Deconstructing the Literary Symposium: Does Old Literature Need Activists?
Saikat Majumdar, speaking to Antiserious, critically breaks down questions raised during the literary symposium organised in Kolkata last December. Does the literary need activism?
1) You were part of a symposium on ‘literary activism’. Literature’s been around longer than you and I. It needs an activist?
Well, it’s a phrase that unravels in several different ways. There is the activism of the literary, where literature is itself the force of change. Literature, after all, is more of an act rather than a thing, as one of our speakers, Derek Attridge, has pointed out in his conversations with the philosopher Jacques Derrida. But this is not to say that people who love literature and who play a role in its making and dissemination cannot intervene in the public sphere as activists for literature, as we might do for nature or wildlife.
So is there a threat of climate change here? Yes. One thing we set about to disrupt in this symposium is the willed fusion of the language of commerce and criticism. A kind of dominant critical language has emerged in the last couple of decades or so, from the venues that were supposed to have an investment in literature as an art form: review pages of major newspapers, awards, academia — where literature that is aesthetically satisfying and is also commercially successful has become the default model, with very little attention going to anything else. In other words, literature here is synonymous with the novel, that can be marketed in this way, and that too the novel written in English (maybe at the most Spanish).The local and the global have also been brought together seamlessly in this new fantasy, creating, as it were, a sealed ecosystem of ambidextrous excellence. What about poetry? Drama? Even fiction of weird indeterminate length, like the novella — a publisher’s nightmare in this climate? These genres have fallen by the wayside, and so have novels which do not meet this globally portable, easily packaged idea of excellence — for instance, works that are stubbornly regional even though written in English.
Clearly, this aspiration of ambidexterous excellence is kind of bourgeois fantasy that has been effectively been realized by forces like the Booker Prize, which, by the way, makes no pretensions that it is the book version of the Oscars, red carpet, TV camera, the works. Many of our speakers spoke about poetry — Laetitia Zecchini about her work on Arun Kolatkar and her championship of the poet in France that resulted in the French translations of Kala Ghoda published by the leading publisher Gallimard; Amit Chaudhuri about the campaign he organized along with another symposium speaker, Peter McDonald, to get Arvind Krishna Mehrotra elected as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, a position that goes all the way back to early eighteenth-century England. Listening to the story of the Mehrotra campaign, I was reminded, a little bit, of Ralph Nader’s run for the US Presidency in 2000: the radical left, Green Party contender running not so much to win but to make a statement. This is true activism; sometimes the point is not to win, you know winning is a long shot, but the very fact that you throw down the gauntlet makes a bold and effective statement. Derek Attridge’s championship of the mixed-race South African writer, ZoëWicomb’s work, however, has had concrete results. Wicomb has become increasingly visible to readers outside South Africa over the years, thanks partly to Derek’s critical activism.
I, for instance, did my Ph.D. under Derek’s supervision and got to know Wicomb through him, and wrote a chapter of my book on world literature to Wicomb’s first collection, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Most recently, Wicomb was awarded the 2013 Windham-Campbell Prize at Yale, a major $150,000 award, for which Derek had nominated her. Does Wicomb need a critical activist to champion her? Well, she would have written what she has written, and the books would have still been there, published by important literary/activist houses like Feminist Press, and would be available for anyone who likes to seek out good writing. But it is also true that fiction operates in the marketplace where forces such as distribution networks and the advocacy of literary agents play a key role, and Derek mentioned, in passing, Wicomb’s stubborn avoidance of publicity and refusal to get an agent, while also talking about the consummate self-image management of J.M. Coetzee, another writer about whom he has written a lot. Coetzee, it became clear in the discussion, is something of a beautifully pragmatic image-maker even in his reclusiveness. At this point David Graham, the former managing editor of Granta and Canongate Books, commented that only a famous person can actually be “reclusive”; if you’re not well-known, being reclusive is essentially the same as being invisible! But conscious shrinking from publicity, I feel, is the least of the reasons why Wicomb hasn’t had the visibility she deserves. A reason that is at least as important is that her short stories and novels are resolutely local, rooted to the moisture and soil of Namaqualand and Cape Town. They cannot be marketed as the portable model of global bourgeois culture that some of the better-known novels can easily become.
