In the past couple of months I’ve struggled to find the time to write (or even really think, a lengthy commute is given over to the gamified logic of a certain language learning app rather than much thought). The below is an attempt to try to renew some of what has been lost.
I dimly remember first hearing about the V21 manifesto whilst on a train heading from London to the Kent coast. My then girlfriend (now wife), a self-avowed historicist, was airing some concerns about what she felt was the manifesto’s dismissive attitude towards the relationship between literary forms and their historical conditions. For her, interest in Victorian novels, for example, lies precisely in their access to the past, to the ways in which they frame, capture, and magnify the period’s social history, its peculiar manners, quirks, and manias. Critical engagement with these texts is thus strengthened and enriched through a greater appreciation of the political events, economic processes, and social fads which inform the particular content of any given novel. The writers of the V21 manifesto disagree. For them, one of the dangers of such a contextualizing approach is that it reduces literature to mere information, a kind of tracing of history. Novels simply exemplify certain apriori identified historical trends or provide documentary evidence of known social ills or obsessions. Literature verifies the past – in its pastness. Contextualist criticism lapses into a modest – or is it smug? – antiquarianism, the ‘primary affective mode’ of which, the manifesto writers charge, ‘is the amused chuckle’. ‘It’s primary institutional mode’, they continue ‘is the instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing’. One tonic is to embrace a form of presentism which is motivated by a recognition, not of absolute differences, but rather of continuities, of the ways in which the contemporary era retains certain features of the Victorian: capitalism, colonialism, and climate crisis, to name a few.
The dialectical relationship between past and present is raised in the epigraph of Barbara Kingsolver’s state of the nation novel Demon Copperhead. Here the eminently Victorian novelist Charles Dickens is enlisted as a presentist avant le lettre: ‘it’s vain to recall the past unless it works some influence on the present’. For Kingsolver, the amused chuckle which would deepen our understanding of the idiosyncratic textures of the British class system is supplanted by an urgent identification with the impulse to tell and humanize the stories of those marginalized, forsaken, and demonized by the liberal institutions which continue to prioritize profits over people.
In the case of Demon Copperhead what is recalled and reworked into the present is a form, the nineteenth century bildungsroman, and one novel in particular, David Copperfield. Exported from the imperial metropole of a still ascendant British empire, with its colonial fixes, Kingsolver adapts and self-consciously re-situates the narrative infrastructure of Dickens’s most personal novel to her own home of Appalachia, an internal periphery of an American empire in precipitous decline.
Capitalist social relations persist; however, the position of living labor to the creation of value might be said to have altered, with significant implications for literary form. Or, perhaps more accurately, the fate of surplus populations has changed. To borrow from Joshua Clover, it could be argued that the nineteenth-century novel emerges within a regime of ‘absorption’, where free labor is incorporated into the circuits of production and disciplined by the wage form or put to work ‘civilizing’ the colonies. In terms of the novel, these relations are encoded through structures of ‘reconciliation’: characters find their calling or accept their place in the symbolic order. When capital is unable to absorb the excess labor its own production creates – the ‘production of non-production’ – it switches to what Clover calls a regime of ‘coloniality’. Here the bodies and minds of surplus populations are structurally excluded from the networks of value and production: they are rendered unfree and harassed, not by the impersonal wage form but by the ghouls of the repressive state apparatus.
There is a pervasive atmosphere and feeling of superfluity throughout Demon Copperhead. The communities across Appalachia have been expelled from the engines of American growth, an exile strongly attached to the closure of coal mines but also to the erasure of social relations that are not mediated through monetary exchange. Investigating the divide between urban and rural life, one character identifies a split between the ‘money economy’, where access to basic necessities is predicated on one’s ability to pay, and a ‘land economy’, which at times gestures to the commons, where communities cultivate forms of subsistence independent from the sale of labor-power – an independence that has to be crushed. Attuned to the plight of the left behind, the novel’s characters are doubly separated: both from the compensatory securities of socially recognized work, but also from its radical refusals – folk and labor – which would re-constitute them as a unified people, rather than a traumatized multitude. (To reclaim and reconnect the term redneck, for example, to its original association with striking miners rather than its current circulation as casual slur).
