A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Magic realism flared up, brilliantly, for a few decades at the turn of the century. It would seem now to have had its day, but history will record it as one of literature's great days.

  CHAPTER 37

  Republic of Letters

  LITERATURE WITHOUT BORDERS

  In the twenty-first century, it's safe to say, literature has become truly global. But what does ‘world literature’ mean if we break the term down? A number of things, as we shall see.

  Let's consider, for example, a novel originating in one of the tiniest, most isolated literary communities on earth – Iceland. The first Viking inhabitants arrived on this barren, rocky, freezing island in the ninth century. The following two centuries are called by literary historians the ‘Saga Age’ (the word ‘saga’, meaning ‘told tale’, comes from the Old Norse that Icelanders spoke, and still speak). It's an astonishingly rich body of thirteenth-century heroic poems about the clans who built the country when they weren't, as they often were, feuding with each other heroically.

  A century before Chaucer, Norse literature was one of the glories of world literature. But only a few thousand people were familiar with it, stored as it was in their little nation's collective memory and recited lovingly from generation to generation. In 1955, the novelist Halldór Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize (no writer from a smaller country had ever received one, the Committee said). The award was made largely on the basis of Laxness's 1934 masterpiece, a novel called Independent People (a defiant description of Iceland, the reader discovers). It's the story of Bjartur, whose family have been subsistence farmers for ‘thirty generations’ – since the Saga Age. Bjartur is steeped in his nation's poems, and recites them to himself as he walks the lonely hills with his sheep. His way of life is being changed, forever, by the twentieth century, and an outside world which has suddenly taken an interest in this cold, remote, tiny place.

  Bjartur's story is as bleak, heroic and tragic as any of his beloved sagas. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Laxness went out of his way to impress upon his listeners his fiction's connectedness, like a baby's umbilical cord, to the stories narrated by Old Norse skalds (poets) in mud huts. Now it was being read in translation all over the planet by millions, and, thanks to the prize, was now ‘world literature’. The conclusion one draws? Literature, if it is great or popular enough, and even when it is as deeply rooted in its own soil as Laxness's, is now no longer confined by national boundaries. It can leap over them.

  The next example is from the largest literary community in the world, that of the People's Republic of China. Despite its vast size, its population of 1.35 billion, and its millennia-long civilisation, even the best-read Westerners would, most of them, be hard put to come up with the names of more than half a dozen great Chinese writers.

  In 2012, the Nobel Prize in Literature was won by the Chinese writer Mo Yan. One of his more significant works is the novel The Garlic Ballads. It was first published a few months before the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989 and was promptly withdrawn from publication. The author has many times found himself in hot water with his country's authorities. ‘Mo Yan’ is a pen-name he has chosen for himself. It means ‘don't speak’.

  The Garlic Ballads is dedicated to the remote region where Mo Yan, born into a peasant farming family in 1955, grew up. The story is of a community – cultivating, as they have for thousands of years, a fertile valley – who are ordered by Party bureaucrats to grow nothing but garlic. It's agricultural nonsense. An edict that, literally, stinks. They rebel and are brutally repressed. Garlic it must be, the Party decrees.

  The book, like others by Mo Yan, has become an international bestseller. Contrary to his pen-name he does indeed speak – and to the world, not just his countrymen and women. And what conclusions would one draw from this example? It's more complicated than with Laxness. The world is now, all of a sudden, interested in Chinese literature because China has become in an astonishingly short time a twenty-first-century superpower. Napoleon is reputed to have said of China, ‘Let her sleep, for when the dragon wakes she will shake the world’. The dragon has woken: China sleeps no more and is no longer ignored, and nor is its literature. Globalism is not just a geopolitical fact, it's a mindset, and literature is now part of that mindset.

