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World Literature and Its Discontents

There is a well-established rule for anyone writing about the increasingly popular, and surprisingly controversial, subject of world literature: Begin with Goethe. It was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who invented the phrase “world literature,” Weltliteratur, in a conversation recorded by his disciple Eckermann in 1827. His mention of the subject is brief, but it has founded a whole discipline: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. . . . National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”

Who could doubt that Goethe’s prophecy has come true many times over? In the twenty-first century, almost two hundred years into the “epoch of world literature,” the canonical books of all languages and cultures have never been easier to access. Whether you want to read the Gilgamesh epic, The Tale of Genji, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or War and Peace—or, for that matter, Goethe’s own works—they are all just a mouse-click away. Nor have living writers ever had a more intimate and up-to-date knowledge of the work of their contemporaries in all parts of the world. A dedicated American reader of fiction today is as likely to be familiar with the works of Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, or Roberto Bolaño as she is with the writers of her own country. Technology, culture, and economics all seem to predict that this union will grow ever closer. Barring a civilizational disaster, it’s hard to see how literature could ever return to a parochial or even merely national perspective.

But if “world literature” were really such a settled matter, Goethe’s words wouldn’t continue to haunt the subject like a guilty conscience. In fact, the more you think about his terms and concepts, the more enigmatic they become. Does “the epoch of world literature” mean simply an age, like our own, in which many books, especially the classics, are available for reading? Or did Goethe hope for something more—a truly cosmopolitan literature, in which national origin would have ceased to matter at all? Could such a thing ever exist, so long as people continue to speak different languages? As long as they do, readers will depend on translations—often translations into English, which is the world’s most popular second language. But is translation a valid form of interpretation, or does it obscure more than it reveals? Does the hegemony of English threaten the diversity of literatures and cultures? And beyond the words on the page, can the national and local context of a book be “translated” in such a way as to make the text as meaningful to foreign readers as it is to its original audience? Goethe believed that national literatures were obsolete, but can a book ever be immediately global? Wouldn’t a truly global literature depend on the abolition of difference altogether?

In this way, what might seem like strictly literary questions turn out to converge with the largest and most urgent issues of our age of globalization. The question of whether world literature can exist—in particular, whether the novel, the preeminent modern genre of exploration and explanation, can be “global”—is another way of asking whether a meaningfully global consciousness can exist. Perhaps the answer is already suggested by the question: It is only because we have grown to think of humanity on a planetary scale that we start to demand a literature equally comprehensive. The novel is already implicitly global as soon as it starts to speculate on or record the experience of human beings in the twenty-first century. Global novels are those that make this dimension explicit.

Of course, this does not mean that the global novel has superseded the novel of the city, or region, or nation. The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived—not through the abolition of place, but as a theme by which place is mediated. Life lived here is experienced in its profound and often unsettling connections with life lived elsewhere, and everywhere. The local gains dignity, and significance, insofar as it can be seen as part of a worldwide phenomenon.

Indeed, the global novel is now the most important means by which literature attempts to reckon with humanity as such. The ambition to speak for and about human nature, which has been the object of critical suspicion for several generations, still flourishes among writers. The difference is that, where a novelist of the eighteenth century might simply assert the unity of human nature—as in Jane Austen’s blithe “it is a truth universally acknowledged”—the twenty-first-century novelist must dramatize that unity, by plotting local experience against a background that is international and even cosmic. But both types of writer advance claims about the nature and destiny of our species. The fact that, in our time, these claims are frequently pessimistic—that they focus on themes of violence, alienation, and reckless exploitation—should not obscure the fact that writing the global novel means making a basic affirmation of the power of literature to represent the world.

It is because the stakes are so high that the academic and journalistic discussion of world literature is so impassioned, and usually so critical. Indeed, the banner of most writers on the subject could be inscribed with the title of a recent book by Emily Apter: Against World Literature. To be against world literature might seem like the ultimate impossibility for a literary scholar, whose vocation is based on reading across borders. Surely world literature is a perfect demonstration of the liberal values on which, all intellectuals depend for their existence—values like tolerance of difference, mutual understanding, and free exchange of ideas.

