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Week 1 – History of Comparison What I want to do is look at how I situate myself, what are the intellectual moments from different locations and from the past that are relevant to what I’m doing today. We’re going to start by looking at mid 20th century Europe, then we will go back to the early 19th century set in Europe and look at Madame de Stael, and then we will go to Martinique and look at Guissant in the latter half of the 20 th^ century, and then I’ll do some thinking with a contemporary mind with Chaudhuri in relation to Dante. The point is, first of all, to give you some historical points of reference for thinking about what comparative literary study has been and could be. Secondly, to kind of point to some issues which have been significant over time and are still with us today, particularly to begin to think about how we think about group identities, especially national identities, which were really important at the foundation of the discipline, and how we think about language difference in relation to that. I want to start by looking by mentioning these these people. So these are major figures in the mid-20th century sort of foundation, really, of a kind of comparative literature. So what we have here is Erns Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Eric Auerbach. So these are all white men, obviously, that are living in Europe, they are all writing in German and they are all writing in dialogue with the Nazi catastrophe: Spitzer and Auerbach were Jewish, fled successively, first of all, to Istanbul and then to United States, where they were then important in developing comparative literature in the United States. Curtius stayed in Germany through the war, but conceived of this work, this book that he was writing then ( European literature in the latter Middle Ages ) as a sort of way of salvaging and preserving European literature, an idea of European literature from the Nazi catastrophe, as he says in the preface to it. So I just want to point to really compelling and important books that it’s still good to read today. Nevertheless, what they’re all interested in doing, what they are all committed to doing is kind of preserving and maintaining and thinking about the European literary tradition. What is noticeable is that they’re doing that in a moment of political crisis, and as you look around to other moments of significant comparative political theorising and activity, you’ll find that often actually, we’ll see other instances later on in the lecture, often these are happening in what are also moments of significant political crisis, and that’s a connexion that it’s always interesting to think about. So these writers gave an intellectual impetus to the discipline in Europe in the mid-20th century, by the decades ago, by obviously the Eurocentrism of their work comes to be seen as problematic, and an obvious next thing for people to do and what starts happening next in the late 20th/early 21st century is a series of writers saying: we can’t really use the word ‘comparison’ anymore, there’s something too problematic about the inheritance from people like Curtius, Auerbach and Spitzer (and actually, as we’ll see, it goes back into the 19th century), we’re uneasy with the eurocentrism of that approach, so we need to find ways of opening comparative literature to traditions of texts that are in Africa and Asia and other parts of the world, we need to find ways of moving beyond eurocentrism of the mid-20th century tradition. So what happens then is people reach the world and start saying that instead of comparative literature, we should be thinking about something called world literature. The one question that leaves me with is why do I still want to think of myself as working in relation to a distinctable comparative literature? And why is a master’s course that I’m involved in teaching called comparative literature and critical translation? Why don’t we just call it world literature? I think for me the reason for that is that it is really important to see that the world is not just there, any account of the world is a description of the world from a point of view that makes a particular set of assumptions about it and projects them onto the material that is out there – assumptions about what’s important, what’s central, about the temporality of it,
you know, what temporality do you image something called ‘world literature’ by. So actually, by looking at all these books, what kind of shout out to me is that you can never have a world literature, you can only have literature conceived according to different ideas of the world, which are always going to be in competition and dialogue with one another. The world, as theorised by one, is seen by one particular individual in one location, so a world is going to be different from world as seen by another person in another place. And so, in fact, it’s a space of, as it were, comparative worlds: you want to get to the world, you can only get to conceptions of the world, and then if you want to get some critical perspective on that, if you want to think about what’s really going on, then you have to think comparatively between this perspective. So I, insofar as we kind of share a kind of stance on my colleagues, like to hold onto the word ‘comparison’ because it puts dialogue and difference at the centre of what we’re doing. So rather than constructing a space in which you say, here is this discipline within which I’m working, when you’re working comparatively, working across language difference or working across cultural difference, you’re thinking that there’s differences within what I'm looking at, rather than differences around what I’m looking at. What am I bringing together and why? It’s not taking for granted that two texts, for instance, which might belong together in the same national tradition will, of course, go together, you have to think about why and for what purposes you want to bring those texts together. And also another thing that’s really important about ‘comparative’ for me is that there’s the texts you’re looking at, but there’s also your own intellectual and writing practise. So one of the things I like about comparative literary practise and conceiving of what we’re doing in terms of comparative literature is you're thinking: what am I doing? And how does what I’m doing relates what other people are doing? What's the justification for the approach I'm taking to the text that I'm describing? A part of what I want to give you in the rest of the lecture is some kind of help in just beginning to describe or continuing to describe and think about what kind of critical practise you want to engage in and why. Okay, the tradition of comparative literature foregrounds language that differences; traditionally, comparative literature has been thinking across texts in what are conceived of as different languages. There’s a problem with talking about different languages, which I'll say a little bit about later and come back to more next term. But if we say it, want to draw from that is a sense of myself as always working, always being aware of language difference, and always being alert to the language difference that is being crossed between the text that I’m bringing together and also the language difference that is being crossed between those text and the writing I’m producing. To me, that’s what’s key about comparative literary practice. And you can see already from that why translation is a really important element in this is that there are, or at least there used to be, ways of conceiving of comparative literature as something apart from translation or even something in opposition to translation: for instance, Spitzer that would be an example of this, as he always quoted texts in the source languages and always avoided translation; there’s a kind of performance of expertise in that gesture, i.e., I can read in all these different languages, I expect you to be able to do that as well if you want to count as a comparativist, then you need to be able to do that. But of course, what that way of thinking constructs is a sense of the being separate and have separate languages that you can be expert in, and what that downplays is the way in which culture is always circulating across language difference. No area of culture that could be constructed as a national literature is about only a national literature, it’s always come into being through interaction with other kinds of writing, and it’s always circulating throughout the space. So one way of seeing the centrality of translation is, it seems to me, to comparative literary practise, is that it draws attention to what is always the circulation of literary texts and culture across language difference – that’s the kind of historical perception. But also it connects to this sense of how this that I’m talking about relates
for instance, English people in the mid-19th century would all have known Madame the style as the author of Corinne , and many of them would have read her book, so she’s a pioneering figure. The other kind of books she writes along with novels is books about social and literary theory, so books about what literary is, such as this book that I'm going to focus on, which is called L’Allemagne or On Germany , published here in London in 1830, more or less simultaneously in English and in French, so she writes in French and it was anonymously translated into English, and both were published in London. And the reason why they were both published in London is that, the occasion for her writing the book was that she’d been exiled from Napoleon and who didn’t like her, he didn’t like her feminism, he didn't like her outspokenness, he didn’t like the various ways in which she was kind of politically active. So he kicked out of Paris and she travels in German-speaking lands and being the well-connected person that she is, obviously she takes the opportunity to go and visit Goethe and other significant figures and writes a book about it. What she does in the book is completely ambivalent, actually, as we’ll see already from the first conception of it, what she thinks herself is doing is giving a description of what she’s characterising as German literature and culture and society to some extent, in order to indicate distinctiveness, but in order then to make it better understood by French reader and the French intellectuals. So on the one hand, there’s a kind of describing something that’s different from us, but then, on the other hand, she is presenting cultural phenomena that she’s suggesting France should enter into more dialogue with and, to some extent, come to share some manner. The idea of this sort of celebration of German speaking culture is a politically problematic thing because Napoleon had invaded much of it. She’s allowed to come some miles within distance of Paris, so she comes back near Paris, she writes a book, gets it printed in French, 10,000 copies are printed, and then they are all seized and pulped and none of them exist anymore. So she then flees again, she travels to various places, she comes to London and the book gets published in London simultaneously in French and in English translation. So somewhat like Auerbach, Spitzer and Curtius in the mid-20th century, here is a significant piece of comparative literature theorising that is happening in a moment of political conflict and crisis. She prints at the start of the book the letter she got from the minister of police saying why the book can be published, and he says ‘it’s not French enough’, meaning I, the minister of police, have an idea of what should count as French and this is a betrayal of the national cause. What’s interesting about how De Stael responses to that is, you think in that climate she might say, well, I’m not really interested in what counts and does not count as French, and I want to find different ways of theorising about culture. But in fact, she has a different conception of Frenchness, but she too is very wedded to the idea that is important to define something that counts as Frenchness in culture, and something that counts as Germannes in culture, and then to think about the relationship between them. So what we can see here very clearly is the origin of one strand of the history of comparative literary study in nations and nationalism. So in the idea that, you know, one can trace back in many different ways, that has real moments of crystallisation of the time of the French Revolution, and then in the period of the liberal nationalist revolution in many countries in Europe and also in South America through the 19th century, that we need to theorise the existence of an entity we’re going to call the nation, which is a unified culture. We need this so we can assert independence from the rulers and empires that have previously been ruling us, so the idea of the nation has a really important political function in helping democracy come to being. So there are lots of forces that are going together to say that is really important to try to construct shared national cultures with a shared language so that there can be political discourse, so that there can then be democracy, so those all kind of factors driving the construction of an idea in the nation and Madame de Stael is kind of there in the
early years of that happening. The one of the things she wants to do in On Germany is to say this is what counts as German and it’s different from what counts as French. So one of the things we can see in this text is a kind of dynamic of comparison that I think is rather like the dynamic of comparison that I just pointed to in Auerbach’s text, which is to say, that I’m looking at these cultures in contrast to one another and that’s helping me notice what’s particular about each, but at the same time, it’s a danger, it tips over into a black and white contrast at some point in the argument. So here’s an instance of her talking about the distinct faculties of the two nations. There are repeated moments throughout the book which have a kind of area of culture she’s looking at that she comes out with this kind of strong contrast. But one of the things that’s really thought provoking about the book, though, is it also does something completely opposite to that, which is to say it’s also quite alert to the varieties of different kind of cultural practise that there are in Germany, and she says there are lots of writing here, she doesn’t know how it can be brought together into a single conception of culture. But then she switches back to a certain distinctiveness of national character, so she switches back to an idea. She’s looking at the variety of distinctiveness of culture in German speaking country, she’s kind of chronicling it and then there’s almost a kind of switch. You can conceive of this, I think, quite interesting as a switch of discourses, so that one kind of mode of thinking and mode of description she’s got in the book is what one could call a realist mode of discourse, which is kind of describing somewhat journalistically what she's encountering, and then it switches into discourse of nationalism that says somehow underneath all this variety, all this variety is somehow expressing something which I know to exist as the German national spirit or the distinctiveness of German culture. When you go that way of thinking, there’s then a question about how you think nations should relate to one another. And one thing it’s possible to think is they should each develop their own particular character, and and difference should flourish. So there’s the idea that dialoguing and sharing between cultures is a problematic thing, on the other hand, though, she also says the opposite. So she also says, what do we do with this difference between what I’m simplifying as German national culture and what I’m simplifying as French national culture, but what we want them to do is merge, distinctiveness is imperfection according to this way of thinking, what we want is for each of them to learn from the other. So I wanted to show this text because it’s completely in this moment of theorising world culture according to different nations, but on the other hand, it also reveals very neatly the complications around that: one kind of complication is that I’m constructing culture according to different national traditions, what should I say about others? And as soon as you’re in that situation, there’s a question about how you conceive sharing and distinctiveness, and Madame de Stael just kind of shows us. The second thing is an issue about when a particularity in detail versus generalisation. So one way of thinking about contradictions that I've been pointing to is to do with national discourses; another way of thinking about this contradiction would be in terms of scale: you could say, of course, there’s a culture of French over there, of course, there’s a culture of German over there, and, of course, they’re different, but then when you move into a more particular mode of description, of course, you see differences within those cultures. So actually the question about where I draw my dividing lines: do I say something about French culture over there which I’m going to construct as homogeneous and something about German culture over here, which I’m going to construct as homogeneous and draw the line between them; or do I look more closely into cultural differences and find lots of different lines within what I previously characterised as a homogenous culture? Well, this is a matter of scale. These are issues that belong in that historical moment. Nevertheless, I think from a larger point of view in general terms, these issues about generalisation versus the particular, or where do I
you’ve got cultures constructed as different from one another, then there’s an issue about how they relate to one another and the thinking that the different kinds of thinking that were done about that were then significant in the history of the discipline. I think they’re still kind of thought provoking for us to engage with now, whatever kind of work we might ourselves want to go on to do. I want to bring in a different figure now: Édouard Glissant , living through much of the 20th century into the 21st, writing significantly from the kind of mid to the late 20th century. He’s writing in French, I would say, but actually I don’t like that phrase ‘in a language’, so I would say he’s writing kind of with the resources of the French language, I don’t think languages are kind of bodies that you of inhabit, I think one’s relations language is more vary and plural than that. He’s writing with the resources of French, so in that respect he is like de Stael, but