What is Literature for Todorov

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New Literary History, 2007, 38: 1332

What Is Literature For?

Tzvetan Todorov

A

s ar back as I can remember, I see mysel surrounded by books.Both o my parents were proessional librarians; there were alwaystoo many books in our house. They were always coming up with

plans or new shelving to hold them; meanwhile, the books accumulatedin the bedrooms and the hallways, orming ragile piles that I had tocrawl between. I quickly learned to read and began to devour classicstories in childrens versions: the Arabian Nights, the tales o Grimm and

Andersen, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, and Les Misrables. One day when Iwas eight, I read a whole novel; I must have been very proud because Iwrote in my diary: Today I read On Grandpas Knees, a 223-page book,in an hour and a hal!

As a student in junior high school and high school, I continued to love

reading. It always gave me a shiver o delight to plunge into the worldo the writersclassics or contemporaries, Bulgarian or oreignwhosebooks I now was reading in complete editions. I could satisy my curios-ity, live adventures, experience right and happiness, without puttingup with the rustrations that troubled my dealings with boys and girls omy own age, among whom I lived. I did not know what I wanted to do

when I grew up, but I was certain that it would have something to dowith literature. Would I be a writer mysel? I gave it a try: I composedpoems in doggerel verses, a play in three acts on the lives o dwars and

giants, I even started a novelbut I didnt get past the rst page. I soonelt that such writing was not my vocation. Without knowing or surewhat would come later, I chose my major at the university: I was going tostudy literature. In 1956 I went to the University o Soa; my proession

would be talking about books.Bulgaria was then part o the Communist bloc, and all humanities

disciplines were shaped by the ocial ideology. Literature courses werehal scholarship and hal propaganda: literary works past and present

were weighed and measured according to the standards o Marxism-Le-

ninism. We were required to show how books represented the correctideologyor, otherwise, how they ailed to do this. Neither believing inCommunism nor being especially rebellious, I retreated into a stancethat many o my countrymen took: in public, silence or lip service to


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new literary history14

the ocial slogans; in private, an intense lie o meetings and lectures,devoted especially to authors that no one would suspect to be the spokes-people or Communist doctrine, the ones who had been lucky enough

to write beore the imposition o Marxism-Leninism or those who livedin countries where they could write reely.To complete our university degree, we had to compose a masters

thesis at the end o our th year. How could I write about literaturewithout knuckling under to the dominant ideology? I chose one o theonly paths that let me avoid the orthodoxy. I concentrated on the studyo things that had no ideological value in themselves. For instance, in

works o literature, the material nature o the text itsel, its linguisticorm. I was certainly not alone in doing this: the Russian Formalists o

the 1920s had blazed this trail, and others soon ollowed them. At theuniversity, or instance, our most interesting proessor was a specialistin versication. For my thesis I did a comparison o two versions o along novella by a Bulgarian author rom the beginning o the twentiethcentury, and I limited mysel to the grammatical changes he had maderom one version to the other: transitive verbs replaced intransitive ones,the perect tense became more requent than the imperect . . .This wayeverything I wrote escaped the censor, and I ran no risk o violating theideological taboos o the Party.

I will never know how this cat-and-mouse game would have endednot necessarily in my avor. A chance came along to leave or a yearin Europe, as we used to say at the time, that is, on the other side othe Iron Curtain (an image that we did not think at all exaggeratedbecause crossing it was just about impossible). I chose Paris because itsreputation as the city o arts and literature dazzled me! This was a place

where I could pursue my love o literature without limits, where I couldunite my private convictions and my public occupation, and thus escapethe collective schizophrenia spread by the totalitarian regime in whichI had been living.

As it turned out, things were a bit more dicult than I thought. Inthe course o my studies at the university, I had gotten used to payingattention to the eatures o literary works that escaped ideology: style,composition, narrative modesin short, literary technique. Because atrst I was sure that I would be staying or only a year in France, sincethat was the length o the passport they had given me, I wanted to learneverything about these subjects. They were neglected and marginalizedin Bulgaria, where they did little to advance the Communist cause, but inFrance, the land o reedom, they would be studied in depth! Yet I hadtrouble nding any such courses in Parisian universities. Literary study

was divided up by nations and by centuries; I had no idea how to ndthe proessors who paid any attention to the things that interested me.


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15what is literature or?

And it was certainly dicult or a oreign student like me to nd his wayaround the labyrinth o academic institutions and their curricula.

I had with me a letter rom the dean o the aculty o letters o the

University o Soa to his Parisian counterpart. So one day in May, 1963,I knocked on the door o an oce in the Sorbonne (at the time theonly Paris university), the door o the dean o the aculty o letters, thehistorian Aimard. When he had read the letter, he asked me what I waslooking or. I told him that I wanted to continue the study o style, lan-guage, and literary theoryin general. But you cant study these thingsin general! What literature do you want to specialize in? Feeling thefoor collapsing under me, I replied rather pitiully that French literature

would do. I realized at the same time that my French was getting mixed

up; it was a bit shaky at the time. The dean cast a condescending glanceand suggested that I would do better to study Bulgarian literature witha specialistthere must be some in France.

