Verse

Verse “It’s written, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread,’” said Nils. “Aye—nor am I even sure to get bread through work and sweat,” retorted Karl Oskar. (The Emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg)

So far we have analysed the cultural impact of economic informality in the fiction of the (semi-)periphery of the world-system. To end the argument here would be to risk ignoring or repressing the economic informality obtaining in core regions, thereby implying that a coherent or ideal modernity exists in the ‘west’. It would be manifestly incorrect to claim that core regions struggle with the same levels of infrastructural privation, poverty, or institutionalised political disorder as the (semi-)periphery—to do so would be to evacuate our analysis of the history of imperialism—but nor should we suggest that core regions experience none of the class disparities which require mediation by what we have here called economic informality.

In this chapter I analyse the impact of economic informality on novels from the core of the world-system. In doing so I advance two related arguments: that economic informality has been a structural feature of core economies at various points across the longue durée, and that more recent representations of economic informality evince the same deferral of the cost of the reproduction of labour to families and communities that we observed in the (semi-)periphery. The overall argument, therefore, bears out WReC’s point that certain literary forms move from periphery to core, in contrast to the prevailing argument in literary studies that forms like the novel move unidirectionally from core to periphery. I look first at how postcolonial studies has, perhaps unwittingly, consolidated a conception of ‘the West’ as a homogeneous geopolitical space, with the result that it has failed to account for core territories’ variegated and uneven cultural forms as they have unfolded throughout the longue durée. To this point, I analyse briefly the impact of economic informality on Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield—a choice of text that will seem perverse to some, substantially preceding as it does not only my other texts but even the French Revolution, thus casting us ostensibly into a period before the hegemony of the liberal ideas whose obfuscations and shortfalls I have been analysing. My argument will be that the novel is manifestly a liberal satire (at a time when these ideas were only just becoming prominent) on the inflexibility and dogmatism of a rural vicar, Charles Primrose, even as the formal structure of the plot depends—for its closure—upon informal economic relations between an emergent bourgeois class and the English aristocracy upon whom their social reproduction still depends.

Again, it would be false to claim that modernity produced in England nothing but a comprador elite, but even in this core region we can observe forms of economic informality mediating particularly sharp class disparities (often refracted through race) in fiction throughout the longue durée. Next, then, I turn to Sandra Vasconcelos’s startling reading of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), which transposes Cândido’s dialectic of order and disorder into the English context, thereby demonstrating the role of economic informality in peripheral modernisation in nineteenth-century England. Finally I look at the retrenchment of informality and dependency in fiction from neoliberal Britain and the United States. “At various moments between the 1960s and 1980s”, writes Melinda Cooper, “poverty activists, welfare militants, feminists, AIDS activists, and public-interests lawyers articulated a novel politics of redistribution that delinked risk protection from the sexual division of labor and social insurance from sexual normativity” (21). Yet while the postwar class compromise brokered in core territories shifted the cost of social reproduction onto the state, amid the combination of migrations of people from (former) colonies to the United Kingdom during decolonisation and the paring back of the state, racialised groups and women have increasingly been (re-)saddled with the task of reproducing labour itself within families and communities, just as we saw in the (semi-)peripheral territories discussed in previous chapters. What was proposed in a confluence of neoliberal and neoconservative thinking from the 1960s onwards, argues Cooper,

was not a return to the Fordist family wage (this particular nostalgia would be a hallmark of the left), but rather the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor-law tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of welfare reform, changes to taxation, and monetary policy. Under their influence, welfare has been transformed from a redistributive program into an immense federal apparatus for policing the private family responsibilities of the poor, while deficit spending has been steadily transferred from the state to the private family. (21)

So extreme has been this deferral under austerity that the cultural features observed in (semi-)peripheral fiction have recently been observed in more broadly liberal and conventional cultural production such as Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh’s Motherland (2016). Cooper’s model of the twin poles of Euro-American political economy is hugely instructive in our reading of post-1980s’ fiction. Genre fiction of the 1990s in Britain, for example, clearly internalises the neoconservative construction of the family as a natural zone of hygienic social reproduction, but one utterly petrified by the encroaching threat of the precarity and dependency of young family units amid the privatisation of social housing and soaring unemployment in the Thatcher era and after. I show how Madeline St John’s The Essence of the Thing (1997) is preoccupied with the breakdown of the clean and safe heterosexual family while strategically repressing the forms of informality and precarity that attend this social process. By contrast, texts such as Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2014) and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020) attempt to represent the rise of economic informality through irrealist aesthetics.

Part I

The ‘West’ and Modernity

A constituent feature of the Marxist critique of postcolonial studies has been the delinking of modernity from ‘the West’. A crucial step in this work is Neil Lazarus’s analysis of a tendency within sociology to treat modernity as a civilisational project bequeathed to the world by Europe. Drawing on Habermas’s critique of modernisation theory, Lazarus argues:

Modernization theory “dissociates ‘modernity’ from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general. Further, it breaks the internal connections between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, so that processes of modernization can no longer be conceived of as rationalization, as the historical objectification of rational structures” (Philosophical Discourse, p. 2). Hence modernization theory’s propensity to cast modernity as a civilizational force – the “historical equivalent,” as Jeffrey Alexander has written, of “a world religion, which relativizes it, on the one hand, and suggests the possibility of selective indigenous appropriation, on the other.” (Nationalism 22)

The result of this failure to grasp the role of capitalism in modernity, argues Lazarus, is the erroneous homogenisation of ‘the West’ as a seamless and coherent geopolitical space, where capitalism functions at or close to its ideal-typical form. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that modernisation theory was a creature of the Euro-American academy of the 1960s and 1970s. These decades correspond roughly to the period of postwar class compromise, social democratic governance, and relative prosperity in several core capitalist territories, which may have overdetermined certain triumphalist and tacitly Eurocentric critiques of modernity. The developmentalist successes of the Attlee government in the United Kingdom, the New Deal in the United States, De Gaulle’s politique de grandeur in France, and successive decades of strong social democracy in Erlander’s Sweden and Kekkonen’s Finland may have contributed to various liberal and progressive critics’ sense that there was some inner relation between modernity and ‘the West’. Yet these achievements were not, as modernisation theory would argue, manifestations of the civilisational project of modernity—one rooted in Europe but which would ideally expand outwards. In response to these claims “[w]e might insist”, argues Lazarus:

that if we are going to trace capitalism to its origins and argue for its essential constitution there, then we ought at least, for precision’s sake, to parse it through reference to southeastern England rather than the “West,” since, strictly speaking, capitalism had its origins not in “Europe,” nor, more narrowly, in “northwestern Europe,” nor even in “England,” but rather in a specific and localized region of England. The selfsame process of universalization that produced the “West” as the orbit of “capitalist production” also produced the “trans-Western” form of the modern world-system. There are no good reasons for arguing that while capitalism spread more or less “organically” from its point of origin in England to “Europe,” its subsequent development must be referred forever to this continental locus. (Nationalism 23–4)

Crucially though for Lazarus, and a host of other critics including Laura Chrisman, Vivek Chibber, Rashmi Varma, Benita Parry, Vasant Kaiwar, and Harry Harootunian, the countervailing critique of Eurocentrism advanced by an iteration of postcolonial studies which rose to prominence in the Euro-American academy from roughly the 1990s failed to overturn what Lazarus calls the fetish of the West. One of its results, in fact, was to, as WReC put it, “ratify this baleful conception” of ‘the west’ as somehow the home of modernity (14). In a severe assessment of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of labour struggles in colonial India, Vivek Chibber notes how, in attacking the supposed Eurocentrism of Marxism, Chakrabarty abrogates Indian labour of virtually any coherent values, bracketing instrumentalised material demands as narrowly European considerations:

Subalternists often accuse Western theorists of imputing a provincial and culturally specific psychology to peasants and workers in the East. Chakrabarty suggests that Marxist analysis cannot appreciate the dynamics of labor struggles in colonial India, because it assumes that Indian workers function in a liberal, bourgeois culture. This assumption, he insists, is carried over from Marx’s own work on the labor contract, insofar as the latter assumes that both labor and capitalists have internationalized bourgeois norms. The most egregious Eurocentric assumption is that workers are motivated by material needs. […] What Marxists fail to understand, he contends, is that workers in India were motivated by an entirely different kind of psychology, namely a psychology specific to their pre-bourgeois culture, wherein choices were not made on “rational” grounds to serve material interests. Rather, workers’ choices reflected the premium they placed on community, religion, and honor. (17–18)

It is increasingly rare to find such claims seriously defended in contemporary postcolonial studies, and even scholars who seek to rescue the reputation of some of this work by contextualising it or urging that we attend to its ‘literary’ qualities have conceded ground to the Marxist critique of the field.Footnote 1 What we should note here is that in establishing effectively a psycho-civilisational binary between Indian labour and European capital, Chakrabarty suggests that “community, religion, and honor” are absent in Europe, while rationality is absent in India.

