World Lite

What is Global Literature?

Published in Issue 17: The Evil Issue
Publication date Fall 2013
World Literature certainly sounds like a nice idea. A literature truly global in scope ought
to enlarge readers sympathies and explode local prejudices, releasing us from the
clammy cells of provincialism to roam, in imagination, with people in faraway places and
times. The aim is unimpeachable. Accordingly, nobody says a word against it at the
humanities department conclaves, international book festivals, or lit-mag panel
discussions where World Literature is invoked. People writing and reading in different
languages (even if one language, English, predominates) about different histories and
cultures and ideas: who could be against that?
Still, in a sick, sad world, its hard not to be suspicious of anything as wholesome as
World Literature.1 The word literature itself has come to sound fake. Is there something
the addition of world is making up for, a blemish its trying to conceal?
This much is clear: by the late 90s, a new literary globalism had begun to flourish. In
1997, Arundhati Roys God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, soon selling 6 million
copies; in 2001, Oprah had her book club read Rohinton Mistrys A Fine Balance, an
excellent 19th-century novel, published in 1995, about Indira Gandhis Emergency; in
2003, reading the bestselling Kite Runner, by the Afghan-born Khaled Hosseini, made
some Americans feel better, and others worse, about our war over there. Literary scholars
have focused on World Literature especially since 1999, when the French literary critic
Pascale Casanova published her pathbreaking World Republic of Letters. In the 00s,
Franco Moretti, from Italy but resident (with Google) in Silicon Valley, instigated databased debates about the world-system of literature in the New Left Review.
The geographic broadening of literary sensibility has taken place alongside the
beginnings of a remarkable economic catch-up of poorer with richer countries. In 2013,
for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, more economic growth will take place in
developing than in developed countries. The Indian market for anglophone literature
will soon be bigger than the British one. Chinese writers have won two of the last thirteen
Nobel Prizes. A South American is now pope, for the first time since Columbus brought
Christianity to the New World.
What has all this meant? In literature, no more folkloric long poems, like Okot pBiteks
Song of Lawino (1966), let alone those dreary tales of hardscrabble villages with
nonpotable water, which everyone in grad school pretended to like. In the new
millennium, literature has taken a Jason Bournelike tour through the emerging financial
capitals of what used to be the third world: big books about Mumbai and Beijing, Nairobi

and So Paulo, have joined books about London and New York in a glittering
constellation rotating across the night sky. In the new economic era of northern
slowdown and southern catch-up, the exemplary novelists have seemed to be those, like
Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian, and Haruki Murakami, who successfully transcend their
homelands and emerge into a planetary system where their work can acquire a universal
relevance.
The progress of World Literature since the 90s has accompanied that of global
capitalism. In the past, the spread of moneywhat Marx called the universal
equivalent, for its ability to serve as an empty vessel of exchange valuestrengthened
rather than weakened national boundaries and languages. It wasnt so much world
literature as vernacular literaturecomposed in Florentine Italian, say, rather than
universal Latinthat developed alongside international finance in northern Italy in the
late 15th century. Later, the headquarters of capitalism shifted to Holland, then England,
then the US, countries mainly inhabited by Protestants who distinguished themselves
from Catholics (the word catholic meaning simply universal) largely by listening to,
but especially by reading, the Bible in the same Dutch or English they spoke over dinner.
Not coincidentally, these countries attained mass literacy sooner than Catholic ones. In
these countries, and others gathered into the capitalist world-system, questions about how
money was to be distributed, for example, were discussed in publications produced in the
local and/or national language and thus legible to far more people than any universal
language had ever been. The overall nationalization of literature, throughout modernity,
didnt mean there could never be an internationalist literature, of the kind once imagined
by 19th-century radicals. But an internationalist literature would be different from World
Literature as we know it.

Certain texts have always circulated among geographically broad but socioeconomically
thin strata that we could call worlds. The Thousand and One Nights, common property of
literate peoples in much of the Middle East and southern Asia, was in that sense world
literature; so was the Sanskrit literature that was read, into colonial times, beyond the
boundaries of the Raj. Likewise, the Vulgate (and associated scholastic work) was world
literature for the literate few of the European Middle Ages. And long before the modern
nation-state, people all over Europe were translating and imitating the canzoni of Petrarch
in their own vernaculars. But the ideal of Weltliteratur in its modern form dates to
Goethe, an indisputably great writer, so Germans say, who happens not to translate very
well. I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of
mankind, Goethe said in 1827. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the
epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. In
the same interview he mentioned reading Chinese novels and Persian poetry in
translation, and discussed his own reception in France.
Most striking about Goethes admirable comments is how wrong they seem. Poetry isnt
as universal a possession of humankind as prose, less of which is lost in translationand
this only became truer with the disjunctions and word games of modern and postmodern

