Jonathan Arac
World English as a term arose in the late twentieth century to address several interrelated conditions. After the globalization euphoria of the 1990s, this term seemed to keep distance from financial markets while still noting two related circumstances. First, the language with the widest geographical spread of large groups of first-language and highly capable later-language speakers is English. Second, excellent literature in English has been produced and continues being produced all over the world. These facts are inseparable from but not identical to the history of the British Empire. In the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom contains only the fifth-largest population of highly skilled English users. The United States stands first by far, followed by India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, with the Philippines close behind. British colonialism in North America, South Asia, and Africa produced the possibility of these speakers, to which American imperialism then further contributed. This chapter begins with the movement of British subjects overseas, which brought English into worldwide use, and it concludes with reverse diaspora: writers born elsewhere came to England and, by their work done there, transformed what readers still know as the English novel.
Consider one marker of world literary esteem – the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first English writer, and novelist, to win this award was Rudyard Kipling in 1907. He was born in Bombay in 1865, and his greatest achievements are inseparable from his Indian subject matter: innumerable short stories, the Jungle Books, and especially Kim (1901). The most recent English writer to win the prize was Doris Lessing, also a novelist, in 2007. She was born in 1919 in what was then Persia (now Iran), in territory occupied by Britain during the First World War, though her most influential fiction is closely related to almost two decades she spent growing up in colonial East Africa. This includes many stories, The Grass Is Singing (1950), the five-volume Children of Violence series (1952–1969), and above all The Golden Notebook (1962). Both Kipling and Lessing figure in the history of the English novel as World English. So do such major recent writers as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, descendant of Indians who had immigrated in the later nineteenth century. Rushdie was born in 1947, like Kipling in Bombay. Naipaul is another Nobelist (2001), recognized as a major figure since A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a novel growing from his father’s life in Trinidad. Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a formally ingenious, linguistically electric perspective on the history of India in the twentieth century, including its independence in 1947 and the subsequent three decades, won the Booker prize the year it appeared and since then has won the meta-Bookers for best winner of the first 25 years and first 40 years. Why are these writers “English”? They also take part in a postcolonial literary history. Yet they write in English, each came to university in England (Naipaul to Oxford and Rushdie to Cambridge), and both pursued their careers in England. Perhaps most decisively, each has been knighted by the Queen: Sir Vidia in 1990 and Sir Salman in 2007. One of the most admired younger English novelists, Zadie Smith, was born in England in 1975 of a mother who migrated from Jamaica. Like Rushdie, she now resides in the United States.
In thinking about World English and the English novel, it’s hard to keep the United States wholly out of the picture. One of the most important English novelists, Henry James, was born in the United States, has always been included by Americans as part of the history of American literature, and only became a British subject, after more than 40 years of residence, in the last year of his life. It was important evidence for the English acceptance of World English, in the form of American English, when over a few years in the early twentieth century Oxford University awarded honorary degrees to the American novelists William Dean Howells (1904), Mark Twain (1907), and Henry James (1912).
From our perspective, the long history of the English novel in relation to World English joins also the issues of World Literature, currently an active topic for debate and exploration among scholars and critics. Among these, some of the most useful are Franco Moretti and David Damrosch. These two approach their subject very differently, but they agree that whatever World Literature is, it is not best understood as a corpus or canon or list of works but rather as a set of relationships.
In Distant Reading (2013), Franco Moretti uses Max Weber’s methodology for the sociology of culture. He defines World Literature as a possible object of knowledge, which must be constructed by an act of synthesis subsuming innumerable studies done by scholars of the national literatures. World Literature, then, is general literature, and the national literatures the specific. Moretti elaborates a model derived from “core and periphery” in Immanuel Wallerstein’s comparative historical sociology of the “world system.” Despite Moretti’s own command of several languages, this model tends to privilege English (Arac 2002).
In contrast to the spatial model that undergirds Moretti’s arguments, David Damrosch, in What Is World Literature? (2003), works with a model similar to Walter Benjamin’s. Rather than institutional in emphasis, his concerns are more dyadic (whether work to work, or work to reader). The connections seem more arbitrary – that is to say both willed and contingent – than rule-bound. Above all, Damrosch delineates a complex temporality by which World Literature arises from the interaction of what we might call different time zones – not for nothing has he published on Nahuatl poetry and the Epic of Gilgamesh. This model pays crucial attention to translation.
