CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This study of world literature begins where many do: with Goethe, but then it will

go backwards from Goethe before it goes forward. The term world literature itself derives

from Goethe’s neologism Weltliteratur, recorded by his personal secretary Johann Peter

Eckermann from a conversation one night over dinner: “National literature is now rather

an unmeaning term; the epoch of World-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to

hasten its approach” (165). The newness of the term is evidenced in John Oxenford’s

1930 translation by the hyphenation that brings the compound concept over from German

into English. World literature is now a commonplace in English, although what exactly it

is remains a matter of debate, allowing for such titles as David Damrosch’s book in 2003:

What Is World Literature? But what Goethe means by world literature or what “we”

mean by world literature today is not entirely my concern here—at least not yet—and this

is where I go backwards from his neologism. In Eckermann’s account, the conversation

in which Goethe lets slip the word that will create a new field of study begins thus:

“Within the last few days, since I saw you,” said he, “I have read many
things; especially a Chinese novel, which occupies me still and seems to me very
remarkable.”
“Chinese novel!” said I; “that must look strange enough.”
“Not so much as you might think,” said Goethe; “the Chinamen [sic]
think, act, and feel almost exactly like us…” (164)

1
Goethe goes on to explain the similarities and differences he finds between the “us” he

refers to and Chinese writing and culture it represents, drawing connections between the

Chinese text he has read and his own Hermann and Dorothea as well as the novels of

Richardson and the Chansons de Béranger. Here Goethe is suggesting what world

literature does, and many critics since then have produced readings of Goethe’s reading

of the Chinese text to articulate a reading practice for world literature.

But what I want to call attention to here is not Goethe’s reading of the Chinese

text but the fact itself that Goethe has read a Chinese text. Thus the question I pose is not,

how has Goethe read the Chinese text (in the hermeneutic sense) but how is it that Goethe

was able to read the Chinese text? The obvious answer—since Goethe had not studied

Chinese—was that he was able to read the Chinese text because it had been translated,

but this only begs the follow-up question: how is it that the Chinese text came to be

translated? Why that text? Why that author? Why from Chinese? Why at that particular

time and place? And how did the translation find its way into Goethe’s hands? The last

question is complicated further by the fact that Goethe actually read a translation into

French, not German.

What I want to emphasize is that what comes before Goethe’s reading of the

Chinese text—the process of its selection, translation, publication, and distribution—is

inseparable from that reading. Goethe’s conclusion that the Chinese “think, act, and feel

almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all

they do is more clear, pure, and decorous than with us” (164) does not necessarily arise

from the inherent qualities of the Chinese text or from his own subjective hermeneutics;

rather, the process by which the text reached Goethe is also implicated. Has a text been

2
chosen for translation from Chinese literature that most closely resembles French or

European cultural values? Has the translator interpreted and rephrased the text in French

or European cultural terms? The fact that Goethe refers to what I have insisted calling a

text as a novel already provides evidence of the way the book has been packaged and

circulates in Europe. In response to Eckermann’s question as to whether “this Chinese

romance [is] one of their best,” Goethe declares, “By no means … the Chinese have

thousands of them, and when our forefathers were still living in the woods” (165,

emphasis mine). Although the Germans were relatively late in literary developments in

Europe, Chinese texts old enough to be written when the Germans were “still living in the

woods” can only refer to literature before the arrival and adoption of the European genre

of the novel in China. Not fitting into the genres circulating in Goethe’s Germany, the

Chinese text has been translated, packaged, and received according to European genre

distinctions nonetheless. 1

The argument I want to make about the way world literature functions is not only

implicated in the lead-up to Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann, the “moment before”

I have insisted on looking at so far. Rather, Goethe’s discussion about the Chinese

“novel” also contributes to and continues that process. He reinforces the classification of

the Chinese text as a novel, he defines the Chinese way of life as “more clear, pure, and

decorous” than the German one, and characterizes Chinese literature as relying on

proverbs to convey moral lessons (164-65). What Goethe has to say about these things—

as has been proven by the many readings and rereadings of his reading—matters to the

way the Chinese text circulates later, and matters to the way other Chinese texts will be

1
In German, Goethe uses the word “Roman,” already a borrowing from French, which shows the way the
genre circulated inside of Europe as well. On the way the novel traveled in Europe, see Franco Moretti,
Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, New York: Verso, 1999.

3
translated and circulate after it. If Chinese literature is understood as “decorous” and

“moralizing,” for example, then texts might be selected and translated according to or

against those criteria that will perpetuate or contradict the way Goethe’s Chinese novel

circulates.

World literature does not just simply happen, then. Or, to use the formulation of

Vilashini Cooppan, “World literature is not an ontology but an epistemology, not a

known but a knowing” (“Ethics of World Literature” 38). As scholars and teachers of

world literature, we need to interrogate not only the ways of knowing but also the ways in

which what is available for knowing becomes available to us, a process inextricably

linked in a feedback loop with our ways of knowing. Certainly world literature as a

discipline has long wrestled with defining its object of study, laboring under the sheer

enormity of the terms that make up its name: “world” and “literature.” The field grew out

of and responded to the Great Books curriculum, which itself presented a set of

“classics,” texts central to the development of civilization and society. The classics

represented in Great Books classrooms revealed—and continue to reveal—a heavily

Eurocentric bias, with civilization as we know it emerging from the Greeks and Romans.

As Sarah Lawall demonstrates, early manifestations of world literature, as well as the

Great Books courses from which they arose, relied on a teleological narrative of progress

that pitted Western civilization against other civilizations that were either behind the

times or lost in some mysterious other time (19-22). Such characterizations corresponded

with the discourse of imperialism that justified conquest based on the idea that Western

civilization was more advanced. Both the Great Books as well as the colonial paradigm,

however, functioned by drawing some Eastern cultures, most notably in the form of the

4
Bible, into their narrative of progress in a gesture of incorporation. These acts of

incorporation have not stopped, however, the construction of a dichotomy between the

civilized, enlightened West and other parts of the world, between what has commonly

come to be called the West and the rest.

In a later guise, the field of world literature moved forward in time and out

somewhat, redefining itself as the study of “masterpieces” rather than “classics,” but far

too many of the masterpieces remained within the confines of Europe, and further were

penned all too often by a limited component of the European population: the Dead White

European Male, the fall guy of attempts to widen the curriculum. Without throwing the

DWEM out with the bathwater, the academy has acted to reverse its various antiquated

biases—gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, regional, and so on. But the wider the base of texts

becomes, the problem of curricular selectivity actually becomes even thornier, since we

are trying to fit representatives of more types of texts into the same amount of class

meetings and credit hours. If World Lit takes all literature of all the world as its object,

how does an instructor construct an intro course? 2 Damrosch has called the latest world

literature paradigm “windows on the world” (“Introduction” 3), but the World Lit

instructor is faced with deciding which windows to open onto which parts of the world.

The question remains: which world and which literature? Damrosch has argued:

World literature surveys can never hope to cover the world. We do better if we
seek to uncover a variety of compelling works from distinctive traditions, through
creative combinations and juxtapositions guided by whatever specific themes and
issues we wish to raise in a particular course. (“Introduction” 9, emphasis
original)

Uncovering those compelling works is precisely what I would like to call attention to at

this juncture—in a sense, this is the “moment before” of Goethe’s Chinese novel.
2
By “World Lit” I mean the academic field of study instituted in mostly American universities.

5
 Damrosch has set out the most commonly used designation of world literature at

the moment: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond

their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (What is World

Literature? 4). Thus for Damrosch, world literature is not all the literature of all the

world but only that literature which crosses a border. Despite whatever history texts may

have in their source culture, they do not exist in world literature until they have been read

outside that culture. So how do texts circulate beyond their source culture? In response to

Damrosch, Harish Trivedi has warned against taking the global circulation of texts for

granted, where the scholar of world literature need possess only a “passive responsive

capacity and readiness to whatever is washed up to our doorstep by the tides of global

market forces or the quirks of literary transmission and translation” (“Transfiguring” 7).

This project, too, aims to interrogate the idea that “important” or “deserving” texts will

inevitably cross cultural and linguistic borders to find themselves on course lists, in

anthologies, and on bookstore shelves. As translation scholar André Lefevere concludes,

the circulation and reception of texts in a given cultural system does not depend on some

ideal of “literary merit”; rather, “issues such as power, ideology, institution, and

manipulation” come into play (Translation, Rewriting 2).

One important such issue is language itself, an issue related also to power,

ideology, institution, and manipulation. Some languages possess more power than others

and hold privileged positions within academic and market institutions. There are more

Chinese speakers worldwide than English speakers, but English has become the lingua

franca of global business. Similarly, universities and other schools employ English and

French as the language of instruction outside the borders of nations where these are the

6
official or most commonly spoken languages, largely but not only due to the residues of

colonial education systems. It is unsurprising, then, that a large proportion of authors

from minority cultures who eventually circulate on a global scale are those that write in

English. Indeed, earlier studies of the way minority literature circulates on the global

market, such as Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary

Marketplace, deal exclusively or mainly with Anglophone examples. This dissertation

contributes to filling this gap in scholarship in its examination of the mechanisms by

which minority literatures written in languages other than English circulate on the global

market both inside and outside of the West.

Instructors, students, and readers of world literature thus do not have the entire

history of all the texts ever written to choose among. There are vast numbers of texts of

which they may not be aware or which they may not have access to for linguistic reasons.

One of the means by which World Lit distinguishes itself as a field from Comp Lit is that

the language of instruction and reading is usually English (in the American academy,

where World Lit as a field mostly resides) as opposed to the original language of

composition. Thus part of the selection process for readers and instructors of world

literature has already been carried out for them by the availability of those texts in their

language and the visibility of those texts on the cultural radar. Eugene Eoyang points to

this as he defines different types of translation, including what he calls “surrogate”

translations, where the reader is not expected to know the language in which the source

text was written: a “difference between realizing and not realizing that something is

missing, and it reminds us of the crucial importance between self-conscious and blithe

ignorance. … [A] work does not exist until it is translated in the significant target

7
language” (244-45). Texts such as these belong to what Margaret Cohen refers to as “the

great unread” (cited in Moretti, 209). Like Goethe’s Chinese novel, we can only read

what has been translated for us, and what we have available categories for.

This dissertation thus addresses what categories are available for texts translated

from other languages as well as how the category of world literature itself is constituted.

These concerns are to a large extent motivated by my own work as a translator of

minority literature by Czech and Haitian writers, and thus as someone seeking to bring

some of “the great unread” to the attention of Anglophone readers. The issue of how

foreign literatures function as literature in a receiving literary system can guide the

decisions translators, editors, and publishers make about the creation of the translated

text. These decisions occur on all levels of the translation’s conception, production, and

distribution, from the choice of a text to the choice of the cover art to the choice of

certain words over others. When taken as a whole, these decisions combine to create a

certain brand of literature that responds (in accordance with or against) current trends in

the market and the academy.

In world literature, one such brand by which texts from other cultures circulate is

otherness itself. Huggan, for example, speaks of “the booming ‘alterity industry’” (vii)

which has resulted in “celebrity critics” like Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri

Spivak (4). The phenomenon of celebrity writers preoccupies Huggan as it does

Brouillette and Damrosch. Damrosch, for his part, has made the case that despite the

expansion in the types of texts included in world literature, we have entered not an

anticanonical phase but a hypercanonical one. He argues that the most “classic” texts

continue to be taught, written, and talked about—“the rich have gotten richer”

8
(“Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age” 45)—and countercanonical texts have also

remarkably found their way into the world literature discourse, but that the repercussions

are a “shadow canon” of “old ‘minor’ authors who fade increasingly into the

background” (45). New movements in the academy, like postmodernism, postcolonial

studies, or gender studies, rather than making the hypercanonical texts irrelevant, become

new lenses for focusing even more attention on them: “Like the Lexus, the high-end

author consolidates his (much more rarely, her) market share by adding value from the

postcanonical trends …” (44-45). Meanwhile, the countercanonical texts, although they

have made considerable inroads, still have done so in rather limited ways. One such

phenomenon is the fact that often only one text from a given “minor” nation or language

is included in an anthology to represent a culture as a whole, “as in some literary Miss

Universe competition” (48). Even in nations or regions with extremely rich and varied

literary output, the tendency is for one or two names only—the Salman Rushdies, Jorge

Luis Borgeses, and J.M. Coetzees—to reach a relative level of recognition. As Damrosch

writes, “it appears that postcolonial studies is reproducing the hypercanonical bias of

older Europe-based fields” to create the “celebrity author” (49-50).

The celebrity author, Brouilette argues, has arisen naturally from a discursive shift

in the Romantic era that paired notions of the individual genius of the author with the

industrialization of literary production and a change in copyright law that favored the

author’s intellectual property claims (see Chapter 3 on Kundera for a full discussion of

this idea). With the emergence of authors, in the academy and the marketplace, as

characters imbued with individual genius came an increased interest in their persons, or at

least their personae, that would help to explain the origins of their genius and also help to

9
create a marketable genius figure. The latter phenomenon has only intensified as the total

number of books for sale has multiplied. Brouillette describes a fractioning of the market

into various niches and a corresponding call for authors to accommodate those niches not

only by their writing but also by the image associated with it (65-70). Authors, then, do

not simply write books; they also play an active part in marketing those books by

assuming saleable public personae, such that they become as much of a commodity as

their work. Brouillette then demonstrates how postcolonial authors engage actively in the

market side of their professionalized careers, showing how they “do not seek to separate

themselves from the commercial or economic spheres—the basis of those ‘corporately

owned’ images—but rather to interact with various forms of politicized interpretation and

reception that are imbricated with transnational culture and capital” (74).

As Damrosch argues, however, the market space for world literature authors,

especially from postcolonial or minor literatures is rather small and usually only

accommodates one author from each nation or region—Damrosch’s “literary Miss

Universe competition.” Competition, then, can be fierce to accede to this privileged

position where one’s work is selected for translation and circulation outside of its source

culture. In this dissertation, I show how authors function as agents provocateurs to draw

a maximum of attention and facilitate their earning the literary crown. Just as in any

industry, controversial or contrarian positions generate press, and even negative press can

be good press when it comes to name recognition and thus marketability. The more ink

spilled over you, the better. The author’s provocation then becomes inseparable from the

author as a figure and from his or her work, thus functioning as a kind of brand that the

author, along with publishers, editors, and translators, can market. In some cases,

10
provocation functions as resistance—a way of saying “in your face”—but as Huggan

contends, resistance is also a type of cultural currency. He examines the strategies of

postcolonial scholars and authors who seek to resist the commodity fetishism of the

global capitalist system when that very resistance becomes a commodity:

To what degree is the recognition—the cultural capital—of postcolonial writing

bound up in a system of cultural translation operating under the sign of the exotic?
What role do exotic registers play in the construction of cultural value, more
specifically those types of value (re)produced by postcolonial products and
(re)presented in postcolonial discourse? How are these exoticisms marketed for
predominantly metropolitan audiences—made available, but also palatable, for
their target consumer public? How, within this process, do postcolonial
writers/thinkers contend with neocolonial market forces, negotiating the
realpolitik of metropolitan economic dominance? How has the corporate
publishing world co-opted postcolonial writing, and to what extent does the
academy collaborate in similar processes of co-optation? (viii, emphases original)

Huggan’s questions prove useful to me here for the manner in which he brings out the

value assigned to a text, what I will call its cultural currency, not as something inherent

within the text itself but as something that emerges in the way it is marketed and

received. Since Huggan deals mainly with global Anglophone literature, he focuses most

often on the means by which authors themselves navigate these market forces, balancing

between conformity and resistance to the roles expected from them and their writing, in

this case as the postcolonial exotic. My work supplements Huggan’s, then, because I

address the way the process of translation in particular complicates these negotiations in

cultural currency across and even within borders. In the transaction between languages

and cultures, how does translation add new types of resistance and/or co-optation? How

does provocation function as a marketing strategy in differing cultures? How is a brand

created in translation?

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 As Lawrence Venuti has shown, the percentage of published works in English

that are translations falls far short of the proportion in other Europhone markets. Aside

from a few celebrity author bestsellers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende,

or more recently Stieg Larsson, translations are generally considered to be poor sellers

and thus financial risks by the large publishing houses. Since translations are thought to

have little cultural currency in the U.S. and American readers are characterized as

reluctant or even hostile toward works in translation, the marketing of the book often

minimizes the fact that it was originally published in a different language, such as by not

placing the translator’s name on the book cover or title page and not including

translator’s notes. In one extreme example, an ad in the New York Times for an Isabel

Allende novel boasted that the book was “also available in Spanish” for the growing

Spanish-speaking minority in the U.S.3 Unlike with authors, the role that translators play

in the brand of world literature is generally effaced.

The irony, then, is that one of the agents most heavily involved in the branding of

the text largely go unremarked in terms of actual brand recognition. World literature in

translation has its celebrity authors, but celebrity translators are indeed a scarcity—how

many readers of Garcia Marquez, Allende, or Stieg Larsson can name their translators?

There are, of course, some rare exceptions, but even then, the most well-known

translators tend, in fact, to be celebrity authors themselves. Vladimir Nabokov, for

example, produced his provocative translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a

translation famous for tenaciously ignoring the form of Pushkin’s poem in favor of its

content, which Nabokov dreamed of explaining with “footnotes reaching up to the top of

3
Comment made by a speaker at the Graduate Student Translation Conference at the University of Iowa in
October 2005.

12
this or that page to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and

eternity” (143). Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry in Cathay have been

similarly provocative, although in this case for their lack of precision rather than their

overzealous exactness. As Pound did not know Chinese and translated extremely freely

from cribs, scholars still disagree whether his effort might best be called translation or

adaptation.

The unconventional translations of agents provocateurs like Nabokov and Pound

do not represent the reigning practice of Anglo-American translation. Venuti’s argument,

now familiar in translation studies, is that the dominant model of translation in the

American literary system is one that favors “fluency,” in which the highest praise

accorded to a translation is that it reads as if it were originally written in the target

language. Target language readers, then, have the impression that they are actually

reading the original—not a translation—and that the “original” shows them a literary

world like their own. Thus Venuti contends that the fluent model of translation enacts an

imperialistic, ethnocentric violence on the source text:

By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true

semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial
interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if not simply
excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey. (Translator’s
Invisibility 21)

If foreign texts are translated in such a way as to be consistent with what the West claims

are universal values, then the “foreign” text only supports, rather than challenges, that

universality. The impression that the people of the source culture, like Goethe’s Chinese

people, “think, act, and feel almost exactly like us” comes not necessarily from the source

text but from the resulting translation. As I will argue in Chapter 5 using Judith Butler’s

13
notions of performativity and discourse, the source text performs the target culture’s

discourse.

To subvert this system of violent ethnocentric translation, Venuti favors a

translation strategy that “signifies the difference of the foreign text … by disrupting the

cultural codes that prevail in the target language” (Translator’s Invisibility 20). In this

foreignizing model of translation, the reader is reminded that the translated text was in

fact originally produced in another language in the context of another culture. We will

see in Chapter 4 how Ngũgĩ enacted a sort of foreignizing translation in his early works

even when the first language to hit the page was English. Ngũgĩ originally attempted to

capture the syntax of African speech in the dialogue of his novels in order to indicate to

his readers that the characters were actually speaking Gĩkũyũ and not English, thereby

insisting on the local difference of the text in the face of the homogenizing universalism

of the West that he criticizes. Since Ngũgĩ was writing in English but imagining a Gĩkũyũ

conversation, he calls this type of translation a mental translation. He eventually

abandoned the practice of foreignizing translation, even when he began writing his novels

in Gĩkũyũ and translating them into English, since he felt that the advantages of the

reader feeling an African syntactical rhythm were outweighed by the disadvantages of the

characters sounding unnatural—both in relation to English and Gĩkũyũ—and thus naïve

or unintelligent, which only played up, in the end, to the colonial march of progress

narrative.

Venuti, however, promotes this type of two-way unnaturalness as he subscribes to

Philip Lewis’s idea of “abusive fidelity,” which “requires the invention of analogous

means of signification that are doubly abusive, that resist dominant cultural values in the

14
target language, but supplement the foreign text by rewriting it in that language”

(Rethinking Translation 12). The rendering of the text into a different language cannot

help but be a violent act against that text, but in the foreignizing model, this violence is

made apparent to the reader through the reciprocal violence against the target language

and culture. Ngũgĩ’s mental translations of African syntax in his novels violate standard

English in this way, even as the mental original Gĩkũyũ is violated by its transformation

into the foreign English lexis. If violence is inevitable, according to Venuti, the freelance

translator (an important qualifier in terms of his market-based model) only “exercises a

choice concerning the degree and direction of the violence at work in any translating”

(Translator’s Invisibility 19). Translation consequently becomes a weapon against the

dominant ideology and poetics of the hegemonic target culture.

We can say, then, that rather than being mere currency converters, dealing in

mathematical equivalences that do not exist, translators take on a privileged role as

cultural brokers, negotiating the transactions between languages and cultures that involve

not only questions of language but also questions of power. Furthermore, the agency with

which translators act in Venuti’s model raises the visibility of the translation process such

that it becomes a vital part of world literature as a brand. In this sense, then, translation

can serve as a provocation in the form of subversive potential instead of being itself

devalued, elided, and ignored in the Anglo-American literary system. The control

translators exert, however, is far from absolute. Despite their efforts to brand their work,

translators are sometimes restricted by editors and publishers who often have different

ideas about the circulation of translations and may seek to limit the foreignness of the

text, to follow target culture literary conventions, to adhere to sometimes stereotypical

15
expectations about the source culture, and to otherwise restrict the visibility of the

translator, as discussed above in terms of the lack of prefaces, glossaries, or the even

label “translation” on the cover of the book.

In her study on Translating Milan Kundera, for example, Michelle Woods uses an

archive of letters between author, translators, and editors in order to reveal the

negotiations determining what type of currency translations of Kundera’s work should

draw on in English translation and how best to capitalize on it. One of these protracted

conversations related by Woods involves a discussion between Kundera, translator Peter

Kussi, and Alfred A. Knopf editor Nancy Nicholas on the subject of punctuation, which

at first blush might appear rather banal (35-36). But Kundera in fact agonized over the

replacement of semi-colons with periods in the translation of his book Life is Elsewhere.

He had sent long letters to Kussi explaining his stylistics that entailed long, run-on

sentences unusual in Czech. While Kussi attempted to preserve this effect in the English

as a result, Nicholas was less convinced and demanded the punctuation replacements for

clarity and to adhere to English stylistic norms. As Woods concludes, clearly influenced

by Venuti, Nicholas favored “fluency” in English over a more experimental style that

would abuse English punctuation standards. Rather than being a pedantic discussion, the

debate about punctuation here exposes how the brand ascribed to Kundera’s texts in

English was based rather on their content—which, as we will see in Chapter 3 was

mainly considered a political one—than on their aesthetic value, all of which relates to

the brand given to Czech writers in the Anglo-American system during the Cold War.

While I am using the economic metaphor of currency here, Venuti’s model

instead relies on an economy of violence, pitting the inscription of hegemonic values

16
partial to the target culture against the disruptive translation partial to the source culture. 4

Part of Venuti’s aim here is to assert difference in the face of the ethnocentric

imperialism of the Anglo-American literary system, but there are ways in which his

model actually obscures difference. Firstly, violence tends to entail some kind of

violation, i.e. a violation of something that was whole and absolute, such as the source

text original or the hegemonic cultural codes. To imply that the Anglo-American target

culture functions as a whole is to actually participate in its narrative of false universalism

since difference within the target culture itself, and not just between the target and source

cultures, is left out of the account. Denying a universalism to the West can involve

subverting, as Ngũgĩ says, the West’s tendency to “generali[ze] its experience of history

as the universal experience of the world” (Moving the Centre 25). But we can also use

translation to question the generalizing of the experience of history within the West itself.

In economic terms, there is not an Anglo-American market but rather markets. The

translator, editor, and publisher can make different choices depending on what type of

cultural currency has value to the intended audience. Anthologies of Czech literature

post-1989, as we will see in Chapter 5, for instance, brought out particular types of

discourse, such as postmodernism or feminism, in the Czech source texts to attract certain

types of Anglo-American readers. In the case of branding these texts as feminist or as

falling under the category of women’s writing, for example, texts were chosen that

featured “women’s issues” such as relationships, and the translators also paid special

attention to words referring to the gender of the characters.

4
See my article “Translation as Peaceable Resistance” (Norwich Papers 18 (Nov. 2010): 115-26) for a full
critique of Venuti’s economy of violence and my alternative model of translation as subversion in the form
of non-violent activism.

17
 The example of post-1989 Czech literature shows that the same set of texts, or

even the same text, can be used to signify different types of difference. It is important to

consider, in the circulation of world literature, what type of differences we give currency

to over others: between East and West, male and female, Third and First Worlds, between

regions, nations, genres, authors, or particular texts. In Venuti’s foreignizing translation,

the cultural specificity of the source text is subordinated to the overall objective of

signifying difference. The type of difference becomes irrelevant; it is only difference as

such—subversion and opacity—that matter. While it may lead readers away from

believing that foreign literature is just like literature in their own literary system,

foreignizing translation can, however, potentially lead to a new normalization of what

“foreign” literature is like. Gentzler compares Venuti to Gayatri Spivak in this regard,

contending that the latter instead “help[s] the Western reader ‘imagine’ … not an

abstract, politically correct Other, but real cultural differences in its specific forms”

(209). Spivak herself warns of the dangers of signifying difference on a large scale:

In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the
democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature
of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the
literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose,
something by a man in Taiwan. (“Politics of Translation” 400)

Spivak’s language here, as she writes of “wholesale” translation into a “with-it

translatese” bespeaks the commodification of literature from the Third World into a

fashionable market trend, where its difference, or at least a homogenized “Other”

difference, is recuperated as a selling point.

According to Venuti, translations have the highest chance of circulating widely

and winning praise when they minimize the foreignness of the text. If world literature has

18
been circulating more recently under the paradigm of the “window on the world,” then,

we might say that readers in the Anglo-American literary system prefer to look at the

world through their own windows, that is, in such a way that the foreign is actually

reflected back to them in their own terms. In opposition to this domesticating type of

translation, Venuti supports foreignizing translation that celebrates difference. What I

want to highlight here is that Venuti is also looking at the world from the vantage point of

his own window, even as he promotes difference. We see in his theoretical model his

debt to the climate of poststructuralism and postmodernism in the academy, with its

emphasis on exposing the trace of signification and showing that all interpretation is

contingent and incomplete. For Venuti, the domesticating translation makes interpreting

the text too easy for the reader, and so he wants to force the reader to not only think

before “understanding” but also to think about the fact that he or she doesn’t understand

everything. Such a translation practice implies not only signifying foreign elements in the

target text and abusing the literary and linguistic standards of the source language and

culture but also choosing texts that facilitate these processes. The translators, editors, and

publishers of the post-1989 Czech anthologies explored more fully in Chapter 5, for

example, selected texts for their collections that deal with such postmodern conventions

as capitalist dystopia, material and semiotic excess, and hypermediatization as well as

with postmodernism’s interest in the Baroque in a reaction against the modernism that

followed it. With postmodernism as a brand with cultural currency in the Anglo-

American literary system, especially nearly twenty years ago when these anthologies

were released, the Czech texts included in the anthologies performed the discourse of

postmodernism in order to capitalize on the contemporary cultural and literary values, in

19
particular among a certain segment of the population that serves as readers of world

literature.

By favoring a certain mode of translating and of selecting texts, however, we run

the risk of creating a brand of “foreign” literature in English with its own set of

normalized norms. In this case, foreign literature appears always to be resistant to

American literary conventions, always to be “difficult,” always to favor hybridity and the

free play of the signifier. We end up creating a foreign literature that is just as much in

our own image—as postmodern, postcolonialist Western academics—as the “fluent”

translations Venuti so derides. Texts, translated or otherwise, do not have an inherent

value in themselves, only the value we grant them depending on the types of currency

that are operative for us. Those currencies in turn derive from our positionality, and by

“position” I intend both the sense of placement and also point of view or opinion, which

combine to locate an agent in the network of agents who negotiate the circulation of

world literature. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has demonstrated how these two aspects of

positionality, placement (or what she calls identity) and point of view (what she calls

evaluation), overlap:

Our interpretation of a work and our experience of its value are mutually
dependent, and each depends upon what might be called the psychological “set”
of our encounter with it: not the “setting” of the work or, in the narrow sense, its
context, but rather the nature and potency of our own assumptions, expectations,
capacities, and interests with respect to it—our “prejudices” if you like, but hardly
to be distinguished from our own identity (or who, in fact, we are) at the time of
the encounter. Moreover, all three—the interpretation, the evaluation, and the
“set”—operate and interact in the same fashion as the hermeneutic circle itself:
that is, simultaneously causing and validating themselves and causing and
validating each other. (10-11, emphasis original)

What I would like to emphasize in the agents’ identity or position are not

demographical data such as gender, race, or class, although these aspects are of course

20
important, shaping our discourse and getting shaped by our discourse. Of interest to me

here, rather, are other positionalities which evoke a network of hierarchies. This interest

in agency and hierarchies derives, for example, from my own position as a translator of

Czech and Caribbean French to English (and thus from periphery to center) and as a

scholar in the fields of translation studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies at a

time when these fields intersect in the American academy with postmodern and

poststructural theory. My approach and my examples originate from this position and

raise larger questions which are, for me, at the heart of the circulation of world literature:

questions of center/periphery, colonized/colonizer, politics/aesthetics, East/West, and

North/South. As Vilashini Cooppan notes, “any map presents the global as a local

utterance, for any attempt to represent ‘the world’ inevitably bespeaks the mapmaker’s

own placement” (“World Literature and Global Theory” 13, emphasis original). The map

I present here of world literature is no exception; a formulation of world literature

depends on the discourses current at the time, for Goethe as for myself. As Immanuel

Wallerstein argues in terms of what he calls “world-systems,” the agents in the system

“are not primordial elements, but part of a systemic mix out of which they emerged and

upon which they act. They act freely, but their freedom is constrained by their

biographies and the social prison of which they are a part” (21). Although the agents can

never completely break free from their prisons, analysis of their situation within the

world-system enables freedom to the greatest extent possible. Accordingly, I here analyze

the types of discourse involved in the negotiation of world literature at the moment,

pointing not only to the way they help to map world literature today but also to the way

that world literature as a concept can help to constitute them in turn.

21
 As we have seen through the work of Venuti, the mass market for translation into

English trades in texts that read as if they were originally written in English and that

present a domesticated version of the source culture. Venuti has been among those

spearheading a movement in the academy to challenge this type of translation in favor of

a practice that makes visible both the process of translation and difference from the target

culture’s aesthetic and cultural codes. In contemporary translation studies as a field, then,

currency is accorded to the kinds of texts that enable these practices: multilingual texts

that show the interpenetration of languages, multicultural texts that show the presence of

minorities in supposedly homogeneous populations, multinational texts that show the

interaction of cosmopolitan subjects with various places, peoples, and ideas. Steven

Ungar’s contribution to the American Comparative Literature Association latest state-of-

the-discipline report in 2006 provides a characteristic example of such a text. Just as

many of the essays in the collection deal with the state of fields and discourses related to

Comparative Literature, such as feminism, francophonie, visual arts, and medieval

studies, Ungar’s paper serves as the representative of current trends in translation studies.

After introducing some of the most important recent contributions to translation studies—

by Venuti as well as by Spivak and Sherry Simon, who works particularly on the

connections between translation, feminism, and postcolonial studies—Ungar advances

the work of Maghrebi author Abdelkebir Khatibi, a Moroccan educated in French, as

exemplary of the “economy of difference and logic of transmission” Ungar sees as

central to the field (131). According to Ungar, Khatibi’s “pluri-langue” and “bi-langue”

texts such as Love in Two Languages mobilize more than one language at the same time

to “[recast] translation less as a process leading to transparency in the target language

22
than as a confrontation in which multiple languages and cultures square off against each

other and ‘meet without merging … without a reconciling osmosis or synthesis” (132,

emphasis original). Not only does Khatibi’s Maghrebi text put Arabic and French—East

and West—into relation with each other, but it also shows how

… the irreducible difference of language … links the geohistorical location of the

Maghreb between Orient, Occident, and Africa as a crossing of the global in itself
to a condition in which the regional languages of classical Arabic, its local
dialects, French, and Spanish contain the inscription of the other languages that
surround and inhabit it. (134-35)

The choice of Khatibi to exemplify an “economy of difference” in translation not only

between cultures but also within cultures demonstrates the currency of concepts like

hybridity, métissage, cosmopolitanism, and creolization in the Western academy. These

concepts make evident the constant transactions that brand cultural artifacts like

literature. Capital can be amassed, stored up, while currency is put to use, circulates,

participates in exchanges. Thus literatures, nations, and cultures are constituted not

simply in the accumulation of artifacts but also through contact with other literatures,

nations, and cultures, displaying the permeability of cultural markets. Even hegemonic

cultures such as the American one are not monolithic but pervaded by the wide range of

transactions occurring within and across their borders.

There is a danger in an uncritical celebration of hybridity, however, especially if it

does not take account of the power dynamics between the different forms of currency

involved. John Milton and Paul Bandia write, for example, of the incursion of minority

subjects into majority cultures through the process of translation: “Many minority

cultures have survived the onslaught of dominant global languages through a deliberate

translation of themselves into such global languages, which they subvert through

23
innovative linguistic practices to assert their identity on the world stage” (3). These

“translated men,” to use Rushdie’s term, however, seem to always be the ones doing the

translating of themselves; the Other is forced to speak in the language of the West, even

if that speech might be subversive. As Trivedi notes through the example of British writer

Hanif Kureishi, cultural translation is “not the need of the migrant but rather more of a

requirement of the society and culture to which the migrant has travelled; it is a

hegemonic Western demand and necessity” (“Translating Culture” 196). The West as a

site of translation and circulation for non-Western cultures can also represent its cultural

dominance in terms of a consecratory function. Ranee Kaur Bannerjee claims:

The First World is increasingly becoming the home of the Western-educated,

Third World intellectual. At home only in the language of the First World, these
intellectuals are best heard in the West. This is where they are published, where
their work is appreciated, where they get international exposure and recognition,
this is where they want to be heard. ... It is the best position from which a
postcolonial writer can challenge popular myths and misrepresentations about his
or her culture ... (197, emphasis original)

While Bannerjee is certainly correct that Third World intellectuals have migrated in large

numbers to the First World, their position there is much more fraught. As discussed

above in terms of Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic, resistance to the alterity industry is often

itself recuperated as a commodity in that industry. Bannerjee’s conclusions about the

“best” position for Third World intellectuals also involves sweeping suppositions about

these intellectuals’ cultural function and the audience they seek to reach. She assumes

that the role Third World intellectuals have to play in world literature is to write for other

cultures in order to correct misunderstandings about their own culture rather than to write

for their own culture. Ngũgĩ (Chapter 4) disputes claims such as Bannerjee’s by his

switch to writing novels in Gĩkũyũ after already having achieved cultural currency as a

24
novelist in English, although his books are still available to the Anglophone world

through translation. Furthermore, by promoting the translation of literature not only

between a minor and major language but also between minor languages, Ngũgĩ disrupts

the conception of world literature as a centralized market where everything passes

through the West and particularly through the United States.

This cultural hegemony of the U.S. has been bemoaned as a homogenization of

world culture, what we might call a McDonaldization or Wal-Martization of diverse

cultural productions. Such warnings should not go unheeded. Certainly the figures show

that texts are translated from English at a much higher rate than into English. Unlike

Rushdie’s “translated men,” it is assumed that the West does not need to translate itself; it

is always already understandable. Such a formulation only underpins the universalizing

gesture in Western discourse by not accounting for the difference types of brands that

circulate in the West itself. Furthermore, too often the assumption is made that texts

coming into English are ethnocentrically domesticated, while texts going out of English

reach all corners of the world unmediated by the translation or transaction process since

these texts are easily digestible bits of “universal” culture. Trivedi, for example, has

decried the fact that the academy has made pointing out instances of Orientalism its

fetish, but has not made the same strides in bringing to the fore moments of

Occidentalism (Das 39). In other words, the Western academy can pat itself on the back

for showing the ways it has oppressed the East, but in so doing, and in limiting itself to

this direction of cultural transfer, it maintains the East in its passive, victimized role, and

therefore only practices a different type of Orientalism. However, as we shall see in

Chapter 5 which deals in part with the import of Western feminism into the Czech

25
Republic, other cultures do not accept Western discourse unfiltered but rather create their

own brands out of them. In this particular case, because of a different social and literary

history, Czechs find that one size does not fit all when it comes to feminism and therefore

translate Western women’s writing so that it performs its feminist discourse differently in

the Czech context.

Because of the location of World Lit in the American academy for the most part,

these distinctions between the West as producer of discourse—of feminism, of

postmodernism, of postcolonialism—and East as receiver of discourse are generally

reinforced in the curriculum. But as Eoyang asks, “Is there really any such thing as ‘non-

Western’ literature, or is that denomination merely a reflection of Western

ethnocentricity?” (258). The Great Books and masterpieces of the older, competing forms

of world literature tend to appear on current World Lit syllabi as “Classic plus its

derivative(s)”—or not to appear at all. That is, the Western texts remain in the national

departments—English, French, German, etc.—while non-Western texts find their way

into the curriculum through World Lit courses, which end up functioning as a big box

marked: miscellaneous Other. In this sense, world literature becomes a euphemism for

non-European literature, postcolonial literature, Third-World literature, or for

Anglophone literature other than British and American. Thus, while world literature

allows for an opening up of the university-wide humanities curriculum to literatures once

and still often excluded, it also, in its current guise, reinforces certain geocultural

formulations. Aijaz Ahmad, who like Trivedi is based in India, addresses one of these

formulations: “It is useful, therefore, to demystify the category of ‘Third World

Literature,’ which is emerging in the metropolitan university now as something of a

26
counter-canon and which—like any canon, dominant or emergent—does not really exist

before its fabrication” (45). Such that, even as we strive to be more inclusive in world

literature, the paradigms by which we do so are by no means intuitive; we draw from

older paradigms, and end up underpinning them. Indeed, the very fact that one body of

literature is asked to operate as a counter-canon means that there must also already exist a

canon. The counter-canon posits itself against the canon; it does not explode it.

Haitian-born Canadian author Dany Laferrière, the subject of Chapter 2, attempts

to earn his place in world literature not only by trading in different types of cultural

currency depending on the context of the literary transaction but also by marketing

himself as a celebrity author even before the fact, creating a rock-star image and making

the most of television gigs. The flexibility with which Laferrière handles various markets

provides evidence of the way that the value of texts is constituted not in the text itself but

in the transactions of reading, interpreting, rewriting, translating, and editing, among

others. We have a choice as to which types of cultural currency are capitalized on in

order to move the text into circulation. The same goes for the teaching of World Lit

where the text might be given value according to a number of current discourses, such as

postmodernism, postcolonialism, or feminism, as discussed above. World literature

courses are often taught according to genre, theme, or region in order to make sense of

the huge body of material at hand, and each of these models further involves creating a

particular sort of commodity out of the text. The generic model tends to rely on Western

genre categories such as the novel, tragedy, or poetry. Not only do these categorizations

make certain formal assumptions, they also involve evaluative assumptions as well. That

is, instead of considering a text which almost-but-not-quite conforms to the generic

27
conventions of (great) epic as something other than an epic, there may be a tendency to

consider it as just not a very good epic, a failed epic, a derivative epic. We shall see, for

example, in Chapter 3 how Milan Kundera insists on Europe as the context by which all

novels should be evaluated and how this reinforces the cultural march of progress

described above, in which European models of writing are considered more advanced. If

texts from other places do not fit neatly into Western genres, they may get excluded from

the umbrella category of literature altogether. This is particularly the case with oral forms

of literature. Currently the category of orature, written literature based on spoken forms

such as the folktale, are making headway in world literature syllabi, but oral texts that go

untranscribed will circulate with more difficulty. These texts will continue to be what we

might call after Cohen “the great unlistened to.” On the other hand, for texts that have

been translated, that process of translation often involves rewriting of the source text

according to the target culture’s generic norms, as with Goethe’s Chinese “novel.”

The thematic organizational model, in which texts from various parts of the world

are put in conversation around a particular topic, can create a comfortable sense of

universalism in which there may be some variations in how we approach certain things,

but at heart we are all concerned by the same things and thus deep down are really all

alike. The regional organizational model, on the other hand, may incline toward

ethnographic readings of the texts, such that a text or two from a certain region are taken

to show what life is like in those parts, Damrosch’s “window on the world.” Such an

approach, I argue, limits the aesthetic potential of the text in favor of the informational

one; content supersedes form. Even when the means of expression is also given attention,

the Other card poses further problems when placed on the World Lit table. As Cooppan

28
explains while discussing her introductory course, “My students … were on the verge of

a romantic attraction to otherness and a well-intentioned desire to turn admiration for

other cultures, literatures, and aesthetic practices into a shorthand ‘understanding’ of the

other …” (“Ethics of World Literature” 35). If one of the goals of world literature is to

show readers that other people, other places, and other cultures may have different ways

of being, speaking, doing, and thinking, there is, as Cooppan notes, the danger that

readers take the insights they gain as complete and the information in the text as

unmediated and objective.

As will be more fully discussed in Chapter 3, Martinican theorist, novelist, and

poet Édouard Glissant has compared the act of understanding to one of appropriation and

assimilation, of reducing the Other to our own terms. Certainly understanding in this

sense is to be avoided in the World Lit classroom. Yet swinging the pendulum too far in

the other direction by making everything difficult, opaque, elusive and by eliminating

paths of access to the texts and the worlds they describe would cripple the ideals that the

field of world literature, whose aim has always partly been, and should remain to be,

unapologetically humanist. Students will simply end up frustrated with a course in which

they feel they haven’t learned anything, and it would be wrong to break a ruler against

their curiosity. And there is also quite a bit more at stake in world literature, which allows

for the textual meeting of cultures that are also meeting on the market, in international

bodies of governance, and quite possibly on the battlefield. Indeed, Cooppan feels she

made the biggest impact with her world literature course when they coincidentally were

reading The 1001 Nights during the 2003 Iraq invasion. The 1001 Nights had thus gained

a new sort of currency due to events on the world political stage, and that currency could

29
be mobilized to give the students and Cooppan a different way of looking at the people

who had found themselves occupied by our troops. As demonstrated in Chapter 2,

Laferrière’s book Tout bouge autour de moi on the 2010 Haitian earthquake, allows for

this same opportunity to build a relationship based on empathy with a culture usually

treated as a dark Other. It is my supposition that, with tragic irony, the earthquake in

combination with Laferrière’s recent prestigious French literary prize may finally bring

about his American success, evidence that the perfect storm of opportunities is sometimes

necessary for texts to travel. Yet Laferrière’s work has already been circulating for years

in various other world markets. He had risen to overnight fame in his adopted country of

Quebec through his cheeky television antics and brazen literary reflections on the

intersection of race and sex. It took some time, however, for him to refine his brand into

one that sells in various other markets. By outlining the traffic of his texts across time and

space, I present the Western system as a network of literary centers—and thus

opportunities—rather than an all-or-nothing, undifferentiated whole.

Whereas in cases like Laferrière’s writers may wait decades for an opening in the

market, in other cases they face a loss of interest from a once-receptive audience. During

the Cold War, Czech authors dissident to the communist regime enjoyed success in the

U.S. as their texts were recuperated into the Western politico-ideological position. How

could these same writers, however, maintain their currency after the fall of the Berlin

Wall? Chapter 3 (East is East, East is West) looks at Kundera, who capitalized on his pre-

1989 success by vehemently opposing the branding on which it was based. Kundera, in

his essays and interviews, attempts to redraw the boundaries of world literature in order

to place himself within a tradition that allows him to be more than just a political writer. I

30
show how he sets forth a grand history of the European novel in such a way as to give

himself a privileged position within it and thus a larger literary franchise.

While the texts discussed in the first two chapters move around and finally into

the vast, lucrative Anglo-American market, the work of Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ could be

said to have journeyed into this center and then back into the periphery. Ngũgĩ first

garnered acclaim in the West for English-language texts, but defiantly declared in

Decolonising the Mind (1986) that he would write henceforth only in his native Gĩkũyũ,

an announcement made, significantly, in English. Chapter 4 (Opportunity Knocks Back)

is unique to Ngũgĩ studies in that I here treat him not only as a writer but also as a

translation theorist in tune with the hierarchies of languages as well as those of culture,

genre, or texts. Ngũgĩ’s stance on translation and textual production proves more nuanced

than his dogmatic pronouncements, and so we see this agent provocateur actually

compromising with the agents of globalization involved in literary circulation.

Writers like Ngũgĩ and Kundera of the Cold War generation converted political

relevance into broader literary significance, but authors whose texts had not already been

translated pre-1989 lack that base level of cultural capital. In Chapter 5 (Not Kundera’s

Sisters), I look at the work of anthology editors and publishers who are bringing Czech

women authors into circulation by a brand shift away from politics toward gender studies.

Through a close reading of the paratextual presentation of the anthologies, I assess how

they conform to these paradigmatic expectations. The shift toward women’s writing in

Czech literature abroad helps to rectify the literary gender imbalance at home, but it also

poses the problem of new, potentially essentializing expectations as to how and about

what these women “should” write.

31
 CHAPTER 2

Dany Laferrière: How Not to Conquer America in One Night

Dany Laferrière gave viewers who had tuned in to see the weather one day in

1988 more than they had bargained for: a forecast presented in the nude. Laferrière was

already no stranger to provocation in his adopted city of Montreal, to which he had

immigrated eight years earlier from Haiti. In 1986, he had created a succès de scandale

with his first novel, or rather with the title alone of his first novel: Comment faire l’amour

avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer [How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired].

The book launched Laferrière into the limelight of both the popular media as well as

Canadian scholarly journals, after which he made what would at first seem the unlikely

transition from literature to meteorology. And yet the incident of the bare Laferrière

telling his viewers whether or not they would need an umbrella actually crystallizes the

place he has carved out for himself in Quebec as an inescapable cultural figure. While he

might appear to be simply playing the clown in his goofy weather segment, Laferrière

was in fact doing what he has always done: wrapping the heavy questions of race, class,

and sex into the guise of entertainment, and then throwing it all into his viewers’, or

readers’, face.

It certainly matters, for example, that the naked body on display to the Quebec

audience is black. Western modern discourse has created a dichotomy between the

32
enlightened, cerebral European and the primitive, corporeal Other. 5 The European in

Africa configured the manners of dress or undress of Africans as a sign of their primal

animal nature, which in part allowed the colonizer to justify the practice of slavery. And

the nakedness of the slaves—in their crossing of the Atlantic on the slave ships, in their

arrival in the New World colonies—became a sign of their abjection. Haiti, Laferrière’s

native land, remains to a large extent in Western discourse a nation not of people but of

abject bodies. A string of violent regimes (not least of which being the Duvaliers in the

20th century), vodou practices, legends of cannibalism, the high incidence of HIV/AIDs,

and poverty so extreme that people have been known to eat dirt in order to appease their

hunger—all these construct Haiti as a land where the corporeal and not the cerebral takes

precedence.6 The exposed black body further signifies carnality. Exoticism and eroticism

often go hand in hand; one need only think of Josephine Baker. It is on this very

discourse that Laferrière’s first novel plays, as the title so clearly suggests, taking to the

absurd extreme the stereotype of the sexualized black male let loose among a white

female population.

In his sexual conquests, the narrator of Comment faire l’amour… announces his

presence among the white Canadian population with fanfare, quite like Laferrière himself

in his unorthodox weather forecast. His job as a morning weatherman on the new station

Télévision Quatre Saisons (now TQS) made him the first black person to work for the

news at a major Quebec network. With his widespread public appearances on the

television screen, Laferrière thus rendered visible the changing face of the Canadian
5
Classic examples include G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) and Count
Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55).
6
See for example, J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary
Imagination (NY: St. Martin’s, 2nd ed., 1997), especially “The Art of Darkness: Writing in the Duvalier
Years” (101-134); and Part III (Affective Cultural Translation: Haitian Vodou) in Madelaine Hron’s
Translating Pain (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009, 133-184).

33
population and the movement toward more institutionalized multiculturalism, starting

with policies enacted in 1971 such as the creation of the Multiculturalism Directorate and

the Canadian Council on Multiculturalism. 7 Since TQS portrayed itself as a fresh

alternative to the older Quebecois channels, it is not surprising that Laferrière’s

groundbreaking entry into a new multicultural televised newsroom should happen there,

and that they would allow him such irreverent behavior. That irreverence functions much

like his novels in creating out of Laferrière a dual insider-outsider figure in his new

country. On the one hand, his cheeky weather forecast endears him to his viewers, not

unlike a class clown. The fact that he makes the weather fun and funny also falls along

the old stereotype of the black entertainer, which neutralizes the potentially perceived

threat from the black population, again with all its associations of corporeality and

primality that in this case some whites fear may be unleashed against them. But as much

as Laferrière assuages those fears by goofing off in front of the camera, he also

paradoxically revives those fears in his unabashed self-exposure, in the unapologetic way

he engages in behavior normally considered inappropriate, in his sheer in-your-faceness.

The “threatening” black male in his nakedness has surprised you in your living room; the

immigrant black male is in your country, and he’s going to do as he likes.

The performativity of Laferrière’s position in a multicultural Canada relates to

Graham Huggan’s concept of “staged marginality,” a term he adapts from sociologist

Dean MacCannell’s “staged authenticity”:

Staged marginality … denotes the process by which marginalised individuals or

social groups are moved to dramatise their ‘subordinate’ status for the benefit of a
majority or mainstream audience. Staged marginality is not necessarily an

7
On Canadian multiculturalism, see for example, Graham Huggan’s chapter “Exoticism, ethnicity and the
multicultural fallacy” in his The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (NY: Routledge, 2001, 124-
154).

34
 exercise in self-abasement; it may, and often does, have a critical or even a
subversive function. (87)

Such is the instance of the naked weather forecast: a mainstream Quebec audience

viewing the exposed black clown, who nonetheless disquiets at the same time as he

entertains. As we will see later in this chapter, this tactic runs throughout Laferrière’s

work, where it is often his marginal status in North American society that comes to the

fore. In staging his marginality in order to gain viewers and readers, Laferrière

participates in what Huggan calls the “alterity industry” as an example of the

“postcolonial exotic”:

The postcolonial exotic is an effect of commodification, but it is not

simply reducible to the cultural logic of consumer capital … In a sense, it
might be seen as a congeries of strategic exoticisms, designed to show the
workings of the globalised alterity industry and to repoliticise exotic
categories of the cultural other as an unsettling force. …. The language of
resistance is entangled, like it or not, in the language of commerce; the
anti-colonial in the neocolonial; postcolonialism in postcoloniality. What
remains—in this context at least—is to lay bare the workings of
commodification; for the postcolonial exotic is both a form of commodity
fetishism and a revelation of the process by which ‘exotic’ commodities
are produced, exchanged, consumed; it is both a mode of consumption and
an analysis of consumption. Cultural products operating under the sign of
this ‘exotic’ are likely to raise the challenging question: what is really
exotic about me? (264)8

Huggan sees the discomfort of these postcolonial authors in their fraught relationship

with the alterity industry, where their very articulations of resistance are what give them

their market appeal. Once critical and/or popular success has been achieved, however,

these authors will have a larger and more attentive audience to whom to voice their

8
Huggan draws the distinction between postcoloniality and postcolonialism wherein postcoloniality
represents the material and ideological situation in the period after outright imperial colonization and
postcolonialism represents a way of thinking that critiques that situation: “Postcoloniality, put another way
is a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange. Value is
constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and,
particularly, culturally ‘othered’ goods. … Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that
stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification” (6).

