Comparing the Literatures: Textualism and Globalism

Rey Chow's very interesting essay sharpens for us a paradox of comparatism—that just as substantial numbers of scholars were lamenting the decline of Comparative Literature as measured by numbers of job openings, the discussion of literary comparatism came to seem one of the most interesting occasions for theoretical debates about literature and the distribution of literature and criticism. Thus, Gayatri Spivak's recent Death of a Discipline begins her proposal for revitalizing comparative studies by announcing that the older, Eurocentric comparatism that trained students to deal with the literatures of England, France, and Germany has largely disappeared.¹ Chow, like Spivak, is concerned not merely with telling us which way the wind is blowing but also with explaining the advantages of its blowing in a certain direction. Writers like Susan Lanser, Emily Apter, and Spivak have called attention to an early political promise in comparative literature and have attempted to imagine how such a promise might be recaptured and transformed. As Lanser puts it in a passage that Chow quotes, "Comparative literature grew up in an era of imperialist nationalism which some comparatists hoped to combat by affirming a transnational spirit in the human sciences. . . . 'Rising above' national boundaries and partisan identities was surely a crucial strategy of resistance . . . for comparatists from France and Germany when their countries were bitter enemies."² Chow is particularly concerned that the universalizing impulses of comparatism that may have responded to the sense that "comparatism" was about "parity" have been unequal in practice, creating what Apter terms "a universal Eurocentrism."³ Thus, she speaks of a comparatism that might be called "Europe and Its Others" and that "has methodologically predetermined the outcome of comparison," inasmuch as the others always look less European than the Europeans, and approvingly cites Harry Harootunian's argument that in "future comparative practice" the and in "Post-European Culture and the West" needs to disconnect as well, so that it will not perpetuate the sort of linguistic hierarchies that Lanse323r has urged the field to dismantle.

I suppose that the central question that Chow's essay raises for me is one about exactly what is at stake in repudiating comparison as a method because it yields hierarchization as a product. Writers like Spivak and Apter essentially try to deal with the problem of hierarchization by arguing that comparative literature of the kind that Apter cites (in the example of Leo Spitzer's practice, which she sees as "a staged cacophony of multilingual encounters") or that Spivak points to in deconstruction (in the example of Jacques Derrida and his practice of continually showing the impossibility of distinguishing between apparently opposed terms) itself rejects hierarchies. In the process, they develop a new rationale for close reading, namely that "textual closeness," in Apter's phrase, keeps comparison itself at bay.⁴

In one direction, I can understand and sympathize with the suspicion of comparison and hierarchization. Insofar as the technique and the product lead us to dismiss the losers in the rankings, we are obviously using them to blind ourselves to the future possibilities of those losers and to the fact that hierarchies seldom remain unchanged. In the other direction, however, I find it hard to imagine that many of the things that we care about—loving someone as opposed to some other one, preferring this critic to that, even choosing to read this book rather than that—would be possible without comparison. For it is hard to imagine judgments without comparison, as John Barrell suggested when he maintained that Western society since the eighteenth century had made evaluation—the perception of the value of this as opposed to that—the most common of common activities. (The alternative would be to adopt a position more Kantian than Kant's that would lead us to treat every object purely as a thing in itself.)

The difficulty with comparison and hierarchization, I want to suggest, is not that we compare and choose but that we imagine that the value of a particular choice is itself generalizable. Although our choices always contain a recommendation in them whenever other people can observe our preferences...