Conjectures on world literature

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 1, 2000, Pages 54-67

  Moretti, Franco ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0034419366     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (53)

1. I address the problem of the great unread in a companion piece to this article, 'The Slaughterhouse of Literature', forthcoming in a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly on 'Formalism and Literary History', spring 2000.
2. Max Weber, 'Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy', 1904, in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York 1949, p. 68.
3. Roberto Schwarz, 'The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in the Work of Roberto Alencar', 1977, in Misplaced Ideas, London 1992, p. 50.
4. Itamar Even-Zohar, 'Laws of Literary Interference' in Poetics Today, 1990, pp. 54, 62.
5. Montserrat Iglesias Santos, 'El sistema literario: teoría empírica y teoría de los polisistemas', in Dario Villanueva (ed.), Avances en teoría de la literatura, Santiago de Compostela 1994, p. 339: 'It is important to emphasize that interferences occur most often at the periphery of the system.'
6. Marc Bloch, 'Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes', Revue de synthèse historique, 1928.
7. Or to quote Weber again: 'concepts are primarily analytical instruments for the intellectual mastery of empirical data'. ('Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy', p. 106.) Inevitably, the larger the field one wants to study, the greater the need for abstract 'instruments' capable of mastering empirical reality.
8. Fredric Jameson, 'In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities', in Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Durham-London 1993, p. xiii.
9. I have begun to sketch them out in the last chapter of the Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (Verso: London 1998), and this is more or less how they sound: second, the formal compromise is usually prepared by a massive wave of West European translations; third, the compromise itself is generally unstable (Miyoshi has a great image for this: the 'impossible programme' of Japanese novels); but fourth, in those rare instances when the impossible programme succeeds, we have genuine formal revolutions.
10. 'Given the history of its formative stage, it is no surprise that the early Russian novel contains a host of conventions popularized in French and British literature', writes David Gasperetti in The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb 1998, p. 5). And Helena Goscilo, in her 'Introduction' to Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom: 'The Adventures is read most fruitfully in the context of the West European literature on which it drew heavily for inspiration.' (Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Evanston 1992, p. xv.
11. 'Given the history of its formative stage, it is no surprise that the early Russian novel contains a host of conventions popularized in French and British literature', writes David Gasperetti in The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb 1998, p. 5). And Helena Goscilo, in her 'Introduction' to Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom: 'The Adventures is read most fruitfully in the context of the West European literature on which it drew heavily for inspiration.' (Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Evanston 1992, p. xv.
12. 'Given the history of its formative stage, it is no surprise that the early Russian novel contains a host of conventions popularized in French and British literature', writes David Gasperetti in The Rise of the Russian Novel (De Kalb 1998, p. 5). And Helena Goscilo, in her 'Introduction' to Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom: 'The Adventures is read most fruitfully in the context of the West European literature on which it drew heavily for inspiration.' (Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Evanston 1992, p. xv.
13. 'There was a demand for foreign products, and production had to comply', explains Luca Toschi speaking of the Italian narrative market around 1800 ('Alle origini della narrativa di romanzo in Italia', in Massimo Saltafuso (ed.), Il viaggio del narrare, Florence 1989, p. 19). A generation later, in Spain, 'readers are not interested in the originality of the Spanish novel; their only desire is that it would adhere to those foreign models with which they have become familiar': and so, concludes Elisa Martí-López, one may well say that between 1800 and 1850 'the Spanish novel is being written in France' ( Elisa Martí-López, 'La orfandad de la novela española: politica editorial y creación literaria a mediados del siglo XIX', Bulletin Hispanique, 1997).
14. 'There was a demand for foreign products, and production had to comply', explains Luca Toschi speaking of the Italian narrative market around 1800 ('Alle origini della narrativa di romanzo in Italia', in Massimo Saltafuso (ed.), Il viaggio del narrare, Florence 1989, p. 19). A generation later, in Spain, 'readers are not interested in the originality of the Spanish novel; their only desire is that it would adhere to those foreign models with which they have become familiar': and so, concludes Elisa Martí-López, one may well say that between 1800 and 1850 'the Spanish novel is being written in France' ( Elisa Martí-López, 'La orfandad de la novela española: politica editorial y creación literaria a mediados del siglo XIX', Bulletin Hispanique, 1997).
