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  • Global Provincialism:Orhan Pamuk and William Faulkner in the Age of World Literature
  • Benjamin Mangrum (bio)

In a 2012 interview, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk cites a declaration by John Updike, who claims that many global writers owe a literary debt to the parochial subject matter of William Faulkner's fiction. Agreeing with Updike's claim, Pamuk explains that Faulkner showed how a writer's "subject matter may be provincial, away from the centers of the West and politically troubled, yet one can write about it in a very personal and inventive way and be read all over the world" ("By the Book"). Pamuk's avowed debt to Faulkner centers on their common investment in literary provincialism as the cornerstone for global engagement. To write for the world, begin with a narrow corner of it. Or, as Faulkner put it in a 1956 interview with the Paris Review, "Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. … It opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my own" (Lion 255). Based on the sentiments expressed by Pamuk and Faulkner, two seemingly mutually exclusive scales—the provincial and the global, the marginal postage stamp and the world itself—become deeply interconnected, such that the smaller scale operates as a route to the much larger one. [End Page 1]

Following on these connections, this essay considers how fiction concerned with its own provinciality functions within the discourse of "world literature." This essay argues that Faulkner and Pamuk employ the provincial in order to justify self-referentially the literary value of provincial texts. The discourse surrounding the provincial is thus a later permutation of the values entailed in what Goethe termed Weltliteratur. For Goethe, these values centered on a form of cultural secularism that ostensibly transcends nationalism. The aspiration of world literature was to connect nations, not to remain rooted in the minor concerns of minor locales. As Goethe put it, the modern literary world would become "a market where all nations offer their goods," thereby facilitating a "general intellectual commerce" (qtd. in Casanova 14). Indeed, as Eric Hayot observes, Goethe's use of the term was itself a response

to the far larger cultural strain of world-orientedness that produced Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history (Weltgeschichte) in Berlin in 1822 (and 1828 and 1830), Kant's theory of cosmopolitanism, and indeed so much of the thought of the Enlightenment. These authors, along with all their … descendants, point to the importance of the term "world" and its variants to conceptualizations of modernity.

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To contribute to world literature was, during the nineteenth century, to discourse on the ostensibly universal themes of the modern age. This conceptualization of literature refused to be mired in the small-town concerns that fell far outside the emerging centers of global cultural exchange. The "world" of world literature was therefore not only an affirmation of cosmopolitan literary capital, as Pascale Casanova argues, but also a statement about space within the discourse of modernity. In early conceptions of Weltliteratur, parochial locales and rooted marginality were not among the spaces that mattered.

Goethe's view of Weltliteratur was also important for how it presented the nation as a route for higher-order cultural exchange. While Goethe's late writings often subordinate the national to cosmopolitan values, Aamir R. Mufti argues that these very values were rooted in the increasingly standardized cultural logic of particular national literatures. As Mufti explains, the concept [End Page 2] of Weltliteratur "emerged precisely alongside the nation-state and nation-form, rather than as a sign of their overcoming" (217). At this stage, world literature was a national idiom posing as a cosmopolitan lingua franca. Yet Faulkner's work establishes a different vein of thought during the twentieth century. In particular, Faulkner's place in world literature hinges on his fiction's investment in the parochial or provincial as an avenue for an ostensibly universal vision of human experience. I describe this view of writing for the world through the universalizable aspects of...

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