Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.
Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.
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Overview
Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller—two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives—debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do not attempt to formulate a joint theory of literature; rather, they allow their different backgrounds and lively disagreements to stimulate generative dialogue on poetry, world literature, pedagogy, and the ethics of literature. Addressing a varied literary context ranging from Victorian literature, Chinese literary criticism and philosophy, and continental philosophy to Sanskrit poetics and modern European literature, Ghosh offers a transnational theory of literature while Miller emphasizes the need to account for what a text says and how it says it. Thinking Literature across Continents highlights two minds continually discovering new paths of communication and two literary and cultural traditions intersecting in productive and compelling ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373698 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently, Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet: From Philip Sidney to T. S. Eliot.
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently, An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.
Read an Excerpt
Thinking Literature Across Continents
By Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7369-8
CHAPTER 1
MAKING SAHITYA MATTER
The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system.
— Third Earl of Shaftesbury
No biases are more insidious than those leading to the neglect of things everyone knows about in principle.
— Stephen Jay Gould
Rabindranath Tagore (1860–1941), the Indian poet-thinker, describes a delightful experience on the river Padma:
It was a beautiful evening in autumn. The sun had just set: the silence of the sky was full to the brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then disappeared, displaying on its vanishing figure all the colours of the evening sky. It drew aside for a moment the many-coloured screen behind which there was a silent world full of the joy of life. It came up from the depth of its mysterious dwelling with a beautiful dancing motion and added its own music to the silent symphony of the dying day. I felt as if I had a friendly greeting from an alien world in its own language, and it touched my heart with a flash of gladness. Then suddenly the man at the helm exclaimed with a distinct note of regret, "Ah, what a big fish!" It at once brought before his vision the picture of the fish caught and made ready for his supper. He could only look at the fish through his desire, and thus missed the whole truth.
The poet was disappointed to see this disconnect with nature. For the helmsman, greed and utility eclipsed a glimpse of the other world. What is this other world? Which world had the poet seen that the boatman had missed?
An incident related to one of Chuang-tzu's (an important Chinese philosopher who lived around the fourth century BC) revealing walks echoes Tagore's experience.
Chuang-tzu was walking on a mountain, when he saw a large tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it. When he was asked about the reason, he said it was good for nothing. Then Chuang-tzu said: "This tree, because of its uselessness, is able to complete its natural term of existence." Having left the mountain, Chuang-tzu lodged in the house of his friend. The friend was glad and ordered his waiting lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said: "One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot; which of them shall I kill?" The host said: "Kill the one that cannot cackle." Next day, his disciple asked Chuang-tzu , saying: "Yesterday we saw the mountain tree that can complete its natural term of existence because of its uselessness. Now for the same reason, our host's goose died. Which of these positions would you, master, prefer to be in?" Chuang-tzu laughed and said: "I would prefer to be in a position which is between the useful and the useless. This seems to be the right position, but is really not so. Therefore, it would not put me beyond trouble."
There is a uselessness that is celebrated in both the events. The boatman found the fish useless because it could not be caught right then, and the fish could not complete its natural term of existence because it was useful as food. What then do we say of a world that resides in the liminality of the useful and the useless? What does it mean to say, like Chuang-tzu, that succeeding in the useless comes to be of greatest use? This takes us beyond the acquisitive and the rational (events) to choose sahit (connection and communication) with the useless leaping of the fish, the fading beauty of the setting sun on the river, the value of the useless goose, and the nonutility of the luxuriant tree for the woodcutter. These can be termed as nonevents that combine, as I shall argue in the course of this chapter, with events to produce the sacred of sahitya.
