【朗西埃】文学的误解

Literary Misunderstanding The first misunderstanding may well concern the very notion of misunderstanding. Indeed anyone who consults a dictionary will notice a strange discrepancy between the meaning of the notion set out in the dictionary definitions and the meaning that emerges from the various citations. The Tre´sor de la langue franc¸aise states two meanings of the term as follows: ‘a divergence of interpretation regarding the meaning of words or acts leading to disagreement; a disagreement brought about by such a divergence’.1 The definition is clear and draws upon a world of familiar experience in which misunderstandings are perceived as a matter of erroneous interpretation that can be traced readily to some ambivalence in the signs to be interpreted. ‘It is just a misunderstanding’, as they say. In these terms misunderstanding appears to be the most benign form of the difficulty of understanding and understanding one another. It is often thought that this derives from the absence of a precise list of signs and their respective meanings. So we like to dream of a form of communication, devoid of misunderstandings, that would result from a language that defined its object unequivocally. We also like to think that evil spirits thwart the use of this language and capitalize on misunderstandings: all kinds of deception are inflicted on us in this way, via the manipulation of words and attitudes with double meanings that lead us to perceive the opposite of what we should. But the same also applies to those who make their living from words whose very value depends on their inaccessibility; those who employ obscure words to disguise the banality of what they have to say, and who, as soon as you presume to challenge them on what you have understood— that is, something banal— retort that there has been a misunderstanding. Thus misunderstanding appears well circumscribed and the notion, if we believe the Tre´sor de la langue franc¸aise, has been fixed since the sixteenth century and thus coincides with the stabilization of the French language. How then can we explain the strange examples cited in the same article to illustrate this business of language ill-understood? I quote: Jankelevitch: ‘It is the trickery of love which gives rise to the most serious misunderstandings’. Martin du Gard: ‘At the root of all passionate love there is, inevitably, a misunderstanding, a generous illusion, an error of judgement, a misconception of the one by the 92 Paragraph other.’ And Zola on the unhappy marriage of the engineer Hennebeau in Germinal: ‘Their discord had grown, aggravated by one of those strange misunderstandings of the flesh which can freeze the warmest heart: he adored his wife, and she had all the sensuality of a voluptuous blonde, but already they slept apart, ill at ease with each other, quick to take offence.’2 Here it can no longer be said that the misunderstanding has occurred simply because one of the partners has misinterpreted the attitudes or speech of the other. The misunderstanding is between two fleshes. This is not merely a euphemism to indicate the incapacity of a male organ to respond to the sensual provocations of a voluptuous blonde. More radically than this, Zola’s sentences suggest an essential link between the failure of relations between two bodies and the capacity for playing with the words ‘the sensuality of a voluptuous blonde’, an essential connection between the felicity of the phrase and the impenetrability of the bodies, between the power of speech and the lack at the heart of the ‘sexual relation’. The dictionary does not bother to note— let alone explain— this discrepancy between two misunderstandings, between a simple matter of badly read signs and a non-relation constitutive of the very capacity to emit and interpret signs. The misunderstanding of misunder- standings finds its home in precisely that shady zone separating the dreamed-of list of words’ meanings from that specific form of usage in which the felicity of the words serves to speak the suffering of bodies: literature. Not that the Tre´sor de la langue franc¸aise fails to invoke literature as an example of misunderstanding. But it is there in a form that offers a peculiarly restricted understanding of literary activity. If Zola stages a lack at the very heart of the relation between language and sexuation, a commonplace borrowed from Thibaudet refers literary misunderstandings back to a less offensive common- place: ‘misunderstanding and hostility between artists and society cannot be denied.’ The fact remains that this cliche´ is still an enigma. Neither Thibaudet’s sentence nor the dictionary definition helps us to grasp why misunderstanding and hostility are taken as synonymous or why he has chosen to term the familiar spectacle of mutual incomprehen- sion between artists and grocers ‘misunderstanding’. It is true that the matter has been discussed at length elsewhere. But this has been at the expense of turning misunderstanding into a sham. I am thinking of course in particular of the famous passages from What is Literature? where Sartre tries to define the status of literature in the era which, according to him, begins with the clash of June 1848: ‘Indeed, from Literary Misunderstanding 93 1848 on �. . .