I was a little discouraged, but I continued my quest, asking aroundamong the ew people I knew. And so one day a proessor o psychology,the riend o a riend, hearing me explain my troubles, said: I knowsomeone else who is interested in these oddball subjects; hes a teach-ing assistant at the Sorbonne named Grard Genette. We met in a darkhallway in rue Serpente, where there were several classrooms, and we

hit it o right away. He explained to me, among other things, that therewas a proessor with a seminar at the cole des Hautes tudes, wherewe could see each other again. The name o this proessor (I had neverheard it beore) was Roland Barthes.

The beginning o my proessional lie in France is linked to theseencounters. It did not take me long to realize that one year in Paris

was not going to be enough and that I needed to stay longer in France.I registered with Barthes to do my rst doctorate, a dissertation that Isubmitted in 1966. Soon ater, I was appointed to the CNRS (NationalCenter or Scientic Research), where I have spent my whole career.Meanwhile, at Genettes suggestion, I did a French translation o the worko the Russian Formalists, little known in France, under the title Theoryo Literature, that came out in 1965. Later, Genette and I ran the journalPotiqueand an associated monograph series, and we tried to infuencethe literary curriculum at the university to ree it rom ragmentationinto nations and centuries and to open it toward what literary workshave in common.

In the ollowing years I gradually settled into French lie. I married,had children, and became a French citizen. I began to vote and to readthe newspaper, becoming more interested in public lie, because I wasdiscovering that it was not necessarily controlled by ideological dog-mas, as it was in totalitarian countries. Without alling into unqualied


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admiration, I was happy to see that France was a pluralist democracy,respectul o each individuals reedom. This realization in turn had animpact on my attitude toward methods o literary analysis: the thought

present in each work, the values that it transmits, no longer had to besqueezed into ready-made ideological containers, and thereore I nolonger needed to set them aside and to ignore them. This led me, notto deny what was then called structural analysis o literary works, butto include the useul things rom that analysis alongside other orms ostudy in pursuing the overall meaning o the work. Structural analysishad become like philology: something that one doesnt attack but thatone doesnt especially eel the need to deend either. Since realizing this,toward the end o the 1970s, I have lost interest in studying the methods

o analysis and have instead engaged in analysis itsel. In other words, Idevote mysel to the discovery o the authors o the past.From that moment on, my love o literature was no longer conned by

my education in a totalitarian country. So I needed to acquire new toolsor my work: I elt the need to learn about the discoveries and conceptso psychology, anthropology, and history. Since now the authors ideasreturned to center stage, I decided, in order to understand them better,to immerse mysel in the history o ideas about man and societies, inmoral and political philosophy.

At the same time the object o that study, literature, took on new dimen-sions. Literature does not emerge rom a void but rom an environmento verbal utterances with which literature shares many characteristics. Itis no accident that the boundary between literature and other discourseshas oten shited. I elt mysel attracted by these other orms o expres-sion, not at the expense o literature but alongside it. In The Conquest oAmerica, to understand better how very dierent cultures encounter oneanother, I read the accounts o Spanish travelers and conquistadores othe sixteenth century along with those o their Aztec and Mayan contem-poraries. In the course o my refections on our moral lie, I immersedmysel in the writings o people who were taken away as prisoners toRussian and German concentration camps; this led me to write Facingthe Extreme. The letters o several writers enabled me, in Les Aventuriers delabsolu, to question an existential ambition: that o oering ones lie toserve beauty. The texts that I was readingpersonal narratives, memoirs,historical works, testimonies, refections, letters, anonymous texts romolkloredid not have, like literary works, the status o ction, becausethey directly described lived experience. However, like literary works,they let me discover unknown dimensions o the world, they moved meprooundly, and they made me think.

In other words, the eld o literature has broadened or me, because itnow includes, alongside poems, novels, short stories, and dramatic works,


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the immense domain o narrative written or public or personal use, essays,and refections. I someone asks me why I love literature, the answer thatI immediately think o is that literature helps me live. I no longer seek

in literature, as I did in adolescence, to avoid wounds that real peoplecould infict upon me; literature does not replace lived experiences butorms a continuum with them and helps me understand them. Denserthan daily lie but not radically dierent rom it, literature expands ouruniverse, prompts us to see other ways to conceive and organize it. Weare all ormed rom what other people give us: rst our parents and thenthe other people near us. Literature opens to the innite this possibilityo interaction and thus enriches us innitely. It brings us irreplaceablesensations through which the real world becomes more urnished with

meaning and more beautiul. Far rom being a simple distraction, anentertainment reserved or educated people, literature lets each one ous ulll our human potential.

Literature Reduced to the Absurd

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role Iassigned to literature was not recognized by everyone. This discrepancy

struck me rst o all in regard to what is taught in schools. I have noexperience o teaching in French lyces, and only a little at the universitylevel; but, once I became a ather, I could not ignore my childrens pleasor help on the eve o quizzes or when homework was due. And eventhough I did not invest mysel totally in this, I began to eel a bit mied tosee that my advice and help tended to get nothing but mediocre grades!Later on I got a broader view o literary teaching in French schools asa member, rom 1994 to 2004, o a pluridisciplinary consulting board,part o the Ministry o National Education. That is when I understoodthat there was a wholly dierent idea o literature, not just on the parto a ew individual teachers, but in the theory behind the ocial direc-tives that guided teachers.

I turn to the Ofcial Bulletin o the Ministry o National Education(number 6, August 31, 2000) with the lyce curriculum, specically theguidelines or teaching French. Under the heading Overview o studies,the document states: The study o texts helps to orm student refectionson: literary and cultural history, genres and the construction o meaningand the specicity o texts, argumentation and the eects o discourseon those who receive it. The rest o the text expands on these headingsand explains that genres are studied methodically, that registers (orinstance, the comic) are dealt with in the next-to-last year o lyce, thatrefecting on the production and reception o texts constitutes an object


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o study in its own right in lyce, and that the elements o argumenta-tion will now be considered in a more analytic way.

As a whole, these instructions are based on a choice: that the aim o

literary analysis is to learn about the instruments that literary analysisuses. Reading poems and novels does not lead to making the studentsthink about the human condition, about the individual and society, aboutlove and hate, and about joy and despair, but about critical concepts,

whether traditional or modern. At school, pupils do not learn what lit-erature talks about but instead what critics talk about.

In every school subject, teachers ace a choice, one that is so unda-mental that they do not even notice it most o the time. We can ormulateit this way, simpliying a bit or the purposes o the discussion: are we

teaching knowledge about the discipline itsel or about its object? Andthus, in our case: should one study, above all, analytic methods, to beillustrated with a selection o literary works? Or should one study the

works that are considered essential, that can be accessed through thebroadest range o methods? Which is the goal and which is the means?

What is required and what remains elective?For other school subjects this choice is made much more clearly. We

teach, on one hand, mathematics, physics, biologya set o disciplines(the sciences), always keeping in mind their evolution. On the other hand,

we teach history, and not one method o historical investigation amongothers. For example in the rst year o lyce in France, it is consideredimportant to bring to lie, or the students, turning points in Europeanhistory: Greek democracy, the birth o the monotheistic religions, Renais-sance humanism, and so orth. We do not choose to teach the historyo mentalities, or economic history, or military, diplomatic, or religioushistory, nor the methodology and concepts o each o these approaches,even i we use these concepts when the occasion arises.

And yet the same choice arises or French (or English or Spanish . .. ) as a subject; and the current way French is taught, refected in theocial curriculum, preers the study o the discipline (as in physics),even though we could instead choose the study o the object (as inhistory). The ocial text that I quote above shows this choice, among itsmany other instructions. A student in the rst year o lyce must aboveall succeed in mastering the essential notions o genre and registerand positions o enunciation; in other words, the student needs to beinitiated into the study o semiotics and pragmatics, and into rhetoric andpoetics. With all due respect or these disciplines, we can ask ourselves:should they be the main thing to learn in school? All these subjects areabstract constructs, concepts created by literary analysis in order to deal

with literary works; none o these subjects derives rom the literary worksthemselves, rom their meaning or rom their history.


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In class, most o the time, French teachers cannot just teach genresand registers, modes o signiying and eects o argument, metaphorand metonymy, internal and external ocalizationthey must also study

literary works. But here we discover another shit in literary teaching.One concrete example is the way we teach, in 2005, the subject Lit-erature (Lettres) in the last year o the specialization L (literature) o amajor Parisian lyce. There are our vast subjects to study, such as majorliterary models and verbal language and images, and with these thereare coordinated literary works, respectively Chrtien de Troyess Percevaland Kakas The Trial(along with Orson Welless lm). However, the testquestions the students get all during the school year and then on thebaccalaureate examination are, in an overwhelming proportion, o just

one single type. They concern the unction o one component o thework in relation to the structure o the whole, not on the meaning othat component nor on the meaning o the book as a whole or its epochor or ours. So the students are asked about the role o a character, oan episode, or o a detail during the quest or the Grail, not about thesignicance o that quest itsel. The student will be asked whether TheTrialbelongs to the comic register or to the absurd, rather than aboutKakas place in the thought o his period.

How could the way we teach literature in schools have come to this?

The simple answer is that it refects a change in university teaching. Imost lyce teachers o French have adopted this new approach, its be-cause literary studies in the university has evolved along the same lines:beore being lyce teachers they were students. The shit took place ageneration earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s and oten in the name ostructuralism. I participated in this movement. Should I eel responsibleor the state o the discipline today?

When I came to France, at the beginning o the 1960s, literary studiesin the university were, as I said, dominated by very dierent concernsrom those o today. Alongside the explication de texte(which was essen-tially an empirical approach), students were mainly expected to acceptthe national and historical ramework. The rare specialists who didsomething else taught outside France or not in literature departments.Rather than refecting at length on the meaning o works, graduatestudents made exhaustive inventories o all that surrounded such works:the authors biography, the possible prototypes o the characters, variantso the text, and the way the works contemporaries viewed it. I elt theneed to give balance to that approach with dierent approaches that Ihad learned about rom my readings in other languages: rom the Rus-sian Formalists, rom the German theorists o style and orms (Spitzer,

Auerbach, Kayser), rom the authors o American New Criticism. I alsowanted scholars to make explicit the concepts that they used in literary


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analysis, rather than to proceed in a totally intuitive manner. Towardthis goal, I worked with Genette to create a poetics, that is, the studyo the properties o literary discourse.

