Abstract: This article considers some of the central concepts pertinent to the current Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature. Focusing on one such concept,circulation, it examines its implications for how we think about the literary text and write the history/histories of world literature. A reconsideration of the notion of circulation could provide tangible benefits by sharpening our sense of the fundamental incompleteness of the text in the process of its multiple appropriations.This argument is advanced from a much-needed longue durée perspective, while asserting its validity for the current environment in which the literary text undergoes incessant fragmentation and re-medialisation.
Keywords: world literature; Anglo-Saxon discourse; circulationIn this article, I reflect on some of the central concepts that inform the current Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature; I am particularly interested in revealing the implications they hold for how we think and write the history/histories of world literature. Circulation is one such concept, amongst others, that might be in need of reconsideration.Moving away from the classic understanding of circulation offers us a chance to revisit the resilient notion of the text as a rounded-off and stable artefact that travels intact down the chain of reception; in its place an understanding of world literature would emerge that rests on a dynamic notion of the text as ever incomplete, living by the law of fragmentation rather than as a fixed whole, and appropriated in ways that further rearrange the parts, often through re-medialisation and/or transposition into secondary orality. Crucially, as I will suggest further on, this life in incompletion and constant remedialisation, which challenges the dogma of the text as an accomplished and stable product (commodity), is not a feature of premodernity alone; it is very much the underlyingmodus vivendi of literature today. Furthermore, the dynamic view of the text this article insists upon compels us to also revisit the notion of the history of world literature—as a process rather than a snapshot of the present (or as a sequence of synchronic snapshots of various isolated past moments); in its temporal depth, this process is grounded in, and propelled by, the asymmetric interaction of literatures within and across various literary zones.Circulation is, of course, a concept helpful and problematic in equal measure. It has widened immensely the geography of world literature and has sharpened our sense of what happens to literary works as they assume existence in different languages and seek to conquer new book markets; these tangible benefits of thinking through the lens of circulation are already recognisable in David Damrosch’s pioneering book,What is World Literature?and in innumerable casestudies that have appeared since.While embracing these benefits, we have to realise that deploying the prism of circulation entails opportunity cost: like most viable concepts, it conceals while it reveals. What it tends to conceal is the fact that world literature is not just a complex assemblage of ready artefacts that circulate around the globe; it is above all a process that has temporal depth to it. Our current notion of world literature, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon mainstream, but often also beyond it, emphasises and studies predominantly the circulation of these ready artefacts; in fact, what circulates, along with these artefacts, are powerful but difficult to capture discursive energies, verbal masses at different stages of formation, debris of older and newly reconstituted genres, building blocks for poetic and linguistic conventions yet to take shape. These are all entities that most of the time fall under the radar of “circulation” as it is conceived of in the mainstream discourse on world literature today. Our obsession with sociological snapshots, with the mechanics of book markets, festivals,etc., is not entirely unproblematic: it places the emphasis exclusively on the ready product (or commodity, if you will), and it tends to forget that literature exists in a much wider ecosystem of modes of writing and of primary and secondarily produced orality, and in a complex media environment to which it responds.What is more, this predilection for metrics-based sociological observation often has the unintended effect of having its findings reaffirm the logic of the object under observation, and thus also the overall picture of existing inequities in the global literary process. The static picture literary sociology customarily produces needs to be complicated by diachronic sets of data and by proper contextualisation; only then do we come to realise that the active circulation of texts sometimes masks the actual lack of recognition or prestige.
