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One

FAREWELL LITERATURE?

The end of literature is at hand. Literature's time is almost up. It is
about time. It is about, that is, the different epochs of different media.
Literature, in spite of its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and
universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes.
Literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place. These
two contradictory premises must govern all serious reflection "on
literature" these days.

What brings about this paradoxical situation? Literature has a history. I
mean "literature" in the sense we in the West use the word in our various
languages: "literature" (French or English) "letteratura" (Italian),
"literatura" (Spanish), "Literatur" (German). As Jacques Derrida observes
in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, the word literature comes from a Latin
stem. It cannot be detached from its Roman-Christian-European roots.
Literature in our modern sense, however, appeared in the European West and
began in the late seventeenth century, at the earliest. Even then the word
did not have its modern meaning. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the word "literature" was first used in our current sense only
quite recently. Even a definition of "literature" as including memoirs,
history, collections of letters, learned treatises, etc., as well as poems,
printed plays, and novels, comes after the time of Samuel Johnson's
dictionary (1755). The restricted sense of literature as just poems, plays,
and novels is even more recent. The word "literature" is defined by Johnson
exclusively in the now obsolescent sense of "Acqaintance with 'letters' or
books; polite or humane learning; literary culture." One example the OED
gives is as late as 1880: "He was a man of very small literature." Only by
the third definition in the OED does one get to:


Literary production as a whole; the body of writings produced in a
particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now also in a
more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration
on the grounds of beauty of form { or emotional effect.

This definition, says the OED, "is of very recent emergence both in England
and France." Its establishment may be conveniently dated in the mid-
eighteenth century and associated, in England at least, with the work of
Joseph and Thomas Wharton (1722-1800; 1728-90). They were hailed by Edmund
Gosse, in an essay of 1915-16 ("Two Pioneers of Romanticism: Joseph and
Thomas Wharton"), as giving literature its modern definition. Literature in
that sense is now coming to an end, as new media gradually replace the
printed book.

WHAT HAS MADE LITERATURE POSSIBLE?
What are the cultural features that are necessary concomitants of
literature as we have known it in the West? Western literature belongs to
the age of the printed book and of other print forms like newspapers,
magazines, and periodicals generally. Literature is associated with the
gradual rise of almost universal literacy in the West. No widespread
literacy, no literature. Literacy, furthermore, is associated with the
gradual appearance from the seventeenth century onward of Western-style
democracies. This means regimes with У expanded suffrage, government by
legislatures, regulated judicial systems, and fundamental human rights or
civil liberties. Such democracies slowly developed more or less universal
education. They also allowed citizens more or less free access to printed
materials and to the means of printing new ones.
This freedom, of course, has never been complete. Various forms of
censorship, in even the freest democracies today, limit the power of the
printing press. Nevertheless, no technology has ever been more effective
than the printing press in breaking down class hierarchies of power. The
printing press ' made democratic revolutions like the French Revolution or
the American Revolution possible. The Internet is performing a similar
function today. The printing and circulation of clandestine newspapers,
manifestoes, and emancipatory literary works was essential to those earlier
revolutions, just as email, the Internet, the cell phone, and the "hand-
held" will be essential to whatever revolutions we may have from now on.
Both these communication regimes are also, of course, powerful instruments
of repression.
The rise of modern democracies has meant the appearance"] of the modern
nation-state, with its encouragement of a sense of ethnic and linguistic
uniformity in each state's citizens. Modern literature is vernacular
literature. It began to appear as the use of Latin as a lingua franca
gradually disappeared. Along with the nation-state has gone the notion of
national literature, that is, literature written in the language and idiom
of a particular country. This concept remains strongly codified in school
and university study of literature. It is institutionalized in separate
departments of French, German, English, Slavic, Italian, and Spanish.
Tremendous resistance exists today to the reconfiguration of those
departments that will be necessary if they are not simply to disappear.
The modern Western concept of literature became firmly established at the
same time as the appearance of the modern research university. The latter
is commonly identified with the founding of the University of Berlin around
1810, under the guidance of a plan devised by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The
modern research university has a double charge. One is Wissenschqft,
finding out the truth about everything. The other is Bildung, training
citizens (originally almost exclusively male ones) of a given nation-state
in the ethos appropriate for that state. It is perhaps an exaggeration to
say that the modern concept of literature was created by the research
university and by lower-school training in preparation for the university.
After all, newspapers, journals, non-university critics and reviewers also
contributed, for example Samuel Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
England. Nevertheless, our sense of literature was strongly shaped by
university-trained writers. Examples are the Schlegel brothers in Germany,
along with the whole circle of critics and philosophers within German
Romanticism. English examples would include William Wordsworth, a Cambridge
graduate. His "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" defined poetry and its uses for
generations. In the Victorian period Matthew Arnold, trained at Oxford, was
a founding force behind English and United States institutionalized study
of literature. Arnold's thinking is still not without force in conservative
circles today.
Arnold, with some help from the Germans, presided over the transfer from
philosophy to literature of the responsibility for Bildung. Literature
would shape citizens by giving them knowledge of what Arnold called "the
best that is known and thought in the world." This "best" was, for Arnold,
enshrined in canonical Western works from Homer and the Bible to Goethe or
Wordsworth. Most people still first hear that there is such a thing as
literature from their school teachers.
Universities, moreover, have been traditionally charged I with the storage,
cataloguing, preservation, commentary, and {-interpretation of literature
through the accumulations of' books, periodicals, and manuscripts in
research libraries and special collections. That was literature's share in
the univer^ll sity's responsibility for Wissenschaft, as opposed to
Bildung. This double responsibility was still very much alive in the
literature departments of The Johns Hopkins University when I taught there
in the 1950s and 1960s. It has by no means disappeared today.
Perhaps the most important feature making literature possible in modern
democracies has been freedom of speech. This is the freedom to say, write,
or publish more or less anything. Free speech allows everyone to criticize
everything, to question everything. It confers the right even to criticize
the right to free speech. Literature, in the Western sense, as Jacques
Derrida has forcefully argued, depends, moreover, not just on the right to
say anything but also on the right not to be held responsible for what one
says. How can this be? Since literature belongs to the realm of the
imaginary, whatever is said in a literary work can always be claimed to be
experimental, hypothetical, cut off from referential or performative
claims. Dostoevsky is not an ax murderer, nor is he advocating ax murder in
Crime and Punishment. He is writing a fictive work in which he imagines
what it might be like to be an ax murderer. A ritual formula is printed at
the beginning of many modern detective stories: "Any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." This
(often false) claim is not only a safeguard against lawsuits. It also
codifies the freedom from referential responsibility that is an essential
feature of literature in the modern sense.
A final feature of modern Western literature seemingly contradicts the
freedom to say anything. Even though democratic freedom of speech in
principle allows anyone to say anything, that freedom has always been
severely curtailed, in various ways. Authors during the epoch of printed
literature have de facto been held responsible not only for the opinions
expressed in literary works but also for such political or social effects
as those works have had or have been believed to have had. Sir Walter
Scott's novels and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin have in
different ways been held responsible for causing the American Civil War,
the former by instilling absurdly outmoded ideas of chivalry in Southern
gentry, the latter by decisively encouraging support for the abolition of
slavery. Nor are these claims nonsensical. Uncle Tom's Cabin in Chinese
translation was one of Mao Tse Tung's favorite books. Even today, an author
would be unlikely to get away before a court of law with a claim that it is
not he or she speaking in a given work but an imaginary character uttering
imaginary opinions.
Just as important as the development of print culture or the rise of modern
democracies in the development of modern Western literature, has been the
invention, conventionally associated with Descartes and Locke, of our
modern sense of the self. From the Cartesian cogito, followed by the
invention of identity, consciousness, and self in Chapter 27, Book II, of
Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the sovereign I or Ich
of Fichte, to absolute consciousness in Hegel, to the I as the agent of the
will to power in Nietzsche, to the ego as one element of the self in Freud,
to Husserl's phenomenological ego, to the Dasein of Heidegger, explicitly
opposed to the Cartesian ego, but nevertheless a modified form of
subjectivity, to the I as the agent of performative utterances such as "I
promise" or "I bet" in the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others, to
the subject not as something abolished but as a problem to be interrogated
within deconstructive or postmodern thinking - the whole period of
literature's heyday has depended on one or another idea of the self as a
self-conscious and responsible agent. The modern self can be held liable
for what it says, thinks, or does, including what it does in the way of
writing works of literature.
Literature in our conventional sense has also depended on a new sense of
the author and of authorship. This was legalized in modern copyright laws.
All the salient forms and techniques of literature have, moreover,
exploited the new sense of selfhood. Early first-person novels like
Robinson Crusoe adopted the direct presentation of interiority
characteristic of seventeenth-century Protestant confessional works.
Eighteenth-century novels in letters exploited epistolary presentations of
subjectivity. Romantic poetry affirmed a lyric "I." Nineteenth-century
novels developed sophisticated forms of third-person narration. These
allowed a double simultaneous presentation by way of indirect discourse of
two subjectivities, that of the narrator, that of the character. Twentieth-
century novels present directly in words the stream of consciousness" of
fictional protagonists. Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is
the paradigmatic case of the latter.
D
THE END OF THE PRINT AGE
Most of these features making modern literature possible are now undergoing
rapid transformation or putting in question. People are now not so certain
of the unity and perdurance of the self, nor so certain that the work can
be explained by the authority of the author. Foucault's "What is an
Author?" and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" signaled the end of
the old tie between the literary work and its author considered as a
unitary self, the real person William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf.
Literature itself has contributed to the fragmentation of the self.
Forces of economic, political, and technological globalization are in many
ways bringing about a weakening of the nation-state's separateness, unity,
and integrity. Most countries are now multilingual and multi-ethnic.
Nations today are seen to be divided within as well as existing within more
permeable borders. American literature now includes works written in
Spanish, Chinese, Native American languages, Yiddish, French, and so on, as
well as works written in English from within those groups, for example
African-American literature. Over sixty minority languages and cultures are
recognized in the People's Republic of China. South Africa after apartheid
has eleven official languages, nine African languages along with English
and Afrikaans. This recognition of internal division is ending literary
study's institutionalization accord-, ing to national literatures, each
with its presumedly self-' enclosed literary history, each written in a
single national language. The terrible events of the mid-twentieth century,
World War II and the Holocaust, transformed our civilization and Western
literature with it. Maurice Blanchot and others have even argued
persuasively that literature in the old sense is impossible after the
Holocaust.
In addition, technological changes and the concomitant development of new
media are bringing about the gradual death of literature in the modern
sense of the word. We all know what those new media are: radio, cinema,
television, video, and the Internet, soon universal wireless video.
A recent workshop I attended in the People's Republic of China (PRC)
brought together American literary scholars and representatives of the
Chinese Writers Association. At that meeting it became evident that the
most respected and influential Chinese writers today are those whose novels
or stories are turned into one or another television series. The major
monthly journal printing poetry in the PRC has in the last decade declined
in circulation from an amazing 700,000 to a "mere" 30,000, though the
proliferation of a dozen or more new influential poetry journals mitigates
that decline somewhat and is a healthy sign of diversification.
Nevertheless, the shift to the new media is decisive.
Printed literature used to be a primary way in which citizens of a given
nation state were inculcated with the ideals, ideologies, ways of behavior
and judgment that made them good citizens. Now that role is being
increasingly played, all over the world, for better or for worse, by radio,
cinema, television, VCRs, DVDs, and the Internet. This is one explanation
for the difficulties literature departments have these days in getting
funding. Society no longer needs the university as"7 the primary place
where the national ethos is inculcated in j citizens. That work used to be
done by the humanities^ departments in colleges and universities, primarily
througr literary study. Now it is increasingly done by television, radic
talk shows, and by cinema. People cannot be reading Charles Dickens or
Henry James or Toni Morrison and at the same time watching television or a
film on VCR, though some people may claim they can do that. The evidence
suggests that people spend more and more time watching television or
surfing the Internet. More people, by far, probably, have seen the recent
films of novels by Austen, Dickens, Trollope, or James than have actually
read those works. In some cases (though I wonder how often), people read
the book because they have seen the television adaptation. The printed book
will retain cultural force for a good while yet, but its reign is clearly
ending. The new media are more or less rapidly replacing it. This is not
the end of the world, only the dawn of a new one dominated by new media.
One of the strongest symptoms of the imminent death of literature is the
way younger faculty members, in departments of literature all over the
world, are turning in droves from literary study to theory, cultural
studies, postcolonial studies, media studies (film, television, etc.),
popular culture studies, Women's studies, African-American studies, and so
on. They often write and teach in ways that are closer to the social
sciences than to the humanities as traditionally conceived. Their writing
and teaching often marginalizes or ignores literature. This is so even
though many of them were trained in old-fashioned literary history and the
close reading of canonical texts.
These young people are not stupid, nor are they ignorant barbarians. They
are not bent on destroying literature nor on destroying literary study.
They know better than their elders often do, however, which way the wind is
blowing. They have a deep and laudable interest in film or popular culture,
partly because it has done so much to form them as what they are. They also
have a proleptic sense that traditional literary study is on the way to
being declared obsolete by society and by university authorities.This will
probably happen not in so many words. University administrators do not work
that way. It will happen by the more effective device of withdrawing
funding in the name of "necessary economies" or "downsizing." Departments
of classics and modern languages other than English, in United States
universities, will go first. Indeed, they are in many universities already
going, initially through amalgamation. Any United States English
department, however, will soon join the rest, if it is foolish enough to go
on teaching primarily canonical British literature under the illusion that
it is exempt from cuts because it teaches texts in the dominant language of
the country.
Even the traditional function of the university as the place where
libraries store literature from all ages and in all languages, along with
secondary material, is now being rapidly usurped by digitized databases.
Many of the latter are available to anyone with a computer, a modem, and
access to the Internet through a server. More and more literary works are
freely available online, through various websites. An example is "The Voice
of the Shuttle," maintained by Alan Liu and his colleagues at the
University of California at Santa Barbara (http://vos.ucsb.edu/). The Johns
Hopkins "Project Muse" makes a large number of journals available (http://
muse.jhu.edu/journals/index_text.html).
A spectacular example of this making obsolete the research library is the
William Blake Archive website (http:// www.blakearchive.org/). This is
being developed by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. Anyone
anywhere who has a computer with an Internet connection (I for example on
the remote island off the coast of Maine where I live most of the year and
am writing this) may access, download, and print out spectacularly accurate
reproductions of major versions of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and some of his other prophetic books. The original versions of these
"illuminated books" are dispersed in many different research libraries in
England and the United States. Formerly they were available only to
specialists in Blake, to scholars with a lot of money for research travel.
Research libraries will still need to take good care of the originals of
all those books and manuscripts. They will less and less function, however,
as the primary means of access to those materials.
Literature on the computer screen is subtly changed by the new medium. It
becomes something other to itself. Literature is changed by the ease of new
forms of searching and manipulation, and by each work's juxtaposition with
the innumerable swarm of other images on the Web. These are all on the same
plane of immediacy and distance. They are instantaneously brought close and
yet made alien, strange, seemingly far away. All sites on the Web,
including literary works, dwell together as inhabitants of that non-spatial
space we call cyberspace. Manipulating a computer is a radically different
bodily activity from holding a book in one's hands and turning the pages
one by one. I have earnestly tried to read literary works on the screen,
for example Henry James's The Sacred Fount. I happened at one moment not to
have at hand a printed version of that work, but found one on the Web. I
found it difficult to read it in that form. This no doubt identifies me as
someone whose bodily habits have been permanently wired by the age of the
printed book.

