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(A version of this article will be published in a forthcoming edited collection on the theme of “emergent forms of

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STYLE AS STRUCTURE OF FEELING: EMERGENT FORMS OF LIFE IN THE THEORY OF RAYMOND WILLIAMS AND GEORGE SAUNDERS’ TENTH OF DECEMBER

DANIEL HARTLEY

1. INTRODUCTION Raymond Williams spent a lifetime developing and refining his major conceptual innovation, the ‘structure of feeling.’1 By 1977 he had come to define it as “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (Williams 1977: 133-134). Williams was thus concerned to capture precisely those elements of social life which are still in process, still emergent, and which are irreducible to pre-existent (“precipitated”) modes of thought or representation, but which are nonetheless not pure anarchic flux: they possess a “structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions” (ibid.: 134) and “specific internal relations” (ibid.: 132). For Williams, then, a ‘structure of feeling’ is, in the strict sense, an ‘emergent form of life.’2 Significantly, the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ arose out of Williams’s lifelong reflections on the manifold politico-philosophical implications of literary style. The aim of this article is thus to explore certain conjunctions of style, structure of feeling, and emergent forms of life. I begin by stressing the inherent relationality of Williams’s conception of style, before going on to outline the two major philosophical issues pertaining to style which occupied Williams above all: transindividual experience and historical temporality. Having done so, I attempt to draw out the practical consequences of these reflections for literary-critical methodology. The final part of the article is then dedicated to demonstrating certain

1 Certain parts of the first half of this article draw on work developed in my forthcoming book, The Politics

of Style: Marxist Poetics in and beyond Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson (Hartley, forthcoming). I am grateful to Gero Guttzeit for his incisive comments on an earlier version of this article.

2 This must be sharply distinguished from the otherwise very useful definition of a form of life given by Rahel Jaeggi: “Life-forms are complex, structured bundles (or ensembles) of social practices, which are directed towards solving problems; these problems are historically contextualized and normatively produced” (Jaeggi 2014: 58; my translation). Jaeggi’s definition refers precisely to those forms which, for Williams, should be classed as “precipitated;” that is, they are not, sensu stricto, emergent.

DANIEL HARTLEY – “STYLE AS STRUCTURE OF FEELING”

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aspects of this new methodology for the analysis of literary styles by examining George Saunders’ recent short story collection, Tenth of December. I argue that there are certain ideological contradictions at work in Saunders’ fiction and non-fiction, that these are inherently linked to his conceptions of language and style, and that his short stories make visible a structure of feeling which I shall call ‘minimal humanity.’ 2. STYLE AS STRUCTURE OF FEELING Before explicating the precise relation of style and structure of feeling in the work of Williams, it is imperative to stress one particular aspect of his theory that must be presupposed in all that follows. For Williams, “good prose and style are not things but relationships […] questions of method, subject and quality cannot be separated from the changing relations of men [sic] which are evident elsewhere in changing institutions and in a changing language” (Williams 1969: 55). Thus, style – like the commodity – may well appear as a “thing” abstracted from all human relations, but is in fact a mode of social relation between humans. Moreover, because it is a mode of social relation, the reproduction of pre-existing styles often entails the reproduction of the social relations they embody.3 Throughout this article, then, when using the terms “structure of feeling” or “emergent forms of life,” I understand by “structure” and “form” matrices which enable certain social relations at the expense of others; that is, I understand them, as Williams did, as inherently relational concepts.

As noted in the introduction, throughout Williams’s oeuvre the question of style is consistently and directly related to the development of his best-known concept: structure of feeling. This is clearest in one of the earliest formulations of that concept:

All serious thinking about art must begin from two apparently contradictory facts: that an important work is always, in an irreducible sense, individual; and yet that there are authentic communities of works of art, in kinds, periods and styles […] The individual dramatist has done this, yet what he has done is part of what we then know about a general period or style. It is to explore this essential relationship that I use the term “structure of feeling.” (Williams 1973: 8-9)

Williams is thus concerned with two of the main problems commonly associated with style: firstly, in the sense of individual style, there is the problem of the relation of an individual work or writer to collective literary conventions such as forms and genres; secondly, in the

3 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule: parody is chief among them.


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sense of period style, there is the more general issue of periodizing and of generationality as such – that ineffable quality common to a distinct number of disparate phenomena at a certain point in time. The first I shall call the problem of transindividual experience; the second I shall name the problem of historical temporality. 2.1 TRANSINDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE Williams developed the concept of the structure of feeling primarily through his lifelong work on the problem of speech in naturalist drama. According to Williams, the basic obstacle faced by naturalist dramatists is that “once a certain level of conversational speech is set, you can never move beyond it: people are confined to its limits at moments when a greater intensity of expression is needed” (Williams 1979: 208). In contradistinction to the innate total integration and expression of ancient Greek drama, the linguistic embodiment of this bourgeois structure of feeling is a style condemned to superficiality, one that is forced to hint at hidden depths beneath what is actually articulated, and in constant danger of mere “wished significance” (Williams & Orrom 1954: 45). (The gestural equivalent of this speech style is the way characters in early naturalist drama tend to stare from windows to where their lives are really being decided). This means, as Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko once observed in relation to Chekov, that “[t]he dialogue the author has written is merely a pale reflection of those emotions, their outward manifestation, which still leaves a great deal over” (cited in ibid.: 46). These observations, somewhat unexpectedly, became crucial to Williams’s insight into the inadequacy of contemporary Marxist approaches to culture, as he understood them (which were, essentially, variations on the base-superstructure model). For these approaches all depended on “a known history, a known structure, known products” (Williams 1977: 106-107) – that is, on internally complete systems of thought with an assumed fully achieved articulation without remainder. What such approaches to culture thus ignored was precisely that realm of experience which naturalist drama was constantly forced to hint at, and to explain which Williams developed his theory of the ‘structure of feeling’: “social experiences in

solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated” (Williams 1977: 133-134). Thus, Williams’s recognition of the constitutive inadequacy of linguistic expression in the early naturalist drama simultaneously provided his key line of


