Major Languages, Minor Literatures, Multiple Legacies

Theo D’haen (University of Leuven – KU Leuven)

Since the rise of the vernacular literatures in Europe there has been a deep divide
between writers working in major languages and literatures and their
counterparts using so-called minor languages for minor literatures. The former
could automatically assume that when they wrote for their home public they
would also reach a wider “world” public. They were writing for the world when
writing about home, without having to do anything extra. The latter would
almost equally automatically resign themselves to writing about home, for an
exclusive home public. Still, authors in minor languages/literatures ambitious to
enter upon the scene of world literature could use a strategy of drawing on
multiple legacies to reach as wide and broad, and as international as possible a
public, and thus consciously invite dissemination beyond their original linguistic
or cultural habitat, usually through translation into the dominant language or
languages of the moment. I will concentrate on two examples, one from the
nineteenth century, and the other contemporary.

Pascale Casanova, in her République mondiale des lettres (1999), and leaning
heavily on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, offers a theory of how, with the
progressive demise of Latin as the lingua franca for Europe’s literati as of the
fourteenth century in Italy, followed by Portugal (Buescu 2012) and Spain
(Nebrija ) in the fifteenth century, and decisively France in the sixteenth century,
with French at least partially replacing Latin as the language of science and
scholarship as of Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse
(1549) and consolidated in Descartes’ 1637 Discours de la méthode, there arose
in Europe, and subsequently in the world, an increasingly autonomous
supranational literary system centered upon Paris. Ever since the rise of this
system, she claims, authors have been acutely aware of their position relative to
not only their own particular literature, confined to a specific vernacular and
over and above this possibly also by national boundaries not necessarily
coinciding with those marked by the use of the vernacular in question, but also
to “world literature.” As Casanova herself remarks, though, the position from
which authors start out can differ considerably depending upon the relative
literary capital carried by their initial environment. To give only one example,
from my own country, Belgium, even though the literary capital carried by
literature in French, German, or Dutch is already widely uneven, within each of
these literatures to be a Belgian writer considerably ups the ante when
compared to the “unmarked” position occupied by “real” French, German or
Dutch writers. However, and obviously so, the first difference in the amount of
literary capital authors start out with has to do with the particular language in
which they write. In Casanova’s theory, not surprisingly, French carries the
highest amount of literary capital in this respect.

Casanova’s largely theoretical-analytical claims are backed up, at least for the
nineteenth century, by the factual research of Franco Moretti, who in Atlas of the
European Novel: 1800-1900 (1998), traces how novels in the period under
investigation were disseminated, translated, and received throughout Europe. He
arrives at the conclusion that Paris, and as a close second London, functioned as
the undisputed literary centers of Europe. On the basis of his famous, yet much
disputed, “distant reading” of the evolution of novelistic fiction around the
world, Moretti in subsequent publications has argued the centrality of French
and English literature also from a world literary perspective. Casanova’s and
Moretti’s theories have been heavily criticized, both as to method and to the
claims based thereon. As for myself, without wanting to dispute the factual
findings of Moretti, I would still want to qualify his to my mind one-sided
emphasis on France/French and England/English literature by adding
Germany/German as a third and important center, or if you want engine, for
European and world literature at least throughout the nineteenth century and up
to the nineteen-thirties. If not necessarily in actual numbers, then certainly in
perception and actual influence German and German literature, as of the time of
Herder and Lessing, but even more so as of that of Goethe and Schiller,
indisputably occupied a central place on the European literary scene. It did so
because of the prestige German authors enjoyed at home and abroad, witness the
awe in which Coleridge, Carlyle, and Mme De Staël held their German
contemporaries. It also did so because of the natural gift for translation Goethe
ascribed to the German language and which he appreciated as a powerful
instrument for the mediatory role he saw German literature as bound to play in
the Weltliteratur emerging around him. Translations into German did indeed
play an important role in the dissemination of works from literatures in less-
known languages in Scandinavia and Central and Eastern Europe, alongside the
translations into French which for Casanova are instrumental in this regard.

