Refusing to compare: difference as a reason and as material
Planning Paper 2, Sam has two works: a 1930s Bengali novel about a household divided by partition-era politics, and a 2005 Australian novel about a family renovating a suburban house. He wants the topic 'the house as a site of confinement.' In the planning session he argues that comparing them would be 'inauthentic' because the Bengali novel is postcolonial and the Australian one is not, and that applying the same frame to both would flatten their difference. He proposes instead to write four paragraphs on each work, then one paragraph noting that both 'use houses symbolically.' His teacher has 20 minutes with him before the exam. Sam is on track to write a well-observed but non-comparative essay, and his topic is due the same week.
1. Is Sam right that the two works should not be compared? Explain what makes a comparison legitimate when contexts differ.
Read the worked answer
Sam is half right, and the half he is right about is important. He is right that imposing one text's terms as the measure of the other is a real intellectual failure - reading the Bengali household as though it were a version of the suburban family, or treating 'confinement' as a universal with local colouring, would flatten both. He is wrong to conclude that comparison requires similarity of context. If it did, comparative literature would collapse, since no two works share a context exactly.
A comparison is legitimate when a shared question can be posed that each text answers differently, and when each answer is explained in its own terms. That shared question is the basis of comparison; it must be genuinely open, meaning either text could have answered it the other way, and it must be answerable from evidence in both texts.
Sam's current plan produces juxtaposition, not comparison: four paragraphs on each plus a similarity sentence. And 'both use houses symbolically' is a claim weak enough to be true of nearly any novel, which is a sign it carries no argument. His objection about flattening difference is actually the raw material for the best essay available to him - difference, explained, is a finding, not a disclaimer.
2. Design the comparison for Sam: state a basis of comparison, two or three sub-claims, and show how his objection about difference becomes an argument.
Read the worked answer
Basis of comparison: the house as an instrument for regulating who belongs to whom - how the floor plan decides who can see, hear and claim whom.
Sub-claim one: in both novels the internal geography of the house allocates visibility, and the crisis is precipitated by someone moving through a space they are not supposed to occupy. Sub-claim two: in both, an outsider's entry exposes the household's rules to itself, so the house functions as a test of kinship rather than merely a setting.
Then the difference, which becomes the thesis: in the Bengali novel the house is inherited, and its division is both a domestic event and a figure for political partition - confinement is a debt the characters did not choose and cannot repay. In the Australian novel the house is purchased and renovated; its constraints are a project the family selects and mistakes for freedom, so confinement is elective. The comparison then produces an argument: the same spatial grammar - corridors, thresholds, the room that must not be entered - can serve inherited and elective kinship, and the novels differ in where they locate the tragedy of the house, in what cannot be escaped versus what cannot be seen.
Why this satisfies Sam's objection: difference is no longer a reason to stop but the engine of the claim, and each text's specificity is explained rather than dissolved. He should test that the thesis could be falsified by his own examples - if it could not, it is another 'both use houses symbolically.'
3. What risks should Sam watch for in drafting, and what should he do in the first two minutes of the exam?
Read the worked answer
Risks: (1) Context slipping into type - 'the postcolonial novel' and 'the contemporary novel' as explanatory labels that end thought rather than start it. Each context detail should appear as a clause explaining a specific effect, not as a paragraph. (2) The Australian text being treated as the neutral or 'unmarked' case, with history belonging only to the other one; a suburban house also has a specific history - mortgage, inheritance, the property market - and Sam should name it. (3) Losing the ratio: four paragraphs of one text and two of the other, or a first half that exhausts the space. (4) Over-claiming direct influence: the two novels are not in an intertextual relation of derivation, so any connection is a comparison drawn by Sam as a reader, and should be framed that way.
In the first two minutes he should write a one-sentence thesis with both texts and the word 'whereas' in it, then three sub-claims, then a quick allocation: roughly 20 minutes per text, 30 minutes on the comparative argument, 10 on the conclusion. He should also choose his two or three central quotations now, from memory in planning and verified in the text during writing, so that close analysis is guaranteed rather than hoped for.