Ovidiu Mircean

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

vlmihnea@yahoo.com

 

 

Perspectives on Haun Saussy’s “Metadisciplinary Comparativism”

 

 

Abstract: The article discusses the latest ACLA report on the state of comparative literature published by Haun Saussy in the collective volume Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalisation. Two main challenging ideas are the main focus of the inquiry, the former being the ideatic inheritance of the old “literariness”, while the latter explores the possibilities of a metadisciplinary comparativism, taking into account the traditional idea of interdisciplinarity, as well as the contradictory definitions of the object and the method of comparative literature as particular field of research.

Keywords: Comparative literature; Haun Saussy; Interdisciplinarity; Meta-disciplinarity; ACLA reports; René Wellek; Henry Remak; Peter Brooks; Homological comparativism; Analogical comparativism.

 

 

One of the most challenging contributions to the recent debates upon the future of comparative literature as a humanistic field of research belongs to Haun Saussy, the president of the American Comparative Literature Association. The Recent theoretical assumption advanced by Saussy in the article Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares, published in the edited volume Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization along with other eighteen answers from distinguished scholars quietly undermines the general perspective upon the over-hybridised methods and objects of this literary discipline. Apparently, the reviews and the responses given to the initial text fail to grasp the real theoretical dimension of Haun Saussy’s stand, focusing mostly on its territorial inclusion or accent put on the recent trends of the field. Even if the initial tone of the author is played on triumphant notes, announcing that comparative literature has won all its battles, being in a constant crisis of identification and at the same time successfully surviving it, the article continues by being not only slightly polemical with the previous ACLA report published by Charles Bernheimer in 1993, but transferring the entire dilemma regarding disciplinary objects and methods to an entirely different theoretical stand. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Exquisite cadavers… manifests a mild reluctance to the extreme opening of the disciplinary boundaries prophesised by Bernheimer, but by proposing a radical new perspective that could actually redefine what is nowadays comparative literature, it envisages possible new limitations of this conceptual term.

“Comparative literature –writes Haun Saussy- is best known, not as the reading of literature, but as reading literarily (with intensive textual scrutiny and metatheoretical awareness) whatever there may be to read. Contextualisation is always a legitimate epistemological move, but let us not grant any context the final authority of the real. […] What most needs to be preserved, what is at stake when we debate whether comparative literature still has a role to play or can be allowed to vanish, its work on earth accomplished, is metadisciplinarity: not because it sounds prestigious or guarantees our uniqueness, but because it is the condition of our openness to new objects and forms of inquiry”[1]

The first affirmation begins by a liberal opening of the field of the discipline outside the borders of literature and it is continued by a following dynamite exploded at the very core of any imaginable object of research: “whatever could be there to read” might allude to the idea that anything, or the entire world, unaware of itself like a sleeping beauty, might be awaiting to be brought back to life in reading. As contemporary readers, whether enthusiastic or reluctant heirs of semiotics and deconstructivism, are we to interpret this as an open invitation to bring into focus the entire culture of humanity, as long as it can be fashionably understood or translated textually? Simply by asking such a question we are positioned inside a long tradition of defining sciences starting from a very specific, concrete and reified object of study, which could never welcome such loose and ambiguous determinants as “whatever”. It is clear that by dismantling an objectified territory of research, Saussy’s chain of arguments relies on the method that alone is constantly configuring and defining the object it is aiming to. According to this, the object of comparative literature is in the eye of the beholder, and as long as it announces a new type of freedom of research, it predefines also new boundaries and new restrictions. Even if the author chooses to open the Preface of the book by renouncing any claim of institutional authority and rejecting the image of an Olympian consensus about the fate of comparatists or the paths they should take, the truth is that we are dealing with the first ACLA report rooted on a theoretical stand, not on a legalistic position or a conciliatory mood. In other words, Haun Saussy’s text reminds more of the first two ACLA reports which were suggestively entitled “report on standards”, than the previous one, belonging to Charles Bernheimer, which was mostly a descriptive text meant to depict a new all-inclusive geography of comparative literature, officially recognizing multiculturalism as a legitimate child of a confused parent struggling permanently with an identity crisis. If, with Bernheimer’s text, comparative literature came out from the closet of the academic scepticism inherited from its American patriarchs, with Haun Saussy’s theoretical contribution, it traces the standards, the hues and the lines of its dandyistic clothing. And it is certainly not easy to dress up to these legitimate expectations, since the first term, “reading literarily” brings out from a too hastily closed coffin, the haunted-haunting concept of “literariness”. What is implied here is not the Formalist meaning of the word, but its functional model, the dynamic understanding of reading: “what is needed is a term similar to “literariness” but that will not suggest an exclusive focus on written texts, on imaginative “literature” (a subdivision of the written that has been current for only a couple of centuries), or more misleadingly still, a particular canon of texts. Culture will not do it; culture is all about subsumption into historical identities and systems of value”. The transition suggested above recalls Saussure’s shift of focus from langue to parole, from ergon to energeia, from the Egypt of a well-defined and reified object to the dynamic wonderings of the method. And yet, for all the trends of comparative literature that have celebrated their liberation from the rigours of the formalist criticisms, any reference to “literariness” might still enact a phantom menace.

