Should one mourn national literature(s)?

Property of the state. (click to enlarge)

There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth:

If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

In other words, big, bad, nasty globalization is diluting the novel so that it can be pitched to the lowest common denominator, thereby finding, like Hollywood blockbusters, a huge international audience.

OK, now, what on earth is Parks thinking, when he complains earlier that “As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature”? World market, perhaps, but Europe has had an international literary market for centuries. One need only glance at the third chapter of Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel to see how everyone on the European continent was reading everyone elses’s work (England kept itself to itself). Don Quixote, a good candidate for First Novel Ever was also, in Moretti’s words, an “international bestseller.” This in the age before “globalization,” literary agents staging simultaneous releases, and the like.

Moretti provides three maps of emerging translations of Don Quixote, and he sees three Europes in it, three waves of translations, with the biggest wave coming in (wait for it) the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, when the novel was finally translated into northern and eastern European languages as well as Asian languages.

Fancy that. Now, what else, maybe, occupied much of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries regarding literature in Europe? Oh, the consolidation of local dialects / promotion of a central dialect into a national language that then needs literature in the language for it to stand as a literary language. So texts get translated, and authors are encouraged to write in their vernaculars not to make money, but, rather, because the state apparatus is finally in the vernacular language, and what was once peasant talk (shameful, dismissed, go watch Becket) becomes, for the first time, the language of power.

This is, of course, all old hat to anyone who’s read Anderson or Gellner or even, hell, DeLanda, who argues that literature, precisely, played the key role in creating languages out of dialects/creoles because of the massive vocabulary expanding opportunities it provided. But despite talking about “consolidating national languages,” the point that Parks misses is that the literature served the exact opposite role (as it got increasingly national) that he wishes it did. Puns, “subtle nuance,” and awareness of (implicitly national/linguistic) “literary culture” are in the text precisely as territorializing moves: they establish the ground rules, the borders, the space of the language, of the nation, of the national community.

In fact, these national literatures should be especially dull to Parks, since they (again, by design) actualize a public that is not, by definition, the one that Parks is a part of. This is not bad, and I’m not against efforts to try and understand different national literatures, but it does run into eventual problems of being boring. If this is the case, Parks should perhaps be championing the new, “international” novel because of its efforts to transcend national(ist) boundaries and histories in order to fulfill the fantasy of bourgeois indvidualist humanism the novel was invented to represent. Or, as I said on Google when I came across Parks’s essay: you wanted Neoliberalism, and now you’ve got it. (There may have been use of the work “circlejerk” too.)

In other words, delighting in “world literature” in pre-neoliberal times is a dilettantish effort of the elite, the people who can bother, like Gabriel Conroy, to go to the Continent every few years to “keep in touch with the languages.” The national insistence on cultural specificity (our language, our literary history, our local celebrities) means that if someone is interested in that specificity without the “our,” something weird is going on. Now that we live in kumbaya pluralism, where gluttonously gorging on multiple simultaneous cultural specificities has become the norm, something about Parks’s seeming pissyness over the fact that people can now read international authors without the effort of getting to know, you know, the author’s nation’s history and tradition and stuff seems especially condescending.

This condescension is further highlighted by the fact that Parks doesn’t bring up the question of translation at all historically, only complaining, instead, that contemporary authors keep translation in mind when writing. A quick example of how confusing this position is: in French class, we read part of Azouz Begag‘s Le marteau pique-cœur, and, in it, Begag describes how the narrator’s (/his–I don’t recall if the work is literally autobiographical) mom reacted to some startling news:

Ma mère était tombée dans les courgettes pour la énième fois de sa vie.

Literally, the sentence means, “My mother had fallen among the zucchinis for the umpteenth time in her life.” However, “tomber dans les courgettes” is a play on the expression “tomber dans les pommes” (“fall among the apples”), which means to faint. But the switching of the noun also shows that the mother was most likely, as in Algerian stereotype, cooking up some couscous when she fainted, which, considering she has fallen among the zucchinis several times, is all she ever seems to be doing. By beuring up a French idiomatic expression, Begag manages to inject some cultural conflict into the sentence.

But if we consider Parks’s take on Hugo Claus, an author he says (seemingly admiringly) did not care about the “special effort” the reader and translator had with his text, who, I ask of Parks, does he expect to catch Begag’s expression? I caught it only by the dumb luck of having learned the normal idiomatic expression a few days before reading the sentence above. In class. No translation could probably catch the dynamics of what Begag is doing here–keeping the sense of being in the kitchen and fainting in the air at the same time as tweaking the idiom of the major language. So either Parks is yearning for a Conroyish past when everyone spoke a million languages and could make the efforts to gather these little twists (a past that never existed–and recall that Conroy feels ultimately isolated from his wife by not speaking Irish), or he’s assuming that this nuance used to be translated, and now writers don’t bother with such nuance and everyone is sad.

But, first, writers can’t avoid nuance, no matter how consciously they write to avoid it, unless novels become just Simple English. They can’t help but inject some of their own subjectivity (or whatever) into what they’re writing. And, second, if it is the case that novels have become victims of literary tricks and gimmicks and a general, flattering (neo-)liberal political sensibility (not “politics” per se), then it’s because Parks is reading the wrong authors, and authors these days, generally, suck.

About seven years ago (in these pages, I think), I got into a dicussion that led me to, if not assert, then at least think, that, well, basically I had gotten sick of contemporary literature–especially literature by white American dudes. This was largely part of my Great Eggers Backlash, but that’s how it was. I don’t claim to have read widely in contemporary American literature, but pretty much everything I’ve read has seriously let me down in retrospect, starting around Infinite Jest.

What it was that I lacked the terminology to describe at the time was an implicit interest in what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature,” which grows out of a “minor language.” They describe “minor language”  in several different ways, but the basic conclusion, when it come to literature, is:

That is the strength of authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one’s own language, in other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by stretching tensors through it.

What I was failing to read were what DG would call “minor” authors–this can be understood as authors who deterritorialize the major language by writing in it. DG have here in mind their supreme example, Kafka, but they also refer to “what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.” But in its state of deterritorialization, the minor literature is always, also, inescapably political and communal. In major literature, “the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background,” so the outside, the surface, the political all get turned into window dressing for whatever Oedipal ish the individual protagonist has to take care of.

In other words, the neo-liberal, cosmopolitan humanism that Parks sees as a sad result of globalization is, in fact, the result of authors’ he cites (and maybe he likes–or used to, before they started feeling international pressure) being major authors. And, in fact, my own disinterest in contemporary literature was related to my getting bored with individual concerns as well. Now see how DG describe the political in minor literature:

Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it. In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles–commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical–that determine its values.

The individual takes a final blow in the third characteristic of minor literature, and this is the one that is most interesting to me, which is how in minor literature “everything takes on a collective value.” DG continue:

It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility; just as the dog of “Investigations” calls out in his solitude to another science. The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern.

It is important not to read this snippet from a too-Marxian standpoint. But that becomes especially difficult to do when comparing to the literature Parks complains about. What DG provide for us is an avenue, through their example of Kafka, of literature’s power to deterritorialize while also actualizing this “machine-to-come.” It is a feature of language and of tensions between the stratified major and the vibrating variation of minor. And there is no reason to assume that these sorts of authors are ceasing to exist. In fact, as the world gets more and more territorialized, the opportunities for minor literatures to emerge (from the teeniest molecule of a piece of graffiti) will only increase.The people need to talk, after all.

So the closing way of looking at Parks’s bizarre complaint about the future of dull, global literature, is to return to one of the assumptions he never addresses in his post, which is the assumption that any/every author wishes to be considered “great”–either on a national or international (his point is that the latter informs the former) scale. The hero who keeps tagging the HSBC in the Marais, for example, does not wish to be considered great. Begag’s tweak of French idiom is possible only since, it’s clear, he does not wish to be considered great. He destabilizes the major with his writing, and no one with an international market in translation in mind would ever write a phrase like “tomber dans les courgettes.” That writer has different goals in mind.

My advice, then, to Parks is that when these various European authors he talks about come up to him to complain about how they aren’t held in high enough prestige, he should ask them to reconsider what their goals are in writing and then go find some better (minor) authors, authors who are too busy fucking up the program to worry about winning a Nobel.

Tags: Azouz Begag, Benedict Anderson, Deleuze and Guattari, Don Quixote, Ernest Gellner, Franco Moretti, Infinite Jest, language, Manuel DeLanda, minor literature, nationalism, neo-liberalism, new york review of books, novel, NYRBlog, pluralism, Tim Parks