What Is Literature’s Now

What Is Literature’s Now?* Laurent Dubreuil

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f course, it is impossible. To define literature—if by this we mean finding a sense that is fixed or given once and for all—nobody’ll do it. “Literature is—” has nothing of an easy beginning. Should we consequently admit that “it is literature” is always a vague or vain expression? I look at the 1973 special issue of New Literary History devoted to the question “What is Literature?” Among other analyses, I find in Tzvetan Todorov’s article the idea of an indefinable literature, which “therefore” could have never really existed.1 Notwithstanding, the ones who doubted literature have not effaced it. Its death cannot be drawn from the failure to delimit its meaning. The lack of so-called rational and integral designation does not even pertain solely to literature. If we aim to use only univocal terms, we shall get rid of numerous words. Are “history,” “metaphysics,” or “politics” firmly and unanimously definable? As for many other substantives, we always need to “clarify”—which, indeed, we do through acts of enunciation. In a discussion, we can simultaneously agree and disagree. All of us do not always mean the same thing; language differs from a merely referential communication. Before deducing from the indefinable some big ideas about the “inexistent” literature, we should investigate what definition, concept, and signification are. Dictionaries are deceptive in that they claim to give exhaustive and delimited repertories of meanings. Furthermore, we ought to consider afresh the very category of meaning. A word does not mechanically refer to a discrete series of meanings; it only signifies something through enunciation. Almost nothing exists in “natural language” that does not bypass the boundaries of lexical or conceptual definition. This includes literature. However, it does not imply that we should renounce literature or literature’s name. Signification occurs beyond the frontiers of sense. Resisting rationalization or definition is what happens in thought and in language. Such an issue is worth a new exposition; all the more so because signification is a literary matter. Not * I want to thank Ralph Cohen for his generous offer to publish this article, Laurent Ferri for his always excellent comments, Ioana Vartolomei, Cory Browning, as well as the editors of New Literary History, who patiently helped me to improve my paper. New Literary History, 2007, 38: 43–70

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that literature possesses the exclusive privilege of creating signification, but in going through language, it necessarily depends on significance. There has been another reason for refusing literature. The point of departure here is a social and political analysis according to which “literature” is mainly or merely a legitimizing fiction. Literature would make acceptable a hierarchical separation between the privileged—and the others. The privileged would be the figure of the genial artist or the audience (bourgeoisie, professors, official interpreters, patriarchal power)—the others: “passive” readers without any creativity, proletarians (to whom a subculture is reserved), illiterates, “mute women,” or the colonized. Especially in the 1970s, the critique against literature’s social vices was often associated with the concern for the lack of rational definition. For instance, Todorov’s interest in genres appeared as a way of undoing the social separation between legitimate writers and ordinary speakers. By and by, Todorov abandoned such a theoretical remedy, to the benefit of a broader discourse analysis where neither genre nor literature plays the major role. Nevertheless, the suspicion against literature’s social power persists today. Now, I maintain that we could have recourse to stigmatized words, and then voice something else. The social-historical is not a receptacle: in it, there is no sense or end to literature. The grammar of political agendas, the collection of lexical definitions, are no valid reasons to simply erase literature. Now, there is a now. Depending on the part of the world we are in, we shall find one or another argument more alive. Because of my personal and professional situation, I mostly explore the interzone of French and American universities. Whereas political approaches seem strong and capital throughout the United States, many French “experts” avoid asking the question of literature because of scholarly hyperspecialization. In many instances in France, inquiring about an author, a genre, or a theme is a consensual way of shunning the literary. But both options are decidedly transnational. We could at most underline local trends, and immediately remark possible combinations. Linked to suspectful rationalism, social critique sometimes gives an inverted image to reaction. Hence the scene of contemporary scholarship gives us two main choices (ineffable and naturally legitimate poetry vs. inconsistent and socially oppressive language) and a multitude of mixed positions. Above all, this theoretical trap conditions our own discourse—far more than literature itself. We had to expose the present configuration in order to leave aside the avoidable antinomies. Each time we speak, let us situate our speech. But once this is done, everything still needs to be done. The picture of the institutional and scholarly locus helps me clarify my goals and desires. I believe in the possibility of qualifying (not defining) the signification of literature. It is also for literature that I am writing this text about the works’ weird temporality. The now of What is literature now? is

what is literature’s now?

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linked to a specific time of literary criticism, from 1973 to 2007. It also allows us to understand literature’s now. There is no need for literature to have a nature, a preformed essence nor an irreducible concept. Literature does not exist before but rather after itself: we reconstruct and designate it without exhausting its signification. I also speak after and to others; though I speak. As much as the commitment to literature happens in the particular or the singular, it is addressed to a beyond. I shall speak literature, and you have to enact, believe, deny, displace what I am saying. The force of affirmation does not require grounding in the universal nor the incontestable: its intensity relies on its gesture. I want to reread here how oeuvres each time undo and redo literature. In this article, I shall dwell on “literature’s literature” for critical reasons. This point of view is not supposed to be unique, nor prescriptive. Each oeuvre is its own and first metatext; but it is more than that, in spite of this phenomenon’s relevance for our present purpose. Even speaking of itself, the literary text exceeds its self-presentation. Such a move gives us the idea of the critical opening we need to accomplish. Always and now. Let us speak literature now.2

Literature Comes Afterwards This now is said the moment after. Here is a proposition to begin after the beginning: “literature comes afterwards.” This three-word phrase is somewhat different from the general opinion among philosophers (and critics). I do not believe in a literature coming from an obscure or sacred source. We should stop thinking it in terms of anteriority, whatever value the latter could have. Literature is not a true voice emerging from the origin, the preconscious imaginary, the prelogical mind or primitive thought. In many respects, the twentieth century has seen the triumph of doctrines founded on the moment before. European phenomenology has especially insisted on the poetical Urgrund, rooted in Sein with Martin Heidegger or directly connected to reduction in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Psychoanalytical readings also contributed to the obsession with the anterior, sometimes even giving new life to old biographism thanks to a systematic exploration of the subjective author’s past. A shining example, surrealism consolidated the idea of an inspiration coming from a preceding obscurity. Surrealism functioned as a catalyst for new and audacious syntheses of previous theories, such as in Aimé Césaire’s works. When, in 1970, Césaire states that “true poetry is prophetical” and “primitive,” that he is “interested in Greek primitive poetry, in Greek primitive tragedy,”3 he condenses the legend of the (post)romantic image and the reevaluation of the literary primitive mostly due to the “Homeric question” in philology. In demanding the “vates”4 to plunge into his own

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automatic fund, Césaire goes further than André Breton did. So there appears a combination between art and primitive thought.5 To Césaire, negritude is a primitivism that adopts “analogical reasoning”6 in the wake of African tradition. This brilliant alchemy fabricates a writer who is at once prophetic, primitive, preconscious, prelogical, pretheoretical. Always the first. In this case and many others, we are definitely dealing with laudatory discourse. But eulogism becomes perilous if it holds literature in the sole moment of creation, in an indistinct and antepredicative source. It is a manner of forgetting or undermining the importance of reading. It also overestimates originarity. This latter aspect is certainly very “modern.” It finds a corollary in the still regnant doxa of originality, according to which literary achievement and talent are functions of the great leap backward. In France, the current editorial market is dominated by narrations of childhood and self-evocation of the self as the self. In this vast and heterogeneous production, some writers have fortunately more ruse than the rules of the market. Nonetheless, the doctrine of the original remains the golden standard for a large majority of journalists and paper-merchants. It happens that this creed is disconnected from literature, which comes after other speeches. Indeed, the primitivist has references. Césaire wrote the famous Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,7 but the poet is not only a “natif-natal.”8 While he returns to his place of birth, he also speaks in a language previously used by others. Numerous quotations are to be found in Césaire’s text. One of the most notorious is the capital “COMIQUE ET LAID” that refers to a verse of The Flowers of Evil.9 In “The Albatross,” Charles Baudelaire compares the poet with the bird; Césaire adds a third term to the comparison: the “Nigger.” Thus, Césaire has recourse to words already uttered, and even learned by heart by thousands of students in the French school system. The so-called “African” ana-logic, this supposed predisposition to poetry, is said with the words of the past. Whereas he points to a radical primitivity, Césaire speaks after Baudelaire. Typography (the capital letters) is a supplementary sign showing that the “natal poet” does not seek to conceal the quote. Should one consider Baudelaire as another primitive, the very mechanism of quotation would be an obstacle to the image of a pure dictation from the depths. More than that, the claim for origin implies the acknowledgment of the literary’s posteriority. We are facing a contradiction that we must keep as a contradiction, one that may also permit the oeuvre’s signification. But for now, we shall only admit this: what we name quotation or intertextuality is a clue to the literature’s moment-after. Still, literature does not only speak after itself. It is full of spoken words, maxims, and sayings of the remnants of treatises in history, an-


