On 16 June 2022, a website called Literary Activism devoted three magazine posts to the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma (1929–2005). It republished a story, “Terminal” (1992), an essay – “‘I Am Lost Somewhere’: Borges in London” (1976) – that appeared for the first time in English translation, and in the third post published an introduction to Verma by Vineet Gill as a preface to these works. The preface, “By Way of Introduction: Thoughts on World Literature and Nirmal Verma”, was an excerpt from Vineet Gill’s book (published after the posts came out). At the end of the Borges essay, Gill describes Verma as “one of the pioneers of modern Hindi writing” who “published some of the most important and formally complex novels, short stories and essays of his age”. Gill also provided a longer translator’s note to the essay that can be productively read as making three salient points on the singularity of literary production and the problem of the universal. “In this essay, as in all the rest of his work, Verma leaves absolutely no markers to establish that he is a Hindi or an Indian writer”, Gill remarks, and adds that Verma “claim[s] Borges as part of his own, self-created tradition”.
Drawing our attention to the fact that this “little-known Hindi writer from the 1970s” was able to write “so perceptively, so confidently about Borges”, Gill continues: “Was a Hindi writer, an Indian writer, allowed to do so? Weren’t writers supposed to work within the bounds of their traditions?” The note ends ruminatively: “It’s rare to come across writing like this in our globalised world, where neither Verma nor Borges would have felt at home.” It is interesting to speculate, though, that writers who inhabit a sense of not being at home in the world are rarely “at home” in it at any point in history, and that the market-driven capitalist and neoliberal world Gill seems to be gesturing at with the word “globalised” belongs peculiarly to our own time, and so also Gill’s, rather than to the 20th-century world of Borges and Verma.
A number of perceptions illuminate Gill’s introduction to Verma’s essay in the context of its publication on Literary Activism, a site dedicated to rethinking the literary today. The first of these is connected to qualities that are intrinsic to the work: the absence of markers of identity or territory locating the writer and his subject matter – if there are “no markers to establish that he is a Hindi or an Indian writer” (or indeed a Bulgarian or an American writer) when translated into another language, then how does the reader approach the work or indeed place it in the pantheon of the world literature curriculum?5 One could situate the writer according to his nationality, regardless of his literary lineage, but this is an author who self-consciously appropriates precursors for “his own, self-created tradition” from anywhere in the world, as Gill points out.
Such a position takes the author out of the grid of nation/territory – the way these categories usually operate becomes extrinsic to the work, and once again militates against the boxing-in of the writer within a territorial tradition in a world literature context. This second point is familiar and widely known from Borges’s position in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (1951); thus Vikram Chandra, accused by Meenakshi Mukherjee of selling Indianness to the West, had retorted that “this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness” was one that he constantly heard, “in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews. And Indians who wrote in English were one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control.” In his justification, Chandra quotes from the Borges essay, concluding that
the exhaustively cosmopolitan and erudite Borges is arguing in this essay for the freedom of artists to choose their tropes from wherever they see fit. Borges wrote, “What is Argentine tradition? I believe that this question poses no problem and can easily be answered. I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhabitants of one Western nation or another may have.”
Although Chandra’s argument with Mukherjee is of relatively recent date, his convictions as a writer in a lineage of world literature were inherited from the career of the modern in India, which incorporated, from its very start in the middle of the nineteenth century, a mix of heterogeneous influences that was unapologetic about its graft of a variety of cultural inheritances.
The third and last point is made briefly in the observation that “it’s rare to come across writing like this in our globalised world, where neither Verma nor Borges would have felt at home”. Verma and Borges are linked together here not just through a self-created lineage or tradition, but through how they may have felt about their imagined existence in the globalised world. It is the perception of not feeling “at home”, evident among certain writers across time and space, that, in fact, constitutes the thread running through this essay on singularity and the problem of the universal; rather than genre, or nationality, or theme, or even lineage, what stitches together certain kinds of writers across time, it seems, is the feeling (transmitted through their writing itself) of not feeling at home in the world, or, more specifically, not feeling at home in, or at ease with, the conceptual parameters through which a literary work is supposed to identify itself.
