Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity.

CAMINO, GONZALO MARTINEZ

ALLEN CAREY-WEBB. Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity. Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Volume 4. New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1998. Pp. xiv + 242. $55.00.

Carey-Webb's book is a piece of cultural research which studies how literary texts construct authority and subjectivity. The book is organized in two parts plus a theoretical introduction. In the first part Carey-Webb writes about seventeenth-century European theater, comparing Lope de Vega's El nuevo mundo descubierto pot Cristobal Colon and Shakespeare's The Tempest. The second part addresses the twentieth-century third world novel, with one chapter about Les bouts de bois de Dieu by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, and the other about Midnight's Children by the Indian Salman Rushdie. Working with a very heterogeneous group of texts, he uses different theoretical approaches in order to understand the links between them. The final result is both enlightening and risk-taking, even, sometimes, breath-taking. We have only to notice that Carey-Webb not only compares different national literatures, but also different cultural perspectives (First World versus Third World), different epochs (seventeenth century versus twentieth century), different ways of telling (and presenting) stories (theater versus novel), and different discourses (colonial and post-colonial).

Carey-Webb's reflections start from the controversy among Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Prasad Madhava, and others about the rhetorical nature and agency of Third World Literature and the concept of the Third World novel as a necessary representation of national history (national allegory). Making Subjects is about how modern literature establishes national identity, and the critique of nation making is the common ground which allows the author to compare a wide range of cultural elements mentioned above: perspectives, epochs, ways of telling, and discourses. The book's introduction elaborates Benedict Anderson's thesis (in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism) about how human subjects become capable of imagining themselves part of a national community that they defend wholeheartedly, even though it is abstract and repressive. According to Anderson, the development of a capitalist marketplace for printed books in European vernacular languages in the context of a massive, urban, anonymous, "clock time" form of culture makes possible the socio-semiotic process: to become national.

Carey-Webb's analysis is especially attractive for readers interested in drama. He searches for the historical place and socio-semiotic function of early modern European drama in the cultural economy, arguing that

 the true antecedents of what we would today describe as a national
 conscious begin to appear in the sixteenth century. John A. Armstrong
 argues that in this period profound economic, religious, and linguistic
 developments were matched with an increasing centralization and
 bureaucratization of the state apparatus (14).

Carey-Webb points out that in a society not yet fully literate, theater was a primary tool for building national subjects and communities. In this way, he furthers Anderson's ideas. For Anderson the circulation of new kinds of narratives, novels, and newspapers, in massive markets of reading audiences, create a new sense of belonging. Readers feel that other people, whom they will never meet face to face, are reading the same texts at the very same time as they are. Besides, these texts, in their turn, tell stories about how people who live far away from each other are following parallel, simultaneous actions and lives. For Anderson this modern sense of anonymous simultaneity is the prerequisite of national identity. However, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when there was not a wide reading audience, we have to wonder what kind of practice could be the antecedent of novels and newspapers. Drama played this role.

If early modern drama and third world literature occupy different margins of modern culture, Carey-Webb shows how these margins can help to define the center. Nationality, as Carey-Webb tells us, is a sense of inclusiveness/exclusiveness. After we observe in the Third World novel the hyper-visible and urgent necessity of creating some kind of continuity from sharp discontinuities, national homogeneity from cultural heterogeneity, we can see the representation of the non-European in Shakespeare's and Lope's texts in a different light. We pay attention to aspects of Western classics which were not so clear to us before; we discover that the flowing of our tradition is not seamless.

Both dramas staged the Other at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lope's El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon tells of Colon's voyage and the discovery of the New World. The drama represents, among other figures, Lope's version of the Caribbean islanders. They appear as a complex and hierarchical society. They respond individually and collectively to the Europeans' arrival. On the other hand, Shakespeare portrays the non-European in the character of just one individual, Caliban.

Lope and Shakespeare wrote the Other from a humanist rhetorical perspective. We witness an early modern elite ideology imagining the difference of a recently discovered non-European. Here Carey-Webb shows that being a national subject is more than the sense of belonging to a community of masses who believe their anonymous lives are following simultaneous parallel lines organized around a day-by-day clocked history. It is also to exclude someone. One of the strong points of this book is its analysis of the `beyond national' as the inescapable other face of the national. However, in a time and space when the beyond national couldn't be international, the Other couldn't be anything else but the subaltern. Thus we see how both Lope and Shakespeare create national drama by mixing, on purpose, noble and lower-class characters, breaking with Greek and Roman dramatic theory. The staged tensions are solved by the agency of the absolutist state which was creating a proto-national sense of belonging. Drama taught us the way to empire and in that way we found the nation.

GONZALO MARTINEZ CAMINO
Universidad de Cantabria