Internal Liminalities, Transcultural Complexities: Expanding Frontiers for Comparative Literature - Peter Lang
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Internal Liminalities, Transcultural Complexities:
Expanding Frontiers for Comparative Literature
Gerald GILLESPIE
Stanford University
Oswald Spengler contended in 1918, in the first volume of Der
Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), that people “of
the Western Culture are, with [their] historical sense, an exception and
not a rule. World-history is [their] world picture and not all mankind’s”;
and once having ripened, the European modes of “self-expression” were
destined to decay, never to return (Decline, I.15). Many newer
theoreticians like the late Jacques Lyotard have endorsed this theme of
supersession, manifested in a supposed collapse of European grand
narratives. Yet literature of the twentieth century offers massive
evidence that non-European cultures have interacted extensively with
the European streams, in an exchange of insights and materials. It is of
course a multidirectional traffic, although the limits of my own reading
as well as of space restrict me here to illustrating it mainly by reference
to Eurocentric authors. Thus the concept I call “internal liminality”
today has a global applicability. The juncture established between
transcultural complexity and internal liminality was virtually pre-
ordained once the Renaissance interest in the peculiarities of the
enormous ancestral Greco-Roman world and other ancient phenomena
and peoples inside and outside the fluctuating Greco-Roman imperial
borders, and fascination for newer overseas discoveries, had taken hold
of European writers. François Rabelais’s rambling novel of Gargantua
and Pantagruel demonstrated that literature could take on board a
plethora of materials of diverse provenance and interrogate strange or
outmoded aspects of the actual inherited repertory. The successor
Enlightenment and Romantic interest in supposed pre-rational
mentalities and early stages of culture, in detectable strata underlying
modern norms, only reinforced the inevitability that such topics would
be explored in the human sciences and become part of international
comparative literature. When, for good or ill, these European habits of
analyzing cultural materials penetrated into the general intellectual
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repertory of the modern era, it was foregone that non-European writers,
too, could and would exploit the patterns of complexity and liminality
which Europe had dished up and grasp the artistic potential of
juxtaposing and/or intermixing elements of their home cultures.
During the twentieth century, the global situation was increasingly
propitious for writers from cultures earlier felt to be more distant from
metropolitan Europe who, through one or more migratory removals in
their family or personal history, became permanent exiles from their
putative original homelands. By inserting themselves into the
international market via one or another European lingua franca, writers
like the West Indian V.S. Naipaul and the East Indian Salman Rushdie
could bring extra-European perspectives across frontiers, and indeed
could enjoy a special kind of intellectual freedom as transcultural
experiencers; or an artist of European origin like the German
expressionist Ret Marut could achieve reincarnation as the mysterious
B. Traven of Mexico. These authors were following in the wake of New
World transplants to Europe starting at least from Garcilaso El Inca in
the sixteenth century, and of such great European migrants as the Polish
Joseph Conrad who, initially as a British sea captain, went forth to
explore the wide world in the later nineteenth century. Sometimes
European authors made their transcultural odyssey in early adulthood
first by way of the New World, as in the case of the Scot Robert Louis
Stevenson and the Greek-Irish (later naturalized Japanese citizen)
Lafcadio Hearn. Sometimes the important start was by way of an
imperial possession like India, as in the case of the Englishman Rudyard
Kipling. Many ethnically non-European writers, whether conscious or
not of the epochal relationship, have been probing areas fascinating to
the Irish novelist James Joyce; that is, they bear resemblance to those
intra-European migrants who have been profoundly aware of the
residual liminality of their original homeland and likewise of the archaic
roots of the metropolitan West, of a heritage which in historical terms,
viewed from the privileged metropolitan perspective, was in some
significant part “liminal.”
Thomas Mann (a long-time exile in America and elsewhere) and
James Joyce (most of his life technically an exile in Europe) both
developed a sweeping developmental view of the modern world. They
not only engaged in explicit modernist mapping all around the global
horizon; their scrutiny also reached all the way back to archaic layers of
human existence. We encounter this passion repeatedly in postmodern
writing by New World by artists such as John Barth, Alejo Carpentier,
and José Donoso.
