Miller Reads So the Chinese (and Young, Western Computer Gamers) Don't Have To

In August 2010, I Attended a Lecture that J. Hillis Miller Gave at the Shanghai jiao Tong University on the Challenge of Reading world literature. The lecture argued that in a globalizing world, traveling literature grows distant from its linguistic milieu, local readership, and aesthetic context, making it our challenge to find a reading method that could safeguard these endangered aspects of the text's specificity. To do this, he proposed to imagine himself as a Chinese anthologist who, wishing to include a translation of William Butler Yeats's poem “The Cold Heaven” in a Chinese anthology of world literature, must ask himself, “Just what would I need to tell Chinese readers to make them the best possible readers of this poem?” Miller concluded that, as that anthologist, he would need to give them the facts about Yeats's life and works, an account of the generic rules of the poem's verse form, a note on the broad recurrence of “sudden” and “suddenly” in Yeats's oeuvre, information about “[w]hat sort of bird the rook is and why they are delighted by cold weather,” a clarification of the differing connotations of “heaven” and “skies” for Christian readers familiar with “The Lord's Prayer,” an explanation of what the oxymoron “burning ice” has meant in the Western poetic tradition, a pointer to the allusion in the word “crossed” to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and some sense of the embedded subtext of Yeats's failure to woo Maud Gonne (256). For, according to Miller (citing David Damrosch), when culturally distant readers are not made aware of the “vast substratum beneath” a poem, they are “likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign work” (254). In short, a respectful reading method must ensure that such readers are guided through the text, in the light of its original context.

The Fundamental Concern in Translation Theory, from Saint Jerome to the Present, has Been the Relation Between a Text and its version in another language. This relation is often conceived in the Platonic terms of original and copy: the original is viewed as sacrosanct (especially when it is a sacred text but also when it is not), while the translation is seen, at best, as imperfect and deficient and, at worst, as an adulteration, a profanation, and a betrayal that is captured in the Italian phrase traduttore traditore. Conversely, that relation has on occasion also been inverted in claims that the translation can be superior to the original—for example, Jorge Luis Borges's famous declaration that “the original is unfaithful to the translation” (239) or, less radically, Gabriel García Márquez's reported remark that Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is better than the Spanish original (Rabassa 43). At other times, the relation between original and translation is seen as antagonistic, the one trying to displace the other, or as its heir and only chance of survival. In this view, the original is condemned to death and oblivion because it is written in a dead language, a rival language, or a geopolitically weak language. Think of the phenomenon that Abdelfattah Kilito cites of some classical Arabic texts—such as al-Harīrī‘s Maqāmāt (“Assemblies”), written at the height of Arab civilization's power in the twelfth century—which seem to have been composed in such a way as to render their translation impossible (17-18). By contrast, notes Kilito, some contemporary Arab novelists seem to write with their translators in mind, avoiding difficult language and obscure cultural expressions that may reduce their works’ chances of being translated into English or French, the gateway to international success (19n7).

Literary Histories Have All Too Often Been Written with the Borders of Nation-States in Mind, Projecting Back in Time a political unity and standard use of language that only gradually, and sometimes recently, emerged. This approach has been criticized and increasingly replaced by an acknowledgment that literary histories must consider many variables that do not neatly map onto the story of single, powerful, and supposedly unified political entities and that these histories' artificial boundaries of inquiry must expand to encompass the movement of people, ideas, and texts. Although potentially more representative of the plurality of particular societies or cultures, a literary history that does not depend on the illusion of a stable state structure and the state's prioritized language is challenging to write, especially when basic questions regarding the location, religious affiliation, and linguistic preferences of the community producing a literature loom large. I present some thoughts and questions on one such challenging example—writing a literary history of the Sri Lankan Malays—in the hope that these reflections will resonate with those exploring other places, languages, and periods as we critically engage with old and new ways of understanding the diverse nature and roles of literature.

