Books
The empire writes back. Should the literary realm be seen as its own republic, complete with frontiers, legislators and rivalries? Yes, according to a bold new theory. Terry Eagleton applauds a milestone in the history of modern thought
Published 11 April 2005
The World Republic of Letters
Pascale Casanova Harvard University Press, 440pp, £22.95
ISBN 067401345X
We think of literature as a set of uniquely individual works, as randomly distributed as the stars. From time to time, however, a critical study comes along that steps back from Dante and Goethe, Balzac and Woolf, and views them, in a powerfully distancing move, as part of a meaningful con- stellation. Such is the virtuoso achievement of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel and Northop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Although Pascale Casanova's new study is not exactly in this league, it is certainly in this dis- tinguished lineage.
The World Republic of Letters is concerned with what one might call the geopolitics of literature. Literary works, so it claims, are never fully intelligible in themselves; instead, you have to see them as belonging to a global literary space, which has a basis in the world's political landscape, but which also cuts across its regions and borders to form a distinctive republic of its own. Like geopolitical space, this literary republic has its frontiers, provinces, exiles, legislators, migrations, subordinate territories and an unequal distribution of resources. It is a form of intellectual commerce in which literary value is banked and circulated, or transferred from one national currency to another in the act of translation.
Like the political sphere, too, the republic of letters is wracked by struggle, rivalry and inequality between the literary haves and the have-nots. There are "peripheral" or "impoverished" literary spheres (Sudan or Bulgaria, for example), which have yet to muscle in on the international literary market through prizes, translations, eminent authors, venerable traditions and canonised genres. Such underdeveloped pockets are poor in literary capital, lacking publishers, libraries, journals and professional writers. Dominating their cultural resources is Old Europe, with its literary capital located firmly in Paris - Europe being a continent that is rich in cultural capital and prestige, and whose chief literary executives (critics, reviewers, academics) largely determine what is to count as artistic value for the rest of the globe. They are, so to speak, the central bankers of the transnational literary republic. Only old nations, ironically, can pass definitive judgement on la derniere chose.
These unacknowledged legislators also get to decide that some languages are more inherently "literary" than others. Paramount among the favoured tongues is French, which is the language not of a nation, but of culture as such. Paris is the capital of international art, not of France, which is why artistic exiles have historically taken shelter in its polyglot cafes. Literature written in these prestigious tongues then becomes "classical" or "canonical", transcending its national basis to constitute a timeless, universal lingua franca. "A classic," Casanova comments, "is a work that rises above competition and so escapes the bidding of time." Critics may be regarded as prime creators of value, while literary foreign-exchange brokers (translators and publishers) export valuable texts from one territory to another.
Whereas Marxist critics relate literature to politics and economics, Casanova sees the realm of letters as a political and economic terrain. Is this anything more than a suggestive metaphor, just part of a fashionable postmodern preoccupation with space (which these days is far sexier than time)? It is certainly more than merely voguish: Goethe was speaking of a "world market of intellectual goods" two centuries ago. In any case, as a good many studies besides this one have argued, there is more than a metaphorical relation between the emergence of national literatures, vernacular languages, political nationalism and the rise of the nation state. In 19th-century Europe, just as in "deprived" literary regions today, literature played a key role in the formation of national identities. A great many ordinary men and women in Latin America know who Pablo Neruda is, in contrast to the participant in the BBC Radio phone-in quiz who thought Evelyn Waugh was Hitler's mistress. The only place where "culture" really matters these days is in politically oppressive, economically dire conditions.
The history of the republic of letters, in Casanova's view, passes through four distinct stages. First, there was the challenge of the Renaissance and Reformation to the ancient hegemony of Latin and the Catholic Church. It was with the formation of the first European states that national literatures emerged, along with the idea of a world literature and an international literary market. If Italy was the first "recognised literary power", France followed hard on its heels, hotly pursued by Spain and England. With so many contending national interests, war was well nigh inevitable. It broke out in the late 18th century between Germany (for which literature was national, populist, Romantic and organic) and France, the home of the classical, elitist and universal.
The second stage is literary nationalism, in which writing finds a role by harnessing itself to the building of the nation state. Literature and language become vital instruments of political power. Once nations have used these instruments to accumulate literary capital, however, they can allow themselves the luxurious delusion that literature is a purely autonomous affair. In a third stage, then, writing frees itself from its former political dependency and makes its strike for freedom. This is known as modernism. You can tell that a district of the republic of letters has made it when its poetry and fiction are regarded as entirely useless. It is the culturally well-heeled, in short, who can afford to forget about the internecine struggles for authority and recognition that mark the literary republic as a whole, and that "dominated" nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America can scarcely avoid. For Old Europe, literature becomes pure, free, timeless and universal. Zulu poets struggling to get translated are not so sure.
The fourth stage is when the empire writes back - when poetry, fiction and drama once again provide a means of access to the global cultural economy for those who have been excluded from it. Because these writers are liberated from the constraints of western canons and conventions, they can make themselves up as they go along, in a curious marriage of avant-garde experiment and cultural deprivation. If this was true a century ago of James Joyce and William Faulkner, it is true today of Gabriel GarcIa Marquez and Salman Rushdie. The greatest revolutionaries of literature, as Casanova comments, are to be found among the ranks of those struggling to get out from under an imposed colonial language, and who are compelled to invent any number of ingenious devices to do so. It is European realism that hampers their development, as do European tariffs.
There is a great deal more to this path-breaking study, not least a superb sketch of Franz Kafka, who is depicted caught between Yiddish, Czech and German, high modernism and popular nationalism. There are portraits of exiles or "translated men" such as Joyce and Samuel Beckett who are adrift between cultures, adept at being homeless in a whole number of languages. And there are snapshots of "assimilations" such as V S Naipaul, who eagerly identify with the imperial heritage that uprooted their own people. Casanova's range of literary allusions, from Berlin to Havana, Norway to Somalia, is astonishing - though an odd absence is any reference to the pioneering work on world literature of the critic Franco Moretti. (Perhaps it is a little too close for comfort to the author's own.) There is also a good deal of repetition, as fresh variations are woven on the same clutch of ideas.
In the end, perhaps, The World Republic of Letters rather overplays the notion of literary conflict and competition, which it derives for the most part from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Doesn't such talk of lethal combat endow literature with a political significance it scarcely deserves? Is it not an inflated sort of rhetoric for so modest a phenomenon? And what of alliances, coalitions and collaborations? Even so, this book, which unlike many other works of literary theory is written (or at any rate translated) with exemplary lucidity, represents a milestone in the history of modern literary thought - even if it does voice its support for the literary underdog from that citadel of high culture, Paris.
Terry Eagleton's most recent book is The English Novel: an introduction (Blackwell Publishing)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
