Debating World Literature

Debating World Literature

Debating World Literature

Edited by

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

with contributions by

Benedict Anderson, Emily Apter, Stanley Corngold,

Nicholas Dew, Simon Goldhill, Stephen Heath,

Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, Peter Madsen, Franco Moretti,

Francesca Orsini, Christopher Prendergast,

Timothy J. Reiss, Bruce Clunies Ross, John Sturrock,

Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela

First published by Verso 2004

© in the collection Verso 2004

© in individual contributions the contributors 2004

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors and the editor have been asserted

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Debating world literature

1. Literature – History and criticism 2. Criticism

I. Prendergast, Christopher

809

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Debating world literature / edited by Christopher Prendergast with contributions by Benedict Anderson … [et al.]. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-85984-458-8

1. Literature—History and criticism. I. Prendergast, Christopher.

II. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. (Benedict Richard O’Gorman), 1936 –

PN501.D43 2004

809—dc22

2003017639

Typeset in 10/12.5pt Baskerville by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

Contents

Introduction Christopher Prendergast

  1 The World Republic of Letters

Christopher Prendergast

  2 Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur

Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig

  3 World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach

Peter Madsen

  4 Global Translatio : The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933

Emily Apter

  5 Mapping Identities: Literature, Nationalism, Colonialism

Timothy J. Reiss

  6 Conjectures on World Literature

Franco Moretti

  7 The Politics of Genre

Stephen Heath

  8 Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World

Simon Goldhill

  9 The Rooster’s Egg: Pioneering World Folklore in the Philippines

Benedict Anderson

10 Hearing Voices: Ricardo Palma’s Contextualization of Colonial Peru

Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela

11 The Order of Oriental Knowledge: The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale

Nicholas Dew

12 Victor Segalen Abroad

John Sturrock

13 Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature

Stanley Corngold

14 Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry

Bruce Clunies Ross

15 India in the Mirror of World Fiction

Francesca Orsini

Notes

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

Christopher Prendergast

In recent years, Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur has received a fair amount of attention in two (often overlapping) areas of inquiry, comparative literature and postcolonial studies, most notably (and especially in the United States) in connection with the theme of globalization. More generally, however, contemporary globalization theory (since it now has a theoretical department all of its own) has had relatively little to say about literature. For example, Arjun Appadurai’s remarkable work (in Modernity at Large) on the formation of ‘diasporic public spheres’ concentrates – for obvious reasons – on the visual and electronic media in tracing the forces of contemporary cultural border-crossing; the written word, especially in book form, is conspicuous by its absence as the new public spheres are ‘increasingly dominated by electronic media (and thus delinked from the capacity to read and write)’.¹ A recent publication, however (Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres²), has put the question of literature back in the spotlight, in terms, moreover, that take the question outside the narrow precincts of professional academic expertise (she is herself a journalist). Casanova’s intervention is the point of departure for the present venture. Yet quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for the reason that ‘globalization’, if it exists at all, is not a state but a process, something still in the making. Goethe’s idea was itself cast in the form of a thought-experiment, a groping reach for a barely glimpsed future. Instructively, his best-known formulation of the idea is cast in the grammar of the subjunctive mood and the impersonal pronoun.³ The idea is thus not, strictly speaking, ‘Goethe’s’ at all; it belongs to no-one in particular by virtue of the fact that its determinate shape and content are as yet far from clear. By the same token, what we make of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate.

The following collection of essays is offered as an addition to this continuing discussion. It does so in a variety of ways, from the general to the particular, and in a manner that is not beholden to any one ideological parti pris. Some of the essays take the form of a theoretical overview, others more that of case-studies centred on diverse times and places, the common thread consisting in a reach for complexity against the grain of some of the polemically simplifying tendencies at work in cognate areas of inquiry. The volume begins with an account of Casanova’s book and the problems thrown up by its argument (in particular its construal of literary ‘internationalism’ as based fundamentally, even entirely, on relations of inter-national competition). This is followed by a return to the true fons et origo of the whole topic, with Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig’s exegesis of the terms and contexts of Goethe’s fragmentary sketches of the contours of a concept, as well as the (often influential) misunderstandings to which it has given rise.