In a Compelling Reading of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, Bhekizizwe Peterson Remarks on the Work's Inscription of multiple imagined readers with different investments in the narrative (79). Quoting from Jean-Paul Sartre's reflections on the intricacies of addressing fractured, and sometimes future, publics, Peterson writes:

[T]he works of writers who find themselves on the “margin of the privileged class” contain a “double simultaneous postulation,” a consequence of the “fracture” in the “actual public” in which their art is produced and consumed. Because the “real public” consists largely of the conservative forces that compose the dominant class and ideology, the marginal writer is compelled to address “the progressive forces, or the virtual public” even if “the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading.” In engaging the future and its virtual public—“an emptiness to be filled in, an aspiration”—the writing exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite. (81)

IN Concluding the Editor's Foreword to the 1950 Edition of D. O. Fagunwa's First Novel, the Classic Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, L. Murby spoke generally of the three novels the Yoruba author had published by then:

[I]n their treatment of character and story, in their use of myth and legend and allegory, and in their proverbial and epigrammatic language [the novels] bear definite resemblances to the Odyssey and Beowulf and the early medieval romances on the one hand, and on the other hand to that great cornerstone of the English novel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

Working for More Than Fifteen Years in Public Universities—First as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, then as a Nontenure-track full-timer, finally making my way onto the tenure track—taught me a great deal about how public education works and literature's place in a world where the concepts of the public and education are devalued if not attacked. J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace stages some of the challenges of teaching literature in the contemporary university. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is a Romanticist struggling to connect with his students: “[H]e does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark.” He is disappointed by the virtual impossibility of this task: “[H]e has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday” (32). In this context, he thinks—and readers probably agree—that he is “no great shakes as a teacher” (63).

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

I Am Not Particularly Sensitive to Space and Location, Except When it Comes to Real Estate. Still, I Cannot Help But Notice their increased importance in the human sciences: philosophers evoke heterotopies and dream of geophilosophy, historians explore lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”), and distant reading or surface reading competes with close reading. It is as if to the end of history there corresponded a beginning of geography, and some scholars, like Michel Collot, have even spoken of a spatial turn (15).

In teaching and studying French literature, which I have been doing for a long time, geographic forces have always had a significant role, because of the distance between France and the United States and because of the global situation of the two countries. That the distance has become less daunting in the past fifty or sixty years has led to more scholarly exchanges, smoother collaborations, easier access to subjects or objects, and the study of the literary extrême contemporain (“extremely contemporary”), say, or that of modern popular literature is now less problematic. As for the global situation, there has been a French loss and an American gain of cultural power, with less United States attention paid to French cultural products. This relative disaffection permeates many texts. I remember quite well how Donald Morrison buried French culture (Morrison and Compagnon), and I will not forget that Mark Bittman even argued in the New York Times that one ate better in London than in Paris. Across the ocean too, there was concern. As early as the 1990s, Jean-Marie Domenach deplored the twilight of French civilization. A few years later, Nicolas Baverez described a falling France.

In the Autumn of 2002, I Gave a Lecture on Mourning the Dead to Final-Year Undergraduates at the University of Cambridge studying the compulsory course on tragedy. The lecture covered the care devoted to the dead body in Sophocles's Antigone and Hamlet's reflections, over Ophelia's grave, on the “fine revolution” of the material corpse (5.1.82-83). But it also extended its range to include the then very recent excavation, for eight and a half months, at Ground Zero in search of the remains of the dead victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the simultaneous daily publication in the New York Times of “Portraits of Grief.” These portraits, I maintained, fulfilled a similar function to tragic drama by refocusing attention on the individual life and by finding a narrative arc to each victim's story, like Aristotle's tragic plots, which must have “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (26). While the firefighters' digging equipment at Ground Zero searched in vain for the missing remains of about 1800 people and eventually hit bedrock, the newspaper reinvested each lost person with significance, finding a value and a pattern in the person's life.

Where We Read Surely Matters as Much as What We Read. As Embodied Readers, How Can it Not? How Can We Not Bring Our experience of our own place in the world to the fictional places in which we also reside? If you are like me, you take pleasure in remembering where you were when you read a particular novel and, in retrospect, how your location infiltrated your reading, never mind how different and distant the fictional place was in which you were simultaneously situated. Sometimes your reading so matches your actual location that you find yourself wondering, like Don Quixote, which is which. This was my experience in Macondo. To be accurate, my Macondo was (and is) Quimbaya, a village in the departamento (department or province) of El Quindío in Colombia, two hundred and fifty kilometers south of Medellín and ninety kilometers south of Manizales, a coffee-growing region on the western slopes of the central Andean cordillera. Quimbaya is named for the indigenous peoples who once occupied the region and produced intricate gold artifacts using the lost-wax method. Macondo and Quimbaya so mirrored each other that when I first read Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in 1969 in Quimbaya, two years after its publication, I experienced the kind of “delirio hermenéutico” ‘hermeneutic delirium’ to which the Buendías are so often apt—for me, an experience of magical realism avant la lettre. How might I have understood this novel, this world, had I not been living there?

