Editor's Column: Reconfiguring Borders

Representative of the continued expansion of the terrain of comparative literature, the six essays in this issue of The Comparatist, as well as the books reviewed, take widely different approaches to their various topics. If there is a common theme here, it lies in the destabilizing or permeating of conventionally established borders, a transformation that illuminates in new ways the objects compared. The first group of essays reconfigures the borders separating literary genres as well as those between literature and the visual arts while proposing a contemporary look at traditional ekphrasis; the second group considers in both theory and practice the question of adaptation in the visual arts, literary forms, the cinema, and life. The third group, treating versions of a fairy tale, autobiography in two languages, and truth or fiction in the testimonial, questions in various ways the borders surrounding narratives.

Borders are also reconfigured in a more literal sense here. Although this issue of the journal may seem more Eurocentric than previous ones, which have traditionally included clusters of essays on East–West literary relations, it expands considerably the borders of the traditional Western European literary canon. Discussing literary works from Denmark and modern Greece, two of the essays push those borders north and south, while the book review section, which includes an essay on a new literary history of East Central Europe as well as three reviews of books from Poland, pushes them eastward.

Peter Bornedal's essay on "the fragmented Nietzschean subject" as an applied critical approach to a poem on a drawing of Michelangelo by the nineteenth-century Danish poet J. P. Jacobsen permeates the borders of philosophy, criticism, poetry, and visual art. Following Nietzsche's "dynamic" model of the mind, which does away with psychological categories such as the unified subject, Bornedal reads Jacobsen's "Arabesque" as the expression of the conflicts of a multiple self seeking to appropriate the enigma, and the danger, posed by the notion of "Woman." Drawing on letters and diary entries by Jacobsen, Bornedal supplements his reading with autobiographical material illustrating Jacobsen's conflicted relationships with women. Although he does not specifically discuss ekphrasis in his analysis, it is clear that the enigmatic image of woman portrayed in the Michelangelo drawing continuously informs the poem.

Ekphrasis is on the other hand a specific focus of Robert Hamner's essay on the incorporation of Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon in V. S. Naipaul's fictional and autobiographical work The Enigma of Arrival. Extending the classical definition of ekphrasis as the written description of an art object to include the "envoicing" of silent objects, Hamner demonstrates how Naipaul's reading of the surrealist work of art, with its manipulation of perspective, informs his fragmented authorial presence in the text. Like Bornedal, Hamner also makes use of autobiographical material to reconfigure the boundaries of autobiography. In Naipaul's case, of course, "the enigma of arrival" is also intimately bound with his own subjective restructuring of the borders of India, Trinidad, and England.

The two essays in the second cluster were both originally papers in a session on literary adaptation at the American Comparative Literature Association chaired by Elaine Martin, and it is thanks to Professor Martin that the revisions of these papers appear here. Both of these essays deal with the adaptation of a literary work into a cinematic one, but both also use the notion of adaptation in a broader sense. Working in three media, Ilan Safit argues that the film adaptation of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring reveals the cinematic potential of the Vermeer painting of the title on which the novel is based. Like Hamner, Safit explores the narrative potential of visual images released by ekphrasis. In his "From Balzac to Iraq," Brian Martin proposes not only to discuss the cinematic adaptation of Balzac's Colonel Chabert, but also to explore the multiple significations of veterans' "adaptations" to violence in war and to their return to an indifferent society at home. He then asks how these adaptations can adequately be rendered in literature or in film. Although he...