That is, “Eurocentric” paradigms of analysis or representation
merged with perceived non- or extra-European phenomena in the works
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of many twentieth-century writers, and the capacity deepened to
perceive archaic vestiges from anywhere also as crypto-European. As I
have argued elsewhere (“Peripheral Echoes”), the so-called Old and
New Worlds frequently served as reciprocal foils. The categories often
overlap and cross-fertilize and switch back and forth between the center
and the periphery of the literary repertory over time. By way of
illustration, I shall touch briefly on just a few categories: There are
authors who focus on a non-European cultural enclave that has been
surrounded by a larger, very complicated multi-ethnic Eurocentric one,
like the American Tony Hillerman in his detective novels set in the
Navajo nation of the American Southwest; authors who depict the
folkways of a non-European culture and the disruptive changes which
occur when an imperial power intrudes into it and takes over for a long
spell, like the Nigerian Chinua Achebe in All Things Fall Apart; authors
who evoke an already evolved, hybrid, but still internally liminal New
World culture affected by international forces, like Gabriel García-
Márquez in Cien años de soledad. Hailing originally from the island of
Santa Lucia, Derek Walcott in the epic poem Omeros evokes a complex
of overlapping hybrid Caribbean cultures that are too small to break out
of their liminality, yet can celebrate their relatedness and reach back in
history for attachments to the larger human story as context.
But I shall pay greater attention here to three further clusters. The
first cluster involves the interlinked phenomena of modern anarchic and
nihilistic writing that often blends into appeals to revolution and
infiltrates fascist, communist, and related totalitarian world views. The
second cluster involves authors who directly experience their own
existence as liminal and palimpsestial, like Flann O’Brien in his wildly
fantastic novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), and whose narrative
consciousness migrates from any putative reality into a textual interior.
The third and fourth clusters, closely related, involve the distinction
between philosophic existentialism that hits boundaries which impose
radical liminality, as in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée (1938), and the
movement toward apophatic vision as in Samuel Beckett’s novels.
I turn first to the tangle of anarchistic and nihilistic impulses that the
Scot-German John Henry Mackay sought to address in his novel of
1891, set in working-class London, Die Anarchisten: Kulturgemälde aus
dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. It was soon translated into English as
The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth
Century. Through the character Carrard Auban, Mackay resurrected the
ideal of pure anarchism lifted from Max Stirner’s remarkable treatise of
1844, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Mackay’s novel contrasted the
communist position as a deceptive new authoritarian threat, and indicted
syndicalism as criminal madness. Stirner’s work has been translated into
English as The Ego and Its Own, but could also be rendered, The Sole
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One and His Property. Stirner’s contemporary Søren Kirkegaard
formulated a Christian existentialism based on radical faith. Stirner, the
father of atheistic existentialism, instead proclaimed the absolute death
of all authority outside of the sovereign individual, including such
concepts as humanity—of course, much to the chagrin of Karl Marx and
others aiming to erect a new, compulsory social order. Die Anarchisten
reflected negatively on the rising tide of endorsements and
rationalizations of violence, rejecting by anticipation such classics as
Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence and Les illusions du progrès
(both 1908). Both the fear of cultural decadence and the supposed
collapse of the enabling grand narratives were being mobilized as
excuses to wreck the established order and go on a rampage through life.
Stirner loathed collectivist thought, yet his proclamation that he
predicated his own transitory self and its cause on “nothing” harbored
the seeds of a radical nihilism that could and often did infect social
crusades. This was a menace latent in European culture of the later
nineteenth century that the radical doubter Friedrich Nietzsche sensed
had to be confronted head on. Not only elegant celebrators of creative,
defiant decadence, such as Charles Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in Axel
(1895) and Gabriele D’Annunzio in Il trionfo della morte (1898), but
thousands of restless, unhoused, and sometimes boorish minds were
inclined to follow the logic which Ivan pursued in fevered dream in
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brat’ia Karamasovy (Brothers Karamasov, 1880):
“If God is dead, all is permitted.”
