The project of doing something *für ewig* (literally, forever) would materialise in the pages of the *Prison Notebooks,*30 a series of essays that Gramsci wrote during his time in prison and that, in spite of its fragmentary and unfinished nature, remains one of the most original contributions to critical thinking in the twentieth century. It is worth noting that, from his arrest onwards, reading and writing had already appeared to Gramsci as vital needs; however, in the letter mentioned above he is saying that now they should respond to a higher purpose and seek a result for their own sake, rather than being a mere instrumental means of survival (Gerratana 1977, XVI).

It is interesting that, trying to explain the expression *für ewig* to his sister-in-law, Gramsci translates it as 'disinterested', which in this case does not indicate a work disconnected from reality, or art done for art's sake. On the contrary, 'disinterested' refers to Gramsci's personal condition as a prisoner: the project he has in mind is to trespass the restrictions imposed by the circumstances, the limits of the cell, the degradation of his body. As Rosengarten states: 'In prison, deprived of any immediate opportunity to influence the course of human affairs, Gramsci's sense of time became, paradoxically, both more intimate and subjective, yet at the same time more oriented to distant horizons' (Rosengarten 2014, 119).

Although their distant horizons differed from Gramsci's, in prison José Luandino Vieira and Graciliano Ramos cultivated their writing, and they used prison time to collect material that would eventually become part of the literature they would write outside prison: the experience of the confinement became a source of characters, stories and themes. Writing also became a form of resistance because it represented the refusal to give up a constructive dimension. It exceeded the logic of the therapeutic function of writing thus reinforcing the idea that, when analysing prison writings, we should look for a contextual paradigm of interpretation, one that takes into consideration both the political and the aesthetic intentions of prisoners who write.

This work was supported by FCT – Fundação Ciência e Tecnologia PD/ BD/113727/2015.

#### Notes

process of overcoming the trauma of confinement' (Gould 2017, 19). Ramos' *Memórias* have also been analysed through this paradigm, such as in Marco (2004); Silva de Abreu (2008); Oliveira (2011); Birman (2012).

on our table. The others did not care much and kept on eating, but I could not eat the soup with the bars mirroring in it.'

#### Works cited

Gramsci, Antonio. 1977. *Quaderni Del Carcere. Volume I*, ed. Valentino Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi.

Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. *The Era of the Witness*. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Wolf, Michaela. 2016. 'Introduction: Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps – Challenging the

"Order of Terror"?' *Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps*, ed. Michaela Wolf, 1–21. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

### 3 Literature as testimony: textual strategies and contextual frameworks in Fatima Bhutto's *Songs of Blood and Sword*

Ana Ashraf

Four years ago I set out to trace my father's life. I opened dusty boxes filled with newspaper clippings, letters, diaries and official documents kept and collected by various members of the family over a forty-years period … documents, both written by hand and officially typed, served to build a political as well as a personal chronology (Bhutto 2010, 8–9).

This excerpt from Fatima Bhutto's *Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir* provides a glimpse of the self-consciousness and the ardent toil with which Bhutto commemorates the controversial past of her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the eldest son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who after his father's assassination by Zia-ul-Haq (1924–88) the military dictator organised armed resistance against the dictator while being in exile, and later returned to Pakistan to join politics but was assassinated under dubious circumstances. To build this 'personal and political chronology', Bhutto mentions her reliance on a vast body of external sources ranging from personal letters to official documents. On the one hand, the reference to the close familial connection establishes the personal motivation to 'open dusty boxes' and on the other hand, her dependence on these external sources exhibits her consciousness to be historically accurate. Through her memoir she recreates her father's past from a daughter's perspective, rewrites the political history of her country and comes to terms with the self-conscious act of mediating the personal memories with political history. Indeed, through a close reading of *Songs*, this article engages with significant questions regarding testimony, its literary representation and the contextual challenges faced by the writer of such work. I analyse different textual strategies and contextual frameworks in Fatima Bhutto's memoir *Songs of Blood and Sword* to understand how testimony, in particular transgenerational testimony, is shaped by different contexts, how witnessing functions within a literary text and how different narrative modes can allow testimony to transcend its own spatio-temporal bounds. Is testimony in its very structure compatible with traditional forms of narrative or storytelling? Does literary testimony1 have an impact on the political consciousness of a society at large?

Published in 2010, Bhutto's *Songs*, while focusing on one man's murder from a familial perspective, puts this murder in parallel with greater political crises in Pakistan. Indeed, within the tradition of anglophone Pakistani literature, *Songs* is one of the few to position a personal testimony of violence and extrajudicial killing within a larger discourse of national history since the Partition of British India (1947), a constant string of political crises with various dictatorships in the country, the onslaught of War on Terror (2001 to date), the rise in extrajudicial murders as a means of counterterrorism and Drone War (2004 to date). *Songs* presents a highly interesting case in the contemporary literature of testimony. Firstly, positioning her memoir as an intermediary between familial and political concerns, Bhutto shows how literary testimony conjoins the personal and the political, the historical and the subjective aspects of lived experience. Secondly, the context of her gender, class and the retrospective authorial position creates a more ambivalent and somewhat alternative testimony which diffuses the official and dominant narrative of Pakistani history. Thirdly, its polyphonic discourse, and its use of other documents such as diaries, letters and family photos, not only makes it stand out in the tradition of Pakistani literature written in English but also constitutes a good example of how the multiple contexts of testimony affect the form and style of a narrative. Finally, *Songs* is also an example of a growing tradition of anglophone Pakistani literature aimed at a more global audience.

The theoretical framework for this reading is informed by theories of testimony and literature by Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Michael G. Levine, Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler, Maria Delaperrière, Marianne Hirsch, and Michael Richardson. Their insights into the complexity of testimonial literature and the role of the author as a witness, will guide my analysis of Fatima Bhutto's *Songs.* This article relies on the critical concepts usually employed to understand the Holocaust testimony. Although the specificity of the Holocaust as a traumatic historical event cannot be denied, the critical and philosophical engagement to understand witnessing can function as a strong threshold to study other testimonies with different personal and political ramifications. As Hirsch emphasises in a detailed study of the concept of 'postmemory':

The beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century – after the brutal dictatorships in Latin America; after Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur; during the aftermath, globally, of the events of September 11, 2001; and in the midst of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict – the Holocaust can no longer serve simply as a conceptual limit case in the discussion of historical trauma, memory, and forgetting (Hirsch 2012, 18).

Though not a 'limit case', the discussion of testimony in literature as provided by scholars mentioned above can help formulate a more intersecting framework to understand different and sometimes divergent historical traumas in parallel.

#### *Songs of Blood and Sword*: an overview

*Songs* chronicles the intertwined histories of the Bhutto family and Pakistani society. Bhutto draws the trajectory of her grandfather's political career and his later assassination. She also breaks the silence surrounding her father's political activism, his exile and murder. She explains how her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, using his nationalist and socialist views, became the most popular politician in Pakistan during the 1960s. Later on, he became the fourth president (1971–73) and the ninth prime minister (1973–77) of Pakistan. Quite soon, however, Z. A. Bhutto emerged as a very controversial figure especially during his presidency both in national as well as international politics. Some of the leading causes for this controversial image were his promise for land reforms against the feudal system, nationalisation of industries in Pakistan, founding of the nuclear programme and a stronger emphasis on the Islamic brotherhood. Moreover, the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 made explicit the vulnerable geopolitical condition of the newly independent country. The two Indo-Pak wars laid down the basis of the cold foreign policy between India and Pakistan and further shaped the international alliances during the Cold War era, whereby China was inclined towards Pakistan and America relied on India for their individual geopolitical goals. The civil war between East and West Pakistan over the election results of 1971 resulted in East Pakistan's separation into Bangladesh. Z. A. Bhutto became the president of a very demoralised society. His adherence to the nuclear programme in Pakistan, in spite of severe international criticism, the rise of Pashtun, Sindhi, and Baloch nationalism and his non-conformist attitude to the military junta of his time played a key role in his overthrow through a military coup. Thus, in July 1977, General Zia ul Haq dissolved the assemblies and Bhutto was put in jail for allegedly planning a murder of a political opponent. For the next two years, his sons, Murtaza Bhutto and Shahnawaz Bhutto, travelled throughout the world to appeal for justice. Meanwhile, at home Z. A Bhutto, without a chance for fair trial, was hanged under dubious circumstances in 1979 and even his dead body was not returned to the family. As a reaction, both sons, while already in exile, organised an armed resistance against the military dictator. In her memoir, Bhutto includes a comment by the British-Pakistani journalist and writer Tariq Ali, to confirm this version of the events: 'The failure to win diplomatic support from government around the world played a big part in convincing Murtaza that the only option was armed struggle' (Bhutto 2010, 176). Later on, the younger son Shahnawaz was found dead under suspicious circumstances. Grounding herself on an interview with the French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, Bhutto holds Benazir responsible for this murder.2 Murtaza lived in exile until Zia ul Haq was killed in an airplane crash. During his exile, Al-Zulfikar (a militant insurgency organization formed in 1979), controlled by Murtaza, hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines flight and diverted it to Kabul in 1981. In the memoir, Bhutto provides another explanation of this hijack claiming that Salamullah Tipu who joined Al-Zulfikar without Murtaza's approval was behind the entire planning of the hijack. In 1993, Murtaza came back to Pakistan to launch his political career but this time found another rival in his own sister, Benazir, who, after coalescing with the military establishment responsible for their father's assassination, became the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country. Murtaza openly criticised Benazir and her husband Asif Ali Zardari's corruption, nepotism and foreign policies. On 20 September 1996, Murtaza was killed in a police encounter. While the official report states that the police was forced to open fire in response to the attack by Murtaza's guards, *Songs* provides a contradictory testimony: her father was killed brutally under a well-planned operation. As his sister Benazir was in power, Fatima Bhutto puts the burden of ethical responsibility on the seemingly irresponsible state. Beyond this personal and familial terrain, the author puts her father's murder in parallel with the political unrest of the 1990s in Karachi. Many have called this time a period of civil war resulting in the killing of almost 2000 people in 1995 alone. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali further describes this as a time of 'virtual civil war between the security forces of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's government and a heavily-armed, ethnically-based political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM, or Muhajir National Front), which claims to represent the interests of Karachi's six million Muhajirs [refugees from India at the time of partition]' (Yacoobali 1996).

Since the enforcement of Police Act 1861, the police departments of British India and Post-Independence India and Pakistan have used methods of extrajudicial killing, or fake encounters (Rumi 2018). Ever since its independence, the Pakistani authorities have never really tried to do away with the Act as it serves to use the police for the vested interests of a corrupt political system.3 In the wake of terrorism, the same method has been used by the military authorities as a counterterrorist measurement (Rumi 2018). Storytelling in such a scenario gains supreme importance. In this larger context, extrajudicial killing is not merely killing the 'other', it causes double indemnity by killing without giving a legal right of trial or of being heard. Thus the narrative of the 'other' is always at risk of extinction – a forced extinction.

