The Global Novel. Adam Kirsch
from inaccessible linguistic folds.” Put more simply, reading across borders opens our minds and gives us access to new ways of thinking and feeling. But Apter goes on to deplore “tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”
This is one of the commonest charges against world literature: By making foreignness into a literary commodity, it prevents the possibility of any true encounter with difference. In this way, it duplicates the original sin of translation itself, which brings the distant close only by erasing the very language that marks it as distant to begin with. Take “ethnically branded” writing: Once we think we know what, say, an Indian novel or a Latin American novel is bound to give us, we will seek out (or publishers will offer us) only books that match that pre-established image. Genuinely difficult or challenging books will go untranslated and unread. More dangerous still, they will go unwritten, as writers around the world begin to shape their work according to the demands of the global marketplace. In this way, literature approaches the total “substitutability” of a monoculture. Just as Starbucks tastes the same in Stockholm as it does in Los Angeles, so a Swedish novel like Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reads exactly like a treatment for a Hollywood movie (which it then inevitably becomes).
This aesthetic critique of globalized literature goes hand in hand with a harder-edged political critique, such as the one advanced by in the literary magazine n+1 in a much-discussed 2013 editorial, “World Lite.” In this essay, the editors of n+1 directly link the current flourishing of world literature to “global capitalism,” an economic system which, it is implied, all people of good will must oppose. The writers who flourish in this system, who win prestigious prizes and occupy university chairs, are the beneficiaries of an unjust order: “World literature . . . has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it.” World literature is likened to the Davos Forum, a venue where celebrities and tycoons discuss “the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped.” Indeed, world literature has its own institutions—the Frankfurt Book Fair, multinational conglomerate publishers, international literary festivals, the Nobel Prize—which the editors consider to be inherently corrupt.
This hostile view of contemporary “world literature” and its leading lights—the editors of n+1 name Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee, along with younger writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—sees its literary and political deficiencies as mutually reinforcing. The type of “world” writing celebrated today is abstract and deracinated: “A smooth EU-niversality prevails” in novels that are “extremely psychological in character and only vestigially social and geographical.” The particularity of place and culture disappears, as well as formal difficulty of the kind associated with modernism. Along with them disappears the kind of political agenda which the editors of n+1 see as indispensable to a valid literary project: They regret the passing of “the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left.” In both literary and political terms, the “smoothly global” is seen as the foe of “thorny internationalism,” and the editors call for “opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and politics” all at once.
This line of argument can be seen as a form of nostalgia for the union of modernist aesthetics and radical politics that characterized the advanced intelligentsia in the 1930s and 1940s. That it took an effort of will to hold the two parts of that project together is something that “World Lite” tends to ignore. Difficult literature is almost never popular, which makes it an uncomfortable bedfellow for socialist politics; perhaps for this reason, the great modernists were more often sympathetic to fascism than socialism. The idea that literature can, and should, be both politically virtuous and aesthetically challenging is one of those ideals that, as the editors themselves say about socialism, “has so far enjoyed hardly a moment of historical realization.” But for that very reason, this ideal can make actually existing world literature seem compromised and complaisant.
Interestingly, like many critiques of globalization, this attack on globalized literature can rally support from cultural conservatives as well as radicals. In a 2015 article, the American writer Michael Lind observes that “if the size of the global audience is the index,” then the leading works of “contemporary world literature” are genre novels like Larsson’s crime series or George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. This is what Lind calls “world literature in the form of . . . popular culture,” and it represents a kind of nightmare inversion of what Goethe had in mind: not the best that has been thought and said, but the lowest common denominator.
To counter it, Lind calls for the restoration of a frankly elitist model of “global classicism.” The global quality of such writing consists not in popularity across cultures, but a cosmopolitan appropriation of the best models of the past, regardless of their linguistic or national origin. Goethe himself, writing German lyrics based on the medieval Persian poetry of Hafiz, is a good example of this sort of cosmopolitanism. If such writing turns out not to appeal to a wide audience, so be it: Lind points out that Goethe envisioned poetry as the possession of “hundreds and hundreds of men,” not hundreds of millions.
In an unexpected turn, however, Lind also employs this ideal of global classicism as a weapon against modernism, which he characterizes as an artistic movement that cut off writers and readers from literary tradition. Global classicism would, then, be formally conservative, as opposed to the radically innovative classicism of writers like Ezra Pound or James Joyce. It would produce “a genuine world literature far more erudite and refined than global popular culture.” In this way, the attack on global literature can lead toward a cultural politics of restoration, a kind of intellectual protectionism in which writers guard their literary resources against competition from corporate behemoths.
The novelist and translator Tim Parks also argues that the winners in the game of world literature are mediocre books. But in a 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, with the blunt headline “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks expands the critique from genre fiction to literary fiction itself. World literature is not just the name of a canon of great books, Parks argues; it is also a market dynamic, in which authors come to define success as “an international rather than a national phenomenon.” And “from the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension.” Local allusions and references disappear, along with the kind of complex wordplay that is impossible to translate. Apter, resisting this kind of simplification, writes approvingly of “the Untranslatable,” as a kind of wrench thrown into the smoothly turning gears of world literature: “Untranslatability [is] a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.”
More fundamentally, Parks complains that “world literature” gives writers an incentive to employ “highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as ‘literary.’” (He instances the “overstated fantasy devices” of Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, to which many examples could be added.) The global novel, if such a thing exists, is necessarily a diluted and deracinated genre, engaged not with reality but with the reiteration of its own themes and techniques. Against Goethe, this argument implies that “national literature” will always remain the most relevant context for any work of fiction. So long as life is lived locally—in a specific language and place, according to the mores and values of a unique society—global literature can only exist by abstracting away from these particularities. This is especially damaging in the case of the novel, which is traditionally the genre that engages most closely with social reality: “A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel,” Parks concludes.
A powerful and intriguing expression of this kind of pessimism can be found in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura. First published in 2008, Mizumura’s book-length essay set off a wide-ranging debate in Japan, as readers responded to her strongly worded disparagement of contemporary Japanese literature and the Japanese educational system. But while much