To my way o thinkingnow as thenthe intrinsic approach (thestudy o the relation o the constituents o the literary work to oneanother) should complement the extrinsic approach (the study o thehistorical, ideological, and aesthetic context). This increased precisionin the tools o analysis would allow more rened and rigorous study, butthe nal goal would remain the understanding o the meaning o theliterary works. In 1969, I organized with Serge Doubrovsky a conerenceon The Teaching o Literature at Cerisy-la-Salle. Rereading today myconcluding comments in the debate, I nd them clumsy (they are the

transcription o spoken remarks) but clear on this point. I presented theidea o poetics and I added, The disadvantage o this type o work is,so to speak, its modestythe act that it does not go very ar and that it

will never be anything other than a rst step, one that consists preciselyo noting, o identiying the categories at work in the literary text, andnot o speaking o the sense o the text.1

My intention (and that o the people around me at the time) wasto create a better balance between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, andalso between theory and practice. But that is not how things turned

out. The spirit o May, 1968, which did not itsel have anything to dowith the direction o literary study, completely changed the structure othe university and the existing hierarchies. The pendulum did not stopswinging when it reached the midpoint and went very ar in the oppositedirection, reaching the point o exclusive concentration on intrinsic ap-proaches and on the categories o literary theory.

Such a change in literary study at the university cannot be explainedby the infuence o structuralism alone; or, rather, we need to understandhow structuralism acquired such a powerul infuence. This brings meback to the underlying conception o literature. During a period o overa century, literary history dominated the university curriculum. This was,principally, a study o causes that led to the creation o the work: social,political, ethnic, and psychic orces o which the literary text was presumedto be the result. Now, this history could be the study o the eects o thetext, its diusion, its impact on the public, and its infuence on otherauthors. The aim was to situate the literary work in a causal chain, whilethe study o meaning was viewed with suspicion. Such study o meaning

was held to be destined orever to lack scientic rigor and was thus letto lowly writers or newspaper critics. As a result, the university traditionrejected the view o literature as the embodiment o a thought or o asensibility, or as an interpretation o the world.


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This long tradition has been pursued and taken to an extreme in therecent phase o literary studies. It has been decided now that the workimposes the advent o an order that breaks with the existing order, the

armation o a regime that obeys its own laws and its own logic2

to theexclusion o a relation with the empirical world or with reality (wordsthat are now used only between quotation marks). In other words, theliterary work is now portrayed as a closed object made o language, sel-sucient and absolute. In 2006 in the French university, these abusivegeneralizations are always presented as sel-evident. Not surprisingly,lyce students learn the dogma according to which literature has norelation to the rest o the world and they study only the way the partso the work relate to one another. This, no doubt, is one o the reasons

students nd the literary specialization uninteresting: in just a ew de-cades the number o those getting the baccalaureate with the literatureoption has gone rom 33% to 10%. Why study literature when literatureis only an illustration o the tools to study literature? At the end o theirstudies, students o literature nd themselves conronted with a brutalchoice: either they must become in their turn teachers o literature orthey must join the unemployed.

Unlike primary and secondary schools, the French university does nothave to ollow a centrally established curriculum. So in the university the

most varied and even contradictory currents o thought are represented.Still, the dominant tendency is to reuse to see literature as a discourseabout the world, and this tendency has a noticeable impact on utureteachers o French. The recent deconstructionist movement does notprovide an alternative. Its partisans can, it is true, raise questions aboutthe way the literary work relates to truth and values, but only to ndorrather, to declare, because they know this in advance, since this is theirdogmathat the work is atally incoherent, that it succeeds in arm-ing nothing, and that it subverts its own values: this is what it meansto deconstruct a text. Unlike the classic structuralist, who set aside anyquestion about the truth o texts, the poststructuralist is willing to lookat such questions, but only to proclaim that they will never be answered.The text can only state one truth, namely that truth does not exist or thatit is orever inaccessible. This conception o language extends beyondliterature and, especially in American universities, concerns disciplines

whose relationship with the world had never previously been in doubt.So history, law, and even the natural sciences are described as just somany literary genres, with their rules and conventions; identied withliterature, which is only supposed to obey its own rules, these disciplineshave become in their turn closed and sel-sucient objects.

