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LEO BERSANI
is even further reinforced by some of the most fully rationalized, dis–
ciplining conventions in the history of literature.
But, as I have said, the demonstration is possible only if the
literal sequences and contexts of events are ignored. And a context is
precisely the opportunity to allow a particular event to subvert a
structure.
If
we tend to spatialize the world in fixed patterns, we
also adapt this tendency to innumerable occasions-in literature and
in life-which we recognize as structurally unassimilable, which we
can only "take in" and "attack" obliquely. That delicate adaptation
defines our style, our tone and, in literature, the "voice" of a par–
ticular passage. An interest in tone, about which the French have
absolutely nothing to say, is an interest in our astonishing capacity to
question and be ironic about the theories and interpretations which
make the world familiar to us. The French, proud of their reputa–
tion as the great nation of "style," no longer have anything to tell us
about the enriching confusions which personal voice or style intro–
duces into a structuralist system. Particular occasions, events in time,
are the contents of literature, and it might almost be useful to re–
introduce the notion of content in literary criticism to designate that
which may indeed obscure the underlying structures, but which as a
result makes a book or a life richer than the orders which it proudly
but somewhat pathetically invents. Content immediately becomes a
function of form only in our most frightened contacts with the world.
The best French criticism is, to be sure, a useful antidote to the
naive indifference to theory in the best Anglo-Saxon criticism. My
own hesitation in this discussion between paraphrase and personal
assertion undoubtedly reflects the difficulty I have found in bringing
together very different critical perspectives in the writing of practical
cirticism. It would, I feel, be interesting to study literature as a
struggle between self-immobilizing themes and structures and the
pull away from such themes toward a greater variety of response to
the world and to language. But I don't see how such a struggle could
ever be described in terms of an exact science, and I see even less
why we should sacrifice time, particularity, content and tone in order
to make such a science possible. The French seem to have taken up
the banner of a very primitive rage for intelligibility. But France
has always been known as the country of reason, and it is perhaps
only natural that it should be the Children of Reason who illustrate
its derisions and its madness.