poetry. More importantly, 19th-century literature, far from converging into a single world
literature, was deepening in its national character. In the prior century, the British
diplomat Lord Chesterfield had been able to say that illiterate, in its common
acceptance, meant someone who didnt know Latin and Greek, implying a definition of
literacy covering only a tiny pan-European elite: socially, a wide puddle of a world, but
they had a literature. Even in the 18th century, however, and especially by the 19th, a
world literature of dead-language classics and neo-Latin was giving way to vernacular
national literatures built atop a broadening base of readers. By the mid-1800s, something
like a bare majority of people were literate, in the contemporary sense, in Protestant
countries, France, and Japan.
The spread of modern nation-statescarrying out central administration, within defined
borders, of a population often linguistically definedstandardized national languages
(sometimes slowly, as with Italian) and sometimes separated them (as with Swedish and
Norwegian). Newspapers published in capital cities and written in the national language
were decisive, as Benedict Anderson has argued, in establishing the imagined
community of the nation-state; the same papers also published poetry, fiction, essays,
and criticism. Literatures audience came to be nationally constituted even where, as with
the US and UK or most of Latin America, states shared a common language. Meanwhile
the Bible, Koran, and Torah, no respecters of borders, dwindled in relative importance.
The big story since Goethes proclamation of the imminence of world literature, in other
words, has been, until recently, the nationalization of literatures. The very idea of the
state-of-England novel or Great American Novel, the fact that these arent the same,
testifies to the national character of writers who have mainly felt themselves to be
addressing a compatriot audience. So does the way that poets in the same language work
the national register: no way Lyn Hejinian, Derek Mahon, and Geoffrey Hill could swap
passports and still sound like themselves. The sound of modern literature, including
almost all modern works later promoted to World Literature, has usually been that of
someone speaking, or attempting to be heard, in a nation-size room.
In practice, this was a room intimate enough that the writer could give offense. Shelley,
living in Italy in his late twenties, had already published enough in England to get kicked
out of Oxford, disowned by his father, and refused the polite society of London, and to
have several pamphlets and poems officially confiscated and destroyed. His more
reverberant calls to revolution are those of someone with a chance of truly pissing off an
old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king; / Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
/ Through public scorn... / A SenateTimes worst statute unrepealed, and other
obstacles in the path of liberty. Something similar could be said of Turgenev, a writer
dismissed by some contemporaries (including Tolstoy) for spending too much time in
Europe, but one who could infuriate, and dideven more than Tolstoyhis fellow
Russians. Flaubert the aesthete was put on trial for obscenity in France. In the middle of
the 19th century you could hardly walk a block in Paris or London without running into
one or another exiled writera Mazzini, a Heine, a Herzen, a Marxsent packing from
his country for calling for revolution, or national unification, or both. (It happens that
Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, first translated Madame Bovary into English.)

In modern times, World Literature has consisted mainly of texts from abroad read in
translation. For readers with a second language, the most common was French. This had
been the case since the establishment of French as the language of diplomacy in the 17th
century, and remained so until a few decades after World War II, when English won out.
Paris was thus, as Pascale Casanova argued, the world capital of the republic of letters
throughout the roughly two centuries when more and more Europeans and Americans
could read and spent more and more time with books. Works in French could more easily
become works of World Literature than those composed in other languages, and it was
most often by way of Parisian houses that World Literature added to its library the works
of a Russian, an American, or an Argentine. (Borgess was among the last gigantic
reputations made principally in French; he shared the first Prix International with Beckett
in 1961.)
Throughout the long Parisian period of World Literaturebefore headquarters were
relocated to London and New Yorka northern or metropolitan author usually
addressed an audience consisting chiefly of compatriots (even if he was later translated).
Things were a bit different for writers from the periphery, whose main or only
publishers might be located in a European capital: for a Senegalese writer, Paris; for a
Peruvian, Madrid; for an Indian, London. This split the southern writers audience more
evenly than the northern writers between an audience abroad (where the sophisticated
and sympathetic read foreign work) and at home (where the literate population was
proportionally smaller). Of course the metropolitan writer might also enjoy an audience
in those peripheral countries where his own language was usedbut the metropole can
always more easily ignore the periphery than vice versa. For this reason, writing from the
global south has always tended to be more international-minded than that from the global
north (even if its translation into other languages was less, rather than more, assured).
Work addressing a smaller-than-national linguistic communityin Catalan, Kannada, or
Welshvery rarely entered into World Literature. An exception was Tagore, winner of
the Nobel Prize in 1913, who used, in Bengali, a subnational language spoken by tens
of millions of people.

Modern literature also emerged in an atmosphere of threatened revolution to radically

reorder or, among colonized peoples, simply establish the nation-state. The specter
of revolution haunts modern literature, from Romanticism to postcolonialism. In the later
19th century (a time of advancing mass literacy and mass agitation both), naturalism
shuddered at images of rising social classes and ruined individuals. Zola in France led to
Gissing in England; Dreiser, Norris, and Wharton in the US; Verga in Italy; Ibsen in
Norway; and arguably to Mao Dun and Lu Xun in China. As apolitical a writer as Henry
James wrote a superior novel about anarchists; and even the infamous arch-decadent
slogan from Villiers de lIsle-Adams Axl (1890) Living? Our servants will do that
for us revealed the unstable class structure underneath lart pour lart.
Literary modernism in the strict sensethe last literary season of Western culture,
Franco Moretti has called itwas a more international than national phenomenon. This