  The third example is that of Haruki Murakami. This leading Japanese novelist has published a number of works of fiction, successful in both sales and esteem worldwide, and in scores of languages. They ‘travel’ extraordinarily well and Murakami has more readers outside than inside his country. His major book thus far was the trilogy IQ84 which concluded in 2010. The final volume was eagerly awaited. In Tokyo crowds queued up for hours to snap up the first copies.

  The plot of IQ84 is, it must be said, totally mystifying. It's magic realist in style (Chapter 36) and includes ninjas, assassinations, Yakuza gangsters, alternative worlds and baffling time-slippages. What is striking, however, is that Murakami knows he is writing for a worldwide public, avid to read and be baffled by him. He chose the title, we are told, because that is what ‘nineteen eighty-four’ sounds like in Japanese. It's an allusion – one could even call it an homage – to George Orwell. The novel's epigraph, ‘It's only a paper moon’, is the title of a 1930s American popular song by Harold Arlen. Murakami says elsewhere that he was inspired to write his novel by the Russian novelist Dostoevsky. The conclusion to be drawn here is that Murakami is a novelist who knows he is being read by the world, and is writing for the world. He sucks up influence from everywhere and makes it his own.

  When writers are lucky enough to go global, they can earn amounts that rival the revenues of a multinational company. J.K. Rowling, for example, was listed in 2013 as the thirtieth richest person in the UK (and unique, among this select group, in that every penny of her wealth was earned, not inherited). She's not as rich as Coca-Cola, but Harry Potter is read in as many places as that fine drink is drunk.

  There are exceptions to the rule but globalism, ‘without borders’, is now the dynamic energy driving literature. How did it happen? By way of the centuries-long growth in communication systems, international trade, and the dominance of certain ‘world languages’. It's a long story, but a useful one, because helps us locate works of literature in their historical worlds, and to map the boundaries of those worlds.

  For most of literary history, getting from one place to another was limited to travel on foot, by horse or under sail. Literature reflects that. One of the problems we face, as readers of literature often centuries older than we are, is adjusting to the fact that its horizons were far closer. Shakespeare, for example, never anticipated his plays being performed outside London or – at their furthest reach – the English provinces. Now billions of lovers of literature, worldwide, enjoy and study his drama.

  The widening of horizons began, dramatically, in the nineteenth century, when mass communication brought people into easier contact within their own countries, and, by the end of the century, connected them internationally. In England in the early nineteenth century, tar-hardened roads made possible W.H. Smith's distribution of newspapers across the country (‘First with the News’), using specially commissioned overnight stage coaches. Literature, in magazine form, travelled with the morning papers. Smith's secured what amounted to a monopoly, at mid-century, in the rapid delivery of newspapers and magazines. They were at this period not merely news vendors, but from 1860 also ran a circulating library. You could borrow one of Dickens's novels from the Smith's booth at Euston Station, read it on the ten-hour journey to Edinburgh, and upon arrival return it at the Smith's booth at Waverley Station.

  From 1840, the UK-wide Penny Post (one of whose architects was the novelist, Anthony Trollope, in his employment at the General Post Office) meant the whole country could exchange messages daily between the big cities, every few hours. It was almost as fast as email. Authors, typically among the most literate members of society, took full advantage of this new exciting level of intercommunication. Trollope wa
s also instrumental in introducing telegraph communication. The invention of steam power brought drastic reductions in voyage time. It's significant that Trollope partly wrote one of his best novels, Barchester Towers (1857), while travelling round Britain by train (aparently on Post Office business) and another, The Way We Live Now (1875) – a meaningful title – on a steamship to America, Australia and New Zealand.

  The effect of all this progress was to internationalise markets, and make a country's internal market more efficient. When the final ‘golden’ spike was driven into the railroad tracks to complete the connection between New York and San Francisco, it meant that new books (many of them brought from Europe, by steamship) could be shuttled across the continental distances of the USA in days.

  In 1912, when Guglielmo Marconi's radio company laid the ground for a worldwide network, he launched it, on air, with a quotation from Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream: ‘I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ Shakespeare himself was now, genuinely, global. The new internationalism was sealed with international copyright agreements (Chapter 11).

