The 'New International'?

If you find yourself within striking distance of London's Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road next Thursday (October 20), and you have a spare quid (or seven): please come along and say hello: I'll be speaking on the discussion panel for "The New International?: Literature in an age of 'globish'", alongside TLS contributors Shirley Dent and George Szirtes, among others. It's a "satellite" event for this year's Battle of Ideas, a whole weekend of topical debating at the Royal College of Art at the end of the month. 

The blurb for this particular satellite event (see below) suggests the potentially unwieldy vastness of the subject; and that the discussion probably won't have that much to do with "globish" in the linguistic sense of the term as used by Jean-Paul Nerriere. But the question of translation alone – "Are we kidding ourselves we even understand works in translation?", as the blurb puts it – could make for a lively debate . . . .

That aside, I like the confidence of the line below about the Nobel Prize for Literature, written well in advance of the announcement of Tomas Transtromer's Nobelification earlier this month. (Although it may also be significant for the future that the Indian-Canadian author of A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, has just won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature; the organizers justifiably boast of the prize's association with future Nobel winners.) Perhaps we'll also find ourselves agreeing with Tim Parks's about the "essential silliness" of it all.

Here's what the organizers have to say about the "New International":

 

"The New International?: Literature in the age of 'globish'"

"'Nothing human is alien to me,' claimed Roman playwright Terence in the second century BC. If he were alive today, he might find good company among 21st century readers. Browsing the shelves of a high-street bookstore, one easily find see a range of world literature, from Chinua Achebe to Zadie Smith; international literature prizes and festivals abound, while World Book Day has become a fixture in the literary calendar. The Nobel Prize for Literature continues to offer a snapshot of the global literati even if, as is alleged by some, it may never again be won by an American.

Yet while the Nobel committee proclaims that it 'is not a contest between nations' there can be no denying that national literature has a particular place in the literary consciousness. Whether it is ‘imperial’ writers such as Virgil or Spenser, or modern nationalists such as Yeats and Mahmoud Darwish, or distinct national bodies of literature (19th century Russian, 20th century American and English), we certainly use nationality as a shorthand when talking about literature. To take America as an example, there can be no doubt that its writers influenced each other in developing a distinctive body of literature: from Henry James and Edith Wharton to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Hemingway and Faulkner, Updike and Roth, Pynchon and DeLillo… Today celebrating indigenous or foreign language writers has become the hallmark of a cosmopolitan sophistication or Western intellectual guilt, depending on your perspective. Genres such as 'Jewish' or 'immigrant' literature, meanwhile, find commonalities between peoples that transcend geographical location but imply a certain specific cultural bond.

Is it ever valid to judge literature with reference to its nationality, linguistic distinctions aside? Are some national traditions simply more important than others? Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, does it matter more to the modern reader whether books are well written or badly written? Is the interest in global literature evidence of a rootless cosmopolitanism, hostile to the influence of the social and political realities of a particular author's nationality and cultural background? Are we kidding ourselves we even understand works in translation? Is great national literature universal because it is great, or great because it is universal?"

Comments

[Andrew McCulloch]

'International' implies efforts to transcend political boundaries where the more neutral 'universal' suggests, perhaps naively, that they don't exist. Literature aspires to universality but writers belong to specific cultures, by which their truths are at least partly shaped - cultures that can get - or even be put - in the way of their attempts to speak to as many people as possible. Shakespeare's appeal is 'international' only until periods of international conflict when he suddenly becomes aggressively parochial, his works ransacked for all the 'proof' they can provide of the superiority of his culture - rather than the universality of his vision. The only fortunate result of all this imperialist cultural swagger is a canon that is at last starting to become properly universal: 'The Empire Writes Back'.

[Michael Caines]

Thanks, Andrew; that distinction between "international" and "universal", with all that they imply, is going to be crucial to the debate next week, I suspect. But what do you mean when you say "properly universal"?

See the opening paragraph of a review published in this week's TLS, by the way - Edmund Gordon on The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides - for what may be a pertinent criticism of the "multicultural novel":

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article796831.ece

[Andrew McCulloch]

Good point, Michael, and one that does call for further refinement of the opening distinction. What I meant was that texts are not platonic forms. All truths are compromised in some way by the images and language in which they have to be expressed, images and language which are culturally constructed. If we accept that there can be no such thing as an imageless truth - only attempts to say something lastingly true through images - a universal canon would be one that refracts the truth through as many different cultural lenses as possible - 'the' truth, not someone's truth. The distinction between 'international' and 'universal' survives, I think, by virtue of the very different discourses to which the two terms belong, and the kinds of connection they imply.