Where I'm Reading From

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE NOBEL?

SO THE SWEDISH poet Tomas Tranströmer wins the Nobel Prize. Aside from a couple of long poems available on the Internet, I haven’t read Tranströmer, yet I feel sure this is a good decision in every way. Above all for the Nobel jury. Let me explain.

There are eighteen of them, members of an organization called the Swedish Academy, which back at the end of the nineteenth century was given the task of awarding the Nobel. At the time two members suggested it was a mistake to accept the job. The Academy’s founding brief, back in 1786, was to promote the “purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language.” Was this compatible with choosing the finest oeuvre of “an idealistic tendency” from anywhere in the world?

All members of the Academy are Swedish and most of them hold full time professorial jobs in Swedish universities. On the present jury there are just five women, and no woman has ever held the presidency. Only one member was born after 1960. This is partly because you cannot resign from the Academy. It’s a life sentence. So there’s rarely any new blood. For the past few years, however, two members have refused to cooperate with deliberations for the prize because of previous disagreements, one over the reaction, or lack of it, to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the other over awarding the prize to Elfriede Jelinek, a writer whom the dissenting member felt was “chaotic and pornographic.”

How do these people decide who are the greatest novelists and/or poets of the day on the international scene? They call on scores of literary experts in scores of countries and pay them to put down a few reflections about possible winners. Such experts are supposed to remain anonymous, but inevitably some have turned out to be acquaintances of those they have nominated.

Let’s try to imagine how much reading is involved. Assume that a hundred writers are nominated every year—it’s not unthinkable—and that the jury starts by reading one book from each of them. But of course this is a prize that goes to the whole oeuvre of a writer, so let’s suppose that as they hone down the number of candidates they now read two books of those who remain, then three, then four. It’s not unlikely that each year they are faced with reading two hundred books (this on top of their ordinary workloads). Of these books, very few will be written in Swedish and only some will be available in Swedish translation; many will be in English, or available in English translation. But since the English and Americans notoriously don’t translate a great deal, some reading will have to be done in French, German, or perhaps Spanish translations from more exotic originals.

Remember that we’re talking about poems as well as novels and that these works are coming from all over the world, many intensely engaged with cultures and literary traditions of which the members of the Swedish Academy understandably and forgivably know little. So it’s a heterogeneous and taxing bunch of books these professors have to digest and compare, every year. Responding recently to criticism that in the last ten years seven prizes have gone to Europeans, Peter Englund, the president of the current jury, claimed its members were well equipped for English but concerned about their strengths in such languages as Indonesian. Fair enough.

Let’s pause for a moment, here, and imagine our Swedish professors, called to uphold the purity of the Swedish language, as they compare a poet from Indonesia, perhaps translated into English, a novelist from Cameroon, perhaps available only in French, and another who writes in Afrikaans but is published in German and Dutch, and then a towering celebrity like Philip Roth, who they could of course read in English, but might equally feel tempted, if only out of a sense of exhaustion, to look at in Swedish.

Do we envy them this task? Does it make much sense? The two members who a century ago felt the cup should be allowed to pass from them were worried that the Academy would become “a cosmopolitan tribunal of literature.” Something they instinctively felt was problematic. They were not wrong.

Now, let’s imagine that we have been condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and nearly impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance. How do we go about it? We look for some simple, rapid, and broadly acceptable criteria that will help us get this pain out of the way. And since, as Borges himself noted, aesthetics are difficult and require a special sensibility and long reflection while political affiliations are easier and quickly grasped, we begin to identify those areas of the world that have grabbed public attention, perhaps because of political turmoil or abuses of human rights; we find those authors who have already won a huge level of respect and possibly major prizes in the literary communities of these countries and who are outspokenly committed to the right side of whatever political divide we’re talking about, and we select them.

So we have the period when the Nobel went to Eastern-bloc dissidents, or to South American writers against dictatorship, or South African writers against apartheid, or, most amazingly, to the anti-Berlusconi playwright Dario Fo, whose victory caused some bewilderment in Italy. It was an honorable enough formula but alas not every trouble spot (Tibet, Chechnya) boasts its great dissident writer, to which we might add that since the prize is perceived as going to the country as much as to the writer, it’s not possible to give it to writers from the same trouble spot two years running. What a conundrum!

Sometimes the jurists clearly get their fingers burned. Having received so many major literary prizes in Germany and Austria, the left-wing feminist Jelinek seemed a safe choice in 2004. But her work is ferocious, often quite indigestible (she’d never win a literary prize in, say, Italy or England), and the novel Greed, in particular, which appeared shortly before her Nobel was awarded, was truly unreadable. I know because I tried, and tried again. Had the members of the jury really read it? You have to wonder. Not surprisingly, after the controversy caused by Jelinek’s victory, the jury fell back on obvious choices for a couple of years: Pinter, politically appropriate and half forgotten; then Vargas Llosa, whom I somehow imagined had already won the prize many years before.

What a relief then from time to time to say, the hell with it and give it to a Swede, in this case the octogenarian acknowledged as his nation’s finest living poet and a man whose whole oeuvre, as Peter Englund charmingly remarks, could fit into a single slim paperback. A winner, in short, whom the whole jury can read in the original pure Swedish in just a few hours. Perhaps they needed a sabbatical. Not to mention the detail, not irrelevant in these times of crisis, that the $1.5-million-dollar prize will stay in Sweden.

But most healthy of all, a decision like this, which we all understand would never have been taken by say, an American jury, or a Nigerian jury, or perhaps above all a Norwegian jury, reminds us of the essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously. Eighteen (or sixteen) Swedish nationals will have a certain credibility when weighing up works of Swedish literature—so we can feel assured that Tranströmer really is an excellent poet—but what group could ever really get its mind round the infinitely varied work of scores of different traditions? And why should we ask them to do that?

A GAME WITHOUT RULES

IN 1904, THREE years after the first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French poet Sully Prudhomme, the English Football Association chose not to participate in the formation of an International Football Federation (FIFA). Members could not see the point. Nor, in 1930, the year in which Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel, did the English participate in the first World Cup: they objected to the prospect of a ten-day ocean crossing to Uruguay to play teams that meant nothing to them. The first international football game, they pointed out, had been between England and Scotland, in 1872—a time when Alfred Nobel was still focused on improving his dynamite. Who needs Argentina or Brazil when you have Scotland to play?

I am not the first to draw attention to parallel processes of internationalization in sports and literature. As with many analogies, it is the combination of similarity and difference that is illuminating. For all the different styles of play in different countries and continents, football is a game whose rules can be universally applied. North Korea plays Mexico with a Swedish referee and despite one or two contested offside decisions a result is recorded and one team can pass to the next round without too much discussion. But can we feel so certain when the Swedish referee judges poems from those two countries that he will pick the right winner? Or even that there is a “right” winner? Or even a competition? The Mexican did not write his or her poems with the idea of getting a winning decision over the North Korean, or with a Swedish referee in mind. At least we hope not.

The interesting thing, then, about the English refusal to participate in the early World Cups is that, although there was no real obstacle to measuring themselves against teams from far away, they did not feel that this competition for notional world supremacy was what the sport was for. What mattered was familiar communities confronting each other in the stadium—that would give meaning to the game.

Vice versa, what is fascinating about international literary prizes is that the obstacles to choosing between writers coming from different cultures and working in different languages are so evident and daunting as to render the task almost futile; yet such is the appetite for international prizes and for winners that people do everything possible to overlook this. So what is the underlying purpose of these prizes? To what extent are novelists—like athletes in the Olympics, or soccer players in the World Cup—being asked to contribute to the building of a vast and for the moment largely imaginary global culture? In what way does this change the kind of literature that gets written, and the way it is written and talked about?

These questions were the subject of a conference on global literature that I and my colleague, the Milanese poet Edoardo Zuccato, organized at IULM University in Milan in 2012. In the opening presentation, David Damrosch, head of comparative literature at Harvard and founder of the World Institute for Literature, rather unexpectedly focused on the work of Rudyard Kipling. Based in Lahore, the twenty-year-old Kipling had started out writing for the local Anglo-Indian community, publishing his short stories in the city’s newspaper. Later, as he became aware of a wider readership in England and the United States, he developed all kinds of strategies for making his fiction more accessible to readers who would know little of India; gradually, Damrosch suggested, discovering and “explaining” India became a central part of Kipling’s work.

Thus begins the development of a kind of literary fiction that is largely detached from debates internal to a nation and presented instead as an opportunity to discover a distant community and a sense of our place in a larger world. One important stop along this road was the explosion of South American magical realism, which enjoyed its defining moment with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the work of Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others, magical realism offered Americans and Europeans an account of South America in which it was honestly hard to see much difference in spirit or atmosphere between the dozens of countries and communities of this vast continent.

The Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi, who is very much in favor of internationalization, nevertheless points out how difficult it had become at the height of magical realism for South American writers to get themselves published if they didn’t subscribe to this highly stylized vision of literature. At the conference he explained how in the 1990s a group of Chilean writers formed the so-called McOndo group (an ironic reformulation of Macondo, the central location in One Hundred Years of Solitude), complaining that by gaining the approval of powerful readerships abroad, magical realism was preventing South American writers from recounting the more prosaic truths about the continent.

Magical realism was not, of course, confined to South America. Among others, a number of Anglo-Indian authors used their own versions of the style to create a new vision of India for international readers; one of those authors was so spectacularly out of touch with the nation he was supposedly presenting to the West that the violent reaction to his Satanic Verses after its publication in India caught him entirely by surprise. Francesca Orsini, a scholar of Hindi literature (and an Italian academic working at the University of London), posed an interesting question: There are many important books written in the languages of the subcontinent and then translated into English, among them Bhalchandra Nemade’s Cocoon, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s The Servant’s Shirt, Geetanjali Shree’s Mai, and Krishna Sobti’s The Heart Has Its Reasons. Why do they not have the same international success as works by Anglo-Indian authors like Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy? Translation, she remarked, could make a novel available, but the real exoticism of the truly foreign text remained a barrier to most readers.

Zuccato, the Milanese poet, might have been answering her when he made an impassioned attack on the whole concept of postcolonial literature. He suggested that those postwar writers in Africa and India who had chosen to write in English and French for the international community have not only given us a superficial and easily consumed exoticism; in doing so they have made it less likely that a Western public will make the effort to read those working in the local languages and offering something that would be genuinely “other” from the Western novel package we are used to. The Milan-based literary agent Marco Vigevani rather confirmed this when he pointed out the situation of Arab-language writers such as the Lebanese Hassan Daoud and the Egyptian Makkawi Said, who work in traditional genres that mix poetry and prose and that have no Western corollary. Prominent in the Arab world, these writers get almost no attention in the West because nobody has any idea how to read the kind of works they write even when they are translated.

What I found fascinating, as this discussion bounced back and forth, was that no one seemed to accept the idea that it might be enough to address one’s own community, that perhaps it was not strictly necessary to appear in this global space or contribute to its formation. Why should the literary world allow itself to be hijacked by this larger project?

The ideal of a single world community is an entirely honorable thing, but when literature (like football) becomes an instrument for creating that community, then there are other implications that may not be so attractive. Bas Heijne, a Dutch essayist and critic, suggested that globalization invites us to see our own cultures as foreign and minor and even proposed that as English dominates the international literary scene, fiction is becoming more and more self-referential and less genuinely engaged with any society. However, despite Heijne’s fascinating arguments, none of his own considerable body of work is available in English. Who would translate a Dutch essayist? According to one ominous prediction, fielded in David Crystal’s book Language Death, by 2100 between 50 and 90 percent of the world’s languages will have disappeared.

Was the IULM conference itself part of this process? With speakers from many countries, all the sessions and discussions were in English. Some later complained that the novelists who participated, and who do not write in English, Peter Stamm and Jorge Volpi, should have read at least something in their native languages and not exclusively in English translation, though the writers themselves seemed happy enough to read in the language most widely understood. Some of the English participants found the accents of those speaking English as a second language hard to handle. Some of the nonacademics found the academic jargon of one or two high-powered professors incomprehensible, even though they shared the same tongue, while an Italian doctorate student told me she found the academics easier to understand, because Italians are all too used to scholarly jargon; it was the colloquialisms and accents of the non-academic, native English speakers she found impossible.

Yet curiously, despite all this trouble communicating, everybody seemed happy simply to be there. Sometimes, perhaps, it’s not important really to understand, but simply to feel one is present and participating in the huge new community that is forming.

MOST FAVORED NATIONS

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS death in 1980, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that social engineering was like trying to reverse a truck with five or six trailers attached to it through a complex maze; you might get somewhere, but where and with what collateral damage would never be clear. So it’s hardly a surprise that the decision in many countries around Europe to insist on English as a second language—to facilitate trade of course and to promote a global scientific community—has had some unexpected effects, not least on literature.

In Milan, where I live, the city polytechnic has announced that some graduate programs are soon to be taught exclusively in English. But Italy is hardly in the forefront. About 56 percent of Europeans speak a second language, and for 38 percent of them that language is English. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, where it’s fairly common to find university courses taught in English, the figure is more like 90 percent. Even where the percentage is smaller we are nevertheless talking about the most educated part of the community, those more likely to be reading novels, particularly literary novels.

Inevitably, as the number of people speaking English increases, so do the sales of novels in English. But not enormously. The surprise is that increased knowledge of English has also brought a much more marked increase in sales of literature written in English but read in translation in the local language. When you learn a language you don’t just pick up a means of communication, you buy into a culture, you get interested.

Statistics provided by the Dutch Fund for Literature show that while the number of Dutch translations of works coming from other languages has been static, or risen only slowly, as English is taught more and more widely in schools and universities there has been a huge leap in translations from English. In 1946 only 5 percent of Holland’s book production was made up of translations; by 2005 it had reached 35 percent, and in the area of prose fiction the share had grown to 71 percent. Of those translations, 75 percent now come from English. What figures I have managed to find for Germany and Italy do not differ a great deal.

At IULM University in Milan, we have a group research project on the effects of globalization on literature. Last year, as part of this project, I went to Holland, where publishers and readers have always been generous to me, and over a month spent a number of afternoons in a bookshop in the center of Amsterdam talking to customers about their reading choices. All in all I managed forty fifteen-minute interviews with “ordinary” readers aged between twenty and sixty and evenly distributed between men and women; all but one older interviewee told me they read mainly foreign novels.

When I asked people to list titles they had recently read, they seemed surprised themselves how prevalently English and American, rather than simply foreign, these novels were. A linguist from Amsterdam University, for example, went away and jotted down the names of all the novelists on his shelves: fifty-eight Anglophone authors (many were Booker and Pulitzer winners), nineteen from eight other countries and twenty Dutch. Until he wrote down this list, he remarked, he had not been aware how far his reading was driven by publicity and availability. Indeed, no one spoke of any method behind his or her choice of novels (as opposed to nonfiction, where people declared very specific and usually local interests).

“I read foreign novels because they’re better,” was a remark I began to expect. (Surprisingly, a senior member of the Dutch Fund for Literature also said this to me.) I asked readers if that could really be the case; why would foreign books be “better” across the board, in what way? As the responses mounted up, a pattern emerged: these people had learned excellent English and with it an interest in Anglo-Saxon culture in their school years. They had come to use their novel reading (but not other kinds of reading) to reinforce this alternative identity, a sort of parallel or second life that complemented the Dutch reality they lived in and afforded them a certain self-esteem as initiates in a wider world.

Apart from the immediate repercussions on the book market, where there is now fierce competition between English and Dutch editions of English-language novels, the phenomenon suggests a few things about reading and the modern psyche. There appears to be a tension, or perhaps necessary balance, between evasion and realism in fiction, between the desire to read seriously about real things—to feel that one is not wasting time, but engaging intelligently with the world—and simultaneously the desire to escape the confines of one’s immediate community, move into the territory of the imagination, and perhaps fantasize about faraway places.

For Europeans, one way to satisfy both desires is to read novels translated from English. These works tend to talk about a culture that is to them far away but relevant because of the dominance of Anglo-Saxon and specifically American culture worldwide, and because they themselves have acquired English as a second language; in most translations there will usually be some memory or trace of the original language, which, for those who are familiar with it, will reinforce their sense of knowing that other world. This may be simply the names of people or places, references to customs or a cultural setting, or, inevitably, some syntactical or lexical habit that appears more often in, say, translations from English than in normal local language use (the frequency of the present progressive is a typical marker).

The Dutch readers I interviewed told me they only really noticed that a text was translated, rather than originally written in Dutch, when the translation had been made from a language they knew. Then they could occasionally hear the English or French or German behind the Dutch. But rather than feeling persuaded as a result to give up on translations and tackle their novels in the original language, they seemed to take pleasure in criticizing the translator for having allowed this to happen: a number of interviewees were convinced they could do better themselves, which of course is an encouraging thing to think. Again, the reading experience reinforces self-regard.

Naturally, the more one reads books by English and American authors, and watches movies and soaps made in America and costume dramas made in England, and is exposed to interminable news stories about American primaries and presidential elections, in which Europeans now feel they are somehow participating, the more full and complex this second life becomes and the more pleasure there is in reinforcing it with yet another English or American novel.

Four of my interviewees, however, all in their early twenties, added another reason for choosing English-language novels in translation over Dutch ones, a reason that again had nothing to do with the quality of the books. “You have to read things that you can talk about when you travel,” one young woman explained. “Nobody outside Holland knows Dutch novels. It’s good to know the big book of the moment, Franzen, Rushdie, what everybody’s talking about.” It was important to her, she said, when reading a novel, to think that it was being read by people like herself worldwide; it made her feel part of an international community. At moments of travel or contact with foreigners the second life becomes real.

Naturally, authors writing in English benefit enormously from this, yet are usually complacently unaware of their good fortune. Sitting on a panel of British writers at a conference in Berlin last year, I was embarrassed when one of my colleagues, a man known for his fierce left-wing satires of presumptuous public figures, said that the British could feel proud of producing a literature of such quality that all the world wished to read it. Well, it is true that Britain has a strong tradition in novel writing, but these days the dice are so heavily loaded in favor of English-language novels that the question of quality is almost a moot point. In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.

These reflections were confirmed when I was among a group of British authors invited to give talks and readings at a charming literary festival—Le Comédie du Livre—in Montpellier. Aside from our formal events, we were asked to sit for a couple of hours a day in open-air bookstalls signing our novels for French readers. It was another opportunity to talk to people about their reading choices.

Now, the French don’t speak English as well as the Dutch or Germans, but again, when questioned, almost all of those buying English fiction in French translation said they spoke some English and in general preferred reading foreign/English-language novels to French ones. It’s uncanny. And again when I discussed this with my fellow British authors, the idea that their work was being bought for reasons other than content, reputation, and quality came as a surprise and possibly an insult; their second languages are rarely strong and their reading is not guided by identification with another culture.

So, to return to Bateson’s unforeseen consequences, partly thanks to the huge increase in English teaching, which is itself in line with the pressures toward globalization, we have a situation where literary fiction is coming to serve a different purpose and to be experienced differently in the different national communities. The politically engaged social novel many European writers (Moravia, Calvino, Sartre, Camus, Böll) were celebrated for writing up to about the 1970s continues in the Anglo-Saxon world, but is fast disappearing in many European countries for the simple reason that people are reading and now perhaps writing rather less about their own societies, and hence novels are less likely to take on national issues. Globalization, it seems, does not homogenize across the board; it may push literature to develop in one way on one side of the Atlantic—or rather the language divide—and in quite a different way on the other.

WRITING ADRIFT IN THE WORLD

EVERY YEAR I send a number of my translation students in Milan to England on an exchange. Years ago they would take general courses in English and American literature; then it was postcolonial literature; now they study “world literature.” Looking at the reading lists, which range far and wide chronologically and geographically, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Ernest Hemingway, the Tale of Genji to Jorge Luis Borges, it is hard to imagine how a strong sense of the social and cultural settings in which they were produced can be built up around any of the individual works. Or rather, the only relevant context is the human race, planet Earth, post 5000 BCE, circa. The stress will be on the essential and universal rather than the local and accidental; the subtext, as David Shields insists, quoting Montaigne, in a recent polemic on contemporary fiction in Little Star, that “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”

But does he? Or she?

As my part of the deal in this exchange, I tutor students from England studying, or practicing, creative writing. They too now move in an international world, as their coming to Italy to work with me testifies. They too have taken courses in world literature, or at least postcolonial literature. They are familiar with the big international names—Kundera, Pamuk, Eco, Vargas Llosa, Roth, Murakami. They know who won the Nobel, the Man Booker International Prize, the IMPAC, the Pulitzer. Exciting as it is, none of this reading is particularly useful to them. Pamuk, for example, may offer a strong sense of place, but it is one increasingly addressed to those outside Turkey, rather than to the Turkish themselves; is the young English writer to talk about England to a foreign audience? Roth, in contrast, deeply engaged in the American experience, invites the young writer into the now ubiquitous second life that most citizens of the world have as passive observers of American culture, a world that often has little or nothing to do with daily experience elsewhere. In Europe today, one reads less and less about the immediate society one lives in. Assisting young writers as they struggle to find a voice that feels like their own, a style that might imbue what they write with a sense of necessity and urgency, I am reminded of what a literary canon is, or was, and what purpose it served.

For most of us, the set of behaviors we call personality or self forms initially in a family of three, four, or five individuals, then develops as it is exposed to the larger worlds of school and, in our teens perhaps, our town, our country. The richness of our individual personalities is a measure of the complexity of the relations that sustain us. A word spoken at home or school can be dense with nuance and shared knowledge in a way unlikely to occur in a casual exchange at rail station or airport, however fascinating and attractive an exotic traveling companion may be. This is not an argument for staying home, but for having a home from which to set out.

One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signaling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, along with the writers they drew on and the later generation they inspired, than to be mixing Chinua Achebe with Primo Levi. This is not of course a reflection on the stature of these writers—it’s simply an observation that many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.

It is not true, as many will claim, that students of creative writing all produce similar and similarly insipid texts. That is not my experience at all. However, with all the variety, two broad tendencies are evident; let me give extreme examples. One student of mine is writing a historical literary thriller set in the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth century. He is talented, he does his research; he knows how to establish a narrative rhythm, mix dialogue and description, keep the ball rolling and the suspense tightening. Still, it is only when he writes about the warrior hero’s being intimidated by his wife and attracted to his dead son’s widow that I suddenly feel that something really interesting is beginning to happen, something that matters to the author. This tormented little subplot clearly exists apart from any ambition or research that has gone into planning the book and might have formed the core of a different kind of novel, of which the English tradition offers a variety of models. But in my student’s narrative it risks derailing the larger locomotive of the saga. The student drops it and sticks to plan, describing great acts of hubris and colorful battles. I feel fairly sure he will find a publisher.

At the opposite extreme, another student tries to write about what it is like being part of a particular family and group of friends in a specific place in England now. He has a plot: the young hero has contracted HIV in a casual and drunken betrayal of the woman who seemed destined to become his wife. The novel charts the realignment of a web of relationships as the hero and those close to him very slowly learn to accept and deal with his changed reality. The highly specific habits of speech among friends and family are crucial in establishing the community, its vitality and resistance to change. A shift in the way two people address each other takes on great significance and poignancy. As a result, the book, if it’s ever published, will make more sense to readers who recognize these speech habits and feel at home with them. The difficulty for this young writer is that despite an excellent ear and fine memory for the idiosyncrasies of speech, he isn’t aware of a range of possible models that might help him structure this material and pace it well. I spend much of my time with him suggesting books and plays, old and new, and mostly English, which attempt similar representations and dramas.

In David Shields’s polemic against the traditional novel, or rather against those who continue to write it when he believes it has lost its validity, he frequently draws our attention to the fragmented character and accelerated speed of modern life, and the prominence of new media—particularly blogs, Facebook, and other social media. He links this to a general preference for what is both immediately contemporary and “true” or at least “documentary,” over traditional fiction. “The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with,” he tells us, “is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.”

I find it hard to understand why the technologically sophisticated is necessarily more visceral. The viscera are visceral, the old primitive gut: this pain, this pleasure, now. At the same time, I share Shields’s weariness with novels that, however elegant and intelligent, appear merely to be going through the motions, to be aimed above all at creating the package that will lead to prominence on the world stage, or at least commercial success (the two are almost the same thing).

If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with Shields that there is, it is not that it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of the sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which writers make their own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by authors who take courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in their own culture. That package may work for some, as I believe my student’s account of dramatic upheavals in the Mongol empire will for many readers; it has its intellectual ideas and universal issues: but it doesn’t engage us deeply, as my other student’s work might if only he could get it right. And this is not simply an issue of setting the book at home or abroad, but of having it spring from matters that genuinely concern the writer and the culture he’s working in.

When, after six months, my Italian students return from England, they have to prepare their thesis, usually a translation of a contemporary novel, complete with accompanying analysis. For this, I tell them, world literature will not be much help. Now they must read as much contemporary Italian writing as possible, whether fiction or nonfiction, journalism or essays, whatever: because it is into this immediate local and contemporary reality, with its ideas, stories, and debates, that the foreign novel they are translating is to be introduced; it is in this restricted national setting, Italy today, that the work must find its place and make sense.

ART THAT STAYS HOME

“IF A BOOK is really good, it will reach out to everyone, the world over,” one of the directors of the Edinburgh Book Festival tells me. We’re attending a reception at the National Gallery of Scotland to celebrate a loan of nineteen Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century, housed for many years in glorious isolation in a stately home on the Isle of Bute, along with the publication of Dutch writer Herman Koch’s new novel, The Dinner. The director has been talking to me about the festival’s determination to bring foreign authors to Edinburgh—because the best writing should be available everywhere.

“It’s interesting,” I tell her, “that this belief in the universal appeal of fine literature exactly coincides with commercial convenience. The better a book is, the more it transcends its local origins, the more people it can be sold to worldwide.” Put like that, she feels, the position sounds cynical, yet she sincerely believes, and her experience confirms, that the best literary work always transcends borders.

“The other advantage of this approach”—I go on playing devil’s advocate, unwisely, since I was one of the authors invited to the festival—is that we never need feel anxious or frustrated that we might be missing out on some truly great work of art because we don’t really know the culture that produced it: if the work were really great, it would, by definition, reach out to us; if it doesn’t, it’s not worth our, nor anyone else’s attention. Basically, I can feel confident that I am the arbiter of everything.

At this point, and it’s probably just as well, our conversation is interrupted by the evening’s scheduled proceedings: the consul for the Netherlands speaks briefly of the Earl of Bute’s remarkable art collection and the nineteen Dutch masters on loan to the Scottish museum; Herman Koch’s publisher and then Koch himself say a few words about his novel, but really so few that he’s hardly started before he’s finished. All I can gather is that the book takes place at a dinner party where two Dutch families discuss an outrage committed by their sons and find themselves obliged to choose between protecting their children and remaining true to their humanitarian beliefs.

After the book presentation, people drift off to visit the paintings, which feature a number of artists, in particular Aelbert Cuyp, who was hugely popular with British collectors in the eighteenth century. Cuyp’s paintings are rather melancholy, sentimental, quietly elegant representations of cattle in watery landscapes, perhaps with a child cowherd adding a touch of pathos, images that do not appear to require any special knowledge or expertise to decipher.

Other works, apparently less popular among foreign collectors, include far more local and particularly social detail. The Disputed Reckoning by Pieter de Hooch shows a behatted man in animated conversation with a drably dressed woman. It takes me a few moments to remember that reckoning is an old word for bill, like the German Rechnung: we have two people arguing about cash. That shifts things a little. No doubt if I were more familiar with Dutch mores in the seventeenth century the clothes and the ambience might tell me more, or perhaps even raise a smile.

And all the time I’m looking at the pictures I’m trying to figure out the implications of this idea that important art always travels. One consequence must be that, however deeply a work is immersed in the local and contemporary—like de Hooch’s painting of this quarrel over a bill, a hotel bill I’m beginning to think now—recognition of local detail is not essential for appreciating what really matters, which in this case must be the falling out over money of two people, a man and woman, their bodies animated, the woman raising a hand as she leans aggressively toward the man who has his right hand in his pocket, perhaps feeling for coins—assuming people kept coins in their pockets, in Holland, in those times.

The universalist approach, that is, invites us to extrapolate or identify some easily communicable, generic element—unequal power relationships, existential anxieties, or some key idea central to all human life—and tells us that this is what matters about the work of art, not the nature of its engagement with its culture of origin, with the colors of the rooms, the furnishings, the things people wore, or habitual body postures of the time. So in Koch’s novel we would be dwelling on the inevitable tension between family loyalty and respect for society’s rule of law, or for humanitarian ideals—something understandable all over the world—rather than savoring, from within the experience of Dutch culture, exactly where these families were coming from, how they recall or don’t recall things Dutch readers recognize in their Dutch lives.

But what if the quality of some fine works of art lies exactly in their relationship with the local and the contemporary, with the life that it has been given to them to experience here and now? I’m reminded of a telling moment at a conference in 2005 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Henry Green, a novelist who never enjoyed more than a small following, but whose admirers nevertheless tend to make great claims for him, as if the intensity of their enthusiasm had to make up for the author’s failure to become a truly major name, or an international figure (for sure, Green’s prose does not translate easily).

Invited to give the keynote speech, James Wood kicked off by asking the question, Why did Green remain, for all our affection for him, a minor rather than a major author? This notion caused some consternation among the adoring crowd. Wood went on to conclude that Green’s novels, all focused on carefully circumscribed and intensely observed milieu (the servants in a wealthy household in Ireland in the Second World War, a group of spoiled rich people on their way to France caught in a fog in Victoria Station, a middle-class London couple and their small circle of friends in the 1950s), had never posited or dramatized grand moral issues, in the way works by, say, Tolstoy, Dickens, Faulkner, or indeed any “great” novelist, do.

My heart rebelled. Of course Wood was perfectly right: Green didn’t pose—or seem remotely interested in posing—grand moral questions. Yet I knew that Green, whatever his national or international reputation, was not minor for me; on the contrary his work had been absolutely crucial to forming my sense of the pleasures that might be had from literature. His eccentric mix of empathetic observation, perfect mimicry, but also strangely distorting, sometimes surreal, often hilarious description and commentary, always enchanted me, conveying an urgency of engagement and a subtle complicity that seemed in no way provincial but that required at least some knowledge of the milieu to appreciate. And in these books, you could not set this aspect aside to extrapolate some universal quality, either at the level of a normally satisfying plot, or a philosophical reflection.

Another example of an author in this position might be Barbara Pym, particularly in a late work like A Few Green Leaves, where the characters, not one of whom is granted so much as a hint of charisma, allow the great intensities of life to pass them by, taking refuge in, but also suffocated by, the warm wet blanket of social routine in an English village parish. After Pym’s death, her work enjoyed a vogue in the United States in the 1980s when she was perceived as a purveyor of English quaintness; yet for an English person reading her fiction, there was nothing quaint about it, rather an invitation to accept that however trivial, a fondness for social minutiae can offer a consolation, or at least a hiding place, when existential winds blow cold.

But again, to engage with this and respond to Pym’s wry genius, some familiarity with the milieu is required. I cannot imagine getting the same pleasure from, say, a Burmese Barbara Pym, or even a Spanish Barbara Pym, if such figures were to exist. But I believe Pym and Green to be finer writers than many a worthy Nobel laureate taking in the grand questions of the century. In this regard, it’s interesting that Alfred Nobel’s will stipulated that the winner of his international literature prize must show “outstanding work in an ideal direction.” While it’s not quite clear what this might mean, it would seem to suggest some characteristic or principle that can be abstracted from the writing and then mentioned by the jury as a good reason for giving an author the prize: this man’s work promotes justice, this woman’s writing promotes peace, etc.

I believe this whole approach is limiting and risks obscuring how literature is actually experienced and how it can indeed act positively in our lives, without playing out great moral dramas or drawing us toward weighty opinions. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, discussing a Balinese painting depicting a cremation procession, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson remarked that you might think the painting was about funeral rituals, or that it portrayed a Balinese tendency to combine grief with gaiety, or alternatively you might notice that by introducing a very large cremation tower that must be carried through a narrow gateway the artist had introduced a bizarre phallic symbol. In fact, Bateson concludes, the more you looked, the more the painting seemed to be an invitation to contemplate the possible relatedness of all these elements and indeed the manner of drawing and coloring in which they were all brought together. The overall effect, he thought, was not to say anything about any of the elements but to draw the mind to a contemplative state where the desire for easy meaning and the consequent purposefulness that comes with believing you have understood something was thwarted by a beautiful complexity, or rather a recognition that life is beautifully complex, beyond easy rational apprehension. Engagement with art, whether it is such a painting, or the interrelatedness of characters and environment in a novel, or the interplay of motifs in music, had the effect of countering what Bateson saw as our dangerous yearning to arrive at a crude understanding of the world and then intervene.

As Bateson saw it, then, the depiction of grand ideals was not necessary to make art that might have a positive influence; on the other hand, an intimate knowledge of the local gave author and audience a chance for a more intense experience of connections, complications, and mysteries. International recognition of this or that hugely superior work of art was not important, nor was a discussion of its supposed ideas; what counted, on the contrary, was a frequent, ongoing experience of art, something that might correct our normally reductive and rapacious ways of thinking.

Let me close by proposing this little experiment. Choose any “great” novel, no more than a century old, from your own home culture; in fact, the nearer to home the better; get on the net and check with a couple of critics what major issues the book articulates, and what profound thoughts make it worthy of the international recognition it enjoys. Then try reading it. A hundred to one the simplicities and dogmatisms of criticism will dissolve in a richness of voice and elusive ethos that is constructed from all the different elements of the culture the writer is bringing together. What you actually experience line by line as the book connects with so much you already know, rearranging it in new ways, or sparking recognitions set off by novelties, is not something that can easily be articulated, or that a foreigner reading the same book in translation will necessarily get.

After a while it may even seem as if those elements that raised the book to its special international status are quite incidental to its real performance, almost an alibi that allowed the work to circulate in a politically correct environment. This was certainly my experience a couple of years ago when I started rereading Thomas Hardy; there is so much more in the texture of his writing, the liveliness of his dialogue playing off against the absorption in landscape, than in any of the famed discussions of fate and destiny. It would be a great shame if we were to lose this intense experience of reading for a product with “an ideal direction” that can more easily be discussed among international audiences at literary festivals.

WRITING WITHOUT STYLE

WHAT IS LITERARY style and why is it bound to change as the novel rapidly goes global?

“Style is the transformation the writer imposes on reality,” Proust tells us. We know what he means, perhaps, but the claim hardly helps us describe how a style is created or how it achieves its effects. In fact I can think of no adequate definition of style, if only because it is always diffuse throughout a text. It cannot be pinned down or wrapped up. All the same, we know at once when style is present, especially when it is extreme. Here are the opening lines of Henry Green’s 1939 novel Party Going:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead at her feet.

There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.

This is not standard English. The deixis, in particular the combination of dropped articles and unnecessary demonstratives, is wayward. There’s something unusual too in the syntax of the opening sentence of the second paragraph: “Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and . . .” And what? “And very thick,” you could say. Or, “and decided to pick up the pigeon.” But you can’t at this point say, “and out of which. . . .” It’s as if two different syntactical structures had been imperfectly aligned around the word and, an effect not unlike the breaking up of visual planes in cubism. In general, there is an odd fragmenting of information, and a curious uncertainty about where sentences are going, “turning over once.”

It’s easy enough to see how this fragmentation links to what is being described: the loss of direction and orientation a fog causes, the idea of departures, both in train stations and in prose. But alongside the disorientation, the alliterative rhythms of the writing suggest purposefulness and solidity. Fog flat fell feet, the first sentence offers, and again, dense bird disturbed balustrade dead. The acoustic effect is intensified by the prevalence of monosyllables and the elimination of unstressed articles, or their substitution with a stressed demonstrative. As in nonsense poetry, if the sense seems odd or uncertain, the forward movement is extremely confident. Here is another sentence playing the same tricks:

Headlights of cars above turning into a road as they swept round hooting swept their light above where she walked, illuminating lower branches of trees.

So a number of strategies interact in a pattern to create something homogeneous and distinct. You know immediately you are reading Henry Green. But this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Readers would not notice the text was “special” if they were not expecting something different, something they had seen many times before. There must be a shared understanding of standard language and syntax, a range of more common usages that generally prevail. English readers in particular (as opposed to American) will notice that some of the effects here recall the working-class dialects of northern England, in which articles are often dropped and one says foot rather than feet when indicating lengths. There’s an irony here since Green’s novel focuses on London’s aristocratic rich, while the third-person narrative voice recalls a working-class north, distant and potentially critical. Yet the voice is not a straight imitation of dialect, since many other dialect elements are missing. In the end, it is not clear what Green’s style “means” or where exactly it’s coming from, but it does begin to establish, as it were, a position, a new and unusual space, within the known cultural setting of 1930s England.

Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. Much of what is surprising in Green’s text is inevitably lost in translation, in a language, for example, with different rules of deixis; some is lost simply by shifting the book across the Atlantic. Green’s work never traveled well.

Perhaps such an extreme example is too easy. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald, introducing Gatsby’s old lover Daisy and her husband, Tom, in The Great Gatsby:

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

At first glance this may seem fairly standard prose. But my Word spell-check does underline unrestfully, and in fact this word is not in Webster’s dictionary. It’s a classic case of a word gaining meaning by not being what you expected: They drifted here and there . . . how? restlessly, of course. But restless suggests an impulse to be up and doing. It can be a noble attribute. Unrestfully suggests not so much the impulse that drives Daisy and Tom to move—actually they only drift—but a lack of benefit from their languor. They drift without relaxing. Fitzgerald feels this mental state is sufficiently special to deserve a neologism to point it up.

But a style requires a combination of interacting elements. What do we have? Well, a reiterated absence of knowledge or meaning: “I don’t know.” “No particular reason.” “I didn’t believe.” “I had no sight into Daisy’s heart.” This lack of knowledge might connect up with the repetition of the verb drift. One doesn’t know where to go, so one drifts. Then, at the heart of the paragraph, there is one strong affirmation of certainty—“This was a permanent move”—but the claim is undermined by a blatant oxymoron, made possible by the double meaning of move: “move house” or just movement. To read a few more pages of The Great Gatsby would alert us to the fact that the book is full of oxymorons—ferocious indifference, magnanimous scorn, inessential houses—suggesting a general state of precariousness.

Perhaps related to the oxymoron, “permanent move,” is the other oddity in this paragraph: “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Standard usage has people being happy together, or sad together: emotional states. Alternatively partners can get rich together, or get stoned together: progressive developments. But this confusion of an emotional state with a generous bank balance, “were rich together,” is emblematic of everything that makes Gatsby’s elegant world so oddly fragile, as if it existed only in the magic of words that somehow stick together despite their contradictory energies.

