Paper Submission to the 8th

International Marx & Engels Colloquium, Marxist Studies

Center – Cemarx at University of Campinas - Unicamp

Thematic group: TG 9: Culture, Capitalism, and Socialism

Paper title: Marxism and the Problem of World Literature

Oded Nir

PhD, Lecturer

Department of Comparative Studies

The Ohio State University

oded.nir@gmail.com

No one is surprised today that the construction of national consciousness no longer designates

the political interpretive horizon of most literary criticism. Even if 1990s declarations of the

death of the nation-state seem today to have been over-hasty, it nonetheless seems impossible to

once again talk earnestly of national literature as some autonomous imaginary, or as capturing a

whole way of life. It is this context – with its discourse of globalization - that has given birth in

the last decades to world literature as a theoretical problem, at the heart of which is, of course, a

definitional problem: what is world literature? As we will see below, the answers provided for

this question are almost unanimously formalist: they try to detect the “worldliness” of literary

texts in their formal features. In a recent essay, Christian Thorne (2013, 53-97) interrogates these

formalist tendencies, on the basis of Adorno’s view of form as sedimented content. If the world

is to be found in literature’s formal characteristics, so goes Thorne’s provocation, why can we

find no novels that “naively” try to represent the world in their content? Why should we find the

world in literary form, if it has never been, in any serious way, the direct representational object

of the novel? The second half of Thorne’s essay is wholly dedicated to considering whether the

novel, which has been singularly useful to the construction of national imaginaries, can

accommodate a realist world as its object of representation.

Notwithstanding possible critiques of Thorne’s essay, it does put us on track for finding a

more satisfying Marxist theorization of world literature. We will return to his essay towards the

end of this paper. First, we will present a typology of world literature theories, one that will show

us why Thorne’s intervention is important. One of the more colossal attempts to concretely

“map” something like a literature of the world can be found in Franco Moretti’s writing about the

spread of the novel as a literary form throughout the world. In “Conjectures on World Literature”

(2000, 54-68), Moretti explicitly expounds the theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from a

study of the novel on a planetary scale. According to Moretti, as the novel travels from its

original European context to other contexts – particularly as a result of colonialism – the form of

the novel has to be adapted to radically different local situations. Not only do “peripheral”

writers have to accommodate new contents, new natural and human landscapes, they also have to

find a way to bring the form of consciousness which the novel can accommodate – the clear

demarcation of a narrative voice – into dialog with local forms of knowledge. What quickly

becomes evident, according to Moretti, is that the process of welding local consciousness with

the novel form is manifested in disruptions in the narrative voice, disruptions that register,

according to Moretti, the material struggles, the transformations of social relations, which

underpin the travel of the novel as an aesthetic form in the first place. Thus, the systematic

inequality between the parts of the global system (a claim that Moretti borrows from Immanuel

Wallerstein) is inscribed into each particular hybridization of the novel’s form, in the case of

“peripheral” novels.

Two results of Moretti’s conception are important for our discussion. First, there is

Moretti’s practice of “distant reading” and, secondly, the anti-nationalist stance that compliments

it. Comparative Literature scholars, according to Moretti, should not study literary texts directly

when working within his conception of world literature. They should rather rely on analyses

provided by scholars of various national literatures, and detourn them. The distance of “distant

reading” comes therefore to constitute more than the methodological indirectness of the

comparatist’s work; it also signifies a political imperative to “disrupt” national-literary

historiographies, particularly their claim to the relative autonomy of their subject matter. We will

return to these points below.

If Moretti’s conception of world literature relies heavily on social and economic history,

David Damrosch’s (2003) writing on world literature can be said to form an opposite approach,

one in which extra-literary transformations are admitted into the theory, but fade into the

background as the aesthetic phenomenon take center stage. World literature, for Damrosch, is not

a circumscribed, pre-defined group of texts. Rather, it is a mode of reading in which cultural

differences and similarities are constantly scrutinized, elaborated and brought into play in a way

which does not reduce any one context to another. According to Moretti, “works of world

literature take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new life

we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new

cultural contexts.” This process leads to the production of new meanings and new ways of seeing

– somewhat similar to what other interpretive traditions would call estrangement – that is

determined by a complex interaction between the text itself, its reader and her cultural context,

and the text’s translation. Thus, the production of meaning does not belong exclusively to the

original cultural context in which it was written.. This process of refraction, as Damrosch calls it,

makes possible both increased familiarity with difference and a rethinking of the local culture

through this difference. Therefore, as was the case with Moretti, Damrosch’s conception of

world literature creates an opposition between the imagined holism of various national literatures

and the emergent world literature. We will not be able to explore this claim in any detail here,

but many other approaches to world literature that take as their starting point the imperialist

heritage of the world system - such as those of Graham Huggan (2001), Sarah Brouillette (2007),

James English (2003), Rebecca Walkowitz (2009, 567-82), and Pascale Casanova (2003) - can

be seen as specific superpositions of the Moretti-Damrosch pair.

