Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 58-68

Chanda Ipshita

Javadpur University, Calcutta

Can the Non-Western
Comparatist Speak?

Having said that, perhaps I should explain what I mean. It is important to clarify who I am, because my argument, I confess, begins with exactly that. As a middleclass female student of Comparative Literature located in an Indian university, my first question on Spivak's announcement of the death of Comparative Literature[1] is a civilized version of the cowboy idiom practiced by the guardians of world peace, but in the same spirit — namely, says who? To put it politely, who has been declared dead and by whom? Who is this announcement addressed to? After having understood all that, we might just ask if the panacea proposed to revive the dying discipline can be used effectively.

To begin with, who/what is dead? Strangely, all the death wishes and warnings sounded about Comparative Literature have originated with bona fide Westerners or those whose future academic is tied to the West. Spivak's concern is for the practice and pedagogy of the discipline in Western universities, or to be more precise, in the US. Given the parameters of that location there is a long history of crisis that Comparative Literature has declared about its own scope and method almost from the moment it was born. Called to birth by Goethe's response to Napoleonic imperialism, Comparative Literature began in the West by envisaging world literature as both an antidote to chaos and a strategy for peace. In hindsight, an inherent contradiction seems to nestle within this birth, for simultaneous with the anti-imperialist impulse was an assertion of national cultural identity as primary resistance to imperialism. This is a contradiction empathized with in the "post" colonial world as well. As far as Comparative Literature in the West was concerned, however, the French tried for a brief while a differentiation between "littérature comparée" and "littérature comparative," but that whiff of methodology somehow fell quietly by the wayside. Starting with the 20^th century, America's own brand of crisis engineering came on the forestage. The exigencies of American angst with its own (disavowedly) multicultural society, its "responsibilities" as a Cold Warrior and its self-appointed task as the guardian of world peace were reflected in the contours of humanities disciplines in US universities, generating Area Studies, "Post"colonial Studies, Ethnic [end page 58] Studies and Cultural Studies over the last fifty years. Given the grant driven nature, and the status of the US as end-user in a large number of cases, humanities and social sciences in the "third world" followed the piper who played the tune and paid for it as well. Through all this, Spivak tells, Comparative Literature in the US maintained an icy and conservative distance. One wonders then, how it came to be described as alive at all. Be that as it may, now Spivak has uttered the last gasps of a dying discipline. All I wish to add to that is a geographical qualifier "in the West." Because for us, inhabiting the non-West (pardon the downright insulting nomenclature, which is used only in the interests of temporary convenience), Comparative Literature is not a discipline at all. So much so that in my own state, where the only full-fledged academic department in the country is located, we are waging a continuing struggle to get the powers-to-be to give our students the opportunity to apply for teaching jobs in single literature departments in state run institutions. If anything kills Comparative Literature in India, it will be our inability to transform lived reality into disciplinary formations compatible with bureaucratic perceptions. The reason for this is the value attached to these disciplines in the still-colonized educational planning ideology. The last thing we need at this point — and not in the least from a Chair in Comparative Literature — is a proclamation of redundancy.

But given the situation in the US as Spivak outlines it, we cannot even blame her; indeed, as I wondered before, if Comparative Literature in US academia is really what she describes it is, then it's a miracle that it lived so long. But that does not mean that firstly, the discipline is dying all over the world; and, secondly, that Spivak's prescribed medicine will work to revive it, in the US and elsewhere for that matter. In fact, in India at least, it is in danger of dying (as many do in "third world" countries) of malnutrition, rather than epistemological collapse. And so our immediate predicament must be functional rather than ethical or intellectual. You might be wondering what I mean by calling comparativism a way of life. Most of us, still, despite the onslaught of the English World, are forced to learn two languages to survive in daily interactions. And these cannot even be so easily designated as languages of self and other, or the mother tongue and the other tongue. The "three language formula" and the "national language" debate have all contributed their share to the din, but have also ensured the fierce espousal of linguistic causes from different areas, from independence until nowadays. This may resemble quite a veritable Babel, but its strengths can be discerned only from a comparative perspective. Consider the reply we got from one of our American students who was asked why he did not attempt the compulsory 50 marks worth of Tamil that is required for the undergraduate degree in [end page 59] Comparative Literature in our university: "You people grow up hearing and speaking so many languages," he said, "you don't know how difficult it is for someone like me to adjust to the sounds: I heard only English all my life until I came here." We do perceive a threat to Comparative Literature, but it comes from a globally homogenized language, and more dangerously, a globally homogenized media-transmitted set of culture codes. We are committed now to reaffirming the Indian-ness of surviving simultaneously in at least two linguistic-cultural networks, perhaps, automatically effecting what Spivak calls "teleopoesis." If this maneuver of simultaneous survival makes India a viable nation-state in the nineteenth-century mould, then so be it. But the theoretical concepts of translation, copy-pasting, living across borders or boundaries, are survival matters — the problem facing Indian Comparative Literature is how to translate this epistemological insight and lived reality into academic practice, into pedagogical and research method.

Spivak's problem, though not so inelegantly articulated, seems to be a similar one — a problem of method. And she hopes to harness the rigor and resources of the old Cold War and new 9/11 Area Studies, as well as the still loosely woven orbits of Cultural Studies to Comparative Literature's "care for language and idiom" (4).These are concerns that hover on the edges of our methodological practice as well. Breaching the disciplinary distance must arise out of local exigencies and realities, so I can only cite the specific case of my department's mode of taking these issues on board.

First, Area Studies: We teach a compulsory paper called Area Studies, in a post-graduate course where students have to choose one out of four options. This is indeed an unfortunate name, which might imply that we are accepting the logic of exclusive demarcation of areas, for whatever reason, and consequently buying the Cold War rhetoric. As a Comparative Literature department, our task in this course is to locate the text in the history of the linguistic and cultural formations of which it is a product, and further in the geopolitical context of its production and reception. We are committed to help the student create a nesting culture for the text, and read it as a stage in the literary system within which it figures; but no reading is complete without acknowledging and taking on board the theoretical fact that the reader herself is also located, thus, within a particular interstice of literary and extra-literary systems. Such readings are comparative in both method and politics, even if we do practice them within the regressive mode of Area Studies.

Next, Cultural Studies. Please bear with me a moment while I articulate the Indian comparatists' pet peeve. Our hesitation with Cultural Studies is the method of its appropriation by forward-looking English [end page 60] departments in our own country, with an eye to their own survival. English departments now insist that they have reached the future by teaching English texts from the world over, and teaching translations of non-English texts as well. As comparatists, our question is, how is all this possible under the nomenclature "English"? What, if any, is the methodology for reading, or are you trying to tell us that there is no difference between Arundhati Roy and Chinua Achebe because they both write in English (do they? — but that's another story). And just en passant, how do you accommodate Rabindranath in an English course — just because you translated him into English so that you could? By that logic, a French Rabindranath could be French literature. Since we have been asking these stodgy questions, our colleagues in English departments have argued that they are able to do all this following the methods advocated by Cultural Studies. Now Comparative Literature has meticulously developed a methodology for the process of reading that Spivak has described in the following words:

All around us is the clamor for rational destruction of the figure, the demand for not clarity but immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average…. This destroys the force of literature as a cultural good…. It is my belief that initiation into cultural explanation is a species of training in reading. By abandoning our commitment to reading we unmoor the connection between the humanities and cultural instruction. (71)

Given this, it is a little unsettling to be told that texts can be directly read off for or into cultures. Further, if there be a way of indirect reading, it does not require specialized tools or a specific training in their use. Cultural Studies in its new avatar can consort with single literature departments in the non-West if it so chooses — as far as Comparative Literature in India is concerned, this is no way out of any crisis that may be looming in the future of the discipline.

But Spivak not only identifies the disciplines to be consorted with, she also, by breathtaking example, illustrates how this coupling may be effected, as an antidote to the last gasps of a dying discipline: "We are going to redo Comparative Literature then, looking for our definition in the eyes of the other as figured in the text. Easier said than done, but then literature is not a blueprint for action" (25). This reminds me of an episode from the Ramayan. When Lakshman is felled by the shaktishail during the war against Ravana, the simian minister Jambuban advises the application of the vishalyakarani herb to revive him. Hanuman is dispatched to the Gandhamadan mountain in the Kailash range, where [end page 61] this herb is found. Unable to locate the herb, and pressed for time, Hanuman uses his own mode of crisis management — with his mighty strength, he uproots the entire Gandhamadan mountain and takes it to Jambuban, who identifies the herb, administers it and revives the dead Lakshman. One cannot fault Hanuman — unable to identify the exact antidote, he brings the entire repertoire of possibilities to the expert. Our problem, alas, is that this is an expert who speaks, with her mighty scholarship, buttressing the strength of her commitment to the impending redundancy of the discipline in her location. We cannot doubt her sincerity to the cause, but we must ask whether the antidote she suggests is the one that will work.

