Abstract
In the curatorial statement to the “Articulations” collection ‘Circulation’, the concept of circulation encompasses both closed, repetitive movement and open, expansive transmission. Analysing Gilgamesh as a paradigmatic case, the text explores how literary works oscillate between novelty and continuity across cultures and epochs, embodying a dynamic interplay of sameness and difference essential for enduring circulation.
Circulation begins by noting the ambivalence of the word “circulation”. To circulate can mean to ‘move continuously [. . .] through a closed system’ Full reference in Zotero Library as when blood moves through my veins, following the same paths again and again. This is what Florian Fuchs, Michael Gamper, and Jasmin Wrobel refer to as “closed” circulation. Or it can mean to ‘pass from place to place or person to person’, as when rumours pass between my friends. This is referred to as “open” circulation.
The metaphor of circulation thus combines two opposite properties: freedom and boundedness, movement and return, a passage into new territory and a continuous homeward travel. Curiously, this double structure also shapes the poem with which David Damrosch Full reference in Zotero Library began his now famous analysis of literary circulation—the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is a constantly restless character, always on the move both physically and psychologically: the gods say of him that there is a ‘storm in his heart’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library). He journeys twice to the ends of the earth, but always comes back to his city Uruk. The epic begins by foreshadowing this return (‘He came back from far roads’, Full reference in Zotero Library) and ends by describing it (‘They arrived at Uruk the Sheepfold’, Full reference in Zotero Library).
Gilgamesh, then, balances the centrifugal force of its hero’s heart with the centripetal force of his home. One force, circulation-as-movement, opens the text up to the world, the other, circulation-as-return, brings the story to a close. For Damrosch (Full reference in Zotero Library and Full reference in Zotero Library), Gilgamesh is a paradigm example of literary circulation, in part because of how the epic was rediscovered and received in Victorian Britain; and the text has since inspired myriad retellings, translations, and adaptations Full reference in Zotero Library. It is a restless story about a restless character.
But we should note another difference within the word “circulation”. When Gilgamesh the character circulates, he does so by moving. When Gilgamesh the epic circulates, it does so in one of two ways. It can move physically just as the hero does: clay tablets bearing the story were transported by archaeologists, especially during the era of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century, from Iraq to Western museums, especially in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Some of those tablets have since returned home, including the ‘Gilgamesh Dream Tablet’ that was smuggled out in 2003 and repatriated to Iraq in 2021 Full reference in Zotero Library. But more often, literary circulation refers to something else: not to the physical movement of a text, but to its reception and adaptation in a new culture or context.
In this second sense, circulation is typically achieved by the “recreation” of a text in another language, medium, or format. But again, this word confronts us with a second ambiguity, which is really the same ambiguity, the same tension between movement and return, openness and closedness. To “recreate” something can mean to ‘create again’, implying a new beginning, or to ‘reproduce; re-enact’, implying a return of the same situation over and over again Full reference in Zotero Library. If the world were to be destroyed and recreated, everything will have changed; if toxic workplace conditions keep being recreated, nothing will have changed. When I translated Gilgamesh, first into Danish and then into English (Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library), it was the same poem and it was not the same poem. It was one text; it was three texts. When Gilgamesh is retold on the stage, in a novel, through a painting, it is the same story and it is not the same story. It is one work; it is a thousand works.
Translation is the same, again. We might say, with Anouk Luhn, that there is something queer about the time of translation and about the looping, recursive time of circulation in general—queer both as in strange and as in oppositional to a time of straight linearity. While reading Luhn’s piece, I kept circling back to Anne Carson Full reference in Zotero Library on the Ancient Greek word dēute as used in Sappho’s fragment no. 1, where it marks the cyclical pattern of human, homoerotic desire as viewed by a goddess. In Gilgamesh, the queerness of repetition is brought out by the hero’s lament over his lover Enkidu: he cannot move on or straighten himself out after his death, so he repeats the loving litany over and over, renewing grief each time. It is the same story; it is a new telling.
These nesting dolls of ambiguity within some of the key terms currently popular in literary criticism—circulation and recreation—point to a central feature of literary culture. For a literary work to persist across time, it must move and return, become new and stay the same, change and endure. A literary work must circulate if it is to endure beyond the immediate place, time, and context that gave rise to it, but what that circulation entails is that the work will always be changing. One may think of the ‘Red Queen hypothesis’ from evolutionary biology, which takes its name from the Lewis Carroll Full reference in Zotero Library character of the same name who declares, in Through the Looking Glass, that ‘it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place’ (italics in the original). As Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor points out in her conversation with Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque, we need not equate ‘home’ with stasis. Home may itself be a site of nomadic movement: the place we return to may be a journey, or a site that is in some other way unsettled. To move and to dwell are not always opposites.
