Qu'est-ce que la littérature, aujourd'hui?

Eric Lawrence Gans

New Literary History, Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 33-41(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.2007.0019

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New Literary History, 2007, 38: 33–41

Qu’est-ce que la littérature, aujourd’hui?

Eric Gans

In 1947, Sartre published a little book entitled Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What is literature?) whose central idea, which became very influential, was that prose was “transparent” to its meaning and was

therefore an appropriate vehicle for making what analytic philosophers call “truth claims” about the world—a view that made every novel into a roman à thèse—whereas poetic language was “opaque,” conveying the poet’s subjective intuitions through its specific configuration of signifiers and their connotations. Sartre’s sympathies lay with the prosateur because his conception of literature, which was in essence that of the Third Republic, put more stake in the ethical message than in its aesthetic integument. Despite this weakening of the aesthetic faith on which the literary edifice ultimately rests, what most strikes us in Sartre’s argument is the critical importance he attributes to literature as the privileged means for conveying this message.

Sartre’s title and the preoccupations attached to it have become alien to us. Those academic entities that formerly thought of themselves as “literature departments” have so far expanded their purview into other cultural and textual areas that a beginning scholar whose intellectual background is largely confined, as was typical until recently, to the study of the classical texts of one or more national literatures would scarcely be able to land a job in one of them. The rise over the past few decades of “area studies” and “cultural studies” as well as the more recent trend toward “postcolonial studies” is among other things a reaction against the autotelic textual analyses of the New Critical era, which even when reading prose focused exclusively on the text’s opacity at the expense of its content. Poststructuralist deconstruction widened the critical horizon to include “nonliterary” texts, but these were almost always high-cultural, most often philosophical. In contrast, the objects that engage these new fields are read less as texts than as documents whose composition is subject to real-world constraints and desiderata, whether or not these constraints are thematized in the documents themselves.

This is not to deny that the lion’s share of the energy driving these developments comes from postmodern victimary politics; the two trends

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are complementary. On the one hand, the victimary trend in academic thought is suspicious of majority domination in cultural as well as political matters, notably including the criteria by which such things as literary canons are constructed; on the other, the exclusive focus on literary or philosophical texts, even if the purpose of deconstructing them be to subvert their legitimacy, can itself be understood as an act of “domination” by the cultures that produce these texts. Thus at the limit even that classic of victimary ideology, Edward Said’s Orientalism, can be reproached with an exclusive concentration on the thoughts and texts of the hegemonic culture rather than on those of the “subalterns” whose cause the author is presumably defending. But the writings produced by the Other are rarely good subjects for text-centered analysis, which would risk putting on display their relative thinness in comparison to the masterworks of the Western “great tradition” on which they in great measure depend. Instead, these works, whether political tracts or novels, plays or poems, tend to be read in a historical context far more densely conceived than that of traditional literary history, let alone the exclusively textual context of the New Criticism. The very dependency of postcolonial writing on Western modes makes it apt for the revelation of (and struggle against) Western hegemony. In contrast, the rival great traditions of India and China or even Islam are seldom touched on in these new branches of study. Not only would immersion in these traditions require a near-lifetime commitment, but by its very nature, serious engagement with another culture is incompatible with the internal dialectic of oppressor and oppressed that is rooted in one’s own.1

This historical and sociological turn has affected both area studies and the study of popular culture within our own society. Although the victimary politics that continues to motivate it is today in urgent need of revision, I consider this turn on balance a healthy development. What-ever one’s original motivation, to take a concrete interest in “subaltern” cultures is to become aware not merely of their victimary history but of their internal pathologies, which cannot simply be blamed on contact with the West. Such awareness is substantially independent of a priori political positions and operates to sensitize us to the real-world problems of these societies, both more intractable and more humanly significant than “textual” ones. Thus the study of the literature of developing coun-tries lets us experience something of the relationship to literature that still existed in our own culture in Sartre’s time. If Western nations have finished evolving and may even be dissolving, postcolonial nations are still bringing themselves into being, and in order to do so, each one seeks to create something that is increasingly treated with irony in the West: a national literature.

