le plaisir du texte

As a sort of antidote to Lukács, I plucked Le plaisir du texte off my shelf and read some choice selections. It’s quite a wonderful little book. Possibly I wanted to go back to Barthes because of an essay I read yesterday or the day before about Barthes and Richard Rorty, which I found myself disagreeing with at nearly every turn. It’s from a very recent issue of New Literary History—and it seems to me to miss several things. The argument seems to be that at the very end of his life, Barthes gave up the playful self-fashioning he’d been engaged in, and turned to a traditional account of literature and écriture as speaking to deep and enduring human questions. This means that he isn’t at all the icon of ironist self-fashioning he apparently was always thought to be, or at least that he rejected the constant play of language in the late 1970s, just before he died.

Now, there’s a reason Compagnon calls Barthes an antimoderne. We should not take his postwar Marxism as a profession of faith (or, if we do, we shouldn’t let it get to us). We should remember that the Mythologies were newspaper columns. They were fun—still are. He isn’t in any sense, I think it’s safe to say, committed to any particular politics. He is, in a certain sense, elitist. There’s plenty to say about that. I won’t go on about it all. Barthes is near to my heart, but I’d like to stay lucid about his successes and his failures.

Le plaisir du texte is from 1973—translated very quickly, in 1975. Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading was translated into English in 1978. Not so long ago I read a piece, also in New Literary History, by Brook Thomas about Iser’s reception in the US, and why it hadn’t gone so well. I’ve read some of Thomas’s other stuff, and been quite impressed. I liked this article as well, but now that I think on it, I don’t remember him mentioning Barthes at all. And if I can imagine myself back in 1980, trying to find a theorist who would help me talk about the reader and the text and their relation...well, there’s no context. Barthes is much sexier. Also shorter. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing intellectual history should be able to take into account when they ask ‘why not?’ questions (which, anyway, are always dangerous to ask).

As a side note, continuing to post ideas had-too-late about the Rancière paper: Barthes loves the idea of inattentive reading, of skipping around. His model of textuality and readerly action is about as far as you can get from Jacotot. Could they talk to each other at all? Lastly, having nothing to do with Barthes: the Jacototian idea that everything is in everything, that any act of language contains all language---this is the totalizing impulse that Rancière otherwise more or less stays away from, or might be. Again, bears some more thinking.

Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel

Today I read Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. It’s a fascinating book. I’d started it some time ago in an airport (because it’s slender and light), which was a terrible idea. I always wonder, when I like one part of a book like this better than other parts, if it’s an artifact of my attentiveness or energy while reading rather than the text itself. In this case, though, I’m fairly certain that it isn’t. I like the last chapter of the first part best. It was breathtaking—dense, energetic, captivating. The first chapters were a warm-up, and the whole last part is typological, which bores me pretty badly. Of course I’m not ready to give any kind of broad summary—I don’t think it’s that kind of book. But three things to point out.

First—in the preface, written in 1961, he talks about how his “conception of social reality was at that time [circa 1914] strongly influenced by Sorel” (18). The index (which is actually pretty good) gives this as Albert Sorel. This is obviously wrong—it’s my guy, his cousin Georges. I’ve seen this before: in Compagnon’s Brunetiere book, for instance, there was a similar mistake in the index. In that case, I think it really is minor. Compagnon certainly knows the difference, it’s just a confusion on the part of whoever did the copy-editing, the reference is anyway an aside, nothing to do with the main line of discussion. (I realize I’ve fallen to quibbling over index entries) Lukacs is different. Sorel’s influence in the period was great, and if it isn’t surprising that Marxists in the 1930s and later (Sartre, say, very influentially in 1961) want to disown him—well, it’s still a politically motivated rewriting of history. Indeed, later on in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs says things that to me echo a Sorelian understanding of the structure of description as such: “the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality” (88). I would make the argument that this is Sorel’s understanding of the relation of social description (meaning) to social reality. Lukacs, then, is translating into the literary-philosophical sphere the epistemological moves Sorel made regarding social science. Of course, even wikipedia mentions that Lukacs knew Sorel. I should get a good secondary source on Lukacs. It’s fascinating. I’ve no choice now but to read History and Class Consciousness next.

Number two very fast: Brownstein’s argument about the novel enacting the becoming of the heroine—the convergence of realism and idealism (empirical woman and feminine ideal) in the body of the heroine—finds a real precursor here, “the inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself” (80). Now, it’s quite possible that B actually cites L, or more likely, that there’s a much larger critical tradition making this observation. I’ve returned her book to the library, or I’d look. Anyway, naive me was surprised.

Last, having to do with something I wish I’d put in my paper on Ranciere. David Bell, in a recent essay on Rancière, uses the word ‘tact’ to describe his ability to balance philosophical generalization and historical specificity (or something to that effect). Lukacs uses the same word—or the translator does—to describe the novel’s balancing act between various impossible completenesses. Zizek also is obsessed with politesse, which is almost the same thing as tact. I guess it’s interesting because it is a widespread, totally common phenomenon of a code of behavior with sometimes strict enforcement methods, which absolutely cannot be expressed or codified. It’s a sub-legal legal order. I suppose Norbert Elias would have a thing or two to say about manners—but tact is a bit different. Hmm. To consider, at any rate.

