ideological context. This essay critically identifies certain acts of reading Wolf Totem and looks at the way these selected readings, all allegorical in their approach, step across the literary subject to build symbolic extensions that stretch thin the wolves for various purposes. Collectively, such acts of reading expose both an important quality of our historical moment and the ideological function of literary intellectuals within it. They show that our era is one of skepticism about the status quo, one in which certain antidemocratic drives commiserate over historical conflicts and strategize for an extended, ongoing, and relentless process of global dominance. The popular reception of Wolf Totem crystallizes the thrust and conduct of these seeming competing drives. In the final analysis, this essay follows through the symptoms of these drives to reveal a kind of energetics or “primitivist social ethos” alive in the unified way humanity makes extinct any life forms unsubscribed to global statisms in their Beijing or “illiberal democratic” forms.

Narrating the extremes: The language of suffering and survival in Laila Lalami’s The Moor's Account

In the 16th century, the tragic Narvaez expedition to the New World ended with only four survivors: three Spaniard masters and a Moor slave who had never been given a chance to give his testimony as his companions had. In the fictional memoir The Moor’s Account (2014), Laila Lalami gives voice to Mustafa/Estebanico to narrate the hardships they went through from his perspective, which reflects his Arabic and Islamic identity. His story depicts several forms of human suffering: deprivation and poverty in his home country Morocco under the Portuguese occupation, slavery and torment while in Spain, and eight years of privation and wandering in the wilderness of North America. The paper will employ postcolonial poetics to reveal the literary devices used to recount these forms of human suffering as they are represented through the ethnicity of the narrator. This in-text analysis will link linguistic and aesthetic signs in the text to their interpretative functions in cultural reconciliation. Therefore, it will highlight the ideological and aesthetic aspects which classify the novel as postcolonial writing. Then, it will focus on the suffering-survival dichotomy and its representation in the narrative discourse.

Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968): authenticity

Fred Ex is the committed drinking protagonist of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, in thrall to the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford. He realises he will never have fame of his own, and over time discovers himself to be alienated from all aspects of modern life and the American dream. The chapter analyses how these elements relate to Existential authenticity, including the novel’s play around the idea of ‘fictional memoir’ and autofiction. There are periods of depression for Fred Ex which lead to being committed to a mental asylum, and the chapter covers the philosophical issues around agency in relation to drinking and mental well-being. This chapter also looks at the protagonist as a developing writer since the novel is partly a künstlerroman, and how this in turn is entangled with drinking.

Subjectivity as Espionage: The Dark Legacy of Modernism in John Banville's The Untouchable

John Banville's The Untouchable functions as a critique of subjectivity after modernism, specifically theories of the decentred subject. The narrator of the book, Victor Maskell, is a fictionalized version of English art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, and through this fictional memoir, Banville offers a portrait of the self with a terrible absence at its centre, implicating modernism's suspicion that the subject, or cogito, is a discursive fiction as the source of Maskell's treason and nihilism. At the heart of Maskell's identity is the death drive, the ‘blind automatism of repetition beyond pleasure seeking’ (in Slavoj Zizek's terms) that confounds the subject such as Maskell, in search of a ‘true self’, and makes life an absurd black comedy. Through his original narrator, who represents a fiction of a fiction of a fiction – Maskell/Blunt/cogito – Banville suggests that the only authentic existence may indeed lie in deception.

Testing the Market

Like their imitators, Eliza Haywood and even Daniel Defoe have been called mercenaries who wrote to formula for low readers with limited intellects. Yet Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe inaugurated a decade of lively, market-driven narrative experiment aimed at sophisticated gentry readers. When low scandal titillated, it originated in high life. Highly inventive, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and some authors of the many lives and surprising adventures in the Crusoe manner read their rivals with professional care. They adapted and contested as well as adopted Defoe’s distinctive fictional memoir, Haywood’s equally modern amatory sublime. So did Jonathan Swift when he parodied Robinson Crusoe’s strategies in Gulliver’s Travels, an anonymous narrative that matched its commercial triumph. Swift hastened the vogue’s end, but these novelists’ commercial and literary legacy endures.