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thropology, philosophy, and psychiatry. I shall not thoroughly examine the case of oral literature, which could serve as the magic origin. But I just want to note that tale-tellers, called illiterate (by literati), regularly refer to the artificiality of their way of telling—and to other kinds of speech. The oral narrations that justify and explain a common expression are here eminently interesting. They ratify the existence of different uses of language and develop a nonsystematic response to utterances and to registers. The same move governs literature’s “afterwards.” Thus, it is not by chance that Birago Diop introduces his African tales as the ones told by the griot Amadou Koumba.10 Koumba is not alleged for the mere purpose of reassuring fiction or respecting ethnographic realities. He is not a source first mentioned and then omitted in the narration. On the contrary, he also acts as a character in the two volumes given by Diop. The stories come from a remote past but they are given after the griot spoke. The latter is a narrator in the mise en abyme of the Tales. Moreover, he sometimes begins with a common opinion and expression. For instance, “Mother Crocodile” starts with a gnome about the stupidity of crocodiles. After this phrase, Diop immediately adds: “‘That is not my opinion,’ said Amadou Koumba. ‘That is what Golo the monkey says.’”11 Diop’s tale originates in an oral controversy between Koumba the human storyteller and Golo the animal “griot.”12 One also finds a proverb in the first line of “The Calabashes of Kouss” (“‘The man who hangs his goods in a tree hates anyone who glances upwards.’”13) In the New Tales, popular sentences and sayings are more numerous than in the first volume: they gradually replace the character of the griot as a point of reference for the narration.14 In doing so, Diop depersonalizes and inscribes his own work in the wake of a more clearly collective creation. This new anonymity converges with the major trend among folklorists who—like many nineteenth-century “Homerists”—emphasized the Volk as a whole. Diop also writes after numerous transcriptions made by missionaries and colonial administrators of oral tales and stories. Diop thus accepts some “scientific” explanations; he equally follows Léopold Sédar Senghor in a rediscovery of the “black soul.” Yet he breaks with classical ethnography in deliberately putting his subjectivity in the heart of fiction. He is the “incomplete child”15 who, in his own way, weaves together the tales he heard about maxims and sayings.16 Not only is the quest for childhood necessarily something ulterior to what is sought, but the recreation of Koumba’s tales are introduced as a vast and displaced response—to African maxims, to what is called “literature” in France, to colonial transcriptions, and to theoretical elucidations. The gap between everyday speech and scholarly discourse is decisive. One could read Diop’s volumes as collections of children’s stories: indeed, they have been used as quasitextbooks in Senegalese elementary

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schools. As literature, these tales respond to preceding words and phrases. An anthropologist has the right to comment on Birago Diop, to recognize features shared by the Tales and the society he studies, to underline the intermingling of inventions in postcolonial cultures. At the same time, we must remember that Diop has already shown a possible relation between science and subjective fictivity in writing and assembling these collections. An “objective” observer who would simply like to forget this aspect would certainly have no insight of what literature can do. Besides, he would play the farce role of an “expert” unable to remark the literary transformation of his own disciplinary discourse. We have just begun asking what such metamorphoses of discourses and speeches imply. These mutations have a very singular value in literature. For literature is made of language. That does not mean that fine arts, music, or algebra have absolutely nothing to do with literary oeuvre. Still, the effect of the latter on the former is different from the regime of what we would call metamorphosis of speeches. Literature evokes arts, techniques, and life; it gives them a shape or a pattern; it sometimes renews their disposition or length. But as for philosophy, journalistic comment, anthropology, or proverb, literature not only speaks of them, but it speaks them.17 It is sometimes said that nobody knows what literature is, except that it is made with language. But that is something. Some could find my point a bit too language-centered, or “linguistic” as it is erroneously said. It is true that I choose to consider literature as not dependent on culture—another fabulous term, en passant. Even voiced in an assertoric tone, theory also betrays individual (or sometimes singular) options and decisions. In this sense, I do not doubt the importance of the weaver’s art in Ouakam, Senegal,18 for the global understanding of Diop’s self-description as a rhapsode. Yet, the metamorphosis of the griot’s performance and colonial report into literary tale written in French transforms the very matter of these discourses—whereas wool and weave stay the same and independent of Diop’s artistry. Literature as mutation is produced by a shock between writings, readings, tongues, and discourses. It is absolutely possible to discard such issues, to prefer speaking literature to speaking of literature. In that case, one will suppose a globalizing concept, which more and more happens to be culture—at least in the last two decades. Such a subsumption is structurally identical to the ancient pedagogical usage that aimed to make cultured individuals know ad hoc quotations and rhetorical loci. I do not ignore that cultural studies are almost always contrary to this normative ideal of social reproduction. I am just mentioning a common double point: the word culture as fixed idea (in spite of divergent meanings), and the dissolution of the literary into something else (portable knowledge of the dominant class or collective production).


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Both attitudes have some qualities. The laws of literate culture exert a social violence, but once learned, they are apt to be exceeded by subjects who paradoxically break the coercion’s frame. Cultural studies free literature from its own isolation in confronting it with the nonscholarly words it includes. But the risk is to consider all utterances as a whole. Furthermore, the immense difference between visual, material, and artifact tends to be undermined. Hence, there is no literary specificity—but also no divergence between love songs and comics, no real culinary art nor manual techniques—if all these elements are able, one day or another, to be unified in a single form (infrastructure or global body). In spite of exorbitant pretensions, culturalism is not devoted “by principle” to the destruction of specificity. But one needs to be aware of the deformations caused by literature to the rule of discourses (which comprehends cultural studies). Just as painting can modify vision, literary oeuvre interferes with the logic of all -logy (even the one questioning this picture or this book). In her own exposition of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal focuses on how concepts travel from poetry to photography, from theater to ethnography.19 The unexpected meetings it gathers makes her “travel guide” fascinating. Bal’s defense of interdisciplinarity, her attention to details, and her recourse to case studies are other remarkable positions. Still, I cannot help being troubled by her permanent use of “concepts.” They “look like words,” she says.20 As a matter of fact, they seem to be words held in a rigid semantic form (operative conceptualization21), and Bal lists the items of her “rough guide” as series of lexical rubrics or wordconcepts.22 The central category in this travel notebook is borrowed from philosophy and linguistics. Now, literature teaches us to distrust word-concepts and to seek another kind of signification. What Birago Diop says to the Africanist anthropologist is also accurate for Mieke Bal. In coming after scholarly discourse, literary oeuvre is always more than an object of analysis. It indicates “the limits of knowledge”23 in such a way that it could play a new role if nowadays researchers truly want to be interdisciplinary. Apart from culture, literature is a gate to refection of disciplines, for its fate lies in defecting other modes of words and speeches. To the ones who live in speaking, literary reading is irreducibly an unsettling and necessary experience.

Reading’s Co-presence of Past and Present Literature includes reading. Even if creation were governed by anteriority, it would not equal the entire process of literature, which lives in reading writing. Those of us who dissert on books (writers, interpreters,

