Deep Time: American

Literature and World History

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Wai Chee Dimock

I begin with a simple observation.1 Here is a list of some of the

most influential books in thefield,published in the past 60 years:
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941); R. W. B. Lewis,
The American Adam (1955); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jer-
emiad (1978); Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual,
The Nation, and The Continent (1986); and Walter Benn Michaels,
Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995).
A lot has changed in the past 60 years, but one thing has not.
One word is still there, still holding court. What does it mean to re-
fer to a body of writing as American! What assumptions enable us
to take an adjective derived from a territorial unit—an America, a
set of spatial coordinates on a map—and turn it into a mode of lit-
erary causality: a set of attributes based on the territorial, deter-
mined by it, and subsumable under its jurisdiction?
Physical space, in this paradigm, is endlessly reinscribed in
other spheres of life: it becomes a political entity, an economic en-
tity, a cultural entity. All of these are its replica; all warrant the use
of the adjective American. There is a kind of causal chain gang at
work here. We assume that there is a perfect fit, a seamless corre-
spondence, between the geographical boundaries of the nation
and the boundaries of all its other operative domains. And, be-
cause this correspondence takes the form of a lockstepped entail-
ment—because its causality goes all the way up and all the way
down—we assume there is a literary domain that lines up in just
the same way. This is why the adjective American can serve as lit-
erary description. Using it, we assume, with or without explicit ac-
knowledgment, that literature is an effect, an epiphenomenon, of
the US, territorially predicated and territorially describable.
American literary studies as a discipline is largely founded
on this fateful adjective. This governs the domain of inquiry we
construct, the range of questions we entertain, the kind of evi-
dence we take as significant. The very professionalism of the field
rests on the integrity and the legitimacy of this founding concept.2
Not surprisingly, its disciplinary stranglehold has tightened rather

© 2001 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY

756 American Literature and World History

than loosened in recent years, when (in inverse relation to the de-
cline of the humanities) specialization has triumphed as never
before. Americanists are now nothing but that: Americanists.

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Thanks to this academic territoriality—an all too sad replay of
the territoriality of the nation—the discipline is organized as a
self-contained fiefdom, its borders policed into a natural fact.
Any line of inquiry that suggests a different circumference is sus-
pect, unprofessional-looking. Steering clear of that danger, we
often write about Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
William Faulkner without ever leaving the borders of America,
assuming that these do literally "contain" these authors. To give a
crude, but not entirely unfair, summary of some of our arguments,
Melville, Stowe, and Faulkner are so many metonymies of the na-
tion: they are a part—a subset—of the American empire, Ameri-
can sentimental culture, American racist modernity.3 Metonymic
nationalism is not a familiar phrase, but it is what this paradigm
amounts to. To practice it is to write off the rest of the world. We
don't ask what it means for Melville to be obsessed with an En-
glish writer, Shakespeare, about whom he wrote: "Dolt and ass
that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago,
never made close acquaintance with the divine William . . . if an-
other Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person."4 We
don't ask what it means for Stowe to have a fan in Tolstoy, who
egged himself on in his diary: "How necessary to write about
this—to write a new Uncle Tom's Cabin" (337). We don't ask what
it means for Faulkner to be a popular author in Japan.5
We don't ask these questions because, for many of us, they
are external to the territorial unit that we take to be a natural unit
of analysis. But is this unit really so natural? Does it serve all our
descriptive or explanatory needs? And is there really a lock-
stepped entailment between these geographical coordinates and
the coordinates of the polity, of the economy, not to say of culture
and literature?
Paul Gilroy, in his important book The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), has responded with
an emphatic no. For Gilroy, the nation, as a geographical unit, is
neither the starting point nor the end point of the modern world,
and certainly not the starting point or the end point of our critical
analysis.6 Territorial sovereignty is sovereign only up to a certain
point. It does not control everything; its causal entailment is not
absolute; its borders are not endlessly reinscribed in other spheres
of life. And so, there is no America in the title of this book. Rather
than taking the nation as the baseline of analysis, Gilroy begins in-
stead with the Atlantic, an alternate frame that disputes, dissolves,
and denaturalizes that baseline. From this vantage point—less a
 American Literary History 757

fact of the territorial map than a spur for redrawing that map—it
appears that the nation is only one determinant, one among oth-
ers. These others can sometimes bracket it and override it. The ad-

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jective American, because it recognizes only national causality,
cannot capture figures more complexly formed: figures such as
Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright. They
are ill served by a metonymic paradigm. Their writings take on
their full significance only when they are seen, not as part of a na-
tional whole, but as an index to what disputes that wholeness.
Gilroy thus highlights the following: Douglass and his relation to
Enlightenment rationality; Du Bois and his relation to German
idealism; Wright and his relation to French existentialism. These
transatlantic ties, requiring for their analysis something other than
a self-contained unit, make it clear that neither a single nation nor
a single race can yield an adequate frame for literary history. Both
the strict Americanist and the strict Africanist come up short.
The Black Atlantic can be seen, in this context, as part of a
broader effort to undo the legacies of essentialism and exception-
alism, built not only into the fabric of society but into the very
logic of academic specializations. Among historians, this has led
to the rejuvenation of a neglected field—comparative world his-
tory—once shrugged off as amateurish, now emerging as one of
the most interesting challenges to academic nationalism. A new
Journal of World History began publication in 1990.7 True to the
spirit of its early advocates—Louis Gottschalk and the UNESCO
History of Mankind, Leften Stavrianos and his work on an inter-
nationalist high school curriculum, William McNeill and his life-
long opposition to the parochialism of the American Historical
'Association—world history, in its current form, remains strongly
opposed to the Eurocentric mainstream.8 By extension, it is also
strongly opposed to the nation-centered paradigm of American
historiography. In the hands of practitioners such as Philip Curtin
and John Thorton, it has changed the very protocol of the field.
The archive for these historians spans more than one jurisdiction;
the baseline of analysis is the Atlantic rather than the US.9 This
sea change makes it impossible for slavery to be seen only as
American. It changes the meaning of slavery and America both.
Nor is this all. World history requires a broader expanse of
space; just as crucially, it requires a longer stretch of time. The
continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of auton-
omy to any spatial locale; it does not grant that privilege of au-
tonomy to any temporal segment. Periodization, in this sense, is
no more than a fiction: unavoidable to be sure, but also unavoid-
ably artificial, naturalized only at our own peril. Periodization
offers a linear chronology, segments of time neatly sliced, neatly
758 American Literature and World History