Stirner’s hypertropic post-Romantic subjectivism pointed the way
over the limes and out of the now “alien” traditional territory of Western
civilization into the interior of the self as its own universe. According to
the literary record, there was already a significant crowd in European
societies that had migrated internally into their own anti-world of
absolute atheistic self-empowerment by the time of the French
Revolution. Long before setting up shop in today’s San Francisco, the
self-selecting club, “les amis de crime,” of the Marquis de Sade’s novels
jostled the more mildly mannered libertines and confidence-men like
Giovanni Casanova. The impulse to break taboos such as the incest
prohibition and to relish fetishistic sex pulsates in writings like those of
Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. His Nuits de Paris ou le spectateur
nocturne (1788-91) and Monsieur Nicolas ou le cœur humain dévoilé
(1796) allow us to wallow in turpitude and perversion; Restif dresses the
grossness, cynicism, and disorder of the times in the flimsiest faux-naïf
pretense of interest in reform. Decades later, more insistently invoking
the moral purpose of societal reform, Naturalist writers like Émile Zola
in the twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93) and other
novels strove to promote awareness of the wretchedness and
waywardness among the lower orders. One strain of Naturalism—such
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as we find in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1894) and
Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)—rekindled the great Enlightenment
theme of sentimental participation in suffering. However, an equally
powerful strain of anxiety also emerged in Naturalism, such as in Joris-
Karl Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891) which explored the lurid aspects
of human sexuality and the proclivity to transgression in long historical
perspective; its protagonist, in revulsion over what the book explores, is
left groping for a spiritual answer at the end.
Everything dark, weird, and criminal about human beings posited by
Romantics like E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Alan Poe, all the old
themes of fate, obsession, and possession, along with the countervailing
yearning for a spiritual or occult pathway out of modern fallenness,
floated back to the surface as materials for Modernism. Audiences only
recently traumatized by World War I were invited into a nightmare
realm with no sure exit in spectral films of the twenties such as Robert
Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1919). A plausible argument
has been made by Michael O’Sullivan that Joyce’s own exploitation of
turn-of-the-century vampirism, Satanism, cabalism, spiritualism, and
occult teachings is not unambiguously parodic but trickily jocoserious,
fraught with tantalizing mystical hints. Vitalistic strains of thought and
newer theorizing about the unconscious by psychiatrists like Sigmund
Freud exercised a simultaneous pressure that encouraged artists to
experiment with passionate expression of feelings of personal identity
and social involvement. The sheer richness and confusion of impulses
feeding on Naturalism appears in figures like the Norwegian Knut
Hamsun (born 1859), the Russian Maxim Gorki (born 1868), and the
German Ernst Jünger (born 1895).
At bottom, Hamsun and Gorki were Romantic Realists like the
socially conscious Victorian Charles Dickens (born 1812); however,
whereas Hamsun was oriented to the mystique of the folk, Gorki was a
Nietzschean elitist and cosmopolitan. Both were drawn eventually in old
age into a mistaken compromise with the totalitarian movements that
had come to power in their homelands. Hamsun’s first popular novel
Sult (Hunger, 1890) was a classic tale of a determined individual, a
starving Norwegian artist, who struggles for survival and a place in the
sun. Hamsun’s Markens Grøde (Growth of the Soil, 1917), about a
pioneer peasant couple, Isak and Inger, was rapidly accepted as the
foundational romance of Norway. In a Rousseauesque fable, they wrest
a human world out of raw nature, only to see their lives encumbered by
the encroaching power of the modern state; and later, when Inger’s hare
lip is repaired by modern science, she returns from the big city, more
sophisticated but now dissatisfied. A fervent nationalist, hostile to the
imperial British and to the Soviets, Hamsun foolishly thought Nazi
policy would support an authentic, independent Norse culture, and failed
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ignominiously to get Hitler to relent from his brutality during the
occupation. Produced in London in 1911 as The Lower Depths, the play
Na dne (1902) cemented Gorki’s already considerable international
reputation. Gorki, a champion of the urban oppressed and destitute, was
drawn to social democracy and was early and openly critical of
Bolshevik censorship. As if an Italian Futurist, he admired Mussolini in
the 1920’s, but in a short story based on a stay in New York in 1906,
“The City of the Yellow Devil,” he excoriated American capitalist
society as soulless in contrast. Between 1928 and 1935 Gorki’s record is
perplexingly mixed. He wrote on world literature and encouraged
Russian writers to translate major foreign works; yet because he wanted
urbanization and industrialization, he justified the terrible treatment of
the peasants under collectivization. Alexander Solzhenytsin devotes an
entire chapter of the Gulag Archipelago to condemning Gorki, as editor,
and his many collaborators who produced the notorious propaganda
work, Belomorsko-Baltiyskiy Kanal imeni Stalina (Stalin’s White Sea-
Baltic Canal, 1934), for being the only group of writers in modern times
to glorify merciless slavery. When Gorki returned to Russia
permanently in 1932 at Stalin’s invitation, he lost his ability to defend
individual freedom against the malign state and may have been
murdered at Stalin’s behest. Hamsun and Gorki still imagined they
believed in the bedrock reality of culture, and not the attraction of the
abyss as they crossed over the limes.
Like Ernest Hemingway on the Italian side, Ernst Jünger had
experienced the transformational baptism of battle on the German side
in World War I as is reflected in his novel In Stahlgewittern (Storms of
Steel, 1920). Whereas André Malraux depicted the courage of engaged
communists in the failed Shanghai rebellion in La condition humaine
(Man’s Fate, 1933) and Hemingway reattached the cult of individual
heroism to the bigger cause of the doomed Spanish Republic in For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Jünger in contrast developed as a
conservative who rejected Western liberalism, while clearly shunning
extremists like the Nazis. In his powerful allegorical novel, Auf den
Marmorklippen (On the Marble Heights, 1939), even while his own
nation rushed into conquest under Hitler, Jünger affirmed a profound
love of the European civilization which monstrous usurpation—that is,
totalitarian dictatorship such as Hitler’s—directly threatened.
Writers like Malraux, Hemingway, and Jünger stand in contrast to
many superficially similar depicters of grim and drastic moments of
life’s cruelty and absurdity, because in the final analysis they do not
cross the limes into the interior of mere anarchic rage or nihilistic
acceptance. I aggregate them, at least for some of their works, in a
bigger class along with such admirable unhoused modernists as the
American Richard Wright. Born in 1908 to a former slave family in
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rural Mississippi, like Gorki an autodidact, Wright ventured to the
northern big cities Chicago and New York, and gained prominence as a
young intellectual star in the Communist Party. But by 1942 he left the
party out of disgust with its repressive controls and appeared among the
famous defectors in the international collection The God That Failed
(1949). All his life Wright remained an advocate of leftwing political
solutions, but he was continuously criticized by leftist and rightist critics
for his unmitigated depictions of violence and degradation. In 1946,
Wright moved to Paris and found some comfort in associating with
Existentialism. His non-fiction book Pagan Spain (1957) is remarkable
for its profound sense of compassion for the poverty-stricken women
who he discovers are being regularly shipped off by the boatload to
Africa and the Near East in the white slave trade. This book is also a
testament to the will of human beings to transcend the brutal blows of
history. Looking back on his own life story, the multiply exiled Wright
realizes that in effect he is more European in spirit than the average
Spaniard, and the average Spaniard is more African than he, the
offspring of black slaves. Wright’s affirmation of Eurocentric culture as
an instrument of liberation rings loud and clear.
The complex case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (born 1894) is
instructive in contrast. His style bears some analogy to that of Hamsun
and Gorki in its intensity but is far more frenetic and idiosyncratic. A
medical doctor, throughout his life he sought to practice under his legal
name Destouches, despite often difficult impediments, most of them
self-inflicted, and like the liberal Anton Chekhov he often cared for poor
patients. Yet Céline gravitated into and remained identified with the
fascist camp in the public mind. Nicholas Hewitt has carefully assessed
the kind and degree of collaboration on Céline’s part during the World
War II period. From his youth onward Céline was a restless wanderer
and anarch who yearned for some undefined transformational
apocalypse that would cleanse Europe of its essential corruption and the
insanity exhibited in fratricidal World War I, in which he like
Hemingway and Jünger had been wounded. His paranoiac obsessions
were extravagant and in my view exhibit a Gnostic hysteria widespread
in the twentieth century. Two of his major works, Voyage au bout de la
nuit (1932) and Mort à crédit (1936), had already gained him notice
before he veered fulsomely into vituperative anti-Semitism as a way to
rail against human blindness, corruption, and degradation. The
aristocratic Jünger disdained this vulgar trait of hatred in him. Multiple
kinds of delirium characterize the Célinian novel, as Allen Thiher has
detailed. I would add that Céline’s works express a negative spiritual
vision, as if penned by the harshest practitioners of Baroque desengaño,
but without any trace of a binding moral framework, so absolute is his
sense of human wretchedness. The adventures of Céline’s paired
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younger and older pícaros in Voyage, Bardamu and Robinson,
demonstrate how all struggle conducts to a deadend, whether in
surrender to, or in self-destructive defiance of, limits inherent in nature.
I will venture an historical comparison: Haunting irredeemable failure in
Voyage resurrects the bitter sneer of the anti-hero in the anonymous La
vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor (1646),
not the uplifting wisdom of the world-traveled survivor in Johann Jacob
Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
Teutsch (1668-69).
Strikingly different in tone and structure is the novel La familia de
Pascual Duarte (1942) by Camilo José Cela Trulock (born 1916), the
Galician fascist of many parts who had a voracious interest in many
fields and whose career as a prolific author long outlived the Franco
period. Wounded in the Civil War, the young Cela worked as a censor
under the incoming Franco regime, helped the dictatorship mollify
dissident intellectuals, and contributed for a while as a far-right
politician to Spain’s transition into social democracy. La familia de
Pascual Duarte, set in depressed rural Estremadura prior to the Civil
War, reveals a frightening reservoir of anger, violence, and cruelty. Cela
uses a mixture of paratextual devices to frame the first-person account
of a primitive peasant who awaits execution as a multiple murderer.
Religious restraint has only a tenuous hold on Duarte through his
superstition and his thwarted instinctive attraction to decency, which is
in very short supply in his family. Duarte can find momentary peace
only when locked up. His ultimate crime is to kill his vicious mother
who incarnates destructive hatred. Cela contains Duarte’s dark act of
rejecting corrupt life in indications that some caring individuals do exist
in the larger society who do the best they can for Duarte but eventually
have no choice other than to put him out of his misery. There is an
implicit subtext to the depicted horrific eruption of criminality on the
part of a lower-class person who is incapable of being a clever pícaro.
Cela’s novel justifies benevolent authoritarian rule. We readers face the
unpleasant problem of deciding whether Cela’s somber vision has some
merit or is in itself a craven capitulation to terrifying forces. Just as
perplexing is how to react to the deep reality of Meursault’s account in
Albert Camus’s L’étranger (1942). Society interprets this antihero’s
anomy and violence as threatening, and he reciprocates with hatred, not
conversion, under death threat himself. But if the universe is indifferent
to humanity, then an atheist who lives intensely in the present may
strangely be in harmony with it.
All too often in the twentieth century, the dilemma of decision does
not entail the relevance of a forgotten moral code. Under these
circumstances the shock effect is greater when an author makes us stare
straight at the failure of human beings in the face of insurmountable
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limits. That is startlingly clear in works contemporary to Cela’s such as
The Sheltering Sky (1946) by the New Yorker Paul Bowles, an
accomplished composer, translator, and writer, who after doing the
modernist scene also in Paris and Berlin, permanently resettled as an
expatriate in Morocco. In The Sheltering Sky we follow the newly
married couple Port and Kit and their friend Tunner, all of privileged
background from the American East Coast, as they move around North
Africa after landing at Tangiers. It is a mystery why Port is attracted to
the dangers of this quite different world, or why Kit indulgently
accompanies him to her own peril, whereas, still attached to the ideas of
home, always as an outsider, Tunner shadows them trying in vain to
help them. Port’s waywardness results in his death from disease in a
dingy fringe town of the French colonial empire, and Kit, literally
enslaved and carried off into the interior by a Twarog caravan leader,
goes insane and cannot adjust after her rescue—she is forever cut off
from the civilization that fails to reclaim her inwardly. Port and Kit
disappear permanently over an edge into an alien realm for which
Bowles offers no explanation, except that it exists. The even harsher
eight-part narration Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), by Hubert Selby, Jr.,
can serve to illustrate that prospective Ports and Kits did not have to
leave metropolitan America for Africa or elsewhere in order to penetrate
beyond the civilized pale into the liminal realm of mortal danger and
dehumanization; one only needed to make a wrong turn off the
Brooklyn Expressway. The coarse colloquial language, the brutal
behavior of the lowlife figures in the neighborhood, the depressing and
degrading banality in Last Exit rival anything that Céline could conjure.
