What Is Literature For?

Tzvetan Todorov

s far back as I can remember, I see myself surrounded by books. Both of my parents were professional librarians; there were always too many books in our house. They were always coming up with plans for new shelving to hold them; meanwhile, the books accumulated in the bedrooms and the hallways, forming fragile piles that I had to crawl between. I quickly learned to read and began to devour classic stories in childrens versions: the Arabian Nights, the tales of Grimm and Andersen, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, and Les Misrables. One day when I was eight, I read a whole novel; I must have been very proud because I wrote in my diary: Today I read On Grandpas Knees, a 223-page book, in an hour and a half! As a student in junior high school and high school, I continued to love reading. It always gave me a shiver of delight to plunge into the world of the writersclassics or contemporaries, Bulgarian or foreignwhose books I now was reading in complete editions. I could satisfy my curiosity, live adventures, experience fright and happiness, without putting up with the frustrations that troubled my dealings with boys and girls of my own age, among whom I lived. I did not know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I was certain that it would have something to do with literature. Would I be a writer myself? I gave it a try: I composed poems in doggerel verses, a play in three acts on the lives of dwarfs and giants, I even started a novelbut I didnt get past the first page. I soon felt that such writing was not my vocation. Without knowing for sure what would come later, I chose my major at the university: I was going to study literature. In 1956 I went to the University of Sofia; my profession would be talking about books. Bulgaria was then part of the Communist bloc, and all humanities disciplines were shaped by the official ideology. Literature courses were half scholarship and half propaganda: literary works past and present were weighed and measured according to the standards of Marxism-Leninism. We were required to show how books represented the correct ideologyor, otherwise, how they failed to do this. Neither believing in Communism nor being especially rebellious, I retreated into a stance that many of my countrymen took: in public, silence or lip service to
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the official slogans; in private, an intense life of meetings and lectures, devoted especially to authors that no one would suspect to be the spokespeople for Communist doctrine, the ones who had been lucky enough to write before the imposition of Marxism-Leninism or those who lived in countries where they could write freely. To complete our university degree, we had to compose a masters thesis at the end of our fifth year. How could I write about literature without knuckling under to the dominant ideology? I chose one of the only paths that let me avoid the orthodoxy. I concentrated on the study of things that had no ideological value in themselves. For instance, in works of literature, the material nature of the text itself, its linguistic form. I was certainly not alone in doing this: the Russian Formalists of the 1920s had blazed this trail, and others soon followed them. At the university, for instance, our most interesting professor was a specialist in versification. For my thesis I did a comparison of two versions of a long novella by a Bulgarian author from the beginning of the twentieth century, and I limited myself to the grammatical changes he had made from one version to the other: transitive verbs replaced intransitive ones, the perfect tense became more frequent than the imperfect . . .This way everything I wrote escaped the censor, and I ran no risk of violating the ideological taboos of the Party. I will never know how this cat-and-mouse game would have ended not necessarily in my favor. A chance came along to leave for a year in Europe, as we used to say at the time, that is, on the other side of the Iron Curtain (an image that we did not think at all exaggerated because crossing it was just about impossible). I chose Paris because its reputation as the city of arts and literature dazzled me! This was a place where I could pursue my love of literature without limits, where I could unite my private convictions and my public occupation, and thus escape the collective schizophrenia spread by the totalitarian regime in which I had been living. As it turned out, things were a bit more difficult than I thought. In the course of my studies at the university, I had gotten used to paying attention to the features of literary works that escaped ideology: style, composition, narrative modesin short, literary technique. Because at first I was sure that I would be staying for only a year in France, since that was the length of the passport they had given me, I wanted to learn everything about these subjects. They were neglected and marginalized in Bulgaria, where they did little to advance the Communist cause, but in France, the land of freedom, they would be studied in depth! Yet I had trouble finding any such courses in Parisian universities. Literary study was divided up by nations and by centuries; I had no idea how to find the professors who paid any attention to the things that interested me.

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And it was certainly difficult for a foreign student like me to find his way around the labyrinth of academic institutions and their curricula. I had with me a letter from the dean of the faculty of letters of the University of Sofia to his Parisian counterpart. So one day in May, 1963, I knocked on the door of an office in the Sorbonne (at the time the only Paris university), the door of the dean of the faculty of letters, the historian Aimard. When he had read the letter, he asked me what I was looking for. I told him that I wanted to continue the study of style, language, and literary theoryin general. But you cant study these things in general! What literature do you want to specialize in? Feeling the floor collapsing under me, I replied rather pitifully that French literature would do. I realized at the same time that my French was getting mixed up; it was a bit shaky at the time. The dean cast a condescending glance and suggested that I would do better to study Bulgarian literature with a specialistthere must be some in France. I was a little discouraged, but I continued my quest, asking around among the few people I knew. And so one day a professor of psychology, the friend of a friend, hearing me explain my troubles, said: I know someone else who is interested in these oddball subjects; hes a teaching assistant at the Sorbonne named Grard Genette. We met in a dark hallway in rue Serpente, where there were several classrooms, and we hit it off right away. He explained to me, among other things, that there was a professor with a seminar at the cole des Hautes tudes, where we could see each other again. The name of this professor (I had never heard it before) was Roland Barthes. The beginning of my professional life in France is linked to these encounters. It did not take me long to realize that one year in Paris was not going to be enough and that I needed to stay longer in France. I registered with Barthes to do my first doctorate, a dissertation that I submitted in 1966. Soon after, I was appointed to the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), where I have spent my whole career. Meanwhile, at Genettes suggestion, I did a French translation of the work of the Russian Formalists, little known in France, under the title Theory of Literature, that came out in 1965. Later, Genette and I ran the journal Potique and an associated monograph series, and we tried to influence the literary curriculum at the university to free it from fragmentation into nations and centuries and to open it toward what literary works have in common. In the following years I gradually settled into French life. I married, had children, and became a French citizen. I began to vote and to read the newspaper, becoming more interested in public life, because I was discovering that it was not necessarily controlled by ideological dogmas, as it was in totalitarian countries. Without falling into unqualified

