LETTER OF SELF-DEFENESTRATION

There is no ‘world literature’, there are only writers in zones of time and space

Goethe.

BERLIN—A few months ago I agreed to join a correspondence of literary critics meant to follow in the tradition of Movie Mutations: Letters from (and to) Some Children of 1960 by Jonathan Rosenbaum et al., an excellent book of letters. As it turned out, however, I wasn’t up to the task, for reasons set out below. I bowed out of the correspondence, which is ongoing and I trust will be very good, after learning that the first round would be about ‘World Literature in Anglophone cultures in the 21st Century’. I had an allergic reaction to the idea, and below is the email I sent to the other critics. I have decided to edit it, to fix infelicities, introduce paragraph breaks, tone some things down, punch some things up, adjust and refine the periodization of the hype cycle for greater accuracy, and add a digression or two. I wish the critics luck. Keep in mind, I was trying to be funny, and it may be true that I have grown unduly sick of anything to do with book marketing discourse. Some of these ideas, if they deserve that name, I expressed earlier and more measuredly in a review of My Struggle 6: The End by Karl Ove Knausgaard for the TLS. Since I am in Germany right now, I should add that I’m aware that the concept of ‘World Literature’ used to have a different meaning when it came out of the mouth of Goethe et al., but in the 18th century the concept was not so tied up in marketing campaigns, hype cycles, or even translation. Or was it?

Dear critics,

With all due respect, I’m out, and here's why. I get that the film critics were talking about ‘World Cinema’, but they also had budgets and expense accounts somehow to attend film festivals at Cannes or Venice or Toronto or whatever, maybe even in Chicago. It was the ’90s when such things as ‘World Music’ were popular because Tower Records created a row of bins for it and the then middle-aged baby boomers could browse the aisles and have a series of epiphanies that there was more to the world beyond Ohio.