The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History

May Hawas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317414643
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History is a comprehensive and engaging volume, combining essays from historians and literary academics to create a space for productive cross-cultural encounters between the two fields. In addition to the 27 essays, the Companion includes general introductions from two of the leading scholars of history and literature, David Damrosch and Patrick Manning, as well as personal testimonies from artists working in the area, and editorials asking provocative questions.

The volume includes sections on:

• People – with essays looking at World Literature, Intellectual Commerce, Religion, language and war, and Indigenous ethnography
• Networks and methods – examining maps, geography, morality and the crises of world literature
• Transformations – including essays on race, colonialism, and the non-human

Interdisciplinary and groundbreaking, this volume brings to light various ways in which scholars of literature and history analyse, assimilate or reveal the intellectual heritage of the past, at the same moment as they try consciously to deal with an unending amount of new information and an awareness of global connections and discrepancies. Including work from leading academics in the field, as well as newer voices, the Companion is ideal for students and scholars alike.

Section 1

People

3
Artist in action

On the lack of an adequate critical vocabulary

Tabish Khair

There is much of significance in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In a specific context, which does not concern me here, it is an excellent reading of Kafka. In a more general context, which does concern me here, their definition of “minor literature” shares many elements with postcolonial literatures, not least that of linguistic and political contestation. However, what really concerns me here is not what I find enabling in this influential essay, but what I find problematic.

My problems with Deleuze and Guattari’s essay arise from two aspects of my existence or, shall we say, praxis – 1) as a critic and teacher of literature and 2) as a ‘creative writer’. Both these aspects are, in my case and often without my endorsement, dubbed ‘postcolonial’. As such, the term ‘postcolonial’ can be considered the ghostly third axis of my critique, divided into two parts here: a largely academic and pedagogic one, followed by a section that is more personal. Finally, in the third section, I offer a rough sketch that, to my mind, suggests a way out.

1

Talking as a critic and a student/teacher of literature, there are some general problems with Deleuze and Guattari’s text. For instance, their use of a signifier, as is the case of “machine” on pages 7 and 8, sometimes refers to too many signifieds. Similarly, their very discussion of reterritoralisation and detteritorialisation shifts as the text develops. To begin with, detteritorialisation is seen as the first characteristic of minor literature: “But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). But as the essay progresses, both detteritorialisation and reterritorialisation are implicitly seen as aspects of minor literature: for instance, when Joyce and Beckett are considered, with some justification, authors of minor literature and the former is associated with “worldwide reterritorializations” (19) and the latter with “dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing detteritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (19). I am not reducing the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of minor literature as a useful category in certain well-defined contexts; what I am highlighting are the problems that one has to encounter in using this category broadly.

I mentioned usefulness in context, and that moves me on to the other – and more specific – set of reasons why I avoid using the concept of minor literature while teaching or studying postcolonial literatures and colonial literatures sometimes written by Englishmen, like Rudyard Kipling, who lived elsewhere for many formative years. And why, as I shall illustrate in the second part of this essay, I find it a category that fails (like other similar categories) to do justice to the works of writers like me.

Let me explain the first (academic) difficulty with reference to the three characteristics of minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari enumerate, commenting on each characteristic as economically as possible:

A

A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization. In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible – the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise. The impossibility of not writing because national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature… . The impossibility of writing other than German is for the Prague Jews the feeling of an irreducible distance from their primitive Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German is the deterritorialization of the German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses.

Deleuze and Guattari 16

Here, while the point about language effected by a “high coefficient of deterritorialization” can be fruitfully applied to many kinds of postcolonial and colonial literatures, its constitutive ‘impossibilities’ cannot be accepted on face value at least in regions like South Asia and Africa. For instance, to what extent does “national consciousness” in India “necessarily exist by means of [English language] literature”? In Jeet Thayil’s collection, English: Poems, for instance, English is posited as the only ‘nation’ for the poet, which implies the disjunction that exists (at least for authors like Thayil) between the language of their enunciation and the political nation of India. Moreover, if one can argue, as some mid-twentieth-century historians did, that English enabled the formation of a national consciousness in late nineteenth-century India, it can only be done by turning a blind eye to the heavy political antagonism between English and other Indian languages – not only the national language, Hindi, but also other major languages like Bangla and Marathi at times. Finally, if there is a national consciousness of English India, and this is hugely debatable, it definitely does not coincide with the national consciousness of Hindi India or, for that matter, Marathi India or Tamil India or Urdu India. Moreover, English is the language of the educated elite in India and the ‘major’ international/colonial language, but Hindi is the politically and, often, bureaucratically dominant language in India – replaced in some vast non-Hindi regions not by English but by other ‘major’ languages, like Bangla, Marathi and Tamil, all of which have long, rich and (usually) pre-colonial literary heritages.

Other complicating nuances can be extracted from the Pandora’s Box of ‘India’, but let us move on to the next informing impossibility: “the impossibility of writing other than German”, or in our case, the impossibility of writing other than English. This impossibility is deeply problematic for Indians in India, or most Africans in Africa: most of them, being literate in more than one language, always have the possibility of writing in a language other than English. One can argue that to some extent, for a certain class, the option of English is not a full choice; it is partly a compulsion. But even in such extreme cases, it is a very different type of chosen-compulsion than that of ‘impossibility’. For instance, in a recent article in Wasafiri, the Kenyan writer, Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, who, after a successful international career as a writer in English has partly eschewed English for his native language, talks about addressing a large group of young African writers, all of whom wrote in English and only in English, but all of whom could speak and write in at least one other African language. When quizzed on their choice of English, the reason that was offered most often by these young writers was that English was a much easier and simpler language than other African languages and Arabic. At this, Ngûgî recounts asking the writers, all of whom had studied English throughout school and university, if they had studied their other language or languages for one year. Not one hand. Six months? Not one hand. One full month? Not a single hand. One week? No hand still, in a group of twenty odd literate Africans. One day: a few hands. Concludes Ngûgî: “All their lives, they were surrounded by English in classrooms, books, commercials, street names, print and television media. Not surprisingly, it was indeed easier to write and read” (2). Here if ‘impossibility’ is a factor, it does not come untinged by an evaded possibility, at least in the sense in which Slavoj Žižek claims that “ignorance is not a sufficient reason for forgiveness since it conveys a hidden dimension of enjoyment” (2). Once again, one can see the possibility of the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, but only at a slant, with reservations and explanations required, at least when applied to ‘postcolonial’ writers like me.