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admiration, I was happy to see that France was a pluralist democracy, respectful of each individuals freedom. This realization in turn had an impact on my attitude toward methods of literary analysis: the thought present in each work, the values that it transmits, no longer had to be squeezed into ready-made ideological containers, and therefore I no longer needed to set them aside and to ignore them. This led me, not to deny what was then called structural analysis of literary works, but to include the useful things from that analysis alongside other forms of study in pursuing the overall meaning of the work. Structural analysis had become like philology: something that one doesnt attack but that one doesnt especially feel the need to defend either. Since realizing this, toward the end of the 1970s, I have lost interest in studying the methods of analysis and have instead engaged in analysis itself. In other words, I devote myself to the discovery of the authors of the past. From that moment on, my love of literature was no longer confined by my education in a totalitarian country. So I needed to acquire new tools for my work: I felt the need to learn about the discoveries and concepts of psychology, anthropology, and history. Since now the authors ideas returned to center stage, I decided, in order to understand them better, to immerse myself in the history of ideas about man and societies, in moral and political philosophy. At the same time the object of that study, literature, took on new dimensions. Literature does not emerge from a void but from an environment of verbal utterances with which literature shares many characteristics. It is no accident that the boundary between literature and other discourses has often shifted. I felt myself attracted by these other forms of expression, not at the expense of literature but alongside it. In The Conquest of America, to understand better how very different cultures encounter one another, I read the accounts of Spanish travelers and conquistadores of the sixteenth century along with those of their Aztec and Mayan contemporaries. In the course of my reflections on our moral life, I immersed myself in the writings of people who were taken away as prisoners to Russian and German concentration camps; this led me to write Facing the Extreme. The letters of several writers enabled me, in Les Aventuriers de labsolu, to question an existential ambition: that of offering ones life to serve beauty. The texts that I was readingpersonal narratives, memoirs, historical works, testimonies, reflections, letters, anonymous texts from folkloredid not have, like literary works, the status of fiction, because they directly described lived experience. However, like literary works, they let me discover unknown dimensions of the world, they moved me profoundly, and they made me think. In other words, the field of literature has broadened for me, because it now includes, alongside poems, novels, short stories, and dramatic works,

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the immense domain of narrative written for public or personal use, essays, and reflections. If someone asks me why I love literature, the answer that I immediately think of is that literature helps me live. I no longer seek in literature, as I did in adolescence, to avoid wounds that real people could inflict upon me; literature does not replace lived experiences but forms a continuum with them and helps me understand them. Denser than daily life but not radically different from it, literature expands our universe, prompts us to see other ways to conceive and organize it. We are all formed from what other people give us: first our parents and then the other people near us. Literature opens to the infinite this possibility of interaction and thus enriches us infinitely. It brings us irreplaceable sensations through which the real world becomes more furnished with meaning and more beautiful. Far from being a simple distraction, an entertainment reserved for educated people, literature lets each one of us fulfill our human potential.

Literature Reduced to the Absurd

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone. This discrepancy struck me first of all in regard to what is taught in schools. I have no experience of teaching in French lyces, and only a little at the university level; but, once I became a father, I could not ignore my childrens pleas for help on the eve of quizzes or when homework was due. And even though I did not invest myself totally in this, I began to feel a bit miffed to see that my advice and help tended to get nothing but mediocre grades! Later on I got a broader view of literary teaching in French schools as a member, from 1994 to 2004, of a pluridisciplinary consulting board, part of the Ministry of National Education. That is when I understood that there was a wholly different idea of literature, not just on the part of a few individual teachers, but in the theory behind the official directives that guided teachers. I turn to the Official Bulletin of the Ministry of National Education (number 6, August 31, 2000) with the lyce curriculum, specifically the guidelines for teaching French. Under the heading Overview of studies, the document states: The study of texts helps to form student reflections on: literary and cultural history, genres and the construction of meaning and the specificity of texts, argumentation and the effects of discourse on those who receive it. The rest of the text expands on these headings and explains that genres are studied methodically, that registers (for instance, the comic) are dealt with in the next-to-last year of lyce, that reflecting on the production and reception of texts constitutes an object

