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In October, shortly before the Swedish Academy awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature to the French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, its permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, gave an interview to Associated Press. “There is powerful literature in all big cultures,” Engdahl declared. “But you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is still the centre of the literary world . . . not the United States. The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature . . . That ignorance is restraining.”
No American writer had won the Nobel since Toni Morrison in 1993 – and now we knew why. For all the apparent vitality of fiction in the US during the intervening 15 years – the miraculously fertile autumn of Philip Roth’s career, say, or the formal daring and intellectual scope of major novels by David Foster Wallace, William T Vollmann and Jonathan Franzen, to name only three members of a notably gifted generation – the American scene, in Engdahl’s view, was irredeemably parochial.
The response from the US was swift and predictable. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, listed just some of the great writers the Nobel committee has failed to honour down the years: Proust, Joyce and Nabokov. An organisation with such oversights on its record ought to “spare us the categorical lectures”, he said. And Michael Dirda of the Washington Post wondered if Engdahl had really been paying attention in all the time since he and his colleagues gave the prize to Morrison. “He is just betraying an insular attitude towards a very diverse country.”
Engdahl wasn’t really – or, at least, not only – complaining about America’s alleged literary provincialism, of course. He is certainly right that the Americans (and the British, for that matter) don’t translate as much as they should: whereas in France almost a third of all works of fiction published in a given year will be in translation, across the Atlantic that figure is closer to one-thirtieth. But the principal reason for this is the global hegemony of the English language.
The real cause of Engdahl’s angst, therefore, is that what he called the “big dialogue of literature” is today actually being conducted mostly in English – by inhabitants of Britain’s former colonies, for instance, especially those in south Asia and the Caribbean; and also by non-anglophone writers who have followed Conrad and Nabokov in choosing to write in English. One of the most interesting and critically acclaimed novels to have been published in the United States this year is The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-born writer who had only a rudimentary command of the language when he arrived in America in 1992.
In France, almost a third of all works of fiction are translated. Across the Atlantic the figure is close to one-thirtieth
Indeed, Hemon’s is an interesting case. For among the complexities flattened out by Engdahl’s vague appeal to an undifferentiated “Europe” is the predicament historically faced by writers who, like Hemon, come from the smaller European nations. One thinks, for example, of the Romanian writer E M Cioran. Looking back in 1949 on his younger self, Cioran wrote of his inner circle in Bucharest: “Located in a corner of Europe, scorned and neglected by the world, we wanted to call attention to ourselves . . . We wanted to rise up to the surface of history: we revered scandals, the only means, we thought, of avenging the obscurity of our condition . . .” Ultimately, avenging the obscurity of his condition meant, for Cioran, leaving for France and writing in French.
Cioran is describing there what Milan Kundera, in his most recent book, The Curtain, calls the “provincialism of small nations”. This is a kind of defensive pride that regards the “large context of world literature” with suspicion. Kundera contrasts it with the provincialism of bigger nations which turn their backs on world literature, not because they fear it, but because their own cultures seem to them “sufficiently rich that they need take no interest in what people write elsewhere”. Leaving aside the question of which “Europe” Engdahl was talking about exactly, the extraordinary thing about his remarks is that they managed to be parochial or provincial in both senses – in other words, defensive and self-satisfied.
At the same time, however, Engdahl did gesture towards the kind of literary cosmopolitanism (the “big dialogue of literature” and so on) that Kundera argues for in The Curtain. In Kundera’s view, there are two contexts in which works of art can be understood: the “small” or national context and the “large”, supranational history of the art form itself. Provincialism is the inability to imagine one’s national culture in the large context, and Kundera thinks it has done great damage to our understanding of literary history. If we were to view the history of the novel in the large context, we would see, for example, that Laurence Sterne was reacting to Rabelais, or that Flaubert was living on in Joyce.
Kundera credits Goethe with being the first to have understood this. In the 1820s, Goethe declared that the age of Weltliteratur, or “world literature”, was at hand: “National literature no longer means much these days, we are entering the era ofWeltliteratur and it is up to each of us to hasten this development.”
He conceived world literature as a series of transactions between national literatures that would eventually give rise to something like a “universal humanity”. In this respect, world literature was analogous to the global market that was taking shape at the same time. (And, in fact, exactly this parallel would be drawn twenty-odd years later by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: “As in material so in spiritual production. The spiritual productions of individual nations become common property . . . [F]rom numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”)
There is a significant wrinkle in Goethe’s theory of Weltliteratur, however – one that Kundera either overlooks or else chooses to downplay. And it is that Goethe reserves a special role for one national literature in particular: Germany’s. He wrote that it was the “destiny” of the German language to become the “representative of all the citizens of the world”. With the centrality of translation to German literary culture, anyone who knew the language well enough wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of learning Greek or Latin or Italian; they could read Homer, Virgil or Dante in German translations that were more than a match for the originals. Germany, therefore, was the literary marketplace par excellence. AndWeltliteratur, it turned out, wasn’t so much a matter of dissolving national boundaries as a matter of a single national literature going global.
You might say that today America (or the “Anglosphere”, if you want to include Britain) plays the role that Goethe once envisaged for Germany. And this, rather than America’s “isolation”, is what Engdahl was railing against.
In his comments to reporters after the announcement that the Nobel Prize this year was going to Le Clézio, Engdahl again struck a cosmopolitan note. Le Clézio, he said approvingly, “is not a typical Frenchman; he is a nomadic writer. He doesn’t belong anywhere.” This was a theme that Le Clézio himself would take up in his Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December…
