Literature as a Comparative Practice
Walter Erhart
Abstract
Instead of asking the well-known question, if and how literary works can be compared with each other, the paper asks if literature and poetry themselves can be seen as comparative practices. Starting with Paul Ricœur’s assumption about the ‘semantic innovation’ through narrative and metaphor, the paper explores literary practices of comparing through two case studies: the reception of the literary figure of Odysseus in world literature and the function of metaphors in modernist poetry. While the comparing of literary figures as re-deployed and re-contextualized in succeeding literary adaptations can be analyzed as a key to the dynamics of world literature in general, metaphors and similes constitute the power of poetry to disclose relations that have not been there before.
The first part of the paper studies comparative techniques in Homer’s “Odyssey” and the transformations of its hero, and its narrative from Vergil and Dante up to Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of the Enlightenment” (and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001—A Space Odyssey”). The second part looks at the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (“Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird”) and his famous poem’s echo in the work of the German author Jan Wagner (“Regentonnenvariationen”). While Stevens’ metaphors demonstrate the perfor-mative power of language by obliterating a tertium compatationis, Wagner’s metaphors and similes melt the semantics of nature and culture in order to create an unprecedented post-materialist world-view of the 21st century.
indicated by the hero Odysseus, and the preservation of water in rain barrels. Or do the terms all appear in theOdyssey? Birds do; rain barrels, probably not.
An example such as this resonates with a famous article by Stanley Fish, “How to recognize a poem when you see one,” in which Fish describes the following sit-uation: A bunch of students, well-trained in interpreting religious poems of the seventeenth century,enter a classroom in which the notes from a previous class are written on the blackboard—in this case, the names of authors of linguistic text-books one below the other: “Jacobs-Rosenbaum,” “Levin,” “Thorne,” “Hayes,” and
“Ohman.” Stanley Fish, the teacher, turned this into a philological experiment by telling his poetry students that the words on the blackboard were a religious poem and the students should start to interpret it. What the students actually did was to find meanings through comparisons. The term “Rosenbaum” [rose tree], for exam-ple, indicates a metaphorical “reference” to the Virgin Mary (“often characterized as a rose without thorns”) and can be compared to the equally addressed “crown of thornes.” The double name Jakob-Rosenbaum might be part of an allegory referring to Jacob’s ladder and is followed by a comparison between “ladder” and “tree” (in which the “fruit” signifies the product of Mary’s womb—that is, Jesus). The term
“Ohman,” through phonetic, semantic, and contextual similarities, triggers com-parisons with the terms “omen” (as prophesy), “Oh man” (as a kind of title theme), or “amen” (as the poem’s “proper conclusion”). The Hebrew names “Jacobs,” “Rosen-baum,” and “Levin,” finally, can be held against the Christian names of “Thorne”
and “Hayes,” thus starting analogies and comparisons between the Old and New Testament.1
What Stanley Fish was trying to demonstrate, of course, was that we should not look for hidden meanings in poems, but that we create meanings and poems by ourselves—after all, that is what reader-response theory wanted to tell us.2 Cre-ating meaning in poetry seems to be all about comparison. Instead of training and testing our comparative habits, however, the three items in my title indicate the parts of a chapter aiming to tackle a rather general problem: Comparisons may be everywhere in literary studies, but is literature a comparative practice itself?
American comparative literature scholars have recently questioned “compar-ison” as a practice of literary studies.3 Comparing is not a neutral business: By comparing works of literature, there is always a notion of measuring, judging, and evaluating involved: atertium comparationisthat has already structured the field of
1 Cf. Stanley Fish,Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cam-bridge/London 1980, 322–337, see 324-325.
2 For an early example within the Anglo-American context, see Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Baltimore/London 1980.
