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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 69-80 The Repeating Apocalypse: I. This essay is dedicated not to the question of whether comparative literature is dead or dying in the face of perceived attacks from postcolonial studies and other multicultural "-isms," but of what a comparative literature existing in the wake of those and other cultural studies discourses might look like. What can comparatists learn from the emergence of postcolonialism and other "-isms"? Rather than engage in a turf war with English departments over the fate of world literature — a war in which, given the proliferation of translations now available, the latter is likely to win — should we not try to imagine a new comparative literature that can abandon its traditional national anchoring, honor regional cultural and linguistic differences within national literatures (Native American or U.S. Latino/a literatures, for example), and continue to protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Aside from topics concerning social justice and agency, important as they are for Gayatri Spivak's most recent book Death of a Discipline, the question here is one of survival: how can comparative literature as a discipline, as a department within the university, continue to be relevant in a world increasingly dominated by English? Before suggesting my own 'future' — the so-called magical realism as one possible form that a future comparative literature might productively assume — I will examine two earlier visions of the field's future, which date respectively to World War I and the so-called Cold War. Then I will turn to Spivak's new and ominously titled book Death of a Discipline, the most recent of this genre of faux-prophetic visions. We read older scholarship, I think, for the same affective reasons that some of us enjoy old science fiction films, or love Disney's Tomorrowland. We may wish to satisfy a sense of nostalgia, perhaps about those mythical good old days "before" theory to which David Richter so wistfully refers in the introduction to his Falling Into Theory.[1] Conversely we may seek to confirm our own superior wisdom and savvy, so much improved [end page 69] since the days when the New Criticism was, well, new. Either motivation, I suspect, betrays its respective holder as an ideologue in the manner of García Márquez's famous final Buendía, who read voraciously not in order to learn, but rather to confirm the truth of what he already believed he knew. "Everything is known," Aureliano Babilonia was fond of saying (García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 344, 352),[2] a perhaps unsurprising statement coming from a character who read "not in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge" (ibid., 352).[3] And a similar sense of self-satisfaction, not to say of smugness, no doubt a gratifying feeling, rewards those who read scholarship of the past to measure the proverbial how-far-we've-come. To return to the science-fiction analogy, however, I want to argue that for the purpose of our topic, the future of comparative literature, this kind of progressivist reading of the past — or more precisely, of the past's reading of the future — can comfort us only to the extent that we are willing to posit ourselves as a sort of end of history. This gesture of spurious hindsight that allows some of us to say "we know better today" can only operate on the condition of a certain ignorance: not only of the constructedness of our hindsight, and of the gesture of hindsight generally, but more ominously of the fact that any number of future retroactive readings — each with its own claim to an infallible a posteriori perspective — may and likely will follow our own. This hindsight or retroaction is both the greatest strength and weakness of the Hegelian dialectic, as well as Marx & Marxism's subsequent appropriations. My point in all this is simply that one thing we can learn from the scholarship of the past — from what literature departments now quaintly call the "history of criticism" — is what the future used to look like. Rather than the much-vaunted future-anterior of poststructuralist theory — the Derridean "will have been" that Spivak invokes in Death of a Discipline, for example — I would like to give equal time here to a different, but equally obscure tense: the perfect conditional, or "would have been." Just as 1950s sci-fi films such as Forbidden Planet or old Twilight Zone episodes portray in all their cheesy glory America's hopes, fears, and anxieties towards the future, so examining decades-old texts bemoaning "the future of comparative literature" can teach us a great deal about the ways in which a sense of crisis, fear of the future, even anxieties about the discipline's very foundations have informed it from the beginning. All of these grim prognostications of the future share the structure of the Sartrean "unless";[4] that is, all of them end with an explicit or implicit prescription that would cure all of the field's ills, or at least let it live to fight another day. I would add my own "unless" to this proliferation of cataclysms and rebirths. I would argue that the future — or rather, the [end page 70] current future — of comparative literature depends precisely on its ability and willingness to let go of the very institutional anxieties that have both enabled and delimited the field throughout its entire history. What comparative literature can learn from Aureliano Buendía, in short, and from "magical realism" generally, is how to manage apocalypse — not just how to survive it, but how to live in a world of outsized beauty and always-imminent