Response to Walkowitz's "Unimaginable Largeness"

Walkowitz specifically addresses “new world literature” in this essay but her thesis has wider implications for how we view all translations, masterpieces, and scholarly work (this is especially interesting to me!!). She presents two models. We are already familiar with the first model because many previous essays revolve around the capability of translation to capture the essence of the original. This first system focuses on literary masterpieces and their ontology; ability to convey that ontology marks the translation. The original remains the privileged, superior object: “[originals] have an ontological existence that defines what they are and what they will be; copies simply inherit that existence” (227). The first model thus proposes any meaning we derive from a translation must refer back to the original, much like the clones’ assumption they must find their “possible” to gain insight of themselves. The problem with this approach is just that: literature never acquires an afterlife because only the original produces meaning and the copy can only approximate that meaning.

The second model, the one present in Ishiguro’s discourse, opens up a whole new can of whoop ass. The idea of a network gives a book a rich afterlife. It also allows transformation of essence, and opens the system to infinite additions. The old system demands faithfulness and the new one privileges “analyzing how a work participates not only in its “original” literary system, the system of language in which it was composed, but also in the other literary systems in which it has a presence” (217). Literature in this context is social and collaborative; it participates globally through translation. This not only necessitates translation, it elevates it. If a work composes a network made of the original and many translations then the latter must be taken as seriously as the former. This is not to say: “art can mean anything—that it is what you say or see—but rather that the content of art will be transformed by expansive circulation and by the local interpretations that readers impose” (226). The network model also permits personal points of connection with a work not limited to those who read the original. Proust’s first editions and the influence of translated works on Ishiguro are both examples of this: “a book can be a unique object, too, both because translations create several versions of a text and because personal history distinguishes the social itinerary of one version from another” (222). To me, this statement contrasts Walkowitz’s concerns about the homogenization of culture and politics through translation in the introductory paragraph. If the network model produces personal points of connection it must be a diverse heterogynous structure.

Walkowitz advances comparison literature’s emphasis on phenomenology or form (consciousness of translatability, 219) instills a new ontology, an ontology that only comes out of this specific phenomenology. Ishiguro is interesting to Walkowitz because this idea of global comparison infiltrates the form as well as content of his stories: “His comparisons link together a variety of international themes, but they also prompt us to examine the shape and scale of that variety” (223). The essence of comparison literature therefore arises in its form. Could we then say that the essence of a work really arises in its diverse network? What attracts me to Walkowitz’s thesis is the idea that the meaning of a work is not fixed and in fact evolves over time.