From Comparison to World Literature

Longxi Zhang

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438454726
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The study of world literature is on the rise. Until recently, the term "world literature" was a misnomer in comparative literature scholarship, which typically focused on Western literature in European languages. In an increasingly globalized era, this is beginning to change. In this collection of essays, Zhang Longxi discusses how we can transcend Eurocentrism or any other ethnocentrism and revisit the concept of world literature from a truly global perspective. Zhang considers literary works and critical insights from Chinese and other non-Western traditions, drawing on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, and integrating a variety of approaches and perspectives from both East and West. The rise of world literature emerges as an exciting new approach to literary studies as Zhang argues for the validity of cross-cultural understanding, particularly from the perspective of East-West comparative studies.

1

Crossroads, Distant Killing, and Translation

On the Ethics and Politics of Comparison

The way (tao) of Heaven, isn’t it comparable to pulling a bow?

That which is too high is lowered down; that which is too low is lifted up.

That which is too much is reduced; that which is not enough is compensated.

The way of Heaven is to reduce what is too much and compensate what is not enough.

The way of man is not like this:

It takes from those who have not enough and gives it to those who already have too much.

Who can take the too much and give it to all under heaven?

Only the one who is in possession of the tao.

—Laozi, chapter 771

To compare or not to compare, unlike to be, or not to be: that is not the question. On a most basic level, ontologically speaking, we cannot but compare, and we compare all the time in order to differentiate, recognize, understand, make judgments or decisions, and act upon our decisions. All our actions in cognitive and physical terms depend on making comparisons, and we have no other alternative but to compare, because as human beings we all rush into existence in medias res, with our living conditions and social environment, including language and culture, already in place, and our life is always caught in between what is given and what is yet possible, external reality and our dreams, desires, and choices. High or low, superfluity or destitution, all these are impossible to conceive without comparison, and it is impossible to achieve the appropriate equilibrium between having too much and having not enough without making the right choice in comparison. It is one of life’s little ironies that we have no choice but to choose, and when we choose, we must compare. The contrast between the self-plenitude of identity and the multiple-dependence of difference is an illusion, because the very concept of identity is established through comparison and differentiation, as Sigmund Freud has argued in psychoanalysis and Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics.

Freud describes the ego as developing according to the “reality principle” by constantly comparing and interacting between the desires and impulses of the id on the one hand, and what is available in the external world on the other. For my purposes here, I cite a short piece by Freud that deals with the problem of identity and difference with direct reference to language in a way that reminds us of Saussure’s linguistic understanding. “Our conceptions arise through comparison,” says Freud in a review of Karl Abel’s Über den Gegensinn der Urworte. “Were it always light we should not distinguish between light and dark, and accordingly could not have either the conception of, nor the word for, light,” Freud reminds us with Abel. “ ‘It is clear that everything on this planet is relative and has independent existence only in so far as it is distinguished in its relations to and from other things’ … ‘Man has not been able to acquire even his oldest and simplest conceptions otherwise than in contrast with their opposites; he only gradually learnt to separate the two sides of the antithesis and think of the one without conscious comparison with the other.’ ”2 In psychoanalytic understanding, nothing exists without comparison with, and in contradistinction to, its opposite. The naive belief in one’s own plenitude is mere “narcissism,” typical of children and “primitive man,” which Freud sees as gradually dismantled by the progress of science: “the self-love of humanity suffered its first blow, the cosmological one,” when the Copernican heliocentric theory was generally accepted; Darwinian evolution dealt “the second, biological blow to human narcissism”; and Freud’s own psychoanalysis constitutes the third blow, “the psychological one.”3 The human self is fundamentally and dynamically constructed in comparison and differentiation, and its development a process of Bildung that proceeds through a constant cycle of alienation and return, an endless process of learning from what is different and alien.

We find an eminently comparable formulation of identity and difference in Saussure’s structural linguistics. “The linguistic mechanism is geared to differences and identities,” says Saussure, “the former being only the counterpart of the latter.” He considers language as a system of mutually defining terms, in which the value of each sign is determined in comparison with those of other signs, and what is seen as identical is actually equivalent, that is, of equal values in comparison. He illustrates this characteristic of linguistic signs by drawing comparisons with non-linguistic examples. “For instance, we speak of the identity of two ‘8:25 p.m. Geneva-to-Paris’ trains that leave at twenty-four hour intervals. We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything—the locomotive, coaches, personnel—is probably different. Or if a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense, perhaps nothing of the old one remains.”4 The examples bring out the point that what we consider to be the same or the identical may in fact be quite different, and what counts as same or different is determined by an entire network of signs in mutual differentiation. “In language there are only differences,” says Saussure. “Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.”5 The point is that identity is not self-sufficient but is defined by what it is not more than what it is. In other words, identity is established in and through comparisons. Human existence is one of relations, and the necessity of comparison is a given in life, which presents both a good opportunity and a serious challenge.

