World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

Conclusion

World Literature: Negotiation and Equilibrium


فليست الثقافة وطنيةً خالصة ولا إنسانية خالصة، ولكنها وطنية إنسانية معاً وهي في أكثر الأحيان فرديةً أيضاً.

طه حسين، مستقبل الثقافة في مصر (394)
Culture is neither exclusively national nor exclusively universal, but it is national universal at the same time, and most often individual as well.

Taha Hussein, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fi misr [The Future of Culture in Egypt] (394)

Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures.

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (282)

On several occasions in In An Antique Land Amitav Ghosh writes of bringing gifts on his way back from India to Egypt, and from Cairo to Nashawy. In the latter instance Ghosh brings Shaykh Musa an ornately-decorated Quran, a memento from Ghosh’s visit to the capital intended for someone who has lived all his life in the provinces. The present is doubly touching as an encoded gesture of tolerance, since it comes from an Indian Hindu with the background of Muslim-Hindu antagonism behind him, and one who has just spent an inordinate amount of time in his sojourn in Egypt resisting amicably-intended but stifling attempts at peer-conversion. The gift is also intended to express gratitude to the sheikh for having been a gracious host and given Ghosh insight into life in Egypt; it is in some sense then, also a payment of a debt of knowledge.

In the Arabic travellers’ texts discussed in Chapter 3 the writers often mention buying gifts to take back home with them or to give to friends, such as pilgrim souvenirs from Mecca: an action of acquiring a tangible memory (or proof of experience) familiar to any tourist until today. Ibn Jubayr dubiously claims to give some of his Meccan souvenirs later to a stranger in Spain, a man who is ‘pretending’ to be a Christian in fear of the new suspiciously-benevolent Christian King. The gifts then acquire a new significance as markers of a kind of fraternity, a show of solidarity and support.

In Beer in the Snooker Club Ram speaks of refusing to ‘go empty-handed’ when invited to lunch at the Dungates. Edna tries to talk him out of it. She tells him he is not in Egypt anymore after all, and there is no need to be so ‘oriental’. Ram, for all his familiarity with British culture, feels confused that he could be anything else. Ram has been invited to dinner by the family of his old headmaster; in Egyptian (and Arab) tradition, he ought not to visit someone empty-handed, and the present is a sign of good manners, but it is also a sign of gratitude for the Dungates’ hospitality, and, politically interpreted, for their English hospitality in hosting Egyptians in Britain. Ram becomes an ‘oriental’ representative despite himself, a debt inherited from his culture, but by giving the flowers voluntarily and happily, Ram is also offering a gift of his own volition.

In Nervous Conditions, when the more affluent Babamukuru visits the reserve, he brings presents to his family. The gesture lies in the spirit of Christian benevolence and charity for the less able, but is also a development out of the traditional African extended family which entails that Babamukuru, as a more prosperous member of the family, ‘owes’ something to the less fortunate, usually numerous, family members. Babamukuru’s benevolence is a moral debt or obligation that is resonant of his acculturation in two cultures, and his family receive the gifts too, with the understanding that their impetuses, and economic means, come from inside and outside Africa.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tomas likens the fortuitous chance encounter with Tereza to Pharaoh’s daughter finding baby Moses in the Nile. Tereza, symbol of the European civilisational Testament, is then obviously a bestowal or a gift. It is, however, also a debt, a responsibility which Tomas must take up and pass on, or else it becomes, as the title of a subsequent book by Kundera puts it, a ‘testament betrayed’.

How can these ‘gifts’ and ‘borrowings’ be interpreted in a critical idiom? Literary ‘gifts’ taken by one author from another or adopted by one culture from another as part of the process of cultural encounter offer readers and critics chances to read into these encounters a ‘locus of negotiation’. “Even a single work of world literature”, Damrosch writes, “is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures” (What is World Literature? 282) One of the key reformers of the modern Arabic Renaissance, Taha Hussein (1889-1973), calls this negotiation of gifts and debts, influences or traces: achieving ‘equilibrium’.

This study has argued that one of the objectives of expanding the list of world’s classics and masterpieces should be to read the engagement with the ‘Other’, whether embedded within the text, language or local culture or evident in market transactions, circulation routes and reader reception. The study has posited that even though there is ground for Postcolonial theory and World Literature theory to diverge, both, under or alongside the umbrella term of Comparative Literature, have aimed for a “global comparativism” (Mufti): that is, a wider and more representative discussion of the literatures and languages of the world in order to bring about or at least consider stronger bonds between cultures. Towards these ends, the constant vigilance to the minor or less-apparent Other in texts and cultures, and a critical position on the power structures that support literary and cultural systems have been part and parcel of the adoption of a wider, transnational view to letters. The consideration of the Other underlies the idea of contrapuntal reading, call-and-response cultural patterns, and the elliptical refraction of texts circulating between national cultures.

By comparing and contextualising a number of texts on or from different parts of the world, focusing on how individual protagonists resist the national imaginary often promoted by dominant political discourse, the study has compared different visions of the ‘transnational’ or the ‘nation-in-the-world’. All of these ‘international’ visions, which have been referred to as ‘supra-’, ‘cross-’, ‘global’ or ‘everyday’ nations, and despite their respective differences, rest on the reluctance of individual protagonists to be transcribed under a certain dominant and popular identitarian umbrella. Instead, these protagonists see themselves as belonging simultaneously, both intentionally and inadvertently, to local communities and to trans-local communities, particularly since their formative conditions are made up of local and trans-local forces.

Hence, resisting Nasser’s politics and concurrent (anti-Nasserite) political discourses in Egypt in the 1950s, Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club constructs a ‘cross-nation’: a private, intimate vision of different Egyptian communities more ‘real’ and sustainable than Nasser’s state. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being counters the totalitarian state of Communist Party rule in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic during the 1960s-70s by depicting a powerful European ‘supra-nation’ as the political and historical imaginary suitable to guide the Czech people into peace and prosperity. He dismisses a self-sustainable independent Czech nationalism as destined to die by its small size and location between larger, often hostile powers.

In the same time, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Women’s Journey from Cairo to America and Tstitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions reject the political affinities propagated during the struggles against the British in 1950s-60s Egypt and 1970s-80s Zimbabwe, respectively. The novels posit a wider transnational imaginary as a proper platform for political empathy. Drawing on the ‘global nation’ embodied by core feminist values, the protagonists strive for a worldly national consciousness based on global solidarity and equality of women.

Finally, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land resists the sectarian violence (and national strife) in modern India and Egypt. The travel narrative counters the prevalent discord between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between Jews and Muslims in Egypt and the Levant by constructing the parallel relations between India and the Middle/Near East in the twelfth century. Ghosh excavates the historical documents of mediaeval Jewish communities found in the Geniza storehouse in Cairo, and builds on the canon of early travel writing in Arabic to construct an ‘everyday nation’, the lives of traders and slaves, pilgrims and warriors, and others who go unrepresented in the main narratives of history, and whose interactions continue uninterrupted despite the political violence of empires and states, rulers and parties. By positing an ‘everyday’ ‘nation’ Antique Land questions official history and state discourse, revealing the large numbers of un-narrated people who travelled across borders. It erases the constructed separating lines between disciplines by showing how History is also written in the personal diaries and letters of travellers. It blurs the lines between religions that push people to sectarian violence by showing how religions have shared beliefs and rituals, and questions the idea of a mono-directional (from West to East) linearly-developing modernity that posits entire regions and communities of the world as unchanging, caught in a warp of time, or ‘antique’.

All these ‘transnational’ visions stress the importance of affiliation as an intentional action to be undertaken by parties who may have exchanged gifts or are, consciously or unconsciously, in each other’s debt. To acknowledge that culture exchange is always happening, that texts are always somehow travelling, is to acknowledge that contrapuntal reading is an implicit negotiation of a gift or debt, both an examination of the cultural ‘ties that bind’ of predecessors, as well as an examination of the historical and political contexts by which these ties –giving and taking, offering and imposing, acquiescing and resisting– take place.

Challenging Homogeneity, Again

As mentioned in the Introduction, many of the moves to revisit the ‘Other’ horizons of Comparative Literature’s founders by theorists of World Literature have found it useful to recognise that the global aspirations of Comparative Literature’s key figures and their motivations to aspire to new international boundaries stemmed from the writers’ own positions as ‘Others’ or their knowledge of ‘Other’ cultures, including Goethe, Auerbach, Wellek, Posnett and Etiemble. Highlighting the Other as an active participant in world culture-making also makes it imperative to shed light on different concepts of World Literature theory appearing outside core countries, and to use them in discussing texts that belong by now to a ‘universal’ readership. Like the scholars located in Europe and the US, it is important to take notice of what might have motivated critics in ‘other’ respective times and spaces to consider a comparative or ‘international’ approach to literature.

In order to return to the problem of homogeneity, seemingly following from using one critical language to reading texts, and in deference to what I see as the mutual objectives of World Literature and Postcolonial theory to decentre and to give agency to the previously ‘represented’, this chapter aims to conclude by looking forward. It aims to rise to the challenge of emphasising the work of Easterners as cultural theorists and moderators of cultural exchange by seeing how such theories may shed light on the analysis of non-Eastern texts. The chapter then will discuss the theory of World Literature propagated by the ‘Dean of Arabic Letters’, Taha Hussein (1889-1973), focusing on one article he published in English but also alluding to his output in Arabic and French, in order to examine what his work and life reflect on the five novels under discussion, and to sum up at the same time certain premises of World Literature as it has been discussed and understood in this study. Born to a poor Egyptian family and going blind at two, by the time Taha Hussein turned sixty he had become an erudite scholar of Arabic and French of world renown: Egyptian Minister of Education, founder of various institutes and Chairs for Oriental studies in France, Greece and Spain, and holder of two doctoral degrees and several honorary ones from around the world, including Oxford, Athens, Rome and Montpellier. Caught in the deprivations of the disabled and poor in Egypt, trained at the hands of key Oriental scholars and the French and Arab intellectuals of his time, and rising to privileged heights in his lifetime, Hussein knew more than most that finding a cultural equilibrium between national, often antagonistic, traditions was a supreme act of comparison, compromise and negotiation. Negotiation and equilibrium were, in other words, both an acknowledgment of a cultural gift, the power to bestow and the grace to receive (and then return), and a cultural debt, ¹⁸³ that is, the power to lend and the sense of accountability needed to acknowledge receipt.
‘Arabic Literature Becomes a World Literature’

In an English article published in 1955, and using the same self-assured tone he was famous for back home, Taha Hussein described for an American magazine (Books Abroad, now World Literature) how a generation of Egyptian intellectuals and writers had managed to ‘turn’ Arabic into a world literature. “The Modern Renaissance of Arabic Literature” reviews the thirty years from 1919 to 1950, illustrating how the “generation of 1900” had to work within strong political constraints to liberate Arabic literature from the chains of highly-formulaic prosody and turn it into a true ‘world literature’ of equal value to and in dialogue with other literatures of the world. As an exposé of what is now known as the modern Arabic nahda or Renaissance the article did a good if perhaps selective job, but it illuminated more strongly Hussein’s personal vision of the world cultural conversation underlying literary culture.

According to Taha Hussein the renaissance of Arabic letters at the beginning of the century was for better or for worse an intrinsic part of the political ferment of the time, particularly since many statesmen were also men of letters. From very early on intellectual debate was both triggered by and served to rouse political issues in Egypt, which would then spread to Arab countries and modify accordingly.¹⁸⁴ The battle between partisans of the sonorous classical school of Arabic literature, for example, and experimental modern Arabic literature would overlap with parliamentarian conflicts between conservatives and liberals or the religious establishment and secular thinkers.

As matters came to a head in one coup d’état after the other between Egyptian nationalists, the last descendents of the Ottoman monarchy still ruling Egypt and the British colonial establishment, Arabic literature underwent a thorough transformation that included the renewal of idioms and language, the appearance of new genres such as verse drama, theatre, novels and short stories, a huge expansion of publishing and translation from and into Arabic, and the emergence of a reformist critical opus questioning the ‘sacred’ dogmas of the Arabic tradition and calling for modernisation and innovation. The struggle against foreign occupation also gave rise to a huge related literary output: intellectuals issued articles, essays, books and poems, while those using popular dialect brought forth songs, poems and pamphlets.

