Ovidiu Mircean

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

vlmihnea@yahoo.com

 

 

The Death of Comparative Literature. False News about True Events

 

 

Abstract: The study is a polemic response to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline. It analyses the political implications of the “new comparative literature” announced in the book, with constant references to the traditional issue of the “crisis of comparative literature”, or to examples of comparatist studies published nowadays and their hermeneutical implications.

Keywords: Comparative literature; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; “Death of a discipline”; Trans-atlantic studies; Charles Bernheimer; Postcolonialism.

 

 

1. Should we wait for the Aliens?

 

In the light of the last six years of different comparative studies published since the death sentence pronounced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her well received essay, The Death of a Discipline (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003), we can only say that the rumors about the death of comparative literature as an academic discipline have been wildly exaggerated. The branch of literary studies reunited under the general title of „comparative literature” flourishes nowadays in a wide variety of frivolous and scientifically promiscuous approaches to the literary phenomena. Both the politicized studies of postcolonialism and cultural materialism, and the return of the old fashioned rhetoric in the surprising reemergence of “New Criticism” turned out to be finally labeled as “comparatist”. One possible explanation for this all-inclusive character of a once classical and somewhat exclusivist field of research lies in the expansion of many departments of English, Modern Literatures or Literary Theory into larger academic units defined under the more comfortable nominal umbrella of “Comparative literature”. One the one hand, the discipline survives in many universities and reviews specifically dedicated to comparatist thematics, on the other hand it is pronounced as being dead and obsolete. Nothing new so far, if we look back at its history. Comparative literature has always been defined in terms of crisis, in-betweenness, liminality and hybridity, reasons for which it has become the ultimate playground of deconstructivism (I never understood the posmodernists’ tendency of deliberately forgetting the fact that both Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller taught comparative literature at Yale), and later on, of its postmodern inheritors. Every single theoretical attempt of defining the object and the methodology of this strange academic discipline founded on comparison used the word “crisis” as the main idea opening and closing the study. The truth is that for the last eighty years of literary criticism, comparative literature lay dying, and no one seemed to mind the agonizing spectacle of this scientific diva, quite the contrary. The small-scale Apocalypse repeatedly announced in the field of humanistic research is not as much an objective analysis, but mostly a legitimizing discourse. If the death of the discipline really occurred, the few scholars remaining are the human survivors of the downfall, the last key-holders of a lost and encrypted knowledge. Dramatic, debatable, and also, convenient. Apart from the obvious editorial reasons of such a sensational title that Gayatri Spivak chose, her overt intentions are those of legitimizing a new comparative literature. The book discusses some important strategies of academic survival and also points towards an underlying ethics of any contemporary literary approach that cannot avoid the issues of political contextualization. As important as it might be in the field of the recent history of literary comparatism, (and undoubtly, it has an outstanding role in describing its limits), Gayatri Spivak’s essay carries the disadvantage of a superficially glamorous title. It is not inadequate from a theoretical perspective, but it is stylistically redundant. Unfortunately, our publishing world is “more than kind and less then kin” with Nietzsche to allow memorable sentences about the successive deaths and rebirths of various gods and random literary genres.

Yet, dead or alive, our headless horseman returns, determined to haunt the academic curricula. The renewed discipline announced by Spivak is meant to absorb both the traditional Eurocentric and therefore inescapably imperialistic comparatism and the so called “Area studies”, in one single global field of research that would inherit the interdisciplinary play of the former and the rigorous positivistic instruments of the latter. The new inclusive comparative literature, oblivious of its old imperialistic origins would be a border-crossing discipline, an “instrument of othering”, perfectly adapted to the new reality of the virtualization of frontiers, and the prevalence of the demographic on the territorial. Nowadays, the literary critic should turn his attention from nations to collectivities, gaining awareness of the “teleopoiesis” inherent in his writings. Spivak borrows from Heidegger (via Derrida) the above mentioned term designating the logical ends of literary criticism which function as a gravitational force for every critical gesture. In other words, every critical text is inextricably bound not only to its conclusion, but also to its effects, which is nothing but a longer and more sophisticated way of re-asserting the need for ethical awareness and, subsequently, for extreme political correctness.

“Again, I am not advocating the politicization of the discipline. I am advocating a depoliticization of the politics of hostility toward a politics of friendship to come, and thinking of the role of Comparative Literature in such a responsible effort[1].”

At this point, I must reveal myself as a flawed reader. Firstly, for any young man educated in one of the ex-communist Eastern European countries, the Marxist echoes of the expression “politics of friendship” are able to generate a strong wave of collective shudder and I seriously wonder if the mirroring reactions of the Western minds could be more than an ironical smile. Secondly, as a young academic involved in the teaching and the practice of comparative literature, I have a serious problem in picturing myself professing an ideology of “politics of friendship”, even if ultimately ignoring all of its Marxist background. Still, as friendless as I might turn out to be (the style of this particular essay might be eloquent for this matter), and however ideologically biased, I cannot but notice that the fragment quoted above, central in Spivak’s essay, contains a deliberate logical contradiction. Utopian or not, a “depoliticization toward a politics of friendship” is still a politicization. The “teleopoiesis” of the critical act is meant to achieve a totalizing consensus of the scholars, a shared view of their ethical stand, no matter how liberal and pluralistic the concept of “friendship” turns out to be. I am sure that none of the eighteenth century readers saw in Robinson’s relationship to Friday anything more than a genuine, generous friendship, and Defoe’s characters are still debatable in spite of the post-colonial consensus on the topic. Even if accomplished, the ideal “politics of friendship” advocated by Gayatri Spivak would not eliminate power: it would dismiss any control issues between the former center and margins, placing power in the collective ideological consensus that would function as a perfect crushing censorship.

Lacking any historical background, the Death of a Discipline eliminates all of a sudden the traditional polemics on the topics, turning more to utopian escapism than to scientifical analysis. In fact, a historical amnesia seems to underlie Spivak’s statements; even if she mentions the old school of comparatists, among which Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, R. Wellek, Renato Poggioli, Claudio Guillén, the essays ignores all the well known debates about the “crisis of comparative literature”, focusing strictly on the recent post-colonial wave, as if the object of the discipline had always been the political territory of the literary discourse. In fact, Comparative Literature has been defined more often through specific instruments than through a specific object of study, a fact that allowed scholars to migrate easily from literary texts to films or mythology. The main anguish of comparatists has always been the total lack of territory which threatened their positions in universities. In Charles Bernheimer’s volume, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism[2], there are relevant stories of possessive reactions of scholars to any comparatist trespassing into their own field of research. Sadly enough, I personally stirred the resentment of a very distinguished colleague by delivering a series of seminars on the author she was specialized in. Dante belongs to dantologists, Proust to the department of French and T.S. Eliot to English studies. No trespassing! The cynical reasons behind much of the discussions concerning the object of comparative literature are not of hermeneutical or theoretical nature; unfortunately, it all comes down to a very serious question of labor division. Spivak’s transition from territories to collectivities seems to solve the problem, at least temporarily till the sociologists will start their own accusations of dilettantism against the new trespassers. Ironically enough, while professing a post-colonialist ethics, many of the contemporary comparatists are desperately looking for a new land or providential island to colonize.

Maybe the most relevant example for that is the very peculiar case of the Transatlantic Studies, recently emerged through the publication of an interesting legitimizing anthology, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor[3]. The volume aims to present a theoretical framework for this brand new field of imagology, recontextualizing forty-two excerpts from previously published essays, some of them belonging to very famous names of literary criticism and cultural studies, among which Walter Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Roman Jakobson or James Hillis Miller. The two authors, American scholars in Anglo-American cultural relations, extended the theme of the dialogue between the old and the new world to the whole transatlantic space, including the Latin Americas or the Western African Coast, establishing a continental claim on an intercontinental space of their own. While the Atlantic has never been an interior sea as the Mediterranean, the fictional construct of a presumable „Atlantic identity” is at least conveniently plurivocal, built through simultanous overlapping of concurrential ideological discourses, among which the two modern „empires”, the British and the American. If the Atlantic is to become an inner sea of the West, it changes the identity of the Occidental individual, rewriting it in a new net of ideological juxtapositions. The old Renaissance concept of „the republic of letters” is recontextualized in the present day form of transnational scholarship unified by a common linguistic environment that is the majoritary use of English, French and Spanish over the Atlantic. Obviously, the sine qua non authorities of postcolonialism are automatically invoked. The second part of the book, entitled „Theories and Practice of Comparative Literature” challenges the traditional approaches of the discipline, dependent upon the axiological centrality of the Western Canon. Instead of a principle of exclusivistic aesthetic value, the text proposes Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, or, the „rhizomatic influence of ideas” across the postcolonial world of the Atlantic. Even if the last section of the book returns to the model of positivistic French comparatism, analysing binary influences between Atlantic authors, its main definition of literature remains the deconstructivist approach of J. H. Miller: „node[s] or intersection[s] in an overdetermined network of associations, influences, constraints, and connections, often connections leaping far over chronological or geographical contiguity[4]”. This assumption, however, cannot overcome the danger of a subtle form of imperialism: as descentered as it might seem, the rhizomatic model of „circum-atlantic relations” seems to serve the central pattern of the American melting pot. In fact, this compilation promotes the conceptualization of American culture within the broader context of transatlantic activity. Secondly, it does not overcome the odd habit of the latter days comparatists of defining their object of study on a geographical basis. Since there is no single sign that this habit is about to change, I can only wonder what the future holds for the perpetual cast-aways from all the formerly white spots of the map. An interplanetary domain, perhaps? Should the young wolves of literary criticism, eager to affirm their voice, wait for the aliens?

The answer is much simpler and lies in the less appetizing bones of the past.

 

2. Old bones of contention

 

More than twenty years after the wave of American deconstructivism was tamed in slightly milder discursive forms, the humanistic disciplines continue to revolve around its inheritance, not only in grounding their epistemological assertions, but also in the impossibility of discarding a strong ethical reflex. An ethics of self-subversion undermines the premises of all humanistic knowledge and questions all claims of methodological coherence and rigor. The aim never justifies the means seems to be the quintessence of the new deontology built on a self-validating meta-discourse. Subsequently, the researcher’s instruments have lost their ability of approaching transitively the object of study. It is mostly created by the very means meant to focus on it: the historical truth emerges only inside the narrative representing it, the sense of a literary text only through the type of hermeneutics that is applied, and the conclusions of a philosophical discourse are tributary to the type of logical constructions used. A general discourse on the method could place the science of literature in a hegemonic position, as the other humanist sciences as history, anthropology, philosophy are being annexed to the traditional object of study of philology: the text. This territorial advancement in areas of knowledge formerly alien to the literary debate has caused both a dissemination of the object of study and a remarkable methodological eclecticism.

Finally, after long years of being cast away from the feast of positivistic rigor, comparative literature has never felt more at home: in full crisis. The main works which defined its object and methods in the second half of the last century started from discussing its constitutive crisis (Wellek in 1959, Etiémble in 1963, Bernheimer in 1994) and the odd status of this branch of the literary science that has never been able to define its own specific field of research. Without any grounding in monographic studies or in the history of a national literature, identified only through the ineffable character of comparison, the discipline has become the queen of all bridges that unite the literary province with its surroundings. What is common in these views on the role of comparatist is not the socio-political context but the “in-betweenness” of their object of study. The comparatist himself does not belong to any kind of super-specialized knowledge, being often an exiled in an indeterminate zone. Spivak herself explains the birth of the American comparatism as a result of a massive intellectual exile to the States, but once again the stress on their political involvement is slightly exaggerated:

“Area Studies was established to secure U.S. power in the cold war. Comparative Literature was a result of European intellectuals fleeing “totalitarian” regimes. Cultural and Postcolonial Studies relate to the 500 percent increase in Asian immigration in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s reform of the Immigration Act of 1965.[5]”

Explaining the birth of the American school through an exclusive cause found in the political context is highly problematic. Without denying the pervasive liberal spirit of the American comparatists and its anti-totalitarian motivation, one cannot ignore the fact that the seemingly new scholarly positions of the U.S. academics were more than sixty years old. Their methodological views, indeed very different from the French school, find a perfect correspondence in the position of the first world review of comparative literature, Acta Comparationis Literarum Universarum, originated in the late 19^th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, or in that of the American M. Posnett who wrote approximately in the same period, long before the birth of the first totalitarian regime in Europe. Moreover, however right-proven it may be, the contemporary school of political suspicion cannot simply wipe out the organic history of literary hermeneutics. Ultimately, even if one chooses to explain every single cultural event as a clear outcome of the political context, the birth or the death of a literary discipline cannot be proclaimed without asserting what is lost and what is gained in hermeneutics. Be it a territory, a community, a theme, an influence, or a whole gallery of “je ne sais quois”, the object of comparative literature has always been the creative result of a specific form of hermeneutics.

It is not at random the fact that the two main schools of comparatism, the French and the American one, took extreme opposite positions. The methodological minimalism of the French school consisting of very detailed analyses of the literary influences between writers was overcome by the maximalism of the American school which opened chains of analogies to extraliterary works and larger cultural areas. If the main aim of the French genetic comparatist was to add a very authorized footnote to a critical monography, the American comparatist of typologies has huge ambitions: his secret wish is to write an essay on the philosophy of culture. The former uses a microscope to observe the germs of contamination between texts, while the latter focuses his telescope towards large cultural constellations; the opposition between them cannot be reduced to the conflict between analysis and synthesis. Also, both of the schools can be successfully labeled as products of the imperialistic mind, but I fail to see how that contributes to the history of the discipline. The French school is born in the tradition of European historism, being perfectly integrated in the field of the science of literature, even if its methods are obviously anachronic when compared to the new hermeneutics of the third decade of the last century. On the other hand, the studies of thematology and the maximalist ones inherit the epistemological background of high modernism, when most humanistic sciences secretly aspired to the position of a totalizing system, organizing general human experiences and transcending all cultural boundaries. Anthropology, which seems to be the prototypal science of the age, will successfully contaminate the neighboring disciplines with its own structuralist urge for universals (archetypes, mythological structures, formal patterns). Rejected by the French School and nursed by structuralism, the maximalist comparatism is the illegitimate son of anthropology. It gives up the obsolete rigors of the French, in order to play with fascinating evolutions of random themes and universals. Very soon, the play of this miracle child of the science of literature trespassing into the history of ideas or social sciences will make him forget the primary object of study: the text as an aesthetic object. The methods of the new-born American Comparative Literature were not limited to gathering proves form the writers’ biographies or dusty libraries, but this anti-positivistic liberalism would very soon open the gates of the discipline to all dilettantisms and essayistic tendencies. Lack of minimal rigor would be very conveniently read as “totalizing intuition”. One of the first interesting reactions to this dissemination that anticipates with a few decades New Historicism is that of Leo Spitzer:

„Under the noble pretext of introducing history of ideas into literary criticism, there have appeared in recent times, with the approval of the departments of literary history, academic thesis with such titles as Money in Seventeenth Century French (English, Spanish, etc) Comedy, Political Tendencies in Nineteenth Century French (English, Spanish, etc) Literature. Thus, we have come to disregard the philological character of literary history, which is concerned not with ideas couched in linguistic form, not with ideas in themselves (that is the field of philosophy) or with ideas as informing action (that is the field of history and the social sciences). Only in the linguistico-literary field we are philologians competent qua scholars. The type of dissertations cited above reveals an unwarranted extension of the (in itself condemnable) tendency towards breaking down departamental barriers, to such a degree that literary history becomes the gay sporting ground of incompetence. Students of the departments of literature come to treat the complex subjects of a philosohical, political or economic nature with the same self-assurance that once characterized those positivists who wrote on The Horse in Medieval Literature.[6]”