From Moretti’s perspective, we can see that so important a work in the history of the English novel as Joseph Andrews (1742) locates itself as peripheral, cued from a more world-central source. Fielding’s preface defines the novel as a “comic epic in prose, written after the manner of Cervantes,” recalling a world in which the Spanish Empire was the biggest thing going. By a century after Fielding, Britain was peripheral to no one. Despite losing the North American colonies that became the United States, Britain established both its empire in India and also its hegemony in the world economy. Yet even in the years closely following Joseph Andrews, a new genre of prose fiction arose in England and quickly gained circulation around the world: the Gothic originated in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s work drew heavily on Shakespeare’s drama, especially Hamlet, and this connection proved important for the joined fortunes of English and World Literature in the next century. German writers took Gothic from England and gave it a new configuration that in turn influenced English-language writers, and German writers also raised Shakespeare to immense prominence, in contrast to France’s far more limited reception.
The conjunction of World English and World Literature takes decisive shape in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Around 1830 the novel as a genre form gained full institutional coherence in the West. At the same time, Goethe was formulating his conception of Weltliteratur (World Literature) in important dialogue with a British writer, Thomas Carlyle. In 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” established the language policy that has made South Asia one of the world’s three most important loci for the use of English. By 1848, the Victorian novel had reached its first peak, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in London, although writing in German, published the Communist Manifesto, which gave World Literature its second major formulation. Let me unpack these telegraphic indicators.
The Western notion of World Literature was first articulated by a German, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the decade before a first-language German-speaker, Victoria, came to the British throne. Goethe’s stabs at characterizing World Literature arose in significant part from his relations with Thomas Carlyle, the Scot who in the 1820s and 1830s formed the major literary bridge between English-language culture, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the literature produced in German. Carlyle met and corresponded with Goethe, and his published contributions included a biography of Friedrich Schiller (1823), his translation Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: A Novel from the German of Goethe (1824), German Romance (1827), which are translations of Romantic novellas, and many essays. Even before Carlyle, the English–German axis of World Literature had begun. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1796) not only launched the transnational genre of the Bildungsroman, which later so flourished in England, but also contributed greatly to the development of Western literary criticism through its speculative interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A reissue of Carlyle’s Wilhelm Meister occasioned Henry James’s earliest published piece on European literature (1865), one of his earliest publications overall. Although James never again published on German fiction, his review is strikingly positive, and in terms that resonate with the next 50 years of James’s writing.
Goethe’s early reception of Shakespeare, in dialogue with Johann Gottfried Herder, who formulated the first major German theorization of Shakespeare (1771), helped to launch his career, and his early neo-Shakespearean history play Goetz von Berlichingen (1771) was translated by Walter Scott as the first extended work over his signature (1799). Scott’s invention of the historical novel redefined possibilities for prose fiction across Europe and contributed to the emergence of many different national literatures, including those of Italy through Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi sposi) (1827) and of the United States, through the “American Scott,” James Fenimore Cooper. The American novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who largely relegated Scott to the Romantic prehistory of the novel, nonetheless gave Scott’s work credit for having “probably … the largest share in establishing fiction as a respectable literary form, and in giving it the primacy which it now enjoys” (1993, 239). Mark Twain had just a few years earlier, in Life on the Mississippi (1883), condemned Scott for undoing the satirical work of Cervantes and causing the Civil War by imbuing Southern culture with chivalric ideals. That’s how important the cultural work done by novels had begun to seem.
Goethe formulated his thoughts on World Literature in the same years when the novel in the West took shape as an effective institution. In the famous paragraph about World Literature in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels do not mention the novel, but it is the genre for which their formulations would hold truest. The power of the press, inseparable from the rise of literature, operates in a complex temporality. In 1831 the French writer Victor Hugo looked back to 1482, from the triumph of print to its earliest days in the West, and wrote into The Hunchback of Notre Dame his prefiguration of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong: “This will kill that” (Hugo 1959, 209, my translation). The book, he meant, would supersede the architectural Bible of the cathedral, and it did, but it took a quarter of a millennium to achieve such cocky dominance. Hugo’s writing of such a novel testified to the power of Walter Scott’s work, which had made the Middle Ages sexy. In 1830 Walter Scott was near the end of the fifteen years in which his Waverley novels started to redefine the project of prose fiction. He had already had a career in verse. The Scottish inventor of modern historical romance in prose had been inspired by his early translation of a historical drama written by a German who had learned to write from reading Shakespeare.
