A Theory of Literary Production

Pierre Macherey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136805004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey's first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to

Some Works

21

JULES VERNE: THE FAULTY NARRATIVE

I THE PROBLEM POSED BY THE WORK

The works of Jules Verne possess for us an immediate historical significance, if only as a consequence of the audiences they have attracted. These audiences have been of at least two sorts, both of them eminently representative of our historical era: the French bourgeoisie of the Third Republic which ‘commissioned’ and had Verne’s work acclaimed by the Académie française; and also the people of the Soviet Union, who have become the guardian of his reputation by keeping his work in print. At least two publics have found themselves in Verne’s work and tied that work indissolubly to their own historical moment: to the conquest of France’s colonial empire and the exploration of the cosmos, to the construction of the Suez Canal as to the cultivation of virgin lands. Obviously it is not a question of identifying these two readings as the expression of a formal continuity within a single project: history demonstrates that the transition from one project to another is not smoothly continuous but discontinuous. Thus the work of Jules Verne, far from deriving a vague coherence from these projects, will on the contrary appear as the expression of a complex ideological phenomenon (not necessarily ‘contradictory’) which, by its very duration, acquires a variety of meanings. It is this variety which demands to be explained. A first question is posed: it is not a matter of reducing the work to a meaning, whether manifest or latent; it is that strange power of internal variation which solicits our attention—that diversity which gives it a priori, its coherence.

But what will an explanation involve in this case? Will it be sufficient, in order to dismantle the work, simply to relate it to the history in which it is embedded? Or rather to demonstrate its secret relationship with history? And thus to reveal its meaning. We should find ourselves writing the history of an ideological theme—(We shall see that the real themes of the work are not the same as these general—and generous—ideological themes which constitute a subject, a descriptive project, but do not contribute to its realisation. The real themes are indistinguishable from the actual elaboration of the work. Thus we already know that the secret of the work is not contained in the ideological themes, which merely indicate a general intention. The work is revealed rather in the instruments of its production; it is these, its real means, that we may legitimately call themes)—the conquest of nature, the expression of a historical phenomenon which revealed what had previously remained a secret of history: the exploitation of natural energy. The history of this conquest and exploitation deserves to be recorded (although this opportunity has been almost entirely neglected), and it may be thought that it contains the work of Jules Verne as one of its specific manifestations. But the work surpasses this history entirely: the general history of a theme implies the priority of history itself; without such a priority the theme remains insubstantial, in an isolation that is the very essence of the ideological. In that case, the (interpretative) explanation succeeds because it snatches at its object from too great a distance, and sweeps it off its feet. This procedure is not, as has so often been suggested, a betrayal of the object, but rather perhaps an extravagance. By being too enthusiastically situated the work is simplified: it becomes merely the site of a meaning; its real complexity has been abolished.

As against the excesses of interpretation it is usual to posit the systematic description, which does not alter the work, because it proposes only to disengage a structure, a specific coherence, to establish a principle of closure which constitutes the work, that sufficiency evident in the internal relations of its various parts. This structuring, which is a relatively simple operation (especially in the case of an author like Verne, who wanted to make his work as transparent as possible by emphasising the obviousness of its articulations), which involves an analysis (the isolation of particular themes, the definition of mythical symbols) and a reassembly (the establishment of a hierarchy among its elements), is the exact opposite of a historical analysis: the logic of the work is the logic of its composition, a logic which is immediate and immanent, even if the study of composition goes beyond a mere problematic of forms. We are satisfied with a singular totality—the work reduced to a coherent whole—from which we have stripped away all that is factitious or contingent. Indeed, this singular totality is precisely the opposite of an individual essence: the work is situated there, and, independently of the fact that it is situated, it is simply this situation, this arrangement, which is to be accounted for. Such an individualisation, such an isolation, is a pure abstraction, a de-realisation. But it is also, as in the previous instance, a simplification, a reduction to the single dimension of a reason (raison).

It thus appears that the choice is to be between two radically opposed methods: that of interpretation, which moves towards the work, seizing upon it from a distance, or that of description, which moves away from the work in order to estrange it from itself. Perhaps it is possible, from the outset, to escape from this contradiction by placing ourselves in that very gap which separates interpretation and description: we should speak of the work by moving it beyond itself, by establishing it in the knowledge of its limits. The question is then no longer one of commentary or reconstitution or unification, but one of explanation—explanation which dislodges the work internally, just as it was obliged to deviate from its intentions in order to realise them. Neither is it a question of rediscovering its very nature in the movement of the history in which it is involved; it is a question of compelling it to speak its true purposes: those purposes which it could itself have known before being written. Thus we are proposing a very different question: What is the principle of the work’s disparity? In this instance it is conceded that—to borrow a well-known metaphor—the work unfolds in more than one plane.