his situation is quite different because he’s located in Martinique and he’s writing from that perspective, so from the perspective of a location subjected to colonisation. And he’s thinking: How do I theorise culture here? I can look and I can see those European nations that put so much energy into conceiving of themselves as homogenous and I can see that that’s a kind of really problematic conception, so how do I want to theorise culture from my side, from my my cultural location? One of the things that really strikes him when he looks at the history of European culture is the importance of an idea of monolingualism, and it’s really language difference that becomes the central element of his critique and the theorisation that he offers in contrast. He talks about linguistic intransigence and the idea of the being a kind of monolingual culture and I think it’s really important to say that monolingualism is culturally constructed by education systems, including the education system that we’re in now: no one is born native speaker in any language, you learn languages, people grow up learning languages in many plural and different words. I really like the word repertoire for talking about people’s language, which is to say it recognises that everyone has different language resources at their disposal, I’m speaking in formal standard English now, but the ability to do this is part of my repertoire, and actually, one of the things I think of myself as trying to do in the world literature and comparative literature sphere is to draw attention to this way of thinking about language difference, which is to say it’s really crucial to get away from the notion of languages as separate standardised entities; if you’re thinking about translation, it's very crucial to get away from the idea that there is one language over here and another language over here with a gap between them and translation operates between them, and instead to think about ‘languaging’, I like to term ‘to language’, which is about recognising that languages are not fixed entities, language is a process that is always changing and we change it by what we speak. Guissant looks at the European nations and says, okay, this monolingualism is a really important thing that’s going on here, and the way that fits into the construction of nations is, in fact, institutions that teach people to be monolingual, schools in which kids are taught that – this happens less now but it used to happen a lot – the languages that they bring to the classroom are not appropriate and they need to speak that standard natural language instead, and things like print culture, etc. Nations are political spaces, and obviously not every nation state is monolingual, but there’s an idea of monolingualism that tends to attach the idea of the nation state. And then what the ideology of nationhood does is back-project that, so it’s really important to see that monolingualism is something that’s institutionally constructed, but actually what the ideology of nationalism does is say that there is something that has all long been called the English language, that has its roots that go back in time and is only now manifesting itself in its glory, but obviously that’s a myth and a construction. By contrast with that, the language in Martinique and the rest of the Antilles where Guissant is writing from, he describes as Creole and this is a mode of language that is very obviously made of mixed
elements. So it comes into being through racist and colonial violence, through the slave trade and, as Guissant documents, it comes into being, particularly through, one of the many horrific practises of the slave owners, which was to put the slaves that were going to be brought to Martinique and other islands from different locations so different languages together in the same room, with the idea that they would know that to be able to communicate with one another, but in fact, what emerged from that was a mode of communicating that drew on many different language resources. So when you think of Creole as a mode of languaging, it’s really clear that you can’t put the line around it and conceive it as a homogeneous thing, it’s a mode of language that has differences inscribed within it. I think one of the really amazing things in Guissant’s work is the way he kind of writes about as he documents the racist violence of the origin of this mode of languaging in very clear ways, and then moves on to say, well, okay, here we have this language, what do we think about it, how should we use it now? So one of the things he says that is what’s great about this native language that we have now is that it’s variable and therefore it has the recognition of differences inscribed within it, so that this is not something that can be presented as a standardised language, one might speak it differently from somebody else and it varies between the island. He visualises Creole languaging with the image of the archipelago, which is a scattering of different entities, by contrast with a map of Europe that has these kinds of blocks of different kinds. One of the things that becomes visible and is really crucial for thinking about language and is going to be important to us, whatever kind of work we’re doing from now on is thinking about the difference between speech and writing. So standardised national languages rely on writing to be standard and standardisation of languages happens through dictionaries, grammar, books and textbooks, whereas speech is always varied by comparison with writing and I think it’s really just it’s really important to keep that difference visible, which is to say that whenever you are engaged in writing and in a particular technology, adopting a particular set of constraints and obviously speech adapts itself to different contexts, etc. and there’s a sense in which speech too is a kind of technology, but it’s freer and one of the things that Guissant is really interested in thinking about is the relation between the fluidity of speech, the ability of speech contexts to make different repertoires of forms quite freely, by contrast with the comparative fixity of print and the tendency of print towards standardised. Printed language is standardised for