# How to Become a Comparatist

William Marx

► To cite this version:

William Marx. How to Become a Comparatist. Comparative Critical Studies, 2024, 21 (1), pp.77 - 91. 10.3366/ccs.2024.0505. halshs-05372429

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# Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture 2022

## How to Become a Comparatist

WILLIAM MARX

**Abstract:**

To become comparatists, we have to go through a series of destabilizing experiences that call into question our naïve relationship with literature. The first experience is that of the profound otherness of the distant text, as Keats discovered in Chapman’s translation of Homer. The second experience is that of changing one’s mental library, because no work exists on its own: it always stands out in a more or less perceptible background of other works and other texts. If you change your library, you reveal the unsuspected possibilities of a text. This is obviously what happens when we read a text from another linguistic or cultural tradition: it immediately awakens unexpected echoes. The comparatist experience is also a sensitivity to the way in which each work enters into a negotiation with the world from which it originates, and ends up acquiring a new value with historical and cultural distance. The comparison is not only in synchrony, but also in diachrony. To acknowledge one’s ignorance, to recognize an anthropological gap, allowing oneself to be decentred by the work, is the basis of the comparatist approach.

**Keywords:** Comparative Literature, Libraries, John Keats, Stéphane Mallarmé, José-Maria de Heredia

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
# How to Become a Comparatist

## Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture 2022

William Marx

Collège de France, Université PSL

### Abstract :

To become a comparatist, we have to go through a series of destabilising experiences that call into question our naïve relationship with literature. The first experience is that of the profound otherness of the distant text, as Keats discovered in Chapman’s translation of Homer. The second experience is that of changing one’s mental library, because no work exists on its own: it always stands out in a more or less perceptible background of other works and other texts. If you change your library, you reveal the unsuspected possibilities of a text. This is obviously what happens when we read a text from another linguistic or cultural tradition: it immediately awakens unexpected echoes. The comparatist experience is also a sensitivity to the way in which each work enters into a negotiation with the world from which it originates, and ends up acquiring a new value with historical and cultural distance. The comparison is not only in synchrony, but also in diachrony. To acknowledge one’s ignorance, to recognise an anthropological gap, allowing oneself to be decentred by the work, is the basis of the comparatist approach.

### Keywords :

Comparative Literature. Libraries. John Keats. Stéphane Mallarmé. José-Maria de Heredia.

### Short bio :

William Marx is Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Collège de France, in Paris. A member of the Academia Europaea, he works on the long-term evolution of aesthetic systems and the status of literature from Antiquity to the present day, and on how these vary from one culture to another. His books have been translated into ten languages. Among the most recent are *Vivre dans la bibliothèque du monde* (2020) and *Des étoiles nouvelles. Quand la littérature découvre le monde* (2021). In English: *The Hatred of Literature* (2018) and *The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic* (2022). In 2023, he edited Paul Valéry’s *Cours de poétique* (Gallimard, 2 volumes).
# How to Become a Comparatist

## Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture 2022

William Marx

Collège de France, Université PSL

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Dear colleagues,

I am not going to offend you by explaining this poem by John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", which is a classic of this country, and even a classic among classics. I am a little ashamed to have recited it in front of you and wasted it with my French accent, as if you did not already know it by heart.

And here I am already experiencing the comparative decentring: for the Frenchman that I am, Keats's poem is a new and virgin work, which I feel I discovered by my own efforts many years ago, leafing through anthologies of English poetry, like Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean. An unknown territory indeed.

For a Briton educated in the UK, this poem is almost a cliché, a commonplace of literary reference, as are for us French the fables of La Fontaine, certain poems of Victor Hugo, certain sonnets of Charles Baudelaire.

This gap in which I find myself is at the root of the comparative experience, and it is already the beginning of an answer to the question I imprudently undertook to answer when I accepted this far too flattering invitation to deliver the Memorial Lecture of the British Comparative Literature Association under the auspices of the late Malcolm Bowie, an eminent servant of literature, and of French literature in particular.

How to become a comparatist? The question is embarrassing indeed. At the very least, I could explain how I became a comparatist. How to become a comparatist: that is less egocentric, no doubt, but also more prescriptive and authoritarian. I am therefore condemned to navigate
carefully between the pitfalls of narcissistic complacency, on the one hand, and the authoritarian regulation of the comparatist's profession, on the other hand.

