Recherche littéraire / Literary Research

The Polyphonic Voices of Comparative Literary Studies

The 2019 issue of Literary Research foregrounds the polyphonic diversity typifying the current configurations of comparative literary studies. Such an array of perspectives can immediately be perceived in the first section of this issue, comprised of three scholarly essays reflecting their authors’ cutting-edge research in progress. In the opening essay, “What Does a Classic Do? Tapping the Powers of Comparative Phenomenology of the Classic/al,” Wiebke Denecke embarks on what she calls a “comparative historical phenomenology of the classic/al and of classicisms” (54). She examines our current anxieties about the classic/al by drawing on examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Chinese, Korean and Japanese societies. She argues that the classic/al may encourage us to come to terms with the nationalisms, fundamentalisms, inequalities and traumas of our age (55). In his contribution, “Poésie diasporique, poésie totale? Devenirs du paradigme avant-gardiste chez Ricardo Aleixo, Ronald Augusto et Nathaniel Mackey,” Cyril Vettorato compares Black poets from Brazil and the United States. He subtly shows how their works make it possible to combine representations of Blackness with avant-garde aesthetics. In “Genres as Gateways to the World for Minor Literature: The Case of Crime Fiction in Galicia,” César Domínguez focuses on the work of Galician crime fiction author Domingo Villar, whose works can be regarded as instances of world literature. Domínguez carefully examines the thorny translation issues that characterize Villar’s crime fiction.

The book review section, containing some thirty contributions, includes discussions of titles ranging from the Renaissance to the postmodern period and dealing with various regions of the American and European continents. This section showcases the work of ICLA research committees, as it provides accounts of two recent collections of essays sponsored by the ICLA Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages project: Eva Kushner’s La Nouvelle Culture, the second tome in L’époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600), and Thomas A. DuBois and Dan Ringgaard’s Nordic Literature: A Comparative History, Volume I: Spatial Nodes. The second volume in the series published by ICLA’s Research Committee on Dreams is also reviewed: Bernard Dieterle and Manfred Engel’s edited Theorizing the Dream/Savoirs et theories du rêve. Further, the titles examined in this section introduce us to Mexican, South African and Filipino material, subjects too infrequently tackled in Literary Research. A subsequent cluster of recent books in postcolonial studies is prefaced by a review of Jenni Ramone’s edited The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates. By way of conclusion, the book review section deals with two titles in world literature studies, in an echo of Domínguez’s scholarly essay: Delia Ungureanu’s From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature, as well as Mircea Martin’s edited Romanian Literature as World Literature. In the summer of 2019, ICLA will hold its triennial congress in Macau. It is therefore fitting that this volume of Literary Research should conclude on several reviews devoted to the 6-volume proceedings of the successful 2013 ICLA congress in Paris.

As of 2019, Literary Research will be published by the Brussels branch of Peter Lang. In this regard, I wish to thank Dr. Laurence Pagacz, the publishing director, who greatly facilitated the transition of the journal into its new format. The completion of this issue would not have been possible without the help and encouragements of many colleagues. I am particularly grateful for the useful advice I received from Dorothy Figueira, the immediate past editor, and from the colleagues serving on our advisory board. I owe a debt of gratitude to my dedicated editorial assistants, Jessica Maufort and Samuel Pauwels. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the unflagging financial support of ICLA.

Marc Maufort

Brussels, June 2019

What Does A Classic Do?
Tapping the Powers of a Comparative Phenomenology of the Classic/al

Wiebke Denecke

1. Variations on a Classical European Question

“What is a Classic?” This question sounds familiar. We might not remember right away what people have said about it, but it is a question that already implies answers. Not any particular one, but a clearly defined arena animated by forces engaged in Titan Wars of cosmic proportions: timeless authority versus historical coincidence or oblivion; the sanctioned canon versus the mere archive; universal relevance versus local parochialism; sanctioned school book text versus ephemeral entertainment tome and so forth. Unlike other big, unanswerable academic questions like “what is philosophy?,” the answer calls for revelations about personal tastes and values, confessions of our innermost cherished convictions. And readers would expect an author with gravitas, of a certain age and with a certain life experience, to take on this question. An authoritative author who can equal the authoritativeness of the subject matter. The question is archetypal and highly personal, calling for the autobiographical.

