Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature

Ana María Sánchez-Arce, Ana María Sánchez-Arce

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136758072
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism

This ambitious and wide-ranging essay collection analyses how identity and form intersect in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It revises and deconstructs the binary oppositions identity-form, content-form and body-mind through discussions of the role of the author in the interpretation of literary texts, the ways in which writers bypass or embrace identity politics and the function of identity and the body in form. Essays tackle these issues from a number of positions, including identity categories such as (dis)ability, gender, race and sexuality, as well as questioning these categories themselves. Essayists look at both identity as form and form as identity.

Although identity and form are both staples of current research on contemporary literature, they rarely meet in the way this collection allows. Authors studied include Beryl Bainbridge, Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Brigid Brophy, Angela Carter, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Enright, William Faulkner, Mark Haddon, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, B.S. Johnson, A.L. Kennedy, Toby Litt, Hilary Mantel, Andrea Levy, Robert Lowell, Ian McEwan, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Oswald, Sylvia Plath, Jeremy Reed, Anne Sexton, Edith Sitwell, Wallace Stevens, Jeremy Reed, Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

The book engages with key theoretical approaches to twentieth- and twenty-first century literature of the last twenty years while at the same time advancing new frameworks that enable readers to reconsider the identity and form conundrum. In both its choice of texts and diverse approaches, it will be of interest to those working on English and American Literatures, gender studies, queer studies, disability studies, postcolonial literature, and literature and philosophy.

Part I
Beyond Identity and Form

1 Official Identity and Clandestine Experience

Thomas Docherty

When Vincent Descombes ponders what it means to be a historical agent, he states pithily that “To act in history is to work at not being what one is;” and this—acting in the world of history—is unlike the world of nature, where, as he puts it, “being signifies identity” (37). In the opposition of worlds of history and of nature here, we see the remnants of a Romantic sensibility. Descombes pits a stable world of exteriority (the world as “given,” where being signifies identity in the form of immutable self-sameness, self-coincidence) against a world of interior consciousness characterised by imagination, by thinking oneself as other than one is. In his formulation, acting in history involves establishing conditions where the world of imagination impinges on the world of exterior nature; and the desired result is a change that must, of necessity, be at best a change in the relation between interiority and exteriority, and a change, therefore, in the self or subject (working at “not being” what we are).

The two realms are distinguished by this power of simultaneously seeing things “as they are” and also “as they might otherwise be.” Exteriority here is immune to consciousness. Consequently, any change is fundamentally a change in consciousness itself: a change or difference that now constitutes, paradoxically, the subject’s identity. It is the “I” of consciousness, and not the world of which the “I” is conscious, that is the locus of change. We usually call this “reflecting on the world,” or “thinking about one’s place in history.” This neo-Romantic structure, however, is not straightforward, and it essentially gives us the predicament of our “modernity,” as I shall show.

In Descombes’ logic, “The historical protagonist is insofar as he acts, and he acts insofar as he is always being different” (37). Consequently, we have a counterintuitive understanding of identity, as sameness predicated on difference, or as difference camouflaged under the sign of self-coinciding. Behind this is a contradiction within the very concept of identity. On one hand, identity is precisely “self-sameness,” the coinciding of two (or more) instantiations of “I”; on the other hand, the mere fact that there are two (or more) such instantiations indicates that the “I” exists in time.

Identity, considered then as a temporal “I”—a historical, secular subject—must acknowledge that such coincidence is simply impossible: by definition, the “I” in history, the “I” as a material “somewhat,” enters into the realm of self-differing. “Self-sameness” in the secular realm is impossible. The prevailing neo-Romantic sensibility revealed by Descombes construes the relation of self to history in spatial terms (interiority of self, exteriority of world); but what is primarily at stake here is the temporality of identity. It is temporality that causes the problem.

Here is our conundrum, as expressed by Descombes:

there is identity not only, as formal logic would have it, between identity and identity, but between difference and difference; there is a certain being in not-being. Now, is there the slightest difference between the identity of identity with identity, and the identity of difference with difference? Certainly not. For there is no more identity between identity and identity than there is between difference and difference. And there is no more difference between difference and difference than there is between identity and identity. And yet identity and difference are clearly different types of relation. Yes, certainly. So the identity between, on the one hand, the identity of identity and identity, and on the other, the identity of difference and difference, is the very factor of difference between identity and difference.

(38)

This linguistic wrestling is the attempt to grapple with identity as a historical and temporally mutable concept. Yet it implies much more. If identity has some relation to the narrative of a life, then, of logical necessity, one has to consider the intimate relation of identity to autonomy, to the human as historical agent, and neither simply a product, nor merely an effect of that history. There is a dialectical relation between consciousness and exteriority. Against this, we usually consider that it is precisely a preexisting identity of consciousness that grounds the specific action that an agent undertakes in bringing about the state of affairs constitutive of exteriority at any given time: the imagination working on nature. I act as I do, we say, because of who I am; and I am as and who I am because of the very actions that define me. The issue is fundamental to any theory that sees identity as being related to the social: it is the question of the possibility of change. Is change possible; and if so, how is it effected?

My argument is that, in our prevailing modes of criticism, our identities, far from being autonomously determined, are, in fact, typically given to us. Further, they are given to us as a means of officially delimiting and regulating our possible behaviours. Our identity is “official,” an office limiting our possibilities precisely to the circumscriptions delineated by that office. Consequently, any genuinely historical act that we would commit is necessarily clandestine, a breaking with or a nonconformity with our office. We are denied the possibility of acting as autonomous historical agents by being ascribed an “official identity,” an identity precluding the possibility of our narrating a life, precisely at the moment when our alleged identity is being confirmed by our actions.

The tongue-twisting formulation of Descombes shows that, in our prevailing modes of thought—caught up in the modernity that has its roots in a certain Romantic sensibility—identity is itself identified as a form of self-sameness, or that identity can be described properly as conformity to a rule. This is so even if one identifies oneself as difference, or as constantly self-differentiating: constant self-differing itself becomes the very rule to which the self conforms. The important thing is the rule: identity is a matter for regulation.

There is a “law of identity,” and identity is first and foremost a legal matter. The demand for identity is a demand for one’s papers, and these formal and official papers have both enormous power and an authority that is abstract and determining. One’s papers become more important than the historical individual carrying them, at least in terms of the verification and authentication of identity; and entitlement to an identity is always something to be authenticated rather than something to be understood. I’ll return to this relative importance of verification in relation to authenticity later. The passport—the abstract and “official” identity—as it were, is the identity, even when the passage of time and experience means that one no longer looks like the face pictured on it. Official identity operates at a remove from actuality, from an experience that is now relegated to the realm of the clandestine.

This present argument is determinedly on the side of the sans-papiers, those who are “not entitled” or who have no identity, no passport or papers. To put this in terms directly related to literary or aesthetic criticism, my argument is for literary experience.¹ First, I explore the relation between identity and experience to show that, actually, identity is form, and that formal identities have little time for any specific actual content. To gain access to such content, secondly, I argue that we must find ways of describing the priority of our “becoming” over our “being.” Consequently, I contend that the expression of an identity—our making it available as a public and social entity—depends upon a fundamental act of confession. In this, identity becomes something constituted by change. The identity of the self is necessarily predicated not just on self-criticism but upon a form of confession that is intrinsically tied to a conversion. Finally, I explore the politics of this, especially for any form of literary or cultural criticism that is based upon identity politics.

Experience

In “De l’expérience,” Montaigne suggests that “There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.” When reason fails to give us such knowledge, we turn to empirical evidence, or experience, “which is a feebler and less worthy means” of gaining knowledge. Following classical rhetorical procedure, he reaches for an example, which he finds in his contemporary French legal process. France has more laws than the rest of the world put together; yet, no matter how many laws we have, we can never encapsulate the infinite variety of possible legal cases.

In every new case, the judge will have to exercise a judgement which, at least in some particulars, must be made without recourse to previous laws. This brings a predicament regarding judgement and justice; and he turns to cases of miscarriages of justice. He writes:

Certain men are condemned to death for a murder; their sentence, being agreed upon and determined, though not pronounced. At this point the judges are informed by the officers of an inferior court in the neighbourhood that they are holding some prisoners who openly confess to this murder, and throw unquestionable light upon the whole affair. And yet these judges deliberate whether they ought to interrupt or defer the execution of the sentence passed upon the first prisoners. They discuss the unusualness of the case, and the precedent it may set up for the reversal of judgements; for the sentence being juridically correct, the judges have no reason to change their minds. In short, these poor devils are sacrificed to the forms of justice.

(Montaigne, Essays 351)²

The particularity—the historical, material actuality—of individual humans is ignored in order to preserve the form of justice, not its content. In this judgement, what is at stake is not the identity of a murderer but the identity of the law: the identity of the law with the law. When experience, as material history, calls the judgement into question by providing the content of a countervailing or critical experience, then that experience must be discounted in the interests of conformity to a rule: in this case, preserving the office of the law, and, more importantly, that of the officer of the law.

This is my first example of an “official identity”: the identity of an officer of the law. It is an identity established by the silencing of experience, by relegating experience to a clandestine place underground: invisible or illegitimate. The identity of the judge triumphs over the facts of experience (or of history, truth, reality). How can this identity be “true,” “real,” or materially historical? How can it be a substantive identity, an identity based upon the material facts of historical agency or existence?

By extension, I contend that the same thing happens in literary and cultural criticism: the identity of Montaigne’s judge maps directly onto the identity of the contemporary critic (my second example: the official identity of the critic). This is what we have learned to call a cultural criticism determined by identity politics, and it helps explain the triumph of what Philippe Lejeune called an “autobiographical pact” in criticism. The consequence of this pact is that criticism becomes an act of signing one’s name.³ Such critique is a matter of style, of the reduction of the self as a location of experience to the pure emptiness of style, or to my “office” as “Irish,” “working class,” “specifically sexed” and so on. In these, I am no longer simply Irish, but am instead “an Irishman”; nor am I sexed in terms of my behaviour in life, but rather I become the sign that represents “the gay” or “the straight”; nor am I an electrician, but rather a representative of working-class interests in general. Not even my proper autobiography is told in this, for I become not an individual but the sign of an individual, a generalised representative of an office. Putting matters bluntly, we are all bureaucrats now, in this form of criticism.⁴ The prioritisation of identity politics reduces experience to what I can now call my “official” identity: an identity focused on the priority of being over becoming, and an identity devoid of historical substance.

In the middle of the last century, Leslie A. Fiedler pondered something similar in relation to abstract art. In “Archetype and Signature,” he argued that: “The abstract painter, for instance, does not, as he sometimes claims really ‘paint paint,’ but signs his name. So-called abstract art is the ultimate expression of personality” (263).

Fiedler was perplexed by contemporary visual art, and especially by abstract expressionist painting. His point was that the artist, by endlessly repeating the same configurations on the canvas, was essentially making herself or himself “recognisable” immediately. Ovals between perpendicular lines are “Robert Motherwell”; rectangles of colour present “Rothko”; parallel lines successively moving towards the centre of the canvas but always following the shape of the canvas mean “Frank Stella.”

For Fiedler, these painters paint a signature, and we approach “Warhol” as a kind of “normative” art or art-value. It is, then, less surprising that a critical attitude in the years after this—broadly during the 1960s—witnesses essays charting the alleged “death” of the author: if the prevailing mood is one seeing art as the celebration of the very being of an author, in the expressing of her or his name and identity, then it is not surprising that criticism—especially a criticism that sees itself as “oppositional”—will want to call that identity—or more precisely that being—into question.

Fiedler’s argument can be applied to any art that lends itself to repetition and thus to parody. In all cases, what is at stake is the triumph of a style over a substance (and we will consider such “substance” more fully later). For this argument, what is at stake is the triumph of form over content to the extent that the content can be evacuated of primary significance. It is the form of the work that gives it its identity, and that even constitutes identity for its author and its reader. This last point is important: the allegedly stable identity of an author, standing over her or his stylised text or signature, also serves the function of imputing to the reader an ostensibly stable identity as well. The reader, receiving the autograph of the writer, knows where she or he stands in relation to the writer, takes her or his bearings from that stability, and finds her or his own name—and critical office—thereby.

Such a view narrows and delimits the artist’s possibilities. Her or his biography can no longer recognize other and disparate experiences that would result in different types of work. A biography is thus reduced to a persona or personality. This explains the single most dominant form in contemporary popular culture: identity given in the form of “celebrity” where an ethos or disposition, with all its mutable content and responsibility for decision making or judgement, is reduced to the merest identity-image. Such identity is entirely consistent with a capitalist ethos that thrives on “branding,” the marking of ownership and servitude on one’s skin. I will address the politics of this in my final section.

One way of describing this prevailing state of affairs—the condition of criticism in which identity and identity politics becomes a grounding for value, truth or significance—is to s...