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Literature for the Planet Author(S): Wai Chee Dimock Source: PMLA, Vol Literature for the Planet Author(s): Wai Chee Dimock Source: PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (Jan., 2001), pp. 173-188 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463649 Accessed: 04-03-2015 17:04 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions i 6. I Literature for the Planet WAI CHEE DIMOCK HEYEAR WAS 1934, A YEARIN WHICHOSIP MANDELSTAM lived in constantterror. Just a few months before, he had commit- ted political suicide by recitinga satiricalpoem on Stalin,featuring "the ten thick worms his fingers" and "the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lips." The poem concludes: He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.1 Mandelstam's arrestcame as expected. On the night of 13 May 1934, about one in the morning, came a knock on the door. Mandelstamwas taken by the secret police to their headquartersin the LubiankaPrison, interrogated,and later sentencedto threeyears of exile in Cherdyn.2 Since the arrestwas not a surprise,Mandelstam at least had the lux- ury of preparingfor it. His preparationswere recordedby NadezhdaMan- delstam (a "pre-Gutenberg"figure, as Seamus Heaney calls her ["Osip" 74], safeguardingher husband'spoems by committingthem to memory): M. obtained an edition of the Divine in small format and WAI CHEEDIMOCK, professor of English Comedy always had it with him in his in case he at Yale University,is the author of Em- pocket, just was arrestednot at home but in the pire for Liberty:Melville and the Poetics street. You could be arrestedanywhere-sometimes they came for you of Individualism (Princeton UP, 1989) at your place of work, and sometimes you were lured out to anotherplace and ResiduesofJustice: Literature, Law, on a false pretext and no one ever heard of you again. [.. .] When M. went Philosophy(U of CaliforniaP, 1996). Lit- to Samatikha(the place where he was arrestedthe second time), he left his eraturefor the Planet"is her new book pocket Dante in Moscow and took another,rather more bulky edition. I do project,an extension of her 1997 PMLA not know whetherhe managed to keep it until he reached the transitcamp essay, "ATheory of Resonance." at Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, where he died. I somehow doubt it: ? 2001 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 173 This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 174 Literaturefor the Planet PMLA in the campsunder Yezhov and Stalin, nobody says, because space and time are not absolute could give any thoughtto books. givens but operational effects, deriving their (Hope against Hope 228) lengths and widths from the relative motion of the frames in which measurements are taken. In a momentof extreme terror,Mandel- political What is simultaneousin one frame might not be stam-Russian and Jewish-saw fit to immerse simultaneous in another;what registers as now himself in a medieval Christianpoem. The im- in one might not so register elsewhere. Of mersion did not save him. Within four years he course, for Einstein relativity of simultaneityis was dead, on his way to a labor camp in eastern strictly a mathematicalconcept: it is a descrip- Siberia. Still, in spite of this overwhelmingbio- tion of the geometry of space-time.4 I have ar- logical fact, it was not trivial that the medieval gued elsewhere that this concept can also be poem was still around,after hundredsof years, understood nonmathematically, that it can be and in the Soviet Union no less. Its very exis- transposedto describe the temporal effects en- tence gave Mandelstam a different reference genderedby reading. point, dimensions of space and time not re- Transposedin this way, relativity of simul- ducible to the armof the Soviet government.3 taneity highlights the existence of differenttime Mandelstam'slove of Dante-the physical frames in any populationof readers.The appar- presence of the poetry inside his pocket-sug- ent unity of the chronologicaldate gives way to gests that there is much to be said for literature a of nows. These as a continuum.This continuumextends across plurality operative nows are not or slotted; do not space and time, messing up territorial sover- discretely uniformly they all line on the same eignty and numerical chronology. Authors cen- up synchronic plane. They owe their to the of turies and thousandsof miles apartcan turn out shapes irregular compass words: words with different differ- to be inseparable.Their adjacency stems from a antecedents, ent extensions of Nows are different linguistic bond and has little to do with the met- meaning. because habits because the rical structurearticulated by numbers,whether reading are, strength these numberstake the form of latitudesand lon- of linguistic bonds can have a drastic effect on the distance between two of gitudes or whether they take the form of dates. any users words. Two For the remoteness or proximity of linguistic thousandyears and two thousandmiles can events does not lend itself to uniform calibra- sometimes register as near simultaneity; ten tions. It cannotbe expressedas a numericalcon- years and ten miles can sometimes pose an un- stant: as one hundred years or one thousand passable gulf. Thanksto this elasticity, the now miles. Literary space and time are conditional experienced by any readeris idiosyncratic, un- and elastic; theirdistances can vary,can lengthen like anyone else's. It has its particularradii, par- or contract, depending on who is reading and ticular genealogies and coevals. Its relational what is being read. No mileage can tell us how fabric is separately cut, stretching and bulging far one authoris from another;no dates can tell in odd places. It is not synchronized with the us who is close to whom. numericalnow on any standardcalendar. This nonnumerical structureof space and Understood in this sense-as the temporal time might be described by way of a concept disunityamong readers-relativity of simultane- from Einstein: "relativityof simultaneity."Ein- ity suggeststhat the continuumof literatureis an- stein uses this to challenge the notion of a uni- archic: impossible to regulate or police. Where versal present, a now everywhere enforced, a literarybonds are intensifiedby circumstances- temporal plane that synchronizes the entire as happenswith Mandelstamand Dante-space globe, putting it under a unified chronology. and time can undergothe most astonishing con- There is no such synchronized plane, Einstein traction,can turna standardizedmetrical unit into This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 116. i Wai Chee Dimock 175 a virtual zero, bringing supposedly remote ob- literaturehandily outlives the finite scope of the jects into directcontact. Space and time, in short, nation. It brings into play a differentset of tem- have no absolutejurisdiction when it comes to the poral and spatial coordinates.It urges on us the bond between texts and readers. Not a preas- entireplanet as a unit of analysis. signed grid, they are molded instead by the ac- This is a minority view. The study of na- tions andpassions of words.They can behavelike tional literatures is currently dominated by a "a kind of fan,"as Mandelstamsays ("Onthe Na- differentpremise-dominated, in fact, by an al- ture"73). This fan can be folded up, puttingItaly most automatic equation between the literary in the immediate vicinity of Russia and making and the territorial.5Nothing better exemplifies strangebedfellows out of the fourteenthand the this premise than the influential work of Bene- twentiethcenturies. The now thus begotten does dict Anderson. For Anderson the advent of mo- not in the least resemblethe now legislatedby the dernityis markedby the rise of the nation-state, Soviet government. Stretching across hundreds a political entity whose "sovereignty is fully, of years and thousandsof miles, it is temporally flatly,and evenly operativeover each squarecen- and spatiallywayward, out of step with any party timetre of a legally demarcatedterritory" (26).6 line, any mechanicalclock of progress. This territorialsovereignty produces cultural ar- Aiding and abetting this population of tifacts likewise territoriallypredicated, likewise nows, all unsynchronized, literaturestands ac- bounded by the geopolitical map. Literatureis cused as the enemy of the state. Its projective one such artifact. Since state sovereignty, ac- and retrospectivehorizons play havoc with terri- cording to Anderson, is no less fully, flatly, and torial sovereignty.To each of its readersit holds evenly operative in this domain, literature be- out a different map, a different time scale, pre- comes a necessary instrumentas well as a nec- dating and outlasting the birth and death of any essary epiphenomenonof the nation.Along with nation. Morphologically speaking, literature the newspaper(from which it turnsout to be in- might turn out to be one of the most robust in- distinguishable),literature enforces the standard- habitants of the planet, a species tougher than ized time of print, a territorialtimetable.
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