35
ambivalence about the position they have reached. The postcolonial exotic thus must, in a

sense, play the market in order to resist the market, at the same time that resisting the

market can be recuperated as playing the market. Throughout this chapter, we will see

how Laferrière throws his marginality in the reader’s face, insisting that he and his work

should not be ghettoized with exotic labels. At the same time, his insistence upon

dredging up the question of exoticization forms the backbone of much of his work, and

thus becomes one of the major features that attracts readers.

If, however, Laferrière might serve as a representative of the postcolonial exotic,

he makes for an interesting case study by which to explore the limits of the term. For if

he is “postcolonial,” which colony is he “post” to, as a Haitian residing in Quebec?

During the colonial era, Haiti passed hands several times among the European powers but

eventually fell under the control of France and became its most profitable colony. But it

also became one of the first ex-colonies when the slaves rebelled and won their

independence in 1804. Although they gained their independence a century and a half

before the African colonies or India, the after-effects of colonialism have had incredible

lasting power, not least because France recognized Haiti’s independence only in 1825

and under the condition that it pay indemnities to the French government for the losses

incurred by the plantation owners, leading Haitian writer Jean Métellus to joke

acerbically that “Haiti inaugurated Third World debt” (218). In the 20 th century, however,

Haiti has experienced a colonial-type relationship rather with the United States, which

occupied the island from 1915 to 1934 and interfered significantly in Haitian politics

twice recently, first by covertly helping to overthrow Haiti’s first democratically elected

president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, and then by more publicly restoring him to

36
power with an invasion in 1994. Further, neocolonial imperialism in the form of foreign

capitalist interests comes from America but also from other industrialized nations such as

Germany and France who seek cheap manufacturing labor.

So when he immigrated from Haiti to Quebec in 1976, Laferrière ended up on the

soil of a nation that had no (neo)colonial past or present with his homeland. The result

places him outside the typical paradigm of the (ex)colonized migrating to the metropole

of the (ex)colonizer. While hardly intentional—Laferrière notes he had only 48 hours to

arrange his departure once he learned his life was in grave danger from the State—the

author has found the choice extremely fortuitous:

Quebec is one of the rare countries of the north to not have a colonial past
(ok, there’s the Indian problem, but if you’re looking for perfection in this
world, my friend, you risk being disappointed). 9 Thanks to this
exceptional situation (Quebecers present themselves as the white Negroes
of America) I was able to avoid the endless, annoying debates about
colonialism, which is what’s on the program every day for Senegalese
writers in France or Pakistanis in England. (Je suis fatigué 111)10

Laferrière thus feels he has been able to escape what he sees as the suffocating

expectations assigned to postcolonial authors living in former colonial nations. There is

no score to settle between the Haitian and the Quebecer, no old injustices to work through

and rectify. For Laferrière, the fact of colonialism limits the work of postcolonial authors

to pointing out those injustices and limits the work of ex-colonial readers to accepting

their responsibility for them. The only subject matter allowed for postcolonial literature,

in this formulation, is postcoloniality. “No dialogue is possible with a subject like that at

the center,” Laferrière argues, even in “a simple daily conversation gangrened by the

9
Laferrière deals with “the Indian problem” in his prose-poem novel A Drifting Year through the character
of the narrator’s Native American co-worker: “Being Indian is worse / than being black in America. / You
can’t even claim / you came from / somewhere else” (79).
10
Unless otherwise noted in the Bibliography, all translations are mine.

37
historical reminders of one party and the guilt of the other. … The most anodyne question

makes direct reference to colonialism” (Je suis fatigué 112). By immigrating to Quebec,

Laferrière can instead slip outside this bilateral configuration of identity, giving him

flexibility in his role as a writer, cultural critic, and citizen.

But if Laferrière’s position in Quebec society is not neatly determined by the

colonizer-colonized paradigm, it only raises more questions about who he is and how he

and his writing relate to their context. Despite the artistic freedom he argues his unique

immigration has offered him, many of the concerns in his writing are shared by

postcolonialism and have shaped the creation and reception of his work in significant

ways. In this sense, postcolonialism is not a historical situation but a set of larger issues

related especially to power structures of race, class, economics, and politics. So if

Laferrière’s condition does not actually put the questions of postcoloniality aside, it

allows a means to look at them less bilaterally and to see the power structures at issue as

overlapping and sometimes contradictory rather than as a simple ladder of one-over-one.

It is precisely the context of Quebec and Laferrière’s position within it that illustrates

such a complex of hierarchies, giving a richer vision of postcoloniality and thus of the

role of the postcolonial writer.

When Laferrière set foot on Canadian soil, he found himself in a postcolonial

context far removed from the First World-Third World paradigm. A different imperialist

state of affairs plays itself out within the borders of Canada itself, and Laferrière made his

entrance there at a key moment in that history. As he notes in the quote above, Quebecers

portray themselves as “the white Negroes of America,” pointing to their relatively

powerless minority status within the larger contexts of Canada and North America as a

38
whole. The French-speaking population of Quebec has tenaciously defended its identity

against the hegemonic Anglophone majority, sometimes violently as happened in the

decade preceding Laferrière’s immigration. The separatist group the Front de libération

du Québec set off 95 bombs from 1963 to 1970, including one in the Montreal Stock

Exchange. In October of 1970, they kidnapped two government officials, which provoked

the central Canadian government to invoke the War Measures Act exceptionally during

peacetime, permitting the arrest of citizens without a warrant and the deployment of the

military. The population favored less violent means of supporting Quebec’s

independence, electing the separatist Parti Québécois to power in the provincial

government in 1976, the year Laferrière arrived. Rather than finding himself in a

powerful imperialist country, then, he was instead located among a population engaged in

its own national liberationist struggle not unlike those of the Third-World ex-colonies.

The Francophone/Anglophone power divide plays itself out particularly in

Montreal, Laferrière’s adopted city, where the English-speaking minority has historically

enjoyed an economic and cultural elite status, embodied in its elevated geographic

position on the top of Mont Royal. Sherry Simon, a translation scholar interested in

postcolonial issues particularly through the example of Montreal, describes it as a

“divided city” where “the crosstown voyage … is always a voyage across languages”

(Translating Montreal 7). These types of voyages figure significantly into Laferrière’s

Comment faire l’amour…, where the crosstown voyage plays out not so much as

horizontal but vertical movement. Since the narrator’s sexual conquests consist of

Anglophone women, their relations require a journey by the narrator “up” into the

affluent, privileged Anglophone space or a journey by the female lover “down” into the

39
poor neighborhood of the narrator’s tiny, filthy apartment. That neighborhood, although

on the Francophone side of the city, also contained a growing immigrant population,

including of course, Laferrière’s narrator. It is here that the question of language, power,

and colonialism becomes more complicated, for neither is French the narrator’s native

language. Laferrière describes the situation in terms of his own writing:

I arrive in Montreal and immediately fall into the national debate:

language. I had just, not five hours ago, left in Haiti a vicious debate on
language where French symbolized the colonizer, the powerful one, the
master to be uprooted from our collective unconscious, only to find myself
in another, no less vicious debate where French represented, this time, the
victim, the downtrodden, the poor colonized demanding justice. And
English the reviled master. The all-powerful Anglo-Saxon. Which to
choose? Which camp to head for? My former colonizer French, or
English, the colonizer of my former colonizer? (Je suis fatigué, 130)

In this context, then, the distinctions between major and minor languages become

blurred, and the ethical choice of which language to use—as a means of resistance

against colonial imposition—becomes thornier.

Interestingly, in Laferrière’s presentation of his dilemma, his native language of

Creole does not even register as a possible choice. To write in Creole would mean

limiting oneself to a small Haitian immigrant population within Canada in addition to

possible exports to other immigrant communities and to Haiti itself. 11 In the new

language debate with which Laferrière is confronted, Creole serves as an elided third

term that appears only in more subtle ways. Indeed, Laferrière’s translator from French

into English, David Homel, has argued that the original texts are marked by “gaps and

uneasiness we sometimes sense” that show that “[Laferrière’s] books, written in French,
11
Even within Haiti, the number of publications in Creole is relatively small due to a variety of factors such
as the low literacy rate, the cost of books, the limited market, and the institutionalization of French as the
language of instruction. In North America, Educa Vision publishes some texts in Creole (creative writing as
well as educational materials in such fields as hygiene and domestic violence), and recently the small
independent publishing house Mémoire d’encrier, founded in Montreal in 2003 by Haitian-born Rodney
Saint-Eloi, has released a few titles in bilingual Creole-French or Creole-English editions.

40
are translations from the Creole that’s in his head” (“Tin-Fluting It” 50).12 Homel does

not give any specific examples of these “gaps,” aside from mentioning that, for him,

Dining with the Dictator bears them most heavily, so it is difficult to know exactly where

and how he (and not “we”) senses them. He does note that “no one has ever remarked on

[the Creoleness of Laferrière’s texts] before,” in all likelihood because most readers don’t

“really know what’s behind what they are reading,” which he claims “proves that

Laferrière has learned the second language exceedingly well—but not seamlessly” (“Tin-

Fluting It” 50). While Homel celebrates this appearance of Creole in Laferrière’s writing

and also sympathizes with his condition of writing in a language imposed upon him

(“Tin-Fluting It” 50), Homel’s account of the situation is problematic and ultimately

condescending, suggesting that he, too, might not “really know what’s behind” what he is

reading, to use his own rather smug formulation.

It is true that, as Homel says, French is not the language of Laferrière’s childhood

and was “acquired secondarily,” but this does not have to mean, as Homel claims, that

French remains for Laferrière “a blunt, unfamiliar set of tools” (“Tin-Fluting It” 50).

Creole and French have been the joint official languages of Haiti since 1961, but there is

certainly a difference in their usage, where Creole remains largely an oral medium of

day-to-day conversation and French the institutionalized language of instruction. Thus

while Laferrière would have spent the first several years of his life in Creole, his

schooling would have been, from the start, more or less in French. Clearly this is an

imposition left over from French colonialism, but this kind of indoctrination leads to a

rather high level of skill in the imposed language. If, as Laferrière observes, most of his

12
See Chapter 4 on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for a discussion of “mental translation” from a native language in
one’s head to a colonizer’s language on the page.

41
schoolbooks were published in France, with the most notable exceptions being in history,

geography, and literature (J’écris 30), then his comfort with French as a written language

would not be much different from that of a French child. Furthermore, despite the fact

that school and public libraries had poor collections of books, Laferrière has often

mentioned being a voracious reader from a young age, tearing through whatever he could

get his hands on. The most important distinction to make here is French as the major

vehicle for the written word and thus for written forms of literature, such that while

French might be out of place in daily lived experience, it becomes naturalized as the

medium for literary expression, and Laferrière’s comfort with it in terms of written

creation should not be underestimated.

Certainly Homel acknowledges that Laferrière has learned French “exceedingly

well,” just not “seamlessly.” What seems troubling in this formulation is the fact that it

attributes the surfacing of Creole in Laferrière’s French as merely accidental and denies

the possibility that it could be intentional and strategic, part of the author’s performance

of the exotic. In the case of Laferrière, this varies from text to text; the level of Creole

emergent in the French increases when the story takes place in Haiti rather than Canada

or the United States. Thus the context of the story, and the lived experience of the people

within it, help to determine the language used to express it. According to Laferrière, Pays

sans chapeau (1996/Down Among the Dead Men, 1997), for example, a novel that speaks

of the narrator’s return to Haiti after twenty years,

is written in French and Creole at the same time. Creole is there even
when the characters express themselves in French. Moreover, one
character points out that they have been speaking Creole for a while even
though they hadn’t stopped speaking French. The fact is that I lose myself
in this linguistic muddle. I’m crisscrossed by different languages, different

42
 customs, different histories waging an endless war over who will dominate
my mind. (J’écris 224-25)

There is, admittedly, in Laferrière’s manner of speaking, a lack of control over what

language he uses, as if he were at the mercy of the languages “dominat[ing] his mind.”

This element of subconscious language use can also be found in the way he describes the

process of writing the first novel he wrote that takes place in Haiti, L’odeur du café

(1991/An Aroma of Coffee, 1993) a fictionalized account of his childhood. Laferrière

relates that, upon reading the original manuscript, his editor “understood all the words,

[but] he had trouble sometimes understanding the meaning of certain sentences.” When

Laferrière reread what he had sent, he “discover[ed] that the syntax was Creole. In a way,

it was impossible to write a book recounting my childhood in Petit-Goâve in a language

other than Creole” (J’écris 224). He eventually “took the manuscript back to establish the

text in French” since “the vast majority of his readers only read French” (J’écris 224). If

this is the case, then in the published text at least, Laferrière had to consider the language

choices he was making deliberately, even if he claims the original was reflexive. Giving

credibility to this version of events would mean accepting Homel’s statement that when

Laferrière writes he is actually translating from Creole in his head, at least in the case of

his Haitian-situated texts, although again it seems that Homel exaggerates the foreignness

of French as a medium of writing for Laferrière. What I ultimately argue is that this

process of translation indicates not so much a strict divide between the two languages as

a melding of the two, such that, in approaching Laferrière’s texts, we are not talking

about French but about varieties of French.

For Homel, the Creoleness of Laferrière’s writing signals itself through “gaps and

uneasiness” in the French. That is, through moments in the text that are “not French.” But

43
what is “French”? In the context of Quebec, it seems strange that Homel should insist on

a French language, as if there were one standard. If Quebec finds itself, as a minority

population, marginalized culturally and linguistically by the rest of Canada, it is

marginalized in a different way in relation to France. French is the official language in

both places, but the variety spoken in France acquires the status of the standard by which

usage in other parts of the globe is measured, and the variety in Quebec becomes

classified as non-standard, derivative, a dialect. So, too, does the cultural production of

France rank highest in terms of prestige and marketability in relation to other

Francophone cultural production, or even compared to most other places in the world.

France has a host of big names in the canon of world literature—its Molières, Hugos,

Vernes, Baudelaires, and so on—and more Nobel Prize for Literature wins than any other

nation, the most recent being J. M. G. Le Clézio in 2008. Few Quebecois writers have

any sort of international name recognition. 13 And so French becomes the language of

Diderot, of Camus, of Sartre and not of Tremblay, Roy, or Maillet.

Well-acquainted as he is with the Quebecois literary scene, Laferrière’s translator

Homel (himself an Anglophone immigrant from Chicago) is aware of its language

politics, both in relation to Anglophone Canada and France as well as within Quebec

itself. He references internal Quebecois language debates when he mentions the dialect

joual: “remember that variety of québécois French that used to have meaning a couple

decades ago?” (“Tin-Fluting It” 50). It is unclear if his patronizing tone is directed at

joual literature for being a silly, reactionary movement or at readers for treating it as such

and thus letting it lose its meaning. But Homel certainly has an awareness of varieties of

13
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow was born in Quebec to Russian immigrant parents, but left during his
childhood and never wrote in French.

44
French as opposed to a supposed universal standard, and so it is surprising that he doesn’t

allow Laferrière’s French to be one of those non-standard varieties, a possible Haitian

French or immigrant French. As Simon has observed, “Many Montrealers came to realize

that the official voices of Montreal’s historic communities no longer reflected the reality

on the ground, as these communities became more diverse and less easy to define

according to strict linguistic or ethnic categories” (Translating Montreal 7). According to

Simon, such a situation comes into existence through a failure in translation:

… as result, not of distance, but of excessive contact and interpenetration. This is

a positive form of failure, a breakdown that indicates an evolution toward new
forms of expression. Translation is a form of regulation. It allows exchange and
intercomprehension, while keeping languages separate. (Translating Montreal 9)

While Simon qualifies the phenomenon as “a failure” (since for her translation would

require a language x and y to translate between), I argue rather that such bleeding

between languages is a very condition of translation, that translation always bears the

trace of the source language in the process of translation, and that prolonged translation

interactions will inevitably lead to the accumulation of these traces. 14 The contact

between Creole and French, then, can be said to have created Laferrière’s variety of

French, which he has obviously mastered. That is, Laferrière might be perfectly

comfortable speaking and writing French as he does, and the “uneasiness” Homel senses

there may be his own.

The most unfortunate part of Homel’s reflection on the Creoleness of Laferrière’s

French is the way he throws up his hands at introducing that element into the translation:

“How can we communicate this in English? I don’t think we can. … Laferrière’s

Creoleness is lost in translation” (“Tin-Fluting It” 50). Strange words coming from the

14
See Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) for an example of this in relation to
translation between Chinese and other languages.

45
translator himself. Perhaps the reason is that Homel is more interested in conserving a

different translingual relationship in Laferrière’s work, that between French and English.

Laferrière and Homel have both often shared the anecdote of the former telling the latter

that the translation of Comment faire l’amour… would be easy because it was already

written in English, just with French words. And Homel agrees: “There is a manic,

immigrant energy there that is perfectly suitable for the English language (some would

say that energy is the English language” (“Tin-Fluting It” 50). What Laferrière and

Homel are mainly alluding to is the style of the former’s writing. Laferrière’s goal is

actually an “absence of style” in which “the reader forgets the words to see the things.

Direct contact with life. No intermediary” (J’écris 54). An excerpt from Comment faire

l’amour… in which Laferrière’s alter ego, who is also a writer, composes a portrait of his

room on his typewriter illustrates this pared-down style perfectly:

A description of my room at 3670 rue St-Denis (done in

cooperation with my old Remington 22).
I write: bed.
I see: dank mattress, dirty sheet, pounded-out pillow, corrugated
couch.
I think: sleep (Bouba sleeps twelve hours straight), make love (Miz
Sophisticated Lady), daydream in bed (with Miz Literature), write in bed
(Black Cruiser’s Paradise), read in bed (Miller, Cendrars, Bukowski).
(98)

The language is trimmed down to the bare minimum, and yet it speaks volumes about the

narrator’s life—his material situation, his relationships with others, his hopes and dreams,

and his intellectual world. Through this type of style, Laferrière places himself in an

American (read: U.S.) tradition of writing, major contributors being Hemingway and then

the writers of the Beat Generation. Laferrière admires Hemingway’s “ability to express

his feelings clearly without trying to explain or analyze them. Not slipping anything into

46
the text to signify one way or another that you’re intelligent: in a word, trusting your

emotion” (J’écris 181). This in opposition to European, and especially French, writing

that he finds verbose: “I’ve always been intrigued by the very French expression c’est-à-

dire (that is to say), asking myself why they didn’t get directly to the explanation in the

first place” (J’écris 180).

In aligning himself with a style of writing practiced by authors from the United

States, Laferrière again avoids neat categorizations, locating himself more densely in the

overlapping context in which he finds himself and defying expectations for postcolonial

writers. His stylistic choices make it difficult to define him as (only) a Haitian writer or a

Quebecois writer, and in fact Laferrière has long identified himself as an American

writer, where America signifies not the United States but North America, including the

Caribbean. Laferrière has dubbed his first ten-book cycle, which has been divided by

critics into “Canadian” and “Haitian” texts depending on the setting, “An American

Autobiography.” Such a move also seeks to wrest some of the cultural power away from

the United States in the Western Hemisphere, where Canada has been living in its

cultural—and political—shadow.

Of course, when I write Une autobiographie américaine, I'm speaking

about the continent and not just the United States. I'm talking about the
fact that Haiti is in America, a fact people tend to forget. The Caribbean is
a region of America. I detest the word “Antilles,” which alludes to France.
When I say that I am an American, I do it in order to place myself and to
say that I am not an Antillean (Antillais)—not a French subject. I belong
to this continent that the United States has wanted to keep simply for
itself. The idea of a “Great American Novel” is not a novel that can only
take place in the United States. I think I am a better contender with An
American Autobiography, which takes place in Petit-Goâve, Port-au-
Prince, Montréal, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, and San Juan (the
airport) than many U.S. writers. (Coates 915-16, emphases original)

47
Thus as a Haitian residing in Quebec, Laferrière participates in multiple hierarchical

relations that complicate bilateral formulations of identity as well as of postcoloniality.

As a small Francophone nation in North America, Quebec remains on the periphery of

both the French-speaking world and the American cultural scene. It is buffeted between

two of the major imperial cultural powers of the contemporary world: France and the

United States. Haiti, too, has French as one of its official languages and is, as Laferrière

constantly reminds his readers, part of the Americas, although differing histories mean

that the way Haiti experiences its position in relation to France and the United States is

quite different from the way Quebec experiences its corresponding position. As a writer

born in Haiti and living in Montreal, Laferrière thus figures into these linguistic and

cultural hierarchies on multiple levels and in multiple directions.

The complex position of Laferrière—with its overlaid contexts and relationalities

between Haiti, Quebec, Anglophone Canada, the United States, and France—serves as a

prime case study for rethinking the model of the way world literature circulates. In the

Western academy, the traditional model of cultural movement presented a chauvinistic

vision of the world in which civilization as we know it was born in Classical Greece and

Rome, grew into Western Europe, and has since radiated outward to the rest of the

unenlightened world. 15 Postcolonial studies in particular has challenged the unidirectional

movement of culture from West to Rest, aiming to give value to cultural production at the

periphery of metropolitan centers like Paris, London, and later New York. But

countermodels such as these that value the periphery in opposition to the center or reverse

the West-to-Rest cultural flow do not go far enough in breaking down the very binary on

which West/Rest chauvinism rests.

15
For an overview of the history of world literature as a field, see the Introduction.

48
 Recently, David Damrosch in his seminal What is World Literature? has brought

the question of circulation back to the heart of the definition of world literature, and he

proposes an alternative model which destabilizes the monolithic poles mentioned above.

Damrosch’s model is as interested in reception as it is in circulation, and thus he invokes

the idea of “refraction” in which texts have no innate integrity but rather are transformed

in the reception process depending on who is receiving/perceiving them where, in which

context, from which perspective. 16 The circulation of world literature thus corresponds,

for Damrosch, to a process of “double refraction” represented by an ellipse “with the

source culture and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space

within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed

by neither alone” (283). He goes on to add, however, that “as we begin to look more

widely we soon find ourselves amid a multitude of partially overlapping ellipses, all

sharing one focus in the host culture but with their second foci distributed ever more

widely across space and time” (284). The space of world literature, then, is not so much

an ellipse but a network of ellipses, overlaid and lopsided, depending on the web of

relations and the power dynamics involved. A change in the ellipse between two cultures

is not restricted to that space alone but has ramifications for the entire network of ellipses.

While Damrosch’s model goes far in advancing the complexity of world literature

circulation, it still presents limitations in its insistence on the source culture focus. Like

the multitude of other mobile writers (be they called immigrant, migrant, exile,

cosmopolitan, etc), Laferrière raises the question as to which culture should be

16
The influence of André Lefevere is evident here. According to Lefevere, “When the non-professional
readers of literature … say they have ‘read’ a book, what they mean is that they have a certain image, a
certain construct of that book in their heads” (Translation, Rewriting 6) which is formed by reading through
the rewrites of and around that book. By reading through the rewrites, one privileged form of which is
translation, the non-professional reader thus reads a “refraction” of the text and not the text as such
(“Mother Courage’s Cucumbers” 240-41).

49
considered the source. Haiti, the culture of his birth? Canada, where he now lives and

where the majority of his books are first published? Must we specify Quebec, rather than

Canada, since intranational reception in the country as a whole already requires the

process of translation? And what of Laferrière’s claim of being an American writer?

What of his more recent novels published simultaneously in Quebec and France? Even if

a source culture could be agreed upon as the “origin” of a text, the elliptical model puts

too much emphasis on that source culture as the starting point. The result is that any

movement to a host culture remains largely bilateral since all the ellipses share the same

source culture focus. But the way texts actually circulate shows that movement into a

host culture does not come only directly from the “source.” A clear example is the fact

that translations of texts from “minor” languages are often performed through the

intermediary of a “major” language such as English or French. What readers in the final

target language get, then, is a refraction of a refraction, a doubly (at the very least)

mediated text. And translation is certainly not the only means by which multiple

mediations occur simultaneously and in which Damrosch’s ellipses could be drawn not

only between “source” and host culture but also between host cultures. In the case of

Laferrière, his reception in France, for example, is influenced not only by his reception in

Quebec—as an immigrant author writing in accordance or against that type—but also by

his reception in Haiti—as a Caribbean author writing for or against that type.

By taking up the case of Laferrière and tracing the reception and movement of his

texts in and between several interlocking markets, I aim to show that the circulation of

world literature requires a less restrictive model that insists less upon a single source and

gives more importance to interactions between what Damrosch calls host cultures. If we

50
return to the reigning concept at work in this dissertation, it is here that currency in its

etymological root of currents proves particularly useful. Thinking in terms of currents

allows us to muddy the waters of circulation, as it were. It lends a certain fluidity to the

movement, which has direction but whose tributaries can come from several “sources.”

Furthermore, just as when water from two or more sources mingles, it is no longer

possible to distinguish which water came from where, so too with texts is it difficult to

say which refraction came from where. As regards the circulation of Laferrière’s texts,

we might begin by breaking that movement down into its constituent parts: so-called

periphery to periphery (Montreal to Haiti); periphery to center (Canada to the United

States); center to periphery (France to Montreal); center to center (France to the United

States). Not only do Laferrière’s texts not move simply back and forth across the axis

between Montreal (where they are originally published) to other markets, but these

constituent currents are much muddier than even this schematic would seem. For the

current from France to the United States has already been flowing with tributaries from

Canada and Haiti. Of all the markets that will be dealt with specifically here, Laferrière

has had the least commercial and critical success (outside of the academy) in the United

States. Despite his film entitled Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit (How to

Conquer America in One Night), he has yet to break into the U.S. literary scene in any

appreciable way aside from attention in academic journals and conferences, and indeed I

will argue that his eventual success there will come from the confluence of currents from

Francophone and Anglophone Canada, Haiti, and France, demonstrating that the perfect

storm of opportunities is necessary to generate cultural currency in certain contexts.

51
 In tracing the currents of movement of Laferrière’s texts across time and space,

the other two senses of my term currency, as outlined in the Introduction, will also play a

vital role. For a text to enter appreciably into a literary market—domestic or

international—readers must find some currency in it, in the sense of relevancy. The

reader must feel that the text speaks to them in a way that bears some relation to their

own concerns, and those concerns very well may be an interest in other cultures. The

reception of Laferrière’s texts proves particularly illustrative of the fact that currency in

terms of relevance changes from market to market (or even within markets, if we

consider niche markets). What makes a text current to a reader in France may be quite

different from what makes the same text current to a reader in Haiti. In this sense, the

globalized market is not as globalized as it might seem. Globalization has become a sort

of shorthand for a world in which the same product, cultural or otherwise, spreads across

the globe in a sweeping move of uniformism and universalization. But as Sarah

Brouillette has argued, books are not Coca Cola:

With a book, too, there is presumably more space for the consumer to
construct meaning, and each book product contains a distinct symbolic
content. ‘Books’ are not just books; the word stands in for an assemblage
of separate entities, and variety in content leads to complexity of ordering
and distribution, and in turn to special technologies for stock control and
consumer profiling. Moreover, books cannot move easily across borders
due to linguistic and cultural differences that impede easy dissemination.
Coke is Coke wherever it goes. … Notwithstanding all this, isn’t Coke
itself a complex carrier of different symbolic material, and isn’t its
meaning as a product something that varies with consumption? (49)

What this means in terms of the circulation of world literature is that a book is not

guaranteed a similar reception in different markets because not only is the context not the

same, neither is the product, the book, itself. Laferrière has been particularly successful in

a variety of markets because of the way that he and the other agents who rewrite his work

52
(in the Lefevrian sense) have been shrewd about transacting in different forms of

currency in different markets.

One of the major principles by which Laferrière has handled his flexible success

is the realization that the product in question is not only the book but also its author. In

fact Homel lists among the lessons he has learned from working with Laferrière “how a

writer can simultaneously use and be used by the media. And I’ve witnessed why writers,

if they want anyone to read their books, have to create public personae for themselves”

(“Tin-Fluting It” 53-54). Laferrière’s created persona emerges from his fiction as he

develops a deliberate slippage between himself and a literary alter ego. Critics and

readers generally accept that the narrator in each of Laferrière books is (more or less) the

same person, and also based on the author’s own life, but Laferrière is careful to point out

that he should not be confused with his narrator, known as Vieux or Vieux Os. 17 Jana

Braziel calls this “alter-biography”: “Alter- because [his texts] enter into alterity and

deconstruct auto-referentiality, while contesting subjectivity and problematizing language

as a transparent medium” (“From Port-au-Prince to Montréal to Miami” 242). The reader

should thus not assume that the situations, actions, or thoughts of the character(s)

necessarily derive directly from Laferrière’s life, even if that character shares key

biographical information with the author, such as name, dates, and family members. One

of the most notable readers to fall into that trap is Laferrière’s aunt Raymonde, herself

both a real person and a character in his work, who actually and fictionally (in Le goût

17
The adult narrator’s friends refer to him as Vieux in conversation, but this is actually just a generic slang
form of address like “man.” In the books that deal with his childhood, his grandmother calls him Vieux Os
(Old Bones), a nickname referring to the fact that he likes to stay up late into the night. As Bernard
Magnier points out, in Pays sans chapeau and Le cri des oiseaux fous the character himself is referred to as
Laferrière rather than Vieux or Vieux Os, which puts a parenthesis around the Autobiography as a whole.
The author responds to Magnier’s observation, “It’s true [the narrator] gets his name back at critical
moments. In my opinion, a traveler—and every human being is a traveler in one way or another—has two
great moments, the moment of departure and that of return” (J’écris 19).

53
des jeunes filles) takes her nephew to task for distorting the truth in his novels, sending

him his books once she has read them with her factual corrections in the margins (J’écris

44). What she doesn’t realize, or won’t accept, is that by presenting a narrator who is in

many ways both Laferrière and not Laferrière, the author is able to create a mythology

around himself and control his image as a writer. Such image management plays into his

larger project of promoting his work.

At a certain point in the biographies of Laferrière and Vieux, it becomes more

difficult to match up their lives. While Vieux in Comment faire l’amour… enjoys the

single life, picking up rich Anglophone college girls, drinking cheap wine and writing his

first novel in his tiny, decrepit apartment, the author was dividing his time between

Montreal and New York City where his new wife and baby daughter lived. Vieux’s

confirmed bachelorhood, which allows him freedom of movement and also freedom of

sexual partners, contributes to a hip persona that then bleeds into that of the author. As

Laferrière indicates in his book-length interview with Bernard Magnier J’écris comme je

vis (2000), “As a writer, I feel closer to a rock star. Rock stars usually don’t have any

children and are never bald. At least that’s the image they want to give of themselves”

(58). A much more accurate picture of Laferrière’s personal life during this period can be

found in the columns he wrote between 1984 and 1986 for the weekly Haïti-Observateur,

a newspaper based in New York and designed for Haitian expatriates. These columns,

later collected and published as Les années 80 dans ma vieille Ford (2005, The 1980s in

my Old Ford), show the author spending time with his family, meeting various other

Haitians abroad, visiting the Krome camp for Haitian refugees in Florida, and returning

briefly to Haiti to report on the situation there, in significant contrast with Vieux, who

54
doesn’t return to his homeland until 20 years after his 1976 departure in the novel Pays

sans chapeau (1996, Down among the Dead Men 1997). This version of

Laferrière/Vieux’s life, however, isn’t nearly as sexy as the other one, and Laferrière is a

man who knows that sex sells, just as it does in the entertainment industry. Indeed,

Laferrière is not afraid to include literature within that very industry. As Ursula Mathis-

Moser has argued, for Laferrière, the artist must come to accept that “the world of artistic

creation is governed simultaneously by business and show business, the latter being only

a variant of the former” (75).

If other postcolonial exotic figures experience or at least present a certain unease

with their necessary cooperation with the market, however subversive the intent of that

cooperation, Laferrière represents an interesting case in that his relationship with the

market is direct and unashamed. Laferrière wants you to read his books; he also wants

you to buy his books. He’s not embarrassed to bring up the material, that impolite

question of money, although money isn’t just about materialistic gain. The outspoken

Laferrière wants to be able to say whatever he pleases. In Haiti, the dictatorship blocked

that right; in Quebec he finds that political correctness limits freedom of speech

(Bordeleau 9). For him, there’s a simple solution to censorship, self- or otherwise, as he

declares in an interview, “The only way to be truly free is to be famous and rich”

(Bordeleau 9). Certainly there is more at work here than money and fame alone; a variety

of power structures to which Laferrière is no stranger enter into the equation: race, sex,

politics, and so on. But the author is to be commended for his openness not just in

connecting money and fame with those power structures—easy enough to do and

maintain the moral high ground—but in admitting his own desire to accede to a position

55
of discursive power through the avenues of money and fame. If you can live off your

writing, you have the leisure to write. If your writing has made you famous, people will

take a greater interest in what you have to say. Money and fame are a means to a more

liberal platform from which to articulate your point of view, and perhaps an oppositional

point of view. Yet how do you attain money and fame? By giving the public a product it

wants to buy, and there’s the rub, as Huggan has noted with his study of the postcolonial

exotic.

But as Brouillette has argued in her critique of Huggan, the relationship between

postcolonial authors and their readers is not as fraught or antagonistic as Huggan makes

out. According to Brouillette, Huggan creates an unsophisticated “global market reader”

serving as a foil for a different class of readers—Huggan, of course, included—who are

“educated, elite, distinguished consumers” (19). The global market reader is thus a straw

man for a kind of self-congratulatory understanding of postcolonial writing, although the

global market reader also functions as a straw man for Brouillette’s critique of Huggan,

since she, not he, invented the term. While Brouillette misrepresents to some degree

Huggan’s argument, there is still value in her own case for a less homogeneous

characterization of the global market reader, allowing for a variety of astute reader

responses:

… strategic exoticism is not something a writer deploys to teach a reader

about the errors in her conceptions about other cultures, much though it
depends upon a construction of a figure in need of such instruction.
Instead, it indicates a set of textual strategies that communicates at all
because the author and the actual reader likely share assumptions about
the way culture operates, and concur in their desire to exempt themselves
from certain undesirable practices. (43)

56
Readers of certain types of postcolonial writing, then, are not looking necessarily for

exoticism but for an ironic distance from exoticism. In the case of Laferrière, we can say

that his readers are in on the joke. When Laferrière protests about being pigeonholed as a

Caribbean writer, a black writer, an immigrant writer, and so on, the readers with whom

these protests have currency—Brouillette’s “actual readers”—will not be the ones being

chastised. Instead, those readers and Laferrière are complicit in a critique of another type

of reader, imagined or not. As Brouillette writes in regards to Nobel Prize-winning Saint

Lucian writer Derek Walcott, his “conflicted hesitation about his relationship to his

material is in many cases his material” (43). This is abundantly clear for Laferrière also in

books such as Why Must a Black Writer Write about Sex?, in which he laments and

exploits the expectations for black authors, or in I am a Japanese Writer, in which he

hilariously resists all attempts to label him by declaring himself a Japanese writer.

Readers would hardly take pleasure in these books—wouldn’t laugh—if they felt they

were the ones being made to look foolish for 150 pages.

Laferrière’s particular brand of strategic exoticism, then, involves casting off

labels at the same time as he plays up to them, however ironically. What increases the

flexibility and reach of this type of Laferrièrian currency is the number of labels he is

willing to take on—both in the sense of to assume and to contest: “A single label isn’t

good, but lots of labels, that’s no problem” (Morency 22). By dealing with/in several

labels, he avoids too strict a categorization and also allows his work to circulate in

accordance with various types of cultural currency. Different markets will favor different

types of currency: Quebecois readers might be more particularly interested in what he

makes of the immigrant label, Haitian readers of the Caribbean label, etc. In this sense,

57
the idea of cultural capital requires refinement, because cultural capital acquired and

accumulated in one place does not necessarily transfer to another. Ezra Pound’s monetary

metaphor of writerly name recognition can be of use here:

If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one
for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value … The same applies with cheques
against knowledge … You do not accept a stranger’s cheques without reference.
In writing, a man’s ‘name’ is his reference. He has, after a time, credit. (cited in
Casanova 16).

Pound’s formulation might be reworked to describe the way writing travels between

markets. Even if Mr. Rockefeller can draw a good check for a million dollars in the

United States, that doesn’t mean he can write a check for a million dollars and use it in

Japan because dollars are not the currency of Japan. The capital does not necessarily

transfer, or rather, it needs to be transferred into another type of currency.

Laferrière’s work has been quite successfully transferred into a variety of

currencies in a variety of markets, thanks to his own shrewd writing and marketing

strategies and those of his translator, his editors, and other rewriters. Laferrière, like all

writers, I argue, does not so much accumulate cultural capital as capitalize on

opportunities. To capitalize on opportunities means to be capitalist and opportunistic, but

I suggest here that these words need not be taken in their negative aspect. Certainly there

is a negative aspect to Laferrière’s capitalist opportunism; it can be self-serving or come

at the expense of others, as it does with regards to white women in his fiction, as we will

see later. His comfort with the material issues of writing also mean that he will unself-

consciously accept material advantage from his work. Invite him to a conference on

Caribbean writing, and he will tell you that he is not a Caribbean writer, but he will allow

you to pay for his trip to your conference where he will tell your audience that he is not a

58
Caribbean writer. Laferrière’s capitalist opportunism thus sometimes teeters on ethical

boundaries, but capitalizing on opportunities does not necessarily imply doing so. In fact,

I argue, it is the very condition of finding a place in the market. Write a book that has no

currency, and no one will read it. Which is not to say that writing needs to pander to a

sanitized global market. Subversion also has currency, and certain opportunities will

enable writers to explore more deeply the subversive potential of literature. Laferrière’s

opportunism has, however, been far from an instantaneous process. While his first novel

became an overnight success in Quebec, his entrance into other markets, such as Haiti

and France, took considerably more time, and his reception in the U.S. market has until

now been rather piecemeal and sometimes even hostile. In what follows, I trace the

circulation of Laferrière’s texts over space and time to bring to light the different sorts of

opportunities his work capitalizes on and the different types of currency that can be

granted to the same texts in different contexts.

French Canada

As an examination of the popularity of Comment faire l’amour… and its author

shows, texts do not succeed in the market merely based on something called “merit.”

Certainly in the case of Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, the title

accounts for a good deal of the attention the book received upon its release. As Laferrière

comments in Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?:

The title of my first novel made me famous. People who never read the book,
especially those who had no intention of reading it, can quote you the title. It took
me five minutes to come up with it. Three years to write the book. If only I’d
known … Forget about those hundreds of scribbled pages; all I needed were ten
little words: How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. (17, ellipsis
original)

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The title sets the tone for an uninhibited, humorous look at interracial sexual

relationships, a subject not without a risqué sort of appeal, especially 25 years ago when

such couples were relatively less common. Flirting thus as it does with taboo, the title

draws in the potential reader to have a closer look and provokes, if not always discussion,

at least a visceral reaction. Lending itself to hot-topic type conversation, the book led to

Laferrière’s almost immediate appearance on the public affairs program Noir sur Blanc

hosted by Denise Bombardier on Radio-Canada television—a case of reality imitating

fiction. In Comment faire l’amour…, Vieux, dreaming of the literary fame his own in-

progress novel Black Cruiser’s Paradise, will afford him, imagines just such an interview

taking place. The concept of this neat mise en abîme probably helped Laferrière land the

interview, as well as the fact that discussing the book on the program places Bombardier

as a cultural arbiter and serves as self-validation and self-endorsement for the television

host. Endorsement was, of course, exactly what Laferrière was also looking for from the

experience:

The book came out on a Friday, and that Saturday I had an interview with Denise
Bombardier. It was the first time in my life that I was on TV. I had seven minutes
to try everything. I’d sworn to myself that I’d slap Denise Bombardier in the face
if it went badly, not because I’d have anything against her, just to be sure to make
the news the next day. … Bombardier started the interview almost like I’d shown
her doing in [Comment faire l’amour…]. (J’écris 162)

His joke about slapping Bombardier to get press fits into his larger project of deliberate

self-promotion. Comment faire l’amour… did not appear on bookshelves and

spontaneously jump off them the next day. Before the book’s release, Laferrière himself

took the initiative of having a friend print posters with a photo of him and then of putting

them up around the city. The author had carefully reflected upon the image he wanted to

present of himself in the photo: barefoot and typing on his typewriter on a park bench

60
with a bottle of beer in a brown paper bag next to him. Some friends accused him of

playing up to stereotypes of black people, but he claims he aimed rather to place himself

within the tradition of Beat writing and to look “like a writer at work” (J’écris 160-2).

Even as a debut writer, Laferrière clearly understood that getting your book read is as

much about the packaging of the book and its author as what’s between its covers.

Behind his carefree attitude he hid a meticulous attention to his image as a writer and

sought out ways to cultivate that image outside the text.

The Bombardier interview was far short of being Laferrière’s last appearance on

television. Soon after, it helped him land the morning weatherman job that saw him

forecasting in the nude. That naked report was only one of the ways in which Laferrière

put his own spin on his segment, as he also left the studio to do popular man-on-the-street

bits, a move which turned him into a veritable television personality and led to numerous

other TV appearances. In the words of fellow Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert:

There’s no doubt about it: he blows up the small screen. From the beginning, he
demonstrated such an ease that I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the
would-be professional put himself through simulated interviews in preparation for
confronting that inhibitory monster [television]. Time, experience, and talent did
the rest. (7)

Unquestionably, then, Laferrière’s on-camera charm played a large part in attracting a

readership, and it also doesn’t hurt that his early novels match the provocative yet jovial

image presented on television. Aside from touching on racy, taboo subject matter,

Laferrière’s books are ostensibly easy reads: short novels with short paragraphs and short

sentences, as already mentioned, in the style of Hemingway and Beat writers. But the

ideas expressed behind Laferrière’s rather flip representation are considerably weighty:

race, identity politics, dictatorship, exile, to name a few. In this way, Laferrière manages

61
to walk the fine line between “serious” and “commercial” fiction in Canada, thus gaining

a wide readership while maintaining his credibility.

Laferrière’s studied self-promotion thus proved quite effective in conquering the

market in Francophone Canada. He gives the impression of being a celebrity in Montreal,

where, he claims, he can’t walk down the street without someone asking him when his

next book will be coming out (J’écris 59). Even if we take this as an exaggeration

designed to contribute to the image he fosters of himself as a rock star writer, we can still

acknowledge that Laferrière has a notoriety in Montreal unlike that of most other writers.

What makes him personally so recognizable, however, appears to derive not so much

from his novels as from his television appearances. Therefore, the way in which

Laferrière is able to capitalize on his media presence in order to gain readers as well as

bargaining power with publishing houses (Dalembert 8) is limited geographically by the

dissemination of that media. That is, his contributions to Quebecois television, radio, and

print media only reach audiences in Quebec, a relatively small market, in comparison to

both the otherwise mostly Anglophone country of Canada as well as of the wider

Francophone world.

Although his public persona has played a key role in Laferrière’s popularity in

Quebec, it by no means accounts for all of it. Other factors based in the texts themselves

have contributed to his status as a writer there, and particularly to his being identified as

an important “Quebecois” writer. Laferrière’s novels, especially Comment faire

l’amour…, appealed to Francophone Canadian readers by matching certain literary trends

and attitudes. As already mentioned, Laferrière’s first novel chronicles the lifestyle of

Vieux and Bouba, two black immigrants who share a tiny, filthy apartment, philosophize

62
over cheap wine, and pick up girls. Central to the book is what Laferrière describes as the

“explosive” sexual encounter between the black male and the white female, which

becomes not only a site for pleasure but also for power struggle. In Laferrière’s hierarchy

of race and sex, the white man stands alone at the top, followed by the white woman, and

next the black man. However, by sleeping with the white woman, by in a sense taking

what “belongs” to the white man, the black man can usurp some of his authority (as well

as that of the white woman). In order to seduce their partners Vieux and his friends

mobilize the stereotypes that attribute black men with exceptional sexual prowess, an act

that the white women envisioned by Laferrière accept all too credulously. It is important

to note that the young women who comprise Vieux’s conquests belong to Montreal’s

exclusive minority Anglophone population, privileged both economically and

socioculturally. Despite their advantaged backgrounds and elite education, the women

easily fall dupe to the immigrant black men’s ruse, and so the playful humor of the text

actually often comes at the expense of Vieux’s conquests. The fact that the women taken

in by the black men’s game come from the Anglophone Westmount neighborhood creates

an appeal for the Francophone Canadian reader. As Pascale de Souza and André

Lamontagne (63; 34), among others, have noted, Francophone Quebecois resentful of the

Anglophone minority derive gratification from the latter being made to look foolish.

The novel, then, functions to form an alliance between a Francophone Canadian

readership and Laferrière, despite his being an outsider in Montreal as a black Haitian

immigrant. By exacting a sort of postcolonial sexual revenge on the Westmount girls,

Vieux/Laferrière becomes “one of us.” A further bond between Montrealers and

Comment faire l’amour… arises from the topographical specificity of the book. Laferrière

63
frequently mentions actual locations in the city: parks, bookstores, bars, a post office, the

cross at the top of the hill in Westmount, as well as the exact address of Vieux’s

apartment on the Rue Saint Denis. The reader familiar with Montreal thus also

experiences the pleasure of recognition, of being in-the-know, of essentially being an

insider in Laferrière’s novelistic world. The Westmount girls and the Montreal sites

combine, then, to create mutual sentiments of inclusion between author and reader,

bringing the author into the reader’s community, and vice versa.

Laferrière’s insiderness is far from being complete, however. He, like his

protagonist, remains subject to racial and cultural discrimination as a black immigrant

from a developing country. It is precisely the unknown or misunderstood aspects of his

background that allow Vieux to manipulate the sexual desires of the Canadian women. In

Éroshima, Vieux describes being the token black person at a chic party, of being an

exotic curiosity which lends the event a certain caché that he in turn cashes in on: “From

now on, you won’t be able to have a party without a Negro. No scene is complete without

one. His presence permits all fantasies. Keiko said that to one of her girlfriends over the

phone …: ‘We’ll have a Negro’” (45). His skin color also leads him to be singled out in

much more overtly racist ways, such as when the police stop and search him because they

are looking for a black male suspect (Drifting Year 45). Laferrière’s early “American”

novels—those that take place mostly in Canada and/or the United States, namely

Comment faire l’amour… (1986), Éroshima (1987), Cette grenade… (1993), and

Chronique de la dérive douce (1994)—taken together depict the experiences of a Third

World immigrant writing himself into the culture of his adoptive country in the First

World. Laferrière is in a sense playing at two kinds of notoriety—the strategic exotic

64
tokenism of the black immigrant and the televised celebrity of the rock star writer, and

the two exist in a precarious feedback loop. He came to fame through his depictions of

the life of a poor exile, but once that fame has been achieved, he is no longer a poor exile.

The mythology that Laferrière cultivates in his fiction thus aptly enables him to keep that

poor exile part of him alive. In one of his most recent novels, I’m a Japanese Writer, for

example, Vieux the writer can still be found in a shabby apartment in an immigrant

neighborhood, barely able to pay the rent. Braziel’s term of “alter-biography” proves

particularly salient because Laferrière’s fiction allows him to construct alternate, parallel

life stories in which he can keep the currency of strategic exoticism in circulation as he

reaps its financial and cultural benefits.

Vieux’s alternate life does not remain fixed, however, to the point where

Laferrière rehearses the exact same postcolonial exotic character ad nauseum. By the

time of Cette grenade…, Vieux’s success as an author has eliminated some of the

material difficulties of his condition, but it poses new problems as to preconceived

notions about what a black, immigrant male can and should write about. Just as

Laferrière’s insiderness—his local television celebrity, his inclusion of specific Montreal

topography, and his protagonist’s alliance with Francophone Canadians against the

Anglophone Quebecois minority—served to ingratiate him to a French Canadian

readership, so did his/his narrator’s outsiderness as an immigrant from Haiti help to

generate interest in his work, especially on the scholarly level. The 1990s saw a turn in

the North American academy toward diversity and multiculturality in which intellectuals

engaged more frequently not only with more and more diverse cultures but also with

diversity within their own cultures. Such investigations involved a rethinking of national

65
identity, a re-positing of questions such as “What does it mean to be Quebecois?” or

“Who qualifies as Canadian?” Vieux’s fictional integration into Quebec thus fits neatly

into one of the hot scholarly topics of the time, and Laferrière’s work began to generate

increased attention from the academy, especially in journals published in and about

Canada.18

Laferrière deems the attraction of scholars to his work self-centered, as an attempt

to get a fresh view of their society from an outsider:

People thought I was talking about them (“How does he see us?”), but I was only
talking about myself. Since in their eyes I was a black writer or a Haitian writer,
they thought my gaze could only be turned toward the surroundings (things,
people), when it was instead directed toward the interior. (Je suis fatigué 101-102)

He misses the complexity of the situation here, however. Those concerned with questions

of Quebecois identity valued not only his gaze looking at them, but also his gaze looking

inside to himself—because that gaze also had repercussions for them. In his personal

identity struggle brought on by his immigrant condition, Laferrière is an outsider in the

process of becoming, at least partially, an insider. In such a case where one of “them”

becomes one of “us,” the identity of “us” must also be reformulated. De Souza also finds

that Vieux’s identity quest in which he tries to find his place in Quebecois society

resonates with readers there because they extrapolate it to their own quest for identity as a

French-speaking minority in the Canadian nation as a whole. Strictly along the

Francophone/Anglophone division in Canada, the “outsider” immigrant Laferrière/Vieux

18
For example: Naudin, Anne, “Dany Laferrière: Être noir à Montreal,” Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian
Studies: Revue Interdisciplinaire des Etudes Canadiennes en France 21.38 (June 1995): 47-55;
Lamontagne, André, “On ne naît pas Nègre, on le devient”: La Représentation de l'autre dans Comment
faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer de Dany Laferrière,” Québec Studies 23 (Spring 1997): 29-42;
Thérien, Michel, “Conjonctions et disjonctions dans Chronique de la dérive douce de Dany Laferrière ou
poésie de la condition immigrante,” in Cultural Identities in Canadian Literature/Identités culturelles dans
la littérature canadienne, Bénédicte Mauguière, (ed.), NY: Peter Lang, 1998, 173-82 ; L'Hérault, Pierre,
“Le Je incertain: Fragmentations et dédoublements,” Voix et Images: Littérature Québécoise 23.3 (Spring
1998) : 501-14.

66
counts as an “insider” in Quebec in opposition to the rest of the country. What makes the

author’s work particularly stimulating, therefore, is the way it puts into evidence the fluid

boundaries of the insider-outsider dichotomy and the way that straddling those

boundaries can help to create a niche in the market.

