It
is a well-known fact that the idea of a European literature became
widely accepted in Western academic
circles since World War II. For it
constitutes a kind of a substitute,
or an alternative to the all too
conflicting Western national literatures,
along with their self-images and
different periodizations etc.
This explains the enthusiasm with
which such books
as Erich Auerbach's Mimesis
(1946), Ernst Robert Curtius' European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages
(1948), and Rene Wellek's Theory of Literature
(1949), co-authored by Austin Warren,
have been received in the West in the
aftermath of World War II.(1)
All of these three books warmly plead for what
they call European Literature in
the singular ! Small wonder, then, that
these books, as well as their authors,
were perceived as propagating the
idea of Western unity in literary
respect. This is especially the case as
literature plays not a minor role
in forming the attitudes and self and
hetero-images of the various world
populations towards one another.(2)
This
process has been intensified in
modern times through the 'translation' of
literary works into audio-visual
productions which exert a huge influence on
the consciousness of people all
around the globe.(3)
To any careful reader it is apparent
that the three books mentioned above
have in common one main cause.
And that is their argument claiming that
there persists throughout history
something like a 'synthetic Western
literary unity', as Erich Auerbach
would have put it, or a common rhetoric
aesthetics of Western literatures
throughout the ages, stemming especially
from the Latin Middle Ages, as
E.R. Curtius would claim, and Rene Wellek
willingly confirmed.
Ernst Robert Curtius writes in his
foreword to the English translation of
his book, European Literature and
the Latin Middle Ages:
....
my book is not the product of purely scholarly interests,
(....) it grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western
culture.(4)
Despite this admission of a not
purely scholarly motive at work, his book
became no less welcome to Western
academics or to such well known writers as
T. S. Eliot, who hurried to cross
the German borders, once reopened in 1947,
to visit his friend Curtius in
Bonn. Curtius states further in his above
mentioned introduction:
(this book) is not addressed to scholars, but to lovers of
literature, that is, to those who are interested in literature as
literature (5)
For this very reason, Rene Wellek
became very interested, indeed, in
Curtius' approach which he absolutely
shares in his (and Warren's)
frequently quoted Theory of
Literature.(6)
As to Wellek, literature is one and
all. Almost the same is valid
for Curtius (with the difference that he
reduces it to a Medieval Latin,
Western heritage). Thus it's no wonder that
Wellek mentions Curtius' book before
that of Auerbach, even though the
latter was published two years
earlier. This all too obvious selective
attitude shows the special predeliction
and affinity between Curtius, with
his aprioristic, arch(e)typal approach
and his neo-kantian follower, Wellek.
This is reason enough to
dwell on their main concern, before going further
to discuss that of Auerbach.
Both Curtius and Wellek have in
fact two main concerns in common, and this
becomes obvious when they argue
that literature is timeless, even though
they would admit that it springs
from specific historical events. And when they,
in addition, assert that
what makes literature is its literariness (Literarizität)
,
that is to say its aesthetics,
which stands out above and beyond all other
factors. For this very reason they
stick to the philological study of
literary phenomenae, and analyze
motifs, rhetoric forms and topics etc. that
they regard as constants in Western
literary texts. These constants,
according to them, don't only constitute
an aesthetics of literature, but
also a common literary identity
throughout European languages and
cultures.
Curtius must have believed to have
found a decisive clue to the constants
that he claimed were the basis
of this identity when he came across Carl
Gustav Jung's theory of arch(e)types.
At the same, he insisted (especially in
his earlier writings) on the Latin
Middle Ages as their most essential
source. The following passage is
quite revealing, in this regard:
The congruence of testimonies stemming from such different
background makes it apparent that we encounter here an
arch(e)type, an image rooted in collective unconscious-
ness, in the sense that Jung had in mind.
(...)The centuries of Late Roman Antiquity (roemische
Spaetantike) and Christian Antiquity are full of visions which
frequently can only be understood as projections of the
subconscious. (7)
And further on:
The
anima, Jung tells us, is something we encounter
above all in the godlike sycygiae, the androgynous
godly couples. The sycygiae, on the one hand, reach
back into the darkness of primitive mythologies, on the
other hand they reach back into the philosophical
speculations of the gnostics and to Classical Chinese
philosophy (sic! M.Y.). It is possible to assert with
regard to these sycygiae that they are just as universal as
the existence of man and woman. From this fact we
easily reach the conclusion that the imagination is bound
by this motif, in such a way that it is compelled at all
places and through all times, to project again and again
this motif. (8)
The discussion of this very image,
the sycygiae (the text refers in its original German version
to the "goettlichen Syzygien, den mannweiblichen Goetterpaaren"), elucidates
very clearly Curtius' ahistoric
paralellisms and 'universalisms' and thus a
tendency which he shares with Rene
Wellek. Such an approach denies the
crucial significance of historic
socio-cultural specificities of literary
production and reception
- even though it admits their existence - while it
looks to man from an anthropologico-
philosophical angle and thus to
relative human cultural phenomenae
as absolute manifestations of abstract
qualities related to 'humanity',
such as happiness, luck, friendship, love
etc..(9)
To Curtius these 'commonplaces' regard Urverhaeltnisse des Daseins
(primordial conditions of (human)
existence), and therefore they are, to
him, timeless: some of them more
so, he cares to say, the others less.
Even though he attempts to be somewhat
cautious in all his generalisations,
he all the same idealizes human
characteristics while abstracting them from
their concrete socio-cultural contexts.
According to his approach, one could
argue for instance that youth (if
we are to take the example of the late
sixties) tends to be revolutionary.
However, while the youth in more or less
affluent Northern 'welfare states'
like France and Germany, protested at the
time against the Western consumer
society, their peers in the southern
countries revolted against poverty
and deprivation.(10)
This example
demonstrates that 'revolt' is not
revolt. It may help us to discern the
fallacy of the abstract statements
of Curtius drawing on C. G. Jungs
Analytical Psychology.
* * *
As a matter of fact, I have not
always been aware of the implications of
Curtius' or Wellek's position.
In a way, it was by chance that I became
rather critical thereof. Let me
recapitulate:
After three years of teaching modern
and contemporary Arabic Literature at
Cologne University, in which I
used to draw comparisons between the literary
trends and forms in contemporary
Arab and European countries, the Faculty of
Arts of said University decided
(in 1968) to 'widen' my teaching assignment by
renaming it Arabische Literatur
der Gegenwart und ihre Beziehungen zur
europaeischen Literatur (Contemporary
Arabic Literature and its relations to
European Literature). I
must confess, I didn't know then why the Faculty would
refer to my assignment as dealing
with Arabic vs. European Literature instead of
European literatures (in plural).
However, I kept on drawing my comparisons,
until I came across the works of
Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach in the
course of the early seventies.
By then, I had already left Cologne to teach
at Bochum University. Later on,
in the course of the conferences of the
International Comparative Literature
Association (ICLA) that I used to
attend regularly since 1967, I
came also to know Rene Wellek in person:
somebody who, unlike his follower
Horst Ruediger, will be remembered as a
subtle, though most decisive adherent,
if not apostle of so-called European
Literature. Since then, and especially
after becoming more familiar with his
writings, I became a critic of
the academically much propagated idea of a
presumed unity in Western literatures.
Meanwhile, this wide-spread idea of
the existence of 'a European literature'
revealed to me the fact that even
the institutions of science and
research, especially in our times, are not
free from the dominant ideologies
and vested interests prevailing in their
respective societies although this
is exactly what they purport to be!