#### Bhutto as transgenerational witness

In the absence of the person killed extrajudicially, the next generation witness is responsible not only to narrate his or her own memories about the life of that person but to ensure that some kind of verbal justice is done through the act of storytelling. In this context, the role or the ambiguous nature of transgenerational witnessing needs deeper perusal. What modes of representation are employed by a transgenerational witness for the act of storytelling? How is the act of transgenerational witnessing shaped? How does the transgenerational witness mediate between the witnessing of first-generation's trauma and his or her own suffering that comes with this encounter? What emotional and subjective interests are at stake in claiming to use the agency of personal, familial witnessing? A witness is one who sees or experiences an event first-hand and subsequently makes a statement about the event. Many scholars define a witness in somewhat similar ways; a witness is 'a witness to the truth of what happened during an event' (Felman and Laub 1992, 80) or the one 'who was present and is able to testify from personal observation' (Gordimer 2009, 66) or the one whose figure is 'credited with a special (typically moral) responsibility' (Gelfert 2014, 17). '[A Witness and testimony] must first be singular, whence the necessity of the instant: I am the only one to have seen this unique thing, […] – you must believe me because I am irreplaceable. When I testify, I am unique and irreplaceable' (Blanchot and Derrida 2000, 40). The 'experience' of the witness in the most corporal as well as figurative way is the gap which makes him different from others. The communication of this gap transforms the witness from victim to survivor. However, a transgenerational witness might seem less authentic as her witnessing relies on her own experience and the experiences of the others. Moreover, in a very literal sense, the transgenerational witness, or a witness speaking on behalf of another generation might be seen as lacking first-hand experience of things she describes. James Young while discussing Art Speigelman's *Maus*  provides an alternative understanding by emphasising that the transgenerational witness by writing the story of his memories of another generation provides a 'new story "grounded" in a directly perceived reality, that of the "events of transmission" in the form of the artist's memory of the witness's memory in the form of "original interviews"' (Douglas and Vogler 2003, 46). The transgenerational witness mediates between his experience and the experiences of the others on the one hand and the collective traumatic past and the present audiences on the other hand. In Hirsch's words, to be the postmemory or transgenerational witness 'is to be shaped, however, indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the structure of postmemory and the process of its generation' (Hirsch 2012, 5).

*Songs* is clearly an example of transgenerational witnessing. The very title of the memoir sheds some light on her position as a witness: *Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir* points to the limitations as well as the strengths of her testimony. First, as the title promises a careful configuration of 'songs' of personal and political struggles in different generations, the subtitle 'daughter's memoir' emphasises a break in the usual patrilineal legacy; rather than a son, it is a daughter who claims or inherits the past of her father and builds a present reality around it. The reference to a familial bond might also function as a universal appeal to the emotion of the reader. This familial bond also has its limitations. The cover photo confirms this notion: Bhutto is standing near a window looking through the blinds. She looks outside with a sombre and serious expression and holds her posture with much dignity and without excessive emotion. Like the subtitle, this position brings out her role as an intermediary: while as an observer she only has an outsider's perspective on her father's personal experiences, as a daughter she is nevertheless located in an intermediate position between inside and outside. The Bhutto household provides a mediation between her father's private experiences and the outside space of party politics. By positioning herself in this space, she promises a privileged access to the reality of her father's life and death. Clearly, her perspective is formulated through a careful mediation of a deeply personal and shared experience and a generational remove facilitated through time and space. What Michael G. Levine says about Spiegelman's *Maus* is applicable to Bhutto's experience:

The subtitle of the first volume of *Maus: My Father Bleeds History*, conveys a sense not only of physical injury, but of psychical wounding and emotional anguish. It suggests that the literally unbearable pain of the first generation will have spilled over somehow into the next, that the still unassimilated historical experience of the father will have bled through the pages of the "survivor's tale" drafted by his son (Levine 2006, 1).

While narrating her father's personal and political legacy, Bhutto also writes self-consciously about this *spilling over*. Born in Kabul, and later spending her early childhood in Syria given her father's exile, she mentions the awareness of homelessness in the form of a double displacement:

I knew we were landless; I knew I came from somewhere else, somewhere I had never seen. Papa played old Sindhi folk songs, 'Ho Jamalo' usually, when he felt like remembering the sounds of his home. He used ajraks, the traditional Sindhi block-printed shawls, as table-cloths and he cooked achar gosht much too spicily (Bhutto 2010, 271).

In an indefinite period of exile, her father resorts to Sindhi (Province of Sindh: the birthplace of the Bhuttos) folk music and food as reminders of a distant homeland. However, Bhutto was neither born in Pakistan nor had she visited it as yet. She nonetheless shares the experience of homelessness and exile with her father without ever knowing the absent home. The *achar ghost* (pickled meat), the *ajrak* (block printed Sindhi shawls) and the Sindhi folk song *Ho Jamalo,* sung in the praise of a nineteenthcentury folk hero, Jamalo Khoso Baloch, serve two different purposes here; for Murtaza they refer to the past memories of lived experience whereas for Bhutto these are absences which in turn inform her own lived experience of connecting with her father's political exile and emotional solitude. Apart from this sense of exile and statelessness, she also inherits the constant fear, uncertainty and sense of danger from her father both literally and figuratively. These fears are given vent many times in the memoir. For instance, through the following comment about insomnia, 'as a young insomniac, something of a Bhutto family curse, I would be scared to sleep by Papa with my very own personalised bogeyman' (269); or when she remembers the browbeaten self of her father after her uncle's death, 'Papa was totally distraught. I had never seen him so overwhelmed by sadness before and would never again, not like this … Papa's eyes welled with tears. There was nothing to break the silence … "I'm sad", he said to me as I shifted uncomfortably next to him' (267–8). In this passage, Bhutto registers not only her father's trauma but also the more inherited and submerged trauma of a young girl compelled to witness her father's political and personal isolation. This transgenerational *spilling over* is not one dimensional in Bhutto's case. In fact, she refers to an incident when her unconscious memory of her uncle's dead body is reconfirmed by the memories of her mother. She was only three years old when she saw her uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto's dead body. Later on, her mother tells her about her childhood behaviour related to this memory:

"It stayed with you for a long time," Mummy tells me twenty three years later …  That's how we knew. You thought he was dead, like Shah" (267).

This example exhibits the two-dimensional nature of the transgenerational witnessing. In witnessing, forgetting is as significant as remembering. Clearly, the impetus of forgetting comes from avoiding the childhood trauma of facing unnatural death. The posture of a dead body stays as a sign of something horrific and inexplicable. This gesture of forgetting is captured through her mother's remembering. Thus, Bhutto's act of remembering the past depends on her own memories and the memories of others. However, as will be delineated in the later section of this analysis, her 'witnessing' also depends on different sources such as her the interview with her father's driver, close friends and even political opponents as well as other personal and official documents. Therefore, her testimony is not limited to what she bore from one generation to another but is inclusive of what her individual witnessing could not incorporate – thus making her testimony transgenerational.

#### The context of gender, class and authorial position in *Songs*

How is the position of the witness and the act of writing one's experience shaped, limited or challenged by different contextual frameworks such as class, gender, familial bonds? What role does the testimonial context play in shaping the text, as well as its reception? Testimonial literature and memoir demand a special attention to context. Unlike other forms of literature, testimonial writing is always burdened with the awareness of the traumatic experience situated outside the text, the unique way in which the witness perceived the event and the retrospective understanding with which he or she writes about it. Such a text therefore, always manifests the twofold significance of contextual frameworks. On the one hand, there are the 'tricks of time and memory' (Douglas and Vogler 2003), 'the necessity of fiction' (Fussell 1996), 'the lie and the perjury' (Blanchot and Derrida 2000) playing their role in an individual's attempt to recount events as they happened years or decades ago. On the other hand, the testimonial writing shows the urgency of communicating the specificity of an experience; what Phillip Dwyer, while analysing the role of storytelling in testimony, calls the necessity of recalling one's experiences in writing (Dwyer 2017, viii). This experience is situated in different contexts such as sociopolitical milieu, gender, race, ethnicity, class and many other frameworks which specify the position of the witness. Therefore, the meaning and purpose of testimonial writing is tied with the context that bears it. Thus in the case of a memoir or a testimony, the context and text continuously undergo what Felman refers to 'the contextualization of the text and the texualization of context' (Felman and Laub 1992, xv).

This synthesis of context and text shapes Bhutto's *Songs.* The contexts of gender, class and authorial position make her testimony ambivalent, polyphonic and intertextual at the formal level. Her testimony is informed by divergent sometimes contradictory perspectives of an apologist daughter, an educated upper-class woman and a self-conscious writer. Although seeking empathy by claiming a universal familial bond of a daughter, the daughter, nonetheless, is an upper class educated woman who with the privilege of education and class can empower her perspective as a dissenting voice. Bhutto navigates these tensions by incorporating other voices and testimonies within her memoir. Whenever her familial bond limits her potential of first-hand experience, she resorts to documents, diaries, letters and other intertextual references. While these documents provide further information necessary to her story, they also lend credibility and authority to her account. Indeed, along with her own memories and the memories of her dear ones, Bhutto establishes her authority as a witness by drawing on other sources, shaping the text into a collage of different external sources and personal memories. She often draws from her grandfather's letters to her father and from Murtaza's diaries, letters, newspaper clippings. She also publishes excerpts from *Venceremos*, a magazine established in 1966 by Murtaza aimed at young Pakistanis to create political and social awareness in them. In this way, she positions her literary testimony within the writings of her own family. For example, she refers to *If I am Assassinated* (1979), written by her grandfather during his imprisonment. In this book, he appeals for justice to the international community and rebuts the charges made against him. The enduring value of his testament lies in its pithy analysis of Pakistani military establishment and political corruption which is relevant even today. Bhutto includes long excerpts from this text in her own memoir, but also comments on its quality and currency as follows:

*If I am Assassinated* was not simply a tract on innocence and justice; it was like his letters – detailed, thorough, and resounding in its eloquence and force. Zulfikar weaves in an analysis of the political coalition that rose against him, the non-aligned movement, and General Zia ul Haq's Afghanistan connections (Bhutto 2010, 154).

While Zulfikar managed to write the book in prison, Bhutto emphasises the somewhat less known role of her father in getting the manuscript published: 'Papa knew the book by heart, he could quote from it citing page numbers. I never asked why and in all those years Papa never mentioned his role in its publication' (154). Following this apologist tradition within the family, Bhutto and her father also reflected on writing a book about his life:

"You should write a book," I said. Papa laughed loudly and threw his hands up in the air. "I can't write a book while I'm alive. They would never let me come out into the open with the things I know." "What do you mean? You have to do it – write a book about your life, Papa…" "No, I can't. You'll do it for me. You can write a book on my life" (22).

This excerpt again places Bhutto's memoir in an already established tradition of literary dissent within her family. It also suggests that she fills the gap her father left by not writing about his life experiences. All in all, these intertextual references to texts by her grandfather and father perform different functions within the text. On the one hand, these references establish the literary tradition of dissent within her family and work as exemplary precedent to her writing. But these references as well as the collage of different sources help to perform another function of creating another picture of her father. In the din of political rivalries, Murtaza's image was tarnished by his terrorist past. A terrorist is literally the political 'other' of the responsible statesman. Bhutto, in order to bring her father out of this 'political othering', does provide him with a story as well as a revised history. She projects him as a loving and obedient son (as an evidence to his obedience to Z. A. Bhutto, she produces an excerpt of a letter from Z. A. Bhutto to Murtaza in which he guides his son to go to Afghanistan for help in case of his death), as a responsible and kind father and as a morally upright brother (as even after the death of Zia ul Haq he does not want to sabotage the political career of his sister).  Moreover, Murtaza shows much more political insight (at least the way Bhutto chooses to write about him) than his female counterpart in the family, Benazir. In this way, Bhutto's memoir is not only a passive rendition of the past of her father, rather it actively reconnoitres the way in which her father as the silenced other is given speech.

In spite of her desire to present her father in a different light, as a conscientious writer she is still able to criticise the political choices made by her father. For example, while discussing how her father organises an armed resistance against the military ruler in Pakistan, Bhutto manifests the ambivalent position of a daughter who wishes to write that book which praises her father sufficiently and an educated woman writer who can see the loopholes within patriarchal forms of violence:

But now I can finally understand the danger that followed my father and Uncle Shah for most of my childhood; it suddenly all makes sense and while his are not the choices I would make now, I feel secretly proud of my father for abandoning the offer of a bland but comfortable exile in London to fight what he believed was an unjust system (218).

Similarly, at another occasion, while she discusses the attempt made by the Kabul-based organisation of the Bhutto Brothers to kill Zia ul Haq, she comments, 'But it was irresponsible nonetheless. The attempt on Zia's life, carried out soon after the PIA hijacking, only created a space, and a legitimate one at that, for Zia and the junta to react against the Bhuttos' (237).

