Perry Anderson

d'you think this is a colossal extract from a longer soon-to-be-pubished book? the "reactionary thinkers" essays in the LRB ended up as a book

(tho they were more easily freestanding: i wonder if some of the sketchier sections will actually exist at some point at deeper length)

This is a good and intriguing thought.

re earlier book, do you mean:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/574-a-zone-of-engagement

?

I don't agree with Anderson at all btw (and from a google of it I saw that Auden was ambivalent about the ending, but it stuck so..), just noting the bizarre contortion at that moment.

Xps

I think I should get a load of the older PA books. I know some of the material but tons I have still not read. Like that book and also:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/228-spectrum
https://www.versobooks.com/books/575-english-questions

PA is pretty good on Global South lit so I reckon he's read Dream of Red Chamber. There is an essay of his in the LRB discussing historical fic that pulls in a wide range of novels (Cities of Salt, Buru Quartet)

spectrum begins with a long chapter on reactionary thinkers -- hayek and oakeshott and etc -- which began life as essays in the LRB (i guess they wd have felt odd in the NLR)

His essays on India (which unusually I am not sure I read!!) became a book.

And so did US FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS after ALREADY occupying an ENTIRE issue of NEW LEFT REVIEW a few months previously.

we shd post him a print-out of this thread so he can rewrite where necessary (e.g. concerning uncle adolphe and also omitting any discussion of john bayley's opinions on anything)

I read all his essays on EU states (incl his essay on Cyprus!) back in the day, and I think that became a book too.

Yes that became a big book.

I didn't read the Cyprus material because it was so vast and I couldn't find any personal interest in Cyprus. There are these rare cases where I can't get excited about PA's work.

The Germany essay in the book appeared in the NLR under the heading 'Land of Ideas?'.

I'd second the recommendations for The New Old World (that big book w/ the EU essays and Cyprus) and Spectrum. I didn't have much personal interest in Cyprus before but found it a v gripping and fascinating read. Perhaps because I knew least about Cyprus and Turkey, those two chapters were the best parts of the book, though his essays on France and Italy are among his best (imo).

I interned at Verso five years ago and asked about what his next colossal one would be - I was told it was likely going to be a collection of the essays on Russia, Brazil, China and a longer theoretical intro/conclusion synthesizing views on the BRICs, although who knows, I could easily see him having switched gears and put out an 600 page book on the 20th century novel.

I haven't gotten to the second part of the essay yet (picked up the print copy of the LRB yesterday) so will withhold judgment on it as a whole for now. Had been a pretty big PA stan before (while not always agreeing with particular points) so am always pleased to find others (and to notice this thread!).

Federico, that is most interesting. Are you a long-time ILB poster? We have a FAP tomorrow.

xp Anderson has written at length about those three countries in the LRB, IIRC

"at length" sort of goes without saying with PAnderson of course

i was disappointed by Spectrum, felt i was lacking background on some of the thinkers (esp on the right) that was assumed

Been on a long holiday, read through the last nine of A Dance to the Music of Time for the first time.
I liked it well enough, but Anderson seems to overestimate it/Powell massively in the two articles. Keeps taking midweight literary basics as some kind of mastery - allusion is catnip to him.
Still on holiday, but will try to get round to saying more about Powell and/or this chunk of Anderson when I get back.

Hey pinefox, I'm a (fairly?) long-time lurker and (very) occasional poster. I'm trying to get in the habit of posting more regularly, though my schedule's been a bit crazy the last while. Unfortunately, I'm not in London, otherwise I'd happily join.

I read elsewhere (on another thread?) that the overestimation is part of PA's "bid" to elevate Powell to a more respectable, if not canonical, status, and using (abusing?) Proust in the process. It seems somewhat plausible, whether it's something he deliberately set out to do or not. Still haven't read pt 2 yet, but look forward to getting to it tmw or this weekend.

That seems about right - the Tariq Ali article on Powell makes it clear that PA has been reading and rereading and laughing aloud at Dance for an age, so I suspect the article is the eruption of a forty year internal monologue where he’s arguing with himself that this is better than Proust. Writes it as a late-life treat.

(I think mark s suggests something like canonising AP for a bet in one of the other threads which I also like)

He’s an unpersuasive critic though imo.

I don't remember Ali on Powell - I don't like Ali but I like it when he drops in anecdotes about PA.

Yesterday I read a Fredric Jameson book which referred to something like 'PA's definitive study of the historical novel', which meant a 2 or 3 page LRB article.

Here, p.259:

https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fredric-Jameson-The-Antinomies-of-Realism-2015.pdf

- actually it was 'landmark survey', not quite the same thing.

Pinefox:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/26/fiction4
PA turns up halfway through.

i don't really have a problem with taking proust down a peg or three -- and i certainly don't have a problem with firing what woof calls "midweight literary basics" into the revered sludge of its rep to do this: if they are a thing powell does well which by comparison does badly or not at all, this is a useful dimension to explore

i feel -- long as it is -- that he really only half-explores the thing he's uncovered though: on the lethem thread PF and i had a mild disagreement abt the rightness of the usage of e.g. description-at--first-meet which too much "raises the stakes" (by manipulating seemingly small realist items overtly to foreshadow larger future events). Unlike MP, AP -- with PA's stated approval -- is not among these stylists: PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction", and PA devotes a half column (pt 1, 19.7.18, p.,17, col.1) to the comparison. OK: MP comes off badly in this comparison by this measure: his descriptions seem to aim to lodge the characters as exemplars of his (tiresome?) overarching apothegms: no one gets anyone else, pain is all -- except for art, which is all-er (PA's caricature via my memory: it's mostly on p.14 same issue but i can't be arsed to redigest it for this point). But late in part 2 (2.8.18, p.32. col.3), AP writes thus

"Powell’s imagination was deeply historical, as Proust’s was not. He was also much more deeply conservative. That could easily have led to a threnody of time past, not individual as in A la recherche, but political and cultural. What checked any such move was the other side of his conservatism, conviction of the constancy of human nature, which he shared with Proust. In the tension spanning those two sides lay the difference between them, which cascades down the last page of A Dance."

This is some of what I mean (on the lethem thread) by the politics of this "raising the stakes" -- powell's refusal tightly imbricated into his beliefs in unchanging human nature across changing history (vs proust who thinks history is -- acc.AP -- just stuck). the figure of "dance" that overlays the entire 12-volume massif actually does the work that any given stakes-raising encounter-description might, in lethem or pynchon or proust or whoever: it points a bony finger to the structural prison of the belief system, which in powell the narrator and characters can have no inkling of… other authors (viz these three) would disagree, tho the character-inkling might be religious, or moulded dream- or fantasy-work, or the underpinning of their political engagement in the story or etc). foreshadowing and prophecy come in many forms in ordinary (=as per realism's nostra) life also. anyway this is an element i'd like much more on, tho i think you have to bring in other authors and styles of authoring to do it justice maybe

lastly, while the bet is a likeable version of PA's project, what i fear he's actually done is decided something along the following line:
1: powell is my fave and i wub him
2: all artistic material that i like must be important and world historical not like those yukky post modernists seem to think
2a: pop is by definition bad and its fans -- the "people" apparently -- shd feel bad)
3: er anyway in what way is AP important and world historical, compared for example to proust who everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees is important and world historical
4: so if i compare them and prove AP > MP qed, then i win and my taste R0X0R snubs to you

(^^^new breakthroughs in the rendering of interior monologue here IMO)

lol what i'm writing myself towards is 80,00 words by me on why pynchon is better not worse than powell OR proust: "a gallumph to the kazoo of space" if you will

jeezus fvck i have actual serious work to do today

hah great post, thanks mark!

I think I agree about the 4-5 stage process of PA's submerged thought / motives here.

Clarification: 'PF catalogues him with the "dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction"' -- only in that I was grouping PA's version of AP, as far as I remembered it, with this, after you had reminded me of it (so it was your classification in fact, which I was just citing!). I have never read a word of AP outside what PA quotes, so don't truly know whether he is dogged, quiet and realistic or not.

Also: the specific criticism I made of Lethem in that post applied to one of Lethem's later novels, but does not at all apply across his whole career - which has transformed quite a bit. So the problem, as I see it, is possibly characteristic of late Lethem, but not early Lethem, at all. Whereas to my eyes (and Lethem's, in fact, as per review of BLEEDING EDGE) early Pynchon and late Pynchon do not look very qualitatively different from each other.

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

There is a consistent supernatural element to Dance that breaks the confines of dogged realism - haunted houses, spiritualism, a character based on Crowley. See also Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion sequence, which again dabbles in the uncanny while presenting a largely realistic portrait of English society.

yes sorry i'm doing a lot of cutting to the chase on my side of the argument (always easier when you've read nearly none of the authors under discussion): i think all i'm doing actually is trying to throw a wrinkle of complexity and reservation into this specific judgment of yours (re lethem's first description of miriam):

It seems to me that in reality, we don't draw this kind of symbolic conclusion from an item of clothing someone wears. And the fact that we wouldn't do it in life makes it risky for the novelist to do it - it's his imposition on the action - without getting anything valuable in return.

