World Literature, 1600

Abraham Ortelius, world map c. 1600

The Flow of Silver

Fifteenth-century Europe was desperately short of cash. The luxury trade had siphoned bullion out of Europe to the east in exchange for silk and spices. In the wake of the Black Death, mining slowed or ceased. For over a century, in the period known today as The Great Bullion Famine, growing European markets were continually hamstrung by a shortage of precious metals.

Then, with the conquest of the Americas, everything changed. Work began on the famous Potosí mine in modern-day Bolivia in 1547. By 1550, massive quantities of New World silver were beginning to circulate in Europe. For the next hundred and fifty years, two thirds of the world’s silver came from the mines of South America. The problem of cash wasn’t exactly solved: in England, market growth typically outpaced the availability of bullion and coin until the creation of the banknote at the end of the seventeenth century.¹ But the flood of silver entering Europe acted as a vital lubricant in an increasingly market-oriented society, allowing the wheels of commerce to turn at ever accelerating speeds.

Commerce, by the end of the sixteenth century, included literature. The silver pennies that paid for broadside ballads and admission to the theaters were minted from ore mined in Mexico or, closer to home, Silesia. Money, in the form of gold and silver, gave a powerful impetus to the creation of the mass, commercial culture arising with print and the public theaters in this period. Today, when we debate the merits of a “sociological” approach to literature on Substack,² we’re discussing how best to understand, and how best to resist, the fateful entanglement of aesthetic value with commercial success that began in the sixteenth century.

So far, so well known. But there’s a crucial caveat. Only a fraction of the New World silver that swept through Europe remained there. In Spain, precious metals lined the coffers of a few generations of grandees before leaving the country, and the continent, for good. In general, they went east. As in the late medieval period, in the Renaissance, vast quantities of bullion made their way to China along luxury trade routes. In fact, thanks to recent isotope testing, we now know that most of the riches extracted from the mines of Peru, including the contents of Potosí, never touched Europe at all: they were taken directly to China via Pacific trade routes. In other words, the impact of New World silver isn’t just a European story. In fact, it’s not even primarily a European story: it’s a global one. And that holds not only for economic, but also for literary history.

That’s the thesis of a book I’ve been reading, Ning Ma’s excellent The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (Oxford, 2016). It’s a study of four major novels from China, Spain, Japan, and England: The Plum in the Golden Vase, Don Quixote, Memoirs of an Amorous Man, and Robinson Crusoe. Each of these novels is generally taken to mark the beginning of a new literary tradition oriented toward the precise, detailed, material description of the lives of ordinary people—that is, literary realism and the rise of the novel. Each marks an aesthetic as well as ethical break with an older courtly or heroic tradition. And, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe, each dramatizes and ironizes the tension between old and new modes of living and writing. The deep parallels between these landmarks of literary history aren’t coincidental, Ma argues. They’re all brilliant responses to the problems posed by newly commercial cultures at the origin point of the global economy.

To my mind, it’s an immediately persuasive argument. In one of my first posts on Substack, I speculated about long-term economic and demographic explanations for the curious similarities between the literature of Renaissance Europe and late Ming China, something that I had been thinking about since reading The Plum in the Golden Vase a couple of years ago. Ma’s thoroughly compelling account helps to explain why these two far-flung cultures, with no literary contact, seem to be on precisely the same timeline.

In fact, if there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that the argument could be drawn even more sharply: late Ming literature, represented by The Plum in the Golden Vase (c. 1590) doesn’t really resemble the eighteenth-century Robinson Crusoe, as Ma concedes at a few points. Defoe is too thoroughly bourgeois. There’s no sense, in Robinson Crusoe, that the rise of the mercantile class marks the loss of something beautiful, profound, and pure. We don’t feel the ghostly presence of an aristocratic class vanquished by history: it’s just gone, irrelevant, not worth mentioning.

But if we go back to the English literature written a century earlier, right around the time Cervantes was composing Don Quixote and the anonymous author known as “the Scoffing Scholar of Lanling” was working on The Plum in the Golden Vase, the resemblances are uncanny. In other words, there’s not just a global early modernity, but a global 1600 in literary history.

High and Low

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries—roughly the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare—Ming China produced a series of monumental works of prose fiction, including Outlaws of the Marsh, Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West. The Plum in the Golden Vase picks up from these works, taking inspiration from their scale and ambition, and lifting its characters from a minor episode in Outlaws of the Marsh. But it’s also a sharp departure. The earlier works are stories of adventure and epic heroism. The Plum in the Golden Vase, by contrast, is a dark satire of erotic debauchery and financial intrigue among the mercantile classes.

Plum tells the story of the many sexual conquests of the pharmaceutical merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing, who’s in equal measures rich, stupid, and bad. He’s propelled along blindly by his insatiable sexual drive, his desire for wealth and status, and the influence of one of his wives, the beautiful and Machiavellian P’an Chin-lien, a kind of Marquise de Merteuil of Ming literature. There’s murder, money, drinking and drugs, and astonishingly graphic, inventive, and varied depictions of sex. It’s at once a scathing satire of corruption and its most triumphant rendering, finding black comedy in its characters’ misdeeds. There’s not a page that doesn’t mingle contempt and pleasure, the distanced, superior perspective of the educated elite with the powerfully material allure of sex and money.

It’s not easy to interpret irony, style, or allusion in a language and literary tradition you don’t know. But David Tod Roy’s excellent translation, and the volume’s copious notes, manages to make it clear that the novel’s irony is a question of style and genre, not just plot and characterization. Sophisticated literary allusion collides with concrete, material description in the description of tawdry domestic incidents. Take this scene, in which Hsi-Men Ch’ing’s only son, a small child, is lying comatose, having been scratched by P’an Chin-lien’s cat and then been given a dubious medical treatment. (He doesn’t know that she trained the cat to scratch the boy as part of an elaborate plot to murder him.)

Heading straight for P’an Chin-lien’s quarters:
          Without permitting any further explanation,
he sought the cat and, dangling it by one foot, strode out to the veranda, took aim at the stone stylobate, swung the cat up into the air, and dashed it against it. All that could be heard was
          The contents of its brain burst into
          ten thousand peach blossoms;
          Its mouthful of teeth were reduced to
          scattered fragments of jade.
Truly:
          No longer able in the world of light
          to capture rats or mice,
          It reverts to the abode of the dead
          to become a fox fairy.
When P'an Chin-lien saw that he had taken her cat out and dashed it to death... she cursed him, saying, "You lousy death-defying ruffian! If you had only dragged me out and killed me, it would have been more heroic of you" (3.471).

It’s this characteristic of Plum that reminds me so much of English writing c. 1600. In late Elizabethan prose fiction, the work of writers like Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, and in city comedy, written by men such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, there’s a constant counterpoint between cultivated, self-consciously literary language and a blunt verisimilitude. Classical allusions are intermingled with coarse slang, illuminating and ironizing the squalid affairs of money- and sex-obsessed Londoners.

The tendency is exemplified in the way English Renaissance writers, like the author of Plum, move comfortably between prose and verse. By the end of the seventeenth century, the two forms had split apart. Tragedies could still be written in verse, but generally only in verse, with no prose parts. Comedies and fiction were written exclusively in prose. Defoe did actually write some poetry, but we think of him, rightly, as a prose writer, and his novels certainly don’t drift in and out of verse: it’s impossible to imagine Crusoe composing an impromptu sestina. But in 1600, the contest between courtly and commercial modes of life, given a new urgency by the infusion of New World silver, could be articulated through form and style.

The Pressure of Comparison

In arguing for a global rise of the novel, Ma is making a methodological case as well as a historical one. It’s an argument for “horizontal comparison”: the comparison of works from disparate languages and cultures by authors who never read one another. It’s not a new idea. Rather, as Ma points out, it’s a return to the ambitions of nineteenth-century Weltliteratur, world literature, which sought to understand cultural divergences and human commonalities across the whole scope of global history. In scholarship today, we’ve become very good at tracing influences from text to text. We can reconstruct elaborate chains of transmission, and locate remote literary predecessors and descendants across languages and regions. But there isn’t a lot of broad, comparative work that explicitly seeks to understand literary evolution across societies.

Viewed from that perspective, Ma was right not to discuss a minor work of Elizabethan prose fiction (no matter how much I personally love Thomas Nashe), but Robinson Crusoe, the landmark novel of the English tradition, alongside equally foundational masterpieces from China, Spain, and Japan. Canonization restricts the range of works that are discussed. Many books that were required reading in their own time, and may still be delightful and interesting in ours, fall off the map. That’s its great disadvantage. Its advantage is that, precisely in narrowing the field, it presses us to compare. When anything and everything can be the object of literary study, we aren’t forced to make sense of the relationships between widely disparate works across time and space. We can trace any path we like, no matter how narrow, idiosyncratic, or meandering. By contrast, as soon as we’re given a limited set of books, we begin drawing distinctions and making connections. If it’s a set that crosses time and space—that is, if it’s a genuine canon—our comparisons will inevitably occur at a bracingly high level of abstraction.

As

Naomi Kanakia

remarked in an excellent recent essay on reading Asian literary classics, encountering beautiful, strange, surprising books is a goal in its own right—ultimately, perhaps, the goal. But the global literary canon also has a lot to offer literary history and theory, as books like The Age of Silver demonstrate.

1. In England, the velocity of money increased in the 1590s, suggesting that, as quickly as the money supply was growing, commerce was increasing even faster. In every decade since, the velocity of money has fallen.

2. In retrospect, I think Lorentzen, and those of us who joined in the conversation that followed, should have identified “market reductionism” rather than “sociology” as the culprit. “Sociology” was never the right term for talking about literary scholars’ and critics’ gleeful embrace of the American cultural market as the sole agent and arbiter of literary history.