CAPONEU

Introductory Reflections on an Impossible Genre

The political novel. For a long time, this was called the tendency novel, thesis novel, committed novel; today, one is inclined to say evasively, ‘the politics of literature’ – meaning something profoundly different. Although research into the politics of literature is no longer such a young field, it has so far only touched on the political novel, let alone undertaken a systematic reflection on the political novel as a genre. This is probably due to the rather diplomatic relationship between political theorists and literary scholars, which means that a proper discussion has yet to take place. It is part of the Caponeu’s ambition to build a bridge between these two areas of research – with the history of politics on one side of the river and the history of literary forms on the other. The political novel is to stand in the middle of this river, as the central pillar of a bridge built between the two.

No man steps into the same river twice. This is why this central pillar of the political novel is not a model that can be applied and followed, but a phenomenon that occurs – quite eventfully – and can only be examined in retrospect. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the attempts to produce a political novel according to a normative model (used by state authorities as much as by anticipations of market needs) have mostly proven to be a failure. This should not remove normative poetics from our field of interest; it should only remind us that it is not our task to discover the secret of the political novel or to prescribe a poetics for it. Despite this impossibility of purposeful creation, or precisely thanks to this impossibility, one thing is obvious: there are political novels. And our question is: How are they possible? (The original reads, “There are works of art – how are they possible?” Lukács 1974, 9) Much like this statement, and most likely confirming the thesis that one cannot write by following a pattern, or at least not successfully, this text unfolding before your eyes, dear reader, is another suspected case of plagiarism. Its honest intention is to open an interval between more general conjectures about the European novel and our own meddling with the political novel. An imitator typing this palimpsest – for that is how she would like to see it – adds new ideas to the famous original, Chapter 3 from Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, entitled “Narrative markets, ca. 1850”.

What the Caponeu team adds to the map of Europe is precisely this strictly speaking impossible genre of the political novel, a genre which is – as Moretti describes his subject – by no means “normal”. Despite or precisely because of its exceptionality, the political novel is just as unthinkable for wide circles of literary studies as it is inappropriate to speak of literary writing in the sense of literary markets. Paradoxically, making the political novel the focus point for a group of more than 50 researchers at a time when politics – and above all ‘the political’ – has been on everyone’s lips for decades may seem outdated. There is, however, an interesting gap between the inherited practices of literary studies, its rather fashionable embrace of ‘the political’ and the understanding of this political turn as experienced in neighbouring disciplines and by non-professional interlocutors and audiences. Our attempt to map Europe in terms of the political novel as a specific cultural product of the 20th century, reworked in recent decades for the purposes of the 21st century, has from the outset received acclaim from experts in neighbouring fields of research such as sociology, sociology of education and political history. These other disciplines have so far shown immense interest in our attempt to ‘make the political novel great again’: I am paraphrasing someone here who is causing intense frustration, a frustration that is seeping into literary writing both in America and beyond, which only suggests that literature, and the novel in particular, is responding to its political environments, albeit often belatedly. It is time that we gave credibility to the questions of how political novels circulate and participate in communities and societies, how they use their admittedly minimal power in society, how they represent (problematise or condone) the relations between the 1% and the 99%, the elites and the masses, the rulers and the ruled, how they preserve or erase the memory of conflicts and peace projects, how they plan and shape the future or erase the memory of alternative futures, how they speak or remain silent about the distribution of resources (who gets what, when and how) and, finally, how they answer the paradigmatic questions of politics such as left vs. right, north vs. south, west vs. east, oriental vs. occidental, black vs. white, imperial vs. subaltern, centre vs. periphery, and so on. And also, how they relate to the choice between social democracy and revolutionary socialism, the secular and the religious, the military and the civilian, parliamentary and presidential, and so on (see van Delden and Grenier 2009, 2). By examining literary texts through these questions, which do not coincide with but complement those of genre, style and form, we simultaneously discover new and fresh answers to the basic, much more general question, ‘What is literature?’.

