Affective Disorders

Front matter

POSTCOLONIALISM ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

EMOTION IN COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

BEDE SCOTT

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Anger: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley 31 2 Reticence: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy 55 3 Jealousy: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro 79

4 Boredom: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story 105

5 Fear: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 127 6 Stuplimity: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games 147 Works Cited 169 Index 183 vii

II

Affective Disorders is situated at the juncture of three different critical perspectives. In addition to its obviously postcolonial qualities, it also engages with the areas of affect studies and narratology. Over the last few decades, there has been a tendency in postcolonial literary studies to focus on the purely traumatic consequences of colonialism — to the exclusion of all the other feelings that achieve a certain prominence, for one reason or another, in colonial and postcolonial societies.” In an essay published in 2012, the South African critic Gerald Gaylard discusses this omission in some detail, asking ‘why it is that [postcolonial] literature is still associated with social issues and politics rather than feeling. After all, he writes, ‘it is hardly the case that [such] literature is lacking emotion’; and yet for some reason, ‘[w|hen emotion in postcolonial literature has been explored, this has usually been in the guise of trauma studies’ (99). In Affective Disorders, then, I have decided to focus on a wider range of feelings than is typical for a work of postcolonial criticism — discussing states such as anger, jealousy, and boredom — while also engaging more substantially with the field

17 See, for example, Craps, Ifowodo, and Ward. This entirely legitimate emphasis on the traumatic consequences of the colonial project has also led to anumber of studies that focus on the psychic/affective states of mourning and melancholia (see Gilroy, Durrant, and Khanna). More recently, however, some postcolonial critics have begun to explore feelings that are not necessarily ‘traumatic’ in origin (see Kim, Majumdar, and Bewes). In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, for instance, Saikat Majumdar argues that ‘[bJanality and its often-attendant emotion boredom need to be understood as key motifs for colonial and postcolonial literary criticism as they help to aestheticize the relation between the imperial metropolis and the colonial periphery’ (4). According to Majumdar, the ‘material, economic, and infrastructural inadequacies felt across the margins of the historical expanse of the British Empire’ move their ‘victims not only toward the intense theatre of trauma but also toward the pervasiveness of banality and the iterative cycle of boredom’ (23).

of affect studies (as a broadly construed, interdisciplinary enterprise). The third major critical perspective I employ here is that of narratology. Once again, there has been a tendency in postcolonial studies to neglect or deprioritize the formal and stylistic qualities of a narrative in favour of thematic readings or ideological critique. As the editors of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry put it, ‘literature and the aesthetic at large have suffered a regrettable abeyance as prime sites for generating theoretical perspectives on the conditions of the postcolonial’ (Quayson et al. 6). In this case, however, I will be emphasizing the formal and structural consequences of the aforementioned emotional disturbances — exploring the way in which feelings such as anger or boredom can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By bringing all three critical perspectives together in this manner, I hope to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces (colonial modernity, bureaucracy, communal violence, etc.) and the affective and aesthetic ‘disorders’ to which they give rise.

As the reader may have noticed, | have chosen to focus on an historically and geographically diverse range of narratives, some of which originate in quite different corners of the colonial and postcolonial world. Proceeding chronologically, we begin with Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro (1899), which is set in Rio during the reign of Dom Pedro II (1831-89). Although Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1825, many colonial practices, such as slavery and patronage, continued well into the postcolonial period — creating, as we shall discover, a peculiar dissonance within nineteenth-century Brazilian society. Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1947) is set in Cairo during the Second World War, a time when the city was occupied by over 140,000 Allied soldiers. Under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, Egypt was obliged to accommodate an unlimited number of these foreign forces for the duration of the war, although the country itself would remain officially neutral until the spring of 1945. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) surveys the early years of Indian independence, focusing in particular on a period spanning from 1950 to 1952, when the fundamental features of the postcolonial nation-state, as envisaged by Jawaharlal Nehru, were being established.'® In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s

18 The so-called Nehruvian Consensus involved the general acceptance of four basic principles: socialism, secularism, democracy, and a foreign policy of non-alignment with any major power bloc. For more on this ‘consensus’ (and its eventual collapse), see Vanaik 301-3.

English, August: An Indian Story (1988), we return to India several decades later to find that the optimism of the 1950s has long since dissipated and the Nehruvian nation-state, which held so much promise in those early, formative years, has become notorious for its bureaucratic inefficiency, petty corruption, and ‘rule-bound incompetence’ (Nandy, ‘Culture’ 68). The action in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) takes place during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), a brutal conflict that claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Although the war itself lasted for twenty-six years, the novel focuses on a particularly violent period in the late eighties and early nineties that came to be known as the beeshana kalaya — or the ‘time of great fear.’ And finally, in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), we make our way to Mumbai at the turn of the twenty-first century, where we discover a city that has been deeply traumatized by the communal violence and terrorism that occurred in 1992-93 (following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya), and whose inhabitants continue to suffer the malign influence of majoritarian politics, corruption, and organized crime.

Although a chronological overview is always beneficial, I have decided, for the purposes of analysis, to trace the various stages of the colonial/postcolonial life cycle as it unfolded in these different locales. We therefore begin our journey in colonial Cairo during the Second World War (Midag Alley), before exploring India’s transition from colony to postcolony during the late forties and early fifties (A Suitable Boy). In the following chapters, we advance even further into the postcolonial period, albeit in different places and at different times. After visiting nineteenth-century Rio (Dom Casmurro), which for many years served as the capital of a postcolonial monarchy, we return once more to India, roughly four decades after independence (English, August). We then travel to Sri Lanka during the ‘time of great fear’ (Anil’s Ghost), before bringing our journey to an end in a Mumbai that is recognizably contemporary (Sacred Games). By structuring Affective Disorders in this way, | am not suggesting that every colonial or postcolonial experience is perfectly analogous. Quite the opposite. In the case of Dom Casmurro, for instance, I will be focusing on the colonial legacy of slavery and the fact that Brazil would remain a slave-owning economy until 1888 (by which time it would be the only such economy in the Western world). When I come to discuss English, August, on the other hand, I will be addressing the bureaucratic legacy of the British Empire, which survives to this day in the form of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Although both of these practices could be considered a colonial ‘inheritance,’ they are, of course, more notable for their differences than for their similarities. But this is precisely what makes it so interesting to consider one alongside the other — and to explore the different emotions that these quite distinct historical experiences generate. In Brazil, as I shall argue, we have a destructive and pathological jealousy that emerges out of the conflict between the social reality of slavery and the liberal ideologies to which the élite ostensibly subscribe. Turning to English, August, however, we find an altogether different type of feeling — an overwhelming sense of boredom that is a direct consequence of the bureaucratic procedures of the IAS. This is the kind of ‘minor’ emotion that is characterized, in Sianne Ngai’s words, by its ‘flatness or ongoingness,’ by its ‘remarkable capacity for duration’ (Ugly 7); and given the nature of Indian bureaucracy, it is entirely appropriate that this should be the case.

The similarities between such disparate narratives can also be instructive. Despite their obvious differences — despite the intensity of the jealousy we encounter in Dom Casmurro, for example, and the languid, apathetic quality of the boredom we find in English, August — there are a number of fundamental correspondences that all six narratives share. To put it briefly, these similarities can be summarized as follows:

1. All six narratives trace the process by which certain social, political, or economic forces penetrate the private sphere, where they induce corresponding (although frequently displaced or sublimated) affective states.

2. All six narratives demonstrate the way in which such affective states assume an intersubjective quality, becoming depersonalized ‘structures of feeling’ (although this collective quality may not always be recognized by the characters themselves, who in some instances continue to regard their feelings as ‘private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating’ [Williams, Marxism 132]).

3. All six narratives reveal the narratological consequences of these affective disturbances, as in each case the dominant emotion (whether it be anger, jealousy, or boredom) infiltrates the structure of the narrative itself, which thereby comes to serve as a discursive correlative for the social, political, or economic forces mentioned above, and for the various affective disorders to which they give rise.

In addition to these general correspondences, it may also be useful to provide a more detailed summary of what can be found in the following pages — beginning with Chapter 1, which seeks to explain the ubiquity of anger in Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley. 1 argue here that this dominant emotion could be read as a collective response to the contradictory social forces, the radical disjunctures and discontinuities, initiated by colonial modernity. I then move on to discuss the role of rumour in the novel and the significance of its pronounced melodramatic qualities, both of which represent an attempt to contain or ‘quarantine’ such dysphoric feelings. As we shall see, though, this strategy ultimately fails, and the melodramatic conclusion that we are expecting never arrives. Instead, the novel itself suffers something of a generic crisis, shifting without warning from the melodramatic mode into the tragic. Rather than focusing on a particular emotion, Chapter 2 explores the way in which strong feelings of any kind are actively discouraged in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. In the days following the Partition of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru delivered numerous speeches in which he asserted that social and political unity could only be achieved by renouncing ‘hatred, violence, [and] anger’ (Speeches 23). This rhetoric, I suggest, profoundly influences the novel’s affective disposition, its ‘world atmosphere,’ causing it to internalize the Aristotelian virtue of metriopatheia (or ‘equanimity’) and obliging the reader to adopt a similar stance if he or she is to survive 1,349 pages of carefully modulated prose.

Chapter 3, as indicated above, focuses on the significance of jealousy in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro. On the face of it, this fictional memoir relates a straightforward story of marital infidelity from the perspective of the ‘betrayed’ husband, Bento Santiago. As the narrative progresses, however, the story we are told becomes increasingly implausible, and we begin to suspect that Bento’s wife may have been unjustly maligned. Although our narrator locates the source of his jealousy in the private sphere, I propose that it actually arises out of the conflict between the archaic socioeconomic practices of nineteenth-century Brazil (i.e., slavery and patronage) and the liberal principles that were so closely affiliated with European modernity. In Chapter 4, I turn my attention to the subject of boredom in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. Here, | explore the connection between bureaucracy, boredom, and realist discourse. More specifically, | argue that the narrative internalizes many of the features that we tend to associate with the Indian Administrative Service and, in so doing, becomes ever more lethargic, repetitive, and ‘boring. Although these qualities undermine the novel’s governing aesthetic principles, the fact that it survives such a grave challenge suggests that realism may be a good deal more agile and accommodating, as a mode of representation, than is often allowed. Chapter 5 discusses the climate of fear that dominates Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.

We can find ample evidence of such fear at the representational level of the narrative — where all the violence and torture and enforced disappearances take place — but it also penetrates the novel’s underlying structure, activating a phobic response on the part of the discourse itself. After analysing this response in some detail, I explore the way in which it defies the generic imperatives that would typically govern a narrative of this kind, making it impossible to achieve the linearity, the hermeneutic closure, and the ‘localization of culpability’ that we associate with classic crime fiction. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses the affective (and aesthetic) consequences of violence and criminality in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. | begin by discussing the minor crimes to be found within its pages (the petty burglaries, the routine corruption, the domestic disputes, etc.), before moving on to address various instances of ‘exceptional’ criminality, such as the communal violence that took place in Mumbai in 1992-93, killing an estimated 900 people, and the retaliatory bombings that occurred on 12 March 1993, claiming another 257 lives. The affective state that emerges out of this combination of the mundane and the extraordinary, I argue, could best be described by invoking Sianne Ngai’s notion of ‘stuplimity’ — a somewhat contradictory aesthetic response in which ‘the initial experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not terror or pain ... but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue’ (Ugly 270).

So what is to be gained, then, by approaching these works of colonial and postcolonial literature from the perspective of affect studies? In the first place, I would contend, it provides us with a deeper understanding of the way in which the social, political, and economic forces that are produced under such circumstances influence the affective lives of ordinary people — whether these forces are encountered in the form of colonial modernity (Chapter 1), communal violence (Chapter 2), slavery and patronage (Chapter 3), bureaucracy (Chapter 4), civil war (Chapter 5), or crime and terrorism (Chapter 6). By analysing the affective consequences of these historical processes, we are able to gain a ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time’ (Williams, Long 63). And as such experiences typically lie at the ‘very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams, Marxism 134), the evidence they leave behind can be identified most clearly, | would argue, at the level of literary form, structure, and style. Hence the emphasis on narratology in what follows; and hence my decision to combine narratology with affect studies (broadly construed). Only thus are we able to trace the process by which a sociogenic feeling penetrates the private sphere, and then infiltrates the structure of the literary narrative itself, where it makes its presence felt in the form of proairetic sequences, plot nuclei, temporal anachronies, and so on. In the opening pages of The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti discusses the relationship between the study of literature and that of history. ‘What kind of history, he asks, ‘what kind of [historical] evidence’ do we find in literature?

Clearly, never a direct one: the mill-owner Thornton in North and South (1855), or the entrepreneur Wokulski in The Doll (1890), proves exactly nothing about the Manchester or Warsaw bourgeoisie. They belong to a parallel historical series ... where the spasms of capitalist modernization are matched and reshaped by literary form-giving ... [I]f we accept the idea of literary form as the fossil remains of what had once been a living and problematic present; and if we work our way backwards ... then formal analysis may unlock ... a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden. Here lies its possible contribution to historical knowledge: by understanding the opacity of Ibsen’s hints to the past, or the oblique semantics of Victorian adjectives, or even ... the role of the gerund in Robinson Crusoe, we enter a realm of shadows, where the past recovers its voice, and still speaks to us ... But speaks to us only through the medium of form. (14-15)

While it may be difficult to prove, incontrovertibly, the connection between the diminution of the proairetic code in English, August and the bureaucratic procedures of the IAS, or between the abundance of ‘catalyzers’ that can be found in A Suitable Boy and the placatory content of Nehru’s speeches during the late forties and early fifties, the formal correspondences between these narratives and their actual or imagined historical circumstances, the structural analogies that serve to conjoin the literary-aesthetic and the sociopolitical in such cases, will, | hope, prove to be reasonably persuasive. As Roberto Schwarz writes, an argument of this nature ‘requires a moment of extraliterary reflection, whose relevance, impossible to prove on the model of 2 + 2 = 4, can be substantiated in the increased understanding [of the narrative that] it ... allows’ (Master 20). And that will certainly be my objective in Affective Disorders, too, where the reader will be asked to pursue these often elusive feelings as they take on a decentred, intersubjective quality, as they colonize the private sphere, and as they saturate the very tissue of the narratives we will be discussing. Such a process may not yield incontrovertible ‘proof’ in the manner of 2 + 2 = 4, but it does provide enough circumstantial evidence, | believe, to make a plausible (even compelling) case.'®

Something else the reader will be asked to do in Affective Disorders, as we have noted, is to follow a rather meandering historical and geographical itinerary, one that includes destinations as diverse as Rio during the reign of Dom Pedro II, wartime Cairo, and contemporary Mumbai. So what logic has informed the selection of these particular texts, and what do we learn by bringing them together in such a way? By choosing to focus on four different countries and two different empires, I am attempting to emphasize the international (or, as Robert Young might say, the ‘tricontinental’) nature of the processes outlined above, while also revealing the various correspondences and specificities that only become clear once we bring these narratives into direct contact with each other.” Generally speaking, then, I have selected these six narratives precisely because of their historical and geographical range

19 By arguing that literary discourse internalizes the dominant structures of feeling within a particular society, and by identifying the traces of such feelings in the formal, generic, and stylistic qualities of these individual narratives, | have clearly consigned the figure of the author to the periphery of my analysis — and | have done so quite deliberately. As a matter of critical principle, I believe that literary narratives assume a certain autonomy from their author and are ultimately responsible for generating their own (polysemic) meaning. | also believe that literature is capable of internalizing various social, political, and economic forces, and that we may learn more about this process by analysing the formal qualities of a narrative than by discussing the biography of its author (although in some cases this may be a productive enterprise too). More specifically, however, given the nature of this particular project and my attempt to move away from individualistic or subject-centred theories of emotion, it seemed important that the affective qualities | explore here should not be seen to originate from an authorial figure (even if such a figure were merely serving as an ‘intermediary’), but instead should be allowed to circulate freely between the public and private spheres, between the domains of the sociopolitical and the literary-aesthetic, as a disembodied and depersonalized structure of feeling.

20 In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Young uses the term ‘tricontinental’ instead of ‘postcolonial’ or ‘Third-World’ in order to emphasize the international dimension of anti-colonial and postcolonial resistance. ‘Above all, he writes, ‘the tricontinental marks an identification with the great Havana Tricontinental [Conference] of 1966, which initiated the first global alliance of the peoples of the three continents [i.e., Africa, Asia, and Latin America] against imperialism, and the founding moment of postcolonial theory in its journal, the Tricontinental’ (5).

— because of their differences, but also because each one demonstrates, in a nuanced and multilayered way, the process by which a collective structure of feeling can infiltrate literary discourse, whether the narrative in question is produced (or situated) in Rio in 1899 or Cairo in 1947. Moreover, all six narratives emphasize the tendency, in colonial and postcolonial societies, for such feelings to acquire a pathological quality; and it is in this regard that the aforementioned similarities and differences become especially instructive.

In Chapter 1, on Midaq Alley, we are confronted by an anger that emerges out of the various inequalities, disparities, and instabilities generated by colonial modernity. Yet given the political circumstances in which the characters find themselves (living in a city under military occupation), this anger must be severely repressed; and as a consequence, it undergoes a process of displacement, being directed instead at more easily mastered substitutes such as wives, employees, and acquaintances. This is what makes the anger in the novel so disproportionate and ‘ill-fitting’: the fact that it is a product of obstructed agency, the fact that it is an emotion looking for a cause, and the fact that it denies the characters the possibility of genuine cathartic release.” Chapter 2, which offers a close reading of A Suitable Boy, is slightly different to the other five chapters in that it does not explore a particular emotional state, but focuses instead on the attenuation of feeling, on the discipline and self-control that Nehru promoted in response to the communal violence that accompanied Partition in 1947. Even so, the fact that this reticence acquires such prestige within the narrative, and within the society it delineates, draws our attention to the volatility (the underlying ‘passion and prejudice’ [Nehru, Speeches 33]) that made the imposition of such a rigid ‘emotional regime’ necessary in the first place. Moving on to Dom Casmurro, in Chapter 3, we also encounter a disproportionate and displaced feeling. In this case, however, the pathological jealousy that our narrator experiences emerges out of the conflict between his professed liberal values and the archaic system of slavery on which his socioeconomic privilege relies; and it could thus be seen as an affective correlative for the more general tendency among the Brazilian élite to misrecognize

21 I have borrowed the phrase ‘obstructed agency’ from Sianne Ngai, whose 2005 book Ugly Feelings explores some of the ‘negative affects’ (envy, anxiety, paranoia, etc.) that such an obstruction produces, ‘regardless of whether [it] is actual or fantasized, or whether the agency obstructed is individual or collective’ (3).

the true nature of their social reality. Such jealousy also became a dominant structure of feeling during this period as a consequence of the patronage that continued to serve as Brazil’s primary form of social mediation, encouraging a fierce competition for favour at every level of society. Chapter 4 focuses on English, August and the debilitating boredom that arises out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service (which, prior to independence, was known as the Indian Civil Service [ICS]). In some ways, we could relate this boredom to the renunciation of strong feeling advocated by Nehru in Chapter 2 — for boredom also de-intensifies our lives, leaving us, as Heidegger observes, ‘equally distant from despair and joy’ (Introduction 2) — but again there are some fundamental differences that ought to be acknowledged. The ‘reticence’ in A Suitable Boy, for example, is designed to protect the narrative from dangerous upsurges of intradiegetic feeling, while the boredom in English, August brings it to the verge of a complete discursive collapse. And whereas the emotional regime in A Suitable Boy still endorses moderate affective states, in English, August the attenuation of feeling assumes a pathological quality that leaves our lethargic hero utterly drained of energy and desire. In Chapter 5, which explores Anil’s Ghost, we discover a feeling of fear that has also acquired a pathological quality. During the Sri Lankan Civil War, the use of violence and intimidation as a deliberate political strategy gave rise to a general ‘culture of terror’ within the country.