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of study in its own right in lyce, and that the elements of argumentation will now be considered in a more analytic way. As a whole, these instructions are based on a choice: that the aim of literary analysis is to learn about the instruments that literary analysis uses. Reading poems and novels does not lead to making the students think about the human condition, about the individual and society, about love and hate, and about joy and despair, but about critical concepts, whether traditional or modern. At school, pupils do not learn what literature talks about but instead what critics talk about. In every school subject, teachers face a choice, one that is so fundamental that they do not even notice it most of the time. We can formulate it this way, simplifying a bit for the purposes of the discussion: are we teaching knowledge about the discipline itself or about its object? And thus, in our case: should one study, above all, analytic methods, to be illustrated with a selection of literary works? Or should one study the works that are considered essential, that can be accessed through the broadest range of methods? Which is the goal and which is the means? What is required and what remains elective? For other school subjects this choice is made much more clearly. We teach, on one hand, mathematics, physics, biologya set of disciplines (the sciences), always keeping in mind their evolution. On the other hand, we teach history, and not one method of historical investigation among others. For example in the first year of lyce in France, it is considered important to bring to life, for the students, turning points in European history: Greek democracy, the birth of the monotheistic religions, Renaissance humanism, and so forth. We do not choose to teach the history of mentalities, or economic history, or military, diplomatic, or religious history, nor the methodology and concepts of each of these approaches, even if we use these concepts when the occasion arises. And yet the same choice arises for French (or English or Spanish . . . ) as a subject; and the current way French is taught, reflected in the official curriculum, prefers the study of the discipline (as in physics), even though we could instead choose the study of the object (as in history). The official text that I quote above shows this choice, among its many other instructions. A student in the first year of lyce must above all succeed in mastering the essential notions of genre and register and positions of enunciation; in other words, the student needs to be initiated into the study of semiotics and pragmatics, and into rhetoric and poetics. With all due respect for these disciplines, we can ask ourselves: should they be the main thing to learn in school? All these subjects are abstract constructs, concepts created by literary analysis in order to deal with literary works; none of these subjects derives from the literary works themselves, from their meaning or from their history.

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In class, most of the time, French teachers cannot just teach genres and registers, modes of signifying and effects of argument, metaphor and metonymy, internal and external focalizationthey must also study literary works. But here we discover another shift in literary teaching. One concrete example is the way we teach, in 2005, the subject Literature (Lettres) in the last year of the specialization L (literature) of a major Parisian lyce. There are four vast subjects to study, such as major literary models and verbal language and images, and with these there are coordinated literary works, respectively Chrtien de Troyess Perceval and Kafkas The Trial (along with Orson Welless film). However, the test questions the students get all during the school year and then on the baccalaureate examination are, in an overwhelming proportion, of just one single type. They concern the function of one component of the work in relation to the structure of the whole, not on the meaning of that component nor on the meaning of the book as a whole for its epoch or for ours. So the students are asked about the role of a character, of an episode, or of a detail during the quest for the Grail, not about the significance of that quest itself. The student will be asked whether The Trial belongs to the comic register or to the absurd, rather than about Kafkas place in the thought of his period. How could the way we teach literature in schools have come to this? The simple answer is that it reflects a change in university teaching. If most lyce teachers of French have adopted this new approach, its because literary studies in the university has evolved along the same lines: before being lyce teachers they were students. The shift took place a generation earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s and often in the name of structuralism. I participated in this movement. Should I feel responsible for the state of the discipline today? When I came to France, at the beginning of the 1960s, literary studies in the university were, as I said, dominated by very different concerns from those of today. Alongside the explication de texte (which was essentially an empirical approach), students were mainly expected to accept the national and historical framework. The rare specialists who did something else taught outside France or not in literature departments. Rather than reflecting at length on the meaning of works, graduate students made exhaustive inventories of all that surrounded such works: the authors biography, the possible prototypes of the characters, variants of the text, and the way the works contemporaries viewed it. I felt the need to give balance to that approach with different approaches that I had learned about from my readings in other languages: from the Russian Formalists, from the German theorists of style and forms (Spitzer, Auerbach, Kayser), from the authors of American New Criticism. I also wanted scholars to make explicit the concepts that they used in literary

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analysis, rather than to proceed in a totally intuitive manner. Toward this goal, I worked with Genette to create a poetics, that is, the study of the properties of literary discourse. To my way of thinkingnow as thenthe intrinsic approach (the study of the relation of the constituents of the literary work to one another) should complement the extrinsic approach (the study of the historical, ideological, and aesthetic context). This increased precision in the tools of analysis would allow more refined and rigorous study, but the final goal would remain the understanding of the meaning of the literary works. In 1969, I organized with Serge Doubrovsky a conference on The Teaching of Literature at Cerisy-la-Salle. Rereading today my concluding comments in the debate, I find them clumsy (they are the transcription of spoken remarks) but clear on this point. I presented the idea of poetics and I added, The disadvantage of this type of work is, so to speak, its modestythe fact that it does not go very far and that it will never be anything other than a first step, one that consists precisely of noting, of identifying the categories at work in the literary text, and not of speaking of the sense of the text.1 My intention (and that of the people around me at the time) was to create a better balance between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, and also between theory and practice. But that is not how things turned out. The spirit of May, 1968, which did not itself have anything to do with the direction of literary study, completely changed the structure of the university and the existing hierarchies. The pendulum did not stop swinging when it reached the midpoint and went very far in the opposite direction, reaching the point of exclusive concentration on intrinsic approaches and on the categories of literary theory. Such a change in literary study at the university cannot be explained by the influence of structuralism alone; or, rather, we need to understand how structuralism acquired such a powerful influence. This brings me back to the underlying conception of literature. During a period of over a century, literary history dominated the university curriculum. This was, principally, a study of causes that led to the creation of the work: social, political, ethnic, and psychic forces of which the literary text was presumed to be the result. Now, this history could be the study of the effects of the text, its diffusion, its impact on the public, and its influence on other authors. The aim was to situate the literary work in a causal chain, while the study of meaning was viewed with suspicion. Such study of meaning was held to be destined forever to lack scientific rigor and was thus left to lowly writers or newspaper critics. As a result, the university tradition rejected the view of literature as the embodiment of a thought or of a sensibility, or as an interpretation of the world.

