Literature, Theory, and Common Sense
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Literature, Theory, and Common Sense
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Overview
An engaging introduction to contemporary debates in literary theory
In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naïve. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature—including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter—have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense.
The book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal?
As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691268347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2024 |
| Series: | New French Thought Series , #5 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Literature, Theory, and Common Sense
By Antoine Compagnon
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2004 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07042-1
Introduction
WHAT REMAINS OF OUR LOVES?That Poor Socrates had only a prohibitive Demon; mine is a great approver, mine is a Demon of action, or Demon of combat. -Baudelaire, "Assommons les pauvres!" ["Let's Beat Up the Poor!"]
To parody a famous expression, "The French have no head for theory." At least not until the upsurge of the sixties and seventies. Literary theory then had its hour of glory, as if the faith of the convert had suddenly allowed it to catch up with nearly a century of foot-dragging in a split second. French literary studies were unfamiliar with Russian formalism, the Prague circle, and Anglo-American New Criticism, to say nothing of the stylistics of Leo Spitzer, the topology of Ernst Robert Curtius, the antipositivism of Benedetto Croce, Gianfranco Contini's criticism of variants, the Geneva school and the critique of consciousness, or even with the deliberate antitheory of F. R. Leavis and his Cambridge disciples. Weighed in the balance against all these original and influential movements that occupied the first half of the twentieth century in Europe and North America, the French had only Valéry's "Poétique" [poetics]-the title of the chair he occupied at the Collège de France(1936) and an ephemeral discipline whose progress was soon interrupted by the war, and then by Valéry's death-and perhaps the ever-enigmatic Fleurs de Tarbes by Jean Paulhan (1941). In this work, Paulhan moved haltingly and confusedly toward the definition of a general, noninstrumental definition of language-"All is rhetoric"-a stance that Decon-struction was to rediscover in Nietzsche around 1968. By the end of the sixties, René Wellek and Austin Warren's handbook, Theory of Literature, published in the United States in 1949, was available in Spanish, Japanese, Italian, German, Korean, Portuguese, Danish, Serbo-Croatian, modern Greek, Swedish, Hebrew, Romanian, Finnish, and Gujarati, but not in French. It made its appearance in France only in 1971, under the title Théorie littéraire, one of the first books in Éditions du Seuil's collection "Poétique," and it has never been published in paperback. In 1960, shortly before his death, Spitzer cited three factors to explain this French foot-dragging and isolation: an old feeling of superiority bound to an unbroken and eminent literary and intellectual tradition; the general spirit of French literary studies, always marked by a nineteenth-century scientific positivism in search of causes; and the predominance of the scholarly practice of explication de texte, that is, an ancillary description of literary forms preventing the development of more sophisticated formal methods. Though it is really part of Spitzer's point, I would gladly add the absence of a curriculum in linguistics and a philosophy of language, comparable to those that had invaded universities in German- and English-speaking countries from the time of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap, as well as the adherence to a weak hermeneutic tradition, which had been overturned in quick succession in Germany by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
Then things swiftly changed-in fact, they began to move just when Spitzer pronounced his diagnosis. And by a very curious reversal that may well give us pause, French theory found itself from one moment to the next on the cutting edge of literary studies around the world. It was as though it had dawdled only to surge ahead; or perhaps such a gulf suddenly breached had allowed it to set the world ablaze with an innocence and an ardor that created the illusion of an advance during those wonderful years of the sixties that would last, in fact, from 1963, the end of the Algerian War, until 1973, the time of the first gasoline shortage. Around 1970, literary theory was in full swing, and it was exercising an enormous attraction on the young people of my generation. Under various labels-"new criticism," "poetics," "structuralism," "semiology," "narratology"-it shone in full force. No one who lived through those magical years can remember them without nostalgia. A powerful current was sweeping us all along with it. In those times, the image of literary studies sustained by theory was seductive, persuasive, triumphant.