WHAT THEN IS LITERATURE?
If, on the one hand, literature's time (as I began by saying) is nearly up,
if the handwriting is on the wall, or rather if the pixels are on the
computer screen, on the other hand, literature or "the literary" is (as I
also began by saying) universal and perennial. It is a certain use of words
or other signs that exists in some form or other in any human culture at
any time. Literature in the first sense, as a Western cultural institution,
is a special, historically conditioned form of literature in the second
sense. In the second sense, literature is a universal aptitude for words or
other signs to be taken as literature. About the political and social
utility, import, effectiveness of literature I shall write later, in
Chapter 4, "Why Read Literature?" At this point my goal is to identify what
sort of thing literature is.
What then is literature? What is that "certain use of words or other signs"
we call literary? What does it mean to take a text "as literature"? These
questions have often been asked. They almost seem like non-questions.
Everyone knows what literature is. It is all those novels, poems, and plays
that are designated as literature by libraries, by the media, by commercial
and university presses, and by teachers and scholars in schools and
universities. To say that does not help much, however. It suggests that
literature is whatever is designated as literature. There is some truth to
that. Literature is whatever bookstores put in the shelves marked
"Literature" or some subset of that: "Classics," "Poetry," "Fiction,"
"Mysteries," and so on.
It is nevertheless also the case that certain formal features allow anyone
dwelling within Western culture to say with conviction, "This is a novel,"
or "This is a poem," or "This is a play." Title pages, aspects of print
format, for example the printing of poetry in lines with capitals at the
beginning of each line, are as important in segregating literature from
other print forms as internal features of language that tell the adept
reader he or she has a literary work in hand. The co-presence of all these
features allows certain collocations of printed words to be taken as
literature. Such writings can be used as literature, by those who are adept
at doing that. What does it mean to "use a text as literature" ?
Readers of Proust will remember the account at the beginning of A la
recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) of the magic lantern
his hero, Marcel, had as a child. It projected on Marcel's walls and even
on his doorknob images of the villainous Golo and the unfortunate Genevieve
de Brabant, brought into his bedroom from the Merovingian past. My version
of that was a box of stereopticon photographs, probably by Matthew Brady,
of American Civil War scenes. As a child, I was allowed to look at these at
my maternal grandparents' farm in Virginia. My great-grandfather was a
soldier in the Confederate Army. I did not know that then, though I was
told that a great-uncle had been killed in the Second Battle of Bull Run. I
remember in those awful pictures as much the dead horses as the bodies of
dead soldiers. Far more important for me as magic lanterns, however, were
the books my mother read to me and that I then learned to read for myself.
When I was a child I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson
had an author. To me it seemed a collection of words fallen from the sky
and into my hands. Those words allowed me magical access to a pre-existing
world of people and their adventures. The words transported me there. The
book wielded what Simon During, in Modern Enchantments, calls in his
subtitle, "the cultural power of secular magic." I am not sure, however,
that secular and sacred magics can be all that easily distinguished.This
other world I reached through reading The Swiss Family Robinson, it seemed
to me, did not depend for its existence on the words of the book, even
though those words were my only window on that virtual reality. The window,
I would now say, no doubt shaped that reality through various rhetorical
devices. The window was not I entirely colorless and transparent. I was,
however, blissfully unaware of that. I saw through the words to what seemed
to ( me beyond them and not dependent on them, even though I / could get
there in no other way than by reading those words. I resented being told
that the name on the title page was that of the "author" who had made it
all up.
Whether many other people have had the same experience, I do not know, but
I confess to being curious to find out. It is not too much to say that this
whole book has been written to account for this experience. Was it no more
than childish ^ naivete, or was I responding, in however childish a way, to
something essential about literature? Now I am older and wiser. I know that
The Swiss Family Robinson was written in German by a Swiss author, Johann
David Wyss (1743-1818), and that I was reading an English translation.
Nevertheless, I believe my childhood experience had validity. It can serve
as a clue to answering the question, "What is literature?"