sequenced, neatly segregated, taken to be discretely analyzable.

Such segments can never fully taxonomize the world. Historical
processes are not all sliced in this way. They do not all march in a

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single file. They cannot all be boxed into fixed slots. The syn-
chronic planes that come with periodization are no more integral
and no more binding than the territorial borders that come with
nations.
Rather than carving up time intofixedperiods, world history
begins with the opposite: extended and nonstandardized dura-
tion. This is its starting point. What would happen if we were to
reckon time by something other than the routine, century-long
periods? What would the world look like if we were to use a dif-
ferent scale, a different temporal taxonomy, a different way of cut-
ting and slicing time? The recent works of Simon Schama—Land-
scape and Memory (1995) and A History of Britain: At the Edge of
the World, 3000 B.C.-A.D. 1603 (2000)—show just how interest-
ing such experiments can be. Longue durte can indeed be a mean-
ingful unit of time. It can be a scale of analysis unquestionably
daunting but also demonstrably useful. Based on the duration of
the human species rather than the duration of any nation, longue
duree suggests that different investigative contexts might need dif-
ferent time frames, with no single one serving as an all-purpose
metric. Some historical phenomena need large-scale analysis.
They need hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years to be
recognized as what they are: phenomena with an extended life,
longer than the life span of any biological individual and di-
achronically interesting for just that reason.10 A shorter time
frame would have cut them off in midstream, would have dimin-
ished their claim to significance.
Islam is one such phenomenon. Of hemispheric proportions,
extending at one time from Sumatra to Spain, from the Nile to the
Volga, this 1,400-year-old civilization can be adequately analyzed
only under the rubric of world history." McNeill and Marshall
Hodgson have indeed done so, putting Islam at the center of the
world map.12 This has a number of consequences.
First, in the course of its 1,400-year history, Islam has reached
every corner of the globe. Historically it spanned three continents:
it was an "Afro-Eurasian" civilization from the outset (Hodgson
97). As such, it "is neither Oriental nor Occidental, nor can be
given any other geographic or cultural specification" (Gabrieli 63).
In the universe of Islam, East and West are no more than taxo-
nomic abstractions, crude and unserviceable for the most part.
Secondly, against the sheer magnificence of Islam from the seventh
to the seventeenth century, Europe can only be called an intellec-
tual backwater for hundreds of years, its centrality on world stage
 American Literary History 759

a late development. The map that aligns the West with literate pro-
gress and the East with primitive despotism is a very recent map in-

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deed. It quickly becomes useless when we go back in time. World
history as the cumulative life of the species puts it out of commis-
sion. Historical depth, in this sense, is a crucial challenge to the
two-dimensional flatness of the territorial map, and to the essen-
tialism and exceptionalism that are its academic offspring.
Finally, and again from the outset, Islam was a multilingual
and multijurisdictional phenomenon, as various in its expressive
forms as in its expressing tongues. Spread through at least three
languages—Persian, Arabic, Turkish—it acquired the status of a
"civilization" primarily through the mixing of these tongues, and
through the mixing of the Islamic faith itself with a wealth of sec-
ular forms, from poetry and philosophy to law, architecture, the
visual arts, medicine, mathematics, and the natural sciences.13 Is-
lam came to much of the world translated and hybridized. The
Koran, inflected through Persian poetry, could hardly retain its
doctrinal purity. Defenders of the faith, for over a millennium,
had thus tried (and failed) to stamp out the unorthodox. Ibn
Rushd (1126-98) was a case in point. A leading Aristotelian and
a major influence on the Latin Middle Ages—known to the West
as Averroes—Ibn Rushd was a voice of rationalist Islam whose
books were banned and destroyed in a bonfire in 1197, a dramatic
occurrence, though hardly the first instance of book burning in Is-
lamic history.14 From the first, then, Islam was a hotbed of inter-
nal strife, fueled by periodic repression and stubborn dissent.
This, no less than its temporal and spatial scope, makes the his-
torical depth of Islam an important axis for world history.
In what follows, I invoke this historical depth to redraw the
map of American literature. To take this depth seriously is to chal-
lenge the short, sharp, executive thrust of dates: 1776, or 1620,
when the Mayflower arrived. Such dates (and the periodization
based upon them) assume that there can be a discrete, bounded
unit of time coinciding with a discrete, bounded unit of space: a
chronology coinciding with a territory. Such a coincidence is
surely a fiction. Rather than taking it for granted—rather than
taking our measure of time from the stipulated beginning of a ter-
ritorial entity—I propose a more extended duration for American [Deep time] produces a
literary studies, planetary in scope. I call this deep time. This pro- map that, thanks to its
duces a map that, thanks to its receding horizons, its backward ex- receding horizons, its
tension into far-flung temporal and spatial coordinates, must de- backward extension into
part significantly from a map predicated on the short life of the far-flung temporal and
spatial coordinates, must
US. For the force of historical depth is such as to suggest a world depart significantly from
that predates the adjective American. If we go far enough back in a map predicated on the
time, and it is not very far, there was no such thing as the US. This short life of the US.
760 American Literature and World History

nation was not yet on the map, but the world was already fully in
existence. The cumulative history of that existence, serving as a

