some theoretical and methodological topics for comp lit earl miner

8/6/2019 Some Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comp Lit Earl Miner

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Some Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comparative LiteratureAuthor(s): Earl MinerSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 123-140Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773005

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SOME THEORETICALAND METHODOLOGICALTOPICS FOR COMPARATIVELITERATUREEARL MINER

Comparative Literature, Princeton

The phrase "comparative literature" obviously does not imply thesame things as "Chinese literature" or "French literature." "Compara-tive" is not a language in which one writes but a kind of study. Infact "literature" once held such a meaning, as "bungaku" does inJapanese still, as perhaps the characters also do in Chinese and as"Department of English" does. The issues have always been what onestudies and how. Some have supposed that comparison was feasibleonly within a common culture and others that generic study or liter-ary movements (Romanticism, realism) deserve attention. There is noreason to dismiss these conceptions but - rightly or wrongly - theyhave not held central interest to recent Western students. Probablythe most striking development in the past fifteen years has been theinclusion of literary theory as a subject for comparative literature. Butmuch of what passes for literary theory in the West has little that isgenuinely comparative.In fact, the first thing that must be said about comparative litera-ture is that its present practice is seldom comparative in any radicalway and that, when efforts are made to compare (for example) thetreatment of nature by Wordsworth and Du Fu or Matsuo Basho, theresults are seldom impressive. Moreover, until recently there has beenlittle effort to incorporate non-Western evidence into Western com-parative study, just as the Chinese have for centuries ignored the liter-ature of their neighbors, unless it was written in Chinese. There aremany hopeful signs that the old narrow attitudes are yielding tobroader views. At the tenth congress of the International Compara-tive Literature Association at New York University in 1982, therewas unprecedented representation of speakers on Asian literature, al-though south Asia and even Korea were little in evidence as intellec-tual concerns. In the United States, Indiana University deserves credit

PoeticsToday,Vol. 8:1 (1987) 123-140


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124 EARLMINERfor beginning the effort to incorporate Asian literatures in compara-tive study. Indiana was followed by Princeton and Stanford Univer-sities and recently other universities have also showed interest inmaking "comparative literature" something other than the study ofliterature in European tongues.Apart from these problems, we are left with intellectual ones, noneas important or as difficult as identifying important issues. Often weare not even sure whether we are comparing what is strictly compar-able or not. For example, in traditional Western thought, literary his-tory is divided into "periods" or "movements." In traditional China,on the other hand, literary history is divided into "dynasties," "styles"and "schools." Are these different conceptions really comparable?Do their differences correct each other and lead us to a superior ad-vanced theory? What are we to infer from the fact that the terms for"lyric" and "narrative" are so recent in China and imported fromthe West via Japan? What are we to infer from the fact that it seemsimpossible to define "fu" in English or other European languages?One can only conclude that there are many problems for which wehave not yet succeeded even in defining the important issues. In whatfollows, I shall attempt to put my own ideas at hazard by raising twoissues that have concerned me. Discussion of them will lead to a lastconcern with problems of what literary comparison may imply.A. SOME IMPLICATIONSOF DISTINCTIONS BETWEENLYRIC, NARRATIVE AND DRAMAIt is a common-sense assumption that these three entities exist, evenif an extended example of any one of them will have elements of theothers. Chinese ideas about lyricism postulate the poet's will or in-tention, thereby presuming that the poet speaks to someone withsome urgency about actual matters, for although many "intentions"led to fictional writing, there is no assumption that literature is basic-ally fictional. The ancient Western views hold that lyricism is distin-guished by certain prosodies and such a prosodic view would find aresponse in many cultures, including the Chinese. The usual modernWestern view has been that a lyric is something "overheard," whichimplies something quite different from Chinese stress on will or in-tention. Some contemporary Western views hold that the distinctionsof lyric, narrative and drama are pointless, because the more radicaldistinction between literary and non-literary writing cannot be sus-tained. I do not subscribe to that view, for reasons that will becomeclear. But truly there are difficulties.Drama is most easily distinguished from lyric and narrative on thebasis of performance by actors impersonating or playing given roles.(The attributive form of drama, the dramatic, in narrative and lyricshows, however, that there are problems that the basic distinctiondoes not account for.) In my view, lyricism is distinguished by inten-


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126 EARLMINERed sufficiently a discrete entity to be honored socially - as Greektragedies were by civic festivals or as specific forms of integral publi-cation became devised. (Painters and musicians are usually namedonly after poets.)My thesis about the emergence of a critical system holds that it re-quires the encounter of a gifted critic or critics with a then esteemedgenre, by which I mean lyric, drama or narrative. That is, literatureas we usually understand today may exist without a critical systemto account for it. In Greece, the poems of Homer and Hesiod fit ourideas of literature but no general poetics existed to account for themwhen they were composed. Systematic Western thought about litera-ture begins with Plato's Ion, Phaedrus and Republic. But to Plato,the poet, the rhetorician and the philosopher are rivals to such an ex-tent that only one can be valid (the philosopher and his thought).Only with Aristotle's Poetics do we have a properly literary concep-tion and, as we all know, he brought his powerful mind into play bydefining literature in terms of drama. His incidental remarks on nar-rative are not adequate and he has precious little to say about lyrics.Out of Aristotle's encounter with one genre, drama (and chiefly tra-gedy), came the Western understanding of literature in terms of a sys-tematic mimesis.