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This long tradition has been pursued and taken to an extreme in the recent phase of literary studies. It has been decided now that the work imposes the advent of an order that breaks with the existing order, the affirmation of a regime that obeys its own laws and its own logic2 to the exclusion of a relation with the empirical world or with reality (words that are now used only between quotation marks). In other words, the literary work is now portrayed as a closed object made of language, selfsufficient and absolute. In 2006 in the French university, these abusive generalizations are always presented as self-evident. Not surprisingly, lyce students learn the dogma according to which literature has no relation to the rest of the world and they study only the way the parts of the work relate to one another. This, no doubt, is one of the reasons students find the literary specialization uninteresting: in just a few decades the number of those getting the baccalaureate with the literature option has gone from 33% to 10%. Why study literature when literature is only an illustration of the tools to study literature? At the end of their studies, students of literature find themselves confronted with a brutal choice: either they must become in their turn teachers of literature or they must join the unemployed. Unlike primary and secondary schools, the French university does not have to follow a centrally established curriculum. So in the university the most varied and even contradictory currents of thought are represented. Still, the dominant tendency is to refuse to see literature as a discourse about the world, and this tendency has a noticeable impact on future teachers of French. The recent deconstructionist movement does not provide an alternative. Its partisans can, it is true, raise questions about the way the literary work relates to truth and values, but only to findor rather, to declare, because they know this in advance, since this is their dogmathat the work is fatally incoherent, that it succeeds in affirming nothing, and that it subverts its own values: this is what it means to deconstruct a text. Unlike the classic structuralist, who set aside any question about the truth of texts, the poststructuralist is willing to look at such questions, but only to proclaim that they will never be answered. The text can only state one truth, namely that truth does not exist or that it is forever inaccessible. This conception of language extends beyond literature and, especially in American universities, concerns disciplines whose relationship with the world had never previously been in doubt. So history, law, and even the natural sciences are described as just so many literary genres, with their rules and conventions; identified with literature, which is only supposed to obey its own rules, these disciplines have become in their turn closed and self-sufficient objects. I understand that certain lyce teachers are delighted at this development: rather than hesitate before the unmanageable mass of information

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available about each literary work, they know that all they have to do is to teach Jakobsons six functions and Greimass six actants, the analepse and the prolepse, and so forth. It will thus be much easier, later on, to make sure that their students learned their lesson well. But have we really gained by this change? Several arguments lead me to prefer the approach of conceiving literary studies on the model of history rather than on that of physicsas seeking to inform us about an extrinsic object, literature, rather than about the arcana of the discipline itself. The first argument is that there is no consensus, among teachers and researchers in the literary field, about what should constitute the core of the literary discipline. The structuralists now dominate the schools, just as the historians did in the past and as the political scientists might in the future. There will always be something a bit arbitrary in such a choice. Not all practitioners of literary studies are in agreement on the list of the main registersnor on the usefulness of introducing such a concept into their field. So this constitutes an abuse of power. Besides, the lack of symmetry is obvious: while in physics the person who does not know the law of gravitation is ignorant, in French the ignorant person is the one who has not read Les Fleurs du mal. It is a good bet that Rousseau, Stendhal, and Proust will be well-known to readers long after the names of todays theorists and their conceptual constructs will be forgotten, and we reveal a certain lack of humility when we teach our own theories about works rather than the works themselves. Wespecialists, critics, professorsare most of the time only dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. Does this mean that the teaching of the discipline should disappear entirely in favor of the teaching of literary works? No, but each kind of teaching should have its own place. In university studies, it is right to teach (also) approaches, concepts used, techniques. Secondary teaching, which is not addressed to literary specialists but to everyone, cannot have the same object: it is literature itself that is for everyone, not literary studies. We should prefer the former to the latter. Secondary-school teachers have a difficult task: to internalize what they learned at the university but, instead of teaching it, to make of it an invisible tool. The meaning of the work is not to be confused with the students purely subjective understanding but is based on knowledge. To reach the meaning, it may be useful for the student to have a limited vocabulary of structural analysis or information from literary history. However, never should the study of these means for entering the literary work be substituted for the study of meaning, which is the goal. Scaffolding may be necessary to construct a building but the former should not be substituted for the latter; once the building is done, the scaffolding is meant to disappear. The innovations of structural analysis from previous decades are welcome as long as they remain a means and do not become goals in themselves.

