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Conjectures on World Literature

‘Conjectures’, too, was an occasional piece, like ‘Modern European Literature’ before it. At Columbia, the department of English and Comparative Literature was re-thinking its structure, and I had proposed to detach Comparative Literature from English; as a series of gloomy departmental confrontations got under way, the Italian Academy asked me to organize a small conference: four papers, of which mine would be one. It seemed like a good opportunity to bring disagreements into the open.

The discussion was on comparative literature; writing on world literature instead was, at the time, a somewhat polemical choice—and problematic, too: I remember considering the title ‘World Literature?’, with a question mark at the end, to signal my perplexity about a concept no one seemed to use any more. Pascale Casanova’s Republique mondiale des lettres, which was about to be published while I was writing ‘Conjectures’, helped change this state of affairs; but back then, people were, at a minimum, sceptical (my colleagues at Columbia, for instance, refused to use the words ‘World Literature’ for the name of the new department). But I had found a strong conceptual model in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and went ahead just the same.

Wallerstein’s tripartition of core, periphery, and semi-periphery appealed to me because it explained a number of empirical findings I had slowly gathered in the course of the 1990s: France’s continental centrality, so often mentioned in the essay on European literature; the peculiar productivity of the semi-periphery, analyzed in Modern Epic; the unevenness of narrative markets of the Atlas of the European Novel—all these, and more, strongly corroborated Wallerstein’s model. Besides resting solidly on facts, the theory also highlighted the systemic constraints under which national literatures had to develop: in a starkly realistic reversal of the creative ecosystem of ‘Modern European Literature’, world-systems theory showed the power of core literatures to overdetermine, and in fact distort, the development of most national cultures.

Although based entirely on the work of Marxist thinkers—Jameson, Schwarz, Miyoshi, Mukherjee, and of course Wallerstein himself—and backed by quite a lot of historical evidence (or at least: a lot, given the parameters of literary history), ‘Conjectures’ provoked heated reactions on the left, to which I replied, three years later, in ‘More Conjectures’. By an odd twist of fate, this first wave of critiques was followed by an even more violent one—this time, equanimously from the left and the right—aimed at the idea of ‘distant reading’. That fatal formula had been a late addition to the paper, where it was initially specified, in an allusion to the basic procedure of quantitative history, by the words ‘serial reading’. Then, somehow, ‘serial’ disappeared, and ‘distant’ remained. Partly, it was meant as a joke; a moment of relief in a rather relentless argument. But no one seems to have taken it as a joke, and they were probably right.

‘Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in 1827; and these are Marx and Engels, twenty years later, in 1848: ‘National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises.’ Weltliteratur: this is what Goethe and Marx have in mind. Not ‘comparative’, but world literature: the Chinese novel that Goethe was reading at the time of that exchange, or the bourgeoisie of the Manifesto, which has ‘given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. Well, let me put it very simply: comparative literature has not lived up to these beginnings. It’s been a much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more.

This is my own intellectual formation, and scientific work always has limits. But limits change, and I think it’s time we returned to that old ambition of Weltliteratur: after all, the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system. The question is not really what we should do—the question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on west European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outside of Britain or France. World literature?

Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’ seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because we’ve just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the ‘great unread’. ‘I work on west European narrative, etc. . . .’ Not really, I work on its canonical fraction, which is not even 1 per cent of published literature. And again, some people have read more, but the point is that there are thirty thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American . . .

Reading ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution.¹

Perhaps it’s too much, tackling the world and the unread at the same time. But I actually think that it’s our greatest chance, because the sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different. ‘It is not the “actual” interconnection of “things”’, Max Weber wrote, ‘but the conceptual interconnection of problems which defines the scope of the various sciences. A new “science” emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method.’² That’s the point: world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That’s not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager—a hypothesis, to get started.

WORLD LITERATURE: ONE AND UNEQUAL

I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-systems school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. ‘Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field’, writes Roberto Schwarz in a splendid essay on ‘The Importing of the Novel to Brazil’: ‘it’s not simply an easily dispensable part of the work in which it appears, but a complex feature of it’;³ and Itamar Even-Zohar, reflecting on Hebrew literature: ‘Interference [is] a relationship between literatures, whereby a . . . source literature may become a source of direct or indirect loans [Importing of the novel, direct and indirect loans, foreign debt: see how economic metaphors have been subterraneously at work in literary history]—a source of loans for . . . a target literature . . . There is no symmetry in literary interference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.’⁴

This is what one and unequal means: the destiny of a culture (usually a culture of the periphery, as Montserrat Iglesias Santos has specified)⁵ is intersected and altered by another culture (from the core) that ‘completely ignores it’. A familiar scenario, this asymmetry in international power—and later I will say more about Schwarz’s ‘foreign debt’ as a complex literary feature. Right now, let me spell out the consequences of taking an explanatory matrix from social history and applying it to literary history.

