literature, nationalism and the challenge of representation

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Review: Literature, Nationalism and the Challenge of Representation Author(s): Catherine Frost Review by: Catherine Frost Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 499-512Published by: for the Cambridge University Press University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of

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Literature, Nationalism and the Challenge of Representation

Catherine Frost

In an age that is coming to terms with the flawed record of legislatures and political system in representing minorities or marginalized populations, theorists are paying more attention than ever to questions of representational reform. The challenge facing contemporary democracies is to re-write their representational order by creating new forms, new styles of politics, in the hope that they might better express the experiences of increasingly heterogeneous populations. Among the groups calling for increased representation or self-determination are, of course, national minorities, and their demands raise pressing issues for multicultural or multinational unions. For national groups, however, the struggle for representation is waged on two fronts- one political, one cultural. Preserving cultural resources proves central to the nationalist effort. Because a national minority that lacks resources for articulating itself as a cultural group will generally also find itself handicapped when it comes to expressing and then advancing claims to enhanced political representation.

If securing enhanced representation involves not just a political effort but also a cultural one, there may be instructive parallels between the two arenas. Yet despite occasionally making common cause under the banner of nationalism there has traditionally been a certain antagonism between the poetic arts and the political ones. Plato, for instance, opts to banish the poets from the just city in order that the "sweetened muse" should not displace law and

Joe Cleary: Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii. 259. $65.00.)

Seamus Deane: Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. 269. $44.00.)

Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation.

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 719. $23.95.) Andras Unger: Joyce s Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History

of the Nation State. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. x, 155. $55.00.)



500 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

argument (The Republic, bk. X, 607a). Nevertheless, this ancient disagreement may belie a deeper affinity of purpose. Philosopher Stanley Rosen argues in The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry (1993) that poet and political philosopher are engaged in fundamentally similar tasks. Both strive to appreciate, express, and represent the world and our lives within it.

Leading literary theorists argue, for instance, that the notable achievements of modern Irish literature cannot be explained without taking into consideration the drive to overcome a serious representational deficit in Ireland's collective life. At the same time, this literary nationalism was closely intertwined with the developments that led to political independence. If we want to understand how representation works, there may be something to be gained in considering how the literary arts have coped with their own representational challenges. This aim of this essay, therefore, is to look at national representation as a cultural or literary phenomenon and ask what insights it might hold for political theorists working to reconcile national claims with liberal-democracy.

In keeping with this approach, three of the books discussed below detail how Irish literature went from a deficit to a surplus when it came to representing the national community. The fourth addresses how the literature arising in places like Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine faces a new representational dilemma, one centered on the experience of partition. Following an outline of each author's conclusions, I suggest that there are lessons here for the growing fields of liberal nationalism and multiculturalism studies. These works remind us, I argue, that representing minority or national groups means representing a process or movement rather than a particular set of institutions or practices. They therefore challenge us to imagine new, more versatile political forms, forms that can better capture this dynamic quality and that can represent minorities-national or otherwise-as changeable, ever-shifting, but nonetheless coherent kinds of groups.

This idea of representation as a process runs through Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland. In it he documents the search for a national style or form, and explains how the process played out in Irish literature as a progression towards collective authenticity. The whole effort is set off by a crisis in representation that linked the political and the artistic efforts in common cause. The original



CHALLENGE OF REPRESENTATION 501

problem, he says, was that the symbolic and practical representation of the country was entrusted to the hands and the language of people who neither knew the Irish well, nor cared to know them in any serious way. Ireland served, he says, as the "perfect foil" for English virtues, by providing a space into which the English could project their collective unconscious. The resulting cultural and representational vacuum eventually generated a remarkable literary effort in the form of the Gaelic Revival and its aftershocks.

The Revivalists, he explains, were motivated by the conviction that style was "the thing to be seized, the zone in which the battle of two civilizations would be fought out" (1995, p. 117). They sought to "elaborate a landscape of internal consciousness" (1995, p. 118) and this effort "dictated that style anticipate subject matter" (1995, p. 121). Making a national literature, in other words, required they put form before content. The efforts and influence of W. B. Yeats in addressing this "national longing for form" (1995, p. 133) receive special attention in the book, but it is Oscar Wilde who best embodies Kiberd's ideal of a liberating, expressive style. Whereas Yeats championed the search for a unique literary form, Wilde in his work and life offered something different. He embodied a "notion of personality, intensified over many multiplications, until it achieved a fragmentary but real authenticity" (1995, p. 122). It turns out that this, and not Yeats's attempt to found a quintessentially Irish style, is the true culmination of the literary odyssey in Kiberd's account.

A favorite metaphor of Kiberd's echoes this idea well-that of the mirror. He cites Synge's Playboy of the Western Word, for instance, where the hero Christy Mahon is first equipped with a distorting mirror that is the instrument of an unflattering and partial reflection. Mahon later comes across his reflection in a complete mirror which is the instrument of self-knowledge but which also yields its own distortion in the form of narcissism, egged on by a fawning community. But in the final act all mirrors are rejected in favor of self-affirmation and self-creation (1995, pp. 166-88). Kiberd explains that the Irish turned from the distorted reflection offered by imperial representations to the more flattering but ultimately narcissistic reflection of the national character which begins with the Gaelic Revival. This representation is taken to an extreme under the authoritarian nationalism of the new Irish State,




but the attachment to self-reflection must ultimately be set aside as restricting in its own right. Only by doing so can the Irish finally fulfill the national narrative implied in Synge's controversial play by "constructing themselves from within and throwing away the mirror" (1995, p. 290).

Should the nationalist Revival, therefore, be understood as a detour on the way to representational liberation? Although critical of its inadequacies, Kiberd does not think so. Instead, he borrows from Nietzsche the idea that "those who haven't had a good father are compelled to go out and invent one" (1995, p. 7-8) and suggests that the Revival was a matter of Ireland inventing its own parentage in order to have something from which it could turn away. Kiberd writes of "the desire to find an enabling narrative, which would permit a person to represent the self," but this is only half the story. He goes on to quote Hannah Arendt, who said the "second look at his own history can transform a man from a creature trapped in his own past to one who is freed of it" (1995, p. 387). In fact, not only must we give up the narcissistic mirror, but we must also be ready to break it in order to assure a fractured, fragmented and liberating image. As he explains, the "nationalist self destroys itself by the very energies which define its being, and so the mirror must be smashed before being discarded" (1995, p. 290).

There is a danger with this reading of Irish literary history, however. It is that in offering a kind of insurance against the seductions of narcissism through the shattering of the national mirror, Kiberd risks returning the Irish, and their literature along with them, to a state of inarticulateness that characterized the initial representational crisis. The mirror-whether degrading or flattering-is still what provides a starting point for self- consciousness. Shatter it completely, and it may be difficult to recognize the fragments as parts of a whole. Kiberd is aware of the paradox that, as he explains it, "perfect freedom of individual expression is possible in a code whose values are nonetheless communal" (1995, p. 124-25).

The Revival, Kiberd instructs us, was a crucial moment in the development of a new indigenous code through which and against which future generations could navigate the collective landscape. In his conclusion, Kiberd makes a case for a dialectical resolution of the process in the form of a multicultural Ireland that has come to terms with the fragmentary, partial, and intersected reality of the national




self. Yet, what he has actually mapped is a recurrent cycle of mirror- building and mirror-breaking, and both stages are a crucial part of the representational process. Of course, the paradox within a paradox is that in weaving a coherent narrative that leads to a pluralist vision of Ireland, Kiberd joins in the process by setting up a new mirror in which he hopes the Irish can discover themselves.

Seamus Deane offers a less teleological account of Irish literary history in Strange Country, but like Kiberd he has a great deal to say about the mode of representation used to express Irish circumstances. The key theme for Deane is that of foreignness or strangeness, so often imputed to Ireland and the Irish as part of their representation under an imperial order. Yet when it comes to constructing the other as foreign it was an Irishman who leveled the first blow, Deane suggests. He argues that Edmund Burke is the father of a literary mode-a kind of intellectual tourism or travel narrative-that cast the champions of modernity and universalism as denizens of an entirely foreign land. This new country, born in the French Revolution, not only created the new citizen. It also made strangers of all those peoples who had not entered into such a project. As Deane put it, it created a world in which "the human person, as traditionally understood," became something alien (1997, p. 8).

Burke issues the opening salvo in this representational showdown in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In it, France and modernity are the phantasm, captured by abstract ideas that have no deep roots in any particular place, and whose universalist pretensions give it away as fundamentally homeless. Against this phantasmal new order Burke juxtaposed the idea of national character, which became for him "a synecdoche for traditional politics and a refusal of revolution" (1997, p. 9).

