Читать книгу On the Horizon of World Literature - Emily Sun - Страница 11

This study examines in juxtaposition literary texts from two periods written in disparate parts of the world. The period in question in England, the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, was a time of political and social transformation and colonial extension accelerated by industrial and technological change. The period in question in China, the early twentieth century, saw the end of the dynastic, imperial order alongside the end of the traditional Confucian civil service examination system. It was a time in which revolutionary social and political change was accompanied by a radical epistemic shift and transformation of culture. Significantly, these moments of historical crisis and transformation saw the emergence of self-conscious—and, to varying degrees, programmatic—critical efforts to redefine literature and to realize literature as new or modern. They constitute moments of incipience for literary modernity and modern literature in separate but connected linguistic and cultural spheres.

Underlying and connecting the two moments of incipient literary modernity in England and China is a common definition of literature as specifically imaginative writing. While corpuses of imaginative writing preexist such a designation, it is this designation, issuing from a particular epistemic framework, that has allowed for imaginative writing in multiple languages and forms to be variously classified, reevaluated, and produced as such. In Keywords, as mentioned previously, Raymond Williams traces a major shift in the definition of the word “literature” itself in eighteenth-century England from its earlier sense as “polite learning through reading” toward the specific sense of “imaginative” or “creative,” rather than “general and discursive,” writing.¹⁹ This new usage was roughly contemporaneous with similar usages in other European languages, for which Williams chooses a few titles as examples: “Über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (Herder, 1767); Les Siècles de littérature française (1772); Storia della letteratura italiana (1772).”²⁰ The redefinition of literature in the European eighteenth century tended to be modified by adjectives that connote both national and linguistic categories, whose separateness or conflation with one another remains a question whose decidability is the matter of ideology.

The European eighteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative writing emerged within the context of a secular-historicist reorganization of knowledge that yielded the modern university and the three-part division of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences that still obtains around the world today and organizes international scholarly collaboration. This definition reached China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through informal means as well as through scholarship whose impact was exerted in a disciplinary-institutional context. Besides the informal channel of translations of literature for popular reading, a scholarly corpus consisting of literary histories, anthologies, biographies, and other taxonomic enterprises circulated to China as it did to other parts of the world throughout the nineteenth century. Such scholarship occasioned in China redefinitions, reclassifications, and revaluations of existing textual practices and forms of writing and often served as sources for translation, imitation, and adaptation. As an effect of the circulation of such a corpus of knowledge, the first Western-style literary history of China appeared in 1904, written by Lin Chuanjia on commission from the Imperial University of Peking, established in 1898, for use in its literature program. As David Der-wei Wang writes, looking back at precursors of his own editorial project in A New Literary History of Modern China (2017), “Lin’s history is an eclectic undertaking that comprises genre classification, philological inquiry and chronological periodization and was modeled after the Japanese scholar Sasagawa Rinpu’s … History of Chinese Literature (1898), which was in turn inspired by European literary histories.”²¹ Lin’s 1904 text was the first among numerous endeavors in late Qing and Republican China to reclassify and reevaluate, with varying degrees of critical sophistication, the tradition of Chinese letters according to criteria attending the definition of literature within the structure of the modern Enlightenment university.²² Such historiographical efforts were contemporaneous with public calls, often with pronouncedly nationalistic inflections, for the writing of a modern literature imagined as adequate to a new China. Significantly, in both European and Chinese contexts on opposite ends of the long nineteenth century, literary history appears to be cognate with literary modernity: a particular conception of the latter gives rise to the former, which in circular fashion produces lines and logics of division between old and new, ancient and modern. The global transmission of positivistic scholarship about literature in the long nineteenth century serves as condition of possibility for heterogeneous linguistic and cultural traditions—among them English and Chinese—to enter into conversation with one another.

But, as Paul de Man cautions with rigorous clarity in his 1969 essay “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” literary modernity is an unstable concept that unsettles the claims of literary history.²³ Literary modernity is unstable for two reasons. First, literature is ontologically a self-contradictory entity. Defined as imaginative writing within a modern epistemic configuration grounded on the authority of reason, literature haunts this very framework as an excess that exposes the limits of reason, manifesting itself negatively in modes of irony and ambiguity and gesturing beyond what can simply be stated as known. Second, modernity is a temporal category of presentness and immediacy and, as such, exists in amnesiac tension with history defined according to a model of patrilineal, genetic extension. Given the conceptual instability of literary modernity, de Man infers that “a positivist history of literature, [as] a collection of empirical data, can only be a history of what literature is not. At best,” he adds, “it would be a preliminary classification opening the way for actual literary study, and at worst, an obstacle in the way of literary understanding.”²⁴

De Man’s remarks about the challenge of reading literary modernity with and against literary history are directed intensively to the context of Western Europe. My study is concerned with a comparative reading of greater cross-cultural scope: the languages in question are radically different; the traditions do not share a past in the Latin Middle Ages or a nexus in the Abrahamic religions. As such, it argues that literary history does not just serve as a preliminary classification for literary study but has indispensable heuristic value for opening up hermeneutic circles of mono-lingualism or monoculturalism, be these Eurocentric, Sinocentric, or a scientistic aculturalist globalism. Approached through the modes of cross-cultural comparative reading performed in this study, literary history and literary modernity become realized in the plural as literary histories and literary modernities. In the plural, moreover, these histories and modernities work in productive tension with one another insofar as the former are not just inventories of facts about languages and literatures but vitally operative as elements of linguistically embedded and culturally differentiated pasts that return in and animate enactments of literary modernity. Literary modernity thus no longer can appear in the singular as an inherent or self-evident attribute of what is called world literature. Instead, it reemerges as the effect of the plurality and complexity of literary modernities.

But this does not mean that the notion of literary modernity, in the singular, has no place. Once we recognize that the singular category of literary modernity is not adequate to the plurality of literary histories and modernities, we can see it instead as itself an effect of their encounter. In other words, literary modernity does not already exist as an attribute of world literature, it does not take place in any language, it has no language of its own. It is activated rather in the movement of reading between languages that constitute the particular and actual mediums of literary modernities and inform the terms and conditions of lived and evolving histories and traditions. The notion of world literature can thus be said to serve as the horizon for literary modernity in two senses and on two levels: on one level, as the framework for encounter and connection between national or regional literary histories and literary modernities, which define and redefine themselves dialectically in relation to one another; and, on another, as that which, in a more abstract sense, orients them, including orienting them mutually toward one another.

These double senses of world literature are active already in Goethe’s coining of the term in 1827. To repeat his comment on that winter evening, “I am more and more convinced that poetry is a common property [Gemeingut] of humanity, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of human beings.”²⁵ This idea that poetry belongs to humanity [Menschheit] as a universal category, rather than to human beings in their particular divisions into nationalities, serves as the premise for the ensuing pronouncement that “national literature does not mean much at present; the epoch of world literature is now at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”²⁶

Earlier that day, before Eckermann’s visit, Goethe had been reading a Chinese novel. A consideration of this occasion of reading illustrates the extent to which world literature already depended in 1827 on a process of encounter and connection between literary histories and literary modernities. Goethe does not name the novel in question but compares it to his own 1796–97 idyll Hermann und Dorothea and to the novels of Samuel Richardson. From the details he mentions, scholars have inferred that the novel he was reading may have been Haoqiu zhuan, an early Qing dynasty or late seventeenth-century work of anonymous authorship.²⁷ While this work enjoys only minor prestige within the sphere of Chinese letters, it has the distinction of being the first full-length work of Chinese fiction to be introduced to European readers. The story of its introduction to Europe is worth retelling. It began with a preliminary and partial translation dated 1719 by James Wilkinson, a British East India Company merchant who was learning Chinese while stationed in Canton, nowadays Guangzhou. The translation was then completed by an unknown hand in Portuguese, probably by a Jesuit missionary. This bilingual manuscript then passed through the translation and editorship of none other than Bishop Thomas Percy, who published the work in four volumes in London in 1761 with the title Hao Kiouu Chouan, or The Pleasing History, with notes and appendices, including the “Argument or Story of a Chinese Play,” “A Collection of Chinese Proverbs,” and “Fragments of Chinese Poetry.” In his Preface, Percy identified the text as “a novel.”²⁸ And this novel was then retranslated in the next few years from English into French, German, and Dutch. It is quite possible that Goethe was reading the German or French edition that January day in 1827.

While there is much that is remarkable about the history of transmission and reception of this text, I limit myself to two sets of observations. First, the editor who introduced the novel to England was the same who would, four years later, publish in 1765 the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection central to the ballad revival in late eighteenth-century Britain and thus to the establishment of local, non-Greco-Roman origins for English national literature. The Reliques also inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge’s “modern” experiments with “ancient” ballad form in their breakthrough 1798 volume Lyrical Ballads. As Eun Kyung Min has traced in her recent book China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770, comparisons with China, however rudimentary, second- or third-hand, and sometimes defensively chauvinistic, aided Percy and others in Restoration and eighteenth-century England to articulate new logics of division between ancient and modern as well as relations between genres in the historiography of English national literature.²⁹ This shows that the articulation of ostensibly vertical divisions did not take place within national literatures in isolation from one another but developed, rather, in encounters among civilizations, languages, and cultures within a framework of horizontality.³⁰

Second, the epoch of world literature whose time Goethe says has come in 1827 (the phrase he uses is “an der Zeit”) seems already to have begun over sixty years earlier in the practices of an English clergyman and, before that, a colonial merchant, his Chinese tutor, and a Portuguese Jesuit, and, before that, a seventeenth-century Chinese author. However, it is crucial to recognize, against the simple logic of linear chronology, that it is only from the deferred vantage point of 1827, with the operativity of concepts and classifications facilitated by the prior operations of translation and collection, that the possibility of a new kind of reading practice and new criticality can take effect with the conceptualization of world literature. In the preliminary comparisons Goethe was making between (presumably) Haoqiu zhuan, Hermann und Dorothea, and Richardson’s novels, he was activating already a new way of reading that would become inaugural of the discipline of comparative literature and that looks forward, strikingly, to present-day comparative work on heterogeneous traditions of prose fiction and the polycentric, rather than Eurocentric, genesis of the novel as a global form.³¹ Proceeding from the premise that poetry is the property of humanity as universal category, Goethe activates the promise of literary modernity as attribute of world literature.

In the strictest sense, logically speaking, literary modernity in the singular and world literature in the singular do not exist. They derive from the actuality of literatures phenomenally available in a diversity of languages and forms and that issue from the diversity of forms of human life. They emerge as effects of the reading of actual literary texts in their foreignness, heterogeneity, and diversity. Such reading is aided by the processes of translation, collection, classification, and reclassification that produce and reproduce heuristic guides to reading but, grounded in the claim to knowledge, are not themselves literary texts. Perhaps Borges showed greater understanding than anyone in his encyclopedist fables and allegories of reading how indispensable yet provisional world literature is as a formation for the forking encounters between languages and cultures.³² In an interview published in 1991, Derrida shows similar insight when he defines succinctly “the space of literature” within the modern framework of knowledge as “that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything.”³³ The classifications and guides to literatures generated in the horizontal encounters among languages, cultures, and literatures institute the space of literature as one wherein literary authority continually puts into question, by means of fiction, the institutions of fiction itself.