Literary Studies in Reconstruction

Marko Juvan

Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature

2011

Contents

Preface Part I: WRITING LITERARY THEORY AND HISTORY TODAY 1 Towards a Theory of Literary Discourse 2 Literary History between Narrative and Hypertext 3 World Literature(s) and Peripheries Part II: RECONSTRUCTING THE CONCEPTS OF CRITICISM 4 Postmodern Textology and Electronic Media 5 The Structure of Literary Text and the Event of Meaning 6 Literariness 7 The Text and Genre 8 Stylistic Subject-Fashioning 9 Fiction, Reality, and Laws 10 Textual and Contextual Spaces 11 Cultural Memory and Literature Works Cited Index

Preface This volume takes its place alongside the efforts of others that—swimming against the currents of passe-partout theory and cultural studies—still wish to preserve the field of literary studies, although not in its established form, but through a fundamental reconstruction comprising both its “internal” conceptual or methodological rearrangement and “external” response to postmodern social, political, and economic realities. My aims are: first, an attempt at conceptual reconstruction that takes into account recent deconstructions of literary criticism’s key notions and critically embraces them in a revised set of hypotheses, not forgetting the constructedness of all knowledge (including that of literature); and, second, to justify contemporary meanings, relevance, and functions of knowledge about literature. Both aims imply a critical redistribution of scholarly topics, methods, and competences that literary criticism has to deal with if it wishes to survive in the present context of disciplinary redivisions and cross-disciplinary methods (in linguistics, the social sciences, cultural history, psychology, cognitive science, etc.). Only by coming to terms with the global redistribution and commodification of knowledge as well as with relocation of scholarly competences can literary criticism still claim greater general validity and broader social relevance for its insights. This book, which could be entitled “Site under Construction,” is an introduction to these problems and is divided into two parts. In the first part, I comment on the prospects of two main branches of literary studies: literary theory and literary history, both “national” and comparative. In the second part, I try to reconstruct and revise some basic critical concepts that are used for modeling literary texts and their temporal or spatial contexts. In postmodernity, literary theory has become pluralistic, perspectivized, and—in parallel with the weakened autonomy of belletristic writing and the deconstruction of the concept “literature”—intertwined with the transdisciplinary, eclectic, and critical discourse of “Theory,” which is directed towards cultural studies rather than towards explorations of the artistic field. Hermeneutic and neo-pragmatist self-reflection has made literary theory aware of its own contingency and of being merely one among several (discursive) practices. As one of the “sciences of the subject,” it has also come to realize that knowledge is subjectdependent and that the field of research (i.e., literature) changes together with and under the influence of its scholarly observation. The answer of literary theory to these challenges proposed here is its disciplinary reconstruction into a theory of literary discourse. Such a theory accounts for the fact that literary texts are part of historical becoming and cultural

changes in human life-worlds. This is why it must choose new objectives: first, with its ability for apt descriptions of literary devices (i.e., as a descriptive poetics), it may also contribute to a better critical understanding of the rhetorical powers of other discourses and language in general. Second, it may provide strong arguments to legitimize the indispensable anthropological values of the literary—including and primarily in the present time, marked by the triumph of the new media and globalized economization of all knowledge. Literary historiography, the second main branch of traditional literary studies, has synthesized its particular research results mainly in the complex and prominent form of literary histories. National and supranational literary histories, as known from the nineteenth century on, are in fact a narrative and/or encyclopedic nonfiction genre that has been fashioned through inter-systemic interaction of the academic field with its own “object” of study: literature. With its comprehensive synthesis, literary history as a “great” genre has gained authority over the shaping of public past, national and broader cultural identities, and the literary canon. The postmodern historic turn in the humanities and social sciences makes new demands upon this genre: it must provide an explanation for the constructionist and semifictionalized character of all representations of the past; it must be aware of the assertive power of its speech-acts, which take part in sociopolitical negotiations about history; traditional omniscient narrative should be dismissed and supplanted by the polyvocality of interpretations and by collages of telling fragments; the ties between the literary work and its historical background should be reassessed in terms of semiosis, which transgresses the textcontext boundary; and, above all, it seems that literary history can preserve its own genre identity (i.e., the literary of literary history) only through historical and anthropological analysis of literature as a discourse and social system. One possible reconstruction of the great genre of literary history is also offered by electronic hypertext archives, because these make possible an open-ended, revisable, multi-layered, highly contextualized, and polyfocal representation of literary processes. Chapter 3 is a rethinking of the notion of world literature. Recently, the original Goethean idea of world literature as analogous to the capitalist world system has become relevant to transnational comparative literary studies: “world literature” presupposes concepts, practices, media, and institutions of cultural transfer, as well as local intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires, and self-conscious production for international audiences. Goethe, feeling disadvantaged in comparison to writers from the French or British metropolises, was among the first to experience Weltliteratur as a growing circulation of literary works across linguistic and national borders. Cultural exchange between nations, continents, and

civilizations appeared to him in the guise of the modern capitalist market going global. On the other hand, he considered critical, imaginative, and intertextual responses to global cultural repertoires essential both to the viability of any national literature and to the cosmopolitan idea of the “generally human.” Ever since Goethe’s time, world literature, conceived either as a network of cultural transfer or a category of ethical, political, and aesthetic discourses, has been shaped by multifaceted experiences of cultural otherness (colonialism, translations, global news, archeological discoveries, tourism, etc.). It is important to stress that, from the times of its origin, Weltliteratur has been intertwined with the ideologeme of “national literature.” Inclusion of the national in the world, the presence of the world in the national, and nationality as a pre-condition for the appearance of world literature are symptoms of the interlocking ideologies of the post-Enlightenment cultural nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices. In literature, national identity has been established internationally and within the global cultural market. Marx and Engels, following Goethe’s economic metaphors, connected the planetary expansion of capitalism to the beginnings of world literature. Indeed, the world system of capitalist economy, with its cores and peripheries (Wallerstein 2004), shows striking analogies with the modern “world republic of letters” (Casanova 1999) or “the world literary system” (Moretti 2000), in which the established and emerging literary fields interact from asymmetrical positions. World literature seems to be reserved for the diffusion of literary texts that, after having been produced or recognized by some global metropolis, exceed the original linguistic boundaries and become actively present in major languages or cultures (Damrosch 2003). However, the strong literatures that function as centers of the world literary system today used to be peripheral during their emergence (Even-Zohar 1990); without the interference of peripheral productivity, even central literary systems would stagnate. Centrality and peripherality are thus variables that depend on historical dynamics and system evolution. Moreover, ever since the cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century, the theoretical or poetic consciousness of world literature, its intertextual coherence, and its material networks have been “glocalized.” The world literary system is plural and accessible only through the archives of local cultural memories, particular cognitive perspectives, and singular acts of critical or creative selfreflection. The second part of this book begins with the elucidation of recent developments in textual criticism and critical editions of literary texts; in doing this, Chapter 4 raises the question of how the materiality of media products, such as literary manuscripts or books, influences the production and comprehension of textual significance. Far from being a

