The Foreign Offices of British Fiction

This essay sets itself two interlocked tasks, at cross-purposes only if we settle for business as usual. It attempts, first, to resuscitate the formalist mandate in the study of prose fiction and, second, to test it out on one of those burgeoning subfields of cultural criticism, colonial and postcolonial literary studies, where such formalism, to judge from current practice, seems far from urgent when not downright suspect. This second effort is less perverse than corrective. The formalist imperative is to read, to read what is written as a form (and formation) of meaning, both authorially designed and culturally inferred. ¹ The nationalist and imperialist bias of classic narrative is now widely assumed, but what shape might be assumed in turn by the local linguistic forms of this bias? How might a recommitted formalism demonstrate not only form's configuring access to the cultural terms of literary production but its now strategic, now unconscious reprocessing of such idées reçues?

Seen in this way, formalism is an account of what makes things work, or what makes out of language a work. For those interested in the cultural labor performed by literature, what could be more useful even now? Toward this redirected task of interpretation, a bridge needs to be built--and more two-way transit encouraged--between an intertextual semiotics of absent causes and a structuralist Marxism of underlying historical determinants. To name names, as they never do each other's: between Michael Riffaterre and Fredric Jameson, our most unrepentant formalist of literary production and our most intrepidly literary of social critics, respectively. What would bring them together is the surface-depth model in both of their systems: the role of the unconscious in the generative formation of literary meaning. In Riffaterre, certain unsettling textual features ("ungrammatical," in his sense) are like the neurotic symptoms of a structuring unsaid. ² In Jameson, surface disturbances (contradictions) are the return of a repressed ideological instability in the text's structuring historical absences. The divergent "formalisms" (formativisms) of these two critics thus meet, or might, on the common (hidden) ground of the buried assumption.

Novelistic formalism could well sharpen tools--and combine forces--for the unearthing of such assumptions, but only by remembering that the best clues remain in plain view: the permutations by which a novel's textual surface lets its political unconscious come up for narrative air. Jameson takes us to the edge of such recognition in his powerful 1990 essay on Forster and Joyce. ³ In a continuing effort to "get beyond the windless closures of formalism" (beyond, if you will, the prison-house of language), he isolates modernist "style" as a cognitive process in its own right, semiautonomous and pervasively reified. ⁴ Such verbal practice is a symptom not only of bourgeois capitalism, as Jameson has long argued, but of imperialist myopia, as he now proposes. His argument, briefly, is that Forster's style stages a perceptual dissociation between the quotidian here and now and the othered and elsewhere, between self and a ruse of infinitude, ultimately between the consolidated values of the metropole and the shaping absence of the colonies, with all the obscure interdependency their conjured remove half summons to mind. Such for Jameson is the true cognitive mapping, always and already geopolitically projected, of early high modernism--a foundational interplay between center and periphery, the seen and the hazily unseen. Granting this intuition should not exempt us, however, from the need to ask what subformations of diction and syntax tend to absorb the shock of macroeconomic anxieties.

The question leads us to--and beyond--the most unabashedly text-bound of procedures in Riffaterre's Fictional Truth. He retrieves from the dustbin of tradition, as the linchpin of his method, the dated trope of syllepsis, emphasized as a lexical conundrum rather than a syntactic fulcrum, punning doubleness rather than swing grammar. ⁵ Syllepsis becomes for Riffaterre, however, no mere stylistic device but the very structure...