Recognition and Ethics in World Literature

Introduction

Ethics, the World, and the Postcolonial:

The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobody would deny (though some of course do) that some works for some readers on some occasions do provide a precious melting of categories that would otherwise freeze the reader's soul. But are we to believe that every reader in every epoch most needs one kind of shock, or even a shock at all, and that there are no other ethical effects that for some readers in some circumstances might be more valuable?

(Booth 1988, 68)

I

The question of ethics in literature is not new. Wayne Booth, in his work The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), comments that ethical criticism is a "human practice" that "refuses to die, in spite of centuries of assault from theory" (6). Indeed, ethical concerns in and about literature (in its various forms) have run from Plato's banishment of poets from his ideal republic, through Sir Phillip Sidney's 16th-century An Apology for Poetry¸ to today's postcolonial, feminist and queer critics, to name only a few. The current prominence of ethics in literary criticism is, then, a return to a concern that has, in the past, been absent from world literature. Focused as world literature tends to be on universalizable aesthetic appreciations, more localised ethical commitments have generally failed to register. It is in postcolonial studies—many of whose texts could also be considered world literature—that contemporary concerns with the ethics of literature have been most robustly investigated. To approach the ethics of world literature is simultaneously to invoke the general (and ancient) question of ethics in literature, and the postcolonial insistence on the influence of the legacy of colonialism on the ethical commitments of texts.

Anne Morgan's recent book, Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer (2015), is illustrative. In it, Morgan relates the reflections and challenges that framed her year of reading a book from every country in the world. Translating her experience into the imagery of travel and exploration, she outlines several difficulties, from ideas of authenticity that result from framing her enterprise in nationalistic terms (what she dubs, in her chapter titles, "Identifying Landmarks") to the need for and limitations of the publishing industry (two features that she likens to following "trade winds" and departing from "the beaten track", respectively). In discussing the more specific challenges confronted in beginning her project—namely the immense quantity of literature in the world and the opacity of other cultures and unfamiliar languages—Morgan criticises the advice of David Damrosch, a leading theorist of world literature, to embed individual readings of texts in cultural knowledge through preliminary research. She comments,

Damrosch overlooks somewhat […] that, for many people, one of the major incentives for reading books from other cultures is discovery itself. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to regard literary works as windows on other worlds. [….] All this earnestness [of first researching the book's culture] takes the fun out of the idea of reading such works. (17–18)

Eschewing contextualizing research, on the grounds that it stamps out the desire with which one picked up the book in the first place, she, ironically, argues for Damrosch's understanding of world literature as "multiple windows on the world" or "worlds beyond our own place and time"—one part of Damrosch's definition of world literature (Damrosch 2003, 15, 281). Morgan's book is interesting, though, not only because a popular text on the challenges of reading works from around the world is indicative of the increasing popularity of world literature, both academically and in mainstream culture, but also because her chosen metaphor of travel and exploration raises the spectre of colonialism and thus evokes the tension between world and postcolonial literature within which this book is positioned.

There is first, somewhat obliquely, the ghost of empire past in the well-documented connections between exploration and travel (writing) and the colonial project (Hulme 1990; Pratt 2008; Boehmer 2005). A more pertinent problem, however, is the way in which the exploration of foreign cultures and lands, particularly its proximity to discourses of tourism, feeds into present imperial structures, namely through the figure of the exotic. Graham Huggan (2001) has explored in detail the tensions inherent in the field of postcolonial studies between

contending regimes of value: one regime—postcolonialism—that posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works towards the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures; and another—postcoloniality—that is more closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally 'othered' artefacts and goods. (68)

The contemporary circulation of literature from other cultures runs the risk of exoticization: "the domesticating process through which commodities are taken from the margins and reabsorbed into mainstream culture" (Huggan 2001, 59). While Huggan's focus here is on postcolonial literature, this challenge is faced more sharply by world literature. A crucial part of Huggan's analysis focuses on the use by postcolonial writers of "strategic exoticism" in order to critique (continuing) imperial structures and discourses (75). Thus, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, despite containing anthropological elements—and frequently being read as ethnography—destabilises such readings through its use of irony and "postcolonial parody-reversal" in its closing movements (92). This is a form of critique that, as Robert Young (2014) remarks, is concerned with the impact of the text, through its various modes of resistance, on "realities beyond itself" (217), but it is this critical aspect of postcolonialism (in both writing and criticism) that risks being elided under the designation of world literature. As Elleke Boehmer (2014) has remarked, world literature is often taken as synonymous with, or as a replacement for, the postcolonial (299), a move that could, she suggests, be in part due to a contemporary discomfort with the latter’s perpetually critical stance (306); world literature is considered to be more neutral. It is seen as focused on the literary rather than the political or ethical (Albrecht 2013; Young 2014), with the result that the critical concerns of postcolonialism, which are maintained in tension with the commercial appropriation of the exotic, can be passed over (Boehmer 2014, 306). It is for this reason, in part, that Huggan has more recently described world literature as "too much a symptom of the often profoundly anti-democratic and neo-imperialist tendencies within globalization" (2011, 491, emphasis in original).

The tension between the "world" and the "postcolonial" that Morgan's imagery of exploration evokes is salient for the study of ethics in world literature since postcolonialism is particularly distinctive in its ethical commitments. Robert Young comments that while world literature makes a claim to universality through its conception of literature "of such quality and insight that it transcends its local context to establish itself as universal, shared by all cultures" (2014, 213–214), postcolonial literature, with its focus on the local and particular, nevertheless "achieves a certain universality through its relation to the ethical" (218).[1] The ethical (or what could be termed the ethico-political, since its concerns are also political "in its broadest sense