Reading for the Planet: Toward a GeomethodologyGatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s

Abstract

The foundational division within world literature studies between forms of close reading and distant reading, or literary theory and literary sociology, is aptly illustrated in these two interesting and provocative critical studies of postwar world literature. Despite their drastically different methods, both critics provide new critical approaches to contemporary world literature with an aim to counter claims of a globalizing monolingual model of world literature by, in Moraru’s case, embedded, formalized histories and individual, archival histories in Marling’s work.Divided into three parts, Reading for the Planet opens with a prologue in the form of a manifesto about the necessity for a critical intervention. This prologue is followed by two sections: the first, “World, Globe, Planet,” provides a thorough and carefully argued critique of existing theories of globalization and world literature; the second, “Geomethodology: Theory and Practice,” offers close readings of an impressive range of fiction (though he discusses novels only) that demonstrate his new method of reading. The manifesto is leveled at positivistic globalization theory, which Moraru describes as comprising abstract, empty categories of managerial space. He sees these categories replicated in critical methods that remain dependent on nation-state models. The subsequent section examines the keywords world, globe, and planet as they have been used by literary and cultural critics, particularly for the ways they relate to a view of globalization as a monocultural singularity. In contrast, Moraru argues for a dialogical, plural form of planetarism; as he puts it, it should be a “relationalized rather than a rationalized system” (52). Moraru seeks a method that will account for globalization’s “others”—the people, geographies, and languages occluded by literary and financial-managerial discourses. In this method, “reading for the planet” means to find in global fiction the “heterotopic co-presence” (6) of literatures such as the presence of Goethe in Yoko Tawada, Haiti in William Faulkner, China in Don DeLillo. Despite its polemical purpose, Reading for the Planet has the rather modest goal of articulating a planetary reading model that attends to the “micro, local, tiny, and the humble” (82). To do so requires, Moraru argues, a geomethodology, which he defines as topological, relational, and ethical; that is, it privileges space, uses a form of deconstructionist analysis, and argues for the planet rather than simply describing it. Certainly, Moraru’s method shows its postmodern affinities in its debt to DeLillo, Gilles Deleuze, Thomas Pynchon, and others; in its familiar criticism of holistic models; and in its call for a method of reading that relentlessly attends to particular differences. However, within this paradigm, Moraru offers nuanced and fine readings of the Romanian novelist Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, the Chinese French novelist Dai Sijie, and more canonical world literature authors, like Zadie Smith and Orhan Pamuk, as models for how his geomethodology suits the intersections of place that occur within contemporary fiction. But why do these novelists all share these similar plots and styles? That it may have something to do with a market that has defined cosmopolitan themes as intrinsic to “serious fiction” does not come up in his analysis, though it is precisely this market context for world literature that is the focus of Marling’s Gatekeepers.Combining David Damrosch’s view of world literature as a process of circulation with the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, James English, and Mark McGurl (though not Pascale Casanova), Gatekeepers examines how four authors, Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami, were made into international authors through a mode of consecration (to use Casanova’s term) involving agents, friendships, translations, reviews, and publishers. The plural in the title is intentional; gatekeeping power does not reside in a single location or sphere. Marling draws on the work of the sociologist Randall Collins and his concept of “interaction rituals” for the terms that constitute the formula he applies to each case. These include emotional energy, the law of small numbers, the first reader, a position, the refracted reputation, and the process and production. While he uses each chapter to illustrate a unique mode of gatekeeping, they all share these similar aspects referring to their process of discovery, encouragement, cultural capital, translation, and finally metropolitan reception. The fact that the same process applies to a counterculture figure like Bukowski as it does to a high culture writer like Auster is part of Marling’s argument about how world literature works as a social system. Written in clear, mostly jargon-free prose (except for its devotion to Collins’s terms), the individual chapters provide career biographies of each author that are full of interesting and revealing anecdotes, such as Bukowski’s television appearances in Germany.Oddly, Marling chooses to supplement each chapter with a “coda” devoted to a female counterpart—Lydia Davis for Auster, Banana Yoshimoto for Murakami, and so on—who did not achieve the same level of consecration in world literature. Since the analysis has no interest in gender, it is never clear what these codas seek to prove about the world literature system or these authors specifically. He writes that the codas do not demonstrate that these women in particular, or women authors in general, fail to appear as often in world literature due to any “structural problems in gatekeeping” since, he writes, “Gatekeeping itself is an opportunity structure” (142). This, however, seems to put the onus back on these women writers for their lack of global success. Not only is this contradicted by the events he describes in the codas, but it further obscures the purpose for including them in the first place. If he wanted to see how gender operates within the rules of gatekeeping, then why not simply study successful women world literature authors? Indeed, there are many women world literature writers—Smith, Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elena Ferrante, the list goes on—who are certainly more significant globally than Bukowski and Auster and whose own gatekeeping narratives would be interesting to consider. Instead, the codas of failed women writers unintentionally inscribe a gender dichotomy to world literature that Marling then struggles to disavow.One shared value of these works is that they limit their arguments about world literature to specific historical periods rather than making ahistorical claims about world literature through the ages. Moraru focuses on literature and globalization both post-1989 and post-9/11 as significant moments that inform the necessity for his critical geomethodology. In contrast, Marling’s study locates world literature as a product of the Cold War, namely, the global counterculture movements of the 1960s, as one of the connecting threads among his subjects. This is a good reminder that, as Amitav Ghosh argues in his essay “The March of the Novel through History,” not every generation reads the same world literature. It is useful to add, too, considering the mainly Western focus of these studies, that for the non-US world, world literature did not “emerge” in the 1960s. As Moraru might argue, in a planetary sense, for those readers it was always just “literature.”