Mukesh Williams

The Representations of World Literature

It has been the major preoccupation of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, both of its philosophers and poets, to universalize European values and create a unified and hierarchical perspective of ‘human achievement’ and imagination. The desire to universalize their ideas made them think in inflated categories of the ‘world’ or ‘the globe’ and intentionally or unintentionally create structures of power and dominance.  In the early part of the twentieth century such “interpretations of life” in both philosophy and literature began to be questioned within Europe itself by a host of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hayden White and others.[i] T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was one such early philosopher who questioned the nineteenth century European “elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity.”[ii] Hulme felt that the cosmos was not organized in a “comprehensive” manner as Europe thought it was, but structured only in “parts.” [iii] Therefore, he felt that, to look for comprehensiveness would be to impose a specific Weltanschauung or a worldview on it, which would be false.[iv] However Europe was not ready for his views when he presented them and later he was seen more as a Bergsonian and not an independent thinker. Notions of continuity and comprehensiveness in nineteenth century Europe gradually evolved into a “category” and ignored all “discontinuities in nature” to create hegemony and control.[v]
The standardization of unique continental experience was further aided by an undue emphasis on the written forms of language to shape experience.[vi] “Each of us,” Hulme points out “has his own way of feeling, liking and disliking. But language denotes these states by the same word in every case, so that it is only able to fix the objective and impersonal aspect of the emotions, which we feel. Language, as in the first case, lets what you want to say slip through.”[vii] The privileging of some of the written European languages over the spoken and written ones from other parts of the world further provided an opportunity to European literary and historical imagination to simultaneously create artifacts of national and world literatures from their unique cultural and linguistic perspectives.

Ach, Weltliteratur!

The category of the “world” was largely conceived within Europe as inflated nationalism, which included one or two of its linguistically different nation states. If Germany constructed the category of world literature it would include a few of the great English and French writers in translation. The literatures of Asia and Africa, Middle East and other European countries were far too exotic and distant to be adequately represented. Remember that at this time the Europeans were still busy colonizing other parts of the world and systematizing their languages and literatures.  It is interesting to note that inflated categories of a purist national identity and cosmopolitan world literature ran at tandem in Germany in the nineteenth century aided by a host of philosophers and writers. World literature was always seen existing “in translation” depending on the target language, which usually was German, English or French. You could call this world view a world monde, welt or mundus which were all functions of the project of European Enlightenment that attempted to answer the question of truth and light—Aufklarung, Lumieres, Illusminismo—in relation to what was proper to man. This globalizing project of language, literature and philosophy, which Jacques Derrida would like to call “mondialisation”, was an attempt to justify a “worldwide-ization,” which in turn “wishes to be a humanization.”[viii]
In his book Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu builds a case against universal prescriptions that present “moralism as egoistic universalism.”[ix]   Bourdieu argues that the “fictitious universalism” arising in the eighteenth century, and so dear to Emmanuel Kant and Jean Jacques Rousseau in their theorizing of communicative reason, was an attempt to universalize a “particular case” and “privilege” a “scholastic condition.”[x] Though today we are once more concerned with the notion of constructing world literature in the hope of creating a world community through tolerance and reconciliation bringing mutual understanding between warring civilizations and peoples, we have not been able to relinquish its hegemonies and dominance.  However this hypothesis raises two fundamental questions: Firstly, who will realize this goal, the nation state or the world reading public? And secondly how shall it be realized, through synthesis or representation or both? In trying to answer these two questions we will find ourselves in a better position to understand the possibility or impossibility of constructing a more representative world literature than imagined by nineteenth century Europe.

Origins of World Literatures

Most constructions of world literature trace their origins to the political-cultural perspective voiced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in the final decades of his life in the oppositional slogan “Ach, Weltliteratur!” to the idea of Napoleonic nationalism.[xi] The slogan first appeared in an essay written by Goethe in a journal called Uber Kunst und Altertum (Art and Antiquity) in May 1827 where he wished to create a pure and inflated category of literature. [xii] Goethe attempted to understand the distinction between national literature and world literature and the accompanying spirit behind both. He felt that the construction of world literature would help to bridge the gap between community and otherness and create an all-encompassing category in which the tensions of the particular and universal could be contained, if not resolved. Though Goethe believed in a cosmopolitan spirit and world citizenship he felt that national spirit and patriotism invariably ran contrary to this belief.  Goethe had a strong dislike for the imaginings of early nineteenth century German nationalists as he felt that their nationalist sentiments often led to isolationist and fragmentary perspectives. [xiii] He, therefore, admired the sense of a global community as against a national one concurring with the thoughts and belief of the editors of the French literary journal, Le Globe that a more encompassing vision of literature was necessary. This rather romantic and impractical notion of world literature soon confronted the muscular power of national ideologies growing in Europe in the nineteenth century. Though Goethe initially read the works of French writers, younger than himself, with enthusiasm, he soon realized their ideological shift from a literary to a political one with some chagrin.  He began to question a cosmopolitan thinking and began to feel that it sometimes ran contrary to nationalist sentiments.

