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Trying to Make It Real: An Exchange between Haun Saussy and David Damrosch

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.53.4.0660

1528-4212

David Damrosch, Haun Saussy, Jacob Edmond,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Historian Takashi Shogimen, bioethicist Jing-Bao Nie, and I established this research group several years earlier to promote dialogue about theories and methodologies of comparison across diverse fields from psychology to anthropology, history to bioethics. Haun's talk itself followed a roundtable discussion in which Haun and Zhang Longxi joined with Otago colleagues from all these disciplines to discuss how each field's engagement with questions of comparison could be brought into mutually illuminating dialogue. “Compared to What?,” then, was initially written to contribute to a dialogue about comparison across disciplines as diverse as the subjects—astronomy, zoology, jazz—that the essay engages.Subsequently, I wrote to David Damrosch, inviting him to contribute to this special issue. In my e-mail to David, I happened to mention in passing that Haun in his talk had identified a certain disciplinary rigidity in the recent rise of world literature. David expressed an interest in reading and responding to Haun's piece, Haun agreed, and the exchange that follows was born.In coordinating the exchange, I sought to preserve both the points of difference and the spirit of dialogue. To this end, I first invited Haun to revise his talk before passing it on to David, who was invited to respond. Haun was then given an opportunity to address David's response, and David responded in turn to Haun's response. Later, Haun provided a very brief coda to conclude the exchange. We agreed that each essay in the exchange could not be substantively revised to respond to any criticisms or corrections, since this would obscure the real and important matters of contention.These matters of contention reflect the exchange's double beginnings both in interdisciplinary dialogue about comparison and in disciplinary debate about comparative and world literature. To “make it real” like Gene McDaniels must we reject disciplinary norms and “make it new” like Ezra Pound? Or, as the Ancient Chinese origin of Pound's injunction suggests, is conformity to a tradition or discipline equally important to making it real? Through these intertwined questions, the interlocutors illuminate the contested relationship between discipline and comparison.I'm going to try to show that comparison, literally, historically, and broadly understood, is what we are doing or what we ought to see ourselves as doing, and that the idea of comparing, far from being a relic of creeds we have outgrown, points the way to the most ambitious kinds of work in the future of the discipline. I'll give an account of where I think we stand today, and relate this to an account of the intellectual origins of the comparative disciplines, of which comparative literature is only one. Then I'll try to show how the act of comparing can guide decisions about what to consider important and worth our energies, if we want the field to remain a place where the most lively, challenging, and consequential work in the humanities can be done.In the country where I do most of my teaching, comparative literature today finds itself before two alternatives, two distinct descriptions of what it exists to do. One is the program of “world literature,” which would eventually result in a global history of all kinds of imaginative or rhetorically charged writing, although the samples currently on display amount to little more than an influence-history of the European novel, but on a world scale. The other is a mission of interdisciplinarity, which I would characterize as both the use of techniques of reading and analysis drawn from the literary disciplines to understand the rhetoric, epistemology, and effects of other media and fields of human activity such as law, architecture, medicine, or politics, and the use of techniques or questions specific to those fields to reframe our understanding of traditional literary objects.Some further considerations: The program of world literature does not particularly disturb the architecture of university departments. In fact it may aid in a long-standing project of academic administrators, the reduction of all language and literature departments to subsets of the English department. (I say this with no particular animus against English departments. If we were in China, it would be the Chinese department that swallowed up the smaller units in the humanities.) The program of interdisciplinarity is more anxiety-provoking within a traditional structure of schools, fields, and disciplines, because it involves crossing the objects of field A with the methods of field B, or other violations of disciplinary integrity; it also always, to some degree, involves inviting nonspecialists to pronounce judgments within a specialist field. If a film scholar one day takes an interest in the ecclesiastical politics of eighth-century Byzantium, say, the Byzantinologists are apt to ask for that person's credentials. They won't readily give up the ownership of their special domain, and they will be especially skeptical if anyone suggests that it is the inner structure of film studies that prepares one to ask the most important questions about church, state, monasticism, heresy, and other matters that bothered the Christians of the eighth century. And likewise if it were the other way around; turf is turf. So, leaving behind this particular example, you can see why interdisciplinarity is a much harder ideal to advocate for; it's exposed, and legitimately so, to all kinds of critique; it doesn't lead back to a state of security and good housekeeping; it is hard to tell good interdisciplinarity from bad, partly because it's not clear who is an authority on such a non-authoritative area.But comparative literature emerged from interdisciplinarity