Comparing the Literatures

Literary Studies in a Global Age

David Damrosch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201283
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

From a leading figure in comparative literature, a major new survey of the field that points the way forward for a discipline undergoing rapid changes Literary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization. More works than ever circulate worldwide in English and in translation, and even national traditions are increasingly seen in transnational terms. To encompass this expanding literary universe, scholars and teachers need to increase their linguistic and cultural resources, rethink their methods and training, and reconceive the place of literature and criticism in the world. In Comparing the Literatures, David Damrosch integrates comparative, postcolonial, and world-literary perspectives to offer a comprehensive overview of comparative studies and its prospects in a time of great upheaval and great opportunity. Comparing the Literatures looks both at institutional forces and at key episodes in the life and work of comparatists who have struggled to define and redefine the terms of literary analysis over the past two centuries, from Johann Gottfried Herder and Germaine de Staël to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Franco Moretti, and Emily Apter. With literary examples ranging from Ovid and Kalidasa to James Joyce, Yoko Tawada, and the internet artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Damrosch shows how the main strands of comparison—philology, literary theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the study of world literature—have long been intertwined. A deeper understanding of comparative literature's achievements, persistent contradictions, and even failures can help comparatists in literature and other fields develop creative responses to today's most important questions and debates.Amid a multitude of challenges and new possibilities for comparative literature, Comparing the Literatures provides an important road map for the discipline's revitalization.

1

Origins

A Tale of Two Libraries

If you retrace Lord Byron’s footsteps down the tree-shaded allée leading to the Château de Coppet, just outside Geneva, you will reach the residence of the woman Byron came there to see: Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein. Philosophe, novelist, and pioneering feminist, Madame de Staël was a leading figure in the early history of comparative literature. The chateau is now in the hands of the tenth generation of her family to own the property, and it is little changed from her day, though light bulbs have replaced the wax tapers in the candelabras. In the opulent rooms open to the public, the furnishings are still those de Staël used when she entertained her many visitors in the years when she held forth at Coppet after Napoleon banished her from Paris.

Ascending the sweeping stone staircase, you can listen for the echoes of the harp once played by Madame de Récamier—displayed in the room reserved for her visits—and in de Staël’s own bedroom inspect the full-length portrait of her late lover John Rocca, twenty-two years her junior, elegantly posed in his blue silk hussar’s uniform before his Arabian stallion, “Sultan.” Downstairs, the Grand Salon is hung with the Aubusson tapestries that a succession of Europe’s leading poets, philosophers, and politicians could admire if their attention wandered from the ceaseless flow of de Staël’s brilliant, seductive, intense conversation. Next to the Grand Salon stands the library, its lofty bookcases crowned with garlands and busts of Virgil, Demosthenes, and Diderot.

A very different result would attend a search for the library of Johann Gottfried Herder, one of the dominant thinkers of his era and de Staël’s greatest counterpart in the early elaboration of comparative literary studies. His childhood home in the Prussian backwater of Mohrungen hasn’t survived, but his longtime residence in Weimar still stands: a pleasant three-story house with just enough space for Herder and his wife, their eight children, and his books. Over the years the great philosopher assembled one of the best private libraries in Europe, an encyclopedic collection of literature, philosophy, theology, and history in eight languages. This library, however, can no longer be seen, and not only because the house is now divided into private apartments. Herder’s modest salary as superintendent of clergy at Weimar was inadequate for the large family’s expenses, and late in life his financial difficulties were exacerbated by a son’s addiction to gambling. Following Herder’s death in 1803, his grieving widow was forced to sell the books at auction to pay off some of their debts.

The history of comparative literature is in many respects a history of archives—of libraries and collections preserved or lost, studied or forgotten, sometimes rediscovered, sometimes not. Perhaps the first library ever created specifically to house and study foreign texts was established by the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang in 645 CE when he returned from his epochal “journey to the western regions”—India—to collect Buddhist manuscripts. He little realized that he would become a literary hero in his own right a millennium later, in Wu Cheng’en’s masterpiece Journey to the West. Closer in time, the discipline has immediate roots in the collection, study, and translation of ancient manuscripts by classicists and biblical scholars in Europe. The foundations of comparative literature were established by the comparative philology that began in Renaissance Italy and spread to many parts of Enlightenment Europe, a history detailed in James Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (2015).

The European philologists’ work was given a dramatically global turn in the 1780s by the great linguist Sir William Jones. Raised bilingually in English and Welsh, Jones had mastered Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic while still in his twenties, sometimes signing his name in Arabic as Youns Uksfardi (“Jones of Oxford”). After being posted to Calcutta as a judge on the colonial Supreme Court of Judicature, he immersed himself in Sanskrit studies whenever he could spare time from his judicial duties. He soon realized the commonality of many European languages with Sanskrit—a language “of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,” as he memorably declared in his “Third Anniversary Discourse” to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he’d founded in 1784.

It is thanks to the work of Jones and his followers that the German comparatist Max Koch could write a century later that “comparative literary history, like comparative philology, gained a sure footing only with the inclusion of the Oriental, particularly Indian, material” (“Introduction,” 72). Baidik Bhattacharya has emphasized that any genealogy of comparative literature should include the Asiatic Society’s work (“On Comparatism in the Colony”). More broadly, a non-Eurocentric comparatism can draw on philological traditions from China and Japan to the Arab world, as Sheldon Pollock and his contributors have shown in their collection World Philology (2015). In chapter 4, we will look at Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, first translated by William Jones’s disciple Horace Hayman Wilson; a comparative history of philology could well counterpoint Master Xuanzang’s Sanskrit translations with those by Jones and Wilson a millennium later.

Issues of antiquity versus modernity, of travel and translation, and of the urge to recover the past while controlling the imperial present will recur repeatedly in the following chapters. The European philologists were more interested in language than in literature per se, but their methods and discoveries fed directly into the comparative literary studies that began to appear at the turn of the nineteenth century, notably in the immensely influential works of Herder and de Staël. Herder was deeply influenced by Robert Lowth’s De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753), a pioneering study of what we would now call comparative poetics. Lowth’s assessment of biblical poetry over against the Greek and Roman classics inspired Herder’s studies of Hebrew poetry and of Asian traditions, while both Herder and de Staël drew on the findings of classical philology in formulating their ideas on the relations of ancient and modern literature.

They shared broadly common Enlightenment roots, but in their lives and work Herder and de Staël display a series of binary oppositions of Saussurean proportions: Johann Gottfried Herder, philosopher-preacher of humble German origins, the great promoter of folk poetry, an ardent apostle of German nationalism, a committed Lutheran and devoted family man, struggling to make ends meet; across the Rhine, the wealthy aristocrat Germaine de Staël, famous for her Parisian salon, something of a freethinker, something more of a libertine (her five children had four different fathers), a widely traveled cosmopolitan but devoted to her glittering life in Paris, until Napoleon forced her into exile in her moated chateau on the shore of Lac Léman.

The oppositions soften considerably upon closer inspection. Neither Herder nor de Staël was a prisoner of their sex. Herder worked in close partnership with his wife, Caroline, and de Staël developed many of her ideas in dialogue with her lover Benjamin Constant. Both she and Herder wrote for women as well as men, and both were creative writers—Herder a talented poet, de Staël a best-selling novelist—who explored social and political themes in their prolific writings. These include genre-defying works that interweave literary analysis, philosophical inquiry, and fervent political discussion, centrally concerned with the challenge of leading an ethical life in chaotic times.

Despite her wealth, moreover, de Staël was a borderline figure in more than one way. She was acutely aware of her precarious position as a woman active in the public sphere, and she was only a generation removed from Herder’s own modest social background. Herder’s father was a church sexton and schoolteacher; de Staël’s mother was the daughter of a Swiss parish priest. Her father, Jacques Necker, was responsible for the family’s recent prominence, having moved from Geneva to Paris at age fifteen to seek his fortune. Like Jews, Protestants could engage in interest-bearing financial practices forbidden to Catholics, and in his twenties and thirties Necker enjoyed a meteoric rise as a banker and speculator. He became Louis XVI’s finance minister, a position he lost in 1781 during a financial crisis brought on by his policy of supporting the American Revolution via high-interest loans, but he remained a voice for reform in the years leading up to the French Revolution. The Château de Coppet dated back to the thirteenth century, but it only came into the family when Necker bought the property as his country estate in 1784, when his daughter was eighteen.

As a Protestant growing up in Paris, daughter of a nouveau riche financier, Germaine Necker found herself in an ambiguous relationship with the aristocratic culture around her. Her parents couldn’t countenance her marrying a Catholic, and so they didn’t take the usual route of buying their way into the French aristocracy through marriage. When their daughter turned twenty, they settled for an impoverished but Protestant Swedish nobleman on the verge of middle age, and so Germaine Necker became Madame la Baronne de Staël-Holstein. Her father bought the grateful groom an ambassadorship to France so that the newlyweds wouldn’t have to live in the baron’s homeland.

Herder too had a complicated relationship to the aristocracy. A commoner by birth, a populist by conviction, and a man of deep personal piety, Herder spent most of his career awkwardly ensconced in court circles as an employee of the libertine Carl August von Sachsen-Weimar. The grand duke of this little duchy (roughly the size of Rhode Island) was a generous patron of the arts, but he took a dim view of the revolutionary changes sweeping over France. Herder’s relations with his patron became increasingly strained after he refused to offer prayers in church for the French royal family after their imprisonment in 1789.

Both Herder and de Staël were lifelong opponents of despotism. De Staël’s first book, published in 1788 when she was twenty-two, was an encomium to the republican ideals of the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau; his portrait hangs to this day in the Grand Salon at Coppet. In 1792 Herder celebrated the early Provençal poets for creating a poetry “whose purpose and goal was freedom of thought”—his italics—breaking the yoke of the “despotism” of Latin (Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, 482). He went farther in a passage deleted from subsequent editions of the book, declaring that “there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble); the king belongs to it as well as the peasant” (768–69).

Both Herder and de Staël welcomed the advent of the French Revolution, only to recoil at the mounting violence capped by Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, the state-sponsored bloodbath that gave the world the very term “terrorism.” During the revolution de Staël took great risks, and spent large sums in bribes, to smuggle endangered friends out of France. She enjoyed a period of substantial political influence during the late 1790s, but her days in Paris were numbered after she opposed Napoleon’s assumption of dictatorial powers in 1799. It is no coincidence that Herder and de Staël wrote two of their most ambitious comparative works—his multivolume Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1792–97) and her De la littérature: Considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800)—during this tumultuous period, as they sought alternatives to the warring despotisms that surrounded them.

The Tongue, This Little Limb

Language and literature are closely bound up with ethics and politics throughout Herder’s multifaceted writings, from his very first works—How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765) and Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–68)—through his Treatise on the Origin of Language (a foundational work for comparative philology), to his Outline of a Philosophy of History (a second field-creating work), and on to such later writings as The Effect of Poetry on Ethics and his Letters for the Furtherance of Humanity. In these works, and in his major collections of Volkslieder (1774–79), Herder developed his highly influential ideas on the intimate relation between language, literature, and national identity—“the Herder effect,” as Pascale Casanova has called it (The World Republic of Letters, 75).

Germany in the eighteenth century was notably lacking in political unity of the sort enjoyed by France or England; Sachsen-Weimar was just one of some three hundred miniature polities (the number kept shifting) wedged in between Prussia and Austria. There were also substantial German-speaking minorities in many other regions, from Hungary to Pennsylvania to Argentina; Herder began his own career teaching school in the German community in Riga, Latvia. He published his first books during his Riga years (1764–69), when he began to seek the unity of German culture in its language and its literature, particularly the literature of das Volk—the people as a whole, not simply the peasantry or commoners. What distinguished true Volkspoesie for Herder was not a specific class origin but rather its embodiment of a people’s aspirations, their culture, their landscape and environment.

In the preface to his first collection of Volkslieder (1774), Herder argued that the wellspring of European poetry could be found in the popular ballads and songs of the Middle Ages. He praises the English poets in particular (with his characteristic use of fervent italics) for staying in touch with their artistic roots: “The greatest singers and favorites of the Muses, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespear and Milton, Philip Sidney and Selden—how can I, how shall I describe them?—were enthusiasts for the old songs … the root and core of the nation” (18–19). And woe betide the artist—or the scholar—who undervalues the old songs:

Anyone who dismisses them and has no feeling for them shows that he is so inundated in the trumpery of aping the foreign, or so transfixed by the senseless fool’s gold of foreign mimicry, that he has ceased to value or have any feeling for what is the very body of the nation. And so a grafted foreign seedling or a leaf fluttering in the wind gets the name of an all-time virtuoso of the latest taste! a Thinker! (19)

In an essay on Shakespeare, Herder stresses the playwright’s homegrown virtues: his colloquial language, his accessibility to a wide audience, and his lack of concern for artificial rules of art. Fundamentally, this means that Shakespeare wasn’t French. “The question I really want to ask,” Herder declares, in tones dripping with irony, “is whether anything in the world possibly surpasses the sleek, classical thing that the Corneilles, Racines, and Voltaires have produced, the series of beautiful scenes, dialogues, verses, and rhymes with their measure, decorum, and brilliance?” (“Shakespeare,” 295). French drama is deadened by “this outward conformity, this effigy treading the boards,” yet “every country in Europe is besotted with this slick superficiality and continues to ape it” (295).

Herder’s sarcastic term for imitation, Nachäfferei (“aping after”), is...