For a start, her location, concerns and agenda for Comparative Literature are different. When she advocates "care for language and metaphor," one surmises from her readings of Stanadayini, of Pterodactyl, pirotha and Puran Sahay, or of Draupadi, that this care is focused on using the texts to shore up a theory and an ideology that are her primary concerns. The theory and the ideology are best suited, for those who, like her, are located as "interpreter… inter-diction, speaking between the two sides" (38-9). Spivak has consistently used texts from the non-West to take firm steps in the minefield of "post"theories, and to grapple with her position in-between. Why this should be the ideal Comparative Literature practice, and why one should welcome it as a replacement for the old "dying" discipline is unclear. At the most it provides stunning examples of engaged practice of a species of reading that illustrates a specific theoretical position and argues powerfully for its espousal across disciplines as an ethical alternative to other existing theories. Why this species of reading should be called Comparative Literature needs further clarification. Indeed, it appears that the 'what' and 'how' of Comparative Literature in the West were rather nebulous until the entrance of Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies and Area Studies upon the scene. And since Comparative Literature departments were battlegrounds for territorial rights over theory, Spivak's joining the battle in the service of her professed theoretical proclivities are, in this scenario, justifiably fought on the terrain of Comparative Literature. But the question of what Comparative Literature itself is and does even outside this location, is left blowin' in the wind. In fact, one might not be faulted for wondering if it exists independently at all of theoretical battles; Area Studies, Ethnic Studies Cultural Studies et al are shorn off. Once all these are discounted, all that Spivak can find to characterize the discipline is "care for language and idiom" (4), "attention to language and idiom" (970), "the skill of reading closely in the original" (6), "linguistic attention that is the hallmark of Comparative Literature" (68). This reads not like the last gasp but like a [end page 62] self-conscious guilt. In all fairness, we have had a lot of philosophers and ideologues among our ranks, but very few have accepted Harry Levin's challenge to compare the literatures and lived to tell the tale of how it can be systematized.

Spivak's panacea for the ills of the discipline is a fraternizing with the social sciences which will yield what she calls "Comparative Literature from below." Indian comparatists have been familiar with a "below" theory at least since the late eighties, when Amiya Dev advocated a Comparative Literature from Below and a Literary History from Below.[2] But of course there is a difference between the two "bellows," a difference that is clear if we locate the two theorists. What Dev advocates is that the critic put the text above her own theoretical proclivities, that the focus of the comparative analysis be the text. It must begin with the text, rather than using the text as the occasion for rehearsing and establishing the critic's theoretical position. Spivak's notion of below, however, locates her as a Western (with the required deferrals thrown in) practitioner of a particular theoretical ideology in a specific relation to some specific non-Western textual and extra-textual formations. While this can be an effective reading strategy for such texts and such formations, how effective is it outside such limitations? Besides, what will be its fate without the theoretical scaffolding offered by Spivak? It would appear that Comparative Literature is only an excuse for a certain theoretical reading. However sophisticated and (contradiction in terms, in this case) generally applicable that theory is, does this leave Comparative Literature with an ontology of its own? Spivak's attempts from the beginning have been to read her own location and access other worlds — the theory that she has thus produced has exhibited the difficulties of what she calls here "direct understanding" (34), and the purchase to be got from what is here characterized as "copying and pasting" (31, 34). If we choose to distance from her position and her agenda, we must also acknowledge that some of her most challenging theoretical pronouncements have arisen out of this engagement — but that does not require us to name her practice "comparative" and her methods as the way to do comparative literature in order to survive as a discipline.

