CHAPTER 1 Introduction This Study of World Literature Begins Where Many
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CHAPTER 1 Introduction This study of world literature begins where many do: with Goethe, but then it will go backwards from Goethe before it goes forward. The term world literature itself derives from Goethe’s neologism Weltliteratur, recorded by his personal secretary Johann Peter Eckermann from a conversation one night over dinner: “National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (165). The newness of the term is evidenced in John Oxenford’s 1930 translation by the hyphenation that brings the compound concept over from German into English. World literature is now a commonplace in English, although what exactly it is remains a matter of debate, allowing for such titles as David Damrosch’s book in 2003: What Is World Literature? But what Goethe means by world literature or what “we” mean by world literature today is not entirely my concern here—at least not yet—and this is where I go backwards from his neologism. In Eckermann’s account, the conversation in which Goethe lets slip the word that will create a new field of study begins thus: “Within the last few days, since I saw you,” said he, “I have read many things; especially a Chinese novel, which occupies me still and seems to me very remarkable.” “Chinese novel!” said I; “that must look strange enough.” “Not so much as you might think,” said Goethe; “the Chinamen [sic] think, act, and feel almost exactly like us…” (164) 1 Goethe goes on to explain the similarities and differences he finds between the “us” he refers to and Chinese writing and culture it represents, drawing connections between the Chinese text he has read and his own Hermann and Dorothea as well as the novels of Richardson and the Chansons de Béranger. Here Goethe is suggesting what world literature does, and many critics since then have produced readings of Goethe’s reading of the Chinese text to articulate a reading practice for world literature. But what I want to call attention to here is not Goethe’s reading of the Chinese text but the fact itself that Goethe has read a Chinese text. Thus the question I pose is not, how has Goethe read the Chinese text (in the hermeneutic sense) but how is it that Goethe was able to read the Chinese text? The obvious answer—since Goethe had not studied Chinese—was that he was able to read the Chinese text because it had been translated, but this only begs the follow-up question: how is it that the Chinese text came to be translated? Why that text? Why that author? Why from Chinese? Why at that particular time and place? And how did the translation find its way into Goethe’s hands? The last question is complicated further by the fact that Goethe actually read a translation into French, not German. What I want to emphasize is that what comes before Goethe’s reading of the Chinese text—the process of its selection, translation, publication, and distribution—is inseparable from that reading. Goethe’s conclusion that the Chinese “think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous than with us” (164) does not necessarily arise from the inherent qualities of the Chinese text or from his own subjective hermeneutics; rather, the process by which the text reached Goethe is also implicated. Has a text been 2 chosen for translation from Chinese literature that most closely resembles French or European cultural values? Has the translator interpreted and rephrased the text in French or European cultural terms? The fact that Goethe refers to what I have insisted calling a text as a novel already provides evidence of the way the book has been packaged and circulates in Europe. In response to Eckermann’s question as to whether “this Chinese romance [is] one of their best,” Goethe declares, “By no means … the Chinese have thousands of them, and when our forefathers were still living in the woods” (165, emphasis mine). Although the Germans were relatively late in literary developments in Europe, Chinese texts old enough to be written when the Germans were “still living in the woods” can only refer to literature before the arrival and adoption of the European genre of the novel in China. Not fitting into the genres circulating in Goethe’s Germany, the Chinese text has been translated, packaged, and received according to European genre distinctions nonetheless.1 The argument I want to make about the way world literature functions is not only implicated in the lead-up to Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann, the “moment before” I have insisted on looking at so far. Rather, Goethe’s discussion about the Chinese “novel” also contributes to and continues that process. He reinforces the classification of the Chinese text as a novel, he defines the Chinese way of life as “more clear, pure, and decorous” than the German one, and characterizes Chinese literature as relying on proverbs to convey moral lessons (164-65). What Goethe has to say about these things— as has been proven by the many readings and rereadings of his reading—matters to the way the Chinese text circulates later, and matters to the way other Chinese texts will be 1 In German, Goethe uses the word “Roman,” already a borrowing from French, which shows the way the genre circulated inside of Europe as well. On the way the novel traveled in Europe, see Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, New York: Verso, 1999. 3 translated and circulate after it. If Chinese literature is understood as “decorous” and “moralizing,” for example, then texts might be selected and translated according to or against those criteria that will perpetuate or contradict the way Goethe’s Chinese novel circulates. World literature does not just simply happen, then. Or, to use the formulation of Vilashini Cooppan, “World literature is not an ontology but an epistemology, not a known but a knowing” (“Ethics of World Literature” 38). As scholars and teachers of world literature, we need to interrogate not only the ways of knowing but also the ways in which what is available for knowing becomes available to us, a process inextricably linked in a feedback loop with our ways of knowing. Certainly world literature as a discipline has long wrestled with defining its object of study, laboring under the sheer enormity of the terms that make up its name: “world” and “literature.” The field grew out of and responded to the Great Books curriculum, which itself presented a set of “classics,” texts central to the development of civilization and society. The classics represented in Great Books classrooms revealed—and continue to reveal—a heavily Eurocentric bias, with civilization as we know it emerging from the Greeks and Romans. As Sarah Lawall demonstrates, early manifestations of world literature, as well as the Great Books courses from which they arose, relied on a teleological narrative of progress that pitted Western civilization against other civilizations that were either behind the times or lost in some mysterious other time (19-22). Such characterizations corresponded with the discourse of imperialism that justified conquest based on the idea that Western civilization was more advanced. Both the Great Books as well as the colonial paradigm, however, functioned by drawing some Eastern cultures, most notably in the form of the 4 Bible, into their narrative of progress in a gesture of incorporation. These acts of incorporation have not stopped, however, the construction of a dichotomy between the civilized, enlightened West and other parts of the world, between what has commonly come to be called the West and the rest. In a later guise, the field of world literature moved forward in time and out somewhat, redefining itself as the study of “masterpieces” rather than “classics,” but far too many of the masterpieces remained within the confines of Europe, and further were penned all too often by a limited component of the European population: the Dead White European Male, the fall guy of attempts to widen the curriculum. Without throwing the DWEM out with the bathwater, the academy has acted to reverse its various antiquated biases—gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, regional, and so on. But the wider the base of texts becomes, the problem of curricular selectivity actually becomes even thornier, since we are trying to fit representatives of more types of texts into the same amount of class meetings and credit hours. If World Lit takes all literature of all the world as its object, how does an instructor construct an intro course? 2 Damrosch has called the latest world literature paradigm “windows on the world” (“Introduction” 3), but the World Lit instructor is faced with deciding which windows to open onto which parts of the world. The question remains: which world and which literature? Damrosch has argued: World literature surveys can never hope to cover the world. We do better if we seek to uncover a variety of compelling works from distinctive traditions, through creative combinations and juxtapositions guided by whatever specific themes and issues we wish to raise in a particular course. (“Introduction” 9, emphasis original) Uncovering those compelling works is precisely what I would like to call attention to at this juncture—in a sense, this is the “moment before” of Goethe’s Chinese novel. 2 By “World Lit” I mean the academic field of study instituted in mostly American universities. 5 Damrosch has set out the most commonly used designation of world literature at the moment: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (What is World Literature? 4).