Actually, if there is one profession that does not suffer from any regulation, it is that of comparatist, which I conceive as a liberation from all the constraints imposed by the school and university tradition and by cultural habits, a liberation from the various communities to which the researcher belongs, be they familial, linguistic, ethnic, socio-economic or national. Comparatism consists precisely in freeing oneself from the established rules and methods and from the well-established corpus, it consists in opening other books, in other languages, those that one understands as well as those that one does not understand, in confronting other cultures and other civilisations than one's own. Everyone here, I suppose, should agree on this, and I do not think I am teaching anyone anything by recalling such commonplaces.

However, the question is not exactly: what is it to be a comparatist? But: how do we get there? In other words, what experiences do we have to go through, not so much to practice the decompartmentalisation of literatures, languages and cultures, as to take an interest in problems that are a little more general than those imposed on us by the national and linguistic frame of reference, which has become the norm in Europe since at least the nineteenth century. This is the daily life of all of us, the comparatists gathered here. For it is indeed an effort to go towards the other, towards other languages, other cultures, those in which we are uncomfortable.

This effort is real and should not be underestimated. Sometimes technologies give us the illusion that the world is within our reach.

I turn on the computer, I go to the Google page, I do a search: the whole world is at my fingertips. The world is at the touch of a keyboard. Google Books gives me access to all the world's literature. The same goes for Archive.org, the Gutenberg project, or (a site whose name can only be pronounced with more discretion than Lord Voldemort's) Z Library.

I am a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan, and technology is evolving to allow me to put this world citizenship into practice. Or at least I think so. Because actually the world that is emerging from Internet is very different from this ideal. Partitioned worlds, social networks: each person is sent back to his or her own little universe, to presuppositions that are increasingly difficult to become aware of, since algorithms do everything to reinforce them.

It actually takes a lot of energy to break out of these frames of thought. And that is what we get paid for as comparatists. But, I suppose, we did not get there by chance. We were not automatically put in a chair and told: you are going to be a comparatist. Rather, it was us in general who looked, sometimes with difficulty, for jobs, for places where we could practise something that we thought was important.

But why do we feel this is important? Why do we make this daily effort? What are the steps we take to become a comparatist?

*

Well, I see a first answer this poem with which I opened the conference, *On first looking into Chapman's Homer*.

Keats's sonnet is the poem of discovery of the forbidden or unexplored continents of literature. Keats finally discovers the true voice of Homer, or the voice he believes it to be, through Chapman's translation. And I, in turn, discover with this poem by Keats a poetic voice that is still unheard of, an ignored archipelago, far from all my French romantic references. Like a handover, from Homer to Chapman, then to Keats, then to a French reader of the twenty-first century.

The comparative experience is first and foremost that of disorientation, of exploring the new possibilities of literature in other cultures or other languages. This is the basic experience, the one Keats tells us about.
But to this is added a second experience, which in a way contradicts the first: it is the
realisation that the foreign, new work is not easily given, it does not deliver itself to the reader.
It requires the intervention of a particular mediation, which is more or less effective.

Keats discovered that in the translations he knew it was not Homer who came to him, but
someone else entirely.

Let us first listen to the beginning of the *Odyssey* in the most literal version possible:

Tell me about the man of many tricks, Muse, he who so
wandered, after having pillaged the holy citadel of Troy,
he who saw the cities and knew the spirit of so many men,
he who on the sea went through so much pain in his heart,
Struggling for his life and for the return of his companions.
But his companions, even so, he could not save, despite all his efforts.
(*Odyssey*, I, 1-6)

Do we recognize this text in Pope's 1725 translation, the one that Keats could practice before
discovering Chapman?