To be sure, Apter herself is not opposed to any of these things: “I endorse World Literature’s deprovincialization of the canon and the way in which, at its best, it draws on translation to deliver surprising cognitive landscapes hailing from inaccessible linguistic folds.” Put more simply, reading across borders opens our minds and gives us access to new ways of thinking and feeling. But Apter goes on to deplore “tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”

This is one of the commonest charges against world literature: By making foreignness into a literary commodity, it prevents the possibility of any true encounter with difference. In this way, it duplicates the original sin of translation itself, which brings the distant close only by erasing the very language that marks it as distant to begin with. Take “ethnically branded” writing: Once we think we know what, say, an Indian novel or a Latin American novel is bound to give us, we will seek out (or publishers will offer us) only books that match that pre-established image. Genuinely difficult or challenging books will go untranslated and unread. More dangerous still, they will go unwritten, as writers around the world begin to shape their work according to the demands of the global marketplace. In this way, literature approaches the total “substitutability” of a monoculture. Just as Starbucks tastes the same in Stockholm as it does in Los Angeles, so a Swedish novel like Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reads exactly like a treatment for a Hollywood movie (which it then inevitably becomes).

This aesthetic critique of globalized literature goes hand in hand with a harder-edged political critique, such as the one advanced by in the literary magazine n+1 in a much-discussed 2013 editorial, “World Lite.” In this essay, the editors of n+1 directly link the current flourishing of world literature to “global capitalism,” an economic system which, it is implied, all people of good will must oppose. The writers who flourish in this system, who win prestigious prizes and occupy university chairs, are the beneficiaries of an unjust order: “World literature . . . has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it.” World literature is likened to the Davos Forum, a venue where celebrities and tycoons discuss “the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped.” Indeed, world literature has its own institutions—the Frankfurt Book Fair, multinational conglomerate publishers, international literary festivals, the Nobel Prize—which the editors consider to be inherently corrupt.

This hostile view of contemporary “world literature” and its leading lights—the editors of n+1 name Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee, along with younger writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—sees its literary and political deficiencies as mutually reinforcing. The type of “world” writing celebrated today is abstract and deracinated: “A smooth EU-niversality prevails” in novels that are “extremely psychological in character and only vestigially social and geographical.” The particularity of place and culture disappears, as well as formal difficulty of the kind associated with modernism. Along with them disappears the kind of political agenda which the editors of n+1 see as indispensable to a valid literary project: They regret the passing of “the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left.” In both literary and political terms, the “smoothly global” is seen as the foe of “thorny internationalism,” and the editors call for “opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and politics” all at once.

This line of argument can be seen as a form of nostalgia for the union of modernist aesthetics and radical politics that characterized the advanced intelligentsia in the 1930s and 1940s. That it took an effort of will to hold the two parts of that project together is something that “World Lite” tends to ignore. Difficult literature is almost never popular, which makes it an uncomfortable bedfellow for socialist politics; perhaps for this reason, the great modernists were more often sympathetic to fascism than socialism. The idea that literature can, and should, be both politically virtuous and aesthetically challenging is one of those ideals that, as the editors themselves say about socialism, “has so far enjoyed hardly a moment of historical realization.” But for that very reason, this ideal can make actually existing world literature seem compromised and complaisant.

Interestingly, like many critiques of globalization, this attack on globalized literature can rally support from cultural conservatives as well as radicals. In a 2015 article, the American writer Michael Lind observes that “if the size of the global audience is the index,” then the leading works of “contemporary world literature” are genre novels like Larsson’s crime series or George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. This is what Lind calls “world literature in the form of . . . popular culture,” and it represents a kind of nightmare inversion of what Goethe had in mind: not the best that has been thought and said, but the lowest common denominator.

To counter it, Lind calls for the restoration of a frankly elitist model of “global classicism.” The global quality of such writing consists not in popularity across cultures, but a cosmopolitan appropriation of the best models of the past, regardless of their linguistic or national origin. Goethe himself, writing German lyrics based on the medieval Persian poetry of Hafiz, is a good example of this sort of cosmopolitanism. If such writing turns out not to appeal to a wide audience, so be it: Lind points out that Goethe envisioned poetry as the possession of “hundreds and hundreds of men,” not hundreds of millions.

In an unexpected turn, however, Lind also employs this ideal of global classicism as a weapon against modernism, which he characterizes as an artistic movement that cut off writers and readers from literary tradition. Global classicism would, then, be formally conservative, as opposed to the radically innovative classicism of writers like Ezra Pound or James Joyce. It would produce “a genuine world literature far more erudite and refined than global popular culture.” In this way, the attack on global literature can lead toward a cultural politics of restoration, a kind of intellectual protectionism in which writers guard their literary resources against competition from corporate behemoths.

The novelist and translator Tim Parks also argues that the winners in the game of world literature are mediocre books. But in a 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, with the blunt headline “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks expands the critique from genre fiction to literary fiction itself. World literature is not just the name of a canon of great books, Parks argues; it is also a market dynamic, in which authors come to define success as “an international rather than a national phenomenon.” And “from the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension.” Local allusions and references disappear, along with the kind of complex wordplay that is impossible to translate. Apter, resisting this kind of simplification, writes approvingly of “the Untranslatable,” as a kind of wrench thrown into the smoothly turning gears of world literature: “Untranslatability [is] a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.”