Consider again Gilgamesh. The epic opens and closes with a hymnic description of the walls of Uruk, which encircle the text just as they encircle the city, in a neat illustration of the centripetal force that brings the hero home: the reader is told to walk along the walls, but if we kept moving, we would be brought back to the point at which we started. The epic draws a parallel between the walls and the text itself, entwining its description of the two Full reference in Zotero Library. The walls serve as an image of permanence; they are a monument that, like the epic itself, will stand forever and proclaim the glory of its creator, Gilgamesh. But, like most buildings and texts in ancient Iraq, the walls and the epic are made of clay, and clay is brittle. Houses made of clay bricks had to be torn down and rebuilt about once a generation. The walls of Uruk, which were made of kiln-fired bricks, would have lasted much longer, but they still had to be regularly repaired. In the nineteenth century BCE, for example, a local leader named Anam proudly declared that he had restored the ancient walls built by Gilgamesh Full reference in Zotero Library. To remain useful, the walls of Uruk had to be rebuilt again and again over three millennia.
The same is true of clay as a writing material. It is remarkably durable, as attested by the survival of clay manuscripts inscribed with the cuneiform script from as much as five millennia ago. But like every other writing material—and indeed, like every other thing in our sublunar world—clay is subject to the passing of time. Manuscripts degrade, disappear, break. Ancient Babylonian scribes would note that a section was missing in the text they were copying with the word ḫepi, ‘broken’ Full reference in Zotero Library. With modern methods, conservationists can dramatically extend the lifetime of a manuscript, but in the premodern world, scribes and scholars knew that the most effective way of preserving a work and perpetuating its life was to make new copies of it. Authors knew this too, which is why, in many premodern works, they do their best to recruit the future. For example, in another Babylonian epic, Erra, scribes who copy the poem and singers who perform it are promised protection from its main character, the god of war and disease Full reference in Zotero Library. The text makes this promise to ensure its own protection, in the form of the many copies that were indeed made of it. The text protects the scribes, the scribes protect the text. Literature lives on through recreation: it must keep running to stay the same.
But as the ambiguity of the word “recreation” has already alerted us to, no copy is ever exact. It is the same text; it is a new text. This is the foundational truth of the field known as philology: every text that exists in more than one copy displays some difference between those copies, and one of the philologist’s main tasks is to figure out what to do with that difference. To borrow a term from Douglas Pompeu, we may think of the variants produced by copying as the ‘noise’ of circulation in the premodern world, the distorting filter of irregularities, innovations, and material accidents that reshape the music of the manuscripts.
I have no real evidence for this claim, but I suspect that the philosophy of Neo-Platonism—as devised by Plotinus, who spent eleven years working with old texts at the library of Alexandria Full reference in Zotero Library—is an elevation to the cosmic plane of this basic philological truth. Plotinus sees the world as being born out of a primordial unity, which he calls ‘the One’, from which emanate a series of increasingly imperfect realms, leading to the material world we see around us. Each emanation attempts to return to the realm from which it sprang, but fails. Much the same can be said of the scribes who, for centuries, recreated an original text as a copy and sought to preserve its wording as closely as possible. Each copy attempts to return its original, but due to the constraints of our material world, it inevitably fails, yielding a new level in the transmission of the text.
This sequence of emanations and imperfect returns allowed Plotuns to explain how a world that seems so multiple to us could arise from an originary oneness. Likewise, for philologists, tracing the history of a text’s transmission allows us to explain how textual difference stems from a single authorial composition. The copy is the perfect mix of sameness and difference, movement—or in Plotinian terms, emanation—and return. It is the same, because it is a copy; it is not the same, because it is a copy.
As Glenn Most Full reference in Zotero Library puts it, in the premodern world, ‘transmission always entailed variants’ which ‘became exponentially more numerous with every further act of copying’. This led scribes across the globe to ‘deal with a fundamental and potentially deeply unsettling paradox: the texts that were central to many of their most important activities were available to them only in copies that diverged from one another in at least some passages’. (However, Most Full reference in Zotero Library also notes that, in some textual traditions, multiplicity and variants were calmly accepted or even celebrated.)
This is the paradox that circulation engenders—even in the case of what Florian Fuchs calls “closed circulation”, which entails little difference in language, audience, or cultural context. Even if literary works stay in one place, they must circulate to survive, and as a result, they can never achieve a complete self-sameness, but always carry within them some measure of internal difference Full reference in Zotero Library. This is especially so for canonical works, which are constantly running and constantly brought back to themselves through the twin acts of copying and editing, that is, the creation and resolution of variants.
What is true at the level of the copy is also true at other levels of circulation, including practices such as translation and adaptation, and more generally in ‘open’ or cross-cultural circulation. However, the relation between these forms of circulation deserves more considerations than it has so far received. The word ‘circulation’ may seem grand and abstract, but as Bart Soethaert points out, the ‘[g]lobal circulation of literary works is local at all points’: it always comes about as ‘the products of concrete actions to design and mobilise (non-human) actors as to afford, sustain, amplify supportive circuitry’. Circulation does not happen by itself, but by the interlinked work of human actors, such as scribes, and non-human actors, such as clay or the skins of the sheep from which parchment was made. What would happen if we thought of all circulation—from manuscript copies to creative adaptations—as a set of local events that combine in complex networks?
Let us return to Gilgamesh. One can go to the Electronic Babylonian Literature website and find there a synoptic edition of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic (composed c. twelfth century BCE): by clicking on the little arrows next to the verses, one can see how each line of the “text” was rendered differently by each “manuscript”. The ‘text’ thus enfolds and abstracts the multiplicity of its various manuscripts into a new singularity. But alongside the Standard Babylonian version, there were also Old Babylonian, Middle Babylonian, and Neo-Assyrian versions of the epic (which are also available to view on the same website). These versions have much in common, but differ from one another more substantially than the manuscripts of a text would; they cannot be reconciled into a single presentation (for this and the following account of the epic’s history, see Full reference in Zotero Library).
We might thus speak of an “assemblage” of texts, with the assemblage that is the ‘Akkadian epic Gilgamesh’ consisting of and enfolding the multiplicity of the texts that make up its versions, just as each of those texts consists of and enfolds the difference of its various manuscripts. The assemblage stands in the same relation to the text as the text to the manuscript.
Gilgamesh is thus inherently multiple. Tatsuo Terada, Tomomi Yoshino, and Yūji Nawata discuss the compilation of anthologies in Medieval Germany and Japan, and such anthologies are a critical medium for Medieval literature in particular; but sometimes, the line between anthologies and other kinds of assemblage blur. The Akkadian Gilgamesh was created through the compilation of five existing Sumerian poems, which were woven together to make a single epic. Unlike most anthologies, the ‘seams’ of these older stories are no longer apparent in the Akkadian version, because they have been crafted into one narrative. But even so, the epic was born of multiplicity and cross-linguistic circulation even before its dispersal and reassemblage in the various versions.
And that is just the Akkadian version of Gilgamesh. Then there are its translations in other languages, including ancient Hittite and Hurrian: we might speak of an ‘ancient Gilgamesh assemblage’, consisting of and enfolding the Akkadian assemblage and the other ancient texts. And then there are the two dozen modern languages into which it has been translated, and the countless performances, retellings, and transmedial adaptations, both ancient and modern, that these various versions have given rise to. If one were to taxonomise these various levels of difference and reabsorption comprehensively—which I will not do—one might end up with a mega-level, the Gilgamesh galaxy, which consists of and enfolds every previous level of multiplicity.
Such a galaxy is a curious chronotopal object, much like the pipelines studied by Susanne Strätling: a distributed, connective tissue that is both then and now, here and there. For example, when Gilgamesh was first translated into Arabic in 1962 by Taha Baqir—just as Iraq was coming into its own as a newly independent, oil-rich nation—the poem was picked up by the Iraqi modernist movement that drew on both Western artists and the country’s heritage to yield ‘an explosive continuation of the past’ Full reference in Zotero Library: a blend of past and present, external and internal influence.
The question, then, is what principles of sameness and what principles of difference guide the circulation of a text at these various levels and in their various contexts? Under what conditions can we say that a text is still the “same” when it circulates across copies, languages, media, etc.? For a text to perpetuate itself across time, it must achieve some balance between those principles of sameness and difference, movement and return, so that it can combine the inevitable variation and the transtemporal identity that are the double preconditions for its circulation.
The question of what those principles are cannot be answered on any level of abstraction, because it will always depend on the context, the medium, and the literary community that decides those principles in each specific case, sometimes implicitly and sometimes, as with philology, in explicit and technical detail. The studies assembled under this curated collection “circulation” can be thought of as various attempts to sketch out the principles by which works are dispersed and re-contained. If we want to understand what literary circulation means for the works involved, we will often do well to begin by studying its unique rhythm of movement and return, that is, how circulation instils difference in the work and yet secures its sameness across time.