Text Portraits

In contrast to other literary categories, such as the dystopian novel, the surrealist poem or the Bildungsroman, the peculiarity of the political novel is that it has no prototype. There is no Red Star, no “Rider’s Song” and no Wilhelm Meister that a budding political author can take as a role model. And yet, when there are political novels, we recognise them immediately, even without a balanced academic definition of the genre. We all have our case examples: Ilmari Kianto’s Punainen viiva (The Red Line, 1909), Louis Aragon’s La Semaine sainte (Holy Week, 1958), David Albahari’s Gec i Majer (Götz and Meyer, 1988), Serhiy Zhadan’s Ворошиловград (Voroshilovgrad, 2010), Marta Sanz’s Clavícula (Clavicle, 2017)... It is easy to say that once we have the object of our study, all we have to do is collect, group and analyse. But how, under what common denominator? For most of us, who are still ultimately literary scholars, the ideal analytical unit would be the genre: but it is impossible to define a literary genre abstract enough to encompass all the different examples of this highly mutable social phenomenon that eventually becomes so powerful that it is perceived as political.

We opted for the bottom-up approach and began by drawing up a preliminary List of Political Novels in Europe, a collection of titles that we consider obligatory and which are indexed on the Digital Map of the Political Novel and explained in more detail in the respective text portraits. Based on intuitive guidance, the list was initially compiled by individual researchers who simply added ‘their’ titles, which were then expanded in the next step to form a list with a certain degree of ‘canonicity’. Further selections were made in consultation with literary scholars from across Europe and beyond, until the first 150 titles were listed. The result is, of course, far from perfect, but at least we now have a plausible index that will be consulted and expanded in the coming years by scholars, students, teachers, cultural workers, activists and, eventually, think-tanks and politicians. While this bottom-up method is prone to the original sin of geographical, linguistic and ideological asymmetry, it does, on the other hand, allow authors to read the novels according to the criteria of the political that they find along the way. The method is not entirely arbitrary, of course, but since different novels rarely have the same historical and social context, we cannot help but let the novels decide the form of the political invested in them.

After establishing the List of Political Novels in Europe, we realised that the least we could and should do was to establish groups of key terms for the novels included in our collection. We set out to define two types of these semi-open groups: keywords and categories. The group keywords includes terms which are used across our Digital Map to link and show content and contexts related to the novel: names (of authors, characters, politicians, critics and censors), locations (cities, provinces, regions, both historical and fictional), and finally events (uprisings, movements, wars and systemic shifts). The group categories allows us to label and group the novels under a literary-specific categorisation, examples of which are literary movements (proletarian-revolutionary literature), groups (Surrealists, Dadaists), genres (utopian novel, thesis novel, social novel) and modes of writing (realism, autofiction, collective writing).

To our preliminary List of Political Novels in Europe several objections can be made, of which the objection that small collections are hyper-canonical might be the most expected and most justified. We answer: So what? That is only the start. For now, our collection of text portraits aims to include ‘all the great books’, which, however, does not mean that we don’t care about the ‘inferior’ ones (‘inferior’ from whatever standpoint considered as canon-defining). Our objective is not only to list political novels that are relevant for their respective contexts but also to select the novels that could have been relevant – and should be relevant when speaking about, for instance, abortion at times when it was illegal (Victor Margueritte’s Vers le bonheur. Ton corps est à toi, 1927; Milka Žicina’s Kajin put, 1934); gay love at times when homosexuality was treated as a sickness of promiscuity (James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, 1956); experiences of People of Colour in a Europe that imagines itself as a white continent (Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, 2021); brutal workforce exploitation during most propulsive economic periods (Fakir Baykurt’s Yüksek Fırınlar / Blast Furnaces, 1983) etc.