Any complete theory of literature seems to me to require at mini-mum a set of concepts posited in literary terms: the world, the poet,the (poet's) work, a text (or physical coding), a reader and the (read-er's) poem. For a fully adequate view, we would also require a con-ception of language and the social conditions for literature: perfor-mers in some cases, scribes or printers and social means to sustainwriters and ensure circulation of their works. Although Plato had asemiotic system of phenomena and noumena, it is not clear to methat he articulated a comparably subtle conception of language. Andneither he nor Aristotle were able to posit the reader and affectivismas a distinguishing feature of literature. The reader and affectivismcould not be differentiae for literature because they were shared withphilosophy and rhetoric, as the Phaedrus well shows. So it was thatthe Western system did not become complete until Horace. He ad-vanced concern with words or language and, by encounter with hisown practice in lyric odes, satires and epistles (many of them satiric,like his epodes), he gave the West its full sense of the reader and thereader's affective response - "dulce et utile," etc. For centuries there-after, albeit with many vicissitudes and counter-claims, it was com-monly held that imitation was the means of literature, with teachingand delight its ends.The emergence of systematic poetics in China, Korea and Japanseems quite different. For one thing, the term usually translated as"literature" included certain kinds of history as well as lyric. I shallnot attempt to honor adequately the inclusion of those kinds of his-


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COMPARATIVEPOETICS 127tory, since lyric poetry was taken as the purest exemplar. But in Chinaand Japan, the dominant poetic system did emerge from the criticalencounter with lyrics and narrative histories of prized kinds. The Chi-nese instance involves the prefaces to the Classic of Songs (Shijing).Here is an articulated -view of the nature of literature as lyric and itcould only have been the more influential because that anthology isnot termed simply a collection but a classic.The Japanese evidence is better known to me. It is quite clear thatlyrics existed in pre-historical Japan. And in the great eighth-centurycollection, the Man'yoshi, there are over 4,500 lyrics organized ina hodge-podge of various principles of native or Chinese classifica-tion. For that matter, the Japanese had earlier collected poems thathad been composed - as best its authors could - in Chinese, with in-struction by resident Koreans. But there was as yet no systematicpoetics, none till the compilation of the first of twenty-one royal col-lections, the Kokinshi (ca. 905-15). What effected the Japanesesystematic poetics was the Japanese preface to the collection madeby Ki no Tsurayuki (884-946).3 Tsurayuki uses the crucial termsmentioned earlier: kokoro (heart, spirt or mind) and kotoba (words,topics or subjects). The significant thing is that he defined an expres-sive (the words, etc.) and affective (heart, etc.) poetics out of lyric-ism. The poet writes on being moved by encountering something innature or by experiencing something in love, travel, death and otherhuman events. When the moved poet writes in words, the expressionmay in turn move someone to whom the poem was sent to writeanother poem, or a reader centuries later. In a particularly Japaneseway, Tsurayuki holds that animals may also be moved to song andthe range of those affected may be lovers, warriors or invisible spirits.When the Chinese and Japanese literary systems are the sole basisof comparison, they seem different on many counts. For example,although the Japanese held to affectivism more radically than did theChinese and, although the Chinese emphasized expressivism more,the Chinese emphasized moral affectivism in a way seldom seen inJapanese criticism. Or again, lengthy fictional prose narrative emergesearlier absolutely in Japan than in China (and relatively far earlier),and history quite distinct from lyric is more important in China thanin Japan. Yet, when we compare these (and Korean) literary viewsand practices to Western ones, the East Asian views seem much closerand opposed to the Western. The Asian affective-expressive emphasisis unlike the varieties of mimesis and affectivism in the West: the veryidea of mimesis is difficult to present in East Asian languages. The3. Tsurayuki's cousin, Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), provided a brief preface in Chinese, and acertain pointless debate concerns the priority of the Japanese or the Chinese preface: bothmen were educated in Chinese learning and, as cousins, would have talked through the mat-ters they were presenting for the first time to readersof Japanese poetry.


