EMILY SUN

Reading Elsewhere, Reading of Elsewhere: Detours, Departures, and Other Ways to Writing

“Reading removes me from my current state of being and places me in other worlds–-that’s the joy of a good book,” wrote the poet Togara Muzanenhamo to me in upstate New York this July from Harare, where it was winter. He remarked that he was working before dawn, hours before his daughter would be waking to go to school online in a Zimbabwe once again under lockdown. Plainly and succinctly, Muzanenhamo’s formulation describes a condition fundamental to the experience of reading: its displacement of the reader to an elsewhere, to elsewheres, to other worlds, a displacement that–when the book is good–occasions that precious and unpredictable something called “joy.” Dawning with that surprise of joy may be glimmers of new understanding, new visions and perspectives, and yet unintuited ways of knowing the world that may then unfold into new ways of writing.

This article results from a query to eight writers from different parts of the world, some living now in yet other parts of the world, about specific displacements that took them as readers out of their familiar times and places–and then, as writers, sometimes back to see and write about these times and places in a different light or to discover new modes of inhabitation or new countries of literary citizenship that do not correspond to any that can be found on a map. The query began with my own critical curiosity about a phenomenon I had noticed: that of particular authors and books being of surprising appeal and inspiration to writers in distant places. Here are a couple of examples. A few years ago, in a world before Covid, I remember hearing at an event in Taipei the novelist Luo Yijun saying how, back in the 1980s and 90s, he and other Taiwanese writers of his generation thought that García Márquez (abridged, as in so many languages, to ma-kui-si in Chinese, without the “Gar-ci-a”), Calvino, and Kundera were their uncles and how surprised those three would be to hear that. As a professor of comparative literature whose job includes thinking herself fairly well-read, I was stunned to hear for the first time, in no less than early(ish) middle age, the name of the late nineteenth-century French writer Marcel Schwob and the importance of his Vies imaginaires to writers in South America from Borges to Bolaño and Chefjec (the latter being the source of the slightly stunning information). I thus contacted a range of writers with the following questions:

•Who are the foreign writers and what are the texts whose appeal for you was shared by other writers and would-be writers in your milieu in a particular place and a particular time–such that they were formative not only of you as a writer but as fellow-reader among writers?

•How would you explain your affinity for these writers and texts? How might you speak for others who shared this affinity?

•How did the texts of these writers speak to you in ways that writers in your own language did not? What kind of strange illumination and/or strange intimacy did they give you?

•Did these texts shape your own writing? If so, how?

•Are there writers you loved (and still love) that you felt your peers should have loved too? What did they miss?

Eight graciously responded. Five are primarily writers of prose fiction. Hisham Matar is a writer of Libyan background who wrote to me on a rainy morning in London. The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez responded from Berlin. Irwin Allan Sealy e-mailed from his home in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Argentine writer Sergio Chefjec wrote from New York City and sent to my country post office a “pamphlet” that I am taking to be part of his response. Novelist and fellow scholar of comparative literature Barry McCrea wrote to me from Dublin, a city for him of origins, departures, and returns. Three of the writers work primarily in poetry. Togara Muzanenhamo responded on a winter’s night in Harare. Poet, critic, and editor Yang Tse delivered a two-part response from Taipei over e-mail and the phone. And Sharmistha Mohanty is a poet based in Mumbai who works in both prose and verse. Among these eight writers, five write in English, two in Spanish, and one in Chinese. Born between 1951 to 1975, all of them experienced the Cold War in one way or another and variously inherited or experienced processes of colonialism and decolonization and histories of political authoritarianism and liberalization. At this pandemic moment when we have been relying more than ever on electronic media to stay in touch, I note that all the respondents came of age before the ascendancy of the Internet and social media–in the eleventh hour before the watershed whose epochal significance it may be wise not to rush to decide but to abide with, if for the very sake of wisdom. Matar reflects in his response on belonging “to a generation and a part of the world–the recently decolonised Arab World–that could not think of literature outside the main concerns of independence, modernity, etc., and this implanted in me the sense that to read is to read internationally, that one’s literature is constantly involved in a conversation with all the other traditions and epochs, but also that literature, even if from another country or epoch, is a way of thinking about the present.” In the digest of topoi I offer below, culled from responses to the query–which took place in various genres and styles (and languages too)–readers may catch segments in the cross-section of a story or history, ongoing and in flux, in which to read is to read internationally, and to write here and now, and of the here and now, is to be involved in a conversation with other places and times.