 

Is “literariness” alive and coming after us?

 

In 1949, a turning year for the history of the discipline, since it marks the appearance of Theory of Literature, René Wellek was already criticising the positivistic limitations of the French school, shifting the comparatist discourse from the analysis of the direct influences between authors to analogies of theme and structure. Apart from denouncing the nationalistic sectarianism of the traditional European school and from promoting a new kind of liberal humanism, Wellek was profoundly indebted to his European roots, especially to the Prague School and to the idea of literarity/literariness imported from the Russian Formalists and largely popularised by Roman Jakobson. Instead of opening the ways of any kind of literary or inter-disciplinary comparison, the Yale scholar repeatedly stated that the final aim of any such study is “comparative literariness”. Moreover, in 1965, in an issue of Comparative Literature that published a monographical study in his honour, Wellek offered an answer in which he warned against an excessive professional frivolity that comparatists tended to suffer from: “It is time for us to return to an understanding of the nature of art. A work of art is an object or a process of some shape and unity which sets it off from life in a row. But such a conception must apparently be guarded against the misunderstanding of being “art for art’s sake”, the ivory tower, or asserting the irrelevance of art to life. All great aestheticians have claimed a role for art in society and thought that art flourishes best in good society. They knew that art humanizes man, that man becomes fully human only through art. It seems to me that literary study again recognize the realm of art and stop being all things to all men, that it returned to its own task of understanding, explaining and transmitting literature. Otherwise, it will dissolve into the study of all history and all life. I know that students – and not only young students – are often resistive to such apparent limitations. Literature for them is simply an occasion or a pretext for the solution of their personal problems and the general problems of our civilization. But literary scholarship, as organized knowledge, needs such limitations.”[2]

