Like Apples and Oranges: A Quinean Reading of Cézanne’s Pommes et oranges (Or, A Proposal for the Founding of Departments of Incomparable Literature)

Abstract

Is comparative literature an exercise in futility, akin, as the old saying goes, to comparing

apples and oranges? This is what Cézanne appears to be doing in his 1899 still-life Apples and

Oranges. In holding them still, as Cézanne’s painting does, something else seems to come to

life: the principle of kinship, allowing us to group one thing with another of the same kind.

Classifying, Cézanne’s work suggests, has the virtue of ontological parsimony, as in Ockham’s

Razor, which states that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. Parsimony is central

to Willard Quine’s theory of ontological commitment: “When I inquire into the ontological com-

mitments of a given doctrine or body of theory,” Quine asserts, I am merely asking what, accord-

ing to that theory, there is” (1966: 126). And within Quine’s “regimented theory” what there is,

finally, is physical objects and sets. In this paper I posit there is no such thing as literature, only

individual things to which we attribute the literary predicate. But if they are not things, what are

they? They are, I submit, collections of things; sets or classes. To call particular entities sonnets

or tragedies is already to have compared them with other entities, and classified them with those

deemed similar. There are good reasons, I argue, why those of us studying literature ought to be

wary of our ontological commitments: for they tend to multiply our obligations towards univer-

sals at the expense of the object itself.

Keywords

• Ontological Parsimony,Comparative Literature,Cézanne,Still-life,Quine.

References

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