More fundamentally, Parks complains that “world literature” gives writers an incentive to employ “highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as ‘literary.’” (He instances the “overstated fantasy devices” of Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, to which many examples could be added.) The global novel, if such a thing exists, is necessarily a diluted and deracinated genre, engaged not with reality but with the reiteration of its own themes and techniques. Against Goethe, this argument implies that “national literature” will always remain the most relevant context for any work of fiction. So long as life is lived locally—in a specific language and place, according to the mores and values of a unique society—global literature can only exist by abstracting away from these particularities. This is especially damaging in the case of the novel, which is traditionally the genre that engages most closely with social reality: “A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel,” Parks concludes.

A powerful and intriguing expression of this kind of pessimism can be found in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura. First published in 2008, Mizumura’s book-length essay set off a wide-ranging debate in Japan, as readers responded to her strongly worded disparagement of contemporary Japanese literature and the Japanese educational system. But while much of Mizumura’s frame of reference is local—she writes at length about the origin of the modern Japanese novel—her wider argument can be applied to any national literature in the twenty-first century.

The idea of national literature itself, Mizumura speculates, may turn out to be only a brief parenthesis in the long history of literature. In most times and places, she argues, literacy required bilingualism: The language a writer spoke was not the language he used for writing books. This was equally true in medieval Europe, where Latin was the language of international philosophy and science, as in medieval Japan, where poetry and religious works were always composed in Chinese. The idea that a writer had a special, even spiritual relationship with his vernacular language was an invention of post-Renaissance Europe, from which it spread to other cultures around the world, including Japan.

But as we enter a future in which English is the dominant language of business, science, and scholarship—in which educated people around the world are expected to be bilingual in English, just as they once were in Latin or in Chinese—Mizumura fears that we may return to that older model. “Bilinguals,” she predicts, will “start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.” This will effectively mean the end of national literature as a vehicle for major creative achievement. World literature will triumph, but at the price of linguistic diversity, and all the mental diversity it makes possible.

Globalization, on this account, is another word for the imperialism of the English language—whose dominion may very well survive the hegemony of the United States, just as Latin survived the fall of Rome. Its effect is to make writers of all other languages feel provincial: “Japanese people at some point, without even knowing it, became captive to the notion that only Western languages are valid. Various non-Western peoples share a similar sense of estrangement from their own language,” Mizumura writes. And the elevation of the English language carries with it, almost accidentally, the elevation of English literature. Indeed, she points out that even French literature, once the universal standard of literary style, is now a more or less specialized interest: The world reads Shakespeare, but not Racine. As a novelist who writes in a non-Western language, Mizumura is dismayed by this prognosis, but she is not sure anything can be done to avert it.

In her analysis of the prestige and power dynamics of national literatures, and the psychological toll these can exact on writers, Mizumura owes a clear debt to the French literary theorist Pascale Casanova. Indeed, Casanova’s book The World Republic of Letters, published in French in 1999 and in English five years later, has become nearly as ubiquitous as Goethe in discussions of world literature. It offers a new way of thinking about literature as a form of symbolic capital, accrued by nations through the production of classic books, as well as through the development of a literary readership and the institutions which support it, like publishing houses and magazines. And just like any other resource, Casanova argues, literary authority is subject to intense competition between nations; she compares it to an “economy, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence.”

This violence is not physical, but spiritual, and it consists in the relegation of writers from smaller countries and language-groups to a literary periphery, subject to value judgments from taste-makers in the capital. For Casanova, this primarily means Paris, which for centuries was the center of the literary universe. Her most interesting insights have to do with the situation of writers from such “peripheral” places, and the challenge they face in escaping their perceived provincialism and winning the recognition of the “capital.” Achieving a place in world literature, she argues, means escaping the provincial time-scale of most national literatures, which lag behind the avant-garde in terms of literary technique, and joining the “Greenwich meridian of literature,” which has traditionally run through Paris. “The continually redefined present of literary life constitutes a universal artistic clock by which writers must regulate their work if they wish to attain legitimacy,” Casanova writes—that is, legitimacy in the eyes of the metropolitan readers and critics who have the power to bestow it.