back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By that I refer to an ambitious, startling interdisciplinarity, the borrowing of thought-patterns and analytical tools from remote disciplines. The condition that we have grown up with, in which comparative literature is a common ground and clearinghouse among different literature departments, is actually a professionalization, a reining in, of the wild interdisciplinarity of the founders, and I would hold that the impatient ardor of those who would like to go back to crossing semiotics with biology in order to produce new readings of Hegel, say, is really the long-term norm of comparative literature.But I must first tell the story. Let us take as our guide through the wilderness René Wellek, the founder of Yale's comparative literature department in the 1940s, who in the 1950s wrote an essay on the “Name and Nature of Comparative Literature” that aimed at clearing up once and for all the problem of origins.1 His essay was in turn deeply indebted to Ferdinand Baldensperger's essay of 1921, “Littérature comparée: Le mot et la chose.” The phrase “comparative literature” and its equivalents in other European languages begin to appear in the 1830s as a late fruit of Romanticism, says Wellek. The idea that every nation, every language, every people, has its genius, and that the writers express that genius, naturally leads to the study of this diversity. Baldensperger is careful to distinguish the post-Romantic comparisons from those more invidious pre-Romantic ones which assumed the existence of stable artistic criteria and a single scale of values. Of these earlier acts of comparison, Baldensperger says, “and what did they want to prove? That Shakespeare is greater or lesser than Corneille; that modern classicism is not the same thing as the ancient classics; that the French will never understand Dante.”2 The relativism produced by Romantic thinkers like Herder and Madame de Staël eventually triumphed over such static thinking and left literary scholars the task of describing and narrating the differences in national spirit; comparatists added to this mission the subtler one of showing how works and parts of works migrated from country to country, to modify and be modified.What Wellek adds, in his 1958 survey of the origins, is a wider field of reference. He noticed that in the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century, comparative literature was only one of the many comparative fields, and, as it was one of the last of these fields to take shape, was in a position to borrow ideas and organizing styles from the earlier arrivals. One of the most prominent comparative enterprises was the zoology of Georges Cuvier, who had been put in charge of the French Museum of Natural History shortly after its reorganization by the revolutionary authorities from a previous royal menagerie and herb garden. Cuvier was one of the great systematizers. He examined and described the thousands of animal skeletons in the Museum with the ambition of explaining their characteristics, of reducing their immense variability to a few consistent laws in the way that Newton had achieved for the cosmos. Cuvier's contribution to European intellectual life lay not only in classifying the animal kingdom but in a particular idea of organic form. He called it “the law of coexistence,” the functional interdependence of the parts of an organism.The family album of comparative literature must include both Cuvier's collections, still preserved in Paris, and the invidious use of comparison to deny commonality in his Natural History of Animals, where humans are divided, on an impardonably slender morphological–functional basis, into the distinct species of “European man” and “Negro man” (Figures 1 and 2).In Cuvier's epistemology, the word “comparative” stood for a double guarantee of systematic character: the idea that an animal was a tightly interdependent system of parts, and the promise that random or mechanical variation would be absent from a synoptic view of the whole animal kingdom. In the inventory of beasts past and present, nature had created prodigious variations limited only by conditions of physical impossibility. To refer back to my title, “Compared to What?,” here every bone of every animal is implicitly connected and compared to every bone of every other animal. Guy Jucquois has written two valuable books on the comparative method in the sciences.4 They reaffirm the importance of Cuvier as an establisher of patterns. Cuvier's zoo is a network of interlocking relationships and the actual model for such classificatory and genealogical projects as comparative grammar, comparative law, comparative architecture, and comparative literature, all dating from the early nineteenth century and all combining curiosity about difference with a drive toward integration that lets no detail escape into randomness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting Cuvier's Cabinet of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes in 1833, was overcome: “How much finer things are in composition than alone,” he wrote. “The limits of the possible are enlarged, and the real is stranger than the imaginary … The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, snakes—and the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms.”5Emerson's diary catches the excitement that once attached to the term “comparative.” At the same time as Cuvier was organizing the zoological realm, another scholar in Paris, the German Franz Bopp, was making similar tables of parallel grammatical forms in the Indo-European languages, suggesting, to anyone who was familiar with Cuvier's tableaux, that the place of a consonant in a word was analogous to the place of a bone in the body of an animal: as the animals differed, so the languages differed, but among their parts could be observed certain constant proportions (Figure 3).This is still a long way from comparative literature, but it announces a program, a model, which the initiators of literary comparison no doubt aspired to follow. But comparative literature could not quite emulate these models on its own ground. Difference, analogy, taxonomy, explanation derived from massive alignments of parallel cases: zoological or grammatical comparisons rely on archives, databases, collections, which made possible and necessary the founding of disciplines that were meant to curate, extend, and theorize these collections.So this is one account of what comparatists do: draw up catalogues of the content of world literature, establish taxonomies and genealogies, and try to draw law-like inferences from the relationships that can be seen among the exhibits. The nearly forgotten Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, author of Comparative Literature (1886), attempted to account for the growth of genres and themes in literature by referring them back to the general progress of civilization, which for him stood in the Darwinian–Spencerian perspective of “social and mental evolution.”6 At the end of this progression stands “world literature,” “the severance of literature from defined social groups—the universalising of literature, if we may use such an expression.”7 A revival of one such model reappeared in the year 2000 with Franco Moretti's proposal to replace comparative literature with “world literature.” As a means of attaining this goal, Moretti commends “distant reading”: not reading actual literary works but reading descriptions of literary works, compiled by experts in the different languages and traditions, and making possible a kind of universal overview.8 Such encyclopedism really only takes to a caricatural proportion a certain relation often found between comparative work and the work in “national languages,” as we call them, that comparison relies on for its material. It is an ambitious call for centralizing and rationalizing a discipline, one that may well put that discipline out of business within a decade or two, but no recipe for interdisciplinarity. For that we have to go back to the original act of appropriating scientific terms and models like “comparative.” Are we comparing similars in respects which they already have in common, or are we linking, as metaphors do, terms that are originally strangers to one another? To propose that readers learn from zoology how to think about poems and plays: that is interdisciplinarity. It may last only a moment (metaphors, as Aristotle observed, are momentary) before resolving into a codified practice, that is, a discipline. Once there are people who specialize in doing what zoology does, but using only poems, novels, and plays as their material, interdisciplinarity has begotten a new discipline, and the newly commissioned specialists in the corresponding archive are free to forget that it ever sprang from an undisciplined intuition.The nonspecialist insight, the unseemly yoking of methods, is necessary to get certain kinds of work done or call attention to certain kinds of difference. To show this, here is another and more extreme example to which Wellek refers. In 1753, Robert Lowth, professor of divinity at Oxford University, gave a series of lectures in Latin on the “sacred poetry of the Hebrews,” meaning principally the Psalms and the Song of Solomon. Lowth told his audience that they would have to suspend their current understandings of poetry, poetic form, or what it meant to compose poetry. Rather than meters based on quantifying the syllables of words or rhymes establishing equivalences between their final sounds, which served his audience as markers of poetic discourse, Lowth instructed his hearers that they would need to imagine an alternate definition of poetry in which the poetic was signaled by systematic series of equivalences between the meanings of words in parallel statements. (A brief example: “the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.”) There was something like rhyme and there was something like meter, but in ancient Hebrew they operated on the level of meaning, not of sound. As a liberator of poetic language, as a likely inspirer of Blake and Whitman, Lowth has his place in literary history, but that is not the reason for his appearance here.9 Rather, it is his odd use of the word “comparative.” It is not enough, Lowth says, to be acquainted with the language of this people, their manners, discipline, rites, and ceremonies; we must even investigate their inmost sentiments, the manner and connection of their thoughts; in one word, we must see all things with their eyes and estimate all things by their opinions; and we must endeavor as much as possible to read Hebrew as the Hebrews would have read it. We must act as the astronomers with regard to that branch of their science which is called comparative, who, in order to form a more perfect idea of the general system and its different parts, conceive themselves as passing through and surveying the whole universe, migrating from one planet to another, and becoming for a short time inhabitants of each. They clearly contemplate and accurately estimate what each possesses peculiar to itself with respect to situation, celerity, satellites, and its relation to the rest; they distinguish what and how different an appearance of the universe is exhibited according to the different situations from which it is contemplated.10 Wellek simply says that Lowth here “formulates the ideal of comparative study well enough.” But Wellek didn't have Google or the digital resources of the French National Library, and I do. It turns out that only one instance of the Latin locution “astronomia comparativa” answers to the search engine's call. Far from being common parlance among astronomers, as Lowth seems to say it is, the phrase appears only as the title of two plates in a 1742 astronomical atlas by Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, a mathematician and physicist from Nuremberg (Figure 4).Doppelmayr's Atlas coelestis or Celestial Atlas mainly gives material that could be found