was a virtue made partly out of necessity, since modernism was nowhere locally popular.
Ulysses, written in Zurich and Trieste, published in Paris in 1922, and unprintable at
home in Dublin, became an event in London and Berlin. Futurism was current in Italy,
but also Soviet Russia and even, through Wyndham Lewiss Vorticism, England.
Surrealism was French (Breton) and Spanish (Lorca), but also Brazilian (Mario de
Andrade) and Chilean (Huidobro). Little magazines and publishing houses set up in
capital cities all over. Yet much as the general air of revolution had invigorated
modernism with a sense of enormous imminent change, the repression of revolution
knocked the wind out of it. The failure of socialist insurrection in Germany and Italy in
the 20s, paving the way for fascism; the success of the generals uprising in Spain
(during which Lorca was killed); the frigid congealing of Stalinism (which put to death
modernists as varied as Mandelstam, Babel, and Pilnyak)these thinned the ranks of
international modernism and demoralized its troops.
In modernism, the universal and the obscure make familiar bedfellows. Who in the 20th
century wrote poetry more deserving of being translated into all languages and sent on
thumb-drives in spaceships to all galaxiesso that aliens may become acquainted with
our better selves before deciding whether to enslave or befriend usthan the
impoverished Peruvian Communist and surrealist Csar Vallejo did upon returning to his
tiny rented apartment in Paris from a Republican Spain that was attempting to stave off
fascism? Virtually no Parisians, Peruvians, Spanish speakers, or fellow Communists read
Vallejo at the time; his posthumous Poemas Humanos (1939) intone distraught sermons
to a nonexistent congregation on the lost cause of somebody elses civil war. These
poems continue to live, while the works of such contemporary world-spanning giants as
Malraux and Gide slowly fade to oblivion. Which goes to show that world literature is
like happiness: you might possibly achieve it, but not by aiming to.
Tidings of war and revolution accompanied European literature for only a few years after
1945. The term modernism became current in the 50s and 60s, when the thing itself
was expiring. The so-called late modernism of the postwarof Beckett, Robbe-Grillet,
and Sarraute; of Peter Handke, Nabokov, and John Barth,[2] as well as the earlier texts of
Kafka and Borges that now attained a vast audiencefeels very different from the high
modernism of Joyce or Woolf, Bely or Dos Passos or Dblin. Titles from these writers
include Dubliners (1914), Kew Gardens (1919), Petersburg (1913), Manhattan
Transfer (1925), and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). There is, by contrast, a kind of
geographical and social underspecification about much of the best Euro-American
literature published after World War II, which, in the most striking cases, turns deep
personal peculiarity into a gnarled universality.
Kafka, precursor to this tradition of blank allegory, had been literally a man without a
country: a fitfully Zionist German-speaking Jew in Prague whose people, including his
three sisters, were soon wiped off the map by the Nazis. That no one can say where The
Trial and The Castle take place helps add these books to World Literature. Borges in
Buenos Aires had his own reasons for stinting on local color in his fiction. Raised largely
in Geneva, speaking English from an early age with a British grandmother, he went
gradually blind while living, until late middle age, under the same roof as his mother; the

hinterlands of Argentina were hardly more familiar to him than those of Canada or
Russia. Beckett, the last modernist, came by placelessness in yet another way. An
Irishman of Protestant background living from his late twenties in and around Paris and
writing, after 1946, in French, his fiction is virtually solipsistic: no need to speak of street
names, let alone social classes, when youre howling and chuckling to yourself in a small
bare room. These late modernistswho attained the purity of World Literature without
seeming to pass through the crucible of nationality firstwere a few very odd people
with unusual backgrounds. Freud had described a related phenomenon: plumb individual
pathology deeply enough and you emerge in an underground realm of universal
mythology.
In the more recent fiction of a pacified Europe, a smooth EU-niversality prevails in place
of the old strife within and between countries. Handke, such a late modernist that the
party appears to have ended, is an Austrian who lives in Paris; but can you regularly
identify the city or country his peripatetic characters are passing through, metafictional
preoccupations in train? Much of the postwar European fiction, some of it very good, that
we might read as World LiteraturePerec, Bernhard, Ndas, Nooteboom, Jelinek,
Maras, Sebald, now Knausgrdis extremely psychological in character and only
vestigially social and geographical. Typically the narrator is a monologist, resembling the
author, who tells of personal turmoil amid social stasis. He recognizes himself, with
snobbish self-approbation, as a part of a stable polyglot pan-European elite; most other
inhabitants of his country, as of the neighboring ones, are unthreatening idiots who turn
on the TV after returning from work. The younger ones take drugs and dance to club
music on weekends; the older ones go on package tours before dying of cancer.
Nietzschean last men (and women), they can be roused neither to the self-promotion nor
to the gun violence that lend spice to American life. Their tribune is Michel Houellebecq.
Other big-name European novelists write books about personal relationships and
international culture, and not much in between. Resigned to terminal minorness, this is a
European novel written by, about, and for literary people who attain a critical mass only
at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and then without taking the opportunity to riot against the
European Central Bank. Many suicides occur in its pages. The wonder is there arent
more.