The moral indignation of reformist Naturalism and Expressionism
seems exhausted. Last Exit leaves a very bitter taste because there is no
explanation, no rationalization.
Selbey’s harsh version of estrangement shatters the illusion of
civilization. Modern barbarians being well entrenched, it is time to
huddle behind security fences in the dawning new Middle Ages. This
constrictive retreat of the limes as it withdraws into city neighborhoods
contrasts markedly with the benign escape from the banal externality of
society, from the ordinary world’s tedium and philistinism, such as we
enjoy in Flann O’Brien’s flight into the textual interior in At Swim-Two-
Birds. Appearing in the same year as Joyce’s Wake, the spiritual
ancestry of O’Brien’s work is diverse. Raised as an Irish speaker, in his
student days O’Brien grew fond of the medieval Irish tradition,
including its rich satiric vein. Many references from the older literature
and Irish folklore are imbedded in At Swim-Two-Birds for comic
effect—a ploy familiar in Rabelais and other Renaissance writers.
O’Brien’s metaphysical joke of having fictional characters rebel against
their hypothetical author and attempt to usurp his creative functions is
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familiar in such modern works as Miguel de Unamuno’s novel Niebla
(1910) and Luigi Pirandello’s play Sei caratteri in cerca d’un autore
(1921). This device burst onto the scene in full armor in the fantastic
comedies of the young Ludwig Tieck in the final years of the eighteenth
century, as did the parodic mixing of human and non-human dramatis
personae and other fairytale elements. The intertwining of increasingly
improbable plot strands, such as O’Brien practices, boasts an equally
proud lineage that reached an early highpoint in such fictions as Der
goldene Topf (The Golden Pot) and Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr
(Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr) by Tieck’s contemporary E.T.A.
Hoffmann. The frame tale in At Swim-Two-Birds out of which the wild
proliferation of plot events is generated, as characters in the several
main strands begin to produce their own fictions, involves a desultory
student who lives with a dull uncle, and the novel ends peremptorily
simply because he passes his exams.
Perhaps the most understandable internal products of At Swim-Two-
Birds are the student’s adaptations of Irish legends about figures like
Finn Mac Cool and the strange bird-man and love-god Aengus. These
moments convey the joy of migrating into an alternate world from the
quotidian present and allowing the mind a ludic romp through the text
which the mind can body forth as its own kingdom. The mysterious
potential of textuality is revealed when a protagonist of a main strand of
the novel, John Furriskey, turns out to be a creation of another of the
student’s characters, the cynical author Dermot Trellis. Furriskey’s
existence eventually becomes entangled with others of Trellis’s
characters. Oddly enough, another main strand of the novel concerns the
rather sophisticated Pooka MacPhellimey who, of course, is not a
human being but a member of the devil class, and among his
inexplicable powers is the ability to poke his finger into the textual web
of the fiction we are reading and tear it. Those who are aware of how
capricious an Irish púca can be, hold their breath at the surfacing of such
a threat; though after a nervous laugh we can take comfort in the fancy
idea that this is just a multifaceted mise-en-abyme, a novel about novels,
in the line which stretches over Cervantes, Sterne, and the Romantics.
O’Brien’s other novel, The Third Policeman (written 1939 and 1940,
published posthumously in 1967), more resembles fictions by Kafka and
Beckett in the way its unexplained contemporary figures seem involved
in something significant that is not obvious and, as in certain paintings
by Salvador Dalí, spaces behind the surface and spaces within spaces
open to our view and certain odd symbols like a bicycle pump recur as
motifs. Joyce praised At Swim-Two-Birds for its imaginative power but
did not live to read The Third Policeman, nor did his younger
countryman Beckett introduce him early enough to Kafka for him to
react to the peculiar genius of the Prague author. Joyce’s encyclopedic
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humorism sometimes incorporates moments that have the quality of
surrealist wit, but in general I distinguish the Joycean fascination for
metaphysical puzzles and special states of awareness from the bigger
wave of Existentialism.