This is no longer quite the case. Theory has been institutionalized, transformed into method, it has become a minor pedagogical technique often as stifling as the explication de texte, which it once attacked with such verve. Stagnation seems to be inscribed in the scholarly fate of all theory. Literary history, an ambitious and attractive young discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the same sad evolution, and the new criticism has not escaped it. Since the frenzy of the sixties and seventies, when French literary studies caught up with and even surpassed others in the area of formalism and textuality, there have been no major developments in theoretical investigation in France. Should we blame the monopoly of literary history on French studies, which the new criticism did not manage to shake to its depths, but only momentarily masked? This explanation-originally Gérard Genette's-seems weak, for the new criticism, even if it did not knock down the walls of the old Sorbonne, was solidly incorporated into the curriculum of France's national education, especially in secondary teaching. This may well have been precisely what made it so rigid. It is impossible today to pass an entrance exam without mastering the subtle distinctions and jargon of narratology. A candidate who cannot say whether the bit of text in front of him is "homo" or "heterodiaegetic," "singulative" or "iterative," or is in "internal" or "external focalization," will not pass, just as once he would have had to distinguish an anacoluthia from a hypallage, and to know the date of Montesquieu's birth. To understand the uniqueness of higher education and research in France, we must always come back to the historic dependence of the university in relation to the competitive recruitment examinations for teachers of secondary education. It is as though before 1980 candidates were given enough theory to renew pedagogy: a little poetics and narratology to explain verse and prose. The new criticism, like Gustave Lanson's literary history several generations earlier, was rapidly reduced to a few recipes, tricks, and tips for shining in the exams. The theoretical momentum was arrested from the moment it provided a little extra science to the sacrosanct explication de texte.
In France, theory was a flash in the pan, and the hope formulated by Roland Barthes in 1969-that the "'new criticism' must quickly become a new fertilizer, in order to make yet another afterward"-does not seem to have been realized. The theorists of the sixties and seventies found no successors. Barthes himself was canonized, which is not the best way to keep a work alive and active. Others recanted and devoted themselves to projects that were rather distant from their first loves. Some, like Tzvetan Todorov or Genette, went over either to the side of ethics or aesthetics. Many have returned to the old literary history, especially to the rediscovery of manuscripts, as evident in the trend toward so-called genetic criticism. The review Poétique, which is still in circulation, publishes the exercises of epigones for the most part, as does Littérature, another post-'68 organ that was always more eclectic, welcoming Marxism, sociology, and psychoanalysis. Theory has found its place, and it is therefore no longer what it was: it is there in the sense that all the literary centuries are there, where all the specialties rub shoulders in the university, each in its place. It is domesticated, inoffensive, it awaits students at the appointed hour, its only exchange with the other specialties or with the world is through the intervention of those students who wander from one discipline to the next. It is no more alive than other approaches now, no longer empowered to say why and how literature must be studied, and what is currently relevant or at stake in literary studies. Nothing has replaced it in this role, and no one studies literature much anymore.
"Theory will come back, like everything else, and we will rediscover its problems the day when ignorance has receded so far that it will produce nothing but boredom." Philippe Sollers announced this return in 1980, in the preface to the reissue of Set Theory, an ambitious volume published during the autumn following May 1968, its title borrowed from mathematics and bringing together the names of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and the whole Tel Quel group, the spearhead of theory then at its zenith, with perhaps a whiff of "intellectual terrorism," as Sollers recognized after the fact. The tailwind of theory was a reason for living. "Develop theory so as not to fall behind in life," Lenin had decreed, and Louis Althusser claimed it for himself, calling the collection that he edited for Maspero "Theory." In this series, published in 1968, the stellar year of the structuralist movement, Pierre Macherey published Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, a work in which the Marxist meaning of theory (a critique of the ideology and the advent of science) and the formalist meaning (an analysis of linguistic procedures) met in the arena of literature. Theory was critical, even polemical, or militant-as in the disturbing title of Boris Eikhenbaum's 1927 book, Littérature, Théorie, Critique, Polémique, translated in part by Tzvetan Todorov in his anthology of the Russian formalists, Théorie de la littérature, in 1966. But theory was also ambitious to establish a science of literature. "The object of theory," Genette wrote in 1972, "would be not only the real but the totality of the virtual literary." Formalism and Marxism were the two pillars that justified research into the nonvariables, or the universals, of literature: the consideration of individual works as possible works rather than real works, as simple exemplifications of the underlying literary system, more accommodating than nonpresent and only potential works; and the attempt to reach their structure.
If theory as ambiguous as Marxism and formalism was already outmoded in 1980, what about today? Are we ignorant and bored enough to want theory back again?
