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In order to initiate a dialogue about the underside of multiculturalism, the most recent report on comparative literature, edited by Haun Saussy, concentrates on globalization. The previous Bernheimer report promoted a future comparative literature as (multi-)cultural studies, and to make its point it tended to criticize comparative literature as a historically non-multicultural, or not sufficiently multicultural tradition. The new report, by contrast, calls attention to the problems inherent in the idea of comparative literature as (multi-)cultural studies, and looks to comparative literature’s past for alternatives. In doing so, it draws a substantially different picture of the history of comparative literature. A major change is that the scholars usually named as forerunners of the discipline – the majority of whom emigrated to the United States around or after World War II – are almost entirely neglected by the report, in favor of one scholar who had never left Europe: Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz, editor of a journal that was apparently the first to carry the term “comparative literature” in its title in 1877.

It seems natural to ask: how could a late nineteenth century Central/Eastern European professor of Germanistik who was not only virtually unknown in the Western world until recently but who has had only a very modest impact on the study of literature, even in his own region, now displace Auerbach and others who used to epitomize the history of comparative literature?

The little that is available from Meltzl’s work in English makes this question even more puzzling – among other things, his “decaglottism,” that is, the suggestion that since comparative literature cannot cover every language of the globe, it should start off with the ten “most important” European languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Portuguese, and Hungarian. Haun Saussy and the other contributors in the volume seem to forgive Meltzl for omitting Asian languages, and one may have the impression that they 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