political reasons, but it’s also standardised for market reasons and has to do with the technology of print: when you print a book, it’s fixed and then the same language form and circulates wherever there are readers in the marketplace. So obviously there are many different elements that go into standardisation of language. So he’s thinking about that and about the particular environment that creates (?) the writer is coming from a Creole repertoire and then working out how to write, for instance, if I wanted to write for French market and he talks about what kind of force, what he calls ‘forced poetics’ (?) which is to say the particular location of linguistic stress and pressure that a writer in those circumstances is under had one negotiate between the expectations of the printing French market and my own language repertoire. We talked about how the mode of being of de Stael’s text relates to what it says and how the mode of being of the translations by Carlyle and Jean Paul relate to what they say. And it’s always important to think in those ways of thinking, what is the text I’m reading like and how does that relate to what it says? Guissant’s work is a kind of evolving gathering of language performance rather than that kind of massive tome that he is coming out with. He thinks of himself as kind of theorising for a future kind of creating possibilities that can come into being through the future. So thinking about Guissant in connexion to the material we’ve seen so far, what we have with Guissant is a mode of theorising language and culture that does without nations, a theorisation of language starting from the repertoire of Creole and thinking about all languages as having
published as a book. One of the lectures about the poet as hero, thinking about Shakespeare as presiding over the glories of the British Empire. But he's also thinking about the idea of Dante as an Italian national poet, and this is what he says: ‘It’s a great thing for the nation that it gets an articulate voice, that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what the hart of it means! Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity at all. Yet the noble Italy is actually one. Italy produced its Dante. Italy can speak.’ Italy, like the German speaking lands visited by de Stael, is not a nation state at this time, it’s divided up into different principalities, and there was a local nationalist movement of kind of resisting that set of political arrangements and moving towards a liberal and democratic way of being, and Carlyle has become friends with one of the revolutionaries leading of that movement called Mazzini who was an exile in London. So here you can see very clearly the notion of a connection between the literary culture, national state and indeed linguistic unity. So the notion that Dante is writing in a language called Italian, Italian is the language of the future Italian nation state, and therefore, the nation state needs to come into being. Despite the fact that actually languaging in the Italian peninsula at that time was extremely varied(?) and, according to history books, probably only about 2% of people in the Italian peninsula would have written or spoken something that could be called standard Italian, Carlyle can be unaware of that because of class-based reasons, but also because his understanding of Italy comes entirely from print, and so the areas of languaging and the different repertoires that the different people living in that space actually have is invisible to him because his sensitivity comes entirely from printed sources. So here we can see very clearly the relationship between print and this kind of national tradition idea of literature as pointed to by Guissant. The other thing that it’s despite is, of course, that Dante was not writing for print, Dante was writing for manuscript circulation. The language environment in the Middle Ages was much more varied than it was in the 19 th-century Italian peninsula, every manuscript copy of the Comedia in the early days is slightly different from the other ones, as it changes language, as it travels across Italy and across Europe each time it’s copied out. But also, Dante had no sense of himself as writing in Italian and no sense of himself as writing in a particular language attached to a particular place at all. Dante’s theorisation of language was on the one hand a kind of languaging that he calls ‘gramatica’, which is done in Latin, which is writing according to a formal set of rules and of sort of intellectual practises, and on the other hand, what he calls ‘volgare’, which is everyday speech, but one of the great kind of steps he made when he wrote the Comedia, around about 1300, was the decision to try to write down something like the repertoires of speech that were around him, so the decision not to write in what we would call Latin that he would call ‘gramatica’, but rather the decision to write it in a kind of languaging that was then susceptible to being described as Italian later on. So he doesn’t see himself as writing in Italian, but rather in his book De volgari eloquentia he describes a kind of range of language variety of different accents, different spellings and different location, etc., and it’s that range of language variety that he thinks himself as writing his text in. At the start of the Comedia he meets Virgil that he’s been reading in ‘gramatica’ as he would call it, and this is an encounter that could be, and that to some extent is, a moment of assertion of cultural continuity, but what happens in this is a language variety that there is. So Dante’s in a strange place, he sees another figure and he calls out to him saying ‘miserere di me’, a Latin liturgical phrase, thinking he doesn’t know what language anyone is going to be speaking here so he’ll try Latin because maybe that will work, so he shouts and then the language he himself writes is a written down version of the speech that is around him everyday, but it kind of overlaps with words that could perfectly well be in Latin. And then Virgil replies and doesn’t present himself as a representative of Latin culture, but as representative of something much
more local, somebody for Mantua, and that’s the connexion that he has with Dante. So what we’ve got there in Dante is a linguistically varied text, the Comedia is not written in Italian, it’s a text with different language resources put together. So really what I would say by way of summing up is that one of the things we’ve done on several occasions through the lecture is to say here’s a version of this text that is being projected by somebody, e.g., Carlyle is taking the Comedia and saying this is an Italian text, and you can go to the text itself and discover reasons for existing, and what has become very evident through the lecture is the way in which the idea of literature as belonging to national traditions and the conception of comparative literature as kind of operating between separate national traditions is problematic in various ways, and we’ve seen various critiques of that description. This also leaves us with a question about our own practise, because national literary traditions are a way of organising literary material, and comparative literary practice is a way of organizing literary material differently but it’s not reformatting it, you don’t need to bring anything together. So the first step is to see the difficulties with the theorisations that I've been talking about and to turn to a text to discover the language variety in the text and to say actually we need a better description of this, we need a better way of joining this text up with other texts in order to think about them. But then that leaves us with the question of what that way of joining up should be, because what literary traditions do is they join up texts in a kind of sequence and create an archive; what the comparative literary space gives us is the liberty to join up text different. But actually, one of the things that becomes really evident is the way literary material is organised in archives, in institutions, in libraries, so national literary traditions are archiving practices, comparative literary study gives us the freedom to construct our own archive. So if you want to construct a way of relating materials that’s not in a national literature tradition, then what are you doing and what kind of future are you constructing with that? I think Guissant’s vision of the future-orientedness of his theory is really important, and it's something that we are all ourselves engaged in, which is to say that when you bring different texts together and write about them together, you’re constructing an archive, that will then be something that other people encounter and you are creating a kind of literary community that your readers will then enter into.So in a way, it’s for us in our own work to think about the different non-national traditions, the non-national communities, the different kinds of intellectual relation that we set up through our own practise. That’s what I want you to integrate.
to do whilst nevertheless recognising its very standard bias towards the European literary canon. One of the things Said sees is the awareness of the contingency of that very canon: ‘for the first time in modern history, the whole imposing edifice of humanistic knowledge resting on the classics of European letters, and with it the scholarly discipline inculcated formally into students in Western universities through forms familiar to us all, represents only a fraction of the real human relationships and interactions now taking place in the world. Certainly Auerbach was among the last great representatives of those who believed that European culture could be viewed coherently and importantly as unquestionably central to human history.’ So Auerbach is at this liminal moment when he’s trying to rescue something like a coherent vision of European culture, which makes all the more sense when he feels that this was threatened by what was happening in Europe in the 1930-40s, but at the same time he is aware that this is a fragile, if not impossible, project. Not convinced by Said’s timeline when he says that this was the first time in modern history: towards the end of War and Peace, Tolstoj’s narrator is very ironic about the idea of European civilisation ‘the welfare and civilisation of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small north-westerly position of a large continent’, in Tolstoj, in the 19th-century Eastern Russia, that sense of the centrality of what seems to be European civlisation is already being questioned. For Said, one of the reasons why Auerbach is able to make this kind of de-familiarising move about the canon he simultaneously wants to rescue is because of his exile (Emily Apter says that his exile sort of became mythologised and that there were actually plenty of German intellectuals in Instanbul who say that it wasn’t as terrible as Auerbach makes out). Said is interested in what makes Auerbach be able to step back from the European canon as he is trying to save it at the same time: Auerbach’s situated criticsm, there is something about exile that produces this beneficial self-consciousness and awareness of contingency in Auerbach, as far as it is read by Said. ‘In Mimesis Auerbach does not simply admire the Europe he has lost through exile but sees it anew as a composite social and historical enterprise, made and remade unceasingly by men and women in society’, we are going to come back to this ‘composite social and historical enterprise’ Goethe’s version of world literature. Auerbach is aware of the fictionality of what you produce, Ansatzpunkt produces a critical ‘work of art’, that doesn’t mean it’s useless, but it’s going back to his history of legends, he is aware that we are always going to be to some extent simplifying and he wants to give us some of the tools to be aware that of fiction which we would otherwise take for granted and think as being just how the world is. When Auerbach started putting aware this self-aware fiction which might be helpful to understanding dynamics of the whole, Wellek moved to zoom in on aesthetic specificity 1959, he very much wants to make this look for formal aspects of the work of art rather than try and tell the big story(?) in the way that Auerbach hopes to do. In a way that actually seems much less self-conscious than Auerbach, he also thinks that the Western tradition is somehow