J. W. von Goethe and the French Globists

The editors of Le Globe, or Globists as they were called in Europe, belonged to the intellectual classes of France and initially endorsed a global and liberal ideology to literature as against an ultra Royalist and right wing one. This appealed to Goethe who read and translated some of its pieces into German for his own understanding. In the initial years of its publication from 1824 until 1827, Le Globe preoccupied itself with primarily literary themes and issues. However, towards the end of 1827 the journal under the editorship of Paul Dubois began to mount a concerted criticism of the right wing government of Comte de Villele and shifted from a purely literary liberalism to political activism.[xiv]
This was a great learning experience for Goethe who soon realized the dangers of unmitigated literary projects. He became more painfully aware of the dangers confronting world literature. Though earlier he distanced himself from the jingoistic construction of German nationalism, he now realized that sooner or later literary thought must come against the intimidating power of a nationalist ideology. Then it must choose between political activism and literary isolation. Like Faust Goethe realized that the ideal international community could only be realized with Helena in an idyllic Arcadia and would fail if taken to the world of reality by Euphorion.
Goethe had no confidence in those who constructed the political ideals of a nation state but hoped that a world reading public would someday realize his ideal. However within the inflated category of a world reading public there are hegemonies and inequalities that would not allow an ideal and fair literary representation to emerge. The national and the cosmopolitan interests meet each other abrasively and often violently as exemplified in Socialist Germany. The social nationalists who wanted to purify the German nation labeled the ones they did not want—Jews, Communists and gypsies—as cosmopolitans. Their pogrom for once revealed the incommensurability of the two worldviews, the nationalist and the cosmopolitan and further cut into Goethe’s ideal of a cosmopolitan community endorsed by national politics.
Goethe’s skepticism towards his grand literary enterprise sprang from the realization that his ideals were impossible to realize. Though he felt that bilingual translation was an important component of world literature, he also realized the un-translatability of literatures and the Babel-like tragedy that awaited such an endeavor. He began to feel that the relationship of poetry and politics was not only a nonfunctional but also a hazardous one. Benjamin Bennett argues that Goethe presents in his later novels especially Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman) a relationship between literature and a reading public as “a radically subversive community, a community that cannot continue in existence without becoming the target of its own subversiveness, a community, therefore, that must be constantly renewed, whose existence is thinkable only as an unceasing enactment of its own origin.”[xv] Though many other critics such as Peter Burgard and Karin Schutjer problematize the issue in Rortyian or non-Rortyian terms, they nevertheless see the tenuous relationship of Goethe’s liberal idealism with Kantian foundationalism and universalism.[xvi] In other words, both the relationship between poetry and politics and the global reading public and ideology were considered subversive and fraught with dangers. The category of world literature as conceived by Goethe was not an easily realizable category.

World Reading Public

Many philosophers have found the idea of a world reading public or the public sphere, proposed by Goethe and Habermas, as an idealistic and fabricated one. Bourdieu argues that the conceptualization of a universal public sphere fails to take note of the unequal economic and social conditions which would prevent an ideal global debate to materialize, a debate which would value competing interests and make it possible for them to be realized.[xvii]  
Goethe too began to realize the tension between the ideal and the real. After reading Le Globe in 1826 he could visualize the burgeoning of a people’s movement that was “removing all obstacles” placed by governments and was making peoples “come closer to one another.” This movement, Goethe felt, was creating “a community of like minds, like habits, indeed like literatures,” from “a higher perspective.” [xviii] By “higher perspective” Goethe meant a perspective that was the very opposite of the narrow nationalism that European governments, especially Germany was creating to scorn and divide peoples.
Goethe was perhaps witnessing the process of European globalization, for it is hard to say that he is thinking of other parts of the world when speaking about the globe. In 1827 he began to see this process of globalization as “the progress of the human race” that would bring the peoples of the world together. He felt convinced that “a general world literature” was “coming into being;” and it would provide an “honorable role” for the Germans through translation.[xix]   Here is the notion of a limited version of canonical world literature in translation.
However Goethe soon began to doubt his grand vision of a literary concord. A year later at a welcome address for nature researchers in Berlin he stated that his idea of world literature does not imply that “different nations” should understand each other or “recognize” their “ products,” but that “hard-working literary figures” should know each other, develop “ a common mind” and “exert social influence.” [xx]   This conception of world literature is based not on literary artifacts but literary dialogue between diverse literary figure and scientists. This definition seems quite interesting but not very encouraging.

