BACHELARD TO BARTHES
219
accuses Barthes of neglecting. Thus, in order to preserve the hallowed
notion of a "modest Aricie" in
Phedre,
he simply ignores the accu–
mulated brutality of eleven verses in which this sweet captive makes
it abundantly clear that what draws her to Hippolyte is the prospect
of making him suffer. Hippolyte is the appetizing object of attack in
the play, the tender virgin whom both Phedre and Aricie are out to
rape. But for Picard, Aricie's love is simply there, an unmotivated,
fleshless absolute, and if she mentions the pleasure of subduing Hip–
polyte, it's simply in order "to justify" (
!)
her feelings. In short, at
its worst the religion of the literary object goes hand in hand with a
shocking indifference to literary texts, and this for the obvious reason
that Picard's critical objectivity only feebly conceals a view of litera–
ture as both banal and sublime, as a triumph of reason and order
over a formless "source" called life.
The central issue between Picard and Barthes (which both see,
but which Picard is unable to argue effectively) is the
specificity
of
literary language. To what extent are its structures different from
those of other organizing systems, from, say, those of dreams or of
myths? Barthes doesn't deny literature's specificity, but it could be
said that, like other new critics in France, he neglects formal and
textual particularities in order to repostulate them within a general
theory of human signs. The implications of
this
are more radical
than it might at first seem. In what I have called the religion of the
literary object, the uniqueness of literature may in fact be affirmed
in order to deny it. The relation between literature and life, for
many people far more perceptive than Picard about individual works,
is thought of in terms of an absolute distance and, paradoxically, an
identity of substance. On the one hand, the critic is not supposed to
use the procedures and vocabulary of nonliterary disciplines; psycho–
analysis and linguistics, for example, can't tell us anything about what
is specifically "poetic" in a poem. The most interesting things we can
say about literature are, in this view, inapplicable to anything out–
side literature. On the other hand, since literary creation obviously
takes place within life, a connection has to be imagined between the
two, and perhaps the only way to protect both the relevance and the
remoteness of literature is to think of it as a sublimated copy of life.
There is something which precedes the literary work and which the
writer lifts up, transforms into what Picard calls the "superior order"
of art. We end up, then, with a curious combination of ideas: the