Peter Madsen in turn considers the afterlife of Goethe’s idea in the work of two of his greatest disciples in the field of literary scholarship, Georg Brandes and Erich Auerbach. Both insisted that, however we are to understand world literature, it is not simply as a library or collection of books, but as intimately bound up with world-historical processes (what we now call modernization and globalization). Brandes was a committed synthesizer of a classically nineteenth-century type, marrying Goethe and Hegel in the view that thinking literature as world literature helped in generating grand ‘world thoughts’ (pre-eminently the idea of freedom). Conversely, Auerbach, out of the less propitious conditions of his experience of Nazism, entertained, in his famous essay ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ the melancholy, even apocalyptic, possibility that the future of an integrated world was difference-obliterating standardization. The task of a philology of world literature was to preserve, for future generations, a memory of a world literary system characterized as a play of similarities and differences. Auerbach, of course, found himself in Istanbul in exile from Nazi Germany, and this is where Emily Apter takes us, with reference to the work of that other Istanbul exile, Leo Spitzer. The philological school created by Sptizer in collaboration with a number of Turkish scholars was the centre of a thriving form of comparative literary study, combining Turkish-language politics and European philological humanism. Many of the issues associated with the heuristic challenges posed by the paradigms and problems of Weltliteratur – global translation, linguistic imperialism, transnational humanism, nationalism and modernity – are seen to be strikingly anticipated by Spitzer’s pedagogical vision and philological practice.

Some of the theoretical and analytical problems associated with an attempted mapping of internationalist scenarios of literary contact and cultural exchange are the concern of the next three chapters. Timothy Reiss’s essay (originally published a decade ago) is republished here, not just for the sweep and lucidity of its critical review of the false starts and dead-ends that beset the discussion almost from the word go (in particular his ruthless dissection of what was wrong with the ‘self/other’ polarity of western metropolitan discourse), but also because of its status as a timely intervention at the very moment some of the new doxas were being formed. Franco Moretti’s essay on the world travels of the genre of the novel and Stephen Heath’s essay on the cultural politics of the category of ‘genre’ itself also belong here, but with an additional feature: their attention to the specifics of literary kinds. It is fair to say that, even in the field of literary studies, it is really only the first term in the expression ‘world literature’ that has elicited serious interest. ‘Literature’ has for the most part been confined to quarrels about the syllabus (the relative places of canonical ‘great’ works and ‘marginal’ works, literary and non-literary texts, and so forth, usually in connection with arguments about representation and identity politics). But without an account of the actual structures and modes of functioning of literary genres, the story of their differential ‘world’ locations and global journeys will make only limited sense.

This must also include inspecting the meaning and reference of the term ‘literature’ itself. If the migratory (and thus the interconnected) is one of the principal themes of this volume, so too is the comparative (and thus the divergent). As several contributors here stress, the reference to Weltliteratur has been one of the constants of reflection on the origins, aims and development of the discipline of comparative literature. Initially, the latter shared the migratory interests of the former, if only in the somewhat dispiriting form of a positivist study of ‘influences’ across national boundaries (although even in this narrow form it was animated by the admirable desire to break the grip of the national). With the anthropological turn, however, ‘comparative’ has also come to signify alertness to differences and relativities. Nowhere is this more pressing than in relation to the historical and cultural variables of the term ‘literature’. This explains in part the inclusion of Simon Goldhill’s essay on the idea of literature in classical antiquity, and in particular his emphasis on the extent to which understandings of writing and reading were heavily inflected by the oral, and in particular conceptions of citizenship and education as based on speech. On the standard definitions, orality falls outside the scope of the ‘literary’. But, then, this perforce excludes not only what has been but what continues to be the most widespread form of verbal art in the world. In the fetching analogy of one of the most distinguished experts on ‘orature’ in a global context (James Foley), if we think of history on the model of a calendar, writing emerges only on the last stroke of midnight, 31 December.⁴

The status of the oral is of particular importance when an indigenous oral culture comes into contact, on the back of colonial conquest, with an imported written one. The innovative transactions which ensue are the subject matter of the two essays by Benedict Anderson and Elisa Sampson on nineteenth-century imperial legacies (of the Spanish variety) in the Philippines and Latin America, respectively on the Filipino and Peruvian writers Isabelo de Los Reyos and Ricardo Palma. In both cases (though in very different political circumstances), there is an encounter between traditional ‘folklore’ and the resources of colonial literacy. Folklore and orality were typically mobilized in the nine-teenth century to support developing nationalist ideologies (what Casanova names the ‘Herder-effect’ of nineteenth-century literary nationalisms). The grafting of ‘voice’ and ‘letter’ in the writings of Isabelo and Palma, however, is shown as opening sites of mediation that are not reducible to the terms of a populist nativism, but are, rather, historically resonant examples of what we now – sometimes all too easily – call the ‘hybrid’. From the point of view of the forging of a ‘world’ literary system, there is little that could be more ‘world-historical’ than the conjunction of the unwritten and the written.