Let me begin with my main concern. “Circulation” as a term is meant to convey a sense of movement and dynamics. On the other hand, and I am not necessarily being Derridean in this assiduous semantic exercise, it evokes a figure of circularity. This is a figure into which various semantic layers are deposited. To begin with, there is a not entirely innocent suggestion of naturalness: literary texts move in the way our blood does through our veins. Or, to nuance and further complicate this hew of naturalness—they do so in the way capital does through the labyrinth of investment opportunities. What these two modes of movement have in common is the implicit interpretation of movement as either free of obstacles or at least reliably set on following the principle of least resistance and maximum profit. With reference to the circulation of literature,fleshing out this principle frequently amounts to a call for decontextualization (both at the point of departure and the point of arrival). The travel of the finished product across borders and boundaries is accelerated by a matching procedure of de-emphasising the cultural, discursive, social, and political baggage the work already carries before and during the process of creation, and since taking its shape as a text. Travel light, travel far, shedding all the way the tedious weight of local knowledge, traditions, and agendas. At the point of destination, what awaits the finished work is the liberal welcome of the marketplace that liberates the text from the fetters of language and history and renders it readily comparable to just about any other text. The anthropological dream of“thick description” gives way to a thin common denominator that flattens the perception of cultural difference. Yet there is also something salutary in this figure of circulation: it does destabilise our notion of compelling cultural identities, of fixed contexts, or shapes; it does offer an antidote to the conservative idea of tradition, of point of origin, and of the bond between a sanctified national language and the content it makes available to a reader. These benefits are as real as—and inseparable from—the problematic intimations of circularity: the restlessness of a voyage that obstructs a more in-depth anchoring of the text; the withdrawal of a meaningfully hermeneutic horizon of interpretation (interpretation being a procedure that rests on mobilising the resources of knowledge and cultural memory as specific efforts); and the inability to identify significant intermedial engagements with a literary text that complicate and disrupt the usual chain of its circulation.
The question of interpretation does indeed loom large here. How does a literary artefact accrue meaning as it circulates around the globe? Does it ever return to the medium in which it was first cast (qua text), and if so does it return enriched? And does it get re-settled into the language, in which it was initially written, upon its long journeys through other languages? If so, in what ways and to what effect? These are all questions answering which would go beyond what the toolkit of circulation may allow us to do. Circulation, I wish to submit here, often functions as a black box that obscures rather than elucidates the multiple transformations a text actually undergoes on these heroically Nietzschean journeys of “eternal return” (an eternal return that may well generate returns and corresponding prestige for writers and publishers).The liberal logic confronts its own limitations here. In the liberal imagination, literature is for ever capable of producing new meanings. This imagination (in a pre-posthumanist fashion) projects literature as an inexhaustible reservoir of meanings that grow in number and complexity along an undulating line of reception sustained by an otherwise restrictive (qualifying) sense of aesthetic accomplishment. Taken to its conclusion, this logic, on full display in the model of world literature based on circulation, defeats the very expectation of growth grounded in a vision of multiplying meanings that areaesthetically embodied. In the regime of free circulation, speed, ease, and profit are vital; the crown achievement here, in the language of the sociological study of world literature,is success. It is perhaps not by chance that the current foregrounding of circulation has been going hand in hand with the necessary downplaying of the set of criteria we have traditionally referred to as aesthetic. “World literature,” which as a discourse is generally far removed from classic literary theory, based as the latter often was (up to and even including Deconstruction) on close reading of texts, displays here an important proximity to the value-neutral approach taken, for example, by structuralist semiotics that would examine Balzac’s novels with the same devotion it would extend to low-brow literature or the study of commercials and company slogans. The emphasis on circulation, I argue, is the methodological expression of this value-neutral approach, which sees literature as generating profit and success rather than aesthetic value, the latter being an uncomfortably contestable entity. The otherwise healthy expansion of the pool of participants in the literary market—the result of empowering the reader to compare beyond any expectation of deeper contextual grasp, but also of insisting (in a gesture that is no doubt noble and enabling) that world literature is made up not just of masterpieces but, in equal measure, of useful texts that allow a glimpse into other cultures—eventually erodes the foundations of the liberal imagination: the hermeneutic horizon retreats, the aesthetic becomes but a subsidiary ingredient of marketability(Murakami declaring that he writes in a Japanese that would guarantee swift and unhampered translation is by now a banal example, and just one of many).One can now expand the argument: while evoking an image of movement and dynamics, the circularity inscribed in the notion of circulation means that this movement seldom amounts to process, it only passingly (and reluctantly) touches upon change and transformation. It thus has ambitions comparable to (once again) the Structuralist emphasis on the synchronic study of language and literature (“synchronic,” of course, does not mean confined to the contemporary moment; it means, as in Saussure, avoiding comparisons with another temporal point, which would contaminate the analysis with the presupposition of change). But what if we want to conceive of world literature historically, through the lens of change, dynamically rather than in the multiple but static frames “circulation” supplies (even when they capture particular moments of the past)? For that we need to reach for another toolkit, be it that of cultural transfer (e.g., in the version developed by Espagne) or that of interaction. Interaction seems to me the key methodological plank that would allow us to see world literature not statically, but dynamically, in its temporal depth. In another text, I write of world literature as the process of asymmetric and uneven interaction of the various literatures of the world, making it clear that not all literatures participate simultaneously in this process; different literatures are part of this interaction at different times.
When I write “asymmetric” and “uneven,” I have to add that I do so in a way that is not entirely in accord with recent work inspired by world-systems theory.An example would be in order at this point. Western interest in Chinese literature begins in earnest in the sixteenth century(in Russia, rather in the second half of the eighteenth century), whereas Chinese interest in European literatures commences much later, at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Goethe’s name is first mentioned in Chinese in 1878 (in Chinese, not in China: it made its appearance in the text of a Chinese diplomat posted abroad); Shakespeare begins to be translated late in the nineteenth century and early in the last century, initially in prose. If we were to follow world-systems theory, we would be inclined to attribute this to China being economically weaker,in fact a semi-colony since the 1840s. But such an explanation would fly in the face of historical economics. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, until the early sixteenth century, China’s GDP was larger than the combined GDP of the West and Russia, with Chinese performance, while declining in relative terms, continuing to be strong in the seventeenth century.So there is here an undeniable asymmetry, but it is perhaps not reducible to economic or geopolitical factors that filter our interpretation through a Western centre-periphery model. Key to the explanation of this asymmetry is just as much the Chinese perspective: the traditional sense of the intrinsic perfection of classical Chinese literature (foremost, classical Chinese poetry), utterly sophisticated and—for foreigners (“barbarians,” for the Chinese)—safely inimitable due to the highly regulated mode of writing (with numerous rules and requirements according to genre, style, tonality, etc.). This sense of the centrality, intrinsic perfection, and thus also self-sufficiency of Chinese culture, strong in times of economic growth and in times of economic decline, could perhaps, at least to some extent,explain the asymmetry we observe here, as well as the absence of a strong exploratory drive in China even at the past pinnacles of its economic power (insights from maritime history are important here as they help falsify this hypothesis: early in the fifteenth century, China had already built a formidable fleet of more than 300 vessels, but westwards it never reached farther than the East African coast and today’s Oman and Yemen). This is not to deny, I wish to emphasise, the explanatory power of Wallerstein’s model (for all the critique it has received from others, perhaps most notably from Walter Mignolo); there is merit to Wallerstein’s notion of inequality becoming clearly recognisable only within the coordinated system of global capitalism—but there are,undeniably, also other key (primarily cultural) factors that play into the asymmetries and unevenness inscribed in world literature as a process.
These asymmetries and the unevenness of world literature understood as a process of interaction that has temporal depth are also conditioned by the fact that, as they interact with one another, literatures (defined linguistically, not nationally) also interact with entire literary zones,those of which they partake historically, and new ones that become their interlocutors at a certain point in time; in a sense, literatures do not interact entirely on their own, but always through the mediation of these larger literary zones. Circulation doesn’t seem to me to be furnishing the right optic here, because the idea of ready artefacts freely moving through the supply chains of the book market imagines the spaces traversed by literature as flat, levelled, and somewhat monotonous terrains, whereas in reality their relief is rather varied. To capture the ruggedness of these landscapes, I prefer to think of world literature as existing zonally, i.e., through the lives of different literary zones—and this is, importantly, the mode of existence of world literature not just before but also since globalisation.Here is the example of a literature written in a small European language. From the perspective of zonality, the whole question of how Bulgarian literature interacts with larger literary spaces(Byzantine; Ottoman; East-European; West-European; etc.) deserves a fresh look that takes into account its integration, over time, into the Balkan literary zone. In my view, a literary zone is defined, above all, by heterogeneity, not by homogeneity, both linguistically and culturally: it is made up of languages that belong to different language families, and is underwritten by the intersection of different religions and ethnicities. It is this underlying heterogeneity that drives the exchanges between literatures within a particular literary zone and propels literary zones into interaction with other zones, with the participants in this interaction changing over time. A further differentiation must be introduced here. I insist there is a Balkan literaryzone, whereas Slavic literatures, of which Bulgarian literature is also a part, are perhaps best referred to as an interliterary community, a term coined by the Slovak comparatist Dionyz ?uri?in who stresses homogeneity (rather than heterogeneity) as the constitutive feature of any such community.With the notion of zonality in mind, the interactions in which Bulgarian literature has been involved with the mediation of the Balkan literary zone suddenly begin to lend this literature volume and valence; and this would be true of any literature, small or large: the respective literary zone(s), in which a literature participates, would amplify and modify the way in which that particular literature is projected and perceived in the world. In a sense, the greater the number of different zones a literature has historically participated in (this participation often depends on the capacity of a language to travel beyond the confines of an ethically bounded polis, either through colonisation or through trade or the spread of religions), the greater the chances for it to be recognised as a globally visible literature.
