It happens in Berkeley, but only because it happened in Paris first
by zunguzungu
Last night, Pascal Casanova came from Paris to give a talk on her book, and larger literary project, The World Republic of Letters. I have to admit at the outset that I’m fairly predisposed not to like this style of argument, the way sweeping claims about inclusiveness and globalization end up focusing on the same old writers we’ve been studying for a long time. And for some reason, her title always makes me think of that Reading Lolita inTehran writer, and her “republic of the imagination,” of which I am not a huge fan. Anyway.
Her project is to think about the ways that literature and the literary is always produced in a global context, or how what she calls the “world republic of letters” structures and influences the ways we all perceive what the literary is. She isn’t quite as naïve as this may sound; she doesn’t try to say that there is one thing out there that makes all the rules, but she tries to think about and chart the various centers of global literary prestige (privileging Paris, naturally) and trace out how those centers set the rules for what texts will be celebrated (she used the word “consecrated” multiple times) and how and why. This is a multivalent process, and she doesn’t deny it; the world republic of letters is (like the global economy, on which it is implicitly modeled) a structure of inequality and domination, and her attention to these modes of domination is something I can embrace.
That said, an example she spent some time talking about was the ways that William Faulkner modeled a particular way of being a writer in a peripheral place, and she recited a long list of writers in Latin America, Africa, and “peripheral” places in Europe who participated in this Faulknerian revolution. It’s a good long list; Faulkner got read all over the place, and lots of writers pointed him out as an influence. But when she writes things like “Faulkner is also a figure with whom all writers in countries on the periphery can identify,” the excessive broadness of this net indicates to me a central problem with her project: while she wants to talk about how a writer like Faulkner becomes a kind of cultural capital (which can be converted into another currency called “modernity”), the fact that a writer in Algeria might find doors opening for him or her after being dubbed “Faulknerian” does not therefore imply that that writer truly identifies with Faulkner. Another obvious example of this kind of argument would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose relationship with Faulkner’s legacy is hugely important, and I know that because I wrote a paper on it (which means it must be important). But when she talks about structural affinities and derives relationships between writers on that basis, she always seems to be claiming that these writers are essentially the same, because the place they occupy in the literary marketplace is analogous, and this is just a bogus claim. When pressed on this point, of course, she was quick to say that this was not her point at all, but her argument gets continually misread in this way (it seems to me) because its logic is always dragging her towards those kinds of readings. For example, Garcia Marquez narrates one kind of genealogy of his craft, in which his master is Faulkner and he learns everything from him. But at other points, he tells a completely different story, about how his writing is basically just a transcription of the way his grandmother used to tell stories. Casanova might reply that when GGM tropes on his grandmother’s stories, he’s actually just marketing himself as an authentic, organic kind of local intellectual (just transcribing the stories of a real Colombian like his grams) and selling that authenticity on the marketplace. And there’s something to that. But because she presumes that the most important factor in a piece of writing is its relationship with the center, she is predisposed to not see anything about a text that doesn’t fit into that model. The fact that GGM, for example, might actually have something interesting to say about Colombia (in a novel like Cien Anos de Soledad, which is obsessively concerned with the position of the writer in a peripheral position) kind of disappears from view. When your paradigm focuses on the ways a work gets commodified (as hers does), it becomes very difficult to talk about the ways that it isn’t only a commodity.
So when she takes as the title of her talk “The Greenwich Meridian of Literature,” she can have some valuable things to say about the ways that the literary centrality of London, New York, and Paris define how and why which texts outside of those centers get integrated into global literary structures. But how does this kind of paradigm help us think about, for example, the particular and ocntingent logics and structures in the lusophone literary world, the strange ways that Portugal and Brazil triangulate for a writer like Mia Couto in Mozambique? A writer as original as him is infinitely impoverished if you try to compare him to writers in the “real” literary meridians of Paris or London or New York, and if you start to think about meridians in Brazil or Portugal, the whole structure starts to get incredibly over complex and unwieldy. It reminds me of the ways that early astronomers would adopt ever more complex structures to explain the motions of heavenly bodies that their models didn’t predict: every time reality doesn’t conform to the model, you just add complexity to the model to incorporate that non-conformity, and pretty soon you have such a complex model that it doesn’t usefully explain anything. Occam’s razor would have sliced right through that mess: when simpler isn’t better, it just might be because the simple answer isn’t completely right.
In any case, Couto would be unlikely to see his literary qualities as anything but rooted in the particular logics and situation of Mozambique; while he has addressed to Mozambique’s status as a “small country” (in a famous letter he wrote to George Bush), this is not (like GGM’s thing with Faulkner) the be all and end all of his “literary” project. You can read A Varanda do Frangipani as a kind of noir mystery novel (or a deconstruction of it), but unless you address the way it is talking about and responding to the end of Mozambique’s thirty year war, very little in that novel makes much sense. Casanova’s paradigm is very good at addressing the former quality, but at the cost of downplaying the latter. As far as I’m concerned, Couto and GGM are both writers for whom the significance of the latter is far greater; Garcia Marquez, after all, is not merely a Colombian Faulkner: his books get read by numerous readers who have never heard of Faulkner. You could make the claim, of course, that the only reason these readers had even heard of GGM, the only reason he had been published in the first place, was his relationship with Paris and Faulkner, but it feels to me like the cart is starting to exert tremendous weight on the horse: we’re no longer explaining the evidence, we’re twisting the evidence to support the explanation.
In any case, all of this puts all the power in the hands of the “center,” in ways that the evidence does not completely support. Most of the writers of El Boom may have been originally published by Spanish presses, but the reason those Spanish presses were interested in Latin American writers in the first place was because they were managing to sell a lot of books down south. But the ways that publishers took note of what kinds of books sold down there and then printed and published more of those is a dynamic that tends to drop out if you start from the presumption that all decisions get made at the center. So while it may be true that the structure of El Boom as a literary movement has much to do with Parisian models of modernismo, that’s only part of the story, and maybe not the most important part (I would say not, but what do I know). The trouble with Casanova, for me, is that her focus on that global centers precludes any real engagement with this kind of complexity.
There is a particular precedent for this, of course, in the old world systems model of globalization, which is itself modeled on a curiously uncritical taking of imperialism at its word. But while the old way of understanding imperialism was to imagine that plans constructed in London got implemented (or contested) in Kenya, for example. But the most interesting studies of imperialism in the last couple decades (I’m thinking of Timothy Mitchell or Frederick Cooper or Ana Stoler, but those are just two great ones amongst a very rich group) have been the people who study the ways that conditions on the periphery influence how plans get made in the center. Imperialists love this way of thinking about empire, love the idea that powerful men hatch plans in civilization and then send forth their influence into the savage wilds of the periphery, but the reality is much more complex than that; Stoler traces the ways that “official” mores about sexual relations with “natives” in the dutch indies get shaped by changing economic circumstances for example, or Cooper traces how conceptions of the potential modernity and modernization of Africans develops out of rapidly changing political struggles in colonial Africa. From my perspective, Casanova’s desire to assert that everything starts and originates in the centers reflects and unwillingness to think of how the centers, too, are already defined and influenced by their relationship with the peripheries. Or rather, there are not really “peripheries” and “centers” but simply a stunningly complex web of relationships between different types of social and cultural capital. Some of it can be explained using a model of centers and peripheries, but a whole lot of it cannot (good luck trying to make sense of or integrate textual production in the “Islamic world” into her model, for example), the same way an earth-centered view of the universe can explain a lot of the data. Just not all of it. So while I’m in full agreement with the argument that we need to look at the ways that the trends in Paris exerts force on writers in the formerly colonized world, and how New York exerts force on the third world, and so forth, such models presume a centrality for the “center” that doesn’t so much explain the complexity of writers like Mia Couto as make predictions about him that can only be fulfilled by oversimplifying and downplaying the very complexity I find most interesting. And if I may, when the choice of model made by an academic in France just happens to emphasize the centrality of Paris and radically downplay the autonomous logic of cultural economies in places that are far from France, well, William Occam again has some suggestions. But I leave those to you, dear friends…
PS- the hits keep coming. Tonight we hear from Immanuel Wallerstein, perhaps the major theorist of “World Systems Theory” back in the seventies and eighties (and still its most prominent standard bearer), so stay tuned!
zunguzungu 
Nice piece here — and thanks for pointing out this book, which I now think I’ll have to read (but not purchase, heh) just to be hip with what others in the department who are very much based “in the center” are likely to say. (And funny enough, I cleaned out my office today and found all of the Boom articles from our class! How topical!)
I still have to read this book. (I admit to finding it very amusing that absolutely no one here buys the Paris-as-center thing, no matter what she says.) I’m glad you’re uneasy with it too: it’s a good old-fashioned paradigm-shifter, riddled with flaws and loose ends and yet highly engaging, like so many formalisms and structuralisms past. I should share with you my notes from her talk at Stanford in 2006, with Moretti and Aamir Mufti as respondents and Margaret Cohen asking everyone in the audience, “You all speak French, don’t you?” before allowing Casanova to continue in French; of course no one admitted ignorance of the language of culture. I do not speak French.
I have to admit that I’ve not read the thing in its entirety. I probably should at some point, partially because one of my committee members thinks it’s worht it, but then its interesting that the both of you (like me) feel the need to read her without actually expecting to agree with much. Why is that? To me, it seems like her work shares in the same class of flaws as someone like Moretti, with his similarly grand ambition: when I try to apply the unified field theory to something I know better (such as the African novel or American naturalism) it fits markedly more badly than the special theories that critics have developed for those movements. Naturalism, for example, is one of those words (like “modernism” itself) that critics need to use, but shouldn’t really take too seriously: it has little basis in the novelists themselves, you can trace how it came into critical parlance via a particular niche it filled for critics at a certain point in time, and it significantly obscures important cleavages within what gets called American naturalism, unifying and rendering coherant something which was neither. People working in American naturalism understand that, usually. But Casanova, for example, had to use the figure of naturalism as a way to describe texts which stayed local, as opposed to the “modern” texts that achieve world currency by being “consecrated” in Paris, and so there was a moment when she discribed two Peruvian authors (Vargos Llosa and someone I didn’t know, maybe Arguedas or something like that? Does that sound right Jeff?) as being international and naturalist, respectively; her point was that everybody has heard of the former and nobody has heard of the latter. And in the question and answer period (conducted in French, because she’s only comfortable making sweeping generalizations about all languages, not in conversing in them), a faculty member noted that three of her colleagues had written about this mute inglorious Peruvian who was supposed to be toiling in obscurity and soledad. Casanova appeared to not take this as a critique (and I sort of did). If you need naturalism and modernity to be different (so you can build a grand unified field theory out of that distinction) then you have to pretend that naturalism and modernity are completely distinct. And so she does. It reminds me of a passage in one of Moretti’s earlier World Literature essays, where he refers to the first generation of postcolonial African writers as “nationalist,” and he cites a set of sure nuff African studies critics to that point (since he’s not himself actually read them). I read that, having actually read the writers in question, and though to myself: “Gosh, what a lousy and oversimplistic way to describe these writers.” So while I appreciate the desire for some kind of way to talk intelligently about literature and globalization (and the admission that that’s nothing new), the fact that one cannot actually read every book from every period speaks to the unlikeliness of being able to actually do it well, so there seems to be a lot of square hole jamming with round pegs for the sake of doing so (and not, as I would prefer, paying attention to the roundness of those pegs).
I also have a major problem with her privileging of the “literary,” both since many of the texts I’m most interested in in my own work are not, by conventional “consecration fo Paris” standards, literary, and because it seems to give pride of place to a currency that’s devaluating as fast as the dollar these days. Seems like now would be a good time to think about that, about how texts of all sorts relate to each other (whether literary or not), but then maybe I just say that because there’s something in the water here at new historicist Berkeley.
PS — Mmm.. El boom… I never read *novels* anymore. Maybe I’ll go crack one those that I bought after Jeff’s class but never read.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this and woendr if we’ll see the day where someone breaks that record set by Mary Faulkner. It seems like we emphasize quantity over quality all the time now; perhaps the next great American (or worldly) novelists will be the ones who write the MOST, not the ones who write the best.
Arguedas sounds right as the “other, naturalist” Peruvian writer. Working further against her theory: the case of Alfredo Bryce Echenique who writes in a very similar style to Vargas Llosa — and therefore probably could be called “internationalist” through her terminology — and yet no one outside Peru has really heard of him. Heck, Arguedas has more translated than Bryce into English.
This is why I will never be a famous academic: because I’m too cautious with my sweeping theories. (It took me forever to get the central crux of my book to work because I wanted it to be right, hahaha.) Then again, I’m the king of designing courses that spend the first half building up the ideal theory, only to completely tear it down in the second half.
Have you read Angel Rama’s The Lettered City, Aaron? It’s not too long and, while based much in Latin America, it’s an interesting glance back at the colonial period relating modernity with urbanity and both with the privileging of writing. This could be why she’s relating the urban with writing, dismaying you doubly at once. (Or, maybe not.)
Ahh, Aamir Mufti. Reminds me of my Michigan days, even if I didn’t have him. I think I’ll go look up some of the other Armani Marxists of my days right now to see what they’re up to.
Yeah, it is Arguedas, she mentions him in her book too. I like the look of Echenique, though; I’m going to try to look up the book with Tarzan in the title, to feed my own personal obsession with that figure. Man I get so fed up when people act like “naturalism” and “modernism” aren’t as connected as heads and tails, as if Joyce isn’t naturalist and Upton Sinclair isn’t modernist. Anyway.
Rama sounds totally up my alley. I can’t believe I haven’t read him yet; in fact, I distinctly recall checking the book out while I was thesis-writing in the bowels of battelle tomkins (or maybe you loaned me a copy, come to think of it), but I never actually got to it. I’m lame. Also Mufti, actually; so little time…
Anyway, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that I’m doing a clumsy hatchet job on her theory, so I’d love to hear your guys’ take on her if you get around to it. But while I’m not sure she so simply opposes cosmopolitan to rural and internationalist to naturalist in the way I was suggesting, it does seem that after her subtlest points and most careful qualifications fade away (like dew in the morning sun…) all that is really left is that kind of clumsy binarism, where there are intellectuals that sell out to the system and noble peasant-intellectuals that suffer and write nobly and silently, all mute and inglorious and stuff. Only in French.
Regarding “consecrated”: perhaps she meant “canonized”?
Beautiful interview Diane! Glad we are lnkied to similar themes in recent weeks as it helps expose people to the wonderful works and people dealing with visual/hearing impairments. I found it interesting that Traci used the word battlle a number of times. I find her thoughts interesting. Traci’s book sounds wonderful, but did she complete her book about growing up blind? It sounds like she is doing wonderful work. I have a friend who is blind that writes the most wonderful poems, e-mails, and she has a similar computer system. Great interview ladies.
[…] It happens in Berkeley, but only because it happened in Paris first […]
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[…] about the power of centers over peripheries to be problematic in exactly the ways that I find Casanova’s world system of literature to lose persuasiveness: the world is just a lot more complex than that, […]
[…] beginnings, and, second, the “Faulknerian revolution” story that Pascal Casanova has been putting forward. In interviews, García Márquez has contributed liberally to both narratives. But here’s another […]
I read an article on this in the New Yorker and have been meaning to read the book since. I don’t believe in the Faulknerian theory of GGM necessarily, etc., but regardless of any details Casanova just seems so literate and informed generally, the book sounds landmark even if one ends up disagreeing.