Afterlives of Comparison: Literature, Equivalence, Value

Abstract

It is better to be consciously than unconsciously time-bound. Erich Auerbach It blasts the epoch out of the reified “movement of history.” But it also explodes the epoch's homogeneity, and intersperses it with ruins – that is with the present. Walter Benjamin The Iliad, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Art of War, The Last of the Mohicans, The Brothers Karamazov, The Origin of Species, The Wizard of Oz, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas An American Slave, David Copperfield, The Inferno, Hamlet, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote, The Red Badge of Courage . These books (and many more like them) are arrayed before me on a bookstore display under the rubric “Barnes and Noble Classics: Enduring Works. Affordable Prices” – with a limited special offer: “Buy 2 get the 3rd FREE.” It is not amongst the first displays you find upon entering the store, but it is in the first row nonetheless, recognizable to me as a certain idea of Literature, even if the category includes titles that are not strictly literary and presents a somewhat motley blend of the world's great classics, classic children's books, and chestnuts from the U.S. high school English curriculum. And so in this corner of everyday life, Literature persists, if precariously, in the sphere of commercial value. The competition from bestsellers and various other commodities (toys, games, yoga mats, tote bags, chocolate, beverage containers, various reading or writing related novelties, etc.) is intense but it is also interesting to note that in what look to be possibly its last days, the bookstore chain is relying on categories not unrelated to “Classics” to sell books of many kinds on tables labeled “Books Everybody Should Read” and “Must-Reads in Paperback,” which combine contemporary bestsellers and critically acclaimed contemporary fiction, with books also present on the “Enduring Works” display, like The Diary of Anne Frank and One Hundred Years of Solitude . Literature is not optional reading for information or entertainment. It retains something of the Kantian aesthetic's universal imperative: you must and should read these books. Of course, many stores have closed over the last months. The Barnes and Noble board chairman and longtime owner, Leonard Riggio, underlines how critical this next holiday buying season will be “in terms of casting a die for the future.”