Finally, she also gives vent to the motivation behind writing this memoir as follows:

I wanted to understand my father. I wanted to break the taboo of talking about what happened in Afghanistan. […] It wasn't enough just to love him, regardless of his choices. I had to dig deeper and understand what happened through retrospective lenses. My reverence for my father did not change, but my method of questioning did. […] My choice not only gave me the tools to understand a period that had been mythical for me growing up, but also gave me the added benefit of distance when working to understand a history that had deeply personal consequences (203).

In this way, understanding (not necessarily agreeing with) her father's choices is the aim of writing this memoir. Clearly, this understanding also gives her (and by extension the reader) a better grip on the history of Pakistan and provides a means to analyse the rampant violence rooted within a patriarchal set up from a woman's perspective.

Apart from the reference to works by her paternal relations, she puts her work in line with other writers and intellectuals who wrote against the oppressive power structures. For example the title of the memoir is taken from *Poem of the Unknown:*

In you nestles songs of blood and sword In you the migrating birds In you the anthem of victory Your eyes have never been so bright (i)

The poem, written by the Iranian journalist, poet, and persecuted communist Khosrow Golsurkhi (1944–74), conveys the resistant and dissenting tone of the whole memoir. This tone is further strengthened when Bhutto notes in the introductory pages: 'Milan Kundera once said that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting; this is my journey of remembering' (10). Thus by giving reference to writers dissenting the dominant narrative through their writings, Bhutto quite explicitly creates literary precedents for her own narrative of resistance. Inevitably, perhaps, most of these references are written by men. Thus, building her narrative on the existing male narrative: both her paternal narratives as well as the authorial judgements of male journalists and writers, she adds her own voice to the longstanding familial and literary tradition. Hence, her witnessing is informed by her role as a daughter, as an upper-class educated woman and as an author who is part of a tradition of critical testimonies, both in terms of the works of her own grandfather and father and in terms of the writings of intellectuals around the world.

This dissenting undertone serves a more explicit function outside the text and shapes a different context. Bhutto published her memoir in 2010 in which she puts the responsibility for her father's murder on the then ruling party, Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. On 27 December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, who came back to Pakistan after a long exile and had much popularity, was killed in a bomb blast. After this, in the general election of 2008, Zardari became the president of Pakistan (2008–13). It is no coincidence that Bhutto chooses to publish this memoir when the same people are in power. However, if the reason for publication lay in some personal vengeance, it might appear a case of settling an old score by damaging his repute as a president. However, her dissent is informed by her identity as a young Pakistani intellectual, because she highlights the greater and more painful irony of so-called democracy in Pakistan. Zardari's presidency, in spite of his bad reputation in the past, did bring a new hope for the people. Since Parvez Musharaf's long stay as a military dictator (2001–08) Zardari was the first democratically elected president. Soon after taking charge, his projects and vision took the country into further difficulties. His decision to tie closer with the United States in fighting the War on Terror resulted in the greatest number of drone attacks on Pakistani soil. According to an estimate, since 2004, of all the 406 drone attacks, almost 356 were conducted during his rule. According to one article published after the completion of his mandate, many impartial analysts regarded 'his five years' stint as a period of rampant corruption, bad governance, economic meltdown, nepotism, tall claims but little work, lies and disconnect from ground realities' (Mumtaz 2013). Within this context, Bhutto's memoir not only places the injustices done to her father within a long forgotten historical context, but more importantly, as a young Pakistani she presents the present-day corruption and violence in more comprehensible form.

#### Context and text: the question of form

What role does context play in shaping up the form of the text? How can we appropriate the question of aesthetics, mimetic representation, style and artistic craft in a form of writing which claims a certain form of urgency? Indeed, the question of linguistic representation is inevitably tied to the contextual frameworks of a literary text. The factual and the literary aspect of any testimony pose greater challenges to the author, who has to mediate between the two, and the critic who has to negotiate between the unique and individual position of the author and the collective and objective historical rendition of the same experience outside the text. The apparent conundrum of the mutual exclusivity of the factual and the literary within the genre of literary testimony actually serves to free the context from the spatio-temporal bounds. Various scholars find a basic conundrum in the 'compossibility', to use Derrida's term, of literature and testimony. Delaperrière sums up this puzzle as follows: 'the notion of testimony already assumes accuracy of rendering someone's experiences by him/herself, whereas literariness (traditionally understood as a group of stylistic and fictionalizing values) seems to disqualify the truthfulness of such message in advance' (Delaperrière 2014, 42). As Derrida asserts, every act of testimony already entails the possibility of lie, of perjury:

And yet, if the testimonial is by law irreducible to the fictional, there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all of these distinctions. […] In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths [intérieur], the *possibility*, at least, of literature [original emphasis] (Blanchot and Derrida 2000, 30).

The literariness of a testimony is not a hindrance to the proper function of testimony. Indeed, rather than considering it parasitic, like Derrida, I consider the relation between testimony and literature as one of mutual 'symbiosis' where each party benefits from its dependence on the other (Delaperrière 2014, 48). In a court of law, a witness is called in the absence of evidence. The 'telling' of the witness formulates the only proof to a happening. Thus justice is the immediate function of the testimony in court, whereas the immediate function of the literary testimony is empathy wherein the reader judges a situation and makes a decision to empathise with the writer. As Richardson explains, 'the ethical practice of literary testimony, then, might be said to reside in its affect rather than any right per se. The writer takes on the task of translation, shifting history, politics, and violence into the literary imaginary' (Richardson 2016, 105). The literariness, the craft and the artistic skills act as the means to achieve this empathy and make this 'literary imaginary' possible. In this way, testimonial literature using the literariness of storytelling becomes 'less definitive, more loaded with potential meanings. Not immediate, but eventual. Not concrete, but gestural' (Richardson 2016, 2). As a result of this mutual symbiosis, a testimony is freed from the spatio-temporal boundaries of its contextual embeddedness and reaches a wider audience in the form of a story. This is most vivid in how quite often testimonial literature shows highly complex formal aspects, as it moves away from textual autonomy to heteronomy, from linear to non-linear narrative modes, from monophonic to polyphonic narration, from a singular to a communal consciousness. Therefore, far from being at odds with the testimonial pact between a witness and an addressee, literariness and storytelling add newer contexts of shaping literature into a political as well as aesthetic tool.

Just as the content of her memoir is guided by different contexts, a similar interdependence is vivid in the form. Bhutto begins by connecting the specificity of her father's murder to the anonymity of many who are killed in constant political violence in Karachi: '"Man found on a highway, cause of death body riddled with bullets, killer unknown – the victim had been shot to death. End of story". There is nothing new about this' (Bhutto 2010, 7). She attacks here both the violence endemic to the city and the lack of storytelling about these deaths. *Songs* defies this silencing as it narrates the story of her father's life and death. Although the official version holds that her father was killed in an exchange of fire between his personal guards and the police, Bhutto presents a different version of the events. She claims that the personal guards did not open the fire. Rather the police surrounded his car and started to fire with a deliberate plan. She also asserts that her father survived this first round of fire. She reports how Asif Jatoi, one of the survivors of the attack, describes the experience:

"Mir *baba* [Murtaza Bhutto] was fine at that point," Asif Jatoi tells me later. "He didn't even need to lean on anyone. The police" – Asif remembers the group including Rai Tahir, Shakaib Qureshi and Shahid Hayat – "told Mir *baba* that they were going to take him to hospital and he walked over to the police car. He got into the open back section, where the policemen sit, and the APC drove off. As it neared *Do Talwa,* it stopped. We heard a single shot. Then it drove off again." It was the last shot that killed my father. He had been injured, but he would have survived. He was walking and talking. It would take more than one bullet to kill Papa and the policemen made sure that the last bullet did the job. The last shot, Papa's autopsy showed, was fired into his jaw at point-blank range.

These interviews by the eyewitnesses are not without a complex legal and political context. The Murtaza murder case was dragged in the court for years. In 2009, however, the court acquitted of murder all the policemen involved and also pardoned the six workers of People's Party. However, in 2011 advocate Omar Siyal, appearing for Appellant Noor Muhammad, requested to reinvestigate the court trial. This appeal pointed to many flaws and gaps in the previous court trial: the report of the initial inquiry tribunal has not been brought on record, the police officers have not admitted to shooting Murtaza and his guards in selfdefence in their records and finally, that the trial court, in spite of lacking any substantial evidence 'disbelieved' all seven eyewitness accounts for the reason that they were 'not of good character'(Mujahid 2018). By conducting interviews with the survivors who according to the court were unreliable witnesses, Bhutto formulates an alternative testimony, a testimony made inaccessible through court procedure is given its due space in the literary realm. However, the credibility of the memoir relies not just on these witnesses. Rather, a sum total of all the resources (personal, political, historical) allows the readers to decide for themselves whether they would want to trust or believe the testimony of these witnesses. In this way, the legal and political context of Murtaza Bhutto's murder case provides strong justification for making the memoir a complex collage of different sources.

The use of different intertextual sources makes *Songs* polyphonic and dialogic in nature. One example of this is her inclusion of dissenting voices – voices that dissented even from her own stance regarding her grandfather and father. For this purpose, she incorporates interviews from many journalists, party workers, friends and foes of her grandfather or father and her aunt. She goes to people who revered her grandfather as the saviour of Pakistan and believed in his vision, and also to people who were his opponents. She goes to people who condemned her father's political activism and resistance movement and the ones who considered him a national hero. For example, her grandfather's permission for a military operation in Balochistan (a province in Pakistan where many people have been involved in a separation movement) engendered hatred from the Balochi leaders and political opponents. Out of many interviews conducted for this memoir, one is with Sardar Marri, one of the strong opponents of Bhutto's strategies in Balochistan, she records, '"Bhutto was no different from Hitler," Sardar Marri revealed, "Before the operation he initiated, death only touched certain areas of the province. Then it affected all of Balochistan. The violence was expanded. Before, our resistance had been traditional, tribal. Then it became more nationalistic"' (Bhutto 2010, 118). This form of narrative challenges the dominating and simplistic metanarratives of history. The polyphony of perspectives, the non-linearity of narrative, the inclusion of dissenting voices and the ambivalence offered by a witness, who is a daughter, an educated upper-class citizen and a woman writer of contemporary society, certainly position *Songs* as a significant contribution to the contemporary testimonial literature in particular and the existing canon of Pakistani literature in English in general.

To conclude, it can be asserted that Bhutto's *Songs* is undoubtedly a complex form of transgenerational testimony wherein the main protagonist relies not only on her own memories, but also on tremendous amounts of resources: personal documents, letters, interviews, family photos, official reports. Bhutto mediates between her own experience as a daughter and an heir to the political and personal legacy of the Bhutto family and the experiences of other people. Her identity as an upperclass, educated woman certainly shapes and adds nuances to the way she remembers the past. It offers the perspective of a daughter and upper-class writer on particular moments in Pakistani history. In linking these moments to a larger cycle of violence, *Songs* transcends its time and place and speaks for the victims of violence to an international community. *Songs*, therefore, presents an elaborate example of how literary testimony problematises a grand narrative, how it defies the traditional, linear narrative structures and how the author-witness uses different formalistic structures to not only convey the truth of his or her testimony, but also the difficulty of writing through that testimony. Bhutto's memoir reiterates the need to understand historical, political and cultural tensions through individual, subjective, and quite often fractal forms of experiences. The multiple contexts shape the form and the content of the text and also give rise to newer contexts in the present-day Pakistan. The somewhat controversial reception of the text within Pakistan and immediate critical acclaim in the international community provide yet another clue to how the contexts of a text keep reinventing and remodulating newer more nuanced contexts of reception and 'acceptance'.

#### Notes

the outskirts of the metropolis on 13 January 2018. (For more details see 'Imtiaz Ali's Anger on Social Media after Waziristan Man Killed in Karachi "Encounter".' *Dawn*. 18 January 2018. https://www.dawn.com/news/ 1383540.) Another incident of extrajudicial killing occurred just after a month when according to Jalal Khan, 34-year-old Moosa Khan was tortured to death by the police on 15 February 2018. (For more details see: 'Protest over Another "Extrajudicial" Killing'. *Dawn*. 17 February 2018. https://www.dawn. com/news/1389836.)