DISTANT READING

Writing about comparative social history, Marc Bloch once coined a lovely ‘slogan’, as he himself called it: ‘years of analysis for a day of synthesis’;⁶ and if you read Braudel or Wallerstein you immediately see what Bloch had in mind. The text which is strictly Wallerstein’s, his ‘day of synthesis’, occupies one-third of a page, one-quarter, maybe half; the rest are quotations (1,400, in the first volume of The Modern World-System). Years of analysis; other people’s analysis, which Wallerstein’s page synthesizes into a system.

Now, if we take this model seriously, the study of world literature will somehow have to reproduce this ‘page’—which is to say: this relationship between analysis and synthesis—for the literary field. But in that case, literary history will quickly become very different from what it is now: it will become ‘second hand’: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be.

The United States is the country of close reading, so I don’t expect this idea to be particularly popular. But the trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premise by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!), close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more.⁷

THE WESTERN EUROPEAN NOVEL: RULE OR EXCEPTION?

Let me give you an example of the conjunction of distant reading and world literature. An example, not a model; and of course my example, based on the field I know (elsewhere, things may be very different). A few years ago, introducing Kojin Karatani’s Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Fredric Jameson noticed that in the take-off of the modern Japanese novel, ‘the raw material of Japanese social experience and the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction cannot always be welded together seamlessly’; and he referred in this respect to Masao Miyoshi’s Accomplices of Silence, and Meenakshi Mukherjee’s Realism and Reality (a study of the early Indian novel).⁸ And it’s true, these books return quite often to the complicated ‘problems’ (Mukherjee’s term) arising from the encounter of Western form and Japanese or Indian reality.

Now, that the same configuration should occur in such different cultures as India and Japan—this was curious; and it became even more curious when I realized that Roberto Schwarz had independently discovered very much the same pattern in Brazil. So, eventually, I started using these pieces of evidence to reflect on the relationship between markets and forms; and then, without really knowing what I was doing, began to treat Jameson’s insight as if it were—one should always be cautious with these claims, but there is really no other way to say it—as if it were a law of literary evolution: in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials.

This first idea expanded into a little cluster of laws,⁹ and it was all very interesting, but . . . it was still just an idea; a conjecture that had to be tested, possibly on a large scale, and so I decided to follow the wave of diffusion of the modern novel (roughly: from 1750 to 1950) in the pages of literary history. Gasperetti and Goscilo on late-eighteenth-century Eastern Europe;¹⁰ Toschi and Martí-López on early-nineteenth-century Southern Europe;¹¹ Franco and Sommer on mid-century Latin America;¹² Frieden on the Yiddish novels of the 1860s;¹³ Moosa, Said and Allen on the Arabic novels of the 1870s;¹⁴ Evin and Parla on the Turkish novels of the same years;¹⁵ Anderson on the Filipino Noli Me Tangere, of 1887; Zhao and Wang on turn-of-the-century Qing fiction;¹⁶ Obiechina, Irele and Quayson on West African novels between the 1920s and the 1950s¹⁷ (plus of course Karatani, Miyoshi, Mukherjee, Even-Zohar and Schwarz). Four continents, 200 years, over twenty independent critical studies, and they all agreed: when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials. Jameson’s ‘law’ had passed the test—the first test, anyway.^{18 19} And actually more than that: it had completely reversed the received historical explanation of these matters: because if the compromise between the foreign and the local is so ubiquitous, then those independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)—well, they’re not the rule at all, they’re the exception. They come first, yes, but they’re not at all typical. The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran—not Defoe.

EXPERIMENTS WITH HISTORY

See the beauty of distant reading plus world literature: they go against the grain of national historiography. And they do so in the form of an experiment. You define a unit of analysis (like here, the formal compromise),²⁰ and then follow its metamorphoses in a variety of environments²¹—until, ideally, all of literary history becomes a long chain of related experiments: a ‘dialogue between fact and fancy’, as Peter Medawar calls it: ‘between what could be true, and what is in fact the case’.²² Apt words for this research, in the course of which, as I was reading my fellow historians, it became clear that the encounter of Western forms and local reality did indeed produce everywhere a structural compromise—as the law predicted—but also, that the compromise itself was taking rather different forms. At times, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century and in Asia, it tended to be very unstable:²³ an ‘impossible programme’, as Miyoshi says of Japan.²⁴ At other times it was not so: at the beginning and at the end of the wave, for instance (Poland, Italy and Spain at one extreme; and West Africa on the other), historians describe novels that had, certainly, their own problems—but not problems arising from the clash of irreconcilable elements.²⁵