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LEO BERSANI
processes
by which the writer constructs a verbal system of coherent
meanings are irreducibly different from other semantic processes, but
these processes have nothing to do with creating the
content
of mean–
ing, which is given before the work is written and which the critic
extracts as a "truth" about life.
The consequence of this view of literature's specificity is, as we
have often seen, nothing less than the absorption of literature itself
into a discussion of Life. For what can the critic actually talk about?
An
exaggerated respect for literature may, it seems to me, be exactly
equivalent to an impulse to judge literary works on the quality of
the life they presumably express. The peculiar position in which the
literary work is placed .by its being considered as an analyzable object
about which certain very definite things can and cannot be said is
one of an extraordinary devaluation (which is the hidden meaning
of its sanctification) in comparison to every other activity in life.
The remoteness of that "superior order" makes it particularly vul–
nerable to the most ruthless judgments. We are to believe that litera–
ture alone is knowable; but the distinctness of the object in literary
criticism is, I suggest, an illusion created by the distance we arbitrarily
put between ourselves and the work, a distance which makes it pos–
sible for us to think of our systematic interpretations of life as epis–
temological certainties. To put the case extremely, the discussion of
literature is perhaps impossible as long as we continue to believe in
the objective existence of literature. At least as far as modern litera–
ture is concerned, it's certainly no longer possible to think that we
can define the particularity of literature in terms of the genres of fic–
tion, drama or poetry; nor are most of us naive enough to think that
words in a literary work are any less ambiguous and symbolic than
they are in ordinary conversation. The most intelligently stated ob–
jections to modern writing often frankly reveal what has perhaps
always been behind our cherished notion of the privileged status of
art: the desire to separate literature from life so that we may possess
the supposed "meanings" and "values" of life in artifacts whose forms
miraculously immobilize experience.
This would naturally be an unfair summary of modern Ameri–
can and English criticism, about which the French, as you might
expect, are abysmally ignorant. The most convincing case for the
existence of a discussable literary object has of course been made not
in the halls of the Sorbonne, but in the studies of twentieth-century
