socius : ressources sur le littéraire et le social

Première publication dans Poetics, n° 14, 1985, pp. 199-207.

Our expectations from literary history are contradictory; Normative orientation in the
jungle of tradition on the one hand and ‘objective’ knowledge of the changing
functions of literature on the other. In order to manage this double problematic the
author proposes to replace the illusionary narrative of traditional literary history by a
construction taking as a vantage point the historical avant-garde movements.

1. The critique of historical narrative

“Tant que nous pourrons considérer l’histoire (littéraire) comme nous apprenant
directement quelque chose sur la littérature, nous n’aurons rien compris à ce dont il
s’agit”1

Is there any evidence that we need the type of discourse provided by literary histories?
If we look at the histories of national literature written in the nineteenth century, this
may be questionable. The authors of these voluminous books are more interested in
stabilizing national identity, than in giving us knowledge about the subject matter.
There has been valuable criticism of the histories of national literature2; we do not
need to repeat it here. Let us cast a glance at the new social histories of literature
published during the last two decades in France. There is no doubt, these books
provide rich information about the economic, social and political background of the
respective period. But nevertheless the reader remains somewhat dissatisfied with
these works. The reason is, that, often it is hard to know how the author has chosen
his historical material. To put it in other terms, the guiding principle of the historical
account is not transparent. The reader is confronted with a narrator, who gives him
interesting informations but does neither explicitate a problematic nor formulate
alternative answers which could be discussed. Thus the reader lacks the possibility to
verify the account; for the simple reason that a narrative cannot be criticized, except
by another narrative on the same topic. No doubt, the narrative form is one of the
main problems of traditional literary history.

Another problem arises for the reader when the history is written by a group of
specialists, who are concerned with natural sciences, music, book-market, journalism
and literary criticism. All these matters can certainly help us to understand the

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literature of a given epoque, but the juxtaposition of isolated monographs fails to

grasp the interrelation between these domains and the process of literature.

As we recognize the undeniable achievements of the new social histories of literature,

like those edited by Abraham and Desné or Claude Pichois, we, nevertheless, feel
uncomfortable with their discourse. This takes us back to the arguments of those
authors who have criticized literary history or history tout court. Nietzsche criticizes
antiquarian historicism as a discourse hostile to life, slackening the impulse to action. I
do not think that this argument is still a strong one today: (1) it is visibly bound up with
an irrational concept of life, and (2) the conservative culture Nietzsche is fighting
against, has largely withered away. In comparison with Nietzsche, Valery’s attack on
history has proved to be stronger. In his view history is nothing but fiction conceived
by minorities in order to manipulate the masses: “L’histoire et les théories politiques
ou économiques sont des fabrications littéraires qui n’ont d’autre fin et d’autre valeur
que celles de servir d’excitants ou d’aliments aux spéculations et passions
individuelles des minorités qui agitent le nombre et en disposent” (Valéry 1974, Vol. 2:
1356).

From this point of view one can elaborate an ideological critique of the histories of
national literature. But Valéry aims at another target, the legitimacy of this historical
discourse and its claim to provide knowledge. Now, an analysis of Valéry’s Cahiers
could demonstrate that he himself does not stick to his own anti-historical principles
and recurs often to historical explanation. What differenciates his approach from
traditional history is the abandoning of the narrative form. Valéry establishes
constellations, observes their changes and tries to find out the reasons of these
changes. Here we can discover interesting suggestions for writing a new type of a
literary history.

The Russian Formalists have not been mainly concerned with traditional literary
history, which they despised as a loose mixture of morals, psychology and philosophy,
opposing to it the artistic device as the only object of literary science.5

These few remarks cannot exhaust a critique of traditional literary history which
should reveal the presumptions of this type of discourse. Limited to canonized works,
it presupposes a concept of literature and a system of aesthetic norms and these
presumptions are taken for granted without discussion. Now, one cannot ignore that
the concept of literature and the system of aesthetic norms have changed during the

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course of history. The occulation of these changes in traditional literary history is not a
failure that could be easily corrected, it is its essence. Thus the discourse of traditional
literary history is defined by a lack of reflection on its historicity. Because it aims at
stabilizing a given tradition it is inevitable that it neglects its historical presuppositions.
Spelling them out it would counteract its social function. Even authors like Gadamer
who acknowledge the historicity of understanding, do not renounce the idea of a
‘timeless presence’ of the works of art.6

A possible alternative to the traditional literary history which, so far I see, has not been
realized in a consequent way, would be a rigorously positivistic approach, renouncing
all normative claims and aiming exclusively at the account of facts.7 The problem with
the positivistic concept of fact is well known, we need not emphasize it in this paper;
nevertheless, it would be interesting to dispose of a History of the French Novel
established rigorously on quantitative data as for instance mass-reception. Stendhal
and Proust would not necessarily be mentioned in such a book, where Pigault-Lebrun
and Feuillet were leading figures. Although a positivistic literary history could be a
useful rectification of our current ideas of the development of literature, it does not
give a satisfying solution to the problem of writing literary history. Setting aside the
normative aspect, it misses the specific interest we have in reading literary works.

2. The construction of the present

“Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene,
leere Zeit, sondern die von ‘Jetztzeit’ erfullte bildet”8

Obviously our expectations from literary history are contradictory. On the one hand we
are keen on normative orientation in the jungle of tradition, on the other hand we are
extremely sensible to authoritative normative claims and we tend to relativize them by
analysing their function.9 To put it in other terms we expect that literary history links a
quasi-objective knowledge of the functions of literature in bourgeois society with a
hermeneutic perspective orientating our commerce with literary tradition. These
contradictory claims can be seen as an expression of the precarious position of the
arts in bourgeois society since the historic avant-garde movements attacked the
autonomous institution of art. We cannot take for granted that this problem is to be
solved at its best by a new concept of literary history. An alternative strategy of
research may even be more plausible, namely studying the function of literature and
the evaluation of tradition separately. One can argue that once the two issues have

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been separated, it would be difficult to reinstate them again. This problem could be
managed by developing a unifying perspective for the history of the function of
literature and for the reflection on aesthetic evaluation. It is the construction of the
present which helps us to develop such a perspective.

In Sartre's La Nausée the narrator suddenly becomes aware of the fundamental

difference between life and story telling. While things happen, you do not know what
will happen next, the future is always open. That is different with story telling: the
narrator knows the end of the story he is telling and he organizes all the details he
mentions from this point of view, which is different from that of the person who lives
the story. Transfered to history, this signifies that the historian regards the past as the
prehistory of his own present. From the infinite quantity of what has happened in the
past he chooses the moments which help him to understand his time along
progressive or declining lines. This difference between the ‘real’ process and the
historical narrative force us to raise the question whether there is a possibility of
writing history which is not in the same way determined by the end. Hans-Robert Jauss
asks why, in order to do justice to the contingencies of history, the historian does not
imitate the literary techniques of the modern novelists who “destroyed the teleology of
the epic plot”10. As far as I know this proposition has never been taken up. This is small
wonder, when we remember that in his Ulysses Joyce had to concentrate on one day,
in order to grasp the contingencies of every day life and to loosen the ties between the
production of sense and the outcome of the story.

The historian cannot dispense with the ties that bind him to his own present, but he
can explicitate them. Thus he destroys the illusion that historical narrative reflects the
real course of events. Indicating that his starting point is not the Renaissance or the
seventeenth century, but the epoque he is living in, the historian enables the reader to
understand the narrative as a construction. Insofar as the choice and interpretation of
the facts are determined by this point of reference, it is the real beginning of the
narrative. If the narrative is thus revealed as a construction, the illusion that it is a
mere reflection of reality disappears. Such a revealance makes the narrative
criticizable and that would be an important step forward in writing literary history.

I have suggested to sketch out the development of the arts in bourgeois society from
the vantage point of the historical avant-garde movements and their project of
abolishing the autonomous art by integrating it into the praxis of life.13 In the two
cases the historical development of artistic material and the aesthetic evaluation are

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closely intertwined. Thus the decision about value-questions is no longer tied to the
analysis of individual works, but previously made on the level of artistic material. This
is all the more questionable, the more we become aware of the impossibility to shrink
the range of aesthetic material by setting aesthetic criteria, even if these limitations
were legitimized by historical reflection.

The Theory of Avant-garde dispenses with this kind of connection between the
development of artistic material and aesthetic evaluation. For instance, it
acknowledges the prominent place of aestheticism in the development of art in
bourgeois society (insofar as autonomy here defines not only the status of art; but the
content (Gehalt) of the work), but from this it does not deduce a positive evaluation of
aestheticist works. It is the distinction between institution (i.e. the normative frame of
the production and reception of art in a given epoch), artistic material (i.e. the forms
historically charged with meaning) and individual work which permits the loosening of
the link between the development of literature and aesthetic evaluation. Mallarmé
realizes the ‘pure work of art’, of which the possibility was inherent in the autonomous
institution of art and he develops an adequate material for this purpose. The
undeniable impact he exercised on the artistic development, on the level of institution
and on the level of material, says nothing about the aesthetic value of his works. If
diagnostical strength is one criterion of an important work, we will probably incline to
prefer Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror to many texts of Mallarmé.

3. Some consequences

We have pointed out not only some problems of traditional literary history, but also the
specific difficulty of a reorientation of the genre. So I want to finish my reflections with
some pragmatic consequences, without making any systematic claims.

(1) The changes to which the concept of literature is exposed to, should be a main
topic for the historian of literature. The institutionalized concept of literature and its
differenciation into genres fix the frame which determines the function and the impact
of literary works in a given epoch. On this level literary history is a history of the
changes of function(s) of literature.14 But our interest in it is a hermeneutic one, finally
it aims by means of historical analysis at an insight into the possible function(s) of
literature in our society.

(2) The critique of the narrowness of the canon of literary works treated by traditional

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literary history has provoked analysis of mass literature which soon became a
separated discipline. A history of the function(s) of literature had to raise the question
of how the two literatures are related to one another. The relation between ‘high’ and
‘low’ (or with Bourdieu’s terms legitimate and illegitimate) literature is not a stable
one. It is the auratisation of the work of art in the aesthetics of autonomy which
creates the concept of the trivial as the literary evil. And it is not by chance that the
erosion of the autonomous concept of the work or art due to the avant-garde
movements has been followed by an attempt of revaluating what has been
depreciated as trivial literature.15

(3) We have discussed above the problem resulting from the juxtaposition of different
parallel histories. If we call institution the normative, organization the economic
instance regulating the different spheres of literary life17

Another example may elucidate the concept of a plurifolded history: For a traditional
literary history Hugo and Baudelaire are the most important poets of the Second
Empire; the most read lyrical author of the time, however, was probably Musset. This
fact sheds light on the literary life of the epoch; but in order to comprehend its full
meaning we have to establish the constellation between Musset’s success and his
rejection from the most prominent authors of the early modernism. For Lautréamont,
Rimbaud and Valéry a moralizing poem like Musset’s Rolla is an object of unanimous
contempt. Lautréamont’s cynical attitude, Rimbaud’s voyance and Valery’s attack on
what he calls les choses vagues are directed at this type of poetry.

(4) As we have seen, traditional literary history provides only poor knowledge about
literature. The positivistic approach, based exclusively on quantitative data, fails also
to meet our interest in a non-dogmatic discourse on the historical development of
literature, because it sets aside the normative aspect. Our problem seems to be that
we want to assume the perspective of the participant and that of the observer at the
same time. On the one hand we want to practice an emphatic commerce with literary
works, on the other we are keen on getting insight into the functioning of literature in
our society. This contradictory position results from the erosion of the concept of
autonomous art due to the avant-garde movements and still going on today. The
discourse of the avant-garde movements aiming at abolishing the autonomous
institution of art is a thing of the past as well as the discourse of traditional literary
history. Adorno tries to meet this crisis by a canonization of modernism, by
which – despite the critical impulse of his thinking – the aesthetics of autonomy and

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thus the normative core of the dominating institution of art is restored. Bourdieu on
the contrary favours a functionalist approach. He analyses the actions of the subjects
within what he terms ‘the cultural field’ exclusively with regard to the chances of
winning power and prestige and considers the cultural objects simply as strategic
means which the producers use in the struggle for power. None of these two
discourses meet the crisis of the institution of art we are experiencing. We continue to
have normative questions about literature, but at the same time we want to get insight
into the function(s) of literature in bourgeois society. And the two discourses shall be
intertwined in such a way that they elucidate one another.

Whether this task can be tackled best by literary history, may be questionable; one
reason is that till now literary history was supposed to deal with all relevant literary
facts. This claim of completeness produces a conservative gesture of saving values,
corresponding to the narrative as a pseudo-objective genre. Historical construction on
the contrary clashes with the principle of completeness. Related to the present, it
provokes criticism, thus compelling to intertwine the insight into function(s) and the
hermeneutic approach of self-enlightenment. The project would neither aim at a new
aesthetic, nor at a pseudo-objective knowledge about the functioning of literature (or
single genres) within bourgeois society, nor at a supposedly exhausting interpretation
of individual works. It would aim at encouraging a dealing with literary texts liberated
from the idealist metaphysic of art but sticking to the truth content of the idealist
aesthetics, i.e., the criticism of alienation.

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