The Global Novel

Writing the World in the 21st Century

Adam Kirsch

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780997722918
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

. What is the future of fiction in an age of globalization?In The Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century's best-known writers-- including Orhan Pamuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolano, Michel Houellebecq, and Margaret Atwood. They are employing a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected. From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, today's novelists use 21st-centry subjects to address the perennial concerns of fiction, like morality, society, and love. The global novel is not the bland, deracinated, commercial product that many critics of world literature have accused it of being, but rather finds a way to renew the writer's ancient privilege of examining what it means to be human.

World Literature and Its Discontents

There is a well-established rule for anyone writing about the increasingly popular, and surprisingly controversial, subject of world literature: Begin with Goethe. It was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who invented the phrase “world literature,” Weltliteratur, in a conversation recorded by his disciple Eckermann in 1827. His mention of the subject is brief, but it has founded a whole discipline: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. . . . National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”

Who could doubt that Goethe’s prophecy has come true many times over? In the twenty-first century, almost two hundred years into the “epoch of world literature,” the canonical books of all languages and cultures have never been easier to access. Whether you want to read the Gilgamesh epic, The Tale of Genji, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or War and Peace—or, for that matter, Goethe’s own works—they are all just a mouse-click away. Nor have living writers ever had a more intimate and up-to-date knowledge of the work of their contemporaries in all parts of the world. A dedicated American reader of fiction today is as likely to be familiar with the works of Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, or Roberto Bolaño as she is with the writers of her own country. Technology, culture, and economics all seem to predict that this union will grow ever closer. Barring a civilizational disaster, it’s hard to see how literature could ever return to a parochial or even merely national perspective.

But if “world literature” were really such a settled matter, Goethe’s words wouldn’t continue to haunt the subject like a guilty conscience. In fact, the more you think about his terms and concepts, the more enigmatic they become. Does “the epoch of world literature” mean simply an age, like our own, in which many books, especially the classics, are available for reading? Or did Goethe hope for something more—a truly cosmopolitan literature, in which national origin would have ceased to matter at all? Could such a thing ever exist, so long as people continue to speak different languages? As long as they do, readers will depend on translations—often translations into English, which is the world’s most popular second language. But is translation a valid form of interpretation, or does it obscure more than it reveals? Does the hegemony of English threaten the diversity of literatures and cultures? And beyond the words on the page, can the national and local context of a book be “translated” in such a way as to make the text as meaningful to foreign readers as it is to its original audience? Goethe believed that national literatures were obsolete, but can a book ever be immediately global? Wouldn’t a truly global literature depend on the abolition of difference altogether?

In this way, what might seem like strictly literary questions turn out to converge with the largest and most urgent issues of our age of globalization. The question of whether world literature can exist—in particular, whether the novel, the preeminent modern genre of exploration and explanation, can be “global”—is another way of asking whether a meaningfully global consciousness can exist. Perhaps the answer is already suggested by the question: It is only because we have grown to think of humanity on a planetary scale that we start to demand a literature equally comprehensive. The novel is already implicitly global as soon as it starts to speculate on or record the experience of human beings in the twenty-first century. Global novels are those that make this dimension explicit.

Of course, this does not mean that the global novel has superseded the novel of the city, or region, or nation. The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived—not through the abolition of place, but as a theme by which place is mediated. Life lived here is experienced in its profound and often unsettling connections with life lived elsewhere, and everywhere. The local gains dignity, and significance, insofar as it can be seen as part of a worldwide phenomenon.

Indeed, the global novel is now the most important means by which literature attempts to reckon with humanity as such. The ambition to speak for and about human nature, which has been the object of critical suspicion for several generations, still flourishes among writers. The difference is that, where a novelist of the eighteenth century might simply assert the unity of human nature—as in Jane Austen’s blithe “it is a truth universally acknowledged”—the twenty-first-century novelist must dramatize that unity, by plotting local experience against a background that is international and even cosmic. But both types of writer advance claims about the nature and destiny of our species. The fact that, in our time, these claims are frequently pessimistic—that they focus on themes of violence, alienation, and reckless exploitation—should not obscure the fact that writing the global novel means making a basic affirmation of the power of literature to represent the world.

It is because the stakes are so high that the academic and journalistic discussion of world literature is so impassioned, and usually so critical. Indeed, the banner of most writers on the subject could be inscribed with the title of a recent book by Emily Apter: Against World Literature. To be against world literature might seem like the ultimate impossibility for a literary scholar, whose vocation is based on reading across borders. Surely world literature is a perfect demonstration of the liberal values on which, all intellectuals depend for their existence—values like tolerance of difference, mutual understanding, and free exchange of ideas.

To be sure, Apter herself is not opposed to any of these things: “I endorse World Literature’s deprovincialization of the canon and the way in which, at its best, it draws on translation to deliver surprising cognitive landscapes hailing from inaccessible linguistic folds.” Put more simply, reading across borders opens our minds and gives us access to new ways of thinking and feeling. But Apter goes on to deplore “tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”

This is one of the commonest charges against world literature: By making foreignness into a literary commodity, it prevents the possibility of any true encounter with difference. In this way, it duplicates the original sin of translation itself, which brings the distant close only by erasing the very language that marks it as distant to begin with. Take “ethnically branded” writing: Once we think we know what, say, an Indian novel or a Latin American novel is bound to give us, we will seek out (or publishers will offer us) only books that match that pre-established image. Genuinely difficult or challenging books will go untranslated and unread. More dangerous still, they will go unwritten, as writers around the world begin to shape their work according to the demands of the global marketplace. In this way, literature approaches the total “substitutability” of a monoculture. Just as Starbucks tastes the same in Stockholm as it does in Los Angeles, so a Swedish novel like Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reads exactly like a treatment for a Hollywood movie (which it then inevitably becomes).

This aesthetic critique of globalized literature goes hand in hand with a harder-edged political critique, such as the one advanced by in the literary magazine n+1 in a much-discussed 2013 editorial, “World Lite.” In this essay, the editors of n+1 directly link the current flourishing of world literature to “global capitalism,” an economic system which, it is implied, all people of good will must oppose. The writers who flourish in this system, who win prestigious prizes and occupy university chairs, are the beneficiaries of an unjust order: “World literature . . . has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it.” World literature is likened to the Davos Forum, a venue where celebrities and tycoons discuss “the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped.” Indeed, world literature has its own institutions—the Frankfurt Book Fair, multinational conglomerate publishers, international literary festivals, the Nobel Prize—which the editors consider to be inherently corrupt.

This hostile view of contemporary “world literature” and its leading lights—the editors of n+1 name Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee, along with younger writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—sees its literary and political deficiencies as mutually reinforcing. The type of “world” writing celebrated today is abstract and deracinated: “A smooth EU-niversality prevails” in novels that are “extremely psychological in character and only vestigially social and geographical.” The particularity of place and culture disappears, as well as formal difficulty of the kind associated with modernism. Along with them disappears the kind of political agenda which the editors of n+1 see as indispensable to a valid literary project: They regret the passing of “the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left.” In both literary and political terms, the “smoothly global” is seen as the foe of “thorny internationalism,” and the editors call for “opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and politics” all at once.

This line of argument can be seen as a form of nostalgia for the union of modernist aesthetics and radical politics that characterized the advanced intelligentsia in the 1930s and 1940s. That it took an effort of will to hold the two parts of that project together is something that “World Lite” tends to ignore. Difficult literature is almost never popular, which makes it an uncomfortable bedfellow for socialist politics; perhaps for this reason, the great modernists were more often sympathetic to fascism than socialism. The idea that literature can, and should, be both politically virtuous and aesthetically challenging is one of those ideals that, as the editors themselves say about socialism, “has so far enjoyed hardly a moment of historical realization.” But for that very reason, this ideal can make actually existing world literature seem compromised and complaisant.

Interestingly, like many critiques of globalization, this attack on globalized literature can rally support from cultural conservatives as well as radicals. In a 2015 article, the American writer Michael Lind observes that “if the size of the global audience is the index,” then the leading works of “contemporary world literature” are genre novels like Larsson’s crime series or George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. This is what Lind calls “world literature in the form of . . . popular culture,” and it represents a kind of nightmare inversion of what Goethe had in mind: not the best that has been thought and said, but the lowest common denominator.

To counter it, Lind calls for the restoration of a frankly elitist model of “global classicism.” The global quality of such writing consists not in popularity across cultures, but a cosmopolitan appropriation of the best models of the past, regardless of their linguistic or national origin. Goethe himself, writing German lyrics based on the medieval Persian poetry of Hafiz, is a good example of this sort of cosmopolitanism. If such writing turns out not to appeal to a wide audience, so be it: Lind points out that Goethe envisioned poetry as the possession of “hundreds and hundreds of men,” not hundreds of millions.

In an unexpected turn, however, Lind also employs this ideal of global classicism as a weapon against modernism, which he characterizes as an artistic movement that cut off writers and readers from literary tradition. Global classicism would, then, be formally conservative, as opposed to the radically innovative classicism of writers like Ezra Pound or James Joyce. It would produce “a genuine world literature far more erudite and refined than global popular culture.” In this way, the attack on global literature can lead toward a cultural politics of restoration, a kind of intellectual protectionism in which writers guard their literary resources against competition from corporate behemoths.

The novelist and translator Tim Parks also argues that the winners in the game of world literature are mediocre books. But in a 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, with the blunt headline “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks expands the critique from genre fiction to literary fiction itself. World literature is not just the name of a canon of great books, Parks argues; it is also a market dynamic, in which authors come to define success as “an international rather than a national phenomenon.” And “from the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension.” Local allusions and references disappear, along with the kind of complex wordplay that is impossible to translate. Apter, resisting this kind of simplification, writes approvingly of “the Untranslatable,” as a kind of wrench thrown into the smoothly turning gears of world literature: “Untranslatability [is] a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan ...