My name is Ben Hutchinson, I'm professor of European literature at the University
of Kent. I'm going to talk to you today about comparative literature. What do you
see in the ink blot? Some see an abstract cloud, others some form of menacing mask,
some see the suggestive spaces, others focus on the lines that shape them. We
can presumably all agree that the two sides of the image are symmetrical but
beyond that our brains process the information differently projecting
associations and prejudices and hopes and fears onto a shifting undefined
object. The image in other words is only as revealing as the observer.
Impressionistic as it is Hermann Horshack's ink blot test offers an
instructive analogy for comparative literature. Understood as the reciprocal
study of at least two forms of writing, comparative literature is both the most
natural and the most constructed of intellectual activities, as we struggle
to make sense out of one text or tradition we instinctively compare it to
another text or tradition. One side of the object mirrors and shapes the other,
cover half of the image behind me and it quickly loses any form of structure. Yet
we also bring a whole set of political historical and cultural predispositions
to the comparison, a perceptual apparatus through which we conjure meaning as we
compare it. To use one text to understand another to read Shakespeare's The
Tempest alongside Montaigne's essay on cannibals, for instance, or to compare
Chinese poetry of the Tang period with European poetry of the modernist period
is to reveal something about one's own tastes and knowledge,
if only the belief that there is something meaningful to be learned
through contextualising one's own tastes and knowledge. Comparison clarifies
through it's very methodology the reading literature is also reading into
literature. For literature exists, after all, comparatively from the drama's of
antiquity to the novels of modernity, from Eastern epics to Western classics,
there is not a text in history that is truly self-sufficient. To read and to
write is to work within an existing framework of characters, conventions,
plots and premises, how we understand one work of literature
is contingent on how we understand another work of literature. The more we
know the more we contextualise, the more we learn the more we compare. Knowledge
itself is comparative; beyond how we read beyond how we write comparison is
hardwired into the very ways that we think. While this makes comparative
literature among the most ambitious of intellectual disciplines, it also brings
the whole undertaking into question. For if to read is to compare in the pithy
words of George Steiner, one of the most influential of contemporary comparatists,
then fencing off a protected zone for its pursuit might in fact seem
unnecessary, since we are constantly doing it anyway. What, to put it simply, is
the force of comparative literature as opposed to that of literature. To answer
this question requires delving into the practice the history and the theory of
the discipline. Why, and indeed how, does one become a comparatist? In my case it
began with a passion for languages, then for the literature's written in them and
then for how to join the dots between them. The moment the dots start to cohere
into a pattern is the moment at which literature becomes truly comparative and it
is amongst the most exhilarating of intellectual experiences. To follow the
evolution of the novel from Cervantes to Calvino, to study the history of the
sonnet from Petrarch to Pushkin is to navigate by new and larger
constellations, drawn on by the delight of making cross-cultural connections.
Anyone naturally inquisitive, whether with or without foreign language skills,
can share this satisfaction. Curiosity, open-mindedness,
intellectual ambition, these are the only prerequisites for making comparisons. But,
if there are few more basic human instincts than the urge to compare,
scholarly modes of comparison take this psychological drive and dignify it with
disinterest. Yet the context of the observer continues to provide the
crucial point of reference, comparative literature may aspire to the objectivity
of a discipline but in reality it is deeply complicit in the prejudices and
positions that define it. There is in fact no such thing as a single objective
sense of comparative literature, almost every comparatist has a different idea
of how and what to compare, almost every comparatist has a different
set of priorities, the only consensus is on the inherent instability of the term.
Like governments in a democracy we have the modes of comparison that we deserve.
This instability is the very essence of comparative literature both its meaning
and its methodology depend on unsettling fixed canons, on forging fresh
connections and mutually enriching links between disparate texts and traditions.
Unlike the clearly demarcated fields of national literature's, English,
French, Russian, etc comparative literature does not have a canon of
texts so much as a canon of approaches to texts. Comparative literature, in short,
constitutes less discipline than an indiscipline. If this makes it akin to a
Rorschach test, it also makes it a mirror for modernity's intellectual anxieties
regarding globalisation. But what is comparative literature, ambitious readers
looking to stretch themselves are generally intrigued by the concept but
uncertain of its implications and rightly so in many ways; even the
professionals cannot agree on a single term calling it, to take just three
examples, 'compared' in French, littérature comparée, comparing in German,
vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, and comparative in English. Where the French
past participial suggests that the comparing has already happened and the
German present participle that it is in the process of happening,
the English adjective blurs the distinction between object and observer.
The very term itself when considered comparatively opens up a Pandora's box
of cultural differences. Yet this in a nutshell is the whole point should look
at literature comparatively is to realise just how much can be learned by
looking over the horizon of one's own tradition. It is to discover more not
only about other literature's but also about one's own and it is to participate
in the great utopian dream of understanding the way cultures interact.
In an age that is paradoxically defined by migration and border crossing on the
one hand and by retreat into monolingualism and monoculturalism on
the other, the cross-cultural agenda of comparative literature has become
increasingly central to the feature of the humanities. We are all in fact
comparatists, constantly making connections across languages cultures
and genre as we read. The question is whether we realise it. So the history
and theory of comparative literature are the history and theory of how literaray
cultures have learned to view each other. The forces of modernity that give rise
to the discipline, from colonialism and nationalism to exile and
internationalism, are also the forces that shaped it, sculpting its project of
analogy, antithesis and cultural differentiation. Comparative literature
in short constitutes something like the international relations of culture. In
fact one doesn't need to look only at the European version of comparative
literature and indeed one doesn't want to go well beyond the merely modern
version of comparative literature the whole idea of European modernity as we
have increasingly learned over recent decades is deeply problematic.
Nonetheless, the discipline of comparative literature developed in
European modernity and to a large extent because of European modernity so I think
I'm gonna concentrate just on that for today. Within modern Europe then, the
development of comparative literature as a process of intellectual exchange
between nations looks back to the post- 1648 idea of national sovereignty
enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia. To be international first one has to be
national, the principle of the balance of power along with that of religious and
by extension cultural freedom ensured that the various empires and dominions
began to pursue intercultural exchange in lieu of international war. By
the 19th century, the era in which the discipline would develop in earnest, this
balance of power was reasserted following the upheaval of the Napoleonic
Wars by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which fixed the European map for the
next hundred years. The fact that the major empires Prussia, Russia, Austria, had
made major gains meant that numerous smaller states and languages
were now subsumed within their purview. A range of differing cultures were howls
within a handful of overarching groupings the better to balance each
other out at the supranational level. The conditions for comparison, one might say,
were perfect. Yet for the emerging discipline of comparative literature
this imperial structure created a double bind since it meant that attempts to
overcome national divisions were tied precisely to those divisions, locked into
a narrative of competing countries and colonies. Comparison developed in short
within and between nations and empires,
Napoleonic, Victorian, the Habsburg as much as within and between languages and
literatures. Understood in the geopolitical terms of the 19th century,
comparative literature was also competitive literature. Given such
competing narratives, how can the process of comparing best be understood? Perhaps
we might usefully begin by viewing it as the search from master metaphor. The
Belgian born critic Paul de Man argued that modern literature constructs its
own allegories of reading. Comparative literature by extension constructs
metaphors of reading, models of how to interpret texts and cultures between
languages and nations. Such metaphors may provisionally be broken down into two
groups, those indicating connection or similarity and those indicating
disconnection or difference. Beginning with the former group, perhaps the most
obvious metaphor for the comparative approach to literature is that of the
crossroads. Standing at the centre of any number of converging routes or spaces, the
Silk Road, the Holy Roman Empire, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the
comparatist surveys and directs the passing traffic. Such a position
confers numerous advantages, constant stimulation and negotiation, exposure to
competing perspectives and privileged access to a range of sources, but it also
risks being disorienting, placing the comparatist at the mercy of chance and
circumstance, her head spinning furiously like the roadrunner in one of those
cartoons where the traffic signs are all flipped around. An alternative
increasingly important model of negotiation is that of the marketplace.
In an age in which successful authors write as much for the
in for an international as for a national audience the
cross-cultural marketability of literature has become a significant
criterion in determining what gets compared and indeed what gets written.
