<au>Sylvia Söderlind</>

<at>Looking at Goethe’s Face</>

<@@@>

This paper attempts to change the “versus” in the title of the seminar in which this article

originated, “World Literature versus Comparative Literature,” into something less

confrontational, reflecting on how the two fields can become mutually helpful. The

fundamental, historical difference between them hinges on the status of translation, which

has indeed become a bone of contention in what is often seen as a struggle for

disciplinary supremacy. It is not surprising, of course, that translation has gained a

prominent place in any study of cultural expression in an increasingly globalized world.

There are few comparatists left in the world, I would wager, that still hold to the old idea

of purity, according to which any student of literature must acquire fluency in any

language into which she may want to venture. We cannot all pretend to live in Istanbul

with Auerbach and Spitzer in the 1930s, and the increasing Anglicization of the Western

world hardly encourages the study of languages of smaller diffusion, even as they

become more and more audible in the streetscape around us.

Djelal Kadir’s warning that resisting translation amounts to aiding and abetting

terrorism provides a pithy parable that may serve as epigraph to my argument. It is, after

all, better to know others a little than to know them not at all, and the resistance to

translation threatens to provide an alibi for a cultural bunker mentality, a kind of

homeland security that will certainly be of less ecumenical power in the long run than the

diplomacy of cultural exchange. Still, it is one thing to acknowledge the inevitable march

1

toward a global language and the necessity of teaching literatures in the language of

students—and to write about it in the language of individual scholars—and quite another

to dismiss bi- or multilingualism as an unnecessary luxury. The cosmopolitan speaks, or

at least understands, more than one language, and if there is one way to turn the tables on

xenophobia that is within reach in our classrooms, it is to value vernaculars as assets

rather than encumbrances.

The recent trend in translation studies toward the increasing visibility of the

translator is a symptom of the desire to value not only the work of translation, but also the

world as a multilingual place. What I would like to investigate, then, is whether, and how,

it is possible to make translation visible in the unilingual world literature classroom and

world literature scholarship. If Kadir sees the anti-translation comparatist as terrorist, I

see the pro-translation comparatist as a kind of anti-totalitarian guerilla. Yes, it is a matter

of perspective—one’s terrorist is the other’s freedom fighter—but at the bottom lies the

same definition of the comparatist as one who commands more than one language and

literature.

The question I am asking here, then, is: how can the guerilla comparatist operate

in the world literature classroom? How can we make translation visible so as to ensure

that our students appreciate the otherness of a text originally written in another language

while making it accessible to the unilingual Anglophone? Introducing texts in peripheral

“Englishes” is surely commendable and even necessary, but I think it is not enough. The

question is if, instead of having English hijack the Other, we can Other the supremacy of

English. If so, this may be where comparatists can regain some of the ground lately lost

to world literature without resorting to the terrorism of linguistic fundamentalism.

2

I want to preface my argument with two case studies or vignettes. The first

illustrates the itinerary from the old appropriation of voice debate—another version of the

purity idea—to what I see as an exemplary model for a new radical pedagogy in the

world literature classroom. In 1998 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed a

miniseries based on a novel by Canadian author Rudy Wiebe published in 1976, The

Temptations of Big Bear. The story concerns the resistance of the Plains Cree to the

British Crown’s attempts to make them cede their land in the 1870s and ’80s. In both

versions of the story Big Bear is the protagonist through whom most of the story is

focalized. His voice is the first one heard, its Cree specificity rendered in the novel

through lyricism, nature imagery, and by juxtaposition with a small number of white,

English, voices. Not surprisingly, as in many colonialist stories, the translator, a métis,

plays a crucial role. His position in the midst gives him privileged access to two distinct

languages and two opposed world views, but he is also given a voice that reflects on

these differences; in other words, he serves as a proto-interpreter of the text for the

reader.

In the televised version, Big Bear is also the first figure seen and heard. The story

plunges us right into the world of the Cree: we listen to Big Bear’s soliloquy; we

overhear conversations among his band members, and are introduced to the back story by

eavesdropping on the other chiefs who have, or are about to, put their Xes on the treaties.