Enzo Traverso, writing on Walter Benjamin, draws on Raymond Williams in order to speak of certain “structures of feeling” of the Left that gesture towards “the way in which ideas and values are perceived, ‘lived and felt’”. What he calls “left-wing melancholia” is not, he clarifies, “nostalgia for real socialism and other wrecked forms of Stalinism”. It “does not mean nostalgic resignation, passivity, or impotence”; rather, melancholia is one of the feelings that, after “any historical defeat…charges with memory the process of mourning and the building of a new perspective. In other words, left-wing melancholia can become a link between the past and the future.” So too in Verma’s thinking in the essay on Borges or in the story set in a nameless city, as we shall see, melancholia is charged with memory and the potential for change. Traverso’s analysis of “leftwing melancholia”, I should clarify, is not being evoked here because either Verma or Borges were of the Left, but because the condition so named captures a “structure of feeling” that relates to a particular quality in Verma’s prose. In these writings, through a description of a relationship imbued with love and estrangement and of a strangely private experience of a public event, we see how one writer draws another, a predecessor, into a camp of his own making through an understanding of a similar sensibility, of a shared response to the demands of realism and history, and of a stated refutation of the Western universal. What do “structures of feeling” do to the conceptualisation and theorisation of world literature or to the historicist moment of the “ends of universalism” today?
Ian Buchanan, in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, mentions that Raymond Williams first coined the phrase “structures of feeling” in Preface to Film (1954) to discuss the relationship between dramatic conventions and written texts. It was a term that he came back to again and again, and in later works, particularly The Long Revolution (1961), “Williams would develop this concept further, using it to problematize (though not refute) Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Hegemony, which can be thought of as either ‘common sense’ or the dominant way of thinking in a particular time and place, can never be total, Williams argued, there must always be an inner dynamic by means of which new formations of thought emerge.”
Interestingly, the Dictionary does not mention Williams’s Marxism and Literature, which has a chapter titled “Structures of Feeling”, which in fact begins by asserting that the “strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products”, which results, always, in the “separation of the social from the personal which is so powerful and directive a cultural mode”. His hypothesis, Williams says, “has a special relevance to art and literature”, for it is in these domains that there is to be found “the unmistakable presence of certain elements in art which are not covered by…other formal systems”. “Specific feelings, specific rhythms” constitute “the specializing categories of ‘the aesthetic’, ‘the arts,’ and ‘imaginative literature’”, and we “need to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these elements . . . . The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming.
The short story by Verma called “Terminal” does not contain “markers to establish that he is a Hindi or an Indian writer” anywhere in either form or content – in translation, the work is shorn of all identification marks of territory or nation. A couple travel together, at her insistence, to a place outside the city by tram to visit a fortune teller who will decide their future. The “terminal” in the title gestures towards the tram terminal, the last stop where they disembark each time; it might also reference the endpoint in their relationship reached on that fateful day. There are no place names or locations mentioned. We only know that “over the last seven months he had known all the different seasons of her soul” and that they liked to habitually sit at a bench at an “embankment that was always vacant”, away from the city, where “there was a bend in the river”. Inner and outer weather are detailed – the woman is distant, then happy, then sad, then withdrawn over the course of the narrative, always more difficult to fathom than the city itself and its outskirts. Outside, the skies are grey and smudged, and the water full of light and reflection. They argue about the visit, and he indicates his disinclination to go with her to a soothsayer:
“Alone?” She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “All right, I’ll go alone. There is no need for you to come with me.”
She got up from the bench. Tied a scarf around her hair. Dusted her clothes and looked at the bench to see that she had not left anything behind – apart from himself, still sitting there. His presence did not concern her. She climbed down the embankment to the street. Started walking. She did not look back to see the city lights sparkling on the surface of the river whose banks were lost in the evening shadows.
But in the end, he goes with her after all the next day and they travel in the tram together, whose windows “were covered with such thick layers of dust that the trees on the footpaths, the lamp-posts and people walking on the streets seemed to slip by like dirty smudges on some old film”. They reconcile, and start laughing, and she “put her head on his shoulder and shut her eyes”. He has two tickets for the Magic Flute in his pocket that he wants to surprise her with at the end of the day, for that is how they first met seven months ago – when she gave him a spare opera ticket after he found the advance ticket counter closed upon arrival; “now it seems as if that was years ago”.