In addition, a reader used to counting and accounting might find that not all countries, regions and languages, and not all historical stages or political events and movements are covered by a reciprocal number of novels. Sure, our collection will never be complete, but we hope it is exhaustive enough. What would, however, be wrong is the implicit belief that this selection is objective and only needs to be found reflected or refracted in literary writing – as if political novels could cover all geographical corners and political settings by the scheme 1:1, switching from one political issue to another, literarising them as if in a sort of unbroken thread. Not even in the (from the viewpoint of literature) ‘outer space’ of politics and history are events evenly distributed across the map of Europe and its near and far peripheries. There are and always will be spots with denser and spots with sparser political activity. Political novels thus follow these discontinuous paths, and even this is not guided by the logic of political density, but by the logic of the productivity of a literary field or space in question – and sometimes precisely against this logic. The late Viktor Sklovsky called this the ‘canonization of the cadet branch’. Theory of Prose:

The legacy that is passed on from one literary generation to the next moves not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew […] new literary forms emerge out of the lower stratum of the literary system to replace the old ones […] H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) is reborn as a radio play, scaring off people with the announcement of a full-scale invasion from the outer space […], Jan Pelc’s ...a bude hůř (1985) uncovers the rhythms of hippies, punks and drunkards in a society that was said to stand fast on its positive-minded socialist people, while the Black American James Baldwin introduces with his Giovanni’s Room (1956) criminal gay love within heterosexual, white Europe, and André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (1933), writing against the backdrop of revolutionary militancy, raises the right to political refusal to a veritable leftist position.

Educational Interlude: The Political Novel in Action

None of these titles has ever been taught in school and related contexts; if at all, the said titles have been of interest to a highbrow, professional readership and also to non-professional readers who are connected with them ideologically, biographically or simply accidentally. If these titles are ever used in schools and similar contexts, then only in terms of an attempt to ‘corrupt the young’, as Alain Badiou puts it in Appel à la corruption de la jeunesse (The true life: a plea for corrupting the young, 2016). European schools and informal education are – and in the last few decades this is increasingly so – suffering from a specific kind of cultural deprivation, one that is political as much as it is literary. By circumventing political literature, compulsory education and the state that informs it deny its citizens the raw literary calibrations of political experiences. Reading becomes scholastic, sterile; the more so, if it also excludes foreign political novels. (And one wonders: could it be that the strength of each canon is directly proportional to the provincialism of its politics?)

Methodological Interlude: Centres and Peripheries in the Political Novel in Europe

‘Happy you are in your retirement’, wrote Samuel Richardson, from London, to Bishop Hildesley of Sodor and Man, ‘where you read what books you choose, either for instruction or entertainment…’ What books you choose? What we have seen so far suggests otherwise. Kenneth Clark:

The history of European art has been, to a large extent, the history of a series of centres, from each of which radiated a style […] which was metropolitan at its centre, and became more and more provincial as it reached the periphery. […] It may be said that provincialism is merely a matter of distance from a centre, where standards of skill are higher and patrons more exacting.

I don’t know about European art, Moretti continues in the chapter “Narrative markets, ca. 1850”, but the history of the novel certainly supports Clark’s thesis. Bakhtin’s belief in the ‘decentralizing forces’ of novelistic writing clashes here with a geography of publishing where the centre holds an almost unchallenged sway. Be it mid-18th-century Britain, mid-19th-century Italy, or our own present, the message is the same: the novel is the most centralized of all literary genres. This claim cannot, however, be transferred to the discussion of the political novel with any sense of haste: for the political novel is inextricably linked to its local contexts and cannot therefore be reconstructed by searching for the patterns designed in the metropolises of the world market of literary goods. Or is that nevertheless possible? It depends on how you define politics, and on what scale. Undoubtedly, if a novel negotiates shared European politics, then its printing and marketing strategies are most likely to follow the dynamics of the one and unequal European book market. This is not to say that a political novel arising from the geographical and ideological periphery of Europe would not be a European novel – yet if it is to circulate across the EU, it has to be written or at least translated into one of the big languages (English, German or French), and it has to be distributed from the centres.