I understand that certain lyce teachers are delighted at this develop-ment: rather than hesitate beore the unmanageable mass o inormation


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available about each literary work, they know that all they have to do isto teach Jakobsons six unctions and Greimass six actants, the analepseand the prolepse, and so orth. It will thus be much easier, later on, to

make sure that their students learned their lesson well. But have we reallygained by this change? Several arguments lead me to preer the approacho conceiving literary studies on the model o history rather than on thato physicsas seeking to inorm us about an extrinsic object, literature,rather than about the arcana o the discipline itsel. The rst argument isthat there is no consensus, among teachers and researchers in the literaryeld, about what should constitute the core o the literary discipline. Thestructuralists now dominate the schools, just as the historians did in thepast and as the political scientists might in the uture. There will always

be something a bit arbitrary in such a choice. Not all practitioners oliterary studies are in agreement on the list o the main registersnoron the useulness o introducing such a concept into their eld. So thisconstitutes an abuse o power. Besides, the lack o symmetry is obvious:

while in physics the person who does not know the law o gravitation isignorant, in French the ignorant person is the one who has not read Les

Fleurs du mal. It is a good bet that Rousseau, Stendhal, and Proust will bewell-known to readers long ater the names o todays theorists and theirconceptual constructs will be orgotten, and we reveal a certain lack o

humility when we teach our own theories about works rather than theworks themselves. Wespecialists, critics, proessorsare most o thetime only dwars perched on the shoulders o giants.

Does this mean that the teaching o the discipline should disappearentirely in avor o the teaching o literary works? No, but each kind oteaching should have its own place. In university studies, it is right toteach (also) approaches, concepts used, techniques. Secondary teaching,

which is not addressed to literary specialists but to everyone, cannot havethe same object: it is literature itsel that is or everyone, not literary stud-ies. We should preer the ormer to the latter. Secondary-school teachershave a dicult task: to internalize what they learned at the universitybut, instead o teaching it, to make o it an invisible tool. The meaningo the work is not to be conused with the students purely subjectiveunderstanding but is based on knowledge. To reach the meaning, it maybe useul or the student to have a limited vocabulary o structural analysisor inormation rom literary history. However, never should the study othese meansor entering the literary work be substituted or the study omeaning, which is the goal. Scaolding may be necessary to construct abuilding but the ormer should not be substituted or the latter; once thebuilding is done, the scaolding is meant to disappear. The innovationso structural analysis rom previous decades are welcome as long as theyremain a means and do not become goals in themselves.


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In turn, the nihilist tendency has one major exception, and this con-cerns the ragment o the world occupied by the author himsel. Thispractice derives rom a complacent and narcissistic attitude that leads

the author to describe in minute detail his slightest eelings: the morethe world is repulsive, the more the sel is ascinating! Even saying badthings about yoursel does not destroy the pleasure. What is essential isto talk about yoursel; what you say is secondary. We can call this thirdtendency solipsism, ollowing upon ormalism and nihilism, rom thename o that philosophical theory that holds that the speaking subjectis the only existing being. The implausibility o this theory condemns itto marginal status, certainly, but does not stop it rom being a source oliterary creativity. One o its recent variants is something called autoc-

tion, sel-ction: the author devotes just as much attention to tellingabout her humors but in addition she rees hersel rom any reerentialconstraint, thus proting simultaneously rom the presumed indepen-dence o ction and rom the pleasure o sel-promotion.

Nihilism and solipsism are obviously linked. They are both based onthe idea that there is a radical break between the sel and the world,or, in other words, that there is no shared world. I cannot declare the

world totally worthless unless I rst exclude mysel. Conversely, I candecide to devote mysel solely to the description o my own experiences

only i I judge the rest o the world to be without value, and, moreover,o no concern to me. These two visions o the world are thus equallyincomplete: the nihilist leaves himsel and those who resemble him outo the desolate vision that he depicts; the solipsist neglects to representthe human and material ramework that renders his own existence pos-sible. Nihilism and solipsism complement the ormalist choice more thanthey reute it: in each case, but in dierent ways, the external world,the one that I have in common with others, is denied or devalued. Inthis gesture, contemporary French literature is at one with the idea oliterature that we nd at the root o teaching and criticism: an absurdlylimited and impoverished conception.

What Can Literature Do?

In his Autobiography, published in 1873, John Stuart Mill tells o thesevere depression that he experienced in his twentieth year. He was un-susceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one o those moods

when what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or indierent.3All the remedies that he tried turn out to be ineectual and a lengthymelancholy settled in. He continued to carry out habitual gestures in amechanical way, but without eeling anything. This painul state lasted


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or two years. Then, little by little, it diminished. A book that Mill readby chance at this moment played a special role in his cure: a collectiono poems by Wordsworth. What he especially ound there is the expres-

sion o his own eelings, exalted in the beauty o the poems: In them Iseemed to draw rom a source o inward joy, o sympathetic and imagi-native pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings . . . . Ineeded to be made to eel that there was real, permanent happiness intranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only withoutturning away rom, but with a greatly increased interest in, the commoneelings and common destiny o human beings (121).

Literature can do a lot. It can hold out a helping hand when we areprooundly depressed, guide us toward the other human beings around

us, make us better understand the world, and help us to live. By thisI dont mean that it is, essentially, a wellness center or the soul; but,because it reveals the world to us, it can also transorm each o us romthe inside. Literature has a vital role to play; but or that we need to takeliterature in both the broad and strong sense that dominated in Europeup until the end o the nineteenth century and that is now marginalized

while an absurdly shrunken conception o literature triumphs. Ordinaryreaders, who continue to look to the books they read or something togive meaning to lie, are right, and the proessors, the critics, and the

writers who say that literature only talks o itsel or that it only teachesdespair are wrong. I the ordinary readers were not right, reading wouldbe condemned to disappear quickly.