  Not all authors addressed the new publics which had been opened up for them, but many did. Communications in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are in a condition of continual evolution. The internet (Chapter 40) is reassembling the apparatus by which we virtually communicate year by year, like an ever-changing literary Legoland. Writers can now see themselves, if they choose, as writing for a global village.

  It all sounds very Brave New World-ish. But there remains one tricky problem: language. Popular music can cross linguistic borders and be enjoyed by audiences who don't know, or care, what the words mean. Literature can't. Take away the words and there's nothing there. Literature has traditionally been stopped at the border, where language changes. Only a tiny quantity of foreign literature ever makes it across the translation barrier.

  Translation (the word literally means ‘carrying across’) is cumbersome and often inefficient. Ask who are the most important writers of the twentieth century and Kafka's name will certainly come up. But the first English translation of a Kafka novel (an incomplete text) was not available until ten years after his death. Kafka's major works had to wait even longer, and some important languages of the world are still awaiting translations. It's not merely a time-lag. However skilful the translator, and despite the fact that translations can greatly increase an author's income and renown, translation is inherently flawed. Anthony Burgess – both a writer and a linguist – wrote that ‘Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture’. Often attributed to the American poet Robert Frost is the wise comment, ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’.

  It matters less, of course, for popular literature, where the finer points of translation are less important for the reader, who merely wants to turn the pages and enjoy. ‘Scandi-noir’, as it's called – novels that have followed in the wake of Stieg Larsson's 2005 international bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – can survive leaden translation, just as the hugely popular Scandinavian TV thrillers can survive their clunky subtitles. Where simple page-turners are involved, fine prose is irrelevant. Functional prose will do very well.

  Sadly, in one respect translation is an ever-decreasing problem for world literature. Linguists inform us that a language ‘dies’ every two weeks; their little literatures of the past, and more poignantly the future, die with them. In the modern era, English has followed world power and is now the ‘world language’ – as dominant as Latin was 2,000 years ago. The fact that the nineteenth century was ‘Britain's century’, and the twentieth was ‘America's century’, has meant dominance by two world powers separated, as George Bernard Shaw put it, ‘by a common language’. The twenty-first century may well change that.

  Literature is at any one time so diverse that no single generalisation will ever fit all. There are any number of important writers who have chosen to live and work in a small world. Philip Larkin, for example (Chapter 34), never travelled abroad. He joked that he was sure he would not like the ‘dust’, and his poetry reflects that insularity. Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1978, wrote his fiction in Yiddish, for a small community numbered in the low thousands, in his local New York. A ‘fit audience … though few’, as Milton said.

  Small worlds thrive, as they always have in literature. But the global world is, like the universe itself, expanding at a huge rate. That is something new, exciting, and, for good or ill, unstoppable.

  CHAPTER 38

  Guilty Pleasures

  BESTSELLERS AND POTBOILERS

  There is more ‘great’ literature readily available to us now than any one person, however ambitious and diligent, can get through in a lifetime – and there is more being added to the pile every year. Literature is a mountain that none of us will reach the peak of; we're lucky if we get through the lower foothills, following our chosen path as carefully as we can, as the summit above us gets ever-higher. To reflect only on authors mentioned in this book, even the best-read of us will go through life not having read all of Shakespeare's thirty-nine plays (I plead guilty to being a bit shaky on Pericles), or all of Jane Austen's fiction, or every word that Tennyson or Dostoevsky put into print. We can no more read all (or even a large sample) of literature than we can get everything on a supermarket's shelves into our trolley.