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We need to go further. It is not only that we study a texts meaning badly if we limit ourselves to the strictly intrinsic approach, while literary works always exist within a context and in dialogue with it; it is not only that the means should not become the goal, nor the technique make us forget the end. We must also ask ourselves about the ultimate purpose of the works of the past that we consider worthy of study. As a general rule, the nonprofessional reader, now as in the past, reads these works not in order to master some method of reading nor to gather information about the society in which they were created, but to find a meaning that permits him to better understand human beings and the world, to discover in them a beauty that enriches his existence. The knowledge of literature, in turn, is not an end in itself, but rather the royal road leading to the fulfillment of each person. The direction that todays literary studies have taken, turning away from this horizon (this week we studied metonymy, next week we go on to personification), runs the risk of leading us to a dead end, and, needless to say, hardly seems to lead toward a love of literature. The reductive conception of literature appears not only in lyce classrooms and university courses; it is abundantly represented among newspaper book reviewers and even among authors themselves. Is this surprising? They all went to school and many studied literature in the university, where they learned that literature is self-referential and that the only way to appreciate it is to show the way its constituent parts interact. If todays authors hope to receive critical praise, they need to fit this image, however pallid it is. Besides, they often start out as critics themselves. We can ask ourselves whether this is not a reason why such literature is so lacking in interest for anyone outside France. Many contemporary works illustrate the formalist view of literature. They cultivate ingenious construction, mechanical means to generate the text, symmetry, echoes and winks to the reader. However, this view is not the only one prominent in French literature and book reviews as the twenty-first century begins. Another trend is what we can call a nihilistic view of the world, according to which people are stupid and vicious and in which destruction and violence are the main truth and life is only the start of a disaster. In this case we cannot say that literature does not describe the world: rather than being the negation of representation, literature is the representation of negation. This fact does not keep such literature from being the object of formalist criticism. For this criticism the world presented in the book is self-sufficient, without relation to the outside world; so it is legitimate to analyze it without asking about the relevance of the opinions expressed in the book or about the truthfulness of the depiction that it gives. History shows this clearly: it is easy to go from formalism to nihilism and back, and one can even profess both simultaneously.

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In turn, the nihilist tendency has one major exception, and this concerns the fragment of the world occupied by the author himself. This practice derives from a complacent and narcissistic attitude that leads the author to describe in minute detail his slightest feelings: the more the world is repulsive, the more the self is fascinating! Even saying bad things about yourself does not destroy the pleasure. What is essential is to talk about yourself; what you say is secondary. We can call this third tendency solipsism, following upon formalism and nihilism, from the name of that philosophical theory that holds that the speaking subject is the only existing being. The implausibility of this theory condemns it to marginal status, certainly, but does not stop it from being a source of literary creativity. One of its recent variants is something called autofiction, self-fiction: the author devotes just as much attention to telling about her humors but in addition she frees herself from any referential constraint, thus profiting simultaneously from the presumed independence of fiction and from the pleasure of self-promotion. Nihilism and solipsism are obviously linked. They are both based on the idea that there is a radical break between the self and the world, or, in other words, that there is no shared world. I cannot declare the world totally worthless unless I first exclude myself. Conversely, I can decide to devote myself solely to the description of my own experiences only if I judge the rest of the world to be without value, and, moreover, of no concern to me. These two visions of the world are thus equally incomplete: the nihilist leaves himself and those who resemble him out of the desolate vision that he depicts; the solipsist neglects to represent the human and material framework that renders his own existence possible. Nihilism and solipsism complement the formalist choice more than they refute it: in each case, but in different ways, the external world, the one that I have in common with others, is denied or devalued. In this gesture, contemporary French literature is at one with the idea of literature that we find at the root of teaching and criticism: an absurdly limited and impoverished conception.

What Can Literature Do?

In his Autobiography, published in 1873, John Stuart Mill tells of the severe depression that he experienced in his twentieth year. He was unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or indifferent.3 All the remedies that he tried turn out to be ineffectual and a lengthy melancholy settled in. He continued to carry out habitual gestures in a mechanical way, but without feeling anything. This painful state lasted

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for two years. Then, little by little, it diminished. A book that Mill read by chance at this moment played a special role in his cure: a collection of poems by Wordsworth. What he especially found there is the expression of his own feelings, exalted in the beauty of the poems: In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings . . . . I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings (121). Literature can do a lot. It can hold out a helping hand when we are profoundly depressed, guide us toward the other human beings around us, make us better understand the world, and help us to live. By this I dont mean that it is, essentially, a wellness center for the soul; but, because it reveals the world to us, it can also transform each of us from the inside. Literature has a vital role to play; but for that we need to take literature in both the broad and strong sense that dominated in Europe up until the end of the nineteenth century and that is now marginalized while an absurdly shrunken conception of literature triumphs. Ordinary readers, who continue to look to the books they read for something to give meaning to life, are right, and the professors, the critics, and the writers who say that literature only talks of itself or that it only teaches despair are wrong. If the ordinary readers were not right, reading would be condemned to disappear quickly. Like philosophy and like the humanities, literature is made of thought and knowledge about the psychic and social world in which we live. The reality that literature aims to understand is, simplyyet, at the same time, nothing is more complexhuman experience. This is why we can say, rightly, that Dante or Cervantes teaches us at least as much about the human condition as even the greatest of sociologists or psychologists, and that there is no incompatibility between the first knowledge and the second. This is true of literature in general, but there are also specific differences. The thinkers of the past, those of the Enlightenment as well as those of the romantic era, tried to identify them. Let us recall their suggestions and add some others. A first set of dichotomies sets in opposition the sensory and the intelligible, the particular and the general, the individual and the universal. Whether this is through poetic monologue or through narrative, literature makes us live unique experiences; philosophy, on the other hand, manipulates concepts. The first preserves the richness and diversity of what is lived, the second favors abstraction, which allows the formulation of general laws. A simple consequence of this contrast concerns the more or less accessible quality of texts. Dostoyevskys Idiot can be read and

