Is "World Literature" relevant today? (part 3)

Sun Ji, "Memory City (Shanghai)"

Some final remarks on this subject, here concerning three elements of Goethe's conception of world literature: world, nation, and language.

Europe in a sense made itself the world in the 19th century. It became privileged out of all proportion to the rest of the earth because of its early ability to capitalize on the scientific and artisanal know-how that it had accumulated over the centuries. This accumulation was an internally driven process: the various countries of Europe all contributed, in the various vernaculars, to the knowledge that would one day send us to the moon and enable heart transplant surgery. These achievements, along with the rising standard of living and in “improvements in the arts of living” transformed "the West" by early 20th century into a wealth-producing commercial society enjoying a rising standard of living and embracing institutionally secured ethical ideals and societal expectations.

Yet this Europe is no longer the world. The scientific premises on which rest the civilizational expertise of modern life are always and everywhere accessible, whatever one’s origins. The  growing spread of literacy and education has increasingly permitted more and more people to participate in the accumulation and application of scientific knowledge and to share in the fruits of the wealth thereby created. And everywhere, of course, people are exposed to ideas of European origin, which are now felt by non-Europeans to be "universal."

Nevertheless, the West is privileged in one way that cannot be so easily assimilated by non-Westerners. The existence of national languages with long literary traditions is rare. Indeed, non-Westerners today, when they participate in the public sphere, generally write in one of the formerly colonial languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic, or Chinese. The one major exception today is Japanese, as Japan itself came late to the notice of European colonists. It already had a vernacular literary tradition, after having imported Chinese writing in the 5th century, and was fortunate to escape the imposition of a colonial language.

The Artful Dodger and Oliver Twist

So it is that European writers are able to continue writing in their mother tongues today, because the European countries have literate populations who continue to read in these languages. Such widespread literacy was also an accompaniment of Europe's rise to a world economic power by the 19th century. European novelists in that century gave voice to the disruptions occasioned by the transformation of their cultures under capitalism. Although it is true that the novel has often been a genre for expression interiority, it has also been a vehicle for conveying the conditions of individuals who have lost their footing in society and in the world at large because of the loss of tradition. Charles Dickens for one made a living portraying such individuals, with many of whom we identify because we too are often lost in a world in which the old signposts have been demolished.

Thus, it is not a surprise that the major literary form worldwide today is the novel. As the rest of the world now comes to terms with "globalism" -- which simply means the spread of the processed that transformed Europe into a commercial society -- people everywhere are experiencing the same losses as ordinary Europeans once felt, trying to forge individual destinies when the earth continually moves under their feet. How, indeed, to live when everything that was solid has melted into air?

Picture credit: Earth Island Journal

Is "World Literature" relevant today? (part 2)

Let us consider anew whether the concept of world literature has any relevance today in the sense that Goethe meant. Those who have read my earlier posts will recognize that I am, to a certain extent, channeling the ideas of Minae Mizumura, while extending her insights to the subject of world literature.

Goethe lived in “a European world” in which learned men like himself could read and speak several languages. For instance, he was able to read French works in French, English ones in English, Italian ones in Italian. For languages with which he was unfamiliar, he read translations, as in the case of Chinese and Middle Eastern poetry. He even felt that translations  of his own works helped him to understand them better. As he wrote to Boisserée (April 24, 1831):

Bei der Übersetzung meiner letzten botanischen Arbeiten ist es ganz zugegangen wie bei Ihnen. Ein paar Hauptstellen, welche Freund Soret in meinem Deutsch nicht verstehen konnte, übersetzt ich in mein Französich; er übertrug sie in das seinige, und so glaub ich fest sie werden in jener Sprache allgemeiner verständlich sein, als vielleicht im Deutschen.

The mutual familiarity of Europeans with the works of other Europeans had been standard for centuries. Whatever their political and linguistic divisions, they were united in a common Christian culture. Following the fragmentation of Europe in the Middle Ages, learned people had continued to communicate in a universal language, Latin. Thus, the discoveries of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and so on traveled all over the continent. With the invention of printing, books in translation began to appear, of Latin works as well as of works in the vernaculars. Long before Goethe considered the topic of world literature, “Europeans” (avant la lettre) were already communicating and sharing both their literary works and their scientific discoveries. As the wealth of the western European nations increased via the application of scientific discoveries and the fruits of colonization, a new European “culture,” i.e., one shared by the various countries, was developing. It comprised an increased standard of living and common ideas about what constituted the good life. Like all "cosmopolitans," they believed that everyone shared their views.

We all feel ourselves to be the center of our world, and Europeans were only different in that they traveled far and wide and became the center of an increasingly larger world.

I am not sure whether Goethe understood what such power would mean. I am also not sure whether he was aware of the multitude of languages in the world. In any case, most of the world spoke languages that were not written down. Thus, they had no literary heritage, which is what distinguished the various European nations. Among the colonized, there developed a class of people who learned the language of the colonizers. They became bilinguals, able to move between their native tongues and the language of the colonizers, for whom they served as translators.  The effect of this can be seen today in India, where all educated people speak English. But how many of them write today in Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, and so on? Since Goethe’s time, what we have seen is that “local” languages are receding in importance in favor of colonial or imperial languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese. If a writer today from, say Somali, wants to reach an international audience with his novels, does he write in Somali (16 million speakers), or does he write in one of the colonial languages?

There are exceptions, however, which I will discuss in the next post.

Picture credits: Leonel Graça; India the Destiny

Goethe and world literature

Obviously I am obsessed with the deer in the back yard. Occasionally there are two of them. I have discovered that if I throw some plums from my balcony, one will approach. I am beginning to think the deer here are a bit like the squirrels in New York City parks: you can be sitting on a bench, and they come right up to you and beg. This is a fishing island; I don't know of any hunting going on. The deer seem to wander around as if they weren't worried. In any case, from the picture it appears that the deer is thin, although maybe deer are always thin.

