How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

Abstract

The title of Gloria Fisk's monograph is somewhat deceptive. Seemingly a throwback to a fast-disappearing species of literary criticism—the single-author study—the book is not that at all. Taking Orhan Pamuk as an exemplary case study, Fisk brilliantly leapfrogs from there to raise broader questions on how the field of world literature is constituted in Euro-American academies and institutions; on what underpins our assumptions when reading literary works from different regions, especially those from the global South; and on the chasm between local and global forms of reception while reading international authors. Her monograph can be situated in a two decades-long conversation regarding the field and compass of world literature that has been shaped by a series of key texts, among them, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (originally published in French in 1999 and translated into English in 2005); David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2004); Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2005); Eric Hayot's On Literary Worlds (2012); Emily Apter's Against World Literature (2013); the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015); and Aamir Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). Populated by heavyweight critics, the field has generated a daunting debate that has grown alongside a flourishing mini-industry—at least relative to the rest of the squeezed humanities—that caters to the pedagogy of world literature in undergraduate and graduate curricula, tenure-track hires, research institutes, textbook anthologies, and academic monographs.It is undoubtedly reductive, though nonetheless accurate, to suggest that this debate has largely been divided into the polar camps of the proponents and opponents of world literature. Its proponents see world literature expanding the narrow confines of the Western canon, thereby breaking down disciplinary linguistic and national-literary boundaries, and also generating knowledge about other cultures to foster a cosmopolitan diversity. But its detractors invariably read world literature as the literary handmaiden to a neoliberal ethos that superficially celebrates diversity while reinforcing both the global forces of capitalism and the hegemony of the Anglophone, since these authors and their works are mainly propped up by multinational publishing industries, Western-based literary prizes (e.g. the Booker and the Nobel), and Anglo-American academic institutions. The divide between the enthusiasts and the skeptics of world literature was conveniently on display at a 2011 conversation at the American Comparative Literature Association between Damrosch and Spivak. The former suggested that we “have much to celebrate here” (456), thanks to a global expansion of the literature canon that might lead to “a more genuine understanding of the world” (463), whereas the latter maintained that “to say that [world literature] is the message of capitalist globalization is not to be tendentious” (467).Fisk comes neither to praise nor to bury world literature but instead to intervene elegantly and incisively in this impasse. As she writes, “I am reading the debate for and against world literature with less interest in taking sides than in taking the polarity apart” (166). The two ostensibly opposed camps have more in common than it may seem, she argues, in that both are structurally generated out of the same institutional framework. Operating in a domestic context in which a rhetoric of crisis pervades the humanities, in which the literary sphere of letters is marginalized in the broader public sphere, in which tenure-track positions and undergraduate enrollments in literature departments have dropped precipitously, critics are quick to instrumentalize literature to make more ambitious claims for its political utility. The supporters of world literature insist on “the good world literature can do” because of “the view it gives its readers on [foreign] worlds they would find hard to see without a local and literary guide” and because of “the kinds and degrees of solidarity [it] creates among strangers” (3–4). The importance of the humanities becomes legible insofar as world literature provides an aesthetic incubator for ethical principles that help readers navigate an increasingly plural and globalized world and that can thus counter the homogenizing processes of capital. Detractors, by contrast, see world literature as a product of neoliberal capitalist systems and seek to unmask its underlying complicity with “the cultural logic of the multinational corporation and the neoliberal university” (184). Fisk sees this anti–world literature position making similarly “grandiose claims” for the political radicalism and ethical good of literary studies. She notes the material irony of this critique in view of both the structural marginality of the humanities and the fact that mounting them helps us to “amass the cultural capital we need to get and keep a tenure track job” (184–85) in the neoliberal university in which we all work. Burdened by the assumptions we bring to world literature, we approach global novelists like Pamuk with the expectation that they, too, must function as a political agent of the liberal values of Western academies—to wit, as a defender of free speech, a cross-cultural bridge, a voice for the marginalized, and a critic of capitalism—without any regard for the position these authors occupy in their national spaces. This leads to the promotion of some global authors at the expense of others who do not meet these standards of liberal goodness, and forces novelists writing for a global readership into an uneasy role, caught between their domestic constraints and the international literary norms imposed on them.Fisk unfolds this argument over the course of her monograph with a dazzling demonstration of methodological scope and variety that reveals an expert grasp of different ways of reading. This scope is revealed in the tripartite structure and expanding foci of the book. The first two chapters examine the good attributed to the global novel in the kinds of cultural work it is expected to perform; the next two consider the good values the novelist is expected to champion qua world author; and the final two chapters interrogate the literary institutions (the Nobel Prize and the U.S. academy) that make claims for the good of world literature. Fisk's scale of interpretation thus widens from section to section, with the first hewing toward the more traditional approaches of close reading. She slyly titles her first two chapters “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People” and “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People's History”—common assumptions about the cultural work expected of world literature—but goes on to argue that a novel fails to reliably do such things. Focusing primarily on Pamuk's Snow, she shows how Pamuk toggles between realist conventions and metafictional postmodernism to cannily satisfy and subvert the reader's expectations by creating both proximity and distance between Western readers and his foreign characters. Furthermore, by altering the representation of historical events in Turkey in ways that elude most non-Turkish readers, Pamuk “thematize[s] the limits of the mimetic representation in world literature” (84) and reveals how realism is always culturally specific rather than a transparent lens into a different world.Turning in the next section from a hermeneutic focus on the text to the broader methods of cultural analysis, Fisk explains how the figure of the global author is constructed in the world republic of letters. Chapter 3 examines the controversy stemming from Pamuk's acknowledgment of the mass murder of Armenians—though he does not use the word genocide, as Fisk points out—under the Ottoman Empire to the fury of nationalist Turks, on one hand, and the admiration of his Western readers, on the other. Tracing the reasons for these opposed responses in his local and global readerships, Fisk criticizes how we box a novelist like Pamuk into being an advocate of human rights, even as we fail to attend to the local histories—nationalism, class, colonialism—that shape the Turkish public sphere and make it dangerous for Pamuk to occupy such a position. By doing so, we inadvertently “reinforce the global unevenness we critique” (112). Chapter 4 expands on this paradox by juxtaposing Pamuk with the father of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach, showing how the disciplinary fetishization of authorial exile forces world writers to sacrifice their relationship to their national publics to become celebrated international figures. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6, Fisk draws on the methods of the sociology of literature to clarify the way our definitions of world literature are inseparable from the norms with which our institutions of literary prizes and universities operate. The Nobel Prize honors foreign authors “for behaving like good citizens of participatory democracies” (164), a political standard rarely applied to Western authors, while U.S. academics make claims about world literature to “advance institutional interests” (171) that have little to do with Pamuk himself or his work. Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still.The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. She reminds us of the political limits of criticism; of the meaningful difference between aesthetics and politics in their effects on the world; of our privileged status as tenured or tenure-track faculty trafficking in world literature; and of our complicit if agonized relationship with the structures of literary and academic capitalism. In this respect, her monograph is an accomplished example of what Jeffrey Williams has described as a “new modesty in literary criticism.” He traces the fullest articulation of this trend to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” which recognizes that, despite the long and robust tradition of criticism conducted in the name of “political activism”—particularly under the aegis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and symptomatic reading—such claims overlook the fact that the “disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change” (2). Fisk echoes their call for a new “political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics” (Best and Marcus 15) when she insists that critical discourses which make grandiose pronouncements about world literature—whether about its ethical good or its complicity with capital—obscure the material conditions allowing those pronouncements to be made in the first place. These arguments rely solely on a form of “magical thinking,” Fisk complains, a phrase she repeatedly uses to describe these critical modes, and “we should not confuse talk of revolution for revolution” (Fisk 170). Williams rightly suggests that this trend toward critical modesty emerges in the wake of the waning power and status of the humanities and literary studies. Rather than being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—the Shelleyesque aims of the Nobel Prize formulated by Alfred Nobel (Fisk 137)—we are closer today to Auden's modest rebuttal that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But if critical modesty aspires to “less hubris” in its claims, it also loses something by virtue of its pragmatism—“the utopian impulse of criticism,” according to Williams, what Fisk would call “magical thinking” perhaps. This loss has led to the accusation that these varieties of surface reading ultimately succumb to a certain “political quietism” (Best and Marcus 16), an acceptance of the status quo of the diminished standing of humanistic study in the world.Given that the coda to her monograph is titled “Now, What?,” Fisk is clearly not proposing the quiet acceptance of the world as it is. If the assumptions we make about the good of world literature make us rather bad readers, we could do better, she argues, by developing reading methods that acknowledge our complicity with the neoliberal university instead of polemics that assume our autonomy from it. This might return us to the solutions of a modest criticism: more accurate descriptions of our state of affairs and self-reflexivity about how we are conditioned by them. Fisk's persuasive sociological analysis, however, also points us in a different direction, suggesting that the answer lies not in the intellectual realm of improved reading methodologies but in the material realm of institutional change. If we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Pamuk's local constraints—“give literary establishments . . . a vocabulary through which to see the complexity of [his] relation to the nationalist discourse” (194)—instead of expecting him to function as a neutral conduit across cultures, we can do so only if we continue to have access to scholarship from historians knowledgeable about Turkey, critics fluent with Turkish literary traditions, or institutional ties that link U.S.-based scholars with scholars elsewhere, all of which Fisk's brilliant monograph is indebted to. Put differently, we read world literature best when we retain access to the very methodologies that the present formation of “world literature” has institutionally supplanted to some extent: “area studies, for example, critical race studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and translation theory” (166), housed in the shrinking departments of comparative literature and foreign languages. Fisk acknowledges that there are better and worse polemics against world literature, but in choosing to focus on the “least convincing arguments that scholarly critics make” against it (168), her argument does not give sufficient attention to critiques that are less about establishing one's political purity or academic credentials by inveighing against neoliberalism, and more about confronting the institutional losses and deaths of disciplines that make us collectively worse readers. We need not return to a fetishization of reading world literature in the original language—for Fisk, Apter's Against World Literature is an exemplary instance of this—to argue that there is a profound intellectual loss when that language and literature ceases to be taught if it is replaced by the proliferation of world literature courses in translation. In such a scenario, we eventually lose the opportunity to learn from scholarship by those fluent in different languages, even if we ourselves are not. Thus, although Fisk argues that the debate for and against world literature is one waged in the hermetic walls of the Anglo-American academy that imposes a set of constraints on world authors, it is frequently also the case that this debate is fundamentally about how to read authors like Pamuk well—or, at least, better—insofar as the material distribution of resources across disciplines and departments shapes these readerly practices. Fisk's monograph is invaluable for highlighting how these practices are imbricated in the institutions we inhabit. If we take the logic of her argument seriously, how to become a good reader of world literature may have less to do with improving the critical methodologies of world literature, and more to do with fighting to ensure that the methodologies of adjacent disciplinary formations can continue to flourish in our institutions of learning, rather than be slowly eclipsed by the allure of the global.