Interviews
Interview with Professor Haun Saussy, October 3rd, 2007
Interviewers: Chris Boehm, Tracy Graves, Kate Parker and Yanning Wang
Transcribed by Kate Parker
[Professor Saussy received the following questions, which we emailed beforehand.]
(1) You begin your ACLA Report "Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares" with a discussion of Comparative Literature's “institutional selflessness,” a model that, in David Damrosch's words, implies "not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading" (11). Yet, as you acknowledge elsewhere in the report, the rigorous academic demands of Comparative Literature departments--including proficiency in multiple languages and knowledge of multiple national literatures, histories, and canons--seems to necessitate a more specialized (and in some ways, more traditional) epistemological and pedagogical approach to our discipline. How can we read broadly without making schematic assumptions about the nature of textual relationships? How do we avoid hierarchy and marginalization in our more practical approaches to the discipline? Can we promote a "mode of reading" that is individually-based as well as collaborative?
(2) In the final section of your 2004 ACLA report, you claim that it is often difficult to consider a definition of Comparative Literature without using negative terms. In other words, Comparative Literature is almost always defined against the backdrop of those established disciplines that it is not (English, Film Studies, etc.). Comparative Literature as a disciplinary approach seems to hold a kind of "negative magnitude," creating comparisons between objects of "weak ties" that might otherwise be rejected by more rigid disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, your account of Comparative Literature seems to take up residence in the interstices, the gaps between these disciplines, most aptly characterized by a model of "reading literarily." Do you advocate a definition of Comparative Literature as a project of productive negativity; if so, do you see this as a proactive measure for the discipline at a methodological and institutional level? Is it possible for Comparative Literature to announce itself positively, as you call for at the end of your report, if it is, perhaps, most productively and clearly defined by what it is not? Finally, how do we balance the positivistic nature of the history of our discipline with its position in the margins of humanities discourse?
The Interview
HS: Let’s start with what I call the “institutional selflessness” of Comparative Literature, a phrase with some funny connotations. One is that it is a kind of deficiency, as if we don’t have any personality, or as if there is no core in Comparative Literature—and that is something people have been saying for decades. On the other hand, when you say that somebody is “selfless,” it is very high praise. It may resonate with Buddhistic ideas about attaining nirvana and losing your Self and so forth. When I wrote that essay, I thought I would try to intertwine all those connotations, and not necessarily be too rigorous about the connections among them. I wasn’t quite ready to come out and say exactly what the “selflessness” consists in—it was a clue rather than an answer.
On a practical level, Comparative Literature is demanding, it’s not empty. Our syllabi of study are full of content and substance: you have to know a whole lot to be in a Comparative Literature department and to join the profession. Since we also have to be specialists in something, and since we absorb into our discipline more traditional epistemological and pedagogical approaches, how does that square with of the seeming emptiness of the specifically comparative-literature institution? This seemed to me to reverberate with the second question, about the problem of defining Comparative Literature—as we so often do—in terms of what we are not. We’re not the English department, primarily. We’re not any of the particular foreign language departments.
That question actually has administrative consequences, because, as happens in many great universities right now, when Deans decide to combine a number of small foreign language departments into a big Department of Foreign Languages—something foreign language departments usually don’t like because they see it as a loss of autonomy—[the Deans] often then say: “Well, now that we have all the animals in one Ark, why did we need the Comparative Literature Department? Shouldn’t we just abolish Comparative Literature?” The “Deanly” view is: as long as you have all these people under one administrative heading, then they’re doing Comparative Literature. That, I think, is an idea we have to resist by proposing a more substantive definition of what it is that we do, what the combination consists in. We are not just people who happen to be coexisting, as if at a cocktail party. What we do involves fostering some pretty intense relationships among the different parts of our fields, and these relationships have to happen in order to do Comp Lit. The second question is urgent in administrative terms—the question is how we define ourselves when there is a pragmatic need to do so. We’re not just lying on the grass and dreaming about what the potential identity of Comparative Literature might be in a better world, but offering a definition in a milieu with very day-to-day consequences.
So, putting those two questions together, I see a problem, or an issue, that is very appealing to me because it has to do with the negative moment and the attraction of the negative. We all live through negations. Good old Spinoza is there to tell us that omnis determinatio est negatio, that every determination is a negation. If I say that I want tea, then I have ruled out coffee, and so on. If I say that I want menthol, I have ruled out non-menthol cigarettes. If we are doing Comparative Literature, we are implicitly not just doing what some other field is doing. But what appeals to me mostly about the negative moment is not just this kind of trite, logical, implicit negation of something by the act of choosing anything, but the plot-line that emerges from negativity. I do believe that the story of literature and of disciplines is a comic story. It is a comic story in which the slave triumphs over the master—as happens in comedy ever since Greece and Rome—and in which the margin becomes the center.
The idea that it is a comic story is worth dwelling on. I am thinking of Hayden White and his idea about historical writing always being dominated by huge mega-plot-lines, and I would definitely opt for the comic plot-line as the model for literary history. I don’t like the clinging to grievance or to marginality as a badge of authenticity or seriousness. At times, when I’ve actually heard people begin talks by saying, “Well, I’m a marginal person in a marginal field, and so I present to you these ideas…” I want to get up and shake my finger and say, “Don’t say that! You always have to say, ‘I’m the most important person on earth, although you don’t know it yet!’” [laughs] The person I’m thinking of is actually an extremely distinguished writer whom I like a lot, so I was particularly annoyed because he had less reason to call himself “marginal” than practically anybody. Well. The idea about a comic plot in literary history is one that I get from Viktor Shklovsky who, I think, deserves to be one of the great heroes of our discipline. Shklovsky’s great book Theory of Prose (1925) includes the chapter “Art as Device,” a canonical piece on every reading list. But few read the later chapters; I’m thinking about the chapter on Rozanov (“Literature Without a Plot: Rozanov”). Rozanov is a writer of unclassifiable essays about personal life and reflections on things, which he combines into a loose “novel.” In this chapter about Rozanov, Shklovsky muses on literary history, asking why we have a problem with this “novel without a plot,” as he calls it. Well, part of our problem is that this is a new genre, it is an emergent genre and everything that is new feels funny at the beginning—when Tristram Shandy was published, people thought it was just a comic routine. When Kafka wrote his stories, his friends used to roll on the floor with laughter when he read them out loud—which would not be the standard late 20th century response to Kafka. Everything that is new strikes people at first as amusing and funny: funny-strange, but also funny-absurd.
This is the sign of something that Shklovsky diagnoses as using the properties of a low genre and mixing it with properties of a high genre in order to elevate the low genre. And this is his model for literary history. Pushkin, to quote a famous example, instead of continuing in the history of grand Russian verse odes—the Klopstockian school, which is what existed at the time—he starts from the styles of album verse and trivial social verse, and elevates them to the high status of the minor epic, the epyllion, the Romantic lyric and so on. So, in literary history you always have this situation of competition among genres. A genre makes a bid for major status all the time. Or, rather, authors make a bid through genres; but for Shklovsky, it is the genres who are the real protagonists. There is something comic in the mismatch between the ambition and the genre that is used as its vehicle, and that is the sign that something new is emerging. And it is also a comic story in a greater sense: the low becomes high. I like this kind of story about literary history, it appeals to me. I don’t like the idea of literary history being the continuous self-reproduction of the same genres and the same properties—which is the impression you might get from certain literary historians. I greatly admire Ernst Robert Curtius for his huge reach and his ambition and so forth, but his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, Eng. tr. 1953)—one of the canonical books in our field—is so dedicated to proving continuity that it gives you the impression that once Plato or Aristotle has launched a topos, it gets passed down like the family silver, being burnished by every new generation. The topos only gets more and more patina and shine as it goes through; but it was always carried from hand to hand reverently, and never got melted down, reconfigured, or used as a doorstop. You don’t have, in Curtius, the stirring up from the bottom of the pot that is so important in Shklovsky’s model. In that way, I think that Shklovsky is our scriptwriter.
The other scriptwriter who is looking over Shklovsky’s shoulder is Hegel, of course. Hegel is the master of all kinds of negation, and I feel the need to tip my hat to Hegel because we’re in Saint Louis, home of the Hegelians of the nineteenth century, those great refugees from 1848 who in fact carried some left-Hegelian ideals into American life. Hegel is a great person to read because he has so many different ways of negating. He’s got more negation strategies than a fishnet has holes. I would urge people to read widely in the Hegelian corpus if they want to see how you make the new thing happen by negating the old thing… In sum, I don’t think it is a bad thing for Comp Lit to be what the other disciplines are not: even if that comes at a certain institutional cost, so that we might have to have a strategic line in which we present Comp Lit to our neighbors as being something in particular, and not just the negation of the other things.