#### Works cited

Bhutto, Fatima. 2010. *Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir*. London: Vintage Books. Blanchot, Maurice, and Jacques Derrida. 2000. *The Instant of My Death. Demeure: Fiction and*

Fussell, Paul. 1996. *Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic*. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Gelfert, Axel. 2014. *A Critical Introduction to Testimony*. London: Bloomsbury.

Gordimer, Nadine. 2009. 'Literary Witness in a World of Terror: The Inward Testimony*'. New Perspectives Quarterly* 26.1: 66–72.

### Part II Interventions in context

### 4

### Between the *Audienzsaal* and the bedroom: A feministnarratological reading of female sovereignty in Caroline Auguste Fischer's *Der Günstling* (1809)

Aude Defurne

In 1797, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote the following on the position of women in the public sphere in his *Foundations of Natural Right:*

The husband is the administrator of all her rights; she wills her rights to be asserted and exercised only in so far as *he* wills them to be. He is her natural representative in the state and in society as a whole. This is her relationship to society, her *public* relationship. She cannot think about exercising her rights directly on her own (Fichte 2000, 299).

In this statement, Fichte denies women any political rights of their own, which is exemplary of the gender ideology that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century and that conditioned the domestication of women. Together with other European philosophers of the period, such as Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Fichte 'succeeded in writing women out of the state', as feminist historian Karen Offen summarises (Offen 2000, 72). The irony of the situation, however, is that while these authors were developing their theories about the apolitical 'nature' of women, one of the most powerful persons in Europe was a woman: Catherine the Great, who ruled over the large Russian empire from 1762 until her death in 1796 (Timm and Sanborn 2007, 17). Yet this example of female sovereignty would not be repeated. As I will be arguing, female political power was erased with the *Ancien Régime* and, in contrast to men, women were offered no alternative in the form of civil political participation.

The present article investigates how literature by German women writers of the early nineteenth century relates to this historical transition. When it comes to the question of female political power, can these texts be more than an aesthetic representation and mediation of their surrounding contexts and actively participate in them? In other words, did female authors try to 'write women back into the state'? Secondly, this article will search for a fruitful methodological and theoretical framework to chart the political potential of women's writing. As such, it will try to contribute to the ongoing debate in literary and cultural studies about the relationship of aesthetic works to their (many) context(s).

#### 'In a republic, men are needed': female sovereignty after 1789

The story of Catherine the Great is, of course, more than exceptional, yet it illuminates a significant change in the political and gender norms of the late-eighteenth century. Although the entire history of sovereignty in Europe reveals a consistent ambivalence towards the idea of female participation in matters of hegemony, during the *Ancien Régime,* dynastic concerns in the continuation of power could supersede 'even the most entrenched attitudes and prejudices' (Earenfight 2007, 2). Examples did not only occur in the Middle Ages or in early modernity: apart from Catharine II, the eighteenth century knew other successful female regents and rulers (Hunt 2010, 325–30; Orr 2004, 2).

Yet the French Revolution, and with it the end of the *Ancien Régime,*  marked a turning point in the history of female sovereignty. As is well known, the French Revolution aimed to replace the old monarchical order by a political system that found its origin and legitimation in the idea of a social contract between equal, free, and rational human beings. Women, however, were excluded from this contractual universe. Joan Landes (1988), Carole Pateman (1988), and Lynn Hunt (1992), among others, have convincingly pointed out the blind spots in the seemingly universal and humanist republican ideology.1 Although the fundamental ideals of the French Revolution might have given rise to more political rights for women, in the end, they resulted in a profound gendering of the public sphere and a castigation of female public action. Discourses on gender thus played a major role in the formation of a new political system. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, repeatedly warns for the corrupting female influence in society and argues that a healthy republic demands the domestication of women (Landes 1988, 66–89). He insists that 'in a republic, men are needed' (quoted in Landes 87). Joan Landes concludes: 'The Republic was constructed against women, not just without them' (171).

These phenomena did not remain confined to France. Even in regimes where monarchical sovereignty was not radically abolished, new ideas on patriotism, nationalism, and citizenship emerged during the nineteenth century that had significant consequences for the public roles of men and women. As the quote from Fichte's work demonstrates, even the slightest association of women and political action was erased or anxiously debated (Abrams 2002, 213–41; Timm and Sanborn 2007, 36–54). The idea of female participation in national and democratic sovereignty ultimately became 'inconceivable' and 'unthinkable' in political discourse (Frevert 1995, 88 and 93).

#### Writing women back into the state? Early nineteenthcentury women's literature and 'dissensus'

The seemingly 'natural' logic that decides throughout the nineteenth century who belongs to the political community and whose speech is considered meaningful could be categorised as what Jacques Rancière famously described as the order of the 'police' (Rancière 2010, 139). Police operations structure what is visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, they distribute competencies and pin 'bodies' down to certain times and spaces and to 'specific ways of being, seeing and saying' (139). The increasing political exclusion of women throughout the nineteenth century is a good example of this policed organisation of people, places, and capacities. Yet Rancière emphasises that it is possible to break with the seemingly 'natural' order of the police and deprive the prevailing 'distribution of the sensible' of its self-evidence, an intervention which he designates as 'dissensus' (139). According to Rancière, politics and art are intrinsically connected because both can define a form of dissensus. Consequently, he defines the 'politics' of literature as follows: 'Literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world' (Rancière 2004, 10). In his attempts to trace the political 'efficacy' of art, Rancière does not assume a dichotomy between the 'real world' and the realm of fiction or representation. Instead of a 'real world' situated at 'the outside of art', there is only a certain partition of the sensible that is constantly challenged by artistic and political practices (Rancière 2010, 148). Works of art thus belong to 'a specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the normal regime of the sensible' (Rancière 2002, 135).

Following Rancière's emphasis on the intervening potential of art, the central question of this article will be whether the regulation of female political activity is 'dissented' in literature written by German women after 1789. One of the reasons why this article zooms in on the German context is because nineteenth-century German feminism was a decidedly unpolitical movement. The idea of women as political subjects was thus absent not only from political discourse, but also from feminist discourse. Until the very end of the century, the German women's rights movement only concentrated on women's possibilities to participate in social and economic life, often rejecting the rare voices who stood up for women's political rights (Evans 1977, 103–4; Frevert 1995, 97–100; Greven-Aschoff 1981, 82–106; Nave-Herz 1997, 11–16). This feminist disinterest and unawareness makes it all the more interesting to trace whether women writers reflected in their fiction upon the sociopolitical, institutional, and ideological changes described above – in short, whether they attempted to 'write women back into the state'.

Early nineteenth-century women's writing, however, hardly gives evidence of such a dissensual potential. In the first place, the theme of political sovereignty is absent from almost the entire literary production by women in this period. Instead, many works focus on domestic themes, often dealing with a woman's struggle to attain personal sovereignty.2 One of the few texts written by a female author that is concerned with matters of state and woman's participation in it, is the novel *Der Günstling*  (1809) by Caroline Auguste Fischer (1764–1842). The novel deals with the Russian Empress Catherine II, who is not named explicitly: the monarch in question is called Iwanova.3 Temporal and spatial settings remain oddly vague, the reader only learns that the story is located in a large, northern country governed by a female monarch who is referred to with the name 'the Great' (Fischer 1809, 7 and 11). Yet considering the widespread fame of the Russian Empress in Germany around the time of publication,4 it may be safe to conclude that nineteenth-century readership associated these descriptions with none but Catherine the Great. *Der Günstling* was published only thirteen years after her reign ended in 1796, which makes the novel one of the few works in early nineteenth-century German literature that stages a recent female sovereign. Whereas a number of texts on mythological, ancient, and medieval queens were published in this period, novels and dramas staging female rulers whose mark on European politics was still felt, were comparatively rare. By representing a recent manifestation of female political leadership, the novel thus establishes an association between bodies and capacities that were disentangled in the dominant distribution of the sensible. It attempts to make 'visible' and 'sayable' what was barely thinkable in nineteenth-century political discourses, both conservative and progressive (Rancière 2004, 10). The novel thus performs a fundamentally political act, as Rancière, by making reference to Plato, states that politics essentially begins when 'the invisible' is made 'visible' (Rancière 2010, 139).

Caroline Auguste Fischer is an author who has hardly found any attention outside the circles of feminist research, and even within this field, scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other women writers of the period.5 Between 1801 and 1820, Fischer published four novels and several collections of short stories and fairy tales. Although her oeuvre is thematically diverse, all stories reveal the destructive consequences for both men and women of living in societies divided by gender, class, and race.6 Her work is characterised by a formal and an emancipatory awareness that is 'unmatched in the work of any other German writer of this period', as one critic would have it (Purver 2000, 292). Yet this progressiveness seems absent in *Der Günstling,* as the plot of the novel and the characterisation of the female protagonists seem to reproduce contemporary discourses on women's participation in matters of state. In order to demonstrate how the novel relates to contemporary attitudes and discourses on gender and politics, the reception of Catherine II in Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will first briefly be outlined.

Before the French Revolution, a number of admiring accounts of Catherine the Great appeared, and satirical images usually remained mild. After 1789, however, an abundance of caricatures, pamphlets, and biographies presenting the Russian ruler as a murderous despot or pervert and lascivious woman appeared, which colors her reception until today (Carretta 1994, 23–9; Dawson 2002, 69–77; Hunt 2010, 329–330; Timm and Sanborn 2007, 19–20). A good example is the satirical image An Imperial Stride*!* (*L'enjambée imperiale!*), which appeared originally in England in 1791 and in France in 1792.

It shows a colossal female sovereign with her legs widely spread, one foot pointing to Constantinople, the other to Petersburgh. She literally subordinates the male leaders of Europe, who look up and make suggestive comments, such as the Turkish Sultan who exclaims that 'the whole Turkish Army wouldn't satisfy her'. The image satirises both Catherine's sexual behaviour and imperial ambitions and betrays anxieties about women in power by evoking the so-called 'vagina dentata' motif. In the French version, Pope Pius VI warns the other male sovereigns: 'Voici un abîme prèt à vous engloutir' (Carretta 1994, 50–51). Other caricatures compare the Russian Empress to monstrous female figures such as witches or Medusa, for instance the print *Royal Recreation*  (1795) by the hand of the famous British satirist Isaac Cruikshank. Here, General Alexander Suvorov, the recent conqueror of Poland, brings his monarch the heads of Polish civilians killed by his troops – a large and sinister collection with which Catherine 'far outdoes Salome' (66).

These demonising and sexualising representations of Catherine II are not exceptional but must be understood against the background of an 'ideological climate in which the overlapping of female sexual and political activity had become a central metaphor for political decay' (Maza 2013, 86). The association of femininity and dangerous (sexual) power is, of course, part of a longer tradition in European religious and philosophical thought (Timm and Sanborn 2007, 21). Yet from the late eighteenth century onwards, when processes of political modernisation were accompanied by enlightenment discourses on essentialist and dichotomic gender roles, this dogmatic idea was discussed more forcefully and anxiously. A key argument in French revolutionary discourses on the illegitimacy of monarchical rule was the suspicious power of women at French court by means of political intrigues or sexual manipulation. Nothing demonstrates this more sharply, of course, than the fate of Marie-Antoinette, who became the subject of a tireless stream of hateful pornographic images and texts before and during the Revolution (Hunt 1992, 103–14). Her body was imagined in antimonarchical propaganda as the summit of perversion, in other words, antithetical to and dangerous for the 'healthy' republican body politic (Vinken 2003, 89–91). The slander on the natural body of queens, as exemplified by the reception of both Marie-Antoinette and Catherine II, can be interpreted as the climax of the perceived incompatibility between women and (modern) political action.7 In the course of the nineteenth century, warnings against female power remained meaningful in the demands of the emerging middle classes for more constitutionalised or republican forms of government in Europe.