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attack – and, ultimately, the basic trajectory of his attempted reconstruction – of Marxist theories of literature and culture. In many ways, the concept of the “structure of feeling” should itself be seen as Williams’s attempt to provide that adequate and total language which naturalist drama often failed to achieve; it was his means of winning back for the common all of that social experience which, in an alienated society, people take to be purely individual or merely subjective. Williams wanted to show that even our innermost thoughts and deepest desires are both social and potentially articulable; only in doing so could forms be developed which would be adequate to their expression and ultimate satisfaction. As far as transindividual experience is concerned, then, the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ is simultaneously descriptive and normative: it attempts to articulate that which cannot (yet) be said, and it drives towards a future in which everything will be sayable.

2.2 HISTORICAL TEMPORALITY Transindividual experience is also inherently connected to the issue of historical temporality. This is the conceptual problematic that arises out of thinking period styles. At its extreme, it becomes the philosophical problem of thinking sameness and difference simultaneously: the sameness of heterogeneous phenomena unified by a shared co-temporal principle, and the difference intrinsic to the emergence of historical novelty. Williams’s own sophisticated theory of historical temporality cannot be understood outside his larger theory of – and lifelong obsession with – the concept of inheritance. There are three reasons why this theme appealed to Williams so intensely: firstly, because it was one of the main themes of the plays of Ibsen, which Williams studied almost fanatically when he returned to Cambridge from the Second World War; secondly, F. R. Leavis’s mode of literary criticism – the mode which affected Williams most deeply – was one based on the construction of lines of literary inheritance, which Leavis called either ‘traditions’ or ‘bearings’;4 finally, the situation of postwar Cambridge confronted Williams with the starkest possible embodiment of the discrepancy between two generations (those who had emerged from the shattered dreams of the 1930s and those who had not). That is, his obsession with generationality and inheritance was born from the unique historical

4 Cf. (Leavis: 1932, 1972).


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circumstances of his return to Cambridge. Consequently, Williams was attuned to Ibsen’s broadening of “inheritance” from the primarily familial sphere to the social sphere more generally. Indeed, there is a crucial quotation from Ibsen’s play, Ghosts, which Williams cites consistently: “I almost believe we are all ghosts…It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that walks in us. It is every kind of dead idea, lifeless old beliefs and so on. They are not alive but they cling to us for all that” (cited in Williams 1973: 49). I argue that Williams saw dominant, pre-existing styles – and cultural forms more generally – as precisely such Ibsenite inherited debts: we are haunted by linguistic modes of social relation from the past. They urge us to reproduce them and the social relations they embody in the present. It is then no wonder that Williams would later modify Gramsci’s theory of hegemony by fusing it with his own tripartite schema of inheritance: dominant, residual and emergent. This schema is nothing less than an immanentist theory of historical temporality. It involves a suturing of past, present and future via what one might call a conception of three ‘modes of presence’ – three modes in which the present presents itself. There are residual social inheritances which “have been effectively formed in the past,” but are “still active in the cultural process…as an effective element of the present,” as is the case with the monarchy or with organized religion (Williams 1977: 122); the dominant which is a totalizing but non-total incorporation of the social as such – indeed, the dominant order defines what counts as the social; and the emergent which is the making-becoming of an alternative future – that which the present will bequeath to future generations, provided it escapes incorporation into the dominant (e.g., the nineteenth-century working-class press). In Williams’s later work the concept of the ‘structure of feeling’ becomes equated primarily with this third mode of presence: “The idea of structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure of feeling is forming” (Williams 1977: 133). Crucially, Williams sees literature as a privileged locus, within the social totality, of emergent forms of life. This is because, thanks to the bourgeois dissolution of rhetoric and the reduction of literature to a realm of supposedly private emotion, it is literature, in the structural distribution of social discourses, which is closest to that realm of non-precipitated transindividual experience. Literary styles and forms thus become, for Williams, immanent and active components of emergent forms of life: that is, they are not mere “reflections” of broader social changes.


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None of this is to argue, however, that true emergence occurs often. On the contrary, the very reason Williams divides the present into residual, dominant and emergent is precisely because the dominant remains dominant only insofar as it captures and incorporates emergence. That is, the social hegemon must capture and incorporate all emergent forms of life if its own form (or forms) of life is to remain hegemonic. In the literary realm, this means that, for the most part, emergent structures of feeling are captured and incorporated by pre-existing styles and forms, which, themselves, embody or imply certain distributions of social relations favourable to the ruling social power. Truly emergent creation, however, does occur, and it is usually either prefigurative of, contemporary with, or an imminent successor to other widespread changes in the social formation (this is most obvious at times of social revolution: Romanticism with the French Revolution, modernism with the Russian). In each and every case, such creation does not simply “reflect” these emergent forms of life, but directly and immanently embodies them; it is endowed with its own social efficacy, however limited that may be. 3. LITERARY-CRITICAL METHODOLOGY Williams’s reflections, as crucial as they are, can only take the literary critic so far. They have two main problems: firstly, they remain at a certain level of abstraction, making it difficult to discern how they might be practically employed in critical readings of literary texts. Secondly, and for reasons which cannot be broached here, Williams’s theory of style occasionally has difficulties accounting for the self-conscious aspects of writers’ stylistic projects.5 Given the limited space here available, there is no way of compensating for these weaknesses in any great theoretical depth; instead, I shall limit myself to the following four theses on style, which combine Williams’s insights with my own elaborations:6

1. Style begins at the level of the individual sentence, but cannot be reduced to it. Critical sensitivity to the social connotations of syntax, texture, diction, tone, and shape is crucial, but only the beginning of a comprehensive stylistic analysis. In

5 I develop this criticism at more length in (Hartley forthcoming). There, I show that what at first appears –

and, to some extent remains – a weakness in Williams’s thought (namely, his lack of a nuanced account of self-reflexivity) is also a strength: his theory of unconscious inheritance is designed to counteract the ideology of modernism, with its emphasis on voluntarist ruptures with the past.