elsewhere, though it presents it elegantly. It includes maps of the night sky, the constellations, depictions of the solar system, comets, the craters of the moon, and so on; some of these plates are reused from the author's earlier publications.11 The two plates marked “Comparative Astronomy” are unparalleled elsewhere (Figure 5).They are meant to show what the motions of the solar system must look like to an observer standing on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn. To get across the general idea, the engraver shows the goddess of the moon peering through a telescope at what is recognizably our earth seen from afar—perhaps a first in science-fiction illustration (Figure 6).Doppelmayr's geometric charts show the times of the appearance of the different planets, including our own, from these other planetary points of view, and the mutual eclipses that arise as we all move along our determined orbits. One thing that puzzled me for a long time was the smaller illustrations in the corners (Figure 7).Doppelmayr there constructs, for each planet except our own, a model of the solar system like that advanced in the sixteenth century by Tycho Brahe. You will remember that after Copernicus had disturbed the consensus upheld by the Churches and put the sun at the center of the world-system, Tycho Brahe, a clever astronomer and a diplomat without peer, devised a rival system that left the earth in the center and had the sun go around it, with the other planets circling round the sun. This was ingenious because the mathematical predictions could be made to work, more or less, so that the appearances of the planets were conserved and the earth's dignity suffered no diminution; and it was more elegant and accurate than Ptolemy's system with the planets rotating around fictional points on epicycles. Eventually, too many measurements were made that rendered Tycho's system inoperative, and by the early eighteenth century it was discarded by all astronomers, even those working for the Vatican. So I could not at first understand why Doppelmayr, under no churchly obedience, would include five Tychonian vignettes in his “Comparative Astronomy”: a Tychonian model which made Mercury the center of the world-system, one that did the same for Venus, and others establishing Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as the centers of their relative worlds. And then it came to me: the point was that, for an observer situated on any of these planets, the home planet is always the one that seems to be immobile while the other celestial bodies go around it. Although no one was saying that Tycho was correct in general or universally, his model does represent, phenomenologically or in terms of experience, what it is like to look out at the night sky from the point of view of an inhabitant of Venus. In short, Doppelmayr was inviting us to see Venus and Jupiter and the rest as the locals see them, and holding back from subordinating their local perspectives to a generally authoritative account of how the world goes round.This is, we can now see, what Lowth had in mind too. If you are going to experience Hebrew poetry to the fullest, you have to forget that there is a wider world of poetry out there, some of which is written in quantitative meters, some of which uses free verse, some of which is chanted to a small guitar, and so on; you have to think as if the only poetry in the world is the kind that uses words in this specific way, and because it does that, changes the weight and application of its words in ways that we couldn't appreciate if we weren't thinking from within the poetic convention. We have to be, not just temporary Jupiterians in a Copernican universe, but Jupiterians with a Tychonic theory of what it is to be Jupiterian.I would argue that it was only by appropriating, in an elaborate metaphysical conceit, the mechanics of Doppelmayr's comparative astronomy that Lowth could frame his relativistic poetics. Though vastly larger in territory covered and vastly more precise in its measurements, Doppelmayr's model stimulated Lowth to a hyperbolic, but in the context of literary studies accurate, statement of the new poetic world he wanted us to experience.And there is interdisciplinarity again: concepts from astronomy, unavailable elsewhere, coming to inform poetics and the theory of translation. This is quite a different thing from using Dante, Virgil, and Homer or even Sima Qian to mark out a theory of the epic that might be applied to judge the merits of Paradise Lost. In the second case, we have, to be sure, examples from different literary traditions, but they are all recognizable to us as literary traditions; they are to a great extent made for each other, made by each other, and in a certain sense, if we are English-speaking readers, made for and by Milton. Business as usual. But the common feature, the fulcrum of the comparison, that projects Doppelmayr's Tychonianism into Lowth's study of Hebrew verse, is nobody's business as usual; it's a startling, excessive, irrational figure marked by the violence of borrowing across disciplines.If I have to choose, the interdisciplinarity presaged by Lowth is what I would take as the model of the comparative literature to come. It is a metaphor for which Lowth cannot take full responsibility, for although he has some knowledge of astronomy he lacks the time to tell us everything that would substantiate his analogy. It suggests more than it conveys, as a metaphor should. Metaphor is the lubricant of many an interdisciplinary argument, and much needed as such.There's an easy test for discriminating the two paths for comparative literature. The disciplinary account of comparative literature operates within the set of literary traditions or literary works recognized as such by our academic colleagues; the interdisciplinary account operates over the boundary defining the set of literary works, and tries to connect literary works with other kinds of knowledge or argument. But do we always know if something