Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and no ideas. Well, then look at Heine. Heine had all the culture of Germany; in his head fermented all the ideas of modern Europe.Matthew Arnold, âHeinrich Heineâ
Writing as a contemporary of Heine, Arnold understood the poetic force of the German writerâs philosophical imagination, which remained undervalued, if not obstinately disregarded by critics for years to come. Arnold sees Heineâs gift as an effortless union of French modernism and clarity and German pathos and intellectual capital. While Arnoldâs effusive praise of Heineâs genius comes at the expense of downplaying the talents of his compatriots Keats, Shelley , Wordsworth, and Coleridge, who, in his view, failed to infuse English literature with the modern spirit, he ultimately laments that we got âa half resultâ from Heine for lack âof nobleness of soul and characterâ (193). The final statement of Arnoldâs essay strikes an unexpected note after his ongoing praise of Heineâs âintense modernism; his absolute freedom; his utter rejection of stock classicism and romanticismâ (178); the incomparable magic of his poetical forms; and his ability to operate at a âjunction between the French spirit, German ideas and German cultureâ (175), thereby creating something incontestably new and fresh.
Arnoldâs paradoxical attitude of profuse praise and muted disappointment at Heineâs failure to deliver the moral goodsââso few reach the goal, so few are chosenâ (193)âis not atypical of Heine criticism by a number of German as well as Anglo-American scholars and, in a sense, duplicates the ironies of Heineâs own life and work. As the title of a study by one of the most prominent Heine critics, Jeffrey Sammons , indicates, Heine is the âelusive poet,â hard to pin down, for his writing cannot be divorced from his many identities as poet, essayist, journalist, chronicler, cultural historian and critic, German, Jew, romantic manquĂ©, exile , politically engaged writer, and in his own words, âa brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity.â Just as many names as identities are bequeathed to Heine in titles, such as The Artist in Revolt by Max Brod, The Tragic Satirist by S. S. Prawer, and Heinrich Heine, Paradox and the Poet by Louis Untermeyer , among others .
What Counts as World Literature?
What is still missing in Heine scholarship is the reevaluation of his poetically and culturally diverse work as a model of world or worldly literature. That is not to say that Heine was regarded primarily as a German or German Jewish writer; on the contrary, in the view of many literary critics and literary historians, along with J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche , Heine belonged to a small group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German writers who were considered Europeans. In the last several decades, however, the increasing globalization of capital and culture has awakened a renewed interest in the concept of world literature and its relation or lack thereof to a national literary canon and in questions, such as which authors and worksâand not only Western or European onesâcan claim world literary status and whether there is an unequal distribution of such status among the worldâs political and cultural haves and have nots. Thus, as readers and critics, it behooves us to reassess the function and value of certain canonical authors and works from different cultural and national traditions in their relation to our current conception of what constitutes world literature.
The increasing volume of cross-cultural and transnational dialogs, expressed in a variety of aesthetic forms and genres in the last decades, has led to the publication of numerous volumes by academic and university presses about the concept of world literature and what constitutes it. As a concept both old and new, world literature has demanded critical attention in the annals of literary history at different times and sites. In the well-worn sense, the term has referred to works from around the world and to Goetheâs pronouncement in Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann (GesprĂ€che mit Goethe) that the time had come to break away from national literatures and expand their range by bringing them into dialogue with other literatures, both Western and non-Western. The recent flurry of books on the âwhat,â the âwhere,â and the âwhoâ of world literature was instrumental in promoting productive debates on re-envisioning world literature in a networked age of multi-directional cultural moves. However, these works often tend to eschew âthick description â of specific literary cultures in broad comparative contexts.
In a special issue of the Modern Language Quarterly, âWhat Counts as World Literature ?â editors Caroline Levine and Venkat Mani begin their introductory essay by asking;
Is world literature a canon , a collection, a mode of reading, a utopian dream, an impossibility? Does it dilute a rigorous study of literatures in their original languages by depending on a glib global marketability and the smooth currency of translation? Or does an urgent embrace of the world helpfully push us out of our narrow and parochial reliance on national literatures? Is world literature simply a prerogative of the professional reader, the literary theorist, or is it a much larger interactive space with numerous actors who range from authors, translators, and readers to librarians, publishers, collectors, and booksellers? (141)
The purpose of the special issue was âto give an account of the many modes through which an abstract ideal transforms into an institutionalized entityâ (ibid.). While the objective of this issue was to chart a future path primarily for the institutional future of world literature as a discipline, my concern here is to explore the dialectical relationship between canon and world literature through the work of a canonical writer, who both belongs to and yet stands outside a national literary canon. Even when this objective is limited to a specific relationship, several questions posed by the explosion of publications on world literature during the first years of the twenty-first century beg for further clarification. Therefore, a docentâs tour through the recently mapped territory of world literature would provide context to the objectives of the present study.