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128 EARL MINERsubordinate emphases also vary. In Asia, one of the most importantis technical competence, practice, use of models.4 In the West, thesubsidiary emphasis must surely be expressionism, which strengthensand weakens intermittently until its great day in Romanticism. West-ern expressionism carries the burden of originality, the fear of notbeing new. The Asian version carries the burden of what has been ex-pressed, the danger of not being traditional, of not measuring up tothe standard of valued prior expression.To return to the main point, the systematic differences appear tobe based on a definition of literature in terms of lyric (as in Asia) ordrama (as in the West). To the best of my knowledge, only Westernviews of literature are founded on crucial engagement with drama,and all other systems presume definition out of lyric (with or with-out narrative).5 If so, it is a matter of special interest to speculate onwhat a poetic system based on narrative might be like. Japanese evi-dence is particularly interesting on this score. There is no parallel inanother literature for the greatest national work to be a narrativethat appeared within about a century of the definition of a systema-tic poetics out of lyric. The work is of course The Tale of Genji (Gen-ji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu (978-1016). In her diary, theauthor reports that her work was read at court. What responsewould there be, we may wonder? It seems telling that, on hearing itread aloud, Ichij6 (r. 986-1011) associated it with a historical classic,The Chronicles of Japan (Nihongi).6Both the author and the sovereign appear to have assumed thatprose narrative shared in the lyric affective-expressive complex butalso to have thought that narrative dealt with versions of historicalreality. That later became the general Chinese presumption as wellfor fictional narrative. It also seems likely that the extraordinarilyearly emergence of great fictional prose narrative in Japan owesmuch to Buddhism. This may seem strange but, in addition to theexempla or parables in Buddhist scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra,which gave respectability to fiction, Buddhist temporality had pro-found effect wherever it was accepted. In China, that sense of timewas important, not so much perhaps for immense periods of kalpaon kalpa, as for a teleology at odds with Chinese cyclicism. (InJapan,4. See Liu 1962, pp. 77-80, a rare explicit attention to assumptions of technical ability.Much else in that book bears on this study, as does much in Liu, 1975. In Japan, the techni-cal requirement is represented in terms of style or manner (sama), writing or compositionalpractice (tenarai) and especially emulation of exemplary poems (shuka).5. I am not wholly satisfied on the latter point with respect to Indian literature: if the In-dian definition of literature is not from drama treated as lyric for the rasa (codified affectivestatus) of individual lines, India may represent a very different, special case.6. Although the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) treats much the same matter as theNihongi (or Nihon Shoki) and is more esteemed today, it was very little known in MurasakiShikibu's time.


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COMPARATIVEPOETICSthe teleology was fused with the Japanese sense of the heightenedmoment.) Whether these speculations fully hold, it is clear that inJapan and China great prose fictional narrative first emerges asliterature tinged by Buddhism.Although the evidence from various cultures is not easily mastered,it does seem clear that fundamental differences occur when giftedcritics initiate a critical system by defining it in terms of lyric ordrama. Similarly, if lyric is thought hospitable to narrative, the re-sults again differ. Such comparative historical evidence confirms thetheoretical assumption that lyric, narrative and drama are meaningfulentities (whether those be termed genres or whatever).B. LITERARY COLLECTIONSIt must be impossible to find an example of a literate culture withoutcollections. Two motives seem universal: the desire to preserve andthe desire to honor the especially valued. The motives are not contra-dictory but the second often leads to veneration approaching thestatus of religious canonicity. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is essential-ly two collections of works that are themselves composites of manyelements. The Buddhist sutras are much the same, subject to divisionand amalgamation in collective units and groups. Chinese evidence isespecially useful in this matter. As we have seen, in addition to col-lections proper, there are "classics" (the character used also desig-nates sutras) that are collections specially honored as works of evidentcanonical worth. In addition to their manifestations of the two mo-tives of preservation and honor of what is valued, collections logicallyinvolve conceptions of the individual literary entity and of the col-lective whole. If the elements compiled do not have a separableindividual status, it becomes impossible to distinguish a collectionfrom, say, a novel or play, since any lengthy work is necessarily acomposite. And if there is no collective whole definable, there is noidentity to discuss. The two versions of the Greek Anthology differconsiderably but each is a distinct collection of individual poems.The preservation of what is esteemed and the collecting of literaryintegers may take various guises but, by obvious logic, all the indivi-dual items cannot be presented at once. That is, some principle ofordering is implicit in the conception of a collection. In moderntimes, Western collections are usually organized on chronologicalprinciples. Anonymous works or those by known authors will bearranged successively according to their historical sequence. Andwithin a single author's selected (or complete) works, the order willbe similarly chronological. But that is a modern and especially West-ern presumption.7