subsidiary discipline, textology is vitally intertwined with the theory, interpretation, and history of literature. It transfers literary texts from the domain of art to the discourses of scholarship and education, strengthens their social relevance, and influences their canonization. Thanks to the textual critic, the literary text, restored and purged of all subsequent interference and error, should speak beyond the confines of its historical frame. The “old” historicism attempted to reconstruct an image of the text closest to the original, but in fact produced an additional textual version, marked with normative finality. Modern, textcentered trends in literary studies, striving to ensure aesthetic pleasure, would, in the process of editing, also filter and retouch the text’s historicity. The postmodern humanities have deconstructed history, presenting it as an interplay of interpretation and narration; however, they have striven for a return of the historical presence, but within a structure of the present: the past should reveal itself in its contingency, polyphony of detail, openness, and becoming. Within these horizons, a different understanding of texts has been formed: they are seen as an open process of writing and reading. Such views have touched the theory and practice of textology as well. The role of the two subjects, the author and editor, becomes looser, as does the notion of the literary work as a finished product. The literary work, observed in the processes of genesis, distribution, and post-production, is presented as a “fuzzy” set of drafts, versions, corrections, and rewriting. Postmodern textology does not reduce the text to its verbal structure, but also pays attention to the circumstances of publication, as well as to the medium; these factors are crucial for the meaning of the work and its cultural position. The postmodern tendencies to restore the historical presence and mutability of literary texts are— paradoxically—answered by the potentialities of virtual cyberspace, which is “in the service of postmodern detailism and the micro-contexts of knowledge” (Sutherland 1997: 13). Moreover, the electronic medium and the hypertext have led to recognition of the semantic role played by older media, the book in particular. E-text is thus not only a rival to a classical book-text, but also a useful tool that represents and interprets its historical specificity. The concept of the verbal text, discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, is central to any attempt at rethinking literary studies in terms of at least partially autonomous discipline. The structure of a literary text does not differ essentially from that of other texts (cf., for example, a historical biography with a biographic novel, or a court trial with a drama) because literariness is a text- and system-dependent cultural variable. It is argued that the question of literariness concerns the very identity and social existence of not only literature per se but of literary theory as a discipline. Literary theorists are not mere observers of literature; they are also participants, who—at least indirectly, via the social systems of science and education—are

engaged in constructing both the notion and the practice of literature as well as the study of literature. Literariness is neither an invariant cluster of “objectively” distinctive properties of all texts that are deemed literary nor merely a social, scholarly, and/or educational function. Rather, it can be defined as the effect of a text in the literary system, which is only possible on the basis of occidocentric paradigms and conventions derived and transferred from the “Western canon” itself. It is therefore no longer necessary for literary theory to stick to its own set of terms for describing basic literary structures and to avoid well-tested interdisciplinary categories provided by text linguistics and other kinds of contemporary textual studies. Textual structure should not be reified, but seen as a virtual model of the relations between linguistic and cognitive elements that, grasped in provisionary wholes and matched to recurrent patterns stored in sign systems, represent concepts and produce the effect of sense. Being temporal, the structure is constituted in the process of writing/speaking and through acts of reception. However, it is also spatial: its coherence is constructed from several layers of differently articulated sense-constituting elements. After an outline of processes of text structuring and comprehension, arguments are presented for the historicity of textual structure that is understood as a representation of and basis for meaning-constituting acts (mental and speech alike). A literary work of art is historical as long as: (a) it exists via acts of writing, distribution, and reception; (b) it is the product of a socially specific form of work; (c) it is a complex speech act situating the subject in a constellation of discourse; (d) it is a generator and accumulator of cultural memory; and (e) in reception it triggers pragmatic effects within changeable interpretative frameworks. The identity of the text is disseminated along the interval in which the time of each reading encounters the representation of historical otherness. The relation between the literary text and genres of discourse is the focus of Chapter 7. An anti-essentialist drive—a characteristic of recent genre criticism—has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. According to such logic, genre identity is historically unstable, depending merely on “extra-textual,” pragmatic, or contextual factors, as a final consequence of how routines in the production and consumption of cultural products are being institutionalized or decomposed. The concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous for explaining genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links or references to prototypical texts and textual series. Genres are classificatory categories and pragmatic schemes inscribed in practical knowledge and communicative competence. They

are cognitive and pragmatic devices for intertextual pattern-matching. Texts or textual sets become genre prototypes by virtue of intertextual and meta-textual interaction: on the one hand, there is the working (influence) of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of prototypical texts on their domestic and foreign literary offspring; on the other hand, we see meta-textual descriptions and intertextual derivations or references, which establish or retroactively revise the hard core of genre pattern. Because of the genre and pragmatic component of the author’s communicative competence, any given text is dependent on existing genre patterns. However, a text with intertextual reference actively takes part in the plurality of genre context; by citational links to various genre conventions, the author articulates the significance and structure of the text and in this way influences the reader’s expectations and response. Chapter 8 tackles the issue of style in literature as a textual identity-marker. Following the decline of scholarly paradigms based on text and author, stylistic research in literary studies became subject to serious criticism. Traditional notions of literary style were sharply criticized for their conceptual vagueness, for dependence on traditional expressive aesthetics and romantic organicism, for taking the author as the authoritative source and proprietor of the textual meaning, for neglecting the realities of reading processes and perceptibility of stylistically relevant patterns, for naive coupling of stylistic devices with a preset code of their meanings and functions, for the seclusion of “poetic language” from other social discourses, and for establishing abstract relations between a literary text and linguistic norm. After the deconstruction of structuralism’s main binary oppositions, the conceptual pairs that used to support prevailing understandings of style became suspicious or even obsolete (e.g., norm vs. deviation, neutral vs. marked, deep structure vs. surface, invariant meaning vs. variant expression). The linguistic norm proved to be relative and contingent, dependent both on changeable positions of communicational partners acting in different sociolinguistic contexts and on their pragmatic skills in language use (knowledge of the literary styles characteristic of individual writers, epochs, periods, genres, regions, classes, and trends thus belongs to general sociolinguistic competence). Style may be described as a distinctive use of language that— through deliberate and spontaneous choices from linguistic repertoires, suggested by particular contexts—connotatively and intertextually affiliates the text or utterance to certain linguistic subcodes, differing and distancing them from others. This is precisely the logic of identity: on the one hand, it is based on the repetition of pre-given, more general, conventional patterns characteristic of social communities, ideologies, cultures, and so on; on the other hand, it marks off its difference from the generally repeatable. The concept of style

gains new relevance in the framework of contextual approaches to language and literature. It may be compared with notions of “lifestyle” or social “habitus;” what is more, textual style may be considered an essential part of culturally significant and socially distinctive behavior. It is an indexical sign of the textual subject’s cultural identity. As such, from the standpoint of the text producer, it is a result of a performative strategy that profiles and stages the public image of writing and, from the observer’s point of view, it is a product of perception and interpretation of the text against the intertextual backgrounds evoked. Textual style is therefore a dynamic, changeable property, articulating the identity of the literary work of art. Fiction is addressed in Chapter 9 as a part of the complex issue of literature’s autonomy and its relation to reality and social discourses; my case study is taken from the late modern conflicts between literature and law. Recent suits for defamation brought against works of fiction (e.g., the novel Modri e [The Blue E], 1998, by Matjaž Pikalo, or the fable Ko se tam gori olistajo breze [When the Birches Up There Are Greening], 1998, by Breda Smolnikar) are a case in point of how literary discourse, with its inherent conventions, is presently compelled into negotiating with other discourses about different regimes of truth; that is, about drawing the boundary between fiction and reality. Pronouncing sentences against both these Slovenian writers of fiction for libeling real individuals that are not publicly known is symptomatic of how the ideology of aesthetic autonomy and the privileged cultural role of writers has lost its broader social legitimacy. The genealogy of conditions making it possible to prosecute defamation in fiction goes back to the nineteenth century, when legal control of fictional representation, once used to secure the ideological monopoly of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities (mainly by censorship), began to be legitimized by public morality and protecting the dignity and good name of private individuals or specific communities, and when literature, organized as an autonomous social field, paradoxically aimed for a “reality effect” (cf., for example, the trials of Flaubert for his novel Madame Bovary). Literature in postmodern, liberal-democratic society cannot secure its legitimacy within its own field; the sense of its distinctive features is weakening, and so is the sense of what is proper to fiction. In public discourse, dominated by liberal-democratic ideology, the same ethical and legal principles hold for journalists as well as writers. In cases of defamation by fiction, two legitimate interests of two ideologically equal “liberal subjects” collide: on the one hand, there is the writer’s freedom of speech and artistic creation, and, on the other hand, there is the individual’s right to privacy and his or her good name. A telling legal consideration of this conflict is presented by Richard Posner (1988), who argues that criminal liability of writers for libel should be limited because the protection of freedom of speech and