For our purposes here it will be crucial to register the double failure in Chakrabarty’s argument. First, any analysis that suggests only Indian (or, perhaps more broadly, ‘non-Western’) labour was driven by the imperatives of “community, religion, and honor” will miss the presence of these motivating factors in the labour struggles depicted in cultural production from the European periphery. Here we might refer to the work of Halldór Laxness, Elio Vittorini, Yaşar Kemal, Magda Szabó, Anton Chekov, Thomas Hardy, Irene Saunderson, or Rhys Davies. In Davies’s novel A Time to Laugh (1943), for instance, we find the long legacy of Welsh industrial action invoked when the central character Tudor Morris attempts to unionise local mine workers:

The valley night always tasted of ancient things, the mountains seemed to remember unruly tribes, long-ago battles, a druidical circle of brooding men waiting for the moon. Still, Tudor standing between the carriage lamps, went on throwing fiery seed into the dim air where the grey faces hovered ghostily. Until the warning nine o’clock night-shift hooter of the Cefn pits hissed forcefully to the sky. […] ‘Men, get yourselves into proper union and remember that as our forefathers fought for these valleys against the thieving barons of old, so we’ve got to fight, but in a different way, for a different reason’. (183)

Here Morris attempts to enliven his audience of workers to their predicament by framing it as the latest episode in a long history of exploitation. Such an act of resistance thus attains significance partly as a filial and communitarian gesture. But as Michael Niblett points out, such appeals to the dignity, antiquity, and coherence of the community are rarely progressive in the kind of utopian anti-capitalist sense that we might wish to imagine. While such rallying cries have historically mobilised regressive ideas of horizontal comradeship—either racial, ethnic, patriarchal, or narrowly national—their energies can be appropriated for a variety of liberal purposes both well-meaning and cynical. As Niblett notes, Tudor Morris is a middle-class doctor, genuinely sympathetic to the cause of the workers, but when the workers use their collective consciousness to strike—and when the strike sees violent scenes—Morris decries it (139–40). By the close of the novel Morris remains sympathetic to the ideal of relieving the suffering of the workers, but he has distanced himself from the concrete forms that labour struggle can take. Ultimately this narrative consciousness is at one with the liberalism of the novel form which has now incorporated labour struggle as a deeply ambivalent component of a historical teleology of progress driven chiefly by modernisation.

This brings us to the second issue with Chakrabarty’s assertion, which is that the imperatives of “community, religion, and honor” can be appropriated or formally subsumed as part of the process of modernisation. This is as true in Bengal as it is in the Rhondda Valley, and here we might put into dialogue Niblett’s reading of A Time to Laugh and Regenia Gagnier’s analysis of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) in which she argues that the deeply exploitative and extractive social relations of India’s caste system are, as it were, ‘tapped into’ by capital, fuelling its grotesque advance through Indian society.

Today, Kancha Ilaiah, a spokesperson for the Dalitbahujans—not only untouchables, Dalits (Marathi for “broken,” divided or split, oppressed), but now also tribals, women, and the so-called OBCs (other backward communities)—claims that the persistence of caste is attributable to the fact that the Indian Liberals […] were abstract liberals, constructing nationalism within their own Brahmanic (caste) image and thus not removing caste from the national (Hindu) religion. […] “Will someone in the social sciences write a dissertation on how the rise of individualism in Bengal (in contrast to the West) destroyed rather than energized entrepreneurship? How, in India, caste and community drive capital and the free market?” writes Amit Chaudhuri[.] (9–10)

The critics that Gagnier quote here grasp what Chakrabarty fails to, which is that the process of modernisation is often refracted through whatever forms of “community, religion, and honor” obtain regionally. These extra-economic relations which nonetheless mediate the capitalisation of particular communities have been crucial to my analysis so far in this book, and by approaching fiction in terms of its relationship with a singular but everywhere heterogeneous modernity, we can trace the role of such economic informality in cultural production from across the various zones of the world-system.

The Vicar of Wakefield

To bear out this argument against the ‘Western-ness’ of modernity I look briefly at Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, written at a time when the mercantile capitalist dispensation of the world-system was reaching terminal velocity, imminently to ‘break through’ into full-blown industrialism. Here, a text that is often associated with the so-called civilisational project of ‘Western’ modernity has as its substrate an economic logic which is, as it were, foreign to the English rural periphery of the eighteenth century. This economic force of mercantile capitalism must incorporate and compromise with the regressive forces of the English aristocracy—the class which will, as in Dom Casmurro, emerge victorious from the novel. The Vicar of Wakefield thus registers how, applying Schwarz to the cultural production of eighteenth-century rural England, Liberal ideas were “false in a different sense, so to speak, in an original way” (20). At stake here is the role of economic informality in the project of global capitalist modernisation across its longue durée and the fact that this regressive process has been—for periods in the history of the world-system—as visible in cultural production from core territories as is it is in the (semi-)periphery.

The Vicar of Wakefield follows the ordeals of a clergyman, Charles Primrose, and his family as they leave the affluent village of Wakefield for a humble rural curacy. Charles’s eldest son George is due to be married to Arabella Wilmot, the daughter of another wealthy local vicar, but a doctrinal dispute between Charles and Wilmot leads to the wedding being cancelled. Meanwhile the family’s fortune is lost when the merchant with whom it was invested disappears. In a final attempt to reproduce the family’s social standing George is sent away to Oxford, yet upon leaving their comfortable life in Wakefield Charles insists that the family resign itself to the rustic modesty of rural life, frequently admonishing his daughters Sophia and Olivia for—as he sees it—engaging in the social games of the landlord Squire Thornhill and his aristocratic set. Meanwhile a poor wastrel friend of the family, Mr Burchell, makes advances to Sophia to her mother’s disapproval. Eventually Olivia disappears. Suspecting kidnapping, Charles sets out in search of her. Here the novel enters into what Robert Mack evocatively calls “a night world of pain, penury, chains, and prisons” (xvii); as he criss-crosses the countryside Charles learns of the death or disgrace of each of his children. Soon afterwards the family home burns down, and Charles is sent to a pauper’s prison. At the nadir of Charles’s despair his children return one-by-one, alive and restored to wealth and honour—Mr Burchell is revealed to be Squire Thornhill in disguise, and the combination of his marriage to Sophy and the apprehension of the merchant who disappeared with the family fortune triggers the Primrose’s final reascent to their former social heights.

No wonder The Vicar of Wakefield has frustrated generations of critics with its apparently meandering plot.Footnote 2 Scholarship on the novel has long dwelt on the various prose and verse forms the novel draws together, but above all readers have struggled with the text’s partial or hybrid satire (Mack ix, xxxii-iii). For Ricardo Quintana, Goldsmith was dismissive of many of the popular literary forms that were emerging and circulating with the growth of the urban press (such as Addison’s and Steele’s Spectator and Tatler), but crucially “he could not bring himself to disown romance. His heart still clung to it. Intellectually, instead of repudiating it absolutely, he seems to have rationalized it” (106). For Goldsmith, the romance form could hold within it “myths” such as “the dreams of ultimate happiness after bad fortune” and “[t]he discovery scene” (presumably referring to the various revelations of ‘real identities’ in the novel) (Quintana 106).

Quintana, it seems to me, doesn’t fully unpack the implications of this analysis of the novel’s generic form. In Marxist literary criticism the medieval romance is a crucial precursor to modern narrative, and the later, demystified collection of romance narratives comprising a text like Don Quixote (1605/15) is often cited as the first modern novel.Footnote 3 To argue compellingly that The Vicar of Wakefield is a ‘rationalised’ romance, containing an assortment of ‘myths’, as Quintana does, is to argue that the novel approaches a Liberal narrative form which subsumes some of the mythic artefacts of eighteenth-century rural England. Indeed The Vicar of Wakefield was a key text for various authors whose work constitutes the canon of the Liberal modern novel, such as Walter Scott and Goethe (Mack xi).

My argument here will be that The Vicar of Wakefield is in its formal structure a Liberal novel but one which does not fully disenchant its constituent narrative topoi. Crucial to this claim is the fact that the novel initially satirises Charles Primrose’s ostensibly irrational commitment to the rigorous patriarchal stratification of English society—a commitment that will play a key role in his downfall—but later seems to reward his stoicism with a full restoration to wealth and status. In this way the novel’s structure functions simultaneously as a modern Bildung narrative and a regressive reassertion of the remnants of the feudal order. At the beginning of the novel Primrose proudly informs his reader that “Matrimony was always one of my favourite topics, and I wrote several sermons to prove its happiness” (12). Here he states his commitment to an obscure and deeply conservative doctrinal point: “I maintained with Whiston, that it was unlawful for a priest of the church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take a second, or to express it in one word, I valued myself upon being a strict monogamist” (12). The narrative pushes this dogma to its logical conclusions and satirises it:

I even went a step beyond Whiston in displaying my principles: as he had engraven upon his wife’s tomb that she was the only wife of William Whiston; so I wrote a similar epitaph for my wife, though still living, in which I extolled her prudence, œconomy, and obedience till death; and having got it copied fair, with an elegant frame, it was placed over the chimney-piece, where it answered several very useful purposes. It admonished my wife of her duty to me, and my fidelity to her; it inspired her with a passion for fame, and constantly put her in mind of her end. (13)

Clearly any identification with this degree of patriarchal overreach is supposed to be foreclosed. Much as in Don Quixote, then, the narrative effects a Liberal displacement of an extreme and disjunctive act or opinion.