Complexity of transaction (beyond the settled binarisms of more orthodox views) is also the brief of the two essays on versions of Orientalism, Nicholas Dew’s on d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale in the late seventeenth century and John Sturrock’s on the paradoxes of the twentieth-century European exote as represented by the remarkable figure of Victor Segalen and his writings on Tahiti and China. As a fulcrum for the ‘meeting’ of cultures, the scene of Orientalism is doubtless open to endless revision in the footsteps of the canonical works on the subject by Raymond Schwab and Edward Said. Against the tendency to see Orientalist texts as fixed items in a discursive paradigm, Dew takes us inside the actual making of d’Herbelot’s book (the forms and contexts of its material production) with a view to showing how it too is in fact an early instance of the ‘hybrid’, born of the ‘complex and fortuitous mediations’ that link two scholarly worlds (European and Arabic). Its modality, so to speak, is Borgesian rather than Benthamite. For Sturrock, Segalen is exemplary by virtue of his double insistence on the imperative necessity of ‘listening’ to other cultures and, at the same time, the radical difficulties of simply tuning in to difference (no tourism, slumming or goingnative here). According to Segalen, we are never ‘closer’ to another culture (and hence liberated from the traps of ethnocentrism) than when we fail to understand it, when confronted with points of blockage to interpretive mastery. He is also alert to the ‘two-way play’ between Here and There, where ‘difference’ is entirely dependent on the contingencies of a particular location at a particular time. This echoes one of Appadurai’s themes: that, for the traveller or migrant, the ‘Other’ can come to be the forsaken homeland.

The last three chapters also constitute a related group, around the oppositions big/small, centre and periphery, in a constellation joining issues of nation, ethnicity, empire and literature. Stanley Corngold’s essay on Kafka takes up the question of his positioning as a Prague Jew writing in German, in terms of what Kafka himself called ‘small literature’. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari translated ‘small’ into ‘minority’, thus at a stroke recruiting Kafka to the grand narratives of culture and imperialism, as a hero in the imperial/provincial struggles of centre and periphery (traces of this view also remain in Casanova’s account). Corngold argues that this is to misconstrue not only Kafka himself but also the form and meaning of his strange meditation on the concept of small literatures. Conversely, Bruce Clunies Ross addresses a ‘big’ literature or, more accurately, a big language, English as a ‘world’ language, but once again with a view to rectifying some of the misconceptions he sees as having taken hold in postcolonial studies. He does so by turning his attention – analytical as well as historical – to the particular genre of verse poetry, a generic focus relatively, and symptomatically, neglected in postcolonial literary studies. Poetry, Clunies Ross maintains, exists ‘in language, not in nation’, and the diasporic character of contemporary English means that ‘from the point of view of poetry, the English-speaking world is polycentric’, thus confounding the model of centre and periphery that is central to the structure of the relevant grand narrative (and also going some way to alleviate the dark prophetic concerns of Auerbach). Finally, Francesca Orsini reviews critically some of the recent modellings of Weltliteratur (in particular Moretti’s and Casanova’s) in relation to the multiple languages and literary traditions of the Indian subcontinent, arguing that much of the latter is obscured in the standard metropolitan celebration of the exiled ‘multicultural’ author writing in English (‘Rushdie’ is its shorthand). The principal claim here is, again, that the model of centre and periphery, the latter pulled inexorably into the orbit of the former, simply fails to do justice to the complex facts on the ground.

But beyond all differences of view and emphasis, the essays gathered here share one thing in common. Franco Moretti claims that a branch of study concerned with ‘world literature’ cannot just be a matter of reading ‘more’, but that it calls for a change in our ways of thinking; ‘world literature’ is not an object but a ‘problem’, whose elucidation demands a shift of categories. Stephen Heath makes of this an occasion for affirming as a possible definition of world literature ‘the newness its study makes’. This is the underlying commitment of the present volume.