Anglophone Canada

If Laferrière’s fiction helped to redefine Quebecois identity by exploring what it

means to be an immigrant minority in Montreal, then it also functioned to redefine

Canadian identity, as the nation as a whole took into account the transformed minority

Quebecois identity within its midst. By discussing Laferrière’s significance to

multiculturality in Quebecois fiction, David Homel, in his introduction to his translation,

also justifies the importance and relevance of bringing the text over into English: “And

without burdening this new writer with the ‘ethnic’ tag, part of the positive response to

Laferrière came from the new image he was projecting of an immigrant Quebec. Quebec

fiction has always worked with the problems of identity; readers seemed ready to accept

Laferrière’s immigrant version of that age-old struggle” (Introduction 10). Homel, an

Anglophone transplant to Montreal who had grown up in Chicago and the son of Russian

Jewish immigrants himself, played a key role in the book’s movement into Anglophone

Canada. The translation of Comment faire l’amour..., popular as it was, should not be

considered an inevitability. When Homel embarked on the translation of Comment faire

l’amour…, he already had numerous book-length translations to his name of texts by

various Quebecois authors, which would have given him more say in what projects he

took on and lent his opinions about Quebecois literature more weight. It was Homel who

approached Laferrière to initiate the process of the translation (Introduction 10), and thus

67
it is the former’s expectations about what makes good fiction, both in Quebec and in

Anglophone Canada, that led to the circulation of the book in English at that moment. He

makes his tastes clear in his introduction when he gives his interpretation of the state of

Quebecois writing:

There is another reason for Laferrière’s success that has to do with the Quebec
writing scene. His book makes an absolute contrast to virtually everything that
has been written in Quebec over the last little while. To read this Nègre, after
suffering through the novels of Jansenist isolation and pent-up madness, the stock
in trade of so many Quebec novelists, is more than a breath of fresh air—it’s a
gale-force wind. Recent Quebec fiction has been so completely fastened to its
navel, so lost in grim retrospection, that we can only hope it will never be the
same after Laferrière’s madcap characters and their excessive energy.
(Introduction 10)

Since Homel sees the fresh immigrant perspective as one of the main types of

currency in Laferrière’s work, this is what he attempts to emphasize in his English

translation. Homel draws on his personal immigrant linguistic heritage, “translat[ing

Laferrière’s] Creole-cadenced French into his own native Chicago tongue, the standard

American street diction of the sixties—i.e. into that language which, he maintains, is

‘half-Black and half-Jewish’” (Diamond 5). This is one of the reasons Simon finds the

pairing of Homel and Laferrière “a fruitful association between writers of similar

sensibilities and convictions” (Culture in Transit 10). But whereas Homel’s “native

Chicago tongue” may provide Canadian readers with a sense of strategic immigrant

exoticism, it will not have the same effect in the United States, where that type of

language would be anything but exotic. Actually, American readers may wonder why this

new immigrant has adopted street slang more than two decades old, and wonder if that’s

part of the joke. For example, Homel translates the title “Paradis du drageur Nègre,” the

novel with the novel that Vieux is writing, as Black Cruiser’s Paradise. The word

68
“cruising” will only feel more dated over time in the American context, or shift

connotation, as it has, to be mainly associated with the gay male community. Thus

something that functions as a sort of strategic exoticism in one context could backfire and

come across as unintentionally comical or out of place in another.

Whereas in Laferrière’s fiction set in Montreal, Homel plays up the aspects

dealing with the immigrant condition in Canada, in translating Laferrière’s novel set in

Haiti, he puts other types of currency into circulation. Homel notes in an essay titled

“Tin-Fluting It” that he changed the title of Le goût des jeunes filles in English to Dining

with the Dictator, not because of problems of linguistic correspondence but because of a

“reception problem” (“Tin-Fluting It” 48).19 That problem is that Anglophone Canadian

readers, because of the sex and humor, do not find Laferrière’s work political, and as at

least one reviewer believed, “any book by a Haitian writer set in Haiti had an obligation

to be political” (“Tin-Fluting It” 47). Rather than quibble with that obligation, Homel

instead aims to prove that Laferrière’s work is, in fact, political. In Dining with the

Dictator, for example, the sex comes in the context of “the attempts of a half-dozen

young women to survive the Duvalier dictatorship by using their wiles and their bodies”

(“Tin-Fluting It” 48). Even in novels, such as An Aroma of Coffee, which the reviewer in

question was criticizing and which do not make direct reference to the dictatorship,

Homel is right to emphasize the underlying political atmosphere of the novel and argues

that “[s]ilence, absence are too subtle a strategy” for some readers (“Tin-Fluting It” 48).

Homel then proceeds to justify his translation choices that highlight the political in

Laferrière’s work, and he also chides readers “willing to read Miilan Kundera as a serious

19
The term “tin-fluting,” as Homel explains, means the radical change of a title in translation and “is
named after Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, which was wisely not translated as ‘Used Happiness,’
but became The Tin Flute” (47).

69
political novelist despite all his joking and sexual play, but the same courtesy doesn’t

extend to Laferrière. Could this have something to do with the colour of his skin?” (“Tin-

Fluting It” 48). Homel’s stress on the political—despite the sex and fun—is particularly

interesting as a strategy for cultivating a certain type of currency for Laferrière in light of

Kundera’s own negative attitude toward being considered a political writer, as we will

see in the following chapter.

Homel’s translation of Laferrière’s debut novel marked the start of a lasting

collaboration in which the former produced the English version of the latter’s six

subsequent texts,20 nearly keeping pace with Laferrière’s rate of a book a year from 1991

to 1994. Indeed, on two occasions, Homel’s translation appeared the same year as the

French version. In the meantime, Homel had become one of the premier translators from

Francophone Canadian literature into English, as well as a novelist himself. He also

edited a collection of essays with Simon: Mapping Literature: The Art and Politics of

Translation (1988). With his formidable output—both in terms of volume and

respectability—as translator, novelist, and commentator, Homel has attained a rather

powerful voice in the Canadian literary and cultural community, which makes him a

rather telling illustration of the way that community functions. As can be seen from

Homel’s catalogue of publications, there is a high rate of exchange between Anglophone

and Francophone Canadian literature, an exchange backed by government grants for

intranational translation. The Canada Council for the Arts, which administers the grants,

requires that the publisher, author, and translator all be Canadian. Canadian translator

20
Namely: Éroshima (1987)/Eroshima (1991), L’odeur du café (1991)/An Aroma of Coffee (1993), Le goût
des jeunes filles (1992)/Dining with the Dictator (1992), Cette grenade dans la main…? (1993)/Why Must
a Black Writer…? (1993), Chronique de la dérive douce (1994)/A Drifting Year (1997), Pays sans chapeau
(1996)/Down Among the Dead Men (1997).

70
Wayne Grady even mentions a case of not being able to get funding from the Canada

Council for translations of Quebecois fiction for The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian

Short Stories he was editing in 1981 because Penguin is not “wholly Canadian-owned”

(20). Homel’s translations of Laferrière were thus issued first by Coach House Press out

of Toronto (the first five novels), and more recently Vancouver-based Douglas &

McIntyre.

The favoring of independent, Canadian presses certainly poses advantages: it

guarantees that the government sponsorship and subsequent profit stay within the

country, thus supporting local cultural development over international corporation-style

publication. But it also means that distribution is limited and that Canadian intranational

literary exchange tends to remain just that—turned in upon itself with little export to

other literary markets. Coach House, for example, is a small boutique press that originally

published poetry and experimental prose. With little financial stability (it actually went

bankrupt in 1996 before restarting in 1997), it has little pull in international distribution,

and in fact none of Laferrière’s translated titles were picked up for republication in the

United States.21 By giving preferentiality to works written by Canadians, the Arts grants

also make it more difficult for texts from nations, especially those with lesser-spoken

languages, to enter the Canadian system. Grady notes that most translations from

languages other than French come from the United States or Great Britain (26). 22 Since

translations in the Anglo-American book market rarely turn a large profit, those that are

21
For a history of Coach House’s translation series, see former editor Frank Davey’s speech at the 1995
conference of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures in Montreal:
http://publish.uwo.ca/~fdavey/c/chpque.htm.
22
For a statistical comparison of the number, language, and genre of translations published in Canada and
the United States, see: Geneviève Parent. “Deux visages de la traduction en Amérique du Nord: le Canada
et les États-Unis.” Traduction et enjeux identitaires dans le contexte des Amériques. Ed. Louis Jolicoeur.
Culture française d’Amérique. Lévis, Quebec: Laval UP, 2007. 15-35.

71
already paid for by the CCA subsidies become more attractive in terms of finances for

publishers. Thus while the Canadian government’s support for translation is laudable, it

also creates a feedback loop between the relatively small markets of Francophone and

Anglophone Canada, impeding movement out to other literary markets, as well as

movement in from other minor-language markets.

Haiti

Laferrière’s early success in his new home of Canada did little to create a warm

reception for his work in Haiti. In many instances, success in a Western nation can confer

Third World writers with credibility in their native countries. French-speaking Canada,

though, is neither a very large nor a very prestigious literary market. It, like the

Francophone Caribbean, lies on the periphery of the French language literary scene,

which revolves around Paris. Thus the cultural capital accorded to Laferrière’s texts by

Montreal has less currency in the French Antilles. Indeed, his success in Canada, rather

than a boon to his reputation in Haiti, was perceived rather negatively by many of his

fellow writers there, who considered him a sellout, particularly for the way he courted the

popular media. Lyonel Trouillot, who remained in Haiti throughout and after the Duvalier

dictatorships, basically accused Laferrière—although not by name—of whoring himself

to pop culture and of not taking the profession of writer seriously enough when he wrote,

“I know some rather proud [writers] who read only their reviews and work eight hours a

day to keep up the pace: their best work consists in posing with their chests puffed out for

a pornographic periodical” (quoted in Dalembert 8). Laferrière had, in fact, appeared

nude in Lui [Him] magazine, a French counterpart to Playboy, which, in addition to

photos of women in various states of undress, also published articles on cultural topics

72
and current events. While this may have contributed to his rock star writer image in

Montreal, it made quite a different impression on readers in Haiti, where, because of

economic, social, and political conditions, the role of the writer takes on entirely different

dimensions.

In a country where the rate of illiteracy is about 50% of a population of almost 10

million with little to no disposable income (to say the least), success for writers can

hardly be measured in massive book sales. With the possibility of a best-seller virtually

eliminated, the potential roles for a writer in Haiti tend toward other formulations. As

Louis-Philippe Dalembert, a writer himself, notes, “Literary activity rather lends the [the

writer] a stature that serves as a launch pad to land a job in civil service, diplomacy, or

politics” (8). Furthermore, with recurrent government instability in Haiti since the

revolution which founded it, literature there has understandably often taken a political

bent. Littérature engagée has a long history in Haiti, and many of the key figures in

modern writing—such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and René

Depestre—were committed communists. Indeed Alexis, whose direct political activism

led to his exile from Haiti under more than one of its tyrants—became a martyr to his

cause when he was captured during an attempt to return secretly to Haiti, tortured, and

executed in 1961. When Comment faire l’amour… appeared on shelves in 1985, the

Duvalier dynasty that had sentenced Alexis to death and precipitated Laferrière’s own

exile was still in power. Thus the critique of Haitian writers like Trouillot—especially

those who had stayed in Haiti—of Laferrière’s brazen self-marketing is linked to their

understanding of the role of the writer as an activist spokesperson for the people.

Literature, for them, ought to function as a selfless act designed to effect social change,

73
and thus, in Laferrière’s words, they “balked even at admitting that I might be a writer.

For them, I was simply a guy writing for nothing but money” (Coates interview 920).

Having produced a sly, ironic book that makes no mention of Haiti, he garnered a

reputation there, especially among literary circles, as having sold out and turned his back

on his native country.

Unsurprisingly, Laferrière’s own version of his motives conflicts sharply with that

of his critics, and more importantly, is much more complex and ambivalent than they

give him credit for. In an imaginary interview with himself, for example, (which in itself

might variously be construed as evidence of his constant self-reflection or constant self-

obsession, or both) “Laferrière” tells “Dany” that he “didn’t dare write the word Haiti in

[his] first novel … [because he] didn’t feel worthy” out of a sense of guilt for having left

when others continued to suffer there (Je suis fatigué 47, emphasis original). But he

further contends, here as well as elsewhere in texts and interviews, that not dealing with

the Duvalier dictatorship in his work does actually serve as a form of resistance to it.

According to Laferrière, totalitarian regimes like those of Papa and Baby Doc aim to

infiltrate all aspects of their subjects’ lives. In addition to physical and legal constraints,

they also exert a sort of mind control in that they become a constant mental

preoccupation. This is not brainwashing: the Duvaliers were not foolish enough to think

that everyone would accept their ideology. But if competing ideologies arise in

opposition to the totalitarian one, then in thinking how to reform the dictatorship, the

people are inevitably still thinking about the dictatorship. Laferrière’s journalistic texts

from Haiti in the the mid-1970s as well as his first novel thus buck the authority of the

74
regime by carving out a space untouched by it. According to his logic, the very refusal to

write about politics becomes a political act.

The fact that Laferrière’s choice not to write about Haiti functions politically does

not mean he wishes to align himself with the project of other Haitian writers. Instead, his

turn away from Haiti in Comment faire l’amour… and his other early “American” novels

is also a turn away from what he considers a stagnant and overly nostalgic Haitian style:

My intention was to get away from the beaten path of our literature. What society
expects gives me a pain in the ass. Pious sentiments (on race, peasants, political
victims, social prejudices) don’t interest me, at least, they interest me less than the
manner in which you deal with them. They left me with a syrupy taste in my
mouth. … I was not interested in imitating other Caribbean writers I knew who
kept writing about the country they came from after living thirty years in New
York, Paris, Berlin or Montréal. I wanted to give an account of the life I was
leading at the moment, not of the past. At that time, the past was too recent to
interest me. For me, the past was the dictatorship. (Coates interview 911)

As already discussed, Laferrière’s decision here proved quite successful in terms of his

reception in French-speaking Canada, but the work it produced did not really resonate

with Haitian readers at the time. This comes as no surprise, since they never seem to have

been intended as Laferrière’s primary audience for his early texts. In Comment faire

l’amour… as in Éroshima, the Haitianness of the narrator is played down or even absent,

so that Vieux functions as The Black Third-World Immigrant, and not a Haitian

immigrant. Vieux deliberately obfuscates his origins, and when a stranger asks him to

point to his country on a map, he lets his finger fall on the Ivory Coast, the first country

to catch his eye (91). Since most of Vieux’s black immigrant friends are African and

Vieux himself quotes freely from the Qur’an, the textual evidence actually points to him

immigrating from Africa. The kind of currency Laferrière aims to generate, then, is that

75
of the minority black subject in the context of Quebec and not of the Haitian working

through his political exile.

Although Laferrière’s books were known in Haiti from the beginning, it wasn’t

until the publication of his third, L’odeur du café with its change in setting to Haiti, that

their reception truly took a positive turn with both critical and popular audiences. The

text garnered the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, which implies its recognition by the judges as

a Caribbean novel rather than a Quebecois one. Later, L’odeur du café began to be taught

in Haitian primary schools and was occasionally selected as the text for the dictation

section of the national primary school exams, largely due to pressure from the public

(J’écris 173), thus institutionalizing the novel as an important text in the Haitian

education system. The subject and setting of the book clearly relate to the response it

generated in Laferrière’s native country. As the author has mentioned in various places,

including the book’s conclusion, L’odeur du café grew out of a single remembered

image, that of a young boy lying on the porch at the feet of his grandmother. This

snapshot incited Laferrière to write the book, to “relive his childhood” and “see [his]

grandmother again” (J’écris 194). The reader spends an idyllic summer with young

Vieux Os in the quiet coastal town of Petit-Goâve steeped in the grandmother’s

homegrown wisdom and the traditional culture of vodou and storytelling. This text is also

where the Creoleness that Homel senses in Laferrière’s writing emerges. For example,

Laferrière plays with oral Creole stylistic forms as opposed to American Beat style when

he includes several versions of the same apocryphal and fantastic stories told by different

residents of Petit-Goâve (46-57, 122-126).

76
 The project is a deeply nostalgic one, then, written by a man who had already

passed 15 years out of the land of his birth, but it is also a nostalgia in which the non-

exiled Haitian reader can participate as well. The book clearly contradicts Laferrière’s

earlier policy, though, of writing only about the present. Ironically, his alter ego Vieux

still echoes these previous sentiments in Cette grenade…, the book published just after

L’odeur du café, when he responds to an editor who asks him to write about the

Caribbean with: “The same old garbage! People are supposed to write about where they

come from! I write about what’s going on around me, here and now, where I live” (13).

But elsewhere Laferrière gives the impression that he didn’t write about Haiti early in his

career not because he didn’t want to but because he couldn’t: “It was only later that I was

able to deal with my own past (childhood and adolescence)” (Coates interview 911,

emphasis added). It is interesting to note that he began dealing with Haiti in his fiction at

the farthest point back in time in his alter ego’s life and that L’odeur du café is his

Haitian novel that has the least to do with the dictatorship, as if Laferrière were working

up to tackling some of the more painful issues of his departure.

Whatever the reason for Laferrière’s change in subject matter, it does not appear

to arise out of a conscious decision to change his audience as well. He notes that he did

not write L’odeur du café with a Haitian audience in mind, but rather presumably a

Canadian (or more broadly “American”) one. The framing of the book corroborates this,

as Laferrière provides background information on the location and its culture,

background a Haitian reader would not require. In this way, L’odeur du café becomes a

book about Haiti by an insider for outsiders. But the place Laferrière carved out for

himself in Quebec as an insider-outsider complicates this dichotomy, since Comment

77
faire l’amour… made him as much “one of us” (Quebecois) as “one of them” (Haitian),

thus producing a confidence in him as a trusted native informant. In Haiti, too, Laferrière

operates as both insider and outsider because of his emigration. Even when he writes

about Haiti, then—as he does in L’odeur du café, Le goût des jeunes filles, Le charme des

après-midi sans fin, La chair du maître, Le cri des oiseaux fous, Pays sans chapeau, and

most recently L’énigme du retour—from the Haitian perspective, he is to some degree an

outsider writing for outsiders and thus not directly addressing Haitians as readers. As a

small market, however, with many of its authors living abroad, Haitian literature is rife

with insider-outsiders writing (mostly or also) for outsider audiences, and the insider

audience largely adapts to reading about itself from the outside in.

The United States

Even when Laferrière’s work was not well received in Haiti, the reading public

still knew who he was. With smaller markets, like Haiti and Canada, writers can more

easily make a large impact, which is not the case for the large literary centers like the

United States. Laferrière claims that while everyone recognizes him in Montreal, no one

knows him in Miami, a city in which he lived for a dozen years, a move he says he made

in part to benefit from that anonymity in order to be left in peace to write and spend time

with his family (J’écris 58-59). Despite his commercial and critical success in Canada

and the fact that his books are already available in English thanks to the translations of

Homel, Laferrière has never reached a wide audience south of the border in the United

States. As mentioned earlier, the translations, issued by the small Toronto press Coach

House, have not been picked up for redistribution by any American publisher, large or

small. In 1999, fourteen years after the publication of his first novel, the journal Callaloo

78
devoted a special section to Laferrière because, according to editor Carrol F. Coates, “[i]t

is high time that a U.S. public attracted by a comic view of life and the serious pursuit of

fiction made their acquaintance with a writer who takes his craft and his readers

seriously” (“Meet Dany Laferrière, American” 923). If anyone in the United States might

be expected to be familiar with Laferrière’s work already, the readers of Callaloo (a

scholarly journal dedicated to writing of the African diaspora) would be high on that list.

It is especially telling, then, that they require an introduction, not a retrospective, at that

point in Laferrière’s career. If Callaloo readers have little awareness of him, then he must

hardly show up at all on the radar of the American reading public at large, and the general

apathy in the U.S. toward translations, as described by Lawrence Venuti, can hardly

account for this phenomenon entirely. 23

As discussed above, Laferrière’s novels and Homel’s translations proved

current—or relevant—in Quebec, Haiti, and Anglophone Canada because they responded

to those contexts and because Laferrière and Homel actively capitalized on the

opportunities at hand to generate cultural currency. This often occurred in terms of the

writing itself—literary trends in immigrant writing, movements away from ponderous

writing styles—or in material conditions—television as an attention-grabbing medium,

government grants for translation. The forms of cultural currency in which they were

trading, however, did not have the same value in the U.S. context. To use Pound’s

formulation, Laferrière had, in a sense, written a check he couldn’t cash in the United

States. Not only did his writing fail to register as relevant there, at times it proved

downright offensive according to U.S. cultural norms. The title itself of Comment faire

l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer, which Laferrière credits with drawing readers
23
See the Introduction for a discussion for the status of translations in the American market.

79
into that book, at least initially, serves as a prime example. Coach House published

Homel’s translation under the title How to Make Love to a Negro—the erasure of the last

half of the French title is immediately obvious in comparison. While part of the reason

for the cut may be merely aesthetic—French-language titles are often entire sentences,

whereas English-language titles tend be shorter—the main motivation appears to have

been one of content. The “without getting tired” bit was considered too racy for a more

prudish WASP audience. But the purportedly moralistic edit actually makes the title more

controversial by eliminating the subversive humor upon which it, and the book as a

whole, relies. In referring to the stereotypical sexual prowess and stamina of black men,

the title gives an indication of the way Laferrière plays with cliché in the rest of the text.

The title contains a stereotype that many people will find offensive, but that is precisely

the point. Laferrière floods his text with stereotypes, and by this very overabundance

reveals their absurdity. 24 By trimming the title, the publishers obscure the way he pushes

limits, just as he pushes the title to the limits of length.25 The foreshortened English

title—How to Make Love to a Negro—reads more ambiguously, and so the potential

reader does not get an idea of the novel’s project of picking apart racial stereotypes.

A further problem of potential offensiveness is presented by the word “Negro” in

the English version of the title. By 1986, when the translation was published, Negro had

already become a retrograde term and, at its worst, seriously pejorative. Nègre, too, when

used by certain people in certain contexts carries a racist connotation, although the

history of the French word followed a different path from that of the English Negro,
24
See, Jana Braziel Evans (Summer and Winter 2003) for a Deleuzian interpretation of the deconstruction
of stereotypes through excess in Laferrière’s novels.
25
Pushes, but doesn’t surpass. The idea for the title came from Laferrière’s roommate, the inspiration for
the character of Bouba, who once said, “How to make love to a Negro when it’s raining and you have
nothing better to do.” According to Laferrière, “His title was too long, but it was funnier” (Why Must a
Black Writer 23).

80
especially in the French Caribbean, where it can be used more neutrally or even as a

reappropriation. 26 Homel, well aware of the racist baggage Negro and Nègre carry,

spends some time discussing the way he maneuvered through this lexical minefield in his

translator’s introduction:

When Laferrière uses the potentially derogatory word, nègre, the translator has
several choices, but he cannot automatically substitute ‘black,’ despite what
current English usage demands. Our word ‘black’ is simply too free of stereotypes
and too politically cool to be used in social satire. In this book, there are very few
occasions when ‘black,’ the politically correct word, can be used if the translator
wants to retain Laferrière’s dynamic between the sexes and colours, in which
blacks will always be nègre. I finally decided on ‘Negro,’ alternating when the
occasion called for it. ‘Negro’ is outdated, it smells of pre-Black Power
liberalism, and because of those echoes it is particularly well suited to Laferrière’s
satirical intent. (Introduction 10)

Homel’s logic is sound here, but in order to reach it, the reader needs to get past the title

page where the word “Negro” already appears. Paired with the boundary-pushing

“without getting tired,” the subversive move in the choice of “Negro” remains more

conspicuous, but without it or the explanation in the translator’s note, a reader without

prior knowledge of the book receives no direction in how to approach the potentially

pejorative word. Additionally, the photo on the English-language version, though nearly

identical to the one described earlier featured on the poster and inside the original

Montreal edition, differs in that Laferrière is leaning back on the bench and staring

absently to his left rather than typing on the typewriter placed on his lap. Because of this,

and the small size of the photo, it is difficult to actually distinguish the typewriter as such,

so that Laferrière looks more like a barefoot drunk than “a writer at work” in the tradition

of the Beat Generation. This serves as yet another factor contributing to the way the

26
See my article “Translation as Peaceable Resistance” (Norwich Papers 18 (Nov. 2010): 115-26) for a full
discussion of the word Nègre and its translation into English. I ultimately argue that leaving the word
untranslated can potentially contribute to a rethinking of linguistic, and by extension societal, formulations
of race in the United States.

81
paratext of the English version tends to reinforce rather than satirize stereotypes around

black men.

Thus whereas Laferrière claims a certain talent for coming up with the titles of his

books, the English versions have sometimes proven infelicitous. The title can also be held

partly to blame for the fact that Laferrière’s mostly deeply American book—Cette

grenade dans la main…—failed to capture the American reading public. The novel’s

English alias—Why Must a Black Writer Write about Sex?—is not completely Homel’s

or the English publisher’s invention; it is the title of one of the chapters in the book.

While still a relatively long title, it is not nearly as long as the French one, which relies on

a pun impossible to reproduce exactly in English around the word grenade, which can

mean both “grenade” and “pomegranate.” Thus the original title Cette grenade dans la

main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? would literally be translated as That

Grenade/Pomegranate in the Young Nègre’s Hand—Is It a Weapon or a Fruit? Although

the pun and the length produce an element of humor, there is also a latent violence in the

French title that draws directly on the tradition of black American writing. As Anne

Marie Miraglia has described in detail (2000), with Cette grenade…, Laferrière places

himself intertexually into a genealogy which includes Chester Himes, Richard Wright,

and most importantly James Baldwin. The narrator even recounts a conversation with

Baldwin’s ghost in a Brooklyn apartment.

The young black man in Laferrière’s title is thus possibly the one fulfilling

Baldwin’s warning of The Fire Next Time, and in fact the last short chapter in

Laferrière’s original French version, which describes a black youth walking down the

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street grenade in hand, is called “Feu sur l’Amérique.”27 Homel misses the chance to

make the direct connection to Baldwin by translating it as “The Assault on America.” In

this sense, the French title locates the novel within a well-known and well-respected

movement in black American writing, one that takes a critical, even militant, stance in

regards to race relations.28 This is a type of currency already in circulation in the United

States to which American readers might respond. The English title, however, mostly

serves to reiterate the problems many American readers found with How to Make Love to

a Negro. It gives the impression that the novel is mostly about sex, whereas this topic

occupies remarkably less space than in his preceding “American” texts (Comment faire

l’amour… and Éroshima). In fact, there are no actual erotic scenes in Why Must…?, but

rather a discourse about sex. The English title, then, seems to trade on the idea that sex

sells, but in this case it only reinforces many of the prior assessments in the U.S. of

Laferrière as a provocative but substanceless writer, conclusions drawn not so much from

having read his books but from the 1989 film adaptation of Comment faire l’amour….

Film as a medium has the ability to attract a wider public—indeed reviews of the

cinematic Comment faire l’amour… outnumber reviews of Laferrière’s books in the

American press—and therefore stoke an interest that may lead spectators to become

readers of the original text as well. The adaptation of Comment faire l’amour… for the

screen, however, did more damage to Laferrière’s literary reputation in the United States

27
The title of Baldwin’s book references the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep,” which contains the line
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.” In the book, Baldwin supports
peaceful, loving means to overcome racism in the United States, but says that violence may erupt if
peaceful measures do not prove effective.
28
Laferrière makes heavy use of intertextual references to other authors or books in his novels, placing
himself within a larger American or world context. Often one author in particular serves as the main point
of reference for a novel—Saint-John Perse for Le goût des jeunes filles, Basho for Je suis un écrivain
japonais, or Baldwin in this case. Interestingly, in the 2002 expanded version of Cette grenade dans la
main…, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass becomes the primary intertext.

83
than good. To begin with, the title caused even more of a flap than it did on the cover of

the novel. The NAACP cried foul over the use of the word “Negro,” and most major

newspapers censored the film’s advertisements, truncating the title even more to “How to

Make Love……..”; an asterisk directed the reader to the bottom of the ad with the

original full title—in French. The reviews published by those same newspapers often

lambasted the film. Rita Kempley’s Washington Post critique is downright scathing,

calling the film “[a] feminist nightmare” that “manages to be as piddling as it is

pretentious, as racist as it is sexist, as self-hating as it is self-congratulatory” (B1). Janet

Maslin of The New York Times, although not nearly as derisive as Kempley, has little

positive to say, but of interest is the fact that she apparently has also read the book, which

she judges much more favorably than the “sophomoric” film: “This French Canadian film

is much less provocative than either its title or the novel on which it is based. Dany

Laferrière … has a much more acerbic and witty voice than the film ever develops”

(C10). Ironically, some of the dialogue she finds tiresome comes directly from the novel,

and the subplots exploring race relations that she seems to want more of have no

precedent in it. The adjective “sophomoric” is also employed by Desson Howe, but

specifically in regards to those added subplot scenes involving racist whites. He

otherwise finds the film “less a conscience-searing tract than a playful good time. The

movie succeeds (and shows its deepest truths) precisely when it doesn’t take itself too

seriously” (38).

Strangely enough, Howe’s review appears in The Washington Post, on page 38,

on the same day Kempley’s withering review was published on page B1 of the Style

section. In fact, Laferrière was much talked about in the Post that day, with another

84
article by Howe on page 43 as well as a review of the novel by Indian novelist and

journalist Raj Kamal Jha alongside Kempley’s film review on B1. One may well ask why

all the stories were not packaged together, especially the two pieces by Howe: his more-

or-less positive review and his short article about Laferrière’s reaction to the critical and

public backlash against the film. That article, “Laferrière: Young, Gifted and Censored,”

represents the writer as an “animated, witty, and amiable” provocateur who once “did the

weather in the nude,” but actually does little to get to the substance behind the

provocation, except for one short paragraph quoting Laferrière’s explanation of the

novel’s “sex in a political perspective” (43). Howe’s two articles taken together thus

provide a picture of Laferrière and his novel and film as fun and engaging, but not

especially serious. Jha’s look at the book and the controversy surrounding its film

adaptation is the most positive and thoughtful of the four articles, and by far also the

longest. Heavily sprinkled with direct quotes from Laferrière, the piece also does the

most to give the author’s perspective and delve into the complexity of his project in

which “the sugary coating of humor [is used] to force the distasteful pill down the

readers’ throats,” the distasteful pill, that is, of “the immigrant’s social and psychological

alienation” (B1). Anne Vassal (1989), in a comparison of the novel and its film

adaptation, indeed argues that the novel offers a bi-level reading—a popular one on the

surface, for pleasure, like Howe’s, and a deeper, more intellectual one like Jha’s—but

that the film essentially dumbs down the material, eliminating the density and gravity of

the material.

Jha’s review shows that the reception in the United States of Laferrière’s book by

those who had actually taken the time to read it was much more welcoming than the

85
reactionary response of groups such as the NAACP who could not get past the film, or

even its title. If Laferrière did not receive much consideration from the popular press,

however, the academy actively engaged with his work. It is perhaps ironic that a writer

considered frivolous in the mass media should be taken seriously by the intelligentsia, as

the opposite is generally the case. Scholars began writing articles on Laferrière’s texts

relatively early in his career, although as already mentioned, many of those papers

focused on Canadian issues and appeared in Canadian journals. A number of university

dissertations have also included Laferrière, or even concentrated entirely on his oeuvre.

The author has accepted invitations to speak at colloquiums and conferences on a variety

of topics, from race to exile, from Caribbean to African diaspora writing, and so on. The

interest in Laferrière has not trickled down into the general public in the United States,

however, and additional reasons must account for why his work has not reached or

resonated with American readers the same way it did for their neighbors to the North.

As discussed above, Laferrière’s early popularity in Quebec derived from the title

of his first novel (altered in translation), his television appearances (limited to the local

media market), and his insider-outsider status. As regards this last element, the appeal in

Francophone Canada of Laferrière’s outsiderness—as a black immigrant male reflecting

on Quebecois society—does not necessarily improve his reception in the United States.

When Laferrière examines the role of black men in a multicultural society, his

perspective is one of integration from the exterior. But while there are certainly recent

black immigrants to the United States (as well as blacks who have been in Canada for

generations), the majority of American blacks have roots in the country that date to the

era of slavery. Their experience as minorities in a multicultural context is thus governed

86
by a very different history. Laferrière himself has discussed the way his perspective on

racial issues diverges from that of American blacks because he was born in a country

where the history of race contrasts sharply with that in either the U.S. or Canada.

According to him, the fact that the slaves in Haiti took their independence by force and

eliminated most of the white population at the time of the Revolution (either by expelling

or massacring them) means that Haitians today are less complexed in their relationships

with white people:

I don’t feel that constant pain, that feeling of impotence, that I notice in other
Blacks when they’re faced with a White person. You get the impression that in
their case there’s a problem that hasn’t been settled. A problem of physical
violence. A tremendous slap in the face that hasn’t been given. (J’écris 31)

And yet in Laferrière’s fiction, black men continue to slap white men in the face

through their “explosive” sex with white women. The desire for the white woman

functions as part of a larger desire for all the “rights” of the white male denied to the

black male, material or otherwise. In Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African

Diaspora, Michelle M. Wright describes the politics of sex and race in the West and

identifies the white woman as a metaphor for the nation, where the white male is her

citizen and the black male an “interloper” (129). This is the sort of discourse with which

Laferrière openly plays, with Vieux ironically taking on the role of the dangerous and

hypersexualized interloper, what he calls “the Black Stud” (How to Make Love 94). The

outsider immigrant black male in Laferrière’s fiction, however, manipulates that

stereotypical discourse in ways that have less relevance to the insider black male in the

United States. Vieux and his immigrant acquaintances from Africa and the Caribbean

dupe the Westmount girls by claiming to come straight from the bush, by calling up

images of primitivism and cannibalism. The technique relies on the girls’ ignorance of

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the Third World and the people who live there, a technique that just won’t work if the

black man in question grew up down the street. Furthermore, American readers, who

have little investment in the internal political and social struggles of Quebec, will also

take less enjoyment from the way the upper-class Anglophone girls are made to look

foolish. If Laferrière’s novel is humorous, it actually asks the reader to laugh with the

black man at the white woman. In a long-overdue published critique (2011) on this

subject, Lori Saint-Martin has methodically shown how in Comment faire l’amour…

“[t]he existence of racism is made to excuse, even justify sexism, which becomes the

base for black men’s affirmation of identity—one kind of discrimination can thus hide

another” (60).29 While Quebecois readers might displace this sexism as an attack not on

white women but on a privileged minority of white women, American readers are much

more likely to react the way Kempling did in her Washington Post review of the film. 30

There are other ways in which the kind of insider currency, such as the

topographical specificity of Montreal, that Laferrière capitalizes on within Quebec

functions differently in the United States. While French Canadians will get pleasure from

feeling like an insider in Laferrière’s fictional world, readers unfamiliar with these

landmarks are more likely to react with indifference or even a feeling of exclusion

because they lack certain information, especially since Laferrière does not provide

background information for the novels set in Montreal as he does for those set in Haiti. In

the United States, another writer, Edwige Danticat, is able to offer that kind of

recognition to the American reader since she herself resides there and places her fiction
29
See also my forthcoming article in Callaloo “Of Male Exiles and Female Nations: ‘Sexual Errantry’ in
Haitian Immigrant Literature” for a critique of the way Laferrière reinforces the trope of woman as nation
at the same time as he promotes a cosmopolitan male subject.
30
Saint-Martin also cites Cameron Bailey’s opinion that black readers have felt Laferrière was aiming for a
white male audience (64). Interestingly, Laferrière’s readership from the beginning has been
disproportionately female, at least according to him (J’écris 172).

88
within that context. The action of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, for example, is

divided between New York and Haiti. Danticat’s location in the U.S. thus gives her the

same appealing insider-outsider status that Laferrière enjoys in his adopted country. In

world literature’s current formulation, there is a tendency to believe that the public’s

interest in foreign places is limited and that the market cannot sustain more than one

representative or representation of each place—unless that place happens to be politically

or socially relevant at the time, such as Eastern Europe during the Cold War (see

Chapters 3 and 5) or the Middle East currently. This is the phenomenon Damrosch refers

to as the “literary Miss Universe competition” (“Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age”

48). In the United States, the title of Haitian writer is clearly held by Edwidge Danticat,

who immigrated to America from Haiti as a child and writes in English. Breath, Eyes,

Memory (1994), for example, achieved vast commercial success, largely due to its

inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, and Danticat’s follow-up short stories, Krik? Krak!

made her a finalist for the National Book Award. Her subsequent books have also been

well received in the U.S. market, and she enjoys a respected position within the American

literary community. 31 She possesses a clear advantage over other “Haitian” writers in the

American market in that she writes directly in English, thus avoiding the marketing

stigma of translation and cutting out a step in the circulation process, a step which costs

the publisher time and money. 32 With her position as an important writer already well

established, Danticat occupies the market space in the U.S. for “Haitian” writers and thus

obstructs the introduction of texts by others.

31
For example, she won the American Book Award in 1999 with The Farming of Bones and a National
Book Critics Circle Award in 2008 for her autobiography Brother, I’m Dying. In 2009 she received a
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Fellowship. Several of her books have made it
onto the New York Times best-seller list.
32
See the Introduction for a discussion of the status of translated work in the United States.

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France

As in Haiti and the United States, Comment faire l’amour… did not achieve the

same success in France as it did in Canada, although the reaction there did not involve

any vehement backlash. Haitians largely regarded Laferrière as a non-serious writer

playing up to a white audience; Americans outside of academic circles saw him as a

juvenile provocateur, and at worst a racist, sexist pig. In France, at least originally, the

book was a non-starter for quite different reasons, paratextual reasons dealing not with

taste but with legal matters. The cover of the first edition in French Canada featured a

painting by Matisse that Vieux mentions in the book, a painting for which Laferrière’s

editor did not have permission to reproduce. When the book was brought over to France,

Matisse’s family blocked its sale. It was distributed in France three more times by various

presses, but, in Laferrière’s words “never took off” (J’écris 178). Understanding why the

book didn’t take off in France is more complicated.

One major reason has to do with a different sort of cultural currency in France for

literature from the Francophone Caribbean, which relates to the historicopolitical

situation of the French-speaking islands. While Haiti gained its independence in 1804

through armed revolution, Guadeloupe and Martinique remain part of France to this day

as départements d’outre-mer. The continued governmental ties play themselves out in a

variety of ways: economic dependence, institutionalized French cultural dominance

through the education system, and freer movement of people and resources across the

Atlantic, although in a lopsided fashion. Quite simply, the connection means that France

is much more present in the daily lives and in the minds of the DOM-TOM citizens than

it is for Haitians. Questions of (neo)colonialism thus come up in the literature of

90
Guadeloupe and Martinique in much more direct and systematic ways, as Laferrière

mentioned, than they do for him as a Haitian in Quebec.

Just such a type of writing—known as Créolité—came into vogue in the late

1980s and 1990s. Founded in Martinique by linguist Jean Bernabé and authors Patrick

Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Créolité involves the celebration of traditional Creole

culture and advocates the use of Creole idiom and a written style that reflects the art of

oral literary forms. The Créolistes employ this style in order to deal with their

heterogeneous and hierarchical cultural heritage, which, at the most simplified level, can

be described as a dichotomy of written French over the Creole spoken word. The result,

at least in the case of those like Chamoiseau who do it well, is a virtuoso innovative

Creolization of the French language as well as a digressive structure and style marked by

the rhythms of the Creole storyteller. Precisely the opposite of Laferrière’s writing, with

his short sentences and plain language. Unsurprisingly, he finds the language in Créolité

style “overwrought, too formal, too florid. … It attracts the reader’s attention to too great

an extent to the words” (J’écris 227). For Laferrière, Créolité gives rise to a “veritable

verbal diarrhea” (J’écris 227).

Although Créolité is not to Laferrière’s taste, it certainly is to the metropole’s. All

ten of Chamoiseau’s novels, the first in 1986, were originally released by Gallimard, one

of the most important French publishing houses. In 1992 he received the Prix Goncourt,

arguably France’s most prestigious literary award, for his novel Texaco. Créolité, with its

distinctive style, benefitted from and contributed to Western literary trends of the time,

such as the postmodern and multicultural turns as well as an interest in writing based on

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oral forms, or oraliture.33 In effect, some critics insist that Chamoiseau and his fellow

Créolistes cater to French tastes and preconceptions about the postcolonial Caribbean and

thereby only reinforce offensive stereotypes. Caribbean studies scholar A. James Arnold

contends that the commercial success of their literature is due to the fact that it is

… formally designed to appeal to the neo-colonialist desire of the European

narratee to see in the West Indies a timeless society, forever playing out the same
plot … It is supremely ironic that these authors, who embrace political positions
of independence for their island, have fashioned an aesthetic of dependence. (47)

Rather than damn them, as Arnold does, I suggest we view their work as a

different type of strategic exoticism which both plays up to certain expectations at the

same time as it exerts a subversive potential. The appeal of Créolistes to a French

audience comes again from a dual insider-outsider status: they are French writers,

although not from the metropole; they apply current trends in metropolitan writing

(postmodernism, etc.) to oral forms.

With the substantial difference between his work and that of Créolité—the

“standard,” as it were, for Caribbean writing—it cannot be mere coincidence that

Laferrière finally began to have important publications in France once the Créolité rage

had passed its heyday. It wasn’t until 2005, twenty years after Comment faire l’amour…

first appeared, that one of his novels (Le goût des jeunes filles) was picked up by a

prestigious French publishing house, Grasset. He had already edged his way into the

French market through Serpent à Plumes, a small, stable company (now part of a larger

corporation) but without the stature of the grandes maisons d’édition such as Gallimard,

which Laferrière has called “not [his] style” (J’écris 177). It was with Serpent à Plumes

33
This distinctive, innovative style has not kept Chamoiseau’s novels from being translated into English.
Several of his books have appeared in English, with the translators using various innovative strategies of
their own to convey a sense of Créolité in the target text. This stands in opposition to Homel’s statement
regarding Laferrière’s texts that he does not believe the Creoleness can be communicated in English.

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in 1999 that Comment faire l’amour… finally “took off” (although not nearly to the same

extent that it did in Canada) because “it’s the first time it’s being regarded as a book

that’s completely integrated into a global project of publication and not as a desirable

object asked to perform on demand” (J’écris 178-79). It seems that the editors at Serpent

à Plumes, then, considered Laferrière’s work—and Laferrière himself—in regards to the

types of currency operative in France, and the result seems to be a more serious version

of the Quebecois clown.

The global project at Serpent à Plumes involved the simultaneous release of

Laferrière’s newest novels with the Montreal editions, beginning in 1997 with Pays sans

chapeau, as well as the re-release of selected older works.34 Two older texts—Cette

grenade… (Serpent à Plumes) and Le goût des jeunes filles (Grasset and Gallimard)—

significantly appeared in revised and expanded versions, more than double in length. The

augmentation of the novels contradicts the author’s own preference for short texts: “My

sole fear is to bore the reader. I hate guests who don’t know when to leave” (J’écris 168).

In inflating these texts, Laferrière realizes his fear, hobbling the fast pace and, in the case

of Le goût des jeunes filles, adding a heavy-handed didactic element. That novel, aside

from a few scenes at the beginning and end, chronicles a weekend Vieux spent as an

adolescent in Port-au-Prince with a group of young women in 1971, a narrative he relates

to us in the form of a movie script. In the expanded version, the imagined film is

interspersed with excerpts from the journal of one of the girls, cutting the flow and

digressing into labored reflections on the class and social structure in Haiti. Laferrière
34
Publications at Serpent à Plumes according to the date of their first issue are as follows: Pays sans
chapeau 1997; Le charme des apres-midi sans fin 1998; Comment faire l’amour… 1999; La chair du
maître 2000; Le cri des oiseaux fous 2000; L’odeur du café 2001; Cette grenade… 2002 (expanded
version). At Grasset: Le goût des jeunes filles 2005 (expanded); Vers le sud 2006; Je suis un écrivain
japonais 2008; L’énigme du retour 2009. Laferrière also has one publication at Gallimard: Le goût des
jeunes filles (expanded) 2007.

93
appears to be self-consciously aware of the potential ungainliness of his additions. The

new female narrator reflects on the writing in her journal:

Human nature knows how to adapt itself… Well, that seems like the start of one
of those essays Sister Agnes hated so much. I know, I know, Sister Agnes would
have written right in the middle of the page with a hot-tempered red pencil: “Be
less predictable”… I feel Sister Agnes behind my neck, waylaying me some
more: “Heavy, pretentious sentences, what’s gotten into you…?” (212, first
ellipsis original)

While the revised, expanded version makes for a much less enjoyable read, it does

correspond to several types of currency that could improve his circulation in the French

market, and create an image of a more serious, cosmopolitan writer. By providing a

sustained female point of view in the journal, Laferrière can counter accusations of

sexism that have dogged him since Comment faire l’amour…, especially as feminist

critiques of literature have only gained more and more space in mainstream Western

markets. Although inelegant stylistically, the journal, in its background information on

Haiti, also plays up the native informant function of the novel, written by an insider for

outsiders. Finally, the addition of the journal results in a further mixing of textual forms

and genres in the novel (which already includes the film script as well as the novelistic

prose that opens and closes the book), thus matching the postmodernist trend of layered

narratives. 35

The expanded version of Le goût des jeunes filles also served quite another

purpose: it offered viewers of the 2005 film adaptation something they hadn’t already

35
Rachel Douglas has written a study of the expanded version of Cette grenade… in which she argues that
the additions are part of an overall process of rewriting and contribute to Laferrière’s program of inserting
himself into American space. For her “the key process” of Laferrière’s revision and American
Autobiography as a whole is one of “accumulation” (76). She mentions also a personal interview with
Laferrière in which he expresses the opinion that rewriting can get out of control and metastasize like a
cancer (76). Douglas does not seem to think Laferrière’s writing has gone too far in this direction, but I
argue that accumulation for accumulation’s sake does not add much to the novel as a whole. Whereas
Douglas sees more of the same, but also from new angles, I find mostly more of the same in such a way
that it takes the punch out of Laferrière’s punchy writing style.

94
seen. While the movie of Comment faire l’amour… drove potential readers away in the

U.S., in France Goût helped instead to draw them in. The 2005 film Vers le sud, starring

Charlotte Rampling and based on an eponymous chapter from La chair du Maître also

surely served as the impetus for that book’s re-release in France, slightly revised and

under the name of the film rather than the original text. Film-goers in France prompted to

read the book may have been disappointed, however, to discover that only 30 of the 250

pages had anything to do with the movie they had seen. Regardless, the possibility of

gaining readers by way of film appears to be what finally induced the grandes maisons

d’édition to publish Laferrière’s work. Le goût des jeunes filles and Vers le sud were his

first two big (re-)releases in France, in both cases one year following the film production.

After years of small print runs in the French Hexagon, Laferrière had finally made it big

there by way of another media, not unlike the importance of television in his Quebecois

popularity. Attaining a top-tier-press book contract operates as a consecration, and in the

case of Laferrière it set off a chain reaction of consecrations that has yet to reach its end

point. In the very act of re-issuing his old texts, Grasset christened him as an important

author worthy of the grandes maisons, and they thus published his two following new

novels, Je suis un écrivain japonais and L’énigme du retour. If being published at a

grande maison makes one a writer of worth, that worth was rewarded in 2009 with the

prestigious Prix Médicis. The same novel published at a different press would not

guarantee the award; all of the Médicis laureates since its inception in 1958 have come

from the high-status houses: mostly Gallimard, Grasset, Minuit, Seuil (36 of 42 total),

and a few from Albin Michel, Flammarion, Hachette, and Mercure de France. If Grasset

consecrated Laferrière as an important writer in France, the Prix Médicis consecrated him

95
as one of the most important writers in France, and it may be this last consecration that

contributes to his finally achieving a positive commercial reception in the United States.

Whereas the Médicis alone might not do it, a factor quite out of anyone’s control could

tip the scales.

Earthquake repercussions

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, its epicenter near the

capital Port-au-Prince. Overcrowding and poorly constructed buildings led to an

absolutely devastating number of victims and little remaining infrastructure to support

relief efforts. In the end, about 230,000 people are estimated to have died. Regrettably, it

took a catastrophe such as this for Haiti to be noticed. The satirical newspaper The Onion

called biting attention to this fact with its article “Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire

Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti’” (The Onion online). Laferrière expresses similar

sentiments:

At the moment of Independence, the Occidental world turned away from the new
republic, which had to savor its triumph alone. … And now today all eyes are
turned toward Haiti. During the last two weeks of January 2010, Haiti was seen
more than it had been during the last two centuries. It wasn’t because of a coup
d’état, or one of those bloody stories that mix voodoo and cannibalism—it was
because of an earthquake. An event that no one has control over. For once, our
misfortune was not exotic. What happened to us could happen anywhere. No one
is safe from the wrath of the gods. (Tout bouge autour de moi 110-11)

In their hour of greatest suffering, Haitians gained their humanity in the eyes of the West,

a humanity born of empathy—“What happened to us could happen anywhere.” With the

earthquake as the center of the international news for days, Haitians finally had the

attention of the rest of the world, and people were for once willing, even keen, to listen to

Haitians talk about themselves, to try to empathize with and understand what a human

being goes through at a time like that.

96
 Danticat, as the “token” Haitian writer in the American literary market, became

the go-to spokesperson in the U.S. for a high-culture Haitian perspective on the

earthquake (musician Wyclef Jean being the popular culture spokesperson). She was

invited for a number of interviews and public events, and The New Yorker published an

elegantly written essay in its Comment section. 36 While Americans relied mostly on the

words of Danticat as the only major Haitian literary figure writing directly in English, the

Francophone world, if for no other reason than a linguistic one, had a much larger supply

of texts by Haitian authors available to them. The French newspaper La Libération, for

example, published a special section called Je t’écris Haïti (19 Jan 2010) that collected

the responses of eight Haitian writers who had lived through the earthquake. As it

happened, the timing of the earthquake coincided in Port-au-Prince with the conference

Étonnants voyageurs, which gathered Haitian writers from throughout the diaspora, and

thus a larger than usual number of literary figures, including Laferrière, were present to

experience the catastrophe first-hand. 37

When the Canadian government gave Laferrière the opportunity to leave Haiti a

few days later, he accepted and immediately began bearing witness to the tragedy in

print, on the radio and television, and on the internet. In Canada, as a well-known

television and literary personality, he already had a large audience eager to hear his

perspective. With some international status, foreign media outlets also retransmitted his

response, notably in two translations into English of excerpts from a diary that he had

kept (originally published by the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur on Jan. 21) and

of an interview he gave to Le Monde. While the first appeared on the Caribbean specialist

36
Danticat, Edwidge. “A little while.” New Yorker. 1 Feb 2010: 19.
37
One of them, Georges Anglade, an immigrant to Canada, died in a collapsed building along with his
wife.

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website Repeating Islands, the latter was reprinted by the Huffington Post. Thus although

Laferrière did not reach the top tier of American media, as had Danticat with her New

Yorker piece, he still managed to circulate in fairly large media markets. Further,

Laferrière’s recent Médicis Prize win garnered him an even more privileged place from

which to serve as a cultural spokesperson, especially in France. The end result is a kind of

mutual marketing where the writer’s notoriety from his recent Médicis favors his

selection as a spokesperson for Haiti—allowing him a position from which to provide an

informed and nuanced perspective on the earthquake and on Haiti—and where the

interest in Haiti generated by the earthquake transfers over into interest in Laferrière. The

linkage becomes self-perpetuating: the more Laferrière speaks in the media about the

earthquake, the more attention he gets for his own work, and the more his work is known,

the more he is asked to speak in the media.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Laferrière was among the first to write and

publish a book about the earthquake.38 Already known for his fast production, he penned

the book in only two weeks. Tout bouge autour de moi [Everything’s Moving Around

Me] came out in March 2010, just two months after the earthquake, and like most of

Laferrière’s writing, it takes the form of short sections—a paragraph or a few pages—

each describing a separate scene or sentiment. Significantly, it was published by a Haitian

expatriate press, Mémoire d’encrier, a small Montreal-based house run by Laferrière’s

friend Rodney Saint-Éloi, who had also gone to Port-au-Prince for the Étonnants

voyageurs conference and was sitting next to Laferrière in their hotel’s restaurant when

the tremors first began. In the prologue to Tout bouge, Laferrière explains that he actually

38
Laferrière’s book was shortly preceded in March 2010 by Pour Haïti, edited by Martinican Suzanne
Dracius, a collection of short pieces written by 129 different authors from Haiti and throughout the world.
Profits from the book go to Bibliothèques sans frontières.