Searching for plums

When I am not working on my own book or reading Jane Brown's book on Goethe and allegory, I take some time out to read Dieter Lamping's short survey, Die Idee der Weltliteratur: Ein Konzept Goethes und seine Karriere. I carry it with me when I take the ferry over to Port McNeill to do some shopping or when I walk down to what is called "Graveyard Point," after the Finnish cemetery there. It is also the only nearby place on the island where I can get cell phone reception. Not that I have anyone I need to call, but sometimes I do so just to use the darn phone.

Does she look thin?

When I get back to New York, having finished my book and my review, I will turn back to an essay on world literature on which I have been working for way too long. I generally hop around in Lamping's book, to keep in touch with the issues. Today was a really lovely day, and I sat on a bench at the beach reading the chapter "Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur." Lamping mentions that very few scholars follow Dieter Borchmeyer, who sees Goethe, Marx, and Nietzsche anticipating the replacement of national literature by world literature because of the development of "modern civilization" and more open societies. No, everyone seems agreed that Goethe did not envision the end of the individual national literatures. World literature, Lamping writes, is always national literature, as is national literature world literature, when it participates in the kind of international exchange (Austausch) that Goethe had in mind.

Yet, he goes on to say something that I don't agree with. He writes that the distinctiveness of literature is not due to its language, but rather to its poetic "Verfastheit," from which emerges a store of forms, themes, subjects, motifs, and the like, which all literatures share. But what would be "national" about a particular literary work simply by participating in "sprachübergreifende Beziehungen"? And what does that mean, anyway?

If I can make a comparison with the visual arts, I suppose there is, for instance, a Japanese style of modernist architecture, just as there is a Swedish and a Brazilian style. And I suppose one might identify certain details as "Japanese" or "Swedish" or "Brazilian." Yet each is participating in an international idiom, just as are playwrights who write in the idiom of Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard or even Andrew Lloyd Weber. Can one really describe any of these by nationality? It's all one big melting pot, as Erich Auerbach rightly wrote in his essay on world literature.

World literature post-Goethe

Gillnet fishing at Bere Point

In his book on world literature, Peter Goßens discusses the reinterpretation of the concept in the years after Goethe's death, especially under the influence of Karl August Varnhagen, who saw in Goethe's last Wilhelm Meister novel a prefiguration of the doctrines of Saint-Simon. Varnhagen was a strong influence on other admirers of Goethe in Varnhagen's Berlin circle and had an effect on pre-1848 proposals for societal reform, which were strongly utopian. Thus, Marx's reference in The Communist Manifesto to world literature and Engels' ridicule of utopian socialists in Anti-Dühring (1878) were reckonings with such "amateur" socialists. In some earlier posts, I had doubted that Goethe had any utopian inclinations, in contrast to many of the thinkers of the 18th century, particularly in France. According to Cyrus Hamlin (quoted by Goßens), Varnhagen’s reading of the Wanderjahre are a “Gebrauchsanweisung für die zukünftige soziale Ordung Europas in 19. Jahrhundert,”

Mounty and Goethe Girl

The term was already widespread after Goethe's first reference in print in Über Kunst und Alterthum in 1828 and subject to discussion in European periodicals. Theodor Mundt, one of the writers influenced by Varnhagen,  mentions that knowledge of Goethe's term was so widespread in England in 1837 that he feared it would be brought up in conversation:

Auf allen meinen Reisen, wo ich mit geistreichen Menschen in irgend ein Gespräch gerathen, habe ich stets große Furcht gehabt, daß Einer von der sogenannten Weltliteraturidee, die durch Goethe in die Mode gekommen zu sprechen anfangen könnte, und meide dies Thema, zu dem man auf Reisen so leicht veranlaßt werden mag, immer mit sichtlicher Angst.

At the Sointula Salmon Days parade

The pictures here are some scenes and people from the past week or so. Only three more days before I return to New York.

Leaving Telegraph Cove in search of whales

On the lookout

With Heather and Joe

I was envious of these kayakers also on the lookout

Spotted!

Goethe on "European literature"

"Deluge" by GC Myers

An article from 1900 by Ferdinand Brunetière, entitled "European Literature," provides much insight concerning both Goethe's concept of world literature and Fritz Strich's interpretation of that concept.

In 1900 the discipline of comparative literature was still defining itself as a field, and Brunetière, a member of the French Academy and editor of the Revue des deux mondes, sought to set out the scope of comparative literature. In the article he applies evolutionary theories to the study of literature, in particular the development of what he calls European literature, which is the transmitter of "European thought." This latter, however, is not "Western" or "universal": there are no transcendental implications in Brunetière's account, no suggestion that European "thought" constitutes a supranational spirit.

His subject is the aims of comparative literature as a subject of study, and thus he speaks solely of literature, because literature is the vehicle which expresses the "national" or "tribal" spirit of a people.  European "thought" in this account is simply the literary blending, so to speak, of the literature of five countries into a common European product: Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany, each of which successively, beginning with the Italians (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio), contributed to this "movement" of thought. In Italy's case, for instance, it was as transmitter of the tradition of antiquity, while among Spain's "truly great European creations" can be found the drama. Spain was the home of Seneca, and even though the work of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson preceded Le Cid, English drama of the 16th century became "truly European" by way of Spanish genius!

None of the "European" products sprang from its own soil ex nihilo. In this movement, some national manifestations remain purely "local" -- this is especially the case with Spain -- and do not become part of European literature. Brunetière is thinking solely of the "comparative" relations among literatures, of what one "national" literature takes from another and develops. His test case is the novel, which expresses the most "English characteristics" in Smollet, Richardson, and Fielding; the origins of the genre, however, can be traced back to the Princess de Clèves and, further, to Diana enamorada by Jorge de Montemayor. 

Brunetière's scheme of progressive development is replicated by Strich in his writings on world literature. In fact, Strich utilizes the same schema, likewise positing that the dominance of one nation in this literary give-and-take occurred when its literature simultaneously manifested most strongly its own national individuality while preserving a maximum of the common European (i.e., classical and Christian) "spirit." Strich likewise affirms Brunetiere's contention that that the knowledge of other literatures sharpens in us an understanding of the most national characteristics of our great writers. Brunetière writes: "we are defined only by comparing ourselves to others; we do not know ourselves only when we know only ourselves."

Soviet-Ukranian amity ca. 1921

 The problem with Brunetière's scheme, of course, is that "national" literature was becoming increasingly irrelevant by the time he wrote. (Which did not prevent the formation, in the 19th century, of university departments of literature along national lines.) In fact, national literature would seem to have been relevant only in the early 19th century: though it may have been an "ideological" construct, it nevertheless allowed a way of talking about literary manifestations in that period. Literature, by the late 19th century, however, was jettisoning its national or local character. Tellingly, Brunetière did not extend his survey to the writings of what he called "the extreme North," i.e., Scandinavia and Russia. As he wrote, they had only recently entered, "to use a diplomatic expression, into the theater of European literature." Though he admires Anna Karenina and The Wild Duck, he does not see what is specifically "Russian" or "Norwegian" in either. We seem to be on the verge of the "internationalization" of literature, in particular of the novel.

Strich, writing some decades later, would have been aware of this internationalization. It was this process, I think, that fueled Goethe's conception of world literature. By the late 1820s, he no longer saw literature as simply the expression of the literary or aesthetic; literature had a larger task, to contribute to a spirit of like-mindedness and political tolerance among nations. The divestiture of national animosities was occurring, as he wrote, through commerce and trade, one of the products of which was literature. He thought, of course, that it was the writings of eminent and like-minded writers of the age -- like himself! -- which would further this process. He did not regard the increasing deluge of popular writing as edifying.

More anon.

World literature and communications

For ages now I have been questioning the use of the word "progress" in the sense of moral improvement. It is true that our ethical sphere has expanded over the past two centuries (abolition of slavery, emancipation of women), but I am troubled by our tendency to regard such "advances" as the outcome of our moral superiority over previous generations, even sometimes the immediate past. In the 18th century, the philosophes censured the religious and social institutions of the past because of the latter's imposition of what the philosophes saw as backwardness. We have moved far beyond the 18th century, however, and it seems that every week I come across a review or an article in which the 1950s is described as an age of "repression." We are all moving "forward," thus Vorwärts.

My contention is that all of this progress has been propelled by mundane material factors, carried by the explosion of industry and technology in the early modern period. World commerce and trade multiplied the objects of fashion and in our households to such an extent that we became "cosmopolitan" in ways of life and standards of living. Something similar took place in the cultural sphere. Despite the historical rivalries between the countries of Europe, each began to assimilate some flavor of the culture of the others. As Joseph Texte wrote in Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, the "classical spirit" of French literature absorbed Nordic input from England and Germany.

Commerce doesn't stay with the same old same old. Some new item of trade is always required to lure consumers. Novelty is thus the engine of capitalism. Our attitudes and values travel the same path, as we exchange old ones for new, more enlightened ones. To take an example from my own lifetime. Back in the 1950s, one spoke of divorce as causing a "broken home." Many decades down the road, it turns out that we were living on the cusp of a profound change in family relations, indeed on the cusp of "single-parent households."

Kant saw in cosmopolitanism a requisite for universal peace among nations. Peace, however, requires a lack of competition, which seems hardly compatible with capitalism and the constant production of novelty. Hegel gave a spiritual spin on this materialistic process, and it was left to others to change what Hannah Arendt has called "the interpretation of history into the making of history," e.g., Karl Marx. Together with Goethe's pronouncements on the subject, Fritz Strich described world literature in terms of a dialectical movement of the spirit of different nationalities.

Goethe seems much more modest in his thoughts on world literature. I can't help thinking that he somehow envisioned the development of communications technologies, although in his life only the semaphore (from 1790; it must have played a role in the military skirmishes between the French and the allied forces that Goethe observed first hand) showed the possibility of almost-simultaneous communication over long distances. Of course, he did not propose effacing the individual character of "peoples" or nations into even a "European spirit." World literature is thus an advanced form of "communications" technology. I wonder what his reaction would be to our contemporary modes of communication.

Picture credits: Luctor et emergo; Majstersztyk

Victor Klemperer on world literature

In off moments I liked to dip into a wonderful volume of essays by Clive James. An Australian by birth, he has lived in England since the 1960s. The volume is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. James' cultural reach is extensive, and the volume includes essays on quite a few German writers. This morning I read the one on Ernst Jünger, who, as James writes, "was incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene," meaning in Germany, during the course of World War II. The Nazi impact on German society was in every way disastrous, no more or less so than on the learned professions. Those who could got out, including Erich Auerbach who secured a post at a university in Ankara.

James writes that had Victor Klemperer, professor of Romance languages in Dresden, secured such a post, rather than being forced to remain in Dresden, where, as a Jew, he was denied access to pen, paper, newspapers, and radio broadcasts, it was unlikely that he would have produced Mimesis. "Fated to stay where he was," writes James, "he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language." James is referring here to Klemperer's book LTI, or Lingua tertii imperii, which documents the "officialese of slaughter." For those who can, I recommend reading it in German, but here is a link to selections from it in English. (Of late, Klemperer belatedly became known for the diaries he managed to keep during World War II.)

Actually Klemperer might have written an important study of world literature had he not been denied access to libraries during the Nazi era. In my research on the "prehistory" of Fritz Strich's groundbreaking Goethe und die Weltliteratur, I have come across an article written by Klemperer on this subject from 1929, during the very decade when Strich was first grappling with Goethe's concept. Unlike Strich, who is notorious for not footnoting, Klemperer does indicate the sources of his thinking on the concept of world literature.

As a note to James's essay and the posting of Auerbach to Ankara, several years ago -- at a conference at the Graduate Center on Erich Auerbach -- Jane O. Newman gave me a small article she had written concerning Fritz Strich's March 26, 1928, letter to the chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on behalf of Walter Benjamin, who was hoping for a posting there. Strich was the author of an essay in 1917 on German Baroque poetry, which Benjamin had cited repeatedly (according to Professor Newman) in his own study of German Baroque theater.

So many connections.

Picture credits: Sigmar Polke; Maira Kalman

Goethe and world literature

I have not stopped blogging, but matters close to home have kept me otherwise occupied. God willing and the creeks not rising, however, I will travel to Chicago this coming Thursday to attend the triennual conference of the Goethe Society of North America, where I will be chairing a panel on the above subject. My thoughts are also turning to my long-delayed essay on Fritz Strich and the "prehistory" of his study of world literature. For today, let me note two things concerning this prehistory.

First, though Strich's study (Goethe und die Weltliteratur) appeared in 1946, he had begun reflecting on the subject much earlier, as can be seen in an essay that appeared in 1927. The essay emerged from a lecture he gave in London in 1926, in which he addressed Germany's place among the nations. Many of us are familiar with the voices after World War II who sought the answer to this question: how did the nation that produced Bach, Goethe, and Beethoven unleash such barbarism on the world? (One might consider that those eminent figures were produced when Germany was not yet a nation and that a "qualification" for serious nationhood used to be an imperial war. But that is another matter.) Fritz Strich had already sought an answer to this question after World War I. Simply expressed, his answer was that the world had not yet taken cognizance of the healing message of conciliation and toleration among the nations as expressed in Goethe's concept of world literature.

Strich was drawing here on some of Goethe's pronouncements, which suggested that the nations of the world -- more specifically, of Europe -- were getting to know each other in a new way. Literary criticism, periodicals, travel, and so one were making us more familiar with the cultural products of other lands and, what was more, revealing a new appreciation for these products.

Second, the foundation of Strich's views on world literature rests on something that is the case: from the time they began writing in the vernacular (which coincides to a great extent with developing national consciousness) the countries of western Europe were constantly engaged in intellectual and artistic exchange, during which one country or the other originated a cultural product that was then assimilated by the others. For instance, the sonnet began in Italy but rapidly made its way through all the lands of western Europe. While such receptivity indicates a universal human tendency (according to Strich), the expression of what is borrowed is specific to each country. Thus, the Petrarchan sonnet is not that of Shakespeare, and the French Gothic is different from the Flemish and so on.

The differences are what interested Goethe. In a letter to his friend Zelter (May 1828), for instance, he mentions different performances of "Helena," in Edinburgh, Paris, and Moscow. (Apparently the episode from act 3 of Faust II, published in 1826 as "Phantasmagorie," had been staged in these three cities.) It is, Goethe writes, "very instructive in this way to get to know three different ways of thinking" (drey verschiedene Denkweisen).

World lit versus global lit

What prompts me to a digression on the above subject is a novel I just finished reading, Seven Years (Sieben Jahre) by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm. (Michael Hofmann provides an impeccable English translation.) It has echoes of Albert Camus, absent the worldly heft that gave weight to the novels of Camus and even of Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus and Sartre, after all, had lived through a world war and French colonialism, whereas the characters in Seven Years have lived through times of plenty, until the end, when they encounter the economic downturn of 2008. But before that happens, during their architectural studies in Munich, their travels to Marseilles, the success of their business, they are plagued by existential anomie.

The subject of Stamm's novel, as can be guessed from the title, concerns a marriage. Besides the echoes of Camus and Sartre (particularly in the pared-down narrative style), I also thought of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Again, Bergman made a movie about individuals who were rooted in a historical place and time. History -- in particular war, during which the civilized nations of the world had turned their vast arsenal of "progress" on each other -- had let people down, so to speak, and their anomie was, to an extent, understandable. (Wonderful portrait here of this state of the soul by Richard Cronborg.) The dissatisfaction felt by Mariane and Johan, with their marriage and their lives, related to the disparity between the ideals with which they had been raised and the compromises of everyday reality. The couple in Stamm's novel, Alex and Sonia, are similarly suffering from this disparity, though neither one has a deep historical consciousness. The novel takes place in contemporary time -- the fall of the Wall is mentioned -- but no one has much interest in what that fall represents, aside from the opportunity to make money in the East.

What does Stamm's novel have to do with world literature? Goethe thought of world literature, particularly the work of translators, as a way of allowing us to understand other cultures and peoples and, if not to love or even like them, to appreciate the differences. Goethe lived in a time in which, materially, people in the advancing West were becoming more alike, but Goethe thought that national differences would remain. Goethe's love for the literature of other lands certainly speaks to appreciation of "difference." Yet the fact is that the worldwide commerce that was making people's material lives similar in his time has also led to the uniformity of their moral life. The people in Stamm's novel might be Americans.

This point is made by Tim Parks in his write-up on Stamm in the New York Review of Books: "If you didn't know Stamm was Swiss, nothing in the English translation would betray this blemish." As Parks writes: "Stamm is one of a growing group of writers ... who, whether consciously or otherwise, have evolved a style to suit the requirements of a global literary market. None of these authors writes exclusively or even first and foremost for the country they live in. ... What we are seeing, then, is the development of styles of writing that are no longer to be understood in relation to the literary tradition the author grew up in, but to the new world of international fiction, books translated no sooner written into a dozen languages." I would only add that Stamm's stories and novels of what Parks calls "ordinary emptiness," of "lives without coherence or direction," is a Western phenomenon, again the result of the spread of material affluence with which the West was beginning to be rewarded in the early 19th century.

Picture credits: The Criterion Collection; Richard Cronborg

World Literature

David Cornwall, aka John le Carré, has just been awarded the Goethe-Medaille 2011, along with the Polish writer Adam Michnik (both pictured above) and the French avant garde theater director Ariane Mnochkine. The ceremony took place in the "Residenzschloss" in Weimar. They were distinguished for their contributions to German letters as well as in connection with the focus of this year's awards, namely, "the cultural future of Europe."

According to the account in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Michnik is optimistic about such a future, while Le Carré is more skeptical, sounding a note that I often invoke. He is quoted as saying that a united Europe remains a project of elites, its institutions far removed from the concerns of citizens and dominated by economics: "What is needed is a peaceful revolution of the middle classes."

I think it was the advent of a "united Europe" in Goethe's time, which was not so much cultural as economic, that determined Goethe's own thinking about the prospects of what he called world literature. Goethe didn't imagine that the nations of Europe would give up their individual destinies or particular character; he hoped, as he wrote, that they would simply learn to get along, which he thought would be helped by acquaintance with the various literary products of the nations. Franco Venturi, in the book on which I posted yesterday, writes that a characteristic of the surviving republics in pre-revolutionary Europe -- e.g., Holland, Venice, Genoa -- was the desire for for peace and harmony. Though he mentions the commercial nature of these republics, he does not stress the connection between a "spiritual ideal" -- harmony, tolerance, etc. -- and the material conditions -- economic prosperity -- that make this ideal possible. Thus, though I would agree with Le Carré concerning the elite nature of the project of united Europe and its appalling "democracy deficit," I think he underrates how much affluence and prosperity make Western ideals possible. Well, as far as I can discern he remains an unreconstructed Leftist.

A year ago, while doing research on my world literature project, I discovered that Le Carré had become acquainted while a student in Berne with Fritz Strich, the "father" of modern studies on this subject. Until Strich's 1946 work Goethe und die Weltliteratur, this aspect of Goethe's oeuvre was practically neglected; starting in the early 1950s, however, that work begat an industry in world literature. As I posted earlier, our understanding of world literature would be assisted by studying the background of how Strich came to his subject. Thus, I was interested in whether Le Carré had any particular memories of Strich and wrote to him. His response, which I am paraphrasing, was as follows:

While he was pleased to learn that the work of Strich was of interest to Germanists, he could not help me in any meaningful way. He was barely seventeen when he attended Strich's seminars, and his German was "indifferent," and much of what was said "went over" his head. However, Strich had "the humanity to notice this" and allowed him to stay behind at the end of his seminar for a few minutes, instructing him in the groundwork of German literature that might enable him to rise to Strich's own level. Le Carré followed his instruction, and by the time he left Bern was equipped with the tools with which he could one day appreciate Strich's eminence. In his note to me, Le Carré confessed that he was a "broken reed" when it came to "the finer points of his [Strich's] theses, or indeed the substance of them" -- meaning world literature. His lasting impression was of "an elderly, distinguished gentleman who had spotted a student who was completely out of his depth" and to whom Le Carré found himself greatly indebted when he returned to German literature.

The substance of this response has been reported in other newspapers and reports in Europe in recent years, including here, on the occasion of the speech Le Carré gave in 2009 at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. In it he again gives due credit to Fritz Strich.

What particularly touched me about Le Carré's response was its similarity to mine at the age of seventeen, when I too went off the university. I come from a really white-bread American background. For instance, before college the only plays I had ever seen performed live were high school productions (though back in my day they were quite professional), and I had never been to a museum. My decision to study German in college was solely determined by my fondness for a history teacher in my last year of high school, who had the intriguing last name of "Braeutigam." I started making up for my intellectual deficits in college, but probably the most formative experience was the year I spent studying in Marburg as a junior in college. Though I didn't study with anyone as eminent as Strich, I had the same experience, not only with professors but also with German students, who went out of their way to assist me in the fine points of the German language and its history. And, of course, they took me into their homes and their activities. For instance, I learned to drink beer and wine!

Photo credit: Breitbart; Modern Alliance; Trübe-Linse

Goethe and Finance

I'm catching up on things, one of which is my mail. Back in June a friend sent me an article from Investor's Business Daily: "Faust Really Sells It." The writer for IBD, Reinhardt Krause, began: "Bankers beware. Heed author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words of caution." Krause was quoting Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, who thought that banks could learn from "Goethe's 1830 tome on self-restraint," i.e., Faust. I was expecting much from the piece on what Goethe might tell us about the financial markets. Faust has, of course, been mined for many subjects, including Goethe's views of childbirth, heaven, hell, etc., but, in the event, the piece was very superficial, with Krause leaving out some really important facts.

For starters, Krause might have mentioned that Goethe was also a doctor of law (University of Strassburg, 1771). On his return to Frankfurt, he wrote legal briefs under the direction of his father, after which he spent a few months in Wetzlar interning at the Imperial Cameral Court. Though no legal writing is known from that experience, he was inspired to write The Sorrows of Young Werther. Later, in Weimar, he served as economic and financial minister to Duke Carl August. His legal and other official writings are contained in four volumes.

Krause might also have mentioned that Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, did his post-doctoral thesis under Hans Christoph Binswanger, the Swiss economic minister, whose Geld und Magie: Eine ökonomische Deutung von Goethes Faust appeared in a revised edition in 205. As the word "magic" in the title indicates, Binswanger, proceeding from the thesis that the Faust of legend was an alchemist, contended that the creation of paper money in part 2 of the drama is a continuation of alchemy by other means. Paper money thus has a magical quality. According to Binswanger, Goethe forecast the potential of the modern economy to create value ex nihilo. (Here is a link to an English-language article, from 1998, by Binswanger on "The Challenge of Faust.") It should be added that money creation likewise stands at the center of things in Ackermann's postdoctoral thesis.

Back in June 2009 the finance section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung featured an interview with Messrs. Ackermann and Binswanger (pictured above), in which they sought to illuminate what Goethe's Faust had to say bout the financial crisis of the time. In the interview Binswanger contended that Goethe could not have done his job had he not been familiar with "economic literature." In his book he mentions Goethe's acquaintance with leading contemporary German economists, including Justus Moser, Georg Sartorius, and Georg von Buquoy. (Do all these connections, including with Ackermann and Binswanger, indicate a German gene for finance? When I was a student in Germany, Ludwig Erhard had just become chancellor.)

In the painting of Goethe at the top of this post, he looks every bit the finance minister that he was. I can't help thinking that he modeled himself on Prince Metternich (at right), who knew a thing or two about finance and politics.

You can imagine that this subject interests me: in connection with my own work on Goethe's concept of world literature, I have been trying to pin down his knowledge of Scottish economic thinkers, especially the connection they made between the improvement in manners and morals and the advance of commerce. Goethe's views always seem "cutting edge," no more so than in the link he made between the free trade in goods and in ideas. Thus, "world literature," a preoccupation of the last decade of his life, the 1820s, when the different regions of the earth were tightly linked through trade and colonization. He welcomed these links, especially as they brought people into contact with like-minded individuals, but they also produced turbulence. Goethe was well aware of the disquieting effects that material changes had on our spiritual condition: "The world is in such a turbulent state that every individual is in danger of being sucked into its vortex." Sound familiar?

Fritz Strich and Goethe's concept of world literature

Because of my editorial duties in connection with the book on the history of freedom of speech -- the title, by the way, will be Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea -- I have not been able to get to my real area of scholarly interest for some time, namely, Goethe and world literature. I have also been detoured by another topic, this time at least on a Goethe subject, the sublime. I first began working on the latter when writing on Goethe's geology; the result was an article in the Goethe Yearbook a few years back. And because of that article, I was asked to participate in a panel at the recent German Studies Association conference on the pre-Kantian sublime, which, in turn, took me further away from world literature. Still, as I gradually put the free speech volume and an article on the sublime behind me, I look forward to getting back to world literature in the New Year.

In this connection, I was recently reminded of Fritz Strich, who was the scholar who put world literature on the academic map. A strange aspect of world literature, which Goethe began to speak and write about in the 1820s, was that the idea lay fallow for another half-century. True, since Goethe had utter the oracular words, there was some attention to the concept in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the discipline of comparative literature began to be established that world literature was drafted to talk about the scope of the new discipline. Still, everyone got it wrong, speaking of world lit as if it stretched back in time, back to Homer or Gilgamesh, or extended to other parts of the world, encompassing, for instance, Chinese or Indian literature. Goethe was speaking of a future phenomenon. More about that at another time.

Before World War II, there were a couple important articles on world literature, but the first major publication on the subject appeared in 1946, with the first edition of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, by Fritz Strich. An academic growth subject was born, and by the 1950s the industry began. The concept of world literature seems to fill a conceptual need, much as did "the sublime" in the 18th century, when that term was drafted to express the new aesthetic consciousness. After all, Longinus's treatise on the sublime (written in ca. 80 A.D.) had been around in Europe since the first editions in the 16th century. It was not until the beginning of the 18th century, however, especially with Joseph Addison's essays on the imagination, that the concept really took off and dominated theoretical discussions through the century, culminating in the works of Schiller and Kant.

A few years ago I placed an inquiry in the Times Literary Supplement concerning Fritz Strich, asking for personal reminiscences of Strich. From a scholarly and an intellectual point of view, Strich has certainly been as important as, say, Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius, whose works are familiar to many outside of Germany. Besides his study of world literature, Strich is almost single-handedly responsible for the rediscovery of German Baroque literature, with an essay on that subject in 1916. Nevertheless, aside from a small Festschrift honoring Strich, there has been no work on him as a person. At the time of my TLS inquiry, however, I received no responses.

Much to my surprise I recently received a letter from Switzerland, from Heinz Günter, an English translator who works in Berne. Mr. Günter, who had saved my TLS inquiry, now sent me a speech given by the novelist John Le Carré on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. Le Carré, it turns out, had as a young Englishman (his name is actually David Cornwell) studied in Berne and had some very kind words to say about Fritz Strich, especially about Strich's encouragement of him. Indeed, Le Carre's tribute to the university and to Strich reminded me very much of my own experience as a student in Germany in the late 1960s. Though I was not so fortunate to have a professor like Fritz Strich take an interest in me, I did have many German friends who initiated me into German ways and also helped me to become a capable speaker of German. Unfortunately, after three-quarters of a century, Le Carré was unable to provide any specific details about the lectures he attended. The impression remains, however, of the kind, polite nature of Fritz Strich. (Here is a link to an article in English, which makes many of the same points as in Le Carré's Berne talk.) I am still hoping for reminiscences from others, though I suspect I may one day have to go to Berne and do some research in the archives that contain Strich's papers.

Translation and World Literature

Translation, fostering understanding and perhaps appreciation among people for other cultures, is a central element of Goethe's conception of world literature. In the essay "Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wieland" (1813) he mentions two "translation maxims"): one requires that the author of a foreign country be brought to us so that we can recognize him as our own (daß der Autor einer fremden Nation zu uns herüber gebracht werde, dergestalt, daß wir ihn als den Unsrigen ansehen können); the second makes a demand on us, namely, that we journey to the foreigner and put ourselves in his circumstances, his way of speaking, and his peculiarities (daß wir uns zu dem Fremden hinüber begeben und uns in seine Zustände, sein Sprachweise, seine Eigenheiten finden sollen) (WA I,36, 329-30).

What I find interesting about this interest in translation is that the foreign works that were most formative for Goethe's own development were in languages that he was able to read: Latin, French, Italian. He even knew enough Greek to read Homer and to get an idea of what Pindar was writing. In was later in life that he stepped outside these and became interested in the literatures of other countries: China, the Middle East, eastern Europe. The focus on translations, however, seems to point forward to our modern era, where even very educated people only master one foreign language.

Certainly translations were essential to my own education or "Bildung." In college, at Indiana University, one of my favorite places on the campus was the Union building. It resembled a huge English manor house of Tutor vintage and was located in the middle of a charming campus of hills and dales and small bridges. Besides the university bookstore, a cafeteria, and a restaurant ("the Commons"), as well as banquet rooms for overnight visitors to the campus, it had a number of reception rooms furnished with large, comfortable couches, chairs, and tables. In the winter months fires would be burning in the fireplaces, and the mantels would be hung with garlands and other seasonal decorations. There was a smaller reading room that held current copies of magazines I had never heard of before but used to take down and try to make heads or tails of: The New Republic is one I remember being fascinated by while unable to figure out the political distinctions. What a long way I have come since then!

The rooms in the Union, with chairs and tables so different from any I had ever sat upon, suggested a larger, more privileged world. And yet, here I was, a part of it. Between classes I like to take possession of one of the solid wooded tables set into a niche. Beyond the window with leaded panes I could look out and see the autumn foliage or the flowers of spring. As I memorized German vocabulary or wrote out grammar exercises, students at other tables or on couches or chairs were similarly engrossed in the written word. Invariably, someone was reading The New York Times or Foreign Affairs, publications I had never seen in Louisville. Since these were public rooms, people passed through on a regular basis, but my feeling of possession was seldom disturbed. Food and drink were not allowed, a policy everyone accepted. Food was to be eaten in the cafeteria, though in any case food had not yet become a consuming American pastime. Indeed, a quiet decorum, conducive to reading or to feeling serious, reigned in these spaces.