The plot of *Der Günstling* seems to reproduce these contemporary scenarios of demonised female power. The title, 'The Favourite', already refers to the connection between female sovereignty, sexuality, and the bourgeois criticism of corrupt court politics. Fischer's epistolary novel consists almost entirely of letters written by Alexander, a statesman at court who writes to his ambitious family at home, though their responses are never shown. Immediately after his arrival at court, queen Iwanova falls passionately in love with him. Yet Alexander, who is already very ambivalent about the fact that a woman is holding sway, reacts with repugnance to her overt amorous advances. Instead, he falls in love with the young girl who is under his guardianship, Maria. As her name suggests, she embodies the contemporary ideal of domestic, virtuous, and innocent femininity. By now, the queen's passion has become an obsession, and when Alexander and Maria finally marry, she turns into a murderous Medea who poisons their wedding bed and kills both.

The stereotypical figure constellation of the novel, associating women with either political corruption or domestic virtue, thus completely affirms ideologies about the unnaturalness of women in political roles. Yet considering the condemning attitudes towards female power, it is not surprising that women's texts do not dissent the political exclusion of women on a direct mimetic or thematic level. Both the conventional plot and the avoidance of any direct reference to the Russian Empress attest to the ambivalence or even anxiety women writers experienced when negotiating the question of female sovereignty in their texts. Yet there is a stream of research that argues that the political potential of women's writing should not (only) be sought on the representational level but (also) on the level of form, style, language, and structure. This is one of the claims of feminist narratology. According to one of the 'founders' of the field, Susan Lanser, feminist narratology is particularly fruitful to study historical literature dealing with culturally sensitive or contested themes, in other words, 'where content may have been closeted by circumstance … and where the story thus can't tell in any literal let alone vulgar way' (Lanser 2015, 37). In the remainder of this article, I will subject Fischer's ostensibly conventional novel to a feminist-narratological reading in order to investigate whether the text contains a dissensual subplot that it cannot tell 'in any literal way'.

Feminist narratology emerged in the 1980s as both an engagement with and a criticism of structuralist or 'classical' narratology. In its original form, narratology proceeded ahistorically and aimed at distilling laws and typologies characterising *all* narrative texts (Lanser and Warhol 2015, 4). As Gérard Genette formulated in his seminal *Discours du récit* (*Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method*, Genette 1980), the goal was to identify 'elements that are universal, or at least transindividual' (23). Against this universalising paradigm, feminist narratology drew attention to the importance of context, insisting that contextual issues do not only shape the thematic dimension and interpretation of narrative, but its particular narratological, formal, stylistic, and structural properties as well. When feminist narratology was developed by Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol in the 1980s, this was the first attempt to bridge the gap between ahistorical structuralism on the one hand and political, ideological, and context-sensitive readings of literature on the other. Lanser and Warhol understood their work not only as a corrective to the gender-blindness in narratology, but also to the prevalent mimetic and historicising orientation in most early feminist literary scholarship (Lanser 1986, 344–6; 1989, 3–4). The field gained firm foothold in the 1990s and has by now been widely acknowledged for pioneering the so-called 'postclassical' and contextualist turn in narratology.8

Feminist narratology thus offers a different contribution from both narratological and mimetic-based historicist approaches to text. Although this distinction might no longer be as absolute as it was in the 1980s, as late as 2010, Susan Lanser observed that 'the more historicized a narrative project, the less likely it is to be narratological, and … the more narratological a project, the less likely it is to be historical' (Lanser 2010, 186). Indeed, some present-day narrative scholars are still sceptical about the project of contextual narratology (Nünning 2009, 51),9 while scholars on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German women's writing still tend to devote more attention to sociohistorical conditions than to the formal or structural dimensions of women's texts (Gilleir 2011, 32). Yet as I will demonstrate here, a purely mimetic reading neglecting the 'transgressions, subversions, and contingencies embedded in form' is not the most productive approach to uncover the political potential of early women's writing (Lanser 2015, 25).

The call of feminist narratology to integrate formalist and contextualised readings of literature also resonates with Rancière, who insists in his article 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes' that only the link between the 'autonomy' and 'heteronomy' of aesthetic practices guarantees their dissensual faculty (Rancière 2002, 134). As diverse as feminist narratology and Rancièrian theory might appear, they share the same commitment towards the question of the 'politics of literature', in other words, the question of how literature is 'involved in the actual generation of the ways of thinking and attitudes that stand behind historical development' (Nünning 2009, 61).

#### 'The greatest of all women…': towards a feministnarratological reading of *Der Günstling*<sup>10</sup>

What is remarkable, first of all, is the question of narrative situation and perspective. The story in *Der Günstling* is told only from the point of view of Alexander's letters, who can thus be classified as an intradiegetic and autodiegetic narrator with internal focalisation. The letters mostly focus on his personal experiences of court life, or they offer direct descriptions of his dialogues with Maria. While her words are, of course, still controlled and shaped by his act of narration, this at least gives a suggestion of her discourse. In contrast, although Catherine II arguably was one of the most powerful persons of her age, her literary alter ego Iwanova hardly receives a voice of her own, which is symptomatic of the real attempts to silence women socially and politically around 1800. In Rancièrian terms, it demonstrates the police distribution of the audible and inaudible, of who counts as 'subjects sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise' (Rancière 2004, 10).11 The opening letter is illustrative of the way Iwanova will be represented throughout the rest of the novel:

I have arrived. Whether she lives up to her reputation? O yes! A great mind, a great dignity and yet very mild – milder than I expected – but also a lot of self-confidence. That is no criticism. What would she be, what would her people be, when she did not have it? They call her mother, and rightly so. She is it, however, more in mind than in deed, which is unfortunately only seldom hers (Fischer 1809, 1).

Alexander's 'barely hidden criticism, despite his claim to the contrary' and his attempt to subsume Iwanova under conventional categories of femininity indicate the fundamental theme of the story, namely the ambivalence towards women and power (Harms 2013, 46). The first lines of the opening letter already show that the novel will primarily revolve around the 'reputation', i.e. the subjective perception and construction of the sovereign woman. All information we receive about Iwanova are subjective interpretations of Alexander, such as 'It *seems to*  *me* as if she has changed' (Fischer 1809, 10, my emphasis). His letters are in fact hardly recognisable as such: they consist of a rapid and fragmentary succession of emotional outbursts, fleeting impressions, and sudden thoughts. Through a repeated use of apostrophes, a highly coloured image of the absent Iwanova arises: 'Unhappy woman! On your lonely throne, you begged for love, but it was not given to you. The immense pain threatened to destroy you, so you fled into the jaws of lust' (50).

These thematic and formal elements – monologic narration, an emotional and associative language, a male narrator who is pathologically struggling with his place in society, and the performative construction of a largely absent female character – all remind of a work that had become a literary landmark in early nineteenth-century Germany, namely Goethe's epistolary novel *Die Leiden des jungen Werthers* (1774). Late eighteenth-century literature in Europe was especially influenced by the epistolary novel as created by Richardson and Rousseau, whose novels display letters of all main protagonists, thus creating a more objective account of the events and situating them in broader familial and societal contexts. By radically isolating the perspective of the hero, Goethe broke with this dominant model and introduced a new subjective tone in Western literary history (Safranski 2013, 159–62). Yet rather than merely imitating Goethe's seminal work, Fischer uses its formal innovations for her own purposes and varies them. While her other epistolary novels lie in the tradition of Richardson's and Rousseau's polyphonic novels, adopting the one-sided, almost narcissistic viewpoint of *Die Leiden* enabled her to reveal that both the figures of the dangerous female sovereign and the angelic virtuous woman are in fact subjective and masculine constructions.12

Because of its single perspective, the novel seems to offer an unanimously negative account of female rule. In contrast, polyphonic epistolary novels usually create a plurality of divergent opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Yet the idea that the role of women lies outside the political sphere was hardly disputed around 1809. Hence, it would have been rather difficult to insert a letter that is openly positive about the question of female power – or, in Rancièrian terms, a letter that is directly criticising the police distribution of capacities, functions, and destinies according to gender. Instead, in far more subtle ways, dissenting voices are woven into the seemingly single perspective of the novel.

A first example concerns the voices of Alexander's relatives, who function as the 'narratees' or fictional addressees of his letters. Although their responses are never shown, Alexander repeatedly refers to their answers in his last letters. His writing thus increasingly approaches a dramatic mode of expression, as Anita Runge points out (Runge 1997, 23). He for instance opens one letter with a seemingly literal repetition of a reproach of his family: '*Thoughtless? And more ruthless to [Iwanova], than I have ever been?* How soft should I be, according to you? – You fear. What do you fear?' (Fischer 1809, 168, my emphasis). According to Runge, the criticism of his family functions as an 'irritating accent' against Alexander's seemingly homogeneous discourse (Runge 1997, 107). It opens another perspective on Iwanova that is confirmed and strengthened through a surprising narrative intervention at the end of the text. While Goethe's novel opens with an introduction by a fictional editor, thus making clear from the outset that Werther's letters are part of an embedded narrative, only at the final page of *Der Günstling* does a fictional editor enter the story. The higher narrative level of the frame is thus only inserted at the end, which is 'the rarest and most striking type' of narrative embedding according to Monika Fludernik (Fludernik 2009, 22). While the editor in Goethe's story largely endorses Werther's viewpoint and conduct and aims at enlarging the reader's identification and sympathy, the editor in *Der Günstling* agrees with the criticism of Alexander's family:

These were the last lines of Alexander to his family. They have reproached him with thoughtlessness and ruthlessness, unfortunately, with good reason. He, who was normally always in control of himself, could now no longer suppress the repugnance to his enemy. […] But this harshness drove the unhappy woman to extremes (Fischer 1809, 172).

The fact that Alexander's narration is for the first time explicitly questioned by another narrating instance has an alienating effect that is increased by the surprise effect of the change in narrative levels. This formal intervention thus causes a turn on the level of story as well: the editor proclaims that Alexander's treatment of Iwanova has provoked her extreme reaction, which casts doubt on the societal conviction of the inherent danger of female power.

Applying a Rancièrian vocabulary allows us to grasp the dissensual potential of the narrative situation of this novel: the radical subjectivity of Alexander's perspective and the criticising voices of both the narratees and extradiegetic narrator are in fact challenging 'the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world', more in particular, the perception of women as having either an inherently corrupt or unpolitical domestic nature (Rancière 2004, 10). By upsetting 'any steady relationship between manners of speaking, manners of doing and manners of being', Fischer's novel tries to suggest an alternative partition of the sensible (14).

Finally, Alexander's own discourse on Iwanova provokes a more complex reading as well. As a highly educated, intelligent, and upper-class man, he is the type of narrator who is conventionally associated with reliability and authority (Allrath and Surkamp 2004, 155–7). Yet the authority of his narration is increasingly called into question, and at times it even resembles unreliable narration. It becomes increasingly clear that Alexander is not the self-controlling and rational man he claims to be, as he is often overwhelmed by his violent emotions, torn by constant doubts and inner conflicts, and repeatedly contradicts previous convictions (Fischer 1809, 50 and 169). Throughout the story, he struggles in vain to reconcile his personal desires with the ambitions of his family, his duty towards the country, and his social and political dependency on Iwanova (Harms 2013, 53). His increasing despair is made evident by the emotional language of the letters, which are characterised by exclamations, rhetorical questions and broken sentences. This already troubled perception of the story world is further distorted by his growing antipathy towards Iwanova, which becomes especially manifest when he falls ill. During his feverish delirium, the perception of Iwanova is more coloured than ever, and his aversion to her grows into sheer 'madness' (Fischer 1809, 149).

On the other hand, he allows a sneaking respect or admiration for her, for instance when he calls her 'noble' (11), 'mild' and 'kind' (119), praises her self-control and sense of duty (45), and even asserts that she deserves the designation 'The Great' (110). Then again he condemns her for being 'cruel' (30), 'fiery' (39), and 'consumed by a terrible passion' (110). One moment he perceives of her as a terrifying, inhuman, Medusa-like figure,13 the next he is filled with deep compassion because of her – perceived – loneliness and unhappiness. Alexander's dissonant assertions testify to what extent he seems to struggle with the available codes and with his own categories and models of thought in order to cope with the phenomenon of female rule. Through his discordant speech, a heterogeneous plurality of different, incompatible 'versions' of Iwanova arises, which again undermines the self-evidence of police dogmas and ideologies.