Like philosophy and like the humanities, literature is made o thoughtand knowledge about the psychic and social world in which we live. Thereality that literature aims to understand is, simplyyet, at the same time,nothing is more complexhuman experience. This is why we can say,rightly, that Dante or Cervantes teaches us at least as much about thehuman condition as even the greatest o sociologists or psychologists,and that there is no incompatibility between the rst knowledge and thesecond. This is true o literature in general, but there are also specicdierences. The thinkers o the past, those o the Enlightenment as wellas those o the romantic era, tried to identiy them. Let us recall theirsuggestions and add some others.

A rst set o dichotomies sets in opposition the sensory and the intel-ligible, the particular and the general, the individual and the universal.

Whether this is through poetic monologue or through narrative, litera-ture makes us live unique experiences; philosophy, on the other hand,manipulates concepts. The rst preserves the richness and diversity o

what is lived, the second avors abstraction, which allows the ormulationo general laws. A simple consequence o this contrast concerns the moreor less accessible quality o texts. Dostoyevskys Idiot can be read and


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mind. Literature has a special role to play here: unlike religious, moral,or political discourses, it does not ormulate a system o precepts andthus escapes the censorship that strikes down positions that are explicitly

ormulated. Disagreeable truthsor humanity as a whole or or our-selveshave a better chance o being expressed in a literary work thanin a philosophical or scientic work.

In a recent study, Richard Rorty proposes another way to describethe contribution o literature to our understanding o the world.4 Herenounces the use o terms like truth or knowledge to describe thiscontribution and suggests that literature does not so much provide a rem-edy or our ignorance o the world but rather cure us o our egotism,understood as the illusion o sel-suciency. Reading novels, according to

him, is less like reading scientic, philosophical, or political works thanit is like a very dierent experience: meeting other people. Making theacquaintance o new literary characters is like meeting new people, withthe important dierence that we can discover right away what they arelike inside. We thus know every act rom the point o view o the person

who does it. The less these characters resemble us, the more they broadenour horizon and enrich our universe. This internal broadening (similarto what representational painting brings us) cannot be stated in abstractpropositions, and that is why we have so much diculty describing it. It

consists instead o the inclusion in our consciousness o new ways o be-ing alongside the ones that we already had. Meeting new acquaintancesdoes not change the content o our mind; instead the container itsel istransormed, the apparatus o mental perception rather than the thingsperceived. What novels give us is not new inormation but a new capac-ity or compassion with beings dierent rom ourselves; in this sense,novels are more part o the moral sphere than o science. The ultimatehorizon o that experience is not truth but love.

Should we describe the new understanding o the human world thatwe gain by reading a novel as a correction to our egotism, according toRortys suggestive proposal, or as the discovery o a new truth o unveil-ing, a necessarily intersubjective truth?5 The dierence in terminologydoes not seem to me to be the crucial matter here, provided that weaccept the strong link that is made between the world and literature,as well as literatures specic contribution to abstract discourse. Theboundary, as Rorty points out, does not separate the argumentative textrom the imaginative text but rather rom all discourse, ctive or actual,that describes a human world other than that o the subject: historians,ethnographers, and journalists are all on the same side o that boundaryas the novelist. They all participate in what Kant, in a amous chaptero the Critique o Judgment, considered to be a necessary step toward acommon sense, in other words toward our ull humanness: to think by


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putting onesel in the position o any other human.6 To think and toeel while adopting the point o view o others, real persons or literarycharacters, this unique way o tending toward universality, permits us to

achieve our calling.The intersubjective truth o unveiling or, i one preers, the enlargedworld that one enters thanks to the encounter with a narrative or poetictext, is the horizon within which the literary text is inscribed. To betruthul, in this sense o the term, is the only legitimate requirementthat we can make o it, but, as Rorty perceived, that truth is thoroughlylinked to our moral education. It is instructive to reread, in this con-text, a amous exchange about the relationship among literature, truth,and morality, the one between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. The

two writers were good riends, they had great aection as well as greatrespect or one another, yet they knew that they did not have the sameconception o literature. At the end o 1875 and the beginning o 1876,only a ew months beore Sands death, they exchanged several remark-able letters on this subject in which they tried to pinpoint the nature otheir disagreement.7

At a supercial reading one might think that Sand wants literature tosubmit itsel to morality, while Flaubert bases himsel solely on the rela-tionship to truth. And it is true that some o Sands expressions seem to

take her in that direction since she appears to be essentially concernedwith the eect that the writers works have on the reader: You are goingto bring desolationand I to bring consolation, because he makes his read-ers sadder while she wished to make them less unhappy. Flaubert repliedthat his aim was truth alone: I have always tried to penetrate into thesoul o things. I their disagreement had stopped there, it would be olittle interest, and we would be tempted to agree with Flaubert. Todaysreader, ater all, does not believe that the primary unction o literatureis to dry the readers tears. But Sand quickly went beyond this startingpoint to ocus the debate on two more essential topics: the writers placein her work and the nature o the truth that the writer reaches.

Sand regretted that Flaubert did not show himsel more in his writ-ing, but he had made nonintervention in the novel a rule without ex-ception. Sand kept hammering at this: it was not so much his absencerom the work that she blamed him or (besides, she believed that thisabsence was impossible, since the thing seen cannot be separated romthe viewers vision): One cannot have a philosophy in the soul withoutit appearing . . . True painting is ull o the soul that holds the brush.Flaubert acquiesced in his replies: he knew well that he did not lackconvictions and that these permeated his work. He also knew that hisconcern or truth would necessarily have a moral eect. As soon as athing is True, it is good. Obscene books are only immoral because they


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lack truth. What he wanted, however, was that his ideas not be spelledout explicitly, but that they merely be suggested by the narrative: it wasup to the reader to draw rom the book the moral lesson that must be

there. I that does not happen, it must be because the book is bad orbecause the reader is a simpleton!However, Sands real criticism is elsewhere: what she deplored was not

Flauberts absence rom his work, it was his way o being present. Sheloved and appreciated her riend, but she did not nd the man she knewin the man who dwells in his books. Nourish yoursel on the ideas andsentiments stored up in your head and your heart . . . All your lie oaection, protection, and charming simple goodness proves that you arethe most principled man in the world. But once you start working with

literature, you want to be, I know not why, another man. What she blamedhim or, in short, is that he did not leave space inside his work or beingslike himsel and thereore did not produce a aithul enough picture othe world. Her paramount requirement o literature concerns Truth, notthe Good. The aim o literature is to represent human existence, buthumanity also includes the author and the reader. You cannot abstract

yoursel rom this contemplation; or man is yoursel and mankind is thereader. Whatever you do, your narrative is still a conversation between youand him. The narrative is enclosed within a dialogue o which humans

are not only the object but also the protagonists.Sand knew that Flaubert tried most o all to be true, even i thepath that he chose passed through continual striving or proper orm,because he believed in a secret harmony, a necessary relation betweenorm and content. That was his method: When I nd a bad alliterationor a repetition in one o my sentences, I am sure that I am stumblingaround in the False. It is not that this method bothers her; or her, thecontroversy concerns not the type o searching but the nature o whatis discovered. Writers like Flaubert have more study and talent than Ido. Only what I think they are missing, and you especially, is a clear andextensive view o lie. The picture o lie that appears in Flauberts booksis not true enough because it is too monotonous. I want to see man ashe is. He is not good or bad. He is good and bad. But he is somethingmore, nuance, nuance which is or me the goal o art. She returnedto this in her ollowing letter: True reality is mixed with the beautiuland the ugly, the dull and the brilliant. Those writers known as realistsmade a choice that betrays reality: they obey an arbitrary conventionthat requires them to show only the somber aspect o the world. Nihilistsbetray not the Good, but the True.

The origin o this dierence between Sand and Flaubert is their phi-losophy o lie. Flaubert, who told his lover Louise Collet, I hate lieand also lie is tolerable as long as you are not alive,8 seemed to Sand


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to be like a Catholic who was looking to be paid reparations becausehe detested and damned lie as i there were an alternative, as i truelie were somewhere else. Flaubert acted as i he expected a better exis-

tence in the next lie. Without admitting it, he adopted the Augustiniandoctrine that the visible world is allen and that men are contemptible,while salvation awaits them in the City o God. Sand, or her part, lovedthe present lie a little bit more every day. As or me, I want to be part othe world until my last breath, not with the certainty or the requirementthat I will nd elsewhere a good situation, but because my only joy is tostay with my own people during the climb. This wisdom brings happi-ness, that is, the acceptance o lie, whatever it is. This is what Sand alsocalls the innocent pleasure o living or the sake o living.9

Their disagreement is thus not between two dierent ideals: bothagree that literature aims above all at a orm o truth. Instead, theirdierence lies in the judgment about the truthulness o narratives.On that score, Flaubert can only admit that he cannot go any urther:I cannot change my eyes! No matter how much you preach to me, Ican have no other temperament than my own. In her turn Sand hadto admit that one cannot choose, in total reedom, to be what one is.

And even people with such liking or one another as Flaubert and Sandcould not easily ollow the advice they received. Her advice to Flaubert

seems, thereore, a bit utile. Nonetheless, in committing himsel towrite A Simple Heart, Flaubert told his correspondent: You will instantlysee your infuence.

By considering this exchange rom the past, we can see that, despitedierences o interpretation, both writers promoted a similar view oliterature. Literature allows us to better understand the human conditionand transorms each o its readers inwardly. Accepting this view wouldhave direct consequences or the writers crat and or literary criticismbut also or the way literature is taught today in schools. The analysis o

works would no longer have as its goal illustrating concepts rom somelinguist or other, some theoretician or other o literature, and thus topresent texts as the deployment o language and discourse; literary study

would take as its aim to help us reach meaningor we postulate thatmeaning, in turn, guides us toward a knowledge o the human, somethingimportant or everyone. This idea is not oreign to the world o schoolteachers themselves. In a report issued by the Association des Proes-seurs de Lettres, we read, The study o literature is basically the studyo man, his relation to himsel and to the world and his relation withothers. More exactly, the study o literature directs us toward broaderand broader concentric circles: the other writings o the same author,national literature, world literature; but the ultimate context, and themost important o all, is provided by human existence itsel. All the great

works, whatever their origin, stimulate refection on that.