LITERATURE AS A CERTAIN USE OF WORDS
Literature exploits a certain potentiality in human beings as sign-using
animals. A sign, for example a word, functions in the absence of the thing
named to designate that thing, to "refer to it," as linguists say.
Reference is an inalienable aspect of words. When we say that a word
functions in the absence of the thing to name the thing, the natural
assumption is that the thing named exists. It is really there, somewhere or
other, perhaps not all that far away. We need words or other signs to
substitute for things while those things are temporarily absent.
If I am out walking, for example, and see a sign with the word "Gate," I
assume that somewhere nearby is an actual gate that I can see with my eyes
and grasp with my hands to open or shut it, once I get in sight of it and
get my hands on it. This is especially the case if the word "Gate" on the
sign is accompanied by a pointing arrow and the words "XA mile," or
something of the sort. The real, tangible, usable gate is a quarter of a
mile away, out of sight in the woods. The sign, however, promises that if I
follow the arrow I shall soon be face to face with the gate. The word
"gate" is charged with signifying power by its reference to real gates. Of
course, the word's meaning is also generated by that word's place in a
complex differential system of words in a given language. That system
distinguishes "gate" from all other words. The word "gate," however, once
it is charged with significance by its reference to real gates, retains its
significance or signifying function even if the gate is not there at all.
The sign has meaning even if it is a lie put up by someone to lead me
astray on my walk. The word "Gate" on the sign then refers to a phantom
gate that is not there anywhere in the phenomenal world.
Literature exploits this extraordinary power of words to go on signifying
in the total absence of any phenomenal referent. In Jean-Paul Sartre's
quaint terminology, literature makes use of a "non-transcendent"
orientation of words. Sartre meant by this that the words of a literary
work do not transcend themselves toward the phenomenal things to which they
refer. The whole power of literature is there in the simplest word or
sentence used in this fictitious way.
Franz Kafka testified to this power. He said that the entire potentiality
of literature to create a world out of words is there in a sentence like,
"He opened the window." Kafka's first great masterpiece, "The Judgment,"
uses that power at the end of its first paragraph. There the protagonist,
Georg Bendemann, is shown sitting "with one elbow propped on his desk . . .
looking out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the
farther bank with their tender green."
Stephane Mallarme gave witness to the same amazing magic of v^ords, in this
case a single word. In a famous formulation, he pronounced: "I say: a
flower! and, outside the forgetting to which my voice relegates any
contour, in the form of something other than known callices, musically
there rises, the suave idea itself, the absence of all bouquets."
Words used as signifiers without referents generate with / amazing ease
people with subjectivities, things, places, actions, all the
paraphernalia of poems, plays, and novels with f which adept readers are
familiar. What is most extraordinary about literature's power is the ease
with which this genera-^ tion of a virtual reality occurs. The little story
of my imaginary walk in the woods to encounter a misleading, perhaps a
sinisterly prevaricating, sign is a small example of that.
It might be objected that many literary works, perhaps modernist or
postmodernist ones especially, though by no means uniquely, deliberately
resist translation into an internal imaginary spectacle. Mallarme's poems,
Joyce's Fiimegans Wake, the strange works of Raymond Roussel, or the late
poems of Wallace Stevens are examples. Such works force the reader to pay
attention to the linguistic surface, rather than going through it to some
virtual reality to which it gives access. Even in such works, however, the
reader struggles to imagine some scene or other. Mallarme's poem about his
wife's fan, "Eventail (de Madame Mallarme)," is a poem about that fan, just
as his "Tombeau (de Verlaine)" is about Verlaine's tomb and the weather
around it on a certain day. Stevens's "Chocorua to Its Neighbor" is pretty
rarefied, all right, but it is still readable as an imaginary conversation
between a star and a real mountain. That is Mt. Chocorua, in New Hampshire,
near which the American philosopher, William James, used to spend his
summers. Early drafts of Finnegans Wake help readers to orient themselves,
for example, in one particularly opaque passage by knowing that beneath
various layers of outrageous puns and portmanteau words it is recounting
the Tristan and Isolde story, with Tristan in modern guise as "a handsome
six foot rugby player." Part of the pleasure of Roussel's Impressions
d'Afrique is the struggle, by no means wholly unsuccessful, to disentangle
the various bewil-deringly intertwined narrative strands. The virtual
realities such works invent or discover are pretty weird, but so, in their
own ways, are even the most traditionally "realistic" fictions. Examples,
to be discussed later, are Anthony Trollope's novels, with their strange
assumption that each character has intuitive understanding of what other
characters are thinking. Moreover, even the most opaque or idiosyncratic
literary construction tends to generate the fictive illusion of a speaking
voice.
A literary work is not, as many people may assume, an imitation in words of
some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or
discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld, a hyper-reality. This
new world is an v/ irreplaceable addition to the already existing one. A
book is a pocket or portable dreamweaver^I refer in this figure to two
series of books popular some decades ago, "Pocket Books" and "Portable"
books - The Portable Conrad, The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Portable
Hemingway, and so on. These names signal the portability of modern books as
/generators of alternative) worldsJYou can carry these little devices
wherever you go. They will still go on working their magic when you read
them, anywhere, anytime. These modern small books are quite different from
Renaissance folios, for example the Shakespeare Folio. Those big books were
meant to stay in one place, most often in a rich person's private library.
Literature makes exorbitant and large-scale use of the propensity words
possess to go on having meaning even in the absence of any ascertainable,
phenomenally verifiable, referent. A beguiling circumstantiality tends to
characterize literature. An example is the specification that it was "a
Saturday afternoon in November" at the opening of The Return of the Native.
Another is the spurious hiding of what are implied to be real street names,
with only the first and last letters given, as if something needs to be
hidden, in the first sentence of Crime and Punishment. No way exists from
the opening sentence of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove to tell whether
or not Kate Croy was a real person: "She waited, Kate Croy, for her father
to come in ..."
Often the illusion that the text is a chronicle of real people and events,
not a fictive concoction, is reinforced by the use of real place names. An
unwary reader, however, is likely to be fooled by a bogus
circumstantiality. Kate Croy's father's house exists in a real place, the
Chelsea region of London, but a search of London maps fails to turn up a
Chirk Street, where the narrator says that house was located. It sounds as
if there ought to be a Chirk Street in Chelsea but there is not. Goswell
Road, however, is a real street in the Finsbury section of East London, but
no Mr Pickwick ever opened a window and looked out upon it, in a passage to
which I shall return. To alter Marianne Moore's aphorism defining poetry as
imaginary gardens with real toads in them, Pickwick Papers names a real
garden with an imaginary toad. The name "Chirk Street" is like a plausible-
enough-looking entry in a fictitious telephone book, that just does not
happen to correspond to any real telephone. Literature derails or suspends
or redirects the normal referentiality of language. Language in literature
is derouted so that it refers only to an imaginary world. The
referentiality of the words a work uses, however, is never lost. It is
inalienable. The reader can share in the work's world by way of this
referentiality. Trollope's novels carry over into the imaginary place they
create (or discover) all sorts of verifiable information about Victorian
middle-class society and about human life, for example about courtship and
marriage, as we all in one way or another know it. The Swiss Family
Robinson is full of accurate information about ani mals, birds, fish, and
plants. Those historical and "realistic"details, however, are, in both
cases, transposed, transfigured;They are used as a means to transport the
reader, magically]from the familiar, the verisimilar, to another, singular
place that even the longest voyage in the "real world" will nor reach.
Reading is an incarnated as well as a spiritual act.The reader sits in his
or her chair and turns material pages with bodily hands. Though literature
refers to the real world, however, and though reading is a material act,
literature uses such physical embedment to create or reveal alternative"
realities. These then enter back into the ordinary "real" world by way of
readers whose beliefs and behavior are changed by reading - sometimes for
the better, perhaps sometimes not. We see the world through the literature
we read, or, rather, those who still have what Simon During calls "literary
subjectivity" do that. We then act in the real world on the basis of that
seeing. Such action is a performative rather than a constative or
referential effect of language. Literature is a use of words that makes
things happen by wayof its readers.

LITERATURE AS SECULAR MAGIC
I have used, and will go on using, the word "magic" to name the power that
words on the page have to open up a virtual reality when they are read as
literature. Simon During, in Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of
Secular Magic, already V referred to, has admirably traced the history of
magic shows and entertainments, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth
century. As part of this history he has discussed the relation of magic to
literature. He is interested primarily in works like Hoffmann's Kater Murr
or Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'-Afrique. Such works have a more or less
direct relation to magic shows. Among these he mentions the Alice books,
important points of reference later on in this present book. The basic
fiction of Alice passing through the looking-glass echoes magic stage
practices and traditions. Moreover, the scenes of the vanishing Cheshire
cat and the baby made to sneeze with pepper may be covert references, as
During has suggested, to a famous nineteenth-century magic stage show, done
with mirrors, called "Pepper's Ghost." John Fisher, in The Magic of Lewis
Carroll, has detailed Carroll's knowledge of nineteenth-century staged
illusions.
During does not explicitly observe, however, that all literary works,
whether or not they overtly refer to magic practices, can be usefully
thought of as a species of magic. A work of literature is an abracadabra or
hocus pocus that opens a new world. During has something to say about the
way cinema extended magic shows, for example by being based in part on
magic lanterns that were long a part of magic stage presentations.
Eventually cinema put staged magic out of business. It had the stronger
force. During also does not observe, however, that modern communications
technologies, from trick photography, to the telephone, to cinema, to
radio, to television, to recordings on disks, tapes, or CDs, to the
computer connected to the Internet, fulfill in reality old dreams of magic
communication, at a temporal or spatial distance, with the living or with
the dead. I can, any time I like, hear Glenn Gould play Bach's Goldberg
Variations with fingers long since turned to dust. I can even hear Alfred
Lord Tennyson reciting his poems. Talk about raising ghosts!
As Laurence Rickels has shown, in the early days of both the telephone and
the tape recorder, people believed they were hearing the voices of the dead
(usually their mother's) behind the voices of the living, or through the
static, on a telephone connection or a tape recording. These tele-
technologies have gradually displaced not only magic stage assemblages, but
also that other fading form of secular magic: literature. Cinema,
television, CDs, VCRs, MP3 gadgets, computers, and the Internet have become
our dominant far-seeing and far-hearing conjurers, sorcerers,
prestidigitators, animators of talking heads. These devices are, in short,
our chief purveyors of magic shows. They have incalculable power to
determine ideological beliefN
One place~wnere4trie~way any literary work is a form of conjuririg_emerges
explicitly is in the first words of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859):

With a single drop of ink for a miiirrar,, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes
to reweal to any chance comer far-reaching wisiions off the past. This is
what II undertake to do ffoir you. readeir. With this drop of ink at the
end of my pen,, II will show fotm the roomy workshop off Mr Jonathan Burge,
carpenter and builder in the wiiage off Hayslope,, as it appeared on the
eighteenth off June in the year off our Lord 1799.

As Neil Hertz has observed, George Eliot and her readers would have known
in 1859 that the Egyptian sorcerer in question was Abd-El-Kadir El-
Maghrabee, who lived in Cairo earlier in the century. He is mentioned,
Hertz reminds us, in a brief work by J. L. Borges, written in the 1930s,,
"The Mirror of Ink." What is striking about Eliot's figure is the way it
uses the figure of a magic trick to name the power not of a Hoffmannian
fantasy nor of a work of twentieth-century "magic realism," but of a
paradigmatic example of good old-fashioned mimetic realism, complete with
circumstantial daffies and places. The analogy also brilliantly transposes
the magic practice of Abd-El-Kadir (who used a small pool of ink in the
palm of his hand as a visionary mirror) into the ink at lie end of the
writer's pen that forms die words on the page we are at that moment
reading. These words are a mirror in what might be called a Carrollian
sense, that is, not as a reflection of something here and now, but as a
magic looking-glass that the reader penetrates to enter a new reality on
the other side, distant in time and space: the workshop of Mr Jonathan
Burge in Hayslope on June 18, 1799. The sentences are both oonstative and
performative. They name Jonathan Burge's roomy workshop constatively. They
promise to "show" it to the reader, "as it appeared." In making the
promise, the words fulfill the promise. The "roomy workshop" arises
"magically" before the reader's mind's eye, more and more circumstantially
so as he or she reads the elaborate description of it that follows these
opening words.

Literature as Virtual Reality

Two


"OPEN SESAME"

For me the opening sentences of literary works have special force. They are
"Open Sesames" unlocking the door to that particular work's fictive realm.
All it takes is a few words, and I become a believer, a seer. I become the
fascinated witness of a new virtual reality. More accurately, I become a
disembodied observer within that reality. "There was a Boy; ye knew him
well, ye cliffs/And islands of Winander!" does it for me with Wordsworth's
"The Boy of Winander." "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
herself," does it for me with Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway. "He was an
inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced
straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a
fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull," does it
for me with Conrad's Lord Jim. "I caught this morning morning's minion,
king-/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon," does it for me
with Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Windhover." "I struck the board and
cried, 'No more,'" does it for me with George Herbert's "The Collar."
Sophocles's Oedipus the King opens ominously with a question from Oedipus
to the procession of Theban priests and citizens: "My sons! Newest
generation of this ancient city of Thebes! Why are you here?" Oedipus's
first words raise the
questions of generation, of fatherhood and sonship. Such themes are
fundamental in Oedipus's story of patricide and incest. Oedipus's habit of
asking questions, and of not being satisfied until he finds answers, gets
him into a lot of trouble, to put it mildly. In that same opening speech,
he says: "Here I am, myself, world-famous Oedipus." He presumably refers to
his fame for solving the Sphynx's riddle. Oedipus becomes truly world-
famous, but not quite for the reasons he thinks. The whole play is
contained in miniature in Oedipus's first speech.
In each case I have cited, the opening words instantly transport me into a
new world. All the words that come after in each work do no more than give
me further information about a realm I have already entered. The words are
radically inaugural. They are the creation, in each case, of a new,
alternative universe. These words are a miniature, secular, all-too-human
version of God's "Let there be light" in Genesis.
A long litany of such beginnings could be cited. I cite a few more out of
admiration for their generative power and to illustrate the way each one is
a miniature genesis. I put them down pell-mell, in deliberate randomness,
as they come to mind. This disorder stresses their heterogeneity. They are
stored, so to speak, in separate partitions within that strange organic
hard-drive, my memory. I shall have something to say about each, either now
or later:

At the beginning of July, during an extremely hot spell, towards evening, a
young man left the closet he rented
from tenants in S у Lane, walked out to the street, and
slowly, as if indecisively, headed for the К n Bridge.
(Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done
anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
(Franz Kafka, The Trial]

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of the Forbidden Tree, whose
mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . .
(John Milton, Paradise Lost)
Peach tree soft and tender, how your blossoms glow! The bride is going to
her home, she well befits this house.
(Chinese Classic of Poetry, VI, "Peach Tree Soft and Tender")
Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena
thinks, "I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-
walking. A fur piece."
(William Faulkner, Light in August)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her
thighs caressed By the dark webs . . .
(W B. Yeats, "Leda and the Swan")
am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe
my liver is diseased.
(Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground)

A number of features characterize these inaugural moments. They tend to be
abrupt or irruptive. Each is a sudden intrusion on the reader, wherever he
or she happens to be when the book is opened. They command attention.
Having read these opening words, the reader wants to go on reading. The
words whisk the reader into a new place. He or she is enchanted in an
instant and wants to explore this brave new world further. This can only be
done by reading further, and so the reader is "hooked."
These opening moments tend, moreover, in one way or another to be violent.
This is so not only in the way they suddenly interrupt whatever the reader
was thinking or doing until the moment the book was opened. They also tend
to be violent beginnings to tales of violence. This may be the relatively
justified and benign violence of God's relation to the self in the poems by
Herbert or Hopkins, or the violence of sexuality in Light and August and
"Leda and the Swan," or the violent stories of transgression told in works
like Lord Jim, or the psychological violence of the really weird character
who speaks in Notes from Underground. I first read Notes from Underground
when I was a sophomore in college. I remember saying to myself, in my
sophomoric way, "Here at last is someone like myself, someone who speaks to
me of my secret sense of myself."
The irruptive, transgressive violence of these beginnings is often
proleptic or synecdochic, part for whole, of the work that follows. The
climactic violence of Lord Jim, for example, when the hero allows himself
to be shot, as expiation at last for his unwilling complicity in asocial
acts, seems somehow foreshadowed in that image of Jim as like a charging
bull. The violence of literature tends to involve either sexuality, or
death, or both.
About violence in The Swiss Family Robinson I shall say something later. I
add here and now, however, as a point of special importance, that this
violence is experienced as pleasurable. This is true however ashamed we may
be of the pleasure in vicarious violence a literary work enacts for us.
Literature gives pleasurable violence even though the violence may be no
more than the laughter engendered by the outrageous wordplay of a work like
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In the latter, for example, a chapter
entitled "The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill" turns out not to have anything
to do with bills in the economic sense. The bill in question is a lizard
named Bill. The Rabbit sends Bill down the chimney and Alice kicks him back
up the chimney. In the Tenniel illustration, he comes flying out like a
projectile. In another episode, Alice and the animals are dried off after
their swim in Alice's tears by hearing the Mouse read aloud an exceedingly
dry historical account. Such puns produce, in me at least, an explosion of
laughter. Laughter too is violent, as Yeats and Freud knew. All ,, literary
works have something of the laughter-producing I weirdness of dreams.
Laughter repeats the transgression from I which it would protect us,
while at the same time holding the ' transgressive at a distance.

WHY IS LITERATURE VIOLENT?
Why all this violence in literature? Why is that violence pleasurable? It
seems as though literature not only satisfies a desire for entry into
virtual realities but that those virtual i realities tend to enact, however
covertly, an approach toward the hyperbal-ic yjolences of jdgath,
sexuality, and the subversion hidden in the irrationalities of language. At
the same / time, literature in one way or another protects us from those
/^violences. Friedrich Nietzsche, as Paul Gordon has shown in Tragedy After
Nietzsche, held that tragedy is essentially superabundant rapture (Rausch)
and that all art is essentially tragic. "If there is to be art," wrote
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, "if there is to be any aesthetic doing
and observing, one physiological pre-condition is indispensable: rapture."
"Rapture": the word means being drawn forcibly out of oneself into another
realm. That other realm is by no means peaceful. It is associated in one
way or another with those excessive things I have named: death, sexuality,
and the irrational side of language. Literature seizes me and carries me to
a place where pleasure and pain join. When I say I am "enchanted" by the
virtual realities to which literary works transport me, that is a milder
way of saying I am enraptured by reading those works. Literary works are in
one way or another wild. That is what gives them their power to enrapture.

