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COMPARATIVE LITERATUREBYSIMON DURING

In 1886, Hutcheson Posnett, an Irish socialist lawyer and Profes-sor of Classics and English Literature at the University of Auckland,New Zealand, published a volume under the title ComparativeLiterature for Kegan Paul's pioneering International Scientific Se-ries. It was written to encourage the "establishment of chairs inComparative Literature at the leading Universities of Great Britain,America and the Australian colonies," and can be said to mark thebeginnings of the discipline's academic institutionalization.1Posnett was not himself primarily a literary scholar. Author of acritique of David Ricardo's theory of rent and a handbook on TheHistorical Method in Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Economy,he was committed to an amalgam of social and historical sciencewhich was indebted both to the "comparative method" associatedwith the legal historian Henry Maine and to the historical sociology ofHerbert Spencer. For Spencer, successful social development invari-ably requires increased functional differentiation and structural com-plexity as well as increases in size. On this basis, in ComparativeLiterature Posnett argued that literature must always be understoodas a function of social organizations which are themselves (potentiallyat least) in process. And he used the comparative method todemonstrate that literature has played a key role in the orderedpassage of social organizations from filiative groups (clans) to a worldcommunity formed by globalized trade, communications, and corpo-rate industrialization (cosmopolitan humanity).His book was more or less explicitly articulated against thecontemporary shibboleths of literary value, including the cult ofindividual genius, any aesthetics based on the Kantian notion ofdisinterestedness, the notion of the autonomy of literature as articu-lated by the French avant garde, and the Arnoldian project for whichliterature and criticism might help cultivate a civil sensibility againstthe supposed disorder and crudity of democratic, commercial society.Comparative Literature was a manifesto for literary science and for aparticular politics, since Posnett also wished to persuade readers thatliterary history or "growth,"as he put it, has been organized by "theELH 71 (2004)313-322 C 2004 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress 313


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progressive deepening and widening of [individual] personality" (C,72). This meant that, at its most successful, contemporary literaturecould depict and express highly individuated characters and voices whoalso, paradoxically,represented wide-ultimately transnational-socialassociations, Walt Whitman (who owned a copy of Posnett's text)being the favouredexample of this "democratic ndividualism" C, 389).In sum, Posnett conceived of comparative literature as a socialscience which, along with the world-literature canon it addresses,forms a basis for the politics of cosmopolitan democratic individual-ism. It does so not just because literature uniquely articulates thosestructures through which individuals recognize themselves as con-nected to and formed by an increasingly wide range of distant socialformations, but because the comparative method enables recognitionof social and cultural differences and, hence, encourages the dissemi-nation of relativism as well as entry into a single world system. ForHenry Maine and the Victorian anthropologists, the comparativemethod used empirical data on surviving nonmodern societies toconstruct a stadial account of the history of early social development.For Posnett, it demonstrated how different social structures producedifferent literatures that might then be judged in relation not toaesthetic universals but to the contemporary advanced society/literature nexus.In these terms, Posnett's treatment of Arabic, Indian, and Chinesecultures is characteristic. Admitting that he is ignorant of a "literaryfield so boundless in its wealth of interest," he nonetheless finds inthe ancient literatures of Asia a cosmopolitanism less retarded thanthat of the West of the time, being based on the extraordinary"diversities of language and race" that they had to address as well ason their sensitivity to the nonhuman environment. NonethelessPosnett's analysis is skewed towards Europe. As a Mainesian, hecontends that in Asia "individual life" remained underdeveloped"among the castes and village communities of India or the familysystem and paternal government of China" (C, 386), so that Asianliteratures failed to cross the threshold into democratic individualismeven if, in their merging of "personal being" with social life, byimplication at least, they anticipate elements of the socialist future.(Ironically, in 1907 Rabindranath Tagore gave a series of extensionlectures on "Comparative Literature" for the Bengali Studies sectionof the Bengali Council of Education in which, not wholly dissimilarly,the "continuous diffusion of self" was posed as a terminus ofBishwasahitya [that is, world literature]).2314 Comparative Literature


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Looking back, perhaps what is most remarkable about Posnett'sbook is how little relation it bears to comparative literature as wehave come to know it. Rarely can a founding text have left so fewtraces on the field it helped inaugurate. Little or nothing of Posnett'ssocial scientific methods or political corporatism or his comparativemethod's global ambitions mark the work of, say, Harry Levin, EricAuerbach, Ren6 Wellek or Paul de Man-to name some of thediscipline's famous names. Basically, of course, this is because, in thelead-up to and aftermath of WWI, literary studies became committedto national-or at least "civilizational"-cultures and, as an indirectconsequence, became organized ideologically around the concept ofliterary autonomy that Posnett refused as well as methodologicallyaround the professionally subtle interpretation of individual texts-aprotocol that positioned itself firmly against the social sciences. Thuscomparative literature (which turned out to be pretty much confinedto the United States as the only major Western state not officially atraditional monoculture) was not principally engaged in comparisonat all. It was peopled by experts in close reading across more than onelanguage (most often the languages of those wartime allies, Franceand Britain/U.S.).

Today, close reading is not as hegemonic in literary studies as itonce was, not because cultural nationalism is in decline but because(among other reasons) the literary canon is losing relative valuewithin Western national cultures. At the same time, at least arguably,literature appears to be less tightly bound to spatially definedtraditions than it once was, partly because of the recent remarkableincrease in transnational flows of people, culture, capital, and tech-nology which we call globalization. This has meant the study of globalliterature can follow new paths. One thinks of Franco Moretti'srecent work on the spatial dissemination of the novel or the reinvigo-ration of translation studies or Pascale Casanova'sintriguing historicalanalysis of international literary cultural capital in her recent LaRepublique Mondiale des Lettres. Comparative literature itself hasbecome increasingly open to questioning about its restricted range,such as that by Rey Chow in her essay here.Chow's postcolonialist essay points in many directions, but let meabstract what I see to be its main argument. She suggests thatcomparison is always locally situated and nuanced, although this hasbeen occluded by the discipline's relative indifference to the other-ness of non-European cultures. Outside of Europe, she argues,literary studies routinely involves recognition of old power differen-Simon During 315


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tials between societies. Certain marginal cultures-many, but not all,of whom were once the targets of European colonialism-have anambivalent relation to the metropolitan centers partly because thememory of colonialism is so traumatic and partly because neverthe-less they have been developed both by connecting to and bydistinguishing themselves from those centers. Since they have beenunevenly formed and deformed by European contact, they possessvarious internal historicities. This dual relation to the center alsomeans that marginal cultures, haunted and segmented by their pasts,are particularly (but not uniquely) transcultural, with the corollarythat comparative literature, whose primary object is now culturaldifference and its history, need possess neither a transnational nor amultilingual scope. Nor need it jettison universal aesthetic judgmentssince such judgments (in their ungroundedness) create moments ofself-reflection in which the mix of resistance and derivation that hasshaped non-European (or post-European) cultures is clarified.This argument may seem to be critical of comparative literaturebut, if I read it right, is in fact profoundly supportive of a reformedversion of the discipline. Indeed to the degree that all cultures areunderstood as transcultures, all literary study needs to be compara-tive or at any rate relational in its orientation. And Chow's particularmode of support for aesthetic judgments that aim for universalauthority seems to place a form of comparativism at the heart ofliterary discrimination itself. Chow's targets then are not thecomparativists. On the contrary,her targets are those who, on the oneside, assume the cultural homogeneity of national literatures and, onthe other, embrace notions of global literature and cosmopolitanismthat make it harder to recognize historical and spatial inequities anddifferences.