artistic expression is more socially valuable than the individual right to a good name. The justification of lawsuits brought for defamation in fiction is further problematized by the deconstruction of their theoretical foundation: the fiction vs. reality opposition. There is always something fictional in reality, and vice versa. The boundaries between the two fields are subject to cultural and historical change because they are cognitive and pragmatic by nature. Fiction may be considered an elaborated possible world that is ontologically homogeneous but also represents versions of persons from extra-literary reality and intertextuality (i.e., a transworld identity of persons, places, etc.). Transgressive play with the possibilities of reality makes literary discourse appealing, but may cause serious difficulties to its authors. The broad topic of textual and contextual spaces of literature is studied in Chapter 10 from a special angle: how spatial boundaries are transgressed in literary texts and what role intertextuality plays in this. Time and space are categories that cognitively found and organize the contexts in which literature is produced and operates (e.g., geo-cultural spaces, regions, and semiospheres); they are also imaginary dimensions of textual worlds. The experience of “real” and “imaginary” spaces transgresses their ontological boundary via semiosis. The discourse of the text penetrates the inner speech of reading subjects, interpellating them to take positions in the imaginary. Through such perspectivization, the imaginary space creates the illusion of presence. Presence, supported by the text’s spatial syntax, is undone by forces producing transgressive spaces (i.e., co-extensive, flowing spaces): figural and palimpsest transgression, textual explosion, and intertextuality. Represented spaces of other texts are intertextually transposed into the structure of the literary text and interfere with its spatial syntax; the text can also evoke extratextual socio-cultural spaces functioning as typical contexts for certain kinds of discourse. The interplay of spaces and discourses constitutes identities and social relations. Because of unstable spatial boundaries and due to the fundamental intertextuality of space, identities are in permanent hybridization and mobility. Turning from space to another fundamental category, that of temporality, the last chapter is devoted to cultural memory and literature. The meanings and structures of individual memory have a social framework. Thousands of years before Halbwachs, Plato and Aristotle’s definitions of memory, as well as the traditional imagery of the imprint, book, or treasury, point to the presence of the collective in the individual; that is, the collective inhabits the individual’s memory through images and signs representing what has become absent. Signs are the instantiation of the Other in the construction of identity. Memorizing has been also a rhetorical skill, the ars memoriae. In it, the content and structures of individual memory

were institutionally (through education) regulated with cultural memory. Following Halbwachs, Lotman, J, Assmann, Lachmann, and others, we may say that cultural memory is the area within collective memory, the content of which is considered permanently important. It circulates through more strictly codified, fixed, and specialized semiotic practices, which are dealt with mostly by elites, selected individuals, and professionals. One of the main media of cultural memory is literature. Its function is to mimetically exemplify historical otherness and, at the same time, to shape cultural identities of social groups. Literary texts are traces of past experiences and mentalities, and they are built like palimpsests of semiotic layers of various times and durations. Through social mechanisms—from criticism and history to the school system—the literary canon ensures the permanence of representative ideas and images and incorporates them into ever new textual repertoires and frames of reference as paradigmatic patterns or prototypes. Topics and mnemonic techniques are the vehicles of continuity in argumentation, style, and imagination in image-creation. Themes and motifs are nexuses that tie the texts to established memory schemata through the processes of production and reception. Genres preserve and restore old representations of the world, and through citationality literature recalls its tradition, reshapes it, and enters a socio-cultural context. All of this is demonstrated in the history of Slovenian sonnet writing. This book is a revised, expanded, updated, and translated edition of my 2006 Literarna veda v rekonstrukciji, originally published in Slovenian by Literatura Publishing in Ljubljana. I am grateful to Matevž Kos, the editor of Literatura’s series Novi pristopi (New Approaches), for his understanding of my plans for this new and translated edition of my book. I am also thankful that Darko Dolinar, Oto Luthar, and other members of the ZRC SAZU Research Center’s editorial board in Ljubljana chose my proposal to be submitted for publication by Peter Lang. Without the support from the ZRC SAZU Research Center, this book would not have been published, so I am indeed grateful for that! Some of the chapters are based on articles that I have already published in English: “On the Fate of the ‘Great’ Genre” (translated by Lena Lenček, in Darko Dolinar & Marko Juvan, eds. Writing Literary History: Selected Perspectives from Central Europe. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 17–46, © Peter Lang), “Postmodernity and Critical Editions of Literary Texts: Towards the Virtual Presence of the Past” (in Amelia Sanz & Dolores Romero, eds. Literatures in the Digital Era: Theory and Praxis. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 201–220, © Amelia Sanz, Dolores Romero, and contributors), “On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory” (translated by Marta Pirnat-Greenberg, in Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, ed. Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue

University Press, 2003, pp. 76–96, © Purdue University Press), “Generic Identity and Intertextuality” (translated by Andrej E. Skubic, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.1, 2005, © Purdue University Press), “Spaces of Intertextuality, the Intertextuality of Space” (in Jola Škulj & Darja Pavlič, eds. Literature and Space: Spaces of Transgressiveness = Primerjalna književnost 27. Special issue, 2004: 85–96, © contributors). I thank the publishers and copyright holders: Purdue University Press, Peter Lang, and Cambridge Scholar Publishing (as well as Amelia Sanz and Dolores Romero) for the permission to use the articles listed above in this book. I wrote Chapters 3, 4, 8, and 10 in English, and others have been rewritten on the basis of translations by Lena Lenček, Marta Pirnat-Greenberg, and Andrej E. Skubic. Simona Lapanja, Donald F. Reindl, and Dawn O. Reindl (of DEKS d.o.o.) translated Chapters 1, 5, 9, and 11 especially for this book and copyedited the rest of it. Many thanks to all the translators for their patience and cooperation! I am also indebted to Jernej Habjan, who carefully checked my bibliographical references and offered many valuable suggestions. Thanks to Alenka Maček for her skilled typesetting. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Galin Tihanov for his careful reading of my manuscript and his important comments, corrections, and emendations. Of course, I alone am responsible for any remaining possible weaknesses of this book.

1 Towards a Theory of Literary Discourse The Discipline’s Fragmentation, Perspectivism, and Self-Referentiality In the past three decades, the international book market and the globalized university industry have been using the label “literary theory” to market either presentations of successive twentieth-century theoretical schools, sometimes accompanied by metatheoretical and historical analysis of their mutual points of convergence and divergence,1 or unrelated treatments of individual theoretical issues and concepts such as literature, the writer, the reader, text, style, or interpretation.2 Both cases reveal a symptom of the fact that literary theory has lost the character of a systematically organized and rational body of knowledge, which theoretical textbooks once used to serve academia’s ideals of the classical, Humboldtian university-level humanities studies. It has split into two branches. One branch entails a diachronically organized series of presentations of diverse theoretical approaches and methods, and the other features synchronized overviews of discussions on the key topics of contemporary literary theory, especially the concepts that ought to be continuing to provide literary studies—which is facing competition from cultural studies and the social sciences— both a disciplinary identity and a broader social importance. On the global stage, both of these tendencies prove their productivity and desirability among consumers of theoretical products. They both promise a seemingly free choice among available theoretical paradigms, especially those that the consecration of metropolises are currently qualifying as modern and having good prospects. However, to be more precise, both types of theoretical books actually demand constant selection among approaches and viewpoints; they are simply structural elements of the field, in which students and researchers are confronted with the knowledge market and equip themselves to play in the arena of political conflicts. Last but not least, with all this, both tendencies in writing theoretical books reveal fragmentation and perspectivism, which dominate the current state of the discipline and determine what it has to offer. In the case of guides through the Euro-American theoretical schools, perspectivism has become an object of presentation; however, when several writers contributed to a literary jigsaw puzzle of theoretical issues, it functioned as a form of presentation.&&

1

Examples of such books include Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) by Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: The Basics (2001) by Hans Bertens, How to Do Theory (2006) by Wolfgang Iser, and the volume Introducing Literary Theories (2001) edited by Julian Wolfreys. 2 High-quality products of this type include Théorie littéraire: problèmes et perspectives (Angenot et al. 1989), Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft (Pechlivanos et al. 1995), Le Démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (Compagnon 1998), and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Culler 2000a).

It seems that literary theory has finally parted from the classifications— comprehensive, systemized and applied down to the last detail—and conceptual inventories and definitions that by the mid-twentieth century had been canonized with the appearance of eternity and universality by Boris Tomashevsky, René Wellek and Austin Warren, and Wolfgang Kayser. Because literary theory has evidently disintegrated into heterogeneous views and approaches without a common foundation, framework, or goal, it also cannot reproduce any coherent conceptual system abstracted from historical events. A lasting conceptual and cognitive system, which, together with the sense of its existence, would be independent of the constant changes demanded of intellectual production by the modernity of capitalism, has become impossible. Today theory cannot produce a relevant organon of categories applicable to analyses of any literary works, regardless of the time and place of their creation or reading. The theory of literature is changing into a fluid field of fragmentary conceptions or historically determined methods that are often mutually exclusive. Their changing perspectives, glossaries, and central issues increasingly thwart and exclude rather than complement and overlap one another. All of this can be seen as a sign of the methodological plurality, ideological division, and epistemic perspectivism of theoretical discourse. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard determines the consequences of the modernization processes, which began during the Enlightenment, in the postindustrial societies of the second half of the twentieth century. Modern science, education, and universities have long proceeded from the Enlightenment-era and Romantic belief that education (Bildung) and the production and accumulation of knowledge are values justified in and of themselves in the liberal bourgeois ideology (“the grand Narrative”) of the individual and social advancement, cultivation, and liberation. Seemingly solid bases were also provided to modern scholarship by the tradition of systemic or speculative philosophy such as Hegel’s. According to Lyotard, through their “encyclopedic net” philosophical systems determined a place in the imaginary totality of knowledge for each discipline. However, these modernization processes themselves undermined these totalities, and destroyed the secularized faith in precisely those speculative and emancipative “grand Narratives” that, having replaced religion or absolutism, legitimized modern knowledge and competence in the post-Enlightenment Europe and the Americas (Lyotard 1984: xxiii-xxv, 3–6, 31–47).3 In line

3

To add my “own” version of the Marxist, Weberian, Habermasian, and systemic theses on modernity and capitalism, I would explain the consequences of modernization processes in knowledge structures in the following manner: with the destruction of the traditional estate codes and consequent proliferation of potential

with Lyotard’s analyses, it was becoming increasingly evident even at the end of the nineteenth century that the collapse of grand narratives and the crisis in metaphysics rendered knowledge fragmentary, atomized, and contingent. Through the weakened protection of their legitimizing ideology, the arts and sciences revealed themselves as “kinds of discourse” and even theories proved to be heterogeneous and autonomous. They are comparable to Wittgenstein’s “language games:” each art and science is based only on its own rules and regimes of validity, which in turn are determined by arbitrary and changeable communication agreements (Lyotard 1984: 3, 10–11, 39–40). The “breaking up of the grand Narratives” reported by Lyotard occurred in the postmodern period and—with the help of deconstruction—in the last decades of the twentieth century, it ultimately shook the general metaphysical grounds of knowledge and ruined their encyclopedic system. In these circumstances, power established itself as the only external measure that could legitimize knowledge (a fact that had already been recognized by Nietzsche, Lyotard’s main inspiration). This power is manifested either through the possession and control of information that enables political advantage and dominance, or in the form of financial or symbolic capital accumulated through successful sale or exchange of knowledge on the intellectual market (Lyotard 1984: 15, 46–47, 51). With its logic of market exchange, the commodification of knowledge, described by Lyotard following the theses from the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto,4 demolished the old humanistic ideals of education as a personal and collective value, affected the scholarly and artistic institutions, especially the universities, and undermined the disciplinary organization of knowledge: The Classical dividing lines between the various fields of science are thus called into question— disciplines disappear, overlappings occur at the borders between sciences, and from these new territories are born. The speculative hierarchy of learning gives way to an immanent and, as it were,

social relations and communications, modernization produced complex and unstable social systems that sought to maintain and regulate themselves by increasingly differentiating and specializing their areas of activity. In its own logic, this type of rationalization had a centrifugal effect and decentralized the former totality. In addition, it was further strengthened by the logic of infinite accumulation of capital and the tendency to achieve economic efficiency: this logic, whose calculations depended on fictionality and contingency of the exchange value of merchandise on the world market, caused unpredictable turns, unbalance, and fluctuations, and also introduced temporal discontinuity into rationalization and differentiation of social spaces. The planetary circulation of capital, fictive representations of values, the alienation of people’s work from the products of that work, geopolitical asymmetries in the accumulation and allocation of capital, and the crises, conflicts, and disturbances arising from this—with their empirical reality, all of these contradictory modernization processes denied the argumentation of metaphysics as an intellectual basis and a reflexive hypostasis of the entire modern project. Therefore, in its “essence” modernity is self-destructive, excessive, fluid, incomplete, and concrete. 4 “It [the bourgeoisie] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.” (Marx & Engels 1998: 37–38)

“flat” network of areas of inquiry, the respective frontiers of which are in constant flux (Lyotard 1984: 39).

As explained below, at the end of the twentieth century the humanities and philology imploded, due to economic pressure, into polymorphic, changeable, and eclectic domains, such as transdisciplinary “theory” and cultural studies. From time immemorial access to knowledge, its possession and creation, and strategies for its distribution or authorization have been connected with the question of power and its unequal distribution in terms of class, geopolitics, sex, ethnicity, and race. However, in our time, characterized by neoliberal economic ideology, knowledge began to be treated explicitly as merchandise, which, in the form of unconnected pieces torn out of the former totality (i.e., various “competences,” “expert opinions,” “databases,” “ideas,” “strategies,” and so on), is subject to market rules and everything that goes along with them: discontinuity, coincidences, risk, uncertainty, and heteronomous interventions of capital. Through globalization, economism has imposed itself as an ideology that replaced Lyotard’s grand narratives and that seeks to have the effect of something real, rational, and calculable (in the sense of the pragmatic relation between costs and benefits), as opposed to the idealism of the grand narratives. Through the neoliberal scholarly and educational policies that dominate universities and research institutions around nearly the entire globe, economism persistently persuades us that knowledge as such is worth nothing if it is not tested on the market in the form of isolated, randomly demanded competences (cf. Liessmann 2006). We are being told that knowledge must be quantifiable, calculable, and marketable, and that it must generate profit, either financial or symbolic: from financing projects and proceeds of scholarly publishers through awarding academic titles, the high profile of academic institutions and securing the existence of university departments to the international representation of a nation’s comprehensive “development” and ideological servicing of transnational bureaucratic organizations. Within such a context, one gets the impression that the development of research methods in the humanities depends on the prosperity of the global market of ideas and the accumulated geocultural power of centers that produce and reproduce knowledge: trends are created and expanded, and they subside in correspondence with the directions of leading universities, prestigious academic publishers, influential journals, and international conferences. Literary theorists are becoming increasingly like sophist rhetoricians, competing for the audience’s and financiers’ affection by being persuasive and using their performance skills, rather than Platonist seekers of the truth, Kantian critics of concepts, or Habermasian fighters for rational cognitive consensus.

It hence follows that theory is not and cannot merely entail a disinterested observation of the subject area from a specific metaposition—that is, it does not exist as a pure metalanguage. Theory is just another discourse, whose agents—like the subject area of their observation—are determined through social inequality and historical change. In this sense, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels established years ago that nobody can stand outside practice: there is no universal method that would ensure a correct interpretation of texts and enable indisputable recognition of the truth about literary features (Knapp & Michaels 1985). Jonathan Levin infers from their insight that theory is at the same level as the discourses it analyzes. Together they are placed within dynamic, socially and historically contingent contexts, on which they also depend. That is, all theoretical categories are structured through the cognitive activities of concrete agents, which attempt to behave as competent members of a specific disciplinary community in the given circumstances. Theories are thus tools produced and tested in practice or concrete problem situations and changeable interactions within various academic communities (cf. Levin 1999: 8–10, 17). The institutional integration of a disciplinary community, the social position of its discourse, and the discipline’s “internal” development have conditioned one another up until the present day. Steven Connor thus finds the following about literary theory: “The development of structures and institutions of knowledge in the later twentieth century . . . has a crucial relationship to the forms of knowledge developed within those institutions” (Connor 1997: 5). According to Connor, from the 1960s onwards literary disciplines became increasingly marginalized and internally diversified and fragmented because the academic system became increasingly introverted, refraining from establishing its concepts within a broader social context and expanding inwards instead (i.e., towards its own internal communications and institutions; Connor 1997: 13): the growing differentiation and specialization of the literary studies’ subject area and the imperialism of successive methodological trends that—also under the influence of the commodification of knowledge—globally appropriated all of the literary discipline’s institutions and forms of activity, but in doing so relativized one another and engaged in endless discussions, leading to the permanent instability of the discipline. Theorists have associated the fragmentariness and epistemic uncertainty of literary studies with the concept of crisis at least since Wellek’s and Etiemble’s lamentations in the mid-twentieth century. Within the crisis discourse, Paul de Man’s influential essay “Criticism and Crisis” mentions that the second half of the twentieth century witnessed accelerated exchange, mixing, and confrontation of critical currents, schools, and paradigms: philosophical existentialism combined with phenomenology and Bergsonianism was

dethroned by Goldmann’s and Lukács’s sociological approach, which in turn was pushed into the background by structuralist anthropology, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and so on (de Man 1983: 3–5). Thus today in the presence of nearly the same literary corpus, various opposing interpretations are being accumulated, while analyses are challenging or limiting one another. This gives the impression of relative and arbitrary literary meanings and structures as well as an epistemic weakness of literary studies: theory seems to be merely a language game, which in the heteroglossia of successive or contemporary methodologies has lost the binding criteria of reality that would exist outside the polyphony of its own language (cf. de Man 1983: 8–11). In addition to the realization that both literature and literary studies are becoming socially marginalized and, moreover, that the connection between them is being severed as well (discussed in greater detail below), the impression of the arbitrariness and relativism of epistemic models in particular has been perceived as a main symptom of the crisis for decades now. As established by de Man, crisis is inherent in literary criticism as a modern discipline (this is already suggested by the common etymology of the words criticism and crisis); however, it is not something exceptional, but merely a permanent and normal state of any reflection on literature (de Man 1983: 3–8). Because the concept of crisis is semantically connected with “distinction” and “decision,” it implies a reflection on various possibilities of identifying a problem and seeking solutions; in addition, it also presupposes a choice or decision, for which a theorist must take responsibility. And because theory is a special type of practice, its agents’ decisions are more than just theoretical. They connote the ethical assumptions and consequences of decisions, and place theorists in the ideological and political constellation of social relationships. That is why today’s theoretical approaches differ not only by their epistemological lineages, such as their references to the phenomenologicalhermeneutic tradition or Marxist and semiotic-structural backgrounds. Differences between these approaches lie not only in the manners of identifying, analyzing, categorizing, and describing the relevant issues. Conflicts between them also arise from their scholarly ideologies because the theoretical discourse—as a genre of (signifying) practice—is produced and reproduced by concrete agents and institutions differing in terms of power, position, social capital, strategies, and value orientations. Thus for example, feminists, Marxists, and postcolonial theorists attack liberal humanists, claiming their text selections and explanation methods favor the predominance of white male culture and higher classes; Harold Bloom, who feels “surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited” (Bloom 1995: 517), considers himself to be called to protect the dignity of the intellectual

elitism of the Western canon and therefore rejects those that stand up for the equality of disadvantaged groups by defending the equality of achievements of creative imagination (Bloom 1995: 1–41, 517–528). The fact that the opposing approaches literally scrutinize one another’s every word has torn the literary-theory discussion and the ideological struggle inscribed in it away from the referent. Theoretical discourse has distanced itself from analyzing the reality of literature, its agents, and institutions, and also removed itself from dealing with concrete texts and their meanings. Literary theory has thus gotten itself entangled in self-reflection and selfreferentiality. Ultimately, the truth value of a theoretical judgment and the attempt to verify a statement in literary corpuses and within valid epistemologies have become less important than the rhetorical suitability of this judgment in terms of the theoretical language selected or, contrariwise, the stylistic—and in the last instance, market—impact of its potential withdrawal from the established trends. The signs of theoretical discourse thus increasingly often refer to other signs of this very discourse, and theory deals mainly with itself and its own versions, concepts, and blind spots; as seen below, its subject (i.e., literature) is neglected, except for how it serves the theoretical language in the role of randomly selected examples (cf. Culler 1994: 13–17; 2000a: i, 1–3; Butler et al. 2000; Wolfreys 2001: 1–17). This tendency towards self-referentiality has exposed literary theory, as one of the humanities, to the serious danger of ending up at the margin of social interest and having its exchange value fall inexorably on the intellectual and media market.5

Scholarship and its Subject in the Historicity of Language In the period when structural poetics predominated, literary theory largely drew its inspiration from the ideals of strict, rational, and nomothetic science. Other directions in literary studies, such as empirical and systemic approaches and cognitivism, have also followed this scientific tendency up until the present day. Nonetheless, the demise of the 5

In some places, such as the French lycées, the loss of contact between theory and literary texts was later also reflected in the curricula of literature classes: French students must now focus more on getting to know the structuralist and semiotic conceptions of literature than on understanding literary works themselves, reliving the different life experiences inscribed in them, or “seeking” the sense of the texts by assigning meaning to the literary representations’ relationship to the original historical contexts on the one hand, and the existential or life experience of students as readers on the other. This state of affairs, which further decreases the need to read literature, is surprisingly being detected and lamented by Tzvetan Todorov (2007b), now in the autumn of his life. He, along with other Parisian pioneers of structuralism, is the very one that carried out the anti-humanist semiotic coup in the 1960s and decisively contributed to the establishment of literary theory as a strict, rational, and allegedly universal discipline dealing with the laws of textuality and signification. With the usual delay (of approximately twenty years), this theoretical paradigm has infiltrated literary teaching, which Todorov is now criticizing and, with his idiosyncratic eclecticism, restoring humanism and the “conceptual” and experiential way of teaching literature.

