--
Or maybe I should just give a snapshot: my latest. Infer the previous motion.
--
“The Common Denominator, If It Must Be”
(MLA, December 2009)
All of us are familiar with the procedure of finding the common denominator for two or more fractional expressions. You do it in order to perform joint operations on the fractions, fractions being relational and proportional numbers (all integers are fractions with a denominator of 1). If I ask you what one half and two thirds make, you can reply, accurately but unhelpfully, that they are precisely one half plus two thirds; but to make a single expression out of them, to synthesize and totalize, in other words to give an answer rather than repeating the question, you will have to express the fractions as differing amounts of the same thing, e.g. 3/6 and 4/6, and from that basis derive the answer, 7/6 or 1 1/6. All this is childishly simple—even a humanities prof can do this kind of math in his head—but it is worth slowing down the instantaneous phrase, “common denominator,” to note its subparts and implicit relations, not just to cite it as we so readily do when a metaphor is familiar and the context rich in redundant signals. The process of finding the common denominator is one of renaming—of multiplying or dividing numerators in order to find the one among the infinite equivalent and tautologous nominations (1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8, 112/224, etc.) that will be most pliable to whatever operation we have it in mind to perform. This is easy in the world of numbers because those signs are devoid of content apart from their mutual relations. You might guess from the foregoing that the person speaking to you doesn’t believe in incommensurability.
One of Aristotle’s examples of a riddling metaphor has an analogous structure: “the cup of Ares.” Aristotle contends that the word “cup” asks to be analyzed and manipulated by the reader in such a way that it will not yield the nonsense meaning it offers at first sight, for Ares is not the god who deals in cups; that’s Dionysus. For “cup,” here substitute “instrument” or “vessel”—a semantic element common to and capable of serving as a vague equivalent of cups, wheels, hammers, swords, shields, etc. A long tradition designates this element as the “tertium comparationis,” the third thing on which a comparison pivots. With that, the bizarre phrase resolves first into an uncontroversial one, “the instrument of Ares” (it is not unreasonable that Ares should have an instrument, only required by public iconography that he have the right one) and thence into a more specific answer, “a shield.” Aristotle depicts a metaphor as a question in need of a solution. Once you have found the answer, you are left with more than just the analogy of cup and shield (they are analogous as instruments, the cup serving for symposia as the shield for battles); you also have the history, the trail, of the process of discovery, which must be a valuable thing for else such expressions would not give people pleasure. Something like the satisfaction of resolving incompatible fractions into a single expression is what Aristotle thinks makes people eager to learn. (And as you know, the formula for learning, for metaphor, for perception and for digestion in Aristotle is one and the same.)
I would like to focus today on the history—the trails and traces of analogical thinking—and the pleasure it affords. One longstanding challenge to our discipline comes from the philosophers. Croce pointed out that “comparison” designates a mere formal operation applicable to any set of objects and therefore cannot designate a field of knowledge. (As if one were to say, “This is the discipline of examples!”—neglecting the fact that every discipline has and uses examples. It wouldn’t be untrue, but it wouldn’t be much of a description.) I would answer that objection with a note from the sociology of disciplines, namely that the specificity of the comparative derived in Croce’s day from the fact that denizens of other disciplines were not performing the kinds of comparison usual among so-called comparatists. Yes, the operation was perfectly general and universally applicable, but its targeted neglect is what needs explanation. It arose as a consequence of the organization of humanistic scholarship along nationalist lines in the nineteenth century, an act of founding that we are still finding it hard to undo. And it is the gradual erosion of national boundaries, national differences, national narratives, national languages, that enables us to ask why comparison had to be suppressed, ignored, or localized in a relatively unfrequented academic asylum. In that sense, we can hail world literature, as Goethe did, as the emergence of the obvious: international literary history, the main mover of literary invention and reception since the days of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
World literature would thus be the discovery of a common denominator that was there all along—an analytically and necessarily true statement that brings us new knowledge only to the degree that it redirects our attention. I’m far from disprizing it, since, like everybody, I direct my attention to the wrong things all the time and am ignorant enough to need to be reminded of what is in front of my nose. But the discovery of the fabric of worldwide literary communication, the model of world literature as global literary history that one finds in, say, Moretti's compilation on the novel, is the exploration of an archive, rather than the construction of something as yet unheard-of.