6 Each of these points is developed at length in (Hartley forthcoming).


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other words, ‘close reading’ should be understood as the initial phase of reading, but never its ultimate horizon.

2. Style is an inherently relational concept in at least three principal senses: a. It is a linguistic mode of social relation between writer and potential reader. b. It consists, in prose fiction, of a hierarchized interrelation of multiple

idioms and intentions; ‘style’ can thus refer either to one of those idioms alone or – more properly – to the mode of their total configuration.7 To adapt the terms developed by the rhetorical narratologist Richard Walsh, style is equatable either with instance (a representational act, in which the voice is not objectified, and carries out the task of narration (Walsh 2010: 48-49)), idiom (an object of representation, which invites ethical evaluation of the character whose discourse it represents (ibid.)) or interpellation (the overall ideological subject position implied by any discourse and to which the reader – either consciously or unconsciously – imaginatively aligns herself (ibid.: 53)). But ‘style’ is also the name for the total mode of configuration of those sub-styles.

c. Its textual autonomy is informed and limited by its relation to other formal elements of a given literary work (most notably to plot and description).

3. New styles do not emerge, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. The critic must seek out emerging tensions, ruptures and awkwardnesses in pre-existing styles, those points where emergent forms of life become visible not yet in their own right but in the pressure they exert on old styles. (One thinks of Raymond Williams’s Thomas Hardy, torn between the customary diction of rural workers and the educated prose of the landed gentry (Williams 1971: 95-118); one thinks also of Fredric Jameson’s Zola, with his excessively elaborate descriptions threatening to explode realism’s delicate balance between récit and affect, and to emerge into full-blown modernism (Jameson 2013: 45-77)).

4. Finally, any sophisticated theory of style must also take into account, not only the words on the page and their implied subject-positions, but also the paratextual and

7 This observation is in line with Bakhtin’s claim that the myriad styles of novelistic heteroglossia “are

subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it” (Bakhtin 1981: 262). Williams was himself very much aware that ‘style’ often meant the interrelation of multiple idioms and speech codes, as his essay on English prose attests ("Introduction," Williams 1969).


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critical pronouncements made upon style by authors themselves. These come to constitute what I call a writer’s stylistic ideology: those self-conscious stylistic projects which writers develop and (to varying degrees of fidelity) put into practice, along with their accompanying theoretical justifications. 8 Quite often, and especially in the case of a writer like George Saunders, an emergent form of life becomes visible, not directly in the words on the page, but in the author’s account of their literary struggle to develop new styles adequate to newly emergent forms of life.

To risk a contentious claim, then, one could say that the truth of any emergent style lies at the midway point between its unconscious embodiment of a specific structure of feeling and the self-conscious poetic shaping of the writer. It is this claim, among others, that I hope to prove with the example of the work of George Saunders. 4. GEORGE SAUNDERS’ LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC IDEOLOGIES Until recently George Saunders was perceived as a writer’s writer, but with his latest collection of short stories, Tenth of December, he is slowly emerging as one of the major American writers of the twenty-first century. His reputation, exemplified in the paratextual critical appraisals featured on the covers and front matter of his works, arguably boils down to three things: his self-conscious attempt to represent contemporary American society in all its brutal and surreal splendour; the capacious scope of his moral compassion along with the warmth of his humanity, which oscillates between empathy and hilarity; and, finally, his unique literary style. 9 To grasp precisely what is at stake in Saunders’ fiction, then, will involve an investigation of the curious overlapping of three notions: America, humanity, and style.

8 In (Hartley forthcoming), I define stylistic ideology as a spectrum ranging from spontaneous to self-

reflexive (the former being, essentially, an automatic reproduction of the dominant ‘linguistic ideology,’ or standard of fine writing). For the sake of counter-acting Williams’s insufficient attention to stylistic self-reflexivity, however, I here focus only on the latter end of the gamut.

9 Cf., respectively, these critical appraisals, which feature in the UK version of Tenth of December (Saunders 2014): “Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America” (Sunday Times Must Reads); “Not only are [these stories] funny, inventive, and brilliantly voiced […] they are also achingly humane” (Jon MCGregor); “In Saunders, no less than in Orwell, language is routinely mutated and manipulated by the powerful to divide humans and obscure inhumanity. In Orwell, it’s terrifying; in Saunders, somehow, it’s hysterical” (Washington Post).


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All of these elements come together at the most general level in what I call Saunders’ ‘linguistic ideology.’ 10 A linguistic ideology is a writer’s spontaneous or self-reflexive theorization of his or her linguistic situation. 11 A linguistic situation is, in its turn, (a hypothetical reconstruction of) the state of language as a writer would have experienced it, including its inner tensions and social stratifications. Whilst there is no space here to elaborate at length on Saunders’ hypothetical linguistic situation – which, at its broadest, is that of postmodern America – let us list some of its principal attributes: the demise of the word at the expense of the (televisual) image; a ‘casualization’ of the spoken and written word, which is the linguistic upshot of the post-1968 demise of the haute bourgeoisie and of neoliberalism’s “general encanaillement of the possessing classes” (Anderson 1998: 86); and the proliferation of “heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular that is built around self-improvement clichés” (Lovell 2013: xv).12 These are the most basic coordinates of the state of contemporary American English, the language in and through which Saunders writes. Saunders himself is unusually attuned to his linguistic situation; indeed, it is central to both his linguistic and stylistic ideologies. In the titular essay of his 2007 essay collection, The