Scott’s work launched more than a vogue for historical fiction. In the process that Georg Lukács articulates in The Historical Novel (1963), Scott’s work taught others to see the present through eyes shaped by history. The original subtitle for Stendhal’s Red and Black (1830) was “Chronicle of 1830,” treating the past year as if it were no more or less historical than the Middle Ages. Balzac’s writing, too, shows Scott’s impact. In Lost Illusions (1843), Lucien seeks fame through writing a historical novel on “The Archer of Charles the Ninth.” Balzac in addition embraced the fiction of Fenimore Cooper, the first major career in American prose fiction.
Institutional density begins here to show the novel as accruing continuity and authority. It goes like this: Balzac, a French novelist with a major career, responds to Cooper, an American novelist with a major career, who was responding to Scott, a British novelist with a major career. Henry James believed the corpus of Balzac’s Human Comedy founded the whole novelistic enterprise. We remember James for his technical refinements and exquisite moral casuistry, but James understood that novel writing was above all a combination of representation and imagination, in both of which Balzac excelled. The two powers combine, for James, to produce what novels stand or fall on, the “strange irregular rhythm of life” (1984, 58). This formulation from James seems to me the red thread that F. R. Leavis (1948) pursued through the works of Eliot, Conrad, and Lawrence, and which could be woven further into Lessing, Naipaul, Rushdie, and of course others.
The British encounter with South Asia operated in two directions, for the purposes of this chapter. It laid the basis for many millions of English speakers, and it also helped to make possible the crucial conceptions both of national literature and of World Literature, as Aamir Mufti has argued in pathbreaking ongoing work (2010). Britain did not directly rule India until after the so-called “Mutiny” of 1857. Before then the East India Company conducted British colonial activities, and its highly paid officials often performed important cultural work. Sir William Jones, who was already a linguistic polymath when he came to India, discovered the fascination of Sanskrit, and in 1786 offered a speculative analysis that enabled the idea of “Indo-European” languages and the philology that for the next 150 years flourished by studying them:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
(Jones 1993, 34)
Fifty years later, through a decision made by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the “Anglicists” triumphed in policy over the “Orientalists,” who had been set into motion by Jones’s work. British Orientalist colonial initiatives crucially furthered the development of vernacular writing in the languages that have come to be known as Hindi and Urdu, both derived from Hindustani, the North-Indian lingua franca. Macaulay addressed how best to expend finances allocated to the improvement of education in India. Macaulay’s argument, and its effect, has widely been called infamous, yet it contributed massively to creating the constituency that led the struggle for Indian independence and became political leaders in the new nations of India and Pakistan. He put the matter polemically, because he was making a case: “The whole question seems to me to be – which language is the best worth knowing?” He continued:
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.
(Macaulay 1972, 241)
The larger context of Macaulay’s argument, however, shows it not just ethnocentric or racist. He was no English-onlyist. During the years he worked in India, Macaulay read widely in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as rereading the Greek and Roman classics he had studied at Cambridge. He considered English in India as analogous to Latin and Greek in the Renaissance: only the opportunity to study these languages, rather than Old and Middle English, allowed English culture to advance. In any case, Macaulay’s minute happened and it worked. Gauri Viswanathan (1989) and Priya Joshi (2002) have demonstrated the importance both of English colonial schooling and of Indians’ leisure reading in creating the culture that produced great writing in English by Indians. The imposition of English as the path for advanced education among Indians for over a century until independence, continuing to the present time, was an “enabling violation” (Spivak 1999, 95). Rushdie has even asserted, controversially, that “Indo-Anglian” writing (such as his own) is “stronger and more important” than what has been produced since independence by writers in Indian vernacular languages (1997, viii).
