How Literatures Begin: A Global History edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney

Abstract

This remarkable book offers seventeen detailed answers to what the editors call a “robust question” (3). The question itself is triple—what is a literature; what is a beginning; and how are they related? The book asks us to “take stock of the tremendous variations within different societies” (4). We do, with a slightly dizzying effect. What does ancient China have in common with modern Russia, or ancient Greece with post-colonial Africa? How close, in any given case, is the relationship between literature and literacy? The editors borrow Wittgenstein’s analogy of family resemblances as a way of saving some connections, but they and their contributors are above all interested in difference. We could add a pair of questions from the same philosopher: “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?”1The chapter titles all name literatures and cultures, and in many cases languages, too—Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German. But how many languages are concealed in the words Indian or African? The larger groupings of the book reflect the lurking riddle. The first two sections identify areas of the world—East and South Asia and the Mediterranean. The third moves from place to language under the rubric of “Modern Vernaculars,” and the fourth, “Modern Geographies,” turns place into a kind of metaphor for complicated categories, namely, Latin American, African, African American, and World Literature. Commenting on this last shift, the editors say that “the birth of the modern nation-state” makes a huge difference to the world of literature and much else, “albeit in often uncomfortable and dissonant ways” (299). Yet three quarters of this book are devoted to cultures active before that birth.In such a context, the idea of the national classic often becomes curiously questionable. If we think of the place of the Chanson de Roland (composed around 1100) in countless histories of French literature, then it seems, as Simon Gaunt dryly says, “somewhat paradoxical that the earliest and most authoritative surviving manuscript was produced in England and written in … Anglo-Norman” (242). Similarly, if we follow Michael Wachtel’s subtle suggestion, The Song of Igor’s Campaign (composed in 1185 or soon after) cannot really represent the beginning of Russian literature since it spent so much time in oblivion, being rescued only in 1790. Medieval German epics and lyrics vanish in the same way, because in Joel Lande’s persuasive reading, German literature was not invented until the eighteenth century. In this regard, we need to remember what the editors call the “heuristic value” of the term, in which the indistinct picture helps us more than clear dogma.The modern meaning of literature as comprising works of the imagination rather than history, religion, the law, or the daily news is often evoked in this book as irrelevant to the question being discussed, but also sometimes as an aid to spotting the literary when it appears in unlikely places. For example, “the notion of play” is essential to Douglas Jones’ sense of the growth of Black American writing in the nineteenth century, along with an awareness of “the imaginative, gritty and vexed resources that sustained Black persons struggling within and against slavery’s ramifications” (362, 361).There are some very interesting definitions of literature in this book, sometimes at odds with each other but more often engaged in an implicit, partial dialogue. We read of “aesthetic efforts beyond the purposes of recording or conveying information” (22: Martin Kern on Chinese literature); of readers who “seek the rewards of information or those of imagination” (84: Sheldon Pollock on Indian literature); of people who “started not just to write things down … but to write things down that might be considered literature” (239: Gaunt on Romance Languages); of scholars who “no longer reduce the ‘written’ and the ‘oral’ to a simple dichotomy” (155: Jacqueline Vayntrub on Hebrew). We are told that “literature is a body of finalized, published, written works belonging to a language or a people” (192: Gregor Schoeler on Arabic; by “published” he means “produced with a public readership or audience in mind”); that we can think of it as “any word that is committed to paper—or, more precisely, to parchment” (281: Michael Wachtel on Russian literature); and that it “is less a product of the world than the world that begins in the literary texts that are the objects on which the philologist’s eye is trained” (374: Jane O Newman on Auerbach). We can argue with any or all of these propositions, and we probably should. But to pluralize meanings and to see how they work is not to lose them. Just the opposite.