The Egyptian Pronoun: Lyric, Novel, the Book of the Dead

Does it make sense to think of literary history as a special kind of world history, and what are the consequences of globalizing in this way, claiming the entire planet as an interlocking archive? How many continents can we realistically embrace, what time frames become necessary, and do these yield a new morphology of genres, along with new longitudes and latitudes? What is the relation between scale and scope in this exercise, between details observable at close range and patterns discernable from afar?

In what follows, I propose to go back to the ancient world—to Egypt—to make a case for a literary history with just this broad compass. Crucial to this undertaking is what Anne Freadman calls an “inter-generic” landscape, populated not by discrete classes of literary objects but by the breakdown of that discreteness, a process of transposing, adapting, and cross-fertilizing, enacted on every route, every locale.¹ The history of genres, told as a formal diaspora—a history of scattering and recombining—calls for a theater of maximum length and width, for to the extent that movement has always been a human propensity, choreographed by words no less than by bodies, the relational arcs generated must span several continents and several thousand years. Far-flung kinship emerges here as key. Lyric and novel, not ordinarily imagined as having much to do with each other, are recast and reintegrated by these enlarged coordinates. Their kinship is counterintuitive, though I hope not unthinkable, for given the importance of Egypt as the crossroads for ancient civilizations—perhaps the first example of what we now call the “global South”—it is quite possible that seemingly disparate traditions might arise here, a nodal point from which several lines of descent can be traced. To reclaim this Afro-Asian nexus, to put it at the head of a network subsequently extending from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic, is to imagine a globalism of the largest scale, one that would seem to require the sort of “distant reading” proposed by Franco Moretti.²

By distant reading, Moretti has in mind “a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction,” necessary in order to put the whole world to a census, to track the total sum of its literary productions, tabulating these as a series of graphs, maps, and evolutionary trees.³ Close reading has no place in this kind of globalism, for Moretti’s method is quantitative rather than textual, an aerial survey yielding a set of statistics. Across-the-board tally takes precedence over any fine-grained engagement. Moretti does not mince words here: “If the text itself disappears,” he writes, “it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more.”⁴ What he calls for is nothing less than a remaking of literary studies into a branch of macroeconomics, a global accounting based on a presumed fungibility among texts, and therefore using aggregation as the key principle, surely one of the most interesting proposals on the table.

Still, there are limits to what numbers can tell us. Those limits are especially severe when we are dealing, not with supposedly discrete genres, but with the unplanned, unsupervised, and often unclassifiable relations evolving among genres. A work-in-progress, held in dynamic suspension among multiple players, this intergeneric landscape is most interesting in its incompleteness, its susceptibility to new input, its tendency to confound fixed taxonomies through the unpredictableness of local variations. Since these variations stem from multiple factors, their scales and degrees of resolution have to be determined case by case. They are not countable on any single platform and do not lend themselves to a unified tally. Indeed, they might not even be statistically significant—might not yield a figure or a rule that is valid across the board—though they are far from negligible from a literary standpoint. Literary history, in this light, stands at the very limits of aggregation: it tells us what tallying and averaging cannot. Not an aerial survey, the most vital form it takes might turn out to be microhistory: a ground-level analysis of...