15. 'Obviously, lofty ambitions were not enough. All too often the nineteenth century Spanish-American novel is clumsy and inept, with a plot derived at second hand from the contemporary European Romantic novel.' (Jean Franco, Spanish-American Literature, Cambridge 1969, p. 56.) 'If heroes and heroines in mid-nineteenth century Latin American novels were passionately desiring one another across traditional lines ... those passions might not have prospered a generation earlier. In fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream their erotic fantasies by reading the European romances they hoped to realize.' ( Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1991, pp. 31-2.)
16. 'Obviously, lofty ambitions were not enough. All too often the nineteenth century Spanish-American novel is clumsy and inept, with a plot derived at second hand from the contemporary European Romantic novel.' (Jean Franco, Spanish-American Literature, Cambridge 1969, p. 56.) 'If heroes and heroines in mid-nineteenth century Latin American novels were passionately desiring one another across traditional lines ... those passions might not have prospered a generation earlier. In fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream their erotic fantasies by reading the European romances they hoped to realize.' ( Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1991, pp. 31-2.)
17. 'Yiddish writers parodied - appropriated, incorporated, and modified - diverse elements from European novels and stories.' (Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, Albany 1995, p. x.)
18. Matti Moosa quotes the novelist Yahya Haqqi: 'there is no harm in admitting that the modern story came to us from the West. Those who laid down its foundations were persons influenced by European literature, particularly French literature. Although masterpieces of English literature were translated into Arabic, French literature was the fountain of our story.' (Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 1970, 2nd ed. 1997, p. 93.) For Edward Said, 'at some point writers in Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like them' (Edward Said, Beginnings, 1975, New York 1985, p. 81). And Roger Allen: 'In more literary terms, increasing contacts with Western literatures led to translations of works of European fiction into Arabic, followed by their adaptation and imitation, and culminating in the appearance of an indigenous tradition of modern fiction in Arabic.' ( Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, Syracuse 1995, p. 12.)
19. Matti Moosa quotes the novelist Yahya Haqqi: 'there is no harm in admitting that the modern story came to us from the West. Those who laid down its foundations were persons influenced by European literature, particularly French literature. Although masterpieces of English literature were translated into Arabic, French literature was the fountain of our story.' (Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 1970, 2nd ed. 1997, p. 93.) For Edward Said, 'at some point writers in Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like them' (Edward Said, Beginnings, 1975, New York 1985, p. 81). And Roger Allen: 'In more literary terms, increasing contacts with Western literatures led to translations of works of European fiction into Arabic, followed by their adaptation and imitation, and culminating in the appearance of an indigenous tradition of modern fiction in Arabic.' ( Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, Syracuse 1995, p. 12.)
20. Matti Moosa quotes the novelist Yahya Haqqi: 'there is no harm in admitting that the modern story came to us from the West. Those who laid down its foundations were persons influenced by European literature, particularly French literature. Although masterpieces of English literature were translated into Arabic, French literature was the fountain of our story.' (Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 1970, 2nd ed. 1997, p. 93.) For Edward Said, 'at some point writers in Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like them' (Edward Said, Beginnings, 1975, New York 1985, p. 81). And Roger Allen: 'In more literary terms, increasing contacts with Western literatures led to translations of works of European fiction into Arabic, followed by their adaptation and imitation, and culminating in the appearance of an indigenous tradition of modern fiction in Arabic.' ( Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, Syracuse 1995, p. 12.)
21. 'The first novels in Turkey were written by members of the new intelligentsia, trained in government service and well-exposed to French literature', writes Ahmet O. Evin (Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis 1983, p. 10); and Jale Parla: 'the early Turkish novelists combined the traditional narrative forms with the examples of the western novel' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', forthcoming)
22. 'The first novels in Turkey were written by members of the new intelligentsia, trained in government service and well-exposed to French literature', writes Ahmet O. Evin (Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis 1983, p. 10); and Jale Parla: 'the early Turkish novelists combined the traditional narrative forms with the examples of the western novel' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', forthcoming)
23. 'The narrative dislocation of the sequential order of events is perhaps the most outstanding impression late Qing writers received when they read or translated Western fiction. At first, they tried to tidy up the sequence of the events back into their pre-narrated order. When such tidying was not feasible during translation, an apologetic note would be inserted ... Paradoxically, when he alters rather than follows the original, the translator does not feel it necessary to add an apologetic note.' (Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern, Oxford 1995, p. 150.) 'Late Qing writers enthusiastically renewed their heritage with the help of foreign models', writes David Der-wei Wang: 'I see the late Qing as the beginning of the Chinese literary "modern" because writers' pursuit of novelty was no longer contained within indigenously defined barriers but was inextricably defined by the multilingual, crosscultural trafficking of ideas, technologies, and powers in the wake of nineteenth-century Western expansionism.' ( Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911, Stanford 1997, pp. 5, 19.)