Leo Spitzer’s warning given in 1948 is still valid today: having left the safe heaven of the linguistico-literary field, literary comparatists have been trying for the last sixty years of nomadic disciplinary existence to obtain complete scholar recognition. The history of the methodological discontinuities and of the theoretical polemics that comparative literature caused in the second half of the last century perfectly reflect the constant need of its followers to exorcize their fundamental anxiety. Charles Bernheimer defines it perfectly as an obsession of constantly redefining the object of study into a more stable and tangible topic. While they refuse to return to the long forgotten „Egypt” of the aesthetic literary text, the comparatists constantly borrow areas of research from close disciplines. The literary text they comment upon is a sociological data, a political subversive discourse, a cultural symptom, an indirect sublimation of a religious feeling, a philosophical theory brilliantly enacted, but seldom, or almost never an artistic linguistic phenomenon. Let it be a rhizomatic prove for the existence of a Trans-Atlantic identity. Or let the comparatists be the hired militia for the promoting of the new „politics of friendship” professed by Spivak. It is a perfect illuministic project of a global-scale reeducation of the masses by erasing all the elements and discourses leading to the „politics of hostility”, starting with the Western Canon. Erring in an ethic desert, Spivak’s „comparative literature” is far from being dead. It dreams of a Promised Land, planning a gentle and sympathetic cultural jihad.

 

3. Who died, in the end?

 

Rumor has it that they are all alive and coming after us. The right question that haunts everyone’s mind should be a far more cynical one: who gets the financial support? Or how can we, as comparatists, accidentally come across an ideological gold mine such as a trendy political position? It could not happen without a strong opposition from the most conservative party of comparative literature. In 1995 Charles Bernheimer identified the endless debate, still going on, between „formalists” and „contextualists”, or what I prefer to call the irreducible opposition between the aesthetic monasticism of the modernists and the postmodern promiscuity. The former keep ignoring literature’body (as a discourse of desire, innevitably projected outside itself), while the latter are oblivious of literature’s inner soul (the voiced „language”). Yet, both schools share a generalizing obsession, or in Margaret Higonnet’s terms, „a hunger for plenitude”, a „bulimic pathology[7]”, which can lead the „school of resentment”, or the cannon defenders to declare their obsolete methods, or even academic death. Miss Spivak is not the first person to announce the much discussed „death of the discipline”. Back in 1958, Albert Guérard was asking the question: „How and when shall we commit suicide?”, prophesising that comparative literature will disappear in its very victory: „the final extirpation of the nationalistic heresy[8]” Politicized as it was, Albert Guérard’s perspective eliminated altogether any relevance of the nationalistic issues, proposing instead a general study of world literature. In other words, comparative literature will die once it has achieved its goals of destroying nationalistic boundaries, by revealing the common cultural elements, the universal formal characteristics of the literary works analyzed in a general aesthetic competition. Of course, one can easily contextualize this stand within the anti-totalitarian liberalism of the sixties and identify a globalizing imperialistic impulse. Nothing contrasts more to Miss Spivak’s position than this utopian plea for the elimination of the national identity/limits and of all of its occurrences in the field of literary studies. While Gayatri Spivak redefines comparative literature as a „cross-boundary” discipline, she reconfirms the boundaries from an ethical perspective. Any mentioning of the aesthetic principle would immediately cancel their relevance, which explains also the author’s reluctance of ever approaching the question of the hermeneutical instruments of the discipline. In fact, the only presumable death is that of the theoretical and historical awareness of any would-be scholar of comparative literature.

 

 

Notes