Some Theoretical and Methodological Topics for Comparative Literature

Author(s): Earl Miner

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 123-140
Published by: Duke University Press
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 SOME THEORETICAL
AND METHODOLOGICAL
TOPICS FOR COMPARATIVELITERATURE
EARL MINER
Comparative Literature, Princeton

The phrase "comparative literature" obviously does not imply the

same things as "Chinese literature" or "French literature." "Compara-
tive" is not a language in which one writes but a kind of study. In
fact "literature" once held such a meaning, as "bungaku" does in
Japanese still, as perhaps the characters also do in Chinese and as
"Department of English" does. The issues have always been what one
studies and how. Some have supposed that comparison was feasible
only within a common culture and others that generic study or liter-
ary movements (Romanticism, realism) deserve attention. There is no
reason to dismiss these conceptions but - rightly or wrongly - they
have not held central interest to recent Western students. Probably
the most striking development in the past fifteen years has been the
inclusion of literary theory as a subject for comparative literature. But
much of what passes for literary theory in the West has little that is
genuinely comparative.
In fact, the first thing that must be said about comparative litera-
ture is that its present practice is seldom comparative in any radical
way and that, when efforts are made to compare (for example) the
treatment of nature by Wordsworth and Du Fu or Matsuo Basho, the
results are seldom impressive. Moreover, until recently there has been
little effort to incorporate non-Western evidence into Western com-
parative study, just as the Chinese have for centuries ignored the liter-
ature of their neighbors, unless it was written in Chinese. There are
many hopeful signs that the old narrow attitudes are yielding to
broader views. At the tenth congress of the International Compara-
tive Literature Association at New York University in 1982, there
was unprecedented representation of speakers on Asian literature, al-
though south Asia and even Korea were little in evidence as intellec-
tual concerns. In the United States, Indiana University deserves credit
Poetics Today,Vol. 8:1 (1987) 123-140
124 EARLMINER

for beginning the effort to incorporate Asian literatures in compara-

tive study. Indiana was followed by Princeton and Stanford Univer-
sities and recently other universities have also showed interest in
making "comparative literature" something other than the study of
literature in European tongues.
Apart from these problems, we are left with intellectual ones, none
as important or as difficult as identifying important issues. Often we
are not even sure whether we are comparing what is strictly compar-
able or not. For example, in traditional Western thought, literary his-
tory is divided into "periods" or "movements." In traditional China,
on the other hand, literary history is divided into "dynasties," "styles"
and "schools." Are these different conceptions really comparable?
Do their differences correct each other and lead us to a superior ad-
vanced theory? What are we to infer from the fact that the terms for
"lyric" and "narrative" are so recent in China and imported from
the West via Japan? What are we to infer from the fact that it seems
impossible to define "fu" in English or other European languages?
One can only conclude that there are many problems for which we
have not yet succeeded even in defining the important issues. In what
follows, I shall attempt to put my own ideas at hazard by raising two
issues that have concerned me. Discussion of them will lead to a last
concern with problems of what literary comparison may imply.

A. SOME IMPLICATIONS OF DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN

LYRIC, NARRATIVE AND DRAMA
It is a common-sense assumption that these three entities exist, even
if an extended example of any one of them will have elements of the
others. Chinese ideas about lyricism postulate the poet's will or in-
tention, thereby presuming that the poet speaks to someone with
some urgency about actual matters, for although many "intentions"
led to fictional writing, there is no assumption that literature is basic-
ally fictional. The ancient Western views hold that lyricism is distin-
guished by certain prosodies and such a prosodic view would find a
response in many cultures, including the Chinese. The usual modern
Western view has been that a lyric is something "overheard," which
implies something quite different from Chinese stress on will or in-
tention. Some contemporary Western views hold that the distinctions
of lyric, narrative and drama are pointless, because the more radical
distinction between literary and non-literary writing cannot be sus-
tained. I do not subscribe to that view, for reasons that will become
clear. But truly there are difficulties.
Drama is most easily distinguished from lyric and narrative on the
basis of performance by actors impersonating or playing given roles.
(The attributive form of drama, the dramatic, in narrative and lyric
shows, however, that there are problems that the basic distinction
does not account for.) In my view, lyricism is distinguished by inten-
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 125

sity and narrative by continuity. The usual versions of lyric intensity

have affective, emotional elements that may range to the moral and
ironic. The usual version of narrative continuance is sustained sequen-
tially in plot, by which I mean the progressive, causal and contingent
sustaining of relations between characters, times and places - with
emphasis, in the sustaining, on temporalities, on the significance of
place and above all on defined, developing characters in relation to
the other two elements. In different literary traditions, emphasis
varies considerably on elements deemed important. For the lyric,
connection with song has seemed significant, especially in traditional
societies and in their earlier stages. Much later, the expressive poet
became a dominant Western concern and therefore originality came
to be a criterion of value. In Japan, for centuries the poet and
audience wvereheld crucial and, with them, the conception of heart,
mind, spirit (kokoro) was deemed a crucial element along with words,
topics and subjects (kotoba). In China, somewhat different emphasis
was given by emphasis on intention (xi) and emotion (xing). It will
be clear that concepts of lyricism (as well as narrative and drama) can
become lost in local emphases and terminology.
The comparative problem therefore becomes one of identifying an
issue bearing on lyric, narrative and drama common to various litera-
tures in identical theoretical terms. There must be many ways of de-
fining useful issues. In what follows, I shall take one way. Its pur-
pose for our present concerns is to show that the distinctions be-
tween lyric, narrative and drama are valid. My thesis is that only the
use of these concepts enables us to understand the emergence of
critical systems, something that I have argued previously.1 The thesis
has two subordinate claims: a literary system involves a conception
of literature as a distinct cognitive entity and the emergence of expli-
cit ideas about literature.
Anthropologists have shown that, in early societies or in primitive
societies in our time, the elements of literature, religion, economics,
politics, etc. do exist but in undifferentiated form.2 As long as that is
the case, we have a proto- or Ur-conception of literature rather than
a distinct one. Such thought differs from our own thinking and prac-
tice. One need only consider the departments of a modern university
or the arrangement of books in a library to see the difference. Of all
the signs that a concept of literature has been gained, the first defini-
tive one seems to be giving a name to the author of a work consider-

1. The rest of the present first section is largely based on Miner 1979b. This study is a re-
vised version of a paper presented at the first Sino-American symposium on comparative
literature in China during the summer of 1983.
2. The most familiar account of primitive thought is probably that of Levi-Strauss
1966,
which posits the presence in such thought of the elements of later thought. He does not
say
so, but it is implicit throughout that the presence involves non-differentiation. For an expli-
cit discussion, see Konishi 1984, pp. 111-200, 266-306.
126 EARLMINER

ed sufficiently a discrete entity to be honored socially - as Greek

tragedies were by civic festivals or as specific forms of integral publi-
cation became devised. (Painters and musicians are usually named
only after poets.)
My thesis about the emergence of a critical system holds that it re-
quires the encounter of a gifted critic or critics with a then esteemed
genre, by which I mean lyric, drama or narrative. That is, literature
as we usually understand today may exist without a critical system
to account for it. In Greece, the poems of Homer and Hesiod fit our
ideas of literature but no general poetics existed to account for them
when they were composed. Systematic Western thought about litera-
ture begins with Plato's Ion, Phaedrus and Republic. But to Plato,
the poet, the rhetorician and the philosopher are rivals to such an ex-
tent that only one can be valid (the philosopher and his thought).
Only with Aristotle's Poetics do we have a properly literary concep-
tion and, as we all know, he brought his powerful mind into play by
defining literature in terms of drama. His incidental remarks on nar-
rative are not adequate and he has precious little to say about lyrics.
Out of Aristotle's encounter with one genre, drama (and chiefly tra-
gedy), came the Western understanding of literature in terms of a sys-
tematic mimesis.
Any complete theory of literature seems to me to require at mini-
mum a set of concepts posited in literary terms: the world, the poet,
the (poet's) work, a text (or physical coding), a reader and the (read-
er's) poem. For a fully adequate view, we would also require a con-
ception of language and the social conditions for literature: perfor-
mers in some cases, scribes or printers and social means to sustain
writers and ensure circulation of their works. Although Plato had a
semiotic system of phenomena and noumena, it is not clear to me
that he articulated a comparably subtle conception of language. And
neither he nor Aristotle were able to posit the reader and affectivism
as a distinguishing feature of literature. The reader and affectivism
could not be differentiae for literature because they were shared with
philosophy and rhetoric, as the Phaedrus well shows. So it was that
the Western system did not become complete until Horace. He ad-
vanced concern with words or language and, by encounter with his
own practice in lyric odes, satires and epistles (many of them satiric,
like his epodes), he gave the West its full sense of the reader and the
reader's affective response - "dulce et utile," etc. For centuries there-
after, albeit with many vicissitudes and counter-claims, it was com-
monly held that imitation was the means of literature, with teaching
and delight its ends.
The emergence of systematic poetics in China, Korea and Japan
seems quite different. For one thing, the term usually translated as
"literature" included certain kinds of history as well as lyric. I shall
not attempt to honor adequately the inclusion of those kinds of his-
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 127

tory, since lyric poetry was taken as the purest exemplar. But in China
and Japan, the dominant poetic system did emerge from the critical
encounter with lyrics and narrative histories of prized kinds. The Chi-
nese instance involves the prefaces to the Classic of Songs (Shijing).
Here is an articulated -view of the nature of literature as lyric and it
could only have been the more influential because that anthology is
not termed simply a collection but a classic.
The Japanese evidence is better known to me. It is quite clear that
lyrics existed in pre-historical Japan. And in the great eighth-century
collection, the Man'yoshi, there are over 4,500 lyrics organized in
a hodge-podge of various principles of native or Chinese classifica-
tion. For that matter, the Japanese had earlier collected poems that
had been composed - as best its authors could - in Chinese, with in-
struction by resident Koreans. But there was as yet no systematic
poetics, none till the compilation of the first of twenty-one royal col-
lections, the Kokinshi (ca. 905-15). What effected the Japanese
systematic poetics was the Japanese preface to the collection made
by Ki no Tsurayuki (884-946).3 Tsurayuki uses the crucial terms
mentioned earlier: kokoro (heart, spirt or mind) and kotoba (words,
topics or subjects). The significant thing is that he defined an expres-
sive (the words, etc.) and affective (heart, etc.) poetics out of lyric-
ism. The poet writes on being moved by encountering something in
nature or by experiencing something in love, travel, death and other
human events. When the moved poet writes in words, the expression
may in turn move someone to whom the poem was sent to write
another poem, or a reader centuries later. In a particularly Japanese
way, Tsurayuki holds that animals may also be moved to song and
the range of those affected may be lovers, warriors or invisible spirits.
When the Chinese and Japanese literary systems are the sole basis
of comparison, they seem different on many counts. For example,
although the Japanese held to affectivism more radically than did the
Chinese and, although the Chinese emphasized expressivism more,
the Chinese emphasized moral affectivism in a way seldom seen in
Japanese criticism. Or again, lengthy fictional prose narrative emerges
earlier absolutely in Japan than in China (and relatively far earlier),
and history quite distinct from lyric is more important in China than
in Japan. Yet, when we compare these (and Korean) literary views
and practices to Western ones, the East Asian views seem much closer
and opposed to the Western. The Asian affective-expressive emphasis
is unlike the varieties of mimesis and affectivism in the West: the very
idea of mimesis is difficult to present in East Asian languages. The

