Is comparative literature an exercise in futility, akin, as the old saying goes, to comparingapples and oranges? This is what Cézanne appears to be doing in his 1899 still-life Apples andOranges. In holding them still, as Cézanne’s painting does, something else seems to come tolife: 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’sRazor, which states that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. Parsimony is centralto 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, onlyindividual things to which we attribute the literary predicate. But if they are not things, what arethey? They are, I submit, collections of things; sets or classes. To call particular entities sonnetsor tragedies is already to have compared them with other entities, and classified them with thosedeemed similar. There are good reasons, I argue, why those of us studying literature ought to bewary of our ontological commitments: for they tend to multiply our obligations towards univer-sals at the expense of the object itself.

Is comparative literature an exercise in futility, akin, as the old saying goes, to comparingapples and oranges? This is what Cézanne appears to be doing in his 1899 still-life Apples andOranges. In holding them still, as Cézanne’s painting does, something else seems to come tolife: 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’sRazor, which states that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. Parsimony is centralto 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, onlyindividual things to which we attribute the literary predicate. But if they are not things, what arethey? They are, I submit, collections of things; sets or classes. To call particular entities sonnetsor tragedies is already to have compared them with other entities, and classified them with thosedeemed similar. There are good reasons, I argue, why those of us studying literature ought to bewary of our ontological commitments: for they tend to multiply our obligations towards univer-sals at the expense of the object itself.