The divide first imagined by Burke ultimately worked against the Irish. Where modernity favored the abstract, the Irish were still grounded in the actual, the immediate, and the local. Left behind in the land of particularity and anachronism, "the real subject and the real country" were, Deane says, "representable only as the unreal-the unreally real" (1997, p. 97). To escape the stigma of inarticulateness and abnormality, therefore, the country needed to "find a manner in which its speech might be represented" (1997, p. 57). The effort is necessary not just so that the Irish might have a representational resource for their own




purposes, but also so that they can represent themselves to their imperial brethren upon whom they were dependent for a solution to the many social and economic problems plaguing the island.

This representational effort amounted to an exercise in translation. A means of expression must be found that made sense to the stranger, but that also sufficiently captured the world of the native. Nowhere was this imperative better illustrated, perhaps, than in the effort to develop a typeface for printing the Irish language. Irish remained a script language until well into the nineteenth century, but if it was to survive, it must become a printed one. Quite literally, a new national character needed to be invented, and it needed to be the work of the Irish themselves.

But in becoming a print language, Irish entered foreign territory. It left the actual, immediate world of oral and script communication and became amenable to the abstract and normalizing speech of modernity. The irony, or indeed perhaps the tragedy, of this experience is that to survive in modernity the Irish must learn to speak through modern forms. The language, and the cultural heritage that the language preserved, was as Deane put it, "betrayed into print"; and yet "it is only through such betrayal that it can be preserved at all" (1997, p. 67). Thus in becoming both familiar enough to be recognizable in modern terms, but distinct enough to retain a sense of the foreign, the Irish staked a claim to a kind of no-man's land in Burke's geography.

This mode of life, suspended somewhere between the new world and the old, finds its expression, Deane suggests, in a work like Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker, an Irish civil servant, imagines a phantasmal creature who travels to the imperial center-London but must of necessity bring some of the old world with him. To survive, Dracula must sleep in the soil of his homeland, which is carried with him to his new lands in England. Deane draws our attention to the critical distinction between land and soil that the story employs. Land is an idea that belongs to the new world; it entails abstract ideas of property and ownership. On the one hand, Dracula can, through the efforts of a hapless functionary, purchase land in England before he ever goes there, and this possibility initiates the terrible narrative. Soil, on the other hand, is a primal attachment, not to be bought or sold. It has a generative and regenerative power that both supports the monster and binds him. For Ireland, a country where land had become a life and death




matter, and where attachment to the soil seemed fundamentally opposed to the workings of property, Stoker's imagery captures the weightiness of the cultural conflict (1997, pp. 89-94).

Translated into the modern world, the idiom that best fits the Irish experience was one that continued the phantasmal theme initiated by Burke. But, Deane suggests, in translating themselves into this new mode the Irish have actually taken on board the normalizing drive of modernity. The new representational system promises that "all that is extreme" can be "brought under narrative control," reassuring the audience that this strange land "can be redeemed for normality" (1997, p. 19).

Insofar as it serves as a normalizing narrative, Deane warns, the new mode runs the risk of "monotony" (1997, p. 156). It lacks the energies of those "seismic events" (1997, p. 164) that characterize premodern story-making, and it produces a culture "prone to petrifaction" through the use of "repetitive, typifying narratives" (1997, p. 157). No sooner is it safely normalized than Irish literature finds itself drawn back to the strange and fantastic as a necessary part of its representational arsenal. The outcome of the process, then, is that a national literature, which Deane argues was founded by a travel narrative set in a politically strange land, never really finds its way home.

Instead, Andras Unger would argue it reaches its zenith in the form of another travel narrative. Unger's book, Joyce's Ulysses as National Epic, is a study of how James Joyce employed a classic literary form-the epic-to solve the problem of national self- definition in Ireland. As an epic, Joyce's masterwork is both innovative and ironic. Usually reserved for great heroes in great eras whose travels span great lands, in Joyce's hands the epic is used to elevate the wanderings of an Irishman distinguished largely by his outsider status, over the course of a single day, and through a narrow slice of Dublin city. However, Unger believes that there is more to Joyce's use of the epic form than the comic mocking of Irish pretensions. The epic both presupposes and actively posits a communal frame of reference that gives the narrative its moral weight. Joyce's great insight in Ulysses, Unger claims, was to understand that epic's "traditional concern with the establishment of legitimacy" (2002, p. 2) is especially well- suited to addressing the problem of nationality.




