INTRODUCTION: NATIONAL LITERATURE AS REFLEXIVE …



LITERATURE AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

AS REFLEXIVE REFRACTION*

By

LUCILA V. HOSILLOS**

The reflexive refraction between literature and Comparative Literature is not a matter of subject-object relationship where the subject acts on the object, which is presumed passive until acted upon, whereby it comes to life. Rather that upon interaction both subject and object refract each other's qualities, values, and other elements reflexively. In the process both constitute a binary in dialectical unity, harmony, synchrony, diachrony, parallels, analogues, influences, and other modes of relationship. They subject each other to changes while through such changes they create endless and boundless refractions that reflexively create entities with their own identities. Comparative Literature brings out the qualities, values, and other elements of literature while altering these through its own methods and perspectives Literature delimits such methods and perspectives, anchoring these to its own qualities and values that force Comparative Literature to modify, reinvent, recreate, and reconstruct its procedures and processes.

Reflexive refraction is an offspring of the view of life/world as a relationship and a process. It is inspired by Galileo Gallilee’s observation that not only our external, but even more so our internal universe, is endless and boundless. Reading and re-reading enrich the texts with interpretations of its qualities and values endlessly and boundlessly.

The theory draws support from Albert Einstein’s theory that time and space are relative to each other, depending on the speed with which space is negotiated. Values are also relative to time and space so that the evaluation of texts depends on the temporal and spatial distance between the reader and the text.

Reflexive refraction occurs simultaneously, synchronic and diachronic in time and space. It can not be graphically represented as linear and evolutionary, but as a whorl of entities bristling with multi-dimensional double arrows without beginning, middle, and end.

Reflexive refraction occurs intrinsically between authors and their selves and their society/environment; authors and their texts; intra-text among its constituent elements; inter-arts among literary texts and art pieces and literature and art; inter-text among literary texts; texts and milieu; texts and authors; constituent texts of national literature; and between national literatures as constituents of world literature. The entities are inextricable from each other and from one another. It is only the inter-arts, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international methods and perspectives of Comparative Literature that can unravel such intricacies, which exist but have to be refined through concrete, specific, and particular studies.

The view of literature and Comparative Literature as reflexive refraction necessitates redefinition of both. The literary text ceases to be a printed entity waiting to be read by a reader for it to come to life. It has its own individuality and identity and is a reflexive refractor that itself acts on and is acted on by the reader. The text also acts on Comparative Literature as the method and process in which it is in reflexive refraction, even as Comparative Literature defines the identity and individuality of the text and its aspects and relations. Literature is no longer just a corpus or grouping of texts in their totality, but is a system, the constituents of which are in reflexive refraction in various modes and forms of interrelationships. Comparative Literature ceases to be the study of literature and the other arts and disciplines and of two or more national literatures. It becomes the study of literature in all its aspects and relations.

Reflexive refraction is needed for literature and Comparative Literature to survive by being relevant in the context of globalization. It is inclusive, specific, and particular, but expansive, comprehensive, and flexible enough as to be applicable to other theories which are rendered obsolete, outmoded, or moribund with the creation of literary texts that can no longer be described and evaluated by their criteria. In contrast, reflexive refraction deals with reality as it is, imbuing it with artistry, artistic qualities and values to intensify and heighten it beyond its common existence. Literature has evolved from an art that provides only dulce et utile into a utilitarian, millinarist, revolutionary, and other functions as an agent of change that can help topple monarchies and other forms of governments, rebuild and reconstruct societies, and build new ones. Personae are no longer images, representations, symbols, and other forms, but are themselves, refractors that reflexively refract and are in turn reflexively refracted.

Comparative Literature, rather than other modes, can proximate the phenomenon of reflexive refraction as a process of being and becoming of the text and of literature. A key word of Comparative Literature study is interrelationship which is characteristic of life in a globalized world. Reflexive refraction can render understandable literature in all its aspects and relations.

Even before writing the text, writers are already in reflexive refraction with their selves and their society. Such interrelationships condition the writing process as dialectical, harmonious, neutral, and other modes. They determine the intention and meaning of the writer, choice of materials, and the form/structure, devices, and other elements, and the nature and function of the text.

The study of the text can start with the text itself or its historical context. The reader has to assume the perspective with which the text was created so as not to violate its nature and function. The author and his work are historical creatures of society and the author is the original creator who can not be dissociated from his work. Besides the reader can always create his own text. The critic’s critique of the original literary text can never be the original.