structuralist project, its deconstruction in poststructuralism, and the relatively marginal position of scientific orientations in today’s theoretical arena testify to the fact that through the plurality, contradictoriness, and self-referentiality connected with the reality of its research object, literary studies can only with difficulty escape the frameworks set by Dilthey’s traditional classification. Until some epistemological revolution takes place, literary studies cannot ignore the categorical determinants that have classified it as a human or “spiritual” science. This classification was actualized by Mikhail Bakhtin: his draft essay of 1959 and 1960 titled “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences” anchored the human “spirit” (as the object studied by the humanities) in sign representations or texts (Bakhtin 1986: 103–106). For Bakhtin text is the “primary given” and the only “unmediated reality” of all thought in the human sciences and philology, which through reading and interpreting texts “originates as thought about others’ thoughts” (Bakhtin 1986: 103). As a realization of the linguistic system, text is classified as a series of reproductions of repeatable signs and structures and therefore their objective theoretical description and the subsequent generalizations formulated in indisputable models and structural laws seem possible. However, at the same time text (as an utterance) is “individual, unique, and unrepeatable,” which means it is “inseparably linked with the aspect of authorship”—that is, with another subject and its historical existence (Bakhtin 1986: 105). Hence it follows that textual structures, which could perhaps still be analyzed as reified and repeatable realizations of the general laws of textuality, always serve the singular use of some “other” (individual, collective, institutional, or corporate) agency or its speech situation. The existence of a text, and its concrete structure and meaning, thus always refer to the other and its purposes, strategies, prejudices, ideology, conceptual world, and inscriptions of the body and the unconscious. By studying the text, the observer’s subject encounters the sign traces of other discourse subjects. In the process of understanding his “object” (of the text), a humanistic scholar translates the semiotic traces of other agents into his own cognitive networks, through which he juxtaposes or confronts them with his life experience. Reading and understanding literary texts entails translating codes whose signs and references change constantly in time and space. Accordingly, literary studies is a discipline whose object and subject are not fixed and independent. In the words of Jean-Marie Grassin, the object of literary theory is “movable and set in a language;” he believes that in general the object of the human sciences “develops together with culture, and together with the object, sciences themselves also develop and transform due to mutations of their object” (Grassin 2000: v-vi). It is therefore understandable

that literature and categories subjected to it are terms that Walter Bryce Gallie added to the multitude of terms also typical of aesthetics, politics, and social sciences as early as 1964 in his Philosophy and Historical Understanding. This involves terminology that inevitably carries value connotations and is complex, subject to debate, and historically marked; it depends on the personal experience, social statuses, languages, and methodological schools of those using and understanding it (cited in Johansen 2002: 14–21). Due to various histories of literary theorists’ personal socialization and their placement within the social-ideological heteroglossia, their metalanguages of literary phenomena are “contaminated” with unconscious motives, shadows of cultural prejudices, ideas of the goals and purposes of scholarly activity, imaginary identifications, political opposition, and so on. This also gives literary-theory concepts changeable stresses, overtones, and explanations, leading to a terminological poiesis—a characteristic feature of all the humanities—that is, making up neologisms and the practice of renaming and revising terminology and transferring it from one discipline to another. The inevitable subjectivity of the humanities has been long considered its flaw and the main reason it has lagged behind the hard objectivity of the natural sciences; however, the postmodern “ending of the [twentieth] century is characterized by the subject’s rehabilitation in science and technology, and the penetration of the indefinable, complex, heterogeneous, and relative into the view of the world” (Grassin 2000: v-vi). The epistemology of radical constructivism showed that ultimately every science is a mental construct providing the observer cognitive orientation in the world; this construct is valid and successful (viable) until it is rejected by the practice, opposing evidence, and new, consistent explanatory models (cf. Dović 2004: 22–33). The fact that through textuality the object of literary theory is connected to the dynamics of language, discourse, and concrete cultural agents, and is thus movable and cannot be pinned down in firm and undisputed terms is reflected in the fate of the term “literature.”6 This term in particular, which is “a product of the European eighteenth century” and “lacks exact or even really close counterparts in earlier times and in other cultures” (Pettersson 2006: x), determines the research area of literary studies, thus legitimizing its specific methods and defining its place in the scientific classification. In the past decades, literary theory has thus made ongoing attempts to define the meaning of the term “literature” (cf. Pettersson 2006; Todorov 2007a): despite the theory’s efforts to conceptually define the textual or structural criteria that could be used to include a specific corpus of texts and genres

6

This is described in greater detail in the chapter on literariness.

in a category, and separate it from other communication in terms of classification (for example, according to its precise and skilful elaborateness, level of invention, and iconicity), functional criteria such as the aesthetic-hedonist relationship to texts, ignoring the informativeness and directivity, and the writers’ pretensions to being culturally important have repeatedly proved more successful. However, already by definition, functional criteria depend on the historically changeable social and cultural conditions and viewpoints of the agents involved with texts.7 On the horizon of postmodern deconstruction of totalities, theory—furnished with the method of deconstruction, constructivist epistemology, and the contextualism

of

cultural

studies—often

emphatically

demonstrated

that

verbal

communication, which in the past two hundred years Europe and cultures subjected to European influence have become accustomed to treating as part of the common concept of literature, does not have clearly outlined and fixed borders. Even today’s Eurocentric view is changing the scope of this term when looking back its own past: the older the period, the greater the tendency to treat the texts and genres that barely meet the criteria of literariness— developed following the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century examples and concepts—as literature and thus also our research subject (cf. Pettersson 2006: 9–10). However, looking beyond the fences of Western civilization, it can be easily seen that elsewhere terms emerged at different times and in different languages that were analogous to literature to a certain extent, but were defined differently—in different relationships and genre classifications8— whereas oral culture and the civilizations of pre-Antiquity that already had their own writing did not use an umbrella category of similar breadth like this at all (Pettersson 2006: 6–7, 29– 30). In his extensive study Literature, Peter Widdowson follows the semantic changes of the term “literature” (from “literary knowledge” and “cultural literacy,” which distinguish the educated elites from ignorant masses, to “literary arts”); he is one of the scholars that 7

Todorov, who is aware that the term “literature” is basically a European product of the nineteenth century, rejects the “structural definitions” of literature one after the other (e.g., that literature is fictional, beautiful, or autotelic) because he believes they are not systematically connected with one another; in addition, they capture many, but not all works that are considered part of literature. According to Todorov, these generalized determinants of literature are derived from partial corpuses and individual genres (e.g., fictionality from narrative art, and beauty and autotelism from poetry). It seems that Todorov finds the “functional” definitions of literature less disputable because they rely on the empirically verifiable reality of socio-cultural life of the texts that are written, distributed, and read as “literature” (Todorov 2007a). Pettersson seeks to view literature within the global context and, by combining structural and functional criteria, define it as a “presentational discourse produced with pretensions to being culturally important, and/or well-formed, and/or conductive to aesthetic experience;” this distinguishes literature from the discourses that Pettersson terms “informative” and “directive” (2006: 16). 8 The Chinese expression wen, the Sanskrit kāvya, the Arab adab, and the Greek poiēsis developed in the first centuries AD: with an increase in the quantity of writing a need emerged to distinguish between “popular,” practical, and “trivial” texts on the one hand, and “high,” prestigious, and important literary creativity produced by elites and worthy of study, inclusion in education, and preserving in tradition on the other (Pettersson 2006: 6–7, 30).

emphasize the eighteenth-century invention of the aesthetic category, which literary studies used—from Romanticism to the triumph of new criticism’s “fetishization of ‘the text itself’”—to decisively co-shape the awareness of literature as literary art that is autonomous, socially important, and separated from other discursive genres (Widdowson 1999: 26–49). Even René Wellek established in 1970 that from the 1760s onwards the word “literature” has experienced “a process of ‘nationalization’ and ‘aestheticization’” (cited in: Widdowson 1999: 35): thus with the help of literary studies and education, in the nineteenth century literature increased its social prestige and began to be perceived as a key cultural factor in forming national identities and as an area intended for disinterested aesthetic experiencing and contemplative consumption of literary-art products, which, in the mass society, can be enjoyed only by educated classes, elites, and individuals that are distinguished from the average by their sophisticated taste, sense of beauty, and the privilege of forgetting any practical interests while enjoying their reading (cf. Widdowson 1999:35–49). The idea of the decisive impact of the philosophical concept of aesthetic experience on the ideology of the European and American formation of the concept of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also formulated in a concise manner by Terry Eagleton in his Literary Theory: It is mainly from this era, in the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge and others, that we inherit our contemporary ideas of . . . ‘aesthetic experience’, of ‘aesthetic harmony’ and the unique nature of the artefact. Previously men and women had written poems, staged plays or painted pictures for a variety of purposes, while others had read, watched or viewed them in a variety of ways. Now these concrete, historically variable practices were becoming subsumed into some special, mysterious faculty known as the 'aesthetic' . . . . The assumption that there was an unchanging object known as ‘art’, or an isolatable experience called ‘beauty’ or the ‘aesthetic’, was largely a product of the . . . alienation of art from social life . . . . Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish. (Eagleton 1983: 20–21)

