Response to Verónica Paula Gómez

Liam Connell

University of Brighton

https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/liam-connell

Response to Verónica Paula Gómez

Globalisation

Writing in 2009, Suman Gupta noted that “the development and gradual democratization of the internet […] coincided with the late twentieth-century […] term ‘globalization’, and to a large degree the conceptual underpinnings of the term and the realization of the possibilities of the internet have fed on each other” (2009, 77). I was reminded of this moment when reading the intervention from Verónica Gomez, not least because Gupta sees one feature of this entangling to be an emerging internet literature of hypertexts. For Gupta, “Literature in hypertext renders immediately visible the always available but usually hidden deformative quality of the literary text: the possibilities of hypertextual reading and writing brings to the surface […] and exposes the deformative nature of literature” (2009, 79).

Gupta’s analysis moves in two directions. On the one hand, he argues that electronic writing has more continuity with print-based literature than we might suppose: and he reads a novel such as The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson as an obvious precursor to electronic writing. Perhaps some of the gamification of reading that we can see in Writers are not Strangers exceeds this comparison and perhaps distinguishing Gomez’s two texts more fully might be one area for our discussion.

The second strand of Gupta’s argument is that something about the decentred means of production which underpins the internet married with a shift in the international order which promises a decentring of geopolitical power. I think this claim is useful for examining Gomez’s implication that the non-hierarchical textual form of her electronic texts unsettles a conventional dyad of the novel and nation. And the historical nature of this combination is one that I want to scrutinise.

If the term globalisation often reached for neoliberal conceptions of liquid economies, it did, at times, offer up the prospect of a cosmopolitanism-from-below in the form of protests (such as the Seattle demonstrations against the WTO) or in the form of democratic movements (such as the World Social Forum meetings since 2001). Since 2008, following the crisis of financial capitalism, and in the swell of populist nationalism, it has been common to claim the end of globalisation. How far this ending extends to popular movements as well as government policy, might be one area for debate.

At the same time, the ‘democratisation of the internet’ now seems a rather utopian claim. This process of a freedom-to-produce may already have waned by 2009 and now seems demonstrably over. Though it was given a brief fillip by social media platforms that initially enabled modes of protest, from the ‘Arab Spring’ rebellions in the Maghreb to the Occupy movements of western democracies, the reassertion of big tech and private ownership seems to be the defining feature of the communicative infrastructure that we commonly call the internet. We are now more likely to worry about what ‘the algorithm’ knows about us and how this is skewing the information that we receive, than we are to imagine that our data habits speak truth to power.

At the start of 2025, Gupta’s picture seems touchingly dated and we are likely to recognise different conjunctions than the one that he identified: we see Elon Musk invited into the US Federal Government by a nationalist-populist President to advise on the privatisation of the US Government. Simultaneously, we see Meta invest large sums to the President’s inauguration fund alongside a change of corporate leadership which promotes a prominent Republican who, under Trump’s first term, supported the President’s controversial nominees to the Supreme Court. Meta’s decision to abandon fact-checking in favour of community-notes might look like a democratic gesture, promoting ‘free-speech’ over censorship, but is more likely an alibi for algorithmic content-production which replicates the ideology of big tech under the guise of democratic content-making.

In the 2010s innovative novelists like Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, or Teju Cole took to Twitter to try to use this new technology to write fiction differently. This writing was less experimental than the texts that Verónica identifies. However, they did share some features of electronic literature which she identifies in Writers Are Not Strangers and novelling. Twitter is multimodal, it is interactive, and involves some, if minimal, ergodic reading practices, and this is (in the way of quote tweeting more than retweeting) recombinant. 

It is hard to imagine any of these writers taking to X to do the same in the 2020s. But even if they did, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest the platform’s algorithm dramatically tilts content in the direction of pre-scripted lines rather than towards users’ tastes. The familiar metaphor of the echo-chamber feels replaced by the metaphor of the foghorn.

And so, one of the questions I would want to ask is whether the political and technological context alters or impacts on the theoretical argument that Gomez is trying to make for the disruptive impact of these texts?

The interzone

The other question that I have is about the idea of the interzone. I am familiar with the argument that the origins of the novel coincided with the origins of nations and served as an instrument of nation-building as discursive formation. Gupta may be echoing this in his claims about globalisation. And, of course, the novel emerges out of technological innovations in the production of writing, which is why Benedict Anderson links the nation to ‘print capitalism’.

I think that Timothy Brennan is an exemplary advocate of this argument. And for our purposes it is valuable to note that he sees the novel as fundamentally political in distinction to the epic, which it replaces (Brennan 1990, 50). Furthermore, he sees the nation as “not simply an allegory or imaginative vision, but a gestative political structure, which the Third World artist is consciously building or suffering the lack of” (1990, 46–47).

