<au>Sylvia Söderlind</>
<at>Looking at Goethe’s Face</>
<@@@>
This paper attempts to change the “versus” in the title of the seminar in which this article
originated, “World Literature versus Comparative Literature,” into something less
confrontational, reflecting on how the two fields can become mutually helpful. The
fundamental, historical difference between them hinges on the status of translation, which
has indeed become a bone of contention in what is often seen as a struggle for
disciplinary supremacy. It is not surprising, of course, that translation has gained a
prominent place in any study of cultural expression in an increasingly globalized world.
There are few comparatists left in the world, I would wager, that still hold to the old idea
of purity, according to which any student of literature must acquire fluency in any
language into which she may want to venture. We cannot all pretend to live in Istanbul
with Auerbach and Spitzer in the 1930s, and the increasing Anglicization of the Western
world hardly encourages the study of languages of smaller diffusion, even as they
become more and more audible in the streetscape around us.
Djelal Kadir’s warning that resisting translation amounts to aiding and abetting
terrorism provides a pithy parable that may serve as epigraph to my argument. It is, after
all, better to know others a little than to know them not at all, and the resistance to
translation threatens to provide an alibi for a cultural bunker mentality, a kind of
homeland security that will certainly be of less ecumenical power in the long run than the
diplomacy of cultural exchange. Still, it is one thing to acknowledge the inevitable march
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toward a global language and the necessity of teaching literatures in the language of
students—and to write about it in the language of individual scholars—and quite another
to dismiss bi- or multilingualism as an unnecessary luxury. The cosmopolitan speaks, or
at least understands, more than one language, and if there is one way to turn the tables on
xenophobia that is within reach in our classrooms, it is to value vernaculars as assets
rather than encumbrances.
The recent trend in translation studies toward the increasing visibility of the
translator is a symptom of the desire to value not only the work of translation, but also the
world as a multilingual place. What I would like to investigate, then, is whether, and how,
it is possible to make translation visible in the unilingual world literature classroom and
world literature scholarship. If Kadir sees the anti-translation comparatist as terrorist, I
see the pro-translation comparatist as a kind of anti-totalitarian guerilla. Yes, it is a matter
of perspective—one’s terrorist is the other’s freedom fighter—but at the bottom lies the
same definition of the comparatist as one who commands more than one language and
literature.
The question I am asking here, then, is: how can the guerilla comparatist operate
in the world literature classroom? How can we make translation visible so as to ensure
that our students appreciate the otherness of a text originally written in another language
while making it accessible to the unilingual Anglophone? Introducing texts in peripheral
“Englishes” is surely commendable and even necessary, but I think it is not enough. The
question is if, instead of having English hijack the Other, we can Other the supremacy of
English. If so, this may be where comparatists can regain some of the ground lately lost
to world literature without resorting to the terrorism of linguistic fundamentalism.
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I want to preface my argument with two case studies or vignettes. The first
illustrates the itinerary from the old appropriation of voice debate—another version of the
purity idea—to what I see as an exemplary model for a new radical pedagogy in the
world literature classroom. In 1998 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed a
miniseries based on a novel by Canadian author Rudy Wiebe published in 1976, The
Temptations of Big Bear. The story concerns the resistance of the Plains Cree to the
British Crown’s attempts to make them cede their land in the 1870s and ’80s. In both
versions of the story Big Bear is the protagonist through whom most of the story is
focalized. His voice is the first one heard, its Cree specificity rendered in the novel
through lyricism, nature imagery, and by juxtaposition with a small number of white,
English, voices. Not surprisingly, as in many colonialist stories, the translator, a métis,
plays a crucial role. His position in the midst gives him privileged access to two distinct
languages and two opposed world views, but he is also given a voice that reflects on
these differences; in other words, he serves as a proto-interpreter of the text for the
reader.
In the televised version, Big Bear is also the first figure seen and heard. The story
plunges us right into the world of the Cree: we listen to Big Bear’s soliloquy; we
overhear conversations among his band members, and are introduced to the back story by
eavesdropping on the other chiefs who have, or are about to, put their Xes on the treaties.