There is a crucial difference between the uses of language in the two versions, however,

one made possible by the translation into film. Working with Wiebe, director Gil

Cardinal resorts to a brilliant ruse that left an indelible impression on this viewer’s

memory.

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Once comfortably ensconced in the Cree world, the viewer witnesses the first

encounter between Big Bear and the deputies of the British Crown. The British chief and

his officers appear on the scene dressed in ostentatious outfits (in a brilliant ironic

reversal the governor has a big plume in his hat); they act with a stiffness that designates

them as actors rather than individuals, and when they open their mouths what comes out

is gibberish. The defamiliarization operated by this simple reversal, in which language,

and the translator, acquires such striking and sudden visibility, is much more than a

matter of viewpoint. At this moment English suddenly “becomes” Cree, and the imperial

centre becomes the unintelligible margin. In the process, the translator becomes the only

one who wields any real power. It is in him the viewer must, like both sides in the

negotiation, put her trust. The use of English as Cree and gibberish as English is more

than a ruse designed to elicit sympathy for the Cree. It is rather the opposite: the

sympathy inherent in the white viewer’s attitude toward a well-known story of brutal

colonialism and futile native resistance is suddenly complicated. The viewer is jolted out

of the comfort zone of white liberalism to which she is accustomed and positioned

outside of both the Cree (no matter how much sympathy she feels for them, she is not

part of them) and the English (whose language the Cree have suddenly expropriated).

This effect changes nothing in the story, which still ends as tragically for the Cree, but it

radically changes the viewer’s position vis-à-vis the story and, by extrapolation, vis-à-vis

Canadian history and the way it has been told. It is, first of all, an affective experience,

but one that cannot help but lead to a deeper reflection on what it means to be a Canadian

subject and citizen.

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The second image I want to discuss as an example of a similar defamiliarization

of subjectivity is the first photograph taken of earth from space. Those of us present when

this image hit the television screens and magazine pages may remember a similar jolt

upon suddenly seeing ourselves from a place outside our, very large and mutual, comfort

zone—the planet. As “a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right”

(Spivak, Death 102), replacing the globe as the new ground of comparison, the planet

becomes a trope for ethical critical practice. Planetarity may have been a cognitive

possibility since Copernicus, but it is only after the first photograph of the earth seen

from outside itself that it accrues the affective force that we have seen expressed in so

many different forms since.

My two examples are analogous, their difference a matter of scale. Both operate a

reversal of perspective that leads to an affective experience in which the self, the

perceiving subject, is radically displaced and becomes other to itself. It is not as if either

of these images teaches us anything new; what they offer is not a cognitive understanding

but an affective experience, and one that cannot help, I argue, but lead to ethical

reflection.

These two examples and their attendant theoretical implications raise the question

of whether it is possible to recreate this kind of affective experience in pedagogical and

critical practice. In the last few decades, translation has become much more than a focus

of disciplinary debate. It is emerging as a potential model for new critical practices, not

only for political reasons having to do with globalization and concomitant questions of

power but, more crucially, I think, precisely because it represents the convergence of two

major concerns of critical theory today: ethics and affect.

5

It is true that translation has always been a matter of both ethics and affect, but it

has mostly been a question of the correct attitude of the translator/subject to the

text/object. Translation was “the most intimate act of reading” long before Spivak said

so, but even if it involved the affective—even “erotic”—“surrender” (Outside 183) the

subject/object relationship was generally retained. In recent reflections, however, it is the

subject, rather than the text, that has become the object of translation, and this is what

makes the kind of practice I am investigating a pedagogical issue. Emily Apter describes

the process:

<ext>translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in

history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of

denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space,

daily ritual and pre-given domestic arrangements. (6)</ext>

It is in the affective “rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself” that my two examples

concur. Pedagogically speaking, it is frightening to allow the classroom to be a zone of

discomfort rather than comfort, but we all know that comfort rarely leads to serious

learning. Once we go from the known into the unknown we are no longer comfortable,

and pretending that learning about any other should be a comfortable and reassuring

process is, I think, hypocritical.