Whatever the “nature of art” might have meant for René Wellek, it comprised the classical Aristotelian idea of formal excellence, and an echo of the Formalist process of “defamiliarisation”. As generous as it was in terms of aesthetic and formalist relevance, Wellek’s idea of “comparative literariness” was never truly followed, as long as the author himself dedicated his professional life mostly to the study of literary criticism, avoiding to exemplify in a specific form of literary interpretation how such a comparative research might actually work. Literariness, as Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky would have it, is always to be negotiated differently in every particular act of reading, since the literary value can be achieved only through the shock of innovation, through a symbolic rape of the reader’s perception. Therefore an extreme atomisation of the literary research to every particular act of reading seemed to be ungraspable. What the formalists did, hunting for the running silver of literariness, was to identify the algebric formulas by way of which literary language usually defamiliarises perception. The historical paradox of the formalisms of any kind is that by trying to enhance the dynamic vision of texts as parole, as living organisms rather than finished products, they almost always end up with the most reified results: bones, tropes, algebric structures. By insisting on the inner life of language, very often they fail to see what is humanly vivid inside literature. We are not very far from what contemporary theories trace back as being a kind of structuralist elitism that totally neglects the role of the referential function of any literary language. On the contrary, thematological comparitivism and all its present day avatars assume as a premises a pre-structuralist thesis: the belief that either programatically or through unconscious and/or inherited mechanisms, in the end, a literary work always refers to or osmotically incorporates an external reality. This very presumption of the underlying realism of every piece of literature, that however auto-referential might be, keeps being external-oriented, recording the echoes, the shadows and the pieces of information of its own epoch legitimises the idea of a pre-existent, already given object or theme for any kind of literary research. The more spectacular the archaeology of the hidden meaning is in a vivid inquiry through different contexts and areas of civilization, the more is gained by a thematic approach in terms of heuristic credit, even if it may lose any literary relevance. Retrieving valid pieces of information from the cultural or historical context often supposes understanding literature as an almost random symptom for something else. Formalists are fascinated by the way in which a literary work breathes, while contextualists focus on what it actually says. However reductive and manicheistic it might be, this opposition reveals the fact that any switch of attention from object to method, from the anatomy of a work of art to the physiology of its existence, will bring most theoretical approaches in the proximity of the old formalist arguments. It is not at random that Haun Saussy’s perspective invokes both “literary reading” and “literarity”, echoing René Wellek’s ideas, and by doing so, it is situated on a somewhat polemical stand against Bernheimer’s report.

Undoubtedly, the contexts differ completely. Most of the definitions of comparative literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century proved to be reluctant to Wellek’s “literariness” and replicated in slightly different forms an object-related acceptance of the term. To some extent, this gradual oblivion of the formal textual aspects came with a growing use of texts in translation as objects of inquiry. On the other hand, the rhetorical grammar of the text might be more exciting for wannabe writers, while themes and contexts are a topic of interest for everyone. If we position ourselves inside René Wellek’s perspective, Henry Remak’s generous definition appears to be a slightly confusing vision, missing the very point of what it is trying to define: “Comparative literature is the study of literature beyond the confines of a particular country, and the study of the relationships between literature on the one hand and other areas of knowledge and belief such as the arts, philosophy, history, social sciences, religion and others. In brief, it is the comparison of one literature with another or others and the comparison of literature with other spheres of human understanding.”[3] The problem with Remak’s definition is that it offers an inventory of objects among which comparison should prove functional, but it does not offer any logical argument for the necessity of “literature” as a chosen object. Not only it does not position itself inside the science of literature, but the focus of its attention seems almost random. Since comparison is the only method involved, with no given finality, is there any reason to stop from going forward? Why should any researcher navigate along the coast of the literary tradition since the open ocean of ideas, ethics, history of art, history of religion, or anthropology is constantly calling? If sailing, or constantly comparing is his true call, why should the comparatist ever refrain from following the mermaids’ song? Any other name would smell as sweet, as a long forgotten past would have it. The institutional affiliation to a department of comparative literature is hardly a satisfying answer. It would only ever reduce the comparatist to the frustrating position of a coast guard, reluctantly hovering around the lighthouse and secretly wishing to weather the sea storms of the philosophy of culture. Claudio Guillen chooses to criticise the same definition, invoking the idea that the comparative method can never be an exclusive constitutive factor, because it is a common reflex of thought inside many sciences. “I acknowledge – Guillen writes – that interdisciplinary imagination is and has been extremely fruitful; without such imagination it would not be possible to comprehend the history of natural sciences, for instance. But what we are concerned with here above all, are the identity and existence of a discipline, one that cannot be defined to begin with, as mens ab alio.”[4] In Haun Saussy’s view, the history of comparative literature has proven to be, on the contrary, one of “universal and anonymous donors”, of people that abandoned the lighthouses of well defined territories, taking a leap of faith into the unknown, and often leading to fruitful results in other domains of research. For instance, Auerbach remains a representative name for comparative stylistics, de Man for poststructuralism, Said for orientalism, or Spivak for postcolonialism, and it is often forgotten that, to begin with, they were all comparatists. However, Guillen’s remark still needs a reply, whether a discipline defined rather through a particular object or method, can still find its specificity in mens ab alio.

Following the Levin and the Greene report, both of which announced a crisis of the professional standards of the discipline, the Bernheimer report openly wishes to overcome the traditional anxieties of comparative literature, by integrating the most eclectic and hybrid methods of critical inquiry in an almost impossible holistic synthesis. It could have never done so, but for a gesture with serious theoretical implications: giving up “literature”, or any acceptance of the term that might claim specificity. “These ways of contextualising literature in the expanded fields of discourse, culture, ideology, race, and gender are so different from the old models of literary study according to authors, nations, periods, and genres that the term <literature> may no longer adequately describe our object of study. […] Literary phenomena are no longer the exclusive focus of our discipline. Rather, literary texts are now being approached as one discursive practice among many others in a complex, shifting, and often contradictory field of cultural production.”[5] Saussy’s position might be read as consistently similar, yet, by not granting the context the final authority of the real, Exquisite Cadavers… implicitly questions the predominant referential assumptions of the contemporary thematological avatars. At first, it begins by taking into account the possibilities of existence of a common referential denominator, a prototypal object of study that could sustain a subsequent definition of our field of research. It has already been stated that the field of cultural production can hardly be the common trunk for the many engrafted branches of literary comparativism, the final candidate and the most obvious one, being, in the end, “the universality of human experience”. The idea has already been stated, more than a century before in Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s book (“it is incumbent, therefore, on the champions of universal literary ideas to discover the existence of some universal human nature which, unaffected by differences of language, social organization, sex, climate and similar causes, has been at all times and in all places the keystone of literary architecture”[6]), but its only function is that of complicating further on any possible attempt of defining comparative literature. We are suddenly facing ridiculously big questions, such as: what is essentially human? Is it desire, will of power, faith, the selfish gene? Or, once more echoing the formalist position: what is the process that constantly makes the human? The series of similar questions can continue endlessly.

Unlike the tradition focusing on circumscribing an object profile, Haun Saussy’s view discusses mostly the comparatist method and this is the reason why the old fashioned exquisite cadaver of literariness revisits the scene of the debate. The essentially autotelic character of the poetic language, always advocated by the idea of literariness, is transferred here from the object to the very method. “Nevertheless –writes Saussy – it is possible that the referent of comparison is not some common substrate of the things being compared, but the act of comparing itself – a conclusion whose institutional consequences might be serious.”[7]

To answer in the same terms the dilemma already mentioned by Claudio Guillen, literary comparativism would be defined by the paradox of mens ab ipse qua mens ab alio.

 

Something “meta-” this way comes

 

Envisaging the age of meta-disciplinary comparativism is not exactly easy. The idea is running the same risks that Wellek’s “literariness” did sixty years ago, namely, to lack a valid and convincing example of applied comparative analyses. On the one hand, this is a false problem, since the whole history of comparative literature studies provides enough examples in which comparison builds its own object (very often a spectacular analogy), but at the same time, they seem to lack a specific form of awareness, unavoidable for any meta-logic, which I would rather call “an ethics of self suspicion”. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell’s song, they might have built beautiful castles in the air, but I am not positive they always got a good look at the clouds on both sides. Applying an ethics of self-suspicion or a hermeneutics of doubt to one’s own assumed methodologies might as well turn any attempt of comparison into a permanent discourse over the method, such as the understanding of the literary language as being primarily dominated by the poetic function led to an almost exclusive preoccupation for the hidden ars poetica of every text. Still, there is no doubt that the contemporary works of research could benefit from such an attempt.

