random reflections on literary history an textual criticism

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Random Reflections on Literary History and Textual CriticismAuthor(s): J. D. HubertSource: New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 1, A Symposium on Literary History (Autumn,1970), pp. 163-171Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468594 .

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Random Reflections on LiteraryHistoryand Textual Criticism

J.D. Hubert

ALTHOUGH New Criticism, by that time, had made its mark

and, in fact, had become dominant in many if not most Eng-

lish departments and literary journals, French studies, in the

early 195o's, remained with very few exceptions, faithful to the spiritand even the letter of Lanson's teachings. This holds true not only for

the various "Facultis des Sciences Humaines," Parisian or provincial,but also for the vast majority of French departments in Great Britain

and the United States. It would appear that professors of French had

failed to communicate with their more

enterprisingcolleagues in Eng-

lish In France itself, few if any scholars had even heard of New

Criticism.' The first article on the subject was to appear several yearslater in the avant-garde journal Critique; and characteristically it took

a comparatist from Harvard, Professor Paul de Man, to inform unsus-

pecting French intellectuals of this "new" approach. Moreover, veryfew Parisian scholars at that time had read anything whatever by Erich

Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, at the height of their fame in the rest of the

Western world. Recently, however, Auerbach's Mimesis and a selection

of articles on French literatureby Spitzer

haveappeared

in Gallimard's

prestigious "Bibliotheque des Idees." In the last few years, in fact,French criticism has not only caught up with North America, Aus-

tralia, and the rest of Europe, but may even have forged ahead in the

application of linguistics to literary theory.It would be unfair to attribute the dominance of Lanson-a pioneer

in his own day--during more than half a century to chauvinism or even

to that form of benevolent cultural imperialism so typical of the Third

and Fourth Republics, for most literary scholars in the French universi-

tiesneglected

their ownavant-garde, ignoring

suchoriginal

theorists as

i Mallarm6, by reason of his hermeticism, became the object of close textual

analysis by such critics as Robert Greer Cohn, L'Oeuvre de Mallarmed: un coup de

dies (Paris, I951), and Gardner Davies, Les "tombeaux" de Mallarme (Paris, I950),Vers une explication rationelle du coup de dis (Paris, 1953), and Mallarmd et le

drame solitaire (Paris, I959).



164 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and the philosopher Gaston Bache-

lard. Moreover, no professor, however prestigious, ever had the bold-

ness or the inclination to teach living, let alone avant-garde writers inany facult6, until the University of Strasbourg, not many years ago,

adopted the policy of including contemporary authors in its curriculum.

The only reasonable explanation I can provide for this attitude, is that

professors of French at the Sorbonne and their colleagues in other in-

stitutions regarded themselves first and foremost as scientists. Lanson's

methods, characterized by their reliability, had achieved many note-

worthy results in the history of ideas. In the hands of imaginative and

subtle scholars of the calibre of Professor Jean Pommier, it had proved

to be a formidable tool. Other methods, concerned merely with inter-pretation, provided results that seemed, by comparison, ephemeral, and

answered questions that serious scholars just did not ask. In this con-

nection, I feel compelled to report a statement made, circa 1957, byone of the pundits of the Sorbonne: "If in America, as in some of our

more distant provinces, you resort to interpretation, it is because youdo not have at your disposal the wealth of documentation we enjoyhere in Paris."

It may seem surprising that a system that had perfected "explication

de textes," taught for generations in every lyc6e and facult6 of the land,should have taken so dim a view of textual interpretation. Actually,French scholars, unlike so many of their colleagues in other countries,had little if any use for "explication" in their serious publications.Even today, many structuralists prefer to rise above-or perhaps delve

below-the text, which they treat as a pretext for whatever theories,

philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, and the more abstruse the

better, they happen to fancy. For instance, Roland Barthes, even in the

structuralist chapters of his Racine, relegates all quotations from the

tragedies to unobtrusive footnotes. It so happens that "explication detextes" differs in one essential respect from the close textual analysischaracteristic of New Criticism: whereas the former functions as a ped-

agogical device, leading to and from the text, the latter is entirely

centripetal, as though the critic assumed that the text had a penetrablecenter where all the disparate elements would somehow fit together.