There is another argument Moretti makes which does not seem to be completely workable in the context of the 21st century. His formula reads, From provincialism – to centralisation. Paradoxical? Not really, they are the two sides of the same coin, because provincialism is not so much a matter of difference from the centre, but of enforced similarity: the conviction that ‘real’ life is only to be experienced in Paris (or London, or Moscow) – while life in the provinces is merely a shadow. And the novels that arrive from the centre, with provincial malaise as one of their favourite themes, reinforce the circle of dependence over and over again. While this may be true for translated titles and their presence in the libraries in the European semi-peripheries, this Morettian framework ignores what Stephen Shapiro names the exquisite innovativeness of the semi-periphery (or zemi-periphery, to be precise; see Shapiro 2023). In terms of the political novel, Shapiro’s argument is even more fitting. The key issue is not how a genre of the political novel is translated and imitated at the peripheries, but that the peripheries with their distinctively different visions and experiences of Europe (especially its markets and EU governance) offer a take on this shared geopolitical and cultural space that differs from the novels written in the centre or with the perspective of the centre as their ideological backbone.

In contrast to Moretti, whose mission is to map the existing state of things, Caponeu’s mission is also to intervene in this state of things and to make available what is currently invisible – at least by means of short presentations of the selected political novels (see our Text Portraits). This includes not only translating from peripheral languages to the languages of the centres, but also making visible those forms of knowledge and experiences which prove to be marginal, or were marginal throughout the last century, especially in the established regimes of political and social acceptability (see our workshop European Centres and Peripheries in the Political Novel).

‘The Experiment with the Map’

By raising the questions mentioned in the section “Introductory Reflections on an Impossible Genre” and exploring different approaches to the phenomenon of the political novel in Europe, the Caponeu project is committed to an alternative mapping of literary Europe. This goes beyond theoretical discussions about the political novel as a genre or the general relationship between politics and literature. This means that the mapping is specifically designed to examine the relationships between literally shaped social spaces such as cities and states, vernaculars and national languages, centres and peripheries, analogue spaces and digital interfaces, and geopoetics and geopolitics. This map of the political novel in Europe thus combines the book historians’ findings that the literary market is ‘vertically’ divided (across decades and also across different social classes and strata) with Moretti’s own ‘horizontal’ approach to the European circulation of novels, including markers of cities or provinces, nations or minorities, and the inner and outer peripheries of Europe.

What this mapping is not: It is not a history of the book or a history of great works of literature, but a history composed of individual titles, some of which are canonic and others which are not, but which are all significant in their specific interactions with political history, social movements and grievances, as well as those tacit sediments of political developments which are in themselves silent narrations about big events because they tellingly unravel their workings on levels which are left to the side of ‘big history’ (zones of privacy, silence and darkness, marginality and forgetting).

There is then a further methodological point. Caponeu’s Digital Map of the Political Novel is determined to treat political novels wholesale. Evolving as an all-inclusive platform, it aims to reach beyond the ideological orientation and preferences of individual creators and include novels from all corners of the political spectrum. But why should it do that? What is to be gained by putting left-wing and right-wing political novels side by side on one geographical map? What can this kind of mapping add to the study of literature?

First, it helps to build a richer historical context. Already the timeframe of two centuries showcases the changing role of political writing (and reading) both vertically, across decades as well as social classes, and horizontally, from one political wing to another, from one corner of Europe (and of the world) to another. The huge systemic shift from monarchy to democracy in the 1920s, the Great Economic Crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the world wars and anti-colonial movements and liberations, the 1960s social movements and political protests, and finally the fanfare-like burying of socialism and the global onset of the liberal-democratic era are determinants without which the functions of the political novel would quickly be exhausted. Second, comprehensive mapping makes the historical events visible through the eyes of different, often diametral subjects and collectives: factory work does not appear to be the same for men and women, let alone for workers and managers (or factory owners); wars are differently experienced by warmongers and their victims; the dismantling of socialism is not the same for capitalists and socialists. Adding this perspective of context has great value for refreshing our views on what literature – and the political novel as a special case in point – actually is.

