Deleted Scenes from my 3 Quarks Daily Essay Series
Hello subscribers, old and new!
You may have recently seen a series of essays from me at 3 Quarks Daily. They are actually closer to being one mega-essay than three separate essays, and you should read part 1, part 2, and part 3 in their assigned order. My essay concerned the literary canon, and how those who are interested in reading and preserving the canon should go about their studies. This essay was in part prompted by the reading in old literature I have been doing for this newsletter.
I know I haven't updated this newsletter very frequently recently - this has mostly been due to events in my life. Good events, but events which took up my time nonetheless. That being said, I hope to publish several reviews on this newsletter very soon.
I may also resurrect an essay series I used to run on this newsletter called “Outside the Scope.” Taken from a stock phrase academics used to dismiss lines of inquiry in a narrowly-focused paper (“these considerations are outside the scope of the present article”), my essays expounded upon stray lines of thought I discovered while writing my reviews. I have more of these floating around my Drive (and around my mind), and I think I shall publish them soon. If you have a preference for whether you’d like me to include these essays within this newsletter, or create an entirely new newsletter for them, let me know.
Anyway, I have some material below that I thought of including in my essay (particularly the final part), but eventually decided not to, either due to lack of space or because it wasn’t particularly relevant to my overall argument. I think this excised material will be of interest to readers of this newsletter, however. Enjoy!
I thought about writing something about the difference between the publishing of classics in the US and the UK, but there doesn't seem to be any major differences. There's some differences in what's published under Penguin Classics from Penguin Random House US vs. Penguin UK, but most books that are published by one branch eventually make it across the Atlantic in one form or another. The poems of Kingsley Amis, for instance, were published by Penguin UK, but in America had to be published by NYRB Poets - a much smaller imprint, although the American book came out before the British one. Strangely enough, the major exception seems to have been an anthology of Korean short stories that was released in print via Penguin UK but has only appeared in the US in an ebook edition – maybe there are some copyright issues? It's a bit harder to get books from the smaller, independent UK publishers in the US, but not that much harder: my library frequently stocks books from And Other Stories, Pushkin Press, and Oxford World's Classics.
On the other hand, the English-language books published by Penguin Classics India are completely different from Penguin Classics US and UK, and the books and authors are largely unheard of in the US:
(To clarify, I assume major classics like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick are sold by Penguin in India, just in the Penguin UK editions).
But damn, I want to read Penguin India’s Classics! I wonder if India’s publishing industry is going through trends similar to America’s – more of a push to release neglected authors, or translate books in smaller south Asian languages into English or Hindi?Meanwhile, here are the latest releases from Gallimard’s Quarto Editions:
Quarto Editions are not exactly the same as Penguin Classics; they publish the collected works of famous writers. Their selection process is a bit scattershot and non-comprehensive (they have published a translation into French of Polybius’ History but not Homer, Thucydides, or Herodotus). The difference between what’s published by Quarto and what’s published in the US is not as great, but still there’s a bunch of authors who are unknown and untranslated in the US, most of whom are French (though the Italian Erri de Lucca makes an appearance in the screenshot above). I am also curious as to why they have now translated Horace McCoy into English, but not F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nathaniel West, John Steinbeck, or Richard Wright. Probably the vagaries of publishing, rather than any specific cultural trend in France.I briefly mentioned the rise of translations of Uhgyur literature in the US. The Uhgyur people are an ethnic group in western China currently facing repression from the People's Republic of China. The US government and many other institutions have classified this repression as a genocide. The Uhgyurs have a distinct language and literary history, and works from their past (as well as their present) have been appearing with some regularity in the past few years. Early on in this newsletter, I reviewed David Brophy’s translation of In Remembrance of the Saints, published by Columbia University Press, and Everyman’s Library will soon put out an anthology of Uyghur poems. In terms of more contemporary literature, Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets has also appeared from Columbia University Press, and we’ve also seen memoirs from writers such as Ilham Tohti and Tahir Hamut Izgil about their time in prison (meanwhile, Tursun is still imprisoned in China). The interest from scholars and publishers has been gratifying, even if it cannot prevent the persecution of the Uyghurs by the PRC.
There was an article in Tablet by Blake Smith recently complaining about NYRB Classics and its role in establishing the reputation of classic books. It touches on some of the same concerns I have (though from a different, and much more satirical, perspective). I will only note how Smith imagines a “good faith” reaction to the latest NYRB Classics rediscovery is supposed to take form: “now is the time to read Magda Szabó—take Agota Kristof away!” This “good faith” reaction is of course that of a dupe to the power of New York Review Books. It is a funny joke, but it frustrates me that NYRB Classics is the only publisher of classic books people seem to recognize (I think many people don’t even realize Penguin Classics still mints new additions to their line). Does Smith realize New Directions published a book by Agota Kristof this year? Would their publicity department be quite so satisfied with readers taking Agota Kristof away?
Here is a sentence I jotted down while drafting my essay and which I think may provide inspiration to other writers: “Joyce, once the most marginal of authors, is now to Dublin what Dolly Parton is to Pigeon Forge.”
Here is a much larger excerpt from an old draft of my essay, one that took another approach to my concepts of the mainstream and the marginal:
Inevitably, if I write about an author translated for the first time into English, I will write a sentence like this: "Until now, (the author) was virtually unknown in…"
… But where, exactly? If it is a Finnish or Bulgarian author, you can simply say that they are unknown "outside their home country." But what if they are an Arabic poet, known anywhere Arabic is spoken and in several other countries as well? I usually resort to saying that they are unknown in "the English speaking world." But it's quite a cumbersome phrase. The obvious solution, the easy, right-in-front-of-you solution is to say that they are unknown in the West.
Of course, in serious writing, the easy, right-in-front-of-you solution is tantamount to being the greatest sin of all - a cliché. Clichés always lack specificity and precision, but the concept of “the West” is much more incoherent (nauseatingly so!) than your standard cliché.
What is the West? It's not Europe, because that leaves out the US, Canada, Australia, ect. but includes parts of Russia, a country that many (both Russian and non-Russian) are invested in distinguishing from the West. Is the West historically Christian countries? Well, that would include Ethiopia and sort of Lebanon. Liberal democracies? That would include South Korea and Japan. But maybe Ethiopia, Lebanon, South Korea, and Japan are part of the West! I'm not here to make settled distinctions.
The closest we get to a mutually agreed upon geographic definition of the West is western Europe and the anglosphere, though even here the edge cases - are Czechia, Hungary, or Poland part of Western Europe? Are Jamaica, South Africa, and Guyana part of the Anglosphere? Around all this, Latin America and the Caribbean, though they very clearly belong to almost any category of the West, somehow do not fit in there as true members.
The West can be an ideal that nations aspire to, a non-nationally bound community of individuals who share certain cultural assumptions, or a hegemonic imposition of powerful countries. And very little of this has to do with literature. Yet the term "Western Canon" has stayed with us, not from any fealty to a certain literary canon, but to the idea of a distinctive "western" literature.
I do not think I need to spend multiple paragraphs detailing why the distinction between the West and the non-West/East is a reductive, slippery, unhelpful concept, especially in matters of literature. What I want to do instead is ponder some ideas around the geographic and cultural provenance of books and authors, and propose an alternative to the Western vs. non-Western divide: mainstream literature versus marginal literature.