is a literary work? If we aren't sure, then the difference between the disciplinary and interdisciplinary tracks will be unclear as well. A capacity to create works of verbal art is, indeed, common to all humanity, though not equally realized in every human being or equally fostered by every human society. Before we can recognize the “literature” of another human group as a literature, however, someone has to perform the translation, the mediation, or the analogizing that refashions a piece of mere behavior into literature. Edward Gibbon, a few years after Lowth, makes a claim for the relativity of literary sense-making: An Iroquois work, even if it were full of absurdities, would be an invaluable treasure; it would offer an unique specimen of the workings of the human mind, when placed in circumstances which we have never experienced, and influenced by manners and religious opinions entirely contrary to our own. We should be sometimes astonished and instructed by the contrariety of ideas thus produced […] We should there learn not only to own, but to feel the power of prejudice.12 For thousands of years, fairy tales have been told all over the world, but only in the last few hundred years have they been considered as belonging to the same overall type of object as epic poems, lyrics, or dramas. When an ancient civilization is dug up and its clay tablets decoded, scholars must determine what in the archive is history, law, accounting, prayer, and so forth, and what is literature. If a previously unknown human group comes into contact with another civilization, some part of their songs and tales may become “literature” through being translated, anthologized, and appreciated. Since the Dada movement of the early twentieth century, nonsense syllables, lottery tickets, and handbills have been eligible for interpretation as literature, if only they were copied into a text that was to be received as an artistic performance. It may be that the frontier defining the literary is, in fact, one of the most active zones of interdisciplinary activity. Ernest Renan suggests as much when, rather like Lowth, he reaches for the description “another world” to qualify an extension of the literary understanding that had been experienced by his generation, the generation that studied under Bopp and Cuvier: Ever since the fifteenth century the sciences having for their object the human intellect and its works have made no discovery to be compared to that which has revealed to us in India an intellectual world of marvellous wealth, variety and depth, in a word, another Europe. If we review our most settled ideas in comparative literature, in linguistic knowledge, in ethnography, in criticism we shall find them stamped and modified by this grand and capital discovery.13An example that leaves “our most settled ideas … stamped and modified”: that is what I think we are always hoping for in Comparative Literature, and one of the reasons we are always pursuing other people's disciplines. It's not conquest of territory so much as a need to be unsettled. The study of other arts in relation to literature is an old advance of the field, underpinned though it may have been at the outset by a lingering Aristotelian mimeticism. Film came into our bailiwick by favor of the same extension: though a narrative art, it teaches us in comparative literature the most when we don't allow the narrative element to dominate. History of science, musicology, ethnography, psychoanalysis, human rights, medicine, anthropology, and on and on; it might be easier and shorter to ask, what is not comparative literature? What would not be acceptable as a thesis topic in a comparative literature department, what could never be published as an article in a comparative literature journal? I am not sure I could answer that question offhand, though once, when I was reading work for a comparative literature prize, I was puzzled when a publisher sent me a cookbook as their submission. Charting new frontiers, I suppose. If it is out there, we probably will be comparing something with it sooner or later—and that is what the eccentric, excessive, metaphorical predecessors I've listed earlier meant by comparison.You probably know the song from which my title question, “Compared to What?,” is taken. It was written by Gene McDaniel and became suddenly world-famous in 1969 after a performance by Les McCann, Eddie Harris, and Benny Bailey at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Part of it gives an angry description of citizens being manipulated and intimidated into passivity by media and government agencies: The President he's got his warFolks don't know just what it's forNobody gives us rhyme or reasonHalf of one doubt, they call it treasonWe're chicken feathers all without one gut.Goddammit!Tryin' to make it real—compared to what?14 There's a story behind this performance. It doesn't sound much like the first recorded version of the song, which appeared as the first track on Roberta Flack's initial solo album. It seems that an hour or so before going on stage, McCann had smoked hash for the first time and was in another universe. The trumpeter, Benny Bailey, arrived late. They had no sheet music and no time for rehearsal. McCann jumped into his first number, which the others weren't familiar with, and Harris stood behind him, watching his hands to learn the chords. There aren't a lot of chords, but McCann makes up for that with energy, and the rest of the band follows him. In these lines we have a collision among the protest song, the hellfire sermon, and free instrumental improvisation of the kind that had brought jazz into close proximity with recognized art music. A collision, in short, like that which I think comparatists should try to accomplish by importing distant methods and inhabitual objects into their work. Those collisions have critical value. Gene McDaniels's lyric is critical too: it insists in every stanza that we are hypocrites, fooling ourselves that we are one thing when we are really