Theory and Common Sense
Is an assessment or survey of literary theory even conceivable? And in what form? Isn't this, in principle, an attempt to do the impossible if, as Paul de Man maintained, "the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists of the impossibility of its definition"? Theory, then, could be captured only by the grace of a negative theory, on the model of the hidden God that only a negative theology manages to articulate. This is raising the bar awfully high, or pushing the very real affinities between literary theory and nihilism rather far. Theory cannot be reduced to a technique or a pedagogy-it sells its soul in the shop windows, in multicolored book jackets displayed in the bookstores of the Latin Quarter. But this is not a reason to make it a kind of metaphysics or mysticism. Let us not treat it as a religion. On the other hand, is literary theory merely of "theoretical interest"? No, not if I am right to suggest that it is also, perhaps basically, critical, oppositional, or polemical.
It seems to me that theory is truly interesting and authentic, not in its theoretical or theological aspect or in its practical or pedagogical uses, but in the savage and rejuvenating struggle it led against received ideas in literary studies, and in the equally determined resistance with which those received ideas opposed it. An assessment of literary theory might be expected, first, to offer its own definition of literature (arguable by definition and indeed the first theoretical common place: "What is literature?"); then to pay a quick homage to ancient, medieval, and classical literary theories, from Aristotle to Batteux, remembering to take a detour by way of non-Western poetics; and finally to list the different schools that have shared theoretical attention in the twentieth century: Russian formalism, Prague structuralism, American New Criticism, German phenomenology, Geneva psychology, international Marxism, French structuralism and post-structuralism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, neomarxism, feminism, etc. Numerous manuals exist in this format; they occupy professors and reassure students. But they illuminate a side that is only incidental to theory. They even denature it, or pervert it, for what really characterizes theory is quite the contrary of eclecticism, namely its commitment, its vis polemica, as well as the impasses into which it charges headfirst. The theorists often give us the impression of raising very sensible criticisms against the positions of their adversaries; but as those adversaries, comforted by their ever clear conscience, refuse to give up and continue to hold forth, the theorists too begin to hold forth and push their own theses, or antitheses, to absurd lengths, and as a result annihilate themselves before their rivals, who are delighted to see themselves justified by the extravagance of their opponents' position. Just let a theorist speak and interrupt him from time to time with a slightly mocking "Oh, really?" and he will burn his boats under your very eyes!
When I entered the sixth form at the little lycée Condorcet, our old teacher of Latin and French, who was also the mayor of his village in Brittany, would pose the following questions about each text in our anthology: "What do you make of this passage? In what way is the writer's vision original? What lesson can we take away from it?" There was a time when we believed that literary theory had swept away these boring questions for good. But the answers pass away and the questions remain. They are always approximately the same. There are some that always recur, generation after generation. They were asked before theory, they were asked even before literary history, and they are still asked after theory, almost identically. To such a degree that one wonders if a history of literary criticism exists, as there exists a history of philosophy or linguistics, punctuated by inventions of concepts like the cogito, or the indirect object. In criticism, the paradigms never die, they accumulate, they coexist more or less pacifically, and they play forever on the same notions-notions that belong to popular language. This is one of the motifs, perhaps the central motif, the feeling of going over the same ground, that seems inevitable in the face of a historical picture of literary criticism: nothing new under the sun. In theory, one spends one's time trying to cleanse terms of current usage: literature, author, intention, meaning, interpretation, representation, content, background, value, originality, history, influence, period, style, etc. This is also what people have been doing in the field of logic for a long time now: they have been carving out of ordinary language a linguisitic region endowed with truth. But then logic was formalized. Literary theory has not managed to get rid of ordinary language in speaking about literature, the language of readers and booklovers. And when theory retreats, the old notions reassert themselves unharmed. Is it because they are "natural" or "meaningful" that we never escape them for good? Or, as de Man believes, because we ask only to resist theory, because theory does harm, it bruises our illusions about language and subjectivity? One would say that today, almost everyone has felt brushed by the wing of theory, which is undoubtedly more comfortable.
Is there nothing left, then, or only the minor pedagogy I have described? Not at all. In its full flowering, around 1970, theory was a counter-discourse that challenged the premises of traditional criticism-objectivity, taste, and clarity, as Barthes summed them up in Criticism and Truth, in the magic year 1966. It was these premises, the articles of faith of universal "criticial verisimilitude," that he wanted to replace with a "science of literature." Theory comes about when the premises of ordinary discourse on literature are no longer accepted as self-evident, when they are questioned, exposed as historical constructions, as conventions. In its beginnings, literary history also based itself on a theory, in the name of which it eliminated the old rhetoric from literary teaching, but this theory was lost from sight or toned down to the extent that literary history was identified with the institution of scholarship and the university. The appeal to theory is by definition oppositional, indeed subversive and insurrectional, but the fate of theory is to be transformed into a method by the academic institution, to be "recuperated," as they say. Twenty years later, what is at least as striking, if not more so, as the violent conflict between literary history and literary theory is the similarity of the questions they each posed in their enthusiastic beginnings, and notably this one, which is always the same: "What is literature?"
The permanence of questions, the contradiction and fragility of answers. It is always relevant, then, to go back again to the popular notions that theory wanted to eliminate, the same notions that have been resurrected since theory has run out of steam, in order to review the oppositional responses it proposed, but also to try and understand why these responses did not settle the old questions once and for all. Perhaps theory, in its battle against the Lernaean hydra, pushed its arguments too far and they backfired. Every year, before new students, we have to go back over the same figures of good sense and irrepressible clichés, the same few enigmas or commonplaces that mark ordinary discourse on literature. I shall examine some of the most resistant, and around these we can construct a sympathetic presentation of literary theory as it hurled the full strength of its justified fury against them-in vain.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: What Remains of Our Loves? 1Theory and Common Sense 4
Theory and Practice of Literature 7
Theory, Criticism, History 9
Theory or Theories 10
Theory of Literature or Literary Theory 11
Literature Reduced to Its Elements 12
CHAPTER 1: Literature 15
The Scope of Literature 17
The Comprehension of Literature: Function 19
The Comprehension of Literature: The Form of Content 21
The Comprehension of Literature: The Form of Expression 22
Literariness or Prejudice 25
Literature Is Literature 27
CHAPTER 2: The Author 29
The Thesis of the Death of the Author 30
"Voluntas" and "Actio" 33
Allegory and Philology 36
Philology and Hermeneutics 39
Intention and Consciousness 43
The Method of Parallel Passages 45
"Straight from the Horse's Mouth "48
Intention or Coherence 51
The Two Arguments against Intention 54
The Return to Intention 58
Meaning Is Not Signification 59
Intention Is Not Premeditation 63
The Presumption of Intentionality 65
CHAPTER 3: The World 69
Against "Mimesis" 70
"Mimesis" Denaturalized 73
Realism: Reflection or Convention 76
The Referential Fallacy and Intertextuality 78
The Terms of the Dispute 82
Critique of the Anti-mimetic Thesis 83
The Arbitrariness of Language 88
"Mimesis" as Recognition 92
Fictional Worlds 97
The World of Books 100
CHAPTER 4: The Reader 102
Reading Sidelined 102
The Resistance of the Reader 105
Reception and Influence 108
The Implied Reader 108
The Open Work 113
The Horizon of (Phantom) Expectation 115
Genre as a Model ofReading 116
Freewheeling Reading 117
After the Reader 121
CHAPTER 5: Style 123
Style in All Its Conditions 124
Language, Style, Writing 129
Down with Style! 131
Norm, Deviation, Context 135
Style as Thought 138
The Return of Style 140
Style and Exemplification 142
Norm or Aggregate 144
CHAPTER 6: History 146
Literary History and History of Literature 148
Literary History and Literary Criticism 151
History of Ideas, Social History 153
Literary Evolution 156
The Horizon of Expectation 157
Philology Disguised 161
History or Literature? 164
History as Literature 167
CHAPTER 7: Value 169
Most Poems Are Bad, but They Are Poems 170
Aesthetic Illusion 173
What Is a Classic? 176
On the National Tradition in Literature 180
Saving the Classic 182
The Last Plea for Objectivism 186
Value and Posterity 188
In Favor of a Tempered Relativism 191
CONCLUSION: The Theoretical Adventure 193
Theory and Fiction 194
Theory and "Bathmology" 195
Theory and Perplexity 196
NOTES 199
BIBLIOGRAPHY 211
INDEX 217
What People are Saying About This
"A strong and eloquent book that skillfully combines intellectual rigor and personal reflection. The debate between theory and common sense provides a kind of dramatic tension that makes for lively and pleasurable reading. In its balanced approach and in its breadth, this is one of the best books I know of for introducing students to literary theory."—Robert Morrissey, University of Chicago