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time frame both antecedent and ongoing, takes American litera-
ture easily outside the nation's borders. A diachronic axis has ge-
ographical consequences. Deep time is denationalized space.
What would American literature look like then? Can we
transpose some familiar figures onto this broadened and deep-
ened landscape? I would like to test that possibility. Using Islam
as the temporal and spatial coordinates, nonbinding but also non-
trivial, I trace a thread of continuity spun out of its migration, dis-
semination, and hybridization. Running through the terrain usu-
ally called American, this thread will knot together kinships no
doubt surprising to many. Such kinships would not have been rec-
ognized in a nation-centered paradigm. They owe their legibility
to the deep field of a large-scale phenomenon: its scope, its
tangled antecedents, its translations and permutations. World his-
tory, as instanced by this unusually extended, durable, and con-
tested phenomenon, yields both the evidential domain and the an-
alytic method, both the time frame and the spatial latitude to
render salient a set of relationships, not strictly American because
not strictly national. Scale enlargement, I argue, enlarges our
sense of complex kinship.
My paradigm, in this sense, is the obverse of Edward Said's
in Orientalism (1979), his account of images of the East (primarily
Islam) in post-Enlightenment Europe (3). "Taking the late
eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point," Said
argues, "Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corpo-
rate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by
making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it,
by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it" (3). This corporate insti-
tution was clearly of European vintage: "To speak of Orientalism
therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British
and French cultural enterprise" (4). Started in England and
France, and never leaving these nations far behind, Orientalism
was less an homage to an alien world than a symptom of Western
domination. As a regime of expert knowledge, it helped forge "the
idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all
the non-European peoples and cultures" (7). For Said, Oriental-
ism is ideological through and through, and Eurocentric through
and through. This is what he unmasks. And yet, in scaling the
problem as he does—scaling it to put Eurocentrism at its front
and center—he ends up reproducing the very map he sets out to
critique. On this map, the West is once again the principal actor,
the seat of agency. The Orient is no more than afigmentof its ide-
ological projection, brought "home" to serve the needs of impe-
 American Literary History 761

rial rule. As Said himself says, his study is "based more or less ex-
clusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose

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unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged" (8). His ana-
lytic domain is strictly "within the umbrella of Western hegemony
over the Orient" (7).
That umbrella gives rise to an odd paradigm, oddly hierar-
chical and segregated: West versus East, the dominating versus
the dominated. The latter exists only as clay molded by Western
hands. The Orient is a fabrication, an artifact. As such, it has no
agency of its own, no life apart from the ideological constructions
foisted upon it, no ability to put its stamp at the head of any sig-
nificant or durable genealogy. The historical sequence that Said
narrates is a sequence that begins in the West and sticks always to
that genetic locale. This is not so much a history of the world as a
history of a gigantic ideological factory, a Western factory. Not
surprisingly, Islam can show up here only as a product, not the
maker but the made. To put agency and causality all on one side,
as Said does, is to reaffirm an all-too-familiar map, a map scaled
to fit the outlines of Western nations, scaled to highlight their in-
put as dominant.
Can we draw a different input map of the world? A sequence
that begins at an earlier point in history, that goes back to other
parts of the globe? The concept of deep time is especially helpful
here. Extending much further back than the late eighteenth cen-
tury that is Said's starting point, deep time also predates the "um-
brella of Western hegemony" materializing during that period.
What this longue durie allows us to see is an Afro-Eurasian civi-
lization, an Afro-Eurasian hybrid, much more interesting and con-
sequential than it would appear when the taxonomic period is no
more than a couple of hundred years. This hybrid is not fully de-
scribable under the stamp, the scope, and the chronology of Euro-
pean nations. Its long life demands a different time frame. Given
that, it will in turn yield a genealogy more surprising and certainly
more militant: one that challenges the jurisdiction of nations, of
periods, and of taxonomic categories such as East and West.
For one thing, that genealogy goes beyond Europe, to a part
of the globe Said mentions only briefly: the US.15 Black Muslims
in America are not usually called "Orientalists." But that is what
they are: a new twist on that word, the latest and most controver-
sial variant. The Nation of Islam literally orients itself toward the
East. It refuses the adjective American, claiming descent instead
from a lineage more ancient and more honorable. The temporal
horizon of the Nation of Islam goes back 1,400 years. Its input
map has at its center an Afro-Eurasian civilization. Far from be-
ing subjugated, skulking on the margins of the planet, Islam—as
762 American Literature and World History