Interpretation nominates the work as situation; description makes of it a simple disposition. We must ensure that the one does not exclude or obscure the other, measuring the work by that real distance between its disposition and its situation. The opposition is not to be abolished, but exploited, regarded as the crux of the problem. There is no question of mistaking the one for the other, of confusing them: deriving the situation from the disposition (an epiphany), or deriving the disposition from the situation (deduction). There is a qualitative difference between these two points of view, a difference which makes them irreducible, although, as we shall see, they define between them a single question which is totally new. It is this differential relation which will define the area of the problematic: and it is this which will enable us to present the work simultaneously in its reality and in its limits, taking into account the conditions of possibility and impossibility which make it visible.

The only point of departure for the specific study of a work—by no means that upon which it actually depends, but its real beginning—is the validity of an ideological project. In the present case it is the general theme of the conquest of nature: it will be seen that it is immediately elaborated by means of specific themes (different in nature? how organised?) which are the real themes of the work. Verne begins by asking himself this question: Is it this conquest of nature which defines the content of the history of the contemporary world? Aware of the topicality of this question he also asks himself: How can this be expressed? The answer will be: By means of fiction.

We live in an age in which anything can happen, we are almost entitled to say: in which everything has happened. If our story does not seem probable today, it may well do so tomorrow, thanks to the scientific knowledge of the future, and it will not enter anyone’s head to regard the story as a legend. Moreover, nobody would invent legends at the close of this practical and positive nineteenth century.

(Carpathian Castle, ch. I)

The future is hidden in the present: mobilis in mobili. We shall again encounter this image (which is not an image) at a later stage. Above all, this era has produced a new kind of narrative—one which gives the imaginary its function as reality: this is why fiction is the privileged form of expression during this historical transition. In this manner, the literary work immediately becomes reality. This intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary, which is the literary form of the sensation, is related to a specific aspect of the narrative—the voyage; and it is this voyage which gives the work its title. The plan thus sketched out can be ordered by a bookseller in this ‘historic’ contract:

Jules Verne’s latest work will be progressively added to this edition which will be kept carefully up to date. The titles already published, as well as those planned, will in their entirety encompass the scheme that the author devised when he adopted for his work the subtitle: Voyages to Worlds Known and Unknown. He actually intends to summarise all the knowledge—geographical, geological, physical, astronomical—accumulated by modern science, and to recast in an appropriate and attractive form, the history of the universe …

Among contemporary productions there is no other which answers more fully the noble impulse of modern society to know at last the marvels of this universe in which its destiny is enacted.

(Hetzel, Preface to vol. I of his edition of The Complete Works: The Adventures of Captain Hatteras)

‘To know’ also implies, as we shall see, to act, to transform. ‘To know at last’—it is that ‘at last’ which defines the modern. And the object of the narrative will be both ‘the marvels’ and those voyages in the area which separates the known and the unknown an area which is also a certain form of conjunction.

Thus we appear to have grasped both the general project and the meaning of the work. However, this initial question is not the inevitable one: within this question the problem of the work itself remains untouched, external to the project, or at least not directly dependent on the project. So many people would like to write, but actually write nothing, that we are not justified in only considering the writer’s intentions when we seek to understand his work. We are obliged to examine not only the conditions of the possibility of the project, but also the validity of the means employed in its realisation. And if, refraining from opposing the meaning of the project to its effective formulation, we display the conjunction (though not, of course, the confusion) of these elements, we can propose a different question: What did Verne actually find that he had done? What is the relation between the initial project and the work for which it was simply a pretext or condition? It is a question of studying the work from the conditions of its possibility—conditions which produced something quite different even while they made the work possible. Thus a second question, superimposed on the first, enables us to confront the work with itself, without recourse to interpretation, to commentary that merely translates the work into another language. This will be the question which makes explanation possible.

II ANALYSIS OF THE WORK

Note that I shall be dealing with only a limited number of novels: those written in the first period (1863–78), which are in fact the best known, and which coincide, for Verne, with the task of inventing a new literary genre. The Mysterious Island was published in 1875. The field has thus been deliberately limited because it seemed pointless to accumulate and duplicate references, whereas it is simple to pick out what is characteristic. It also seemed pointless to contest certain statements with references drawn from Verne’s later work. Obviously he developed, and once he had devised themes he would put them to various different uses. See in particular the pessimism of the later works: Robur, The Begum’s Fortune, The Barsac Mission, The Last Adam. They amount to an attempt to close off the future by means of that which had been devised to portray its opening out. This issue is studied by Michel Butor in Répertoire I. It is interesting that Verne’s work has a history, but it is not this aspect of his work which has been historically important, and the study of this development belongs in another domain. The disparagement of science is a new ideological theme, not a denial of the earlier work but a new questioning of the means of its realisation. Thus this description of the work of Jules Verne is not complete, but it is sufficient to its purpose.

A The point of departure: the ideological project

It seems not only possible but necessary to begin from the work itself, rather than at a distance or simply by moving through it. It is even inevitable that we must begin where the work itself begins: at the point of departure which it has chosen, its project, or even its intentions, which are able to be read all through it like a programme. This is also what is called its title.

Firstly, then, a general and explicit theme against which the work is continuously defined: the internal transformation of the social order by a process which is history itself, but which has now (and here arises the theme of modernity) come to predominate: the conquest of nature by industry. This is an easily identifiable ideological theme:

Verne belongs to the progressive line of the bourgeoisie: his work proclaims that man is capable of everything, that even the most distant world is an object within his reach, and that property is only after all a dialectical moment in the general subjection of nature.

(Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London, Cape, 1972)

The idea of an industry takes on a very general meaning which brings together individual and social conditions, both ingenuity and labour. (One must, however, mention that individual and social conditions could only be rather artificially distinguished within Verne’s work: society is represented entirely by typical individuals—the expert or the adventurer, who are actually identical. This is to say that everything in Verne which seems to derive from individual psychology is merely allusive, and that all his descriptions of character only seem to be irritating failures because there is neither psychology nor character.) To resume, this unity of the individual and the social, of ingenuity and labour, is visible in the privileged object of the machine.

This theme is immediately made more specific—and the problem will then be to know if these themes are similar or different, independent or in a hierarchy. It must be pointed out that the general theme is only the appearance of a theme: it only indicates a certain movement at the level of society or its ideology—a movement which is of the greatest importance for the emergence of the work, but on its own level, not in so far as it is translated into a general idea which deforms and simplifies that movement.

Man’s domination of nature, the subject of all Verne’s work, though sometimes in a disguised form, is presented as a conquest, as a movement—the propagation of the presence of man in the whole of nature, which is also a transformation of nature itself. Nature is invested by man: this is Verne’s elementary obsession (elementary because it is conscious and deliberate). A total conquest is possible; man penetrates nature only because he is in total harmony with it. The great novelty is that this movement, like a voyage, has an ending, and that this ending can be seen and described: the future bathes in the present, the future is completely contained in the present. See the opening of Carpathian Castle, already quoted. Butor has covered this definitively in his Répertoire I. Science, the supreme work of man, enjoys a close intimacy with nature: science will eventually know and transform nature entirely. (Note that for Gramsci this intimacy is only the result of an equilibrium: it implies a voluntary limitation, the decision not to press too far ahead in fiction (in contrast to Poe or H. G. Wells). This would explain the obsolescence of Verne’s work: this equilibrium condemns it because it is dated and ought to be revised. But is Verne’s work obsolete?)

‘It will be done,’ answered Captain Hood, ‘just as some day voyages will be made to both the North and South Pole!’

‘Evidently!’

‘Or an exploring party to the lowest depths of old Ocean.’

‘Doubtless.’

‘Or a journey to the centre of the earth?’

‘Bravo, Hood!’

‘As everything will be done!’ I added.

‘Even an aerial voyage to each of the planets of the solar system!’ rejoined Hood, whom nothing daunted.

‘No, captain,’ I replied. ‘Man, a mere inhabitant of the earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.’

‘He can, he must!’ cried Banks. ‘All that is within the limits of possibility may and shall be accomplished. Then when man has nothing more to discover in the globe which he inhabits—’

‘He will disappear with the spheroid which has no longer any mysteries concealed from him,’ put in Captain Hood.

‘Not so!’ returned Banks. ‘He will enjoy it as a master, and will derive far greater advantages...