Using a trope I will elaborate on in the following, because I find it singularly

productive, I would like to describe the relationship between my two examples as one of

fractal recursiveness. Introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, fractal geometry brought

6

a new perspective to mathematics that has proven suggestive to other fields. Wai Chee

Dimock is the most articulate advocate of fractal geometry as a model for literary study:

it provides the model for her suggested resituating of American literature within world

literature—in itself a radical idea—in Through Other Continents. The idea of “fractal

differentialism” (Cronin 15) is also forwarded by translation theorist Michael Cronin,

who offers the fractal as an alternative to what, according to Franco Moretti, have been

the two ruling metaphors of world-scale cultural comparisons: the tree for heterogeneity

and geographic discontinuity (such as the evolution of nation-states and languages

branching off from one trunk) and the wave for geographic continuity and homogenizing

forces (such as the market). Fractal geometry disproves Moretti’s contention that the two

have nothing in common. When examined closely it becomes quite clear that not only do

the tree and the wave share a fractal structure, but they also share a groundedness in

nature and the literal that dooms them to remain illustrative metaphors. Unlike the fractal

which, even if occurring just as “naturally” and more equally across the planet—from the

treeless Gobi desert to the frozen waters of Greenland—remains form rather than

essence, trees and waves can never accede to the generative status of catachresis. As

earthly in its way as trees and waves in theirs, the fractal escapes the quest for new

grounds of comparison by allowing for a “groundless” comparative practice—that is, one

that is groundless in substance while grounded in form. This analogy is entirely

congruent with David Damrosch’s notion of national and world literature as elliptical

foci; the number of such ellipses and their potential embeddedness is potentially infinite.

To return to Moretti for a moment, his notion of the relationship between the

“distant reading” required by world literature and the close reading best left to specialists,

7

is itself a matter of fractal scale. As Dimock points out, and as Damrosch has observed in

the pages of this journal, comparative criticism, like all criticism for that matter, happens

on a sliding scale of knowledge, and the most productive work in world literature comes

from collaborations among scholars working at different distances from the object,

covering the greatest number of scales. Dimock’s definition of fractal geometry as the

convergence of “finite parameters and infinite unfolding” (77) encapsulates its suitability

for a planetary practice. If we accept that, unlike the nation, the planet is the only truly

finite parameter for literary study, we are inevitably thrown into a universe of scalar

differentiation.

At this point I want to loop back to my two prefatory encounters. Both the

earthling who sees the planet from an outside perspective for the first time and the

imperial subject who is positioned as other to her own history experience the jolt of being

thrown suddenly out of a comfortable subject position into one of radical otherness. As I

pointed out in the beginning, the affective experience is similar, the scale different. More

intriguingly, at least for our discipline, they point to the metonymic relationship between

planetarity and translation, and here I want to make a case for the usefulness of Gayatri

Spivak’s search for generative catachreses. The place into which the subject is thrown is

the realm of precariousness and possibility that Apter labels the “translation zone” and

that, according to Spivak, is indeed the birthplace of the ethical subject. In “Translation

as Culture” Spivak quotes Melanie Klein’s description of “the violent production of the

precarious subject of reparation and responsibility” (13). She describes the process:

8

<ext>The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing

(begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside,

going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing(s)

grasped. One can call this crude coding a ’translation’. In this never-ending weaving

violence translates into conscience and vice versa. (13; my emphasis) </ext>

One does not have to grasp (begreifen) the complexities (perplexities?) of Spivak’s

diction to notice the fractal relationship that emerges between planet and subject. If the

planet is the inevitable ground for collective responsibility, translation is its counterpart

on the level of the individual subject. The subject is a mise en abyme of the planet

What I have called the “jolt”—for want of a better word—that I dream of reproducing

seems like an uncanny repetition of Spivak’s primal scene, a violent—in the sense of

affectively sudden—reminder of what makes us human. If, as I believe, the production of

ethical subjects is the ultimate goal of a humanist education, a pedagogical practice based

on this model would indeed seem appropriate. In terms of the disciplinary debate in

which we are engaged, it would also seem to offer the comparatist a golden opportunity

to run some interference with world literature, preventing it from becoming nothing more

than a panacea for Anglocentric angst, countering the terrorism of comparative

absolutism with a counter-terrorist, or at least cosmopolitan, or nomadic, guerilla activity

on behalf of the planet. Comparatists have always been bricoleurs; there is no reason why

we should not make excellent guerillas or maquisards. My metaphor is not intended to

perpetuate the articulation of the relationship between the two fields as conflictual; rather

I think world literature and comparative literature are equally “anti-” a number of -

9

centrisms; it’s just that the latter has the means to be more explicitly “counter-” or

activist.