The ongoing debate on what counts as world literature has necessarily led to both an expansion and a delimitation of terminology. The first order of business, then, would be an explanation of the differentiated realms of the terms world literature and world literatures. While the former can subsume the latter, I conceive of world literature more as an abstraction that merges the two German words ideel (of the idea) and ideal. I also posit it as the opposing term of national literature and further understand it as the repository of human wisdom and exemplary cultures, represented by classical works from the antiquity to the present. Goetheâs widely quoted proclamation that a Weltliteratur was in the process of arriving was not inspired by a belief that a conglomeration of worldâs literatures would transcend the respective domains of separate national literatures, but rather âby his sense that the reception of literary works was moving beyond linguistically and politically drawn cultural borders through increased translation activitiesâ (Pizer , 4).
In the âIntroductionâ to his celebrated study of translation in the era of German Romanticism , Antoine Berman refers to a statement by Goethe, who maintains that independently of their own literary output, the Germans have achieved a high degree of Bildung (learning and formation), due to a full appropriation of what is foreign to them, that is, in their ability to produce eminent translations of other literatures. Thus, those who understand German find themselves on the marketplace, where all nations offer their âmerchandise.â The power of any language is ânot to reject the foreign but to devour itâ (qtd. in Berman, 12). This reference to the increased activity of the translation of world literatures into German during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which enhanced the expressive modalities of German, sounds more like a celebration of German culture âdevouringâ other cultural productions rather than an acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of worldâs literatures. However, John Pizer maintains that Goetheâs emphasis on the central role of German in increased translational activity at this time should not be attributed to a ânationalist tingeâ in his remarks but should be seen as âmerely highlighting Germanyâs central role with respect to European geography and its undisputed centrality with respect to the mediation of culture through translationâ (Pizer , 4). While a consistent feature of Goetheâs model âis its inherent postulation of a dialectic between the particular and the general driving the world literary dialogueâ (ibid., 8), the relation of the particular to the universally human that is often stressed in the continuous reception of Goetheâs pronouncement, attributes to world literature the Enlightenment ideal of the universal. However, in the view of the contested contemporary debates about the legacy of the Enlightenment, this ideal is seen as culturally specific, e.g., Western oriented. Nevertheless, as Pizer maintains, Heine was to become the âmediator of Weltliteraturâ (48), as it was envisioned by Goethe, since Heineâs vast knowledge of Occidental literature and history and also considerable familiarity with Oriental poetics facilitated his work as a cultural mediatorâor cultural interpreter.
The concept of world literatures, with that innocent letter âsâ tagged on to it, pluralizes the domain of Weltliteratur and expands it indefinitely and infinitely to include the study of multiple national, ethnic, regional, or transnational literatures . These are variously related to or are in dialog with the canonical works of world literature . The domain of world literatures should not be understood as a motley grouping of national and ethnic literary works, translated into a few languages of high status and served as curricular smorgasbord. The historical, geographical, linguistic, and literary dimensions of these texts as well as the translational regimes that govern them need to be examined not only in their inherently interlocking scripts but also in relation to what Pascale Casanova calls âthe literary Greenwich meridianâ (352). In other words, the singularity of the work should be seen in its distinctive temporality, while acknowledging its invisible yet indivisible links to the perceived timelessness of world literature writ large.
Contemporary approaches to world literature and its more inclusive analog world literatures may provide some critical insight into what historically constituted world literary status vis-Ă -vis the national literary canon . David Damroschâs focus on how texts migrate from their sites of origin and follow certain trajectories has contributed to a renewed understanding of histories of reception not only in terms of their predictable and measurable course but also in the chance encounters of works with other works. 1 Casanova envisions a broadly cosmopolitan view of world literature , whereby what is communicated through the structures and the aesthetic context of a work can be understood through the specific place it occupies in the world literary space. Ex-centric languages and cultures are drawn to centers of literary capital, most notably Paris, where they undergo a worldly conversion in the concentric circles of the metropolis and, in turn, transform the center. The world literary field is continually restructured by the interaction of the works in the peripheries and the centers and through an assessment of their relative status and prestige.
In a gesture of writerly self-irony, Milan Kundera, a world literary novelist and essayist himself, asserts that Goetheâs appeal to the ...