coherent: comparative literature ‘is obviously right [...] in its conception of a coherent Western tradition of literature woven in a network of innumerable interrelations’ ( Concepts , p. 283), there is a kind of logical jump in this sentence, you can have innumerable interrelations but there is no reason to think that they’re therefore a coherent tradition, and in fact they might much more interestingly bleed into other traditions and indeed that might be a reason for hope because we would then realise that the West has always been provincialized and so we can find ways out of what we thought was the dominant culture. Wellek is doing this in part because he wants to rescue the aesthetic specificity of the work of art and he doesn’t want art to be reduced to, e.g., what George Eliot borrowed from Goethe, if you focus on debit and credit in the work of art you lose specificity of that work of fiction in making that comparison: ‘works of art,
however, are not simply sums of sources and influences: they are wholes in which raw materials derived from elsewhere cease to be inert matter and are assimilated into a new structure’ ( Concepts , p. 285). When we think of the first generation, we immediately think of Auerbach but Wellek is important because prepares the way for an ambivalent character named De Man and for the post-structural version of the Yale school of the 70s and 80s. Comparative literature is not going to be looking for influences, but something about the way in which you honour the aesthetic specificity of the works that you’re comparing. Nevertheless, ‘nothing would be further from my mind than to deny the human relevance of art or to erect a barrier between history and formal study’ ( Concepts , p. 294): he is kind of pulling in two directions, he wants to defend the aesthetic autonomy and yet he wants to say you obviously need to consider its context. But he is basically into aesthetic autonomy and coherence, he is retreating from the chaos of there being so much culture we can’t really order it to say ‘somehow, we will look at the formal ordering of the work of art, we will get some version of coherence, and indeed, the Western tradition that we will compare and contrast within it will also show some coherence. He is not really interested in comparing beyond the Western tradition, but we get a sense of order again by focusing on the order that is aesthetic form itself. But in parallel to Auerbach he is aware that what the world produces is to some extent a fiction, we are basically re-enacting the values that were kept in the aesthetic sphere by doing this work of honouring the specificity of the literary form. De Man as development/critique of the Auerbach/Wellek approach So Wellek says: art has some relation to the world, but the most important thing is to focus on the specificity of the aesthetic form and not to reduce the aesthetic form to credits and debits and national influences, and this staring at the form is essential what makes Paul De Man go blind: all he sees is rhetoric, and he loses the ability for rhetoric to have any reference to the world beyond it, so the trick that De Man always does is taking you to the point where you can’t tell whether you’re looking at the world or at a piece of rhetoric and there’s no place you can go and stand to understand whether it is rhetoric or real. In Auerbach and Wellek we had this awareness that there was something fictional about the world of criticism, and now De Man says: ‘literature, as well as criticism – the difference between them being delusive […]’. Wellek’s attention to form in de Man becomes an awareness that there is only form and form might always already be getting in the way, and indeed even that awareness might be an example of form getting in the way. Yale school in its second generation takes seriously the fact that culture a cognitive import, we’re not escaping the world, we’re trying to make sense of the world. So, despite Wellek’s attempts to rescue the specificity of the aesthetic form, certainly by the time we get to the second generation, because of the awareness that obviously all philosophical texts also have a rhetorical aspect, we make sense of the world in and through narrative: ‘Without the pressure of philosophy on literary texts, or the reciprocal pressure of literary analysis on philosophical writing, each discipline becomes impoverished’ (Geoffrey Hartman, “Preface,” Deconstruction and Criticism , 1979). Musil’s The man without qualities would be a great example of philosophizing and also a piece of literature. ‘The emphasis has increasingly moved toward literature as a language about language, or a metalinguistic discipline best understood as a response to the specific complexities and resources of language. From this perspective, the anthropological function of literature cannot be examined with any rigor before its epistemological and verbal status has been understood’ (‘Curriculum for Lit Z Proposal (1975),’ The Paul de Man Notebooks , pp. 247-48): importance
which that you don’t have an overview, you try and do well what the situation is demanding of you in the here and now, but you do it well because you’ve learnt the practical tools that allow you to engage with it. So it is this sense of how culture is a set of tools that people learn to use and debate between one other, and the fact that the knowledge is in the cultural tools and not in our heads that helps us break out of the problem by which the brain is the centre of cognition and we can’t see anything. Goethe puts forth the idea that if you know your trade well, then that trade already has the skills which allow you to connect with and make sense of the wider world. Through the intelligence in the tools themselves we can get a more optimistic version of the conversation about world culture and break out of the European tradition and the worrying anxiety of ignorance that comes with being stuck in a cartesian mindset and take Auerbach’s and Benjamin’s intuition and move them beyond the European canon that they are both very much stuck in. Pushing a little bit beyond what Auerbach and Wellek said about criticism as an act of imagination to writing and reading as both situated forms of social interactions.