Narrated in the first-person, Demon Copperhead commits to cultural memory the exemplary birth and rebirth of Damon Fields. Orphaned from an early age, Damon passes through a series of predatory social institutions – ranging from inattentive child services, to cruel foster homes and demanding high school football regimes – which exploit those who fall outside the protection of the nuclear middle-class family. Astute to the emotional anguish of such a formation, Demon is also at pains to note how it is the physical capacities of the body that are corralled and put to work: farming tobacco leaves; draining battery acid; taking hits as a star tight end. In a bid to keep his season on track after having sustained a brutal leg injury, Demon turns to powerful pain killers and gradually slips towards malign dependence, a fate experienced in common with many of his contemporaries as powerful opioids flood the county in which he lives. The portrait of addiction is one largely emptied of the joys of getting fucked up and more attuned to the nihilistic search to numb various psychic, personal, and physical agonies.
In this respect, the formal and thematic conventions of the Victorian novel provide Kingsolver with the resources through which to socialize what, especially in the United States, are often dismissed as individual pathologies. Whilst Demon periodically participates in‘pharm parties’, he only truly succumbs to substance abuse after trying to dope his way back onto the football field. Dori, his waif like, ill-starred girlfriend, drifts towards drugs as a response to having prematurely assumed care responsibilities for a severely incapacitated parent. Maggot, Demon’s best friend, becomes a user in order to mitigate the alienation and estrangement of being a young queer person in a socially conservative town without a future. These characters do not have an inherent predilection for vice and dereliction but their paths towards disarray are shaped by the social conditions they encounter and the historical circumstances which constrain their opportunities.
The flip side is that Demon Copperhead also appears to have inherited some of the sentimentalism of its Victorian predecessors. In one sense this manifests itself in the tendency to present the feminine objects of Demon’s affection, like his surrogate aunt June Peggot or his foster sister Angus (Anges) Wickfield, as angels. On another, the narrative risks depicting the opioid epidemic as if it were a natural disaster. Throughout the novel, June, a nurse very much on the front lines of this public health disaster, insists that the dependency on, and abuse of, pain medication by Demon and his generation is not their fault, but a catastrophe that has been inflicted upon them. Whilst this admirably pushes the discourse away from individual weakness, the novel nonetheless struggles to imagine causality beyond the immediacy of direct experience. (the closest it gets is to conflating June’s ex-boyfriend, a pain pill salesman, with the devil). One consequence of its first-person narration is that its sensitivity to the effects – individual and local – of substance abuse, are not matched by a representation of their causes – which would presumably need to leave the milieu that encircles and envelopes Demon. Without innovative forms of mediation, Demon Copperhead naturalizes its characters into the status of passive victims, helplessly overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control.
The historical deck is so stacked against Demon and his peers that they are robbed of any form of agency. If the realist novel in its emergent form negotiated a period of absorption, expanding and incorporating ever greater regions of social life into its narrative structures as capital spread across the planet, reshaping the world in its own image, Kingsolver reactivates the realist novel in its residual phase, detailing nascent feelings of superfluousness and abandonment. For Clover, and other critics who have retheorized the novel in terms of capital, some of the most powerful forms at work today gesture to the formal impossibility of reconciliation, on individual existence never quite coinciding with structural meaning – a gap that is nonetheless felt. Demon Copperhead takes the opposite tack. There is hope for the survivors; however, their re-socialization is consistently linked to forms of discipline – stable employment for some, prison for others. What marks out a survivor in the novel is precisely this capacity for reform, a willingness to commit to institutions which will remake the dissolute into productive members of society. This might sound excessively dismissive of narratives of redemption and overlooks the novel’s effort to work through bodily, psychological, and collective trauma. Yet it is this reconciliation with social relations that remain fundamentally undisturbed which contributes to a sense that the novel’s formal orthodoxy is out of kilter with the aesthetic demands of the present.
Thomas Travers 