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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The City of Words

A world without frontiers

William Skidelsky on Alberto Manguel's new book

But it is not just on account of their ability to console us that stories are important. They have more positive benefits too. Stories, Manguel suggests, take us out of our narrow daily existences and connect us to something larger — above all, to our common humanity. It is this boundary- dissolving power, this ability to help us transcend ourselves, that makes literature truly valuable in Manguel’s eyes. ‘The language of poetry and stories,’ he writes, ‘groups us under a common and fluid humanity … [where] there are no borders, no labels, no finitudes.’

At this point, it becomes clear that Manguel’s defence of storytelling is also an attack on politics — at least politics as traditionally conceived. Where literature enlarges, politics makes smaller, since it has always been mainly about subdividing humanity into groups and establishing fixed identities. Whatever the unit of subdivision — the city, the nation-state, the continent — Manguel dislikes the way that political discourse narrows humanity’s scope, and suggests that ‘we’ are different from ‘them’. Temperamentally, he is a universalist — and, by creed, a multiculturalist. The unstated, though obvious, thesis at the heart of The City of Words is that literature itself, by encouraging us to question the familiar and look beyond ourselves, is a natural ally of multiculturalism, which likewise insists that all barriers are artificial and can be overcome.

But recruiting literature to the cause of multiculturalism in this way is a crazy strategy. Literature may indeed, as Manguel says, help us to grasp the limits of political dogma; but surely multiculturalism, with its vocabulary of ‘togetherness’ and ‘inclusion’ is as much a dogma as any other creed. In what sense, then, is it literature’s ally? The absurdity of the proposition becomes apparent when Manguel treats us to a detailed reading of Gilgamesh, which emerges from his account as a sort of prototypical multicultural text (later, Don Quixote receives the same treatment). He then launches an attack on Gordon Brown’s ‘exclusionary’ policy of Britishness, the implication being that if Brown had spent his time reading the Mesopotamian epic rather than all those drab enlightenment tracts, he would welcome the Muslims into the fold just as King Gilgamesh does the monster Enkidu. At this point I’m afraid I rather lost patience with Manguel’s thoughts not only on multiculturalism, but on literature as well. Sometimes, stories really are just stories.

William Skidelsky is Deputy Editor of Prospect.

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