3. Tsurayuki's cousin, Ki no Yoshimochi (d. 919), provided a brief preface in Chinese, and a
certain pointless debate concerns the priority of the Japanese or the Chinese preface: both
men were educated in Chinese learning and, as cousins, would have talked through the mat-
ters they were presenting for the first time to readers of Japanese poetry.
128 EARL MINER

subordinate emphases also vary. In Asia, one of the most important

is technical competence, practice, use of models.4 In the West, the
subsidiary emphasis must surely be expressionism, which strengthens
and weakens intermittently until its great day in Romanticism. West-
ern expressionism carries the burden of originality, the fear of not
being new. The Asian version carries the burden of what has been ex-
pressed, the danger of not being traditional, of not measuring up to
the standard of valued prior expression.
To return to the main point, the systematic differences appear to
be based on a definition of literature in terms of lyric (as in Asia) or
drama (as in the West). To the best of my knowledge, only Western
views of literature are founded on crucial engagement with drama,
and all other systems presume definition out of lyric (with or with-
out narrative).5 If so, it is a matter of special interest to speculate on
what a poetic system based on narrative might be like. Japanese evi-
dence is particularly interesting on this score. There is no parallel in
another literature for the greatest national work to be a narrative
that appeared within about a century of the definition of a systema-
tic poetics out of lyric. The work is of course The Tale of Genji (Gen-
ji Monogatari) by Murasaki Shikibu (978-1016). In her diary, the
author reports that her work was read at court. What response
would there be, we may wonder? It seems telling that, on hearing it
read aloud, Ichij6 (r. 986-1011) associated it with a historical classic,
The Chronicles of Japan (Nihongi).6
Both the author and the sovereign appear to have assumed that
prose narrative shared in the lyric affective-expressive complex but
also to have thought that narrative dealt with versions of historical
reality. That later became the general Chinese presumption as well
for fictional narrative. It also seems likely that the extraordinarily
early emergence of great fictional prose narrative in Japan owes
much to Buddhism. This may seem strange but, in addition to the
exempla or parables in Buddhist scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra,
which gave respectability to fiction, Buddhist temporality had pro-
found effect wherever it was accepted. In China, that sense of time
was important, not so much perhaps for immense periods of kalpa
on kalpa, as for a teleology at odds with Chinese cyclicism. (InJapan,

4. See Liu 1962, pp. 77-80, a rare explicit attention to assumptions of technical ability.
Much else in that book bears on this study, as does much in Liu, 1975. In Japan, the techni-
cal requirement is represented in terms of style or manner (sama), writing or compositional
practice (tenarai) and especially emulation of exemplary poems (shuka).
5. I am not wholly satisfied on the latter point with respect to Indian literature: if the In-
dian definition of literature is not from drama treated as lyric for the rasa (codified affective
status) of individual lines, India may represent a very different, special case.
6. Although the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) treats much the same matter as the
Nihongi (or Nihon Shoki) and is more esteemed today, it was very little known in Murasaki
Shikibu's time.
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 129

the teleology was fused with the Japanese sense of the heightened
moment.) Whether these speculations fully hold, it is clear that in
Japan and China great prose fictional narrative first emerges as
literature tinged by Buddhism.
Although the evidence from various cultures is not easily mastered,
it does seem clear that fundamental differences occur when gifted
critics initiate a critical system by defining it in terms of lyric or
drama. Similarly, if lyric is thought hospitable to narrative, the re-
sults again differ. Such comparative historical evidence confirms the
theoretical assumption that lyric, narrative and drama are meaningful
entities (whether those be termed genres or whatever).

B. LITERARY COLLECTIONS
It must be impossible to find an example of a literate culture without
collections. Two motives seem universal: the desire to preserve and
the desire to honor the especially valued. The motives are not contra-
dictory but the second often leads to veneration approaching the
status of religious canonicity. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is essential-
ly two collections of works that are themselves composites of many
elements. The Buddhist sutras are much the same, subject to division
and amalgamation in collective units and groups. Chinese evidence is
especially useful in this matter. As we have seen, in addition to col-
lections proper, there are "classics" (the character used also desig-
nates sutras) that are collections specially honored as works of evident
canonical worth. In addition to their manifestations of the two mo-
tives of preservation and honor of what is valued, collections logically
involve conceptions of the individual literary entity and of the col-
lective whole. If the elements compiled do not have a separable
individual status, it becomes impossible to distinguish a collection
from, say, a novel or play, since any lengthy work is necessarily a
composite. And if there is no collective whole definable, there is no
identity to discuss. The two versions of the Greek Anthology differ
considerably but each is a distinct collection of individual poems.
The preservation of what is esteemed and the collecting of literary
integers may take various guises but, by obvious logic, all the indivi-
dual items cannot be presented at once. That is, some principle of
ordering is implicit in the conception of a collection. In modern
times, Western collections are usually organized on chronological
principles. Anonymous works or those by known authors will be
arranged successively according to their historical sequence. And
within a single author's selected (or complete) works, the order will
be similarly chronological. But that is a modern and
especially West-
ern presumption.7

