History and Theory 40 (May 2001), 267-271 © Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

FROM EVERY TONGUE A SEVERAL TALE?

LITERARY THEORY AND THE CLAIMS OF HISTORY: POSTMODERNISM, OBJECTIVITY,

MULTICULTURAL POLITICS. By Satya P. Mohanty. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 260.

Satya Mohanty writes from the perspective of the Left at a time when the Left is
in disarray both theoretically and practically. “What is now in crisis,” he observes
somewhere near the middle of his book,
is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the work-
ing class, upon the role of Revolution with a capital ‘r,’ as the founding moment in the
transition from one type of society to another, and upon the illusory prospect of a perfectly
unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics.
The plural and multifarious character of contemporary social struggles has finally dis-
solved the last foundation for that political imaginary.

No one any longer believes in the possibility of “universal subjects” or in

“History in the singular.” The Left today is “witnessing the final act of the dis-
solution of that Jacobin imaginary” (119-120).
Though he is a professor of English at Cornell, Mohanty’s subject is not
English literature or any literary text or body of texts, but the possibility of a crit-
ical and—broadly defined—“progressive” politics in a situation in which the tra-
ditional foundations of such a politics (rationalism, universalism, humanism)
have been subjected to devastating philosophical challenges (Rorty, Foucault,
Derrida, et al.), denounced as ideologically repressive (Adorno-Horkheimer),
and exposed (by the actual history of the Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe and
Russia) as incapable in practice of creating and sustaining a genuinely open and
humane society. Indeed, the professor of literature appears to have been so
deeply affected by political and cultural concerns that, breaking ranks with many
of his professional colleagues, he challenges the more extreme claims of “liter-
ary theory”—by which he understands the “postmodernist” thought that domi-
nates a broad range of disciplines including “film and media studies, anthropol-
ogy, ethnic and third world cultural studies, feminism and various kinds of inter-
pretive projects in the social sciences” (10). What he advocates instead is greater
openness to and understanding of “science” and, in the end, serious considera-
tion of the idea that there is continuity, rather than discontinuity and non-com-
munication among different persons, cultures, and “discourses.”
On the one hand, he sympathizes with the motives behind the “postmodernist”
strategy, popular in literary and cultural studies quarters, of emphasizing the
“constructed” and conventional aspect of science, presenting it as a kind of self-
contained “culture”—with no epistemological privilege over other systems of
268 LIONEL GOSSMAN

