I swear, Tim Parks' blogging for the New York Review of Books is getting more and more brilliant. Most recently, he questions the reading of world literature that, in emerging from a wide swath of geography and chronology, is tends to be unhooked from an understanding of the particular context of each book.
Or rather, the only relevant context is the human race, planet Earth, post 5000 BCE, circa. The stress will be on the essential and universal rather than the local and accidental; the subtext, as David Shields insists in a recent polemic on contemporary fiction in Little Star (excerpted here), that “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”
But does he? Or she?
Parks particularly positions this idea into the work of writers. He teaches in Italy, and his writing students have an exchange program with writers in England. Many that he tutors are learning literary translation, which makes this question of disembodied world literature particularly interesting. According to Parks, as young writers struggle to find their voices, "a style that might imbue what they write with a sense of necessity and urgency," he is reminded of the purpose that literary canons once served.
One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signalling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, along with the writers they drew on and the later generation they inspired, than to be mixing Chinua Achebe with Primo Levi. This is not of course a reflection on the stature of these writers—it’s simply an observation that many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.
I rather hope Parks does a part-two on this essay, but shifts from the vantage of writers on world literature and looks at the experience of the pure reader.
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