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journalists, professors, friends, and so forth) are expressing ourselves from within our readings. Reading is not decoding. Literature is not a highway code, not even a sophisticated one. Reading goes through text without stopping there; it then comes back to it; and goes again. Even description of writing by writing is reached by reading, so that temporality is altered. Besides—specifically in literature—texts construct a figuration of reading that incites us to take one path or another. Such a figuration emerges from a preface, a chapter’s title, a sudden allusion to the audience in the body of the narrative, or any other allegory. In that case, figuration tends to be indirect, more compelling and more discrete at once. Here is a quasi-invisible way of “advising” readers in John Ashbery’s poem “Sortes Vergilianae.” The text begins with the assertion “You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know.”24 The reader is solicited throughout the poem each time he reads this repeated you. He also sees the breach in the body of knowledge that “Sortes Vergilianae” describes. But we are not only spectators of the revelation. We are additionally led to perform it, to reform our own reading. The phonic association between know, now, and no that the first verse conveys is then developed throughout the poem.25 So is posed the question of negativity and knowledge in different “nows”—a problem closer to ours, as a matter of fact. Whatever the solution to the enigma is in Ashberry’s text, I just want to point out the method of reading that the first verse already delivers. While our knowledge is changing, a suggestion is made that invites us to read the trajectory of signifiers as well. To paraphrase the fifth verse: “Then the text opened up, revealing much more than any of you were intended to know.” 26 What writing creates is possibly enacted by reading. In America, the very category of “allegory of reading” is attached to Paul de Man’s works. It is quite normal, given the historical transformations of the literary critic due to American “deconstructive scholarship” and to the place de Man had in this process. Nonetheless, the very idea of an allegory of reading refers back to ancient practices. Among other names, I shall just quote Jean Dorat, who was, in Renaissance France, the professor of classics for the “Pléiade” new generation of poets and humanists, such as Pierre de Ronsard or Joachim du Bellay. In the notes taken by one of his students during a class on Homer, we find that the episode of the Sirens contains an evocation of the uses and limits of reading the Odyssey. Dorat admits that the wax Ulysses’s comrades use to fill their ears refers to the oeuvre’s own materiality, since “one wrote in wax.”27 Hence, “the words themselves and the parts of a discourse are nothing but wax.”28 So Ulysses—who orders his comrades to use wax but who personally wants to hear the Sirens’ song—becomes the allegorical figure of a reader both able to understand the matter of writing (words


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or wax) and hear its hidden meaning (song or literary meaning).29 The hero’s attitude is a model for the interpreter who should read texts by combining scrupulous attention to “philological” detail with metapoetical comments. To many, Dorat’s explanation might seem less convincing than de Man’s. Nonetheless, it is obvious that reading has found its own portrait in literature much before our so-called “postmodern” era. Thus, allegory of reading is not exclusively intrinsic to an historical period (the reader’s and/or the writer’s): it is susceptible to occur here and there. But the very form figuration takes relies on the text’s historical situation and its reader’s moment. Let us show it briefly with Ovid’s Metamorphoses—this book whose title I had previously used as a critical category. At the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid asserts “And now my oeuvre is done.”30 Nothing—including time, gods, violence—will “abolish” (15.872) such an oeuvre, Ovid adds. If the poet’s body will die, the opus will remain as a “better part of me” (15.875). It will assure that his “name will be indelible” (15.876) and his glory will “live” (“vivam” is the last word of the book). As cultural analysis could tell us, there is here a double reference to the monumental system of glory in Rome and to the ancient necessity of perpetuating a name. Partisans of intertextuality could also study the manifest reference to Horace.31 But furthermore, the writing that is held “high above everlasting stars” echoes a new metamorphosis (15.875–6). While so many characters of Ovid’s narration have been turned into stars, the production of the poem allows the author to reach the skies of fame. Is it a question of reading? One could argue that Ovid takes only memory into account—in accordance with the anthropological structure of Roman tradition. But we are reading the end of a very long poem on transformations. The Greek word metamorphoses underlines that this Latin oeuvre responds not so much to Hellenic mythology (it has been partially absorbed into Rome’s rites) but rather to philosophia (especially the pre-Socratics). By the figure of the “man of Samos” (15.60),32 the last book delivers an explanation of the world’s metamorphic course. Thanks to the insertion of his long monologue, the prodigious transformations that had occurred in the text thus far receive a new value: they are extraordinary examples of the ordinary law of cosmic perpetual mutation. Therefore, the vital perennis (“everlasting”) at the end of the book also evokes an immortality that transformation assures. Since it will live forever, Ovid’s oeuvre will have to change forever in a metamorphic universe. It will be modified in readings, recitations, and commentaries. Only death could make the opus immutable. An exception in its turn, this text commands us to alter it through reading. Let us add that this open prescription can only be found in reading the accumulation of transformations—in seeking in Ovid more than a “myth,” a poetic lie, or the print of social convention.

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Figuration is not configuration. Literary texts rarely renounce their power on the modes of reading; and even then, they sometimes develop a sort of double-talk. In any case, we are not always forced to follow a model. It is not at all certain that the best way of reading the late Antonin Artaud implies seeking Artaud’s approval, in spite of his own claim for “verified readers”33 only. Literary reading is something other than reading cookbooks. In recipes also, one finds the reader’s figuration expressed by imperative order or advice. In this matter, figuration is above all configuration. If you want to make a cheesecake, reading literally is better than literary reading. That is: you have to limit interpretation to the strict minimum (two extra large eggs could be used instead of three small eggs, but not instead of cheese) and must conform yourself to the representation of the reader who performs recipes step by step. Even nonrelativists—and to put it too briefly, I am one of them—must admit that a so-called “total misreading” has no incidence on the fact of literature. The latter is not deducted from an ensemble of legitimate practices but precisely from the possibility of uses apparently illegitimate. It could be inaccurate to be converted to Satanism by the litanies Baudelaire wrote to the Devil. It could be unjust to be turned into a racist (or an antiracist) by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It could be, but it also happens, which is what makes literature. It is well known that canonical novels such as Don Quixote and Madame Bovary enact existential misreadings. Apart from the correction of illusion that is so often (and too simply) attributed to Cervantes and Flaubert, the fame of both novels is linked to the affirmation—at the very heart of literature—of reading’s disfiguring. Errors are able to make you lose your sense or make you lose your strength. But they will not disallow literature; they will contribute to produce it. Other types of discourses require interpretation and reading, from law articles to philosophy, from holy writings to history books. Literalism is nothing more than interpretation forced to annul itself entirely (without being able to succeed). Quarrels arise between purists and orthodox who all pretend to read without reading. Let us refer to religious fundamentalism or (in a more carnivalesque fashion) to the multiple “authentically” Trotskyite parties in contemporary France. At the same time, the large spectrum of interpretation should not lead to the elaboration of general hermeneutics as did a German “tradition” eminently represented by Hans Georg Gadamer.34 As soon as one remarks hermeneutic necessity here and there, literature appears as a particular case. For literature partly identifies with a maximalist mode of interpretation where criteria of exactitude and accuracy could obviously intervene, but without having any consequence on the effective reality of reading. Literature today plays the role of a warrant for the possible infinity of interpretation. Deconstruction as an intellectual and university movement has deliberately transferred literary


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reading towards discourses that generally tend to limit or prohibit the proliferation of interpretation. After deconstruction’s heroic attempt, the expression “literary reading” is more of an homage to literature than the designation of a consubstantial character. But I would like to maintain the tendency towards the unlimited in reading that literary texts provoke. This tendency does and undoes literature. Just as cultural studies have great difficulties in seeing singularities, hermeneutics is doomed to tautology when it considers all texts and facts on the same and unified “interpretative” level. Hermeneutics should begin by examining the potentialities of interpretation that discontinuous discourses recommend or represent. Problems of “good” or “acceptable” literary commentaries are not at all solved by the acceptance of unlimited reading. But local hermeneutic action is posterior to the opening of its possibility—even if the latter presupposes the former. Was this a digression? Perhaps not. Literature comprehends both writing and reading. This is definitely a truism, but it is generally so discarded that we have to repeat that the thought, trajectory, and allure of literary texts come to us through the reading we make. Even the author reads (and writes) herself. From this point of view, “genetic criticism” does not restitute the pure time of writing in publishing manuscripts.35 Whatever its method is supposed to be, a textual edition is a reading. If it pretends to be objectively transparent or absolutely scientific, it only denies itself in an unproductive manner. If I am not the writer of the text, it is my sole reading that will make me participate in writing. The presentation of writing through reading does not annul the preexistence of text, the historical reality of one or several “authors,” the “manuscript’s work,” and so on. I who read am not producing an oeuvre. Still, the latter does not exist independently of the ones who compose and read it. By the way, reading is no visual operation, contrary to what is thoughtlessly ingeminated. Blind people as well as auditors know how to read. Furthermore, literary reading bypasses the technical field of reading. According to the paradox of succession of time, the literary now is diffracted in different presents: tenses and times of writing, steps in reading, constitution of comment, and vital commitment (such as quixotism, bovarism, and their refusal). Each moment is necessitated by the one that follows: there would be no literary writing without audience or readers, no reading without a quest for joy or a better life. Nonetheless, those successive instants are not assembled in a linear or teleological manner. They reanimate yesterday through literature’s now, so that what is past stays past and is present at the same time. In his recent and seminal essay on The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge has insisted on “the curious temporality that governs our reading of literature.”36 He states that “the words as we read them produce their effects in the present” (104),