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owed Saint-Éloi another book, Notes à l’usage d’un jeune écrivain, whose proofs he

should have been correcting during the two weeks he composed the manuscript for Tout

bouge. He claims that he hadn’t intended to write a text about the earthquake; in fact, he

had already refused multiple offers to do so (Tout bouge 11). But he found that the

subject became an obsession, and being a firm believer in his own advice—“Don’t look

for a subject, it’s the subject that will find you” (9)—he followed his compulsion and set

Notes aside for the moment. He also expresses his belief that Tout bouge is “a book that

can only be written in urgency” (12). It’s a case of striking while the iron is hot.

Laferrière is not so much interested in contributing to a mythology of the earthquake, or

of writing the Great Earthquake Novel. That, he believes, will come after (128). The

project of Tout bouge is rather to participate in the very immediate discourse about the

earthquake—to complement, counter, or complicate other representations, especially

those in the popular media. In addition to writing the book for himself, to work through

his personal, emotional response, he is writing it “for others. Those who weren’t present”

(10). Thus Tout bouge communicates an insider Haitian perspective to an outsider

audience.

Laferrière’s position as a writer of some renown outside of Haiti is what permits

him to reach those who weren’t there. As he himself says, “this damned Médicis has to be

good for something” (87). The self-reflexive epigraph to the book even quotes the

Médicis-winning L’énigme du retour. Several passages throughout Tout bouge, in fact,

assume a reader familiar with Laferrière for more than his Médicis. When referring to a

friend he thinks may have died in the earthquake, for example, he mentions that the two

of them “used to meet up at Izaza, that nightclub I described in Comment faire l’amour

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avec un nègre sans se fatiguer” (56). Such a statement presupposes that the reader is not

only aware of the fact that Laferrière is the author of that book, now 25 years old, but also

that the reader has read that book and knows just what bar the author means. Just as

Comment faire l’amour… functioned to create a doubly appealing insider/outsider status

for Laferrière by placing him as a multicultural immigrant who was still “one of us,” the

reference to the former book in Tout bouge continues to reify that dual status; his long

history as an author in Francophone Canada forms a bond between him and the reader

which makes him a trusted source for information, as does his residual outsiderness as

someone who is native to the country in question. He is able to play upon his past

marketability to make himself more marketable in the current situation. This is in no way

to condemn Laferrière for such a move, or to suggest that he is cashing in on the

earthquake to sell books, or at least not his own. 39 In this case, the earthquake does give

Laferrière the opportunity to raise both his recognizability and sales, but it also allows

him enough cultural currency to be able to circulate a competing representation of Haiti

in the international market.

With the attention toward Haiti generated by the earthquake, the U.S. market may

be ready to support more than one writer from the island in a substantial way. What gives

Laferrière the edge over other Haitian writers in occupying that place is the confluence of

factors granted to him by the circulation of his work in not only Haiti, but also France,

Quebec, and Anglophone Canada. The conference of the Médicis in France, which led to

further honors such as a starring role at the 2010 Paris Salon du Livre, consecrate him as

a writer of import since the French scene continues to function, as Pascale Casanova

39
The profits from Tout bouge autour de moi will be used to help finance the publication of young Haitian
authors by Mémoire d’encrier.

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argues, as the arbiter of serious literary tastes. L’énigme du retour earned Laferrière a

further spate of awards, including the Grand Prix du Livre du Montréal (November 2009)

and the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix (October 2009), a prize that

carries with it $10,000. He was also recently named the Personnalité Canadienne de

l’Année by Radio-Canada. Considered a cultural periphery, Quebec’s prize laureates

receive less literary authority than do those in France, but the accumulation of awards in

Laferrière’s case multiplies their significance. If he has become one of many important

writers in France with his Médicis, his spate of wins in Quebec positions him as perhaps

the most important Quebecois writer of the moment, thus allowing him the potential to

accede to the role of token Quebecois writer in the American market. Access to that

market for Francophone Canadian authors requires translation into English, and

Laferrière also benefits from a long history of having his work translated as well as a new

resurgence following a long hiatus of publication of his work in translation. In 2009,

Douglas & McIntyre issued Heading South, a translation of Vers le sud done by Wayne

Grady. While Vers le Sud first appeared in France in 2006, as mentioned earlier, it is

nearly identical to La chair du Maître, which dates back to 1997 and marked the first of

Laferrière’s texts that Homel did not translate. 40 The film also probably contributed to the

decision to finally produce an English-language translation of the book, whose title

(Heading South), matches that of the film’s English-language release. In July 2010,

Douglas & McIntyre followed up Heading South with I am a Japanese Writer, this time

with Homel back in the role of translator. They also re-released How to Make Love to a

Negro, with the remarkable difference that Without Getting Tired has been reinstated

40
The other novels not translated by Homel, or anyone else, in the interval between 1997 and 2009 were Le
charme des après-midi sans fin and Le cri des oiseaux fous.

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parenthetically into the title. Laferrière’s recent slew of literary awards as well as the

earthquake undoubtedly play more than a small part in the renewed interest in publishing

his work in English, and indeed L’enigme du retour appeared in a 2011 Homel translation

as The Return.

While the already-published translations have not been picked up by a U.S.

publishing house, other channels are now available for widespread distribution. For

example, whereas in 2006 none of Laferrière’s work was available through purchase

directly from Amazon.com, only from independent sellers in its Marketplace, the

corporation itself now offers a few of his titles for sale, including How to Make Love to a

Negro (Without Getting Tired). Twenty-five years later, the overlapping combination of

the author’s circulation through a number of centers and peripheries may have created the

opportunity for that book to find a U.S. readership. Not exactly overnight, but Laferrière

may finally be posed to conquer America.

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 CHAPTER 3

Milan Kundera: East is East, East is West

Interviewer: …your play was a great success throughout the entire world.
Milan Kundera: Well yes, but precisely because it was misunderstood. It’s like
that very often: one almost always owes one’s success to the fact of being
misunderstood.41

The play in question here is Kundera’s Keeper of the Keys, which French

interviewer Normand Biron has just called a play about the Czechoslovak Resistance

under German occupation. Disappointed, Kundera explains that the historical setting of

the theater piece is only a “pretext,” a “ruse” that allows him to address its “true subject,”

which he never names (21). He gives the impression that he has heard this

misinterpretation many times before and has grown weary of it, and yet Biron simply

can’t seem to help himself. Like the majority of Western readers, Biron has preconceived

notions about what a Czechoslovak writer during the Cold War would, or even ought to,

be writing about.42 As a result, this 1979 interview devolves into a contest for Kundera’s

identity, Biron perpetuating the notions circulating in his culture, and Kundera

desperately trying to assert his own version of himself and his work.

41
Biron 21. Unless otherwise noted in the Bibliography, all translations are my own.
42
Here and throughout this chapter, I use the words “Czechoslovak” and “Czechoslovakia” since I am
mainly discussing the period prior to the country’s split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic
on Jan. 1, 1993. Czechoslovakia was the country into which Kundera was born, the country he left behind,
and so in many ways the country he describes in his nostalgic writing. Unfortunately, many people
mistakenly continue to use these terms to refer to the present day. In Chapter 5 on post-1989 writing, I
switch to the current “Czech” and “Czech Republic.”

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 But as Kundera observes, those other notions—those “misunderstandings”—had

led in part to his success. By the time of this interview, he had already become

internationally famous, with several translations of his work into the major languages of

French and English. As we shall see, the perception of Kundera as a dissident under

communism suffering for his art launched him into the world literature limelight. His

biography certainly suited that perception in a number of ways. Born in 1929, Kundera

ran afoul of the communist party in Soviet-occupied former Czechoslovakia and had his

books banned from 1970 onwards. He left for France in 1975, had his Czech citizenship

revoked in 1979, and became a French citizen in 1981. Since 1991 he has been writing

his novels in French, while he began publishing essays originally penned in French even

earlier. There are, of course, parts of his biography that contest the one-sided

representation of Kundera as a die-hard dissident in the Western imagination. Before his

disillusionment with communism, he was an engaged member of the Party, and after his

disillusionment he quarreled with dissident golden-boy (and future president of

postcommunist Czechoslovakia) Václav Havel about the best response to Soviet

occupation. Regardless, Kundera’s entrance onto the Western literary scene in the

unasked-for guise of a political writer helped launch his now illustrious international

career in which he enjoys both popular and critical praise. Indeed, although the Cold War

political currency that gave Kundera his opportunity to hit the world stage may be one

that he rejects, it has undoubtedly granted him a platform from which to “correct” the

misunderstandings about his work that gave him that platform in the first place.

One of Kundera’s main objections to the way his work circulates is his

classification as an Eastern European writer, and all that that implies, in the Western

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literary market, especially during the Cold War. While as we saw in the last chapter Dany

Laferrière, born in Haiti and residing in Quebec, claims an American (that is, North

American) identity over a Haitian or Canadian one, Kundera casts off the label of Eastern

European novelist in favor of Central European and ultimately European novelist. The

term “European novelist” functions almost redundantly for Kundera because he views

Europe as the privileged location of the novelistic tradition and therefore the context

against which all novels should be evaluated. I will deal more fully with Kundera’s

mappings of Europe at the end of this chapter. First I focus on his definition of the novel,

although that definition is both a product and producer of the Europe Kundera constructs.

Kundera’s definition of the novel, even when not directly addressing his own work,

guides the reader in what he considers the correct understanding of his texts and those of

his fellow novelists.

Kundera elaborates his ideas about the history and role of the novel in his essay

collections: The Art of the Novel (1986/1988), Testaments Betrayed (1993/1995), The

Curtain (2005/2006), and most recently Encounter (2009/2010).43 Far from a

systematized, chronological look at the evolution of the novel, these books instead work

and rework several novels, authors, and themes in a sort of repetition and variation—to

use a musical term common to Kundera’s textual practice. 44 The effect of his study is

thus not culminating but cumulative. From these books, it is possible to define and

analyze Kundera’s own theory of world literature and the global circulation of the novel,

providing key insights into the way he has presented his own novels to the public and

reacted to both critics and supporters. Indeed, although Kundera is often dealing here

43
The dates here refer to the release of the French edition followed by the release of the English translation.
44
See, for example, Gillian B. Pierce, “Theme and Variation: Milan Kundera, Denis Diderot, and the Art of
the Novel,” The Comparatist 33 (May 2009): 132-55.

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with other novelists, he authorizes the application of what he has to say to his own novels

by such statements as the one he makes in an essay on Francis Bacon: “When one artist

speaks about another, he is always talking (by ricochet, by way of detour) about himself,

and therein lies the interest of his judgment” (Encounter 23).

While, according to Kundera, lyrical poetry sinks into the realm of the ego, of the

lyrical “I” that seeks to impart a Truth to the reader, he himself champions “the radical

autonomy of the novel” (Art of the Novel 117, emphasis original). In his 1979 interview

with Biron, Kundera systematically rebuffs attempts to classify his texts as

autobiographical or political, two modes for which he has an extreme distaste. Instead,

Kundera’s novels answer to a higher calling: “What interested me was not historical

description but the problems, if you will, of a metaphysical, existential, anthropological

nature … in short, the so-called eternal human problems illuminated by the projector of a

concrete historical situation” (19). Kundera’s novelistic project is not to bear witness or

to support a particular ideological point of view, Western or otherwise. He aims, rather,

to call into question the received knowledge that circulates in society and to rework—

stylistically and philosophically—the “eternal human problems.” I will return to

Kundera’s assumption that the “eternal human problems” are self-evident in a moment,

but for now let us stay with his rebuttal of the way his texts have been read.

In the interview, Biron at times slips into reading Kundera’s texts through those

ideological points of view, which Kundera then refutes. His main complaint here is that

he has been “misunderstood,” or in the original French “mal compris.” That is, Biron and

others like him have not found Kundera’s work incomprehensible; they have formed an

understanding of the texts, but according to Kundera, they have understood them poorly,

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or in the “wrong way.” The larger issue here, therefore, is what it means to “understand”

a text or an author, especially from another culture, and this issue is central to the field of

world literature where contact with other literatures is not merely an exercise in scholarly

analysis but is often called upon to serve a humanistic function. What, then, does it mean

to understand the Other? In approaching this question, I put Kundera’s definition of

understanding in conversation with that of Martinican theorist, poet, and novelist

Edouard Glissant. Such a comparison proves useful in that, while they both object to

reductionism, for Glissant reduction occurs through understanding, but for Kundera

understanding is a means of overcoming it. These diverging definitions consequently

bring out the conflicts and concords between a so-called universal humanism in the

European tradition and postcolonial interventions in that tradition. In the world literature

classroom, bringing such issues to the surface demonstrates the need to situate for our

students not only the text but also our method of approaching it.

Glissant uses the etymology of the verb comprendre to make a point about the

way that “understanding” functions as a means of control in the West. He draws attention

to the French verb’s Latin antecedent, comprendere (which means to seize) in order to

claim that comprendre “contains the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and

bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation” (Poetics of

Relation 191-92). Indeed, this sense of incorporation follows the word as it enters the

English language as “comprise.” Thus for Glissant the process of “understanding” a text

actually involves inserting it into one’s own system of norms: “In order to understand and

thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with

grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce” (Poetics of

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Relation 190). The “ideal” here is actually the local masquerading as the universal. The

text is subjected to a system of norms different from the one in which it was created and

in the process becomes a subject of that system, not in the sense of having philosophical

agency but rather in the sense of being subordinate to and under the dominion of an

Other. The early reception of Kundera into the Western European and American markets,

for example, occurred in large part due to an understanding there of his texts that matched

certain expectations of what writing from his part of the world is and should be like.

Glissant’s understanding (compréhension), then, is an act of enclosure,

appropriation, reduction (Poetics of Relation 190-192). Kundera in his essays rails

against this type of reception, specifically calling out critics who “reduce” (see for

example Art of the Novel 17, 131). But in his terminology, understanding is actually the

opposite of reduction. To reduce a text is to view and interpret it from only one angle, to

focus on one aspect alone and attempt to draw a Truth from it, a practice Kundera

denounces in strong terms: “I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for

a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than

searching it for an effort to know [connaître], to understand [comprendre], to grasp

[saisir] this or that aspect of reality” (Testaments Betrayed 91, emphases original). The

effort mentioned here is of prime importance, since for Kundera the novel does not deal

with certainties or easy answers. As we have seen, Kundera privileges the novel as the

genre which underscores the different manifestations of human existence and avoids

imparting the Truth: “Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is

sure of his statements … Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is

the realm of play and hypotheses” (Art of the Novel 78). For example, the most simplified

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version of Western Cold War ideology demarcates communism as “bad” and

“dissidence” under communism as good. But as François Ricard points out, novelists like

Kundera refuse to take sides: “[I]t’s all politics, (and not only regimes on the right or

left), it’s the political reality itself that [The Joke] challenges” (26, emphases original).

Taking the shortcut to easy answers, to one side or the other, is what Kundera calls

stupidity, the “nonthought of received ideas” (Art of the Novel 163, emphasis original).

Rather than provide axioms or simplistic truths, the novelist instead aims to describe—in

the minutest detail—moments, feelings, or ideas that are elusive in their infinite

complexity. This principle helps to account for Kundera’s use of the repetition-with-

variation form; he returns to the same topics because his previous efforts to explain them

fall short. In his definition of the word “definition,” Kundera writes:

If I hope to avoid falling into the slough where everyone thinks he understands
everything without understanding anything, not only must I select those terms
with utter precision, but I must define and redefine them. … A novel is often, it
seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions. (Art of the
Novel 126)

Some of these terms in his novels include “lightness” (The Unbearable Lightness of

Being), “youth” and the “lyrical” (Life is Elsewhere), and “return” (Ignorance), and

certainly in his essays the terms include “novel” and “novelist.”

But if Kundera finds his definitions inadequate, imprecise, then what does it mean

to understand them? In fact, understanding for him is an open-ended process rather than a

conclusive act: “The novel … is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither

Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and

Karenin” (Art of the Novel 159). Understanding thus appears to involve a certain

recognition or empathy that is non-judgmental. If we limit the discussion momentarily to

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characters, it means for instance appreciating the motives of a character’s actions, not

necessarily identifying with the situation—although this is possible—but at least with the

feelings underlying it. Kundera expects that readers should then also react to the

characters and their situations without moralizing, without coming to a verdict about

what or who is right or wrong. For Kundera, then, understanding is humanistic, whereas

for Glissant it presents a potential for aggression. Since Glissant’s understanding entails

appropriation and reduction, he calls for opacity, the right not to be understood (Poetics

of Relation 189-90). To understand the Other means putting the Other in my own terms,

not the terms of the Other, and thus subjecting the Other to my own expectations.

Kundera, on the other hand, argues for identification, for finding and defining the

thoughts, feelings, and situations that unite humanity, however contingent they might be.

The identification should not lead to a value judgment but rather lead me to call into

question my own values.

I suggest that we think of the work of world literature as a balancing act between

these two types of understanding. One of the bases of the field is a humanistic one, to go

beyond mere ethnographic information-gathering about other cultures and to create ties

between disparate people. Cultivating those ties can be accomplished through the

evocation of empathy, a feeling which emerges out of identification. Your situation may

not be the same as mine, but I can empathize with yours because it touches on what

Kundera calls the “so-called eternal human problems.” But the danger in indulging too

far in this sort of empathy is believing that my empathy has given me a full understanding

of you, whereas that “full” understanding is actually Glissant’s type of understanding that

denies your right to opacity. Furthermore, what I take to be the “so-called eternal human

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problems” might actually just be my own problems. That is, what I in my culture

consider to be universally human is actually determined by my culture. This is where the

situatedness not only of the text but also the approach of to it becomes of vital

importance. I suggest here that the example of Kundera can bring to light the reductive

potential not only of one-sided readings—for example, from the angle of politics—but

also of so-called eternal or universal readings which appeal for a higher calling but upon

closer inspection belie their own situatedness in a specific tradition, such as Western

humanism. I turn next to the processes by which these approaches become inscribed in

textual and cultural practice.

According to translation scholar André Lefevere, who has described the way texts

are subjected to their own and other cultural systems, the circulation and reception of

texts in a given cultural system does not depend on some ideal of “literary merit,” or what

Kundera would call aesthetics. Rather, “issues such as power, ideology, institution, and

manipulation” come into play (Translation, Rewriting 2). These factors combine to create

a number of “constraints” for texts entering a literary system, and it is the process of

“rewriting” not “writing” that determines how a text meets or challenges those

constraints. Rewriting, for Lefevere, can be broadly defined as the processes—which may

include, among other things, translation, reviews, literary criticism, historiography,

anthologizing, or editing— that create the “image” of a text in a textual system as

opposed to that text’s “reality.” Accordingly, “[w]hen the non-professional readers of

literature … say they have ‘read’ a book, what they mean is that they have a certain

image, a certain construct of that book in their heads” (Translation, Rewriting 6) which is

formed by reading through the rewrites of and around that book. By reading through the

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rewrites, the non-professional reader thus reads the “refraction” of the text (“Mother

Courage’s Cucumbers” 240-41) and not the text “as such.” Again, according to Lefevere,

the rewriting that creates images or refractions of a text is not an arbitrary process; rather,

it occurs according to (or against) an ideology (a “certain concept of what the world

should be like”) and poetics (“a certain concept of what literature should be like”) current

in a literary system (“Why Waste Our Time?” 217). We will see in this chapter how the

literary systems of Western Europe and the U.S. rewrote texts by Kundera and his

compatriots according to a Cold War ideology that favored political dissidence and

relegated aesthetics to the background in Soviet bloc writing. The comment quoted by the

interviewer Biron at the beginning of this chapter is one such instance of this type of

rewriting. But Kundera’s responses are just as much a form of rewriting that does not

present the text “as such” but rather the text refracted through Kundera’s ideology and

poetics ,which are in turn determined by his own situatedness.

Translation, for fellow scholars like Lawrence Venuti, is a privileged site for this

type of rewriting. Venuti argues that the dominant model of translation in the Anglo-

American literary system is one that favors “fluency,” in which the highest praise

accorded to a translation is that it reads as if it were originally written in the target

language: “In this rewriting, a fluent strategy performs a labor of acculturation which

domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to the target-

language reader, providing him or her with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his

or her own culture in a cultural other” (Rethinking Translation 5). Target language

readers, then, have the impression that they are actually reading the original—not a

translation—and that the “original” shows them a literary world like their own. Since the

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target language readers do not see the layers of rewriting that have moved the text from

source to target language, the process of translation becomes transparent for them, and in

fact, the center of Venuti’s argument is the invisibility of the translator. If we phrase

Venuti’s argument in Glissant’s terminology, we can say that while a translation might be

expected to reveal the opaque differences of an Other culture, an Other language, an

Other literature, a fluent translation only reassures readers as to how similar the Other is

and how straightforwardly understandable (compréhensible) the Other is in the readers’

own terms, since the translation speaks to them in their own language, both linguistically

and ideologically. Thus Venuti contends that the fluent model of translation enacts an

imperialistic, ethnocentric violence on the source text: “By producing the illusion of

transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in

fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language

values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to

convey” (Translator’s Invisibility 21).

From the work of Venuti and Lefevere, we can see that “foreign” texts entering a

literary system through translation are thus in a double bind. Not only are they measured

against the target culture’s norms—such that, for example, forms unknown there might

be classified as strange or inferior, or simply be passed over—but also against the target

culture’s notion of the foreign culture’s norms. The result is a reductive refraction of the

texts which places them within preconceived constraints dictating what literature should

be like and what literature from a particular Other should be like. Thus Frederic

Jameson’s famous claim that all postcolonial Third World texts are necessarily national

allegories (1986). Aijaz Ahmad and Timothy Brennan have reasonably reproached

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Jameson for “mak[ing] Third-World literature an important artefact [sic] or record, but an

artefact without theoretical importance” (Brennan 37). Brennan finds that politically

themed texts from the “Third World” (like those, I argue, from the Cold-War Second

World) gain favor with Western critics like Jameson, but only in keeping with

“metropolitan tastes and agendas” (38). In the Western literary system, “foreign” authors,

especially those from “outside” the West, are thus expected to serve as native informants,

although only to corroborate “facts” already circulating in the West. It is important to

note that the East figured in the beginning of this chapter in regards to Kundera, that is,

Eastern Europe, is not the same as the East figured by Brennan, Ahmad, and most notably

Edward Said with his theory of Orientalism. While North America and Western Europe

remain steadily in “the West,” Eastern Europe actually becomes a contested middle site,

and indeed its Cold War designation as the Second World indicates this. The placement

of the former Soviet bloc countries on the cultural map is of grave importance to Kundera

because of all that placement involves. I will turn, then, at the end of this chapter to

Kundera’s modes of mapping Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Europe, and finally the

world. As Vilashini Cooppan has remarked, “any map presents the global as a local

utterance, for any attempt to represent ‘the world’ inevitably bespeaks the mapmaker’s

own placement” (“World Literature and Global Theory” 13). While Kundera’s map may

expose a situatedness that privileges the European tradition, I ultimately argue that if we

take his framework and apply it differently, it actually serves as a useful means for

provincializing Europe, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term, and for recontextualizing and

remapping world literature.

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 Much of the way Kundera maps literature, or rather the novel, comes from the

way his work was first understood (in Glissant’s sense of the word) in the West, and so

we will look first at the construction of that understanding in the Anglo-American literary

system. Since my concern is not so much the texts themselves as their refraction and

reception, my study centers around the forms of rewriting that frame the translations for

the Anglo-American reader. I will thus be dealing with what Gérard Genette calls

paratexts, all the texts and figures accompanying or commenting on the object that is the

text itself: “the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such

to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (1). This involves everything from the

title and dedication to prefaces to press packages and reviews. Here I focus primarily on

introductions and prefaces to the translated texts—be they by the author, the translator, or

another writer or critic—and reviews and other articles in four major newspapers: The

New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago

Tribune. The brevity of these genres makes them particularly well suited to this study

since it encourages a shorthand that plays up the reductive aspect of the rewriting. These

various introductions, reviews, and articles act as what Genette calls the “threshold” for

the reader deciding whether or not (and how) to “enter” the text. In the case of

translations of foreign literature, these paratexts often tell readers, in a limited amount of

words, why they should be interested in a text by a particular author from a particular

culture. As Carol S. Maier has noted in her study of the reception of Latin American

literature in translation, reviews frequently attempt to spark their reader’s interest in a

foreign text “by focusing almost exclusively on a translation’s potential role in English”

(248). These paratexts tend to suggest that the role Czechoslovak texts principally had to

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play in English was a political one, and it is against this rewriting that Kundera will react

with his own forms of rewriting to argue for a broader role not only in English, French, or

Czech but in Europe as a whole.

Peddling Dissidence: The reception of Czechoslovak writers in Cold War America

In late 1967 and early 1968, Czechoslovakia enjoyed a relative amount of

freedom with respect to other Eastern and Central European communist countries.

Writers were at the forefront of the reform movement, and the Writers Union became a

forum for dissident points of view. Under the communist party leadership of Alexander

Dubček, a number of liberalizing reforms were introduced in 1968, including a relaxation

of rules governing the press. Taking advantage of the more tolerant censors,

Czechoslovak writers used their texts to criticize the abuses of the government. Their

books flew off the shelves. As far as the Soviets were concerned, however, the Prague

Spring—as the liberalization movement came to be known—was getting out of hand.

During the night of August 20-21, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia,

initiating the Soviet occupation and the period of “normalization.” Dubček was replaced

by Gustáv Husák, and the reforms Dubček had instituted were stripped away.

Unsurprisingly, dissident writers were among those most deeply affected by the strict

laws of normalization. The Writers Union was disbanded in 1970, and nonconformist

writers found it difficult to get even the most innocuous works published. 45 Dissident

texts circulated in the samizdat press, which entailed private individuals hand-typing

45
For historical accounts of the Prague Spring, see for example: Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual
Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia, 1956-1967,
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971; Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak
Politics, 1968-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. For an enlightening look at primary historical
documents, including speeches and statements from writers, see the hefty volume The Prague Spring: A
National Security Archive Documents Reader, Jaromír Navrátil et al, eds, Mark Kramer et al, trans,
Budapest: Central European UP, 1998.

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copies distributed in secret.46 Some works also found print with the expatriate press

Sixty-Eight Publishers, operated in Toronto by émigré writers Josef Škvorecký and

Zdena Salivarová. The main audience for Sixty-Eight releases was Czechs living abroad,

although copies were also smuggled into Czechoslovakia. While the kinds of texts issued

in samizdat and expat editions were in extreme demand, the harsh censorship of the

period virtually eliminated their public market in Czechoslovakia. In the end, however, it

was precisely what made them unpublishable at home in the 1970s and 80s that enabled

Czechoslovak dissident writers to gain wider access to foreign markets, namely in North

America and Western Europe.

While both sides of the Iron Curtain stockpiled nuclear weapons, they also

stockpiled ideologies, presenting the Cold War as a struggle to maintain a certain way of

life, the “right” kind of life. The rhetoric of the day promoted a Manichean opposition

between “us” and “them” with simplified images about what “we” and “they” were like.

The West, for example, characterized itself as a place where free market capitalism and

democracy offered everyone equal rights and an equal opportunity to benefit materially.

It viewed the communist East, on the other hand, as a land of restricted civil and

economic liberties and rampant shortages, a land of show trials and exile to Siberia, a

land where the people dreamed of defection to the West. Such an image is what

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius has termed “Slaka.” Taken from the name of a fictitious

Eastern European country invented by British novelist Malcolm Bradbury, Slaka here

denotes the essentializing Western perception of the undifferentiated countries behind the

Iron Curtain, a perception marked by “spatial indeterminacy, unbelongingness, hybridity,

46
On the samizdat press, see for example H. Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in
Central and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

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backwardness, as well as an innate propensity for submission” (29). The poor,

beleaguered Slakanians (Eastern Europeans) with unpronounceable names can only bear

witness to the miserableness of their situation and had better leave aesthetic concerns to

the West. In order to support these images, the West sought out “native informants,”

people from inside the Soviet bloc who could testify to the horror of life there, that is, to

corroborate the “facts” already in circulation. Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, for

instance, relates an anecdote about an American journalist who asks her about

communism but then immediately answers her own question by adding, “I know it was

terrible,” leaving Ugrešić to wonder how the journalist “knows” this (Have a Nice Day

139).

Any Eastern writer whose work could tell the West what it already “knew” thus

had an opportunity for publication, although not without certain constraints. Czech writer

Ludvík Vaculík has no illusions about the circulation of his work, as he sums up the

situation:

It is almost impossible to tell the world something else than what the world is
used to and is curious about. Even the better translators, who are familiar with this
fact, translate in such a way that a work’s purpose can be linked to their readers[’]
experience. . . . Why did they publish my 1977 feuilleton ‘A Cup of Coffee with
My Interrogator’ so many times? Because it documented their own opinion about
communism! (quoted in Brodská 131)

“A Cup of Coffee...” was one of Vaculík’s most straightforwardly political books, and

indeed Second World texts dealing directly with politics had a clear advantage in gaining

currency in the First World. The literary merit of the text, therefore, takes a secondary

position to its ideological stance, craft subordinated to content. Ugrešić recounts the story

of an editor informing her that because she writes “‘pure’ literature,” her work is

unpublishable and asks if she has anything about the war, since publishing anything else

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at the time would “not be right” “[f]rom a moral standpoint” (Have a Nice Day 141). The

same American journalist who “knew” communism was terrible also suggests that they

“leave boring questions about literature to Western writers. As an East European writer

and intellectual [Ugrešić] surely [has] far more interesting things to talk about than

literature” (Have a Nice Day 139). These anecdotes from Ugrešić reveal reciprocal

expectations on the part of the West. Firstly, if you come from an “oppressed” country,

then it is your duty to testify about those conditions in your writing. To ignore your

country’s plight and write “pure” literature is, in fact, morally reprehensible. The West

then recuperates these political statements as justification for its own ideological stance.

Secondly, the realm of “pure” literature belongs only to the West because it alone has a

free enough social and political system to allow its writers to concentrate on more

aesthetic matters. By not discussing politics in their texts, Eastern bloc writers risked not

being translated into Western literary systems because they failed to match these

expectations.

In order for Eastern bloc writers to meet these expectations and gain currency in

the West, they had not only to write what the West considered a politically dissident text

but also to live what the West considered the life of a political dissident. This meant that

they should either have suffered for their art by remaining a dissident in an oppressed

country or suffered in exile in order to have freedom for their art (freedom here, of

course, being political rather than artistic freedom). Being imprisoned or having your

book banned confirmed that you were doing the “morally responsible” thing. It also

confirmed the West’s assumptions that communist governments practice “evil” methods

of stripping away their citizens’ rights. The oppressed dissident played into romantic

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David-and-Goliath ideals about the struggle of everyday people against a massive,

totalitarian machine. Romanticized notions also surrounded writers who left for exile,

whom Westerners supposed were very brave and experienced a great deal of pain.

Ugrešić details the way the West pigeonholes the exile according to its own expectations:

The exile is the screen onto which we project our fantasies of exile, and as long as
he lets us do this, he is welcome. He is welcome as someone who has suffered, as
a victim of the régime, a fighter for democracy, a lover of freedom who couldn’t
stand oppression in the country he left. As soon as he steps out of his stereotype,
he becomes undesirable, because he has betrayed our expectations. (Thank You
for Not Reading 135, emphasis original)

The West values exiles in that they defend the same ideals with which the West identifies

itself, namely democracy and freedom. Because exiles must suffer for these ideals, they

become a fetish for the West, living symbols of just how important and in need of

defense those ideals are. Should exiles “step out of this stereotype,” as Ugrešić puts it, by,

for example, not experiencing their immigration as a kind of pain, they lose their

symbolic power to reinforce the dominant Western ideology.

When, however, Eastern bloc writers matched all or most of the West’s

expectations, they could find a receptive market for translations of their books. Dissident

Eastern writers served as ideological allies in the West’s struggle against its Cold War

foe, and the seeming smallness of these writers in the face of the large and looming

enemy of the Soviet bloc lent them a quixotic charm. I do not mean here to deny or

trivialize the very real oppression of Soviet-style communist rule in countries like

Czechoslovakia or the very real danger some writers risked in criticizing that rule.

However, these conditions did give them cultural currency that relatively increased the

chances for success on the Western book market. This is also not to say that these Eastern

bloc texts did not possess other merits that made them “worthy” of translation or critical

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accolade, but the fact that they were “dissident” surely played into the rewriting that

helped these texts circulate more widely in the Western literary system. I am not making

judgments about the “correctness” of their politics, the “quality” of these texts or their

translations, or whether or not they “deserve” to be translated. Rather, I argue that the

cultural cachet granted dissident writers gave them opportunities for publication in the

West that would not necessarily have been available outside the context of the Cold War

ideological struggle. It is imperative to note, however, that whether or not texts by

Eastern European authors met Western expectations is not merely a function of the texts

themselves. What is important is whether these texts were perceived as meeting those

expectations. Although the reader, according to Venuti, may feel that he or she has a clear

view of the text based on the invisibility of the translator—and, we might add, of other

rewriters such as editors, critics, scholars, teachers—as Lefevere has demonstrated, the

reader actually faces a refraction of the text, multiply mediated by layers of rewriting.

With that in mind, I turn next more specifically to forms of rewriting—prefaces,

introductions, and reviews—that marketed Czechoslovak Cold War-era writing to the

Anglo-American audience according to the understanding, in the Glissantian sense, of

Eastern European literature discussed above.

Rewriting begins already at the process of selection. If the selection process

favors politically themed texts from Czechoslovakia as an Eastern European nation, then

we can certainly understand if readers have the impression that most Czech writing is

political in nature. Three years after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, English

playwright Peter Spafford created a piece of theater called Interference that comprised an

anthology of short excerpts from various Czechoslovak texts. In his preface to the

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published version, Spafford admits the bias that “[m]ost of the writers featured … have

been silenced, prevented from official publishing, or exiled at one time or another” (xiii),

but, he goes on to say, such a bias was largely due to circumstances beyond his control.

All the excerpts chosen had been previously translated, and Spafford found:

[T]he general gamut of work by Czechoslovak writers available in English

translation naturally reflects the bias of our culture, and what we have chosen to
translate on our side of the former Iron Curtain is the story we always wanted to
hear: a tale of bad and good, of cruel oppressors and heroic resisters. (xiv)

Indeed, the prefaces and reviews that frame these texts for the reader often highlight the

circumstances in which they were written or the political statement they make,

frontloading this type of information at the beginning of the piece, even when it is

somewhat irrelevant to the text at hand. Thus Kundera’s introduction to his play Jacques

and His Master—which, its subtitle tells us, is “An Homage to Diderot” (and not

Czechoslovakia)—opens, “When in 1968 the Russians occupied my small country, all

my books were banned and I suddenly lost all legal means of earning a living” (1). 47

Similarly, Škvorecký begins the preface to the English translation of his novel Miss

Silver’s Past with the story of how his first novel The Cowards became a “succès de

scandale” when the party banned it in 1959 (xiii, emphasis original). Such a practice

plays up the cultural currency given to dissident writers and immediately prompts the

reader to anticipate a dissident text, no matter what its subject matter. That is, the reader

expects to be told “truths” about life under communism because the writer has

established himself as a credible (because oppressed) native informant.

47
The play was written in 1968 in Czech, but first appeared in print in French in 1981 with the preface
referred to here. I quote here from the English version, published in 1986. The play did not appear in print
in Czech until 1992, after the Velvet Revolution.

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 Many of the reviews and other newspaper articles go out of their way to

demonstrate the oppressed and dissident nature of the biography of the writer in question.

Both halves of a certain formulation are important: first, that the writer experienced some

kind of persecution at the hands of the Soviets and secondly, that he or she reacted

rebelliously to it (for which he or she was probably persecuted again, etc.). Having been

censored and later disowned by the communist Czechoslovak government, Kundera met

the criteria for a writer who has suffered both artistically and personally. The only proof

needed of the dissidence of his writing was the fact that the communists objected to

publishing it, although it was certainly not without clear critiques of the contemporary

Czechoslovak political situation. Having left his native land after his work was banned,

Kundera then also plays for the American media that role of exile described by Ugrešić

who “has suffered, as a victim of the régime, a fighter for democracy, a lover of freedom

who couldn’t stand oppression” (Thank You for Not Reading 135, emphases original).

Michiko Kakutani’s 1982 New York Times profile accordingly introduces Kundera as “A

Man Who Cannot Forget,” signifying the melancholy he feels from his separation from

Czechoslovakia as well as his continued opposition to the communist system, even

though he has left the country (C13). The article emphasizes the fact that the Party

banned all of his work and then revoked his citizenship after he immigrated to France,

and the pain of Kundera’s exile is indicated by his statement that he was “very sad to

leave,” a phrase that also serves as a subheading in the article. In a 1984 interview two

years later with Jane Kramer, Kundera shows a keen awareness of—and resistance to—

Kramer’s desire to brand him with the label of dissident exile. Early in the interview,

Kramer asks Kundera to “describe [him]self,” then returns to the question again later.

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When Kundera dodges the question by saying there are “hundreds of motives, hundreds

of themes” in his and everyone else’s life and he “[doesn’t] know which is the most

important one,” Kramer insists on the centrality of exile and dissidence to his identity:

“Certainly the fact that you are a Czech writer living in Paris—an intellectual who

dissented and cannot go home—is important” (“No Word for Home” BR47).

Kramer and journalists and reviewers like her cannot refrain from making

personal and national histories of communist repression essential to the identity of

Czechoslovak writers, and to their art. Reviews of books by Kundera and Vaculík in The

Washington Post (Carol Eron 1974) and The Los Angeles Times (Robert Kirsch 1975),

for example, are startlingly similar in the way the reviewers articulate their inability to

ignore the circumstances of textual production. Both reviewers refer to Philip Roth’s 48

admonition in the introduction to Kundera’s Laughable Loves that it and Vaculík’s The

Guinea Pigs deserve to be read for their literary merit and not out of pity for their plights

under communism. The very next sentence in each review begins with the word “But.”

The reviewers simply cannot help themselves; they feel compelled to read the texts

through the prism of communist oppression. Anatole Broyard stands out as a literary

reviewer who reproaches his colleagues, and Kundera, for confusing politics with

aesthetics. He judges Laughable Loves, the book that Eron and Kirsch appraised so

favorably, as merely “passable” (“Iron Bedsheets”). In fact, Broyard begins his review by

accusing his fellow critics of becoming blinded by the situation of dissident writers from

communist countries and overvaluing their work:

48
Philip Roth was the general editor of a new series called “Writers from the Other Europe.” Laughable
Loves and The Guinea Pigs were the series’ flagship releases, which involves another degree of
consecration in the American market.

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 We praise them for their moral courage and forgive their literary lapses. Their
fiction takes on for us a tension of personal risk and drama that obscures its
mediocrity as art. ... In a simple inversion, the censor’s disapproval is regarded as
a guarantee of quality. There is a naïve assumption that a man would not risk his
career or his life to write a bad book. (“Iron Bedsheets”)

Ten years later, Broyard had similar criticism for Kundera himself: “One of the irritating

assumptions of ‘The Joke’ is Mr. Kundera’s conviction that to be bored or sexually cruel

in a totalitarian country is somehow to be heroic, as if any kind of resistance to the

regime is a triumph of the human spirit” (“Matter of Purging”). It is key here that despite

Broyard’s disagreement as to the quality of Kundera’s work, he still takes it as a political

statement. Critics like Eron and Kirsch find aesthetics irrelevant to the conversation and

claim that the value of Kundera’s work lies in its political dissidence. For Broyard,

aesthetics cannot be set aside. 49 Finding no literary merit in Kundera’s novels, he

assumes they are meant to convey an ideological message, and not a very good one at

that.

Broyard is in the minority, however, when it comes to valuing politics over

aesthetics. What most critics expect first and foremost of dissident Eastern bloc writers is

some sort of political commentary, or more specifically, a political and social

condemnation of communism. In their articles, the reviewers often foreground the

politics of the book in the same way that they foreground the elements of the author’s

biography that prove he or she is a legitimate dissident. So great are the expectations that

49
Broyard’s digs at Kundera’s writing are numerous and scathing. In regards to The Farewell Party: “He
explains too much, and for a writer of fiction, he is overfond of philosophy ... [which] pushes the writer’s
style to the pontifical ...”. One story is “an interesting gift in a poorly wrapped parcel,” another “has a
clumsiness as art that reminds one of the clothing the men wear in his country.” Two other stories are “set
pieces, mere vehicles for some unremarkable aphorisms about sexual behavior. ... [B]oth stories are little
more than pseudo-sophisticated psychologizing thinly disguised as fiction” (“Iron Bedsheets”). As for The
Joke, its “style [has] a heavy, pedestrian quality. The book is filled with dead lines.” In sum: “As far as I’m
concerned, Mr. Kundera, who is generally highly praised, is not writing well. His language seems to be
somewhere between George Orwell’s Newspeak and the querulousness of certain kinds of narcisstic
fiction. And there isn’t an interesting or convincing character in the book” (“Matter of Purging”).

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Eastern writers must write about politics that the paratext sometimes functions to rewrite

their texts with a politics that is not necessarily there. After a full (and accurate) review of

Škvorecký’s The Bass Saxophone (Maloff 1979), for example, The New York Times later

published a blurb about the book in its “Editor’s Choice” section describing it as “[t]wo

novellas about life, politics, and music in communist Czechoslovakia,” when in actuality

both novellas are set during the German occupation of World War II (BR9). This is not to

say that Škvorecký doesn’t use the German occupation as a means of talking about the

Soviet occupation, but the blurb on its own is hardly accurate. Critics had also come to

assume that dissident-exile-par-excellence Kundera could and would only write about

politics. They therefore exhibited a degree of creativity in finding the politics in his 1976

English-language release. Saul Maloff closes his review, “‘The Farewell Party’ is the

kind of ‘political novel’ a cunning, resourceful, gifted writer writes when it is no longer

possible to write political novels” (1976), and Elizabeth Pochoda concludes that “The

Farewell Party attests to the longevity of political oppression in Czechoslovakia by never

mentioning it” (cited in Wachtel, 67). Expectations about the necessity of politics to

Eastern bloc writers was such that the very absence of politics was rewritten as its

presence.50 Again in his 1984 interview with Kramer, Kundera expresses his ambivalence

about how the Western literary system refracts and rewrites his texts: “If I write a love

story, and there are three lines about Stalin in that story, people will talk about the three

lines and forget the rest, or read the rest for its political implications or as a metaphor for

politics” (“No Word for Home” BR46).

50
See Chapter 2 for the case of Dany Laferrière who does actually use the strategy of not mentioning the
Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti as a means of resisting them.

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 The reception of Kundera in the West thus depends largely on the Cold War

context in which it initially occurred. The first translations of his work in France

appeared in 1968 (The Joke and Laughable Loves), and the English-language translations

of these two works were published the following year. The release dates hardly seem

accidental. At the time, Czechoslovakia attracted particular attention from the West for 1)

its loosening of restrictions on artistic and personal freedoms, culminating in the Prague

Spring of 1968, and 2) the abrupt end to this openness on August 20, 1968, with the

invasion of Soviet allied troops, the subsequent occupation, and the period of

normalization. The received knowledge circulating in the West was that Czechoslovak

writers, at least those that mattered, were politically oppressed and suffering, and

therefore fated to testify about their oppression and suffering to the world. “Eastern

European” writers had currency in the West insomuch as they corroborated the West’s

ideological superiority over the brutish East. This is not to imply, as Broyard does, that

Kundera’s books were translated in the West for political reasons alone and that they

otherwise possess no literary merit, but his personal and political history surely played a

role in his international success. Indeed, the translators and editors of these early

published works in English and French intervened heavily in the texts to give them this

type of cultural currency. Their rewritings, against Kundera’s wishes, played up the

political at the expense of other features of the texts. As Michelle Woods shows in her

meticulous study of Milan Kundera’s work in translation, in the first editions of The Joke

in English, the British and American publishers simply eliminated large portions of the

novel that were deemed extraneous to its purported political message, resulting in what

Piotr Kuhiwczak deems an “appropriation” of the novel (1990). Despite the cuts, or

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perhaps because of them, Audrey C. Foote finds in her 1970 review that The Joke is

“unusually rich and human for so politically oriented a piece of fiction” and that “the

central power of the book is that of an introspective, melancholy, immensely Slavic study

of the icy hell of prolonged and arid bitterness” (240).

While the reception of The Joke was generally positive, Kundera reacted

vehemently against the way it circulated in translation and attempted to rewrite the

rewriting of it, asserting what he considers his authorial rights. He describes the

translations, in which his novel was both heavily emended and rearranged into

chronological order, as having “scarred [him] forever” (Art of the Novel 121). At the time

of the first publication in English in 1969, he responded with an open letter in the Times

Literary Supplement comparing the publishers to the “Moscow censors” for the way they

had revised the novel to suit the expectations of English readers and “improve the sales”

(1259). Kundera claims that he will “[f]or a certain time” refuse “the slightest

intervention in my texts, even if this should mean that they will not be published owing to

my attitude” (1259), as this was the only power he could exercise. The Joke established

him as a writer in the Anglo-American market; without its publication he had no

influence with which to make demands. For the time being The Joke had to remain in its

“appropriated” form, but its success granted him some pull in the translation and

publication process for subsequent releases (Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The

Book of Laughter and Forgetting)51 including for example, having a say in who would be

chosen as translator. As Woods demonstrates by referring to correspondence between

Kundera, his publishers, and translators, the novelist felt continuously forced to make

51
The first publication dates of these books in French and English are as follows: La vie est ailleurs (1973),
Life is Elsewhere (1974); La valse aux adieux (1976), The Farewell Party (1976); Le livre du rire et de
l’oubli (1978), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980).

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compromises in order to have his work published, but with the last of these books came

enough positive critical and popular attention to assert himself in the translation

publishing process (30-38). Kundera had long been published by the prestigious French

maison Gallimard, but he gained a stronger voice there and also found a trusted ally in

Aaron Asher at HarperCollins in the United States. Once established, he set about

revising the French and English translations of The Joke, The Farewell Party (now The

Farewell Waltz), and Life is Elsewhere, consuming much of his time and creative energy

for years and resulting in what were deemed “definitive” editions author-ized by

Kundera. 52 Woods, though ultimately sympathetic to Kundera’s revision process, finds a

“certain pathological element” to it (66), and the novelist has even described himself in

this process, with as much humor as he can muster, as “a sorry figure to himself, a

laughable one to others” (Art of the Novel 121).

While Kundera maintains that he made these revisions in order to resist certain

reductive forms of currency in the West, some critics have accused him of actually

playing up to Western expectations and actively courting international success. Ugrešić

mentions such a tendency among Eastern European writers to assume the role the West

assigned to them: “becoming the voice of the people … I watch them adapting, modelling

their own biographies, no longer knowing how much is true, and what is a newly

acquired image” (Have a Nice Day 140, emphasis original). Allegations of this kind

leveled against Kundera have come from colleagues and readers in the country he left

behind as well as from the West. Vaculík, for example, a dissident writer who did not

emigrate, claimed in 1986 that his colleague Kundera wrote with a “foreign” rather than a

52
The first publication dates of the revised editions in French and English are as follows: The Joke (1984),
La plaisanterie (1985); La valse aux adieux (1986), The Farewell Waltz (1998); La vie est ailleurs (1987),
Life is Elsewhere (1987).

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Czech audience in mind and “does not express the real experience of this country” (Diehl

G5). The reaction of Czech critics like Vaculík is, of course, also shaped by specific

cultural expectations, in this case expectations that Czechs should be writing a certain

way for a certain type of “Czech” audience. Milan Jungmann (1988) further argues that

Kundera turned his back on the Czech audience by penning The Unbearable Lightness of

Being with an eye to eroticism and an avoidance of the more complicated aspects of

Czech history in order to intentionally increase its international marketability. Bowing to

the Western market is also the charge that Allison Stanger (1999) and Caleb Crain (1999)

level against Kundera, claiming that he whitewashed The Joke in translation by removing

references to Soviet collaboration as well as passages that would be considered sexist in

the Anglo-American context. The fact that Kundera switched to writing first his essays

and then novels in French rather than Czech has also been seen as an opportunistic means

to fit more easily into the more highly regarded and more highly remunerated center of

the Western literary market. Since he has not granted permission for the translation of

any of his French-language novels into Czech, readers in his homeland feel left out,

betrayed by Kundera’s devotion to the French and Anglo-American literary systems in

preference to their own.

Although I agree that Kundera has acted in self-interest to create an audience for

himself in the West, I cannot align myself with critics like Vaculík, Jungmann, Stanger,

or Crain who damn him for it, viewing his behavior as merely a shameless search for

international celebrity. Detractors such as these approach the matter simplistically and

fail to put Kundera’s actions into the larger context of his literary philosophy. Woods

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sees rewriting as central to understanding Kundera’s literary practice and presents it as a

useful way of thinking about the other ways in which he asserts control over his oeuvre:

Kundera argues that rewriting is as creative an act as writing, and that an author
has every right to reconsider and re-evaluate his or her work. If some of the
writing or some of the work does not come up to the standard of the rest of the
work, then it is the author’s duty to omit it or rewrite it. (62)

According to Kundera, it is the writer’s prerogative to make any changes that he or she

likes to achieve the aesthetic aim of the novel. While the critics view revision as

whitewashing and base opportunism, Kundera insists the novelist’s rewritings are an

attempt to perfect the craft. Rewriting thus becomes part of the repetition-with-variation

schema: returning to the same theme, idea, or moment in an effort to define it for the

reader more precisely. Since the definition is always elusive, rewriting is always possible

and even necessary. Woods is right, though, to call attention to a double standard in

Kundera’s idea of rewriting. Despite the necessity of rewriting, he only allows certain

people to practice it:

The author’s act of rewriting, for Kundera, is in direct opposition to rewriting

enacted upon a writer’s work or words by others, because he argues of the
dangers of reductive interpretation and manipulation for the ends of rewriters. ...
Kundera sees no obstacle in allowing for different versions of the same work to
exist across languages as long as he himself is involved in the changes, because of
his fear that changes implemented by others are made for the wrong reasons and
for manipulation to a certain end. (63)

Even as she points out this double standard, however, Woods’s efforts to remain

even-handed prevent her from using rewriting in the Lefevrian sense (which she invokes

in the introduction to her book) to its greatest potential for evaluating Kundera’s rewrites.

