The Global Novel. Adam Kirsch
global problems, including immigration, terrorism, environmental degradation, and sexual exploitation, appear through the lens of fiction?
What emerges from this kind of comparative reading is that the global novel is not a unitary genre. It is impossible to say that all global novels have certain formal qualities in common. On the contrary, the global is best thought of as a medium through which all kinds of stories can be told, and which affects their telling in a variety of ways. A global novel can be one that sees humanity on the level of the species, so that its problems and prospects can only be dealt with on the scale of the whole planet; or it can start from the scale of a single neighborhood, showing how even the most constrained of lives are affected by worldwide movements. It can describe a way of life common to people in many places, emphasizing the interchangeability of urban life in the twenty-first century; or it can be one that emphasizes the importance of differences, and the difficulty of communicating across borders. It can deal with traditional cultural markers like appearance and behavior or with elusive cosmic intuitions that seem to transcend place.
What unites all these various approaches is the insistence on the global dimension not just of contemporary experience, but of contemporary imagination. If we understand ourselves as citizens of the world, then the novel must come to grips with this cosmopolitanism—just as over the last three centuries it has explored each new iteration of “the way we live now.” Ambitious novelists in the twenty-first century will find themselves writing global novels, not out of a cynical desire to elevate their commercial or critical rewards, but because individual lives are now lived and conceived under the sign of the whole globe. In the process, such writers will indeed encounter the problems of representation and homogenization that criticism has been quick to point out. But such problems are not necessarily disabling; for the resourceful novelist, they can be stimulating and productive. To examine the global novel in its twenty-first-century variety is to be hopeful, if not for humanity, then at least for the capacity of fiction to reveal humanity to itself.
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