7. This present section is largely founded on Miner 1985.

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COMPARATIVEOETICS 131topics were specified, using aesthetic rather than purely moral cri-teria. Some writings we might consider collections were given thatspecial Chinese status of classics. By the time of the compilation ofThe History of the Tang Dynasty, an order emerged that would lastfor many other "histories." There were four parts: classics, history,philosophy and poetry in collections. Other kinds of collectionsemerged in the Tang. They might be ordered by poetic kind, as shivs. fu; by chronology; or by imputed quality. An individual poetmight issue more than one collection, ordering poems by kind or sub-ject. The heirs or followers of a poet might reprint poems as the poethad ordered them or reorder them along different lines, e.g., bychanging the arrangement from kind to chronology. Some sovereignsmight decree collections and very popular poets might have collec-tions of their poems made in their lifetimes. By the Song dynasty,collections were often programmatic to justify the practice of an in-dividual, a school or a critical position. Chinese practice includesother principles but most of the important ones have been specified.In the Chinese collecting of literary works, we seem to discover apure or simple version of the human desire to collect: preservation ofwhat is thought to be of value. So much so that the collections havethe air of compendia. The first Japanese poetic collection (of poemsin Chinese), the Kaifuiso, preserves some 120 Chinese poems and itis natural that it follows Chinese guidelines - to a point. Since thereare sixty-four poets represented, the average is only about two poemsper poet, which seems unlike Chinese collections after earliest times.The smallness also seems unusual in Chinese terms. Later collectionsof exemplary prose stories (setsuwa) seem more like Chinese collec-tions. The Konjaku Monogatari is certainly integrated but the effectis very much in the style of a Chinese omnibus collection, as if theeffort were primarily to preserve all the good stories available. Thisfeature is not conspicuous amongJapanese literary productions.The two most prominent features of Japanese collections are theirnumerousness or centrality and their integration. We may begin withthe first system of writing used to representJapanese. That employedChinese characters in two ways: to represent meaning and to repre-sent sound. Because Japanese is an inflected language (unlike Chinesebut closely like Korean), sounds were necessary to represent particlesand inflections of verbs and adjectives. This system might have beencalled kojikigana, after its first principal used in the Kojiki (Recordof Ancient Matters), or kudaragana (Kogury6 writing), after theKoreans who were almost certainly the ones who devised it. In fact,it is called man'y6gana after the first collection of Japanese poems,the Man'yashi (last datable poem 759). So strong is the Japanesesense in collections that define the Japanese nature of Japaneseliterature, that the first writing system was named after a collection,in spite of the system's having been used earlier.


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132 EARLMINERThe Man'yoshu was compiled in stages and by different hands intoa collection made from previous collections and is not wholly inte-

grated. In Book 2, there is a run of poems that has been plausiblyargued to be a sequence and in various books we see a desire to groupaccording to principles of likeness. Great as much of that poetry is,however, its collective integration is rudimentary compared to thatof the first of the twenty-one royal collections, the Kokinshu (ca.905-15). Thereafter socially esteemed poetry is collected poetry,not just in royal collections but collections like them, in personalcollections, in exemplary or formulary collections or in set sequences(as of one hundred poems).The full title, Kokinwakashu, means something like A Collectionof Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems. The poets represented in itappear along with some less than recent poems and a majority ofpoems from the generation of the compilers. The poems are not ar-ranged chronologically or by author but rather by topics, of whichthe two most important are the seasons (Books 1-6, two each on

spring and autumn) and love (Books 11-15, beginning the secondhalf of the twenty books). Starting with a poem of bewildermentabout whether one can now say it is spring, the seasonal poems movestep by step through the codified annual emergence of natural pheno-mena. The love poems begin with the male experience of hearing ofsome desirable woman. There follows a fluctuating series of attemptsto get in touch with her, her initial coldness, poems on concealedlove (to avoid gossip) and, at some point, consummation in a lovemeeting (au koi). After going to visit the woman (property was in-herited matrilineally in early Japan) at dusk and leaving her at dawn,the man was obliged to send a next-morning poem, an aubade of sorts.The attention then shifts more to the woman's point of view. Shewaits for a lover whose visits become less frequent; she grows anxious,then distraught, then bitter. She may finally put the lover out of hermind and much later, by some sudden image, recollect the man. Asall this suggests, the essence of love is primarily loving or yearningrather than being loved and the collective expression of it is takento be fluctuation. Even after successive women have been deserted,runs of poems may start new affairs.What is true of these principal books is true of others on such sub-jects as travel: unlike Western sonnet sequences, these collections andtheir parts do not develop plots. The names of the different authorsand the headnotes (somewhat like titles but often fairly lengthy ex-planations of circumstances and persons) prevent our taking the prin-cipals involved to be continuous. Continuous characters, times andplaces - with logic of some sort for any shifts - are necessary forplot. Instead, the narrative we discover in Japanese collections, if it isnarrative, is one of the collective lyric units ordered by progressionsand associations between poems. The arrangement is made by the


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compilers to form a collection, and that is as true of their own poemsas of those by others.The Kokinshu principles set the terms for subsequent Japanesepoetic collections. It remained to improve on them, as was the casewith later royal collections and hundred-poem sequences; or to adaptthem, as linked poetry did by making the act of alternating composi-tion by a group of poets the simultaneous act of collection; or toplay comically with the principles. The Japanese urge to collectionsgoes so far that the sequences of linked poetry (themselves collectivein their way) were drawn on to make collections resembling the royalones. The Tsukubashu (1356) compiled by Nijo Yoshimoto (1320-

88) is organized into twenty books on the model of the royal collec-tions. And in this first collection of renga, an esteemed stanza isgiven wvith its predecessor, since each stanza after the first must beunderstood for the skill in connection with its predecessor.8The later, less courtly kind of linked poetry, haikai, was also col-lected. The most famous collection, Sarumino Shu (1691) is in sixparts.9 The first four include opening stanzas (hokku), required toincorporate a season. Given that the collection is known as "theKokinshi of haikai" and, after centuries of honoring the Kokinshimodel, the order of the hokku in Sarumino is shocking: Part 1, Win-ter; 2, Summer; 3, Autumn; 4, Spring. This is deliberate "haikaichange" in giving the two least esteeemed seasons first and, in eachpair, giving the more esteemed season second, all out of their naturalorder. Yet it also enables the compilers to arrange the entire hokkusection as a gigantic haikai ?equence, so that (for example) the crucialflower stanzas occur at the point equivalent to the 35th stanza of a36-stanza sequence. For that matter, the design of the 36-stanza orkasen sequence, can be seen throughout the collection. Just as rengaand haikai stanzas might be selected for a collection, in the SaruminoShu, the collection is variously patterned on the kasen model (Miner-Odagiri 1981:28-34).The eccentricities of the compilers of Sarumino Shu are deliberateintegrative gestures playing with older ideas of coherence. There isother evidence to show how consistently the Japanese chose to inte-grate, even to the point of altering Chinese models to their own pur-poses. One of the Chinese collections most prestigious in Japan wasthe Wenxuan, Monzen to Japanese. That collection provided theJapanese with numerous classifications for kinds of writing: xu (jo),chuan (den), lun (ron), etc. By the seventeenth century, a FzzokuMonzen or Popular Wenxuan had appeared in Japan. This consistedof prose writings (often including verse) by Basho and his school,using about twenty of the Chinese classifications adapted so that the8. For an account of linked poetry, see Miner 1979a.9. For an English translation and commentary, see Miner-Odagiri, 1981.

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134 EARLMINERChinese would often not have recognized the categories they had in-vented. In 1724, another version was compiled, Wakan Monzen (AWenxuan in Japanese and Chinese), including many older writingsalong with some experimental ones, once again grouping them underthe Wenxuan categories, although somewhat fewer than in the Fuzo-ku Monzen. The point of this detailed account is that the Japanesecould not rest with such Chinese collection by categories, even whenso radically adopted to alien purposes, as we have seen. The sequencebeginning with veneration of the Wenxuan comes to its Japanese ful-fillment with the Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu (1702-83). This is acollection of various sketches or essays or verse compositions of wide-ly different kind. Each is labelled by a category or title ending withone of the Wenxuan terms. But the collection (or collections, sinceparts appeared in a series) is grouped into runs integrated by aJapan-ese need to incorporate collectively a number of units - not at all bythe Chinese categories but by integrative procedures derived fromlinked poetry.As this brief account shows, the abstract, separating and compen-diously classifying genius of the Chinese certainly produced collec-tions that differ from Western anthologies, and the Japanese took theChinese versions seriously. But the Chinese versions required modifi-cation to suit Japanese tastes and the process was complete onlywhen the separating Chinese classifications were transformed to yieldintegrated collections.So far is this true that Chinese inventions lost in China might sur-vive in Japan and be put to alien use. A form of court music, calledgagaku in Japan, was introduced from China via Korea (there wereearlier Indian elements as well) and, although the music is lost in theother countries, it is still performed in Japan to this day. In fact, agroup from the University of California, Los Angeles, performed thismusic in New York City in January, 1983. From this music, theJapanese conceived of a three-part rhythmic structure consisting of astately introduction, jo, an agitated, broken or development section,ha, and a fast close, kyu. This three-part rhythm became a basis ofintegrating renga sequences and, from renga, was passed on to no,haikai and other kinds of literary writing. As the use made of theWenxuan and of the rhythmic basis of gagaku shows, these Japanesecollections, linked-poetry sequences and even dramatic pieces gainfull realization only by integrative means essentially collective innature. If the Japanese conception of literary wholes differs fromWestern and Chinese conceptions, so must the concept of the integersintegrated into collections. Any reasonably full account of these mat-ters would need to attend to political ideology, conceptions of socialrelations between individuals and groups and much else (Miner1985). Without entering into such matters, it should be clear that theuniversal practice of collecting literary works takes strikingly differ-


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COMPARATIVEPOETICS 135ent forms in various literary traditions. In short, by starting with auniversal conception presuming identity - that of collections - wecan work comparatively to derive sets of resemblances and differ-ences.Western sequences are usually based on some kind of plot, formalor thematic ordering. Alternatively, more recently, the principle oforganization has been chronological. In China, compendiousness andseparate categorizing are of prime importance, while in Japan, it isfar more important to use integration based on sequential principlesother than plot, chronology or separate categories. To consider onlyChina and Japan, the rational, practical and yet abstract Han way ofthinking characterized by Confucianism has dominated Chinesethought over the centuries and is important to this day. The Japan-ese, on the other hand, seek to integrate highly diverse elementssequentially or in social, literary and even religious terms. Clearly,"collection" must be viewed comparatively if it is to be understoodas a useful literary idea with explanatory power.C. LOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CRITERIAFOR LITERARY COMPARISONPerhaps the least studied issue in comparative literature is what ismeant by "comparative" and, more precisely, what are the principlesor canons of comparability. Some have argued that comparativestudy is feasible only within a coherent culture. This argument hasoffered, in practice, a Eurocentered conception that rules out otherliteratures as offering no assistance to categories established in theEuropean antique, medieval and modern periods. That position is,one hopes, not taken seriously by many people today. Another tra-tidional conception holds that comparative literature involves studyof the influence of one literature or author in one language uponanother in a second.10 This study may have genuine comparativemerit if it is used to compare - and better understand - what the re-ceiving writer has written in light of what was borrowed. In much thesame fashion, translations may be compared with originals, showingsomething of the selections and emphasis of the translator and some-times making explicit certain features of the original that had thither-to escaped notice.10. In English-speaking countries, "influence" became respectable once more with Guillen1971; and it became compulsive for many readers of Bloom 1973 (and following studies byhim). Although Bloom's skill as an interpreter of poems must be evident to any reader, histheory of anxiety - particularly with its accompanying Freudianism - seems bizarre in anAsian context. I do not know when the original of Durisin 1974 was published but, in spiteof the rigidities of the English translation, his argument for considering as reception what isusually termed influence earns my conviction. In a forthcoming study I argue that influenceis better thought of as an effect of cultural and political dominance, whether through poweror prestige and, therefore, that influence necessarily entails reception, although there maybe reception without influence.


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136 EARL MINER"Influence study" or certain versions of "reception" continue tobe practiced and for good reason: they can be controlled or verified

historically and they reveal things that other kinds of study do not.But the study of influence has also had undeniably poor examplesand dull work. Hence, it has been common recently (as noted earlier)to consider matters of literary theory as a main concern of compara-tive study.Before turning to that subject, however, we should pause to con-sider the proper subject of influence or the grounds of the compara-tive. Only custom - certainly not logic - has led us to think of thecomparative as a kind of study restricted to cross-literary or cross-language study. There is no reason why, say, the influence of medi-eval English literature on Victorian English literature should not beconsidered comparative; and, with its very long literary history andthe veneration of the past, Chinese literature affords many oppor-tunities for comparative study in purely Chinese terms. There is ofcourse the danger that what is thereby taken to be of universallysecure definition holds only for England or China. There is a dangerof Eurocentricism or Sinocentricism, as we all know from numerousexamples. But, if the danger is recognized, there is no reason not toinvestigate comparative topics within a single literature. For thatmatter, literature may be studied comparatively with other arts,especially painting and music.Certainly matters of literary theory have occupied comparatistsin recent years - for some important and some merely fashionablereasons. More naturally than non-comparatists, comparatists have asense of theoretical issues posed by differences between nationalliteratures and, by definition, are likely to read theorists' writing invarious tongues. In fact, many so-called comparatists have become sotheoretically minded that they have ruled out historical evidence. Itshould be clear that those who do so cannot be termed comparatistsin the sense of those who compare evidence from more than one lan-guage or culture, aware that, even in one language or culture, thingshave not always been the same. This is a serious matter. Historyenables us to differentiate and relate. And without differentiationand relation of some kind, comparison is not possible. This simplefact takes us to the very serious problem of the absence of principlesof comparability useful for literary study.Comparison is a matter of central importance for many kinds ofscientific study and is often claimed by social scientists as well.11 To11. One sociological essay stands far above others known to me. This is Zelditch 1971. Hismost important contribution is the positive one of adapting - by correction and amplifica-tion - J.S. Mill's System of Logic on comparison. His severe remarksapply no less to whatwe glibly term comparative literature: "in the present state of the social sciences there areinvestigations that pass as comparative that in fact are not in any useful sense comparative"(p. 270); "a political investigation is often said to be comparative if the political scientist is