The Uncles

It turns out that Luo Yijun was not alone in thinking García Márquez, Calvino, and Kundera his uncles in a Taiwan emerging out of martial law in the 1980s and 90s.  The term Luo used in Chinese for “uncle” is jiujiu, specifically “maternal uncle” in a language that is stricter and richer than English when it comes to kinship forms.  Unsaddled with patrilineal responsibilities, these moms’ brothers pop up like pied pipers here and there in the responses, luring nieces and nephews into other ways of looking at the world.  Primus among uncles is García Márquez.  As Sealy writes, “Marquez and Calvino were my uncles too.”  Mohanty recounts being in her teens “when Marquez won the Nobel [in 1982] and I remember going with my father to the bookstore where he bought me a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  A lot of people read Marquez in India, and he has been translated into several Indian languages.  I think the Nobel meant a lot more in those days and very often we discovered writers we never knew.”  In college studying French and Spanish literature in Dublin in the 1990s, McCrea recalls reading Lorca and the Latin American Boom novelists and deciding in his early twenties that “my job as a writer was to raid the toolbox left open by García Márquez and Cortázar, and use the instruments provided by them to transform humdrum Irish reality into myth.”  Then, in graduate school in the U.S., he continues, “imagine my surprise, as they say, when I discovered Joyce’s Ulysses,” noting in parenthesis, “it was not on the curriculum in Ireland.” 

If García Márquez entered into constellation with Joyce as a writer that helped McCrea see Irish reality anew, he joined forces, for Sealy in India, with other sources of illumination. “Marquez and Calvino were my uncles,” writes Sealy, “but Gunther Grass was my Daddy.  Brecht, too, formed me and others of my generation.” He elaborates:

The illumination they cast was on the world around me, material that had not (in my experience) been treated in that peculiar and irresistible way.  These writers expanded the modernist horizon of our colonial English: suddenly the formal experimentation of even a Joyce was extended.  With Brecht the attraction sprang from his dramatic mix of ideas and common speech; with Grass the intimacy consisted of watching a family yarn–a patently tall tale–woven into credible history; with Marquez it was the ravishment of tinted spectacles.  Calvino’s Invisible Cities were at one and the same time recognizable places and eternal categories.  These writers helped me view Indian reality in a startlingly new way by demonstrating that the familiar could be refracted without fatal distortion.

According to Mohanty, from the perspective of “the English-speaking world which was receiving largely the Anglo-Saxon realist novel,” García Márquez “was more than a breath of fresh air.  He showed us that plot and character and conflict, in the conventional, realist sense, was not the only way to write fiction.  And psychology was replaced by larger, perhaps more capacious forces.”  While García Márquez was not a formative figure for herself on an individual basis, she observes that, in “a colonized country like India,” where “the Anglo-Saxon novel still dominates, when Marquez reached us he brought back the awareness of our own myths, legends, tales which we had left behind when we wrote.  Indian writers have been afraid of tapping that vein in our culture, almost as if it is something that they had to shake off.  So reading Marquez would have probably brought them some relief.  It certainly did for me.”

In another vein, besides introducing or re-introducing readers far from Colombia to Indian and Irish realities through myth, García Márquez had the impact of leading the syntax, along with the reality, of a Taiwanese novelist where millenia of Chinese prose had not yet gone.  As Yang Tse remarks, as a “native” uncle of Luo Yijun as literary nephew, the rhythms of Luo’s long sentences in Chinese constitute a “translational form” indebted to García Márquez’s Spanish translated into English.  Curiously, this leading astray of Chinese prose presents, in turn, a challenge to translators of Luo into Western languages and thus to Luo’s being heard by clans of distant cousins far away.

Realisms, Realities, and their Discontents

Vexed relationships to realities here and now have vexed and continue to vex relationships to realism as a mode of reckoning with such realities.  In Sealy and Mohanty’s accounts, García Márquez afforded refraction and relief to readers in postcolonial India, opening up and recovering aspects of reality obscured by the lens of Anglo-Saxon realism.  As a young reader in Libya and Egypt in the 1980s, Matar recalls a different route and relationship to realism.  He begins his recollection by referring to a writers and readers in these places a generation or so before him: 

…most of the writers I knew and read were poets, and the readers I knew mainly read poetry.  I think this was a peculiarity of the circles my family moved in. Several of the poets we read, or who were in the periphery of my awareness when I was little, were enlivened by the French symbolists, particularly Mallarmé and Rimbaud.  They found energy and, I suppose, a modern liberation from the ‘real’ or literal–particularly in light of the often oppressive censorship laws.  But this, for many of them, eventually became an alibi and, at least to my sense then, drove them further and further away from daily life.  And so what started as a source of freedom, became escapism.  This made me, and several of the young readers I knew, gradually draw closer to the tangible or realist writings of authors such as Naguib Mahfouz, who, in turn, led us to Stendhal and Balzac.

