Un/Knowing the World: Literature Between Sense and the Senses

Quelque chose de neuf et de très ancien à la fois, impalpable comme le vent, immatériel comme les nuages, infini comme la mer. […] Quelque chose de simple, de vrai, qui n’existe que dans le langage.

J.M.G. Le Clézio, “Dans la forêt des paradoxes”

At a time when emotions have returned to the center of critical inquiry and when the materiality and effective power of literary texts, as well as the worlds created by them, have been examined in numerous studies, it is useful to analyze the way in which aesthetic work connects sensation to interpretation, the sensory to the signifier, the body to the work, or, in other words, the senses to meaning.

First, this juxtaposition can betray a binary view of the world, derived from a seemingly commonsensical hierarchy that asserts the power of the mind over matter and the superiority of reason, associated with abstraction and transparency, over the low materiality of sensation construed as irrational and opaque.

Second, the homonymy of these two terms (“le sens et les sens”) in French might also caution us against the risk of mobilizing one for the sake of the other; that is, it can serve as a warning against attempting to explain the meaning of a literary work via its scriptural materiality (sensoriality) and its emotional charge (sensitivity), or at their expense.

By proposing to read sense and the senses together, this volume aims to highlight the overlaps and the dividing lines between distinct but often complementary approaches, such as affect theory, which recovers the pleasure of the text via its emotional charge and its transformative effects; ecocriticism, which proposes rethinking the relationship between humanity and the natural world; posthumanist criticism; genetic criticism; aesthetics; phenomenology; and the theory of world literature.¹

Based primarily on an analysis of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s first book, La Structure du comportement, whose ideas would carry over into his posthumous publication, Le Visible et l’invisible, Aiko Okamoto-MacPhail’s article explores the question of gestures, real or imaginary, in the work of the French philosopher. The gesture is a key concept necessary to understand the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on the relationship between mind and body, the perceived world and the perceiving subject, language and its speakers. Identifying the figure of a chiasmus to describe the dialectic of the self and the world as conceived by the French phenomenologist, Okamoto-MacPhail emphasizes the privileged status of literature, which, like philosophy, mobilizes the fundamental functions of language to capture meaning via the five senses (and not in spite of them); as a result, meaning itself emerges as the sixth sense.

The capacity, doubled by an intimate need, to conceive of language as the extension of the body takes on its full meaning in the context of the work of the “bedridden poet” Joë Bousquet, whose meditative practice is analyzed by Kaliane Ung. In the texts that comprise his literary testament, the poet, immobilized in his bed, pursues his criticism of Cartesianism in the form of mixed writing, which combines keeping a diary with philosophical reflection and artistic creation. Opting for the flexibility of spiritual exercises over methodological rigor, Bousquet puts the “I,” fractured by a physical wound, at the center of his meditations, surrounding it with ethical and poetic mystique.

The recording of sensible experience meets poetic reflection in the practice of notebook keeping in Philippe Jaccottet’s writing. Valérie Zuchuat examines the work of the Swiss poet in order to highlight the variations on the short form of the notebook (writing on the go, sketches, fragments, collages). The philological and hermeneutic significance of this notebook writing, which becomes the writer’s true creative laboratory, has held the interest of critics for many decades. In her article, Zuchuat also demonstrates its intertextual (Joyce or Quignard) and intermedial (Schubert or Schumann) dimensions. The intertextual and intermedial aspects of Jaccottet’s work link him to his predecessors, both writers and musicians, who used similar techniques of immediate notation followed by a methodical recovery of artistic ideas in free form, whose completion, independent of any external criteria, is governed by its own logic based on elements such as musical rhythmicity, the spatiality of a page, or intonational accuracy.

The dialogue between literature and philosophy, specifically its phenomenological aspect, is pursued in the article by Thomas Franck. Franck examines the analogy between rhetorical and thematic interrogations raised by the existential novel and the Nouveau Roman, on one hand, and the research on corporeality, alienation, and the materiality of everyday experience conducted by Husserl, Heidegger, and the theorists of the Frankfurt School, on the other. Franck’s reading is particularly illuminating in regard to what he calls “rhetorical tension” and “the logic of interference,” which characterize postwar French literature and lead to a criticism of classical narrative techniques and the emergence of different ways of writing materiality and corporeality.

Turning to the Christian dimension of Pascal Quignard’s writing, Jean-Louis Pautrot’s contribution enriches an already established critical field. Highlighting the familiarity of the author of Tous les matins du monde with the Scriptures, and, more generally, the importance of religion and religions in Quignard’s work, Pautrot examines interpretative and textual distortions, as well as demystifying writing, which cast doubt on the meaning of the figure of Christ, and offer the reader the image of a “Christ who is against religion,” but who is nonetheless surrounded by profound mystery.

The unknown—or the silence—that lies at the very heart of literary knowledge is the subject of Emilie Cappella’s article in which she explores the fusion with nature in the writings of Patrick Chamoiseau, from Chronique des sept misères to Un dimanche au cachot. Starting from Jean-François Lyotard’s reflection on the word “ecology,” understood as that which escapes us in this world and must be recovered through the work of anamnesis, Cappella’s rereading of the Martinican author’s novels attends not just to the historic quest that is supposed to uncover the colonial memory buried in official chronicles, but in particular to the sensory and cognitive search for a human experience that “shifts the question from that of discourse on nature to that of discourse of nature.”

The sensible dimension of colonial trauma and the effects of silence and the absence of meaning it generates in postcolonial literature are at the center of Edwige Tamalet Talbayev’s investigation of the question of translation in La Prise de Gibraltar by Rachid Boudjedra. Looking at the translation process from the point of view of linguistic and political violence and artistic resistance, the Algerian writer imagines a pluralistic fiction of history. According to Tamalet Talbayev, this fiction invites us to acknowledge the “sedimentary” nature of the present as well as the fundamental unintelligibility inherent in any literary and cultural relationship that dispels any monolithic and monolinguistic illusion.

A confusion, or a shock, of the senses becomes the aesthetic principle characterizing the work of the Franco-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed. His exhibits and videos have elicited strong and contradictory reactions. In her article, Stéphanie Boulard links Abdessemed’s work and his auto-exegetical discourse to Hélène Cixous’ reflection on anger and the cry of literature. This fruitful dialogue generates a series of questions about perception and meaning as well as the artwork’s sensuality and its power to affect through the senses. Moreover, it also invites further reflection on the various strategies of closing off meaning deployed by the artist to make sense of the innumerable forms of material and symbolic violence that inhabit the world.

The textual account of genocide by Révérien Rurangwa heightens the visual image of a disfigured body, while Rurangwa’s writing emerges from the duty of remembrance articulated around what Romain Delaville calls “two interconnected semiotic regimes” mobilizing and diverting colonial and postcolonial strategies of signification.

The commodification of life becomes a particularly insidious form of violence when it pretends to operate in the name of the improvement of human beings, of their physical strength and cognitive abilities, which is the inevitable result of scientific and technological progress. Emmanuel Buzay offers a posthumanist reading of the Golem, a figure that stands for the expression of humanity resisting reification in the work of Pierre Assouline. Undergoing the test of sensory and psychological processes, humanity thus draws a new self-awareness from writing, of which “bodily knowledge” becomes an integral part.

In a broader context of discussions on rivalry and complementarity between literature and history, Emmanuel Bouju invites us to consider the “judicial paradigm” of the contemporary novel, as opposed to its “indexing paradigm.” Those associated with the indexing paradigm claim to possess the eyewitness perspective, that of “istor,” whose emotional capacity imbues the historical narrative with the power of presence. The more distant the displayed complexity of narrative devices make this power appear (in works by Claude Simon or Patrick Modiano), the greater it becomes. The new forms of the “istoric novel” (Yannick Haenel or Lola Lafon) reject the figure of the witness altogether. Instead, they choose “the act of force of a self-established authority,” which makes it possible to incorporate incomprehension, emptiness, the impossibility of representation, and “phantom pain” of the past in a historical investigation.

If literature is considered to be an ideal space of remembrance and reflection, it can also be confronted with transformations that call into question its own significance. As his starting point, Alexandre Gefen analyzes the uproar caused by the Nobel Prize awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016 in defense of an “inclusive” approach to literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The power of action, the performative capacity, and the restorative value underscored by the practices characterizing the work of contemporary writers, both professionals and amateurs (participants of writing workshops or social networks of literary creativity), all go along with a renewed transitivity of the literary experience.

Patrick Chamoiseau closes his reflection on the relationship between sense and the senses in contemporary literature with the following paradox: “Un des défis de l’art contemporain est de ne pas donner du sens aux choses, mais d’augmenter notre capacité de vivre en face du mystère, de l’inconnaissable, de l’inexprimable, de l’indescriptible, de l’impensable.” It seems odd to hear this statement from a writer whose poetics, informed by a deep reflection on the silences of colonial history, the inequities of the postcolonial present, and the plural intensity of the Creole experience, uncompromisingly unites ethical duty and aesthetic innovation. Nevertheless, this contradiction is only apparent. It is precisely because the writer, “renifleur d’existence” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 39), is driven by the desire to capture the world in its infinite complexity, that s/he embarks on the quest for elusive and multiple forms in which art meets life—music, dance, story, visual arts—, thus delving into the heart of the unknown.

Oana PanaïtéRoger Célestin and Eliane DalMolinGuest Co-EditorEditors

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Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

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).

Eliane DalMolin

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).

Oana Panaïte

Oana Panaïté is Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies in French/Francophone Studies at Indiana University–Bloomington (USA) where she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century postcolonial writing in French (fiction, essay, and theory) from Europe, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. Her publications include Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (Rodopi, 2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2017), and Entre-Textes: Dialogues littéraires et culturels (co-edited with Vera Klekovkina; Routledge, 2017).

Notes

1 In the vast bibliography of works on affect theory and criticism, two titles that have become classics, published by Duke UP: Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002) by Brian Massumi and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. One can also add two collected volumes, also issued by Duke UP, to this list: The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010) and The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (2007). We should also mention a republication, in 2005 (New York: Perigree Books) of the major work by the philosopher John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934), as well as studies by Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), and by James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (U of Chicago P, 2013). In the francophone domain, we can highlight the contributions of Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être (Paris: Gallimard, coll. “NRF Essais,” 2011) and Laurent Jenny, La Vie esthétique. Stases et flux (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2013). For a brief survey of the current state of ecocriticism, see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2012), Alain Suberchicot, Littérature et environnement. Pour une écocritique comparée (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), and Stéphanie Posthumus, French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (U of Toronto P, 2017). On the subject of literature as creation or re-creation of the world (“worldedness”) and its cosmopolitan vocation (“world-making”), see the work by Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP, 2012) and one by Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2016).