Drawing on my experiences abroad, I decided to loosely mimic Phileas Fogg’s route from London eastward through Asia, across the Pacific to the Americas, and finally back to London. I would recall, and often actually revisit, a group of particularly memorable locations and the books I associate with them, both to see how literature enters the world and to think about how the world bleeds into literature. In January of 2020, I was plotting my itinerary, building it around upcoming talks and conferences. Then came Covid-19.
David Damrosch (chair of Harvard University's department of comparative literature) has built a career on introducing (sometimes even translating) non-English texts into the Western canon. Planning a series of literary talks around the world for 2020, Damrosch thought he might visit a globe-encircling series of cities that mimicked Phileas Fogg’s imaginary eighty day journey and write a book about those experiences that could further “introduce a broader readership to the expansive landscape of literature today”; but then Covid hit and the world shut down and Damrosch’s project was iced. Until, that is, he decided to host his tour online — taking inspiration from Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (a fanciful “Grand Tour” of the chambers of an aristocrat who found himself under house arrest in 1790) — with house-bound Damrosch exploring an exotic locale through five books per week, covering eighty diverse books over his sixteen week project. This book is the result of that project.
Starting with novels (and some poetry collections) set in London (mimicking Phileas Fogg’s launching point), Damrosch then voyages out to Paris (discussing Proust to Perec), Kraków (Primo Levi and Franz Kafka to Olga Tokarczuk), Venice, the Middle East, Africa, Israel and Palestine, Tehran, India, China, Japan, South and Central America, Caribbean Islands and an island off the coast of Maine (which was the childhood home of the author; surprisingly more literary than one might anticipate), New York City and back to London (with a special look at Tolkein). Much of the familiar Western canon is referenced throughout — books such as In Search of Lost Time, The Odyssey, and Candide have been reframed countless times by a diverse range of authors through time and space; every memory-inducing bite of rice cracker is a Proustian moment — and Damrosch masterfully uses the familiar to not only demonstrate how world literature has responded to the West, but also to underline how they have developed independent canons of their own. Around the World in 80 Books is quite long , and sometimes dense, but I found it consistently fascinating (and I will say that I imagine it would be infinitely more interesting to actually take a course in Comparative Literature from Damrosch) and it gave me much inspiration for further reading. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It would be impossible to go over all eighty (one) of Damrosch’s selections (and countless other references), but to give a sense of how he links things together: Beginning in London, Damrosch notes that the city is well (if very differently) described by authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He points out that Woolf didn’t think much of those other two writers (she wrote a famously damning essay on David Copperfield and once wrote of Sherlock Holmes’ beloved sidekick, “to me Dr. Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun”). Damrosch further writes of the complexity that Woolf brings to her title character in Mrs. Dalloway: “Devising her own version of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique, and like him adapting the ancient Greek unities of time and place for her novel, Woolf draws on Sophocles and Euripides as well as on Chekhov, Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust.” (This kind of intertextuality is frequently, exhaustively, noted.) When Damrosch’s imaginary travels take him to India, he begins with an analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, writing, “Kipling can be said to have invented India for many foreign readers, much as Oscar Wilde thought that Dickens and Turner had invented London.” Part of this analysis is a thorough introduction to Kipling’s Indian character Hurree Chunder Mookerjee (an employee of the colonial government and an agent in the “Great Game” of espionage), and this becomes vital later when Damrosch introduces us to novelist Jamyang Norbu’s most famous work (which sees a resurrected Sherlock Holmes and Hurree Chunder Mookerjee collaborating on a case in the Himalayas):
Grounded in Norbu’s creative rereading of Kipling and Conan Doyle, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes blends genre fiction and political advocacy in a mode of metafictional play, in which Tibetan Buddhism is shown to be a moral resource for the whole world, transcending greed and the quest for domination, in an ideal blend of religion and science, ancient and modern, East and West together. The book has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Hungarian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
(I particularly liked the fact that Holmes’ discovery of Buddhism helps him kick his drug addiction.) Many sections play out like this: Damrosch acknowledges that a European first introduced Western readers to a foreign land (as did Kipling for India or Marco Polo for China), then discusses authors (like Salman Rushdie or Norbu) who have written as emigres or exiles about their homelands, and then concludes with a modern author (in this case, Jhumpa Lahiri) who writes for a modern audience at a generational remove from the locale. This feels balanced (acknowledging the initial Westernised view of a location and then including the voices of the locals) and feels like it is giving equal say to two sides of a global conversation. One more example of the depth of intertextuality to be found in this book:
Writers such as (Derek) Walcott, James Joyce, and Jean Rhys, who all grew up on colonized islands, can feel the need to invent a language suited to their island’s modest material circumstances, intense localism, and distance from the metropolitan centers of politics, history, and culture. Island-based writers often orient themselves in the world with reference to other islands, near or far. In this chapter, we’ll proceed from Walcott to two of his inspirations, Joyce and Rhys, and then to Margaret Atwood’s feminist rewriting of Joyce’s rewriting of Homer, and finally to Judith Schalansky’s mapping of remote islands around the world.
And I’ll end with Damrosch’s own conclusion; on the absolute necessity of reading widely in world literature:
Jules Verne didn’t content himself with sending his heroes around the world in eighty days, but also propelled them to the moon and immersed them 20,000 leagues under the sea. In antiquity, restless Odysseus was said to have left Ithaca late in life, not for another sea voyage but for its opposite, a journey on land until he’d find a place where people wouldn’t know what an oar was used for. The list of new literary destinations is endless. With the world falling apart in so many ways, and the pandemic’s aftershocks likely to long remain with us, it’s good to connect in the ways we can, over the things that matter to all of us, as we tend our gardens and perform le tour du monde dans nos chambres.
