Is "World Literature" relevant today? (part 2)

Let us consider anew whether the concept of world literature has any relevance today in the sense that Goethe meant. Those who have read my earlier posts will recognize that I am, to a certain extent, channeling the ideas of Minae Mizumura, while extending her insights to the subject of world literature.

Goethe lived in “a European world” in which learned men like himself could read and speak several languages. For instance, he was able to read French works in French, English ones in English, Italian ones in Italian. For languages with which he was unfamiliar, he read translations, as in the case of Chinese and Middle Eastern poetry. He even felt that translations  of his own works helped him to understand them better. As he wrote to Boisserée (April 24, 1831):

Bei der Übersetzung meiner letzten botanischen Arbeiten ist es ganz zugegangen wie bei Ihnen. Ein paar Hauptstellen, welche Freund Soret in meinem Deutsch nicht verstehen konnte, übersetzt ich in mein Französich; er übertrug sie in das seinige, und so glaub ich fest sie werden in jener Sprache allgemeiner verständlich sein, als vielleicht im Deutschen.

The mutual familiarity of Europeans with the works of other Europeans had been standard for centuries. Whatever their political and linguistic divisions, they were united in a common Christian culture. Following the fragmentation of Europe in the Middle Ages, learned people had continued to communicate in a universal language, Latin. Thus, the discoveries of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and so on traveled all over the continent. With the invention of printing, books in translation began to appear, of Latin works as well as of works in the vernaculars. Long before Goethe considered the topic of world literature, “Europeans” (avant la lettre) were already communicating and sharing both their literary works and their scientific discoveries. As the wealth of the western European nations increased via the application of scientific discoveries and the fruits of colonization, a new European “culture,” i.e., one shared by the various countries, was developing. It comprised an increased standard of living and common ideas about what constituted the good life. Like all "cosmopolitans," they believed that everyone shared their views.

We all feel ourselves to be the center of our world, and Europeans were only different in that they traveled far and wide and became the center of an increasingly larger world.

I am not sure whether Goethe understood what such power would mean. I am also not sure whether he was aware of the multitude of languages in the world. In any case, most of the world spoke languages that were not written down. Thus, they had no literary heritage, which is what distinguished the various European nations. Among the colonized, there developed a class of people who learned the language of the colonizers. They became bilinguals, able to move between their native tongues and the language of the colonizers, for whom they served as translators.  The effect of this can be seen today in India, where all educated people speak English. But how many of them write today in Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, and so on? Since Goethe’s time, what we have seen is that “local” languages are receding in importance in favor of colonial or imperial languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese. If a writer today from, say Somali, wants to reach an international audience with his novels, does he write in Somali (16 million speakers), or does he write in one of the colonial languages?

There are exceptions, however, which I will discuss in the next post.

Picture credits: Leonel Graça; India the Destiny

Martin Luther and Donald Trump

Have I got your attention? You weren't expecting that, were you? No "Hitler and Trump"? No way I am going to get into that argument. As I mentioned in a post sometime ago, I refuse to engage in political discussions. I take seriously the advice of Uncle Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood. (See below.) Every January I write my list of New Year's resolutions in my thick calendar (pictured left), transferring the ones from the previous year and adding a comment on my success rate. Number 8 is: "Do not discuss politics." My notation for the past year: "Continuing success." (As for number 1 -- "Stop Swearing" -- the notation reads: "Total failure.") I have to admit that number 8 was broken already on January 24. After attending a talk at Columbia University (on the most recondite subject, but inevitably laden with reference to "Hitler"), I went to dinner with several of the attendees. I won't describe what happened in the course of the after-dinner discussion; it is not pretty when Goethe Girl loses her Zen-like attitude. Well, it is now February, and so far I have been faithful to my resolution. Of course, it helps being in Aruba. Besides the lack of distractions that enable me to concentrate on my essay on world literature (due June 1!), I never encounter anyone who wants to talk about U.S. politics.

