Institutions of World Literature

This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation
of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended,
active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world
literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but
as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as
an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observa-
tion that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and
materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics,
critics, and readers, as weIl as authors themselves. This volume therefore
substantiates, refines, as weIl as interrogates current approaches to world
literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova,
and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market
dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and
translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute
to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in
transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional
dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its method-
ological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the
triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America
as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of
the volume's focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such
as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational
studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

Stefan Helgesson is Professor of English at Stockholm University. He is

the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele,
and Coetzee (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature
(2009), and the editor of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspectiue,
vol. 4 (2006).

Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the

University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Romanticism after the
Holocaust (2010) and Contemporary Literature and the End of the Nouel:
Creature, Aflect, Form (2015).
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Writing, Translation, Markets
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Institutions of world literature : writing, translation, markets / edited by Stefan Helgesson

and Pieter Vermeulen.
pages cm. - (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 47)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 2. Literature publishing.
3. Translating and interpreting. 4. Authors and publishers. 1. Helgesson, Stefan, editor.
II. Vermeulen, Pieter, 1980- editor.
PN45.I532015
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Contents

Acknowledgements IX

Introduction: World Literature in the Making 1

STEFAN HELGESSON AND PIETER VERMEULEN

PARTI
Instituting Literature

1 How Writing Becomes (World) Literature:

Singularity, The Universalizable,
and the Implied Writer 23
STEFAN HELGESSON

2 Instituting (World) Literature 39

PETER D. McDONALD

3 World Literature in a Poem: The Case of

Herberto Helder 53
HELENA C. BUESCU

PART II
The World Literature Market

4 The Oblivion We Will Be: The Latin American

Literary Field after Autonomy 67
LILIANA WEINBERG

5 On World Literary Reading: Literature,

the Market, and the Antinomies of Mobility 79
PIETER VERMEULEN

6 World Literature and Market Dynamics 93

SARAH BROUILLETTE
Vlll Contents
PART III
Postcolonial Worlds

7 ArchivaI Trajectories and Literary Voice in

Indian Ocean Narratives of Slavery 109
MARIA OLAUSSEN

8 African Mediations: Transcultural Writing in Achebe,

Gourevitch, Eggers, and Okri 126
MADS ROSENDAHL THOMSEN

PART IV
Fields of Translation

9 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in

France in the Twentieth Century: The Case of Gallimard,
or the Making of an International Publisher 143
GISÈLE SAPIRO

10 How African Literature is Made: The Case of Authors

from Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa (1960-2010) 160
CLAIRE DUCOURNAU

Il The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field from

a Global Point of View: A Peripheral (Sub )field? 174
YVONNE LINDQVIST

PART V
Worlds in Translation

12 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP":

Provincial Literatures in Global Time-The Case of
Mariene van Niekerk's Agaat 191
ANDREW VAN DER VLIES

13 Transcendental Untranslatables:
Emerson and Translation 209
DAVID WATSON

Contributors 225
Index 229
Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the generous support from the Bank of
Sweden Tercentenary Foundation for the symposium" Instituting Literature:
Writing between Singularity and Transnational System" held at Stockholm
University in June 2013, which laid the foundation for the present volume.
Introduction
World Literature in the Making
Stefan Helgesson and PieterVermeulen

World literature isn't everyone's cup of tea. In department corridors, seminar

rooms as weIl as high-end scholarly publications, it is sometimes disparaged
as a diffuse preoccupation, lacking in focus and seriousness. Worse still, it
has been accused of maintaining outdated, conspicuously Eurocentric disci-
plinary approaches to literature. Sorne of the most thorough condemnations
of world literature have, not unexpectedly, emerged from within the field
of postcolonial studies. One of the main charges has been that the "world"
in world literature is "studiously neutral" (Hitchcock 5) and thereby inat-
tentive to the convoluted, unequal structuring of the world as a lettered
and political space. In similar vein, but with a denser and more capacious
theoretical vocabulary, Emily Apter organizes her recent book Against
World Literature around the daim that world literature is a flattening para-
digm, aIl too enamoured of the ways in which literature does travel instead
of studying the multifarious ways in which it does not. For Apter, therefore,
"the Untranslatable" is a more enabling term for cross-border literary study
(Apter, Against 9).
This volume sets out primarily not to disprove such criticism, but rather
to accommoda te it in a series of investigations of the multiple ways in
which world literature cornes to be. A first point of departure for this
book is precisely that world literature is made, not found. A second is that
world literature de facto exists-as a set of disciplinary interests, a bone of
contention, a pedagogical undertaking, a field of research, and, indeed, as
actual literary texts. Judging from the spate of publications, conferences,
and new institutional formations under the banner of world literature in
recent years, we are in fact witnessing a powerful consolidation of the field,
which is in and of itself a phenomenon that calls for description, analysis,
and reflection. This recent and ongoing institutional entrenchment, apart
from underlining the timeliness of a volume such as this one, confirms
the premise from which we depart: it demonstrates that the dominant,
emergent, as weIl as residual modes of world literature as something made
can be critically examined-which is precisely what the different contri-
butions to this volume set out to do. In this context, it is all-important
that the word "institutions" in our title be read in a double sense: both
in its more conventional meaning, as socially entrenched forms, and in
2 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
the active, verbal sense. To institute something is to bring it into being, as
when the performative function of language is activated. But the agency
required for successful performativity does not emerge out of nothing; it
needs social recognition and sustenance, and it is precisely this dynamic
involving writers, publishers, translators, and scholars that the present
volume explores.
If the first decade of the millennium was dominated by heated debates
over key interventions in the field of world literature (by Pascale Casanova,
Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, and others), the last years have seen its
consolidation: think of the continued success of the Norton and Longman
anthologies of world literature, of publications such as The Routledge
Concise History of World Literature (D'haen), World Literature: A Reader
(D'haen, Domfnguez, and Thomsen), Approaches to World Literature
(Küpper), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (D'haen,
Damrosch, and Kadir), and the forthcoming collaborative undertaking
Literature: A World History (with Gunilla Lindberg-Wada as the main
editor), or of the founding of the Institute for World Literature in 2011.
The last ten years has also seen the establishment of successful courses and
programmes in world literature in places such as Harvard, Simon Fraser
University (Vancouver), the American University of Beirut, and NYU Abu
Dhabi. Even Apter's Against World Literature, mentioned above, testifies
to this consolidation, if only because its pointed interrogation of the pres-
ent shape of world literature studies no longer questions, and thus ends
up reinforcing, the legitimacy of the field. The guiding assumption of
this volume of essays is therefore not that world literature needs to be
"defended," but rather that it should be investigated in its actuality. It is on
that premise that we would like to describe this volume as a contribution
to critical world literature studies.
Of course, the suspiciously simple statement that world literature exists
invites a plethora of other questions. We will inevitably need to begin
by revisiting David Damrosch's seminal question "What is world litera-
ture?," only this time with an awareness that we are referring to a set of
disciplinary protocols and institutional contexts as much as to the literary
works that the se protocols and contexts frame and deliver. And we must
also ask anew Damrosch's less well-known question" Where is world lit-
erature?" ("Where"), given that much of the confusion around the term
arises out of a failure to acknowledge that its meaning and substance
will differ, sometimes sharply, depending on who is using it, in which
contexts, and for what purposes. This introduction begins therefore by
rehearsing sorne salient aspects of the history and usage of the term. We
will then go on to highlight key characteristics of world literature as it
is understood and performed in sorne contemporary disciplinary loca-
tions. Finally, by gui ding the reader through the different sections, we will
explain in greater detail what this volume aims to bring to the table of
world literature.
 Introduction 3
1. RESIDUES: GOETHE, MARX, AND AFTER

The thoroughly European geneaology of the term "world literature" is weIl

known. Goethe in 1827 and Marx and Engels in 1848 are the famous har-
bingers of world literature as something that will emerge in the modern age.
It is certainly the case that Rabindranath Tagore provided an early Indian-
or, more precisely, Bengali-account of "world literature," but even this rare
non-European instance arguably had a strong connection both to Goethe
and the post-Enlightenment philological revolution. Tagore's Calcutta,
after aIl, had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries been a key strategic
site for the epistemological and disciplinary ordering of the world's lan-
guages and literatures (Mufti). It is therefore necessary to appreciate that
the term "world literature" was born of the specific and complex "planetary
consciousness" (Pratt) that emerged in the modern era under the double
auspices of European colonialism and the rapid expansion of the (human
as weIl as natural) sciences in Europe. Indeed, the first recorded German
use of Weltliteratur dates back already to the eighteenth century, which fur-
ther confirms that the idea had been brewing for sorne time in the German
Enlightenment's dialectic negotiations between national particularism-
routinely associated with Herder-and cosmopolitan universalism-most
famously formulated by Kant (D'haen 5-7).
Even at this early stage, however, it was by no means self-evident what
the term should refer to. Goethe's unsystematic musings in Johann Peter
Eckermann's Gesprache mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe) first made
the term current among wider literate circles--not only in Europe proper, but
certainly restricted to "Euro-literate" circles. There is now broad agreement
that Weltliteratur for Goethe was first and foremost an ideal space of sorts
who se time had come, an elevated concert of voices from different times,
languages, and cultures. And insofar as the concert was made audible to size-
able audiences, this was above aIl thanks to translation. In the Gesprache,
Goethe mentions having just read "a Chinese novel" in translation and extols
the virtues of translations of his own writings into other languages. And with
a work such as the West-ostlicher Divan (1819), which engages Persian lyrical
forms, Goethe also actively, indeed almost programmaticaIly, contributed to a
form of literature that could not be imagined as belonging to one national or
linguistic space only. As will become evident, this midwifing of world literature
by authors themselves figures prominently in the first section of this volume.
Against Goethe's idealistic take on world literature, scholars routinely
invoke Marx and Engels as a materialist counterpoint. In the Commu-
nist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels did not hail world literature with
Goethe's enthusiasm. They observed it instead in more neutral terms as an
inevitable after-effect of the internationalization of capital:

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,

we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of
4 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The
intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and
more impossible, and from the numerous national and local litera-
tures, there arises a world literature. (39)

Yet Marx and Engels share a temporal vector with Goethe: aU three imagine
world literature as something that is not yet here but is about to come; world
literature is both inevitable and imminent, but it is not yet something that
exists. Interestingly, the Manifesto itself was meant to be "born-translated"
(Walkowitz 569) by being published simultaneously in English, French,
German, ltalian, Flemish, and Danish. These plans didn't materialize at the
time, and its initial impact was "exclusively German" (Hobsbawm 4). Yet the
ambition as such manifests, again in a future-oriented spirit, an intention on
Marx's and Engels's part to contribute performatively to the establishment
of the world literary space that they predicted.
If the early uses of the term "world literature" are at least partly aspira-
tional and utopian, partly cautionary, they are most certainly directed towards
the future, ev en if the term is meant to gather the heritage of the deep pa st
in its fold. A culmination and conceptual end-point of this forward-Iooking
approach can be found in Erich Auerbach's largely pessimistic account from
1952, in which he predicted that "man will have to accustom himself to
existence in a standardized world, to a single literary culture, with only a few
literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith
the notion of Weltliteratur would be a t once realized and destroyed" (3).
World literature in both the Goethean and Marxian senses, then, has been
shaped in the ambit of a geographicaIly expansive (and often imperialist)
planetary consciousness as weIl as an ambivalent temporality of progress
and historicism-a temporality that was already decisively inflected by
Marx and is lucidly mourned by Auerbach. This macro-scale spatial and
temporal backdrop helps to explain why the term can mean so many dif-
ferent things to different people. If sorne see it as just a code word for the
Western canon, others think of world literature as everything not included
in Western literature-in which case the "world" in "world literature" is
akin to that in the contentious market label "world music." And again,
where sorne conceive of world literature in terms of maximal and convivial
diversity, others-not least Auerbach-see it as the final and devastating
triumph of the homogenizing forces of modernity.
From our present vantage point, we must note that world literature has
always been a polysemie term, constituted by tensions and polarities rather
than a single, consistent meaning. In their TheOJ')' of Literature (1948)-
once a compulsory textbook for students of literature and a formative text
for postwar literary studies-René WeIlek and Austin Warren distinguished
between three meanings of the term (49). The first is precisely the future-
oriented Goethean sense; the second is the encyclopaedic sense of the sum
 Introduction 5
total of aIl literatures everywhere; and the third, which has perhaps been
the most popular, is the notion of world literature as a treasure trove of
masterpieces.
These three different senses of the term have been combined in various
ways over the past two centuries in what can be described as a fourth defini-
tion of the term: world literature as a field of study (see also A. Pettersson,
"Transcultural" 470). As Theo D'haen and others have demonstrated, this
institutional dimension of world literature has a more diversified-but still
very European and overwhelmingly male-dominated-history than the
standard references to Goethe, Marx, Engels, and Auerbach would imply.
Since the nineteenth century, scholars such as Jean-Jacques Ampère, Hugo
Meltzl, Ernst Robert Curtius, Claudio Guillén, and René Etiemble have aIl
promoted their own versions of literary study that in different ways move
across or sidestep the national boxes of conventionalliterary study.

2. WORLD LITERARY DOMINANTS: CASANOVA,

DAMROSCH, MORETTI

These venerable precursors notwithstanding, it is fair to say that the stakes

of world literature rose dramatically around the turn of the miIlennium.
Three scholars are typicaIly associated with this development, namely
Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch. Yet besides the
scholarly strength and bravura of their interventions, we need to recognize
other factors that helped prepare literary studies for the global turn it took
in the last quarter century. AIl through the 1990s, renewed and intensified
critical pressure had been applied to the global question in the humanities. In
particular, postcolonial scholars devised methods of reading that disrupted
the nation-based protocols of English literary and cultural studies. Edward
Said developed what he caIled "contrapuntal reading"-as in the famous
example of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (80-96)-so as to render visible
the occlusions and obfuscations of colonial discourse; Homi Bhabha, who
already engaged with Goethean world literature in his seminal The Location
of Culture from 1994 (16-17), applied a poststructuralist optic on writings
emerging in and after empire; Gayatri Spivak, for her part, reconfigured
feminist, Marxist, and Derridean approaches so as to accommodate colo-
nized and post-colonized worlds, while EIleke Boehmer provided synoptic
overviews of Anglophone writing across four continents.
In brief, the same decade that witnessed an intensified process of glo-
balization foIlowing the end of the Cold War in 1989 also saw a rapid
increase in the globalization of the humanities and social sciences. A work
that provided a theoretical fulcrum for these developments was the social
anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996). Appadurai's
main claim was that the acceleration of mobility and the proliferation of
new communication technologies (and this was long before Facebook and
6 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
YouTube) required new, deterritorialized ways of conceptualizing culture
and community in terms of "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," "financescapes,"
and so on (33). It is in this context of a heightened global sensitivity that
we must understand the remarkable impact in literary studies of the work
of Casanova, Moretti, and Damrosch. Even if Casanova downplayed the
actual term "world literature," each in thei-r own way provided theoretically
novel ways of approaching literature in a global framework.
A student of Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova presented in La République
mondiale des lettres (1999)-translated as The World Republic of Letters in
2004-a grand theOl'y of the successive stages of the autonomization of the
literary field. Choosing the vernacular turn in France in the sixteenth century
as a point of departure, she argued that "literature" has since evolved into
a global system with national literatures vying for international prestige,
and with the graduaI emergence of strong centres of consecration, most
notably Paris. A strong point in Casanova's bold account-which stirred
controversy, but often based on a simplistic understanding of her Paris-
centricism-is her observation that literature to a certain degree constitutes
a world unto itself-rather than being, say, a mere appendix of global capi-
talism. This means that writers from "dominated" spaces such as Latin
America and Africa have a qualified chance of entering this space, provided
that they adopt its values. This perspective has been a productive adden-
dum to the otherwise more directly politicized account of transcontinental
literary exchanges provided by postcolonial scholars.
Franco Moretti also elaborated a systemic notion of world literature,
which he formulated as a methodological challenge: "world literature is not
an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method:
and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That's not
how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager-a hypothesis, to
get started" ("Conjectures" 55). Famously, Moretti's hypothesis concerned
the "law" that allegedly governs the global evolution of the novel: foreign
form combined with local content and local narrative voice. The method
he proposed to prove this law was "distant reading," which dispenses with
direct encounters with literary works and instead invests in compiling previ-
ous scholarship so as to get a comparative overview of general tendencies.
This was Moretti's initial wager to get world literature to move beyond its
hagiographie concern with a "canonical fraction" of literary production (55).
Less revolutionary than he made it out to be-as it can quite accurately be
characterized as a mixture of established sociological methods and Imman-
uel Wallerstein's world-system theory-the notion of distant reading none-
theless provoked a vast debate, mainly in the English-speaking academe
(Prendergast) .
Casanova's and Moretti's foci were different, with the former theorizing
literary value and consecration and the latter tracking the wide dissemina-
tion of fonn. What the y had in common, however, was their understanding
of world literature as a unified but unequal system, organized by hierarchies
 Introduction 7
obtaining between centre and periphery and animated by endemic forms of
symbolic violence. The third major figure in this post-millennial upsurge,
David Damrosch, circulated and curated a more open-ended conception
of world literature. Attuned to the task of teaching rather than theorizing
world literature, Damrosch provided an elegant definition:

A work enters world literature by a double process: first, by being

read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world
beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin. A given work
can enter into world literature and then fall out of it again if it
shifts beyond a threshold point along either axis, the literary or the
worldly. (What 4 )

Its unmistakable grounding in the practice of reading actual works of

literature is not the only thing that sets Damrosch's intervention apart from
those of Casanova and Moretti. Damrosch is interested in the "phenom-
enology" of texts in circulation rather than in their ontological constitu-
tion in a system. That is to say: for Damrosch, there is nothing in and of
itself that makes a given work a work of world literature. It is only when
it moves, when it is translated, when it is read at a remove, that the term
"world literature" becomes a relevant descriptor. "World literature," that is,
is not a rigorous set of systemic affordances and constraints, but is a post
hoc observation of particular trajectories of textual mobility.
This account has so far implied that the early post-millennial career of
world literature occurred largely in and around Anglophone, North American
academic contexts. There is sorne truth to this, a truth that somehow
reinforces itself as soon as one discusses these issues in English. Pascale
Casanova's rise to global fame undeniably coincided with the English trans-
lation of her book in 2004. And despite the massive scope of his five-volume
encyclopaedia of the novel in ltalian, entitled Il Romanzo, it is Moretti's
English-language work that has secured his international impact. Even so, it
is critically important to recall the multiple linguistic and academic contexts
within which world litera l'y scholarship has evolved over the past twenty
years. Casanova, of course, emerged out of the same school of sociology in
Paris that also shaped Johan Heilbron's and Gisèle Sapiro's ground-breaking
work on the sociology of translation. On a different tack, but also in France,
Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud challenged the jaded imperial hierarchy of
the "francophonie" (referring to Francophone literature from outside France)
in their manifesto (and subsequent volume) "Pour une littérature-monde" (Le
Bris and Rouaud). In Brazil, Roberto Schwarz's work on the circulation and
reception of European literature provided Moretti with crucial impulses for
the" Conjectures on World Literature." In Scandinavia, global perspectives
on literature have been developed in a number of contexts, from projects on
literary history such as the Danish Verdens litteraturhistorie (Hans Hertel
et al., published in the 1980s and 1990s) and the Swedish single-volume
8 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
Vatldens litteraturer (M. Petersson), to more theoretical interrogations of
the very premises of studying literature on a world scale, as can be found
in the volumes Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective (Helgesson;
Lindberg-Wada; M. Petersson; A. Pettersson). It is also a Danish scholar,
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, who has provided one of the most succinct intro-
ductions to the field with his Mapping World Literature from 2008. And the
list goes on: among the countries with particularly long scholarly traditions
of world literature, one should mention Hungary, Russia-where Bakhtin's
influence remains strong-and Romania. Chinese interest in world litera-
ture has risen sharply in recent years, as the 2011 conference "The Rise of
World Literatures" in Beijing and work by scholars such as Zhang Longxi
dernonstrates. As one of the most obvious examples of an "institution" of
world literature, finally, the Institute for World Literature has since its incep-
tion organized high-profile summer sdlOols in China, the United States, and
Turkey. Dare we draw a provisional conclusion from this disparate disciplin-
ary picture? Perhaps this: if world literature in its North American guises
has most powerfully been a pedagogical undertaking, the stress elsewhere
has often been on its ability to generate new research agendas. This volume
places itself at the latter end of this spectrum.

3. EMERGENCES: TRANSLATION STUDIES, BOOK HISTORY,

SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE

The standard account of current world literature studies aside, it is crucial

to underline at least three other developments that alert us to the multi-sited
emergence of the discipline, namely translation studies, book history, and
the sociology of literature. Ir is one of the merits of Emily Apter's Against
World Literature, which in its subtitle refers to the "politics of untranslat-
ability," to have identified translation as a relatively understudied aspect
of world literary circulation. Building on her earlier book The Translation
Zone, Apter underscores the value of linguistic material that stubbornly
resists translation-of the inevitable residues that processes of textual trans-
mission and consumption secrete and that extant world literary discourses
often leave unaddressed. While Apter's criticism of celebratory accounts of
frictionless global circulation is well ta ken, her emphasis on the singularity
and ineffability of the untranslatable underestimates the achievements of lit-
erary translation studies, as it has been instituted since the 1970s, in tracking
the complex dynamics of translation processes; indeed, we can observe that
the acknowledgement of the vital role of translation by prominent scholars
such as Apter, but also, for instance, Rebecca Walkowitz, Lydia Liu, and
Gayatri Spivak, aIl too rarely leads to a sustained engagement with actually
existing translation studies. At least four of the chapters in this book-by
Sapiro, Lindqvist, Watson, and Van der Vlies-demonstrate how a sustained
study of translation as a practice and a publishing endeavour can illuminate
 Introduction 9
the question posed by world literature; these chapters reflect our belief that
the diverse procedures of translation studies can refine and enrich the world
literature paradigm.
Standard accounts of translation used to devalorize translated texts
as diminished products, and early versions of world literature at times
considered the reliance on translation as regrettable inevitabilities (D'haen
117-18). eurrent world literary perspectives, in contrast, emphasize that the
global circulation of texts crucially depends on translation, and they under-
line that this necessitates a more fine-grained calculus of loss and gain. David
Damrosch noted that unlike non-literary texts, which "neither gain nor lose
in a good translation" (What 288), literary language is "language that either
gains or loses in translation" (289). What is distinctive about world literary
language, for Damrosch, is that it gains in translation, as "stylistic losses"
are "offset by an expansion in depth as [these works] increase their range"
(289). If translation studies typically complicate and nuance elegant formulas
such as Damrosch's, his intervention helpfully foregrounds the productiv-
ity, rather than the inevitable impoverishments, of translation. As we noted
above, this notion of translation as a motor of creativity was already a cru-
cial aspect of Goethe's understanding of world literature.
Literary translation studies has increasingly shifted its attention from
source texts and questions of equivalence and authenticity to the circulation
and reception of texts in the receiving culture. As Gideon Toury, André
Lefevere, Susan Bassnett, and others have shown, the norms and values in a
target culture not only shape the ways in which a given text is translated-
whether it is, for instance, received as canonical or marginal, peripheral or
central-but also the selection of which texts are being translated. Translation
can be conceived as an ongoing process of institutionalization: when a
dominant culture decides to translate a text from a non-dominant culture, it
endows that text with a certain prestige as it exercises its power to consecrate
it; and conversely, when a non-dominant culture translates texts from pow-
erful cultural centers, it imports the prestige that these texts afford. Acts of
translation, then, count as vital events in the receiving culture. The analysis
of such transfers-whether they count as "domestications," "refractions," or
"foreignizations," to invoke but sorne of the field's key terms--has not only
been inspired by the work of Casanova, but also, and already in the 1980s
and 1990s, by the polysystem theory developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, which
provides a dynamic account of the interrelations between central and periph-
eral sub-systems within an interlocking polysystem. In such constellations,
translation, far from being a mere derivation, becomes a spur to creativity
and change.
AlI this means that translation processes constitute a privileged object
for world literary studies that aim to trace global patterns of textual move-
ment. By showing that processes of translation are inevitably implicated in
struggles over cultural prestige, both within and between cultures, trans-
lation studies inscribe the dynamics of literature in ongoing processes of
10 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
institutionalization; and if Damrosch's valorization of translation arguably
threatens to locate literary change in a textualist vacuum, translation studies
resolutely inserts it into contexts of what Emily Apter calls the "jockeying
for power and respect in the field of language" (Translation Zone 244). The
study of translation can also considerably nuance and complicate Moretti's
formula for the global career of the novel (f'Ûreign form, local content); and
as Lawrence Venuti, among others, has demonstrated, such a more fine-
grained account requires that we complement Moretti's focus on distant
reading-or indeed, Even-Zohar's polysystem theory-with a principled
attention to the minutiae of textual change (Venuti).
Book history (or history of the book) is another scholarly field that brings
into focus the institutional and material dimensions of the asymmetries of
globalliterary circulation. Since the 1960s and 1970s, scholars such as Roger
Chartier, Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean
Martin, and D. F. McKenzie have reminded the study of literature that its
objects are not just texts, or alterations between texts, but that these altera-
tions crucially consist in material processes in which texts, in the words of
Chartier, become "objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed, and today
computerized" (53). The materials, media, and formats in which texts travel
affect the ways their meanings can be actualized in different contexts; book
history trains its focus on the material, social, and economic dimensions that
inform the manifestation of texts as physical objects-as books, as scripts, or
as data. Like translation studies, it shows that literary transmission cannot
be reduced to an interaction between authors and readers, and brings into
fOClls a range of agents-publishers, censors, printers, teachers, critics-that
allow texts to count (or not) as world literature; like translation studies,
the n, it shows how literary mobility is marked by power struggles-not only
over who can decide on textual meaning, but also, and more radically, over
the materialities through which meaning can be given shape.
Book history first established itself in the study of three particular areas:
early modern Britain, ancien régim,e France, and the nineteenth-century
United States (Hackel 5)-all moments that saw a radical reorganization of
the infrastructures of textual production and consumption. Another obvi-
ous domain in which such radical reorientations and shifts in power asserted
themselves is, of course, that of colonization, and the field of postcolonial
studies has since the millennium begun to explore the complex roles that
print (and printing) assumed in different colonial locales (Van der Vlies
13-17). While it might seem obvious to see the printing press as an agent of
colonization and as an aggressively modernizing force, this recent research
has yielded more nuanced results that have notably challenged many of the
categories that European and American book-historical scholarship tended
to take for granted-most remarkably the category of the book itself-and
fostered an appreciation of the diverse fonns that linguistic expression
in writing and print takes across different societies (Barber; Hofmeyr).
By weaning book history from a principled focus on the book toward a
 Introduction 11
consideration of a broader range of materialities, book history through
postcolonial eyes (to quote the tide of an important book by Robert Fraser)
has made the field available as a vital interlocutor for world literary study.
There are at least three further reasons why we believe that an intensified
dialogue between book history and world literature is a promising avenue.
The first ties in with the volume's ambition to interrogate world literature's
recent institutionalization. As the contributions to this volume by McDonald
and Weinberg underline, one salient aspect of this institutional consolidation
is its reliance on a particular kind of book: the anthology. The success of the
Longman and Norton anthologies of world literature means that many of
the texts that are routinely described as world literature reach their audiences
as part of anthologies. That many of these texts accordingly only circulate as
excerpts is but the most visible sign of the impact that the anthology format
has on the actuality of world literature. We can add that the consolidation of
world literature as a research paradigm has in its turn materialized through
a range of different formats; we can think of the formats of the "compan-
ion" and the "reader," or of the repeated reincarnations of Moretti's semi-
nal provocations-as journal articles, as part of a volume debating world
literature (Prendergast), as a monograph on the merits of abstract models
for literary history (Graphs), or as part of a monograph promoting distant
reading (Distant Reading). Taking into account these differences is a crucial
dimension in any understanding of the institutions of world literature.
The global duopoly of the Longman and Norton anthologies-about
which Norton boasts on its website that it has been "[r]ead by millions of
students since its first publication"-alerts us to a second issue where book
history can enrich world literature enquiry: the fact that the international
publishing market is increasingly dominated by a small group of ever larger
players. This means that most contemporary literary production, while
inevitably locally inflected, is inscribed in a supranational system of circu-
lation by the very fact that it is written for publication. This is especially
true of publications in the major former colonial languages such as French,
Spanish, Portuguese, and English-the languages to which this volume lim-
its itself. The fact that the production and consumption of texts published
in one of these languages are almost inescapably inflected by economic and
strategic interests of geographically distant agents is something that a book-
historical approach can make visible. In this way, book history can make
an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the tensions between
the cosmopolitan and the national, or between the metropolitan and the
provincial, as they figure in the world literature field.
A third book-historical aspect of CUlTent world literary circulation concerns
the precipitously shifting relations between print and digital media. The ri se of
digital media necessitates a drastic reconsideration of, for instance, Casanova's
focus on Paris and, to a lesser extent, London and New York as capitals of
globalliterary power. The recent consecration of Roberto Bolaiio as a world
literary phenomenon, for instance, crucially depended on the mediating
12 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
role of Amazon, which promoted Bolafio's The Savage Detectives as part of
its monthly "5ignificant 5even" list, a decision that was instrumental in its
American, and later global, success. In a digital age, there might be grounds for
considering 5eattle-where Amazon has its headquarters-"a new center of
literary capital" (Pollack 357). New digital possibilities are, moreover, bound
to reconfigure the relations between oral and print formats, which are espe-
cially charged in colonial and postcolonial contexts. As a number of contribu-
tors to this volume show, the relations between different materialities to which
book history attunes us is not restricted to a "distant" or systemic a pproach;
literary texts have always displayed an awareness of the interrelations between
different media and materialities, and the ways in which they express that
awareness can only be accessed through rigorous attention to textual detail.
Book history intersects with another research tradition that, we believe,
deserves to become a more systematic interlocutor for world literature
studies: that of the sociology of literature. This is, in truth, best considered as
a polyglot cluster of rather diverse intellectuallineages. These traditions share
a conviction that literature needs to be studied as a social phenomenon-or
more properly, as an interrelated set of phenomena, such as the production,
circulation, distribution, and consumption of literary products. An inherently
interdisciplinary enterprise, sociologies of literature have taken different
shapes in different national contexts. We will briefly mention four.
First, there is the tradition of the Frankfurt 5chool, which channelled
Marxist social theory and an often normative aesthetics into influential
and ambitious interrogations of the multifarious relations between social
and literary realities. Apart from the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor
W. Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal, it is perhaps Jürgen Habermas's early
Strukturwandel der Oflentlichkeit (1962) that remains most relevant; a
magisterial attempt to trace the sociohistorical emergence of the public
sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, Habermas's study underlines the cru-
cial role of the literary in the development of bourgeois society, even while
it understands the literary as essentially composed of institutions such as
the salon and the press. The Frankfurt 5chool's contribution to the sociol-
ogy of literature exemplifies the latter's inclination to encompassing and
synthetic perspectives-a tendency that informs at least one aspect of world
literature studies' ambition to coordinate the singular and the transnational.
It also underlines the enabling role of Marxist thought in formulating the
question of the relation between the social and the literary, even if many
of the most persuasive answers to that question-including those of the
Frankfurt 5chool itself-have markedly deviated from Marxist orthodoxies.
The Marxist influence and the tendency toward synoptic perspectives
also made themselves felt in France, where they informed the work of Pierre
Macherey and Lucien Goldmann. Yet here these strands were also enriched
by a more empirical orientation: we can think of Robert Escarpit, whose
studies of "literary facts" rigorously restricted themselves to the "facts" of
the life of literature, and especially of Pierre Bourdieu. Using and developing
 Introduction 13
methodological tools for surveying and mapping the logic of cultural prefer-
ences, Bourdieu extensively studied the social history and the logics of liter-
ary valuation and canon formation. Pascale Casanova's work is unthinkable
without the example of Bourdieu; the same can be said of the work of Johan
Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro. They have theorized and mapped what they caH
"a world system of translation," which exemplifies the productive interaction
between translation studies, the sociology of literature, and world literature
that this volume wishes to foreground (Sapiro; Heilbron and Sapiro).
The combination of a Western Marxist inspiration and an empirical
orientation also marked the approach instituted since the 1960s in the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The centre initially
built on the intellectual foundations laid by Richard Hoggart (the centre's
first director) and Raymond Williams, to which literature was central, before
it later expanded its sociology of literature into a comprehensive study of
culture-including work, leisure, consumption, and everyday life. If the evo-
lution of British cultural studies testifies to the permeability of the borders
between literature and other domains of social life, the long Swedish tradi-
tion of the sociology of literature-exemplified by Lars Furuland and Johan
Svedjedal-seeks to develop a comprehensive, inclusive, and interdisciplinary
perspective on geographically and historically circumscribed literary domains
as a whole (Svedjedal). Attempting to transcend the more local interests of
book"historical, formalist, or genetic approaches, it traditionally aims at a
more encompassing account of literary phenomena.
As this short overview of different European traditions shows, the
"sociology" in "sociology of literature" constitutes too diverse and too inter-
nally conflicted a field for it to serve as a solid empirical grounding for world
literature research, if such a thing were needed (English); at the same time,
its variations along the axes of the singular and the transnational and of the
empirical and the abstractly theoretical are precisely what make it a privileged
interlocutor for world literary research. This capaciousness certainly marks
the work of Moretti, which dissolves the literary work as the default unit
of critical analysis and instead trains its eye on devices, themes, tropes, and
"clues" that can be mapped through an interaction of qualitative and quanti-
tative methods. It also characterizes other worldly extensions of the sociology
of literature. We think here of the work of Wendy Griswold, whose sociology
of culture has used ethnographie and distant reading methods to study the
realities of novel reading in Nigeria and the formation of a "reading class" in
places like Norway, Italy, and the United States (Bearing Witness; Regional-
ism); or that of Sarah Brouillette, whose first book offered a careful mapping
of the reciprocal relations between the institutions of international publishing
and the texts they inscribe. Brouillette's work showcases how book history
and the sociology of literature can enrich each other; through its meticulous
attention to the literary texts that it situates, it at the same time demonstrates
how systemic and micrological perspectives can collaborate to envision a
world literature that is both resolutely worldly and unflinchingly literary.
14 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter
4. OUTLINE OF THIS VOLUME

Without writers, no world literature. For this reason, the first section of this
volume focuses mainly on the agency of writers, and on how the singular
act of writing inscribes itself in-or is already shaped by-world literary
exchanges. Stefan Helgesson's chapter proceeds from the premise that world
literature provides a limit-case for how the singularity of writing can be made
"universal." Drawing on examples from Fernando Pessoa,]. M. Coetzee, Ngugi
wa Thiong'o, and Assia Djebar that bring the singular moment of writing
preceding publication and circulation into focus, it argues that this, too, is
both pressured and sustained by world literary values upheld institutionally.
Helgesson introduces the notion of the "implied writer" as a conceptual tool
to identify this uneven and socially situated give-and-take between singularity
and system in which the "right to nal'rate" is always at rislc
In "Instituting World Literature," Peter D. McDonald draws our attention
to the verbal sense of "institution," arguing-in ways that resonate with
Helgesson's essay-that works of literature can be disruptive acts of institution
in their own right. McDonald considers the implications this has for world
literature by looking at James ]oyce's Finnegans Wake in the modernist "little
magazine" transition in the 1920s, and at Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's trans-
lations from the Prakrit in David Damrosch's The Longman Anthology of
World Literature. McDonald forcefully argues that literary institutions-
anthologies, magazines-can never hope to contain the force of verbal insti-
tuting, and that a comprehensive account of the dynamics of world literature
requires an appreciation of the interaction between these vectors.
The productivity of acts of writing and of what she calls a non-
domesticating practice of translation is further explored by Helena C. Buescu.
Focusing on the work of the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder, Buescu
investigates his practice of producing "poems changed into Portuguese,"
whereby the transformation (or even "cannibalization") of distant traditions
in a so-called national literature can plausibly be seen as a transformative
"worlding" and estrangement of the national. Cumulatively, the essays in
the first section of this volume powerfully illustrate that the instituting of
world literature is animated by the constitutive tension between writing and
system, between the singular and the transnational.
The second section of essays focuses on one incarnation of the transna-
tional that threatens to overwhelm and neutralize the constitutive tension
propelling literary writing: the world market. One effect of the neoliberal
reorganization of society in the pa st few decades has been the graduaI
erosion of the hard-won autonomy of the literary and cultural spheres, as the
market increasingly extracts value from cultural and literary practices that
used to enjoy at least a semi-autonomous status, and as gestures of dissent
are seamlessly enlisted as niches of marketable difference. AIl three essays in
this section observe how these developments have affected the production
and consumption of contemporary literature in ways that calI for a different
critical engagement on the side of scholars and critics.
 Introduction 15
Liliana Weinberg's essay traces the alteration of the Latin American
literary field, as the intrusion of the world market has demobilized the mutu-
ally reinforcing interplay between social, literary, and cultural institutions
that developed in the twentieth century. At the same time, the shift of literary
power from Latin America to global centres-what Weinberg refers to as a
"text drain" ---has made the transnational region that" Latin America" names
almost obsolete. Latin American literature, Weinberg concludes, inhabits the
globalized world as an anthologized culture-a culture that collects remain-
ders of a literary culture as a strategy to preserve the hope of recovery and
recuperation.
Taking on board the first section's affirmation of the inevitable
co-implication of the singular and the transnational and Weinberg's dire
diagnosis of the forces of the market, Pie ter Vermeulen's essay starts from the
observation that the saturation of the literary field by the market makes it
impossible to valorize literary singularity and untranslatability as somehow
magically untouched by the compulsive circulation and comprehension that
the market dictates. Instead, he proposes a strategy of world literary read-
ing that reads contemporary fiction's near-saturation by socioeconomic but
also affective dynamics; a careful and close reading of literature's inflection
of these forces, Vermeulen argues, is bound to reveal frictions, overlaps, and
tensions that point to the limits of the market's claim on literature. If this is a
decidedly unheroic conclusion, it provides one way to account for the persis-
tent vitality of world literature.
Sarah Brouillette looks critically at the prevalent discourse around world
literature that sees it as insufficiently resistant to its solicitation by capital.
The point, Brouillette shows, is not to design and valorize a more subversive
mode of writing-as if the market would not find a way to co-opt such ges-
tures of defiance-but to realize that these discussions over world literary
style obscure the lack of a proper political economy of literary production.
Her essay argues and collects resources for a more principled sociological
engagement with the ways labour, property, and ownership work within the
literary system; the field of literary production, she shows, is riven by the
uneven distribution of the agency and ability to author and of uneven access
to reading materials and to the means of publication. Training our critical
eye on the se inequalities not only brings into focus the reality of capitalist
social relations, but it also attunes our reading practices to contemporary
literature's intense occupation with these realities.
The volume's third section explores the reciprocal relation between the
singular and the transnational in postcolonial contexts. As this introduction
has underlined, postcolonial studies has played an enabling role in foster-
ing attention to the questions of comparison and transnationality that are
central in early twenty-first-century world literary studies. More recently,
however, postcolonial scholars have reminded world literature of the pri-
macy of the socioeconomic relations codified by colonialism and persisting
in the postcolony for an understanding of literature-a primacy that world
literature, on an ungenerous reading, often tends to forget as it focuses on
16 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
textual mobility (Helgesson, "Postcolonialism"). The two essays in this sec-
tion carefully calibrate the productive tensions between postcolonial and
world literary perspectives.
Maria Olaussen traces the vagaries of the archive and literary voice in
two contemporary literary works that revisit histories of slavery and the
legacies of lndian Ocean trave!. Olaussen,discovers that traditional postco-
lonial understandings of voice and subalternity do not quite fit this particular
archive; here, giving voice is not automatically a gesture of empowerment,
but rather interrupts forms of exchange and conviviality that cannot sim-
ply be mapped as relations between dominant and subaltern subjects, and
that thereby escape postcolonial templates and access the domain of world
literature. The works by Amitav Ghosh and Yvette Christiansë that Olaussen
discusses are not concerned with voicing obliterated histories, but rather
with what she calls a practice of "over-hearing" (Richard Aczel's term)-an
interrogation of the conditions and effects of the archives in which voices
are buried and preserved.
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen similarly looks beyond the postcolonial
to describe a world literary dynamic in four works that present African
realities to global audiences. In spite of the momentous complexities--of
voice, agency, language, and power-besetting such an enterprise, Thomsen
shows how four writers draw on very different hybrid strategies to convey
realities that may initially seem to escape customary templates. Whether
we talk about the delicate negotiation of the vernacular and the universal
in Achebe's Things Fal! Apart or about the complex multiple authorship in
American writer Dave Eggers's What Is the What, these instances of trans-
cultural writing intermittently manage to transcend colonial inhibitions and
market demands.
If the first three sections of the book explore different institutional-and,
as we saw, instituting-nodes in the dialectic of singularity and the trans-
national system that energizes contemporary world literature, the last two
sections are devoted to a particularly multifaceted instituting force: that of
translation. Where the very last section focuses on the textual minutiae of
translation dynamics, the fourth section presents three sociological studies
of the functioning of translation in an increasingly globalized literary field.
Gisèle Sapiro's essay focuses on one indispensable institution in the cir-
culation of literature: the publisher. Sapiro investigates the importation
strategies of the most prestigious French literary publisher, Gallimard, as
it evolved from the interwar period to the globalized present. The result
is a fascinating account of how Gallimard's translation decisions bolstered
its considerable symbolic capital, and how the preservation of that capi-
tal has required different negotiations with changing literary and worldly
realities-most notably, the opening of the world market of translation to
non-Western cultures after the Second World War, and the decline of France in
that world market in the era of globalization. The essay serves as a welcome
reminder that if, as Casanova famously holds, Paris is the capital of world
 Introduction 17
literature, maintaining that status has forced Paris to ceaselessly renegotiate
its relations to the rest of the literary world.
Claire Ducournau's essay traces the processes through which African
literature has been instituted as an internationally recognized category of
its own by considering the case of writers from Francophone countries of
sub-Saharan Africa from the 1960s onward. Unsurprisingly, the consecra-
tion of these writers has been a thoroughly transnational process-which,
incidentally, intersects with the story of Gallimard told by Sapiro, as Paris
publishers played a key role-which has increasingly institutionalized a set of
African writers, dominant in their own cultures and dominated globally, as a
semi-periphery in the world literature system. In her essay, Yvonne Lindqvist
scrutinizes a different semi-periphery: that of the Scandinavian countries.
Through a rigorous empirical study of translation data, Lindqvist shows
how the Scandinavian languages function as relatively prominent hubs in the
international translation system, and how within Scandinavia, the Swedish
literary field plays a central role as a relay for translations moving into, out
of, or through Scandinavia. Together, the essays in this section display the
powers of the sociology of translation for mapping and explaining the intel"-
locking dynamics of economic and symbolic capital.
The book's final section complements the previous section's concern with
a sociology of translation with a meticulous attention to textual detail; as
the contributions by Andrew van der Vlies and David Watson show, local
insights in the operations of translation can productively be leveraged into
more encompassing accounts of the politics of cultural transfer-that is, of
world literary circulation. Van der Vlies discusses the English translation of
Marlene van Niekerk's Afrikaans-language novel Agaat as a case study in
the traffic between a provincial culture and a world language like English
that promises to bring a provincial product in global time-if only because
it serves as a bridge language for further translations. Van der Vlies shows
how this transfer is less a matter of "gaining" in translation, as Damrosch's
definition of world literature has it, than of inevitable sernantic losses that
serve as a powerful reminder of the ineluctable provincial inflection of aIl
world languages-in this case, the provincial, South African character of the
English culture and language through which Agaat is delivered to interna-
tional audiences. Rather than a straightforward calculus of loss and gain,
we end up with a decidedly more fine-grained account of the reciprocal
imbrication of the local and the global.
David Watson's essay closing this volume confirms this point through
a careful consideration of the place of translation in the work of Ralph
Waldo Emerson. If Emerson has been read at times as a quintessentially
American voice and at other times as an exemplary transnational writer,
Watson shows how these interpretations emerge from a more basic matrix
that is shaped by Emerson's thoroughly ambivalent take on translation.
Translation as a form of linguistic mediation between different contexts, for
Emerson, is at once integral to and disavowed by his writing, which at once
18 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
engages in translation and affirms that the book of nature requires no trans-
lation, speaking a single tongue that, however, often seems to contract into a
decidedly American one. Emerson leaves us with a sense of the mobility and
intangibility that continue to mark translation and literature as they enter
a world literary domain-a restlessness that, as this volume demonstrates
throughout, can never be definitively instituted.

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20 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen
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1949. Print.
Part 1

Instituting Literature
1 How Writing Becomes (World)
Literature
Singularity, The Universalizable, and
the Implied Writer 1
Stefan Helgesson

A work of literature, most pointedly when viewed from a world literary

angle, spans the gap between the singular and the systemic. But how may
we assess its systemic nature without negating its singularity? And, con-
versely, how do we account for the singularity of literature without wilfully
forgetting that it is also shaped, produced, and reproduced as a social and
material fact under conditions of inequality, sometimes within, sometimes
across national and linguistic boundaries? Gayatri Spivak's sybelline yet
suggestive solution to this conundrum has been that "[ t] he singular is the
always universalizable, never the universal" (Damrosch and Spivak 466),
which invokes singularity, in a postcolonial spirit, as a means to resist the
workings of the system. David Damrosch, by contrast, has been more affir-
mative in identifying circulation, translation (notably into English), and
transcultural comparison as universally enabling factors in the shaping of
works of world literature. Damrosch's words about how a text enters world
literature by "circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic
and cultural point of origin" (4) apparently sec ure a space for the singu-
lar work. His less discussed first criterion-that a work of world literature
must first of aIl be read "as literature" -alerts us, however, to the fact that
there is another, normative cultural dynamic involved here than "simply"
the material circulation of books. Reading works as literature presupposes
that there are already established, sedimented notions of what might count
as literature. These notions are, of course, neither restricted to nations nor
unchanging and universal: instead, they assume firmer contours in a push
and pull between local conditions and an often elusive faith in literature as
a transcendent category. Such faith not in the being but in the becoming of
literary transcendence appears to be just as present in Spivak's words about
the singular. It is precisely this primary aspect of world literature, of litera-
ture as a transportable notion shaping the work of individual writers, that
informs my discussion here.
Drawing on the examples of Fernando Pessoa, J. M. Coetzee, Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, and Assia Djebar, l choose here to approach the question of uni-
versalizability in world literature by bringing the singular moment that pre-
cedes publication, translation, and circulation into focus. We can calI this
the moment of writing, although l am not aiming to retrieve this moment as
such, but rather self-reflexive representations of writing, or of the stoking of
24 Stefan Helgesson
the very ambition to write. The "beginnings" 1 am looking at here are inevi-
tably retrospective and mediated through different systems of publication
and critical reception. Hence, they are staged. They reach me on the printed
page and not, as it were, in the solitary act of writing. 2 Note here that 1 am
challenging critical orthodoxy: 1 do not see literary writing and literature as
seamlessly synonymous. They overlap, bLJt there is no unmediated relation-
ship between the practice of writing and the printed, commodified, and pos-
sibly consecrated text that is displayed in a books hop or read on a Kindle.
This is made clear not least by the fact that my examples are from the work
of internationally highly consecrated authors, which further dramatizes the
disparity between system and singularity. In this context, Pessoa is a signifi-
cant anomaly, insofar as his fame is posthumous. But this underscores yet
further the systemic dimension: without a congeries of institutions and indi-
viduals that over time have been equipped to care for his writings, Pessoa
would have been destined for oblivion.
By challenging the conflation of writing with literature, 1 also depart
from the more conventional reading of such reflexive moments of writing
about writing as purely metatextual. What interests me is instead-and this
explains why 1 draw on fictional as weIl as essayistic and autobiographical
examples-how the writer positions his or her craft in relation to a system
that exceeds yet enables the text. What we find then is that the writer cuts a
vulnerable figure, caught between text and context. To get a han die on this,
1 will la ter in the essay suggest the term "implied writer" (as distinct from
"implied author") as a means to explore how writing can be articulated
in relation to a system. Placed at the crossroads between the deep time of
language(s) and literary genres, the contemporary conditions for publica-
tion, and the elusive, future-oriented act of bringing a new piece of writing
into being, the implied writer is, moreover, a figure that enables meaningful
points of comparison between the otherwise discrete worlds of "Western"
and "postcolonial," or "European" and "African" literature. It is, in other
words, the constrained universalizability of separate and uneven begin-
nings as a condition of possibility for world literature that lies in focus here.
Interestingly, however-and this cornes close to Pascale Casanova's view of
the potential for "peripheral" writers to invoke the aesthetic authority of
international literary space and its most autonomous centres (82-125)-
the literary system could also be construed as a saleguard for the singular
by granting it a qualified space it would otherwise be denied. While Emily
Apter's championing of untranslatability de serves serious consideration, and
although Peter Hitchcock's assertion of the "non-coincidence between liter-
ary institutions and the literary" (2) bears comparison with my distinction
between writing and literature, their principled defences of that which is pre-
sumably untouched by cultural hegemony and commodification miss out on
the transpersonal and indeed impersonal existence of literature as multifari-
ous phenomenon that structures the very possibility of becoming a writer.
If our critical task is to universalize the singular, it may also be the case,
 How Writing Becomes (World) Litemture 25
then, that the literary system--and 1 am speaking here beyond voluntarism
as weU as idealistic conceptions of literature as a bringer of good things by
default-allows the "universal" (as in the case of hegemonic print languages
such as English or French, or for that matter the aggressively "universal"
effects of the market explored by Brouillette and Vermeulen in this volume)
to be singularized. It is the implied writer's positioning in this give and take
between the universal and the singular that the rest of this essay will explore.

1. PESSOA AND COETZEE

Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, and the Australian-formerly South

African-writer J. M. Coetzee provide us with complex and frequently mel-
ancholy representations of writing in relation to system. In Pessoa's Livro
do desassossego (Book of' Disquiet), written in the heteronymic voice of
Bernardo Soares, we find a passage that begins like this: "Why should 1 care
that no one reads what 1 write? 1 write to forget about life, and 1 publish
because that's one of the rules of the game" (Disquiet 108).3 He continues,
even more sombrely: "If tomorrow aU my writings were lost, l'd be sorry,
but 1 doubt l' d be violendy and frantically sorry, as one might expect, given
that with my writings would go my entire life .... The great earth that cares
for the dead would also, in a less motherly fashion, take care of the pages
l've written " (108).4 Much more recently, in Summertime (2009), when pre-
senting a retrospective "autrebiographical" account of himself as a budding
author in South Africa in the 1970s, Coetzee's narrator also muses on the
futility of writing. A journal entry dated 1 September 1972 describes a bout
of hard, physicallabour when John lays a concrete apron around his father's
house in Cape Town. "The slabs he is laying," he reflects, "will oudast his
tenancy of the house, may even oudast his spell on earth." This is "[i]mmor-
tality of a kind, a limited immortality ... not so hard to achieve after aIl. Why
then," he asks, "does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint
hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?" (7).
Both writers address here their activity as writers in the form of a ques-
tion that links writing to mortality: in Pessoa's case as a way to evade life;
in Coetzee's case as a wager to cheat death. In both instances, writing seems
futile. Why, ultimately, does this obsession with words and sentences mat-
ter? How can this solitary activity connect with a wider human community?
Why not build walls of concrete instead, if the whole point is to make an
enduring mark on the world? If we accept that writing by definition is turned
outward, this is extroversion of an extremely qualified and pessimistic kind.
However, when Coetzee places his question in the mind of a younger,
fictional version of himself, he does so tongue in cheek. The author of Sum-
mertime, who should of course be kept distinct from the narrator, is an
astoundingly consecrated writer, a Nobel laureate and double winner of
the Man Booker Prize. As he lets his proxy younger self muse on the futility
26 Stefan Helgesson
of writing, he (the author) must be perfectly aware that Summertime is
"born-translated" (Walkowitz 569), destined for publication in more than
thirty languages, and that his work is the focal point of a massive scholarly
industry. Given Coetzee's stature, one may in fact modestly assume that a
fair number of people not yet born will decipher his marks. The sceptical
rumination invites various responses, both sincere and humorous, but above
all, it dramatizes the disparity that l have been speaking of: a reminder of
the humble beginnings ("almost nothing," to invoke Beckett as well as the
ending of Coetzee's Disgrace) of what has the potential to become both a
national and a global phenomenon thanks to the labour of editors, publish-
ers, translators, critics, and readers. It is in fact in the ironical stance towards
the post facto obviousness of Coetzee's stature within the system of litera-
ture that one may detect the workings of the implied writer.
The incongruity between singularity and system becomes even more
striking in the case of Pessoa. In contrast to Coetzee, Pessoa's stoic question
was not unmotivated. He published fairly little during his lifetime: only one
book, Mensagem, and various poems and essays in journals. At his death, he
left almost 30,000 unorganized manuscript pages behind, and it was by no
means a foregone conclusion that eighty years later he would be regarded
as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. What we today think of
as the oeuvre of Pessoa is the result of the painstaking work by editors and
critics who have salvaged and tried to organize the disorderly manuscripts.
Although important work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, not least thanks
to Gaspar Simoes and Adolfo Casais Monteiro, the archive was in a sorry
state by the late 1960s, which prompted a more organized effort resulting in
the cataloguing principles used today (Nobre dos Santos et al.). It is since then
that we have seen a proliferation of editions produced by scholars (known
as "pessoanos") such as Jacinto Prado Coelho, Joao Dinis, Richard Zenith,
Teresa Sobral Cunha, Maria Aliete Galhoz, and most recently Jer6nimo
Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari. Even today, previously unknown notes and frag-
ments of poems are being uncovered in the "esp6Iio," or the archive, adding
still new dimensions to what we think of as Pessoa's work.
The Livro do desassossego, which l quoted from, demonstrates with
exceptional clarity how Pessoa's authorship is a retroactive construction.
The book never existed even as a coherent manuscript in Pessoa's life-
time and is therefore by definition incomplete and uncompletable. What
we know today as the Livro has been pieced together following the clues
left behind by Pessoa-among them envelopes marked "Livro do D." A few
of the fragments were published when Pessoa was alive, but he would
continue to add and revise fragments throughout the entire period of its
composition-which ran from at least 1913 until his untimely death in 1935
(Zenith). It was only in 1982 that the first book publication called Livro
do desassossego appeared, and since then several other editions, following
divergent principles of organization, have been published. The numbering
of the fragments is completely different in the chronologically ordered 1982
 How Writing Becomes (World) Literature 27
Âtica edition compared to Teresa Sobral Cunha's thematically organized
1990-1991 edition which, again, differs from both Richard Zenith's version
that l have been using as well as Jerônimo Pizarro's meticulous 2010 criti-
cal edition (called Livro do desasoçego, following Pessoa's dated orthogra-
phy). It is undoubtedly the case that with each edition, new knowledge is
acquired, the precision and comprehensiveness of the critical understanding
of Pessoa's disorderly manuscript are honed, but it is no less obvious that
there never will exist a "proper" version of the Livro authored by Pessoa
himself. Instead, each new edition manifests once aga in that the Livro does
not and cannot exist without a community of scholars as well as a material
system to sustain it.
This is a far cry from what Pessoa experienced while still alive. Having
left South Africa as a teenager in 1906, and living in a kind of inner exile in a
politically volatile Portugal, it may often have seemed that he wrote for no one
but himself, and that his labours were exceptionally futile. And yet, he also
anticipates the material processes of reception and circulation that will crys-
tallize around his writings: he lets Bernardo Soares speak of the "game" and
its rules (which recalls how Coetzee, too, has foregrounded the game aspect
of literature; see Penner), explicitly highlighting publication as that which
ultimately will turn his writing into literature, and hence into something else
than just marks on paper. Indeed, Pessoa's entire heteronymic project could be
described as an elaborate way of positioning his acts of writing in relation to
a system of publication and reception that involved not just the national space
of Portugal, but also was imperial and global in scope, and included the Anglo-
phone and Francophone spheres. His lifelong practice of writing through the
agency of imagined personas resulted in no less than 136 alter egos rang-
ing from simple pseudonyms scribbled on a piece of paper to full-scale fic-
tional personalities such as Alberto Caeiro and Âlvaro de Campos with their
own biographies and poetics. Sorne of his early alter egos, such as Alexander
Search and Charles Robert Anon, weren't even Portuguese, but Englishmen,
drawing thereby on Pessoa's own experience of a British colonial education
in Durban (Pizarro and Ferrari). What we can see, then, is that Pessoa tended
from the very beginning to present his writing at a remove, through a double-
voiced discourse that played deliberately on the tension between immediacy
and mediation. This also bears comparison with Coetzee's practice of writing
through the voice of alter egos sueh as Elizabeth Costello (the most famous
instance being "The Lives of AnimaIs," which instead of an essay on the suf-
fering of animaIs provides the reader with an aceount of the fictional author
Elizabeth Costello giving two lectures about animaIs; Costello 59-115).
Such heteronymic endeavours, and more specifieally the passages from
Pessoa and Coetzee quoted above, make us aware of the gap between what
we read as an irreducibly personal utterance and the sheer fact of its medi-
ated and public nature that both writers gesture towards and without whieh
we could not have read it in the first place. It is thanks to the instantiation of
Summertime as a printed book in codex format with a handsome coyer and
28 Stefan Helgesson
global distribution that l am able to speak about that supposedly singular
formulation. And it is indeed thanks to a material instantiation of Livro do
desassossego that l can translate that passage and discuss it as though it gave
me access to a version of Pessoa's own thoughts.
This brings us back to the question of singularity and system. If we fol-
low Derek Attridge's deflnition, singularit); should be seen as "the difference
[of a cultural object] froIn aIl other such objects, not simply as a particular
manifestation of general rules, but as a peculiar nexus within the culture
that is perceived as resisting or exceeding al! pre-existing general determina-
tions" (63; emphasis mine). Such an austere deflnition of singularity begs the
question if it can, in fact, be applied to literature at aIl. The event of writing,
insofar as it is an individual act (however networked the writing individ-
ual may be), is no doubt singular by default; representations of writing are
not necessarily so. Literature, however, is a more complicated matter alto-
gether, premised not only on what Walter Benjamin theorized as mechanical
reproduction, and hence on the very undoing of singularity (what Benjamin
termed "aura") through repetition and circulation, but also on the packaging
and pigeonholing practices of the market. Here it would seem that Attridge
either ignores the distinction or veers towards a (paradoxically) normative
or even circular conception of literature as that which by deflnition lies out-
side the norm. Attridge's own negotiation of this tension between what he
calls "instrumentalist" and "aesthetic" approaches reads like this:

What is needed ... is a mode of attention to the speciflcity and singu-

larity of literary writing as it manifests itself through the deployment
of form ... as well as to the unpredictability of literary accomplishment
that seems connected with that deployment-an approach that at the
same time fully acknowledges the problematic status of aIl daims to
universality, self-presence and historical transcendence. (13)

Attridge's reminder to take form seriously is of crucial importance, but this

still evades the fact that literature, as opposed to "mere" writing, requires
a machinery that secures its existence. As we have se en already, literature
is never simply a given, but performatively and materially instituted by
authors, translators, publishers, academies, academics, critics, and readers. 5
These entangled acts of instituting are necessarily historical in their precon-
ditions and put great strain on daims of singularity; yet they could also be
understood as mechanisms, expressive of that fungible and border-crossing
faith in literature, that support the integrity of the singular in the system.

2. THE VULNERABILITY OF WRITING

Antonio Candido, the Brazilian cridc whose magisterial Formaçao da litera-

tura brasileira (1957) provided an account of the autonomization of Brazilian
 HoUJ Writing Becomes (World) Literature 29
literature, was acutely aware both of literature's socio-historical and autono-
mous aspects. When expressly devising a theory of the "literary system" in
Formaçêio (25-39), he found both the external and internaI approaches to
literature to be insufficient in and of themselves, and insisted therefore on
the need for a dual optic that gave the faith in literature (or art) its due. It
is not by chance, 1 wish to argue, that it was a critic from the South who
pioneered such a method in the 1950s and early 1960s, that is, during the
high point of formalist and New Critical orthodoxy in the North. His most
exhaustive methodological intervention is found in Literatura e sociedade,
first published in 1965. Explaining his modus operandi, Candido states the
following:

If we look at the three fundamental elements in artistic communication-

author, work, audience-we will see how society defines the role and
position of the artist; how the work depends on technical resources to
incorporate its values; how audiences are configured. AlI of this is neces-
sary in order to make sense of artistic production, and, although we are
mainly concerned with one of the vectors of this relation
we will provide the requisite caveats in or der to make it possible to per-
ceive the importance of the other vector In fact, the artist's
activity contributes to the differentiation between groups; the creation of
works will modify the available resources for expressive communication;
the works delimit and organize the audience. Approaching the problems
from this double viewpoint, one c1early perceives the dialectical move-
ment that envelops art and society in a vast communicating system of
reciprocal influences. (33-34; my translation)

This dynamic, as opposed to deterministic, understanding of literature and

society, has of course been further developed since then. In Brazil itself, Can-
dido's erstwhile student Roberto Schwarz has been instrumental in refining
this approach and pushing it in a more materialist direction. In France, Pierre
Bourdieu (and in the world literature context his student, Pascale Casanova)
developed a stringently sociological conception of literature as a "field"
wherein aesthetic values achieve a qualified autonomy from economic or
political pressures. There are, however, two reasons why I return to these
earlier statements. One is to sociologize Candido himself: he is an example
of how frequently it is critics and writers based in postcolonial societies, and/
or on the wrong side of a racial, gender, or c1ass divide, who have the stron-
gest awareness of the bm'den of history. Intriguingly however-and this is
a point that is easily missed-such an awareness can also sharpen the value
of the literary, of the very idea of literature as a cosmopolitan value that can
somehow transcend the colonial, racial, or national constraints of a given
situation, as among others Ankhi Mukherjee has explored at length.
This leads me to my second reason for citing the passage above: while the
sociology of literature, broadly understood, has been adept at demystifying
30 Ste/cm Helgesson
the production and distribution of literature in terms of the first vector
mentioned by Candido, it has had less to say about the second vector
(art-+society), which entails not just a recognition of the agency of the
writer, but also of the very vulnerability and undecidability of the act of
writing in a given historical moment. Literary writing cornes with no guar-
antees and has in this respect no predeter.mined relationship with the wider
world. When speaking of the subjective experience of writing a novel, Coe-
tzee makes the point that

[t]he novel becomes less a thing than a place where one goes every
day for several hours a day for years on end. What happens in that
place has less and less discernible relation to the daily life one lives or
the lives people are living around one. Other forces, another dynamic,
take over. l don't want to sound silly, to talk of possession or the Muse,
nor on the other hand do l want to be drearily reductionist and talk of
a bag called the unconscious into which you dip when you can't think
of what to say next. But whatever the process is that goes on when one
writes, one has to have sorne respect for it. (Doubling 205)

Despite Coetzee's reluctance to talk of "possession," this could be a helpful

way of thinking about writing: as being possessed not only by the work that
is taking shape, but also by the dimly or sharply discerned possibilities that
inhere in the deep time of the genre through which the work evolves, in the
tradition of literary writing, and hence of a specifie, easily beleaguered faith
in that which still is in the process of becoming. What l am arguing for in
a world literary context, then, is the necessity for a heightened sensitivity
towards how such a vulnerable process takes shape both temporally and
spatially, across discrete historical and cultural spaces.
This is where the implied writer comes in. The term is obviously related
to, yet must be kept distinct from, the implied author, who is typically
understood as the organizing intelligence of a narrative. There is no room
in this essay to expand on the heated controversies sparked by the lat-
ter term (Booth; Chatman; Lanser; Nünning; Phelan), but l accept Susan
Lanser's postulate that the implied author has no empirical existence, and
should best be understood as a workable mediation between intentionalist
and non-intentionalist a pproaches to interpretation. As she points out, the
implied author only emerges as a "reading effect," yet must also be under-
stood as a re-construction, based on the premise that a text is an intentional
discursive construct (154). The implied writer is also a reconstruction, not
of the organizing intelligence of a narrative, but rather of a cultural ideal-
the writer as sage, as the voice of the nation, as autonomous artist, and so
on-that the author aspires towards or attempts to resist. This is to some
extent also related to the rhetorical notion of ethos, the speaker's "charac-
ter," and comes particularly close to what Ruth Amossy (with reference to
ethos) and Dominique Maingueneau have theorized as "l'image d'auteur,"
 Hou; Writing Becomes (World) Literature 31
or the image of the author, as something produced both intratextually as
weil as sociaIly. As Maingueneau contends,

the discursive staging of the writer is no longer understood as a set of

activities occurring solely outside of the sacred enclosure of the Text,
but as an integral dimension both of the co-enunciation of literary
communication, and of literary discourse as an activity that occurs
within a determined social space. (3; my translation)6

These various angles notwithstanding, my methodological focus remains

(as stated previously) tied to the writerly ethos as a "textual eHect"
(Amossy 7), and an elusive and polysemie one at that. It is not the case,
therefore, that passages which thematize writing give us direct access to the
implied writer. As with the implied author, an implied writer may ironize
the presented image of the writer, which we saw in the Coetzee exam-
pIe. The passage from Pessoa seems less amenable to an ironie reading,
but Pessoa's heteronyms could very productively be read as the making
of a protean, Pessoan implied writer who constantly devises new ways
to exploit the aesthetic resources of Portuguese, English, and French. The
crucial thing to recognize is that the implied writer, too, is a cultural, social,
and gendered construction. The conditions for insertion into a transna-
tionalliterary system differ even at the level of being "called," or interpel-
lated into writing-and this is where world literature scholarship would
do weIl to spend greater energy exploring the myriad different positions in
a globalliterary space with which writers must contend. Sarah Brouillette's
work on how the international, Anglophone book market creates a par-
ticular slot for "postcolonial writers," but also prompts writerly resistance
to such prior positioning, could be invoked here as one such investigation
of the social production of the implied writer (Brouillette).

3. NGUGI AND DJEBAR

1 am claiming, the n, that the implied writer bears witness to sorne of the
more subtle tensions that characterize world literature. Allegiance to the val-
ues of a world republic of letters could also mean allegiance to the singular
experience of the "place" of writing of which Coetzee speaks. This may be
registered with particular precision in how a writer's labour with the formaI
challenges of genre is expressive of deep litera l'y time rather than (only) of
a response to a synchronie political situation. To bear this out, let us look
at sorne other accounts of coming to writing from the work of Ngugi and
Djebar. In his two memoirs Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of
the Interpreter, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o returns several times
to an argument he had as a young boy with his friend Kenneth. This is in
colonial Kenya in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Ngugi and Kenneth
32 Stefan Helgesson
are growing up as colonial subjects. Schooling is coveted but hard to come
by, although both Kenneth and Ngugi belong to the lucky ones who manage
to get into mission schools. These memoirs can be read as Bildungsromane
of a kind, with Ngugi's discovery of English literature-Stevenson, Dickens,
Shakespeare, Bunyan, Wordsworth-as an ongoing theme throughout,
interweaved with vivid images of colonial repression and anticolonial resis-
tance. Such narratives of the disco very of literature, notably canonical Euro-
pean literature in print form, are a common motif in postcolonial writing
(Mukherjee). In familiar fashion, Ngugi's memoirs deal with how this dis-
covery also stoked the longing to write. As a boy he loved Treasure Island
and wanted to produce something similar. But there was a catch: he was
convinced that he needed a license to do so. Not "poetic license," but liter-
allya license, like a driver's license, and to qualify for this one needed higher
education. His friend Kenneth disagrees, but Ngugi is adamant: "1 coun-
tered by asserting that if one wrote without such permission, one would
surely be arrested" (Dreams 220).
The joke cuts two ways. Later, when Ngugi does try his hand at writ-
ing stories, Kenneth ironically asks if he had got his license now, which of
course he hadn't. So Kenneth wins the argument, but that doesn't mean he
was right. The anecdote brings to mind not least what Karin Barber and
Sean Hawkins have called "documentary fonns of domination" in African
colonial contexts: the specifie form of authority, which followed a racial-
izing rationale, that was invested in the written word, or more to the point,
the printed word in the language of the colonizer, and which had a direct
regulatory effect on the lives of colonial subjects (Barber 6). Young Ngugi's
"naïve" assumption about the license was an accurate metaphor for how
the literary was not merely a personal matter but entangled with vari-
ous fOrIns of power-both oppressive and liberating. This is what Ngugi's
own career as a writer has dealt with from beginning to end, from his
initial anticolonial phase (in, for example, Weep Not Child and A Grain of
Wheat) to his postcolonial, anti-government phase that has also entailed
his principled advocacy of writing fiction in the vernacular-Gikuyu--
and not in English. Rather than being granted a license to write, however,
Ngugi's career is better described as a series of transgressions of the limited
license that colonial or state authorities at any given moment have been
prepared to grant him. Most famously, he was imprisoned in 1977 by the
then president Daniel Arap Moi for his play l Will Marry when l Want,
written in Gikuyu, which was exactly what prompted him to write the
essay Decolonising the Mind and decide never to produce fictional work
in English again.
His account in the latter essay of his first attempt at writing a novel in
Gikuyu (which became Caitaani Muthabara-ini or Devi! on the Cross) is
justly famous and clarifies the deeper point of the anecdote above. Coetzee's
"place" of writing a novel is in Ngugi's case brutally material: a prison cell.
Separated in this way from society by the rulers of that society, his first
 How Writing Becomes (World) Literature 33
challenge was to secure pen and paper. He had to settle for toilet paper,
the coarseness of which was "bad for the body" but "good for the pen"
(Decolonising 74). His second challenge, which corresponds with Attridge's
definition of singularity, was to shape a vocabulary and mobilize formaI
resources that would enable him to accomplish something unprece-
dented: a full-scaie novel in Gikuyu. His self-appointed task was nothing
less than to reinvent himself as a writer such that his oId, Anglophone,
coloniaIly educated writerly persona gave way to a fully decolonized art-
ist. In what is only an apparent paradox, it is here that world literature
emerges as a moral and aesthetic resource for the implied writer: Ngugi's
own account of this process demonstrates with unusual clarity how the
traffic between art and society, between system and singularity runs along
a two-way street. It is after aIl Ngugi's own, transnational literary train-
ing that shapes his writerly aspiration in the prison cell. In the essay, he
states that he had to confront "two interrelated problems of 'fiction lan-
guage' vis-à-vis a writer's chosen audience: his relationship to the form, to
the genre itself; and his relationship to his material, that is to the reality
before him" (Decolonising 75). Battling with an imperfect Gikuyu orthog-
raphy inherited from missionaries, and the lack of a specificalIy nove lis tic
tradition in Gikuyu, it is by drawing on his knowledge of Conrad, Achebe,
Soyinka, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Balzac, Faulkner, George Lamming, George
Eliot, and others that he eventually succeeds in shaping his first Gikuyu
novel (Decolonising 75-82). Ngugi's faith in the novel genre as inherited
mainly from Europe has been criticized as a contradiction of his decoloniz-
ing ambitions (Gikandi), and the roll calI of names reveals a canon that is
exclusively male (with the predictable exception of George Eliot). Beyond
such political observations a posteriori, however, the enduring point is that
even this state-induced, isolated experience of writing without a license is
presented to us as occurring with recourse to the authority of the, or rather
a, world republic of letters. Indeed, it was only thanks to Ngugi's mental
effort to turn the prison cell into a world literary space that the singular
Gikuyu novel could come into being.
Another way to phrase this is that Ngugi has assumed and continually
reasserted what Homi Bhabha once called "the right to narrate" whereby
"the fictional 'as if' opens up the counterfactual ethical narrative of the
'what if'" (197). The metaphor of the "right to narrate" is apt, therefore,
insofar as a legal right can only be recognised within a given "legal" sys-
tem, in this case a diachronic entanglement of authorities ranging from
mission schools to the Kenyan government to Heinemann's African Writ-
ers Series ta the North American academe (where Ngugi has made his
home professionally for decades) to, ultimately, the world republic of let-
ters. The account of writing in Decolonising the Mind resonates in this
way with the tough faith in literature as a cosmopolitan and translatable
medium that Ngugi has expressed (with different emphases) ever since
calling for the abolition of the English department in Nairobi in 1968 to
34 Stefcm Helgesson
his most recent essayistic works such as Globalectics and Something Torn
and New.
A fourth and final example might be rallied to buttress but also complicate
this more constructive view of literature as a giobally transportable institu"
tion: in her Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (also an autobiographi-
cal novel) the Aigerian novelist Assia Djebar writes about her initiation into
literature and the transgressive delights of translation. As a teenager, young
Assia attends a French girls' high school. Together with a French school-
mate, she el1ters the enchanted realm of reading by way of French books.
French becomes her "silent language" (Arabie being her mother tongue),
opening up interior worlds hitherto unimagined:

It was as a reader of aIl these novels, poems, chronicles in French-this

being my silent language-it was ultimately through this surreptitious
activity (1 continued reading at night in the dormitory, even when 1
was fourteen or fifteen, with my flashlight under the covers), yes, it
was thanks to this passion which kept alive in me the devouring, noc-
turnal hunger for books, that 1 gradually became more mature. (274;
my translation here and elsewhere)

As she grows older, young Assia also embarks on her most daring transgres-
sion of both the law of the father and the constrictions of French civiliza-
tion: she begins to exchange letters with a young boy her age, Tarik. She
thinks of these letters as "love letters," but their content is literary: what
she wants from Tarik is to be introduced to Arabic poetry. While she has
not been trained in litera te Arabie, Tarik does have access to this particular
heritage and makes sorne of it available to Assia through translation. After
their first meeting, she asks Tarik to write down a poem by Imru' al-Quais
for her, with clear instructions: "Send me the text in Arabic, but vowelled,
if you please! l'm sorry to say that my classical Arabic is mediocre! 1 have
ne ver been able to learn my mother tongue as weIl as 1 have wished!" (315;
italies in the original).
The correspondence with Tarik, which from the beginning is marked by
Djebar's estrangement from her "own" language, evolves into a eomplex
exehange between languages and versions of classical poetry. In the first
letter, Tarik includes the Arabie and French versions of the poems, "the orig-
inal and the French translation ... on opposing pages" (317). In a later let-
ter, when transcribing a pre-Islamic poem, he makes a note of the different
translated versions- "the dates of first Latin translation, then the English,
German, and French ones" (320).
In this episode we discern a eomplex dynamie of transgression and eom-
plianee. The illicit correspondence with Tarik serves for Assia to exceed
the limitations of French; but French is at the same time what makes her
transgression possible to begin with. She can only ever communicate with
Tarik in French, because this language funetions for her as "a veil." Without
 How Writing Becomes (World) Literature 35
it, she would remain faithful to the law of the father, which prohibits her
from contact with Tarik. It is, then, only this peculiar combination of the
colonial institution of a French literary education and an excluded Arabie
heritage that both prompts and enables Assia to reach across the Mani-
chean divides of colonialism as weIl as patriarchy in this hybrid fashion. My
choice to speak of "Assia" as a character in the novel is in itself indicative
of Djebar's success at transferring this complex scenario to the realm of lit-
erature: "As si a Djebar," supposedly the na me of the author Nulle part, is of
course only a pen name first adopted by Fatima-Zohra Imalayène in order
to escape the disapproval of her father. The first-person narrator of the novel
is in fact nameless, but "Assia" directs us towards the implied writer's mani-
festation of the qualified freedom of producing an "indefinitely rewritable"
work (Zimra 177) in a zone of unending translation.
Read together, the various accounts by Pessoa, Coetzee, Ngugi, and
Djebar of coming to writing provide us with different takes on the vulner-
ability of literary writing as a practice threatened by oblivion, regimented
by social hierarchies, constrained by material imperatives, structured by
the temporal resources of genre, and sustained through individual as weIl
as institutional manifestations of belief in its value. The stature of Pessoa's
oeuvre accumulates over time, thanks to collective efforts mainly within
the national linguistic space of Portugal. Coetzee, pressured previously by
political urgencies and occupying what was perceived as a socially strong
but morally weak position as a white male in late apartheid South Africa,
abides by the "nothing that is" of writing fiction. Ngugi mobilizes the formaI
resources of canonical literature in resistance against the predicaments of
colonial and postcolonial (or neocolonial) rule. For Djebar, the experience
of French reading and French writing provides a way to challenge, if not
resolve, the contradictory demands made upon her by her family, French
schooling, the Arabic heritage, and different patriarchal value systems. There
is no level playing field in these acts of instituting writing, yet each singular
instance is readable in relation to contingent, sometimes conflictual connec-
tions between canons, cultures, languages, and audiences. Put differently,
they present us with no single version of an "implied writer," which is pre-
cisely what makes this term a productive point of entry for exploring how
writing relates to world literature. If, following Pheng Cheah's suggestion,
world literature is to be reconceived as "a site of processes of worlding and
as an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes" (303), the
implied writer provides one conceptual space through which such worlding
can be explored. With reference to my initial discussion of the singular and
the universalizable, and the spatial metaphor of the "gap" between singular-
ity and system, it would seem that Cheah's emphasis on temporality offers
a more enabling perspective. Insofar as worlding refers to "how a world is
held together and given unit y by the force of time" (322), it is the implied
writer in my examples that traces the specifically literary labour that such
holding together entails.
36 Stefan Helgesson
NOTES

1. 1 would like to acknowledge Patricio Ferrari's and Richard Zenith's assistance with
various Pessoan details and Pieter Vermeulen's astute comments that helped knock
the argument into shape. Its weaknesses are, of course, my responsibility alone.
2. There are, of course, methodological alternatives to this approach to writing as
a practice and a motif, most obviously gerietic eritieism which will trawl through
notes and manuseript versions, reconstrueting the aetual process whereby a fin-
ished work (supposedly) has taken shape. Another option would be to approaeh
individual writers by way of ethnographie methods. 1 choose instead to look at
how these moments reach me in the act of reading, by way of the writers them-
selves but mediated through literary systems.
3. "Que me pesa que ninguém lei a 0 que escrevo? Escrevo-o para me distrair de
viver, e publico-o porque 0 jogo tem es sa regra" (Livro do desassossego 141).
4. "Se amanha se perdessem todos os meus escritos, teria pena, mas, creio bem,
nao corn pena violenta e louca como seria de supor, pois que em tudo ia toda
a minha vida ... A grande terra que serve os mortos serviria, menos maternal-
mente, esses papéis" (Livro do desassossego 141).
5. And as Peter McDonald has shown in the case of South Africa, even censors, the
assumed enemies of literature, may act as self-appointed (or state-appointed)
guardians of literary value (see McDonald).
6. "La mise en scène discursive de l'écrivain n'est plus appréhendée comme un
ensemble d'activités qui demeureraient à l'éxterieur de l'enceinte sacrée du
Texte, mais comme une dimension à part entière à la fois de la communication
littéraire comme co-énonciation et du discours littéraire comme activité dans un
espace social déterminé."

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2 Instituting (World) Literature
Peter D. McDonald

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "institution," under-

stood as a noun, refers standardly to "an establishment, organization, or
association, instituted [note the verb form in the definition] for the promo-
tion of sorne object, esp. one of public or general utility, religious, charitable,
educational, etc., e.g. a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reforma-
tory, mission, or the like" ("institution"). The noun is, in other words, com-
monly used to refer to an organization, which is identified not just with a
particular purpose or object but with a specific location, even building. This
is fairly obvious when we are talking about, say, Stockholm University, but
it is less clear which organization, building, or, indeed, object and purpose
we might be referring to in the case of "The Institution of Literature," or,
to put it in the terms of this volume, "Institutions of World Literature."
l shall return to this uncertainty in a moment. As a verb, the standard usage
is equally straightforward, according to the OED. The transitive verb can
mean "to set up, establish, found, ordain; to introduce, bring into use or
practice"; or, more specifically, "to establish in an office, charge, or position;
to appoint; now, only, to place in a spiritual [or legal] charge" ("institute").
Here the two key components are the concept of inauguration or founding,
on the one hand, and the quasi-juridical idea of establishing authority, on
the other. Etymologically the verb is linked to the Latin "statutum" from
which we also get the English word "statu te."
In the past decade or so literary scholars have drawn attention to "the
institution of literature" as a guiding methodological concern in various
ways. As much of the commentary shows, however, the debate has focused
almost exclusively on the noun form. Jonathan Bate's formulation in the
General Editor's preface to the Oxford English Literary History is char-
acteristic. Signalling a methodological departure, he notes that his mul-
tivolume series, which began to appear in 2002, is concerned not simply
with authors and works but with "the institutions in which literary acts
take place (educated communities, publishing networks, and so forth)"
(Bate viii). One of the strongest volumes in the series, Randall Stevenson's
Last of England? (2004), which covers the years 1960 to 2000, accordingly
40 Peter D. McDonald
has chapters entitled "Literature, Culture, and Society" and "A Golden Age?
Readers, Authors, and the Book Trade." Among other things, these co ver
the role of the Arts Council as a sponsor of culture in the United Kingdom,
censorship, economic and technological developments affecting the struc-
ture of the book trade, and the rise of new media. Lawrence Rainey antici-
pated many of Stevenson's concerns in Institutions of Modernism (1998),
a comparable study focusing on literary publishing in the first decades of
the twentieth century. Part of the rationale for this development came from
the interdisciplinary field now generally known as book history, which has
since the early 1980s fostered a new interest in the material and institutional
conditions of literary production among a broad range of scholars in the
humanities.
Others have taken this line of enquiry in different directions. In Bring on
the Books for Everybody: Hou) Literary Culture Became Popular Culture
(2010), a study of the transformation of literary culture in the United States
in the pa st two decades, Jim Collins poses the central question for his own
investigation as follows:

How do we begin to get a handle on this robust popular literary cul-

ture fueUed by such a complicated mix of technology and taste, of
culture and commerce? Sorne of its infrastructural features are directly
attributable to the conglomeration of the publishing industry-the
ever-expanding number of tides, the ubiquity and velocity of delivery
systems in the form of superstores and online book sales; the increas-
ing synergy among publishing, film, television, and Internet industries;
and the exponential increase in targeting quality consumers. But a
number of other factors are the result of changes in taste hierarchies-
the radical devaluation of the academy and New York litera l'y scene as
taste brokers who maintained the gold standard of literary currency,
the collapse of the traditional dichotomies that made book reading
somehow naturally antagonistic to fiIrn going or television watching,
and the transformation of taste acquisition into an industry with taste
arbiters becoming media celebrities.
(Collins 7-8)

For Collins, as for Bate and Stevenson, the "infrastructural features" of

the institution of literature, understood as a noun, encompass publishing
houses, educational bodies, voluntary associations, bookshops of aIl forms,
magazines, journals, and more. Hence, as 1 have suggested, is the difficulty in
identifying the institution as such, at least in Western-style democracies. The
problem is less acute in totalitarian regimes, like the former Soviet Union,
which had Glavlit, the Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and
Publishing, and professional bodies like the USSR Union of Writers, though
even here we need to talk about institutions in the plural rather than the
singular.
 Instituting (World) Literature 41
Complicating this still further, it is, as Collins rightly insists, impossible,
particularly in the contemporary world, to isolate these many dispersed insti-
tutions, given the synergies among all the various media industries and the
broader sociological shifts in cultural authority that shape them and that
they in turn shape. Film adaptations increase the public visibility of certain
classics, for example, while literary cri tics and academics find themselves
eclipsed as arbiters of culture by talk-show hosts. These intersections are
worth noting given the way sorne early institutional theorists, notably Arthur
Danto and George Dickie in the 1970s, tended to view what they called
the "artworld" as an autonomous and self-enclosed system in and through
which works of art (and, by extension, literature) acquire their meaning and
status as such. Responding to the anti-essentialist spirit of those times-the
institutional turn first took place within a series of debates about the ontol-
ogy of art influenced in part by Dada and Pop art-Danto, for instance,
declared that "objects are works of art when the artworld decrees them to
be" (6). Dickie, for his part, claimed that art is a "conferred status" in which
the agent doing the conferring is "sorne person or persons acting on behalf
of a certain social institution (the artworld)" (34). As Danto argued, this was
"not equivalent to the idea that anything goes." It did, however, imply that
"the concept of art [or literature] is not like the concept, say, of cat, where the
class of cats do pretty largely resemble one another, and can be recognized as
cats more or less by the same criteria" (7).
The most innovative, influential, and systematic contributor to this
developing mode of institutional analysis was the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu. He focused not on the "artworld" but on the "consecrating"
power of what he called the "field of cultural production" (Bourdieu 42 and
passim). Though he tended to reinforce the idea of autonomy in the way he
defined his various research initiatives-by, for instance, studying the inter-
naI dynamics of the French publishing industry-he was well aware of its
methodological pitfalls. lndeed, his own more elaborated conception of the
"literary field" was specifically designed to address them. If his auto no mous
"field," like Danto and Dickie's "artworld," remains primary insofar as it
yields the greatest explanatory power, it is not eut off from what he called
"external determinants."

It is this peculiar universe, this "Republic of Letters," with its relations

of power and its struggles for the preservation or the transformation
of the established order, that is the basis for the strategies of pro duc-
ers, for the form of art they defend, for the alliances they form, for
the schools they found, in short, for their specifie interests. External
determinants-for example, the effect of economic crises, technical
transformations or political revolutions-which the Marxists invoke
can only have an effect through resulting transformations in the struc-
ture of the field. The field exerts an effect of refraction (much like a
prism). (181-82)
42 Peter D. McDonald
Insisting on the relative autonomy of literary institutions and the prismatic
effects of the field was a way for Bourdieu to combat the kinds of class-based
reductionism associated with the various styles of French Marxism against
which he defined his own more Weberian project. Comparable forms of
reductionism, relating to gender and race or ethnicity, emerged within cer-
tain styles of feminism and postcolonialism. At the same time Bourdieu's
prism analogy put the isolationism of Danto and Dickie's "artworld" in
question.
When it comes to the question of who defines literature institutionally,
or daims guardianship over the literary, then, we need to consider both the
"internaI" and "external" forces that shape the "field of cultural produc-
tion." At the same time, we need to recognize that many institutions, rang-
ing from publishers to courts, universities to talk shows, are involved, often
in complex, intersecting, even rivalrous ways. Consider, for example, how
D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) was seen by some writers,
publishers, and cri tics as great literature at the time of its first publication
in the late 1920s, but as pornography by the English state (via customs
and the courts) until 1960. As this example indicates, we cannot grasp
the internaI dynamics of the literary field, to stay with Bourdieu's terms,
without understanding the ways in which it intersects with the field of
law. Yet, whether we are talking about Collins's "infrastructural features,"
Danto and Dickie's "artworld," or Bourdieu's more nuanced "field," the
focus among existing forms of institutional analysis is, as Bate's formu-
lation has it, on "the institutions in which literary acts take place" and,
indeed, on the power they have to "confer" a "status" on those acts as
"literary." This opens up an obvious but challenging question: what hap-
pens if we turn the grammar around, putting those "literary acts," now
understood as acts of institution in the verbal sense, at the centre of our
analysis? 01; to put it another way, what happens wh en we see writing as a
foundational act of inauguration, as a force itself, within the literary field,
which can be explained neither wholly in terms of the field's own internaI
dynamics, nor through the effects of refraction it creates for any "external
determinants"? It is worth noting that Bourdieu in the passage cited above
do es not include writing itself among his examples of the "strategies of
producers" that reflect their "specifie interests." Instead, in keeping with
his own broader sociological preoccupations, he mentions "schools," "alli-
ances," and a generalized "form of art" (e.g., "Imagism" or "surrealism").
To consider what it might mean to think of institution as a verb, or to keep
both the noun and the verb in play, 1 shall focus on two examples, one
historical, the other more contemporary. The first looks at the role "little
magazines" played in shaping the emergent forms of "world literature"
in the 1920s; the second, which has less to do with the initial moment of
production than with the subsequent processes of republication and circu-
lation, considers the impact anthologies have on the way we understand
"world literature" today.
 Instituting (World) Literature 43
2

In the so-called "Western" literary tradition, the genre most explicitly and
familiarly dedicated to the institution of literature in the active, verbal
sense is the avant-garde manifesto, of which there are many examples. For
the sake of this argument, 1 shall focus on one typical case: Eugene Jolas's
"The Revolution of the Word," which appeared in his "little magazine"
transition in June 1929 (Critical Writings 16-17). Identifying the princi-
pal targets of his revolution-that is, the "established order" in Bourdieu's
phrase-Jolas begins what he calls his "Proclamation" as follows: "Tired of
the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hege-
mony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive
naturalism" (111). Here the dominant order is identified as a set of discur-
sive rules, covering genre, language, character typology, and writerly mode,
and the revolutionary impulse is seen to be driven by exhaustion or bore-
dom. In sorne of his other writings, also published in transition, Jolas men,"
tions a series of larger threats at work, including the political (specifically
nationalism, capitalism, and communism), the cultural ("neo-classicism,"
"neo-romanticism," "proletarian primitives," and "skyscraper-futurists"),
and what he called "conventional critics," "upholders of the status quo,"
or "critical dictators" (248-51). Against aIl these law-ma king bodies and
forces of the law within the literary field of the 1920s, he figures transition
as a champion of the literary "hors la loi" ("Notes" 1007). Characteristi-
caIly, however, and in keeping with the genre of the manifesto, he then goes
on to proclaim a list of alternative "decrees" of his own: "Narrative is not
mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality"; "the
literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primaI matter of words
imposed on him by the text-books and dictionaries"; "he has the right to
use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical
and syntactic laws"; and, most famously, "the plain reader be damned"
(Critical Writings 111-12). As various supplementary quotations he added
from Blake, principally from the "Proverbs of Hell," and Rimbaud suggest,
these decrees may have heralded a "revolution of the word," but Jolas did
not present them as being wholly unprecedented.
The language of Jolas's manifesto, much of which is borrowed from
political, specifically revolutionary, discourse, reflects one of the inescapable
tensions associated with the institution of literature in the verbal sense. His
manifesto might be, as one contemporary reviewer put it, "full of a furious
anarchistic spirit," or, as Jolas claimed, "hors la loi," but it is also a "procla-
mation" with a series of "decrees" relating to the "rights" of expression, mak-
ing it less anti-institutional than counter-institutional, that is, a text designed
to establish, to institute a different authority and doxa ("Notes" 1007). Fol-
lowing Bourdieu's account of the literary field, this is predictable enough. We
have a younger generation of writers (Jolas was then in his early thirties),
located, via the "little magazine," in a peripheral, non-commercial position
44 Peter D. McDonald
within the contemporary field, and making a bid for authority against the
older and more conventional guardians of literature. Jolas's manifesto is,
on this account, a reflection of his "specific interests" (Bourdieu's phrase)
as a relative newcomer to the literary field of the 1920s. Yet, as l have been
arguing, when we think of the institution of literature in verbal terms, we
are dealing not only with fairly generalized "proclamations" of this kind,
the primary purpose of which is to create a new space within the field. Each
work, each act of writing, understood as an inaugurating act of institution
in itself, is a potentially disruptive intervention, albeit of a singular or sui
generis, rather than general, kind.
Consider, by way of illustration, the work that was very much at the
heart of Jolas's "revolution": James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), or, as it
was known when it appeared in transition throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
Work in Progress. It will be enough to quote only three characteristically
cryptic sentences:

Maass! But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes. And Simba the
Slayer of his Oga is slewd. (203)

Sorne of the complexities associated with the process of literary institution

in the verbal sense, which involves competing acts of inauguration and bids
for quasi-juridical authority, can be seen more clearly if we consider the
tensions between this sequence from the Wake and Jolas's transition. As
the Joycean Jed Rasula has argued, "transition was not just the magazine
that happened to print the bulk of Finnegans Wake as it was written but
also a laboratory for initiating readers into the nuevo mundo that Joyce
prescribed" (517). "By publishing and defending Work in Progress," Jolas
himself wrote, "transition established a basis for a literary insurrection that
included a radically new conception of the processes of consciousness and
of the development of language" (Critical Writings 258). This, of course,
begs the question: what kind of frame did transition crea te for Joyce's own
insurrection? If it is paratextual, as Rasula implies, then what status does it
have and what relevance ought it to have for us as readers today? These are
impossibly large questions that cannot be fully addressed here. Two brief
points will, l hope, be enough to show why we should be cautious about
following either Jolas or Rasula, who, in their different ways, oblige us to
ask where we, as readers, stand when faced with the challenge of coming to
terms with the institution of literature in the verbal sense.
The first point is that, as Jolas himself put it in 1933, transition based
its frame for the Wake "primarily on a study of the Freud-Jung-Levy-Bruhl
explorations into the unconscious in order to discover the laws dominating
the mutation of language" (Critical Writings 116). Rejecting what he called
a "positivist metaphysics" in favour of "the enigmatic or the pre-Iogical,"
he invoked "the primitive mythos," which he described as "a subterranean
stream (held up by 'civilized' consciousness) which we observe again and
 Instituting (World) Literature 45
again in such manifestations as the dream, neuropathic conditions, and
poe tic inspiration as such" (249). This way of reading the Wake was, of
course, very close to sorne of Joyce's own pronouncements. In an interview
for Harper's magazine in October 1931, he said: "In writing of the night,
1 really could not, 1 felt 1 could not, use words in their ordinary connec-
tions. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in
the different stages-conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious"
(qtd. in Ellmann 546). Yet, to privilege this idea of the Wake as, say, a prim-
itivist dream text, is, first, to give too much credence to what was, for Joyce,
partlya strategic pronouncement designed to keep his already exasperated
readers with him; and, second, to downplay, perhaps fatally, the Wake itself
as an actively disruptive literary force by using it merely as an illustration
of psychological theory in the 1920s.
The second reason for being cautious about Jolas as a guide to the Wake
is that there was a conspicuous gulf between his own experiments with mul-
tilingual writing and the work he himself took as his inspiration. According
to Rasula, "Joyce provided Jolas with a practical foundation on which he
could erect his own mythico-anthropological quest for an 'Atlantic or cru-
cible language'" (517). Yet if this is the case, then it is clear that Jolas had
his own, rather limited, understanding of that foundation. Consider the first
few lines of his poem "Mots-Frontiere: Polyvocables," for example, which
appeared in transition for July 1935:

malade de peacock-feathers
le sein blue des montagnes and the house strangled by rooks the
tender entêtement des trees
the clouds sybilfly and the neumond brûleglisters ein wunder stuerzt
(qtd. in PerloH 92)

Here, as Marjorie Perloff notes, the Polyvocables "imply that if only poetry
could conta in French + German + English in equal additive measure, the
treacherous frontiers increasingly separating the nations of Europe might
be crossed" (92). By contrast, if we take just the two words "majik wavus"
from the Wake sequence 1 have quoted, we can see that Joyce's style of lin-
guistic disruptiveness takes a very different form. In the first place he plays
on English (magic waves) and Kiswahili ("maji" meaning water, and "wavu"
meaning net), that is on European and non-European languages; and in the
second place he does so simultaneously rather than additively, interlingually
rather than multilinguaIly. Far from absorbing aIl the world's languages into
one place, or creating the literary equivalent of the League of Nations, the
Wake sought, among other things, to make it impossible for any reader to
feel securely in any one place at any one time, insisting as it did that "there
are always two signs to turn to, the yest and the ist" (Joyce 597). So if Jolas's
manifesto, like his transition project as a whole, was designed as a paratext
for the Wake, inaugurating Joyce's final work as a new revolutionary act of
46 Peter D. McDonald
writing that would transform the literary field, the commentary it provided
tells us more about Jolas's "specific interests" and his understanding of the
field in the 1920s than it does about the Wake. In fact, the mismatch between
the kind of "European" or "transatlantic" consciousness, perhaps even con-
science, Jolas was attempting to forge and Joyce's own very different effort
to create a new "world" consciousness brings the tensions between the ver-
bal and nominal senses of institution, and between singular and general acts
of institution, sharply into focus.

These tensions are not restricted to avant-garde literary groups, "little

magazines," and the works they champion. They are equally evident if we
turn from the inner workings of the literary field in the 1920s to the worlds
of scholarship and education today. In this context, as my second example
shows, it is scholars and the anthologies they create that exemplify the per-
ils of literary institution in the double sense of the noun and the verb. To
illustrate this, 1 shall focus on the following short poem:

When she bends to touch

Her mother-in-Iaw's feet
And two bangles slip
From her thin hands, tears
Corne to the cold woman's eyes.

If you are an ambitious university student in the so-called "West," particu-

larly in the United States, who likes keeping up with the latest academic
trends, then you are most likely to come across this poem in the first vol-
ume of David Damrosch's Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004).
Like any anthology, this is an ornately structured exercise in paratextual
framing and curation. To begin with, it identifies the poem as belonging to
"The Ancient World," locating it historically and geographically in a section
called "Early South Asia" under a sub-section entitled "Love in a Courtly
Language," dating it from the second or third century C.E., and tracing
its provenance to a two-thousand-year-old anthology, which it calls The
Seven Hundred Songs of Hala (x-xi). In addition, it prefaces the poem with
an informative headnote, which gives an account of Prakrit, the classical
language in which the poem originally appeared, and which explains the
principle of dhvani, the ancient poetic practice of "suggestion." Suggestive
implication, setting the said to resonate with the unsaid, is, the headnote
explains, "a hallmark of Prakrit poems" (938).
Yet the Longman Anthology is more than a scrupulously arranged his-
torical guide to a wide selection of the world's written heritage. It is also the
most ambitions introduction to the idea of "world literature" not as Goethe
 Instituting (World) Literature 47
or Marx understood it in the nineteenth century, or as Tagore or Zhenduo
defined it in the early twentieth century, but as Damrosch has come to redefine
it over the past decade. In his sense "world literature" is a twenty-first-century
venture responding, on the one hand, to the "tremendous increase in the range
of cultures that actively engage with each other" in today's world, and, on
the other, to "the process known as globalization," which makes this kind of
engagement aIl the more likely and consequential (Longman xxi). He also
acknowledges that his project is driven by narrower, specificaIly academic
and US institutional imperatives, notably a need to refashion comparative
literature and the "Great Books" tradition in less parochiaIly Euro-American
terms. "An extraordinary range of exciting material is now in view," he notes
before inviting his largely US student readership to explore the "embarrass-"
ment of riches" that is "the world's literary heritage" (xxi). Decreeing a new
global Xanadu for our individual aesthetic pleasure is not Damrosch's only
objective, however. By creating "remarkable opportunities for cross-cultural
understanding," he believes his project has an ethical, perhaps even a socio-
political purpose as weIl. In case this sounds a little too much like visionary
UNESCO-"speak, he quickly points out that such "cross-cultural" encounters
always bring "new kinds of tensions, miscommunications, and uncertainties,"
the most obvious of which centre on the endlessly vexed issue of translation
(xxi). Yet here too Damrosch has a solution. "One way to define works of
world literature," he says, citing the central premise of his project, is "that
they are the works that gain in translation" (xxv): "Sorne great texts remain so
intimately tied to their point of origin that they never read weIl abroad," while
others "gain in resonance as they move out into new contexts, new conjunc-
tions" (xxv). As this suggests, "world literature," for Damrosch, is an effect of
translation and circulation, not a fixed canon of works or, indeed, a repository
of univers al human verities.
The questions Damrosch's conception of "world literature" raises about
the various uses of the term "institution" l have been discussing become
more apparent if we pick at one smaIl thread in the vast tapestry of the
Longman Anthology. In the table of contents for the first volume, under
the general tide The Seven Hundred Songs of Hala, which frames the poem
l have quoted, we have the following brief acknowledgement: "(trans.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)" (xi). If you take the time to follow this up in
the densely printed seven-page bibliography at the end of the volume, you
find the source specified as "Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, trans., The Absent
Traveller, Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasatï of Satavahana Hala,
1991" (1334). This is the first volume of Mehrotra's collection, which
appeared under the imprint of Ravi Dayal, the most significallt literary pub··
lisher in lndia at the time. Penguin Books lndia subsequently re-issued The
Absent Traveller as a Classic more globally in 2008. These editions frame
the poem in ways that are tellingly different to the Longman Anthology.
Unlike Damrosch, for instance, Mehrotra does not see translation as an
evaluative economy entailing either "loss" or "gain," nor, by implication,
48 Peter D. McDonald
does he see world literature as an effect of circulation with works moving
"abroad" from their "point of origin."
Disarmingly, Mehrotra begins his "Translator's Note" by wondering if
translation involves anything more than mere repetition. "The Gëithëisaptasatf
speaks the minute you open it," he observes, "and as its translator l felt at
times l did little more than repeat in anotber language what it said" (x). This
is largely because the poems use a repertoire of images-"cupped hands, a
pregnant woman, a man staring"-that function "like international signs,"
which "hardly seem to need translators" (x). This certainly gets at an aspect of
the poems, the visual images of which are often almost iconic, but we should
not overlook Mehrotra's tentative language and obvious hyperbole. Though
he refers arrestingly ta "the script of their images," it is clear that, as verbal
fonTls, the images in the poems do not exist independently of words (x).
Moreover, as the poem l quoted above indicates, many require explication.
Though it focuses on a silent gesture, a women touching her mother-in-
law's feet, it presupposes a significant amount of cultural knowledge, as
the headnote to the version in Damrosch's Longman Anthology rightly
points out. Besides knowing the lndian social code of "absolute deference"
between daughter- and mother-in-Iaw signified by the act of touching the
feet, we need to be aware that "a woman separated from her husband is
often depicted as wasting away for sorrow: her wrists will become thin,
and her bangles-the symbol of marri age, rather like a wedding ring in the
West-will slip from her hands" (938). This kind of knowledge does not,
of course, help us interpret the older woman's tears, which, following the
conventions of dhvani or suggestion, remain enigmatic, but it does suggest
we should not take Mehrotra's daim about the almost spontaneous "com-
municability of the poems" at face value (x).
Mehrotra's second daim about translation is, if anything, more radi-
cally at odds with Damrosch's metaphors of "loss" and "gain." While
aIl translations "edit, highlight, and compensate," he remarks, "great
translations go a step further": "instead of compensating for losses,
they shoot to kill, and having obliterated the original transmigrate its
soul into another language" (xi). Confronted by the stock binaries that
dominate debates about translation-faithfulness/betrayal, primary/
secondary, loss/gain-Mehrotra simply sidesteps them. Though his own
beguiling metaphor of transmigration draws on one of the tenets cen-
tral to many lndian religions, he is quick to point out that he is not
offering a peculiarly "Eastern" model of translation. Looking back to
Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Ezra Pound's "The
River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," he notes that both became "immortal
English poems who se Oriental origins have ceased to matter" via simi-
larly radical process of transmigration (xi). lndeed, citing Pound on the
role of translation as a means of reviving the English literary tradition,
he remarks that "during its periods of ill-health, these 'exotic injections'
helped put English poetry back on its feet" (xi). Mehrotra describes his
 lnstituting (World) Literature 49
own translations as "more modest, less homicidal," but, as is clear from
the following example, his practice is deadly enough:

Lives in main street,

Attractive, young, her husband away,
A light wench her neighbour, hard up too,
And, unbelievably, still chaste (4)

With its arch juxtaposition of the quaintly archaic and menacingly

lecherous Middle English word "wench," the twentieth-century American
colloquial phrase "main street," the slangy "hard up," and the chival-
rous Old French word "chaste," this example, like many other Mehrotra
translations, "shoots to kill." Playing fast and loose with linguistic and
literary history, it transmigrates the soul of a two-thousand-year-old
Prakrit poem into a uniquely composite, specifically deracinated English
idiom and a contemporary form that might be described as a free-verse
epigram-cum-personal-ad.
The Absent Traveller as a whole signaIs the importance of such unpre-
dictable osmotic flows froIn the very outset. Between the contents page and
the "Translator's Note," we find two brief epigraphs, one from Pound's
Confucian Analects, the other from William Carlos Williams's poem "Classic
Picture." While these link the collection to Euro-American modernist, per-
haps specifically Imagist, projects of the 1920s, which, as the Pound refer-
ence indicates, are in turn linked to ancient Chinese philosophy, they also
point to Mehrotra's own affirmation of a poetics of perception, which privi-
leges direct observation above knowledge. Translating section 6.XVIII.1 of
the Analects, Pound has Confucius say: "Those who know aren't up to those
who love; nor those who love, to those who delight in" (Mehrotra, viii).
Developing this critique of knowledge, "Classic Picture" in its final lines
invites readers to "look more deeply into" the portrait of a woman, noting
"her maneuvers," which "puzzle as we will about them / ... mal' mean /
anything" (Mehrotra viii). What the epigraphs effectively construct, in other
words, is an interplay not just of languages (English, classical Chinese, and
Prakrit) but also of literary and philosophical traditions, geographies, and
histories. If they associate the ancient poetic practice of dhvani with the even
more ancient traditions of Confucian philosophy, they also draw a line from
the modernist poetics of Pound and Williams to Mehrotra's own project
of remaking his poetic ancestors and the English language in terms that
are at once contemporary, extraterritorial, interlingual, and intercultural.
Far from being archaeological curiosities from the ancient world, which
belong to "world literature" because they "gain" in translation and circulate
"abroad," the poems in Mehrotra's own editions of The Absent Traveller
emerge as radically contemporary acts of writing, instituting their own con-
ception of world literature and challenging us to rethink the assumptions on
which Damrosch's project is founded.
50 Peter D. McDonald
4

At the beginning of this essay l suggested that the new Oxford English Liter-
ary History is committed to understanding "the institutions in which liter-
ary acts take place" largely for historical reasons. As Bate's phrasing and
Stevenson's exemplary chapters developi,ng this idea make clear, the "edu-
cated communities, publishing networks, and so forth" that comprise these
"institutions" form an important part of the surrounding context in which
"literary acts take place." Yet, as Danto and Dickie and, above aIl, Bourdieu,
have long argued, this broadly historicist orientation, which is also reflected
in Rainey's Institutions of Modernism, underplays the vitally constitutive
role these institutions play as agents of "consecration" that make it possible
for these acts to be seen as "literary" in the first place. Put in the idiom of
speech act theory, this means that a term like "literature" is never simply
or unprobiematically descriptive. Under the right conditions, following the
operations of the literary field in Bourdieu's sense, the term functions perfor-
matively as a marker indicating a "conferred status," to use Dickey's phrase.
Understood in this way, any institutional analysis of, say, "educated com-
munities," "publishing networks," or Rainey's "literary elites" always goes
beyond the material evidence-the details that book historians, for instance,
too often enumerate merely for their own sake. In publishing or anthologiz-
ing a particular work, the relevant cultural intermediaries and authorities,
whether we are talking about an editor like Jolas in the 1920s or a scholar
like Damrosch in the 2000s, are undoubtedly effecting significant material
changes in the world. They are, at the same time, using their authority (itself
a product of field dynamics) to confer a particular status on that work, to
present it to readers in specifie ways, and, in so doing, to give meaning to
the term "literature," or a phrase like "world literature," at a certain histori-
cal juncture. As l have suggested, we need to bear in mind that This power
is not restricted to the literary field itself, construed as a self-enclosed sys-
tem: it has effects in the wider world when, for example, literary critics give
evidence in a court of law as expert witnesses, and it is, in turn, affected by
Bourdieu's "external determinants" and by the other fields and institutions
with which the literary field inevitably intersects.
Insofar as it encourages literary cri tics to step back from the details of
any act of writing and to reflect on the institutional conditions that make it
and their readings of it possible, this kind of analysis is indispensable. Yet
it remains limited, as l have argued, because it focuses on "institution" as
a no un and tends to keep writing and reading in the background. Rainey,
who sees himself as a no-nonsense cultural materialist, is, for instance, pro-
vocatively militant about "close reading," which he dismisses, not without
justification, as the "scholastic scrutiny of linguistic minutiae" (106). If we
bring writing, construed as a singular act of literary institution back into
the picture, albeit now as a key feature of the landscape rather than as close
readers' obsessive focal point, and if we keep the double sense of institution
 Instituting (World) Literature 51
as a noun and a verb in play, we can do more than effect a qualified, and
no doubt for sorne a reassuring, return to text: we can add a further criti-
cal and ideally seZrreflexiue dimension to our analysis and, perhaps more
importantly, develop new ways of engaging with the public force of writing
as a "literary act." As the example of Finnegans Wake shows, this applies
to the moments in which works are initially published. Seeing a magazine
like transition not just as a part of the cultural infrastructure of the 1920s
but also as an act of institution in its own right enables us to examine the
ways in which the Wake, again as an act of institution itself, exceeds and
perhaps even turns back on the institutional conditions that made it pos-
sible. As the example of Mehrotra's Absent Traueller shows, this kind of
analysis applies equally to the subsequent moments in which works are
republished over time. Again, seeing a volume like Damrosch's Longman
Anthology of World Literature not just as a part of the contemporary cul-
tural infrastructure but also as an act of institution in its own right allows
us to appreciate how Mehrotra's writings invite us to ask new questions
about Damrosch's conception of "world literature" and, indeed, about his
consecrating authority as a scholar. This does more than bring an element
of critique into the equation, however. If it allows us to place the Wake and
The Absent Traueller, among others, within a series of historical or contem-
porary disputes internaI to an increasingly globalized "Republic of Letters,"
it also, and perhaps more importantly, enables us to see them as specifically
literary interventions in a series of often acrimonious and sometimes violent
public debates about communal identity, ideas of culture, and the status of
English as a "world" language today. That this, in turn, imposes demands on
us to be more self-reflexive as commentators-because when it cornes to the
institution of literature in the double sense no one can daim a lofty position
outside the fray-is only to be welcomed.

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Danto, Arthur C. Philosophizing Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Prim.
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"Institution, n." Oxford English Dictionary Online. Sept. 2014. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.
52 Peter D. McDonald
Jolas, Eugene. Critical Writings 1924-1951. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2009. Print.
- - - . "Notes." Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell,
2005.1007-10. Print.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939. Print.
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. The Absent Traveller; Prakrit Love Poetry from the
Gathasaptasatf of Satavahana Hala. New'Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1991. Print.
Perloff, Marjorie. '''Logocinéma of the Frontiersman': Eugene Jolas's Multilingual
Poetics and its Legacies." Diflerentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2004.82-101. Print.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Rasula, J ed. "Finnegans Wake and the Char acter of the Letter." James Joyce
Quarterly 34.4 (1997): 517-30. Print.
Stevenson, Randall. The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary History
Vol. 12. 1960-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
3World Literature in a Poem
The Case of Herberto Helder 1
Helena C. Buescu

Tt is arguable that, if world literature is also a mode of reading, as David

Damrosch states, there may be special cases in which the choice of works to
be read and/or to be translated has to be accounted for as a poetic gesture
towards a planetary literary awareness. In such instances, the sense of literary
estrangement is part of the reading process, and the project of its non-
domestication (perhaps a stronger way to draw on Lawrence Venuti's notion
of foreignization) is very much at the centre of the hermeneutical process. In
what follows 1will be dealing with an interesting case of translation (or some-
thing akin to it), from the point of view of a poet. It is not only that it is a poet
who translates poems by others. Tt is also, as we shall see, that he translates
them as a poet, that is, as part of his own poetic stance. What is (and what
isn't) a literary translation? That is the question that lies at the heart of this
endeavour. As we shall see, it is also a case in which, through translation,
cultural diversity and provenance are transformed into a clearly distinguished
work: translating is a mode of reading, but it is also a mode of shifting socio-
logical and aesthetic functions and procedures. This is why we may be able
to say that world literature is not solely a mode of reading, but a mode that
deals with the constant invention of reading-by reshaping the centre and the
peripheries of literary systems, and by thus proposing ever-changing forms of
actually reading texts that seemed to have been already read.
Not that world literature and translation do this in a totally different
way than other approaches; yet they certainly render explicit the need ta
consider an extraterritorial approach in the way one reads each and every
text, and therefore accounts for what the text does and how it cornes to
mean different things in different ways. This approach also brings another
consequence, namely that world literature is, from my point of view, not
conceivable apart from a comparatist approach. Of course one knows that,
particularly in the United States, there has been a disciplinary need to distin-
guish between comparative and world literature (at least since the 1950s)-
especially linked with a more pedagogical (world literature) or a more
theoretical (comparative literature) emphasis. However, it is also obvious
l'hat the ever expanding approaches within the field of literary studies, from
the second half of the twentieth century onwards, make it incumbent upon
us to reconsider these debates in our current time and from our current
54 Helena C. Buescu
positions. Strangely or not, the notion of estrangement, with its formalist
pa st and, as 1 argue in this essay, its very interesting future, has resurfaced in
the discussions around translatables or untranslatables. The issue might not
be an either/or question, meaning that it may be more interesting to consider
these terms as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. My main
argument in this essay is that the notion of estrangement introduces a more
complex view of the relations between comparative and world literature, as
one recognizes that comparative literature also deals with varied factors of
estrangement, and that therefore what is translated is, very often, paradoxi-
cally untranslatable. It is also my contention that we may therefore try to
find more complex cases where the play between world and comparative
literature, as weIl as that between the familiar and the estranged, become
two of the major factors in the dynamics of reading.
The case that 1 deal with in this essay is one of these complex cases. The
essay presents an approach to and a practice of translation that not everyone
would immediately accept as translation. It takes its eue from the notion of
estrangement, as it argues that the substantial reason for this labour of trans-
lation, and the choices it manifests, is precisely the recognition of the diversi-
fication of the literary world, in both historie al and geographical terms. And
it insists upon the fact that what this poet does with his poetic translations
belongs to a comparative approach, as he puts quite different literary tradi-
tions in dialogue with the Portuguese one and ne ver loses sight of how they
clash, mix or do not mix, and change each other. There is no peace in these
translations: they are the site of conflicts that are never resolved, not even
(or especially not) when a translation has supposedly been achieved. In a
sense, then, the comparative approach of a world literature scope perma-
nently deals with estrangements that are the very basis of any reading we may
do and of every worle of art we may confront.
This of course is also a way of responding to the historical debate that
oscillates between an optimistic view of world litera ture-in the sense that it
might be a project of literature ta come-and the more pessimistic view that
sees in it the probable loss of the "world" in its non-neutralized diversity.
We have different scenarios in which these opposing views have been the
object of discussion, and sorne still quite recent (1 would just like to men-
tion the cases of Pascale Casanova and Gayatri Spivak). My position, which
1 revisit in the present essay, assumes that there is actually no way in which
we would be able to reach a final description of world literature-either
because of the historically diverse vantage points it subsumes, or because
of the theoretically diverse points of entry that are used in its practice and
discussion, be they sociological, hermeneutical, or through the history of
translation and, therefore, comparative. If we view world literature as an
epistemologically engaged practice, and therefore a structurally changeable
one (comparative literature has also taught us that), we may indeed accept
that Damrosch's definition of it as a mode 0/ reading still stands as a viable
description of how it works. And if to this we still add, as Helgesson's and
 World Literature in a Poem 55
Vermeulen's introductory remarks to the present volume point out, the com-
plementary questions posed by Damrosch, on the "what" and "where" of
world literature, we will have to accept that perhaps what world literature
offers is still another way of making clear that literary studies always deal
with a matter which is ne ver completed, and even less closed. They will
always be "too human" for that. It may be interesting to read approaches
that try to make "order" out of such a contradictory matter, but l doubt that
this "order" will one day be able to positively (and positivistically) describe
what we do when we do comparative world literature. We must also be pre-
pared for such an estranged reading as this if we want to navigate between
distant and close readings and between familiar and unfamiliar texts and
literary systems, as l do indeed believe we must.
In 1966, the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder (1930-2015), arguably the
most important poet in the second half of the twentieth century in Portugal,
began an intriguing experiment with poetry written by others and with its
relation ta his own poetry. In that year, he published 0 Bebedor nocturno
(The Night Drinkard), a collection of what he called "versions," that is, a
series of mostly indirect translations coming from disparate geographical
regions, historical periods, and cultural affiliations. Twenty-one years after
this collection, he published As Magias (1987), presented once more as
"versions" of other texts and poems. And in 1997, he published three titles
in three months: Ouolof (October), Poemas amerîndios (Amerindian Poems;
November), and Doze nôs numa corda (Twelve Knots in a Rope; December).
These three volumes are no longer presented as "versions." Instead, Helder
uses for each of them the subtitle "Poemas mudados para Português por
Herberto Helder" (" Poems changed into Portuguese by Herberto Helder").
Until 1990, in his constant revisions of his own poetry, he had also included
the pre-existing "versions" in his complete poems, stating that in so doing,
he "boldly dare(d) to turn it [the poem] not only into a Portuguese poem but
also into a poem by [him] " (Helder, Poesia toda 209; my translation). In the
case of the 1997 volumes, the notion of a "changed poem" is underlined,
with different connotations than the previous concept of "versions." This is
at the core of this essay's reflections. Is world literature about translations
that may not even be translations (at least literally), as l will demonstrate?
How estranged must a poem be to be recognized as a poem translated
(or changed) into another culture and language? As we shall see, there are no
simple answers to these and related questions.
Let me begin by describing in more detail the structure and the contents
of the five volumes mentioned above. This is already an important point to
underline, as it makes the degree of estrangement explicit, and leads us to
recognize how distant literary traditions may be from the vantage point from
which they are read and, in this case, translated and reworked. Standing
out for the even casual reader is undoubtedly the extraordinary range and
diversity of cultural sources from which these texts are selected. The 1966
volume collects materials from Ancient Egypt, the Old Testament, Maya and
56 Helena C. Buescu
Nahuatllore, Ireland, Scotland, Finland,]apan, Indochina, Indonesia, Greece,
and Madagascar, together with Zen poems, Arab and AI-Andaluz poems,
"Eskimo" and Tartar poems, Haikus, and "Red-Skin poems." As magias, in
turn, offers poems from the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, D. H. Lawrence,
Robert Duncan, Blaise Cendrars, and Stephen Crane, among others, lined up
with native materials from Central Asia,.Equatorial Africa, Sudan, Gabon,
British Columbia, India, Panama, Australia, Colombia, Ancient Greece,
Mexico, and Mongolia. As for the 1997 trilogy, Ouolof collects texts from
Mayan and Amazonian sources, as weIl as poetry by Zbigniew Herbert,
Jean Cocteau, Emilio Villa, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Malcom Lowry. Poemas
amerindios starts out with a long poem by Ernesto Cardenal (he himself
working with several sources of sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts, as weIl as
the Florentine Codex) and goes on to gather texts culled from Aztec and
Quichua cultures, as weIl as texts from an array of native North and South
American sources. Finally, Doze nôs nu ma corda seems to move away from
the logic governing the previous volumes by privileging Western sources:
Antonin Artaud, Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Henri Michaux (whose poetry
takes up almost two-thirds of the book), and a short poem by Hermann
Hesse which closes the collection. In these volumes, poems by fairly canoni-
cal twentieth-century Western writers are set si de by side with anonymous
texts stemming from orally produced and transmitted cultures worldwide,
covering "genres" as diverse as riddles, hymns, songs, prayers, incantations,
exorcisms, mythical narratives, and invocations, rooted in highly ritualized
contexts animated by a belief in the magic and propitiatory power of words. 2
As may weIl be understood, one of the gestures underlined by the poet is
the fact that no national or even regional boundaries make sense in his con-
cept of literature: poetry is understood as a transversal phenomenon which
no external boundary may contain or define, not even a language, a litera-
ture, or a nationality-there is no mention whatsoever of these categories as
being relevant to the choice and the practice of translated poems. Herder is in
fact quite distant from Helder's notion of literature, which therefore appears,
at least potentially, as a planetary phenomenon, oscillating between and com-
bining a vital process of inventiveness (energeia) and the heritage of historical
works of art (ergon). One further question relates to the concept of author-
ship, which is also implicitly invoked to dissolve the idea that the authority
of authors is of greater importance than that of texts themselves. This text-
centric practice defies our basically author-centred literary system (at least in
the West, mainly since the eighteenth century, as both Roland Barthes and
Michel Foucault have underlined); we may consider it a further instance of
estrangement in the reception of an already previously estranged set of texts.
How do we cope with such a "mess"? We cannot avoid such a question-
and the word "mess" is indeed a conscious choice, as it relates to the vitalist
conception of poetry that Helder explicitly endorses. Finally, and although
this is not my main argument here, the concept of translation, as weIl as that
of adaptation, is also under scrutiny. If, again according to Damrosch, one
 World Literature in a Poem 57
of the characteristics of world literature lies in the fact that it is about texts
that gain in translation, then what we also have in Helder's case is a most
convincing argument in support of this view. There are also different kinds
of gain in aIl this: the fact that some untranslatables are objects of change
and translation; the fact that they become part of the literary capital of
another language and literary system(s); finaIly, the fact that they are with-
drawn from a certain context and "violently" placed in an altogether differ-
ent one, as is the case of the published volumes by Helder. Their meaning can
never be the same again-and this becomes part of their estrangement too.
We must however aeknowledge that this is a polemical view of translation,
which boldly submits notions such as fidelity, proximity, and domestication
to ideas and practiees sueh as transformation and foreignization. A way of
reading becomes a statement about poetry itself-the poet's own poetry as
weIl as the poetry of others.
l am mainly concerned here with the notions of "change" and of a "ehanged
poem," and with the fact that poems not only are subject to change but also
seem to aetively invite change. The act of "ehanging" (in the etymological
sense of "mutation," expressed in the Portuguese word "mudado") a work
from one language to another and the act of incorporating dissonant codes
and conventions into a personal poetics gain, l think, from being considered
as specifie cases of intercultural or transeultural intertextuality-a specifie
mode, l would argue, through which world literature may be considered and
appreciated. In fact, from a certain point of view these acts also contribute
to a different concept of world literature, in which both personal and distant
poetie choices are able to coIlide (rather than be solved, as we have seen). In
reality, largue that these acts also stress the awareness that world literature
is as much about what travels outside its original system of production as
it is about what travels from the outside to the inside while maintaining
ablatant qua lity of strangeness. If we follow Apter's lead, this interiorized
strangeness also becomes a way of making what does not travel (yet) travel
in a different (and blatant) way (Apter). It does not "travel weIl "-but this is
also an integral part of any process of change and of any process of transla-
tion. From my point of view, therefore, the notion that a poem is change-
able, and that one of the fonns it can take is through an act of translation
(or something related to it, as Helder never accepted that these published texts
should be caIled "translations") also addresses the problem of originality, as
it explieitly undermines it. Helder is doser instead to the "anthropophagie"
attitude that Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian modernist, prodaimed in the
"Anthropophagie Manifesto" in 1928:

Only anthropophagy unites us. SociaIly. Economically. PhilosophicaIly.

The unique law of the world. Masked expression of
aIl individualisms, of aIl coIlectivisms. Of aIl religions. Of aIl peace
treaties.
Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.
58 Helena C. Buescu
Against aIl catechizations. And against the mother of the Gracchi.
1 am only interested in what is not mine. Law of human.
Law of the anthropophagus.