Casanova’s new model of world literary space and time is meant to reveal the power struggles that are constantly taking place under the apparently harmonious surface of literature. In this sense, it does for world literature as a system what Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence did for the psychology of individual authors. Key to Casanova’s insight is that literary competition, though grounded in national and linguistic identity, is relatively independent of political rivalry. That is, a country can accrue literary capital in excess of its geopolitical power—like France in the twentieth century—and, conversely, a writer from the periphery (Joyce in Ireland, Kafka in Czechoslovakia) can elude his or her political identity to become an international figure. Indeed, it is only writers on the literary periphery who perceive—because they are forced to—the actual relations of domination and subjection that make up literary space. Such “domination . . . is recognized as accepted by outsiders while remaining wholly unknown to the inhabitants of the centers”—just as an American reader, accustomed to living in an English-speaking world, would never guess at the anxieties that the English language causes a Japanese writer like Mizumura.

But after Casanova has articulated the complex mechanisms that governed international literary space in the modern world—from the Renaissance until at least World War II—she observes that the twenty-first century might turn out to be very different. For one thing, Paris has lost its primacy as the gatekeeper of world literature. Though many writers still come to world attention through French translation, it is now possible to appeal to centers in London or New York instead. More insidious, however, is what Casanova—like several of the writers we have seen—identifies as the rise of a new “world literature” based on “denationalized content [which] can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding.”

Like the editors of n+1, Casanova opposes this new global literature to the older model of “genuine literary internationalism.” Whereas the world republic of letters used to be constituted by innovation and rivalry, today it is dominated by “international business,” which produces an ersatz “‘world fiction,’ products based on tested aesthetic formulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership.” It is easy to hear in this complaint an echo of the Frankfurt School’s mid-twentieth-century attack on the American culture industry, which was said to mass-market kitsch in order to stupefy the population into obedience. Like Theodor Adorno, contemporary critics of world literature bemoan the disappearance of aesthetic originality and difficulty, and the corruption of popular taste for the sake of corporate profit and control. In Casanova’s case, this takes the form of a (historically quite familiar) defense of French and European values against “American (or Americanized) large-scale literary production, [which] . . . poses a grave threat to the independence of the world of letters as a whole.”

In theory, then, world literature sounds like a prescription for disappointment and mediocrity. But does the reality live down to the expectations and prophecies of the critics? The only way to answer the question is empirically, by returning to the books themselves. The following chapters examine eight novels that have reached worldwide audiences in the twenty-first century, by writers who are generally agreed to be leading figures in the pantheon of world literature: Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Michel Houellebecq, and Elena Ferrante. While the list is inevitably partial, it is also intended to be representative; other studies of world literature today could include different books, but none could be complete without taking account of the work of these writers. They span six languages and five continents, and the variety in their narrative strategies and prose styles is just as great. Nothing unites them, perhaps, except contemporaneity and the shared status of being “global” novelists.

For this very reason, however, reading them together helps to reveal what it really means to talk about global fiction. And it offers a more hopeful picture of world literature than the one painted by critics and theorists. As it turns out, the global novels of our time are not passive products or victims of globalization; rather, they are acutely conscious of their position as part of a world system. Globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore. In very different ways, each of these writers addresses the question of what it means to write across borders. How can a writer situated in one culture communicate its truth to readers in very different places? Is it possible to generalize about human beings on the level of the species and the planet? Is literature impoverished by taking the whole world as its frame of reference, or enriched? How do contemporary global problems, including immigration, terrorism, environmental degradation, and sexual exploitation, appear through the lens of fiction?

What emerges from this kind of comparative reading is that the global novel is not a unitary genre. It is impossible to say that all global novels have certain formal qualities in common. On the contrary, the global is best thought of as a medium through which all kinds of stories can be told, and which affects their telling in a variety of ways. A global novel can be one that sees humanity on the level of the species, so that its problems and prospects can only be dealt with on the scale of the whole planet; or it can start from the scale of a single neighborhood, showing how even the most constrained of lives are affected by worldwide movements. It can describe a way of life common to people in many places, emphasizing the interchangeability of urban life in the twenty-first century; or it can be one that emphasizes the importance of differences, and the difficulty of communicating across borders. It can deal with traditional cultural markers like appearance and behavior or with elusive cosmic intuitions that seem to transcend place.

What unites all these various approaches is the insistence on the global dimension not just of contemporary experience, but of contemporary imagination. If we understand ourselves as citizens of the world, then the novel must come to grips with this cosmopolitanism—just as over the last three centuries it has explored each new iteration of “the way we live now.” Ambitious novelists in the twenty-first century will find themselves writing global novels, not out of a cynical desire to elevate their commercial or critical rewards, but because individual lives are now lived and conceived under the sign of the whole globe. In the process, such writers will indeed encounter the problems of representation and homogenization that criticism has been quick to point out. But such problems are not necessarily disabling; for the resourceful novelist, they can be stimulating and productive. To examine the global novel in its twenty-first-century variety is to be hopeful, if not for humanity, then at least for the capacity of fiction to reveal humanity to itself.

The Global Novel

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