In the year before Macaulay’s minute, events laid the ground for V. S. Naipaul’s not only knowing English well but also being born in Trinidad. In 1834 the British abolished slavery in their colonial possessions, the result of long political struggle in which Macaulay played a role (and his father a major one). The continuing desire of British colonial owners, especially of sugar plantations, for cheap and unfree labor, however, soon led to the “coolie” system, in which indentured laborers from Asian colonies replaced enslaved Africans. The indenture system, in turn, and its global diaspora (not only in the Caribbean), has inspired the great ongoing series by the Bengali-born, English-educated, American resident Amitav Ghosh, begun with the astonishing language performance of Sea of Poppies (2008) and continuing in River of Smoke (2011).
This confluence of events energizes the analysis of Marx and Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto, whose most famous phrase in English, “All that is solid melts into air,” comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1609) to translate a term that in German had very different resonances – with allusion to the steam engine, verdampft means evaporates. The key passage begins with “world market” and ends with “world literature.” In between, its abstract references could be filled in with particulars, such as the shift in British textile production from domestic wool to cotton imported from the hot climates of the world, including the American South, and the further shift in British consumer habits that brought to India the cultivation of tea, formerly restricted to China, and that mixed tea with sugar grown in the West Indies. Britain even succeeded in exporting printed cottons to India, the source from which many of the designs were taken.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries … that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property … and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
(Marx and Engels 1959b, 11)
So much of the business of this passage is condensed in the single word translated “intercourse”: Verkehr. The related verb, verkehren. means to turn over, with the usual off-key sense carried by the prefix ver–, so to put it colloquially, to screw up. Die verkehrte Welt means the world turned upside down, which in the metahistory of Marx and Engels is just what the bourgeoisie does through its Verkehr.
Starting the story of globalization and World Literature with the Communist Manifesto is so familiar that we rarely ask: why is now the global age, not then, back in 1848? The answer is because globalization was then emergent but now dominant. World English is now a banal fact but was then a vision. Even after the disasters of twentieth-century state Marxism, the Manifesto retains intellectual power. It is both analytic and prophetic; it reads “the seeds of time” (a phrase Fredric Jameson takes from Macbeth [1606]), yet it marches with its age in the power it gives to literature. The Manifesto appeared just as the new conception of literature had come to dominance. World Literature for Goethe arose from new opportunities for communication offered by the newly important print medium of the review journal.
Goethe explores his intuitions concerning World Literature in a register of language surprisingly consonant with that of the Manifesto. In a letter to Carlyle, Goethe wrote:
Understanding and study of the German language bring a man to the market where the nations all offer their wares; he acts as an interpreter and grows richer himself … It is the business of every translator, then, to be an active agent in this universal intellectual commerce, and to help the exchange of these goods. Whatever one may say about the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and praiseworthy activities in the general traffic among nations. (1957, 533)
Goethe could hardly have imagined our world, in which English so predominates that, paradoxically, works are translated from English at a much higher rate than into English. Part of what makes World English an uncomfortable idea is its implication that if something is not (already) in English, then it’s not really in the world at all.
The “print capitalism” of Goethe’s age that made nationalism possible also produced transnationalism. Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) displays both the splendors of literature in “The Hero as Poet” and its miseries in “The Hero as Man of Letters.” His poetic heroes are Shakespeare and Dante, and he concludes by claiming that Dante already unified the Italian nation, which as of 1841 still had not occurred politically:
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak!
(Carlyle 1901, 131)
Shakespeare, for Carlyle, provides the force that can hold together the wide world of different English-speaking peoples. What we now see as the work the global novel does, Carlyle attributed to Shakespeare:
[Shakespeare] is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give-up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English? … Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us! … [B]efore long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall-out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? … Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. (1901, 129–130)
In Carlyle, the figure of Shakespeare incarnates the value of the institution of literature, developed in Romantic criticism and theory and about to enter educated discourse for the next century and more. During that period, in which literature came to replace poetry as the key term of cultural value, the novel occupied an ever-larger place within what literature embraced (Arac 2010, 2014).