Yet Charles stands by his views to the detriment of his family’s status. By a curious sleight of hand (the first of several) both the market and matrimony intervene simultaneously—Wilmot calls off George and Arabella’s wedding, thereby preventing the Primroses from cementing their class position, and the merchant with whom Charles has invested his inheritance disappears. These two social institutions—market and matrimony—which, at this point in English history, are operating independently, cannot seem to do so in the narrative imaginary. The family thus become tenant farmers, and Charles’s conservatism surfaces in his insistence that the family must, as it were, know its place. Jameson articulates the orthodox Marxist position that the church in England is “the place of production of the ideology that harmonizes [discrepant classes]” (Political Unconscious 199), and Charles’s vocation has been to produce the ideology that keeps different classes distinct, particularly in the countryside where landlords and tenants are predisposed to the kind of informal encounters we will witness throughout the novel like those between Squire Thornhill and the Primrose daughters. Indeed Charles’s position on matrimony further serves to garrison different classes as widows are forbidden from subsequent marriages of social mobility.

Curiously the novel appears much more ambivalent to Charles’s resolve that, as poor rural folk, the family must accept its low status and avoid pretentions to nobility. At one point Charles delivers a speech warning his daughters of the dangers of engaging with the rural aristocracy—a speech that can be read either as a virtually feudal condemnation of class aspiration or as an accurate portrait of eighteenth-century English class resentment (55). But if Charles has accurately taken the temperature of English social relations, we also sense that he is condescending to some young women whom the narrative frames as highly shrewd and socially skilled, with the result that the novel effects another Liberal displacement of Primrose’s patriarchal dismissiveness.Footnote 4 So ultimately Charles’s oblique and irrational pride is thrown into relief by Olivia and Sophy whom the narrative seems to represent as deftly negotiating the social game of the rural aristocracy. Therefore, as the narrative goes on and the family sink deeper and deeper into misfortune, we get the sense that their descent is unnecessary given their close proximity to sources of wealth and status.

Within the moral economy of the narrative, then, Charles’s pride is partly to blame for the family’s downfall. At the same time, however, the pace and nature of the novel’s conclusion at least partially gives the impression that Charles’s moral character has undergone a test and passed. Robert Mack, for example, teases out some of the parallels between Charles’s trials and the story of Job (xii-xxii). As Charles is in prison, believing one of his daughters to be dead, another abducted, and his son disgraced, the comic resolution is suddenly brought about—Mr Burchell rescues Sophy from abduction, leading Charles to allow their engagement. Burchell then reveals that he is in fact Mr Thornhill in disguise. Shortly afterwards the merchant who disappeared with the family’s money is apprehended; in another of the novel’s double moves, where matrimony and the market coincide, the Primroses are restored to their former class position. The narrative arc of The Vicar of Wakefield, then, seems to feature the cadences of the Liberal Bildungsroman—and it is worth reiterating that the novel was crucial for authors like Goethe whose Wilhelm Meister is synonymous with this form.

But if the text takes the form of a Liberal novel, it is a strangely hollow one, devoid of any developmental narrative arc or meritocratic social ascent. Charles is ostensibly rewarded after his travails, yet as Mack also notes in his comparison between the Vicar and Job, “Dr Primrose and his faith, by the end of the novel, may have been sorely tried, but at no point does the Vicar, like his Old Testament predecessor, achieve the sublime insight that leads to a gesture of wholehearted surrender or submission” (xxi). And although George Primrose undergoes the paradigmatic novelistic coming-of-age, finally to marry into the aristocracy, virtually all of this happens off stage (off page?), with the narrative offering only periodic glimpses of his failures and wanderings. It is as if the entire novel is suffused with a sense of safety—or, as Mack puts it, “the thematic landscapes of Goldsmith’s novel are shades cast only by momentary obstructions against a relatively constant background of light”—giving a sense that the whole plot is some arbitrary game sanctioned by a powerful guarantor (xxi).

Here we arrive at the outer political horizon of The Vicar of Wakefield, composed as it was at a time when the economic policy of the British government sought to protect key national exports such as grain in order to secure the country’s emerging hegemonic position in the modern world-system (Wallerstein, Modern World-System II 261). But at the same time the British mercantile class—and later its industrial bourgeoisie—remained dependent on the cooperation of the aristocracy, as Hobsbawm contends in Age of Revolution.Footnote 5 Crucially, the novel’s conclusion in fact dissolves the putative class vehicle for the Liberal ideas of subjective development propelling the form! While living in the countryside the family Primrose run a farm and thus live for a few years from their own labour—similarly their humble friend Mr Burchell is a “money-borrower” who doesn’t appear to work, but doesn’t live (directly) off the exploitation of a rural proletariat or peasantry. When Mr Burchell is revealed to be, in fact, a member of the aristocracy in disguise, and the Primroses are married back into this class, the narrative dissolves the only thing resembling a petit bourgeois or moderately autonomous class.Footnote 6

What we have in The Vicar of Wakefield, then, is what Schwarz calls the objective form of the eighteenth-century English class society—a society rationalised increasingly along the lines of bourgeois Liberalism, yet one in which these ideas have not achieved full hegemony. The extent to which the novel doesn’t merely satirise but also formally subsumes those conservative and even regressive values, such as Charles’s monogamy and Mr Thornhill’s omnipotent noblesse oblige, gives the lie to the ‘Western’ provenance of modernity. Here we see the process of modernisation advance in eighteenth-century rural England in a comparable fashion to nineteenth-century Brazil—through the formal subsumption of antecedent social forms by an economic logic without any specific ‘civilisational’ provenance.

I have tried to show what Roberto Schwarz would call the “ideological comedy” of The Vicar of Wakefield, which is comparable to the arbitrary formal resolution of Memorias analysed above in Chap. 1 (“Misplaced Ideas” 20). In both texts the narrative resolution is brought about not through the completion of some subjective developmental arc but through the central character(s)’ receipt of elite patronage. Throughout The Vicar of Wakefield Charles has resisted playing the social game of the rural aristocracy, but ultimately the informal links that Olivia and Sophy forge with members of the Thornhill estate will lift the Primroses back into their former high status. The family’s trials, much like those of Leonardo Filho in Memorias, take place against the backdrop of clientelist relations. The Liberal novel form should of course be at war with these nodes of economic informality, but ultimately they are functionally incorporated into the mechanics of the text. This is perhaps why, for Henry James, the novel’s chief aesthetic feature is its “amenity”, in other words its ability to cheerfully embrace formal features or impulses to which the Liberal novel is ostensibly opposed (qtd in Quintana 100).Footnote 7 This is the correlative, in the English novelistic tradition, of the “corrosive tolerance” that Cândido attributes to the mid-nineteenth century novel in Brazil, unwilling or unable as it was to leverage the moral authority to castigate the slave economy which undergirded its production (87).

For Schwarz, Brazilian culture of the nineteenth century is responsive to the nation’s combination of slavery and Liberal ideas:

In sum, an ideological comedy is set up, different from the European. Of course, free labour, equality before the law and, more generally, universalism were also an ideology in Europe; but there they corresponded to appearances and hid the essential – the exploitation of labour. Among us [Brazilians], the same ideas would be false in a different sense, so to speak, in an original way. (“Misplaced Ideas” 20)

But even in Europe, the novel form—either consciously or unconsciously—often finds that Liberal ideas do not correspond to appearances, and perhaps it is only a handful of ideal-typical realist novels of the late nineteenth century which can participate in ‘concealing the essential – the exploitation of labour’. The dialectic of Liberal form and (semi-)feudal content is detectable throughout the English novel. In her startling essay “The Third Girl”, Sara Guardini Vasconcelos extends the terms of Schwarz’s work on Dom Casmurro and The Diary of Helena Morley to a ‘third girl’, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel.Footnote 8 Vasconcelos explicitly draws on Schwarz’s framework—the essay title indicates that the argument is largely an extension of Schwarz’s argument about (semi-)peripheral cultural production to that of the core—but her close reading of Tess owes a debt to the precise terms of Cândido’s analysis of Memorias.

Vasconcelos traces Tess’s oscillation between two opposed realms in the novel: one the rationalising bourgeois world of wage labour, the other a reservoir of cheap labour which has not been fully penetrated and restructured by capital, meaning that it is a realm to which capital owes no living wage or infrastructural development:

If Marlott, Tess’s native village, is still the place for collective and, to a certain extent, communal activity, such as the harvest, the festival in honour of Cerealia (the goddess of agriculture), the May Day dance, and the old customs of smallholding, Flitcomb Ash, where the protagonist finally goes as a rural worker, is organised as a capitalist agricultural enterprise, already mechanised (with a steam thresher), and where the brutality of work, human degradation, and dehumanisation occur under the yoke of a foreman who regulates the production of wealth for a perennially absent landowner. (194)

As she moves between these two realms, the social wage of Tess’s reproduction as a worker is drawn from the collective labour of the village. Whereas in The Pickup the material cost of Abdu’s social reproduction is represented as a transnational flow of value away from the periphery, here Tess’s (ultimately botched) Bildung is underwritten by a traditional community of rural southwest England:

Between each stage [of her development as a labourer, Tess] returns to Marlott, where she arrives each time in a different condition. The decline not of a moral character, but a social one: the independent girl pushed by poverty into the world of work, where she enters first as a dependent, then a salaried worker, and finally a proletarianised rural worker. (194)

Here Vasconcelos completes her analysis in the terms of Cândido’s concept of objective form: “[t]he plot structure itself, therefore, is responsible for making the character move between the two orders that structure the book” (194).