If you pulled out from Comparative Literature research that which is strictly and solely comparative, how much would be left? This is a real question. I teach a proseminar in which we are always trying to say “Where is the Comp Lit in this book?” Is it merely a matter of putting one brick here and one brick there, and narrating the closeness of the two bricks, or is there some added mortar that holds them together? Is that where Comp Lit emerges? Is it something added onto the contact of the two or more bricks? Is it an approach to the bricks? Enough bricklayer’s metaphors for now, but this is always an interesting question to me. What is the ingredient that makes our products what they are? And I think, in general, it is an art of combining, articulating, and arranging, that inherently is not a concern for people in national language fields, who don’t always have to worry about this sort of thing. (The more endangered the field, the more important it becomes to show linkages!) As people inside and outside of a specific language field, Comp Lit scholars always have to worry about it.
The great thing about the history of Comparative Literature is, I think, is its history of dissatisfaction with its own projects. Here, we get a more subtle form of negation. It’s not just the slave negating the master, but it’s now the slave who is sitting on top of the master and trying to ask: “Do I just want to be the master the same way this guy was the master? Or do I want to be a different kind of master?” To its very great credit, Comp Lit has always tended to win victories and then say, well, but that wasn’t enough. We still lack an object of study and an established method. This is the complaint that rings down the centuries (the century, actually) of Comparative Literature. And what that ACLA report in 2004 tried to say was that this is actually something to be proud of. I once made a joke about monotheism -- that it gives you a lot more to explain and a lot less to explain it with. That’s the good thing about monotheism. Think about the problem of evil, which doesn’t exist at all in the same way for polytheism. You want to know where evil comes from? Well, there’s an evil god over there who is struggling with the good god and that’s all you need to know, right? But if you only have one God to deal with, then you have to account for the emergence of evil from the supposedly good God. Well, then you begin doing real philosophy [laughs] because things get very tight all of a sudden! The person who enters Comparative Literature experiences a similar disproportion, I think, between the demands that he or she is making and the resources he or she has to work with, even when the base of knowledge that that person possesses is very large. That’s what I take to be the core of the comment about rigor and specialization and how that fits with Comp Lit lacking self-definition in some way. I think it’s the disproportion between the huge questions we ask and the resources that we have—even if they are very large—that makes for that sense of “selflessness.” We don’t want to be dilettantes, but compared to the universe of texts that we can survey and by jurisdiction ought to be surveying, we’ll always be “dilettantish.” As long as we have some consciousness about that, we’re doing all right. That is what we’re supposed to do.
KP: I wonder what you think of Michael McKeon and his dialectical theory of the novel. From what you’re describing it seems very Shklovsky-esque, in that they both talk about the resurgence of the old in the new, and that what is novel about the novel is always what is archaic about the novel. I wonder if you can speak to that.
HS: Histories of the novel—this is a whole genre that maybe would form the subject of a great piece of meta-criticism. Lots of people—Bahktin, Ian Watt, Margaret Doody, Michael McKeon—there are some very, very big, interesting minds who are trying to narrate the history of the novel. They are making all these historiographical choices in a Hayden White-ish manner, and they can’t not be conscious that they are writing the novel of the novel. In fact, I think Doody’s book is called The True Story of the Novel (1996), which is a very funny, campy gesture in the direction of all those novels from the eighteenth century that are titled “true histories”—The True History of Moll Flanders—which then generates the genre of tabloid newspapers: the untold story, right? “Britney Spears: the Untold Story” (as if there would ever be an untold story about Britney Spears). If I say there is, you’re going to buy my tabloid.
KP: Of course, it is again part of the problem we were discussing earlier. McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 is a comparative book: he is talking about French romances and courtly poetry alongside the Greek Enlightenment, citing Auerbach everywhere, and yet it is considered the foundation for an English tradition of the novel. It is a kind of frustration, because it is clearly comparative work even though it is not always identified as such, and even though it announces itself as a history of the English novel. I’m sure McKeon might identify it as comparative.
HS: That’s the teleology of these histories. One of their main ingredients and main results. Ian Watt, when he writes about the rise of the novel, has a very definite object in mind when he writes about The Novel, and he’s engineering the history that will result in The Novel. I think Franco Moretti’s enormous encyclopedic project—which it will take us all the rest of our lives to finish reading—is interesting because he allows for the novel to be a proliferating multiform thing. My only suggestions to improve Moretti would be to make it even more multiform, and give it more origins, because in the Moretti project there is a bit of a tendency to say that the novel goes where European influence goes. He has an Immanuel Wallerstein-ish story about European colonial expansion since 1500: the novel gets carried along with certain diseases and products as the ships radiate out from Europe. That’s a valuable story to tell, and it applies to many cases, but there are things I think are imminently novels that don’t fit with his story. There are Japanese Heian monogatari, there are in Chinese zhiguai, xiaoshuo, bianwen and other Silk Road genres of romance: extraordinary intercultural objects that I think correspond in some ways to the novel and that have to do with different networks of communication and trade, not just European maritime commerce. Moretti is, I think, expanding on Bahktin’s brilliant and (as often) unverifiable story that the novel emerges in central Asia, in oases that are the points of contact for traders of different languages, religions and cultures. I like that story, partly because I work a lot with Asia, therefore anything that gets us closer to there is, in my book, good. But the Central Asia scenario operates like the story about European expansion—only it’s not European expansion, it’s about trade and exchange wherever it may be happening. Maybe there is something about trade and exchange that creates the novel. We could start a colony on Mars, and watch it, and see if the novel is produced spontaneously. [laughs]
Emergence. I like emergence. Lots and lots of little independent low-order things that interact in a way to produce a higher-order thing that you couldn’t predict. So maybe that is the real story about the novel, and if we’re telling it in a narrative mode that requires us to have one focus or one point of view at each moment in the story, we are inherently making it more like the novel, with a principal narrator and a hero in place from the get-go; and maybe that form doesn’t correspond to a properly emergent process, for example the multi-line or no-plot-line story such as the emergence of big bugs out of little bugs.
KP: I was wondering, along the same lines with the idea of genre, the ways in which we institutionally have to account for a certain canon. I wonder if you could speak as a professor, as someone who teaches classes in Comparative Literature, how you get around the practical issues of trying to be broadly comparative while still having to account for the students’ needs. Do you read in translation? Do you prefer original texts?
HS: The only advice is to go with what you have. I complain about translation all the time, and I use translation all the time, always with a feeling of dissatisfaction. I guess if you are satisfied with the translation, then something is really going wrong. I feel all the time that I need to know more languages and that I need to be able to see what is going on with the text more closely. I’m currently, in fact, being hoist on my own petard, because after decades of reading Shklovsky and all these Russian poets in translation, I’m now in first year Russian. And it is hard, it is really hard. Russian is not an easy language. Lots of detail, lots of morphology. It requires you to put in a lot of time doing things that are kind of dumb: repeating, that kind of scut work in the classroom. But it is valuable.
But on the topic of translation, I had another thought as well: It would be helpful if we remembered—maybe just among ourselves as Comp Lit people—that even when you’re reading in the original, you are of course always reading it in translation because your mind is a mind that’s prepared through languages and experiences that are not those of the person who wrote it. In fact, even if you are a speaker of the “same” language, with quotes around the word same, at a couple of hundred years distance, you are in some way translating eighteenth-century English into twentieth-century English whenever you read it. So, I wouldn’t want to break down the distinction between those who read in the original, the point d’honneur of the Comp Lit scholar, and those who read in translation, the unlucky ones that we also are much of the time—it’s a valuable distinction and one that is institutionally important for us—but in some ways we are always reading in translation. The wonderful thing about learning a language is that it gives you more access to more aspects of the text. Even if you memorize something, even if you possess it in your mind, it is still not completely yours.
KP: A kind of reader-response theory of translation. No matter what, we’re all experiencing a different text. I like that.
HS: Yes! Of course, in an undergraduate classroom we have to pretend we’re in immediate contact with the text, or we’ll take the air out of everyone’s tires by saying, “It’s always mediated! You’ll never get there!” People are rational beings, and they will interpret that as don’t try. Do try, although you’re doomed to fail.
CB: Just mention that later on.
KP: Mention it after you’ve learned five languages.