Whereas Curtius' and Auerbach's
books became dominant after the Second
World War, within the philological
departments at Western Universities (where,
unlike Edward Said for instance,
I was not educated !), they were hardly
known to any specialist on
Arab philology or literary theory. Being an
outsider, I could see the fallacy
in their argument, that might often go
unrecognized in Western academic
circles.
* * *
According to Rene Wellek (in
his and Warren's book, Theory of Literature,
London, 1966, 3d edition, p.49),
the ideal of European Literature goes back
to the nineteenth century when
such
men as the Schlegels, Sismondi, Bouterwek and Hallam
pondered on it. (11)
However, while quoting such glamorous
names, in such a chronological,
diachronic order, Wellek doesn't
tell us why each of these thinkers dealing with
literary history became so
interested in the idea, or as he calls it, the ideal of a
European Literature, in singular.
Instead he firmly states:
one
must recognize a close unity which includes all Europe, Russia, the
United States, and the Latin American cultures (12),
and he adds further:
Happily, in recent years ( after World War II - M.Y.) there are
many
signs which augur a return to the ambition to general literary
historiography. Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and
The Latin Middle Ages (1948), which traces commonplaces through the
totality of Western traditions (...), and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1949),
a history of realism from Homer to Joyce (...) are achievements of
scholarship which ignore the established nationalisms and convincingly
demonstrate the unity of Western civilisation, the validity of the heritage
of classical antiquity and medieval Christianity.(13)
Needless to say that already Etiemble
(in his Essais de litterature
(vraiment) generale), was
critical of this new provincialism
claimed by Rene Wellek, and pleaded,
instead, for an openness towards all
world literatures, without which
a real general literature cannot be
established.(14)
However, a few years later, in 1982,
Horst Ruediger, the founder of Arcadia,
the first (West) German periodical
of Comparative Literature after World War
II, who was originally a professor
at the German department, with a
predilection for Romance literatures,
especially Petrarca's poetry, before
becoming a professor of Comparative
Literature at Bonn University during the
sixties, criticized Goethe's concept
of World Literature, and pleaded,
instead, for a more realistic regionalism.
To him:
World
Literature is not simply a General Assembly of the United
Nations. As in such an organization it makes no sense - thus Ruediger
-
when the vote of a previous colony, which has been only recently given
it's
independence, being void of any intellectual or economic resources,
equals that of a Superpower, or of a population with a millennial cultural
heritage (sic !).(15)
Happily or unhappily enough, Ruediger
unveiled what Wellek would have
prefered to keep as a discreet
consensus with his eurocentric fellows. Of
course, from a restricted, philological
point of view, this appears to concern
only a metatheoretical aspect
of Ruediger's and Wellek's approach.
But if we ask for the social functions
of cultural products or, in other words,
their concrete socio-cultural role
within interactive processes between producers
and recipients, we will have to
admit that the implicit, eurocentric, and in fact
hegemonistic tendencies discovered
are not without importance. Rather, they
may have contributed to the considerable
weight that these authors and their
books were accorded. I have
already briefly touched upon the fact that it was
the period of the late 1940s and
early 1950s, that is to say, a period
connected with a specific social
and political climate when the books in
question by Curtius, Auerbach,
and Wellek were published. Is it really their
theoretical profundity that explains
their success, or did they in a fatal
way answer a felt need at the time
- a need, that is, which corresponds to
such other 'needs' as the unleashing
of the Cold War, of Mc Carthyism, and
the foundation of the forerunner
of N.A.T.O.? However this may be, the
acclaim accorded to these books
is perplexing. But my experience in Bonn and
Bochum showed that the trend was
still very much alive, twenty years later.
Having so far attempted a rather
general assessment, regarding some
disquieting trends and characteristics
shared by the authors here dealt
with, let us now come back to Curtius:
* * *
Curtius, as we have seen, bases
his theory of European Literature on the
commonplaces (topoi) deriving from
the arch(e)typal symbols of the Latin
Middle Ages that he thinks to encounter,
once and again , in the literary
works of European writers. Being
in favour of an anthropologico - philo-
sophical approach which looks for
the so-called constants in human
inventions (he was a member of
the philosophical circle along with Erich
Rothacker, among others, at Bonn
University during the early thirties),
Curtius looked for those constants
in European literature, as he calls it.
Apparently, he was convinced
that he could detect them in what was for him
a certain recurrence of the symbols,
themes and rhetoric forms of medieval
Latin in the literary inventions
of modern and contemporary European writers.
Implied is a concept of heritage;
in fact, a rather static, ahistoric heritage,
consisting of a reservoir or Fundus
of items. Already in the early thirties he had
an argument with the Nazi ideologues,
before German fascism attained power,
with regard to the question of
the cultural heritage of the Germans.
Instead of relying on the limited
resources of myths and legends in Germany,
as the Nazi's cultural policy tended
to, he enthusiastically pleaded for an
inclusion of the rich mythology
of ancient Rome, thus to consolidate and
back up the German Geist or
spirit, more conventionally referred to as 'the
German mind.' I think the
word spirit is semantically much closer to Curtius'
mystic approach than the word mind
is (see his collection of essays
entitled Deutscher Geist
in Gefahr (German Thought [or rather: spirit] in Danger),
first published in various German
periodicals, and then republished in book
form in 1931 and reprinted in1932).(16)
His
suggestion, though, of having
recourse to Medieval Rome or, as
he calls it, Romania instead of Germania,
constituted quite a secondary contradiction
between him and the Nazi
authorities, which let him hold
such a key position as head of department of
Romance studies of Bonn University
throughout the thirties, till the end of
the World War II.
After the war was over, Curtius
resumed his endeavours. He did so, however,
by widening his proposition to
encompass all European literatures, instead
of focusing only on Germany, and
he did so by claiming that their
arch(e)typal commonplaces, which
would constitute their identity, are to be
looked for in Ancient Rome. As
I pointed out, the success of the reception
of his theory has been tremendous
in the West, especially since the late
fourties, after he published European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
in 1948.
Until 1982, the number of reviews
devoted to his writings in European
languages alone, reached four hundred
and thirty-six.(17)
And that is
astonishing enough, as his rather
subjective and mystic thesis (claiming to
be philological) hardly sustains
any rational examination. For it is an
already widely accepted finding
of intercultural research that in the course
of any reception process, the received
cultural element has to match the new
needs of the receiving culture
and thus will be transformed in terms of the
different structural contexts.
Therefore, it is not the received element
that really forms the receiving
one, but rather the other way round. Apart
from this, it would be really a
sign of its impoverishment if we had to deal
with a Europe, in which the present
could be reduced to the past, either as
a national myth, or as an imagined
epitome. Any rigid fundamentalism
wouldn't be, I am afraid, far from
it. What matters after all is the mark
that the receiving culture leaves
upon what it receives, whether it be
national or alien. And this is
certainly true in the case of Medieval Latin
mythology. Here lies the real creative
contribution. The question of
identity is nevertheless a complex
one. It could be referred to, regarding
its relationship to the past, as
a historic subject, as Hegel would have
said, thus calling up or rather,
invoking the past to support the demands of
the present. This kind of selectivity
which consolidates identity is
affected or governed (thus
not to say, determined) by the synchronic
context through which it is received.
I have already shown that E.R.Curtius'
theory of European literature is
chiefly based on C.G.Jung's theory
of arch(e)types. The problem with both
theories, Freud's Psychoanalysis
and Jung's Analytical Psychology, is that
they stem from the premises that
the present is controlled by the past.