Finally, the third impossibility: the “impossibility of writing in German is the deterritorialisation of the German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses”. As is obvious, there is much of relevance here too: the idea of English-writing Indians or Africans as a dominant minority, though again ‘oppressive’ is a problematic term, given the fact that much political power has shifted to non-English speakers in many of these countries. The rise of Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India, might or might not have to do with a certain kind of ‘fascism’, as the Indian Left claims, but it definitely has to do with the political shift to languages other than English. Even with English, there is a shift from the kind of elite (convent-educated or international) English spoken by Modi’s ineffective opponent, Rahul Gandhi, and the kind of learnt-through-other-Indian languages English spoken by Modi, and almost every successful Indian politician who even bothers to speak English today. This is even reflected in literature, most obviously with the rise of bestselling writers like Chetan Bhagat, whose ethos might be English-convent-educated at times, but it is definitely not the same as those of Vikram Seth or Salman Rushdie – and whose readership is even more significantly different. It is not a coincidence that many of the readers who worship writers like Chetan Bhagat, whether from English-medium schools or not, seem to be the same as voters who have pinned their hopes on Modi.

More problematically, the notion of a ‘German population’ works in the case of Kafka’s Prague, but creates various dissonances in Asian, African and even Caribbean contexts. I am constantly reminded every time some of my colleagues (and I can think of two such occasions during department meetings alone) enumerate the strengths of the English Department as offering various ’native English speakers’ to our students and fail to list me among those speakers, that English speakers or writers in Asia, Africa or the Caribbean do not translate into an English population. More confusingly, colonial English writers from these parts, such as Kipling, do translate into the terms of this ‘impossibility’, thus obfuscating colonial and postcolonial matters. I can go on with this list, but, as you can see, its teeming contradictions make the use of ‘minor literature’ in many postcolonial contexts rather problematic, if not undergirded by extensive explanatory footnotes and qualifications.

B

The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political.

17

There are two versions of this observation. The simple one is a direct reading of the political, and it runs the risk of a kind of essentialism which is problematic, both with reference to other cultures and with reference to the term ‘political’. If one means ‘political’ in that reduced sense – as opposed to ‘individual concerns’ (and this is initially suggested by Deleuze and Guattari when they say that in major literature, unlike in minor literature, “individual concern … joins with other no less individual concerns”) – then obviously one runs into the colonial spectre of an un-differentiated ‘collective’ non-West and simultaneously one overlooks an entire series of postcolonial and feminist theorists who have very precisely and convincingly exposed the political in ‘individual concerns’. If, however, one adopts a more complex reading, which is fairer to Deleuze and Guattari and which is suggested a bit later in their text, one still runs into the need for excessive re-clarifications. For instance, an observation like this one: “Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes more necessary, indispensable, magnified” (17). This is a rich, and in certain contexts, useful observation, but it once again requires too much elaboration and hedging: for instance, to mention only the obvious fact, how does one distinguish easily between this slippage from individual concern qua individual concern in some texts and individual concern as political in some other texts? Given the simpler reading of Deleuze and Guattari, one can argue that postcolonial authors like R. K. Narayan are not ‘political’ and are motivated by individual concerns qua individual concerns just as much as an English writer like Henry Green. Given the second, more complex reading, one can as convincingly argue that Green is just as political as Narayan, and, for that matter, both are as political as Ngûgî. Similarly, it is possible to read V. S. Naipaul’s great novel, A House for Mr Biswas, as framed solely by ‘individual concerns’, but it is just as possible to read that selection of concerns as highly political.

C

The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value. Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation.

17

I will not labour my point: it is obvious that a perception like this can be a useful tool of exegesis in context. Deleuze and Guattari, because they are writing about Kafka, mostly work within such a context: a European context. But using this perception in, say, a postcolonial context, without some serious grafting and pruning, would be risky and even counter-productive. It would, outside a European literary context, end up replicating old Eurocentric binarisms, deeply imbibed by postcolonial writers at times: that between the ‘individualist’ West and a collective ‘Rest’, that between a secular West and religious ‘Rest’, that between a materialist ‘West’ and spiritual ‘Rest’, etc. These are overlapping, mutually supporting binarisms. They are also gross simplifications, even if one re-constructs them along more materialist lines (such as the influence of industrialisation, capitalism and modernity) – one can argue that nothing is more materialist and even individualist than religion, with its vast enterprises and many entrepreneurs, in India! In one of his books, I think Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger notes with some surprise that the Arab Bedouin is the most individualist of peoples but has no idea of privacy. In making that seemingly contradictory remark, Thesiger goes far beyond the usual colonial binarisms which depict the non-West as ‘collectivist’. To apply Deleuze and Guattari outside their limited European context of a discussion of Kafka would be to fail to go even a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments, and some blame
• Introductions
• Section 1 People
• Section 2 Networks and method
• Section 3 Transformations
• Index