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I. The Literary Myth

The earliest use of littérature in its modern sense in the ARTFL database dates from 1634, where it still bears its medieval English meaning of literary culture, as in “he had great literature.” The newer sense of literary productions or writing is first found at the end of the seventeenth century, and in 1734 Voltaire uses the term littérature française. By the turn of the nineteenth century, marked by Mme de Staël’s De la littérature, the term was in common use. Particularly in conjunction with an adjective like française, which refers ambivalently to a language and a “culture,” littérature designates, and thereby helps to bring into conceptual being, a transtemporal national entity into which each new writer is conceived as (and conceives him or herself as) requesting entry. Staël’s book, which brought to France a nascent Germanic tradition of “literary history,” treats littérature from antiquity to the present in a series of chapters about national literatures. Literary consciousness contributed to the formation of national entities, including the as yet purely virtual “German nation.” (Staël’s best known novel, Corinne, ou l’Italie, is centered on the other major stateless European “nation.”) Literature is the most national of the arts for the obvious reason that it is written in the “national” lan-guage and reflects, however perversely, its implicit worldview. It is also the most generic of the arts, requiring no highly specialized talent or technique. Thus the growing salience of the idea of literature gave rise to a significant phenomenon of nineteenth-century culture: the quasi-universal ambition of educated young men, and some young women, to achieve personal salvation through literary authorship. The garrets of Henri Mürger’s bohême were populated with painters and occasional musicians, but they were above all full of writers.

Less obviously, the emergence of the concept of literature corresponds to the rise of the novel to the top of the heap of literary genres. The Italian Renaissance, concerned with “illustrating” the national vernacular, had focused its attention primarily on lyric and epic poetry; the French proved themselves more adept at imitating the former than the latter. Following the sixteenth-century religious wars, the stabilization of early modern Europe restored the classical primacy of the theater. Nicolas Boileau’s neoclassical Art poétique begins with lyric poetry, discusses theater at length, and makes a few obligatory remarks about epic; the novel is mentioned only disdainfully in passing. At the time of Staël’s book, tragic drama remained the highest of literary genres. For Schiller, Hegel, and their contemporaries, the typical mark of sentimental literary modernity (in contrast with the naïve creations of the ancients) is not the modern novel’s divergence from epic but the absence of a chorus in modern theater. Yet De la littérature is already beginning to move away from these

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emphases. Although Staël’s brief discussion of Spanish literature fails to mention Cervantes, she is full of enthusiasm for Werther and she admires the English novel, which she opposes to the French (including Rousseau’s vastly popular Nouvelle Héloïse) as describing les moeurs de la nation (the manners, or “lifestyle,” of the nation). Her novel Corinne itself illustrates this distinction: it presents Italy as a classical, public space, almost as a locus for tourism, whereas the private settings of the scenes situated in England (Corinne, we discover, was born an Englishwoman) convey an intimate sense of place.

As the nineteenth century advanced, the limitations of the theater as the standard-bearer of national literature became increasingly apparent. The modern nation is a virtual rather than concrete entity that operates more powerfully through representations shared by ordinary individuals in their homes than by those performed for an elite in a public spec-tacle. The nationalism of postrevolutionary market society reflects and reinforces the nodal nature of the intensified human interactivity of the marketplace; the relative autonomy of national markets creates a need for general literacy in a uniform national language. The individual in market society is not bound by the ineluctable fatalities of classical tragedy but by contingent obstacles thrown up by encounters with rival desires knowable only through worldly experience. If theater was well adapted to revealing the paradoxes inherent in traditional, ritual-based societies, the novel is more suited to exploring market society’s unpre-dictable dialectic of desire and resentment. Only the mediating voice of an “omniscient” narrator could make comprehensible the characters’ experience of this newly opaque world. The novel alone is long and detailed enough to convey a nation’s distinctive “density of life”; to its specificity of language corresponds a specificity of institutions, attitudes, customs, and objects.

