‘There isn’t a book in it; there isn’t that thing, that creation, that work of art of a book that, organized and developed, marches toward its dénouement via paths that are the secret and genius of the author.’ This is how, in 1869, a French critic judged a work that had been recently published. Thirty years later, an English newspaper would address the same sort of reproach to another new book: ‘To tell the honest truth, it drags. The paragraphs, for one thing, are far too long. They sometimes wander on for pages. The book wanders on in the same way. It is full of atmosphere, full of the magic of the East, but it lacks vertebration. The want of backbone paralyses the book.’1
Thus discredited were two novels that posterity will ordain masterworks of modern literature, Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and Conrad’s Lord Jim. If I recall these judgements, it is not to validate the received idea about novelty disrupting conventional criticism. I intend, on the contrary, to take seriously what this sort of criticism tells us: books that for us are exemplary were initially non-books, erratic accounts, monsters lacking backbone. During the times of L’Éducation sentimentale and Lord Jim something happened to fiction. It lost the order and proportions by which its excellence was judged. This was the view held by those critics who perceived Flaubert to be wandering aimlessly like the idle youth that is his paradoxical hero, and Conrad to be losing his way ever more in pursuing the flight of his anti-hero towards the most distant islands. This same sentiment is one that these innovators themselves also experienced. Rereading the second part of Madame Bovary, Flaubert finds the work’s disproportion troubling: does the length of the ‘prologue,’ which develops the ‘picturesque, grotesque and psychological preparatives’ of the action, not require the novel to extend to over 75,000 pages if he is to ‘establish a close to equal proportion between the Adventures and the Thoughts’?2 But if proportion presents the novelist with a problem, this is precisely because the writing of this ‘prologue’ has erased, line after line, the very gap between the immateriality of thought and the materiality of action, between the time of ‘preparatives’ and that of ‘adventures’. For Conrad, the indistinction between the action and its prologue, thought and adventure, is an acquired thing. Moreover, he has no hesitation in positively asserting the vagabondage for which others reproach him. To a colleague who complained about all the sideshows that interrupt the story of Lord Jim, he replied simply that the main show itself, the story of the ship with its hundreds of pilgrims abandoned in cowardice, ‘is not particularly interesting – or engaging’. Hence the necessity, he says, of introducing into the sketch ‘a good many people I’ve met – or at least seen for a moment – and several things overheard about the world’.3 But by dismissing the most universally accepted principles for constructing stories, the author of Lord Jim reopened a fundamental question: what makes a literary fiction different from a simple account of things and people encountered in the happenstance of life? And he had to confront the reply commonly accepted since Aristotle: what separates fiction from ordinary life is to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Conrad resolved half of the problem by beginning his tale (récit) with the middle and by making this time of the middle no longer a median point but the sensible cloth out of which the ‘thoughts’ and the ‘adventures’ are made. But he could not shirk the other obligation, which is to complete the tale with its ending. And he had to confer this ending to a deus ex machina, to an adventurer who appears from nowhere to provoke the gunshot that is alone able to stop Jim’s roving. Conrad justified this purely factual ending to his editor: enough is known about Jim’s psychology at this stage of the story, he said, to allow one to stick to the bald facts.4 But the problem is more radical: passing from ‘psychology’ to ‘facts’ means breaking with the very principle of new fiction, which is no longer to separate action from its ‘preparation’; it means being unfaithful to this sensible fabric, which renders adventures and thoughts indistinct. New fiction is without end. The books it produces must have an ending, but it is perhaps doomed never to be the good ending.
The essays collected here attempt to think through some of the transformations and some of the paradoxes that found modern fiction on the destruction of what seemed – and still often seems – to found all fiction: the backbone that makes it a body standing by itself; the internal organization (ordonnance) whereby the perfection of the whole subordinates the details; the chain of causes and effects that ensures the story’s intelligibility through its temporal development. This revolution was not achieved through manifestos, but instead via shifts in writing practices. Sometimes these shifts were deliberate attempts, but sometimes also surprises even for those undertaking them. So it is that this revolution will be treated here through singular cases: solutions found by a writer to alter the nature of events comprising a fiction, to give it new characters, other temporal sequences, another form of reality or necessity; thus, with Virginia Woolf, we have the attempt to recount the story of an uninhabited house via the purely material events affecting its walls and objects; or, with Flaubert, the way, again, in which a chain of sensations produces the event of a hand surrendering itself; or, with Conrad, of a body leaping into a boat. But this revolution will also be broached through the problems raised for readers and critics by fiction’s new proportions or disproportions; this is the case of the disequilibrium between the immobilities of description and the dynamics of action that Roland Barthes interprets through the category of the ‘reality effect’. I will try to show that the ‘realist’ excess of description can be interpreted quite differently, if one takes account of the relation between the population of fiction and the structure of fictional action, and to draw from it a wholly other idea of the relation between the poetics of fiction and its politics.