My proposal, then, is not to relegate the world and comparison to separate spheres

but rather to smuggle comparatist strategies into the practice of world literature. In other

words, to turn a unilingual environment—whether the classroom, the scholarly paper or

the conference presentation—into a translation zone, taking students, readers, and

listeners out of “the comfort zone of national space.” Here I want also to acknowledge a

debt to Doris Sommer’s advocacy on behalf of the possibilities for aesthetic pleasure

offered by unexpected encounters in the translation zone, at the risk of the ridicule and

embarrassment that always adheres to any departure from the comfort zone but that often

leads to ethical reflection. I know that for me, the greatest incentive to learning languages

was the recurring note in the margin of the books I read growing up in Sweden:

“untranslatable word play; translator’s note.” The feeling of not being “in the know,” of

being reminded of my outsider status with regard to stories I loved spurred me to find out

what was withheld from me. I see no reason why the same should not be true for students

in the world literature classroom. Undergraduate world literature students, if taught well

and required to engage with languages in some form, would likely make the best

comparative literature graduate students. Perhaps the difference is again a matter of scale

or dimension: world literature as a step toward comparative literature is a move from

breadth to depth.

Speaking about dimensions, it is strange to contemplate the conservatism of

literary criticism, with its continued reliance on linearity, succession and closure, in the

face of the simultaneity of hypertextuality that is taking over the creative space. When I

10

presented this paper at the ACLA conference, it was accompanied by a series of slides

designed not simply to illustrate issues of scalar refraction, such as fractal images of trees

and waves, but, more crucially, to introduce other dimensions of interpretation in the

manner of hypertext. This visual aid allows me to counteract the linearity of my argument

and my interpretative statements with additional, sometimes contradictory, observations

whose simultaneous presence—verbal and visual—are left without comment. While such

a pedagogical tactic may raise the level of discomfort, it avoids the finality and certainty

of the closed interpretation, and it allows for a great deal of comic relief. It is a tactic that

follows the model of translation while making visible all the possibilities which a linearly

finished product necessarily leaves out.

The institutional visibility of translation is an increasingly common thread in

translation studies and what I propose here, then, is a pedagogical version of that

endeavour: to make translation as visible as possible in the classroom. To do so we need

to pay close attention to the material part of language that is the domain of the most

intimate reading. And this is where I pick up on Walter Benn Michaels’s attacks on post-

structuralism’s exaggerated and nefarious attention to “the shape of the signifier” which,

as he sees it, lies at the bottom of the ills of identity politics—a sentiment some of us

share albeit for different reasons.1 As a self-professed member of the critical community

Michaels accuses and as a—however apostate—Lutheran, I know better than to let guilt

go to waste. I want, therefore, to illustrate my idea of a radical critical practice to make

translation visible by riffing on my plea for a heightened visibility of translation,

beginning with my noun morphing into a plea of guilty as charged. Here’s to the shape of

the signifier! If the signifier is what becomes invisible in translation as traditionally

11

conceived, it follows that the aim of my critical practice is to rescue the signifier and

make it, if possible, hypervisible.

This brings me back to Dimock’s observation about fractal geometry: “More so

than cleanness or smoothness, it is the rough weave of the fabric, the bumpy surface of

pits and pocks, that is threaded throughout the world, in infinite extension and infinite

regress” (77; my emphasis). Infinite extension from the perspective of the snail faced

with Mandelbrot’s conundrum about the length of the British coastline, infinite regress

from the perspective of the satellite that can take in the same distance in a matter of

seconds but only at the expense of an equally infinite number of scales. The snail’s close

encounter with the land may be as intimate as the translator’s with language; the

comparatist’s infinite luxury is that she can be both snail and satellite, hugging the

minutest shapes one moment and flying around the world at lightning speed the next.

Both perspectives, however, require us to abandon our desire to leave our footprint on the

planet, ceding our ground and our authority instead to the pied de la lettre and at the same

time following the ligne de fuite (a term I borrow from Gilles Deleuze whose unilingual

odes to the signifier may also inspire strategies similar to those I advocate) of the

capricious, and capacious, signifier wherever it may take us.

Before I go further, I want to pause for a moment to ponder the coincidental

recurrence of metaphors relating to textiles in the otherwise disparate discourses of

fractals and translation. Walter Benjamin—who was constantly searching for appropriate

metaphors, perhaps because he was stuck in Euclidian geometry—famously likened

translation to a robe enveloping the body of the original in its rich—excessive, even

baroque—folds, wrinkles, Fälte, or plis. My plea is for a critical practice that will follow

12

les plis de la langue, the fissures and fault-lines where languages meet, where the shape

of one signifier—suddenly and unexpectedly—collides or coincides with another and so

becomes foreign to itself. In Swedish pli means a certain kind of discipline, in the sense

of asserting discipline over, oneself or others, as in “hon har ingen pli,” meaning she has

no sense of discipline; she has no control over herself. That is exactly the point. Ceding to

le pli means letting go, of self-mastery and logocentrism. Le pli is also Gilles Deleuze’s

chosen title for his treatise on Leibniz’s view of “the world as a body of infinite folds and

surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space” (my emphasis)2 which

in retrospect seems like a prequel to Mandelbrot. My indebtedness to Deleuze’s, no

matter how unilingual, advocacy of the ligne de fuite of the signifier is becoming clear; a

radical pedagogy of the kind I advocate would perhaps make our century the Deleuzian

one that Foucault predicted.

The folds and surfaces of language are the shapes of the words themselves, those

things that can only be perceived up close, in face to face encounters, or if we take le pied

de la lettre at face value—in a pied à face meeting that would take us back to the infant’s

play with the extremes of the body, the near but invisible and the far but touchable. The

fractal value of a face brings me back, in a final loop, to the faces that form the alpha and

omega of the debate in which we are engaged: Goethe and the planet. Looking at

Weltliteratur in the twenty-first century is inevitably looking at the face of the planet, and

this is—should be, and will be if we only allow it, or indeed provoke it—an affective

experience every bit as powerful as looking at the face of Goethe was for Johann

Eckermann. Here I thank David Damrosch for providing me with my punchline:

13

Eckermann’s comment on looking at Goethe’s old face: “Jede Falte voller Ausdrück”

(29) (“Every wrinkle full of expression”; my translation).

<#><aff>Queen’s University</>

<bmh>Works Cited</>

<bib>Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. </bib>

<bib>Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge,

2006. </bib>

<bib>Damrosch, David. “How American is World Literature?” The Comparatist 33

(2008): 13–19. </bib>

<bib>_____. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

</bib>

<bib>Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1988.

</bib>

<bib>Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep

Time. Princeton University Press, 2006. </bib>

<bib>Kadir, Djelal. “Comparative Literature in the Age of Terrorism.” Comparative

Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2006. 68–77. </bib>

<bib>Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History.

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. </bib>

14

<bib>Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” Debating World Literature.

Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004. 148–62. </bib>

<bib>Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education. Duke

University Press, 2004. </bib>

<bib>Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia

University Press, 2003. </bib>

<bib>_____. “Translation as Culture.” Parallax 6.1 (2000): 13–24. </bib>

<bib>_____. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

179–200. </bib>

<bib>Wiebe, Rudy. The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,

1976.</bib>

<bmh>Notes</>

15

1<en> It is sobering to see the extent to which Michaels’s analysis, in spite of his advocacy of a

heightened attention to class, lays the blame on the same “deconstructionist coalition” as Samuel

Huntington (Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity).

2 See www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/deleuze_fold.html</en>