Comparative Literature

Henry Gifford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367550769
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000190663
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Comparative Literature explores an 'area of interest' rather than a special discipline. The book begins with an account of the approaches that twentieth century writers took to literature by writers other than themselves. It discusses the common tone shared by those who subscribe to a national tradition, and considers what is meant by 'the mind of Europe'. It ponders the problems of translation, and discusses the nature of comparative study at university. Lastly, the special case of American literature is treated as pointing to the need for adjustment to a new stage in the world's culture.

The criticial discussion of comparative studies provided in this book demonstrates the greater depth and vivacity that these studies can give to our ideas about literature.

1
The education of a modern poet

What I examine in this opening chapter is the remarkable awareness of some twentieth-century writers that only a world horizon will serve them. The exploration of foreign literature, even at a good distance from their own, has seemed a necessity of their being. Matthew Arnold required that ‘every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better’ (Arnold, 1865, 39). This he felt was a law of criticism; it appears in our day to be almost a law of the creative imagination.

Our first example, Ezra Pound, is beyond any cavil a learned poet, even if the learning can sometimes be exposed as superficial or wrong-headed. He seems to have mistaken, with Fenollosa, the essential nature of the Chinese written character; his misreadings of Propertius are wanton; he played fast and loose with the Old English of The Seafarer’. Yet more often than not his errors have been fruitful. Any treatise on comparative literature would have to mention Pound, the earlier the better. He figures here, at the head of this chapter, for three reasons: first, for the range of his achievement; second, for the power of his influence; third, because he is an American.

To start with the final reason: an American writer, half inside European culture and half outside, is born to comparisons. He shares a language that already houses one of the world’s richest literatures; but nothing ties him to our tradition; he is no longer restricted by any Navigation Acts of the mind. As Pound wrote of the Americans in 1914 with a heady enthusiasm: ‘…our opportunity is greater than Leonardo’s: we have more aliment, we have not one classic tradition to revivify, we have China and Egypt, and the unknown lands lying upon the roof of the world—Khotan, Kara-shar and Kan-su’ (Pound, 1954, 224). The American poet holds a position today that fairly soon (whether we like it or not) could be the position of poets in older countries: while representing an extreme case, he is not untypical both in his restlessness and his craving for order. Among American poets, none has attempted so much as Pound. The Cantos are designed to be the Great American Poem of modern times. They are also meant as a contribution to world literature, a meeting of the waters.

Pound’s interest moved from Victorian poetry (Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites) to the Provençal and Italian medieval writers he had studied at the University; he reached backwards to Ovid, Propertius, Homer and Sappho: and, with the help of Fenollosa’s researches, to the Japanese haiku and the Noh play and the Confucian anthology. These are only his principal resting-points. We should not dismiss such activity out of hand as proof that he lacks a centre. Pound has been called a ‘translation poet’. This need not imply that all his light is derivative. He has been concerned with seeking out and enlarging the tradition—not merely of one literature, but of literature in all places. He has called for ‘a criticism of poetry based on world-poetry, on the work of maximum excellence’, a criticism which must be done by those who ‘have had the tools in their hands’ (ibid., 225). It will depend largely on translation which elsewhere he has recognized as a form of criticism (ibid., 74). The practitioners must make available to their own public ‘the work of maximum excellence’, a process which has been going on through the ages, ever since the Odyssey was rendered for the Romans into Saturnian verse during the First Punic War.

Given his immense range, how much is Pound able to unify and control? We are assuming that the interests of Pound should weigh seriously with the modern reader; in effect, that an educated man (so far as literature goes) will need to follow Pound into these foreign literatures, so that they become a living part of his experience. Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti do not come appreciably nearer, I think, in Pound’s versions. He wanted to recover in Cavalcanti ‘the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies.. (ibid., 154). But his actual renderings of Cavalcanti are mannered, awkwardly ninetyish for all their vigour. ‘The Mediterranean sanity’ he admired will have to be looked for in passages of the Cantos where Cavalcanti and the Divine Comedy are working at one remove, as a peculiarly clear atmosphere. It remains doubtful whether Pound has convinced the world that the Troubadours and Cavalcanti still count away from the lecture-room. Dante, on the other hand, partly through the attention given to his work by Pound and Eliot, has entered the modern consciousness, and all of him is potentially there, not simply the poet of Hell, as with the Victorians.