Muslims both black and nonblack insist—is actually expanding,

becoming more global each day, bringing the North American

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continent into the fold. And the demographics support their
claim. According to a Reuters report on 26 April 2001, Muslims
are now the fastest growing group in the US, their population es-
timated to be between 6 and 7 million, mosque attendance having
registered a 94% jump over the past six years.16
Such translations are hardly without conflict. If the legacy of
Islam is a divided spectrum—a passionate religiosity pitted
against an agnosticism no less passionate—black Muslims would
seem to rehearse that spectrum to the full. At the two poles stand
Malcolm X and James Baldwin. What these two eloquent—and
antithetical—voices represent is nothing less than the antithetical
scope claimable by Islam: how capacious it is, how encompassing.
For Malcolm X, Islam is very capacious indeed; it is a world phe-
nomenon; nothing is broader, nothing falls outside its rubric. That
rubric can accommodate every branch of the human species, as
the American nation never can:

I only knew what I had left in America, and how it contrasted

with what I had found in the Muslim world. . . . Never have
I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming
spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all col-
ors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of
Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the
Holy Scriptures.... I have been blessed to visit the Holy
City of Mecca. I have made my seven circuits around the
Ka'ba, led by a young Mutawafnamed Muhammad. I drank
water from the well of Zem Zem. I ran seven times back and
forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al-Marwah. I
have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on
Mt. Arafat.
There were tens and thousands of pilgrims, from all
over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed
blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all partici-
pating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and
brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to
believe never could exist between the white and the non-
white. (338-40)

For Malcolm X, the dignity of Islam comes from the fact that it is
not just a contemporary phenomenon. Here is a religion that goes
back to Abraham and Muhammad; its scriptures and rituals are
ancient; it is almost as old as the primordial landscape of Al-Safa,
Al-Marwah, and Mt. Arafat. This tongue duree is not just a mat-
 American Literary History 763

ter of time past, it is also a matter of time present. The historical

depth of Islam gives it an expressive width. It is mappable onto the

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entire species, not exclusive to a single race. That is why it can take
in the blue-eyed and the black-skinned and have room to spare. To
become a Muslim is to undergo a scale enlargement in every sense.
This is, of course, the very opposite of what strikes Baldwin.
The Fire Next Time (1962) is a passionate dissent from the Nation
of Islam precisely because of the scale reduction Baldwin experi-
ences in its midst. Where Malcolm X sees an expanse of time go-
ing back to the seventh-century prophet Muhammad, Baldwin
feels suffocated by a small and contracting circle gathered around
Elijah Muhammad, the current prophet, a noose very much in the
present: "I had the stifling feeling that they knew I belonged to
them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unready,
and that they were simply waiting, patiently, and with assurance,
for me to discover the truth for myself. For where else, after all,
could I go? I was black, and therefore a part of Islam, and would
be saved from the holocaust awaiting the white world whether I
would or no. My weak, deluded scruples could avail nothing
against the iron word of the prophet" (97-98). Is Islam capacious
or is it stifling? Is its radius coextensive with the species, or is it
locked into one particular race, its membership automatically de-
cided by identity politics? Can it encompass the life of someone
who sees himself primarily as a writer? These antithetical ques-
tions, put forward by Malcolm X and Baldwin, yield some of the
terms on which American literature bursts out of the confines of
that adjective, merging with the continuum of world history.
It would be a mistake, however, to see this as a strictly twen-
tieth-century phenomenon, affecting only African-American au-
thors. Indeed, the importance of Islamic deep time lies precisely in
its ability to break down some of the standard dividing lines, turn-
ing them into unexpected lines of kinship. For the longevity of this
world religion weaves it not only into black history but also into
the history of a very different segment of the American popula-
tion. Baldwin and Malcolm X have company. They are the un-
likely extensions, unlikely heirs, to a group of people rarely men-
tioned in the same breath: the Transcendentalists.
The Transcendentalists were avid readers. Comparative
philology and comparative religion—two newly minted disci-
plines of the nineteenth century—were high on their reading lists.
The relative claims of various civilizations were hot topics for
them. Henry David Thoreau, immersing himself in a translation
of Manu's Sanskrit text, the Institutes of Hindu Law (1825), was as
elated as Malcolm X would be by ancient Islam: "I cannot read a
sentence in the book of the Hindoos without being elevated as
764 American Literature and World History

upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the

winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and seems as supe-

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rior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mounts. Even at this late hour,
unworn by time, with a native and inherent dignity it wears the
English dress as indifferently as the Sanscrit" (266-67). The
Ganges and the Himalayas easily dwarf the landscape around
Concord; they put America in perspective. Mindful of that,
Thoreau's friend, Bronson Alcott, tried to borrow these books
from the Boston Athenaeum on 24 March 1849: "Collier's Four
Books of Confucius, History of China (by the Jesuit), The Kings of
Confucius, The Vedas, The Saama Vedas, Vishnu Parana, Saadi,
Firdusi, The Zendavesta, The Koran" (qtd. in Christy 243).17
Nor was this only a masculine pursuit. Margaret Fuller was
an early and enthusiastic reader of Persian poetry, and was rueful
about her lack of competence in the Asian languages: "Gentle
Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not"
(122).18 Meanwhile, linguistic competence or not, Lydia Maria
Child was able to write a three-volume treatise called The Progress
of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (1855), beginning with
"Hindostan," followed by "Egypt," "China," "Thibet and Tartary,"
"Chaldea," and "Persia," and ending with a 68-page chapter on
"Mohammedanism." The Transcendentalists were international-
ists to a fault. And none more so than Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson's introduction to Islam probably began as early as
1822, when he was 19 and reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (1788) {Journals 1:131)." Chapters 50 to 52 of that
book are devoted to Arabic culture, with high praise for its lan-
guage and poetry.20 Emerson's subsequent readings included Ori-
ental Geography (1800) by Ibn Haukal, the Annales Muslemici
Arabice et Latine (1837) by Abulfeda, Simon Ockley's Conquest of
Syria, Persia, and Egypt by the Saracens (1708-18) (Carpenter
198), not to mention Carlyle's chapter on Mahomet in On Heroes,
Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).21 What impressed
him about Islam (and world religions in general) was what would
later impress Malcolm X: the scope, the long duration, the ability
to bind people across space and time, a point he made as early as
1822, in one of hisfirstjournal entries:

The History of Religion involves circumstances of remark-

able interest and it is almost all that we are able to trace in the
passage of the remote ages of the world. . . . Indeed the only
record by which the early ages of any nation are remembered
is their religion. We know nothing of the first empires which
grasped the sceptre of the earth in Egypt, Assyria, or Persia,
but their modes of worship. And this fact forcibly suggests
 American Literary History 765

the idea that the only true and legitimate vehicle of immor-
tality, the only bond of connection which can traverse the

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long duration which separates the ends of the world and
unite the first people to the knowledge and sympathy of the
last people, is religion. (Gilman et al. 1: 62)

World religions are probably the most durable diachronic axes

known to the human species. This is their strength. But this di-
achronicity suggests something else as well. Phenomena that last
a long time are likely to change, to disperse, to become mongre-
iized by many new contacts. A book that exemplified all of these
was the Akhlak-I-Jalaly, translated from the Persian by W. F.
Thompson as The Practical Philosophy of the Muhammedan
People (1839). This came into Emerson's hands in 1845, giving him
some 50 quotations for his journals.22 Thompson was quite clear
why he was moved to become a translator. His goal, announced in
the preface, was that the "depreciation of the Muhammedan sys-
tem should now be at an end" (qtd. in Richardson 406). For that
purpose he picked the Akhlak-I-Jalaly—a text showing Islam at
its most compelling, though hardly its purest. Cobbled together in
the fifteenth century by a worldly philosopher, Molla Jaladeddin
Davani (1410-88), the Akhlak was anything but Islamic dogma.
Mixing the Koran with Sufi mysticism as well as the ethics and
politics of Plato and Aristotle, it was a mutt, a linguistic and philo-
sophical hybrid, with Arabic, Persian, Greek, and now English in
its veins (Ekhtiar 22).
Hybridity, indeed, was the condition not only of the texts
that came to Emerson but of his own making as a reader.23 Mono-
lingualism was alien to him; he was the offspring offiveor six lan-
guages. Emerson learned the classical languages as part of his
nineteenth-century education, and seemed to read Latin with
ease.24 His borrowed books from the Boston Athenaeum and the
Harvard College Library included many texts in French.25 On his
own, Emerson also taught himself two other languages: German
and Italian.26 The former was urged upon him by his brother.
William Emerson was in Gottingen during 1824-25, attending the
lectures of Jacob Eichhorn, full of the Higher Criticism, and writ-
ing home effusive in his praise of the German language. Emerson
wrote back on 20 November 1824: "If you think it every way ad-
visable, indisputably, absolutely important that I shd do as you
have done and go to G—& you can easily decide—why say it dis-
tinctly & I will make the sacrifice of time & take the risk of ex-
pense, immediately. So of studying German" (1: 154). By 1828 he
apparently knew enough of the language to check out from the
Harvard College Library volume 3 of Goethe's Werke (1828-33),
766 American Literature and World History

the beginning of a lifelong attachment to that author, carried on,

from the very first, partly in German (Cameron 47). Emerson

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clearly became fluent in the next few years. In 1834, he borrowed
Wieland's Sammtliche Werke (1824-26) from the Boston Athe-
naeum; in 1835, Schlegel's Sammtliche Werke (1822); in 1836,
Grimm's Kinder- und Haus-Mdrchen (1819-22), Musaeus's Volks-
mdrchen der Deutschen (1826), and Hardenberg's Novalis Schriften
(1826) (Cameron 21-23). These readings would continue for the
rest of his life.
The German authors were read for their own sake, but
knowing the language also opened up to Emerson a world of
translations in German, quite different from the translations
available to an English-speaking world. And translations had al-
ways been important to him, though weirdly and triangularly so.
He had been in the habit of reading his way to one foreign lan-
guage, in which he had no competence, through the vehicle of an-
other foreign language, in which he was somewhat more at home.
He had read Aristophanes in Latin and Plutarch in French.27 Now
the newly acquired German would, once again, do the work of tri-
angulation. It would take Emerson even farther afield, give him
access to a language he would probably never be able to learn.
German, indeed, had already affected Emerson as no other
foreign language had. It was "indisputably, absolutely important"
in his vocational crisis of the 1830s. Taking William's advice and
reading Eichhorn's Higher Criticism—and swayed by its herme-
neutic skepticism toward the Bible—Emerson had found it im-
possible to accept Christianity as absolute, as a collection of words
literally rather than figuratively true.28 He resigned as the pastor of
the Second Church of Boston in 1832. Such was the input from a
non-English-speaking world. Now, in a less drastic fashion, Ger-
man would leave its mark on Emerson once again, bringing a
body of material close to the heart of a lapsed minister. Islamic
poetry—the bulk of it written in Persian, written centuries after
Muhammad, and burdened by no undue piety toward the Ko-
ran—would speak to Emerson as a poetry uniquely vital: vital as
an expressive form living both within and beyond its scriptures.
This vital poetry spoke to Emerson primarily in German.
Persian poetry, especially the work of the fourteenth-century
poet Hafiz (1320-90), became widely known in the German-
speaking world with two translations by the Austrian scholar
Joseph von Hammer: Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din
Hafis (1812-13), and Geschichte der schonen redekunste Persiens
(1818).29 Workmanlike rather than elegant, these translations
managed nonetheless to give some sense of what the Persian must
have been. Goethe was one of the readers. Bowled over, he in turn
 American Literary History 767

paid his homage to the Persian poets in the form of a cycle of po-
ems, the West-ostlicher Divan (1828), followed by a series of ex-
planatory essays, the Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Ver-