Already in the 1820s Goethe, in launching the term world literature, used the
metaphor of the marketplace partly in the Enlightenment sense of a forum for
trade and commerce, partly in order to encourage the dissemination of his own
works. Monetised in this way the metaphor of the marketplace points towards the
socio-cultural framework in which comparative literature necessarily
operates towards the network of publishers, reviewers, translators and
professors who make it possible. Metaphors such as crossroads and
marketplace, as well as other more overtly political variations, such as
parliament or United Nations, facilitate interaction between two or more
perspectives, indeed they mimic the very meaning of
metaphor just as the process of comparison functions as a simile by
saying that one thing is like another, so too it acts as a metaphor from the Greek
metaferthoún meaning to carry over or transfer, indicating as it does the ways
in which we compare one idea to another. Yet metaphors can be misleading,
sometimes meaning is not so much carried over as intercepted. The Danish critic
Georg Brandes described comparative literature as a telescope that both
magnifies and reduces, since it sees further but only by focusing on specific
objects. An image neatly captures the ambivalent nature of both of comparison
and of its attendant metaphors, how are we to understand those metaphors that
call into question any easy sense of comparative literature as simply an
intellectual import-export business? How are we to understand the mechanisms of
difference as well as of similarity? What, in short, of what one might term
contrastive literature. Contrastive literature forms the necessary
counterpart to comparative literature, without difference no similarity, in
order to say that one thing is like another one must implicitly say what it
is not like. To compare presupposes the ability to contrast. Seen in this way,
comparative literature is as much about reconfiguring comparisons as making them
and accordingly it attracts a corresponding group of metaphors
centered on the creation of new perspectives and meanings. Perhaps the
most prominent metaphor in this group is that of the melting pot. Unlike the image
of the crossroads, which suggests that texts and ideas may take different
directions but will still keep moving in some previously recognisable form, the
linguistic melting pot in pre-modernity Latin or Sanskrit, in post-modernity
world literature in English or French, implies that local ideas undergo a
fundamental change of form in order to find
expression within the many variations of one global recipient. Of course
comparison even within one language is not this straightforward, a single pot
can contain a multitude of ingredients, ingredients that it is the role of the
comparatist to taste and identify. Locating the border between one version
of an idea and another, bringing them together but also keeping them apart, is
an essential aspect of comparative practice. If the model of the melting pot
dissolves conflicting elements as much as it solves them the idea of
comparative literature as a border point invests the comparatist with greater
powers still, for it suggests that she can just as well block the traffic of
ideas as allow them safe passage, that she is authorised to rifle through texts
in search of contraband content, such as for instance vestigial colonialism in
modern European literature. The comparatist sits in judgement on the flow
of ideas with a more or less liberal more or less laissez faire
sensibility. To study the history of the subject, however, is to realise that
comparative literature is ultimately not so much about policing borders as
crossing them. Comparatists choose to distance themselves from their own
native cultures, they choose not to belong to any one particular tradition,
indeed, this unbelonging is arguably their defining characteristic. As intellectual
emigrés comparatists make links between cultures but in doing so they also
paradoxically reinforce the distinctions between those cultures, as such the
contrasts are as important as the comparisons, the disconnections as
instructive is the connections, but why, one might ask, do such metaphors matter?
Why should I, why should you, care about how comparative literature views itself?
The answer lies not in specialist skirmishes but in common sense. For, in
the case of comparative literature, the metaphors it lives by are arguably as
important as the insights it makes possible.
Unlike other disciplines, historically more secure in their intellectual and
institutional status, comparative literature must constantly renew its
sense of mission, constantly tell itself a new story
about how and why literatures should be compared. It is the continuous need to
justify itself to itself that marks out comparative literature as uniquely
beholden to changing intellectual fashions and thus to changing
disciplinary metaphors. So, what we might provisionally take the adjective
comparative to convey is that the idea of comparison, in conjunction with the
idea of literature, is as important as its practice. The animating impulse of
comparative literature is not just the urge to take a broad perspective across
differing forms and languages of literary expression, it is also the
politically, ethically and ascetically charged notion that this is a worthwhile
undertaking in the first place. Comparative literature cannot get by, in
other words, without a pinch of pathos, since it is the utopian dream of being
in no place (utopus) and thus in every place that drives it. Comparative
literature is in fact defined by its strategic position between languages
literatures and culture. Literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonialism, world
literature, translation studies, reception studies, comparative literature
in the 21st century draws on all these disciplines and more. Out of these points
of intersection emerge a number of recurring debates: the changing notions
of high and popular culture, the shifting hierarchy of original and translated
texts, concepts and criticisms of the Canon, debates that make comparative
literature among the most dynamic of intellectual fields. Irrigated by any
number of sources, it overflows with ideas as to how to conceive the role and
purpose of the verbal arts in an ever more visual world, for this indeed is
perhaps the principal function of comparative literature in the 21st
century. For ambitious readers with an appetite for ranging beyond their own
native traditions, comparative literature is the natural home. Yet it is also the
natural home through all those big questions about why literature and by
extension culture still matters. To compare literatures and cultures must
be to do more than merely accrue the sum of their parts, it must be
to ponder and to protect cultural relations. The surest way of moving
beyond a purely subjective response to the Rorschach test is to study the
practice, the history, and the theory of comparative literature. Thank you very
much for your attention.