Since 2001, I Have Been Teaching Courses in Cultural Studies, European and Turkish Literature, Modern Drama, and Gender and sexuality studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. During my fifteen years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, the Armenian genocide was a particularly challenging theme to bring into the classroom. Even at Sabancı University, one of the rare liberal universities in Turkey to offer courses that challenge Turkish national myths, most students, including those who graduated from “liberal” high schools, had received a nationalist education and came to college either not knowing anything about the Armenian genocide or denying it altogether. Denial of the Armenian genocide is still pervasive in Turkey; 1915 is identified in history textbooks as the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, the most important Ottoman victory against the British and French naval forces during World War I. For most of the twentieth century and up until 2005, when the seminal Ottoman Armenians Conference opened a public discussion of the topic, silence regarding the deportation and genocide of the Ottoman Armenians prevailed. If denialist myths in Turkey acknowledge the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians, they justify such deaths as “retaliation” for the deaths of Turkish Muslims during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 or equate the massacres of Armenians with Turkish casualties of war from the same period. For instance, Talat Paşa, the mastermind behind the deportations and massacres of roughly one million Armenians in 1915-16, argues in his memoirs that an equal number of Turks were killed by Armenians during World War I and in its aftermath (51-56).

In Dictee Theresa Cha, a Korean American Writer Who Died Tragically at the Age of Thirty-One, Shows Us How Dwelling in language can lead us to the truth of a radical instability. On the first page, she sets blocks of text in French and English one above the other, spelling out the terms for spacing and punctuation that a child might not understand. The English paragraph reads:

I Have Been Teaching Literatures in English for Over Twenty-Five Years at the Universidad Nacional AutóNoma de México (Unam), Mexico's national university, where I received my undergraduate degree. My formative years were marked, undoubtedly, by the universalist ideal that defines the motto of the university, “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu” (“The spirit will speak on behalf of my race”). I cannot recall whether I was aware of the motto's real meaning, or of its cultural and social implications, but I suppose I took for granted that what I was taught as a student was as much part of a Mexican culture as it was of a “universal” one. Reading English literature at the department of modern languages and literatures in the late 1970s meant that I was exposed to a canonical view of literature shaped as much by The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and by our lecturers' (primarily) aesthetic approach to it as by the idea of “universal” literature conveyed in the textbooks for elementary and secondary education in Mexico. This conviction that as a Mexican I belonged to “Western” civilization greatly diminished when in the early 1980s I traveled to London for graduate studies and was almost shattered by the attitudes I encountered while conducting my doctoral research on the image of Latin America in British fiction. I was often asked whether I had ever seen a car (let alone ridden in one), or if there was electricity in my country, and the ambivalent, mostly negative, view of Latin Americans and Mexicans in what I read (authors like Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Aldous Huxley, as well as more than three hundred adventure novels set in the continent) forced me to question the idea that one ought to read literature merely for the enjoyment (and admiration) of it or to analyze it with assumptions that fall roughly in the category of “expressive,” or “mimetic,” criticism, which was common in those days and often took the form of monographic studies, which relied heavily on paraphrase.

As 2016 Draws to a Close, the Most Hotly Debated Topic in Hong Kong is the Controversial Behavior of Two Newly elected legislators of a localist political party during their oath taking at the Legislative Council earlier this year. The proindependence advocates roused anger among mainland Chinese and local Hong Kong officials and citizens alike when they declared allegiance to the “Hong Kong nation” and pronounced “China” in a way that painfully echoed for many the derogatory pronunciation used by the Japanese forces that occupied Hong Kong in World War II. Ironically, in their attempts to lobby for the Hong Kong people's interests and right to self-determination, the legislators were accused of ignoring Hong Kong's history and disrespecting those who had perished during or survived those dark days. Subsequently, China's National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) issued an interpretation of Hong Kong's Basic Law that disqualified the pair from government service and preempted any ruling by a local Hong Kong court. This decision prompted thirteen thousand Hong Kong people to take to the streets in protest against what is widely perceived as the mainland's tightening of control over its special administrative region.