24. 'The narrative dislocation of the sequential order of events is perhaps the most outstanding impression late Qing writers received when they read or translated Western fiction. At first, they tried to tidy up the sequence of the events back into their pre-narrated order. When such tidying was not feasible during translation, an apologetic note would be inserted ... Paradoxically, when he alters rather than follows the original, the translator does not feel it necessary to add an apologetic note.' (Henry Y.H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern, Oxford 1995, p. 150.) 'Late Qing writers enthusiastically renewed their heritage with the help of foreign models', writes David Der-wei Wang: 'I see the late Qing as the beginning of the Chinese literary "modern" because writers' pursuit of novelty was no longer contained within indigenously defined barriers but was inextricably defined by the multilingual, crosscultural trafficking of ideas, technologies, and powers in the wake of nineteenth-century Western expansionism.' ( Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911, Stanford 1997, pp. 5, 19.)
25. 'One essential factor shaping West African novels by indigenous writers was the fact that they appeared after the novels on Africa written by non-Africans ... the foreign novels embody elements which indigenous writers had to react against when they set out to write.' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, Cambridge 1975, p. 17.) 'The first Dahomean novel, Doguicimi ... is interesting as an experiment in recasting the oral literature of Africa within the form of a French novel.' (Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Bloomington 1990, p. 147.) 'It was the rationality of realism that seemed adequate to the task of forging a national identity at the conjuncture of global realities ... the rationalism of realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers, Onitsha market literature, and in the earliest titles of the African Writers Series that dominated the discourses of the period.' (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing Bloomington 1997, p. 162.)
26. 'One essential factor shaping West African novels by indigenous writers was the fact that they appeared after the novels on Africa written by non-Africans ... the foreign novels embody elements which indigenous writers had to react against when they set out to write.' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, Cambridge 1975, p. 17.) 'The first Dahomean novel, Doguicimi ... is interesting as an experiment in recasting the oral literature of Africa within the form of a French novel.' (Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Bloomington 1990, p. 147.) 'It was the rationality of realism that seemed adequate to the task of forging a national identity at the conjuncture of global realities ... the rationalism of realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers, Onitsha market literature, and in the earliest titles of the African Writers Series that dominated the discourses of the period.' (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing Bloomington 1997, p. 162.)
27. 'One essential factor shaping West African novels by indigenous writers was the fact that they appeared after the novels on Africa written by non-Africans ... the foreign novels embody elements which indigenous writers had to react against when they set out to write.' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, Cambridge 1975, p. 17.) 'The first Dahomean novel, Doguicimi ... is interesting as an experiment in recasting the oral literature of Africa within the form of a French novel.' (Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Bloomington 1990, p. 147.) 'It was the rationality of realism that seemed adequate to the task of forging a national identity at the conjuncture of global realities ... the rationalism of realism dispersed in texts as varied as newspapers, Onitsha market literature, and in the earliest titles of the African Writers Series that dominated the discourses of the period.' (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing Bloomington 1997, p. 162.)
28. In the seminar where I first presented this 'second-hand' criticism, Sarah Golstein asked a very good, Candide-like question: You decide to rely on another critic. Fine. But what if he's wrong? My reply: If he's wrong, you are wrong too, and you soon know, because you don't find any corroboration - you don't find Goscilo, MartíLópez, Sommer, Evin, Zhao, Irele ... And it's not just that you don't find positive corroboration; sooner or later you find all sorts of facts you cannot explain, and your hypothesis is falsified, in Popper's famous formulation, and you must throw it away. Fortunately, this hasn't been the case so far, and Jameson's insight still stands.
29. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
30. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
31. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
32. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
33. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
34. OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read some of these 'first novels' in the end (Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abramowitsch's Little Man, Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei's Ukigumo, René Maran's Batouala, Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi). This kind of 'reading', however, no longer produces interpretations but merely tests them: it's not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don't really read the text anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it's a reading without freedom.
35. For practical purposes, the larger the geographical space one wants to study, the smaller should the unit of analysis be: a concept (in our case), a device, a trope, a limited narrative unit - something like this. In a follow-up paper, I hope to sketch out the diffusion of stylistic 'seriouness' (Auerbach's keyword in Mimesis) in nineteenth and twentieth century novels.