annihilation. II. Let us begin not with the last Aureliano and his apocalypse but with H.V. Routh, the Cambridge comparatist whose 1913 essay "The Future of Comparative Literature" already expresses many of the same anxieties that beset today's professoriat. Routh frets over what the hypothetical future historian of comparative literature might think of the current scholarly crop: [W]hen he enquires what common bond united all these scholars and to what common goal all these efforts were directed, he will search long and in vain for a sufficiently convincing reply… After all, to what purpose is all this minute knowledge of literature? Much of it has obviously and clearly no purpose at all, and runs riot almost as wildly as did the post-Augustan Virgilians or some of the seventeenth-century scholars; so that able men devote toilsome years to the discovery of quaint and curious details which they vaguely declare to be important, without saying why. Can all this erudition be put to any ulterior and nobler use, or must most of it lose its vitality as soon as created? (Routh, 1 [my emphasis]) It would take us more space than we have here to unpack all of the "quaint and curious details" from this paragraph alone: the image of the professor as an "able" man devoting "toilsome years" to his chosen authors and texts, the appeal to a "common bond" or "common goal" among scholars, and others I have no room to linger over. Let us note, however, Routh's last question about an "ulterior and nobler use" for comparative literature. It is a question that must strike us today as either incredibly prescient or unbelievably naïve. Yet I do not believe that we, Routh's readers 90 years on, should read his question as a mere rhetorical gesture, nor that we should think him disingenuous. Put another way, in another time, Routh's question might read something like this: Given what comparatists do, what might comparative literature as a discipline have to offer the world whose literature it studies? As Rushdie's [end page 71] Saleem Sinai, a character striving for his own sense of agency in troubling times, explains to his friends, in a novel that has become the emblem of a literature that Routh could not even have dreamed of in 1913: "We must think… what we are for" (Rushdie, 273). Routh's own answer to this question, which I have retroactively and perhaps unfairly posed to him, is succinct in its hopefulness: "[I believe] that a subtler and higher kind of knowledge can be extracted from it by a method rather inadequately designated as that of Comparative Literature" (Routh, 1). The problem for Routh, in fact that which drives much of the essay's obvious anxiety regarding the future, stems from his difficulty to sufficiently distinguish this "subtler and higher" kind of comparative study from the "desiccated perversion" of the other kind (2). More troubling, Routh's later description of what a comparatist actually does tends to undermine the lofty tone he takes such pains to establish in his opening paragraphs: The real value of comparative literature can be appreciated only in the hands of some scholar who has no special author or period in mind, nor any desire to 'give a bird's eye view of the whole field,' but whose curiosity is excited by the strange contrasts and deviations of literary development…. Not being distracted by any of the specialist's interests, though availing himself largely of his labours, he will pass from one author to another, wherever contrasts suggest an opening…. He finds that by avoiding the bibliographical and textual minuteness of the specialists, he has himself become a specialist of another sort…. His chosen province is neither aesthetics nor biography, but the study of literary essence and evolution. (Routh, 5 [my emphasis]) The comparatist of Routh's time emerges as a specialist who is not a specialist, and his field — a specialty that Routh defines in the same paragraph as "not a department of study but an obvious resource for any well-read and conscientious monographer" (5). Thus, from its earlier days, comparative literature has suffered from a certain disciplinary schizophrenia produced by conflicting centrifugal and centripetal forces. One projects itself outward, toward ever subtler and higher unities, the other circles the wagons, and seeks the security of tradition and clearly delineated borders distinguishing it — protecting it — from other intellectual disciplines. Given all this, and in light of the virulent nationalisms and race-fueled cultural chauvinisms that culminated in World War I only a year after Routh's essay, we can easily see the larger stakes in this struggle of a discipline to learn what it can offer the soon to be war-torn world. [end page 72] Before moving on to our next text and war, let us note that Routh's final gesture in this essay is perhaps the most prophetic of all. At the end of a closing paragraph in which he praises a number of comparative studies working along the model he has proposed, Routh reserves his final and warmest praise for Freud's editorship of the Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde [Essays on Applied Psychology],[5] which he singles out for its "endeavour to analyze the fundamental instincts of humanity" (14). The gesture is significant not only for its advocacy of psychoanalysis during a time when anti-Semitism is sweeping Europe, but for its move towards an interdisciplinarity that would eventually lead to comparative literature's absorption of (or by) literary theory, an eventuality that scholars nearly a century later still find troubling.