Globalizing Literary Genres

Literature, History, Modernity

Jernej Habjan, Fabienne Imlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317483427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of globalization and literature, we in effect invoke the entire history of literature. Essays examine literary genres in relation to broader historical processes, connecting the present state of globalization to such key world-historic events as the early modern geographical and scientific explorations, the Enlightenment, the expansions of modernity in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postmodernity and postcoloniality, and contemporary counter-hegemonic movements. The book offers innovative readings of the pastoral from Saint-Pierre to Carpentier; the novel in Kant and Wieland, and in Diderot and Marx; travel writing from Verne to Cortázar; sports writing in James and Kahn; entrelacement in Bolaño, Ghosh, and Soderbergh; and also the Mozambican ghost story, Indian genre fiction, "fake" autobiographies, Sephardic "language memoirs, " the postcolonial Gothic, Irish "chick lit, " and counter-hegemonic novels. Making important theoretical contributions to a renewed discussion about genre, especially genres of narrative fiction, this volume addresses global studies, the history of the novel, and debates over periodization and nationalism in literary history.

Part I
From Here to Early Modernity

1 A Globe of Sinful Continents

Shakespeare Thinks the World

Richard Wilson

Think of the World

What were William Shakespeare and his fellows thinking when they called their playhouse the Globe? How, in the dramatist’s own proto-Hegelian expression, did they “think of the world” (Julius, 1,2,301)?¹ The name they attached in 1599 to “This wide and universal theatre” (As You Like It, 2,7,136) provokes this question, as much as it cries out to be revisited in the context of twenty-first century debates about the competing claims of universalism and pluralism. Yet it has become so over-familiar that even Shakespeare scholars rarely give its significance much pause. Theater specialists infer that in naming their house the Globe, its founders advertised “a decorative scheme intended to foster an emblematic conception of the theatre as a microcosm … a theatre of the world” (Keenan and Davidson 1997, 148–49). But the ways in which the ancient topos of the Theatrum Mundi, and the Pythagorean metaphor that “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, 2,7,138), resonated in what Martin Heidegger (1977, 115) termed “the age of the world picture” with Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of 1577–1580, Abraham Ortelius’ cartographic theatre of the world, or the 1570 atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the World), with its planispheres sectioned like some exotic fruit, remain strangely unexplored. More importantly, the relation of the name of the people’s palace erected on London’s quayside to the contemporary shock of global religious multiplicity has rarely, if ever, been discussed.

The first visitors to Shakespeare’s playhouse were quick to notice its resemblance to Rome’s circular amphitheaters and to conclude that “the theatre was constructed in the style of the ancient Romans,” as a German tourist reported on July 3, 1600 (quoted in Orrell 1988, 45), because the Coliseum provided the classical architectural model for “this great globe” (Tempest, 4,1,153). But in Globes, the second volume of his Spheres trilogy, Peter Sloterdijk has teased out the sinister implications of this roundness, the dark precedent that “the Roman arena could advance to a metaphor for the world” only because “the central tenet of ancient fatalism attained concretion in its construction: no one escapes this world alive.” For Sloterdijk, the lesson of the circus was hence that “a human life can never be more than a saving up to die,” and the mass slaughters in the amphitheater routinized the immune system that was otherwise stimulated in scapegoat rites, like the Lupercalia, or wolf game, aimed at warding off death. The agôn of the “bloody ring of decision” was an auto-immunization that generated the primal enmity, in this analysis, between those who die now and those who die later: “Him or me, us or them: the fascism effect was invented in the gladiatorial games as the theatricalization of différance.” (Sloterdijk 2014, 177–78, 307–308, 311) And it was just this primordial antagonism haunting the shape of the theater that Shakespeare confronted in his inaugural Globe play, Julius Caesar, where the Lupercalia is rerun within the “course” (1,2,4) of a circular “O world” (3,1,208) that is explicitly associated with the circuit where “so many lusty Romans / Came smiling” (2,3,78) to feast their eyes on blood.

“When the stadiums scream,” writes Sloterdijk, “the masses celebrate their success in postponing death”; and it is only when the Christians show that “those who die sooner are not losers” that the repetition compulsion of the sacrificial violence enacted inside the Coliseum is broken. The philosopher locates an architectural symbol for this rupture in “the counter-arena” of Saint Peter’s Square, “a true anti-circus” that gave “access to the community of love.” (Sloterdijk 2014, 312, 318, 320) But cued by the mimetic theory of René Girard, he also explains how the name of Shakespeare’s Globe recorded an immunological crisis that was even more fatal than Christianity to the ancient inurement in the round, when Europeans grasped “that they are contained or lost—which now amounts to virtually the same thing—somewhere in the boundless.” The icon for that exposure was the model of the earth as a terrestrial globe, which, starting with the Behaim Globe of Nuremburg of 1492, represented the world from the outside: “[T]he new ‘earth apple’—as Behaim called his globe—proclaimed to Europeans the topological message of the Modern Age, that humans exist on the edge of an uneven round body whose whole is neither a womb nor a vessel, and offers no shelter.” (Sloterdijk 2014, 774, 777, 792) So, for Sloterdijk (2014, 788), “the immunological catastrophe of the Modern Age is not the ‘loss of the center’, but the loss of the periphery.” For what made the “world picture” of the globe such a traumatic break with the morphological circularity of the theatrical arena was that it afforded European consciousness no immunity to its loss of differentiation:

[I]n the earth’s circumnavigated spaces, all points are of equal value. This neutralization subjected the spatial thought of the Modern Age to a radical change of meaning. The traditional “living, weaving and being” of humans in regional orientations, markings and attractions is outdone by a system for localizing any point in a homogeneous, arbitrarily divisible representational space. … [H]umans can no longer remain at home in their traditional world interiors, and the phantasmal extensions and roundings-off of those interiors.

(Sloterdijk 2014, 783–84)

The name of Shakespeare’s Globe signaled the “authentically historical hyper-event of the earth’s circumnavigation and quantification” (Sloterdijk 2014, 862), when Europe’s sense of its own exception was shattered, according to this account of globalization. For along with the thought of the outside, “[a] second abyss opens up in the foreign cultures that … demonstrate to everyone that practically everything can be different elsewhere.” When the “plague ships of knowledge” returned to Europe, it was therefore with the news that “every point on a circumnavigated orb can be affected by the transactions of opponents, even from the greatest distance.” Sloterdijk’s book is prompted, he explains, by the fact that “Europeans have managed to ignore and falsify” this realization for so long that globalization hit them late in the twentieth century as a novel phenomenon, a disregard he identifies in particular with “the last legitimist of European power in the world,” Carl Schmitt. (Sloterdijk 2014, 783, 789–90, 870) In the Nazi legist’s study The Nomos of the Earth, the exceptionalist doctrine that possession is nine tenths of the law received its ultimate legitimation; but Sloterdijk traces Schmitt’s metaphor-spawning association of the terrestrial globe with the geopolitics of Lebensraum back to Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, where Tarquin eyes his victim’s breasts “like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden worlds unconquered” (407–408). As early as 1594, the philosopher comments (Sloterdijk 2014, 876), it was “already sufficient for an object to appear round, desirable and asleep in order to become describable as a conquerable ‘world’.” Yet Sloterdijk (2014, 890) concludes that Shakespeare also foretells the rude wakening from this Eurocentric delusion, when “unanalyzable Calibans declare their decolonization.”