If the prospect of social revolution or counterrevolutionary crackdown departed Europe

after World War II, it didnt disappear from the world. It flared up in the form of wars of
national liberation in South Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, and Indochina. The
portion of southern writing that became World Literature required champions in the
publishing houses of northern capitals. Through declining Paris, the West got Carpentier
and Cortzar from Latin America; through rising London, Gordimer and Naipaul from
the Commonwealth. Their international reception depended on a cosmopolite audience
political, curious, appalled by the war in Vietnam that emerged with the end of
colonialism and seems to have lasted through the Central American dirty wars of the
1980s.

The social situation of the southern writer remained what it had ceased to be in the rich
countries not long after World War II: to one side of the writer stood a large, increasingly
educated population of working people whose ongoing tolerance of social injustice could
not be taken for granted, and to the other side a government run on behalf of an owning
class too insecure and divided to shrug at the opinions of national writers. The class
composition of many postcolonial countries resembled that of European countries threequarters of a century before: a ruling class uneasily split between rural landlords and a
thin stratum of urban bourgeoisie, a working class that still consisted more of peasants
than city-dwelling wage-seekers. The combination of restive masses and a hostile or
approving but not indifferent bourgeoisie gave the work of southern writers a social
charge no longer available to literature in the stabilized rich countries.
The valence of this charge naturally depended on the book in question. In Petals of Blood
(1977), Ngugi wa Thiongo, a man of the left from Nairobi, excoriated the comprador
bourgeoisie of young independent Kenya; in Guerrillas (1975), by the increasingly
reactionary V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent writing from southern
England, the leader of a left-wing uprising on a Caribbean island was a half-educated
black rapist. Either way, these and other southern novels of their time were buoyed by
revolutionary ferment. The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosas War of the End of the World
(1981)a historical novel about a millenarian movement for social justice in 19thcentury Brazil written in the middle of the authors trajectory from reflexive leftism to
Thatcherite neoliberalismwas pervaded by contemporary South American anxieties
about left-wing maximalism and neofascist repression.
The major transitional figure from this earlier era of World Literature, when things were
still postcolonial, to the contemporary globalized period, is Salman Rushdie.
Midnights Children (1981), a genuinely angry book, belongs to the older style of World
Lit: Rushdie, outraged by the Emergency, wrote a Gnter Grassinspired denunciation of
the failures of India. Pakistan was served up for similar treatment in his next novel,
Shame (1983). In The Jaguar Smile (1987), a still left-wing Rushdie went to Nicaragua to
check out the Sandinistas, about whom he offered guarded praise. The book was
criticized in the US for its silence about the totalitarianism of the Sandinistastwice
elected in honest elections and facing a right-wing paramilitary insurgency from the
Contras, secretly funded and armed by the Reagan Administration.
The book Rushdie published the next year, The Satanic Verses (1988), now looks like the
inauguration of World Literatures global phase, in the form of the novel of hybridity.
Rushdie answered the question posed at the beginning of the novelHow does newness
come into the world?by devising his own English-Hindi-Urdu patois, in which he
gave a revisionist account of the mingled, mongrel voices that went into composing the
Koran. Fortuitously, The Satanic Verses was published the year before the Warsaw Pact
unraveled: now a world split by the cold war could become a unified globe. Less
fortuitously, the head of the Iranian Revolutionitself a salvo against cultural
globalization, among other thingsput a price on Rushdies head. Khomeini had thus
inadvertently sanctified the global novel in English. Laffaire Rushdie became an
opportunity for some writers (Sontag, Hitchens) to put on their best face in defense of

free speech, and for others (Le Carr, Berger) to don their worst in a misguided thirdworldism. The novel itself was deeply impressive, deploying the metafictional techniques
of postmodernism to address the major contemporary theme of migration, later prompting
as much theory as it seemed to be responding to.
But a postcold war, globalized World Literature was not a more radical or politicized
one. On the contrary: for Rushdie and other writers like him, what had been radicalism
swiftly collapsed into a single pious axiomfreedom of speechon whose behalf they
would support any action. Three years after The Satanic Verses, the US would invade
Iraq for the first time; just over a decade later it fell to Rushdie, no longer in hiding, to
make the liberal case for the second invasion. Rushdie, who hadnt cared for the Indian
national ideal, came to have few qualms about the United States. Following The Satanic
Verses, the association of postcolonial writing with anti-imperialism was dead.