Week 4 – Figures Two figures interesting for the way they show a motif being picked up and reworked across a large corpus : George Steiner’s (1929-2020) Antigones: The Antigone myth in Western literature, art and thought , and Terence Cave’s (b. 1938) Mignon’s afterlives: crossing cultures from Goethe to the twenty-first century. We could read both of these critics as using their chosen literary figure as something like Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt. Steiner’s Ansatzpunkt : Antigone is specifically important in relation to European culture, reacting to the radical changes brought about by the French revolution. Cave thinks he is doing one better than Auerbach by introducing what he calls a ‘category’, as a way of developing with and beyond Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt. He pays close attention to the details of the text he is dealing with and he wants us to avoid reducing them to a programme that we know in advance. He encourages flexibility and engagement with afterlife, which is pluralistic, but the figure of Mignon becomes meta-fictional rather than historically dense. Virgil taking on of figures is aware of its historical situation and knows it’s doing historical work as it reappropriates figures -> historically specific, politically motivated version of the figure. Jung’s version of a ‘visionary’ archetypal literature depends much more on the sense that there is some deep human need to which archetypes answer, and the archetypes are in some sense always doing versions of that need wherever they turn up -> Jung: figures are answering some deeper need; Virgil: figures are powerful ways of making meaning that are rewritten and readapted to specific situations; useful heuristic contrast between the extreme ends of how different literary traditions have used figures from other traditions or from their own past. Sophocles’ Antigone :
that he has not yet received his author copies. As he relates to the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal in January 1924, the process of translation has taught him that “translation is never finished. Nine years passed between my first attempt at a translation of the Flowers of Evil and the book publication. This time allowed me to make many improvements, but also toward the end, afforded me insight to what was inadequate but nonetheless not amenable to ‘improvements’. I have become so clearly conscious of the problem that I am given sufficient incentive to undertake the translation I knew.” It is after he has finished his translation and after it has been published that he suddenly feels that he could do it all over again with all the insights that he has learned through the process of doing it the first time. To Benjamin’s dismay, Stefan Zweig was asked to review the book for the Frankfurter Zeitung, a major periodical. According to Zweig, Benjamin’s responsible for the third worst German translation of Baudelaire, and the review is, in his word, “obviously petty”. But what wrinkles Benjamin most of all is that Zweig dismisses the foreword: “disposes of the foreword with the following parenthetical comment: ‘translation (the difficulties of which the author is aware, as the foreword demonstrates)’.” For some reason, this really bothers Benjamin. He is being called out for writing a foreword that doesn’t in the end really address the practice of translation, and yet, these letters, which span several years, attest to both the practical and philosophical challenges that this translation raises for Benjamin, and perhaps it is precisely because the practice itself is so difficult that the only way to approach translation is theoretically, metaphorically, abstractly. And yet what this correspondence illuminates for us, is the nature of this practice: one that happens in the context of missed deadlines, money troubles, difficult publishers and even, according to one early letter, sciatica pain. Two decades earlier, while living in London, the Hebrew writer