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stdndnis des West-ostlichen Divans (1828-33). This lyrical and
highly erotic outburst was quite a surprise. Goethe was then in his
sixties; his return to the lyric form was sparked, it would seem, by
his encounter with the Persian lyric, the ghazal, unlike anything he
had seen before (Schimmel 3-9).30 Hafiz, master of the ghazal, was
thus the central presence for Goethe, not only in book two, "Buch
Hafis," but throughout the entire poem cycle, directly named in no
fewer than 19 poems.31 Goethe saw the Persian poet as his twin:
"Lust und Pein / Sei uns den Zwillingen gemein!" (West-ostlicher
62-63) ("Let joy and pain / Be ours in common as twins are one!").
This "twin" lived a long time ago, it is true, but that temporal dis-
tance poses no problem, for a few hundred years mean nothing to
Hafiz. The duration activated by this poet is of a different order of
magnitude from the length of the human life span:

DaB du nicht enden kannst, das macht dich groB,

Und daB du nie beginnst, das ist dein Los.
Dein Lied ist drehend wie das Sterngewolbe,
Anfang und ende immerfort dasselbe,
Und was die Mitte bringt, ist offenbar
Das, was zu Ende bleibt und Anfangs war.

That you cannot end, that makes you great,

And that you never begin, that is your fate.
Your song revolves as does the starry dome,
Beginning and ending for evermore the same,
And what the middle brings is the open truth
that what stays in the end is what was in the beginning.
( West-ostlicher 62-63).

Hafiz, as the title of the poem makes clear, is "unbegrenzt," un-

bounded. He stands as empirical proof of the duration achievable
by human beings: a kind of eternity without theology. Poetry then,
rather than religion, is the true measure of time—a true measure in
the sense of humanizing infinitude, giving us a time scale that both
is and is not ourselves, a time scale based on the cumulative life of
the species rather than the atomic life of a single individual.
Emerson had in his library all four German books: the two
anthologies by von Hammer, and both Goethe texts.32 It was these
German works that he owned and read, rather than Sir William
Jones's Latin translation.33 He quoted them for the rest of his life.
The West-ostlicher Divan first appeared in his journals in 1834; it
768 American Literature and World History

made its last appearance in 1872.34 Likewise, he went back to the

Noten und Abhandlungen again and again, reading them some-
times on odd occasions, as suggested by this journal entry from

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1851: "Goethe's 'Notes to W. O. Divan,' —I read them in bed for
I was very ill today. I can always understand anything better when
I am ill" (Gilman et al. 11:485).
And Emerson was not just a reader. He also translated. He
had always been in the habit of rendering for himself bits and
pieces of foreign texts and including them in his journals. A trans-
lation of a couplet from the West-ostlicher Divan now appeared on
29 March 1834: "My Heritage how (far) long & wide / Time is my
heritage my field is Time."35 For Emerson as for Goethe, time is
the one dimension of experience that defines the human species,
that sets us apart from other animal species. This is his heritage,
his field. Since this is the case, it is not surprising that the Persian
poets—the fourteenth-century Hafiz and the thirteenth-century
Saadi (1213-92), both from the city of Shiraz, now in Iran—
should resonate for him as they did for Goethe: as exemplary du-
rations. These poets made their way into his journals in 1841,36 In
1842 Emerson published his poem "Saadi" in the Dial. And, just
as he had been translating Goethe for himself, he now did the
same for Hafiz. Working from von Hammer's German texts, he in-
cluded his first translation as a journal entry in 1846, and kept up
the practice for the rest of his life. Over the course of the next 30
years, Emerson produced at least 64 translations, a total of 700
lines of Persian poetry.37 Some of these were included in his long
essay "Persian Poetry," first published in the Atlantic in 1858, later
collected in his Letters and Social Aims (1875).38 When Ticknor
and Fields brought out the first American edition of Saadi's Gulis-
tan in 1865, it was Emerson who was called on to write the pref-
ace. And finally, toward the end of his life, he paid yet another trib-
ute to these beloved poets in a long poem of his own, entitled
"Fragments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift."39 Hafiz was one of
the last names to appear in Emerson's pocket diary. From 1841 to
1879 he was never absent from Emerson's journals. 40
Emerson was struck by the name Hafiz. The Persian word,
he noted, "signifies one gifted with so good a memory that he
knows the whole Koran by heart" (Gilman et al. 10:17). Knowing
the Koran by heart, however, does not make one its slave. Quite
the contrary. For Hafiz, an intimate knowledge of the Koran was
also the beginning of a contrapuntal poetics: revealed religion
turned into human speech, a heaven-bent teleology turned into
the cumulative time of a long-lived species. Poetry, as exemplified
by Hafiz, is a kind of negative extension of the Koran: a heresy
 American Literary History 769

sometimes reckless and flaunting, sometimes not, but always giv-

ing him a path oblique to, tangential to, and thus not containable
by Islam. This heresy has now been passed on to Emerson. He rev-