  But there is an even larger mass to contend with: the less-thangreat literature. According to the (distinguished) American author of science fiction, Theodore Sturgeon, ‘Ninety per cent of [science fiction] is crud. But then, ninety per cent of everything is crud’. There are close to 2 million volumes classified as ‘Literature’ in the vaults of the British Library and the American Library of Congress. The average literate person reads 600 works of literature in an adult lifetime. If we are honest, a large portion of those 600 are, for most of us, what Sturgeon would dismiss as ‘crud’. If you look around any airport departure lounge as people while away the hours of waiting, the chances are you'll see more Dan Brown and Jilly Cooper than Gustave Flaubert or Virginia Woolf. (And this, a primitive fear tells them, might be the last book they read in their lives…)

  The 2012 winner of the Booker and Costa fiction prizes (of which more in Chapter 39) was Hilary Mantel, for her historical novel Bring Up the Bodies. It sold, within six months, close on a million copies – no previous winner in fifty years had enjoyed such sales success. But let's contrast that with the tens of millions of copies that E.L. James sold over the same period of her ‘bonkbuster’ (as they are irreverently called) Fifty Shades of Grey. Needless to say, it won no great literary prizes and was universally sneered at. Doubtless Ms James cried all the way to the bank (she rather charmingly confided she would use her millions to remodel her kitchen).

  We can interpret such figures in two ways. Critics of a puritan cast of mind see it as evidence of the incorrigible cultural depravity of those whom Dr Johnson called ‘the common reader’ (Dr Johnson, as it happened, did not despise them). Those who take a more pragmatic view on the insatiable public appetite for ‘crud’ see it as healthy, particularly if you look at the big picture. E.L. James, for example, is now published by an imprint of Random House, the same conglomerate conjoined with the supremely ‘respectable’ Penguin Books imprint. Penguin is one of the main channels to have brought ‘high’ literature to a mass readership, ever since Allen Lane founded the quality paperback line in 1935. Lane dedicated himself to bringing the best contemporary fiction to the market at the same prices as were charged for cheap reading matter by the chain store Woolworths (in America the ‘Five and Ten Cent Store’, in Britain the ‘Threepenny and Sixpenny Store’). He wanted to offer the highest literature at the lowest price.

  Publishers let the sales of ‘low’ literature pay for the ‘high’. That is, these so-called ‘potboilers’ put bread (or should that be stew?) on the table. This can work in mysterious ways. Ever since T.S. Eliot was instrumen
tal in founding the firm Faber & Faber in 1929, it has been the most respected publisher of poetry in the English-speaking world. To have its imprint on your volume is, for a poet, the seal of highest achievement. In recent decades the finances of Faber have been helped to stay robustly healthy by – what? Sales of The Waste Land, or the works of Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin? No. Most prosperously, it is said, by subsidiary rights revenue from Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical stage adaptation of Eliot's extended joke in verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. No one would call anything that T.S. Eliot put into print ‘low’ (or, perish the thought, ‘crud’). But his Practical Cats is not what has made him, by general agreement, the most important poet of his century.

  If we are being open-minded it makes more sense to call what isn't ‘high’ (or ‘classic’, ‘canonical’ or ‘quality’) literature ‘popular’ rather than ‘crud’. ‘Popular’ implies ‘of the people’ – that is, not of institutions like the Church, the universities or the government. The fifteenth-century mystery plays (Chapter 6) were popular; the Bible, in Latin at that time, was institutional. We still have institutionally-prescribed literature, forcibly studied at school, college and university.

  The novel is the popular genre par excellence. When it hits the mark it has always stimulated ‘uncritical’ consumption. We can see this from the genre's earliest days. When Samuel Richardson published Pamela (1740), his chronicle of a pretty maid-servant persecuted by her lecherous employer, it triggered a ‘mania’ – particularly among women readers of the time. When Sir Walter Scott published one of his novels, there are accounts of purchasers besieging bookshops and tearing the brown paper off the volume to start reading the story in the street. We have seen any number of such ‘reader stampedes’ all the way to the publication of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series – each of which became a kind of national holiday as purchasers, dressed as wizards, queued up all night outside bookshops. They were not doing so because the book had been well reviewed in that week's Times Literary Supplement or was on the A-level syllabus.