The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observing stray'd,
Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,
On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils!<fnref n="1" />

In this polished, prolix language, which is rather far from the original text (*long exercised in woes, vain toils*), Pope portrays Ulysses as an ideal of the honest man of the eighteenth century, accomplished in all the arts of intelligence (*for wisdom's various arts renown'd*), and making his Grand Tour (*wandering from clime to clime*), or even as an inspector or civil servant of the British Empire (*their manners noted, and their states survey'd*). In contrast, Keats discovered in Chapman an entirely different sound of voice and atmosphere:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wander'd wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shiver'd down;
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
Much care sustain'd, to save from overthrows
Himself and friends in their retreat for home';
But so their fates he could not overcome,
Though much he thirsted it<fnref n="2" />.

<footnote n="1">¹ Alexander Pope, *The Odyssey of Homer* (London: Bernard Lintot, 1725), 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² George Chapman, *The Odyssey*, in *Chapman's Homer*, II, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1956), 11-12.</footnote>
These are the same lines from the *Odyssey*, and yet the difference with Pope could not be more striking. Chapman follows the order of the Greek text, he is much more literal (*though much he thirsted it*), ingenious even (*many a way wound* to translate the Greek *polutropon*), and above all, through multiple alliterations (*wound with his wisdom to his wished stay, sacred Troy had sack'd*), he imposes a rhythm, a pulsation (*with all their manners, minds, and fashions*), a harshness, a roughness, a vocality that seizes the reader. Chapman “speaks out loud and bold”, writes Keats, and in so doing the Romantic poet offers a pastiche of the euphonious finds of the Elizabethan translator, just as his sonnet already opened as a pastiche of the *Odyssey*.

But Keats does much more: he gives substance to the universe that exists behind each book, behind the library, behind literature. How do you give the library a presence? How can we materialise the forces that move it, the currents that underlie it, the poles around which it is organised? How can we make visible the almost infinite textual spaces that it houses?

For the common man, a library is but a space, a room where books are stored. It is just that. It is a silent place, dead in a way.

The space of the building is one thing, but how can we show the mental dimension of the library and the fact that the bindings count less than the texts they enclose?

There is a need for a gaze that would restore the virtual dimension housed in the library. A look that would unfold the worlds enclosed in each volume stored on the shelves. We usually live in a four-dimensional world: the three dimensions of space plus time. What is special about the library is that it introduces a fifth dimension, a dimension that exists only in the mind, only in the act of reading: that of the content of books.

The gaze that will restore the virtual dimension of the library can only be a reader's gaze, and the transmission of this gaze, its sharing, can only be achieved by a reader who is also a writer.

Well, Keats offers precisely the poem par excellence of the library, the poem that does justice to the vast expanses hidden within each volume, the poem that does not allow itself to be caught up in the “realms of gold”, that is in the outward trappings of the gilding and vast porticos of the great libraries, but that discovers behind a humble binding, in a simple paperback, the infinity of a universe.

In Keats's sonnet, we first think we hear the voice of a traveller, a new Ulysses, but we understand that he is actually a reader. All reading is a journey, where you travel through different lands. Each poet is a world in itself, each contains a universe. Homer is an ocean: the Pacific Ocean, with its crisp, serene air, but an ocean that passes through the voice, through *one* voice, Chapman's voice. Keats's poem is thus offered as a praise of translators and smugglers, a praise of transmission and literary intersubjectivity.

*

However, translation is only one of the many mediations through which the work reaches our consciousness. The major mediation, the one through which any new work is given to us, is first of all that of the mental library from which we extract this work.

The works we read do not make sense in isolation. They take on meaning among other works, between which links are woven that are more or less perceptible, either intentional or involuntary. Our memory serves as an echo chamber for all the poems we have read, and sometimes interference phenomena take place that modify the meaning or value of the work we discover. Works only make sense within the framework of mental libraries, invisible libraries, but no less real than the visible ones, among which every newly discovered work finds a specific place. I am not going to do you the offence, as a Frenchman lecturing in England, of
quoting the famous passage where, in his 1919 article, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”,
T. S. Eliot describes the “ideal order<fnref n="1" />” that works form among themselves. Since I have already
quoted at length one of Keats’s most famous poems, I will try not to make it worse for myself.

As you know, according to Eliot, art and literature form organised totalities whose elements,
the works, are in constant relation to each other. Each work is in constant relation not only with
its neighbours, but with the whole. Literature thus appears as the mental library par excellence,
infinitely more complex than any physical library.

