Dissensus, Irony, Dialectic

Thinking Literature across Continents brings to mind a memory of sitting next to the great English poet and critic Donald Davie at a conference dinner and hearing him say that his Stanford students could not properly understand Keats because today's Californians (this would have been in the 1970s) live in a different world. As a second-generation Californian specializing in British Romanticism I—naturally—bristled. (I cannot vouch for this recollection, of course, but it does not matter for the present occasion.) But I also bristled as a comparatist. I always, inevitably, and by choice, look at things from the outside. I was studying Keats and others because they were a different world, not in spite of it. Of course, the Davie of my recollection must have been thinking of surfer dudes (or something like that), not me. But that is beside the point. For who is or ever was close enough to Keats to read him from the inside? On many accounts, not even authors themselves know whereof they speak. Picking one older such account more or less at random, I could invoke Graham Hough's distinction between intended and achieved meanings. What the author knows and intends, Hough once claimed, is essential but reductive; it is only the surface layer, "round" which swirls an "ambiguous space" of "gaps" through which "unintended meanings" come into view and "beneath" which lie "a culture and a history" and ultimately "the locus of a civilisation."¹ While Hough does not actually stress the distinction between beneath and around—between the broadly Freudian and the broadly cultural or historical—their possible but problematic overlap is the challenge of Thinking Literature across Continents.

Reading around, beneath, across, through. We all agree that just reading "in" is not enough. Of the two authors, Ranjan Ghosh seems to me closer to Hough when he writes of infusion as "a kind of knowledge regime that respects … the boundaries of tradition, … but also dares to infringe on them."² As a "compound experience," his "whispered poetry," like Hough's gappy poetry, is "both a plan and a chance,"³ though Ghosh puts a more ecstatic spin on things than any sober Brit would. In much he agrees with J. Hillis Miller; Miller prefers the term imaginary to Ghosh's sacred, but agrees that the terms are "not altogether different."⁴ That is in his first response. But as the dialogue continues, a divide opens into what Miller identifies as a dissonance, "the absence of music in clashing sound."⁵ Ghosh retorts with a loose quotation from Arnold Schoenberg in a chapter epigraph, "Dissonances are only the remote consonances."⁶ Ghosh envisions a reconciliatory itinerary that "[does] not allow antagonism but … rediscover[s] together" the "climate … around us"⁷; Miller instantly retorts by reiterating his individuality: "I feel my way inductively toward any generalizations I make," whereas Ghosh "abstracts details … to support [his longstanding] transcultural poetics."⁸ Their sense of ethics, he writes, "differs to some degree," and "I shall especially stress the way Ghosh's procedures differ considerably from mine"; their emphases, he continues, are "somewhat different," and "from our somewhat different premises" it follows that "our interpretative procedures differ greatly."⁹ Thus, as Miller says, the dialogue wavers between consensus and dissensus,¹⁰ with his emphasis on the divergence of "two ways to think literature across continents"¹¹ pitted against Ghosh's inclination toward "togetherness" in "a domain of altogether."¹²

Hough's image of encircling gaps surrounding the buried "locus of a civilisation" evokes Wilhelm Dilthey's notion that the hermeneutic circle is rooted in a central core of meaning and is probed via the "universal sympathy" embedded in "an ideal historical consciousness."¹³ The hermeneutic in Thinking Literature across Continents has a different ancestry. The progression from dialogue through debate to dissensus presumes a hermeneutic spiral, dynamic and unbounded rather than reflective and self-correcting. Neither Miller nor Ghosh settles for or even points at the proto-Freudian inwardness that dreams of "knowing the author better than he knows himself." Instead, they turn outward in their climactic sections on pedagogy and on ethics. And there...