What Is Literature's Now

What Is Literatures Now?
*
Laurent Dubreuil
f course, it is impossible. To define literatureif by this we mean finding a sense that is fixed or given once and for allnobodyll 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 Todorovs 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 clarifywhich, 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 literatures 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: 4370
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new literary history
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 privilegedand 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 literatures social vices was often associated with the concern for the lack of rational definition. For instance, Todorovs 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 literatures 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 discoursefar 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 literatures now?
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linked to a specific time of literary criticism, from 1973 to 2007. It also allows us to understand literatures 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 literatures 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 phenomenons 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 authors 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 Aim Csaires works. When, in 1970, Csaire 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 vates4 to plunge into his own
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automatic fund, Csaire goes further than Andr Breton did. So there appears a combination between art and primitive thought.5 To Csaire, negritude is a primitivism that adopts analogical reasoning6 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. Csaire wrote the famous Cahier dun 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 Csaires 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; Csaire adds a third term to the comparison: the Nigger. Thus, Csaire 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, Csaire 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 literarys posteriority. We are facing a contradiction that we must keep as a contradiction, one that may also permit the oeuvres signification. But for now, we shall only admit this: what we name quotation or intertextuality is a clue to the literatures 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 tellingand 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 literatures 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 Diops 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 wholike many nineteenth-century Homeristsemphasized 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 Lopold Sdar 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 child15 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 Koumbas tales are introduced as a vast and displaced responseto 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 Diops volumes as collections of childrens 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 cultureanother 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 weavers art in Ouakam, Senegal,18 for the global understanding of Diops self-description as a rhapsode. Yet, the metamorphosis of the griots performance and colonial report into literary tale written in French transforms the very matter of these discourseswhereas wool and weave stay the same and independent of Diops 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 cultureat 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 coercions 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 specificitybut also no divergence between love songs and comics, no real culinary art nor manual techniquesif 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. Bals 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 knowledge23 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.
Readings 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. Besidesspecifically in literaturetexts construct a figuration of reading that incites us to take one path or another. Such a figuration emerges from a preface, a chapters 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 Ashberys 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 nowsa problem closer to ours, as a matter of fact. Whatever the solution to the enigma is in Ashberrys 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 Mans 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 Pliade 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 Ulyssess comrades use to fill their ears refers to the oeuvres own materiality, since one wrote in wax.27 Hence, the words themselves and the parts of a discourse are nothing but wax.28 So Ulysseswho orders his comrades to use wax but who personally wants to hear the Sirens songbecomes 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 heros attitude is a model for the interpreter who should read texts by combining scrupulous attention to philological detail with metapoetical comments. To many, Dorats explanation might seem less convincing than de Mans. 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 readers and/or the writers): it is susceptible to occur here and there. But the very form figuration takes relies on the texts historical situation and its readers moment. Let us show it briefly with Ovids Metamorphosesthis 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 Nothingincluding time, gods, violencewill abolish (15.872) such an oeuvre, Ovid adds. If the poets 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 (15.8756). While so many characters of Ovids 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 accountin 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 Romes 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 worlds 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, Ovids 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 transformationsin 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 Artauds approval, in spite of his own claim for verified readers33 only. Literary reading is something other than reading cookbooks. In recipes also, one finds the readers 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 nonrelativistsand to put it too briefly, I am one of themmust 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 Toms 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 affirmationat the very heart of literatureof readings 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 deconstructions 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 possibilityeven 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 manuscripts 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 literatures 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 undecidability38 than a significant contradiction. We recognize literary texts as being totally past and thoroughly present. In proposing that literatures singularity, each time it is read, lies in performance (106), Attridge chooses to confuse presents presence and contradictory co-presence. Though he is aware of literatures 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 readers. 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 Robespierres mobilization of Frances Roman heritage. We are now apt to see that Benjamins 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 1793in 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 literatures 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 literatures aprs-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, literatures now requires a supplementary upheaval affecting the very manner of thinking contemporariness. Pound also comes after and before Sophocles or Franois 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 beingand 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 wordsthat are oursI 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. Genesiss narrative cannot be adapted, thus we shall count days and millennia according to the Bible and refuse Charles Darwins theory of evolution. Karl Marxs 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 Hegels 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 readers 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 Racines theater was written many centuries before the beginning of psychoanalysis and was not meant to be in accordance or discordance with Sigmund Freuds 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. Racines 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 Racines 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 Racines 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 Freuds 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. Freuds 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 no45and 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. Greenbergs 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, Greenbergs 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 dnouement is not automatically the highest point of intensity in a text. In Phdre, is the suicide of the eponymous character more of an achievement than the declaration scene, Thses 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 Phdre 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 Blooms 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 Shakespearesince the best of his doctrine has already been said by the Bard. The chapter devoted to Shakespeare in Blooms 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, literatures 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 Racines verse Cest Vnus toute entire sa proie attache50 seems a grammatical inversion. Attache has lost a great part of its erotic value; even in todays 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 Racines 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, Racines 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 Jentendrai des regards que vous croirez muets51 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 our.52 The verse plays on words and creates mute eyes that are still audible for Neros 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 languages 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 Scudry, 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 Scudry) is related to the social position of women in Frances Ancien Rgime. 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 Scudrys 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 Clines 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, dont 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 readings now. If we seek to respect past and present, we need to abandon both phantasms: readers free play as well as historical unicausality. Literature exhibits historys 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 Fayettes 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 Scudrys 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, 154759). 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 Clevess 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 Scudrys and Honor dUrfs 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 Clevess 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 Fayettes 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. Scudrys 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 Scudry. There, she has no particular measure. As much as she is historically classical, she shuns classicisms historical reason. La Fayettes 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 oeuvres 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 Scudry 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 Clevess
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advertisement to the reader.57 Being called Roman, Scudrys fabulous history refers to itself as both a romance (by a play on words) and a narration whose authenticity is assured by Romes 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 Fayettes novel], I believed I was going to read the history of France.58 Ces romans sont bien de lhistoire: 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 Ovids time or during the Grand Sicle? 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 Rancires book La Parole muette. Rancires study is a perfect example of contemporary historical reconsiderations of the literary. Perfect is without irony. I truly believe that Rancire has offered a profound meditation on literature. I also truly believe that Rancires 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 Rancire, 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 Aristotles poetics, Rancire states that in ancient times, the Middle Ages, and the Ancien Rgime, 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, thenin the
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most partpoetry 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 (od ). 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 Rancire 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 oncontrary to Rancires claims. The same phrase of hexametric mimesis contradicts La Parole muette on the second principle, attributed to Aristotle once again.63 Rancire 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, Aristotles 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 Boileaus Art of Poetry (1674) does not celebrate the omnipotence of expressionas literature, Rancire affirms, tends to do. In Boileaus 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 Franois de Malherbe is the one who redeemed . . . our tongue65 (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 mtier is shown by the perfect adequation of words, rhythm, and thought. But this prcis of belles lettres clearly shows that the mode of language and the lingual form are indeed importanteven in the so-called old poetics. The two other principles Rancire 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. Sometimeswhen he speaks of aloof indifference for instanceRancire seems to deny to belles lettres any notion of poetrys lingual nature. In other instances, he speaks of the primacy of fiction (28) or of elocutios 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, Stphane Mallarm, Marcel Proust) is perhaps a little bit too convenient for Rancires historical purpose. In short, there is no change of cosmology, no term to term inversion68 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 Rancires 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? Rancires 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 (17891871). In the name of love for literature and democracy, Rancire 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 literatures 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 Rancire). They remind us that literature should not be taken for granted. It has to be inventedbut 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 Blanchots 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 Gngora Yargote, and Maurice Scve. 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 literatures 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 afterwardsafter 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 dsoeuvrement ends in making an oeuvre leads us to consider literatures affirmation beside any de(con)struction. Such an affirmative force has often been taken for a nave 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 literatures 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 wordsand especially the disciplines that enter into the range of the so-called humanities. To put it simply, one will recognize literatures 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 themafter 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. Literatures 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 literatures negativity, nor suspend all judgment? Perhaps, and wethat is all the Is that we areshould try to invent it. Does it mean that well
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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 theorys 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 literatures 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 promotemore and morethe 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 thoughtand 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 nowof course. Cornell University
Notes 1 Tzvetan Todorov, The Notion of Literature, New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1973): 516. 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 Rancire). Variations in languages, geographical origins, and historical dispositions are intended to tacitly question the categories of canon and corpus. 3 Aim Csaire, Entretien avec Aim Csaire par Jacqueline Leiner, Tropiques (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), xix, my translation from the French. 4 Csaire, Entretien avec Aim Csaire, xix. 5 Lucien Lvy-Bruhl popularized the concept of prelogic mind and primitive thought during the first part of his career. See for instance La Mentalit primitive (Paris: Alcan, 1922). Translated by Lilian A. Clare as Primitive Mentality (New York: Macmillan, 1923).
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6 Csaire,Entretien avec Aim Csaire, xxiii: lOccidental privilgie le concept par rapport limage et se mfie de cette dernire, privilgie le raisonnement logique par rapport au raisonnement analogique. 7 Here, I have recourse to the English translation appearing in the bilingual edition of Csaire, Cahier dun retour au pays natal (Paris: Prsence 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 Csaire, Cahier, 8889. 10 Birago Diop, Tales of Amadou Koumba, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), originally published as Les Contes dAmadou-Koumba (Paris: Prsence africaine, 1961); Les Nouveaux contes dAmadou Koumba (Paris: Prsence 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 dteste 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, 28789: 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 Interprtation allgorique de lOdysse X-XII et de LHymne 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 compltes, vol. 24 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 134 (my translation from the French). On this question, see Laurent Dubreuil, De lattrait 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), 43148. 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): 10717. 38 Attridge, Singularity of Literature, 105. 39 From theories of performance to Alain Badiou. 40 Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 701 (my translation from the German). 41 Benjamin, ber 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. 23, in Gesammelte Werke: chronologisch geordnet (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961), 323: das Verhalten des Traumes gegen die kategorie von Gegensatz und Widerspruch. Dieser wird schlechtweg vernachlssigt, das Nein scheint fr 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, Phdre et Hippolyte, in Oeuvres compltes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), verse 306. In English, Its 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 compltes, vol. 1, verse 682. In English The glances you think dumb Ill 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 nont jamais paru en France avec tant dclat, que dans les dernieres annes du regne de Henry second. La Princesse de Clves, vol. 1 (Paris: Barbin, 1689), 1. 55 Madeleine de Scudry, 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 lillustre Aronce, & de ladmirable Clelie. Clelie, Histoire romaine (Paris: Courbe, 1670), 1. 56 Jean Baptiste Henry du Trousset de Valincourt, Lettres Madame la Marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clves (Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1678), 5. 57 See Le Libraire au Lecteur, in La Fayette, La Princesse de Clves, iii. This advertisement does not appear in the first English edition of The Princess. 58 Valincourt, Lettres, 6. 59 See Alain Viala, Naissance de lcrivain: Sociologie de la littrature lge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 280; Christian Jouhaud, Les Pouvoirs de la littrature: Histoire dun paradoxe
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(Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 25; Eric Mchoulan, Le Livre aval: De la littrature entre mmoire et culture (Montral: Presses de lUniversit de Montral, 2004), 910; Jacques Rancire, La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littrature (Paris: Hachette, 1998); and finally Florence Dupont, LInvention de la littrature: de livresse grecque au livre latin (Paris: La Dcouverte, 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 Rancire, 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 Rancire, Parole muette, 21. 64 Nicolas Boileau-Despraux, Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 15962. The first canto is translated in English by Ernest Dilworth in Boileau, Selected Criticism, trans. Dilworth (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 1117. 65 Boileau, Selected Criticism, 15 (Oeuvres, 160). 66 Boileau, Selected Criticism, 15 (Oeuvres, 160). 67 See Rancire, Parole muette, 2227 for the principle of convenance and considerations on speech-acts. 68 Rancire, 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 CaliforniaBerkeley. 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 Reformers 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 atthe 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 upa manuscript on Atta et tous les autres: foi et savoirdans la pense 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 Literatures 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: 239240
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 novelists 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 narrators literary vocation. This desultory structure is homologous to that of the blog, the auto-narrative of todays 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. Dubreuil, Laurent. What Is Literatures Now? [Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF] Subject Headings: r 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: r Literature. r Criticism. Abstract: I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experienceits 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 otherour basic task is to characterize fully how sensuousness is achieved and put to work for the imagination. Hayles, N. Katherine.
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