[6] I find Routh's portrayal of the crisis of his discipline, and more importantly his response to it — both his perfect conditional "would have been" and his cautionary "à moins" — richly instructive for both comparative literature's present predicament and its prospects for the future. René Wellek's 1956 assessment of comparative literature in the post-World War II era, in his once very famous essay entitled "The Crisis of Comparative Literature," begins with the premise that his discipline's "conflict of methods" constitute an ongoing, "less violent, muted echo" of the state of "permanent [end page 73] crisis" that has defined the century to that point (Wellek, 282). The essay ends, however, with an almost heroic vision of a comparative literature that will fulfill its potential of transcending national literary studies. I don't have time to quote the entire remarkable final paragraph of Wellek's essay, but here are its final sentences: Once we grasp the nature of art and poetry, its victory over human mortality and destiny, its creation of a new world of the imagination, national vanities will disappear. Man, universal man, man everywhere and at any time, in all his variety, emerges and literary scholarship ceases to be an antiquarian pastime, a calculus of national credits and debts and even a mapping of networks of relationships. Literary scholarship becomes an act of the imagination, like art itself, and thus a preserver and creator of the highest values of mankind. (Wellek, 295) Beyond the grandeur of Wellek's gesture and its now-dated use of the generic "man," we find traces of the same anxiety that besets Routh's essay: the charge of superficiality based on a research method that yields only the most cursory and trivial inventories of forgotten books and obscure literary "influences" (73). And in fact Wellek spends much of the essay, between his opening description of a discipline in "permanent crisis" and his concluding manifesto, in criticizing comparative literature for just these shortcomings: "An artificial demarcation of subject matter and methodology, a mechanistic concept of sources and influences, a motivation by cultural nationalism, however generous — these seem to me the symptoms of the long-drawn-out crisis of comparative literature" (290). Together these two passages present the poles, as it were, of a familiar oscillation. Between Wellek's glowingly expansive vision of a new "universal" study of literature and his acknowledgement of comparative literature's long-standing methodological crisis — which amounts to an epistemological crisis — we can read the same conflicting impulses that inform Routh's earlier tract: one centrifugal and internationalist, the other centripetal and self-conscious of its lack of "diachronic" rigor. In this context of lingering ambivalence, Wellek's courageous final invocation of comparative literature's internationalist ambitions as "a preserver and creator of the highest values of mankind [sic]" in the 20th century come off in hindsight as false bluster. We may even detect a certain paradoxical foreboding in such statements, as if we've heard this one before and know how the story ends: comparative literature's collective acting-out of the Freudian Uncanny [unheimlich].[7] Many of these same aspirations and anxieties surface nearly 50 years later in Spivak's Death of a Discipline — curiously enough, in the immediate context of Spivak's having given the most recent Wellek Library Lectures at UC Irvine. In Spivak's case, this still unresolved tension — perhaps inherited from the shadow of Wellek in which she is lecturing — between the centrifugal and centripetal takes the form of her by-now familiar attacks on globalization as a force that destroys difference — and world literature in translation as the disciplinary and marketing accomplice of this force — alongside her later call for "the turning of identitarian monuments into documents for reconstellation" (Spivak, 91). Spivak seems to call for a "reconstellation" of comparative literature's traditional strengths in careful reading and analysis of language, in the service not of policing the borders of national literatures but of a more expansive comparative model: what she calls "planetarity."[8] Thus Spivak's cautionary tale of a lecture may be reduced to the same structural components as her predecessors in prophesy: a comparative literature threatened by an imminent danger, in this case globalization, and paradoxically offering itself as an antidote for apocalypse. Globalization emerges as a cataclysm threatening difference everywhere it looms, as "the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere" (Spivak, 72). Spivak proposes planetarity, on the other hand, as a way out of the unproductive (though institutionally no less real) opposition of "the old Comparative Literature and Cultural/Ethnic Studies [end page 74] [as] polarized into humanism into identity politics" (28). Rather than linger over the politics of this institutional turf war, Spivak prefers to cast her gaze into the future in the form of the Derridean "telepoiesis," a term signifying both a future ("tele-" as far off, in distance or time) and a new cultural formation ("poiesis" as a creative vision or "imaginative making") (Spivak, 31). Here planetarity appears as the very embodiment of Wellek's earlier (and, it must be said, already telepoietic) vision of "a new world of the imagination" and "[m]an, universal man, man everywhere and at any time, in all his variety," as an uncanny return to literature as "a preserver and creator" of difference in the face of an apocalyptic global capitalism. Spivak's planetarity thus comes off as a rather traditional sounding humanism — odd words indeed for an erstwhile deconstructivist to find herself mouthing. Yet this recurring oppositional structure of apocalypse, with comparative literature as both its potential victim and antidote, seems to play itself out once again in Spivak's lecture. Yet here the binary breaks down, as this time the threatening force looms not in the form of nationalism (the "national vanities" of Wellek's day) but paradoxically of globalization, the ultimate centrifugal force. Globalization raises its homogeneous head as Wellek's "universal" literature run amok, in the form of a standardized world literature rendered in good old hegemonic English. Seen in this context, globalization emerges as the unforeseen expression (and paradoxical result) of comparative literature's centrifugal drive toward the higher unities it calls for in its affirmations of an expansive "universality." Spivak's planetarity, on the other hand, shares at least one salient quality with the old comparative literature: its centripetal and self-conscious sense of being a traditional force preserving borders — its own and its texts' — from the onslaught of globalization's coercive sameness. Comparative literature turns out to be not so easily cleaved from its nationalist origins. Thus does Spivak's planetarity deconstruct itself, for in order to preserve its own disciplinary borders from the apocalypse of a globalized world literature in English, comparative literature finds itself retreating into an argument for difference that willy-nilly preserves national identities in one form or another. Whither nationalism? Here it finds itself reinscribed, albeit in a subtler, more "planetary" form, as Spivak circles the wagons against both English and the global. Despite Spivak's cogent and necessary arguments for comparative literature as a corrective supplement to "the apparitions of Cultural and Ethnic Studies" (70) and facile generalizations of much of postcolonial studies, it is perhaps unavoidable that her concluding attempt at an expansive gesture undermines itself. As Spivak stands in the place and name of the man who once called for comparative literature to act as "a preserver and creator of the highest values of mankind" (Wellek, 295), she can muster only a fuzzy, ambivalent move towards telepoiesis: [end page 75] In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right of the textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable. The "planet" is here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous — an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction — the toughest task in the diaspora. (Spivak, 101-2). The final gesture of Spivak's Wellek Lecture confirms one last time the recurring structure of comparative literature's brave, doomed stand against the apocalypse, which never turns out to be quite final — yet another message in a bottle, sent off to "a future reader" (93), to be read and reenacted, again and again. To return to our comparative literature prophets, in the space remaining I wish to call attention to one specific characteristic common to all their visions. Each of these texts — Routh's, Wellek's, Spivak's perhaps most self-consciously — offers despair and hope almost simultaneously, as if the two sprang from the same mechanism, the same tropes. I will conclude to the trope, a common one in magical realism, which captures the ambivalent and contradictory omens that have long informed comparative literature. The trope or image of apocalypse in magical realism provides both a parallel and an instructive example for the discipline. As I have stated elsewhere, apocalypse in the biblical sense denotes an inevitable and necessary purification or cleansing, a wiping-clean in the most extreme sense and as the final option. Yet this ritual cleansing always comes in the name of something to come, a better future world to come after the biblical destruction of the cataclysm. Thus the apocalypse simultaneously signifies the ultimate closure and the most provisional yet potent prologue to rebirth — both an end and a beginning.[9] I will conclude with arguably the two most famous examples of the apocalypse in magical realism, one of which I've already introduced. Aureliano Buendía is not only wrong about the nature of and reasons for reading. He also mistakenly and fatally believes that the apocalypse is both fatal and final, a belief that the narration of Cien años de soledad's final pages strategically undercuts. The most significant clue to a more hopeful reading of Macondo's apocalypse is simply that, in his haste to [end page 76] finish deciphering Melquíades's parchments before the storm kills him, Aureliano Babilonia deconstructs his own suicidal determinism by choosing to skip eleven pages and read the end — acts not contained in the supposedly omniscient parchments.[10] Aureliano thus fails to recognize the structure of both reading itself and of reading (and living to reread) the apocalypse. Aureliano Babilonia is in a sense psychically and emotionally attached to the symptom of his own suicidal fatalism as a condition of reading, as a type of jouissance. I would argue that a similar jouissance, on an institutional level, fuels the recurring invocations of "the end" and dread of the future that fuels all these prophesies of disciplinary doom. More apropos of the alternative reading of apocalypse I have been suggesting appears in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a novel that performs the very structure of apocalypse as a serial, ongoing state of crisis rather that a single move to closure. Each promise of a cleansing apocalypse in Midnight's Children turns out to be just another clearing in the sense of the Heideggerian clairière, each more bombastically "final" than the one before.