I would spend hours on the oversized chairs in the Union delving into books by writers who were largely unknown to me before leaving my parents' home: Thomas Mann, Camus, Lermentov. My initial efforts with these writers were a struggle, and sometimes it was only a paragraph here or a sentence there that resonated. Even the title of Lermentov's short novel -- A Hero for Our Time -- suggested something big and important. I was principally kept going in my efforts by my awareness that thoughtful people had taken the trouble to read these writers. I liked the picture of myself sitting on one of the big chairs in the Union reading a thick Russian novel. Those novels seemed to add heft to me, as if I were absorbing all the weight of the history and tragedy of the characters' lives.

As Goethe said, in one of his comments about world literature, we come to know ourselves and our own country better by knowing other peoples and countries. My own experience bears that out. My junior year in college was spent studying in Germany. Despite the importance of foreign cultures in my life, however, I must admit that I have never felt like a "citizen of the world." One of the things that always annoyed me in my travels was the view of some people -- often Americans -- that the U.S. was somehow deficient in not being more like Europe. People who spent five days in Japan (where I lived for 5 years in the late 1970s) would be pronouncing on the superiority of the way Japanese did things.

This view of America's shortcomings reared itself in the past week with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in literature to the German-Romanian (or is that Romanian-German?) writer Herta Muller (pictured above on learning of the award). The reaction of Americans, according to European accounts, was again evidence of our eternal "parochialism." I particularly liked the headline in the Belgian newspaper De Morgan: "Amerikaanse media: Müller, who the f*** is Müller?" Need I translate? (Actually, my favorite headline was to be found in The Indian News: "Nepal Maoists disapprove of Nobel for German Author.")

Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon (now, that is a site concerned with world literature) had good coverage (on October 10) of the reaction of the award to Müller. Orthofer has long been campaigning for more critical attention to translations, especially in The New York Times Book Review. (I agree with him, though for different reasons, that the NYTBR is a mediocre publication.) He was irritated at the reaction of "Herta Who?" on the part of professional reviewers. After all, as he notes, five of Muller's books have been translated into English. I haven't read them, in German or in English.

Not long ago I came across an essay in the Wilson Quarterly by Aviya Kushner, a speaker of both Hebrew and English. In the essay she wrote of the parochialism of American students she had encountered while studying in France. "It is not that Americans lack curiosity of any kind" she writes, "but that we seem to lack the right kind." She faults the Americans who preferred to live in "Anglophone dorms," thereby missing the experience of French bathrooms and kitchens.

Kushner has an attitude I have often encountered among European elites, for whom the important things in life are represented by culture and art. They seem offended by America, an entrepreneurial society in which one accrues status by making money or creating jobs. What they fail to see is that most Americans are "average," just as are most Europeans, and certainly European elites don't look down their noses at their own compatriots. Class distinctions in Europe may mean that they don't expect much from Europeans who are not like themselves in education or cultural achievement. It is the ordinariness of Americans that bothers them. It must seem wrong to be successful and not have read, for instance, Goethe.

Kushner is bothered by the lack of translations, too, and more so by the fact that foreign cultures are increasingly being represented by foreigners writing in English: "Now, sadly, we have forgotten what is is to live between languages, to have translators who inhabit the space between tongues. We prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian."

My sense is that most people like to read about people like themselves. What is wrong with that? "Literary" works, whether in English or in a foreign language, are a special category. I think, for instance, of the Chilean writer Robert Bolaño, whose Nazi Literature in the Americas I am currently reading. On August 30 of this year, the New York Times Book Review reviewed the new translation of Bolaño's The Skating Rink, first published in Spanish in 1993. Bolaño's novels tell me more about what interests other writers than they do about Chile. I wonder where Herta Müller fits in. Does she write books that most people want to read, or is she an acquired taste?

Goethe, Wieland, and World Literature

Goethe, according to Eckermann (July 15, 1827), mentioned a benefit of " the present close communications [Verkehr]" among the French, English and Germans, namely, that they find themselves in the position of being able "to correct [korrigieren] one another." I think he means by correction something like "revision" of a country's image of itself. Such revision is one of the functions of world literature. His example here is Carlyle's biography of Schiller, which appraises Schiller in a way that no German would be likely to do. Similarly, Goethe continued, Germans understand Shakespeare and Byron and appreciate their achievements even more than do the English themselves. Thus, we come to recognize ourselves more clearly through the judgments of others and thus are able to engage in revision. Writers of course have always taken note of the efforts of other writers -- Virgil would hardly have written the Aneid had he not had Homer's epics to emulate -- but Goethe is noting the civilizing effects on countries in the modern world, sort of "getting to know you."

An early example of Goethe's noting of the useful benefits of contact between writers of different nations can be found in remarks he made in honor of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) shortly after the latter's death ("Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wielands"; WA 1,36: 313-46). He mentions the influence on Wieland of the English writer Shaftesbury (1671-1713).

The latter worked on a larger stage and in what Goethe calls "a more earnest time" than Wieland. He also enjoyed great advantages: he was born to high status, had traveled and occupied high offices. Wieland, though coming from much narrower circumstances, was nevertheless spiritually akin to the Englishman: Goethe describes this kinship as one of "opinion, cast of mind, and overall view" (Ansicht, Gesinnung und Übersicht). By dint of hard work Wieland transmitted Shaftsbury's optimistic and moral rationalism in his own light and graceful works. The artist John Closterman designed the portrait below of Shaftesbury and his brother Maurice to convey the neo-Platonist beliefs of the brothers. Shaftsbury gestures toward the light of knowledge.

Later in his appreciation of Wieland Goethe captures something of this Shaftesburian spirit by describing Wieland's aversion to "the enormous system of theories" (das ungeheure Lehrgebäude) of late Kantian philosophy. To those who had been used to passing their life "poeticizing or philosophizing," this system must have been nothing less than a "threatening stronghold or oppressive fortress restricting their cheerful excursions across the field of experience" (eine Drohburg, eine Zwingfeste ... von woher ihre heitern Streifzüge über das Feld der Erfahrhung beschränkt werden sollten).