Meanwhile educational reform enabled more Egyptian youth to receive solid training and come into contact with the wider world. Cairo University (founded 1908) enabled the systematic grounding in ancient languages –Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and modern ones –English, French, German and Italian. It attracted European professors from diverse countries –France, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, Spain and the Netherlands. It received students from around the world, from Morocco to China, and sent Egyptian teachers to teach in and found educational institutions in Arab countries. The government also sent Egyptian students on missions to Europe and America, and solid cultural relations were established between countries.

It was in this Renaissance, Taha Hussein argues, that Arabic literature was made once again into a ‘world literature’ after centuries of cultural isolation: “Thus, this generation, whose history I am trying to sketch broadly, will not only have given back to Arabic literature the splendor that belonged to it when it was at its epopee [sic], but will have begun to make it a world literature” [my italics] (14). What does it mean to be a world literature, or as Hussein puts it elsewhere in Arabic, one of “al-adāb al-kubrā” (Great literatures),¹⁸⁵ al-thaqāfa al-‘ālamia (world culture)¹⁸⁶ or al-thaqāfāt al-kubrā al-‘ālamia (great world cultures)?¹⁸⁷ Hussein offers a seven-step formula for world literature which makes it a creative and educational process and a literary criterion.

Expanding the National Canon

To be classified as world literature texts must undergo a process of translation, circulation and re-creation. In Taha Hussein’s description of how the short story, “novelette” (novella) and novel genres appeared and developed in Arabic, one can discern a pattern for the creation of world literature which would go as follows: (1) translation from a foreign language, (2) circulation, (3) imitation, (4) assimilation, (5) innovation, (6) canonisation, and (7) transmission/translation from the language in question into another language. Hussein describes the process over a couple of pages in his article (brackets mine):

The [Egyptian] writers…have thus to their credit the introduction of an entirely new genre in classical Arabic literature:…the short story, the novelette, and the novel….First, translations of Western stories were made [translation]; they were soon liked [circulation] and attempts were made to do the same in Arabic [imitation]. It was Hessein Heikal who first published…a novel….A special place [also] belongs to Mahmud Teymour; he began by writing novelettes and short stories in which it was easy to trace the influence of certain French masters, notably Guy de Maupassant [assimilation]; little by little his personality evolved and took shape about 1935-1940; then the novels of Teymour became the most authentic expression of Egyptian life in its commonplace aspects [innovation]….Since the end of the Second World War the novel has become the most important literary product of Egypt as well as of all the other Arabic countries [canonisation]. (13)

….

We have it [Arabic literature] translated or in process of being translated into several Western languages and, naturally, several Eastern ones, [translation] and this new phenomenon must be emphasized: Everywhere that Arabic is taught in European and American universities it is the texts of contemporary Arabic writers, especially Egyptian, which are being explained, commented on, and taken as models of style [transmission]. (14)

Over and above, here and elsewhere, this kind of cultural exchange is what Taha Hussein refers to as the process that makes world literature. World literature is in this instance a single global site of cultural exchange and production, and from there, a criterion for critical appraisal: both a gift, to be received gratefully, and a debt, to be returned. Even when he does not use the term ‘World Literature’ it can be assumed by reading Taha Hussein’s polemics that the aim of modernisation, innovation, acculturation (and those three words or ideologies permeate his life’s work) was to make Arabic literature a modern science of enquiry that would be able to move by the efforts of its nationally and intellectually liberated people into the sphere of world art.

Using this concept of literature as a criterion, Hussein judges the two ‘renaissances’ of Arabic literature. He compares the process of assimilation of Arabic, Greek, Persian and Indian cultures during the first four centuries of Islam to the assimilation of the modern European and Arabic-speaking cultures in the twentieth century, and concludes that the second period bore far greater fruit. In only thirty years, he writes, the Arabic-speaking peoples did more than their ancestors did in centuries: they created a fraternity in resistance, a combined struggle for political and intellectual freedom against religious dogma and foreign occupation, and still managed to pay homage to the extraordinary diversity of cultures between them. “Thanks to their persevering effort the Arabic language today draws on all the sources of civilization, Western or Eastern, ancient or modern” (“Modern Renaissance” 16).

Published after some forty years of working towards academic reform, Hussein writes the English article as a proud patron of Arabic letters. With the native subjects of his writings whom he knew needed to work constantly in a politically-turbulent world to be able to establish and (this time around) sustain a literary academy, his opinions were much less complacent. The need to modernise, educate, update, translate, etc., and the fear of cultural containment (and consequently literary decline) seemed constant. So in the prodigious works that reflect a lifetime spent attempting to remove the cobwebs from the musty cerebral condition that was the study of Arabic literature, Hussein repeats this seven-step method almost like a mantra, consistently and unwaveringly stressing that literature cannot aspire to be great (world/modern) in isolation, without dialogue with other cultures –and the nation-state could be framework and mediator.¹⁸⁸

Thus the insistence in almost all his critical writings on the diversity that lay behind the first and second Arabic renaissances and the cultural historicity forming Egyptian culture. During the 8^th-13^th centuries the Arab-Muslim¹⁸⁹ invasions spread Islam over a huge area and merged myriad indigenous peoples, cultures and languages, creating new levels of linguistic and textual hybridity. Hussein argued that the respective singularities and inter-dialogues of such indigenous cultures (merging through more or less the same seven steps) made possible the ‘golden age’ of classical Arabic literature in a way that did not and could not have happened at a time of cultural isolation. ¹⁹⁰ In the modern Arabic Renaissance, classical Arabic heritage (with its initial diversity of sources) mixed with modern Arab and Western languages and cultures to prompt a new renaissance as prosperous as the old.¹⁹¹

As a natural corollary to his theory Hussein argued that the surest way to bring a literature down to a degenerative limited, localised level would be to separate its peoples from the outside world and to cut off dialogue: cultural isolation posing a natural anathema to world literature. Drawing on Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s argument (whom Hussein had heard lecturing in Cairo), Hussein likened the process of cultural isolation and subsequent literary deterioration forced on Arabic letters by Ottoman and Central Asian invasions to the European ‘dark’ ages which had been brought on by the Mediterranean impasse between antagonistic Muslim and Christian empires (Future of Culture 8-9).¹⁹²

Hussein’s call for the absolute need for ‘foreign’ knowledge was where his detractors accused him of beating the Western drum a little too strongly. The insistence that Arabic literature at the height of the Islamic Caliphates and even, horror of horrors, the sacred text itself had needed to be Hellenized and ‘foreignized’ in order to be ‘great’ was too much for the conservatives. Moreover, the too-fine line that Hussein drew between ‘homogenization’, ‘imperialism’ or ‘universalism’ on the one hand and ‘dialogue’ on the other made the idea of ‘merging’ slightly suspect for those whose literatures have had a history of being swallowed, silenced, dismissed or, at best, ignored, rather than gracefully merging –one of the fears expressed today towards World Literature in its recent re-emergence.