The last formal strategy of importance here is plot structure. The story is driven by the two scenarios that have dominated Western literature at least since the late eighteenth century: the marriage plot and the plot of the *Bildungsroman.* Both plot structures are intimately connected with the values, norms, and world views advocated by the emerging middle class. Principles such as the idealisation of the bourgeois family or the ideology of the separate spheres also figure prominently in *Der Günstling.* On the other hand, as scholars have rightly noted, Fischer's protagonists also look critically at some aspects of bourgeois life. Alexander denounces, for instance, the exhausting work regime that is expected from him as a statesman, as it is undermining his mental and physical health (Harms 2013, 55–6) and might threaten his relationship with Maria (Dawson 2002, 84). In general, however, most values and norms associated with the nineteenth-century middle classes seem to be endorsed on the level of story.

This ideological stance makes the end of the novel all the more striking. As the story proceeds, *Der Günstling* seems to turn more and more into a parody on the *Bildungsroman:* Alexander initially left his family to search for professional and private success, but because he rejects Iwanova, he loses his career and social status, and his wedding ends in violence and death. *Der Günstling* thus engages critically with two prominent literary genres of its time: the epistolary novel and the *Bildungsroman,* of which the prototypical example, *Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre* (1794/96), was also written by Goethe. Instead of outlining the *Bildung* of its subject, Alexander's letters register his increasing alienation and collapse. The novel also responds to the genre's exclusive focus on *Bildung* as a male process, by showing how Maria's eagerness to receive a scientific and artistic education is disapproved by Alexander, who dismisses her inquisitiveness as something 'that could distract her attention away from me' (Fischer 1809, 56). Through this manipulation of generic conventions, the novel reveals the incongruities of Enlightenment ideals such as *Bildung* and exposes the regulation in bourgeois gender ideology of 'the "proper" relationship between what a body "can" do and what it cannot' (Rancière 2010, 140). By placing one woman in the position of a political ruler and the other in the position of a subject striving for *Bildung*, maturation and self-realisation, the novel introduces female bodies 'into a new configuration of the sensible' and participates in a 're-distribution in the whole set of relationships between capacities and incapacities', which is a central example of 'aesthetic rupture' (140).

The figure of Maria demonstrates that the only possible course for female characters lies in the marriage plot. Today, feminist narratologists have well established the dominance of this heteronormative scenario in narratives featuring female protagonists.14 Yet as Judith Roof revealed in her seminal study *Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative* (Roof 1996), not only the novel of marriage is intrinsically heteronormative but virtually *any* narrative that is oriented towards futurity and closure – as, indeed, most stories usually are. She points out to what extent prevailing understandings about what narratives are, depend on endings (6). She emphasises that narratives are essentially heterocentric even when they do not appear to represent sexuality at all. Roof is in other words not so much interested in literal representations of sexualities, but instead, she traces how narrative's teleological structure metaphorically reaffirms and reconfigures a reproductive heteroideology (xxviii).

Because of its emphasis on the developing love story between Alexander and Maria, the plot of Fischer's novel seems to be driven by a teleological development towards the founding of a heteronormative couple and nuclear bourgeois family. Yet the abrupt and violent ending of the novel interferes with this scenario. One could raise objections against this analysis by arguing that Maria's and Alexander's death is nothing more than a variation of the marriage plot: after all, the extradiegetic narrator describes their death as their 'union for all eternity' (Fischer 1809, 173), and the connection between love and death is a conventional topos in the history of Western literary imagination, as, for instance, Denis de Rougemont has argued (De Rougemont 1983). Moreover, their mutual death once more replays the heteronormative 'narrative structure of joinder and completion to which we are accustomed as the premise of narrative satisfaction' (Roof 2015, 49). From this angle, the ending of Fischer's novel would not so much undermine but rather *reproduce* the bourgeois and heteronormative marriage plot. However, it can be argued that the 'eternal union' of Alexander and Maria follows a radically different logic. The tragic ending of the lovers was anticipated by a letter of Maria, inserted halfway in the novel, in which she describes a prophetic dream about her and Alexander being killed by Iwanova and ascending to heaven:

Would it be possible for two people to only think of one another? To only find happiness in one another? That must be an indescribable and blessed state! … There was a large, glorious angel, who caught us with his wings. … We heard heavenly music … We floated higher and higher, there were a thousand stars around us … it was as if you were me, and I were you, and I knew … everything you thought (Fischer 1809, 122–5).

According to Anita Runge, the letter affirms the image of Maria as 'childwoman' (Runge 1997, 60). Yet it presents more than a mere sentimental and naive fantasy: it is the only moment in the novel when a female voice disrupts the dominant masculine and heteronormative logic. Maria dreams of a removal of all differences and boundaries between lovers in another dimension, characterised by an almost static and eternal temporality. Her vision, refusing closure, futurity, and productivity, is at odds with the logic of the bourgeois family, which hinges upon reproduction, progress, and strict differences between the male and female position. This challenge to normative conceptions of time is what several queer theorists have called 'queer temporality.' As Judith Halberstam has argued in *The Queer Art of Failure* (Halberstam 2011), time is not a neutral or objective given, nor is it value free. In dominant conceptions of time and history, temporal development is interpreted as a linear movement that builds on the old and proceeds according to a generational logic. The main social form connected to this temporal model is that of the family, with its emphasis on lineage and tradition (70–75). Queer challenges to time, on the other hand, seek for alternative ways of relating people and operate 'against the logics of succession, progress, development, and tradition proper to hetero-familial development' (75).

These arguments allow us to conclude that Fischer's novel is *queering* the heteronormative, bourgeois plots of both marriage and *Bildung*. To take this argument even one step further, I would suggest that the inherent structure and temporality of epistolary fiction *in se*, where the narrator during the act of writing can have no sense yet of the final outcome of the story, disrupts and *queers* the specific temporal and teleological organisation crucial to both the plots of romance and *Bildung*. 15 This leads to the important insight that, although some aspects of bourgeois ideology are criticised on the level of story, these world views undergo a much more profound subversion on the formal level.

#### Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have traced how Caroline Auguste Fischer's novel *Der Günstling* is shaped by and responds to its historical moment, especially when it comes to the political exclusion of women. Although I have focused on one individual case study, the analysis has shed light on the 'political' – in the Rancièrian sense of the term – potential of early nineteenth-century German women's writing as a whole. Moreover, it has addressed a central debate in literary studies since decades, namely the relationship between a literary text and its (many) context(s).

In the first place, this contribution has shown that even neglected and ostensibly conventional literary texts can actively negotiate their relationship to broader contextual issues, instead of being only a passive echo of prevailing societal discourses. *Der Günstling* seems to reproduce police distributions regarding gender and power on a mimetic level, but a combination of feminist-narratological and Rancièrian analysis has proven to be a fruitful approach to reveal its dissensual faculty. By taking up two dominant literary genres of her time and consistently incorporating innovations on the level of form and structure, Fischer can challenge the self-evident de-politicisation of femininity in contemporary ideology and discourse. As such, the novel essentially reminds of and affirms the scenarios of artistic political intervention as explored by Jacques Rancière. The societal consensus on woman's domestic nature and the ambivalence towards female political participation can explain why Fischer did not incorporate direct statements on women's political exclusion in her novel, but used narratological devices and intricate plot lines to define a form of dissensus instead. Hence, a final conclusion is that, although formalist and politically engaged readings are to a certain extent still considered incompatible, only a methodology combining a narratological and historicist approach can elucidate the political efficacy of a text that cannot dissent 'in any literal way'.

#### Notes

(*Julchen Grünthal. Eine Pensionsgeschichte,*  1784*),* Sophie Mereau (*Das Blüthenalter der Empfindung. Roman,* 1794; *Marie,*  1798; *Amanda und Eduard. Ein Roman in Briefen,* 1803; *Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt,* 1806*),* Therese Huber (*Louise. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Konvenienz,* 1796; *Die Ehelosen*, 1829*),* Caroline Auguste Fischer (*Die Honigmonathe,* 1802; *Margarethe,* 1812; *Justine,* 1818*),* Johanna Schopenhauer (*Gabriele. Ein Roman,* 1819/20; *Sidonia,*  1827/28*),* Ida Hahn-Hahn (*Gräfin Faustine,* 1841*)*.

"contextually driven concerns" (835) into account' (Kindt and Müller 2003, 415, my emphasis).

#### Works cited

Pateman, Carole. 1988. *The Sexual Contract.* Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Roof, Judith. 1996. *Come As You Are. Sexuality and Narrative.* New York: Columbia University Press.

Safranski, Rüdiger. 2013. *Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens. Biographie.* München: Carl Hanser Verlag.

### 5 Literary form and limited liability: it-narratives and the context of corporate law in the British public sphere, 1860–1880

Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen

'What philosopher can explain to me the nature of the causes of which I am the vile effect?'

> Laurence Oliphant. 'Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company (Limited)'. 1876.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, it has become common to imagine corporate and financial bodies as autonomous or even cognisant entities. The concept of 'corporate personhood', the idea that companies, as 'artificial persons', are, in fact, legal subjects separate from the humans who form them, underscores this metaphorical autonomy, even if it remains a somewhat controversial concept in corporate law. The legal definition of a company as a 'corporate person' is useful insofar as it safeguards individuals from personal liability and thus facilitates investment, but it also sits uneasily with ethical and legal concerns about corporate responsibility. As a legal concept, as well as a cultural metaphor, corporate personhood also mediates a fantasy of containment – a fantasy of a separate and autonomous place known as 'the financial sector' in which the business of trade takes place according to obscure rules and conducted by experts who are functionally if not ethically 'in the know'. Even so, incorporation is a lot less controversial today than it used to be. In the late nineteenth century, when incorporation was deregulated and gradually became a common form of business organisation, the idea of a corporate person was still highly controversial and gave rise to an inflamed ethical and political discussion about corporate responsibility. The debate took place in several discourses but became particularly nuanced in fiction, where the abstractions of high finance could be interpreted, questioned, and concretised by the narrative and rhetorical devices of imaginative writing.

In this article, I shall focus on the late Victorian period, when rapid financial development afforded new and controversial ways of making money in corporate enterprise. One of the most controversial developments, propagated by deregulatory legislation in the 1840s and 1850s, was the increased availability of company incorporation and the extension of 'limited liability' privileges to smaller and smaller private companies. Corporate personhood was a highly controversial topic (economically, politically and ethically) in the 1870s and sparked debates across the public sphere. In this context, narrative fiction, I shall argue, played a key part in negotiating the ethics of these new financial institutions. Literary discourse was able to shed light on the concrete influences of changing economic structures on social and interpersonal experience – to displace finance from its rhetorical obscurity and resituate it in a domain of cultural and aesthetic visibility. Literary devices such as anthropomorphism, narrative form, and prosopopoeia helped common readers understand how corporate finance worked, paradoxically enough by representing companies as fundamentally uncanny or contradictory entities.

More specifically, I shall analyse the relationship between the new developments in corporate law and a contemporary literary text that built its internal structure directly on this logic of corporate organisation. In his short fictional essay from 1876, 'Autobiography of a Joint Stock Company (Limited)', Laurence Oliphant lets a joint stock company be the narrator of its own biography, thus giving narrative authority to an abstract, immaterial financial entity. This anthropomorphic perspective, typical of object tales or 'it-narratives', dramatises the issue of corporate 'personhood' in a highly specialised and direct way. Oliphant's text is entangled, formally as well as contextually, in its historical moment and gives literary form to a discussion about incorporation and liability that was not possible in the financial press, in political economy, or even in novels – a form that engages *formally* with the economic context in question.