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and I agree. Such description is relevant for multiple kinds of readings, which always occur in the present, after all. There, literary reading is additionally determined by the co-presence of past and present. In my phrase, co-presence points toward the nonpositive affirmation of a presence ruined by its defect and past.37 So, it is less a question of “undecidability”38 than a significant contradiction. We recognize literary texts as being totally past and thoroughly present. In proposing that literature’s “singularity, each time it is read, lies in performance” (106), Attridge chooses to confuse present’s presence and contradictory co-presence. Though he is aware of literature’s “pastness” (105) in what he calls the “act” of reading, the critic occults the impossible to the benefit of the happening performance. Hence, we should not be surprised to find in his book that “reading . . . is what the writing writes,” and that the author wrote “in a different present” (105) than the reader’s. On the one hand, reading is translated as “another writing”; on the other hand, the past writer becomes a performer in “another present.” Thus, traditional prerogatives of writing are simply transferred from the author to the reader: the specificity of literary reading is unspecific, and the writer continues to die. To hold writing and reading, present and past is what is at stake in literature. Nothing proves that we shall succeed in formulating it critically; yet I believe that we must take the chance. French contemporary philosophy and Anglo-American theory accord a crucial role to the category of event.39 But it would be inappropriate to obscure the notion of past in the name of the event, or to identify the latter with history. On the threshold of this debate, Walter Benjamin played a key role. In his fourteenth thesis on the concept of history, Benjamin writes “history is the object of a construction whose site is not homogeneous and empty time, but filled with now [Jetztzeit],”40 and he immediately applies this remark to Robespierre’s mobilization of France’s Roman heritage. We are now apt to see that Benjamin’s conception of history is a reading. For Benjamin, the form of the French Revolution is contingent to the death of “Ancient Rome.”41 Because it was defunct, Rome could go back and phantomically haunt 1793—in the wake of the historical scheme Jacques Derrida described in Specters of Marx. In literature, writing is never over, no more than reading or vital interpretation, and so on. The rearranging of times in literature’s now is different from historical revenance or variations of the invariant. These latter phenomena intervene in literary history. Notwithstanding, the literary site for the conflagration of times is not the intrusion of yesterday in today (that is: what Benjamin sees in history). Being all past and all present, the oeuvre lives to the rhythm of literature’s après-coup. This makes it more difficult to apprehend contemporariness. Synchrony and contemporary are often taken for pure synonyms. This confusion


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gives birth to the expression of “contemporary literature.” Undoubtedly, some events happen at the same period. It could be meaningful to say that Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot revolutionize American poetry in approximately the same years. That said, we know that all of us are not of the same time. History and historicity change what is given by chronology. Were Ezra Pound and Benito Mussolini contemporary? Pound was sure of it, but his own theory of fascism could raise some doubts about it. Besides the differences between history and chronology, literature’s now requires a supplementary upheaval affecting the very manner of thinking contemporariness. Pound also comes after and before Sophocles or François Villon. I do not deny the pertinence of chronology once interpretation reconstructs it.42 Yet, in these pages, I am more interested in the violent distortion that literature imposes on time. In this regard, there is no urgent need for investigating here “contemporary literature,” if the locution refers to what is published today. Such a today is an important issue, but I have decided to consider it at a distance for the time being—and to dwell on what is less evident. Finally, it should have become clear that in my own text, now does not indicate the triumph of the present. On the contrary, the now I am attributing to literature exceeds “simple presence” as well as “pure present.” Is this use of the word idiomatic? I hesitate. I assume that it could be eminently idiomatic, that is: extremely singular. With “my” words—that are ours—I would try to construct a signification for the extraordinary. Or: to reexpress what literature can do now.

History and Temporal Complication What is approached here as “literary reading” could be called “reading in a critical state.” It is very possible that none of the traits we are drawing belong to “literature proper”; and in fact, literary oeuvres are at odds with appropriation. But it is the relation between shared features that contributes to specificity. The literary functions at a high intensity. The co-presence of past and present is here in excess. Current religious dogmas refuse to ratify the fact that holy writings belong to the past. Let us quickly quote three examples. Genesis’s narrative cannot be adapted, thus we shall count days and millennia according to the Bible and refuse Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains totally valid, in spite of any posterior historical event. Aristotelian logic is so perfect that no reform on contradiction will ever be acceptable. Such purist and orthodox positions solve reading contradictions by eternalizing texts: what has been uttered once will stay forever as it was. Another (more popular) remedy consists in taking things apart. Historicizing reading separates the still-relevant from the outdated. Here,

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the mark of a former epoch (moral description, weight of prejudices, ignorance); there, a truth to keep. Although he states that Africa has not been visited by Spirit, Hegel is still read today. Even anticolonialists or people who are not experts in the “history of philosophy” are able to find Hegel’s writings interesting. In Continental philosophy especially, it is common to take things apart. Historiography also revisits the past of historical discipline, lists misconceptions or fictions, and celebrates what will be “possessed for ever” (to use Thucydides’ phrase). Many readers do the same with literature. It is not an excuse, but misogyny, monarchism, anti-Semitism, and stubbornness are to be “understood.” This apologetic attitude finds its own and paradoxical limits in doctrines of complete presentification. In concentrating on aesthetic experience here and today, one will gradually get rid of all past. A symmetrically inverted image, historicized pragmatism insists on original reception, then sometimes considers nonarchaeological readings as globally irrelevant.43 Far more problematic than presentification, this position is lethal, since it seeks to prohibit other readings, and particularly the one of the amateur. The profane reader’s joy is confiscated for the benefit of the preliminary elucidation given by a specialist. I am proposing something else. Annulling this temporality to keep another one (or erasing both of them in eternalizing texts) is nothing but a mere fallacious convenience. These types of easy “solutions” are constitutive of what interpretation “has to be” in some fields of discourses. In, and for, literature, we should attempt to value the troubling experience of the readers who impossibly are in several times. The moment-after we described is less a hope for the future than the attribute of a speech affected by its times. Jean Racine’s theater was written many centuries before the beginning of psychoanalysis and was not meant to be in accordance or discordance with Sigmund Freud’s research. But Racine comes after Freud each time analytical theory is used to reread tragedies. I am not saying that Racine “intuits” Freud. Racine does not announce nor foresee, and he does not exemplify; he rather responds. Racine’s oeuvre could explain the very formation of analytical concepts. Classical tragedy comes before and after psychoanalysis. Exploring what he names “the culture of French absolutism,” Mitchell Greenberg sees in Racine’s tragedies a “locus of resistance.”44 Such a weird space, Greenberg states, is “created by the oscillation between poles of fragmentation and stability, between the ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ oedipal” (268). The double representation of “the unconscious scene” and “the stable fixation of culturally imposed models” (268) situates the tension (or even contradiction) at stake in Racine’s theater. The fissures in the identity principle, the fact that one thing is sometimes more than itself, form a crucial problem in the elaboration


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of Freud’s theory. According to Freud, condensation and displacement condition dream production. These two phenomena are supposed to help in formulating an answer to the question of nonidentity. Freud’s Traumdeutung refers to composite entities and transferred qualities. One could have the impression that theory does its best to avoid the very possibility of contradictory co-presence. In order to shun the difficulty, Freud even affirms that “dreams have no means of expressing the relation of a contradiction, a contrary or a ‘no’”45—and then adds “denial” on “denial.”46 If it is true that a psychoanalyzed Racine “both proposes and then denies,”47 he will also help us to return to the delicate role of contradiction in Freudianism. Greenberg’s analytical reading of Racine makes us take note of the psychoanalytic tendency always to “tame the monster,” to organize psychic life through topics and to deny contradiction rather than confront it. Finally, Greenberg’s “then” points out our own difficulty in thinking pre- and post- together. In spite of its “end,” tragedy comprehends the possibility of the infinite. A dénouement is not automatically the highest point of intensity in a text. In Phèdre, is the suicide of the eponymous character more of an achievement than the declaration scene, Thésée’s coming back, or the verse diction itself? The curtain falls, but the significance of the play is not riveted to the fifth act; it does not stop there; the “oscillation,” or the contradiction, continues nonetheless. Thanks to Freudianism, Racine may reveal the psychic structure of absolutist power. But Phèdre immediately and equally responds to psychoanalysis, delivering arguments for a critique of that which Freud avoids. Let us add a short digression on the same issue. About Shakespeare (but I am going to make a substitution here), the critic Harold Bloom has written: “he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in [Racine] already, with a persuasive critique of Freud.”48 Is it exactly what we have just said? I do not think so. First of all, this quote could be deceptive. Is Bloom really interested in reading both Freud and Shakespeare (or Racine) together? He firmly denounces the reduction of “the aesthetic to ideology, or at best to metaphysics” (18). With a “stubborn resistance,” he opposes thinkers who see in a poem “an attempt to overcome philosophy” (18). Therefore, it is manifest that the idea of Shakespeare (or Racine) critiquing Freud is a sort of concession, without any effective consequences in Bloom’s approach. A poem must be “read as a poem” (18), with conceptual discourses kept at distance. The “persuasive critique” is transformed into a general verbiage; it is voiced in abstracto and ex cathedra. Bloom positions literature before concept, or keeps it separate. “Postfiguration” is decorative or provocative, but it has no contact with the literary now as moment-after. On an historical level,