However, libraries of the mind lock us into orders and systems that are difficult to get rid of. You can never read a work outside a mental library. Libraries of the mind make it possible to interpret the singular work, but in doing so they also direct its meaning, prohibiting other meanings. Depending on the case, those mental libraries may have more specific names: tradition, canon, heritage, inheritance, or they come from simple individual habits.

To change mental libraries is to change our reading of the works themselves. When we put
Proust in relation with *The Princess of Cleves* or with Robert Musil's *Man without Qualities*,
that is in the frame of the grand French tradition of the psychological and moral novel, on the
one hand, or within the modernist deconstruction of the European novel, on the other, it is not
the same Proust that we read. The singular work hardly exists by itself: it always stands out in
a more or less perceptible background of other works and other texts. This is how we can make
sense of it and orient our understanding.

Every canon creates a series that encloses the work in a system of significations. T.S. Eliot's famous "ideal order" is also a constraint imposed on reading. Let me give you another example, less canonical perhaps. Do you remember Agatha Christie's novel *The A.B.C. Murders*? Here, the murderer creates a series of murders, following the alphabetical order, but actually it is a trompe-l'oeil. Among the multiple crimes committed by the murderer, only one really matters to him, the others are there only to confuse the issue and to conceal the real motive of the main crime, so that Hercule Poirot would be led into false leads. Sorry if I have spoiled the ending! Likewise, as readers, we are all Hercule Poirots on our own, but without knowing it. For every series of texts creates its own meanings and leads the reader to a specific type of interpretation. There is a difference, however, between crime and literature, and this is that, unlike crime, no literary work is independent of a series, no work can be read in isolation. Every reading, whether we are conscious or not, is comparative. Every killer is not a serial killer, but every reader is a serial reader: we read in series.

To change one’s mental library, to change one’s canon of reference, is, so to speak, to change
the work we are reading, to change its meaning and value, but also to direct the interpretation
in new and unexpected directions. One becomes a comparatist when one realises that the foreign
work takes on an unexpected value for oneself, which the original reader does not know. You
become a comparatist when you realise that reading a work in a different environment from the
one in which it was created enriches your life, but also enriches the work. Comparatism is a
deliberate misreading.

*

Thus, at times, as a Frenchman, I am led astray by sonorities that steer Keats’s poem into
worlds seemingly alien to Keats’s intentions. For the French-speaking reader, Keats’s sonnet is
enriched by a new resonance that is not permitted by the English language. In *Darien*, I see and
hear *rien*, that is *nothing*, through a linguistic interference effect that we should not find
disrespectful. No doubt Keats had not thought of this cross-linguistic echo, although we cannot

<footnote n="1">¹ T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), *Selected Essays* (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 15.</footnote>
be sure of it: he mastered and wrote French as well as Latin. Why should he not have heard *rien* in *Darien*?

Yet the echo is not only linguistic, but literary. The frightening immensity that can be seen from a Darién peak makes one recall Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie<fnref n="1" />” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”). And even more anachronistically, this final *rien* evokes the *rien* of another sonnet, but an initial one, the one with which Mallarmé opens the poem “Salut” (*A Toast*), and here I am happy to pay homage to Malcolm Bowie, a great commentator, if any, of the poet of *L’Après-midi d’un faune* (*The Afternoon of a Faun*):

Rien, cette écume, vierge vers
À ne désigner que la coupe;
Telle loin se noie une troupe
De sirènes mainte à l'envers.

Nous naviguons, ô mes divers
Amis, moi déjà sur la poupe
Vous l'avant fastueux qui coupe
Le flot de foudres et d'hivers;

Une ivresse belle m'engage
Sans craindre même son tangage
De porter debout ce salut

Solitude, récif, étoile
À n'importe ce qui valut
Le blanc souci de notre toile<fnref n="2" />.

Nothing! this foam and virgin verse
to designate nought but the cup;
such, far off, there plunges a troop
Of many Sirens upside down.

