The Novel without Literature

CARLOS J. ALONSO

The category of literature arose in the late eighteenth century as a balm against the
dislocations of modernity, its seeming acceleration of temporality, and its unfor-
giving challenge of received knowledge. In Max Weber and more recently in Pierre
Bourdieu we can trace the itinerary of the progressive autonomization of aesthet-
ics in general and the literary field in particular from their historical inception.
Beyond this radical historicization of the supposedly universal and transhistori-
cal category of literature, the latter has also been shown to be a handmaiden of
empire (Edward Said), an instrument for the formulation of nationalist projects
(Doris Sommer), or an allegorical narrative for third-world predicament (Fredric
Jameson). In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova has shown the work-
ings of the international market that determines the assignation of value to and
the circulation of literary works in our contemporaneity. I could go on for quite a
while characterizing the present vexed circumstance of any claim for literature’s
autonomy, but the five-minute limit wisely imposed on us by this forum must be
heeded.
All these critiques, which provide the assumptions and presuppositions for the
contemporary study of literature in most of our departments, singly and collec-
tively have dismantled any possible claims for literature as an immanent succes-
sion of works in time, as the repository of transhistorical truths about the human
condition, as a discourse that reveals the ambivalent nature of language, or as a
cultural horizon that necessarily engages reality from a critical perspective. We
may bemoan this state of affairs or welcome it, but the inescapable truth is that this
is where we are right now. The autonomy of the literary field and all the claims that
derived from it, which undergirded its value and study, have collapsed. Ours is a
discipline invested in an object whose value is precisely to be beyond quantifiable
value, yet we are endeavoring to ply our disciplinary trade at a historical moment
in which nothing is regarded as being beyond exchange value.
It is no wonder, then, that in a succinct and powerful essay from 2007, the Argen-
tine critic Josefina Ludmer labeled Latin American cultural contemporaneity as
the epoch of “post-autonomous literatures”: “These literatures of post-autonomy
are founded on two postulates about our world today: The first is that everything
cultural and literary is economic and everything economic is cultural and literary.
The second postulate is that reality, when considered from the media that continu-
ally produce it, is fiction and fiction is reality.” Ludmer continues: “These works do
not open themselves up to a literary reading, which means that it is not known or
it does not matter whether they are literature or not. Nor is it important whether
they are reality or fiction. They inhabit the local in an everyday reality to ‘fabricate
present,’ and that is precisely their sole meaning” (my translation).
Whatever we may consider to be the future of the novel, it must be understood
in the context of this de-autonomization of the literary and cultural field. The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44:1  DOI 10.1215/00295132-1164311  © 2011 by Novel, Inc.

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 4 novel  | spring 2011

s­ eparation of the novel from “the literary” as a rubric for autonomy from commod-
ification is already transforming the very production of the novel in Latin America.
Literature gave us the great continental or national epics of the Boom and magical
realism; in the wake of the cancellation of literary autonomy, we now have a novel-
istic production that is consciously eschewing the ponderous social role that those
earlier texts arrogated to themselves: texts that show a complex awareness of their
own circulation and consumption in a field of generalized commodification—the
leveling of the cultural discursive field that Ludmer identifies.
The idea that the third-world novel is invariably a composite of a foreign form
and local materials has been with us from the beginning of the critical project to
incorporate it into the larger history of the novel as genre. Critical works on the
genre by Fredric Jameson, Roberto Schwarz, and Franco Moretti could be taken as
paradigmatic of this conceit. As Moretti put it succinctly in a recent article:

[I]n cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system, the modern novel first
arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western
formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials. [. . .] By “compro-
mise” I mean something a little different from what Jameson had in mind. For him,
the relationship is fundamentally a binary one: “the abstract formal patterns of West-
ern novel construction” and “the raw material of Japanese social experience”: form
and content, basically. For me, it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material,
and local form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot; local characters; and then, local
narrative voice: and it’s precisely in this third dimension that these novels seem to be
most unstable. (58, 64–65)

This understanding of the third-world novel as an artifact rent down its middle—
as a novel invariably manqué—will not help us navigate the non-Western novel
in the age of globalization and its unrelenting commodification of culture. The
foreign form−local materials distinction on which our understanding of the third-
world novel was articulated has been challenged to the core since the late 1990s
with the widespread publication of novels written in Spanish by Latin American
writers and published in Latin America or Spain that nevertheless do not incor-
porate Latin American “reality” in any meaningful fashion. Novels such as those
of Alan Pauls, Santiago Gamboa, Ignacio Padilla, Jorge Volpi, José Manuel Prieto,
Edmundo Paz Soldán, and many others mark their distance from the preceding
novels of the Boom by taking leave from Latin American history and circumstance
and by suffusing their texts with paradigms, categories, and even plots derived
from mass media, the new digital technologies, and global networks of circula-
tion and meaning. But what is most significant about these works is their refusal
to separate and distinguish themselves from all the other discourses of the social
configuration in which they are immersed: their indifference to being consumed
as a distinct and privileged cultural discourse—in other words, as literature—as
well as their ready availability to market-driven circulation. This is why they do
not aim to be consumed as literature, yet they avail themselves of the remnants of
the literary institution: they are published in the usual venues, are reviewed in the
literary supplements of newspapers and journals, and compete for literary prizes.
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 alonso  | the novel without literature 5

This is not a circumstance exclusive to recent Latin American narrative, of course,

but the epic backdrop of the Boom makes it perhaps a more visible development in
that realm. For our purposes today, though, any attempt to delineate proleptically
the future of the novel will have to contend with the profound ramifications of this
phenomenon. Does it make sense to speak of the novel when the claim for literary
autonomy can no longer be sustained? Can the novel live as such divorced from
literature and its attendant institutions?

Works Cited

Ludmer, Josefina. “Literaturas postautónomas.” <http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciber​

letras/v17/ludmer.htm> (accessed 4 Mar. 2011).

Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.

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