Crossroads and Parallelism

The difficulty of comparing and making choices is well-illustrated by the story about an ancient Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu, who “wept at a crossroads, for it could lead to the south or to the north.”6 This may sound odd, but it takes a philosopher to weep at the juncture of uncertain possibilities, where the philosophical Angst is as much about making comparison as it is literally about choosing the right road. Facing a crossroads is of course a conceptual metaphor for facing the dilemma of uncertain possibilities and difficult choices. As George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue, “metaphor resides in thought, not just in words.”7 Conceptual metaphors reveal the deep-seated metaphoricity of the mind that constantly puts things in comparison and maps them over one another. It would be sheer stupidity to take a road that may lead to the south or to the north without considering what may lie ahead, but it is the figurative or metaphorical meaning of a crossroads that enables us to understand Yang Zhu’s anxiety—not that he was perplexed by roads going in different directions, but that he feared the consequences of making a wrong move.

In facing roads that diverged in a wood, Robert Frost may have shown, in comparison with the Chinese philosopher, a more robust sense of determination in simply saying that “I— / I took the one less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.”8 The last line seems to make a factual statement about the consequences of the road taken or the choice made, but what about the road not taken (which is, after all, the title of this famous poem)? Isn’t the statement made “with a sigh”? Isn’t there the suggestion of a sense of loss or regret, a tinge of sadness perhaps in those words? As another American poet, John Whittier, puts it, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘it might have been!’ ”9 It is in comparison with what “might have been,” the lost opportunity of an imagined better condition, that sadness sets in. Happiness or sadness is of course a matter of perception in comparison. “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so begins Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina, in a neat parallelism.10 The Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms starts likewise with a comparison, a cyclical notion of history, which presents unity and division as the two choices alternately made in the unfolding of dynastic history: “Speaking of the overall condition of all under heaven, it tends toward unity after prolonged division, and division after prolonged unity.”11

It could be instructive to see how many memorable beginnings of great novels tell us about the world, real or fictional, by way of comparison. Here is one of the most well-known, the beginning of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.12

The parallel structure of this passage is fundamentally comparative, and comparison is, as noted above, not just a structural given in language, but in the mind itself. “In giving shapes to human beings, nature always makes their bodies in symmetry with limbs in pairs. Through the use of divine principles, nothing is left in isolation,” says Liu Xie (465?–522), a fifth-century Chinese critic, as he traces parallelism in language and thinking to a natural, even divine origin. “The mind creates literary expressions, and puts a hundred thoughts in the right design. The high and the low are mutually dependent, thus one-to-one parallels are naturally formed.”13 Liu Xie’s words seem perfectly suited to what we experience in reading the passage from Dickens. The rhetorical juxtaposition, antithesis, and parallelism are all predicated on the mental work of thinking in comparisons, and in reading Dickens’s depiction of an age full of contradictions, we seem to detect a strong rhythmic impulse that reveals a natural tendency toward comparison.

For Roman Jakobson, parallelism embodies Saussure’s legacy, his “radical distinction between the ‘syntagmatic’ and ‘associative’ planes of language,” a “fundamental dichotomy.”14 Jakobson further develops that dichotomy into the two axes of “positional (namely, syntactic) contiguity” represented by metonymy and “semantic similarity” represented by metaphor, the interaction of which can be seen everywhere in language, but is particularly pronounced in literary parallelism. “Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines,” says Jakobson, and he mentions examples “in Biblical poetry or in the West Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions.”15 If he knew Chinese, he would probably have added Chinese poetry as the most exemplary, for the second and third couplets in a Chinese lü shi or regulated verse, also known as “recent-style poetry,” require the parallel structure of an antithesis far more strict than most other prosodies. A famous poem by the great Tang poet Du Fu (712–770) is unusual in having parallelism in every couplet, which may give us some idea of the strict pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Crossroads, Distant Killing, and Translation: On the Ethics and Politics of Comparison
• 2: The Complexity of Difference: Individual, Cultural, and Cross-Cultural
• 3: Difference or Affinity? A Methodological Issue in Comparative Studies
• 4: Heaven and Man: From a Cross-Cultural Perspective
• 5: The True Face of Mount Lu: On the Significance of Perspectives and Paradigms
• 6: History and Fictionality: Insights and Limitations of a Literary Perspective
• 7: In Search of a Land of Happiness: Utopia and Its Discontents
• 8: Qian Zhongshu and World Literature
• 9: The Poetics of World Literature
• 10: The Changing Concept of World Literature
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover