I take Russell’s wariness of how he infrastructure and structure model “seems… a formulation that could be applied to basically any situation, which makes it very promising but also makes me a little suspicious of it” (Coldicutt) especially when he puts it into account with traditional Marxist critique through some compelling historicization and a dash of media theory. I look forward to poking at that potentially sore spot in class, but here I’d prefer to lean into the ability of Levine’s proposed methodology to swell to the size of the object and think about Americanah, literary realism, and literary fiction writ large in the same frame.
Levine, I think, makes a very persuasive case for the way in which realist fiction can defamiliarize our habituation to the invisible infrastructures. Levine’s argument allows for realist fiction to supersede its traditional categorization as fundamentally conservative / anti-progressive, a form that reifies social structures rather than upends them, as, say, an avant-garde Modernist novel might. Americanah, and realist fiction in general, then has the capacity not just to paint the structures as they are, but to call our attention to their very making when they are by definition almost impossible to actually comprehend in their totality. As Ian Baucom (quoted in Levine’s article on page 593) argues, “Americanah belongs squarely in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism,” and Levine makes a real case to revisit realist fiction for its inherent radical potential, rather than dismissing it. But there’s a major distinction between Adichie’s novel and the nineteenth-century realist novel, in that it was published in 2013.
We have spent a great deal of time this semester talking about the ways in which literary fiction has responded to the rise of digital media and how this incorporation refigures our conception of genre, canonicity, epistemology, even the form of narrative itself. With a great reading of Americanah that deploys the same moves made in Lupton’s article, Russell points out the way in which the novel, through Ifemulu’s blog posts, points to itself as a book-y book that’s nonetheless part of the broader networked system of blog culture, but I don’t think the blogs themselves do much to really radically destabilize the novel form like Book From the Ground does (sorry, already looked ahead on the syllabus). Blog culture in the novel is mundane, because blog culture has become mundane in the culture – it’s how Ifemulu makes her money, and her role as a blogger is less akin to the liminal hacker of Snow Crash than it is to the itinerant writer or disillusioned shop-keeper of La Comédie humaine.[1] So when we see something like Americanah, it just seems so… old, so nineteenth-century.
But if we take Levine’s advice to pay more attention to the ways in which we’re habituated to avoid seeing infrastructure, perhaps Americanah’s nineteenth-century-ness is what’s really doing the defamiliarization in the first place. Against the crowded subfield of literary fiction working as hard as it possibly can to understand, respond and incorporate the rise of digitality in our contemporary world, Americanah stands out in its refusal to fall into the Modernist trap of “roughened verbal textures and often startling juxtapositions,” in order to “inject a sense of strangeness and surprise into its portrayal of the most commonplace phenomena” (Butler in Levine 596), while nonetheless dealing with the internet all along. The novel treats that which other works on our syllabus have found strange – digitality itself – and renders it commonplace.
Ifemulu drags her boyfriend Curt past racks of magazines to point out the all-too-often ignored system of racialized discrimination embedded in mass-market magazine production. Perhaps we as readers metaphorically walking past racks of review pages and syllabi and nice Barnes & Noble’s tables at the front of the store should see Americanah itself as the defamiliarizing rock in our shoe that knocks us out of our own habits of turning to novels that appear more transparently destabilized in the Modernist sense as the only sites of that radical politics in literature.
[1] Sorry for the near-constant references this semester to Balzac. Perhaps the conservative, anti-progressive realist in this story was me all along.