Nations are made by the people in them, based on their retroactive claim that the nation already exists as a historical entity. Traditional nationalists approach this challenge by unearthing and popularizing historic cultural resources. Unger argues that Joyce rejected this mode of historiography because its teleological trappings lead to a "history-burdened actuality" (2002, p. 4). Instead, the epic form promises "an open-ended meditation on historical continuity" (2002, p. 4) and accommodates a "nonprogressive, countervailing movement" (2002, p. 94). By telling a story laced with significance for national self-determination in the form of an epic, Joyce is harnessing this "open-ended quality" to change the approach to national legitimacy. Instead of making national history the basis for the national claim, Joyce's epic "ensures that the significance of a historic moment will be recognized as finally sui generis" (2002, p. 4).

In other words in Joyce's epic treatment, Irish nationality performs the literary equivalent of pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. "Ulysses treats the making of history, the prospect of a distinctively contemporary Irish historical horizon, as a fait accompli" (2002, p. 3), Unger says. Without falling back on burdensome history, the narrative aspires to deliver a "master code to the communal experience" (2002, p. 10) in the travels, reflections, and encounters of its characters. Joyce was influenced by the writings of Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith, whose Resurrection of Hungary (1904) set out a program for achieving Irish self- determination. Joyce drew from this work, Unger says, the idea that defining the nation "constitutes a rare compositional opportunity" (2002, p. 23).

This problem of national history is not the only one that Joyce's epic seeks to resolve through its narrative form. By relating in detail the daily experiences of its leading characters, Ulysses juxtaposes the individual and personal with the national and communal. The tension is, again, more than just comic or ironic. It seeks to express the two-sidedness of the national project. Constituting the nation involves a collective act aimed at a collective goal. But this collective agency can only be realized through the lives of individuals. Unger quotes Frederick Meinecke who said "the nation drank the blood of free personalities" (2002, p. 27). In telling a story where the individuality of the characters furnishes the basis for the communal code, Ulysses too "registers such an achievement" (2002, p. 27).




According to Unger's reading of Ulysses, the simultaneous literary and political achievement of the work lies in the recognition that the epic is uniquely suited to cut through the Gordian knot of national authenticity. The Joycean epic integrates both individual and communal identity in its narrative structure and from this generates its own self-legitimation and self-definition. But this definition must remain open-ended and revisable, and must remain rooted in the present, rather than any particular past. To put it another way, Joyce's work aims at modeling national self-definition rather than completing it. As such Ulysses is, Unger says, "an extraordinary celebration of formative force" (2002, p. 16), while the larger nationalism it aims to address remains, as it should, "officially inarticulate" (2002, p. 102).

Often overlooked in the rush to celebrate Ireland's extraordinary literary fecundity, however, is the fact that Irish nationalism was realized at the price of dividing the island's population. In Literature, Partition and the Nation State Joe Cleary looks at the work of select Northern Irish, Israeli, and Palestinian writers to see how partition-so often a byproduct of nationalism-is "constructed and contested" in literature (2002, p. 2). The book is divided between a discussion of partition as a political phenomenon, and a critical analysis of literary works arising in the partition context.

Cleary's sympathies are evident throughout. He supports the Palestinian right to armed struggle and argues that the goals of Irish and Palestinian nationalists were "more emancipatory" than those of their "opponents" (2002, p. 38). These blanket statements are especially ironic since the most valuable insight to the book is the idea that the moral or practical divide between partitioned populations is never a necessary outcome. Instead, it is the product of a concerted effort to deepen divisions in a once conjoined community. For partition to take hold, Clearly explains, the "pre-partition intimacy" of these populations, must be undermined through "an even more violent and clamorous estrangement" (2002, p. 57).

This "clamorous estrangement" works its way into the literature of these communities, creating a mode of writing that can either confirm or confront the political distance that partition establishes. In leading literary works drawn from the three cases he considers Cleary detects a failure to fully confront the partition experience,




although in the case of Palestinian writers he finds this failure has its own poignant power. What ties the works that Cleary selects together, therefore, is their inarticulateness. These narratives founder when it comes to representing what Cleary would consider a genuine resolution of their story, as opposed to their mere termination. Instead, these stories offer up reformed rebels, domesticated dreamers, or irredeemable victims, figures that reinforce the partition solution even as they highlight its tragic dimension.