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els in it in one of his drafted translations:

The very wind pipes rowdy songs,

[Drives sober people mad][Makes saints and patriarchs
bad]
[Should] [Shall] we [suffer] [tolerate] such wrongs
And not [give the alarm] [cry out like mad]
Makes saints perverse [&] [makes] angels bad (Smith et al.
2:46)

Badness is what makes Hafiz an Islamic poet, a poet energized by

his contrapuntal relation to his faith. And badness is what trans-
ports him, takes him all the way to America, as Emerson puts it
more soberly in "Persian Poetry":

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to

the reader. . . . He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love
is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet,
in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cupbearer. This
boundless charter is the right of genius.
We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try
to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much
less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz
himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpre-
tation. {Complete 8: 248)

Hafiz's poetry is earth-bound, precisely because he knows the Ko-

ran so well, because he knows it by heart. His poetry swarms with
bottled spiders, and these are quite content in their spidery lives.
They do not bow their heads before the Koran, or, for that matter,
before a "God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one
holds a spider" (Edwards 164). The infinitude promised by reli-
gion has already been realized on earth: the work of human
hands, the work of writers, readers, translators. Doing that work,
and making workers of others, "Hafiz's poetry is [in the] habit of
playing with all magnitudes, mocking at them. What is the moon
or the sun's course or heaven, & the angels, to his darling's mole or
eyebrow?" (Gilman et al. 16: 40). Poetry is scale enlargement that
makes theology small. What is at stake here is not the salvation of
a single individual, but the hybridized, mongrelized duration of
the entire species. And no one is more of a hybrid, more of a mon-
770 American Literature and World History

grel, than Emerson, as in this translation of Haflz, worked over

many times, existing in at least three other drafts, and turned back
into a tribute to the Persian poet:41

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O Haflz, give me thought,
Infieryfigurescast,
For all beside is naught,
All else is din & blast. (Gilman et al. 14: 120)

Going back hundreds of years, triangulating at every step, reading

the Koran by way of German, and looking forward to Malcolm X
and James Baldwin by way of Goethe and Hafiz, Emerson is
American only in caricature.

Notes
1. A shorter version of this essay was presented at an ML A 2000 panel: "Repo-
sitioning the American Nineteenth Century: Twenty-First Century Directions."

2. For a critique of the constitution of the discipline on territorial grounds, see

Peter Carafiol, The American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly A ctivity (1991),
esp. 4-5.

3. See Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Indi-
vidualism (1989); Lauren Berlant, "Poor Eliza" (1998); and Michaels.

4. Melville bought the seven-volume Hilliard and Gray edition of Shakespeare

(1837) in early 1849 and, as evidenced by his letters and marginalia, read them
with great concentration. The Houghton Library, Harvard University, has these
volumes. Ironically, earlier scholars were much less nationalistic in constructing
the temporal and spatial coordinates of Melville's world. See, e.g., Charles Ol-
son's foregrounding of Shakespeare in Call Me Ishmael (1947). Matthiessen (for
all his talk of an American renaissance) likewise went beyond the confines of the
nation in constructing Melville's literary genealogy. See his discussion of Melville
and Shakespeare (412-17,423-31,438-78).

5. For Faulkner's extensive interviews in Japan, see Lion in the Garden: Inter-
views with Faulkner, 1926-1962 (1968); see esp. 84-198.

6. In this sense, it is especially useful to see the "Black Atlantic" world as a chal-
lenge to the nationalist paradigm put forward by Benedict Anderson in Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).

7. See Journal of World History (1990). An earlier Journal of World History

was published by UNESCO as the Cahiers d'histoire mondiale (July 1953-April
1972); this became Cultures in 1972.

8. For the work of Gottschalk, Stavrianos, and McNeill, see Gilbert Allardyce,
"Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World
History Course" (1990).
 American Literary History 771

9. See Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in
Atlantic History (1990) and John Thorton, Africa and Africans in the Formation
of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992). Both are published in the Cambridge

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"Studies in Comparative World History" series.

10. For an interesting discussion of different time frames required by world his-
tory, including a time frame of 15 billion years, see David Christian, "The Case
for'Big History'" (1991).

11. For Islam in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia, see Francesco Gabrieli, "Islam
in the Mediterranean World"; loan M. Lewis, "Africa South of the Sahara";
C. E. Bosworth, "Central Asia"; Aziz Ahmad, "India"; and C. A. O. Van
Nieuwenhuijze, "Indonesia," in The Legacy of Islam (1974).

12. See William McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Commu-
nity (1963), as well as Marshall G. S. Hodgson's "The Role of Islam in World His-
tory," "Cultural Patterning in Islamdom and the Occident," and "Modernity and
the Islamic Heritage," all in his Rethinking World History (1993).

13. Algebra (an Arabic word), geometry, optics, and medicine all flourished un-
der Islam. See Martin Plessner's "The Natural Sciences and Medicine" and Juan
Vernet's "Mathematics, Astronomy, Optics," both in Legacy of Islam.

14. Al-Ghazali's Rebirth of the Sciences of Religion (Ihya' 'ulum al-Din) had been
burned earlier. See Roger Arnaldez, Averroes: A Rationalist in Islam (2000), esp.
6. For the lack of influence of Ibn Rushd in the Islamic world, see Majid Fakhry,
A History of Islamic Philosophy (1970), esp. 302-25, Dominique Urvoy, Ibn
Rushd (Averroes) (1991). It should be pointed out that Islam was historically
much more tolerant than Christianity. Ibn Rushd was neither tortured nor killed,
only banished.