The discursive field, which—especially thanks to this “fetishization” of the aesthetic (Widdowson 1999: 36)—has been considered literature in the Western world from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, has thus entered the living environments of individuals and societies through changeable temporal and spatial frameworks via various labels and categories, diverse cultural models and many types of discourse genres, and countless forms and meanings. After a series of criticisms directed at the “humanist aestheticization of ‘Literature,’” which Eliot, Leavis, Richards, and others turned into critical orthodoxy (Widdowson 1999: 49),9 at the end of the twentieth century it also became obvious in theory that the concept of literature cannot be justified with any “essence” that could be realized in 9

Discussed in greater detail below.

all literary works. Explaining phenomena based on their alleged essence abstracted from individual examples and viewed as their origin or basis was branded as essentialism by postmodern critics. They perceived it as a stubborn remainder of metaphysical thinking, which had also determined natural and human sciences all the way up to the postmodern era. Following Nietzsche’s example of the metaphysical search for essences, Derrida’s critical method of reading philosophical and theoretical texts revealed that every idea is caught in the nets of language and sign differences. Therefore, mental categories and their linguistic descriptions and references also depend on semiotic relationships and codes, which—together with the social and existential position of the thinking and speaking subject—continue to change through history. The concept of literature is one of the historical, cultural, and social variables of this type. It is an example of “conceptual relativity” because the meaning and scope of the concept of “literature” change according to different representation systems: “the meaning of the word ‘literature,’ the content of the concept of literature, is what competent people perceive it to be” (Pettersson 2006: 17–20). Through a multitude of various genres literature performed functions that were sometimes downright incompatible: from glorifying great ideas and authorities through critically unmasking all pretence to the escapist production of kitschy illusions (cf. Culler 2000a: 18–41). With this realization, the crisis of theory is further aggravated. As seen above, it is being driven by the question of how to draw the limits of a field in which its specific methods continue to be valid and transferrable from one case to the other regardless of the contingent, cultural, linguistic, or historical differences between texts. The Dissolution of Aesthetic Autonomy and the Change of Identity of “Literary” Theory In addition to awareness of the subjectivity and historicity of knowledge, cognitive relativism, and linguistic and ideological dependence of the determinants of the concept of “literature,” another change caused today’s literary theory identity crisis; this change has been experienced by literature and reflection on literature from the end of the 1960s onwards. Especially in the French, German, and Anglo-American environments, reconsiderations of the autonomy of art and the sciences that are defined by arts as their subject area have been multiplying. As already indicated above, the idea of the aesthetic was the criterion based on which from the eighteenth century onwards the Western cultures began treating the arts— including literature—as an autonomous field that was supposed to include a special type of subjects and at the same time promote a special type of relationship towards them; therefore,

literature had to be ideologically separated from other social practices (cf. Bennett 1990: 143– 190). Especially from Romanticism onwards, literary writers, mediators, critics, literary historians, and educators began to institutionalize the comprehension that literary arts is a spiritual field, which—as an alternative to modern alienation and a counterweight to the practical and particular interests of everyday life—excels in autonomy, in which an individual can still experience the totality of transcendence and, at least in his imagination, implements the synthesis of ethical, cognitive, and aesthetic values. As stated by Peter Bürger’s wellknown thesis, art is an institution that has on such bases succeeded in strengthening the ideology in society that works of art are special types of products distinguished from realistic life contexts and that “a distinctive sphere of experience, i.e. the aesthetic,” crystallizes in them; according to Bürger, art was to play the role of an “advocate of humanity” and be an “alternative to the real world” (cited in Bennett 1990: 169–171). The autonomy of art understood in this way also defined the ideological position of literature. The “ideology of Literature” (Eagleton 1985/86: 98–99) namely also had its roots in the “aesthetic discourse,” which—as Tony Bennett convincingly explains in his Outside Literature—literally socialized romantic aesthetics by the first half of the twentieth century. Premises of the aesthetic discourse were Kantian and Romantic ideas about a general human feeling for the beautiful and the disinterested experience of the beauty of those products that were presented in public as part of the newly isolated area labeled “art” (i.e., galleries, museums, literary magazines and books, recitals, theaters, and concerts);10 aesthetic discourse developed these ideas in literary criticism and studies through a multitude of value judgments, selections, and hierarchizations, and largely enforced and disseminated them in school literature instruction: teachers’ supervision and encouragement of “appropriate”—that is, aesthetically and ethically sensitive—student responses to works included in the school canon literally turned into a “moral technology” for developing one’s self (cf. Bennett 1990: 150–153, 171–185). 10

According to Kant, aesthetic judgments—which are notably subjective and unverifiable as judgments of taste—presuppose a certain general human feeling for beauty (sensus communis); to Kant, aesthetic experience is characterized by pleasure enabled by the experiencing individual’s liberation from practical life interests. Compared to a multitude of other “value discourses” that, according to Bennett, regulate social practices according to the particular interests of individual communities, aesthetic discourse is characterized by a pretension to universality and hegemony derived from Kantian premises: anyone, regardless of their stratum, class or group and their general goals, is supposed to establish—even because of their cultural education—the same relationship to the field of art: a sensitive, imaginary, hedonistic, and reflexive surrender to the sensitive, imaginary, and reflexive address of a beautiful work of art (Bennett 1990: 150–161, 173).

Aesthetic discourse was embedded in the tradition of liberal bourgeois humanism and nationalism, which set the tone of the entire history of post-Enlightenment modernity. Based on the secularization typical of the Enlightenment period, aesthetics and art were acquiring the role of a substitute religion among the European artistic and intelligentsia elites, so that the discourse on literature took its vocabulary from the Bible (Anderson 1991: 12–19; Perkins 1992: 3–14; Widdowson 1999: 36). Poetry appeared as an esoteric and sublime “new mythology” as cultivated by the romantic poets, critics, and aesthetes: poets such as Hölderlin, the Schlegel brothers, Prešeren, and Pushkin perceived themselves in the role of socially underprivileged prophets, clairvoyants, and geniuses, who could not care less about the hypocritical gains of the average person because they, the poets, were the only media for the forces of nature, mythical addresses, gods, freedom, and creativity (cf. Juvan 2002). Art was also elevated above other types of social activity in another way, to which Wellek has already brought attention with his term “nationalization.” This refers to the public, politically motivated worship of the “nation’s spirit,” “national poets,” and similar ideas stemming from the language of cultural nationalism, which on the one hand were recycled into a number of rhetorical clichés, and on the other embedded in the ideology and methodology of serious literary historiography (cf. Widdowson 1999: 36; Leerssen 2006a, 2006b; Juvan 2008a). According to analyses by Bourdieu and others, the ability to enjoy art nobly, freely, and spiritually without prejudices and trivial interests also introduced another segregating factor, through which the bourgeoisie and artistic and intelligentsia elites highlighted their cultural superiority over other classes and professions, and their dislike of modern mass society and the trivialization of public sphere; by institutionalizing the aesthetic and accumulating “cultural capital,” the great bourgeoisie even tried to distance itself from its own involvement in the triviality of the market economy and capitalist exploitation (cf. Bennett 1990: 151–152; Guillory 1993; Widdowson 1999: 27–33, 41–56). In the last third of the twentieth century, this kind of comprehension of art and literature had to confront a wave of critical opposition (Widdowson 1999: 64–91). This was partly already stimulated by the continuation and gradation of the secularization process through inertia: modern substitutes for myth and religion, such as literary arts and its aesthetic autonomy, were also demystified on the horizon of the “disenchanted world.” To an even greater extent, this had to do with assaults on “literature as an ideological formation” (Widdowson 1999: 66). They were triggered by resistance to the forms of cultural hegemony that the Western bourgeoisie and patriarchate produced with their institutions and ideological apparatuses. Especially in neo-avant-garde circles and leftist movements and orientations—