Ideas of Kant, Hegel, Marx and World Literature

Kant, Hegel and Marx are the early thinkers who conceptualized our modern world providing a moral, universal and ideological standard for its diversity, analysis and construction. But this very “intellectualist universalism” lies at the heart of the scholastic illusion that believes that diverse opinions are “equivalent” possessing the right to “unrestricted production.”[xxi] Kant and Hegel forced us to see the world in universal categories while Marx gave an economic twist to modes of production and distribution. Cartography, demography, census, trading ship routes further aided in providing a pictorial and data-based conception of our world that allowed universal categories to solidify. 
Half a century after Goethe’s death Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto and by then the political and ideological equation in Europe had radically changed.Marx employed the term world literature as an antithesis to national literatures, which had been accelerated by the bourgeoisie “exploitation of the world-market” and given the forces of production and consumption a “cosmopolitan character.”  Goethe’s notion of “hard-working literary figures” sustaining world literature shifted to the idea of Marx’s national middle classes defining intellectual property and creating world literature. Friedrich Engels explained in the “Preface to the English Edition of 1888” of The Communist Manifesto that socialism in 1847 enjoyed a more respectable reputation than communism at least in the continent; while communism functioned within a middle class domain.[xxii]   Marx wrote,

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.  And as in material, so also in intellectual production.  The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.  National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.[xxiii]               

According to Marx, literature possessed an economic base and also represented, in both form and content, a specific cultural ideology that created a false consciousness, making people believe in the ideological representation of an artwork. However there were times when literature might even challenge the intellectual assumptions of society and tend to become subversive or anti-status quo. Gyorgy Lukacs argued that literature used economic power of societies and transformed some of its ideological structures in quite interesting ways. Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser were more concerned in the ways literature represented reality and created experience through the medium of language.

World Literature Today

Most constructions of world literature today are either created in a politically–dominant language, like English or French or funded and produced within powerful nation states like the United States or Britain with stereotypical residues of colonial biases and orientalist constructions. Not only ideological preferences but underpinnings of a state mechanism, modes of production and state legality find their way in the manner and construction of world literature. The inclusion and exclusion of translatable texts into the target language can also be dictated through cultural and class prejudice as well as national and legal inferences. The trajectories are many and they are hard to define in a short paper like this.　
The quality of representation and representativeness that constitute an important component of the notion of the ‘world’ has more to do with the changing relationship of the historical moment with the rest of the world and not with a sacrosanct unchanging truth about the world.  Our conception of the universe and our place in it not only determines our geographical discoveries, scientific investigations and cartographical conceptions but also our understanding of what constitutes world literature. Obviously there is no objective or absolute standard to conceptualize the monolithic category of world literature. The prejudices of class, national identity, received knowledge, literary ignorance, cultural and rational beliefs play a significant role in the decisions of a literary historian in the conceptualization, organization and selection of literary texts of the world. It has also been pointed out that corporate or state funding, copyright, the decisions of an intellectual corpus and the media play a deeper role in the creation of world literature than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Literary Representations, Genres, Encounters

Categorizing world literature as an inflated category also involves grappling with the large volume of national representative artifacts, which may run into millions. It is neither possible to read nor represent them all even in many volumes. Furthermore the interconnectedness of different literatures, if there is such a thing, will encounter the problem of influences and interferences. This would require a specialist to elaborate and explain the forces that have acted and interacted to create hybrid categories. For example, the way the Indian novel in English has evolved through English, Persian and vernacular genres and the way these genres have influenced other linguistic traditions and narrative techniques would require special treatment. The influences and interferences acquire different and multiple trajectories that may be rather difficult to treat in the conglomerate wholeness of world literature. Furthermore the hegemony of the centre vis-à-vis the periphery and the problem of translatability of the one into the other has been problematized by critics such as Montserrat Inglesias Santos, Itamar Even-Zohar, Meenakshi Mukherjee and others.[xxiv]  
The analysis and synthesis of different genres of literary production within nationalist frames require an understanding of different disciplines and literary traditions that might lead us away from the written text and its representativeness. In fact in recent times with the new emphasis on theory the importance of a close reading of a literary text has decreased, making a student know less about a text and more about theory.

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

The present paper is a summary of a more elaborate paper on world literature that I am presently engaged in writing. I received some insightful and useful comments from Professor Ryohei Tanaka of Soka University, Japan regarding Goethe’s ideas, German translations and references, and about the issue dealt with here. I gratefully acknowledge his help and contribution, though he bears no responsibility whatsoever for the views expressed here or errors made.

 

References

[i] T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).  Hulme writes, “A Weltanschauung is by no means necessarily connected with a philosophy. The effort to find some ‘interpretation of life,’ to solve what it feels to be the riddle of existence, is obviously a permanent characteristic not only in philosophy, however, but in literature; where in a relatively formless way attempts may be made to deal with the relation of man to the world and with all these questions, the answers to which used to be designated as Wisdom,” p. 24.

[ii] Hulme, ibid., p. 3. He writes, “The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent necessity of the present.” 

[iii] Hulme, ibid., p. 220. Hulme writes, “There is a difficulty in finding a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos, because there is none. The cosmos is only organized in parts; the rest is cinders. Death is breaking up into cinders. Hence partial truth of the old Greek conception of Hades (a place of les organization and no happiness).”

[iv] Richard Shusterman, “Remembering Hulme: A Neglected Philosopher-Critic-Poet,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct-Dec 1985), pp. 559-576. Shusterman argues that the influence of Hulme on ideas of universalization and fragmentation are quite central to us today. He states, “Finally, having corrected these errors of commission and omission, in the interpretation of Hulme’s thought, I shall go on to maintain that some of his central philosophical ideas and insights, which have been largely overlooked and neglected, are at the forefront of   philosophical developments today” (p. 559).

[v] Hulme, p. 3

[vi] Hulme ibid.,p. 166. Hulme writes “Language, we have said, only expresses the lowest common denominator of the emotions of one kind…. Most of us, then, never see things as they are, but see only the stock types which are embodied in language.”

[vii] Ibid., p. 165.

[viii] Peggy Kamuf trans., Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 203
[ix] Richard Nice trans., Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, London: Polity Press, 2000), p. 65.

[x] Ibid., pp. 65-66

[xi] John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Pizer maintains that the term Weltliteratur was coined by Christoph Martin Wieland in his notes to the translation of Horace and Wieland died fourteen years before Goethe popularized the term in 1827. According to Pizer another writer August  Ludwig Schlozer used the term in “Vorstellung der Universaltheorie” in 1772. 

[xii]  In the journal Goethe makes frequent references to the idea of  the emergence of an “eine allgemeine Weltliteratur” or a general world literature in which Germany will play a leading role as a principal translator and synthesizer. Refer to Goethes Werke, C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Jahsen , 1953 rpt 1967, pp. 361-364.

[xiii] David Barry, “Faustian Pursuits: The Politcal-Cultural Dimension of Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the Tragedy of Translation,” The German Quarterly, Volume 74, No. 2 (Spring　2001), p. 169.

[xiv] Heinz Hamm, Goethe und die franzosische Zeitschrift “Le Globe”: Eine Lekture im Zeichen der Weltliteratur, (Weimar: Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1998). Hamm’s excellent study brings out the reading of Geothe of Le Globe from the pencil marked pages in Goethe’s original hand. Hamm provides three distinct preoccupations of the journal’s preoccupations—it literary preoccupation (from 1824 to 1827), its political preoccupations (from the replacement of Villele’s government in 1828 to the July Revolution of 1830), and Saint Simonists activism (from 1830-1832). Goethe stopped reading the journal from 1828 onwards

[xv] Benjamin Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 61.

[xvi] See Peter Burgard, Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay, (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992, p. 221; also see Karin Schutjer, Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe and Holderlin, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. Notes to Chapter 3 No. 47, p. 236.

[xvii] Ibid, p. 65.

[xviii] Goethes Werke, Band 41, (Tokyo: Sansyusya Publishing Co., Ltd, 1975), in “Aus dem Französischen des Globe,” p. 230.

[xix] Goethes sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, Band 1-40, (Stuggart & Berlin: J.S. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, n.d.), 38:74.

[xx] Ibid., 38:141

[xxi] Ibid., p. 68.

[xxii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1955). p. 5.

[xxiii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ibid., p. 13.

[xxiv]  Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature Within,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuri, (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 192-93.  Commenting about the role of translation and the target language Even-Zohar writes, My argument is that translated works do correlate in at least two ways: (a) in the way their source texts are selected by the target literature, the principles of selection never being uncorrelatable with the home co-systems of the target literature (to put it in the most cautious ways); and (b) in the way they adapt specific norms, behaviors, and policies—in short, in their use of the literary repertoire—which results from their relations with the other home co-systems. These are not confined to the linguistic level only, but are manifest on any selection level as well. Thus, translated literature may possess a repertoire of its own, which to a certain extent could even be exclusive to it.

[xxv]  Ksratani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, (London: Durham, 1993) p. xiii; Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality, (New Delhi: OUP, 1996).

[xxvi]  Hulme, ibid., p. 256.