Only Noticed When It Fails

Asked to observe the state in action (Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has used this assignment in a course on the anthropology of the state), students may well object that they don't have a car. The assumption seems to be that in order to encounter the state you have to travel some distance, maybe as far as Washington, DC, maybe only as far as the local bureau of motor vehicles. In other words, they don't think of the state as already there, enmeshed in their daily lives. This pervasive if understandable shortsightedness has an impact on criticism of the novel, which is widely believed to be at a crippling disadvantage if it tries to deal with matters of public concern, let alone directly state-level issues of legislation or (the lack of) support for public institutions. Recent criticism of the novel has tried to correct this political misprision by paying attention to infrastructure. Whether wholly or partially owned by the state, like urban mass transit and power plants, or at least regulated by the state as necessary to the general welfare, like water, telecommunications, and electricity, infrastructure is demonstrably integral to everyday life, even if it is only noticed when it fails. It brings the state within hailing distance. When it can be shown to play a significant role in a novel, something is accomplished. But jumping the gap between characters, where fiction is most at home, and the state, where it is not, remains a major challenge for criticism in our time.Attention to infrastructure in fiction has been most fruitful with regard to modernism, which so often exposes the unheimlich side of the everyday. Good examples are Michael Rubenstein's Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (2010) and Sophia Beal's Brazil under Construction: Fiction and Public Works (2013). For Kelly M. Rich in The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel: States of Repair, the relevant period term is again modernism, stretched here to cover the period since 1945 and shorn of its association with the bold experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Rich is right to underline the memory of World War II as still constitutive of our present sensibility. But the key to her project is space, space seen as a sort of infrastructural common denominator between the state and what is not the state, enabling the novel to see the public in the private and vice versa. It's a wonderful premise, even if in practice it often just means houses, about which critics have had their say before. She describes her subject, ambitiously, as “quasi-administered living spaces” that serve as commentaries on “new forms of welfare infrastructure” that distribute “public good in the name of the common good” (26). The novels that interest her, Rich says, “do not ultimately seek to escape the state, though at times they gesture toward what that might look like, however fleeting. Instead, their plots continue to test whether the social organization of space has the potential to produce meaningful forms of interpersonal connection across divides of class, race, gender, age, and culture. These operations draw on, while they also critique, the community imagined by the welfare state” (27).The Promise of Welfare is richly informative about government initiatives after 1945 and their aspiration not just to repair British society, but to rebuild it in a more genuinely democratic mode that had no precedent except the collective solidarities of the anti-fascist war effort itself. Future scholars working in this domain will find Rich's background research extremely valuable. The question—a question for any of us who have tried to bring the state back in, so to speak—is how to make a convincing connection between background and foreground, between the period's state projects and the intimate life of the novel, including its formal structures and techniques. It's not easy; I speak from experience. With the best intentions in the world, the critic's default is likely to be rough parallels and not entirely convincing allegories, practices of daily life that don't so much interact with the state as mimic in a domestic setting the state's concern with nonkin collectivity. The risk is that the state will disappear, as it disappears into Rich's unfortunate subtitle. States of Repair is clearly trying both to borrow the authority of reparative criticism (a bad idea) and to play on the ambiguity of “states.” But the effect of the plural is to make the state in the governmental sense, the one centralized state that creates and funds welfare institutions and sponsors their promise of postwar reconstruction, flicker and fade. That is especially unfortunate given what neoliberal ideology since Margaret Thatcher has been propounding: that the state's welfare institutions should be replaced by private initiatives, charitable or market based.Rich is intrigued by private domestic interiors, including windows and furniture. But how much larger public meaning can be deduced from the description of houses? The second chapter, on “angry young women” like Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark, might better have been titled “Angry Young Shabby Genteel Women.” A substantial if indefinite portion of their anger seems to be the anger of entitlement without the financial means to live up to it. In Bowen's case, the interest in domestic spaces seems largely conditioned by the contrast between a Big House, possessed in the past by one's family, and a lowly present in which one is obliged to share with others some less imposing dwelling. Rich uses the war to avoid facing the privilege. Instead, we get the argument that “domestic space provides a powerful index of what effect war has on individual and psychic interior life” (81). Is it the war, or is it class hierarchy? As we get deeper into the twentieth century, class feelings—how bleak and ugly the dwellings of the common people can be!—get more visible and harder and harder to ignore. What family and home mean is probably different if you are looking back on a property that has been in the family for nine generations. Bowen's “distaste for burgeoning social democracy during the war” (52), for the new blocks of flats and the housing estates, is not a distaste for war, but for social leveling. Later chapters do not entirely correct the impression of class-based judgment. When the clones of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go visit Miss Emily in her retirement, after Hailsham has been closed down, reference is made to Miss Emily's “odious Victorian furniture” (225). It is Rich, not Cathy, who uses the word “odious.”One of the book's intentions, Rich says, is to explore welfare's darker failures. But discovering failures would not be much of an accomplishment. No one doubts that welfare's promise of democratic transformation was not fulfilled. The genuinely interesting thing about the legacy of postwar welfare projects is what remains alive in that transformative promise despite the disappointments. Bowen and Spark, with their nostalgia for a prewar “Britain that never was” (3), have little to contribute to this argument. No one can deny Rich her right to appreciate writers of a conservative, quasi-religious sensibility, Catholic converts like Spark, Anglo-Irish gentry and Burkean conservatives like Bowen, and so on. But the persistence of the Big House and the British class hierarchy can nourish a moral that Rich quite rightly disdains. Efforts at reform are likely to fail and perhaps even to hurt more than they help. In that case, better not try, right?It would be easier to forget the transformative impulse and make the case that “unconventional living arrangements” (200) do something to repair the traumas of war. Repairing is, of course, a less ambitious goal than the democratic transformation of society. It aims to restore a presumed state of preexisting health. Democratizing doesn't. These two understandings of the promise of welfare are distinct enough to demand further elaboration. That would require speaking directly about the state. The premise that people “living together in domestic space” can serve as “a proxy for larger welfare infrastructures” (234) permits Rich to talk, instead, about the same things that critics are in the habit of discussing in domestic novels, not all of which make a compelling claim on the reader's attention, and it permits the critic to leave out the defining role of the state, which is much harder to bring into focus in fiction and thus might deliver greater critical rewards.Carefully covering all the identity bases, Rich includes a chapter on novels of racial migration to Britain and another chapter on gay fiction. Each pays its Robert Putnamesque respects to nonstate spaces where people gather, like clubs, cinemas, gyms, and public housing, and each seems pleased that people do indeed gather as much as they do. But neither chapter pays much attention to the trickier political issues involved, like support for and resistance to public institutions. The motives for gathering in the sites of queer collectivity that Rich explores in Hollinghurst, “networks of care that run parallel to the official welfare” (161), are clear enough, but they are neither examples of the welfare state nor critical commentaries on it. What is their relation to democracy? “As two upper-class white peers, both Charles and Will discover the limits of their sympathy and understanding when it comes to black, working-class, colonial or post-colonial subjects: men with whom both are troublingly infatuated” (172). This appears as an afterthought. It might better have been the subject of the chapter.There can be no doubt that, as Rich suggests, World War II and its welfare-generating aftermath continue to have a powerful hold on our sense of the contemporary. As Naomi Klein has argued, the experience of collective self-sacrifice and shared austerity in the 1940s may still bear inspiring lessons for how, via collectively mandated state action, society might be able to confront global warming. That is not the sort of thing Rich finds in her chosen materials. Whether that's her perspective or simply the truth about those materials, her account of the novels flirts with a banal anti-statism. In the ruined villa of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, what is healing and enchanting for Rich is “individuals . . . detached from the grammar of state violence” (195). Here the state is violence. What one sees in the Ondaatje chapter is not continuity with the project of the welfare state, but continuity with the country house. Does The English Patient model a working global community and practices of domestic, mutual care? Hana the nurse keeps nursing until Almasy dies. Otherwise, where's the care? Economically speaking, their common life is built on theft. That is, as in zombie apocalypse stories, it's premised on the breakdown not just of the state but of all of society. No one will inherit this house; they are squatting in it and will all abandon it. No one repairs the house; it is and stays a ruin.It is, of course, always tempting to forget the free orange juice that Carolyn Steedman was so grateful to receive in school as a child (as she recounts in her Landscape for a Good Woman [1986], and to remember only the Agent Orange that the US military dropped on Vietnam. One explicit intention of this book is to make sure that the orange juice—the postwar will to democratize British society—is not forgotten. Yet the transformative impulse tends to drift into the indistinct background, while what we see again and again is the pleasant surprise of private individuals, left to their own devices, taking over the responsibility of care for each other. This spectacle may inspire faith in humanity, but not in political transformation at a large scale. According to Rich, Zadie Smith's NW asks “whether hospitality might be the necessary supplement to the work of the postwar welfare state” (133). Private hospitality as a supplement to the work of the state—and why not as a replacement for the work of the state, which could then be funded more sparingly, if at all? We are in the ideological neighborhood of neoliberalism.It may be that the more positive visions of state action in the common interest are to be found outside or at the fringes of classical realism. For all its bleakness, the sci-fi-ish Never Let Me Go remains an interesting example of the state reimagined. Rich also mentions Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, which seems to have decided that material infrastructures are only a distraction from the deeper truths of the refugee condition. When Hamid “offers the device of the portal, or door, which admits the passage of bodies from one location to another nearly instantaneously,” Rich writes, he is choosing to “forego the representation of traditional migration infrastructures” (239). The example sheds a subversive light on the premise of Rich's book: that literature cannot successfully deal with the state without passing through the materiality of particular infrastructures. Her sentences on Hamid suggest an irreverent experiment: take away the book's attention to space, especially houses, and see how the central argument looks without it.