[11] Neither the chaotic aftermath of Indian Independence in 1947, nor the annihilation of Saleem's family during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, nor the destruction of his magical Midnight's Children's Conference during the Indian Emergency of 1975-1976 turn out to be the final disaster, and even the apocalyptic language of the novel's final horrific paragraph suggest an ongoing, open-ended crisis rather than one climactic cataclysm: Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. (Rushdie, 552). The open-endedness of this kind of apocalypse, with its paradoxical subtext of hope despite all, provides an instructive fictional counterpart to what has literally been for comparative literature "Cien años de crisis." Unlike the destruction of Aureliano Babilonia's Macondo, Saleem's apocalypse is an ongoing cycle of destruction that subjects have no power to avert, but which they can and will survive. And this simple act of survival is [end page 77] already an overcoming, because it signifies the frustration and thus the deconstruction of the logic of apocalypse that would seduce us into believing that the end really is at hand. It is an apocalyptic agency that says, in effect: we didn't die, we're still here. To paraphrase the translated title of García Márquez's recent memoir, we have indeed lived to tell the tale. So what happens to the future after the end of futures that the apocalypse would have been? As with the literatures inadequately labeled "magical realism" and the real places and peoples they mimetically portray, apocalypse has become — has perhaps always been — a way of life for comparative literature. As in Saleem Sinai's India, the crisis of comparative literature is open-ended: a recurring cycle of disciplinary hope and despair. Perhaps we can say that comparative literature emerges from its own self-diagnosed catastrophes precisely as a discipline of the apocalypse, of crisis — or rather of crises, as its own anxieties are informed by the state of chronic crisis of cultures and nations and diasporas forever at the mercy of the larger imperatives of globalization and capital. [1]. See Richter, 1-11, and especially 3-6. [2]. "Todo se sabe" (García Márquez, 407, 415). [3]. "Gaston pensaba que no compraba los libros para informarse sino para verificar la exactitud de sus conocimientos" (García Márquez, 415). [4]. This is Sartre's alarmed Frenchman from the preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, who despairs that all is lost: "And then, usually, he adds, 'Unless…'" See Fanon, 9. [5]. Seelenkunde literally translates as "knowledge or study of the soul." Thanks to Annette Trefzer for her help with my awful German. [6]. See for example Remak, 434-6 and Gunew. [7]. See Freud. [8]. See Spivak, 71-102. [9]. See López, 192-5. [10]. For a more thorough discussion of the novel's conclusion see González, 24-30 and Rodríguez. [end page 78] [11]. Clearing [Lichtung] for Heidegger is not simply a clearing of presence, in the sense that something posited as presence appears in a self-evident way. Rather, Heidegger sees clearing as "unconcealment" (aletheia or clairière), a clearing not of simple presence but of presence concealing itself, or as Heidegger himself puts it "the clearing of a self-concealing sheltering." The distinction is part of a larger project that posits Lichtung as a means to critique the Enlightenment [Aufklärung] and as an alternative to it. See Heidegger, 441. References Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Pref. Jean Paul Sartre. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963 Freud, Sigmund, "The 'Uncanny'" [Das Unheimliche] (1919). In The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955: 217-56 Garcìa Márquez, Gabriel, Cien años de soledad (1967). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1985 ___, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). New York: Harper Perennial, 1985 Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto, Myth and Archive: A theory of Latin American narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1998 Gunew, Sneja, "'Hauntings by Otherness': Theory's home, post-colonial displacements, and the future of comparative literature." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 22.3-4, 1995: 399-407 Heidegger, Martin, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." In Basic Writings. 2nd ed. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993 Lawrence, D.H., Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). New York: Bantam, 1983 López, Alfred J., Posts and Pasts: A theory of postcolonialism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001 Remak, Henry H.H., "The Future of Comparative Literature." In Actes du VIIIe Congres de l'Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée/Proceedings of the VIIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. Ed. Béla Köpeczi & György M. Vajda. Stuttgart: Bieber, 1980: 2. 429-39 Richter, David H., ed., Falling Into Theory: Conflicting ways of reading literature. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1993 [end page 79] Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, "One Hundred Years of Solitude: The last three pages." In Books Abroad 47, 1973: 485-9 Routh, H.V., "The Future of Comparative Literature." In Modern Language Review 8, 1913: 1-14 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children. New York: Knopf, 1981 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003 Wellek, René, "The Crisis of Comparative Literature" (1956). In Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., ed., Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963
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