The Art of Comparison

How Novels and Critics Compare

Catherine Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193498
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Comparison underlies all reading. Readers compare words to words, and books to all the other books which they have read. Some books, however, demand a particular comparative effort - for example, novels which contain parallel plot lines. In this ambitious and important study Catherine Brown compares Daniel Deronda with Anna Karenina and Women in Love in order to answer the following questions: why does one protagonist in each novel fail whilst another succeeds? Can their failure and success be understood on the same terms? How do the novels' uses of comparison compare to each other? How relevant is George Eliot's influence on Lev Tolstoi, and Tolstoi's on D. H. Lawrence? Does Tolstoi being a Russian make this a 'comparative' literary study? And what does the 'comparative' in 'comparative literature' actually mean? Criticism is combined with metacriticism, to explore how novels and critics compare."

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

What is Comparative Literature?

Aims of the Book

Every act of the reception of significant form, in language, in art, in music, is comparative.

GEORGE STEINER 1996: 157

This book considers a practice which is involved in all reading, yet is rarely the explicit subject of literary theory. Comparison, in the broadest sense of term, is the mental process which enables the perception of similarity and difference. As such it is intrinsic to thought. Sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, and concepts cannot be distinguished without a perception of their similarities and differences to others. Will cannot be exercised without a comparison of options; to choose comes from gusto, and involves tasting the difference; Anna yields to Vronskii after a comparison of Vronskii with Karenin. Unfamiliarity is mediated by comparison of the less with the more familiar; an orange is likened to an apple, and distinguished from it as Chinese (Icelandic appelsína, Russian апельсин). Words used to describe comparison are either highly abstract, or metaphoric and therefore comparative: broad, narrow, strict, loose, reflecting, shedding light. This book frequently uses the terms which it is describing, in describing them. Criticism involves judging the difference between things.¹ A reader will describe a literary work as mimetic only after comparing it with both life and other works. A reader of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Die schlesischen Weber’ will unconsciously compare this experience with all of the other experiences that she or he has had. Assuming appropriate prior experience on her part, this will allow her to determine that she is reading a mid-nineteenth-century German poem in trochaic-cum-dactylic tetrameter which ventriloquizes the rage of exploited machine-weavers. In order to establish these characteristics, and having established them, she will compare the poem with her general sense or detailed memory of any of the other things which share any of them. Matthew Arnold, who coined the term comparative literature as a translation of literature comparée, claimed in his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1857 that ‘Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literature’ (quoted in Bassnett-McGuire 1993: 1). In our own century, Richard Rorty wrote: ‘Good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read’ (2006: 64). He might have added that good reading of criticism involves bouncing the criticism you are reading off the rest of the criticism which you have read.

Such bouncing, even if unconscious, involves a narrower focus and greater mental effort than the comparison which is involved in any act of cognition. Yet it is not comparison in the narrowest sense of the term. The latter involves paying a similar quantity and quality of attention to a discrete number of things in order to determine their similarities and differences with regard to possession, lack, or degree of possession of a particular quality. A minority of literary criticism is of this kind — both the international, inter-lingual, and inter-artistic criticism which is often considered to be comparative literature, and the criticism which includes none of these divisions. The minority may be larger in the first case, but it is still a minority. A comparison of George Eliot with George Sand on a given topic may have the interest, but also the complication, of involving linguistic and cultural variables which are not directly related to the topic concerned. A comparison of George Eliot with Elizabeth Gaskell, which involves fewer circumstantial variables, may be more cleanly comparative, and in this sense more comparative. But only relatively; any two writers have differences of circumstance, and any comparison must be performed against a ground which is to some degree abstract, like the flat table surface and block background of Bright Pear (on this book’s cover), which presents three fruits for comparison.