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understood by countless readers, from different periods and cultures; a philosophical commentary on the same novel or the same thematic would be accessible only to a minority with the habit of reading such texts. On the other hand, for those who understand them, the propositions of the philosopher have the advantage of presenting ideas without ambiguity, while the lived adventures of the characters of a novel or the metaphors of a poet lend themselves to many interpretations. In representing an object, an event, a character, the poet does not make a statement, but incites the reader to formulate one: she proposes more than she imposes, she makes the reader freer and more active. By using words in an evocative way and by using narratives, examples, and specific cases, the literary work produces a vibration of meaning, it sets off our faculty of symbolic interpretation, our capacity to associate and provoke a movement whose reverberations will continue long after the original contact. Poets truth and that of the other interpreters of the world cannot claim the same prestige as science because poetic truth needsfor confirmationthe assent of many human beings, now and into the future. Public consensus is the only way to legitimate the move from the statement I like this work to the statement, This work tells the truth. The assertive discourse of a scientist hoping to state a truth possesses another advantage: because she is making a statement, it can be immediately subjected to validation; it will be refuted or confirmed. In this case we do not have to wait for centuries and to consult readers from many countries to know whether the author is saying something true or not. The arguments presented call forth counterarguments: one can engage in rational debate instead of remaining in admiration and reverie. The reader of the scientific text is less likely to confuse seductiveness with exactness. At every moment, a person in society is immersed in a web of discourse that presents itself to her as obvious truths, as dogmas to which she must subscribe. These are the common places of a period, received ideas that constitute public opinion, habits of thought, routines and stereotypes, what we can also call dominant ideology, prejudice or clichs. Since the Enlightenment, we have thought that the duty of a human being is to learn to think for herself, instead of settling for the ready-made worldview that she finds surrounding her. But how to do this? In Emile, Rousseau calls this process of apprenticeship a negative education and suggests keeping the person who aspires to autonomy far from all books, in order to avoid any temptation to imitate the opinions of other people . . . Yet we can follow a different logic: received wisdom, especially today, does not need books to gain control of a young mind. Television has already left its mark! The books that the young person takes hold of could help her set aside the obvious truths and free her

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mind. Literature has a special role to play here: unlike religious, moral, or political discourses, it does not formulate a system of precepts and thus escapes the censorship that strikes down positions that are explicitly formulated. Disagreeable truthsfor humanity as a whole or for ourselveshave a better chance of being expressed in a literary work than in a philosophical or scientific work. In a recent study, Richard Rorty proposes another way to describe the contribution of literature to our understanding of the world.4 He renounces the use of terms like truth or knowledge to describe this contribution and suggests that literature does not so much provide a remedy for our ignorance of the world but rather cure us of our egotism, understood as the illusion of self-sufficiency. Reading novels, according to him, is less like reading scientific, philosophical, or political works than it is like a very different experience: meeting other people. Making the acquaintance of new literary characters is like meeting new people, with the important difference that we can discover right away what they are like inside. We thus know every act from the point of view of the person who does it. The less these characters resemble us, the more they broaden our horizon and enrich our universe. This internal broadening (similar to what representational painting brings us) cannot be stated in abstract propositions, and that is why we have so much difficulty describing it. It consists instead of the inclusion in our consciousness of new ways of being alongside the ones that we already had. Meeting new acquaintances does not change the content of our mind; instead the container itself is transformed, the apparatus of mental perception rather than the things perceived. What novels give us is not new information but a new capacity for compassion with beings different from ourselves; in this sense, novels are more part of the moral sphere than of science. The ultimate horizon of that experience is not truth but love. Should we describe the new understanding of the human world that we gain by reading a novel as a correction to our egotism, according to Rortys suggestive proposal, or as the discovery of a new truth of unveiling, a necessarily intersubjective truth?5 The difference in terminology does not seem to me to be the crucial matter here, provided that we accept the strong link that is made between the world and literature, as well as literatures specific contribution to abstract discourse. The boundary, as Rorty points out, does not separate the argumentative text from the imaginative text but rather from all discourse, fictive or factual, that describes a human world other than that of the subject: historians, ethnographers, and journalists are all on the same side of that boundary as the novelist. They all participate in what Kant, in a famous chapter of the Critique of Judgment, considered to be a necessary step toward a common sense, in other words toward our full humanness: to think by

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putting oneself in the position of any other human.6 To think and to feel while adopting the point of view of others, real persons or literary characters, this unique way of tending toward universality, permits us to achieve our calling. The intersubjective truth of unveiling or, if one prefers, the enlarged world that one enters thanks to the encounter with a narrative or poetic text, is the horizon within which the literary text is inscribed. To be truthful, in this sense of the term, is the only legitimate requirement that we can make of it, but, as Rorty perceived, that truth is thoroughly linked to our moral education. It is instructive to reread, in this context, a famous exchange about the relationship among literature, truth, and morality, the one between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. The two writers were good friends, they had great affection as well as great respect for one another, yet they knew that they did not have the same conception of literature. At the end of 1875 and the beginning of 1876, only a few months before Sands death, they exchanged several remarkable letters on this subject in which they tried to pinpoint the nature of their disagreement.7 At a superficial reading one might think that Sand wants literature to submit itself to morality, while Flaubert bases himself solely on the relationship to truth. And it is true that some of Sands expressions seem to take her in that direction since she appears to be essentially concerned with the effect that the writers works have on the reader: You are going to bring desolation and I to bring consolation, because he makes his readers sadder while she wished to make them less unhappy. Flaubert replied that his aim was truth alone: I have always tried to penetrate into the soul of things. If their disagreement had stopped there, it would be of little interest, and we would be tempted to agree with Flaubert. Todays reader, after all, does not believe that the primary function of literature is to dry the readers tears. But Sand quickly went beyond this starting point to focus the debate on two more essential topics: the writers place in her work and the nature of the truth that the writer reaches. Sand regretted that Flaubert did not show himself more in his writing, but he had made nonintervention in the novel a rule without exception. Sand kept hammering at this: it was not so much his absence from the work that she blamed him for (besides, she believed that this absence was impossible, since the thing seen cannot be separated from the viewers vision): One cannot have a philosophy in the soul without it appearing . . . True painting is full of the soul that holds the brush. Flaubert acquiesced in his replies: he knew well that he did not lack convictions and that these permeated his work. He also knew that his concern for truth would necessarily have a moral effect. As soon as a thing is True, it is good. Obscene books are only immoral because they

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lack truth. What he wanted, however, was that his ideas not be spelled out explicitly, but that they merely be suggested by the narrative: it was up to the reader to draw from the book the moral lesson that must be there. If that does not happen, it must be because the book is bad or because the reader is a simpleton! However, Sands real criticism is elsewhere: what she deplored was not Flauberts absence from his work, it was his way of being present. She loved and appreciated her friend, but she did not find the man she knew in the man who dwells in his books. Nourish yourself on the ideas and sentiments stored up in your head and your heart . . . All your life of affection, protection, and charming simple goodness proves that you are the most principled man in the world. But once you start working with literature, you want to be, I know not why, another man. What she blamed him for, in short, is that he did not leave space inside his work for beings like himself and therefore did not produce a faithful enough picture of the world. Her paramount requirement of literature concerns Truth, not the Good. The aim of literature is to represent human existence, but humanity also includes the author and the reader. You cannot abstract yourself from this contemplation; for man is yourself and mankind is the reader. Whatever you do, your narrative is still a conversation between you and him. The narrative is enclosed within a dialogue of which humans are not only the object but also the protagonists. Sand knew that Flaubert tried most of all to be true, even if the path that he chose passed through continual striving for proper form, because he believed in a secret harmony, a necessary relation between form and content. That was his method: When I find a bad alliteration or a repetition in one of my sentences, I am sure that I am stumbling around in the False. It is not that this method bothers her; for her, the controversy concerns not the type of searching but the nature of what is discovered. Writers like Flaubert have more study and talent than I do. Only what I think they are missing, and you especially, is a clear and extensive view of life. The picture of life that appears in Flauberts books is not true enough because it is too monotonous. I want to see man as he is. He is not good or bad. He is good and bad. But he is something more, nuance, nuance which is for me the goal of art. She returned to this in her following letter: True reality is mixed with the beautiful and the ugly, the dull and the brilliant. Those writers known as realists made a choice that betrays reality: they obey an arbitrary convention that requires them to show only the somber aspect of the world. Nihilists betray not the Good, but the True. The origin of this difference between Sand and Flaubert is their philosophy of life. Flaubert, who told his lover Louise Collet, I hate life and also life is tolerable as long as you are not alive,8 seemed to Sand

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to be like a Catholic who was looking to be paid reparations because he detested and damned life as if there were an alternative, as if true life were somewhere else. Flaubert acted as if he expected a better existence in the next life. Without admitting it, he adopted the Augustinian doctrine that the visible world is fallen and that men are contemptible, while salvation awaits them in the City of God. Sand, for her part, loved the present life a little bit more every day. As for me, I want to be part of the world until my last breath, not with the certainty or the requirement that I will find elsewhere a good situation, but because my only joy is to stay with my own people during the climb. This wisdom brings happiness, that is, the acceptance of life, whatever it is. This is what Sand also calls the innocent pleasure of living for the sake of living.9 Their disagreement is thus not between two different ideals: both agree that literature aims above all at a form of truth. Instead, their difference lies in the judgment about the truthfulness of narratives. On that score, Flaubert can only admit that he cannot go any further: I cannot change my eyes! No matter how much you preach to me, I can have no other temperament than my own. In her turn Sand had to admit that one cannot choose, in total freedom, to be what one is. And even people with such liking for one another as Flaubert and Sand could not easily follow the advice they received. Her advice to Flaubert seems, therefore, a bit futile. Nonetheless, in committing himself to write A Simple Heart, Flaubert told his correspondent: You will instantly see your influence. By considering this exchange from the past, we can see that, despite differences of interpretation, both writers promoted a similar view of literature. Literature allows us to better understand the human condition and transforms each of its readers inwardly. Accepting this view would have direct consequences for the writers craft and for literary criticism but also for the way literature is taught today in schools. The analysis of works would no longer have as its goal illustrating concepts from some linguist or other, some theoretician or other of literature, and thus to present texts as the deployment of language and discourse; literary study would take as its aim to help us reach meaningfor we postulate that meaning, in turn, guides us toward a knowledge of the human, something important for everyone. This idea is not foreign to the world of school teachers themselves. In a report issued by the Association des Professeurs de Lettres, we read, The study of literature is basically the study of man, his relation to himself and to the world and his relation with others. More exactly, the study of literature directs us toward broader and broader concentric circles: the other writings of the same author, national literature, world literature; but the ultimate context, and the most important of all, is provided by human existence itself. All the great works, whatever their origin, stimulate reflection on that.

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If one agrees that the goal of literary studies is to help us better grasp the meaning of works and, through this meaning, to better understand the world and ourselves, the factitious opposition between the structure and the history collapses, as does the opposition between the different methods of literary analysis. All new information that helps us better grasp this meaning is welcome, whether it comes from textual commentary or from knowledge of the context. We just have to understand that the study of structure, like the study of history, of the writers art as of his sources, is not a goal in itself but only a means to reach a richer meaning. Literature must be understood here in its broadest sense, with awareness of the historically moveable boundaries of this concept. This requirement implies that we not take as dogma the worn-out postulate of the late romantics according to which the destiny of poetry has nothing in common with the gray background of universal reporting produced by ordinary language. Recognizing the true value of literature does not mean that we have to believe that literature is the only true life or that everything in the world exists only for the purpose of making a book, a dogma that would exclude three quarters of humanity from true life. Texts known as non-literary can teach us much; and for my part I would have happily required that French classes study the letter, unfortunately not fiction, that Germaine Tillion wrote in Fresnes prison to the German military tribunal on January 3, 1943. It is a masterpiece of humanness and students would learn a lot from it.10 They are killing literature (to use the title of a recent polemical work) not by studying non-literary texts in school, but by making literary works mere illustrations of formalist, nihilist, and solipsist views of literature. This is obviously a much more ambitious program than what we are currently setting for our students. The changes that it requires would have immediate results in terms of careers. Since the object of literature is the human condition itself, the person who studies it and understands it will become, not a specialist in literary analysis, but an expert in being human. What better introduction to the understanding of human behavior and passions than an immersion in the works of great writers who have been working on that task for thousands of years? And, at the same time, what better preparation for the many professions that deal with the relations among people, with the behavior of individuals and groups? If we consider literature in this way and if we orient teaching along these lines, what resource could be more precious for the future student of law or political science, the future social worker or psychotherapist, the future historian or sociologist? Would it not be an exceptional education to have Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, and Proust as professors? And is it not clear that the future physician, for the actual practice of her profession, would learn more from such professors than

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from the mathematics exams that now determine her future? Literary studies would thus find its place within the humanities, next to history and philosophy, all disciplines that bring progress to thought through the study of the past, a past made up of works as much as doctrines, by political events as much as by social shifts, by the life of peoples as by the life of individuals. If we can agree on this aim for the teaching of literature, which would no longer simply serve to create more teachers of literature, it is easy to articulate the spirit of such teaching: we need to include the works of the past in the great dialogue among humans, the dialogue that started at the dawn of time and in which each one of us, however small our part, still participates. In this inexhaustible communication, triumphant over time and space, the universal significance of literature is affirmed, wrote Paul Bnichou.11 We, the adults, have the duty to pass on to future generations this fragile legacy, these words that help us to live. Directeur de recherche honoraire Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis Translated by John Lyons
NOTES 1 Serge Doubrovsky and Tzvetan Todorov, eds., Lenseignement de la littrature (Paris: Plon, 1971), 630. 2 Jean Rousset, Forme et signification (Paris: J. Corti, 1965), II-III. 3 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 112 (hereafter cited in text). 4 Richard Rorty, Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises, Telos 3, no. 3 (2001): 243-63. 5 Todorov makes a distinction between a truth of adequation (vrit dadquation) or scientific, referential truth, on one hand, and a truth of unveiling (vrit de dvoilement) or shared insight. This type of truth does not conform to the same verification procedures; instead, a scene is true, in this sense, if it is persuasive to the people who lived during that epoch and if it enlightens today those who seek to know about it. This truth, in other words, is intersubjective and not referential. This is the truth that novelists and poets attempt to attain. Todorov, La mmoire devant lhistoire, Terrain 2 (September 1995), http://terrain. revues.org/document2854.html (accessed July 5, 2006).Trans. 6 Immanuel Kant, Oeuvres Philosophiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 1073. 7 Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, Correspondance (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 51030. 8 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 10, 255. 9 Flaubert, Correspondance, 486, 483. 10 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrck (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 35-40. Translated by Gerald Satterwhite as Ravensbrck (New York: Anchor Books, 1975). 11 Paul Bnichou, Une communication inpuisable, in Mlanges sur luvre de Paul Bnichou (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 228.