Atelier Aterui: "Joyce to the World and Murakami to the Globe"

Joyce to the World and Murakami to the Globe

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     The Earth seems to have become much smaller since the growth of the Internet around the world. Owing to such an age as this, it is important to reconsider what world literature is. David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, is also known as the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004). He also wrote an exhaustively detailed book titled What Is World Literature? (2003), which has led readers to read various literary masterpieces from all over the world. In this age of the globalization brought on by the end of the Cold War and the diffusion of the Internet, Damrosch’s views on world literature seem very significant in the contexts of Orientalism and Post-colonialism, particularly in the United States, a nation of immigrants.
     In mid-nineteenth century Ireland, after the Great Famine, approximately one-third of America’s immigrants came from Ireland, about 4.5 million Irish migrated between 1820 and 1930.1 Naturally, the immigrants brought their native literary traditions to America. These immigrants and their descendants have greatly contributed to American literature. Among Irish American authors, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger were very influential on Haruki Murakami, a renowned Japanese novelist, who has translated some of their major works into Japanese: Chandler’s The Big Sleep (2012), Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (2006) and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (2003).
     Subsequently, America became the center of studies for world literature at the general education level and for comparative literature at the graduate level, both of which largely covered Greek and Roman classical literature and great modern Western European literature. This Eurocentric tendency lasted until the end of the twentieth century.
     The change was impressively indicated in the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, whose first six editions (1956, 1965, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1992) featured only Western European and North American works. The “expanded version” of the sixth edition, with the new title, The Norton Anthology of World Literature (1995) included substantial non-Western selections, 2,000 pages of non-Western works. According to Peter Eckermann it was the seventy-seven-year-old Goethe in 1826 that used the then newly minted term “Weltliteratur” (Damrosch 1). Goethe read a Chinese novel and found that “the Chinese think, act, and feel almost exactly like us [Germans] ... except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous, than with us” (Damrosch 10-11). This is what Damrosch wants us to do: to read world literature, even in translation, to find similarities and differences.
     This paper aims to compare the works of James Joyce and those of Haruki Murakami following Damrosch’s threefold definition of world literature:

  1. World Literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures.
  2. World literature is writing that gains in translation.
  3. World literature is not a set cannon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time. (What Is World Literature? 281)

Some people may insist that Damrosch’s definition is neither perfect nor canonical. However, it seems at least appropriate and very practical nowadays in the Age of the Internet.

Keywords: James Joyce, Haruki Murakami, Ulysses, 1Q84, world literature

The full version is available in The Katahira: Studies in English & Literature, Vol. 52. The Katahira Society, March 2017, 1-18.