In the quote above, she allows Kundera’s voice to call rewriting by others

“manipulation,” with all the negative connotations associated with that word. But

Lefevere’s concept of rewriting always and necessarily involves manipulation to which

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he does not assign a negative meaning. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter,

for Lefevere, all writing and rewriting is performed in relation to an ideology (a “certain

concept of what the world should be like”) and a poetics (“a certain concept of what

literature should be like”) current in a literary system. And we might add that ideology

and poetics are inextricably linked, such that, for example, ideology determines the

concept of what role literature plays in the world. Art for art’s sake is not merely a

poetical formulation but also an ideological one. An idea like Kundera’s, then, in which

rewriting is reserved for the author and his or her illusory quest for aesthetic perfection is

a product of an ideology as much as a poetics. In a sense, Kundera has come out of the

same Western school of thought as the editor who told Ugrešić he could not publish her

work because only Western authors are at liberty to write “pure” literature. Kundera and

the editor both value “pure” literature as the Western ideal; the difference is that whereas

the editor believes that authors from other cultures should be responding to local political

concerns, Kundera believes that “pure” literature is the only standard for all novels.

Novels that fall outside of “pure” aesthetic aims fall outside the realm of the true

European novel. This idea of pure literature comes, in sum, from Kundera’s situatedness

in time and place with its particular ideology and poetics, which he traces in his essays on

the history of the novel.

The control Kundera exerts over his translations and other forms of rewriting can

be traced to his ideas about the novelist in what he terms the Modern Era, which for him

is the moment in history when the individual, rather than the collective, came to the

forefront, allowing for the emergence of the author (Testaments Betrayed 272). Before

that, stories didn’t “belong” to anyone and were adapted freely, but since the time when

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Cervantes castigated a rival for writing his own sequel to Don Quixote, a precedent for

the author’s authority has been established (The Curtain 99-100), one reflected in current

copyright law: “If a work of art emanates from an individual and his uniqueness, it is

logical that this unique being, the author, should possess all rights over the thing that

emanates exclusively from him” (Testaments Betrayed 271). Kundera’s version of

literary history is, of course, marked by a fundamental paradox. While he defends

Cervantes’s assertion that he is, in Kundera’s words, “the sole master of his work; he is

his work” (Testaments Betrayed 100, emphasis original), Kundera does not seem to care

at all that Cervantes mentions several chivalry books without citing their authors because

“respect for authors and their rights had not yet become customary” (Testaments

Betrayed 99). Why should Cervantes suddenly get to decide that his claims to ownership

are singular and binding whereas the preceding authors get ignored? Kundera is, in effect,

presenting a version of literary history that is both born out of and legitimates the beliefs

of the time and place in which he lives, which, according to him, privilege the individual.

Later he explains that the author of the Modern Era, rather than having erupted onto the

scene with Cervantes, “emerged only gradually over these recent centuries and that in the

history of humanity, the era of authors’ rights is a fleeting moment, brief as a photoflash”

(Testaments Betrayed 272). Thus Kundera does not see the author of the Modern Era as a

kind of teleological endpoint, but he does consider it a high point from which literary

history is now in a pitiable decline.

It is worth taking a critical look at Kundera’s narrative of literary history to bring

out its situatedness in time and place. Such a move will allow us to see how Kundera’s

narrative imposes a local model onto world literary history and also how its underlying

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ideology mystifies the conditions out of which it arose. First of all, Kundera, with his

Modern Era, creates a kind of world clock out of the European clock. Cultures not

following the same narrative are treated as not being outside of time, but behind the

times. This permits Kundera to make statements such as: “...Rushdie belongs by origin to

a Muslim society that, in large part, is still living in the period before the Modern Era”

(Testaments Betrayed 25). Rather than allowing for the possibility of other time

narratives, Kundera instead presents a narrative which chauvinistically characterizes non-

European cultures as having to catch up with Europe, which is presented as more

advanced.53 Such a narrative is, of course, in the same vein as those used by Europeans to

rationalize colonialism as a charitable act of spreading technology and culture in order to

help quicken the progress of other civilizations. It is not paradoxical, then, that Kundera

identifies writers outside of Europe as those now writing the best European novels, as we

shall see in the last section of this chapter. While Europe, for Kundera, has already fallen

into postmodern decadence, non-Western cultures lagging behind are just now hitting the

moment of the Modern Era.

Furthermore, by considering Europe’s Modern Era the most “modern” one,

Kundera also favors its tenets and discounts other systems of belief about authorship and

authority as retrograde or backward. He relates, for example, how he himself used to be

“enchanted by Moravian folk music ... much like those who looked upon such a world

with no artistic-property claims as a kind of paradise ...” (Testaments Betrayed 271-72).

But he only shares this anecdote to show the error of his ways, subsequently arguing that
53
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) on this point and his argument for a European modern history
contemporaneous and coexisting with a subaltern past in non-European cultures. See also The World
Republic of Letters for Pascale Casanova’s concept of a literary Greenwich mean time (where Paris serves
as Greenwich), similar to Kundera’s mapping of world literature as a periodization with some literatures
being not spatially apart from but temporally behind others.

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the progression from folk art to art of the Modern Era has led to “Europe’s greatest

glory,” i.e. the novel (Testaments Betrayed 272). In fact, in support of his argument for

authorial rights, Kundera maintains that even folk music was not actually written

collectively but had its original composers whose work then sadly slipped out of their

control (Testaments Betrayed 271). Thus from his location in a culture that privileges the

individual and rights of ownership, Kundera writes, or rather rewrites, a literary

historiography that presents anonymous works of art almost as orphans stolen from their

melancholy creators. Such a move reinforces his privileging of authorial ownership and

belittles other systems of belonging as pre-modern in the case of traditional or oral

literatures and anti-modern in the case of socialist literature.54 The fact that these other

systems are collective has implications, however, that are not only aesthetic but also

economic.

For Kundera, as already cited above, the uniqueness of an individual gives

uniqueness to the work of art he or she creates, and thus that work of art should be

uniquely his or hers. This statement then leads into a reflection, which lasts a few pages,

on the state of copyright law, with Kundera first explaining how author’s legal rights

came to be through the assertion of individual genius and then lamenting the dwindling of

those rights in the audiovisual age when, as is the case with films, it is more difficult to

identify works of art as the “original expression of a unique individual” (Testaments

Betrayed 272). Kundera’s connection between individual genius and individual

ownership fits neatly into the ideology and poetics reigning in his historical and

54
Translation theory scholarship has recently devoted particular attention to the idea of ownership and
copyright, questioning the authorial monopoly on the intellectual property of the “original” text and its
derivatives. See, for example, Christi A. Merrill’s Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and other
Tales of Possession (NY: Fordham UP, 2008), which puts forth the Hindi term anuvad for a figure of
translation as “telling in turn.”

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geographical situation. While he sets the beginning of the Modern Era at Cervantes’s

proprietary claim over Don Quixote, Kundera also argues that copyright law took some

time to evolve to support such claims. Indeed, book historians have shown how the

Industrial Revolution functioned to tighten restrictions on ownership, both of material

and also intellectual property. Sarah Brouillette has discussed the way this change

functioned discursively, and the echoes of that discourse are quite evident in Kundera’s

thinking. According to Brouillette,

Establishing the inspired originality of the literary work—one part of the

writer’s heroic self-inflation—was an important strategy in authors’ efforts
to reform copyright law and gain proper compensation for their labour. …
[W]ith the romantic era the modern view of authorship becomes firmly
one of individual, original expression. The gradual movement toward such
formulations was never only an aesthetic process, but instead accompanied
changes in the general structure of the literary marketplace as it became a
space of overwhelming commodification. (47)

The claims Kundera makes in response to his critics about his rights as an author should

therefore be situated in this framework. While Kundera tries to untie aesthetics from all

other considerations (political, economic, etc.), in the larger context of the Modern Era in

which he lives, we can see this as a sort of mystification of those other considerations.

This is not to condemn Kundera for wanting to earn money from his books, or to suggest,

as Vaculík, Jungmann, Stanger, or Crain do, that pleasing readers to sell better is the

main motivation for the changes he makes. Rather, a more nuanced view is required that

puts the economic concerns of the critics in relation to the aesthetic concerns of Kundera,

insisting on the inseparability of ideology and poetics and revealing his mystification of

the material as a discursive sign of his times.

The ideology of what he calls the Modern Era in which he lives has therefore

shaped Kundera’s version of the origins and development of that era at the same time as

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it justifies his own position about what the Modern Era consists of as well as,

consequently, his position vis-à-vis his own role and rights within that Modern Era.

Kundera is quite adamant when it comes to the author’s right to his or her work:

Because what an author creates doesn’t belong to his papa, his mama, his nation,
or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants
and if he wants; he can change it, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it, throw it in the
toilet and flush it down without the slightest obligation to explain himself to
anybody at all. (The Curtain 98).

This is, in effect, his response to those like Stanger and Crain who critique him for not

merely “restoring” what was distorted in or removed from earlier translations but also

introducing his own deletions and revisions, for instance of passages dealing with sexism

or communist collaboration, so that the “definitive” versions do not match the “original”

ones (Woods 78-80). Kundera has also demanded that some of his earlier work be struck

from his bibliography. He longs for a system like that in music in which composers “give

opus numbers only to works they see as ‘valid.’ They do not number works written in

their immature period, or occasional pieces, or technical exercises” (Art of the Novel

147). For this reason, Kundera bemoans the practice of literary scholars who compile

archives and critical editions with textual variants, contending that this goes against the

wishes of the author, as he makes extremely clear in his own case: “Nowhere in the world

nor in any form whatsoever may there occur the publication or reproduction of anything I

ever wrote (or will write) except for the books of mine listed in the most recent Gallimard

catalog. And no annotated editions. No adaptations.” (Art of the Novel 152).55 Critics

such as Michal Bauer (1998) have condemned Kundera’s bibliographical emendations,

accusing the author of removing certain texts from his oeuvre—including early engaged

55
The text is from the definition of the word “testament” in Kundera’s “Sixty-three Words.” It was not
added to the French edition until 1995, and thus did not appear in English until the 2000 revised edition of
The Art of the Novel. (Trans. Linda Asher. NY: Perennial, 2000.)

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communist poetry—in order to avoid tarnishing the image created of him in the Western

market as a heroic dissident. Kundera maintains, once again, that his choices are

motivated by aesthetics, and that the work he essentially wants to erase from his

bibliography does not meet his literary standards. Woods further speaks in his favor by

arguing that these texts have become incorporated into the later ones through various

means: the revision of the text, the return to the same theme, the presence of similar

situations, or even the recycling of titles and character names. But again, I argue that we

need to qualify Kundera’s statements about aesthetic decisions by tempering poetics with

ideology. Certainly, as Woods has shown, those older texts are rewritten into newer, we

might say more mature or sophisticated works, works intended by Kundera to have a

higher aesthetic value. Instead of avoiding the problem of ideology, Kundera might better

respond to Bauer by saying that the communist ideology led to too-easy answers in his

early texts, rather than open-ended reflections on human experience, the latter being the

value by which the Modern Era judges novelistic output.

The Modern Era to which Kundera is so attached is also, in his sad opinion,

drawing to a close. To his great consternation, Kundera finds that we have entered an era

in which stupidity—that “non-thought of received ideas”—is proliferating

uncontrollably. While he places much of the blame for this on the facile formulations of

contemporary mass media and the technology disseminating it, Kundera also finds

scholars much at fault for their literary interpretations. The academy today, in his

opinion, is far too entrenched in restrictive schools of thought, producing professors “for

whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends” (Art of the Novel

32). Those agents more directly involved in the production of novels—namely editors,

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publishers, and translators—are also implicated, as are the reviewers who present the

work to the public. For Kundera, one of the most distasteful forms of reductionism in

rewriting by scholars and critics are simplistic roman à clef interpretations that read

novels as figures for the author’s own life. Kundera, in his definition for the word

“pseudonym,” thus imagines a utopia in which authors are free from the confines of

biography and history; he “dream[s] of a world where writers will be required by law to

keep their identities secret and to use pseudonyms” (Art of the Novel 148). He

consistently bemoans the critical practice of reading an author’s stories in conjunction

with his or her own life story, a reductionist move that refuses to let the art speak for

itself. “By insisting on decoding him,” Kundera declares, “the Kafkologists killed Kafka”

(Art of the Novel 132). At the same time, then, as Kundera asserts the right of the author

to intervene in the text after publication as much as he or she likes in order to revise or

explain, he conversely asserts the author’s right to be left out of the interpretation given

by third parties. The seeming openness of Kundera’s interpretive principles as resistant to

reduction actually function by closing off interpretation by anyone but the author, whose

rights are jealously guarded.

In response to these agents producing what he feels are misunderstandings or

reductions of his texts, Kundera insists upon the author’s authority not only in the

creation but also in the interpretation and reception of the text. He concurs with Witold

Gombrowicz’s response to a reader who admonished him to “‘not comment on [his] own

work! Just write!’”: “Gombrowicz replies that he intends to go on explaining himself ‘as

much as he can and for as long as he can,’ because a writer who cannot talk about his

books is not a ‘complete writer’” (The Curtain 78). Kundera’s four collections of essays

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certainly serve as a means for him to “explain himself,” and this is a forum in which he

can retain control. Whenever possible, however, he refuses to participate in activities

where he cannot comfortably keep control of his authority (author-ity). One such case is

the interview, a form “that can only lead to the disappearance of the writer: he who is

responsible for every one of his words” (Art of the Novel 133). Kundera finds his remarks

misrepresented by journalists and does not recognize what he said. As he is unwilling to

give up this measure of control, since 1985 all “interviews” with Kundera are in fact

dialogues that he has scrupulously edited and copyrighted; any other “reported remarks”

are nothing but “forgeries” (Art of the Novel 134). Another such instance of closing off

“misinterpretations” is Kundera’s refusal, after his disappointment with the film version

of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to have any more of his books adapted for the

screen. Thus as his success grants him the ability to do so, Kundera increasingly appears

to be policing both the production and interpretation of his novels with, as Woods notes,

a “pathological” obsession. While he may claim that it is all in the name of

understanding, an effort to avoid being mal compris, Kundera’s constant interventions

risk producing their own type of reduction. The more he persists in explaining his texts to

his readers, the closer he gets to making affirmations of Truth regarding their meaning.

He reserves for the author the right to create variations in repetition, and forces stupidity

upon his reader; that is, the writer gets to do all the thinking while the reader is left with

the non-thought of ideas received from the writer.

With the end of the Cold War came a relaxation of the constraints which governed

the early reception of Kundera in the West. The relaxation of these constraints combined

with the notoriety those constraints at first granted him allowed Kundera a platform from

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which to delineate his own conception of the novel and of world literature as such,

conceptions which placed him in a privileged position as a figure of authority in

hegemonic Western Europe. More recent reviews of his work suggest that Kundera has

largely succeeded in his efforts to place himself in a larger European and international

context. We do find the odd comment which approaches his current situation with new

expectations and reductive national interpretations. Thus Robert Grudin complains in a

1998 review about Identity’s “lengthy dyspeptic philosophical maunderings after the

French fashion” (BR11), and Kakutani finds that although his humor was “highly

subversive” under communism, with “Slowness set in France years after the fall of the

Berlin Wall, Mr. Kundera’s humor has turned sour …” (“Trysts” C17). But such

instances—aside from confirming Kundera’s place in the West as a French writer—are

rare. If he has become a Western writer, then Kundera has earned the right to concern

himself with aesthetics rather than just politics, and it is the aesthetics of his novels and

their ideas that occupy the most space in later reviews of his work.

And yet just as Kundera had carved out a space where interpretation without

reference to history, biography, or politics might be possible, these three reared up again

in a most dramatic way. In October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt published an article

stating that information voluntarily provided by Kundera to the State police in

Czechoslovakia in 1950 led to the fourteen-year imprisonment of a man named Miroslav

Dvořáček. Respekt’s accusation was based on a police report—later proved authentic—

that named the writer as the young man who had told authorities that a visitor to his

dormitory had left a suitcase in another student’s room, resulting in an investigation and

the arrest of Dvořáček. Kundera vehemently denied the charges, insisting that not only

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did he not go to the police that day but that he had no acquaintance with any of the people

involved. The truth of the matter has still not been proven either way. But as Jana Prikryl

writes in her excellent account of the Respekt article and its aftermath, the sheer amount

of debate it generated in the press has perhaps indelibly linked Kundera to the incident:

[T]he best intentions of journalists trying to give Kundera the benefit of the doubt
by cleaving to the subjunctive in writing about the allegations have usually
collapsed beyond the first wordy sentences: among the many Czech articles that I
read on this subject, including those defending Kundera, only a handful
stubbornly avoided the conclusiveness of the past tense. Ironically, as more
writers joined the scrum of Kundera's defense, the more tightly his name became
associated with the episode and the less credible his denial appeared. (1)

Kundera’s response did little to clear his name and save his reputation. Having broken his

policy not to speak to the media, Kundera sounds harried in the audio of this rare

interview.56 Although it certainly did nothing to help his case, his reaction is

understandable given the importance to Kundera of authority and the autonomy of the

novel. The interpretation of his work which he has so painstakingly policed is suddenly

spinning once more out of his control.

Aside from the harm to his personal reputation, the Respekt article also triggered

the type of literary interpretation most despised by Kundera: the roman à clef method

where the reader tries to match the action and characters in a novel with the life of its

author. As Prikryl notes, “Czech journalists spiced their accounts of the affair with scenes

from his novels in which characters seem to play according to the 1950 script” (1). The

danger here is grave. If the “Kafkologists” killed Kafka, then Kundera’s oeuvre is under

the same risk from what we might call Kunderologists. The incident threatens to take

over Kundera’s image completely so that he is remembered not as a “Man Who Cannot

56
The sound file is available on the Internet: http://www.novinky.cz/domaci/151786-video-historici-
ukazali-dukazy-kunderova-udani-lzou-rika-spisovatel.html.

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Forget” but as a “Man Who Lied,” with his work considered a covert confession of his

ultimately revealed sins. The temptation to read a long-hidden guilt into Kundera’s work

is certainly clear, not only in his novels but in his essays, for example when he is

considering the reception of writers like Céline or Mayakovsky:

[W]e prefer to say that the great cultural figures tainted with the horrors of our
century were bastards; but it isn’t so … If we don’t want to leave this century just
as stupid as we entered it, we must abandon the facile moralism of the trial and
think about this scandal, think it through to the bottom, even if this should lead us
to question anew all our certainties about man as such. (Testaments Betrayed 233-
34, emphasis original)

The defense he articulates here for his fellow authors is much more eloquent than in his

taped interview in his own defense; it is much more complicated and in fact much more

novelistic in Kundera’s sense of the term in that it doesn’t aspire to Truths about right and

wrong but rather explores the eternal human problems. But in his efforts to maintain

authority—especially as he sees the very real possibility of it being stripped away—

Kundera’s essayistic writing becomes less novelistic. The repetition-in-variation form

becomes more repetition and less variation. The ideas in Encounter are basically the same

as in the earlier collections without much new or innovative being added; indeed many of

the pieces in Encounter were originally written in the 1990s, that is, before the

publication of Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain. Rather than responding to new

constraints in the aftermath of the Respekt article, Kundera gives the reader more of the

same again, more “received ideas” from the author.

One noticeable difference in Encounter, however, is the amount of space it

devotes to literature and other arts from outside of geographical Europe. In the last

section of this chapter, I turn to the ways Kundera charts out not a political but a cultural

and literary geography. If his concern is the European novel, it is imperative to define

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what he means by Europe, especially as I have argued that his situatedness there

constructs his entire ideological and poetical philosophy at the same time as that

philosophy constructs the Europe from whence it came. Significantly, Kundera’s

mapping of Europe serves to place himself squarely within its cultural borders, thus

challenging his categorization as an Eastern European writer, and all that that implies, so

that he is not “reduced to a formula” (Scianna 4). Asserting the prerogative of the author

(Eastern European or otherwise) to write and be read beyond biographical or politico-

historical context, Kundera centers his efforts to escape what, after Murawska-Muthesius,

we might call Slakanian space on two related strategies. He first rejects the label “Eastern

European” in favor of “Central European,” although as we shall see, such a move

mobilizes an exclusionary discourse about East and West. But he ultimately redraws the

cultural boundaries of Europe in an inclusionary move that risks falling into Glissant’s

compréhension, with its image of hands taking onto themselves what is not theirs. I will

finally propose that, despite the shortcomings in the way Kundera himself applies it, we

may use his strategies for mapping literature to a more nuanced effect by shifting the

context.

Mapping world contexts

According to Kundera, if we take the cultural and socio-historical perspective, the

lands that became Czechoslovakia never belonged to Eastern Europe; it was only the

geopolitical act of the Yalta Conference in 1948 that carved up the continent and trapped

the Czechs behind the Iron Curtain (The Curtain 48). Those countries like

Czechoslovakia sacrificed by the West to the Soviets, Kundera maintains, are more

properly termed “Central Europe.” It is with exasperation that he corrects the great

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number of interviewers and journalists who blunder into using the “wrong” adjective

“Eastern,” reminding them that Prague lies at the very heart (center) of Europe.

Kundera’s logic holds that a few decades of recent political history cannot reverse a

centuries-old historical trajectory:

To say that Prague under the Soviets is Eastern Europe is like saying that France,
occupied by the Soviets, would be Eastern Europe. … The real drama is that a
Western country like Czechoslovakia has been part of a certain history, a certain
civilization, for a thousand years, and now, suddenly, it has been torn from its
history and christened “The East.” (Kramer BR46)

Yet Kundera’s idea of Europe and the European novel is not so indeterminate as

might seem. Kundera’s strategy to place “Central Europe” inside of Europe does not

simply mobilize positive comparisons—showing what Central Europe has in common

culturally with Western Europe—but also negative ones. That is, he aims to strengthen

his case by illustrating the difference between Central Europe and “Eastern Europe.” By

insisting on the term Central Europe, Kundera has not done away with Slaka; he has

simply shifted the border. As Murawska-Muthesius herself writes, “Introducing thus the

claim for difference within the body of the Eastern bloc, divided into the raped and the

rapist, Kundera did not question, but reproduced, the rules of the discourse” (34).

For Kundera, the East is Russia, as he is quick to inform his interviewers once he

sets them straight about his being from Central Europe. The centuries-long civilization to

which Czechoslovakia belongs is the occidental one characterized by rational humanism,

while “far off” Russia—“another world” (The Curtain 44)—becomes the depository for

the “Slavic spirit, a purely negative notion” (“Quatre-vingt-neuf mots” 113).57 “Slavic”

57
“Slavic” (“Slave”) is one of the “Quatre-vingt-neuf mots” (“Eighty-Nine Words”) Kundera defined in the
French journal Le débat in response to so many misunderstandings with his translators. The article was
reprinted in the collection of essays L’art du roman with only seventy-three words, and the English

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for Kundera means “inordinate poetization of things, feelings on display, simulated

profundities, long looks which claim to say something and accuse you of not knowing

what” (“Quatre-vingt-neuf mots” 113), and for him the “Russian universe” is a

“hysterical” one (Biron 27). At the same time, its writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky

play vital roles in the development of the European novel, although Kundera confesses to

a personal aversion toward Dostoyevsky because he creates “a universe where … feelings

are promoted to the rank of value and truth” (Jacques and His Master 1-2). Citing

Solzhenitsyn, he argues that the crucial moment in history comes with Russia’s lack of a

Renaissance, leaving it irrational and sentimental (Jacques and His Master 3). Elsewhere

in Kundera’s writing the divide from the rest of Europe comes much earlier, as Russia is

“rooted … in the ancient past of Byzantium, possesses its own historical problematic, its

own architectural look, its own religion (Orthodox), its alphabet (Cyrillic …) and also its

own sort of communism …” (The Curtain 43). While Kundera deplores the fact that

Westerners include former Czechoslovakia in the “European Orient” (The Curtain 43),

that is precisely what he himself does to Russia. He takes part in a type of Orientalism

that casts Russia as the foil to the rational humanism of the West. Russia is a dark and

mysterious country whose brand of excessive emotion looms as a threat on the

Occident’s eastern front.

The threat becomes reality when Soviet tanks roll into Czechoslovakia in August

1968. Kundera hyperbolically describes the occupation as “the violent end of Western

culture such as it was conceived at the dawn of the modern age, based on the individual

and his reason, on pluralism of thought, and on tolerance. In a small Western country I

translation The Art of the Novel includes only sixty-three. I quote here from the original article since
“Slavic” is one of the words missing from the French and English book versions.

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experienced the end of the West” (Jacques and His Master 11). The death of the West is

epitomized by the death of the novel, the European genre par excellence. Before invading

“Central” Europe, Russia had already managed to kill off the novel within its own

borders. According to Kundera, the totalitarian state, which hands the Truth down from

on high, is antithetical to the mode of the novel, which asks more existential questions

than it does give answers to them. He asserts that the “hundreds and thousands of novels”

published in contemporary Russia “add nothing to the conquest of being. They discover

no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said,” and they

therefore “place themselves outside [the history of the novel], or, if you like: they are

novels that come after the history of the novel” (Art of the Novel 14, emphases original).

The problem here is that Kundera assumes that all novelists in Russia are writing either

for or against the State. If their novels are published, then they must be mere mouthpieces

for communism, and if they are circulating clandestinely, then they must be ideological

attacks on communism. Kundera imagines dissident literature in Russia as political and

not aesthetic dissent. Apparently he feels that to be as “apolitical” and indeterminate as

he himself purports to be, a writer had to do what he did and emigrate. Regardless of the

19th-century contributions from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, by the end of Kundera’s study

of the European novel, we can only conclude that Russia no longer belongs there. If, for

Kundera, Europe is not so much a place but a mode of thinking and writing, and if it is no

longer possible to think and write that way in Russia, then Kundera has essentially

removed it from Europe.

As Joseph Brodsky indicates in his scathing response to Kundera’s disgusted

characterization in the introduction to Jacques and His Master (1-2) of Dostoyevsky as

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embodying the sentimental Slavic universe, Kundera has fallen prey in his literary

evaluations to historical circumstances (477). His Orientalist representation of Russia

arises from the deep emotional pain caused him by the Soviet occupation of

Czechoslovakia. But while Kundera’s Russian East descends into reductive stereotype,

his theorizing of the West that he pits against it proves much more nuanced. As already

mentioned, in his collected volumes of essays Kundera traces the centuries-old

civilization of Europe as epitomized in the European genre par excellence: the novel. His

history does not recount the national histories of the separate European countries in

chronological order. Instead, he presents Europe as a supranational cultural collective,

and he works and reworks a few novels, authors, and themes in a sort of repetition and

variation. According to Kundera, no country has a monopoly on the great novel; rather,

innovations appear in different places at different times. The genre begins for him in Italy

with Boccaccio, moves to France and Spain with Rabelais and Cervantes, and continues

to cross borders and take on new incarnations with authors like Sterne, Fielding, Diderot,

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce. It is important to note that for

Kundera the site of exceptional novel writing in the early twentieth century is Central

Europe with Kafka, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz whose names, aside from that of

Kafka, do not have the same recognizability in Western Europe as the ones in the

previous list. His genealogy thus places lesser-known Central European novelists on a par

with some of the most “classic” writers in the West, a move which has significant effects

for the understanding of both Central Europe and Europe as a whole.

By including the literary output of Central Europe in his history of the European

novel, Kundera can prove the adherence of the former region to Europe “in general,”

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thereby shifting it west culturally. The texts of Central Europe become part of the

Western canon, which is more or less the canon, such that Central Europe no longer ranks

as a European backwater. That is, Kundera has given evidence that Central Europe shares

its cultural history with that most privileged of places, and in so doing, he has positioned

himself, as a Central European novelist, within that literary heritage as well. As Kundera

presents it, writers like Kafka, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz have too frequently been

interpreted in relation to their small context, that is, their national context, or even worse

the “microscopic” context of their biographies (The Curtain 35-36; “Three Contexts” 10),

but such interpretations are limiting because “the aesthetic value of a literary work (in

other words, what the work has contributed that is new) is fully comprehensible only in

the great context, that is, in the world context (or, more precisely, the context of

European literature)” (“Three Contexts” 6). I will return to the problematic slippage

between Europe and the world later, but for the moment, what is important to note is

Kundera’s assertion that the “great context” is necessary to grasp the aesthetic

significance of a novel and its novelist. For Kundera, the separate national histories of the

novel do not function independently: a Sterne doesn’t emerge without a Rabelais, a

Diderot without a Sterne, a Stendhal without a Fielding, a Fielding without a Cervantes, a

Joyce without a Flaubert, or a Broch without a Joyce (The Curtain 35). In tracing the

history of the European novel, Kundera intends to show how the genre crosses borders

and benefits from the innovations and new incarnations that its statelessness affords. At

the same time, what unites the novels termed “European” is that they are “bound by [a]

continuous evolutionary line to the historical enterprise that began with Rabelais and

Cervantes” (Tesatments Betrayed 28-29).

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 Kundera’s move of placing Central Europe within the Western canon involves

more than its simple subsumption, however. Indeed, Kundera’s history of the European

novel, in which “there are no state borders” (The Curtain 61-62) is not one of stasis, but

of contact and change, and so the inclusion of these lesser-known Central European

novelists in the canon demands a rethinking of the canon and the West itself. The key to

the undermining of the West’s stability comes with Kundera’s formulation of Central

Europe as an imaginary whole made up of small nations. Central Europe here comprises

a “median” context between the small national and the large global contexts (The Curtain

45). Instead of owing its definition to a concrete geopolitical unity, Central Europe has

only a “vague and approximate nature,” a “unity that was unintentional” brought on by a

shared historical experience (The Curtain 45, emphasis original). The “smallness” of the

Central European nations derives precisely from that shared historical experience in

which they have continuously fought for their existence against a series of invasions and

empires such that they “haven’t the comfortable sense of being there always, past and

future; they have all, at some point or another in their history, passed through the

antechamber of death … [T]heir very existence is a question” (The Curtain 192,

emphasis original). In this sense, Central Europe gives the lie to the unified hegemony of

Europe, both by revealing the imperialist hierarchies of power within Europe itself and by

responding to that power with flippant subversion:

The people of Central Europe … cannot be separated from European History;

they cannot exist outside it; they represent the wrong side of this History: its
victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their
culture, of their wisdom, of the “non-serious spirit” that mocks grandeur and
glory. (“Kidnapped West” 108-109).

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With their survival in constant uncertainty, Central Europeans have come to learn that

even the large nations cannot count on their dominance to last forever. Their fragile

existence thus provides evidence of “Europe’s vulnerability, all of Europe’s vulnerability

… [A]ll European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and sharing their fate”

(“Kidnapped West” 109, emphasis original). Thus Europe, like the Central Europe at its

heart, is only imagined; it is not an ontological given.

As such, the latest embodiments of the European novel need not have their origins

within geographical Europe. The genealogy of “great” writers mentioned above arrives

more recently at Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Patrick

Chamoiseau. Kundera draws links between their writing and that of Europeans,

constructing a “silvery bridge,” for example, between the median contexts of Central

Europe and Latin America as the “two edges of the West located at its opposite ends; two

neglected, abandoned lands, pariah lands; and the two parts of the world most profoundly

marked by the traumatizing experience of the Baroque,” leading to “key positions in the

evolution of the twentieth-century novel” (The Curtain 82-83). Similarly, Kundera finds

a close resemblance between Czechoslovakia’s Bohumil Hrabal and Martinique’s

Chamoiseau in their eccentric mixing of fantasy and daily life (“Three Contexts” 9). It is

toward the Martinicans Chamoiseau and Aimé Césaire and the Haitians René Depestre

and Jacques Stephen Alexis that Kundera feels the most direct and personal attraction,

and he sees their introduction of oral literature into the novel as one of the most important

recent innovations of the genre, albeit one that also relates back to Rabelais.

According to Kundera, what distinguishes the work of these Caribbean writers

from the European novelists is the use they make of “le merveilleux” or “the

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marvelous”—adapted from Rabelais, the surrealists, and traditional oral culture—in the

creation of “le réel merveilleux” (“marvelous,” or more commonly translated in English

as “magical,” realism), and Kundera mentions this term repeatedly in his discussion of

their work. The Haitians elaborate on marvelous realism as a counterpoint to socialist

realism (Encounter 84); Depestre is “a real poet, or to say it the Antillean way, a real

master of the marvelous” (Encounter 87); the paintings of Martinican Ernest Breleur pass

from “the realm of cruelty to the realm (to reuse this catchword) of the marvelous”

(Encounter 90). In his celebration of the inventive potential of the marvelous in the large

context of the European novel, however, Kundera ends up reducing the median context of

the Caribbean to a formulaic aesthetic convention, which he himself admits is a

“catchword.” Well-intentioned as he might be, Kundera is not unlike the editors and

critics of whom Pascale Casanova, in The World Republic of Letters, notes the tendency

“to create the impression of a group by gathering under a single label authors who had

nothing, or very little, in common … to legitimize the ‘newness’ of a literary project”

(180). In such a manner, the center (for Casanova it is Paris, moving toward London)

expropriates the work of the periphery to renew its own literary tradition. Not only does

Kundera collect Caribbean writers under “the marvelous,” but he also brings together the

work of authors as diverse as Rushdie, Márquez, and Chamoiseau under the term “novel

from below the thirty-fifth parallel, the novel of the South” (Testaments Betrayed 30,

emphases original), which aside from geographical location does not tell us much about

the actual writing. These novels, “though a bit foreign to European taste, are the

extension of the history of the European novel,” and Kundera indicates their innovative

difference by employing the tired metaphor of a gray Europe and the colorful lands

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outside of it (Testaments Betrayed 31). For Kundera, these excentric literatures offer the

“tropicalization” of the novel, as he here makes reference to the character Gibreel

Farishta’s desire to “tropicalize” London in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which amounts in

the list that follows to siestas, exotic flora and fauna, “religious fervor,” “spicier food,”

tropical diseases and insects, “dust, noise, a culture of excess” (Testaments Betrayed 30-

31). The images that Kundera admires for their novelty in the European context are no

more than a series of stereotypes. What we get is the exoticization of the novel, the

European novel with palm trees.

What is even more troubling than Kundera’s exoticizing the very literature he

seeks to incorporate into the history of the European novel is his insistence on the term

“European.” While I applaud him for thinking beyond national or even regional contexts,

his terminology ends by privileging Europe as the site of “great” novelistic output. As

mentioned above, there is a slippage in Kundera’s thinking where “Europe” stands in for

the world. Referencing Goethe’s weltliteratur, Kundera claims,

[T]he word “world,” in Goethe’s sense of the term, was meant and is still meant
to designate that unity of art rooted in the epoque of Modern Times in the space of
Europe, a Europe which since then has enlarged its culture beyond its geographic
frontiers to the [American] continent. That’s why whoever lives in the house of
the “world” novel automatically and naturally inclines toward the enigma of
Europe. (La littérature contre elle-même, 10)

In this fashion, Kundera establishes an imbalanced relationship between Europe and the

rest of the world. The history of the novel according to Kundera occurs as a combination

of the two systems of literary circulation put forward by Franco Moretti and Casanova.

Fernando Caba Aseguinolaza defines these two systems as “expansion and appropriation”

and “integration and assimilation,” respectively (424). That is, in Moretti’s system,

culture radiates out from a center; in Casanova, the center co-opts everything coming in.

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Cultural artifacts, such as the novel, may undergo some transformation in their contact

with the rest of the world, but when, for example, the “tropicalized” novel begins to

circulate in the world, it only has value once Europe acknowledges it and incorporates—

or rather expropriates—it into the European context.

This system of circulation returns us to Kundera’s framework of large, small and

what is variously translated as middle or median contexts. He is not so much interested in

describing a historiography but in making evaluative judgments, which according to him

can only be made comparatively: “the aesthetic value of a literary work (in other words,

what the work has contributed that is new) is fully comprehensible only in the great

context, that is, in the world context (or, more precisely, the context of European

literature)” (“Three Contexts” 6). Kundera’s slippage between Europe and the world once

more comes to the fore here. Aware that some readers might find such a configuration

problematic, he attempts to explain himself:

Let’s be more modest and narrow the world to Europe (in the sense that Edmund
Husserl understood it: a spiritual unit that transcends the geographical boundaries
of Europe to include regions such as the two Americas). We take this approach
not because we are Eurocentrists uninterested in other continents, but because
only European literature can exist for us, as a self-evident whole. German and
Chinese literatures, though they may understand one another, do not share a
common history, whereas German and Portuguese literatures do. There are
various European literatures (a banal statement), but there is also a single
European literature (a statement only seemingly banal). (“Three Contexts” 5,
emphases original)

That second statement is not even seemingly banal and only reinforces, rather than

dissipates, the problem of referring to Europe as the world. On what grounds can

Kundera claim a single European literature? Or, by extension, a single European culture?

In fact, he is able to do so by the very processes of exclusion and inclusion described

above. That is, everything that falls under his definition of European is “European,” and

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everything that does not, is not. His Europe is a tautology that allows him to pass it off as

“self-evident.” As Aseguinolaza writes, “To co-opt is to appropriate a cultural space, by

means of its identification and characterization, and then use it at a later time as a form of

self-recognition. In other words, it is a way to incorporate something by recognizing it

and using it for one’s own benefit” (419-420).

And yet while Kundera seems to take the wholeness of European culture, as well

as its greatness, for granted, he does not take its continued existence for granted. In his

definition of the term “Europe,” he explains how European unity used to depend on

religion, then culture, but “[n]ow, in our own time, culture is in turn yielding its position.

... And thus the image of European unity slips away into the past. A European: one who

is nostalgic for Europe” (Art of the Novel 129). Indeed, the notion of Europe has resurged

both inside and outside of academia. As the European Union expands politically, issues

such as whether or not Turkey belongs to Europe have been raised. The increasing

presence of immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Asia

has also sparked heated debates such as the one around the ban on burqas in France.

These matters are seen as a threat by many, as Aseguinolaza notes, “the world is no

longer conceived of as a place to which access is granted through expansion of the

European referent, but a place where European identity is in danger” (422). At this

moment, it is helpful to read Kundera’s nostalgia for a lost Europe against his very own

characterizations of small and large nations. According to him, “a small nation

experiences its existence as an eternal ‘to be or not to be,’ as a wager, whereas big

nations take their existence for granted” (“Three Contexts” 7). In this sense, small nations

are also like the nations in the median context of Central Europe discussed earlier which

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“haven’t the comfortable sense of being there always, past and future ... [T]heir very

existence is a question” (Testaments Betrayed 192). These small nations serve as a

warning to Europe itself, and Kundera would do well to follow it in his conception of

Europe, not just for the future—which he sees as in danger—but for the present and past

as well. The greatness in regards to other cultures that he sees as whole and self-evident

is as illusory as it is for big nations who, he says, allow themselves to ignore the culture

of other nations because their own culture has achieved such widespread recognition:

“The literatures of big nations resist the idea of world literature because they themselves

have risen to that level” (“Three Contexts” 7). To be more precise, Kundera is here

saying that nations like France, by resisting the idea of a “world” literature, resist the idea

of “European” literature (since these are for Kundera synonymous). But we can say that

Kundera resists the idea of truly world literature because his Europe has seemingly “risen

to that level.”

What I want to suggest, then, is that we consider Europe not as a large context but

as a median one. Certainly the novel is a European genre in origin, for example, but to

only view novels in terms of the context of Europe is restrictive. How has the novel

changed over time and space? And what of other genres? To look at the novel in this way

with Europe as a median context would be similar in approach to Wai Chee Dimock’s

idea of genre as system in which she “invoke[s] genre … as a ... self-obsoleting system, a

provisional set that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by its many subsets”

(86). To consider Europe a median context, then, would be to approach the rest of the

world in a manner that does not reduce it, as Kundera and Glissant both fear, but to open

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it up for evaluation in which it is not always already the apex against which the Other—

West Indian or Eastern European—is measured.

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 CHAPTER 4

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Opportunity Knocks Back

In previous chapters, I have examined the circulation of world literature in terms

of the work of writers moving from what has traditionally been called the periphery to the

center. My case studies of Dany Laferrière and Milan Kundera serve to challenge the

very notion of center and periphery, though, by revealing the global literary market as a

more complicated network of flows. These two authors, by resituating their work within

larger cultural contexts, allow us to push out the boundaries of localized centers.

Laferrière asks to be taken as an “American” writer and Kundera as a “European” (see

chapters 2 and 3), fighting labels such as “Haitian,” “Czech,” “Caribbean,” or “Eastern

European.” The work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, however, could be said to have made the

opposite trajectory: from the center back to the periphery. Ngũgĩ’s understanding of his

identity as a writer stands in stark contrast to that of Laferrière and Kundera. Despite his

international renown and decades of living abroad, mostly in the United States, Ngũgĩ

strongly identifies culturally and linguistically as a Kenyan writer, and bemoans the fact

that he is cut off from his people, and thus his cultural heritage, whereas Kundera and

Laferrière dismiss the stereotypical pain of exile. Having broader, more fluid identities

has helped the former two authors carve out a place for themselves in the center of world

literature, especially in the case of Kundera, who rewrites the history of the novel in order

to give himself a privileged place within it. And even though Laferrière circulated for

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some time around the so-called cultural peripheries of Quebec, Anglophone Canada, and

Haiti, his oeuvre has now been consecrated by a contract at an important Parisian

publishing house and a prestigious French literary award.

Ngũgĩ, on the other hand, received his consecration in London at a young age

writing in English. He began his literary career seriously in college and published his first

play, The Black Hermit, in 1963. Three novels followed soon after: Weep Not, Child

(1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), released by the British

publishing house Heinemann as part of their African Writers Series. Thus Ngũgĩ quite

quickly established himself as one of the foremost writers in East Africa at a time when

most African literature circulating outside the continent came from West Africa with

authors like Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka who also write in English.58 Since then, he

has actively sought to challenge center-centric models of world literature, like that of

Pascale Casanova, which place Western cities like Paris or London as cultural arbiters

who consecrate the literary output of the periphery, and where the flow of texts occurs

mainly along the center-periphery axis. The center in this model disseminates its cultural

forms—such as the novel—to the rest of the world, and then expropriates the local

manifestations of those forms back into its cultural heritage (see Chapter 3). As the title

of Ngũgĩ’s essay collection Moving the Centre shows, the author is not so much

interested in having his writing recognized by the center but in privileging the periphery

to make it a new center. He speaks of the “obvious fact” that “there could never be only

one centre from which to view the world but that different people in the world had their

culture and environment as the centre” (Moving the Centre 9). While he draws the

58
On the development of the African Writers Series, see Graham Huggan’s chapter “African literature and
the anthropological exotic” (34-57) in The Postcolonial Exotic.

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theoretical equivalence between a people and its location in a culture quite clearly, the

reality is not so straightforward, as we will see throughout this chapter. Ngũgĩ himself

wrote these words when his exile first in the United Kingdom and then the United States

had already begun, and where he remains until this day.

The most dramatic way that Ngũgĩ has acted to “move the center” was by

declaring in his 1986 collection of essays Decolonising the Mind that he would

henceforth write only in his native Gĩkũyũ and bid “farewell to the English language as a

vehicle for any of my writings” (xiv), including essays: “From now on it is Gĩkũyũ and

Kiswahili all the way.” (xiv). This programmatic statement crystalized Ngũgĩ into a

figure of the agent provocateur. That Anglo-Americans and other English-speaking

people even care about Ngũgĩ’s choice to stop using English as an original medium for

communication derives from the fact that they already know who he is, that is, that he

had a certain currency in the Anglophone world, a reputation first attained as an English-

language novelist and playwright. Even during the years he wrote in English, Ngũgĩ had

already begun to think about the role and responsibilities of intellectuals in African

society and the formation of African literary culture, as can be seen in his early collection

of essays Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and

Politics (1972). After studying at Makerere University College in Uganda and then at the

University of Leeds in Great Britain, Ngũgĩ became a lecturer of English literature at the

University of Nairobi back in Kenya. There he put his cultural politics into practice

through an earlier act of provocation by calling for the end of the English Department in

favor of a Literature Department that would place African literatures at the center of the

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syllabus.59 Thus before his switch to writing in Gĩkũyũ, Ngũgĩ had already drawn a good

deal of attention, both in Africa and abroad, as an important literary figure as well as a

militant postcolonial intellectual activist, significantly placed also within institutions of

cultural power such as the university.

Even before his declared “farewell” to English in all his work, including his

essays, Ngũgĩ had already begun to write his creative work in his native language. A

decade earlier he had begun to produce plays in Gĩkũyũ in the context of a collaborative

community theatre group and had written his first novel in Gĩkũyũ—on toilet paper—

during his year-long detainment by the Kenyan government in 1978. Although an official

reason for his detainment was never provided, Ngũgĩ has consistently put forward as the

government’s motivation his activities with the Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural

Center, where he produced his first creative work in Gĩkũyũ in a collective effort with

members of the community: the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want,

1977), coauthored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii. The year 1977 also saw the publication of

Ngũgĩ’s last novel written directly in English, Petals of Blood, which sharply critiqued

the neocolonial regime of Jomo Kenyatta. Ngũgĩ believes it was primarily the Gĩkũyũ-

language plays, and their accessibility to a wide lower-class audience, that frightened the

government into detaining him without trial. As a figure of the Author oppressed by the

State, Ngũgĩ gained a good deal of renown, with articles of support appearing in the

Western press and protests held outside the Kenyan embassy in London. Statistical proof

of the increased circulation that his detention granted him comes from his longtime

publisher in England, James Currey who, in a 1980 letter to his Kenyan counterpart,

59
The declaration, “On the Abolition of the English Department,” coauthored with Henry Owuor-Anyuba
and Taban lo Liyong can be found in Homecoming (145-150).

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Henry Chakava, indicates, “It is regrettable but a fact that sales of translations [of his

novels] have increased since [Ngũgĩ’s] detention” (47). The Japanese publishers, for

example, doubled their advance at the news of his arrest (Currey 44). Like Kundera, then,

Ngũgĩ benefitted on the global market from his political and literary oppression. Related

to an increase of sales was, of course, an increase in cultural currency and the

opportunities it provided Ngũgĩ to act with greater agency on the stage of world

literature, much as Kundera does in rewriting the history of the European novel. As

Oliver Lovesey has noted, Ngũgĩ’s detention “symbolically authorized him as a

spokesperson” (121), but he acts out this role much differently than does Kundera.

Ngũgĩ is able to parlay his own political and literary notoriety to participate in a

politico-literary struggle, and the difference with Kundera (see Chapter 3) is striking here.

For Kundera, politics has no place in true literature as he champions “the radical

autonomy of the novel” (Art of the Novel 117, emphasis original). He turns against itself

the success he achieved from being taken by the West as a political writer, channeling his

fame into a platform from which to depoliticize the novel and himself. Ngũgĩ, on the

other hand, has unswervingly insisted upon the inevitable relationship between literature

and politics, as evidenced by the title of his collection of essays Writers in Politics. In the

preface to that volume, he makes his position quite clear:

[L]iterature cannot escape from the class power structures that shape our everyday
life. Here a writer has no choice. Whether or not he is aware of it, his works
reflect one or more aspects of the intense economic, political, cultural and
ideological struggles in a society. What he can choose is one or the other side in
the battle field: the side of the people, or the side of those social forces and classes
that try to keep the people down. What he or she cannot do is to remain neutral.
Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what and whose politics?
(xvi).

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He accordingly places both his literature and the recognition it brings under the service of

a political cause, a cause he views not as personal but as the universal cause for all

humankind. While the immediate political problem against which Ngũgĩ fights in, for

example, Barrel of a Pen is the limitation on free speech and other human rights abuses

in Kenya, these play into a larger struggle against neocolonialism at large and all forms of

oppression, mostly in the form of the class struggle. For Ngũgĩ, history has unfolded as a

dialectic relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed; economic, political, and

cultural domination will give rise to resistance by the dominated.60 During the last two

hundred years, colonialism and neocolonialsm (in the form of a nationalist bourgeoisie

and foreign capital à la Fanon) have functioned as the main forces of oppression, leaving

the peasantry of ex-colonized nations dispossessed of their land and the products of their

labor.61

The writer, or more broadly the intellectual, thus for Ngũgĩ has a moral

imperative to side with the oppressed, which in his Marxist conception of history can be

understood as “the people”: the peasantry and working classes. This is all the more

important in the postcolonial context—according to Ngũgĩ, still following Fanon—

because it is the people who comprise the repository of the nation’s culture. The upper

classes have been contaminated, in a sense, by the culture of the oppressor and thus

become alienated from their native culture and language, which they see as inferior,

having bought into the racist, ethnocentric philosophy of the West. Writers and other

intellectuals, like Ngũgĩ himself, he avows, educated in (neo)colonial school systems or

60
See, for example, “Culture in a Crisis: Problems of Creativity and the New World Order” (126-131) in
Writers in Politics.
61
Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Frantz Fanon’s “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the
Earth in his discussions of the nationalist bourgeoisie.

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abroad in the former colonizing countries, fall prey to this neocolonial bourgeois

indoctrination. To fight oppression and create a community, then, Ngũgĩ believes that the

writer should not only draw from the cultural heritage still located in the people but also

address him- or herself to them. Literary culture should center itself around the people in

its forms, genres, language, subject matter, and audience. Ngũgĩ thus paradoxically made

his reputation worldwide through his provocative ideas about privileging not the world

audience but the local, “native” one, which puts him in quite a complicated position.

Ngũgĩ’s decision to write in Gĩkũyũ, for example, might be seen as a turning

away from the West toward a local, national audience. But when he announces his

“farewell to the English language” in Decolonising the Mind, he significantly does so in

English, which demands some attention on its own accord and as part of the author’s

long-standing ambivalent relationship with the Anglo-American literary system. Ngũgĩ

revised the essays that comprise Decolonising the Mind from lectures he had given at

Auckland University, although he had presented earlier versions of the talks at

conferences in Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Bayreuth, and London. The essays are

preceded in the published book by Ngũgĩ’s English-language preface and introduction, as

well as the half-page “Statement” of his plan to give up writing in English. It is debatable

whether the main intended audience is African or Western, but it is nonetheless key that

Ngũgĩ’s declaration be accessible to the hegemonic Anglo-American literary system

because the author is writing as much against something (African literature in European

languages) as he is for something (African literature in African languages). His statement

is, in some ways, a “thanks, but no thanks” to the Anglophone literary establishment, but

even if he chooses to write in Gĩkũyũ because he considers his primary audience to be

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Kenyans, he still feels the need to inform the West about this decision. While his gesture

has practical value for Kenyans for whom his work is now accessible, it also has

symbolic value in the West as a sign of his privileging another audience; it is that

symbolic move of resistance to postcolonial cultural oppression that requires the

accessibility of his declaration to those against whom it is levelled. Thus while Ngũgĩ

seeks to generate cultural currency for writing in local, or minor, languages instead of

global English, that currency still requires the medium of criticism in or translation into

English to circulate widely in the field of world literature.