Braindead Megaphone, Saunders attempts to draw out the political and human consequences of the postmodern American linguistic situation as it becomes shot-through with Bush-era, post-9/11 moral panic. Drawing on a linguistic ideology which stretches back at least as far as F. R. Leavis,13 if not to Flaubert (with his hatred of cliché) and Mallarmé (with his desire, in T. S. Eliot’s version, to “purify the dialect of the tribe” [Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la

tribu] (Eliot 2001: 39)), Saunders argues that the dumbed-down, trivial language of the commercialized U.S. mass media has “affected the quality and coloration of the thoughts” of its viewers (Saunders 2007: 4). 14 The “national discourse” and “national language” have become so “dumbed-down” (BM 6) that they have produced a “failure of imagination” in the

10 In practice, the analysis of a writer’s style usually moves from the particular to the general, from ‘close

reading’ to ideological analysis (as exemplified most clearly in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, where each chapter begins with an explication de texte before broadening out to historical contextualizations (Auerbach 2003)), but the order of presentation of the results of the analysis may be reversed. This is the practice I shall adopt here.

11 I am using “spontaneous” here in the sense of Althusser’s Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (Althusser 2012).

12 I expand at length on the geopolitical coordinates of this linguistic situation in (Hartley forthcoming). 13 Cf. (Mulhern 1979: 54-57). 14 Henceforth BM.


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American populace (BM 10). Thus, Saunders draws an equivalence between linguistic paucity, literary paucity and moral paucity. Crucially, however, Saunders gives no account of how this linguistic situation arose. To better understand his position, then, we shall have to provide the genealogy he omits. For the post-9/11 linguistic situation was, in fact, the consequence of a collective, consciously planned political project on the part of a fraction of the American ruling class; this fraction sought to win social hegemony and to restructure the nation according to neoliberal and neoconservative principles. 15 As Philip Mirowski has written: “The starting point of neoliberalism is the admission, contrary to classical liberal doctrine, that their vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed, and will not come about ‘naturally’ in the absence of concerted political effort and organization” (Mirowski 2013: 53).16 This effort took the form of a multi-billion dollar campaign to found or enhance extremely powerful think tanks (such as the Cato Institute), to win influence in universities across the nation, and to seize control of influential media outlets (cf. Unger 2007: 59-62; Harvey 2005: 43-44). Ronald Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which had been designed to ensure journalistic objectivity and a multiplicity of political perspectives, can be seen retrospectively as a key component of this ideological struggle; it paved the way for the rise of aggressive, ‘personality’-driven talk radio shows which, by the time of 9/11, had transmuted into the violent philippics of Fox News. It is precisely this linguistic situation, then, that Saunders is criticizing in “The Braindead Megaphone,” but without any mention of its historical origins. The logic of Saunders’ argument reaches its zenith in the following controversial claim: “Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination” (ibid.). Saunders is writing here in what became known in the 1970s and 1980s as the ‘liberal

15 David Harvey sees neoconservatism as an ideological counterbalance to many of the undesirable side-

effects of neoliberalism: “Their [the neoconservatives’, D.H.] aim is to counteract the dissolving effect of the chaos of individual interests that neoliberalism typically produces. They in no way depart from the neoliberal agenda of a construction or restoration of a dominant class power. But they seek legitimacy for that power, as well as social control through the construction of a climate of consent around a coherent set of moral values” (Harvey 2005: 83-83).

16 Cf. (Unger 2007: 59-60): “If the neoconservatives were to truly take power, a handful of small front groups and a couple dozen intellectuals would not suffice. What was needed, and was soon under way, was nothing less than a massive effort by right-wing billionaire philanthropists to completely reframe the entire national debate – about tax policy, the economy, welfare, the judiciary, foreign policy, national security, and so on – an elaborate institutional infrastructure that could sustain itself for generations to come.”


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humanist’ tradition. 17 Broadly speaking, this is an ideology organically related, but not reducible, to liberalism, which poses structural political and economic problems in individualist, ethical, and inter-personal terms, and which sees in literature and culture a repository of transhistorical moral values which are widely unavailable in the society at large.18 In the sentence just quoted, attention to linguistic exactitude goes hand in hand with that ultimate of liberal-humanist faculties – the imagination – in an attempt to propel the monadic ego beyond its selfish confines.19 Saunders often then combines this basic liberal humanist stance with the theological conception of grace, which he understands in two ways: firstly, as a total ethical openness towards others and the world,20 and secondly as a type of authorial technique in which the writer gradually gives himself up to the intrinsic necessities of the work, voluntarily sacrificing his initial designs (henceforth equated with the selfishness of the ego) yet pro-actively ushering in the inherent “mystery” of each story.21 (It is for this reason that he rejects the rationalist humanism implicit in certain literary forms: “In terms of dramatic

structure, I don’t really buy the humanist verities anymore […] I mean, I buy them, they’re a subset of what’s true. But they’re not sufficient” (quoted in Lovell 2013: xix-xx; emphasis added)). In this light, Saunders’ proposed solution to what he tellingly names the “moral battle” (emphasis added) of the “Braindead Megaphone” is unsurprising: “awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same […] This battle […] will be won, not with some easy corrective tidal wave of Total Righteousness, but with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once” (BM 19). What is happening here is that the linguistic situation of the Bush-era U.S. – which, as we have seen, was co-produced as part of a conscious class strategy by America’s neoliberals and neoconservatives – is being moralized and individualized; consequently, any potential collective counter-strategies are a priori reduced by Saunders to gradualist, accumulative “titrations.” Ultimately, then, the ‘humanity’ for which Saunders is so renowned is, at the level of his linguistic ideology, that of the liberal, individualist human who lacks the ethico-literary

17 In the British context, it was especially the work of Catherine Belsey and Terry Eagleton which led to the

prominence of this term. 18 Cf. (Williams 1963). 19 Cf. Terry Eagleton’s comments on George Eliot (Eagleton 2005: 163-186). 20 Joel Lovell has even gone so far as to write: “You could call this desire – to really have that awareness, to

be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace – the George Saunders Experiment” (Lovell 2013: xiv).

