European literature vs. world literature

"Heroes" of European literature

Reading these early comparatists (see previous post, among others) gives me a handle not only on the sources of Fritz Strich's study but also on what Goethe had in mind, the latter being endlessly dissected. For the moment I will remain with the former.

I have mentioned elsewhere that Strich generally does not cite his sources. It is only in the 1957 edition of Goethe and World Literature that he includes a true bibliography. I have gone through many of the studies contained there and have begun to get a feeling for why he embarked on a field that, until Goethe and World Literature, was not a scholarly field as such. In other words, Strich inaugurated the modern study of the subject.

I have discovered in the articles by the early comparatists statements that Strich takes up, if not word for word, certainly concept for concept. Yet, one hesitates to call this plagiarism, as is shown, for instance, in an article by Joseph Texte (on whom I have also posted). According to Texte, in "The Comparative History of Literature" (translated from Revue de philologie francaise et de la litterature [1896]), the requirement for literary production historically (let us say up to the mid-18th century) was precisely based on imitation of ancient literature. In turn, criticism likewise modeled itself on the relationship between work and its source. Thus, literature was plagiaristic, and criticism documented this reliance on models.

The "modern period," as Texte writes, presents a different story; modern writers are indeed more "scrupulous."  Yet, "in imitating more freely, they do not imitate less; moreover, how can one determine their originality if one does not begin by comparing them with their contemporaries, with those by whom every writer, no matter how independent ... is influenced?" Texte is arguing for the relevance of the new field of comparative literature, one of the aims of which is the discovery of such "intellectual relationships." He mentions Taine and his "followers" who would remove the aesthetic element from literary study, by extricating "the personal from each work and the original from each literature."

Tongue twisters

Texte is very brilliant, yet his article made me aware of a problem with this idea of intellectual relationships. While it is a truism, long recognized before the 19th-century comparatists (see Daniel Morhof), that writers in the Western literary tradition before the 18th century were either influenced or consciously modeled their works on earlier models, they were not writing "nationally," even while writing in their respective vernaculars. The formation of "political nationalities" in the modern period, however, especially since "the Revolution," has likewise led to the formation of "intellectual nationalities." As Texte writes: "modern nations did not become consciously aware of their intellectual personality apart from antique imitation until a relatively recent epoch." Thus, the development of comparative literature seems to have been a rearguard action to maintain a humanistic conception of "literature," based on a common intellectual heritage, even as the study of literature in the universities in the 19th century was herding literary study into departments based on "national language."

Picture source: Europe Is Not Dead

World literature and communications

For ages now I have been questioning the use of the word "progress" in the sense of moral improvement. It is true that our ethical sphere has expanded over the past two centuries (abolition of slavery, emancipation of women), but I am troubled by our tendency to regard such "advances" as the outcome of our moral superiority over previous generations, even sometimes the immediate past. In the 18th century, the philosophes censured the religious and social institutions of the past because of the latter's imposition of what the philosophes saw as backwardness. We have moved far beyond the 18th century, however, and it seems that every week I come across a review or an article in which the 1950s is described as an age of "repression." We are all moving "forward," thus Vorwärts.

My contention is that all of this progress has been propelled by mundane material factors, carried by the explosion of industry and technology in the early modern period. World commerce and trade multiplied the objects of fashion and in our households to such an extent that we became "cosmopolitan" in ways of life and standards of living. Something similar took place in the cultural sphere. Despite the historical rivalries between the countries of Europe, each began to assimilate some flavor of the culture of the others. As Joseph Texte wrote in Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, the "classical spirit" of French literature absorbed Nordic input from England and Germany.

Commerce doesn't stay with the same old same old. Some new item of trade is always required to lure consumers. Novelty is thus the engine of capitalism. Our attitudes and values travel the same path, as we exchange old ones for new, more enlightened ones. To take an example from my own lifetime. Back in the 1950s, one spoke of divorce as causing a "broken home." Many decades down the road, it turns out that we were living on the cusp of a profound change in family relations, indeed on the cusp of "single-parent households."

Kant saw in cosmopolitanism a requisite for universal peace among nations. Peace, however, requires a lack of competition, which seems hardly compatible with capitalism and the constant production of novelty. Hegel gave a spiritual spin on this materialistic process, and it was left to others to change what Hannah Arendt has called "the interpretation of history into the making of history," e.g., Karl Marx. Together with Goethe's pronouncements on the subject, Fritz Strich described world literature in terms of a dialectical movement of the spirit of different nationalities.

Goethe seems much more modest in his thoughts on world literature. I can't help thinking that he somehow envisioned the development of communications technologies, although in his life only the semaphore (from 1790; it must have played a role in the military skirmishes between the French and the allied forces that Goethe observed first hand) showed the possibility of almost-simultaneous communication over long distances. Of course, he did not propose effacing the individual character of "peoples" or nations into even a "European spirit." World literature is thus an advanced form of "communications" technology. I wonder what his reaction would be to our contemporary modes of communication.

Picture credits: Luctor et emergo; Majstersztyk

"The cosmopolitan spirit"

Just a few more comments on Joseph Texte's book on Rousseau and cosmopolitanism. Texte seems to define cosmopolitanism as Romanticism bred with the "classical spirit," the latter of French provenance, of course. This cosmopolitanism has now (writing in 1899) gone on to "embrace the literature of the world." Thus, Frenchmen like Hugo and Chateaubriand, he writes, are no longer Frenchmen in the way of their predecessors, but speak to a more "European side of the national genius."

He then imagines a literary scenario that, in many respects, has come to pass by the early 21st century. Noting the number of books published on the "little European continent," the multiplicity of translations, and facility of exchange, he asks the following:

Would it be so absurd if, from the comparison, the juxtaposition, and, let us admit it, the confusion of so many works from every country in Europe, there should result a sort of composite ideas consisting of elements artificially compounded so as to form a literature no longer ether English or German or French, but simply European--until the time should come when it would be universal? Should such a day ever arrive, across the frontiers  -- if any remain -- there will be stretched a network of invisible bonds which will unite nation to nation and, as of old during the Middle Ages, will form a collective European soul.

He does not see this "peril" as imminent, as there remain obstacles in its way, "men held together for long years to come by community of race, of language, and of historical tradition" and preserving the literary heritage as a "sacred legacy." Leslie Stephen, in his review of Texte's book, comments on this scenario: "At present, we do not seem to be rapidly approaching the period at which patriotism will be lost in universal philanthropy. When the 'parliament of man' has been elected by the 'federation of the world,' it will be time enough to make up our minds as to the gain and loss."

 Stephen continues:

The real danger is ... a little different. It is quite true that the modern author does his best to be in one way cosmopolitan. He goes about the world searching for new sensations. If an original writer arises in France or Germany, Russia or Norway, he is translated and imitated, and has his sect of fervent admirers in every other civilized country. That, no doubt, represents a very different state of things from the old order, under which each vernacular literature grew up utterly unconscious of the existence of others, or even from the order in which a small body of critics could lay down a code of absolute laws and keep to the elaboration of a single type.

He does not allude to economic trade and commerce, probably because men of intellect like Leslie Stephen (don't forget Carlyle and Ruskin) disdained trade and commerce and believed in something like an intellectual spirit progressing through history.

The spread of Roman culture (click to enlarge)

 From my reading of Goethe's comments on world literature, it strikes me that he was aware that it was specifically the rapidity of world commerce and trade that was affecting the field of culture. He writes, for instance, of the "rapidity" of these transformational processes going on by the early 19th century. According to Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig in his contribution to Debating World Literature (ed. Christopher Prendergast), Goethe was engaged with "a changing field" and thus did not concentrate on any one discipline. Instead, his "encyclopedic interests" caused him to perceive "new general structures for poetic and intellectual work, ... [a] transformation of cultural space ... and the emergent conditions for further interest and exchange."

Commerce in its crassly material sense of economic trade has, by now, produced a composite "West," nations sharing lifestyles that are, with ever lessening national variations, pretty similar. Back in 1950, if my parents had traveled to Europe, they would not have felt comfortable staying in most French or German homes, simply because the interior facilities would have been so foreign to them. Today the differences are ones of style, and indeed many American homes now copy the interiors of French or Italian or German interior decor.

The same goes for literary "products," at least in the literary market place.

Picture credits: San Rafael Chamber of Commerce; Bible Light

"The cosmopolitan spirit in literature"

The title of this post refers back to my previous post and to the book of that name by Joseph Texte, the late-19th-century French comparatist. As I wrote in the post, Texte used the concept of the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" in the sense in which Fritz Strich would later speak of the "supranational" development of a "European spirit" in literature. As Strich wrote, literary commerce  between and among  the various nations of the continent played a leading role in this development. He cited the same cultural manifestations in European cultural history. For instance, Gothic architecture can be found in Germany, France, Italy, England, Spain, and Prague. Similarly Baroque art. Yet, this manifestation began in one place before it was borrowed and transformed by another country. Thus, there is a temporal difference in the appearance of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romanticism, and so on.

For Strich each nation had a specific mission in the development of this "spirit" of Europe, and its contribution "reveal[ed] its own innermost character." E.g., France bequeathed to Europe the rule of reason, "transcending any place, any time," yet "this rational spirit of French literature [was] also a very national spirit." The French classical spirit dominated the arts until Germany found its moment and, with Romanticism, carried other nations before it in breaking the bonds imposed by the regimentation of classicism.

Strich modifies somewhat the "ethnological" aspect of Texte's account of cosmopolitanism, and, in the article from which I have quoted him above, published in 1930, he also problematizes what is exactly meant by "European."