The imagined opposition between the two positions, however, has yielded some bitter

debates. For example, the edited volume Debating World Literature (2004), which includes

contributions by well known comparative literature scholars, is dominated by a rejection of any

approach that focuses on literary and extra-literary struggle as the point of departure for

theorizing world literature. In his introductory essay, Christopher Prendergast vehemently attacks

Casanova’s World Republic of Letters and Moretti’s writing, with an array of arguments in

which the charge of reductionism – reducing literary meaning to extra-literary struggles – looms

large and ominous. Prendergast does not offer much in the way of a positive conception of world

literature, but his critique seems to indicate a weak dialogical image of world literature, in which

both moments of struggle and struggle-free literary value coexist independently of one another,

in a kind of pluralistic acceptance of interpretation, which changes according to readers’

perspectives.

Simplifying the different positions we have addressed so far, we can now map the

different approaches to world literature with the help of Fredric Jameson’s rendering of the

Greimassian rectangle. According to Jameson’s writing in The Political Unconscious (1981), the

rectangle offers a spatial metaphor for the work of dialectical thinking. The rectangle is defined

by two types of opposition: the top horizontal line of the internal square connects two

“contraries,” to use Jameson’s term. These are two terms that exclude each other in some sense,

while being positive concepts in their own right. The diagonal lines in the internal square connect

each of the main contraries with its “simple negation,” or a term that receives its significatory

power by negating the term with which it is diagonally connected. The following Greimassian

rectangle thus plots the typology of world literature theories outlined in the preceding pages:

Several things need to be emphasized about this mapping of the different approaches. The basic

opposition or the pair of “contraries,” in the rectangle is the one between a dialogical conception

to one that stresses struggle. Each corner of the outer rectangle represents a combination of the

two corners of the inner rectangle closest to it (thus, for example, Moretti and Casanova

represent a combination of struggle and non-dialogue). Of course, none of the real approaches

match completely the ideal type of that specific corner. Moretti and Casanova, for example,

cannot be said to reject dialogue altogether. However, it is clear that in their theorization of

world literature stresses struggle is dominant as an explanatory mechanism in their conceptions

rather than dialog. The non-dialogical moment of Moretti, for example, can be seen not only in

his stress on struggle, but also in the negative characterization of the hybridization of the novel

as it travels: the construction of narrative voice is disrupted, it acquires a constitutive lack from

the point of view of the European novel. This effect is theoretically registered as a disruption of

communication. The “pluralist approach” at the top corner of the outer square designates the

weak combination of the two approaches, one that does not commit to either pole as a more

fundamental moment, and so is hesitant to asserting any meaningful connection between them

except a loose, independent coexistence – a pluralism of interpretations, one which can be

considered a Hegelian “bad” variety. What is missing from the diagram is the bottom term, to

which we will return shortly.

This mapping is, of course, a reduction. It is the enigma posed by the bottom term,

(which Jameson calls the neutral term), whose exploration will enable us to see that the typology

constitutes a productive reduction. Now, the neutral term is occupied by everything that is

strongly rejected by our theoretical accounts: if the top term designates some combination of the

two types of theoretical accounts, the neutral term is necessarily characterized by an impossible

combination of non-dialogue and non-struggle. This double cancellation of the initial opposition

(the one between struggle and dialogue, in our case) that the utopian finds its expression in the

imaginative space opened by the rectangle for Jameson, as Phillip Wegner (2009, 221) shows.

We might begin understanding what the neutral term entails, in the context of theorizing

world literature, by looking for what is rejected or excluded from counting as world literature in

the different conceptions that we have been considering. These excluded or rejected options

appear in many forms – the archaic or retrograde, the degraded, the bad imitation, etc. – but in

general they belong to two groups: those that designate a past situation or consciousness, and

those that designate an ominous new development that should be distinguished from the

possibility of real world literature. National literatures are probably the most conspicuous

example of the first kind: they are what is being refracted and broken down in Damrosch’s global

literary dialogue, and they are what Moretti’s whole program of world literature sees as its main

antagonist. Prendergast, Huggan and Brouillette also situate the new global literary language or

field - whether it is a good or a bad one - in opposition to the various national literary

consciousnesses, deemed to be a thing of the past. We can even refine this observation: what is

particularly antagonistic about national literatures, from the perspective of world literature, is in

one way or another their proclaimed autonomy, their attempt to view themselves as constituting

whole subjects, whether through the projection of a cultural center in Casanova, or in Moretti’s

rejection of national literatures’ claim to some smooth, wholly internal developments in their

respective contexts. In short, we can say that it is the totalizing impulse of national literatures

that somehow makes them unsavory to theoretical accounts of world literature. It is no surprise,

therefore, that the formation of a “good” world-literary field is by definition non-totalizing,

except on a very thin formal level: the universal disruption of narrative voice in Moretti, the

appropriation-for-different-ends of literary rules and conventions by Casanova’s literary

revolutionaries, Brouillette’s authors of exoticism – all are anti-totalizing “first principles” of the

emerging world literary system.