Although historical criticism, as practiced by Gustave Lanson and

his followers, has gone out of fashion and has come under attack in its

stronghold, the Sorbonne, I do not wish to imply that it has been super-seded by more recent methods. Indeed, present-day literary historiansin France realize the limitations of Lanson's methodology; and their

sophisticated approach to literary history has acquired a flexibility and

a discrimination unknown to most of their predecessors. Nonetheless,their basic assumptions have inevitably remained the same today as in



REFLECTIONS ON LITERARY HISTORY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM 165

1951, when I defended my thesis on Baudelaire's use of ambiguity,2or, for that matter, when the great Lanson himself developed his method

and formulated his theory at the turn of the century. While my intro-ductory chapter contained a not too tactful critique of biographical in-

terpretation and the search for literary sources, I tried to come to terms

with the historical approach by merely pointing out some of its funda-

mental conventions, as so many theorists, notably Rene Wellek, had

done before me, but none of them in French.3 The historian, or so it

seemed to me, by regarding a poem as a document-as a source of in-

formation concerning the poet's ideas-completely loses sight of it as a

work of art. In thus reducing a poem to its "content"-to a prose

paraphrase-he must provide a single and, in his opinion, definitive in-terpretation whereby the poem coincides with the ideas the author

seems to take seriously. From this viewpoint, the Fleurs du Mal would

appear, more or less, as variations on, and variegations of, ideas alreadyformulated by such Romantics as Balzac and Sainte-Beuve, or by such

mystics as Swedenborg. Having admitted the usefulness and even the

necessity of these conventions, I dwelled at length on the presupposi-tions of New Criticism in general and of my own approach in particu-lar. At that time, historians unfortunately considered their conventions

not only useful and fruitful, but regarded them as axiomatic truths, andtheir interpretations as objective, coherent, and practically infallible.

Reading a poem in its own terms struck them as a subjective, impres-

sionistic, and frivolous occupation, suitable perhaps for contemporary,unconsecrated literature.

Strangely enough, in looking back on L'Esthe'tiquedes Fleurs du Mal,on L'Essaid'dexegiseacinienneand on Moliere and the Comedyof In-

tellect, I have to admit that my own approach has always been more his-

toricalor,

worsestill,

moreeclectic,

than I hadpresumed

when I wrote

them, in spite of all the neocritical niceties they contained: the search

for puns and paradoxes, the insistence on the inner coherence as well

as the ontological independence of plays and poems. In applying Emp-son's idea of ambiguity to the poetry of Baudelaire, I replaced his seven

types with categories borrowed from the theoretical and critical writingsof the poet-with ideas And in a subsequent article, read at the 1954

meeting of the English Institute, I attempted to relate Baudelaire's poetic

practice with that of the French Romantic school. It appeared to me

that while Lamartine, Vigny, and Hugo strove so hard for self-ex-pression that they let their own physical presence get in the way of their

2 L'Esthe'tique des Fleurs du Mal (Geneva, 1953).

3 "Literary History" in Literary Scholarship, Its Aims and Methods (ChapelHill, N. C., 1941 ), pp. 96 ff.



166 NEWLITERARYISTORY

poetry, Baudelaire discovered a way of using his own identity instru-

mentally and of subordinating not only the outside world, but inner

experience to poetic creation. True or false, this statement clearly be-longs in the realm of literary history. In interpreting the tragedies of

Racine, I took the author's Jansenist background into account as well as

the idea of self-love, as expressedin Pascal's Pense'esand in the Maximes

of La Rochefoucauld. The paradoxical situation of the actor, excom-

municated by the Church, but lionized by king and court, played a not

unimportant part in my commentaries on Moliere's comedies. Now,from a purely neocritical or structural standpoint, the historical ele-

ments involved may appear unnecessary, out of place or even detri-

mental. In any case, an uncompromising critic, new or old, might carpat my approach because of its lack of methodoligal "purity." But how

can any critic or scholar get around the fact that the meanings of words

in general and of key expressions in particular are closely related to the

social and philosophical trends as well as the religiousbeliefs and literaryattitudes of a given period?

If a critic fails to take into consideration certain facts, for instance

the conventions of a literary genre, or if he chooses to ignore intellectual

trends or fashions-more often than not the cliches popular at a given

moment-he proceeds in constant peril of misreading the text and ofmissing therefore the ironies or innuendos that would hardly have es-

caped sophisticated and perceptive contemporaries of the author.

Usually, familiarity with the literary background should suffice for all

except historians. A writer, or, for that matter, any artist, rarely starts

with nature or ideologies in the raw or even with his own intimate ex-

periences, but rather with the well-wrought fabrications of other artists,

usually his older contemporaries. Baudelaire, for instance, started with

a taste for Sainte-Beuve and Gautier in the same manner that Leonardo

found his inspiration in the paintings of his master Verrocchio, or Beeth-oven in the compositions of Haydn and Mozart. They imitated art

before looking at the world around and within them. Unfortunately, a

familiarity however extensive with these admired predecessors will ob-

viously never enable the critic to understand even the early works of a

Baudelaire, a Leonardo, or a Beethoven, although ignorance in such

matters might prove embarrassing.It would thus appear that historical information, even of a literary

nature, can play no more than a subordinate part in criticism and can-

not, of itself, provide or even suggest a coherent interpretation of a work

of art. As historical or even biographical information is essentially a

sort of digest or reduction, it may at best tell us about the state of mind

of a writer before he wrote his masterpiece, but very little about the crea-

tive process itself and still less about the work of art. Between this state




of mind and creative activity, between the latter and the finished work,lie considerable gaps that many a critic or scholar unconsciously tries to

conceal under a thick cover of words. This might explain why manycritics, new no less than old, believe-as Rene Wellek said of I. A.

Richards's chief theory-that "poetry puts into order the chaos of our

impulses,"4 or, as some romantics and a few mystics felt, that the poem

faintly but sincerely expressessome glorious or abominable vision or visi-

tation. For my part, I have always assumed that the poet functions as

an explorer or discoverer, and that the poem, by transcending whatever

feeling, experience, or vision may or may not have preceded it, is never

commensurate with the past. In spite or perhaps by virtue of these

gaps, critics, at their own risk, have felt free to link the poem withwhatever set of experiences, occurrences, ideas, or linguistic recurrences

they or their masters happen to take seriously. In short, these areas of

mystery and indetermination permit, if I may borrow a term from

Roland Barthes, various kinds of "mitalangage."The limited or subservient usefulness of background information has

also had some rather paradoxical results insofar as some new critics mis-

takenly assume that the history of ideas plays no part whatever in their

interpretations. Actually, the mere fact of consulting old dictionaries

transforms them ever so slightly into literary archeologists, at least tothe extent that their interpretation involves a reconstruction. Many a

textual critic, in explicating a text, tends to take for granted whatever

background knowledge he may have acquired, though usually for other

purposes; and he therefore acts as though his exegesis flowed naturallyand totally from the text itself. He may not even realize that his "prep-aration" for reading the text would be the envy of an historical scholar.

I must admit, however, that if this purely hypothetical new critic de-

cided to put into writing the matrix of each of his comments, he might

never find a publisher.

The confirmed historian conceals, or rather dismisses from his mind,

quite different matters. It may even happen that he so completely re-

presses his personal appreciation, and blinds himself so successfully to

subtleties considered irrelevant, that his reading of the text becomes

perversely pedestrian. For the historian as well as for the new critic,

it all boils down to a matter of focus. And they would be joined, in this

respect, by phenomenologists, concerned with the creative consciousness

and evenby

the structuralists, for we all dismiss salientaspects

of a work

of art and even of our own reading in order to apply as efficiently as

possible our techniques.