Yet while Hussein a-politically glosses over the means by which such ‘merging’ happens, the sword or the cultural centre, he stresses that an interactive compendium of cultural influences is necessary for literature to flourish. Inasmuch as he found positive such events as Napoleon’s expedition to/invasion of Egypt and admitted that ‘foreign’ (colonial and missionary) schools gave the best sort of education,¹⁹³ Hussein also refused outright the idea that Arabic culture or the Meccan-Arabic language was ‘foreign’ to Egyptian culture, and often spoke lovingly of the distinctive nostalgia of the desert that lay at the essence of Arabic literature (ironically of a broad region whose ancient civilisations have settled for millennia near the lush valleys of Iraq, the Nile Delta and around the ports of the Mediterranean). If he wrote gratefully and welcomingly of the spread of the superior science of European letters through European colonisation, not, one would imagine, the most soothing argument to hear for peoples caught in the struggle for independence from those same European colonisers, Hussein also glorified the cultural debt bequeathed from the military invasions of the Islamic empire. At his most outrageous public hour, if he declared that certain religious narratives were invented for practical political concerns,¹⁹⁴ he did remove the statement from the subsequent edition of the book, and steered clear away from such sensitive issues for the rest of his career. Finally, if, influenced no doubt by the primary two cultures of his own learning, Hussein had echoed one time too many the classicist European and particularly French tradition in his own critical appraisal, he consistently insisted on the urgent need for literature and littérateurs to absorb a multiplicity of cultures, a position which also clinched the ‘international’ incentives of ‘resistance in interaction’ (Boehmer Empire) between Egypt and the rest of the colonised world:
A country which wanted to be really free must not give her spirit solely to one rather than to another of the numerous foreign literatures. Quite to the contrary, this country ought to welcome all forms of civilization and culture, lend itself to absorbing all literatures and all ideas, wherever they may come from. (“Modern Renaissance” 10)¹⁹⁵
According to World Literature theorists then, including Hussein, to respond to expanding networks, World Literature requires appropriately expanding the foundational texts of all national canons. This is partly manifested in the importance given to acculturation and formation beyond the national paradigm in the five modern works chosen in this study. The search for new experiences and fresh material for self-acculturation (literary and otherwise) in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Beer in the Snooker Club, Nervous Conditions, A Border Passage, and In An Antique Land pre-empts the individual protagonists’ journeys, and is the underlying cause for the action. The development of the protagonists’ formation is part and parcel of the protagonists’ actions of defining the nation-state, assessing and critiquing the performance of national leaders and locating the protagonists’ own positions as fictional citizens or members within the imaginary collective.

The five works are also directly preoccupied with literary cultivation and canons. The protagonists’ experiences stem directly from their ability to read the world they live in from a comparative and therefore intelligent perspective. Tomas, Ram, Leila, Tambu, and Ghosh the narrator are all at least bicultural and are familiar with several literary traditions, and so even when they ‘narrate’ the cultures of Zimbabwe, India or Czech Republic, they use a multicultural, inherently comparative understanding of these cultures.

All characters too, resort to analogies from the literary corpus as a shared referent for which to render experience. In the article which gets Tomas into political trouble and overturns his life, he asks whether the Czech Communists who had welcomed Russian influence in 1948 should hold themselves accountable, like Oedipus, for 1968. The life Tomas chooses to live is compared to a romance, giving him the role of either a Don Juan or a Tristan. For Tomas’s experience to become understandable, it draws upon a world of shared referents which, wherever they originated, circulated widely enough to make them ‘household names’, transcending national borders. The first step to a more worldly experience then is to widen these referents, to push back the parameters of the ‘national canon’.
Translating the National Canon

To bring forth cultural eclecticism and make diverse reading material available for his audiences, Taha Hussein started and edited a monthly periodical entitled al-Kātib al-misri (The Egyptian Writer) which would run for thirty years. Like many magazines at the time, The Egyptian Writer was issued in Cairo (and was available in large Arabic cities) to present a highly eclectic selection of literature and literary criticism from around the world translated into Arabic. Such magazines often attracted world famous contributors and enjoyed wide circulation among Arab intellectuals, many of whom, as mentioned before, were also statesmen, reformers and prominent social leaders. The preface to the first issue (1945) asserts that the aim of the magazine was a critical enquiry into everything literary with the aim of covering Eastern and Western literatures, old and new.¹⁹⁶ The ‘Programme’ stresses the importance of cultural eclecticism:

This magazine will present to Easterners their cultural output in a way that is strictly regulated by an unbiased criticism of Art and Truth. It will also present to them quality selections of the literary movements in Europe and America. It will not limit its attention to one [national] literature rather than the other, and it will not give preference to one culture rather than the other, but it will throw its doors wide open to all literary and cultural trends, wherever they come from, whichever peoples produces them, and in whatever language they are written. This is because science, art and literature are subjects that should be loved for themselves, and should be received as they appear, so the heart and mind can absorb what they want to absorb or renounce what they want to renounce, but may benefit from them in all cases.
Neither will this magazine give priority to one peoples over another, or one group of Arab writers over another…desiring to raise literature above such disputes that are provoked by people’s immediate practical concerns. [My translation] (‘Programme’ 3)¹⁹⁷

To produce world literature, then, the first steps were obvious: scholars or intellectuals had to throw the doors of literary acumen wide open, allowing the translation and circulation of as many literatures as possible. These diverse literatures must then be properly read, and if liked, cultivated and emulated, but in a way that makes one’s production not mere mimicry, but an innovative addition to the world literary heritage, and thus, worthy itself of being translated and sent out into the world for the cycle of World Literature to begin afresh.

Translation is a key to world circulation in many ways. Obviously it makes texts accessible to more readers and has always formed a large part of scholarly endeavour around the world. It has traditionally held a prestigious and important place in Egyptian history, prominently associated with the French campaign as well as Mohammed Ali’s modern state, but also playing a vivid role in scholarship in pre-modern times with the Alexandria library. In Arabic letters, political-educational establishments like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and the strong translation or Arabization practices (of Greek and Latin, Chinese and Persian writings) they encouraged, tend to be emblematic of literary prosperity. In twentieth-century North Africa and the Levant, magazines like Taha Hussein’s Egyptian Writer were important ways by which translated excerpts and serialised whole texts could penetrate the Arab markets, and indeed, most leading Renaissance figures were translators as well. Hussein himself published a number of translations with the idea that there were certain “world masterpieces with which Arabic must be enriched, even if the public is not prepared to receive them” (Cachia 182).

Accordingly, World Literature requires increased translation of works. The desire to translate certain texts indicated for Hussein the literary merit of the text in question and offered increased cultural value through wider readership, but it also presented a miniscule, text-level demonstration of his vision of world literature in practice. In an article on Khalil Mutran, for example, Hussein commends Mutran on having translated Shakespeare, Corneille and Racine as a practised poet, thereby managing to transcend the restrictions of authenticity (which sacrifices the poetic quality of the text) by poetic imagination. Hussein asserted that a play by Shakespeare which had been translated into Arabic by Mutran was in some sense a collaborative production. He held that Mutran had enriched Arabic literature with such translations not only by making the texts accessible to Arab readers, but also by paying homage to the overall poetic experience of the texts and their specificities, and therefore by making evident the inter-linguistic dialogue at play in any literary expression (“Khalil Mutran 2”).¹⁹⁸ The importance Hussein gave to translation and circulation has significantly rung true in his own autobiography, Days, which, translated into several languages and widely circulated, has often been claimed as “one of the [Arabic] books most likely to survive as part of the literature of the world” (A. Hourani History of the Arab Peoples 341).¹⁹⁹

There are two sides to translation considered here: translation as a market phenomenon, and translation as a creative and professional practice. Previously in each chapter, some discussion has been made to the translation and circulation of the five works discussed in the study. Yet there is another type of ‘translation’ at work in the texts, particular to multilingual writers, as they take great pains to ‘self-translate’ local experiences and phrases into the worlds of their creation, not, as some detractors of what is dismissively referred to as the ‘global novel’ argue, to ‘exoticise’ their works for the ‘global’ market, but to ‘go glocal’, that is, to bring the world (of the authors) into the text, undoubtedly for a global outreach, but also because despite themselves, multicultural authors are products of the polemics and cultures of several ‘canons’.

For all Milan Kundera’s portents for the doomed destinies of ‘small nations’ he makes a great point of giving lengthy digressions into the semantics of Czech words, or telling Czech jokes, thereby consecrating that which is most distinctive, and perhaps most sellable and likeable, about The Unbearable Lightness of Being: the simultaneous universality of its critique of totalitarianism, and the specificity of its ‘Czech’ experience. In the same way Tambu ‘translates’ something of Bantu culture, from the way traditional sadza is prepared to the respectful method of greeting people. Leila too recounts feeling confused at the constant nagging to eat that passes for hospitality in Arabic-speaking cultures in the same time as she self-consciously ‘translates’ or compares the use of the first chapter of the Quran to that of the Lord’s Prayer. Not perhaps knowing that the ‘global novel’ would be later considered ‘faddish’, Ram too, translates Egyptian jokes and proverbs and a line from one of the songs of Um Kalthoum, perhaps the most well-known Arabic singer of all time. Meanwhile Ghosh’s dialogues are all hybrid transcripts of English and Egyptian, with entire translations of mediaeval documents in Judeo-Arabic thrown in. World Literature then allows for translating the ‘national’ canon, both on the level of the text, by bringing the world to the reader, as well as outside the text, in the space of the market, by sending the text to the reader in the world.

Achieving Equilibrium in Space and Time

After translation and circulation in Taha Hussein’s theory comes assimilation or familiarisation, that is, educated or trained reading, and then (re)creation. Valuable literary creation necessitated striking a balance between imitation and innovation.²⁰⁰ Hussein held that artists must be aware of the work of both the ancients and moderns but should imitate or prioritise neither in their own production, allowing the work to develop its own distinctive personality. If, even by the very first step of translation, the efforts of the translator-intermediary shows through, then by the end product the author’s whole literary tradition and his own individual contribution must appear. In this manner an Egyptian man of world letters (and there should be no other kind) should write with what T. S. Eliot once called "contemporaneity", the spatio-temporal dimensions which Hussein defined as: Egypt’s ancient Hellenized-Pharaonic heritage, her classical regional Arab-Islamic heritage, and modern and contemporary culture of Eastern and Western nations.

Rather predictably, perhaps, given such weighty inheritance, Hussein’s most repeated, acerbic censure would be that a certain writer lacked knowledge of the world, ancient and modern, or aped one or either ‘tradition’ too slavishly, thereby failing to achieve this world literary fine-tuning (see “Kayfa yatajaddad al-shi‘r al-‘arabi” [How Arabic Literature is Renewed]). At the final balance the repeated injunction was to consider literature as a global site of cultural capital exchange between ancients and moderns, east and west, north and south. In other words, World Literature is an act of ‘contrapuntal reading’, ‘elliptical refraction’, ‘call and response’, or ‘double-mirroring’ of cultures across space and time.

This is precisely what this study has sought to show in the five works. In their resistance of predatory nationalist identities, the protagonists of the five works all refute a simple and formulaic representation by the loud political powers of the day. All protagonists insist on subverting and reformulating the political status quo by revisiting ‘national’ heritage and history, realigning the nation with larger, sometimes alternative, histories, and seeking alternative political definitions. As such, all the protagonists look to their historical past for rootedness, locate their national present vis-à-vis the situation of other peoples in the world, and offer alternative political and creative futures.

