Peripheral vision.

THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 

BY PASCALE CASANOVA, TRANSLATED BY M. B. DEBEVOISE

CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 420 PAGES. $35.

According to Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett achieved the highest degree of literary subversion and emancipation possible for a writer. He did so, Casanova claims, by remaining loyal to the conditions of literary creation even as he refused to submit to the laws of grammatical, not to mention orthographic, correctness. In this regard, she writes, Beckett's texts "are among the most autonomous ever imagined." In her wide-ranging discussion of a variety of writers, Casanova bestows on Beckett such accolades through a method of analysis that she defines in opposition to those of "pure criticism" (for example, New Historicism and New Criticism). For the "pure critic," literature is something "sudden, unpredictable ... [an] isolated expression of artistic creativity." Casanova's project is to retain the idea of literary autonomy yet, at the same time, to provide a political and historical grounding for it. Beckett's brilliance lies in his creation of a literature "delivered from the verbal meaning itself." But to understand what makes his work so important also requires tracing the trajectory of his "progressive autonomy"--his struggle against Irish literary heritage; his use of self-translation as a means of dealing with linguistic barriers; even his relocation from his native Dublin to Paris. The point is that Beckett deserves the highest literary praise for reasons that are external to his work, but eventually, and only, for reasons that are concentrated within it, in literary terms.

Beckett of course is a pinnacle, but Casanova concentrates particularly on the struggles of writers to achieve even a degree of visibility within the "world republic of letters." Globalization neutralizes the concept of "world literature," making it seem as if the "literary world" worldwide, such as it is, is rapidly expanding and open to all. On the contrary, Casanova argues, "world literature" is a field (in the sense used by Pierre Bourdieu) based on "unequal trade," functioning according to a "peculiar economy" in which literary value is a unit of exchange linking dominant centers (the literary capitals, or, in Casanova's scheme, "central banks"--Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt, and Barcelona) with the peripheral countries they dominate. The latter are marginalized, or "demunis," as a result of their lack of literary heritage and/or political independence. Transactions between them, then, are bound to be unequal at least in part because of the "gardiens litteraires" at the centers--the publishers, critics, judges of literary prizes, and translators--who deal with the consecration and dissemination of works and evaluate them according to an often exclusive set of standards. Casanova, by contrast, advocates what she terms the "unity of literary space," by which she means a state of affairs in which all writers are free to enter "literary space" as equals (at least initially), rather than having to struggle against the deficit that comes with being from the periphery.

Few literary theorists and critics acknowledge this particular structure or recognize the inscription of structural positions within novels themselves. Edward Said and Fredric Jameson are exceptions, briefly praised by Casanova for "internationalizing literary debate" by having worked to draw out "the reality of relations of cultural domination" that exist in every novel, "thereby reveal[ing] the political truth of literature, hitherto obscured." Casanova herself, however, guards against superimposing politics onto literature, and so qualifies her praise for Said and Jameson. As she writes: "With the emergence of a literary space that becomes progressively more autonomous, that acquires its own distinctive tempo and its own chronology, so that it is partially independent of the political world," it becomes difficult to insist, for example, on "a strict correspondence between the political events that unfolded in Ireland between 1914 and 1921" and Joyce's Ulysses. The existence of a literary space that is autonomous, functioning in accordance with its own logic rather than with that of the "real world," is essential to Casanova's general proposition, as is her distinction between the "Greenwich meridian of literature"--that is, the temporal order that governs the literary sphere--and the ordinary time of the world at large.

By introducing a dual temporality, Casanova goes some way toward addressing the traditional tug-of-war between politics and aesthetics in the field of literary analysis. She demonstrates her proposed method of criticism through some exemplary readings of canonical and "eccentric" writers alike--from Nabokov to Naipaul, from the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra to the Nigerian Chinua Achebe. Each of these writers arrived at the center from the literary periphery, a process that entails two basic "strategies": assimilation and differentiation. The former refers to the dilution or erasure of difference, and a molding of one's work based on established literary models--Naipaul's "hypercorrection" in English can be understood in this way. Differentiation, by contrast, involves the constituting of a distinctive identity, a process that often occurs against the backdrop of newly independent nationhood, the acquisition of a literary antiquity through the compiling of folk tales, the codification of languages previously existing only in oral form and their popularization through theater, and, at a more advanced level, the written use of vernaculars as a subversion of the dominant language. Compromise is evident everywhere in this process, which Casanova calls "litterisation." Translation is one obvious example of such compromise, as is the use of political aspirations to determine aesthetic choices (which explains why the national aesthetic of any given country is most often realist in nature) or beliefs (e.g., Naipaul's conservatism). Hence, every writer faces a Hobson's choice--to either "yield to a set of rules ... not only literary ... but also social and political ... or deliberately break with them ... by exaggerating one's own difference."

It is notable that, apart from a scattering of references to Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze and the passage on Jameson and Said, there is no real positioning on the part of Casanova vis-a-vis the existing body of literary theory. The sparseness of her theoretical engagement may be explained in part by the fact that her background is in radio journalism rather than academia, but it also points to an anomaly in French publishing and French intellectual life in general. Although France is a leader in the number of foreign works that are translated each year and international films often find their first outlet there, there is a remarkable dearth of theoretical work translated into French from English, Italian, or German. Not a single work by Jameson, for example, exists in French.

