do so partly because they find Meltzl’s provincialism exotic: “Such a list of prerequisites could perhaps only have been imagined by a nineteenth-century Central European nobleman; both admirably cosmopolitan and geographically restricted, it exhibits a certain Habsburg cut,” Saussy writes, but he is less forgiving when it comes to Romanian and Russian: “Romanian, the language of Meltzl’s immediate surroundings, is excluded, presumably and unfairly as an idiom that had created nothing more than folklore; the omission of Russian is more serious and makes the list look more politically parochial” (Saussy 8). Still, the mistake of leaving out Russian is not as significant as the feat of including Hungarian: “The inclusion of Hungarian in an otherwise unremarkable list opens comparative literature to being something other than a science of origins.” Saussy later drives this home even more emphatically:
[T]he inclusion, through Hungarian, of an irreducible philological exception, and all the exceptions to the definition of literature and literary history that were to come, had the effect of impeding comparative literature’s dissolution into one or another existing branch of the historical sciences. (Saussy 9)
Hungarian is comparable to the other languages on this list but the basis of comparison cannot be, in this case, historical, for Hungarian is neither a Romance nor a Germanic language. In Saussy’s reading, Meltzl’s gesture of including Hungarian is a sign of his refusal to be complicit with the general trend of nationalist-historicist sciences in the nineteenth century.
Some go even further in emphasizing the emblematic value of Meltzl’s work for today’s comparative literature. David Ferris cites Meltzl as one of the first representatives of comparative literature as an impossible discipline:
What is comparative literature … if not a discipline transfixed with, and distracted by, the totality of its impossibility as well as the infinite task of translating and transforming this impossibility, a discipline only able to survive in the failure of its own inmost tendency …? (Ferris 93)
How, in other words, is comparative literature to proceed in a world that accuses it of attempting to cancel out the difference between the different, an accusation that 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 –
