Abstract
As a discipline, comparative literature suffers from a whole set of image problems. Perennially overshadowed by the study of national literatures – ‘English’ in the Anglosphere – it has long been suspect as potentially unpatriotic. Increasingly sidelined by more fashionable pursuits such as cultural studies and media studies, it has also come to be perceived as arcane and old-fashioned. Yet, many of the key figures in contemporary literary and cultural studies were actually trained as comparatists: Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak. Moreover, for a discipline supposedly in decline, literary comparatism has proven strikingly productive theoretically. Witness the recent debates over ‘world literature’, prosecuted by Pascale Casanova (1999), David Damrosch (2003) and Franco Moretti (1998, 2013), and their attendant controversies (Prendergast, 2004).
Comparative literature inherited the term Weltliteratur from Goethe’s Über Kunst und Alterthum, which he had come to envisage as an organ for both Weltpoesie and Weltliteratur (Goethe, 1950: 895). Twenty years later Marx and Engels would use exactly the same word, in more or less exactly the same sense, in the opening section of the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Marx and Engels, 1959: 466). Its precise empirical meaning remained distinctly problematic, however, since for Goethe, as for Marx and Engels, world literature was essentially a work in progress rather than an achieved reality. So it continues to be in the more recent debates, to which we can now add Alexander Beecroft’s Ecology of World Literature, an ambitious attempt to subsume Damrosch, Casanova and Moretti into a wider synthesis, a Jamesonian if not quite Hegelian Aufhebung. As Beecroft explains: ‘these…are not so much competing models for understanding how literature circulates, but rather different concrete answers, emerging in specific contexts, to the same set of problems about the interactions between literatures and their environments’ (p. 3). And the more general answer to the more general question, it turns out, will be ecology.
By ecology Beecroft means not ecocriticism in the conventional sense, but rather a quite literally ecological approach to the study of literature itself. ‘Ecologists’, he explains, ‘examine the interactions between the different forms of life that exist in a particular region, as well as the interactions of those living things with their non-living environment’ (p. 18). By analogy, he continues, ‘any given literature must…be understood as being in ecological relationship to other phenomena – political, economic, sociocultural, religious – as well as to the other languages and literatures with which it is in contact’ (p. 19). Why exactly this should be deemed ecology rather than, say, sociology isn’t clear at this stage. But Beecroft pushes the analogy further, insisting that, just as ecology distinguishes between ‘ecozones’ and ‘biomes’, so comparative literature can distinguish between ‘civilizations’ and ‘literary biomes’, the latter understood as ‘particular patterns of ecological constraints operating on the circulation of literary texts in a variety of different historical contexts’ (p. 25).
Beecroft identifies six main literary biomes, devoting a chapter to each: the epichoric, or local, from the Greek epichôrios, as in the literature of the Greek polis or the Warring States Chinese city-state (pp. 37–61); the panchoric, from Panhellenic, where a plurality of small-scale polities are bound together in a wider cultural unity (pp. 63–99); the cosmopolitan, where a single literary language is used over a relatively large area for a relatively long period of time, as in the Roman and Han Empires or the original Islamic Caliphate (pp. 101–144); the vernacular, where locally spoken languages generate their own literatures from out of the cosmopolitan (pp. 145–193); the national, where vernacular literatures combine with nationalism and the nation-state to produce the most characteristically modern of literary ecologies (pp. 195–241); and the global, in which literary circulation finally transcends all borders (pp. 243–299). The last is, as Beecroft readily admits, ‘a hypothetical future ecology’ (p. 243), and this chapter thus is largely speculative. Its conclusion, that we face a choice between, on the one hand, global Anglophonocentric linguistic and literary homogeneity and, on the other, the development of a new heterogeneity, capable of producing texts with ‘a cosmopolitan yet richly detailed sense of place’ (p. 296), seems as uncontroversial as Beecroft’s own preference for the latter. One cannot help but fear, however, that the smart money will be on homogeneity.
The earlier chapters are necessarily less speculative and bring together an impressively erudite understanding of theory and history, texts and contexts, languages and literatures. Beecroft is by training an expert in ancient Greek, Latin and classical Chinese literatures and is thus, unsurprisingly, at his most persuasive on epichoric, panchoric and cosmopolitan literatures. As he rightly observes, Casanova and Moretti focus ‘almost exclusively on the literature emerging from the modern West and from the non-West’s reaction to Western modernity’ (p. 2). Moreover, their controlling metaphors are ‘economic’ rather than ecological; and ‘where economics tends to simplify our understanding of complex systems in order to make them easier to understand, ecology is more comfortable accepting that the complexity may be inherent to the system’ (p. 18). Clearly, neither Casanova’s model, which derives from Pierre Bourdieu, nor Moretti’s, which derives from Immanuel Wallerstein, can have very much purchase on pre-modern literatures. But if this is a weakness, it is also a strange kind of localized strength. For, however one might choose to theorize modernity, whether through Marx’s ferociously competitive accumulation of capital or Weber’s iron cage of reason, or Adorno’s fusion of both into the dialectic of Enlightenment, it is difficult not to interpret the history of capitalism as a progressive triumph of economics over ecology. And this is as true for the specifically literary mode of production as for the general mode of production itself.
Which leads us to the depressing conclusion that ‘if this goes on’, as the science fiction writers say (Heinlein, 1940), the global literary future is more likely than not to be homogenized, monopolized and Americanized. There is, nonetheless, much to be learnt from Beecroft, as also perhaps from Gramsci’s famous borrowing from Romain Rolland, for the masthead of L’Ordine Nuovo: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Two quibbles: the index is oddly inadequate (why an entry for Bourdieu, but not for Raymond Williams?); and the text tends at times to exaggerate the peculiarities of English. At one point Beecroft suggests that, unlike other languages, English as spoken in North America and the United Kingdom has relatively clearly defined boundaries and cannot be perceived as constituted out of a ‘dialect continuum’. This might well be so for Beecroft’s native Canadian English – as, indeed, for Canadian French – but is surely not the case for British English. Not only Scots and Ulster Scots, the partial exceptions he concedes (p. 4), but also Welsh, Irish, Cumbrian, Geordie, Scouse, even my own native Yorkshire, all typically exhibit characteristics Beecroft attributes to European Romance languages: ‘a range of dialects shifting imperceptibly from village to village and town to town and more drastically from region to region’ (p. 5). A minor point, but irritating nonetheless.