Casanova's analysis relies heavily on Bourdieu's model of the literary field organized along market lines, though she alters his nationally based concept of symbolic and literary capital to render it international in scope. Employing a structural analysis, she "assemble[s] literary 'families'--sets of cases that ... display a kind of family resemblance." Writers who are otherwise apparently unconnected are thus seen to share the same structural relationship to a central literary power. Kafka and Kateb Yacine, or Henri Michaux and Henrik Ibsen, in spite of their separation in time and language, all find themselves "faced with the same alternatives," argues Casanova, and they "discover the same ways out from the same dilemmas." Her model places each novel or writer fully within literary history and sees the totality of relations from which each given work has emerged (writer and nation, literary heritage, the mediation of translation, and so on), every part of which must be understood in relation to the whole.

When applied to culture, however, structural analysis of this sort struggles to do more than examine and illuminate the environment from which a novel has emerged. It is not possible to articulate why a novel is "good"--explaining the ruptures and revolutions in writing and their significance, not to mention their political impact--solely by means of an analysis of structural relations. Casanova fully acknowledges this by emphasizing the dual nature of works of art and their creators: Writers are nationals and yet they have an international status; literature exists as a material product as well as in the mind, and in a specifically literary time. It is the rebels and revolutionaries who have defined and redefined this space and what is variously described as "modernity." What salvages Casanova's structural framework is her argument that these ruptures, when studied case by case, reveal a generative model that is "almost transhistorical," laying out the literary, stylistic, and political possibilities for overturning established conventions. It is at this juncture, when she seeks to expand her structural analysis to incorporate the parameters of change, that the theoretical thrust of Casanova's project seems superfluous and overaccommodating.

What is the dominant force organizing these structural relations? Casanova's conception of the autonomy of the world republic of letters appears fragile, if not purely symbolic. She stresses that literary space is "only relatively autonomous," that is to say, "relatively dependent" on ordinary time and the ordinary world. The more peripheral one's position, the less this is the case: Writers from countries that lack political independence, with a comparatively minor language or without a strong literary heritage, are demunis. As Casanova shows compellingly, literary space and its values, in the process of litterisation, are determined by and large by broader political and economic relations. Autonomy, it seems, is possible only after "real-world" circumstances have changed to the point where aesthetic aspects alone may suffice as a means of obscuring continued domination. The Creole writers from Martinique who signed the Eloge de la creolite manifesto in 1989, for example, were asserting their identity in contradistinction both to French literary norms and to the negritude of their elder compatriot Aime Cesaire. But their rupture with French linguistic and political norms through the use of a previously oral language, when entering into the literary center--Paris--was neutralized. The Creole writers were recognized, but at the cost of reappropriation, their dissent presented only as stylistic and semantic innovation.

It is refreshing that Casanova is critical of the centers' failure to enact the claims of universal value worldwide, instead often basing standards and attention on more conventional and established assumptions that are hostile to innovation of any kind--grammatical, semantic, or structural. However, it is difficult to see how the process of unification she calls for can be enacted without a more robust conception of autonomous literary space--in other words, one that is not undercut or relativized by the structural framework. In Casanova's view, the Nobel Prize for Literature is the only existing example of the unification she desires; but even this one tangible example is not sufficiently developed and so fails to convince the reader that it is indeed an example of said unification.

A fully autonomous literary space would require a definition of literary value in which the term is not understood, even metaphorically, as a "unit of exchange," which suggests that value is relative, like anything else, and thus renders impossible any defense of a novel on grounds of "literary greatness." In Casanova's discussion of the Nobel Prize, and her charting of the development of centers of literary space and the process by which certain works have attained the status of classics, value is equated with prestige. But the question remains moot as to whether these classics actually have substantial literary worth or whether they are just pawns in the efforts of nations to acquire symbolic capital.

Casanova certainly avoids glib demands for a more diverse literature that includes, solely on the grounds of difference, "writers from everywhere." As she rightly suggests, this would be tantamount to presenting the periphery at the center along multicultural lines, thereby legitimating the poverty and underdevelopment of many nations. Casanova concludes her work by placing herself and her text on the side of the demunis--"my book," she writes, quoting Proust, "being merely a sort of magnifying glass. [I hoped] with its help I would furnish [my audience] with the means of reading themselves." To those on the periphery she presents her work as a weapon of the weak, "an instrument for struggling against the presumptions, the arrogance, and the fiats of critics in the center." In taking this stand, however, Casanova risks negating an essential characteristic of literary space--the inevitability of winners and losers when literary greatness is viewed as the pinnacle of achievement. For literature to be meaningful, there must be a hierarchy; no comparative process is possible otherwise, nor any literary innovation or challenging of conventions. And the literary critic, as a result, must be willing and able to evaluate every work with a sense of what constitutes quality.

Casanova fails to consider, too, the divisions over literary quality and judgment that exist even within the capitals of literary space. She tends to tar all critics with the same "pure criticism" brush, yet the question of whether this approach is valid is one of the most animating and divisive discussions among critics today. The emergence of a contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre seems unlikely. It was on the strength of Sartre's critical authority and by appeal to "literary value" that William Faulkner was "admitted to the center," a full decade before the Mississippian received any significant attention in the United States. Yet the absence today of figures with Sartre's critical weight and literary convictions reveals doubt at the center, rather than what Casanova calls "critical arrogance." The current situation suggests that defensiveness is the reason peripheral works are met with hostility by the centers, as those in authority are aware that their positions are maintained, at least in part, through their nations' literary heritage rather than their contemporary literary excellence.

Emilie Bickerton is a writer and critic based in Cambridge, England.