Leslie Stephen, ca. 1860,
before he was Virginia Woolf's father

Leslie Stephen, in his lengthy review of Texte's book in volume 4 (1909) of Studies of a Biographer, questions the notion of a "spirit," cosmopolitan or otherwise. He agrees that there has been, since the 17th century, a "tacit freemasonry between the higher classes" and that the "cosmopolitan spirit was the product of the innumerable causes which were bringing nations into closer intercourse at their higher levels." He argues, however, that it was not Rousseau, but Voltaire, who proclaimed the new alliance between the French and English "mind." His achievement was to acquaint the French with the philosophy and science of the Englishmen Locke and Newton. But philosophy and mathematics, as Stephen writes, are not especially English. Nevertheless, Voltaire concluded that Britons were philosophers because they were "free" men, resolved "to think as they pleased and to say what they thought." But freedom is not necessarily in the particular "character" of any nation, even the English. In fact, only a generation earlier the French had considered the English more savage "than its own mastiffs" for killing its king.

In the end, Voltaire remained true to his French roots and to the Academy. The classical rules in art, according to Stephen, did not allow literary expression of the deepest subjects; that was the realm of religion. What Rousseau got from Richardson was the legitimacy for expressing sentiments directly. By introducing "enthusiasm" into French letters, however, Rousseau was engaging in genuine revolt against the established order, unlike Richardson, whose "frank utterance of common sentiments and freedom in dealing with common subjects" was not revolutionary in a country that had never possessed an Academy in the true sense.

In conclusion, Stephen criticizes what he calls this "scientific" approach to literature, the search for causes in the development of literary and artistic phenomena. Critics are always trying to trace origins, for instance, of "romanticism" and so on, and then speak

as though its first representative had made a discovery of a new product as a chemist discovers a gas which nobody had ever before perceived. Rousseau, or somebody else, has then the credit of all the subsequent developments, as Watt gets the credit of the steam engine. Each new critic pushes the origin a little further back, because in reality there is no origin but only a gradual change of form.

Picture credit: Science and Literature Reading Group

World literature again

Colbert Presenting the Members of the French Academy to the King in 1667

I am jumping back into world literature, after so much time away in the realm of utopia, especially as I am scheduled to give a paper on it on January 11 at the MLA in Chicago. In truth, utopia and world literature are not that far apart in the realm of ideas: both are proposals to create more harmony  and decrease animosities among peoples. Utopia, however, would halt the process of change, while world literature is about change and communication. It decidedly is not, as David Damrosch contends in , about great works of literature, those that have "an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces it." Thus, Homer and Sophocles, alongside the Kalidasa and The Tale of the Genji in "world literature" surveys.  Goethe's comments on world literature are not copious, but in none of them does he designate a particular work as a work of world literature.

A term that crops up frequently in my research in this connection is "cosmopolitanism." A couple of days ago I was taken aback when I came across a book from 1899 entitled Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature. This concept is not one I associate with Rousseau, and in fact I wrote a post on this subject earlier this year. Rousseau, as I wrote, loathed the very idea of cosmopolitanism, asserting that Germans, French, English, and so on all had the same taste and manners: they had become "Europeans."

The book, as I discovered, uses "cosmopolitan" in a different sense. It is by Joseph Texte, who was a professor of comparative literature at Lyon. For Texte, the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" was the result of the embrace of the English canons of art by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La nouvelle Heloise  abandoned the normative classical ideals of the French Academy and introduced the more "barbarian" (in the view of the French) values of English literature, especially as seen in the homely, realist conventions of Samuel Richardson's novels.  This opened the floodgates to the reception of the "Nordic" spirit: The new content entering French literature by the 19th century was that of imagination and sensibility," definitely not a French product; they were of a northern cast and infused, as Madame de Staël expressed it, with "foreign vigour." The French developed an appetite for the foreign as a consequence of exposure to "northern" writers.

Madame de Staël by François Gerard (ca. 1810)

Texte defends his use of such racial categories. Since Taine, "the successor of Madame de Stael," the study of literature has become an "ethnological problem." What, after all, he asks, is an individual without his environment? "Dante without Italy? Could the works written in Latin be attributed to the Arabians or Chinese? Could the Alhambra be the work of the architect of the Parthenon? Each nation utters a portion of the 'interminable discourse' (Vigny) delivered by humanity." The discourse, he says, is interminable, but the nations have been participating in it for only a few centuries. He goes on to write something that is very redolent of Fritz Strich:

"'For the past eight or ten centuries there has been, in a sense, a traffic or interchange of ideas from one end of Europe to the other, so that Germany has been nourishing itself upon French thought, England upon German thought, Spain upon Italian thought, and each of these nations successively upon the thought of all the rest." 

Since my current work concerns the origins of Fritz Strich's views on Goethe and world literature, this book by Texte would seem to be part of these origins. Texte in his introduction thanks as his mentor Ferdinand Brunetière, whom I have already alluded to in an earlier presentation on this subject: In a long article in 1900,  Brunetière sketched the development of what he called "European literature," in particular the way in which the individual nations had developed a European literature on the soil of medieval Christianity and in particular antiquity, which he called "the master of Europe's mind and spirit." The great literatures of Europe developed successively (there are five: first, the Italians, followed by the Spanish, then the French, the English, and finally the Germans), with one after another manifesting "what were its most national and particular aspects," and each literature contributing to "the movement of European thought."