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COMPARATIVEPOETICS 137the best of my knowledge, nothing of importance has been done onthe subject of literary comparability. It is passingly strange that thoseof us who profess to engage in comparative study have not botheredto inquire what are the principles - including the grounds and limits- of comparison. In what follows, there will be some attempt tosuggest very simple logical matters, along with certain practical pro-cedures and conceptions.Obviously we cannot compare that which is the same. Some dif-ference must exist or else we identify rather than compare. On theother hand, if differences are too great, comparison becomes unfeas-ible because the logical or practical results do not satisfy. Anotherversion of the problem of too great difference is error in categoriescompared. There may be value to the comparison of imagery or plotin plays in differing literatures but there is no immediately apparentvalue in comparing the imagery of Chinese drama with the plots ofGreek tragedy.There would be a value in that exercise if it could be shown thatthe imagery of Chinese plays was more than analogous to the plotsof Greek tragedies. The comparer would need to demonstrate thatthe imagery of the one kind of play was homologous with the plotsof the other kind. In zoological terms, the wing of the bat and theforeleg of the mouse are homologous, although they differ strikinglyin appearance as well as function. And in mathematics, there is anenormous body of theory dealing with homology and co-homology.Whatever the case with some semioticians, literary comparatists havenot done anything with conceptions of homology, not at least in ex-plicit theoretical terms. Given such lack of definition, comparativestudy is still in need of some fundamental and simple clarification.Without going very far in providing basic principles, I should like tooffer a few observations.

The first is that one useful homology for comparative study isfunction. We all recognize that, in different literatures and societies,differing elements may serve the same function and therefore becompared. If in China, history serves the function that epic serves inthe West, there is sufficient homology to make comparison feasible.For that matter, if it could be shown that the imagery of Chinesedrama and the plots of Greek tragedy both served the function ofestablishing dramatic character, comparison would not then be acategory error but a meaningful act. In fact, it is when there seems tobe no evident counterpart of something in one culture with that inAmerican but his subject France or Russia" (ibid.); "A study is sometimes called compara-tive when all that it does is illustrate a concept by describing an example that is in somesense foreign" (p. 271). In the strict sense stipulated by Zelditch, comparative literary studyhardly exists and certain questions such as the privileged status of theory or history have yetto be raised in terms of strict comparison. My observations represent only a few first steps.


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138 EARL MINERanother that one may be led to search for what it is, however dif-ferent, that serves a comparable function. Traditional Japanese litera-ture seems surprisingly lacking in panegyric in comparison with Chi-nese, Korean and Western literatures. But investigation would showthat early collections and poetry-matches, like later performances ofno, were sufficiently institutionalized to fulfill a major function ofpanegyric, the legitimizing of an individual or group or social struc-ture. After all, the twenty-one royal collections could only be madeby royal order and are alternatively known as the collections oftwenty-one reigns (nijuichidaishu). In many instances, however, care-ful comparison will show simply that our initial definitions requirerevision.No doubt there are numerous other criteria besides function thatcan establish homologous and therefore comparable entities. Nodoubt it may also be profitable to think of such things as symmetriesand asymmetries as alternatives to homology or of analogy as a lower-order degree of comparability. But these other possibilities need tobe accompanied by a second kind of observation having to do withdistinctions between words and things. "Tragedy" is a good example.Of course it is a Western term and the modern East Asian translations(e.g., Japanese higeki) do not very well convey what "tragedy"means. Some people hold, in fact, that tragedy is limited to certaihliteratures. It is commonly said that Christian tragedy cannot existbecause the Christian afterlife renders true tragic suffering impossible.If so, Buddhist tragedy must be yet more infeasible, since so-calledreality is so questionable a concept, as the famous passage from TheHeart Sutra makes clear: "Reality is the Void; the Void is Reality."Yet, as Aristotle himself acknowledges, there were Greek tragediesthat ended happily and the one Greek trilogy extant, the Oresteia,ends in Athenian celebration. To invoke "tragedy" along Westernlines alone is itself to invoke a considerable jumble. The Frenchcould not abide the comic scenes in Shakespeare; Milton's SamsonAgonistes must be a tragedy if Oedipus at Colonus is - and so forth.And if such diverse things termed tragedy in the West are tragic, thenI do not see how the quality can be excluded from the last chapterfeaturing the life of the hero in The Tale of Genji or the accounts ofvarious characters (Lin Daiyu, for example) in The Dream of the RedChamber (Hongloumeng).Yet there is a dangerous tendency in the effort to seek literaryeffect A (the tragic) in every country and it is most desirable tospeak of more particular matters: suffering, concepts of individualsand their world, the nature of perceived problems or disaster, etc.And some presumption of difference is, as mentioned earlier, funda-mental to the whole enterprise of comparative literature - and tohistorical understanding. Theory is useful because it tends to enlargeareas of likeness, but that is also its defect; history tends to overpar-


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COMPARATIVEPOETICS 139ticularize and render relative, but that is its differentiating virtue. (Ofcourse we may have theories of history and histories of theory.)Moreover, those of us interested in East Asian literature are some-times too defensive. It may well be that the best answer to the Euro-centric assertion that there is no Asian epic is not to point to historybut rather to assert that European literature is deficient in lackingthe fu or monogatari. Both of these kinds demonstrate, in any event,the congenial relation between lyric and narrative discoverable inChinese and Japanese literature.In the first two parts of this discussion, the topics were "genres"(lyric, drama, narrative) and collections. The former were dealt within terms of the definition of a poetic system within a culture. Inother words, in both earlier parts, there was an explicit or implicithypothesis that there are "identical" elements in various literary cul-tures: emergence of poetic systems defined in terms of a given "gen-re" (lyric, drama) and literary collections. That initial hypothesissoon leads to differentiation, since the details of what is "identical"or "universal" vary from one literary culture to another. What I sug-gest, therefore, as a method for comparative study is the isolation ofconceptual, cognitive, historical elements that are only formally, pre-sumptively and categorically identical in the sense of being commonto various literatures. Once we isolate such elements, we do not in-deed have identity but a sufficient homology or symmetry for com-parision to make sense.This approach has two variants useful in teaching and criticism.My terms for these variants do not matter but since the proceduresmust be named, I shall term them alienation and misreading, bothconsidered as deliberate procedures, both considered valuable morefor what they suggest and reveal than for what they prove. "Aliena-tion" is a deliberate introduction of something kindred but uncon-nected historically with the issue or matter at hand. Suppose, forexample, one is studying Western renaissance sonnet sequences. Ifthe subject is "self-fashioning," a poet's creation of a role to play inthe world, it would be very useful to alienate the subject by study-ing, let us say, Chinese poems using the love motif of the abandonedwoman as a political allegory for neglect of the scholar bureaucrat bythe poet's prince. One would quickly see that the supposed renais-sance artifice or crisis of self-definition is far less radical than sup-posed and that the means of "self-fashioning" in those sonnets is farfrom being the sole means of establishing a conception of self. Again,if the issue with the sonnets is their integration, it will prove usefulto alienate them by examining the extraordinary integration ofJapan-ese royal collections and other collections modelled on them. It willbe clear, of course, that the advantage of the alienating process de-pends on a degree of homology or symmetry within the apparentlyunhomological, alien or asymmetrical evidence brought to bear.


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140 EARL MINER"Misreading" is an equally deliberate procedure, interpreting acomplex whole by an important subordinate, rather than the domi-

nant, feature. Even in Western literature, it is often useful to "mis-read" lyrics as narratives or narratives as lyrics. It is certainly usefulto do so in East Asian literatures, although the greater hospitality ofthese two kinds in East Asia makes "misreading" of that kind a nar-rower or finer task than in the West. Misreading lyric or narrative asdrama, satires as utopias, description as subjective response or imag-ery as action - these are some of the many practical ways of operat-ing with an explicit, self-aware technique of misapplication used torelevant ends. Just as the study of what may seem identical in variousliteratures soon lapses into differences yielding the possibility ofcomparison, so (if carefully handled) these leaps to the alien and thesystematically perverse may yield degrees of likeness or illuminationthat other procedures may not.It will always be useful to compare what history shows to haveactual connection. But in the study of the basic features of lyric andnarrative and, indeed, in the study of the lengthy Asian and Westerntraditions, we are apt to gain far richer results by approaches that donot depend solely on historical connections between Asian and West-ern literatures: those really began only in this century. The enormousriches of Asian literature in earlier centuries simply are too importantto comparative study throughout the world for us to concern our-selves with influence or reception alone. And the aims of our studyare too important to be left to the definitions of any single one of usor to the methods devised in any single literary tradition. Such indivi-dual or chauvinistic pride would defeat the aims of comparativestudy of literature.REFERENCESBloom, Harold, 1973. The Anxiety of Influence (New Haven: Yale UP).Duriin, Dionyz, 1974. Sources and Systematics of ComparativeLiterature (Bratislave: Uni-versita Komenskeho).Guillen, Claudio, 1971. Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton UP).Konishi, Jin'ichi, 1984. A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 1, The Ancient Age (Prince-ton: Princeton UP).Levi-Strauss,Claude, 1966. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Liu, James J.-Y., 1962. The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).1975 Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Miner, Earl, 1979a. Japanese Linked Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP).1979b "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems," Critical Inquiry, 5,

339-353,553-568.1985 "The Collective and the Individual: Literary Practice and its Social Implications,"in: Earl Miner, ed., Principles of Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: PrincetonUP), 17-62.

Miner, Earl and Hiroko Odagiri, 1981. The Monkey's Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry ofthe Bash6 School (Princeton: Princeton UP).Zelditch, Morris Jr., 1971. "Intelligible Comparisons," in: Ivan Vallier, ed., ComparativeMethods in Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press),267-307.

some theoretical and methodological topics for comp lit earl miner

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