So it may well be risky for this novelist at this moment in this book: in the sense of "getting nothing valuable in return" and in the sense of annoying well disposed reader mr p fox late of this fandom. (And no one on that thread has stepped in to defend the description at issue…) But there are other kinds of novels where there is a useful return -- my claim is that this return functions at the level of overarching belief systems, mostly, either the author's or those of the world being sketched (or both), rather than locally and empirically. There will sometimes be good reason to raise the stakes, even if there isn't here -- it's not just a matter or good or bad taste.

the (to me) rather laboured section at the start of pt 2 is PA talking through the relative popularity of the two authors less in units sold than in reception theory terms i guess (books about and industry surrounding; translations of etc). his argument that proust is proto-pop bcz proto-pomo is both snide and flimsy

everyone (not the "people", the other better everyone) agrees genuinely is the move that underpins it, and any extended discussion threatens to bog down in a quasi-political argument abt who "the people" actually ever are

re previous post about JL:

I don't think I can judge these claims, for my part, without seeing another example, ie: of an instance where you think an author does this successfully.

Again for me a relatively extreme example of the aesthetic would be Rushdie, which for me would ring alarm bells about it as a tendency.

I think that 'belief systems' are sometimes relevant but also that authors (like JL in that case) can fall into an 'aesthetic' that doesn't really have much belief attached to it - maybe an 'attitude' or 'stance' in the external, posing sense, more than a belief.

PA seems to be suspicious about Proust being popularized because popularizable. (PoMo, I think, would just be a spin-off of that -- he doesn't actually think Proust is aesthetically PoMo himself, surely.)

I quite like the way that, as this discussion reminds me, PA's discussion is so entertainingly rangy and manifold in theme and approach.

nice tart letter* also in the current lrb on anderson being wrong abt balzac: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n16/letters

(one of the things going on here, i suspect, is that PA has read and reread powell quite a lot bcz he enjoys doing so -- but has read the various other Vast Oeuvres** bcz as a High-Level Savant he felt he Ought To Have: it's not that he has nothing valuable to say as a consequence, he is a learned and an intelligent reader, but that there's just a trace of duty-based ressentiment to the critique?)

*(from a prof specialising in balzac*** and proust)
**(some of them, half-finished red chamber klaxon is that you i feel beating soundless but imperative on my mind's ear?)
***(i have actually read some balzac! old goriot aka pere goriot)

Christopher Prendergast is also the editor of the newer translation of Proust (and the one I read).

btw i am reading all these posts as if everyone itt rhymes proust with frowst, the only correct way to say it

Was Powell a popular author in his day, amongst "the people"? The alleged soapiness of A Dance had lead me to think so, while Proust is pretty much shorthand for stuff only effete intellectuals read.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 23 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I see there was an adaptation of Dance.. for TV in 1997 (four parts). Anyone here watch it?

yes, I've seen it. Simon Russell Beale is excellent as Widmerpool from youth to bloviating Lord and there are lots of other familiar faces, but it doesn't get anywhere near capturing the scope of the novels, and it's all a bit Downton Abbey

Also two different radio adaptations (neither of which I've heard)

yes i watched some of the TV version, i wasn't very taken by it: four parts is the opposite of soap, it totally needs to be tackled reina del sur-style IMO: can i really be the only person watching LA REINA DEL SUR?

as does recherche, with a very boyish kate del castillo as albertine

every time i think of engaging with powell i can feel an #istandwithwidmerpool position rising, a bubble of challops frozen into the glaciated mammoth like a dormant pliocene megavirus

albertine:
https://68.media.tumblr.com/a92ef861f1c2056ae6a16aa7e8adc7ec/tumblr_inline_mlxzsjMhxw1qz4rgp.gif

Anderson must be commissioned to do LA REINA DEL SUR next.

as you say he is good on the global south, what can possibly go wrong

The judge in Dublin who ran the trial in which Samuel Beckett was a witness in the 1930s called Proust 'Mr Prowst'. This is supposed to be one of the things that made SB despair of Ireland and never want to return.

What was the trial about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Was_Going_Down_Sackville_Street#Libel_lawsuit

Mentioned this on the pub last night and was just scrolling thru now - two left-wingers and their love for a reactionary (in this case Naipaul):

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-painful-sum-of-things/

Thanks for sharing, I'd like to give that a read as well this weekend.

I've been thinking more of the "painful admiration" one of them cites and the ambivalence of that relation between a left-wing/progressive reader/critic and a reactionary author (Tariq Ali also wrote an obit of Naipaul - it appears they were friendly?).

It struck me as curious that - with some notable exceptions - this appears to be much more common in English literature than in other countries/regions/traditions? There's Naipaul and Powell, but also the love of Waugh, Larkin, Amis, Kipling, etc. I had assumed it was perhaps in large part due to "high Tory" culture and its reproduction in the cultural institutions/universities in the UK?