However, with a difference: the
relationship: present/past is predominantly
causal, and therefore rationally
recognizable in the case of Freud, whereas
in the case of Jung it cannot be
accounted for, as it transcends the
rational, thanks to a kind of a
mystic, collective symbolism. Both theories,
Freud's and Jung's, deal with therapeutic,
mostly pathological cases. The
treatment of such cases focuses
on the necessity of reversing this
neurotic, or occasionally psychotic
relationship to reality: a past
dominating psychically the
present is to become a present that no longer
remains in the shadow of the past
[either as a repressed experience, as
Freud would say, or as an
unawareness of anima and archetypes, as Jung
asserted]. The theory of European
literature, as set up by Curtius, is based
on that causally unaccountable
past which stems from a pure mythology that he
claims is enriching and unifying
what he calls the European civilisation. To
him, such a Latin 'thesaurus' of
the Middle Ages would hold the Europeans
together and discern them from
other populations, thus giving them a special
identity, or an identity of their
own. Now, I wonder if not exactly this
attempt would lead to a new provincialism,
thus rendering the Europeans
paranoid, like so many other social
myths would do, e.g. masculinity,
superiority, and so on and so forth.
Fortunately, we haven't reached
that degree of provincialism yet on the
political inter-national scene,
where we now have a Euro-Mediteranean
cooperation project, called
Euro-Med for short, which is concerned about a
cultural cooperation of southern
European and northern African and Asian
countries and states located around
the Mediterranean.
Of course, Curtius' contribution,
despite its stark shortcomings, is not
devoid of pertinent insights. In
his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches
Mittelalter (European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages), for instance,
he is right where he regrets the
fragmentary study of the various European
literatures in Western universities
until the end of World War II. This
fragmentary division, he says,
would lead to a lacking of a Sinneinheit -
that is to say, a coherent unity
of meaning. (18)
However, I don't think he
is right in trying to work out what he calls
topoi (commonplaces) that are beyond
time and space (or rather, beyond
specific socio-cultural contexts)
and which still are claimed to be
essentially European, pervading
European literatures, according to him,
from Ovid and Vergil to Dante and
Diderot, thus to proof that a certain
unity is there. For how can he
prove that Goethe's drawing on Hafiz is
European and not Persian,(19)
or how are we to judge Hugo von
Hofmannsthal's attempt to imitate
1001 Nights in his story entitled: Das
Maerchen der sechshundertund
zweiundsiebzigsten Nacht (The story
of the six hundred and seventy-second
night)? Are they mystically
unified with Persian poetry and
Oriental tales or are they German and
Austrian writers of a specific
historical context in the first place? I am saying
here on purpose: German and
Austrian, as Hofmannsthal would rage
in his grave, had he been called
'a German writer', even though he was
writing in German! The same applies
to many Latin American writers
who write in Spanish and Portuguese.
They wouldn't accept, or
even bear the idea of being identified
with the Iberian literatures.
When I met the late distinguished
Brazilian writer and anthropologist
Darcy Ribeiro in 1973 (he died
three years later in 1976),
he was keen to tell me:
There's
no way that European and Northern American criteria
would be applicable to culture and society in Latin America.(20)
And the renowned Cuban poet and
critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar wrote
already in1975 that European criteria
either of the left or the right are
not in a position to assess Latin
American literatures, as :
they
(...) all, including the Russian figuratives, the
Czechoslovak structuralists, the Spanish
stylists, and the partisans of the Northern
American New Criticism, Barthes and his
disciples, and in a row: Lukacs, Caudwell and
Brecht (...,) spring from a specific literary
experience. There is no doubt that many of their
concepts have a validity that well surpasses their
applications, but there is no doubt, also,
that they directly spring from the sources that
gave them birth.(21)
Such statements must be astonishing
to us, as Rene Wellek, the main figure
in the American School of Comparative
Literature, (or as he prefers to call
it: simply literature), by
drawing on E.R.Curtius and Erich Auerbach,
considers Latin American literatures
as a part of what he calls 'European
literature'...
Instead we are forced to conclude
that belonging to one and the
same language doesn't necessarily
mean sharing the same
identity, nor even the criteria
of assessing the literary inventions
springing from different
socio-cultural contexts, as remote from each other
as Latin America is from Spain
and Portugal. It certainly would be
worthwhile to reflect, in this
context, on the relationship of Irish
Anglophone literature and English
literature, as well. Is the former just a
variety of English literature?
or are we to be aware of the fact that the
one is the literature of those
formerly colonized, while the other is that
of the colonizers?
However, in contrast with our insights
into the specificity of Brazilian vs
Portuguese, or Irish vs English
literature, writing in one of the European
languages was considered to be
enough of a criteria in order to be included
into what is called 'European literature'.
In 1993, a voluminous book of
1025 pages was published in French
in the series Hachette-Education under
the following title: Histoire
de la litterature europeenne.(22)
Its two editors,
Benoit-Desaucey and Guy Fontaine,
succeeded to get a hundred
and fifty authors writing
in European languages and hailing from
various continents (in fact, from
countries as different and as culturally
remote from each other as
India is from England, or Macao and Ghana from
Portugal and France), to contribute
to their book while claiming not to be
eurocentric, even though they were
trying to prove the 'validity' of the
idea of 'European Literature'.
The editors of this book think that they
escaped eurocentrism by organizing
such an international demonstration in
favor of what they believe to be
a Western cultural identity. This is,
according to them, linguistically
founded in the languages used in Europe (I
wonder if Irish is one of them,
as there is no reference to it there! ) and
based on what the editors call
the common Greek and Roman legacy of Europe,
as well as the Jewish-Christian
and Northern European heritage. If we are to
take just the first argument referring
to the Ancient Greek and Roman
legacy, we only need to have a
look at Martin Bernal's book Black Athena
(1987) to find out that both the
Greek and Roman culture were heavily indebted
to Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian
models.(23) However,
I'd apply the
same criteria I used above to Bernal's
findings, as well. No matter, how much
the old Greeks and Romans may have
'borrowed' from the Ancient Egyptians,
for instance, they still changed
(in the process of acculturation) that
which they borrowed in terms of
their different socio-cultural and societal
needs. So, it's not the emitting
culture, but the receiving one which is at
stake. It is obvious that in contrast
to the approach chosen by the
traditional French School of Comparative
Literature, this approach goes
exactly the opposite way.
* * *
But let us come back now, to the
above-mentioned French book compiled by
Annick Benoit-Dusausoy and Guy
Fontaine: What they regarded as "a worldwide,
open 'European liteature'"
- ascribing to it such renowned writers as
Borges, Ben Jelloun, Naipaul, and
Carpentier, even though they are not
Europeans but writers in European
languages - reminds me of the story of the
Irish whisky in the U.S.A.. The
Americans used to drink and admire Irish
whisky until a ban on alcohol was
put in effect there during the second
decade of the 20th century. However,
when this ban got lifted, the Irish were
busy fighting for national
independence. Meanwhile, the dealers trading in
Scottish whisky hurried to take
the place of the Irish on the American
market. And in order to propagate
it, they declared themselves ready
to pay one penny to every writer
for every appearance of the word
Scottish, or Scotch in his or her
text, no matter in what context. In the end, they
succeeded, with the help of public
relations, to have the term Scotch pass as
a synonym for whisky. And that
is how Irish whisky, even though so much older
and so renowned for its triple
distillation, lost its market. Now, after
having achieved what they aimed
at, there's no harm anymore to be expected
by speaking of the high quality
of Irish whisky. It is also whisky, and granted
a form of existence side by side
with the Scotch !
This reminds me, also, of Indian
cotton and silk products, which were very
popular in England, until India
was colonised by the British. The colonisers
then destroyed the Indian textile
industry and attempted to force Indian
consumers to buy British products.(24)
Subsequently, after Indian silk and
cotton cloth had lost its reputation
on the British market and its
productive infrastructure had been
destroyed, there was no risk involved, no
harm so to speak, in conceding
its high quality, as there is also no harm
in conceding that Hermann Hesse
was impressed if not influenced by Indian
spirituality or Artaud by Indonesian
total theatre, so long as 'Western
Culture' is still dominating worldwide...