Pictures of the Coliseum and the London replica of Shakespeare’s playhouse bookend Sloterdijk’s Globes to illustrate the immunological transformation it recounts “[f]rom the closed world to the open universe” (Sloterdijk 2014, 525). On Bankside, “The little O o’the earth” (Antony, 5,2,79) still incorporates a pillared tiring house “painted with unnumbered sparks” (Julius, 3,1,63) to symbolize the enfolding celestial sphere, augmented by “Hercules and his load” (Hamlet, 2,2345), the Atlas figure who had propped up the sky in classical cosmography. But the first drama staged in this “majestic world” (Julius, 1,2,132) concerns the impatience of Renaissance men at how the ornamented “canopy most fatal” (5,1,87) of this “disturbèd sky” (1,3,38) oppresses “the narrow world / Like a Colossus” (1,2,135–36); while it is now “the foremost man in all this world” (4,2,74), and not the slave, who is hunted in the circular “O world” (3,1,208) like some beast. “This wooden O” (Henry V, Pro,13) is therefore “naughty” (Julius, 1,1,15), as poststructuralist critics point out, because here “the sway of earth / Shakes like a thing infirm” (1,3,3–4) with “the awl” (1,1,21) of undifferentiation that is personified by the punning Cobbler at the start of the opening play. Shakespeare’s world is the disenchanted globe, in other words, of the age of circumnavigation and quantification; and the Bard of Bankside knows as well as any postmodern philosopher that “the geographically quantified globe is not beautiful, but rather interesting” (Sloterdijk 2014, 771):

Every globe adorning the libraries, studies and and salons of educated Europe embodied the new doctrine of the precedence of the outside. Europeans advanced into this outside as discoverers, merchants and tourists. … The celestial globes set up in parallel with the terrestrial globe … continued to promote the illusion of cosmic shelter for mortals beneath the firmament, but their function became increasingly ornamental. … Nothing can save the physical heavens from being disenchanted. … What looks like a high vault is an abyss perceived through a shell of air. The rest is displaced religiosity and bad poetry.

(Sloterdijk 2014, 792–94)

The Thick Rotundity of the World

Terrestrial globalization terminated what Sloterdijk (2014, 946) terms “the First Ecumene,” because “Christianity too had to face being told of its particularity.” Yet although Shakespeare’s Globe was built on the quayside of a tidal estuary, like a true cosmopolitan threshold or Thames-side window on the world, the liminal situation of this revolving “planet” is seldom connected with the pluralist revelation of seventeenth-century thinkers like Robert Burton (1994, 393) that God, who “is immense and infinite, … should be as diversely worshipped,” for it is “impossible … for one religion to be universall.” Ortelius had styled his atlas a theater, however, precisely because the Dutch mapmaker pictured what John Donne (1996) called “the round earth’s imagined corners” framing an unfolding spectacle within a classical arena like that of Andrea Palladio’s contemporary Teatro Olimpico, a perspective scene in which all the diffuse acts of the global drama would be played according to the unities of time and space, as though, two centuries before universal clock time, contemporaneity was already understood as the temporality of a new planetization.² So the frontispiece to Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum figures a proscenium arch, crowned by twin hemispheres, from behind which “will emerge the show of all the world’s countries,” as in a theater “the actors … perform actions that add up to the play itself, an analogue for amassed knowledge” (Binding 2003, 204). It is not necessary, then, to go as far as Frances Yates, who fantasized about the Globe as a cosmic memory theater, to see how this planetary model for “the idea that the events, features, and phenomena of the created world are infinitely many but all one” (Binding 2003, 206) worked two ways, and how the circularity of Shakespeare’s theater and Ortelian cosmography were “dialogically related” (Gillies 1994, 70). According to Yates, the Globe Theatre “would have been for Shakespeare the pattern of the universe, the idea of the Macrocosm, the world stage on which the Microcosm acted his parts. All the world’s a stage. The words are in a real sense the clue to the Globe Theatre” (Quoted in Gillies 1994, 91).

