Impressions

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It seems too obvious to say that the literature we read tends to be written by a certain class of people because of the nature of capitalist social relations. We are ourselves for the most part in the positions we are in because we belong to a particular class of people who have tended to be capitalism’s beneficiaries. The literary marketplace is part of capitalism’s cultural infrastructure, and the animus against the commercialization of culture, the attempts to imagine a time when culture was more autonomous from capital, and the subtle gradations of accommodation to and distance from commercial imperatives have not done much to challenge what Marx and Engels recognized in their claim that Weltliteratur was a cultural accompaniment to an avowedly economic reality. The idea that the problem is a cultural one—a matter of lack of diversity arising from the pressures of the market—threatens to give the impression that a market better able to accommodate a more diverse array of writers doing more sophisticated, political, and less translatable things is the most pressing issue. But the problems are much deeper. The requisite level of cultural literacy and access to literary works is fundamentally determined by status in hierarchies demanded by the division of labour—hierarchies that a better or more representative world literature (more complex, more sophisticated, less translatable, more committed) cannot hope to affect.

A third point to make about the sociology of world literary production—in addition, that is, to the point about brand equity, and about literacy and access—is that if critics want to locate and valorize a kind of culture that will not be so readily available to easy market appropriation, they may not be giving the market enough credit. It is a characteristic of contemporary capital that it accommodates critique very well and finds the marketable kernel in even the most virulent anti-market gestures. The inequities of copyright and the iniquitous distribution of access to media platforms, including literary writing and the outlets that celebrate it, is a ubiquitous theme in contemporary writing and the reception of contemporary writing. So much so that scandals about who gets to benefit from the celebration of a given work are willingly orchestrated and anticipated by writers, marketing departments, agents, editors, et cetera. Think, for instance, of the debates about the (in)authenticity of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. This kind of refutation of elite—often middle-class, white, or developed-world—prestige is now one of the main engines of prestige. Such critique is explicitly invited. It means sales.

So this is part of how we might understand the contemporary moment of world literature: a moment of purportedly global circulation that is really a moment of uneven distribution of the agency and ability to author and of uneven access to reading materials and to the means of publication. In these conditions we can observe heightened consciousness about the compromises, complicities, and constraints on literary work and its valorization, and heightened kinds of circular games with reflexive unease about the extent to which particular individuals have the right to represent certain kinds of experience in their writing. The debates over world literature’s market dynamics appear here as symptomatic articulations of this kind of self-consciousness.

 

Notes

I wish to thank David Thomas and Lina Shoumarova for their research assistance.

 

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