By the late eighties, as one Amnesty International report indicates, violence had become ‘so widespread that it [was] often difficult to establish with certainty who the agents of specific killings were — or even to identify the victims,’ whose bodies may have been ‘grossly mutilated’ or ‘burned to ashes’ (qtd. in Senaratne 146). Under these circumstances, as we shall see, the kind of fear that is created cannot be easily localized in the form of an unidentified corpse or a representative of the state, but instead moves from body to body, and from place to place, creating a dysphoric atmosphere that permeates every level of the discourse. Finally, in Chapter 6, we address the significance of stuplimity — the conjunction of the stupefying and the sublime, the boring and the astonishing — in Sacred Games. As mentioned earlier, this term was first employed by Sianne Ngai to ‘highlight certain limitations in classic theories of the sublime,’ which fail to account for the boredom that has become ‘increasingly intertwined with contemporary experiences of aesthetic awe’ (Ugly 8). In Chandra’s novel, however, the feeling of stuplimity assumes a broader social significance. Instead of being inspired by an encounter with an aesthetic object, it is generated by the intermingling of two different types of crime: the ‘ordinary’ criminality that has become a feature of everyday life in Mumbai, and the episodes of ‘spectacular’ criminality, such as communal violence and terrorism, that have also come to be associated with the city.

Before proceeding any further, I would like to clarify precisely what I mean when I use the word ‘emotion.’ In some recent theoretical writing within the field of affect studies, a crucial distinction has been drawn between affect and emotion — the former term being employed to describe pre-subjective, asignifying bodily ‘intensities,’ while the latter refers to feelings that have been recognized as ‘subjective’ and granted both social and linguistic significance. According to Brian Massumi, for instance, affect and emotion follow ‘different logics and pertain to different orders. Whereas affect is ‘embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin — at the surface of the body, at its interface with things’ (25), emotion involves the ‘sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (28).?? Although I have found this formulation useful at times, by and large I agree with Sara Ahmed that the distinction between affect and emotion can ‘under-describe the work of emotions which involve forms of intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about “subjective content” or [the] qualification of intensity’ (Promise 230). In other words, drawing such an emphatic distinction between affect (as an asignifying bodily ‘intensity’) and emotion (as a clearly defined, subjective feeling) can conceal the extent to which these categories merge into one another. It is possible, as Ahmed notes, to ‘separate an affective response from an emotion’ at a theoretical level — to separate the bodily sensation of fear, say, from the feeling of being afraid — but this ‘does not mean that in practice, or in everyday life, they are separate’ (Promise 231). In the present study, therefore, I shall not be observing this particular theoretical distinction. For one thing, my interest lies not in dividing the bodily from the cognitive, but in exploring the interaction between these two categories. Or to put it another way, | shall be focusing on the point at which feelings such as anger or boredom achieve a certain discursive

22 For more examples of this theoretical distinction, see Grossberg, We Gotta 79-87, Terada 4, and Jameson, Antinomies 28—44.

23 Other critics who have chosen not to make use of such a distinction include Brennan 3-6, Ngai, Ugly 25-28, and Flatley 12. For an especially forceful critique of the affect/emotion dichotomy, see Greco and Stenner 10-12.

legibility, coming into view by way of the ‘impression’ they leave on the literary narratives they infiltrate. These are the structures of feeling we discussed earlier — the feelings that lie at ‘the very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams, Marxism 134) yet nonetheless reveal themselves in ‘the actual conventions of literary or dramatic writing’ (Williams, Politics 159). Although such structures of feeling have assumed a certain significatory presence, this does not mean that they have lost their physiological qualities. On the contrary, what literature provides is a site where the subjective and the objective, the semiotic and the asignifying, the cognitive and the somatic, can come together; and it is the conjunction of these different categories, as revealed, enacted, or produced within the domain of the literary-aesthetic, that we will be exploring in the following pages. As we do so, I shall be using the term ‘emotion’ to describe a state of feeling that combines, to varying degrees, the categories of the physiological, the psychological, and the sociocultural. And I will also be emphasizing the three characteristic features of emotion that I mentioned at the beginning of this introduction — (1) the fact that it is both psychogenic and sociogenic, (2) the fact that it is historically constituted, and (3) the fact that it is inherently mobile, an affective quality that slides all over the place, defying all boundaries, even those that would distinguish between a feeling you register on your skin, as a bodily ‘intensity, and your cognitive understanding of what that sensation signifies.