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Bloom tacitly refuses the fact that Freud wrote after Shakespeare—since the “best of” his doctrine has already been said by the Bard. The chapter devoted to Shakespeare in Bloom’s Western Canon has almost nothing to do with reading.49 The canon takes the place of literature, and the claimed (but unproved) “postfiguration” has only one meaning: reaffirming the eternity of Culture. Far from that, literature’s instant-after demands an ongoing interest in past and in present together. Seized in the temporal complication of its now, literature is an historic substance. To read a multicentennial book incites us to set aside certitudes, even in the experience of our “native” language. To Frenchspeaking readers Racine’s verse “C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée”50 seems a grammatical inversion. “Attachée” has lost a great part of its erotic value; even in today’s versified poetry the alexandrin marks a separation from a time when this meter was still held in prestige. Historical discrepancy requires understanding and learning. But temporal distance is not an explanation. The artificiality of Racine’s verses is historically and linguistically decipherable, but not in totality. Historical elucidations, even about lingual uses, are a part of writing; they should not consume particularities in the name of ancientness. Notwithstanding its political appropriations, Racine’s usage does not equal a collective use of the idiom in any given time. We perceive lingual historicity and something that resists it. In current school editions in France, verses such as “J’entendrai des regards que vous croirez muets”51 are translated. One claims that entendre means comprendre. This is quite obvious in many texts from the seventeenth century. But “entendre” is also “entendre” or “ouïr.”52 The verse plays on words and creates mute eyes that are still audible for Nero’s ear. The jealous emperor expresses the power of hyperesthesia. Lingual historicity is no excuse for rationalizing or oversimplifying interpretation. Even if one tried to “abolish the referent” once again, the very idiom should remind us of the language’s inscription in time. Yet historical substance of literature is not only a question of language. The lengths of French classical tragedy and of Elizabethan drama are not the same, and this detail signals very different situations of elaboration and performance. The numerous characters of kings, queens, princes, and other aristocrats in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century European literature might be linked with political regime. Mlle de Scudéry, one of the greatest French novelists, rarely published her books under her own name. The public attribution of many of her works to a man (Georges de Scudéry) is related to the social position of women in France’s Ancien Régime. Another novelist, Mme de La Fayette chose anonymity for similar reasons. The fact that both women wrote novels rather than tragedies illustrates the persistence of discourse hierarchies. Not all readers know all that,


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to be sure. Still, we always know more than expected, and there is no “virgin” reader. Methodic amnesia in criticism is a deception, where the “average reader” is considered as ignorant or neutral. The insertion of literary oeuvres in history is so multiple that the few remarks I have just given should be taken for simple memoranda. My point here is more theoretical: we should be aware of the limits of historical explanation. Restoring a “context,” an “historical background” does not exhaust signification at all. I see that Mlle de Scudéry’s novel The Grand Cyrus is not “readable” anymore because it has been “elaborate[d] in a salon” and “conceived in function of the mode of consuming mundane genres: reading aloud in an interactive social context.”53 Now, I confess that, to me, The Grand Cyrus is more readable than Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. “Readability” is very relative, and it does not only depend on the ways of access to the text. Furthermore, my friends and I quite often read passages of books, and then discuss them. Are we the only ones to do that? Finally, in a class or a conference, we read “aloud in an interactive social context,” don’t we? A correct acknowledgement of an historical situation should not lead to a confusion between destination and destiny. If a literary text has a destiny, it is precisely to escape its historical destination and audience through reading’s now. If we seek to respect past and present, we need to abandon both phantasms: reader’s free play as well as historical unicausality. Literature exhibits history’s separation. Let us say it quite categorically. The history of literature examines how texts (and related practices) are inscribed in a space seen as heterogeneous (the social-historical). A “new” literary history would focus on the temporal passages that oeuvres open. That these two inquiries have some common points is likely, though not necessary. In histories of literature, Mme de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves is mostly considered as the archetypal modern and analytic French novel. The first sentence largely echoes other beginnings. Whereas Mme de La Fayette writes “Grandeur and Gallantry never appeared in greater splendour in France, than in the Declension of the Reign of Henry the Second,”54 Scudéry’s Clelia states “Never was there a fairer day, then [sic] that which should have preceded the Nuptials of the Illustrious Aronces, and the admirable Clelia.”55 In both quotes, we find a concern with gallantry. But The Princess of Cleves develops a “true” anecdote, linked to a rather near past (the reign of Henri II, 1547–59). The narration focuses on main characters and is quite brief (some hundred and fifty pages in most of our current editions). On the contrary, Clelia is a “roman fleuve,” whose plot is totally composite, combining repeated “cliffhangers” with long and frequent pauses (for discussion, in general). The first words I cited are only a small portion of a very long sentence, which once again contrasts with The Princess of Cleves’s more sober style. Mme de La Fayette

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historically situates her novel by partially evoking and revoking the beginning of a previous bestselling novel. She also reinterprets the history of her own work. The first two novels written by the Countess (Princess of Montpensier and Zayde) hesitated between revisiting the historical and continuing in the vein of gallant and more utopian narratives. With The Princess of Cleves, La Fayette outdates Madeleine de Scudéry’s and Honoré d’Urfé’s creations as well as one of her own previous works. Is this a classical creed? One has undoubtedly the right to link The Princess of Cleves’s poetics to the whole political movement of artistic creation under the reign of Louis XIV. The last volume of Clelia is published in 1661, the same year Cardinal Mazarin stopped exerting an influence on the young king. When, in 1678, The Princess of Cleves is released, the castle of Versailles is almost ready to become the home of the Court, and Racine has written most of his tragedies. So, it could be accurate to read Mme de La Fayette according to the political and critical category of classicism. Yet, as expressed from the very first pages of the novel, the historical relation between The Princess of Cleves and Clelia shows troubling affinities. Both novels are hyperbolic narrations. Never is voiced again and again in La Fayette, and it makes the novel experience absolute. Writing transcribes perfect virtue, thorough love, and total duty. In describing an exceptional epoch where only pure feelings ruled, La Fayette’s narration is hyperbolic. In Clelia, the heterogeneity of affects is an issue in itself, and it leads to the “pays de Tendre,” whose toponymy corresponds to the different kinds and degrees of love and friendship. Scudéry’s hyperbole comes both from the exaggerated multiplication of diverse sentimental theories and the “incredible” accumulation of episodes and cliffhangers. But when she “purifies” noble feelings, Mme de La Fayette is no more “realistic” than Mlle de Scudéry. There, she has no particular “measure.” As much as she is historically classical, she shuns classicism’s historical reason. La Fayette’s insistence on the golden age of Henri II is already a deviation from the classical praise of the present grandeur of absolutism. As soon as The Princess of Cleves was published, a man of letters named Valincourt worried about the politically incorrect statement of the first paragraph. Valincourt wrote: “he [the author] undoubtedly forgot that he was living under the reign of Louis XIV.”56 The oeuvre’s historical substance is no substrate. Literary texts teach historians something other than forms of “mentality” or socially dominant values. Literature reminds us that historical experience is not limited to history (in all the semantic extension of this term). Literature invites all instituted knowledges to examine their own procedures. A last word on our two novelists. Between Scudéry and La Fayette, what is poetically at stake is precisely located in their conceptions of history. A Roman History serves as subtitle to Clelia; “history” is the key word of The Princess of Cleves’s


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“advertisement to the reader.”57 Being called “Roman,” Scudéry’s fabulous history refers to itself as both a romance (by a play on words) and a narration whose authenticity is assured by Rome’s prestige. The “story” of the Princess of Cleves comes directly from “history.” Valincourt confesses: “in reading the long description of the Court at the beginning [of La Fayette’s novel], I believed I was going to read the history of France.”58 Ces romans sont bien de l’histoire: These novels are story, and history, and herstory, together. The ambivalence of words interrogates in act the type of knowledge and disciplinary protocols used in scholarship.

The Anachronism of Signification A final and crucial issue has still now to be addressed. Historical concerns could dismiss a large part of our previous reflection with only one word, anachronism. Was there anything like literature in Ovid’s time or during the Grand Siècle? It is well known, for instance, that the very word “literature” is not as ancient as it seems and that, for a long time, it did not even “refer to what we mean” by it now. Nevertheless, it is a pity that scholars focusing on the institutional history of literature do not agree on chronology. In gathering only a few (and respected) books written in French in the last two decades, we discover that “the invention of literature” dates back from the mid-seventeenth century, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Romantic era, or even the Roman Empire.59 This moving periodization is so evidently puzzling that we would in turn be entitled to dismiss such conjectures. But it might be a bit hasty. After all, lexicographers have observed the constitution of the new word literature and several semantic inflexions. Otherwise, this “literature” has some resemblance with other universalistic words and ideas that we are now used to criticizing harshly. Finally, the interrogative force we have described in our previous readings could paradoxically lead us to question the very validity of the category of literature. To my view, it would be pointless to recourse once again to an ahistorical and conceptual identity or to deny any effect of society on texts. We shall not save the idea (or the word?) of literature in effacing the history of which it is also made. Notwithstanding, one central argument in this debate has to be previously revoked. I am thinking here of the “lexical reason.” The fact that no such word as “literature” existed in ancient Europe (or elsewhere in the world, by the way) does not prove anything at all. As it should be very clear now, signification is not imprisoned in words. The appearance of a substantive is no contingent fact, to be sure; but semantic concentration in a specific term does not imply that nothing existed before the neologism

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in question. The Chinese have no verb such as to be; “therefore” they have no being, to the contrary of the ancient Greeks. Wishful thinking has no direct equivalent in French, “because” Parisians are lucid and rational. Let us add that the English phrase was apparently coined between the wars, which “establishes” that the conscience of self-deception is relatively new. “Lexical realists” apply exactly the same kind of pseudoproofs to literature, with the same type of absurd consequences. If “literature” was invented once, the occurrence of the word in European languages is a clue at most; but no direct or univocal deduction can be drawn. Besides, formulas such as “we know what we call literature” or “what we mean by literature” are mere illusions. As far as we can go back, even the word “literature” implied different and contradictory meanings. The question on the signification of literature has been continuous since the first attempts to define it. We do not “know” what literature is to us. And I am not sure of this “we,” either. In this text at least, “we” refers to nobody else but you and me, each time I insistently invite you to follow me. Though I am not convinced by the rationale of this lexical-magical realism, precise analysis of the social-historical is able to raise more valid doubts about “literature.” In this regard, I would like to scrutinize Jacques Rancière’s book La Parole muette. Rancière’s study is a perfect example of contemporary historical reconsiderations of the literary. “Perfect” is without irony. I truly believe that Rancière has offered a profound meditation on literature. I also truly believe that Rancière’s thesis is not grounded in history. The philosopher suggests that the revolutionary era in France facilitated the shift “from Belles-lettres to literature.”60 La Parole muette illustrates the strong affinity between the democratic era and the invention of literature. According to Rancière, poetics change during and after the Enlightenment period: language becomes essential to postrevolutionary writings. The author finds four principal features in Belletristic poetics that new literature will thoroughly transform. The first “grand principle” of belles lettres “is the principle of fiction” (20). In referring “to the first chapter of Aristotle’s poetics,” Rancière states that in ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the Ancien Régime, “the poem cannot be defined as a mode of language,” for it is by “essence . . . imitation, representation of actions” (20). “The lingual form of the oeuvre” (20) would have no importance to old poetics, only fiction would be implied in aesthetic judgments: “a poem is a story, and its value or defect pertain to the conception of this story” (20). This depiction violently contrasts with what will be “the primacy of language” (28) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Still, the first chapter of the Poetics tells me something else. Aristotle definitely considers mimesis as the rule of art. The first sentence says “epos and tragic poetry, as well as comedy or dithyrambic poetry, then—in the


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most part—poetry performed with a flute or a cithara, all have a common point: they are representations.”61 Let us add that, to the original Greek readers, the terms for epos, tragedy, and comedy immediately referred to speech (epos) or to singing (odè ). No special etymological knowledge is here required. As for “dithyramb,” the substantive has long been compared by grammarians with the noun iamb. Flute and cithara poetry are characterized by the musical instrument these forms required. In any case, at the same time that he focuses his reflection on mimesis, Aristotle also says that tragedy, comedy, and epos are made62 with language. There is a real “primacy of fiction,” but language largely intervenes. Each sort of poetry, Aristotle says a bit later, “enacts representation in a rhythm, a language and a melody” (1.47a). Here again, the capital importance of mimesis does not accompany what Rancière calls “aloof indifference . . . toward the lingual form of the oeuvre” (20). The Stagirite is just elaborating a hierarchy: language, rhythm, and music are somewhat secondary to mimesis, but they are properly essential. Aristotle also disapproves of the common practice of “nam[ing]” poets according to “the meter” they use (1.47b). This remark shows that in putting mimesis first, Aristotle does not express the old and collective poetics: he simply formulates his own theory. Though he wants to undermine theoretically or even occult the “mode of language,” he sometimes says “hexametric mimesis” (6.49b) for “epos.” Aristotle is indeed concerned with language, registers, meters, modulations, and so on—contrary to Rancière’s claims. The same phrase of “hexametric mimesis” contradicts La Parole muette on the second “principle,” attributed to “Aristotle once again.”63 Rancière states that the genres of belles lettres depend on “the nature of what is represented, on what makes the object of fiction” (21). Yet the epithet “hexametric” points out a supplementary accordance between the object and the means of fiction. Is this only a Greek problem? After all, Aristotle’s Poetics has been widely reread after the Renaissance and the first chapter of La Parole muette mainly refers to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French texts. But even there, the dramatic shift between two different kinds of poetics is dubious. For sure, Nicolas Boileau’s Art of Poetry (1674) does not celebrate the omnipotence of expression—as “literature,” Rancière affirms, tends to do. In Boileau’s first chant, “Reason” is a sovereign judge and arbiter. But the dozens of verses dedicated to the likes and dislikes of the “Reader” are about word choice, verse regularity, and lingual exactitude.64 The short history of modern poetry Boileau develops is governed by concern with the French tongue. Pierre de Ronsard is criticized because “his muse . . . spoke Greek and Latin in the French language”; whereas François de Malherbe is the one who “redeemed . . . our tongue”65 (that is French). The concern with language culminates in

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the precept addressed to other poets: “Above all, let language be always sacred to you, even in the extremest moments of poetic rage.”66 There is little doubt that in Boileau, reason has to give orders to language. In this respect, poetical métier is shown by the perfect adequation of words, rhythm, and thought. But this précis of belles lettres clearly shows that “the mode of language” and “the lingual form” are indeed important—even in the so-called old poetics. The two other principles Rancière indicates (on the role of “convenance” and the strong ties between speech and action) might be more relevant.67 Even though the bias of the first two criteria would remain. I also have the impression of a twofold demonstration. Sometimes—when he speaks of “aloof indifference” for instance—Rancière seems to deny to belles lettres any notion of poetry’s lingual nature. In other instances, he speaks of the “primacy of fiction” (28) or of “elocutio’s obedience to invented fiction” (22). In any case, the solidity of the whole system is fragile. The “grand principles” are belittled, two distinct epochs begin to collide, and belles lettres become more and more literary. On the other side, the holy triad of emblematic literary writers (Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Proust) is perhaps a little bit too convenient for Rancière’s historical purpose. In short, there is no “change of cosmology,” no “term to term inversion”68 between two ages, ruled by two collectively accepted poetics. That is: there is no invention of literature during the (post)revolutionary era since all elements of “literary” poetics were already there in Rancière’s belles lettres. Historical transformations occur. On a global level, trends may be acceptable points of view. Macroscopic movements are the condensation of discrete trajectories and oeuvres. I imagine that nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American literatures focus more on words and speech than they had done before. Does this trend reveal a paradigmatic change in poetical regimes? Rancière’s philosophical project is here in command: renewing politics, promoting equality and democracy beyond their technical institutions, and celebrating a century of political revolutions in France (1789–1871). In the name of love for literature and democracy, Rancière deliberately confuses entities. Facing this particular case and all other historicizing approaches, we have to raise one question: what are they intended for? For what reasons do some scholars attempt to find literature’s birth certificate? The ancient legend put the origin in Greece and praised the glorious European (“universal”) heritage. Others will now prefer to see the coincidence between literature and: the triumph of the individual, the loss of oral culture, the civilizing process of capitalism, the event of effective equality, and so on. In those histories, conceptual obsessions feign to take the form of effective events.


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There is paradoxically some sense in these discourses, apart from the value they may have in a whole philosophical system (such as in Rancière). They remind us that literature should not be taken for granted. It has to be invented—but each time anew. The fallacy is this will for periodization that reifies tendencies and changes them into systems or regimes. But yes, there was a moment when literature did not mean what it means for us: the moment before. “Literature once and for all” does not exist. Literature each time says all literature again; so, it is never “the same.” What could pass for a round-trip between general and particular is in fact the experience of singularity. Instead of banning ancient authors (or contemporary ones) from literature under the pretext of a unified historical process, let us see how Maurice Blanchot’s negative poetics make us read Boileau or Aristotle differently. Modern thought may help readers and writers to underline textual significations that were invisible so far. The insistence on metaliterary and language impossibilities seems typical for Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Paul Celan. Now, they could “illuminate” new readings of Petrarch, Luis de Góngora Yargote, and Maurice Scève. I prefer this after-reading to ideas of shift, ruptures, and oppositions. As soon as a belles lettres text, an Athenian tragedy, or an African tale allow literary readings, literature has been formed and reformed. Such an invention is apt to escape historical “data” and global trends. Perhaps this position is purely anachronistic. Perhaps it is also simply as anachronistic as literature’s now. We began with the words of literature, and with them, we shall end. Whatever the histories of occultation and exhibition may be, literary oeuvres always happen in language. Literary enunciation opens up a complex scene where reading has to work on the signification writing evoked. Everything occurs afterwards—after others’ discourses, conventions, sayings, proverbs, and disciplines. Furthermore, literary signification explodes lexical fixity. In return, the signification of literature itself is not determined by its name. Literature goes through dictionary definitions, pierces its own attributive concept, and undoes made-to-measure histories of the literary. One experiences literature in a weird now, in the odd moment-after that fractures linearity and cuts circularity. Literature did not invent the process of signification occurring in tongues, but it is its warrant. There, it witnesses the disequilibrium of any contradictory thought, leaving communicational transparency. In the enunciation, and after it, we are able to think. The first person (singular or plural) reminds us that hypotheses uttered in an idiom are only almost autonomous: they still depend on me, you, us. We may firmly hold a position and have to know the undoing of our own thought.

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The field of literature is conditioned by the affirmation of the impossible. Despite difficulties and contradictions, I bet that there is literature and have tried to portray it. Oeuvres also speak of the significant defection that allows them. Not only language, but languages. Not only speech, but registers. Not only discourses, but differentiated usages. The contemporary negative poetics incite us not to restore reading as fully positive, and rather to keep the exhibition of the defect. Yet the fact that désoeuvrement ends in making an oeuvre leads us to consider literature’s affirmation beside any de(con)struction. Such an affirmative force has often been taken for a naïve or direct positivity. It is not, though the encomiastic vein of literature often feigns plenitude. But as it shows failures or contradictions, literature is not nothing. It creates after the finite, in order to signify in spite of all. For our joy. Here, I could put an end to this article. If literature’s qualification is far broader than what I have said, I mostly meant to underline the singularity of a co-presence. But I am writing in New Literary History after having received an invitation addressed to a scholar. So, from my literary and adoptive town of Ithaca, I would like to add, then send, a codicil about literature in higher education. In destroying and deploying meaning and signification, literature questions all types of texts or words—and especially the disciplines that enter into the range of the so-called humanities. To put it simply, one will recognize literature’s effect on the logic of scholarly discourses only if one reads the disciplines. In the temporal change that produces it, literary text is neither opposed nor inimical to concept and instituted knowledge in general. It just occurs after them—after their point of rupture. If the purpose of literature is not to deliver a critical kit designed for scholars, it remains that researchers in the humanities should not ignore what an oeuvre says of their own ways of saying. I hope the study of literature brings some joy to students; and in spite of apocalyptic prophecies, I am sure that literature is still read and enjoyed by “nonprofessional readers.” But in supplement, interpreting literature could be crucial to the whole architecture of knowledge in the university. We should take literature at its peak, and as it speaks of the disciplines, their writings, their readings, and their teachings. What philosophical critique has brought to the humanities in the past decades can be altered and continued by a new literary scholarship. Literature’s now points out the unlimited that discourses of knowledge seek to contain. Far from being riveted to the ineffable, literary mise en oeuvre gives renewed ways of understanding the defects of disciplinary thought. There emerges a subsequent problem: is there a scholarly speech that would neither omit the infinite, nor cover literature’s negativity, nor suspend all judgment? Perhaps, and we—that is all the I’s that we are—should try to invent it. Does it mean that we’ll

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have to consider literature as theory, as Stathis Gourgouris has recently stated in his remarkable essay Does Literature Think?69 To me, literature rather enacts theory’s cracks, and comes through the theoretical. If one had not used and abused this prefix, we would say that literature is above all posttheoretical. Every theory articulated with words is apt to be affected by literature in its most decisive moments. In this respect, a theory of literature is also temporary and frail, including this one of course. But the aim is to follow literature’s traces, and to find some new significations for the lacks that scholarship traditionally denies, represses, or stigmatizes. Such a renewal could by no means be a grave return, or an absolute rupture. Major alterations will occur in philosophy, in history, and in social and human sciences if we keep something of the dangerous thought that literary oeuvres make us know. If we look for these violent changes, rather than staying with certitudes and overspecialized concerns, we shall have to promote—more and more—the teaching of literature, and of language. On the other hand, literary critics should also renounce the too-current posture of the splendid aesthete. They have to learn what the disciplines say, if they want to approach the upheavals of literature. We are all students, and forever. In the sense I just evoked here, literary studies are no discipline (if they ever had been). They are an indiscipline, a commitment to rebellion in thought—and a vital place for productive doubt in the humanities. It is obvious that it is not all literature. But if our question is the discourse that scholars are able to construct about and after literature, I believe that the elaboration of such an indiscipline could be enough. At least for now—of course. Cornell University Notes 1 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Notion of Literature,” New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1973): 5–16. 2 To each section of this article corresponds a different body of texts. “Literature Comes Afterwards” focuses on black francophone writers linked to the negritude movement. The second part explores many authors of the so-called Western tradition (from antiquity to the present) in a comparative way. Throughout “History and Temporal Complication,” I mainly refer to the second part of seventeenth-century France. The last ensemble is devoted to theory and literary criticism (Aristotle, Nicolas Boileau, Jacques Rancière). Variations in languages, geographical origins, and historical dispositions are intended to tacitly question the categories of canon and corpus. 3 Aimé Césaire, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner,” Tropiques (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xix, my translation from the French. 4 Césaire, “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” xix. 5 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl popularized the concept of prelogic mind and primitive thought during the first part of his career. See for instance La Mentalité primitive (Paris: Alcan, 1922). Translated by Lilian A. Clare as Primitive Mentality (New York: Macmillan, 1923).

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6 Césaire,“Entretien avec Aimé Césaire,” xxiii: “l’Occidental privilégie le concept par rapport à l’image et se méfie de cette dernière, privilégie le raisonnement logique par rapport au raisonnement analogique.” 7 Here, I have recourse to the English translation appearing in the bilingual edition of Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence africaine, 1968). 8 I play on the French and Creole words. In Creole, “natif-natal” is expressively redundant. It refers to the place of birth in combining two synonymic substantives having the same etymology (native and natal). 9 “RIDICULOUS AND UGLY” in Césaire, Cahier, 88–89. 10 Birago Diop, Tales of Amadou Koumba, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), originally published as Les Contes d’Amadou-Koumba (Paris: Présence africaine, 1961); Les Nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958). 11 Diop, Tales, 45 (Contes, 49). 12 Diop, Tales, 45 (Contes, 49). 13 Diop, Tales, 68. The French version is more expressive: “Qui suspend son bien déteste celui qui regarde en haut” (Contes, 155). 14 Diop, Nouveaux Contes, 25, 40, 49, 73, 83. 15 Diop, Tales, xxiii (Contes, 12). 16 About weaving, see Diop, Tales, xxiii (Contes, 12). 17 The works of arts that are nonliterary but largely include language (cinema, theater, comics, songs, and so forth) are apt to be partially spoken by literature. On the other hand, such oeuvres are often tied to some historical phases of literature (such as rap and rock and roll, which nowadays perpetuate verses and rhymes outside the realm of contemporary poetry). 18 Ouakam is the birthplace of Diop. 19 See Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 20 Bal, Travelling Concepts, 23. 21 Bal, Travelling Concepts, 33, or 287 (“turning a word into a concept”). 22 The first occurrence of the phrase “word-concept” is Bal, Travelling Concepts, 23. 23 Bal, Travelling Concepts, 333. 24 Extract from The Double Dream of Spring in John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1997), 287. 25 Ashbery, The Double Dream, 287–89: “more than any of you were intended to know,” “when you know,” “they know no other kind but themselves,” “now that newness,” “its none-too-complex ordinances,” “No fishing,” “knowing its day over,” “though you cannot imagine this,” “you know the story,” “this is just a footnote,” “it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew.” 26 Ashbery, The Double Dream, 287. 27 Jean Dorat, Mythologicum, ou Interprétation allégorique de l’Odyssée X-XII et de L’Hymne à Aphrodite (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 12r (original pagination of the edited manuscript). My translation from the Latin. 28 Dorat, Mythologicum, 12r. 29 Dorat, Mythologicum, 12r. “Allegory” appears in the original text. 30 Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939) 15.871 (hereafter cited in text). My translation from the Latin. 31 See Horace, Odes, 3.30. 32 The first part of this chant is a philosophical elucidation. 33 Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 24 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 134 (my translation from the French). On this question, see Laurent Dubreuil, De l’attrait à la possession: Maupassant, Artaud, Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2003).


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34 Hans Georg Gadamer, “The Universal Aspect of Hermeneutics,” in Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 431–48. 35 See Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 36 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 104 (hereafter cited in text). 37 On this point, see Laurent Dubreuil, “The Presences of Deconstruction,” New Literary History 37, no. 1 (2006): 107–17. 38 Attridge, Singularity of Literature, 105. 39 From theories of performance to Alain Badiou. 40 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 701 (my translation from the German). 41 Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 701. 42 We respected chronology in taking together negritude writers in the first part of this article. 43 See the last books written by Florence Dupont. 44 Mitchell Greenberg, Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 268 (hereafter cited in text). 45 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 4, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 326. German edition Die Traumdeutung, vol. 2–3, in Gesammelte Werke: chronologisch geordnet (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961), 323: “das Verhalten des Traumes gegen die kategorie von Gegensatz und Widerspruch. Dieser wird schlechtweg vernachlässigt, das ‘Nein’ scheint für den Traum nicht zu existieren.” 46 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 327; also see 337, 434. “Denial” adapts the original “widersprechen.” Gesammelte Werke, 331; also see 342. 47 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, 268. 48 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 25 (hereafter cited in text). In this quotation, I substitute Racine for Shakespeare. 49 Only four verses are quoted in this chapter. 50 Jean Racine, Phèdre et Hippolyte, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), verse 306. In English, “It’s Venus tense extended on her prey!” in The Complete Plays, trans. Samuel Solomon, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1967). 51 Jean Racine, Britannicus, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, verse 682. In English “The glances you think dumb I’ll overhear” in The Complete Plays, vol. 1. 52 See, for instance, Racine, Britannicus, verses 730, 744, 1004, 1100, 1328. 53 “Lire le Grand Cyrus,” http://www.artamene.org. My translation from the French. 54 Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Countess of La Fayette, The Princess of Cleves: The Most Famed Romance (London: Bentley & Magnes, 1679), 1. French version: “La magnificence & la galanterie n’ont jamais paru en France avec tant d’éclat, que dans les dernieres années du regne de Henry second.” La Princesse de Clèves, vol. 1 (Paris: Barbin, 1689), 1. 55 Madeleine de Scudéry, Clelia, an Excellent New Romance (London: Herringham, 1678), 1. French version: “Il ne fut iamais vn plus beau jour que celuy qui deuoit preceder les Nopces de l’illustre Aronce, & de l’admirable Clelie.” Clelie, Histoire romaine (Paris: Courbe, 1670), 1. 56 Jean Baptiste Henry du Trousset de Valincourt, Lettres à Madame la Marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clèves (Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1678), 5. 57 See “Le Libraire au Lecteur,” in La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves, i–ii. This advertisement does not appear in the first English edition of The Princess. 58 Valincourt, Lettres, 6. 59 See Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 280; Christian Jouhaud, Les Pouvoirs de la littérature: Histoire d’un paradoxe

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(Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 25; Eric Méchoulan, Le Livre avalé: De la littérature entre mémoire et culture (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2004), 9–10; Jacques Rancière, La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998); and finally Florence Dupont, L’Invention de la littérature: de l’ivresse grecque au livre latin (Paris: La Découverte, 1994). The latter is available in English translation: Dupont, The Invention of Literature: from Greek Intoxication to the Latin Book, trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 60 Rancière, Parole muette, 11 (hereafter cited in text). My translation from the French. 61 Aristotle, Poetics, 1.47a (hereafter cited in text). My translation from the Greek. 62 Poiesis (poetry) is linked to the verb poiein (to make). 63 Rancière, Parole muette, 21. 64 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 159–62. The first canto is translated in English by Ernest Dilworth in Boileau, Selected Criticism, trans. Dilworth (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 11–17. 65 Boileau, Selected Criticism, 15 (Oeuvres, 160). 66 Boileau, Selected Criticism, 15 (Oeuvres, 160). 67 See Rancière, Parole muette, 22–27 for the principle of convenance and considerations on speech-acts. 68 Rancière, Parole muette, 28. 69 See Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). I have a deep sympathy with the scholars who seek to represent literature as a mode of knowledge. But literature is both more and less than that. Its singularity rather lies in the disarticulation of rationality and irrationality, of positive and negative knowing.

CONTRIBUTORS Charles Altieri teaches modern poetry and some history of ideas at the University of California—Berkeley. His most recent books are The Particulars of Rapture (2003) and The Art of Modern American Poetry (2006). He is now working on a book on Wallace Stevens and trying to recuperate the concept of appreciation. Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Formalism and Marxism (1979); Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (with Janet Woollacott, 1987); Outside Literature (1990); The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995); Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998); Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Michael Emmison and John Frow, 1999); and, most recently, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004) and New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, 2005). Terry Cochran is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal. Author of Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print (2001), his most recent book is Profession: comparatiste (2007). He is currently finishing up a manuscript on Atta et tous les autres: foi et savoir dans la pensée du sacrifice humain. Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Literary in Theory (2006). Laurent Dubreuil is Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Literatures and the Director of the French Studies Program at Cornell University. His research explores the relations between literary thought and conceptual knowledge (from philosophy to social thought). He is an editorial board member of the journals Labyrinthe and Diacritics. “What Is Literature’s Now?” is a part of a new book project entitled The Indiscipline of Literary Studies. Eric Gans attended Columbia College and the Johns Hopkins University, where he received his doctorate in Romance Languages in 1966. He has taught French literature, critical theory, and film at UCLA since 1969, and written a number of books and articles on aesthetic theory as well as on Flaubert, Musset, Racine, and other French writers. Beginning with The Origin of Language (1981), Gans

New Literary History, 2007, 38: 239–240

New Literary History, Volume 38, 2007 - Table of Contents

The concept of Literature is associated with the emergence of national consciousness around 1800; its master genre is the novel. But in the developing consumer society of the nineteenth century, the novelist’s fiction of authentic life becomes asymptotic to his own, culminating with Proust, whose novel is a series of intermittentnarratives structured only by the ultimate realization of the narrator’s literary vocation. This desultory structure is homologous to that of the blog, the auto-narrative of today’s archival society. But although the ultimate narrative artwork is a series of semi-connected tales, we still need traditional novels and stories that give meaning to the life of desire.

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Dubreuil, Laurent. What Is Literature’s Now? [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF] Subject Headings: ❍ Literature. Abstract: Yes, it is still time to read literature and to write about it. In this essay, I consider the different moments of the literary experience and how diffracted “nows” lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought. If poetical oeuvres always come afterother discourses (and not beforethem, as it is usually said), we need to reinspect the very notions of time and history through the prism of literature. In reading several discrete corpus (from the Francophone negritude movement to Aristotle and Ranciere, from John Ashberry to Ovid or Freud), I show how the literary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of our knowledge should be altered. Altieri, Charles, 1942The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF] Subject Headings: ❍ Literature. ❍ Criticism. Abstract: I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience—its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because it is has now no significant other—our basic task is to characterize fully how sensuousness is achieved and put to work for the imagination. Hayles, N. Katherine.

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What Is Literature’s Now

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