Memos From the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability by Djelal Kadir (review)

Djelal Kadir, an eminent professor of comparative literature who has been active on several fronts in the effort to establish world literature as a discipline, offers in this book a kind of manifesto for philology in the twenty-first century. The volume is structured as a series of essays on individual authors from around the globe and across history. Each example has been chosen to articulate a pattern of heroic scholarship intended as a guide for comparatists in the currently beleaguered state of the university.

For the most part, the exemplary figures Kadir chooses to flesh out his metaphor of memos from the past are exiles and martyrs who were persecuted by the state or church. He begins with Erich Auerbach, whose Mimesis serves as a model for this whole volume, each chapter of which is a particular illustration of the recurring waves of resistance to critical humanism. Examples include the thirteenth-century historian Rashiduddin Fazlulla, Orhan Pamuk, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, the Mexican priest, politician, and traveler Fray Serviando (1765-1827), Zbigniew Herbert, Hannah Arendt, Chinese Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian, and Italo Calvino.

These essays are bookended between a hortatory introduction and an equally exhortative epilogue. In both Kadir seeks to counter potential charges of arbitrariness in his selection of such disparate exemplars. His method for doing so is to isolate a set of relations connecting his subjects to each other and to current scholarship. The 'introduction, a highly literate rhetorical performance throughout, explicates the primary terms of Kadir's title, "memos" and "besieged city." The first derives from Calvino's posthumous lecture series, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the second from Zbigniew Herbert's great poem ""Report from the Besieged City." As a learned scholar and much traveled cosmopolitan, Kadir chooses these terms to convey the anxiety he feels about his profession's current state. A sense of threat determines the rhetoric throughout this passionate book.

So it is, among other things, a catalogue of key precursors from the past who—for all the differences that separate them linguistically, historically, culturally—have in common the ability to illustrate foundational categories or "touchstones" (the "lifelines" of the book's subtitle) for comparative literature as a discipline in the present. Kadir thus pairs each of his exemplars with particular topics they are intended to represent, such as world history and world literature (Rashiduddin), cultural space and identity (Nicholas of Cusa), cultural memory (Giordano Bruno), orthodoxy, consensus, and conspiracy (Fray Serviando), ekphrasis (Zbigniew Herbert), ethics (Hannah Arendt), literature and the state (Gao Xingjian), metadiscourse and spectralization (Calvino).

Kadir is a serious scholar, and his style—when not compromised by melodramatic exaggeration—achieves local triumphs of fervent eloquence. It is a personal style, devoted to the pathos of dramatic life stories, including Kadir's own autobiography in an attenuated reference. In his discussion of the Mongol siege of Baghdad, he invokes along the way the battle of Lepanto, which occurred three hundred years later. However, this permits him to mention that despite Venice's victory over the Ottomans, it lost control of Cyprus, and that is "why, ultimately a native of that perennially unfortunate island is writing this present memo in English, the language of another island in the northern periphery of the 'Great Western Sea,' rather than Dante's Tuscan vernacular or in the Venetian dialect" (49).

The book's dominant impulse is to make broad generalizations, but this strategy is at points complicated by painstaking attention to minute detail, as in Kadir's reading of Zbigniew Herbert's piece on the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Torrentius. The Polish poet's essay is a meditation on the details in Torrentius's only surviving painting, Emblematic Still Life with Bridle. In the nine pages Kadir devotes to this painting, you will learn more about "Dutch snuffle gag bits with eggbutt ends," blind spots built into the equine retina...