We are navigating, my diverse
Friends! I already on the poop
You the splendid prow which cuts
The main of thunders and of winters;

A fine ebriety calls me
Without fear of its rolling
To carry, upright, this toast

Solitude, reef, star
To whatever it was that was worth
Our sail's white solicitude.<fnref n="3" />

<footnote n="1">¹ Blaise Pascal, *Pensées*, Brunschvicg 206.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Stéphane Mallarmé, “Salut” (1893).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Translation by Roger Fry, in S. Mallarmé, *Poems* (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936).</footnote>
This astonishing poem was spoken by Stéphane Mallarmé at a literary banquet in 1893, and it is no coincidence that Mallarmé placed it at the head of his poetic work. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful toasts ever given. These fourteen verses, in which there is not a word too many, go from the foam formed by the champagne in the glass to the foam raised by the poets' crew, some on the stern (Mallarmé, already fifty years old), others on the bow (the avant-garde).

The whole thing begins with *rien*, with nothing, the nothingness of foam or froth, which is structured only by the void. The nothingness of a verse poised unstably on the edge of nothingness, on the white of the sail or the page. Poetry, navigation, star: the three terms are still linked, as in Keats (but in Keats we have a planet in lieu of a star).

But there is much more than an orthographical kinship between *rien* and *Darien*. The connection with Keats is no accident. Mallarmé was an English teacher, a reader of the Romantics and of Coleridge. In *L'Après-midi d'un faune* one can perceive echoes of Keats’s great poem, *Endymion*<fnref n="1" />. To hear *rien* in *Darien* is therefore merely to highlight a flow passing from English Romanticism to nineteenth-century French poetry.

Mallarmé’s and Keats’s poems evoke both the absolute of poetic novelty: Homer is for Keats both the oldest author and the newest continent, rediscovered through Chapman’s translation, arousing the awe of uncharted lands and the sense of the infinite; he is that newness which the overtly avant-garde quality of Mallarmé’s sonnet almost arrogantly proclaims.

When I discovered Keats’s sonnet, I heard Mallarmé’s poem, with its initial *rien*, which somehow follows the final *Darien* in a direct continuity. But I also made the connection with another famous sonnet in French literature, “Les Conquérants” (“The Conquistadors”) by the Cuban-born poet José-Maria de Heredia, a poem that appears in all anthologies of French poetry and which has this particularity of staging, like Keats, the conquest of the New World, the discovery of a new star in the sky and the discovery of the poetic nature of the world:

Comme un vol de gerfauts hors du charnier natal,
Fatigués de porter leurs misères hautaines,
De Palos de Moguer, routiers et capitaines
Partaient, ivres d'un rêve héroïque et brutal.

Ils allaient conquérir le fabuleux métal
Que Cipango mûrit dans ses mines lointaines,
Et les vents alizés inclinaient leurs antennes
Aux bords mystérieux du monde occidental.

Chaque soir, espérant des lendemains épiques,
L'azur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques
Enchantait leur sommeil d'un mirage doré ;

Ou penchés à l'avant des blanches caravelles,
Ils regardaient monter en un ciel ignoré
Du fond de l'Océan des étoiles nouvelles<fnref n="2" />.

As falcons from their native eyrie soar,

<footnote n="1">¹ See Robert Greer Cohn, “Keats and Mallarmé”, *Comparative Literature Studies*, vol. 7, no. 2, June 1970, 195-203.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² José-Maria de Heredia, “Les Conquérants” (1869), in *Les Trophées* (1893).</footnote>
So, tired of woes long borne with haughty air,
Bold-hearted men from Palos and Moguer
Went forth with daring dreams mad to the core.

They longed to seize the fabled metal store
Cipango's mines in rich perfection bear,
And favoring breezes bade their brave prows dare
The dim, mysterious western shore.

At eve, as Hope unveiled each epic view,
The tropic sea's bright phosphorescent blue
Bewitched their slumbers with mirage of gold;

Or from the foredeck of their caravels
On alien skies they wondered to behold
Strange stars new risen from ocean's glowing wells<fnref n="1" />.

Of course, there are many differences between Keats's poem and Heredia's. In particular, in both sonnets the comparisons are reversed. Heredia's poem is about conquerors, and the final image of new stars is to suggest the existence of another kind of reality than the pure material greed and brutality of European warriors. In Keats's poem, by contrast, the subject is primarily the discovery of the aesthetic sphere, it is literature, it is poetry, it is Homer, and the discovery of a new planet or of the Pacific Ocean is meant only as a point of comparison. The images may be similar, but their use is dissimilar.