7. This present section is largely founded on Miner 1985.

130 EARLMINER

Western collecting begins in late Greek or Alexandrian times. Two

examples may be offered. The odes of Pindar were later collected in
the order of the historical institution of their occasions. He celebrated
winners of various games, and since the Olympian games were the
first to be ordained, his Olympian odes come first, the Pythian later,
etc. When a major collection of the tragedies of Euripides was made,
the organization was alphabetical by titles, just as the Homeric poems
were constituted by books (some scholars have speculated that the
divisions were made in a thitherto undivided poem) specified by the
twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet in their sequence.
The Romans were more compulsive and complex in their ordering.
The Odes of Horace appeared first in but one book carefully ordered.
As he continued to compose these poems, a second and third were
added, each carefully ordered and in fact making a single whole with
the first book. Later a fourth book was published but not integrated
with the first three. Virgil's Eclogues have been carefully studied and
elaborate analysis has produced theories of balanced and paired
groups of poems reflecting various themes and motifs. It is more or
less accepted that Virgil introduces an acrostic version of his name.
Some have argued for numerical patterning.
Leaving aside evidence from the European Middle Ages, in the Re-
naissance there are numerous sonnet sequences, mostly arranged in
obvious terms of plot. But John Donne has a sequence of sonnets
called La Corona. In a "corona" or "crown" like his, the last line of
one sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next and the last line of
the final sonnet is the same as the initial line of the first. George Her-
bert's collection, The Temple, begins with "The Church Porch." This
is followed by a poem whose title might be translated, "On the Door-
step" of "The Church," the title of the main body of the collection.
The next poem is "The Altar," the object a devout Christian would
first attend to on entering the church. Various links, varyings and
Chris-
progressions finally lead to a climactic poem, "Love" (III) on
tian holy communion. Later in the seventeenth century, John Dry-
den devised a collection of mostly translated and mostly narrative
in-
poems, Fables, with links from one poem to the next but which is
heroism and vain
tegrated chiefly by recurrent concerns: love; war,
striving; the nature of art and the artist; and historical subjects. The
result is an integrated collection twice as long as Milton's Paradise
Lost. In short, chronological, alphabetical, thematic, proportional,
numerological and related schemes characterize Western collections.
Relatedness of whatever kind and pleasing variety seem to be the
central principles.
Chinese conceptions appear to differ considerably. From very
on
early times, collections were made, at first (sixth century B.C.)
the principle that the songs or poems exemplified the virtues or de-
fects of sovereigns. By the third century A.D., authorship and poetic
 COMPARATIVE
POETICS 131

topics were specified, using aesthetic rather than purely moral cri-
teria. Some writings we might consider collections were given that
special Chinese status of classics. By the time of the compilation of
The History of the Tang Dynasty, an order emerged that would last
for many other "histories." There were four parts: classics, history,
philosophy and poetry in collections. Other kinds of collections
emerged in the Tang. They might be ordered by poetic kind, as shi
vs. fu; by chronology; or by imputed quality. An individual poet
might issue more than one collection, ordering poems by kind or sub-
ject. The heirs or followers of a poet might reprint poems as the poet
had ordered them or reorder them along different lines, e.g., by
changing the arrangement from kind to chronology. Some sovereigns
might decree collections and very popular poets might have collec-
tions of their poems made in their lifetimes. By the Song dynasty,
collections were often programmatic to justify the practice of an in-
dividual, a school or a critical position. Chinese practice includes
other principles but most of the important ones have been specified.
In the Chinese collecting of literary works, we seem to discover a
pure or simple version of the human desire to collect: preservation of
what is thought to be of value. So much so that the collections have
the air of compendia. The first Japanese poetic collection (of poems
in Chinese), the Kaifuiso, preserves some 120 Chinese poems and it
is natural that it follows Chinese guidelines - to a point. Since there
are sixty-four poets represented, the average is only about two poems
per poet, which seems unlike Chinese collections after earliest times.
The smallness also seems unusual in Chinese terms. Later collections
of exemplary prose stories (setsuwa) seem more like Chinese collec-
tions. The Konjaku Monogatari is certainly integrated but the effect
is very much in the style of a Chinese omnibus collection, as if the
effort were primarily to preserve all the good stories available. This
feature is not conspicuous amongJapanese literary productions.
The two most prominent features of Japanese collections are their
numerousness or centrality and their integration. We may begin with
the first system of writing used to representJapanese. That employed
Chinese characters in two ways: to represent meaning and to repre-
sent sound. Because Japanese is an inflected language (unlike Chinese
but closely like Korean), sounds were necessary to represent particles
and inflections of verbs and adjectives. This system might have been
called kojikigana, after its first principal used in the Kojiki (Record
of Ancient Matters), or kudaragana (Kogury6 writing), after the
Koreans who were almost certainly the ones who devised it. In fact,
it is called man'y6gana after the first collection of Japanese poems,
the Man'yashi (last datable poem 759). So strong is the Japanese
sense in collections that define the Japanese nature of Japanese
literature, that the first writing system was named after a collection,
in spite of the system's having been used earlier.
132 EARLMINER

