Editors’ Introduction

Sometimes, literature is the experience of limits.

The literary use of a topos, image, or theme paves the way for a certain practice of responsibility. A crucial test for writing, be it poetry, novel, or theatre, responsibility gives a particular form to the word literature, that of a promise, a commitment, a challenge.

Under the aegis of an homage to Michael Sheringham, a remarkable passeur, the essays presented in this volume elucidate this experience of limits. Some of the texts presented here cross through, some cross over, some burst through. Still others, on the contrary, arguing for a new regime of responsibility in the order of the Word, finally welcome—which is “good news” indeed—nature within culture,¹ they invite us to an imminent and urgent reversal, to the unprecedented threshold of an uncrossable tipping point.

Combining literary, philosophical, and sociological approaches seemed necessary to us. Traditional literary analysis by theme or genre seemed insufficient, too peripheral to respond to the current urgency. Without foregoing literature—but also without being afraid to upset it—it was time to confront the suddenly urgent questions raised at the Saint Louis Colloquium, “Passages, thresholds, doors/Passages, seuils, portes.” Long a symbol of pioneer days, of triumphant modernity, the Gateway Arch, erected on the west bank of the Mississippi River and officially opened on May 25, 1968, embodied a westward movement, a conquering crossing. But the radiant future it promised seems to have lost its glitter. From east to west, and from north to south, “at the time of disruption” (Bernard Stiegler), the same urgent questions continue to await their pressing replies. It is indeed a good thing, the right thing for literature to participate in this reversal, that it not remain on the entertaining and decorative sidelines to which it is often assigned or reduced.

Finding words that are less deceitful to state what is and to describe what is coming: this is the task of the philosopher, the sociologist, the poet, the playwright, the writer. In modern poetry, Michel Collot reminds us, the image of the threshold is prominent. It can certainly be considered lackluster, like any common metaphor, but as Philippe Jaccottet proposes, placing us under “la métaphore vive,” the rule of metaphor (Ricoeur), the image of the threshold can “indicate the space where poetry evolves.” On the threshold, the poet listens to “words from another world,” no matter what it may be. Stepping out of his “porcelain filled room,” like Victor Segalen deserting the “imaginary palaces,” he confronts the “real”: the body, the world, the “diverse,” “substantive matter” (Cécile Hervet).

Once, Hugo taught us that man, “this living being of short duration,” is a “rodent.” He painted an enthusiastic portrait of the Modern Subject whose Promethean frenzy he could not have foreseen and who has been praised, until quite recently, for his ogre's stride where stepping over was first and foremost: “At his feet, everything changes, for better or worse. […] He disturbs, shifts, eliminates, cuts down, razes, ruins, undermines, digs, searches, breaks, pulverizes, erases this, abolishes that, and rebuilds with the destroyed. Nothing makes him hesitate, no mass, no block, no impediment, nothing of splendid matter's authority, nor of nature's majesty.” A strange two-legged rodent, mounting “an assault upon immensity with hammer in hand”! “Everything restricts him, but nothing stops him”: “his response to any limit is to step over” (Hugo).

No one can continue to ignore the “rupture” (Stiegler) occurring after two centuries of ecocides and inhumanity. From being used… to being used up, we can see the extent of the devastation. The limit, of which we were proudly unaware in the past, has become a protective threshold. Therefore, we are now destined for another journey, as lucid surveyors of the limits of a precarious world. The blindness of modernist faith in progress is being replaced, for whatever it's worth, by a “progressivity” searching to express itself, shattering past representations, reevaluating the discourse as well as the conditions of our time on this planet (Maffesoli).

In response to History's forced marches and imperious commands (Forward! Back! Right! Left!), “we have to build huts,” writes Jean-Marie Gleize: places of autonomy, spaces of resistance, where new ways of acting and of being are invented, where the upcoming present is thought about and constructed; “microcosmologies,” as Bernard Stiegler calls them, for another economy and another ecology of the mind.

Discontinuity, complexity, evolving subjects severing themselves from the practices of submission: there's no border here, except the traditional one, between literature and philosophy. In the footsteps of Victor Segalen poised between East and West, Foucault's last work restores “the care of the self” and the “practice of the self on the self” which allow the transformation of “true discourse into ethos,” indexing living on saying, putting your body where your words are, one might say, leading an ethopoiêtic existence (Vuillemin). Learning then to “dis-adhere” from what is in the way, what bogs down the act of existing.

The first issue of Révolution surréaliste, from the winter of 1924, announced the conquest of unexplored inner spaces (Frémond). “Surrealism,” they wrote, “opens the doors of dreams to all those for whom night is stingy.” Therefore, automatic writing constituted a “subtle poison” where “the liberated mind runs in exhilarating freedom.” The misfortunes of this practice—whose weaknesses André Breton never ceased to regret—are well known. But in it, nonetheless, is one of the tasks of literature when it doesn't hold back: shifting, exploring, letting itself be lived like a will to rupture. It then demands books “that slam like a door”: on the world as it is, teeming with filth, waste, garbage, and where beauty suddenly appears—over life, over death.

And over evil as well, as Ionesco wrote, taking inspiration from Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, to create his 1970 play Jeux de massacre (Lesmesle). In one of his darkest works, the playwright claims the impossibility for the individual to protect him or herself against the epidemic of the plague, which becomes a metaphor for the human condition.

Viral and pandemic motifs reflecting a dying modernity and calling for a change of paradigm, for a re-founding of the human condition; a digital viralness affecting the ways we read and demanding that novelists not adapt but claim it as their own space and impose, against contemporary disorder, the order of literary alphabet books (Simotas); the photographer's or the painter's questioning of the limits of representation, between the erasure, the emergence, and the reappearance of forms (Favier); the (re)invention of self between worlds and languages—American English and Acadian French—in the painful crucible of abrasive cultural assimilation and the jolt of a claim for identity and language to stave off disappearing (Rabalais)… Between survival and disappearance, metaphorically or otherwise, ways of beings are to be invented or sought, stories are constructed, diagnoses and analyses are formulated. More than ever, it's about thresholds and limits: to be noticed, recognized, understood, protected, rejected, ignored or imagined in order to learn to live (again).

Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to finally learn to live. Finally but why?

To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn? From whom? To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever know? Will we ever know how to live and first of all what ‘to learn to live’ means? And why ‘finally’? (Derrida xvi)

Roger Célestin, Lionel Cuillé, Eliane DalMolin, Olivier Penot-Lacassagne

Translated by Dawn Cornelio

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Lionel Cuillé is the Jane and Bruce Robert endowed professor of French at Webster University. He is a specialist of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, and he has published articles on poets Francis Ponge, Blaise Cendrars, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire.  Since 2012, he is also the founder and Director of the Centre Francophone which promotes French and Francophone cultures in Missouri. He is the author of Des Mots et des choses: l'herméneutique littérale de Francis Ponge (Garnier, 2019) and co-editor (with Jean-Marie Gleize and Bénédicte Gorillot) of Francis Ponge: ateliers contemporains (forthcoming).

Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Olivier Penot-Lacassagne is a maître de conférences HDR at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. He has published and edited many works, including: Beat Generation. L'inservitude volontaire (ed.) (CNRS éditions, 2018); Poésie & Performance (co-ed.) (Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2018); Back to Baudrillard (ed.) (CNRS éditions, 2015); Vies et morts d'Antonin Artaud (CNRS éditions, coll. « Biblis », 2015); Contre-cultures! (co-ed.) (CNRS éditions, 2013); Engagements et déchirements. Les intellectuels et la guerre d'Algérie, co-authored with Catherine Brun (Gallimard/IMEC, 2012); Le Surréalisme en héritage: les avant-gardes après 1945 (co-ed.) (L'Age d'Homme, 2008); « Moi, Antonin Artaud, homme de la terre » (Aden, 2007); Le Grand Jeu en mouvement (ed.) (L'Age d'Homme, 2006); Antonin Artaud et les avant-gardes théâtrales (Minard, 2005). He is a member of the UMR THALIM (Théorie et histoire des arts et des littératures de la modernité XIXe-XXIe siècles).

Notes

1. “The river, the fire, and the mud call out to us again and again./We aren't interested in spilled blood, hunted men, detective stories, that line where politics turns into murder, we are only passionate about the bodies in the battles, the power and glory of starving people thirsting to humiliate the losers, to such an extent that the entertainment business now gives us nothing to see but corpses, vile death that both founds and appears across history, from The Iliad to Goya, and from academic art to evening television./Modernity, I've noticed, is beginning to grow tired of such repugnant culture […]./Yet in these representations, which one would wish were now archaic, the adversaries, more often than not, battle to the death in an abstract space where they fight alone, with no marsh, with no river. Remove the world from around the combats, keep nothing but the combats or the debates, dense with men, purified of objects, you'll get the theatre stage, the majority of our stories and philosophies, and the totality of the social sciences: the interesting spectacle that we call cultural. Who ever indicates where the master and slave are fighting?/Our culture loathes the world” (Serres 15–16).