3 Cf. Rita Felski/Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.),Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Balti-more 2013
comparison; a “centrism”4that assembles thecomparataas related objects seen from a dominant point of view. The comparing of cultures starts as a specific Western and European enterprise.5 The term and the idea of “world literature” still holds true to the assumption that literary works can be measured and compared from a dominant point of view—wherever this may come from.6We should be aware of our prejudices while comparing, because there has always been a power structure deciding who is able to compare, who is interested in keeping the incommensu-rable “other” within the confines of a presupposed horizon of comparison, and who determines the norms of comparative judgments.7
In the meantime, however, some have questioned this rather one-sided notion of comparison by seeing comparing as an ambivalent practice that could just as well head off in the opposite direction. Comparisons are inevitable and set off a search for similarities and differences without knowing where this leads to.8The practice of comparing—like using metaphors—sets the compared objects in motion, thus transforming the objects by constantly challenging and changing thetertium com-mune. Therefore, you can just as well describe comparing as a way of “decentering”
because it relates objects in a quite different and often unexpected way: It may as well be “a questioning of certainties and a suspension of security.”9By putting common perceptions and our own world in unforeseen relations; that is, by looking at familiar settings from the outside, comparisons alter the perspectives when it comes to seeing ourselves and the “other” (an issue on which cultural and global comparisons, in the wake of the eighteenth century, have always performed their most centralizing and imperializing power). If performed differently, comparisons not only produce knowledge, they also challenge the way we see ourselves:
4 Rajagopalan Rhadakrishnan: Why Compare? In: Rita Felski/Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.), Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Baltimore 2013, 15–33, see 20.
5 Cf. Walter D. Mignolo, Who is Comparing What and Why?, in: Rita Felski/Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.),Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Baltimore 2013, 99–119.
6 Cf. Emily Apter,Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability, London 2013;
Rajagopalan Rhadakrishnan, World Literature, by Any Other Name?, in:PMLA131 (2016), 1396–1404; Walter Erhart, Weltliterarische Vergleichspraxis—am Beispiel des Odysseus, in:
Dieter Lamping (ed.),Vergleichende Weltliteraturen, DFG-Symposion 2018, Stuttgart 2019, 137-155.
7 Cf. Sheldon Pollock, Comparison Without Hegemony, in: Hans Joas/Barbro Klein (eds.),The Benefit of Broad Horizons. Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science, Leiden/Boston 2010, 185–204; Zhang Longxi*, Comparison and Correspondence: Revisiting an Old Idea for the Present, in:Comparative Literature Studies53 (2016), 767–781.
8 Cf. Susan Stanford Friedman, Why not compare?, in: Rita Felski/Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.),Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Baltimore 2013, 34–45; Haun Saussy,Are We Com-paring Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability, Bielefeld 2019.
9 César Domínguez/Haun Saussy/Darío Villanueva,Introducing Comparative Literature. New Trends and Applications, London/New York 2015, xvi.
“Comparisons, to be educative, need to happen in a site that belongs to no one.
Comparisons should not be the vehicles of a latent calculus that has predeter-mined who, within the comparative continuum, is more developed than whom.
Rather, they should function as precarious and exciting experiments where ev-ery normative ‘Self’ is willing to be rendered vulnerable by the gaze of the ‘Other’
within the coordinates of a level playing field.”10
The quite controversial assessment of comparison and comparative literature—the critique of comparison as a philological, cultural, and political measurement on the one hand; the call for decentering, relativizing, and provincializing the “western”
perspectives via comparisons on the other—have all left the problem unresolved. As a practice of scholars and cultural critics, it might be up to a mere choice, a political conviction, or the confines of a historical paradigm to decide which strategies or options of comparing were picked up or should be picked up. By comparing while studying literature, it is supposedly we who choose the method and the strategy.
The obvious two-sidedness of comparing, though, could also lead to a considera-tion whether and how these ambivalences and tensions are part of the practice of comparing itself.
Any comparison as a method of literary studies can be traced back to a well-known everyday reading practice. As readers, we constantly compare different heroes and different actions, different fictions and different reading experiences.
Moreover, reading itself might be conceptualized as a “transfer” whereby readers always compare the fictional figures and actions with their own: a “constant analogizing” that enables the reader “to rewrite and extend the narrative of his own identity.”11
The literature lays it out for us—and we, as readers, start to compare not only heroes and objects within the text but fictions with previous fictions, with our own reading and our own experiences. That is why comparative literature studies are so powerful and so self-evident: They double and deepen the practices of the readers who immediately start to compare when they start to read.
As readers and scholars, we partake and we invest in the practice of comparing, but we seldom ask whether literature itself is a comparative practice.12Comparing has been—at least since the eighteenth century—the declared self-evident basis of the sciences and the humanities alike13, and it is up to a critical history of the
hu-10 Rhadakrishnan, Why Compare?, 32.
11 Winfried Fluck, Reading for Recognition, in:New Literary History44 (2013), 45–67, see 59.
12 Cf. Ralf Schneider, Comparison, Analogy, and Knowledge in Literature: Some Basic Consider-ations and the Case of Early Modern English Texts, in: Christoph Haase/Anne Schröder (eds.):
Analogy, Copy, and Representation. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Bielefeld 2018, 139–156.
13 Cf. Michael Eggers,Vergleichendes Erkennen. Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und zur Epistemologie des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik, Heidelberg 2016.
manities within the realm ofScience Studiesto study when and how literary scholars have used comparisons as scientific tools; what suppositions, interests, and con-sequences were at stake while scholars chose and abandoned their strategies and practices of comparing.
The recent discussions and negotiations of comparison in the field of compar-ative literature, however, limited their scope almost exclusively to comparison as a method and as an all- embracing tool of the humanities instead of taking dif-ferent and often changing historical practices into account. However, if historians and literary scholars turn their attention away from comparison as a method to comparative practices, from comparison to comparing, they suspend their own habitual procedures by turning their eyes to the actors who compared, the situ-ations in which comparing took place, and the interests and strategies that were involved.14Comparison may have its own history in the field of comparative his-tory and comparative literature, but it has hardly ever been studied as a historical practice in itself. If our purpose is to study what actors did when they compared, we immediately face serious—and quite familiar—problems in literary studies. If not the scholars themselves, who is comparing in literature: the author, the narra-tor, the hero, or the reader? Literary communication partakes in ordinary language and everyday communication, but usually there is no author being held responsi-ble for her or his words and actions. Narrators compare, literary figures sometimes compare—but does literature itself compare? I want to suggest that we at least try to approach this question by taking up Rita Felski’s recent proposal to treat lit-erature—with the help of Bruno Latour—as an agency, to treat literary works as actors who communicate and act across time and space.15How does literature do this? What does literature do when it compares?
From early on, since Aristotle at least, literary critics have trusted in the com-parative power of the arts. When Aristotle, in the famous ninth chapter of his Po-etics, declares that poetry and theeposare more philosophical than history because what is at stake in themimesisof literature is the “general” instead of the “particu-lar,”16comparison lies close at hand. The “general” that a literary hero embodies and that can be observed in his actions—Achilles’ anger for example—is a kind of ter-tium communethat enables readers to measure and judge particular and contingent traits, patterns, and practices of human beings.
Within quite another historical context rooted in analytical philosophy and Gestaltpsychologie, I. A. Richards connected hisPrinciples of Literary Criticismin the 14 Cf. Angelika Epple/Walter Erhart (eds.),Die Welt beobachten. Praktiken des Vergleichens,
Frank-furt a. M./New York 2015.
15 Cf. Rita Felski, Latour und Literary Studies, in:PMLA130 (2015), 737–742.; Rita Felski, Com-parison and Translation. A Perspective from Actor-Network-Theory, in:Comparative Literature Studies53 (2016), 747–765.
16 Aristotle,Poetics, 1451b.
1920s with the belief that literature and the arts—as a “storehouse of recorded val-ues”—contain an internal mechanism to open up our capacities for experiencing and recognizing values via comparing: “For without the assistance of the arts we could compare very few of our experiences, and without such comparison we could hardly hope to agree as to which are to be preferred.”17Quite explicitly, for Richards, the act of comparing is not rendered to the readers but to literature itself, to the works and the poets, a “body of evidence” and a “vehicle of communication” that contains and guides the comparisons.18
Paul Ricœur has considered literature’s function as a capacity for “semantic in-novation,” a new perception and description of reality altogether: “the power of the metaphorical utterance to redescribe a reality inaccessible to direct description.”19 Ricœur identifies two literary forms of semantic innovation: fabula, narrative and mimesis on the one side, metaphor and metaphorical invention on the other. I want to argue that in both cases, comparison plays a crucial role; that comparing is, indeed, responsible for the semantic innovation that takes place in and through literature. In what follows, I shall try to give a short outline of different comparative practices that literature may be able to perform—from inner-textual comparisons to the circulation of literary forms, figures, and themes. Following Ricœur’s distinc-tion, I focus on comparing as a feature of narratives in the first part (Odysseus), then move on to the question of metaphors (such as “birds”) by discussing poems by Wallace Stevens (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”) and Jan Wagner (“Regentonnenvariationen”).