Context Matters

Abstract

Acknowledging the influence of New Criticism on literary studies, Vernay notes that conceptualizing a literary text as an enclosed space does not take into account the different forces that have participated in the creation of the work. The influence of these forces on the text is often ignored, something that could be related to anxieties about imitation. But influence is not confined only to literary aspects. The text is also at the mercy of hidden editorial forces which go as far as impacting on the style, tone, and format of the book as object.

Literature is not conceived in a vacuum, but in a crucible of living speech with which it shares many features …—Tzvetan Todorov

The novel—whether it be “engaged” or “disengaged,” to quote Georges Perec ¹ —emerges as a multifaceted genre due to its remarkable capacity to renew itself on so many levels: thematic, aesthetic, even deontological. If the text has enough resources to be the subject of a good analysis, it will give its full measure only after having been illuminated in its context, in which the publishing world plays a part.

Adherents of New Criticism, who see the literary work as a hermetic and self-sufficient linguistic system, would almost have us believe that “the work imposes the advent of an order that ruptures the existing state of affairs, the affirmation of a rule that obeys its own logic and law.” ² There is something quite peculiar about this need to see the text as an enclosed space in order that it be open to a plurality of interpretations, but that is indeed the underlying intention of New Criticism not wishing to be burdened with the author’s views. It was then very convenient to divest authors of all authority over their texts by proclaiming their symbolic death (as did Roland Barthes), to deny the autobiographical dimension of a text by rejecting out of hand any link between the life of the author and his work, and simply overlooking the part played by social forces in novels. ³ It remains to be seen whether such a categorical stance could be improved by being more nuanced.

Textual self-sufficiency—a Modernist principle taken over by New Criticism—gives primacy to the word over the world. To declare a text free from any influence is the best means of ridding critics of all interpretive inhibitions. As a result, “it is unsurprising that pupils learn the dogmatic view that literature is unrelated to the rest of the world, and study only the internal relations between the elements of the work.” ⁴ Based on this premise, anything and everything becomes acceptable: By not taking into account contextual factors, criticism will not privilege one particular reading over any other. But it would be difficult to identify theoretical contributions, underlying cultural elements, and any traces of intertextuality—whether borrowings, influences, or simple allusions—without information on the following contexts: genetic, in order to trace literary descent; historical, especially for historical or political novels; and biographical, surely unavoidable for novels that have been termed “roman du moi.” ⁵

A vision of the literary text that is deprived of such richness may well be incomplete, if not naïve, and even more so if the information is available! Of course, this problem does not arise for anonymous works, nor for those by ancient authors. As Pierre Bayard so aptly said, “For many ancient authors, it is hardly contestable that our complete ignorance of their personalities, of their circumstances, or of their lives or creations is no disadvantage in appreciating their work and making an informed judgment about them.” ⁶

Why did New Criticism wish to hide the power of influence—whether of one text on another, or of a context on a text? Could it be linked to the unease that influence generates, an unease identified in Freudian terms by Harold Bloom in his seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Influence is a phenomenon that few authors will readily admit due to the thin and porous border between influence and imitation. While influence is seen as the ability to “fecundate,” as T. S. Eliot pertinently observed, imitation “can only sterilize.” ⁷ That being the case, the writer would pass for an imitator who would write “in the manner of” right up to being accused of plagiarism. No doubt many discerning readers will view imitation as an admission of impotence, or even worse: a dried-up imagination! But this fear has not been borne out, as evidenced by the absurd and very funny 2009 book by Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation (Anticipated plagiarism), a work that chronologically reverses issues of influence.

Each text is written in a context that should not be ignored, for why else would authors leave paratextual clues in their work? It is done in response to two basic needs: the popularization and readability of their plots. Indeed, it is likely that writers do this to expand their readership beyond Umberto Eco’s Model Readers (on whom nothing is lost because they possess encyclopedic knowledge, required for a detailed reading) and to provide keys for comprehending the complexity of the work.

The question of context is essential for any “literature in the second degree” (Gérard Genette), particularly in the case of pastiches, parodies, and text-palimpsests. For those, it would be wise to adapt the reasoning behind the translation principle (based on the dialectic of the original and the copy) to the mechanisms of the hypotext and hypertext, to reprise Genette’s terminology. In fact, one can see that the difference that emerges after rewriting is inherent in the original (read: hypotext). To return to George Steiner’s idea, rewriting (be it a translation or the hypertext pastiche) provides the original with a “spatial and temporal resonance” and serves as a telling measure for it, a process that makes the transformations visible in a new textual space (read: hypertext):

Supreme translation … makes live restitution to the original not only in that it gives to it a new range of spatial and temporal resonance, not only in that it can illuminate the original, compelling it, as it were, into greater clarity and impact. The process of reciprocation goes much deeper. A great translation bestows on the original that which was already there. It augments the original by externalizing, by deploying visibly, elements of connotation, of overtone and undertone, latencies of significance, affinities with other texts and cultures or defining contrasts with these—all of which are present, are “there” in the original from the outset but may not have been fully declared. ⁸

In other words, variation emerges through the phenomenon of transposition, thanks to another context, but for all that it is not the result of any contribution from without—the difference being contained within the body of the original: Against all expectations, the hypertext can achieve no originality without the original. What is valid for the creative process applies to interpreting: Any close reading of a text that aims at originality cannot dispense with the original (that is, the hypotext, or context).

If one wishes to know what types of influence affect the aesthetic work, and how they are going to change our perception of the literary text, it would be unwise not to take into account the publishing world. To take an interest in the work as publication is to note the passage of the manuscript from the private sphere of the author to the public exposure of it through marketing. In other words, it means factoring in the economic logic in which the work is inscribed, without necessarily making the literary text a pretext for a Marxist analysis of the laws of production and profit inherent in the book market. Since this is about literature and not economics, the aesthetic work must remain our central concern.

When culture started to become mass produced, from around the end of the 1970s, Marthe Robert directed our attention to the desecration of literature and to the birth of what I will call “the marketing-modified book,” a book reduced to nothing more than a commercial commodity tailored to popular tastes.

No longer something crucial and compelling, literature has no more prestige or interest than any other cultural product, and indeed is forced to provide some justification for its privileged status. It can no longer rest on its laurels and must henceforth consent to become one of many controlled objects, or admit that it is an outdated myth. ⁹

Unlike publishers who are all too aware of this fact, consumers, referred to out of aesthetic prudishness as “readers,” often forget that a published text immediately becomes a “book object,” and what seems to be part of a “literary production” remains nonetheless a “marketing product,” involving a number of actors in the production cycle. For Alain Finkielkraut, “it was the instrumental reason or ‘calculative thinking’, to use Heidegger’s phrase, that relegated meditative thinking (what we are calling culture) to the realm of entertainment.” ¹⁰ And the philosopher concluded his book The Defeat of the Mind (1987) by sounding the swan song:

So barbarism has finally colonized culture. In the shadow of this great word, intolerance grows at the same pace as infantilism. When it is not cultural identity boxing up individuals in their groups and which, under penalty of high treason, refuses all access to doubt, irony, and reason—all that would disconnect the individual from the collective mould, it is the leisure industry, this creation of the technical age, which reduces intellectual works to dross (or, as they say in America, to “entertainment”). ¹¹

These days, the publishing industry—claiming to be responding to consumer demand—has changed so much in the way that it presents the novel. To guarantee authors a loyal readership, publishers have three requirements: simplicity, readability, and reliability. How can we comment either positively or negatively on the stylistics or aesthetics of a work if “the entertainment industry” reduces it to dross, as Finkielkraut said above? It is precisely on this point that a pluralistic perspective could make a difference to the critical appraisal of literary works.

No doubt professional readers will be called upon to make a distinction between two types of publishing: independent or niche market publishers which allow their authors the discretion of developing their chosen structure and style, while remaining confined to a limited readership; and general publishers who are more interested in the profitability of their publication than in the possibility of welcoming a potential or actual Nobel Prize-winning writer into their stable.

Notes

• 1. In “Powers and limits of the contemporary French novelist”, a conference held at the University of Warwick May 5 1967, Perec observed that roughly between 1945 and 1955, there were two types of literature, one which was politically engaged and defended by Sartre and by Communist writers, and the other type which was the opposite, as it was apolitical: instead of fine sentiments, there were ugly opinions, instead of interesting stories about political and economic aspects of French society, there were stories about the relationship between a rich young man and a poor girl, and things of that sort. H. Coulet (ed.), Idées sur le roman (Paris: Larousse, 1992), 404.

• 2. J. Rousset, Forme et signification. Essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: José Corti, 1961), ii.

• 3. It must be recognized that the genetic structuralism of Lucien Goldmann, the author of Pour une sociologie du roman, presents itself as an alliance between the sociology of the novel and the New Criticism, even though these two approaches would seem contradictory.

• 4. T. Todorov, La littérature en peril (2007), 31.

• 5. Translator’s note : “Roman du moi” is a term coined by Michel Zink to describe a type of writing which first became widespread in French medieval literature, and which claimed to be the product of an individual consciousness. In this writing, contends Zink, “writers and poets, memorialists and historians, locate and define themselves and their subjects via the anecdotic moment, intimate, unshared”. In other words, these were early examples of an authorial presence melded with a heterodiegetic narrator. See Jane M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54.

• 6. P. Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Minuit, 2009), 93.

• 7. T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 18.

• 8. G. Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber), 1996, 203.

• 9. M. Robert, Livre de lectures (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977), 137.

• 10. A. Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, 1995, translated by Judith Friedlander (NY: Columbia University Press), 120.

• 11. Ibid., 183.