Thinking Literature Across Continents

Abstract

Botescu-Sireteanu reviews Thinking Literature Across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller.

Ranjan GHOSH, J. Hillis MILLER, Thinking Literature Across Continents, Durham and London, Duke University Press Books, 2016, 320 p.

Thinking Literature across Continents is a joint project proposed by two renowned academics coming from two very different parts of the world, historically and conventionally labelled as the East and the West, India and the USA. Wonderfully written in the form of a productive dialogue between brilliant academic minds, methods and eventually egoes, Thinking Literature across Continents is in fact a bridge between cultures, continents and schools of literature, Eastern and Western, without ever attempting a joint theory of literature, but rather a consonance in dissonance.

On the one hand, Ranjan Ghosh, a cosmopolitan scholar at the University of North Bengal and the inititator of this volume, on the other, the now legendary American literary critic J. Hillis Miller, engage in a spellbounding discussion on the current status of literature, of its production, reception and consumption in the contemporary era of globalization. Thinking Literature across Continents is a less conventional and more innovative book of comparative literature, one in which the two authors elegantly plead in favour of two very different manners of approaching the literary text in the 21st century. In fact, difference seems to be at the center of this intellectual entreprise, but not in its hypostasis of rigid and definitive break, so well consecrated by traditional Western thought in the form of mutually exclusive binaries, but in a very contemporary and effective aspect, one that can be traced back to Deleuze's positive reconceptualization of difference in the 1960s (see Deleuze's 1968 Difference and Repetition) or to Derrida's playful différance. Right from the start, in two very compelling introductions to the volume, Ghosh and Miller straightforwardly lay out their essentially different theoretical approaches to literature, without falling back to the obsolete and counterproductive cleavage between East and West, so much used and abused in the academic discourse on cultures in the past centuries.

In his Introduction: Thinking across Continents, Ghosh articulates a theory of literature that would start from a method that he calls infusion, a philosophy of seeing, a hermeneutic desire, that difracts to in-teract (p. 4) and proceed towards the literary text, arguing in favor of a transcultural, transnational, transdisciplinary approach to literature that he assigns to his upbringing in a cosmopolite family of academics. In this respect, he argues that he approached the book as a deep victim of trans-habit. [...] This crossing, going across, and staying perpetually crossed is what motivates and character-izes my doing of literature (p. 3).

By way of contrast, J. Hillis Miller, makes the apology of a theory of literature that departs from the text and proceeds towards a method, letting the text speak, breathe, produce its own meanings, interactions, connections. Illustratively entitled The Idiosyncrasies of the Literary Text, Miller's introduction opens with a definitive rejection of the desconstructionist label that has so often been attributed to the author. Not because the term is not accurate in itself, but because of the intense and frequent misunderstandings of it by the general public and some members of the academia. Miller feels the need to 'clear the grounds' from the very start in order to ensure an unbiased reading of the present volume by readers with a background in comparative literature and theories of literature. For Miller, the literary text is unique, the experience of it is unique, so unique in fact that not even the same person can have a similar reading experience with the same text. This uniqueness, Miller argues, comes from difference, that difference that breaks the binary logic and opens infinite possibilities of interpretation.

Once the two authors have made their opening statements, insisting on an understanding of difference as productive, opening and positive, especially when it comes to literature, Thinking Literature across Continents launches its dialogic debate. Conceived in five equally divided parts, the volume oscillates between Ghosh's transcultural, transdisciplinary, unifying readings of sahitya (the Sanskrit generic term for literature) and Miller's unique, deeply contextual and circumstantial decodings of various literary texts.