The Man'yoshu was compiled in stages and by different hands into

a collection made from previous collections and is not wholly inte-
grated. In Book 2, there is a run of poems that has been plausibly
argued to be a sequence and in various books we see a desire to group
according to principles of likeness. Great as much of that poetry is,
however, its collective integration is rudimentary compared to that
of the first of the twenty-one royal collections, the Kokinshu (ca.
905-15). Thereafter socially esteemed poetry is collected poetry,
not just in royal collections but collections like them, in personal
collections, in exemplary or formulary collections or in set sequences
(as of one hundred poems).
The full title, Kokinwakashu, means something like A Collection
of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems. The poets represented in it
appear along with some less than recent poems and a majority of
poems from the generation of the compilers. The poems are not ar-
ranged chronologically or by author but rather by topics, of which
the two most important are the seasons (Books 1-6, two each on
spring and autumn) and love (Books 11-15, beginning the second
half of the twenty books). Starting with a poem of bewilderment
about whether one can now say it is spring, the seasonal poems move
step by step through the codified annual emergence of natural pheno-
mena. The love poems begin with the male experience of hearing of
some desirable woman. There follows a fluctuating series of attempts
to get in touch with her, her initial coldness, poems on concealed
love (to avoid gossip) and, at some point, consummation in a love
meeting (au koi). After going to visit the woman (property was in-
herited matrilineally in early Japan) at dusk and leaving her at dawn,
the man was obliged to send a next-morning poem, an aubade of sorts.
The attention then shifts more to the woman's point of view. She
waits for a lover whose visits become less frequent; she grows anxious,
then distraught, then bitter. She may finally put the lover out of her
mind and much later, by some sudden image, recollect the man. As
all this suggests, the essence of love is primarily loving or yearning
rather than being loved and the collective expression of it is taken
to be fluctuation. Even after successive women have been deserted,
runs of poems may start new affairs.
What is true of these principal books is true of others on such sub-
jects as travel: unlike Western sonnet sequences, these collections and
their parts do not develop plots. The names of the different authors
and the headnotes (somewhat like titles but often fairly lengthy ex-
planations of circumstances and persons) prevent our taking the prin-
cipals involved to be continuous. Continuous characters, times and
- are necessary for
places - with logic of some sort for any shifts
plot. Instead, the narrative we discover in Japanese collections, if it is
narrative, is one of the collective lyric units ordered by progressions
and associations between poems. The arrangement is made by the
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 133

compilers to form a collection, and that is as true of their own poems

as of those by others.
The Kokinshu principles set the terms for subsequent Japanese
poetic collections. It remained to improve on them, as was the case
with later royal collections and hundred-poem sequences; or to adapt
them, as linked poetry did by making the act of alternating composi-
tion by a group of poets the simultaneous act of collection; or to
play comically with the principles. The Japanese urge to collections
goes so far that the sequences of linked poetry (themselves collective
in their way) were drawn on to make collections resembling the royal
ones. The Tsukubashu (1356) compiled by Nijo Yoshimoto (1320-
88) is organized into twenty books on the model of the royal collec-
tions. And in this first collection of renga, an esteemed stanza is
given wvith its predecessor, since each stanza after the first must be
understood for the skill in connection with its predecessor.8
The later, less courtly kind of linked poetry, haikai, was also col-
lected. The most famous collection, Sarumino Shu (1691) is in six
parts.9 The first four include opening stanzas (hokku), required to
incorporate a season. Given that the collection is known as "the
Kokinshi of haikai" and, after centuries of honoring the Kokinshi
model, the order of the hokku in Sarumino is shocking: Part 1, Win-
ter; 2, Summer; 3, Autumn; 4, Spring. This is deliberate "haikai
change" in giving the two least esteeemed seasons first and, in each
pair, giving the more esteemed season second, all out of their natural
order. Yet it also enables the compilers to arrange the entire hokku
section as a gigantic haikai ?equence, so that (for example) the crucial
flower stanzas occur at the point equivalent to the 35th stanza of a
36-stanza sequence. For that matter, the design of the 36-stanza or
kasen sequence, can be seen throughout the collection. Just as renga
and haikai stanzas might be selected for a collection, in the Sarumino
Shu, the collection is variously patterned on the kasen model (Miner-
Odagiri 1981:28-34).
The eccentricities of the compilers of Sarumino Shu are deliberate
integrative gestures playing with older ideas of coherence. There is
other evidence to show how consistently the Japanese chose to inte-
grate, even to the point of altering Chinese models to their own pur-
poses. One of the Chinese collections most prestigious in Japan was
the Wenxuan, Monzen to Japanese. That collection provided the
Japanese with numerous classifications for kinds of writing: xu (jo),
chuan (den), lun (ron), etc. By the seventeenth century, a Fzzoku
Monzen or Popular Wenxuan had appeared in Japan. This consisted
of prose writings (often including verse) by Basho and his school,
using about twenty of the Chinese classifications adapted so that the