This reference to the ‘Third World’ (while problematic) hints at something important about Brennan’s argument. And if we unpack his essay at more length we see that he carefully historicises this process. Nations are not simply authoritarian but are components in a struggle over different compositions of authority. The Third World nation is often recombinant, fashioning elements of European precursors that had transformed themselves into imperial powers; powers that pushed the nation-language into extra-national contexts. Significantly, although Brennan understands the origin of the novel in the terms set out here, he also argues that writing from Asia and the Americas diverges from the forms that European theories of the novel presume.

It is worth noting that in the year before the publication of the “The National Longing for Form” Brennan included a very different version of the essay as a chapter in his monograph, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Brennan 1989). In this version of the chapter, Brennan begins by demonstrating that Midnight’s Children involves a complex critique of the novel tradition and that its postmodern playfulness is, in part, a challenge of the imperial structures that brought forms of the novel to India. Something of Brennan’s language in his account of Rushdie offers useful context for thinking about Gomez’s concept of the interzone.

What we have, in other words, is an extreme case of that de-aestheticising of literature that Bakhtin found typical of the novel form, it being […] a “zone of valorised perception”, but one responsible for the process in which the social function of literature is called into question and made an object of artistic treatment. Given Rushdie’s interests, that “social function” derives from the intermediary role played by the Third-World cosmopolitan author. Detaching himself from his own characters the better to study them, Rushdie is best seen as a critic for whom “fiction” in the monumental sense of high modernism is no longer preferable […]. His novels […] are novels about Third-World novels (Brennan 1989, 85).

By deploying Bakhtin’s use of the word zone, which, for Bakhtin, refers to a mode of “structuring literary images” in “maximal contact with the present […] in all its openendedness” (Bakhtin 2000, 325), Brennan interprets Rushdie’s parodic incorporation of the novel’s tradition as a dialogic act. In Brennan’s reading, the European novel is placed at arms-length and recast as an object most suited to scrutinise its own incongruity. The “contemporary reality” (2000, 325), which Bakhtin uses synonymously with “the present” (2000, 325), is recognised as both a temporal category and a geopolitical one. Accordingly, the Third-World novel represents a decentred perspective, in part by means of dismantling the centrality of the European novel as a means of representation – or as “zone of contact with the present” (2000, 324).

In responding to Gomez’s claim that electronic novels occupy non-geographical spatialities that deterritorialise the novel, I think there is a strong argument for the claim that postcolonial novels have already detached the novel from the nation as the site of power. One of the uses of the novel in the eighteenth century was to usher in an era of polyphony, where a string of national languages unseated the dominant language of Church and Empire. While, these new national languages sort to usurp these imperial languages and were consciously used as instruments of new colonial empires, in the twentieth century, writing in English (French/Spanish/German) was no longer English (French/Spanish/German) literature. Following Bakhtin, by way of Brennan, the parodic stylisation of the European novel by postcolonial novelists offered texts that could not be reduced to specific national geographies.

So, where does this leave the internet novel? For all their innovation Writers Are Not Strangers and novelling don’t immediately appear to radically depart from the use of vernacular literature: as yet, they appear to address readers in English no matter from where they access the text. Translation technologies may promise to achieve something more but would that re-enshrine national belonging or further disperse the reader from a national frame?

In our discussion, though, we did encounter electronic texts that appeared to offer something slightly more radically deterritorialising. Gomez invited us to consider Eugenio Tisselli’s text El 27 || The 27th, which mediates the power relations between Mexican constitutional property rights and United-States-centred financial capitalism, by way of an electronic version of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. Each day that the New York Stock Exchange closes with an increased value a word from Article 27 is translated from Spanish into English. However, the English that is produced is “a highly distorted computer-generated English” as the idiomatic and relational meaning of phrases is lost through a more literal word-by-word process of translation (Tisselli 2013). To the Spanish reader, the Mexican Constitution gradually loses meaning as it is translated to English. However, to the English reader, the ‘English’ of Tisselli’s text does not quite carry meaning; it is jangly and imperfect, its meaning is suspended in ways that force reader to scrutinise its mode of production. In thinking about the political possibilities of electronic writing, it seems these types of engagements might align with the notion of politics as action (after Hannah Arendt) or with the notion of politics as re-ordering (after Jacques Rancière).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2000. “From The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.” In Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, edited by Michael McKeon, 321–353. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Brennan, Timothy. 1989. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: myths of the nation. Basingstoke et al.: Macmillan.

Brennan, Timothy. 1990. “The national longing for form.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 44–70. London: Routledge.

Gupta, Suman. 2009. Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity.

Tisselli, Eugenio. 2013. “El 27 || The 27th.” ELiterature Org. https://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=the-27th. Accessed June 5, 2025.