The narrow lane they reach after they have walked from the terminal for some distance could be in Calcutta or old Delhi; “the sky above, masked by smoke and mist, was like a dirty rag spread over the houses”. The house they reach, where “the first thing he noticed was the dirt”, could also be anywhere, as could the courtyard, “surrounded by dimly-lit jute curtains”. The soothsayer too, with her methods of fortune telling, is nameless, anonymous. The future that is predicted is dreadful in a way unknown to the man – he only watches her horror as it is shown to her by the fortune teller behind a palm covering her eyes. They return in the same way, on the same seats in the same tram. “Never try to see me again”, she says to him at her stop, leaving him on the tram to reach the other terminal, where he gets off. Returning, he stands on the ancient bridge and looks at the water, where he sees a face floating – is it of the empress of legend who was said to have drowned herself in that river, or is it “of the woman he had seen in candlelight three hours past and who had saved them from drowning”? That is the last line of the story.
How then, in such a story, do we go about reconceiving Williams’s “specific feelings, specific rhythms” that constitute some traditions of world-writing which are marked by the “specificity” of their “elements”? The task of reconceiving, of reconsidering the grounds of universalism would then have to shift from a European understanding of universalism as a teleology of Progress and a tool of the coloniser’s civilising pretension to a more delicate, subtle and elusive understanding of a writer’s quarrel over forms of narrative and ways of being in the world.
Speaking in 1907 in Bengali to the National Council of Education in Calcutta, India, about “what in English is called Comparative Literature”, Rabindranath Tagore (not yet a Nobel laureate) begins by saying: “All our faculties of heart and mind are there only for contact with others. This contact is what makes us true, what enables us to find the truth. Otherwise, ‘I am’ or ‘something is’ makes no sense at all.” The specificity of the elements of Verma’s “Terminal” may be found in this articulation of Tagore’s made in relation to his attempt to define what literature is, for it may be read productively only in light of this sense of “contact with others” or yog – the act of joining. This sense of connectedness, of totality and of interrelationships in Tagore’s definition of world literature uncannily reflects Verma’s narrative.
Three things, Tagore says, connect us to the world: first, buddhir yog, the intellect, which is arrogant with the power of knowledge; second, prayojaner yog, or self-interest – imbued with use-value; and third, ānander yog, or joy, where we truly experience our self. Rabindranath’s understanding of ānanda in this essay is to be found formulated in the relation of the self and the other. This yog, or connection, of ānanda with the world is one where all differences cease to exist (“samasta pārthakya ghuciyā jāy”) – there we do not feel the power of the intellect, there we experience (“anubhav kari”) only ourselves. “What is this thing – the connection with ānanda?” – he asks in colloquial, non-literary everyday language (“ei ānander yog byapārkhānā kī?”). Here, in this essay, his answer is: “It is when we know the other as our self and know our self as other.” Every formulation here takes us back to Verma’s story, which in its delineation is fundamentally concerned with exactly this, to “know the other as our self and know our self as other”.
“‘I Am Lost Somewhere’: Borges in London” starts with Verma at an auditorium, watching an elderly man make his way to the stage through “deafening, echoing applause”. The man “seemed unusually delicate and pure – like a man who brings all the excitements of youth to his old age”, which explained why, that evening, “Borges to a large extent looked like an ‘outsider’ – a child out of his depth in a room full of grownups”. Verma is full of doubt. He doubts whether all the English admirers packed in the hall actually know Borges at all, and he also doubts if Borges, “who himself walks in the dark”, would be offering anyone any “illumination” that evening. “Not a single question had anything to do with his creative universe – people were more interested in figuring out which technical key could help them unlock the world, the mysteries of his stories. In fact, not for one moment did it seem that his English intellectual admirers had been able to take hold of that thread with which they might establish some sort of harmonious link with that blind Argentinian sufi writer.”
Unlocking world literature by figuring out which “technical key” would unlock Borges’s “world” so as to include it alongside other worlds of literary production is also among the primary preoccupations of world literature studies today. Emily Apter, following Barbara Cassin, puts up the most widely read objection in Against World Literature (2013) to the majority of attempts at unlocking world literature with the keys of translatability and anthologisability (coining a word), a project successfully executed by Damrosch and others in the industry. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, Apter’s “chief concern seems to be the emergence of world literature as a twenty-first-century literary theoretical rubric” rather than an enquiry into particular forms of writing, let alone structures of feeling.
The book’s claim to “a politics of literature critical of global literary management within corporate education” is admirable, as is its clear-sighted argument that one of the primary reasons why literary studies “falls short as anti-capitalist critique is because it insufficiently questions what it means to ‘have’ a literature…. Literary communities are gated: according to Western law and international statute, authors have texts, publishers have a universal right to translate (as long as they pay), and nations own literary patrimony as cultural inheritance.” Here, “translation, seen as authorised plagiarism…belongs fully to no one”; it is “a model of deowned literature” that “stands against the swell of corporate privatisation in the arts”. A translational author – shorn of a singular signature – brings Verma to mind, both in this essay as well as in his most characteristic short stories written in Prague, such as “Terminal” above; his works too seem to belong “fully to no one” and are, in themselves, “a model of deowned literature” – except in a completely different sense to Apter, of course. The absence of any markers of location complicates the construction of the local in unexpected ways in relation to the global here at quite a distance from the field of global world literature as it exists today.
What is “the local”? Nirmal Verma (1929–2005) was located in the 20th-century Hindi-language literary sphere as it existed in his time in the subcontinent before the country joined the “Global South” of today after economic liberalisation in 1991. He stayed in Prague for ten years at the height of the non-aligned movement and the Cold War, returning to India in 1958 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the 1976 essay on Borges, he is anything but “local” in opposition to “global” – which brings us to the larger point that the location of a writer, however provincial, does not automatically translate into provincialisation – to label writers in marginal locations as “provincial” can be self-defeating. Sometimes, as in the case of Verma, or poets such as Arun Kolatkar or Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the references and experience of the provincial writer encompass the world in a far broader way than some of those located in the Metropole.
Margin and centre do not work here as they do in postcolonial studies, and the physical location of a writer leads to a misleading mapping of provincial/cosmopolitan. Reading Verma’s Borges essay, I think it would be fair to surmise that if asked about location, Verma might answer by mentioning “fog, night, the metropolis”. The essay addresses this issue when he mentions that he feels Borges is not worried about “the now-fashionable crisis of ‘identity’: the crisis of modern intellectuals”. What concerns the Argentinian writer, rather, is memory and forgetting – how to recover a memory and how to forget what cannot be forgotten. Verma mentions that on that evening in London, Borges spoke of a story (referring perhaps to Borges’s “Funes the Memorious”) he had written “about a man who could never get rid of his memories. Whatever he experienced seemed already to be a part of his memory – as though every experience was merely a process for the duplication of memory…” (suspension points in original).
Verma points out that the “problem of memory is linked to time”, and how in “almost every story of Borges’s time spreads out like a desert landscape – with all its mirages and illusions – neither separate from reality nor part of a reality”. Time, Verma points out, is like “that ‘joker’ in a deck of cards which can be made to stand for anything in the game, because in itself it stands for nothing. That which is nothing, can be everything” (emphasis in original). He also goes on to distinguish this sense of time from what he calls “Proust’s ‘circular’ time, whose high points come to light through moments of ‘spontaneous reminiscence’. As if the entire past could be segmented with light poles placed at short distances.”
Verma’s critique of linearity (“light poles placed at short distances”), it needs to be noted here, is aligned with and also different from Barthes’s argument against the récit in Writing Degree Zero. Verma mentions the nouveau roman and RobbeGrillet, although he doesn’t mention Barthes, pointing out that “Borges’s approach is not unrelated” to them, although he feels Borges was not interested in RobbeGrillet’s “spectacular artistic experiments . . . to get rid of time”. “I want to write straightforward stories”, Borges had said at one point in his speech as reported by Verma, “like the ones Kipling had written when he was 21–22’”. Yet Verma shares certain premises of Barthes’s critique of the “serial story” in those “long recitatives”, the Novel and History; these serial stories are, as Barthes says, “plane projections of a curved and organic world”.
The function of the realist narrator, according to Barthes, is to reduce “exploded reality to a slim and pure logos, without density, without volume, without spread, and whose sole function is to unite as rapidly as possible a cause and an end”. Thanks to it, Barthes points out, “reality is neither mysterious nor absurd” anymore; “it is clear, almost familiar, repeatedly gathered up and contained in the hands of a creator”. The mysterious and the absurd: the use of these words bring Verma’s disquisition immediately to mind – for instance in his understanding that what the Anglophile Borges has taken from English literature and culture is “just the London fog – filled with invisible signs and mysterious dangers – that pulls Borges towards itself”.
Why is Borges’s time unlike what Verma calls Proust’s “circular time” in “I Am Lost Somewhere”? Proust does not produce linear narrative, and although Barthes does not invoke him in Writing Degree Zero, Proust’s work is replete with what Barthes called the “trembling of existence” (tremblement de l’existence) against the characteristic requirements of realism, of narrative, of causal events that follow each other in some preordained order. Yet, for Verma, Borges’s time is different, because for Borges, “remembrance is a form of self-deceit – because there’s no such thing that we can call the ‘past’…because the past is only a component of the eternal present”. Verma feels that “Proust’s world is a world of ‘similarities’, where one thing reminds us of the other, where one memory comes out of another memory, like layers of onion peel”.
In contrast, Borges, Verma feels, “doesn’t divide time into segments, he doesn’t accept these “similarities”. One moment is not “similar” to the next – it is exactly the same as that first moment was.” The “question of similarity doesn’t even arise [because] when the coming moment is exactly the same as the moment past, then time has no meaning”. Like Koselleck’s rejection of linear as well as cyclical time, Verma seems to want to access “sediments of time” in relation to experience and history (“In Greek, historia originally meant what is called Erfahrung (experience) in German”, Koselleck points out, and it is interesting that he turns to what he calls “dream stories” as his first examples).
Verma says that it is his understanding of time that constitutes the path for Borges “to free reality from the trappings of history and to accept it on one’s own terms”, and this understanding is present for Verma in a passage from Borges that he quotes which sounds, to an Indian ear, remarkably like the Upanishads:
Time is the element I am composed of. Time is the river, which takes me in its stream – but I am the river. It’s that cheetah who mauls and tears me apart – but I am the cheetah. It’s that fire, which swallows me – but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real – I, unfortunately, am Borges.
This is the reason that Verma calls Borges a Sufi writer, like the medieval Sufi saints, or the ancient Chinese poets, because he knew “what it was like to be ‘astonished’, just as they knew how to ‘astonish’ others”. Verma ends this section with a wry reflection – perhaps this, this ability to “be astonished” and to “astonish others”, is why Borges wrote only stories and those stories were in the form of “fables, illusory tales, dreams and anecdotes”. After all, he points out, Borges “has never written a novel”, and “let alone writing one, he finds it difficult to read novels”.
He recalls Borges as having said hesitantly that evening to that audience: “I feel quite embarrassed to admit it…that I can never read a long novel – not even great novels like Madame Bovary and War and Peace!”, although he has read, he says, Don Quixote “again and again, perhaps because it isn’t a ‘true’ novel”. The essay ends with a question a member of the audience asked: “What’s the thing you feel most frequently in your life?” “Borges looked at us with his tired eyes,” Verma writes, and said, “I always feel that I am lost somewhere, I always feel this.” Stepping out into London’s fog, with the rain “drenching the darkness”, Verma reflects as he descends into the Underground that all the writers of the world can be divided into two kinds: “Those who belong to this world – Homer, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann; and those who bring to us reports from that other world beyond the grave – like Lazarus – they deliver to us rumours from the underground . . . and we start looking at our world from that side – Dostoevsky, Kafka and Borges are such writers.”
What would world literature look like if we took Verma’s suggestion literally and divided up its field into two – of writers “who belong to this world” and those “who bring to us reports from that other world beyond the grave”? Could this be one sort of response to the task of reconceptualizing world literature? Would such a reconceptualisation be considered to be as urgent and ongoing as “the combined pressures in recent years of techno-capitalist globalism, ‘illiberal’ populist nationalisms, resurgent racism, refugee crises, the climate emergency, or indeed the current virus crisis?” How would such a reconceptualisation address “the problem of the universal”? If vernacularity were to be enabled by emerging as “a crucial (albeit elusive) point of reference for constructing the universal – by literary means – from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity”, then, for that “vernacularity” to fit Hindi writer Nirmal Verma’s vision, it would need to be reconceived radically, perhaps reconfigured as universal. For there is no rubric of the “experiences of social subordination or complicity” here at all. There is, rather, an attentiveness on the part of the writer “to the particulars of languages and texts” within a tradition he constructs not from within the premises of nation or identity or mother tongue, but within a “crucible of connected histories” that allows him a “defamiliarising perspective both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices”, encouraging us perhaps to read him in world literary studies in the same way.
Nirmal Verma’s essay and story refuse to reference time-place-thing, the key category in Tagore’s Viśva Sāhitya when he repeatedly asserts that “if we reduce literature to time-place-thing [deś-kāl-pātra], we do not properly comprehend it”. “We cannot reduce literature to the smallness of deś-kāl-pātra – we don’t see it at all if we do so” (sāhityake deś-kāl-pātre choṭo kariyā dekhile ṭhikmata dekhāi hay nā), he says. Repeatedly, Tagore emphasises that the socio-political-historical content of a work is not literature, giving the example, for instance, that in a hypothetical literary work “Akbar’s rule, Gujarat’s history, Elizabeth’s character” is “mere information…just the pretext” – these are merely devices one may use. “When man expresses himself as man-in-the-world [viśvamānab], when he breaks and builds and breaks himself again in order to experience his self individually and collectively – that person tries to show us not individual people, but everyday man in his everyday efforts and desires.”
It is the self that is crucial here. Literature is a counter to both the generic abstractions of history (“the feudal order”) and the individual problems of the one. The continuous process of breaking and building and breaking the self leads to the universal, that is, to the connection “collectively” with “everyday man in his everyday efforts and desires”. In the last essay Rabindranath wrote (or rather, dictated from his sickbed, with many revisions and emendations) – “Sāhitye Aitihāsikatā” – he had said much the same thing, with the same emphasis on the everyday existence of the man-in-the-world, identifying his own writing as emptied of history.
“We must not interpret it as a constructed composition; it is a world” (ihāke krittim racanā baliyā jānile haibe nā; ihā ekti jagat; my emphasis): world literature is not the sum of literatures in the world; rather, literature is a world. It is a world, says Tagore, to be found within the self that expresses itself, therefore it is within the self and so in the world. Further, it is a world/self always under construction, always unfinished, always striving for completion. Some of the examples to illustrate this are that it is like the mandala of the sun, like the trembling light surrounding the part-fluid, part-solid inner sun; literature is an “intangible emanation made of words” around man, surrounding him, spreading around him and connecting with him: “the second world all around the world of man – that is literature”. We come, at the end of the numerous examples and metaphors furnished by Tagore to elaborate upon his understanding of what literature is and what literature does, to his claim that literature needs to exist in a domain “without self-interest” (svārtha sekhān haite dūre). Beside the world of necessity (“prayajaner sansār”) man creates a world of literature (“sāhityer sansār”), which is superfluous, unnecessary (“prayajan chārā”). The notion of excess is returned to: he points out that “beauty is extravagance, it is excessive and wasteful expenditure” (“behisābi bāje kharac” – two adjectives here precede the verb kharac, or “spending”, as if one will not suffice), it “exceeds need”, it flowers without use and flows without purpose. Nature (Tagore’s analogy here for writing) is large because it is full of the unnecessary. “What is expressed in literature?” he asks, and answers directly: “We find man’s plenty [prācurya], his wealth [aisharya], that which overflows all his need. It has that which does not finish within the boundaries of his world.” This preoccupation with the superfluous goes back at least to 1894 and Rabindranath’s essay on children’s nursery rhymes, where too words such as anābaśyak are used repeatedly, and the celebration of the arbitrary and the unfinished, the superfluous and the purposeless provide “a sort of space” which functions as “a reconfiguration of emptiness, or a crack, a gap in the everyday realm of valuation”.
Gayatri Spivak identifies this notion of excess – the “peculiar idea” of bāje kharac – as one of the two “transgressive moments” in this piece “worth looking at”; the other is “the intimations of singularity”. This repeated and “powerful metaphor” of “wasteful spending”, she says, stands for “what in the imagination goes above, beyond, beneath, and short of mere rational choice toward alterity”, consciously or unconsciously repeating Lawrence’s famous passage on the workings of the imagination in Cézanne: “For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all round, not only just of the front…. The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of the presented appearance.” “The uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is ‘wasteful’”, Spivak continues, for Tagore “defines that worldliness beyond, beneath, above, and short of not only merely rational choice but also the verbal text”. Conceding that “this lesson is hard to learn”, “this message of Tagore – that what goes across is not immediately profitable or evaluable . . . that it is ‘value-added’ in an incommensurable sense with no guarantees”, she misses the significance of the word preceding bāje (literally: “bad”, but here: “useless”) kharac that would support her argument to the hilt – behisābi – a word that means “wasteful”, but also evokes the accounts book, hisāb meaning “calculation”, “counting” or “accounting” – so behisābi is that which doesn’t adhere to the adding up. The message is also hard to learn, of course, because it does not subscribe to the predominant metaphor of commerce, circulation in the world or world-systems that underpins much of the thinking on world literature. Neither can it be understood by incrementally adding to the corpus: learning more languages, undertaking more collaborative work or subscribing to a great deal of pluralism.