21 “The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined” (cited in Treisman 2012).


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virtue of imagination; linguistic precision – “every pen stroke in a document” (ibid.) – is literally the potential antidote to the Project for the New American Century. Significantly, however, Saunders’ fiction at once re-enacts the theologically-inflected liberal humanism of his linguistic ideology and rejects it. This ambiguity has its roots in Saunders’ stylistic ideology – that is, his overt theorization and justification of his stylistic practice. For one of the generic strongholds of liberal humanist ideology has traditionally been that of realism – or, at least, a narrow, stereotypical conception of realism –,22 and it was just such a narrow conception of realism that Saunders felt he had to break free of in order to discover his unique literary style. The realism that trapped him consisted of three obstacles: its uncongenial geographies,23 its limited diction, and its imperviousness to the full range of contemporary everyday experience in postmodern America:

In retrospect I was lucky – lucky to have my lame, black-and-white, museumish idea of

literature, in which it was always 1931, denied me. This sent me in search (in spite of myself)

of a prose style that wasn’t full of shit given the life I was leading, a style that felt truly

American – that took into account the Hemingway-Copland-Steinbeck-Ives America I loved

(red, white, and blue bunting draped above a white-painted porch, a marching band playing in

the distance) but also this new America in which I was just becoming a full participant: a place

where paucity reduced a person, fear of failure produced neuroses, where everyone became a

freak via material obsession, where there were no artifacts of previous cultures, no ancient

ruins, just expedience-formed vistas (Saunders 2013a)

By introducing new settings, such as theme parks, into his stories he was able to rid himself of his residual, faux-Hemingway prose, precisely because the socio-cultural conditions of Hemingway’s style were antithetical to the trivial frivolity of such postmodern forms of life.24

22 The following definition (of “expressive realism”) is typical of the narrow view I have in mind, not least

since it uncritically accepts the liberal-humanist definition of realism propounded by those ideologues it ostensibly opposes: “This is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience, as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses this perception in a text which enables other individuals to recognize its truth” (Belsey 2002: 6). For more nuanced understandings of realism, see (Beaumont 2007) and (Jameson 2013).

23 “I’d always loved Hemingway and all through grad school had been doing some version of a Hemingway imitation. If I got tired of that, I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel had lived in Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which always ended up sounding, to me, like Carver.” (Saunders 2013a)

24 Fredric Jameson says as much in the following majestic passage: “As for the human environment of Hemingway’s books, expatriation is itself a kind of device or pretext for them. For the immense and complex fabric of American social reality itself is clearly inaccessible to the careful and selective type of sentence which he practices: so it is useful to have to do with a reality thinned out, the reality of foreign cultures and foreign languages, where the individual beings come before us not in the density of a concrete social situation in which we are also involved, but rather with the cleanness of objects which can be verbally circumscribed. And when at the end of his life the world began to change, and the Cuban Revolution made a retreat back within the borders


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Moreover, by throwing off the shackles of reified realism’s limitations of diction – which constitute nothing so much as a residual Stiltrennung – Saunders broke through into “a style that felt truly American,” in which “you could literally ‘hear America singing’ – just as it was. Whatever you heard was de facto a candidate for inclusion in fiction” (Saunders 2013b). The joyfulness of Saunders’ description of that moment when he finally found his unique voice as a writer is nothing less – in the terms developed in the first half of this article – than the affective upsurge attendant upon an emergent form of life finally discovering a style which is adequate to the transindividual experience it embodies. That Saunders assumes this voice to be that of contemporary America is not insignificant. Firstly, it means that he overtly aligns himself with the Whitmanesque tradition of the “American Bard” – the poet who speaks as a social outsider yet for the nation.25 Secondly, “America” here becomes an overdetermined code word for three interrelated topoi: the joyful union of form and content; the boundless imperial gaze and ear of the writer (“Whatever you heard was de facto a candidate for inclusion in fiction”); and a hyper-modern temporality (“this new America in which I was just becoming a full participant”). It is a stylistic ideology which partly overlaps with a U.S. expansionist ideology of ambiguous pedigree,26 thus proving that, even when true emergence does occur, there is almost always a dominant discourse on hand to reincorporate it. 5. THE LAW OF THE FATHER IN TENTH OF DECEMBER A writer’s stylistic ideology, however, does not always neatly cohere with her actual stylistic practice. The reason for this is usually a mixture of the tenacity of pre-existing stylistic conventions and the resistance of the thematic content to the writer’s artistic will. The overriding theme of Tenth of December might be described as a commitment to humanity in

of the United States in order, it does not seem too farfetched to speculate that it was the resistance of such American reality, which as a writer he had never practiced, that brought him to stylistic impotence” (Jameson 1971: 412-413).

25 Saunders’ reference to “hear America singing” is of course to Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “I Hear America Singing”. I am grateful to Gero Guttzeit for bringing my attention to Edward Whitley’s American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (2010).

26 To take one example, Wai-chee Dimock explains how an 1838 essay, entitled “The Great Nation of Futurity,” uses the topos of futurity to justify imperial expansion and appropriation of indigenous and foreign lands: “America’s claims to being the ‘nation of futurity’ had everything to do, apparently, with its geographical expanse, its territorial claims to an entire ‘hemisphere.’ Such an empire was to be one of ‘space and time,’ for America’s dominion in space would, in this formulation, ensure its dominion over time […] Melville […] was to make the same equation in White-Jacket, when he asserted America’s title to ‘the Future’ as a corollary to its ‘future inheritance’ of ‘the broad domains of the political pagans’” (Wai-chee 1989: 14).


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the face of systematic inhumanity – or, to borrow Saunders’ idiom, the attempt to remain graceful in a situation which erodes all grace.27 I will return to the precise manner in which Saunders operationalizes this theme to great comic effect, but for now let the following quotation stand as the archetypal example. It constitutes the concluding passage to “Al Roosten,” a story about a lonely, unpopular and impoverished store-owner (the store is tellingly called “Bygone Daze”), who spends much of the story comparing himself to Larry Donfrey, his wealthy, successful nemesis. Here, Roosten reaches the climax of his frustration and rage and projects it onto a passing tramp:

An old man in filthy clothes staggered up the street, dragging a cardboard square on which, no

doubt, he slept. His teeth were ghoulish, his eyes wet and red. Roosten imagined himself

leaping from the car, knocking the man to the ground, kicking him and kicking him, teaching

him, in his way, a valuable lesson on how to behave.

The man gave Roosten a weak smile, and Roosten gave the man a weak smile back. (Saunders

2014: 108) In such passages we see the paradoxical nature of Saunders’ fiction at work. He takes as his artistic material the social fabric of neoliberal America, with its systematically produced contradictions, antagonisms and disastrous emotional and ethical consequences, but his mode of symbolic resolution of these problems is individualization and moralization.28 That is, Saunders recognizes the painful and degrading panoply of injustices that U.S. late capitalism inflicts on its subjects (indeed, this is the source of some his most savage satire), but his response – the sole principle of hope in his work – is always the moralized, individualized gesture: “The man gave Roosten a weak smile, and Roosten gave the man a weak smile back.” The weak smile is the liberal mask which conceals the possibility of collective political projects.

27 Cf. Saunders’ observation that “the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace”

(cited in Lovell 2013: xxvii). 28 On symbolic resolution, cf. Kenneth Burke: “Even if you would write a drama, for instance, simply for the

satisfaction of writing a drama, you must write your drama about something. And you or your potential audience will be more interested in some subjects than others. These subjects involve tensions, or problems – and since you can’t make a drama without the use of some situation marked by conflict, even though you hypothetically began through a sheer love of dramatic exercise, in the course of so exercising you tend to use as your subject matter such tensions or problems as exercise yourself, or your potential audience, or mankind in general. Thereby you become variously involved in ways of ‘resolving’ such tensions or problems. And even though your drama is still motivated poetically by the love of the exercising for its own sake, it becomes so interwoven with the problems you symbolically resolve, people tend to see these problems as the motivating source of your activity” (Burke 1973: 29).


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In several stories this main theme becomes conjoined to one of the most important motifs of the collection: fatherhood. In Tenth of December we encounter overbearing fathers, symbolic fathers, indebted fathers, imperfect fathers, fathers trying to be good fathers. It is a structure of feeling common to many contemporary cultural works. As Hannah Hamad has argued, paternity “has become the dominant paradigm of masculinity across the spectrum of mainstream U.S. cinema, a move that has taken place in tandem with the cultural normalization of postfeminist discourse” (Hamad 2014: 1). Postfeminist fatherhood, as she conceives it, is “emotionally articulate, domestically competent, skilled in managing the quotidian practicalities of parenthood and adept at negotiating a balance and/or discursive confluence of private sphere fatherhood and public sphere paternalism” (ibid.: 2). This, then, is the idealized image of fatherhood whose concomitant version of masculinity Saunders’ male protagonists in one way or another fail to live up to. Instead, they tend to hover between falling short of this new paradigm (usually because they lack the material means to achieve it) and a dangerous nostalgia for an older paradigm: the patriarchal Fordist father. According to Mathias Nilges, the contemporary moment is an “anti-anti-Oedipal” one, in which the once progressive desubjectifications of postmodern subjects against Fordist social structures have since become institutionalised into a post-Fordist mainstream (Nilges 2008):

The political and philosophical logic of the struggle against post-Fordist subjectivity hence

merely gives rise to a nostalgically romanticizing (and de-historicizing) “at least” argument: at

least Fordist norms and repression had a stable, easily identifiable centralized structure; one

was at least able to rebel against the centralized father and formulate teleological narratives

based on the desire to replace the father […] (ibid.: 40)

Saunders’ male protagonists can thus be seen to inhabit the range from failed postfeminist father to nostalgia for a now obsolete, and consequently doubly violent,29 patriarchal Fordist mode of masculinity. This holds true even – perhaps especially – for those male characters who are not yet fathers, but who are haunted by the Law of the(ir own) Father.

29 I am here drawing indirectly on a line of thought developed by Judith Butler. In Giving an Account of

Oneself, Butler, taking inspiration from Adorno’s argument that moral questions only arise when the collective ethos has ceased to hold sway, explains that “although the collective ethos is no longer shared […] it can impose its claim to commonality only through violent means […] this ethos becomes violence only once it has become an anachronism. What is strange historically – and temporally – about this form of ethical violence is that although the collective ethos has become anachronistic, it has not become past; it insists into the present as an anachronism. The ethos refuses to become past, and violence is the way in which it imposes itself upon the present” (Butler 2005: 4-5). My argument is that the Fordist paradigm of masculinity is just such an anachronism which insists into the present via violence; it is a doubly violent phenomenon because the violence of its anachronistic insistence is coupled with its intra-paradigmatic domineering patriarchal ethos.


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“Victory Lap,” the opening story of Tenth of December, exposes the violence at the heart of both paradigms of masculinity (the postfeminist and the Fordist-nostalgic). It is set in a quiet, middle-class small-town suburb. Alison Pope, an innocent, dreamy teenage girl is attacked by a (schizophrenic?)30 rapist and potential serial killer, only to be saved by Kyle Boot, her unpopular, cross-country running schoolmate neighbour. Alison and the rapist, like the majority of Saunders’ characters, are incurable narcissistic Bovarystes; they compensate for their existential ennui or miserable lives by imagining themselves as the heroes or heroines of various daydreams, which Saunders portrays via a gentle comic accentuation of the irony innate to free indirect discourse. Significantly, these daydreams tend to involve genres and value-systems which are specifically pre-modern: Alison imagines herself as a princess rejecting suitors (the folktale; chivalry); the rapist, even when fatally wounded, imagines himself as a mixture of samurai warrior and king (epic; noble heroism). Saunders signals these moments of pre-modern fantasy via an archaic diction, which he intersperses with colloquial American English to hilarious bathetic effect (here, Alison as princess confronts a hunter): “Here came the hunter now, dragging the deer’s mother by the antlers. Her guts were completely splayed. Jeez, that was nice! She covered the baby’s eyes and was like, Don’t you have anything better to do, dank hunter, than kill this baby’s mom?” (Saunders 2014: 6).31 This carefully crafted juxtaposition of idealized pre-modernity with the casualized diction of postmodern America goes a long way to accounting for that “warmth” and “humanity” for which Saunders has become known. If the “human” in Saunders is, as we have seen, in part a residual liberal humanism, it is also a rhetorical product of Saunders’ carefully orchestrated correlation between this juxtaposition (of pre-modern and contemporary) and that of the character’s idealized self-conception with the self’s fallible actuality. Like moist warm surfaces for bacteria, the gap between ideality and actuality is the optimum breeding ground for the modern conception of the ‘human.’ Kyle, who ultimately murders the rapist, nonetheless shares an implicit bond with him. Kyle’s family home is a savage satire on the suburban variant of postfeminist fatherhood, and suggests its internal relation to neoliberalism. Instead of being run by a centralized, Fordist father-figure, Kyle’s family life is structured around a “system of directives designed to benefit [him]” (TD 14). Each aspect of daily life is broken down and rationalized into its

30 The double-voiced, free indirect discourse makes it ambiguous as to whether the rapist is actually referring

to himself as an other (named “Gal”): e.g., “Stop, pause, he said./ Gal stopped” (Saunders 2014: 19). 31 Henceforth TD.


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constituent parts and ruled by a specific directive; if a directive is broken, Kyle is either punished by a docking of “Treat Points” or is urged to “self-correct” (TD 12). Designed to foster “cheerful obedience” (TD 14), this travesty of neoliberal workplace structures in fact produces in Kyle the exact opposite:32 a constant, low-level primitive (or id-like) rage, initially articulated in his inventive fits of mental swearing (my favourite: “Flake-fuck the pale vestige with a proddering dick-knee” (TD 13)), which eventually explodes in his murder of the rapist. At this precise moment, a decidedly Fordist masculinity suddenly appears: “He’d never felt so strong/ angry/ wild. Who’s the man? Who’s your daddy?” (TD 23). And when his inner parental super-ego tries to prevent him – “Easy, Scout, you’re out of control” – he responds simply: “Quiet. I’m the boss of me” (ibid.). This Fordist triad of man-daddy-boss also perfectly captures the character of Melvin, the demonic father-figure who, we infer, has physically and sexually abused the rapist as a boy. But if Kyle can ultimately escape neoliberal rationalization only by becoming the Fordist patriarch, then the rapist attempts to exploit neoliberal rationalization to escape the constant goading of Melvin: “If she wouldn’t get in the van, punch hard in gut. Then pick up, carry to side van door, throw in, tape wrists/ mouth, hook to chain, make speech, etc. etc. […] Fucksake. Side door of the van was locked […] Ensuring that the door was unlocked was clearly indicated on the pre-mission matrix” (TD

19). The lesson of Saunders’ fiction, then, is that no amount of logistical matrices, which fulfil (in modern, rationalized mode) the same function as the pre-modern ideality of the daydreams, are sufficient to the actual fallibility of humans. There is that within humanity which will resist all systematicity: this is the rather unoriginal liberal-humanist moral of Saunders’ work, yet it arises – paradoxically – out of a stylistically and intellectually savage anatomization of the cultural and social logic of neoliberalism. 6. THE ART OF IDIOCY; OR, THE EMERGENCE OF MINIMAL HUMANITY This ambiguity – between Saunders’ residual humanism and his razor-sharp social critique – becomes most accentuated in what I believe to be the major source of his comedy: what I call his ‘art of idiocy’. It is present in every Saunders story, but nowhere is it put to more effective

32 Cf. Sebastian Budgen’s summary of the preferred neoliberal form of organization – the flexible network:

“The flexible network is presented as a distinct form between market and hierarchy, whose happy outcomes include leanness of the enterprises, team-work and customer satisfaction, and the vision of leaders or coordinators (no longer managers) who inspire and mobilize their operatives (rather than workers)” (Budgen 2000: 5).


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use than in “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” This story is a piece of speculative fiction, recounted in diary-form by a lower middle-class father on the verge of absolute poverty, about a world very much like our own, but with one bizarre addition: wealthy families own “Semplica Girls,” which are beautiful female immigrants who hang from their heads in a row from a metal cord which has been passed through their brain. These living monuments become luxury garden items: the more girls in a row, the more luxurious. But as well as offering this surreally powerful metaphor for the international division of labour, the story also continues the examination of paternity that pervades much of the book. It develops a sophisticated network of mutually enabling preconditions for successful fatherhood: access to history, multinational neoliberalism, and philosophical contemplation. That is, only those families and, by extension, those fathers who can afford to buy access to the past, thanks to their favourable position within the national and international division of labour, can also afford the time and mindset for real thought. Thus, the Torrini family in “The Semplica Girl Diaries” are restoring a “historical merry-go-round,” whilst they also own a “red Oriental bridge flown in from China” (TD 113); the first-person protagonist understands this as a precondition for successful fatherhood – a precondition which he lacks. It is within this mournful situation – indeed, because of it – that Saunders’ art of idiocy, which I shall define presently, achieves optimum effect. Take the two following extracts. The first is the protagonist’s address to potential future readers of his diary; the second is his memory of his mother having bought him a cheap basketball which embarrassed him in front of his friends:

So good night to all future generations. Please know I was a person like you, I breathed air

and tensed legs while trying to sleep and, when writing with pencil, sometimes brought pencil

to nose to smell. (TD 110)

Once got basketball but was overly bouncy ABA type, red, white, and blue, with, for some

reason, drawing of clown on it. When bounced, went like two feet higher than normal ball.