People express skepticism about a comparative-literary project in a familiar way. You are embarking on a thesis, let’s say, about A and B—about Mayan hieroglyphics and the fish markets of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Someone says, “What do those have to do with each other?” In other words, the challenge says, “Tell me the common denominator, the tertium comparationis, that makes these two different things somehow the same.” One thing they have to do with one another is Charles Olson. When you’ve named him, you’re off the hook, you have offered a solution to the enigma. I don’t know if Charles Olson could have offered the same answer. Perhaps he should have. I always try to give what is termed a reasonable answer to these challenges, though sometimes I would like to say, and dream of advising others to say, “They don’t have anything to do with each other—yet. What they have in common is me, or my attention.” That would sound like taking oneself seriously as an artist, which in my case would be absurd, though not in Olson’s.
One way or another, we will not be free of the common denominator, though we might want to undermine the supposition that it is the thing we are “solving for,” the goal of the process of comparison. We could also usefully point out that the third thing is not necessarily a thing or a name; it can be a proportion, an analogical relation, a thread of narrative. Indeed I’ve described the history of comparative literature as a series of attempts to discover or name the tertium comparationis, the basis of comparison, the specific object of the discipline. This attempt never succeeds (at least, it never terminates) and needs to be repeated once every generation or so, but the failure is not a disaster and it yields delightful by-products. The distinction I would like to bring forward is that between a common denominator that is supposed to be given, and one that is constructed through the exercise itself. The distinction is anything but hard-and-fast. Some acts of construction stick, give rise to a precedent or even a sub-discipline, as the risk their original formulator took in fashioning them is spread over so many participants that it approaches zero for any new contributor. Consider the precedent of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a book everyone admires but which appeared to some of its distinguished early readers, Ernst Robert Curtius and René Wellek among them, as dangerously capricious, arbitrary, artistic, even solipsistic in its neglect of a clearly-stated methodology, terminology, and corpus. It is true that Auerbach was uninterested in the existing definitions of realism and had no ambition of building up the kind of literary history that deals in points of contact and transmission. His version of realism emerges from the examples and from an essay not included in the book, the famous piece on figura, which sets out a frame story for the collapse of ancient rhetorical distinctions of style and level which had to occur so that humble realism could emerge, more in asides and episodes than as the dominant mode of any European literary tradition before the nineteenth century. Auerbach couldn’t present his realism as the generally recognized extant third term under which all the texts he analyzed would have sheltered; his project wasn’t about that sort of thing. He disclaimed continuity and comprehensiveness—properties that in his day were more self-evidently Good Things in a scholarly work. Though now if someone wanted to write a project that collected a number of texts and analyzed them for their qualities of “Auerbachian realism,” I think it would seem not adventurous at all, indeed a little tame and in need of revision. Nor would I be made to say wow, without further information, by the fact that the project about “Auerbachian realism” happened to include, let’s say, texts from Chinese or Azerbaijani literature. The category is well enough established that extending it seems to me a matter of detail, of course requiring intelligence, taste, tact, and plenty of explanation, but the very fact that I can outline such an extension to you and not elicit an absolute blank wall of stares supports my point about the building-up of precedent.
So how does the present practice of “world literature” deal with the problem of common denominators? By obliterating the problem as such, by substituting itself for the missing conceptual or contextual pivot. Nonetheless, the substitution is not complete, if you consider the examples I’ve given. (How is this different from saying “I am the common denominator,” as in my fictional Olson example above? Only because saying “me” is more sheerly and nakedly an acknowledgment of the made-up quality of the common denominator, which seems to me a valuable difference.) What seems to me incomplete about “world literature” as a project is its tendency to present itself as an archive awaiting discovery. If the world is everything that is the case, as the young Wittgenstein put it, then “world literature” is everything that is the case about literature, but what about everything that isn’t the case, or that hasn’t been proposed as being the case yet? The national literature framework needed to be discarded, but we shouldn’t use the epithet “world” in a way that makes world literature ever and only the determinate negation of “national narrowness and one-sidedness.” “World literature” can and should be an assumption about the corpus of relevant documents and therefore unremarkable, a starting-point rather than the goal toward which Goethe urged us to be “hastening.” Which is not to say, of course, that “world literature” is complete, finished, dead or useless as a framework of investigation; only that the ambiguity of its designation, with the unfortunate suggestion of completeness and authority, needs to be corrected by our making space for comparative projects that have as their objects things and relations that are not part of the world—yet.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