1

The World Republic of Letters

Christopher Prendergast

1

In today’s conditions, what, if anything, might it substantively mean to speak of the ‘world republic of letters’? Rhetorically, the phrase of course signals entry into the game nowadays routinely known as going global, where, in a set of major disciplinary and perspectival displacements, time is mapped onto space, history onto geography. Time inflected by space, moreover, yields a geography that is fluid rather than fixed. As borders blur, nation-states implode and the ‘world’ both speeds up and contracts, ‘migration’ has become the new buzzword. Rewriting the map of literary history against this turbulent background perforce calls for special ways of thinking and seeing, whose own borders are themselves necessarily blurred, not least because, whatever the world-wide view might productively be, it cannot – other than in the paradoxical form of the deeply ethnocentric – be the view from nowhere. A literary geography underpinned by that kind of complacent transcendentalism merely forgets (or ‘ends’) history, typically issuing in the tacky Third Way clichés of a dominant strand of globalization theory; while actual immigrants remain locked up in detention centres, the more fortunate can go in for fantasy-migration at will, trying on ‘identities’ in a manner akin to trying on hats. Even that analytically and ideologically more robust engagement with the world-wide view, postcolonial studies, has not proven entirely immune to these temptations, as reflected, for instance, in the spectacularly successful marketing of its more high-profile practitioners as the academic equivalent of super-commodities.

A recent arrival into this intellectually messy space has come from France: the book by Pascale Casanova bearing the bold, if controversial, title, La République mondiale des lettres (1999). Its terms and arguments, even when (as here) contested, are the catalyst for the enterprise represented by the following collection of essays. One reason for this is that one of Casanova’s starting points is historical: namely, the play of forces which produced that extraordinary moment of nineteenth-century literary thought, the idea (and the ideal) of Weltliteratur, famously sketched by Goethe as the dream of ‘a common world literature transcending national limits’. ‘We hear and read everywhere’, wrote Goethe, ‘of the progress of the human race, of the wider prospects in world relationships between men. How far this is the case is not within my province to examine or to determine: for my part I seek only to point out to my friends my conviction that a universal world literature is in process of formation’. As Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig shows in his contribution, quite what Goethe had in mind is to a large extent a matter of speculative inference, since the record of his thinking on the subject of Weltliteratur consists mainly of fragmentary jottings and remarks experimentally addressed less to an actuality than to an emergent tendency. What, however, appears to be imagined in and for this half-glimpsed future is a form of what Hoesel-Uhlig calls ‘cultural traffic’, a kind of grand cosmopolitan gathering of (some of) the literatures of the world to engage in what an earlier and influential commentator on Goethe termed ‘an international conversation’.¹

Goethe’s idea, however generously conceived, is of its time, and hence circumscribed and constrained by the presuppositions and preoccupations of an age that is no longer ours. In the first place, although Goethe’s aspiration is towards a transcendence of the ‘national’ (‘national literature has not much meaning nowadays’), the parties to the imagined conversation are essentially national literatures (world literature concerns ‘the relationship of nation to nation’). Secondly, there are the limiting implications of the central, even privileged, place assigned by Goethe to Europe in his account. While it would absurd to accuse Goethe of a kind of blind Eurocentrism (given the extraordinary sensitivity with which he entered into the spirit of Persian and Chinese literatures), in several of the fragments there is what appears to be a virtual identification of world literature with European literature (‘a European, in fact a universal world literature’, ‘European, in other words, World Literature’). But, for all its limits, Goethe’s example matters a great deal. If we start here, it is at once to acknowledge those limits and then to take from him what is useful for our own times.

A later definition (by one of the founders of the discipline of comparative literature, Richard G. Moulton) describes world literature as ‘the autobiography of civilization’. The definition is at once curious and attractive, but also problematic, principally because the analogy with autobiography not only reads back through time from what is essentially a very modern notion, but also implies a view of the history and structure of world literature as a single, coherent story told by a single subject. In today’s conditions, we are more likely to want to break up and diversify this story and its subjects according to the plurality of human cultures. Perhaps then we might start to redefine the idea of world literature in terms of an observation by Carlos Fuentes, to the effect that ‘reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other’ (there is here a resemblance with the characterization of Goethe’s idea as ‘an international conversation’). This version of the idea is likely to speak to us more powerfully and directly. But it too is problematic as well as attractive. In the first place, such ‘introductions’ do not necessarily constitute a polite get-together. The terms on which civilizations ‘meet’, both in and out of books, are not necessarily, or even generally, those of equal parties to the encounter. Moreover, the effects of such meetings can range widely across a spectrum from exhilaration to anxiety and vertigo, as questions are raised, problems explored and identities challenged.