The possibility of what was once called “literary evolution” depends on the symbiosis of a literary genre with a social structure such that as the structure matures and reveals its inchoate possibilities, the genre “evolves” to reflect these possibilities. The nineteenth-century evolution of market society from its early stages to the beginnings of consumer society had room for two series of such attempts, in lyric poetry and in the novel. The evolution of both genres roughly corresponds to that of the most general attitudes of the “bourgeois self” as it maneuvered to define its own niche in a world permeated by the values of exchange, but it is the novel alone that situates the self concretely in this world.2

The use of the novel to convey this density was a recent development. There is a vast difference between Laclos near the end of the eighteenth century and his admirer Stendhal a generation later. Les liaisons dangere-uses is a masterpiece but it is not a national work like Le rouge et le noir, or

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the novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, Theodor Fontane, Benito Pérez Galdós, or Alessandro Manzoni. The works of the great nineteenth-cen-tury novelists seemed to embody the notion—or the myth—of a national literature as a set of immortal masterpieces, what Matthew Arnold would call later in the century “the best that has been thought and said.” The transition from Balzac’s fascinated discovery of the arcana of the mod-ern socioeconomic order to Flaubert’s cynical denigration of the values of the market in both economic and political terms does not signify a withdrawal from market society so much as a more nuanced relationship to it. Emma Bovary’s consumerism reflects a new stage of the market economy in which we all participate, and where bankruptcy and suicide are relatively rare. Frédéric Moreau, the protagonist of Flaubert’s later masterpiece, L’éducation sentimentale, survives life’s disillusions with his adolescent dream unfulfilled but imaginarily intact.

Yet Emma’s and even Frédéric’s experience of the world are not quite that of the novelist himself. The final step in that progression was taken by Marcel Proust, who is no longer hostile to the exchange system but indifferent to it except as a mediator of the interpersonal attitudes and postures that constitute the self’s “lost time.” Considered as late as the 1960s as the eccentric creator of an idiosyncratically beautiful but flawed work, Proust has become the principal literary icon of the twentieth century.3 Unlike England, Spain, Italy, and Germany with Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe, France long lacked a “superwriter” who could serve as a universal point of reference for its national literature. Racine, who had held this position in the era of French neoclassicism, was chased from his throne by the Romantics, who found him wanting in the sublime fecundity of Shakespeare and the other national writers. The throne stood vacant for nearly two centuries, but today Proust is its unchallenged occupant. More books have been written about Proust than any other French writer, including those who lived centuries before him. Yet Proust, who lived at the very end of the heyday of European nationalism, is scarcely a “national writer” at all. His narrator’s deci-sion to leave the world and begin writing is pointedly situated in the aftermath of World War I, which destroyed for good the intellectual comforts of the nation-centered nineteenth century. Even more than his contemporary cosmopolitans Joyce and Kafka, Proust is not just a national but a transnational writer. Indeed, the degree to which Proust is identified with the generic idea of “literature” has come to rival that of Shakespeare himself.

During the several decades following the publication of Du côté de chez Swann in 1913, the time required for Proust to scale the literary summit, the educated class continued to believe (at least in their youth) in the nineteenth-century myth of literature. This myth was both universal and

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national, as we are reminded by the semi-ironic ambition of every young writer in the United States to write “the great American novel.” By the time we realized that Proust had already written the great transnational novel, and that his own weakly narrative, “intermittent” life story was the last word in the aesthetic construction of the bourgeois self, we had lost our faith in literary salvation and, with it, in literature as a living and motivating category.

