In the past year or so, several articles have addressed the issues raised in ‘Conjectures on World Literature’: Christopher Prendergast, Francesca Orsini, Efraín Kristal and Jonathan Arac in New Left Review, Emily Apter and Jale Parla elsewhere.footnote¹ My thanks to all of them; and as I obviously cannot respond to every point in detail, I will focus here on the three main areas of disagreement among us: the (questionable) paradigmatic status of the novel; the relationship between core and periphery, and its consequences for literary form; and the nature of comparative analysis.

One must begin somewhere, and ‘Conjectures’ tried to sketch how the literary world-system works by focusing on the rise of the modern novel: a phenomenon which is easy to isolate, has been studied all the world over, and thus lends itself well to comparative work. I also added that the novel was ‘an example, not a model; and of course my example, based on the field I know (elsewhere, things may be very different)’. Elsewhere things are different indeed: ‘If the novel can be seen as heavily freighted with the political, this is not patently the case for other literary genres. Drama seems to travel less anxiously . . . How might the . . . construct work with lyric poetry?’, asks Prendergast; and Kristal: ‘Why doesn’t poetry follow the laws of the novel?’.footnote²

It doesn’t? I wonder. What about Petrarchism? Propelled by its formalized lyrical conventions, Petrarchism spread to (at least) Spain, Portugal, France, England, Wales, the Low Countries, the German territories, Poland, Scandinavia, Dalmatia (and, according to Roland Greene, the New World). As for its depth and duration, I am sceptical about the old Italian claim that by the end of the sixteenth century over two hundred thousand sonnets had been written in Europe in imitation of Petrarch; still, the main disagreement seems to be, not on the enormity of the facts, but on the enormity of their enormity—ranging from a century (Navarrete, Fucilla), to two (Manero Sorolla, Kennedy), three (Hoffmeister, Kristal himself), or five (Greene). Compared to the wave-like diffusion of this ‘lingua franca for love poets’, as Hoffmeister calls it, western novelistic ‘realism’ looks like a rather ephemeral vogue.footnote³

Other things being equal, anyway, I would imagine literary movements to depend on three broad variables—a genre’s potential market, its overall formalization and its use of language—and to range from the rapid wave-like diffusion of forms with a large market, rigid formulas and simplified style (say, adventure novels), to the relative stasis of those characterized by a small market, deliberate singularity and linguistic density (say, experimental poetry). Within this matrix, novels would be representative, not of the entire system, but of its most mobile strata, and by concentrating only on them we would probably overstate the mobility of world literature. If ‘Conjectures’ erred in that direction it was a mistake, easily corrected as we learn more about the international diffusion of drama, poetry and so on (here, Donald Sassoon’s current work on cultural markets will be invaluable).footnote⁴ Truth be told, I would be very disappointed if all of literature turned out to ‘follow the laws of the novel’: that a single explanation may work everywhere is both very implausible and extraordinarily boring. But before indulging in speculations at a more abstract level, we must learn to share the significant facts of literary history across our specialized niches. Without collective work, world literature will always remain a mirage.

Is world-system theory, with its strong emphasis on a rigid international division of labour, a good model for the study of world literature? On this, the strongest objection comes from Kristal: ‘I am arguing, however, in favour of a view of world literature’, he writes, ‘in which the West does not have a monopoly over the creation of forms that count; in which themes and forms can move in several directions—from the centre to the periphery, from the periphery to the centre, from one periphery to another, while some original forms of consequence may not move much at all’.footnote⁵

Yes, forms can move in several directions. But do they? This is the point, and a theory of literary history should reflect on the constraints on their movements, and the reasons behind them. What I know about European novels, for instance, suggests that hardly any forms ‘of consequence’ don’t move at all; that movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of;footnote⁶ that movement from the periphery to the centre is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from the centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent.footnote⁷ Do these facts imply that the West has ‘a monopoly over the creation of the forms that count’? Of course not.footnote⁸ Cultures from the centre have more resources to pour into innovation (literary and otherwise), and are thus more likely to produce it: but a monopoly over creation is a theological attribute, not an historical judgment.footnote⁹ The model proposed in ‘Conjectures’ does not reserve invention to a few cultures and deny it to the others: it specifies the conditions under which it is more likely to occur, and the forms it may take. Theories will never abolish inequality: they can only hope to explain it.

Kristal also objects to what he calls the ‘postulate of a general homology between the inequalities of the world economic and literary systems’: in other words, ‘the assumption that literary and economic relationships run parallel may work in some cases, but not in others’.footnote¹⁰ Even-Zohar’s argument is a partial response to the objection; but there is another sense in which Kristal is right, and the simplifying euphoria of an article originally conceived as a 30-minute talk is seriously misleading. By reducing the literary world-system to core and periphery, I erased from the picture the transitional area (the semi-periphery) where cultures move in and out of the core; as a consequence, I also understated the fact that in many (and perhaps most) instances, material and intellectual hegemony are indeed very close, but not quite identical.