So I see the main function of literary activism is to make a case for the re-fragmentation of literary value, across popular and critical, local and global lines. In this it is something of a polar opposite of say, the Booker Prize, the great totalizer of literary value into a single idea of the global novel. The diffuse, elusive, and idiosyncratic nature of literary beauty is lost under this forcibly universalized idea of greatness. It’s okay for value to be local and diffuse, even provincial, to refuse to be harnessed under a synthetic excellence that fuses commerce and criticism.
2) Are you prepping Literature for the market or do you want to take it elsewhere?
As the symposium’s mission statement says, there is always a market for things that are beautiful, funny or moving. You have to get them; for human beings they are as basic as survival. The question is where you choose to get them. People pay for aesthetic value all the time — in clothes and fashion, in home decoration, in the design of their cars, for culinary art. The question is: will they pay to get it through literature? That being said, we need to remember that all markets are not the same — in shape or kind or texture. There is a market, for instance, for poetry, which changes form radically as you move from the individual volume to the anthology to the textbook to poetry set to music and performance and distributed digitally. The market is not a single monolithic thing, as I imagine any marketing professional will tell us. Some markets need to be subsidized by the state, supported by pedagogic institutions such as schools and universities, as their value is not visible on the mass-scale like that of other kinds of consumer goods. They can also operate on market logic, but on a smaller scale, maybe regional ones.
3) Can literature exist outside the marketplace?
If you don’t want to sell to many, you need to sell it to one rich man (more likely a rich woman). The alternative to the market system is the patronage system, which is how the arts thrived before modernity. The rise of a middle class and the contingent spread of literacy created a market for written literature — a large number of middle-class buyers as opposed to a small number of wealthy patrons. But even with print literature, the patronage system has never really gone away. Kings and aristocrats have given way to the Guggenheims and the MacArthers. Outside of the free market and wealthy sponsors, the third alternative is the state: Sahitya Akademi and the Arts Councils and the National Endowment of Arts. And there are universities, which can fuse all these alternatives together. The market logic for literature has historically been supplemented with that of patronage and state sponsorship, as left to the Darwinian free market, it probably doesn’t have a ghost of a chance next to fast cars and video games
4) Is literary activism only for academics then?
Academia can play a far greater role than it has played so far. We live in a world where literature diminishes in public importance with the same intensity with which the university grows in importance. This growth is happening not in the arts and the humanities, but in business and STEM fields. It is hard to miss the historical irony. Just as the humanities were seeking to increasingly professionalize themselves as academic disciplines, the university was professionalizing itself on a far greater scale. As the twentieth century came to a close, the traditional core of the university had essentially shifted outside, to the professional schools.The shift is felt acutely at a school like Stanford, located as it is in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it is felt everywhere, and with an altogether different intensity in the rising economies of Asia. The programmatic professionalization of literary studies around the globe have made us too indifferent to the dialectic of the amateur and the professional at the heart of literature. Let’s de-professionalize a bit; that way, the humanities can stand out on their own terms against the inevitable tide of professionalization with which university education is now synonymous. The miracle of the literature is that de-professionalization takes one deeper into the very roots of literary thought. One of the most significant things academic humanists can do is to encourage the amateur humanist — deflect some of the energy devoted to nurturing the professional humanist towards the making of the amateur. Let’s face it — the world will always need far, far more engineers and business administrators than it will need professional humanists. But there is no reason why some — or many — of our doctors and engineers and finance professionals should not emerge from a more serious encounter with literature, philosophy, and history than the lip service paid in existing curricula. But for that we also need to keep our end of the bargain. As academic humanists, we should be able to suspend, from time to time at least, our investment in the professionalizing impulse of the humanities. So that the next time the proverbial nuclear scientist tells that studying literature is easy, anyone can do it, even as we feel exasperated, we also feel gloriously happy.
5) Is the “literary” synonymous with “books”?
In JM Coetzee’s quasi-fictional piece, “The Novel in Africa,” the African writer Emmanuel Egudu — once a novelist and now a speaker/performer — claims that reading is not a normal activity in Africa. It’s too solipsistic; its rewards are way too abstract. It is alien to African culture which is too deeply rooted in a robust and vital sense of community to care for the isolated act of reading, and far too tuned into the sensory to privilege the abstracted “pleasures” of the private consumption of books. No wonder, therefore, that it is a culture of orality, with oral storytelling its favorite mode of sharing stories. Coetzee’s masterstroke is the ironization of the claim. Egudu comes across as quite the poseur, an aggressive marketing genius, selling a delicious idea of Africa to wealthy elderly white consumers, as with the passengers of the luxury cruise where he delivers entertaining lectures. But his claim also leaves a sneaking doubt. Literature, especially if we think of it as a written form, is closely linked to the culture of modernity we inherited from the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, which was globalized by colonialism. Especially literature in the material form we understand it to be in — the printed book, the private act of reading, etc. — not the aesthetics behind it, which are richly contained in pre-modern, performative genres such as drama, oral performance, music, etc. Literature, of course, shares its essential spirit with these genres, but in its material form, it remains linked to this culture of modernity and print capitalism. This print culture of modernity is now undergoing a great transformation, which some would call a crisis — as a humanist working in Silicon Valley I get a direct and immediate sense of this. Inasmuch as literature as “books” is rooted in this culture, the crisis/transformation mostly affects literature as embodied in books. The spirit of aesthetics that literature contains is under no threat — it has simply migrated to other media. Antiserious has a great grip on the pulse of this migration. Inasmuch as this crisis or transformation affects print, this activism, I would say, is also about the literary embodied in print. But again, the most perfect embodiment of literature-as-print is the novel. Other forms, like poetry and plays have a deeper link with orality and performance and therefore bleed into spaces beyond print.
6) What do you think this symposium achieved?
It was quite an event. What I liked was the way Amit Chaudhuri, the originator of the symposium, had imagined this to be an alternative to the two commonly fetishized events — the litfest and the academic conference. For me it was a great homecoming, back to the Jadavpur campus and to bookstalls of College Street, which, alas, these days, only sell books for competitive exams. A favorite moment was the last session on the Presidency lawn lit up with holiday lights where the poet and translator Jamie McKendrick leaned back from the panel to roll and smoke one of his hand-crafted cigarettes — that would not happen in the PC world of academia, especially in the US, and no, not in Jaipur either. One of the best things about this symposium is that it brought together a wide range of constituencies that haven’t been speaking to each other as much as they should — academia, trade and small publishing, magazines, journalists. Speaking at Presidency, Rosinka Chaudhuri evocatively described the formation of a literary public sphere in nineteenth century Calcutta — where Michael Madhusudhan Dutt dreamt of the neighborhood bootblack and tea-seller debating the merits of his poetry, and it gave me shivers to think that it was happening right here — right across College Square. Jamie McKendrick spoke about the nightmare the Italian language could be to the conscientious English translator. Editors spoke from the frontline of literary activism — Anjum Hassan from Caravan, Chinmoy Guha, the former editor of Desh, and Benjamin Kunkel from n+1 joined us on Skype from New York, and I hope Antiserious and Northeast Review will speak at one of the future events on e-zine culture, where the most exciting activism seems to have shifted.
Writers come from all these spheres and more, and literature lives in all these spaces, and beyond them. One extremely important thing this kind of symposium can achieve is to have a real impact on young people, college and university students, and people of that age group. I spend some time teaching in Calcutta every year and I’m simply dazzled by the students — both JU and Presidency have a constellation of amazing young minds who are hungry for ideas, artistic and intellectual excitement. You can see some of that energy on social media. I’m hopeful this symposium will open some possibilities for them. And this is an invitation to academia and media to imagine an engagement with literature that is different from what the recent culture of global capitalism has given the appearance of inevitability. Academia and the marketplace can assume hostile indifference to each other, and sometimes good literature gets lost in this indifference. Symposia like these can help to renew such lost or damaged relationships and dissolve what are often false binaries. Arundhati Roy once said the figure of the writer-activist is a bit like the sofa-bed. No “cum” here. To seriously believe in writing today is to fight a kind of climate change.
Saikat Majumdar teaches world literature at Stanford University and is the author of a novel, Silverfish (HarperCollins, 2007), and a book of criticism, Prose of the World (Columbia UP, 2013). His new novel,set in the world of Calcutta theatre, will be published in May 2015. An early excerpt was recently published in The Kenyon Review.