der Weltliteratur is the expression used by Heinz Schlaffer in his study of Goethe’s poem (Faust Zweiter Teil, Die Allegorie des 19, Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1981, p. 107). On the analogies between the architecture of museums and that of jails, see the first part of The Lost Centre, by Hans Sedlmayr.
43 This is certainly the case for the Spanish and Portuguese literatures of Latin America, and for literatures in English from Asia and Africa (not to speak of America and Australia); francophone African literatures may soon play the same role.
Conjectures on World Literature
‘Conjectures’, too, was an occasional piece, like ‘Modern European Literature’ before it. At Columbia, the department of English and Comparative Literature was re-thinking its structure, and I had proposed to detach Comparative Literature from English; as a series of gloomy departmental confrontations got under way, the Italian Academy asked me to organize a small conference: four papers, of which mine would be one. It seemed like a good opportunity to bring disagreements into the open.
The discussion was on comparative literature; writing on world literature instead was, at the time, a somewhat polemical choice—and problematic, too: I remember considering the title ‘World Literature?’, with a question mark at the end, to signal my perplexity about a concept no one seemed to use any more. Pascale Casanova’s Republique mondiale des lettres, which was about to be published while I was writing ‘Conjectures’, helped change this state of affairs; but back then, people were, at a minimum, sceptical (my colleagues at Columbia, for instance, refused to use the words ‘World Literature’ for the name of the new department). But I had found a strong conceptual model in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and went ahead just the same.
Wallerstein’s tripartition of core, periphery, and semi-periphery appealed to me because it explained a number of empirical findings I had slowly gathered in the course of the 1990s: France’s continental centrality, so often mentioned in the essay on European literature; the peculiar productivity of the semi-periphery, analyzed in Modern Epic; the unevenness of narrative markets of the Atlas of the European Novel—all these, and more, strongly corroborated Wallerstein’s model. Besides resting solidly on facts, the theory also highlighted the systemic constraints under which national literatures had to develop: in a starkly realistic reversal of the creative ecosystem of ‘Modern European Literature’, world-systems theory showed the power of core literatures to overdetermine, and in fact distort, the development of most national cultures.
Although based entirely on the work of Marxist thinkers—Jameson, Schwarz, Miyoshi, Mukherjee, and of course Wallerstein himself—and backed by quite a lot of historical evidence (or at least: a lot, given the parameters of literary history), ‘Conjectures’ provoked heated reactions on the left, to which I replied, three years later, in ‘More Conjectures’. By an odd twist of fate, this first wave of critiques was followed by an even more violent one—this time, equanimously from the left and the right—aimed at the idea of ‘distant reading’. That fatal formula had been a late addition to the paper, where it was initially specified, in an allusion to the basic procedure of quantitative history, by the words ‘serial reading’. Then, somehow, ‘serial’ disappeared, and ‘distant’ remained. Partly, it was meant as a joke; a moment of relief in a rather relentless argument. But no one seems to have taken it as a joke, and they were probably right.
‘Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in 1827; and these are Marx and Engels, twenty years later, in 1848: ‘National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises.’ Weltliteratur: this is what Goethe and Marx have in mind. Not ‘comparative’, but world literature: the Chinese novel that Goethe was reading at the time of that exchange, or the bourgeoisie of the Manifesto, which has ‘given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. Well, let me put it very simply: comparative literature has not lived up to these beginnings. It’s been a much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more.
This is my own intellectual formation, and scientific work always has limits. But limits change, and I think it’s time we returned to that old ambition of Weltliteratur: after all, the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system. The question is not really what we should do—the question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on west European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outside of Britain or France. World literature?
Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’ seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because we’ve just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the ‘great unread’. ‘I work on west European narrative, etc. . . .’ Not really, I work on its canonical fraction, which is not even 1 per cent of published literature. And again, some people have read more, but the point is that there are thirty thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American . . .
Reading ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution.1
Perhaps it’s too much, tackling the world and the unread at the same time. But I actually think that it’s our greatest chance, because the sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different. ‘It is not the “actual” interconnection of “things”’, Max Weber wrote, ‘but the conceptual interconnection of problems which defines the scope of the various sciences. A new “science” emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method.’2 That’s the point: world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That’s not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager—a hypothesis, to get started.
WORLD LITERATURE: ONE AND UNEQUAL
I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-systems school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. ‘Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field’, writes Roberto Schwarz in a splendid essay on ‘The Importing of the Novel to Brazil’: ‘it’s not simply an easily dispensable part of the work in which it appears, but a complex feature of it’;3 and Itamar Even-Zohar, reflecting on Hebrew literature: ‘Interference [is] a relationship between literatures, whereby a . . . source literature may become a source of direct or indirect loans [Importing of the novel, direct and indirect loans, foreign debt: see how economic metaphors have been subterraneously at work in literary history]—a source of loans for . . . a target literature . . . There is no symmetry in literary interference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.’4
