Serial Fiction as a Nation-Building Medium?
Warning: this post is has very little to do with The Portrait of a Lady in particular and is instead about its form, serial fiction.
Benedict Anderson’s chapter “Census, Map, Museum” from Imagined Communities offers the three media as a mode of colonial nation-building. The census groups and identifies in ways that, at first, do not affect or reflect the populations it reports, but as the census’ designations shape policy, the realities of living within the census groups created by the bureaucracies of education, policing, courts, clinics, etc. do begin to divide and shape the population along the colonizers’ imaginings of them. The map does the same thing with drawn borders, putting “space under the same surveillance which the census makers were trying to impose on persons” (173) and creating of the country’s silhouette a brand or logo. And, the museum creates the nation through aligning artifacts and art with the newly-delineated peoples and space; it creates a visual cultural history that the nation can embrace. But these modes of nation-building are not entirely confined to the colonial enterprise: we can imagine these phenomena at work in any time period wherein it behooves the hegemonic class or system to gird the nation into thinking of itself as such: that is, England after the second French Revolution or the postbellum United States both sought security through nationalism. This offers one explanation for why, during these times, cultural production reached new heights, especially of literary media.
In the postbellum and Victorian Eras mentioned above, one particularly popular form of literature that is still identified almost exclusively with this period is serialized fiction. The serial mode’s appropriateness to the times lies in its particular ability to create community. Much like the contemporary sitcom, the serial novel would have fostered conversation and a spirit of like-mindedness that the book form or the feature film cannot. Unlike these more condensed media, the protraction of the experience through months or years (either as the narrative unfolded in a magazine or through a television season) creates a shared temporal space in which to discuss and process what we collectively find interesting in them; they provide a space in which and a topic from which may evolve comradery. This is even more true for serial fiction than for the typical episode in a sitcom, because there is an inevitable suspense in the serial installation such as we only occasionally find in the television episode that is “To Be Continued...”. Such an episode leads to rehashing and speculation that strengthens the community of viewers and which was an expected part of reading serial fiction.
In serial fiction, we speculate as to motives and as to the fiction’s actors, thereby characterizing through reading in a way that reveals and makes obvious the readerly function; as we read together, we see the traces of our reading made clear, since we do not always read what others in the community do. Through the process of articulating and speculating within the reading community, the reader becomes invested in BOTH the literature and in the community: as he considers the literature with others, he invests and is invested in both his ideas and in his identity as one of a community of producers of ideas around the work. Star Trek is perhaps the most enduring present instance of this: the viewer finds value in the series and explores the nature of this value with others; as they reinforce each other’s valuation of the series, the value increases and evolves into an identity -- the Trekkie. While I will not attempt to argue that the production of Star Trek is a hegemonic attempt at nation-building (although one could probably say that it is), like serial fiction does, it does produce a community that complements a period of national anxiety (of space exploration and the Cold War) as much in the very fact of establishing a community as in the subject of the series itself.
The Portrait of a Lady was enormously popular on both sides of the Atlantic, speaking to its function more as a form than as a text whose content was national in character.
As with Anderson’s essay, the processes that the media (census, map, museum) enacted were as important than their contents. While these media were the means of initiating the colonizers’ imagined communities, the communities were not built until the imaginations within them self-identified as community members through engaging with the forms. Similarly, the postbellum or Victorian citizen who read serial fiction became part of a community not because of hegemonic enterprise in this direction, but he perhaps reflected through his choice of media a more generalized spirit of coming together in response to threats that would dissolve the nation.
Warning: this post is has very little to do with The Portrait of a Lady in particular and is instead about its form, serial fiction.
Benedict Anderson’s chapter “Census, Map, Museum” from Imagined Communities offers the three media as a mode of colonial nation-building. The census groups and identifies in ways that, at first, do not affect or reflect the populations it reports, but as the census’ designations shape policy, the realities of living within the census groups created by the bureaucracies of education, policing, courts, clinics, etc. do begin to divide and shape the population along the colonizers’ imaginings of them. The map does the same thing with drawn borders, putting “space under the same surveillance which the census makers were trying to impose on persons” (173) and creating of the country’s silhouette a brand or logo. And, the museum creates the nation through aligning artifacts and art with the newly-delineated peoples and space; it creates a visual cultural history that the nation can embrace. But these modes of nation-building are not entirely confined to the colonial enterprise: we can imagine these phenomena at work in any time period wherein it behooves the hegemonic class or system to gird the nation into thinking of itself as such: that is, England after the second French Revolution or the postbellum United States both sought security through nationalism. This offers one explanation for why, during these times, cultural production reached new heights, especially of literary media.
In the postbellum and Victorian Eras mentioned above, one particularly popular form of literature that is still identified almost exclusively with this period is serialized fiction. The serial mode’s appropriateness to the times lies in its particular ability to create community. Much like the contemporary sitcom, the serial novel would have fostered conversation and a spirit of like-mindedness that the book form or the feature film cannot. Unlike these more condensed media, the protraction of the experience through months or years (either as the narrative unfolded in a magazine or through a television season) creates a shared temporal space in which to discuss and process what we collectively find interesting in them; they provide a space in which and a topic from which may evolve comradery. This is even more true for serial fiction than for the typical episode in a sitcom, because there is an inevitable suspense in the serial installation such as we only occasionally find in the television episode that is “To Be Continued...”. Such an episode leads to rehashing and speculation that strengthens the community of viewers and which was an expected part of reading serial fiction.
In serial fiction, we speculate as to motives and as to the fiction’s actors, thereby characterizing through reading in a way that reveals and makes obvious the readerly function; as we read together, we see the traces of our reading made clear, since we do not always read what others in the community do. Through the process of articulating and speculating within the reading community, the reader becomes invested in BOTH the literature and in the community: as he considers the literature with others, he invests and is invested in both his ideas and in his identity as one of a community of producers of ideas around the work. Star Trek is perhaps the most enduring present instance of this: the viewer finds value in the series and explores the nature of this value with others; as they reinforce each other’s valuation of the series, the value increases and evolves into an identity -- the Trekkie. While I will not attempt to argue that the production of Star Trek is a hegemonic attempt at nation-building (although one could probably say that it is), like serial fiction does, it does produce a community that complements a period of national anxiety (of space exploration and the Cold War) as much in the very fact of establishing a community as in the subject of the series itself.
The Portrait of a Lady was enormously popular on both sides of the Atlantic, speaking to its function more as a form than as a text whose content was national in character.
As with Anderson’s essay, the processes that the media (census, map, museum) enacted were as important than their contents. While these media were the means of initiating the colonizers’ imagined communities, the communities were not built until the imaginations within them self-identified as community members through engaging with the forms. Similarly, the postbellum or Victorian citizen who read serial fiction became part of a community not because of hegemonic enterprise in this direction, but he perhaps reflected through his choice of media a more generalized spirit of coming together in response to threats that would dissolve the nation.
Hi Aimee!
ReplyDeleteAs someone dealing with another serialized text (those Victorians just serialized everything!), your analysis of serialization as the building of community and nation really spoke to me. I was struck by your point about the "shared temporal space" of serialized texts as this time of nation-building in Britain and America. It made me wonder about the fact that serialized narratives (generally) come to an end at some point, unlike maps and museums that may exist almost indefinitely, and whether that shorter duration of the serial affects the type of community that it builds? Or if the content/style of certain types of texts invite a community that is more persistent than other texts (once a Trekkie always a Trekkie?)? Or perhaps as the changing census suggests, the community of serial-readers, continuously dissolves and reforms itself into new serial groups as texts end and begin?