Libya’s colonial history presented certain Italian authors to his early reading: “Moravia (because my mother liked him) and Calvino (because I liked him).”  Libya’s alliance with the Eastern Bloc introduced him and other Libyan readers to “the usual suspects–Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, etc.,” but also to “the Yugoslav author Ivo Andric, who touched me, I think, because he was contemporary and belonged to a culture that was in flux, very much like my own, and therefore his experiences and concerns seemed familiar.”  The dominance of the short story in Libya at the time led all to read modernist authors such as Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway.  In a recently decolonized Arab world, where ideas of modernity and progress were implicated with literature, this cluster of writings, including realist works, appealed to Matar for their engagement with “issues of transformation or flux, together with the modernist interest in individual subjectivity and the end of the non-unitary perspective,” and spoke to “his interest in interpretation and the subjective experience” in making sense of a reality in flux.

For Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a Colombian writer a generation or two after García Márquez, it is Sebald more than any other who showed a new kind of relationship to realism and the writing of reality.  For him, Sebald’s work “seemed to create a kind of mania in my generation at the turn of the century.”  He recalls:

I discovered his work on my own, picking up Vertigo at a second-hand bookstore in London, and I remember feeling that recognition and that selfishness you feel when you think nobody else has discovered this jewel.  Months later, in Barcelona, I found out that everyone around me was reading Sebald.  It became our main source of conversation for months.  I was working at a literary magazine (from 2000 to 2002) and people used to fight over who got to review his books.  His death in 2001 left us with the feeling of being cheated out of somebody who had still to write several masterpieces.  I remember the call that gave me the news with the same tone you would use if it had been a friend of mine.

What I found appealing about Sebald was the presence of the past, the act of memory, that was being dealt with in ways that were new to me and extremely effective.  I was trying to write The Informers, and the long sentences seemed to provide new tools to deal with memory and the past.  I was also seduced by the autofiction conventions: the ways in which the author pretended to be the narrator, and the ways in which he discovered somebody else’s story, suggested to me new ways of doing things I knew were in my future.  I know the autofiction aspect fascinated my colleagues too, for different reasons.  We were all looking for ways to abandon the most tired conventions of realist fiction.

Sebald figures in constellation too, for Sergio Chefjec, with Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Gerald Murnane, “some Pierre Bergounioux,” “some Emmanuel Bove,” and Olga Tokarczuk as “contemporary writers whose books impact my thoughts about my own narrative–and my dialogue (or soliloquy) with some Argentine or Latin American writers.” He questions the extent to which borders crossed in practices of reading may have been drawn in the past by forces of institutional and symbolic power, rather than the energies of other predilections.  His own work, with its auto-fictional narrative tendencies, may be seen to revisit and unsettle some of these borders.

Detours and Departures

In the responses, reading elsewhere and reading of elsewhere may take place, in the literal sense, elsewhere. A writer from Bogotá encounters Sebald in a secondhand bookshop in London and vies to review his books at a magazine office in Barcelona; he thinks of Sebald’s long sentences while writing a novel unearthing a segment in Colombian history. For Togara Muzanenhamo, the way to writing seems to have taken a double detour, of both geography and subject matter. “I only became interested in literature,” he recalls, “while studying business in the Netherlands. I met a friend who was also studying business but was heavily into the arts. She introduced me to August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera. As the years went by I started reading more poetry and was touched extraordinarily by the work of Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Louise Gluck, Charles Simic and Philip Larkin. As I began to read more–writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy struck me heavily.” The affinity shared at first “was the stirring of the imagination. But with some of the writers it was the beauty of the language.” In the Netherlands there came about a turn to literature that involved the experience of transformative listening and looking: “when I read poetry,” Muzanenhamo writes, “I am reading the words, using my imagination, listening to the music of the words and the music of the ideas and imagery and also looking at the form of the poem. So when I first read Seamus Heaney’s Spirit Brides–that collection touched me on all of those levels–as did Wild Irises by Gluck.” A trajectory that began in detour seemed to bring Muzanenhamo to discover an idiom—“Heaney taught me form–as in how to write a sonnet or villanelle using everyday language–that’s why he is so accessible”–and a musical rhythm, in relation to McCarthy, who “taught me new things about sentence structure and the depth of imagery.” The English verse of a poet in Harare took impetus in relation to the English of a poet in Belfast, a poet in Massachusetts, and a writer of the American West.