The World Literature that confronts us today seems, at first glance, to fulfill the hopefulsounding prophecy of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848): National
one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and out of the
many national and local literatures a world literature arises. Many writers today are
unavoidably, increasingly, transnationalin experience, subject matter, reading tastes.
Still more belong to a manifest world-system. Their publishers are multinational
corporations; the universities they teach at, or where their work may be taught, train a
global elite; and much of their audience, actual or hoped-for, reads English, though huge
markets for books also exist in Mandarin, Spanish, and French. In France itself and in
smaller markets, half the fiction on offer may be in translation (though in Europe two out
of three translated novels are from English).
Marx and Engels wrote, however, when literature was on the march, at a time of fastgrowing readerships in Europe and America and the beginnings of universal public
education. The literate portion of the population, and the quantity of modern literature it
consumed (in addition to its diet of journalism, scripture, and delectable trash), would go
on swelling for another 120 years or so. Even today, in a few countries, including
enormous India, the average person probably reads more rather than less each year, and
maybe even reads better stuff. Elsewhere, writers of serious or half-serious fiction and
essays, never mind poetry or plays, face national audiences apparently shrinking in
relative or absolute terms. The readership for literaturein the sense of actual or
wannabe works of artistry and intellectmay be spreading out, globally, but in most
societies it appears also to be thinning. Literature never quite shed its elite connotations;
today it is a more professionalized and elite activity than it was a generation or two ago.
One temptation is for writers to hope that enough thin-sliced national audiences, stacked
together, might be world enough to support them.
Todays World Literature might better be called Global Literature. World calls up
aspirations to true universalityWe are the world!while global, through no fault of
its own, evokes phenomena like global capitalism and global warming the good and bad

effects of which are by no means universally felt. Global, in other words, implies
worldwide processes that polarize the conditions of the worlds people (including,
presumably, their literary condition). Through globalization, the US and China can
become equally unequal! Writers arent to be blamed for this situation, or not much. The
question is what we make of it.
Global Literature cant help but reflect global capitalism, in its triumph, inequalities, and
deformations. In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers:
Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its own economy, consisting of
international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. It has its prizes: the Nobel, of
course, but more powerful and snazzier is the Man Booker, and the Man Booker
International. Its political arm is PEN. And it has a social calendar full of literary
festivals, which bring global elites into contact with the glittering stars of World Lit.
Every year, sections of the dominant class fly from Mexico City to have Julian Barnes
sign books in Xalapa, or from Delhi to Jaipur to be seen partying with Mario Vargas
Llosa. The Hay Festival, started in Hay-on-Wye in rural Wales, now has outposts in
Dhaka, Beirut, Nairobi, and elsewhere. Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias is an
accidentally funny phrase S, hay festival redolent of a strange new intimacy
between global north and south.
What happens at these festivals? No debate; no yelling; some drinking; lots of signing of
books. They are like peace conferences, though the national constituencies havent been
consulted. They represent the state of World Literature at the present time. Everywhere, a
political writer has acquired a quieter global successor. Insurrectionary Gordimer has
given way to the sedulously horrified Coetzee; ranting Grass to mourning (and deceased)
Sebald; angry Rushdie to shitty Rushdie. Of course there was something wrong with the
old militancy, too. We fought for parties that, if they had won, would have sent us
immediately to forced labor camps, Bolao said bluntly, without too much exaggeration:
We fought and put all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for more than fifty
years.
World Literature was not often called that when there were still three worlds: first
(capitalist), second (Soviet-style socialist), and third (could go either way). Since the cold
war, what it has gained in circumspection it has lost in direction. In spite of the increasing
worldliness of writers, the contemporary world often fails to impress itself on World Lit
with much force. Themes of the novel (the main vehicle of World Literature) from the era
of late modernism and postcolonialismexile and trauma in particularhave become,
pried from their original political context, devices of blindness more than insight.
Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankanborn Canadian of Dutch ancestry and hero to many
world litterateurs, has been exemplary in the worst way, with his sinuous capacity to
suggest a political mind without betraying a real one. From the occasionally good English
Patient (1992), you could catch a whiff of how his signature brew would go sour:
dispossessed Hungarian count and Sikh sapper exchange quick words in a moldering
Italian landscape, all expressed in the kind of breathless short sentences that once were
John Bergers specialty (though Ondaatje avoided any hint of Bergers nostalgic

Marxism). More recent books like Divisadero (2007) and The Cats Table (2011) show a
deeper spoilage. Here are soft-focus word-pictures of fig jam and recipes for spring
salads, the glimpse of a sprig of absinthe leaves used as a bookmark, and rural poets
lifting their wives yellow cotton dresses and fucking a tergo beside the water barrel still
glinting in the moonlight. Late Ondaatje will give a French character a Spanish name, so
that another character can reflect on its brilliance: Segura. The irony of his name was
not lost on him. Shifting arbitrarily from region to region with spurious worldliness,
these books inspire jet-setter jacket copy: Spanning three continents... Its not even as
if the novelist were desperate to match the American imperium or international finance in
scope. Its more like the writer is writing for a global West Village.
An older global novel was animated by an attempt to win for fiction not only a new
language and form but a role in securing an entire realm of freedom. But the political
liberation failed, or was botched or betrayed; to write as if third-worldism were still a
source of promise would be an especially tedious kind of cant. In the absence of political
prospects, writers have produced backward-glancing narratives of trauma (like the atom
bomb going off at the end of The English Patient). World Lit trauma thematics mar the
work of a number of acclaimed younger Jewish novelists, with characters discovering the
source of everything in the Holocaustthe most flagrant case so far being that of
Jonathan Safran Foer, whose first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) was a
tearjerking mixture of ESL comedy and destroyed-shtetl travelogue. His second novel,
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), was about an innocent and precocious child
traumatized by the death on September 11 of Tom Hanksor rather his perfect father: a
conceit at any rate designed to create the maximum of sympathy with the minimum of
reality. Burnt Shadows (2009), by Kamila Shamsie (one of Grantas latest 20 under 40),
carries the global formula to a climax of absurdity: it begins in Hiroshima in 1945, moves
to partition-era Delhi in 1947, Zia-ul-Haqs Karachi in the 1980s, New York on
September 11, and concludes in Afghanistan as American bombs start to fall.
More significant and accomplished works have also concentrated on historical trauma in
a way now typical of World Literature, as when Junot Dazs Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao (2007) turns abruptly from the lives of contemporary Dominican Americans
to their painful background in the Trujillo dictatorship. In Teju Coles Open City (2011),
a searching and often brilliant book, the main character Julius quests throughout New
York for memorials testifying to slave markets, the killing of American Indians, and
other atrocities. As in Sebald, a clear influence, melancholy wanderings among the dead
seem a way of shielding the novels protagonist, and perhaps the novelist himself, from a
contemporary world he cant face.
The obsession with past trauma refracts World Lits sense of belatedness, even when the
genre advertises its contemporaneity. You can argue that were still haunted by
Hiroshima or the Holocaust, that people refuse to speak about this hauntingkind of the
way they refuse to care about the novel. Past horrors, unlike contemporary ones, also tend
to be events liberal readers agree about. But they displace the contemporary world,
locating politics always elsewhere, in some distant geography and irrecoverable past.
Present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.

10

The key institution in the creation of World Literature has not been the literary festival, or
even the commercial publishing house, but the university. Every World Lit writer seems
to have an appointment. Pamuk teaches at Columbia; Paul Muldoon at Princeton; Junot
Daz at MIT. University-produced postcolonial theory was also part of the education of
World Lit. Rushdie had crucial friendships with Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, as did
Ngugi with Gayatri Spivak. Increasingly writers from Calcutta and Cape Town attend
MFA programs in East Anglia or Syracuse. Universities that celebrate their commitment
to diversity of cultural identity, if not class background owe it to themselves to hire
writers of odes to hybridity. I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either Im
nobody, or Im a nation, wrote Derek Walcott from Santa Lucia in The Schooner
Flight in 1979, the same year he joined Boston University, where hes remained.
Walcotts definitely not nobody, with an ear for English to rival Tennyson or Eliot and
much more intelligence than the former and more commitment to his vocation than the
latter but hes not really a nation anymore either (nor, it seems, an internationalist,
despite the elegy on Che Guevara he wrote long ago). His work of recent decades bears
the mark of the global in being more broad than deep.
Universities began to hire and promote writers from the global south around the time that
the national liberation movements failed, prompting many to flee abroad. (After the cold
war, the US was also willing to grant visas to writers, like Gordimer, whose fellowtraveling sympathies had previously kept them out.) These southern writers turned into
guest workers of a kind, their employment dependent on a permanently foreign identity.
The result was uprooting without assimilation; foreign writers transformed exile into
professional expertise and literary theme. Fundraising draws at the university and stars of
the festival circuit, they were invited to speak on panels about the loss of self under
migration, or to meditate on the bloody crossroads of politics and literature in rooms
where nobody raised his or her voice. (Across the hall, the purely academic panels in the
1980s were, for better and worse, more vituperative.) Bereft of both a native and a
general metropolitan audience, with a readership geographically broad but
socioeconomically thin, they floated in the wake of the academic boat steaming ahead of
them. Academic theorists of hybridity, the postcolonial, and World Literature gave
novelists an authority that no longer emanated from themselves. The novelists must have
felt required to perform their identity in a solemn key, since few if any wrote selfburlesquing comedies of exile as Nabokov had in Lolita and Pnin.
The university even more quickly became basic to the careers of younger writers. You
can see this in the way it suddenly intrudes, like a dissonant chord, in the sophomore
work of World Lit authors: the trace of the moment when they took their first teaching
job. Dinaw Mengestu, whose first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
(2007), was an assured first-person narrative by an Ethiopian migr shopkeeper in a
gentrifying neighborhood of Washington, DC, wrote a second novel, How to Read the Air
(2010), narrated by an Ethiopian migr teacher of literature. The narrator of the earlier
book told a straightforward story of flight from a failed revolution; the second novel told
a similar story, but presented it metafictionally in a classroom setting. Junot Daz shifted