Furthermore, in so far as Fuentes’s view is a version of what we now call ‘multiculturalism’, there is the quite fundamental issue as to who actually gets invited to the meeting in the first place; as the Japanese-American poet David Mura has argued, for many literatures multiculturalism is a matter of sheer ‘survival’, of whether or not there will be any representation at all at the international rendezvous. This is a two-way consideration involving both terms of the expression ‘world literature’: it concerns not only who is included in the ‘world’, but also what belongs to ‘literature’. Indeed arguably the most basic – or at least the first – question has to do with what counts as ‘literature’. What in the West is normally understood by it (imaginative writing, plays, poems, novels, etc.) is of relatively recent invention (a point to which I shall return). The history of the idea of ‘literature’ in fact reveals a process of increasing specialization of meanings, whereby ‘literature’ is originally equated with all kinds of writing, then subsequently, in the post-Gutenberg era of printing, with printed works, and only much later restricted to the notion of works of the imagination. Above all, we need to sever the idea of literature or, more generally, verbal art from a fixed attachment to writing. Henry Louis Gates has shown how the European Enlightenment established a link between ‘reason’, ‘civilization’ and writing, thus confining oral culture to a position of inferiority, often attaching the pejorative valuation ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage’. The argument that a culture attains to civilization only when it is capable of ‘inscribing’ itself not only devalues the oral tradition in the name of a specious fable of ‘development’, but also overlooks the very real ambiguity of the acquisition of writing: at once an immense cultural gain, but also helping to institute structures of power and domination, within which those who have the skills of writing and reading enjoy advantages over those who do not. Finally it also overlooks the simple fact that, both historically and geographically, the oral vastly exceeds the written; the former is and even today remains the most fundamental mode of humankind’s self-expression.

How, then, does one enter, delimit and define the object of study known as world literature? To some extent, help has been to hand from the now well-established ‘world-systems’ theory developed in that paradoxically specialized branch of historiography known as world history, and whose most distinguished practitioners include Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, William McNeill and Janet Abu-Llughod. McNeill divides human history into three constitutive phases: first, from around 3500 bc (early Mesopotamia) to 500 bc; secondly, from 500 bc to ad 1500; and thirdly, from ad 1500 to the present. The first phase witnesses the emergence of four major civilizations: the Middle East (Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor); India; China; and Greece (defined, in conjunction with the later emergence of the Roman Empire, as the starting point of a ‘European’ civilization). The second phase (500 bc to ad 1500) is at once a period of the consolidation and extension of the above, along with the birth of Christianity, the rise of Islam in the seventh century ad, the creation of the Ottoman Empire and the installation of feudalism (notably in Europe and Japan). The third period, from around ad 1500 onwards, is broadly the period of the creation of the ‘modern’ world, crucially linked to the so-called ‘rise of the West’, fuelled by economic take-off in Europe, the expansion of the world trading system and the related colonial adventures of ‘discovery’ and conquest (initially of the Americas and then later vast portions of the globe), and issuing finally in a form of modernity that McNeill calls ‘global cosmopolitanism’.

Wallerstein charts in great detail the place of Europe in these developments, in a comprehensive survey of the principal factors in the formation of the ‘modern world-system’: techniques of modern capitalism and technologies of modern science, especially of transport and communications (and warfare); division of labour, both occupational and geographical; constant expansion of the system (imperialism) but with a ‘skewed distribution of its rewards’; a multiplicity of cultures and fluid boundaries but with power residing in the metropolitan centres and nation-states of the West. On the other hand, Janet Abu-Lughod (in a book significantly titled Before European Hegemony) takes the formation of the world-system back into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, arguing that in period before the West became dominant, regions of the so-called Old World had already established a complicated network of contacts through a trading economy and a system of exchange stretching from North West Europe to China across the Middle East and India. This system consisted of eight sub-systems or ‘loops’ grouped into three larger circuits of trade. The Middle East was a ‘geographic fulcrum’, while Europe was more at the ‘periphery’. India also was a fulcrum, with land routes to Russia in the north and China in the east, as well as having links to the Muslim world. The whole network depended on the strategic role of a number of ‘world cities’ (especially Baghdad and Cairo) and the geographically variable use of a multiplicity of languages, principally Arabic, Greek, vernaculars of Latin and Mandarin Chinese.