Remarkably enough, both poems subject the figure of the conqueror and the coloniser to an experience of an almost metaphysical nature. These brutal, ferocious, domineering people are suddenly confronted with the experience of an unknown world, beyond all expectations: the Pacific Ocean for Cortez, new stars for Columbus.

And yet both poems, the English of 1816 and the French of 1869, are equally embroiled in the current of history. They have to face a similar transformation of the colonial imaginary. Both emphasize in different ways the figure of the conqueror and the coloniser, the discoverer of the New World, to make it the symbol of the discovery of something unexpected, greater, more beautiful than what had been imagined, beyond the simple colonial conquest. It is almost an experience of transcendence, which makes the conquerors experience human finitude.

The reversal of value undergone today by the figures of colonisers might eventually render these poems obsolete, if not inaudible or even outrageous. The risk of misunderstanding does exist, but I believe that both works are capable of passing this difficult hurdle, because already in many respects they are less a complacent exaltation of the colonial enterprise than its transfiguration, or even its redemption into a metaphysical and aesthetic quest. I believe that this fundamental ambiguity of meaning is what still makes these poems readable today, in addition to their obvious formal qualities.

The comparatist experience is also this: a sensitivity to the ideological context of works, to the way in which each work enters into a negotiation with the world from which it originates, and ends up acquiring a new value with historical and cultural distance. This is why the comparatist is not the enemy of history. On the contrary, comparison is one of the essential tools of the historian. To make the difference of time perceptible, to worry that the passage of time distances us from the works and makes their understanding, if not their acceptability, more

<footnote n="1">¹ Translation by Edward Robeson Taylor, *Sonnets of José-Maria de Heredia* (San Francisco: Doxey, 1896).</footnote>
difficult, but also sometimes allows us to perceive dimensions hidden from their contemporaries, is this not an attitude that lies at the heart of both the historical approach and comparatism? The comparison is not only in synchrony, but also in diachrony, and any good specialist in English literature should realise that he or she is often doing comparatism without knowing it. But it is certainly better to practice comparatism and to know it!

How could Romanticism be defined solely on the basis of the Lakists, however brilliant they may be? Could Pastoral be defined on the basis of Philip Sidney's *Arcadia* alone? Shouldn't we include foreign works? We have to broaden the scope. But how far? As far as possible. But when to stop? Ideally, never.

Yes, the comparatist must have as a privileged vocation a total description of literature, without stopping at the borders and demarcation lines more or less imposed by intellectual comfort and the various traditions.

But, you may say, it is impossible to carry out this project. Indeed, it is impossible, and it is this very impossibility that is the foundation of the comparatist experience.

At the heart of the comparatist experience is the feeling of lack, the feeling of incompleteness, the very feeling of incompetence, of not being up to the required standard. Another work could have been added to the study you were doing, a work which you did not know, in an unknown language, and the study has to be started again or at least reformulated. This is what we all experience at every moment of our comparatist life. This is hopeless, but this is also what makes this experience exhilarating: the feeling that there is always something more to do, one more book to read, and another one to write because our information has increased.

The experience of lack, the feeling of inadequacy is deeply comparatist, and this acknowledged weakness should also be our epistemological strength. It is when I am weak that I am strong, said Saint Paul (2 Corinthians 12:10).

*

And finally, to conclude with a look back at my own history as a literary researcher, I must confess that I am constantly referred back to this experience of insufficiency and inadequacy, which is at the root of my vocation as a comparatist.

The legend tells how the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, leaving his palace and meeting successively an old man, a sick man and a corpse on his way, changed his life in such a way that he ended up becoming the Buddha, the enlightened one. To be sure, although my name is William, I am not a prince, and the only palace I ever lived in was that of the pomps and prestige of literature. But it was precisely when these pomps collapsed that I found, like Siddhartha, enlightenment, but an enlightenment or awakening to a new conception of literature.