Part I, The Matter and Mattering of Literature (p. 27-68), illustrates the cultural differences as well as bridges in the understanding literature itself, its essence and substance, as well as of its functions. For Ghosh, the underastanding of literature is derived from the etimology of the Sanskrit word commonly used to refer to it: sahitya, literally translated as 'united together', but commonly used in India to refer to all forms of creative writing. Ghosh insists on a particular sacred feature of sahitya, a "mystery and a meaning, a substance and a secret" (p. 29), that is substantially different from the common understanding of sacred as holy or religious, and that points to "the substance that stays withheld, a kind of withdrawal from its readers, a febrile anxiety to see itself exhausted at the hands of its readers" (p. 29). To better illustrate this unconventional definition of literature, Ghosh resorts to ancient Sanskrit and Taoist texts attributed to Laozi which point to a simultaneous necessity/ impossibility of to name the sacred, to uncover and reveal it to the world. This is the essence of sahitya for him. The "surplus of literature" (p. 32) is precisely what exceeds understanding and manifestation, what remains obscured, what remains uncovered, what causes identity and alterity to collapse into each other and eventually vanish. Without a doubt, there is a certain timeless academic mysticism in Ghosh's approach, which can be traced back to his cultural background. By way of contrast, Miller articulates a cool, detached, rationalistic, deeply contemporary Western point of view on literature which he acknowledges as being, at least partly, the result of his cultural and scholarly background. Difference is once more intentionally made visible by Miller, as he starts his argument of what literature is by vigurously insisting on the cultural and epistemic divergences between his own methods and Ghosh's. However, eventually, these differences end not in cultural fracture but rather in "an unexpected consonance" between their views of literature (p. 45). In explaining why literature matters in the Western world, Miller insists on its 'mimetic paradigm', its ability to represent the real world and real experience. Moreover, he speaks of the effects of globalization on literature and viceversa, as literature has expanded beyond the printed text and into the digital, virtual world, adjusting its functions and forms. More interested in stylistics and rhetoric, Miller cites from the Western tradition in order to argue for his understanding of literature, but eventually finishes by finding an unexpected resemblance between Wolfgang Iser's theory of the imaginary, which he calls "magnificently persuasive" (p. 64) and Ghosh's poetic, transcultural, infusionist account of sahitya. Miller concludes that "literature matters because it serves three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary" (p. 67).

Part II, Poem and Poetry (p. 71-108), approaches poetry as a significant part of literature, and sketches the current declining condition of poetry in the Eastern and Western worlds and academia, largely as the effect of globalization and digitalization which have led to a demise of people's interest in and abilities of resonating with a poem. The rhythm of poetry, Ghosh argues, is so different from the rhythms of contemporary life that this discrepancy makes it really difficult for the average readers to engage with poetry. Moreover, the poetic effect comes as the result of a unique immanence and self-referentiality of the text. As Ghosh puts it, "poetry is produced at the expense of a poem" (p. 73). In arguing in favor of his thesis, Ghosh once again relies on Bengali and Chinese texts and on an long line of Asian-Arabian literary theory for which poetry is an "exhaustion of words and an inexhaustibility of meaning" (p. 80). Contrastively, Miller exhibits his expertise in Western literary theories in a technically perfect account of Wallace Stevens's "A Motive for Metaphor", although claiming that for him theory is "ancillary" to reading poems. His conclusions refers back to his theory about the idiosyncrasies of the literary texts, its immanent uniqueness and the superfluosness of all literary theory before the direct experience of the act of reading.

