Present Junctures World Literature, Translation, and the Limits of Contemporaneity
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PRESENT JUNCTURES WORLD LITERATURE, TRANSLATION, AND THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORANEITY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jan Steyn May 2018 © 2018 Jan Steyn PRESENT JUNCTURES WORLD LITERATURE, TRANSLATION, AND THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORANEITY Jan Steyn, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 Present Junctures approaches world literature from a translational and comparative perspective by asking, for a situated “we,” who, in the world, shares “our” time, and who is excluded from “our” framings of the present? Present Junctures reads works of contemporary world literature that figure these boundaries between who is and who is not considered “contemporary.” Reading works by writers as diverse as Geoff Dyer, J.M. Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Edouard Levé, and Ivan Vladislavić, it argues that the literary work of de-limiting the now is structurally analogous to the work of translation. Just as translators merge literary cultures by producing translated texts, each framing of the present generates intercultural links. And just as translation is unidirectional and asymmetrical, producing a text first and foremost for a target readership, making the originating context available in an altered form, and not the other way around, so is contemporaneity a determination of relevance and urgency for the benefit of a limited receiving context. The four chapters of Present Junctures illustrate different critical aspects of contemporaneity, showing it to be generative, limited by opacity, provisional, and secular. Each chapter also explores a different scale of worldliness at which contemporary world literature attempts to operate: the world city, the trans-national, the inter-national, and the global. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jan Steyn is a scholar and translator who specializes in contemporary literature in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and French. He holds a Ph. D. (2018) and MA (2014) in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, an MA in Cultural Translation (2010) and BA in Comparative Literature (2009) from the American University of Paris, and a BCom in Finance and Economics (2004) from the University of Cape Town. For my teachers, present and past. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Caite Dolan-Leach has lived with this dissertation, and with me in dissertation-writing mode, for longer than anyone can reasonably expect a partner to do. For her patience, support, and sharp eye for obfuscation, I am ever in her debt. Neal Allar, Rita Barnard, Colette Gordon, Geoff Gilbert, Dan Gunn, Clare Greene, Chris Holmes, Mee-Ju Ro, and Elizabeth Wijaya each read or heard part of this dissertation and gave important feedback. They have my gratitude. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a fantastic committee: Cathy Caruth, whose close attention to texts is exemplary; Grant Farred, whose intellectual generosity knows no limits; and Naoki Sakai, who has for me disproved the dictum that one should never meet one’s (academic) heroes. Above all I would like to acknowledge Natalie Melas, who has guided this project from its inception with precisely the right combination of critique and encouragement, and who at every step has been the paragon of a mentor: an irreproachably lucid thinker and a model of human warmth. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Time is Not a Guest” 1 1. Setting, An Example: On (Richard Philcox’s Translation of) Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003 … 2008 … 2015) 37 2. Translation and Opacity: On Ivan Vladislavić’s “The Reading” 95 3. The World Today: On News and Fiction 149 4. Afterlives: Timeliness, Untimeliness, and Timelessness in J.M. Coetzee’s Global Fiction 229 Bibliography 289 vii LIST OF FIGURES 0.1 Maurizio Nannucci, All Art Has Been Contemporary, 1999, (fabricated in 2011) 1 0.2 J. R. and #NotABugSplat collective, #NotABugSplat, 2014 5 1.1. The Cecil John Rhodes statue removed from the University of Cape Town on April 9, 2015 37 1.2. Covers of Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale (2005 Folio edition) and The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2008 WSP Reader’s Club) 67 2.1. David Goldblatt, “She told him: ‘You’ll be the driver and I’ll be the lady’, then they grabbed the car bumper and posed, Hillbrow, 1975”, from the series, TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010. Black and white photograph. 95 2.2 Mise-en-abyme structure of “The Reading” in the context of its place in 101 Detectives 118 3.1. Edouard Levé, untitled, from the series, Rugby, 2003. 3 3 Color photograph, 39 /8 x 39 /8 inches 149 3.2. William Kentridge, Drawing for Il Sole 24 Ore (World Walking), 2007 152 viii 3.3. Edouard Levé, “L’Accord”, from the series, Actualités, 2001. 3 Color photograph, 27 ¼ x 39 /8 inches. 199 3.4. Edouard Levé, “Monument aux morts de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à Berlin”, from the series, Amérique, 2006. Color photograph, 15 ¾ x 15 ¾ inches. 202 3.5. Levé’s minimal pointillist self-portraits on the English-language covers of Autoportrait and Suicide 205 4.1. Berlinde de Bruyckere, Cripplewood 229 4.2 Screenshot of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year 235 4.3. Claudia Rankine, from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, p54. 241 ix Introduction TIME IS NOT A GUEST ‘Contemporary’ is, at base, a critical and therefore a selective concept: it promotes and it excludes. To claim something is contemporary is to make a claim for its significance in participating in the actuality of the present – a claim over and against that of other things, some of which themselves may make a similar claim on contemporaneity. – Peter Osborne, Anything or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, p. 2. Figure 0.1 Maurizio Nannucci, All Art Has Been Contemporary, 1999 (fabricated in 2011) 1 In 2009, the British novelist and essayist, Geoff Dyer, published Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. In the first half of that novel, Dyer’s alter ego, Jeff, frantically chases after sex, fleeting intimacy, and the most exciting new artworks at the Venice Biennale; in the second, an unnamed protagonist, who may or may not be Jeff, remains at rest in Varanasi, India, contemplating death, ritual, and his limited access to local epistemologies. The two parts of this book conjoin Venice and Varanasi, contemporary art and ancient theater, Eros and Thanatos, inhuman acceleration and superhuman duration. The novel leaves the reader questioning whether Venice and Varanasi, which display the same epiphenomena of global capitalism (airports, hotels, fashion brands, fast-food chains), but which also display the brutal inequalities of global development, could actually be contemporaries. Present Junctures investigates how contemporaneity is produced and posited by works of literature like Jeff in Venice. Over the course of four chapters, each considering literary works alongside other art forms, I argue that contemporaneity – conceived of relationally, as entailing at least two entities united through a sense of shared time – is produced in a manner analogous to translation, which is to say by constructing a space in which elements (including people, nations, cultures, languages, landscapes, or places) are joined together asymmetrically. I call each space that results from this translational work, a “present juncture.” Surrealist techniques have taught us that the random juxtaposition of elements may produce surprising and interesting meanings; present junctures, however, are non-random determinations of relevance, or, at least, determinations of relevance that are experienced as motivated. It is important to distinguish between a coincidence (co-appearance in time or place) of events, and noting the coincidence. Even if events are truly coincidental (causally unrelated), pointing out that coincidence, bringing the events into the same frame of reference, is always experienced as motivated if only because it its selective, choosing to group these events and not those. I argue that, in order to understand emergent and politically important trends in the 2 contemporary arts, it is important to see these present junctures in their plurality and in their constructed-ness, as competing versions of what is important or urgent right now, from a determinate location. So, to recap: certain literary works, acting in a manner analogous to translation, produce spatio-temporal constructs that I call “present junctures,” which bring together elements, positing them in a relation of relevance and urgency. Seen as “present junctures” the works of contemporary world literature that I discuss, and many that I do not discuss, make more sense and become more interesting. It is a claim of this dissertation that a growing body of contemporary work asks how distant entities share time and become pertinent to one another. I offer no proof; the works that I read in these pages are far too few to be “representative” in the statistical sense. Nor is it a claim that can be disputed with counterexamples. The value of this claim can only be measured against critical practice; I will be satisfied if some readers find that Present Junctures reveals and provides a vocabulary for the hitherto under-examined junctural dimension of recent works of world literature. By “world literature” I intend simply those works that travel beyond their original context of production. There is, in this figure of travel, of course, already a sense of juncture: a joining of the local and the foreign, the origin and destination, along a trajectory of travel. Most theorists of world literature have explored this juncture in its geographic sense; I here join the smaller subset of world literature theorists that think of this juncture also in temporal terms, as a joining of times. Mine is a descriptive rather than a normative project. I aim to describe how the works I have selected in each chapter produce and posit contemporaneity.1 That said, I could have selected different literary works.