The Singularity of Literature

Derek Attridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138701274
• eBook ISBN: 9781351697965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art.

Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as "invention," "singularity," "otherness," "alterity," "performance" and "form." He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a "responsible," creative mode of reading.

The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

1
Introductory

Opening Questions

There is no shortage of testimony, in the pages of daily and weekly publications, in reading groups and book clubs, in off-the-cuff comments, to literature’s unsettling, intoxicating, moving, delighting powers. A small number of philosophers and literary theorists have taken these powers seriously without, on the one hand, attempting to reduce them to a system or, on the other, taking refuge in vagueness and irrationalism. And there are some signs of an increasing willingness among those who study literature to address, as an issue of major importance, the question of aesthetic effect (as well as aesthetic affect), thus restarting a very old debate that had, for a time, almost fallen silent. I do not wish to begin, however, as many theoretical accounts of literature do, with the various philosophical projects that have largely determined our approach to these issues and the vocabulary we use, but rather with the observable phenomena themselves: the paradoxes inherent in the way we talk about literature, the pleasures and the potency that we experience in reading it.

My title, The Singularity of Literature, may be heard as an echo of that of an earlier book of mine, Peculiar Language. The arguments I work through in this book arise to some degree from the argument in that study: to put it over-simply, that all attempts since the Renaissance to determine the difference between “literary” and “non-literary” language have failed—and that this is a necessary failure, one by which literature as a cultural practice has been continuously constituted.¹ In pursuing further this question of literature’s evasion of rules and definitions, and trying to elucidate my own experience of and pleasure in particular works of literature, I have found myself coming back again and again to two issues that have received much acknowledgment in passing but surprisingly little close attention as theoretical questions that extend well beyond the particular histories of artistic movements. The first of these is the role of innovation in the history of Western art;² the second is the importance to readers, viewers, and listeners of the uniqueness of the individual artwork and of the artist’s oeuvre. I redefine these two widely acknowledged properties of art and of our understanding of art under the names “invention” and “singularity” (giving the book’s title a second implication), and bring them into conjunction with another property that has been much discussed, though also much abused, in recent theoretical writing: “alterity” or “otherness.” Such a coming-together involves more than a conjunction, in fact: I see invention as inseparable from singularity and alterity; and I see this trinity as lying at the heart of Western art as a practice and as an institution.³ This conception of the artwork brings into focus two further dimensions which, I believe, are crucial to our understanding of it: its occurrence as a particular kind of event to which I give the name “performance,” and its participation in the realm we call “the ethical.” These topics are all addressed in the chapters that follow.

That the history of Western art in all its genres is a history of innovation—a long sequence of artists or groups of artists constantly searching for new modes of expression to exploit, new facets of human life to represent, new shades of feeling to capture—is a familiar fact, but the significance of this fact has not always been appreciated. That we can read a poem or watch a play written hundreds or even thousands of years ago and feel we are experiencing directly its creator’s inventiveness is a phenomenon most of us would recognize, but accounts of this phenomenon have tended either toward the mystical or the dismissively demystifying. That we experience literary works less as objects than as events—and events that can be repeated over and over again and yet never seem exactly the same—is something many have acknowledged, but the implications of which few have pursued. In all our transactions with art, whether as creators, consumers, critics, or dealers, we put a premium on the uniqueness of the work and the distinctiveness of the oeuvre or school, yet our aesthetic theories often make little of this central fact. And although many attempts have been made to describe or analyze the act of creation, artistic or otherwise, few of these face head-on the puzzle which it entails: how does an entity or an idea unthinkable or unimaginable within existing frameworks of understanding and feeling come into being as part of our understood and felt world? And why is it so often described by creators not as an experience of doing something but of letting something happen?

This could have been a book about art in its widest sense, and I hope it will be read with profit by some whose particular interest is in an art-form other than literature. It is only by an artificial and often arbitrary act of separation that the qualities of the literary can be discussed, as I shall for the most part be doing, in isolation from related qualities in other art-forms. My decision to limit the discussion to literature springs from two sources: a hesitation to make pronouncements about other fields in which I have less training and experience, and the realization that the need to pay due attention to the specificity of each art-form would result in a book much longer and more unwieldy in its argumentative procedures than I was willing to contemplate. Although I give some attention to “the singularity of literature” in the sense of its difference from other art-forms, I do not discuss those other practices as such. However, there is some consideration of the aesthetic field more generally in the early chapters and an occasional glance toward other art-forms in the rest of the book. It would not, I believe, be an especially difficult task to extrapolate from the main points of my characterization of literature to the wider arena, including those developments in electronic media that may—who knows?— spell the end or at least the transformation of the verbal arts as we presently understand them.

Since my claim is that literature, or rather the experience of literary works, consistently exceeds the limits of rational accounting, what I offer is less a logical argument than a report and an invitation: a report on a certain living-through of the literary, and an invitation to the reader to share, at least for the duration of the reading, this living-through. In the interests of economy and pace, I limit literary examples to a few short poems; this may skew the argument to some degree, but not, I hope, damagingly. (In Chapter 8 I discuss the possible objection that my approach privileges poetry over other literary modes.) I refer the reader to my companion book, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, for further exemplification of these arguments.

One point that needs to be made clear is that this attempt to understand the “literariness” of certain written texts is not an attempt to state what is most important about such texts in our private lives and social existence. Importance can be measured in many ways, and in our day-to-day lives the scale on which the literary comes high may not be a scale that counts for a great deal. We rightly value the works belonging to the tradition of literature for a number of different things they are capable of being and doing, most of them not strictly literary. Poems such as Henley’s “Invictus” or Kipling’s “If” have clearly given comfort or courage to thousands, but it is not obvious that it is as literature—in the sense which I try to develop in this book—that they possess this remarkable and much prized power. A work like the Iliad or Beowulf can serve as a rich source of historical information; Fielding’s and James’s novels may be instructive in the art of moral living; Zola and Stowe perhaps played a part in ameliorating the lives of many individuals in unhappy circumstances: none of these capacities, however, falls peculiarly within the literary preserve. My argument is that literature, understood in its difference from other kinds of writing (and other kinds of reading), solves no problems and saves no souls; nevertheless, as will become clear, I do insist that it is effective, even if its effects are not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program.

Understanding "Literature"

Do the terms “literature,” “the literary,” and “literariness” refer to actual entities—objects, institutions, or practices— to be found in certain cultures at certain times, or are they categories that have come into being as a way of organizing and simplifying the complex and fluid processes of linguistic production and reception in those cultures? Where such questions are taken seriously today, the second of these alternatives is no doubt the favored one, and for good reason: there seem few grounds for thinking that the concepts named by these terms correspond in a one-to-one fashion with objects or patterns of behavior that exist independently of the language that labels them. There have been many discussions of the long and convoluted history of the idea of literature, and of the closely related (though significantly different) histories of similar concepts named in other Western languages, which serve as valuable reminders of the complicated past and continuing ambiguity of this group of interrelated words.

But in order to understand the importance today of this cluster of terms and concepts to the broader web of ideas and practices that make up what we call Western civilization, and thereby perhaps to encourage fresh thinking about the future direction of that civilization, it is necessary to embark on something other than cultural history or lexicographical investigation. Literature always seems to present itself in the final analysis as something more than the category or entity it is claimed to be (writing that has a particular institutional function, say, or writing with a particular relation to truth), and as valuable for something other than the various personal or social benefits that are ascribed to it. This “something more” or “something other” remains obscure, however, although many different attempts have been made to specify it.⁴ It is as if the linguistic and intellectual resources of our culture, while registering the importance of the property or process or principle to which the term “literature” and its cognates serve as witnesses or which they bring into being, are unable to provide direct access to it.

Analytical language is already beginning to break down in my attempt at lucid exposition. I have employed the words “property,” “process,” and “principle” to refer to what it is that literature might be said to witness or bring into being in the full knowledge that all these words are unsatisfactory, as, in this sentence, is the use of the word “it” and the notions of “witnessing” or “bringing into being.” This difficulty is, of course, a direct outcome of the curious state of affairs we are discussing: were it possible to find unambiguous names, to use pronouns with confidence, to talk in terms of simple acts of referring or constituting, there would be no need to ascribe to the non-discursive mode of literature a peculiar potency not possessed by other linguistic practices. There is something fundamentally paradoxical, perhaps even wrongheaded, in an attempt such as the present one to use a nonliterary discourse to convey what literature, most importantly, can do. Nevertheless, there might be some profit in pursuing the attempt to the extent that theoretical and descriptive language will allow it, as a corrective to other—often even more reductive—accounts of literature, and as a complement to the primary activity of the reading of the works we call literary.

Although I have acknowledged that the entities named by the terms under scrutiny—the (ill-defined) body of literature, individual literary works, the practice of reading those works, and the literary as a property of certain texts—can be thought of as in fact produced by the concepts that appear to designate them, it is also the case that the difficulties that beset any theoretical analysis derive from the resistance of those categories to the process of conceptualization. If the term “literature” does not uncomplicatedly name something in the world, it does not uncomplicatedly bring something into existence either. Rather, by putting the processes of naming and constituting themselves into play, by, in a sense to be developed later, performing them, it complicates that very opposition. Literature may be a cultural product, but it is never simply contained by a culture.

Literary Instrumentalism

Once a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor of communications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is allowed to offer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment, because that is good for morale. This year he is offering a course on the Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Communications 101, “Communication Skills,” and Communications 201, “Advanced Communication Skills.”⁵

J.M. Coetzee’s satiric portrayal, in his 1999 novel Disgrace, of the impact of reductive, management-driven methods on universities, and on their teaching of literature in particular, no doubt struck many a chord among its readers in a number of countries. The plethora of fashionable buzzwords that emerged in the world of education during the last two decades of the twentieth century—quality assurance, benchmarking, accountability, outcomes assessment, performance indicators, and all the rest of them—are symptoms of an attitude toward teaching and learning, and toward what we can loosely call the aesthetic domain, that is far from new—Dickens parodied it in Hard Times, Weber, Adorno, and Horkheimer in their very different ways addressed it as a significant historical phenomenon—but that is now, as one aspect of increasing globalization, permeating more areas and activities than ever before.

A large majority of literary critics, scholars, theorists, and historians have been strongly opposed to this approach as it has manifested itself in the policies of government departments, funding bodies, and educational institutions. It is regarded, quite rightly, as a threat to much that is valuable in humanistic learning. However, some of the modes of literary study that became popular in the same period might be said to share to a certain degree its underlying assumptions, or at least to operate with a notion of literature that poses no challenge to those assumptions. Let me, for the sake of brevity though at the risk of oversimplification, give it the single label “instrumentalism,” collapsing together under this term a diverse but interconnected group of preconceptions and tendencies.

What I have in mind could be crudely summarized as the treating of a text (or other cultural artifact) as a means to a predetermined end: coming to the object with the hope or the assumption that it can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and responding to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness. The project in question may be political, moral, historical, biographical, psychological, cognitive, or linguistic. This book is an attempt to conceive of literature (and by implication other artistic products and practices) in a different light, as, in fact, defined by its resistance to such thinking. In doing so, I have been able to draw on a number of thinkers who have made similar attempts—most important to me in this regard have been Derrida, Blanchot, and Adorno— but whose arguments have not had the impact on our practices of literary commentary they deserve.

What I am calling an instrumental attitude to literature, I must at once add, is a necessary one for most of our dealings with verbal texts: it enables us to process them efficiently, it prevents the continual re-evaluation of our beliefs and assumptions, and it is in accord with the main function of most of the writing and speech we encounter. In the field of literary studies, this attitude has been highly productive, giving us valuable accounts of literary works as indices to the historical, sociological, and ideological texture of earlier periods and other cultures and to the psychic and sometimes somatic constitution of authors, injecting literature into political struggles (in the name of humanism, the working class, oppressed races and nationalities, women, and homosexuals, to name just a few), and exemplifying in literary works important features of linguistic structure, rhetorical and formal organization, and generic conventions. The experience of immediacy and vividness which we often gain from literary works of the past leads naturally to their being pressed into service as a source of evidence for lives led before ours or in foreign places; and although there is a danger that the “reality effect,” the created illusion of a real referent, may interfere with as much as it aids accurate historical and human judgment, the judicious use of literary evidence is clearly as valid as other modes of access to a vanished or otherwise inaccessible culture.

Literature’s powerful effects, and the high estimation it is accorded in cultural formations, inevitably lead also to its being appealed to and utilized when a political or ethical cause is being fought for. Although there is an inescapable tendency on the part of those whose professional lives center on literature to exaggerate its potency as a political weapon, there is no doubt that it has had a role to play in significant, and frequently laudable, social changes, like the ending of slavery or the reduction in the use of capital punishment in some parts of the globe. Its complex handling of language makes it a prime source, too, of linguistic and stylistic investigation and education, even though its complexity is sometimes too great for a science that is still finding extraordinary complications in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGΕ CLASSICS EDITION
• 1 Introductory
• 2 Creation and the other
• 3 Originality and invention
• 4 Inventive language and the literary event
• 5 Singularity
• 6 Reading and responding
• 7 Performance
• 8 Form, meaning, context
• 9 Responsibility and ethics
• 10 An everyday impossibility
• DEBTS AND DIRECTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX