Institutions of World Literature

Writing, Translation, Markets

Stefan Helgesson, Pieter Vermeulen, Stefan Helgesson, Pieter Vermeulen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317565574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics, critics, and readers, as well as authors themselves. This volume therefore substantiates, refines, as well as interrogates current approaches to world literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its methodological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of the volume's focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

Part I Instituting Literature

1 How Writing Becomes (World) Literature

Singularity, The Universalizable, and the Implied Writer¹

Stefan Helgesson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315735979-2

A work of literature, most pointedly when viewed from a world literary angle, spans the gap between the singular and the systemic. But how may we assess its systemic nature without negating its singularity? And, conversely, how do we account for the singularity of literature without wilfully forgetting that it is also shaped, produced, and reproduced as a social and material fact under conditions of inequality, sometimes within, sometimes across national and linguistic boundaries? Gayatri Spivak's sybelline yet suggestive solution to this conundrum has been that “[t]he singular is the always universalizable, never the universal” (Damrosch and Spivak 466), which invokes singularity, in a postcolonial spirit, as a means to resist the workings of the system. David Damrosch, by contrast, has been more affirmative in identifying circulation, translation (notably into English), and transcultural comparison as universally enabling factors in the shaping of works of world literature. Damrosch's words about how a text enters world literature by “circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (4) apparently secure a space for the singular work. His less discussed first criterion—that a work of world literature must first of all be read “as literature”—alerts us, however, to the fact that there is another, normative cultural dynamic involved here than “simply” the material circulation of books. Reading works as literature presupposes that there are already established, sedimented notions of what might count as literature. These notions are, of course, neither restricted to nations nor unchanging and universal: instead, they assume firmer contours in a push and pull between local conditions and an often elusive faith in literature as a transcendent category. Such faith not in the being but in the becoming of literary transcendence appears to be just as present in Spivak's words about the singular. It is precisely this primary aspect of world literature, of literature as a transportable notion shaping the work of individual writers, that informs my discussion here.

Drawing on the examples of Fernando Pessoa, J. M. Coetzee, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Assia Djebar, I choose here to approach the question of universalizability in world literature by bringing the singular moment that precedes publication, translation, and circulation into focus. We can call this the moment of writing, although I am not aiming to retrieve this moment as such, but rather self-reflexive representations of writing, or of the stoking of the very ambition to write. The “beginnings” I am looking at here are inevitably retrospective and mediated through different systems of publication and critical reception. Hence, they are staged. They reach me on the printed page and not, as it were, in the solitary act of writing.² Note here that I am challenging critical orthodoxy: I do not see literary writing and literature as seamlessly synonymous. They overlap, but there is no unmediated relationship between the practice of writing and the printed, commodified, and possibly consecrated text that is displayed in a bookshop or read on a Kindle. This is made clear not least by the fact that my examples are from the work of internationally highly consecrated authors, which further dramatizes the disparity between system and singularity. In this context, Pessoa is a significant anomaly, insofar as his fame is posthumous. But this underscores yet further the systemic dimension: without a congeries of institutions and individuals that over time have been equipped to care for his writings, Pessoa would have been destined for oblivion.

By challenging the conflation of writing with literature, I also depart from the more conventional reading of such reflexive moments of writing about writing as purely metatextual. What interests me is instead—and this explains why I draw on fictional as well as essayistic and autobiographical examples—how the writer positions his or her craft in relation to a system that exceeds yet enables the text. What we find then is that the writer cuts a vulnerable figure, caught between text and context. To get a handle on this, I will later in the essay suggest the term “implied writer” (as distinct from “implied author”) as a means to explore how writing can be articulated in relation to a system. Placed at the crossroads between the deep time of language(s) and literary genres, the contemporary conditions for publication, and the elusive, future-oriented act of bringing a new piece of writing into being, the implied writer is, moreover, a figure that enables meaningful points of comparison between the otherwise discrete worlds of “Western” and “postcolonial,” or “European” and “African” literature. It is, in other words, the constrained universalizability of separate and uneven beginnings as a condition of possibility for world literature that lies in focus here. Interestingly, however—and this comes close to Pascale Casanova's view of the potential for “peripheral” writers to invoke the aesthetic authority of international literary space and its most autonomous centres (82–125)—the literary system could also be construed as a safeguard for the singular by granting it a qualified space it would otherwise be denied. While Emily Apter's championing of untranslatability deserves serious consideration, and although Peter Hitchcock's assertion of the “non-coincidence between literary institutions and the literary” (2) bears comparison with my distinction between writing and literature, their principled defences of that which is presumably untouched by cultural hegemony and commodification miss out on the transpersonal and indeed impersonal existence of literature as multifarious phenomenon that structures the very possibility of becoming a writer. If our critical task is to universalize the singular, it may also be the case, then, that the literary system—and I am speaking here beyond voluntarism as well as idealistic conceptions of literature as a bringer of good things by default—allows the “universal” (as in the case of hegemonic print languages such as English or French, or for that matter the aggressively “universal” effects of the market explored by Brouillette and Vermeulen in this volume) to be singularized. It is the implied writer's positioning in this give and take between the universal and the singular that the rest of this essay will explore.

1 Pessoa and Coetzee

Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, and the Australian—formerly South African—writer J. M. Coetzee provide us with complex and frequently melancholy representations of writing in relation to system. In Pessoa's Livro do desassossego (Book of Disquiet), written in the heteronymic voice of Bernardo Soares, we find a passage that begins like this: “Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that's one of the rules of the game” (Disquiet 108).³ He continues, even more sombrely: “If tomorrow all my writings were lost, I’d be sorry, but I doubt I’d be violently and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given that with my writings would go my entire life. … The great earth that cares for the dead would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages I’ve written ” (108).⁴ Much more recently, in Summertime (2009), when presenting a retrospective “autrebiographical” account of himself as a budding author in South Africa in the 1970s, Coetzee's narrator also muses on the futility of writing. A journal entry dated 1 September 1972 describes a bout of hard, physical labour when John lays a concrete apron around his father's house in Cape Town. “The slabs he is laying,” he reflects, “will outlast his tenancy of the house, may even outlast his spell on earth.” This is “[i]mmortality of a kind, a limited immortality … not so hard to achieve after all. Why then,” he asks, “does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” (7).

Both writers address here their activity as writers in the form of a question that links writing to mortality: in Pessoa's case as a way to evade life; in Coetzee's case as a wager to cheat death. In both instances, writing seems futile. Why, ultimately, does this obsession with words and sentences matter? How can this solitary activity connect with a wider human community? Why not build walls of concrete instead, if the whole point is to make an enduring mark on the world? If we accept that writing by definition is turned outward, this is extroversion of an extremely qualified and pessimistic kind.

However, when Coetzee places his question in the mind of a younger, fictional version of himself, he does so tongue in cheek. The author of Summertime, who should of course be kept distinct from the narrator, is an astoundingly consecrated writer, a Nobel laureate and double winner of the Man Booker Prize. As he lets his proxy younger self muse on the futility of writing, he (the author) must be perfectly aware that Summertime is “born-translated” (Walkowitz 569), destined for publication in more than thirty languages, and that his work is the focal point of a massive scholarly industry. Given Coetzee's stature, one may in fact modestly assume that a fair number of people not yet born will decipher his marks. The sceptical rumination invites various responses, both sincere and humorous, but above all, it dramatizes the disparity that I have been speaking of: a reminder of the humble beginnings (“almost nothing,” to invoke Beckett as well as the ending of Coetzee's Disgrace) of what has the potential to become both a national and a global phenomenon thanks to the labour of editors, publishers, translators, critics, and readers. It is in fact in the ironical stance towards the post facto obviousness of Coetzee's stature within the system of literature that one may detect the workings of the implied writer.

The incongruity between singularity and system becomes even more striking in the case of Pessoa. In contrast to Coetzee, Pessoa's stoic question was not unmotivated. He published fairly little during his lifetime: only one book, Mensagem, and various poems and essays in journals. At his death, he left almost 30,000 unorganized manuscript pages behind, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that eighty years later he would be regarded as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. What we today think of as the oeuvre of Pessoa is the result of the painstaking work by editors and critics who have salvaged and tried to organize the disorderly manuscripts. Although important work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, not least thanks to Gaspar Simões and Adolfo Casais Monteiro, the archive was in a sorry state by the late 1960s, which prompted a more organized effort resulting in the cataloguing principles used today (Nobre dos Santos et al.). It is since then that we have seen a proliferation of editions produced by scholars (known as “pessoanos”) such as Jacinto Prado Coelho, João Dinis, Richard Zenith, Teresa Sobral Cunha, Maria Aliete Galhoz, and most recently Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari. Even today, previously unknown notes and fragments of poems are being uncovered in the “espólio,” or the archive, adding still new dimensions to what we think of as Pessoa's work.

The Livro do desassossego, which I quoted from, demonstrates with exceptional clarity how Pessoa's authorship is a retroactive construction. The book never existed even as a coherent manuscript in Pessoa's lifetime and is therefore by definition incomplete and uncompletable. What we know today as the Livro has been pieced together following the clues left behind by Pessoa—among them envelopes marked “Livro do D.” A few of the fragments were published when Pessoa was alive, but he would continue to add and revise fragments throughout the entire period of its composition—which ran from at least 1913 until his untimely death in 1935 (Zenith). It was only in 1982 that the first book publication called Livro do desassossego appeared, and since then several other editions, following divergent principles of organization, have been published. The numbering of the fragments is completely different in the chronologically ordered 1982 Ática edition compared to Teresa Sobral Cunha's thematically organized 1990–1991 edition which, again, differs from both Richard Zenith's version that I have been using as well as Jerónimo Pizarro's meticulous 2010 critical edition (called Livro do desasoçego, following Pessoa's dated orthography). It is undoubtedly the case that with each edition, new knowledge is acquired, the precision and comprehensiveness of the critical understanding of Pessoa's disorderly manuscript are honed, but it is no less obvious that there never will exist a “proper” version of the Livro authored by Pessoa himself. Instead, each new edition manifests once again that the Livro does not and cannot exist without a community of scholars as well as a material system to sustain it.

This is a far cry from what Pessoa experienced while still alive. Having left South Africa as a teenager in 1906, and living in a kind of inner exile in a politically volatile Portugal, it may often have seemed that he wrote for no one but himself, and that his labours were exceptionally futile. And yet, he also anticipates the material processes of reception and circulation that will crystallize around his writings: he lets Bernardo Soares speak of the “game” and its rules (which recalls how Coetzee, too, has foregrounded the game aspect of literature; see Penner), explicitly highlighting publication as that which ultimately will turn his writing into literature, and hence into something else than just marks on paper. Indeed, Pessoa's entire heteronymic project could be described as an elaborate way of positioning his acts of writing in relation to a system of publication and reception that involved not just the national space of Portugal, but also was imperial and global in scope, and included the Anglophone and Francophone spheres. His lifelong practice of writing through the agency of imagined personas resulted in no less than 136 alter egos ranging from simple pseudonyms scribbled on a piece of paper to full-scale fictional personalities such as Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos with their own biographies and poetics. Some of his early alter egos, such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon, weren't even Portuguese, but Englishmen, drawing thereby on Pessoa's own experience of a British colonial education in Durban (Pizarro and Ferrari). What we can see, then, is that Pessoa tended from the very beginning to present his writing at a remove, through a double-voiced discourse that played deliberately on the tension between immediacy and mediation. This also bears comparison with Coetzee's practice of writing through the voice of alter egos such as Elizabeth Costello (the most famous instance being “The Lives of Animals,” which instead of an essay on the suffering of animals provides the reader with an account of the fictional author Elizabeth Costello giving two lectures about animals; Costello 59–115).

Such heteronymic endeavours, and more specifically the passages from Pessoa and Coetzee quoted above, make us aware of the gap between what we read as an irreducibly personal utterance and the sheer fact of its mediated and public nature that both writers gesture towards and without which we could not have read it in the first place. It is thanks to the instantiation of Summertime as a printed book in codex format with a handsome cover and global distribution that I am able to speak about that supposedly singular formulation. And it is indeed thanks to a material instantiation of Livro do desassossego that I can translate that passage and discuss it as though it gave me access to a version of Pessoa's own thoughts.

This brings us back to the question of singularity and system. If we follow Derek Attridge's definition, singularity should be seen as “the difference [of a cultural object] from all other such objects, not simply as a particular manifestation of general rules, but as a peculiar nexus within the culture that is perceived as resisting or exceeding all pre-existing general determinations” (63; emphasis mine). Such an austere definition of singularity begs the question if it can, in fact, be applied to literature at all. The event of writing, insofar as it is an individual act (however networked the writing ind...