In this article, I aim to demonstrate that Oliphant's text offers a unique take on the public debate about joint stock companies in the 1870s. The formal nature of its intervention in an economic context puts it within something of a blind spot in the field of literary studies of economics and finance, which has been predominantly organised around studies of the realist novel.1 It draws on different generic structures – differently orientated connections between writer, text, audience and context – that are difficult to reconcile with either formalist or historicist methodologies and thus, I argue, calls for an analysis based on an extended concept of *form*. In the first section, I briefly introduce the field of literary studies of finance and argue for an expansion of its traditional empirical horizon to include, on a more consistent basis, financial it-narratives. In the second section, I briefly flesh out the specific aspects of late Victorian corporate law which relate to corporate personhood. In the third section, I analyse Oliphant's text with an emphasis on the nature of its engagement with this financial context. In the fourth, fifth and concluding sixth section, I discuss these insights by reflecting historiographically on the use of the 'context concept' in the field and, referring to recent scholarly works on form, suggest a methodological reorientation towards the historicity of economic and aesthetic *forms*.

#### Economic contexts and the social cycle of things

The contemporary scholarly field of literary studies of economics has always had an erratic and changeable attitude towards the concept and methodology of historical context. In a recent survey article, Nancy Henry attributes the conflict between (new) formalist and historicist methodologies to a fondness for comparisons between 'nineteenthcentury economics [and] the present economic climate' (Henry 2015, 217). On the one hand, formalist critics argue that the 'truly financial element' (Kornbluh 2014, 13) of literary realism is not the contexts of contemporary finance, but the *form* of 'aesthetic disclosure' (13). On the other, historicists argue that the specificity and particularity of a given historical moment and the specific public debates about finance it occasions, constitute the determining frame of reference for understanding a work of fiction as an utterance which is, so to speak, in dialogue with its own historicity. Excellent research is conducted from both sides of the spectrum, but the best new works, Henry concludes, 'are those that balance historicism and formalism, providing both viable historical narratives and original interpretations of literary texts' (Henry 2015, 221). This division is by no means absolute, but most scholars in the field have a stake in the theoretical discussion about context, which is particularly pertinent in this field.

My aim in this article is not to distance myself from the field, nor to attempt reconciliation between historicism and formalism. Rather, I want to address the empirical horizon which has kept scholars predominantly preoccupied with the novel, while the significance of other genres of literary fiction about finance has been somewhat marginalised. To be sure, the research on the major British novelists has been crucial for a historically and culturally qualified understanding of nineteenth-century anxieties about finance, but other texts existed that afforded, and still afford, other insights which were not determined by the material and commercial circumstances of novel writing and publication.

It-narratives, also known as 'novels of circulation' or 'object tales', are a good example of this. In short, it-narratives are fictional narratives (short as well as novel-length) about objects or animals, often narrated in the first person by these objects or animals themselves, usually based on the satirical insights afforded by the free movement of mundane things, inscribed narratively with aesthetic and cognitive sensibilities, between the sociopolitical boundaries of society. The genre became popular during the growth of commercial society in eighteenth-century Britain, and contains several subdivisions (animal narratives, organ narratives etc.). In the following, I will focus on the so-called 'specie narrative' in which monetary tokens narrate their horizontal movements across financial networks and the hierarchies of commercial society.2 A 'curious record of British society's relationship with its material framework' (Blackwell 2007, 12), the genre and its preoccupation with the silent and hidden circuits of monetary things indeed offered a salient allegory of a society increasingly organised by the flow of money and paper in only partially visible networks.

The defining feature of it-narratives is the narrative authority it attaches to the perspective of objects. Coins, bank notes and other monetary tokens 'move freely' between sociopolitical boundaries, because they move organised according to the horizontal logic of the market rather than the vertical hierarchies that restrict human interaction to predetermined relationships. Liz Bellamy has distinguished it-narratives from novels by attributing the former with a preoccupation with disunity, fragmentation, and a lack of narrative closure. Novels, she argues, 'are primarily structured around a plot that culminates in the establishment of permanent bonds between individuals' (Bellamy 2007, 122). Whereas novelistic realism depends on internal continuity and narrative coherence, it-narratives, she argues, represent a social reality characterised by disunity, disorder, and permanent flux: 'the [social] relationships […] are inherently transitory […] They are narratives of irresolution' (122). The objects themselves are often characterised by a lack of 'independent agency' (121), which makes them subject to the haphazard movements and motivations of human actors, but this in turn affords them this different horizon of information. Such a fictional perspective allows writers to imagine commercial society from a specialised position which subsequently frames the narratives as 'disclosures' of covert information.

This element of disclosure also shapes the formal properties of it-narratives. Essentially a string of more or less random encounters between objects and people, their narratives often take the form of 'an accumulation of interpolated accounts' (122) rather than a causal chain of events. It-narratives resist causality, Bellamy argues and, while this diminished contemporary taste for their literary merits, it also allowed them to render commercial reality in a different form. She continues:

By refusing to enclose individual stories within a structure of fictional containment, these works are able to explore the social system from a range of ideological positions and with a satirical vision that avoids the reassertion of hegemony and negation of subversion that tends to be implicit within narrative resolution (124).

It-narratives, then, probe the disunity of commercial reality, the rhizomatic and networked ontology of commercially mediated social relations. Bellamy's argument might be overstressed, as the element of disunity and incoherence are also very much at work in realist novels focused on the obscurity of modern commerce and finance.3 She is right, however, in asserting that these texts are fundamentally different (formally and structurally) from the classic novels of Victorian realism and that their stories about economic life provide insights calibrated according to a different and highly specialised literary mediation. Therefore, they should be analysed with a different set of terms when it comes to the distinction between the narrative itself and the economic context in which it is nested.

#### Corporate persons in the age of financialisation

In the 1870s, that context was still influenced by the introduction and early naturalisation of joint stock companies. Until the 1840s and 1850s, such companies had been a relatively rare sight. Before the company Acts of these decades, incorporation and its attendant privileges of limited liability was only granted to major public works such as railways, canals, and mining operations (Poovey 2003, 9–18; Taylor 2006, 3–8).4 The political aversion to incorporation had roots in the disastrous South Sea bubble in 1719–20, and only started to give way to free trade and *laissez-faire* arguments after the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844. The proponents for deregulation contended that the strictness of corporate law was an impediment to economic growth (Taylor 2006, 9) and an unnecessary restriction of freedom (Robb 1992, 24). Because of the possibilities of risk diversification afforded by limited joint stock companies, the private wealth of directors as well as shareholders became safer from bankruptcy and fraud suits and financial speculation consequently became less perilous and much more profitable.5 The economic 'surrogacy' provided by the limited liability principle drew new lines between economic and personal life and upturned many of the prevailing notions of economic responsibility, ownership, and agency within the economic sphere. This gave rise to a long and heated public discussion about the ethics of risk diversification and the unsettled connection between personal and economic integrity it entailed.6 This debate took place in many discourses, but assumed a special significance within narrative fiction in its various forms: novels of all kinds, short prose fiction, satires, even lyrical poetry and – of course – it-narratives. Literary form thus became a key player in negotiating new concepts and categories related to corporate law and finance, because it could mediate, in a publicly intelligible way, the ways in which abstract economic forms permeated not just the financial sector, but the private lives of individuals.

#### 'An abstract being like myself': corporate personhood and literary form

While the popular serial novels about finance, such as Charles Dickens' *Little Dorrit* (1857) and Anthony Trollope's *The Way We Live Now* (1875) rather famously provide insights into Victorian anxieties about finance, it-narratives offer a different and more direct staging of how the contemporary public imagination was troubled by the proliferation of joint stock companies and financial capital. Laurence Oliphant's 'Autobiography of a Joint Stock Company (Limited)' from 1876 is one of the most radical attempts to approximate literary form to the specificity of joint stock companies. By telling a story about corporate finance from the perspective of a financial entity, not from human economic agents, it is able to foreground the ethical problem of limited liability in a way which highlights implicit tensions in the form of corporate personhood. The narrator reports on its 'brief and stormy career' (Oliphant 2003, 327) as a limited company (presumably a large international bank)7 from its 'gestation' in the brain of an adventurous speculator via its birth at the registrar of joint stock companies to its 'deathbed' in the 'Court of Chancery', all of which is narrated in the past tense from the point of view of the company in its final hours before 'liquidation'.

The company narrator is anthropomorphised through the autobiographical coding and narrative structure of the text. With no byline, the text further signals a satirical element, while also inscribing itself within the collective authority of the periodical in which it appears.8 The paratext thus allows the company narrator to speak from a position of testimonial authority. The company has supposedly ruined thousands and extends this 'most timely and instructive warning' (328) as penance for its crimes. It asks to be recognised as a fellow victim of larger, systemic shifts in society. As victim and offender both, it claims a moral faculty, and the text employs displays of empathy and psychological interiority to calibrate reader response to sympathetic engagement. The narrator addresses its anticipated readership directly: 'I address myself to you, fair readers […] the parsons, the widows, the orphans, the officers on half pay, the rich squires, the titled dupes' (328). It also acknowledges that it is far more likely to be read by speculators, brokers, and other stockjobbers, who will read its story 'as thieves read the police reports […] on account of the affectionate interest they take in the profession' (329).9 The tension between its moral conscience and sense of interiority on the one hand, and its complete lack of independent agency on the other, is the primary narrative tension afforded by the coupling of an anthropomorphic perspective and the formal logic of the limited company. The company narrator's moral faculty affords no jurisdiction over the actions ordered of it by the board of directors. It wields no influence over its own actions and exists solely as a vehicle for the will, whims and actions of its board members.

Oliphant's narrator, in other words, anthropomorphises a limited company into a recognisably moral subject by calibrating its narrative form to the elements of disclosure and empathetic engagement afforded by the coding of the text as a deathbed testimony. The position of psychological interiority from which the company speaks is thus different from the empirical reality it inhabits insofar as the former allows for moral judgements while the latter (the financial sector) is a space of action rather than contemplation. This incommensurability between a sphere of action and a sphere of contemplation underlines the notion that financial activity is closed off to the jurisdictions of ethics and even politics.

The generic framework of the it-narrative, however, is what gives the text its unique narrative structure. The company narrator thinks and narrates as a single psychic entity, but senses material reality through the various pieces of paper (prospectus and share certificates) on which it exists in writing at any given time. It is thus characterised simultaneously by centrality and decentrality, by psychological unity and simulacral proliferation. The company began its maturation in the mind of a speculator, was born into material reality on the prospectus offered to initial investors and from there spread out to countless pieces of paper, as the prospectus and share documents multiplied, duplicated, and spread to the pockets of all the syndicate members and eventually, the shareholders. This gives it access to otherwise inaccessible information. The company often explains how it obtains certain snippets of incriminating information from within the jacket pockets of the very people for whom it assumes liability. This is also the way the text introduces narrative tension and suspense, as in the following case, where the company suddenly sees itself implicated in an insider-trading scheme which eventually overinflates it into insolvency.

I must here remind my reader that having been printed in so many forms, I now filled the pockets of all the syndicate members, and that it was owing to this circumstance that I overheard the following conversation in Mr. Mire's office [one of the directors] (343).

This decentral aisthesis is the key point I want to highlight here. As a morally well-adjusted, thinking subject, the company narrator is characterised by centrality – whatever the size and scope of the company, it remains *one* individual, one corporate person. At the same time, however, the senses by which it registers events and people around function according to a differently proliferating logic. In turn, this networked sensibility supplies the corporate person with *too much* information – knowledge which it can never translate into action except by writing it down in autobiography, by bearing witness.