But Ngũgĩ’s position is more complicated than simply needing to tell the big kids

in the Anglophone literary market that he’s going home and taking his ball with him in a

language that they can understand. In fact, Ngũgĩ is still interested in playing with the big

kids in the global market. How, then, can he balance his privileging of the local with a

continued desire to be read outside the Kenyan nation? And how does his reputation as a

militant socialist and anti-(neo)colonialist play into such a bargain? As Sarah Brouillette

argues,

[In the] postcolonial version [of the Romantic author figure] the ultimate position
of mystified esteem may belong to those who never offer their localized texts to
the global field of print capitalism to begin with. … In those instances where
writers do seek to attain some measure of self-authorization, where autonomy
continues to possess some small (if discredited and destabilized) purchase or
appeal, this often derives from the desirability of negotiating a position in relation
to the burdens of precisely this incorporation. In fact, the weight of many self-
conscious gestures lies here, as writers respond to the idea that there is some
essential fault involved in making one’s persona available for consumer access
within a globalized industry. Where they are denied any claim to one kind of
autonomy, they seek to negotiate another. (73)

If Ngũgĩ’s self-branding places him resistant to global capitalism as well as forms of

cultural prejudices and hierarchies entrenched in both the market and the academy, he

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then needs to work out, as Brouillette suggests, a means for that brand to also circulate

within the global market and the world literary system without necessarily betraying that

brand. Ngũgĩ’s position is particularly thorny because of the programmatic nature of his

pronouncements and the unabashed utopianism of his vision. He often quotes these lines

from Guyanese poet Martin Carter: “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the

world” (Sander and Lindfors 177). His first steps toward achieving those dreams often

involve bold, unrelenting statements—such as his 1986 decision to write only in his

native language of Gĩkũyũ. Making such categorical statements, however, frequently

involves not being able to uphold them. For example, Ngũgĩ has continued to write his

fiction in Gĩkũyũ and then translate it or have it translated into English, but he has since

composed essays in English. While Ngũgĩ has been praised for his boldness, he has also

been called out on the ways he sometimes contradicts it. These actions might be variously

construed as inconsistencies, paradoxes, or at their worst hypocrisy. Apollo Obonyo

Amoko sees Ngũgĩ’s situation as paradigmatic of the postcolonial moment:

While much of his writing explores the romantic possibility of African restoration
and/or postcolonial revolution, a discourse of tragedy and despair seems to
pervade his work. He appears to depict postcolonial Africa as a place ripe for
restoration and renewal. But he also seems to recognize, often with bitter irony,
the sheer impossibility of realizing such intellectual longings. (2)

This mix of hope and hopelessness characterizes, to an extent, Ngũgĩ’s own theoretical

practice and positioning as a postcolonial intellectual where he both dreams to change the

world but realizes he cannot do it, or at least not on the desired scale.

Utopianism may conjure up images of impracticality, but Ngũgĩ is also a

materialist, tuned in to the intersections of culture and commerce. Although he trades in a

rather different type of cultural currency, he is just as shrewd as Laferrière in capitalizing

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on opportunities to reach an audience with a novel or a discourse. In contrast to

Laferrière’s rock-star image, Ngũgĩ’s bold dreamer appears rather pious, but that very

image serves as a type of currency that helps put his work into circulation. I do not mean

to suggest that Ngũgĩ uses a romanticized image of the postcolonial author and his

struggle simply to sell books. There is clearly conviction in his beliefs, and when he does

not hold to them exactly, it is not merely cynicism at work. I suggest here that we think of

these moments when the dream does not coincide with reality instead as compromise. To

what extent, I ask in this chapter, is Ngũgĩ able to compromise with the material

conditions of the global market without compromising his ideals? If we look to the Latin

etymology of the word, compromittere, there is the sense of a mutually agreed upon

promise, and a promise is a type of engagement.62 I argue that engaging with the forces of

the global literary market can still, and in fact must out of necessity, be the realm of

politically engaged literature. By this, I do not mean to suggest a necessary evil, a bowing

to the logic of unfeeling financial calculations. Compromise is not one-sided. As

discussed in Chapter 2, Laferrière wants to sell books, but those books contain subversive

formulations of race, national identity, and language. By using English as a language of

composition for theoretical writing, by signing contracts with international publishers, by

using a position at an American to found a Gĩkũyũ-language journal—in short, by

making use of globalized institutions of power—Ngũgĩ, too, is able to reach a wider

audience for his own subversive ideas. In so doing, he also pulls those same globalized

institutions of power into his project. They fund it, give it cultural weight, disseminate it.

Instead of seeing world literature and globalization as ideological opposites, we should

62
My thanks to Jennifer Croft for pointing out the etymology of this word.

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look instead at the ways they interact and overlap, which interests they share and which

they do not.

One first step toward this compromise between world literature and globalization

is a re-examination of the way we define and use the term globalization itself. In his

essay that opens Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), the latest

report on the state of the field of comparative literature as prepared by the American

Comparative Literature Association, Haun Saussy declares: “Globalization is

Americanization, not in the superficial sense of spreading a uniform consumer culture ...

but in the shaping of economic and political decisions on a world scale by the perceived

needs of the United States” (25). But as Amitava Kumar pertinently poses in the

Introduction to World Bank Literature, a book heavily concerned with the relationship

between literature and economics: “Is ‘corporatization’ the same as ‘globalization,’ and is

‘globalization’ the same as ‘capitalism’?” (xxix) He goes on to add that later in the book

“Doug Henwood ... rightly asks: ‘Why ... do so many people treat globalization itself as

the enemy, rather than capitalist and imperialist exploitation?’” (xxix). These critiques

prove extremely relevant to my project proposing here of imagining the global as a site

for engagement rather than the type of alienation suggested by faceless corporate

conglomerates. While capitalism is the dominant economic system of the age, it is not the

only one going. Socialism, of which Ngũgĩ has remained a staunch supporter, also aspires

to global status in its utopian vision of equal material conditions for all people.

Closing the gap between the world in world literature and the globe in

globalization—to use Vilashini Cooppan’s phrase (“World Literature and Global Theory”

24)—means systematically bringing the material and ideological conditions of

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globalization into the discussion of how literature circulates across borders. It takes the

forces of globalization—which facilitate but also regulate the flow of commodities,

information, cultural artifacts, and ideas—as not entirely antagonistic to those of the

world literature scholar. It would be naïve to cast world literature as ultimately altruistic

and globalization as driven mainly by the profit margin. We saw in Chapter 3 how

discourse since the Industrial Revolution has represented the author as an individual

genius uninterested in monetary gain at the same time as this same discourse mystifies its

own justification for copyright laws that protect the financial interests of authors in their

work. While Kundera participates in such a characterization of himself, I suggested in

Chapter 2 that Dany Laferrière openly raises the issue of money and the politics of the

author being able to live from his or her writing. Ngũgĩ presents an interesting contrast in

that his socialist, traditionalist discourse emphasizes the social over the individual

function of the author both in terms of literary production and remuneration. In order to

do that, however, he often transacts with the agents of globalization. Again, rather than

aiming to show the way these transactions compromise his position, I demonstrate that

Ngũgĩ makes compromises with these agents in such a way as to engage them as well in

the contract that binds them both to his utopian goals.

With language as a key component of Ngũgĩ’s philosophy of culture, translation

logically plays a vital role in his politico-literary project. If he insists upon Gĩkũyũ as the

language of composition, translation will be necessary to reach an audience outside of

Africa. I want to here posit translation as a form of compromise in the sense I have

elaborated on above. Translation engages both the source and target languages and

cultures in the production of a text. We might think of this as a transaction between two

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currencies. Whereas English, as the global lingua franca, is usually the preferred currency

of global literary circulation—just as dollars can be spent all around the globe—Ngũgĩ’s

language and translation policies might contribute to a revaluation of other language

currencies and give those who transact in them more bargaining power on the global

market.

Although Ngũgĩ has practiced and written about translation and holds the

directorship of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of

California Irvine, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative

Literature, he has virtually no status as a translation theorist among translation studies

scholars, with whom he hardly seems conversant in his published discussions of the

topic. His theory of translation seems to be derived largely from his own practice, as

evidenced by his recent article in the Translation Review, a short, anecdotal piece in

which he makes no reference to other thinkers of translation studies. Here, then, I aim to

engage Ngũgĩ’s own articulation and practice of translation, as well as the circulation of

those translations, with broader debates in postcolonial and translation studies, showing

how his translation philosophy might affect the currency of languages and literatures at

the site of local production, in the contested metropolitan centers, and in the globalized

localities outside the centers. I first examine how translations into Gĩkũyũ function in

Ngũgĩ’s project of community-building and Kenyan nationalism. I then look at

translations into English from Gĩkũyũ of Ngũgĩ’s novels, asking what difference it makes

to the texts themselves, and to their reception in Anglo-America, that they were written

first in Gĩkũyũ, as opposed to the earlier English-language novels. Finally I turn from

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translation between English and Gĩkũyũ to Ngũgĩ’s hopes for increased translation

between Gĩkũyũ and other “small” languages.

Compromises in Gĩkũyũ publishing

Ngũgĩ’s 1986 declaration in Decolonsing the Mind proved untenable, and only

two pieces were originally penned in Gĩkũyũ of the twenty-one written between 1984

and1992 in his next collection of essays, Moving the Centre (1993). Those two texts are

the ones that “give [him] special satisfaction” (Moving the Centre xiii), which seems

sadly anticlimactic from someone who had pronounced his intention to write everything

in Gĩkũyũ. One of the essays, “English, A Language for the World?” was published along

with the Gĩkũyũ original, “Kiingeretha: Ruthiomi rwa Thi Yoothe? Kaba Githwairi!” in

the fall 1990 issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism, where Ngũgĩ was teaching at the

time. Since the number of readers of the journal who speak Gĩkũyũ is probably relatively

small, the appearance of the essay in the original there takes on rather a symbolic

function, that is, to prove that Gĩkũyũ is suitable as a language of scholarship and by

extension to prove that Ngũgĩ’s larger project of writing everything in Gĩkũyũ is in fact

within the realm of possibility, albeit quixotic. In the case of the other essay in Moving

the Centre originally written in Gĩkũyũ, the African-language version “is still in

[Ngũgĩ’s] drawer among a good many others” (xiv).

The fact that Ngũgĩ wrote the nineteen other texts in Moving the Centre directly in

English speaks to the very impractical, idealist nature of this enterprise. These pieces

were created for publication in English-language media such as The Guardian or for talks

delivered in English-language contexts. As Ngũgĩ has so frequently argued when

explaining his decision to switch to Gĩkũyũ: “For the African writer, the language he has

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chosen has already chosen his audience” (Moving the Centre 73). Thus writing a Gĩkũyũ-

language version first and then translating (or having someone else translate) the text

simply does not make much sense from a pragmatic point of view in terms of time and

effort when the Gĩkũyũ version would not be visible or audible to the reader, unless

Ngũgĩ were to doggedly insist on facing-page publication or on delivering his speeches in

Gĩkũyũ with an interpreter. This is a moment of compromise, where engaging with the

global to disseminate his message involves making concessions.

In the preface, Ngũgĩ never directly admits to the failure of this project to write

only in Gĩkũyũ, or even makes direct reference to it, speaking only more broadly of his

“current involvements in the struggle to move the centre of our literary engagements

from European languages to a multiplicity of locations in our languages” (Moving the

Centre xiv). But he does discuss the difficulties of its realization:

The Gĩkũyũ writing community for instance is largely within Kenya. There are no
journals or newspapers in the language inside or outside Kenya. … This means
that those who write in African languages are confronted with a dearth of outlets
for publication and therefore platforms for critical debate among those using the
languages. They can only publish in translation or else borrow space from
European languages journals and both options are clearly not solutions. The
situation does not help much in the development of conceptual vocabulary in
these languages to cope with modern technology, the sciences and the arts. The
growth of writing in African languages will need a community of scholars and
readers in those very languages, who will bring into the languages the wealth of
literature on modern technology, arts and sciences. For this they need platforms. It
is a vicious circle. (Moving the Centre xiv)

If Ngũgĩ had not succeeded in fulfilling his vow to write only in Gĩkũyũ, he has at least

contributed to overcoming that dearth of outlets for publication by creating and editing

the Gĩkũyũ-language scholarly journal Mutiiri, founded at New York University in 1994

and continuing today at the University of California Irvine. With the wide range of

academic fields represented in Mutiiri, Ngũgĩ can produce a positive feedback loop in

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opposition to the vicious circle of which he speaks. That is, the authors featured in the

journal help to produce that “conceptual vocabulary … to cope with modern technology,

the sciences and the arts” in Gĩkũyũ, and the journal then disseminates this vocabulary,

making it available to other Gĩkũyũ speakers who had not managed to express these

concepts in that language. This, then, is in opposition to English as the highly favored

language of scholarly discourse, not only in the humanities but also in the hard and social

sciences. The journal also makes scholarly writing in Gĩkũyũ a possible, even

respectable, endeavor, and thus encourages Gĩkũyũ intellectuals not only to make use of

the vocabulary it offers but to contribute to the elaboration of the vocabulary themselves.

The hoped-for result would be a broadening of scholarly Gĩkũyũ discourse and the

creation of additional platforms for its distribution.

Again, despite the ideals embodied by the journal, the actuality of production

resulted in a number of compromises, as Simon Gikandi points out. Ngũgĩ has long

professed a double interest in “the people,” both as the source of a national language and

culture and as the group most committed to forms of resistance against (neo)imperialist

oppression. But located as he is in the United States, Ngũgĩ has been to an extent cut off

from the people such that “the journal tended to be a forum for representing the cultural

disenchantment of a Gĩkũyũ émigré intelligentsia struggling to recover a ‘national’

culture for metropolitan Gĩkũyũ readers distanced from Kenyan concerns” (Gikandi 276).

There remains an anxious wish to continue to identify with “the people” instead of “you

people,” but from the position of a Western institution of discursive power, maintaining

that claim proves difficult, and other concerns surface. Indeed, Gikandi finds that Mutiiri

was “driven not so much by the concerns of Gĩkũyũ or Kenyan workers and peasants, but

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the rhetoric of American identity politics” (276), which seems only logical given the

context in which it arose. Ngũgĩ himself argues that culture evolves out of day-to-day life

and the struggles of the oppressed against the oppressor. His anxiety about losing his

national culture is then perhaps misplaced, since the language of Mutiiri emerges not out

of the daily struggles of the people in Kenya but out of the discursive and identity

struggles of his daily life in the U.S. It is not surprising, then, that Gikandi, also based in

the United States, finds “a desire, among [the journal’s] publishers and editors, to both

‘Africanize’ the practice of producing knowledge within the Western academy, but also

‘westernize’ Gĩkũyũ discourses on subjects ranging from love to multiculturalism” (275).

It is in Mutiiri that the real compromises of Ngũgĩ’s language project, compromises he

does not himself acknowledge, surface. While Ngũgĩ posits a naturalized national

language, language—in its contact with other languages, in the transactions of

translation—does not emerge in a supposedly unadulterated state, even among the

people. The language of Mutiiri—a Gĩkũyũ born out of life not in Kenya among the

people but out of life in the West as one of “you people”—is the eventual compromise

between the transactions between Gĩkũyũ and English. This represents a compromise of

Ngũgĩ’s ideals only if he continues to insist upon an unmediated national Gĩkũyũ

language. But what happened to Gĩkũyũ, and to Western languages, in the creation of a

language for Mutiiri is indicative of the way Gĩkũyũ has evolved in Kenya itself,

transformed by its contacts with other cultures.

The problem of distribution raises issues not only of what language can be

published but who publishes it. One of the other areas in which Ngũgĩ has taken criticism

for inconsistency is his contracts with non-African publishing houses for his texts,

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especially his creative work in Gĩkũyũ. He has most frequently made publishing deals

with Heinemann, based in London, which was among the vanguard in bringing African

writers to the West and across Africa with its African Writers Series. Again, much of the

reasoning behind Ngũgĩ’s compromise in this area derives from pragmatism. In the 1970s

at least, most of the publishing houses “local” to Kenya were actually branches of

international publishing conglomerates (Sander and Lindfors 79); it was not until later

that a greater number of truly locally owned publishers fought their way onto the literary

scene in Kenya. So until a certain point, finding a quality publisher without ties to neo-

imperialist sources of wealth would have proved extremely difficult. Ngũgĩ did look for

ways to localize the production and distribution of his work, though. His three one-act

plays, This Time Tomorrow, were put out under the East Africa Bureau, but Ngũgĩ

indicates that he “had nasty experiences in dealing with Kenya-based publishing houses”

(Sander and Lindfors 131), noting that when seeking a publisher for Ngaahika Ndeenda,

one asked him and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii to pay up-front and another pulled the plug on the

publication when Ngũgĩ was detained.

Thus Ngũgĩ chose to release even his Gĩkũyũ-language texts with Heinemann,

who brought out both the English and Gĩkũyũ editions of Devil on the Cross. He is very

much aware of the problematic nature of his decision but defends it on a couple of fronts.

Firstly, and rather ironically, he notes that non-local publishers may be more inclined and

even more suitable to release texts engaged with local political issues because they are

less “amenable to state pressure” (Sander and Lindfors 298). So while international

publishers are less concerned with the local political situation, and so have less of a stake

in engaging in it in any militant way, they are also less vulnerable to the potentially

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dangerous elements in the political situation. International publishers could be subject to

the same sorts of government reprisals in the form of censorship but need not fear more

dangerous, physically harmful politico-literary crackdowns like imprisonment because

they are simply not on site, and furthermore the detainment of Western nationals would

draw international human rights attention in a way that abuses against local citizens,

unfortunately, does not, giving international literary agents a certain degree of immunity.

Making the compromise of publishing with an English editor, then, is not necessarily

self-serving nor merely practical. It also draws the English editor into a global contract

that is not only financial but also political and cultural.

In terms of international attention, Ngũgĩ puts forth an additional line of reasoning

for publishing with Heinemann that is worth some analysis:

We live in a world of contradictions and limitations. The point, however, is how

we can turn a limitation into an advantage. … I wanted the standard of production
of [Devil on the Cross in Gĩkũyũ] to be the same as that of an equivalent novel in
the English language. I knew the novel could have been produced in some less
sophisticated way, but by the terms of the attitudes we have towards the
industrialized world’s publishing tradition, it was very important that the
production of Devil on the Cross in Gĩkũyũ be not one iota less in quality than
that of an equivalent novel in the English language. This meant that the publishers
had to be prepared to invest in the quality of production I demanded. … This is
what I mean by turning a limitation into an asset. … (Sander and Lindfors 194,
ellipses original)

Here Ngũgĩ draws on his pre-existing relationship with Heinemann as an Anglophone

novelist, a relationship which had been mutually beneficial, to obtain the desired level of

investment and quality. Ngũgĩ had served as an important component of Heinemann’s

African Writers Series, and his activist, sometimes controversial stances, such as his call

for the abolition of the Nairobi English Department, had a certain amount of currency in

the West and attracted attention to his work. Thus Ngũgĩ and Heinemann forged a

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reputation together, Ngũgĩ as an African writer of international importance and

Heinemann as a publisher on the cutting edge of the “emerging field” of African

literature. Ngũgĩ’s past success in English, both in Kenya and abroad, persuaded

Heinemann to take the risk of publishing him in a quality Gĩkũyũ edition as well. The

high quality of production demanded by Ngũgĩ serves a rather symbolic function

designed to prove to the Kenyan and international audiences alike that Afrophone

literature is on a par with Europhone literature. Other African intellectuals, perhaps those

“alienated” from their national languages, will see that Afrophone writing brings as much

prestige in the African community as does writing in the language of the former

colonizer, as will the former colonizers themselves, and the popular audience can feel

proud that the local culture has been given such esteemed treatment. The act of writing in

Gĩkũyũ is not enough; the manner in which it is done also plays a crucial role in the way

that writing is received.

The investment made by Heinemann paid off: the Gĩkũyũ edition of Devil on the

Cross exceeded their sales expectations. The original print run of 5000, intended to last

three to five years, proved inadequate after only a month. During the first year,

Heinemann eventually printed a total of 15,000 copies, outselling even any of its

Anglophone novels in Kenya, and for at least a few years after its release continued to

sell around 1000 copies a year, on a par with Kiswahili and English bestsellers

(Decolonising the Mind 84). Figures like these give Ngũgĩ concrete grounds from which

to dispute the assumption that to write in English is to reach a larger audience within and

between African nations. Certainly literature in English would be accessible to people

from a wider range of ethnic groups than literature written in the national language of

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only one of those ethnic groups. But all of those people, from whichever ethnic group

they came, would by default comprise the educated elite, and thus number among a

limited minority of the Kenyan population at large. And, in Ngũgĩ’s way of thinking, it is

the peasantry who carry culture, who make up both the ideal subject and the ideal reader

for a national Kenyan literary culture. Indeed, Devil on the Cross attained its widespread

commercial success despite the practical problems it faced in reaching a poorer, less

urbanized readership. Instead of waiting for the people to come to them, the publisher

went to the people with vans serving as “mobile bookshops,” and other enterprising

individuals would take it upon themselves to buy several copies of the book and resell

them in rural areas (Decolonising the Mind 84). Even the low level of literacy in the

Gĩkũyũ language did not deter Devil on the Cross from connecting with its audience.

Those who could would read the book aloud to others at home or even in more public

readings at work, on public transportation, or in bars, where the appreciative listeners

would pay the reader’s tab (Decolonising the Mind 83). It was with much satisfaction that

Ngũgĩ saw the “appropriation” of his piece of literature back into the tradition of orature.

The importance Ngũgĩ placed on producing, publishing, and distributing a quality

novel in Gĩkũyũ did not preclude him from concerns about global and local Anglophone

audiences for the same book. After completing Caitani Mutharabaini, Ngũgĩ felt

compelled to do the translation into English as Devil on the Cross “to prove and to show

that when one writes in an African language, one is not invisible for other communities

such as the English-speaking communities” (Sander and Lindfors 407). Elsewhere he

writes that he embarked on the English-language translation specifically because he “did

not want my non-Gĩkũyũ speakers [in Kenya and Africa] to feel that they had been left

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out” (“Translated by the Author” 17). Earlier, under different circumstances, he had had

somewhat different plans for translating Devil on the Cross. While still composing the

Gĩkũyũ version in prison, and with no end to his detention in sight, Ngũgĩ had decided to

pass his time by first finishing the novel in Gĩkũyũ by 1978, then, “[i]n line with my new

thinking on Kenya’s national languages” to undertake its translation into Swahili in 1979,

followed by the English translation in 1980 (Detained 98). Once he was released, the

Kiswahili version fell out of his plans, or at least out of his hands, since another translator

was eventually responsible for Shetani Msalabani (1982). The ultimate priority of

producing the English version over the Swahili one could largely be explained as a matter

of practicality: Ngũgĩ had a long history of writing in English but not much experience

writing in Swahili, and so the English translation was significantly easier for him to

accomplish. But other reasons bear a much more significant value in relation to the

circulation of world literature. Ngũgĩ again needed to prove to other African authors

writing in Europhone languages that it is possible to circulate in the large, prestigious

Western markets even when the original language of creation is African. By making an

English version of the novel accessible, he also manages to keep himself current in world

literature and therefore maintain his bargaining power. His announcement that he would

only write in Gĩkũyũ made a stir in the West, especially among those interested in

postcolonial studies, but should that literature only be available in Gĩkũyũ, he would soon

fall off the world literature radar.

Translations into Gĩkũyũ and nation building

Pascale Casanova has outlined at length the process by which the rise of

vernacular European languages in opposition to Latin, as a hegemonic, pan-European

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language, contributed not only to the formation of national literatures but to the formation

of the nations to which those literatures belonged. 63 Ngũgĩ has explicitly drawn the

parallels between this process and his own project in response to critics who find his

position of writing in African languages radical: he states that he is not doing anything

that Dante didn’t do (Something Torn 83-84). In addition to creative works written

directly in African languages, translation into these same languages is key to Ngũgĩ’s

project, in the same way as it was for the rise of national languages and literatures in

Europe. Casanova highlights the translation of the Bible from Latin into vernacular

languages as one of the driving forces behind Latin’s fall from grace as the privileged

form of written, and especially religious, communication. The stakes were high enough

that Bible translators like William Tyndale were put to death for heresy. Centuries later,

speakers of what are known as “minor” European languages played out similar efforts at

nation building through translation to escape from the smaller empires that had sprung up

throughout Europe after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Martin Procházka (1997)

chronicles one such example in the Czech nationalism movement where Czech speakers

translated literature from the major European languages into Czech as evidence of

Czech’s distinctness and respectability as a literary, and a national, language. For

instance, if Shakespeare was fetishized in the Western literary tradition as a genius of

language, by “proving” that is was possible to translate Shakespeare into Czech—that

Czech could accommodate the genius contained in Shakespeare’s English—then the

Czech language could appropriate that genius status for itself. The act of building up a

national literary language functions to give Czech more currency on the global market

and more bargaining power in translational transactions.

63
See for example, “How to ‘devour’ Latin” (48-57) in The World Republic of Letters.

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 The tendency in European nation-building was for national boundaries to fall

along presumed lines of national languages: one language, one nation. Areas of border

conflict were often areas with a population speaking a language minor to the nation in

which they had ended up, such as the Germanophone Sudetenland in former

Czechoslovakia. The existence of separate languages can actually derive from political or

ethnic rather than linguistic lines of reasoning, as in the case of the dissolution of

Yugoslavia where a presupposition of the difference between Bosnian, Serbian, and

Croatian, without any major linguistic variance, was mobilized to argue for the formation

of separate nation-states. There are, of course, European exceptions to the one language-

one nation axiom, such as German being the national language of both Germany and

Austria, or the two national languages of French and Flemish in Belgium. And certainly

the major European languages have also at best masked, and at worst nearly stamped out,

minor languages occupying the same territory, such as Welsh, Scots, and Gaelic in the

United Kingdom. But the communities imagined in European nationalism, to use

Anderson’s terminology, are on the whole monolingual. The case in Africa is much more

complicated, where the carving up of the continent occurred according to agreements

between European colonizers with no basis in the African demographics of language or

ethnic groups. As the current African nation-states take their borders more or less from

these inherited, arbitrary partitions, the result is that these same nation-states tend to be

multilingual, making the process of nation building more linguistically complicated. As

Ngũgĩ argues, this gives translation an additional but no less important role to play in

nation building.

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 In many African countries, the language of government, of the “state” in nation-

state, is the language of the former colonizer. But Ngũgĩ has maintained that the language

of the former colonizer cannot be the language which forms the basis of the national

literature nor, in consequence, of the nation itself. That language may be used for the

conveniences of communication but not to carry (the national) culture because that

language is not associated with the day-to-day struggles of the people nor with their

traditions (Decolonising the Mind 13-16). Interestingly, although Ngũgĩ does promote the

possibilities of Kiswahili as an all-African language that would allow for communication

between Africans of different ethnic groups without recourse to a European linguistic

intermediary, he does not see in Kiswahili the answer to the question of which language

should be the national language of Kenya, and for Ngũgĩ, a national language is

necessary as a manifestation of cultural solidarity in the face of neoimperialism. Kenya,

however, does not have one but rather several national languages. Ngũgĩ makes himself

quite plain in correcting an interviewer who refers to the various languages spoken in

Kenya as “tribal languages” (Sander and Lindfors 110). In the sense that its territory

encompasses several national languages, Kenya is not a nation-state at all but “a multi-

national state” (Sander and Lindfors 131):

What makes Kenya is in fact a combination of these nationalities. In the same

way, what makes for Kenyan culture is in concrete terms a combination of the
cultures and languages of all these nationalities. Every language and culture has a
right to develop. What I would like to see is a situation in which different cultures
and languages begin to talk to one another. (Sander and Lindfors 131)

Ngũgĩ’s project of nation building does thus not revolve around an idea of

commonality, at least not a linguistic or cultural commonality, although I will return to

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the notion of cultural commonality in a moment. As Raoul J. Granqvist has argued in

regards to the writing of Chinua Achebe and other African writers:

Political and ethnic heterogeneity feeds on a communal capacity to “switch”

between what are in fact illusory absolutes and convoluted differences. The
meeting-place, whether it is the bus or the Nation, does not constitute a constant
nor does it offer a safe homecoming. (100)

The ties that bind the Kenyan people together in this case are not related to a tradition

they share but are in fact related to relationality and to the way that they share their

individual traditions with each other. To be more clear, translation—the process of

mediation, of relation—forms the very ties that bind.64 Ngũgĩ believes that to make these

ties stronger, they need to be as short and direct as possible and therefore not pass

through the intermediary of English or Kiswahili (in its all-African status, but not in its

national status, since it, too, is one of the national languages). For Ngũgĩ, although the

various linguistic and ethnic groups in Kenya do not share pre-colonial traditions, they do

have one thing in common: their history of resistance, first to Portuguese and British

colonizers and then to the neocolonial national bourgeoisie. In this case, the unity of the

Kenyan people does not occur in the relationality among them but in their oppositional

relation to an Other that is historically determined. So we can conclude that the unity of

the Kenyan people does not exist as such, does not exist before a certain historical

moment (the arrival of the Portuguese) in which their various linguistic and ethnic groups

joined in a common cause of defending their soil from those who would seek to take it,

and later of defending themselves from those (the national bourgeoisie and foreign

interests) who would seek to exploit them. Without this common point of resistance,

64
See the Introduction for a fuller discussion about the mediating role of translation.

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Kenyan culture as such would fall apart, but in sharing their versions of the struggle with

each other through translation, they build the relations that build the nation.

There is another sense in which translation functions in Ngũgĩ’s nation-building

project which is unique to the neo-colonial situation and to some extent combines the two

types of translation already mentioned: translation from a dominant, imperialist language

to prove the literary (and national) suitability of the target language and translation

between national languages to increase solidarity. This third type of translation outlined

by Ngũgĩ arises from the fact that the languages of the former colonizers occupy a

fraught position in the literary output of Africa, the position exactly at which Ngũgĩ made

his critical gesture of refusing that language for his creative writing. In the majority of

other cases, though, African writers use the former colonizer’s language, which, as

mentioned before, is also often a state language, such that although their work is created

in a dominant, imperialist language, it still takes Africa as a cultural base, or more

precisely, one of its cultural bases. Ngũgĩ declines to call such literature African in the

truest sense; he insists upon qualifiers such as Afro-European, or in the case of English-

language texts, Afro-Saxon. Works written in European languages cannot, strictly

speaking, be African because European languages in the African context function only as

languages of communication, not as carriers of culture. They do not grow out of the day-

to-day life of the people and their resistance struggles, although Ngũgĩ does argue:

Some of the best products of the intellectuals and artists from the communities
who have been trained in English draw their strength, their stamina, if you like,
from their [national] languages. But what’s happening is that the original text is
now lost to English. English gains, the language from which they draw loses.
(Sander and Lindfors 404)

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 In response, then, rather, to this loss of cultural resources to the West, Ngũgĩ

proposes a sort of repatriation in the form of a program of translation called “the

Restoration Project”:

Restoration would mean translating Europhone literature and Europhone

intellectual productions back into the languages and cultures from which the
writers have drawn. This would help to restore the works to their original
languages and cultures—akin to rescuing ‘the original’ mental text from a
Europhone exile—as well as to reverse the brain drain by ensuring that the
products of the brain drain return to build the original base. (Something Torn 126-
27)

In a move that seems rather more conciliatory than sincere, Ngũgĩ insists that “we are

saying that we are not interfering with those texts as they are, and they are works of

genius” and that he is not saying the Afro-European authors should write in their national

languages (Sander and Lindfors 404). But the implication is clear that their output

“belongs” to Africa, and part of the reason is that their texts—the “original mental”

versions—are African in the linguistic sense. Ngũgĩ maintains, based on his own

experience, that the act of writing in a European language for an African writer requires a

process of “mental translation” (“Translated by the Author” 18-20). Even if the first

language to hit the page is English, African writers still, in a sense, compose in their

national languages—because that is where their cultural heritage is stored—and then

make the linguistic and cultural leap into Europhonia. This is Ngũgĩ’s gesture of wresting

African literature from a monopoly on the part of the global and insisting upon the local,

or rather his version of it, as the prime site of circulation.

Ngũgĩ’s dreams of restoration to a lost “original” prove problematic even on the

linguistic level. With his idea of “mental translation” into English, Ngũgĩ implicitly posits

writing in Gĩkũyũ as an unmediated form of expression, and yet his own description of

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the process of creating his first play and later his first novel in Gĩkũyũ reveal how such an

implication is misleading. When narrating the story of how Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will

Marry When I Want) came into being at the Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural Center,

Ngũgĩ says that he “learnt [his] language anew” (Detained 76) from the peasants with

whom he and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii collaborated. The peasants would point out what they saw

as mistakes in Gĩkũyũ usage, such as when a character would speak out of register or

social position or would use an unnatural turn of phrase. In his Detained prison diaries,

Ngũgĩ also mentions turning toward his fellow inmates as well as the warders to gather a

wealth of knowledge about Gĩkũyũ vocabulary and oral traditions (Detained 9). Indeed,

the impetus for writing Devil on the Cross, or rather Caitani Mutharabaini, was a

haranguing from one of the prison guards, which comes without quotation marks at the

beginning of a new section in the Detained prison diary so that the reader is at first

unsure who is speaking. Ngũgĩ devotes an entire paragraph to the guard’s discourse

before identifying the speaker, such that his words are lent an added significance and

authority:

The trouble with you educated people is that you despise your languages…. You
may possess all the book education in the world, but it’s we, ordinary people in
tattered clothes with bare feet and blistered hands, who have the real knowledge
of things…. You people, even if you follow Europeans to the grave, they will
never let you really know their languages. (Detained 129)

Ngũgĩ wants to respond by telling the guard about the Kamiriithu project, but knowing

that this would put an end to the conversation, he holds himself back, although it is clear

that his desire to respond comes from a wish to defend himself, to prove that he is not one

of “you people,” the educated elite out of touch with the ordinary people. And yet the

accusation still hits home—“his talk has stung me in ways that he will never know”

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(Detained 130)—and provokes the author into starting his first Gĩkũyũ-language novel

that very night.

The words of the guard express Ngũgĩ’s own opinions about the African elite’s

alienation from their national languages and the unsuitability of the former colonizer’s

language as a means for reaching the people and as a carrier of a national culture. In this

construction, the European language is “foreign” to the African, while the national

language is “natural.” Because of their alienation, African intellectuals must relearn their

national languages from their “true” speakers: the people. Thus we see Ngũgĩ’s anxious

efforts to resituate himself primarily among the local rather than global, among “the

people” rather than “you people,” despite his education and eventual exile and position in

an American university. According to Ngũgĩ, once the African elite begin to make use of

their national languages in their intellectual output, they will no longer be required to

pass through the step of mental translation and will be able to express themselves without

mediation. But the very fact that the national languages must be “relearned” from the

peasants means that they are just as mediated a form of expression as the European

languages, at least for the African intellectual. Ngũgĩ’s own struggles to find the “right”

words indicate the “unnaturalness” of writing a novel in Gĩkũyũ.

Even if Ngũgĩ would concede that Gĩkũyũ comprises a mediated language for

intellectuals because of their alienation in the form of the neocolonial education system,

his system still rests upon an unmediated, natural relationship between the people and the

national languages, but again, no such assumption can be made. One of the other

problems Ngũgĩ dealt with while writing his first novel in Gĩkũyũ was the lack of a

standard Gĩkũyũ orthography. He would often go through several drafts, the words’

187
slipperiness escaping him as he tried to capture the sense of the language in the modified

Roman alphabet used to denote Gĩkũyũ phonetics. Ngũgĩ’s commitment to the production

of creative, scientific, and technical work in Gĩkũyũ led to his participation in a

University of Nairobi project of standardizing Gĩkũyũ orthography, a project which,

Brendon Nicholls reminds us, is not without its own colonial legacies (196), since the

university is a seat of institutionalized power founded by the colonists.

The efforts of the university to standardize Gĩkũyũ spellings can also be linked to

the other groups who first attempted a systematic transcription of the language: European

missionaries. Ngũgĩ often acknowledges the contributions made by European

missionaries to the development of the written Gĩkũyũ language and in translation into

Gĩkũyũ, although these contributions were made through the creation of texts—such as a

complete version of the Bible in Gĩkũyũ—motivated by an evangelical desire to convert

the Kenyans to Christianity (Something Torn 96). These conversion efforts proved highly

successful, and Christianity maintains a prominent presence in modern-day Kenya,

including among the peasantry, not only in terms of actual religious belief, but also in

terms of the culture at large. Although he himself has given up what he admits to having

been a once-fervent Christian faith, Ngũgĩ continues to use heavy religious allegory in his

fiction because it carries such a high degree of cultural reference—the majority of

Ngũgĩ’s readers, even those without an education, are going to “get it” if he phrases his

argument in the familiar terms of Christian imagery (Sander and Lindfors 142-43). The

practice and discourse of Christianity are just one of the cultural legacies of the colonizer

that infiltrates even the imagined “natural” relationship between peasant and language.

As Nicholls so astutely puts it:

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 Hence, far from treating the Gĩkũyũ language as a pristine repository of culture or
heritage, we should entertain the more likely probability that modern Gĩkũyũ,
whether it is spoken by the bourgeoisie or the worker, or indeed the peasant,
carries traces of the institutional and epistemological violence of colonialism. If
this is the case, then the ‘Gĩkũyũ’ used by Ngũgĩ in Matigari or Devil on the
Cross is not an homogeneous or undifferentiated ‘means of communication and
carrier of culture’, nor the founding moment of a community of workers and
peasants, but an irredeemably ‘prostituted mother tongue.’ (196)

Language, then, is itself a compromise. Ngũgĩ would like to present national languages as

emerging unmediated from “the people,” but they have also, willingly or not, participated

in global transactions. The exchange between Gĩkũyũ and other languages, global or

national, will leave its mark. In this case, however, Ngũgĩ mystifies the global aspect of

Gĩkũyũ in order to prioritize the local and chip away at the more powerful global

language of English. He mobilizes in the translation of Devil on the Cross into English

the local, or national, language of Gĩkũyũ in opposition to the global language of English.

To do otherwise might compromise his ideals of a naturalized national language, but it in

fact would also serve as a means of emphasizing the compromise between Gĩkũyũ and

English. Although English may be present in Gĩkũyũ, even among the working classes,

that is not to say that they have not transformed it for their own uses, thus engaging it in

their own ways of making meaning. Acknowledging the already-global nature of Gĩkũyũ,

in the way it has not remained tied to an essentialized Kenya but has interacted with and

been transformed by national and global languages, would help Ngũgĩ avoid accusations

of a dogmatism doomed to failure in a globalized world, accusations similar to the ones

we will see in regards to his failure to stick to his stated language policy.

Translating into English

John Haynes, an Englishman working in the 1970s and 1980s as a lecturer at

Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, claimed just after the release of Decolonising the

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Mind that “the language question is exaggerated because after all it can be translated”

(65). Put another way, we might frame Haynes’s question as: Why does Ngũgĩ make such

a fuss about writing in Gĩkũyũ, and then translating into English, when he could just as

easily do the opposite? A Gĩkũyũ version would then still be available. The most obvious

point that Haynes misses here is the symbolic value of Gĩkũyũ becoming the primary

language in this literary transaction. Despite the efforts of translation scholars such as

Lawrence Venuti who seek to deconstruct the sacrosanct position given to the “original”

text and to place translations on equal footing with it, translations are still generally

considered secondary or derivative forms of creation. Lori Chamberlain, for example, has

demonstrated how this plays up to gendered notions of parentage and plays out juridically

in the form of copyright law (322). Writing his novels, plays, or essays in Gĩkũyũ first

thus confers upon them a certain degree of importance which they would not have if they

were “derivative” of an English “original.” Such a power dynamic is only exacerbated by

the lopsided status of English and Gĩkũyũ in the world. Writing a novel in English seems

completely natural; writing one in Gĩkũyũ does not. To write a Gĩkũyũ-language novel,

which, because of Ngũgĩ’s already-achieved fame, will receive international attention is

to raise the status of the Gĩkũyũ language itself and to prove that it deserves to be

considered an appropriate means for literary expression.

By writing his novels or plays in Gĩkũyũ first, Ngũgĩ makes a symbolic statement

not only about the standing of his native language in world literature but also about

whom he considers to be his primary audience: a Kenyan local rather than a world

audience. Ngũgĩ expresses the notion that he writes first and foremost for Gĩkũyũ people,

whether or not the text later circulates within other national language groups in Kenya, in

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other African nations, or outside of Africa. This is related to his Afrocentric focus in

terms of the pedagogy of literature in Kenya. In this sense, he to some extent

symbolically casts aside his international fame, or renders it secondary to his politico-

literary intentions of forging a national Kenyan culture. At the same time, the gesture is

only made visible to the international community by the fact that he has already achieved

notoriety on the stage of world literature with his English-language novels, and actually

that notoriety only increased with the polemic of Decolonising the Mind.

Aside from the symbolic value conferred on the Gĩkũyũ language and the Gĩkũyũ

people, the problem of whether to write first in Gĩkũyũ or English begs further questions

about the texts themselves. Outside of Kenya, readers will generally have access to only

one of these languages. If Ngũgĩ himself translates his Gĩkũyũ-language novels into

English, does this in some way elide the Gĩkũyũ original for the reader of the English

text? Does it make a difference within the actual novels whether the English or Gĩkũyũ

version is the translation or the original? Put another way, would an English original look

more or less the same as an English-language translation done from a Gĩkũyũ original,

and conversely could the same be said of the Gĩkũyũ original and Gĩkũyũ translation

from the English original? Does the translated text makes its translatedness known to the

reader, and if so, how? That is, is the gesture of insisting on a local language, rather than

global English, apparent? Ngũgĩ’s notion of mental translation would seem to equate the

two types of English versions because in that sense both are actually translations, rather

than the text written first in English being an original, since the actual “original” exists

somewhere in the African author’s head.

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 Interestingly enough, despite the programmatic nature of Ngũgĩ’s insistence upon

a Gĩkũyũ-language original, his actual translation practice does not bring the Gĩkũyũ

original to the fore, does not render it visible. As Venuti has argued, the favored method

of translation in the Anglo-American system is one where the translation reads “fluently”

so that the Anglophone reader has the impression of reading an original text and not a

translation at all. The work of the translator, and of the existence of an alternate-language

version, are thus rendered invisible to the target reader. Because the fluent translation

functions by eliding not only linguistic but also cultural dissonance that would give itself

away as translated-ness, even the source culture becomes, to an extent, invisible, or at

least transparent: easily readable in terms the target reader can “understand.” 65 To combat

the invisibility of the translator, Venuti favors a “foreignizing” rather than a

“domesticating” practice of translation which puts the translatedness of the text into

evidence, for example by the retention of cultural or linguistic elements unfamiliar to, or

even unreadable by, the target language reader.

Ngũgĩ’s project of raising the awareness and appreciation of Gĩkũyũ-language

literature on the world stage would seem to assume that a practice of translation not

unlike the one posited by Venuti, and yet this is precisely not the case in the second two

translations of Ngũgĩ’s novels into English. He compares what he sees as the more

successful translations of Matigari and Wizard of the Crow to the mental translations of

the Anglophone novels as well as the English version of Devil on the Cross. In the case

of the early English novels, Ngũgĩ believes that since Europhone languages can only be

languages of communication, not cultural carriers, for Africans, then African writers must

“translate” their culture, their way of being in the world, into an idiom that is not proper
65
For a discussion of the term “understanding,” see Chapter 2.

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to it. In some cases, this translation is more explicit than in others, for example, in

dialogue. Peasant characters would certainly not be speaking English in reality, but they

speak English in an Afro-Saxon novel. According to Ngũgĩ, the author conceives of the

dialogue first in his or her native language and then attempts to translate it into English in

such a way as to convey the sense that an African language is being spoken (Sander and

Lindfors 105). Expressed in English, the reader has access to African culture only in

“edited” form (Sander and Lindfors 165). Indeed, Ngũgĩ finds that in trying to create the

effect of a character speaking an African language while actually using a European

language often has the undesired effect of making the character “sound naïve because

some of the writers would try to render the syntax of the African speech directly into

English or French or Portuguese” (Sander and Lindfors 207).66

What Ngũgĩ faults as well in his first translation of Devil on the Cross is the way

he has stayed to close to Gĩkũyũ syntax in an effort to give the Anglophone reader the

impression of African speech. Later Ngũgĩ will argue that this impression does not

matter; what matters is that the “essence” of the text is conveyed (Sander and Lindfors

207), and he praises Wangui wa Goro, the translator of Matigari for “avoid[ing] the

pitfalls of mental translation and that of making the rhythms and syntax of the original

language overly present in the target language. … In other words, readers could

concentrate on their identification with the world of the novel without being tripped

through the constant reminder that they were reading a translation” (“Translated by the

66
On this phenomenon, see also Talal Asad in regards to ethnographic cultural translation: “The Concept of
Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. On the
creation in translation of a generic “Third World” voice, see Gayatri Spivak’s “Politics of Translation”: “In
the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of
the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it
translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose,
something by a man in Taiwan” (“Politics of Translation” 400).

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Author” 20). When he later works on the translation of Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ

attempts to follow her lead:

My one determination was that I would not try to make the source language
intrude overtly in the target language. I was no longer interested in trying to make
readers feel they were reading a text that had been written in another language. If
they wanted to authenticate the original language of its composition, they could
go to the Gĩkũyũ language original. (“Translated by the Author” 20)

This is about as explicit as Ngũgĩ gets in developing a theory of the praxis of

translation. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, despite serving as director of the

International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California Irvine,

Ngũgĩ has not written widely about translation, nor has he apparently read widely, since

his philosophy derives mostly from his own practice. One of his only written published

discussions of translation is a short essay in the journal Translation Studies where he

draws mostly from his personal experience translating his own work and lays out the idea

of mental translation. We might consider an essay such as this an act of resistance against

Western forms of knowledge and discourse as it occurs in the Western academy. Indeed,

as Rita Kothari and Judy Wakabayashi point out in the introduction to their Decentering

Translation Studies, ideas originating in Western Europe have long dominated the field,

and that they have edited this volume because, “[they] realize [they] too have some

unlearning to do” (3). The goal of the book is to bring to light alternate models of

translation globally where “[t]ranslators in such settings are not talking about the text as a

fluid entity, just doing it” (4). In terms of translation, fluidity involves a blurring of the

dichotomy between a single, authoritative original and the translation. The fluidity of the

text is also an idea current in postmodern scholarly discourse, but Kothari and

Wakabayashi insist that “[a]lthough these untheorised practices might seem to lend

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themselves to postmodernist labels, such a perspective would wrench them out of their

local contexts” (4). The point is granted, but certainly also these alternative models of

translation—such as seeing the source and target texts not in a unidirectional relationship

but as multiple versions of the same story—can gain currency in the Western academy at

this moment due to the current height of postmodernism crossed with postcolonialism

mobilized to question the grand narratives of modernism. That is, a compromise is at

work between the goals of postcolonialism and postmodernism that precipitates

engagement in a common aim.

Ngũgĩ’s practice of translation, however, as articulated above, hardly fits with

these other postcolonial/postmodernist models of translation. While they deal in the

fluidity of the text, he is dealing in its “essence.” Rather than a model of translation

alternative to the dominant Western one, his talk of “essence” is a throwback to the

foundations of that dominant Western model, Platonic thought.67 It is Platonic

philosophy, according to Antoine Berman, that results in the now-commonplace

dichotomy in translation studies between “spirit and letter, sense and word, content and

form, the sensible and the non-sensible” (“Trials of the Foreign” 296). Ngũgĩ’s

translation policy thus bears some relation to his language policy, as described by

Gikandi, influenced by a Western metaphysical notion of culture in the tradition of

Arnold and Leavis: that is,f a remnant of Ngũgĩ’s university education. Some close

readings of Ngũgĩ’s texts, from his early “mental” translations to the later translations

from written Gĩkũyũ originals, may help to elucidate how all this plays out on the textual

level.

67
See Antoine Berman, “L’essence platonicienne de la traduction,” Revue d’Esthetique 12 (1986): 63-73.

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 Since Ngũgĩ especially mentions the speech of the characters as a place where he

before tried to convey the Africannness of the language, I propose to focus my close

readings on excerpts of dialogue. I will proceed chronologically through Ngũgĩ’s

bibliography from an early English text, A Grain of Wheat, to what Ngũgĩ considers the

less successful translation of Devil on the Cross, to the later successful translations of

Matigari and Wizard of the Crow. Ngũgĩ deplores the double standard where those who

study and write about Africa are not expected to have any knowledge of even one African

language, whereas no such leniency is given to those who undertake serious study of

European culture (Sander and Lindfors 271), and I must count myself among the former

group. Nicholls frankly acknowledges the difficulties for the Anglophone critic reading

Ngũgĩ’s work in translation:

When one reads a translated text in the target language, one must play host to all
of the hidden possibilities and limitations at work upon one’s reading that the
source language makes available in the original. How, after all, might an
Anglophone critic ever know whether or not the English translations of Devil on
the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow are “faithful” to the spirit of the
“original” Gĩkũyũ texts? More generally, is any text ever completely capable of
fidelity to its intertexts? (194)

With his scare quotes, Nicholls rightly puts into question the ideas of fidelity and

original, especially in regards to Ngũgĩ who is often working from more than one version

at once, mental or written. Based on the discussion above, I would also add “spirit” of the

text to those concepts put into question. According to the paradigm put forth in this

dissertation, there is no innate spirit to any text; there is only the currency given the text

in the way it circulates. Particularly in the field of world literature, as opposed to

comparative literature, that circulation occurs in translation, and the possibilities and

limitations of which Nicholls speaks are relevant not only to African texts. Comparatists

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have long been anxious about reading and teaching in translation, both guarding their

institutional territory as well as guarding themselves from overstepping their expertise.

World literature asks scholars not to put those anxieties aside but to channel them into

thinking how to interpret and teach texts in translation. Even if we teach only texts for

which we can access the original language, this will not be true of all of our students, and

so we need to model approaches to translated literature for them if we want them to think

critically about what it might mean that the text in front of them has been mediated

through more than one language.

In this case, I would like to align myself with Sarah Brouillette’s conception of an

active and “canny” reader of postcolonial literature, and by extension, I argue world

literature, in response to an undifferentiated “market reader” who is always “guilty of

exoticizing, aestheticizing, and/or deshistoricizing” (17). Instead of claiming this

canniness only for ourselves as scholars, we need also to claim it for our students who

may already be and who we hope will continue to be consumers of world literature in the

future. It is, nonetheless, our responsibility to help develop this sense of canniness in our

students, and the metaphor of compromise proves useful here. What sorts of currencies

seem to be involved in the transaction between the two languages? What sorts of

negotiations might be involved in the compromise reached between them? What sort of

commitment do they seem to be engaged in? As we read world literature, however, there

is a further compromise involved: that between ourselves and the text. Our interpretation

is its own transaction that eventually settles, however provisionally, on certain terms. We

and the text may be trading in different currencies and or the same ones, and these will

need to be negotiated. The canny reader will better be able to maneuver these sorts of

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transactions. Furthermore, the co-promise present in compromise implies our active

engagement with the text and a possible commitment to a larger project or ideal. So as

not to leave these metaphors in the abstract, I want next to return to Ngũgĩ’s texts to show

what a reading of translated world literature as compromise might look like. I specifically

want to mobilize such close readings in regards to Ngũgĩ’s own ideas about translation

with his favoring the “spirit” over the “letter.” How does this actually play out textually

to the world literature reader of Ngũgĩ’s translations?