Dev's idea of below, on the other hand requires that the text be made central. The text necessitates theory rather than the other way round. And so, the task of the comparatist is to locate both text and reader in the interstices of literary and extra-literary systems that form the context of its production. The strength of the unglamorous conglomerate of comparative methodological tools, namely thematology, historiography, genealogy and the relations of contact, is that they enable us to discern the repertoires of questions posed and answered by texts produced and received in particular historical conjunctures. Of course this is only possible through [end page 63] what Spivak insists on as characteristic of Comparative Literature, namely "attention to language and metaphor." But a mere insistence on close reading suggests that as long as that demand is fulfilled, a critic can do anything by any means and label her endeavor Comparative Literature. This is akin to declaring open season on the discipline, which is but a step away from forcing it to extinction. Dev's notion of below originates in the literary/cultural artifact and deploys Comparative methodology to understand its production and reception within literary and extra-literary contexts. This understanding enables us to trace the text as part of a collectivity, and then use theoretical tools to unpack this collectivity. This is far from revolutionary. Except that for most of us, most of the time, a collectivity of texts is already pre-formed from the vantage point of some theory; and reading that collectivity is an exercise in the establishment of that theory as best suited to all reading engagements. Comparative Literature's culture of crises, one feels will die a natural death if comparatists spent some quality time at home, so to speak — experimenting with a rigorous application of comparative methodology. We do not intend to throw theory overboard, but we must be careful not to sink under its weight. To my mind, Spivak sounds most like a comparatist when she says: "Why have I written largely of women to launch the question of recognition of ceaselessly shifting collectivities in our discursive practice? Because women are not a special case but can represent the human with the asymmetries attendant upon any such representation" (70).

This absolves us of thinking that theory x or y is a panaceum for all ills, and gives us something beyond the satisfaction of using a theory to read a text. The processes of generation and reception of texts, the trails they make across histories and cultures, are literary processes which only comparative methodology equips us to understand. Spivak's insistence on "care for language and idiom" sounds like a self-conscious attempt at preserving the literariness of literature. If all the prescriptions of consorting with the social sciences opens Comparative Literature to something like the rickety base superstructure charge, then a consistent application of comparative methodology is the way out, rather than gestures towards close reading. But let me also record that some of us called upon to teach courses in Women's Studies, Film Studies, and (even!) English departments have successfully used these methodologies for classroom interaction with cultural texts. In multicultural or cross-cultural engagements, comparative methodology provides a dynamic of reading on a par with the demands of these milieus; and, at least for the "non" Westerners, the question remains "which of us lives in monoculture?"

Spivak's project is perhaps pertinent from her location — but it is difficult for us to accept it as a blueprint for the Comparative Literature of [end page 64] the future. To start with, who are we, and where do we figure in her scheme of things? As literate upper/middle class academics involved in the practice of Comparative Literature and located outside the West, we are her (unacknowledged) "other" as well as the "other" of those whom she places "below" in her theory. We are "below" her and "above" those whom she has designated as "below." And above all (to overdo a good thing) we are an absence in her theory and prescription for the revival of Comparative literature because it is spoken from and addressed to her location. We might read our absence as a theoretical lapse — were we included in the "below" after all? In that case, the below seems to be a homogenous category. To conceive of it as such, is, as Spivak has taught us, the first step towards abstraction. And in terms of comparative methodology, this implies depoliticization as a consequence of dis-location.

In insisting on methodology I may have opened myself to being labeled positivist, or liberal a-political. I must admit that using the tools of comparative methodology will not leave the trails of agony that mark Spivak's pages of engagement with self and other, but I haven't heard that guilt is a professional requirement for comparatists. Sure enough, Comparative Literature is a political practice, and Husserl's "apresentational analogy," invoked by Spivak, suggests the one way of proceeding — to approach the text in as many dimensions as possible, for it to speak, for its milieu, its producer, its audience to be heard through it. What it says to us need not be what it says to others in other times and milieus — comparative methodology will help us to understand these differences and account for them. Let us not deny that what we hear is also what we want to hear — the ethical edge to Comparative Literature is that it offers training in actively hearing the other. This itself often leads outside the academy into activism.