There is a crucial difference between the uses of language in the two versions, however,
one made possible by the translation into film. Working with Wiebe, director Gil
Cardinal resorts to a brilliant ruse that left an indelible impression on this viewer’s
memory.
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Once comfortably ensconced in the Cree world, the viewer witnesses the first
encounter between Big Bear and the deputies of the British Crown. The British chief and
his officers appear on the scene dressed in ostentatious outfits (in a brilliant ironic
reversal the governor has a big plume in his hat); they act with a stiffness that designates
them as actors rather than individuals, and when they open their mouths what comes out
is gibberish. The defamiliarization operated by this simple reversal, in which language,
and the translator, acquires such striking and sudden visibility, is much more than a
matter of viewpoint. At this moment English suddenly “becomes” Cree, and the imperial
centre becomes the unintelligible margin. In the process, the translator becomes the only
one who wields any real power. It is in him the viewer must, like both sides in the
negotiation, put her trust. The use of English as Cree and gibberish as English is more
than a ruse designed to elicit sympathy for the Cree. It is rather the opposite: the
sympathy inherent in the white viewer’s attitude toward a well-known story of brutal
colonialism and futile native resistance is suddenly complicated. The viewer is jolted out
of the comfort zone of white liberalism to which she is accustomed and positioned
outside of both the Cree (no matter how much sympathy she feels for them, she is not
part of them) and the English (whose language the Cree have suddenly expropriated).
This effect changes nothing in the story, which still ends as tragically for the Cree, but it
radically changes the viewer’s position vis-à-vis the story and, by extrapolation, vis-à-vis
Canadian history and the way it has been told. It is, first of all, an affective experience,
but one that cannot help but lead to a deeper reflection on what it means to be a Canadian
subject and citizen.
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The second image I want to discuss as an example of a similar defamiliarization
of subjectivity is the first photograph taken of earth from space. Those of us present when
this image hit the television screens and magazine pages may remember a similar jolt
upon suddenly seeing ourselves from a place outside our, very large and mutual, comfort
zone—the planet. As “a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right”
(Spivak, Death 102), replacing the globe as the new ground of comparison, the planet
becomes a trope for ethical critical practice. Planetarity may have been a cognitive
possibility since Copernicus, but it is only after the first photograph of the earth seen
from outside itself that it accrues the affective force that we have seen expressed in so
many different forms since.
My two examples are analogous, their difference a matter of scale. Both operate a
reversal of perspective that leads to an affective experience in which the self, the
perceiving subject, is radically displaced and becomes other to itself. It is not as if either
of these images teaches us anything new; what they offer is not a cognitive understanding
but an affective experience, and one that cannot help, I argue, but lead to ethical
reflection.
These two examples and their attendant theoretical implications raise the question
of whether it is possible to recreate this kind of affective experience in pedagogical and
critical practice. In the last few decades, translation has become much more than a focus
of disciplinary debate. It is emerging as a potential model for new critical practices, not
only for political reasons having to do with globalization and concomitant questions of
power but, more crucially, I think, precisely because it represents the convergence of two
major concerns of critical theory today: ethics and affect.
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It is true that translation has always been a matter of both ethics and affect, but it
has mostly been a question of the correct attitude of the translator/subject to the
text/object. Translation was “the most intimate act of reading” long before Spivak said
so, but even if it involved the affective—even “erotic”—“surrender” (Outside 183) the
subject/object relationship was generally retained. In recent reflections, however, it is the
subject, rather than the text, that has become the object of translation, and this is what
makes the kind of practice I am investigating a pedagogical issue. Emily Apter describes
the process:
<ext>translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in
history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of
denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space,
daily ritual and pre-given domestic arrangements. (6)</ext>
It is in the affective “rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself” that my two examples
concur. Pedagogically speaking, it is frightening to allow the classroom to be a zone of
discomfort rather than comfort, but we all know that comfort rarely leads to serious
learning. Once we go from the known into the unknown we are no longer comfortable,
and pretending that learning about any other should be a comfortable and reassuring
process is, I think, hypocritical.
Using a trope I will elaborate on in the following, because I find it singularly
productive, I would like to describe the relationship between my two examples as one of
fractal recursiveness. Introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, fractal geometry brought
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a new perspective to mathematics that has proven suggestive to other fields. Wai Chee
Dimock is the most articulate advocate of fractal geometry as a model for literary study:
it provides the model for her suggested resituating of American literature within world
literature—in itself a radical idea—in Through Other Continents. The idea of “fractal
differentialism” (Cronin 15) is also forwarded by translation theorist Michael Cronin,
who offers the fractal as an alternative to what, according to Franco Moretti, have been
the two ruling metaphors of world-scale cultural comparisons: the tree for heterogeneity
and geographic discontinuity (such as the evolution of nation-states and languages
branching off from one trunk) and the wave for geographic continuity and homogenizing
forces (such as the market). Fractal geometry disproves Moretti’s contention that the two
have nothing in common. When examined closely it becomes quite clear that not only do
the tree and the wave share a fractal structure, but they also share a groundedness in
nature and the literal that dooms them to remain illustrative metaphors. Unlike the fractal
which, even if occurring just as “naturally” and more equally across the planet—from the
treeless Gobi desert to the frozen waters of Greenland—remains form rather than
essence, trees and waves can never accede to the generative status of catachresis. As
earthly in its way as trees and waves in theirs, the fractal escapes the quest for new
grounds of comparison by allowing for a “groundless” comparative practice—that is, one
that is groundless in substance while grounded in form. This analogy is entirely
congruent with David Damrosch’s notion of national and world literature as elliptical
foci; the number of such ellipses and their potential embeddedness is potentially infinite.
To return to Moretti for a moment, his notion of the relationship between the
“distant reading” required by world literature and the close reading best left to specialists,
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is itself a matter of fractal scale. As Dimock points out, and as Damrosch has observed in
the pages of this journal, comparative criticism, like all criticism for that matter, happens
on a sliding scale of knowledge, and the most productive work in world literature comes
from collaborations among scholars working at different distances from the object,
covering the greatest number of scales. Dimock’s definition of fractal geometry as the
convergence of “finite parameters and infinite unfolding” (77) encapsulates its suitability
for a planetary practice. If we accept that, unlike the nation, the planet is the only truly
finite parameter for literary study, we are inevitably thrown into a universe of scalar
differentiation.
At this point I want to loop back to my two prefatory encounters. Both the
earthling who sees the planet from an outside perspective for the first time and the
imperial subject who is positioned as other to her own history experience the jolt of being
thrown suddenly out of a comfortable subject position into one of radical otherness. As I
pointed out in the beginning, the affective experience is similar, the scale different. More
intriguingly, at least for our discipline, they point to the metonymic relationship between
planetarity and translation, and here I want to make a case for the usefulness of Gayatri
Spivak’s search for generative catachreses. The place into which the subject is thrown is
the realm of precariousness and possibility that Apter labels the “translation zone” and
that, according to Spivak, is indeed the birthplace of the ethical subject. In “Translation
as Culture” Spivak quotes Melanie Klein’s description of “the violent production of the
precarious subject of reparation and responsibility” (13). She describes the process:
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<ext>The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing
(begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside,
going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing(s)
grasped. One can call this crude coding a ’translation’. In this never-ending weaving
violence translates into conscience and vice versa. (13; my emphasis) </ext>
One does not have to grasp (begreifen) the complexities (perplexities?) of Spivak’s
diction to notice the fractal relationship that emerges between planet and subject. If the
planet is the inevitable ground for collective responsibility, translation is its counterpart
on the level of the individual subject. The subject is a mise en abyme of the planet
What I have called the “jolt”—for want of a better word—that I dream of reproducing
seems like an uncanny repetition of Spivak’s primal scene, a violent—in the sense of
affectively sudden—reminder of what makes us human. If, as I believe, the production of
ethical subjects is the ultimate goal of a humanist education, a pedagogical practice based
on this model would indeed seem appropriate. In terms of the disciplinary debate in
which we are engaged, it would also seem to offer the comparatist a golden opportunity
to run some interference with world literature, preventing it from becoming nothing more
than a panacea for Anglocentric angst, countering the terrorism of comparative
absolutism with a counter-terrorist, or at least cosmopolitan, or nomadic, guerilla activity
on behalf of the planet. Comparatists have always been bricoleurs; there is no reason why
we should not make excellent guerillas or maquisards. My metaphor is not intended to
perpetuate the articulation of the relationship between the two fields as conflictual; rather
I think world literature and comparative literature are equally “anti-” a number of -
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centrisms; it’s just that the latter has the means to be more explicitly “counter-” or
activist.
