Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War by Andrew N. Rubin

As the Introduction suggests, Andrew N. Rubin’s project is defined ambitiously along several conceptual lines. Theoretically, this book “engages recent efforts to develop a new paradigm for comparative literary historiography” (1), one that revisits critically Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur. Yet this revisitation is rendered problematic from two opposed directions: on the one hand, the paradigm of Weltliteratur is upset by “the corrosive forces of totalitarianism, nationalism, provincialism, racism, and imperialism” questioned periodically in this book (2); on the other, the globalized vision of literature is problematic in itself, conjuring up a “world literary space” for “sweeping transhistorical movements” that cancel out specificities of experience (4). Against this confrontation of paradigms (global vs. local, dynamic vs. static), Rubin addresses the instrumentalization of literary culture during the Cold War era, its use in ideological projects that pursue self-serving regional or globalized agendas.

Rubin traces the genealogy of these phenomena to the early years of the Cold War that undermined the “productive exchanges between cultures,” limiting the “discourse of mutual understanding and coexistence” (8). Through bodies such as the British Council and the CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom), the British and US governments encouraged writers to occupy “multiple transnational positions” (9) and stimulated the appearance of Cold War magazines and institutions that promoted a “new kind of international literary system” (9).

Chapter 1, “Archives of Authority,” focuses on the transformations of the literary system in the aftermath of World War Two. Especially through the fifties, disciplines were “partitioned, divided, separated into areas of study” (18); writers traveled abroad “at the behest of such organizations as the British Council or the CCF” (19); and the little magazines of modernism were replaced by monthlies like Encounter which pursued a globalizing agenda. Against Pascale Casanova’s claim that the new international literary order “owed nothing to political fiat,” Rubin emphasizes the connections “between authors and the interrelated activities of the British and American empires” (21).

Chapter 2, “Orwell and the Globalization of Literature,” considers the adaptation, translation, and recontextualization of Orwell’s work in transnational context. The chapter starts from Orwell’s collaborationist intervention in the global ideological war (his denunciation to the British Foreign Office of former “crypto-communists and fellow travelers”), and moves on to Orwell’s relevance in our post 9/11 global context. Rubin’s critical reevaluation of Orwell’s significance emphasizes correctly the limits of his vision (his racial prejudices, for example), but only occasionally admits that Orwell’s targets (George Bernard Shaw, for example) had themselves pursued dubious goals, being deluded into thinking that the Stalinist regime was the right political answer for the times. In this chapter and elsewhere, Rubin seems to downplay the expansionist threat of Stalinist communism. As he writes, outside of Soviet Union’s annexation of Azerbaijan in 1948 and the occupation of Eastern Europe, Soviet Union was not a threat to Western Europe. This may be true but Soviet communism was certainly more than a “putative” (37) threat to the half of Europe it occupied. In that part of Europe, Orwell’s work inspired a significant number of anti-totalitarian parables.

Chapter 3, “Transnational Literary Spaces at War,” discusses the transformation of writers into cultural emissaries abroad and the expansion of official patronage deplored by T.S. Eliot, among others. In addition to the British Council (established in 1934) and BBC’s Third Programme, which brought together Anglophone writers to read and discuss their work on the air, the new CCE journals reinforced, according to Rubin, “the formidable structure of cultural domination” (51). While Rubin is right to contrast the explorative journals of the earlier modernist period with the ideologically more cautious magazine like Encounter, according to his own description the Encounter was more diverse in its approach, mixing “the subjectivities of Bloomsbury with the anticommunism of such New York intellectuals as Mary McCarthy and Leslie Fiedler” (53). Rubin’s own example of the censoring of a former editor of Encounter (Dwight McDonald) pales in comparison with the continuous censorship and persecution of writers on the other side of the ideological divide. While McDonald was able to publish his article in another magazine, Dissent, Eastern European writers did not have viable alternatives outside of smuggling their articles abroad.

Chapter 4, “Archives of Critical Theory,” focuses on the case of Theodor Adorno and his work written under surveillance or in exile. In reaction to “widespread surveillance” (74) as early as 1934, Max Horkheimer and Adorno revised the language of Dialectic of Enlightenment in its first published edition (1947), replacing words like “capitalism,” “class society” or “classless society” with more neutral terms. In the 1950s, the exiled Adorno and other members of the original Frankfurt School had to compromise their positions further through “systemic self-censorship” (81). Yet Rubin also emphasizes Adorno’s gradual effort to move beyond a simplified political understanding of communism and anticommunism, foregrounding “theory” and “critique” (83) as analytic tools to reappraise both. Against Lukács, Adorno emphasized “the dynamic contradictions inherent in artworks” (86), their aesthetic autonomy. This latter idea continues to be relevant today, offering theorists like Fredric Jameson or Edward Said a “transformative, non-coercive, and non-dominated humanism,” based on a “negative dialectics” (86).

Chapter 5, “Humanism, Territory, and Techniques of Trouble,” discusses Edward Said’s “antinomian” and “anti-systematic” work (88). In Adorno’s manner, Said ties his concept of Orientalism to an “attempt to establish the conditions for non-dominative, non-coercive knowledge” (89). This position is complicated further through Said’s emphasis on his exilic position, defined by dislocation, opposition, and rejection of dogma. His admiration for Eric Auerback is directly related to the latter’s exilic condition which allowed him to reconstruct “a Europe against the grain of an essentialized, racialized, and genocidal vision of Europe” (94). The Cold War theme is involved in this discussion as well, with Auerbach responding (especially in his 1952 “Philology and Weltliteratur”) to the Cold War pressure to present a polarized vision of world literature.

The ending of Chapter 5 focuses on Said’s more optimistic post-1989 discourse in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). Said’s remarks on the “changing conditions of humanistic practice” (105) were delivered in 2000, before the events of 9/11 and the wars of the new century; the latter events called them into question. And yet Rubin still considers them relevant for a type of humanistic discourse that can question “the dictates of an instrumentalized reason” (107). In his reading, Said’s humanism meets the challenges posed by Adorno’s theory of the late style of artwork defined as “intransin-gent, difficult, and unresolved” (107).

At its best, Rubin’s book offers a form of “investigational literary historiography” that challenges “the epistemological limits of the archives of authority that increasingly define the conditions of modernity” (22). What I miss in this insightful book is a clearer sense of the interactional cultural narrative developed in the West in response to the narrative of Communism. The references to the dominant role that the “socialist rhetoric of the Communist Information Bureau” (11) had in the late 1940s and 1950s are rare. The political archives on the other side of the ideological divide are as important to the Cold War narrative as the Western documents explored in this book.