The Global Novel. Adam Kirsch
wider argument can be applied to any national literature in the twenty-first century.
The idea of national literature itself, Mizumura speculates, may turn out to be only a brief parenthesis in the long history of literature. In most times and places, she argues, literacy required bilingualism: The language a writer spoke was not the language he used for writing books. This was equally true in medieval Europe, where Latin was the language of international philosophy and science, as in medieval Japan, where poetry and religious works were always composed in Chinese. The idea that a writer had a special, even spiritual relationship with his vernacular language was an invention of post-Renaissance Europe, from which it spread to other cultures around the world, including Japan.
But as we enter a future in which English is the dominant language of business, science, and scholarship—in which educated people around the world are expected to be bilingual in English, just as they once were in Latin or in Chinese—Mizumura fears that we may return to that older model. “Bilinguals,” she predicts, will “start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English—especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.” This will effectively mean the end of national literature as a vehicle for major creative achievement. World literature will triumph, but at the price of linguistic diversity, and all the mental diversity it makes possible.
Globalization, on this account, is another word for the imperialism of the English language—whose dominion may very well survive the hegemony of the United States, just as Latin survived the fall of Rome. Its effect is to make writers of all other languages feel provincial: “Japanese people at some point, without even knowing it, became captive to the notion that only Western languages are valid. Various non-Western peoples share a similar sense of estrangement from their own language,” Mizumura writes. And the elevation of the English language carries with it, almost accidentally, the elevation of English literature. Indeed, she points out that even French literature, once the universal standard of literary style, is now a more or less specialized interest: The world reads Shakespeare, but not Racine. As a novelist who writes in a non-Western language, Mizumura is dismayed by this prognosis, but she is not sure anything can be done to avert it.
In her analysis of the prestige and power dynamics of national literatures, and the psychological toll these can exact on writers, Mizumura owes a clear debt to the French literary theorist Pascale Casanova. Indeed, Casanova’s book The World Republic of Letters, published in French in 1999 and in English five years later, has become nearly as ubiquitous as Goethe in discussions of world literature. It offers a new way of thinking about literature as a form of symbolic capital, accrued by nations through the production of classic books, as well as through the development of a literary readership and the institutions which support it, like publishing houses and magazines. And just like any other resource, Casanova argues, literary authority is subject to intense competition between nations; she compares it to an “economy, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence.”
This violence is not physical, but spiritual, and it consists in the relegation of writers from smaller countries and language-groups to a literary periphery, subject to value judgments from taste-makers in the capital. For Casanova, this primarily means Paris, which for centuries was the center of the literary universe. Her most interesting insights have to do with the situation of writers from such “peripheral” places, and the challenge they face in escaping their perceived provincialism and winning the recognition of the “capital.” Achieving a place in world literature, she argues, means escaping the provincial time-scale of most national literatures, which lag behind the avant-garde in terms of literary technique, and joining the “Greenwich meridian of literature,” which has traditionally run through Paris. “The continually redefined present of literary life constitutes a universal artistic clock by which writers must regulate their work if they wish to attain legitimacy,” Casanova writes—that is, legitimacy in the eyes of the metropolitan readers and critics who have the power to bestow it.
Casanova’s new model of world literary space and time is meant to reveal the power struggles that are constantly taking place under the apparently harmonious surface of literature. In this sense, it does for world literature as a system what Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence did for the psychology of individual authors. Key to Casanova’s insight is that literary competition, though grounded in national and linguistic identity, is relatively independent of political rivalry. That is, a country can accrue literary capital in excess of its geopolitical power—like France in the twentieth century—and, conversely, a writer from the periphery (Joyce in Ireland, Kafka in Czechoslovakia) can elude his or her political identity to become an international figure. Indeed, it is only writers on the literary periphery who perceive—because they are forced to—the actual relations of domination and subjection that make up literary space. Such “domination . . . is recognized as accepted by outsiders while remaining wholly unknown to the inhabitants of the centers”—just as an American reader, accustomed to living in an English-speaking world, would never guess at the anxieties that the English language causes a Japanese writer like Mizumura.
But after Casanova has articulated the complex mechanisms that governed international literary space in the modern world—from the Renaissance until at least World War II—she observes that the twenty-first century might turn out to be very different. For one thing, Paris has lost its primacy as the gatekeeper of world literature. Though many writers still come to world attention through French translation, it is now possible to appeal to centers in London or New York instead. More insidious, however, is what Casanova—like several of the writers we have seen—identifies as the rise of a new “world literature” based on “denationalized content [which] can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding.”
Like the editors of n+1, Casanova opposes this new global literature to the older model of “genuine literary internationalism.” Whereas the world republic of letters used to be constituted by innovation and rivalry, today it is dominated by “international business,” which produces an ersatz “‘world fiction,’ products based on tested aesthetic formulas and designed to appeal to the widest possible readership.” It is easy to hear in this complaint an echo of the Frankfurt School’s mid-twentieth-century attack on the American culture industry, which was said to mass-market kitsch in order to stupefy the population into obedience. Like Theodor Adorno, contemporary critics of world literature bemoan the disappearance of aesthetic originality and difficulty, and the corruption of popular taste for the sake of corporate profit and control. In Casanova’s case, this takes the form of a (historically quite familiar) defense of French and European values against “American (or Americanized) large-scale literary production, [which] . . . poses a grave threat to the independence of the world of letters as a whole.”
In theory, then, world literature sounds like a prescription for disappointment and mediocrity. But does the reality live down to the expectations and prophecies of the critics? The only way to answer the question is empirically, by returning to the books themselves. The following chapters examine eight novels that have reached worldwide audiences in the twenty-first century, by writers who are generally agreed to be leading figures in the pantheon of world literature: Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Michel Houellebecq, and Elena Ferrante. While the list is inevitably partial, it is also intended to be representative; other studies of world literature today could include different books, but none could be complete without taking account of the work of these writers. They span six languages and five continents, and the variety in their narrative strategies and prose styles is just as great. Nothing unites them, perhaps, except contemporaneity and the shared status of being “global” novelists.
For this very reason, however, reading them together helps to reveal what it really means to talk about global fiction. And it offers a more hopeful picture of world literature than the one painted by critics and theorists. As it turns out, the global novels of our time are not passive products or victims of globalization; rather, they are acutely conscious of their position as part of a world system. Globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore. In very different ways, each of these writers addresses the question of what it means to write across borders.