The K-Effect: Romanization, Modernism, and the Timing and Spacing of Print Culture

Christopher GoGwilt’s The K-Effect treats the use of the letter K in romanization as a searchlight that illuminates how alphabetic writing both standardizes and destabilizes the colonial hierarchy of languages, scripts, and literatures, with continuing significance on the digitization of global print media in our times. This “double effect of romanization” (6) is the through line that supports the comparative study of canonical writers such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Lu Xun, Franz Kafka, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Activating and mobilizing a vast body of languages, scripts, and literatures with erudition, conceptual rigor, and methodological innovation, The K-Effect exemplifies the best kind of scholarship that comparative literary studies has to offer.What exactly is the K-effect, and why does it matter? There are at least four layers—etymological, conceptual, literary, and sociolinguistic—to the key concept of the K-effect. According to the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED), the entry for the letter K traces its original usage in English to “the Greek Kappa K, originally ꓘ, from Phoenician and general Semitic Kaph U+1090A.” As a “supplementary letter to C” used by medieval scribes, K was often used to transliterate “Greek or other foreign words” (6). The letter K thus operates on two levels: Romanization with an uppercase “R” indicates “the long-standing adoption of the Latin alphabet as the writing system for a range of European languages”; romanization with a lowercase “r” signifies transliteration, or “the more recent proliferation of systems of romanization” (7). The distinction between Romanization with an uppercase R and romanization with a lowercase r is crucial to our understanding of how “English as a case of (lowercase) romanization” aspired “to take the hegemonic place of Latin in (uppercase) Romanization” (50). As a result, the English alphabet constantly oscillates between its role as the singular worldscript—a writing system with “a global and historical reach”—and its function as a mediator of different scriptworlds—GoGwilt tweaks David Damrosch’s term to invoke literary systems with “cultural, linguistic, and often racial and ethnic expectations” (11). The double effect of English romanization takes place when English switches perspectives between the hegemonic worldscript and a mediator of scriptworlds through romanized print transliteration. The K-Effect brilliantly showcases how “the prestige of English as worldscript” is conditioned and reconfigured by “its own displacement, abandonment, and betrayal” (59).Besides the etymological and conceptual K-effect, the term is further concretized by the example of Joseph Conrad’s name. If Conrad initially changed his name from Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Joseph Conrad to avoid abuse of his real surname, then his later addition of the letter K to his signature (from JC to JKC) was meant to mark his Polish origin and ended up pointing to the impossibility of maintaining scriptal monolingualism (101). Tracing the English, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Chinese chronotopes of romanization both visible and hidden in Conrad’s work, GoGwilt extends the literary and aesthetic K-effect to “index a range of transnational, modernist experiments” in Joyce, Kafka, Lu Xun, and Pramoedya. Relatedly, GoGwilt invokes the sociolinguistic K-effect of romanization as “a transformation in the global (and multimedia) timing and spacing of print culture” (189) from the OED to alphanumerical coding in the age of digitization. In addition to the four interconnected definitions of the K-effect, GoGwilt provides in passing one more tangential definition of the K-effect as montage, or the “Kuleshov effect,” named after the filmmaker and film theorist Lev Kuleshov, which turns everything into an “‘ideographic’ filmic image” (154, 152), echoing the “ideographic turn” of alphanumerical codes already seen in Joyce’s iSpace, where Joyce plays with the temporal and spatial arrangement of letters in Finnegans Wake (Wake, Book 1, Chapter 5) (60).The first three out of a total of four body chapters are organized around these varying forms of the K-effect throughout Joseph Conrad’s work. Taking Conrad as a point of departure—or Ansatzpunkt, à la Erich Auerbach1—the first three chapters examine the role of romanization and the status of print culture in the modernist, postcolonial, and transnational framework. Chapter 1 takes on the double effect of romanization of English and compares Conrad’s use of romanized Malay at the expense of the effaced Arabic Jawi (Arabic Malay script), his appearance in the OED, and the blank space in the Heart of Darkness with James Joyce’s preoccupation with diacritics in iSpace, demonstrating how the English romanization with a lowercase r mediates “between the worldscript of its romanized print form and the scriptworld of other languages” (70). The making of the standard print English unwittingly renders English “the site of a profoundly destabilizing encounter between worldscripts and scriptworlds” (59). Chapter 2 adds on to the English case of romanization an alternate worldscript of the Cyrillic and the respective double effect of the Russian romanization: Russia’s multilingual and multiscript historical formation and reality vis-à-vis its untenable undertaking “to align scriptworld and worldscript” (81). By pairing Conrad’s addition of the letter K to his initials in A Personal Record with Franz Kafka’s fondness for the letter K, alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s take on “the K function” (the letter K as an assemblage of the literary machine) (103), GoGwilt showcases the impossibility of imposing ethnonationalism on any script, for “there can never be a monolingualism of script” (101). Chapter 3 turns to the East Asian and Southeast Asian chronotope of romanization to uncover a covert postcolonial plot in Conrad and subject the privileged European forms of language and script to an unexpected ideographic turn. Performing detective work on the Conradian effacement of Chinese characters—both people and script—from Almayer’s Folly to Victory, GoGwilt reveals the mediating role played by Indonesian-born Chinese (peranakan Chinese) in the publishing boom of the romanized print Malay, a crucial link to the formation of the Indonesian anticolonial struggle. Relatedly, the effacement of Chinese characters and the effect of Chinese romanization in Lu Xun’s canonical work make a convincing case of how filmic images in the ideographic form challenge hierarchies of all languages and scripts (151). The last chapter of the book departs from Conrad but stays on the course of romanization by adding Sanskritization and digitization to the mix. Sanskritization, romanization, and digitization formed what GoGwilt calls “a speculative, dialectical grasp of writing systems” (157). An idealization of the Sanskrit model—aided by Humboldt and Saussure—as “the perfect alignment of language and script” (173) sits at the core of comparative philology and world literature and overshadows romanization in its fraught construction of the Roman letters as the standardizing, near-universal alphabet for the modern print culture. As the ideographic turn of all alphanumerical codes precipitates digitization, the chronotope of digitization intensifies Sanskritization and romanization and is poised to reproduce and displace all scripts, languages, and literatures.The K-Effect has many merits. For one, it maintains a refreshing conceptual clarity throughout its discussions of language, script, alphabet, and writing system, a necessary virtue unfortunately not shared by all monographs on language and writing. For another, it offers sharp secondary literary reviews of wildly different subfields with admirable intellectual generosity. In addition, the book showcases superb literary sensibilities, inspiring readerly interest in engaging with the primary literary pieces from Conrad’s Malay trilogy to Pramoedya’s Buru quartet. Gems of intellectual discoveries abound. Readers learn about the importance of 1911—the same time around which Conrad added the letter K, Kafka articulated a position of a “minor literature,” Virginia Woolf determined the starting point of the change of human characters, and Lu Xun pondered the Chinese Xinhai Revolution (22–24)—and 1928—when the completion of OED, the success of the Turkish script reform, the adoption of the anticolonial Bahasa Indonesia, and the official recognition of the Chinese Gwoyeu Romatzyh all coincided (39–40)—while appreciating meaningful coincidences such as the Russian term for “novelization” could be translated as “romanization” (115). The heftiest and most valuable discovery, to this reader, lies in the book’s elucidation of how the complicated question of romanization holds one heretofore overlooked key to understanding the disciplinary origins of modern comparative philology, structural linguistics, and by extension, world literature. Humboldt’s forgetting of the real Sanskrit model as well as Saussure’s expedient bracketing of Humboldt’s idealization gave rise to a constructed phonocentric proto-relationship between language and script. By fixating on the question of romanization, GoGwilt drives the poststructuralist critique home by revealing how “the extreme ideal of Sanskritization (a universal form of literature for all scriptworlds) meets the extreme ideal of Romanization (a universal worldscript for world literature imposed to the exclusion of all other scripts), to produce the extreme ideal of Digitization (a single code of worldscript to unlock access to all scriptworlds)” (159). What GoGwilt has performed is the kind of philologically grounded, historically informed, and politically aware act of disciplinary introspection that Sheldon Pollock has called “critical philology.”2 Equally inspiring is GoGwilt’s use of the comparative method. Through a concentrated consideration of the chronotope of romanization—its standardization and its traces of erasure—GoGwilt needs little justification to bring together and compare English, Malay, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Indian writing systems and print culture, using each and every one of them to illuminate the others while ascertaining the future of the digitized timing and spacing of print culture of all scripts and languages. Although GoGwilt refrains from pontificating about the future of that digitized chronotope—an open question unanswered till the very end of Chapter 4 and could use more elaboration in a conclusion or a postscript—the study and understanding of the timing and spacing of the digitized alphanumerical codes will benefit from the lessons offered in the book. The K-Effect by Christopher GoGwilt is a must-read for any scholar who works with the shifting dynamics of scripts, languages, codes, and literatures.