15. Said begins with this disclaimer: "Americans will not feel quite the same
about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very dif-
ferently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the
French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese,
Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orien-
talism" (1).

16. Quite aside from this population exploration, Islam in America is also
marked by its ethnic diversity: 33% of mosque goers are of South Asian origin;
30% are black Americans; 25% are Arabs; the rest from other groups.

17. The list was given to AJcott by James Freeman Clarke, who would himself
go on to write Ten Great Religions: Essays in Comparative Theology (1971). See
Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (1932), esp. 243.

18. Fuller had just read Firdusi's Shah Nameh, translated by James Atkinson
(1832), and was writing to Emerson about it.

19. Emerson mentioned Gibbon in his journals in 1822 (Gilman et al.l: 131).

20. In chapter 50, Gibbon writes: "In Arabia as well as in Greece, the perfection
of language outstripped the refinement of manners; and her speech could diver-
772 American Literature and World History

sify the fourscore names of honey, the two hundred of a serpent, the five hundred
of a lion, the thousand of a sword, at a time when this copious dictionary was en-
trusted to the memory of an illiterate people. . . . Thirty days were employed in

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the exchange, not only of corn and wine, but of eloquence and poetry" (346—47).

21. Carlyle said: "Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a schem-
ing Imposter, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and
fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one" (qtd. in Goldberg et al. 38).

22. For Emerson's quotations from the Akhlak-I-Jalaly, see Gilman et al., 9:200,
263,278, 284-88, 291, and 385-86.

23. Reading as a genetic condition for hybridity is not unique to America. For
a discussion of this as a world phenomenon, see my "Literature for the Planet"
(2001).

24. Among the earliest books borrowed from the Boston Athenaeum was a
Latin copy of Aristophanes's Comoediae See Cameron 17. It is a sign of Emer-
son's competence in that language that he should read a translation of Aris-
tophanes in Latin rather than English.

25. On 17 Feb. 1825, Emerson checked out from the Harvard College Library
Fenelon's Oeuvres and Leibnitz's Essais de Theodicee. On 2 Nov. 1826, he
checked out vol. 15 of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch and renewed the
book on 16 Nov.—a good sign of his facility in French. See Cameron 45—46.

26. By 11 July 1843, Emerson seemed to be competent in Italian, as evidenced

by this letter to Margaret Fuller: "Geo Bancroft gave me Dante's Vita Nuova, &
recalling what you said, that I could not have read it, I have turned it all into En-
glish" (Letters 3: 182-84).

27. Aristophanes, Comoediae; Plutarch, Oeuvres. See notes 24 and 25 above.

28. This would, of course, be developed in his famously controversial point in

the "Divinity School Address" (1838).

29. Joseph von Hammer would later become Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall
(1774—1856). Since his name appeared as von Hammer in the editions owned by
Emerson, I refer to him simply as that.

30. The intensity of the outburst was also due in part to Goethe's newfound
love, Marianne von Willemer. See John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (1998),
esp. 111-15.

31. Goethe named Hafiz so frequently partly in deference to the convention of

the ghazal, which requires Hafiz to include his own name in each poem.

32. The two von Hammer anthologies owned by Emerson are at the Houghton
Library. Goethe's Werke (1828-33) and SSmmtliche Werke (1840) are both listed
by Walter Harding in Emerson's Library (1967) (118). In 1862 Emerson also
checked out Hafiz's Eine Sammlung persischer Gedichte (1856) from the Boston
Athenaeum. See Cameron 34.
 American Literary History 773

33. See Sir William Jones, Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex (1774).
Cameron did not list this as a book owned by Emerson.

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34. See Gilman et al. 4: 271 and 16: 276.

35. This is a translation of "Mein Erbteil wie herrlich, weit und breit! / die Zeit ist
mein Besitz, mein Acker ist die Zeit!" Whaley's translation: "Inheritance splen-
did, here and now! / For time is my estate, and time my field to plough" (206-07).

36. See Gilman et al. 8: 67: "And so there are fountains all around Milton or
Saadi or Menu from which they draw." Carpenter also cites a reference to Hafiz
in 1841 that I have been unable to locate: "Hafiz defies you to show him or put
him in a condition inopportune and ignoble" (93).

37. Thefirsttranslation I am able to find is in his 1846 journals, a translation of

Hafiz's poem, "Come let us strew roses" (Gilman et al. 9: 398). For a checklist of
Emerson's translations, see J .D. Yohannan, "Emerson's Translations of Persian
Poetry from German Sources" (1943). See also The Topical Notebooks of Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1990-94), edited by Susan Sutton Smith et al.

38. See Albert J. von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (1994), esp. 331 and 505-06.

39. See Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson 9: 320-34.

40. The last entry was in 1879 (Gilman et al. 16: 527).

41. The three other drafts are in Gilman et al. 14: 139-40:

O Hafiz, give me thoughts,

(If thoughts) For (&) pearls of thought thou hast;
All (else is) beside is n(o)aught
(Empty chatter & [noise] blast)
All (else) is din & blast

O Hafiz, give me thought

(Thought) In / golden image / fiery fancy / cast;
For all beside is n(o)aught
All else is din & blast.

O Hafiz, give me thought(s)

In fiery (fancies) figures cast;
For all beside is naught,—
For all beside is naught,—

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