Quite how one might adapt the long temporal and spatial reach of world history to the idea of world literature is not straightforwardly obvious. For one thing the parameters of inquiry are not identical. In the perspectives of world history, one might be tempted to classify the ‘literatures’ of the world into three broad kinds: folk literatures (that is, orally transmitted unwritten literatures), traditional literatures and modern cosmopolitan literatures. The study of ‘world literature’ does not typically seek to incorporate all of these, and it is difficult to conceive of a methodology which could cope with such a vaulting ambition (for one thing, it would be impossible to avoid the inbuilt ethnocentrism of literary-historical periodizations, what Appadurai calls ‘Eurochronology’²). Rather it has in practice concerned itself with printed literatures that, by some mechanism or other, have entered into ‘relations’ with others, whose historical point of departure is usually the European Renaissance and the development of national literary traditions, and whose terminus (so far) is the literary world ‘marketplace’ of the late twentienth and early twenty-first centuries. ‘World’ here (including the term mondiale in Casanova’s title) thus does not mean ‘global’ (in the sense of all the literatures of the world) but rather ‘international’ structures that arise and transactions that occur across national borders.

In this context, Franco Moretti has taken from Wallerstein’s world-systems theory the formula ‘one but unequal’ as a basis for re-thinking the idea of world literature. Although – amazingly – there is no reference to either in Casanova’s book, this notion underlies her entire project (if there is no mention of Wallerstein, she does cite Braudel’s formula of ‘unequal structures’). Goethe, however, does enter the picture, namely his stress on world literature as a meeting of national literatures, but less as some ecumenical gathering (Goethe, in anticipation of his notion of world literature, once referred to literature as a ‘common world-council’) than as a competitive market. Echoing Antoine Berman’s association of Weltliteratur with Weltmarkt and quoting Goethe himself (in a letter to Carlyle) on the formation of a ‘general intellectual commerce’ and a ‘market where all nations offer their goods’, Casanova proceeds to the construction of a fully fledged theory of the international literary system based on relations of competition. In respect of its Goethean provenance, one should perhaps not press too hard on what is basically an analogy (her claim that Goethe’s idea of a ‘market’ is ‘nullement métaphorique’ is strictly for the birds). There is of course a literal sense in which one can speak of trade here: for instance, Moretti’s reflections (in Atlas of the European Novel) on the functioning of ‘narrative markets’ in the nineteenth century, an import/export trade carried out largely on the back of translations. Casanova glances at this sort of thing, especially in connection with the international book trade in the late twentieth century. But how far the analogy of Weltmarkt helps us make sense of Goethe’s thinking remains moot. Goethe does not appear to have construed the circulation and exchange of works of literature across national borders as competitive, and it is unclear how he could have done so, since this would presuppose the existence of an international or common market in which literary ‘value’ was comparatively and competitively assessed. For Goethe, the economic conditions permitting greater circulation pointed more towards an internationalization of reading publics, a new cosmopolitanism of reading.

Rivalry and competition, however, are the foregrounded concepts of Casanova’s account, buttressed by the theoretical underpinning of Bourdieu’s work on the constitution of the literary ‘field’ (although mercifully she stays away from the most luridly pathological form of the theory of literature as agonistic warzones, Harold Bloom’s). The main contenders in this arena are nations, where there are winners and losers. The international is thus the result or expression not of some free-wheeling global cosmopolitanism but of, precisely, the inter-national, a cultural conflict between nations and national literatures to control the rhythms and outcomes of what Casanova terms ‘literary time’. Literary time is related but not reducible to the time of political history (here we catch an implicit genuflection to the model of history as ‘series’). The great prize is what Casanova also fetchingly calls the Greenwich Mean Time of literary history. The winners determine Greenwich Mean Time by instituting a regime of centre and periphery, the ‘developed’ (who stipulate and defend the norms of the ‘literary’) and the ‘backward’ (who strive to catch up). Rivalry creates a ‘space’ at once riven (by the contest for domination) and ultimately unified (by the cross-border movements the competition unleashes).