World Literature and the State: Diversity as a Basis for Dominance

Most synopses of Taha Hussein’s hefty and infamous educational treatise Mustaqbal a-thaqāfa fi misr (1938) or The Future of Culture in Egypt (1954)²⁰¹ describe it as an attempt to disclaim all of Egypt’s ‘regional’ allegiances except the Mediterranean one. In fact what the introduction (and only the introduction) actually does is locate Egyptian culture outside the ‘frail spiritual Oriental East’ and within ‘rational materialistic’ Europe, at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. The argument has a strong rhetorical purpose. Written shortly after Egypt had concluded a treaty of friendship with Great Britain and had been admitted to the League of Nations, the book carries strong nationalist overtones, and exposes an agenda for school education devoted to national Bildung.

Reacting to the urgent nation-building problems of illiteracy and lack of educational infrastructure in Egypt, Hussein’s introduction intended to spur Egyptians to action by using concurrent Orientalist power discourses. He argues that Europeans teach in their schools that Hellenized Egypt was part of the Western world and then in their imperialist foreign policy decide it is part of the East. He argued that Egyptian culture, in itself always distinctively Egyptian, had been influenced far more greatly by European cultures than it had ever had by the Far East. He refuted that there was any such thing as a ‘spiritual irrational Near East’, and argued that the only Near East he knew of was the rational one that had enriched Hellenistic and then European cultures; the place where three religions –Christianity, Judaism and Islam– had first appeared before travelling to Europe. Why, he asked, consider those religions ‘spiritual’ in the East and ‘materialist’ in the West? Islam had ‘Easternised’ Egypt inasmuch as Christianity, another religion from the East and of the same theological premises had ‘Easternised’ Europe. He ends by stating that the only difference between the way Europeans and Egyptians did things was time, and if there was any point for the Egyptians in gaining independence and writing a constitution, it would be to work towards instituting a powerful, progressive democratic and secular state. Forming less than ten percent of the book, the introduction seems to have been intended as a rousing prompt to push Hussein’s own agenda of revamping the entire nation-wide educational system; and he would often employ similar rhetoric elsewhere for any call for action. The point of this cultural relocation was less historical veracity and more nationalist resistance: a denial of the essential difference between native and coloniser.

Moving slowly through primary, secondary (middle to college) and university levels, Hussein’s organicist theory of education aimed to eventually produce, for those who finished the three stages, a cosmopolitan world scholar, meaning both a professional of world standard, and an individual aware of world cultural matters. Hussein advocated that the primary stage should give primacy to Arabic language, Egyptian geography and history so as not to destabilise students’ ‘national affiliations’. Through the secondary stage, however, focus should be widened onto the world, and students should be taught modern and ancient foreign languages. In order to avoid focusing on the two most prevalent British and French cultures, students should be allowed to choose which modern European languages they wanted to learn. Those who wanted to go on to university and become specialists would also need to choose an ancient language related to their subject of study.

One can see a linear progression here (the book was called the ‘future’ of culture for a reason). If there was going to be an Arabic literature, then formal or written Arabic needed to be kept a ‘living’ language to ensure some continuity of ancient and modern, that is, to guarantee that a rich source of (fundamentally diverse) traditions would be available for contemporary Egyptians to draw from. If schools would produce readers, scholars and writers who would eventually feed the academy’s pipeline, then the schools would have to teach and make accessible classical Arabic. If the literary academy would engage with world literature then schools would also need to teach foreign languages. If Egyptian literature would achieve high circulation then a whole support system had to be set up that included increasing translation to and from Arabic, financially encouraging writers and artists, guaranteeing freedom of expression and creating markets and cultural spheres of influence in Arab and non-Arab countries. Hussein’s description of the cultural transactions and assimilation that took place in the classical Arab age could have been stated by many an Orientalist scholar, not least by those who taught Hussein in Cairo University or Paris, but the educational agenda Hussein presented took the theory a few steps further in the agency it imparted to Arabic-speaking peoples to produce their own work on their ‘Orient’, the possibilities it generated for creating public individuals aware of and engaged with the world, and the scholarly impetus to move from a comparative literary practice of adab, or polite letters, to a comparative literary discipline. Ultimately, World Literature questions national homogeneity and exclusion but works within the framework of the nation-state.

Political power discourses in Hussein’s time could often be broadly placed in sweeping categories such as ‘nationalist’ Egyptian, ‘coloniser’ British and Turkish, ‘educationally and diplomatically’ French, miscellaneous ‘Orientalist’ (German, Italian and Belgian) or ‘alternative’ (Soviet and, later, American); and this reflects naturally in Hussein’s primary intellectual preoccupations, yet by drawing on the material available to him in Arabic and French, he could speak of contemporary events in Japan, quote a Hungarian author or condemn the caste-system in India and racism in the US. In his autobiography Days, the only non-Arab writer he alludes to besides his teachers in Cairo and Paris is not, as would be expected, any of the foremost French intellectuals that Hussein associated with as friends and mentors, but the “great Indian poet, Tagore” whom he meets at an evening of poetry in Cairo (Days 384). Invited to speak on the place of Arabic literature among world literatures at the American University in Cairo in 1932, Hussein began by saying that he would not speak of Indian or Chinese literatures only because ‘he knew little about them’ (“al-Adab al-‘arabi wa makānatihi” [The Position of Arabic Literature] 526). In short, and this cannot be stressed enough, for Taha Hussein literature simply meant “taking something from everything”²⁰² like he believed the best of Arabic literature to have done, from the “policies of the Persians” to the “wisdom of India” (Fi-l adab al-jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Literature] 21). It is testimony to his true world vision that despite the dominant East-West binaries creating Egypt’s political scene he still desired to widen the East-West encounter to a global perspective. From its specific location, World Literature seeks to bypass essentialist ethno-cultural entities.

From another angle, this tension in choosing between ‘modern’ and ‘antique’, to ‘take what is suitable and reject what is unsuitable’ from a certain culture, to be a ‘bridge’ or ‘crossroads between East and West’, embedded in the quandary of the need to emulate a foreign culture to achieve ‘progress,’ has been from early on a common, if sometimes suppressed, epistemological concern or disjuncture within communities that have suffered from colonialism. The fine epistemological line that any of those interested in cultural interconnections find themselves treading between ‘our’ knowledge and ‘their’ knowledge becomes a tightrope when these cultural intersections have been paralleled with military might and economic power, making ambivalent the difference between ‘compare’ on one hand, and ‘weigh and balance’ on the other, and throwing into stark relief the need to somehow validate the less powerful culture in order to effect a just comparison or assimilation. The idea of ‘balance’, whether it entailed political resistance or submission, or, more commonly, the attempt to find a third way using a little of both, has thus been central to the modern conception of world cultural intersections or dialogue in Arabic letters (and other Postcolonial as well as minor-culture contexts). Yet in arguing that the urge to find a ‘balance’ or ‘third way’ had always existed, Hussein made it an aesthetic norm, a cultivable national tradition –not only resistance, but independence, and not only independence, but individuality: the way of the world.²⁰³

This then, the idea that resistance and assimilation have always existed as part of the nation-state, is the nucleus from which Postcolonial theory and World Literature theory can be said to start. Perhaps one of the main reasons that Postcolonial theory as it rose was easily affiliated to Comparative Literature was that the writers and intellectuals of, or writing on, the postcolonial world either cannot afford to ‘ignore’ or have no inclination of ignoring the ‘Western’ tradition.

It is no coincidence that earlier, during liberation struggles, nationalist ‘reformers’ around the third world, even those who wrote in languages already with an established history of scholarship, debated how to practise ‘world’ literature, if not by that name. Many of such ‘reformers’ may not have been necessarily or solely inspired by Goethe, but like Goethe found themselves because of their particular places and times facing a wider reality of national formation, such as Tagore (1861-1941) in Bengal (see Tiwari) and José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) in Cuba (see Lupi). Caught in the balance between colonial resistance and international affiliation, such figures provided a global imaginary which asserted their own culture’s intricate relation with the culture ‘of the West’ (their right, to misquote Said, to appreciate Beethoven even if they were not German), but also their right to be heard even if they were not from a dominant culture or tradition of letters. Practising ‘world literature’ by reading and writing across borders and in translation, and debating world literary encounters was often part of modern nation-making under networks of empire. World cultural exchange, not without irony, frequently became a form of national struggle against cultural provincialism, political insularity, and both imperialist and self-enforced Orientalization. Precisely because of the national struggle for liberation, many reformers, comparatists or visionaries in postcolonial contexts had, in other words, all the reasons ‘in the world’ to engage with the Other.

Hence, while the five works examined in this study can be claimed for ‘postcolonial’ literature, they can also be claimed for World Literature. A comparative approach to local and trans-local cultures is inherent to the narratives, and stands as an expected result of the authors’ multiculturalism, but also stands as testimony to the authors’ intentional ‘balancing’ of various cultural, written and oral traditions: the Czech and a wider European culture in Kundera’s novel; Egyptian and Western European culture in Ghali’s novel; Egyptian, European and Islamic culture in Ahmed’s memoir; Zimbabwean, African and British culture in Dangarembga’s novel, and Indian, Arabic, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish culture in Ghosh’s travelogue. In the intentional juxtaposition of different cultures, of those of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, there is a strong effort to retain the structure of a sovereign nation-state but still claim a worldly, international attachment and solidarity.

If used to read texts contrapuntally, Postcolonial and World Literature theories reveal discrepant experiences of different cultures but not essentialist, oppositional and unresolved discrepancies. The protagonists’ journeys to ‘Other’ shores –whether to those of other cultures, or by different means such as exile or migration, or in the imagination, through books and art –only serve to reaffirm something particular about the protagonists’ own image and sense of accountability, societal assimilation and general well-being. Tambu and Leila’s local oral histories resemble the lessons learnt about in the great works of literature. The mediaeval writings in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic serve to affirm the possibilities, however exceptional, of tolerance and reciprocal respect between modern antagonistic communities in India and the Middle East. Ram’s disappointment in love and life is offered new possibilities in his alliance with Didi. Tomas and Tereza’s political aspirations and actions in occupied Prague can find a spiritual and physical rootedness in an Edenic countryside.

Reading Contrapuntally, Globally

This chapter began by suggesting that world literary dialogue could be expressed as a negotiation of cultural ‘gifts’ and ‘debts’. One can see, for example, in Taha Hussein’s writings, how intricately the ‘renaissance’ in which Hussein played a key role was linked to its political context, and how the political situation may have created an impetus for engagement in his writing that would not have otherwise existed (particularly in light of Hussein’s own suspicion of committed literature as modus operandi). If Goethe had written of world literature at a time when “there was, even within the domain of permissible public discourse, no German nation” (Pizer, Origins and Relevance 7), Hussein wrote at the peak of Egyptian nation-formation, and his pedagogical initiatives and literary criticism, from his Arabic language project to the occasional book review, were embroiled, frequently to their detriment, in the immediate nationalist issues of the time.²⁰⁴ Faced with the awkward problematic of creating a discourse which simultaneously resisted imperialism, constructed a modern national voice and envisioned a world cultural dialogue, Hussein had to recognise that some ‘world’ cultures were more equal than others, and so as part of the movement towards independence, his single world literary plane emphasised negotiation, balance, and reciprocity.

While it was imperative for Easterners to look to the West for acculturation, according to Hussein, it was as imperative for the West to look to the East: by both acknowledging the ‘debt’ of classical times taken from the East, and by returning the ‘gift’ of Eastern cultural interest in the West in modern times. In global times, World Literature intentionally promotes the movement of texts in multiple and reciprocal directions.

To affirm the importance of reciprocity, Hussein rejected the idea that cultural dialogue was a one-way endeavour to be undertaken solely by Arabic letters for its own betterment. Rather chidingly, Hussein expresses hope in “Modern Renaissance” that Arabic texts in translation would gain more currency, and that “this regrettable lacuna of the West will soon be overcome, to repay us a little for the warm interest we have always borne it” (254).