In Sanskrit, sahitya is derived from the word sahita, "united together." V. Raghavan argues:
The concept of Sahitya had a grammatical origin. It became a poetic concept even as early as Rajasekhara [an eminent Sanskrit dramatist, poet, critic]; as far as we can see at present, the Kavyamimamsa [880–920 CE] is the earliest work to mention the name Sahitya and Sahitya-vidya as meaning Poetry and Poetics. Even after Rajasekhara, grammatical associations were clinging to the term up to Bhoja's time. Kuntaka [950–1050, Sanskrit poetician and literary theorist], about the time of Bhoja himself, was responsible for divesting Sahitya of grammatical associations and for defining it as a great quality of the relation between Sabda [word] and Artha [meaning] in Poetry. Sometime afterwards, Ruyyaka or Mankhuka wrote a work called Sahitya-mimamsa, which was the first work on Poetics to have the name Sahitya. Afterwards, Sahitya became more common and we have the notable example of the Sahitya-darpana of Visvanatha [a famous Sanskrit poet, scholar, rhetorician writing between 1378 and 1434].
The word sahitya retains its Sanskrit origin but is now commonly understood as literature encompassing poetry, plays, poetics, and other forms of creative writing. Although sahita means "united together," this does not point to fusion or intermelding but connection (the across-momentum), a kind of being-with. By sacred I mean a mystery and a meaning, a substance and a secret. I have used the word sacred in a sense that is completely different from what we commonly understand (holy, consecrated, pertaining to or connected to religion). The sacred of sahitya is the substance that stays withheld, a kind of withdrawal from its readers, a febrile anxiety to see itself exhausted at the hands of its readers. What kind of sahit does sahitya create? How does this sahit matter in helping sahitya matter meaningfully? With what matters does sahitya concern itself, to help us understand its mattering? Do the complexities of sahit confer upon sahitya the status of being sacred? Is sahit the troubling feature that has never deserted the attempt to understand sahitya? Is there a way of completing the natural process of sahitya, just as Chuangtzu's tree was allowed its full lifespan because it was useless?
Sahitya and the Sacred
Paul Hernadi rightly observes that there inevitably has to be a vigorous dissensus over "whether or not the question 'what is literature?' should be answered. Given the multiplicity of ways literature has been intended, produced, transmitted, stored, and mentally processed since prehistoric times, it is hardly surprising that no definition commands widespread acceptance." Lacking a fixed definition, and hence a constant, the Dao of literature, I would contend, is puzzling. To borrow figures from the Chinese text Tao Te Ching (a Chinese text ascribed to Laozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher and poet usually dated to around the sixth century BC and reckoned a contemporary of Confucius), sahitya can be described to turn within itself to emerge and prance backward to establish a solid ground for moving forward. The Dao, or the sacred, is amenable to being named, identified, and discoursed about (daokedo), but that naming exists in a creative opposition to being considered unnamable, ineffable, and infinite (changdao). This begets both a resistance (guarding the secret) and a surrender (exposed to or making allowance for meaning) in sahitya, as it submits to the realities of human understanding and also to our troubling anxiety about the incomprehensibility of experiences. Here are a few lines from Tao Te Ching. It must be pointed out that this Chinese text does not talk about what literature should be. But frame worked within my understanding of across poetics of reading, where varied sources come into making unlikely and yet productive correspondences, my arguments here appropriate (in)fusionally a few concepts from this Chinese text to make a different sense of sahitya.
The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery —
The gateway of the manifold secrets.
The way of sahitya results in two kinds of desires: one makes sahitya express itself in forms, images, and thoughts, and the other is the desire to stay unnamed and avoid making itself a desire machine of theoretical formulations. These two forms of desire are not incompatible and divergent but dialectical. Sahitya cannot be an experience in explorative desires alone — the fierce urge to investigate what it really means, establishing the institution of sahitya as something that is constant. But sahitya's sacredness is its power to avoid being named always; it is a desire that sahitya has about keeping up with its regenerative abilities. These are the mysteries: the meaning generated through desires (the assigned, the assertive, and the ascribed, the Chinese you) and the meaning sans desires (the surprise and seduction, "follow a way that cannot be walked," the wu, which has no somethingness, no conscious design or prejudice): "Mystery upon mystery — / The gateway of the manifold secrets." I choose to implicate the nonaction of sahitya (this is another dimension of sahitya's sacredness), where
Something and Nothing (you and wu) produce each other;
The difficult and the easy complement each other;
The long and the short off-set each other;
The high and the low incline towards each other;
Note and sound harmonize with each other;
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking nonaction and practices "the teaching that uses no words."
Sahitya is deeply invested in words and yet speaks and teaches beyond words. The sacredness of sahitya holds and projects "manifold secrets" that involve what language can represent (events), the failure of language, the rationalization of meaning and representation (events), and spaces that do not listen to the strictures of language, formulation, and theorization (the nonevents). It is beholden to a variety of sahit, to what we understand and benefit from, to what refuses our categories of understanding and, consequently, contributes to the development of a different aesthetic of meaning and affect.
The sacredness of sahitya creates the ability to fraternize intimately (the desire to network, sahit) with — and to extend boundaries to include — whatever it engages. In fact, the pleasure and puzzlement that Miller points out in the next chapter are owed, in my opinion, to the imaginary that literature is able to generate and inhere within. Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" bears out the dialectical dimension of sahitya's sacredness. Miller experiences the poem both in its constancy and inconstancy of meaning. The sacredness of the poem becomes on one hand the power (the hermeneutical strength) that enables Miller to make sense of the poem, and on the other hand it generates a secret (the levels that the poem did not allow Miller to touch and experience) that makes him undertake several visits to garner more meaningful experiences. Miller, in my reading, has grown a different kind of sahit with the poem.
The sahit comes to matter differently when Miller tries to demonstrate our experiences of literature through the intricate exchanges between man and machine. Tennyson's poem read on a Kindle, or imagine Tagore's typing his poems on an iPad, cannot just qualify as an exciting event. It is predominantly about changing the dynamics of experiencing literature by encountering it through a different material medium. Caught in such "prestidigitalization" when something speaks — "some impersonal inner voice" — to Miller through the medium, we encounter an excess. This is what I see as the surplus that literature in its complicated matrices, with a newfound medium, is able to deliver to us. This is another level of mystery, somewhat spiritualist and spooky, that makes literature transmit telepathically. Miller's idea of prestidigitalization, the "migration of the literarity" to digital media, sees new modes of finding sahit between the reader, his body, his mind, his understanding, and his emotions. There is, thus, an excess that things bring to our understanding of literature: the materiality of matter that is how the dravya (things) contribute to the visaya (the subject of sahitya), about which I have spoken at length in my discussion of ethics of sahitya in chapter 9.
Rabindranath Tagore observes that "man daily extends in literature the field of what is dear to him, that is, the field of his clear realisation. Literature is the realm of his unresisted, strange and vast play (lila)."The lila (it can also be interpreted as a pervasive kinetic energy, an unpredictability that makes something happen with surprise and excess) of sahitya is its norm, the quintessential paradigm to achieve its natural process, whereas hermetic entrapments of meaning resemble, metaphorically, the woodcutter's chopping a useful tree and the goose's being served for dinner. For Tagore, when art focuses on nature, it is a humanized nature whose relationship with man is touched by human emotions that constitute its content. For him, sahitya has never gone beyond man. Yet the non-private self, the surplus in man (Kant's "supersensible substratum" and Schiller's ästhetische Zugabe, the aesthetic supplement) is the source of creation. The deepening of world consciousness is coterminous with self-consciousness. Sahitya owes its origin and texturing to a connection between the artist's self and the Greater Being or the Great Further. (These are Tagore's words for the Infinite self; Infinite is not God or divinity. Rather, it is a spirit of creation that exists beyond the realm of our creaturely and material needs.) This is a process that is more invested in becoming (a sense of the not-yet) than knowing. Metaphorically speaking, it is not the fish that leaped out of the water, but the greater world beyond the fish, which is always alluringly yet to be.
Sahitya is about knowing man, the world, and knowing beyond man and the world. In sahitya, man is engaged in the "work of knowing himself," and "the truth of his knowing rests on his actual realisation and not on the verity of any objective fact." The poetic truth is truer than factual truth; the poet's imagination is truer than Ayodhya, as Tagore notes in his poem "Balmiki." (Ayodhya is the birthplace of Lord Rama in the Hindu epic Ramayana and a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in India; here it becomes an aesthetic imaginary beyond the geography of the place.) To know about the rose is one thing, and to feel something about it is another. In one case, we have a truth-value, in another the issue is taste-value. The truth about the rose comprises both these values: "We must not merely know it, and then put it aside, but we must feel it because by feeling it, we feel ourselves." Tagore argues that rocks and crystals are "complete definitely in what they are and keep a kind of dumb dignity in their stolidly limited realism. But human beings are teased by their creative ideal, and if divested of it, they are turned into a rock or crystal like being. In fact, God has decorated the peacock in a wide range of quaint colours. He has not done so to man; rather, has installed a bowl of colour inside him and said, 'you have to deck yourself in your own hues.' He has said, 'I have put everything in you, but with all those ingredients you have made yourself strong, beautiful and wonderful. I shall not prepare it for you.'" Sahitya is the manifestation of those ingredients inside man. Consequent upon its creation, sahitya builds its own sacredness, its own bowl of colors, which starts to color the mind of the readers. Readers are often successful in identifying the colors of sahitya but, with the bowl of color inside it, sahitya can deliver a new set of colors, resulting in fresh experiences for the readers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thinking Literature Across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface / J. HIllis Miller vii
Acknowledgments / Ranjan Ghosh ix
Acknowledgments / J. Hillis Miller xi
Introduction: Thinking across Continents / Ranjan Ghosh 1
Introduction Continued: The Idiosyncrasy of the Literary Test / J. Hillis Miller 9
Part I: The Matter and Mattering of Literature
1. Making Sahitya Matter / Ranjan Ghosh
2. Literature Matters Today / J. Hillis Miller
Part II: Poem and Poetry
3. The Story of a Poem / Ranjan Ghosh 71
4. Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens's "The Motive for Metaphor" / J. Hillis Miller 93
Part III: Literature and the World
5. More than Global / Ranjan Ghosh 111
6. Globalization and World Literature / J. Hillis Miller 134
Part IV: Teaching Literature
7. Reinventing the Teaching Machine: Looking for a Text in an Indian Classroom / Ranjan Ghosh 155
8. Should We Read or Teach Literature Now? / J. Hillis Miller 177
Part V: Ethics and Literature
9. The Ethics of Reading Sahitya / Ranjan Ghosh 207
10. Literature and Ethics: Truth and Lie in Framley Parsonage / J. Hillis Miller 232
Epilogue / Ranjan Ghosh 259
Notes 263
Bibliography 291
Index 307
What People are Saying About This
"Rejecting any easy binaries between East and West, Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller read across not just continents but also languages, traditions, cultures, texts, philosophies, and pedagogies. For Ghosh, method comes before text; for Miller, text comes before method. Working both ends to the middle, the authors elegantly demonstrate a new, powerful, and generous way to do critique, inviting readers directly into their conversation to tease out its productive ruptures, surprising convergences, and thorny entanglements. A highly readable, wonderfully inventive, and deeply satisfying book."
"This collaborative, explicitly dialogical volume is a most important intervention in comparative and world literature studies. Its five sections provide vital new perspectives on transcultural entanglement within and across Asia, Europe, and beyond. Ranjan Ghosh's explorations in '(in)fusion,' his transnational, transcontinental theory of literature, combined with J. Hillis Miller's 'unmasking' of ideological distortions via rhetorical readings of individual works, offer timely challenges to past and present configurations of both 'world literature' and 'comparative literature.' Thinking Literature across Continents rightly urges and itself provides an expert example of continued rigor and broader outlooks in our study of literature in all its myriad forms."