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I one agrees that the goal o literary studies is to help us better graspthe meaning o works and, through this meaning, to better understandthe world and ourselves, the actitious opposition between the struc-

ture and the history collapses, as does the opposition between thedierent methods o literary analysis. All new inormation that helpsus better grasp this meaning is welcome, whether it comes rom textualcommentary or rom knowledge o the context. We just have to under-stand that the study o structure, like the study o history, o the writersart as o his sources, is not a goal in itsel but only a means to reach aricher meaning.

Literature must be understood here in its broadest sense, with aware-ness o the historically moveable boundaries o this concept. This require-

ment implies that we not take as dogma the worn-out postulate o thelate romantics according to which the destiny o poetry has nothing incommon with the gray background o universal reporting producedby ordinary language. Recognizing the true value o literature doesnot mean that we have to believe that literature is the only true lieor that everything in the world exists only or the purpose o makinga book, a dogma that would exclude three quarters o humanity romtrue lie. Texts known as non-literary can teach us much; and or mypart I would have happily required that French classes study the letter,

unortunately not ction, that Germaine Tillion wrote in Fresnes prisonto the German military tribunal on January 3, 1943. It is a masterpieceo humanness and students would learn a lot rom it.10 They are killingliterature (to use the title o a recent polemical work) not by studyingnon-literary texts in school, but by making literary works mere illustra-tions o ormalist, nihilist, and solipsist views o literature.

This is obviously a much more ambitious program than what we arecurrently setting or our students. The changes that it requires wouldhave immediate results in terms o careers. Since the object o literatureis the human condition itsel, the person who studies it and understandsit will become, not a specialist in literary analysis, but an expert in be-ing human. What better introduction to the understanding o humanbehavior and passions than an immersion in the works o great writers

who have been working on that task or thousands o years? And, at thesame time, what better preparation or the many proessions that deal

with the relations among people, with the behavior o individuals andgroups? I we consider literature in this way and i we orient teachingalong these lines, what resource could be more precious or the uturestudent o law or political science, the uture social worker or psychothera-pist, the uture historian or sociologist? Would it not be an exceptionaleducation to have Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, and Proust asproessors? And is it not clear that the uture physician, or the actualpractice o her proession, would learn more rom such proessors than


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rom the mathematics exams that now determine her uture? Literarystudies would thus nd its place within the humanities, next to historyand philosophy, all disciplines that bring progress to thought through

the study o the past, a past made up o works as much as doctrines, bypolitical events as much as by social shits, by the lie o peoples as bythe lie o individuals.

I we can agree on this aim or the teaching o literature, which wouldno longer simply serve to create more teachers o literature, it is easy toarticulate the spirit o such teaching: we need to include the works othe past in the great dialogue among humans, the dialogue that startedat the dawn o time and in which each one o us, however small ourpart, still participates. In this inexhaustible communication, triumphant

over time and space, the universal signicance o literature is armed,wrote Paul Bnichou.11 We, the adults, have the duty to pass on to uturegenerations this ragile legacy, these words that help us to live.

Directeur de recherche honoraire

Centre National de la Recherche ScientifqueParis

Translated by John Lyons

NOTES

1 Serge Doubrovsky and Tzvetan Todorov, eds., Lenseignement de la littrature(Paris: Plon,1971), 630.2 Jean Rousset,Forme et signifcation(Paris: J. Corti, 1965), II-III.3 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography(London: Penguin Books, 1989), 112 (hereater citedin text).4 Richard Rorty, Redemption rom Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,Telos3, no. 3 (2001): 243-63.5 Todorov makes a distinction between a truth o adequation (vrit dadquation) orscientic, reerential truth, on one hand, and a truth o unveiling (vrit de dvoilement) orshared insight. This type o truth does not conorm to the same verication procedures;instead, a scene is true, in this sense, i it is persuasive to the people who lived during that

epoch and i it enlightens today those who seek to know about it. This truth, in other words,is intersubjective and not reerential. This is the truth that novelists and poets attempt toattain. Todorov, Lammoire devant lhistoire, Terrain2 (September 1995), http://terrain.revues.org/document2854.html(accessed July 5, 2006).Trans.6 Immanuel Kant, Oeuvres Philosophiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 1073.7 Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, Correspondance (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 510-30.8 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance(Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 10, 255.9 Flaubert, Correspondance, 486, 483.10 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrck(Paris: Seuil, 1988), 35-40. Translated by Gerald Sat-terwhite as Ravensbrck(New York: Anchor Books, 1975).11 Paul Bnichou, Une communication inpuisable, in Mlanges sur luvre de PaulBnichou(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 228.

What is Literature for Todorov

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