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from his chronicles of down-and-out Dominicans in Drown (1996) to an American

campus in Oscar Wao, where the eponymous character is obsessed, cultural studiesstyle,
with the semiological analysis of comic books and science fiction. The very first word of
Adichies third novel, Americanah (2013), is Princeton. No law of literature says the
university cant be the setting of great fiction, but it says something about the difficulty of
the feat that the best example we can think ofDeLillos White Noisewas written by a
writer who has never taught at one.
The university always threatens to insulate World Lit from the world it wants to describe
and address. The great Ngugi began with socialist bildungsromane and in midcareer
wrote Petals of Blood, a Marxist classic about rising peasants and workers whohe
hopedwould overthrow the corrupt new ruling class of postcolonial Kenya. But Ngugi
eventually decided he was producing one of Empsons versions of pastoral
proletarian literature for nonproletariansand stopped writing in English altogether. He
composed subversive plays in Gikuyu and put them on in villages, deliberately forsaking
global literature for pieces addressed to a specific community. His gamble that Gikuyu
was more threatening to power than English proved correct: he was thrown in prison by
the Moi dictatorship (an injustice protested by writers around the world), where he
composed the first Gikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, on prison toilet paper; in 1982, he
went into exile. In the university Ngugis analysis of the uses of language by those in
power faded into a wan poststructuralism. All material questions were replaced by issues
of language. In 2006 he published a Big Africa novel, The Wizard of the Crow (written
in Gikuyu and translated by the author into English), which bore the marks of
performance theory. In 2011, he gave the Wellek Library lectures, published the next
year as Globalectics: an unhappy attempt to fuse theory and autobiography, crowned with
a dreadful title. Unable to return to Kenyathe last time he tried, about a decade ago, his
wife was kidnapped by people who remembered his provocations from thirty years
beforeNgugi continues to teach at UC Irvine.
One writer who avoided the University Archipelago was V. S. Naipaul, a genuinely
dangerous and unstable quantity. Despite some pain and admiration (Edward Saids
phrase) for his work on the academic left, he was the ogre of World Literature. Invited to
teach at Wesleyan for a year in the late 70s, he alienated everyone in his department with
his hostility to campus liberalism and wasnt invited back. He and Rushdie were perhaps
the last World Lit writers to elude the university. In Naipauls best novels you get the
impression of a man calling it like he sees it, pitilessly. (Walcott, who admired Naipauls
prose and disliked his politics, seems to have shared with his fellow Caribbean what
might be called an antitraumatic aesthetic: Now, I require // nothing from poetry but true
feeling, / no pity, no fame, no healing.) But Naipauls vision was always filmed with
prejudice, especially toward women, and eventually these prejudices curdled into pure
hatefulness, jeering. In the autumn of his monstrousness, he became a figure of the
English country house, whose strangeness he evoked in his last great book, The Enigma
of Arrival (1987) its very title a masterstroke, standing for any work of World
Literaturebefore he no longer found England enigmatic, and called it home.

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Alas, Rushdie; alas, Naipaul. In the mid-80s, people debated these two figures as if they
represented a momentous choice. Rushdie is brilliant, says one of the guests in the
Hindi film Party (1984), a skewering of the Indian literary scene, but give me Naipaul
any day. Oh, Naipaul, no, notoo bitter! says his interlocutor in reply. Each novelist
is now a Faust, relegated, as if in exchange for his achievement, to a private hell. Rushdie
emerged from the fatwa a damaged writer, his puns reflexes, his recourse to myth and
fable showing signs of hackery. He took to appearing onstage with U2, grinning with
Bono under the suspended Trabants of their Zooropa tour. To view him nowwitty but
humorless, soft and thick with moneyed confidenceis to view a wreck. The books are
soft, too; the reviewers knives dont even need sharpening. Rushdie himself reviewed
Naipauls latest in 1987, for the Guardian: I think it was Borges who said that in a riddle
to which the answer is knife, the only word that cannot be employed is knife. There is
one word I can find nowhere in the text of The Enigma of Arrival. That word is love.
For Rushdie, this made the book very, very sad. Theres something in this: if later
Rushdie seems estranged from earlier Rushdie, the sadness, the lovelessness, he rightly
identified in Naipauls work comes from Naipauls persistent implication that the only
legitimate escape from half-made postcolonial countries is to become V. S. Naipaul.
Other major writers from the periphery have had happier or, at least, less compromising
fates. The Russian Eduard Limonov, a significant figure on the national level, has
remained outside World Lit circulation and off the festival circuit, probably because he is
such a jerk: he goes uninvited, one imagines, less because of flirtations with fascism than
because the last time he attended a literary festival he hit the British writer Paul Bailey in
the head with a bottle of champagne. Saramago, in his weaker work, could be
sentimental, but his greatest novels were those of an unrepentant Communist and antiChristian blasphemer for whom humanism was the foundation of politics but no
replacement for it. Bolao, having become famous in the Spanish-speaking world when
he won the Romulo Gallegos prize for The Savage Detectives (1998), a book thick with
mockery of literary types, didnt follow that novel with anything easier to digest but with
the enormous and appalling 2666, 150 pages or so of which are a plotless catalog of
masculine violence against women in a Mexican border town (a contemporary rather than
past atrocity). Then theres Arundhati Roy, who may well have abandoned the novel,
after The God of Small Things, because she couldnt find a fictional form that was right
for her developing radical politics. With her unrelenting critique of not only the liberalist
development of India but also the expansive double standards of the USA, wrote the
Indian novelist Tabish Khair of her activism, Roy has isolated herself from many people
of the sort who go to literary festivals. What they want is some soft criticism that does not
make them feel too uncomfortable.