It is, however, in a French article, appropriately on Goethe, that Hussein uses a musical analogy faintly reminiscent of Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ reading and Paul Gilroy’s cultural antiphony to express his much-used standard of ‘equilibrium’. Goethe, argues Hussein, was ‘undoubtedly’ the first European who sincerely attempted with his Divan ‘a solid familiarity’ of East and West on a basis of equality. Refuting critics’ reductive tendency to measure the Divan’s ‘authenticity’ in line with the Persian tradition, Hussein argued that Goethe had aspired to be Persian or Arab with his Divan as much as he had aspired to be Greek with his classicist writings. Hussein stressed instead that the value of Goethe’s creation lay in how he had utilised a particular Eastern way of expression and had simultaneously drawn on his own German and European learning to articulate his individual genius, thereby succeeding in ‘removing distances and discrepancies and realising the integral unity in human thought’. In the respect and a-politicised interest its author bequeathed to the cultures of the Orient, the Divan symbolised more than an individual achievement in the history of a great man and marked a milestone ‘in the history of European literature’ (“Goethe et l’Orient” 185-95; “Guta wa-l sharq” 35-37). By looking to past and present, East and West, Goethe in his lifetime had achieved the ‘equilibrium’ of a ‘fine piece of music’:

Ibn Sina [Avicenna] disait: «Je préfère une vie large et courte à une vie longue et étroite.» Il eut ce qu’il voulait; sa vie fut aussi large, aussi variée que possible, mais il mourut avant d’atteindre la soixantaine; ce qui, à son idée, ne représentait pas un très grand âge. La vie de Goethe fut à la fois large et longue; c’est qu’il avait la qualité essentielle qui manquait au grand philosophe musulman: l’équilibre, et cela rendit sa vie aussi harmonieuse qu’un beau morceau de musique”. (“Goethe et l’Orient” 183; “Guta wa-l sharq” 35)
Since World Literature is created by achieving equilibrium, according to Hussein, it is a literature that is in constant motion, progressing in a ‘natural’ chronological or linear progress forward by acculturating its intellectuals or developing the nation in the Enlightenment tradition, but also creating a cultural expansion ‘breadth-wise’, constantly receiving and transmitting, being written, being read and being commented on wherever it travels around the world. World Literature is then a constant act of negotiation.

Thus, Hussein often celebrated the outward conveyances of modernity, perceiving them as a global salvation for literature by quite literally bringing the peoples of the world closer. Like the constant advances in technology today, modernity had brought, according to Hussein, speed and transparency to the world. It allowed peoples around the earth to exchange news and culture much faster, and increased the performance of printing machines so people’s immediate responses to events could be issued much more quickly and could be circulated more widely. Although, as he argues in Qādat al-fikr [The Leaders of Intellectual Thought], such advancement could have hegemonized local cultures and created a culturally-autocratic world empire ruled as if by Alexander or Caesar, what the printing press and improved means of communication had actually done was shorten temporal-spatial distances, allowing literature to proliferate and compete in diverse places all at the same time. “[Linear] Progress there still is, of course, but no longer does one genius, or one line of endeavor, or even one nation stand above all others” (Cachia 79).

In a ‘modern’ world, Hussein hoped that free democratic nations could produce cultural dialogue equally, on a single platform. Wishful thinking, crackpot optimism, a stab in the dark, part of the brief, secular liberal Egyptian honeymoon at the beginning of the century –whatever this opinion reflected, it is the same spirit with which Hussein welcomed the idea of a UNESCO office in the Middle East in 1948 with a suitably glocal metaphor of his own, also intended to depict a state of balance: “Here, then, is the salute of the West offered to the Orient, sincere and disinterested; a salute worthy of being joyfully received and truly appreciated…more especially as the Arab World is influenced by the civility of the Koran which says: ‘If you are saluted, answer the salute by a better one or return it similarly’” (“Taha Hussein” 7). In addition to being a matter of critical standard, then, a global comparative also appeared to be a matter of good manners or etiquette, or even social responsibility, of knowing how to give and receive cultural gifts and return debts,²⁰⁵ so as the text might truly be, in Damrosch’s words, “a locus of a negotiation between two different cultures” (What is World Literature? 282).

Whether World Literature is a process of translation, circulation and re-creation; an agora for dialogic national productions; a form of resistance to a politically-biased world market; or an individual’s way of Being in the world, in many ways Taha Hussein left behind a theory in practice and future questions to ponder. Yet Hussein’s own reception with local audiences after his death has been less than embraced. Rather than offer a vision of a crossroads between cultures, Hussein is seen to pose as a bridge for the dominant culture to walk over. Rather than a monument to national education, his Future of Culture has been critiqued for affiliating Egypt ‘too eagerly’ with (implicitly, indebting it too greatly to) Europe. Figures like Taha Hussein retain their places as fore-figures of the modern Arabic renaissance while remaining part of the class of intellectual black-skin-white-masks: shining the torches on the path to ‘modernisation’ as they shade over the harsher aspects of imperialist domination. At a time when predatory nationalist identities, such as religious fundamentalism and other ethnic-nationalisms, find global succour, Taha Hussein’s call for dialogue and exchange, for intellectual (and political) secularism seems like a very lonely voice. This is precisely why this is a good moment to re-read him, to question his limitations and to re-formulate his vision for the present. All this, knowing that “conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another” (Appiah Cosmopolitanism 85). By critically and constantly questioning one’s centre, one’s locus of affiliation, and by resisting ‘predatory identities’ that depend on exclusion and extermination, through an intentional and systematic widening out of perspective to the world, World Literature will be of this world (critical), about this world (global) and for this world (secular).

It is mainly in this spirit of ‘equilibrium’ between different parts of the world, between ancient and modern, and between individual and collective, that the ‘gifts’ given by Ghosh to Shaykh Musa, Ram to the Dungates, and Babamukuru to his family, or the influence of Oedipus and Beethoven, Nietzsche and the Old Testament on Tomas, or the educational scholarships and the world of reading offered to Tambu and Leila, can be figuratively read. To achieve literary ‘equilibrium’, World Literature requires expanding the idea of the national canon as some limited and unchanging list of ethnically-categorised works intended for the moral education of a select number of people. It requires translating the national canon, both on the level of the text by ‘going glocal’ and outside the text by translating and circulating it in a world market. It necessitates achieving equilibrium in space and time by looking to diverse cultural spheres of influence, attaining a balance between what one has been and what one wants to be; and resisting cultural domination (from within or outside a local culture). If the dialogue between cultures means negotiating gifts and debts to others, then reading contrapuntally globally requires, above all, retaining an acknowledgment of the Other, an indebtedness to the Other and a mutual interdependence with the Other, such as has been creatively manifested in the five works discussed in this study.