* * *
I come now briefly to Auerbach and
his contribution to Western eurocentrism.
Erich Auerbach's method in Mimesis
is intuitive while dealing with texts; it
is thus quite close to that of
American New Criticism.(24)
By synthesizing what
he calls the Anschauungsweise
(the way of perceiving reality) in the
individual literary texts of so-called
European authors, he comes to the
conclusion that their Darstellungsweise
(or way of presenting [social]
reality), that is to say
the mode of (re-)presentation, diverts from the
former, while the Publikumssynthese
(the synthesis of the public) is
completely severed from the two.
This renders it impossible, thus Auerbach,
to recognize the social reality
the text mimetically refers to.
Realism or the mimetic strategy
of an author thus is tantamount to
inner-literary devices, or Kunstmittel.
The author, by implying them, refers
to an extraliterary reality, but
his writing practice as author, that is to
say, his way of perceiving and
presenting or of Anschauung and Darstellung
remain enclosed in the realm of
his mind and of the work of art it brings
forth. There is no way in which
we can deduce from the 'reality' which the work of
art unfolds, any traits of the
extraliterary reality. Literature does not
mirror reality; the strategy
of mimesis refers merely to an internal
process inside the autonomous literary
work of art - a strategy that has
evolved historically over time
(as Auerbach tries to show over 3,000 years of
time) from Greek antiquity to today
in, it is implied, a common or unified
European cultural context. The
paradox is of course that due to his tendency
to hypostasize phenomena, separating
them from their specific socio-cultural
contexts, the resulting history
of realism, or mimetic literary forms that
became Auerbachs raison d'etre,
his main concern as a researcher, turns out
to be an idealistic construct that
is largely ahistoric in character.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied
that in attempting to reconstruct the
audience, to achieve a Publikumssysnthese,
sociological categories are
brought into play. His insistence
that the reception process is to be
regarded as something totally separated
from the production process of the
literary work of art and tells
us nothing about the latter, does however
contribute not only to the concept
of an autonomous literature, placed
outside real, social history and
inside a separate history of literature
stuffed with recurrent devices,
topoi, and other essentially ahistoric,
unchanging phenomena. It is also
the reception process itself which, by not
being able, in his view, to interact
actively with a historically and
socially anchored literary production,
becomes a mere mockery of a
historically comprehensible phenomenon.
The insufficiency of his approach
becomes apparent in the following
example of Auerbach's methodological
approach:
In his illustration of his hypothesis
of the incongruity of the author's
mode of perception and mode of
representation and the total separation of
the two from the reception process,
Auerbach attempts to criticize, in his
study La cour et la ville,
Hyppolite Taine who claimed that the
recognition accorded to the Classical
theater in 17th century France was due
to the taste of the French
court at the time.(25)
Instead, Auerbach links the
success of the Classical theater
of the respective period in France, as
represented by Moliere's plays,
to a kind of alliance represented in the
ideology of the honnete homme
shared by that part of the French aristocracy
that had lost its land holdings
and was recruited by the king as courtiers,
royal secretaries etc., and
a section of the bourgeoisie that avoided the
risk of commercial enterprise in
an era of economic crisis and preferred to
have recourse to purchasing honorary
titles from the court which in turn was
more than happy to sell these nobilitating
titles to them in view of its
permanent need of funds.
Now, Auerbach's hypothesis
of a synthesis of the theater public united by a
common ideology - the Publikumssynthese,
as illustrated by this example -
elucidates his method which
severs the social reality or, (as I would call it)
the concrete socio-cultural context,
from the socio-psychological synthesis
of his public. In this, he is quite
close to the approach of the sociology
of knowledge, especially
to that of Karl Mannheim who also severs what he
refers to as soziale Schicht
(social stratum) from the geistige Schicht
(the intellectual stratum).
Auerbach's approach, that his disciple
Werner Krauss was critical of, led
Auerbach to an ahistorical reception
of literature throughout three-thousand
years of what he intuitively calls
European literature. To him, the 'unity'
of world literature stems from
its representation in the European
literature(s). Accordingly, the
unity of World culture is realized by way of
an ahistorical perception process.
To him, culture is a fully autonomous
nature, contrasted with society.
For Werner Krauss, literature and culture
have a relative autonomy, but all
the same they are dialectically related to
the societal processes. Thus, for
instance, he differs with Auerbach in his
interpretation of the ideology
of the honnete homme and sees it instead as
reflecting an alliance between
an impoverished aristocracy that was striving
to regain its lost economic and
political position and a bourgeoisie that
was looking for an opportunity
to attain political influence if not power,
though the initiative in this case
was taken by the impoverished
aristocracy. Therefore, according
to Krauss, there is a possibility of
recognizing societal processes
in the ideological predeliction to certain
literary and theatrical productions
in a given period of society.
We may sum up as follows: It is
impossible, in the view of Auerbach, to
look through mimetic literary works,
in order to see the mimicked or
imitated (an extraliterary
reality, as it were). For the literary work of
art is considered to be completely
autonomous. For his former disciple and
theoretical opponent, Krauss, it
makes sense instead to speak of its relative
autonomy. Which is to say that
the literary work of art reflects in a
mediated way social ideologies
and relationships. For Auerbach, this is
absurd and absolutely not the case.
The realism of literature is an immanent
or 'inner-literary' phenomenon,
an invention of a reality which exists only
inside the respective work. How
the recipients relate to this 'inner-literary'
phenomenon (the reality depicted
or constructed in the work) tells us
something about them, rather than
about the work of art. In starting out from
the work of art instead of the
recipients, Auerbach maintains that it is
impossible to know extraliterary
reality or any of its aspects by knowing
the literary work. The analysis
of the public, on the other hand, tells us
something about the public and
its ideology or ideologies. Both aspects,
audience (public) and ideology
are separate, in Auerbach’s approach. The
ideology of the honnete homme
is a common ideology per se, whereby the
different social situations of
its adherents can not be recognized as
process - but only as status
quo. For Auerbach, the socially anchored
ideology is the expression of a
status quo. For Krauss, it amounts to a
process, and a dialectically one
at that, as there is a conflict. It is
contained in the constellation
of the impoverished courtiers (Hofadel)
which link up with the bourgeoisie.
Thanks to the fact that this conflict
existed in French society at a
specific time and that, in mediated form, it
entered into the work (of Moliere,
for instance), affecting the way it was
performed, it becomes possible
to recognize and understand the gestures of
the theater and their historical,
social significance in their reciprocal
interaction (Wechselwirkung) with
the public.
Typical, then, of Auerbach's
view is the notion of the autonomy of
literature. All literature, including
European 'realism,' to him is existing
in and for itself, allowing no
conclusions regarding a reality outside
literature. The writer or poet
imitates reality (mimetically), but the way
he 'perceives' reality and depicts
it has nothing to do with the 'imitated'
reality. In so far, there is no
mirroring of reality (Widerspiegelung). The
gap Auerbach maintains to exist
between both is in its own way as profound
as in the case of Plato, who maintained
a corresponding separation
between phenomena or
mere images (the representations of ideas) and the
heaven of ideas, that is eidos.
That literature relies on the mimetic
strategy and thereby gives a fictional
interpretation of reality is clearly
a concept that Auerbach borrows from
Plato, thereby applying Plato to
the supposed needs of an elite at his time
which was interested in emptying
literary realism (as well as realism in
the theater, in painting, etc.)
of its specific Realitaetsbezuege or
interactive relationship with a
changing social reality.