OPENINGS AS THE RAISING OF GHOSTS
Shakespeare's plays might almost be taken as a counterproof of what I have
been saying. They typically open not with a speech by one of the main
characters but by dialogue among subsidiary folk. A Shakespeare play often
begins with minor characters who establish the social milieu within which
the main drama will be enacted. Hamlet, for example, starts not with the
appearance of the ghost but with a conversation between two sentinels,
Bernardo and Francisco (unlikely names for Danes), on the battlements of
Elsinore Castle. Othello begins not with Othello himself, but with a speech
by Roderigo, a "gulled gentleman," victim of Iago's villainy. Shakespeare's
beginnings, nevertheless, obey my law of an irruptivejstart in the middle
of things. They instantly establish a new social space, the space within
which Hamlet or Othello will work out his tragic destiny.
The opening of Hardy's The Return of the Native sets a scene, Egdon Heath.
The heath is, the chapter title says, "A Face on which Time makes but
Little Impression": "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the
time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon
Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."
The openings of Mrs Dalloway, Lord Jim, Crime and Punishment, Herbert's
"The Collar," Faulkner's Light in August and many other works, however,
establish in a single sentence a character, often a chief
protagonist. For me the character springs to life with this sentence. The
personage remains alive ever afterward somewhere in my imagination, as a
kind of ghost that may not be exorcized, neither alive nor dead. Such
ghosts are neither material nor immaterial. They are embodied in the words
on the pages in all those books on the shelves waiting to be invoked again
when the book is taken down and read.
Sometimes it is not quite the first sentence that brings the character
alive. The opening sentence of the second chapter of Pickwick Papers brings
Mr Pickwick to life for me, along with the distinctive ironic parodic voice
of Dickens himself, the "Immortal Boz," as he liked to be called. What is
parodied in this case is the circumstantiality of place and date that is
expected of "realist" fiction. The sentence opening the second chapter
picks up the fiat lux echo in the first sentence of the novel. Here is part
of that first first sentence: "The first ray of light which illumines the
gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the
earlier history of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved ..."
This opening parodies not only Genesis but also the pomposities found in
official biographies of "great men." It also indicates Dickens's own
inaugural power as author, light-bringer. The echo of that in the beginning
of the second chapter applies the same figure to Pickwick's appearance on a
fine morning: That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen,
and begun to strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of May, one
thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr Samuel Pickwick burst like
another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked
out upon the world beneath. Goswell Street was at his feet, Goswell Street
was on his right hand - as far as the eye could reach, Goswell Street
extended on his left; and the opposite side of Goswell Street was over the
way.

George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, to give another example of
a deferred beginning, does not come fully alive for me in the opening
sentences. The novel opens like this: "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty
which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were
so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than
those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters ..."
This is circumstantial enough, but what really brings Dorothea to life
for me is a moment in the opening scene with her sister Celia when, against
her principles, Dorothea admires the jewelry they have inherited from their
mother: " 'How very beautiful these gems are!' said Dorothea, under a new
current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam [that the sun has just reflected
from the jewels]."
The attentive reader will note how often these openings, though I have
chosen them more or less at random from those that stick in my mind,
involve in one way or another either the sun or the opening of a window.
Sometimes, as in Pickwick Papers, both motifs are present. Mrs Dalloway, to
give а nnal example, a few sentences beyond the opening sentence I have
cited, shows Clarissa remembering an experience of her childhood:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with
a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open
the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.

The beginning of the world, even these imaginary literary ones, seems
naturally figured by a rising sun or by a window opening from the inside to
the outside.
Such openings, in third-person narrations, are also spoken by another
voice, the narrator's. Even first-person narrations are double. The "I" as
narrator speaks of a past "I" whose experiences are narrated in the past
tense: "I struck the board ..." Such opening sentences create the illusion
of a speaker out of nothing but words. An example is the ironic
understatement of Kafka's narrative voice. That voice tells about the most
grotesque or horrific events in a flat matter-of-fact tone. The opening
of Paradise Lost establishes the poet's voice as it invokes the Muse,
just as the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice fabricates out of a few
words an ironic narrator quite different from Kafka's ironic narrator.
Austen's story-teller reports, with cool objectivity, the ideological
assumptions of the novel's community. It does not wholly distance itself
from those assumptions: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
In spite of the immense variety of these opening sentences, they all
function as the instantaneous creation of a fictive world. In all these
cases, the opening sentences are radically initiatory. They are a genesis,
a new birth, a fresh beginning. One of the main pleasures of reading
literary works is the power they give to put aside our real cares and enter
another place.

LITERATURES STRANGENESS
What are the main features of these virtual realities that we call literary
works?
First feature: they are incommensurate with one another. Each is singular,
sui generis, strange, idiosyncratic, heterogeneous. Literary works are
"counter, original, spare, strange," to borrow a formulation from Gerard
Manley Hopkins. That strangeness estranges them from one another. One might
even think of them as so many Leibnizian windowless monads, or as
Leibnizian "incompossible" worlds, that is, as worlds that cannot logically
co-exist in the same space. Each is the fictive actualization of one
alternative possibility not realized in the "real world." Each is an
irreplaceably valuable supplement to the real world.
Stressing literature's strangeness is a point of some import- J ance, since
much literary study (not to speak of much journalistic reviewing) has
always had as one of its main functions covering that strangeness over, as
the Swiss family Robinson killed or domesticated the animals, birds, and
fish on their island. Literary study hides the peculiarity of literary
language by accounting for it, naturalizing it, neutralizing it, turning it
into the familiar. This usually means seeing in it as in one way or another
a representation of the real world. Whether this accounting takes the form
of relating the work to its author, or of trying to demonstrate that it is
typical of its historical time and place, or characteristic of the class,
gender, and race of its author, or of seeing it as a mirroring of the
material and social world, or of relating it to conceptual generalizations
about the way literary language works, the unspoken goal is ' to appease
the conscious or unconscious fear people have of j literature's true
strangeness. We fear the way each work is/ incomparable.To affirm that each
work has its own truth, a truth different from the truth of any other work,
sets what I am saying not only against mimetic or referential definitions
of literature, but also against Heideggerian notions of literature or of
"poetry" as what he calls the "setting-forth-of-truth-in-the-work." For
Heidegger the truth set forth in the work is universal. It is the truth of
Being. That truth is not something unique to the work, with a singular
truth for each work. My definition of literature is closer to Derrida's
explicitly anti-Heideggerian "concept" (it is not exactly a concept) of a
poem. In "Che cos'e la poesia?," which may be crudely translated as "What
Thing is Poetry?" and in the subsequent interview, "Istrice 2: Ick biinn
all hier" (both reprinted in translation in Points . . .: Interviews,
1974-1994), a poem is figured as a hedgehog rolled up in a ball. (The
strange German is Derrida's citation of Heidegger's citation of a sentence
in the Grimm fairy tale of "The Hare and the Hedgehog." In this story the
hedgehog beats the hare in a race by sending the female hedgehog ahead to
be waiting at the finish line. It is an example, Derrida says, of the
"always already there.") The hedgehog image is a catachresis, as Derrida
says, for what is idiomatic about each literary work. One form this takes
is the approach toward coincidence of its meaning and the materiality of
its letters. Derrida's refusal to translate the idiomatic Italian title of
the first essay and his insistence on the "str" sound in the admirable
Italian word for hedgehog, "istrice," in the interview, is an example of
one form of specificity: dependence on the idiom of a particular language.
For me too, each work is a separate space, protected on all sides by
something like quills. Each work is closed in on itself, separated even
from its author. The work is also separated from the "real world" and from
any unified supernal world which all works might be presumed to put to
work.
No doubt I am here, by making a conceptual analysis, committing again the
error against which I warn. It cannot be denied that literary theory
contributes to that death of literature the first sentence of this book
announces. Literary theory arose in its contemporary form just at the time
literature's social role was weakening. It was an oblique response; to that
weakening. If literature's power and role could be taken for granted as
still in full force, it would not be necessary to theorize about it. The
greatest ancient treatise on what we today would call literature,
Aristotle's Poetics, appeared at the time Greek tragedy, not to speak
of the epic (Aristotle's chief examples of "poetry"), were in their
decline. In a similar way, the remarkable twentieth-century theoretical
reflections on the nature of literature appeared just at the time
literature in the modern sense of the word was in the process of fading as
a primary force in Western culture. I am thinking of all those theorists
from Sartre, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Blanchot down to de Man, Derrida,
Jameson, Butler, and the rest, not to speak of those statements by creative
writers like Mallarme and Proust who anticipated later twentieth-century
reflections by theorists on the essence of the literary.
The efflorescence of literary theory signals the death of literature. That
Routledge editors should have invited me to ^wite a book "on literature" is
a symptom of this. They would not have thought of making such a request if
literature were not widely perceived these days as problematic. Many people
See literature as perhaps in mortal jeopardy, certainly as something that
can no longer simply be taken for granted, j theory both registers the
imminent death of literature, which of course cannot die, and at the same
time helps make that death-without-death happen.
This takes place by an implacable law that says you can see clearly
something that is deeply embedded in your culture only when it is in the
act of receding into the historical distance. Maurice Blanchot already
quietly recognized that vanishing and its primary cause in an essay of 195
9, "The Song of the Sirens: Encountering the Imaginary." Speaking of the
novel as the primary modern literary form, Blanchot wrote: It is no small
thing to make a game of human time and out of that game to create a free
occupation, one stripped of all immediate interest and usefulness,
essentially superficial and yet in its surface movement capable of
absorbing all being. But clearly, if the novel fails to play this role
today, it is because technics has transformed men's time and their ways of
amusing themselves.