Their various answers could not have been more different. One of the most notable points in Sainte-Beuve’s column is that he promotes the concept of a “classic” of European vernacular – rather than classical Greco-Roman – literatures. This is particularly remarkable given his cult of Latinity, his distaste of popular and contemporary literature and his non-democratic views (Prendergast). Taking his readers back to the locus classicus of “classicus” as a term for canonical writers, the Latin erudite raconteur Aulus Gellius (2nd cent. CE), he states: “a writer of value and distinction, classicus assiduusque scriptor, a writer who is of account, has valuable property, and is not mistaken in the proletarian crowd.” (Sainte-Beuve 39). The Latin root of the word is socio-economic, referring to the land-owning classes of Roman society; it is patrician and anti-proletarian. Gellius applies it to works of publicly acknowledged worth and reputation, literally pieces of cultural capital. Eliot dismisses the European vernaculars and elevates Virgil’s Aeneid to the one and only universal classic, a metaphor for the pinnacle of European cultural history. For him, no works in any of the European vernacular traditions deserve the predicate of “universal classic.” Coetzee, visibly uncomfortable with any assumption of inherent timeless worth, finds the classic in the process of social and academic consensus building, in the fact that it has “passed the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of intelligences before me, by hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings.” He thus clears space for the critic, like himself, who becomes not the foe, but producer of the classic by “interrogating” it (Coetzee 16).

Throughout their meandering reflections on the topic all three engage, with some gravitas, in personal confessions of sorts. For Sainte-Beuve, the classic is also biographical capital, accrued over a life time, that unfolds its full powers in a process of ageing, maturation, and ultimate fulfillment:

Blessed are those who read and reread, those who can follow freely follow their inclinations in their reading! There comes a time in life when – all journeys completed, all experiences made – there is nothing more palpably joyful than to study and reexamine the things we know, to truly savor what we feel, as if we see the people we love again and again: pure delights of the heart, of that taste of maturity. It is then that the word ‘classic’ acquires its true meaning… (Sainte-Beuve 54)

The classic becomes a tool to nurture the sublime maturity of the man of “good taste”; and a tonic against the vagaries of life, offering “a friendship which never deceives and could never fail us” (55). Eliot mentions Sainte-Beuve’s essay and says he doesn’t have it at hand – yet some of Eliot’s concepts seem to owe much to or at least resonate with the Frenchman’s. “Maturity,” both of the individual or a civilization and literature, is the backbone of Eliot’s vision. A language and literature need history behind them to deserve the appearance of the classic. What in Sainte-Beuve still resonates as a romantic éloge on the personal maturation with and through books, has by Eliot’s time become more of a desperate gasp of the waning 20th-century European Bildungsbürgertum.

Just how autobiographical and confessional Eliot’s lecture might actually be becomes clear in Coetzee’s merciless dissection of it. In contrast to Eliot’s lack of explicit engagement with Sainte-Beuve, much of Coetzee’s lecture is devoted to unveiling Eliot’s elevation of the Aeneid to the universal classic as an allegory of Eliot’s own life and his attempt to bolster his standing as an American who has made it in British letters and espouses a radically conservative political program of European unity (in 1944!), centered around the epitome of Europe’s Latin heritage and guarded by the Catholic Church. An attempt to be the prophet of this vision and remake his identity “in which a new and hitherto unsuspected paternity is asserted – a line of descent less from the Eliots of New England and/ or Somerset than from Virgil and Dante, or at least a line in which the Eliots are an eccentric offshoot of the great Virgil-Dante line” (Coetzee 6). In a “transcendental-poetic” reading Coetzee sees Eliot inserting himself into a venerable lineage, thereby appropriating the weight of the classic himself. In a “sociocultural” reading he sees Eliot’s essay as the “magical enterprise of a man trying to redefine the world around himself – America, Europe – rather than confronting the reality of his not-so-grand position as a man whose narrowly academic, Eurocentric education had prepared him for little else but life as a mandarin in one of the New England ivory towers” (7).

Coetzee’s analysis undoes the self-promoting halo of Eliot’s lecture – which, curiously, still maintains the status of a classic on the classic question despite its ensconced brand of Roman catholic imperialism that today is even more foreign to us than it already was in the middle of the 20th century. What is more, Coetzee’s essay carries the seed of undoing the question and the genre of “what is a classic?” as a whole. It becomes a potentially rotten, embarrassing question and he senses it: “Is being spoken to across the ages a notion that we can entertain today only in bad faith?” (13)

2. The “Comparable Classic” and the Classic Question for a New Age: What Does a Classic Do?

It is Italo Calvino’s answer to the why question that opens our eyes to a hitherto disregarded dimension of the classic question, namely the question of a “comparative” or “comparable classic.” Calvino first refreshes some of the previous answers to the what question: that classics are works to be reread (with special pleasure in maturity), that they are part of collective memory and the social subconscious. He also evokes the magic power of the classic, its mystic unity with the universe: “A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans. A definition such as this brings us close to the idea of the total book, of the kind dreamt of by Mallarmé” (Calvino 6 f.). Or, inversely, its mysterious power to attract us, even if we resist it or dispute the author and his work. The evocation of the classic’s numinous powers, paired with the nihilism regarding the why question, already makes for a potent mixture. But the real punch-line appears in his sudden confession towards the end of the essay: