Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

William A. Johnsen

Literary Study, Tolerance, and the Clash of Civilisations

Email - Profile - Subtheme # 6

ABSTRACT

In Identity and Violence (2006) Amartya Sen’s has recent dismissed Samuel Huntington’s idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ as hopelessly compromised by categorisation. 

In fact Huntington has been a favorite target since Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993). I will quickly summarise Huntington’s presentation of his thesis (which anticipates most of the subsequent criticisms) as well as review many of the alternatives (Said, Sen, Appiah and a few others) to suggest that neither Huntington nor his critics has a sufficiently developed or global theory of human behavior to comprehend violent conflict anywhere or everywhere, especially in comparison with the mimetic model.

Girard has drawn profitably from literature. I hope to do the same for the conference theme of tolerance. Seamus Heaney suggests himself here because he found his own way into translating Beowulf by recognising in the AS verb tholian a word still used by his own linguistic community to indicate necessary suffering and bearing up to it. Tholian is etymologically related to tolerate and it will lead me to a discussion of Heaney’s marvellous poem on tolerance “Weighing In”. 

Ireland is a great subject for any discussion of the clash of civilisations to test itself on. At the moment, the text of the poem and an Italian translation is available at http://www.vicoacitillo.it/transat/5.htm
The poem beautifully represents the great burden of mutual tolerance as a temporary and precarious holding place between cultures not in perfect accord.

For an alternative I will turn to the moment in globalisation after World War Two as seen by Erich Auerbach, the great comparatist. In “Philologie und Weltliteratur” Auerbach warns that the old ideas of Weltliteratur are useless now. [By Weltliteratur Auerbach means a mastery of the European languages and their antecedents which prepares the student to make a synthesis of and mutual enrichment (wechselseitige Befruchtung) of interpenetrating Western cultures]. Auerbach sees that if present globalising developments continue, languages and cultures will be absorbed into a few dominant ones. Yet Auerbach still plots out a career for a scholar no longer able to master all the relevant languages and literatures who must choose an Ansatzpunkt to create in a
different time something more than the clash of civilisations, to find perhaps even the possibility of fruitful intercourse among cultures. 

Where might such an Ansatzpunkt be found? I will offer the potential (and thwarted) fruitful intercourse of cultures as presented in Achebe’s first novel Things Fall Apart, published a few years after Auerbach’s
article.