Historically, the argument is centred on three moments. It begins in the sixteenth century, with Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse. It matters very much that Casanova starts here, by virtue of the fact that Du Bellay’s text is a proto-nationalist document in which the assertion of the virtues of French against the dominion of Latin (and Antiquity generally) coincides with the formation of the nation-state (the obvious earlier candidate for starting point, Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, is dismissed because Dante’s model of a vernacular literary language, based on a composite of Tuscan dialects, does not have the backing of a unified Italian kingdom; the Dante/Boccacio/Petrarch axis is something of a false dawn). It also matters for another reason: Du Bellay’s tract sets in motion a process whereby historically France, and more particularly Paris, emerges as the dominant force in the shaping of the Republic of Letters. Paris, as the capital of the nation, also becomes the centre par excellence of the international literary order, reigning supreme right up until the late twentieth century (Casanova rebuts the anticipated charge of Gallocentrism by claiming, in some measure persuasively, that this has nothing to do with tricolour-waving patriotism and everything to do with the historical facts³). It does so by projecting itself and being perceived as a de-nationalized locus of the Universal, home to the Classic, guardian of Taste, resolver of Quarrels, arbiter of the New, host to the Avant-Garde – in short, all the cultural appurtenances with which a geographical capital accumulates, hoards and dispenses, in the somewhat unfortunate economic metaphor Casanova also takes from Bourdieu, literary capital (while it is perfectly legitimate to think of literary works as ‘commodities’, sold by authors to publishers and from there to readers, it is arguably illicit to extend the relevant thought to the notion of ‘capital’).

Orbiting around the Sun City, like so many provincial satellites or menacing predators (England), is more or less everybody else, in a historical trajectory running until our own time. The second moment highlighted in this relatively longue durée is the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries as the period of what Casanova calls the ‘Herder-effect’, with the development of various resistances to French literary rule, largely in the form of a turn to folk traditions and the corresponding ideologies of tribal nationalism (she does not herself use the term ‘tribal’; acquaintance with Martin Thom’s Republics, Nations and Tribes might well have tempered her admiration for this sort of stuff and modified the narrative of poor relations struggling for admission to the Pantheon). The third moment concerns the effects of empire and, later in the twentieth century, of decolonization, characterized by the flow across national boundaries and a strong pull to the metropolitan centres of the West, still crucially Paris, whose authority as centre of a dominant national culture is at once confirmed and yet contested (or dissolved) by the arrival of outsider figures from all parts of the globe, those whom she terms the ‘ex-centrics’. This supplies the essential form of the modern international literary system, multiple, heterogeneous but also stratified and hierarchical. In connection with the ‘ex-centrics’, Casanova sketches three typologies: the ‘rebels’, who stay at home to cultivate their local cultural patch – a (post)colonial extension of the Herder-effect – or who, after wandering, return home (for example, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ? wa Thiong’o quitting English for his native Gikuyu); the ‘assimilated’, who are absorbed into the system on its own terrain (Naipaul); the ‘revolutionaries’, whose basic position vis-à-vis the Greenwich Mean Time is neither avoidance nor assimilation but subversion (Beckett and others too numerous to mention). The revolutionaries are the real heroes of the tale, producing a new measure of literary time, a patrimoine litteraire mondial, a truly international form of literary capital in the capital (for the most part, again Paris). What makes them heroes is that, in besieging the citadels of the literary imperium, they succeed in conquering not only for themselves but for also the institution of literature a certain ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’; literature not only becomes fully international (as distinct from inter-national), it also becomes ‘literature’, a practice finally freed from its subjection to national imperatives. There are thus two kinds of literary ‘autonomy’, a false or mystified kind, which arises when a major literary power has accumulated sufficiently large amounts of literary ‘capital’ as to allow the writer to go about his or her business relatively unmolested (in this reminiscent of Gramsci’s ‘traditional intellectual’); and a true autonomy, hard-won in the struggles of the ‘ex-centric’ to enter the force field of the literary system.