explanation—and thus undermining its hegemonic claim to truth. On the other,

he questions the intellectual well-foundedness of this strategy and its conse-
quences for politics. If it has been “liberating,” it has also been “limiting” (251).
Mohanty’s aim is certainly not to shore up the familiar rationalist and positivist
ideal of a completely unrooted, neutral, and universalist objectivity. However, he
does hope to outline the possibility of another kind of objectivity, one that arises
out of the very inevitability of the investigator’s rootedness in particular histori-
cal experiences and a particular culture and out of his willingness to encounter
and respond to views developed on the basis of different historical experiences
and a different cultural context—a kind of objectivity that is therefore not
absolute, not unchanging, not the polar opposite of subjectivity (as in classical
rationalism and positivism), nor simply the reflection of an achieved consensus
(as in pragmatism), but always in process of re-evaluation and rearticulation in
light of newly discovered experiences.
It is appropriate, given these ideas, that Mohanty should be forthcoming in his
preface about the rootedness of his own work in a particular historical situation.
It was because he believes “postmodernism is a popular position on the Left,” but
is uneasy about its implications for a Left politics, he relates, that he wanted to
“look at it critically and politically” in order “to decipher both the reasons for its
attractiveness and the theoretical conclusions it implies or entails.” At the same
time, since he also believes that “a strong and defensible notion of objectivity
best serves our political and cultural projects,” he wanted “to explore and devel-
op a theoretical alternative to the notion of objectivity which is assailed by post-
modernists, an alternative position that can be characterized in philosophical
terms as ‘realist’” (xi-xii). Mohanty’s project is thus avowedly not neutral or
purely professional; its author acknowledges his own engagement, but at the
same time hopes to be able to convince others whose experience may not be
identical to his. His mode of argument, one might say, is neither dogmatic nor
dialectical, but dialogical. What he would like to do is work with people with dif-
ferent experiences toward what would be a new and more comprehensive under-
standing for both parties.
As a reviewer, I do not consider myself any more neutral than Mohanty and I
should be as forthcoming as he. After a journey that began with Lukacsian
Marxism and passed through a long stage of “constructivism,” aimed at under-
mining positivist complacencies, I have been drawing closer and closer over the
last twenty years or so to the kind of objectivity Mohanty advocates. Like him, I
now take a more flexible view of cultural practices, including the scientific inves-
tigation of nature and the historical investigation of society, and view them as the
collective product of the endeavors of individuals within communities and of
communities in their encounters with each other—even though these encounters
have usually been strongly marked by hostility, violence, and repression. I may
thus be too close to Mohanty to be the kind of truly productive reader he is prob-
ably looking for.
 FROM EVERY TONGUE A SEVERAL TALE? 269
If I have a criticism to make of his argument, it is in fact that it is inattentive
to its own history and hardly acknowledges the degree to which it too is the prod-
uct of sustained struggle and dialogue between different experiences and inter-
ests. Goethe is mentioned once somewhere in the book, but there is no recollec-
tion of his remarkable theory of translation—although translation is a vital sub-
ject for Mohanty, since it represents the crucial area of “negotiation” between
varying views of the world, different cultures, different systems of understand-
ing, out of which greater “objectivity,” he holds, will emerge. Goethe outlined
three kinds of translation. Literal translation acquaints the outsider with the basic
elements of a foreign text and culture. In the second kind of translation, which
adapts the foreign language to the national one, “the translator supposedly wants
to enter into the spirit of the foreign land, but in fact only tries to appropriate this
spirit and reconstruct it in his national one.”1 Intelligent people, notably the
French (i.e. the Enlightenment) are particularly partial, according to Goethe, to
this approach. Finally, the “highest” translation expands the national language by
forcing it to accommodate what is strange and new to it, “to make the translation
identical with the original, so that the one is not accepted instead of but actually
takes the place of the other.”2 Goethe’s greatest admiration is thus reserved for
the risk-taking translator “who associates himself closely with his original” and
“more or less abandons the genius of his own nation.”3 It is surely not fortuitous
that these reflections of Goethe’s were published in a volume of poems and prose
commentaries inspired by and adapted from the Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and
Indian. Or that they are contemporary with an ambitious project of translations
devised by Madame de Staël and her circle at Coppet (A.W. Schlegel, Constant,
Barante), the goal of which was to contribute to the creation of a Weltliteratur,
not through the translation of texts in the various national languages into French,
the most “rational” of all languages according to most of the Enlightenment
philosophes, but rather in the comprehensive and sympathetic spirit of Herder.
Or that Goethe, Schlegel, and Constant—along with Ranke, Hegel, and
Michelet—were trying to achieve a fruitful dialogue between seemingly warring
positions: subjectivity and scientific objectivity, tradition and reason, conserva-
tion or restoration and revolution, the local and the national, the national and the
international. A century after they were expounded by Goethe, those early nine-
teenth-century Romantic ideas about translation were still the basis not only of
Benjamin’s now celebrated essay (the only one referred to by Mohanty), but of
a brilliant earlier study by a wayward member of the George Circle, the poet and
essayist Rudolph Pannwitz. “The fundamental error of most translators,”
Pannwitz declared, “is that they maintain the accidental state of their own lan-
guage instead of letting it be violently moved by the foreign language.”4 That

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan: Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem
Verständnis des West-östlichen Divans [1819] in Werke, 22 vols.(Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965–1978),
III, 307-310.
2. Ibid., 307.
3. Ibid., 308.
4. Rudolph Pannwitz, Krisis der Europäischen Kultur [1917] (Nuremberg: Verlag Hans Carl,
1947), 193-194).
270 LIONEL GOSSMAN

timid and conservative style of translation is contrasted with Karl Eugen

Neumann’s translations of Pali Buddhist texts (1893–1912), which, in
Pannwitz’s view, “achieved an almost new German language” by importing sig-
nificant elements of the foreign language.
If I also note the absence of Michelet from the pages of Mohanty’s book, that
is not simply because I have spent a good deal of my time reading and writing
about him, but because his work is indeed highly relevant to Mohanty’s project
and argument. Michelet’s entire career as a historian was defined by his effort to
“let the silences of history speak,” to engage with the experiences and under-
standings of the dead, the poor, the forgotten, the defeated, the despised (old reli-
gions, old cultures, old systems of law, women, witches, even animals). No one
wrote more eloquently about that project than he and no one experienced more
acutely in himself the tragic nineteenth-century tension between, on the one
hand, respect for, even love of the other, willingness to enter her world and her
life, see with her eyes, feel with her senses, speak with her voice, and learn from
that experience, and, on the other hand, the triumphalist and imperialist need to
domesticate and subordinate, the desperate fear of the other, the terror of “going
native” and “losing one’s reason.” In chapter five in particular (“Political
Criticism and the Challenge of Otherness”) I kept thinking on almost every page
of Michelet’s struggles with the very problems that concern Mohanty.
No doubt it was not Mohanty’s intention to provide a historical dimension to
his argument but to conduct it in relation to some of the most influential and pop-
ular theoretical writings of our own time. His method is accordingly to expound
patiently, and on the whole sympathetically, the work of a major contemporary
thinker that is relevant to his theme (the single exception might be the unsympa-
thetic presentation of Ernest Gellner), before either pointing to the inadequacies
of the arguments themselves, as well as to their “implications,” or building on
their strengths. Thus chapter one addresses the issue of language, truth and fic-
tion by way of a critical discussion of De Man. In chapter two Mohanty argues,
with the help of Bakhtin, Peirce, and Hilary Putnam, against what he calls post-
modernist epistemological skepticism and in favor of the social basis of language
and reference as a valid ground for modest epistemological confidence and opti-
mism. Chapters three and four deal sympathetically but, in the end, critically
with the attempts of Althusser and Fredric Jameson to articulate a “postmod-
ernist” Marxism capable of responding to the skepticism and relativism that
Mohanty believes have been promoted by postmodernist thought. Chapter five
takes up the issue of otherness, the need to establish some basis for a common
human reason in the midst of deep cultural difference (Mohanty finds it in the
notion of “rational agency, a basic concept shared by all humans across cultures”
[135-140]), to “go beyond a simple recognition of difference”—that is to say,
beyond radical relativism and skepticism—without reverting to Gellner's “arro-
gant” positivism or to a rationalist universalism that has lost credibility. In chap-
ter six the two extremes of foundationalist realism and antifoundationalist con-
ventionalism and pragmatism—“all or nothing at all,” as Mohanty puts it—are
 FROM EVERY TONGUE A SEVERAL TALE? 271
both rejected, being seen, correctly in my view, as subscribing to the same view
of what constitutes true knowledge. Instead, an attempt is made to establish “the
general possibility of a naturalized epistemology, with its open-ended reliance on
the empirical sciences.” As Mohanty envisages it, such an epistemology, resting
on “a modest and realistic conception of the social organization of human knowl-
edge” (164), would be capable of accepting the limitations and “frailties” of the
human condition without throwing out the baby along with the bathwater. Rorty
and Quine are Mohanty’s chief interlocutors in this chapter. Finally, chapter
seven offers an extended meditation on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which Paul’s
relation to Sethe is evoked to illustrate Mohanty’s argument that in our relation
to others, if it is aggressive and domineering to identify one’s own point of view
with the universally human, it is equally insufficient simply to acknowledge dif-
ference uncritically (the cultural relativist position), since this “tolerance”—
according to Mohanty—is close to indifference, involves no real engagement
with the other, and consequently provides neither party with insight or under-
standing. It is not enough, in other words, to say simply that “translation is
impossible.” As humans we have no option but to be engaged with each other;
we must translate, and our aim should be to improve the translation process as
much as we can.
Sethe does not defend infanticide; she widens the scope of the moral debate to include the
relevant contexts of her action, and thus makes it more complex. Paul’s growth is predi-
cated on his coming to know Sethe’s perspective, on learning to acknowledge both the
partiality of his knowledge and the reason Sethe knows something that he does not about
the world in which they both live. Sethe’s epistemic privilege is not an accident. It derives
from her experience of being a slave mother, that is her resistance to being a reproducer
of slaves. (235)

Mohanty has written an earnest, well-intentioned, patiently argued book on a

topic of great contemporary relevance. Some readers may regret that he did not
write it with more style, wit, and sparkle. It is ponderous reading at times. More
important, readers of History and Theory may regret that there is so little in it
about the historiographical controversies of the last fifty-odd years, though these
are surely relevant to its theme. White receives one passing mention in the chap-
ter on Jameson, but there is no sign of Ankersmit, Haskell, Megill, Mink, Novick,
Perelman, to name only a few who have contributed to a lively and important
debate. I have already noted the absence of a historical dimension of the argu-
ment itself, despite a couple of brief allusions to Herder. The non-English speak-
ing thinkers discussed at any length are the usual ones: Gadamer, Heidegger,
Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard. In general, the frame of reference appears to be that
of contemporary English literature departments with theoretical ambitions. But
these are quibbles. This is a book that addresses a serious issue in a serious way.

LIONEL GOSSMAN
Princeton University