It should be noted that John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was an admirer of Wieland's works. He translated Wieland's poetic masterpiece, Oberon (1780), into English.

Picture credits: The Plate Lady

Goethe and "World Culture"

Is there or should there be a "world culture"? This question occurred to me as I searched the web for some ideas on translation in connection with Goethe. At the site Literary Translation, of the British Council, I found the following statement: "Translation has played and plays a key role in the development of world culture." Then, "It is common to think of culture as national and absolutely distinct."

Clearly, since Goethe lived "absolutely distinct" traditional cultures are going the way of the dodo. When I first went to Germany as a student, it was obvious to me that Germans were different from Americans and also from other Europeans I encountered. Swedish girls, for instance, were not to be confused with Italian ones. The same with the males of Europe. Goethe was aware of these differences. Thus his comment: "Every nation has its idiosyncracies which differentiate it from others and make it feel isolated from, attracted to or repelled by them. The outward manifestations of these idiosyncracies usually seem strikingly repugnant, or at best ridiculous, to another nation. They also are the reason why we tend to respect a nation less than it deserves."

It was the appreciation of these cultural differences, often repellant to outsiders, that Goethe saw as a benefit of world literature. He didn't envision that there would be a unified "world culture." In 1828, for instance, writing about the contribution of periodicals to world literature, he stresses that countries should think alike, only that they should be aware of one another. (There are inconsistencies or paradoxes -- aporias, as we like to say in academia -- in Goethe's comments on world literature; I will return to these at a later date.)

Festival of World Culture at Dun Laoghaire, 2006

About twenty years ago, however, I began to notice here in New York that I could no longer distinguish Germans from Danes from French and so. Only the Africans, standing on street corners selling "Gucci" bags or "Rolex" watches, seemed foreign anymore. There is now a "McEurope" (is that the effect of the E.U.?).

The concept of "world culture" (along with "multiculturalism") has certainly taken off in recent years. Again, I tie this spread not to a growth in humanistic thinking but rather to global commerce. The results (at least for those of us who care about "culture," "civilization," "Western values," and all that stuff that the world culturalists would like to usher off the stage of history) are quite sappy, as some of the pictures here vividly demonstrate.

Picture credits: Do-ho-Suh; Unity-and-Diversity World Council; the Dublin Community Blog; Explore and More

Goethe and World Literature

I would like to begin to tie together some posts about our modern "accelerated" culture (see last two posts) with Goethe's ideas on world literature. The speeding up of life is connected of course with the increased pace of technological progress and invention, the fruits of which are in turn speedily disseminated to all corners of the world. I have also been saying for a while (see, for instance, my essay in the fall 2008 issue of The Yale Review) that Goethe's ideas on world literature were connected with the progress of commerce and trade in his time.

Goethe's dinner table in Weimar, full not only of the produce of his own garden but also of the products of different European lands, was also the site of pleasant conversation, some of it with Europeans who had traveled to visit the poet in Weimar. And, indeed, world literature as Goethe conceived it concerned such intellectual commerce. In his introduction to the German translation of Thomas Carlyle's life of Schiller, he spoke of "free intellectual commerce" (freien geistigen Handelsverkehr). Besides enjoying visits from many Europeans, Goethe was also in correspondence with luminaries on the continent. His journal Kunst und Altertum -- you might call it an early 19th-century blog -- discussed literary developments and products in France, England, and Italy. He was also aware of more far-flung efforts (e.g., Serbian folk poetry) through translations. The Persian poet Hafiz, inspiration for the West-East Divan, had been read in translation. Indeed, in Goethe's telling Germany was a literary entrepôt. Reviewing Carlyle's German Romance (WA I, 41/2, 304-7), he wrote: "Whoever understands and studies German is at the market where all nations offer their wares."

In tracing this connection Goethe made between world literature and commerce, I have been immersing myself in various works, some of them popular, that offer insight into the global expansion of trade in the modern period, beginning shortly after Columbus' encounter with the "New World." One of these is A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein.

Goethe did not use the term "free trade" (as far as I know). This policy, which allows traders to act and transact without government interference, was only gradually coming into intellectual purview in the 18th century. Adam Smith was one of the first to point to the benefits of free trade, namely, that economic and cultural flourishing went together. He cited the Mediterranean cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome, but also those of the East. In Europe until the 19th century, however, there were contending protectionist and isolationist arguments against free trade, including (nothing new here) the power of special interests. Thus European economic policy was generally characterized by mercantilism, the belief that a nation's prosperity is dependent on its supply of capital, which was seen as represented by bullion. This was a zero-sum game, since there was only so much gold, silver, and other trade value.

It was David Ricardo who came up with the "law of comparative advantage." As Bernstein writes: this law "tells us it is far better for the Argentinians to grow beef, the Japanese to make cars, and the Italians to turn out high-fashion shoes than for each nation to attempt to become self-sufficient in all three areas." Although free trade (and "globalization") is accused of creating a kind of McCulture, what I find interesting about this example from A Splendid Exchange is that it assumes that different nations have a specific identity or character. Herder had been writing about this for decades before Goethe's comments on world literature. His influence on Goethe is immense, including when Goethe emphasizes that by world literature he does not mean that all the nations should be alike: "We repeat," he writes in Kunst und Altertum in 1828 (I, 41/2, 348-50), "We are not saying that nations should think alike, but only that they should be aware of one another, understand one another and, if they cannot love one another, they should at least learn to be tolerant."

Goethe thought tolerance would be aided through commerce in the intellectual products of other cultures and nations. But it strikes me that appreciation for different cultures, especially those far from our own milieu, is really an acquired taste, like that for exotic foods. Most of us are "cosmopolitan" enough to appreciate Russian literature or the works of different South American authors, but how many of us have recently (or ever) read a novel written in the Telegu language (a Dravidian language spoken by 69 million people in southeast India)?

Picture credit: The Guardian; Barrie Maguire; Olga's Gallery; Adventures in Capitalism; Colleen Graham