Here are some of the trials or stages I had to go through. First, in high school, while I loved literature itself, I did not understand the interest or the usefulness of the discourse on literature, which seemed to me to be vain. I did not want to study literature, but classics and linguistics, until I realised that maybe my problem with literature was simply *the* problem of literature. I could thus turn my incompetence into an additional skill. So I became interested in the historicity of this formalist discourse on literature, with Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot at the centre of my attention: this was my doctoral thesis. And I wrote two more books on the evolution of the idea and function of literature<fnref n="1" />.

<footnote n="1">¹ William Marx, *L'Adieu à la littérature. Histoire d'une dévalorisation (XVIIIᵉ-XXᵉ siècle)* (Paris: Minuit, 2005); *The Hatred of Literature* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).</footnote>
I also saw how the literary histories I read were biased by a progressive conception of history, and I thought about those blanks in modern literary history that are called rearguards: this was again the recognition of an insufficiency, of holes in our knowledge.

Earlier, I had moved to Japan, where I spent two years and completed my thesis. I always had a taste for foreign languages, and I had even started my studies by doing the comparative grammar of Indo-European languages, and learning Sanskrit and Hittite. But in Japan I understood the major interest of learning a language fundamentally different from one's mother tongue (like Japanese for a French or an English person), much more different than Semitic languages are for us. Thus one understands that any translation is necessarily an interpretation. But in Japan I understood even more the virtue of cultural and anthropological distance: looking at the completely foreign is the only way to understand what we are ourselves.

And all this resonated with my long training as a classicist, in Latin and Greek, with the anthropological dimension that any study of ancient literature requires. The distance in time, with Antiquity, or in space, with Japan, confronted me with the fundamental incompetence that was mine, an incompetence that can only be partly overcome by an anthropological questioning.

I would like to add, but here we are truly entering the sphere of intimacy, that a sexual orientation different from that of the majority has led me since my adolescence to look at society as a whole, at its values, and at literature itself with a distanced, marginal gaze, putting me in a position of deviation and decentering which is itself comparative and anthropological in nature. I am speaking about it all the more easily here because a few years ago I published a book on this subject touching on sexuality and intimacy<fnref n="1" />.

In any case, it is this anthropological questioning that has animated me since then in all my books, and which is at the basis of *The Tomb of Oedipus*<fnref n="2" />. Posing the question of literature as an anthropological fact of a variable nature is both my endeavour, and also the recognition of my constant ignorance, which I am only trying to fill in little by little, an ignorance as to how human beings, at such and such a time, in such and such a place, in such and such a remote context, considered and used the objects of language that we now call literary works, but which for those people were perhaps something else entirely.

I can never tire of questioning the variability of ideas of literature. And in this way I have been able to turn ignorance, if not into knowledge, at least into an approach which, in my eyes, is the basic comparatist enquiry. The point is not so much: how to become a comparatist, but rather how, under these conditions, not to become a comparatist.

So yes, like Keats I can say again:

> Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
> And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
> Round many western islands have I been
> Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

And sometimes, indeed, I experience, like Cortez in front of the unknown, that moment of stupefaction and silence, that of an aesthetic emotion that follows the shock of discovery and prepares for new investigations. And sometimes too, as with Keats, the Grecian urn keeps its silence and its enigma:

> Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
> As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

<footnote n="1">¹ W. Marx, *Un savoir gai* (Paris: Minuit, 2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² W. Marx, *The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic* (London: Verso, 2022).</footnote>
Now, to acknowledge one's ignorance, to recognise this gap, this impotence and this fundamental deficiency, allowing oneself to be decentred by the work, allowing oneself to be observed and understood by the work itself, like Rainer Maria Rilke in front of the "Archaic Torso of Apollo" he contemplated in the Louvre museum, is, I believe, the basis of the comparatist approach:

> [...] da ist keine Stelle,
> die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

> [...] here there is no place
> that does not see you. You must change your life<fnref n="1" />.

When we think we are reading texts that have come to us from faraway cultures, we are actually being observed and read by them. We are required to change ourselves in order to understand them. This existential process is what often makes comparatist studies works of creation and emotion, literary works in the fullest sense of the word, as evidenced by the great books of Erich Auerbach, George Steiner or Malcolm Bowie, to whom I am happy to pay this last tribute.

<footnote n="1">¹ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaïscher Torso Apollos" (1908), *Selected Poetry*, translation by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989).</footnote>