Yet, suddenly this morning the Luther–Trump pairing occurred to me. And here is how it came about. I have been reading, as I posted earlier, Minae Mizumura's The Fall of Language in the Age of English. In the third chapter, “People Around the World Writing in External Languages,” she provides a historical overview of how how we have reached the point where English is “a formidable universal language above and beyond all others.” Mizumera’s major point is that texts written in a universal language represent knowledge that is accumulated in what she calls a “library,” not so much a physical place, but, rather, “the collectivity of accumulated writings.” For a long time, extending into the 16th century, Europe had a very good universal language in which the most important knowledge was expressed: Latin.

Latin proved itself serviceable for expressing the knowledge considered most important by elites, the ones who read and wrote in the universal language. It also showed itself flexible enough to express the new science. As late as Newton, scientific discoveries were written in Latin: the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo traveled from region to region, accessible to all who read Latin. These men, one might say, belonged to the same universal culture, even if in everyday life they spoke in their mother tongue. The same could be said for humanists: Erasmus, Thomas More, Martin Luther. Spinoza, for goodness sake, wrote in Latin. Their ideas, set down in books, traveled, too. As Mizumera writes, it was “economical” to write in a universal language.

The Whore of Babylon Wearing the Papal Crown

Writing in Latin began to decline in the early modern period, and "national" languages took shape (a process that I will not attempt to summarize here). Luther, a humanist who had written most of his major anti-papal texts in Latin — not to forget the 95 theses —in the sacred language that elites had kept from ordinary people, now turned to the people themselves and wrote in German, inaugurating its development as a national language. To further his Reformist cause he began his translation of the Bible, but he also let loose a flood of scurrilous anti-papal writings, also in German. His argument with the Church became personal.

Luther's opponents portrayed as animals

Anyone who visited the Morgan Library for the recent Martin Luther's Reformation exhibition (see my post) will know what I mean. Calling Pope Leo X the "Anti-Christ" was one of Luther's milder insults. Ultimately, fhe effect of Luther's Reformation were "YUGE." All are permitted at this point to make their own comparisons.

Come to think of it, I am surprised that the comparison between Trump and Luther has not yet been made.

Picture credit: F1 Online

World Literature and "Universal Language"

Arashi Beach, Aruba

Minae Mizumura, in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, makes the argument that if one is to enter the world of learning, one must be able to read the “universal language,” for it is only, as she writes, “in the single universal language … that knowledge is best pursued.” (Italics in the original.) In the West, that language was for a time Latin, to which Greek was added during the Renaissance, but the overwhelming importance of Latin as the language of learning is indicated by the fact that all learned men wrote in it. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, all lived in different regions of Europe, and their work traveled from one region to another over two centuries, thanks solely to Latin, the language in which they wrote. Something similar happened in the humanities: Erasmus, though born in Holland, traveled all over Europe. Others who wrote in Latin include Thomas More, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Leibniz. It turned out to be “economical” to write in a universal language.

These writings in Latin and Greek constituted "universal libraries." For a while the two classical libraries remained at the top in prestige; they possessed, after all, in quantity and quality, the greatest accumulation of knowledge. In time, texts in the classical languages were “steadily transferred to local libraries,” to vernacular languages, which eventually caught up and surpassed the classics in the accumulation of “universally applicable knowledge.”

If it is more “economical” to write in a single universal language, how is it possible, asks Mizumura, to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, as happened in Europe beginning in the 18th century, when national languages came into their own? Major writers of the Enlightenment — John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Kant, to name a few — wrote their most important works, after all, in their own languages. She finds that Europeans were able to “ to purse knowledge efficiently even when national languages replaced Latin as a tool for learning.” The reason: the pursuit of knowledge in Europe was carried out by people who shared a common cultural and religious history, not to forget that they were also strongly influenced by the abstract concepts of Latin and Greek learning. I would only add that it is not paradoxical that they wrote in a national language, and still gave birth to “universal” concepts and values.

Intellectuals did not only read books written in their own language. They “frequented” other national libraries, and many continued to have personal interactions across Europe. National languages thus functioned as universal languages and as national languages in their regions. In time, however, three languages — French, English, and German — became the main media of exchange, with works of “less major” languages translated into these three and thereby receiving a wider audience. She cites the example of Kierkegaard, who could have written in German, but he chose Danish in which to write his critique of Hegelian philosophy. It was, later, through posthumously published German translations, that his work became more widely known.

Something of the crucial importance of French, English, and German as “universal languages” in the distribution of knowledge can be see in The Magic Mountain. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am reading the novel during my stay in Aruba. In the chapter “Research,” Hans Castorp, to while away the hours shivering on his balcony under his camel-hair blankets, has purchased a number of books on anatomy, physiology, and biology. They are written, as Mann notes, in German, French, and English.

As Mizumura writes (thus alluding to the title of her book), this “tripolar system” fell apart in the course of the  20th century. Increasingly, “the world” was no longer represented by the West. Non-Western intellectuals began to enter the world of learning, and if their works were to attain wide distribution, to enter into “the universal library,” then they, too, had to write in the universal language, namely, English,  “the language that circulates most widely.”

Red versus Blue

I thought I was finished with colors, but I came across something interesting today in a book by Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, which I am reading in connection with an article I am writing on Goethe's concept of world literature. In the third chapter, she discusses the rise of Western vernacular languages in the early modern period. Each of these became a "print language" representing a "library" of accumulated knowledge, which was in turn shared among readers of the various vernaculars -- English, French, German, Danish, Italian, etc., etc. Whatever hostilities may have been felt among the various nations, scholarship and scientific discovery did not stop at the borders. Even if they wrote in different languages, the elites of the various nations were "culturally and linguistically kindred." As Mizumura writes, the knowledge shared across borders was "mutually translatable with minimal loss of meaning." This is most evident in modern science, the achievements of which have been a combined undertaking.

At the same time, as she writes, it cannot be denied that, for instance, "bread" in English feels different from the French pain. Still, the difference between bread and pain is nothing to the difference between English "rice" and the Japanese word ine, "the latter having been lyricized and mythicized for well over a millennium in Japanese culture." As she writes, "Japanese emperors still go through the ceremony of planting rice and harvesting it, a tradition said to have begun in the sixth century." Thus, Japan is a world apart from the nations that make up "the West," societies that are "culturally and linguistically kindred." And then she goes on to say, "To put it in terms of colors, if the Japanese language were red, then all European languages would be some shade of blue."

She gives no reason for choosing these color referents, but, to return for a moment to Michel Pastoureau's books on the history of color, red and blue can be regarded as bookends. Red, as Pastoureau writes is “the first color,” the most primordial and symbolic, for thousands of years in the West “the only color worthy of that name.” It is the basic color of all ancient peoples (and still the color preferred by children the world over). It appears in the earliest artistic representations, the cave paintings of hunter-gatherers 30,000–plus years ago. Blood and fire (the domestication of the latter constituting an important human achievement) were always and everywhere represented by the color red. Both were felt to be sources of magical power, and both played a role in human communication with gods via bloody sacrifices. Humans also painted their bodies red, and shells and bones painted red are found in abundance in burials from 15,000 years ago.

Red is not placid: thus, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Army Faction, but today the legacy of ancient social codes is restricted to denoting things forbidden or dangerous. “Red warns, prescribes, prohibits, and punishes”: firefighters and red stop lights, while fire extinguishers are often the only red objects in office buildings.

As I wrote in a previous post, blue began to offer competition to red starting in the 12th century, to the point that it now outdistances red in everyday life and private space. The reversal of red and blue in prestige from the Paleolithic era to the present suggests a pacification of Western sensibilities. Blue has become associated with peace and tolerance (as in the flag of the U.N. and its peacekeeping forces). In Pastoureau’s telling, blue is the color of consensus, of moderation and centrism. It does not shock, offend, disgust, or make waves; even stating a preference for black, red, or green is a declaration of some sort. Blue invites reverie, but it anaesthetizes thinking. Even white has more symbolic potential.

What a shock the U.S. electoral map was to blue sensibilities on the morning of November 9, 2016. Judging from the red baseball caps of Donald Trump’s supporters, the unruly powers represented by the primordial color have not been subdued at all.

Image credit: Deviant Art