Georg Brandes, a Dane writing mostly in German in order to reach a wider

audience, at the end of the nineteenth century argued that when it came to “the
likelihood of acquiring world renown or just a certain measure of
acknowledgement,” the French, although their language was only the fifth in the
world when measured according to the number of native speakers, were in the
best position, and that the English and Germans were “first in the second rank.”
And he concluded that “it is only the writers in these three lands who can hope
of being read in the original by the most educated in all nations” (Brandes 2013:
25). Earlier in the century, though, the leading role Moretti sees English
literature as coming to occupy in European, and by extension world literature, to
a considerable extent depended on French and German mediation. In fact, it is
translations into both French and German that initially helped spread English
literature abroad. Even in Holland, a nation that historically and economically
for the longest time had maintained close relations with Britain, many Dutch
readers of English literature throughout (certainly the early part of) the
nineteenth century continued to rely heavily on French and German translations,
and some of the early Dutch translations of the British Romantics as well as
many translations of British and American fiction were based on German or
French translations rather than on the English originals. Of course, because of
the number of native speakers of their language, the situation for English writers
never was as desperate as, in Brandes’s words again, for “those who write in
Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, Greek, and so on,” and
who “in the universal struggle for world renown [are] clearly positioned most
disadvantageously,” because they lack “their weapon, their language, and for
writers that about says it all” (Brandes 2013: 25). Still, comparatively speaking,
and from a world literature perspective, writers in English could less readily
count on foreign readers being immediately familiar with their language, and
with their world, than could French writers. A French writer, while writing
about things French, at the same time, and without having to give it any further
thought so to speak, was “always already” writing for the world. Even in French,
though, writers from outside of France itself cannot assume a similar
“universality” unless they are fully adopted in France and then become “French”
for all practical purposes – Brandes’s example is the Belgian French-language
author and later Nobel Prize Winner Maurice Maeterlinck. A fortiori, then, the
same thing goes for non-English English-language writers such as United States
authors for most of the nineteenth century. How then does such a writer assume
a “world literature” stance?

Brandes in the 1899 article from which I have been quoting all along
complained that “when Goethe coined the term world literature, humanism and
the spirit of world citizenship were still ideas universally entertained.” Since
then, however, Brandes found that “an ever stronger and more bellicose
nationalism ha[d] pushed these ideas backward” and that “the literatures or [his]
day bec[a]me ever more national” (Brandes 2013: 27). Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) seems to perfectly fit Brandes’s
diagnosis. Jonathan Arac has called Huckleberry Finn the most
“hypercanonized” of “American” texts, because according to the orthodoxies of
the study of American literature from its rise in the 1920s, but particularly so
since Lionel Trilling’s 1948 essay (Trilling 1970) on the novel, to the rise of
multiculturalism in the 1980s, it has been taken as the embodiment of the spirit
of the American nation, and its author, in Norman Podhoretz’s words (1959) as
quoted by Arac, as “the quintessential American writer,” (Arac 3). Much of the
stature of Twain as the founding father of a true American literature –
Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa (1935) famously claimed that “all modern
American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry
Finn” – rests upon what has been perceived as his until then unparalleled ability
to “catch” pure American reality and pure American speech. In these “national”
interpretations Twain is seen as writing exclusively, or at least primarily, about
America and for Americans. Now it seems to me that such an approach occludes
an important dimension of Twain’s novel, namely that which situates it within
Casanova’s “world republic of letters.” We can bring out this dimension if we
consider that Twain draws upon a number of intertexts from European literature.
Elsewhere, and drawing upon earlier work by Montserrat Ginés (2000) and
David Quint (2003), I have looked at Huckleberry Finn in relation to one such
“intertext,” Cervantes’ Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615
respectively. I here briefly summarize.

