saussy compartive literature

8/6/2019 Saussy Compartive Literature

1/7

Modern Language Association

Comparative Literature?Author(s): Haun SaussySource: PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 2 (Mar., 2003), pp. 336-341Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261421Accessed: 16/08/2009 04:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261421?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mlahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mlahttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1261421?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/7

PMLA

theories andmethodologies

ComparativeLiterature?

HAUN SAUSSY

HAUN SAUSSY, uthor of The Problem f

a Chinese Aesthetic Stanford UP, 1993)and Great Walls of Discourse nd Other

Adventures n Cultural China (HarvardU Asia Center, 2001), is professor of

Asian languages and comparative iter-

ature at Stanford University.

336

WHAT S COMPARATIVE ITERATURE? OT A THEORY RA METH-

ODOLOGY, CERTAINLY WHICH RAISES THE QUESTION OF WHY

this article should appear n a series so entitled), though theories and

methodologies aplenty occur as part of its typical business. Is there, or can

there be, an object of knowledge dentifiable s "comparative iterature"?

The Rule of Three

When I began hearing about comparative iterature n the middle 1970s,there was a fairly straightforward means of distinguishing comparativeliterature n the university campuses where it was done. The English de-

partment pursued knowledge of language and literature n one language;the foreign language departments pursued similar studies in two lan-

guages (typically English, assumed to be most students' native lan-

guage, plus the foreign tongue); and comparative iterature ommittees,programs, or departments carried out literary analysis in at least three

languages at once. The three-language rule identified the discipline as

something apart rom English, national-language tudies, or studies ofliterature n translation; t set up a criterion of eligibility for new en-

trants, hus laying a basis for the discipline's continued social reproduc-tion; but it did not always specify the three languages or dictate thesubstance of what was to be done in them. Now, in geometry three

points make a plane, and three dimensions make a solid; Thirdness, nPeircean semiotics, makes signifying possible as a mediation betweenFirstness and Secondness (Peirce 387-90); but in comparative iteraturethe effect of adding he magical third element s more elusive.

The third-language urdle assured, demographically, hat compara-tive literature programs would not expand to cover all the territory f thehumanities if anyone was worried about hat), but t did not go far toward

answering he question, What s, or is not, comparative iterature? he ruledefined he social membership f comparative iterature etter han t didthe object of study. (And even in its influence on membership, the rulecould be applied nconsistently: or lack of relevant programs or person-

? 2003 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA


3/7

Haun Saussy 337

nel, a student luent n English and Cantonese, orin Breton and Quechua, might on many campusesbe in the same position as a strictly monolingualstudent.) This all made for a fragile discipline,one whose definition depended crucially on thedefinitions of the institutional cells surroundingit; and n pragmatic erms, his fragility was real-ized in the status of most comparative iterature

programs as epiphenomenal groupings without

permanent unding. In North America at least,from the 1970s onward, comparative iteraturefound ts disciplinary bject n, and based ts casefor institutional ndependence n, an always con-troversial set of practices known as literary he-

ory. To hear some people tell it, the comparatistswere no producers, but an army of Soldiers of

Theory bent on occupying other people's fieldsand reducing hem to tributary tatus.

The intervening ears have brought hangesto comparative iterature n all its registers, notleast because the neighboring disciplines have

changed. We see more and more bilingual stu-dents, with instant repercussions on the idea of

"foreign languages." The departments devotedto "major" anguages are increasingly nterested

in and permeable to their less prominent rela-tives (ex-colonial creoles, new Englishes, pid-gins, dialects, and sociolects). Languages onceconsidered "less commonly taught" now oftenboast higher enrollments than some "morecommonly taught" languages. Theoretical ap-proaches have long since naturalized hemselvesin English departments. In comparative itera-ture programs, too, the scope of the term lan-guage is no longer self-evident: a medium suchas film or music now often substitutes for thethird language. What defined comparative itera-ture twenty-five years ago no longer distin-guishes the field, positively or negatively, byreference o its membership r object of study.

Another menace to comparative iterature'sfragile dentity omes from he very condition hatmade he discipline possible: cosmopolitanism.

The bourgeoisie as through ts exploitation fthe world market iven a cosmopolitan harac-

ter to production and consumption n everycountry.... The ntellectual reations f individ-ual nations ecome ommon roperty. ationalone-sidedness nd narrow-mindedness ecome

more and more mpossible, nd rom he numer-ous national nd ocal iteratures, here arises aworld iterature. (Marx ndEngels 38-39)

Or as the systems theorist Niklas Luhmannputs t, "Under modem conditions... only one so-cial system can exist. Its communicative etworkspreads over the globe ... A plurality f possibleworlds has become impossible" (178). If dis-tinctions are no longer meaningful, comparisonbecomes the likening of like and like, a hollowgesture with a predetermined utcome. Reducedto the scale of the university campus, a globaleconomy of communication makes compara-tivists of us all, as "national ne- sidedness" nd heconsequent "plurality f possible worlds" become"impossible" ven as a scholarly oncentration.

Comparative? Literature?

So, then, now more than ever: comparative itera-

ture? If the specificity of our enterprise s wear-ing away through its banalization, we need tothink once more about what comparatists havedone to see if there s anything or the disciplineto keep on doing. What were the models for com-parative work, and what lessons do they teachthat may still apply n changed circumstances?

The name of the field-"comparative"-once denoted a method and, behind that method,a theory of how literature was organized. Com-parative eligion, comparative aw, and the othercomparative disciplines that arose in the nine-teenth century under the strange dual patronageof comparative natomy and comparative hilol-ogy all began as what one might call tree-shapeddisciplines, organizing historical and typologi-cal diversity nto a common historical narrativewith many parallel branches. Difference be-came differentiation, he subject of a historical-developmental account. Through that account,morphology became readable as genesis.

rP

0

C*

3

r0o

(A_5

I I 8.2 2


4/7

338 Comparative Literature?

Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the de-

velopment of comparative literature in this

country, E. R. Curtius's European Literature

and the Latin Middle Ages, makes exactly thissort of claim. Reaching back to a time beforethe national separation of the languages andtheir increasing mutual opacity, Curtius recon-structs a common basis for the major Europeanliteratures in Latin authors and topoi.1 TheLatin basis was there all along, hidden in the"one-sidedness" of the national languages;scholarship restores it to view, elucidating thedifferential paths taken and leading them backto the source. Curtius's mode of comparison s a

phylogeny. But surely in many other contextsthis would be a naive or impossible way of

putting one's comparative laim.

Although new tools such as genetics and

ethology confirmed he usefulness of tree- hapedcomparativism for the biological sciences, inmost of the human sciences the narratives pro-viding the substantive ground or differentiationsooner or later broke up. General evolutionaryparadigms (as in Maine, Morgan, or Frazer)

could not be maintained without begging toomany questions about the universal reach of the

categories employed. Only in linguistics, my-thology, and manuscript iliation are distal treesstill important argumentative ools. In compara-tive literature, he typological tree of written cul-ture was never more than a vestige anyway.Actual comparative studies covered only small

pieces of the literary record, rarely venturing sofar afield as to challenge the applicability of the

discipline's terms; moreover,when

widely sepa-rated iterary raditions were involved, compara-tists wrote as if little could be done to explain (asopposed to reciting) the typological differences

among the traditions.

Comparative iterature was thus a disciplinewith a branching ogic, but the branches ackeda trunk. That trunk might conceivably have beenfurnished by a universal poetics, a historical ori-

gin of all literary raditions, or an ultimate ypo-logical category such as literariness.2 But none

was needed. Historical tudies (influence and re-

ception) could carry on in various sections ofthe tree without worrying about the existence of

a trunk. Studies cast in the mode of differenceand similarity could disregard it, taking for

granted such generally applicable erms as theyfound necessary. "Theory," never a compactphilosophical system, migrated from case tocase or let itself be carried with the broadeningacceptance of certain historical narratives or

methodological metaphors.Perhaps the best thing about comparative

literature s its failure to live up to its name. Un-like the other comparative disciplines, this oneis not principally about the relation of sub-

sidiary phenomena to an original or ancestralsource. And unlike Aristotelian comparison, itis not about discovering the "third thing" onwhich two other things stand as on a common

ground of identity. It must then have an unusual

logic. Perhaps a "rhizomatic" ogic (Deleuzeand Guattari -8)?

