“Surviving Globalization”: Experiment and World-Historical Imagination in Rana Dasgupta’s Solo

This essay investigates Rana Dasgupta’s Solo as an exemplar of world-mapping fiction that takes the system of global capitalism as its interpretative horizon. I argue that Solo invites world-literary criticism informed by world-systems and world-ecology perspectives because its “operative totality” (Tutek) is world history rather than the nation and its aesthetics self-consciously address the formal problem of representing global scales. I consider experimental writing in the context of structural narrative innovation and demonstrate how Solo’s diptych structure renovates the forms of the historical novel and the Zeitroman in order to represent successive revolutions in the capitalist world-ecology. I contend that the text answers Dasgupta’s question of how to survive globalization by manifesting a counter-history of capitalist modernity that restores history to the neoliberal present, from the perspective of narratives set in the former Soviet and Ottoman empires. I conclude by exploring how the generic divide between the realist and oneiric halves of the novel negotiates the problem of futurity and attempts to conjure a totalizing retrospect by dreaming the future.