Conclusion: Unevenness as ‘Hidden Symmetry’

The book’s conclusion starts with a summary of the preceding four chapters, drawing attention to what each chapter has contributed to our understanding of the formal and aesthetic features of semi-peripheral literature, especially the unstable combination of realism and irrealism identified across all eight texts. The conclusion proceeds to discuss the suggestion by Neil Lazarus that unstable narrative forms, such as those encountered in The Good Hope, Iceland’s Bell, The Black Cauldron, The Atom Station, Istanbul, Dear Shameless Death, Snow, and Swords of Ice, do more than register the social logic of modernity in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of capitalism. Through their ability to mediate the ‘discrepant and discontinuous’ reality of the semi-periphery these texts engender a world-literary way of reading that draws attention to Lazarus’s observation that there is ‘no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the “universal” and the “local” or the “national”, but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms’ (2011, p. 134). This is illustrated further with a brief discussion of William Heinesen’s short story “Sprøjteprøven” (“The Fire-Pump Test”). It is argued that Heinesen’s story captures the sense of an underlying system, which connects the spectacle of testing a new fire-pump in the distant capital of Tórshavn, on an isolated archipelago in the North Atlantic, as part of a shared global experience: the militarised modernity introduced by the First World War. The story, like the other texts included in this study, thus registers both the local ‘social logic of modernity’ (Lazarus 2011, p. 122), whilst maintaining an awareness of the globality of capitalism. The chapter then returns to the idea of semi-peripheral realism, arguing that by registering capitalism’s unevenness it also reflects the dialectical complexity of nationalism in the world system. It is this interaction between nation, global capitalism, and literary form that makes semi-peripheral literature a valuable object of study within world-literature.