Combined and uneven styles in the modern world-system: stylistic ideology in José de Alencar, Machado de Assis and Thomas Hardy

Abstract

The stylistic discontinuities that are a widely recognised feature of literature from the world-systemic periphery can also be located in literature at the intra-core periphery: that is, those cities, regions or macro-regions within a core state that have been peripheralised by capitalist centralisation processes. Engaging with Franco Moretti’s theory of world literature, Roberto Schwarz’s influential readings of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis, as well as Raymond Williams on Thomas Hardy, this essay tries to make visible the extent to which peripheral writers actively stylise their combined and uneven linguistic and cultural situations. Whilst aligning itself with theories of world-literature premised on the combined and uneven development of the modern capitalist world-system, the essay argues against an understanding of world-literature as a passive ‘reflection’ or ‘registration’ of this system. It suggests that an expanded definition of style – one which emphasises ‘stylistic ideologies’, the self-conscious stylistic projects writers develop – could help avoid such underestimations of the political and literary agency of writers at the periphery. It concludes with some remarks on the problem of historical temporality shared by peripheral styles and theories of style alike.

Keywords:

• Franco Moretti
• Machado de Assis
• Raymond Williams
• Roberto Schwarz
• politics
• style
• Thomas Hardy
• world literature

Notes

1. The ‘modern world-system’, a concept developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, consists of cores, peripheries and semiperipheries – cores being characterised by the prevalence of quasi-monopolised production processes within strong states, whose condition of possibility is the manufactured weakness of the periphery (Wallerstein, 2004: 28ff.).

2. The Warwick Research Collective (WReC) consists of Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry and Stephen Shapiro.

3. Cf. Bakhtin (1981: 259–422).

4. I have adapted the following summary of style’s tripartite relationality from a previous article (Hartley, 2015: 168).

5. Lukács, Sartre and Barthes would all in their different ways claim that this lasted until the insurrection of June 1848.

6. I am not, of course, suggesting that Schwarz is insensitive to the problem of intentionality. On the contrary, he notes that a ‘careful distinction’ must be made ‘between degrees of intention’ (1992: 64). My argument is simply that he has omitted one such crucial ‘degree’.

7. Much more could be said of Alencar’s stylistic ideology, not least of his nationalist desire to produce an authentic ‘Brazilian’ language that would break with Portuguese (Sommer, 1991: 138–171). Due to the limited space available, however, I am unable to expand on this topic here.

8. Throughout this section I shall refer to the original edition of Williams’s essay. He later reprinted it in a slightly modified form in Writing in Society (1983).

9. He admitted as much himself in 2003 when responding to his critics (reprinted in Moretti, 2013: 116–117).