Twain’s indebtedness to Cervantes has of course been noticed before (Moore

1922, Blair 1960, Nash Smith 1960). However, the actual relationship between
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and
the Quixote, is far more fundamental and specific than has hitherto been
acknowledged, and this has important consequences for my argument. Quint
essentially reads Part II of the Quixote in function of Part I , interpreting the
sequel as a re-write of its predecessor, and a conscious reflection upon it. The
same suggestion has been made with regard to Huckleberry Finn and Tom
Sawyer. What has perhaps been less readily noticed is that Twain is deliberately
following in the mold cast by Cervantes. For Quint, the changes from Part I to
Part II of the Quixote reflect the social and other changes affecting the Spain of
Cervantes, and primarily the transition from military to court nobility, and from
a feudal order based on honor and prowess to a proto-capitalist or mercantilist
order founded on money and favor at court. As Quint himself puts it, “Don
Quijote throughout tells and retells a master narrative of early-modern Europe:
the movement from feudalism to the new order of capitalism that will become
the realistic domain of the modern novel, the genre this book does so much to
invent” (Quint x). I would argue that the change from The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reflects a comparable transition in
nineteenth-century America. Specifically, I would see in this change a reflection
of the transition from a belief in an America of youthful innocence restored after
the Civil War, with the issue of slavery supposedly solved, Reconstruction under
way, and the achievement of the ideals encoded in the American Constitution
apparently within actual reach, to the realization of the closing of these
opportunities with the end of Reconstruction, the institution of Jim Crow laws,
and the Unites States rapidly turning into a fully capitalist society. But just as
Don Quixote needed to destroy what went before in order to allow modernity to
come into being, and did so by parodying to death the literary form
“organically,” that is to say socially and ideologically linked to the old feudal
order, so too Twain, using a comparable strategy, had to do away with the
literary forms linked to the pseudo-feudal order of the Old South in order to
allow his own realistically inspired fiction to be born. Hence the famous passage
from the end of chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi where he compares the
effects wrought upon the nineteenth-century South by Don Quixote and
Ivanhoe, respectively, concluding that “the first swept the world’s admiration for
the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it … as
far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly
a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it,” (Twain
502). To revive that dead letter, and to “sink” Sir Walter Scott is precisely what
Twain aims to do with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain, then, like
all “great” writers, was acutely aware not only of his own position within his
own “national” literature, but also of the position of that literature within the
context of world literature, and hence his own place within Casanova’s world
republic of letters. To write about “home” in a “national” yet at the same time
“world” fashion Twain for his own foundational text of his own American
literature unhesitatingly drew upon the authority of the foundational text in the
genre of the modern novel, knowing full well that this for him also constituted
the only possibility for gaining access to world literature as a major writer in his
own right, and not as a minor author in a major language not his own.
Significantly, the literary ancestor he chose came from outside his own linguistic
orbit, but carried the highest literary capital possible, as the Quixote had long
been one of the most widely translated texts in the European tradition.

My second example comes from the contemporary Caribbean. After WWII the
linguistic hierarchies in European literature changed dramatically. Fritz Strich
in 1930, in an article on “world literature and comparative literary history,”
argued that each literature that took center-stage in world literature did so when
for the particular people from whom it issued had struck its “hour” (Strich 2013:
40). Strich’s colleague Viktor Klemperer, writing around the same time on
“world literature and European literature” could still confidently claim that
world literature was basically a matter of either a French or a German way of
writing, even if one wrote in a different language altogether. His examples were
Unamuno and Pirandello, whom he saw as in the German vein, and Joyce, in
the French. T.S. Eliot, in an inaugural address, “What is a Classic?”, he gave to
the Virgil Society in London in 1944, could still confidently posit that English
literature had not yet produced anyone equal to the illustrious Mantuan. Two
years later Erich Auerbach in his famous Mimesis (1953, German original
written in Istanbul during WWII, could still deal with European literature as
predominantly consisting of the Classical tradition as extended into the
Romance literatures, with attention only to Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf
from the English-language area. But the same Auerbach in 1952, his famous
article on “Philology and Weltliteratur,” where he foresaw, and feared, a time
when man would have to accustom himself “to existence in a standardized
world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary languages, and perhaps
even a single literary language,” wherewith “the notion of Weltliteratur would
be at once realized and destroyed” (Auerbach 2013: 66), clearly saw this single
literary language as being English, or perhaps even American. After WWII,
then, with the US indisputably in the lead in most matters, military, economic,
and political, of the so-called free world, the “hour” of English-language
literature had struck, eventually leading to the core of “Euro” or “Western-lit”
increasingly being centered upon what Jonathan Arac (2002) has called “Anglo-
globalism” feeding upon the dominant position of English as universal lingua
franca, of the American book market, also for textbooks including anthologies,
as the prime determinant for worldwide book production, of the popularity of
American literary products around the world, and additionally also of that of the
postcolonial literatures issuing from the former British Empire.

An author who seems to have perfectly understood from where the world
literary wind is blowing at present is Maryse Condé (1937). As a French-
language author originating from Guadeloupe, she is in a “minority” position
vis-à-vis contemporary French literature somewhat similar to that of Twain with
regard to late nineteenth-century English literature. Maryse Condé's La
migration des coeurs (1995, translated as Windward Heights in 2003 ), as a re-
write of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, at first sight seems to take the
typical postcolonial stance of “writing back”, in the terms made famous by
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in their 1989 landmark The Empire Writes Back,
to hegemonic European literature and culture. On closer inspection, though, she
is actually “shadowing” Emily Brontë’s masterpiece in a strategic balancing act
that allows her to re-position her work, herself as a French-Caribbean writer, and
Caribbean literature in general, within the context of an emerging “world
literature.” This balancing act also involves enlisting the example of that
“Other” cultural translation of a Brontë classic, not of Emily’s this time but of
Charlotte’s. Indeed, though her native Guadeloupe is the predominant setting of
Condé's La migration des coeurs (1995), a significant part of the novel’s action
is laid on Dominica, and more particularly in Roseau, the island's capital and
birthplace of Jean Rhys, English but of Dominican descent. This is an indication
on Condé’s part that La migration des coeurs is not just, as advertised via the
novel's dedication, “une lecture” of Emily Brontë's “chef-d'oeuvre” Wuthering
Heights (1965 [1847]), but that her novel should also be “read” through the
prism of her British Caribbean counterpart’s re-writing of Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre as Wide Sargasso Sea. However, there is more to Condé’s particular
choice of ancestors than “mere literature.” In fact, her choice is motivated by
economic and ideological strategy as much as by literary considerations.

In the most general terms we can see Condé as repeating at the end of the
twentieth century, and in the Caribbean, a move similar to that Pascale Casanova
(1999) sketches as also having been made in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in French literature. Then, ambitious French authors such as Joachim
Du Bellay, François Malherbes, and René Descartes “exiled” themselves from
the then-dominant language of science and authority, i.e. Latin, and went over to
the vernacular French in a bid for power, and to gain a wider, more democratic,
or more “popular” audience, thereby sealing the linguistic translatio imperii
from Latin to French as the new “master language” of Europe. With La
migration des coeurs Condé follows suit by exiling herself from her native
French culture into Anglophone culture, if not in the use of language then at
least in terms of cultural reference, thus affirming yet a further translatio
imperii. On a more specific level, Condé’s opting for the particular literary
antecedents she does in La migration des coeurs also indicates her positioning
herself in a struggle for literary dominance raging in French-Caribbean
literature at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, and that pitted
Maryse Condé against the writers of so-called “créolité,” that is to say foremost
Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau.

James Arnold’s (1994) has convincingly argued that Confiant and Chamoiseau,
at least with their work up to the publication of their (and Jean Bernabé’s) 1989
Eloge de la créolité, inscribed themselves within a male tradition of French-
Caribbean writing that aimed to construe, completely in line with Casanova’
theories, a French-Caribbean “national” literature, following the model
previously established for Europe’s national literatures. Because of the specific
circumstances under which Caribbean societies have come into being, the
literature of “créolité” propagated by Confiant and Chamoiseau, according to
Arnold, aims to write into existence a nation that is essentially black, male, and
proletarian, and that defines itself in opposition to the mother country, France.
Inevitably, the literature written in support of such a nationalist ideal, if written
in French, is not only “minor” in the common-sense of the word, but also
constitutes itself as a “minor literature” in the term as used by Deleuze and
Guattari (1986 [1975]). Inevitably, too, such a militant view of French-
Caribbean literature leaves little room for a writer like Maryse Condé who for
various reasons, having to do with her gender, the themes and subjects of her
novels, and the standard (i.e.non-créole) language she uses in her work, does not
fit the mould. I have briefly argued elsewhere that already in 1987, with La vie
scélérate , Condé overturns the “créoliste” recipes for nation and literature
(D’haen 1997). With La migration des coeurs I see her as taking even sharper
issue with the particular idea of a French-Caribbean or Antillean nation, and
literature, as propagated by the “créolistes.” But in this particular work Condé
also pursues a particular politics of novel writing in the French Caribbean. By
casting La migration des coeurs as a re-write of Wuthering Heights Condé
allies herself with an alternative culture, one with equally strong or even
stronger ties to the Caribbean than in the French case. As Emily Apter (2003:
441) puts it, “English allows (Condé) both to bypass the burden of the French
literary tradition, weighing down on her own formation as a Francophone writer,
and the strictures of nativist dogma adhered to by certain of her créolité cohort.”

