Fugue
André Dao on George Eliot
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‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.’ So says Antonio Gramsci, the renowned Italian Communist in his Prison Notebooks—3,000 pages of history and philosophy written across 30-odd notebooks smuggled in and out of the Fascist prisons in which Gramsci spent the last eleven years of his life.
What I think Gramsci was saying is that revolution begins with self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge is not—despite what bourgeois literature and neoliberal self-help manuals would suggest—introspective. It is not even, properly speaking, subjective. It is objective; we are not self-forming subjects but objects, formed by historical processes.
I am, then, the product of French imperialism, of Roman Catholicism, of 3,000 years of Sino-Vietnamese war and culture and interbreeding, of American imperialism, of Leninist-Marxism, of the Sino-Soviet split, of capitalism—proto-, Golden Age, late stage—of settler colonialism, of British imperialism, of patriarchy in its many cultural guises, of heteronormativity, of the rice-based agriculture of the Red River Delta, of successive advances in irrigation technology, of the Internet, of English literature, of identity politics, of 1990s Californian pop-punk, of 2000s trailer park chic, and so on and so on.
Of course, such a list is entirely useless. It is only an accumulation of abstractions, when the point is to find the concrete—as Gramsci says, to inventory the traces deposited in me by each and every one of these forces. The point, then, is to begin with the concrete trace—to catalogue these traces and only then to synthesise them into abstract processes.
So—to Gramsci. I first came across him as a forbidding name to which was attached even more forbidding concepts. It was only later on, when I began to write a book about my grandfather that the man behind the name came into focus. Gramsci was thirty-five when Mussolini’s fascists imprisoned him. I write these words now the day before my thirty-fifth birthday.
Here is a manoeuvre characteristic of my technique as a writer, such as it is—the drawing of a false equivalence, the making of banal, self-aggrandizing comparisons. For in tracing the parallel, I am wondering, aloud, as is the wont of the bad, sentimental reader—if they took me in next week, would I write my own Prison Notebooks? I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer.
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My only excuse for this hubris is that I have been doing this since I was very young. I have always been asking, as a sweet habit of the blood: would I have got on a boat, would I have been able to start again, where I know no one and nothing, not even the language? Most of all, I have been asking, would I have survived, as my grandfather did—if indeed, he had—ten years in Chí Hòa prison?
Such questions are ridiculous, I know. They seem to do the opposite of what I want, which is to get concrete, to understand the historical processes the formed me. They are idle, frivolous questions. And yet—it was by asking such questions that I was able to write Anam. By imagining that Gramsci, for instance, might be a mirror for my grandfather—eleven years in prison versus ten, a Communist imprisoned by Fascists versus a Catholic imprisoned by Communists, 3,000 pages of writing versus nothing, death in custody versus a dubious kind of survival—this imagining, banal, self-serving as it is, nevertheless allowed me to draw out something concrete about my grandfather, and about myself.
Though I thought about Gramsci as I wrote Anam I did not come across the quote about compiling an inventory until after I had finished, as a reference in the introduction to Edward Said’s Orientalism. Another exalted name from my undergraduate days, though I had in fact read this book—had gone as far as referencing it in my essays. But I had not noticed this quote, nor Said’s response to it, the most intimate note in the book:
‘Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies…In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.’
And so, retrospectively, I have begun to think of Anam as an inventory of the cultures and forces that have dominated and shaped my own life.
‘The essence of counterpoint,’ writes Edward Said, ‘is simultaneity of voices, preternatural control of resources, apparently endless inventiveness. In counterpoint a melody is always in the process of being repeated by one or another voice: the result is horizontal, rather than vertical, music.’
He is thinking of Glenn Gould, the genius pianist and interpreter of Bach. The apotheosis of counterpoint is the fugue; a phrase is introduced in one voice (the soprano, the oboe) and then it is repeated, and developed, by other voices.
Said makes counterpoint a central metaphor for his technique: ‘We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented [in] such works. In practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as I have called it means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England…contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.’
Reading Daniel Deronda contrapuntally, Said shows first that Eliot’s presentation of Zionism is in keeping with her long-standing interests in idealism and spiritual yearning. It is not only the Jews but well-born Englishmen and women who suffer from a ‘generalized condition of homelessness.’ Zion, for Eliot—according to Said—is ‘one in a series of wordly projects for the nineteenth century mind still committed to hopes for a secular religious community.’ If salvation and belonging can no longer be found in the Church, then some other organic community must take its place: a national homeland.
Counterpoint: there is, in Daniel Deronda, ‘the total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular.’ The novel ends with Deronda setting sail for the East, presumably to help advance the great cause. The ‘Question of Palestine’—the question of what will happen to the current inhabitants—is answered, obliquely, by Mordecai Cohen, Deronda’s spiritual guide: ‘[The Jews] have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors…There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East.' Zionism will be, for Eliot, the ‘method for transforming the East into the West’.①
F. R. Leavis, the great zealot of English literature, famously wanted to cleave Daniel Deronda in two. ‘There are two George Eliots,’ he writes, ‘and they both—neither, it seems, embarrassed by consciousness of the duality—play dominating roles in the massive book: they dominate it together as if they were one. But the essential spirits in which they dominate are so much not one that the creatively vital of them by its mere presence as what it unmistakably is exposes the creative impotence of the other.’ The good half of the novel he proposes to call Gwendolen Harleth—a ‘major classic’, indeed, a model, and a superior one at that, for Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady.
The half that is to be purged is thus Daniel Deronda himself, and the whole Zionist adventure. Though the problem, for Leavis, was not so much the Zionism itself, but that in writing about Deronda Eliot betrayed her own genius—‘her truly noble and compassionate benignity’—by her ‘profound need to feel benignly and compassionately disinterested, and sometimes this prevails as a kind of intoxication that licenses for self-indulgence the weak side of her femininity. The egoism and falsity of day-dream manifest themselves as sentimentality.’
What must be expunged, if Eliot is to be saved from herself, is her femininity, her sentimentality.
Some of the best parts of Daniel Deronda provide a theory of ennobling sentiment. Deronda is not romantic, ‘but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life… When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before—saw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope and fear.’
It is, then, a novel about the ‘urgency of inward vision’. But as Said writes, ‘Every idea or system of ideas exists somewhere, it is mixed in with historical circumstances, it is part of what one may very simply call “reality.”’
And yet Eliot knows this. She writes of the ‘contemptible details’ of Gwendolen Harleth's return home to family money troubles: ‘the dirty paint in the waiting-room, the dusty decanter of flat water, and the texts in large letters calling on her to repent and be converted’. Contemptible as they are, those details must be included, ‘for the turn of most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them. They are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not quite free from such determining influences; and to be dropped solitary at an ugly, irrelevant-looking spot, with a sense of no income on the mind, might well prompt a man to discouraging speculation on the origin of things and the reason of a world where a subtle thinker found himself so badly off.’
Even philosophy finds itself not unaffected by dreary country railway stations.
So too, Daniel Deronda’s ‘urgency of inward vision’ is not unaffected by his role as Gwendolen’s lay-confessor. ‘Without the aid of sacred ceremony or costume, her feelings had turned this man, only a few years older than herself, into a priest; a sort of trust less rare than the fidelity that guards it. Young reverence for one who is also young is the most coercive of all: there is the same level of temptation, and the higher motive is believed in as a fuller force—not suspected to be a mere residue from weary experience.’ Of course, this is a transformation that occurs in Gwendolen’s mind, not in the young man before her. But this is the point: that one’s image of another is transformative of both self and other: ‘But the coercion is often stronger on the one who takes the reverence. Those who trust us educate us.’
Can we say, then, that Eliot herself reads—and writes—contrapuntally? What is the intertwining of Gwendolen and Daniel’s voices if not the repetition and development of counterpoint? Is this not a novel about the outward movement of inward urgency?
‘A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and—kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.’—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
Another name for an inventory of traces: nostalgia, the longing for a home. Not just any home, but, as Eliot says, an early home, that time-place where a human life might be well rooted in some spot of native land, and not through sentimentality, not through effort and reflection, but a somehow natural working of early memories, by the sweet habit of the blood.
On a personal level, this resonates. Who doesn’t remember, with something more than fondness, the first scene of belonging? Who would argue for rootlessness?
I think of Jasmin, who flew from Palestine to Australia thirty-six weeks pregnant. When her daughter was born, in Sydney’s Royal Hospital for Women, the staff asked for Jasmin’s country of birth. ‘But they couldn’t find Palestine. We could find any country except my country. I found out they put that I’m from Iran, they just picked any country.’ ②
When we asked her what home meant to her, Jasmin said, ‘I can see tomato plants, cucumber, capsicum, eggplants. Small farm, little kids playing around, and some chickens. I miss these things. We used to have the chickens just living in the whole farm and laying eggs anywhere. It was like I won the lottery if I found eggs before my brothers.’
