On January 31 1827, Goethe tells Eckermann that he has just finished reading a Chinese novel and has found it both comprehensible and profoundly interesting. It contains elements in the description of characters, in the relation to nature and to the cultural environment that accord with accounts of similar phenomena in European literature. We do not know exactly what text Goethe had in mind, but we know that he read various translations and re-elaborations of Oriental literature and drew on them for inspiration in his poetry and essays. The book in question may have been Abel Remusat’s translation (1826) of the anonymous seventeenth-century novel Yu Jiao Li1 or perhaps Peter Perring Thom’s collection of texts entitled Chinese Courtship (1824).
Goethe goes on to conclude that, if the Germans fail to direct their attention toward the world outside their Heimat, they will remain enclosed in “a pedantic dusk” (175). Moreover, he argues, “National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World literature is at hand, and each one must strive to hasten its approach” (174). But, behind the programmatic words, Goethe still holds that the ancient Greeks set the standard. They possess a power of expression beyond any historical, linguistic, cultural and national confines and differences. What Goethe envisions for world literature is, therefore, a number of works that belong to a literary domain of their own, situated above national boundaries and rooted in universal human values. Great world literature gives the reader access to that domain no matter where and when it is written.
Attempts to articulate a universally valid conception of the human being constituted a pressing issue on the cultural agenda in Goethe’s lifetime, even more so after human rights had been expressed in writing, and after the French and the American revolutions had sought to realize them under violent and bloody circumstances: France at war with herself and the rest of Europe, America at war with England. Goethe was more preoccupied with the gradual realization of universal human potential in the individual human being than with revolutionary movements and national boundaries. The most fundamental of the universal human capacities, according to Goethe, is that of Bildung: the capacity of each person to fully realize him- or herself, mostly himself, as an individual being, in a gradual process fostered by the encounter with society and nature. A widely accepted idea, with a long afterlife, was that the nation constituted a natural frame for the collective organization of this process. Our national language, which we acquire naturally, as it were, enables each individual to realize his (or her) full potential in relation to others and in relation to ideal human freedom. This is why Bildung became a guiding principle for the national education systems established all over Europe from the early nineteenth century onwards. For much the same reasons, national literature came to play a decisive role in the social formation of the individual. To this end, national literary histories emerged as coherent representations of how each nation gradually evolves through its bond with the universal ideals of mankind.
This connection is fully realized when a particular national language is molded in the universal forms of literature – as happened, for example, with the emergence of universal poetry in German Romanticism. Literature comes to be conceived as universal because it enables the expression of what is common in all human beings, despite individual differences and particular cultural and national boundaries. Hence the possibility of a world literature: a literature that in particular national languages articulates universal truths about the human condition and which is therefore accessible to everyone, regardless of linguistic differences and the use of translations and other cultural filters.
The rise of national literary histories was accompanied by the emergence of a new field of general and comparative literary studies that aimed to investigate the connections between national literatures and to identify universal literary qualities. This coupling of the national study of literature with the general study of literature was iterated in the other new domains of cultural studies born in the same period: linguistics, anthropology and history.
Goethe’s statements about world literature appear in the context of these overarching concerns. He is clearly more interested in the relation between the individual and the global possibilities for human development and in new forms of cultural evolution, than in the purely national aspects of culture and society. In his conversation with Eckermann, Goethe remarks that the high quality of the Chinese novel he has just read derives from the fact that it resembles his own idyllic narrative in verse, Hermann und Dorothea (1797). However, the remark is not purely narcissistic. What Goethe is suggesting, indirectly, is that we always embark from a local and personal starting point when we reach out to understand a global context that we cannot experience directly ourselves. Goethe himself experiments with writing poetry in a foreign style, primarily in the collection West-östlicher Diwan (1819, enlarged 1827), diwan being the Persian word for a collection of poetry. The first word in the title, West, refers to his own home ground. This should be understood not so much as a self-projection, but rather as a challenge to himself. Every local culture with its own language and norms can offer a valid point of departure for a global perspective. This is the function of the term ‘West’ in the title and the book. Similarly, any locality can be challenged productively from the outside, irrespective of its size and location. No population, German or other, in any location can justifiably seek to hide in “a pedantic dusk”. This is the critical essence of Goethe’s self-reflection.
LOCAL LITERATURE AS THE PRISM OF WORLD LITERATURE
It is at this point that Georg Brandes interacts with Goethe further developing the latter’s idea of world literature in the short article “Verdenslitteratur” (World Literature, 1899). Goethe walked a tightrope between classical universalism and a modern global perspective that takes into account both the local and the universal: in the universal perspective, the human being addresses the ideal or divine dimension of life, or, alternatively, God or nature speaks to us through poetry. For Brandes, however, the heart of the matter is that through literature and across languages and cultures human beings share common issues and concerns, yet remain fully aware of their local differences and varieties. This represents a modern global perspective.
Brandes begins by reminding us of the progress of science as a global intellectual process and in this regard mentions the travelogues of nineteenth-century scientific expeditions. He adds that transport, communication, the modern press and the translations of texts all serve to accelerate the global process, and he might also have listed the newly established international time zones, telegraph lines and world fairs. What is at work here is not a universalist idealism, but concrete global cultural contacts and interactions. Brandes shifts the focus away from the universal content of world literature, which Goethe saw as transcending the boundaries of the national literatures. World literature in Goethe’s sense, which is supposed to be immediately comprehensible everywhere, may for this very reason be deprived of all “vitality and power” (28), simply because it is not rooted in a particular time, place and culture. Consequently, if a given text is written in order to be marketed as world literature, it is highly probable that it will fail to capture anyone’s attention. Brandes’ world literature is primarily seen as a local literature that just happens to be written in a language – such as French – that for the time being, and more or less accidentally, enjoys a global reach. Minor languages may therefore conceal works that actually have world literature quality, but which, by the accident of language, are known only to a few. The point Brandes wants to make is that the world literature perspective emerges inside rather than outside the national and local literatures:
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