Global Mimesis: the Ethics of World Literature After Auerbach Madigan Keegan Haley
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Global Mimesis: The Ethics of World Literature after Auerbach Madigan Keegan Haley Minneapolis, Minnesota Master 2, Université de Paris-7, 2007 BA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August, 2014 i Abstract This project argues that the global in the literary is best approached not as a stable content, imposed ideology, or economic byproduct, but rather as an ethos, which has been at stake and emerging over the past half century in literature from around the world. Reading across genres and continents, it shows how writers such as Samuel Beckett, Nuruddin Farah, J. M. Coetzee, Zoë Wicomb, W. G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, Teju Cole, and Naomi Wallace have used literary means to imagine collective life beyond the nation, in the process reconceiving literature’s ethical forms (Bildung, allegory, the sentimental). Attending to how these works refigure the horizon and nature of the common at specific historical junctures, this study proposes a conception of the global as emergent within mimesis and reorients ethics away from the encounter with radical alterity toward the performative ways in which texts and objects contour publicity, give exemplary shape to actions and events, and relate audiences to seemingly distant worlds. In this way, “Global Mimesis: The Ethics of World Literature after Auerbach” addresses contemporary world literature’s ability to figure “a common life” not as a process of cultural and political standardization—as Erich Auerbach influentially argued in Mimesis (1946)—but rather as its ethical potential. ii Table of Contents Introduction (1-26) Global Mimesis Chapter 1 (27-85) Bildung: Rightless Appearance and Global Dialogics in Beckett and Farah Chapter 2 (86-131) Allegory: Marginal Figures and the Ethos of the Global Novel Chapter 3 (132-192) Sentiment: Global Spectatorship in Pamuk, Sebald, and Coetzee Coda (193-219) Recognition: “the dependencies of this world” 1 Introduction Global Mimesis World/Globe Halfway through Teju Cole’s 2011 novel Open City, the narrator, a Nigerian transplant to the United States, travels from his home in Manhattan to Brussels, ostensibly as a tourist. On the plane Julius speaks with a Belgian doctor who lived through the period when Brussels was an “open city,” having surrendered to the Germans in order to avoid bombardment. When shortly thereafter Julius enters the city for the first time, its landscape opens out into an imagined vista of the far-flung characters who appear elsewhere in Cole’s narrative: I looked outside the window, in my mind’s eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders’ retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans [...] I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half-century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment. (2011, 96) 2 Cole here draws together Asia and America, Europe and Africa in a fictional moment that holds freedom alongside unfreedom, the emerging postwar alongside the contemporary world. For September 1944 recalls September 2001, the event around which much of Cole’s novel turns, just as Brussels’s status as an “open city” ironically recalls the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this way, Julius’s imagined midcentury landscape of people, their “eyes open as if shut,” references a similar condition in our own time. Cole’s novel represents this contemporary landscape through reflections that range from Nigerians in New York to the situation of North Africans in Europe. The latter is addressed by Farouq, a Moroccan student of literary theory who works at a Belgian “talk shop,” a hub, which he offers at one point as a figure for the world at large (113). Farouq speaks to Julius of Paul de Man’s notion of an insight that is blindness, and “how what seems blind can open up possibilities” (127)—a dynamic that repeats the play of open and shut eyes in the above-quoted passage. So if Cole’s title ironically places Brussels alongside New York, in a deeper sense it references a new world whose apparent openness masks entrapment, yet whose blind spots bear the potential for illumination. In this way, the title Open City is also a password or imperative, marking the work as an attempt to manifest a polis where one is absent. How should we describe such a work and its ethical-political vision? While Open City was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award, its purview extends well beyond American culture, just as the transnational designation “Nigerian-American” does not capture the scale at which passages, like the above, conceive of human history and dwelling. In what 3 follows, I will describe works such as Open City as global, arguing that this status is predicated on the way in which they give ethical form to a notion of globality. While this might seem a predictable assertion at a time when the word “global” has assumed a frenetic adjectival life that renders it at once both reassuring and insipid, my claim rests upon more pointed conclusions: first, that we do not yet know what the global is; and, second, that signal writers from around the world, such as Samuel Beckett, Nuruddin Farah, J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Naomi Wallace, have endeavored over the past half century to imagine the global in distinctly ethical terms. In other words, my dissertation attempts to conceive of the global as a domain and product of modern and contemporary ethical culture, an idea which not only requires us to rethink the global, but also core ideas about the place of ethics and the work of literature. If the increasing ubiquity of global talk over the past decades has endowed the word with the aura of meaning both everything and nothing, it has been given a specific content in recent humanities criticism and largely viewed with suspicion. In his 2006 book Reading the Global, Sanjay Krishnan argues that the global is best understood as a perspective rather than an empirical process: a “mode of thematization or a way of bringing the world into view” (2006, 1, 4). For Krishnan, the perspective of the global “derives from the conceit that it transcends perspective,” and this way of viewing the world arises through British imperialism and is continuous with contemporary neoliberalism. Thus the global, in the present, becomes synonymous with a particular economic process of so-called globalization that predicates a new worldwide prosperity, and even “community,” on free 4 markets. Krishnan advocates, then, a mode of critical reading that can “interrupt the global perspective,” a correlative to Mariano Siskind’s recent claim that the modern novel has been complicit in shaping such a perspective. Siskind calls this the “novelization of the global,” whereby the novel constructs images of a “globalized world” of bourgeois production (2010, 338). The complement to this, in Siskind’s account, is the “globalization of the novel,” which describes the spread of the historically European genre to the world at large through the same economic- imperial processes. Even Pheng Cheah, who cogently approaches such a “globalization of the novel” as the conduit for a liberatory postcolonial nationalism (2003) and the means of inscribing peoples of the global South within the contemporary history of globalization (2008), insists on a distinction whereby “world” names a cosmopolitan mode of relating and being-with while the globe signifies “the totality produced by processes of globalization [...] a bounded object or entity in Mercatorian space” whose cultural mechanism and endpoint is “mass cultural homogenization” (34). These are powerful critiques of what I will call neoliberal globalization, the urgency of which, to my mind, is beyond question. Yet do we want to collapse the meaning of the global into this specific, if widespread, ideological and economic process? This is more than a strategic question about the global as a term currently “at stake.” Rather it addresses the global as one of the possible names of an emergent historical era whose potential we have perhaps not yet fully seen. In more concrete terms, the imaginative perspective adopted by Julius in the above-quoted passage, Farouq’s figure of the worldwide talk shop, Julius’s “touristic” travels, and 5 the very form of Cole’s novel—reworking, as it does, that of W.G. Sebald’s prose fiction—all seem related to a globality that is both little understood but increasingly preunderstood as compromised. While the reasons for this are overdetermined, such a view of the global arises—explicitly in Krishnan’s work, implicitly in Cheah’s—from a Heideggerian distinction between the organicism of worlds over against the artificiality of “global” or “techno-scientific” civilization. Saying such a distinction derives in part from Heidegger is not at all an attempt to dismiss it “by association,” as it were, or necessarily discount it outright, but rather names its source in order to address it (which I will do in more detail in the second chapter).