Early memories. Sweet habits of the blood. But something strange happens when Eliot’s nostalgia is transposed from the personal to the political: it gets twisted, becomes grotesque.
Eliot’s final novel follows two characters—the beautiful, egotistical Gwendolen Harleth, and the serious and moral young man, Daniel Deronda. The arc of the novel traces the beneficial influence on Harleth of Deronda’s moralism (‘her feeling had turned this man into a priest’)—through him, she is able to overcome her cynical instrumentalism of others to develop a sensibility of wider communal obligations.
But as F. R. Leavis points out, Deronda’s solution to the problem of egoism is ‘the religion of heredity or race’. That is, Deronda’s sense of higher duties is linked to his discovery of his ancestry—he is a Jew.
‘It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry—his judgment no longer wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that partiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical—exchanging that bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance.’
Later readers, including Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah, will try to reclaim Deronda as a paragon of universal, humanistic concern—a good cosmopolitan. ③ (The bad cosmopolitan being the one who wanders through the ‘mazes of impartial sympathy’, the one who takes the perspective of ‘bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference’. It is a rootless, risible cosmopolitanism, and an attitude Eliot identifies at the heart of British imperialism: ‘Meanwhile enters the expectant peer, Mr. Bult, an esteemed party man who, rather neutral in private life, had strong opinions concerning the districts of the Niger, was much at home also in Brazil, spoke with decision of affairs in the South Seas, was studious of his Parliamentary and itinerant speeches, and had the general solidity and suffusive pinkness of a healthy Briton on the central table-land of life.’)
But what is the source of Deronda’s ‘generous reasonableness’, his good cosmopolitanism? It is in ‘drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance’. It is, in other words, in turning to ethno-nationalism. One overcomes individualism by absorbing the ego in the nation—a nation that is understood, in the Romantic German tradition, as having a soulful, organic essence. The empty pursuit of individual gratification gives way to the honour of higher duties. For Deronda, the higher duty, the honourable inheritance, is Zionism.
As I write this, the Israeli Defence Force is conducting ‘Operation Home and Garden’, its largest attack on the occupied West Bank in two decades. I look online at photos from Jenin, Jasmin’s home city, the site of the raid. In one family home, ‘three small boys knelt on the tile floor, picking up hundreds of spent bullet casings left by Israeli snipers who had used their kitchen as a firing position.’ ④
‘Quite apart from its considerable beauty, a fully developed contrapuntal style like Bach’s has a particular prestige within the musical universe. For one its sheer complexity and frequent gravity suggest a formidable refinement and finality of statement…One cannot say more in music [than] in a strict fugue…To master counterpoint is therefore in a way almost to play God…Counterpoint is the total ordering of sound, the complete management of time, the minute subdivision of musical space, and absolute absorption for the intellect.’
Like many Asian kids, I grew up playing classical piano. That education had three distinct phases: at first, I chafed at the imposition—the injunction to always be practicing, the need to listen to and play music that seemingly had no connection to my everyday life and that of my peers; then, came appreciation and the desperate yearning for virtuosity, not only as a matter of playing but also, perhaps especially, as a matter of listening and of taste—during this phase, I would have given anything to have the ‘formidable refinement’ of Said’s ear, refined enough at least to recognise the ‘formidable refinement’ of Bach; finally, when such virtuosity seemed out of reach, I tried to move on, first to jazz piano, where my tin ear was even less capable of hearing the music for what it was, and then on to noise and other experimental genres where I could, for a time, hide my ear.
Today I am still yearning for that ‘formidable refinement’. In Anam, I write about my family in such a way that no one can accuse me of not having done my reading. I write in such a way as to deflect accusations of sentimentality.
‘No one today,’ writes Said, ‘is purely one thing.’ Imperialism has seen to that. And yet, he says, imperialism’s ‘worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental.’
Contrapuntal reading resists this poisoned fruit. It does not deny, writes Said, ‘the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies’. But nor does it insist on their separation and distinctness. ‘Survival in fact is about the connection between things’.
In the end, ‘reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.”’ ⑤ Instead, ‘it is more rewarding—and more difficult—to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about "us."’
Edward Said: but you know for some of the people in the orchestra, I was very aware of it, amongst obviously the Arab musicians, who come from a culture where Western music… I don’t know about the Israelis, I assume for them Western music is their music—but I know for the Arab musicians, most of them are trained as Western musicians not as an alternative but as a different form than the one they grew up with. As for me, I mean the first things I heard were obviously the oud and songs of ong ka soun, which I loved, as it turns out, but that’s neither here nor there—it was familiar to me. And one of the things I was very interested in in this workshop was the extent to which they didn’t forget that they came from a different culture, I mean they focused with great discipline on Beethoven and Mozart and so on but at the same time, around them, is their own music, which they—I think that’s also a kind of paradox, or at least I’d say it’s a tension, an unresolved tension.
Daniel Barenboim: there’s no attempt to exclude—
Edward Said: no, there’s no attempt to exclude, but in fact when they’re doing one thing or the other, they’re not doing both, they have to do one or the other. And you know I wondered, because I don’t know enough about this generation, where they come from in Syria and so on, to what extent it represents a diminishment of their identity to be playing music that’s different from theirs. ⑥
‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.’ So begins Said’s Orientalism, with a quote from Marx.
Orientalism, writes Said, is premised on exteriority: the Orientalist ‘makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation.’
I represent the Orient (I write about it, I make it speak) therefore I am not Oriental.
‘They have to do one or the other.’ ‘A diminishment of their identity.’ ‘Their own music’. What is this if not a kind of denial of hybridity? A regression to thinking we are ‘only, mainly, exclusively’ one thing? The validation of a theory of organic wholeness of identity, of ethnic inheritance as an ‘added soul’?
But what is the alternative? An empty, rootless cosmopolitanism, in which all difference is dissolved—and never neutrally, it is a dissolution always in favour of certain material interests (whiteness as neutrality, as objectivity, and so on and so on). One must think concretely about the other; that means, in the end, remaining distinct.
An unresolved tension, then.
A full inventory of traces is, of course, impossible.
Said: ‘The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.’
It is a condition of my being able to represent—in all the senses of that word ⑦—Vietnameseness that I am exterior to that Vietnameseness. So I am, after all, a rootless cosmopolitan—and never more so than when I represent my roots; more than that, I am complicit in my uprooting.
Eliot, on Gwendolen Harleth: ‘It was something vague and yet mastering, which impelled her to this action about the necklace. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.’
Point: to fill in the unmapped country of one’s interiority—that is the starting point of critical elaboration.
Counterpoint: what is a map but another representation? What is an inventory of traces but the insistence—the illusion—that I can stand outside myself?
And yet—what else can be done? ‘Representation has not withered away.’ ⑧
If I could speak for myself, I would; since I cannot, the representation does the job.
I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representations through the real objects…
—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer.
—James Joyce, Ulysses.
One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away.—Edward Said, Orientalism.
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Endnotes
✷ 1. Edward Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’ (1979) Social Text Winter, No. 1, 7-58.
✷ 2. Khan, Hafsar, Aziyah, Jasmin & Abbas, ‘Still Lives’, Meanjin (Winter 2021).
✷ 3. Aleksandar Stevic, ‘Convenient Cosmopolitanism: Daniel Deronda, Nationalism and the Critics’ (2017) Victorian Literature and Culture 45. 593-614.
✷ 4. Bethan McKernan and Sufian Taha, ‘“It’s just like the intifada”: Palestinians reel from Israel’s raid on Jenin’, The Guardian 6 July 2023.
✷ 5. Said quotes here from the other Eliot, T.S, ‘Burnt Norton’ (No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’):
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust in a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
(How else can we understand Operation Home and Garden but as part of the systematic effort by the Israeli government to eliminate the other echoes in the garden – indeed, to deny that other voices sounded in that land at all, that it was, before their homecoming, empty, silent desert?)
✷ 6. ‘Conversation between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, part 1’, EuroArtsChannel, YouTube.
✷ 7.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988), 271-313, 70: ‘representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’. So in re-presenting the lives of my family in Anam, I am claiming to be—or, more accurately, I am interpellated as—representing them, politically. It follows that Anam is only possible if I believe that my family, like Marx’s peasants, like Said’s Orientals, ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’.
✷ 8. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.
André Dao is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
The first section of this essay was written and performed for the NSW State Library’s ‘Fresh Takes’ event in June 2023. Some of the thinking in this essay was first developed in response to a keynote lecture given by James Parker titled ‘Law’s Counterpoint’ at the Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory on 24 November 2022.