Summary
The novel of formation: in Anna Bernard’s reading of Said and Barghouti, a genre whose variants — classical, ‘late’, ‘dissensual’ and political — structure how a protagonist’s coming to selfhood can carry a claim for collective enfranchisement (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.53, p.60-61, p.68-69).
Details
- The classical European Bildungsroman is the fictional counterpart of a ‘great man’ autobiographical tradition common to European and Arabic literature, each didactically depicting a ‘model relationship between the individual and the social world’ (Swindells, 1995, 2, quoted PDF p.60). Its trajectory is the ‘conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demand of socialization’ (Moretti, 2000, 15, quoted PDF p.53), and it offers the bourgeois reader ‘the happy belonging to a harmonious totality’ ‘in exchange for freedom’ (Moretti, 2000, 65, quoted PDF p.64).
- The ‘late Bildungsroman’ (Moretti on Kafka, Mann, Conrad and Joyce) is set in a world ‘solidified into impersonal institutions’, where ‘uselessly painful tasks’ and ‘all-encompassing trials’ replace turning points of free growth (2000, 233–34, quoted PDF p.61).
- The ‘dissensual Bildungsroman’ (Slaughter, 2007, 27, 181) is the genre’s most common contemporary variant: the predominant formal technology in which social outsiders narrate claims for inclusion in a regime of rights, investing in the promise of the protagonist’s enfranchisement even as it narrates its perpetual unfulfilment; it narrates ‘not the fusion but the fission of the narrator-protagonist’ (Slaughter, 2007, 239, quoted PDF p.68). It does not offer the affirmative postcolonial form’s ‘triple uhuru’ of simultaneous individual, national and racial liberation (Slaughter, 2007, 125, quoted PDF p.68).
- The political Bildungsroman, in which mass movements are constitutive of individual identity, remained marginal in European and North American writing (Moretti, 2000, 232) but in Palestinian memoir and fiction coming of age is virtually synonymous with politicization (PDF p.69).
- Said’s Out of Place draws on all of these: Bernard reads its intellectual awakening, institutional alienation and deferred self-integration as a dissensual and political Bildungsroman that denaturalizes becoming Palestinian by ‘natural right’ (Slaughter, 2007, 98, quoted PDF p.69) into becoming Palestinian by choice and commitment (PDF p.53, p.60-69).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Edward Said, National allegory, Exile, Affiliation