I have chosen the following passages because of the strong emotions of the

characters speaking. These are spontaneous, visceral speech acts and not pre-formulated

discourses, and thus we might expect them to be closer to “natural” speech, and to

contain less formal, unusual, or poetic constructions. In the passage from A Grain of

Wheat (1967), originally written in English according to a “mental translation,” emotions

run high when Mwaura brings a message to Karanja at the library. At that moment,

Karanja is occupied by other thoughts, and the sudden appearance of Mwaura upsets him:

His face had turned a shade darker. He tried, with difficulty, to control the
tremulous pen in his hand.
“Why don’t you people knock at the door before you rush in?” he hissed at
the man standing at the door.
“I knocked three times.”
“You did not. You always enter as if this was your father’s thingira.”
“I knocked at this door, here.”
“Feebly like a woman? Why can’t you knock hard, hard, like a man
circumcised?” Karanja raised his voice, and banged he table at the same time, to
emphasize every point.
“Ask your mother, when I fucked her—“
“You insult my mother, you—“
“Even now I can do it again, or to your sister. It is they who can tell you
that Mwaura is a man circumcised.”
Karanaja stood up. The two glared at one another. For a minute it looked
as if they would fall to blows.
“You say that to me? Is it to me you throw so many insults?” he said with
venom. (34-35)

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Sections of speech do not fall into modern standard usage. The most obvious examples

are the emphatic constructions “It is they who can tell you” and “Is it to me you throw.”

The “not-quite-rightness” of these constructions for the Anglo-American reader is

intensified by the sentence: “You say that to me?” Even the modifier-noun inversion in “a

man circumcised” feels less antiquated or high register since the adjective is rather

anatomical than poetical. It doesn’t have quite the same effect, for example, as “hell hath

no fury like a woman scorned.” The informality or unantiquatedness of the passage is

reinforced by “fucked,” and the Gĩkũyũ word “thingara” also helps to place it out of an

Anglo context. Here, then, the non-standard constructions may be read as an intrusion of

African syntax into the English language, in accordance with Ngũgĩ’s aim of giving the

Anglophone reader the sense that the characters are not actually speaking English, and it

is also true that the “not-quite-rightness” of some of the constructions call attention to

themselves, which for Ngũgĩ could interfere with the message.

The language in the following dialogue from Devil on the Cross (1982) also

follows fairly standard, everyday usage, aside from another instance of an African

proverb:

“Can a simple length of cloth really turn out to be so beautiful?” These

were Gatuiria’s first words on recovering his speech.
“You mean the cloth is more beautiful than I am? In that case I should
take it off at once!” Wariinga said lightheartedly.
“A smooth body is made of perfume oil,” Gatuiria replied in the same
bantering tone, “but perfume oil is not made out of a beautiful body. Mke ni nguo
. . . . Lakini nguo si mke.”
“Sometimes I feel guilty about decorating my body,” Wariinga said, in a
slightly sad voice.
“Why?” Gatuiria asked.
“These are not times for decorating our bodies with necklaces and
perfume,” Wariinga replied. “These are times for keeping our bodies and minds in
a state of readiness.”

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 “For…?”
“The struggles ahead.”
“Those will come soon enough,” Gatuiria replied promptly. “Today is
today. Don’t take off the cloth. The struggle for national cultures is a relevant
struggle.” He broke off to sing, and Wariinga joined in. (242, ellipses original)

The untranslated text, apparently in the form of a proverb based on its repetitive structure

does present the Anglophone reader with a problem of interpretation in that it is not

entirely clear if “Mke ni nguo. Lakini nguo si mke” translates directly, that is, restates

what has come before in another language or serves as an idiomatic illustration of what

has come before. Without knowing to what “mke” “nguo” or “lakini” refer, the

Anglophone reader can only guess. The canny reader will ask, at least, what the inclusion

of this untranslated text engages in. If it more or less expresses the same sentiment as

what comes before, then its inclusion signifies the inadequacy of the English in capturing

the sense of the proverb. There is a compromise between the two phrases where the first

aims at expressing, however inadequately, the sentiment, and the second aims at making

that inadequacy visible as well as privileging the African proverb as a form of expression.

Up to this point, I have been calling this phrase the untranslated or African text

rather than the Gĩkũyũ text because it is possible that the phrase also puts into circulation

the other forms of linguistic currency operating in Kenya. As a multilinguistic country, it

is possible also that Ngũgĩ has left this phrase untranslated to indicate its linguistic

difference from the rest of the text; that is, the phrase is in Swahili while the rest of the

dialogue would in reality be spoken in Gĩkũyũ. Other than this moment, what particularly

stands out in this passage is not the Africanness of the speakers’ constructions but their

reliance on Marxist or Fanonian discourse. A compromise has thus been reached between

local Kenyan discourse and global Marxist discourse to engage in the same project of

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politico-literary resistance. The overriding “essence” of the text, if one were to be

identified, is a revolutionary one.

In the following passage from Matigari (1987), too, the mood is revolutionary,

but the use of language owes less to Marxist theory than it does to idiomatic English:

“Then he said to them: You breed of parasites! Give back the keys to these
houses and these lands which you took away from the people!”
“Say that again! What did he actually say? That the whole clan of white
and black parasites must do what?”
“Give the stolen wealth back to the owners!”
“That is good. Serves the imperialists and their servants right! They have
really milked us dry. Yesterday it was the imperialist settlers and their servants.
Today it is the same. On the plantations, in the factories, it is still the same duo.
The imperialist and his servant. When will we, the family of those who toil, come
into our own?”
“That is what Matigari ma Njiruungi was saying: Imperialist foreigners
and their servants out! This country has its owners.”
“He really told them the truth.”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh, yes. The real hidden truth.”
“Yes, I have always said it: Where will these sell-outs go when the
freedom fighters return, roaring like lions to the tune, ‘Patriots here! Sell-outs
against the wall!’?” (78-79)

Unlike the “not-quite-rightness” of the mental translation of Gĩkũyũ in A Grain of Wheat,

Wangui wa Goro has plainly favored colloquial English turns of phrase: serves them

right, milked us dry, come into our own, sell-outs, against the wall. The last phrase,

somewhat disturbingly, conjures up distinctly European brands of execution by firing

squad. There is a less technically worded reference to Marxist revolution in “Give the

stolen wealth back to the owners!” as well as reference to another Western discursive

tradition—that of Christianity—in the first sentence, which recalls the Biblical episode of

Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the temple. The text thus puts into evidence the

compromises, again, between Kenyan culture as represented by the people and Western

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discourses, which as already discussed, have been interacting with the local language in

Kenya long before the current global age.

Despite the abundance of English idiom and Western references, however, the

text still comes across as “not-quite-right” in English, largely because of the complete

lack of contractions. That is, the syntax is not unusual and thus does not seem to be

putting into circulation Gĩkũyũ sentence structure and thus pointing toward the fact that

the characters are actually speaking Gĩkũyũ at this moment. The effect ends up being

similar to what Ngũgĩ describes with naïve-sounding characters in the process of mental

translation: the reader has the impression that the peasant farm workers in this scene are

actually not quite native speakers of the language they are speaking. Instead of giving the

sense through English that these characters are speaking Gĩkũyũ, one rather gets the sense

that the characters are non-native speakers of English using a colloquial yet stilted form

of it. In this case, the currency of the Gĩkũyũ in the transaction is largely elided, leaving

only a sense of an imperfectly assimilated global English of the characters in

conversation with a “standard” or “native” English of the reader.

Ngũgĩ does a better job in Wizard of the Crow (2006) of avoiding the language

calling attention to itself by its “not-quite-rightness”:

“Why are you calling me so early, Titus?” Sikiokuu asked jovially.

“I want permission. Now.”
“For what?”
“I’m not in the mood to play games!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need to beat my wife. Otherwise anger will choke me to death.”
“Why? Did you find another man topping her?”
“No. It is not that. Please allow me.”
“Titus! What are you talking about?”
“You told me not to beat my wife without first consulting you.”

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 “Oh, yes, of course,” Sikiokuu said vaguely. Then he recalled the famous
photographs and their role in the confessions. “Did you quarrel about those
photos?” Sikiokuu asked, now alarmed.
“No, but . . .”
“Then don’t you think about it, Titus. Leave her alone. Or better, fuck her
instead of fucking up matters of state security. You are to uncover her connections
to the subversives; patience, my brother. Don’t rush into anything you’ll regret.
Better wait for the return of the Ruler and that arrogant enemy of the State,
Machokali. Fortunately, you don’t have long to wait . . .” (425, ellipses original)

At least the use of contractions is much more regularized and natural in this passage.

Sikiokuu also resorts to an extremely colloquial play on words in “fucking her” and

“fucking up matters.” In general, the language use in this passage calls less attention to

itself in terms of “not-quite-rightness” that would suggest either Gĩkũyũ speech or non-

native English speakers. However, the English is still outside of what we might call

“standard” in that there are frequent shifts in register: from the colloquial “not being in

the mood to play games,” to the more poetic “anger will choke me to death,” to the more

antiquated colloquialism of “topping,” to the more formal “quarrel,” to the modern slang

in the play on “fuck.” This suggests not so much a sense of translatedness but a baroque

use of language in line with certain forms of postmodern writing, postcolonial and

otherwise, that emphasize the heterogeneity of language.

So Ngũgĩ may have actually achieved his goal of not having the source language

“intrude overtly” on the target text, but the currency instead here is one of the postmodern

baroque with its virtuoso hybridity and absurdity. It seems fitting that this type of

currency should be put into circulation in a text that deals explicitly with globalization

and the compromises enacted by the encounter of peoples, technologies, finances, and

discourses across the world. This is also a text in which Ngũgĩ worked back and forth

simultaneously between the Gĩkũyũ and English versions, creating a rupture with his idea

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of an original Gĩkũyũ text in his head. While Ngũgĩ’s politico-literary project of

resistance to neocolonialism remains, his compromises with the global agents working

both for and against it have been made apparent in the shift in the way he puts that

engagement into circulation.

Translating between minor languages

While up to now I have primarily focused on translation between English and

Gĩkũyũ, and briefly between African national languages, translation plays another major

role in Ngũgĩ’s politico-literary project. For some years, and particularly as Director of

the International Center for Writing and Translation, he has advocated for cooperation

and inter-translation among the underdeveloped nations of Africa, Asia, and South

America, to which he gives the acronym AASA. For Ngũgĩ, “translation is the language

of languages, a language through which all languages can talk to one another”

(Something Torn 96), and in the context of AASA nations, such communication is

particularly important as a source of cooperation in a collectivized struggle against

neoimperialist oppression. As Nicholls writes, “In Ngũgĩ’s view, polycentric translation

is the cultural corollary to the lateral distribution of global power and wealth” (197). Such

a project is not without very real practical problems, the main one being the need for

individuals with sufficient knowledge in both the target and source languages. For

speakers of minor languages, the second language (often the language of education) tends

to be one of the dominant European languages, most likely that of the former colonizer in

ex-colonies. Learning one of these languages serves a definite pragmatic purpose as it

offers economic and social opportunities. Minor languages simply do not travel in the

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same way, so to find a qualified translator for a minor language among the population of

another minor language would prove, in most cases, extremely difficult.

One way to avoid this difficulty is to work through a third, intermediary language

such as English. While Ngũgĩ sees the value in this “enabling” function of English for

purely practical reasons (Sander and Lindfors 405-407), he nonetheless now insists that

all translations of his work must be done from the Gĩkũyũ original and not via the English

translation. He suggests that the collaboration of people with expertise in either the

source or target languages and literary conventions could be used to meet this demand

(Sander and Lindfors 271). Ngũgĩ’s ultimate goal in such a requirement is the

deconstruction of language hierarchies that place European languages in a privileged

position. In an interview with fellow postcolonial scholar Harish Trivedi, Ngũgĩ insists

that at the International Center for Writing and Translation, translation is treated “as a

conversation, and a conversation assumes equality,” although he admits that under the

current conditions, this can only be “an idea or a possibility” (Sander and Lindfors 405).

The ideal for Ngũgĩ would be a conversation not merely among dominant languages or

even between marginalized and dominant languages but a “multilateral or multi-sided”

conversation that would also occur among marginalized languages. As Trivedi points out,

the very means by which Ngũgĩ intervenes in the discourse of translation, his directorship

at the Center, is institutionalized at the center of the most powerful cultural imperialist

nation of the moment (Sander and Lindfors 412). Ngũgĩ acknowledges this as yet one

more of the many paradoxes—like publishing his African-language novels with European

presses—to which the resistance movement must submit.

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 World literature itself remains a paradox with its institutional setting largely

consigned to the United States, despite the inroads it has made into universities in other

nations, including those where English is not the major language. The current state of

affairs is a compromise before a truly global world literature can be, if not achieved, at

least approached. While the discourse of world literature idealizes the cosmopolitan

subject and the free movement of texts and ideas, borders are in many ways getting

tighter in the global era rather than more open because the global era is also, as Djelal

Kadir indicates, “an age of terrorism.” He sees the geopolitical situation reflected in the

work of the humanities:

What, in other words, is the ratio of comparatistic activity between the

United States of America and the twenty-seven countries on the planet
whose citizens are exempted from the biometric regime of fingerprinting
and racial and ethnic profiling, on the one hand, and the level of
comparatistic focus and activity between the United States and the rest of
the planet’s countries whose citizens are subject to such management, on
the other hand? (72)

Kadir further elaborates that the flow outward from the metropolitan centers is just as

uneven as the flow inward. Even the idea itself of world literature is one of the “envois

and formative constructs unimpeded in their penetration and diffusion ... to arrive at what

we deem to be our periphery” (73).

Indeed, world literature as a field is largely based in the United States, as well as

Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Not only is English the language of instruction,

discussion, and scholarship, then, but it also the language of reading, since world

literature as a discipline generally takes up global Anglophone writing, such as Ngũgĩ’s

early English-language novels, or texts in translation, such as his later works. Both

Ngũgĩ’s fiction and essays have also been anthologized in world literature readers.

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Anthologies of world literature, such as those by Bedford, Norton, and Longman, put into

evidence the intersection of academia and the market in that they disseminate a variety of

short texts by becoming a commodity for sale not only at home but also abroad. There is

some disagreement in the field, though, as to how far-reaching a commodity, intellectual

or economic, these anthologies are. While Gayatri Spivak worries that even Taiwanese

students will someday be reading, The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s most

classic novels, in a short excerpt in English, John Pizer staunchly disputes her claims,

arguing that there is no evidence that world lit anthologies actually have a sizeable

market outside the U.S. since world lit “is a uniquely American pedagogic domain”

(Pizer 113). Pizer also challenges Spivak’s doom-and-gloom “assumption that editors of

World Literature anthologies are authoritarians or cultural imperialists acting in bad

faith” (Pizer 113). He underestimates, however, the spread of world literature as a field of

study. A summer Institute for World Literature, directed by David Damrosch (himself a

Longman anthology editor), held its inaugural session in 2011 at Peking University in

Beijing with sixty scholars from fourteen countries.68 Peking University was an

appropriate location for the first year of this program because its Institute of World

Literature has been in existence since 1986, although this is not necessarily to say that

world lit is taught there the same way as it is in the United States.

68
The summer Institute for World Literature is based mostly at Harvard, the home of David Damrosch, but
it will travel each summer (with every other summer normally at Harvard). It has an advisory board made
up of the following members: Damrosch, Emily Apter (NYU), Murat Belge (Istanbul Bilgi University),
Sandra Bermann (Princeton), Homi Bhabha (Harvard), Helena Buescu (Universidade de Lisboa), E. Efe
Çakmak (Columbia), Wiebke Denecke (Boston University), Theo D’Haen (Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven), Paolo Horta (NYU Abu Dhabi), Djelal Kadir (Penn State), Stephen Owen (Harvard), Martin
Puchner (Harvard), Bruce Robbins (Columbia), Haun Saussy (Yale), Diana Sorensen (Harvard), Nirvana
Tanoukhi (Wisconsin), Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus Universitet, Denmark), Karen Thornber
(Harvard), and Zhao Baisheng (Peking).

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 The reach of world literature thus extends beyond the borders of the United

States, and although the PKU Institute may provide evidence of different approaches to

world literature, or we might even say to different world literatures, Spivak’s unease

about the spread of world lit resources is not entirely uncalled for. At the summer

Institute, for example, the language of instruction, discussion, and reading was English,

including literary criticism by Ngũgĩ, despite the fact that about half the participants were

native Chinese speakers. Texts for discussion were therefore limited to what is available

in English translation, even as the instructors made a conscious effort to specifically

include Chinese texts. With English also serving as the oral lingua franca, as it tends to

do in international scholarly contexts, academia proves itself not unlike global business in

this regard. Business students around the world have been learning English to

communicate with their global partners, whether or not those partners come from

Anglophone countries. The same largely occurs in the study of international literatures,

and not only or not mainly in terms of the literature itself but in the discourse around it.

While the 1970s saw the heyday of French critical theory and philosophy, English has

now asserted itself as the main language of scholarship, especially in the area of

postcolonial studies, and intellectuals from developing countries often move to

metropolitan centers, especially in the United States to work. This is true, for instance, of

the three main “celebrity” postcolonial scholars identified by Graham Huggan: Homi

Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and the late Edward Said (4), to which we might add Ngũgĩ.

Thus we see Kadir’s concern about comparatists, like the American envoy in Ngũgĩ’s

novel, “function[ing] as envoyants rather than as destinataires” (73, emphasis original),

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not only in the production and dissemination of texts but also ideas, ideas formulated in

English, which consequently gives form to them. 69

Important as it is to acknowledge the inequalities in world literature as well as the

difficulties in its circulation, this should not be an aim in itself, a sort of compulsive, self-

deprecating inventory of the field. Identifying the problems needs to serve as a means of

addressing and possibly even overcoming them. Pizer, for example, finds that Spivak’s

criticisms of world lit undermine her own goals of “a nonhegemonic, nonobjectifying

approach to cultures other than our own” because she cuts off possibilities for making

any first step toward achieving such “an open-ended goal necessarily denied full

articulation” (Pizer 113). Spivak’s goal is utopian, but that doesn’t mean the goal should

not be pursued, even if the steps are small or sometimes seem contradictory.

69
See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the way ideas travel in translation, specifically the way Western
Anglophone and French feminism circulates in the Czech Republic.

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 CHAPTER 5

Not Kundera’s Sisters:

Czech Anthologies in the Context of Global Women’s Writing

Sarah Brouillette’s incisive study on Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary

Marketplace emphasizes, as I have in this dissertation, the key role played by authors as

people, or rather as personae, in the marketing of world literature texts:

Moreover, part of the aggressive marketing of certain titles, necessary in order for
book divisions to remain competitive within transnational media firms, entails an
emphasis on the connections between the book in question and its biographical
author. The author’s name and attached personae have become key focal points
for the marketing of literary texts, such that one could argue that the current
industry brands literature more by authorship than by other aspects of or ways of
approaching a given work’s meaning. (65-66)

Brouillette demonstrates this phenomenon through the examples of Derek Walcott,

Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, and Zulfikar Ghose, all authors who write directly in

English. The fact that these writers use English makes it easier for them to circulate, not

only because of the added work and cost of translation, but more importantly because, as

discussed in the Introduction, the Anglo-American literary market has proven

exceptionally unreceptive to literature in translation, especially when it is perceptibly

presented as such. English as their main language of output also gives authors an edge in

how much direct control they have over the brand created by their public personae. The

examples I have presented, on the other hand, show how the translator and the process of

translation serve to mediate the author’s persona in the host culture. I have mainly

focused on the way those personae develop from the authors playing the role of the agent

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provocateur, and in fact the act of provocation can directly relate as well to translation.

Ngũgĩ, for example, created a stir by insisting on the translation from his work from the

original Gĩkũyũ. And Kundera gained notoriety for the way he stubbornly revised the

English and French translations of his work into authorized, definitive versions.

By vocally taking provocative stances in the public sphere, Laferrière, Kundera,

and Ngũgĩ generated buzz in academia and the market and consolidated that buzz into a

literary brand that gave them an edge over other world authors seeking translation and

global circulation. The success of the agent provocateur image as a means of creating a

literary franchise underlines Michel Foucault’s argument that the Author is far from dead;

readers still experience a drive to identify a singular figure as the author of a text, what

Foucault calls the “author-function” (“What is an Author?”). As Foucault notes, however,

despite the identification of a named, individual author, texts are created more

collectively. In previous chapters, I have described the role of other agents—such as

translators, reviewers, editors, publishers, and readers themselves—in the production of

literary texts and their branding. Here, I will pay particular attention to these agents as I

approach the case of literature that aspires to circulate without a strong author brand

behind it. The celebrity agent provocateur figures, like the famed global writers in

Brouillette’s book, are all too often male. I here turn to overlooked women authors to ask

how we might bring other voices onto the stage of world literature. In this chapter I will

look at the case of Czech writing, especially by women, post-1989 to see how world

literature might circulate when the author-function becomes minimized. My study centers

on recent anthologies of Czech writing, where the branded celebrity author is replaced by

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a list in the table of contents of unfamiliar names with Slavic diacritical marks inscrutable

to the average Anglophone reader.

In Chapter 3, we saw how Milan Kundera has fought narrow definitions of

himself as an Eastern European writer that “reduc[e him] to a formula” (Scianna 9). At

the time of his first international exposure, this was a political formula, that of a dissident

writer challenging a totalitarian regime that happened to be the ideological and

geopolitical enemy of the cultures publishing his books in translation. His early success

based on the paradigm of the politically dissident Eastern European writer (what

Dubravka Ugrešić ironically terms the EEW) did, however, give him a platform from

which to put other ideas about himself into circulation. Since that time, with the end of

the Cold War, the types of cultural currency that have value have also changed not only

in Eastern Europe but in the Anglo-American context. It was precisely the cultural

currency he gained as a politically dissident EEW that gave Kundera the bargaining

power to accede to other cultural currencies, allowing him to stay in circulation even after

1989. Not only has his work been translated into major European languages like English,

French, and German, but there are also versions in several other languages including

Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. Two of his novels have made the New York Times Bestseller

List (Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being), and in 2011 he became only

the fourteenth writer to have his complete works published by the prestigious French

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection during his lifetime.

Ask an educated, although not necessarily specialist, reader of world literature to

name a contemporary author from Eastern European, then, and they will probably come

up with Kundera. Thus although he may not have entirely rid himself of the Eastern

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European Writer label, he has, at least, become the Eastern European Writer par

excellence. This is in keeping with David Damrosch’s assertion that we have entered a

“hypercanonical age” that favors the emergence of “celebrity authors” (“Postcanonical,

Hypercanonical Age” 49-50). These celebrity authors tend to take up all the literary space

from their nation on the world literature stage, making it look, according to Damrosch,

like “some literary Miss Universe competition” (48). Kundera represents in this case not

only Miss Czech Republic, but more broadly Miss Eastern Europe. In this sense, Kundera

has become the paradigm itself of the Eastern European Writer.

Such a status allows people to ask Andrew Baruch Wachtel, as “editor of a book

series devoted to translations of contemporary East European literature” the question:

“Why has no new Milan Kundera appeared in Eastern Europe since the collapse of the

communist regimes?” (1). Here Wachtel and I are not so much interested in Kundera as

such but in what he represents. According to Wachtel, “the words ‘Milan Kundera’ stand

in for a writer who is simultaneously highly talented and world-renowned” (1). There are

plenty of highly talented contemporary Eastern European writers, Wachtel argues; the

problem is the world-renowned bit. After sketching out briefly the way an author might

achieve world renown, Wachtel concludes that “[t]he phenomenon ‘Milan Kundera’ is,

therefore, as much sociocultural as literary” (1), and if there are no new such authors, it is

because “the sociocultural conditions that once allowed for the appearance of ‘Milan

Kunderas’ no longer exist in most of postcommunist Eastern Europe” (2). Indeed,

Wachtel’s study of Eastern European writing since 1989 is titled Remaining Relevant

After Communism. While he is partly motivated by a desire to generate interest in new

Eastern European writers from his readers in English, Wachtel mainly describes the

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relevance of postcommunist writers within their own countries. He ends his book by

declaring that Cold War conditions united the countries behind the Iron Curtain such that

literature could be seen as “recapitulat[ing] the general truths of people’s experience,” but

“[n]ow that there is no longer a single society with a single shared experience, an author

or work can be relevant only to a segment of the population” (218). For this reason, he

believes “it is safe to say that in this new environment the appearance of another Miłosz,

Solzhenitsyn, or Kundera is all but impossible” (219).

My purpose here is to look more deeply at the ways Eastern European writers,

and Czechs in particular, might remain relevant not only in their own nation but also in

translation now that the cultural currency of political dissidence to communism is falling

out of circulation. The publication of full novels in translation from Czech, for example,

has fallen off dramatically since the early 90s. Among the most notable of these, we

might name Jachým Topol and Michal Viewegh, hardly as recognizable to an American

or British reader as a Kundera, Havel, or Hrabal or even a Klíma or a Škvorecký. Without

the paradigm of political dissidence to serve as a springboard for their work, what

different paradigms might be used to help postcommunist Czech literature find an

audience in translation, especially in English? What new trends in literature or trends in

literary scholarship might give these writers wider currency? And most importantly here,

how does the process of translation itself reflect and inscribe these trends into the text?

Such paradigms are important not only by those directly involved in the creation

of the text itself (author, translator, editor, publisher) but also by those who comment on

such texts: scholars and critics like Wachtel. With their access to the original languages

and their knowledge of the current cultural situation in the source literary system,

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scholars of Eastern European literature are well placed to find ways to relate these texts

to potential readers in translation. Doing so also means reconsidering the way they

approach their own work, now that the cultural currency in circulation in Eastern Europe

as well as the Anglo-American context have changed. Such discursive rethinking

contributes to the survival of the field of study and thus also the survival of those engaged

in that field of study; that is, scholars are in a sense called upon to make the case for their

own relevance as well. Caryl Emerson gave a sort of state of the field address at the 2002

conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European

Languages (AATSEEL) in her First Distinguished Award Lecture titled “Slavic Studies

in a Post-Communist, Post 9-11 World: For and Against Our Remaining in the Hardcore

Humanities.” She noted that “the Cold War was good for us professionally [because it]

… provoked curiosity” about a “dangerous, and closed off” world (449).70 Indeed, Slavic

Studies, like many Area Studies programs, grew out of a certain political climate which

resulted in governmental funding because “enemies are fundable” (450). Thus Slavic

Studies was not required to reinvent and innovate itself as much during the Cold War

because “enemies are more easily describable” (450), which is to say that the government

funding the research was quite satisfied to have a straightforward representation unsullied

by complexities. As a consequence of the Area Studies structure and other conservative

tendencies in Slavic Studies itself, such as its emphasis on linguistics, the field has fallen

behind the times. One of the reasons Emerson gives for the decline of Slavic Studies is

that it has not been as quick to adopt curricular updates like “Women’s Studies,

70
Emerson unfortunately throughout her talk conflates Russia with Slavic Studies, a practice common in
the field, and a tendency which scholars like Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena
Gapova, who together edited the book Over the Wall/After the Fall, have deliberately tried to combat. The
traditional centrality of Russian has contributed to the lack of innovation in Slavic Studies which Emerson
mentions.

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Deconstruction, Multicultural and Post-Colonial studies,” and similar trends in the

academy which are actually already decades old. (450). These discourses, however, can

present new paradigms for keeping the literature of Eastern Europe relevant in the post-

communist, post-9/11 world.

When I refer to women’s studies, deconstruction, and multicultural and

postcolonial studies as discourse here, I do so in the Foucauldian sense. Chris Weedon

defines Michel Foucault’s use of the term discourse as:

… ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of

subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations
between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing
meaning. They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious
mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. (108)

The second half of this formulation is especially important to the work of this chapter.

That is, I am interested in discourses such as women’s studies or postcolonial studies not

only as means of speaking about and constructing knowledge about texts but as means of

constructing texts themselves. I realize that I am sliding the text from an object of study

to a subject (as in the definition above) constituted by discourse. Texts have neither an

unconscious nor conscious mind nor an emotional life. But in the era of the death of the

Author, it does not seem entirely out of place to give the text a certain subjectivity. When

we ascribe a particular stance to a text (instead of to its author), we are in a sense

constituting it as a subject. This is especially relevant here when we are considering texts

with a minimal author-function, where the audience knows little to nothing about the

person behind the text, unlike the texts dealt with in the previous three chapters where the

authors’ provocative image becomes part of the book’s package deal.

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 Following Judith Butler, however, to argue here that the text is a subject

constituted in discourse is, in the end, to return it to being an object, since Butler presents

“a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object

rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (270, emphasis original). Butler makes the

case that the power of discourse is such that its function becomes naturalized and

constructions, constitutions are taken as innate. This can most clearly be seen in her

distinction between sex and gender: sex is biological whereas gender is a social

construction, a performance of sex that in turn constructs the idea of sex itself:

Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an

objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various
acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no
gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.
(273)

The key word here is “acts,” since for Butler, gender is performative. It does not exist as

such, but rather its constitution occurs in the way it performs the discourse that shapes it.

I want to carry the idea of the text as constituted in discourse further to speak here about

the text, especially translations, as performance.

In this sense, I want to distinguish my approach from others treating translation as

performance. Scholars like Christi A. Merrill (2008), for instance, have tied this

conception of translation to oral literatures. Merrill makes use of the Hindi term anuvad,

“telling in turn,” to present translation as performance of the same story by a different

translator/storyteller, a move which also puts into question the idea of an original text and

an original author of that text. Ruth Blandón, on the other hand, in looking at

transnational formulations of race, presents translation as a performance of identity:

“language and cultural translation (and even mistranslation) is a dialogic performance

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that (sometimes simultaneously) asserts the self, seeks unity with an “other,” and creates

distance from self by questioning assumptions of cultural essence” (21). Both of these

approaches put forward translation as a performance of the text by the translator. In

contrast, I want to speak here about the text as actually itself performing discourse. It will

be useful to give a similar example of reading as performance: there is a difference

between performing a feminist reading of a text and the text performing feminism. To

perform a feminist reading of Dany Laferrière’s How to Make Love to a Negro (Without

Getting Tired), showing how it mobilizes sexist stereotypes in order to break down racial

ones and makes fun of women as credulous dupes (See Chapter 2), is not the same thing

as saying that the novel is feminist. That is, the novel does not perform feminism. Even

novels which are read as feminist, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre are not feminist

as such. The process of reading, however, makes the text perform feminism. I want to be

careful here not to say that a reading or translation makes the text perform its feminism,

as if the feminism were inherent in the text and only needs to be made evident through

the act of reading. Instead, I argue that the discourse of feminism as mobilized by the

reader/translator constitutes the text as feminist. If Jane Eyre is then mobilized as

feminist discourse, we see the way that discourse becomes self-perpetuating, becomes a

performance of a performance.

In this chapter, I will look at the ways contemporary Czech texts in translation

perform certain kinds of discourse, such as the ones mentioned by Emerson as ways of

updating Slavic Studies, specifically postmodernism and feminism or “women’s writing”

to create a new brand for writing from Eastern Europe post-1989. I examine not only the

process of translation itself but also the processes of editing, packaging, and marketing

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that offer the texts up to the reader as representative of a certain paradigm. Again, these

texts are not inherently postmodernist or feminist, but the act of editing and translating

them into English mobilizes a performance of these discourses. Different translations,

publications, or interpretations might mobilize the performance of different discourses,

such that the same text might be asked to perform postmodernism in one context and

feminism in another (or both at the same time). As these texts perform these discursive

paradigms, they then help to shape and reinforce those paradigms, creating a feedback

loop. If an editor introduces contemporary Czech literature as postmodernist and the text

performs according to the paradigms of postmodernism, then contemporary Czech

literature will come to constitute postmodernist discourse, in the same way that

performances of gender constitute sex. Postmodernism itself does not exist as such; it,

too, is a discursive construct, not a description of a pre-existing social or cultural order.

As mentioned earlier, a relatively small number of postcommunist Czech novels

have been published in translation. However, there have been four anthologies to appear

since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This Side of Reality (1996) features a close-up

photograph of pickles on its cover, which gives an idea of the way its editor Alexandra

Büchler places it within a tradition of typically Czech absurdism and irony. Daylight in

Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation (1997), edited by

Elena Lappin and published by the Czech-translation specialist press Catbird (now

basically defunct), however, presents a rather darker continuation of this tradition. The

last two anthologies were part of series of women’s writing. 71 Büchler stepped into the

role of editor again for Allskin and Other Tales by Contemporary Czech Women (1998),

71
A third anthology of Czech women’s writing was published in 2001, although it deals with a different
time period, and so I leave it aside here. That book is: A World Apart and Other Stories: Czech Women
Around the Turn of the 19th-20th Century, ed. Kathleen Hayes, Prague: Karolinum Press, 2001.

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this time adding folktales into the mix of the Czech tradition she showcases. Finally,

Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women (2006), edited by Nancy Hawker, is designed to

appeal to readers looking for a guided tour of Czech literature not unlike a guided

vacation tour of Prague.

Anthologies, because of the way they bring together many different texts into a

whole, prove particularly useful for this type of study that deals with paradigm shifts.

Anthologies need to have some guiding principle, even if that principle is just geographic

or temporal, such as Czech writing post-1989. However, anthologies, due to limited

space, quite obviously require selectivity, and here discursive choices come to light,

either explicitly or implicitly. An anthology of contemporary Czech literature is a

performance of the state of that literature that is supposed to tell us what that literature is

like. Even if the texts are simply defined as the “best” writing on offer, there must be

some underlying opinions on the part of the editor, translators, and publisher about what

constitutes “good” literature and specifically good Czech literature. What is termed

“good” will depend on what sort of literature has cultural currency according to the

agents creating the text. That is, it may not be that “good” Czech texts tend to be

postmodern, but rather that the editors and translators of the anthologies believe that what

constitutes “good” writing are the same things that constitute postmodernism, or that

postmodernism is “good.” In presenting post-1989 Czech writing according to more

current paradigms, the agents involved in the creation of these anthologies attempt to

make that writing relevant to the Anglo-American reading public on new terms. They

thus seek an audience not only for the anthologies themselves but for a broader type of

writing as well, be that, for example, contemporary Czech literature not included in the

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anthology or women’s writing. This, then, might lead to the reader picking up a novel by

one of the authors included in the anthology, or buying another anthology of women’s

writing in the same series but from a different country.

Before turning to the four anthologies mentioned above that shift the paradigm by

which Czech literature in translation circulates, I first consider briefly the introduction by

Czech author Ivan Klíma to Description of a Struggle, an anthology of Eastern Europe

literature published in 1994. Klíma was one of those writers like Kundera to profit from

the political paradigm of the Cold War to reach an audience in translation well before

1989. His introduction, entitled “Writing from the Empire behind the Wall,” is a useful

point of departure for this study since it performs precisely that pre-1989 paradigm which

no longer proves adequate to the later anthologies. Firstly, the title of Klíma’s

introduction makes reference to Ronald Reagan’s designation of the Soviet bloc as “the

Evil Empire,” thus playing up the politics of the literature. The rhetoric he uses

furthermore demonstrates the paradigm indicated by Wachtel of Eastern Europe as a land

united in a common struggle for freedom that represents a universal struggle for humanist

ideals:

This anthology comes from a world habitually called Eastern Europe, though it
would be more precise to call it the Soviet realm, the Empire of Stalinist tyranny,
the Empire of great illusions, of broken dreams for a better world. For me, it is the
Empire behind the Wall. Reagan called it the Evil Empire; which might make one
conclude it was the Empire of a single, basic struggle. For in few other places did
the struggle between impersonal power and the individual; between tyranny and
the desire for a worthwhile life, assume such visible form as here, where fear
became a daily companion, where tragedies were played out with bloodshed. (xix)

We see here how Klíma speaks in much the same terms as Kundera (see Chapter 3), with

his characterization of invasion from the East, his privileging of the individual, and his

appeal to universal ideals. Klíma does, however, move past the Good-Evil dichotomy

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which characterized much of Cold War political discourse, claiming that “the bipolarity

of a world divided between two superpowers reinforced and made this [dualistic] view

easier; in doing so, it closed off paths to a multi-dimensional view of human destiny”

(xx). This anthology, according to him, shows how writers in Eastern Europe resisted

such easy dualist thinking, and thus we can see the work of the book as moving past, to

some extent, the political paradigm of the Cold War. But the discursive paradigm

performed here is still very much in the vein of Kundera, who also moved past a political

understanding of his work to argue for (a European) humanism that could serve as a

universal ideal for making evaluative cultural comparisons (see Chapter 3). Klíma

correspondingly declares that Description of a Struggle:

… bears convincing witness to the fact that we live in a single world with similar
problems, albeit some of them may have taken on sharper edges behind the Wall
and so exhibit truths which might otherwise elude us. Nevertheless, the real
struggle, be it between good and evil, life in truth or life as a lie, life as universal
order or being in nothingness, takes place as Kafka saw it: within every one of us.
(xxiv)

In following the successful Kundera brand of politics turned universal humanism, Klíma

targets readers already familiar with it in order to convince them that post-1989 Eastern

European literature is still, or also, relevant. To some extent, Büchler also follows this

type of branding in her introduction to This Side of Reality; in which she describes “…

the traditionally privileged status of the written word, its immense power and influence in

a culture in which writers … were seen as the ultimate moral arbiters of their society”

(viii). This type of outlook, however, belongs to Kundera’s Modern Era, which even he

himself announces is coming to a close. Büchler and Lappin seek paradigms other than

the Kunderian one to match the discursive paradigm shift of the times, and they both rely

on the paradigm of postmodernism to do so. With Kundera’s Modern Era ending, we can

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begin to define the paradigm of postmodernism performed here as post-Modern Era; that

is, it departs from Kundera’s grand linear narrative of literary historiography, his

emphasis on the figure of the Author, and his universal humanism forged from a

European perspective. Since discourse, like the texts that perform it, is also constituted in

its own performance, we will also see how the definition of postmodernism alters

depending on the text and its context.

English-translation anthologies performing postmodernism

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno in particular displays a fraught relationship between

the celebrity figure of Kundera and the new generation of Czech authors with its subtitle:

Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation. There he is again, Kundera, the

inescapable brand name of Czech writing. The back cover of the anthology further poses

the question in a bold, red heading: AFTER KUNDERA, WHAT?, as if Kundera

represents all of Czech literature up to this point and what follows him has been a mere

vacuum before the appearance of this anthology. Reviewers of Daylight in Nightclub

Inferno have also felt compelled to discuss the anthology in terms of the Kunderian

paradigm, and they generally find the title and the premises on which it rests problematic.

Kathleen Hayes, who calls the title “infelicitous,” observes that the meaning of “post-

Kundera” is not quite clear: “Does one measure this by date of birth or style? A glance at

the biographies at the back of the book informs the reader that some of the writers are the

same age as Kundera … ‘Young writers,’ a category one might define arbitrarily as

writers under fifty, are underrepresented in this collection” (“Daylight”). In contrast, Paul

Maliszewski has no quibbles with the ages of the authors included, but rather with what

the title implies about the continued literary presence of Kundera:

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 Calling these writers the post-Kundera generation, while factually accurate, is
odd, for one because the man is still alive and writing, and for two because the
younger writers are probably more accurately called postcommunist, and I find it
disheartening to think of Kundera as only relevant to a world with communism.
(50)

Indeed, Karen Von Kunes goes the farthest in her criticism of the book’s title—and more

importantly its content—by protesting that the authors included are simply not Kundera

enough:

The reader cannot avoid perceiving the label post-Kundera as a literary criterion
and an esthetic point of departure for the ‘new’ writers’ generation, which, one
would assume, regards Milan Kundera as its spiritual ‘father.’ It is precisely here
that the reader feels cheated. A novelist of world stature, and a man of profound
reflection, Kundera always has something significant to say as he simultaneously
flirts with and appeals to the reader in his strong, personal voice. That voice is
missing from Daylight in Nightclub Inferno, just as the elements of universalism
which make Kundera so human, so vulnerable, and so approachable are
predominantly absent in the stories, or at least do not serve clearly as a unifying
force drawing together the selected pieces. (825-826, emphasis original)

Von Kunes, like Maliszewski, underscores the lasting position Kundera has obtained for

himself as a paradigm of Czech writing on the world literary scene. In her very evident

affection for his work and his brand of “universal” humanism, however, she appears

unable to analyze it or her own views on it critically. Why, for example, would one

assume that “new” Czech writers consider Kundera their spiritual “father,” especially

considering the fact that he left Czechoslovakia in 1975, makes his visits to his place of

birth out of the public eye, and has been writing his novels in French since 1991?

Whereas Kunes takes the “post” in post-Kundera to mean the continuance of a tradition,

the postmodernism of these texts would suggest instead “post” in the sense of coming in

the wake of but also reacting against Kundera, rather than just following in his

paradigmatic footsteps. I would argue that if Kundera is a father figure to the younger

generation of writers, the relationship might best be described as Oedipal. Reviewer Peter

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W. Schubert is, if possible, even more blunt in his Kundera-based critique, in this case of

the This Side of Reality. He simply complains that Kundera ought to have been included

in this anthology, too.

Instead, however, of performing the Kundera paradigm, as Klíma does in the

introduction to Description of a Struggle, This Side of Reality and Daylight in Nightclub

Inferno seek to cultivate an audience for relatively more recent Czech writing through the

discourse of postmodernism. The titles of these anthologies do reference and thereby

reinforce Cold-War metaphors—for instance “This Side” as in two sides of the Iron

Curtain. The title Daylight in Nightclub Inferno also suggests that Czech literature is

coming out into the light after the dark, hellish years of Communist rule. But as much as

the titles play on the old paradigms of good and evil, light and dark, normality and

absurdity, they also bring in the new paradigm of postmodernism. The word “nightclub,”

for example, which in this case is an inferno, brings to mind dystopic capitalist

infiltration after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Daylight is coming, but it’s coming to a rather

seedy world. According to Lappin’s introduction:

[I]t is hard to tell from the writing which period is more infernal, the period of
communism or the new period of growing capitalism. The daylight in the title
comes not from the authors’ visions of the world, but rather from the quality of
their writing and from their ability to publish it freely at home. (vi)

Büchler, too, makes reference to the postmodern excesses of capitalism that have

overturned what seemed to be the moral certainties of the Cold War era, even calling into

question that literary freedom that Lappin carefully celebrates:

But it is Jachym Topol’s narrative that opens the floodgates to the nightmarish
new reality governed by the twin superpowers of today, the media and the mafia.
Literature is knocked off its high ground by market forces and censored by
business priorities, the books for which authors and readers once risked their

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 freedom are remaindered by street vendors, while the very word “freedom” has
been hijacked by the jargon of economics. (viii-ix).

The excerpt Büchler mentions here is taken from Topol’s short story “A Trip to the

Railway Station,” but critics have had similar things to say about the rest of his work. His

novel Sestra (1994) has been one of the most notable book-length translations into

English since 1989. Yvonne Howell examined reviews to see how the translation, City,

Sister, Silver (2000) has been received in the United States. She concludes that the

reviewers all share the assumption that whereas the Cold-War-era dissidents had a

concrete enemy against which to react, “Post-Soviet literature is characterized as an

exploration of the dark, apocalyptic, sinister, and surreal; it depicts a violent, fragmented,

incomprehensible reality” (46). Büchler herself concurs with this generalization when she

closes her introduction by indicating that Topol’s work “bear[s] witness to a new, deeper

corruption of values from which there is no escape, for there are no more walls to fall”

(ix). Topol’s writing is thus branded as an exemplary performance of Czech literature in

which the discourse of postmodernism constitutes the currency of the text. While Topol’s

text is supposed to tell us about the postmodern condition in the Czech Republic, the

discourse of postmodernism itself actually engenders that reading of the text, engenders

the performance of postmodernism.

The infiltration of the market into literature, as decried by Büchler is actually

performed by Daylight in Disco Inferno, whose editors offer it up for easy consumption

and speak the language of new media. The publisher’s foreword is only a short two

pages, and there is no introduction from Lappin. In describing the selection of texts, the

publishers perhaps meant to be hip with the mention of “three bonus selections” “[j]ust

the way CDs often have bonus tracks” (vi). Furthermore, the organization is intended to

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“give readers … a constantly changing experience—from dark surrealism to comic

postmodernism, from realistic narrative to stylistic tour de force. … Also, longer pieces

are separated by shorter palate clearers” (vi). The rhetoric here echoes that of the

supposed shortened attention span of the new technological age, known for channel-

surfing and the sound bite. At the same time, then, as Daylight offers literary

representations of the postmodern fall into global capitalism, it also performs it.

A certain old guard in Slavic Studies has resisted, though, branding contemporary

Czech writing with the paradigm of postmodernism. Von Kunes, a Senior Lector of

Czech Studies in Yale’s department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, appears to miss

those days of universalism where good was Good and evil was Evil, a world free of

postmodernist complications and more importantly free of complicated postmodernist

writing. In her review of Daylight in Nightclub Inferno, she finds the choice of three

older writers for the “bonus texts” unfortunate, if the idea of the anthology is to introduce

newer Czech writers, but at least she likes their work. The other selections are, according

to her, “less successful: they are either too surreal to reach a general readership …, too

literarily self-conscious …, or too forced in originality …” (826). In her opinion, “the

gem of the collection” is Vašek Koubek’s “The Bottle”: “offering all the elements of a

great story: it is a simple, genuine, human tale … it reads as smoothly as any of

Hemingway’s stories” (826). She decries the doom and gloom she sees in the use of the

word “inferno” in the anthology’s title, which she calls “a fatal misnomer,” since most of

the stories “preserve the ‘Svejkian’ tradition of Czech humor” (826), whereas inferno

“suggests a great deal of suffering, as represented in Russian literature by Dostoevsky or,

more recently, by Solzhenitsyn, for example” (825). In addition to being one of the

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foremost names in Czech language instruction, having written one of the subject’s few

textbooks—a stuffy, outdated manual—Kunes is also a scholar of Kundera, and his

influence on her opinions is clear here. As we saw in Chapter 3, Kundera associates

“Slavic” with Russia, a term that involves “inordinate poetization of things, feelings on

display, simulated profundities, long looks which claim to say something and accuse you

of not knowing what” (“Quatre-vingt-neuf mots,” 113).

Old-school Slavicists have evidently been less enthusiastic in rebranding their

subject matter for a wider audience. Since these reviews mostly come from specialists in

Slavic Studies writing for a more general world literature audience (the Von Kunes and

Schubert reviews appeared in World Literature Today), it is less easy to tell if these

anthologies were successful in bringing Czech authors of the newer generations to the

more general Anglo-American book market through the paradigm of postmodernism.

Subsequent book-length translations might give an additional indication. Of the sixteen

authors featured in Catbird Press’s Daylight in Nightclub Inferno, seven have since had

full novels published in English translation, most notably Topol and Viewegh, whose first

English book was already in the works when the anthology came out. Among the others

now available in English, novels by Viola Fischerová (Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else,

2000) and Alexandr Kliment (Living Parallel, 2001) were released by Catbird itself

before it went defunct.72 One novel by Pavel Brycz (I, City, 2006) and two by Ewald

Murrer (Diary of Mr. Pinke, 1995; Dreams at the end of the Night, 1999) were printed by

Twisted Spoon Press, a small independent publisher based in Prague. Finally, two of

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The Fischerová was translated by Neil Bermel, who had also done her story for the anthology. Kliment’s
novel was translated by Robert Wechsler, who had also participated in the Catbird anthology, but for
another story. Wechsler co-translated a story by Marta Kadlečíková for Daylight. The Kliment excerpt
appearing there was translated by Andrée Collier.

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Michal Ajvaz’s novels (The Other City, 2009; The Golden Age, 2010) appeared quite

recently at Dalkey Archives Press, the translations performed by some of the more widely

known current translators from Czech, Gerald Turner and Andrew Oakland, respectively.

Turner, for example, comes from the older guard of translators of Czech, having worked

on texts by Ivan Klíma as well as some smaller pieces by Vacláv Havel and Ludvík

Vaculík. While some of these authors are thus reaching an audience in English, it must be

noted that it is mainly through smaller presses specializing in Czech or other translated

literatures. The demise of Catbird can hardly be a good sign for a renewed relevance for

Czech writing. None of the authors mentioned above can claim anything close to the

world literature celebrity status of Kundera. The success of bringing contemporary Czech

writing into the Anglo-American book market post-1989 has been thus far rather limited,

then, with only a few inroads through avenues directed at specialized, interested

readers.73

English-translation anthologies performing women’s writing

No new Kundera has emerged, then, out of the contemporary Czech writing that

has made its way into translation through anthologies and selected novels. The

performance of postmodernism in particular in anthologies has not resulted in what we

might call a post-Kundera. Rather than billing their authors as part of a movement post-

Kundera, Allskin and Povídky, the two anthologies devoted to writing by women, stake

out an alternative movement that has always existed alongside the dominant (male) one,

73
Works by the authors featured in Daylight have also been translated into other languages, most
frequently into German and Dutch. There are also a notable number of translations into other Eastern
European languages—Slovene, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Polish—and a small amount into other Western
European languages such as Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, and French.

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though largely ignored.74 In an interview with Czech radio, Büchler indicates that the

motivation behind Allskin came from her experience editing This Side of Reality, when

she “realized that Czech women authors had not been translated at all. … [A]nd that

really was a very simple reason. [She] just thought that they deserved to be better known”

(Higgins “Alexandra Büchler”). Her introduction to the text provides a brief history of

women’s writing and feminist thought in the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia.

While Büchler does bring up politics here, including Cold War politics, it is mainly to

examine the influence of those politics on the debate of the so-called “woman’s question”

and the creative response of women in particular to those politics, not so much in terms

of content but in terms of form. That is, Büchler’s main focus in the introduction is on the

way in which women tell stories, which she maintains differs from the way most men tell

stories, due to the mobilization in women’s writing of fairy tale and fantasy:

… Czech women writers have found their own way of formulating and conveying
a view of the world they inhabit by incorporating elements of folk-tale, legend,
myth and magic into a highly literary tradition, using what is sometimes seen as a
purely feminine ability to reconcile and integrate opposites. (xvii)

Indeed, Büchler’s anthology performs this alternative form of women’s writing

through its title, Allskin and Other Tales by Contemporary Czech Women. Allskin is the

name of a girl in a Czech fairy tale who dresses in animal skins to hide her beauty, so not

only does the title reference the fairy tale and folklore tradition on which B‎üchler claims

this literature draws, the fairy tale chosen is also one which itself can perform feminism.

In fact, Daniela Fischerová’s modern retelling “Allskin Dances on Tables” opens the

collection. The story deals with society’s expectations about femininity, which the

narrator subverts:

74
I should note, however, that they are not completely free of Kundera. In Büchler’s introduction to
Allskin, there is a reference to his novel The Joke (xvi).

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 I exuded the sex-appeal of heresy, and it needs to be said that was the only kind of
sex-appeal I could ever claim to possess. I was a thin, sadly neglected girl. I was
Allskin. ... I was one of those girls who are told, “You could be quite pretty, if
you only wanted to be. Allskin didn’t want to. (5-6)

While Fischerová’s text refers directly to the fairy tale tradition, the other texts

included in the anthology do not necessarily, but by titling the book “Allskin and Other

Tales,” Büchler affixes them all with the tale label, and draws them in to a certain

tradition. That is, she constitutes them as representatives of a particular genre, which for

her is also a gendered one, such that the category of women’s writing is performed

through what she claims as participation in specific generic conventions.

The title of the other anthology, Povídky: Short Stories by Czech Women, uses

different strategies to place it in an even broader context of global women’s writing.

Povídky is simply the plural of the Czech word for the short story, (but not fairy tale,

which would be pohádky). While the title is less specific in suggesting a certain type of

tradition for women’s writing, it does in fact suggest a sort of universal women’s

literature when put in the context of the series, published by Telegram in London, of

which it is a part. The title of each book in the series follows the same pattern as Povídky:

the word for “story” in the source language (or presumably one of the source

languages)—colon—Short Stories by “x” Women. Thus the national and linguistic

specificity is balanced out by the universality of the “short story” as written by women.