Anne Barton (1962, 61) noted that it was only at the time of the first terrestrial globes, in the mid-sixteenth century, “that the image of the world as a stage entered English drama,” a trope that Jean-Christophe Agnew (1986, 56) also connects to “England’s new map of commodity circulation” with the emergence of a world market. The topos of the theater of the world would soon become ubiquitous in Baroque culture. But while the notion of the “theater state” served to reinforce social roles in countries like Spain, when Shakespeare has a character sigh “I hold the world but as … / A stage where every man must play a part” (Merchant, 1,1,77–78) it sounds as though this meta-theatricality is keyed to some personal disorientation at “Peering in maps for ports and piers and roads” (19). On this world-stage an Antonio will discover he has to share the same space as his enemy Shylock: the corollary, Sloterdijk (2014, 844) points out, of having investments “not in one bottom trusted, / Nor in one place” (Merchant, 1,1,42–43). For whether or not the Latin motto translated in As You Like It, the first Globe comedy—Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem—was literally written up above its stage, the name of this circular house implied an entire philosophy of life as a unified play, a humanist concept that Ortelius’ biographers connect to his membership of the Protestant sect, the Family of Love. And in one of the rare critical attempts to grasp what was implied in such a name, John Gillies reminds us that, just as universal cartography gained prestige from the old idea of the world-as-theater, so theater acquired universality by being associated with the cosmological picture of planetary cartography, allowing plays like Henry V and Julius Caesar to transmit “the exhilaration of both dramatist and audience with the imagined conquest of geographic space” (Gillies 1994, 90–91).

Critics have long perceived that what distinguishes Elizabethan theater, and above all Shakespeare, is the way it abolishes the representational difference between “world and stage” by literalizing the ancient philosophical cliché (see, for example, the “Epilogue: The World Stage,” in Kottman 2008). Thus, all Elizabethan plays were acted within what was effectively a world map in its own right, Gillies reminds us. Yet the moment of the Globe, which was the high noon of globe manufacture, was also the instant when the very concept of earth’s planetary roundness was delivering the unprecedented shock to Christian universality that Sloterdijk describes, as the persecution of Shakespeare’s coeval Galileo testified (see Binding 2003, 100). So, when he had Puck promise to “put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes” (Dream, 2,1,175), the dramatist registered how uncanny the idea of the earth’s curvature, and Europe’s relativity, must have appeared to a generation experiencing the literal disorientation entailed by the terrestrial sphere: “that it was possible to travel in a straight-line course” yet return to the same place (McLuhan 1962, 11). For East was West, or outside inside, according to the shape of the “earth apple,” as John Hale noted. Hale’s inference that Europe’s self-positioning within planetary space marked the point when inhabitants of this peninsular of Eurasia became “civilized” has been criticized for ethnocentrism. But what the historian described was the loss of Europe’s exceptionality, a loss that, if it did not yet lead to toleration of the intolerable, at least introduced the worldliness that arose from cartographic exposure:

[N]either atlases nor maps showed a Europe biased towards the West. Devoid of indications of national frontiers until late in the century, they were not devised to be read politically. … In spite of the dramatic power games among countries of the West, cartographic Europe retained an even deployment of information across the continental board. Neither cartographers nor traders thought of Europe as comprising an “advanced” Mediterranean and a “backward” Baltic.

(Hale, 1993, 20)

In Shakespeare’s Restless World, a hurried spin-off, via a BBC radio series, of a 2012 exhibition of late-Renaissance bric-à-brac, “Shakespeare Staging the World,” British Museum Director Neil MacGregor relates the first English terrestrial globes, constructed for the Inns of Court by Emery Molyneux in 1592, to what he terms the sixteenth-century “space race,” and proposes that when such instruments “went on triumphant public display” before Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, “Shakespeare would almost certainly have been amongst them.” So, when Oberon boasts how “We the globe can compass soon, / Swifter than the wandering moon” (Dream, 4,1,95–96), according to this reading, “Shakespeare’s very English fairies are, in their whimsical, poetical way, restating the nation’s pride” in England’s triumphal rise from piracy to paramount position (MacGregor 2012, 5–6).³ Such is the elision of nationalism with universalism in every populist celebration of the Bard. Evidently, MacGregor is deaf to the local anti-Elizabethan errancy of that “wandering moon.” To be sure, the representation of space is never neutral, as Francis Barker remarked of Lear’s cadastral map, for the “chart of sovereign possession … is already a field of struggle … the focus of power and danger, and the site of peculiarly powered or impote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Globalizing Literary Genres
• PART I From Here to Early Modernity
• PART II To the Enlightenment and Its Limits
• PART III To the Long Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• PART IV And Back
• List of Contributors
• Index