I finished the Anderson essay last night and was disappointed he hadn't gone a bit further in exploring this peculiarity of English culture but this afternoon happened to remember he dedicated a typically lengthy essay on more or less this question 50 years ago (!).

It's paywalled on their site, but I believe can be found elsewhere online (or in his book English Questions) https://newleftreview.org/I/50/perry-anderson-components-of-the-national-culture

As someone who doesn't know much about WWI I am really enjoying the piece.

The section on Imperialism is terrific.

The Sleepwalkers is a great book but I'm troubled by the information in the opening paragraph of this piece that Clark claims to be descended from Irish famine refugees and that also he accepted a fucking knighthood!

still, all history profs are melts but tbf on him Iron Kingdom is a good book as well.

yeah that struck me as a bit strange too, I guess Clark has been thoroughly assimilated into the ruling classes now!

Perry does go on to talk about Clark's latest book, Revolutionary Spring, tbf.

plumpes Denken!!!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/christopher-clark/the-murmur-of-engines

lol, good one

would anybody be able to send or post the the text from the PA article about clark in the NLR? i've read the clark piece and now want to work backward

I'll DM you with it, I have institutional access to the NLR

thanks!

before i embark on "regime change in the west" need someone who's read both to tell me if perry (b.11 sept 1938) is just making the same point simon jenkins (b.10 june 1943) was making in the guardian

Just read both and they aren't making the same points though there is an interesting correspondence between Mao and Trump (much more pronounced in the Jenkins comment piece) across both.

Did lol @ this from Jenkins: "You cannot stage much of a revolution in two years."

Feel -- especially after chipping away on ILE just now -- that this piece is actually taking populism seriously as a thing that emerges from the cracks of liberal democracy.

i wd very loosely argue that perry's political response to "what if the so-called smart boys lost control to the surging crowds lol" has always been "time for the even smarter boys (perry anderson) to take charge"

(followed by the [???] line for how this is to happen)

but i still haven't read more than the first page of this (it seems fine so far)

Things will pass.

Smashing it out of the park again! pic.twitter.com/ra4UpINRnv

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) April 4, 2025

finally completed (and reread) perry's lrb piece on "populism" as a response to neoliberal hegemony

as always he manages the "view from 30,000 feet" moves p well -- including a usefully lucid couple paragraphs summarising what *he* means by neoliberalism -- and as always he skimps any exploration of how to fashion the fightback: as in "well, populism is the fightback but it's purely a negative reaction and theoretically inchoate" -- and he sneers that no theory has been developing to underpin such a fight (as if the NLR hasn't been in constant publication since the 1960s: what were your lads up to then, perry?)

also there's lots of little summaries which are just bad pundit-speak shortcuts: viz "the unprecedented success of the Societ Union in avoiding the slump altogether" -- where "the slump" is the Great Depression (1929-39), in the middle of which timeslot the USSR endured terrible famines -- causes and scope highly contested to this day of course but all the more reason not just to handwave through the notion that the soviet union somehow dodged this systemic bullet…

or when he notes that "[t]he Communist International was closed down as early as 1943" -- needs horrible goose chasing him across the page honking "who closed it perry? who closed it?"

a smaller sin that probably irritated me more (lol) is when he precedes the claim that "[m]athematicisation had long anaesthetised much of the discipline of economics" with the following: "judging by neoclassical canons what they essentially amounted to was a mathematical squaring, or cubing, of the underlying dynamic" -- i mean come on dude, i get that maths is not yr wheelhouse but this is garbage

china mieville (for it is he) has since had a go at him on the letters page concerning immigration: when perry says the right have a rhetorical advantage on this issue, which the left have to date failed to find a convincing answer to, mieville says this is merely uncritically to accept and to amplify the right's framing -- which again speaks to anderson's usual hifalutin disinterest in the politics of any fightback. mieville doesn't put it this way, tho -- and nor does he outline what such a politics might be

(i can kind of guess as i know which activist tradition mieville comes from, but it's not there in the letter in any immediate practical sense)

oh noes, the underlying dynamic has been cubed! He gets away with this stuff, I suspect, because no one is willing to edit him properly?

I though the Mieville response was a good one, that letter may well have been "edited for length" though, ironic given the latitude Perry is allowed!

xp great post mark s

Has Perry ever come up with explorations of fightback? This crowd do lol analysis/buy my latest book, which is probably better than anything you read in The Economist. But still they leave you (the reader) to figure it out.

At the end of his review of Clark's book on 1848 he says we'll be getting some kind of chaos iirc. Not exactly helpful.