Chapter One - Literary Worlds and Degrees of Distance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
Les choses ne sont pas seulement des objets de connaissance,
mais des motifs de co-naissance. Elles provoquent, elles déterminent dans le
sujet toutes les attitudes impliquées par sa construction.
Elles suscitent en lui une image animée, leur symbole commun.
Elles lui fournissent le moyen de co-naître,
de se connaître par rapport à elles, de produire et
de diriger la force nécessaire pour assurer
entre les deux termes contact.
When Paul Claudel began to compose l’Art Poétique, he was taking his first look at the “grand livre de l’Orient” as a young consul in China. Fed up with the “l’ancienne [logique qui] avait le syllogism pour organe” (the old logic with the syllogism as its motor), Claudel constructed “une nouvelle logique” that could explain the correspondences he found in the “East”:
Jadis au Japon, comme je montais de Nikkô à Chuzenji, je vis, quoique grandement distants, juxtaposés par l’alignement de mon oeil, la verdure d’un érable combler l’accord proposé par un pin. Les présentes pages commentent ce texte forestier, l’énonciation arborescent, par Juin, d’un nouvel Art poétique de l’Univers, d’une nouvelle Logique. (Po. 143)
This new logic accounts for the co-naissance of self and other, the way in which two things fill one another's gaps and bring one another into being, just as the greenery of the maple rises to accord with the pine at Chuzenji. It might be more just to say that the two things bring a new aspect of one another into existence. The pine and the maple complement one another and create a third image that arises from their fusion. When we compare in order to carry out world literature in theory, and when the writers we study compare to carry out world literature in practice, we carry out a similar process. We create a new simplified set of the two things we are comparing. This set includes properties we believe are held by each thing, be it the “East,” “China,” “France,” or “Britain.” But, like Claudel's maple and pine, this image needs the image of the comparand, the thing to which it is compared, in order to be complete:
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- Information
- Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English, French, and Japanese Literatures , pp. 21 - 48Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020