8. For an account of linked poetry, see Miner 1979a.

9. For an English translation and commentary, see Miner-Odagiri, 1981.
134 EARLMINER

Chinese would often not have recognized the categories they had in-
vented. In 1724, another version was compiled, Wakan Monzen (A
Wenxuan in Japanese and Chinese), including many older writings
along with some experimental ones, once again grouping them under
the Wenxuan categories, although somewhat fewer than in the Fuzo-
ku Monzen. The point of this detailed account is that the Japanese
could not rest with such Chinese collection by categories, even when
so radically adopted to alien purposes, as we have seen. The sequence
beginning with veneration of the Wenxuan comes to its Japanese ful-
fillment with the Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu (1702-83). This is a
collection of various sketches or essays or verse compositions of wide-
ly different kind. Each is labelled by a category or title ending with
one of the Wenxuan terms. But the collection (or collections, since
parts appeared in a series) is grouped into runs integrated by aJapan-
ese need to incorporate collectively a number of units - not at all by
the Chinese categories but by integrative procedures derived from
linked poetry.
As this brief account shows, the abstract, separating and compen-
diously classifying genius of the Chinese certainly produced collec-
tions that differ from Western anthologies, and the Japanese took the
Chinese versions seriously. But the Chinese versions required modifi-
cation to suit Japanese tastes and the process was complete only
when the separating Chinese classifications were transformed to yield
integrated collections.
So far is this true that Chinese inventions lost in China might sur-
vive in Japan and be put to alien use. A form of court music, called
gagaku in Japan, was introduced from China via Korea (there were
earlier Indian elements as well) and, although the music is lost in the
other countries, it is still performed in Japan to this day. In fact, a
group from the University of California, Los Angeles, performed this
music in New York City in January, 1983. From this music, the
Japanese conceived of a three-part rhythmic structure consisting of a
stately introduction, jo, an agitated, broken or development section,
ha, and a fast close, kyu. This three-part rhythm became a basis of
integrating renga sequences and, from renga, was passed on to no,
haikai and other kinds of literary writing. As the use made of the
Wenxuan and of the rhythmic basis of gagaku shows, these Japanese
collections, linked-poetry sequences and even dramatic pieces gain
full realization only by integrative means essentially collective in
nature. If the Japanese conception of literary wholes differs from
Western and Chinese conceptions, so must the concept of the integers
integrated into collections. Any reasonably full account of these mat-
ters would need to attend to political ideology, conceptions of social
relations between individuals and groups and much else (Miner
1985). Without entering into such matters, it should be clear that the
universal practice of collecting literary works takes strikingly differ-
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 135

ent forms in various literary traditions. In short, by starting with a

universal conception presuming identity - that of collections - we
can work comparatively to derive sets of resemblances and differ-
ences.
Western sequences are usually based on some kind of plot, formal
or thematic ordering. Alternatively, more recently, the principle of
organization has been chronological. In China, compendiousness and
separate categorizing are of prime importance, while in Japan, it is
far more important to use integration based on sequential principles
other than plot, chronology or separate categories. To consider only
China and Japan, the rational, practical and yet abstract Han way of
thinking characterized by Confucianism has dominated Chinese
thought over the centuries and is important to this day. The Japan-
ese, on the other hand, seek to integrate highly diverse elements
sequentially or in social, literary and even religious terms. Clearly,
"collection" must be viewed comparatively if it is to be understood
as a useful literary idea with explanatory power.

C. LOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CRITERIA

FOR LITERARY COMPARISON
Perhaps the least studied issue in comparative literature is what is
meant by "comparative" and, more precisely, what are the principles
or canons of comparability. Some have argued that comparative
study is feasible only within a coherent culture. This argument has
offered, in practice, a Eurocentered conception that rules out other
literatures as offering no assistance to categories established in the
European antique, medieval and modern periods. That position is,
one hopes, not taken seriously by many people today. Another tra-
tidional conception holds that comparative literature involves study
of the influence of one literature or author in one language upon
another in a second.10 This study may have genuine comparative
merit if it is used to compare - and better understand - what the re-
ceiving writer has written in light of what was borrowed. In much the
same fashion, translations may be compared with originals, showing
something of the selections and emphasis of the translator and some-
times making explicit certain features of the original that had thither-
to escaped notice.
10. In English-speaking countries, "influence" became respectable once more with Guillen
1971; and it became compulsive for many readers of Bloom 1973 (and following studies by
him). Although Bloom's skill as an interpreter of poems must be evident to any reader, his
theory of anxiety - particularly with its accompanying Freudianism - seems bizarre in an
Asian context. I do not know when the original of Durisin 1974 was
published but, in spite
of the rigidities of the English translation, his argument for
considering as reception what is
usually termed influence earns my conviction. In a forthcoming study I argue that influence
is better thought of as an effect of cultural and political dominance, whether
through power
or prestige and, therefore, that influence necessarily entails
reception, although there may
be reception without influence.
136 EARL MINER

"Influence study" or certain versions of "reception" continue to

be practiced and for good reason: they can be controlled or verified
historically and they reveal things that other kinds of study do not.
But the study of influence has also had undeniably poor examples
and dull work. Hence, it has been common recently (as noted earlier)
to consider matters of literary theory as a main concern of compara-
tive study.
Before turning to that subject, however, we should pause to con-
sider the proper subject of influence or the grounds of the compara-
tive. Only custom - certainly not logic - has led us to think of the
comparative as a kind of study restricted to cross-literary or cross-
language study. There is no reason why, say, the influence of medi-
eval English literature on Victorian English literature should not be
considered comparative; and, with its very long literary history and
the veneration of the past, Chinese literature affords many oppor-
tunities for comparative study in purely Chinese terms. There is of
course the danger that what is thereby taken to be of universally
secure definition holds only for England or China. There is a danger
of Eurocentricism or Sinocentricism, as we all know from numerous
examples. But, if the danger is recognized, there is no reason not to
investigate comparative topics within a single literature. For that
matter, literature may be studied comparatively with other arts,
especially painting and music.
Certainly matters of literary theory have occupied comparatists
in recent years - for some important and some merely fashionable
reasons. More naturally than non-comparatists, comparatists have a
sense of theoretical issues posed by differences between national
literatures and, by definition, are likely to read theorists' writing in
various tongues. In fact, many so-called comparatists have become so
theoretically minded that they have ruled out historical evidence. It
should be clear that those who do so cannot be termed comparatists
in the sense of those who compare evidence from more than one lan-
guage or culture, aware that, even in one language or culture, things
have not always been the same. This is a serious matter. History
enables us to differentiate and relate. And without differentiation
and relation of some kind, comparison is not possible. This simple
fact takes us to the very serious problem of the absence of principles
of comparability useful for literary study.
Comparison is a matter of central importance for many kinds of
scientific study and is often claimed by social scientists as well.11 To
11. One sociological essay stands far above others known to me. This is Zelditch 1971. His
most important contribution is the positive one of adapting - by correction and amplifica-
tion - J.S. Mill's System of Logic on comparison. His severe remarks apply no less to what
we glibly term comparative literature: "in the present state of the social sciences there are
investigations that pass as comparative that in fact are not in any useful sense comparative"
(p. 270); "a political investigation is often said to be comparative if the political scientist is
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 137