This use of decentral narrative logic differentiates Oliphant's text from other specie narratives, in which narrator and sensibility usually inhabit the same, singular material object. It is not a single coin or bank note circulating randomly, but a proliferating genre of economic writing (the forms representing a certain denomination of shares) that 'reports back' to the corporate entity they collectively constitute. This narrative perspective explodes the logic of physical proximity and subsumes plot and narrator both in a kind of formal stalemate in which the forms of cognitive sequence (thinking, writing) and spatial networking (circulation of paper) continually stress the contradictory nature of a speaking limited company. Interestingly, however, this contradiction allows the company to disclose otherwise covert information and inscribes its disclosure in a moral framework that is calibrated specifically to evaluate and judge the consequences of the information disclosed. Who better to judge the ethics of corporate finance than a financial company? The abstract body of the narrator, its network of sensory nodes mysteriously comprising a centralised cogito, mirrors at once the new networks of financial trade mediated entirely by paper and the telegraph and the divorce between ownership and control that the Company Acts of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain gradually implemented. As a moral surrogate for the syndicate members, the company assumes all the economic liability, but also, as a thinking, moral subject, all the guilt, shame, and embarrassment that must be removed from the equation if a company is to be profitable on the money market. Drawing on the vocabulary of aesthetic and political forms as 'comparable patterns that operate on a common plane', recently advocated by Caroline Levine (Levine 2015), one could say that a bounded whole affording centrality and singularity and a network affording proliferation and connectedness are overlapping here. Over the course of the text, this collision, which is essentially a collision between a literary form (narrative time) and a financial one (incorporated companies and their networks of circulating paper), mediates the central contradiction which is being addressed, namely, that the principle of corporate personhood, while immensely profitable, involved an ethical and social problematic for which the discourses of political economy or economic theory had an imperfect vocabulary. The core ideas behind limited liability, personhood, incorporation, and the attendant atomisation of ownership become the formal principles of the literary text itself. Limited liability translates into apathy, while the scattered ownership structure of incorporated companies organises the aesthetic experience of the company according to the network of sensory nodes (i.e. shares) that represent its substance (i.e. capital stock). The text's central tension is based on this contradiction inherent in incorporation (the 'giving body' to an abstract entity is not an ethically neutral operation) and comes to symbolise the moral impotence of modern finance – the narrator's inability to translate knowledge contemplation into action is the tragedy of its 'artificial' life.

This is not an outright accusation of financial capitalism. Rather, by letting one of the 'beings' of the 'financial sector' speak, Oliphant removes it (the financial sector) from the artificial domain of obscurity this has come to imply in the public discourses surrounding the financial market. The financial sector is not a mystical domain where hidden forces such as capitalism secretly govern the course of history. It is rather, it seems, merely another *social* sphere of action where high and low interests intersect. Oliphant's text thus gives specificity and context to the abstractions of financial capitalism, showing how limited companies are not ethereal entities (as they may appear) but concrete activities entered upon by concrete people motivated by regular interests and emotions. As opposed to the general trend of specie narratives, where money narrators tend to be relatively unconcerned with the 'paradox of value' and to have 'an unshakeable conviction of their own utility' (Bellamy 2012, xlvii), Oliphant's company narrator is extremely preoccupied with its nature and functionality as a joint stock company. While it acknowledges the potential of joint stock companies, affectionately referred to as 'my fraternity', this initial credit is quickly exhausted as the 'moral element' temporarily infused in its 'system' becomes 'expelled' (Oliphant 2003, 328) over the course of the narrative.

To conclude, then, Oliphant's curious text exposes the notion of a rationally coherent financial market as a fiction; a fiction whose function is to alienate the investing public from the prosaic nature of finance, the baseness of the interests proliferating in the modern market, and the specificities of ownership and management of joint stock companies, prone and vulnerable as they are to speculation and more or less illegitimate trading practices. Another fiction this implicitly engages is the notion of 'Economic Man' and the transparent and rational nature of 'the market'. If the entities who mediate market activity are allowed to speak, it seems, they tell not of informed rationality but rather of incoherence and erratic decision-making. The warning, then, is not against capitalism, but against letting greedy speculators play Doctor Frankenstein with your money – you never know which monstrosities your pension funds might end up creating and what kind of life (social as well as ethical) that monster will have to endure.

#### Financial metaphysics: form, genre, and history

Oliphant's 'Autobiography' appropriates a specific historical context and invests itself directly in the discussion of joint stock companies that began around mid-century and carried on through to the twentieth century. This kind of contextual entanglement is not, of course, unique to Oliphant's text. Many novelists of the Victorian age based their plots more or less implicitly on contemporary financial crises or fraud cases. In Oliphant's case, however, this reflection on contemporary finance is bilateral and occurs principally on the level of *form*. This happens in a way which, I shall now be arguing, destabilises the prevailing scholarly narrative about how literary narratives about the financial sector should be conceptualised historiographically.

In order to elucidate this point, it is necessary to reassess the prevalent concept of context. Oliphant's text uses the context of corporate law actively, as a formal architecture which organises the text into a literary approximation of the incorporation and limited liability principles. Unlike realist novels, which attempt to describe the different aspects that characterise the historical reality of their characters with a certain degree of accuracy or plausibility, the 'Autobiography' works instead toward a kind of philosophical realism, striving not for accuracy in detail but specificity in principle. The relationship between text and context is thus not of reflection or determination, but of appropriation and participation. This may be said of some novels as well, to a certain extent, but the 'Autobiography' is unique in the way it intermingles the form of its content with the form of its discursive logic. The generic mix that determines it is key to this hybridity. As it-narrative, it enacts and dramatises the hidden circuits of financial entities; as autobiography, it anthropomorphises a tale of corporate greed into useful information (and warning) for potential investors (the implied reader); and as testimony, it unveils and disenchants the machinery of joint stock companies and the kinds of relationships they institute between the people they connect. Finally, it then forces corporate personhood into cultural visibility by representing it as a matter of empathy rather than analysis. Through this combination of diverse genres, Oliphant's text is able to frame the question of finance in a way that is markedly different from most other accounts. Instead of representing the 'financial sector' as a place where people go to become either rich or destitute through the application of chance or the dark arts of speculation, he deconstructs the spatial metaphor on which the notion builds. By building the principles of incorporation and limited liability into literary form, he is not *representing* joint-stock enterprise, but *enacting it as a specific way of organising and categorising a plausible reality*. The underlying principles of the joint stock company with limited liability, namely, the separation of ownership and control and the limitation of economic responsibility, thus become the formal scaffolding to a mode of thinking mediated by the object of thought itself.

This makes Oliphant's text something of a curiosity within the paradigm of context and historiography currently being debated by literary and cultural researchers. The scholarly discussion of formalist and historicist methodology is still highly influenced by Rita Felski's provocatively titled article from 2011, 'Context Stinks!' Felski laments the Sisyphus-like pendulum that has come to determine literary scholarship, swinging it back and forth between formalist and historicist methodologies with an institutional rhythm of a few decades. The pendulum hinges at the 'context concept' which, she argues, 'inveigles us into endless reiterations of the same dichotomies: text versus context, word versus world, literature versus society and history, internalist versus externalist explanations of works of art' (Felski 2011, 576). From the vantage point of Latour's network theory, she instead advances the actor-network model as an alternative to the text-context distinction, one that allows the critic to do justice to both the 'singularity' and 'worldliness' of literary texts, by analysing them as 'non-human actors […] enmeshed in a motley array of attachments and associations' (589). Felski therefore, on the one hand, charges historicists of imprisoning texts 'in their moment of origin' (575) and on the other hand, formalists of a naive kind of 'transcendental' timelessness (575). Actor-network theory is the alternative, she argues, allowing the critic to see 'the social […] only in its instantiations, in the sometimes foreseeable, sometimes unpredictable ways in which ideas, texts, images, people, and objects couple and uncouple, attach and break apart' (578). Felski is not pitting formalism against historicism, nor seeking middle ground. Instead, she proposes a flat ontology of text that renders both meaningless.

Interestingly, Felski accuses the context concept of 'knowing [the text] far better than it can ever know itself' (574). In Oliphant's case, however, the 'knowing' flows in the opposite direction. As a literary text formally founded on the specificity of a certain context – joint stock companies and limited liability – the 'Autobiography' becomes meaningless if viewed from either methodological polarity: from a strictly formalist perspective, it is easy to overlook the role played by a contingent discussion about joint stock companies taking place within in its form, while a strictly historicist reading is likely to overlook the significance of its aesthetic qualities, its complex formal structure and assign it to the contextual orbits of the popular novels. The latter has so far been the fate of Oliphant's text, which is commonly referred to as a secondary curiosity in the margins of novel studies, but rarely analysed in its own right. As a periodical essay satirically masquerading as autobiography, it calls for a different and more compound set of terms, especially in relation to form and context and this discrepancy may explain the relative scarcity of literary studies dealing with it.10 From the perspective of novel studies, the text fails to achieve the transhistoricity of 'exceptional texts' and does not, as a work of periodical short fiction, seem to merit independent discussion in that context. However, when analysed as a work of narrative fiction in its own right, the text becomes, in my view, highly exceptional, and of methodological relevance to the field of literary studies of finance.

A slight recalibration of terms remains necessary to explain the significance of a text such as Oliphant's in this field. First of all, it is important to remember that any literary text is a product of aesthetic mediation. Even in the late nineteenth century, any text about finance, literary or not, struggled with the scarcity of reliable information about companies and institutions. Indeed, as Mary Poovey has pointed out, 'the lack of readily available information means that every piece of writing about finance in this period [nineteenth century] was an attempt to understand and interpret something that was only partially visible and constantly in a state of change' (Poovey 2003, 4). Credible journalistic accounts of how financial institutions and companies really functioned were rare, so any one individual writing about financial institutions would never have access to the full picture and any resulting texts would be inherently speculative. Oliphant's text strives for economic and social realism, but is, perhaps, more akin to a kind of philosophical conjecture than mimetic representation. As aesthetic mediation, it works performatively, not mimetically. Anna Kornbluh, in the case of the realist novel, attributes this performativity to all literary form, arguing that 'Form […] wields a conceptual agency – an agency for assembling concepts while simultaneously defamiliarizing them' (Kornbluh 2014, 16). Literary texts that engage with economic ideas through transformative mediation are not texts *about* finance but an exercise in 'the formal logic of capital' (13) itself. Kornbluh stresses the capacity of realism to create 'excessive, aberrant, counterfactual realities' which, to a higher degree than 'documentary evidence' allows it 'to think the conditions of ficticious capital' (4).11 Even if this is true across literary genres and discourses, however, it is also true that novels and most other self-contained genres inevitably fail to implement this in full. Oliphant's text is conspicuous here because it combines marginal genres, differently calibrated to reader response and historical context, into a composite discourse whose function is not to depict nor mediate – in any real sense – stories about humans and their money, but, instead, to force the contradictory and ambiguous nature of joint stock companies into full view, allowing it to appear in precisely those forms which its contradictory nature affords. The form of corporate personhood thus adjusts literary form to suit it, and not the other way round.

#### The *form* of contexts

What is needed, then, to explain the significance of Oliphant's 'Autobiography' is a concept of form that is bound neither by the context concept nor the form/content distinction; a formalism attuned to historical specificity as well as the discursive functioning of aesthetic mediation. A persuasive attempt at such a formalism was recently put forth by Caroline Levine, in her 2015 book, *Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network*. Levine proposes a historical formalism based on an extensive definition of form, which includes 'all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference' (Levine 2015, 3). Form is not simply the rhetorical structure of literary discourse, but mechanisms that distribute the latent potentialities of materials, objects, and forms – in the empirical world as well as in discourse. Spatial and temporal forms alike (Levine includes bounded wholes, rhythm, hierarchy and network) organise individual, social and political experience in any given historical moment, setting the horizons for different intersecting ways of knowing and identification. The 'affordances' of various forms can overlap, delimit, and travel across material reality and discursive domains, determining 'what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context' (5). Levine does not apply her method to finance, but the possibility is implicit in the logic of her argument. Forms such as social hierarchies, financial legislation and even corporate entities are determined by a historical moment, in which they organise social and political experience. But these forms also travel historically and, in this view, continue to exert their influence over the popular imaginary of finance across decades. In this way, as structural principles, they permeate several social strata and geographical areas and also enter into the aesthetic, political and journalistic discourses that are active in the same moment. Forms move into literary texts by carrying their affordances with them into texts where they organise 'aesthetic experience' (5). In other words, forms, which are specific to a historical moment, at the same time as they move across historical time, exist *before* they appear as organising principles in discourse. Levine thus extends the vocabulary of formalism so that it, so to speak, becomes applicable to texts *as well as* contexts. This implies substituting the logic of causality (dialectics, structuralism) to the logic of 'collision', which affords a flat ontology of forms: