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Small World Literature


          Domenico Remps, "Cabinet of Curiosities" (1690s)
 

This is a small story about world literature.

In high school I was a bookish kid in a town with no bookstore. When I went to college the library immediately became the center of my life; I spent most of my undergraduate years reading my way through the social sciences. It was only in my final, empty semester that I began to flip through literary magazines, though I did not at that time foster any literary ambitions. I was working as a library assistant, and the periodicals room was one of the few places where I could divert myself with something that looked like honest work. Of the magazines on the racks, I was particularly impressed by Chicago Review, which published a mix of translations and dense, confident-sounding criticism. The people publishing the magazine seemed to know about a world that I didn't, not merely the literary world of a big city (as imagined by an undergraduate in a small college town), but a multinational, polyglot world that seemed impossibly far away.

Three years later I was Chicago Review's fiction editor, a job for which I had very meager qualifications: I was a sociology graduate student with one semester of freshman English, 200 words of published fiction, and no experience as a critic. I was, however, enthusiastic about literature and quick to hand out rejection slips. Perhaps most important, I wanted the job; so far as I know, nobody else was interested. In my first official act as editor, I asked New Directions Publishers to let me publish an excerpt of their forthcoming Victor Pelevin novella, The Hall of Singing Caryatids. I did not expect much to come of this request—I could offer them no money and a very limited circulation. A day or two later they sent me the complete manuscript and told me, not unkindly, to do the excerpting myself. I made my selection while riding the bus, the only time I had to spare. Opinion on Pelevin varies, but it is certain that he is one of Russia's more distinguished living novelists, and the oddsmakers sometimes give him an outside shot at the Nobel Prize. It was humbling to be handed his work and told to carve it up as I saw fit. It also struck me as more than a little ridiculous: this was work for people who knew what they were doing and had the time to do the thing well, not me.

This feeling has recurred every time I have selected fiction for Chicago Review. We publish translations in every issue, many of them from living authors of extraordinary distinction. I still feel unequal to the responsibility of handling (and judging) their work. But I now know that there is probably not a better qualified or less distracted person eager to take my place. The world's literature is translated, published, and read by the people who can be bothered to take an interest in it, and all the evidence suggests that not very many people do take an interest.

The shortage of literary translations in America is a regular topic of complaint, and this complaint is about many things at once: the apparently small segment of the public that reads seriously; the lack of attention given to the rest of the world even by serious American readers; and a pronounced shortage of philanthropic, public, and consumer support for literary publishing. It is easy to concede the justice of these criticisms: many other countries invest more in their own literature and in the enrichment of their literary culture by translation.

However, I think this is simply the complaint that is fitting to America’s place in world literature. World literature has plenty of theorists. One of my favorites is Pascale Casanova, who argues that it consists of the international poles of national literary fields. Practically speaking, this means that the proponents of world literature are all unhappy in nationally distinctive ways, and what seems wonderful in one country may be awful in another. My own experience offers some ready examples.

Mexico spends a great deal in support of its literature, and has long given authors positions of genuine political and cultural power. The Mexico City airport has a state-subvened bookstore where, instead of Newsweek and pulp bestsellers, one can buy classics and literary magazines; as somebody who has spent far too much time in O’Hare International Airport, I was mightily impressed. Yet my college Spanish professor Eloy Urroz saw things very differently. He was one of the five Mexican novelists who wrote the Manifiesto Crack, an incendiary document that draws a line from state support to literary complacency and nationalism. (Mexico rewards its rebels, too. Jorge Volpi, another of the Crack authors, had been made a diplomat and the head of a public television station at an age when American writers are still counted as “emerging.”) At an academic conference, I told an Austrian friend that I envied him for living in a country that produced Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard. He told me—in Bernhardian fashion—that  Austria is full of patronage-seeking mediocrities. He envied me for living in a country that produced Jonathan Franzen. On a visit to China’s Anhui province, I told a professor that, in my extremely limited way, I admired China's long lyric tradition. She said that the tradition was stale and so were the supposed innovators. For her part, she hoped to visit California one day. Robert Hass made it sound very beautiful.

World literature is what happens when people are hungry for more than their country can offer, even if the local offerings are very rich. Because such people are not very numerous, world literature is a widely diffused but small enterprise—a colony of ants crawling over the Behemoth of national literature. One might wish it otherwise. If nothing else, people are missing out on some wonderful writing. Yet I would like to take a moment to reflect on three virtues of its smallness.

Beneath the rarefied world of major international prizes, book fairs, and festivals, there is very little money or glory in translating or being translated. The circulation of writing across languages and cultures happens mostly through the efforts of translators and editors, who must be working from love, because they cannot be doing so for riches or even thanks. I have found most literary editors to be unusually thoughtful, curious, and unegotistical readers. I have not had the experience of being translated, but authors could count themselves lucky to have readers as attentive as the translators I have met. One reason I read literature is to seek company, and these people are very good company.

The pluralism of world literature also assures that good company does not simply mean agreement. Culture can be a form of mutual admiration: two people who find they like the same things congratulate each other for liking the same things, then take a moment to belittle others who like different things. Interacting with translators or omnivorous readers abroad has not been like this: these people love literature as much as I do, but we don’t simply like the same things. They like things I have never heard of. They like things I like for different reasons. (Casanova suggests that Faulkner revolutionized Latin American fiction. A fascination with Mississippi had little to do with it.) I also respect and admire some readers who like things that I don’t like, and prompt me to reconsider my own views. Perhaps there is something about Jonathan Franzen that I haven’t appreciated—I have it on good authority that Austria would be lucky to have him.

In my very subjective view, the smallness of world literature has one other virtue: it has made a little place for me, though I have no right to it. 


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