As with Henry Green, much of this is lost when Fitzgerald’s text leaves the culture it was written in and travels around the world in other languages. I’ve looked at five Italian translations of Gatsby. None is able to convey “unrestfully,” “permanent move,” or “get rich together.” It’s surprising how much trouble they have too with an “irrecoverable football game,” a longing for an unrepeatable past that connects Tom with Gatsby and measures the distance between them: Gatsby dreams of reviving love, Tom of reliving sporting glory. And as the separate stylistic devices disappear in translation, so does the pattern that they combined to sustain; losing the pattern one inevitably loses the peculiar position the text created for itself within its culture of origin and hence its special relationship with readers. In translation, stripped of its style, Gatsby really doesn’t seem a very remarkable performance.

What I’m getting at is that style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful. In the past, a work of literature would establish a reputation in its culture of origin, first among critics who were presumably equipped to appreciate it, then among the larger public; only later, sometimes many years later, would it perhaps be translated by those cosmopolitan literati who wished to make it known in another country. Now, on the contrary, everything is immediate; the work of a major established author is pronounced a masterpiece the day it is published; translations, even of less celebrated authors like myself, are often prepared for simultaneous publication in a score of countries. In the long run, whether through a growing awareness of the situation on the part of writers, or simply by a process of natural selection, it seems inevitable that style will align with what can be readily translated more or less into multiple languages and cultural settings, or into an easily intelligible international idiom.

In this regard let me mention two recent novels at once very literary and evidently global in their aspirations: Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, and the 2013 Booker winner, The Luminaries, by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton. Neuman, Argentinian, but resident in Spain, sets his work in the early part of the nineteenth century somewhere in Germany (neither date nor place are exactly defined), where a mysterious traveler falls to frequenting the cultural salon of a rich family and deploys his wit to seduce a local and highly intellectual beauty. The register is high, the lexical range considerable, the style extravagantly articulated and playfully pompous; but the knowledge it asks of its reader is all book knowledge, general history, a vague awareness of what a high prose style once was. There is no appeal to anything writer and reader know and share in the here and now, though we do get some softly eroticized, politically correct enthusiasm for internationalism.

This is what our mysterious traveler talks to his beloved about when they are at last between the sheets:

How can we speak about free trade, Hans pronounced as he lay next to Sophie, of a customs union and all that implies, without considering a free exchange of literature? We should be translating as many foreign books as possible, publishing them, reclaiming the literature of other countries and taking it to the classroom! That’s what I told Brockhaus. And what did he say? Sophie asked, nibbling his nipple. Hans shrugged and stroked her back: He told me, yes, all in good time, and not to get agitated. But in such exchanges, said Sophie, it’s important that the more powerful countries don’t impose their literature on everyone else, don’t you think? Absolutely, replied Hans, plunging his hand between Sophie’s buttocks, and besides, powerful countries have a lot to learn from smaller countries which are usually more open and curious, that is to say more knowledgeable. You’re the curious one! Sophie sighed, allowing Hans’s probing finger in and lying back. That, Hans grinned, must be because you’re so open and you know what’s what.

Reviewing The Luminaries, an eight-hundred-page mystery story set in 1860s New Zealand, Catton’s compatriot C.K. Stead remarks on its “chintzy,” “upholstered” pastiche of the nineteenth-century novel and adds:

Every episode has its setting, decor, clothing, its period bric-a-brac, its slightly formal but often sharp dialogue. This is costume drama. It is conventional fiction but with the attention to fact and connection that the (cross-checking and online research) facilities of the modern computer permit. That apart, only the author’s cultural sensitivity in dealing with Maori and Chinese characters, and an occasional anachronistic word or phrase in the dialogue (“paranoid”, “serendipitous”) locate authorship in the present.

In general terms this would also be an appropriate description of Neuman’s book. Removing us from the present, pastiching what the modern ear assumes the eloquence of the past to have been, the writer can appear “stylish” without appealing to anything in his readership’s immediate experience. Catton’s prose has been likened to that of Dickens in The Pickwick Papers. But for readers who followed it in the 1830s, Pickwick was drenched in references to the world they shared, and the language itself was not so far away from what could be heard and read every day. If one translates Dickens into another language, an enormous amount is lost; even for the Londoner reading him today, half the references mean nothing. Neuman’s and Catton’s novels have dispensed in advance with this intense engagement with a local or national readership and seem set to lose very little as they move around the world in different languages. It is in this regard alone that one has to disagree with Stead. Authorship is located in the present exactly insofar as its appeal—as in a Hollywood costume drama or indeed an extravagant computer game—is to well-established, globally shared tropes and not to any real contact with the specificity of a here and now.

LITERATURE AND BUREAUCRACY

I AM CURRENTLY involved in two huge projects: one to give the Italian government an absolutely exhaustive description of the degree course in which I teach and one to give the same, but in response to a different set of questions and assumptions, to the European Commission. We are talking hundreds of pages and hours upon hours that could far more usefully be spent helping students, correcting their essays, and preparing lessons. Needless to say my university is not alone in devoting time to such activities. Nor are universities special in this regard. Nor is Italy, where I live, for all its genius for bureaucracy, any worse than the UK or the USA in this matter (indeed my dealings with both the States and Britain suggests those countries may be worse). What we have then is a propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for actual doing, to create for ourselves an illusion of responsible action by endlessly multiplying the work, so-called, that precedes and—in the rare cases where it actually occurs—follows responsible action.

Literature, of course, is implacably opposed to bureaucracy. Isn’t it? Here is Dickens in Little Dorrit (the chapter is called “CONTAINING THE WHOLE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT”) castigating the British Treasury Office, which he renames the Circumlocution Office:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

For a dozen pages the concept of how not to do something and the mysteries of this policy’s universal “implementation” are thoroughly explored. Some of the observations will be all too familiar to anyone living in a democracy:

It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honorable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Dickens was not the only one to launch such attacks. It’s hard to think of a major writer—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence—who hasn’t at some point or other satirized bureaucracy. So why has such writing produced no results? This is Orwell, himself no mean satirist of the British civil service, commenting on Dickens:

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

Orwell treats Dickens as if he were a special case, but the question he raises here is whether all satire isn’t to some extent in connivance with the object of its attacks. After all, hasn’t Orwell’s own 1984 become almost an official text in the country that has more surveillance cameras per citizen than any other in the world? Leaving England, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, another ferocious critic of his state, became fascinated by the extent to which people actually lapped up the criticism, applauded him for berating them. In the play Am Ziel (which might be translated Arrived) the lead character, who is simply designated The Writer, remarks of his successful play:

I can’t understand

why they applauded

we are talking about a play

that exposes every one of them

and in the meanest way

admittedly with humor

but nasty humor

if not with malice

true malice

And all of a sudden they applaud.[1]

Years later, commenting on the controversy surrounding Bernhard, the East German playwright Heiner Müller said, “He writes as if he had been hired by the Austrian government to write against Austria. . . . The disturbance can be articulated that loudly and clearly because it doesn’t disturb.”

So could it be—and this is the question I really want to ask—that however much literature may appear to be opposed to bureaucracy and procrastination, it actually partakes of the same aberration? Balzac’s Comedie humaine with his declared ambition to “compete with the civil registry”; Proust’s monstrous, magnificent Recherche, which he likened to a cathedral, tediously extending the analogy to every section of the work; Joyce’s encyclopedic aspirations in Ulysses, his claim that Finnegans Wake would be a history of the entire world. Or go back to Dante, if you like, and his need to find a pigeonhole in hell for every sinner of every category from every sphere of society. Or fast forward again to Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two incompetents who react to practical failure by becoming obsessive copiers of literary snippets. This without mentioning the contenders for the Great-American-Novel slot, so eager to give the impression that their minds have encompassed and interrelated everything across that enormous continent (one thinks of the interminable lists of contemporary paraphernalia in Jonathan Franzen’s writing). In each case, however different in tone and content the texts, life is transformed into a series of categories, made more mental, more a matter of words and intellect; we revel in the mind’s ability to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit it or change it.

And of course all these literary achievements are wonderful and “enriching” (as they say) and infinitely more attractive than the dull documents I and my colleagues are compiling to describe our degree course to the European Commission; nevertheless they share with that document and with the people who devised it the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it. Similarly, the windy length of Dickens’s denunciation of the Circumlocution Office, and the lingering pleasure he evidently takes in blowing it away, share that office’s sinister vocation, which is why, as Orwell says, the bureaucrats themselves recognize and love the spirit of the passage. One almost feels it’s worth having a Circumlocution Office so Dickens can describe it. A dangerous state of mind.

The question arises: Is all locution inevitably circumlocution (as Beckett tended to think), and will the West perhaps slowly and voluptuously choke itself in a mounting tangle of red tape, meantime entertaining itself to death with a mountain of literature that describes and charmingly castigates the whole scandalous process? Wouldn’t it be strange, in the end, if there were not a continuity of vocation between these two major facets of the same culture? Here am I, after all, writing about other people writing about things, and with a little luck someone writing somewhere else will castigate me for my cynicism and irresponsibility, since we all know that literature, like democracy (and most of all the British democracy that gave us the Circumlocution Office), must always be praised to high heaven.

1 Translation by Gitta Honegger in her biography, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 36.

IN THE CHLOROFORMED SANCTUARY

“WALK AROUND A university campus,” fumes Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage, “and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.” Is Dyer correct that while original literature throbs with life, literary criticism is the work of cloistered drudges who suffocate the very creature that provides them with a living?

At least on this score reviewers can be quickly exonerated; it may be miles away from facing and firing bullets, or performing open heart surgery, but reviewing does have an immediate impact on other people’s lives. Panning or praising a novel, the reviewer is aware he is administering pain or pleasure and that quite possibly there will be a reaction, as when Jeanette Winterson turned up on a reviewer’s doorstep to berate him in person for a poor review. One celebrated novelist who felt I had reviewed him unkindly spent an hour making a transatlantic phone call to my own publisher to complain about my wickedness. A reviewer fearful of the fray would be well advised to find another job.

Not so the academic critic. While the reviewer is generally freelance and may hope to increase his or her income through a policy of lively provocation and polemics, the academic, though hardly well off, is more reliably salaried within a solid university institution. Rather than being part of the market with the obvious function of swaying reader’s purchasing choices, these critics treat literature as an object of quasi-scientific research. They’re not obliged to entertain, but then nor is there any question of their findings being used to propose any program of improvement; they needn’t fear the moment when their work is measured against reality. In short, the academic critic’s task is purely one of exegesis and clarification. So it may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with this kind of writing how frequently it resorts to a jargon and manner that guarantees ordinary consumers of literature will be repelled.

Here are three typical passages, none of them extreme, the first pulled (at random) from an essay by Paul Davies in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett:

From its first words, then, Comment c’est acknowledges the aesthetic of recommencement that Beckett had already developed with such compaction in Texts. Working together, these two projects carry out the wisdom of the pun: “commencer” is “comment c’est.” Beginning again, he returns again. Commencing, he quotes. As I argued above, it was the insistence of this insight that had led Beckett in the Texts to the strategic deployment of the gap between texts. These twelve gaps were in their turn yet another seed for How it is. They grew into roughly eight-hundred-and-twenty-five gaps, each of which, as John Pilling has pointed out, enabled a formal re-enactment of the book’s inception.

Here, equally at random from the shelves beside my desk, is Amit Chaudhuri writing about Lawrence’s poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers:

What is agreed upon generally then is that, to appropriate a term from linguistics, the “signified” of the poem is undefinable, powerful, ineffable, but mysteriously transmissible and even paraphrasable. This “signified” which may be called “otherness” or “life,” lies outside the text, out there in the landscape or object described, while each signifier—bat, snake, eagle, tortoise, fish—makes a connection with the “signified,” thus capturing, conveying or evoking it.

Finally, from the realm of translation criticism, this is Lawrence Venuti, in Rethinking Translation, talking about Iginio Tarchetti’s nineteenth-century Italian “adaptations” of stories by Mary Shelley:

Yet Shelley’s authorship comes back to worry the ideological standpoint of Tarchetti’s intervention by raising the issue of gender. To be effective as a subversion of bourgeois values which deterritorializes the Italian literary standard, his text must maintain the fiction of his authorship, referring to Shelley’s tale only in the vaguest way (‘imitation’). At the same time, however this fiction suppresses an instance of female authorship so that the theft of Shelley’s literary creation has the patriarchal effect of female disempowerment, of limiting a woman’s social agency.

All three of these pieces contain useful, almost “common sense” observations on the texts they are talking about. Yet this common sense is made to seem arduous through the use of unnecessary jargon. There is also a solemnity that combines with the ugliness of style to push the writing toward bathos. I suspect Davies’s metaphor of “twelve gaps” being “a seed” that “grew into roughly eight-hundred-and-twenty-five gaps” would have had Beckett laughing out loud.

The mix of intellectual control and creeping tedium goes hand in hand with a focus on the arcane rather than the evident; technique rather than content. Areas where the critic can claim special expertise are stressed, while a book’s part in the writer’s life is played down, as if for fear that any layman might feel he had the right to discuss such matters. Academics are naturally attracted to the kind of writer whose flaunted complexity offers scope for that expertise, rather than one taking on his material in a more direct fashion. So Joyce is infinitely preferred to Chesterton (in passing it’s interesting that Borges, himself the object of endless academic criticism, preferred Chesterton to Joyce).

What is in it for these critics? They stake out a field in which only a relatively small group of initiates can compete; their writing is safe from public scrutiny, it threatens no one and can do little damage; at the same time they may enjoy the illusion of possessing, encompassing, and even somehow neutralizing the most sparkling and highly regarded creations of the imagination.

This is what Dyer so comically hates in Out of Sheer Rage. Here he is opening the Longman Critical Reader to his favorite author, D.H. Lawrence:

I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on “Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality” (in the section on “Gender, Sexuality, Feminism”), Daniel J. Schneider on “Alternatives to Logocentrism in D. H. Lawrence” (in the section featuring “Post-Structuralist Turns”). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on “Radical Indeterminacy: A Post-Modern Lawrence” and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?

But is Dyer really angry? Is he angry for the reasons he says he is? Might it not be that the creative writer, conflicted over issues of fear and courage (Dyer seems terribly eager to demonstrate that his own writing is alive, engaged, and courageous) is actually a little envious of the academic who is perfectly happy to retreat from life into the chloroformed sanctuary of academe and makes no pretense at all of being in the front line?

Or, alternatively, could it be that the creative writer is delighted to find in the evident dullness of academic criticism a kind of writing in comparison with which his or her own work will inevitably seem vital and exciting? Dyer is wonderfully alive and engaged as he lets rip at the academics, “this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off.”

At this point you might begin to think that the secret purpose of dusty, phobic academe is to reassure the insecure “creative” writers of their own liveliness. This “vast graveyard of dust,” as Dyer would have it, is a place you visit to congratulate yourself you’re still up in the sunshine. It is also a very soft target. Nobody need be afraid, attacking academe, that the critics will lash back, or that they could hurt much if they did. Indeed the idea that academic critics “kill” literature tells us more about Dyer’s lively imagery than about the critics’ lethal powers. These men are hardly killers. If there’s an assassin here, it’s the creative writer. At worst the academics will tuck an author to sleep in mothballs. We can enjoy getting a whiff of camphor and feel superior.

For myself, I’ve written too many novels, plenty of reviews, and an academic monograph on translation and literature. Reviewing, I try to say what I think without actually being offensive. Writing fiction, I try not to worry how offensive the reviewers might be to me. Writing academic criticism—a ticket-punching necessity if one wishes to teach at a university—I’m relieved, of course, that offense and abrasion just don’t come into it, but immediately anxious that no one cares what I write in this department; life is passing me by.