For Yang Tse, the way to writing involved affirmation of the notion in one of Kundera’s titles, Life is Elsewhere.  In East Asian literary modernism, transformed by contact with Western literature, the early 20th-century Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke has the protagonist in his 1927 Life of a Fool visit a bookstore in Tokyo and declare, “Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.”  Yang’s own route to Baudelaire was through Akutagawa, and in university in Taiwan in the 1970s he shared with others in his generation an interest in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who seemed to exude a youthfulness and specifically “American vitality” in contrast to a writer of a previous generation like Henry James.  Preceding his own departure from Taiwan for graduate school in the U.S., Yang recalls frequenting bookstores in Ximending, a part of town in Taipei then nicknamed “Little Shanghai” for its reproduction in the era of the Cold War of the pre-1949 Western-oriented sensibilities of that Chinese coastal metropolis.  For Yang, modern poetry in Chinese, in Taiwan and elsewhere, took a horizontal rather than vertical form of development, interacting with Western literature in translation and currents within an East Asian cultural sphere that includes Vietnam and Korea.  If modern poets writing in Chinese are all prodigal children, some are filials among prodigals and some, like Ya Xian, Yang notes, are prodigals among prodigals.  Yang’s reading elsewhere situates itself in relation to previous and contemporary East Asian readers reading elsewhere.  As he reflects, it anticipated his literal departure and decade-long stay in the U.S. before his return to Taiwan in the 1990s.

Mohanty faced outward too in her reading in her younger years.  On a biographical level, she had spent a few years of her growing up in New York; on another level, she found in those younger years, and likewise in later years, that looking outside of India brought her in touch with more writers who experimented with form.  Reflecting on her trajectory, she thinks of writers she has admired and read repeatedly not so much as influences but as writers who have given her the moral courage to be herself and “to be different in form or subject.”  The French poet René Char, as she writes, “is a poet I have read for years.  What I feel very, very connected to in him is that he is a philosopher-poet.  He mines the depths of anguish and transformation with a vision that is hard to compare to anyone else.  He does this also through very different poetic modes, from the aphorism to the prose poem.  I did go to Provence, and laid carnations on his grave.”  Hermann Broch is another writer to whom she returns: his Death of Virgil “is like a long prose poem, deeply philosophical but traveling through a plot at the same time.  The work is a meditation on the death of Virgil and on art.  Char and Broch are not very widely read anywhere, Char perhaps in France but I doubt outside.  So I can’t be surprised that they were not read by anyone here in India.”

In his reflection on being a young reader in Libya and Egypt, Matar recalls foreign books as being, as a simple matter of fact, “often better written and produced.  The heyday of Arabic literature was well behind us, and it seemed that some of the best books being written were written elsewhere, in Europe and Latin America and other places.”  In such detours from one’s own place and time, “most remarkably for me,” Matar writes, “was how I kept finding myself and the people I knew in those books set in other places and other times…As singular as our experiences often appear to us, I’m sure my reading wasn’t that unique and many of the people where I grew up were reaching for similar books.”

New Territories, New Modes of Inhabitation

It was after leaving Ireland that Barry McCrea re-discovered Dublin in Joyce’s Ulysses.  And it was “being gay–never a straightfoward predicament, even less so in the church-drenched Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s [that] saved me,” he writes, “from the hazardous belief that representing Ireland was a literary end in itself.”  The novels of Edmund White brought him to “realize that the apparently inexpressible inner lives of gay people could not merely be acknowledged to exist, but could be put at the centre, could determine the shape and rhythm of whole works of literature.  This was for me a discovery as shocking and revolutionary in its way as my encounter with Dublin in the pages of Ulysses.”  But it was the reading of Proust that constituted the pivotal literary revelation: the Recherche “is animated by an instantly recognizable gay sensibility.  Things are discovered and communicated not in the open, social, sunlit world of Ulysses but rather by listening at doors, peering through windows, intercepting secret glances.”  In the Recherche McCrea finds “the map of a divided country of which I could finally feel–despite the years and kilometres and chasm of social class that divides me from Proust’s milieu–a full citizen.”

Reading and rereading Proust led McCrea to a new understanding of literary citizenship.  He writes:

My sense of belonging to Proust’s literary country has allowed me to feel affinity and common cause with writers who in other times and places, and in circumstances very different from my own, have feared that their experience, that the world as it has appeared to them, might vanish unrecorded.  The tool Proust has to offer is a whole new language capable of endowing with dignity experiences that at first feel too private or strange or trivial or boring to warrant literary expression…

 Proust offers a grammar for this work: a literary mode that is not leading up to a result, a finale, a redemption, but whose parenthetical form offers hospitality for all kinds of aimless or uncelebrated lives.  Because of Proust I feel an authentic, exciting sense of intimacy with writers such as Tommasi di Lampedusa, Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes, W.G. Sebald, and the contemporary Italian novelists of my own age; reading them is like finding fellow exiles from a vanished civilization; only Proust allows me to recognize them as compatriots.

Such transnational literary citizenship does not correspond to belonging fully to any territory on a map but establishes fellowship with others elsewhere whose exilic or semi-exilic perspectives attune them to what may be everywhere preciously unnoticed and possibly evanescent.

In a different tone, the narrator of the “pamphlet” Sergio Chefjec sent me, Notes Toward a Pamphlet (trans. Whitney DeVos; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), establishes a fellowship with the elusive subject of his contemplation, an Argentine poet named “Samich” who moved from the provinces to the outskirts of Buenos Aires.  “He’s not a well-known figure,” the narrator recounts, “and he doesn’t belong to any particular circle of celebrities.  Although his life lacked longevity, the general impression is that he didn’t have much left to do.  He was to live in that part of the twentieth century before everything was either stored or archived.  Therefore many more things are unknown of Samich than are known” (5).  Considering Samich from the twenty-first century, this narrator, our contemporary, observes that “the poet operated on the surrounding environment by irradiation.  In some cases, discursive developments emanated from him, and in other cases they were developments more ineffable and thus difficult to describe, directly linked to the paradigm of the affections, in a broad sense” (7).  In Note 18, the narrator declares:

Samich is a radiophonic being.  Always available, neighbors and disciples fold to his personal tempo.  Some have the feeling of, quite simply, being under his frequency as soon as they knock on the door.  To capture his frequency does not mean to be in tune with it, but rather to submit to the regime of an individual entity comprised of myriad enveloping signals. (31)

In relation to Samich, Chefjec’s narrator maps a way to writing through the reading of both discursive and non-discursive developments, a reading that styles itself as the transmission of a frequency, the irradiation of a tempo whereby what was—or is?–a regime of the “here” may perhaps be felt anew.

Coda

In lieu of a conclusion, I transmit what the writers above wrote–when they did–in response to the last question: “Are there writers you loved (and still love) that you felt your peers should have loved too?  What did they miss?”

Matar: “Absolutely. Abu al-Ala al-Maari, Marcel Proust and Joseph Conrad are some.  And, oddly, they remain to be.  Neither Arab nor English readers read them enough, in my view.  Although Proust and Conrad are far better read than al-Maari.”

Mohanty: “It is hard for me to answer questions about what my peers here should have loved.  I think mine has been an unusual trajectory in that I grew up for a few yeaers in New York and then later studied at Iowa and travelled to many places.  This naturally gives you access to a greater variety of writers, as well as those that are not in the mainstream.  And my own bent, towards depth and philosophical work also means I rarely read even the more mainstream serious writers.”

Muzanenhamo: “I’m not too sure what you mean by peers.  But every writer will have their own favorites.  I guess it’s like music–we like what we hear and could love something that we have never heard.”

McCrea: “Contemporary English-language literature is too focused on itself and is in desperate need of pollination from the outside.  I think English-speakers often do not know what heights of literary achievement have been reached in the world, and might hold their own work to higher standards if they knew.  To pick one example, the Italian novelists of the mid-twentieth century, such as Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, produced works of a quality which is barely equalled by any of their contemporaries who wrote in English.  Their work–not just their well-known hits If this is a Man or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, but the whole, breathtaking range of their novels and prose–would bring a truly rare kind of energy and ambition to writers in English which could reanimate their work.”

Sealy: “Perhaps Borges is one; we still lack his playful seriousness.”

Emily Sun is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College in New York City. Her new book is titled On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham University Press, 2021).