"Against World Literature"

Collage by Maureen Mullarkey

I am finishing up my essay on Fritz Strich –– oh, how bedeviling are the footnotes! I find myself in opposition to almost every scholarly approach to world literature since it has become such a scholarly industry –– since Strich's Goethe und die Weltliteratur, first published in 1946. The term was of course in circulation already in Goethe's lifetime, as it first appeared in 1827 in volume 6, no. 1 of Ueber Kunst und Altertum. Peter Goßens' study (discussed here by me) has detailed the afterlife of the concept in the period immediately after Goethe's death. For instance, its political and ethical ramifications were seized on by Karl August Varnhagen and other Goethe admirers in Varnhagen’s Berlin circle, among whom the ideas of the followers of Saint-Simon had taken root. Goßens quotes Cyrus Hamlin on Varnhagen’s reading of the Wanderjahre as “Gebrauchsanweisung für die zukünftige soziale Ordnung Europas in 19. Jahrhundert,” thereby forming, in Goßens’ words, “der Grundstein einer sozialistischen Goethedeutung.”

Marx and Engels blew that interpretation out of the water, and after 1848 "world literature" came more and more to be identified with comparative literature, which began to establish itself as a scholarly discipline. Not that everyone agreed with that conflation, and in the decades before the appearance of Goethe und die Weltliteratur there occasionally appeared an essay or a book that sought to rescue the concept from the comparatists.

Since at least the 1980s, the concept of "Eurocentrism" has been intimately linked to the world literature industry. It is true that Europe and its offshoots have dominated the rest of the world in economic terms, to the extent of producing inequalities in respect of “marginalized peripheries.” (That's from Samir Amin, the guy who invented the term "Eurocentrism.") And in a burst of 19th-century overreach, they sought to "export" their institutions to non-Europe, with not such great results. In my essay on Strich, however, I seek to distinguish "Europe" as an economic product from "European" literature. The former is in about "progress," which means rejecting what was loved only yesterday. In non-material terms, this has given rise to one of the most characteristic features of Western life of the past several centuries, namely, the rejection of the intellectual and cultural authority of the past (the Battle of Ancients and Moderns marking an early milestone in this rejection).

"Using Literature to Teach Global Citizenship"

The provocative title of this post is also that of a new book by NYU professor of French Emily Apter. The TLS reviewed the book, providing a clear summary of Apter's critique: world literature, according to Apter (but in the words of the reviewer), is "the handmaiden to a late-capitalist moment that transforms all cultural idioms into easily digestible products for an expanded global marketplace." I agree with this sentiment. One only has to consider those ghastly anthologies of world literature foisted off on high school and college students. Not to mention the cloying, dumbed-down multicultural programs. Apter's fight "against" world literature seems to concern the issue of "untranslatability" (as per her subtitle). I say "seems," for frankly it is hard to know what she is talking about. The following is exemplary of her terrible writing:

"[I]n translation studies, the limits of sayability and expressibility are increasingly a focus, conjugating logic and philology, with the latter understood in Werner Hamacher's ascription as an 'inclination' (or disinclination) to that which is 'said and not said.'"

Why the weird use of "conjugate" and "ascription" here? And how does the second half of the sentence follow on the first? And why are the writings of full professors so offputting?

Proudhon and His Children by Gustave Courbet (1853)

It strikes me that Apter is a 21st-century version of the proto-socialist enthusiasts of Goethe's day. Her wish, like those proto-socialists, is the formation of non-national, emancipated, cosmopolitan literary communities. But that is exactly what the market creates. One only has to read a contemporary English-language novel coming out of India or Pakistan or an African country to understand that the writers of these novels are repeating the experience of Europe, namely, rejecting their own traditions, literary and otherwise, and becoming "cosmopolitan." Such has been the arc of the novel in the West, namely, to portray individuals contending with a non-traditional world, one in which the old sureties have been destroyed in the name of "progress."

I am beginning to find something weird about the world literature movement. Besides the endless numbers of conferences, I just came across an announcement for a "Four-Day Vacation School" on the topic of "World Literature: Theories, Practice, Pegagogy." Held in September at the University of Warwick, it was sponsored by "the Connecting Cultures Grp." Need I say more?

Picture credit: Vamos a leer; Encyclopedia Britannica

World literature and the "sick, sad world"

Returning to the subject of my previous post, I do agree with critics of world literature when they speak of the "entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world's cultural resources." That quote is from a review by Gloria Fisk of Emily Apter's book Against World Literature. Apter's "beef" seems to be with the idea that such anthologies assume that literature is "translatable," whereas a translation of, say, Dante's Commedia, is in no way commensurate with the original. Duh!

Apter's argument, as per the n+1 critics mentioned in the previous post, is a critique of the nexus between world literature and the economic processes of globalization. The anthologies thus obscure what Fisk calls the "extra-literary implications" of world literature, i.e., the links between "the commercial, the literary, and the curricular." Again, duh!

Paris on a Rainy Day, by Gustave Caillebotte (1877)

These critics are belatedly proclaiming what Pascale Casanova already laid out in wonderful detail in The World Republic of Letters, in particular, that literatures existing on the margins, if they are to become commercially successful, follow the trends set by the center. Casanova discussed the way that literary reputation in the 19th century followed what had been blessed with success in Paris. (For a Frenchman, France is still the center of the world.) An example in our present time would be Salman Rushdie, who is probably more popular in the West than in India. Rushdie's subject, at least in Midnight's Children, was the effect of the processes, first unleashed in the European world, that have undermined and transformed the traditional order of society. Those processes have been market-driven. We live in a capitalist world, and it is not surprising that literary "products" are marketed the same way as other products in the marketplace. And that there is competition.