World Literature, in the form gestured at by Goethe and now canonized by the academy,
has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who
otherwise mostly ignore it. If an earlier World Literature arose in the four decades after
World War II to challenge northern narratives of the south, these days writers from
outside the rich countries dont seem afflicted by white writing in the same way, not

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when titles like Mohsin Hamids How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) are being
published. The contemporary phase is different, less contentious. Todays World Lit is
more like a Davos summit where experts, national delegates, and celebrities discuss,
calmly and collegially, between sips of bottled water, the terrific problems of a humanity
whose predicament they appear to have escaped.
There is another path. The historic rival to a World Literature made up of individual
national authors was the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary
left: journalism, treatises, and speeches, novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs necessarily
written in a given vernacular but always aimed at a borderless audience of radicals. This
was an internationalism embodied by Marx and Engels themselves, German-speakers at
ease in English and French, able to read Latin and Italian, who corresponded from
England with comrades born as far away as Russia. The politics of 19th-century radicals
required them at least to listen to speeches delivered in heavy accents, and often to go
into exile (where they would become the guys with the accents). Prison was another
common destination for socialists and anarchists, and years behind bars offered, if
nothing else, the company of foreigners and plenty of time to read and write. The formal
name of the first International, The International Workingmens Association (186476),
gives some idea of the intended audience of the revolutionary left, as does the title of the
speech delivered in Russian by Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 during Soviet peace
negotiations with the Central Powers: An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and
Exhausted Peoples of Europe.
When it came to an audience, the reach of the international left considerably exceeded its
grasp. This was even more true after World War I than before: the Western Marxists who
grew into intellectual maturity during and after the 1920s, though polyglot, were less
aware of arguments made in languages not their own (or in French) than earlier
generations of comrades had been. Meanwhile, for writers in the Soviet Union, the
abstract ideology and practical censorship accompanying Stalins socialism in one
country interfered with any real internationalism of the mind. Like international
socialism, a truly internationalist literature has so far enjoyed hardly a moment of
historical realization.
Uncompromising work across the world suggests the outlines of a thorny
internationalism opposed to the smoothly global. A list drawn up by a few Americans
incapable, unlike the offspring imagined by Leopold in Ulysses, of speaking five
modern languages fluently can only be drastically incomplete and tentative. Still its
worth naming a few names: in France, the polarizing works of Marie NDiaye, with her
long sentences dividing into different strains of thought; in southern Italy, the feminist
novels of the reclusive Elena Ferrante, the terrifying Days of Abandonment (2002) and
the quieter trilogy beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2009). In Mexico, Juan Villoro
and lvaro Enrigue place themselves at a sharp angle to the history of Latin American
literature; in Argentina, Pola Oloixaracs Savage Theories (2008) is an extremely smart
novel of the Theory Generation. In Russia, the poet Kirill Medvedevs rejection of
copyright, made in response to the depredations of the Russian publishing system in the
1990s, has turned into a gesture of international significance. In China, Yan Lianke,

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unlike the Nobel-winning Mo Yan, has moved underground and gained in creative
power. In India, a host of English-language writers from Samanth Subramanian and
Tabish Khair to Roy herself and, in the vernaculars, Girish Karnad and Mahasweta Devi,
have been lending their efforts to a more combative public sphere.
A developed internationalist literature would superficially resemble the globalized World
Lit of today in being read by and written for people in different countries, and in its
emphasis on translation (and, better yet, on reading foreign languages). But there would
be a few crucial differences. The internationalist answer to the riddle of World Litof
its unsatisfactorinesslies in words never associated with it. These include project,
opposition, and, most embarrassingly, truth. Global Lit tends to accept as given the tastes
of an international middlebrow audience; internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create the
taste by which it is to be enjoyed. The difference, crudely, is between a product and a
project. An internationalist literary project, whether mainly aesthetic (as for modernism)
or mainly political (as for the left) or both aesthetic and political, isnt likely to be very
clearly defined, but the presence or absence of such a project will be felt in what we read,
write, translate, and publish.
The project can only be one of opposition to prevailing tastes, ways of writing, and
politics. Global Lit, defined more by a set of institutions than a convergence of projects,
treats literature as a self-evident autonomous good, as if some standard of literary
excellence could be isolated from what writers have to say and how they say it. In its
toothless ecumenicalism, Global Lit necessarily lacks any oppositional project of form
(as, again, international modernism did) or of content (as international socialism did); the
globally literary content themselves with the notion that merely to write or read literary
books is to enlist, aesthetically and politically, on the side of the angels.
Literary excellence aside, Global Lit makes no judgments. The work it favors is in
consequence often a failure on its own narrow terms, good writing being, in a word, the
creation of people trying to tell the truth, however slant, rather than to produce
literature. Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never
come out with either thingone reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as
if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in sustenance,
is more like what we have in mind.

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