In the case of Northern Irish writing Cleary detects, in works such as Bernard Mac Laverty's Cal or Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, a readiness to use the "romance-across-the-divide" device to cultivate in readers a desire to reconcile the divided communities (2002, pp. 113, 109). But the consummation of this romance is in Cleary's view, a kind of cheat. It is achieved only when the characters turn away from the political realm in favor of an "anti-political privacy" (2002, p. 114). Instead of romantic fulfillment prefiguring or embodying a wider social transformation, the romance serves only to justify a retreat from political engagement. Clearly feels this narrative pattern "must be read as a sign of imaginative failure," where "endings remain stalled" and where the price of personal fulfillment is political resignation (2002, pp. 115, 140).

Israeli writers find themselves in a similar bind, Cleary believes. The romantic dream takes on a more broadly utopian flavor, however, in the hands of an author such as Amos Oz, whose works Elsewhere, Perhaps and A Perfect Peace, describe a longing that the narrative cannot fulfill. Indeed Cleary feels that Oz's work is aimed at discrediting utopian fancy (represented as flight from Israeli territory) in favor of domestic responsibilities. These are stories of disenchantment where "the adult capacity to assume the burden of one's destiny, seems always to require the abandonment of the desire for some transfigured social order" (2002, p. 179). As in Northern Ireland, the narrative teaches that life can only be pursued within the terms set by the existing order.

The final and most difficult literary position is reserved for Palestinian writers. Cleary suggests that in a novel such as Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun inarticulateness itself has become a self- conscious part of the narrative. Instead of romance, a pointless tragedy involving the mute deaths of migrant Palestinian workers confronts readers with its own emptiness and exhaustion. The




indeterminate status of the Palestinian community manifests in its literature, he suggests, as "an immanent problematic of representation and form" (2002, p. 198).

Each of these cases involves a situation that defies easy representation. In Northern Ireland, a severed population cannot express its unity, in Israel, a transplanted population cannot embrace its new symbolic landscape, and for Palestinian writers the narrative of a non-people from a non-place seems to have nowhere to go. Cleary's work, therefore, argues for the significance of form, but it also raises the question of whether literature can or should be handed a political agenda, and expected to solve intractable problems through sheer force of inspiration. Literature may have political significance, but it is not the same thing to say that it should serve political ends. This much broader question is never broached in Cleary's otherwise fascinating study.

Broadly speaking, these four authors-Kiberd, Deane, Unger, and Cleary-are addressing the same basic problem: How does a population that has been rendered inarticulate under existing forms of representation develop the ability to overcome this deficit? The problem is a common one for national minorities, but as Cleary's work reminds us, it is not limited to such groups. Where a new set of political and social relations are created by partition, it can leave populations struggling for ways to represent this complex reality. More importantly, the authors agree that the form of representation adopted can have serious consequences for the political and social options open to a population.

Kiberd and Deane both present the development of a national literature as a process that involves some kind of passage. And both suggest a tripartite structure to this passage. For Kiberd, the passage involves the movement from a debased image through a narcissistic one to a final, fragmented but authentic mode of representation. For Deane, the movement is between one state and another-between a local, premodern immediacy and a universal, modem abstraction. Yet the movement itself creates a third state- a translated, unsettled, "in-between" existence that is something more than is captured in either of the original two states.

This idea of representation as passage, as a movement through stages or between states, is key to understanding the significance of Unger's and Cleary's works. For what Unger has described in his work on Joyce is a representational breakthrough.




Joyce's genius was in creating a literary mode that was both ancient and modern, political and personal, collective and individual. Rather than fall into any one state or stage of the representational process, Joyce manages to create a mode of representation that itself moves between them.

Cleary tells a different story, however. There is nothing predetermined, it seems, about the resolution of representational problems. The process that goes so smoothly in the Irish case runs afoul of the partition solution in, among other places, Northern Ireland. Whereas Kiberd, Deane, and Unger are describing a representational success story in the form of Irish literature, Cleary is focused on cases where the process has become stalled. Unable to articulate an alternative reality, partitioned societies are hampered in their efforts to move beyond the hostility or estrangement bred by their situation. Instead, the dominant narrative form may serve to reinforce divisions and deter hopes for broader reconciliation.