Very often in the history of comparative literature, methods were taken for granted. Interdisciplinarity, which is probably up to present the most attractive promise of comparativism, can also become a dead end, once it is assumed as a necessary premises for all studies. One of the answers to the Bernheimer report from 1993, signed by Peter Brooks and entitled Must We Appologize? defends the banished specificity of literature in the following terms: “It is rather to say that studying literature, as a form of attention, as a reading competence, needs to remain in focus. Here, it is perhaps worth a polemical caveat against a bland <interdisciplinarity>, of the type so often touted by deans. Real interdisciplinarity doesn’t come from mixing together a bit of this and that, putting philosophy and penology and literature into a Cuisinart. It comes when thought processes reach the point where the disciplinary boundary one comes up against no longer makes sense – when the internal logic of thinking impels a transgression of borderlines.”[8] Interdisciplinarity often fails, not only in understanding literature as a “form of attention” (the expression alludes to Frank Kermode), but in a surprising paradox: it ceases to be trully inter-disciplinary because it doesn’t succeed in encountering effectively two or more different methods. The inter-disciplinary conjunction is often missed in the name of a common element positioned in a Platonic heaven of trans-disciplinarity (be it a theme, an image, or a archetype). In an article called Chiasmus, published as a reply to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, Haun Saussy himself applies this model of transitory objects of study: “what we do qua comparatists, after all, is to take objects that have a meaning for another discipline and give them new meanings by putting them in new constellations of relationship”[9]. If we are to apply the theoretical implications of Exquisite Cadavers…, the fragment above is slightly ambiguous because, on the one hand it is trying to prove Saussure’s argument that “the viewpoint creates the object”, but on the other hand, it confirms the former acceptation of sciences defined by territorialized irreducible objects. The idea that every science possesses a territory, clearly drawn on an ideal map, wherein it can apply different methods, can be misleading. The human body, for instance, does not belong to a specific science, but is constantly created as a meaningful object of research by different methods that fit anatomy, aesthetics, chemistry, etc. Chemistry does not take a complex organic structure from anatomy to redefine it in proper meanings; it simply creates an entirely new object, which is a chemical compound. On the other hand, it is true that comparative literature often operates with conclusions extracted from different scientific domains such as sociology, political and cultural studies, history of religions, arts, etc. Any conclusion formulated inside the mental frame of a certain discipline is not a finite product, entirely clean of the remains of its prefabrication. Nor can it be a Europa safely kidnapped from its homeland. Even if unseen, the unspoken presumptions and the methodological conventions that generated it, will accompany it incognito in whatever new medium it is transferred, unexpectedly projecting their specific understandings of culture, etc. This is not an argument against interdisciplinarity, but a claim for the necessity of meta-disciplinary awareness in the case of every eye-catching or however sceptical a comparison. In the absence of such a deontological principle, the mirage of trans-disciplinarity, or in Margaret Higonnet’s terms, “the hunger for plenitude”, the “bulimic pathology[10]” that defines comparativism will only bring us back to the aporia of the common denominator.

According to Haun Saussy, the question of the common denominator would be furthermore irrelevant, because unlike the many sciences of comparison born in the 19th century as a spin off from comparative anatomy and comparative linguistics, on the same model of a tree shaped-logic of organization, the branches of comparative literature always lacked a proper trunk. “Comparative literature has grown, not from the roots upward like a tree, but as the International Space Station does, through the lateral construction of linking elements. […] Metalepsis (the positing as accomplished of something yet to occur) is the structuring trope of these speculative investigations, which spin the rope before them as they walk on it. The willingness to tolerate readings that produce, rather than discover, meanings brings a risky, experimental quality to comparative literature and shows why its virtues are inseparable from its questionable legitimacy.”[11] The fact that it produces, rather than discover meanings doesn’t necessarily make comparative literature questionable as a humanist practice, but it definitely excludes it out of the paradigm of contemporary sciences. Openly giving up any scientific claim would equal to Saint Frances of Assisi’s marrying Lady Poverty, for what is a metalepsis (as defined above), if not a bold leap of faith?