Vasconcelos confronts the critique that will no doubt be levelled at this chapter—“[t]he rapprochement between Capitu, Helena Morley, and Tess may, at first glance, seem unreasonable, considering the differences between the Brazilian case, which at that time had just emerged from a slave regime, and the English experience, where capital had already gained momentum” (199). We will return to Vasconcelos’s answer to this conundrum in a moment—my own is that, for the Primroses, Leonardo Filho, Tess, Capitu, and Helena Morley, social reproduction cannot be achieved by labour alone but must be secured also through patronage. The reason for this is clear in nineteenth-century Brazil, where the presence of slavery exerts enormous pressure on the ‘free’ labour market. But for Goldsmith and Hardy a hybrid political economy still exists at the core of the world-system through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The English rural economy that confronted Goldsmith and Hardy could not offer sufficient raw material to be shaped into the fiction that subjects might advance through labour under capitalism. To bring in Vasconcelos’s final evaluation here, the homologies between cultural production of the centre and periphery:

are worth pointing out, because […] they are engendered by a system that, whether at the centre of capitalism or on its periphery, is configured as equal in inequality. Or, to put it better, on its own periphery, the center produces inequalities whose effects can resemble the inequalities we [in Brazil] are familiar with. (202)

Certainly this structural inequality is less stark, and has a distinct spatial organisation, in core territories. As Vasconcelos notes, in the England of Hardy’s Tess capital has gained “momentum” sufficient to “launch the imperialist adventure” which heralded a monumental expropriation of value from the periphery (199). As Frederick Cooper has noted, the result of Britain’s extended period of decolonisation was the continued transfer of wealth from subjugated societies such as Kenya, which persisted through the construction of vast social security infrastructures such as the National Health Service (203). Thus the inequalities between, for example, Dulwich and Slough in London are less vast than those between Rosebank and Soweto in Johannesburg; and where vast social inequalities now exist (on the hither side, in Britain, of over two decades of austerity) between the southeast of England and the Clydebank in Scotland, such polarisation has existed for a shorter time than that between the suburbs of Johannesburg.Footnote 9 The point here is that the modern world-system is one and unequal, and the benefits that accrue to its hegemon will be unequally distributed within a particular territory. Furthermore hegemony within the world-system is temporary, so economic disparities within core territories will only increase as elites insulate their economic advantages amid a relative stagnation.

At this point it becomes more helpful to think of world-systemic modernity as a process rather than as an object with particular geopolitical ‘bases’ (a Euro-American core, an Asian and Latin American semi-periphery, and an African periphery). Rather, I suggest we follow Deckard and Shapiro in grasping the ‘development’ of the world-system as a process of ‘semi-peripheralisation’ where different regions are made, by turns, wealthy and poor, before each being disaggregated as capital exhausts local sources of profit and moves to a new frontier:

In discussions of the core-semiperiphery-periphery, the tendency has been to treat these as spaces, rather than processes, thus reducing the world-system to a homogeneous geography of nation-states. […] Semipheripheries exist simultaneously in core nations, like the United Kingdom, the United States, or Germany, and in peripheral nations with weaker sovereignty, like African or Caribbean states. In these sites, the experiences of traumatic dispossession and exploitation by people from peripheries subjected to primitive accumulation, enclosure, and extraction collide together with the speculative entrepreneurship, technical innovations, jobbing interests, and cultural forms of the core. […T]hese different zones […] rise and fade in prominence[.] (9–10)

The conclusion Deckard and Shapiro draw from this is that “particular features of financialization and speculation, enclosure, accumulation via dispossession and so forth” are shown to have “antecedents in earlier phases of accumulation”, and the attendant cultural forms from these concatenated phases are brought together once again in contemporary cultural production (11). To bear out this point I turn now to the reappearance and representation of economic informality in contemporary cultural production from putatively ‘core’ regions.

Part II

Repressions and Representations

The specifics of this process in core capitalist regions—as we explored at length in Chap. 3—were a weakening of capital amid the destruction of the Second World War, allowing it to be forced by administrations such as Roosevelt’s in the United States and the Attlee government in the United Kingdom, into a “social democratic strategic class compromise” (Lazarus, Nationalism 31). This settlement was gradually dismantled as “the world system entered a phase of structural crisis”, resulting in widescale destruction of the welfare state amid the reassertion of “the logic of unilateral capital” (Amin 94–5). As the state retreated from financial regulation (in the form of capital controls) and social reproduction (in the form of affordable housing), financial services expanded rapidly to provide easily accessible mortgages and cheap liquidity to unprecedented numbers of people, a phenomenon often referred to as “financialization” (Mason 15–20). Meanwhile many in core regions remained unable to access even the cheapest money from the most unscrupulous of loan providers, or had their lives and credit scores destroyed by catastrophic encounters with this early form of financialisation, leading to rapid declines in general standards of living made worse by the widening holes in the social safety net. The crucial point here is that during the postwar period core territories constructed social democratic states to shift some of the cost of the reproduction of labour away from the family and communities; in the wake of the dismantling of these class compromises this cost has been deferred back onto families in a process outlined by Melinda Cooper in her pathbreaking study Family Values (2017). Once again the labour of social reproduction has been deferred, as Gonzalez and Neton have put it, onto the people whose labour is cheapest and least valued to begin with, which is to say racialised and feminised people. It is in this context that the Cameron administration coined the term “Big Society” to commend Britons to the kinds of informal community collaboration required to survive high indebtedness and stagnating wages in the absence of adequate social services (Gonzalez and Neton 170).

As delusional as much of the Cameronite imaginary regarding British social relations truly was, various kinds of informal collaboration were in fact necessary to secure basic social reproduction. A highly prominent representation of economic informality and the deferral of the cost of social reproduction back onto women in Britain is the television series Motherland (2016) written by Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh. The inclusion of a television series in a book about the impact of economic informality on the novel form presents certain problems, and limitations of space and expertise will prevent a full consideration of the form of the television comedy serial here. For now I want simply to note the confrontation of economic informality in a popular cultural product shaped largely by liberal-conservative values. Motherland comprises three series of six episodes each, set in a largely affluent yet unevenly developed part of London. The programme’s principal characters reflect the class composition of the suburb, with Julia living in a large three-story home; Kevin (a single father by series three) living in a modest semi; and Liz—divorced from an unhelpful co-parent, Lee—living in a former council flat, presumably privatised in the 1980s or 1990s and now rented to her at exorbitant cost. The programme follows the characters as they criss-cross London in increasingly frenzied attempts to balance work and childcare commitments, or paid wage labour and unpaid domestic labour. The ur event, referenced in the pilot episode, that apparently triggers Julia’s difficulties is her mother, Marion—brilliantly played by Ellie Haddington—withdrawing the childcare she has provided in her retirement in order to focus on recreation. Indeed one of the comic set pieces throughout the programme is Julia, at a maximal moment of stress, running into Marion engaging in leisure activities at various locations around London. Motherland immediately seems remarkable, then, for its explicit staging of the perennial intergenerational tension of post-Thatcherite Britain. As Julia puts it at one point (in a moment of ironic conciliation, delivered to Marion’s closed front door):

I just wanted to say that … I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry for anything that I’ve done because you really landed me in it. But I’m sorry that we live in a patriarchy and modern economics is skewed in favour of men; I’m sorry that our generation is so reliant on our parents as a result, so I’m sorry for the system. I apologise for the system!

Which I have to say, your generation is almost entirely responsible for. And I’m not blaming all that on you, mum … Mum? Anyway, I’m sorry. (“The Caretaker” 00:30–00:01:10)

A late stage of the unravelling of Britain’s postwar class compromise is thus represented as interpersonal and intergenerational conflict. This deferral of political struggle to the family unit is the first in a series of moves in the programme’s neoconservative and neoliberal imaginary—an ideological constellation analysed in Melinda Cooper’s startling work Family Values and a point to which we will return. Marion’s withdrawal of childcare throws Julia into the world the programme explores; in the first episode, for example, Julia attempts to drop her children off at school only to realise it is half term. She pleads with a teacher (who has come in to undertake some administrative tasks) to take care of the children so Julia can go to work; when this fails she drives to her mother’s house and attempts to reopen childcare negotiations, but Marion flatly refuses. In this and subsequent episodes, Julia shuttles between the café where various parents congregate and the homes of Liz, Kevin, Ann, and Amanda—the latter a privileged social nucleus of the catchment area—bartering for childcare. Later in the series Julia goes to great lengths organising a vast birthday party for her daughter Ivy in order to effectively ‘buy’ an equivalent afternoon of childcare from each of the attendant children’s parents in exchange. In another episode, Ann acquires a ‘people carrier’ vehicle, and Julia must compete with other parents for her children’s spot in the carpool by ingratiating herself to Ann. Despite Julia’s comparative dislike of the seemingly irritating and insecure Ann, a week of intense social engagement ensues in which Ann’s ego and emotional fragility must be carefully nursed by the competing parents. While the programme frames Julia as nobly refusing to join the flattery and adulation of Amanda, the former will throw herself into the social game when there is something to be gained (besides the mere prestige bestowed by Amanda’s apparent friendship). Julia, then, charges around the city attempting to integrate the various elements of her life displaying all the hallmarks of “zaniness” described by Sianne Ngai (7). Incidentally this zaniness is ever present in Anna Maxwell Martin’s physical performance as Julia—there are endless tracking shots of her running to the schoolyard to make it on time, dodging pushchairs and ducking umbrellas; at one point we see her contort herself in agony on the lawn after trapping her finger in a deck chair; at work she smashes her phone in fury, and while hungover she vomits into a potted plant.

The comedy of the programme inheres in the fact that the limit of absolute surplus value has been reached. Under austerity, full-time wage labour and domestic labour have been deferred in toto to certain people by the retreat of the state. The only solution is the exchange of different forms of labour time, namely swapping hours of massed-up childcare in the form of hosting a birthday party, for wage labour time later on. This is a neoliberal iteration of what Schwarz calls the economy of favour. It must be conceded that the homology here is in one sense highly superficial: the Brazilian economy of favour Schwarz describes is produced by the pressures exerted on the political economy by slavery, a distant configuration from London in the 2010s. The crucial similarity, however, is that in the case of both agregados and beleaguered British parents, social reproduction is impossible through meritocratic labour alone. In each case there is a regression to a hybrid or articulated system of exchange in which extra-wage forms of value are swapped in order to secure basic social reproduction.

We can understand Motherland as exposing the opposite dialectical pole of bourgeois British life, which is increasingly dependent upon chaotic and improvisatory forms of social reproduction such as Julia’s sleepless nights attempting to ingratiate herself to Ann, commandeering fellow café patrons into informal secretarial work, and wading into the murky world of online hate speech. This is a local example of a dialectic of order and disorder and is articulated via the reappearance of arcane cultural forms. Just as, for Cândido, Memorias appears formally as a novel articulated with a picaresque cast, in Motherland Julia must traverse the hostile landscape of London always mindful not to provoke the school secretary Mrs Lamb, the dispenser of favour in the form of before- or after-school care, guarding the gate to the castle with all the caprice of a troll under a bridge. Amanda—wealthy and much admired—can grant or deny inhabitants of the school catchment area access to more universal forms of prestige given her deep engagement with major global commodities; in Julia and Liz’s resentful imaginary she functions as an evil princess who bars access to a court that increasing numbers of enlightened protestant town merchants are no longer interested in. Ann brings modern technology and fresh reserves of value to alleviate the suffering of the ailing townsfolk when she looms into view one day with a new people carrier and is thus cast in the role of the “donor” identified by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale (39).

The use of elements of the folktale to articulate how farcical the struggle for even middle-class social reproduction has become in austerity-era Britain is in one sense a registration of what Deckard and Shapiro have called the process of semiperipheralisation where the ongoing creative destruction of capitalism blasts apart particular socio-ecologies leading to clashes of arcane and contemporary cultural forms. This, twinned with the fact that economic informality constitutes some of the manifest content, lends Motherland a degree a critical irrealism. Yet any critique of neoliberal political economy that the programme appears to offer is largely circumscribed by the centrality of the heterosexual nuclear family. A fact that the programme generally represses but is occasionally explored and then recontained is that Julia and Paul are actually able to afford a few hours of private childcare, but Julia “want[s] the children to be brought up the way I was … by my mother” (“Pilot” 07:50). In one episode the couple employ an Australian nanny (superbly played by Sarah Kendall) whose keen awareness of her labour rights and insistence on a strictly formal professional relationship repulses Julia. The ingratitude of this commonwealth economic migrant, her refusal to treat the dirty work of social reproduction for the almost valueless casual labour it is in the neoconservative imaginary, her unwillingness to accept this as a staging post of the migrant worker’s journey to a real job like marketing consultant remind Julia that a functional work-life balance is not worth surrendering the coherence of the family. For Melinda Cooper part of the Friedmanite ideological project of neoliberalism was retrenchment of “family values”, which markets would increasingly rely on to perform the work of social reproduction that a fiscally disciplined state would no longer provide (8–9). In order to retain its mass cultural appeal the ambivalence of Motherland neuters a potentially trenchant critique of the retreat of the social democratic state in Britain and the informal kinds of economic activity that have sprung up in its wake.

Seen in the wider context of British popular cultural production since the late 1990s, however, Motherland’s partial critique of neoliberalism and economic informality appears remarkable when we attend to the extent of its repression in the popular novel. Madeline St John’s 1997 Booker-shortlisted novel The Essence of the Thing, for example, tells the story of a young woman—Nicola—whose ex-partner Jonathan must buy her out of her financial stake in their Notting Hill apartment after he abruptly ends their relationship. The novel deals with Nicola’s emotional disarray as she is forced to move in with friends, but there is virtually no emphasis on the material precarity that she would doubtless experience after being forced to liquidate her partial share of an asset in central London in the late 1990s. Throughout the novel Nicola is taunted by the domestic bliss of the friends with whom she lives—she observes the good behaviour of their son Guy and is reminded constantly of her failure at social reproduction, as if this were her vocation:

Verse

Verse ‘What’s your dad doing?’    ‘Watching telly.’    ‘Take him a caramel then.’    The child departed and the two women sat looking at each other for a moment. ‘Lucky you,’ Nicola sighed. ‘Your turn will come,’ said Susannah.    ‘Do you really think so?’ (25)

At Nicola’s emotional nadir she goes out clubbing with the only friends who don’t remind her of her failure to secure a successful, socially reproductive relationship—the perennially unreproductive couple Philip and Jean-Claude. These gay men are the only characters in the novel with a serious interest in the apparently useless and decadent world of the feminine, reduced here to a fixation with acrylic nails and fishnet stockings (183–6). Nicola descends into Philip and Jean-Claude’s moral wasteland of seedy clubs, ecstasy pills, and taxis home at dawn—that foetid underworld inaccessible to upstanding citizens with parental responsibilities.Footnote 10 Yet the consolations of this nihilism are short-lived for Nicola, and ultimately she realises that her singledom must lead her away from London and into the shadowland of Scunthorpe in the economically backward East Midlands of England. At the last minute Jonathan begs Nicola to take him back, but her resolve is now firm; she has given herself to a man who was unsure if he wanted to marry her; they have lost their house meaning she can no longer afford to live comfortably in London; and her childbearing timescale has been thrown into question. She is a total failure who must seek penance in a provincial cultural management job. Perhaps both Scunthorpe and her very soul can be healed through an arts council urban regeneration programme, but as with everything in this world, it will simply be a question of fate.

Despite the regressive nature of the novel it would be heavy handed to disparage The Essence of the Thing exorbitantly in this context. St John endured a degree of precarity herself in order to pursue her writing, and Essence—her final novel—achieved popular acclaim (Potter n.p.). During her life St John was clearly subject to overbearing paternalistic authority; she was brought up in a strict religious home and school, and in his obituary Christopher Potter reports that the young Madeline was forbidden from mourning the death of her mother (n.p.). By contrast, in the novel Nicola is given the space to grieve her relationship at great length, but the parameters of this grief are deeply conservative. As her friends listen sympathetically, Nicola discovers that she had assumed her relationship, once it had become sexual, would lead inevitably to marriage. Ultimately the novel’s emotional impact is supposed to derive from its extended meditation on the grief of someone clearly out of step with the postlapsarian social mores of millennial London. Yet this catharsis floods the emotional plane of the novel and obscures how narrow a portrait of Britain in the late 1990s it is.

The opening of the novel describes the process by which Nicola and Jonathan came to co-own a property together in one of the most exclusive suburbs of London:

The flat was one of those lucky scores – such things can’t be sought or even found serendipitously: they fall into the laps of those who manage to be in the right place at the right time by sheer accident. It had been one of the last of those dilapidated, rent-controlled Notting Hill flats, in a Victorian building whose 120-year lease was due when Nicola first moved in to expire a few years later.

The time arrived, the freehold of the building duly changed hands, and the new owners promptly notified each of the building’s several tenants of his or her consequent options. Nicola, like her neighbours, was presented thus with the choice either of vacating her flat in return for a cash payment, or of purchasing the leasehold of the flat herself. (49)

Unable to afford the leasehold alone, Nicola’s new relationship with Jonathan enables them to go in on the flat together. This passage is typical of the novel’s occasional lapses into the kind of detail that ostensibly lends it a high degree of verisimilitude, steeping the text in the estate-shtick of young people contemplating property ownership. The novel doesn’t try to conceal the fact that property ownership is at least partly predicated on arbitrary forces rather than merit, but of course this realisation is not extended to a critique of the financial instruments or political economy which produces these windfalls between roughly 1979 and 2012. After Jonathan ends their relationship and Nicola leaves Notting Hill, she moves frictionlessly to one friend’s spare bedroom, then another’s, then eventually out of London altogether to take up a secure job that she applied for, not so much out of necessity—we are told—but on a whim: “Nicola was looking at the job advertisements in the previous day’s Guardian. She often did this – supremely pointless as it was: for as was well known, no one ever actually got these jobs; […] the entire exercise appeared in fact to be a sort of art form” (153). Job shortages are here framed as a topic of casual complaint rather than crisis.

Similarly Nicola’s increased transience following the breakup seems rather idyllic:

She left the flat on Monday morning long before her usual time, and when she got to Fitzrovia, where she worked, she found an empty table in a coffee shop. She ordered a large filter coffee and a croissant. […] She took a long time eating it and then she smoked a cigarette. She might do this every morning now. She was free to do exactly as she pleased, now, almost whenever it pleased her. She need never think of Jonathan at all. She was free, she was horribly, abominably free. (93–4)

The novel tells in its content (rather than shows in its affect or form) Nicola’s sense of displacement and boredom, but it is an experience undergirded by formal wage labour and is thus closer to what Quayson calls bourgeois “leisure time” than truly precarious “free time” (199). Indeed, when the novel again tells us that Nicola’s very subjectivity has collapsed in the wake of the breakup (without any of the attendant aesthetic features of true abjection), the text indulges the fantasy that wallowing in the transient space of the café might facilitate self-renewal:

she had indeed – she saw – been murdered. Jonathan’s speech had ripped away a veil of delusion into which her very soul had been woven. If he had ceased to love her […] she was no longer the Nicola she had known and unquestioningly been.

[…]

On the following morning she simply smiled at the young man in the coffee shop, and said, the usual, please, and he grinned back: right you are, he said; coming right up. As she sat down she at last saw why it was important, and even essential, that she should come here each morning, that she should continue to have this glancing encounter with this nameless dark-haired young man: because it was the only one in which she was not known to be – to have been – the Nicola who had lived with Jonathan; loved Jonathan; belonged, altogether, to Jonathan. Here, and only here, she could fairly purport to be unashamed and whole. It might be a sort of rehearsal for a new existence. (112–4)

So the miserable and dangerous experience of precarity that might follow the loss of accommodation or the end of a domestic partnership in neoliberal Britain is largely repressed in the novel. But here a kind of economic informality reappears in the form of Britain’s expanding service economy, staffed by casual labour on ‘zero hours’ contracts. Nicola can fall into this economy as a patron rather than worker, and it offers emotional solace rather than a wage, however meagre.

In this way, we can read Essence as clinging on to the class settlement and attendant confluence of subjective Maginot lines which were under great strain by the years of New Labour. For Stuart Hall, this particular moment of British history needs to be grasped in terms of the contradictory economic, political, and ideological pressures obtaining in the country since the halt of the postwar boom (somewhere between 1968 and 1973) and the bourgeois literary modalities through which it was mediated. What needs to be explained, argues Hall, is:

how a capitalist economic recession (economic), presided over by a social-democratic party with mass working-class support and organized depth in the trade unions (politically) is ‘lived’ by increasing numbers of people through the themes and representations (ideologically) of a virulent, emergent ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideology. These contradictory features of the present crisis are absorbed into some orthodox analyses only at considerable cost. (41)

The key social forces which provide the occasion for the novel and shape its content—the privatisation of social housing, the gentrification of London, the increased emphasis on the family as the integral economic monad—are all regressive and damaging to Nicola, but the novel can mount no critique or even any aesthetic ‘working through’ of the situation. In its tone of exorbitant mourning, Essence merely laments the loss or inaccessibility of bourgeois subjecthood in a political economy which recognises no other way of being in the world. Yet this political economy can only survive by incrementally restricting those conditions of subjectivity—property ownership, crucially—from more and more people, thereby eroding its own sources of reproduction.

Working within the realist novel form, with a highly linear plot, whose main content is the mourning of a relationship and a shared flat, Essence fails to attenuate bourgeois cultural forms in order to criticise their ideological imperatives. For Jed Esty, the ongoing crises of the world-system can be represented through botched Bildung narratives which mediate the arrest of subjective and societal development (371). The arrested development we observe in Essence is precipitated by Nicola’s seemingly terminal state of grief for a lifestyle and a self that is now inaccessible; yet her insistence that she has “indeed been murdered” never tips into the critical irrealism of the ghost story or the representation of psychological breakdown that might actually do violence to the ideology and property relations that are causing her so much pain. This faux critique of neoliberal London is exemplified by the novel’s representation of the growing service sector. As mentioned above, insecure service-sector labour is framed as an opportunity for self-renewal—both of a stagflationary economic crisis and of a bourgeois woman in mourning. The necessity of this casualisation of labour in the face of the ‘long downturn’ is accepted by ostensibly progressive people as part of an economic recovery, but under no circumstances could Nicola ever contemplate inhabiting this class. Structing the novel, then, is a phantasmatic epistemological break which preserves the stable realism and bourgeois subjectivity of someone like Nicola who could, in reality, never reproduce herself within middle-class London life under the circumstances described in the novel. The production of a novel such as Essence in 1997 provides an imaginary solution to a concrete social contradiction such as Hall describes, but it is one that—despite its realism—remains squarely within the realm of fantasy.

Abstraction and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary

In a dialectical move that we can recognise from Schwarz’s analysis of Alencar and Machado, it is the more surreal texts from the core of the world-system which most effectively mediate economic informality. Hilary Leichter’s 2020 novel Temporary, for example, is the story of a young woman moving rapidly between different jobs in a dystopian world in which everyone is in search of “the steadiness” (7). Allocated various positions by an employment or ‘temp’ agency, the protagonist briefly takes the name and identity of the person she’s replacing, in roles ranging from pirate, to barnacle on a rock, to Chairman of the Board. The hallucinatory lifeworld established by the novel is nonetheless one in which we easily find points of identification; the protagonist’s need to move between temporary, insecure jobs in search of something more permanent, and to treat herself as a corporate entity who must ingratiate herself to potential employers, is one that workers in informal economies across the world will readily recognise.

One way to approach Temporary, then, is as a mediation of a social reality immanent to neoliberalism. If Heading South demonstrates how economic informality obfuscates and displaces the unequal material relations between sexual partners in Haiti, the irrealist aesthetic strategy of Temporary seeks to explore the ruthless social relations which economic informality implies. To understand this point it will be useful to refer to Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s concept of real abstraction. In Thomas Waller’s lucid gloss on real abstraction, he explains that:

the spatiotemporal distinction between use and exchange within capitalist commodity production […] causes objects of use to appear stationary in the marketplace or in shop windows, whereas acts of exchange themselves appear to move through an empty space time. Since this process of abstraction “belongs to the interrelationship of the exchanging agents and not to the agents themselves,” this means that “it is not individuals who cause the social synthesis but their actions. And their actions do it in such a way that, at the moment it happens the actors know nothing about it”[.] (Sohn-Rethel qtd in Waller 187)

Waller draws on Toscano’s evaluation of this point, which is that “the nature of exchange is such that the ‘abstract’ activity of equivalence and commensuration is concrete, while use-value becomes a matter of ideal representation, and thus turns out to be abstract” (qtd in 187). This constitutes a “topsy-turvy inversion of the concrete and the abstract” in which “subjects under capitalism carry out their actions as if they were themselves objects, while the objects around which their actions are oriented—commodities—themselves appear as subjects” (Waller 187–8). This obviously underscores Marx’s comments about the fetish character of the commodity, but what the concept of real abstraction develops is the sense in which “the subject under capitalism reproduces the fetishistic relation without knowing it” (Waller 188). At stake in our application of real abstraction to literary studies, then, is the question of whether and how texts represent the objective manifestations of our subjective interrelations under capitalism.

An example of an interpretative heuristic which grasps cultural objects as mediating real abstraction is Alberto Toscano’s reading of the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini. Drawing on Althusser’s startling evocation of Cremonini as the “painter of abstraction” (230), Toscano finds that the artworks “distance men from our ideology of men” (1233). While for Althusser, “Cremonini ‘paints’ the relations which bind the objects, places and times. [… He is] not an abstract painter, ‘painting’ an absent, pure possibility, but a painter of the real abstract”, Toscano qualifies this in a passage that warrants quoting at length:

Cremonini’s problem is […] analogous to the problem of a Marxist theory of capital as a theory of real abstractions – including in terms of the question of how one is to confront the anti-humanist reversal which takes place in the ‘inter-objectivity’ of fetishism, once things not only appear to but really determine ‘their men’. Yet far from arranging this aesthetic of abstraction in terms of a dialectic of the abstract and the concrete, Cremonini appears to unfold his plastic project in terms of an ascension, a chain of being, moving from the mineral, to the vegetable, to the animal (and the human). […] From the geological to the vegetal to the animal we move, at the figural level, across ‘the armatures and articulations, […] of the passive body of an island, dormant in the heavy oblivion of the rocks, at the edge of an empty sea, a matter-less horizon’ to ‘the sharp growth of a bulb, the long shriek of the dumb stems’ and at last, as dehumanised men commingle with dissected beasts to ‘dismembered animals scattered among men collecting bony carcases, men like the carcases they bear on their emaciated shoulders’. Yet the focus is elsewhere, off-screen, off-canvas – the rocks’ ‘difference’, which makes them the ‘ground’ of men; the absences in the presences of the flowers, the invisible ‘time of their growth’. And throughout the ponderous materiality – rocks like stems like bones like people – is really the site for a kind of ‘materialist’ similarity whose urge is rather ‘abstract’: to distance men from our ideology of men[.] (Althusser qtd. in Toscano 1232–3)

For Toscano, Cremonini’s unfamiliar and ostensibly distorted paintings are in fact more real than the illusion of autonomous, sovereign subjectivity presented by Liberalism. While Essence of the Thing clings onto the phantom of this kind of subjecthood—thereby producing a realist text at the cost of actually apprehending social reality—Temporary makes manifest the bizarre web of subjective and objective relations as they actually exist in a vastly expanded informal economy.

The anonymous protagonist tells us that her role is to temporarily fill any vacant position:

I worked my way up like anyone else, starting with the bottom-barrel business, those city-living jobs that make the city pretty.

I shined the shoes of important showmen and watched them tap and hoof themselves all the way through Grand Central. […] I washed the windows on skyscrapers that truly scraped the skies[. …] Next I tried my hand at directing traffic. The stop and the start of it all. Then I tried my feet at pounding the pavement. But literally, with a jackhammer. And filling in for the mail man. Filling in for the mural artist on Tenth Street. (12)

In this labour market, all individuals are absolutely interchangeable. The humanity and individuality of these atomised subjects is heavily emphasised—the mantra “there is nothing more personal than doing your job” is repeated sincerely throughout the novel (5)—but functionally they are clearly little more than Chaplin’s assembly line worker, a totally fungible unit of labour power, deskilled and unspecialised as possible, but infinitely flexible and adaptable. This image of the fully flexible labourer is, for some Marxian thinkers, a more ‘free’ subject under a transitional phase of capitalism—one in which the deracinated industrial worker is no longer the dominant proletarian subject. In his book Postcapitalism, for example, Paul Mason cites the German “management guru” Peter Drucker as a “prophet of postcapitalism” for claiming that the proliferation of non-material commodities and forms of exchange—crucially that of “knowledge”—would necessarily loosen the bonds of material commodity production and thus the dominant social relations of capitalism (112–3). Mason develops this point into a defence of the gig economy in which individuals undertake short-term work, engage in forms of production ostensibly unrelated to the commodity, and relate through forms of exchange such as barter and favour. As I have attempted to show hitherto in this book, such an economic model is already with us and can coexist with and be subsumed by capital.

Thus while such relations between people may seem totally unmediated and free in the idealistic terms of Mason—or those of Libertarianism—they are represented in Temporary as the full logical extension of capitalist productive relations. When the protagonist fills in for a pirate called Darla, her coworkers all rigorously maintain that she is Darla even though they are clearly aware that she is not:

Verse

Verse Most everyone else is friendly in an affirmative, nodding sort of way. There’s a woman in a patchwork skirt who makes conversation with me every morning, waiting in line for grub.   She says, “Good morning, Darla!”   I say, “Good morning to you!”   She looks supremely disappointed shoveling hash browns onto her plate, knowing I’m not Darla, that I have no desire to be Darla, that I’m not even in character as Darla, that I’m only humouring her. It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess. I concentrate over my scrambled eggs. I try to feel Darla’s absence as it relates to every other person[. …] I sense Darla is someone both loved and feared, and I try to adjust my temperament to properly fill her boots. I slap a lot of backs and laugh a lot of laughs, and other times I walk the deck with stern and hollow eyes. A little of this, a little of that.   “Not bad,” the captain says, encountering me on one of my jaunts. “Not bad at all.”   “Thanks,” I say, but then I wonder. Would Darla give thanks? (38)

Here everyone is participating in the fiction that they share intersubjective relationships, but the rigour and inflexibility of this kind of relation—conditioned, in part, by the fact it is so obviously a shared fantasy—evacuates everyone of anything approaching subjectivity and turns them into interchangeable objects. Here we have a representation of Sohn-Rethel’s real abstraction, as the only ‘real’ social relation—that between commodities—has been projected back into human relations and reshaped them. Temporary is, in this way, a contemporary permutation of an eighteenth-century ‘commodity satire’ in which dressing tables and hairbrushes come to life and converse.

The absolute flexibility required of workers necessitates (or, rather, is the product of) what Waller calls the “illusionary non-knowledge” or “practical solipsism” of subjects bound up in the exchange relation (187). Just as the protagonist has to behave as if she were Darla, her coworkers have to join this shared fantasy. It is this shared fantasy that is shown to shape the absurdly, almost hilariously dystopian world of the novel. The narrator is a character with whom we can find some point of identification, partly because she is bound up in a set of recognisable institutions: she finds work through an employment agency, and when arriving at each job—whether it be as a Chairman of the Board or mate on a pirate ship—her point of contact is with a member of Human Resources. But while the world of the novel is recognisable in terms of its prevailing institutions, the narrator still executes the tasks of pirate, or, later on, assassin’s assistant, or mother. So despite being represented as a modern workplace with an HR department, the pirate crew engage in actual piracy—in search of what the crew calls “adventure capital”, the passengers of another boat are kidnapped: “[t]he capture isn’t violent in the traditional sense. No one is outwardly harmed, but there’s harm everywhere. There are weapons at the ready” (55). This ostensibly projects forward into a ‘futuristic’ world in which piracy has been formally subsumed by capital. Yet the deliberately ambiguous representation of the violence recasts our contemporary predicament: in what way is an aggressive privatisation of a public institution or imposition of an economic ‘structural adjustment program’ any less violent or destructive in its impact and lack of consent than the swashbuckling adventures of seventeenth-century piracy. The name ‘adventure capital’ for the company’s activity brings together these two ostensibly opposed modes of accumulation or epochs of capitalism, thereby demonstrating the extent to which ‘adventure’ is always immanent to capitalism.

It is the detachment that the narrator feels from each of her temporary roles which helps facilitate the ongoing process of violent or primitive accumulation. After the real Darla returns to the pirate ship, the narrator literally walks the plank and ends up ‘filling in’ for a barnacle on a rock. Later she is washed ashore with a coworker from the pirate ship. Once ashore her priority is to call her contact at the employment agency, creating the humorous effect that these bizarre and random events are all undergirded or assimilable by formal bureaucratic procedures: “ “Farren?” I say. “I’ve completed my assignment.” […] “Don’t forget to update your resume.” “I won’t,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I’m a stickler.” “And your time sheets?” ” (95). Somehow, the man with whom the narrator washes ashore turns out to be her new employer, and in her desperation to ingratiate herself to Farren—the employment agent—the narrator, a character with whom we can find various points of moral identification, is willing to perform this new role in a “small murder business” (103). Later on the narrator and her murderer boss, Carl, team up with Laurette, a woman whose sister Carl has murdered. Determined not to take this murder—strictly a matter of business—personally, Laurette joins the company on a murder job, but, pricked by guilt, the narrator helps Laurette exact her revenge on Carl. This gesture, legible within the ethical system of the protestant Liberal novel, is a serious violation of the rules of the labour market: “ [“]Explain it to me one more time?” “Carl’s in jail.” “Right! Right. And you left your position without being discharged?” “That’s right.” “As in, no one discharged you?” ” (131). This turns the narrator into some form of non-person. Here, the labour of murder is a perfectly legitimate form of work simply because it has a functional role within the system of value production; the great crime or illegitimacy is, instead, a casual worker exercising autonomy and independent judgement in a way that derails production. In this way the rules that govern a totally rationalised set of social relations are thrown into relief.

Meanwhile a deepening rationalisation of social relations has the effect of widening what Marx calls the reserve army of labour, putting casual labourers under ever-increasing pressure to compete for a smaller and smaller number of roles. Whatever fragments of value-producing tasks remain to workers are frequently combined into total routines which dictate greater and greater portions of an individual’s life. While the narrator of Temporary moves between various different contracted roles, she has various tasks, such as protecting a woman’s shoe collection and wearing the ashes of the real Chairman of the Board in a necklace, which have no formal contract or end date: “ “You are meant to carry him with you,” Farren explains, “so he can be about town. See, he was a man about town, and now he still is.” “When does the assignment end?” I ask. “When does anything end in this infinite world?” asks Farren” (16–7). The simultaneity of various work tasks finds a correlative in the simultaneity of the narrator’s various boyfriends, all of whom end up living in her apartment together while she is away on assignments. By representing all of her intimate relations as existing simultaneously and permanently, the emotional labour demanded of women is shown to be a task which expands to fill all available time. While Marx argues that the process of capitalist modernisation initially expands forms of labour such as slavery to fill all hours of the day, industrialisation eventually drives the reduction of labour time. Yet under neoliberalism the rollback of Fordist working routines and those state and labour institutions which seek to maintain caps on working hours, twinned with the overall decline in the rate of profit, has meant that value production is forced to expand once again through increases in labour time. The absurd image of the coexistence of all of the narrator’s boyfriends is effected by the same social process that sends the characters of Motherland casting around for ways to balance wage labour and childcare. The expansion of labour to the limits of absolute surplus value in core regions is evidence of the end of the postwar class compromise brokered under the Attlee and Regan governments, and we can begin to glimpse the true extent of its bizarre miseries in a text like Temporary.

The Social Cost of Reproduction: Race and Gender

Ultimately the world of the novel seems to be one in which two discontinuous temporalities are articulated and held in tension. On the one hand the narrator moves as quickly and frictionlessly between jobs in apparently distant places—a realisation of the fantasy of people finally moving across borders as freely as capital. This movement is managed by a powerful and vast institution representing the interests of capital; the employment agency seems to have a reference from the narrator’s previous employer before she has even had the chance to call them to say she’s switched jobs. This is a hypermodern imaginary of the world of work, but within it—as I have shown above—the narrator remains highly gendered. What Temporary demonstrates is that the abstract forms of gendered labour are reproduced rather than smoothed away by capitalist modernity. Finally it is crucial to note that it is the same in the case of race. In Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009), for example, the very form of the novel is overdetermined by the (again, anonymous) narrator’s production of absolute surplus value. The narrator is a Zimbabwean immigrant who has come to London (or ‘Harare North’) to earn enough money to give his late mother a proper burial in her home village. The upheavals of postcolonial Zimbabwe and the Mugabe regime’s chaotic and destructive modernisation scheme have meant her resting place has been disturbed, so the narrator’s very connection to his ancestry, the land, and a whole pre-capitalist cosmology has been disrupted. This cataclysm sends him to London, a city where an ostensibly ‘supply-side’ labour regime sits within a ‘core’ territory offering relatively high wages and (crucially for the narrator) a strong exchange rate against the hyperinflated Zimbabwean dollar. It is these pressures—the need for quick cash, the willingness to undertake dangerous, unregulated, short-term jobs—as much as anything else which play a role in the subject’s racialisation. Indeed undertaking this labour constitutes his reproduction as a racialised subject.

As he realises that he will be unable to secure formal employment without a work visa, the narrator contemplates the prospect of having to work for well below minimum wage in the shadow economy of exploited migrant labour:

Shingi say that if I want graft maybe I can try the company that he know in Wimbledon because they is looking for more labour; they don’t make big deal if your papers is not okay. […] I just want find my money and then boom, I disappear[.]

Last year, before I leave Zimbabwe, if you wanted US$5,000 you have to find £2,777.78. The exchange rate was 1.80. Last week it stand at 1.89. Maybe in few months exchange rate jump to 2.5. (40)

The narrator’s series of mental currency conversions shows the extent to which his fate—and the trajectory of the novel—is subject to global forces completely beyond his control. These inventories punctuate the novel and essentially fuel the narrative: a startling echo of a much older formal trope as we shall see below.

In the Prologue, which is set just before the end of the novel, the narrator has realised the value of an official work visa, deciding to usurp the position of his dying friend Shingi: “I have keep his passport because his asylum application get approved by the immigration people some while ago. His passport and National Insurance number come in handy now” (2). Before this, however, the narrator has no official right to work in Britain and is denied any ability to formally or officially participate in the international division of labour upon which his entire fate rests. This kind of situation is one of Chikwava’s chief inspirations, as he tells me in an interview:

I tend to find it easier to creatively articulate the experiences of people that are on the margins. […] People who find themselves in these spaces, on the margins, have no control and cannot shape the kind of spaces they live in. They are just there. For a fiction writer, when you have that kind of configuration where someone finds themselves is in a world without necessarily having created it, you get to ask interesting questions about this configuration and the people there. […] Basically it is a function of how the modern world works, the way the economy works: it spreads its tentacles up to an extent, and beyond that there is this underbelly of a city or a society where there are so many possibilities. (qtd in Jewell n.p.)

The effect of unregulated and informal employment on the narrator is that he can be paid well below the cost of his reproduction as a labourer. His identification, therefore, with what Gonzalez and Neton call “the abject” produces the novel’s schizoid aesthetics and structure (169–71). Throughout the novel, argues Madhu Krishnan, the anonymous narrator flits between first- and second-person narration “demonstrate[ing] an instability of self which functions not just as raced, in individualistic terms, but within a set of socio-historical divisions which resonate more broadly” (45). There is also ambiguity over whether the narrator and the character ‘Shingi’ are in fact refractions of the same subject; after an attack that leaves ‘Shingi’ in intensive care, the narrator wanders around London in a state of total disorientation that registers the exhaustion of all sources of value and stability—collective and individual; formal and informal:

I wake up and realise I had fall asleep. It’s maybe after four o’clock in the afternoon. But it also can be after six o’clock because from outside, the street lamp is already beaming into my room. I check Shingi’s mobile phone – it say it’s 3.03pm. I get out of bed, open my suitcase to take clean socks out and the smell of Mother hit my nose and make me feel dizzy. I […] go down to Brixton Road to wait for bus to go to city to look for graft.

The 159 bus come and it take me straight to Bond Street station where I jump off because I have to check out for the second time that place where they stick many grafts on the window. But Shingi is still in my head, so me I go window-shopping to get him out of the head first. The city swirl around me like it is in the grip of bitter winds and it make me feel dizzy.

To get this funny feeling off my tail, me I go into West One Shopping Centre where I see electronics shop is flaunting them latest hi-fis, iPods and flat-screen TVs. I quick my pace past the shop, not wanting to let such desire catch me.

And suddenly absent-minded, I stray into clothes shop fizzing over with them people. My odour suddenly back. Over one of the mirrors to the right of the entrance, they have stick notice: This mirror compresses your image and makes you look short, squat, and wide. We suggest you go to the basement where there’s a better mirror that will make you look nice. I think it would be hard for me to tell which is normal mirror – the one downstairs or the one that I am looking at – but me I see no point in wasting time on this. (Bold text in original, 206–7)

Like Fanon recounting his experience in “The Fact of Blackness” (82–8), the narrator has their very sense of self constantly disrupted and denigrated by multiple sources—they can find no stable point of identification with anything: memories of their mother, commodities, and mirrors all serve to make them feel dizzy and distort their experience of reality. Here we see the formation of a “contextually-derived African self” which is “forever compelled to exclusion and objectification” due to its constant shifting identification with the work “no one else is willing to do” (Krishnan 65; Gonzalez and Neton 171).

So Harare North is structured by a global financial system in which the narrator can play no direct or official part, but which nonetheless overdetermines his entire life. This explicitly financial structure compresses the whole history of the novel form in Britain, because another novel that is manifestly structured by the attempt to accumulate wealth in a society within which the narrator has no agency is Daniel Defoe’s 1724 novel Roxana in which a young woman must attempt survival and social reproduction in seventeenth-century England. Roxana, too, performs endless inventories of her funds and possessions throughout the novel, as it is her highly unstable relationship to these objects that is crucial to her survival. In this way Roxana’s and the Harare North narrator’s cash and commodities seem, to use Sohn-Rethel’s terms, stable and stationary, while it is the gendered and racialised subjects in a territory as wealthy as England which seem unreal and constantly in feverish motion. Even within the core territories of the world-system, then, we see structural homologies appearing across its longue durée, wherein precarity is a structural feature of capitalism in its ostensible ‘Western’ homeland.

For Gonzalez and Neton, the real abstraction of gender (and we can see an analogy here with the production of race) is produced in the following way:

Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have children” […] and once this social activity “having children,” is structurally formed as constituting a handicap, women are defined as those who come to the labor-market with a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation—through the market-determined risk identified as childbearing “potential”—keeps those who embody the signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM [indirectly market mediated] sphere [which includes informal economies]. Therefore, because capital is a “sex-blind” abstraction, it concretely punished women for having a sex, even though that sexual difference is produced by capitalist social relations, and absolutely necessary to the reproduction of capitalism itself. [… O]nce sexual different becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as a bearer of labor-power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the commodity labor-power with a cheaper price. (162)

The racialised and gendered subjects—Roxana, the narrators of Harare North and Temporary, the characters in Motherland—find that they are simply unable to secure social reproduction through labour. Their role within the reproduction of the social totality is to perform both the poorly waged work available to them and the “abject” work described by Gonzalez and Neton: the work that the state is increasingly unwilling to organise will fall to those subjects whose labour is cheapest—those subjects who are of least value—“there is always a remainder, which we will refer to as the abject, that is, what cannot be subsumed or is not worth subsuming” (169). ‘It is not that we will have to “go back to the kitchen,” if only because we cannot afford it’, and the “fate” of gendered and racialised people “is having to deal with the abject” alongside poorly waged work (171). In cultural production across the history of capitalism, and across the capitalist world-system including the core, literary forms responsive to economic informality will be shaped by the varying ratios of poorly waged and abject labour, and we can trace these shifting ratios across history by attending to these cultural forms. In neoliberal cultural production we see forms associated with the intensification of both of these kinds of labour—and thus an emphasis on the extraction of absolute surplus value—that have homologies with earlier phases of capitalism. If we choose to draw no other conclusion, it must be that the forward momentum of capitalist modernisation is not that which we call progress