Furthermore, the political novel is not only a novel that represents political events and introduces the readers to political personalities (such as Stefan Heym’s Lassalle, FRG 1969, GDR 1974), events (Vassilis Vassilikos’s Z, 1966) and party structures (Sarah Waterfeld’s Sex mit Gysi, Sex with Gysi, 2015), but it also registers the slow pace of everyday life and perspectives that surround personalities, events and political constellations. Especially in the last few decades, there have been shifts in perspective on what the political novel does, and how it works, that need to be considered: the larger embedding of what politics is and does is currently conceptualised as ‘the political’, encompassing a much broader domain of less monumental, even invisible everydayness (Annie Ernaux’s Les années / The Years, 2008). The theoretical and literary uncovering of this other scene of politics demonstrates how slowly this territory changes and, by the same token, how big events are refracted in spheres of life which are traditionally not considered to be political (the private life, memories, passiveness and pensiveness): this is the discovery of the ‘histoire immobile’, as Braudel has polemically called it. Sometimes, it is thanks to this immersion in seemingly unpolitical slowness and everydayness that some novels are recognised as political insofar as they intersect with a particular time and particular space, and sometimes even effectuate or find themselves, unexpectedly perhaps, within a ‘breach’ – an aperture in the constellation of what is possible and what is given.

Encompassing this undoubtedly less determinable domain of the political, is another task that the mapping of the political novel needs to undertake: a reversal of the hierarchy between the exception and the series. However, this has a reverse value that differs from what Moretti envisioned with his own reversal: whereas Moretti’s project is bound to the evolution of specific literary forms, so that he rewrites the history of literature as a history of norms and discovers less innovative, much ‘flatter’ configurations (repetitive, slow – even boring, as he says), the lens given by the political novel discovers exceptional turnabouts in the body of literary and political history. If Moretti looks for what most of life is like and invites us to recognise the prosaic features of literature, and to understand what they mean, mapping the political novel requires us to be attentive to those moments where literature enlightens politics in new and unpredictable ways, and how our politically informed perspectives unravel what is and was political in return. Moretti continues: just as most science is ‘normal’ science – which ‘does not aim at novelties […] and, when successful, finds none’ – so most literature is normal literature. This unravelling of politics, the discovery of the political in domains traditionally considered unpolitical, certainly applies to autofiction – a mode of writing that emerged in the 1970s, when the Flaubertian everydayness comes into focus of emancipatory politics, and when hours of work spent at a factory and hours of work at home are claimed as exchangeable quantities, so both qualify to propel literary innovations such as Karin Struck’s Klassenliebe (Class Love, 1973) or, much later, Annie Ernaux’s aforementioned Les années (2008). Then and now, this suturing of political history with private experiences can show how politicised we all are in our private anonymous ordinariness. Yet writing about privacy and deprivation still does not make a novel straightforwardly political. The novel is or becomes political when its literary creation arouses in us, its readers, processes of self-recognition, awakening or estrangement; and when it inspires public discussions and tectonic shifts in the private and public spheres of our social being together. Together, all this possibly, yet not necessarily, also co-constitutes those much larger shifts that enter history as political turnabouts and episodes of historical change. It is through these boring and small trajectories of anonymous characters, both real and fictional, that we experience the weight of political life.

There is, therefore, no big contradiction between ‘a flatter, more boring literature’, as Moretti emphatically terms it, and literature focused on changes that have already been recognised as tectonic. This, however, still leaves our central question unanswered: how does a narrative form crystallise out of a collection of haphazard, half-baked, often horrendous attempts – how does the political novel come into being? Or is it more apt to say that, beyond any convention, the political novel remains present in its thousand disguises? What would then be its minimally stable trait which allows us to recognise it as such? And are there periods when the potentiality of the novel to produce insights and condense political experiences collapses? How on earth can the same phenomenon exist in such different places – Scotland and Italy, Denmark and Hungary?

While raising broader methodological questions, these issues continue to be explored in individual studies, as reflected in Caponeu’s numerous publications and discussions.

References

Badiou, Alain. The true life: a plea for corrupting the young. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2017.

Delden, Maarten van, and Yvon Grenier. Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009.

Lukács, Georg. Heidelberger Ästhetik (1916–1918). Georg Lukács Werke. Bd. 17. Frühe Schriften zur Ästhetik II. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1974.

Moretti, Franco. “Narrative Markets, ca. 1850.” Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. 141–199.

Shapiro, Stephen. “Zemiperiphery Matters: Immigration, Culture, and the Capitalist World-System.” Wallerstein 2.0. Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century. Ed. Frank Jacob. Bielefeld: transcript, 2023. 49–72.