Kristin Ross

In the process of getting inspired to write a paper on Jacques Rancière, I looked back at Kristin Ross’ 2002 May ’68 and its Afterlives. I read this book in French two years ago, and had a very different reaction to it then. It is much more interesting after one has actually read Rancière, and especially Badiou. The conception and construction of the book are impressive. I wish I had time to go through it more carefully.

becoming a heroine

Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. [1982]

Since I’m apparently engaged in trying to bring it back, I thought it would be good to read some ‘personal criticism.’ To that end: Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine which is more or less the same age as I am. Brownstein’s basic argument is that the English novel ‘in the Richardsonian tradition’ takes the form of an empirical female struggling to become the ideal woman—a heroine. In Clarissa, a foundational case for Browstein, there is a long (very long) struggle, which ends in death, sealing Clarissa into her idealized status. More often, the story ends with a perfect marriage—but it’s the same story. Brownstein’s point is that ‘we’ can learn about the crippling dynamic of ideal and reality that makes up the ideology of gender (she doesn’t put it quite like that) in the contemporary world, by indulging ourselves and reading these novels. Indeed, the point is to take seriously the desire that many women apparently have to read these ‘serious’ novels. What do these novels do? They teach the reader about how to live up to—or at least struggle toward—the ideal. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a privileged example for Brownstein because in her reading of the final lines, there is an explicit disavowal of the narrativized ideal—Dorothea does not achieve apotheosis, but rather splits like a river at its delta, and allows her influence to reach the wider social world in a thousand small ways. She escapes the fate of the heroine, suggests Brownstein, and becomes a human. Brownstein’s book is large, so I’ve just picked out a few examples. Virginia Woolf’s Ms. Dalloway also has a special status for her—the tradition meditating on itself.

I enjoyed reading Becoming a Heroine. The early 1980s really were a different time. The book should be filed under reader-response as well as personal criticism. The problem is that the reader—and I know this is a trite objection—really is only Rachel Brownstein. If we allow Brownstein’s ‘women’ any larger meaning, then to my mind it becomes essentializing and useless very quickly. (Today, it seems to me, we’re suspicious of attempts to speak for others, even housewives). However, as an analysis of a person reading, I think there’s really not a great deal to object to. In a way it’s more honest than, for instance, Iser’s phenomenological analysis. One of my colleagues has been talking a great deal recently about ‘the dialogic mode’ of criticism—it seems a perfect way of differentiating Brownstein and Iser. She is dialogic, that is, she asks: I read it like this, do you read it this way too? Iser has no such questions.

Also, and no doubt there are good ideological reasons for this, I can’t help but be surprised that Brownstein isn’t more focused on professional self-awareness. She is so careful (it’s a bit too clean for me, actually) about setting out how her father’s ideal of womanhood influenced her choice of career—why not more reflexivity about graduate school? I can see many problems there. Not least that Brownstein positions herself as non-academic.

I’m glad to have looked at this book, though I need not to get caught in the 1980s. Perhaps they could be a small specialty of mine? One of my sub-subfields?

quatrain

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

From Philip Larkin, "Money"

Compagnon on Brunetiere, pt 1

Compagnon, Antoine, Connaissez-Vous Brunetière ?: Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis. (Seuil, 1997).

I’m still in the middle of reading this, but I wanted to pause and record some impressions. Above all, confusion about how and to what purpose Compagnon constructs his books. Compagnon is an immensely productive and interesting scholar—I’ve read various essays, most of his book on Proust, chunks of Les Antimodernes, and some of Troisième Republique des lettres (I’m going to have to go through that one with some care in the coming weeks). He seems to be interested in many of the same things I am (what hubris). For instance, since working on Maurras I’ve been impressed by Albert Thibaudet—and Compagnon has set himself the task, apparently, of sparking a renewal of interest in this interwar critic. [See the two brand-new and hefty collections, Réflections sur la littérature and Réflections sur la politique, both 2007, Gallimard Quarto and Bouquins, respectively--so it's pretty obvious which one has more prestige.] I’ve gone over what seem to be the most important texts in his polemic with Naomi Schor about the French canon—and I must say that he seems to me both conservative and correct in his opinion that the canon as manifest in coursework and publications in French studies is smaller than it should be. I’m less certain about the “shrinking” part. It’s painful to admit, but I think he gets the better of Schor.

At any rate, as I said, I’ve just begun this book. The introduction is sure-footed, and makes a case for investigating Brunetière and looking more critically at the intellectual positions which radicalized themselves into for-or-against during the Dreyfus affair. But then, and I suppose the book will be as much about her as about Brunetière, we get 40 pages on the history of the family of “Mme Alexandre Singer, née Ratisbonne.” The family is interesting (uncle Alphonse famously converted to Catholicism in Rome...Compagnon points out that William James discusses the case at some length—I’m reasonably certain that I remember this, at least, from Varieties). Indeed, the history of Jews in 19^th century France is inherently fascinating. It’s cosmopolitan, but also speaks volumes about the vicissitudes of Republican ideology. Indeed, I’ve also today just finished a relatively careful reading of Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Demands of Liberty—and admit with some chagrin that only now do I realize that he doesn’t mention (possibly even once) the case of the Jews. I know very little about it. Perhaps it isn’t relevant to the problem of intermediary organizations.

Perhaps the remainder of Compagnon’s book will justify or explain what seems now like a totally unnecessary narrative side-track.

urban revolution

Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. South End Press, 1998. [2nd edition]

If through some weird turn of fate I ever end up teaching a 20th century US course, or, more likely, anything on the ideology of revolution, this book will have to be on the syllabus. I'd have to be a bit better educated about various macroeconomic history issues...