It is in this context that my brief reanimation of Posnett's workbecomes relevant. Not that his book can be resuscitated: the prejudi-cial bases and over-abstraction of its theory of history and socialevolution need no spelling out. But for all that, I think that it retainsa certain disciplinary "spectrality,"as Harry Harootunian might put it.(There is a sense in which Chow and Harootunian's language of"haunting" "historicity" and "spectrality,"with its confidence aboutwhat is contemporary and what is not, is a transposition of the oldcomparative method's "survivals"-now rendered posthumous andwith primary historical agency ascribed to Western modernity andcolonialism). Posnett represents not so much a lost path for compara-tive literature as a faint reminder that it is constituted by hope, based316 Comparative Literature


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on ever increasingglobalcontact,markedby radicaldiscontinuities,ordered by tensions between theory and evidence, and articulatedthrough the instabilityof its primary concepts including that of"literature"tself.For Posnett literaturewas primarilyan institution,not a set ofaestheticizedtexts or genres,and one organizedradicallydifferentlyin different times and places (even though it alwaysturned on thestructurationof subjectivity-what Posnett generally called "indi-viduality.")And Posnett'shighlytheorizedjudgmentthat the literaryinstitutiondiffers acrosstime andplace is, at least in principle,basedon empirical data-in his case on facts and texts supplied byphilologistsand colonial administrators. his is importantbecause ifone thinks of literaturesfrom other places and times outside theprotocolsand values of close readingand aestheticjudgment (andeven if we wish to defend these things), then we need thickdescriptionsof these literatures'institutionality.This requires pre-cisely empiricist (often sociological)methods-even if we know inadvance hat these methodswillpresentus with less realityandtruththanwe hope for or, indeed, need.So it is no accidentthatliterary ociology s undergoingsomethingof a resurgenceat the moment.In relation o globalandcomparativeliteratures 'mthinking, orinstance,notonlyof Casanova's ourdieu-inflected book mentioned above but also of two recent accountsofWestAfricanAnglophoneiterary ulture: he firstbyWendyGriswoldon contemporaryNigeria, and the second by StephanieNewell oncolonial Ghana n the interwaryears.Casanova'sbook constitutes a challenge for any account ofliterature'srelativizingcapacities since she represents the globalliterary ystemas constitutedbynations,ethnicgroups,and individu-als competingfor prestige and recognition.For her, modernlitera-ture begins when, in the wider resistanceto Papalauthority, ertainEuropeanvernacularlanguageswere calleduponto produceclassicsthat might challenge Latin'sdominance.Thus for her JoachimduBellay'sLa Deffenceet Illustrationde la LangueFranpoyse 1549) isliterarymodernity'soriginatingmanifesto. Modern literature,how-ever, soon escapes containmentby nationsjust because its texts areconstantly circulated and translated across borders. The literaryimport/exportmarket ormsthe basisof modern iterature'sliberatingautonomyfromspatially-basedocieties and cultures-an autonomywhich, by the same stroke, permits experimentationand aestheti-cism. Nonetheless great literature confers status on the culturesSimonDuring 317


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which produce it. And only the metropolitan centers-notably Paris-can consecrate literary works, their power to do so being, to somedegree, quantifiable. That power is a function (approximately) of thesum of translations in and out of the national language, the degree ofthe language's international usage, along with the dissemination ofcommentary that translations receive. Thus writers like the CubanAlejo Carpentier, the Algerian Kateb Yacine, the Irish SamuelBeckett and James Joyce, the Roumainian E. M. Cioran, the CroatianDanielo Kis, the Belgian Henri Michaux, the Czech Milan Kundera,even the American William Faulkner all owe their global fame, andthence their capacity to mold future literary form, to Parisianrecognition.

With whatever qualifications one might want to receive thisargument (and Casanova does seem to be reacting to English'scurrent global dominance), it makes a convincing case for theexistence of a major metropolitan and international literary systemand canon with its own conventions and institutional modes, indi-rectly related to the politics of nationalism, which is independent ofthat of so-called minor literatures, and which sometimes, as Casanovainsists, offers resistance to local oppressions, limiting conventions,and censorships. This argument, however, also evacuates the local orregional valency of peripheral literary cultures as well as the constantneed to invent and relegitimate the terms of metropolitan validationin a literary institution split and spread across its constitutive groups.Griswold's and Newell's books describe whole other worlds thanCasanova's, focused as they are on localized literatures. In Nigeria,for instance, literacy rates are relatively low (officially around 50%)and what Griswold calls a "reading culture" is not deeply embeddedin everyday life: the physical settings of relative privacy, light, quiet,and some degree of comfort are rare, and widespread social supportfor reading is lacking in this poor, intensely religious, ethnically andlinguistically divided, politically repressed nation. So Nigerian read-ers form a comparatively well-educated, Christianized, Western-orientated, urbanized group. Nonetheless, Griswold's "Nigerian fic-tion complex," as she calls it, shares a great deal with first-worldliterary culture.3 Nigerian readers read for many reasons-escape,instruction, substitute sociability, the acquisition of prestige, informa-tion about the world, and sheer entertainment. They seem by andlarge to prefer imported fiction to that locally produced. Localwriters with international reputations are not widely read, and a newgenre of diasporic globally-orientated Nigerian literary fiction (such318 Comparative Literature


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as Simi Bedford'sYorubaGirl Dancing) are almost unknownbackhome.Yet the Nigerianliterarycomplexalso possesses distinct features.Its distributionand marketings weak: Griswoldoffersa hair-raisingdescription of trying to buy a book in a large Lagos bookstoreprimarilydedicated to sellingschooltexts.4Bookclubs, so importantto Western amateur literary-fictionreadershipsand once a corecomponent of West-Africanliterarylife, are absent. Readers areyoungerthan those in the West. For all that, because literacyandreading are restricted, they retain prestige at least among certainsocial sectors. And they are seen to offer some promiseof an absentdemocraticpublicsphere.The novelsthemselves tend to representamore masculinizedethos than do Westernfictions;this is so even inthe romancegenre, which is largelyread by women (thoughoftenwrittenby men). Local novelsroutinelyarticulatea distrustof officialinstitutionsand authority,with the difficulties faced by the talentedand honest because of corruptionand nepotismforminga commonbasisforplots. Infertilityandits evils are a primary heme, while sexis a much less importantndicatorof characterandfeelingthanin theWest. Many Nigerian popular novels describe collisions betweenurban modernity and more established rural lifeways, and offerfantasynarrativesn which characters an enjoythe benefits of both.Unlike Griswold'sbook, which is largely based on interviews,Newell's work is archivaland historical.And she comes to ratherdifferent conclusionsthan does Griswold, indingin colonial Ghana"a distinctive literaryaesthetic"constructedat the intersection ofolder,vernacularoralcultures,readingpracticesdisseminatedby themissions and imported Anglophonefictions.5Colonial Ghanawasmuch less literate still than contemporaryNigeria (about6%of thepopulation completed primaryschool) so this aesthetic was veryrestricted.Indeed the increasingly ierce strugglefor decolonizationseems to havereducedliteraryactivity rom the 1930sonwards.Thedevelopment of Anglophone skills was also problematizedby thecolonialgovernment'sndecisive attemptsto encourage print-basedvernaculars, policywhich was attackedby manypan-Africanistsndelite radicals n the prewaryears.So Newell describes literary culture as emerging out of mid-nineteenth-centurybiblereadingandaproliferation f missionbasedhow-to books, on topics from marriage o soil erosion. By the latenineteenth centurya West AfricanEnglishpress had emerged andliterary clubs were widespread:these were the institutions thatSimonDuring 319


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nurtured a literary reading culture. They also simultaneously fosteredanticolonial nationalism and new forms of local social hierarchy. Thesingle most important import novelist for the development of thelocal fiction complex was Marie Corelli, whose influence on non-European literary cultures worldwide was immense. For instance,the first generation of Thai novelists were inspired by her, and acrossWest Africa she was routinely regarded as the greatest Englishnovelist by all kinds of readers, a judgment which retained force intothe 1960s. Why? Newell argues that Corelli's supernaturalism, herChristianized melodrama, overt idealism, and, probably most impor-tantly, hard critique of English ruling-class decadence formed thebasis for her global success.