But here’s a conundrum to close on. If, in response to Dyer’s claim that there is “an almost palpable smell of death” about university campuses, a critic were to remark that “almost palpable” is nonsense—in that you can either smell something or you can’t and if you can’t how could you know that you almost could?—would that critic be against life, because he was pedantically deflating Dyer’s lively rant? Or would he be on the side of life because he was reminding us of how things really are and what the words actually mean? Certainly the campus where I teach is full of young people, often in each other’s arms, usually far too busy with life to be bothered about literature. The only musty smells are in the library stacks.

WRITERS INTO SAINTS

THE GREATEST, THE best, the finest, the most innovative, the most perceptive . . .

Over the last ten years or so I have read literary biographies of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Hardy, Leopardi, Verga, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Moravia, Morante, Malaparte, Pavese, Borges, Beckett, Bernhard, Christina Stead, Henry Green, and probably others too. With only the rarest of exceptions, and even then only for a page or two, each author is presented as simply the most gifted and well-meaning of writers, while their behavior, however problematic and possibly outrageous—Dickens’s treatment of his children, Lawrence’s fisticuffs with Frieda—is invariably seen in a flattering light. We’re not quite talking hagiography, but special pleading is everywhere evident, as if biographers were afraid that the work might be diminished by a life that was less than noble or not essentially directed toward a lofty cause.

Consider Hermione Lee on Woolf’s suicide: the biographer takes it as an indication of Woolf’s resilience and courage for not having committed suicide in the preceding years, despite her severe depression—a courage directed at breakthroughs in fiction on behalf of female emancipation and for the general furtherance of our culture. There is no real basis for this reflection, or any need for it. Lee simply takes whatever chances she can to build up a positive moral image of Woolf.

Gordon Bowker takes Joyce at his word that he had to leave Ireland because he was unable to become a great writer in a provincial atmosphere amid competing claims of nationalism and Catholicism. Yet the facts suggest Joyce was working well in Ireland; he was publishing and had a growing reputation. A more urgent problem was Nora, his uneducated and very young girlfriend whom he was embarrassed to present to family or intellectual friends as his partner, but with whom he wanted to enjoy nuptial bliss at once. That was possible only by moving abroad, a move that definitely slowed down his career and would condition all his work from then on. Bowker enthusiastically recycles the myth of the independent artist seeking alone the “spiritual liberation of his country,” then lets us know that Joyce was consulting his aunt by post over his young wife’s depression (Nora was desperately lonely in countries where she could not speak the language) and visiting prostitutes in the meantime.

All biographies of Beckett speak with awe of his artistic integrity, his unwillingness to give interviews or to have his novels entered for prizes. But elsewhere it’s clear that Beckett had problems with all forms of social engagement, and in particular anything that laid him under an obligation or limited his freedom in any way. In early adulthood he would not work, insisted on his parents’ supporting him, but refused to accept that this gave them any right to tell him what to do with his time. Later, he found in his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, someone who not only supported him financially but also promoted his work and wrote letters to his publishers for him. In his first novel, Murphy, the eponymous hero refuses to work and is supported by a prostitute, though the person he most admires is an autistic patient totally secure from outside influence. In his short story “First Love,” a tramp is picked up by a prostitute and taken back to her house for sex. He escapes into a back room, barricades himself in, and asks to be fed and have his chamber pot removed while conceding nothing in return. In neither work is there any question that this withdrawal is done for art or out of a need for integrity.

I deeply admire the work of all these writers. I have no desire to run them down. On the contrary. What I find odd is that biographers apparently feel a need to depict their subjects as especially admirable human beings, something that in the end makes the lives less rather than more interesting and harder rather than easier to relate to the writing. It is so much clearer why the books were written and why they had to be the way they are if the life is given without this constant positive spin.

The tendency may be most pronounced in biographies of Dickens. Quite apart from the writer’s dramatic rejection, expulsion even, of his wife after she had given him ten children, there is simply an enormous resistance to admitting what a tyrant the man was, seeking to control the lives of those around him to an extraordinary degree, deeply disappointed and punitive when they didn’t live up to his expectations, which was almost always, yet at the same time fearful of any sign of competition. Robert Gottlieb, in Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, is sublime: to let Dickens off one hook he quotes previous biographer and Dickens descendant Lucinda Hawksley as claiming that the author discouraged his son Walter Landor from writing because he was “probably aware ‘that [Walter] did not have the aptitude or ambition to work at [it] as hard as he would need to in order to succeed financially.’ ” At this point the boy, who after all had been named after a poet, was not even in his teens. The fact is that, having styled himself “the Inimitable One,” Dickens never wanted competition from his children.

The habit of imagining the writer as more well-meaning than he or she probably was is even more curious when we turn to academe. Usually hostile to any notion that knowledge of a writer’s life illuminates his work—“Biographical Fallacy!” one professor of mine would thunder—academic critics nevertheless tend to assume that the author is a solemn soul devoted to profound aesthetic enquiries and invariably progressive narratives. So for Linda Shires, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy was “educating his readers by defamiliarization,” something that “is the primary goal of a novelist who would have us treat women differently, alter linguistic conventions, and reform the institutions that misshape women as much as language.” While for Paul Davies, Beckett “veritably hunted realism to death,” where realism is understood to be the convention underpinning bourgeois complacency.

This is biography, not criticism. We are being told of a plan the author had to improve the world. Unfortunately, Shires’s remarks give us no sense of why Tess is such an absorbing read, nor does any careful attention to the life or indeed the book suggest that this is what is really going on in the writing. It’s true that Hardy said he wanted “to demolish the doll of English fiction,” but what he was talking about was the freedom of the writer to evoke the lure and terror of sexual experience.

As for Beckett, it is truly hard to see his work as politically motivated. His manner of relating to others in his personal life and in print is to say something and immediately unsay it, declare and then deny. Again and again in the novels he builds up a credibly realistic scene, then steps rapidly away from it: “There’s a choice of images!” remarks Malone, having offered us a moving description of his hero Saposcat. His words “went dead as soon as they sounded,” says Murphy’s girlfriend of Murphy. In his strangely contorted letters to Duthuit, after championing a form of expression free from all relation to the world, Beckett warns: “Bear in mind that I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” In the end, the image he uses to clarify this conundrum is excretion: his writing is something he shits or vomits. He produces it, has to produce it, it is of him, but it is not about anything nor purposefully meant, and he wishes to push it away from himself as soon as possible—a sort of enactment of self-loathing. This is a fascinating pronouncement on the creative process (Byron said something similar), but hardly the description of a noble task.

Returning then to these overgenerous biographies, and to the constant insinuation of academe that writers are talented laborers in a good cause, one can only assume that they are satisfying a general need to reinforce a positive conception of narrative art, thus bolstering the self-esteem of readers, and even more of critics and biographers, who in writing about literature are likewise contributing to the very same good causes. Authors themselves, though often contradicting this positive image in private (Dickens frequently acknowledged that certain negative characters in his books were based on himself), soon learn how to play the part. Beckett must have been aware of how those famous author photos, suggesting a lean, suffering asceticism, fed the public’s perception of an austere and virtuous separateness. “How easy,” wrote Beckett’s friend Emil Cioran, “to imagine him . . . in a naked cell, undisturbed by the least decoration, not even a crucifix.” Actually Beckett was sharing a spacious flat in central Paris with his lifetime companion, Suzanne, spending weekends and summers with her in their country cottage, but drinking heavily with friends (never Suzanne) most evenings and generally making time for mistresses when possible.

But let’s finish with Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a masterpiece in having it both ways: “I feel this award was not made to me as a man,” he begins with apparent humility, seemingly denying personal prowess and heading off, as Faulkner always did, the all-too-evident relations between his stories and his biography, “but to my work, a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit.” All the attention must be on the work, but as a manifestation of saintly human endeavor. Whose? Faulkner’s of course.