In An Essay Titled “The Future of Criticism,” Edward W. Said Made a Remark That I First Took to Be a Platitude: “Criticism exists only because critics practice it. It is neither an institution nor, strictly speaking, a discipline” (165). On further thought, I began to see the strength of this assertion and the implication that practices cultivate continuity and certain ways of seeing. People are in many ways products of their historical and cultural contexts. For example, while I initially resisted starting my reflections on teaching literature by discussing how I was taught the subject in my early years, I know that my story will be incomplete if I do not at least devote a paragraph or two to that experience.

Landing in Yangon (Formerly Rangoon) in February 2013, Less Than Three Months After President Barack Obama's Historic trip to Myanmar (Burma), I wondered what I would encounter. Serving as the first Fulbright specialist at a Myanmar public university in thirty years forced me to alter my approach to teaching the literature of the United States that appeared during the time Myanmar isolated itself. It also compelled me to reconsider the relations among literature, human rights, and language. Locals who taught literature of the United States and Britain never experienced the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the expansion of the literary canon. Keats was on the syllabus in every undergraduate English course, while African American authors were absent, and some of my students were surprised that Americans no longer enslave Africans.

I Was Born in Spain to a Spanish Mother and a Nigerian Father. I Moved to Nigeria on the Day That I Turned Seven and remained in the country for nine years. The interplay between my cultural liminality and an early aestheticism has determined my experience of literature—first as a precocious reader and later as a teacher and scholar.

My first literary diet, like that of many children, consisted of fairy tales and abridged classics. At primary school in Nigeria, our English textbooks featured passages from African novels to teach reading comprehension. While I found the short storylines interesting, their pedagogical use meant that I did not perceive them as “literature”—a word that I associated with stories to wonder at, get lost in, and daydream about. At the age of nine I graduated to unabridged Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays alongside Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, supplementing my diet with Spanish chivalric romances such as Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula (1508) and Francisco Vázquez's Palmerín de Oliva (1511). Apart from a sense of intrigue, these two works gave me respite from an unrelenting sense of otherness. They provided vicarious adventure, and their settings reminded me of the Castilian castles that formed part of my early-childhood landscape.

Returning Recently to Teach at My Alma Mater, The University of Cape Town, I Was Amazed to Find That the Undergraduate curriculum to which I had been exposed at the dawn of the post-apartheid era remained substantially unaltered. With the exception of an experimentally convened introductory year that reverses chronology with interesting effects, the English major continues to plot a literary history across four inherited periods: Shakespeare and Co., Romance to Realism, Modernism, and Contemporary Literature, which collapses a previous bifurcation of the capstone course into Postmodernism or Postcolonialism.

I Have Taught Literature at the University Of Nairobi Since 2009. Previously, I Taught at Masinde Muliro University and at Moi University. From my experience at the three universities, I can trace, in hindsight, two dominant influences on my knowledge of literature and expectations of how it ought to be conceived and taught. First is my graduate training at Moi University, in Kenya, and at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa, where I was encouraged to see literature as a broad discipline that speaks to others in the humanities and in the social and natural sciences in terms of concerns, research methodology, and, especially, analytic tools. The second influence is the academic composition and orientation of the literature departments, as shaped by the politics of development. In the face of two competing forces—on the one hand, the Kenyan government and its preoccupation with development as an ideal and a pretext for de-emphasizing the teaching of some humanities disciplines and, on the other, the neoliberal political economy that gave rise to nongovernmental organizations' setting the scholarship research agenda in Kenya—literary academics seemed to be torn three ways: using the discipline and their knowledge of it to position themselves for government appointments, pursuing nongovernmental-organizations-funded research, or continuing to teach literature in the ways that they know. Those who chose the third option were also equipped with an institutional memory of the discipline as they were taught, the department, and its practices. Because, of these three groups, I have interacted the most with members of the third, my reflections here focus on them exclusively.

In 1995 I Taught a Course in New Zealand Literature at Tokyo University. The Students Were Attentive, and Curious About New Zealand, but they found my Kiwi English hard to follow, being accustomed to American or British varieties. I wondered about their seeming tolerance recently while teaching a similar course to undergraduates back home, at Victoria University, in Wellington, when one of the Maori students complimented a Pākehā (New Zealand European) colleague for her Maori pronunciation. Like most Pākehā, I have a rudimentary grasp of Māori, enough to be familiar with the words and phrases that have entered everyday speech and those in the poetry and fiction I teach. But I cannot conduct a conversation in Māori or read a Māori text, and I am as embarrassed by the irritation that my pronunciation of te reo (the Māori language) causes Māori speakers as I was by the difficulty my rising terminals and strange accent posed for competent English speakers in Japan.