HS: And, about constructing syllabi and so on, there once was a time when Harvard could publish the Five-Foot Shelf of books that was supposed to make you an educated person. Back when people had a sense of cultural property in common, such that if you hadn’t read Homer, or the Bible, or Dickens, you couldn’t really participate in the conversation, people knew what those things were that you had to have. But I think there was probably always a sense that there was more to read and more to know than one could, even with a Five-Foot Shelf. Now, however—particularly in the U.S.—we’re feeling that rather acutely. We’re engaged in very complicated forms of interaction right now with people who have different sets of classics from ours.
It used to be that you could open up the newspaper, I’m not talking about the big international newspapers in the U.S. but your hometown newspaper, like the Nashville Banner or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and there would be no international stories on the front page. You would go to page three or four, and there would be a heading—“International”—and you would learn about what was happening in places that were far away. But now India, China, the Middle East, are conspicuous on the front page absolutely every day. Everybody knows that. We should be preparing students to read the books that come from those civilizations. I’m ill-equipped to deal with Arabic and Persian literature, I can do a little bit with Chinese, and Indic, again, is something that I know far too little about, but I’ll jump into the fray because I have to, with the help of translations. It’s important for people to know what happens in the Mahabharata, for example, why people keep telling those stories again and again. Why these stories are still alive, even. You can watch hundreds and hundreds of hours of TV series drawn from the Mahabharata1. This tradition has jumped right into whatever medium was available. I would imagine that there are probably text-messaging services that will send you messages from the Mahabharata every five minutes on your phone, maybe, just to make sure you are participating in it. The classics, the great books, according to other civilizations, they didn’t become obsolete when Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” or when somebody invented the Western Civilization survey; nor did they have to be dug out by the patient toil of Comp Lit scholars in the service of multiculturalism. I would want to think that a Comparative Literature undergraduate curriculum would include these formerly exotic, now not-so-exotic works. But then we get into the further problem about how we present them, how we read them.
At a certain moment, such works were presented as ingredients of area studies curricula. You read the Mahabharata so that you would know the Indian mind. Presumably the idea was that when the State Department sent you out to serve in India, you would be prepared, so that when they came with their visa problems, or whatever, you’d know what’s going on in their minds and you’d be able to rebuff them. I’m making up this sarcastic story about the normative American student and the normative non-Western curriculum, of course, but the assumption is rather plain in anthologies and textbooks that the motivation for reading these works was to understand that particular form of consciousness which was not ours. Now, I think, that way of doing things is justly seen as patronizing and dehumanizing, so we don’t do that so much. But that leaves us trying to figure out what to do with the exotica, because one of the ways in which you justify the presence of items in a curriculum is that they’ve been influential. There are probably people who say, “Why do I have to read Spenser?” and you can quickly answer, “Because, if you haven’t read Spenser, most of Shakespeare and Milton won’t make sense.” And if they then say, “Why do I have to read Shakespeare and Milton?” then you get a little bit redder in the face and say, “If you haven’t read Shakespeare and Milton, nothing in English literature will make sense!!” “Well, why do I have to read English literature?” “Because if you don’t, nothing in life will have any meaning for you!” [laughs]
Again, I’m joking, but the point is that this idea that you judge something’s value by its influence on other things works within a national canon; outside of a national canon it gets much dicier. There are books that have world-historical importance, like War and Peace. Everybody has heard of War and Peace, including the few people in the United States who have read it in the original, or the people who have read it all the way to the end in translation. This kind of object is notorious, it is noteworthy, it is famous as cultural property. Start a list, then, with War and Peace. And if we add more items to that list and say, these books are important in themselves, then we get into the job of saying why it’s important, and thereupon some sort of meta-reflection becomes necessary. The historicist “it’s important because other people think it’s important” argument doesn’t necessarily work for us, because we’re committed to some kind of literary interpretation and evaluation, I hope, we don’t just stop with the attested historical prominence of a book; there are plenty of books of great historical importance that don’t speak to me, somehow, and I can’t teach them well. Incidentally, this is a question we pull back and forth every year in our Intro to Narrative course at Yale, which is our Introduction to Comparative Literature, although we don’t describe it as such. We have fourteen weeks, we give people lots of examples of narrative that we think are important, and of course we don’t do it by starting with the World Census, identifying the books that are the most popular among the five billion inhabitants of the Earth and ranking them that way, because that would put us in a position of having to, well...
TG: Teach Harry Potter!
HS: Yes, thank you, put us in a position of having to teach Harry Potter. But we work partly with our expertise. We have someone who is great with Norse saga. Norse saga is a fairly restricted corpus, not a lot of works, probably local influence rather than global influence, but these are really good books to teach. When you’ve read a Norse saga with the way it presents problems that confront heroes making their decisions, it helps you make sense of Mahabharata—which, of course, we don’t teach in its entirety, but just in a chunk that can be easily detached and read. So we end up doing things in a more or less thematic way but trying to always emphasize narrative construction, and art and so forth—in some way letting the question of the historical or evaluative importance of the books take care of itself. Undercover, we’re always thinking, “Why do we have to teach this book? Why don’t we do that one?” Because we have such a wide field of books to choose from, being responsible for no national or methodological canon, it gets to be quite an interesting discussion.
CB: The influence of critical theory has really expanded, not only a sense of national literatures, in the sense of different types of media, studying graphic novels, television, down to Žižek talking about vulgar jokes. What becomes relevant to study not necessarily in terms of literature but in terms of someone who is driven, as I am, by models of critical theory—particularly, for me, psychoanalysis?
HS: Yes, the question of the global reach of critical theories is an interesting and important one, and some people have voiced a kind of political unease with the fact that it is usually the Western European critical models that get exported to the rest of the world. I am not sure that’s a thing to be enormously worried about, for a few reasons. One is that you work with what seems to be successful, and when models from other parts of the world do work, in a way that no other model can do, then they will be adopted. Of course, somebody has to come along and present these models in a way that is appealing and attractive. The other main reason, the one I prefer, is that most of our main models are created by people who are deeply dissatisfied with Western culture, they were rebels from within it. I would say the same thing about Plato—even though Plato was an aristocratic snob, and had a tendency toward totalitarianism and disciplinary specialization I wouldn’t necessarily endorse. From Plato to Kristeva, passing through Rousseau and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the critical theories on our master-list are all generated by people who, for various reasons, are completely dissatisfied with Western Civ, and who want to do something to change it. Their attempts to change it then, bizarrely, get canonized as critical concepts. The thinkers in this series are not at all triumphal universalists, and so I would think, all right, if the West needs to export some critical vocabulary, let’s let it be the vocabulary generated by these uneasy sleepers, and not by people who are speaking on behalf of power, let’s say. (Even Plato was stimulated to his totalitarian fantasies by the feeling that democracy had taken the prizes away from him and his kind. He was out of power and that helped him think.)
So, for these two reasons, I’m not so worried about the fact that it is one particular kind of critical vocabulary that is constantly getting exported. Still, I think we should be constantly looking for a new kind of vocabulary and helping newfound vocabulary items get more reach, get more traction. I think of one example: when I got started in the field, when I was writing my dissertation, there were a number of people who were saying things like, “Chinese poetry can be interpreted only through Chinese critical concepts,” or else the converse: “Western concepts do not apply to Chinese poetry.” I thought that was a self-defeating way of talking. Because if you say they do not apply, you’re saying, “I decided not to try hard enough to make them apply.” It’s much easier, and more accurate, to say: “if you apply them, you will get strange or uninteresting results, compared to the results that you get from using a Chinese critical concept.”
But also, more broadly, is there some moral imperative to evaluate a culture’s products in its own terms, in the terms given by that culture? It is a useful thing to do, it might not be a moral imperative. Sometimes you can learn things about that culture by evaluating it in terms that don’t belong to that culture. I would say that that’s a helpful way to look at Western cultural objects, too—it is one of the main reasons for learning a non-Western language, to get a kind of handle on what it would mean, to look at it from outside —but the conceptual nativism that I saw active in that moment in Chinese literary studies felt, to me, self-defeating because it was really a defensive move. It was a way of saying: “Don’t bring your dirty concepts into our beautiful literature.” But when you do that you’re also saying, “Don’t try to export Chinese literature and put it into the hands of people who aren’t prepared for it.” And that limits the readership, it limits the number of possible interchanges, it limits the number of people who will be inspired by the reading of, say, Dream of the Red Chamber, to do something new and interesting. If that’s the alternative to translation, give me translation any day!