Moreover, although undoubtedly most blatant in La migration des coeurs, such

reaching out to the literature that as of the middle of the twentieth century has
arguably replaced French literature at the heart of Casanova’s world republic of
letters, with Condé is not an isolated instance, but rather a recurrent strategy.
Indeed, in Moi, Tituba sorcière … Noire de Salem (1986) she clearly treads the
ground of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and of Ann Petry’s
Tituba of Salem Village (1963), while in Traversée de la mangrove (1989) she
brushes up against Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856) as well as William
Faulkner’s As I lay Dying (1930). In La migration des coeurs there are not only
the obvious parallels with Wuthering Heights, but also clear echoes of Jane
Eyre, and of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Condé, in other words, is not just
appealing to English literature, but likewise to American literature, and to earlier
“Caribbean” writing in English. Derek O’Regan has also incontrovertibly
established that Condé’s intertextual preferences are predominantly English-
inclined. Thus, she is no longer profiling herself as uniquely a representative of
a minor culture (French-Caribbean) on the edge of a major one (French), but she
is making a bid for the stature of at the very least a “New World” author, or,
alternatively, a “transnational” and “transatlantic” author. At the same time, she
is reconfiguring the map of relations pertaining to French-Caribbean writing,
privileging not the Césaire of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal but rather that of
Une tempête (1969), and already anticipating upon Glissant’s own
“reassessment” of his indebtedness to William Faulkner in Faulkner, Missisippi
(1996). In other words, rather than as a peripheral offshoot of French literature,
Condé is re-grounding French-Caribbean literature as a Caribbean literature, and
as a literature of the “Americas,” plugged in fully as much to Anglophone
literature relating to that continent as to its Francophone counterpart. By the
same token, French-Caribbean literature becomes a “central” part of a newly
constellated American hemispheric literature. As Apter (2003: 441-42) again
puts it, “the use of English also draws attention to the prevalence of British
narrative models in her fiction. Unlike her forebears, Césaire, Albert Memmi,
Octave Mannoni, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, all of whom fashioned
postcolonial Calibans out of Shakespeare's Tempest, Condé's rewriting of
Wuthering Heights has as much to do with establishing a new kind of literary
inheritance, as it does with political “détournement and appropiationism.” A
similar argument holds when we stop to notice that Condé draws upon an
exclusively female literary ancestry in La migration des coeurs and thus may be
seen to also reposition herself beyond the national, or even the hemispheric, and
as truly “global.” Apter (2003, 442) opines that “in opting for an introjective
rather than a purely intertextual model of literary transference, Condé's fiction
downplays the ethics of reversal in favor of a preoccupation with the
transmission of literary voice. This transfer of voice becomes a strategy for
inserting oneself into a genealogy of ‘women writers of genius’ that includes
Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Virginia Woolf.” Again, an ancestry that is purely
“Anglo.”

Condé’s allegiance to Anglo-American models is not a lone case. In fact, it can

be seen as exemplifying what has been going on in Caribbean fiction for the last
twenty years or so. By the time Condé came to write La migration des coeurs
Raphaël Confiant in Bassin des ouragans (1994) and La savane des
pétrifications (1995), as analysed by Emily Apter again in The Translation
Zone, was also firmly on the road toward “globalization,” albeit in a way
different from that of Condé. Instead of exchanging genealogies, he opted for
integrating an international vocabulary, in origin primarily US American or
metropolitan French, into his writing, thus updating the notion of “créolisation”
from that of an attempt to cling to a nativist tradition to that of an active
engagement with the modern and international world that the Caribbean,
including the French Caribbean, is part of, and effectively claiming for his
American hybrid “creole” French a greater, more “global” future power than
that still exerted by “fading “hexagonal French. Almost at the same time that
Confiant was putting into practice his particular “transnational poetics” of
creolisation , Edouard Glissant, in Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), explicitly allied
himself to the US author not just because of a specific form of “Caribbean
Gothic,” as Apter (2006) claims also for the link between Faulkner and Condé,
but more generally and comprehensively in terms of a shared “Caribbean
discourse.” Here too, then, Glissant is partially “translating” his own novelistic
practice into a wider genealogy initially stemming from Anglophone America.

A number of other Caribbean writers, from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and
elsewhere, while continuing to write about their islands of origin, and to be
labeled as Haitian, Dominican, etc. have opted to switch to American English
for their fictions. For reasons of time and space I cannot here go into detail, but
suffice it to think of for instance Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvárez.

By way of summary, then: If at the time of writing his most famous novel,
widely regarded as foundational for his national literature, Mark Twain still
found it necessary to appeal to a continental European legacy to anchor his work
in world literature, we see that with Condé the situation has been completely
reversed, and it is the “Anglo-Atlantic” legacy that holds out the possibility of
adherence to world literature.
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