In and And

Some literary scholars have a penchant for the

preposition n, some for the conjunction and. In

suggests that a reading s a matter of observationand inventory; and, that a reading s a collision.A paper titled "Renunciation n Mahabhdrata,Huckleberry Finn, and Der Rosenkavalier"claims to discover a common thread "in" a bodyof writings; a paper itled "Mansfield Park and A

Theory of Justice" tells you to think about one

thing in relation to another. Comparative itera-ture s largely a discipline of the and type. It doesits work best as a chain of ands: this relation andthat relation and that relation . .. .each and

modifying he sense of those that came before.The and is comparative iterature's answer

to the tree model. Lacking a common substanceto which the differences among its objectsmight be reduced, comparative literature has

grown, not from the roots upward ike a tree, butas the International pace Station does, through

t!1

0

.C

EIoc4^:

PMLA


5/7

Haun Saussy 339

the lateral construction of linking elements.

Leaving aside Curtius's "Romania," with its ori-entation toward historical recovery, the modeltexts of comparative iterature ink together setsof examples whose mutual coherence s not ob-vious in advance of their combination. t is as ifthe reader who asks, "What do X, Y, and Z haveto do with one another?" ould only get the an-swer, "Nothing-up to now."

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis proffers a histor-ical narrative (the growth of realism) but doesnot substantively develop realism or give it therole of a protagonist who might lead the storytoward ts outcome. (For that type of story, see

Lukacs.) Rather, Auerbach beckons us to exam-ine a series of sample passages-touchstones-in historical sequence, each different from theothers, each exhibiting a different mode of de-tail, each contributing indirectly to a mode of

seeing that is also the critic's (the eye for justwhat makes this text a new turning for literaryrepresentation).3 his is and criticism: but readit as in criticism, and the thing in all the exam-

ples is a thin thread ndeed.

In Qian Zhongshu's work, comparabilityis the point to be made. Recognizing the utterdominance n Chinese scholarship of the kind ofliterary history that reduces a text to the generalcircumstances of its period-and thereby deniesthat the relation between two texts can be any-thing but historical-Qian answers this under-

standing of literature with a model of meaningas open-ended translatability. n a tacit rebuketo historical determinism, his essays simply jux-tapose passages or motifs from Chinese classi-cal literature with "equivalents" n Latin, Greek,English, French, German, and Spanish litera-ture-an empirical but experimental challengeto the assumption of Chinese uniqueness.

Comparative literature books may be aselaborately structured s Northrop Frye's Anat-omy of Criticism or Paul de Man's Allegories ofReading or as loose as Qian Zhongshu's or LeoSpitzer's essay collections, but they all mustraise the question of what glue holds them to-

gether. The job of every comparative iteraturebook is to find that out, and rarely do two an-swers coincide. Metalepsis (the positing as ac-complished of something yet to occur) is the

structuring rope of these speculative nvestiga-tions, which spin the rope before them as theywalk on it. The willingness to tolerate readingsthat produce, rather than discover, meaningsbrings a risky, experimental quality to compara-tive literature and shows why its virtues are in-

separable rom its questionable egitimacy.

The Rule of Three Revisited

What might be called a third-language effecthelps to explain comparative iterature's ast in-tellectual affinities and to mark what keeps thefield open for particular inds of innovation. Thethree-language rule precipitated (i.e., contrib-uted to causing without necessarily entailing) akind of questioning hat the then-current tate ofpractice in national-literature rograms did not

satisfy, and the moving frontiers of the disci-pline should continue responding o similar dis-

satisfactions now that so many of comparativeliterature's former specialties have been taken

up by others. One cannot say that t always hap-pened, but often and ideally the addition of athird language made it necessary to appeal totheoretical considerations where taste, commonsense, or a shared literary history would havetold the practitioners of English or a single for-eign literature what was significant, beautiful,predictable, necessary, or controversial abouttheir objects of study. Just as Anaxagoras, ac-cording o Aristotle 1071), attributed he intelli-gence of human beings to their having hands, soperhaps n comparative iterature he third lan-guage as an organ created ts own functions.