II. The Archival Culture4

It is the archival aspect of contemporary society that compensates us for the loss of the literary myth. The practice of recording our words and actions is fast becoming automatic. Soon all our e-mails will be saved for posterity, if they are not already. Video cameras may soon record our every public move, perhaps even our private ones. The more petabytes and exabytes5 of storage we acquire, the more the fact that we are no longer obliged to throw anything out is converted into the legal obligation to save it all. If God in our culture has sometimes been envisaged as a cosmic Santa Claus who records all our thoughts and actions in order to determine who is naughty or nice, today the human world is in the process of embodying his memory capacity, if not his moral judgment; there is already enough room on an ordinary hard disk for the name of every human being in the world. The archival universe constructs an afterlife, neither Heaven nor Hell, where we are all immortal by default. In a society in which everyone is assured of immortality, we all seek fame as well, but our quest need not be mortal like ourselves. Since each archive entry is increasingly more complete and once compiled, goes on forever, we can envision reality shows of the future that will tap the posthumous record, an “American Idol” chosen from voices recorded long ago. We can’t all be famous, even for fifteen minutes, but we can console ourselves with the thought that even after death we will remain potentially famous.

Complementary to the universal archive and chronologically anticipat-ing it, there have emerged more specific substitutes for literature: the personal Web page and its variants such as MySpace and FaceBook, and most importantly, the blog. Not content to let the soulless system write our story for us, we are increasingly tempted to organize it for ourselves by composing on a daily basis a running account of our various activi-ties. What was formerly the province of diaries meant to be seen only by their creator and perhaps a few intimates now resides, universally accessible, on the Internet. Such writings put us at the antipodes of the myth of Literature to which only the most gifted and dedicated could

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aspire. The blogger is likely to be gainfully employed or in the process of preparing for gainful employment, but his day-to-day activities need not be conducted with the Napoleonic drive of a Julien Sorel or even a Raskolnikov—who today might well be bloggers themselves. The personal blog typically records a series of incidents and reflections each connected to what precedes less by a “plot” than by the simple inertia of existence; over time we typically deal with the same people, engage in the same activities, think similar thoughts, and these evolve “historically” without any special effort to construct them as a history. Some of these Internet narratives have a commercial edge, touting the sale of stories or songs or videos; some provide technical advice or political wisdom; some solicit romance, fleeting or permanent—and in each group, some attract, un-predictably, an ephemeral mass audience and sudden fame. Each blog that enters the blogosphere, whether posted on a lark or shrewdly targeted, joins a mass market for attention and possibly more substantial rewards. All are, in one form or another, narratives of individual lives.

When we examine what there is about Proust’s unique novel that allows it to escape the twin excesses of solipsism and naturalism, we discover in the author’s and by extension the narrator’s attitude toward experience a curious anticipation of our own. By maintaining the ambiguous status of his life-experience as both wasted time and material for art, Proust was a forerunner of the bloggers of today. His novel comes closer to the form of a blog than any other great work of literature. When we compare A la recherche, as per the common cliché, to a cathedral, we are pointing up its similarity to an edifice whose construction may continue for centuries but that from the beginning (once the roof is put on) can be used as a place of worship. A cathedral is a work in progress defined in advance by its sacred end. Because a work of literature is built only with words, Proust’s novel was able to fulfill its formal design from the beginning through the virtual construction of the protective “roof” that is the concluding promise of the protagonist’s salvation through art. As a result, the individual elements of the novel are not designed as a con-tinuous narrative that depicts the unfolding of a single or perhaps dual plot. The narrator’s faith in his literary vocation holds the book together at the expense of the full engagement of his desire in the world that would provide his life and his book with a coherent story line; even the more concentrated sections that deal with his relationship with Albertine describe a series of discreet incidents, intermittent as is, finally, their rela-tionship as a whole. Proust’s novel, although full of ironic coincidence, all but lacks the novelistic tension between life’s linear course and the impingement of often unpredictable events that threaten to perturb or destroy it. No doubt the Proustian narrator’s unconcern for either eco-nomic goals or anything resembling marriage and family is the product

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of his privileged social situation; but this is just another way of saying that the protagonist is maximally close to embodying the author’s total devotion to the literary myth that motivates his narrative. Flaubert’s final, caricatural heroes, Bouvard and Pécuchet, “authors” like himself, begin their story only on retirement.

At a certain moment the visible passage of time on his friends’ faces makes Proust’s protagonist realize that his and every personal history constructs itself willy-nilly by the mere fact of human mortality. It is then that he decides to write his novel, so to speak the equivalent of publishing his blog in a more permanent form. The fact of being the first person to conceive a blog as a novel, or rather, to conceive the novel as a lifelong blog, explains the extreme care with which Proust refined and elaborated each “entry,” all the while never really departing from its desultory overall form.

If this analysis is pertinent, then Proust’s novel, which until recently had never appeared particularly modern in comparison with the avant-garde efforts of Joyce or the nouveau roman—or even of André Gide in Les faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), which during my undergraduate years was admired as a daring modernist experiment—is now seen to have followed the most advanced conception of all. Proust realizes the ultimate degree of fragmentation that narration can sustain without, by arousing and frustrating the reader’s expectations, recalling and rein-forcing traditional narrative conventions in the very act of transgressing them. Proust’s blog-narrative may not follow a conventional plot, but it does not shirk from telling stories and has no desire to confuse us by refusing to distinguish dreams, hopes, and memories from “real” events. Each entry tells its tale as clearly as possible; the blog as a whole has no plot other than its existence within a life-trajectory to which only the blog-novel can lend significance. By the time we become aware that this is all the immortality almost any of us can hope to achieve, it is too late for us to emulate Proust—but not too late to read his novel.

I believe Proust’s blog-novel will remain unique. Precisely because the Internet and exabyte storage let us all accede painlessly to immortality, not only will no one have the tenacity to imitate Proust’s lifelong devo-tion to his oeuvre, but even if he did, no one else would want to read the result. The absolute novel is already written.

Yet a world where the literary myth survives only in muted forms is not a world without literature, merely a world where literature knows its place, a world of stories that we need not believe in as the universal story. As recent events keep trying to tell us, the survival of our technologically superior civilization is not a foregone conclusion. Nor does its capacity to make every detail of our lives immortal make it any easier for us to

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sacrifice these lives in its defense. Although in times that allow us to cultivate the illusion of perpetual peace, traditional narratives may strike us as failing to convey the paradoxical richness of our experience of self and other, times of war provoke in us the need to contemplate and on occasion, to emulate, tales that give meaning to our mortality.

University of California—Los Angeles

NOTES

1 I am reminded of a campus debate a few years ago over whether to impose a “diversity requirement”; as proposed, the requirement would have been satisfied by a course on Chinese-American literature, but not by a course on Chinese literature.2 In this respect, Baudelaire’s evolution from lyric poetry to prose poetry in Le spleen de Paris (The Spleen [depression/resentful frustration] of Paris) is less a broadening of the powers of the poetic than a sign of its limitations; the more concretely “Parisian” Baudelaire becomes, the more the prose poem resembles a short story. It is significant that the poetry, in verse and in prose, of Baudelaire’s major successors abandons the attempt to define a “realistic” social space, and that the later poetry that does so was subject to parody by the “Zutistes” in the form of vieux Coppées.3 René Girard’s article, “Où va le roman?” French Review 30 (January 1957): 201–6, after a disapproving look at the contemporary novel, ends prophetically: “If I may hazard a prediction in conclusion, I will say that the novel will recover its equilibrium and its depth [only] when it discovers Remembrance of Things Past.”4 The chief ideas of this section emerged from discussion with my Proustophile archivist wife, Stacey Meeker.5 One petabyte = one quadrillion or 1015 bytes; one exabyte = one quintillion or 1018 bytes, one million terabytes.