In 1948 appeared The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis of Cambridge University, a century after Carlyle, the year after Indian independence, Rushdie’s crucial hinge of Midnight’s Children. The Great Tradition is the oldest academic study of the English novel at large that is still worth reading in itself, not just as a historical relic. The book’s shortcomings have been widely criticized, especially its refusal to treat Dickens as a major novelist, which Leavis himself corrected a generation later. Yet Leavis pioneered what is still one of the most important techniques for critical writing about novels – detailed analytic attention to the language of selected passages. The major works of novel criticism available in English at the time he wrote do nothing like this: E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), D. H. Lawrence’s many essays, Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1920), Edwin Muir’s The Structure of the Novel (1928), Woolf’s many essays all reward reading, but they don’t do what Leavis did and what we teach our students to do, and of course neither does Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1916). In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, first published in 1946 in German, Erich Auerbach brought a powerful version of philological exegesis to criticism, including influential chapters on the novel, but his work was not available for Leavis. The general story about Leavis is that he was a little-Englander, nationalist, committed to the soil of traditional ways of agricultural life. Yet his canon of the major English novelists – limited as it was – comprised Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence – that is to say, two women, an American, a Pole, and an expatriate. Nor does Leavis try to cover this over. In his introduction he directly addresses the foreign origins of James and Conrad – their importance comes because they chose to join the English tradition of moral seriousness in fiction. World English means, among other things, the attraction that English and its cultural values hold for great minds coming from afar.
World English also means the English taking what seems most powerful and generative in other languages, as they become available in English through translation. We have already noted this in relation to German. Starting in the 1890s and continuing into the 1930s, Constance Garnett, through her massive series of translations from the Russian, helped shape the course of the English novel. Thanks to Garnett’s translations, Woolf and Lawrence, for example, recognized new possibilities for their own writing.
In 1949, the year after Leavis’s book appeared, Doris Lessing first came to England. Lessing gave a larger world to the “two women” plot so important to Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. The Golden Notebook (1962) helped inspire and fuel the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What has that to do with World English and World Literature? Lessing places her novel amidst a world in change. Civil rights and women’s rights both advanced, however unevenly. Like Lessing herself, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and briefly lived in South Africa before coming to England, her central character, the writer Anna Wulf, has come to England from Africa. There she took part in illegal dissident anticolonial activism, frustrated by the difficulties of relationships between the whites and the blacks: the two races worked together, yet real social equality seemed impossible, even in the movement for liberation. Anna, also like Lessing, became a Communist, only to grow disenchanted with both the large shape of the world movement – cued by Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes at the 1956 party congress – and also the local organization. She turns from the hope of revolution to the “boulder-pushing” of social work and reform activism, evoking the Western democratic welfare state, which in the 1950s and 1960s seemed a successful alternative to radical change.
In this respect, the novel differs from the British New Left around 1960, with which Lessing was closely and critically involved. Her autobiography Walking in the Shade (1998) includes fascinating correspondence with her friend and fellow ex-Communist the great historian Edward P. Thompson. While Lessing was writing The Golden Notebook, Thompson was writing his masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Even though his father had lived in India and was a major translator of Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali into English, E. P. Thompson is often thought of as insularly English, a fault generally attributed to the “British cultural Marxism” of this period. However, the front-matter of his work makes clear that his account of England in the nineteenth century hopes to affect the history of the world in the twentieth century. Capitalists and Communists alike, the developed world was telling the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa a story about top-down “modernization” and “industrialization.” Against this discourse, Thompson hoped that showing the paths not taken in British history would allow those making a new world to make it differently, not follow the Victorian model in its Cold War form. In India, Thompson’s work sparked debates crucial to forming the Subaltern Studies group of historians, massively influential in setting the terms for what has become postcolonial studies.
Lessing too placed her work in a world reaching beyond England and its Empire. Her valuable 1971 introduction to a reissue of The Golden Notebook spells out what had not yet entered the conversation about her work. She maps her work by reference to major French and Russian novels of the nineteenth century that show ideas in action – what Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent magazine, had studied in his still-valuable Politics and the Novel (1957). (As an independent leftist, she read and wrote for the American journal of arts and politics Partisan Review.) She also locates her novel as part of a European tradition of novels about artists coming to maturity (what Germans call the Künstlerroman but in English is usually assimilated to the Bildungsroman). In its over-plot, The Golden Notebook tells how a novelist finds her way to writing the book we are reading, just as does Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). Her work also bears comparison to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1945) for coordinating the story of the artist with that of the political world. Anna Wulf cites Mann as being the last novelist with the “philosophical” concern that makes a novel truly worthwhile. Otherwise, “we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know” (Lessing 1994, 57).