One might infer that no two critics or scholars have ever read the

4 Ibid., p. o05.



I68 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

same text. Criticism, by its very nature, attempts to transform as rapid-

ly as possible whatever is read into a convenient construct-a construct

that, in some respects, involves reduction, but that in others, by dintof paraphrase and interpolation, entails creation. And this convenience,however valid it may seem within a scientific or systematic framework,often negates not so much literary values, however they may be defined,but qualitative reading. Some structuralists, for instance, transform thetext into a construct where linguistic relations take the place of human

perceptivity. The very nature of their approach prevents them from

taking into account the effects on, or the awareness of, a reader.5 For

that matter, all scientifically inclined scholars and critics, with the ex-

ception of the phenomenologists, would wish to abolish the subjectivefactors involved, i.e. the perceptive reader whose very presence mightobscure the various target structures, sociological, psychological, lin-

guistic . ... In what sense, then, may we claim that these structures

constitute literary interpretations? Whatever the answer, it would ap-

pear that appreciation and scientific constructs can never coincide.

Scholars tend to develop strange reading habits. My own inclination,

upon first reading a literarywork, is to look for recurrent patterns, meta-

phorical structures, and hidden meanings.

If the aim of literary studies consists in establishing objective rela-

tionships, then the various approaches could all claim to have scientific

validity, even though they might not share many of the proposed re-

lationships. The history of ideas and the search for ambiguities, for in-

stance, would probably have nothing whatever in common. The his-

torian attempts to establish some type of intellectual coherence where

ideas derived from a given text will find their rightful place, whereas

the textual critic, if need be, will derive from various sources whatever

ideas might serve to establish some sort of coherence within the workof art. They have opposite views not only of ends and means but of the

very nature of information.

Ideally, the scholar should be both textual critic and historian. He

could then establish some sort of dialectic between the two apparentlycontradictory types of coherence and the two opposite kinds of informa-tion. A recent article by Professor Jean Dubu brings out only too clearlythe advantage of combining the two types of competence.6 Professor

Dubu has not attempted to reinterpret Racine's Plaideurs. He has

5 See Michael Riffaterre's discussion of Levi-Strauss and Roman Jacobson,"Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's Les Chats," YaleFrench Studies, special issue on structuralism, XXXVI-XXXVII (1966).

6 Jean Dubu, "Racine, les plaideurs et les juges," Annali dell'Instituto Universi-tario Orientale, Napoli, XI, I (Gennaio, 1969), 5-32.




shown, rather, that a knowledge of seventeenth-century legal proced-

ure, an acquaintance with contemporary attitudes toward the adminis-

tration of justice, an awareness of the author's first-hand experiencewith law enforcement during his stay at Uz6s, would be indispensable to

any critic eager to grasp the elusive relationships between play and au-

dience, all the more so because Les Plaideurs is, to begin with, a free

adaptation of Aristophanes' Wasps, a comedy that derived much of its

sting from specific comments on contemporary events. In this case at

least, the critic would be hard put to establish a sufficientlysafe and solid

springboard before making his interpretive leap. Luckily, I did not in-

clude Racine's only comedy in my exegesis No doubt the wealth of

background material so skilfully and patiently unearthed by Jean Dubudoes not explain the play, but without it, essential relationships, percep-tible within the text to perhaps a handful of Racine's contemporaries,would be lost forever.

With the exception of the ideal scholar capable of combining both

approaches, the historian will continue to establish facts and intellectual

coherences. The textual critic will, according to his requirements, as-

similate whatever facts enable him to understand a given work of art.

His behavior consists at times in rejecting the historical approach while

taking full advantage of its contributions. And his attitude resembles insome respects Ronsard's method of "innutrition"-the intensive,

lengthy, and disciplined preparation that leads to poetic creation. The

great Leo Spitzer could derive splendid interpretations of an entire

work through close analysis of a brief passage chosen at random onlybecause he could bring to bear in his explication a thorough and almost

total knowledge of literature and linguistics. No wonder a short pas-

sage could yield such a wealth of meaning, including of course the meta-

phorical structure of the entire work.

Unlike Spitzer, Georges Poulet focuses his attention on a large sam-

pling of brief passages. He stresses consciousness-the consciousness of

the reader who lends himself, as it were, to the creative work and the

consciousness of the artist, insofar as it transpires through his writings.

Although he may not have used the term, Professor Poulet appears to

insist on the passivity of the reader, who surrenders to the book, and on

the passivity of the book itself, which asks for nothing better than to

yield to the reader. But behind the passive externals of the complexact of

reading,

lurks the ceaseless activity of the reader-the enormous

preparation of the critic, who, among other things, must not let him-

self be misled by the writer's deceptiveness and duplicity-by the se-

ductions of the apparently passive book. It would seem that the com-

munion of, or collaboration between, two passive sets of consciousness

might cover a multiplicity of virtues and that the phenomenologist, no



170 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

more and no less than the new critic, can escape history. Both, how-

ever, make it serve quite different purposes.

Should we conclude that all methods fail insofar as they cannot pos-sibly take into account our total reading experience, but must establish

a restricted and perhaps partly arbitrary set of relationships at the ex-

pense of others? In other words, must the critic pay the penalty for

having crossed the ill-defined borderline that separates reading from ob-

jective relatedness? It would appear that the limitations of literarystudies pertain to the very nature of the questions asked, of the problemsexamined. But it so happens, in literary studies, that almost any rea-

sonable question or sensible problem can receive a convincing, if not

necessarily true, answer or solution. Thus the scholar, whatever hisapproach, translates literature into concepts, susceptible of being related

in any number of ways and of yielding, at a price, plausible answers to

all sorts of contradictory questions.One literary problem, and by all odds the trickiest, requires for its

solution the conjunction of all possible approaches: attribution. I

have recently become involved in tentatively attributing four anony-mous poems, published in 1841, to no less a writer than Baudelaire.

My own experience as a reader sufficed to convince me that these four

texts were early works of the great poet. But in order to justify this at-tribution, even in my own eyes, I resorted to considerable textual analy-sis so as to establish metaphorical structures and ambiguities compara-ble to those in the Fleurs du Mal, undertook a study of the ideas ex-

pressed and of literary sources in accordance with the teachings of

Lanson so as to relate the unsigned poems to known works of Baude-

laire, and compared the author's conception of time and space with that

of Baudelaire, as established by Georges Poulet. Unfortunately, statis-

tical analysis proved to be of little help, for there remain far too few

early and unrevised poems of Baudelaire to serve as a basis for com-parison.

Paradoxically, this rather ponderous critical apparatus will probablyconvince only those scholars (if there be any) who feel, upon readingthe poems, that indeed only Baudelaire could have written them. My

arguments will, on the contrary, appear insufficient on all counts to

readers who feel that Baudelaire could not have written the four texts.

But what is the use of a lengthy commentary that can persuade onlythose readers who have convinced themselves? Perhaps a few will

obligingly suspend their disbelief, while others by force of habit will wel-come any sort of intellectual justification. In any case, the answer mightbe that the critical arguments involved, whether historical, phenome-

nological, metaphorical, or statistical serve to translate into reasonably

clear, systematic, and coherent thought the obscure, if not unconscious,




activities involved in reading and appreciating the texts. These argu-ments provide in addition somewhat tendentious interpretations of the

poems and may lead the (persuaded) reader to revise some of his viewsconcerning Baudelaire's development as a poet by showing that his

well-known interest in the "unreal city" as well as his taste for subdued

puns started at a very early stage in his career.

In contrasting somewhat artificially the historical approach with the

methods of New Criticism and in adding a few remarks on phenome-

nology and structuralism, I have had to dwell on the mysterious act of

reading; but I have so far failed to discuss the really essential problems-the nature of a literary work and the aesthetic issues involved in its

analysis. A few remarks on poetry may help to clarify my attitude as acritic. I do not believe that a poem or, for that matter, any creative

work is, strictly speaking, an imitation of the "real," either external or

internal. Obviously, the poet makes use of recognizable phenomenaand incorporates them, after suitable transformations, into,his creations,but usually without wishing to reproduce and perpetuate them. As

Baudelaire stated in his "Confiteor de l'artiste," a poet is involved in

a life and death struggle with the "real." He must somehow destroy it

so that his own work may prevail. In short, the work of art exists at

the expense of "reality" and thrives best in the midst of deprivation andbloodless destruction. The artist thus tends to sacrifice the world around

and within him on the altar of his projected creation. This may ex-

plain the prevalence in art of violence, suffering and every form of de-

struction or negation.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

IRVINE

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