� it was taken for granted that it was better to be unrec- ognized than famous, that success— if the writer ever achieved it in his lifetime—was to be explained by a misunderstanding.’3 Sartre defines misunderstanding as the feature of an epoch, the epoch of literature, in which literature asserted itself as literature through a number of paradigmatic figures: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarme´, Rimbaud, Proust. . . But he defines it in a very singular way that is at once both minimal in its content and radical in its form. Radical in its form: authors do not want to be understood. They refuse to serve the ends assigned to literature by a bourgeois public. For good measure they refuse to serve any ends at all, beyond those of art itself. Minimal in its content: the argument about misunderstanding does not refer back to any structural specificity through which the work might evade comprehension. The idea of the misunderstanding is merely postulated and is a corollary of translating the attitude of writers who assume on principle that even when they have been admired it has not been for the real reasons that make them admirable. This ‘misunderstanding’ is therefore perfectly well understood. Artists, as portrayed by Sartre, strive not to be understood, to say the minimum possible, to say nothing. Not serving the ends of the bourgeois oppressor (les fusilleurs) is also a way of establishing a certain distance, which helps artists affirm their identity and by which the artistic elite distinguishes itself from the vulgar masses.4 This suits everybody: the artists, who are pleased that the fusilleurs are defending their assets; and the fusilleurs, who fear nothing so much as a literature that might reveal to their victims the real state of the world and their subordination within in. By this account, the misunderstanding appears to be fictitious. It would be the fiction that seals the tacit contract between the literary elite and the socio-political elite at the expense of the public, that is, in the final analysis, the people. This presumes that the elite is in agreement about its actions. Yet any such agreement is far from apparent. Indeed, it would seem that those closest to each other do not at all agree about what they are doing. Here for example is a letter addressed to a writer by a very close friend about other close friends. Flaubert writes to George Sand: You talk of ‘my friends’, you talk of ‘my school’. �. . .� The writers I often see, and those whom you mention, all cherish the things I scorn and care very little for the things that haunt me. �. . .� Goncourt, for instance, is so pleased when he 94 Paragraph has picked up a word in the street that he can paste into a book, whereas I am contented if I have written a page without assonances or repetitions.5 It is no longer a question here of a misunderstanding advanced in order to protect the elite soul from any risk of being understood by the vulgar masses. The failure of communication occurs precisely between those writers who make up the elite. Talking about misunderstanding is a way of discussing the very texture of the book in particular and the ‘literary’ more generally. These misunderstandings are not about what one group or another ‘means to say’. They are about what writers do in the very passages describing characters or situations devoid of any enigmatic quality. Take another example: the misunderstanding that pits Henri Ghe´on and Proust against each other with regard to the description of the church at Combray. Ghe´on bemoans the overload of detail: ‘M. Proust will not even spare us Mme Sazerat with her little box of cakes; it is enough for him to remember having seen her once in church!’6 Proust’s response is well known: You think that I mention Madame Sazerat because I don’t dare omit that I saw her that day. But I never saw her �. . .� By placing end to end the little impressions I experienced during the impassioned and lucid hours I was able to spend over the course of various years at the Sainte-Chapelle, Pont-Audemer, Caen and Evreux I have pieced together the stained-glass window. I placed Madame Sazerat in front of it in order to enhance the human feel of the church at such-and-such an hour. But all my characters and all the circumstances of my book are invented with a particular meaning in mind (dans un but de signification).7 Thus the misunderstanding bears neither on a linguistic ambiguity or obscurity, nor on an enigma to interpret. Ghe´on is not even bemoaning the length of Proust’s sentences. And Madame Sazerat has no symbolic significance. The misunderstanding is not hermeneutic, in its habitual sense. It