Blindness, Invisibility, and the Negative Inheritance of World Literature (original) (raw)

Twentieth Century European Literature: A Cultural Baggage

2016

Europe: a mix of races, a continent torn by conflicts, a group of nations united by Christianity and more recently, the Euro. Under this canopy lies a myriad of works of art critically acclaimed as European Literature. The very character of Europeanism forms the basis of this distinction. Each author from Europe has written in his native language and everyone has been examining one’s times. The sense of belonging to Europe has been the platform from which each author has presented his own version of the scenario and offered his insights. There has been a constant dialogue between authors from each of these European nations. Creative writers base their art on some thought propounded by their gurus, men of genius whom they consider seriously, whether to refute their theories or to endorse them. Therefore, other than their nativity, nothing differentiates them from each other and all the authors from the continent are grouped together as European. If we look into the twentieth century alone, as this volume offers, the common experience of all the European authors has been that of the world wars and the revolutionary wars. With the political and economic scenario in view, many European thinkers have developed many philosophical ideas, some rooted in Christian doctrine and some rooted in scientific inventions. Modern European thought is a mix of many brilliant minds who have been grappling with nature and reason to explain away phenomena so varied and so bewildering such as the Nazi Movement or the advent of Communism. Modern European Literature addresses some of the basic problems forced upon beliefs rooted in Christianity. The death of god professed by Nietzsche after the development of genetics became an intellectual quicksand in which every brilliant mind fell. According to the Bible, God created man in His own image and created all the other things for man to enjoy. Man is god’s favourite creation. He has been situated at the centre of the universe to assess the rest of nature according to his whims and fancy or call it reason. Moreover, the purpose of life is to be morally good according to what the priests taught so that one can attain heaven after death. God as the higher intellect that governs human life became nullified by the theory of evolution of species where only the fittest survive. For the Western world comprising of the United Kingdom, European nations and the United States where Christianity is the major religion, every modern thinker is great for the bulk of writings, philosophical treatises that they have produced and which are meticulously preserved, studied and reproduced. But for an Indian mind, rooted in Hinduism, much of what Marx, Freud or Nietzsche has said is an additional subject of study forced upon by English education. The book is designed for an average Indian student who has not incorporated western ethics via Christianity since birth. Much of the confusion that Indian students feel regarding a philosophy such as Existentialism is because one encounters it in fragments in English and European literature, not as a given such as the Hindu ethics. For an Indian, God is manifest in the animals and plants and does not interfere in day to day decisions. For a Christian, God is the father who governs all our actions and each utterance, each action is judged as either faithful or blasphemous. A Hindu does not face the existential question of what is the purpose of life if it is not to please God. For a Hindu, life is a part of nature, like grass, and like any other animal one becomes earth after death. As given in the Bhagvad Gita, the concept of soul as a traveler from one body to another newborn makes it easier for a Hindu to swallow the bitter truth of death. Thus it becomes a struggle for an Indian to understand the chief concerns of the Western authors who questioned religion whenever there was a social crisis. It is also not unknown that most of the greatest writers of the twentieth century became strictly atheists. Such extreme apathy, extreme sense of futility and the extreme worry for mankind becomes a burden on the Indian mind which is content with little and happy to do one’s small part in the vast world. The sense of purpose of living ends quite satisfactorily if one has simply earned one’s respect in one’s immediate society. That includes the teachings of elders and priests. This is where the introduction to European literature and its wider concerns becomes a job, a deliberation. While studying Modern English Literature a student is briefed about the advent of realism, naturalism and a little about the politics of the century. The major thinkers, Marx and Freud, the scientific developments, whose advantages we all share, and the unhappy effects of the wars and catastrophes of the twentieth century are all part of English Literature. The same concerns in a more marked way make up the European consciousness. Their literature reflects economic as well as political concerns in many ways. A few areas which stand out as more specifically European in theory are surrealism, epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, magic realism, meta theatre, existentialism and the communist occupation of many European nation states after the second world war. Political conditions such as totalitarianism, communism, anti-Semitism, exile, the holocaust, the scientist’s predicament and the common man’s predicament in the face of dictatorship are central to a European author’s work in the twentieth century. It is important to acknowledge that the history of the world has been created largely by the activities of the Europeans and therefore, their books are also part of our cultural baggage. In addition, there is a baggage of literary theories propounded by students of language which bog down the average reader. Someone who wants to enjoy a work of art is hugely frustrated when he is accosted with a flood of literary theories and asked to attack a text with critical tools. A student of English is generally taught to use many of these tools before one can read a text of considerable literary value today. Thus, the following essays have been designed to provide a vivid variety of readings of some of the most famous European texts translated into English for an Indian student. The essays are free of lines from western critics who are wont to quote and refer to many theories and many scholars and thereby confusing the subject of the text in hand. In our days, critical essays are like jigsaw puzzles, where each reference is supposed to link a thought and tease the synapses of a clever mind. References are virtually hyperlinks that take one into wider and wider scopes endlessly. In a way it is good to be able to let a student wander into greater mysteries of literature, but in doing so one gets further and further away from the actual work of art, one’s first reference. I have noticed that many brilliant students can perform well in the examinations without having read the text at all. They are habituated to learn the great comments by great scholars rather than great lines from the text. In view of the aforesaid problems I have tried to quote extensively from the texts rather than from the scholars. The aim is to give a complete account of the text instead of making oblique references to history and its erstwhile scholarly discourse. It will encourage the student to read the play or the novel with enjoyment and not merely for scrutiny. The following essays address the texts without tools, like a tolerant admirer who also understands differences. There was a time when the job of publishing was difficult and only those who had firm conviction about the worth of their words went out of the way to publish them. In this way only those works have been able to survive which have passed the test of time, which have proved their worth generation after generation. Until literature became a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to comment on someone else’s work was felt only as an instigation from the work or the author. But now every scholar has to write critical essays, whether he feels compelled by his inner drive or not. It has become a means of earning one’s bread and butter. No wonder much of what a student gets to read in the library is forced reading, with little instruction. And one is likely to get lost in the maze of hyperlinks. It has been an imperative for scientific advancement that a student should learn everything that has been already discovered by one’s forefathers. The same imperative is now applied to a student of literature that one should read all that the other scholars have already said about a particular work of art; hence, the abundance of discourse. Books are full of citations and references. It definitely ruptures the unified experience of reading one volume. This argument does not lead to discourage secondary reading. The aim of this book is to help an Indian scholar to assess the whole of modern European consciousness in a small space. Beyond this, there is ample scope for further reading. In this book I have not included words of other scholars. I have only discussed all the concerns raised by the individual works of art. Needless to say, the choice of the nine texts discussed in the following sixteen essays is based on my own reading of experts in this area. These nine texts are selected from among the greatest classics of the century. History and philosophy have been woven intricately in the discussion of every text in this book. This book is an outcome of my own teaching experience in this part of the world. It is a gift to my students and to the community at large to encourage the study of European literature.