This relation was most often posited within a problematic of representation. Now, this problematic is doubly reductive. On the one hand, it places fiction on the side of an imaginary to which it contrasts the solid realities of action, and notably of political action. On the other, it explains its structures as the more or less deformed expression of social processes. But, as we have known since Aristotle, fiction is not the invention of imaginary worlds. It is first a structure of rationality: a mode of presentation that renders things, situations or events perceptible and intelligible; a mode of liaison that constructs forms of coexistence, succession and causal linkage between events, and gives to these forms the characters of the possible, the real or the necessary. Now, this twofold operation is required wherever it is a matter of constructing a certain sense of reality and formulating its intelligibility. Political action, which names subjects, identifies situations, links events and deduces possibles or impossibles from them, uses fictions just as novelists or filmmakers do. And likewise for the social sciences, which retain their very possibility from the literary revolution that blurred the ancient opposition between the causal rationality of poetic fiction and the empirical succession of historical facts. True, the social sciences readily forget this when attempting to explain the inventory of fictional schemas on the basis of the reality of social processes. But the price to pay for this forgetting is that they thus explain fiction simply by means of another fiction. Playing this role in the ‘political’ interpretation of literary schemas is the concept of reification. This sole concept made it possible to reduce the descriptive exuberance of Balzacian novels, the impersonality of Flaubertian style, Baudelairian flanerie, the visual epiphanies of Conrad, of Proust or of Virginia Woolf, Joycean interior monologue, ‘modern’ formalism and ‘postmodern’ fragmentation all to a single cause, namely the commodity form that conceals human labour. But reification is by no means the concept of an economic process that would serve as a basis or model for others. It is merely one interpretation of the evolution of modern societies. The origin of this concept can be found in the Schillerian critique of the division of labour. This critique came to be intercepted by counter-revolutionary discourse about the human community that revolutionary abstraction has broken, then became transformed into the romantic opposition between the organic and the mechanical, and the young ‘sciences of the spirit’ reprised it and communicated it further to the sociology of ‘rationalization’, prior to Lukacs’s identifying it with Marxian commodity fetishism and it becoming the one great fiction that serves as the foundation for all others. The essays gathered here would like to show that this fiction of politics, focused on the becoming-thing of human relations – alienation, reification, spectacle – has not ceased to mask the real political stake, which bears on the very nature of these ‘human relations’. An entire progressist tradition has seen in the modern revolutions of fiction a process of fragmentation of the human totality or of dethroning of action in favour of the passivity of things. The following pages encourage us to see in it something else altogether: a destruction of the hierarchical model subjecting parts to the whole and dividing humanity between an elite of active beings and a multitude of passive ones.
I will therefore localize the politics of fiction not in terms of what it represents but in terms of what it operates: the situations that it constructs, the populations that it convokes, the relations of inclusion or exclusion that it institutes, the borders that it traces or effaces between perception and action, between the states of things and the movements of thought; the relations that it establishes or suspends between situations and their meanings, between temporal coexistences or successions and chains of causality. In their principle, none of these operations is proper to literary fiction. And the ritual interrogation into the relations of politics and literature could usefully be replaced by an analysis of paradigms in which facts are presented, events linked up and sense constructed, paradigms that circulate between the various domains of human knowledge and activity. But, from another angle, avowed forms of fiction enable us to perceive the logics behind the presentation of facts and production of their sense that invoking the given in its self-evidence or scientific necessity hides elsewhere. The Aristotelian rules of fiction subtend the principles that realist political action, social science and media communication lay claim to. And, conversely, disturbances of the fictional order make it possible to think through the new relations between words and things, perceptions and acts, repetitions of the past and projections of the future, the sense of the real and the possible, of the necessary and the verisimilar, from which forms of social experience and political subjectivation are woven. This is the perspective from which I will analyse herein the paradoxical forms of novelistic democracy, the singularities of the poetic Republic and the disturbance of relations between thought and action that the theatre reveals on the very stage where it convokes the people of revolutions and that of the fait divers.5