If we wish to preserve literature, to set it apart from transient market products, we must insist that the literary heritage preserves "values" that are worth preserving. Those works that we consider great are foundational to civilization. The past was never a golden age, but in the long stretch of history, certain values have been transmitted, even during the most terrible cataclysms. Their survival suggests that they are essential to the human condition and, indeed, to the continuance of civilization: love of family, sacrifice for others, courage, self-discipline, self-reliance, inner cultivation, patriotism. Aristotle summed them all up long ago, and no one has improved on them. (To judge by this world literature reader for 10th-graders, these anthologies are introducing students to these values.)

Antigone and the body of Polynices

As Marilynne Robinson writes in her recent collection of essays, "The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another." But what if such goodness is in conflict with other values? Thus, a major preoccupation of the Western literary tradition, since Sophocles and the Old Testament, has been what the Marxist critic Georg Lukács called the breach between inner and outer worlds. Antigone and Oedipus may have had fewer distractions, but the condition of the individual under advanced capitalism, despite a panoply of choices, is in essence the same. When push comes to shove, one is often still faced with choosing between incompatible alternatives, between what we love or desire and what we are required to do. The world, it seems, has always been a "sick, sad place," one in which literature and art recall us to our better selves.

And what has been the academic response to this inheritance? An attack on the literary patrimony, which has been rechristened as "patriarchy." It is not only "capitalist structures" (as Fisk writes) that inflict "violence" on the world; violence is inflicted daily on our own literary and, indeed, cultural inheritance in college classrooms.

World literature in a "sick, sad world"

"Making the Good Book Safe for Capitalists"

Anyone who has read this blog may have recognized that I stand somewhat apart from the political consensus of the culturati. I am drawn to the 17th and 18th centuries, especially the Enlightenment, because of the appeal to reason and to critical thinking. Reason and critical thinking, however, are simply categories for evaluation, tools for navigation in the modern world of change and uncertainty. In this world there are, as it were, only goods now, not the Good, no certainties to guide us. I don't hold with those philosophes or intellectuals of the 18th century who imagined that technology and science would lead to a world of consensus, one absent inequities, but we in the West at least have managed to pull off a good trick. I am also not an optimist that the rest of the world can be peacefully brought up to the standards of the West -- although I just read the other day, something I find a bit hard to believe, that the "average" Chinese now earns what the "average" American earned in the 1950s -- but the modern industrial order seems inexorably to be making the world alike in that respect. I guess this makes me a conservative.

I am continually taken aback at how many people in the literary world, people who care about literature and the arts generally, as I do, are against this ameliorating vision. Indeed, they are reflexively leftist. One of the "benefits" of getting a Ph.D. was to discover the roots of this reflexive tendency at its source, the university. Anyone who is not of this persuasion has the feeling that leftist thinking has been imbibed with the mother's milk and become naturalized. In other words, one is imprisoned in a mental paradigm that is, simply put, self-evident. No "right-thinking person" would think differently.

"Hands of Unity" by Dick Termes

I am aware that those on the Left also think that I, too, am trapped in a mental paradigm, but, in their view, my paradigm is an evil one; I, on the other hand, merely believe that they are guilty of irrational thinking. The difference between us comes down to our view of the world in which we live. To me it is not the "sick, sad" one of the editors of the online magazine n+1, who recently penned a contentious piece on world literature entitled "World Lite." There were several things in the piece I agreed with, especially the criticism of the "elite global village" of writers all speaking the same language and absorbed by the same subjects (and food), with only the softest of criticism of the economy that makes their lives so comfortable. The essay has the earnestness of undergraduates of my youth and the wide range of reading of the intellectual strivers of that same era, but it is burdened with Leftist assumptions, principally that literature should engage and transform consciousness and thus lead to healing a "sick, sad world." (Should that be "sick, fat world?)

The n+1 "critique" is very Frankfurt School, recommending a project of "opposition to prevailing tastes." The editors believe that the major international authors have thrown in the towel as far as contributing to radical change. Instead, "a smooth EU-niversality prevails." What they call "World Lite" now "has its own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. ... And it has a social calendar full of litrary festivals, which bring global elite into contaact with the glittering stars of World Lit." And what happens at these festivals?

"No debate; no yelling; some drinking; lots of signing of books. They are like peace conferences, though the national constituencies haven't been consulted."

As I mentioned above, the editors of n+1, like most of the Left, believes that literature should heal the world; that it does not to so appears to lead to despair, evidenced by a book by Emily Apter (with a tenured position at NYU, certainly part of the elite global village decried by n+1) entitled Against World Literature. I won't review it in this post, but it is, as Apter puts it, an "anti-capitalist critique" invoking the usual specters -- capitalism and the global economy. This critique has a long heritage, going back to Marx and pervading the 19th century, though the belief in literature's power to make the world a better place is rooted in Goethe's pronouncements. Goethe of course was cautious about what he called world literature, and his comments on Saint-Simon's followers in his letters to Carlyle and elsewhere suggest he would not have been a socialist.

I have gone on too long and will return to this topic soon. Stay tuned.

Picture sources: Brane Space; Times of Malta