Democracy, Secrecy and Dissidence in Contemporary Literature in English

Reference: PID2019-104526GB-I00

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Main researcher: Paula Martín Salván.

Duration: 1/6/2020-30/5/2023.

Participants: Jesús Blanco Hidalga (UCO), Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (UGR), Paula Martín Salván (UCO), Mª Luisa Pascual Garrido (UCO) Juan Luis Pérez de Luque (UCO), ángela Rivera (UGR), Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (UGR), Pilar Villar Argaiz (UGR).

Summary:

This project is anchored in two theoretical realms. On the one hand, the recent rise in the humanities and social sciences of what has come to be known as the field of secrecy studies (Birchall 2016), concerned with the central role played by secrets in public life, political structures and cultural representations, and fundamentally indebted to Georg Simmel’s sociological work on secrecy as a determining factor in social relationships. On the other hand, the idea, indebted to Jacques Derrida, that literature constitutes the privileged realm for the thinking of the secret. In their defence of the value of secrecy, thinkers and scholars in the field of secrecy studies tend to focus on secrets from a social and political point of view, and here lies the main contribution of this project: to show the crucial ways in which literature may contribute to our understanding and analysis of secrecy. In doing so, we are following a long line of critics and theorists – constituting our second theoretical anchor – that have approached literature as the realm of secrecy par excellence.

A tentative formulation of the connection between these two theoretical concerns may be succinctly put as follows: literary texts, to the extent that they remain always open for further interpretations which do not exhaust the immediate context of reading, can be perceived as exemplary forms of secrecy, replicating an operating mechanism which is to be found in all forms of human sociability and public life, as argued by Simmel. In our main aim to establish a dialogue between secrecy studies and literary studies, we are fundamentally indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, in which the “implications” of his thoughts on the secret, as argued by Derek Attridge, “still have to be followed through with any comprehensiveness” (2010: 42).

The burgeoning field of secrecy studies may be characterized by its critique of a hegemonic discourse of transparency in public life, identified as a feature of political liberalism. This critique tends to be grounded on two different realms: 1) the tendency to establish a binary opposition between transparency and secrecy in which moral alignments are consistently traced; and 2) the totalizing tendencies of technopolitical transparency, whose most direct theoretical rendering is found in Foucaultian analyses of disciplinary societies.

The connection between literature and democracy seems to work, we may tentatively argue, at two levels: 1) as the realm where dissidence and resistance may be expressed, where the ideas of freedom of expression and censorship come to play most explicitly, and where, as Derrida argues in Given Time, an individual may refuse to take responsibility for whatever he/she may have written. 2) as the realm where the impossibility of full disclosure in any aspect of human life is most visible, as the literary work is precisely one that never exhaust its interpretive potential in a given context, so that the singularity of the text (Attridge) is made evident in each and every reading. As argued by Attridge (2020), the issue of form does not feature explicitly in Derrida’s account of the secret. Thus we join him in claiming that “the formal properties of literary works play a significant part in their impenetrability; they do not fold seamlessly into the meanings of the text.” A main concern in this project, then, is to identify these formal properties.

Henry James in Literary Contexts

Reference: PID2019-104409GB-I00

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan.

Duration: 1/6/2020-30/5/2022.

Participants: Julián Jiménez Heffernan (PI) (UCO), Leonor Martínez Serrano (UCO), María Valero Redondo (UCO).

Summary:

The characterization of Henry James as the Master rests on romantic assumptions of infinite creative freedom. It is thus dismissive of conceptions of literary invention based on imitatio. The fact that the deviant tradition of the novel lacked accommodation within the Neoclassical normative system may help explain the absence of considerations of sources and influences in early critical assessments of prose fiction. But this absence remains very pronounced today. The examination of the narrative sources of Henry James's narratives has never been a critical priority. Expressions of interest in the literary influences shaping James's oeuvre were apparently restricted to the province of an old-fashioned critical practice (Wilson, Trilling, Leavis, Matthiessen, Edel). To make things worse, the current vogue for sociological approaches to narrative texts has contributed to obscure the focus on anomalous inter-textual connectivity that characterized the work of desconstructive hermeneutics (Bloom, De Man, Hillis Miller, Felman, Brooks, Rowe). Still, there is a slow but steady return to considerations of influence in James studies, visible in recent work by important critics like Philip Horne, Adrian Poole or Tamara Follini. To describe the dynamics of intertextual appropriation, these critics have resorted to original tropes like possession, haunting, chaos and dispersal. Catachrestic substitution and synecdochal fragmentation map out the “indirections of influence” (Follini), which in turn spell a mode of stringent intertextual determinism. This alone can account for the violence of memory inscription (James's early traumatic reading of Oliver Twist, for example).

In this project we shall try to flesh out some of these indirections. In particular, we have singled out seven trajectories of influence-analysis: Shakespeare-James, Richardson/Fielding- James, Boswell-James, Emerson-James, Austen-James, Dickens-James, Thackeray-James. Our aim is not to subject these intertextual (in)directions to a rigid genealogical narrative, not to sustain the critical dream of one great tradition providing a single family for James, with Jane Austen as the great-grandmother. We assume that James was inexorably at liberty to scan and appropriate several narrative lineages at once, and that this freedom of an ambulatory aesthetic sensibility procured him an inevitable sense of open literary experience which he would eventually sublate into the one theme of his narratives—human (emotional, sexual, moral, intellectual) freedom. His was the freedom to be enslaved by other writers' texts, and he decided to sublimate this gift into the pragmatic freedom (to renounce and forgo) many of his characters exhibit in the face of societal determinism. The intellectual freedom of Hamlet, the emotional-textual freedom of the subaltern Pamela, the republican freedom of Boswell, the freedom from social convention in Emerson, the freedom to observe and judge in Austen, the ambulatory-spectatorial freedom in Dickens, and the freedom to be textually free, to write about nothing, in Thackery: these are some of the shapes that liberty takes in James's work. By examining some of the literary sources James tapped throughout his formative years, we hope to describe better the indirections of his literary influence and assess more firmly the intertextual determinism (the unfreedom) behind the apparent freedom of a Master who was always aware of being preceded, sometimes outranked, by other masters.