concerns a trivial matter: the status to be accorded to the presence of an individual on a kneeler. Thus, all in all, the misunderstanding is, in the strict sense of the word, a miscalculation (me´compte), a falling-out over an account (compte). For Ghe´on, there is a being too many in that scene. But his critique of this being-too-many stems from a misunderstanding of this particular being-there. Let’s be clear. Ghe´on is not naı¨ve. He is not the victim of the disdain of Don Quixote before the puppets of Master Peter. Nor does he believe, like the Duc de Guermantes, that novelists go around salons Literary Misunderstanding 95 with nets in which to catch the people they meet there. He knows that Madame de Sazerat is a fictional character. And this is precisely why he sees her as superfluous in this scene. Fictional characters have a number of traits that distinguish them from real-life beings. Authors are not obliged to depict them in every chance encounter and with all the particular characteristics that pertain to the concrete existence of real individuals. Encounters and characteristics should be pared down to what is useful to fiction. This is precisely the mistake Proust makes. He is the one who confuses reality and fiction. There is no fictional need to name the character on whom a ray of light refracted by the window falls— especially if her name is Madame Sazerat, a character known to the reader only as the presumed owner of an unidentified dog. Thus the critic is bound to conclude: if this character, whose presence is fictionally inconsequential and who could be substituted for any other, is there on the kneeler, it is because she was already there, because the author did not know how to withdraw her from a composition shaped not by any novelistic necessity but by his own memories. The novelist’s failing is therefore the complete opposite of the one articulated in Sartre’s critique. Sartre highlighted the taste for rarefaction, for holding back, the nihilistic desire to say nothing (rien dire). Whereas Proust’s failing seems rather to be his inability to hold anything back, to prevent himself from saying everything. But to say everything (tout dire) is to be unaware of the sort of ‘(every)thing’ that a work of art constitutes, that is, an organic individual, possessed of all the constituent parts necessary for life and nothing more. As for that organic satisfaction we get from a work where we take in all its parts, its form at a glance, he stubbornly declines to provide it. The time that anyone else would have used to let a little light into this dense forest, to open up spaces in it and provide vistas, he gives to counting the trees, the various kinds of species, the leaves on the ground. And he will describe every leaf in the way it differs from the others, vein by vein, front and back. That is his delight and his affectation. He writes ‘pieces’ (morceaux). (Ghe´on, ‘Review of Swann’, 106) Proust’s miscalculation thus creates an opposition between two ideas of the whole. On the one hand the ‘animal’, endowed with all the required limbs, assembled in the unity of a form. On the other hand, the ‘vegetable’ infinity, an endlessly fragmented totality. And the critic is assigning a social aetiology to this latter pathology of writing; if the writer gets lost in the detail, it is because he is a ‘gentleman of leisure’. He has all the time in the world to create his ‘pieces’, because 96 Paragraph he has all the time in the world to look at stained-glass windows, to wander through the world, to observe people and so on, because he shares in the time of the privileged. Proust, as we know, dismantles this argument point by point. Literature for him is the complete opposite of a ‘stock list of sensations and the inventory of his knowledge’ (Ghe´on 106). There is not a single excess body in his book. Everything therein has been invented to serve the purpose of a fiction that must demonstrate an idea. Finally, he has no leisure. He is not a dilettante who hangs around in salons and takes home sketches, but an invalid, shut away, for whom the clock is ticking. This response is not simply a personal justification. Broadly taken, it expresses the misunderstanding about literature. Proust was not the first to have heard the argument about the ‘living creature’ (bel animal ) broken up into a heap of bodies.8 The criticism had already resounded in the ears of writers who were not all of the same filiation: Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert and others. The same reproach was made to all those writers who invented this new form of the art of writing that we call literature: incapable of leaving things out, they would impede the individuality of the whole by weighing it down with ever more detail. Listen for example to Pontmartin commenting onMadame Bovary: ‘A hideous villager wants to be bled: description of the dish, the arm, the shirt, the lancet, the spurt of blood. Monsieur Homais, the bel esprit pharmacist, buys some little cakes in Rouen: description of the little cakes �. . .