Ghana's colonial literary aesthetic crystallized out of this mix. Itwas characterized by a particularly ornate rhetoric and vocabularythat seemed pompous to Western observers, but which, from theinside, signified linguistic and cultural mastery. It engaged no inter-pretative or evaluative techniques based on Western high-culturenotions of aesthetic autonomy, organic unity, and fusion of form andcontent. Since it was heavily influenced by Christian missionaryactivity, it was primarily concerned with consolidating Christianizednorms concerning love, marriage, and money. Yet it provided roomfor anticolonial and anti-Christian satire as well as nationalist critiqueand black consciousness raising (often drawing on African-Americanwriting). By the late forties this culture was already in decline,threatened by commercial leisure industries able to offer "highlifedances," "concert parties," and "Hollywood blockbusters."6My main aim in drawing attention to these descriptions of WestAfrican literary cultures is not to enquire how well they fit eitherChow's sense of the historicity that organizes postcolonial cultures orher hopes for a recuperation of aesthetic judgment and the "alterity"of non-Western literariness and historicities, although, it has to besaid, neither Griswold's nor Newell's accounts confirm, for instance,the "involuntary,neurotic" ambivalence and memory of violation thatChow sees organizing Europe's relation to its "post-European" oth-ers. The history of non-European Corelli reception, for instance, orof the relations between literacy, literary writing/reading, religion,ethnicity, space, politics, class, gender, and other forms of popularculture in West Africa, are (if it's possible) both more simple andmore complex than that.

My aim is rather to join with Chow and affirm how differentliterary cultures and history across the globe are, and, more espe-320 Comparative Literature


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cially, how recondite and specific our literarypractices are-I'mwritingas a first-worldprofessional iteraryacademicto others such.Those practices, of course, are an outcome of something like thecentralized and imperial system of validationthat Casanova de-scribes,and are based on assumptionsabout aestheticautonomyandform, techniques of interpretation,and a general understandingofthe patterns of literary history and canons that are fairly recent(Posnett,forinstance,did not knowof them)andsharedbyalmostnoone except ourselves,even in the West.What follows from this recognitionis complicated. Recognizingdifferencewhere indifference or sameness once reignedcan lead tonew hierarchies s well as to the new"possibilities f supplementarity"that Chow gestures towards.Certainlythe kind of future-directedpolitical expectationsthat Chow shares with Posnett have a historymarkedmainlyby disappointment. t is hard,afterreadingGriswold,Newell, and Casanova, o have faith in the possibilitiesfor Chow's"semiotic onjunctionmediatedby differenttemporaldynamics."Myown sense is that we might rather hope to be able to join asociologicalunderstandingof the varietyand materialityof globalliteraryculturesto practicesof elite, academiccriticism,themselvesattuned to local amateurreading cultures, in ways that (and hereidealism makesanotherappearance)might help literary tudies (andthe doctrineof literaryautonomy)expandinto those regionsof theglobaluniversity ystemwheretodaytheymean little.Whyone mighthope for the transnationalexpansionof a renovatedliterarystudiesdespite literarystudies'sremoteness from wider culturalpracticesanddespitetheir alliance o privilege n a scene of terribleglobalandlocal inequity, s a knotty topic all of its own. At any rate, I am notpersuaded that Chow'sbrave and subtle defense of universalizingaestheticjudgmentsis a good place to begin. Once more it's hardtosee how suchjudgmentswouldoperate n the kind of literary ulturesthatNewell and Griswolddescribe,orhowtheycan be disarticulatedfrom the processes that Casanovabringsto our attention.Perhaps,afterall,Posnett'snotion thatthe ultimatebasisforliterary udgmentis not aesthetic universalsbut rather a concrete notion of what ademocratic, ust, andinterconnectedglobalsocietywouldlook likeismorepromising.TheJohnsHopkinsUniversity

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NOTES1 Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (New York: D. Appletonand Co., 1886), vii. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parentheticallyby pagenumber.2 Rabindranath Tagore, in Selected Writings on Literature and Language, ed. SisirKumarDas and SukantaChaudhuri New Delhi: OxfordUniv. Press,2001), 149.3 Wendy Griswold, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria(Princeton:PrincetonUniv. Press,2000), 29.4 Griswold,85.5 Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: How to Play the Game ofLife (Bloomington: ndianaUniv. Press, 2002), 7.6 Newell, 48.

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