What comes through in these works is the idea that representation-and national or collective representation in particular-is a process not a terminus. There is a perpetual restlessness to the representational effort. When it moves between states or stages, or when it gives rise to a style or mode that is itself a kind of journey or movement, then it has promise. When it stalls or becomes fixed around a set of conventional options, that is a sign of a population in trouble. Cleary's partition literatures all describe scenarios where the protagonists are trapped in some way-through guilt, obligation, or misplaced hope. Their movements are curbed and re-routed within the boundaries of the existing system.

The lesson here is twofold. At the most general level, these studies caution us against one-off solutions to representational problems. In representing collectivities, be they national groups or multinational populations, we are trying to represent bodies in motion, not at rest. To think of these groups as having some settled character may lead us toward a mode of representation that can trap a population in a narcissistic, phantasmal, or inarticulate state. At a more specific level, these books may also teach us something about nationalism.

The past decade has been a prolific time for political theorizing about nationalism. Led by works such as Yael Tamir's Liberal




Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), a philosophic renaissance rescued nationalism from its status as a kind of social pathology, one that could be analyzed and categorized, but one that did not present a moral puzzle. The work of Tamir and Kymlicka, among others, turned this around by taking nationalism as a normative question, and asking when cultural difference might be politically salient.

The literary theory discussed above shares a common goal with this recent multicultural turn in liberal theory. Both approaches are looking for appropriate modes or forms of representation-ones that combine personal authenticity with shared meaning, individual with collective self-determination. Yet in contrast to the works discussed above, liberal-nationalism or multiculturalism rarely captures the restless quality that proved essential to the development of literary representation.

When it comes to the moral claim of national or cultural minorities, theory has found itself caught in the same representational conundrum that haunted Irish literature. At first cultural minorities were supposed to remain mute within a liberal order, or might appear only as aberrations on the theme of universal citizenship. But they developed forms of address that won them a place on the political stage, and now have the full attention of liberal theory. In our eagerness to redress the original misrepresentation, however, we may lean too far in the other direction. In a well-intentioned effort to "translate" (Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, p. 14) national concerns into liberal language, liberalism has developed an idea of culture as something that can be identified and made amenable to the existing terms of liberal-democratic representation.

For the purposes of political representation, both Tamir and Kymlicka understand culture as an inheritance, a set of institutions that have been codified into a working system (Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, pp. 8, 74; Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 76; see also David Miller, On Nationality [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], pp. 27, 142; and Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], pp. 59, 56). Of course, neither author would want to see such a system reified or essentialized. They are deeply concerned for the autonomy of the individual, and culture or cultural institutions merit




accommodation only insofar as they facilitate the lives of those individuals. They stress that such attachments are voluntary and must remain open to revision, so that a culture can re-create itself over time. Nonetheless, accommodating national cultures is thought to require that we know what a particular culture involves to begin with. It is precisely this effort at definition that the literary theorists have been arguing against.

More recently theorist Margaret Moore, has recognized this difficulty and argued that because of its inherent changeability culture should not be the basis for accommodating national or minority groups. She suggests in The Ethics of Nationalism (2001) that we use political identity instead; however, the political and cultural aspects of collective identity are too closely intertwined for this delicate operation to work. In short, when it comes to representing national or cultural minorities, the problem for liberal theory is not one of intention, it is one of form: How do we politically represent a reality that is more characterized by movement than by stability?

Homi Bhabha answers this question in a 1994 essay, "DissemiNation," by saying we must learn to live with instability. He sees nationalism as a perpetual movement between performance (lived in the here and now) and pedagogy (based on a collective past). Liberal nationalism, because of its emphasis on public institutions and inherited practices, comes down on the pedagogical side. Literary nationalism, however, reminds us of the performative, the repeated shaking off of the past in pursuit of new forms. Both are expressions of nationalism and understanding the phenomenon fully will, as Bhabha argues, require us to keep both these actions in view.

The search for form evidenced in literary nationalism reminds us that the collectivities or communities we aim to represent are never static entities. They are always in flux, and only forms that express this dynamic can avoid distortion. It also reminds us that even though collectivities generate certain cultural narratives, we should be careful not to base political responses on them, for they are only one moment in an ongoing process. The political form will, like literature, need to develop more versatile modes of representation if it is to capture this movement. Although liberal nationalism reflects an awakening to the challenges of representation, in this regard, we still have a long way to go.



literature, nationalism and the challenge of representation

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