reveals the core that comparative literature has always been confined to: the desire to translate the untranslatable, the desire to translate “the purely national of all nations?” (Meltzl 60).
Finally, David Damrosch’s Meltzl not only recognizes the problem that current comparatists are preoccupied with but also offers the solution. In an essay on the Saussy report, Damrosch writes, “[a]ll these essayists share the concern forcefully articulated by Gayatri Spivak in Death of a Discipline that the older great-power perspective often found in comparative studies not be continued in another guise under the rubric of a cosmopolitan multiculturalism.” And after praising Meltzl’s work for its “polyglot anticosmopolitanism,” Damrosch adds: “Meltzl’s Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum … can help guide us in the rebirth of a discipline of genuinely global scope and impact” (Damrosch 99, 111).1
LEFTOVER IDEOLOGY: MELTZL’S ANTI-COSMOPOLITANISM
Being Hungarian myself, I first felt flattered to find all these references to Meltzl in the works of leading contemporary theorists of comparative literature. Not that Meltzl was Hungarian: along with the co-editor of the journal and his patron at the University of Cluj/Klausenberg/Kolozsvár (today, the city is called Cluj-Napoca), Sámuel Brassai, Meltzl belonged to the Saxon minority of Transylvania – a region that, after being the victim and the site of unabashed political and military competition for centuries, became, in the nineteenth century, the battlefield of linguistic and historical arguments over whether Romanians or Hungarians had inhabited it first.
Ethnically, Meltzl was neither Hungarian nor Romanian but German. But he became particularly famous in Hungarian circles in Transylvania when, upon receiving the chair of Germanistik, he gave his inaugural lecture in Hungarian against what he considered to be Gervinus’ nationalistic misinterpretation of Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur. He was also a lifelong fan of the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi, whose work he translated and advocated enthusiastically.2 This was the same Petőfi who, pace Meltzl – who took him, alongside Goethe, to be a representative of Universalpoesie – was in fact the poet of the national revolution in Hungary in 1848 and was probably killed by Cossacks in a battle in 1849. Petőfi, just like Meltzl’s friend Brassai, fought in the war against the Austrian and Russian Empires for Hungarian independence. One may not be too far off the mark in thinking of Meltzl’s inclusion of Hungarian in his decaglottist list as the inclusion of Petőfi in Weltliteratur, and accordingly, his omission of Russian as an omission of the language of those who killed Petőfi.3
To be sure, Meltzl was critical of nationalism, both in its old unapologetic version and in its newly emerging forms, which, he argues, are the same old nationalism in the guise of cosmopolitanism: “[f]or today every nation demands its own ‘world literature’ without quite knowing what is meant by it. By now, every nation considers itself, for one good reason or another, superior to all other nations” (Meltzl 60). What he suggests instead really borders on the impossible: since comparative literature should both translate and keep intact the national literature of a people, the ultimate but unattainable ideal is Weltliteratur, which for Meltzl is identical with comparative literature, and means the “loving cultivation of the purely national of all nations.”
But it would be anachronistic to ascribe Meltzl’s anti-cosmopolitanism to any broader concern about cosmopolitanism’s potential collateral damage. It is, rather, a position that has very transparent political motives: a last position accessible to someone who wants to advocate the literature of a country that had lost its war for national independence just two decades earlier, a country that around this time, in the aftermath of the 1867 compromise between Austria and Hungary, was becoming more powerful than it had been in more than 300 years.
At the same time, this new political power was emerging as part of an empire in which the price of Austrian and Hungarian dominance was being paid by the other ethnicities living in the Monarchy’s realm – the Czech, Slovakian, Croatian, Serbian and Romanian, none of which is included in Meltzl’s list. In order to become part of an empire, and indeed a dominant part of it, Hungary had to forget about its dreams of national autonomy; this is the particular context that shapes Meltzl’s position on literature, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Both the nationalist and the cosmopolitan arguments are already taken by other countries to justify their national literatures. Meltzl’s perspective is simply the last one left for an advocate of a smaller literature under the new conditions of the European literary scene.
AMERICAN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: AFTER HISTORY, BEFORE PHILOSOPHY
The Saussy report is primarily a report on American comparative literature, and Meltzl’s significant role in the report is therefore likely to tell us more about the state of comparative literature in the United States today than about Meltzl’s own project in the nineteenth century. It may be useful, then, to take a look at the past and present of American comparative literature.
Just as Meltzl’s ostensibly anti-nationalist journal was really an appeal for Hungary to demand “its own Weltliteratur,” the later history of comparative literature was similarly dominated by a series of attempts to negotiate the particular through the universal, the national through the cosmopolitan. The study of national literatures emerged in the early nineteenth century and marched on gloriously, enjoying the full support of the new nation states. When its position became problematic, toward the turn of the century, the main reason was quite simply its success: the study of literature had fulfilled its role of contributing to the creation of national identities.4
The fact that literary studies survived their role was partly due to comparative literature – which, although roughly contemporaneous with the national literature disciplines, became prominent only toward the end of the century, when it hastened to save them in the name of supranational bonds and/or anthropological theories about literature.
If all this is not entirely clear from Meltzl’s journal, it should be more evident from other proponents of the new discipline. The May 1886 issue of Meltzl’s journal announced the arrival of a new rival, Max Koch’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, which quickly became much more prestigious and widely read than its predecessor. In Koch’s journal, the new comparative approach proved merely to be a way of camouflaging the very same national or even nationalistic ambitions that triggered the study of national literatures.
Certainly there were also genuine attempts to cross the national boundaries; around the Second World War and even more so afterwards, these attempts were often motivated by anti-fascist ideas and had their own metahistorical agendas. Auerbach’s Mimesis, for instance, is informed not simply by a general Hegelian sense of history as a gradual coming to self-consciousness of humankind, but also by the Kantian idea of perpetual (and cosmopolitan) peace.
As the crimes of the war were gradually disclosed, this Kantian project began to sound increasingly utopian, and the cultural conservatism that was based on it came to be regarded by many as cultural elitism. Thus comparative literature, like many of the other disciplines, emigrated to the country in which the war had had an entirely different impact on historical consciousness. For whereas in Europe the war, and the Shoah in particular, called into question not only all former Heilsgeschichten but also the possibility of metaphysics as such, in the United States, the victory of the allied forces on the continent reinforced not only a teleological view of history but also the belief that the United States had a distinct role in this process.
The first comparatists in the United States were either from or closely associated with the historicist, conservative-liberal tradition that, from Jacob Burckhardt to Eric Auerbach, represented an old, cultural elitist and to some extent anachronistic worldview whose uttermost value was culture in history but also against or despite history – and of course both culture and history meant Western culture and history. But when, a few decades later, post-war French philosophy arrived in the United States, comparative literature fell under the sway of the novel ways of thinking.
Few people cared that the “new” philosophy was doing something that aesthetics and philosophy