What Spivak identifies in Tagore’s essay as “the singularity of the literary production”, is read by her in relation to Genet’s question about the essence of art – “What remains of a Rembrandt, torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet?” What remains in the four pieces – “the politics of identity, voting blocks, Melissa Williams’s view of multiculturalism, systemic grids, competing cultures” – belongs in the opposite spectrum to Rabindranath’s notion of the “ethics of alterity” in which “we can imagine the other…as singular, universalizable, but never universal”. “Universalisable but never universal” – she repeats – this rethinking is hard, she maintains, and perhaps here she is thinking of familiar claims such as the one that, for Tagore, literature “serves to express universal humanity”.
Rabindranath crucially concludes his essay by reminding his audience, lastly, that world literature is not an addition of parts: “All I wanted to say is that just as the world is not my field and your field and someone else’s field, so too literature is not my writing, your writing and someone else’s writing – that is a very provincial way of knowing the world – ordinarily, we view literature in this provincial way.” He does not add here that this provincialism emanates from Europe, although he has said that on other occasions. What he would ask for, rather, is to “free ourselves of this narrow provincialism” and aim to “see the world of man [viśvamānab] in the world of literature [viśvasāhitya]”. In conclusion, Rabindranath suggests that accomplishing this would involve seeing in each writer’s work an accumulation, a convergence or coming-together (samagratā) and finding in all the expressions of man that connection or relationality that for him indicated a renewal of man’s connection with the world. This is not a universalist statement, despite the notions of convergence and relations between all men in this part of the sentence; it is, rather, what Spivak again usefully calls “singularity in a collectivity”, where “‘singularity’ doesn’t necessarily imply single texts [but] simply implies that what is singular in any text is the universalisable”. Placing Tagore alongside Rembrandt and Bach, Spivak repeats that we need to speak for them as “universalisable but never universal” – that is, the problem and delight of confronting literature or art as a world, rather than of it as manifested in the attempt to frame the world in a grid.
In the work of Tagore or Borges or Nirmal Verma, “literature of the world” is rejected in favour of an understanding of “literature as the world” or “as a world”. Refusing to think of (world) literature in terms of contexts and circulation, these writers have articulated, each in their own way, that literature is something to be found in the particular or the self or the part in relation to the whole. The past as unfinished, the incompleteness of narrative form, the breaking and building and breaking again of self and consciousness differently articulate and bind together a certain way of being in the world and of literature-in-theworld for these writers and thinkers. Perhaps this is what Gill had in mind when he ruminated in his headnote to Verma’s essay that “it’s rare to come across writing like this in our globalised world, where neither Verma nor Borges would have felt at home”. What he is suggesting, it seems to me, is that a closer look at Verma or Borges or Tagore demands that we base our discomfort with locating and sourcing the universal in literary works not only on a postcolonial plank of critiquing universalism as an imperialist imposition, but also, perhaps, on a reconceptualization of our understanding of the particular in relation to the universal.
This means that we work so that we do not universalise the other, but find in them, rather, the “universalisable” that is also specific and local; in these instances discussed here, this paradoxical quality seems to be placed in an experience of not feeling at home in the world. This overturning of how we do literature in the world – that is, the problem and delight of confronting literature as a world, rather than of it – is the fundamental contribution made by these writers – Borges, Verma, Tagore – to the debate on world literature. This is also what animates Williams’s theorisation of structures of feeling, which conveyed in its many articulations a sense of something akin to the consciousness of time. In this way of conceptualising the work of literature, the phrase “structure of feeling” encapsulated and valorised the felt sense of life that ties people together and is intrinsic to their cultural universe; “it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organisation”.
This article first appeared in Literature and the Work of Universality (De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston, 2024), edited by Alice Duhan, Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg and Paul Tenngart, page 21-38.
