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Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and other Literary Forms
Powell vs Proust
There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell's achievement against Marcel Proust's celebrated In Search of Lost Time.
The literature on Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements.
The closing chapters of Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from Waverley to Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as 'a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible'.
There are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell's achievement against Marcel Proust's celebrated In Search of Lost Time.
The literature on Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements.
The closing chapters of Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from Waverley to Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as 'a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible'.
- GenresLiterature
207 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2022
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55 people want to read
About the author
Perry Anderson
110 books256 followersPerry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.
He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_An...
He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_An...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 15, 2025
Interesting.
A splendid work if the tender has either read Proust and Powell or intends to do so. Perry Anderson takes no prisoners regarding the breadth and complexity of his arguments which can be daunting but intellectually stimulating.
A splendid work if the tender has either read Proust and Powell or intends to do so. Perry Anderson takes no prisoners regarding the breadth and complexity of his arguments which can be daunting but intellectually stimulating.
December 12, 2022
This book surprised and educated me in a lot of ways. The surprises were less about the figures discussed – Proust, Powell, Montesquieu, and a host of writers and theorists of historical fiction – than about the author discussing them, Perry Anderson. He’s renowned for masterful histories and penetrating reflections on politics, be they of the European Union, Italy, Brazil, Russia and more besides. Yet this book demonstrates that he’s quite at home in boulevards and on battlegrounds of literary studies, especially where historical contexts matter. Perhaps his literary proficiencies shouldn’t have surprised me, but they are impressively on display in this book.
A further surprise was his defence of the literary achievements of Anthony Powell – someone whose reactionary political views are repellent to Anderson, a major figure on the European intellectual Left. Drawing on a major biography of Powell, and on his 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, Anderson tells us why Powell’s work merits appreciation. He offers specific reasons to say that his writings were “consistently the funniest English narrative of the last century”, among other superlative qualities. In Anderson’s comparison of Powell with Proust – which in two long chapters forms the heart of this book – he finds Powell the better writer, in part due to his irrepressible interest in other people, a trait largely lacking in Proust.
Now where writers don’t measure up to prevailing political norms, a common ad-hominem reflex is to dis or even ‘cancel’ them regardless of their cultural achievements. But Anderson declines to do that in the case of Powell, whose political sympathies on everything from Nationalist/Francoist Spain to Margaret Thatcher were resolutely on the Right. In his surprisingly dispassionate stance, Anderson is both a gentleman and a scholar.
Taking these four previously-published pieces as a whole, however, I sensed the presence of an inconsistency or paradox. In the third, highly illuminating chapter, Anderson discusses the historical novel mainly as it flourished in 19th century. He concludes that the genre was “a product of romantic nationalism” in support of church, crown and armed might. The fire in the bellies of those producing historical fiction generated fantasies accessory to ‘nation building’, but also uglier mindsets. He shows how even great novelists, including Tolstoy, were carried along by nationalist sentiments to the detriment of the quality of their literary works. He slights Proust for patriotic reflexes. Yet when assessing Powell’s fervent national sentiments, which were saturated with pride in the British Empire and always anti-communist, Anderson seems to excuse them as merely expressions of Powell’s “own brand of patriotism”. So that’s okay then?
That niggling doubt aside, I’m full of admiration for this collection of essays, and hope to find more of Anderson’s writings at the crossroads of literature and history.
A further surprise was his defence of the literary achievements of Anthony Powell – someone whose reactionary political views are repellent to Anderson, a major figure on the European intellectual Left. Drawing on a major biography of Powell, and on his 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, Anderson tells us why Powell’s work merits appreciation. He offers specific reasons to say that his writings were “consistently the funniest English narrative of the last century”, among other superlative qualities. In Anderson’s comparison of Powell with Proust – which in two long chapters forms the heart of this book – he finds Powell the better writer, in part due to his irrepressible interest in other people, a trait largely lacking in Proust.
Now where writers don’t measure up to prevailing political norms, a common ad-hominem reflex is to dis or even ‘cancel’ them regardless of their cultural achievements. But Anderson declines to do that in the case of Powell, whose political sympathies on everything from Nationalist/Francoist Spain to Margaret Thatcher were resolutely on the Right. In his surprisingly dispassionate stance, Anderson is both a gentleman and a scholar.
Taking these four previously-published pieces as a whole, however, I sensed the presence of an inconsistency or paradox. In the third, highly illuminating chapter, Anderson discusses the historical novel mainly as it flourished in 19th century. He concludes that the genre was “a product of romantic nationalism” in support of church, crown and armed might. The fire in the bellies of those producing historical fiction generated fantasies accessory to ‘nation building’, but also uglier mindsets. He shows how even great novelists, including Tolstoy, were carried along by nationalist sentiments to the detriment of the quality of their literary works. He slights Proust for patriotic reflexes. Yet when assessing Powell’s fervent national sentiments, which were saturated with pride in the British Empire and always anti-communist, Anderson seems to excuse them as merely expressions of Powell’s “own brand of patriotism”. So that’s okay then?
That niggling doubt aside, I’m full of admiration for this collection of essays, and hope to find more of Anderson’s writings at the crossroads of literature and history.
November 3, 2022
Perry Anderson as always been a great writer....
This one is quite special than everything he had made before ... His thoughts in this book will surely make a resurrection ❤️✨
This one is quite special than everything he had made before ... His thoughts in this book will surely make a resurrection ❤️✨
January 28, 2024
One of the pleasures of this book is finding how much Perry Anderson’s style chimes with Powell’s.
June 2, 2025
This is a very useful collection of four essays or public presentations. Anderson has learned well Jameson's dictum: to always historicize the subject.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews