The Nobel individual

Paradoxes of 'interactional literature'

Tim Parks

A novelist is not famous today unless internationally famous, not recognized unless recognized everywhere. Even the recognition extended to him in his home country is significantly increased if he is recognized abroad.

The smaller the country he lives in, the less important his language on the international scene, the more this is the case. So if for the moment the phenomenon is only vaguely felt Anglophile cultures, it is a formidable reality in countries like Holland or Italy. The inevitable result is that many writers, consciously or otherwise, have begun to think of their audience as international rather than national.

One can get a sense of the mindset behind is development by considering the changing profile of translation on the one hand Id international literary prizes on the other. a writer is to be projected on to the world age, his work must be translated into a number of languages. If a certain amount of promotional hype is to be generated around a book, then the publisher will make sure that these translations are commissioned and completed in a number of territories more or less simultaneously and prior to the publication of the book in its country of origin. In this ay the novel can be launched worldwide, something that increases its profile in each separate territory. Translation thus becomes an all-important part of the initial promotion of a novel, which may well find fewer readers in its original language than in its many translations. Yet translators are becoming less rather than more visible. Few readers will be aware who translates their favorite foreign novelist, even though that person will have a huge influence on the tone and feel of every page.

At the same time, the number of international literary prizes and attention paid to them grows more intense every year. Endless articles speculate on the tortuously negotiated committee verdicts of a number of elderly Swedish professors choosing a Nobel winner from hundreds if not thousands of possible candidates, whose writings are read for the most part in translation. Often, one assumes, the judges have only approximate knowledge of these candidates' cultural backgrounds.

At one level it is generally agreed that literary prizes are largely a lottery and international prizes even more so. It will be evident that what happens when judges get together to discuss a winner is infinitely less complex and interesting than what happens when a creative translator sets to work on the text of a fine writer, at once deconstructing it and reformulating it in the entirely different context of his own tongue and culture. But it is the prizes that get talked about. Indeed, the larger and more improbable the prize, the more the talk and the more the credit extended to them.

What fascinates the literary community, no doubt, is the idea that someone is being granted the ultimate international recognition. The global space of modem literature is declared, and at the same time someone is crowned king of it. In an instant, as when a pope canonizes someone, the chosen writer's status is transformed and his work transfigured from contemporary to classic. This is done with exactly the same logic, the same authority, as when the Vatican decides who is to be among the elect in heaven: that is to say, with no logic or authority at all. Yet we hunger for such transformations because it is through the attention given to them that literary ambitions of the most extravagant kind are legitimized.

Conversely, the thought that a work of literature has been mediated by a translator, that it is not the real thing, undermines the notion of the supreme achievement of this Nobel individual, and above all, the idea that the writer and his writing are the same throughout the globe. Readers, wherever they are from, want to feel that they are in direct, unmediated contact with greatness. They are not eager to hear about translators. The writer wants to believe his genius is arriving, pristine, unmediated, to his readers all over the world. So the prize is important, while the translator must disappear. The translator must be reduced to an industrial process, or a design choice; he is on the same level as the typeface or the quality of the paper. If a translator himself or herself wins a prize it is because he or she has translated a major author. A brilliant translation of a little-known author impresses no one.

Thus the rapid internationalization of literature and the progress of an exasperated individualism are in strict relation to each other. "The supreme authority of the translator", Milan Kundera complains in Testaments Betrayed, "should be the author's personal style. But most translators obey another authority, that of the conventional version of 'good French, or German or Italian'." We are driven towards one international literature because in the imagined global arena the individual, unconditioned writer meets the individual unconditioned reader. Emancipated - or so they imagine - from the limitations of cultural and linguistic contexts, everybody can read everyone else on an equal footing.

The speed of the process has been astonishing. When I started writing in the late 1970s, one still thought of a book as directed towards a national audience. Today, a first draft, a first chapter, by Jonathan Franzen can be emailed to a score of publishers worldwide. And if, nevertheless, Franzen can continue to write in a traditional fashion and to address himself largely to an American readership, describing in meticulous detail 1 every aspect of American life that is only because America is very much the object of the world's attention. In a study I have been directing at IULM University in Milan, we have compared the number of articles in the cultural pages of major newspapers dedicated to Italian authors and the authors of other nations. The space given to America is quite disproportionate. American authors, far more than their British, French or German counterparts, need not make any special claims to international attention. No novelty is required. The opposite is true for the writer from Serbia, the Czech Republic or Holland. A writer from these countries must come up with something impressive and unusual in terms of content and style if a global audience is to be reached. Five hundred pages of Franzen-like details about popular mores in Belgrade or Warsaw would not attract a large advance.

The question arises then: what kind of literature is it that reaches an international public, surviving what is now an industrialized translation process squeezed into the briefest possible time and paying little attention to questions of affinity between translator and text (to the point that many larger novels are split between a number of translators)? To answer tills, it may help to remember the other great shifts in language use and target audience that brought about the literary world my generation grew up in. In her excellent book La Republique mondiale des lettres (2008), the French critic Pascale Casanova summarizes the main phases and transitions thus: first the period through the Middle Ages when writing in Europe was mostly in Latin addressed to a clerical elite, didactic and discursive in nature; second the switch during the Renaissance to the vulgate and the formation of Italian, English and French literatures, with French dominant and supposedly expressing universal literary values (the use of the vulgate brings an explosion of interest in common people and everyday life); third the romantic revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which followed Herder n thinking of literature as an expression of the genius of a people and its language, thus freed from the dictates of the French academy (all over Europe folk tales and aural traditions are dusted off and brought into print and many national literatures emerge, chronicling contemporary life); and finally the modem period in which individual writers resist the limitations of the national view, go into exile perhaps, deliberately undermine standard forms of discourse in their own languages, and in so doing inspire like-minded liberal elites in other countries.

Today's international space, then, as Casanova sees it, is created on the one hand through a rivalry between the growing number of nations eager to establish a literary prestige, promoting their poets and novelists internationally with the help of government institutions: literature here is understood as expressing the genius of a people - one thinks of the magical realist novels from South America, or indeed a book such as Midnight's Children - but its productions are only properly consecrated when translated worldwide, or, paradoxically in the case of Rushdie, when written in English. This literature is not, that is, addressed to the people whose genius it supposedly expresses and celebrates. If such a phenomenon can be traced back to Herder, it is hardly what Herder would have wanted.

And on the other hand, this international space is created by writers seeking to escape from the strictures of more established literary traditions into an emancipated transnational culture where the text can be "pure" again; they are seeking to repeat, that is, the mythical careers of a Kafka or a Beckett, but with an awareness, now, of the harvest of celebrity to be reaped in terms of international recognition by doing so. Rather than embodying the spirit of a people, this is a literature that tends to the existentialist, speaks of Everyman, not an Irishman, an Englishman or a Frenchman; and existentialism is necessarily a form of internationalism.

Summaries of this kind are woefully reductive. Nevertheless, one can hardly help asking: can the two tendencies be reconciled in a package that does not present insuperable problems of translation and can therefore be made swiftly available to a worldwide audience? Imagine: a writer, strongly identified with a particular country precisely because he or she is in conflict with its repressive authorities, produces a colorful, non-realist account of life there. The daringly deviant language of early modernism, its aggressive subversion of received values, so difficult to translate, is substituted by the lingua franca of literary special effects: intellectual tropes and extravagant extended metaphors, a fore-grounded literariness, oneiric elements of fantasy and fable, a shift of the narrative into the threatening future or the mysterious past: these strategies allow the now magically rather than realistically national to be available internationally. Above all, anything that would require a profound, insider's cultural knowledge to be understood is avoided, or shifted away from the centre of the book. The spark of social recognition that animates the language of a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym is gone.

No sooner has one conjured up such an identikit than it becomes easy enough to find faces that fit. One notes in passing that the recipe coincides with the need of the writer from the periphery to amaze if he or she is to draw attention to himself or herself on the world scene. His or her country is presented, one might even say exploited, as a fantastical place, not represented as it might still be in an American novel.

An editor at a Dutch publishing house remarks that if she wishes to sell the foreign rights of a Dutch novel, it must fit in with the image of Holland worldwide. An Italian editor comments that an Italian novelist abroad must be condemning the country's corruption or presenting the genial intellectuality that we recognize in different ways in Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco or Roberto Calasso. All too often, novelists from ethnic-minority communities find that publishers will only buy their work if it speaks about those communities.

We arrive at this paradox. However much you prize your individuality, your autonomy from your national culture, nevertheless you'd better have an interesting national product (ball and chain?) to sell on the international market. Rather than liberating us, the process of internationalizing literature reinforces stereotypes as, faced with the need to be aware of so many countries; we use a rapid system of labeling. And the faster the translator has to work, the more, you can be sure, the final product will be flattened and standardized.

TLS April, 2011