Part III, Literature and the World (p. 111-152), expands on how literature has come to adjust to a globalized world, both in substance and in form, in order to properly reflect the current ongoing changes as well as bridge the transcultural, transnational gaps and become both global and local. From an Eastern, formerly marginal and post-colonial perspective, Ghosh approaches the local/global binome with caution and elegance. He coins the term intra-active transculturality to refer to something he calls 'more than global', going beyond referents such as global or local in order to reach a radical immanence of the text that would ensure a transcultural reading. As he puts it, "intra-active transculturality, revealed through the more than global, eventalizes sense more than the mere reclaiming of Europeanness, which is symbolic of creating and producing horizons" (p. 113). The comparison of Wordsworth's 19th century Daffodils with ancient Sanskrit texts is at least original and produces legitimate unease. How can one suddenly leave aside his cultural background and go beyond the global/local context in reading these texts? Ghosh responds: through intraactive transculturality, through reading beyond one's own culture and reaching a space of cultural absences "that are not vacant but are points where thinking begins to open sense" (p. 131). As part of their dialogue, understood both in the "Habermasian give and take meaning" (p. 135) and as Bakhtinian dialogism (the absence of necessary consensus while in conversation), Miller this time openly disagrees with Ghosh in discussing literature as a global form of being in the world and strongly argues in favor of a contextualized, circumstantial reading of literature as the only way of being able to uncover the full meaning of a certain literary piece. To him, there are several challenges to Ghosh's 'more than global' model for the study of literature, which, although admirable, Miller says, is strongly impractical: the challenge of translation, the challenge of representation, the challenge of defining literature itself. Relying on the Nitzschean rejection of the idea of a world literature, Miller insists that the new forms of globalization eventually affect what is or what ought to be the new discipline called literature: "I challenge world literature in the name of the irreducible idiosyncrasy and specificity of each literary work" (p. 152).

Part IV, Teaching Literature (p. 155-204), is meant to offer a diachronic as well as synchronic outlook on what happens in the academia, both in Asia and in America. Differences are again celebrated as dialogic and productive rather than insurmontable or limiting. Whereas Ghosh provides examples from teaching English literature in Indian classrooms and pleads for a reinvention of 'the teaching machine' which would challenge traditional methods and accommodate the intense social, technological and cultural changes, holding that "the passion of the classroom is both knowledge and ignorance" (p. 176), Miller wonders on which would be the bigger challenge nowadays: teach or read literature. Calling his chapter an endnote to Derrida's consideration that 'an entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications' (Derrida, 'Envoi' in The Post Card), Miller argues that the real challenge is keeping students interested in literature altogether, because, as he sees it, reading and teaching literature are intertwined and mutually dependent. Neither of them is, however, a necessity.

Finally, Part V, Ethics and Literature (p. 207-258), approaches a rather unexpected aspect of literary studies, the one concerned with the truth and lie in literature. Whereas Ghosh focuses on the ethics of reading, claiming that the success of a reading is almost always a lie, whilst interpretation is always a coming into being of the other and an effacement of the self, Miller discusses the long-debated inability of literature, many times also called fiction, to be truthful in the literal sense of the word. Although a product of the imagination, and therefore essentially unreal, literature has, according to Miller, the instrinsic capacity to reflect profound and universal truths and to impose moral authority. For Ghosh, hunger is a key word in his understandings of literature and its relationship to ethics. For him, hunger relates to "desire, motivation, intention, and dynamicity" (p 232). For Miller, ethics operates in an Aristotelian sense and in the sense it has had in the Western episteme since Aristotle, namely as the moral authority that a certain literary text has over him, "its ability to influence my ethical acts and judgments" (p. 233). It comes therefore as natural that their perspectives on the ethics of literature differ greatly: while Ghosh seeks to support his transcultural approach he calls (in)fusion by overgeneralizing the particular aspects of a certain literary work, Miller always departs from a close reading of the text, an almost intimate experience of literature, seeking the means in which that literary piece gains moral authority and legitimacy. As he puts it, that "authority derives from a performative use of language artfully begetting in the reader, as James puts it, a disposition to take on trust the virtual reality the reader enters when he or she reads a given work" (p. 235).

To conclude, Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's joint volume represents both a charming transcultural dialogue of brilliant academic minds coming from very different backgrounds, and a demonstration that differences need not be futile oppositions following the logic of either/or, but can be opportunities for a profound understanding of the contemporary world, in this case through literary studies. For these reasons, Thinking Literature across Continents is a necessary reading for literary scholars and students as well.

Ileana Botescu-Sireteanu

"Transilvania" University of Brasov Romania