Pan Literary Endeavour and the Problematic Of Comparison: A Re-Reading Of “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” By Rene Wellek
Wellek designates the overwhelming ruptures that
could be observed with literatures across the world to political events since
1914. The reason for the ruptures is identified as the exclusive reliance on
facts. Literature as a form of art may not be deciphered efficiently using
facts regarding the author’s background alone. Wellek advocates a perspective that
crosses temporal boarders on this issue. He triangulates a crisis in the method
and focus of comparative literature. According to Wellek, literary critics like
Benedetto Croce in Italy and philosophers like Wilhelm Dilthey in Germany argued
before Wellek himself for a renewal in methods and practices in literary
scholarship. Wellek stresses “re-examination” of present methods suggesting the
concreteness of existing paradigms of literary scholarship and their apparent
disintegration while facing varied streams of literary art.
Wellek’s
suggestion that “there is something to the passing, in the last decade, of
several, asters: Van Tieghem, Farinelli, Vossler, Curtius, Auerbach, Carre,
Baldensperger, and Spitzer” (Wellek 162) asserts his idea of the existence of a
certain flaw in the present framework for reading literature. Comparative
literature or literary scholarship in general, apparently, tends to incline
towards two serious hollows: lack of “distinct subject matter” and “specific
methodology.” “The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is
the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a
specific methodology” (Wellek 162).
Wellek
identifies failure in association with the endeavours to read literature by the
earlier mentioned theorists. He asserts that “nineteenth-century factualism,
scientism and historical relativism” are the reasons for the present crisis in
comparative literature. According to Wellek, comparative literature attempts to
incorporate the compartmentalisation of literature on the basis of
nationalities. This seems to appear as the highest purpose of comparative
literature within the epistemological terrain of literary scholarship. Wellek
points out that compartmentalisation of national literature do not deserve
merit as the Western literary tradition is “woven together in a network of
innumerable interrelations” (Wellek 162) as a whole.
Wellek
registers his specific distrust towards what Van Tieghem separately addressed
as “comparative” and “general” literature. Wellek notes this in relation to the
dismantling of compartmentalisation in literary scholarship. According to Van
Tieghem, comparative literature holds no further scope than just being a “study
of interrelations between two
literatures while “general” literature is concerned with the movements and
fashions which sweep through several literatures”
(Wellek 162). Wellek pushes these notions to the background by identifying them
as “untenable and impracticable”. He suggests that although the commonsensical
notions that bind today’s practices in comparative literature are inept and can
only deliver enough to tarnish its appeal, in its essence, every act of
literary analysis involves processes that are common to both the so-called
comparative as well as general literature. This puts forth another argument
that, maybe, what is known as “world literature” is essentially the potential
field of comparative analysis. As Hassan writes “[w]hen Gœthe coined the term Weltliteraturin 1827, he was envisioning
a future state rather than naming a contemporary canon. As René Wellek writes,
for Gœthe “the term world literature. . . suggests a historical scheme of the
evolution of national literatures in which they will fuse and ultimately melt
into a great synthesis” (39). In Wellek’s notion, this scheme of fusing of national
literatures foregrounds comparative analysis as an essentiality. This is why
Wellek, in “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” condemns any form of study of
foreign literature under the label of comparative literature, marking these
literatures as separate from national literature. In such a scenario,
comparative literature would be “broken off from meaningful wholes.” The
totality of world literature proposed by Gœthe may not be visible in the
continuum of literary interaction existing in the present scenario. This is
evident in Hassan’s observations on comparative literature in the time of globalization.
For a long time, “world
literature” was synonymous with European literature, but with the vigorous
interrogation from a number of perspectives of the primacy of the Western
canon, the rise to global celebrity of scores of non-Western writers (including
several Nobel laureates and others equally canonized by the Western
literary-critical establishment), and the increasing availability of English
translations, the teacher of a world literature course today faces an
unprecedented abundance of texts from which to choose. Yet this situation is
fraught with difficulties of its own, for even as the “globalization of
literary studies” emerges as the topic of the hour, the selective inclusion of
non-Western texts in critical and pedagogical cadres often reveals new
configurations of power and domination” (38).
The
challenges of incorporating literary interaction in the post-globalized era
present quaky grounds for Wellek’s totality of literary endeavour. The notion
of totality might give way to the varied “configuration” of power structures
operating in the scenario. However, Wellek underscores that fragmentation in
the methodology of comparative literature and the very act of comparing foreign
works makes the stream of study denigrate. Such a scheme underpinning the
stream of comparative literature may marginalize it into a “subdiscipline,” to
use a term by Wellek. Separating methodology and subject matter of comparative
literature and general literature may not be favourable to the general growth
of literary scholarship. However, Wellek also raises questions on the existing
methodology of comparative literature. Comparative literature is only concerned
with minor authors, myths, and legends that affected the creative process of
the authors, etc. This Wellek identifies as “nineteenth-century positivistic factualism” and as “a study of
sources and influences”. Such a methodology has serious implications regarding
the survival of literary scholarship. Through analyses of motifs, themes,
character, situations, plots, and various aspects of cultural influences during
the period of the creation of the work, such a scheme narrows down the analysis
into a cause-effect paradigm.
“Works
of art, however, are not simply sums of sources and influences: they are wholes
in which raw materials derived from elsewhere cease to be inert matter and are
assimilated into a new structure” (Wellek 164). According to Wellek, the social
influences that benefit the author’s imagination or creative faculty should not
occupy the central position in the analysis of a work of art. A work of art is
conceived in free imagination and carries forward a set of signifiers and implications
totally different from a science fact. Wellek’s attempt could be identified as an
endeavour in “New Humanism”.
“Comparative literature
arouse as a reaction against the narrow nationalism of much nineteenth-century
scholarship” (Wellek 165). The pan literary model proposed by Wellek requires
methods and subject matter that are universal in their affiliations. In other
words, one may also term Wellek’s model of literature a ‘mega structure’ that defies
any form or manner of disintegration and exists in totality. However, comparative
literature has been shaped by those who have experiences of crossing
geographical boundaries and political boarders. Those who exist on a third
space, without any apparent affiliation to either side, may also practice,
comparative literature. This event also undermines Wellek’s notion of the totality
of “world” literature. The persons or groups that that occupy margins may well
contain within themselves sets of signifiers that suggest schemes for
practicing their version of literary activity, which may be different from the
totality of world literature of the dominant strata. In other words, Wellek’s
argument is questioned by its own innate desire to universalize.
Another
crisis unveiled by Wellek in the field of comparative literature scholarship is
expansionism. A culture or nation sees comparative literature as a tool for
expanding their culture and national territories. Analyses such as the
influence of one author in another culture or language, affirm the demarcation
that in such cases literary scholarship must be identified universal
literature. Such tendencies, Wellek identify as cultural expansionism. How one
culture impacts another and the attempt to trace these impacts may be nothing
more than “cultural bookkeeping, a desire to accumulate credits for one’s
nation by proving as many influences as possible on other nations or, more
subtly, by proving that one’s own nation has assimilated and “understood” a
foreign master more fully than any other” (Wellek 167). Expanding this
argument, Wellek quotes Farinelli’s comments on the “creditor debtor calculus
in matters of poetry,” indicating the depth and breadth of cultural bookkeeping
in contemporary comparative literature studies.
Wellek’s
seminal point is unravelled just as he ascertains his intolerance towards using
comparative literature to propagate cultural expansionism. The crisis of
comparative literature, according to Wellek, could be identified by making
assessments over symptoms such as “a mechanistic concept of sources and
influences,” and “a motivation by cultural nationalism” in the analysis of
literature. These assessments suggest “an artificial demarcation of subject
matter and methodology” (Wellek 167). In other words, Wellek presupposes a
‘natural’ methodology and essentialist paradigm in existence in order to
analyse and test literatures across cultures. However, apparently, he does not
provide logical explanations to what this natural methodology is, and what the
various modalities are, concerning the essentialist paradigm of reading
literatures.
One
may also observe some suggestions by Wellek toward reviving the spirit of
comparative literature. He advocates dissolving the ‘artificial demarcations’
that apparently exist between ‘comparative’ literature and ‘general’
literature. Wellek asserts that ““Comparative” literature has become an
established term for any study of literature transcending the limits of one
national literature” (167). Wellek even goes for a general term for literary
studies, underplaying the binaries of comparative and general literatures. Often,
such a demarcation is the product of the academic imagination of the subject. Such
‘experts’ often use the cultural expansionist notions and factual elements of
cause-effect paradigm to decipher literary art. This process of
nineteenth-century humanist endeavour attaches the sense of authority with
fragmentation and analysis based on geo-political boarders. The answer Wellek
delivers to this crisis is “greater mobility and ideal universality”.
In
Wellek, the totality of a literary work of art finds its unique value only in
relation to the universality of world literature. Wellek finds it relevant to
draw the line of differentiation between contemporary practises of literary
scholarship and comparative literature. Although in literary scholarship
“theory, criticism, and history collaborate to achieve its central task: the
description, interpretation, and evaluation of a work of art or any group of
works of art” (169) comparative literature shuns this collaboration. It is this
demarcation that caused Wellek to suggest a renewal of subject matter and
methodology of comparative literature. Wellek comments on literary scholarship
too. He argues that literature has a distinct space of its own, largely, as
proposed earlier, due to its origins in the locale of free imagination. Although
this free imagination may, at some point in time, be interpolated by the
society of the writer existence, Wellek does not acknowledge this factor. Instead,
Wellek imagines “an “ontological gap” between the psychology of the author and
a work of art, between life and society on the one hand and the aesthetic object”
(170).
This
ontological gap may also suggest a ‘no-signifier’ zone, where none of the
existing signifiers of the present culture contribute any decipherable meaning.
This location, because it is related to the creative act of producing a piece
of literary art, could be within the subjective location of an individual. Wellek
suggests, as a solution, a ‘holistic’ approach to the analysis, study, reading,
and comparison of literature. This may, perhaps, be identified as the only
visible solution offered by the author to the crisis of comparative literature.
Works
Cited
Hassan, Waïl S. “World Literature in the Age of
Globalization:
Reflections on an
Anthology”. College English 63.1 (2000): 38-47. Web. 22 October 2015.
Wellek, Rene, Stephen G. Nicholas. “The Crisis of
Comparative
Literature”. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1963. Print.
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