Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour
Interdisciplinary/ and Not Interdisciplinary:
A Playful (probably incorrect) Deconstruction of “Comparativism.”
April 07 , 2010
Disruption. Since that’s pretty much what’s on the table for this particular entry, I may as well start with one. Let’s throw narrative-conventions (even blog-conventions?) out the window for a moment. What follows started out as an addendum to a prior fragment that was intended to be the body of the entry. Once I had completed this post-script, however, and the original body was still a fragment at best, I realized that, if I completed the body, the length of the entry would push well into the terrain of the absurd. Thus, I ditched the original body of the text, and I’ll return to those ideas at a later time.
(insert some sort of figurative ellipsis here, and the marginalia becomes the text.)
On a somewhat unrelated/ and not unrelated note, I will be traveling to New Orleans Easter weekend to present a paper as part of a panel at my first Literary conference, for the American Comparative Literature Association. I wanted to mention this here for a couple of reasons; first, I hope to contribute some sort of documentation of my experience to this blog (I’m hoping to possibly do something in the way of a video-blog for this site, but, as this is my first such experiment in both regards, the “situation on the ground” down there will dictate whether or not this is a feasible idea). Second, certain thoughts I’ve been trying to grapple with about my involvement in this panel seem to be relevant to some themes that I’ve been discussing with this blog.
Prior to receiving the invitation to put together a proposal for this panel, I had never even remotely considered myself engaged in anything that could be conventionally termed “Comparative Literature.” I was always under the impression that this sort of analysis required the use of multiple languages, and I tended to interpret this in the literal sense.
Problem is, my personal connection to foreign languages is (particularly academically) tenuous at best. Up until now, I’ve fulfilled my degree-requirements with Latin, which, by being a dead language, completely disrupts most contemporary understandings of what it means to be “fluent.” My understanding of Latin has become convoluted and confused by fragments of other romance-languages, such as a partial-fluency in “restaurant-Spanish” (which, outside of the context of the restaurant industry isn’t “fluent” at all, as phrases like “frijoles aqui por favor” carry very little linguistic-currency), a completely botched attempt to learn French from a Parisian teacher early in high school mingled with my childhood attempts to pick up the Quebecois of older members of my family... etc. In other words, my “foreign-language” understanding, at present, is a linguistic goulash that has done FAR more enrich my understanding and use/ manipulation of English than it has to make me feel in the least “fluent” in anything other. In short, at present I’m forced to consider myself, hopelessly and problematically, “monolingual.”
However... as I understand it, from a bit of poking around through contemporary definitions of the “comparativist” movement, the pertinent definitions of “language” have become rather broad and far less literal, with some theories including divergent disciplines among the “languages” being compared.
I have a (probably bad) habit of returning to deconstuctionist theory when tackling problems like this, and while engaged in this inner-dialogue, I have coincidentally happened to be revisiting decon a bit for a Theory seminar. In further happy coincidence, the theme of the conference at which I’m presenting involves “cosmopolitanism,” and one of the noted theorists who’ve worked with this concept happens to be Derrida. It doesn’t seem a huge leap (as much as it might be politically-problematic) to co-opt a bit of deconstruction into my personal relationship to the comparativist discipline.
Bear with me a bit as I get a bit abstract for a moment, and probably get quite a bit wrong. In relation to both literal languages and interdisciplinary figurative languages, I’m reminded of Derrida’s “A/ and not-A.” I’m starting to feel more comfortable participating in a comparativist dialogue by thinking that I (as well as everyone else, in one way or another) is “monolingual/ and not-monolingual,” “interdisciplinary/ not-interdisciplinary” by the very “relation/ not-relation” between these terms. My cursory knowledge of fragments of literal non-English languages is both a component of my understanding of my mother-tongue, and something separate from it, simultaneously. My understanding of the “languages” of literary-art and musical-art are both separate disciplines and the same, at the same time.
To add a further kink to disrupt, I’m not presenting a blatantly “interdisciplinary” paper at the ACLA conference. On the surface-level, my analysis has nothing to do with music. The panel that I’m participating in is presenting on Cosmopolitanism in the work of Melville. For my particular piece, I’m doing a bit of disruption of the idea of “primary text;” I’m examining a letter-trail, a series of personal correspondences, citing the works of fiction to which they relate (the conventional “primary texts”) as secondary. In so many regards, when trying to wrap my head around the relationship between my paper and comparative interdisciplinary languages, the answers become not-answers, it always comes back to “A/ and not-A” simultaneous. At some level, is my paper about music, even though it mentions it explicitly nowhere as such, since that is among my primary lenses through which to comprehend interdisciplinary-analysis? Yes and no (or “not-Yes”?), at the same time.