I shall return in Chapter 3 to this question of "technics." I shall turn
also to Blanchot's notion of the way the recit, as opposed to the novel, is
oriented not toward amusement but toward what he calls "the imaginary" or
"literary space (l'espace litteraire)." The latter phrase is the title of a
book by Blanchot.
A person can enter "l'espace litteraire," the space, for example, of Crime
and Punishment or of Pride and Prejudice, in no other way than by reading
the work. All the reading in the world of Russian or English history or of
the biographies of Dostoevsky or Austen, or of literary theory, valuable as
such knowledge is, will not prepare you for what is most essential, that
is, most idiosyncratic, about these works. Henry James expressed eloquently
the uniqueness of each author's work in a famous passage in the preface to
The Portrait of a Lady: The house of fiction has in short not one window,
but a million - a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather;
every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast
front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the
individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so,
all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a
greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at their
best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not
hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their
own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least
with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique
instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct
from every other.

LITERATURE IS PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE
Second feature: since a literary work refers to an imaginary reality, it
follows that it makes a performative rather than a constative use of words.
"Performative" and "constative" are terms from speech act theory. On the
one hand, a constative statement names some state of affairs, as in the
assertion, "It is raining outside." Such a sentence can, in principle at
least, be verified as true or false. A performative utterance, on the other
hand, is a way of doing things with words. It does not name a state of
affairs, but brings about the thing it names. For example, in the right
circumstances a couple is married when i minister or some other duly
appointed person says, "I pronounce you man and wife." Sentences in
literary works, such as the inaugural statements I have cited, for example,
"She Waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in . . . ," look like
constative statements describing a possibly true state of affairs.
However, since the state of affairs does not exist or at any rate is not
reachable except through the words, those words are actually performative.
They bring Kate Croy, waiting in exasperation for her father, into
existence for the reader. Every sentence in a literary work is part of a
chain of performative utterances opening out more and more of an imaginary
realm initiated in the first sentence. The words make that realm available
to the reader. Those words at once invent and at the same time discover (in
the sense of "reveal") that world, in a constantly repeated and extended
verbal gesture.
The imaginary realm opened by a literary work is not simply "made
available" to the reader, however. The performative \ dimension of the
work's words demands a response from the j reader. Right reading is an
active engagement. It requires a tacit decision to commit all one's powers
to bringing the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself.
The reader must utter, in response to the work's invocation, another
performative speech act: "I promise to believe in you." The famous opening
sentence of Herman Melville's Moby Dick makes that double-performative,
demand invoking a response, explicit. This is also another of those
sentences that brings an imaginary character to life: "Call me Ishmael."
Though this sentence might be read as a permissive: "You may call me
Ishmael, if you like," or as an evasion, "My name is not really Ishmael,
but that is the pseudonym I ask you to call me by," its strongest reading
would see it as a peremptory demand: "I command you to call me Ishmael."
The reader can only assent or dissent from this demand. He or she must say,
"I agree to call you Ishmael" or "I won't do it. That sounds silly."
Tacitly uttering the first responsive performative is the formal acceptance
of a contract. This saying "Yes" is
the "Open Sesame!" that gives the reader access to all the rest of
Melville's huge work. If you agree to call the narrator Ishmael, you can
enter the work. Otherwise not. Some such response to a demand that the
reader accept the particular rules of a given work is necessary to all acts
of reading.

LITERATURE KEEPS ITS SECRETS
Yet another feature of literary works follows from the condition that we
can gain access to the unique world each reveals only by reading the words
on the page. We can only know of \ that world what the words tell us. No
other place exists where we might go to get further information. A novel, a
poem, or a play is a kind of testimony. It bears witness. Whatever the
narrative voice says is accompanied by an implicit (and sometimes even
explicit) assertion: "I swear this is what I saw; this truly happened." The
difference between literary testimony and "real" testimony is that no way
exists to verify or supplement what a fictive narrator says. What a real
witness in the witness box asserts can be, in principle at least, checked
against the testimony of other witnesses or by other means of verification.
Such checking, however, does not disqualify the witness's claim that this
is what he or she saw. The witness may be speaking truly of what he or she
thought was there to be seen, even if it was not. Gaps and omissions in
real world testimony can nevertheless often be filled in. Literature, on
the contrary, keeps its secrets.
The reader can, for example, never know just what the two Parties said when
Gilbert Osmond proposed to Isabel Archer "id was accepted, in Henry James's
The Portrait of a Lady. This is
cause James's narrator does not directly recount that event.
does he tell the reader what happened to Isabel when she reJoined her
husband in Rome, beyond the end of the novel.

