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Abstract
While comparative literature is often called a discipline in crisis, it is just as often charged with the responsibility to see into the future. But why has comparative literature been given the task of the fortune-teller? To answer this question, I compare the works of Philip K. Dick and Ricardo Piglia to address a method of accessing the future by means of the random reading of books, also known as “bibliomancy” (divination by books). My argument opens up a disciplinary question (the practice of comparative literature, the mechanism of comparison) by means of a theoretical inquiry into the relation between reading and chance. I argue that Piglia’s incorporation of Dick’s theme of bibliomancy introduces us to “comparomancy,” which describes the way the chance crossing of texts bears witness to the forces at work in the present and opens up the present to strikingly new paths.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Futures of Comparative Literature makes a clear effort to be more open to the future, even in the way that it solicited contributions to the volume. Whereas earlier ACLA reports had a more exclusive air, the editor of the 2017 report opened a website so that any ACLA member could submit essays of varying lengths, formats, and styles.
2 In a review from 1991, Richard Bernstein asserts: “Philip K. Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.” Simon Critchley expresses the same idea, but with less certainty: “Maybe he was writing the future.”
3 See Pieter Van der Horst, “Ancient Jewish Bibliomancy”; idem, “Sortes.” Richard Hamilton argues that the sortes Vergilianae (the reliance on The Aeneid as an oracle by opening the text at random) might in fact be a Renaissance interpretation of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, not in fact a practice cultivated in those times (323). This argument is based, in part, on the problem of finding evidence for the practice of sortes Vergilianae, a problem already highlighted as early as 1928 (Loane 185). Phyllis B. Katz argues that there was indeed no confirmed practice of consulting The Aeneid as an oracle until a fraudulent work, the Historia Augusta, falsely asserted that it was a common practice, thus noting how this particular tradition of bibliomancy “begins and ends in fiction” (258).
4 Both Hamilton (314) and Van der Horst (“Sortes” 169) highlight the relation of this scene from The Confessions to divination by lots, or “sortes Biblicae” (Hamilton 314).
5 See Van der Horst (“Ancient” 11) and Strickmann (xxi, 144) on bibliomancy as a populist prophetic power.
6 See Van der Horst on the relation between bibliomancy and “cleromancy,” or divination by lots (“Sortes” 143–44).
7 See McGrath on the way reading is always haunted by the chance effects of machines (24).
8 One of Dick’s biographers, Emmanuel Carrère, notes that Dick’s “discovery of the I Ching in 1960 put him, so to speak, at the tail end of the avant-garde” (59).
9 On Dick’s use of the I Ching to write the novel, see “Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes” and a 1976 interview quoted in Sutin (112).
10 Mountfort suggests that the I Ching serves as an unconscious and acausal connection between multiple characters (296). More generally, Hayles suggests that Dick’s novel utilizes Jung’s notion of synchronicity to connect characters even when the I Ching is not the primary focus (58).
11 See Piglia’s 2005 reading of The Man in the High Castle, specifically his discussion of Juliana as “la única lectora,” the only reader capable of accessing the truth of Abendsen’s novel (El último lector 151).
12 See Rieder’s emphasis on the way Dick’s text positions truth as differential, between text (I Ching) and text (Grasshopper) (215).
13 In one letter early in the novel, Marcelo Maggi translates and transforms Stephen Dedalus’s famous line from Ulysses (“History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce 28)) to “History is the only refuge I can find from a nightmare from which I would like to wake up” (AR 17). For a discussion of the effects of Piglia’s “translation” of this line, see Kelman; López Parada.
14 See Piglia’s discussion of Dick in El último lector, where he develops a notion of “random reading,” or “lectura casual” (154).
15 Tardewski’s discoveries are often presented as intentional acts or demonstrations of mastery. For example, Colás’ very productive reading of Piglia’s use of “citas” (meaning both “quotes” and “appointments”) nevertheless emphasizes the intentional nature of citation (actively quoting something, actively making an appointment) and “discovery” as a sovereign act (Colás 136–37, 142).
16 Dove similarly notes the fortuitousness of truth in this same scene (230–31).
17 In Levinas, ethics is the moment of “teaching,” when the “I” is overwhelmed by the exterior and brings me more than I contain: “It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I” (Levinas 51). Or, as Derrida puts it in his reading of Levinas: “In the arrival of the arrivant, it is the absolute other who falls on me” (Derrida 451).