Revitalizing the National-Popular

John T. Connor's Mid-Century Romance: Modernism, Socialist Culture, and the Historical Novel is a fascinating study of British late modernism and mid-century communist culture that breathes new life into a genre that has had its share of hard times—namely, the historical novel. Georg Lukács famously dated the historical novel's decline to the 1848 defeats of revolutionary movements across the European continent; subsequently, critics from across the political spectrum have deemed it moribund, tied as it was to the fate of the nation-state and a past long past, and hence out of sync with a newly global capitalist world. But Connor suggests otherwise, tying the fortunes of the historical novel to the culture of British and international communism and the “reparative” possibilities that it envisioned “of the nation transformed” (6). The genre of romance and its connection, in particular, to Walter Scott's historical novels and their legacy is key to this reparative work, which at once looks backward to antiquarian traditions and a common culture of the people that emerges from within the space of the nation, and looks forward, with its distance from realism and the realities of everyday life and its capacity for dreaming and envisioning new futures.To make his case, Connor marshals an illuminating range of concepts and frameworks to contextualize the novels he discusses and establishes an alternative genealogy of the historical novel. Giovanni Arrighi's concept of “long centuries” or systemic cycles helps Connor to frame the mid-century moment as one of “radical reorganization of the economic world-system” (7) that needs to be seen both from the vantage point of capital—from above, as it were—and from those on the ground—a history from below, for which E. P. Thompson and other left social historians had advocated. For the “chaos of the interwar years afforded historic opportunity for social movements to challenge the status quo” (8). Crucially, this reorientation involved a turn toward the nation as a potent site of struggle, a tactical shift that, in turn, positioned the historical novel as a genre fully up to the task of capturing this new political landscape. Antonio Gramsci's notion of the “national-popular” and a consonant national-popular literature is equally generative for Connor's articulation of a communist politics and a culture of the people that moves away from elite forms of cosmopolitanism and high modernist aesthetics and instead emerges from common practices and national spaces, while nonetheless keeping the international fully in its sights. Far from a retreat from the reality of the global economy, this “national turn” constitutes the ground from which to envision alternative forms of anticapitalist social and political life attuned to creating a genuinely collective egalitarian future. Connor also deftly highlights the centrality of developments within the Soviet Union and the importance of Georgi Dimitrov's call at the Seventh World Congress in 1935 to “set the record straight, to ‘enlighten the masses on the past of their own people’ and bring it to bear on the present” (26). This call was answered not only by British writers and historians, but also globally, as Connor demonstrates in his discussion of the expansive reach of the communist historical novel and its relationship to “marvellous” or “magical” realism. But the most virtuosic reframing comes from Connor himself in the wide-ranging ways he grounds his analysis in works of literature as varied as Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, replete with fantastical dragons; Virginia Woolf's time-traveling Orlando; Sylvia Warner Townsend's tale of fourteenth-century nuns, The Country That Held Them; Alejo Carpentier's magical realist novel The Kingdom of the World; and Jack Lindsay's The Thunder Underground, set in Nero's Rome. Attending to both neglected or little-known authors and much more canonical figures, Connor narrates a moment in fiction and in fact that was brimming with new aesthetic forms, new political alliances and allegiances, and new ways of seeing the world, even as the grim realities of the interwar years were front and center. On the literary front alone, he makes clear that modernism was never “the only game in town” (4).The chapters in Mid-Century Romance are, as Connor describes them, “case studies of the drawing of a modernist cosmopolitan or international proletarian aesthetic into the forcefield of the ‘national-popular’” (27). Chapter 1 sets the stage in its pairing of Mirrlees as a “pioneer of British modernism's national turn” (30) and Woolf as the most iconic modernist in Connor's study, who is shown to increasingly move toward a vision of national identity as a counter to the dislocations and materialism of modern society. Scott is central for both Mirrlees and Woolf, as he offers a model for a resurrected national culture separate from the state and collective in its practice. Likewise, for both Mirrlees and Woolf, this change in orientation is a process of discovery and recovery: Connor traces this process by reading Mirrlees's historical novel Madeleine (1919) alongside her historical fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) and by examining Woolf's Orlando (1928) in relation to her later fiction and nonfiction. Madeleine tells the story of its seventeen-year-old eponymous heroine, who is desperate to meet Mademoiselle de Scudéry and become part of her salon culture. Ultimately unsuccessful, and with her desires thwarted, Madeleine ends her days in an asylum for the insane. As Connor argues, however, the salon scene is but one of many “threads” in the novel's “dense ideological fabric” (42), all of which contribute to the larger story Madeleine is telling about the 1650s, a key historical moment in the process of modernity and its multiple forms of alienation. Following Scott's example, Madeleine is a type in the Lukácsian sense: “Defined by her amour-propre, she is a figure of this new social type, the modern self-interested individual” (43). If her function as this social type explains how unlikable she is, her desire, which evolves into a “mysticism of one” by the end of the novel, becomes the “problem” that Mirrlees's later Lud-in-the-Mist “sets out to solve” (49). Lud's characters overcome this form of modern solipsism by reconnecting to their cultural heritage and forging a sense of belonging that the march of progress has deemed obsolete. Mirrlees grounds this renovation in a reformed religion and a privileging of the land, a shift that Connor sees Woolf mirroring, albeit without the clerical overtones. According to Connor, Woolf “dials down the emphasis on private epiphanies and transcendental symbols, and on the experimental artwork capable of rendering their truth, towards a contingent but collective vision of national identity” (56). Fittingly, as Connor notes, Woolf was a rarity among the Bloomsbury group in maintaining her love for Scott. In Orlando, his influence is felt in the attention to locations, specifically those of “literary modernity, the great house and the lumber room” and the acts of dispossession that subtend Orlando's early life (62). Forms of enclosure—of the land and of the self—are made literal in Orlando's walled estate and the material resources necessary to “support an autonomous subjectivity” (62). If Orlando dramatizes the construction of the modern self and the privations it rests upon, Woolf's later essays and fiction “drive home the price of all this Renaissance self-fashioning” (63). In “Anon,” the death of an anonymous common culture—which in Orlando Woolf associates with “Shakespeare,” a threshold figure for an English culture not yet untethered from popular culture—signifies what has been lost; indirectly in “Reading” (1919) and explicitly in her later thinking, Woolf envisions a revitalized “anon” in the freeing of literature from its institutional confines so that it can “circulate as the linguistic combinatoire of our common life” (39). Woolf's common readers and the community they would form constitute a national-popular culture grounded in an imagined England and committed to a Humean epistemology able to keep at bay virulent forms of nationalism.In contrast to the close readings of chapter 1, the second chapter offers a broad survey of novels that follows the migratory path of the communist historical novel within a global frame. This global literature responds to Dimitrov's appeal to “save” the nation from its co-optation by fascist and imperialist nationalisms and to narrate a new vision of nationalism tied to the national-popular and popular struggles that by the 1930s Lukács saw as ripe for a new form of epic and a revitalized historical novel. Connor touches on how novelists from the United States, Australia, and Brazil to China, Egypt, India, and West Africa all participate in this revitalization. In greater detail, he also focuses on the development of the communist historical novel in Britain, by writers within the Communist Party and those who later left it in 1956. He connects this work as well to British historians such as Christopher Hill, Thompson, and others who wrote history “from below.” As with Mirrlees and Woolf, inspiration comes from popular songs and poems—with the traditional folk song “The Cutty Wren” playing a central role for several novelists—and a broadly phonocentric approach to British history and culture. Jack Lindsay's 1649 is exemplary in this regard, positioning “popular song as a repository of utopian desire and political resistance: it makes hearing the people's ‘unimportant voice’ the project of a reparative social history; and it frames the affirmation and amplification of these native and vernacular traditions as vital to the present political struggle” (113). This form of Popular Front politics and literature, Connor argues, is also intimately tied to an alternative genealogy of magical realism in its comfort with and blending of “poetry and prose, romance and realism, utopian desire and political reason” (117). This view of the genre, exemplified by Carpentier's The Kingdom of the World rather than by Gabriel García Márquez's politically denuded One Hundred Years of Solitude, compellingly reminds us that “part of its genesis . . . lies with the ‘Novelists’ International’” and Dimitrov's Seventh World Congress, thereby restoring its socialist and anticolonial politics and its faith in the struggles and resistance of common people (123).This same faith is fully on display in Connor's readings of Sylvia Townsend Warner's and John Cowper Powys's respective historical novels and their shared connection to the Spanish Civil War. Unlike the communist novelists of the preceding chapter, however, both Warner and Powys come to the historical novel more closely allied with the modernist tendencies of the day. As Connor situates them, Warner's The Corner That Held Them (1948) and Powys's Porius (1951) “probe the limits of the mid-century communist novel and the cultural formation that gave rise to it” (127). Set in 499 CE, Porius narrates a before-and-after of romance and its possibilities in which history wins out and Porius is left to view the damaged world his own actions—the rape of the giant's daughter and the subsequent death of her and her father in the battle that ensues—have brought into being. With no respite to be found in the natural world—a vision more akin to Thomas Bewick's than William Wordsworth's—the novel leaves us with a view of history's “grim dominion” (143). Warner's novel also narrates a transitional moment: Set in a fourteenth-century convent during the Peasant's Revolt, the novel narrates the development from manorial feudalism to capitalism. While it may seem a long way from Spain in the 1930s, this setting and the novel's treatment of the nuns and the clergy reflects, as Connor argues, Warner's experience witnessing the violent sacking of churches in Barcelona and her insistence that “the violence in Spain had a popular mandate. . . . Spontaneous, sincere, the violence visited upon the fabric of religion was born of a justified resentment” (156). While some of the nuns in Warner's tale may “anticipate the collapse of their world” (158), some of her readers may also see that collapse as justified. As importantly, Warner understands the long game: While the peasants don't win in 1381, they are “on the march with events in the Soviet Union and in China and Spain the hopeful horizon for her and Ackland's her lover . . . attempts to organize country workers in Dorset” (159). As with these other revolutionary movements of the time, Warner's communism has its long-term sights set on rural insurrection and transformations in relation to the land, even as she recognized the “urgencies of anti-fascism” and the “need for cultural intervention in civil society” (161).Warner's comrade, Jack Lindsay, appropriately rounds out Connor's study as “Britain's leading theorist and practitioner of the historical novel” (164). His own life charts the path from modernism to the national-popular as he moves away from his father's modernist aesthetic practices and his powerful influence on Lindsay in the 1920s and embraces Marxism and the cultural politics of the Popular Front in the 1930s. Taking up Dimitrov's call, Lindsay's early historical novels and nonfiction look to “‘link up the present struggle with the people's revolutionary traditions and past’ by ‘acclimatizing’ international communism in their home countries by naming it the telos of their traditions of domestic struggle” (169). Of particular interest to Connor is Lindsay's last historical novel, Thunder Underground, set in Nero's Rome, both for the shift it marks from his optimism in the 1930s about culling from past traditions in the heroic service of present struggles and his later involvement with the communist movement and the Party post-1956. The novel, as Connor argues, at once takes stock of the “betrayal of the Russian revolutionary project” under Stalin and provides a “narrative exposition” of what Lindsay termed “‘a creative Marxism,’ not in deference to a Party line but in solidarity with ‘our people in this actual moment of deep-going change’” (182). Lindsay's trajectory also helps Connor map the development of the New Left in Britain and the beginnings of a socialist humanism to be found in Lindsay's initial engagement with Marx and his concept of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts. But of course, the story doesn't end there. By the end of the 1960s, the turn to national culture is seen as part of the problem rather than a solution, given the “national-imperial chauvinism of British culture in the 1950s” and the utopianism that, for Lindsay, resided in a socialist humanism now challenged by developments in French and psychoanalytic theories (191). Missed conjunctures, for Connor, are also part of this story: The hiving off of romance from realism, utopianism from Marxism as a result of the “frequent asynchrony of social movements insurgency and emancipatory visions”—an asynchrony that the delayed publication of Thunder Underground in 1965, seven years after it was written, reproduces—contributes to the demise of the politics and cultural aesthetics of the Popular Front and the disappearance of the historical novel (194).Lest this seem too grim a note to end on, Connor ends his study with Raymond Williams's “mining” of the “mid-century margins” in 1986 in helping to reissue Gwyn Thomas's historical novel All Things Betray Thee (1949) and then writing his own unfinished trilogy of historical novels, People of the Black Mountains (196). Organized around “lesson-learning within and between generations” (201) regarding place, these novels are less about moments of historical crisis or revolution than “the fact and feat of survival . . . and a statement of faith in our ability to invent, and continually to reinvent, from with the scene of survival, new idioms of the social” (203). Williams's trilogy, like Thomas's novel and the more recent historical novel Q by the Italian writers’ collective Luther Blissett/Wu Ming, is invested in “the present tense, a present the imagination holds open to what it may yet become,” a vision of the present in which there “remains a role for romance to play, as what distinguishes fiction from history, as what cuts against the recognition of our blighted world” (205).Given the richness and scope of Connor's analysis in Mid-Century Romance, it is hard to fault him for the ground he doesn't cover. But equally, given the charged nature of nationalism today, his relative silence on the profoundly problematic ways in which nationalism has functioned historically strikes an odd note. To be sure, Connor identifies the difficult tightrope that Woolf, for example, walks when he describes her view of national identity as “contingent but collective,” and notes that “like Mirrlees, she peels apart the cultural nation from the nation state, insular England from imperial England; language and literature are again this England's authentic repository” (56). Whether such a peeling apart is even possible is left largely unquestioned, however, as is the notion of an “authentic repository” of language and literature that is somehow cleaved from its embeddedness in the larger structures of state and empire. Race is barely mentioned, despite the intimate connections between race and nation and race and class. While Connor briefly references the “national-imperial chauvinism” of 1950s British culture in relation to the Left's turn away from the national-popular, there is little sense of the ongoing issue of race throughout the history he narrates (191). The and the come to the as of national belonging that can at by the imperial history of which they are a these connections and toward what it to the land in a revitalized Marxism like a given the to new in of change and capitalist to the ways in which across the is the nation and national belonging to its Connor's study of the among late the national-popular and the historical novel has much to us about the and of these past political and aesthetic form of in its own it is a in our political so many of that Popular Front an increasingly political in the and years