Povídky is joined in Telegram’s series of women’s writing in translation by anthologies

of Iranian, Bangladeshi, Lebanese, Pakistani, Palestinian, and Irish women’s writing.

Allskin was also released as part of a series on women’s writing, in this case by a small

Seattle publisher called Women in Translation, who during the decade of the 1990s

issued translations from Norwegian, Dutch, German, Catalan, Spanish, and Arabic of

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novels by women authors as well as the collections: Unmapped Women (fiction by

Japanese women), Wayfarer (Korean women), Everyday Story (Norwegian women), and

Echo, Stories about Girls by Scandinavian women. The books on that list are even more

multicultural than they appear since one of the Dutch novels is Dutch Indonesian, and

one of the Norwegian novels is by an ethnic Chinese woman. The origins of the literature

in both series is thus fairly diverse, and are not limited to either “Eastern” women’s

writing or “Western” women’s writing; instead these anthologies take up global women’s

writing as a subject of supposedly universal relevance. The inclusion of Povídky and

Allskin in these series therefore allows literature by Czech women to circulate in English

translation under a new paradigm, that of gender, a paradigm that functions globally and

universally, as opposed to emerging out of the local Kundera paradigm. This involves

quite a different type of branding for writing by Czech women, one which privileges

gender as a category of greater weight than nationality.

In a radio interview, Hawker explicitly makes this connection between gender and

a certain type of writing, a connection she believes can be found in any cultural context

around the world. At the same time, she also explains her understanding of what that

connection is, that is, what women’s writing specifically is and does that makes it

different from writing by men:

I think the contribution of women writers to literature is that they take

relationships to be a fact of life and they deal with them as such. This is an
alternative view to relationships and I think you can see it very clearly in the
stories. There is always an element of the relationship between genders or gender
roles or expectations of gender roles, and they modify this, or subvert it, or give
their specific angle on it. I think you can find this not only in the Czech women's
short stories, but as I was reading or working on the other collections in this
series, some of the situations between women or with regards to children or other
members of the family were repeated in the Palestinian anthology or the Lebanese
or Iranian anthology. It was interesting to see some patterns emerging throughout

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 the world, even if we do not believe in women's unity or some kind of women's
alternative. There are still patterns that are significant, and this is, I think, why it
makes it interesting for everybody to read. (Higgins “Povidky”)

One pertinent question, of course, is: if in fact the stories in all the anthologies do deal

with relationships in a certain way, is this because that is what women’s writing—

globally and essentially—is “really” like, or is the category of women’s writing

performed by these texts, is it constituted by the choices of the translator, editor, and

publishers? It is interesting that Hawker characterizes women’s writing as having

“always an element of the relationship between genders or gender roles or expectations of

gender roles,” since in her introduction, she celebrates the fact that “‘[w]omen’s

literature’ is no longer relegated to the category of ‘Romance and Relationships’” (10).

What Hawker seems to be saying from these two statements, then, is that women’s

writing does deal with relationships, but not only with relationships, and that when it does

deal with relationships, it does so in such a way as to “modify this, or subvert it, or give

their specific angle on it.” She thus would be making a distinction between “chick lit”

and “real” women’s writing. This latter type of writing showcases the way “… women

writers have put their fingers on issues that not many men have raised,” such as “attitudes

toward Roma …, the tricky legacy of the Sudetenland …, pornography, … broken

families, … sexual abuse of children and … rape” (10). So while for Büchler women’s

writing is performed through certain stylistic, narrative, and generic conventions, for

Hawker it is performed through approaches to certain subject matters.

If these two anthologies perform the gender of the writers in these ways, how do

they perform the nationality of the writers? These are, after all, anthologies of Czech

women’s writing. Does the constitution of one category affect the constitution of the

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other? Is there something particular to the way Czech women write as opposed to women

from other places? And how would such a distinction give Czech women an image on the

market that would help them compete with women’s writing from other locations? In her

introduction, Hawker declares:

I must apologize to all those who aimed to map new Czech literature, who wished
to draw some conclusion about the fate of women in Eastern Europe, or who
wanted to grasp the essential Czech literary style. To some extent, I have shied
away from answers, and I disagree with the premise of some of the questions. My
aims are modest: to offer a collection of stories that have never been published in
English to an interested readership that wishes to be entertained and edified. (12)

If she intends these stories for an “interested” readership, we may well ask: interested in

what? Whereas Büchler offers a thorough and insightful overview of the major

developments in Czech women’s writing across the last century—her introduction is by

far the longest of the four anthologies I discuss here—Hawker’s introduction is rather

more uneven and only gets to the question of women’s writing on the third of its six and a

half pages. What comes just before is a brief look at the ideological shift after 1989,

although her view is nuanced, as she insists upon the lack of “black-and-white terms” (8).

However, the most notable thing about Hawker’s introduction is that it opens not with

Cold War imagery but with a completely different set of Czech stereotypes. “What,” she

asks, “springs to mind when people think of the Czech Republic?” (7).

The answer Hawker gives is not Milan Kundera, but rather Prague, beer, Havel,

Švejk, classical music, ice hockey, and Good King Wenceslaus. Such a move implies a

somewhat different readership than for the other anthologies, especially the earlier non-

gendered ones. While those anthologies seemed to be drawing on an audience already

versed in Cold War Czech literature, Hawker here assumes a less specialist sort of reader,

a reader-tourist, we might say, and more specifically a female reader-tourist. The reader-

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tourist, however, even if not a specialist in Czech literature, is not a cultural boor but does

have a firm grounding in liberal education. For example, Hawker imagines an educated

readership with an academic background in the humanities or social sciences when she

makes reference to “the ‘Foucauldians’ among the readers” (12), and we can imagine that

the translation and editing process, as well as the reading process predicted here by

Hawker, will lead to a performance by the anthology of Foucauldian discourse. Here we

see how the performance of postmodernism can intersect with the performance of

feminism, as it does in Büchler’s introduction when she writes:

Readers familiar with Czech literature in translation will recognize the

characteristic features: its inclination toward the fantastic, the absurd, the
grotesque and the surreal, its penchant for political allegory and satire, its sense of
irony and black humor, its lopsided view of reality. (iii) 75

The way that postmodernism and feminism constitute each other in this

intersection will bring out performances of specific types of discourses: for example, a

postmodernism particularly interested in breaking down grand patriarchal narratives of

society or a feminism particularly interested in de-essentializing the divisions between

genders.

Thus the Kunderian, postmodern, and feminist paradigms might all be performed

simultaneously to varying degrees, depending upon the way the translator, editor, and

publisher have constituted the translated text. To see the way that the processes of

selection, translation, and editing in these anthologies create a performance of a certain

discourse, we can look at the example of Alexandra Berková, the only author to appear in

all four anthologies. Berková is one of the most innovative writers stylistically in recent

years with a range in narrative technique from colloquial conversation to high-register

75
Recall that the title of the other collection she edited is This Side of Reality.

235
Biblical chronicle, and all in the space of one page. Although her writing had been

circulating unpublished for years, Berková’s first book-length release came in 1986 with

Knížka s červeným obalem (The Book with the Red Cover),76 which Büchler describes as

“loosely connected narratives which trace the life of a woman from conception to death”

(Allskin xii). As both Büchler and Hawker note, the book appeared at a time of relatively

less strict censorship. Heavy on stylistic experimentation and thus deviating wildly from

socialist realism, Knížka offered readers a welcome alternative to what had been on offer,

helping it to achieve sales of 60,000 copies, a rather impressive figure in a nation of ten

million inhabitants.

Berková‘s next book Magorie aneb Příběh velké lásky (1991, Magoria: or a Tale

of Great Love) satirizes pre-Velvet Revolution society in a grotesque allegory that mixes

narrative techniques, including fairy tale and pastiche socialist realism. Büchler more

suggestively gives the title in English not as Magoria but Loonyland (xii), since “magor”

is a Czech slang insult to indicate that someone is crazy or an idiot. Winner of the

prestigious Egon Hostovský prize, Magorie was followed by Utrpení oddaného Všiváka

(1993, The Sufferings of a Devoted Scoundrel), which might be described as Paradise

Lost meets the picaresque. The devoted Scoundrel is cast out of heaven and roams the

earth, encountering many strange people, not unlike Rabelais’s Pantagruel in its

heterogeneous and often vulgar register. Berková’s next novella, Temná láska (2000,

Dark Love), which deals with an abusive marriage would seem to operate on a smaller

scale, but in fact it includes more grand discourse-mixing with a highly metaphorized

characterization of the marriage in the larger frame of a psychiatric visit, all mixed in

76
None of Berková’s texts have appeared in full book-length translation. Their titles have been variously
translated for excerpts as well as Berková bibliographies prepared in English. Unless otherwise indicated, I
will use the English translation given by her literary agent, Dana Blatná (dbagency.cz).

236
with elements of Dante’s Inferno and the type of allegorized social commentary found in

Magorie. Berková’s last book before her untimely death at the age of 49 in 2008 was

Banální příběh (2004, A Banal Story), actually quite banal compared to her other books

with a rather more straightforward telling of a romance between a Ukrainian immigrant

and a woman whose husband is cheating on her. Rather than the Baroque, multilayered

narrative style for which she has become known, Berková presents this story in the form

of a film with short scenes, as indicated as well in the novel’s subtitle, Filmová povídka o

prostém životní běh (A film story of the simple course of life).

Already, the choice of which text to excerpt for each anthology provides evidence

of the way Berková’s work performs certain discourses in English translation and

becomes branded for Anglo-American audiences. We can see the shift away from the

political discourse of the Cold War in the fact that none of the anthologies include

Magorie, which in its critique of Soviet communist society would fit easily in theme, if

not in style, with the dissident Czech writing of the previous decades. Instead, both This

Side of Reality and Daylight in Nightclub Inferno provide excerpts from Utrpení

oddaného Všiváka, the former in James Naughton’s version titled The Sufferings of

Devoted Lousehead and the latter as The Sorrows of Devoted Scoundrel translated by

Jonathan Bolton. Since, as I have argued, these anthologies largely present contemporary

Czech literature in the paradigm of postmodernism, Utrpení can easily be used to fit this

role, most notably by performing postmodernism’s renewed interest in the Baroque.

If postmodernism is in many ways a reaction against modernism, then the

Baroque is of interest to postmodern discourse mainly to figure the pre-modern. It thus

represents a pre-Enlightenment style of literature free from the tyranny of rationalism and

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order and marked by an excess of signs, styles, and referents. The Baroque makes heavy

use of metaphor, allegory, folklore, and satire, and the picaresque was one of its signature

forms. Although the narrative structure of the picaresque is linear, the progression of the

action might be described as “flat,” as opposed to Freytag’s pyramid with its climax and

resolution. The picaresque is a genre of movement, but it’s not going anywhere in

particular; the end destination is not as important as the various encounters along the

way. Such is the case with Berková’s Všivák who sometimes remains in a place for the

space of several pages, other times for only a few paragraphs, with no logical progression

from one location to the next. We can also see Berková’s subversive use of religious and

folkloric discourses, another feature common to the Baroque. The novella opens, for

example: “ … in the beginning there is nothing—force fields—whirlwinds and waves—

look, smoke: Is there a right angle anywhere?” (Daylight 147, ellipsis original). A few

lines after having undermined the gravity of the Genesis story, Berková deflates the fairy

tale: “it could, incidentally, be phrased otherwise: once upon a time everyone lived in

paradise happy as a kitten” (Daylight 147). The way the text undercuts serious discourse

with simple, ironic language also performs the postmodern Baroque, which favors

heterogeneous language with signs piling up on top of each other. I have already drawn a

parallel with Rabelais, and such a relationship is important here in that Rabelais has

enjoyed a postmodern Renaissance based on Bakhtin’s rereading of his work as

exemplary of the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin, carnival “celebrated temporary liberation

from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all

ranks, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (10). We might find, then, the divine

combined with the vulgar, as we do in the prayer to Všivák, which begins:

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 Devoted Scoundrel,
our brother!
Thou, who have been chosen to writhe in anguish instead of us,
Thou, repudiated for our sake, suffering for us, infinitely striving for us,
forgive us our depravity, in which, inexperienced, we persist,
as we forgive ourselves, wretched and weak—
—but that's just the way we are—what do you want from us—our prince!
sun of our days!
intercede for us!

and ends on a far less sacred or decorous note:

When I realize how lonely I am, I actually cry and feel like a drink ...
intercede for us!
well? is it a deal? Can I count on you?
Thanks!!
I knew you were a pal!
amen (Daylight 151-2, emphases original)

The carnivalesque, in its sheer permissiveness, encourages the use of the grotesque and

the downright scatological, which can also be seen in Berková’s text, for example, in the

journal of a man who has recorded his master’s “instructions for future generations”:

… today I saw another dead animal, dead for some time, the way I like them—but
... its gray color had been skillfully concealed with red aniline dye, its greasiness
covered with sawdust, and its stench hidden by the scent of tar—it was pretty hard
on my stomach ... and I relieved myself in the bathtub: it’s so—liberating.
(Daylight 158)

So far, I have been quoting from Bolton’s translation in Daylight in Nightclub

Inferno, largely because some of the passages I mention above are not included in

Naughton’s translation in This Side of Reality. While the two versions are about the same

number of pages and both start from the opening of Berková’s novella, Naughton’s does

not proceed from there with the integral text but skips sections without any indication in

the translation that the excerpt is in fact excerpts. Since the picaresque is not really plot-

motivated as a genre, such a practice makes little difference in following the course of the

story, but where it does make a difference is in the way the two translations perform

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postmodernism. I have discussed above how Bolton’s translation in particular performs

postmodernism in terms of the neo-Baroque. This aspect is certainly not absent from

Naughton’s version; in fact, his title—with Všivák rendered as Lousehead instead of

Scoundrel, evokes a more bodily and grotesque image in keeping with the carnivalesque,

as Naughton makes use of an etymology that refers back to veš, louse. But in the later

passages that This Side of Reality includes, other discursive features of postmodernism

are performed. For example, we see the mixing of various narrative styles, but in addition

to the pre-modern forms of allegory, parable, sacred text, and fairy tale, we also have

postmodernism’s emphasis on hypermediatized forms of discourse and multiple

perspectives. The selection in This Side thus features a news interview where a reporter

asks several bystanders about Lousehead sightings, playing up to sensationalist media

excess associated with postmodernism (174-176). Rather than following traditional

narration, the scene is presented in the form of a transcript or film script, as is the final

scene in the excerpt, which deals itself with narrativity. In this passage, Lousehead goes

to the market in the Little Land and pays a site administrator so he can set up shop as “a

narrator” (178), showing the commodification of culture. Lousehead begins to tell his

story, but members of the audience interrupt him with various questions and digressions,

and the storytelling session soon devolves into insults and a literal fight for who has the

right to speak. This scene thus performs the multiplicity of voices and the subversion of

the authority common to postmodernism.

The sorts of literary features described here in Utrpení oddaného Všiváka are not

unique to this text in Berková’s oeuvre. That is, her other texts published before these

two anthologies could also have been used to perform contemporary Czech literature as

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postmodernism. Utrpení oddaného Všiváka, too, can be used to perform feminism and

women’s writing in addition to postmodernism. In the excerpt included in Daylight in

Disco Inferno, for example, we find the following statement: “In another city there lived

a woman with large, imploring eyes: her punishment in life was being born a woman, as

everyone knew” (156). This sentence opens a passage describing the life of the woman

who lives with her husband, who lavishes gifts and affectionate words on her but

withdraws every time she tries to look at him or touch him. Such a passage can be read

according to feminist theory which critiques the objectification of women in which they

are not allowed to display or act upon their own desires. Another dysfunctional couple is

presented in the passage which precedes this one, performing a feminist critique of the

tendency of women to be forced into maternal roles. The woman, “loudly lamenting,”

tells Scoundrel how “he wants me to be tender, though he never was to me, and to take

care of him, though he never took care of our children, and to have sympathy for him,

though he never had sympathy for his aging parents. He wants everything for himself—”

(154, 155). Bolton’s version in This Side of Reality, however, does not incorporate these

two passages. By including the portions of the text on media and narrativity, then, as

opposed to these two about relationships, we can say that Bolton’s translation works to

favor the performance of postmodernism rather than feminism.

The opposite can be said of the excerpts included in Povídky and Allskin.

According to Hawker, Berková is “the most significant avowed feminist [included in the

anthology], although nearly all authors touch on gender roles” (10). We have just seen

how even Berková’s work that does not take as its main subject gender or women’s

experience also touches on gender roles, but the editors have here included in their

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women’s writing anthologies excerpts from texts other than Utrpení oddaného Všiváka or

Magorie. In fact, both anthologies go back to her first publication, The Book with the Red

Cover, for their selections. The first story from The Book with the Red Cover,

“Mininovel” also opens Povídky. Since the story describes, from an unborn child’s point

of view, how her parents got together and eventually conceived her, it seems a fitting

opening to the book, as if starting a life story not only of a woman but of women’s

writing. The story takes the form of reported dialogue interspersed with only very

minimal actions; the first lines are indicative of the rest of the text:

When Mum and Dad ran into each other they said, it’s been ages, what
have you been up to all this time. And Mum said, I guess I’ll have to get married.
And Dad said, why have to and why guess, and Mum said, have to because I
don’t want to, and guess because I guess I’ll do it. And Dad said, marriage is an
outdated institution, let’s go to the cinema. And Mum said, thanks but I don’t
have time. So they went. (15)

The very subject matter of the story performs women’s writing as defined by Hawker,

that is, it deals with relationships and gender roles, although in a potentially subversive

way. Here the mother is reluctant to marry but feels she must, and interestingly the father

calls marriage “an outdated institution.” Later the couple will have to navigate an

unplanned pregnancy, which results in the birth of the narrator, but not before they

consider abortion, single motherhood, marriage, and then finally settle on having the

baby together without that outdated institution of marriage.

The way in which the story is told, with its informal, spoken register of largely

reported speech also performs women’s writing, although more closely associated with

Büchler’s definition. Broadly we can say that the oral family history stands in contrast to

an official written history, which has been one of the movements in women’s writing and

feminism in general, as women have often been left out for the most part of chronicles of

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History. In the story, the unofficial nature of the narrative can be seen in the time

markers, such as “a week later” (15, 17, 18), “a month later” (15), “three days later” (19),

“two hours later” (21), and the frequently repeated “then.” These time markers give a

sense of the duration of the story and how the separate scenes relate to each other in time,

but there are no dates, no years or months, which places the story outside of an official

history. We don’t know where and when the story fits into the grander scheme of Czech

history. While the alternative history form performs women’s writing, it also performs

postmodernism which posits histories over against a singular grand narrative History.

Here the intersection between postmodernism and other contemporary movements,

including feminism, postcolonial studies, and multicultural studies, becomes apparent,

combining to give voice to previously marginalized groups and redistribute narrative

power.

“Funeral,” the Berková story that appears in Allskin, also performs both feminism

and postmodernism, but its postmodernist narrative technique more closely resembles the

carnivalesque of Utrpení than the low spoken register of “Mininovel.” The story is, in

fact, literally carnivalesque, as the funeral for someone identified at first only as “the

man” becomes a public festival, with “allegorical floats,” “tableaux vivants,” “motley

clowns and conjurers, with much blaring of party whistles, rattles and hooters, tutu

dancers popping off garish firecrackers, everything flashes and glitters, the whole place is

full of singing, hue and cry and clamor ...” (74, 75). The seedy postmodern influence of

capitalist excess also appears at the funeral, as the festivities are followed by a market

where the people can buy “a spray of Number Five perspiration, a holographic Santa,

self-polishing thigh-boots, self-suffocating braces, brawn in a powder mix and perfect

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reproduction fire, indistinguishable from the real thing!” (82). These goods take on a

more Westernized air in the translation, where Mikuláš (Nicholas), the saint whose

holiday is celebrated in the Czech Republic on December 6, is replaced by Santa Claus,

who exists in the Czech Republic only as an import, although most Anglophone readers

would not be aware of this.77 Furthermore, other products offer a feminist critique of the

beauty industry in which cosmetics are sold to reproduce “natural” looks: “the pale girl

gazed at opalizing soaps and phosphorescing creams, the invisible make-ups, lotion that

makes hair go bleached as if in the sun, an ointment that makes the skin sunburnt …”

(82). While the solemn occasion of the man’s death has become a frenetic and

commodified public spectacle, the story goes even one step further in undercutting the

gravity of death and its commemoration. Even as the town lets loose in the streets, a

character referred to only as Great-Aunt undresses the body, rolls it in a tablecloth, and

carries it off for the actual burial where she unceremoniously tips the corpse into a

garbage dump. Thus the story performs neo-Baroque postmodernism in its subversion of

the sacred and emphasis on the body in all its corporeality.

Along the way to the garbage dump, Great-Aunt is joined by a man in a helmet

who used to know the deceased. The interactions between these two characters

demonstrate the way the translated story in particular performs feminism. As they walk,

the man philosophizes on death and on the difference between men and women: “Things

are complicated so often in this life, he said, only you wouldn’t ever grasp how that is. A

woman doesn’t grasp things the way a fellow does. Women have it simpler” (78).

Certainly the man expresses a sexist point of view, that women have an easier life

because their mental capacities do not allow them to tackle complicated subjects. But
77
Ježíšek, little baby Jesus, brings presents in the Czech Republic on Christmas Eve.

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even while the man belittles the intellect of women, the translation performs a subtle,

contrasting valorization. In the Czech, the man uses casual speech, spoken rather than

standard written Czech. This is noticeable, for instance, in the way that he refers to

gender. The standard words for man and woman are muž and žena; indeed, the man is

designated as muž throughout (Czech has no articles). In the quote above, however, he

says chlap and ženská, informal terms. The translation conveys this by the word “fellow”

for chlap, but in the English, there is no indication of the corresponding use of ženská,

which can perform in Czech to sound dismissive or condescending. So in the translation,

no matter what he may think of them, women remain women and not “birds,” for

example, as this is a British English translation. The use of “woman” for ženská continues

in the translation, but as the man talks about his fear of death, chlap is given as “bloke”

instead of “fellow”:

Only, that sort of thing don’t interest a woman, questions like that, women
don’t care about that. That’s just the way you are, you see. Sort of simple and
straightforward. Looking after people, and that sort of thing.
Um ah well—said Great-Aunt, shifting the bundle over to her other
shoulder.
But a bloke—a BLOKE, you follow?—he’s in the world for a totally
different reason! A BLOKE, he’s—he oughta—he has to—know what I mean?
Yes, yes, said Great-Aunt.
Has to PROVE something!—DO something!!—simply in a nutshell—
leave some kind of TRACE—or IMPACT!!—after himself—something
GREAT!!—you know what I mean ...
I do, said Great-Aunt.
Anyway a woman can never understand that kind of thing ... in a nutshell,
there’s got to be something—SOMETHING!! (78-79, ellipses original)

The use of “bloke” here signifies not only a man, but a “real” man, a manly man, who has

proven himself in life. Yet even as we have more and more indicators of the man’s casual

speech—“oughta,” the grammatical irregularity in “that sort of thing don’t,” the

repetitions, etc—“woman” remains “woman,” making her a stable category somewhat

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resistant to the man’s characterizations. In fact, this characterization can be interpreted

potentially more positively in the translation. When in English the man says, “That’s just

the way you are, you see. Sort of simple and straightforward,” in Czech he says, “Vy už

ste holt takový. Takový jednoduchý” (martinreiner.cz). In this case, the single word

jednoduchý has been rendered with two: simple and straightforward. The “simple” could

be read as “uncomplicated” but also “simpleminded,” but the addition of the second word

“straightforward” encourages a more positive reading. Here, of course, the man is

critiquing the “straightforwardness” of women as opposed to men who are compelled by

deeper, and higher, philosophical questions. But we also see the way the man struggles

with those questions and does not manage to articulate any profound thoughts, in fact

does not even manage to articulate complete sentences: “A BLOKE, he’s—he oughta—

he has to—know what I mean?” The supposed straightforwardness of women, then,

actually becomes valorized in contrast to useless, pseudo-esoteric philosophizing. Great-

Aunt agrees with the man’s statements, but only in a way that appeases him, as if he were

a child. A critique such as this is not far from the characterization of Kundera by Anatole

Broyard (see Chapter 3), who argues that two of Kundera’s stories are “little more than

pseudo-sophisticated psychologizing thinly disguised as fiction” (“Iron Bedsheets”). In

this sense, we can view Berková as a provocative anti-Kundera.

This approach of the characters to existential questions also serves to constitute

the genders of man and woman in certain ways, as Great-Aunt’s no-nonsense attitude

toward death is juxtaposed throughout the story to the man’s fearful meditations. She

deals very straightforwardly with death, as we are reminded when she “shift[s] the bundle

over to her other shoulder.” The man, on the other hand, is wearing the helmet because at

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“[a]ny moment something could fall on [his] head!” (79). To this confession, Great-Aunt

maternally replies, “I’d be glad to help you any way I could, mister, but I don’t know

how,” just as she tosses the corpse into the garbage dump, giving her concern for the man

an ironic edge. The words she pronounces to the corpse also show a maternal care that is

limited in its scope to practical, or straightforward, matters: “Well now, my lad, she said,

this is the most I can do for you—tidy up your mortal integument. The wind’ll scatter it

with earth and birch trees will grow, she said, shoving on top some broken glasses, cans

and grit” (79). In a new paragraph just following the “cans and grit’” we get the final

lines of the scene: “If only you could see yourself now, Franta, you with all your fine

talk—there you are in that sack and I’m still here” (79). No indication is given here as to

who has said this sentence, and Berková’s non-standard punctuation does not make it

obvious either. What is most striking, then, in the way that the translation performs as

opposed to the Czech text is that Berková has written “zašeptal muž” after Franta’s

name—that is, “whispered the man” (martinreiner.cz). Whereas in the Czech, then, the

man expresses a sense of melancholy for his brother-in-arms, the translation allows for a

more feminist performance in which Great-Aunt triumphantly announces the victory of

female practicality over futile male philosophy.

The translation thus performs feminism differently than does the Czech text, a

situation which puts into question feminism as a discourse with a unified and universal

identity. In “Funeral” Great-Aunt resists the man’s belittling comments because of the

intransigence of discourse (a woman is a woman is a woman and never a bird a chick or a

lady). To say that the translation performs feminism differently is not to say that the

source text does not perform feminism, although I do want to be careful not to say that

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the source text performs its feminism, as if it were always already necessarily there.

Choices made by the translator, editor, and publisher bring out certain performances, for

example, as we have seen, postmodernism over feminism. Those discursive choices thus

construct a discursive identity for the text, which, like gender or even sex, is not a given

but only emerges in constitutive processes, in this case of translating, interpreting, or

editing. This slippage in discursive identity is just one further manifestation of

postmodernism and feminism as discourses that interrogate essentialized categories.

The text may be constituted differently than its author may wish, as was the case

for Kundera, but Berková at least had no problems with her texts being associated with

women’s writing. She declared quite plainly in a documentary, “I’m a feminist, and I’m

proud of it” (Sommerová, Feminismus). But as Andrée Collier argues in her review of

Allskin, not all Czech women writers would be as comfortable with this label: “Ironically,

due to a pervasive Czech distrust of feminism, many of the authors included would think

little of being singled out as women writers” (“Allskin”). Thus the currency of feminism

and women’s writing in Anglo-America differs from that in Czech Republic. There and

elsewhere in Eastern Europe, according to Wachtel, “[w]omen writers, even those

inclined to feminism, leave at least one layer of irony to distance themselves from

feminism in the form of an active and organized movement” (161). By not taking on the

label of feminism, these writers help to avoid the “distrust,” as Collier calls it, and

sometimes the downright hostility toward feminism in the Czech Republic. Aggressive

Czech anti-feminism can be seen, for example, in the vitriolic statement made by one of

the most renowned writers of the Kundera generation, Josef Škvorecký, who emigrated to

Canada and found Western feminism—or his own understanding of it—appalling:

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 The worst thing that can happen to a good idea is to have some fanatic, à la Lenin,
make it the basis of an ideology. … The idea of equal rights for women in all
spheres of private and public life gave birth to the idea of women’s superiority.
Their spokeswomen (and spokesmen—masochism knows no gender) create the
typical “front line” of feminism which, at its most extreme, is openly lesbian and
radically anti-male. (cited in Smejkalová 233)

In the remainder of this chapter, I examine how feminism is constituted in the

Czech Republic by Czechs themselves, and how this depends to some degree on their

own contact with the Western discourse of feminism either through time spent in the

West or through readings in the original languages or in translation. If above I discussed

the way Anglophone editors brought out feminist performances in Czech writing, in this

last part of the chapter, I pay particular attention to how Western feminism is constituted

in the Czech context through the process of translation as well as how the constitution of

feminism and women’s writing as discourses are then performed in contemporary Czech

literature, especially by women.

Czech discourses of feminism

According to Czech feminist scholar Mirek Vodrážka, the current attitude toward

feminism in the Czech Republic has its origins in a historic emphasis on the equality of

citizens rather than the difference of citizens. For example, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the

first president of modern Czechoslovakia and a respected social philosopher, declared,

“There is no woman’s issue, there are only human issues” (cited in Vodrážka “Before the

Great Exodus”). While Masaryk is often considered a pioneer in women’s rights—the

“Garrigue” in his name comes from his 1887 decision to take his wife’s surname in

addition to his own—Vodrážka does not believe his importance to feminism should be

overstated: “There are even activists who go as far as to interpret Masaryk as a ‘radical

feminist’. They take no heed of the postmodern question of whether a radical feminist

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can also be a ‘humanist’” (“Before the Great Exodus”). This humanist line of social

reform held sway throughout the days of the First Czechoslovak Republic, so that even in

the woman’s movement during the 1920s,

… the women’s issue was viewed, at best, as a transient side-issue of the

Universal Social issue, and as such would ultimately cease to exist … In the worst
case, the women’s issue was treated as subversive, as a manifestation of civic
non-solidarity and a-social character which undermined the sacred, universal basis
of civic society. (“Before the Great Exodus”)

After the advent of Soviet-style communism, the dissidence movement, led by figures

such as Vacláv Havel, mobilized the discourse of humanism and citizens’ rights as a

means of resistance against the regime. We have already seen how Klíma, in his

introduction to Description of a Struggle, argues that Soviet oppression resulted in “a

single, basic struggle. For in few other places did the struggle between impersonal power

and the individual, between tyranny and the desire for a worthwhile life assume such

visible form as here …” (xix). Because the emphasis was on a “single, basic struggle”

against communism, other struggles, such as feminist ones, remained secondary. The

individual at the center of the dissidence movement was a sexless one.

While dissident activities called for solidarity in the face of the regime, socialist

ideology also called for solidarity in the face of capitalism. Accordingly, proletarian

women should fully participate in the struggle, including in national production, and so

equal participation in the workforce became the ideal. Feminist scholar Gerlinda

Šmausová concludes that while the imperative to work had a tendency to give women

less control over reproductive issues, it did allow for greater parity, both in the workplace

and in the home, where the scarcity of some goods meant more handyman-type work on

both sides:

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 The alliance of men and women, paradoxically induced by both official,
emancipatory socialist politics as well as household shortages, and later by
political pressure in the era of normalization, is one of the reasons for the
deprecation of feminism as an ideology of gender conflict. (199)

After the Velvet Revolution, women largely retained their earning power, which they

viewed positively in comparison to their counterparts in the West, who, the Czech

women believed, minimized the question of class and income in favor of feminism as “a

language game” (201). Thus, according to Šmausová “[f]eminism … collided with the

lived experience of Czech women, who in many respects felt themselves to be more

competent members of society than Western emancipated women who were implicitly

put forward as a model” (201). One stereotypical opinion, then, is that feminism is for

rich housewives with too much time on their hands. In the words of Vodrážka, “feminism

is generally viewed as a luxurious western commodity not needed in our country”

(“Before the Great Exodus”).

A look at two Czech books of interviews with women provides a useful means of

understanding the way Czech women perform the discourse of feminism, especially

depending on their positionality in relationship to the West. The interview format is a

popular genre in the Czech book market, especially for interviews with women, which

derives from the feminist discourse of alternative histories. A collection of interviews is

transcribed—either directly with the questions and answers, or somewhat edited to appear

as a monologue—with the interviewees representing various perspectives around a

certain theme, such as aging or the Romany population. The most notable books for

women in the genre are by Olga Sommerová, based on her well-received documentaries

beginning with O čem sní ženy [What Women Dream About] (1999). Two more books

followed: O čem sní ženy 2 and O čem ženy nesní [What Women Don’t Dream About].

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The documentary also had a male counterpart released in the same year O čem sní muži.

Sommerová chose a wide range of subjects for her interviews: intellectuals, artists,

teachers, an engineer, a cleaning woman, a foster mother. In the published volume of

interviews, Sommerová poses similar questions to all the women participating, asking,

for example, about their childhoods, their marriages and other romantic relationships,

whether they are afraid of getting older, whether they are glad to be women, and what

they see as the differences between men and women. The discussions do not have a

highly theoretical tone and come across much more as intimate conversations between

friends, especially since Sommerová mostly uses the informal “you” form in Czech. It is

notable that not once in the interviews does any of the women use the word “feminism,”

except in the last selection in which a friend interviews Sommerová herself and asks how

the filmmaker arrived at her feminism (195). Certainly other women address what would

be called feminist thinking, yet they never make reference to feminism as such, nor to

other words associated with feminist discourse. Kateřina Pošová, for example, a

journalist and translator, responds to Sommerová’s question as to how she views the

difference between men and women: “Not in any way. My whole life I’ve never made

any difference between beings of the male and female sex. … I don’t see any reason to.

In my opinion, that would only be a certain kind of racism” (152, emphasis added).

The discourse is much different in the interview collection entitled Ženy mezi

dvěma světy: Deset životních příběhů žen, které odešly do ciziny a po letech se vrátily

[Women between Two Worlds: Ten life stories of women who moved abroad and returned

years later], which is part of a project called Paměť žen [Women’s Memories]. Paměť

žen draws specifically on the genres of oral history and narration, which, as mentioned

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above, play a part in some forms of feminist discourse. In this case, the organization

makes it clear that their oral histories not only contradict official patriarchal History, but

are also “a reaction to Western European and American feminist theories that could not

have been applied within the lived reality of women in post-socialist countries”

(http://www.womensmemory.net/english/). Interestingly, the women featured in this

volume of Pamětˇ žen’s project emigrated during the communist regime to such places as

Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. Pavla Frýdlová, the editor,

chose to present the interviews as monologues, so it is impossible to know which

questions she asked and how they were phrased, but the number of times the women

employ the word “feminism” is flagrantly higher than in O čem sní ženy. Indeed, some of

the women are activists for feminist causes, such as Marie Saša Lienau, who started the

organization ProFem and has worked with the Gender Studies library and Pamětˇ žen

itself, and Rosťa Gordon-Smith, who testified before parliament about workplace

discrimination against women. The women featured in Ženy mezi dvěma světy are

precisely, therefore, one of the major avenues for the import of Western feminism into

the Czech Republic.

There is, as already mentioned, a good deal of resistance to that importation. As

Jiřina Rybačková, author of the book Svět zvaný Amerika [A World Called America],

notes, “A lot of people here [in the Czech Republic] are allergic to the word feminist,”

even if they agree with many of its principles (Ženy mezi 59-60). Lienau, now one of the

most important feminist activists in the Czech Republic, agrees:

In the early years, it was often very difficult to say in public that I worked in a
women’s organization, for the women’s movement. To use the word feminist was
to make a fool of oneself; for the majority of Czech society, being a feminist
constituted being a crazy woman. (182)

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Since she has moved back to Prague from Germany, Lienau has been hopeful that things

will change, but she clearly believes that much of that change will come from outside the

country rather than from within:

I don’t think that in the Czech Republic in recent years anything much
fundamental has changed in that direction [of equal relationships between men
and women], except for maybe young women who have lived abroad for some
time and don’t put up with a lot of things. But otherwise it’s going to take as long
as it did in Western Europe. I note each step in that direction with pleasure, even
if for now it’s only those nine fathers in Prague who have parental leave. And I
place hope in that fact that, thanks to open borders, we’ll get a fresh breeze from
Europe. Whether people want it or not, they can’t keep saying, “nobody’s going
to tell us Czechs how we’re going to have it here.” In that way, I consider myself
an enthusiastic European. (187)

One of the major ways, of course, that feminism can be imported from Western

Europe and the United States is through translation. In the first half of this chapter, we

have seen how the process of translating, editing, and publishing contemporary Czech

literature occurred such that that literature performed Western discourses like

postmodernism, feminism, and women’s writing. That is, for example, postmodern

discourse constitutes what it means to be postmodern, and when texts are then constituted

in and by that discourse, they then serve as yet one more example of postmodern

discourse, so that the process becomes a self-perpetuating discourse machine, not unlike

the self-perpetuation of gender norms. If the Anglo-American market favored translations

from Czech that performed Western discourses, what happens when those discourses are

translated into Czech? How, for instance, is Western feminism performed in Czech? In

what ways do the texts perform Czech ideas about feminism? If discourse is a means of

thinking about the world and the language that constitutes that means of thinking, how do

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you translate a discourse into a language and culture that constitutes the world differently,

where the same terms of knowledge do not exist? As Jiřina Smejkalová states:

Such commonly used words as “marginal,” “oppressed,” “alternative,” were part

of different language games and political struggles before 1989. The terms
“gender,” “discourse,” or “representation” do not have Czech equivalents at all
and have to be used in their English versions. Thus, translated feminist texts are
loaded with even more of a flavor of obscurity. (236)

Indeed, in her foreword to Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society, when Marie

Čermáková explains the term “gender,” as opposed to sex, she even tells the reader how

to pronounce it phonetically in Czech (džendr) (11). What discourse of feminism do

Czech translations perform when so many of the words, and thus concepts, seem to be

uneasily borrowed?

As Čermáková notes, access to Western feminist discourse is available to those

who study English or other foreign languages, and indeed this is the main form of access

since very little has been published in translation “that would help orient those interested

in gender and feminism” (11). According to her guesstimation, the number can’t be more

than five or so publications. While the situation is not quite as extreme as Čermáková

believes, the offer is, in fact, rather poor. For Anglo-American readers without access to

Czech, the texts available in translation become more or less what they know about

Czech literature, and so if Czech texts in translation perform postmodernism, then Anglo-

American readers will have a tendency to believe that at least one of the major features of

contemporary Czech literature is postmodernism. Similarly, Czech readers without

knowledge of English, French, or German will take Western feminism to be the discourse

performed in those translations; they will take the feminism constituted in those

translations to be what feminism is. Because of the extremely small number of

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translations, the Czech constitution of the Western discourse of feminism will not

necessarily be representative of that discourse in all its complexity, just as with

contemporary Czech fiction in English. Indeed, even Butler, whose ideas have shaped

this chapter and who is one of the leading contemporary thinkers of feminism, has not

been translated into Czech, although Gender Trouble is available in Slovak, which would

be readable for a Czech person.78 The publication dates of the original texts demonstrate

that, although the amount of translation of feminist discourse has increased since 2000,

very few of the translated texts were actually originally published after that year, such

that Western feminist thought in the Czech language is stuck in the early 1990s.

Fortunately, the prevalence of English as a language of study makes many of the

“missing” texts available to scholars with an interest in gender studies. These intellectuals

can then engage in a different sort of translation process by bringing in the untranslated

Western works into their own scholarly writing in Czech.

In addition to these scholarly texts, there have also been more popular books

about gender translated into Czech. The most notable, and controversial, of these are two

books by Elisabeth Badinter, a French historian and professor of philosophy, dubbed a

“contrarian” feminist by Jane Kramer in a recent New Yorker profile (“Against Nature”

44). The presence of Badinter among the few translations into Czech is telling in the way

it performs a counter-feminism to the currently more dominant Anglo-American

78
To give an idea of the Czech canon of Western feminism, I list some of the major texts that have been
translated from French and English in order of appearance in Czech, with the original date of publication
given after: Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1966, 1949); Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch
(1991, 1970); Hélène Cixous’s, essay “Le rire de la méduse” (1995, 1975); Pam Morris, Literature and
Feminism (2000, 1993), Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society (2000, 1972); Carole Pateman’s The Sexual
Contract (2000, 1988); Naomi Wolf’s The Myth of Beauty (2000, 1991); Julia Kristeva’s, Jazyk lásky.
Eseje o sémiotice, psycholanalýze a mateřství (2004, from La révolution du langage poétique and Histoires
d’amour 1974 and 1983); Gilles Lipovetsky’s La troisième femme : Permanence et révolution du féminin
(2007, 1997); and Kristeva’s Polyphonies (2008, collected from various works).

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feminism. Despite her credentials, American gender studies scholars have largely

dismissed her work as unfounded, polemical generalizations. In France, her books are

bestsellers, and a 2010 survey of readers of Marianne magazine named her the most

influential intellectual in the country. Her Fausse route: Réflexions sur 30 années de

féminisme was published in Czech translation just one year after its appearance in French

in 2003. Significantly, the subtitle of the book in Czech, rather than referring to “30 years

of feminism” is given in Czech as “Slabé ženy, nebezpeční muži a jiné omyly radikálního

feminismu”: “Weak women, dangerous men, and other mistakes of radical feminism.”

Sociologist Miloslav Petrusek’s back-cover blurb proves equally dismissive of feminism,

as each time of the three times he uses the term “feminine discourse,” he precedes it with

a condescending “so-called,” as he does for “political incorrectness” and “gender

studies.” In contrast to his disgust with “radical” “so-called feminist discourse,” Petrusek

approves of Badinter’s approach:

The author distinguishes the struggle for women's rights, a great sociological
theme of “the status of women in society” that loses nothing in gravity, from the
extreme attitudes of some very influential and authoritative representatives of so-
called feminist discourse. She claims and proves that a feminism obsessed with
incriminating the male gender and the problem of identity ignores the real social
and human problems of women.

The Czech translation of Fausse route thus performs Czech reactionism to Western

feminism portrayed as a radical, single-minded discourse. The text’s characterization of

particularly Anglo-American feminism feeds into the type of anti-feminist rhetoric

employed, for example by Škvorecký, positing Western feminism as a new kind of

discursive tyranny. The translation of Fauuse route was followed in Czech in 2005 by the

translation of XY: de l´identité masculine (1992), an earlier text from Badinter’s oeuvre.

In her introduction, Pavla Horská, a historian who has written about early Czech

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feminists, also performs an anti-Western-intellectual-feminism discourse as she points

out that the book was a bestseller, “[n]ot that Elisabeth Badinter’s university colleagues

would notice her new book on the same scale. Even feminists did not apparently enthuse

much over it” (256). But more than the anti-radical-feminist discourse, through the

introduction, the text performs the attitude that Western feminism is irrelevant to Czechs,

thanks to their grounding in humanism:

It seems that Prague at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century—especially in the
Czech milieu—did not suffer from the misogyny of Viennese decadence. In
Bohemia, that is, the opinions of F. X. Šalda or T.G. Masaryk had considerable
influence on opinions, and they looked at the contemporary “women’s issue”
more as a serious social problem affecting men as well as women rather than as
an echo of Western feminism. (258)

Horská’s tone then becomes self-congratulatory when she indicates that while this book

may be useful in the Czech Republic as a window into the world of the history of

Western European gender roles, there are few lessons Czechs can take from it about their

own lives; rather the opposite is true: “And as a consequence of the stance of these Czech

emancipationists, as these women called themselves, there was an attempt, in the early

20th century, at a sort of reconciliation with the world of men, not unlike the one

Elisabeth Badinter hopes for in the future” (259).

Czech anthologies performing women’s writing

Thus Czech feminism performs the current trend of feminisms, as opposed to

Feminism, that respond to local situations rather than creating an essentialized vision of

womanhood the world over, regardless of class, race, sexuality, etc. But it also

differentiates itself in such a way as to verge on arguing at times that the “woman’s

question” has already been settled in the Czech Republic. As Büchler writes in the

introduction to Allskin: “It is ironic that the ‘women’s question’ was raised far more

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vigorously almost a hundred years ago, and that in the literary sphere, contemporary

critics show little understanding of the specificity of women’s writing” (viii). As Hawker

mentions, aside from a few major names like Božena Němcová, woman writers have

often been relegated to the “chick lit” section and are paid far less attention than are men.

This was true as well during the communist era when all the most important translation

publication releases in English were of male writers like Kundera, Havel, Škvorecký,

Klíma, Vaculík, and Hrabal. The publication of Allskin and Povídky helped upset this

balance in the Anglo-American market, and may have contributed to a similar jump in

women’s writing collections in the last few years, when three such volumes have

appeared: Ženy vidí za roh (2009, Women Can See around the Corner), O čem ženy píší

(2008, What Women Write About), and Ty, která píšeš: Čítanka současné české ženské

povídky (2008, You Who Write: A reader of contemporary Czech women’s short stories).

Before that the Antologie nové české literatury 1994-2004 (2004, Anthology of New

Czech Literature) featured only 12 women out of 65 authors total, or less than one-fifth

of the volume. If, as Büchler argues, Czech critics “show little understanding of the

specificity of women’s writing,” and as we have seen, the discourse of feminism differs

in the Czech Republic, what kind of women’s writing do these Czech texts perform, in

comparison with the ones translated into English and collected in anthologies in Anglo-

America?

The editors and publishers of the collection Ženy vidí za roh suggest, as does

Hawker, that what women write about is relationships. The back jacket of the book

features one-sentence summaries of each story. Halina Pawlowská’s story is presented as

one where a professor goes on vacation “with her lover,” Alice Nellis writes about a

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“marital crisis,” Irena Obermannová shows that “a relationship with a married man is

probably not the road to happiness,” Petra Soupkupová describes the existential crisis of a

“frustrated wife,” Hana Andronika presents a mother “pathologically loving her son,”

Daniela Fischerová’s tale asks whether for a woman with special powers “a man can be

found,” and Eva Lustigová relates the story of “former lovers” who redevelop a

relationship years later. Only two of the stories as presented do not tackle romantic

relationships: Věra Nosková’s look at the world of women’s gossip magazines and Irena

Dousková’s study of an aging actress thrown out of the theatre. The title of the

collection—Ženy vidí za roh [Women Can See around the Corner] also implies an innate

difference between men and women, one which posits women as intuitive rather than

rational. The front cover of the book displays a stylized nude female figure coquettishly

closing her eye, with another eye wide open on the back of her head, all against a

background of pink. The beginning of the back-jacket matter poses the questions: “Can

women really see around the corner? Are they really as prescient, intuitive, and

empathetic as they’re said to be?” It is interesting that this supposed intuitive and

emotionally sensitive aspect of women becomes the focus of the collection since only one

story deals directly with these sort of “special powers.” While all the other stories are

firmly rooted in realism, Fischerová’s “Baba” (“Crone”) relates the tale of a woman who

finds that she “can see around the corner,” giving the title to the collection as a whole.

Thus this popular collection of short stories performs an essentialized sort of women’s

writing where the figure of woman draws on her intuition, over rationality, in her

relationships.

260
 In the foreword to O čem ženy píší [What Women Write About], which is clearly a

take on her film O čem ženy sní, Sommerová also presents an essentialized spiritual

woman: “the real gift of womanhood and motherhood is the value which lets us recognize

by way of visionary women the female mystique of the 21 st century” (9). If the title

implies that we will find out what women write about, Sommerová suggests it will be the

life of women, as seen through the eyes of women:

Creation by female writers does not have authorship by a person but by a woman.
Woman doesn’t live through her destiny as a person but as a woman-person. It
wasn’t until the 20th century that Czech and world literature reached after the rare,
artistic, flashing symphony of female voices that complete, after long centuries of
the political, social, and artistic dominance of men, the actual picture of two-in-
one humanity. (8)

Sommerová’s introduction, then, while it insists upon a difference between men and

women, performs again an essentialized and shared notion of womanhood, something

that unites all women such that they can relate to writing by other women in ways they

cannot to men’s writing, who describe the world in a way foreign to them. Unfortunately,

much of the writing offered up here, while it may perform women’s writing to a fairly

popular market in the Czech Republic, does not really speak to Western feminists, as it

utilizes clichés no longer considered empowering there.

While Povídky, O čem ženy píší, and Ženy vidí za roh all perform a discourse of

women’s writing which associates it especially with a certain way of approaching

relationships, Vladimír Novotný, in the foreword to Ty, která píšeš [You Who Write, the

Czech indicates feminine grammatical gender] presents relationships between men and

women as the main subject matter of not only women’s writing but of all writing in

general:

261
 After all, literary men and women write about the same world in which they live
and in which we also live, together with heroes, antiheroes, heroines, and
antiheroines of all presented prose texts, only in some of them it’s possible to
strikingly and inventively distinguish their feminine contours, in yet others to
robustly and energetically sketch out their masculine silhouettes. Sometimes in
the midst of that, nevertheless, they happen as if the roles were completely
reversed or overturned. But all in all, each one in countless different ways writes
with varying intensity and various temperaments but always about the same
thing—that is, about in what way the given aggregate of texts is defined as the
precursor model of every anthropocentric literary narration, whereas certainly not
by chance right at the beginning, just in the very first words of Hana
Andronikova’s story: “Once upon a time. She loved him. And he loved her. They
lived together.” (9)

Rather than an essentialized feminism, Novotný performs rather a humanism based in

individuality, and thus perhaps not too far from the postcommunist Kundera paradigm:

“it’s not a matter here of women existentialists bravely and courageously tackling the

world … or postmodern reflection on the seemingly infinite spectrum of various concepts

of behavior, actions, and thought” (12-13). Rather what is at issue here is “[t]he world ...

in its most elemental element … so that in these texts we permanently meet with the

phenomenologicality of the world” (13).

Novotný thus takes women’s writing out of any specificity that feminists, Czech

or otherwise, would assign to it. He may be reacting to what Halina Janaszek-Ivaničková

has described as the situation in socialist writing pre-1989:

The consequence of this trend of thinking in Slovak and Czech literature took on
the form of conviction that there is no feminist literature, only good and bad
literature. If a work written by a woman was described as “feminist,” this
signified that it was defined as bad literature. (48)

This is similar to Kundera insisting upon the large world context for evaluating a

work, rather than the small national context, or to Laferrière insisting that he does not

want to be labeled as a black, Caribbean, or immigrant, what-have-you writer, but only as

a good or bad one. And yet the stories collected in the book Novotný is introducing are

262
all by women writers, and thus perform that paradigm in various ways, depending on the

context. While the paradigm of women’s writing may come with a certain set of

discursive expectations, for example that texts should deal with “women’s issues” such as

gender relations, child-bearing, or family life, it also helps to these texts to gain a

different sort of currency in the West and sidestep the Cold-War or even postcommunist

paradigm. At the end of her review, Collier expresses the hope that Allskin will “inspire

translators and publishers to bring us more of the words of these women and others

(“Allskin”). The continued publication of such anthologies indeed has the potential to

generate a market for translations of full novels by Czech women, such that they may

succeed in Anglo-America where the male Czech authors circulating under the paradigm

of postcommunism and postmodernism have largely failed. With the disproportionate

attention given to female authors in English-language translation anthologies, there may

also come a rectification of the literary gender imbalances in the Czech Republic itself.

And finally, we may eventually be able to talk about these women without having to

mention Milan Kundera.

263
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