OSWALD DE ANDRADE
In Piratininga.
Year 374 of the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha.
(Andrade 1)3

In fact, Helder himself talks about his own poetic activity as a case of textual
"anthropophagy" (he also published a book with this telling tide), in which
not only the more canonical traditions are assimilated (the Bible, Camoes,
the epic poet, and of course Fernando Pessoa, whose oeuvre resonates on
many levels with Herberto Helder's) but also the more distant ones are con-
fronted and "eaten up" by the poet. The fact remains that Helder seems to
privilege, in his choice of other texts, what we might calI non-traditions, at
least insofar as Portuguese and Western poetry in general are concerned.
What 1 mean by this is that he clearly tries to look beyond "expected" texts,
authors, and nationalliteratures, and that in so doing he is also addressing
what has been silenced-what precisely has not traveIled. Yet, this choice
is therefore also about the proposaI of a radicaIly different and changeable
canon, which might work as a background noise and prevent the unaware-
ness of different cultures, literatures, and traditions, as weIl as invite their
collision, expected or not. These texts pro duce a noise, within Helderian
poetics, that the biblical or Camonean intertextuality alone would not be
able to generate. They are dissonant.
Returning to my opening remarks, 1 argue that world literature is perhaps
mainly constituted by the awareness and the practice of dissonance and
non-conformity as these are played out within a given literary system. Let us
read, in this light, the way Herberto Helder highlights this non-conformity
himself, in an introductory note to his 0 bebedor nocturno:

1 have sometimes imagined the acrobatie and centrifugaI life of the

polyglot. 1 suppose his daily life to be vibrant with an unceasing move-
ment of displacements, transmutations, exchanges, and exhilarating
hunts for equivalences under the sign of affinity. He lives off sus-
pended significations and a fascination with sounds that converge and
diverge-and there is no doubt a mute desperation in him, for in the
disjunction of languages he searches for an improbable unity. By mul-
tiplying the operations that favour unit y, he walks radiandy towards
dispersion. He decentralizes himself. He exists in a state of Babel ...
As for myself, 1 don't know languages. This is to my advantage.
It allows me to render poetry from Ancient Egypt into Portuguese
without knowing the language. 1 take the Song al Sangs in English
or French as if it were an English or French poem, and boldly dare to
 World Literature in a Poem 59
turn it not only into a Portuguese poem but also into a poem by me.
An indirect version, someone will say. Personal recreation or idle dilet-
tantism, someone else will say. 1 say nothing. If 1 were to say anything,
1 would say pleasure. My pleasure is this: wandering aimlessly, emerg-
ing through sudden love, projective. 1 have no right to daim that the
texts in this book are translations. 1 would say they are swift, laborious
explosions ...
Someone asks: what about fidelity? 1 don't feel unfaithful. What
l'm trying to do is to build the Portuguese poem in tune with the
emotional, mental, and linguistic meaning which 1 stealthily got when
1 read it in English, French, ltalian, or Spanish. It is an oddly personal
notion of fidelity, 1 know, but then aIl fidelity is personal.
(Poesia toda 209-10; my translation)

This idea of poetry is therefore not about straightforward similarities or

even equivalences, but about dissonances and their outcome. This is why
Herberto Helder refers to these changed poems as "swift, laborious explo-
sions" (Poesia toda 210). And he adds, in the volume Ouolof, regarding a
poem by the Caxinauâ Indians:

We are facing a powerfully mythical, magical, lyrical diction, which

transgresses in every way the norm of the Portuguese word. This dis-
turbance itself immediately turns into poetic substance and action ...
The decentring structure between the two languages-captured as
poetic legitimacy-becornes an instantaneous expressive force in Por-
tuguese, an untidy, wrong, liberated, regenerate, recreated Portuguese.
The act of speaking becomes animated with a jubilant material energy.
It is totally new. (44; my translation)

The word "mess," which 1 previously used, may now appear under its full
light: poetry and literature are "messy" matters for Herberto Helder. They
cannot be constrained in one given system. Instead, they derange (and
rearrange) it continuously, for instance, by me ans of translation. And what
he calls "poetic legitimacy" depends on the fact that one is able to capture
the "decentring structure" that happens between two different languages,
cultures, and literatures. The question is therefore not one of merely includ-
ing or excluding texts, authors, or institutions-instead, there are always a
number of mixed procedures through which literature precisely escapes the
either/or logic of inclusion and exclusion. It is not hard ta understand how
these principles relate to an idea of world literature that does not shape
itself around a strict "commerce" of texts. And it is not hard to understand
that what we have here is an idea of poetry able to bring into itself and
into its tradition that which Helder will calI, further down, the "happy mis-
take" (45). In this sense, what the poet proposes is also a different concept
of tradition, transversal to different historical moments and geographical
60 Helena C. Buescu
contexts, shifting within them in a potentially chaotic movement, partially
governed by chance (or what academics refer to as a very real serendipity).
For instance, when the poet publishes Emilio Villa's text, he acknowledges
that it is a literaI reproduction of what Villa has himself written. But he also
describes how he came across that poem by mere chance, and this chance is
part of the poetic agency as he conceives. it. But of course we already knew,
since Borges's Pierre Menard, that a literally reproduced text is never a liter-
ally reproduced text. Literature (and therefore world literature) lives out of
this paradox.
Through this apparently disordered and untidy process, therefore, the
poem is conceived of as able to integrate a personal poetics in the exact
measure that it also manifests itself as other, somehow combining the
tension between domestication and foreignization that Lawrence Venuti
described concerning the act of translation. In a sense, it is a foreign poem
in its personal or even domestic form, conceived as an "explosion" of the
unfamiliar in the context of a personal oeuvre and trajectory. Herberto
Helder plays with the notions of contiguity and discontinuity, as he groups
together and gives an order to what still appears as disordered. In As mag· c

ias, for instance, Stephen Crane's "Heart" is preceded by a chant used in

the cannibalistic ceremonies of a British Columbian tribe and succeeded by
an invocation to prevent snake bites from African Pygmies; we have ta read
Crane in such a context, and this certainly changes our reading of Crane's
poem, as it conversely changes the chant of the British Columbian tribe.
Another intriguing aspect, particularly in the Portuguese and Lusophone
contexts, is that the African languages that he translates from are not the
local languages of the African Lusophone though Helder was
deliberately rejecting our most immediate and obvious choices. A similar
situation is indicated by the tide Ouolof (the name of a language spoken in
the region of Senegal, quoted by Michaux), opening a volume in which no
African oral pre-colonial text appears. Perhaps it just signaIs the following
volumes? There is no way of knowing.
The poet puts together fragments from extremely diverse works, com-
ing from different literatures and cultures, as he juxtaposes high and low
culture, erudite sources and popular ones. In so doing, Herberto Helder
subscribes to an idea of world poetry akin to his idea of personal poetry: he
publishes "his own" poetry and "his own" books (by now we know that we
have to use quotation marks for these expressions) next to these volumes,
and in a way, even when, after 1990, he excIudes these volumes from his
"poesia toda," he turns them into his own. lndeed, let me also point out that
Herberto Helder is engaged in a similar process as far as his own poetry is
concerned. He integrates, eliminates, rewrites, puts in a different order, in
a course of action for which his metaphor of "continuous poem" ("poema
contînuo") is used, as yet another name for the "complete poems" that are
never really complete. The image of cannibalism again cornes to mind-and
it may be worth to recall that Jean Klucinkas and Walter Moser use that
 World Literature in a Poem 61
precise image to refer to the process of "cultural recycling" (Klucinkas and
Moser). The case of Helder is, from this point of view, extremely significant,
both in his personal poetry and in his poetry-by-others. And if we take into
account that Portuguese poetry, in the twentieth century, is haunted by the
poetry-by-others that Fernando Pessoa coined as heteronymia, an interest-
ing way to look at these ehanged poems by Herberto Helder might be to
consider them as a response (with a vengeance) to Pessoan heteronymia.
Helder also faces the conflicts between languages and between different
traditions to which Pessoa found an answer through his multiple hetero-
nyms. Helder finds a different answer to a similar problem. For him, there is
no need to create new voices and new poets, that is, new heteronyms. Poetry
is always about such messy voices coming into collision with one's own, and
this makes it always a new voice, changes it.
One last question would make me underline the way this reveals and per-
forms a specifie awareness of literary history. The fortuitous event (the chance)
that seems to be part of the whole process does not erase the historicity of
the texts that are changed or the alterity of the cultures and literatures that
they represent or signal. On the contrary, this historicity becomes more com-
plex and multilayered: these texts do gain in translation, in historical terms
too. History is also made from these facts, encounters as weIl as ignorance,
conversations as weIl as silences. Poetry is mainly about the non-conformity
of historical awareness and about anachronisms (one of the fullest ways of
being historical, from my point of view). Herberto Helder's family of poets
is not the coherent, simultaneous tradition of T. S. Eliot's reflection; in fact,
he belongs to various vast and contradictory families of poets, and no effort
whatsoever of reaching a synthesis between them is made. They stand out
as different families, between which clash and dissonance are perhaps more
important than consonance and equanimity.
The idea of poetry that underlies this choice implies therefore an ongoing
conversation between differences in time, space, and culture, which Helder
also recognizes in his anthology of contemporary Portuguese poetry (1985),
when he refers to it as "Vozes comunicantes" (communicating voices), a
word playon "vasos comunicantes" (communicating vessels) (Edoi lelia
doum). The metaphor of these "vozes comunicantes" applies to whatever
poetry there is, independently from national or regional or historical disso-
nances. The poet's role, therefore, is to "change" something into something
else. But is not the alchemical tradition intimately connected with the search
for the philosopher's stone? In Herberto Helder's context, poetry is at least
one of the shapes the philosopher's stone may take. And sometimes poems
are even changed without being changed at aIl: a Comanche transcript is
merely transliterated, but this still changes a poem into Portuguese.

Djâ i dju nibâ u

i dju nibâ i dju nibâ u
djâ i dju nibâ i nâ ê nê nâ
62 Helena C. Buescu
i dja i nai ni na
i dju niba u
i dju niba i dju niba u
dja i dju niba i dja ê nê na.
(As magias 36)

The prosody, the rhythm, and the ritual repetition of this Comanche text
have thus been integrated in Portuguese poetry, and that is what change
is about, even if, or perhaps because, we are not able to recognize its ver-
bal meaning, much less to traditionally engage in its translation. The poet
is the "communicating voice" through which the different "vessels" are
always in contact. And as one discovers that this is a poem that must also
be spoken, not only read, we have to be able to integrate an irnaginary
(or imagined) prosody into our everyday Portuguese language, therefore
again changing it into something that was not there before-even if it was
always there. A world literature that does not include such paradoxical and
"messy" practices misses part of what happens in a truly comparative view
of literatures in the world. Different modes of reading are precisely this.
Do sorne of these practices (which are by no means exclusive to Helder)
raise ethical dilemmas? This is of course a debatable point. In a strict sense,
and in a very literaI concept of a supposed "poetical ethics," there would
seem to be a problem in making one's own what was originally others'.
But the history of poetry provides us with abundant examples of imitatio
and emulatio being considered an intrinsic part of the hommage that a
poet pays another poet, whom by so doing he or she recognizes as his or
her predecessor. We should be careful when engaging in such a discussion,
especially as we understand that, historicaIly, ethical questions have had
very distinctive cultural answers. If poetry is the locus of "communicating
voices" (and vessels), then one possible answer would also be that it would
be unethical to erase such indebtedness.
A final remark on the whole process will underline something l have
alluded to previously. The idea of originality and the idea of nationality
have the same historical roots, and are intimately bound together, as we
know. Once one is questioned, the other also cornes under scrutiny. As
the poet puts together in a real, virtual, or imaginary place bits of mate-
rial (that is, textual) evidence that were never "meant" to be together, he
subscribes to an alternative mode of writing, as weIl as to an alternative
mode of reading: neither of them may be subsumed by traditional ideas of
originality or nationality. And this practice certainly represents yet another
form of that "musée imaginaire" that Malraux talked about: a confronta-
tion with differences in art, and a presence, in our life, of that which seemed
to be destined to disappear but which, through transformation and change,
lingers on, albeit in different forms. One of these is what we calI transla-
tion, even under the "messy" form that Helder uses to read his own poetry
as world poetry.
 World Literature in a Poem 63
NOTES

1. This paper is part of a wider research project on Herberto Helder's poetry.

Although with distinctively different objectives in mind, it points to two previ-
ously published papers. See Buescu and Buescu and Duarte.
2. An earlier version of this paragraph was published in Buescu and Duarte,
175-76.
3. "MANIFESTOANTROPOFAGO/S6 aANTROPOFAGIA nos une. Socialmente .
Economicamente. Filosoficamente. / Unica lei do mundo. Expressao mascarada
de todos os individualismos, de todos os coletivismos. De todas as / religi6es. De
todos os tratados de paz. / Tupi, or not tupi that is the question. / Contra todas
as catequeses. E contra a mae dos Gracos. / S6 me interessa 0 que nao émeu.
Lei do homem. Lei do antrop6fago. / '" / Oswald de Andrade / Em Piratininga /
Ano 374 da Deglutiçao do Bispo Sardinha" (Andrade 1).

WORKSCITED

Andrade, Oswald de. "Manifesto antropofâgico." Revista de antropofagia 1.1

(1928): 1. Print.
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Polities ofUntranslatability. London:
Verso, 2013. Print.
Buescu, Helena C. "Herberto Helder: uma ideia de poesia ornnlvora." Diacritica
23.3 (2009): 49-63. Print.
Buescu, Helena c., and Joao Fen-eira Duarte. "Communicating Voices: Herberto
Helder's Experiments in Cross-Cultural Poetry." Forum far Modern Language
Studies 43.2 (2007): 173-86. Print.
Darnrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003. Print.
Helder, Herberto. As 111agias. Lisbon: Hiena, 1987. Print.
- - - . "Este poerna pede para explicar-se." Ouolof: Poemas 111udados para Português
pOl' Herberto Helder. Lisbon: Assirio e Alvim, 1997.43-45. Print.
- - - . Poesia toda. 2 vols. Lisbon: Plâtano Editora, 1973. Print.
Helder, Herberto, ed. Elio Lelia Doura: Antologia das vozes co111unieantes da poesia
1110derna portuguesa. Lisbon: Assîrio e Alvirn, 1985. Print.
Klucinkas, Jean, and Walter Moser. "A estética à prova da reciclagem cultural."
Scripta 11.20 (2007): 17-42. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translatol"s Invisibility: A Histol'Y of Translation. London:
Routledge, 1995. Print.
Part II
The Literature Market
4 The OblivionWeWill Be
The Latin American Literary Field
after Autonomy
Liliana Weinberg

The tide of this essay is inspired by one of Héctor Abad Faciolince's novels,
El alvida que seremas (The Oblivian We Will Be, published in 2006 by
the Colombian branch of Planeta, a Spanish publishing house), and also
echoes the first line of a poem attributed to Jorge Luis Borges: "Ya somos
el olvido que seremos" ("We already are the oblivion we shall be"). At the
moment of the assassination of the author's father, a public health physi-
cian persecuted by the Colombian repression at the time, the son finds in a
pocket a poemaIlegedlywrittenbytheArgentinianwriter.This discovery
triggers this autobiographical novel's transformation into a book of essays
and memorabilia against oblivion. The book is then the struggle and the
commotion of a dying memory in the face of what is understood as oblivion:
oblivion that is individual as weIl as social, general as well as particular, and
that is framed by the strong convulsion that literature in Latin American
countries experiences in the transition from the model of the nation-state
to the realities of the aftermaths of pa st dictatorships, the privatization of
state-run businesses, and the introduction of the excesses of speculative and
transnational capitalism. The new conditions of exploitation and unemploy-
ment add up to a situation in which the modernization and creation of an
inclusive sense of citizenship-in which intellectuals played a decisive role
as symbolic mediators between the past and the present in the efforts to
legitimate one or another social and historical vision-enter into a crisis, as
national memory is increasingly becoming a disputed territory in which dif-
ferent, coexisting conceptions of society are being debated.
What Faciolince is depicting in his work is not only the death of his father
but also the oblivion of this common space for debate and comprehension,
the loss of this sense of public interest, and the implosion of a process of
modernization and a sense of citizenship that, through the institutions of the
nation-state, allowed for a certain degree of balance and a certain measure
of inclusion for the extended sectors of the middle class. In the present, not
only have many national administrations failed to achieve openness and to
permeate or expand this model, but, on the contrary, the model has been
cornered and suffocated not only by its own contradictions, but also by new
68 Liliana Weinberg
processes of barbarism, such as drug and human trafficking, corruption, and
slavery. The space of "us" draws back into an uncertain area of fragile daily
coexistence, of distrust between the "1" and the "others." To these features
1 would add the loss of dialogue between the different actors in the cultural
field, between text and tradition, between writer and reader, and, more gen-
erally, the increasing postponement of ? dialogue with other cultures and
experiences, the emptying of public spaces, and the disembodiment of social
life, whose last remaining bonds cannot resist the blows of corruption, drug
trafficking, and new forms of terrorism.
Among the large production of Abad Faciolince, 1 am interested also in
two other moments in his works. The first is his saga in search of the poem
left by his father, Traiciones de la memoria (Betrayals of Memory, from
2009), where we read:

1 would not have liked for life to give me this story as a gift. 1 would
not have liked for death to give me this story as a gift. But life and
death gave me, no, better, they imposed onto me the story of a poem
found in an assassinated man's pocket, and 1 could do nothing but
accept it. It was a true story, but it has so many symmetries that it
sounds made-up. If it were not true, it: could weIl be a fable. Even if it
were true, it would still be a fable. (11)1

After this statement, the text incorporates a detective-like search in archives

and a recovery of forms of sociability with characters from aIl over Latin
America and Europe. The search for those cIues, indeed the search for a lost
tradition and the possibilities of dialogue, is also the keynote of sorne of
the works of contemporary Latin American writers such as Ricardo Piglia,
Leonardo Padura, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Edmundo Paz Soldân.
ln another of Faciolince's novels, Basura (Garbage, from 2000), a
young journalist finds and recovers from the trash of his apartment build-
ing the manuscript papers thrown away by an older writer who happens
to be his neighbour. The young man starts to put the pieces together and
assembles the life and the work of the writer from the remainders that he
manages to recover from hazardous, incomplete, and sometimes incompre-
hensible cIues. Basura lays out another form of oblivion, which coincides
with a moment in which literatures have become, as Josefina Ludmer says,
"post-autonomous" :

Many literary works of the present cross the border of literature (or
the parameters that define it) and remain in and out of the field, in
a sort of diasporic position: being outside while still being trapped
in its interior ... They appear as literature but they cannot be read
under criteria or categories such as author, work, style, writing, text,
and meaning. They cannot be read as literature because they perform
a drastic emptying operation ... They may represent literature at the
 The Oblivion We Will Be 69
end of the cycle of literary autonomy, in the time of the transnational
book businesses ... The end of this cycle implies new conditions of
production and circulation of the book that result in the modification
of reading habits. We could calI them post-autonomous writings or
literatures (n.p.).

The "diasporic position" of many literary works and the "drastic emptying
operation" they perform could be considered as one manifestation of the
loss of specificity and autonomy in the current literary field and in contem-
porary literary practices. The retreat of reading and the loss of meaning are
different expressions of Latin American solitude.
There are many forms of loneliness and oblivion. The Cuban literary
critic Jorge Fornet remembers that the Chilean writer Antonio Skârmeta
wrote in 1991 that "dictatorship had violently divided a society that had
previously been knitted together" (26). In FOl"net's words, "Today many
writers reject Macondo [the emblematic town where Cien an os de soledad
is set and that has come to be se en as a representation of Latin America]
in order to feellike citizens of the world" (26). Our current literary period,
often referred to as post-autonomous, shows an increasing overlap between
genres, mock fraud, plagiarism, replacement, and above aH, an increasingly
hazy distinction between the limits of truth and fiction. Gustavo Guerrero,
a Venezuelan-French critic, wonders: "Who are our novelists writing for?
In the global village the first reader of their work is not exclusively Latin
American, nor is he necessarily Latin American, since the traditional soli-
darity between the production context and the reception context has weak-
ened, and we have go ne from Macondo to MacOndo following 'the cultural
logic of Latin American neoliberalism'" (qtd. in Fornet 34). Sorne critics,
like Antonio Cornejo Polar, have denounced "the risks of a Latin Ameri-
canism that, grounded in the metropolis, uses its context only as a pretext
and subject, and ignores the ideas that originated in Latin America, instead
submitting to the latest academic style" (qtd. in Fornet 41). In this way, a
new international division of knowledge is taking place, and it includes a
strong attempt to recycle or re-adapt analytical categories long familiar to
Latin America.

In or der to appreciate the importance of the changes 1 have outlined, we can

briefly go back to the nineteenth century. During the process of the creation
of the national entities in Latin America-those "imagined communities," in
Benedict Anderson's words, that provided a narrative of the nation-literature
played a fundamental, even hegemonic, role in organizing the discourse around
nationality. Yet soon contradictions became evident, since, as Renato Ortiz
writes, "modernity, while embodied in the nation, brings with it the seed of its
70 Liliana Weinberg
own negation" ("La modernidad-mundo"). This became vividly evident in the
la st decades of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, intellectuals would look for new symbolic solutions to contradictions in
the project of modernity, and would find the answer in a key concept: culture.
This concept would be subject to a brilliant interpretative procedure, inclu-
sive and self-aware made by great essayists such as Pedro Henrfquez Urefia
or Alfonso Reyes, that made possible an understanding of Hispanie America
as a unity. It consisted in the conformation of an ideological matrix in Latin
America centred in a particular perception of the relationship between culture,
literature, and history (Myers). A new window of opportunity supported this
matrix: the consolidation in Latin America of the publishing industry, journal-
ism, and magazines, as weIl as the transfer of the linguistic centre of gravity
for Spanish from Europe to America. These developments also allowed for the
consolidation of a critical mass of public intellectuals. This was particularly
evident in the case of the essay genre and the role that intellectuals played in
the creation of educational programmes, a renewed "order of books," and in
the construction of a Latin American literary and cultural tradition. Progres-
sively the twentieth century became the great era of the essay, the book, and
the cultural magazine.
In The Voice ol the Masters, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarrîa writes: "As a
reservoir of meaning, the concept of culture has consequently been a source
of authority on various levels ... In the functioning of literature as an institu-
tion the concept of culture is a key element" (8). l agree and go further: there
is more than a close relation, indeed nothing less than an "inherent circular-
ity" between culture and literature in Latin America. Culture and literature
not only work in an interrelated manner, but also on two levels at the same
time. To use the terrns that this volume foregrounds, culture and literature
operate as both instituting and instituted: culture represents a standing point
for literary construction, and at the same time serves as a confirmation of its
authority. This relationship has been identified by intellectuais such as Pedro
Henrîquez Urefia and Ângel Rama, who analyzed literature from a cultural
perspective and wrote histories of literature and culture combined. They
both embarked on great publishing projects (Biblioteca Americana and
Biblioteca Ayacucho, respectively) in or der to break the literary-cultural
circle through policies that gave a more prominent place to literature within
the culture as weIl as an understanding of literature through new approaches
to culture. Remarkably, these studies were undertaken before cultural stud-
ies were established as a research field, showing that in decisive moments,
in Latin America, there has been a consciousness among intellectuai sectors
that culture determines literature just as much as literature makes culture
legible. This logic applies to any society, past or present; but in the case of
Latin America there has been a particularly intense articulation between
culture and literature. When l speak about "the oblivion we will be," l mean
that this particular articulation has run into a crisis along with the ideas of
modernization, the welfare state, and so on.
 The Obliuion We Will Be 71
By the mid-twentieth century, there existed a certain degree of balance
between the position of the intellectual, the academic and educational sys-
tems, the publishing industry, a certain economic growth model, and the
ideal of political participation; there was, in short, an implicit contract of
representativeness between the authors, their subjects, and the community
of readers. Literature, and particularly the novel and the essay, occupied a
solid position between the literary and the intellectual fields. Yet when sorne
degree of balance had been reached, the economic and political conditions
shifted dramatically during the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution polarized
the notion of "commitment" by the intellectuals, and soon the intellectual
scene started to change in a radical way: new practices and discursive forms
appeared together with processes of professionalization and the consolida-
tion of the academic space and of the social sciences. Starting in the 1970s,
the various crises of citizenship models, and also of the school system, of
democracy, and of editorial production left inteilectuals without a specifie
working ground. With the political problems of Latin America in the late
1970s and the 1980s, when military dictatorships in various countries relied
on censorship and repression, sorne scholars were exiled and had to look for
work in foreign academic spaces (Dorfman), while others began to refer to
"the death of the intellectuals" (Bartra) in the face of neoliberalism and the
changes of the "lettered city" (Rama). The particular sense of culture coined
by intellectuals in order to strengthen national and continental projects and
to find an inclusive public space-from Rodô to Fuentes, with figures such
as Mariâtegui, Henrfquez Ureiia, and Reyes--had initially paired up with a
relative autonomization of their practice, yet it began to face the emergence
of late capitalist societies that required that social relationships no longer
submitted to the local interaction context. To sum up, in the sixties, the
model of culture as a reservoir managed by an illustrious elite who thought
of itself as universal suffers a crisis and shifts to historically determined par-
ticular groups, towards urban processes, and towards activities, experiences,
and other areas foreign to the elites and academies. In short, the history of
twentieth-century Latin American culture can be summed up as the transi-
tion "from incomplete modernity to world modernity," in Renato Ortiz's
words ("América Latina"), with ail the asymmetries and bottleneck effects
inherent to a peripheral position.
It would be too easy to idealize or condemn the whole conception of His-
panie American culture, which had its lights and shadows. It accompanied a
process of modernization, a "non-traditionalist" understanding of tradition,
and the opening up to more inclusive models of citizenship and the idea of a
public space. These factors contributed to create more dynamic societies and
to suppress certain accumulations of feudalism that still remained by break-
ing with the old elites and conservative traditions, which were represented
then by the figures of the book and the master teacher; they supported differ-
ent literary projects and the incorporation of new urban and rural popular
sectors to decision-ma king processes. But the idea of Latin American culture
72 Liliana Weinberg
also had its dark sides, as it at the same time involved the strengthening of
certain distinctive marks of identity with respect to Western culture; even
if it audaciously incorporated the experience of the avant-gardes, progres-
sively discovered Brazil and the Caribbean, and even integrated the other
Europe of Joyce and the other United States of Faulkner, it nevertheless
failed to achieve a better knowledge of the world outside Europe, as weIl as
of the lives of women or other minorities. Few, very few were the voices-
like those of Martfnez Estrada and other intellectuais who were receptive
of the idea of the Third World-that extended an invitation to open Latin
American realities to other comparable processes in Asia and Africa and to
lessen the prominence of Paris. For the most part, however, Latin Americans
felt that their region was inscribed in the narrative of Western civilization
and the "republic of letters" turned towards Paris, the literary rnetropolis, in
confirmation of Pascale Casanova's central daim (Casanova 40-54).
The boom phenomenon is paradoxically both the product of the modern-
izing processes that Latin America went through up to the sixties as weIl as
their cri tic al reading. In its effort to symbolize specific cultural realities that
questioned the model of a monolithic culture, it made other realities emerge
(this is one of the achievements of magic realism). Today, many voices
dedare themselves to be fed up with the boom and announce the death
of Macondo, not in a critical sense but in a sinister agreement with mar-
ket demands, which also resonates in the name "MacOndo" itself or in the
concept of "magic neoliberalism." Many writers are mostly concerned with
what the market expects of them. Furthermore, many writers also dedare
that they are tired of the cult of memory or the relation between literature,
history, and politics. Sorne of them are tired of nationalism and latinoameri-
canismo, or of concepts like "underdevelopment" and "peripheral capital-
ism." Sorne of them dedare, as the Argentinian writer Héctor Schmuder
once said, that "La ûnica verdad es el relato" ("The only truth is the tale").
From Borges on, fiction has confirmed its own legitimacy, and we know that
facts don't have any meaning before becoming a part of a narrative; the
morality of form is as meaningful as the form of morality.

As Renato Ortiz says, our time is marked by a movement of people, the

circulation of commodities, symbolic referents, ideas, and the deterritorial-
ization of the local space of origin (Ortiz). But far from resulting in a democ-
ratizing process, this opening of collectivities to world modernity, with new
referents, sorne of them old-ethnicity, regionalism-and sorne recent-as
the result of cultural globalization-is crossed by a clear and unjust hierar-
chy: different identities are also unequal. According to Darcy Ribeiro, there
are different cultural matrices in Latin America, and according to Renato
Ortiz, there is not one but a certain number of Latin Americas: it is possible
 The Oblivion We Will Be 73
to rethink the Latin American map depending on historical and cultural pro-
cesses, as weIl as on the differentiated responses to the effects of modern-
ization. 2 Today, we face the new terms of the triumph of capitalism, with
transnational capital and companies, new phenomena of enrichment such as
drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption, the dismantling of the state
and of basic guarantees such as food, work, education, and health, the selling
of public companies and the weakening of society, of the notion of citizen-
ship, and of public space. In this radically different context, we may weIl ask
whether the book remains a potent symbol, or whether it has become merely
a commodity? Or is it both, as Pierre Bourdieu and others have shown?
Here l can only discuss one of the many forms of disembodiment and
oblivion that are linked to the book, this basic tool for drawing a literary
map and knitting a literary texture. Although alternative answers to the
crisis of the publishing industry have been articulated, these attempts, as
weIl as the transformation of the public space by the internet, lead us to
what l call a text drain. Latin American document archives and librar-
ies that shelter the traces of our history and the history of our intelli-
gence experience vicissitudes that resemble diasporic processes, as they are
forced to be transported and dismantled and then re··enter new libraries,
editorial routes, and units of meaning, if they do not die in the oblivion
caused by dispersion. The Latin American critical tradition itself has not
been completely settled yet, nor has it even been sketched, since the spaces
of dialogue that the editorial communication propels have been cut off or
deformed.
The case of the book in Latin America is another example of the asym-
metries besetting the region's peripheral condition. This is how Fernando
Escalante Gonzalbo depicts it in A la sombra de los libros (ln the Shadow of
Books): "Generally-Mexico is just another example-there is an unequiv-
ocal structure: books travel easily, they circulate, they are translated and
sold from the center to the periphery, but it is only after strong efforts that
they manage to travel in the inverse direction" (276). The phenomena of
in-translation and ex-translation are manifest, and English is the mandatory
language of exchange among many of us:

Seve nt y per cent of the books and academic articles that circulate
are written in English, seventeen per cent in French, three per cent in
German, and just a little over one per cent in Spanish ... It is not a ref-
utation of globalization, but a quite obvious indicator of its structure.
The possibility of having everything circulate and be known does not
mean in fact that everything circulates equally, even less when it cornes
to cultural consumer goods and much less when they are destined to
the greater audience. (Escalante Gonzalbo 278-79)

It should be noted that many of the books written by Latin American

authors pass through the editorial meridian in Spain, in a process that Vîctor
74 Liliana Weinberg
Barrera Enderle denominates "alfaguarizaci6n.,,3 The global turn calls for
standardization, and also, in Garda Canclini's words, "equalization," in a
kind of cultural "homogenization" according to hegemonic narratives. Latin
American writers have been particularly affected by the risk of standardiza-
tion and effacement of the contextual elements and specifie traditions that
mark their texts, and they tend to prep;lfe literature "for export" by first
unpinning it from its idiosyncrasies and then adding a "differential feature."
Néstor Garda Canclini refers to "The last trains to modernity" ("Ûltimos
trenes a la modernidad").4 Paraphrasing these words, 1 affirm that in order
for the literary work to board in time on one of the last trains that hurdes
towards modernity, it must get rid of many of its own particularities that
make it legible within a certain tradition but that need to be left out when
entering another reading tradition and aspiring to fuI fi 1 market demands
(Garda Canclini 86-91). This process of decontextualization, departicular-
ization, and loss of sense and function in the process of being reframed and
translated is a risky one because, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, "the sense and
function of a foreign work are at least determined by the field of reception
as much as by the field of origin," and frequendy "sense and function are
completely ignored," as "the readers apply to the work categories of percep-
tion and questions that are the result of another field of production" (4; my
translation).
Against Garda Mârquez's model of Macondo-the universalization of
the Latin American imagery along with cultural traditions and political
and economic contradictions-today Borges has become the paradigmatic
"author-hero" who achieves, through literary universalization efforts, an
individual and independent integration of his work in a worldwide orbit.
In addition to the processes of "alfaguarization" and the incorporation of
works in editorial programmes that "edit" and "program" meaning for the
market, the notion of the" brand" returns to artificially individualize those
distinguishing characteristics which had previously been standardized and
homogenized and to create a fake sensation of difference and boost sales.
Standardized works and author biographies fit better into a globalliterary
landscape. There is an increasing involvement of transnational publishers,
who through their editorial policies try to influence tides, genres, reading
circles, and marketable authors. The risk that this may entail is that in order
to arrive at an abstract concept of world literature that determines standard-
ized comparative units, it may be necessary to prune and leave out elements
linked to the context of enunciation, to neglect material and social pro-
cesses of literary production, and to "equate" debates and particular affilia-
tions, feeling structures, dialogic environments, and particular aesthetic and
literary traditions.
This phenomenon is combined with a significant growth of cultural indus-
tries and changes in popular culture, as has been studied by a great num-
ber of connoisseurs, from writers like Carlos Monsivais to specialists like
Néstor Garda Canclini, Jesus Martîn Barbero, George Yudice, and many
 The Obliuial1 We Will Be 75
others; these developments set the agenda of current comprehensive studies
and dictionaries such as those by Altamirano and by Irwin and Szurmuk. In
Juan Goytisolo's words, "[t]hose on the margins of the economic power that
configures our life styles must content themselves, in relation to the interna-
tional market and cultural products, with an extremely reduced number of
clichés that can be rapidly and easily identified" (qtd. in Escalante Gonzalbo
281). We are tempted to trace new cartographies of reading starting from
these phenomena, in addition to designing cartographies that go against
the grain, aU in the struggle to empower the access to books to outwit these
developments. Furthermore, the se struggles have been rendered more com-
plex by the arrivaI of digital texts. The distortion of the book market also
means a distortion of the dialogical practices that characterize the field of
humanities. Escalante Gonzalbo explains:

The result of aIl this is the "fragmentation of the market"-of the pos-
sible readers of Spanish-into a set of isolated groups of readers, who
do not know anything of what is published in neighbouring countries.
Aiso the massive diffusion of a few authors of "world class" [clase mUl1-
dial] who usually are the most accessible or the most renowned '" This
causes a double distortion of the book market that affects the periph..
eral countries in a particularly serious way. The biggest novelty, some-
how paradoxically, is the segregation of the national audiences, because
of the explicit decision to not distribute sorne authors outside of their
countries. (286)

There is also a modification in book culture according to the change in pub-

lic life: "The place of books has shifted because the books themselves have
changed (and vice versa) and also the authors: the forms of reflection and
dialogue characteristic of book culture are no longer dominant, and that
means that there is another structure of public life" (341).
In sorne way we now return to a situation that Mariâtegui described so
eloquently in 1928. In Temas de nuestra América (Tapics al Our America),
where he pointed out the strong relation between the notions of culture and
the book, he noted: "We still have to find a solution to our most elemen-
tary problems in bookshops and bibliography ... The scholar would need a
great amount of resources to deal with his own bibliography by himself. He
would have to invest time and energy, stolen from his own intellectual
ulation" (19). Mariâtegui points to the relationship between "the editorial,
authorial, and bookselling activities," between "the public and the State,"
and he insists on "drawing attention to the most important cultural index
of any nation" (19), that is to say, the growth of literacy in societies where
education became a motor of social change and the development of full citi-
zenship. Journals, cultural supplements, editorial projects, and initiatives to
publish collections generated basic structures of sociability, spaces of con-
fluence that in their turn contributed to create certain areas of intellectual
76 Liliana Weinberg
encounter and to build dense (as opposed to easy or light or senseless) mean-
ing. Over the years, from the foundations of political and intellectual inde-
pendence until the 1970s, sorne of the mediating formats par excellence
have been books and journals, editorial projects, translation programs, and
anthologies, aIl of which suppose a permanent effort to organize-or, in the
terms of this volume, institute-meaning. Anthologies and translations gave
circulation to proper and alien words, and other forms of open circulation
and generation of a variety of constellations of texts and meanings were
encouraged. For many years, Latin America was a host continent for popu-
lations; many were the flows of immigrants that arrived. Nowadays, this
process has been reverted, as people leave, like their grandparents, perse-
cuted for political reasons, victims of violence, insecurity, or unemployment,
to try their luck in different destinations.

l do not consider it accidentaI that the anthology is one of the formats that
has survived in Latin America. There was a time when the anthology had as
its main purpose the construction of an image of Latin America for Latin
America (1 am thinking of Juan Marîa Gutiérrez's or Andrés Bello's efforts),
where the major concern was representativeness and the achievement of
public support for the better circulation of works. Nowadays the intention
is more often the recuperation of selected texts, sometimes supported by
state institutions (such as the Universidad Nacional Autônoma de México),
but increasingly financed mainly by priva te investment, and the preservation
of entities in the process of being socially and politically dissolved.
Are we perhaps a region destined to be anthologized? An anthology har-
vests that which is considered the best. Each text is at the same time decon-
textualized and placed in dialogue with other texts. The whole production
of an author cornes to be represented by only a few of his or her works,
which, combined with other works, draws an artificial map of our culture.
Anthologies paste random elements together and trace always incomplete
itineraries. They represent large organizations of meaning set in circulation,
cultural circulation in sorne cases, but nowadays mainly commercial. They
are a selection of what a critical eye considers the best or the most repre-
sentative. However, nowadays, they also constitute a space for recovery and
recuperation of aIl that can still be done, after aIl and in spite of everything,
in Latin America. l think of the extraordinary Entre las cenizas (Among the
Ashes), a chronicle-essay that dares to speak of the new processes of perse-
cution of civil society and migrants (Turati and Rea).
The phenomenon l have referred to as text drain has at least two faces:
on the one hand, the newly asymmetrical forms of orientation and circula-
tion of ideas and thought traditions; on the other, decontextualization and
the loss of specificity. Here rests one of the components of the crises of the
 The Oblivion We Will Be 77

humanities: a shrinking of public spaces for dialogue, discussion, and joint

construction and sharing, as weIl as a loss of the sense of specificity in artis-
tic and literary practices. Isolated texts, hardly known, randomly found,
saved from oblivion, secret, persecuted, and diasporic (because texts can
also experience the process of diaspora, as victims of new versions of what
Stuart Hall calls "imperializing" and "hegemonizing" practices); these texts
find comfort, and also the maximum circulation they can possibly hope to
achieve, through anthologies. This may be a new version of what Garda
Mârquez referred to as "the solitude of Latin America": the risky oblivion
we could come to be.

NOTES

1. Here as elsewhere, translations from the Spanish are my own.

2. For a further discussion on the idea of Latin America, its culture, and its litera-
ture, see Weinberg.
3. This term refers to Alfaguara, the Spanish publishing house, which had been
increasingly dominating the book market and displacing several smaller Latin
American publishers. In 2013 it was acquired by Random House.
4. Garda Canclini borrows this term from the Argentinian writer Héctor Tiz6n's
short st ory "The last train to Jujuy" ("El ultimo tren a Jujuy").

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Abad Faciolince, Héctor. Basura. Madrid: Lengua de trapo, 2000. Print.

Altamirano, Carlos dir. Ténninos crîticos de sociologîa de la cultura. Buenos Aires:
Paid6s, 2002. Prim.
- - - . El oluido que seremos. Bogota: Planeta, 2006. Print.
- - - . Traiciones de la menwria. Bogod.: Alfaguara, 2009. Print.
Barrera Enderle, Vîctor. "Entradas y salidas del fen6meno literario actual 0 la
'alfaguarizaci6n' de la literatura hispanoamericana." Sincronîa 7. 22 (2002):
n. pag. Web. 10 Aug. 2014.
Bartra, Roger. "Cuatro formas de experimentar la muerte intelectual." La sangre y la
tinta: Ensayos sobre la condicion postmexicana. México: Océano, 1999,43-48.
Prim.
Bourdieu, Pierre. "Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées."
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5 (2002): 3-8. Web. 8 Aug. 2014.
Casanova, Pascale. La Repûblica mundial de las letras. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001.
Prim.
Dorfman, Ariel. Rumbo al sur deseando el l1orte. Barcelona: Planeta, 1998. Print.
Escalame Gonzalbo, Fernando. A la sombra de los libros: Lectura, mercado y uida
pûblica. México: El Colegio de México, 2007. Prim.
Fornet, Jorge. Los nueuos paradigmas: Prologo narratiuo al siglo XXI. La Habana:
Instituto Cubano del Libro, 2006. Prim.
Garda Canclini, Néstor. Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo. Buenos
Aires: Paid6s, 2002. Print.
78 Liliana Weinberg
Garda Marquez, Gabriel. "La soledad de América Latina" (1982) in Dialogos sobre
la novela latinoamericana. Garcia Marquez/Vargas Llosa. Lima: Editorial Peru
Andino, 1988.
Gonzalez Echevarrfa, Roberto. The Voice ol the Masters: Writing and Authority in
Modern Latin AmerÎcan Literature. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1985.
Print.
Irwin, Robert McKee y .Monica Szurmuk co·ords. Diccionario de estudios culturales
latinoamericanos. México: Siglo XXI Editores: Instituto Mora, 2009. Print.
Ludmer, Josefina. "Literaturas postautonomas." CiberLetras 17 (2007): Il. pag. Web.
7 Aug. 2014.
Mariategui, José Carlos. Temas de Nuestra AmérÎca. Lima: Amauta, 1928. Print.
Myers, Jorge. "Gênese 'atene1sta' da historia cultural latino-americana." Tempo
Social 17 (2005): 9-54. Web. 10 Aug. 2014.
Ortiz, Renato. "Améric a Latina: de la modernidad incompleta a la modernidad-
mundo." Nueva Sociedad 166 (2000): 44--61. Print
- - - . "La modernidad-mundo: Nuevos referentes para la construccion de identi-
dades colectivas." InnovarÎum. Web. 7 Aug. 2014.
Rama, Angel. La ciudad letrada. Hannover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984.
Ribeiro, Darcy. Las Américas y la ciuilizaci6n: Proceso de lormaci6n y causas de!
desarrollo desÎgua! de los pueblos amerÎcanos. Buenos Aires: CEDAL, 1972. Print.
Turati, Marcela, and Daniela Rea, eds. Entre las cenizas: Historias de vida en tiem-
pos de muerte. Oaxaca: Sur Ediciones, 2012. Print.
Weinberg, Liliana. Literatura latinoamericana: Descolonizar la imaginaci6n. México:
CCYDEL-UNAM, 2004. Print.
5 On World Literary Reading
Literature, the Market, and the
Antinomies of Mobility
PieterVermeulen

1. WORLD LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF READING

We aIl know what's wrong with world literature-and if we don't, we can

count on Tim Parks to periodically remind us. As "we are moving toward
a world market for literature," Parks notes in one of his typical missives,
writers increasingly surrender the" subtle nuances of [their] own language
and literary culture" in or der to "remove obstacles to international com-
prehension." Vernacular particularity has become so much "culture-specific
clutter" that needs to be cleaned away and replaced by a sanitized selection
of "highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as 'literary' and 'imagi-
native'" and by "the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the
author among those 'working for world peace'" (Parks n.p.). If Parks ai ms
his critique at the authors producing contemporary world literature, his
refrain of stylistic impoverishment and political impotence also echoes in
the academic circles that-through anthologies, translations, editions, and
curricula-help in instituting world literature. The institutions of world lit-
erature, on such critical accounts, operate to promote a fiction of frictionless
literary circulation that obscures the inequalities marking the literary world,
let alone the non-literary world; they cater, so this refrain goes, to privileged
consumers' demands for easily digestible cultural differences and variations.
It's not just that the domesticated differences that world literature delivers
fail to disturb its audiences-more damningly, its carefully calibrated mix-
ture of the exotic and the familiar is assumed to keep them hooked; nor is
the problem that world literature is entirely compatible with the material
inequalities forged and perpetuated by the market-worse, by promoting
world literary culture as an imaginary dispenser of equality, it is said to help
entrench actual global unevenness.
If the objectionable politics of world literature is rooted in its pro-
pensity to facilitate frictionless transport, a seemingly more appropriate
literary poli tics invests in those elements that stubbornly resist transpor-
tation. In Emily Apter's widely noted Against World Literature (2013),
this investment is coded as a politics of untranslatability (the book's
subtitle). The Untranslatable, for Apter, is that which resists comprehen-
sion and consumption; it is "that x-factor that disqualifies presumptive
80 Pieter Vermeulen
knowability" (120)-the spanner thrown in the interlocking machines
of language and capital. For Apter, this spanner is thrown not by world
literature, which aIl too readily greases these machines, but instead by
a new comparative literature inhabiting the translation zone-a com-
parative literature thal' is "case-sensitive and site-specific in ways that
avoid reproducing neo-imperialist cart.ographies" (42) and that watches
over Untranslatables as so many "hubs of singularity" (33) that resist
subsumption under capital.
One weak point of Apter's case for a new comparative literature beholden
to the Untranslatable is that it may underestimate the machine it rages against:
it undervalues the power of contemporary capital to convert singularities into
marketable differences, and to design niche markets for experiences that may
initially seem too insignificant to count (a point also made by Sarah Brouillette
in this volume). Equally problematic is that it misunderstands the interactions
between literature and the market: it situa tes political action-whether the
alleged capitalist politics of world literature or the anti-capitalist politics Apter
herself promotes-on the level of critical reading practices; resisting capitalism
in effect boils down to heeding the Untranslatable, to reading more carefully
and hesitantly, and to pausing at the challenges and obstructions of linguistic
matter. As Sarah Brouillette argues in l'his volume, such a position amounts to
a limited form of materialism, in that il' obliterates the very real inequalities
that sustain the globalliterary field-whether we design that field in the super-
conductive way that world literature does (at least on the critical account of
Apter and others), or according to the more halting rhythms of nontranslation.
For Brouillette, a turf war between reading preferences amounts to very
little-that is, to nothing very political-compared to a "fundamental reori-
entation of the class dynamics of writing, publishing, and reading [that]
would be necessary in order to make different sorts of aesthetic objects circu-
late successfully." A truly materialist literary criticism, Brouillette argues, has
to study the material constitution of the industry itself rather than take sides
in a methodological debate that, by misrecognizing its outcomes as political
solutions, shows that it remains internaI to that constituted industry and
impotent to achieve an external analytical perspective on it. lndeed, invoca-
tions of the Untranslatable-or of the "untranslational" (Joshua Miller) or
of "idiolectic incommensurability" (Brian Lennon) (Walkowitz 184-85)-
are suspiciously complementary to the account of world literature that the
likes of Parks have developed; the idea that "books designed for global dis-
tribution will be stripped of idiosyncrasy and dulled by accommodation"
(Walkowitz 172) directly feeds into the conviction that obstructing circu-
lation somehow becomes a laudable oppositional practice for writers or
professional readers. In effect, this is a discursive feedback loop that leaves
the material constitution of the literary field entirely untouched.
50 what would a mode of world literary reading look like that does not mis-
take itself for genuine political action? Brouillette's own sociological approach
to literature offers one answer: it patiently brackets the temptation of close
 On World Literary Reading 81
reading until it has developed a fine-grained account of the ways contemporary
writing is inscribed in the market and its institutions before it turns to the texts
at hand. In this essay, 1 abbreviate the first-and, arguably, properly political-
step of this analysis by borrowing a more encompassing understanding of the
relations between world literature and the market in order to address the via-
bility of a project that Rebecca Walkowitz has caIled "close reading in an age
of global writing" (171).1 want to test the possibilities of reading how literary
texts produced within the (partly overlapping) horizons of world literature and
the market mediate, inflect, dis tort, and refract the socioeconomic forces that
afflict them. One (avowedly non-sociological) way to understand the forms
and functions of fiction in the age of world literature, then, consists in training
a critical eye on the ways contemporary writing engages the demands of the
market and the aspirations of world literature. As Pheng Cheah has recently
argued, most world literary discourses tend to conflate "the world with market
processes of global extensiveness"-a tendency that reduces literature to "an
epiphenomenon of a material base" ("World against Globe" 317, 311). This
reduction misrecognizes "world literature as an active power of world making"
that does not simply coincide with the reality made by capitalist globalization
but instead insists on its abiding difference from it (303).
As 1 argue in the next section and demonstrate in the rest of the essay
through a reading of one novel, the demands of the markets and the aspira-
tions of world literature are not quite the same; indeed, 1 situate literary works'
worldliness in the gap between their worldly aspirations and their undeniable
supersaturation by market demands. The mode of world literary reading that 1
propose reads for that gap. The novel 1 discuss, Dinaw Mengestu's The Beauti-
ful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), lends itself very weIl to such a reading:
not only does its account of the lives of Ethiopian immigrants in the United
States-written, moreover, by an Ethiopian-American writer-directly address
the realities of globalization; its protagonists' lives also unfold between the
promises of economic success and the realities of their ambitions' frustrated
worldly realization. Still, 1 argue that the novel's engagement with socioeco-
nomic forces is not only situated on a thematic level, but mainly in its modu-
lations of affect and potentiality, making my mode of world litera l'y reading
workable for a much broader range of contemporary fictions. This approach is
decidedly less sociological than Brouillette's, and while it intervenes in the meth-
odological debates that Apter also participates in, it ultimately understands the
relation between the market and literary singularity very differently-a differ-
ence that, as will become cIeal; also leads me to moderate the often somewhat
excessive political daims of world literature criticism.

2. WORLD LITERATURE, GLOBAL MARKETS

How does contemporary literature engage the market? In his book Post-
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of just-in-Time Capitalism, Jeffrey
82 Pieter Vermeulen
Nealon notes that the interrelations between capital and culture have been
intensified since Fredric Jameson diagnosed those relations in the 1980s.
This "intensification"-·a technical term in Nealon's vocabulary-can be
described as a process of reciprocal saturation: not only have the demands
of the market infiltrated aIl but the most marginal restricted cultural fields,
but also the contemporary market itself, Nealon writes, is "cultural to the
core" (183). Indeed, long before the economy morphed into the manipu-
lation of symbols, the trafficking in information, the embrace of undecid-
ability as risk, and the mining of affect, these elements already populated
the fields of the cultural and, more specifically, the literary. The analytical
promise of literary studies, then, is not situated, pace Apter, in literature's
resistance to translation, circulation, and commodification, but rather in
its thorough envelopment in market processes-processes that would be
properly unthinkable without a notion of the literary. Due to its relentless
imbrication with market forces, literature, Nealon writes, can no longer
automatically be valorized as "the subordinated, supposedly subversive
term in any opposition" (152)-as both terms of any opposition are now
equivalent positions on a field of exchange. Literature, that is, can no longer
be promoted as a "mode of inexorable slowness" (151), and this means
that "the generalline of reasoning concerning the uselessness and/or semi-
autonomy of literature is aIl but exhausted" (154).
And what goes for uselessness and semi-autonomy also goes for untrans-
latability. With no Untranslatable to be invested with political power because
it refuses to count, literary studies in the age of market saturation need to
find ways to describe literature's engagement with-rather than celebrate its
illusory disengagement from-the market. They need to be attuned to the
affective and vital dimensions along which literature has always operated,
and which the market has increasingly begun to colonize in its compulsive
drive for value. If literature has always aimed to manipulate readers' affects,
the contemporary market invests in micromanaging affect flows, and this
awareness reflexively inflects contemporary literature's own affective opera··
tions; and if the intractable affective force of literature, and especially fiction,
is intimately related to its ability to shape worlds of possibility (Houen), then
the realization that the market overwhelmingly casts human capacities and
faculties in terms of potentiality also alters contemporary literature's "real
affective potency"-its ambition to "extend the range of a person's capacities
for thinking and feeling" beyond the scenarios ratified by market Ideologies
(Houen 11-12). The reciprocal saturation of literature and the market means
that literature is thoroughly permeated by socioeconomic forces; yet because
these forces-especially the management of affect and potentiality-are also
its own, literature can make a minimal difference from the market through
its saturation by it; its singularity, on this account, is a mark of its supersatu-
ration by, and not of its specious withdrawal from, the market. The fate of
literature in an age of globalized capital can, perhaps somewhat flippantly, be
described as a position of singularity through saturation.
 On World LiteraJ'Y Reading 83
50 what does all of this have to do with world literature? How, that is,
can the "world" in world literature circumscribe the place of literature under
globalized capital? Here, the distinction between the world and the globe, or
between mondialisation and globalization, is pertinent. This distinction has
probably been theorized Inost influentially by Jean-Luc Nancy (in his The
Creation of the World or Globalization) and Jacques Derrida (in Rogues
and elsewhere).While the intricacies of Nancy's and Derrida's thinking do
not concern me here, it is remarkable that they both position mondiali-
sation or "world-forming" (the term adopted by Nancy's translators) as a
mode of meaning-making that is irreducible to the realities of globaliza-
tion. For Nancy, globalization is a realm of "global equivalence" (54), of an
"indistinct integrality" (27) that is "perfectly accessible and transparent for
a mastery without remainder" (Raffoul and Pettigrew 1) and offers no van-
tage from which to sidestep the drift of capital. The word mondialisation,
in significant contrast, looks beyond "economic and technological matters"
(29) and retains "the horizon of a 'world' as a space of possible meaning for
the who le of human relations (or as a space of possible significance)" (28).
ln a comparable way, Derrida emphasizes the aspirational qualities inherent
in the term mondialisation--its functioning as a normative claim to com-
munity and as a (Kantian) regulative Idea rather than a descriptive term
(Rogues 85; see Li); it is, for better or worse, indicative of "a certain oriented
history of human brotherhood" ("Globalization" 375)-a history that
Derrida connects to Kantian cosmopolitanism and the Abrahamic tradition.
If these overlapping histories are decidedly troubled ones, their update in an
age of globalization yet indicates an inclination toward a reality that cannot
be reduced to the forces of global capitalism.
Interestingly, both Nancy and Derrida cast the difference between morzdi-
alisation and globalization in terms of (un)translatability: Nancy notes that
"mondialisation preserves something untranslatable, while globalization has
already translated everything in a global idiom" (28; for Derrida, see "What
Does it Mean" 118 and "Globalization" 372). A residue of untranslatability is
preserved through an engagement with the forces of globalization, not through
a principled resistance against it (and this is different from Apter's case for the
Untranslatable); in that way, it points to the possibility of a world in excess
of these forces. For Nancy and Derrida, "world" names a site where a critical
engagement with an avowedly problematic Eurocentric tradition bespeaks a
commitment to an irreducible reality-a site where complicity and irnbrication
enable rather than cancel such commitment. 1 Aamir Mufti has influentially
shown that "[i]n its historically received fOl'ms," world literature has been an
agent of globalization, as it "effected the assimilation of heterogeneous and
dispersed bodies of writing onto the plane of equivalence and evaluability that
is literature" (488); still, this genealogy does not cancel the potential of world
literature's as yet unreceived forms, which for Mufti take the shape of "a radi-
calization of philology," a "better close reading, attentive to the worldliness of
language and text at various levels of social reality" (493).
84 Pieter Vermeulen
World as an occasion for worldly commitment through complicity:
I want to argue that this complex semantic structure accurately captures the
"world" in "world literature." World literature is often seen as a "patently
hierarchical and Eurocentric" label (Cheah, "What is a World?" 31)
that wishfully and disingenuously "disconnects literature from its own
Euro-colonial historicity" (Helgesson 485). Yet once the notion of world is
sufficiently problematized-in Nancy, in Derrida, and, I would add, in sorne
world literature scholarship-it persists as something less determinate: it
delivers "world as an ongoing, dynamic process of becoming, something
continually made and remade" (Cheah, "What is a World?" 30-31)--as a
placeholder for the aspiration to construct meaning and difference in excess
of the forces of the market that yet saturate life.
I noted before that the structure of singularity through saturation ade-
quately describes the place of literature in the age of its real subsumption
under capital (Brown); we can now see that this structure also points to the
world Iiterary dimension of literature, and that one possible job descrip-
tion for world literature studies is the work of reading for that dimension.
If world literature is, as David Damrosch has famously noted, first of aIl
"a mode of reading" (86), then I suggest that a reading that traces texts'
saturation by the dictates of the market in order to discover their mini-
mal difference from these dictates can be ca lIed world literary reading-a
reading that reads for literature's minimal difference from the market, and
recognizes Iiterature as "an exemplary modaIity of the undecidabiIity that
opens a world" (Cheah, "What is a World?" 35).
Of course, the world literature label has been linked to a des ire to resist
the reduction of literature to a mere effect of socioeconomic forces before.
As Pheng Cheah has noted, "[i]f we collapse the world into a geographical
entity, we deny world literature autonomy by reducing it to a superstructure
of an economic base" ("What is a World?" 30). In a recent assessment of
the productive tensions between world literature and postcolonial studies,
Stefan Helgesson echoes this idea when he notes that world literature's focus
on global circulation reminds postcolonial scholars that literature "cannot
be understood exclusively in terms of political power and domination, but
also as a world of its own and an enabling alternative to other domains of
power" (484); for Helgesson also, reading literary works as world literature
resists their reduction to socioeconomic forces, and recognizes their partici-
pation in multiple dynamics, of which the persistence of coloniaIism is but
(an admittedly important) one; it fosters an understanding that "'literature'
cannot be seen either as a purely autonomous realm or as a mere symptom of
the colonial drama between dominant and dominated-it is instead a more
fluid phenomenon, evolving as it circulates" (496). For Cheah, this mode of
reading delivers a recognition of Iiterature as "a fundamental force in the
ongoing cartography and creation of the world" ("What is a World?" 31).
A world literary perspective, for Helgesson, makes "the full range of the
literary visible, from local generic conventions and the singular encounter
 On World Literary Reading 85
between a reader and a text ... all the way to the global flows of genres,
books and translations across dozens of languages" (489). Different world
literary approaches access this broad range in different ways: Helgesson
himself privileges translation as an angle from which to enter this spectrum,
just as Brouillette, as we saw, favours literary sociology; my approach, in
contrast, aims to condense this spectrum into a site of overdetermination
that world literary reading can access through a close engagement with
texts' treatment of affect and potentiality, as these are two of the crucial
sites that suture it to the market.
ln the rest of this essay, 1 turn to one contemporary American migrant
novel in order to illustrate this strategy of world literary reading. 1 trace
the imbrication of Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven
Bears with the powers that (almost) saturate contemporary migrant lives,
and its dramatization of the minimal rift between the realities of globaliza-
tion and the potentialities of world-making. 1 pay special attention to the
novel's figuration of different forms of mobility-migration, social mobility,
walking, but also affective transport. 1 argue that the work's distinctiveness
is situated in its peculiar inflections, distortions, and refractions of these
movements and rhythms, which disturb the association of movement and
speed with freedom and of stasis with bondage in order to make visible
overdetermined sites of what Rob Nixon has ca lIed "displacement without
moving" (19). As Sarah Sharma has argued, experiences of slowness and
speed are thoroughly shaped by power relations, and reading the micropoli-
tics of time and movement as they take shape in the novel, as 1 propose to
do, can show that "maintaining a fiction of generalized effects" is "[p]art of
capital's transformative effect" (70-71), an effect that literature can engage
and deflect. The world literary reading that 1 propose reads literature's sat-
uration by the forces of globalization in or der to capture its paradoxical
irreducibility to those forces.

3. WORLDLY MOBILITY AND THE MOBILIZATION

OF POTENTIALITy2

ln her study of the resurgence of the political novel in the early twenty-first
century, Caren Irr notes that The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears par-
ticipates in an ongoing mutation of African migration fiction. Like other
such works, the novel turns "away from themes of culturalloss and trau-
matic history," and instead elects to "map the restless psychology of newly
mobile contemporary subjects" (50). On the face of it, this psychological
emphasis fits the familiar template of literary migrant fiction: The Beauti-
fui Things duly documents the realities of transcontinental migration and
exile; its style is overtly literary and sophisticated, its mood melancholy;
its narrator is, like its author, a displaced Ethiopian in the contemporary
United States, and this overlap has been exploited by branding the work
86 Pieter Vermeulen
and its author through "their ostensible attachment to specifie locations"
(Brouillette 61). Yet while the novel invites consumption as a moving tale of
migration and exile, it goes on to frustrate the expectation of a significant
emotional experience; its restlessness, to recall Irr's terms, is too unsettled
to be contained by psychology alone. The novel shows how different forms
of restlessness and mobility fail to map.onto each other, and how the fric-
tion between these movements generate an intractable affect that cannot be
slotted as a readily recognized emotional experience, even if its genre and
its peritexts seem to promise such an experience. The novel, in other words,
unleashes a particular affective dynamics that, while it is generated through
the novel's imbrication with the rhythms of the market, cannot simply be
synchronized with those rhythms. Of course, there is no guarantee that this
unruly dynamics will not be recuperated by the market; still, these moments
of misalignment are elements that the approach l calI world literary reading
aims to capture.
The novel is set in 1997 and narrated by Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian
migrant who runs a small shop on Logan Circle in Washington, D.C. This
sets the novel in a place and time that connects the end of the American
Century to the realities of globalization, while the importation of African
cultural memory into the capital of the United States locates the book at the
juncture of postcolonial and world literature. The nov el shows how migra ..
tion is first of aIl an experience of being stuck in a place that is not home:
Sepha is "stuck living on the sidelines" (23) in the position of a witness who
can only observe, not participate in, the gentrification of the neighbour-
hood, and who will only be able to move when he is forced to by an eviction
notice. In a novel obsessed with modulations of pace, migration materializes
as a compulsive rhythm of doomed inertia and forced mobility that Sepha is
initially powerless to influence. The novel portrays the dissociation between
market fluctuations, personal trajectories, and patterns of migration; as
l show, it complicates the opposition between the reality of "stagnant ...
immigrant melancholia" (Irr 50) and the potential of upward mobility by
figuring adynamie that cuts across these categories, as well as across the
differences between free and compulsive movement. In this way, the novel
resists its marketable codification as an instance of immigrant melancholia.
The chorus of critical voices reprinted on the back cover and on the first
pages of the American edition of the novel gives a good idea of the generic
expectations that frame its reading. It clearly positions the book in a rec-
ognizable niche by dutifully repeating a limited set of generic markers: the
book belongs to a "special group of American voices" produced by global
migration; it excels at "giving voice" to (or even "sing[ing]") "the immigrant
experience"; it depicts that experience accurately (the characters are "well-
observed" thanks to Mengestu's "plausible depiction" of them); and because
of these aesthetic choices, it manages to promote intercultural connection, as
it traces the "fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity"; it "moves the conversa-
tion fOl'ward" and cracks "open the dusty window that often separates us,"
 On World Literary Reading 87
thus giving shape to "meaningful human connection." The emphasis on a
cosmopolitan politics and on literariness not surprisingly echoes Tim Parks's
assessment, with which 1 begin this essay, of what he caUs "the dull new
global novel." If we understand "genre," with Lauren Berlant, as "an aes-
thetic structure of affective expectation" (4), these characterizations set up
the ethical and emotive expectations that the novel will amply confirm in
its first half, before it will go on to explore an unexpected new track in its
second ha If.
The novel's very first paragraph, which introduces us to its main setting
(the narrator's Washington grocery store) and three of its main characters,
immediately upstages this procedure of slotting people and experiences: we
learn that the three African immigrants met each other working as valets at
the Capital Hotel, and it was there "that Kenneth became Ken the Kenyan
and Joseph, Joe from Congo" (1). As for Sepha, being skinny in the 1980s
was enough for Americans to (correctly) identify him as Ethiopian. Living
on the fringe of society, these three immigrants have adopted the idea that
blending in is a process of persistent repetition: Ken has "come to believe
that American men are so successful because they say the same thing over
and over again" (2). Belonging, then, is a matter of endless repetitions of the
same, and a failure to abide by these unwritten rules confirms one's margin-
ality. After an awkward dinner with Judith, a white professor with whom
he strikes up a tenuous friendship when she cornes to live in the neighbour-
hood, Sepha berates himself for his romantic expectations: it is "a case of
mistaken identity," a foolish attempt to "recast" himself as a different "type
of man" (80). This logic of strict codification ultimately rnarks the defini-
tive end of the tentative approaches between Sepha and Judith, as the black
inhabitants of the square are united by the wave of evictions that threatens
them and as Judith's house is set on fire by one victim of these evictions.
On a thematic level, then, the novel underlines the pervasiveness and the
destructiveness of the logic of categorical codification-a logic it resists on
the level of affect (which 1 understand as an impersonal, non-individual, and
non -signifying dynamic).
The Beautifit! Things That Heaven Bears dramatizes the false promises of
freedom and upward mobility. Sep ha duly invests "two thousand dollars of
borrowed money .. , with the idea that perhaps [his J store could become a
deli, a restaurant" and therefore a source of personal pride (3). Kenneth most
enthusiastically embodies the conviction that" [y Jou can't stay still, man. You
have to move on. That's the way the world works" (190). Yet the way the
globalized world works is not the way it works for those living on that globe:
the novel's plot underlines that Sepha's individual fate intersects with lat'ger
socioeconomic fluctuations in a seemingly random way. lnitially, the arrivaI
of Judith and the white middle class she represents seems to herald a rising
tide that will float aU boats (16-17); in reality, it soon leads to the eviction
of most of his regular customers. In contrast, Sepha notes that his shop has
never been more successful than in the days when it was still frequented by
88 Pieter Vermeulen
prostitutes and their customers (38). The store again attracts large crowds in
the immediate aftermath of the first evictions and the subsequent incidents
that signal the end of the illusion of shared material progress (193). The
novel offers no structural parallel between larger socioeconomic trends and
personal profit, which puts pressure on the idea that there is a significant
relation between investment and reward, and on the ideology of upward
mobility that this meritocratic idea sustains. As a chastened Sepha remarks
near the end of the novel: "1 knew that there were patterns to life, but what
1 had never understood until then was how insignificant a role we played in
creating them" (194).
If the novel addresses patterns of thinking, feeling, and moving on a the-
matie level, it decisively intervenes in them in its staging of potentiality
and affect. Confronted with the capture of potentiality into a restricted
set of scenarios for actualization, Sepha notes how the incomprehensible
intersections of diverse dynamics, far from merely spreading confusion,
also end up extending the range of the possible. Against the background
of the stasis that marks migrant life, the swift renovation of Judith's house
seems "something that bordered on the miraculous," undercutting Sepha's
expectation "for the things that are dead or dying to remain so" (209). In
its first half, the novel mournfully assesses Sepha's exclusion from these
untapped potentialities. Ir describes immigrants like him as lacking both
substance and freedom: "Somnambulists, aIl of us ... we wake to sleep and
sleep to wake" (35). Someone like Judith, in contrast, has both substance
and the liberty to move: "[p]art fugitive, part adventurer" (81), she feels yet
weighed down by the soli dit Y of her property (23) and the but"den of the
masses of furniture she has inherited. If Sepha needs to cling to the illusion
that endless repetition will end up synchronizing his movements to the pace
of social change (68 )-the way Judith's daughter manages to "time ... her
sips to match her mother's'" (112)-Judith has the cultural and economic
capital to keep moving and to avoid having to say "the same thing over
and over to students who stayed the same age" (54) by leaving her teaching
job. In the first half of the novel, then, the potential to construct a world
out of the realities of globalization only pertains to the haves and is rigor-
ously denied to the have nots; this neat distinction maps onto that between
self-directed movement and compulsive movement or stasis. Ir is only in
the second half of the novel that a potentiality that here still strikes Sepha
as near-miraculous will be explored through a mode of mobility that is, as
we will see, neither compulsive nor controlled, and that escapes the tracks
of globalization to open up the possibility of what a world literary reading
may call the possibility of mondialisation-of a significance in excess of the
movements the work chronicles.
The first half of the novel prepares for this different mode of mobility
and potentiality through intermittent modulations of pace and agency that
demobilize the habituated rhythms that initially constrain migrant life.
This part of the novel is punctuated by formulations and passages through
 On World Literary Reading 89
which it tries to undo the antinomies of stasis and decisive action and to
decompose sovereign individuality into movement. Yet the novel only really
taps into new potentialities-that is, it becomes readable as world rather
than migrant literature-when this concern with a mode of mobility that is
neither compulsive nor speciously individual becomes the narrative's main
organizing feature. Sepha finally breaks the destructive rhythm of his shop-
keeping when he one day walks out of his shop and magnetically shadows
two random tourists who show up in the store, only to abandon them after
a while and to travel on. The narrator's ca suai defection not only suspends
his investment in the dream of upward mobility, it importantly also occurs
without a conscious decision on his side-without, that is, a strong affirma-
tion of agency, but rather with an almost indifferent sabotaging of his poten-
tial for worldly success (73). The absence of a determinate plan of action
is underlined by the novel's use of the present tense, which forces readers
to share the narrator's lack of foresight for the rest of the novel. The novel
had earlier suggested that the idea that "there's a purpose, or even a real
decision that turns everything in one direction" is an illusion (55); the day
Sepha wakes up with "a firm resolution" to finally get his act together, he is
cut short when he finds the eviction notice on his doorstep (65-66). Finding
himself outside his store, Sepha for the first time experiences mobility with
freedom, and precisely at the moment when the protocols of upward mobil-
ity are suspended; Sepha will return to the store imagining "that it belongs
to someone else" (218). In its very last paragraph, the novel seems to imag-
ine a position of suspension-moments "when we are neither coming nor
going" (228 )-as the point from which the whole novel has been generated;
the novel affirms literature, in Pheng Cheah's words, as "primarily a process
that keeps alive the force that opens up another world, a force that is imma-
nent to the existing world" (Cheah, "What is a World?" 35-36). Impor-
tantly, this world of potentiality emerges from within the global flows it taps
into, not by refusing them. This is one way in which the novel reconfigures
the relations between potentiality and actuality: it situates the literary work
as an effect of a temporary suspension of regulated patterns of mobility that
is achieved by literary means. Narrated from an underdetermined position,
the novel's second ha If infuses the events and memories it recounts with an
open-ended potentiality that those in its first half were lacking.
The novel tends to charge figures of suspension with a sense of power
or powerlessness (37, 92) from its title onward. The book's tide, in which
what appears to be "suspended" is inverted into a higher-order "bearing,"
refers to a line from Dante's Commedia, which describes the poet's vision
when he is finally leaving hell (99-100). In what simultaneously seems like
a work of world literature and a parody of such a work, Sepha's friend
Joseph reads the line as "a metaphor for Africa" (100), and for a very long
time tries to rewrite it as an evocation of the history of the Congo (169-71),
with bathetic results. The attempt to forge a productive relation between
the memory of Africa and the present is an abiding concern for the novel.
90 Pieter Vermeulen
Initially, the three friends indulge in the "built-in nostalgic quality" (7)
afforded by an old map of Africa, to which they connect through touch
and anthropomorphization (when "Africa's hanging do ur head looks like
a woman's head wrapped in a shawl"; 7). They have developed agame
in which they match African dictators with countries and coups. These
memories overshadow present potentialities-they "supplant the present
with their own incorrigible truth" (60), and keep the three immigrants from
developing a more energizing encounter between past and present: "Coups,
child soldiers, famines were aIl a part of the same package of unending grief
that we picked our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and
disappointments in life" (222).
Sepha's wandering in the novel's second half activates a more enabling
interaction between memory and the now; ultimately, it shows that litera-
ture not only reflects colonial and postcolonial dramas, but is also fuelled
by and testifies to a "contingent desire for literary inventiveness" (Helgesson
499) in excess of mere reflection. The novel moves back and forth between
the account of Sepha's relationship with Judith, on the one hand, and mem-
ories of Ethiopia, on the other. These latter are triggered by Sepha's visit-
again, not preceded by a definite decision-to the apartment of his uncle,
where he initially lived upon arriving in the States. Here, he remembers his
earlier memories of the atrocities he witnessed in Ethiopia-most notably,
the killing of his father. These memories regain a marked vividness ("I saw
the corpses ... l saw my father's face ... "; 119), and soon explode into the
present tense (127), until Sepha even addresses his dead father (176), which
initia tes a mode of transport that is different from the stale dominance of
the past that holds the characters in its grip until Sepha sets out on his walk.
As l underlined, the novel refers to the uncanny effect of dead things coming
to life again (when it registers Sepha's reaction to the renovation of Judith's
house), as weIl as to the nostalgic powers of the past to haunt and ultimately
disable the present; it is Sepha's unwilled wandering that unlocks these
potentials, robs them of their destructive force, and mobilizes them while
normal narrative protocols are suspended (147), and while Sepha graduates
from being the novel's predictably melancholic center of identification to an
entirely more ambivalent and open-ended affective force.
This altered relation to the pa st also sediments in the changed geogra-
phy of the novel; increasingly, experiences of Washington and memories of
Abbis overlap; a motorcade on Logan Square makes it seem "as if time
has been temporarily suspended" (92), and the novel capitalizes on that
suspension to compare it to earlier displays of imperial power in Ethiopia;
a painted portrait of Frederick Douglass bears a striking resemblance to
pictures of Haile Selassie (176); a park in Addis looks "just like Logan Circle
does from a distance" (216). Crucially, the powers of distant vision afforded
by Sepha's wandering-and, more pointedly, by the novel's world-making
inflection of the powers of globalization-inaugurate relations between
present and past that are not simply mutually exclusive, but open-ended and
 On World Literary Reading 91
full of potential; the regained power to "clearly" see the past spills over into
the narrator's power to finally see his store for what it is (174). This is the
difference between a destructive submission to the past and what Michael
Rothberg has influentially called multidirectional memory, which is subject
to "ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing" between differ-
ent pasts and presents, and which in that way makes room for "complex
acts of solidarity" rather than for the affirmation of ready-made emotions
and identifications (3-11).
From the perspective of a world literary reading, this alteration also tes-
tifies to the powers of the literary to undo the fixities of the past and to
generate a world of possibility out of (the frictions between) the compulsive
convulsions of capital. The novel's demobilization of these forces opens up
potentialities that were foreclosed by the vectors of mobility that the nov el
initially seems to affirm: movements of migration, celebrations of cosmo-
politan mobility, ideologies of upward mobility, and promises of readerly
transport. World literary reading makes these sites of worldly potentiality
visible, even if it refuses to mistake that project for political intervention-
as if, as ]oshua Mostafa has remarked of Apter's self-professed politics of
untranslatability, "the critique of literature and other cultures from a posi-
tion of political commitment is political action in and of itself" (n.p.). It
isn't. Yet even if world literary reading do es not count as political action, it
offers one way to access literary worlds in an age of globalized capital.

NOTES

1. In light of the distinction between world and globe, Apter's elision of this dis-
tinction when she reads world literature as an accomplice of globalization looks
like the result of a too hast y translation of the world into the globe-of insuf-
ficient attention to the untranslatability inherent in world-making, or indeed
world literature. "Monde" is one of the Untranslatables to which Apter devotes
a characteristically sprawling chapter (175-90).
2. A different and earlier version of this section on Mengestu's novel was published
as part of" Reading Alongside the Market: Affect and Mobility in Contemporary
American Migrant Fiction" in a special issue of Textual Praetiee on neoliberal-
ism and the novel.

WORKS CITED

Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Polities of Untranslatabilit)'. London:

Verso, 2013. Print.
Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Urzfinished Business of Sentimentalit)'
in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.
Brouillette, Sarah. Posteolonial Writers in the Global Litera?')' Marketplace. London:
Palgrave, 2007. Print.
92 Pieter Vermeulen
Brown, Nicholas. "The Work of Art in the Age of its Real Subsumption under Capital."
Nonsite.org 13 Mar. 2012. Web. 26 Sept. 2014.
Cheah, Pheng. "What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity."
Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 26-38. Print.
- - - . "World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception ofWorld Literature."
New Literary History 45.3 (2014): 303-29. Print.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literaturet Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. "Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism." Negotiations:
Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001. Trans. Elizabeth Rothberg. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002.371-86. Print.
- - - . Rogues: T·wo Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print.
- - - . "What Does it Mean to Be a French Philosopher Today?" Paper Machine.
Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 112-20. Print.
Helgesson, Stefan. "Postcolonialism and World Literature." Interventions 16.4
(2014): 483-500. Print.
Houen, Alex. Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print.
Li, Victor. "Elliptical Interruptions: Or, Why Derrida Prefers Mondialisation to
Globalization." CR: The New Centennial Review 7.2 (2007): 141-54. Print.
Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead
Books, 2007. Print.
Mostafa, Joshua. "Quand même." Rev. of Against World Literature by Emily Apter.
Sydney Review of Books 13 Aug. 2013. Web. 26 Nov. 2014.
Mufti, Aamir R. "Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures." Critical
Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 458-93. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. François
Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2007. Print.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of JUst-il1- Time
Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Print.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the POOl'. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.
Parks, Tim. "The Dull New Global Nove!." NYR Blog 9 Feb. 2010. Web. 26 Nov.
2014.
Raffoul, François, and David Pettigrew. "Translator's Introduction." The Creation of
the World or Globalization. Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. François Raffoul and David
Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 1-26. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the
Age of Decolonizatiol1. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.
Sharma, Sarah. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. "Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing." Modern Language
Quarterly 74.2 (2013): 171-95. Print.
6 World Literature and Market
Dynamics 1
Sarah Brouillette

There is a popular take on the market for world literature that 1 will be
recounting here in a very summary way. While 1 will not suggest that this
take has no validity, 1 will argue that, in failing to stress the most press-
ing and most basic material circumstances that determine how literature is
made and read, this story tends to ignore what matters most to the indus-
try's organization and self-conception. What matters most is not the fact
that world literature is a consumable commodity constrained by market
demand. It is rather that the whole system of literary production is funda-
mentally determined by unevenly developed capitalist social relations. Put
simply, these relations dictate that only sorne relatively privileged individu-
aIs are engaged in the production and circulation of literature. Part of what
1 argue in what follows is that recognition of the division of labour under
capitalism and of the iniquitous and uneven nature of literary production
and reception is actually more important to a materialist critique of world
literature than endlessly recounting the story of the commodification of cul-
tural difference for elite consumers.

Scholars have been discussing world literature's status as an elite commod-

ity for a number of years now, beginning perhaps with Timothy Brennan's
important critiques, first expressed in the late 1980s, of celebrated "Third
World" writers ("Cosmopolitans and Celebrities," Salman Rushdie). Since
then a number of studies of postcolonialliterature-a category of texts that
tends to be subsumed into the world literature canon-have argued for the
importance of understanding that literature in relation to the markets for
it (Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers; Huggan; Watts). It recendy became
especial1y hard to avoid this concern, however, after Verso published Emily
Apter's Against World Literature and an editorial appeared in the widely
read cultural magazine n+l under the tide "World Lite" (both in 2013).
The basic narrative that these latter works construct is one in which the
label world literature, for decades applied to a canon of classics curated by
94 Sarah Brouillette
acquisitive publishers located in the West, signaIs now little more than a
predictable set of moderately "different" works. These works are said to be
written in such a way that they are ideal for transport from peripheral to
core locations, or, when a less one-way flow is evident, they are said to be
produced and consumeel by the taste-making elite who inhabit the world's
networked cultural capitals. The story goes that, in addition, even expansive
anthologies covering centuries of world literature cast today's elite writers
in the flattering image of inheritors of a rich tradition of liberal international
literary exchange. In effect, in a double movement, contemporary writers
are successfully marketed through their inscription in a lengthy cosmopoli-
tan tradition, and, meanwhile, this constructed tradition, in supporting the
image of an inevitably networked globalized world, is inseparable from the
power of global capital. The making of this networked world is in turn part
of the story that today's successful writers engage with in their work and
emboely in their biographical trajectories as they cross borders with relative
cosmopolitan ease.
David Damrosch's well-known approach to world literature might seem
to offer a contrast, since he suggests that world literature is not a homoge-
neous object unified by particular thematic concerns or aesthetic param-
eters. For Damrosch, rather, any work that has travelled across a border
to meet its readers in localized moments of consumption can be deemed a
work of world literature (Damrosch). Yet his approach is finally compatible
with the narrative I oudine, which positions world literature as an elite,
homogenizing, complacent commodity. Even if it is only a heterogeneous
aggregate of mobile works consumed in disparate locations, world litera-
ture can still be read as, also, a cultural accompaniment to an encompass-
ing process of global market expansion. lneleed Damrosch's own project of
insisting that every literary work is unique, and that every act of consump-
tion of a literary work is irreducible to any other, is highly compatible with
contemporary capitalism's fetish for particularity and diversity. As many
scholars have argued, flexible production catered to particular consumers
and inducements for people to imagine themselves as irreducibly individual
are integral to our times (Harvey; Nilges).
Let us look more closely now at Against World Literature, in which
Emily Apter writes of her "serious reservations about tendencies in World
Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substi-
tutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded
'differences' that have been niche marketed as commercializeel 'identities'."
She quotes with approval Simon During's argument that world literature
is a "genteelleisure industry," part of "the recent rapid extension of cross-
border flows of tourists and cultural goods around the worlel," and states
that she is "uneasy in the face of the entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthol-
ogize and curricularize the world's cultural resources" (2-3). She even links
world literature to a politically dangerous "oneworldedness," signifying "a
relatively intractable literary monoculture that travels through the world
 World Literature and Market Dynamics 95
absorbing difference" (83). This monoculture is defined by "the centrifugaI
pressure of dominant world languages and literatures" and connected to
everything from the surveillance state to state-based monomania and cata-
strophism (71).
In a comparable way, the editors at n+l say of successful writers: "Their
publishers are multinational corporations; the universities they teach at, or
where their work may be taught, train a global elite; and much of their audi-
ence, actual or hoped-for, reads English, though huge markets for books also
exist in Mandarin, Spanish, and French." Furthermore, they write:

In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers:

Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and I(iran Desai, Mohsin Hamid,
and Chi maman da Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its
own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts,
and book fairs. It has its prizes: the Nobel, of course, but more power-
fuI and snazzier is the Man Booker, and the Man Booker International.
Its political arm is PEN. And it has a social calendar full of literary
festivals, which bring global elites into contact with the glittering stars
ofWorld Lit. ("World Lite" n.p.)

Increasingly written by authors employed by universities, world literature

"has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global
elite." It is "like a Davos summit," they maintain, "where experts, national
delegates, and celebrities discuss, calmly and collegially, between sips of
bottled water, the terrifie problems of a humanity whose predicament they
appear to have escaped" ("World Lite" n.p.).
Both Apter's book and "World Lite" are deliberately provocative. It is no
surprise that they were widely discussed and critiqued. A piece by Poorva
Rajaram and Michael Griffith argued that the n+l editors were holding
writers of world literature to a standard of political commitment they would
not apply to authors from, say, their own New York neighbourhoods, and
were thereby denying this particular canon the priority of aesthetic con-
cerns. Caroline Levine, for her part, suggests that, contra Apter, "works that
come from distant places and times" do not "feel readily familiar in transla-
tion" and worries about the limitations we impose on ourselves if we decide
only to read works in their original languages. Yet most of the commen-
tary that followed these works' publication embraces the basic proposition
that world literature today tends to entail the production of writing that
translates local particularities into sameness and homogeneity, whether this
translation occurs during the writing process-when a writer knowingly
presents a place as an exotic paradise, for example (Lau and Mendes), or
writes in such a way that her work will be easily translated into several
languages (Walkowitz)-or after the act of writing has been completed and
the work is acquired, marketed, purchased, and read. The general story-
a story about world literature as a product saturated by commercial and
96 Sarah Brouillette
institutional pressures-has proven quite popular, such that today it seems
that world literature is widely understood, as 1 have been describing, as
a niche commercial category serving relatively elite consumers' desires to
be exposed to exotic or simply unusual experiences or even just to have
their own biases confirmed. These privileged consumers either read world
literature in such a way that its contraplJntal or oppositional tendencies are
effectively muted, or the work is from the get-go written in a style that is
meant to aIlow for the accumulation of acclaim and prestige and little else.
Importantly, the existence of a niche market for works of world literature
is thought to have real implications for literary fonn. The writing is "born-
translated," in Rebecca Walkowitz's terms, in that works of contemporary
world literature "anticipate their own future in severalliterary geographies"
(174). It wants to be read across borders, it wants to be included in lucrative
international translation rights deals, it wants to be understood by people
aIl around the world-people with the requisite cultural capital, that is-
and it wants to be adapted for film. Complexities of style and language are
deemphasized; the writing is flat; plot dominates. While not aIl scholars are
particularly dismayed by this state of affairs-Walkowitz, for instance, is
interested in simply charting formaI innovations, and is indeed even wary
of the notion that this writing is somehow degraded-much of the recent
commentary does have an oppositional tone. For Apter and for the 11+1 edi-
tors, certainly, world literature signifies easily consumed works from which
progressive scholars should be distancing themselves. As Fisk argues in her
review of Apter's book, it becomes a crucial construct against which they
define and defend another kind of literary writing that deliberately resists
being easily accommodated by the market, along with a style of critique
that values instead what cannot be easily translated and traded. Fisk sug-
gests that both Apter and the 11+1 piece construct as much as they identify
their object: they present world literature as "politically naive, theoretically
unenlightened, and crucially caught up in the business of making money"
because they want to celebrate themselves and their audiences in flattering
contrast. For Apter the work to be celebrated is that which is finally untrans-
latable. For the 11+1 editors what is worthy of promotion is an internation-
alist literature which would, unlike world literature, embrace the idea that
it has an oppositional project and avowed truth to put fOl"Ward: "Global
Lit tends to accept as given the tastes of an international middlebrow audi-
ence," they write, whereas "internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create
the taste by which it is to be enjoyed. The difference, crudely, is between a
product and a project" ("World Lite" n.p.).

This argument, resting on the notion that there is a self-evident difference

between a product and a project, is for me a crucial signal that the narrative
 World Literature and Market Dynamics 97
of world literature's market readiness entails a limited form of materialism.
It seems to suggest that the market for world literature could be improved
by the incorporation of works written in a different style, thus raising the
crucial question: if the market could be reoriented in such a way that this
preferred internationalism, or untranslatability, became the dominant taste,
would the problem of world literature no longer exist? Moreover, what
would be involved in changing the market to make it able to accommodate
the kinds of writing that these critics prefer? Isn't it the case that, far from
resulting from the insistent interventions of a few vocal intellectuals, sorne
fundamental reorientation of the class dynamics of writing, publishing, and
reading would be necessary in or der to make different sorts of aesthetic
objects circulate successfully? In other words, isn't it a matter of the material
constitution of the industry itself?
Motivated by these questions, the remainder of this essay attempts to
broaden the terrns of the materialist critique of world literature beyond
the story of commodification outlined above. Part of what l suggest is that
the very story of world literature's market incorporation is actually itself
symptomatic of a broader set of tendencies that have become character-
istic of cultural and intellectual work today. While l cannot fully elabo-
rate my argument here but do so elsewhere (Brouillette, Literature and the
Creative Economy), l discuss briefly how laments about the commercializa-
tion of culture have become an important motor within the cultural and
academic industries. Certainly the dominant litera l'y cultures produced in
the advanced economies have become definitively self-questioning and self-
critical. Writers and critics are expected to bemoan the fact that literary
work is compromised by the commercial necessity of appealing to a broad
readership, and so, in effect, these laments are generative concerns for the
industry's commerce.
Consider for a moment that one of the likely authors of "World Lite"
is 11+1 editor Benjamin Kunkel, a successful novelist and critic who pub-
lished in 2014, to much fanfare, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present
Crisis, described by Verso as a "tour through the world of Marxist thought";
his likely co-author is Chad Harbach, also a successful novelist and critic,
whose widely read article "MFA vs. NYC"-the occasion for a collection
of essays on "the two cultures of American fiction" published in 2014-
laments that the NYC novelist's imagination "is shaped by the need to make
a broad appeal, to communicate quickly, and to be socially relevant in ways
that can be recreated in a review." These men are not marginal to the indus-
try. They and their anti-market-even anti-capitalist-views are central to a
key niche within it. Articulations of the idea that the product is too easy, too
palatable, or too lacking in the necessary complexity and restive force are a
crucial part of what the product is today.
l would suggest, then, that because the story of literature's constraint
by the market is so central to the market itself, a fuller materialist account
of world literature is necessary in order to understand what it is about
98 Sarah Brouillette
that constraint-and the circulation of the story of constraint-that actu-
ally matters. In brief, if we are concerned about the dominance of literary
products over literary projects, we cannot begin to understand and contest
this dominance without outlining and critiquing the political economy of
literary production. This is a topic that the critics 1 have been discussing
leave entirely untouched. Primary to this. economy is the deceptively simple
fact that reading and writing literature are elite activities. The majority of
the world's inhabitants do not imagine that it will be possible for them to
become authors or readers of literature. Nor would it be possible for them
to imagine themselves as authors or readers-or, what is far more likely, as
film directors or pop stars-so long as they have other more pressing priori-
ties fundamentally determined by their position within the global economy.
To be dear, 1 am not lamenting the fact that they are not reading and writing
literature, which is by any measure a residual mode of cultural expression.
What 1 am lamenting is the persistence of the exploitative capitalist social
relations revealed by the fact that participation in the literary economy is a
mark of privilege. In other words, to repurpose a point that John Guillory
made about the canon debates of the 1980s, it hardly matters how repre-
sentative our marketable literature is, and how attentive to the cultural par-
ticularities and nuances of identity that we like to see forcefully on display
in our art, if access to dassrooms and other sites of literary reading is so
limited and literature itself is mainly a privileged articulation of a dassed
sociolect. That is, for any concerns about the commercial delimitation of
literary writing to be actually pressing, we would have to assume first what
Guillory calls "a universalized literacy not exhibited by any social forma-
tion, induding the present one" (485). Given that not everyone reads and
writes, and that only a relatively elite group of readers would ever access the
better kind of writing that Apter and the 11+1 editors promote, preferences
for one sort of writing over another come to seem merely aesthetic, and the
limitations of the prevalent anti-market positioning become apparent. This
position fails to acknowledge fully that the production of literature is itself
fundamentally determined by capitalist social relations. This determination
means, moreover, that literature's production is fundamentally unavailable
for any sort of redemptive reform while those relations persist. Some of the
work in the 1970s' sociology of literature tradition, which 1 will return to
briefly below, made this same daim about literature's fundamental and irre-
deemable heteronomy (Balibar and Macherey; Williams 45-54).
It follows, of course, that it is capitalism itself, and the realities of com-
bined and uneven development, that make it the case that only a select group
of people read and write what will sell as literature. In The Commu11ist
Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously wrote that an imperative to expand
markets "chases the bourgeoisie over the surface of the whole globe," and
so they "nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections every-
where" (84). They argue that the rise of a genuine Weltliteratur-an inter-
national literature moving easily across increasingly hazy borders-would
 1X7orld Literature and Market Dynamics 99
parallel the expansion of the world market and the intrepid travels of its
bourgeois beneficiaries. More recently, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova
have formulated the most influential expansions of this daim, arriving at
theories of world literature that are attentive to the imbalances and ineq-
uities that determine the distribution of cultural and economic resources,
and cognizant of the ways in which economic unevenness impinges upon
the literary field. Moretti's "Conjectures on World Literature" is the first
of his interventions discussing world literature as "literature of the capital-
ist world-system," and so necessarily, like that system, "one, yet unequal."
Moretti elaborates:

the world-system school of economic history, for which international

capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a
core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in
a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature
(Weltliteratur, singulat; as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better,
one world literary system (of inter--related literatures); but a system
which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because
it's profoundly unequal. (56-57)

For her part, in The World Republic of Letters, first published in French
in 1999, Casanova insists that the world's national literatures have been
defined by the hierarchized and iniquitous cultural field in which they cir-
culate. She argues that there is a fundamental connection between liberal
capitalism and the literature we tend most to esteem, since the literature
that is celebrated by the industry is the work that believes in and strives
for a version of aesthetic autonomy compatible with bourgeois liberalism:
committed to formaI perfection and to the freedom of the writer to do as
she pleases. 2 Sharae Deckard suggests that work by Moretti and Casanova,
along with the materialist studies in world literature by scholars affiliated
with the Warwick Research Collective, might be designated "world-literary
criticism," and she applauds it for recognizing how "literature mediates the
structural divisions of the world-system." In her own work Deckard articu-
lates this world-literary criticism to world-ecological criticism, "drawing
together a theory of combined and uneven development, with an under-
standing of the differentiation of the world-system into cores and peripher-
ies, and a conceptualization of capitalism as a world-ecology constituted by
ecological regimes" (1-2).
My own suggestion is the modest one that we might also articulate such
a world-literary criticism to an as yet extremely underdeveloped political
economy of literary production, which would consider how labour, prop-
erty, and ownership work within the literary system, and how they impinge
upon the writing that exists. This political economy would discuss how
people come to make a living working within the literary book industries
and how people come to be able to enjoy what those industries produce. It
100 Sarah Brouillette
would, for instance, chart how people begin to find it possible to perceive
themselves as capable of becoming authors, how their work is made vis-
ible to the right people in the industry, how manuscripts are acquired and
transformed into final products, how contracts (including foreign rights and
translation stipulations) are negotiated, and how a work is put in a position
to be noticed by the educators who assign it to students and to the prizing
bodies that bring works into the limelight.
These are matters that publishing and print culture studies have been
charting in a very limited and particular way. Since the early 1980s, when
book history was inaugurated mainly as a Eurocentric and neutral disci-
pline of empirical research, the studies that do exist have tended not to take
an avowed position on the fact that the majority of the world's people are
excluded from the practices in question, nor have they connected that exclu-
sion to capitalism (Brouillette, "UNESCO and the Book"). In fact, a broad
survey of book-historical research would give one the impression that the
st ory of the last two hundred years is the story of the graduaI and welcome
democratization of access to literary experiences and opportunities. There
are exceptions to this rule, including a number of studies arising from or
paralleling the political economy of communication in the 1970s and 1980s,
which were concerned with the iniquitous distribution of the resources nec-
essary for participating in what was purported to be an increasingly global
industry and were inspired and supported by international intergovernmen-
tal attempts to establish a New World Information and Communication
Order (NWICO). Philip Altbach, for instance, has written and assembled
countless works on the neo-colonial drive of the academic system and book
marketplace. But these studies, from his early work on "literary colonialism"
in the developing world to his more recent studies of unequal "distribu-
tion of knowledge" within the academic system, have been aimost entirely
ignored by literature scholars and book historians (Altbach, "Literary Colo-
nialism"; Comparative Higher Education).
The self-styled "new sociology of literature" has also led to sorne work
in this area. Scholars affiliated with the new sociology of literature have
presented their work as an alternative to the earlier sociology of literature
of the 1970s and 1980s, practiced by Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu,
Terry Eagleton, and Janet Wolff, among others, which they position as hav-
ing been committed to "dichotomized and homogeneous poles of'literature'
and 'society'" (Frow 237) and as having "sought to explain transformations
in literary forms in terms of the external forces that had acted on them"
(Bennett 255). Premier among the rejected binary models is the Marxist
one positing an economic base that determines the cultural superstructure.
What recent scholarship in this field claims to envision instead is a set of
interlocking and overlapping spheres (cultural, economic, social, legal, and
political), each of which mediates, informs, influences, and shapes the other.
Literature is, thus, like any other cultural process, a set of "phenomena" that
"operate in and across different kinds of publicly instituted sociomaterial
 \Xlorld Literature and Market Dynamics 101
assemblages" (Bennett 259). 1 propose instead that we return to the earlier
models of literary sociology precisely because they emphasize political econ-
orny and the determining force of capitalism. Raymond Williams was, for
example, devoted to uncovering the constitutive and mediating nature of the
social practice of making culture even as he acknowledged that this practice
exists within a system of capitalist cultural production shaped by the pursuit
of profit. He stressed that the interlocking spheres of culture, economics,
society, and politics exist not on a "flat" plane of "assemblages," but rather
in definitively hierarchical relations, with economics often dominant.

What points might a contemporary sociology of world literary produc-

tion make? To begin with, it can be noted that where the commercial
dynamics of contemporary literary culture are concerned, the division of
labour within the literary book industries is highly significant. The fact that
people direcdy involved in literary publishing generally do not make a lot
of money do es not mean that their work is materially insignificant. Even
though sales may be modest relative to other kinds of cultural commodities,
publishers' imprints that successfully market world literature tides make
valuable contributions to the publisher's brand equity and to the brand
equity of the transnational media company or conglomerate that houses
the publisher. This literature's association with global sophistication and
cosmopolitan taste is important to those parent companies that are eager
to justify market expansion, and eager also to establish a global division
of labour in which aspects of the production chain, such as copyediting
and cover design, are outsourced to cheaply staffed "processing zones."
The fact that these companies have literary holdings associated with glob-
ally humanistic values for diversity and difference is precisely what eases
their expansive drive. Caroline Davis has shown, for instance, that Oxford
University Press (OUP) accrues cultural capital by highlighting the non-
commercial status of brands like Clarendon Press and Oxford University
itself, and by publishing academic tides selected for academic markets
located in the West. Yet in the decades following decolonization, it was
the economic capital that was gained through extensive sales of educa-
tionai material in the African market that bankrolled those ostensibly non-
commercial ventures. The sheer distance between an African branch office
in Ibadan or Accra and the site of the Clarendon Press made it possible
for the academic arm to pretend that it was insulated from the commer-
cial enterprise that in fact funded its publishing programme. In volatile
markets-affected, for instance, by the oil and economic crises of the early
1970s, by the Nigerian civil war over Biafra, or by a rising tide of anti-
apartheid sentiment and attendant boycotts-the prestige of Oxford could
help to justify the publisher's continued attempts to sec ure contracts with
102 Sarah Brouillette
Africa's state educators. These included controllers of the contentious Bantu
education system in South Africa, which OUP continued to court, despite
the fact that several of its own tides were highly critical of the racist and
intentionally limited education it afforded.
A second point to make about the sociology of world literary
production-and a point that the broad narrative of world literature's
incorporation does make in certain ways·-is that class is a crucial restric-
tion on access to literary experiences. lt is not only the case that world
literature exists for a small roster of readers but that alliiterature exists for
a small roster of readers. As Gloria Fisk wryly indicates in her review of
Apter's boolc "By aIl of its definitions, world literature is about as bound
up with the economic conditions as other cultural phenomena-which is
to say, completely." 1 would add that perhaps more than ever there is now
what Wendy Griswold has called "a reading class" made up of "habituaI
readers of print with a distinct demographic profile" (1). In Griswold's por-
trait, what Raymond Williams described as "the long revolution" during
which, over sorne hundred years, reading became a habituaI activity even for
working··class people, was in fact something of an exception to the general
rule in which only a distinct social elite read for anything other than basic
information. The culture of literary reading is in fact in decline; the reading
class is shrinking and closing ranks. It seems too obvious to say that the
literature we read tends to be written by a certain class of people because of
the nature of capitalist social relations. We are ourselves for the most part in
the positions we are in because we belong to a particular class of people who
have tended to be capitalism's beneficiaries. The literary marketplace is part
of capitalism's cultural infrastructure, and the animus against the commer-
cialization of culture, the attempts to imagine a time when culture was more
autonomous from capital, and the subtle gradations of accommodation to
and distance from commercial imperatives have not done much to challenge
Marx and Engels's insightful recognition that Weltliteratur was a cultural
accompaniment to an avowedly economic reality. The idea that the problem
is a cultural one-a matter of lack of diversity al'ising from the pressures
of the market-threatens to give the impression that a market better able
to accommodate a more diverse array of writers doing more sophisticated,
political, and less translatable things is the most pressing issue. 1 merely
wish to point out that the problems are much deeper. The requisite level of
culturalliteracy and access to literary works is fundamentally determined by
status in hierarchies demanded by the division of labour-hierarchies that a
better or more representative world literature (more complex, more sophis-
ticated, less translatable, more committed) cannot hope to affect.
A third point to make about the sociology of world literary production-
in addition, that is, to the point about brand equity, and about literacy and
access-is that the narrative of culture's full incorporation into capital has
been quite important to writers and how they envision their work. An under-
studied aspect in the existing commentaries on world literature's market
 World Literature and Market Dynamics 103
dimensions is the nature of intellectuallabour and how writers themselves
acknowledge it. Sharae Deckard usefully argues:

allliterature is mediated in the sense of being produced by intellectuals

and artists who work upon the material of their own socio-ecological
context, and must be understood as semi-autonomous, liable to the
conditions of the literary field of production, which is only one rela-
tion among many in the capitalist world-system, dialectically related
to economic and political relations without exactly mirroring them.
Literary artworks are produced in a restricted field of production with
its own dynamics of competition between agents (writers, publish-
ers, critics, institutions); its own temporality of production (in which
the necessary time of writing may lag far behind historical events, so
that novels do not register economic or ecological crises in the pre-
cise moment of their occurrence, but often retrospectively); its own
dynamics of uneven consecration in the world literary market (so that
with the popularity of magical realism, peripheral literary production
from Latin America ironically became a central product of core con-
sumption); its own relation to the availability of truth-apparatuses
and dispositifs; and its own repositories of cultural materials, aesthetic
modes and folkways for writers to work upon. (2)

Picking up Deckard's point about literature's semi-autonomy, 1 would sug-

gest that one of the key ways in which this autonomy tends to be negotiated
and expressed today is in authors' acknowledgement of and engagement
with the fact that even when their work is highly critical of capitalism it is
still available for consecration within the market (1 make this argument at
greater length in Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy). In this
light, if critics want to locate and valorize a kind of culture that will not be
so readily available to easy market appropriation, they may not be giving
the market enough credit. It is a characteristic of contemporary capital that
it accommodates critique very weIl and finds the marketable kernel in even
the most virulent anti-market gestures. Whether or not it is completely true
that culture has succumbed to total market incorporation, the narrative of an
autonomous critical culture's graduaI incorporation into an utterly heteron-
omous market for commodities is a constitutive part of writers' and readers'
self-understanding. Writers and readers readily admit literature's commodity
status, and forms of engagement with this status-forms that are self-critical,
sanguine, ironie, et cetera-are characteristic of a significant body of contem-
porary writing. It is also-as the popular narrative about the complicities of
world literature evinces-a refrain in readers' reactions to works, especially
to works that could be sa id to offer privileged, elite, personal-capital enhanc-
ing insights into destitute or underprivileged or unevenly developed areas of
the world. l would suggest that as we grapple with this self-consciousness
about literature's commodity status we veer away from the melancholy and
104 Sarah Brouillette
largely static approach that Theodor Adorno forwarded in Aesthetic Theory,
in which modern art gradually cornes to understand its own commodity sta-
tus but rejects that status in its form and so holds onto sorne modicum of
that crucial prize, "autonomy." There is no reason to celebrate self-reflexivity,
and no prize to be won in the current game.
The inequities of copyright and the iniquitous distribution of access to
media platforms, induding litera l'y writing and the outlets that celebrate
it, are a ubiquitous theme in contemporary writing and the reception of
contemporary writing. 50 much so that scandaIs about who gets to benefit
from the celebration of a given work are willingly orchestrated and antici-
pated by writers, marketing departments, agents, editors, et cetera. Think,
for instance, of the debates about the (in)authenticity of Aravind Adiga's The
White Tiger or Monica Ali's Brick Lane. Critics charged that Adiga's elite
status, crystallized by his education at Columbia and Oxford, meant that he
could never give accurate voice to the troubles of his novel's underdass nar-
rator (Kumar). Objections to Ali's work were similar. How could someone
who did not live in the Brick Lane area and who had only tenuous links to
its Bangladeshi population possibly daim to be able to honestly represent
a recent immigrant's experiences? Wasn't she just exploiting the area resi-
dents (Taylor)? This kind of refutation of elite-often middle-dass, white,
or developed-world-prestige is now one of the main engines of prestige;
indeed, such critique is explicitly invited, as it generates conversation.
This is part of how we might understand the contemporary moment of
world literature: a moment of purportedly global circulation that is really a
moment of uneven distribution of the agency and ability to author and of
uneven access to reading materials and to the means of publication. In these
conditions we can observe heightened consciousness about the compro-
mises, complicities, and constraints on literary work and its valorization, and
heightened kinds of circular games with reflexive unease about the extent to
which particular individuals have the right to represent certain kinds of expe-
rience in their writing. The debates over world literature's market dynamics
appear here as symptomatic articulations of this kind of self-consciousness.
In considering contemporary world literature in its political-economic con-
text, we have to think about the effects of unevenness on how authorship, as
a species of general creativity, is being conceived by writers and by critics like
Apter and the n+1 editors: that is, specifically, often, now, as the privileged
expropriation of socially held properties, and as a transposition of what
should be useful into nothing more than another abstract exchangeable item.

NOTES

1. 1 wish to thank Pieter Vermeulen and Dan Hartley for helpful comments on
drafts of this piece, and David Thomas and Lina Shoumarova for their research
assistance.
 World Literature and Market Dynamics 105
2. We can note that Casanova partakes of the narrative of literature's extensive
contemporary incorporation. She suggests that in recent years the autonomous
pole of literary acclaim has become little more than a marketing niche, as a
genuine literary internationalism has given way to commercial globalization
(see Casanova 164).

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Part

Postcolonial Worlds
7 Archivai Trajectories and Literary
Voice in Indian Ocean Narratives
of Siavery
Maria Olaussen

1. INTRODUCTION

The relation between archives and literary texts in a postcolonial context

shows many similarities to the use of archivaI material in history, ethnog-
raphy, and human geography. The task of the postcolonial archivist or
the author interested in a particular set of events is not merely to collect
subaltern histories. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out, it is also to investigate

the compositional logics of the archive as such: the material condi-

tions that allow something to be archived and archivable; the com-
pulsions and desires that conjure the appearance and disappearance
of objects, knowledges, and socialities within an archive; the cultures
of circulation, manipulation, and management that allow an object
to enter the archive and thus contribute to the endurance of specifie
social formations. (152-53)

Literary texts approaching archivaI material often also end up reflecting

on what Andrew van der Vlies terms "the ethics of narrative in the context
of the legacies of colonial discursive formations" (583). While seeking to
articulate events from the point of view of the subaltern, these texts there-
fore need to take into account far more than the predominance of parti cu-
lar experiences in earlier narratives of the same events. They also need to
engage with the idea of literary voice itself and consider how the generic
conventions used to express a voice build on understandings of human sub-
jectivity and form part of the structures that determine relations of power.
In this essay l want to focus on two texts which both problematize the
relation between archive and literary voice: Amitav Ghosh's travelogue In
an Antique Land (1994) and Yvette Christiansë's novel Unconfessed (2006).
Both texts deal with the complex structures of freedom and dependence born
out of the long history of trade across the Indian Ocean and both articulate
their critique of colonial epistemologies from within this history. As Isabel
Hofmeyr points out, Indian Ocean studies challenge binary notions of colo-
nizer and colonized, "the dominating global and the resistant local," and
complicate understandings of diaspora by stressing interaction and exchange
across diasporic communities in littoral societies and port cities (589).
110 Maria Olaussen
Print cultures generated out of these exchanges as part of the religious com-
munities and institutions consisting of "Sufi networks, madrassas, pilgrims,
students and middlemen" (Hofmeyr 580) built on competing daims of
universality rather than on unidirectional strategies of power and subor-
dination. Postcolonial approaches that focus on the devastating impact of
European imperial powers on indigenous communities are here faced with
a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one consisting of several interacting
nodes of power, often replacing each other over time, and generating com-
plex structures of dependence and subordination. Reading these texts within
a world literature context points to exchanges and forms of translation that
were interrupted by European colonial expansion and that were reinvented
as part of the formation of European modernity.
Ghosh's text points to these possibilities of a premodern form of cosmopoli-
tan universalism as it draws on material from the eleventh century and traces
the relations between a highly trusted enslaved Indian, Bomma, and his Jewish
merchant master Ben Yiju as described in Ben Yiju's correspondence with other
merchants and friends. The travelogue focuses to a large extent on the relation
between the present-day narrator and the archivaI material found in an Egyp-
tian Geniza, a storehouse connected to a synagogue, and it takes the form of
a quest narrative describing the complex ironies of an Indian scholar visiting
Egypt in the 1980s and trying to find and express pa st connections between
India and Egypt. In addition, In an Antique Land describes the ethnographic
research the present-day protagonist carries out in two Egyptian villages. The
historical and present-day projects are connected through their questioning of
traditional methodologies, thereby testifying to the predominance of European
Enlightenment ideas that form the basis of traditional scholarly methods.
Through its tide, the travelogue also gestures towards P.B. Shelley's
famous poem "Ozymandias," in which the inscription on a statue among
ruins speaks of vanished empires in the voice of a decayed ruler. The use of
this intertext stresses the function of literary history and generic conven-
tions in determining the space within which voices are created and stories
articulated and heard. As Theo D'Haen points out, Shelley's poem, although
ostensibly dealing with a displaced and long forgotten ruler of ancient Egypt,
translates this political context into that of Shelley's own time and thereby
critiques Britain's imperial power. In doing so, the poem challenges the con-
ventions of Romanticism that it employs by turning "the meditation upon a
remote past" (D'Haen 113), typically used in the sonnet form, into a pres-
ent-day political intervention. The narrative ''l'' in Shelley's poem further
relies on the account of a traveller for the information on the statue in the
Egyptian desert and is therefore removed from the scene itself. In a compa-
rable way, Ghosh's travelogue complicates questions of genre and voice by
creating a narrator-protagonist who corresponds to the biography of Amitav
Ghosh himself. He is a scholar of South Asian origin who, during his work
on a doctoral dissertation at Oxford, cornes across archivaI rnaterial on the
enslaved Indian, carries out fieldwork in Egypt, and then travels in se arch of
 Archiual Trajectories and Literary Voice 111
more information about the medieval Indian. The text does, however,
conta in "such novelistic techniques as imaginative plot construction, evoc-
ative imagery, and empathetic characterization" (Chambers, "Absolute
Essentialness" 26). Theo D'Haen, therefore, hesitates "whether to caU it a
travelogue, a travel tale, a novel or an essay" (D'Haen 113). In refusing to
conform to the expectations of conventionalliterary genres when it cornes
to identifying the source of the speaking voice in the text, this use of a
narrator-protagonist complicates customary ideas of speaking subjects.
Christiansë's nov el is similarly concerned with the legacy of Indian Ocean
structures of travel and human bondage. It is set in a later period and deals
with South African slavery leading up to emancipation in the 1830s. Explicitly
positioned in relation to Toni Morrison's novel Be/oued, it tells the story of a
woman, Sila, incarcerated on Robben Island for the mur der of her son, Baro.
While this gesture towards Beloued crea tes a connection to the history of
Atlantic slavery, a connection reinforced by the fact that the protagonist Sila is
brought from Mozambique in a slave raid, the history of South African slavery
as part of a longer history of unfree labour brought across the lndian Ocean is
central to the novel. The first slaves were brought to the Cape in the 1650s as
part of the households of merchants and administra tors of the Dutch East India
Company; they followed the social and economic structures of Indian Ocean
trading networks and Indian Ocean slavery with the majority of enslaved
persons being brought to the Cape from South East Asia. Only later did the
enslaved population also inc1ude persons from Mozambique and Angola who
were forcibly removed from these areas in slave raids (Shell; Worden). Robben
Island was originally also only one among a number of island prisons for
"slaves, political exiles, prisoners of war, indentured labourers, soldiers, and
prisoners" (Hofmeyr 588). Christiansë's own family history, as explored in her
poetry collection Castaway, contains the stories of another island prison, that
of St. Helena, the birthplace of Christiansë's enslaved grandmother.
Similar genealogical connections, where the authors are positioned as
descendants either of slave-owners or the enslaved, are found in other pres-
ent-day novels dealing with the history of slavery at the Cape such as Rayda
Jacob's The Slaue Book (1998), Therese Benadé's Kites ol Good Fortune
(2004), and André Brink's A Chain ol Voices (1981) and Philida (2012). In
contrast to these novels, the story in Unconfessed, although told in the first
pers on by the enslaved woman herself, draws our attention to the power
structures inherent in processes of representation. Rather than building on
structures of identity-formation found in the binary between colonial pow-
ers and the indigenous oppresse d, the nov el gestures towards earlier histories
of cosmopolitan belonging and exchange now displaced by a new racialized
order. Both Unconlessed and In an Antique Land are crucially concerned
with tracing the literary both as an expression of an enabling sympathetic
imagination and as embedded within oppressive discursive structures.
Christiansë's novel uses voice-in the sense of "who speaks" -both in
the identification of the voice in the archive and in the rendering of the story
112 Maria Olaussell
in the voice of the enslaved woman, while at the sa me time drawing our
attention to the problem of interpellation and the function of the slave as
catachresis. The novel takes at its starting point the efforts by the colonial
administration and representatives of the church to make Sila herself con-
fess to the crime of infanticide, thereby making her an active agent within
oppressive discursive structures. Sil a refu.ses to take up this subject position
and instead speaks to her dead son who visits her on Robben Island. In this
sense Sila's refusaI to speak points towards the power of new discursive
and legal structures that continued to enslave black people in South Africa
following emancipation, and which created a continuum from enslave-
ment to colonialism and apartheid. The novel traces the power struggles
between slave-owners, British colonial officiaIs, and missionaries in the lives
of enslaved people from bodily inscriptions of that power over force and
corporal punishment to legal inscriptions of social control and the enforce-
ment of moral ideals. The story we hear Sila tell is not intelligible within
these structures but is a result of memories born out of a haunting that
escapes these structures.
The relation between voice and archive in these texts can best be under-
stood through Richard Aczel's concept of over-hearing. Aczel argues for a
notion of voice as "a composite configuration of quoted speech styles" and
defines the concept of over-hearing as "the intentional activity of a subject
whose intentions are subjected to the historical dialogue which renders
his or her speech possible" (597). In the complex hierarchies of power
and dependence that characterized Indian Ocean trading empires and the
societies they influenced, the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, in Aczel's
words, as "utterances permeated by the tongues of others" (597), takes up
a very specifie meaning when the movement from dependence and enslave-
ment goes through a process of speaking for and acting on behalf of those in
power. Both In an Antique Land and Unconlessed articulate the shift from
this understanding of the speaking voice as not necessarily articulating an
individual or collective experience to an overdetermined voice from which
there is no escape. Aczel points to the important insights offered by Hei-
degger in the elaboration of the crucial role of language in processes of sub-
ject constitution necessary for speech: "The human subject, or Heidegger's
'man' ('der Mensch') ... only speaks 'insofar as he (co)responds to language'
('insofern el' der Sprache ent-spricht')" (Aczel 601). In the case of Uncon-
lessed this correspondence to language is available only through the subject
positions that determine her state of subjection.
The main character Sila in Unconlessed refuses to cooperate with the
legal conventions of confession and absolution; while framed in terms of
freedom, these conventions would make her complicit in the act of inter-
pellation, calling her into being as a slave and a criminal. Her scepticism is
expressed in terms of the relation between speech and writing: "1 have had
enough of that speech that travels on paper" (211). The overdetermination
in Ghosh's travelogue derives from the same source of European-inflected
 Archival Trajectories and LiteraJ'Y Voice 113
understandings of freedom and modernity, whereby the ancient connections
between lndia and Egypt seem impossible to retrieve and articulate. Ir is
further present in the often humorous encounters between the narrator and
the Egyptian villagers in which the villagers, in a kind of inverted ethnog-
raphy, shape the discursive space within which the customs and religious
practices in lndia are unfavourably compared to those in Egypt. These
novels extend the idea of world literature to include these ancient net-
works but also the historical processes of their subordination to paradigms
derived from colonial epistemes. Postcolonial reading strategies therefore
need to take into account these more multifaceted structures of power and
dependence as weIl as the limitations of subject positions based on indi-
vidual humanism.

2. ARCHIVE AS COMMENCEMENT AND COMMANDMENT

An archive consists of material documents with a history of their own: their

inscription, use, storage, transportation, discovery, and function within
different contexts. The story in the archive is therefore also a story of the
archive-the history of collecting, storing, and putting the documents to use.
As Verne Harris points out, both archivists and novelists work with these
fragments as possibilities of inscription into competing stories: "Meaning
and significance in archives is unstable, imbricated in ever-shifting contexts,
determined, in principle, by a future which is always coming" (154). As
Carli Coetzee notes, Harris develops a connection between archivist and
novelist that challenges the dichotomy of fact versus fiction and points to
the centrality of the creative imagination in any archivaI work. Artists and
writers are, in turn, influenced by the idea of the archive in their efforts "to
read between the lines, to unearth hidden lives, to make unheard voices
speak, to fill in the gaps" (Coetzee 560).
One strand of the narrative of In an Antique Land focuses on the materi-
ality of the archive and describes the size and shape of letters and fragments
as weIl as the history of their different locations and their way into historical
accounts. Significantly enough, the account moves from the story about Ben
Yiju and the slave over the story of the use historians have made of the
material to the narrator's encounter with the letters as material objects. This
movement undermines the idea of the original as in itself containing and
generating a narrative. What the travelogue suggests, instead, is a move-
ment from the story about the slave as the narrator understands it, over the
accounts by historians, to the buildings housing the fragments in which this
story is contained. The story of how the documents in the Geniza came to
the interest of European scholars is significant in that it also reflects a shift in
power from the nations involved in the lndian Ocean trade to the predomi-
nance of European traders and imperial powers. Tt is within the framework
of Egypt's strategie importance for European powers that the new scholarly
114 Maria Olaussen
interest in ancient Egypt and, in the mid-nineteenth century, also in the
Geniza documents, came about.
In Ghosh's account, the enslaved lndian is consistendy referred to as
"the Slave of MS H.6," referring to the catalogue number of a letter
stored in the National and University Library in Jerusaiem. What the
narrator terms the slave's appearances. refers to published accounts by
historians who make use of the material in the letters. Subsequent chap-
ters tell the story of Abraham Ben Yiju, "the master of the Slave of MS
H.6" (34), within a historical and political context, interspersed with
accounts of the narrator's anthropological fieldwork. Only towards the
end of the narrative do we have an account of the name of this enslaved
person, Bomma, in a discussion that involves the specifie characteristics
of Judeo-Arabic script as weIl as research into the history of an ethnie
group resident in the vicinity of Mangalore in lndia. The merchant Ben
Yiju, for his part, is described as belonging to a "richly diverse body"
of Indian Ocean traders resident in medievai Egypt, "a group of people
who se travels and breadth of experience and education seem astonishing
even today" (55).
In Jacques Derrida's Archive Pever, the archive is etymologically linked
both to a physical site and to the legal function of the documents it houses.
The principle of commencement, having a place and ta king place, is linked
to the princip le of commandment: "there where men and gods command,
there where authority, social or der are exercised" (1). Anél Boshoff points to
the centrality of the patriarchal function of the archive in this definition in
which "the archive thus marks the domain of the father, the father's law, his
house and his language" (636). The archive fever in the tide of Derrida's text
refers, on the one hand, to the des ire to establish a relation between the live
origin and its traces and, on the other hand, to an obliterating force: "This
'violence of forgetting,' the anarchive, cleanses the system of the remain-
der, of that which could not be incorporated into the Law of the Father"
(Boshoff 642).
In an Antique Land focuses on documents with a very interesting history
of their own and with a literaI focus on patriarchal inscription:

The Synagogue's members followed a custom, widespread at the time,

of depositing their writings in a special chamber in the synagogue so
that they could be disposed of with special rites later. This practice ...
was intended to prevent the accidentaI desecration of any written form
of God's name ... The chambers in which the documents were kept
were known by the term "Geniza," a word that is thought to have come
into Hebrew from a Persian root, ganj, meaning "storehouse." (56-57)

In contra st to other such storehouses, the one connected to the Synagogue of

Ben Ezra was never emptied and buried, and various documents continued
to accumulate for eight centuries.
 Archival Trajectories and Literary Voice 115
A similar focus on the archive as building and repository of the letters
as material objects is found in the description of the Annenberg Research
Institute in Philadelphia:

The documents are kept in the Institute's rare book room, a great vault
in the bowels of the building, steel-sealed and laser-beamed, equipped
with alarms that need no more than seconds to mobilize whole fleets
of helicopters and police cars. Within the sealed interior of this vault
are two cabinets that rise out of the Ho or like catafalques. The docu-·
ments lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exqui-
sitely crafted covers. (348)

The documents themselves are also described as material objects. In a

description of particular events in the life of Abraham Ben Yiju, the narrator
refers to "a curious fragment" (177) and then describes the contents of the
letter and its significance and go es on to give a detailed description of the
fragment itself:

Ir is written on a fragment of paper of good, if not the best, qua lit y,

more than a foot in length, and about four inches wide. The paper
is considerably weathered and discoloured; it is torn at the top, and
there is a small hole in it that looks as though it has been caused by a
burn. But the writing, which extends aIl the way down on both si des, is
clear and can be read without difficulty: it is written in a distinctively
Yemeni hand. (177-78)

Through a detailed description of the documents, the history of their physi-

cal location in the Geniza, their removal from Egypt and the stories sur-
rounding their discovery by eminent historians, Ghosh's narrator turns his
attention to the archive and the archivaI material as subjects of history in
their own right. He points to the power struggles involved in the inclusion,
preservation, and removal of the manuscripts, something that is explicitly
placed in the context of colonial historiography. Of the collector Abraham
Firkowitch he writes:

If there is any irony today in the thought that a Jewish collector, not so
very long ago, would have seen reason to steal manuscripts from his
fellow Jews in Palestine in order to take them to Russia, it is not one
that would have been apparent to Firkowitch: he was merely practis-
ing on his co-religionists the methods that Western scholarship used, as
a normal part of its functioning, throughout the colonized world. (84)

It is within a similar context of collaboration between collectors and his-

torians that the documents are brought from the Geniza in Egypt to the
University of Cambridge in 1898: "The collection contains about a hundred
116 Maria Olaussen
and fort y thousand fragments and is the largest single store of Geniza mate-
rial in the world. It is in this collection, spread over a few dozen documents,
that the stories of Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave are preserved-tiny
threads, woven into the borders of a gigantic tapestry" (95).
In spite of his alleged interest in the "slave of MS H.6.," the narrator does
not attempt to tell the story of this person. As we have seen, the narrative
is the master's story, always placing Bomma in relation to events and fam-
ily histories of Abraham Ben Yiju. Telling the story along the archivaI grain
thus also involves maintaining the marginal position of the slave with a
minimum of contextual information about medieval notions of slavery and
systems of dependence within patriarchal power relations.
More interestingly, this narrative of medieval documents suggests a radi-
cal challenge to the postcolonial idea of voice as expressions of hidden and
subjugated histories. The slave in this narrative occupies a position of unde-
niable power within complex structures of dependence and his voice and
actions are therefore situated as the voice of the master. He is an active
agent who shapes the meaning of the structures around him and he does
this as a member of the merchant's household. In close affinity to the mean-
ing of religious subordination, this servitude is also expressed in terms of
belonging. Given the fact that survival depended on such affiliations, shift-
ing power structures created new masters, new patterns of obligation, new
messages, and a new voice. The focus of the narrative, however, remains
on the archivaI material and on a reading based within the political and
historical contexts of the time and therefore primarily focused on the slave-
owner rather than the slave.
This exploration of the archive is cornbined with an account of ethnographie
fieldwork that similarly exposes the power structures transmitted through the
forms, genre, and tropes of anthropological knowledge. As Claire Chambers
argues in her study of Ghosh's text, the relationship between anthropology,
language, and literature, as weIl as the similarities between translator and
anthropologist are brought out in Ghosh's travelogue ("Anthropology as
Cultural Translation" 2). Questions of academic knowledge production and
transmission are addressed through the interconnected projects that the pro-
tagonist undertakes, as both his fieldwork and the seat-ch for the slave in the
archives are focused on attempts at understanding other cultures. Chambers
shows how Ghosh's text can be read as an experimental ethnography within
the framework of the movement of the New Anthropologists (2). In Ghosh's
text this involves the playful and humorous reversaI of roles between the
ethnographer and his subjects as weIl as the subversive use of personal
anecdotes within the narrative itself. This process of rearrangement and
translation of alterity set in opposition to the traditional epistemologies of
anthropological fieldwork is also found in the approach Ghosh's protagonist
takes to the archive. As Chambers points out, the prologue does not conform
to the anthropological conventions of opening with a personal reflection and
description of one's own arrivaI to the site of fieldwork; instead, it focuses on
 Archival Trajectories and Literary Voice 117
the processes whereby the medieval slave "stepped upon the stage of modern
history" (13). In this way, Ghosh's text reverses the relation between historian
and archivaI material as weIl as undermines the power relations between eth-
nographer and the subjects of anthropological study.
The opening description of "the Slave of MS H.6" is cIearly focused on
the archivaI material and the itineraries of the letters that contain this infor-
mation, thereby presenting archivaI documents, in the sense of Ann Laura
Stoler, as "active generative substances" (1) that allow for "[c]ontrapuntal
intrusions" (2). In this way, Ghosh's narrative shares a number of strategies
with critical historians reading colonial archives against the grain, but is, as
l hope to show, ultimately involved in a more complex work-what Sarah
de Leeuw, following Stoler, describes as working along rather than against
or with the archivaI grain. Ghosh describes the appearance of the slave in the
documents as "a brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres, and he was scarcely
out of the wings before he was go ne again-more a prompter's whisper than
a recognizable face in the cast" (13). Sarah de Leeuw's description of critical
historians reading the colonial archive against the grain stresses this preoc-
cupation with that which is hardly discernible in the material: "accounting
for the gaps, silences, and evidences of resistance in the documents with
which they work and often analyze the texts for cIues about the logics of
power at work in colonial projects" (275). Following the chronology of the
discovery of the letters rather than the chronology of the events described
in the letters, Ghosh's narrator continues to describe both the itineraries of
the letters and their contents. The mention of the slave is described as brief
and marginal but significant: "no more than a name and a greeting" (16).
Another important aspect of the text concerns the focus on the inter-
subjective relations in the letters and on what de Leeuw describes as "the
eminently emotional and subjective nature both of archivaI research and
geographic inquiry" (274). Placed against the backdrop of the crusades as
political upheavals of the twelfth century and the Indian Ocean trade con-
nection, the letters between Ben Yiju and his merchant friends are discussed
more in terms of their friendship and what these letters reveal about "the
complex, pluralistic, chance-fiIled, intimate, and personal components that
underpin-if not make up-broad systems of power" (de Leeuw 275). In this
way Ghosh's work, while acknowledging the subaltern position of Bomma
and the social and political power structures determining his relative absence
from the archivaI records, do es not seek to rewrite history from the slave's
perspective. The relation between the protagonist as scholar and his discovery
of the slave in the archives is similarly described in personal terms as some-
thing that happened to the researcher rather than something that was part of
a well-designed research project: "In the ten years that had passed since l first
came across Goitein's brief reference to Abraham Ben Yiju and his Slave, my
path had crossed theirs again and again, sometimes by design and sometimes
inadvertently, in North Africa, Egypt and the Malabar, until it became cIear
that l could no longer resist the logic of those coincidences" (99).
118 Maria Olaussen
The methodology involved in working along the archivaI grain "demands
a heartfelt and emotive orientation to both the physical spaces of an archive
and to the materials and narratives housed therein" (de Leeuw 275) and is
therefore not seen as fundamentally different from ethnographie fieldwork.
These two strands are brought together in the discussion of the language
skills necessary for deciphering the Geniza documents, something the pro-
tagonist needs in order to "follow the stories of the Slave of MS H.6 and
Abraham Ben Yiju" (Ghosh 104). He discovers that dialects of the villages
he had learnt during his ethnographie fieldwork ten years earlier bear a
strong resemblance to the language used in the manuscripts. In this way
the two research projects, focused on alterity and built on deciphering and
translation, are brought together.
ln an Antique Land challenges the oppositions between living and dead,
dominant and subaltern subjects, between historical and anthropological
methodologies as weIl as between the researcher and his material. Ir shows
an emotional investment in the stories and an interest in unravelling the
"complexities, insecurities, and heterogeneity of those with or in power"
(de Leeuw 275). What is even more remarkable in this narrative in which
the subaltern do es not speak is the fact that it illustrates Spivak's conten-
tion that "the subaltern as female is even more deeply in the shadow" (257).
Towards the end of the narrative of Ben Yiju, and paralleled by a short
remark about the narrator's inability to tell us anything about "the self-
contained world of Nashawy's women" (164), we learn of"two unusual and
intriguing fragments which can fortunately be dated without fear of inac-
curacy" (227). Both documents-one is a legally attested deed and the other
is a rough draft of the same document-concern the manumission of a slave
girl named Ashu. Significantly enough, the document containing the actual
deed "has long been relatively inaccessible being lodged in a collection in the
erstwhile Leningrad" (227). Like the other documents, it carries a history
of its own, and it contains the "haunting effacement" (230) of the story of
another slave and a different context, that of enslaved women. In the travel-
ogue, the story is told only as it affects Ben Yiju. The narrator describes his
stay in India within a context of enslaved prostitutes and publicly accepted
concubinage and goes on to imagine Ben Yiju's relation to Ashu as one of
these girls-one he later marries. The narrator describes her as "the woman
who probably bore his children" (227).

Ashu is not mentioned anywhere else in the entire corpus of Ben Yiju's
documents, although her children figure in it frequently. Ben Yiju did
not once refer to her in his letters or jottings, and his correspondents in
Aden, who were always careful to send their good wishes to his chil-
dren, never mentioned her either, not even by means of the euphemisms
customary in their time, nor did they send her their greetings. (229)

Despite the patriarchal structures of dependence and sexual coercion, the

narrator imagines this relation within a context of romantic love with the
 Archival Trajectories and LiteraJ'Y Voice 119
expectations of the religious community as the only obstacle to their hap-
piness: "If 1 hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no
certain proof" (230). What the narrator sees as the only sign of presence
in the otherwise haunting effacement of Ashu in the archive could also be
seen as an inscription into a patriarchal and legal structure of power and
dependence. Framed as a document of freedom, the deed of manumission is
here imagined only in terms of ideals of individualism and freedom, and as
a necessary precondition for the imaginative reconstruction of events.
The processes and techniques of representation brought out in Ghosh's
text testify to the difficulties inherent in the imaginative reconstruction of
past lives and events, particularly when trying to articulate marginalized
stories or to speak for those whose voices have not been preserved. When
confronted with the history of Indian Ocean cosmopolitan exchanges and
the complexities of various forms of bondage, dependence, belonging, and
obligation, when the speaking voice could weIl be a voice speaking for the
master, the reconstruction of the speaking subject cannot be contained
within the ideals of individual freedom. As Christiansë's novel shows, such
ideals might, on the contrary, be employed in order to introduce new forms
of subservience and perpetuate existing structures of dependence.

3. SPEAKING FROM THE PRISON

Yvette Christiansë's novel Unconfessed differs from In an Antique Land

in that it focuses exclusively on the imaginative recreation of events docu-
mented in the colonial archive. The information concerning the archivaI
work is mainly given in a short postscript to the novel and also in an article
the author wrote ('''Heartsore'''). By focusing on the archivaI material in
a scholarly article rather than in an autobiographical account of the pro-
cesses of discovering this material, Christiansë offers an interpretation of the
material that exists alongside the novel as an additional story following the
conventions of another genre.
What Christiansë focuses on in her rendering of the story of Sila in the
archivaI records are the "fragmented records and palpable silences of crimi-
nal proceedings" (" 'Heartsore'" 1) epitomized in the different variations on
her name. In the records, she appears as "Sila, Siela, Silla, Silia, Drucella,
Drusilla, and Drusiela" ('"Heartsore''' 2). Apart from the problems of trans-
lation and transcription as well as the common practice of changing the
names of a slave at the time of purchase, Christiansë points to the possibility
of relating these variations to "duplicitous actions" (2); in the rest of her arti-
cle, she traces these actions in the power struggle over the property of the late
Hendrina Jansen, including the enslaved but later manumitted people. Ir is
within this narrative that the story of Sila's mur der charge is brought up and
evolves out of the word "hartzeer"-or its transliterated form "heartsore"-
as "a desire for speech resulting from the inability to be heard fully from
within slavery's discourse" (1). Although concerned with giving an account
120 Maria Olaussen
of the events reconstructed out of these documents, Christiansë approaches
the archive as a listener "to echoes of subjects for whom one might not have
an adequate language" (2). Unconfessed emerges within this opposition
between the way statements by slaves went unheard by the powers in the
recorded court cases and the challenge involved in listening to these voices.
In her article Christiansë also distanGes herself from the "language of
sentimentality" used by Sila's lawyer in his appeal when he presents Baro's
death through a "messianic tableau" of the mother and child of Christian
imagery (11). This fails, according to Christiansë, due to the missing father
figure who would stand as an agent in this sacrificial allegory. In the novel,
the question of the paternity of the children of enslaved women constitutes
the nodal point in which the patriarchal law manifests itself. For the pietà
tableau to be at aIl intelligible it must be read within a discursive context
where the rape of enslaved women by their masters was understood and
discussed only as a problem of female purity. As Pamela ScuUy points out,

Slave women suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their owners who in
addition to raping slave women as part of their rights as masters also
had an incentive to sire children who would add to their slave labour
force with the closing of the British transatlantic slave trade. Evidence
suggests that slaveholding society condoned but did not encourage
sexual relations between masters and their slaves. And when such rela-
tions were discussed, they were seen as being the result of the promis-
cuity of slave women, not as the result of domination by slave holders.
("Narratives of Infanticide" 28)

In contra st to other novels dealing with slavery at the Cape, Christiansë's

novel is concerned with an exploration of the power of the dominant discur-
sive structures that initiated and formed the inscription of this story in the
first place. Through its tide, Unconfessed clearly marks a position of oppo-
sition to narratives of culpability, confession, and absolution underlying
abolitionist scenarios (ScuIly, Liberating the Family?; Shum).lt also points to
the silences surrounding sexuality and motherhood in the lives of enslaved
women. Pamela ScuIly's work on the court records and political discussions
surrounding cases described as infanticide at mission stations in the Western
Cape in the 1840s shows how the control of the freed population moved
from a focus on physical coercion by slave-owners over a demand for reli-
gious submission at the mission stations to the legal regulation of sexual
and moral practices by the British colonial government (ScuUy, "Narratives
of Infanticide" 89). The cases of infanticide at the mission stations and the
subsequent legal and political discussions grew out of the enforcement of a
moral discipline that was questioned both by slave-owners and by British
colonial authorities. As Scully points out, none of the competing narratives
surrounding this issue address the conflicting demands on women as both
workers and mothers (ScuIly, "Narratives of Infanticide" 92).
 Archiva! Trajectories and Literary Voice 121
Christiansë's novel focuses on issues of motherhood and sexuality left out
of the archivaI records, but it is equally concerned with what Scully described
as the process through which the" knowledge produced and recorded in the
archive helps drive a particular narrative about infanticide that itself needs
to be examined" (Scully, "Narratives of Infanticide" 91). Unconfessed points
to how the desire for the voice of the enslaved woman, be it as an act of
confession or an explanation in the form of her own story, is in itself already
embedded in these structures of power. Instead of focusing on the historical
context or physical location of the documents, Christiansë describes her
project in terms of a double haunting arising out of the accidentaI encounter
with the utterance of a slave in an archive-she was "haunted by a powerful
trace of this woman's 'voice,'" but adds that "perhaps as is really the case-
that the living long for the dead-I came to haunt her" ("Author's Note"). In
fictional texts, this dual process of speaking for the dead can be understood
through Paul de Man's discussion of prosopopoeia as a figure representing
the process whereby the author lends his or her voice to an ancestor or a
precursor: "the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless
entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply and confers upon it
the power of speech" (de Man 75-76). As Colin Davis points out, this is also
a figure of the linguistic process in general: "the fiction of an exchange with
the dead and of a possible harmony and mutual intelligibility between sepa-
rate worlds is a mystification inherent in language" (79). In a formulation
that echoes Christiansë's understanding of her project, Davis reads de Man
as showing that "by succumbing to the fiction that the dead may speak, we
give voice to the haunting within ourselves, which ensures that we are also
deprived of our own voice" (79).
The problem of speaking for others has generally been understood in
terms of how the powerful impose their words on those who cannot speak.
Christiansë's statement suggests the possibility of a reversaI where, in the
words of Agamben, "the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the
human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to estab-
lish the position of the subject, to identify the 'imagined substance' of the 'l'
and, along with it, the true witness" (120). Between the speaking subject in
the literary text and the colonial archive is the concept of voice, metaphori-
cally standing in for a presence. In contra st to texts, both fictions and the
works of historians that set out with an intention to unravel events, the task
of the author or researcher is here described in tenns of listening to these
voices as a form of over-hearing in the sense used by Richard Azcel, who
finds that "the question of hearing voices in literary texts is always going to
be a matter of understanding rather than knowledge" (617). In taking an
inscription of a refusaI to speak as a starting point and relying on the idea
of haunting for the telling of the story, Unconfessed undermines the idea
of speech as a "guarantor of self-presence" and stresses the importance of
the position of the listener. Aczel quotes Derrida 's insight tha t "[v] oiee can
betray the body to which it is lent, it can make it ventriloquize as if the body
122 Maria Olaussen
were no longer anything more than the actor or the double of another voice,
of the voice of the other, even of an innumerable, incalculable polyphony"
(Derrida qtd. in Aczel 599). This is the situation that Sila avoids through her
act of unconfession.
It is therefore significant that the novel opens not with a description of
the protagonist Sila but with the new sllperintendent entering her cell: "The
guards said he came to the Cape to fix up prisons because that kgosi, the king
of the English, was pleased to send him" (6). But already during this first visit,
Sila sees his inability to deal with the world he finds himself in, the world
where "the guards and the field cornets, the police, the landdrosts, the court
clerks, the fiscal, the judges, everyone was going to teach him, this man, just
how things were done here" (6). Emblematically expressed through a "thread
working its way loose around a button," Sila sees how "they would try to
undo the very secrets of life that held this man together" (6).
Shifting from the third-person narrative in the opening sections of the
novel to a first-person narrative where Sila addresses her murdered son,
the question of who speaks sets the tone from the very beginning. Who is
the woman found in the prison? The answer to this question determines the
possibilities for freedom but is in itself framed in such a way as to make Sil a
"a prisoner in the country of lies" (3). In the struggle between the superin-
tendent and the warden, Sila must choose to be "Sila van den Kaap, slave to
the burgher Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat" (2) in order to have her case
looked into. Within this legal system that has sentenced her to imprisonment
for murder she is, however, no longer a slave but was fraudulently sold to
Van der Wat after her manumission in the will of the late Hendrina Jansen.
Sila's refusaI to speak is thus also directed at this act of interpellation where
she is first identified as a slave before given the right to speak.
Freedom inscribed in the will as a legal document is here also linked to
place as a double designation of commencement and commandment. Placed
outside and in opposition to patriarchal control with Oumiesies Hendrina
Jansen as head of the slave-owning household, the farm is the site for opposi-
tion to this control metonymically expressed through the will as inscription
that ultimately disappears. Oumiesies' farm stands outside the patronymic
as a farm that has been handed over to her from her mother and kept out
of the control of her husband and son while she is still alive. As Margaret
Lenta points out in her analysis of the novel, this departure from a protec-
tive matriarchal site is one aspect that Unconfessed shares with Morrison's
novel Beloved (106).
Another ineffectual and unreliable intervention is that of the church and
the missionaries. Minister Neethling and his wife, to whom Sila is first sold
when brought from Mozambique, are forced to sell her and others in the
household due to the drunkenness of Minister Neethling. In the same way
as the vanished paper containing the deed for the manumission of the slaves
in Oumiesies' household, the efforts at securing Sila's future take the form
of inscriptions, this time the efforts by the minister's wife to teach her how
 Archival Trajectories and LiteraJ'Y Voice 123
to read and write: "Scratching on asiate that spoke when you pointed at
it and said what the missus said it said, and which then took on its chalk
body, which transfixed her as she tried to understand what else it was say-
ing behind aIl the blood banging in her ears" (10). This incident in which
Sila is puni shed for wanting to trace the words on the slate brings together
the scratching on the slate with the corporal punishment: "She examined
her body for the bruises. Missus Neethling was more determined than ever
that she read without tracing the words with her fingers" (11). FinaIly, the
minister puts an end to the lessons: "So, the writing stopped at a struggling,
cramped 'my name is Sila van Mozambique'" (12). This is also the end of
any possibility of self-determination: "Her life was being summed up in that
same language that said how she was" (16).
Unconfessed examines archives as sites of knowledge production rather
than of "knowledge retrieval" (Povinelli 151). In its reliance on Beloved as
a precursor, it also helps shape a literary tradition of narratives engaged
in the imaginative reconstruction of events that incorporate a critique of
the dominant forms of knowledge production inherent in realist fiction. It
thereby shows how the archive can have a two-fold meaning in relation to
literary texts: first, as the repository of fragments and traces that enable
imaginative reconstruction, and second, as a tradition of texts, tropes, and
allegoricai renderings of events that demand engagement, either through
acts of disruption or gestures of continuity.

4. CONCLUSION: HEARING VOlCES

What emerges as the most important aspect of these texts' examination of

epistemologies of alterity is the reliance on the literary, not only in terms
of canonical context but also in the tropes used to describe the relation
between the subjects in the archive and the present-day listener and reader.
Both Unconfessed and ln an Antique Land position the reader in a relation
to the colonial archive as an unexpecred listener not only over-hearing this
exchange between author and protagonists but also listening in on conver-
sations among the characters. What we are hearing does not correspond to
the expected story as it is inscribed in the archive but relies on a notion of
hearing that is "logically and ontologically prior to speaking"(Aczel 602).
Here the hearing is itself constitutive for the meaning that evolves out of
the dialogue and that contains echoes of other voices that remain utterly
beyond inscription in the archive. The reader is thus involved in several acts
of over-hearing, listening in on the author's haunting of the archivai pres-
ence and the archive's haunting of the author. World literature as reaching
beyond the national, forging new and unexpected connections, and relying
on surprising linguistic connections is present in these texts as a silenced
aspect of global connections predating European expansion and therefore
not properly heard in merely postcolonial discussions. Over-hearing the
124 Maria Olaussen
voices in the archive thus depends on both a familiarity with the stories
and voices heard and an attunement to the strangeness of the haunting that
opens up to what is unfamiliar. What it means to tell the story of the voice
in the archive is thus a matter of changing perception, of over-hearing the
difference from ourselves, as "that which is no longer, or not yet, heard"
(Aczel 615).

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8 African Mediations
Transcultural "Writing in Achebe,
Gourevitch, Eggers, and Okri
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

1. WRITING BETWEEN CULTURES

Migrant writing has become more and more significant in contemporary lit-
erature. Rather than being literature that is impeded by not really belonging,
it is exactly this lack of belonging that is increasingly seen as a distinctive
and productive transcultural element of the migrant writer's work-and this
perception can also be extended to writers who are not migrants, but whose
writing can be characterized as l'ranscultural. In this article, l will analyze
four works on Africa from the perspective of transcultural writing. This per-
spective goes beyond the biography of the authors to look at the strategies
for creating multi-perspective works that in very different ways tell specific
stories, although the y are also received as literature "on Africa." Chinua
Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) is a modern classic and a keystone of
modern African literature, whereas the three other works are from the past
two decades and with an as yet less prominent status: Philip Gourevitch's We
Wish to 1nform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
(1998), Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006), and Ben Okri's Starbook
(2007). Two of the writers are Nigerian, but with prolonged stays in the OK
and the USA, whereas the other two are Americans who rely to an unusual
extent on testimonies from African victims of atrocities.
One of the reasons for the impact made by migrant writers is arguably
that their position between at least two cultures helps l'hem find new forms
of expression by combining traditions, impressions, and genre traits from
two or more cultures. At the same time, their writing also serves the impor-
tant function of facilitating exchanges of history and knowledge between
different cultures in a way that mixes the strange and the familiar, rather
than trying to make the reader comprehend a culture completely from the
outside. The claim to being authentic is limited, but that does not mean that
the hope of representing a partly foreign reality in a nuanced way has been
glven up.
The four works have issues of violence and atrocities at their centre,
something that plays no small part in much significant migrant literature.
This has not only to do with historical circumstance-and, in the works at
hand here, the importance of the slave trade, colonization, and genocide;
 African Mediations 127
the handling of these themes is also related to the ways in which these nov-
els reflect and communicate about traumatic events, ways that lend them-
selves weIl to communication between cultures, as l have argued in Mapping
World Literature (Thomsen, Mapping). Similarly, in Multidirectional Mem-
ory, Michael Rothberg shows how traumatic events can be linked to other
traumatic events and can cast light upon each other despite distance in time
and space. One effect of this is also that memories can be tied up with each
other and can thus belong to more than one culture, and through literature
can be seen from multiple perspectives, as Rothberg shows, for instance,
in his analysis of Caryl Phillips's work (134). Another important aspect of
Rothberg's work is a move away from the idea of competitive memories
towards ways of remembering which connect different kinds of memories
and which do not rely on a hierarchy of memories that singles particular
memories out as being unique.
Cathy Caruth has also brought attention ta the way in which trauma
takes part in processes of negotiation between cultures (11). Even more
so, traumatic events tend to bracket the social encodings and customs of
ordinary life in a culture: they create a state of exception where everybody
has a more equal understanding of the centra lit y of certain events. Life-
threatening events are bound to the biological universal of survival, and
make narratives of such events different from those that are bound to more
historical and contingent ways of manoeuvring in a society (Thomsen,
Mapping 113-14). In my view, the establishing of multiple perspectives
between different cultures, as weIl as the concern with traumatic events,
has been and continues to be a very important part of the presence of
Africa in world literature.
This is, of course, not unproblematic. Just as almost any literature could
daim to be misrepresented in its international reception, when it cornes to an
entire continent this reaction can be even more outspoken. Madhu Krishnan
delivers a strong critique of the ways in which African writing tends to be placed
under one hat and reminds us how complicated it is to talk about "African"
writers and "African" literature. But even while she eschews this generalizing
agenda, she also sees sorne hope that original writing can intermittently over-
come the demands of the markets and the impossibility of the idea of Africa:

The imperative, for the African writer, to write Africa, to teach the
Western reader about this wild and dark continent of the unknown
that is somehow simultaneously a place already known, is one which
seems inescapable. The extent to which literary success is met or
missed is mediated bath by the value of the work as an aesthetic arti-
fact, and by its economic success in gaining a readership, an outgrowth
of the asymmetrical transnational book trade. Yet, somehow, within
this nexus, the writers of contemporary African literature manage to
do just this, escaping from these imperatives, if only fleetingly and if
only incompletely. (23-24)
128 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
While 1 share Krishnan's analysis of the forces and perils surrounding African
literature and its relations to the rest of the world, 1 think that important
and vibrant works have been and continue to be created that are driven
by the ambition to mediate and to take seriously the different perspectives
readers may have on Africa and to create works that are about Africa to the
extent that they rely on hybrid strategies ..

2. THE HYBRIDITY OF FORM

More than fifty years after its publication, Things Fal! Apart remains one
of the world's bestselling books, as is, for example, evident from the sales
on Amazon, an aspect 1 will return to at the end of this essay. For better
or worse, it is the first African novel many non-African readers encounter
outside of Africa. The tale of the colonization of an Igbo village in the late
nineteenth century still offers the rare combination of being at once accessi-
ble, sophisticated, and original, yet one can also speculate whether Achebe's
debut cast a shadow of ignorance over other African literature or instead
opened a do or to it. The reality is probably a bit of both, but there is no
doubt about the enormous influence of Achebe (Lindfors 14-15). Ir is also
vital to appreciate how Achebe evolved as a writer along with the continued
changes following decolonization and urbanization (Izevbaye 32).
The nov el is remarkably muiti-faceted in almost every aspect one can
think of. The complexities of the author's biography, historical references,
focalization, language, and genres aIl make it possible for the nov el to
oscillate between different positions in the otherwise very straightfor-
ward stories. Taken together, these elements produce an effect of limited
strangeness, where the familiar and the strange stand si de by side. Refer-
ences to Western literature, for instance, are abundant. The tide is a quo-
tation from a poem by W.B. Yeats, and the structure of the novei mimics
the home-away-home structure of a Bildungsr01nan, the conventions of
which are also apparent in the protagonist's troubled relationship with
his father. Ir could also be argued that Okonkwo's inability to adapt to
a changing reality is a classic hamartia in the tradition of Greek trag-
edy. Rather than distancing himself from Western literature, Achebe uses
these resonances to create a space where questions of both universality
and uniqueness are made void by a series of more complex renderings of
African culture and the process of colonization. While the plot structure
is rather simple and forceful in its rendering of a graduaI colonization of
both land and minds, it is often overlooked how the novel also contains
many passages that do not contribute to drive the plot but could instead
be described as ethnographic passages. Particularly in the first part of the
novel, these serve to show how the Igbo society was buiIt on a number of
highly codified institutions and conventions, including a tradition of oral
storytelling.
 African Mediations 129
Achebe's use of language is the most clear-cut example of his hybrid strat-
egy. The novel is, of course, written in English, the language of the colonizing
power, something which Achebe had to defend for decades, most notably in
his essay "The African Writer and the English Language" (344-45). One of
Achebe's arguments in his defence for not writing in Igbo was that English
was a common language for the new nation and that it could be used in a
way that was distinctively African. An argument Achebe did not make was
that his nov el would probably not have had the international impact it has
had if he had written it in Igbo. However, Things Fal! Apart is not written
entirely in English. It incorporates numerous Igbo expressions and terms.
There is a delicate economy in the use of these phrases: there are so many
that they become an important part of the work, but there are far too few
to speak of a bilingual worle Many of the tenns can be deduced from the
context, although most editions come with a glossary. The importance of
these phrases cannot be overstated. Even if the predominant language of
the novel is that of the colonizer, one is constantly reminded of the intricate
ways in which the Igbo culture sees the world, not merely by reference or a
thematic rendering, but in the very fonn of the work itself.
The same kind of hybridity goes for the novel's narrative perspective.
The focalization shifts many times during the novel from the covert nar-
rator to Okonkwo, his wife, his son, and his foster sons, as weIl as to mis-
sionaries and a British commissioner, and the gallery of characters includes
both Africans and colonizers unwilling to change their worldview, as weIl as
those who find a way to establish a new community. It is, not least, the non-
violence and general acceptance of everybody, strong and weak alike, among
the missionaries that attract the villagers to break out of their culture.
The violence in the Igbo village is presented as an everyday phenomenon,
where children are disciplined physically. The wrestling matches and inter-
communal wars are, however, codified so as to minimize the hurt to the
combatants. On the other hand, the almost bureaucratically administered
torture used by the colonizing authorities presents itself as just as brutal as
this everyday violence, as it is carried out not impulsively or in a state of
strong affection, but as a deliberate means of suppression and humiliation.
So on the one hand, violence is violence; on the other, the kinds of intent
and harm are clearly differentiated between deliberate social control and
habituaI ways of disciplining.
A key scene is the killing of the protagonist Okonkwo's foster-child
Ikemefuna, who is taken to the forest to be killed on the orders of the village's
elders and their imagined messages from the spirits. The scene is heartbreak-
ing and prolonged compared ta the otherwise very succinct narrative style,
with shifts in focalization to Ikemefuna, who believes he is to be taken back
to his village to be reunited with his mother. In this passage, aIl the ele-
ments of a hybrid use of language, genre, and perspective come together as
Ikemefuna tries to decide whether his mother is weIl by chanting an "Eeny,
meeny, miny, moe" children's counting rhyme to himself. The words are in
130 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Igbo. They are usually not listed in the glossary to the novel, but playon the
universal recognition of such songs that provide unfounded comfort in the
face of imminent threats. Even more than this, the killing of Ikemefuna takes
place right after he has been thoroughly inscribed into the cross-cultural
phenomenon of using rhymes to deliver a false sense of certainty that goes
beyond the otherwise fundamentallonging for one's mother. The many per-
spectives in the novel, not least that of Okonkwo's estranged and converted
son Nwoye, create the sense of an ambivalent: loss of identity:

As soon as his father walked in, that night, Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna
had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the
snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry. He just hung limp. He
had had the same kind of feeling not long ago, during the harvest
season '" They were returning home with baskets of yams from a
distant farm across the stream when they heard the voice of an infant
crying in the thick forest. A sudden hush had fallen on the women,
who had been talking, and they had quickened their steps. Nwoye had
heard that twins were put in earthenware pots thrown away in the
forest, but he had never yet come across them. (61-62)

The ambivalence of the novel is also stressed by Francis Abiola Irele, who
finds it expressed not least in the portrait of Okonkwo (455-56). Okonkwo
is a tragic figure: he appears morally just in his resistance to colonization
but stands no chance against an enemy that he do es not understand and that
is organized in a manner completely strange to him. At the same time, the
outspoken violence, the murder of children and newborns based on super-
stition and omens, the oppression of the weak, and the rule by the masked
eIders of the village portl'ay a society which is far from perfect and difficult
to defend as it is. Irele observes that even if Okonkwo is complex, he is also
a flat character whose personality is heavily determined by the structure of
the Igbo society (469-70).
The radicality of the transformation of the culture in the novel cannot be
overestimated, and Achebe's novel stands as a testament to the culture that
once was, without succumbing to an unreflective nostalgia for a society that
was flawed as well. l have argued elsewhere that the process of colonization
brought about a change so radical that it can be likened to the much more
deliberate attempts in the totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century to
crea te a "new human," as a new language, a new religion, a new morality,
and new technologies were introduced within only a few decades (Thomsen,
New Human 127-33). However, as with other attempts to reform cul-
tures, the transformation was not complete, but created a hybrid culture
that continues to struggle to find ease between two very different ways of
looking at the world and of organizing society. There is, of course, the risk
of an "anthropological fallacy," as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has termed it, in
Things Fal! Apart, when readers take the descriptions of pre-colonial and
 Afi-ican Mediations 131
colonized Africa at face value as accurate descriptions of a historical situa-
tion (Krishnan 13). But if not everything is historically factual, the framing
and interpretation of a deep cultural change and trauma remain vivid and
convincing.

3. WESTERN REFLECTION ON AFRICAN TESTIMONIES

Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be

Killed with Our Families is not a work of fiction, but it is still a text highly
aware of its own composition and rhetoric in dealing with the 1994 geno-
cides in Rwanda, where the Hutu killings of Tutsis took place with an almost
unprecedented speed. Gourevitch's position is that of the reporter who
cornes on the scene after the events have taken place, and his book relies to
a large degree upon testimonies from survivors. The perpetrators are hard
to find and document, even though they were in the tens of thousands, and
Gourevitch does make one killer talk, reluctantly, about his deeds (309).
However, the book does much more than merely lend a voice to individuals
who would otherwise not have been heard. Gourevitch boldly uses his own
position as an outsider to write of impressions that can be taken to suggest
a lack of decorum, but that manage to establish a gaze upon the scene that is
open-minded towards everything that has ta ken place. One example of this
cornes early in the book, when Gourevitch reflects upon the uncomfortable
beauty of a skeleton lying in the sunset:

The dead at Nyarubuye were, l'm afraid, beautiful. There was no get-
ting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of
the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the
skull here, the arm bent in sorne uninterpretable gesture there-these
things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of
the place. (19)

The passage could be viewed as disrespectful, but Gourevitch is able to

use emotions that might otherwise often be self-censored to strengthen the
credibility of his narrative voice. The skeleton is also a symbol of the com-
mon fate of aIl humans, which will eventually leave behind aIl the signs of
ethnicity. This aesthetic stance towards the world is not sustained through-
out the book, but it does add a level of estrangement to a subject otherwise
framed by the predetermined images from news media and the interpreta-
tions that follow with them. René Lemarchand lauds Gourevitch's book in
general, but also formulates sorne criticisms with which l do not completely
agree, notably about the use of the Holocaust as a frame of reference and
the inclination to see only good and bad guys (89). While Gourevitch's
book is not perfect, Lemarchand's critique does not seem fair on these
points, as Gourevitch makes a strong effort to understand perpetra tors
132 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
and to inscribe them into the wider narrative of a troubled process of
decolonization.
An important, if not the most important, aspect of Gourevitch's book is
its demonstration of how the image of a stereotypical African genocide car-
ried out by machete in an uncontrolled explosion of violence between ethnie
communities in fact masks a much complex and more Westernized
affaire. First, there are the tensions that were created by the Belgian coloniz-
ers who instigated a pro-Tutsi administration of the country, which already
in 1959 had led to a violent attack by the Hutu majority on the domi-
nant Tutsi minority. Second, the transition to independence did not provide
the framework for a stable democracy (as was the case also in many other
African countries). The images of men carrying machetes became the domi-
nant image of the genocide, while the use of mass media in the events did
not become a part of the narrative in the West. Gourevitch describes the
importance of radio propaganda, which tells a very different story from the
chaotic frenzy with no central organization that was transmitted to news
media (99). By contrast, the deliberate use of centralized media and the
demagogic appeals to act give one the impression of having been sent back
to 1930s' Europe; indeed, the similarities in the use of the media and the
seduction of the masses are hard to ignore.
Quotes from Western writers are displayed prominently between selected
chapters to strengthen the ties to the Western context and to suggest that
the words of these writers are just as applicable to this catastrophe and
breakdown of moral behaviour and neglect of human dignity as they are to
a Western context. The bar is set high with a quote from Plato's Republic on
gaining the strength to look at killed bodies. American and English writers
such as Ralph Ellison, John Milton, and George Eliot are quoted, while the
inclusion of two quotes from Primo Levi, warning against a repetition of
the Holocaust, most directly frames the Rwandan genocide in the context
of the Shoah.
Importantly, Gourevitch opens the book by showing that it is not just
him imposing Western perspectives on this framework. He reports a con-
versation with a Rwandan who displays his knowledge of Dickens before
providing Gourevitch with his own quotes on belief in a united humanity
(5-6). Gourevitch also makes sure to maintain his distance from events,
or rather, not to give the impression either that he understands it aIl or
that his world has been shaken as much as the Rwandans. He refers to
his local newspaper (the New York Times, 185), and writes about inflight
movies about racism in southern USA to demonstrate that he does not
believe that his empathy can make him comprehend everything-but also
that he too cornes from a place where group differences led to murder not
too long ago (342). The perspective of the outsider may also be the reason
for writing in the tradition of witness literature, whereas Achebe's work
(as weIl as Okri's work, as we shall see) deals with past events in a less
constricted wa y.
 African Mediations 133
In the end, Gourevitch gives voice to witnesses who would not have had
the possibility of publishing the way he has, and in fact would probably not
have written about the events themselves. He does so in a way that breaks
up the chronology that one would expect from a firsthand witness, as the
reports from eyewitnesses are carefully used within the complex narrative
of the book, which also tells Gourevitch's own story of getting to the truth
of the genocide, as weIl as the many journeys back in time that provide
contexts for the testimonies. One can, of course, question the combina-
tion of Gourevitch's empathetic yet also analytical style, which presents
events from a deliberate emotional distance. Still, his compilation of testi-
monies pro duces a different kind of text, where it is precisely his analytical
and historical ambitions that make the individual testimonies forceful and
trustworthy.

4. GIVlNG VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Whereas Gourevitch's book stays within the conventions of journalistic

reportage, Dave Eggers's What Is the What crosses the border between wit-
ness and penholder. On the tide page it is labeIled The Autobiography of
Valentino Achak Deng, but also A Novel. The coyer does not mention auto-
biography, but highlights "A nov el by Dave Eggers," thereby downplaying
the reliance on a witness. The book is a much more unconventional coIlab-
orative project than Gourevitch's more traditional reportage, which main-
tains a clear distance between writer and witnesses. The hybrid nature of
Eggers's work is very apparent: Eggers has written a novel closely based on
the life of a real person, a young Sudanese refugee, yet Eggers is not a ghost-
writer and only he is credited as the author. Other paratextual elements
include the establishment of a foundation-which is still active and focuses
on education-in Valentino Achak Deng's name, to which aIl royalties from
the book are donated to help other young people in Sudan.
With What 1s the What, Eggers is lending his voice to Valentino Achak
Deng just as much as Deng is lending his story to Eggers. Eggers is using his
cultural capital to bring attention to a human tragedy whose victims, as was
the case in Rwanda, do not have easy access to media, nor are they writers
with the ability to compose long narratives of their experiences. As in Egg-
ers's breakthrough novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the
loss of the parents is essential with aIl the feelings of being lost in the uni-
verse that follow. Ir is obvious that the non-fictional background to the story
matters to readers, whether in Eggers's autofiction or in his adopted story.
Even more than this, it is the complicated relationship between truth and
fiction that contributes to the fascination of the work, putting the reader
in a complicated situation between, on the one hand, wanting to believe
everything, and, on the other, knowing that not everything can be taken as a
correct representation of real events.
134 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Violence is a central element of the book; it features the ruthless destruc-
tion of people and their villages, as weIl as images that are hard to shake off:

It scared me to hear a baby making such a sound, guttural and chok-

ing, something like the dying growl of a cat. We soon found the infant,
perhaps six months old, lying next to its mother, who was splayed
on the path, dead. The baby tried to breastfeed on its mother for a
moment before giving up, crying out, tiny hands as fists. (308)

Eggers goes on to describe how the mother had been shot in the waist, and
how she had tried to move, Ieaving a trail of blood behind her. Against this
background it is important to observe a decisive trait that Eggers has chosen
for his rendition of Deng's story. Instead of telling Deng's story chronologi-
cally, Eggers begins the novel with a home robbery in Atlanta, where Deng
was supposed to be in safe conditions. Besides situating the possibility of
violence in the USA (if one needed to be reminded), and not just in Africa,
the book makes sure that there will be no easy binary interpretation. In the
opening passage, the narrative voice is reporting what is happening in the
apartment, but in a way that is highly reflective and eloquent:

But at this moment, when the woman is in my bedroom and the man
is guarding me with his gun, 1 want to be in Kakuma, where 1 lived
in a hut of plastic and sandbags and owned one pair of pants. 1 am
not sure there was evil of this kind in the Kakuma refugee camp,
and 1 want to return. Or even Pinyudo, the Ethiopian camp 1 lived in
before Kakuma; there is nothing there, only one or two meals a day,
but it had its small pleasures; 1 was a boy then and could forget that
1 was a malnourished refugee a thousand miles from home. In any
case, if this is punishment for the hubris of wanting to leave Africa,
of harboring dreams of college and solvency in America, 1 am now
chastened and 1 apologize. (10)

By going back and forth between Africa and the USA, What 15 the What
is able to create breaks From the increasingly hopeless situation in Sudan
and present the violence with a certain economy and restraint that can be
found in much trauma literature as, for instance, in the work of Primo Levi.
Instead, Eggers is able to make it recurrent, weaving back and Forth between
traumatic events and slow recovery. The shifts between Africa and America
also create a specifie way of installing a form of hybridity into the story in
addition to the collaboration between Eggers and Deng.
Deng is eventually changed by his stay in America. He has become a
hybrid figure, who cannot imagine himself going back to his earlier existence
in Sudan, even while he is not completely adapted to life in America (449).
A possible critique of Eggers's novel is that it can be read as a prototypical
optimistic American story, because, after aIl, Deng is a survivor who is given
 African Mediations 135
a new beginning against aIl odds. But that is trumped by the loss of the par-
ents, something he shares with Eggers, and by the persistence of violence in
the United States. The sorrow from Eggers's first work thus connects with the
sorrow of Deng.

5. THE INSISTENCE ON UNIVERSALS

Ben Okri's earIy breakthrough with the Booker Prize-winning The

Famished Road (1991) gave him significant independence as a writer as
weIl as the opportunity to publish experimental works which lesser-known
writers might not have been able to publish. Starbook is such a book.
A 400-page fable, distinctively about Africa, it goes on for long passages
without giving the reader any clue about where the story is taking place
or in what time. Starbook seeks to be an original composition that is both
universal and specific. Dan Izevbaye stresses how Achebe uses the dialogi-
cal nature of the novel form in Things Fal! Apart and emphasizes the con-
trast to the monological Western fable (34). On this point, Okri has gone
in the opposite direction.
Starbook uses strong imagery from African history, such as descriptions
of people in chains being shipped:

Soon it was rumoured everywhere that white spirits had come into the
kingdom and bought and kidnapped the strongest and bravest of the
land and carried them off in great ships to distant places or to the bottom
of the sea. There was much talk of vast farms where the missing young of
the land worked from dawn till dusk in captivity to the white spirits at
the bottom of the sea. But only children believed these tales. (247)

Ir is not possible to claim that this story could be set anywhere else than
Afl'ica, but most of the novel do es not give away much of the local identity
and uses generic figures as the main characters. There are princesses, suitors,
and artists, who could just as weIl be part of a fairy tale by the Brothers
Grimm. With this radical strategy Okri has produced a very unusual text,
which takes the form of the fable to the extreme by its sheer length.
At the end of the book, Okri addresses questions of the univers al very
directly. Again, he tries to balance two opposing views or principles when
it cornes to historical time. He argues for the universality of aIl stories to aU
times, while acknowledging that there are historical processes that bring about
change and difference. The la st chapter in 0 kri's novel is entitled "The Alchemy
of AIl Things." It expresses the belief that transformation is the condition of
life but does not necessarily mean a loss of a longer historical perspective:

AlI is not lost. Greater times are yet to be born. In the midst of the low
tide of things, when aU seems bleak, a gentle voice whispers in the air
136 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
that the spirits of creativity wander the land, awaiting an invocation
and the commanding force of masters to harness their powers again to
noble tasks and luminous art unimagined. (421)

Okri's dual perspective is both perplexing and daunting. It asks for the
reader to read the text both as an allego!-"y of Africa, just Africa, and as a
universal story of, as the subtitle says, "love and regeneration." The images
of slaves being dragged away are, of course, central in order to make clear
that this is indeed Africa, as weIl as the conflicts among "tribes," which is
a cliché of pre-colonial Africa and a legitimation for the colonization of
the continent (Brantlinger 205). Okri's very significant move to counter the
image of violence is to speak about art and creation again and again, as if
to make sure to drive the point home by drawing a new balance between
the different narratives and making that balance swing in favour of creativ-
ity rather than violence. Not violence, but people ma king masks should be
the image of Africa; this seems to be the implicit message of the narrative,
and this is an image that is already widespread, though not as a dominant
part of Western narratives of Africa. In this sense Starbook could be said to
counter narratives centred on conflict, atrocities, and trauma, as the works
of Achebe, Gourevitch, and Eggers are, and insist on a different perspective
on Africa. It is a bold strategy, but not necessarily one that resonates with
readers or critics, as the spa l'se response to the novel indicates.
In many ways Starbook can be read as a counter or a supplement to
Achebe's Things Fal! Apart. Where Achebe chronicles a relatively short
but decisive period of time in the colonization of his Igbo ancestors, Okri
opts for a long historical view on African history from prehistoric times to
visions of a future where the colonial traumas will have been overcome.
Where Achebe focuses on violence, Okri focuses on art and creation. Where
Achebe represents Igbo culture through language, cultural habits, and his-
tory, Okri opts for generic descriptions as the dominant mode. Okri's ra di-
cally different strategy should, of course, not be interpreted as his way of
getting right what Achebe got wrong, but rather, l suggest, as a supplement
to Achebe's novel, which in any case has sold and will continue to sell many
more copies than Okri's book. Both Okri and Achebe, however, use hybrid
stylistic strategies in their works that underline their ambition to create a
complex narration that cannot be subsumed into a single position or moral
standpoint. This also carries over into the reflections in Starbook that strug-
gle to find a way between the specific and the univers al and between change
and reconstruction:

But sometimes a people forget who they are, and lose their secret
necessity, and start, slowly, to become strangers to themselves without
knowing it. And then they dream up rituals, and faH into rites, and
deeds, and enter into wars, and perform sundry acts upon the stage of
the Earth to forget their forgetting, or to try to remember or redefine,
 African Mediations 137
or find out who they were, and now should be. Such ventures are
doomed. A skin shed is a skin shed. A loss is a loss. (141)

6. CONCLUSION: TRANSCULTURALISM,
INNOVATION, AND POLITICS

The works of Achebe, Gourevitch, Eggers, and Okri on Africa are important
for at least three reasons. First, they have explored-successfully, 1 would
daim-ways of writing between cultures. Second, they have done so in dose
connection to their desire to be inventive as literary works in order to bring
about truly transcultural texts. Finally, they voice profound political opin-
ions, not just on the historical events they chronide, but also on how cul-
ture, history, memory, peoples, and individuals are and should be related to
each other.
Literature that aims to provide a bridge between cultures could be scolded
for not presenting a pure representation of a particular culture. However,
one can question whether this kind of representation is even possible, and
whether there is not always international influence at play, anywhere. But
of course there can still be differences. What sets stories like those analyzed
here apart is that they try to establish a cultural encounter within the text.
A pragmatic reason for this could be that utter strangeness does not sell: if
readers do not have something to grasp, they will often be alienated from
the text. A more idealistic reason would be that these texts seek to find
points of exchange between culture by using forms, references, and themes
that balance the familiar and the unknown.
The ability of books to reach an audience should not be underestimated.
Things Fall Apart is still a bestselling book, not least in an American con-
text, if Amazon's sales rank is an indicator. On 12 August 2014, only 65
titles outsold Things Fal! Apart on Amazon.com, among which were mostly
new non-fiction and just seven novels more than ten years old: The Great
Gatsby, To Kil! a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen
The Alchemist, and Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night.
Such a position is unique, and it underlines to what extent Achebe's work
is a standard reference. Both Eggers's and Gourevitch's books continue to
be steady sellers, ranking among the 7,000 to 8,000 bestselling books on
the American website, with What Is the What more popular than A Heart-
breaking Work of Staggering Genius. For better or worse, these works out-
sell most prolific African writers by a wide margin. On the other hand,
Starbook is hardly as popular as The Famished Raad; the latter outsells the
former by a wide margin according to Amazon's sales rank, also in the Ul(.
In many ways, Starbook is not a book that caters to its audience. Instead,
it goes against expectations and becomes a monument to a highly differ-
ent strategy for writing about Africa. Sales are not everything, of course,
as Lahoucine Ouzgane and Onookome Okome show in their chronicle of
138 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Achebe's novel's influence in literary circuits (137-38), but the figures of
millions of copies are hard to ignore when it cornes to the wider dissemina-
tion of images and knowledge of a culture through literature.
The demands of finding ways to balance local references and general
subjects propels literary innovation in or der to find new forms of commu-
nicating local matters to foreign audienc.es, as weIl as ways of expressing
the transcultural point of view through the aesthetics of the work. Sorne of
these new fonTIS are more radical than others-we can think of Achebe's use
of genre, language, and perspective or Okri's use of the fable in an extreme
form. Nevertheless, Eggers and Gourevitch also make very conscious and
unconventional choices in their works, and the collaborative nature of their
work permeates every page.
There is also the important statement, made both implicitly and by way
of form and narrative in these texts, that histories and memories do not just
belong to a nation or a community but can be shared more widely as the
people of the world interact more and more and ultimately face shared prob-
lems such as security, peace, resource scarcity, climate, and common prosper-
ity, and as they often have to take responsibility for one another-of which
the lack of intervention in Rwanda is a sad example. The colonial influence
on Africa was and is vast, and the bord ers that were drawn between peoples
are the responsibility of Western nations, just as the upholding of nations
requires the consensus of an international community. As such, these works
join a long list of works that lift national questions and traumas into an
international debate about the responsibility to pro vide opportunities for
people everywhere.
There are also flip sides to the high visibility of works on trauma and
war. The realities of everyday life are overshadowed, and the strong repre-
sentation in literature of conflict does not sufficiently reflect the real world
or the real Africa. But literature never does represent the world as it is. At
least these works strive to find a balance between portraying a slice of ordi-
nary life and representing junctures in history that one cannot escape-nor
forget, after having read any of these books.

WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. "The African Writer and the English Language." Morning Yet on
Creation Day. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1975.91-103. Print.
- - - . Things Fal! Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca: Comell
University Press, 2011. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. "Introduction." Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 3-12. Print.
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. London: Picador, 2000.
Print.
 African Mediations 139
- - - . What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. A Novel.
San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2006. Print.
Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to I11for111 You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with
Our Families: Stories fro111 Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Print.
rrele, Francis Abiola. "The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe's Things
Fal! Apart." Things Fall Apart. Ed. Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 2009.
453-91. Print.
Izevbaye, Dan. "Chinua Achebe and the African Novel." The Cambridge C0111-
panion to the African Novel. Ed. Francis Abiola Irele. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.31-50. Print.
Krishnan, Madhu. "Negotiating Africa Now." Transition 113 (2014): 11-24. Print.
Lemarchand, René. The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Print.
Lindfors, Bernth. Long Drums and Canons: Teaching and Researching Afj'ican
Literatures. Trenton: African World Press, 1995. Print.
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. New York: N.A. Talese, 1992. Print.
- - - . Starbook: A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration. London: Rider, 2007.
Print.
Ouzgane, Lahoucine, and Onookome Okome. "Introduction: Encounters and
Engagements with Things Fal! Apart." Interventions 11.2 (2009): 135-40. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the
Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. MapPing World Literature: International Canonization
and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Print.
The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body,
Mind and Society after 1900. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Prim.
Part IV
Fields of Translation
9 Strategies of Importation of
Foreign Literature in France in the
Twentieth Century
The Case of Gallimard, or the Making of
an International Publisher
Gisèle Sapiro

The research fields of world literature and postcolonialism have contributed

to the denationalization of literary history, which had long been a strategic
site for the construction and reproduction of national cultures. However,
insofar as these approaches focus on text analysis, the social conditions for
the circulation of works have largely been ignored. Instead, we find that
translation studies scholars and historians and sociologists of literature and
publishing have developed descriptive models to analyze the circulation
of works in translation as cultural transfers (Espagne and Werner; Even-
Zohar), as a stock exchange of literary value (Milo), as a system organized
around centres and peripheries (Heilbron), as a field in which national liter-
atures compete (Casanova, The World Republic), or as a market. Attention
has been given to the role of mediators (Bourdieu, "The Social Conditions"),
espeeially translators (Casanova, "Consecration"; Popa; Sapiro, "Transla-
tion and Identity"; Wilfert) and publishers (Popa; Sapiro, "Globalization";
Rundle; Serry). However, the consecrating power of publishers on an inter-
national scale has not yet been studied.
For publishers, as for other agents, translation can fulfil different types of
functions: political, economic, and/or cultural (Sapiro, "Sociology of Trans-
lation"). It is a means to accumulate or to enhance symbolic capital and/
or to extend their eonsecrating power. From a sociological standpoint, this
observation invites us to consider the importers' strategies and goals, which
vary according to their positions in the field of cultural production to which
they belong and to the position of their country in the transnational space
of cultural production. In this essay, l will analyze the role of one specifie
publisher, Gallimard, which during the twentieth century concentrated the
highest amount of symbolic capital in France. Because of its centrality, Gal-
limard's importation strategies also indicate more general tendencies in the
field of publishing.
The theoretical and methodological framework proposed here combines
Bourdieu's field theOl'y (Field ol Cultural Production; Rules of Art), especially
his analysis of the publishing field ("A Conservative Revolution"), with the
144 Gisèle SapÎ1'o
centre-periphery model (Sapiro, "Translation and the Field of Publishing";
Trans/atio; "Globalization"). Bourdieu's field theory provides a frame of
analysis for studying the agents of cultural transfers, in particular the publish-
ing houses, which have played a major role in the international circulation of
books since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his reflections on the
social conditions of the international circulation of ideas, Bourdieu (Ru/es of
Art) also draws our attention to underlying interests such as internaI strug-
gles within the field of cultural production under consideration (the literary
field, the philosophical field, etc.), and strategies of appropriation, distinc-
tion, branding, and so on (think, for instance, of the label "French theory,"
which was created in the United States). Moreover, his approach enables us
to differentiate between different channels or circuits of circulation, mainly
between the subfield of large-scale production (the mass market), ruled by
the law of the market (where sales are the only measure of success), and the
subfield of small-scale production, where intellectual and cultural criteria
prevail over economic ones. Whereas at the pole of large-scale production,
publishing is conceived of as a way of accumulating and reproducing eco-
nomic capital, at the pole of small-scale production, the accumulation of
economic capital is achieved through the accumulation of cultural or sym-
bolic capital, which is reconverted in the long run into economic resourc:es,
when the books in their list become c:lassics. As a consequence, the symbolic
capital of a literary publisher is not a function of the publishing house's size
or dividends. Moreover, the autonomy of a field can be rneasured by the
capacity of symbolic capital to be reconverted into econornic capital. This
is the case in the field of literary publishing, where a firm's accumulation of
symbolic capital translates into economic value (Reynaud). Literary prizes
also have the power to operate such a conversion of symbolic capital into
economic capital in this "economy of prestige" (English).
Incorporated in its backlist, the symbolic capital accumulated by a pub-
lisher is encapsulated by its name; Gallimard functions as a "brand name."
The initial accumulation of symbolic capital by a firIn may happen through
a transfer of symbolic capital from its first authors, such as, in the case
of Gallimard, André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard. Once its reputation
has been established, a publisher acquires the power to consecrate debut
authors. Significantly, Gallimard, founded in 1911, was first called "Éditions
de la Nouvelle Revue française," after the name of the review launched by
André Gide in 1907. This strategy of linking a new publishing house to a
journal was a means to ensure literary autonomy from market constraints.
Conversely, the change of the firm's name after the Second World War to
Gallimard shows that its consecrating power was no longer dependent on
the review (it was probably also linked to the fact that the review was sup-
pressed in 1945 because of its support of the collaboration with the German
occupying forces; see Sapiro, The French Writers' War).
The symbolic capital of a publisher can be assessed through the awards
won by its authors, the most prestigious being the Nobel Prize for literature.
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 145
By the end of the 1930s, Gallimard had four Nobel Prize winners on its list-
one French, Martin du Gard (1937), and three foreign writers: Rabindranath
Tagore (1913), Ivan Bounine (1933), and Luigi Pirandello (1934). From 1945
to 1950, three Nobel Prize winners were published in French by Gallimard:
André Gide (1947), William Faulkner (1949), and Bertrand Russell (1950).
Such a concentration of awards enhanced Gallimard's symbolic capital and
reinforced its position in the world market of translation. But conversely, we
must also ask the following question: at what point, historically speaking,
did the fact of being translated and published in French with Gallimard start
to increase a writer's chances to win the Nobel Prize?
To understand Gallimard's international strategy, it is necessary to refine
and extend Bourdieu's theory. First, it is important to note that the two
circuits of large-scale and small-scale production usually co-exist in big pub-
lishing houses and even in large conglomerates, but are often located in dif-
ferent series or imprints: after the Second World War, Gallimard launched a
series of detective novels called "Série noire," which was distinct both from
the prestigious "Collection blanche," and from the foreign literature series
"Du monde entier." Short-sellers and long-sellers balance each other in this
way and enable more risky acquisitions. But publishers are more or less
identified with one circuit rather than the other: Gallimard is identified with
the "upmarket" circuit, whereas Robert Laffont, for instance, is identified
with the "commercial" one, to use the vocabulary of literary agents.
Second, the polarization between the subfield of large-scale production
and the subfield of small-scale production can also be observed at an inter-
national level insofar as it structures the world market of translation. As 1
have shown elsewhere (SapÎl'o, "Translation and the Field of Publishing";
Translatio; "Globalization"), the source languages of translated books are
not distributed randomly between these two subfields: in the globalization
era, everywhere in the world, the English language is dominant at the pole
of large-scale production where we find bestsellers, crime novels, rornantic
novels, and science fiction, while linguistic diversity is very high at the pole
of small-scale production. ln the latter case, English is still the most trans-
lated language in terms of the number of tides but its share is much smaller
compared to the pole of large-scale production, and many other languages
(absent from large-scale production) are represented.
This observation also allows us to refine the core-periphery model,
adapted to the world system of languages by Abram de Swaan ("The Emer-
gentWorld Language System"; Words of the World) and to translation
flows by Johan Heilbron. Analyzing the Index Translationum database,
Heilbron defines centra lit y according to the rate of exportation of books
in translation. He then observes that the more central a language, the less it
imports books in translation, and vice versa: the share of translation in the
American and British book industry was around 23 pel' cent at the begin-
ning of the 1990s, 15-18 per cent in France and Germany, 25 per cent in
ltaly and Spain, more than 25 pel' cent in a smaller and peripheral country
146 Gisèle Sapil'o
such as the Netherlands, and even more than 40 per cent in Greece. The low
share of translations in the United States and in the United Kingdom can be
explained by the fact that the pole of large-scale production is dominated by
English: there are no translations at this pole into English, while the trans-
lations from English dominate this sector in aIl languages and often even
compete with the national language.
As Pascale Casanova convincingly argues, national literatures are
endowed with an uneven amount of symbolic (or literary) capital in the
world republic of letters (World Republic). This can be measured through
the number of works from a nationalliterature which have become part of
the world cultural heritage. These works, which became classics by the end
of the nineteenth century, replaced the Greco-Latin European heritage in
the first half of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in a study by Daniel
Milo based on the number of translations in aIl languages, using the data
gathered by the UNESCO Index Translationum. The position of French lit-
erature at that time was dominant, as a result of its tradition and prestige
dating from the eighteenth century. As mentioned above, dominant cultures
tend to import less than they export and to annex the imported products
to their own culture. The attraction they exert on cultural producers from
other countries reinforces this tendency, as the examples of Beckett and
Ionesco illustrate. Because of the centrality of the French language and of
French literature, the French publishers had a very important consecrating
power in the world republic of letters; being translated into French ensured
international recognition.
1 will analyze here the importation strategies of Gallimard during three
periods: first, the interwar period, when Gallimard became a major conse-
crating authority in the French literary field and began investing in transla-
tions from European and American literature in a conjuncture of French
hegemony and increasing cultural exchanges; second, the period from 1945
to 1979, when internationalization opened the world market of translation
to non-Western cultures, in the context of a changeover from French to US
hegemony; third, the globalization era, when the position of France in the
world market of translation began to decline, while the United States further
strengthened its dominance. 1 will in this connection investigate whether
Gallimard succeeded in maintaining its symbolic capital on the international
scene. The study of Gallimard's translation policy and strategies is based on
a quantitative analysis of the publisher's list, on the archives of the publisher,
and, for the contemporary period, on interviews. 1

1. CONSTRUCTING A EUROPEAN LITERARY CANON:

THE INTERWAR PERIOD

French literature occupied over a long period a hegemonic position in the

world republic of letters. Indeed, it was in order to counter the domination
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 147
of French that nationalliteratures in vernacular languages developed, begin-
ning in the late eighteenth century, from Scodand through Germany to Italy
(Thiesse). In France, this movement was acknowledged by the creation of
university chairs in foreign literatures in 1830, which instituted the "para-
digm of the foreigner" that would henceforth structure the perception of
translated literature as representative of a national culture rather than uni-
versaI values (Espagne, Le Paradigme). It was only from that time on, and in
direct relationship to these "foreign literatures," that the notion of "French
literature" developed, according to a princip le of division that would be
transposed from higher education to publishing, with the appearance in the
late nineteenth century of series of foreign literature distinct from French
literature, such as Stock's "Bibliothèque cosmopolite."
The nationalization and vernacularization of literature were linked
direcdy to the industrialization of publishing and to the spread of literacy
and education. Whereas Balzac had been read in his time in French through-
out Europe, the international circulation of Zola's work occurred more
through translation, which enabled it to reach a readership beyond the cul-
tural elite who mastered French. In the second half of the nineteenth century,
intercultural exchanges became increasingly structured by the nation-states
that attempted to control the expanding book market. The Berne Conven-
tion, adopted in 1886 at the initiative of the Société des Gens de Lettres, was
the first attempt at an international regulation of this market, intended to
curb unauthorized editions.
After the First World War, the internationalization of the world of letters
was encouraged by the governments as part of the pacification policy. Thus,
the primary objective behind the creation of the PEN Club in 1921 was to
defend intellectual values against nationalism by bringing together writers
devoted to peace and freedom. The creation of the League of Nations in
1920, and the establishment of its committee for intellectual cooperation,
helped to intensify such exchanges. By that time, the hegemony of French
literature, which played a major role in the construction of an international
literary canon, began to be challenged by English and German.
Embedded within the book market and international power relations,
literary exchanges were promoted especially by agents in the literary field
who occupied key positions in publishing and official proceedings, and who
managed to preserve a certain autonomy for these exchanges with respect
to economic and political constraints. In France, in periodicals such as La
Nouvelle Revue française, published by Gallimard, and Europe, published
by Éditions Rieder, an intercultural dialogue emerged thanks to the con-
tributors' linguistic skills and international networks.
In the 1930s, the number of tides translated into French increased signifi-
candy, from 430 in 1929 (which represented 3.8 per cent of aIl the books
published that year) to more than one thousand in 1938 (13 per cent of
books published) (Girou de Buzareingues 268). More than half the trans-
lations were literary works. Among the source languages, English had the
148 Gisèle Sapiro
highest share (increasing from one-third to almost one-half), followed by
German, Russian, ltalian, and Spanish. The rise in the translations from
English was in large part due ta the translations from American literature,
in which Gallimard played an important role.
In the introduction to Gallimard's 1936 catalogue, we read that "the Édi-
tions de la NRF have from the start seen)t as their role to introduce to the
French public the most typical manifestations of aIl foreign literatures" (my
translation). The Éditions de la NRF first began translating mainly from Eng-
lish, relying on the linguistic skills of its board, but also from Russian, because
of Gide's interest in Dostoevsky. In the 1930s, the source languages became
more diversified. In 1936, the publisher's li st included 368 tides in transla-
tion out of 2,200. Ten languages were represented. More than half of these
translated tides were literary works. English was the first translated language,
and one-third of the novels were by British writers; Conrad, Meredith, and
D. H. Lawrence were the favourite authors. Lady Chatterley's Lover, which
could not be printed in England because of its alleged obscenity, was one of
Gallimard's bestsellers in the 1930s: in 1939,214,000 copies had been sold.
One tide out of five was a translation from an American author, mainly John
Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Russian came in second (17.4 per cent),
followed by German (16 per cent); the German writers, Thomas Mann and
Alfred D6blin, were emigrés who fled from Nazi Germany. Lagging far
behind were translations from Spanish (4.6 per cent) and ltalian (3 per cent).
The hierarchy of languages thus appears clearly and cornes close to the
national tendency in translation, with the exception of Russian, for which
Gallimard had specifie competence thanks ta Jacques Schiffrin, an emigré
from the USSR who in 1922 had launched a small firm called Les Éditions de
la Pléiade, which Gallimard bought in 1933 when hiring its founder.
The newest of aIl these literatures was the American one. Gallimard
began introducing American literature in France thanks to Maurice-Edgar
Coindreau, a professor of French at Princeton who identified important
American writers on Gallimard's behalf. The examples of Dos Passos and
Faulkner are indicative of these importation strategies. lt must be remem-
bered that circulation at that time encountered many obstacles, starting
with the time required for transportation-it could take a couple of weeks
for a book to arrive from the United States to Paris-the lack of means of
reprography, and the weak professionalization of the translators, who usu-
ally added this activity on top of other professional commitments, which
meant that the translation process could take up to ten years.
The translation of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, published in
1929, was weIl received in France, though the sales were not very high (2,600
copies). Gallimard asked the translator, Coindreau, to suggest other works
by this author. Coindreau recommended Streets of Night, a picture of life in
Boston published in 1923 but banned by the Boston Booksellers Commit-
tee. Streets of Night had already been translated into Czech, and it had the
advantage of being short, contrary to Dos Passos's tirst novel, Three Soldiers
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 149
(1921). Coindreau considered the latter to be a "remarkable" work, and it had
been extraordinarily successful in the USA, but he felt it was too long. More-
over, Coindreau was not sure that the topic of war was still of interest for
the French public. He also suggested that Dos Passos's travelogues might be
interesting for Gallimard to publish, after Gide's Retour du Tchad. Ultimately,
Gallimard decided to publish Orient-Express but rejected The 42nd ParaUel,
which they found to be redundant after the disappointing sales of Manhattan
Transfer. For this reason, Gallimard would lose its option on Dos Passos's
work and would spend a lot of time and energy after the Second World War, in
the context of the new American hegemony, to obtain the rights for his worle
they finally succeeded because Dos Passos was eager to see his work published
with Gallimard, an evidence of the symbolic capital the firm had acquired by
that time. The criteria of selection thus appear clearly: interest for the French
public, coherence with the publisher's list, the number of tides published per
year, and sales. There were also, most likely, political motives behind the selec-
tion: Dos Passos's novels could be perceived as too left-Ieaning. Gallimard
refused other tides by this author in the 1930s, in particular 1919 and The
Big Money. Incidentally, Gallimard also turned down Henry Miller's Tropic
of Cancer in 1934 for a different reason: the board considered that "Miller
was not gifted enough to justify the publication of his pornographic book.,,2
However, the criteria of sales could be relativized when Gallimard
believed in the literary quality of an oeuvre, as the case of Faulkner illus-
trates. The translation of As l Lay Dying was ready to go to print when
Gallimard decided to delay its publication and to publish Sanctuary
instead, which he thought was more accessible for the public. This deci-
sion illustra tes the strategies for introducing a new author. In addition to
the order of publication of the translations, another strategy was to ask a
famous French author to write a preface. Malraux was invited to intro-
duce Sanctuary, which he defined as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy in the
crime novel," thus presenting this work as at once innovative and universal.
This preface certainly attracted the literati's attention, but hardly helped
the novel to be received beyond this circle: in 1938, a mere 3,900 copies
had been sold, and 1,008 of As l Lay Dying. Nevertheless, despite what
he called the "public's indifference," Gallimard did not give up publish-
ing Faulkner: the translation of Light in August was published in 1935,
Sartoris in 1937, The Sound and the Fury in 1938, and These 13 in 1939.
This long-term investment was compensated that year by the huge success
of the translation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, which sold
more than 800,000 copies. Translations from English had by then started
nourishing the pole of large-scale production in the French publishing field.
At the pole of small-scale production, however, the introduction of
American literature in France was a source for developing new narrative
techniques and for subverting the dominant literary norms. Sartre drew
inspiration from the novels of Dos Passos and Faulkner for La Nausée, pub-
lished in 1938. He also declared that the device of the omniscient narrator
150 Gisèle Sapiro
had bec orne obsolete, and promoted instead the adoption of the characters'
points of view by the narrator-what narratologists would later calI inter-
naI focalization. Another source for revitalizing fiction techniques, Franz
Kafka's The Castle, appeared in French with Gallimard in 1938.
The war and the German Occupation in France interrupted the move-
ment of translation, as the number of tratlslations into French fell to 119 in
1941. The German cultural policy in occupied France was aimed explicitly
at shattering French cultural hegemony; regulating the flow of translations
was one of the cornerstones of this policy. Thus, only eleven French authors
were authorized to be translated into German. The titles that were trans-
lated served an overtly political objective. At the same time, translations
from German rose in this period, accounting for one-third of aIl transla-
tions into French (113 out of the 322 appearing in 1942); Gallimard, for
instance, published Ernst Jünger, while in 1942, it also published the com-
plete works of Goethe in La Pléiade, its series of classics. While the choice of
a German author partly expresses the political constraints upon publishing
at that time, it was consistent with a project Gallimard launched just before
the war: to collect in one or two or three volumes, in a Bible format, the
complete or main works by major classical authors of European literature.
Even before acquiring La Pléiade, Gallimard had begun translating English
and Russian classics, which contributed to the process l already mentioned
in which the Greco-Latin canon was replaced by a canon of European liter-
ary classics in vernacular languages; a volume of works by Shakespeare had
appeared in the Pléiade series in 1938, with an introduction by André Gide.
Until the war, translations into French originated mainly on the European
continent, apart from the works by Tagore and American authors. After the
Second World War, the geographical horizon expanded.

