Endings and Beginnings: Reimagining the Tasks and Spaces of Comparison

Abstract

Endings and Beginnings:Reimagining the Tasks and Spaces of Comparison Mary N. Layoun (bio) ΄Ωμως την μαστοριά σου όληνα τη θέμε τώρα.Σε ξένη γλώσσα η λύπη μας κ' η αγάπη μας περνούν.Το αιγυπτιακό σου αίσθημα χύσε στην ξένη γλώσσα. Κ. Π. Καβάφης, "Για τον Aμμόνη, που πέθανε 29 ετών, στα 610" [But we need all of your craftsmanship now.Into a foreign language our sorrow and our love move.Pour your Egyptian sensibility into a foreign language. C. P. Cavafy, "For Ammon, who died at 29, in 610" (1917)] Comparison is a specter precisely because it is a form of inhuman automatism conjured up by capitalism's eternal restlessness. Pheng Cheah, "Grounds of Comparison" Comparative projects are likely to remain driven by particular interests, animated on the one hand by singular knowledge, commitments, languages, and on the other by the general theoretical questions that arise when one reflects on one's interest in multiple kinds of texts. Jonathan Culler, "Whither Comparative Literature?"1 "On Comparison" and the Comparative in the Modern, Again Though I'm a "professional comparatist"-that is, my academic training and paid job are located in the discipline of comparative literature in a U.S. academic institution-I've chosen not to respond to the intriguing series of questions posed by our editors with [End Page 583] another account of the disciplinary or institutional or historical aspects of comparison.2 I've written elsewhere about the history and practices of the discipline that I inhabit, suggesting there a comparative process predicated on "relational literacy."3 And as I will briefly outline below, others have traced with insight and scholarly care the trajectory of disciplines and of philosophical categories of comparison in the modern period-from which work I draw with appreciation. Here though, I will turn to two literary texts as a response not to the question of what comparison or disciplines have been or should be, but to one of our editors' questions regarding "what other methods of comparative thinking we might envision." I am interested in the literary instances of the workings of the comparative in a 1917 poem by the Greco-Egyptian Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy, "For Ammon, who died at 29, in 610," and the Jordanian born, Iraqi-educated, Saudi-Iraqi novelist Abd al-Rahman Munif's 1977 novel al-Nihāyāt / (Endings).4 In thinking about comparison, each of those literary instances is suggestive in its own right. Both evince a poetic understanding-if we understand poetic in its literal, classical Greek sense as "creative making"-of comparison as created in a matrix of the modern that radically accelerates the juxtaposition of difference both temporally and spatially. And something like this notion of the juxtaposition of what is different or "foreign" or "strange" or putatively "incomparable" and the discerning or distinguishing potentially provoked with and among the juxtaposition of those differences has long seemed to me a more productive way to think about comparison-in listening to, speaking with, and inhabiting diverse communities and a diverse world. (This is the literal meaning of the classical Greek concept of comparison as synkrisis-from συγκρίνω: to distinguish or discern [κρίνω/krino]-with or among [συν/syn]-what is brought together.) Telling Historical and Theoretical Stories: "On Comparison" and on the Comparative in the Modern The histories, origins, and modern practices of comparison have been the object of much and welcome scholarly attention in recent years. A striking characteristic of no small part of that scholarly attention has been the effort to redress other accounts and practices of comparison-and of "the comparative" as its adjectival putting into practice-that have forgotten or ignored the nineteenth-century origins of modern comparative thought, that have forgotten or ignored the times and spaces beyond Anglo-Europe, which were constituent components of that comparatist positivism or universalism or imperial triumphalism.5 [End Page 584] In this context, and because much of the comparative theoretical and historical work I cite below takes a rather more specific focus, it may be worth remembering that, in the broadest sense, comparison is resolutely situated on the ground (political, historical, social) of modernity, occasioned by the very component aspects of that modernity. The massive movements and dislocations of peoples in the modern period, the radical juxtaposition-in metropolitan cities or in colonial centers, for example-of different peoples and ideas and things that were hitherto not colliding with...

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