Great novels change their contour over time, as readers’ landscapes alter. Seen from the twenty-first century, The Golden Notebook still lays bare the pains frustrations of love and sex between men and women in the 1950s, although Lessing insisted she was no feminist. Because the novel depicts a woman’s mental breakdown followed by healing reintegration, it came to be seen as postmodern for its resonance with the antipsychiatry movement of R. D. Laing (The Divided Self [1960]). The novel deliberately embraces much important historical detail of its time, an aspect increasingly important as its era recedes and much that went without saying now needs to be specified. The novel’s action starts in 1957, and it shows a world changing so rapidly and so massively that it’s hard to comprehend. This bafflement leads to the formal structure of The Golden Notebook. The novel is framed by “Free Women,” which focuses on Anna Wulf, a blocked writer. Anna was born Anna Freeman – gender-twisting the title. Anna has written a successful first novel, based on her youthful experience in Africa. So had Lessing, but Lessing kept writing, while Anna is blocked. Seeking to stabilize her mind and comprehend the world, Anna keeps notebooks. The Black notebook, divided into “source” and “money,” looks to her African experience and the subsequent writing possibilities that derive from it. The Red notebook addresses her experience with Communism. The combination of red and black revises Stendhal’s Red and Black: his colors signaled the alternatives of clerical and military, Lessing’s a twentieth-century distinction between the “second” and “third” worlds, as seen in the Cold War. The Yellow notebook contains Anna’s drafts and trials for new works of fiction, and the Blue notebook consists of diary entries. “Free Women” and the four notebooks alternate sequentially through nearly 600 pages, until the Golden Notebook comes just before the end, making possible Anna’s return to writing, as the author of “Free Women.”
This elaborate and complex formal structuring makes the novel seem modernist. Lessing emphatically signals her dialogue with important English-language modernist innovators. In the Yellow notebook Anna’s fictional alter ego Ella develops a character type called “Mrs. Brown” – an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s programmatic manifesto-essay of 1924, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” And in the Blue notebook diary, right in the middle of the novel, Anna decides to record one whole day in its simple and full truth. Embarrassingly, this day’s truth includes the start of her period. She recognizes that this involves “a major problem of literary style, of tact,” and she recalls James Joyce’s intention “to rob words of their power to shock” (1994, 318). Yet the novel’s prose resists the glories of Woolf’s or Joyce’s sentences; it relies on a naturalist register, detailed and rather dull, even though her earlier work had readily followed the lead of Lawrence’s more emotionally vivid prose. This discord between modernist structure and naturalist sentence marks the novel as postmodern. The notebooks contain a great diversity of discourses – not only news clips but also therapy sessions, diary, and much more. It’s like the novel as seen by Mikhail Bakhtin, but, unlike his prized exemplars, there’s no sense of stylistic exuberance – it’s a grey heteroglossia.
In the late 1980s V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie each published a major novel about immigration, about coming to England from the outreaches of empire: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Despite their shared subject, the books differ immensely: World English in the novel can mean very different things. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival some 30 years into his career, and he had long been recognized as a major author. Reviewers originally viewed him as a new kind of local color writer, one of the “calypso novelists” of the 1950s. Already by his fourth novel, A House for Mister Biswas (1961), Naipaul’s mastery of comic eccentricity summoned comparison to Dickens. After that, he played in Joseph Conrad’s league with Guerrillas (1975) – a very different take on Naipaul’s native Trinidad – and A Bend in the River (1979), set in East Africa. His reflective travel writing done for the New York Review of Books brought Naipaul his widest audience. His 1976 series collected as India: A Wounded Civilization captivated readers. This book was spurred by India’s 1975 Declaration of Emergency, which also figures crucially in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Naipaul’s work came to divide readers. Metropolitan liberals loved it, but it distressed a new generation of intellectuals from the formerly colonized world. The emergence of “postcolonialism” parallels the resistance to Naipaul’s work. In 1980 Joan Didion noted especially the negative views of Edward W. Said, whose Orientalism (1978) is now considered the start of postcolonial criticism, although it never uses the term. Both Naipaul’s prose and Rushdie’s have been analyzed as linguistically hybrid (Bhatnagar 2011, Chaudhuri 2004). Yet the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981 made vivid the contrast between two kinds of writing. One readily wins praise for skill, style, and intelligence, but fits easily within the traditions of English literature; the other kind is far more eclectic and diverse in its connections. Rushdie’s novel was instantly recognized as wonderful and important, but it affiliates outside of English traditions. Struggling to place it, many readers thought it followed the “magic realism” of the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), while Rushdie himself acknowledged the German Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), which like Midnight’s Children connects national political events to the life of a strange youth. Moreover, Rushdie has always admired, and several times written about, the American Thomas Pynchon, whose work shimmers through Rushdie’s. A very different literary practice animates Rushdie’s novel, though both he and Naipaul rejected the current state of Indian politics and leadership. Each in his different way made the India of the 1970s seem a sad, even an atrocious place.
Their views of England contrast even more sharply. The Enigma of Arrival is thickly autobiographical, yet distinctly a novel – for instance, the narrator–protagonist makes no reference either to a wife or to a mistress, though Naipaul had both, according to Patrick French’s impressively candid authorized biography (2008). The novel starts with the narrator’s coming to live on an estate in Wiltshire (a locale John Bayley’s 1987 review noted as highly desirable, with the highest property values on the island), after spending nearly two decades in London. This rustic setting seems familiar. Such places resonate in English literature, which he’s been reading since his childhood in a Trinidad village. Yet Wiltshire also feels alien, because he has never lived in such a landscape. The book’s long first movement charts the narrator’s acclimating. It opens starkly: “For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was.” The book’s “I” opens as a blinded eye. Even when it sees, the eye does not know what it sees: “Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields.” Later – years later, when the land “had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up” – seeing has become knowing: “I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as ‘water meadows’ or ‘wet meadows,’ and the low smooth hills in the background beyond the river as ‘downs’.” But on first arriving, even after twenty years in England, “all that I saw … were flat fields and narrow river” (Naipaul 1987, 5). This process of learning what you’re seeing, the proper words to define the conditions of your life, defines acculturation. Naipaul seems to be prepping for knighthood, making sure that he really becomes English.
Yet he can’t help bringing also a severe historical understanding to his situation. He recognizes that in this landscape, on this estate, he – a colored ex-colonial immigrant – embodies the biggest difference between now and then: “I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country” (15). The house now has passed its peak, but at its prime, “in that perfection, occurring at a time of empire, there would have been no place for me” (52). Yet reflecting on his relationship with his landlord, whom he meets only twice in the narrative’s many years, he realizes also that “This empire … linked us.” Empire discriminates, but it also connects: “This empire explained my birth in the New World, the language I used, the vocation and ambition I had; this empire in the end explained my presence in the valley” (191). Naipaul’s critical analysis of empire, race, and immigration matches that of advanced critical thinking, but his performance in prose seems to belie the difference he proclaims. He fits right in. He writes classic contemporary English, which makes him English literature’s “most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James” and joins him with T. S. Eliot as “another expatriate radical of the right” (Ricks 1987).
Rushdie enacts the strangeness of immigration to England far differently. The Satanic Verses begins:
“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die. Hi ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun!” … Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.
(Rushdie 1988, 3)
What novel has ever before had to start by affirming that its main characters are “real, full-grown, living men”? Rushdie must because the story sounds fantastic – how can it be real? That the two tumbling Indians are victims of terrorists who have blown up in midair their hijacked plane, that’s real enough, but to survive a plummet from the exact height of Mount Everest, singing rhymes all the way? Storytelling, fantasy, allegory, all these and more make up Rushdie’s resources to render a world in which heteroglot mixtures fall from the corners of the earth to inhabit London, and produce a mess that is also “newness” (272).