Describing the relations which obtain among things is a broader, more complex process than comparison itself. First, whereas the latter involves comparing things in relation to the same quality, the former may involve characterizing their different qualities. Second, the relations of things include not just the percept but the significance of their similarities and differences, understood in their separate and shared contexts. Third, relations may be described in terms of the comparer’s responses to things as juxtaposed: for example, the relationship of Shamela to Pamela, or of the poems of Thomas Hood to those of Alfred Tennyson, may be felt to make certain features of the latter of each pair appear ridiculous. Fourth, relations may be described in terms of influence: that is, the similarities and differences of objects may be coordinated with historical and biographical information which at least allows the possibility that the creator of one knew something of the other object. Unlike comparison strictly defined, influence studies analyse relationships in an asymmetric manner, describing the presence and absence of the qualities of the earlier work in the later (the Japanese verb for comparison, hikaku suru, can be translated by to do metaphor — to describe one thing in terms of something else). However, asymmetric comparison does not necessarily imply that the comparer is more interested in either the one or the other. One might identify characteristics of Charles Dickens’s writing in those of Franz Kafka out of a greater interest in Dickens or Kafka or out of equal interest in both. In Latin one may distinguish the primum comparandum, one’s primary interest, from the secundum comparatum, what one compares it to, and the tertium comparationis, which is their similarity. This book, however, will use comparandum/a as a generic term for any patient of comparison. Asymmetric comparison has strong similarities with criticism which is not usually considered comparative. For example, studying the influence of Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha on Nikos Kazantsakis’s Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά [Life and Adventures of Alexis Zorbas] has much in common with studying the representation of attitudes towards sex in rural 1930s Greece in the latter novel. In both cases the critic is looking for features of one complex entity (a novel, and an aspect of a culture) in another; the discussion of any topic in literature involves a comparison of the form looking for X in Y.

Types and theories of literary criticism assert the importance of comparative practices to varying degrees. Plato contrasted artistic representations with the objects they represented and with the ideal Forms. Vladimir Propp — to say nothing of the intervening millennia — pursued detailed comparisons in order to reach the conclusion of Морфология сказки [Morphology of the Folk Tale] that folk tales are structurally similar. New Critics, and F. R. Leavis, emphasized the singularity of texts, but used comparisons rhetorically to point to differences in their quality: ‘Adam Bede is good — but compare him with Caleb Garth’ (Leavis 1948: 37). Leavis and T. S. Eliot each traced a literary tradition according to their perception of works’ affinities to a perpetually evolving structure. The Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský thought that the most acclaimed works of literature violated the aesthetic norms established collectively by previous works. Explicitly ideological theorists advocate comparisons according to the categories in which they are interested: writings by women and by men, by colonials and colonizers, by monologists and heteroglots, by those who accurately depict society in its historical evolution and those who do not. Comparison in its broadest sense is embedded in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, with their shared emphasis on difference as intrinsic to meaning.

Nonetheless, comparison in its narrower senses has received little explicit attention. In the sixth yearbook of the British Comparative Literary Association’s Comparative Criticism Elinor Shaffer commented: ‘Conducting a retrospective inquiry into specifically comparative modes of close analysis, we find that a very few comparative literary handbooks offered some direct discussion of comparative analysis of texts’ (1984: xiv). The position of comparison as a topic in philosophy is also undeservedly obscure. No English-language reference work of philosophy of which I am aware has an entry for the term, despite the facts that comparison is as important a method to philosophy as to literary criticism, and that it is philosophically complex. Harry Levin recounted the dream of a student’s wife, in which two men in overalls (Levin and Renato Poggioli) arrived at their house late at night, claiming to have come ‘to compare the literature’ (1972: 76). The anecdote’s humour relies on the apparent meaninglessness of their claim, in contrast to for example the claim of having come to mend the pipes. However, this book argues that to compare literature does mean something, that all literary criticism is comparative in a broad sense whereas much criticism called comparative is not comparative in the strictest sense, and that an analysis of these distinct senses can contribute to several debates in literary criticism.

This chapter and Chapter 5 will consider comparison per se, how it is used in literary criticism and this book, and how these issues relate to comparative literature. The three central chapters are case studies, which will discuss George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874–76), Lev Tolstoi’s Анна Каренина (hereafter Anna Karenina) (1873–77), and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1915–19). These have been chosen as novels containing two plots focused on two couples, one of which ends with the death of a partner and misery of the survivor, and the other of which ends in relative happiness. These novels invite the reader to pay comparative attention to the similar literary objects — stories — which they contain. Chapter 5 will then compare how the novels compare their stories, and reflect on what can be learned about the comparison of literature from comparisons within literature itself. This two-way traffic between criticism and meta-criticism justifies the puns of the book’s title and subtitle: The Art of Comparison refers both to art which is inherently comparative, and to the process of comparing; How Novels and Critics Compare refers both to the comparisons which novels and critics severally construct, and to how these may be compared with each other. That is, not only how Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, and Women in Love are similar and different with regard to the comparisons which they invite, but how the comparison of objects juxtaposed by the choice of an artist (the stories of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda) resembles and differs from the comparison of objects juxtaposed by the choice of a critic (Daniel Deronda and Anna Karenina). This book therefore joins other studies which draw, and advocate drawing, meta-critical conclusions from the intensive close reading of literary texts, including Vladimir E. Alexandrov’s 2004 Limits to Interpretation, K. M. Newton’s 1986 In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice, and John Bayley’s 1960 The Characters of Love. The first of these resembles this book in its combination of meta-criticism with close critical attention to Anna Karenina, which in Alexandrov’s case furnishes a case study for the neo-formalist, quasi-structuralist approach for which he argues. Bayley’s book resembles this one by basing a meta-critical statement on the scrutiny of one topic in three major works (Troilus and Criseyde, Othello, and The Golden Bowl). In this book the central chapters are semi-independent: they may be read on their own, but Chapter 2 lays out terms in which all three novels are discussed, and Chapters 3 and 4 make comparative reference to previous discussions.

The three novels are not only intensively compared on the topic of double-plotting, but are briefly related to the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Germany. The Bible’s religion covers the entire geographical region marked out by the countries in which the novels were produced. Shakespeare was native to one of those countries but was well known in the other (for example through Nikolai Gerbel’s translation of 1865). References are made to Shakespeare’s work in each of the novels: Gwendolen acts the part of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, Levin listens to a Fantasia of King Lear, and the Fräulein at Breadalby suggests acting the Three Witches from Macbeth. Moreover, Shakespeare was keenly concerned with the attractions and dangers of comparison as an intellectual and rhetorical strategy; the growing acquaintance of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister with Shakespeare himself is emblematic of his openness to the practice of comparison, as well as to foreign influences. Goethe and his country lie between England and Russia, and mediate between them; Germany’s cultural influence had been particularly strong in Russia since the time of Ekaterina II Velikaia [Catherine the Great], and in Britain since the accession of the House of Hanover; German families connected the monarchies of Britain and Russia. Goethe popularized (although he did not coin) the concept of Weltliteratur [world literature], by which he meant literature which could mediate between peoples. His own works served this function, and drew the temporary or lasting admiration of Eliot, Tolstoi, and Lawrence, all three of whom knew German, and had read Die Wahlverwandschaften, which itself contrasts two couples. The novels will be compared in their attitudes towards contrast, comparison, nation hood, and mediation. The novels examined in this book all contain crucial episodes set in Germanic resorts at which people from across Europe are brought together. For such reasons Germany, and its early advocate of vergleichende Literatur [comparative literature], are well-placed to support the novels’ comparison.

Issues in Comparative Literature

The comparative method, precisely because it is a mere method of research, cannot suffice to delimit a field of study.

BENEDETTO CROCE quoted in Saussy 2006: 12

The academic subject comparative literature, it is commented with a frequency which has tamed it into a reassuring truism, is anxiogenic.² The academic subject English literature has some of the same problems of self-definition, but in its case they are less acute and currently pose little threat to the survival of departments which bear its name. Comparative literature is not easily defined by either method or matter. Saussy comments that:

Most disciplines are founded on successful reifications. Not to reify is to settle for a weak hypothesis about the identity of the thing one is describing [. . .] Comparative literature in the contextualizing mode finds itself once more an adverb among earthshaking nouns.

(Saussy 2006: 20–21)

And this adverb was, by the very breadth of its applicability, a weak one for the purposes of definition. In 1936 Frank Chandler noted that Columbia University’s comparative literature department, which had existed when he was a student, had been m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• Abbreviations
• Note on the Text of Anna Karenina
• 1 Introduction: What is Comparative Literature?
• 2 Daniel Deronda
• 3 Anna Karenitm
• 4 Women in Love
• 5 Conclusion: How Literature was Compared
• ibliography
• Index