But perhaps the crucial question is that of Chinese and Japanese poetry. Nothing testifies more vividly to the opening of horizons than the way in which Japonisme came in, from the later nineteenth century. And it is not Gautier or the Goncourts or Whistler so much as Pound (though he learned from the others) who discovered the application of the Japanese example. Earl Miner has shown that Chinese thought (about ethics and history) and Japanese form (in poetry and drama) have each contributed very much to his development (Miner, 1958, 152). Pound the Imagist—that is to say, Pound the poet still in course of finding himself—recognized in the haiku or hokku (a Japanese poem of three lines arranged in five, seven and five syllables) a conception and a technique he could make his own. The conception was that of the ‘natural object’ as ‘the proper and perfect symbol’ (ibid., 124); the technique that of ‘Super-Position’, the setting of ‘one idea… on top of another’ (ibid., 114). Pound gives an example from a Japanese haiku:

The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

A butterfly.

(Machado has nearly this image:

… el bianco del almendro en la colina

ioh nieve en flor y mariposa en arbol!

(Poesías completas, 1943, 201.)

He uses this technique nowhere more finely than in the Tisan Cantos. Here is one example selected by Miner:

did we ever get to the end of Doughty:

The Dawn in Britain?

perhaps not

(summons withdrawn, sir.)

(bein’ aliens in prohibited area)

clouds lift their small mountains

before the elder hills

(Canto lxxxiii.)

The aliens are Yeats and Pound in wartime Sussex, and the whole scene is evaluated in the light of its final image which reassures the poet that he, like the elder hills beyond his Pisan confinement, will survive the persecutions which (not surprisingly) came to him from a power he regards as illusory.

In the Cantos Pound took from the Noh plays ‘what we call Unity of Image’ (Miner, 140) as an organizing principle. They do not, obviously, like the Noh plays, cohere round a single image. There are three main image-fields, if we can so describe them, for the Cantos: Renaissance Italy, Adams’s and Jefferson’s America, and Chinese history. Each is presented with massive detail: the reader gets thorough instruction in all these periods. As the Cantos unfold we come to see that China can be made part of our experience no less than the worlds of Malatesta or President Adams. Eventually Chinese ideograms are planted like banners in the text, and we learn to recognize them. In this way Pound has admitted a new stream into Western poetry. The method may be peremptory, if not violent. Yet it enlarges our sensibility and compels a fresh understanding of the simplest ideas. He decided that Chinese thought can be located in Western poetry through the ideogram, an object like Sigismondo’s temple which takes many lights in the poem but stands firm. Other approaches may be found as Chinese culture grows more familiar. It has at any rate moved up to the frontiers and perhaps over them.

Eliot demanded, in words often quoted from the best-known of his essays, that a poet should write ‘not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’ (Eliot, 1951, 14). Pound has extended the order to take in literatures outside Europe, but their idea is the same. An American has to define where he stands intellectually and imaginatively in relation to all other writing, in whatever tradition may be used. Miner distinguishes between the attitudes of the Americans and the English among the Imagists towards Japanese culture. Both learned a technique from its poetry; but whereas the English Imagists went no farther than this, the Americans needed to clarify what their discovery meant to American culture. They felt that the United States was called upon to unite East and West (Miner, 180). World literature is an easier concept for the American, accustomed to the mingling of races on his own soil.

Something like a world literature declares itself in the Cantos, which open with a recall of the Odyssey and the Voema de mio Cid, and have soon reached ‘the pines at Takasago’, ‘Ecbatan, of plotted streets’, and with it the beginnings of civilization:

To North was Egypt,

the blue deep Nile

cutting low barren land,

Old men and camels

working the water-wheels … (Canto v.)

Many of Pound’s allusions are lost on the reader. But if the detail escapes him, the broad picture shines clearly enough. One poet at least has tried to encompass many of the moments in human civilization—he ignores the Hebraic stream—to show their meaning for one another, and to knit them together in a single consciousness. The Cantos, like Finnegans Wake, lay claim to a very large tract of recorded experience. Both works rely on a much more diversified learning than is attainable by all but the most unusual of readers. Yet, once having known these possibilities, literature will hardly retreat. What seems outlandish to one generation very soon, if it makes sense, becomes natural for its successor.

No doubt Pound’s special kind of awareness belongs particularly to a literature still forming. Our own literature at the time of the Renaissance, or Russian literature in Pushkin’s day, showed a similar desire for appropriation, though these had a much firmer native base than the American today. Pushkin ran through French poetry of his father’s time and his own, through Byron, Shakespeare and Scott, he touched on Hafiz, Dante, the Koran and Bunyan, he refused nothing of interest that came to hand. Goethe, of course, provides the supreme example of a modern poet seeking to communicate with all literatures and to assimilate them all. The situation of Germany when he lived, still waiting for national unity and a German renaissance, made for a curiosity and receptiveness that are perhaps paralleled in our own situation now, when the idea of one intellectual world begins to be realized.

Such curiosity and receptiveness, if we turn to English literature, will be found in Arnold, of course, and (for a modern example) in Lawrence. As a poet Arnold made his cautious mark; as a critic he guided and in part reflected the taste of an educated public. His field was properly Europe, American literature being for him no more than a department, none too satisfactory, of his own. He was acquainted with English literature in some depth, the Greek and Roman classics, and the outstanding writers of France, Italy and modern Germany. Late in life he threw a glance towards Russian literature, which he encountered in Tolstoy’s work, notably Anna Karenina. But if Arnold displays the comparative view at its best, though within obvious limits, we may find Lawrence today more appealing to our interest, more boldly affirmative. His faults of interpretation, his waywardness and obsessions deny him the large centrality of Arnold—if indeed such centrality can be won in an altered world. The value of Lawrence’s explorations principally comes from the fact that he was driven to them by the necessities of his art. If we compare him as a critic, say, with his onetime friend, Middleton Murry, it is manifest that they both regarded literature in the same light. For each of them a given work meant self-discovery, a challenge to their own living. But Lawrence had more to discover and he met the challenge more ardently. The title Murry gave to a collection of his essays, Countries of the Mind, would never have been used by Lawrence. It implies a ruminative ease and a comfortably peripatetic habit quite alien to him. Lawrence’s peculiar insight led him elsewhere: it revealed ‘the spirit of place’, a foreignness that the mind could see intuitively but not annex or accommodate.

Everything with Lawrence is a matter of living relationship. He explored more eagerly than most critics of his day, and struck through to the essentials as he found them. There are no half-hearted passages in his criticism, none of the evasiveness or superficiality that occasionally mars Eliot’s writing. Lawrence prized in a critic like Sainte-Beuve ‘the courage to admit what he feels, as well as the flexibility to know what he feels’ (Lawrence, 1955, 119). He liked Sainte-Beuve for being ‘emotionally educated’,^* for his readiness to cope with each experience on its own terms. All the emphasis falls upon the particular experience. Lawrence does not interest himself in arranging his perceptions, or in the kind of inquiry that stirs Eliot: What is a classic? What is minor poetry? And hence, where do we place George Herbert or Hopkins? The Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda may be a minor novelist. Lawrence recognizes that ‘she is not a first-class genius’, but she holds his attention, because of the community she describes. Grazia Deledda knows how ‘to create the passionate complex of a primitive populace’ (ibid., 292). And that suffices for him. Enough to render truthfully his emotion in reading her novel. To classify, to assign her a place in the European order, among ‘the existing monuments’, does not concern him.

* Lawrence’s italics.

Lawrence had dealings with much that was best in contemporary literature: with Hardy, perhaps the closest of his predecessors; with Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells, none of whom met his standards; he wrote on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rozanov and Shestov; on Thomas Mann and Verga; and on the American classics of the nineteenth century, to whom he gave a serious and probing attention then almost unprecedented. And he had something to say about new arrivals like Joyce, Forster, Dos Passos and Hemingway. There is no great backward depth to his view, and mostly not more than perfunctory and almost jejune reference to the old masters. He cared for the present and for so much of the past (Hardy, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Cooper, Whitman, Melville) as had yet to fulfil its meaning. Not all that signified in Europe seems to have caught his eye; but he missed nothing, one would guess, that might hold significance for himself.

Lawrence could be unjust, nagging and doctrinaire. But he came to these works with a fierce passion of inquiry. Thus the criticism he wrote, and equally the novels and stories which respond to a challenge like that of Anna Karenina, show all of them a single preoccupation. He divines immediately whether a book has the emotional honesty, the truth to its occasion and place, for which he is searching. And Lawrence goes out to try conclusions with Melville or Dostoevsky, to grapple with them and find what is genuine thew and sinew, and what mere flabbiness. For him Europe and America abound in opportunities, the Russian way of life, the Sicilian, the buried Etruscan, the surviving Hopi. There are no limits to his curiosity, and he speaks out:

European culture is a rootless thing in the Russians (ibid., 242).

The trouble with Verga, as with all Italians, is that he never seems quite to know where he is (ibid., 272).

… it is perhaps easier to love America passionately, when you look at it through the wrong end of the telescope, across all the Atlantic water, as Cooper did so often, than when you are right there (ibid., 318).

These statements are uncompromising in their pungent candour. Lawrence puts forward each as showing a predicament. Whether he has told the complete truth may be argued. But the degree of his interest and sympathy allows him, as an experienced witness, to say these things.

The essay on Verga’s novel Mastro-don Gesualdo (ibid., 270–9) proves the quality of Lawrence as a critic—his range, exactitude, feeling for the particular, and sincerity. At the start he takes his bearings from I Promessi Sposi, ‘one of the best and most interesting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 The Education of a Modern Poet
• 2 National Accent and Tradition
• 3 The Mind of Europe
• 4 Notes on Translation
• 5 Comparative Studies at the University
• 6 American Literature—the Special Case
• Bibliography:
• Appendix: Sketch of a One-year Postgraduate Course in Comparative Literature