To Compare, To World: Two Verbs, One Discipline

In a special 2004 issue of Comparative Literature Studies devoted to “World Literature and Globalization,” I considered the possibilities of “world” as a verb, as a transitive verb, to be exact.¹ Once “to world” is read as transitive, the ensuing question about the binomial “world literature” would logically become “which world are we worlding literature into and why?” And, concomitantly, from what position are we worlding world literature?

On this occasion, I invite us to consider the verb “to compare” as an intransitive verb. Logically, this would lead to the grammatical subject of comparison as something or someone other than us, the comparatists. The focus in “to compare” as intransitive verb would fall on what it is that compares and how. For our disciplinary purposes, the focus would fall on literature. This focus is not an insignificant event, especially for those in comparative literature who confess to no longer be reading any literature. Arbitrary as the proposed exercise might appear, I believe it could possibly shed some light on the dual phrases “comparative literature” and “world literature” that on this occasion we consider in counterpoint.

Let us first take the verb “to compare,” not as what we are wont to do, but as what would be done by the verb’s subject if the verb were intransitive. What compares, how, and to what effect? And, in the case of comparative literature, if the agential subject we designate for the verb is “literature,” the question then is how does literature do so? Once we claim that literature is the verbal agent, that literature compares, intransitively, and we can then describe it adjectivally by what it does and call it “comparative,” how does this “comparative literature” differ from what we now understand by the phrase? And what might this difference between comparative literature as literature that compares intransitively and comparative literature as predicate of our own professional performance as transitive action of comparing reveal about the phenomenon? Once we understand comparative literature in this context, then we could move to the next logical question with which we are tasked by the topic of this seminar. Namely, how could this atypical phenomenon of comparative literature as something that does the comparison without an object predicate relate to what we call world literature, especially if we characterize world literature not as a phenomenal object but as a predicate, as literature that is predicated on the action of a transitive verb “to world”?

I suspect that through this grammatical exercise we shall discover, on the one hand, that literature might well be inevitably comparative, in which case our practices as comparatists are concurrent with inevitability, inexorably engaged in performing the obvious. On the other hand, we might re-discover that world literature is far from being a logical necessity or inevitability, inasmuch as the lexis “world” has no particular or necessarily predictable referent. This discovery makes it unavoidable for us to have to explain the phenomenon we are referring to as the predicate object or as the predicative process of our worlding actions—which world, at what time, in what location, through which language, and with what intentions. World, in other words, can never be taken as a given since it is invariably the constructed outcome of our particular performative interventions. And, by extension, the literature it conditions becomes a particular literature whose specificity is a derivative of the instance of the phenomenon “world” we define as predicative referent of our action in the verb to world. I shall say nothing about the questionable relevance to comparative literature of those who still claim to be comparatists without the need to read any literature since in effect they remove themselves from one of the terms of the binomial, thereby giving an altogether different meaning to intransitive action by transforming comparison into solipsistic onanism.

There could well be some resistance to this epistemic operation that I propose here, though not because of its technical difficulty. We all know our grammar. Rather, it might seem difficult because we are not accustomed to this mirroring in which we reverse the traditional roles of comparative literature...