By John Lloyd
The opinions expressed are his own.
Nothing can be more nationally rooted than the novel. Recall your mental images of the squalid alleys of Dickensian London and the stormy moors of the Brontes (both Emily’s and Charlotte’s, the latter beautifully photographed in the latest film reworking of “Jane Eyre”); the narrow streets and minds of the Norman towns in which Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary’s yearning for romance is broken and the gilded salons of Paris where Eugenie de Balzac’s heroes claw, or fail to claw, their way up the social scale; the field of Borodino where Tolstoy had Pierre Bezhukov put face to face with carnage of war, and the crumbling slums of Petersburg where Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov commits his crime and suffers his punishment. These are part of the reader’s mental furniture, imagined and re-imagined millions of times down the decades, but always seen as inextricably of their place; places which take on characters of their own, malign or comforting.
Now, a series of intertwined trends threaten this assumption of rootedness, and have the capacity to shift us from the tidy allocation of fictions to nations which the study of literature has furthered, and which it now struggles to contain. The British-Italian writer and translator Tim Parks believes that this shift is as large as that from the use of Latin to the “vulgar” or local languages as the medium for literature in the medieval period. It is, though, a kind of reverse process: where, almost a millennium ago, pioneers like Dante and Chaucer, writing in what became Italian and what was already English, led the writing world into multiplicity, the pressures of globalization hammer away at Babel’s Tower, seeking to replace it with a single column of glob-ish.
One trend is the continued spread of English as a global lingua franca, giving birth to a variety of English-es with a French, Italian, Russian, Chinese coloring – as well as the longer established African and Indian versions, ingrained in imperial times. Closely tied to that is the dwindling weight of the smaller national languages, as a growing group master English and freely choose Anglophone rather than native sources for their reading of all kinds, as well as, of necessity, their business.
Tied to this again is the vast imaginative attraction of the United States which – however much its economy is declining relative to the tigers of the east – remains a real and virtual center of dreams and stories, flawed heroes and sympathetic villains. A place in which the fiction factories of Los Angeles and New York, Chicago and San Francisco, have poured out such powerful streams of narrative and character that every culture, even those which set themselves against it, is caught in some part of their coils. A country whose readers are both largely indifferent to the products of other nations’ active imaginations and carelessly colonizing of their passive literary enjoyment.
Ancillary to these trends are the cascades of literary festivals and prizes, used by publishers everywhere to distinguish their products from the ruck, and brand them on the international market as something more than “just” another foreign writer. And for the publishers themselves, those who survive have transformed their once famously snail-like habits into strategies of rapid, multinational marketing, where the products of the mainly Anglophone genre masters — as Tom Clancy, Jodi Picoult and Ken Follett, as well as the more literary but still massively marketed novels of Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen and Hilary Mantel -– are sent for translation, sometimes, before the author has finished writing, and flood into a hundred national markets almost simultaneously.