Most relations of influence that can be for-mulated historically (the original problem forcomparative iterature o resolve; see Schulz andRhein) occur, like the standard model of trans-lation, between two poles, with a source and atarget. Typological considerations reduce to an

PO

0*1

(A

z

CL

2

7

0

00

0;

611

I I 8.2 2


6/7

340 Comparative Literature?

exchange between a type case and a candidatetoken. If a two-language pattern s adequate orformulating and answering most questions ofhistorical nfluence or typological similarity, hethird anguage, ike an uninvited guest, points tothe things that a two-language pattern eaves out.What s going on, even in a dyadic relation, hat adyadic explanation leaves unaccounted for? Arelation occurs under particular onditions: whatare those? What is the relation about; what in itilluminates relations not now under discussion?In my experience, he third anguage or field fur-nishes counterexamples. t frustrates he progressto universal literature-to the delivery of the

same thing in different anguages, ad infinitum.Because it is precisely not a tertium quid, t keepsthings from settling down. The space of this third

language-a space analogous to the yet-to-be-constructed relation and opposite to the missingtrunk-might be held by an indefinite et of enti-ties. Whatever occupies that space mediates essthan t interferes, as signifiers do, and ts interfer-ence produces omething new.

What is specific to comparative iterature,

as distinguished from investigations into na-tional literary histories or from literature akenas a single mass, is its propensity to construc-tion-a technical term on which sociologistsand geometers idiomatically cohabit. It wouldbe a mistake, hen, to seek to define comparativeliterature through its objects of knowledge ormethods; acking exclusive title to any of these,it is rather a practice, a way of constructing ob-jects. As in surveying, every completion of a tri-angle makes measurement, and thus conclusive

knowledge, possible; but the apex of the trian-gle just determined s also a point from which anew angle opens up for measurement. "The

suitability of the figures [used in surveying] de-pends to a great extent upon the shape of the fig-ures selected. Angles near 0? or 180? are subjectto large computational errors and are avoidedwhen possible" ("Surveying" 15).

PMLA

NOTES1On Curtius's vision of a culturally unified Europe, see

Menocal 133-37.2A tension between folklore or linguistics and literary

study structures ome phases of the field's development. Seethe encyclopedic project of Chadwick and Chadwick, mod-eled on folklore and diffusionist history; see also the differ-

ing accounts of "literary anguage" produced by the NewCritics and the inheritors of Slavic linguistics and folklore(Ransom; Jakobson).

3On the peculiarities of Mimesis as a historical narra-tion, see the essays in Lerer.

WORKS ITED

Aristotle. "Parts of Animals." The Complete Works f Aris-totle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Vol. 1. Princeton: PrincetonUP, 1984. 994-1086.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation f Reality inWestern Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton:Princeton UP, 1953.

Chadwick, H. Munro, and N. Kershaw Chadwick. TheGrowth of Literature. vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1932-40.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the LatinMiddle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Prince-ton UP, 1948.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language inRousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven:Yale UP, 1979.

Frazer, ames George. The Golden Bough: A Study n Magicand Religion. Abr. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Prince-ton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." Style in Lan-guage. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT P, 1960.350-77.

Lerer, Seth, ed.Literary History

and theChallenge of

Phi-lology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Stanford: Stan-ford UP, 1996.

Luhmann, Niklas. Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Co-lumbia UP, 1990.

Lukfcs, Gy6rgy. Studies in European Realism. New York:Grosset, 1964.

Maine, Henry Sumner. Ancient Law. London: Murray, 1861.Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Commu-

nist Party. Selected Works n One Volume. New York:Intl., 1968. 35-63.

Menocal, Maria Rosa. Shards of Love: Exile and the Originsof the Lyric. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

(,

0

0Jc

-

.m

E

L.0


7/7

118.2 Haun Saussy

Morgan, Henry Lewis. Ancient Society. New York: World,1877.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Values n a Universe of Chance:Selected Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Philip

P. Wiener. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1958.Qian Zhongshu. Guan zhui bian [Essays of the Pipe and

Awl]. 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua huju, 1979.-. Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. Trans.Ronald Egan. Cambridge: Harvard U Asia Center,1998.

Ransom, John Crowe. Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays1941-1970. New York: New Directions, 1972.

Schulz, Hans-Joachim, nd Phillip H. Rhein, eds. Compara-tive Literature, he Early Years: A Collection of Essays.

Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973.Spitzer, Leo. Essays in Historical Semantics. New York:

Vanni, 1947.. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylis-

tics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948.

"Surveying." ncyclopaedia Britannica. 1964 ed.

34I

0

0

Ce

Foo

Q.oq&Po,

saussy compartive literature

Documents