36. How to set up a reliable sample - that is to say, what series of national literatures and individual novels provide a satisfactory test of a theory's predictions - is of course quite a complex issue. In this preliminary sketch, my sample (and its justification) leave much to be desired.
37. Scientific research 'begins as a story about a Possible World', Medawar goes on, 'and ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life.' His words are quoted by James Bird in The Changing World of Geography, Oxford 1993, p. 5. Bird himself offers a very elegant version of the experimental model.
38. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how 'the merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt in Turkish fiction to achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other.' (Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mould fit for the Ottoman society. The mould, however, was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks.' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee ('it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside': The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very true - The Uneasy Narrator and see the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the book-the complications generated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular fiction ... The huge amount of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instability of his status ... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ... moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivocal', and at times the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
39. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how 'the merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt in Turkish fiction to achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other.' (Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mould fit for the Ottoman society. The mould, however, was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks.' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee ('it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside': The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very true - The Uneasy Narrator and see the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the book-the complications generated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular fiction ... The huge amount of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instability of his status ... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ... moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivocal', and at times the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
40. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how 'the merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt in Turkish fiction to achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other.' (Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mould fit for the Ottoman society. The mould, however, was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks.' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee ('it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside': The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very true - The Uneasy Narrator and see the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the book-the complications generated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular fiction ... The huge amount of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instability of his status ... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ... moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivocal', and at times the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
41. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how 'the merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt in Turkish fiction to achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other.' (Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mould fit for the Ottoman society. The mould, however, was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks.' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee ('it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside': The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very true - The Uneasy Narrator and see the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the book-the complications generated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular fiction ... The huge amount of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instability of his status ... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ... moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivocal', and at times the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
42. Aside from Miyoshi and Karatani (for Japan), Mukherjee (for India), and Schwarz (for Brazil), the compositional paradoxes and the instability of the formal compromise are often mentioned in the literature on the Turkish, Chinese and Arabic novel. Discussing Namik Kemal's Intibah, Ahmet Evin points out how 'the merger of the two themes, one based on the traditional family life and the other on the yearnings of a prostitute, constitute the first attempt in Turkish fiction to achieve a type of psychological dimension observed in European novels within a thematic framework based on Turkish life. However, due both to the incompatibility of the themes and to the difference in the degree of emphasis placed on each, the unity of the novel is blemished. The structural defects of Intibah are symptomatic of the differences between the methodology and concerns of the Turkish literary tradition on the one hand and those of the European novel on the other.' (Ahmet O. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, p. 68; emphasis mine.) Jale Parla's evaluation of the Tanzimat period sounds a similar note: 'behind the inclination towards renovation stood a dominant and dominating Ottoman ideology that recast the new ideas into a mould fit for the Ottoman society. The mould, however, was supposed to hold two different epistemologies that rested on irreconcilable axioms. It was inevitable that this mould would crack and literature, in one way or another, reflects the cracks.' ('Desiring Tellers, Fugitive Tales: Don Quixote Rides Again, This Time in Istanbul', emphasis mine.) In his discussion of the 1913 novel Zaynab, by Husayn Haykal, Roger Allen echoes Schwarz and Mukherjee ('it is all too easy to point to the problems of psychological fallacy here, as Hamid, the student in Cairo acquainted with Western works on liberty and justice such as those of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, proceeds to discuss the question of marriage in Egyptian society on such a lofty plane with his parents, who have always lived deep in the Egyptian countryside': The Arabic Novel, p. 34; emphasis mine). Henry Zhao emphasizes from his very true - The Uneasy Narrator and see the splendid discussion of uneasiness that opens the book-the complications generated by the encounter of western plots and Chinese narrative: 'A salient feature of late Qing fiction', he writes, 'is the greater frequency of narrative intrusions than in any previous period of Chinese vernacular fiction ... The huge amount of directions trying to explain the newly adopted techniques betrays the narrator's uneasiness about the instability of his status ... the narrator feels the threat of interpretive diversification ... moral commentaries become more tendentious to make the judgments unequivocal', and at times the drift towards narratorial overkill is so overpowering that a writer may sacrifice narrative suspense 'to show that he is morally impeccable' (The Uneasy Narrator, pp. 69-71).
