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.

What do you do when you come to know that you're stuck to the intractable stuff of other folks' and other times' making, stuck more deeply the more you rail against it for not answering to your hailing? What do you do when you're busted to pieces and can't pull it all together with the hum of a song? What do you do when you find yourself outside a structure that won't let you (or your loves) inside its towered walls and gated communities? What follow are prescriptions divined from fabulous tales of tar babies, terrapins, and supersized machine-horses. Southern myth-science. To borrow from others in this collection: hum/animal songs from outer space(s).

The interesting question is in fact a two-way street. Familiar enough, with its accusatory hint of idealism and intellectualizing elitism, is the query, In what sense was Marx a Hegelian? But more tantalizing, more science fictional and counterfactual, is its echoing alternative: In what sense was Hegel a Marxist? The sharing of the dialectic is of course the easy way out, in a speculative dilemma calculated to open up fresh answers and unexpected new problems. I will only take on one of them here—namely, what Hegel might have to tell us about the possibilities, and also the limits, of Marxist literary criticism, an issue that may seem as remote today as literature itself (and the theorizing criticism of it).

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).

My vision for the future of southern studies is for the field to develop as a site of activism. Since comparative civil rights scholarship and a focus on radical activism in the South are on the rise, I hope that work in these areas can teach us lessons about how to act on our ideas, to convert manifestos into practice. Any scholar of, or participant in, sixties (in the extended, poetic sense of the term) activism will recognize the frustration that accompanies mobilizing for change. As one of the characters in Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters, a community organizer from Georgia, states, “The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality” (126). I call for us to reflect on the unreality of our limitations, and I suggest places where we could open dialogue that would push the field forward.

Haun saussy opens his influential discussion of past and present conceptions of comparative literature, “exquisite cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” by linking them in an apparently historic claim to victory: “Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles” (3). The ambiguous nature of that claim, and the real subject of Saussy's ensuing discussion, is indicated, however, by the qualifying phrase “in a sense.” In another sense, Saussy implies, the achievements of comparative literature remain open to debate. For, despite the widespread adoption by national-literature departments of comparative literature's theoretical methods of inquiry, comparative approaches to literature continue to be considered inessential or secondary to the defining aim of national-literature departments—investigating and describing the reality of historically grounded national traditions and identities. Saussy's “sense” of victory is thus snatched from the jaws of an unapologetic sense of defeat:

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Whereas the past decade of progress for LGBTQ Americans has accompanied a turn away from liberalism and a silencing of radicalism, in that gays who face discrimination are seen as innocent victims while unarmed black men gunned down by police are seen as thugs, and in that queers celebrate judicial acknowledgment of their dignity while food stamps disappear, recipients of public assistance are tested for drugs, one third of young black men have been incarcerated, torture is an instrument of American foreign policy, and the top one percent get wildly richer each year;

What it is to be gendered remains a disputed topic in feminist philosophy, not to mention in the quotidian struggle over gender categories as they are lived and questioned outside the academy. In this paper I want to explore what contemporary work in analytic feminist philosophy can tell us about how the “categories we live by,” or the categories that organize our social lives and constitute our identities, can sometimes render life unlivable because of their restrictive or oppressive effects (Kapusta; Ásta Sveinsdóttir, “Metaphysics”; Butler, Undoing 4 and Notes). The phrase “categories we die for” captures this ambiguity. On the one hand, many of us have died, and continue to, for gender categories that we couldn't, or refused to, live up to. Think of the violence done in the name of normative and regulatory gender ideals to gender nonconformists—those who do not find a place in gender binarism (“man/woman”) or sexual dimorphism (“male/female”). Queer populations continue to be vulnerable to marginalization, pathologization, and aggression for not doing their gender, sex, or sexuality “correctly” (i.e., heteronormatively or cisnormatively). In this sense, social categories and norms can ruin lives, and we ought to argue against their restrictive regulation. On the other hand, we are also willing to stand behind, defend, and even sacrifice ourselves for gender categories that promise to make life more livable, flexible, and sustainable for those we cherish (Kapusta; Butler, Undoing). When we fight for the recognition of categories like “genderqueer,” “trans∗,” and “agender” we seem to be saying that these are categories worth dying for (a further issue, we will see, is whether binary gender categories like “man” and “woman” per se are worth dying for, or whether the effort to make these existing categories more inclusive is). The contemporary struggle to expand the compass of gender terms and concepts, to expand the sense of the livable, seeks to make categories more inclusive. When we mobilize for trans∗ inclusiveness, gender variance, intersex visibility, and more, we are fighting for categories to be protected, in law and in life. So, to speak of “categories we are dying for,” as I will, implies both a punitive sense (“categories due to which many of us die”) and a positive sense (“categories worth dying for”). Depending on their uses and effects, gender categories can make or break one's life.

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.

Our understandings of early moments of southern literature and culture share some common frameworks. Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century, for example, revolve largely around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth-century South as defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographic place? What does it mean to read, watch, listen to, study, and teach southern literature and culture in the twenty-first century? What do we mean by the terms southern and literature? What cultural forms and media are central to understanding twenty-first-century southern culture? What is the utility of the literary? How do southern literature and culture relate to the nation as a whole?

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)

Marx's early article “for a ruthless critique of everything existing” was written as a letter to arnold ruge, a young hegelian, in September 1843 and then printed in the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher in 1844. It is one of several letters that Marx wrote to Ruge during that period on the need to upend philosophical authority. Translated into English, the essay is often taken to be an exuberant and ironic prefiguration of the writings that came to be known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The essay's title is taken from Marx's letter, in which he remarks that we must undertake “die rücksichtlose Kritik alles Bestehenden”—the ruthless critique not of “everything existing,” exactly, but of everything established, even institutionalized as the establishment over time.

Try as we might, kant conclusively explains in his “exposition” of “space” in the critique of pure reason's “transcendental Analytic”—the opening section of that inaugural work, in which Kant demonstrates the fundamental, “practical” necessity of its guiding, “theoretical” premises—we cannot imagine, let alone perceive, any external “matter” or object without first representing it to ourselves as occupying space. Objects are individual, distinct, exactly because they are material—whether empirically experienced or merely imagined as such—and the always impure, partly intellectual, partly empirical basis of their apprehension indicates that objects cannot themselves be the basis of their spatial perception by us. A less “philosophically” descriptive, somewhat more contemporary, but certainly contemporarily more recognizable analysis of the same intellectual procedure may be recognized in Marx's upending account of the things we perceive and value as “commodities.” As on Marx's analogous terms, “commodities form the presupposition” of the “circulation” of “values” (that “produces exchange value”) and not the other way around, and thus have “constantly … to be thrown into [circulation] anew from the outside, like fuel into a fire,” so no number and variety of objects or quantity and quality of the general object we call “matter” could ever suffice to account for space, the indispensable basis of their own conception as phenomenal, material objects (Grundrisse 254-55). While Kant deduced that no knowledge, and no possible access to knowledge, would result from the solipsistic wish to make space itself an object of spatial perception—or, for that matter, of pure (immaterial) speculation, that is, the wish to spatialize or idealize a “real,” or nonperceptual, reality of space—Marx deduced, conversely, that, without “standing in any connection to [the] commodities” that “mediate” it, “circulation” itself—the basis of valuation—would “flicker out in indifference,” “d[ying] out with money” or, rather, taking money along with it, destroying the abstracted “economic existence” of this essential while “non-substantial form of wealth” precisely by reducing it to an object “with only its metallic existence left over” (255).

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.