And also, just to up the ante and make things more extreme, I worry about the language of validity and application that one often hears. “Is it valid to apply this concept to this work?” and so on. I worry about that because sometimes it seems to point down a road at the end of which a conversation cannot occur except among people who share the same terms, the same concepts, the same ideology and so on. That might be a smooth conversation, among people who share everything, but it would also be a very uninteresting one. I like a little bit of conflict. I like it when you put a couple of things that seem incompatible together, because the restless Comparative Literature mind is always trying to construct a relation among those things -- maybe not reduce them to the same thing, I don’t think that would be much of a victory, but create some kind of relationship that will not just be “A is A and B is B.”
I would urge people to stage contradictions in their reading, to actually go for concepts that maybe are a poor fit for objects that they are reading, in order to uncover why it is a poor fit. To take an example that, in fact, would have some interesting social and political consequences: psychoanalysis in China, might seem to many people to be a very bizarre thing, because when Dr Freud came up with psychoanalysis, he was saturated in a certain late-Victorian or Austro-Hungarian cultural context, many aspects of which—thankfully, I add—are no longer so natural to us, and some of which are still in force. If you carry this Viennese circus over to China, it’s going to play out in rather different ways, and it will be interesting to find out what does and doesn’t secure quick uptake among Chinese practitioners, or theorists. In fact there is a very interesting project going on right now which is to translate the totality of Freud’s works, from German—not from the Ernest Jones English version, which as we all know adulterates Freud in many ways—into Chinese. And it is going to be a massive enterprise because capturing what was happening when some of these concepts were coined is going to require a lot of work, if it is done responsibly. Of course, you could do it mechanically, and the result will be very enigmatic for generations to come and people will have many arguments about whether Freud meant this or Freud meant that and what a Chinese analyst should say to a Chinese patient who confesses, for example, “I would give my thigh to be eaten by my mother.” Or how a Chinese analyst would apply the theory of the transition from oral to anal stages, though that transition is supposedly biologically determined. We can see that Freud in Chinese is not going to be a cookbook! If someone tried to anticipate those problems and interpretations in the act of translation, that would be better.
Staging a contradiction, staging a mismatch, I think that’s a fun thing to do, and I think it gives a plot line for many Comp Lit writing projects that’s different from the usual “Let me tell you about A. Now let me tell you about B. And let me tell you about the thing they have in common.” And the conclusion: “We are all tenants of the great palace of literature. Hurray!” I’ve written some pieces that work like that, where you say, “Okay, it’s wonderful! Literature works for everyone!” This is good, but the other plot line, where a work and a concept bring each other to a standstill, or agree to disagree—that can be very productive too. And, I’m happy to say, I have written some pieces that ended like that too. And I learned something from both kinds of writing.
YW: You were talking about teaching narrative in a Comparative Literature class, and I’m wondering about teaching lyric poetry, for example, because, of course we can talk about the themes and the content of the poetry, but sometimes I feel like it’s hard to reproduce [in translation] the form, and the rhythm. I’m very interested in your current project on rhythms and psychology in literature, linguistics and folklore. Can you talk more about that?
HS: Sure! I’m mostly a poetry guy. I practically stood up and cheered when, a couple of years ago, Jonathan Culler was giving his ACLA address about how poetry has dropped out of the curriculum, leaving most people in Comparative Literature to work on narrative. I think good scholars of narrative should be worried about that too, because many of the great ideas in narrative theory in the 20th century came from the side of poetry, and seeped into narrative—again Shklovsky, Jakobson on realism, Nicolas Abraham on cryptonyms, and so on. It makes sense that poetry, as the most artificial, worked-over language, was the place where theoretical discourse got its start, and I would like to think that the day of poetry is not yet over.
In poetry you can’t ignore the language. French, Spanish, Chinese—I don’t mean “language” as a synonym for style. Even if nobody in the room knows the language the poem is written in, the teacher should try to give them the auditory experience of hearing it (and now it’s easy to download clips of recitations good and bad). You can show how the sensory form of the work has a relation to the job that it is doing. When I teach poetry I often start out with ethnographic questions, for example: “What is the job that something that we might call poetry is doing?” Poetry is often a linguistic tool that is meant to accomplish a certain purpose: it enchants, or it registers things in memory, or it lulls babies to sleep. With this you get into that strange area where people speculate about the origin of language and the origin of society and so on, and although things may get a little woozy, it’s not all nonsense! Magic spells, ritualistic repetitions, and so on, are chunks of language designed to have certain properties that were meant to do something in the world. And those are still the properties by which we recognize poetry.