43. In some cases, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchi's translation of The Bride of Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring breeze love story], and Tsubouchi himself 'was not beyond excising the original text when the material proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scott's imagery into expressions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese literature' (Marleigh Grayer Ryan, 'Commentary' to Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, New York 1967, pp. 41-2). In the Arabic world, writes Matti Moosa, 'in many instances the translators of Western fiction took extensive and sometimes unwarranted liberties with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf not only changed the title of Scott's Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The Lion Heart and Saladin), but also admitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting, adding, and changing parts of this romance to suit what he believed to be his audience's taste ... Other translators changed the titles and the names of the characters and the contents, in order, they claimed, to make the translated work more acceptable to their readers and more consistent with the native literary tradition.' (The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 106.) The same general pattern holds for late Qing literature, where 'translations were almost without exception tampered with ... the most serious way of tampering was to paraphrase the whole novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and Chinese background ... Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment ... Western novels became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese traditional fiction.' (Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229.)
44. In some cases, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchi's translation of The Bride of Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring breeze love story], and Tsubouchi himself 'was not beyond excising the original text when the material proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scott's imagery into expressions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese literature' (Marleigh Grayer Ryan, 'Commentary' to Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, New York 1967, pp. 41-2). In the Arabic world, writes Matti Moosa, 'in many instances the translators of Western fiction took extensive and sometimes unwarranted liberties with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf not only changed the title of Scott's Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The Lion Heart and Saladin), but also admitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting, adding, and changing parts of this romance to suit what he believed to be his audience's taste ... Other translators changed the titles and the names of the characters and the contents, in order, they claimed, to make the translated work more acceptable to their readers and more consistent with the native literary tradition.' (The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 106.) The same general pattern holds for late Qing literature, where 'translations were almost without exception tampered with ... the most serious way of tampering was to paraphrase the whole novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and Chinese background ... Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment ... Western novels became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese traditional fiction.' (Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229.)
45. In some cases, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchi's translation of The Bride of Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring breeze love story], and Tsubouchi himself 'was not beyond excising the original text when the material proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scott's imagery into expressions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese literature' (Marleigh Grayer Ryan, 'Commentary' to Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, New York 1967, pp. 41-2). In the Arabic world, writes Matti Moosa, 'in many instances the translators of Western fiction took extensive and sometimes unwarranted liberties with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf not only changed the title of Scott's Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The Lion Heart and Saladin), but also admitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting, adding, and changing parts of this romance to suit what he believed to be his audience's taste ... Other translators changed the titles and the names of the characters and the contents, in order, they claimed, to make the translated work more acceptable to their readers and more consistent with the native literary tradition.' (The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 106.) The same general pattern holds for late Qing literature, where 'translations were almost without exception tampered with ... the most serious way of tampering was to paraphrase the whole novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and Chinese background ... Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment ... Western novels became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese traditional fiction.' (Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229.)
46. In some cases, even translations of European novels went through all sorts of incredible somersaults. In Japan, in 1880, Tsubouchi's translation of The Bride of Lammermoor appeared under the title Shumpu jowa [Spring breeze love story], and Tsubouchi himself 'was not beyond excising the original text when the material proved inappropriate for his audience, or converting Scott's imagery into expressions corresponding more closely to the language of traditional Japanese literature' (Marleigh Grayer Ryan, 'Commentary' to Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, New York 1967, pp. 41-2). In the Arabic world, writes Matti Moosa, 'in many instances the translators of Western fiction took extensive and sometimes unwarranted liberties with the original text of a work. Yaqub Sarruf not only changed the title of Scott's Talisman to Qalb al-Asad wa Salah al-Din (The Lion Heart and Saladin), but also admitted that he had taken the liberty of omitting, adding, and changing parts of this romance to suit what he believed to be his audience's taste ... Other translators changed the titles and the names of the characters and the contents, in order, they claimed, to make the translated work more acceptable to their readers and more consistent with the native literary tradition.' (The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 106.) The same general pattern holds for late Qing literature, where 'translations were almost without exception tampered with ... the most serious way of tampering was to paraphrase the whole novel to make it a story with Chinese chracters and Chinese background ... Almost all of these translations suffered from abridgment ... Western novels became sketchy and speedy, and looked more like Chinese traditional fiction.' (Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, p. 229.)
47. Why this difference? Probably, because in Southern Europe the wave of French translations encountered a local reality (and local narrative traditions) that weren't that different after all, and as a consequence, the composition of foreign form and local material proved easy. In West Africa, the opposite situation: although the novelists themselves had been influenced by Western literature, the wave of translations had been much weaker than elsewhere, and local narrative conventions were for their part extremely different from European ones (just think of orality); as the desire for the 'foreign technology' was relatively bland - and further discouraged, of course, by the anti-colonial politics of the 1950s - local conventions could play their role relatively undisturbed. Obiechina and Quayson emphasize the polemical relationship of early West African novels vis-à-vis European narrative: 'The most noticeable difference between novels by native West Africans and those by non-native using the West African setting, is the important position which the representation of oral tradition is given by the first and its almost total absence in the second.' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, p. 25.) 'Continuity in the literary strategic formation we have identified is best defined in term of the continuing affirmation of mythopeia rather than of realism for the definition of identity ... That this derives from a conceptual opposition to what is perceived as a Western form of realism is difficult to doubt. It is even pertinent to note in this regard that in the work of major African writers such as Achebe, Armah, and Ngugi, the movement of their work has been from protocols of realist representation to those of mythopeic experimentation. (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, p. 164.)
48. Why this difference? Probably, because in Southern Europe the wave of French translations encountered a local reality (and local narrative traditions) that weren't that different after all, and as a consequence, the composition of foreign form and local material proved easy. In West Africa, the opposite situation: although the novelists themselves had been influenced by Western literature, the wave of translations had been much weaker than elsewhere, and local narrative conventions were for their part extremely different from European ones (just think of orality); as the desire for the 'foreign technology' was relatively bland - and further discouraged, of course, by the anti-colonial politics of the 1950s - local conventions could play their role relatively undisturbed. Obiechina and Quayson emphasize the polemical relationship of early West African novels vis-à-vis European narrative: 'The most noticeable difference between novels by native West Africans and those by non-native using the West African setting, is the important position which the representation of oral tradition is given by the first and its almost total absence in the second.' (Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, p. 25.) 'Continuity in the literary strategic formation we have identified is best defined in term of the continuing affirmation of mythopeia rather than of realism for the definition of identity ... That this derives from a conceptual opposition to what is perceived as a Western form of realism is difficult to doubt. It is even pertinent to note in this regard that in the work of major African writers such as Achebe, Armah, and Ngugi, the movement of their work has been from protocols of realist representation to those of mythopeic experimentation. (Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, p. 164.)
49. The same point is made in a great article by António Cándido: 'We [Latin American literatures] never create original expressive forms or basic expressive techniques, in the sense that we mean by romanticism, on the level of literary movements; the psychological novel, on the level of genres; free indirect style, on that of writing ... the various nativisms never rejected the use of the imported literary forms ... what was demanded was the choice of new themes, of different sentiments. ('Literature and Underdevelopment', in César Fernández Moreno, Julio Ortega, Ivan A. Shulman (eds), Latin America in Its Literature, New York 1980, pp. 272-3.)
50. 'The Importing of the Novel To Brazil', p. 53.
51. Rizal's solution, or lack thereof, is probably also related to his extraordinarily wide social spectrum (Noli Me Tangere, among other things, is the text that inspired Benedict Anderson to link the novel and the nation-state): in a nation with no independence, an ill-defined ruling class, no common language and hundreds of disparate characters, it's hard to speak 'for the whole', and the narrator's voice cracks under the effort.
52. In a few lucky cases, the structural weakness may turn into a strength, as in Schwarz's interpretation of Machado, where the 'volatility' of the narrator becomes 'the stylization of the behaviour of the Brazilian ruling class': not a flaw any longer, but the very point of the novel: 'Everything in Machado de Assis's novels is coloured by the volatility - used and abused in different degrees - of their narrators. The critics usually look at it from the point of view of literary technique or of the author's humour. There are great advantages in seeing it as the stylization of the behaviour of the Brazilian ruling class. Instead of seeking disinterestedness, and the confidence provided by impartiality, Machado's narrator shows off his impudence, in a gamut which runs from cheap gibes, to literary exhibitionism, and even to critical acts.' (Roberto Schwarz, 'The Poor Old Woman and Her Portraitist', 1983, in Misplaced Ideas, p. 94.)
53. 'Grafting processes', Miyoshi calls them; Schwarz speaks of 'the implantation of the novel, and of its realist strand in particular', and Wang of 'transplanting Western narrative typologies'. And indeed, Belinsky had already described Russian literature as 'a transplanted rather than indigenous growth' in 1843.