Friends called it my ‘bouncy ball.’ […] Believe Mom got with soap coupons […] [Mom]

[t]ook photo of me trying to dribble bouncy ball […] In photo, ball bouncing up out of frame.

Bottom curve of ball just visible, like moon. Chris M. looking up at ball/moon,

amazed/flinching. (TD 123)

Obviously, removed from the stylistic and emotional rhythms of the totality, the comic effect of these passages is dulled, but the point still stands. What they have in common is a carefully orchestrated, artistic exploitation of a moment of pure – borderline irrational – idiosyncrasy:


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the pencil to the nose; the surreally exaggerated basketball anecdote. Saunders is the master of capturing and exploiting these moments of sheer contingency. They are fleeting instances of total social formlessness, impervious to any mode of propriety and which undermine all officiousness and systematicity. I call it the ‘art of idiocy’ because the Greek idiotes was the person who lived an entirely private existence and played no part in the civic life of the polis, thus emphasising the fact that these moments are in many ways socially absolute. Saunders’ art of idiocy consists of two principal modes. The first extract exemplifies the corporeal mode: It focuses on the absolute peculiarities of the body and represents an almost physiological conception of singularity.33 The second extract exemplifies the trivial mode: It latches onto objects, deeds, or subjects whose narrative significance would normally be adjudged trivial, ‘eventless’ or unworthy of elaboration; Saunders then exaggerates and elaborates on this initial triviality, to the point where he forces it into a new, absurd kind of eventfulness.34 This, then, I claim, is the final refuge of the (liberal) ‘human’ under neoliberalism: the corporeal punctum and the farcically exaggerated triviality.

What Saunders thus makes visible is a structure of feeling (and here we return to the concepts explicated in the first half of the article) which I call ‘minimal humanity’: 35 a humanity so limited that it is reduced to a fleeting, formless, semi-corporeal “flinch,” or to a type of relevance which is achieved only at the price of farce; such minimal humanity has no way of incorporating itself into the civic institutions of the society at large. Crucially, however, it must be recalled that a structure of feeling embodies an emergent form of life, not in the sense that it fully and rationally explains it, but in the sense that it gives form to it by adequating the transindividual experience from which it emerges. Thus, ‘minimal humanity’ is

33 Another, tragicomic example of this mode can be found in the same story: “Image that stays in mind is of

three sweet kids in backseat, sad chastened expressions on little faces, timidly holding bumper across laps. One end of bumper had to hang out of Eva’s window and today she has sniffles, plus small cut on hand where bumper was sharp” (TD 111; emphasis added).

34 Other examples would include the following: “Today at work, at lunch, was Fall Fling. Down we all went, perhaps a thousand folks streaming out […] Someone had distributed orange and yellow mini-flags stamped ‘FF,’ which soon nearly covered ground. Fake river runs through courtyard, many assholes had dropped their mini-flags into fake river. Filtering device at one end soon clogged with mini-flags, maintenance man with several mini-flags sticking out of rear pocket crossly going around attempting to dislodge mini-flags from filter with yardstick” (TD 119); or, this time taken from the story “Escape from Spiderhead”: “We got some rough customers in here. I noted that Rogan had a tattoo of a rat on his neck, a rat that had just been knifed and was crying. But even through its tears it was knifing a smaller rat, who just looked surprised” (TD 59).

35 Technically, of course, a structure of feeling is a transindividual phenomenon. In practical terms, that means it would have to be located in several contemporary literary works, not just one. Given the limited space here available, however, it was not possible to do so. I do, however, plan to write an article which links this structure of feeling in contemporary fiction to the recent philosophical trend of object-oriented ontology, which emphasizes the absolute aspect of objects which withdraws from all relationality.


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an emergent form of life only in the sense in which it gives form to the contradictions of the individualist, liberal-humanist imagination when faced with the structural limitations of the neoliberal present – this latter claim being my explanation of the structure of feeling. That said, ‘minimal humanity’ is the point at which Saunders’ residual humanism, which I have traced throughout this article, ironically comes closest to cohering with his trenchant social critique: whether intentional or not (and I imagine it is not), he has produced nothing so much as a reductio ad absurdum of the liberal-humanist position under neoliberalism. Titrational acts of linguistic probity give way to the weak smile of liberal humanism and reach their apotheosis in the idiotic sniffing of a pencil: that is the trajectory and terminus of liberal humanism in our time. CONCLUSION What I hope to have shown is not only the validity of Williams’s insight that style as structure of feeling embodies emergent forms of life, but also that stylistic analysis should not be limited to ‘close reading.’ What I have called a writer’s ‘linguistic ideology’ and ‘stylistic ideology’ are equally as significant in detecting emergent life-forms, not least since writers tend overtly to theorize the ways in which inherited styles, which may have been adequate to old life-forms, have since become unusable. The ideological ambiguity of George Saunders’ work – between a residual liberal humanism and a politically incisive social and economic critique – comes to a head in what I have named his ‘art of idiocy.’ Here, humanity is reduced to a pure, hilarious, apolitical contingency. I suspect the anarchic laughter to which his art of idiocy gives rise contains more political potential than the structure of feeling it embodies.


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in solution precipitated emergent - WordPress.com · before going on to outline the two major philosophical issues pertaining to style which occupied Williams above all: transindividual