Nevertheless, let us not forget that comparative literature was born as a science inside a paradigm where it properly evolved accomplishing its aims, that of the Romantic scientific thought. The key concept that opens the lock of any Romantic knowledge is that of “organism” – the tree as an emblem of life substitutes the image of the clock, which incarnated the principle of mechanic intelligibility during the classical age. According to Georges Gusdorf, while the Cartesian dualism is replaced by a form of vitalist monism, the transcendental determinisms are also discarded in favour of organic dispositions which sustain any presence in the world[12]. The epistemological reflex of the romantic scientist will always be an analogical type of comprehension, meant to discover the elective affinities of organic elements. In a letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, dated 11th of May 1798, Novalis wrote “all sciences should be poetised”[13], and comparative literature seems to be nowadays the legitimate heir of this transition from a rationalistic paradigm to a Romantic one, which involves metaphors, intuitions and analogies. “Le scandale du savoir romantique, aux yeux des modernes – writes Georges Gusdorf – c’est la coexistence de deux ordres d’intelligibilité, l’une au niveau des faits, qui a permis des acquisitions durables, l’autre au niveau d’une spéculation embrassant la totalité cosmique, au mépris des commandements de la science puérile et honnête. […] À la connaissance sur le mode de l’absence réciproque du sujet et de l’objet, le savoir romantique oppose une connaissance sur le mode de la présence, ou, plus exactement, de la participation et de la réciprocité; l’opposition entre dedans et dehors, intériorité et extériorité, matériel et spirituel, perd la meilleur de sa signification.”[14] In order to be able think and conceptualise a universe understood as a living organism, the scientist had to adopt the model of a vegetative decentred life, present in any distant or marginal corner of the world, echoing and mysteriously invoking the others. It is not at random that at the same time the old conception of the cerebro-spinal system loses predominance in favour of the attention to the neuro-vegetative system – the history of romantic sensibility is parallel to the discoveries made in neurology and physiology. The new decentred and organic neurology is the one that postulates the idea that it is the function that creates the object. In the words of Jean Baptiste de Lamarcq, “ce ne sont pas les organes, c’est-à-dire la nature et la forme des parties du corps d’un animal, qui ont donné lieu à ses habitudes et à ses facultés particulières; mais ce sont au contraire ses habitudes, sa manière de vivre, et les circonstances dans lesquelles se sont rencontrés les individus dont il provient, qui ont avec le temps constitué la forme de son corps, le nombre et l’état de ses organes, enfin les facultés ont il jouit.”[15] Following the same idea, in 1948 Richard Owen is the first one who establishes on scientific terms the difference between Homology (structural similarity) and Analogy (functional similarity)[16], the former being centred on describing the same organ in different species while the latter investigates the ways in which the same function creates specific organs in individual branches of diverse species.

An import of concepts from the scientific paradigm that generated comparative literature would perhaps be useful in investigating its history and reasons of existence. In my opinion, the main point of the theoretical stand adopted by Haun Saussy is that of discussing the discipline from the perspective of an analogical comparison, while Bernheimer, Remak, and a most of the well known scholars of the field keep being the adepts of a homological comparison. Meta-disciplinarity could therefore mean, apart from adopting a healthy ethics of self-suspicion, establishing analogies not between themes and ideas that keep being the specific object of homologies, but between different functions, different cultural processes and movements (perhaps formalized to a certain extent) that will never cease to stir an autoscopic analysis inside the very travail of research. Whether analogical or homological, comparative literature will never cease to re-enact and consume the promises of Romanticism, always closer to a form of divination than to one of rigorous interpretation, always haunted by the nostalgia of an organic totality that could, allegedly, turn it into a fascinating discourse of anthropological poetics.

 

 

Notes