Since my intended audience consists of practicing comparatists (who are alive, presumably), I would generally wish to avoid giving demonstrations of Comparative Literature practice — but it might do to give an example here of what I mean when I refer to the political nature of Comparative Literature in my location. My example of the productivity of reading texts through the methodology of Comparative Literature is situated in the Ram-fuelled fundamentalism that has decisively shaped the polity of India for the last ten years. Educated secularists have soul-searched for ways to understand, and negotiate this phenomenon and its hold upon a vast number of our fellow citizens, above and below our own social location. We can offer a set of readings of a body of texts that at different historical conjunctures have, engaging with the demands of time and space, molded the residual element of Ram in theme and form. I cite here three texts at random — they are certainly not exhaustive of the [end page 65] number of Ram-related texts that we have across the breadth of Indian literatures, from past to present. I cite these primarily because they seem to be important to the understanding of the Ram phenomenon that has become central to our polity. To begin with, Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas presents Ram as a god who will answer the prayers of his devotee, and who presides over a benevolent divine, Ramrajya, the rule of Ram. On the other hand (and I am not going chronologically here), there is the Jain text Paumcariu, a rewriting of the Ram-matter keeping the Jain prescriptions for morality in life and kingship in view. Here, though the battle between Ram and Ravan is part of the text as much as it was in the original Ramayan, Ram is not burdened with jeevahatya — the taking of life — which is crucial to transform him into an ideal hero among the followers of the Jain religion, a hero who lives his life in accordance with ahimsa, the central tenet of Jainism. And finally, a text that is close to our times, Satinath Bhaduri's Bangla novel, Dhorai Charit manas (whose title, even the non-Indian reader will notice, echoes Ramcharitmanas). But Bhaduri, writing in the India of nationalist struggle, does not allow the latter texts to be permeated by the lives of his hero — a poor untouchable —; and the community cannot further their knowledge, orally gleaned, into the life of Ram, nor (and yet hence) their veneration for the epic hero. He narrates the role this knowledge plays in the formation of the nationalist Gandhian movement that is made possible by the participation of these poor illiterate untouchables, through Gandhi's strategic and politicized use of the concept of Ramrajya. The transformation of text into politics is surely not exclusive to Indian literatures, or even to this thematic alone — surely literature, even if it cannot, as Spivak says, provide a blueprint for action, holds within it seeds of that action, if it is located in a position from where it can speak in a voice of its own. The dialectic of history is visible in this tracing of generic and thematic change, in the needs the text answers and the demands it makes upon present and future readers, shifting, creating, and extending what the aesthetician of reception Jauss calls the "horizon of expectation." This cannot but be a political task, given that the text is itself a political act.

For comparatists located in the non-West, living as they do is fundamentally a comparative exercise. Given these circumstances, Spivak's advocacy of deferred positionality and postponed arrival appears to be wishful, possible only within periodic engagement and located at a distance. When you live cheek by jowl with the other, sometimes within the same body, and when inclusion in any broad-based collectivity is necessary for political action to be meaningful, this seems almost a luxury. What one needs then is truly the skills of a comparatist and what Spivak advocates (through a totally different method) as a "politics of friendship." [end page 66]

Living in a heterogeneous milieu makes us believe that connection and arrival and firm positions are not only possible but imperative — unlike Spivak who has spent a lot of (too much?) time in places where homogeneity seems to be consistently represented as the hegemonic norm. K.A. Appiah talked of the interconnected-ness of nineteenth-century Europe and the culture that arose out of it as the base of the "old" Comparative Literature — one wonders why he did not refer to the inter-connectedness of the various groups of Akan-speaking peoples who are spread across the Gold Coast of Ghana and their contacts with Africans of the interior, with Islam and with the invading Europeans. Is there not a history of contact, of interconnection in the traffic set up by slavery, global capital, migration as well as pre-colonial conquest, trade and political matrimony, to suggest processes off-hand? Does not the methodology of Comparative Literature provide the tools to study these contactual relations and are these tools not flexible enough to address the issues foregrounded by these texts at the points of production and reception? Spivak has warned us that we will never arrive at identification, representation or complete understanding — but if a methodology provides opportunities for exploring the varied contacts through cultural texts, should we refuse that possibility in the service of a theory of non-arrival? Shall we be content to reduce Comparative Literature to a straitjacket of eternal deferral (though, how that can fit into a strait jacket is anybody's guess).

However inconvenient it may seem, comparatists outside the non-West do exist, and we do figure in some interstice of the disciplinary formation. And from our perspective, it seems as if the recurrent crises of Comparative Literature arises from the best intentions, the most engaged political commitment and calls forth the most rigorous theoretical ability from our Western counterparts — but they also seem at a loss for application. And without that, the poverty of Comparative Literature characterrized as "care for language and idiom" becomes embarrassingly apparent.

As I finish writing this, the newspaper informs me that the last two Levi's manufacturing factories located in the US have shut down and the manufacture of these quintessential symbols of Americana have been outsourced to South Asian countries. If this is the reverse irony of global capital, let's make the most of it. Can you outsource a discipline? Is someone scared that the hitherto invisible layer "below" will take it over, as they say in the language of operation global (sic!) freedom?

But Dr. Spivak, you can come "home," too. We're alive and waiting to welcome you. [end page 67]

Notes

[1]. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP/"The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory," 2003.

[2]. Amiya Kumar Dev, "Literary History from Below," in S.K. Das & A.K. Dev, eds., Comparative Literature Theory and Practice. Delhi and Shimla: Allied Publishers/Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1989; and "Comparative Literature from Below," in Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, no. 29, 1993.