It is this zonal mode of existence and interaction of individual literatures that makes possible and sustains world literature over the course of its history. It is essential to realise that the cast of literatures that assume the role of interlocutors in these zonal interactions changes over time. If we look at the Caucasus, this certainly could be taken to be a prime example of a literary zone: at least three distinctive languages (Georgian; Armenian; Azerbaijani), each of them of a different linguistic filiation, two versions of Christianity, and a very sizeable Muslim population, along with Jewish and other minorities. Now, historically, this literary zone would interact with the Balkan literary zone (mostly through the Byzantine impact on Georgian and Armenian literature, and of Ottoman and Turkish literature in today’s Azerbaijan), but also with the Indo-Persian zone (with important presence of Persian and Sanskrit genres, conventions, motifs, etc., throughout the Caucasus). This changes in the early nineteenth century when Russian literature comes to the fore as a major interlocutor, and in fact modern Azerbaijani literature in the first half of the twentieth century is very much the outcome of this new interaction (with Turkish literature—notably but not exclusively proletarian—still an active interlocutor in the first formative decades), while Georgian literary modernism and the Georgian avant-garde are inseparable from the wider Russian (to an extent also French) modernist and avant-garde developments.
Literary zones are not discrete formations; they often overlap, making the spaces which literature navigates as it crosses these zones even more heterogeneous. Take, for example, Eastern Europe: a conglomerate zone of Slavic, Romance, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric languages (and Yiddish over a considerable period of time), whose major interlocutors have traditionally been the literatures created in German and French, to some extent also Russian, less so Scandinavian. This large zone would intersect with the Balkan one, or even with the Mediterranean zone; we thus could have literatures participating in intersecting zones, with different intensity at different times.What is just as important to realise, it seems to me, is the fact that zonality as a mode of existence of world literature is not transcended or annulled with the arrival of advanced globalisation in the 1970s, and especially in the last forty years. If you are an Eastern-European writer today, you would still expect the seal of approval of your work as writer, and of its aesthetic significance, to come from Germany or France which have traditionally been major interlocutors for Eastern-European literatures—not as much from America or Britain (which may bestow the market success that circulation is better suited to capture and measure). The zonal mode of existence of world literature compels us to think of multilingualism in a more rigorous historical way that takes into account not just the horizon of what Glissant calls “the languages of the world” in their potential totality, vis-à-vis which writers create their work,but also the interaction of actually present languages within and across literary zones.My final point is that circulation could sometimes deprive us of a notion of agency in our thinking about world literature. This is especially true when we come to reflect on the role translation plays in this process. The current discourse of world literature is, of course, built on valorising translation and the work of translators, and this has been, in my view, a welcome development. I suppose the problem is that we operate with a slightly static notion of translation,one that reflects the static approach studies of circulation adopt when they assume that what circulates are solely fully formed, ready to consume literary artefacts that need no more than being rendered linguistically in a manner that reproduces their integrity as completed objects. Some work in this direction has already been done, but it seems to me that we need to go further and start thinking of translation and, respectively, translation studies primarily as a dynamic (often intermedial) process of adaptation (and its study), heeding its multiple historical and current manifestations that acknowledge and follow theinstability and inherent incompleteness of the source textas an object of continuous and active appropriation. This change in how we conceive of the translated text could be enormously exciting in intellectual terms. Think of the various acts of translation, thus understood, that take place when the written text of the Bible meets oral apocrypha in East Africa, and this combustible mixture of interzonal koines and local dialects is enacted in textual delivery encased in dance and ritual.In the process, the Biblical text gets fragmented,reimagined, and then integrated anew. Circulation as an interpretative strategy would not be able to cope with this rich and multi-layered process of active appropriation, dismembering, and reassembling of the text.To grasp the significance of translation as a process of dynamic adaptation that stresses the provisional nature of the source text and treats it as open for interaction and appropriation, let me furnish a brief historical excursus. Translation, in the modern sense in which we understand the term, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Its emergence is concomitant with the rising sense of intellectual property—and of the significance originality and imagination play in literature and in scholarship—that crystallises in the West in the late eighteenth century. Before that,translation—and I mean here primarily the translation of non-sacred texts—lives other lives: those of imitation, transposition, rendition, emulation, and recreation of the text. This is true of the West,as much as it is true of the wider cultural region formed by the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.In the European context, we are aware of poetic contests that sought to emulate rhetorically examples of Greek and Roman poetry. These competitions were forms of translation; the resulting texts did not insist on originality, nor—importantly—did they insist on complete faithfulness. They presented a mode of creativity that is beyond the binary expectations of either originality or fidelity. For centuries on end, helping oneself to someone else’s plot or figure of speech, or range of similes, or metaphors, often suitably updated, was a way of ferrying an earlier discourse into a new zone of contemporaneity. This wider meaning of“translation,” which highlights both the passive following and the co-creative departure from the source text, continues—at least to some extent—to be constitutive of our seemingly more advanced, but perhaps also more one-sided, understanding of translation today. As late as the twentieth century, we can still observe this mode of consciously unfaithful translation in what, in the German tradition, is known asNachdichtung, the making of poetry following another text, a process grounded in a deliberate refusal of copying or rendering that text with precision.Of course, there lurks behind all this the question of the canon, for it is the assumption of the rhetorical force and beauty of the canonical text that often enables these acts of permissible transgression. In Central Asia and Persia, as well as in the Arab-speaking world, for a very long time the practice of translation remains alien to our modern notion of it, and this is probably best exemplified by the practice of translating texts that were part of the shared canon of these vast literary spaces. When Nizami, in the second half of the twelfth century, created his five long narrative poems in Persian, all through to the eighteenth century (in some cases even in the nineteenth century), throughout Central Asia, Persia, and in India, one would encounter various forms of their rendition based on emulation, adaptation, and conversation with the canonical pieces—but not on the literal reproduction that our norms of translation would require. This emulation through conversation with the source text is a genre in its own right at the time, known in the Persian tradition asnazira: a work that echoes and responds to an earlier work, thus plunging the reader of today into profound uncertainty as to where the line between translation, re-creation,and original writing was to be drawn—if such a line had at all existed before the late eighteenth century.I would thus venture a hypothesis: for as long as the canon—based on the certainty flowing from adherence to a combination of recurrent rhythms, plots, compositional devices, and rhetorical figures—remains in place, there is no imperative for literal repetition or exactitude. It is with the shift towards originality, the premium value placed on novelty, and the sense of property that emerges as a by-product of this shift at the end of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century, that tradition is put under strain and ceases to be self-evident. (In Europe, the practice of translation as identifying “ownership” begins gradually already in the sixteenth century but does not crystallise into prevalence until the turn of the nineteenth century.) We know that it is precisely at that time—late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century—that the European canon of“great literature” is constructed, in which Shakespeare takes his pride of place. But no longer as the borrower of circulating plots, but rather as the originally irregular, chaotic, and disorderly potent genius that the German Romantics saw in him. Similarly, Calderon is unearthed from oblivion by the Romantics. But not the Calderon who was stealing plots, or in one of his plays had lifted an entire act from Tirso de Molina; rather, it is now the playwright of the vacillation between dream and reality, the poet of un-folding, to invoke Deleuze,that is entering the new canon. This canon reshuffles the previous order and signals the unmooring of literature from a long-standing pool of recurring plots, meters, compositional patterns, stylistic norms, and rhetorical tools.This is when translation as we know it becomes important, fitting this new situation in which novelty and originality require to be captured with reliable precision of nuance. What is more, this is a process that—historically speaking—seems to me to be nothing but the culmination and the logical end to the protracted transition from powerful cosmopolitan koines—Greek, Latin, Persian,Sanskrit—to a multitude of vernaculars, each of which insists on its own inimitable vocabulary,sensitivity, and plasticity, in the way advocated by the many supporters of a presumably organic bond between language and thinking, from Humboldt to Gachev. This transition to exactitude relates specifically to the way in which profane rather than sacred texts began to be translated at the turn of the nineteenth century (the history of translating the Bible would reveal continuous battles and wars over precision). It is important to recognise that the lack of expectations of exactitude before that extended far beyond the realm of literature; the translation of philosophical and political texts, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, would be marked by the same relaxed interpretation of fidelity, by co-creation and adaptation, sometimes amounting to co-writing. One of my favourite examples is the first German translation of Edmund Burke’sReflections on the Revolution in Franceprepared by that inveterate conservative, Friedrich Gentz. Gentz published his translation of Burke’s important book in 1793, only three years after its appearance. The translation is marred not just by inaccuracies, but by numerous insertions of Gentz’s own thoughts and interpretations of Burke’s work.By our standards today this is not a reliable translation, and yet it is this translation that penetrated German and Austrian conservative debates and participated in them for more than a century and a half until a new German edition was published not long before the eventful 1968, noting the less than conventional ways in which Gentz had approached his task as translator.The moral of the story here is one we may wish to keep in mind: the texture of ideas is discursive, and translations—even before the time our stricter notions of loyalty to the source text were introduced—have always been very much part of this texture. Once a translation begins to be read, it begins its work through the discursive universe, of which it becomes inseparable. The effects of a translation, once planted in the discursive body of culture, cannot be undone so easily,the clock cannot be turned back so swiftly.All of this is perhaps a rather uneconomical way of making a laconic point: “circulation”conceals the agency of co-creativity, dynamic adaptation, and dialogue with the translated texts,and with the texts that are the outcome of this process. These practices of adaptation, recreation,and dialogue have over centuries shaped the life of literature as world literature. At any one point of its existence, world literature has been the dynamically reconstituted outcome of such practices,a process rather than a given. The rather short spell (couple of centuries) of cultural modernity which in the West we came to privilege as our own is, from this processual point of view, perhaps less representative of the modus vivendi of world literature than either its long history or the current trends of secondary fragmentation and intermedialisation of the literary text. Crucially,“circulation” precludes the possibility of thinking the texts that travel (both in the original language and in translation) not as ready entities and fully formed artefacts, but as evolving works, live bodies that often live selectively or in parts and never quite freeze into objects of passive consumption in discrete and quantifiable acts of appropriation. It is this incompleteness and instability of the text that I think is so intrinsic to the mode of existence of world literature, and that mode becomes recognisable solely from alongue duréeperspective.I began this article by summoning the difficulties in capturing dispersed discursive energies,verbal masses at different stages of formation, debris of older and newly reconstituted genres,building blocks for poetic and linguistic conventions yet to take shape. These are indeed much harder to identify and arrest, but thinking about them is imperative if we are to treat world literature in a way that circumvents the merely static and sees in it an asymmetric process of interaction between literatures that participate in different (and changing) literary zones. Without this, we are in danger of reifying cultural difference; this would be, historically speaking, a secondary reification, much along the lines of what the Enlightenment passion for safely cataloguing and marvelling at samples of writing from different corners of the world would do 250 years ago.Paradoxically (another dialectic of the Enlightenment?), we are spiralling towards a reproduction of this mosaic, deeply static model. Our anthologies of world literature accommodate, with sanguinity and skill, enticing samples of writing from around the world; the growing number of such samples is to be heartily welcomed. But we are still less prepared to ask the questions: How has world literature been produced in time, in the past and now?; What are the foundations of this process of asymmetric interaction?; What is world literature the outcome and articulation of in different moments in history? The cabinet of curiosities, this beloved piece of eighteenth-century furniture,is probably still a suitable metaphor for our overwhelmingly stationary model of world literature:one pulls the drawer, admires lovingly the sample, and then the drawer is safely pushed back; the sample does not come into contact with other samples, the mosaic is yet to be broken up, giving way to an arrangement that seeks to do justice to the dynamics of interaction—beyond circulation.
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