Gibreel Farishta begins to experience visions as soon as he lands, as if he were the archangel Gibreel. Before being taken from his life into this new one, he had been a star in Bombay, specializing in a Bollywood genre called “theologicals,” in which he played Hindu deities, despite himself being Muslim. His fellow fallen new-born Saladin Chamcha is a long-expatriated Indian who has made a good living in England as an actor, doing voice-overs. Like Naipaul, he’s got the sounds of English down perfectly. In his new life, however, the natives suspect him of being an illegal immigrant. He assumes a new shape to match his status, growing horns and hooves, like a satyr or devil. The racist slur for a South Asian, “paki,” morphs into “pachy,” leading to a vision of elephants taking over the neighborhood streets (Rushdie 1988, 299).
Immigrant London, in this novel, is “A City Visible but Unseen” (the longest and central of the novel’s nine sections). In the sanatorium for mutant aliens, Saladin is awakened at night by a potential comrade, “an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth” (167). This manticore describes the other inmates: “There’s a woman over that way … who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes” (168). The manticore also tells Saladin how this takes place: “‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’” It’s just like what Wittgenstein said of language games. This conceit of “aliens” as beings with monstrous physical oddities inspired the recent US TV series Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010–2012).
Even more fantastic and terrible than the events it recounts, The Satanic Verses transcended World English and World Literature to become an infamous touchstone in the political life of nations. Within the novel, some of Gibreel’s visions included versions of the life of the Prophet Mohammed; various groups within the United Kingdom and abroad took offense at this free, fictional reimagining of materials that are sacred within Islam. On February 14, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a judicial order, a fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s assassination and offering a large reward to whoever performed this killing. As the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami put it in one of the first and best essays in response to this situation, “a world religion has been attacked by a writer who was born into the religion and wishes to tell the world about its failure to cope with the world” (1989, 172).
Rushdie himself immediately entered police protection and for years had to live underground, never appearing in public. He has so far survived, but the book’s Japanese translator was killed, its Italian translator seriously injured, and its Norwegian publisher survived assassination. The fatwa was never rescinded (and technically never can be, since its author has died). It took years of political maneuver to establish one by one the commitment of various national polities to protect Rushdie and others involved and to win Iran’s tacit consent to letting the death sentence lie inactive. This most global of affairs waxed and then waned, based on national actions. Rushdie’s 600-page memoir Joseph Anton (2012) details his life in hiding and his efforts to assert his right to live and write freely. The title comes from the alias he used, confected from the names of two writers he greatly admires, the Russian Anton Chekhov (first known in English through translations by Constance Garnett) and the Polish-Briton Joseph Conrad, an early hero of World English. Some readers may prefer the powerful, concise account of Rushdie’s persecution and resistance by Christopher Hitchens (2010), who devoted a chapter of his memoir to Rushdie and who indefatigably supported free speech and the right to speak freely concerning religion.
The world response to Rushdie’s book marked the emergence of a new Islamic public sphere, based on principles different from those of the public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth-century West (Mufti 1994). That first Western public sphere arose with the novel and the burgeoning of periodicals of opinion, which Goethe later found so important for his conception of World Literature. Aamir Mufti observed in 1994 that the hostile “public responses by Muslims to the publication of this book, written by a writer of Indian origin naturalized and living in Britain, have been registered not only in Britain, India, and Pakistan, but in places as diverse and as remote from the ‘scene’ of the infraction as South Africa, Soviet Central Asia, and Indonesia” (324). This public response gravely distressed many Western writers, scholars, and critics, because it did not adhere to the principles of analytic, detailed reading so integral to our understanding of literature. Mufti argues that understanding this new postcolonial space of exchange requires recognizing that the reception of works may take place through forms of “mass ‘consumption’ other than ‘reading’ in the narrower sense of that word” (309). In other words, Islamic offense did not require reading but could arise from “extracts published in the print media, in English and in translation, commentary in print, on the airwaves, and from the pulpit, fantasticated representation in the popular cinema, rumors and hearsay” (309). Mufti’s analysis of the controversy takes its cue from Rushdie’s novel, which itself fictionally shows the power of these and other new forms of communication.
The novel, the controversy, and Mufti’s analysis preceded the Internet. The Rushdie Affair previewed the advent of new modes of cultural circulation that twenty-first-century readers, writers, and scholars must learn to negotiate. It also demonstrated that the novel continues as a powerful form in the world, even as it slips away from the institution of literature that for the past two centuries supported and took strength from it.