Mute Speech

Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics

Jacques Rancière, James Swenson

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231528009
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.

FROM RESTRICTED TO GENERAL POETICS

PART I

CHAPTER 1

FROM REPRESENTATION TO EXPRESSION

LET US return to the stone wall and refuge of silence. Blanchot, in fact, did not invent the metaphors he uses to celebrate the purity of literary experience, and the valorization of purity is not their only possible use. These same metaphors have often served to denounce the perversion inherent in that purity. They thus structure Sartre’s arguments expressing both fascination and contempt for Flaubert and Mallarmé. Sartre continually denounces Flaubert’s infatuation with poems in dead languages, “words of stone falling from the lips of statues,” or the Mallarméan poem’s “column of silence blossoming alone in some secluded garden.” He valorizes a literature of expository speech, in which the word serves as an intermediary between an author and a reader, in opposition to a literature in which the means becomes an end, in which speech is no longer the act of a subject but a mute soliloquy: “Language is present when someone speaks, otherwise it is dead—words neatly arranged in a dictionary. These poems uttered by no one, which seem like bouquets of flowers or arrangements of jewels selected for their harmonizing colors, are in fact pure silence.”¹ We might think that Sartre is responding to Blanchot and, therefore, quite naturally uses his vocabulary. But this critique of literary “petrification” has a much longer history. When Sartre denounces, from a political and revolutionary viewpoint, the sacrifice of human speech and action to the prestige of a petrified language, he paradoxically takes up the accusations that the literary and political traditionalists of the nineteenth century continually leveled against each generation of literary innovators. Whether in opposition to the images of Hugolian “Romanticism,” the descriptions of Flaubertian “realism,” or the arabesques of Mallarméan “symbolism,” it was always the primacy of living and acting speech that the traditionalists upheld. In What is Literature?, Sartre sets up an opposition between a poetry that uses words intransitively, as a painter uses colors, and a literature that uses words to show and to prove. This opposition between an art that paints and an art that demonstrates was similarly already a leitmotiv of nineteenth-century criticism. It is the argument Charles de Rémusat made against Hugo when he denounced a literature that “ceases to serve as the instrument of a fruitful idea and isolates itself from the causes it ought to defend [. . .] in order to become an art that is independent of anything it might express, a particular, suigeneris power that looks only within itself for its life, its goals, and its glory.” Barbey d’Aurevilly made the argument against Flaubert: the realist “only wants painterly books” and rejects “any book whose purpose is to prove something.” Finally, this argument is also at the core of Léon Bloy’s great denunciation of the “literary idolatry” that sacrifices the Verb to the cult of the sentence.² In order to understand this recurrent denunciation of literary “petrification” and its metamorphoses, we must thus break through the convenient barrier erected by Sartre between the pantheist naivety of the Romantic age, when “animals spoke and books were taken down directly from the lips of God,” and the post-1848 disenchantment of disabused aesthetes. We must grasp this theme at its origin, in the very moment when the power of speech immanent in every living being and the power of life immanent in every stone are first affirmed.

Let us begin at the beginning, that is, the battle over “Romanticism.” The first thing that got the partisans of Voltaire and La Harpe riled up against Hugo was not the “hidden/staircase [escalier/dérobé]” and other enjambments of Hernani or the “liberty cap” he put on the old dictionary. It was the identification of the power of the poem with that of a language of stone. Witness the incisive analysis given by Gustave Planche of the work that, much more than Hernani, symbolizes the scandal of the new school, Notre-Dame de Paris:

In this unique and monstrous work, man and stone come together and form a single body. Man beneath the ogive is like moss on a wall or lichen on an oak. Under Monsieur Hugo’s pen, stone comes to life and seems to follow all human passions. The imagination, dazzled at first, believes it is witnessing the expansion of the realm of thought and the conquest of matter by intelligent life. But it is soon undeceived, seeing that matter has remained as it was but that man has been petrified. The guivres and salamanders carved on the cathedral’s walls have remained immobile while the blood that had flowed in man’s veins suddenly froze; his breathing stopped, the eye no longer sees and the free agent has fallen to the level of stone without having raised it toward himself.³

The “petrification” spoken of by Hugo’s critic does not stem from a posture the writer may have adopted, a choice to silence his voice. Properly speaking, it is the opposition of one poetics to another, an opposition that expresses the break of Romantic novelty not only with the formal rules of belles lettres but with their very spirit. What opposes these two poetics is a different idea of the relation between thought and matter that constitutes the poem and of the language that is the site of this relation. If we refer back to the classical terms of poetics—the inventio that concerns the choice of subject, the dispositio that arranges its parts, and the elocutio that gives the discourse its appropriate ornaments—the new poetics that triumphs in Hugo’s novel can be characterized as an overturning of the system that gave them order and hierarchy. Classical inventio defined the poem, in Aristotle’s terms, as an arrangement of actions, a representation of men in action. It is important that we see clearly the implications of the strange procedure of putting the cathedral in the place of the arrangement of human actions. Notre-Dame de Paris certainly does tell a story, knots together and then resolves the destiny of its characters. But the title of the book is not thereby merely an indication of the time and place where the story occurs. It defines these adventures as another incarnation of what the cathedral itself expresses in the distribution of its spaces and the iconography or relief of its sculptures. It stages its characters as figures drawn from the stone and the meaning it incarnates. To accomplish this Hugo’s sentences animate the stone, make it speak and act. If elocution formerly was subject to inventio, giving the represented agents of the action the expression appropriate to their character and their circumstances, it now emancipates itself from this tutelage, to the profit of the power of speech granted to the new object of the poem, and takes its mistress’s place. But, as Planche tells us, this omnipotence of language is also a reversal of its internal hierarchy: henceforth it will be the “material part” of language—words with their sonorous and imagistic power—that takes the place of the “intellectual part”—the syntax that subordinates those words to the expression of thought and to the logical order of an action.

Planche’s analysis allows us to understand what is at stake in Hugolian “petrification,” namely the overturning of a poetic system. It also allows us to reconstitute the system thus reversed, the system of representation, as it had been set forth during the preceding century in treatises by Batteux, Marmontel, and La Harpe, or as it inspired Voltaire’s commentaries on Corneille. The system of representation in fact consisted less in formal rules than in their spirit, that is, in a particular idea of the relations between speech and action. Four great principles animated the poetics of representation. The first, established in the first chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics, is the principle of fiction. The essence of the poem is not found in the use of a more or less harmonious metrical regularity but in the fact that it is an imitation, a representation of actions. In other words, the poem cannot be defined as a mode of language. A poem is a story, and its value or deficiency consists in the conception of this story. This principle founds the generality of poetics as a norm for the arts generally. If poetry and painting can be compared with one another, it is not because we could consider painting as a kind of language and assimilate the painter’s colors to the poet’s words. It is rather because both of them tell a story, which can be analyzed in terms of the fundamental common norms of inventio and dispotitio. The primacy of the “arrangement of actions” that defines the fable also provides the foundation for the casual way critics and translators treat the linguistic form of the work, notably in the license translators take in transposing verse into prose, or resetting it in verse forms more common to their own nation and age. La Harpe objected when La Motte transposed the first act of Mithridate into prose in order to demonstrate that metrics was merely an obstacle to the communication of ideas and sentiments. But one of the exercises most commonly assigned to students in order to form their style—and this would remain true well into the nineteenth century—was to transpose verse fables into prose. What constitutes a poem is in the first place the consistency of an idea set into fiction.

There is a second aspect to the principle of fiction, which is that it presupposes a specific space-time in which the fiction is offered and appreciated as such. This seems obvious: Aristotle does not need to spell it out, and it still goes without saying in the age of belles lettres. But by then the fragility of this distribution had been demonstrated by a fictional hero: Don Quixote who, in breaking Master Peter’s puppets, refused to recognize the specific space-time in which one acts as if one believes in stories one does not believe. Don Quixote is not simply the hero of defunct chivalry and imagination gone mad; he is also the hero of the novelistic form itself, the hero of a mode of fiction that places its own status in peril. It is true that such confrontations between novelistic heroes and puppeteers belong to a world about which the order of belles lettres has nothing to say. But it is not for nothing that the new literature will adopt Don Quixote as its hero.

Next comes the generic principle. It is not enough for a fiction to announce itself as such—it must also conform to a genre. What defines a genre, however, is not a set of formal rules but the nature of what is represented, the object of the fiction. Once again it was Aristotle who set forth the principle in the first books of the Poetics: The genre of a poem—epic or satire, tragedy or comedy—is above all linked to the nature of what it represents. There are fundamentally two sorts of people (and two sorts of actions) that can be imitated: the great and the small. Likewise there are two sorts of people who imitate—noble spirits and common spirits—and two ways of imitating—one that elevates the object imitated and another that lowers it. Imitators with nobility of soul choose to represent the striking actions of the great, the heroes and the gods, and to represent them with the highest degree of formal perfection that they can attain: these imitators become epic or tragic poets. Imitators of lesser virtue choose to tell little stories about lowly people or reprove the vices of mediocre beings, and they become comic or satiric poets.

A fiction belongs to a genre. A genre is defined by the subject represented. The subject takes its place in a scale of values that defines the hierarchy of genres. The subject represented ties the genre to one of two fundamental modalities of discourse, praise and blame. There is no generic system without a hierarchy of genres. Determined by the subject represented, the genre defines the specific mode of its representation. The generic principle thus implies a third principle, which we will call the principle of decorum [convenance]. The poet who has chosen to represent gods rather than bourgeois, kings rather than shepherds, and has chosen a corresponding genre of fiction, must give his characters actions and discourses appropriate to their nature—and thus also appropriate to the poem’s genre. The principle of decorum is thus in complete harmony with the principle of submission of elocutio to the invented fiction. “The tone, or key of the discourse is determined by the particular state and situation the person is in at the time he is speaking.”⁴ It was upon this principle, much more than on the too-famous “three unities” or catharsis, that the French classical age constructed its poetics and founded its criteria. The problem is not one of obeying rules but of discerning modes of suitability. The goal of fiction is to please. On this point, Voltaire agrees with Corneille, who agrees with Aristotle. But because it must please well-bred people [honnêtes gens], fiction must respect what makes fiction respectable as well as pleasing the principle of decorum. Voltaire’s Commentaires sur Corneille meticulously applies this principle to all characters and situations, to all their actions and discourses. What is wrong is always unsuitable. The subject of Théodore, for example, is vicious because there is “nothing tragic in this plot; a young man refuses the bride offered to him because he loves another, who in turn does not want him—this is in fact a purely trivial subject for comedy.” The generals and princesses of Suréna “talk about love as if they were Parisian burghers.” In Pulchérie, the verses in which Martian swears his love “seem to come from an old shepherd rather than an old warrior.” Pulchérie herself speaks “like a serving-girl in a comedy” or even like a writer. “What princess would ever begin by saying that love languishes amongst signs of favor and expires amidst pleasure?” Moreover, “it is not fitting for a princess to say she is in love.”⁵ Indeed, a princess is not a shepherdess. But we should not mistake the nature of this unseemliness. Voltaire knows high society well enough to know that a princess, whether in love or not, speaks in pretty much the same way as a bourgeoise, if not a shepherdess. What he means is that a princess in a tragedy should not declare her love in that way, that is, should not speak like a shepherdess in an eclogue, unless you want to turn tragedy into comedy. Even Batteux, when he recommends having gods speak “in the manner they really and naturally do,” is perfectly aware that our knowledge in this matter is fairly limited. The problem is to have them speak “not only as they commonly speak, but as they should speak, supposing each in his highest degree of perfection.”⁶ It is not a matter of local color or faithful reproduction but of fictional verisimilitude. Verisimilitude involves the overlap of four criteria of decorum: first of all, conformity to the nature of human passions in general; next, conformity to the character or manners of a particular people or historical figure, as we know them through the best authors; third, agreement with the decency and taste that are appropriate to our own manners; and finally, conformity of actions and speech with the logic of actions and characters proper to a particular genre. The perfection of the representative system is not that of a grammarian’s rules. It is that of the genius who unites these four forms of decorum—natural, historical, moral, and conventional—and orders them in terms of the form that should dominate in a particular case. This is why, for example, it is Racine and not his doctrinaire critics who is correct when he shows us, in Britannicus, an emperor (Nero) hiding in order to overhear a conversation between lovers. The critics say that such an action is not fitting for an emperor and a tragedy; the situation and the character portrayed are comic. But this is because they have not read Tacitus, and therefore do not feel that this sort of situation is a faithful portrayal of Nero’s court, such as we know it through Tacitus.

Indeed, decorum is something that is felt, and its proof lies in sensation of pleasure. This is why La Harpe can absolve Chimène of the accusation of acting like an “unnatural daughter” when she listens to her father’s murderer speak to her of love. For even if the proof is negative, the theater verifies what is natural and what is unnatural:

I must once again ask the Academy’s forgiveness, but I consider it to be conclusively proven that an unnatural daughter would not be accepted in the theater, much less produce the effect that Chimène produces. Mistakes like that are never forgiven since they are judged by the heart, and the people assembled cannot accept an impression that is contrary to nature.⁷

The Rousseauist accent of La Harpe’s formulation here allows us to date the argument to the period of his revolutionary enthusiasm. But the only change this makes is to grant to the republican people a privilege of verification that La Harpe’s master, Voltaire, reserved for informed connoisseurs. The principle of decorum defines a relation between the author and his subject whose success can only by judged by the spectator—a certain kind of spectator. Suitability is felt. The littérateurs of the Academy or the periodical press do not feel it—Corneille and Racine do. They feel it not on account of their knowledge of the rules of art, but on account of their kinship with their characters, or more precisely with what their characters ought to be. This kinship consists in the fact that, unlike the littérateurs, both the great authors and their characters are men of glory, men of beautiful and active speech. This further implies that their natural spectators are not men who watch but men who act and who act through speech. According to Voltaire, Corneille’s primary spectators were Condé and Retz, Molé and Lamoignon; they were generals, preachers, and magistrates who came for instruction in speaking worthily and not today’s audience of spectators composed merely of “a certain number of young men and young women.”⁸

The principle of decorum thus rests upon a harmony between three persons: the author, the represented character, and the spectator present in the theater. The natural audience of the playwright, as that of the orator, is those who “come for instruction in speaking,” since speaking is their true business, whether it to command or convince, to exhort or deliberate, to teach or to please. In this sense, La Harpe’s “people assembled” is every bit as much opposed to the simple gathering of “a certain number of young men and young women” as are Voltaire’s generals, magistrates, princes, and bishops. It is as agents of speech that they are qualified to make the pleasure they feel into a proof of the suitability of Chimène’s behavior and Corneille’s play. The edifice of representation is “a kind of republic, in which everyone ought to hold the rank proportioned to his condition.”⁹ It is thus a hierarchical edifice in which lan...