The indebtedness of European literature
to a Greek (and Roman) antiquity that
is implied is obvious. The connections
made between modern literatures in
Europe and Classical antiquity
are in a fundamental way more of an
ideological nature than real. Construing
the existence of a European
Literature informed by antiquity
is tantamount to bestowing the honor of
seniority, of ancientness, of being
filled with the wisdom of old and
permanently valid philosophies,
artistic devices (Kunstmittel), and even
values on it. In the
last analysis, it denigrates non-western literatures
lacking the renommee or nobilitation
of a Classical heritage. The linkage
of literature qua European literature
to a supposedly unique and
unsurpassed antiquity delivering
once and for all the decisive model (or
mimetic strategy) makes all other
literatures pale, or look as if of lesser
value. They are at best, proto-literatures
- related to today's Western or
European literatures and their
Classical precursors like the 'ape', in
Darwin's theory of evolution, is
related to man. Unless, of course, the
literatures of other continents
are indebted to Western literature and in
fact descendants or a brain
child of the same. This ideological view which
is completely unaware of Non-Western
contributions to world literatures, can
treat non-European modern forms
of the novel or the theater only as
influenced by the West. The supposed
cultural supremacy of the West is, to a
considerable degree, theoretically
based on thinkers like Auerbach and his
reception and reinterpretation,
that is to say, ideological construction of a
mimesis theory that
defines literature as autonomous and rejects all
literary forms that deliberatety
try to intervene in social conflicts,
throwing them into the hades of
non-literary forms of expression.
As far as Auerbach's humanistic
approach of abstractly overcoming real
separations between (European)
literatures is concerned, it denies their
specificity and concrete, social-culturally
relevant way of interacting with
recipients in specific historic
contexts. It furthermore restricts this
(ahistorical) unity that is equivalent
to what Hegel would have called an
empty abstraction, to European
literatures. This is a trait that makes it
only the more plausible to discuss
his contribution in a context where we
also deal with Curtius and Wellek,
as proponents of eurocentrism. As far as
the challengers of eurocentrism,
like Said, are concerned, their partial
affinity (or shall we say, recognition)
of Auerbach is puzzling. Thus, it is
perhaps interesting to note that
Auerbach's concept of 'cultural unity' was
already foreshadowed by Giambattista
Vicos Principia di una scienza nuovo,
translated by Auerbach as Die
neue Wissenschaft. Ueber die gemeinschaftliche
Natur der Voelker (The new science
and the commonly shared nature of
populations) and published
in 1924,(26)
whereas Said actually mentioned during
a lecture at Cairo University that
he translated an article by Auerbach from
German into English.
* * *
Said identifies himself with Auerbach,
who declined to accept a chair at
Leipzig University after the end
of World War II, offered to him by his
previous disciple Werner Krauss,
and who preferred instead to emigrate to the
U.S. without having been offered
a job and without any resources. He had to
share a room in a students dorm
with his son who was studying there, until
people who cared for his work got
to know about it and he was finally
offered a chair. This fact demonstrates
very well Auerbach's reticence if not
aversion towards socialism.
Said, on the other hand, even though living in
the U.S., makes use of Marxist
thought as an instrumental frame of reference
in his criticism of Western Orientalism
and cultural imperialism. Unlike
Pierre Bourdieu or Juergen Habermas,
with his concept of the colonization of
the Lebenswelt (in
other words, of the ambiente of our lives, the milieu
de la vie quotidienne),
Said could not elaborate a theoretically coherent
interpretative approach to the
phenomenon he intended to criticize.
Therefore his 'criticism' was moralizing
(not to say superficial) so long as
he was founding it on the same
subtle eurocentric approaches shared by the
theorists of European literature.
In a televised interview with him, (by
Richard Kearney), Said concedes
from the very beginning the existence of
European literature and culture
without recognizing the ethnocentric
provincialism it implies.(28)
What he seems to be against is only the flagrantly
racist attitudes in the discourses
of some Western orientalists. In other
words, such attitudes as do not
need much intellectual effort to be unveiled
and which certainly would not be
shared by critical European scholars like
Etiemble. But to my mind, the real
task of a researcher is rather to
consistently unveil the subtly
ethnocentric, ideological discourses that
would otherwise be hardly recognizable.
Said occasionally accepts things at
their face value, taking them as
what they appear to be, rather than
subjecting them to a critical analysis.
This is obvious for instance where
he hails Senghor's theory of negritude
as a noteworthy contribution while it
is in fact imagologically based
on the ethnocentric one of Leo Frobenius
which maintains a dualism of French
rationalism and the German speculative
mind.
Senghor, who stayed in France during
the Second World War, clearly became
influenced by the conservative
and schematic approach of Frobenius.
He drew on it to give rise to a
'new', compensatory consciousness of the
politically liberated, though economically
and culturally dependent Senegal
while reiterating the same stereotyped
ideas of Frobenius. Instead of the
image of Deutschtum
or Germanitude (that is to say, German-ness}, he
inserted a romantic self-image
of Africans, as adepts of the soul (his image
of negritude or Africanicity)
while the Westerners appear in his 'theory'
as clear-cut rationalists and calculators.
For this accomplishment of
borrowing from the ethnocentric
self and hetero-images of Frobenius, Senghor
was awarded a distinguished
prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Said initially referred to the
theory of Senghor here discussed with much
sympathy if not enthusiasm, modifying
this view only later, after having
been confronted with my criticism
and that of Wole Soyinka.
Even though trying to materialize
a specific socio-cultural approach to his
subject of hegemony and resistance
that he deals with both in Orientalism
and in Culture and Imperialism,
Said at times naively falls back into the
lap of abstract idealistic claims
(such as Etiemble's littérature
universelle) and the
psychologistic philological generalizations of
Curtius, reiterated by Rene Wellek.
By and large, Said's approach,
even though critical and materialistic
in some aspects, is largely
ecclectic. It is above all where
he becomes philological that his analysis
falls short of what one would expect
to see accomplished.
To me, literature is not mere words.
For one thing, the level of words
(whether spoken or written) as
that of gestures is an important aspect, and
we should be well aware that even
on this restricted level of analysis, the
vocabulary and syntax of a language
are ideological. But of course,
literature is more than the written
text, or its performance, in the case of the
theater. We should not fetishize
its Resultatcharakter (quality or character of
being a fixed result). Literature,
as a human production, is in the first
place an interactive one
- it is a process situated within society. And as
such, as interactive process, it
is either in the service of the dominant
social relations and therefore
reiterates its illusions and ideologies of
absolute or functional stability.
Or else, it is seriously critical of the
dominant, widely propagated illusions
and delusions. Therefore, to me there
are no constants in literary productions,
whatever they seem to draw on or
borrow from, whether it be local,
national, or alien legacies... Literature
is only possible in terms of a
changing process - even when trying to
conserve the status quo, as it
does very often to resist the critical
approaches demanding change. In
other words, the so-called constants of
literature are permanently on the
move in a historical process, either in
its focus, or deflected away
from it, until it perishes...
Said's criticism of Orientalism
and Cultural Imperialism is impressive
enough. However, his drawing on
and acceptance of the subtle eurocentric
approach of the theory of European
Literature (propagated by Wellek and set
up by Curtius and Auerbach) renders
him susceptible to, and in fact makes
him a victim of, the same
ideology he sets out to combat. And that is
objectively accomplished by reproducing
the same ethnocentrism he so
conspicuously abhors. For once,
he concedes the image of Western literary
and cultural unity - something
he explicitly and implicitly referred to on
several occasions, which in turn
leads him to perpetuate the hetero- or
contra- image of a fictional 'Orient.'
Both of his major works - Orientalism,
and its extension, Culture and
Imperialism - appear
as more of a moral criticism of eurocentrism. Both,
however, appear to me to fail in
so far as they do not surpass the
methodological and epistemological
background of eurocentrism. On the
contrary, Said overtly expresses
his consent with the theory of a (unified)
European Literature and Culture
(the superiority and character as a model
for all literatures and cultures
is implicitly contained in the approach of
Curtius, Auerbach, Wellek, and
others). Whereas I think that his job could
have been that of unveiling its
subtle racist and exclusive character
while calling, at the same
time, for a real world literature based on free
interaction between literary inventions
worldwide, without any
discrimination against any of these
from an ethnocentric, so-called European
point-of-view or perspective.
Said does not dig deep enough in
order to thus recognize the epistemological
fallacy of the argument for a so-called
European Literature. He bases his
own argument, instead, on the same
theoretical premises of Auerbach and Vico
(whom Auerbach translated in the
1920s), and he went even further to suggest
to his fellow Arabs that they look
for a unity of their cultures à la
Auerbach (and his ideological
construct of a unified European culture). Such
irrational, mystic endeavours existed
and still exist in the Alawite
Baathist Pan-Arab claims which,
however, never went beyond the stage of
providing a kind of rationalization
for the elitist and despotic aspirations
of their ruling party, within a
one-party-state.
In the course of the mid sixties,
I got acquainted in Bonn with Zaki
el-Arsouzi, a leading Bath philosopher
who obtained his degree in philosophy
during the 1930s in Paris. El Arsouzi
presented to me his writings, among
them his linguistic theory claiming
that the Arabic language, unlike the
European languages, is not etymological.
According to him, it is originally
derived directly from the sounds
of nature. Thus, according to him, the
phonemes signifying the term
flowing canal water, in Arabic hadir, were
directly derived from the natural
sound of flowing waters. Interestingly
enough, the entire Baathist (or
Rebirth) ideology is a response to the
Ottoman annexation of the Iskenderun
governorate (i.e., gouvernement or
Liwaa) which belonged
to Syria when it was part of the Fertile Crescent.
Thus, it is a concrete historical
experience which gave rise, in a given
socio-cultural context, to an irrational
ideological phenomenon, a backlash
phenomenon, in the Syrian case.
The desire for a mythically unified culture
of all Europeans or all Arabs (typical,
for instance, of Baath or
Alawite ideology) is in fact
such an irrational, idealistic response
to a concrete irritation. The great
Chinese realist writer, Lu
Hsün, by creating the figure
of Ah Q and satirically describing the Ah Q
syndrom of powerless, unrealistic
ressentiment, springing from the
experience of Chinese humiliation
by Western powers since the First Opium
War, has tried to produce an insight
into the underlying psychological
mechanism. Both those Europeans
which, in the wake of Nazism and in view of
the incipient Cold War, hypostasized
a European Literature and Culture, and
the Arabs whose aspirations, as
Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, or Egyptians,
remained frustrated after 1947,
can be said to have tried to compensate for
something that had escaped them
- by inventing a cultural unity which de
facto did not exist. They both
share something in this respect - but with a
difference: The European proponents
of European Literature, in the tradition
of earlier European colonizers
and philosophers of superiority, claimed
universal validity for what they
saw as their cultural model. They equate
their model of pretended
cultural European unity with
universalism, universal validity
of their cultural model, their literary
forms, their social values, their
socially relevant forms of dealing with
one another or of behavior
(Verkehrsformen), and so on.
If thinkers in Brazil, in China,
in diverse Arab societies subscribe to this
concept of Western universalism
and Western cultural unity, this, to my
mind, bares witness of the
factually existent, strong influence of a
particular, hegemonial culture.
And it presupposes, at the same time, a
capitulation to an unfounded claim
to universal validity, formulated by
thinkers and proponents of the
dominant, particular culture and, in fact,
several adhering, particular European
cultures, subjected to a greater or
lesser extent to a particular hegemonial
culture (that to some extent can
be identified with U.S. popular
culture, but also with certain technological
aspects and achievements), which
they conversely believe they can count as
theirs while sharing in its 'strength'
and influence and providing, they
may believe, its solid or high-brow,
classical foundations. A weak and
splintered Europe, teaming up with
the U.S. hegemonial power after World War
II, in fact existed in 1948 in
the form of junior partners - but their
self-defined intellectual 'elites'
certainly shared with their American
counterparts the belief that they
could look back to a glorious past which
still informed Europeans, it was
sometimes claimed, to a greater extent than
was the case in the newer American
mass society. We see here the same
compensatory mechanism at work
that prompted the weak and humiliated Ah Q,
in Lu Hsün's stories, to gird
himself with the consciousness of China's once
glorious five thousand year old
culture while taking the concrete insults of
technically and educationally superior
barbarians invading his country.
Many 'Third World' intellectuals
tend to forget that their effort should be
directed towards a regained
awareness and possible (re-)vitalization of
their specific socio-cultures.
And this not in a defensive and isolationist,
pretended return to
a so-called heritage (seen as something static, as a
thing of the past believed to be
of eternal and unchanging relevance) but in
a lively confrontation with present
cultural needs and at the same time
engaged in open and equal cultural
exchange processes with other cultures.
This struggle, attuned as it should
be to real needs of the population, must
not be conceived in elitist terms;
it rather should be about a real
democratization of these cultures.
That is to say, what this democratization
of culture would be about is a
real access to it for the subaltern classes
and thus, interaction with and
between these new, and culturally vital
recipients who will have to become,
even more than they are already,
cultural producers. Instead, many
'Third World' intellectuals - aware of the
cultural capital and social reputation
attached to the Western education
they have received - flock to the
easily available, seductively presented,
dominant cultural heritage and
what is accepted in it by an elitist majority
as the humanist heritage; sometimes
they may also succumb to its latest
outgrowths, like postmodernism
which certainly is such a fashionable
trend. This is the easy, the most
questionable way of asserting
cosmopolitanism, humanism, and
the like - but it implies a false
cosmopolitanism which denigrates
the contributions of the overwhelming
majority of cultures and
a perverted, that is to say, an idealistic
humanism that has capitulated to
the ideological dominance of the particular
U.S. culture, British culture,
French culture, or perhaps even German or
Dutch culture so many of them were
influenced by in their most formative
years. Needless to say, the postmodernist
critics of humanism are part of
the flock that subscribes to the
implicit or explicit thesis of the
superiority of Western culture.
It is from this reservoir that they take the
exclusive material they deconstruct,
or recycle. It is not by accident that
their proponents defend Western
universal values as self-righteously as
their Western humanist opponents.
Said, for one, has been exposed for years
to New York's intellectual
climate and is deeply imbued in U.S. culture.
And Said, in fact, is also the
first expatriate Arab to suggest
Auerbach's theory as a model for
an Arab unification in literary and cultural
respect.
It is perhaps interesting to note
that Said, in the Introduction to
Culture and Imperialism,
quotes a passage from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
which reads,
The
starting point of critical elaboration is the
consciousness of what one really is (...) as a product
of the historical process to date, which has
deposited in you an infinity of traces, without
leaving an inventory. (...)therefore it is imperative
at the outset to compile such an inventory. (29)
He shortly later notes,
All
of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and
in the United States, has been Western (....) In many ways
my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces
upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination
has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.
This is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center
of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the inventory
prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to judge, although I have felt it
important to be conscious of trying to produce one. (30)
In a way, Edward Said is positioned
between ideology and spontaneity. On a
theoretical level, his position
often appears to be idealistic. And still,
he turns materialist very
often when dealing concretely with concrete
aspects of the cultural phenomena
he researches. He reminds me, in so far,
of the Egyptian peasants which
insisted on having an Italian stage, even
though a progressive director tried
to convince them to establish their
theater on the basis of their rich
traditions of samir, instead. However,
when being confronted with the
Italian model of the theater, soon after the
performance began, they removed
the curtains and seated themselves on the
edges of the stage, while watching
the players, thus changing the whole
Italian stage to their original
form of entertainment. Said, in his literary
discourse, repeats the same ideas
of Auerbach and Curtius, regarding a
European Literature, and even at
the outset of his interview with R.
Kearney, he reiterates this position
- a position which reflects his
education in the West and the concomitant
acculturation process he was
subjected to. But then, of course,
he is able to sharply criticize, in
concrete contexts, the observable
examples of cultural imperialism and the
various attempts to assert
a global cultural monopoly of the West. And he
does so, for instance, by defending
(up to a point) the concrete examples
of liberationist energies he observes
as they surface, in terms of
sociocultural forms of interaction
of Non-Western populations, vis à vis
the hegemonial globalized culture
patterned on the model of American popular
culture.
* * *
In addition to Said, whose criticism
vis-a-vis Western cultural hegemonism
is a subdued and ambivalent one,
there is another figure that looked in fact
very critically at eurocentrism
in literary theory: I refer here to the
well-known comparatist Rene Etiemble.
In his Essais de litterature
(vraiment) universelle, a book of 350 pages,
he criticizes the narrowness of
the American School of Comparative
Literature, which - under the strong
influence of especially
Rene Wellek - restricted its attention
almost exclusively to Western
literatures.(31)
Etiemble pleads, instead, for widening the scope of literary
research (and literary theory)
so that it would encompass all the world
literatures, thus including, for
instance, those of the Middle East (with a
strong accent on Arabic literature)
and of the Far East, of South East and
South Asia (where Chinese, Malayan
and Indonesian literatures, Indian,
Pakistani and related literatures
(in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, etc.) would come
into focus).
Being critical of the traditional
French positivistic school of comparative
literature (comparaison n'est pas
comparaison), he pleaded for the same
philological approach R. Wellek
upheld in the U.S.A., citing Mallarme's
famous dictum that la litterature
n'est que des mots. (32)
But by committing himself to Mallarme's
understanding of literature, Etiemble
falls back into the lap of ahistoric
aesthetics, even when he claims that
the Arabic Moallaqat should
be included in a really universal theory of
poetry. His stance abstracts from
the non- and paralinguistic components of
literary invention, that is to
say, the socio-culturally specific conditions
of literary production and reception
and therefore, in the end, turns out to
be not much better than that of
R. Wellek.
Adrian Marino in his book, Etiemble
et le comparatisme militant, refers to
Etiemble as one of the harshest
critics, if not the harshest critic, of
literary eurocentrism.(33)
It
is true that Etiemble tries to open the literary
boundaries between nations. But
he does so by looking primarily for the
aesthetic dimensions of a
literary work - an orientation that stems from
his predominantly philological
perspective. In other words, Marino's positive
evaluation ignores the fact that
Etiemble's poetological research apparently
pleads for the same aesthetic,
philological orientation as the Neo-kantian
Wellek and his followers, such
as Ruediger. While I appreciate Etiemble's
massive support for non-European
literatures in the French media, foremost
in the Encyclopaedia Universalis,
in which he was in charge of World
Literatures, his poetological
research (which leads him to an affinity with
the American School of Comparative
Literature) needs a lot of revision.
In his Questions de poetique
comparee (Paris 1959-62), which is based on his
lectures at the Institut de Litterature
Generale et Comparee at the
Sorbonne, he is very critical
of the use of American-English expressions in
the French media, describing
it as a kind of submission to the language of
the New Rome of our times - a submission
that turns the worlds languages,
even its major ones, into
mere dialects vis-a-vis American English, just as
the popular romance languages of
another epoch were turned into dialects
vis-a-vis Latin, the dominant language
of Rome.(34)
My criticism of Etiemble's approach
is not devoid of solidarity, aiming in
fact to elevate his discourse to
a more coherent and consistent level. I hope
that this is not in the least diminishing
my real admiration for his
comparatist militancy, to use the
phrase of Adrian Marino.
Well before the prohibition of franglais
respectively of the use of English
in official French government correspondence,
etc., Etiemble was extremely
critical of a trend that he referred
to as Le Babelien, alluding to the
biblical narration of a Babylonian
linguistic disaster.
Etiemble's fight against the invasion
or intrusion of (mainly American)
English into the French language
today goes back to a date as early as 1959.
He then fought in his lectures
at the Sorbonne against what we called the
language of the multinational trusts
which bring into play their
dominance of the market or of certain
market segments and tend
to dictate their prices, as we
now see again in the case of international
oil corporations. Dictating their
prizes on the French market (or
local and regional sectors of the
same) was to him comparable to
forcing a terminology onto the
French language that was in no way adding
something productive, but was rather
an expression of asserting cultural
hegemony.
I understand this critique of American
linguistic hegemony over the French
language, as formulated by Etiemble,
as indicative of his sensibility that
in fact, words are not just words
but reflect social relationships, as in
this case the overwhelming political,
economic, military, and of course
media-based power of the U.S.A.,
of its government and above all its
dominant classes. This social setting
must not be excluded when we reflect
on the self-assertion of eurocentrism
vis-a-vis the rest of the World's
literatures and cultures.
Etiemble's fascination with what
once was called chinoiserie which became
apparent when he was tracing Chinese
influences on French literature and
culture in over a thousand pages,
is consistent with his attempt to overcome
eurocentrism. It is perhaps not
without interest to know that he taught
French at Alexandria University
during the early 1950s. After his return,
in 1957, from China and in 1964
from Japan, Etiemble deplored the lack of
interest in Chinese and Japanese
at French lycees. His enthusiasm for
Korean literature, especially Korean
folk-tales, is significant, as is the
attention he paid to Arabic literature,
both ancient and modern. I corresponded
with him in the late sixties and
the seventies, until the mid 80s in this
regard. And we met at the Sorbonne
in 1970.
In one of his articles published
in 1979, called Innovation? Feu
l'Europeocentrisme; ou feu sur
l'Europeocentrisme?, Etiemble praises the
Encyclopaedia Universalis
(under the editorial supervision of Claude
Gregory) for having devoted as
much space to Philippine literature, that
of Madagascar, and Malay literature
as to German, French, Spanish, or
Italian literature.(35)
As a French encyclopaedia, it devotes 25 pages to
Chinese literature, 14 to Japanese
literature, and 5 pages to French
literature.
Still, Etiemble implicitly and explicitly
held on to a very questionable
concept of constants or universals
in literature (as well as other, more or
less related cultural phenomena,
like the theater) that were thought to
transcend its socio-cultural specificity
which he perhaps never truly
perceived.
An example of this can be found
in his belief to have found a truly
international or universal language
in the expressivity (that is to say the
facial mimetics and the gestures)
of the famous French mime, Marcel
Marceau. However, it is apparent
that Marceau is by no means an
'international' mime, understood
internationally in always the same way,
regardless of the specific socio-cultural
context in which he performs and
is being 'received.' Gestures are
not understood in identical fashion
wherever they are used. In other
words, a man is not a man in all times and
places. The ahistorical abstraction
does not work. The commonplaces become
only common when they lack the
demystification of their myth. Even
arithmetic equations are, according
to E. Husserl, mental constructions,
that is to say, they exist in the
perceiving mind and not in the perceived
objects. The real task of critical
research is to unveil the illusionary
ideologies which try to either
suggest an exclusive elitist unity, or a
nivellating equality (and interchangability)
of human inventions, denying
their concrete specificity and
contribution tied to specific needs at a
specific time and in a specific
place. No, man is not the same man in time
and space... nor in his or her
production nor in the consumption contexts -
unless, of course, he (or she)
becomes entangled in the illusions tied to
certain, fixed ideologies. It's
the equalizing approach, presupposing an
interchangability, as well as the
elistist approach which in the end
reinforce the globalizing trends
of hegemonistic uniformity and thus, the
illusionistic unification of human
creativity, instead of helping the latter to
diversify, to grow richer in its
diversity, and to mutually fructify human
cultures.
It was Werner Krauss who pointed
out the contradiction between Etiemble's
critical practice and his philological
ideology. I think that this point
which Krauss made should be taken
serious indeed.
* *
*
Let me now briefly come to my critique
of Martin Bernal's book, Black Athena
(so often cited and hailed by Said).(36)
Bernal criticizes the current,
wide-spread notion of a Western civilization,
usually thought to be superior
to others, that derives its glory from the
Classics, being based as one thinks
it is, on Ancient Greece and Rome.
He philologically argues that both
the Hellenistic and the Roman
civilization were largely indebted
to major cultural inventions accomplished
in the Middle East, especially
in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Bernal
attempts to gather proof that Greece
was colonized by the ancient Egyptians
in an era preceeding the
migration of Hellenic tribes to the Greek
mainland and the isles. As the
Ancient Egyptians were dark-skinned, he
demonstratively chose the title
'Black Athena' to underscore their cultural
contribution that kept on echoing
throughout the Hellenic era.
Bernal's work provoked many reactions
in the West. And many scholars, like
Said, hailing from non-Western
countries, actually welcomed it. My
criticism of Bernal's approach
is epistemological: his diachronic approach
stresses the significance of the
emitting culture and of its cultural
inventions while downplaying or
ignoring that of the receiving culture, or
in other words, of those interactively
creative cultural producers in
Ancient Pre-Classical and Classical
Greece who appropriated these foreign
inventions in their own way, within
a different socio-cultural context.
Epistemologically speaking, Bernal
therefore does not surpass the
traditional eurocentric approach,
as it is typically represented by the
early French School of Comparative
Literature until the 1950s, for example.
This approach started with national
literary inventions and then tried to
follow them up, with regard to
their successes in foreign literatures and
cultures. The only difference between
this approach and that of Bernal is
that he reverses the direction
of the supposedly dominating influence: this
time it is the Middle East which
appears as the point of origin of major
cultural contributions, and Western
culture finds itself at the supposedly
passive, receiving end.
In sketching the process of
cultural influence, or rather, exchange, Bernal
abstracts from the crucial changes
that played a major role in the
reception process of
Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultural inventions
in Greece (and, mediated by Greece,
in the various European countries).
However, an approach that would
stress the objective socio-cultural
difference, not only between nations
but also in one and the same nation,
would lead to a real
alternative to the one-sided, diachronic,
authoritarian and ethnocentric
approach he unconsciously perpetuates, even
though his work is meant to surpass
and unveil the self-centered, mystic
illusions tied to the concept of
a common European cultural heritage.
At the same time it is obvious that
Bernal leaves unanswered another
question, which is, If the Middle
Eastern cultures were the real origins of
Western cultures, where do
we have in turn to look for the origins of
Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian
inventions? Are they, for instance,
derived directly from nature? The
suggestion is not as absurd as it seems.
As we have seen already, this is
exactly the way the Syrian Baath
intellectual Zaki Al-Arsouzi (a
disciple of Bergson) argued when dealing, in
his writings, with the question
of the origin of the Arabic language. But by
'naturalizing' cultural inventions,
we rob ourselves of the chance to
understand them as an outcome of
cultural, interactive processes, rooted in
specific socio-cultural contexts.
* *
*
I may briefly mention here that
Bernal's approach is not unique but was
paralleled, for instance, in Ireland
where, at about the same time when
Black Athena appeared during
the late 80s, a film was produced by the
Galway-based director Bob Quinn,
which was titled Atlantean. In this
film, Quinn argues that the origins
of Irish culture do not go back to the
Celts of Northern Europe but to
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. In his film,
he traces the cultural line of
Christianity from Cairo to Carrero, where he
lives now, on the shores of the
Atlantic. He is dressed in this film with
the hood of an Egyptian monk, thus
to symbolize the origins of St. Patrick.
Quinn wrote also a book titled
Atlantean
and subtitled Our (Irish) Middle
Eastern Cultural Heritage.
Now, this popularized, anti-eurocentric approach
with all its noble intentions of
identifying the Irish population with other
populations, marginalized by the
eurocentric hegemonic standards of today,
might be excused as being a mere
fictional and tentative account rather than
a quasi-scientific enterprise the
results of which could be expected to be
taught (if not preached) in Western
universities, just like Auerbach's
Mimesis or the books of
Curtius (except, of course, his Deutscher Geist
in Gefahr). And yet,
isn't it remarkable that Auerbach and Curtius in fact
do not accomplish anything else
than what Quinn has accomplished:
they invent a source, a fictional
point of reference, an imagined 'cradle'
and energizer of a present socio-culture
which (despite the differentiations
that any close scrutiny would show
to be necessary) they call 'European'.
Still, their works are acclaimed
as major, rational, scientific contributions.
It may have strengthened their
renommée that both seemed to
criticize the nationalistic provincialism
of Nazi Germany, which between
1939 and 1945 tried to germanize
Europe. But as it turns out, their argument
- both that of Curtius and of Auerbach
- is the expression of a new provincialism based
on the demarcation between what
they believe to be a common (in the last
analysis, superior) European heritage
feeding on a unique Classical Greek
and Roman culture, and other
cultures not as fortunate to be able to draw
on that indispensible, unique source.
In the case of Curtius, he is not
far from the Italian Fascist mysticism
that in its own way reactivated
the Roman heritage when he insists on the
relevance of a purportedly unified
European literature drawing from the
richness of the mythological
symbolism of the Latin Middle Ages. We notice
an affinity with Romantic theories
that influenced both the Fascists and
Ezra Pound. The conservative bias
of his theory is underscored when we note
the friendship of Curtius and Eliot,
who in turn had close ties to Pound and
who, shortly after World War II
(in 1947), visited Curtius in Bonn.
As far as Bernal is concerned, I
think it is clear that I take him, of
course, more serious than Quinn.
His attempt to challenge eurocentrism
certainly is legitimate and more
than welcome. The question is whether he
truly succeeds.
It is obvious that certain objections
have been formulated not only with
regard to Bernal, but regarding
E. Said and R. Etiemble, as well. Still,
their contributions should not
be taken lightly or seen as devoid of
scientific value. I'm certainly
not denying their importance as critical
thinkers nor their various contributions
in combating eurocentrism. On the
contrary, it should be clear that
what I have in mind is to formulate a
solidaire, and that is to
say, a constructive criticism that might encourage
them and their followers to formulate
their objections to eurocentrism on a
more consistent and stringent level.
Before I conclude this paper, let
me mention here, briefly, that apart
from the justifications of eurocentrism
that mainly prompted my criticism
and that we owe, above all, to
Curtius, Auerbach, and their disciple, Rene
Wellek, there exist of course other
attempts to scientifically 'prove' the
existence of a European Literature.
One such argument has been offered by
Prof. Vajda of the Academy of Sciences
in Budapest. He held the view that
European literature can be defined
by referring to that which other
literatures do no have,
namely the theater.
This is a challenging argument
that I am going to prove totally wrong in
another paper, The Problem of
Models in Contemporary Theater.(37)
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