The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds

This book's wistful title and evocative cover herald a wise, eloquent book about cultural transience. Its three far-flung novelistic case studies—Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence (USA, 1920), Joseph Roth's Radetsky March (Germany/Austria, 1932), and Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous (Israel, 1977)—offer a provocative argument about the possibilities of novelistic form.There can't be a realist novel in the nineteenth-century sense, Nir Evron argues, until there is a conception of a bounded, knowable world. Only in the wake of the Enlightenment did that understanding of a cultural lifeworld crystalize, in the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Yet the ways of life they describe are already under threat. The subsequent worlds Wharton, Roth, and Shabtai chronicle are likewise crumbling, or recently slipped away. The realist novel, then, establishes a bounded, knowable world—but, tragically for those living within it, not a fixed one. And paradoxically, we are able to recognize the world's temporal boundedness only because it keeps shifting, one period giving way to another.Realism is often considered a mode which enforces the ideological status quo. Evron's case-study novels, however, show values and institutions shifting, buckling, perishing. Instead of reinforcing the norms, values, and human types that populate each novelistic world, these novels culturalize, temporalize, and parochialize them. In contrast to bildungsroman protagonists who are learning to understand the world better, their protagonists progressively unknow, as their certainties and sense of identity are stripped away. In exchange, they glimpse worlds beyond worlds—parallel cultural worlds or future historical worlds they might have inhabited instead. They become less blinkered, even while their sense of loss undoes them. For Evron, the processes these books describe thus give rise to an alternative perception of modernity—not as linear (let alone utopian) progress, but as a cycle of disillusion and dissolution. At times, surfaces of near-classical prose are thus underpinned by a partly tragic sense of perpetual motion and mutation.One implication of Evron's argument is that the calculus of loss and gain inspire new novelistic forms: for Wharton, the fusion of omniscient narrator and new-style ethnographer; for Roth, magical realism under the surface of the historical novel; for Shabtai, the eschewal of linear narrative for a narrative form in which sideways movement, into digression and backstory, cumulatively builds a narrative sense of community, even as it evokes the cultural complexity and social contradiction of 1950s Israel. Shabtai's novel is openly elegiac, beginning with a death and ending with a suicide. Roth is elegiac yet sardonic. Wharton indicts Gilded Age claustrophobia, the self-satisfaction of the upper class of a nation nominally democratic, republican, and pluralist. Roth and Wharton are arguably concerned with castes as much as whole nations—and their models of caste awakening prove central to later novels of colonial transition. For both, the novel is partly a vehicle for thinking about the price of certain kinds of cultures.Blossom's conceptual framework helped this reader, at least, see many new facets of the works under discussion. Evron describes, for instance, how Wharton's novel self-consciously draws on both an anthropological notion of culture and an archeological sense of time, loss, and temporal layering. Yet while the nascent discipline of anthropology attempts to manage analytic distance from the culture in which the observer is immersed, archeology tries to retrieve or reassemble a culture that is lost. One framework is comparative, horizontal; the other vertical, palimpsestic. Both disciplines reconstruct how a culture fit and held together. But ethnography, Wharton shows, is interested in power structures: how a culture made rules, how its organizing principles held its participants in and close, rendered them acquiescent. Archeology, more speculative, reconstructing from the void, is freer to mourn past meanings.Wharton is interested in New York's vestiges of Dutch imperial culture, mimicking structures of faraway Europe, while threatened by incursions by actual Europeans. Roth shows Hapsburg imperial culture erected on a Faustian bargain: Czech speakers, Slovenes, and Jews renounce their languages and religious and cultural traditions to assimilate to a bureaucratized, hierarchical military culture—then are spread over the empire's vast expanses to keep nationalist resurgences in check. In the process, however, they become emotionally dead and linguistically mute, with only German, the language of empire, left to enact intimate, inner life. The sound of peasant singing, in a now-forgotten Slavic language, triggers nostalgia, envy, and crisis—but there is no obvious way back. And as officers are ordered to fire on peasant protestors, they experience something close to a break in reality.Shabtai, in turn, offers the modern-day Israeli equivalent of Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, a meta-historical novel of political disillusionment in which the dream of socialist utopia fades, leaving broken hopes and lives. Yet as Shabtai's novel continually, disorientingly moves sideways, it showcases dozens of apparently walk-on characters as they struggle, hourly and over lifetimes, to make sense of themselves. Arguably Shabtai's reader, too, gradually consents to become permanently, radically lost, floating in a collective narrative consciousness, simultaneously holding many experiences, many lives.Evron's readers might wonder, finally, whether such novels understand culture as an artifact or a process. The transience of cultural worlds underscores individuals' deep grounding in culture. But it may also demonstrate how cultural life itself (attitudes, taboos, cuisine) involves a kind of collective artistic practice—and hence grounds all making. Individual artists, writers, and craftsmen shape artworks against the backdrop of the continual, communal making, remaking, negotiating, and reimagining of culture we all do together, whether by patrolling language use or innovating new artistic forms, internalizing or refusing cultural expectations, refusals which slowly, collectively, over time, might lead to paradigm shifts. Is our collective work of living, upholding, shaping, and gradually forcing the evolution of culture parallel to art making? Are Evron's case-study novels in fact meta-novels, about the making and unmaking not only of culture but also of art itself?Profound and beautifully written, Evron's first book gives us new terms to understand the terrain of the novel—and of collective life.