The main successor current to Naturalism as a movement concerned
to reorder values, Existentialism rose to its zenith in Europe in the years
bracketing World War II, roughly 1935 to 1955. Existentialism
overlapped with the continued worship of anarchic impulses we find in
the heavily drug-oriented Beatnik generation in America who by the
mid-sixties morphed into the Hippies. The two main kinds of
Existentialism which interest me here—that of philosophic revaluation
and that of apophatic reaction—are sometimes virtually indistinguish-
able. In my judgment Jean-Paul Sartre’s powerful novel La nausée
(1938) exhibits the basic philosophic stance, at moments with
approximation to the apophatic mode. The threatened denial of meaning
for humanity is coupled with a fervent sense of horror when Sartre’s
protagonist, the writer Roquentin, whose confession we are reading,
fully grasps the mindless enmity of nature. The natural order stands ever
ready to encroach on the works created by human beings; it is poised to
overgrow the ruined city if mankind defaults; thus implicitly the human
creatures who express a will to form and who create values are heroic.
The novel La nausée builds toward one of the most remarkable extended
epiphanies in twentieth-century literature, Roquentin’s description of his
nightmarish encounter with the inherent horror of existence. The lineage
of such existential visions stretches down to the present from Werther’s
gaze into the monstrosity of the world in Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young
Werther, 1774) and the apocalyptic “Rede des toten Christus vom
Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei” (“Dead Christ’s address from the
roof of the universe that there is no God,” 1798) by Jean Paul Richter.
La nausée is a worthy successor. I find it interesting that the New
Directions edition in English omits the epigraph for his book which
Sartre lifts from Céline—perhaps the link was too disturbing for a left-
oriented press.
I shall preface my example of an apophatic response by a brief
reminder of some remarkable symbolism of self-referential questioning
associated with Joyce’s Shem the Penman, a multi-purpose figure, in
Finnegans Wake (1939). A number of critics (for example, Gian
Balsamo) have interpreted the motifs of Shem’s making ink out of his
own urine and feces and inscribing the story of humankind on his own
body as betokening the natural martyrdom of consciousness, an
apophatic messianism. Elsewhere I have suggested that this, too, needs
to be read in the larger context of an eternal rebirth which we experience
poetically in the novel’s famous coda. Samuel Beckett thought of
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Joyce’s fundamental approach as being expansive and additive and of
his own approach as concentrative and subtractive; accordingly, the
longer-range outcomes are encyclopedic versus minimalist writing. The
former tendency is actually exoteric because of its enormous referential
register, whereas the latter is esoteric and thus closer to Kafka. I choose
Beckett’s novel Watt, written in English during World War II, in part
because of its historical nearness to Flann O’Brien and the late Joyce, in
part because it repeats the ground pattern of epistological disturbance
seen in the movie Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari and the ambiguous
symbolism of the madhouse. As we discover well into the novel Watt,
the materials are being narrated by Sam (a Shem figure?), a seeming
doppelgänger of Watt, yet he got them from Watt and both interlocutors
may be insane. The unexplained strange realm of Mr Knott, his house
and garden with its tree, is perhaps on one level metaphorically a
madhouse. But the way Watt encounters a variety of figures who come
and go, and experiences various rooms and interconnecting grounds,
reminds in many respects of unexplained doings and theater of the mind
in Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle). In Das Schloß the reader still can
follow a sequence of happenings, strange though they may be, as in
traditional narrative flow, whereas in Beckett’s novel narrative chunks
are transposed into an idiosyncratic sequence. Only in the opening lines
of chapter four do we get a confirmation that the actual order of the
story as Watt told it is “[t]wo, one, four, three.”
