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The World Novel and the Perils of “One-World Thinking”

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-7547056

1945-8509

Ali Behdad,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

In recent years, literary scholars have reintroduced the idea of world literature—first elaborated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early decades of nineteenth century in his discussions of Weltliteratur with his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann—to move literary studies beyond both traditional paradigms of national literatures and postcolonial theory. Debjani Ganguly's This Thing Called the World is a timely intervention in this rich field of critical inquiry. What is the relation, she thoughtfully asks, between a world of “hyperconnected humans sensitized as witnesses to the depredations of gruesome global violence and the excesses of liquid capitalism,” on one hand, and the “contemporary world novel” on the other (23, 24)? In raising this important question, Ganguly does not mean to suggest that the imagined worlds conjured in the world novel are somehow reducible to empirical antecedents nor that the world novel is an essentially mimetic form. Instead, Ganguly suggests that this new novelistic genre “opens up many worlds that variously converse with, interrogate, interrupt, and even enter the forgotten histories of the world made in the image of contemporary global capital” (83).Organized around three broad rubrics—world, war, and witness—the book offers a series of theoretically informed meditations on a genre that Ganguly posits as emerging at the intersection of three phenomena: a state of perpetual war and violence, hyperconnectivity due to advances in information technology, and a new humanitarian sensibility. Intrepidly, she proclaims the transformations “wrought on the narrative grammar of the human in the novel form in this era of spectatorial capitalism, when the capacity to respond to distant suffering has increased greatly with advances in information technology” (32). Specifically, the author claims that 1989 constitutes a distinct historical threshold in inaugurating the genre of world novel at the moment when information technology helped literary imagination to become more global in scope and sensitive to the plight of human suffering in distant places. While tracing the genealogy of the world novel to the eighteenth century, when notions of sympathy (as elaborated in the philosophical works of Adam Smith and David Hume) and popular sovereignty (as articulated in the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) took hold, Ganguly contends that the post-1989 novel is defined by a new and more radical understanding of “the idea of humanitarian suffering and the human,” one that “illuminates the dangerous violence of projecting an abstracted image of the international human rights person” and “exposes the radical vulnerability of being human in our times” (27). Elaborating this idea, Ganguly deploys the notion of ekphrasis (literary description of a visual work of art) to argue that the post-1989 novel adopts a visually inflected mode of representation as a response to the dominance of visuality in contemporary culture and by way of destabilizing the mediatized representations of war and humanitarian suffering.Each section of This Thing Called the World intersperses theoretical discussions of a topos with close readings of selected novels. For example, in the first section, Ganguly reads David Mitchell's 1999 Ghostwritten and Salman Rushdie's 2005 Shalimar the Clown to illustrate her claims concerning a new configuration of a world marked by “neoliberal wars, technological hyperconnectivity, the excesses of liquid capitalism, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism” (85). She argues cogently that while Ghostwritten “disturbs the assumption of a flat global readership” and refuses to provide “a known world of otherness” to the anglophone reader, Rushdie's novel splices “historically and geopolitically disparate terrains and bring[s] them into reckoning with the global present” (105, 122). Throughout the book, close readings of exemplary texts are punctuated with theoretical detours through works ranging from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination to Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx.The second section on “war” begins with a lengthy chapter that draws widely from theoretical interventions, including Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz, to show the impact of contemporary wars, information technology, and humanitarian activism on the post-1989 novel. Describing the contemporary moment as an “age of witnessing,” Ganguly maintains that digital technology has enabled the massive visual documentation of war and violence, the global consumption of which has produced a distinctively mediatized form of humanitarian sensibility (140). Following a short discussion of Art Spiegelman's 2004 graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, Ganguly uses Don DeLillo's 2007 Falling Man to demonstrate her contention that the contemporary world novel challenges the mediatized spectacles of terror, declaring the 9/11 terrorist attacks to be “symptoms of a much larger geopolitical malaise infecting the globe” (172). The final section of the book provides two examples of novelistic witnessing. Drawing on the theoretical writings of Brian Massumi and Lauren Berlant, among others, Ganguly offers close readings of Michael Ondaatje's 2000 Anil's Ghost and Janette Turner Hospital's 2007 Orpheus Lost. Unlike contemporary cinematic or televisual genres, these world novels provide readers with an alternative mode of witnessing, rooted in legibility as opposed to visibility, she contends. While Anil's Ghost speaks to the world novel's “capacity to explore the vagaries of the factual in witnessing human experience in extremis,” Orpheus Lost highlights the subjective and affective dimensions of witnessing violence and human suffering (194). To counter the immediacy of violence in visual media that has led to overexposure and desensitization, Ondaatje and Hospital deploy alternative narrative strategies to create a more empathetic form of witnessing.This Thing Called the World deserves praise as a salutary effort to transcend the pieties and apolitical tendencies sometimes discernible in recent debates about world literature. But a welcome ambition to center complexity is thwarted by countervailing forces emanating from what Edward Said once characterized as a growing tendency toward professionalism among literary scholars. In recalling Said's concerns, I have in mind not only his thoughts on technical formalism—although it must be said that the excessive and often cursory citation of other scholars' work in this book results in a surfeit of jargonistic prose and renders it a challenging, not to say tedious, read. More broadly, I found myself wondering if increasingly common professional practices—social, citational, and otherwise—might be counterproductive if qualities such as historical rigor and analytic depth are to remain priorities in the fields of literary and cultural criticism. An evident hazard of working in academic environments in which a small number of like-minded scholars write, read, and evaluate each other's specialized and technical criticism is not only the resulting lack of “worldliness” that Said specifically bemoaned but also an unchecked proliferation of unregulated assertions that threaten not just the credibility but the integrity of the academic enterprise.The following statement from This Thing Called the World, which the author offers by way of substantiating the claimed importance of 1989 as a historical threshold for both a new world order and the rise of the world novel, is a case in point: “In August 1990 the internecine warfare between the Kurds and the Iraqis escalated into the first Gulf War when the sole superpower of the post–cold war world thought fit to push through an alliance of thirty-four states to intervene in this ethnic conflict and declare war on the state of Iraq” (8). The use of the phrase “ethnic conflict” here is perplexing. Does the author mean to elide the well-known fact that the first Gulf War was directly precipitated by Saddam Hussein's unprovoked invasion of Kuwait and annexation of its oil fields? Among other problems, the phrase “ethnic conflict” obscures the imbalanced brutality of a dictator whose use of chemical weapons against the Kurds two years earlier and against the Iranian army in 1981 and 1983 failed to elicit an international response until others' economic interests were perceived to be threatened.Even more problematically, Ganguly asserts that during the postwar period (1945–70), liberalism, which she defines as a political ideology marked by “the principles of individual liberty, private property, and equality before the law,” became “all but global under the aegis of the United States” (6, 7). While proclaiming a global zeitgeist is rhetorically expedient and perhaps even logically necessitated by an argument that pivots on the presumptive legibility of the term world itself, I nonetheless worry about the histories that are elided by assertions of a global consensus about liberalism during a time when world leaders included such figures as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, Milton Obote in Uganda, Kenneth Kauda in Zambia, Oswaldo López Arellano in Honduras, Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, René Barrientos in Bolivia, Ne Win in Burma, Thanom Kittikachorn in Thailand, and Suharto in Indonesia, to name just a small selection of strongmen from these regions—leaders who not only denied liberty, equality, and basic human rights to their people but in too many cases brutalized them with extreme violence. Nor is it clear to me what Ganguly has in mind by suggesting that liberalism gained global consensus under the aegis of the United States, given that many of the dictators I have named were in fact backed and supported by the US government.The cavalier approach to historical claims-making at the very least indicates an engagement with political history far too cursory to underwrite the ambitious analytic claims at the heart of this book. And while This Thing Called the World is peppered with references to continental theory, the book hardly addresses other equally relevant works, such as writings on the politics of contemporaneity, including Arjun Appadurai's Fear of Small Numbers and Étienne Balibar's Equaliberty, to cite only a few of the most obvious exclusions. At the same time, This Thing Called the World sometimes rather too conveniently overlooks the significance of a scholar's argument when it might complicate, if not contradict, the book's central claims. For example, Lynn Hunt's compelling argument about the historical origins of human rights discourse in her magisterial Inventing Human Rights is dismissed in one sentence via Samuel Moyn's criticism of that book as a “critical misunderstanding” of the genealogy of human rights (11). Similarly, Talal Asad's provocative discussions of so-called Islamic jihadism and his persuasive critique of Western assumptions about death and killing in his book On Suicide Bombing are relegated to a footnote. Had Ganguly engaged more rigorously with some of these works instead of relying so heavily on secondhand assessments, This Thing Called the World might have produced a more nuanced understanding of “the world-oriented compulsion of the contemporary novelist to address an ever-expanding realm of virtual publics routinely exposed to spectacles of war-induced carnage” (50).I offer these last comments not to suggest that these examples warrant dismissal of Ganguly's general argument concerning the emergence of world novel as a genre tout court, albeit some readers may legitimately question the significance of 1989 as a historical threshold for the emergence of both the “world novel” and the new world order, as they may also question the book's Anglocentric view of the world novel. Nor do I wish to question the value or vitality of the contemporary project of literary criticism. Quite the contrary. In an age of information, close reading and critical thinking surely are needed more urgently than ever to counter misinformation and the rise of “fake news.” My aim is simply to suggest that there may be perils of professionalism, as yet underappreciated, that enable tendencies toward ungrounded argument and erroneous assertions that risk undermining the critical humanistic project of a worldly and engaged criticism.