This is, however, only half of the story. The breaking down of old holisms is

complemented by the second kind of rejection that we have mentioned: the “bad” kind of world

literature. For some, like Huggan, this is the only kind that exists – the representation of

postcolonial otherness always ends up in the commodification of postcolonial exoticism, the

transformation of once-antagonistic representational strategies into literary value to be consumed

and celebrated. If for Huggan the new aesthetic code marks the transition from an antagonistic

politics to its neutralization by the global capitalist market, for Damrosch it is this

commodification’s expression in what he calls “airport literature” – a mere imitation of

engagement with otherness for commercial purposes – that constitutes a degraded form of world

literature, a mere imitation of true defamiliarization through the encounter with otherness.

It is important to emphasize here how these alternatives fit into the Greimassian

rectangle: for both Damrosch and Huggan, for example, commodification excludes dialogue or a

negotiation of otherness (“non-dialogue” in our rectangle), and at the same time it neutralizes

political antagonism or struggle (“non-struggle” in our rectangle). The commodification of a

literary language of otherness for both these Authors, therefore, is both non-dialogic and anti-

struggle – in accordance with the defining characteristics of the bottom corner of our square.

Thus, we have three examples for the theoretical possibilities included in the neutral

term: national literatures, commodification of the aesthetic of otherness, or centralization around

the cultural powerhouses of the West or global North. It is here that our particular reductionism

starts paying off, for all three of these options have something in common: they all offer us

simple allegories of totality, whether the complex totality of national autonomy or identity, or the

grand unifying logics of commodification (through which literature turns into what Adorno

(1941) has called “social cement”), or of a global cultural center which makes particular

aesthetic norms into the universal norms of a larger field of literary value. Now, relegating the

imagined national social whole to the dust-bin of history is not itself a problem – for it could

have signified the emergence of a new type of historical consciousness. What should give us

pause, however—at least if we consider the two other examples that we have for the bottom term

in the rectangle—is the undialectical throwing out of the baby with the bath water: not only a

particular, historically determinate totalizing imaginary is rejected here, but totalizing aesthetics

itself seems to be antagonistic to world literature, at is it construed by most of its theorists, even

of only unconsciously.

What the dialectical structure of the Greimassian rectangle makes possible for us is to

propose a definition of world literature in terms of what is excluded from the previous

definitions: world literature is contemporary literature that totalizes. To demonstrate the

productivity of this definition, we will conclude with a short discussion of totalizing aesthetics

and its relation to global capitalism. Totalization is a term that I borrow from Georg Lukacs’

lexicon. For it is Lukács whose work on the historical novel and nineteenth-century realism

focuses on their totalizing aspect (1964, 5-6, 88; 1980, 28-59). Realism, for Lukács, narrates the

contradictions of bourgeois society, representing them thorough setting up social typology, with

its corresponding psychology, ideology and material settings. The mediating activity of realist

narration, according to Lukács, slowly reveals social types as constituting antagonistic positions

that belong to a single system, or a contradictory whole. It is in this sense that realism presents us

with a totalizing aesthetic, or an attempt to map the social whole, fraught as it is with internal

antagonisms. It is here that we can return to Christian Thorne’s article, with which we began our

discussion. For Thorne is looking for a specifically realist answer to the problem of

representing the world – not just any invocation of far away territories, as he amply

exemplifies. The important point for our purpose here is that Thorne’s interrogation of the

possibility of realism on a global scale fits perfectly with our new definition of world

literature: it provokes to find a Lukacsian realism that is not bound by national imaginaries.

To be sure, there are other examples of totalizing aesthetics: that of the historical

novel, also analyzed by Lukacs; and that of utopian literature, as Jameson’s (2005) and

Wegner’s (2002) writing demonstrates, if to mention only two additional examples. We will

not be able to address these at any length here. In all of these, the totalizing structure’s

essence lies in generate a figure for the social whole, one that can help us perceive the

necessarily unrepresentable totality of social relations. And it is precisely this attempt to

generate a figure of the whole that brings us back to globalization. For, the increasingly

global reach of capitalism means, first and foremost, the stretching of the social relations of

production onto a global scale.1 Thus, any attempt to generate a figure of these social

relations will have to produce a figurative devices for capturing their ”stretching.”

Therefore, totalizing literature today is necessarily world literature: not because of the

holism implied by the image of the globe, but because the social relations to be mediated

into the form and content of the work are necessarily global ones.

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