2

If we stand back and ask what are the key questions subtending Casanova’s account, they would seem to be twofold and interrelated: the nature and significance of relations between national literatures; the status of the competitive model of literary history. These are without doubt genuinely interesting questions.⁴ The devil, as ever, is in the detail. It is not that the national-competitive model is irrelevant; on the contrary, it can be made to do much useful work. In particular it should be stressed that, unlike many of her precursors who deploy the competitive view, Casanova sees that, if the latter has any grip at all, it is at the level of the national, given that nation-state relations really do unfold historically as a field of rivalry. It is simply that in her hands it is made to do all the work, accorded such grand explanatory powers that it is effectively posited as capable of accounting for everything. But for this claim to stand up it would have to be subjected, Popper-style, to a range of counter-considerations, none of which get a look in.

The most predictable objection to the model is that there are variables other than nation and relations other than competition. Take two examples (one mentioned by Casanova, the other not) from the canon of one of the more powerful players in the alleged rivalry game, English literature. Both Wordsworth and Shakespeare have been adduced as major figures in the unfolding of the ‘national genius’, the making of the ‘Englishness’ of English literature, with particular reference to an alleged rivalry with French hegemony. There are unquestionably ‘competitive’ impulses animating Wordsworth’s appeal to the language (specifically the diction) of the ‘common man’ in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads as the basis for a new kind of poetry attuned to the textures of the ordinary and the everyday. It might just be possible to hear in this a very distant echo of a nationalist hostility (based on an assumed English common-sense empiricism of ‘experience’) to the formality and artificiality of French literary culture. But whereas in the roughly contemporary case of the German turn to ‘folk’ material we hear this not as an echo but as a roar, Wordsworth’s competitive agenda seems to involve very different variables, such as class, gender and region, all of which are internal to pressures and debates within England itself. The appeal to the language of the common man is a class-based move directed at the polite discourse of eighteenth-century English poetry; the appeal to the common man an attempt to restore masculine virtues in the face of the ‘feminizing’ influence of the late eighteenth-century poetesses; and the location of these possibilities in the world of the Lake District as the opening of a regional divide between North and South, rural and urban. Relative to these concerns, nation seems to come way down the list. Wordsworth’s case tells us not only that inter-national competition is not necessarily the primary motor of absolutely pivotal literary developments but also that a monolithic image of ‘nation’ can mask all manner of divisions and constituencies.

Secondly, take the deployment of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century onwards in the formation of a ‘national’ literary identity in England. Casanova has it that the use of Shakespeare in the constitution of the ‘Englishness’ of English literature is to be understood principally in terms of national rivalry with France and French neoclassical drama (in this she takes her cue from Linda Colley’s Britons). Competition with France is certainly part of this story, especially in the potential kinship of Shakespeare’s formal freedoms with English natural-law theories of liberty as against the rule-bound character of French drama associated more with a political culture dominated by a centralized monarchical state. But it would be just as plausible to see the Shakespeare/Racine opposition more as a debate about the poetics of dramatic art than as totemic items in an agon of nations (that is, as a debate concerned with what makes for successful drama rather than for a distinctively national one). For ‘Shakespeare’ was not a uniquely English affair. The national-rivalry scenario might, once again, make sense of the appropriation of Shakespeare in Germany, as part of the struggle against the hegemony of French ‘taste’ which Frederick the Great had sought to impose. But what of the appropriation inside France itself? In turning away from Racine towards Shakespeare (Stendhal’s Shakespeare et Racine is its energetic polemical statement), the French Romantics were hardly enlisting in the cause of English literary nationalism against the French variety (on the argument that England was now poised to seize the high ground in the rivalry of nations).⁵ If anything, the French Romantics were themselves fervent literary nationalists, deeply preoccupied with liberating the spirit of French drama from the dead weight of normative ‘rules’ but who, in pursuit of that goal, were unafraid to cross the Channel for inspiration and legitimation. They were unafraid to do so because their prime concern was less with defending a national legacy than with refashioning French understanding of what it meant, under certain conditions, to write a good play. This suggests not just a dilution of the ‘national’ criterion but, equally importantly, a major adjustment of the red-in-tooth-and-claw competitive model. It might make more sense to speak here of literary ‘negotiations’, itself of course a diplomatico-commercial term, but with the implication of at least a modicum of cooperative rather than competitive transaction. This would not necessarily mean that the negotiations constitute a cosily eirenic exchange; they may well be fraught with tension and ambivalence.⁶

The implications of this particular case take us well into what is problematic about Casanova’s terms and assumptions. It is not just that, even on its own terms, the account fails to address the full range of relevant facts.