World Literature and Its Discontents

Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the consumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, *Against World Literature*, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world literature, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive nationalism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously preserve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative literary studies in an age of globalization.

An Essay against Global Literature: Literature and the Global Public

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2017

The paper approaches the question of global literature and its putative public by reviewing some of the major debates about world literature (Damrosch; Spivak; Casanova; Moretti) and focusing on the contribution of Alexander Beecroft and his notion of literary ecologies. The institutions officially and unofficially governing the world republic of letters (publishing houses, literary prizes, and so forth) are briefly reviewed and criticized (following Parks; Owen; Coletti). I then address the “global literary ecology” by looking at a few recent examples from Africa, first that of J. M. Coetzee, and then briefly that of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as well as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in order to question the viability or desirability of the de facto Anglophone hegemony in the world republic of letters. I conclude by rehearsing the position more or less against global literature (with Spivak and Apter) and for a renewed philology and multilingualism in the spirit of Auerbach and Said.

World Literature and Defeat

Germanic Review, 2024

This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe's concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe's writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one's own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.

World Literature: From the Politics to a Poetics

2017

This article examines the place of world literature today. Starting with the current political context in Britain, the first part outlines a brief history of Weltliteratur via Goethe, Marx and Engels, and contemporary literary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Emily Apter. Using Samuel Beckett’s views and letters on nationalism and translation, the second part problematizes the centre and periphery model upon which most of these theories are based. The final part introduces Tagore’s contrasting view of visva-sahitya, which, as evidenced through Beckett’s position as a writer and translator of impotence, presents an alternative mode of perceiving world literature.

Globalisation and Literary History

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2006

Last week I was at a meeting of Latin American scholars who were debating a joint project provisionally titled, ' Between Power and Knowledge. Towards a History of Intellectual Elites '. It soon became clear that all of the terms of the title including ' between ' were to be contested. Such radical revisionism also haunts Latin American literary studies as we attempt to rethink national and regional cultures in what is now regarded as a post-national moment, one in which there has been a rejection of linear historical narrative, a questioning of the very term ' Latin American ' as a self-explanatory framework and of literature as an evolving series of well defi ned genres and movements, evaluated according to not always very clear aesthetic criteria and with regard for linguistic virtuosity. The national and continental imaginaries, deployed in Neruda ' s Canto General , in Gabriela Mistral ' s Canto a Chile , in López Velarde ' s Suave Patria , and explored, re-evaluated and condemned in countless novels, are diluted or dissipated as Latin American writers now situate their narratives in Siberia, Germany, Africa, London, Paris or a myriad of other places or abandon the nation ' s capital for its margins and provinces. When I began teaching in the early sixties, it was quite common for people to ask what was ' my ' country, taking it for granted that one specialised in a national culture. José Donoso remarked on the fact that it was uncommon in 1960 to hear laymen speak of the contemporary Spanish American novel: 'there were Uruguayan, or Ecuadorian, Mexican or Venezuelan novels ' (Donoso, 1977: 10). Yet many writers, most prominently Borges, had already repudiated the idea of a purely national tradition. Cortázar (1969) boasted of the mental ubiquity afforded him because of living and writing in Paris, and Donoso (1977: 19) enthusiastically supported the ' disfi guring contamination of foreign languages and literatures '. But this did not mean that they did not situate their writing within the nation, although their view was often oblique. There was an abundance of terms-dependency, underdevelopment, Third World, periphery-to which thinking about the nation was yoked (Escobar, 1995), and there was anxiety over anachronism, over the time warp, over the need to attain parity, or, as Octavio Paz put it (e.g. Paz, 1967), to inhabit a time when Latin Americans would be in synchrony with the rest of the world, a synchrony which the novelists felt themselves to have attained. The boom was a coming of age, an entry into adulthood, and a refusal to be identifi ed with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the ' novela de la tierra ' .