Nor can the reader ever know what was the content of Milly Theale's
deathbed letter to Merton Densher, in James's The Wings of the Dove. This
is because Kate Croy burns the letter, and the narrator does not reveal the
letter's contents. The reader never knows just what were the contents of
the Aspern papers, in James's novella of that name, because Miss Tina burns
them before the first-person narrator can get a chance to read them. In a
similar way, Baudelaire, in an example Jacques Derrida discusses, does not
tell the reader whether one protagonist in the prose poem "La fausse
monnaie (The Counterfeit Coin) " did or did not give the beggar a
counterfeit coin.
It is, I claim, an essential feature of literature to hide secrets that may
not ever be revealed. Sir Thomas Browne's example of this is the
impossibility of ever knowing what song the Sirens would have sung to
Ulysses, in The Odyssey. This is because Homer only cites the song of
irresistible promise, which is not the actual song that Ulysses would have
heard if he had yielded to the Sirens' enticement. Nor are these secrets,
for example the ones I have mentioned, trivial or unimportant. The whole
meaning of the works in question turns on what is forever hidden from the
reader's knowledge. The reader would like to know, needs to know, in order
fully to understand the work. An unappeased curiosity is one of the
emotions generated by reading literary works, but literature keeps its
secrets. We would like to know just what the Sirens' song sounded like.
Hearing the Sirens' song for oneself would be the only way to know whether
Ulysses was exaggerating. Knowing that, however, might be fatal, as Maurice
Blanchot asserts in "The Sirens' Song." In that essay the Sirens' song is
taken as an allegory of the "imaginary" and of what is dangerous about
literature in general. If you were to hear the evens' song you might be
lured permanently away from the eryday world of mundane responsibilities. A
long history "яд be adduced of statements in literary works themselves that
express a fear of literature's seductive power. I shall refer to some
later.

LITERATURE USES FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
One sign that literary works use language in a performative rather than
purely constative way is the dependence of their creative power on figures
of speech. Such figures assert a similarity between one things and another.
This similarity is often ') generated by words, rather than being a feature
of things in_J themselves. Examples of the many varieties of this abound in
the examples I have cited of opening sentences. Lord Jim is put before the
reader in that simile asserting he is like a charging bull. In the poem
from the Chinese Classic of Poetry, all the fragile beauty of the bride
going to her new home is expressed in her juxtaposition with peach
blossoms. Chinese poetry often puts a physical image and a human one side
by side without asserting their relation, in a metonymical juxtaposition.
The latent personification of Egdon Heath in the phrase "was embrowning
itself," not to speak of the overt prosopopoeia in the word "face" in the
chapter title, prepares for the extravagant personification of the
heath in the rest of The Return of the Native's first paragraph.
Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, is defined, in another form њi
metonymy, by that tiny attic room he lives in as well as by "6 hot weather
the narrator begins by mentioning. Kate СгоУ s narcissism is figured when
she looks at herself in the 'nirror. Samuel Pickwick's comic sovereignty is
defined by way he rises like the sun, while the sun is demoted to eing his
servant, "striking a light" for him at dawn. Lena Grove's inextinguishable
vitality is figured in the way she is always in motion. She has already
come a "fur piece" from Alabama when the reader first meets her,
bearing her illegitimate child within her. The Boy of Winander is defined
by the way the cliffs and islands of Winander, in another personification,
"knew" him. That poem begins with an extravagant apostrophe. An apostrophe
is a trope in which the speaker turns toward someone or something and hails
it. In the case of apostrophes to inanimate nature, the invocation is also
a personification. To say "ye knew him well, ye cliffs/ And islands of
Winander!" is to animate the cliffs and islands, to imply that they might
answer back, as the owls answer the boy's "mimic hootings" in the rest of
the poem.
What can one say of figurative language's ubiquity in these inaugural
sentences? First, they indicate, as I have said, that these new births are
performed by language. No metaphors, similies, metonymies, apostrophes, or
personifications exist in nature, only in collocations of words. To say
that Lord Jim exists as someone who comes toward you with his head down,
like a charging bull, suggests that he exists only in language. Lord Jim is
not to be found anywhere in the phenomenal world, however
circumstantial is Conrad's description of the pseudo-world he dwells
within.
Second, these figures illustrate the extraordinary power tropes have to
bring an imaginary personage to life economically and elegantly. An example
is the touching juxtaposition of peach blossoms and the new bride in the
poem from the Chinese. The new bride, Lord Jim, and all the horde of such
literary phantoms are effects of language. To say that Jim comes toward you
with his head down, like a charging bull, combines, in a way
characteristic of such literary language, several different tropes in one.
The locution is an ocation calHng Jim's ghost to come, as Ulysses invokes
the hades of dead warriors in the Odyssey. Saying Jim was like a charging
bull is a covert apostrophe or prosopopoeia hailing or interpellating Jim
as one of the absent, the imaginary or the dead, thereby personifying him.
It is a catachresis transferring a name ("charging bull") to what has no
proper names, that is, Jim's imagined interiority as a person.
In the case of Lord Jim, as in so many other literary works, the
protagonist is dead when the narrator tells his or her story. Even if the
protagonists are not dead at the end of the story, each already belongs to
an absolute past by the time his or her book is published. Their ghostly
apparitions haunt our brains and feelings, as the memory of Lord Jim haunts
Marlow, the narrator of his story in Lord Jim, just as Marlow haunted
Conrad, returning in several novels, and just as Marlow haunts the
imaginations of Conrad's readers, you or me.
Third: it is true that figures of speech are an ever-present aspect of
language used in its ordinary referential way, for example in newspaper
headlines that often nowadays are allowed sly plays on words. Here are some
real examples, the first from the China Doily, the rest from one issue of
USA Today: Medical Insurance undergoes Surgery"; " 'Green power' gets
second wind" (a headline about windmill power); "U.S. taps wcial Security
reserves"; "Maturing boomers smack into the silver ceiling'." Nevertheless,
the presence of tropes of one 1 њW or another in almost all my opening
sentences is a clue 10 the adept reader that he or she may be about to
read' something that would be defined in our culture as "litera- | e- The
puns in headlines are an understood convention. \ ls does not make them, in
most people's eyes, "poetry,"; ^ough it would be possible to dispute that.
DOES LITERATURE INVENT OR DISCOVER?
Final feature of literary language: though nothing could be more important
to know than whether the alternative world opened up by a given literary
work is created by the words of the work or just revealed by them,
nevertheless such knowledge is impossible to obtain. It is impossible to
obtain because the words would look exactly the same in either case.
Literature has often been defined in recent decades by its self-reflexivity
or self-referentiality. Literature is said to be distinctive because it
refers to itself and to its own way of working. The great linguist Roman
Jakobson, for example, distinguished literary language from other uses of
language saying it manifests "the set of language toward itself." I think
this feature of literature has been greatly exaggerated. By appeal to a
latently sexist distinction, it has misled many readers into dismissing
literature for its sterile, feminine, and boring self-reflexivity.
Literature is thought to be like Kate Croy looking at herself in the
mirror, as opposed to the virile use of language to refer to real things in
the real world. Calling literature "self-reflexive" is a way of calling it
powerless. Most literary works, on the contrary, confess only infrequently
to being something an author has made up and is manipulating. That explains
why I as a child could take The Swiss Family Robinson as referring to a
real place somewhere. Most literary works go right on talking as if the
virtual realities they describe, with all their contents and events, have
independent existence and are only being described, not invented. Who is to
say that this is not the case, that all those alternative worlds have not
been waiting somewhere for some author to find fit words for them? If so,
they would go on existing there, waiting, even if their recording author
were never to appear. I think of all those novels Fyodor Dostoevsky is said
to have had in his mind, no doubt wonderful works. He just never got around
to writing them down. One cannot quite say that those unwritten novels did
not exist. Their mode of existence, however, is exceedingly peculiar. The
words of those works that do get written down would be exactly the same
whether or not their referents pre-exist the words or not. Literature may
therefore be defined as a strange use of words to refer to things, people,
and events about which it is impossible ever to know whether or not they
have somewhere a latent existence. That latency would be a wordless
reality, knowable only by the author, waiting to be turned into words.