� A beggar holds out his hands beside a main road: description �. . .�.’9 The argument relates to literature as such, and not to the lifestyle of this or that writer. It is about a politics of literature. At the heart of this politics is the relationship between saying everything and a certain political and social state. Ghe´on interprets this relationship in the bluntest of terms: if you do not stop, it is because you do not have to, because you are privileged and have time. Pontmartin, as a good reactionary, goes to the heart of the matter. The problem for him is not the time that writers may or may not possess in accordance with their wealth; it is the symbolic space of the coexistence of bodies. The new novel falls short of the unified totality because it expresses a structuring of this space that does not leave room to remove obstacles to the totality. Conversely the traditional novel benefited from the space created by a clearly stratified social hierarchy: The character embodying all the refinements of birth, education and the heart left no room for secondary figures, still less for material objects. This exquisite world Literary Misunderstanding 97 saw ordinary people only through the doors of its carriages and the countryside only through the windows of its palaces. This left wide and fertile scope for the analysis of the finest sentiments, which are always more complicated and harder to decipher in the souls of the elite than amongst the lower classes. (Pontmartin, 321–2) In this sense, Flaubert is the archetypal writer of a time where everything exists on the same level and where everything must be described. A tide of beings and things, a tide of superfluous bodies floods the novel. This tide has a political name. It is called democracy. And in this sense, Proust’s novel is democratic, as is Flaubert’s. There are two social regimes that produce two regimes of writing. In this sense, the murky forest bemoaned by Ghe´on is the effect of a new form of social vegetation. As Taine taught us, there are two main types of society corresponding to two types of tree-filled space: on the one hand the old-style arrangement of parks with grand vistas and majestic trees. On the other hand the modern jumble of shrubs squashed up against each other, suffocating, and preventing the air from circulating and the onlooker from gaining an overview. The novels of both Flaubert and Proust bear witness to this new regime of society and of writing, this indistinction of places and times called democracy. We know that Flaubert, like Proust, had a response to this. If he chooses to count all the leaves it is not because he is a democrat, but quite the opposite, it is because, since they are all different, the leaves refute democratic uniformity. On a more profound level, the literary population requires an altogether different unit of accounting from the democratic population, a different form of individuality which is no longer molar but molecular. ‘Human’ individualities, defined as the unity of a body animated by a soul which determines its overall form and its particular expressions and postures, are replaced by pre- human individualities, resulting from the arbitrary mingling of atoms: encounters between a blade of grass, a swirl of dust in the air, the flash of a fingernail, a ray of sunshine, the elements which, in daily life and in the tradition of artistic representation, translate into the feelings and opinions of individuals. In evoking the Flaubertian response to the question of the leaves, my intention has not been to add a further twist to the misunderstanding about misunderstanding, but rather to try to get to the heart of the miscalculation. The issue is not a hermeneutic one. The literary miscount is not a matter of linguistic ambiguity. It is about bodies and counting and the relation between the body count (le compte des corps) and the tally of words and meanings. Anti-democratic pamphleteers 98 Paragraph would like to reduce the matter to a question of population density: too many equal bodies all tumbling inexorably into the novel’s net. But the excess is not numeric. It is defined in relation to a supposed harmony between the body count and the tally of words and their meanings. We should not be comparing the social density of bodies with their density in the novel. Rather, we must compare the orderliness or disorderliness of the relationship—between bodies and words— that governs two forms of fiction, the political and the literary. Literature is concerned with democracy not in terms of the ‘rule of the masses’ but as an excess in the relation between bodies and words. Democracy means firstly the invention of words by means of which those who do not count make themselves count and which blur the assigned distribution of speech and silence that constitutes the community as ‘living creature’ or organic whole. Democ