Gans, Qu'est-Ce Que La Lit Aujourd'hui?
Gans, Qu'est-Ce Que La Lit Aujourd'hui?
Gans, Qu'est-Ce Que La Lit Aujourd'hui?
Eric Gans
I
n 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
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
36 new literary history
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.
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.
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