The elaborate business of the train station and arrivals and departures
in Watt frame the novel’s narrated quiddity (“whatness’) or fictive
substance so insistently that we cannot rest on any simple explanation of
the fluctuating personae and possible avatars at Mr Knott’s, nor of
Knott’s odd ways of communicating, appearing, or vanishing. Of
course, we cannot help wondering whether Watt’s name suggests
entelechy through its association with electricity and whether the
indefinite pronoun and adjective “what,” with implicit exclamation point
and/or question mark, also hints at the something that arose out of
nothing and is related to that mysterious origin. Another irrepressible
question is whether then the name Knott can suggest a puzzle to solve,
indescribable complexity, the elusive “unground” of Boehmean
theosophy, the “ain soph” of cabalist thought, and like things. It is
legitimate to invoke Beckett’s later trilogy written in French, Molloy,
Malone meurt (Malone Dies), and L’innommable (The Unnamable), as a
help in understanding, since these concentrate on an “I” and on stages in
its experience of dying and crossing from one realm to another.
Beckett’s greater amplitude in Watt seems still to have a residual
something of the flavor of the more elaborate orchestration of
Finnegans Wake which Joyce loosely correlates to stages in the soul’s
passage through the night and into the new day reborn. He saw these
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via Victoria University of WellingtonExpanding Frontiers for Comparative Literature 41
aspects of human identity in the Egyptian Book of the Dead among
other guides. The adventures of the actor Watt and his doubles may
picture as through a glass darkly the entire mysterious cyclicality of
incarnation and possibly reincarnation—a daunting subject matter far
beyond the scope of this survey outline. In this respect, Beckett’s Watt is
gnosiological. It attempts to capture unusual insights into processes and
states of discovery of the soul as a poetic experience. If we follow the
poet into these recondite levels of awareness, we sense how the
apophatic inability to affirm finally hits against a boundary or limes
reached by many great mystics.
Only a tentative close to this medley of examples toward an outline
is feasible. There are numerous works of literature which illustrate the
actual blending of European and non-European knowledge, and more
particularly of writers who express kinds of culture shock in moving
across boundaries, and/or loss of the comforting conviction in
rootedness or in an inherited codification of belief. Both the craving for
and the relinquishing of any sure hold on personal and/or cultural
identity is a widespread felt reality today in many parts of the globe. The
challenge which this state of affairs presents for comparative studies is
enormous. International comparative literature must resist giving in to
over-simplifying misprisions about the cause or flow of cultural
impulses that partisan ideologues may propose to explain the
innumerable and various cases of negative liminality; yet at the same
time international comparative literature must be ready to understand
why such narrow approaches, which may be inadequate on the
international level, are part of the bigger picture as well as often a
significant feature in a local or regional repertory. Some imaginative
writers and plenty of critics contest the validity of pursuing any
supposedly “totalizing” cultural history—they act as if this, as in
Spengler’s view, is just a deplorable European habit. But it seems
doubtful that the bulk of non-European writers of the present will be
willing any more than Eurocentric writers to throw away the advantages
of playing with this construct of comparative scrutiny that has already
crossed over so many frontiers and opened so many vistas, including
especially our consideration of cultural “insider-outsiders” like the
clairvoyantly deranged Meursault. If that is so, comparatists are well
advised to examine how writers actually define and shift boundaries,
and not to assume where the boundaries should lie.
Works Cited
Balsamo, Gian. Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the
Messianic Self. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004.
Büttner, Gottfried. Samuel Beckett’s Novel “Watt.” Trans. Joseph P. Dolan.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1984.
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via Victoria University of Wellington42 Old Margins and New Centers
Gillespie, Gerald. “Peripheral Echoes: ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds as Reciprocal
Literary Mirrorings.” Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 339-59.
—. “Swallowing the Androgyne and Baptizing Mother: Some Modernist Twists
to Two Basic Sacraments.” The Comparatist 33 (2009): 63-85.
Hewitt, Nicholas. The Life of Céline: A Critical Biography. Oxford, UK, and
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. I: Form and Actuality. II:
Perspectives of World-History. Ed. and trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 1928.
—. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit. Der Untergang
des Abendlandes: Welthistorische Perspektiven. München: C.H. Beck’sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918, 1922.
Thiher, Allen. Céline: The Novel as Delirium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1972.
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