the best of my knowledge, nothing of importance has been done on

the subject of literary comparability. It is passingly strange that those
of us who profess to engage in comparative study have not bothered
to inquire what are the principles - including the grounds and limits
- of comparison. In what follows, there will be some attempt to
suggest very simple logical matters, along with certain practical pro-
cedures and conceptions.
Obviously we cannot compare that which is the same. Some dif-
ference must exist or else we identify rather than compare. On the
other hand, if differences are too great, comparison becomes unfeas-
ible because the logical or practical results do not satisfy. Another
version of the problem of too great difference is error in categories
compared. There may be value to the comparison of imagery or plot
in plays in differing literatures but there is no immediately apparent
value in comparing the imagery of Chinese drama with the plots of
Greek tragedy.
There would be a value in that exercise if it could be shown that
the imagery of Chinese plays was more than analogous to the plots
of Greek tragedies. The comparer would need to demonstrate that
the imagery of the one kind of play was homologous with the plots
of the other kind. In zoological terms, the wing of the bat and the
foreleg of the mouse are homologous, although they differ strikingly
in appearance as well as function. And in mathematics, there is an
enormous body of theory dealing with homology and co-homology.
Whatever the case with some semioticians, literary comparatists have
not done anything with conceptions of homology, not at least in ex-
plicit theoretical terms. Given such lack of definition, comparative
study is still in need of some fundamental and simple clarification.
Without going very far in providing basic principles, I should like to
offer a few observations.
The first is that one useful homology for comparative study is
function. We all recognize that, in different literatures and societies,
differing elements may serve the same function and therefore be
compared. If in China, history serves the function that epic serves in
the West, there is sufficient homology to make comparison feasible.
For that matter, if it could be shown that the imagery of Chinese
drama and the plots of Greek tragedy both served the function of
establishing dramatic character, comparison would not then be a
category error but a meaningful act. In fact, it is when there seems to
be no evident counterpart of something in one culture with that in

American but his subject France or Russia" (ibid.); "A study is sometimes called
compara-
tive when all that it does is illustrate a concept by describing an
example that is in some
sense foreign" (p. 271). In the strict sense stipulated by Zelditch, comparative
literary study
hardly exists and certain questions such as the privileged status of theory or history have yet
to be raised in terms of strict comparison. My observations represent
only a few first steps.
138 EARL MINER

another that one may be led to search for what it is, however dif-
ferent, that serves a comparable function. Traditional Japanese litera-
ture seems surprisingly lacking in panegyric in comparison with Chi-
nese, Korean and Western literatures. But investigation would show
that early collections and poetry-matches, like later performances of
no, were sufficiently institutionalized to fulfill a major function of
panegyric, the legitimizing of an individual or group or social struc-
ture. After all, the twenty-one royal collections could only be made
by royal order and are alternatively known as the collections of
twenty-one reigns (nijuichidaishu). In many instances, however, care-
ful comparison will show simply that our initial definitions require
revision.
No doubt there are numerous other criteria besides function that
can establish homologous and therefore comparable entities. No
doubt it may also be profitable to think of such things as symmetries
and asymmetries as alternatives to homology or of analogy as a lower-
order degree of comparability. But these other possibilities need to
be accompanied by a second kind of observation having to do with
distinctions between words and things. "Tragedy" is a good example.
Of course it is a Western term and the modern East Asian translations
(e.g., Japanese higeki) do not very well convey what "tragedy"
means. Some people hold, in fact, that tragedy is limited to certaih
literatures. It is commonly said that Christian tragedy cannot exist
because the Christian afterlife renders true tragic suffering impossible.
If so, Buddhist tragedy must be yet more infeasible, since so-called
reality is so questionable a concept, as the famous passage from The
Heart Sutra makes clear: "Reality is the Void; the Void is Reality."
Yet, as Aristotle himself acknowledges, there were Greek tragedies
that ended happily and the one Greek trilogy extant, the Oresteia,
ends in Athenian celebration. To invoke "tragedy" along Western
lines alone is itself to invoke a considerable jumble. The French
could not abide the comic scenes in Shakespeare; Milton's Samson
-
Agonistes must be a tragedy if Oedipus at Colonus is and so forth.
And if such diverse things termed tragedy in the West are tragic, then
I do not see how the quality can be excluded from the last chapter
featuring the life of the hero in The Tale of Genji or the accounts of
various characters (Lin Daiyu, for example) in The Dream of the Red
Chamber (Hongloumeng).
Yet there is a dangerous tendency in the effort to seek literary
effect A (the tragic) in every country and it is most desirable to
speak of more particular matters: suffering, concepts of individuals
and their world, the nature of perceived problems or disaster, etc.
And some presumption of difference is, as mentioned earlier, funda-
mental to the whole enterprise of comparative literature - and to
historical understanding. Theory is useful because it tends to enlarge
areas of likeness, but that is also its defect; history tends to overpar-
 COMPARATIVEPOETICS 139

