Abstract
Early in 2012 we called for papers that would acknowledge the challenges of thinking about craft and of seeing craft itself as a kind of thinking. These aims could be meaningfully pursued only if craft and technique were understood to be the fundamental grounds for critical interpretation rather than subsidiary concerns for cultural critique and “textual analysis”. Such an understanding, we suggested, had been missing as much from recent conversations about world literature as from older conversations about Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures, and this to their detriment, since it is in craft that works are oriented towards and have knowledge of the world.
The enthusiasm of the response confirmed that others in the field shared our misgivings about the eclipse of craft and technique, though it soon emerged that each participant understood the reasons and remedies for this eclipse somewhat differently. This was not wholly unexpected, since we had asked for a range of approaches: formalist, stylistic, narratological, but also sociological, book historical, bibliographic; and we had hoped for the kind of geographic range that was in the end represented: Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, the Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe; ground which postcolonial criticism could hardly pretend to cover, even if we did choose to prioritize the context of decolonization in the call for papers. But over and beyond the divergence in focus and method, the uncertain meaning of craft, as indeed of technique, style and form, ensured the conference could do little more than initiate a series of further conversations and debates. This special issue is the concretion and surpassing of the initial moment, and itself belongs to an ongoing project. 1
We introduced the call for papers with a passage from J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986:147): “Writing does not grow within us like a cabbage while our thoughts are elsewhere,” I replied, not a little testily. “It is a craft won by long practice, as you should know.” Foe pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But as there are many kinds of men, so there are many kinds of writing.”
Much in this passage continues to resonate. To us, craft is indeed a literary practice, a practical knowledge acquired in making and doing: craft as a habit of seeing, thinking, and feeling, cultivated through effort; and also a competence in which reflection inheres, even in the guise of intuition, and that emerges from and aims at aesthetic judgements, which are always judgements of value: craft as in well crafted, poorly crafted, craftsmanship.
Craft, then, as a synonym of technique, for whenever the question of how arises in composition, we speak of the search for a technical solution. Yet notions of technique are themselves, necessarily, located in times and places, with sedimented meanings and associations. So it is, for example, that technique becomes especially salient in European aesthetic theory when art is threatened by mechanical reproducibility and the expectation therefore takes hold that expressive parameters must be continually reinvented. Craft, too, comes freighted with meanings and associations, for example: artisanal mastery preceded by apprenticeship within a confraternal enterprise, where membership is a function of common occupation and common cause: to learn a craft, to belong to a craft. And then, to us, craft is also a means of superseding, or at least avoiding the unhelpful distinction between pure art and folk art, so frequently encountered in the accusations of naïveté, backwardness, and conservatism levelled by defenders of the metropolitan canon against local artists, as much as in efforts to defend local art as autochthonous, indigenous, authentic.
Others have understood craft differently. Even in this special issue the word is used in ways we had not foreseen. Ruth Bush focuses on the craft of editors, suggesting how editorial taste and the processes involved in publishing might affect decisions not only about marketing but also about narration and syntax. To different ends, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Harrison, and Arvind Mehrotra address the craft of translation, which assumes responsibility for re-constituting the work in different literary environments, whilst Kei Miller reflects on the extent to which writing is constrained by its own technologies and media. In other essays, the entry into craft is by better known routes: Rachael Gilmour writes of the tensions of print and voice; Rachel Bower of genre, and especially of the epistolary novel; Vidyan Ravinthiran of the interplay between grammar, diction, and rhyme in poetic description; Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler of prosody, narration, and style; and Timothy Brennan of the rhetorical value of sincerity.
Quite purposefully, then, this issue works against the occultation of craft and technique, as well as its consequences, one of which has been the conceptual and institutional separation of critics and writers into the subjects and objects of literary scholarship. When writers are invited to postcolonial and world literature conferences it is often as pseudo-scholars, privileged native informants or window-dressing. Our emphasis on literary practice means restoring the decisions of writers to the centre ground, making scholars and writers collaborators in thinking through the thinking of literature. None can assume the mantle of objective science, but nor do any carry the entitlement to complete subjective licence. This view informed the conference programme as much as it has this special issue, where we have avoided sequestering the poets Arvind Mehrotra and Kei Miller. This is not out of a wishful sense of equivalence, but because, across the range of approaches and viewpoints taken, it is no more possible to ignore the constitutively subjective nature of aesthetic judgements than to evade the dialectical rigour of making substantive claims about literary works.
It is of interest that, by and large, the articles collected here do not address the most celebrated authors of postcolonial or world literature, indicating, perhaps, that a different literary history would emerge if craft were prioritized over thematics and the undoing of discourse. Indeed, a good number of our contributors concern themselves with poetry, going against the trend in postcolonial studies, where the focus on the novel has been so relentless.
Not that our readers should expect any uniformity of practice and purpose. There are real and important differences between these essays, certain of them irresolvable. For some, a criticism concentrated on craft persists in the direction of cultural critique; for others, it restores appreciation and taste-formation as the discipline’s defining task. For some, thinking globally about craft could only push translation to centre ground; for others it would divert us from the Idea that any meaningful act of crafting pursues. These tensions are not to be lamented: our aim has never been to offer up to the academic market a new portable methodology. Instead, it has been to reorient our field; not because we wish to escape into the close comforts of aestheticism or even a new formalism; but because we believe that it is in and through the decisions pertaining to craft and technique that works have their effects and meanings, that they confront us with their truth-contents.
Towards this end, in their opening article, Etherington and Zimbler (2014) work through critical categories that might assist the legibility of technical decisions made in particular works crafted in particular locations. They argue that the true character of any given literary practice can be grasped only in its “context of intelligibility”, a notion they seek to elaborate by synthesizing literary field and literary material. These concepts are used in turn to organize the special issue; not out of any theoretical tendentiousness, but because they illuminate the sense of locality and locatedness to which each of the essays is in some way committed; the sense, that is, of aesthetic materials and practices conditioned by the pressures of time and place, by institutional environments, and above all by the history and trajectory of particular literary cultures.
Locatedness is explicitly foregrounded in Miller’s (2014) analysis of the valence of different media. The poet’s decision to make zinc his expressive surface negotiates the imperatives of Caribbean political history, material economy, and aesthetic community. Likewise, in Ravinthiran’s (2014) persistent reading across Kolatkar’s oeuvre, the value of something as seemingly straightforward as description is shown to be determined within the context of a particular set of literary debates. Bower’s (2014) discussion of Brick Lane carefully reveals how the pressures of British trade book publishing constrain Monica Ali’s ambition to write a global novel, whilst Gilmour (2014), writing of John Agard and Daljit Nagra, explores ways in which readers inattentive to the divergent operations of graphotext and phonotext can lapse into misrecognition. Both ear and eye need to be keenly attuned. Even Arvind Mehrotra’s (2014) argument for Kolatkar’s cosmopolitanism, as well as the cosmopolitanism of his predecessors, works from within the specific dynamics of a constellation of Indian debates and practices.
If this suggests that the position-takings of critics are as much captured by the logic of relationally determined value as the works on which they focus, Brennan’s (2014) contribution might be read against the several decades of metropolitan cultural and intellectual production which have incessantly prioritized irony — along with aporia, disjuncture, and pastiche — as the hallmarks of an “ethical” or “resistant” or “subversive” literature. His article displays the lengths to which philosophical reflection and aesthetic reorientation must go in order to acknowledge properly that craft of writing which gains strength through repetition, sincerity, personality, and voice.
To emphasize locatedness is not to deny the possibility of movement, though a commitment to field and material does require that careful thought is given to how literary works might take up positions in several places at once, and how national, regional, and international arenas might intersect. Our original call for papers invited participants to interrogate notions such as exile, diaspora, and transnationalism, but omitted translation. Yet now we deploy it as one of the special issue’s key terms. Why?
In part, because three of our contributors — Attridge, Harrison, and Mehrotra — address it directly. Indeed, Harrison suggests that translation might be regarded as “the craft of world literature”, and both he and Attridge consider certain of its peculiar challenges: while the former cautions that reading in translation is worthwhile only if it prompts us to reach for what is untranslatable — the work’s musicality — the latter reminds us, via Derrida, that this irreducible element defines the translator’s task, for it is when encountering that which does not readily transfer that a true decision must be made. But the broader significance of translation, as practice as much as concept, is that it offers an especially helpful avenue into thinking about how works in one field become works in another, facilitating exchange between literary cultures, though always, as condition and consequence, by remaking the work, inserting it into a new literary environment, a new set of literary relations, and thus a new context of intelligibility, where its effect and meaning will be different.
The practice of translation, since it more obviously entails the work of agents other than the author, also alerts us to the importance of institutions, which, as both Bush and Bower make clear, play a part in position-taking and in the constitution of the field itself. Publishers, editors, anonymous readers, reviewers: literary works arrive with the imprimaturs of all. Translation only makes explicit what we might otherwise take for granted, activating a different set of institutional agents to remake the work in new fields, more concertedly and substantively, but in a way that is nevertheless related to trans-location without a change in language. It is movements of this kind that expand the ambit of the work and cumulatively create the sense of a global literary space.
What then is the value of world literature in an issue devoted to locatedness? Is it only a way of folding our claims into the jargon of the moment? Hardly. For we take seriously the notion of a world literary-system in which what Pascale Casanova (2004) calls literary capital is unevenly distributed, and we acknowledge the fact that many authors aspire to global stature, as well as the pressures brought to bear by the global literary marketplace. At the same time, we in no way take “world literature” to be some universal literary field which incorporates all others as subfields, or a sphere constituted by the transnational circulation of valued texts, or the totality of all writing that, from a distance, might notionally be labelled literary. Here the plural, “crafts”, is essential, not for the sake of plurality itself, but in order to recognize that we never encounter Practice as such, only particular practices, grounded practices.
There is, in other words, no singular, undifferentiated context of intelligibility in which crafting seeks truth, but many such contexts, whose dimensions are nothing other than human works and judgements. Rather than globalized connections and social totalizations, and in place of distant reading and a preoccupation with intertextuality, crafts of world literature invites us to begin in these contexts, each a world with its own topography. As so many of our contributors show, inhabiting particular worlds of craft need not restrict the works’ horizons. On the contrary, crafts of world literature asks that we bring our experience of these worlds to bear in our readings across them. Thinking through the homologies and divergences of fields and materials as they connect and cross-fertilize, we become alive to their truth-content in world-historical totality.