In starting with the text, readers can reflexively refract it according to their own tastes, sensibilities, preferences, and priorities for its fulfillment of its intent and meaning through artistic values and norms, simultaneously contextualizing it with the historical realities in which it exists and wherein it is read. The dialectics of truth or reality in the text has to be reflexively refracted in relation to the harmonies and dialectics of its historical realities.

Or the reader can start with the realities or the context in which the text was created and currently exists, where historical conditions affect its reception, where its influence is negative or positive, or where it is not influential at all, ignored. If the text was created in the past, it has to be read within the context of that historical reality. Reflexive refraction can proceed from its context and can progress into its internal realities. Only after it has been contextualized in the historical milieu in which it was created should it be interrelated with its contemporary context in which it is read, that of the reader. Or the reader can progress in interrelating the text at will with whatever and whichever it refracts reflexively and whichever and whatever also reflexively refract it in terms of human experience and historical truth.

The textual elements individually do not imitate or reflect reality but refract reality reflexively through the writer’s intervention and mediation. Refracted, they exude prismatic effects, interacting with each other. Such refractions in turn are reflexive, bouncing back and forth to their refractors. So that a maze of refractions emitted by the textual elements continuously interact with each other and with their prismatic effects, mutually enriching and enhancing or damaging and eliminating one another reflexively. It is the writer, however, who at the stroke of the pen can tilt the artistic balance to reveal the meaning and purpose of the text as objective, neutral, involved, committed, or partisan, the nature and function of each constituent defined and discernible. The process is in contrast with synthesis that dissolves the individual constituents to create a new entity.

Once it is created and printed, the literary text exists independently on its own in the space-time continuum of other literary texts, other art forms, and external factors. In its reflexive refraction with other art forms the text is not just a source material that can be adapted, recreated, and reinvented into film, music, theater, and other forms; its qualities and values reflexively refracts those of the other forms and become constituents of the new art forms.

In the reflexive refraction of the text and the reader, the text is not inert and lifeless like a museum piece. The readers bring the text to life with their intelligence, imagination, temperament, sensibilities, taste, view of life, commitment, and other qualities and values. The attitude of the reader toward the text can be favorable or unfavorable, sympathetic or adversarial, harmonious or dialectical, and other kinds of reception. In the process of reading, however, the text also reflexively refract the qualities and values of the reader, creating tensions between reader and text that determine the reader’s exegesis and interpretation, as the text asserts also its own individuality and identity.

Intra-text, all elements are in reflexive refraction, creating tensions and pressures, such as form vs. content, art vs. purpose, and other modes. It is intra-text reflexive refraction that holds together the constituents with their conflicting claims in the structural eurythmics that build up the architectonics that is the text. Such artistic poise within the literary text is factored by reflexive refraction as it holds together the diverse constituents of the text with their opposing claims of materials/content, form/structure, intent/meaning, style, technique, language usage, and devices toward ascendance and predominance. The dialectics within the text are generated by the dichotomies, antinomies, and tensions that are resolved artistically by depicting the diverse constituents in reflexive refraction with each other in structuring the architectonics of the text.

The inter-text reflexive refractions occur in the corpus of texts by one author, several authors in the same tradition, language, culture, nation, and other groupings, and beyond such boundaries. They determine the interaction between and among writers, author and text, reader and text, text and text, and other forms of reflexive refraction.

In interrelating texts and text, CL goes beyond mere comparison and searches for the cultural roots as basis for its inter-textual refraction. Not only the texts, but also their contexts, reflexively refract each other. Comparative criticism of individual texts within a nation/culture is also needed to evaluate their niche in national literatures. Comparison has to be contextual, delving into the similarities and difference of their cultural roots. Otherwise such critiques will not be different from those of the New Criticism which treat texts as if they exist in a vacuum.

Intra-text studies use the multi disciplinary and the inter-disciplinary approaches which are confused interchangeably.

The multi-disciplinary approach to literature is through the methods and perspectives of disciplines in gaining insights into literature as source material for their own purposes and to understand literature from their own perspectives and principles. The prefix "multi" presupposes the simultaneous use of these disciplines in the explication of literature. One has to know all these disciplines or a little of each to gain insights into literature.

The interdisciplinary is preferable. It focuses on the literary text or on literature and draws from the other disciplines only whatever can help in gaining insights into literature. The proper study of literature is the literary text/work. Literary study has its own requisites based on the nature and function of literature as an art, which distinguish it from other forms of discourse.

The prefix "inter" presupposes that the relationship is between literature and other entities with individual identities. Thus in interdisciplinary studies the preposition in and the conjunction and are crucial. Psychology in literature means the behavior, motives, action, and psychology of the characters and groups in the literary text. Psychology and literature means the relationship between these fields of knowledge without their principles and concepts necessarily entering the artistic configuration of the text. Psychology of literature refers to the behavior and motives of characters and the literary process under certain situations in the course of the creation and development of the text. The literature of psychology refers to the corpus of writings about psychology.

In the case of reflexive refraction among authors, texts, and literatures within the same languages, tradition, cultures, and nations, the interrelationships are similar to that of national literatures as constituents of world literature. Within nations literatures differentiated by geography, races, languages, traditions, and other elements. There are proponents of multi-culturalism who synthesize all these as constituents of national literature, such heterogenous elements losing their individuality and identity. Such synthesis creates the apprehension that races and their cultures can be obliterated, such fears creating antagonisms, conflicts, and violence. It is not just preserving ethnic traditions and values that is important, but also that indigenes as marginalized need the freedom and opportunity to live their own lives, in “cultural liberty” and to contribute to nationality, society, and human culture..

Reflexive refraction provides for the indigenous to be constituents of national literature without loss of individuality and identity and to be enriched with nationality, even as they contribute ethnicity and indigeneity to national literature. For reflexive refraction concretizes, particularizes, and specifies their qualities and values that individualize and identify them. They participate as constituents of national literature, not just static sources of materials for national identity.

In the continuum of literary texts that constitute a national literature, the individual literary text exists in reflexive refraction with other texts that are ethnic/indigenous, vernacular, foreign, and others of linguistic and cultural diversity. The interrelationships of Individual texts and groupings within a language, tradition, culture, and nation are crucial to the formation of national literatures. Reflexive refraction holds together in different kinds of unity the constituents of a national literature. It is through reflexive refraction that Comparative Literature can integrate the literatures in the ethnic languages, the precolonial literature, the literature in the colonial languages, and the literature in the regional vernaculars into the national literatures in the national languages of decolonizing nations.

In the case of reflexive refraction among national literatures as constituents of world literature, three types of reflexive refraction occur: interdependence, dependence, and independence.

Inter-dependence, the most complex, is the more desirable as it results in mutual enrichment. Further, it is based on interaction, not on imposition,; on individuality and identity, not on multi-cultural synthesis; and on diversity, not on hegemony It values the organic qualities of the individual literatures and their origins, development, and problems.

Dependence implies that one literature is inferior to another, as in the case of the literatures of the colonies influenced by those of the colonizers, which are imposed as superior, in their development towards modernity. Reflexive refraction recognizes that all literatures, great and small, have something to contribute to each other and to literature in its totality. The ethnic/indigenous may be richer in human values than the mercantile modern.

No literature can be said to be independent in a world globalized by travel, communication, and information technology. Except ethnic literatures in isolation by reason of geography and tribal laws and injunction to preserve the tribe, where oral literature is still dynamic in the rituals and processes of life.

In its reflexive refraction with external factors the literary process is epi-phenomenal with the economic, political, and social processes of history; it is not a superstructure that occurs or should be given importance only after these processes have been prioritized. It occurs with these processes and has been an agent of change, helping topple monarchies, tyrants, and oppressive governments and has reformed societies, reconstructed damaged ones, and built new ones.

The insistence of Compartive Literature on the study of two or more national literatures and of texts belonging to two or more cultures beyond national boundaries can be rendered fallacious by the formation of national literatures out of the diversity of literatures within a nation. Its requirement to study the works in the original, although the ideal, is rendered artificially demarcated and unrealistic by globalization and post-modernization. If these trends are irreversible, it can not just cling to its dearly-held areas and methods at the risk of being overwhelmed toward extinction by information technology, mass media, cultural consumerism and the other products and by-products of globalization and such as post-modernism

The theory/method that can be a means by which Comparative Literature can study literature to be true to its very nature and function, while meeting the problems and challenges of being relevant in a globalized human society, can be the theory/method of reflexive refraction.

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*Read at Panel 10, “Cross-Cultural Studies, Comparative Poetics, and Comparative Literature” on the 12th of August of the 17th triennial congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Hong Kong, August 8-15, 2004.

**Retired Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines.

E-mail: hosillos@iloilo.ph.

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