Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature

In recent debates about the new world literature-now understood as literature that circulates outside the geographic region in which it was produced-it is often assumed that texts are being translated into English and that the process of translation leads to cultural as well as political homogenization.1 Translation leads to cultural homogenization, the argument goes, because readers will learn fewer languages, and because texts written for translation will tend to avoid vernacular references and linguistic complexity. (Owen 31; Spivak 18-19; Apter "On Translation" 12). It leads to political homogenization because the world market requires stories that everyone can share, which means fewer distinctions among political histories and social agents (Brennan 59-61). The concern is this: translation is bad for what it does to books (presents them apart from their original language and context); but it is worse for what it does to authors (encourages them to ignore that language and context). In truth, as Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and Martin Puchner have shown, the effects of translation will depend on what is being translated and on what happens when translated books are read. Moreover, the meaning of these effects will depend on how we evaluate sameness and difference: do we assume, for example, that homogenization is always a negative outcome? There are many variables in the new world literature, and they press us to consider not only the global production and circulation of texts but also our ways of thinking about cultural and political uniqueness.

In today's critical parlance, the "new world literature" refers to a shift both in the study and in the production of books. As a matter of study, scholars such as Damrosch and Moretti have called for a new emphasis on the "phenomenology" rather than the "ontology" of the work of art, where phenomenology means investigating the form of a book's appearance, its circulation and translation, as opposed to ontology's interest in the nature or essence of the text (Damrosch 6; Moretti 67). The emphasis on circulation seeks to replace two older definitions: the one that designated literary masterpieces, those books everyone in the world should read; and the one that designated literary underdogs, those books produced outside of Western Europe and the United States. Whereas world literature once designated "works," Damrosch argues, it now designates "a network" (3), and that network is the cause rather than an effect of the field.2 It is because of the network, the several literary systems that share a single text, that the work can be categorized as world literature.3

Privileging networks means analyzing how a work participates not only in its "original" literary system, the system of the language in which it was composed, but also in the other literary systems in which it has a presence. Whether one emphasizes broad trends (as Moretti does) or individual case studies (as Damrosch does), the new world literature demands comparative scholarship (the analysis of several literary systems) that focuses not simply on different works from different national traditions but on different editions and translations of a single work-if it is ever "single."4 Because a text's network will continue to grow and multiply, as that text is circulated and read in numerous regions and languages, its geography and culture will be dynamic and unpredictable. It is no longer simply a matter of determining, once and for all, the literary culture to which a work belongs. "Works of world literature," Damrosch writes, "interact in a charged field defined by a fluid and multiple set of possibilities of juxtaposition and combination" (300). In other words, because works can continue to become part of different national traditions, there will always be more comparing to do.

In this essay, I share Moretti's and Damrosch's interest in the circulation of texts, but I examine in addition the ways that ontology recapitulates phenomenology: I am interested in how the global translation and circulation of literature has changed the production and theory of transnational fiction.5 Moretti and Damrosch conceive of world literature as those texts that move from one place out to many places: "literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin" (Damrosch 4). According to Damrosch, "virtually all literary works are born within what we would now call a national literature" (283). But what of those contemporary texts, written by migrants and for an international audience, that exist from the beginning in several places? How does reflecting on unoriginality, as some contemporary writers now do, influence the ideas of community that authors-and readers-are able to imagine?

This essay takes up these concerns by turning to the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novels have been translated from English into twenty-eight languages to date, and who has written throughout his career about problems of authenticity, comparison, and adequation. Ishiguro's novels offer compelling examples of the new world literature and of what I call "comparison literature," an emerging genre of world fiction for which global comparison is a formal as well as a thematic preoccupation. My discussion of Ishiguro's work brings together his early novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which has been analyzed widely as a book about interwar England and the postwar decline of imperial confidence, with his 2005 novel about cloning, Never Let Me Go (Robbins 26-30; Walkowitz 109-30; Lang; Su; Wong). The Remains of the Day becomes more legible as a book about uniqueness and world reading when seen in the light of Ishiguro's comments about translation and his recent analysis of reproducibility. In both books, we find an ongoing critique of uniqueness and a persistent weighing of global paradigms such as the network, the tradition, and the scale.