2. THE DIVERSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES AND THE

ENLARGEMENT OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

The second ha If of the twentieth century ushered in a new era that saw the
world book market grow and become more international, as attested by
the intensification of exchanges, by the establishment of a foreign literature
series and a foreign rights department in most large publishing houses, and
by the creation of prizes for translated books: in France, the Prix du Meilleur
Livre Étranger was founded in 1948, followed by the Prix Médicis Étranger
in 1970. In 1960, the international Formentor Prize for debut authors was
launched by five publishers from different countries, who also created an
International Prize for established writers (Gallimard from France, Seix-
Barral from Spain, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt from West Germany, George
Weinderfeld from the United Kingdom, and Barnet Rosset from the United
States). Although they lasted only a few years, these two initiatives illustrate
the internationalization of the book market at that moment.
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 151
The conjuncture was also characterized by the opening of the geographi-
cal borders ta the non-Western world, by the growing hegemony of the
United States, and the waning hegemony of France. This opening induced a
diversification of languages in the world of publishing. From 1948 ta 1976,
there were 24,387literary works translated into French from 136 languages,
according ta the data collected by the UNESCO Index Translationum. Two-
thirds of these titles were translated from English (67 per cent), followed
by German (8.7 per cent), Russian (4.3 per cent), ltalian (4.2 per cent), and
Spanish (3.4 per cent).
English was already dominant at the pole of large-scale production. In
the "Série noire," launched by Marcel Duhamel at Gallimard in 1948, nine
out of ten tides (all of them detective novels) were translations, most of
them from American English (84 per cent). However, while American hege-
mony had bec orne indisputable after the war, in the 1960s, one can observe
a diversification of the translated literature. In the series "Du monde entier,"
which was launched by Gallimard in 1931 for deluxe editions and became
in 1950 its main series of "foreign literature," regrouping most of the trans-
lated tides, the average number of translations rose from 15 ta 37 per year
between the 1950s and the 1960s. The number of languages rose from 14 ta
24 and the number of countries represented from 23 ta 38. English was still
dominant, but its share fell from 60 per cent ta 42 per cent, ta the bene fit of
other languages. Gallimard gave voice ta a new generation of writers from
everywhere in the world.
The Spanish language reinforced its presence with the discovery of an
innovative literature not only in Spain (with Juan Goytisolo), but also in
Latin America, thanks to Roger Caillois who in 1952 launched the series" La
Croix du Sud" and introduced thereby writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and
Julio Cortâzar from Argentina, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico, Pablo Neruda
from Chili, and Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru. Being published in France,
especially with Gallimard, increased an author's chance to be translated in
other languages, indicating the consecrating power Gallimard had acquired
in the world republic of letters: the publication of Borges's Ficciones in
French in 1952, for instance, immediately aroused the interest of American,
British, and ltalian publishers for this still unknown author. The new ltalian
literature also came out in front (one tide out of ten), with Elia Vittorini,
Cesare Pavese, and Elsa Morante (published in 1977, La Storia was a big
success). By contrast, Gallimard engaged in few translations from Germany
after its defeat, and the selection was more turned towards the past (with an
author such as Hermann Broch). It was the newcomer Les Éditions du Seuil
that introduced Günter Grass and Heinrich BoU, from the Gruppe 47, in
France (Serry). However, the share of translations from German in the series
"Du monde entier" grew in the 1960s (from 10 pel' cent to 16 per cent),
and Gallimard would soon introduce ta the French public the work by the
avant-garde Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, which denounced the Nazi
past, and his young fellow countryman Peter Handke.
152 Gisèle Sapiro
Among the new translated languages, modern Greek appears in the
1960s, after the colonels' coup which followed the liberalization in 1963,
and which forced a number of intellectuals into exile in France. The iron
curtain made the exchanges with Eastern Europe more difficult. The share
of Russian in "Du monde entier" was only 2.6 per cent, but in 1957, after
the Krushchev report announcing the "thaw" -which piqued the curiosity
about Russian literature among many French and American publishers-the
communist writer Aragon launched a Gallimard series called "Littératures
soviétiques." This series mixed up the communist and anticommunist chan-
nels of importation (Popa), introducing for instance Yury Tynyanov's 1925
novel on exile in Siberia, Le Disgracié.
The cases of Greece and the USSR show how a political conjuncture can
generate interest in literature, confirming the national framing which char-
acterized the importation process at the pole of small-scale production (as
opposed to the pole of large-scale production, where national or cultural
differences tend to be erased). Poiitically speaking, Gaston Gallimard's strat-
egy had always been to balance right and left and to privilege a more distant
approach to politics through literature, philosophy, and history rather than
direct commitment, although he had among his authors politically engaged
intellectuais such as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Aragon, as weIl
as some less famous right-wing figures. In the archives of the series" Littéra-
tures soviétiques," the inner struggles around the importation of Russian lit-
erature at that time appear clearly, especially between Aragon, upon whom
the contact with the Soviet Literary Agency depended, and Dionys Mascolo,
who tried to promote dissenting voices.
Along with "La Croix du Sud," dedicated to Latin American litera-
ture, it was the series "Connaissance de l'Orient," launched in 1953,
that illustrated the enlargement of geographic and cultural horizons. The
impulse for its implementation was the funding that UNESCO-where
Gallimard's author Roger Caillois worked-offered in order to favour
"literary interpenetration," which met with a project for a Chinese series
envisioned by the sinologist René Étiemble. Communist China was not
included in the UNESCO projects, but Étiemble convinced Michel Gal-
limard (Gaston's son) that it was necessary to translate contemporary
Chinese authors such as Lu Xun in order to attest to the "literary revo-
lution" which had been occurring in this country for fort y years. As he
explained to Caillois in a letter dated 5 J uly 1953, Étiemble's purpose
was to render

accessible to the French educated public works of high literary quality

that have never been published in our language (or so badly translated
that it is better not to talk about them), and chosen in order to illus-
trate the mores and cultural values in aIl the countries in question:
lndia, China, and Japan to begin with (but I would also like to include
Persia and the Arab world).
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 153
Neither the publisher nor myself are looking for immediate com-
mercial success; we want to educate the public, to enlighten them
about the Orient. But it goes without saying, especially at the begin-
ning, that we must offer them tides that encourage them to educate
themselves: novels that, while perhaps entertaining them, inform them
about people they are not familiar with. Most of the great novels from
Asia are unknown in France. (my translation)

"Educate the public," encourage the readers to "educate themselves,"

"inform them about people they are not familiar with" while "entertaining
them": the pedagogical function ascribed to translations of upmarket for-
eign literatures is clearly expressed here. The idea that literature can inform
us about the culture and mores of a country also underlies the teaching of
foreign languages and civilization in France, which was developing during
this same period and contributes to explain the rise of translations from
certain peripherallanguages.
In 1960, ten tides had been published in this series despite the length and
scope of the endeavour (the great Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng-Le Rêve
du pavillon rouge-was 2,500 typed pages). Étiemble consulted the best
scholars, an unusual procedure at Gallimard where academics were always
treated with sorne suspicion because of their ambition to produce edited
volumes with prefaces and footnotes. As expected, the sales were modest
(1,189 copies, on average), but the series, which filled a gap in French cul-
ture and publishing, was praised by the critics.
In 1972, the series "Du monde entier" could boast of 320 authors, six-
teen of them Nobel laureates, representing 35 countries. The high number
of Nobellaureates illustrates the amount of symbolic capital that Gallimard
had acquired by that time. During this period, publishing experienced an
unprecedented growth: between 1955 and 1978, the number of books
published in France, in West Germany, and in ]apan grew threefold; in the
United States, it grew sixfold. In 1974, publisher Robert Laffont remarked:
"Paris is only one stop now in the circuit of literary capitals, of which New
York has become the centre" (Laffont 151).

3. THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

This growth in American production reinforced the hypercentral position of

English in the world system of translation. At the end of the 1970s, 45 per
cent of translations worldwide came from English, while other central lan-
guages such as German, French, and Russian represented between 10 and
12 per cent according to the Index Translationum. Eight languages, inclucl-
ing Spanish and ltalian, occupied a semi-peripheral position, representing
from 1 to 3 per cent. With a share of less than 1 per cent in the international
market, ail the other languages occupied a peripheral position (Heilbron).
154 Gisèle Sapù'o
Regarding the number of copies of translations in circulation, the distri-
bution was even more uneven. From the 1970s on, production in English
would have something of a monopoly on mass-market books, bestsellers,
popular literature, romances, and thrillers.
This evolution coincided with changes in the publishing world, notably
concentration into large conglomerates, which stiffened the economic con-
straints (Sapiro, Les Contradictions; Schiffrin), and internationalization,
in the context of the neoliberal turn in the 1970s and the replacement of
"development" policy by "globalization," meaning the opening of borders
to the free circulation of goods and capital. A global book market devel-
oped, with its own modus operandi, including the international book fairs
(each cultural city now hosts one, from Peking to Ouagadougou to Guada-
lajara) and professionalized agents-,-literary agents, scouts, representatives
for foreign rights in publishing houses, and translators who became more
professionalized and organized.
The rise in translations is an indicator of the intensification of exchanges
in this new period: between 1980 and 2000, the number of books translated
worldwide went from 50,000 to nearly 75,000 (including new editions and
reprints) according to UNESCO's Index Translationum-that is, an increase
by 50 per cent. This intensification was accompanied by a diversification of
exchanges, as evidenced by the appearance of languages rarely present in
the translation market in the past, notably Asian languages, but also by the
growing domination of English. Its share rose to 59 per cent of translations
in the 1990s, while Russian fell from 11.5 percent in 1980 to 2.5 per cent
after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. German and French maintained their
positions, representing 9 per cent and 10 per cent of the total, respectively
(Sapiro, Translatio). Among the semi-peripheral languages, Italian main-
tained its position of around 3 per cent and Spanish reinforced its position,
from 1.7 per cent to 2.6 per cent.
Being the second source language for exportation, and lagging far behind
English, French is, by contrast, one of the three target languages (with
German and Spanish) into which the highest number of books are translated
in terms of absolute numbers. In 2004, it reached first place. After a decline
in the mid-1980s, the share of books translated into French in the global
market increased steadily, from close to 10 per cent in 1980 to 13 per cent
in 2000, and then to 15.5 per cent in 2004, while the shares of books trans-
lated into German and into English declined. In fact, the growth in trans-
lations into French was two times higher than the international average:
the annual number of translations into French, including new editions and
reprints, doubled between 1980 and 2000, according to the Index Transla-
tionum, going from 5,000 to about 10,000, to reach nearly 13,000 in 2004.
About three-quarters of those translations appeared in France.
This development in translation does not mechanically reflect the growth
in the book market. The share of translations in the national production
increased significantly, going from no more than 10 per cent in the 1960s
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 155
(fewer than 2,000 tides) to 14 per cent in 1970, and, between 1985 and
1991, from 15 per cent to 18 per cent, which represents, in absolute figures,
an increase of more than 50 pel' cent in books translated per year (from
about 3,000 to 4,400 new tides). The rate of translations into French con-
tinued to increase before declining early in the second millennium: in 2005,
it was at 15.9 per cent, which still represents twice as many new translated
tides as in the early 1990s.
One should specify that this average varies a great deal according to
the categories of books: in France, for instance, the share of translations
in literary production is twice as high as the average for book produc-
tion overall (around 35 per cent). Because of its link to the construction of
national identities, literature is indeed the category where translations are
the most numerous and where cultural diversity as assessed by the variety
of source languages is highest, though as mentioned above, this diversity
can be observed only at the pole of small-scaie production. Literature is also
the most translated category of books in the world market of translations
(it accounts for around 50 per cent of aIl translated books in the world
according to the Index Translationum).
Conforming to the global trend, it is the number of translations from
English into French that has experienced the greatest increase in absolute
numbers: it has more than doubled. After English, German has been the
main source language for translations into French, but it was outstripped
in the late 1990s by Italian and indeed even by Japanese, if we consider the
number of acquisition contracts signed by French publishers. 3
As mentioned, linguistic diversity varies a lot between the poles of large-
scale and small-scale production. At the pole of large-scale production,
English is dominant and hardly challenged by any other language, while
at the pole of small-scale production, especially in literature, diversity is
very high. The foreign literature series of the big French literary publish-
ers in the 1980s and 1990s contain works from around thirty languages
and fort y countries (Sapiro, Translatio). In these series, English is still the
most translated language, but it represents only one-third of the transla-
tions (compared to two-thirds of the translations into French during the
same period). Moreover, these series display much more diversity regard-
ing the geographic origins of English translations: in "Du monde entier,"
for instance, besides consecrated American authors such as Philip Roth, the
winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis Étranger in 2002 for The Human
Stain, John Updike, or the British writer Iris Murdoch, Gallimard publishes
Australian (Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard), Irish (Seamus Heaney), Indian
(Arundhati Roy), and South African writers.
In the period from 1980 to 2010, there has once again been a diversifi-
cation of languages in the series "Du monde entier," the number of which
reached fort y (compared to 24 in the previous period), covering no less than
fifty countries. This strategy was implemented especially in the 1990s, in the
conjuncture of globalization and European construction. While the interest
156 Gisèle Sapiro
in Eastern European literature declined after 1989, the rnap of foreign litera-
tures was enlarged compared to the previous period also within the Arabic
area (Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya); two new countries were repre-
sented in the Spanish language (Venezuela, Uruguay); the presence in the
series of Spanish-Ianguage authors such as Vargas Llosa, as weIl as ltalian
writers (including Erri de Luca and Antonio Tabucchi), was reinforced;
literature in Dutch, which attained international visibility in the 1990s, is
represented at Gallimard by a recognized author: Harry Mulisch. Another
small literature also gained visibility during this decade: Israeli literature is
represented in the series by Zeruya Shalev (the winner of the 2014 Fernina
Prize for foreign literature) and Alona Kirnhi. These two authors illustra te,
moreover, the feminization that occurred in the circulation of literary trans-
lations in the 1990s.
Added to this, Gallimard plays a role in the canonization of modern for-
eign writers with its above-mentioned series of collected or complete works,
the" Bibliothèque de la Pléiade." The presence of translations in this series
increases in proportion with the ri se in the overall number of tides and
includes more and more authors of the twentieth century who are thus
canonized, not only authors of GaIlimard's backlist, such as Kafka (1976),
Faulkner (1977), Conrad (1982), Pasternak (1990), and Borges (1993), but
also Lorca (1981), Joyce (1982), and Pessoa (2001). Underrepresented, for-
eign female authors (Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Virginia Woolf)
acceded the prestigious series only since 2000, again confirming the process
of feminization of the international market of translation.
Although Gallimard's consecrating power on the international scene is
certainly not as important as it was in the previous period, we can assess the
symbolic capital of Gallimard in the world republic of letters through its rep-
resentation in the translations from French into English in the now dominant
centre, the United States. Between 1990 and 2003, Gallimard concentrated
29 per cent of the translations from French into English, while aIl the other
146 French publishers who had at least one work translated during these
years held a share below 8 per cent (Sapiro, Les échanges littéraires; "Trans-
lation and Symbolic Capital"). Among the translated works from Gallimard,
55 per cent were modern classics (Proust, Queneau, Céline, Green, Your-
cenar) and 45 per cent contemporary (which is higher than the average of
fort y per cent). Gallimard represents one-third of the works of modern clas-
sics translated during this period, which proves the symbolic capital accumu-
lated by this publisher during the twentieth century. This attests to the fact
that for American publishers, Gallimard still functions as a "brand name."
From 2003 to 2010, half of the works for which Gallimard sold translation
rights to American publishers were contemporary novels. This share reached
a peak of 75 per cent in 2009 (eighteen out of twenty-four, which included
six tides by the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery, who had died the previous
year, and Marie N'Diaye's novel Three Powerful Women, which won the
prestigious Goncourt prize that year).4 The translation rights in English for
 Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France 157
Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, another Goncourt winner published by
Gallimard in 2006, were sold by his agent for an unprecedented one million
dollars to Harper Collins. Gallimard is also the publisher of J. M. G. Le
Clézio, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008, despite the protests of
American publishers and critics who expected Philip Roth to be the laure-
ate (also published by Gallimard in France, as we have seen), and of Patrick
Modiano, who won it in 2014. And Gallimard is the publisher of The Ele-
gance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbéry, which was a huge bestseller (it
stayed on the bestselling list of the New York Times for several weeks). With
these recent successes, Gallimard reaffirmed its still dominant position and
consecrating power in the world republic of letters.
In the 1980s, Gallimard's value was estimated at five times its yearly
turnover. But economists pointed out that its value was even greater than
that, because of all the skills which would be required to rebuild its list. This
is an illustration of the conversion of symbolic capital into economic capi-
tal. Translations participated in the construction of this symbolic capital in
the 1930s, enabling Gallimard to build an international network of writers
and publishers. From that moment on, writers aspired to be published with
Gallimard, even when they had first been rejected or partIy rejected like
Dos Passos and Henry Miller. The number of Nobel Prize laureates among
Gallimard's foreign authors-in addition to its French authors: Martin du
Gard, Gide, Camus, Sartre (who refused it), Le Clézio, and Modiano-attest
to its international power of consecration. Being published in translation
with Gallimard certainly increases an author's chances to win the Nobel.
Gallimard's importation strategies have combined the investment in estab-
lishing a foreign author in the French landscape and a diversification of
the languages and cultures represented in its series" Du monde entier." This
investment was not commercial, since the sales remain very low apart from
famous American authors like Philip Roth or sorne exceptional successes
(like Morante). As we saw, even in the period of the relative decline of the
French power of consecration in the world republic of letters, Gallimard
succeeded in maintaining its position and is still far and away the primary
exporter of French literature abroad. However, as pointed out by Bourdieu
("A Conservative Revolution"), this symbolic capital relies heavily on past
as sets and Gallimard has become less innovative and daring; an author like
Marie N'Diaye, for instance, was discovered by Minuit, and it was when she
moved to Gallimard that she won the Goncourt Prize. In aIl sectors (social
sciences and the humanities, youth literature, tourist guides), Gallimard
offers upmarket products, but the harshening of the competition with the
big conglomerates has introduced more and more commercial concerns.
Will Gallimard be able to maintain a balance between symbolic and com-
mercial interests? Will other publishers be able to challenge its dominant
position in the world republic of letters? The outcome is hard to predict
in the current moment of changing power relations in the world market of
translations.
158 Gisèle Sapiro
NOTES

1. Access to this data was granted in the context of research commissioned by

Gallimard for the firm's centennial, the results of which were published in the
catalogue of the exhibition which took place at the French National Library
(Sapiro, "A l'international").
2. Henry Miller's files in the Gallimard Arch'ives.
3. Data on the number of contracts signed annually by French publishers to acquire
or grant translations rights is gathered by the Syndicat National de l'Édition
since the mid-1990s.
4. According to the data that Gallimard's foreign rights department kindly gave us.

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10 How African Literature is Made
The Case of Authors from Francophone
Sub-Saharan Africa (1960-2010)
Claire Ducournau

This essay addresses how African literature has been instituted as an

internationally recognized category of its own. In particular, I consider the
case of writers from Francophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa from the
1960s onward. I focus more precisely on the mechanisms by which these
writers have attained literary recognition over the pa st five decades. World
literature is implicitly defined here-and consequently African literature-
as a body of canonized texts, which, as the introduction to this volume
explains, is a current, but not the only, meaning of the term. I further con-
sider Francophone African writing as a relatively autonomous universe, with
its own narratives, institutions, and events, despite its historical relationship
to other kinds of literature. A significant other of Francophone African liter-
ature is, curiously, Anglophone African literature, which constitutes in sorne
ways a parallel universe, with its own defining texts and moments (such as
the First African Writers Conference at the Makerere University in Uganda,
in 1962). For methodological reasons, I do not focus on this other body
of literature, except for sorne of its connections with Francophone African
literature (through translations, for instance).
Irrespective of this apparent separation between literatures, the mecha-
nisms that stabilize such classifications and canon formation and that position
authors and their works (regardless of country of origin) in relation to one
another are thoroughly transnational. Such recognition relies on processes of
producing and legitimizing literary works, which in turn involve institutions
located in Africa, but also-importantly-outside of Africa. A celebrated case
in point is the Parisian and cosmopolitan Négritude movement, in which
black identity was associated with a more or less distant Africa. This is often
seen as a beginning for African literature, yet Négritude involved institutions
located in France such as reviews (Revue du monde noir, Présence africaine),
publishing houses (Presses universitaires de France, Seuil), as weIl as interna-
tional organizations (Société africaine de culture). Nowadays, the institutions
which publish and value African literature, including publishers, cultural
festivals, and literary prizes, remain located in different countries and con-
tinents, partly because of the postcolonial domination of its writers in the
"world republic of letters" (Casanova), or, in other words, because of the
"extraversion" of knowledge about and of Africa (Hountondji).
 How Africall Literature is Made 161
These phenomena allow us to consider a broad range of sociological issues
linked to the social and geographical trajectory of authors born in African
countries, where foreign travel and study are still reserved for an elite.
In this global context, how and where have their writings been instituted
as "African literature"? To understand the canonization of these writers,
one has thus to consider different languages and at least three continents,
namely Africa, Europe, and (North) America. The historical and contempo-
rary importance of the continental classification prevents us from limiting
the study of the literary recognition of these African writers to national
perspectives. Geographic markers, often themselves inseparable from racial
markers, can determine editorial reception, define the parameters of aca-
demic research and fields of specialization, inforrn cultural promotion (the
"Salon du livre africain" festival held every year in Genève is a case in point)
and publishers' series (such as "Lettres africaines" with Actes Sud), provide
the selection criteria for writers' residencies, or influence literary awards
that are sornetimes granted according to nationality or place of publication.
Overall, intellectuals from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa still consider
themselves as "African" in their practices and representations, through their
literary references, through the legacy of Pan-Africanism, and through their
modes of association or their circles of sociability (Guèye 33-48). By con-
trast, few of these writers have claimed to belong to a national literature
(Moudileno 33). One reason for this is that many African states have been
unable to build a consensual and unified cultural memory for these social
groups (Piriou 20). It seems productive to adopt a continental scale, not as
something given, but as something constructed, on the part of those who
conceptualize this literature from the outside as weIl as those who write it
from the inside. This situation makes the investigation more complex, but
also offers a good case study that can contribute ta the current development
of world literature methodology.
Despite recent conceptualizations of "world literature" as a critical
approach, with striking theoretical proposaIs, the meaning of the label
is far from stabilized either in the academy or in the publishing world
(Thomsen 2-3). But, as sorne scholars have argue d, the most constructive and
innovative part of these debates is certainly the methodological propositions
they have produced (Helgesson, "Going Global" 306-308). Jérôme David
has, for instance, distinguished four competing genealogies of "world litera-
ture" since its first Goethean formulation: a philological genealogy, a critical
genealogy, a pedagogical genealogy, and a methodological genealogy. This
"historical semantics" helps to bring to light some of the misunderstandings
that underlie the current debates and controversies on "world literature":
it shows that different layers of meanings and diverse ramifications coexist
without being always clearly stated. According ta David, the methodologi-
cal genealogy is the most recent. It dates back to the 1950s, contrary to the
three others, which go aIl the way back to Goethe. Through this genealogy,
"'world literature' is not so much an object, but a ... challenge that demands
162 Claire Ducournau
a radical, epistemologicallitmus test of literary studies. In this sense, 'world
literature' designates everything our interpretive habits do not incorporate:
neglected languages, forgotten works, and silent cultures" (David 22-23).
These requirements (and their illustrations by David) demonstrate how the
methods of reading provided by postcolonial scholars (like Edward Said or
Gayatri Spivak) or the systemic approaches. proposed by dominant scholars
in the world literature debates (like Pascale Casanova or Franco Moretti)
can, despite their mutual disagreements, also enrich each other.
Following more specifically the directions opened by Pascale Casanova,
1have employed Bourdieuan field theory as a tool to study literature in a global
framework. 1 would like to show that this affords a better understanding of
the transnational dynamics which shape African literature, without sacrific-
ing empirical validation (Boschetti 16-17). To this end, 1 first explain the
theoretical and methodological choices 1 have made to address the question
of the transnational institutionalization of African literature by construct-
ing an "African literary space." 1 then describe in broad terms the inquiry
1 have conducted. Finally, 1 summarize the main findings 1 have obtained,
focusing on the institutions and then on the writers.

1. BEYOND THE EXTERNAL/INTERNAL DIVIDE

When studying the modalities of the artistic success of writers from

Francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa convincingly, there are two pit-
falls to be avoided. The first would be the adoption of an essentialist assumption
of innate talent, or the related assumption that such talent is directly reflected
in what it produces. For example, sorne scholars speak about "genius," as if
creators were not themselves created. InternaI approaches focus mostly on
textual analysis, leaving producers aside; sociologists challenge this bias and
insist instead on the process of socialization of the writers, but also on how
their literary works are produced. Yet this brings on a second temptation: to
overemphasize the contextual data and the social properties of the authors,
paying no attention to their literary texts. The risk here is to forget the impor-
tance of their aesthetic choices and to ignore the specificity of symbolic goods.
External approaches, whether historical, sociological, or biographical, tend to
reduce works to their material conditions of production and reception.
To move beyond this internal/external divide, and to make this tension
conceptually productive, 1 have described a "space of possibilities," to use
Pierre Bourdieu's terms. The expression refers to a repertoire of models
which changes constantly (Bourdieu 381-87): the "possibilities" are genres,
themes, styles, but also institutions and different material supports, oppor-
tunities for publication, literary awards, etc. This "space" includes singular
writers, who are always in principle able to change the "rules of the art"
with disruptive literary innovations, and literary institutions, which mediate
these writers' production. 1 have considered that the construction of an
 How African Literature is Made 163
artistic reputation, defined as the social objectification of a talent, depends
on external sanctions and aesthetic parameters. These factors contribute to
structure an African literary spa ce that is distinguished by its own way of
functioning.
But what are the salient features of this constructed space? First, it is a
literary space. This means that it produces symbolic goods, in African lan-
guages, which are the mother tongues of most of the people born and raised
in Africa, but also, of course, in formerly imperiallanguages such as French
or English, which are much more present in the globalliterary marketplace.
These works of literature are inscribed in a literary genre, but also commodi-
fied, sometimes packaged as part of a special series, then diffused and dis-
tributed on a market, whether formaI or informaI. Book history has shown
that these material parameters affect the meanings of the texts, which are
always actualized in specifie contexts. In the case under consideration here,
it is these material dimensions that define African literature as African lit-
erature. Inspired by this direction of research, Sarah Brouillette has fruitfully
insisted on the necessity to take this commercialization into account when
studying "postcolonial writers' authorial self-consciousness": "As a niche
developed in tandem with general market expansion in the publishing indus-
try, postcolonialliterature is especially compromise d, and this is a situation
with significant implications for the writers 1 discuss" (3). A proper under-
standing of this spa ce requires thus that we investigate these (dual) products,
their formaI and internaI characteristics, as weIl as their reception, i.e., their
uses by different audiences, including academics and critics.
Second, this space is shaped through social relationships and hierarchies.
Social belonging, gender, nationality, place of socialization, geographical
mobility, and power struggles inherited from colonialism have established
a particular set of social dispositions. The African literary space is a spa ce
of interrelations between individuals, be they writers, publishers, critics, or
translators, with their particular social properties. One cannot understand
the representations and practices of these agents without taking into account
their respective positions and their competitive relations in this space. In
this way, the African literary space has its specifie logic and values that act
like a prism refracting external determinations. Its stakes are the legitimate
definition of an "African writer" and the nature of the writer's relationship
to Africa. Consequently, there is a struggle between a variety of phenom-
ena that may be defined as African literature, depending on the language
used, the way of producing texts, and the location of the writer. From this
viewpoint, the space is linked to other spheres of social activities, located in
different countries: trade-unionism, political power, school systems, univer-
sities, and cultural fields.
Entangled in diverse national societies, this space is, nonetheless, orga-
nized as a transnational system. It comprises publishing centres (such as
Paris), semi-peripheries (Lausanne, Dakar, Abidjan), and peripheries (such
as Ouagadougou or Bamako). This organization into a hierarchy changes
164 Claire Ducournau
depending on the historical moment and the geographical point of refer-
ence. Book markets exist on a national scale, in African countries, in France,
but also on an international scale, through translations or through the
Francophone book trade. This hierarchized market comprises African coun-
tries, but also Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, and it changes constantly.
Every localliterary event can be situated in.this variable and unequal system
of economic and geopolitical relations, while each text also circulates with a
specific meaning according to national contexts and intellectual traditions.
This characteristic complicates the construction of an author's career, which
may occur on different geographic scales. The authors born in African
countries are themselves often travelling around different countries or con-
tinents. Social history, sociology of literature, and comparative literature
have made considerable advances on such transnational objects, including
on African literature-the works of Isabel Hofmeyr and Stefan Helgesson
being two good examples. The pioneering works of Christophe Charle and
Gisèle Sapiro (Translatio), mostly on European literature, show also that
Bourdieu's model can be transposed to an international scale. Of course,
this global perspective makes the investigation more complex, as a rigorous
analysis is by definition limited in extension (Boschetti 13).

2. MAPPING FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN LITERATURE

To understand the map and the structure of the African literary space,
l have gathered a large amount of empirical material. This material com-
prises archives, literary texts, interviews with writers, publishers, and other
cultural agents, ethnographic observations of literary events, and a statis-
tical survey of writers who were socialized in this part of the world, and
who were active between 1983 and 2008. Two additional factors were used
to select authors: first, early and/or long-term socialization in one of the
eighteen diglossic countries of sub-Saharan Africa-countries, that is, where
French remains, officially or in practice, a prestige language, particularly in
the government or in the school system; and second, a minimal degree of vis-
ibility as a writer between 1983 and 2008 with at least two published literary
works. Data were prepared for individual authors, drawing on biographi-
cal information. Complementary criteria included explicit daims of a link
to Africa (self-presentations in interviews, publication in specialized series,
etc.), insertion within specific circles of sociability, and the actual content of
the writing. A classic methodological apparatus used in the sociology of art
and literature was employed in order to ascertain authors' visibility, namely
their inclusion in 32 documents considered representative of the diversity
in types of consecration: anthologies, encyclopaedias, readers, dictionaries,
reference works, data base or internet sites, and the list of the winners of the
best-known literary prizes awarded to African writers (whether generalist or
specifie). The materials consulted bring together a vast array of documentary
 Hou; African Literature is Made 165
evidence but favour institutions and specialists based in Europe and in the
Anglo-American university systems, given the uneven availability of infor-
mation between the sub-Saharan African countries under consideration.
Presence in at least two of these documents yielded a group of 404 authors,
and presence on at least six of them narrowed down the group to the 151
best-known authors, who were central to my research.
During this fieldwork, l have experienced the complementary nature of
these different sources, which are both qualitative and quantitative. If it is
obviously not possible to apply close reading methods to every text writ-
ten by a writer from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, the realization of a
collective biography allows an overview of their social, geographic, and liter-
ary trajectories, and the selection of a few interesting case studies. The his-
tory of institutions such as literary prizes, cultural associations, publishing
houses, or reviews, for example, is deeply entangled in individual trajectories.
Thus the combination of statistical methods and microanalysis brings out the
complexity of the stakes and factors shaping relationships among writers and
institutions in the African literary space.
But how does such an inquiry highlight the instituting of African
literatures? l would like to describe the main findings l have obtained.
First, we can observe that the history of the legitimation of these writers is
marked by continuities as weIl as discontinuities in the course of the long
twentieth century. On the one hand, there is continuity: sorne networks,
sorne institutions, sorne kinds of discourses which value this literature have
persisted after the geopolitical ruptures of decolonization. The election of
Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Académie française in 1983, the activities of
the Association des écrivains de langue française (ADELF), an association
whose history dates to 1926, when it was first founded as the Association
des romanciers coloniaux, but also the classifications adopted by sorne
French cultural agents, show that representations associated with the
colonial period are still shaping the horizon of expectations for this litera-
ture. For instance, the ongoing symbolic prestige of the Grand prix littéraire
de l'Afrique Noire, known colloquially as the "Goncourt Africain," created
in 1961 by the ADELF, has been informed by its historical links to struc-
tures and rhetorics of political power, including the Académie des sciences
d'outre-mer, French Ministries (of Foreign Affairs and of Cooperation, for
instance), and an institutional Francophonie (Dahlgren). But from the 1980s
onward, the activities of the association have progressively declined, while
new structures of publication and promotion have appeared, in a context
of increased commercialization and mediatization of art (English). More
recent specialist awards such as the Prix Tropiques (created in 1991 by the
Agence française de développement), the Prix RFO du livre (created in 1995
by RFO, Réseau France Outre-mer), or the Prix des cinq continents de la
francophonie (created in 2001 by the Agence intergouvernementale de la
francophonie) are more generously endowed, heavily mediatized, and better
adjusted to the contemporary professionalization of African writers.
166 Claire Ducournau
On the other hand, the institutional and bibliographic data show con-
siderable discontinuities in the processes of recognition of the writers from
Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Their legitimation follows two waves,
the first of which occurred in the early 1980s. During that time, publish-
ing houses created in African countries since the age of decolonization
were developing but often remained under the control of publishing con-
glomerates located in the Northern Hemisphere. At the same time publish-
ers' series (such as Hatier, Monde noir) or publishing houses specializing
in African literature (such as L'Harmattan, Akpagnon, Karthala, Silex, or
Dapper) were created outside Africa, as were specific awards such as the
Noma Prizes, active between 1980 and 2009 in Oxford, funded by Sjoishi
Noma, a japanese publisher, or the literary contests of Radio France Inter-
nationale, or RFI-a French radio broadcasted in African countries. The
number of publications increased regularly and steadily: for instance, writ-
ers from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa published six times more tides in
2006 (312 tides) than in 1960 (49 tides).l The number of tides translated
into English also increases, be they published by the famous Heinemann's
African Writers Series from 1964 onwards, like the novels of Mongo Beti
and Sembène Ousmane (Currey 59-70), or by Oxford University Press's less
well-known Three Crown Series (Davis). Having known its first critical suc-
cesses in the mid-1950s, the novel replaced poetry as the dominant literary
genre at the beginning of the 1980s, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Before this period, the majority of new writers began by publishing poetry,
which was the most represented literary genre in terms of the number of
tides published in the marketplace (Ducournau 108-109,466-67). After the
early 1980s, the consecrated authors of the Négritude movement did not
publish any new poetic texts, whereas some recognized poets, such as j ean-
Marie Adiaffi or Tchicaya U'Tam'si, published their first novels.
The second wave of legitimation occurred in the mid-1990s with the
renewal of publishing houses in Africa, the growing interest for these
authors from more established French publishing houses like Grasset and
Gallimard, and the multiplication of cultural events to promote their writ-
ings, such as literary awards, festivals, and writers' residencies. Both the se
waves are transnational and separated by a reflux: the economic crisis in
the late 1980s, which jeopardized most of the publishing houses settled in
Afl'ica as weIl as the most precarious in France. The Nouvelles éditions afric-
aines (NEA), for instance, a publishing house founded in 1972 and active in
Senegal, Togo, and Ivory Coast, disappeared in 1988, before its dual rebirth
in 1992 under the names of Nouvelles éditions africaines du Sénégal (NEAS)
and Nouvelles éditions ivoiriennes (NEI).
These movements are key to understanding the construction of "African
literature" as a commodity in the global literary marketplace. As Graham
Huggan and Sarah Brouillette have shown for the English-speaking area,
a restricted set of authors has now become marketable within a niche of the
market of postcolonial writings targeting quality consumers. This audience
 How African Literature is Made 167
has renewed a more traditional readership, located in Africa, through the
African educational markets, which use certain novels as set books within
the school curriculum. ln this way, the Heinemann African Writers Series
has played a central role in creating "African literature" as a valid category
in the Anglophone world, including translations from French, Portuguese,
and Arabie. The series was relaunched in 1987, and again in 1993, target-
ing a new profitable audience during the emergence of a strong interest in
postcolonial and world literature in the Northern Hemisphere, and sustained
by the educational structures in the Anglophone countries (Lizarribar Buxo
178-85). A few years later in France, a handful of Francophone African writ-
ers have also obtained critical and public successes; we can think of Ahmadou
Kourouma (for En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages in 1999 or Allah n'est
pas obligé in 2000), Fatou Diome (for Le Ventre de l'Atlantique in 2002), or
Alain Mabanckou (for Mémoires d'un porc-épie in 2006). Their books are
carefully packaged and read by non-specialist readers. After decades of devel·"
oping the teaching of Francophone African literatures in different countries,
these writers are finally also becoming more visible in the French media.
Apart from the continuities and discontinuities marking the history of the
legitimation of African writers, we can observe that the institutional changes
in the rules of the African literary game also produce effects on writers them-
selves (and this is a second major finding of this research). From the 1980s
onwards, new opportunities emerged, as writers became more profession-
alized and quickly expanded their readership. The range of viable genres
increased, including genres such as the crime novel, youth literature, romance
(for example, with the popular collection "Adoras" implemented by the NEl).
There are now two possible ways to earn a living from literary activity. The
first case is that of writers with real commercial success who benefit from
long-term contracts with established publishing houses and from elabo-
rate marketing. Calixthe Beyala, for instance, who was born and raised in
Cameroon but has been living in France for years, almost every year publishes
books packaged with exotic representations of Africa that are received in the
large-scale field of production (Jules-Rosette 202-205, 275; Hitchcott). The
second case is that of authors who accumula te grants, writing residencies, or
awards obtained for their high literary standards, so that they can write with-
out conforming to a pre-existing demand. One example is Abdourahman Ali
Waberi, from Djibouti but regularly travelling, from France, in America or in
Germany for writer's residencies or as visiting scholar at universities.
The existence of these new positions changes the structure of the African
literary space. This space becomes more independent of other social activi-
ties such as political fields and trade-unionism, which were important for
the first generation of writers who published their first literary tides before
1980. This evolution fits into a declining recourse to political paradigms in
the French literary field from the 1970s onwards. There is also a general
disengagement of African states from the cultural sector, while the nation-
state is more generally weakening as a coherent context for literature and for
168 Claire Ducournau
the value of literature (Helgesson, Transnationalism 124-28). The African
literary space tends to organize itself as a microcosm in which literary activ-
ity is more specialized. The most recent generations of writers are more often
artists or cultural agents, working as journalists, publishers, or artistic lead-
ers, unlike their earlier counterparts, who were more often involved in their
country of origin as diplomats or politicians. In general, the group of 151
recognized writers under scrutiny still enjoy elite positions in society and
are often highly mobile. The proportion of academics, for instance, remains
stable among the different generations: one quarter of this population of 151
writers works in an academic institution. Another quarter of this population
has worked as politicians or senior officiaIs. Their levels of education allow
them to assume such professional responsibilities: almost one third of these
writers (48 exactly), for instance, has completed a doctoral degree, while 21
more have completed a master's degree. These rates are much higher than
for populations of authors located in the Northern Hemisphere. Apart from
their education, their familial background has also very often been favour-
able to their education. This social recruitment is particularly the case for
the fernale writers. Women in Francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa
have less and later access to education and diplomas than their male coun-
terparts. Consequently, they began to publish literary texts fifty years later
and the number of new female writers has increased steadily from the 1980s
onward. As a result, if the writers under scrutiny are dominated in the world
literary space, their social, cultural, and linguistic resources make them dom-
inants among the dominated. They are, in short, located in a semi-periphery
of the world literary space.

3. SUCCEEDING IN THE SEMI-PERIPHERY

Interestingly, Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti have suggested that this
location at a semi-periphery of the world literary space could create an environ-
ment peculiarly conducive to literary innovation. While Moretti has underlined
the importance of the "transitional area (the semi-periphery) where cultures
move in and out the core" (77-78), Casanova has dubbed these literary spaces
"eccentrically central": "The great literary revolutions have originated from
these European dominated spaces" (129; my translation). She mentions the
"Irish miracle" ["miracle irlandais"] between 1890 and 1930, but also coun-
tries of Central and Eastern Europe, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, or the case
of Kafka in Prague (129). The literary success of Francophone African writers
could showcase the validity of this hypothesis.
What about this literary success? 1 have studied the conditions of these
authors' access to recognition through a va ri et y of external sanctions, and
through statistical analysis, with multiple correspondence analysis and
regression analysis. The results show that publishers in Paris have played
a decisive role in paving the way for the most eminent literary distinctions.
 Hotu African Literature Îs Made 169
There is a flexible but important pattern in which these authors combine at
least one tide published by a generalist French publisher (such as Seuil, one
of the oldest to have shown inter est in these writers) and one tide published
by a specialized collection or publishing house (such as Présence africaine,
the pioneering publishing house created in 1949 by Alioune Diop, two years
after the eponymous review). Still, the existence of nomadic social networks
and the efficiency of specific categorizations, for instance, for female writers,
occasionally make it possible to circumvention this model: while Afriean
women writers are more visible among the laureates and the juries of insti-
tutions like the Noma Prize or the UNESCO, often have their literary works
translated, and are read through feminist and gendered perspectives in the
Northern Hemisphere, they are less often published by the most prestigious
Parisian publishers (such as Seuil).
While these tendencies have shaped an African niche in a more frag-
mented French literary marketplace-and then, notably through transla-
tions into English, in a globalliterary marketplace-the writers' relationship
to Africa has become less eoncrete. From the 1980s onward, they have been
socialized for longer periods in Europe or in North America. Contrary to the
previous generations, they are also more often settled outside Africa. This
explains the enrichment of the repertoire of justifications for the writer's
relationship to Africa. A new rhetoric and new aesthetic choices appear, as
weIl as increased reflexivity about the stakes of literary recognition. Take, as
an example, Alain Mabanckou, an author born and raised in the Congo and
now residing in the United States of America after having lived for years in
France, who is still published in Paris-his main publisher is now Gallimard,
while previously it was Seuil. Having defined himself as a "migratory bird"
("oiseau migrateur"), he has argued in a recent text for the possibility of
"redefining" Africa: "Perhaps we should reconcile ourse Ives to the idea of
redefining the very notion of Africa and stop picturing the continent as a
circumscribed geographical entity. For Africa is no longer solely in Africa.
By dispersing aIl over the globe Africans create other Africas, embarking on
ventures perfectly liable to enhance and promote African cultures" (" Immi-
gration" 87). No less significant is the positioning of Mabanckou in relation
to literary genre. He consistent:ly claims his distance from traditional cul-
tures, tales, or oralliterature (86). More generally, he has explicitly claimed
the right to write poetry "in" the novel, arguing that "poetry's face has
changed" (Tant que les arbres 19; my translation). He nevertheless began
his literary career by publishing poetry with L'Harmattan, one of the less
prestigious French publishing houses, in explicit homage to Léopold Sédar
Senghor. Mabanckou's evolution is not accidentaI but highly representative.
Statistics show that the majority of the writers have moved away from tra-
ditional tales and poetry, which predominated during the colonial period, in
favour of the novel, now the major literary genre in the marketplaee-even
if sorne poets, sueh as Gabriel Okoundji, whose literary works are translated
in many languages, are still resisting this law of the marketplace.
170 Claire Ducournau
Other authors still living in their countries of birth do not adopt
Mabanckou's approach either: their definition of "Africa" is grounded in the
"emergencies of their local environment.,,2 Anthony Appiah, who coined
the critical term "comprador intelligentsia" (149),3 has also reminded us
of the vivacity of a popular culture anchored in the continent, giving the
examples of oral poetry, music, and visual arts (157). It is helpful, however, to
think of these oppositions between local/global, nomadic/sedentary, or poet/
novelist as poles rather than systemic antagonisms. Moreover, national can-
onization has a different logic than international consecration. The authors
considered as "classic" in their country of origin are not always the writers
canonized on an international scale, especially from the 1990s onward. For
instance, Amadou Koné, from Ivory Coast, has seen his books, little sold in
the French book market, studied in academic institutions in several African
countries. 4 This observation echoes a key insight of world literature criti-
cism: for Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, "national canonization has a different
logic and different values than international canonization. World literature is
consequently not a reflection of nationalliteratures" (3). Further, the ranking
li st of the most recognized writers also depends on a classic phenomenon that
Robert K. Merton has famously termed the "Matthew effect" in the sociology
of science (Merton).5 For instance, Léopold Sédar Senghor (from Senegal)
and Ahmadou Kourouma (from Ivory Coast) have benefited from by far the
most numerous and eminent distinctions, while a large number of writers
have only a minimallevel of visibility. In the case of Ahmadou Kourouma, the
study of his public reception (notably in the press), close readings, and genetic
criticism also show that current interpretations of his different literary works
which are institutionalized as "canonical" can be partly renewed in the light
of unpublished textual archives. This archivaI approach, which considers
"everything in the world that is literature" is another potential way of defin··
ing the "world" in world literature (Helgesson, "Going Global" 308-10).
Comparing literary generations also allows us to identify a "forgotten gen-
eration" among the authors who published their first literary title in the 1980s.
The uncertain state of the publishing industry at the time can explain impeded
vocations or interrupted literary trajectories. Sorne literary works, such as those
of Yodi Karone or Bolya Baenga in France, have disappeared from the market-
place even if they proposed new themes and styles. Conversely, the possibility
of becoming a media celebrity, the apparent blurring of the limit between the
large-sc ale and the restricted fields of production, and good publishing condi-
tions account for a higher level of success among the later generations.
The manifesto "Toward a World-Literature in French," published in
Le Monde des Livres in 2007, reflects sorne of these changes. Two writers
from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman
Ali Waberi, are the most vocal proponents of these public demands, together
with the French writers Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris. Le Bris was also the
initiator of the successful Étonnants Voyageurs literary festival in 1990, based
in Saint-Malo, with branches in Bamako, Port-au-Prince, and Brazzaville. The
 How A/rican Literature is Made 171
authors propose a new label, a lexical calque into French of the English expres-
sion ("littérature-monde"), to challenge the ghettoization of "Francophone lit-
erature," as opposed to a "French" body of texts. Signed by 44 writers, the
manifesto argued that French-language writing from outside France is no
longer marginalized by literary institutions: "the centre, as the autumn prizes
made dear, is now everywhere, in every corner of the world" (my translation).
Though critics have debated the validity of many of the manifesto's assertions
and contradictions, such as its ongoing exclusive appeal to the French language
and Parisian literary institutions (symbolized by the "autumn prizes" here), it
highlights a recent shift in the mainstream French public sphere. Admittedly, this
kind of daim is not totally new, neither in space nor in time: the case of Salman
Rushdie, awarded, among other postcolonial writers, with the Booker Prize in
1981 and then with the "Booker of Booker Prize Winners" in 1993 (Huggan
105-23), illustrates a similar shift in the English-speaking world twenty years
before; and the previous generation of Francophone African writers also pro-
tested against constrained horizons of expectation and reductive African iden-
tifications. Still, their complaints remained confined to specialized cil-cles. The
real novelty of the manifesto "Toward a World-Literature in French" is its suc-
cessful reception in a French public sphere that is now more sensitive to postco-
lonial representations: its provocation, which discredited current French literary
categorizations, stirred controversy in the media and in the cultural world of
French publishers, critics, librarians, booksellers, and also in the academy, espe-
cially in the English-speaking countries. This literary event also fits with the
domination of English in transnational cultural exchanges and with the general
revival of the cultural category of world literature in both the publishing world
and educational structures (Sapiro, Les Contradictions 298-301).
By way of conclusion, let me briefly give elements of an answer to my intro-
ductory question-the question of how, and where, African literature has been
made from the 1960s onwards. The case of writers from Francophone sub-
Saharan Africa shows that a transnational institutionalization has occurred.
l have tried to map the institutional mechanisms of the legitimation of writers
from this part of the world in space and time, using the heuristic potential
of field theory on a global scale, and identifying different meanings of the
"world literature" label: as a patrimonial dimension; as a field of research;
as an archivaI approach; and as a cultural category. My empirical inquiry
shows that the literary recognition of the writers from Francophone coun-
tries of sub-Saharan Africa does not occur randomly; instead, the increase
in the number of publications, the importance of the novel in the hierarchy
of literary genres, the state of the publishing industry in sub-Saharan Africa
and in France, and the circulation of authors from one country to another
combine to explain their success in a structured African literary space. At the
same time, sorne institutions located in Europe remain decisive for writers in
attaining visibility in the book market. But the economic parameters of the
global marketplace have also led to the forgetting of a literary generation
negatively affected by the state of the publishing industry in the late 1980s.
172 Claire Ducournau
These results, which fit into global reconfigurations, also lead us to update
our literary references, and to renew our readings of canonicalliterary works,
such as Ahmadou Kourouma's novels.

NOTES

1. These data were obtained in November 2011 using the Weblitaf database
(http://www.litaf.sciencespobordeaux.frlpage2.html). Republications, which are
important for the African book economy, are included.
2. This phrase was coined by lsmaëla Samba Traoré in interview 1 did with him in
Mali in October 2008.
3. "Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously calI a compra-
dor intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of
writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world
capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they
oHer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa
and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for
Africa" (Appiah 149).
4. Interview with Amadou Koné in Washington in January 2009.
5. 1 have constructed this ranking list using the writer's presence in the 32 documents
discussed earlier in the text and two additional criteria: the number of tides trans-
lated into other languages (using the Index Translationum) and the number of
doctoral dissertations on the writer's literary work (using a French database named
Sudoc). These two database were consulted online in August 2011.

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11 The Scandinavian Literary
Translation Field from a Global
ofView
A Peripheral (Sub )fieId?
Yvonne Lindqvist

This essay deals with the odd fact that two very small and peripheral lan-
guages on a global scale, namely Danish and Swedish, rank among the ten
most important source languages in the global translation field today. The
essay sets out to examine how this is possible. Is the ranking merely a con-
sequence of the Nordic Noir conquest of the literary world? Or do other
factors influence the state of affairs as weIl? The essay sketches a theoretical
background for a project analyzing the conditions that have to be fulfilled
in order for translations between two literary peripheries to take place-the
French, Spanish, and English Caribbean literatures and the Scandinavian-
in the world republic of letters. The project studies the so-called bibliomi-
grancy patterns of Caribbean and Scandinavian literature during the period
1990-2010 with a focus on translation relations. Venkat Mani offers the
following definition of bibliomigrancy:

rit is] an umbrella term that describes the migration of literary works
in the form of books from one part of the world to the other. While
"physical" migration of books is comprised of book production and
trade, translations, library acquisitions and circulation, "virtual"
movement happens through adaptations and appropriation of narra-
tives; in more recent times "virtual migration" has become the techni-
cal term for digitization of books. (289)

With an emphasis on the meeting of peripheral literatures by means of

translation, the concept of bibliomigrancy is useful since it embraces both
the physical and virtual pro cesses preceding and defining translations-
processes that never communicate in an untroubled fashion and always
involve struggles over cultural and linguistic prestige.
The overall aim of the study presented in this essay is to investigate
whether a relatively autonomous Scandinavian translation (sub )field in the
global translation field can be discerned due to the common peripheral posi-
tions and overall make-up of the literary systems of the Scandinavian coun-
tries. Such a Scandinavian translation (sub )field would offer an expia nation
 The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field 175
for the strong position of the Scandinavian languages in the global transla-
tion field. In fact, it is very plausible that the production, circulation, and
reception of translations in Scandinavia are conditioned by the fact that the
rest of the publishing world considers Scandinavia as one remote market
and not as three independent markets and cultural systems. l However, at
this stage of the study, no distinction between large-sc ale and small-scale
production and circulation is made, nor are specifie categories or genres of
translation considered within each Scandinavian country. The analysis pre-
sented is instead based on spatial relations-on the core-periphery model of
flows of translations between dominated and dominant language groups in
the global translation field (Casanova, "Literature as a World").2 The cen-
tral idea of this model, which informs the second aim of the study, is that
literature translated from one periphery to another is a consequence of what
is translated from the peripherallanguage in question to central languages
and cultures; indeed, the more central a language is in the global transla-
tion field, the more effectively it serves as a connector between peripheral
languages. The second purpose of this essay is thus to investigate whether
there is a centre in this alleged peripheral (sub )field of translation-a centre
where particular works and writers are legitimized and consecrated in the
first instance before being distributed to the local periphery.
An important working tool in the study of translation bibliomigrancy
from Caribbean to Scandinavian literatures is the Double Consecration
Hypothesis, i.e., the necessity for peripheral writers to become conse-
crated within the Anglo-American culture as weIl as within their own
(former colonial) culture in order to be considered for translation in the
Scandinavian countries (Lindqvist, "Dubbel konsekration"; "Det globala
oversattningsfaltet"). Due to the strong impact of Anglo-American culture
in this part of the world, peripheral writers have to be "filtered" through
that culture in order to be considered for translation in Scandinavia.
Consecration is a term coined in the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,
which refers to processes of recognition and legitimation by the agents in
the field under study (The Field 0/ Cultural Production 243; Konstens regler
326-27). To be consecrated by autonomous critics signifies the crossing of
a literary border-a metamorphosis of ordinary material into "gold," into
absolute literary value (Casanova, The World Republic 126). In a given
space and time, a hierarchy of relations is established between the differ-
ent domains, in which the works and the agents have different degrees of
legitimizing authority. This hierarchy, which is always dynamic, expresses
the structure of objective relations of symbolic force between the differ-
ent producers of symbolic goods who produce for either a restricted or
an unrestricted public and are consequently consecrated by differentially
legitimized and legitimizing institutions (Bourdieu, The Field 0/ Cultural
Production 121). From a global point of view, translation is thus a form
of consecration in its most general sense; it constitutes the principal means
for access to the literary world for writers outside the centre. In fact, the
176 Yuonne Lindquist
very notion of world literature is hard to conceptualize without transla-
tion, since in most historical periods and in most parts of the world only
a small part of the reading public reads more than one or two languages;
world literature is therefore made possible by translations (Venuti 180).
In order to structure the analysis of the literary systems in Scandinavia,
I also rely on Gideon Toury's methodology for reconstructing norms.
The variables of the analysis at the cultural level consist of reconstruct-
ing and comparing the so-called preliminary norms within the differ-
ent Scandinavian countries-the norms, that is, reflecting the nature of
its translation policy and, hence, the related directness of translation
(Toury 82). The preliminary norms are reconstructed by scrutinizing offi-
cial publication statistics of the different countries, which yield points of
comparison between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish literary fields.
1 examine and compare four variables: first, general translation rates, i.e.,
the amount of translated literature within the total output of published
literature; second, the non-translation rate, i.e., the amount of published
works in (mainly) English in relation to the total output of published lit-
erature; third, the five most important source languages; and fourth, the
position of the Scandinavian languages as source languages in the global
transla tion field.
The results from these studies form a background for generalizations
about an existing Scandinavian translation (sub)field and the central posi-
tion in that field. General translation rates (the first variable) reveal whether
literary systems are open or closed systems when it cornes to translations: if
translated literature has a central position within the literary system, then
the general translation rate is high and, consequently, the literary system is
an open system that uses translated literature to elaborate its literary rep-
ertoire (Even-Zohar 46-50). The non-translation rate is another variable
pointing at the relative openness or insularity of a literary system (Pym). The
top five source languages of published translations within a culture, for their
part, reveal the power positions and struggles of that literary space. And,
finaIly, a comparison of dominant source languages within the Scandinavian
literary systems reveals whether there are regional patterns of domination-
patterns that are confirmed by the position of the Scandinavian languages as
source languages in the global translation field.

1. GENERAL TRANSLATION RATES IN SCANDINAVIA

A comparison of the general translation rates of the totality of book produc-

tion of the Scandinavian countries shows that they are aIl more or less open
literary and cultural systems in the polysystemic sense of the word (Even-
Zohar 46-50).3 Translation rates during the first decade of the twenty-first
century vary from 16 per cent in 2010 in Sweden as the lowest rate during
the period to 38 per cent in Denmark during 2007-2009 as the highest
 The Scandinavian Literar)' Translation Field 177
(Tables 11.1 and 11.3). The average translation rate in Denmark dUl'ing the
period 2001-2010 amounts to 34 per cent of the total number of publica-
tions (including fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature). The highest
yearly Danish rate is 38 per cent and the lowest is 30 per cent.

Table 11.1 The numbers of published works of Danish literature (in Danish and in
translations into Danish), the numbers of works of translated literature
in Denmark, and the share of translations in the total number of
publications in Denmark during the period 2001-2010 ("Bogstatistik").
Category/ 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Year
Danish 8851 8585 9126 9217 8341 8364 8142 7462 8200 7707
Literature
Translations 2834 2961 2752 2951 2719 2769 3086 2865 3144 2661
Percentage of 32 34 30 32 32 33 38 38 38 34
Translations

The average translation rate in Norway for the period 2001-2010 amounts
to 31 per cent of the total number of publications. The highest Norwegian
rate, as shown in Table 11.2, is 32 per cent and the lowest is 22 per cent.
The Danish and Norwegian statistics demonstrate the rather stable condi-
tions of the influence of translated literature in the first decade of the new
century.

Table 11.2 The numbers of published works of Norwegian literature (in standard
and new Norwegian and in translations into Norwegian), the numbers of
translated works of literature in Norway, and the share of translations in
the total number of publications in Nonvay during the period 2001-
2010 (Taule).
Category/ 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Year
Norwegian 6377 6864 7446 7164 8431 8477 8442 8835 7919
Literature
Translations 2037 2194 2286 2417 2735 2781 2628 2547 2558 2528
Percentage of 32 32 31 34 32 33 31 29 32 22
Translations

The Swedish statistics accounted for in Table 11.3 reveal surprisingly low
percentages with 16 per cent of the published litera ture consisting of trans-
lations as the lowest value and 30 per cent as the highest. The average per-
centage of Swedish translation rates runs as low as 21 per cent. This is a
recent change within Swedish literary culture, where the average rate during
the 1990s amounted to over 36 per cent ("Bocker").
178 Yvonne Lindqvist
Table 11.3 The numbers of published works of Swedish literature (in Swedish
and in translations into Swedish), the numbers of works of translated
literature in Sweden, and the share of translations in the total
number of publications in Sweden during the period 2002-2011
(" Statistik").
Ca tegory/
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Year
8122 9740136291600416097166641967015295
Literature
Translations 2472 2559 3008 3232 3066 3081 3628 2736 2708 2907
Percentage of 30 26 22 20 19 18 18 18 16 24
Transla tions

A possible explanation for this change is the apparent recent "explosion"

of non-fiction publications in Sweden. In 2002, for instance, 4,294 non-
fiction works were published in Sweden, while in 2010, no less than 11,042
works were published-an increase of 257 per cent. However, in 2004, the
routines for the registration of non-fiction changed at the Royal Library in
Sweden in order to enable the registration of the total output during a year.
The change in routines implies that statistics before and after 2004 are not
totally comparable, which can partially-but only partially-explain the
increase in non-fiction publications in 2010. The Swedish literary system
is thus the most closed in comparison with Danish and Norwegian litera-
ture. The Danish proves to be the most open literary system during the
period, which means that the Danish literary repertoire is the Scandinavian
system most susceptible to translation influences. Nevertheless, the aver-
age Scandinavian translation rates during the first decade of this century aIl
exceed the average translation rate of 15 per cent in Europe (Casanova, The
World Republic 168).

2. NON-TRANSLATION RATES IN SCANDINAVIA

Another way to examine the relative openness of a literary system is to study

the non-translation rates within the system, i.e., books produced (printed,
published, and/or distributed) by Scandinavian publishers in foreign lan-
guages within the system. In aIl three Scandinavian countries, English is by
far the most common language for this kind of publication.
On the one hand, the Danish non-translation rates during the period 2001-
2010, which are shown in Table 11.4, add up to an average of 16 per cent.
The highest yearly amount is 19 per cent and the lowest is 15 per cent. The
Norwegian non-translation rates in Table 11.5, on the other hand, have
the lowest average percentage of non-translations in Scandinavia, namely
11 per cent, with 9 per cent as the lowest rate and 13 per cent as the highest.
 The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field 179
Table 11.4 The numbers of works of literature published in Danish (Danish
literature including translations into Danish), the numbers of non-
translations published in Denmark (in English), and the percentage of
non-translations within the Danish literary system during the period
2001-2010 ("Bogstatistik").
Category/ 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Year
--------------------------------------------------------
Danish + 11685 11546 11878 12168 11060 11133 1122810327 11344 10368
Translations
English 2469 2415 2734 2455 1970 2049 1999 1776 2093 2005
Total 14154 1396114612 14138 13030 13182 1322712103 13437 12373
Percentage 17 17 19 17 15 16 15 15 16 16

Table 11.5 The numbers of works of literature published in Norway (Norwegian

literature including translations into Norwegian), the numbers of
non-translations published in Norway (in English), and the percentage
of non-translations within the Norwegian literary system during the
period 2001-2010 (Taule).
Category/ 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Year
Norwegian + 6377 6864 7446 7164 8431 8477 8442 8835 791911690
Translation
English 598 792 736 794 924 976 1106 1298 1088 1389
Total 6975 7656 8182 7958 9355 9453 9548 10133 900713079
Percentage 9 10 9 10 10 10 12 13 12 11

Clearly, the Swedish rates are the highest in Scandinavia with an average of
20 per cent, but Sweden also has the largest range, from 8 to 30 per cent.
These numbers are shown in Table 11.6. The lowest rate, in 2003, is prob-
ably a reflection of the changed reporting routines mentioned in the previ-
ous section.

Table 11.6 The numbers of works of literature published in Swedish (Swedish

literature including translations into Swedish), the numbers of non-
translations published in Sweden (in English), and the percentage of
non-translations within the Swedish literary system during the period
2002-2011 ("Statistik").
Category/ 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Year
Swedish + 8122 9740 13629 16004 16097 16664 19670 15295 16596 11958
Translation
English 1637 878 3390 5061 5144 5620 5911 4105 4554 2590
Total 9754 10568 17019 21065 21241 22284 25581 1940021150 14548
Percentage 17 8 16 24 24 25 30 21 21 18
180 Yvonne Lindqvist
Scrutiny of the statistics has so far revealed that the Scandinavian liter-
ary systems, due to their peripheral position in the global translation
field, share many features, but that they also differ in their most pro-
found internaI relations. Thus Denmark, Norway, and Sweden aIl show
signs of being open literary systems, since both translation rates and
non-translation rates dominated by EI)glish are high. But each system
is clearly also a system in its own right, as the internaI relations differ.
Denmark is the most open system with regard to translation rates, but
not wh en it cornes to non-translation rates. Norway holds the middle
position in both translation and non-translation rates. And Sweden
proves to be the least open literary system in Scandinavia judging from
translation rates, but with the highest percentage of non-translations
published.

3. THE MOST IMPORTANT SOURCE LANGUAGES IN

SCAN DINAVIA

In order to find similarities and differences concerning the overall make-up

of the Scandinavian literary systems and to find out whether there are any
indications of a regional translation (sub )field in Scandinavia, we can look
at a comparison of the five most common source languages in Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden. Tables 11.7, 11. 8, and 11.9 clearly show the total
dominance of English as the main source language in the Scandina vian
countries.

Table 11.7 The top Eve source languages in Denmark per registered publication
during the period 2002-2011 ("Bogstatistik").
Language/ 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Total
Year
English 2017 1925 1908 1743 1762 1960 1738 1909 1603 1294 17859
Swedish 328 301 342 318 265 358 325 403 325 318 3283
German 183 136 146 126 124 209 214 236 190 231 1795
Norwegian 122 106 168 145 156 146 150 129 146 169 1437
French 150 123 163 143 140 145 142 143 136 139 1424
Other 161 161 224 244 322 268 296 324 261 226 2487
Total 2961 2734 2951 2719 2769 3086 2865 3144 2661 2377 28285

In Denmark (Table 11.7) and Norway (Table 11.8), Swedish is the most
frequent source language after English. Swedish is aimost twice as common
as the third most recurrent source language in Denmark, namely German.
Interestingly, Norwegian as a source language is defeated by German in
Denmark.
 The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field 181
Table 11.8 The top five source languages in Norway per registered publication
during the period 2001-2010 (Taule).
Language/2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Tata!
Year
English 1462 1439 1517 1586 1753 1768 1648 1627 1775 1635 16210
Swedish 202 264 323 302 347 350 366 358 291 315 3118
Danish 79 124 107 120 155 131 121 98 99 131 1165
German 61 83 90 86 120 103 125 100 97 99 964
French 83 92 78 83 101 113 112 99 80 95 936
Other 150 192 171 240 259 316 256 265 216 287 2352
Total 2037 2194 2286 2417 2735 2731 2628 2547 2558 2528 24745

Norwegian holds the fourth place as most frequent source language in

Denmark, closely followed by French. Within the Norwegian literary sys-
tem, Danish as source language is, however, favoured over German, and
French holds-as in the Danish system-the fifth position of most recurring
source languages. Bere, Swedish is almost three times as common a source
language as Danish, ranking in third place.

Table 11.9 The top five source languages in Sweden per registered publication
during the period 2001-2010 ("Statistik").
Language/ 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total
Year
English 1978 1821 1859 2095 2339 2141 2169 2490 1897 1889 20678
Norwegian 127 122 152 190 162 130 149 179 130 157 1498
Danish 93 111 90 140 130 133 151 161 141 136 1286
German 88 116 86 116 104 109 118 175 130 113 1155
French 76 100 104 127 138 125 96 151 124 115 1156
Other 108 90 114 143 173 239 199 246 164 140 1616
Total 2470 2360 2405 2811 3046 2877 2882 3402 2586 2550 27389

The Swedish system favours its Scanclinavian neighbours' languages over

German and French as source languages for their translated literature.
Norwegian and Danish are the second and third most important source lan-
guages in Sweden after English, which is shown in Table 11.9. Table 11.10
below presents an easier-to-read comparative summary of the source-
language situation in the Scandinavian translation (sub )field. It neatly
displays the close interaction of the Scandinavian languages by means of
translation and also reveals the centrality of the Swedish language in the
Scandinavian literary space.
182 Yvonne Lindqvist
Table 11.10 The top five translated source languages in Scandinavia during
the first decade of the 20th century in order of importance
("Bogstatistik"; "Statistik"; Taule).
Denmark Norway Sweden
English English English
Swedish Swedish Norwegian
German Danish Danish
Norwegian German German
French French French

In fact, more than 50 per cent of the translations with Swedish as source
language during the period 1979-2006 were published in the Nordic coun-
tries (Ringmar 746). The statistical overview has shawn that, apart from
English, Swedish is-when it cornes ta source languages for translations of
literature-the most central language in this remote part of Europe.

4. THE SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES AS SOURCE

LANGUAGES IN THE GLOBAL TRANSLATION FIELD

The last statistical variable of this study examines the position of the
Scandinavian languages in the global translation field. The regional
hierarchies of source languages have revealed the interrelations of an existing
translation (sub )field in Scandinavia, and a survey of the most important and
most central source languages on a global scale provides additional informa-
tion about the hierarchies or power relations between the Scandinavian lan-
guages. Importantly, the data in the overview shown in Table 11.11 should
be interpreted as indications of tendencies in the global translation field,
since exact numbers are virtually impossible to produce. The percentages
are approximate and compiled from the findings of Heilbron ("Towards"
433-35) and Sapiro (Translatio 68-72; "Globalization" 423) and then
compared ta the numbers in UNESCO's Index Translationum (2012).4

Table 11.11 The top ten source languages in the global translation field in
the 1980s, the 1990s, and in 2012 in approximate percentages
according to Heilbron ("Towards" 433-35), Sapiro (Translatio 68-72;
"Globalization" 423), and the Index Translationum (2012).
1980-89 1990-99 2012
(Heilbron) (Sapù'o) (Index Translationum)
Language Percentage Language Percentage Language Percentage
English 40 English 59 English 62
French 12 French 10 French 10
German 11 German 10 German 9
Russian 10 Spanish 3 Russian 5
( C011tÎnued)
 The Scandinauian Literary Translation Field 183

1980-89 1990-99 2012

(Heilbron) (Saph'o) (Index Translationum)
Language Percentage Language Percentage Language Percentage
Italian 3 Italian 3 ltalian 3.5
Spanish 3 Swedish 2 Spanish 3
Danish 2 ]apanese 2 Swedish 2
Swedish 2 Latin 2 ]apanese 1.5
Polish 1 Russian 1.5 Danish 1
Czech 1 Danish 1 Latin 1

As Table 11.11 shows, the ranking of centrality in the global translation field
has not changed essentially du ring the last 30 years in the central positions,
except for the decline of Russian in the 1990s: English, French, and German
remain as the hyper-central and central languages. Sorne minor alterations
also connected to the Russian decline concern the semi-central languages:
Spanish and Italian have changed place in terrns of importance between the
1980s and 2012, and Danish, which is one of our main concerns here, has
lost ground from the seventh position of importance in 1980s to the tenth
in 1990-surpassed by japanese and Latin-and to the ninth position in
the year 2012. The ascent of Latin in the 1990s can probably be ascribed
to a worldwide increase in translations of the literary classics and medieval
text genres for educational use-texts that used to be read in the original
(Wilson).
The overall tendency in the global translation field is towards greater
diversification of the amount of source languages mainly due to the decline
of the Russian language from 11 per cent in the 1980s to 1.5 per cent in
the 1990s, shifting from a central position to a semi-central position and
then gaining ground again in 2012 with 5 per cent of the translation mar-
ket. Swedish, for its part, has advanced in the scale of importance from an
eighth place in the 1980s to a sixth place in the 1990s as a source language
in the global translation field. The privileged position of Swedish over
Danish as a source language in the global translation field as weIl as in
the regional periphery makes the Swedish language and literature a good
candidate for constituting a centre in the Scandinavian regional periphery.
Domination patterns in the global translation field are, as we have seen,
reproduced on a smaller scale within the Scandinavian literary space. The
most dominant source languages occupy a secure position even within
Scandinavian literature, but the regionallanguages also play a crucial role,
thereby signalling the existence of a regional translation (sub )field. These
dynamics reveal a constant and ongoing literary struggle over dominating
and dominated positions. The position of the Scandinavian languages in
the global translation field, as weIl as their position in the local regions,
indicates the centra lit y of the Swedish language in relation to Danish and
Norwegian.
184 Yvonne Lindqvist
5. DISCUSSION

Summing up the findings of this study, we can make sorne tentative con-
clusions. The Scandinavian literary systems are open, which means that
they are dominated and peripheralliterary systems in the global translation
field. They aIl expose high translation rates weIl above the average rates in
Europe. The Swedish literary system is the most closed system within the
regional periphery concerning translation rates, which is an indication of
its centrality in that periphery. The Scandinavian literary systems also have
a high percentage of publications in foreign languages within the different
literary systems, the so-called non-translation rate, with a near-total domi-
nance of the English language. Sweden has the highest non-translation rate
in Scandinavia.
The top five source languages in the Scandinavian countries show that
there is indeed a Scandinavian peripheral translation (sub)field. Apart from
English, Swedish is the most common source language in Scandinavia,
which is another indication of its centrality in the periphery. Conversely,
Danish and Norwegian are the most common source languages in Sweden
after English. This constant interaction of the Scandinavian languages as
source languages makes it possible to speak of a relatively autonomous
Scandinavian translation field and of the semi-peripheral position of the
Swedish language in the global translation field, where Swedish is the most
central Scandinavian language today-yet another indication of its central-
ity in the periphery.
On the basis of the analysis presented in this essay, it seems safe to state
that there is a relatively autonomous Scandinavian translation (sub)field in
a peripheral position in the global translation field. There are also some
rather strong indications that Swedish literature functions as the centre of
this peripheral Scandinavian translation (sub )field. Possibly, the combina-
tion of relative semi-openness (about 20 pel' cent) in the translation rate, a
high non-translation rate within a literary space (around 20 pel' cent), and a
relatively high prestige as source language both regionally (second position)
and globally (sixth position) constitutes the conditions for centra lit y in the
periphery.
Additionally, the results of a recent study of inter-Scandinavian lan-
guage understanding conducted by the Nordic Cultural Council (Delsing
and Lundin Âkesson 135-38) confirm these hierarchies. The Council study
reveals that Swedes have more difficulties than Danes and Norwegians
in understanding their neighbouring languages, which might again be a
symptom of the Swedish centrality in the Scandinavian space, as weIl as
an expression of historÎcal power relations. In the late fourteenth century,
political struggles for domination of the Scandinavian territory and the
Baltic Sea engendered the creation of the Kalmar Union as a counterpart
to the powerful North German Hanseatic League. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, Sweden became a major European power conquering vast territories in
 The Scandinavian Literar)' Translation Field 185
Northern Europe. The Swedish crown also reigned over two colonies in the
Caribbean Sea in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The dissolution of
the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway happened as late as in 1905,
but this dissolution has clearly not abolished aIl cultural hierarchies.
Needless to say, these results alone-with aIl their inherent statistical
shortcomings-will not conclusively show us how open or hegernonic a
culture is. The results need to be contextualized with other literary inves-
tigations concerning the Scandinavian translation (sub )field. Possible
paths for such further investigations are distinctions between the large-
scale and the small-scaie production and circulation of translations within
each Scandinavian literary space, as weIl as translations of specifie genres
within each Scandinavian country. AIso, recalling the Double Consecra-
tion Hypothesis, future research could explore the hypothesis that Swedish
centra lit y in the Scandinavian translation (sub )field is expressed by conse-
cration powers in this regional periphery. The consecration power would
imply, for instance, that double-consecrated Caribbean literature first enters
the Scandinavian (sub )field through the Swedish literary spa ce by means of
translation. The writer and the translator are then consecrated by agents
of the Swedish literary field and institutions and afterwards further distrib-
uted and translated to the other Scandinavian languages. The function of
the Swedish literary system in Scandinavia in this respect would then be
that of a logis tic consecration centre-a window to foreign literatures in
Scandinavia.
The existence of the peripheral Scandinavian translation (sub )field in the
global translation field with Swedish literature as the most central power
aptly explains the odd fact that the Danish and Swedish languages-despite
their relatively restricted number of speakers-rank among the ten most
important source languages in the global translation field today. 5 The (sub-)
field relations neatly expose that there is no direct relation between the num-
ber of speakers of a language in the world and the prestige of the language
as source language on the global translation field. The examined relatively
autonomous (sub)field constitutes a necessary condition for the high pres-
tige of the Scandinavian languages in the global translation field. Having
said that, since world literature is always "glocalized," combining global
and local statistics, differences in prestige of languages and literatures, and
geographicallocation will at least for the time being nuance previous find-
ings and shed light on the complex literary relations materializing in and
through translations. This combined approach will constitute a me ans to
understand the impact of translation in the creation of world literature as
particular trajectories of textual mobility (Damrosch). To that end, chains of
consecration patterns for languages and literatures over time revealing cos-
mopolitan and vernacular tensions wait to be discovered. These chains can
be compared to jammed literary highways with exit roads, stop signs, and
detours where printed translations constitute a privileged lane to connect
the peripheries of the world republic of letters.
186 Yvonne Lindqvist
NOTES

1. In the case of children's literature translated from Dutch to Swedish, this is

borne out by van Meerbergen.
2. The theoretical framework of the study presemed here draws on polysystem the-
ory (Even-Zohar), descriptive translation studies and the norm concept (Toury),
the cultural sociology of Bourdieu and its adaptation to translation studies by
Casanova, Heilbron, and Sapiro.
3. See Bassnett and Pym for the difficulty of drawing the line between open and
closed systems based on publication statistics. A pragmatic solution is to con-
sider an average of 20 pel' cent or more as typical of open systems.
4. For a discussion of the reliability of this database, see, for instance, Heilbron,
"Responding"; Sapiro, Translatio; and Svedjedal.
5. Sweden has approximately 9.5 million inhabitants, Denmark 5.6 million, and
Norway 5 million.

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8 Dec. 2014.
"Bogstatistik." DBC.dk. Dansk BiblioteksCenter, n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Konstens regler: Det litterdra fdltets Uppk0111St och struktur. Trans.
Johan Stierna. Stockholm: Symposion, 2000. Prim.
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- - - . The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard
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Damrosch, David. "What Is World Literature?" World Literature: A Reader.
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Delsing, Lars-Olof, and Katarina Lundin Âkesson. Hdller sprdket ihop Norden?
En forskningsrapport 011'1 ungdomars forstdelse av danska, svenska, och norska.
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Heilbron, Johan. "Responding to Globalization: The Development of Book Transla-
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- - - . "Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural
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 The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field 187
Lindqvist, Yvonne. "Det globala oversattningsfaltet oeh den svenska oversattnings-
marknaden: Forutsattningar for litterara periferiers mote." Lasarnas markl1ad,
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197-209. Print.
- - - . "Dubbel konsekration: En forutsattning for svensk oversattning av utomeu-
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PartY
orlds· Translation
1

1
12 "MÊME DYING STOP
CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP"
Provincial Literatures in Global Time-
The Case of MarIene van Niekerk's
Agaat1
Andrew van der Vlies

Perhaps 1 should try to write in English. Perhaps domesticities will

sound better to me in a world language.
-Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat 202 2

Milla de Wet, a character in South African writer Marlene van Niekerk's

2004 Afrikaans-language novel Agaat, wonders at one point-she writes the
words quoted above in her diary-about the payoffs of writing in English.
Although she do es very occasionally express he l'self in English in the origi-
nal Afrikaans-language text, she does not offer this particular reflection in
English; its first appearance in the world language about which it specula tes
is in the 2006 English translation by Michiel Heyns. Milla's rumination oper-
ates on a number of levels. At the level of plot, no matter in which language
we read it (which is to say whether in the original or in any of the transla-
tions published to date),3 it might be taken to indicate frustration with the
limitations of life as a new mother on an isolated farm in a country governed
by discourses of patriarchy (the diary entry is for 6 September 1960; Milla
is suffering from post-natal depression). This independent-minded, educated
woman-musical, bilingual, and an accomplished farmer-bristles against
these strictures, and casting her diary entries in a world language might,
she thinks, serve to defamiliarize domesticities, might make her life seem
less banal to herself. There is no sense that Milla imagines a readership for
her private musings, but her speculation about English imagines a means
of rendering her experience communicable beyond a bounded language
community.
Above and beyond the level of plot, however, naming the language also
indicates that the author would have us understand this passage not to have
been written in English. No matter the language in which we read Milla's
diary entry, in other words, the character's speculation about the possibility
192 Andrew [Jan der Vlies
of writing in English draws attention precisely to the fact that she is not
doing so.4 In the English translation, therefore, we are given to understand
that we are party to a fiction, Milla's expressing herself in English, and that
this speculation about how English might render domesticities in fact (and
ironically) refuses the possibility of a domesticating translation, one that does
not remind the reader that a translation is. being read (Venuti 16; Pym 33).
Agaat was intended, in Marlene van Niekerk's words, to serve as an
"archive" of partieular sets of out-of-use Afrikaans vocabulary.s Ir sets out
ta reimagine a genre central to early twentieth-century Afrikaner mythol-
ogizing, the plaasroman or farm novel, to explore the limits of-and the
possibilities that might be repurposed in-modes of representation cen-
tral to this language community's literary self-imagining. 6 It is concerned
throughout with the institutions in and through whieh a notional white
Afrikanerdom's cultural products have been validated and commodified,
including with how its writing has been marked and marketed, with texts'
particular afterlives (including global transmission),7 with their compliei-
ties. It is thus a text deeply immersed in its locality at the same time that it
is aware of the restrictions of snch locatedness-of the tendency to exclude,
and of the difficulties of communicating across linguistic barriers. This is
why Milla's mnsing about English accrues such pathos at the same time as
representing a metafietional foregrounding of the novel's insistent identifica-
tion as an Afrikaans text. Whether or not this remains true in translation is
the question posed by this essay.
Agaat is tremendously suggestive for such an inquiry beeause it the-
matizes adoption and attendant anxieties about assimilation-adoption
as a kind of metaphorical translation (and vice versa). At its heart is the
relationship between two women, Milla and the eponymous Agaat Lourier,
bound together by an act of adoption. Childless seven years into her mar-
riage to the flashy but ficlde Jak de Wet, Milla had removed the child Agaat
from the (coloured) workers' quarters on Milla's mother's farm (there is a
suggestion that Agaat's parents both neglected her and allowed her to be sex-
ually abused) (E 469; A 485). Milla initially raises the child as her own, but
when she gives birth to Jakkie she has the little girl, then aged twelve, move
into the servants' quarters. Agaat's initial adoption is a translation whose
domesticating impulses are undone by the insistence on ethnie otherness
as an impermeable boundary in 1960s South Africa. No transgression of
this boundary can hold, and Agaat becomes a quasi-indentured servant,
nursing the pain of her betrayal for 36 years up to the present moment of
the novel's narration, December 1996, in which the reader encounters her
tending to Milla, now nearing eighty and terminally ill with amyotrophie
lateral sclerosis (or Lou Gehrig's disease), bedridden, and able to eommuni-
cate only by blinking or rolling her eyes. Agaat reads extracts from Milla's
diaries, prineipally from the 1950s and 1960s, aloud to the immobile older
woman, as an act of reckoning. They include the words in which Milla
muses about the attractions of the English language. 8 There are three further
 aMÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 193
narrative strands: Milla's thoughts on her deathbed in the novel's present;
Milla's account of past events, addressed to herself in the second person; and
italicized passages of free indirect discourse, apparently reflecting on that
period in which Milla first realized she was ill. A Prologue and an Epilogue,
offered in the voice of Milla's son ]akkie as he journeys to his mother's
deathbed and returns after her funeral, frame the narrative.
Such a novel could not but pose a serious challenge to translators. In
addition to Milla's reflection on the relative merits of different languages in
what we might call global (or globally conscious) affect-scapes, it repeatedly
dramatizes the great difficulty of cultural and linguistic translation. In the
Prologue, for example, ]akkie, journeying from Canada, muses on the name
of the family farm, challenging himself (and the reader) to translate the name
of the farm, Grootmoedersdrift: "Probeer dit. Granny's Ford? Wat sê dit?"
("Try it. Granny's Ford? What does that say?"; my translation) (A 6). Heyns
does not translate the exhortation to attempt the translation ("Probeer dit"),
instead offering a formulation that augments ]akkie's translation, elaborat-
ing on the ambiguity of the word drift, which might be translated as "Ford"
or indeed as "Passion" (E 6). Soon hereafter, ]akkie thinks about words
that evoke the particularities of vernacular architecture, landscape features,
and farming methods in this corner of the Western Cape's Overberg region
(the nearest large town is Swellendam), "wolfneusgewel, rûens, droëland,
drif," and urges himself to grapple with an adequate translation (A 8; E 8,
the Afrikaans words rendered in italics in the English translation). Again
Heyns rises to the occasion, once more omitting Jakkie's injunction and
instead textualizing the puzzling out, putting words (one might say) in this
character's mouth: "jerkin-head gables, ridges, dry farming-Iand, crossing,"
]akkie begins. But if this is to be a real puzzling out, Heyns has to make him
struggle, and consequently the character is described as having to overcome
a "[p ]rosaic" first attempt (the description added by Heyns), one that merely
uses dictionary definitions. ]akkie has instead to "[d]evise something" more
adequately metaphorical: "wolfnosed gables, humpbacked hills, dry land,
drift" is the result (E 8).
This English-Ianguage text is thus clearly other than a purely semantic
translation. Ir is, at least in part, a different version-an observation made
by Leon de Kock, translator of Van Niekerk's first novel, Triomf (1994),
in a review in South Ah-ica 's Sunday Times. Though full of praise for
Heyns's work (elsewhere he caUs it a "value-enhancing English translation";
"Cracking" 22), De Kock suggests that "the best way to read Agaat is to read
it twice, because it's been written twice"-both in Afrikaans, and "then in its
extended English version" ("Found" 18). Heyns's translation has been justly
praised, winning the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize for author
and translator, and the South African English Academy's Sol Plaatje Prize for
Translation. ln Britain, the translation (published as The Way of the Women
in 2007) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and in
the United States, where it was published in 2010 under its original tide,
194 Andrew van der Vlies
it was named as one of Publishers Weekly's top 100 Best Books, a Booklist
Editor's Choice List for 2010, and was shortlisted for translation awards. 9
This essay is not intended to criticize Heyns's translation: l begin from
the sincere assessment that it is a considerable and admirable feat to have
rendered the original's 718 pages of often very difficult (and sometimes
obscure) Afrikaans in a translation that continues to convince Anglophone
readers that Van Niekerk is one of the most significant writers currendy
working in South Africa. However, musing on sorne of the implications of
the kinds of choices Heyns has made nonetheless allows me to pose a ques··
tion with wider ramifications: what does it mean for a text-and by exten-
sion a linguistic community's cultural products-to adopt (to be adopted
by or into) another linguistic or cultural tradition? More specifically, what
does it mean if the target language is not a geographically specific one (with
aIl the usual caveats about not essentializing linguistic traditions, being cau-
tious about the word "tradition," and so on)? In relation to Agaat in par-
ticular, addressing this issue necessitates considering how the novel's English
translation negotiates the difficult question of domestication-precisely that
which, idiomaticaIly, Milla seeks to make the grounds for her own flirtation
with a world language.
My tide quotes Agaat's accented pronunciation of an honorific, a term of
endearment and of grudging deference for Milla (E 3): "Même," which might
also be translated Ma'am. Without the accent, it becomes simply "meme,"
that is an element of culture passed by non-genetic means, which is to say by
imitation (" Meme, n."). In common usage, a meme is also something passed
from one internet user to another without care of provenance, originating
context, or local meaning. Non-genetic relations-those of adoption-are,
as l have suggested, at the he art of this novel, as is imitation (for example, in
relation to recurring images of mirrors, and to Agaat's ever-present perfor-
mance of mimicry). Adoption, memes, and reflection might aIl be considered
metaphors for various operations (and theories) of translation: adoption
into another language; imitation of the norms and expectations of target-
language readers. Another way of framing my interest would be to ask how
literature loses its accent(s) in translation. lO We might also ask whether this
matters.
Mindful of the pitfalls attendant on any comparison of original with
translation (let me reiterate: l am not simply making the case that there
should have been a different translation), l want to attend to the implications
of choices made in the process of translation for those theories that concep··
tualize world literature as work that travels beyond its cultural origins (to
invoke David Damrosch), that is always already multiple (to invoke Rebecca
Walkowitz's idea of "comparison literature"), or that is written with its own
translatability in mind (to invoke Walkowitz on works of world literature
that are, in her formulation, always already translatable).l1 Is it inevitable
that a South African novel that is in part an exploration of the connections
between language and place (a celebration and an indictment) can do so
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 195
only in the original language? How does such writing relate to the category
of "world literature"?

The translator's note to the English version of Agaat gives a sense of the
interventions Michiel Heyns deemed necessary in the attempt to convey
the complexity of Van Niekerk's Afrikaans-language text. He attempted to
make his "own translations"-"as far as possible"-of what he called the
many "traces of Afrikaans cultural goods" in the novel ("songs, children's
games, ... idiomatic expressions, farming lore"), always with an ear to retain-
ing (in his words) "something of the sound, rhythm, register and cultural
specificity of the original" ("Translator's Note" iii). But where Van Niekerk
had "quoted from mainstream Afrikaans poetry," he explains, he had sought
"equivalents from English poetry" (iii; my emphasis). One example is the
substitution made for a broken quotation from G.A. Watermeyer's "Ballade
op die Dronkparty." In the original text we read:

Kom Milla, het hy gesê, dink jy nie dis tyd vir 'n gediggie nie? Wat is
daardie een wat jy altyd so graag vir my aangehaal het? Die liefde is
die leë glas. En dan? Donker? Bitter? Wat in die hart se holte pas? Hoe
gaan dit nou weer? (A 564)

Loosely translated, the passage in the original, with its halting quotations
from Watermeyer, might be rendered something like this:

Come Milla, he said, don't you think it's time for a little poem? What
is that one that you used always to quote so eagerly for me? Love is an
empty glass. And then? Dark? Bitter? That fits in the heart's hollow?
How does it go again? (my translation)

The lines Jak is searching for from Watermeyer's poem (literally "Ballad on
the Drunken Party") are the following:

Die liefde is die bitter glas,

die droë glas, die donker glas;
die liefde is die naverdriet
wat in die hart se holte pas.
(Opperman 147)12

Where, in the original text, Jak goads Milla to recite a poem he only vaguely
recalls (love is, respectively, the bitter, dry or empty, and dark glass, the regret
that occupies a void in the heart), in the English translation, Jak remembers
a poem (less) weIl-but it is not the same poem. Heyns instead substitutes
196 Andrew van der Vlies
quotations from Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening" (133-35),13 writ-
ten in 1937 (published in revised form in 1940), as follows:

Come Milla, he said, don't you think it's time for a little poem? What's
that one that you were always so fond of quoting to me? 0 stand,
stand at the window. And then? As the tears scald and start? How do es
it go again? You shalliove your crooked neighbour with your crooked
heart? (E 545)

Jak quotes Auden's lines in full in the English translation; this Jak recalls his
poetry without flaw, despite his inebriation, making him even more coldly
calculating than in the original text. And Auden's poem carries very different
symbolic freight: it allows Jak to chide Milla for her gloomy worldview; it
does not suggest an engagement with intense personal regret at love turned
sour.
Heyns explains that he took what he calls "the liberty of extending the
range of poetic allusion" such that readers would encounter "scraps" of
poetry in English "generally without acknowledgement," as is the case with
the Auden ballad above ("Translator's Note" iii; my emphasis). The assump-
tion is that these are poems by poets that the Anglophone reader will rec-
ognize: Heyns singles out four in particular (Hopkins, Donne, Auden, and
Eliot), though others invoked include Wordsworth, Pound, and Tennyson.
Aline from Tennyson's poem "Tears, Idle Tears" (1847) is imported at the
end of an entry in Milla's diary for 4 July 1960, for example. 14 Intriguingly,
the Swedish translation renders this additionalline in Swedish, which is to
say without marking the fact that it is a quotation from English poetry, and
even though it does not appear in the original Afrikaans-language text.1 5
The Swedish translator, Niclas Hval, indicates in his translator's note that
although he made reference to the original Afrikaans, particularly for help
translating "songs, rhymes, and chants," his is in essence "a translation of
the English Edition" (my translation).16 If Heyns means for the Anglophone
reader to imagine that Milla switches between Afrikaans and quotations of
snippets of English poetry recited in English, his translation cannot mark
the distinction, the implied switch between languages. Consequently, trans-
lations like the Swedish, which use the English as a bridge text, run the risk
of rendering words spoken in a "world language," like Heyns's imported
quotation from Tennyson, in a way that suggests to readers of these trans-
lations (Swedish readers, in this case) that they are spoken or thought in
Afrikaans in the original-because they are translated (here, into Swedish).
Such moments of potential confusion about the language it is implied
Milla is using, whether spoken aloud or not, recur. But it is with regard to the
range of imported references to one particular poet in the English transla-
tion that the stakes bec ornes clearer. Frank England has offered an extensive
critique of Heyns's use of allusions to T.S. Eliot in the English translation.
In addition to the supplementary epigraph-from "Little Gidding"-that
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 197
Heyns adds to his translation (an addition that might, in fact, be read rather
ungenerously-against the grain, as it were-as comment on the trans-
lation itself) (E iv), England considers four instances in detail. 1 will not
rehearse them fully here, save to comment that England's conclusions are
compelling. 17 He faults Heyns for assuming that references to Eliot would
be familiar to the target audience, whether these are (in the first instance)
English-speaking South Africans or readers in a global Anglosphere. "[I]t
is difficult," England writes, "to resist at least questioning wh ether the dis-
tance between the source text and the target reader is increased rather than
decreased for the South African English-speaking reader" by the allusions
to Eliot; Van Niekerk's "local allusive intertext" -in particular, her use of
folksongs and Afrikaans poetry-"may weIl be more familiar to them than
the ... less proximate one," which is to say that imported by Heyns, England
argues (6, 16).
Writing in 2009 about the process of translating Agaat, Heyns recalls
mentioning to Van Niekerk, "early in the process of translation," that her
text seemed to him frequently to evoke lines from The Waste Land and Four
Quartets (Heyns, "Irreparable" 131). That she confirmed that these had in
fact been in her mind "licensed" him, he claimed, "to interpolate from time to
time references to Eliot that underlined Agaat's place in a different tradition,
of what one might calI 'formaI culture'" (Heyns, "Irreparable" 132). Heyns is
much given, in his explanations, to phrases ("cultural goods," "mainstream
poetry," "formaI culture") that suggest an attitude to canonicity and hybridity
indicative of a reading of white South African English culture as provincial.
In such a reading, Eliot stands as a global modernist measure of literariness,
his work a kind of North Atlantic English Literature (with a capital L) that
is-ironically, as a consequence of being thought transnational and cosmo-
politan (and th us "unmarked" if you will)-heavily ideologically marked,
valorizing a very circumscribed, conservative, and Anglocentric sense of a
"world" literature. In this regard, England's critique does not go as far as it
might: it does not consider the lingering cultural capital Eliot enjoys (perhaps
it would be truer to say enjoyed) in South African university English litera-
ture departments until at least the early 1990s (and here we remind ourselves
that Heyns is a retired professor of English literature). If Van Niekerk's novel
is a late-modernist masterpiece on its own terms, we might ask whether it is
necessary that such status be endorsed, as it were, through allusion to this
particular canonical figure from a quite different tradition. But this is per-
haps also the place to note Van Niekerk's active collaboration with Heyns
in approving the translation, a fact that complicates any reading of the Eng-
lish translation as a text that plays fast and loose with what Van Niekerk
might be thought to have intended. It is my contention that the collaboration
does not render any less compelling or significant questions about the fate of
minority-or provincial-literatures transposed into a world language, how-
ever. If anything, it suggests how the author's original text is not the primary
driver of "world literature" "accreditation."
198 Andrew van der Vlies
Heyns cites translation theorist Lawrence Venuti in support of his search
for equivalences and his extension of allusion: "'The translator's language,'
Venuti writes, 'can also send down deep roots into the receiving culture,
establishing suggestive connections to styles, genres, and texts that have
already accumulated meaning there'" ("Irreparable" 132). Heyns comments:
"By almost subliminally citing Eliot (and also, elsewhere, Shakespeare and
Donne), l could establish links between Agaat and an English cultural con-
text enriching to both" (132). In a discussion of the translation with Van
Niekerk and Leon de Kock, Heyns added that, in his view, what makes
Agaat "not unique, but exceptional, is that it's not just a South African book
in the sense that, if you go back to T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent,' you get the idea that every work draws on tradition, changes the
tradition, while it is also added on to it" (De Kock, "Intimate" 138). While
the nov el was "very much uit eie bodem" (homegrown), he continued, it
also "subsumes good European tradition .... it has the best of the novel that
is from this country and yet it also recognises that it's not just an African
tradition that we're working in"; this was why the novel "should have a
worldwide appeal" (De Kock, "Intimate" 138). "And as a South African
book?" asks De Kock, and Heyns's reply-"It really takes the plaasroman
by storm, doesn't it?"-suggests a narrow interpretation of the question,
without reference to what Agaat becomes in his translation (or indeed in his
collaboration with Van Niekerk) (138). In a generous reading, there is here
a fascinating proposaI of a two-way feed for writing not in a global lan-
guage, writing that must perhaps transcend--in translation-the provincial
version of that global language in order for its potential global attractive-
ness to be realized, for it to be synchronized with a putative global readerly
expectation that requires works of world literature to be immediately acces-
sible, their codes and cultural contexts transparently legible, because they
have travelled across linguistic borders, because they are able to have been
translated-linguistically, metaphorically, and materially.
Agaat does, of course, rewrite the plaasroman. 18 We might then ask
what De Kock is really asking when he wonders about the translation "as a
South African book"? When he translated an equally demanding
novel (about an incestuous, lower-class family in the eponymous white
Johannesburg suburb built hubristically on the remains of the demolished
Sophiatown), De Kock had taken the decision to render what he called Van
Niekerk's "calculated bastardisation of Afrikaans" in the kind of English he
grew up speaking in white lower-middle-class Mayfair, a suburb over the hill
from Triomf (De Kock, "Cracking" 23, 24 ).19 As he explained, "if the original
Trioml was a hybrid of Afrikaans with English," his translation attempted
to approxima te "a hybrid of English with Afrikaans" ("Cracking" 24).20
"Many if not most of my fellow [South African English] speakers would have
heard the kind of language l intended to use, or they would be able to get the
drift," he argued (26). When the English rights outside of South Africa were
sold to multinational publisher Little, Brown, however, De Kock was forced
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 199
to produce a second version of his translation, omitting most of the remain-
ing Afrikaans words and finding equivalences for idiomatic expressions; in
sorne cases, Van Niekerk wrote new sections (De Kock, "Cracking" 27-35).
There are, consequently, two English translations-or versions-of Triomf.
The idea of equivalence in translation theory holds that source text
and translation can share the same-or equivalent-value (1 oversimplify
of necessity) (Pym 6-8). Much rides, of course, on defining value and on
the understanding of equivalence, from semantic and formaI through
"dynamic" (in which translation performs "the same or similar cultural
function" as the original) (Pym 8, 25). But if Venuti can be quoted to sup-
port the idea of the translator finding a language that resonates with "styles,
genres, and texts" in the "receiving culture" (Heyns, "Irreparable" 132), and
leaving aside whether this is South African or "global" English in the present
instance, Venuti might also be quoted arguing against the kinds of equiva-
lences through which a text is domesticated (Pym 32-33). We could use a
range of other words to indicate this side of a binary that opposes transla-
tions seeking to appear fluent or covert, as opposed to retaining a sense of
cultural particularity: resistant; overt; foreignizing (though this latter is not
quite right in a society that, while not universally multilingual, hosts many
languages in the same national space). Czech theorist Jifî Levy distinguished
between "illusory" and "anti-illusory" translations; German theorist Juliane
House favoured the terms "covert" and "overt," while other pairings for
similar oppositions include "communicative" and "semantic" (Newmark)
and Lawrence Venuti's own "fluent" and "resistant" (Pym 33).
Writing in 2008, Venuti argued that whereas British and American tradi-
tions of translation had long been "dominated by domesticating theories
that recommend fluent translating," the production of a resistant transla-
tion could perform an ethical role, constituting what he called "a strategie
cultural intervention ... pitched against the hegemonic English-Ianguage
nations and the unequal cultural exchanges in which they engage their
global others" (16). "Foreignizing translation in English," Venuti contin-
ues, "can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural
narcissism and imperialism" (16)-something that importing T.S. Eliot into
a translation from Afrikaans precisely cannot do, 1 would contend. What
Venuti is advocating is not "an indiscriminate valorization" of markers of
culture foreign to the receiving culture. Rathel; in his words, "the foreign
text is privileged in a foreignizing translation only insofar as it enables a dis-
ruption of receiving cultural codes, so that its value is always strategie" (34).
Importing markers of a canonical transatlantic modernism instead imposes,
rather than disrupts, codes of the northern Anglosphere.
As 1 have noted already, translations into English frequently serve as
bridge texts for translations into many other languages, imposing an addi-
tional responsibility not shouldered by every translator (England 8). It was
Heyns's English translation that served as the source text for the Swedish
translation-a version of Van Niekerk's novel that, remarkably, not only sold
200 Andrew van der Vlies
18,000 copies in hardcover and 10,000 copies in paperback, but also spent
five weeks in the top spot on the prestigious "Cri tics' choice" li st of the major
Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter in 2012 (Weyler). This remarkable success
suggests that, despite critical acclaim for Agaat (in Afrikaans and English)
in South Africa, it is undoubtedly abroad that the novel has found a greater
number of readers. I do not have sales figures for South Africa but an educated
guess is that it has sold in the single-digit thousands in both languages there.
The Dutch translation had, by contrast, sold 30,000 copies by April 2013.
This translation used the Afrikaans original, not Heyns's English translation,
as its source text. Consequently, the translations of Van Niekerk's novel circu-
lating in Europe are-and will continue to be-versions of different versions
of the novel, and not simply because they exist in different languages.

There are multiple further examples of the ways in which the English
translation is a different version of Agaat, aIl of which serve to elabo-
rate the argument I have been making. In moving towards a conclusion,
however, I will discuss only a few indicative examples to offer a glimpse
of some of the wider ramifications of my analysis. These have to do with
cultural competency and cultural products in relation to which charac-
ters measure their sense of their own engagement as "South African," or
indeed their participation in quite other kinds of (international) conversa-
tion, performance, or aspiration.
Consider, for example, the following. Agaat is given three guidebooks
to skills and facilities associated with (white) Afrikaner-and specifically
rural-culture when she is moved into a servant's room: a 1929 hand-
book for farmers, the Hulpboek vil' boere in Suid-Afrika; a compilation
of Afrikaans folksongs, the FAK- Volksangbundel; and a guide to embroi-
dery, Borduur sô (embroider thus).21 As she is unpacking the books in
Agaat's new room, Milla stumbles on a curious spelling in the farmer's
handbook. In the text of the original Afrikaans version of the novel, Milla
records in her diary that she comes upon the word "core" (referring to the
inside of a riem, a cured leather thong), which she transcribes, indicating
her bemusement ('''core?'''), and interprets as "koor" (A 78). In other
words, the word she substitutes (koor) is the Afrikaans equivalent of the
English--or English-sounding-word (core); koor is indeed CUlTent usage
for that to which the word core refers in context. The handbook is "full
of funny words & spelling mistakes," Milla comments, making a note to
herself to point them out to Agaat. 22 In the Afrikaans text, one infers that
Milla assumes that the word core, which sounds not unlike the Afrikaans
word for the same thing (koor), has crept into the government text. One
can imagine further that this word would signify for farmers when the
Hulpboek was published in 1929, shortly after Afrikaans-with its still
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 201
flexible orthography-had become an officially recognized language in
the Union.
In the English translation, however, the word in the handbook that
gives Milla pause is still rendered core ('''core?'''), but Heyns translates as
"cawr" Milla's interpretation, which is to say what she thinks the word
should be (the direct equivalent of "koor" in the Afrikaans text). Cawr
has no English meaning, however; it simply sounds like core (E 74). This
makes litde sense. If the handbook is understood, in the world of the
English translation of Agaat, to be in English (and Heyns does render it as
the Handbook), there is no reason for Milla to think core either a strange
word or a misspelt one: it conveys precisely the middle (of a thong). If,
however, the Anglophone reader is to understand the Handbook as actu-
ally being in Afrikaans in the world of the novel (in its English translation),
as being read by a character the reader knows is meant to be interpreted
as Afrikaans-speaking and -reading, then it is still surely the case that core
would signify koor and not the neologism cawr.
The only way to replicate Milla's bemusement adequately-if we are
asked to imagine Milla reading the Handbook in English-would be for her
to find (and transcribe) the word koor, understand it to mean core, and com-
ment on its occurrence, perhaps implicidy thinking that the English text of
the handbook had erroneously substituted for the English word its Afrikaans
equivalent; the translation might thus have retained "core" and "koor" and
simply swapped their positions. There are mise-en-abyme dangers here, but
the fact is that the English translation does very litde to convey the reason
for Milla's confusion, nor is she able to provide a word in current farming
usage as explication. The English text's Milla, in other words, is neither as
adept in farming terminology nor (ironically) as confident in English as the
Afrikaans text's Milla.
Consider next what happens to the shows on Milla's bedroom television
in the novel's present (late 1996). In the English translation, Agaat insists
that there are "already too rnany things happening" in the sickroom to
make space, too, for People of the South, erstwhile ANC President Oliver
Tambo's son Dali's famously flamboyant talk show, or for The Bold and the
Beautiful, a long-running American soap opera very popular with South
African audiences (E 17--18).23 These become, in the Swedish translation
from the English, the generic talk show and soap opera, "pratprogram och
sapoperor" (S 27). In the original Afrikaans-language text, however, it is
the more expansive New South Africa-not a specifie show, but the entire
new political dispensation-and the more appropriately culturally specifie
Afrikaans sing-along show "Noot vit Noot" that Agaat references (A 18);
the latter accords with the novel's sustained engagement with folk music,
notably the FAK- Volksangbundel.
Heyns also places different books on the novel's characters' book-
shelves. 24 In Milla's second-person address in chapter 2, she recalls
unpacking books from her parents' house into her own shelves in 1947,
202 Andre'UJ [Jan der Vlies
"next to the poetry collections, the novels and dramas [she'd] read at
university" (E 46). Here are the relevant passages.

Jy het huIle langs die digbundels, die romans en dramas wat jy op

universiteit gelees het, langs Wuthering Heights en Northanger Abbey
en Belydenis in die skemering en Die kersieboord en Die heks van
Leipoldt en Kringloop [Jan die UJinde en Die siel [Jan die miel' in die
rakke gepak. (A 48)

You packed them in the shelves next to the poetry collections, the nov-
els and dramas you'd read at university, next to T.S. Eliot and Donne
and Hopkins and the Complete Shakespeare and the Oxford Collected
Poems and Wuthering Heights and Northanger Abbey and Belydenis
in die Skemer and The Cherry Orchard and Die Heks by Leipoldt and
Kringloop [Jan die Winde and The Soul of the White Ant. (E 46)

As if to explain allusions inserted elsewhere, Heyns adds books to the shelves

in the English translation, specifically collections of poetry by T.S. Eliot, Donne,
Hopkins, the plays of Shakespeare, and the Oxford Collected Poems (although
the latter is referred to elsewhere in the Afrikaans text so we might perhaps not
regard this as an import; A 213; E 204). Heyns retains Afrikaans titles, however,
even as he mistranscribes one (" Belydenis in die Skemer") and has Milla read
an English translation of Eugene Marais (The Soul of the White Ant) where we
might expect her to own it in the Afrikaans given that other Afrikaans works in
this list are not translated into English (the titles are simply capitalized).
l may stand accused of pedantry here, so let me ask rather, setting aside
the imported texts, why Heyns did not translate aIl of the titles into English
(as the Afrikaans translation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard makes
way for the English in Heyns's list, for example). Surely not because the
Afrikaans titles he retains had not been translated into English in reality,
for this is a rationale not sustained elsewhere (as we shall see shortly). The
Milla character in the English translation-and in those others that follow
the English text, compounding the changes with their own choices about
what to translate from what is retained in Afrikaans within the English text,
what to leave if in English in the original Afrikaans-language text, what to
add, and so on-becomes something other than the Afrikaner woman she is
in the original text. 25 Milla becomes a much more bilingual reader, more au
fait with canonical Anglophone texts, her bookshelf rather less domestic-
in the sense of being local-than in the original, in which we see her simply
imagining herself possibly rendering her locatedness less domestic through
access to a world language.
Similarly interesting substitutions and additions take place in the opening
chapter, in which Agaat repacks books that have tumbled out of the book-
case in Milla's sickroom. 26 In sorne cases in Heyns's translation, published
English translations of Afrikaans tides are offered as substitutions, while in
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 203
others the tides are translated freely. Henry ]ames's The Portrait of a Lady
is added to the bookshelf and Eben Venter's Ek stamel ek sterwe makes
way for Faulkner's As l Lay Dying. Venter's novel was published in English
translation as My Beautiful Death in 2006, but this translation could, of
course, not be on Milla's bookshelf in 1996 (the novel's present), although if
Milla's bookshelf in 1947 (in the previous example) had Afrikaans tides on
it that are retained in the English translation, it is not clear why something
like Ek stamel ek sterwe could not be retained too in the novel's present.
The fact that Venter's Afrikaans text was published in the same year that
Agaat handles it (in the Afrikaans original) suggests in fact that it is she-
Agaat-who has kept up with new local fiction (Milla has been incapaci-
tated for nearly three years), something that is lost through the appearance
of Faulkner, for whom one wonders whether Agaat would have much time.
ln other words Faulkner's novel is likely Milla's in Heyns's text, whereas
Venter's is quite possibly Agaat's in the original.

"If the contemporary novel is increasingly an object to be translated and

[is] translatable," Chris Holmes asks provocatively, "will there be a remain-
der from this process?" (42). Holmes's interest in those forms of cultural
knowledge that resist assimilation through translation-understood met-
aphorically and literally-Ieads him to the metaphor of the closed book,
"the object of knowledge that effects narrative development without mak-
ing itself legible as part of that larger narrative," which he traces through
particular Anglophone examples (43). (One could certainly expand consid-
erably on the closed books in MiIla's-or Agaat's-differendy configured
bookcases above, though there is no space to do so in this essay.) Here
Emily Apter's endorsement of a kind of keeping alive of the possibilities of
non-translation cornes into view as a counterpoint to Rebecca Walkowitz's
idea of literatures that eye their own translated futures (Holmes 46; Apter,
"Untranslatables"; Walkowitz, "Unimaginable"). South African critic Carli
Coetzee's valorization of what she calls "accented" thinking-the imagina-
tion of discursive exchanges that resist the expectation of necessary translat-
ability into hegemonic languages-is another recent example of a grappling
with this problematic (Coetzee xi, 157).
ln the case of Van Niekerk's Agaat, the issue of translatability and the
closed book of knowledge is slighdy differendy inflected than in these criti··
cal formulations, 1 would suggest. De Kock's translation of TJ-iomf proved
that writing as determinedly local as Van Nierkerk's could be translated, but
also that the "world language" into which it might be translated could have
determinedly local variants. That decisions might be made about how to ren-
der a text in a version accessible locally and globally, but whose compromises
seem acceptable to the author (we think of Van Niekerk's collaboration with
204 Andrew van der Vlies
De Kock, and with Heyns on Agaat) does not suggest necessarily that such
a text can be considered as having been written with its own translatability
in mind; this might more easily be said about texts written in a globally
accessible English (though l would suggest there are always remainders).
Nor do l believe that there is much to be gained from maintaining a posi-
tion that holds that certain works are inJrinsically untranslatable-unless,
in fact, such a daim is largely rhetorical (as it seems to be in Apter's case).27
That Agaat seems to set out to be encydopedic in relation to words that
have fallen out of use in current Afrikaans usage suggests that it was already
performing a kind of translation within the very language in which it was
written: this was the primary act of translation imagined in the text. The
translation into English performed by Heyns suggests nothing more than
that anything might be translated, after the facto Ir has not been my intention
to argue in the first instance that Heyns's translation might have been more
nuanced or that he might have made different choices-though the reader
might certainly infer this from my discussion. Rather, it has been to illustrate
the inevitable loss that happens when translation enters a "world language"
(in sorne senses what l have described as this translator's strange choices
merely helps make my point more dearly), a loss that is imagined within the
world of the novel itself, and one that replicates structurally the unquantifi-
able loss that results from the enforced adoption of Agaat into a language
community that polices its boundaries in such a way that she can never be
entirely at home, even if-truer to say even as-she performs competencies
that are taken by the community itself to mark membership thereof to a
degree even better than its "native" members.
There is an ethical dimension here too, of course. Musing on his trans-
lation of Triomf, De Kock suggests that the ethics of translation matters
in South Africa, as it does in any multilingual, multi,·ethnic society with
a history of colonialism, trauma, and inequality, because ethics is meta-
phorically at the very core of writing-or of representation more broadly.
"[I]n a setting of unresolved heterogeneity, the translation of experience,
the mediation of perception, and the static-ridden transfer of intercultural
comrnunication become the matter of a bigger, more problematic mode of
translation," De Kock argues ("Cracking" 18).28 This might suggest that
literature serves in the South African context to bridge local communities.
The sad fact, however, is that fiction is not the vehide for cross-community,
inter-community conversation in South Africa. Less than one per cent of the
nation regularly buys books; the proportion is highest among readers of
Afrikaans fiction, like Agaat. My point is th us not only that Heyns makes
choices that might usefully be examined with a view to elaborating their
pedagogical, ideological, and cultural implications. More broadly, if reading
literature in translation is something of which we ought to do more in or der
to encounter that which is not like us and ours, it seems a paradox that the
otherness we encounter in literature that travels across borders is so often
rendered familiar.
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 205
NOTES

1. The author wishes to thank Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen for the
invitation that prompted this essay and for their suggestions during the process of
revision; also Peter D. McDonald, Derek Attridge, Chris Holmes, Sarah Brouillette,
and especiaIly Patrick Flanery, for reading drafts of the essay in progress.
2. Throughour this essay hereafter, page references to different versions of the
novel are preceded by an initial: A for the Afrikaans (original); E for the English,
N for the Durch, and S for the Swedish translations.
3. Dutch, Swedish, and Italian, with rights sold for the French, German, and
Norwegian translations ("Current" 32-33).
4. For Milla's diary entry as it appears in the Afrikaans original, see A 210.
5. Van Niekerk claimed, in conversation with Sonja Loots in 2004, that she wanted
"to record the Afrikaans language, to archive the language, bits of it that are no
longer heard" (iv; my translation).
6. Van Niekerk was called the archaeologist of the Afrikaner soul in one early
review (Brynard).
7. I am thinking here of the novel's engagement with Elsa Joubert's 1978 Die
Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena. MiIla's husband Jak raises the case of white,
Afrikaans-speaking author Joubert's retelling of the story of her black domestic
servant as an example of "Afrikaners making a name for themselves with coon
stories that they pick up in the backyard and spread far and wide as gospel
truth"; he caIls this, sarcastically, "[f]irst-class export produce." Jak's critique is
of Joubert (and implicitly of Milla for her interest in Agaat), but also of Poppie
Nongena-"old Poppie Whatsername"-for "recount[ing] her miseries as she
knew the writer wanted to hear them" (E 597-98; A 618).
8. This is made clear early in the novel: "She'd already marked the bit she wants to
read tonight, the corner of the page emphatically dog-eared" (E 9).
9. Specifically Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award (2011) and the St. Francis
College Literary Prize (2011). AlI information on prizes from "Current."
10. It is worth noting here that the British edition of Heyns's English translation of
Agaat, published in the United Kingdom as The Way of the Women, does not
use the accents used in the South African English translation to approximate
the many instances of accents used for emphasis in the original Afrikaans text.
This unaccented text was later published as the American (English) edition as
Agaat.
11. See variously Damrosch (3-5) and Walkowitz ("Comparison Literature";
"Unimaginable" 217). Walkowitz argues that while "literary studies and com-
parative literary studies" both traditionally "trade in national categories and
assume the ontologie al integrity of a given text," an idea of" comparison litera-
ture," sitting "uneasily within methodologies, comparative and national, that
assign unique locations or unique substance to literaiT artifacts," might require
us "to imagine new geographies of literary production and requires method-
ologies that understand the history of a book to include its many editions and
translations" ("Comparison Literature" 568).
12. South African singers Valiant Swan and Randall Wicomb have both offered
versions set to music.
13. The quotation from Auden is credited in a general note in the acknowledge-
ments at the end of the translation (E 696).
206 Andrew uan der Vlies
14. The line is "Tears idle tears l know not what they mean" (E 74). The corre-
sponding entry in the Afrikaans original ends with the preceding observation
("must be the hormones that are mixed up"), in the original Afrikaans "seker
maar die hormone wat deurmekaar is" (A 77).
15. The Swedish reads: "vara hormonerna som spokar. Tarar tamma tarar jag vet
inte vad de betyder" (5 84).
16. "1 aIlt vasentligt ar detta en oversattning' av den engelska utgavan" (Hval 716).
17. The instances include in the Prologue, "Aljander deur die bos" becoming "Fare for-
ward, traveller!"-a quotation from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" (A 4; E 4). Heyns
also imports an allusion to The Waste Land and, behind it, to Antony & Cleopatra
(A 510; E 493); Heyns's explanation can be read in his essay on the difficulties
of translation ("Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain" 132). England also notes
the appearance of a line from "East Coker" (from Eliot's Four Quartets) on ends
being present in beginnings (A 699; E 645). Finally, he notes the rendering of the
line "alles saI regkom" (A 685), as "aIl shall be weIl," an echo of a line that occurs
twice in "Little Gidding" (A 685; E 661). England reads this against Eliot's own
quotation of the line from the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich, for
whom it has rather different implications than for Milla de Wet (England 11-14).
18. Sonja Loots suggests it is "a reckoning with what Van Niekerk jokingly describes
as 'purple prose full of noble labour terminology [arbeid ade/-terminologie],
overly lyrical ... and loaded with the farming-is-burdensome-topos" (Loots iv;
my translation).
19. In an interview in De Kat magazine, De Kock explained that Triomfs language
is "a bastardised Afrikaans, as Breyten Breytenbach means by 'bastard'-a kind
of bastardization that smites away the narrow, dark little corners of 'good'
Afrikaans" (De Kock, "Vertaler" 32; my translation). It is the pretense to purity
of "Algemene Beskaafde Afrikaans" ("General Civilized Afrikaans"), the lan-
guage of Christian higher education and of the establishment Durch Reformed
Church, that is being attacked here.
20. According to De Kock, "1 decided ta do a translation that mimics this kind of
bastardisation" (Scholtz 31-32).
21. These texts provide the epigraphs: see A iii-iv; Ev-vi. Milla lists them as neces-
sities when planning to move Agaat into a servant's room; see A 55; E 52.
In chapter 16 (in the section set in the present, on 13 December 1996), Milla
notices Agaat has piled aIl three volumes on the dressing table: A 464; E 449.
l explore ideas of adopted competencies in relation to theories of technicity,
temporality, and ideology, in a chapter of my monograph-in-progress and do
not here have the space ta elaborate further.
22. "[M]ust point them our to A[gaat]," Milla notes in the English text (E 74). In the
original, her comment is: "ou boek =vol snaakse woorde & spelfoute moet vir
A. attent maak daat'op" (A 78).
23. See, for example, Tager for an instance of local implications of the widespread
national popularity for the soap opera during this same period.
24. De Kock also notices the substitutions and additions in his 5unday Times review
of Heyns's translation, though without detailed analysis, and withholding
one ("Found in Translation" 18).
25. The Swedish translation follows Heyns, but translates al! English and Afrikaans
titles except for the Oxford Col!ected Poems and Northanger Abbey (5 55); the
Dutch translation repeats the Afrikaans exactly (N 44).
 "MÊME DYING STOP CONFIRM ARRIVAL STOP" 207
26. "Sy het die titels opgesê soos sy huIle teruggesit het. Met 'n reguit stem, die
hele lys. Laat vrugte, Die burgemeester van Slaplaagte, Foxtrot van die vlei-
seters, Sewe dae by die Silbersteins. Dis nog niks. Drie en veel'tig jaar by die
De Wets, Vloedwater in die voortuintel', Op veld en l'ante, Kroniek van Kalkoen-
poort, Kringe in 'n bos, Reguit spore in die halfiuoestyn, Uitdraai, July's People,
Ek stamel ek sterwe, Die afdraand van die dag is kil, Wie skryf kl'Y opdraand,
Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, Stoetmeesters val nie flou nie, tsk, probeer
Die vroedvrou van Tradouw, Hierdie lewe, Daardie Doodgaan, Juffrou Sophia
vlug vorentoe, The Story of an African Fal'm, hmf, dan liewer In the Heart of
the Country" (A 16). Compare this with Heyns's translation: "She recited the
tides as she put them back. With a straight voice, the whole list. Late Harvest,
The Mayor of Colesberg, Cm'nival of the Carnivores, Seven Days at the
Silbersteins. Thât was nothing. Forty-three Years with the De Wets, Floodwaters
in the Fall, On Veld and Ridge, Chronic/e of Crow's Crag, Circ/es in a Forest,
Straight Traeks in the Semi-desert, TUl'n-off, July's People, As l Lay Dying, The
Doumhill of the Day is Chill, She Who Writes Waits, The Long JOUl'ney of
Poppie Nongena, Breeders Don't Faint, tsk, try The Midwife of Tradouw, This
Life That Death, Miss Sophie Fiees Forward, The Portrait of a Lady, The Story
of an African Farm, hmf, rather then [sic] In the Heart of the Country" (E 14).
The Swedish bookshelf has only Swedish titles, apart from July's People, As
l Lay Dying, The Portrait ofa Lady, and The Story of an Afriean Farm (S 23).
27. Apter suggests that to hold open the category of the untranslatable is not to
endorse "pure difference in opposition to the always translatable" (though the
"always translatable" remains "suspect as just another non-coeval form of the
romantic Absolute, or fetish of the Other, or myth of henneneutic inaccessi-
bility"); rather, she advances "a linguistic form of creative failure" that might
counter the illusion that world literature allows unfettered access ta the rest-of-
the-world's riches in quasi-imperialist fashion (Apter, Against 20).
28. See further: "[R]ecasting perceived and reimagined experience about others and
otherness in a language other than that in which it arose-across different value
systems, incommensurably divergent cultures, unevenly aligned epistemologies,
opposing cosmologies and inconsistem worldviews, has historically been the
core matter of the writing project itself" (De Kock, "Cracking" 17-18).

WORKS CITED

Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Potities of Untranslatability. London:

Verso, 2013. Print.
- - - . "Untranslatables: A World System." New Literm'y History 39.3 (2008):
581-98. Print.
Auden, W. H. Col!eeted Poems. Ed. Edward .Mendelson. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Print.
Brynard, Karin. "Argeoloog van die Afrikanersel." Insig July 2004: 55-57. Prim.
Coetzee, Carli. Aecented Futures: Language Aetivism and the Ending of Apartheid.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013. Print.
"Current Client List." Blake Friedmann Sept. 2014. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003. Print.
208 Andrew uan der Vlies
De Kock, Leon. "Cracking the Code: Translation as Transgression in Triomf" Journal
of Literary Studies 25.3 (2009): 16-38. Print.
- - - . "Found in Translation." Sunday Times 28 Jan. 2007: 18. Print.
- - - . "Intimate Enemies: A Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel
Heyns about Agaat and Its Translation into English." Journal of Literm'y Studies
25.3 (2009): 136-51. Print.
- - - . "Vertaler se triomf." De Kat May 199'9: 32. Print.
England, Frank. "Imposing Eliot: On Translating Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk."
Journal of Literary Studies 29.1 (2013): 1-19. Print.
Heyns, Michiel. "Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain: On Translating Agaat."
Journal of Literary Studies 25.3 (2009): 124-35. Print.
- - - . "Translator's Note." Agaat. Marlene van Niekerk. Trans. Michiel Heyns.
]eppestown: Jonathan Bali, 2006. iii. Print.
Holmes, Chris. "What the World Leaves Behind: Ready-Made Translations and the
'Closed Book' in the Postcolonial Novel." Literature, Geography, Translation: Stud-
les in World Writing. Ed. Cecilia Alvstad, Stefan Helgesson, and David Watson.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.40-53. Print.
Hval, Niclas. "Om oversattningen." Agaat. Marlene van Niekerk. Trans. Niclas
Hval. Stockholm: Weylers Forlag, 2012. 716. Print.
Joubert, Elsa. Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1978. Print.
Loots, Sonja. "Nog in die kielsog: Marlene van Niekerk het met Sonja Loots gesels
oor haar nuwe roman, Agaat." Rapport [PerspektiefJ 28 Nov. 2004: iv. Print.
"Meme, n." Oxford English Dictionary Online. Sept. 2014. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Opperman, D. J., ed. Groot Verseboek: 'n Bloemlesing uit die Afrikaanse Poësie.
Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1951. Print.
Pym, Anthony. Exploring Translation Theory. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Scholtz, Hettie. "Digter skep eie idioom vir Engelse Triomf." Boekeseksie May 1999:
31-32. Prim.
Tager, :Michele. "Identification and Interpretation: The Bold and the Beautiful and
the Urban Black Viewer in KwaZulu-Natal." Critical Arts 11.1-2 (1997): 95-119.
Print.
Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2004. Print.
- - - . Agaat. Trans. Michiel Heyns. Jeppestown: Jonathan BaU, 2006. Print.
- - - . Agaat. Trans. Riet de Jong-Goossens. Amsterdam: Querido, 2006. Print.
- - - . Agaat. Trans. Michiel Heyns. New York: Tin House, 2010. Print.
- - - . Agaat. Trans. Niclas Hval. Stockholm: Weylers Forlag, 2012. Prim.
- - - . The Way of the Women. Trans. Michiel Heyns. London: Little, Brown, 2007.
Print.
Venter, Eben. El( stamel ek sterwe. Cape Town: Queillerie, 1996. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1996. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd
ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Prim.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. "Comparison Literature." New Literary History 40.3 (2009):
567-82. Print.
- - - . "Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World
Literature." Novel: A Forum 011 Fiction 40.3 (2007): 216-39. Print.
Weyler, Svante. Message to Stefan Helgesson. 19 Dec. 2014. E-mail.
13 Transcendental Untranslatables
Emerson and Translation
David Watson

For much of the twentieth century critics cast Ralph Waldo Emerson as
the "faintly embarrassing guardian of our most cherished American isms:
optimism, exceptionalism, individualism, ahistoricism" (Posnock 142). Tak-
ing at its word his early dedication of his work to the "Spirit of America"
(Journals l 160), cri tics consecrated and critiqued Emerson for envision-
ing an ahistorical America in which the individual is realized through
the mediation of nature. Canonically, EO. Matthiessen depicts Emerson
as "celebrating life whereby the moment bec ornes infinitely larger than
itself" (626) through a conjunction of the individual and timeless nature
embodied by the nation's landscape. Myra Jehlen's later account differs
little in this respect from Matthiessen's analysis: in Emerson's Nature, she
suggests, "infinite power emerges as the reward of the American's oneness
with America" (19). But for Jehlen, this indicates that Emerson is complicit
with a middle-class ideology whereby landholders imagine their relation
to a land of plenty. Whatever their ideological inflections, these accounts
cohere around a vision of Emerson as imagining the" Spirit of America" is
embodied in the world, and read his work, accordingly, as standing in an
isomorphic relation with the nation. Recently, it has become evident that
such accounts might very weIl offer a "caricature" ("Deep Time" 770) of
Emerson, as Wai Chee Dimock puts it. Lawrence BueIl, for instance, inserts
Emerson in the transatlantic company of the "Victorian sages" who "range
across the domains of human knowledge" (46). In a familiar movement,
a more cosmopolitan Emerson, more amenable to ClU'rent critieal interests
in world literature, appears to supplant the outmoded progenitor of the
American Renaissance.
Emerson's body of work has regularly offered Ameriean studies a rieh
field whereby to reformula te its presuppositions: first a nationalist Emerson
is celebrated by inaugural American studies eritics such as Matthiessen; then
this figure is interrogated eoncurrently with the field's adoption of the proto-
cols of New Historicism, only to be supplanted by a cosmopolitan Emerson
at the moment of its transnational turn. But my aim here is not to account
for these fluctuations in the field imaginary of American studies, or to adju-
dicate between different Emersons. Taking my cue from Emily Apter's insis-
tence that "translation and untranslatability are constitutive of world forms
210 David Watson
of literature" (16),1 want to suggest that Emerson's writing forces us to cal-
culate its relation to national and world literary formations in terms of ques-
tions concerning translatability and untranslatability. Like Apter, 1 do not
associate untranslatability with the nation as if it harbours a language inac-
cessible to outsiders. 1 also do not connect translatability straightforwardly
with the cosmopolitan, as though it guarantees the liquidity of texts circulat-
ing in the global market. Rather, problems around translatability turn out to
be not just about deciding between the nation and cosmopolitan networks,
but primarily about Emerson's own complex relation to both milieus.
Why identify translation as a central issue in how we read Emerson's
relation to national and transnational formations? Such a move is paradig-
matic of contemporary engagements with world literature and, as it turns
out, there is good reason to view Emerson's body of work through this
lens. While until fairly recently translation has been understood as a mar-
ginal activity in antebellum literary America, footnoting its more significant
nationalist projects, there is little doubt about the importance of translation
within Emerson's milieu. 1 Almost aIl of the New England Transcendental-
ists were translators. Margaret Fuller translated Johann Peter Eckermann's
Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens and Bettina von
Arnim's Günderode and induded translations in Summer on the Lakes.
Her 1838 abridged translation of Conversations with Goethe appeared a
scant three years after its initial publication. This translation was part of a
programme intent on transforming German literature and philosophy into
something like Goethe's Weltliteratur for antebellum America, thereby log-
ging the New England community into literary and philosophical moder-
nity. Ir appeared as the sixth volume in the Specimens of Foreign Standard
Literature series, edited by George Ripley, an early contributor together
with Frederic Henry Hedge, Fuller, and Emerson to the New England
Transcendentalist journal The Dial. Other writers Ripley hoped to publish
induded the French Germanophiles Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, and Benja-
min Constant, as weIl as Herder, Schiller, Schlegel, Wieland, Lessing, Jacobi,
Fichte, Schelling, Jean Paul, Uhland, Menzel, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and
de Wette. James Marsh's translation of Herder's On the Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry appeared in 1833. James Freeman Clarke translated de Wette's Theo-
dore; Or, The Skeptic's Conversion for this series, in which the author pro-
vided an overview of Kant, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. Theodore Parker
produced paraphrastic translation of de Wette's A Critical and Historical
Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament. Hedge's
translations ranged from the twenty-eight lengthy excerpts from German
Idealism and Romanticism anthologized in his Prose Writers of Gennany to
many translations of Schelling and Schiller for The Dial.
Emerson was part of this community of translators. He translated Dante
and Hafiz, and induded in The Dial a brief excerpt from Hyperion by
HOlderlin-the first and last time this poet would appear in America for
a century (Hamlin 108-11). His response to receiving a copy of Fuller's
 Transcendental Untral1slatables 211
translation of Eckermann is telling: "1 am so much in your debt by the
Eckermann book that 1 must at least acknowledge the gift," Emerson writes,
"the translating this book [sic] seems to me a beneficent action for which
America will long thank you" (Letters II 201-202). A similar sentiment
appears in his letters to Frederic Hedge, where he instructs Hedge that
if he knew anything about "foreign Universities, or their professors" he
should inform Emerson, and that if "anything in the shape of poem, letter,
or capriccio, come into your thought, for the Dial, entertain it & send it"
(Letters III 85). Writing from abroad was a welcome distraction from the
"thin romance & roaring politics" (Letters III 84) of America. More impor-
tantly, they confirmed that a "subterranean current of identical thought"
connects "very remote & dissimilar circles of thought & culture" (Letters
II 168). Unsurprisingly, Emerson's essays serve as a testimonial to the deep
inroads foreign influences have made into his writing: fragments from Nova-
lis and Goethe stand next to citations from Sophocles and Wordsworth,
translations from Hafiz, and allusions to the Bhagavad Cita.
Given that a concern with translation permeated Emerson's cultural
milieu and work, it is tempting to consider it as a justification to embed his
writing within transnational networks. 2 But translation activities cannot be
disentangled easily from nationalist projects in antebellum America. Argu-
ing for more awareness of "the intellectuallabors of continental Europe,"
William Ellory Channing suggests in his widely read "On National Litera-
ture" (1830) that it would rectify that "reading is confined too much to
English books" (276). His remark appears unattributed in Ripley's preface
to the first volume of his Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature series
where it justifies the task of "translating the writings of a favorite author
in a foreign literature into our own language" (xi). For Channing and Rip-
ley, translations from Germany and France inoculate America against the
influence of English literature. Pragmatically, such translations are a neces-
sary step in the direction of Emerson's pronouncement in "The American
Scholar" that American dependency "to the learning of other lands" is end-
ing. That is as much to say that for them translation enables a culture to
become more like itself in the long run.
What is more, it is arguably so that translations and transnational cir-
culations provided antebellum America with the protocols whereby to
imagine a national culture. Describing a homological relationship between
the nation and its culture, Emerson writes in "Self-Reliance" that "if the
American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done
by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of
the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house
in which aU these will find themselves fitted" (Essays 271). Suggesting that
a national culture grows out of everyday life and nature, he is restating
an isomorphism offered by the editors of the North American Review in
which they propose that a nationalliterature grows out of a "difference of
country, of habits, of institutions" ("On Models in Literature" 203). These
212 David Watson
editors, Edward Everett, Emerson's professor of dassics at Harvard, George
Ticknor, the first professor of Romance philology and literature at Harvard,
and George Bancroft, founder of modern American historiography and the
first American commentator on Herder and Goethe, were aIl Gottingen
graduates, where they absorbed from German Romanticism their notion of
what a national culture should look like. 3 1

In this history, translations signal transnational continuities but are

reframed within nationalist projects. One of the results of this contradic-
tion, at least in Emerson's writing, is that the act of translation is made
almost invisible in favour of the unattributed content of translated texts.
For instance, when he writes in Nature that the "axioms of physics trans-
late the law of ethics" (Essays 24), he echoes Madame de Staël's axiom
"Almost aIl maxims of physics correspond with the maxims of morals"
(qtd. in MueIler-VoIlmer 105) from her De L'Allemagne (On Germany)-
a key text in Emerson's education in German Romanticism-without
acknowledging either De Staël or the translation that took place for the
axiom to appear within Nature. De Staël's maxim glosses Kant's famous
equation of "the starry heavens above me and the morallaw within me" in
his Critique al Practical Reason, yet in Nature it interprets an unattributed
quote from Emanuel Swedenborg: "'The visible world and the relation of
its part, is the di al plate of the invisible'" (Essays 24). At once invoking
and eliding Swedenborg, De Staël, and Kant, Emerson suppresses the act
of translation and its multilingual contexts. It is as if translation becomes a
secret to be kept from his readers until they realize that what is translated
in his maxim is not ethics into nature or physics, but source texts into a
script dedaring, somewhat ironicaIly, an "original relation to the universe"
(Essays 7).
Considered as a form of linguistic mediation between different contexts,
translation is at once integral to and disavowed by Ernerson's writing, sug-
gesting once again the contradictions surrounding it within a culture that
is both cosmopolitan and dedicated to a nationalist fantasy. But when he
writes that the "axioms of physics translate the law of ethics" he offers
not only a paraphrastic translation but also an account of translation that
shifts our understanding of what it means. 4 Here, as elsewhere in Emerson,
it names primarily a movement between the internaI and external-matter
and soul, or physics and ethics-that establishes astringent continuity
between these antinomies. In a similar vein, in the later" Method of Nature"
Emerson daims that the "individual soul" is the "power to translate the
world into sorne particular language of its own; if not into a picture, a
statue, or a dance,-why, then, into a trade, an art, a science, a mode of liv-
ing, a conversation, a character, an influence" (Essays 122--23). To translate
is then to actualize one of the potentialities inherent in the world and dotlle
it in a "particular language." This is for Emerson a way of asserting a corre-
spondence between the individual, its work, and the world; these are united
via the circulation of the same soul through aIl of them. Sharon Cameron's
 Transcel1del1tal Ul1tral1slatables 213
discussion of the kind of voice we encounter in his essays sheds further
light on this non-linguistic mode of translation. She notes that Emerson acti-
vates an impersonal voice that "speaks despite us, though through us" (22).
Curiously, this experience is de-individualizing: in "The Over-Soul" it is
described as resembling being captured in a "light" that "shines through us
upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is aIl"
(Essays 387). There is no personal voice here; what speaks is what Emerson
calls whim, soul, nature, or fate. Cameron makes clear the consequences of
this for translation: when Emerson offers in translation a citation from The
El1l1eads, it is neither his voice nor Plotinus' voice that we hear, as it is "no
one's voice at all" (16). Emerson is not translating, citing, or plagiarizing
since the citation never belonged to Plotinus, but to the impersonal voice to
which Emerson abandons his writing. Consequently, it is impossible to tell
apart the original author and translator: both are subsumed within the voice
circulating in an unmediated way through aIl things. Strictly speaking, there
are only particular instances of the universal here. Consequently, "civil and
natural history" as weIl as the "history of art and of literature" (Essays 244)
are all "emanations" of "very few laws." Accordingly, linguistic differences
become negligible. Imagining speaking Italian or Arabic, Emerson remarks
that even in speaking different languages "1 say the same things" (Journals
VII 101), rendering thereby the empirical need for translation secondary to
the semantic correspondences between statements. 5
Emerson's thinking on translation follows a curious trajectory. He at
once engages in translation activities and denies the need for them since it
seems to him, as Barbara Packer puts it, that "the book of nature is written
in a single tongue" (190) and requires no translation. Still, Emerson, like
Ripley and others, wants to place translations at the service of a nationalist
project. Consider this passage from his "History":

The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as l. The sun and
moon, water and fire, met his he art precisely as they meet mine. Then
the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic
and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought
of Plato becomes a thought to me,-when a truth that fired the soul
of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When 1 fee! that we two meet in
a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do,
as it were, run into one, why should 1 measure degrees of latitude, why
should 1 count Egyptian years? (Essays 249)

Emerson's scale enlargement appears to do away with any kind of national

or linguistic differences in recognition of the absolute translatability of
experiences across time. Suddenly the present appears to be enlarged by aIl
the possibilities available to the self. But if Emerson thinking in terms of
centuries seems like a scale enlargement, it is also a contraction that brings
temporally and spatially distant resources to present-day America. He is
214 David Watson
marshalIing the resources of antiquity for an American self that "shall col-
lect into a focus the rays of nature" and within whom history "shalI walk
incarnate" (Essays 255).
In essays such as "History," it is difficult to distinguish between a nation-
alist and a cosmopolitan Emerson. Rather, it appears as if he is straining
after a synthesis between these formations, with his insistence on the abso-
lute translatability of discourses across time and space logging him into a
transnational and transhistorical continuum, enabling its American itera-
tion. If so, this synthesis contrasts intriguingly to what he at times sug-
gests are the privative effects of translation. A late essay, "Quotation and
Originality," is concerned explicitly with these effects of translations across
national or linguistic boundaries. The es say pivots around the insight that
"[ 0 Jur debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive,
our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,-and this com-
monly on the ground of other reading or hearing,-that ... one would say
there is no pure originality. AlI minds quote" (Essays 1028). Quotation here
indudes translations, as Emerson makes dear by citing Rabelais, Bacon, and
Grimm's Mémoires in their original. It describes the passage of fragmentary
texts between cultures, languages, and people, and carries with it the risk of
derivation-a "debt to tradition." In this essay, it appears there is very little
that cannot be described as translations, allusions, or citations: "Our coun-
try, customs, laws ... aIl these we never made ... we but quote them" (Essays
1040). By implicating the nation in this movement, Emerson presents it as
a kind of bricolage, built up out of transculturated objects and texts. The
danger of this explicitly transnational understanding of the nation-state is
dispossession. To quote or translate is not to possess but to relinquish own-
ership of what only appears to be your own discourse: "Admirable mimics
have nothing of their own," he daims, "they live as foreigners in the world
of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them" (Essays 1034).
In this essay, Emerson presents an interesting double bind that disarticu-
lates the synthesis offered in essays such as "History." It appears there is
nothing that can be called properly American, no entity that can perpetu-
ate itself without resorting to foreign content; and yet, to translate a self
or community into being is to disown them. To put this differently, he at
once admits to the necessity of the translation activities taking place in ante-
bellum America, and denies the possibility of incorporating these activities
into a nationalist project. After aIl, to live like a "foreigner in the world of
truth" is to be unable to speak and possess the truth in your native tongue.
Moreover, to mimic received truths and traditions is to enter into a relation
of indebtedness with the history from which these originated. In "Guilt His-
tory: Benjamin's Sketch 'Capitalism as Religion,'" Werner Harnacher names
such a temporal relationship a "guilt history," in which whatever occurs,
"happens {rom another and towards yet another and is therefore indebted
to these occurrences"; what takes place in this "line of descent occurs as
a theft in which something is torn away, leaving a lack in the place of its
 Transcendental Untranslatables 215
origin" (83). Harnacher offers this time of guilt and debt as characteris-
tic of capitalism and Christianity, but it serves weIl as a description of the
temporal or der we encounter in Emerson's "Quotation and Originality,"
where indebtedness and thus dispossession emerge as distinctive of a culture
founded on translation.
In "Quotation and Originality" translation does not worle It pro duces a
present shadowed by the past in much the same way Rey Chow daims that
a translation maintains the spectre of its original within its own body. 6 In
fact, translation appears to be invested with the potential to enable an expe-
rience of the present as a site interpenetrated by those traditions to which it
is indebted, the experience essays such as "History" want to repudiate. Con-
sidered as a series of translations and quotations, Emerson's essays are sub-
ject to the same judgments; after aIl, he cites in "Quotation and Originality"
Goethe's remark that "Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by
a thousand different persons, a thousand things" (Essays 1040). However
this essay is contextualized, translation surfaces as at once productive and
destabilizing. From this, we can say that if translation can be called a form
of technics, a writing tool or technique, it shares in the contradiction inher-
ent, according to Jacques Derrida, in aIl technological media: "That which
bears inteIligibility, that which increases inteIligibility, is not intelligible ...
technics is not intelligible," which means, as he goes on to suggest, that
technics "does not belong '" to the field of that which it makes possible"
(Derrida and Stiegler 108). This does not just mean that we cannot use a
particular translation to understand translation as such, but also that the
act of translation exists on the boundaries of the text it produces. Technics,
for Derrida, returns into view as a spectre "irreducible '" to everything it
makes possible," an uncanny visitation that makes the present seem "out of
joint" (Spectres 51), and prompts a "new thinking of borders, a new experi-
ence of the house, the home, and the economy" (Spectres 174). This spectre
exposes the family home, the community, the nation, and aIl the other topai
of civil society and nationalism to a disorienting movement irreducible to
the se institutions themselves; this is exactly the expropriating movement
Emerson associates with translations across national boundaries.
But do the privative effects visible in "Quotation and Originality" also
complicate the other largely non-linguistic mode of translation we find in
Emerson? Few figures seem as resistant to these effects as the poet: as Emer-
son suggests in his 1844 essay "The Poet," the poet unites man and nature
into a homology in which "America is a poem in our eye" (Essays 465).
Described as the "interpreter" (Essays 450) of the world, the poet prom-
ises to "reconcile me to life" (Essays 451). ln the 1841 lecture also entitled
"The Poet," the poet is figured as "a soul through which the universe is
poured,-into his eyes, and it cornes forth ... a fair picture" (Early Lectures
356). As this transformation of the "universe" into a "fair picture" indi-
cates, the role of the poet is, as Emerson puts it, "to translate the world into
sorne particular language of its own." Yet the method of the poet is scarcely
216 David Watson
recognizable as translation. The poet "resembles a mirror carried through
the street, ready to render an image of every created thing" (Essays 467).
Instead of being differentiated from the poet, the reflected images of the
"street" are incorporated in consciousness or the poem without any media-
tion or hesitation. Not simply holding a mirror up to nature, the poet is
"a mirror." Accordingly, reflection here ,is the same as the unification of
poet and place into an "image" in which intervals between mind and nature
are crossed, dosed, and rendered in'elevant. The synchronic unit y of the
Emersonian image, in which differences transform instantaneously into self-
identity, is structurally opposed to normative understandings of translation.
There are no distinctions that would allow the recognition that a media-
tory movement has taken place. Nloreover, it is unlikely that an image that
conflates subject and place requires translation in a direct way. Would such
a translation, in which the image is given extended duration in language
and transported out of its natural habitat, not be a mistranslation, and a
testimonial to the self-sufficiency of the original? It seems the poet's images
escape the expropriating effects of translation pointed to in "Quotation and
Originality." The work of the poet puts into play the possibility of a text that
requires no translation for its existence, and might indeed be untranslatable
in its own right.
Considering that the poet is understood within a nationalist context by
Emerson, it is difficult to not hear traces of Herder's On the Origin of Lan-
guage: "The more alive a language is, the less one has thought of reducing
it to letters, the more spontaneously it rises to the full unsorted sound of
nature-the less, too, is it writeable, the less writeable in twenty letters; and
for outsiders, indeed, often quite unpronounceable" (93). Herder's account
of a national language echoes many of the topai of "The Poet" and the
intellectual milieu of New England Transcendentalism. This language is an
organic extension of nature that refers back to this origin; the nearer it
cornes to its origin, the doser it cornes to the national, and the less open to
"outsiders," or translations. To reiterate this homology, as Emerson does, is
to search for the nation in language. It is also to foredose on translation:
this language can only be grasped in its immediacy, and cannot be carried
across national boundaries in a written script.
It would be premature, however, to condude a reading of "The Poet"
with this depiction of the poet's images as achieving a kind of national pos-
session that is itself untranslatable. While Emerson presents this as a possi-
bility, he interrogates it as weIl in a movement looking forward to the more
privative moments of "Quotation and Originality." Early on in "The Poet" a
passage appears that seems to be not just about translation but also poten-
tially a translation itself:

For poetry was aIl written before time was, and whenever we are so
finely organized that we can penetra te into that region where the air
is music, we hear those primaI warblings and attempt to write them
 Transcendental Untranslatables 217
down, but we la se ever and anon a ward or a verse and substi-
tute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men
of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and
these transcripts, though imperfect, become the sangs of the nations.
(Essays 449)

The resemblances between this passage and the one from Herder's On the
Origin of Language cited earlier are striking: bath posit the existence of a
natural language that is akin to music and cannot be written down prop-
erly. The projection of an organic correspondence between language and
nature leads in both ta the sphere of the national: the "warblings" of nature
become "the songs of the nations." The possibility that Emerson is translat-
ing Herder here is supported by Emerson's familiarity with Herder's writing
and his practice of induding in his essays unattributed translated texts. Yet,
this passage first appears in Emerson as faint praise for the "rude strengths"
of the "second degree" verses of Henry David Thoreau (Journals VIII 257).
Has the origin of this passage in Herder been elided in the same way the
references ta Thoreau have been erased in the published essay? Emerson's
compositional practices invite questions such as this one. The spectre of
translation cannat be fully exorcised from his writing, even, as in "The
Poet," when what is at stake is a mode of poetry that resists translation.
This suggests that we encounter here a situation familiar from "Quotation
and Originality": if the passage is nothing more than an "imperfect" "tran-
script" of Herder, its status in Emerson's essay is ambiguous and makes it
undear whether he daims possession of or disowns his writing here.
But leaving aside question about the status of this passage, it seems that
what Emerson adds ta Herder is a sustained narrative on translation, in
which he makes explicit the mediation occurring at the centre of his syn-
thesis of nature, language, and nationhood. The passage from the eternal
music of nature ta the written word resembles the incarnation of the soul
in the body, as weIl as a movement between signifying systems that become
increasingly corporeal. As such, it puts into play a distinction between the
semantic meaning of a text and the signs conveying this meaning that enables
translation. In his lecture "The Poet," this point is made even more emphati-
cally: we are told there that the "language of truth is always pure music,"
and that "language subdued by music" is a "fine translation into the speech
of man of breezes and waves and ripples" (Early Lectures 358). This passage
between music and language is then neither instantaneous nor organic, as
the work necessary to give material incarnation to this "music" makes dear.
The "cadences" the poet overhears must be transcribed and transported into
a new language via a contingent process that, if it works, would produce
something like the "songs of the nations." But there is no direct continuity
between the words of the poet and the "warblings" of nature. First of aIl,
this music needs ta be written down, and writing disfigures the original text:
"we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our
218 David Watson
own, and thus miswrite the poem." The transcript or translation is a po or
copy that testifies as much to its dislocation from its source as to the subsis-
tence of nature's "cadences" in the writing of man, which, in turn, confirms
nothing so much as the dimness of the echoes of nature's "primaI warblings"
in the poet's words, and the asymmetrical relation between this poem and
the "songs of the nations." As in "Quotatian and Originality," the poet fails
to fully possess the "cadences" of nature, and cannot daim full ownership
of the translation as if it originated from within himself.
Unsurprisingly, from this point in the essay onwards, the poet who would
reconcile language, self, and nature becomes someone for whom Emerson
searches "in vain" (Essays 465). For example, when listening to a young
poet's verse, Emerson finds that the reconciliation it promises is fleeting.
For a moment it seems that America is given a "new confession" by its
"interpreter" (Essays 450). Later, however, Emerson complains comically
that instead of carrying "me into the he aven," "this winged man" takes him
"like the fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground" (Essays 452).1
The cause for this dismissal is again the poet's "imperfect" "transcript" of
nature. InitiaIly, his words inspire Emerson to "mount above these douds
and opaque airs in which 1 live ... and from the heaven of truth 1 shall see
and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate
nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what 1 am doing"
(Essays 451). The poet seems to embody the unit y of the manifold of life
and is identified with nature itself: "1 had fancied that ... nature had spent
her fires, and behold! aIl night, from every pore, these fine auroras have
been streaming" (Essays 451). But the description of the poet's words as
"fine auroras" is troubling. In part, it repeats the earlier description in which
Emerson exdaims, "How gladly we listened! how credulous! .. , We sat in
the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out aIl the stars" (Essays 451). Here,
the words of the poet are identified with the "sunrise," and this "sunrise" is
understood as that which illuminates and annuls distances. In other words,
"the aurora" is the revelation of man's unit y with nature. But the "auroras"
Emerson offers a few lines la ter as a trope for the poet's figures come not
from the rising sun; they are the Northern or Southern lights-illusory
tricks of light without visible origin. In this drama the poet's audience dis-
covers what Emerson has learned earlier, namely that "[ e]very natural fact
is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also"
(Essays 131), as he puts it in "Method to Nature."
No origin is discoverable in this mise-en-abyme; each time man thinks he has
reached and has been reconciled with nature, he is reminded that "aIl language
is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance,
not as farms and houses are, for homestead" (Essays 463). Signs convey us to
other signs in this movement, which associates writing with an expropriation
from the national. In this sense, Emerson's notion of translation parallels Paul
de Man's account of romantic allegory as designating "primarily a distance in
 Transcendental Untranslatables 219
relation to its own origin" (207). AUegory refers implicitly then to "another
sign that preceded it ... a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since
it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority" (207). From this
perspective, aUegories are temporal narratives, which suggest the irrecoverable
nature of an anterior moment, even as they connote this time frame. If this
is the case, we might have to suggest that translations produce for Emerson
similarly allegorical accounts of their sources, which signify, first and foremost,
their remoteness from their origin. After aU, Emerson's account of the young
poet serves to confirm his earlier insight in "The Poet" that writing offers not
an almost impossible reconciliation with nature or the origins of language; this
rapprochement is exactly what is postponed and, at best, projected into the
future.
In making this point, my aim is not to associate Emerson's body of writ-
ing with the deferrals of deconstruction, or to suggest he simply demystifies
the reconciliatory synthesis he offers at times. In essays such as "The Poet"
he alternates between insisting on the translatability and the untranslatabil-
ity of discourse, in much the same way as among his late essays we find
both "Quotation and Originality" and "Books," in which he suggests that
whatever is best in any book is always translatable (219). To put this dif-
ferently, he turns between thinking of writing as activating what Cameron
terrns an impersonal voice to viewing it as faUing short of achieving the
synthesis he desires. In a way, to attend to problems around translation in
his writing is to discover a dynamic re-evaluation of the writing itself, of its
failures and successes. But more immediately, it casts new light on contras-
tive daims seeking to rein sert Emerson within his national context or to
emancipate him into a transnational field. Jay Grossman, for instance, sug-
gests in 2003 that Emerson positioned himself as a representative American
and "retained a foundational belief in himself as truth-giver to the masses"
(137). Dimock, in contrast, argues in 2006 that Emerson habitually per-
forms a kind of "scale enlargement" in his writing in which "aIl human dif-
ferences vanish" (Through Other Continents 55). These conflicting claims
emerging a few years apart appear less contradictory when viewed from the
perspective of Emerson's complex understanding of translation. On the one
hand, he proffers a synthesis in which distinctions between national and
transnational discourses disappear into a fantasy of an impersonal voice
that is both undifferentiated and American. This fantasy coordinates and
draws together the national and cosmopolitan projects of New England's
literary culture by asserting the absolute translatability of any discourse. On
the other, he imagines a mode of writing impacted by the untranslatability
of other texts or signifying systems. This imaginative possibility results in an
expropriating movement, which does not so much re-establish real distinc-
tions between the national, the foreign, and the transnational as dispossesses
Emerson of any claims to these formations. In some respects this resembles
what Emily Apter describes as a "dispossessive stance" that "casts World
220 David Watson
Literature as an unownable estate ... over which no one exerts proprietary
prerogative" (329), but instead of lending itself to the imagining of a textual
commons, Emerson's privations block his access to such a literary commons.
Ultimately, the Emersonian account of translation l have been pursuing here
connects asymptotically to national and transnational readings of his work,
narrating at a distance the possibilities has of relating his work to these
formations.
We might very weIl then supplement national and transnational readings
of Emerson with this fantasy of absolute translatability as weIl as its denial,
leaving us thereby with four rather than two antinomies whereby to calculate
his relation to the field that can be heuristically identified with world litera-
ture. One result of such a move would be to begin to dislodge the tendency
to read Emerson in isomorphic or homological terms, whether the homol-
ogy draws parallels between his texts and the nation, cosmopolitan vistas,
or the transchronological continuum explored by Dimock. In Emerson's
case, questions about translatability and untranslatability complicate such
parallels, leaving us unsure about what exact homology is to be established,
if parallels of this kind can be drawn at aIl. More speculatively, it might very
weIl be the case that such a four-fold structure would enable us, as Fred-
ric Jameson remarks of his reformulation of Greimas's semiotic triangle, to
map "the limits of a specific ideological conscÎousness" (47) by identifying
its impasses and contradictions. Such a historicization of Emerson's texts
would necessarily add an account of their internallogic and textual dynam-
ics to descriptions of the circulations of texts across national boundaries and
the centripetal pull of national ideologies. Within it, Emerson would attempt
to transcend and resolve an opposition between cosmopolitan ambitions
and nationalist aspirations via a synthesizing movement, even while he
remains locked within the possibility that his ambitions and aspirations are
unrealizable and that the protocols ensuring the translatability of discourse
will fail. That is to say, it would map the same convulsive movements as
Emerson do es in "Circles" when he asserts "1 am God in nature; l am a weed
by the wall" (Essays 168) by relating hirn dynamically to national and trans-
national formations, ev en while keeping the possibility in play that we drift,
as he puts it in "Experience,"" [g]hostlike ... through nature, and should not
know our place again" (Essays 471).

NOTES

1. See Mueller-Vollmer for the argument that we have an incomplete history of

New England Transcendentalism if we ignore the impact on it of translations
from Europe, as weIl as for a detailed account of these translation activities.
2. Several studies have attempted just that. Laura Dassow Walls argues, for
instance, that Emerson's "The American Scholar" was his "attempt to rewrite
[Francis] Bacon in an American idiom" (40), while Patrick J. Keane suggests
 Transcendental Untranslatables 221
that Emerson should be situated within a transnational configuration made up
of German idealism, British Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism.
3. The relationship George Bancroft imagines between the nation and literature is
given in his "The Life and Genius of Goethe": "If a good book contains the best
thoughts and sentiments of a fine mind, 'the life blood of a master spirit,' the
literature of a nation contains aIl the noble feelings, the creed, the morals, and
the aspiration of a people" (304).
4. Noah Webster's definition of the verb "translate" in his American Dictionary
of' the English Language is a useful reminder of the complex associations swirl-
ing around the term in antebellum America: "1. To bear, carry or remove from
one place to another ... 2. To remove or convey to heaven, as a human being,
without death ... 3. To transfer; to convey from one to another ... 4. To cause to
remove from one part of the body to another ... 5. To change ... 6. To interpret;
to render into another language; to express the sense of one language in the
words of another ... 7. To explain" (851).
5. For an account of this remark, see Boggs (101-102). As she notes, for "Emerson ...
the return to a univers al language results in the erasure of linguistic and inteIlectual
differences" (102).
6. Rey Chow observes that there are always "inequitable temporalities" (569) at
work in any transfer between an original text and its translation: the origi-
nal text is lost and maintained within its translation as a mournful "spectral
presence" (Chow 573). Chow is following Derrida's insight that translation
"elevates, preserves, and negates" the "mournful and debt-Iaden memory of the
singular body, the first body, the unique body" of the source text ("What 1s a
'Relevant' Translation?" 199).
7. Emerson's journal entries of 1842 reveal the young poet as William Ellery
Channing, who wrote some poetry while visiting Emerson (foumals VII 463,
468-69).

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Books." Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol.
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Contributors

Sarah Brouillette is an Associate Professor in the Department of English

at Carleton University, where she teaches contemporary British, Irish,
and postcolonialliteratures, as weIl as cultural theory. She is the author
of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and
Literature and the Creative Economy (2014).
Helena C. Buescu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of
Lisbon. Her main areas of interest are nineteenth- and twentieth-century
literature, as weIl as theoretical issues in comparative and world litera-
ture. She has held several positions as Visiting Professor or Researcher
(Universities of KaIn, Indiana, Harvard, King's College London, Santiago
de Compostela, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Wisconsin,
Stanford, Princeton) and she has published widely, in both Portuguese
and international periodicals. She founded and directed the Centre for
Comparative Studies in Lisbon and belongs to the Board of the Institute
for World Literature. She has won several prizes and is a member of the
Academia Europaea.
Claire Ducournau is Associate Professor in Francophone Literature at Paul
Valéry University, Montpellier III. Her research interests include African
literature, the sociology of literature, publishing history, and postcolo-
niaI studies. Her first book, La Fabrication du "classique africain," is
forthcoming from CNRS Éditions. She has co-edited, with the collec-
tive "Write Back," Postcolonial studies: Modes d'emploi (2013), and,
with Gisèle Sapiro and George Steinmetz, Représenter la colonisation, a
special issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (2010).
Stefan Helgesson is Professor of English at Stockholm University. His
research interests include southern African literature in English and
Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory,
and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis:
Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele, and Coetzee (2004) and
Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), has edited
volume four of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective (2006),
and is co-editor of Literature, Geography, Translation (2011).
226 Contributors
Yvonne Lindqvist is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Interpretation
and Translation Studies within the Department for Swedish and
Multilingualism at Stockholm University. Her dissertation Translation as
a Social Practice (2002) dealt with translation strategies, comparing and
contextualizing translations of Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison and
Harlequin romances published in Sweden during the 1990s. Lindqvist's
later research focuses on developing a multimodal translation analysis
with culinary literature as textual material and systemic functional gram-
mar as a theoretical framework. Her most recent research project, on the
interactions between literary peripheries on the global translation field,
concerns bibliomigration patterns of Caribbean French, Spanish, and
English literature to Scandinavia.
Peter D. McDonald is a Fellow of St Hugh's College and Professor of English
and Related Literatures at the University of Oxford. His research focuses
on the socio-political space of literary production and literature as a spe-
cific mode of thinking. His main publications include British Literary
Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (1997) and The Literature
Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009). He
is currently working on a book about literature and internationalism
since the 1860s.
Maria Olaussen is Professor of English at Linnaeus University in Sweden
and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
Her teaching and research focus on African literature, gender, human-
animal, and postcolonial studies, with particular emphasis on southern
African literature. Her latest book is the edited collection Africa Writing
Europe (2009), which deals with representations of Europe in African
literature. She has also co-edited special issues of the journal Kunapipi
(2012) on African intellectual archives and of English Studies in Africa
(2013) on the works of Abdulrazak Gurnah. She is a member of the
research centre on Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Spaces at
Linnaeus University.
Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the École des hautes études en sci-
ences sociales and Research Director at the CNRS. Her interests include
the sociology of intellectuals, of literature, and of translation. She is the
author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (1999, translated as The
French Writers' War, 2014), La Responsabilité de l'écrivain: Littérature,
droit, et morale en France (2011), Sociologie de la littérature (2014),
and of numerous articles in twelve languages. She has also edited or co-
edited Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France à l'heure de la
mondialisation (2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale
(2009), and several other volumes. She is the editor of the forthcoming
Dictionnaire international Pierre Bourdieu and runs the European Project
INTERCO,·SSH (FP7).
 Contributors 227
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Associate Professor in Comparative Litera-
ture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World
Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature
(2008), The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in
Body, Mind and Society (2013), and the editor of several volumes, including
World Literature: A Reader (2012) and The Posthuman Condition: Ethics,
Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012). He has pub-
lished in the fields of literary historiography, modernist lite rature, world
literature, canonization, and historical representations of the posthuman.
Thomsen has taught at the Institute for World Literature (Harvard, 2013),
and he is currently co-director of the research project "Posthuman
Aesthetics" (2014-2017). He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
Andrew van der Vlies was born and raised in South Africa and is a gradu-
ate of Rhodes University in Grahamstown and of the University of
Oxford. He is the author of South African Textual Cultures (2007)
and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace: A Reader's Guide (2010), and editor of
Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (2012) and of Safundi:
The Journal of South African and American Studies. He has published
widely on South African writers, literary history, print cultures, and art,
and recently completed a project on affect, temporality, and postapart-
heid fiction. Van der Vlies teaches in the Department of English at Queen
Mary University of London and is a Research Associate in the Depart-
ment of English Literature at Rhodes University.
Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in American and Comparative
Literature at the University of Leuven. He was previously an Assistant
Professor of English at Stockholm University. He works in the fields of
critical theOl-Y, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. He is the
author of Romanticism After the Holocaust (2010) and Contemporary
Literature and the End of the Nouel: Creature, Affect, Fonn (2015), and
the co-editor of volumes on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, the relation
between Bildung and the state in the nineteenth century, the relations
between literature and cultural identity, and, most recently, the notion of
the creaturely.
David Watson is an Associate Professor specializing in American Literature
at the Department of English, Uppsala University. He has published on
modernist poetry, nineteenth-century and contemporary American litera-
ture, and transnational and translation studies, and is the co-editor of two
volumes, Trauersing Transnationalism (2011) and Literature, Geography,
Translation (2011). His current research addresses depictions of finance
and security in the contemporary American novel, as weIl as the rhetoric
of popular sovereignty in the early American novel.
Liliana Weinberg is a researcher, literary critic, and essayist, who works on
the relationship between literature, culture, and intellectual history. She
228 Contributors
works at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as a
principal investigator at the Center of Research on Latin America and
the Caribbean (CIALC) and Professor in Literature and Latin American
Studies. She is the author of several books, including El ensayo entre el
paraîso y el infierno (2001), Literatura latinoamericana: descolonizar la
imaginaciôn (2004), Situaciôn del ensayo (2006), Pensar el ensayo (2007),
and Biblioteca americana (2014). In addition, she has been Director of
Graduate Studies in the UNAM School of Philosophy and Literature, edi-
tor of Cuadernos Americanos, and director of Latinoamérica. Weinberg
is a CONACYT Fellow, the recipient of the Lya Kostakowsky Prize for
Latin American Essays and the Siglo XXI Essay Award, and a member of
the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Câtedra Alfonso Reyes.
Index
Abad Faciolince, Héctor 67-68
Achebe, Chinua 126, 129-30, 132,
135-38; Things Fal! Apart 128-31,
135-36
Aczel, Richard 112, 121
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 95
Adiga, Arvind 104
Adorno, Theodor W. 12, 104
affect 81-2,85-8, 193
African literature 24, 126-28, 160-71;
as commodity 166
Afrikaans 17, 191-204
Ali, Monica 104
Aliete Galhoz, Maria 26
allegory 120, 136,218
Altbach, Philip 100
Amazon.com 12, 128, 137
American Studies 209
Amossy, Ruth 30
Ampère, Jean-Jacques 5
Anderson, Benedict 69
de Andrade, Oswald 57-58
anthropology 116
anthropophagy - see cannibalism
Appadurai, Arjun 5
Appiah, Anthony 170
Apter, Emily 1-2, 8, 10,24,57, 79-83,
91,93-96,98,102,104,203-4,207
Arabie 34-5, 114, 156, 167,213
archive 68, 73, 109, 111-21, 123-24
Artaud, Antonin 56
Attridge, Derek 28, 33
Auden, W.H. 196
Auerbach, Erich 4-5
Austen, Jane 5, 156
autonomy 14,29,41-42,69,84,
99,104,144,147; autonomization 6,
28, 71; semi-autonomy 82, 103
avant-garde 43, 46, 72, 151
Aztec 56
Bakhtin, Mikhail 8,112
Balzac, Honoré de 33, 147
Barber, Karin 32
Barbéry, Muriel 157
Barrera Enderle, Vfctor 74
Barthes, Roland 56
Bassnett, Susan 9
Bate, Jonathan 39-40,42,50
Beckett, Samuel 26, 146
Bello, Andrés 76
Benjamin, Walter 12, 28
Beyala, Calixthe 167
Bhabha, Homi 5, 33
Bhagavad Gita 211
bibliomigrancy 174-75
Blake, William 43
Boehmer, Elleke 5
Bolafio, Roberto 11-12
Booker Prize 25, 135, 171
book history 8, 10-13,40, 100, 163
book trade 40, 127, 164
Borges, Jorge Luis 60,67, 72, 74, 151,
156
born-translated 4, 26
Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 12-13,29,41-44,
50,73,74,100,143-45,157,162,
164,175
Brennan, Timothy 93
Brouillette, Sarah 13,25,31,80-81,85,
163, 166
BueIl, Lawrence 209
Bunyan, John 32
Caillois, Roger 151-52
Cameron, Sharon 212-13,219
Candido, Antonio 28-30
(:annibalism 57-58, 60
capitalism 6,43,67, 73, 80, 83,93-94,
98-103,214-15; peripheral 72
Caruth, Cathy 127
230 Index
Cendrars, Blaise 56
censorship 10, 40, 71
Chambers, Claire 116
Channing, William Ellory 211
Charle, Christophe 164
Chartier, Roger 10
Cheah, Pheng 35, 81, 84, 89
Chow, Rey 215
Christiansë, Yvette 109, 111, 119-121
close reading 50, 55, 81, 83, 165
Cocteau, Jean 56
Coetzee, Carli 113,203
Coetzee, J. M. 23,25-27,30-32,35,95
Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar 148-149
Collins, Jim 40-42
communism 43
comparative literature 47, 53-55,
80, 164
comparison literature 194
Confucius 49
Conrad, Joseph 33, 148, 156
Cornejo Polar, Antonio 69
Crane, Stephen 56, 60
Cunha, Teresa Sobral 26-27
Curtius, Ernst Robert 5
Damrosch, David 2, 5-7, 9-10, 14, 17,
23,46-51,53-56,84,94,194
Danish (language) 4, 174, 176, 179,
181-85
Dante 89,210
Danto, Arthur C. 41-42, 50
Darnton, Robert 10
David, Jérôme 161
Davis, Caroline 101
Davis, Colin 121
Deckard, Sharae 99, 103
De Kock, Leon 193, 198,203-4
De Man, Paul 121, 218
Derrida, Jacques 114,121,215
Desai, Kiran 95
De Staël, Madame 212
De Swaan, Abram 145
D'haen, Theo 5, 110-11
Dickens, Charles 32, 132
Dickie, George 41,42,50
Diome, Fatou 167
Dimock, Wai Chee 209, 219-20
Dinis, J oào 26
Djebar, Assia 14,23,31,34-35
domestication 9, 53, 57,60, 194;
domesticating 192, 199; non-
domestication 53
Donne, John 196, 198,202
Dos Passos, John 148-49, 157
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 33, 148
Douglass, Frederick 90
"Du monde entier" 145, 151-53,
155, 157
Duncan, Robert 56
Duri.ng, Simon 94
Dutch 156,200
dhvani 46, 48-9
Eagleton, Terry 100
Eckermann, Johann Peter 3, 210-·11
Eggers, Dave 126, 133-38
Eisenstein, Elizabeth 10
Eliot, George 33, 132
Eliot, T. S. 61, 196-99,202
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 209-20
Engels, Friedrich 3-5, 98, 102
English (language) 4, 6-7, Il, 17,23,
25,31-32,34,39,45,49,51,58-59,
73,95,129,145-51,153-56,163,
166,169-71,175-76,178-184,
191-204,213
Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando 73, 75
Escarpit, Robert 12
Estrada, Martinez 72
estrangement 14,34,53-57, 131
Étiemble, René 5, 152-·53
ethnography 109, 113, 116
Even-Zohar, Itamar 9-10
Faulkner, William 33, 72, 145,
148-49,156,203
Febvre, Lucien 10
feminism 42
Ferrari, Patricio 26
field of cultural production 41-42,
143-44
Fisk, Gloria 96, 102
Fitzgerald, Edward 48
Flemish (language) 4
foreignization 9,53,57,60,199
Fornet, Jorge 69
Foucault, Michel 56
Frankfurt School12
Fraser, Robert Il
French (language) 4, Il,25,31,
34-35,41,45,49,58-59,73,
95,99,145-48,150-51,153-56,
163-64,167,170-71,174,
180-83
Fullel; Margaret 210
Fuentes, Carlos 71, 151
Furuland, Lars 13

Gallimard 16-17, 143-57, 166, 169
Garcia Canclini, Néstor 74
gender 29, 31,42, 163, 169
German (language) 4, 34,45, 73,
147-48,150-51,153-55,180-83
Ghosh, Amitav 16, 110, 117
Gide, André 144-45, 150, 157
Gikuyu (language) 32-33
Glavlit 40
globalization 5, 16,47, 72-73, 81, 83,
85-86,88,90,145,146,154-155
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 3-5,9,33,
46,99,150,161,210-12,215
Goldmann, Lucien 12
Gonzâlez Echevarria, Roberto 70
Gourevitch, Philip 126,131-33,
136-38
Goytisolo, Juan 75, 151
Griffith, Michael 95
Griswold, Wendy 13, 102
Guererro, Gustavo 69
Guillén, Claudio 5
Guillory, John 98
Habermas, Jürgen 12
Hafiz 210-11
Hall, Stuart 77
Harnacher, Werner 214-15
Harbach, Chad 97
Harper's (journal) 45
Hawkins, Sean 32
Hedge, Frederic 210-11
Heilbron,Johan 7, 13, 145, 182
Heinemann's African Writers Series
33, 166-67
Heidegger, Martin 112
Helder, Herberto 14,55-62
Helgesson, Stefan 54, 84-85, 164
Heyns, Michiel191-204
Henriquez Ureiia, Pedro 70-71
Herbert, Zbigniew 56
Herder, Johann Gottfried 3,56,210,
212,217
Hesse, Hermann 56
heteronyms 25, 27,31,61;
heteronymia 61
heteronomy 98
Hitchcock, Peter 24
Hofmeyr, Isabel 110, 164
Hoggart, Richard 13
Holmes, Chris 203
House, Juliane 199
Huggan, Graham 166
hybridity 129, 134, 197
Index 231
Imalayène, Fatima Zohra - see Assia
Djebar
implied author 24, 30-31
implied writer 14, 24-26, 30-31, 33, 35
Index Translationum 145-46, 151,
153-55, 182
Indian Ocean 16, 109, 111-14,
117, 119
instituting 14, 16,28,35,49, 70,
79, 165; institution 1,8, 11-17, 24,
34-35,39-44,46-47,50-51,59,67,
162,165-66,168-71,175,185,192,
211,215
intertextuality 57-58
Irele, Francis Abiola 130
Irr, Caren 85
Izevbaye, Dan 135
Jameson, Fredric 82,220
Jehlen, Myra 209
Jolas, Eugene 43-46, 50
Joyce, James 44-45, 72, 156
Kant, Immanuel3, 210, 212
Kiswahili (language) 45
Kourouma, Ahmadou 167,170
Krishnan, Madhu 127
Kunkel, Benjamin 97
Lamming, George 33
Lawrence, D. H. 56,148
Le Bris, Michel 7, 170
Lefevere, André 9
Levine, Caroline 95
Levy, Jiff 199
littérature-monde 7, 170
Liu, Lydia 8
Longxi, Zhang 8
Lowenthal, Leo 12
Lowry, Malcolm 56
Ludmer, Josefina 68
Mabanckou, Alain 167, 169-70
Macherey, Pierre 12
Maingueneau, Dominique 30-31
Malraux, André 62,149,152
Marais, Eugene 202
Maria Gutiérrez, Juan 76
Mariâtegui, José Carlos 71, 75
Mârquez, Gabriel Garda 74, 77
Martin, Henri -Jean 10
Martîn Barbero, Jesûs 74
Marx, Karl 3-5, 47,98-99,102
232 Index
Marxism 42
Matthiessen, F.O. 209
McKenzie, D. F. 1°
Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 14,
47-59,51
Mengestu, Dinaw 81, 85-86
Meltzl, Hug6 5
metafiction 192
.Nlichaux, Henri 65, 60
migrant writing 126
Miller, Henry 149, 157
modernity 4, 69-74,110,113,210;
modernization 67, 70-71, 73
NIoi, Daniel Arap 32
mondialisation 83, 88
&Ionsivais, Carlos 74
Monteiro, Adolfo Casais 26
Morante, Elsa 151,157
&Ioretti, Franco 2, 5-7, 10-11, 13,
99, 162, 168
Morrison, Toni 111, 122
Mufti, Aamir 83
Mukherjee, Ankhi 29
11+1 93,95-98, 104
Nahuatl 56
Nancy, Jean-Luc 83-84
nationalism 43, 72, 147,215
Nealon, Jeffrey T. 82
New Criticism 29
Nobel Prize for literature 144-45,
157
Norwegian (language) 176, 179-84
Nouvelle Revue française 144, 147
Okri, Ben 126, 132, 135-38 de Ory,
Carlos Edmundo 56
Ortiz, Renato 69, 71-72
Oxford University Press 101, 166
over-hearing 16, 112, 121, 123-24
Padura, Leonardo 68
Parks, Tim 79-80, 87
Paz Soldân, Edmundo 68
PEN Club 95,147
Pessoa, Fernando 14,23-28,31,35,
58,61,156
Phillips, Caryl 127
philology 83,212
Piglia, Ricardo 68
Pizarro, Jer6nimo 26-27
plaasroman 192, 198
Pléiade 148, 150, 156
poetry 34,45,48,55-62,111,166,
169-70,195-97,202,210,216-17
pornography 42, 149
Portuguese (language) 11,14,31,55,
57-62, 167
postcolonialism 42, 143
poteq.tiality 81-82, 85, 88-89, 91
Pound, Ezra 48-49, 196
°
Povinelli, Elizabeth Il
Prado Coelho, Jacinto 26
Prakrit (language) 14,46,49
Prix Médicis Étranger 150, 155
prosopopoeia 121
al-Quais, lmru' 34
Quichua 56
quotation 128, 195-96,214-19
Rainey, Lawrence 40, 50
Rajaram, Poorva 95
Rama, Angel 70
Rasula, Jed 44-45
Reyes, Alfonso 70-71
Ribeiro, Darcy 72
Rimbaud, Arthur 43
Ripley, George 210-11, 213
Roncagliolo, Santiago 68
Rouaud, Jean 7, 170
Roth, Philip 155, 157
Rothberg, Michael 91, 127
Rushdie, SaI man 95, 171
Said, Edward 5, 162
Sapiro, Gisèle 7, 13, 164, 182
Sartre, Jean-Paul 149, 152, 157
Selassie, Haile 90
Schiffrin, Jacques 148
Schmucler, Héctor 72
Schwarz, Roberto 7,29
semi-periphery 17, 168
Senghor, Léopold Sédar 165, 169-70
Seuil 151, 169
Shakespeare, William 32, 150,
198,202
°
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Il
Sim6es, Gaspar 26
singularity 8, 14-16,23-24,26,28,33,
35,80-82,84
Skârmeta, Antonio 69
slave trade 120, 126
sociology of literature 8, 12-13,29,
98-101; of world literary production
101-02

sociology of translation 7, 17,
144, 164
Spanish (language) 11,59, 70, 73, 75,
95,148,151,153-54,156,174,
182-83
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 8, 23,
54,118,162
Scully, Pamela 120-21
Stevenson, Randall 39
Stevenson, Robert Louis 32
subaltern, subalternity 16, 110,
117-18
Svedjedal, Johan 13
Swedenborg, Emanuel 212
Swedish (language) 174, 178-85,
196,199,201
Tagore, Rabindranath 3,47,145,150
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 196
Thiongo, Ngugi wa 14,23,31
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl 8, 170
Thoreau, Henry David 217
Toury, Gideon 9,176
Transcendentalism 210,216
transcultural (writing) 16, 57, 126
transition (journal, 1920s) 14,
43-45,51
translation 3, 8-18,24,34-35,
47-49,53-62,76,79,82,85,
95-96,100,110,118-19,143-51,
153-57, 160, 164, 167, 169,
174-85,191-204,209-20; ex-
translation 73; global translation
field 174; in-translation 73;
nontranslation 80; translation
zone 80
translation studies 8-10, 13, 144
Tsvetaeva, Marina 56
unconscious, the 30,44-45
Index 233
UNESCO 47, 100, 146, 151-52,
164, 169, 182
untranslatability 8, 15,24,54,57,
79-80,82-83,91,96-97,204,
209-10,216,219-20
USSR 42, 148, 152
Van der Vlies, Andrew 109
Van Niekerk, Mariene 17, 191-200,
203; Agaat 17,191-204; Trioml
193,198-99,203-04
Venuti, Lawrence 10,53,60, 198-99
Vermeulen, Pieter 25, 55
vernacular, vernacularization 6, 16,
32, 79,
Villa, Emilio 56, 60
voice (literary) 6, 16,25,27,30,
109-14,116,119,121-24,131,
133-34,137,193,213,219;
communicating voices 61-62
Waberi, Abdourahman Ali 167, 170
Walkowitz, Rebecca 8, 81,96, 194,203
Wallerstein, lmmanuel 6
Warren, Austin 4
Watermeyer, G. A. 195
Wellek, René 4
Williams, Raymond 13, 100-02
Williams, William Carlos 49
Wolff, Janet 100
world republic of letters 31, 33,51, 72,
146,151,156-57,160,174,185
Wordsworth, William 32, 196,211
Yeats, W.B. 128
Yùdice, George 74
Zhenduo 47
Zenith, Richard 26-27
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