Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism and the Fiction of Development (review)

In the last quarter century, since the publication of Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, we have seen a slow but determined interest in the modernist bildungsroman, especially in postcolonial and transnational contexts. Jed Esty’s new book, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism and the Fiction of Development, brings these strands together in an immanent critique of the bildungsroman and the disjunctive temporalities of the colonial and postcolonial subject. The core of Esty’s argument is that the modernist bildungsroman undergoes a destabilizing breakdown of narrative authority, due primarily to the heightened tempo and spatial extension of capitalism in “colonial contact zones” and the curious timelessness that characterizes colonialism, in which youth is forestalled completely or spun out endlessly. In both cases, individual development and maturation are undermined, as are the narratives that convey and legitimize it under the cover of Bildung. This breakdown effectively annuls the power of the bildungsroman to provide a normative model for individual development that is blocked or deferred by disjunctive and alienating plots “of colonial migration and displacement” (2). Esty draws on the work of M. M. Bakhtin, David Lloyd, and Pheng Cheah, all of whom theorize the interrelation of time, the nation, and Bildung. Esty presupposes the kind of “world” approach to literary history found in Moretti and Pascale Casanova when he asserts a link between generic imperative and historical necessity in order to register the failure of classical Bildung but also to signal the space of the subject outside the national imaginary. “I am hypothesizing that the developmental logic of the late bildungsroman underwent substantial revision as the relatively stable temporal frames of national destiny gave way to a more conspicuously global, and therefore more uncertain, frame of social reference” (6).

Esty develops the Bakhtinian idea of “national-historical time” and shows how the transposition of Bildung from the sphere of philosophy to that of the novel requires a dialectical and synthetic relation between the nation and the subject, a relation predicated on the progressive temporality of dialectical closure. For the modernist hero, however, the narrative of development is not always serially or chronologically temporal, a condition of anachronism that produces “a formal tension between narrativity and closure” (45). The kind of “soul-nation allegory” found in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is impossible in the modernist bildungsroman, in part because narratives of self-formation can no longer presuppose closure, that is, they can no longer presuppose the future. Esty’s argument that the modernist bildungsroman narrates “a breakdown in the allegorical function of the coming-of-age-plot” (15) follows from Moretti’s claim that youth was the “material sign” of modernity in the nineteenth century. This breakdown, represented in “stories of stasis, regression, and hyperdevelopment” (25), exposes the contradictions in what Cheah calls national Bildung: a conception of the national body to which the individual Bildung process is affiliated, either in conformity or, as the case of the “recalcitrant” subjects Lloyd describes, in resistance to it. By decoupling “adolescence from the dictates of Bildung,” modernist writing created “an autonomous value for youth and cleared space for its own resistance to linear plots while registering the failure of imperialism as a discourse of global development” (25). One might argue that Bildung is not so easily separated from development, but otherwise, Esty is right: the modernist antidevelopmental narrative, understood as a “global genre,” creates a new space of value and valuation, one that is already emergent in the negative dialectics of the early modernist bildungsroman.

At stake is the seedbed of subjectivity, the point in adolescence when identity is fungible and susceptible to even the slightest tensions that restrict aspiration and striving. Conrad and Shreiner demonstrate the fragility of the young subject in colonial Africa, where the contradiction between capitalism (work) and culture (aesthetic vocation) is disclosed within the structure of colonialism. They “frame a colonial divide between the dream of soul-making and the brute...