ticularize and render relative, but that is its differentiating virtue. (Of
course we may have theories of history and histories of theory.)
Moreover, those of us interested in East Asian literature are some-
times too defensive. It may well be that the best answer to the Euro-
centric assertion that there is no Asian epic is not to point to history
but rather to assert that European literature is deficient in lacking
the fu or monogatari. Both of these kinds demonstrate, in any event,
the congenial relation between lyric and narrative discoverable in
Chinese and Japanese literature.
In the first two parts of this discussion, the topics were "genres"
(lyric, drama, narrative) and collections. The former were dealt with
in terms of the definition of a poetic system within a culture. In
other words, in both earlier parts, there was an explicit or implicit
hypothesis that there are "identical" elements in various literary cul-
tures: emergence of poetic systems defined in terms of a given "gen-
re" (lyric, drama) and literary collections. That initial hypothesis
soon leads to differentiation, since the details of what is "identical"
or "universal" vary from one literary culture to another. What I sug-
gest, therefore, as a method for comparative study is the isolation of
conceptual, cognitive, historical elements that are only formally, pre-
sumptively and categorically identical in the sense of being common
to various literatures. Once we isolate such elements, we do not in-
deed have identity but a sufficient homology or symmetry for com-
parision to make sense.
This approach has two variants useful in teaching and criticism.
My terms for these variants do not matter but since the procedures
must be named, I shall term them alienation and misreading, both
considered as deliberate procedures, both considered valuable more
for what they suggest and reveal than for what they prove. "Aliena-
tion" is a deliberate introduction of something kindred but uncon-
nected historically with the issue or matter at hand. Suppose, for
example, one is studying Western renaissance sonnet sequences. If
the subject is "self-fashioning," a poet's creation of a role to play in
the world, it would be very useful to alienate the subject by study-
ing, let us say, Chinese poems using the love motif of the abandoned
woman as a political allegory for neglect of the scholar bureaucrat by
the poet's prince. One would quickly see that the supposed renais-
sance artifice or crisis of self-definition is far less radical than
sup-
posed and that the means of "self-fashioning" in those sonnets is far
from being the sole means of establishing a conception of self.
Again,
if the issue with the sonnets is their integration, it will
prove useful
to alienate them by examining the extraordinary integration
ofJapan-
ese royal collections and other collections modelled on them. It will
be clear, of course, that the advantage of the
alienating process de-
pends on a degree of homology or symmetry within the apparently
unhomological, alien or asymmetrical evidence brought to bear.
140 EARL MINER

"Misreading" is an equally deliberate procedure, interpreting a

complex whole by an important subordinate, rather than the domi-
nant, feature. Even in Western literature, it is often useful to "mis-
read" lyrics as narratives or narratives as lyrics. It is certainly useful
to do so in East Asian literatures, although the greater hospitality of
these two kinds in East Asia makes "misreading" of that kind a nar-
rower or finer task than in the West. Misreading lyric or narrative as
drama, satires as utopias, description as subjective response or imag-
ery as action - these are some of the many practical ways of operat-
ing with an explicit, self-aware technique of misapplication used to
relevant ends. Just as the study of what may seem identical in various
literatures soon lapses into differences yielding the possibility of
comparison, so (if carefully handled) these leaps to the alien and the
systematically perverse may yield degrees of likeness or illumination
that other procedures may not.
It will always be useful to compare what history shows to have
actual connection. But in the study of the basic features of lyric and
narrative and, indeed, in the study of the lengthy Asian and Western
traditions, we are apt to gain far richer results by approaches that do
not depend solely on historical connections between Asian and West-
ern literatures: those really began only in this century. The enormous
riches of Asian literature in earlier centuries simply are too important
to comparative study throughout the world for us to concern our-
selves with influence or reception alone. And the aims of our study
are too important to be left to the definitions of any single one of us
or to the methods devised in any single literary tradition. Such indivi-
dual or chauvinistic pride would defeat the aims of comparative
study of literature.
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Bloom, Harold, 1973. The Anxiety of Influence (New Haven: Yale UP).
Duriin, Dionyz, 1974. Sources and Systematics of Comparative Literature (Bratislave: Uni-
versita Komenskeho).
Guillen, Claudio, 1971. Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Konishi, Jin'ichi, 1984. A History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 1, The Ancient Age (Prince-
ton: Princeton UP).
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1966. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Liu, James J.-Y., 1962. The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
1975 Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Miner, Earl, 1979a. Japanese Linked Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP).
1979b "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems," Critical Inquiry, 5,
339-353,553-568.
1985 "The Collective and the Individual: Literary Practice and its Social Implications,"
in: Earl Miner, ed., Principles of Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton
UP), 17-62.
Miner, Earl and Hiroko Odagiri, 1981. The Monkey's Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of
the Bash6 School (Princeton: Princeton UP).
Zelditch, Morris Jr., 1971. "Intelligible Comparisons," in: Ivan Vallier, ed., Comparative
Methods in Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press),
267-307.