My proposal, then, is not to relegate the world and comparison to separate spheres
but rather to smuggle comparatist strategies into the practice of world literature. In other
words, to turn a unilingual environment—whether the classroom, the scholarly paper or
the conference presentation—into a translation zone, taking students, readers, and
listeners out of “the comfort zone of national space.” Here I want also to acknowledge a
debt to Doris Sommer’s advocacy on behalf of the possibilities for aesthetic pleasure
offered by unexpected encounters in the translation zone, at the risk of the ridicule and
embarrassment that always adheres to any departure from the comfort zone but that often
leads to ethical reflection. I know that for me, the greatest incentive to learning languages
was the recurring note in the margin of the books I read growing up in Sweden:
“untranslatable word play; translator’s note.” The feeling of not being “in the know,” of
being reminded of my outsider status with regard to stories I loved spurred me to find out
what was withheld from me. I see no reason why the same should not be true for students
in the world literature classroom. Undergraduate world literature students, if taught well
and required to engage with languages in some form, would likely make the best
comparative literature graduate students. Perhaps the difference is again a matter of scale
or dimension: world literature as a step toward comparative literature is a move from
breadth to depth.
Speaking about dimensions, it is strange to contemplate the conservatism of
literary criticism, with its continued reliance on linearity, succession and closure, in the
face of the simultaneity of hypertextuality that is taking over the creative space. When I
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presented this paper at the ACLA conference, it was accompanied by a series of slides
designed not simply to illustrate issues of scalar refraction, such as fractal images of trees
and waves, but, more crucially, to introduce other dimensions of interpretation in the
manner of hypertext. This visual aid allows me to counteract the linearity of my argument
and my interpretative statements with additional, sometimes contradictory, observations
whose simultaneous presence—verbal and visual—are left without comment. While such
a pedagogical tactic may raise the level of discomfort, it avoids the finality and certainty
of the closed interpretation, and it allows for a great deal of comic relief. It is a tactic that
follows the model of translation while making visible all the possibilities which a linearly
finished product necessarily leaves out.
The institutional visibility of translation is an increasingly common thread in
translation studies and what I propose here, then, is a pedagogical version of that
endeavour: to make translation as visible as possible in the classroom. To do so we need
to pay close attention to the material part of language that is the domain of the most
intimate reading. And this is where I pick up on Walter Benn Michaels’s attacks on poststructuralism’s exaggerated and nefarious attention to “the shape of the signifier” which,
as he sees it, lies at the bottom of the ills of identity politics—a sentiment some of us
share albeit for different reasons.1 As a self-professed member of the critical community
Michaels accuses and as a—however apostate—Lutheran, I know better than to let guilt
go to waste. I want, therefore, to illustrate my idea of a radical critical practice to make
translation visible by riffing on my plea for a heightened visibility of translation,
beginning with my noun morphing into a plea of guilty as charged. Here’s to the shape of
the signifier! If the signifier is what becomes invisible in translation as traditionally
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conceived, it follows that the aim of my critical practice is to rescue the signifier and
make it, if possible, hypervisible.
This brings me back to Dimock’s observation about fractal geometry: “More so
than cleanness or smoothness, it is the rough weave of the fabric, the bumpy surface of
pits and pocks, that is threaded throughout the world, in infinite extension and infinite
regress” (77; my emphasis). Infinite extension from the perspective of the snail faced
with Mandelbrot’s conundrum about the length of the British coastline, infinite regress
from the perspective of the satellite that can take in the same distance in a matter of
seconds but only at the expense of an equally infinite number of scales. The snail’s close
encounter with the land may be as intimate as the translator’s with language; the
comparatist’s infinite luxury is that she can be both snail and satellite, hugging the
minutest shapes one moment and flying around the world at lightning speed the next.
