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Five: Passing On
- Fordham University Press
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205 f i v e Passing On Spectral Justice We could address the riddles raised in the previous chapter a little differently and ask: If we are interested in articulating a more complex “dialectic of difference” in our reading of world literature, which differences should we decide to address (and even redress) in our evaluations of a text? What value system should we rely on to frame our literary historiographies? Here we need to acknowledge the multiple values—moral, political, economic, aesthetic—that are put into play in this ongoing, collective enterprise of literary evaluation.1 Ultimately, it will not be productive to dismiss summarily the frames of nationalism usually organizing our interpretive practices (as would be the first reaction to reading a story like “Toba Tek Singh”), for without a dynamic, self-reflexive awareness of the framing tendencies themselves, another framing device will simply replace the nationalist narratives that similarly fix the text in time and place. We will still be 206 Passing On left unaware of our own ideological position in relationship to the text. To begin understanding how these framing devices negotiate an intersection of colliding values, we need to look more closely at the relationship we assert exists between one corpus and another in our own literary historiographies . What is the basis of such a comparison? The stories of a Rajasthani writer such as Vijay Dan Detha, for example, cannot read be exclusively alongside other writers in his language (whether you categorize that as Rajasthani or Hindi), other writers of his nation, or even of his era, but should read transtemporally, transspatially, translingually . We might locate his work in comparison to the writers he names as his major influences: a social-realist Hindi writer such as Premchand, German folklorists such as the Brothers Grimm, a Russian fabulist such as Anton Chekhov. We might even read him in comparison to a writer like Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, whose work I contend raises similar issues about the relationship of language to nationalism in a postcolonial context. I am suggesting here that part of the task of formulating a critical practice of reading translated work is to take into account the fact that these literary exchanges go beyond tidy national, cultural, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Part of the task is to understand that even a work read directly in Hindi or in Rajasthani is already a translation. And thus part of our task here is to formulate a critical reading practice that accounts for what Benedict Anderson, in a nationalist context of political performance, has called “the specter of comparison” haunting all our literary endeavors. Not just translators and literary critics but all writers and readers participate in a network in which we interpret a text and pass it along. What values do we assume we have in common? We already know from the example of Salman Rushdie in the previous chapter that not only do contemporary writers of world literature participate actively in such transnational projects of comparison—holding forth on the writers they deem part of the world literary club or not—but we as the audience of such pronouncements respond to them in our own production of literary scholarship in an ongoing chain of triangular relation. In the early nineties, the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow purportedly declared, “Show me the Zulu Tolstoy and I will read him!” thus setting off a storm of controversy .2 Put crudely, such an ejaculation assumes we agree that Tolstoy’s contribution to the world of letters is valuable whereas nothing in the Zulu tradition is worth talking about. The truth Bellow touches on indirectly is that the majority of readers do know the name of Tolstoy and do indeed have [3.83.87.94] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:51 GMT) Passing On 207 trouble naming a single Zulu writer. We ourselves are part of an economy of world literature that participates in exactly the kinds of inequalities we find so reprehensible. These are not the values we would wish to subscribe to, and yet we cannot help but notice that we not only subscribe to them but reinscribe them in our own exchanges over topics literary. Bellow’s crass remark should be interesting to us not just because of the questions it raises about our unconscious habit of creating hierarchies in our evaluations of world literature but also because it makes us aware of the rhetorical strategies we use to negotiate the bounds of...