Winter 2003
Volume 29, Number 2
Anyone who has worked in comparative literature can appreciate Moretti's emphasis on antinationalism. The doxa of national language departments tend to be more apparent to those accustomed to working across or outside them, while critical tendencies and schools appear more obviously as extensions of national literatures to those committed self-consciously to combining or traducing them. National character ghosts theories and approaches even in an era of cultural antiessentialism. English departments are identified with a heritage of pragmatism, from practical criticism to the New Historicism. Reception and discourse theory are naturalized within German studies. French is associated with deconstruction even after deconstruction's migration elsewhere. Slavic languages retain morphology and dialogism as their theoretical calling cards. Third-World allegory lingers as an appellation contrôlée in classifying third world literatures, and so on. Lacking a specific country, or single national identity, comp lit necessarily works toward a nonnationally defined disciplinary locus, placing high stakes on successfully negotiating the pitfalls of Weltliteratur, especially in an increasingly globalized economy governed by transnational exchanges. But, as we have seen, the more talk there has been of "worlding" the canon along lines established by Edward Said, the less consensus there is on how to accomplish the task. As Moretti puts it: "the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system. The question is not really what we should do--the question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we do it? I work on West European narrative between 1790 and 1930, and already feel like a charlatan outside of Britain or France. World literature?" ("CWL," pp. 54-55).
A number of rubrics have emerged in response to this how-to question even if they hardly qualify as full-fledged paradigms: global lit (inflected by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi), cosmopolitanism (given its imprimatur by Bruce Robbins and Timothy Brennan), world lit (revived by David Damrosch and Franco Moretti), literary transnationalism (indebted to the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), and comparative postcolonial and diaspora studies (indelibly marked by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Françoise Lionnet, and Rey Chow among others). While promising vital engagement with non-Western traditions, these categories offer few methodological solutions to the pragmatic issue of how to make credible comparisons among radically different languages and literatures. Moretti, once again, articulates the matter succinctly: "World literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method; and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts" ("CWL," p. 55). Does he himself propose a method? Well, yes and no. He introduces the promising idea of distant reading as the foundation of a new epistemology (echoing Benedict Anderson's notion of distant or e-nationalism), but it is an idea that potentially risks foundering in a city of bits, where micro and macro literary units are awash in a global system with no obvious sorting device. Distance, Moretti pronounces, "is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes--or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more" (CWL," p. 57).
If, in this formulation, distant reading seems scarcely distinct from the old tropes, themes and genres emphasis from comparative literature of yesteryear, Moretti, to give him his due, is proselytizing for something more radical. Frankly admitting that in his own area of expertise he has dealt only with literature's "canonical fraction," Moretti advocates a kind of lit crit heresy that dispenses with close reading, relies unabashedly on secondhand material, and subordinates intellectual energies to the achievement of a "day of synthesis." Following Immanuel Wallerstein, the champion of world-systems theory, Moretti sets his hopes on the synthetic flash of insight that produces a shape-shifting paradigm of global relevance. His examples emphasize a socially vested formalism–"forms as abstracts of social relationships"–ranging from Roberto Schwarz's formal reading of foreign debt in the Brazilian novel, to Henry Zhao's concept of "the uneasy narrator" as the congealed expression of East-West "interpretive diversification," to Ato Quayson's use of genre--Nigerian postrealism--as the narrative guise assumed by imperial interference ("CWL," pp. 64, 63).
Moretti's attempt to assign renewed importance to plot, character, voice, and genre as load-bearing units of global lit has much to recommend it, as does his political formalism in the expanded field of world-systems theory, which bluntly recognizes the uneven playing field of global symbolic capital. Like the work of Perry Anderson and other affiliates of the New Left Review, his macro approach is clearly indebted to Jameson's Marxism and Form. But it is an approach that ignores the extent to which high theory, with its internationalist circulation, already functioned as a form of distant reading. It also favors narrative over linguistic engagement, and this, I would surmise, is ultimately the dangling participle of Moretti's revamped Weltliteratur.
The problem left unresolved by Moretti--the need for a full-throttle globalism that would valorize textual closeness while refusing to sacrifice distance--was confronted earlier in literary history by Leo Spitzer when he was charged by the Turkish government to devise a philological curriculum in Istanbul in 1933. In looking not just at what Spitzer preached--a universal Eurocentrism--but more at what he practiced--a staged cacophony of multilingual encounters--one finds an example of comparatism that sustains at once global reach and textual closeness.