Changing Language and Changing Worlds

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in a process discussed in the previous section, literature became an institution in its own right, by courtesy of the market and its politics. From then on, there were two kinds of writing. One kind, literature proper, was the province of an elite of writers and intellectuals, who wrote in the first instance for each other. The other kind was produced for the audiences of the mass market, passive consumers of ideologies generated by the elite. But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the situation was recognised, the changed status of literature analysed, and the right questions asked about the distinctive nature of literary language (for which Roland Barthes coined the term écriture). Between the change and its perception lies a history of economic, social and philosophical changes that ended with an association of politics and language that would in itself be an instrument for further change. Modernity begins with the generation of Mallarmé.

[C]’est dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, à l’une des périodes les plus désolées du malheur capitaliste, que la littérature a trouvé, du moins pour nous, Français, avec Mallarmé, sa figure exacte: la modernité — notre modernité, qui commence alors — peut se définir par ce fait nouveau: qu’on y conçoit des utopies de langage. Nulle ‘histoire de la littérature’ (s’il doit s’en écrire encore) ne saurait être juste, qui se contenterait comme par le passé d’enchaîner des écoles sans marquer la coupure qui met alors à nu un nouveau prophétisme: celui de l’écriture. ‘Changer la langue’, mot mallarméen, est concomitant de ‘Changer le monde’, mot marxien: il y a une écoute politique de Mallarmé, de ceux qui l’ont suivi et le suivent encore.

[(I)t is the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the grimmest periods of calamitous capitalism, that literature finds its exact figure, at least for us Frenchmen, in Mallarmé. Modernity — our modernity, which begins at this period — can be defined by this new phenomenon: that Utopias of language are conceived in it. No ‘history of literature’ (if such is still to be written) could be legitimate which would be content, as in the past, to link the various schools together without indicating the gap which here reveals a new prophetic function, that of writing. ‘To change language’, that Mallarmean expression, is a concomitant of ‘To change the world’, that Marxian one. There is a political reception of Mallarmé, of those who have followed him and follow him still.]¹