Both perspectives, however, require us to abandon our desire to leave our footprint on the
planet, ceding our ground and our authority instead to the pied de la lettre and at the same
time following the ligne de fuite (a term I borrow from Gilles Deleuze whose unilingual
odes to the signifier may also inspire strategies similar to those I advocate) of the
capricious, and capacious, signifier wherever it may take us.
Before I go further, I want to pause for a moment to ponder the coincidental
recurrence of metaphors relating to textiles in the otherwise disparate discourses of
fractals and translation. Walter Benjamin—who was constantly searching for appropriate
metaphors, perhaps because he was stuck in Euclidian geometry—famously likened
translation to a robe enveloping the body of the original in its rich—excessive, even
baroque—folds, wrinkles, Fälte, or plis. My plea is for a critical practice that will follow
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les plis de la langue, the fissures and fault-lines where languages meet, where the shape
of one signifier—suddenly and unexpectedly—collides or coincides with another and so
becomes foreign to itself. In Swedish pli means a certain kind of discipline, in the sense
of asserting discipline over, oneself or others, as in “hon har ingen pli,” meaning she has
no sense of discipline; she has no control over herself. That is exactly the point. Ceding to
le pli means letting go, of self-mastery and logocentrism. Le pli is also Gilles Deleuze’s
chosen title for his treatise on Leibniz’s view of “the world as a body of infinite folds and
surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space” (my emphasis)2 which
in retrospect seems like a prequel to Mandelbrot. My indebtedness to Deleuze’s, no
matter how unilingual, advocacy of the ligne de fuite of the signifier is becoming clear; a
radical pedagogy of the kind I advocate would perhaps make our century the Deleuzian
one that Foucault predicted.
The folds and surfaces of language are the shapes of the words themselves, those
things that can only be perceived up close, in face to face encounters, or if we take le pied
de la lettre at face value—in a pied à face meeting that would take us back to the infant’s
play with the extremes of the body, the near but invisible and the far but touchable. The
fractal value of a face brings me back, in a final loop, to the faces that form the alpha and
omega of the debate in which we are engaged: Goethe and the planet. Looking at
Weltliteratur in the twenty-first century is inevitably looking at the face of the planet, and
this is—should be, and will be if we only allow it, or indeed provoke it—an affective
experience every bit as powerful as looking at the face of Goethe was for Johann
Eckermann. Here I thank David Damrosch for providing me with my punchline:
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Eckermann’s comment on looking at Goethe’s old face: “Jede Falte voller Ausdrück”
(29) (“Every wrinkle full of expression”; my translation).
<#><aff>Queen’s University</>
<bmh>Works Cited</>
<bib>Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. </bib>
<bib>Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge,
2006. </bib>
<bib>Damrosch, David. “How American is World Literature?” The Comparatist 33
(2008): 13–19. </bib>
<bib>_____. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
</bib>
<bib>Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1988.
</bib>
<bib>Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep
Time. Princeton University Press, 2006. </bib>
<bib>Kadir, Djelal. “Comparative Literature in the Age of Terrorism.” Comparative
Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006. 68–77. </bib>
<bib>Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. </bib>
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<bib>Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” Debating World Literature.
Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004. 148–62. </bib>
<bib>Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education. Duke
University Press, 2004. </bib>
<bib>Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003. </bib>
<bib>_____. “Translation as Culture.” Parallax 6.1 (2000): 13–24. </bib>
<bib>_____. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
179–200. </bib>
<bib>Wiebe, Rudy. The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1976.</bib>
<bmh>Notes</>
<en>1 It is sobering to see the extent to which Michaels’s analysis, in spite of his
advocacy of a heightened attention to class, lays the blame on the same “deconstructionist
coalition” as Samuel Huntington (Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National
Identity).
2
See www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/deleuze_fold.html</en>
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