here, the Parisian magazine Tel quel was an emblematic example—radical criticism of established literature and its canon spread at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.11 In Western societies and especially in the US, “culture wars” between the radical left and the conservative right, and the supporters of multi- and mono-culturalism broke out: leftist theory, feminism, cultural studies, and post-colonialism reproached literature with the fact that both traditionally and contemporarily, the Western canon has appeared mainly as an institution of the ruling bourgeois class, an ideological apparatus or some sort of a performative forge of “false consciousness” (i.e., liberal humanism, nationalism, eurocentrism, and the patriarchate) hidden treacherously under the camouflage of disinterested aesthetic experience. Therefore, theoretical discourse revealed the predominating bourgeois-humanistic ideas of the author, art, the literary work, and meaning as sublimated outlets of political power, cultural hegemony, and capital. Radical theorists replaced terminology, which by the mid-twentieth century had become common in describing literature, with new concepts of writing, the play of signifiers, texts, and intertextuality. Philosophically, these ideas originated from the destruction/deconstruction of metaphysical thought in Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. However, in its premises at the political level, the seemingly purely academic settling of accounts with metaphysical essentialism in the tradition of aesthetics and literary theory had unmistakable emancipatory, anarchistic, rebellious, and transgressive accents. The new metaliterary concepts, such as writing or text, were also created in order to challenge the established value hierarchies. Some of these value scales were embedded in the basic discourses of modern liberal democracies and social subsystems of art, science, and education. The new Parisian theory personified in Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, as well as its fellow travelers and successors,12 would not acquiesce merely to disassembling the established metalanguage, but often resorted to activism to settle accounts with the ossified university institutions, and destroyed, opened up, extended, or replaced the Western canon in the “culture wars.” They promoted authors, female writers, literatures, poetics, and genres that had been marginalized in the past (e.g., de Sade, Mary Shelley, women’s or minority writing, postcolonial literatures, 11

However, this does not mean that all literature was attacked; critical theory praised authors, genres, and poetics that had been marginalized until then (e.g., De Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, fragments, prose poems, grotesques, dark romanticism, etc.), or sought forces in the poetic language (e.g., the unconscious, play, etc.) that transcended the forms of their ideological adjustments within the bourgeois horizon. 12 Important exceptions in this regard were Paul de Man and those protagonists of the American deconstruction that, in a prominent and rich academic environment, chose to treat literary, philosophic, and other texts in a notably self-reflexive, rationally skeptical, “formalist,” and externally completely depoliticized manner. However, as suggested by de Man’s “suppressed” biography with its collaborationist stain, a political background can be hidden even in this kind of withdrawal from the political sphere.

mass culture, ludism, open forms, fragment, syncretism, intertextuality, and so on) as an alternative to the former “great writers” and other branches of elite culture. Radical theorists perceived some of these areas nearly as a revolutionary alternative capable of changing the known world order through poetic language or at least resisting the overwhelming pressure of the authorities and the doxa that was spreading in the mass society through the trivialization of the public sphere (cf. Juvan 2008b: 73–79).13 More recent objections to the idea of aesthetic autonomy and the higher social and metaphysical mission of art, which were partly tuned with the artistic neo-avant-garde, also paradoxically shattered the foundations of modern literary theory. From Russian formalism onwards—and in reference to the far-reaching aesthetic thought of Romanticism—literary theory made efforts to determine the specific nature of literature as art, and the literariness of texts. In order to be able to describe this, it sought to establish its own disciplinary autonomy and develop special explanatory tools and procedures so that it would no longer have to borrow these helter-skelter from here and there: history, linguistics, biology, sociology, and psychology. In the mid-twentieth century, when literary theory had barely begun to establish a profile and independence across Europe and the US, it began a transformation— approximately from the “revolutionary” year of 1968 onwards—in the more radical intellectual circles in France, the US, and other centers by creating the impression of an eclectic mixture of linguistics, poetics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, history, and “hard” sciences such as mathematics, physics, and cybernetics. It began to convert into an inter- and transdisciplinary discourse simply referred to as “the theory” (in order to better distinguish it from literary theory I use the capitalized version, “Theory,” from now on). Jonathan Culler and Jean-Michel Rabaté ingeniously described the features of this Theory in their texts.14 They believed that Theory is speculative and inclined towards farreaching abstractions and unverifiable theses; that it tends to question everything that seems self-evident; that it is radically critical even toward itself, which leads it to consistent selfreflection and polemics between various theoretical directions; that it pays great attention to language and its semiotic character because it sees language as a basis of the subject, a 13

As an institution of “affirmative culture” of the ruling class, in the German-speaking environment the established literary canon was subjected to critical theories by Adorno, Marcuse, and Bürger, which saw an alternative in the negativism of consistent modernism and the avant-garde (to a great extent, critical theory also relied on their experience and utopias); in Great Britain, Raymond Williams and the pioneers of cultural studies turned against the bourgeois and modernist elitism, and began studying mass pop culture instead (cf. Bennett 1990: 169–172; Widdowson 1999: 64–91). 14 In describing Theory here and in the following paragraphs, I rely primarily on Culler 2000a: 3–15; Rabaté 2002: 1–20, 46–92.

medium of existence and all knowledge areas; it crosses the boundaries between traditional scientific disciplines: the terms, ideas, and concepts that were developed in one discipline are transferred to another area, where they function productively, although in altered frameworks and meanings—for instance, the linguistic terms in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytical terms in sociology and anthropology, the philosophical ones in literary interpretation, and physical and mathematical expressions all around. In terms of Theory reshaped in this way, literary works—neither in their singularity nor dependence on literary-art codes—may no longer be the main subject of research, at least not in principle. As illustrated by a somewhat caricatured finding: literature professors have gotten used to writing and reading articles on Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Daoism, performatives, quantum physics, fractals, Bushman rituals, tobacco corporations, music videos, sexual harassment at work, and things like that, and only reaching for one or two popular examples from the belles-lettres treasury in between. Before this, literary theory appeared primarily—hyperbolically paraphrased—to be a servant to literary history or criticism, or in other words, as an organon of methods and concepts used for interpreting, classifying, and historically explaining literary works. Only rarely did it tear away from literature and the study of concrete texts and turn to an independent and more “philosophical” discussion. The new transdisciplinary Theory began acting differently towards literature, especially after having been included in university programs during the 1970s in the US (i.e., the epicenter of globalization). On the one hand, its self-referentiality was turning it into a self-sufficient field of study: professors and students today neglect the literary canon because they must focus on the theory canon instead (i.e., de Saussure, Jakobson, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Spivak, Butler, Žižek, and others); on the other hand, due to its transdisciplinarity and critical radicalism, Theory was used as a methodological basis of cultural studies. With its broad subject area ranging from lifestyles to pop literature, cultural studies have in many places already supplanted literary history and changed it into an auxiliary discipline.15 The sea change in the views of high culture, literature, and canon, which has characterized a considerable part of theory from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, was prepared or reacted to by changes in the theoretical methods, which were no less fatal to the treatment of literature. Structuralism and semiotics promoted approaches that no longer distinguished between literary and non-literary texts, or between the autonomous aesthetic sphere and everyday pragmatics. The goal of these analyses was no longer to determine what transforms linguistic

15

Discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2.

texts into works of art, and how their artistic nature, singularity of meaning, or style were established. Instead theorists strove to isolate general principles from the text corpus (i.e., codes, conventions, and procedures, through which meaning is produced, understood, and transformed). In this, they focused on how the speaking/writing and reading subjects are established in the semiotic circulation, and how they are positioned within the imaginary and symbolic systems that form the society and culture. In this, they did not make any methodological distinctions between studying myth, short story, film, advertisements, or history. As a concept and even more as a value, literature thus became contentious in the eyes of Theory. By affirming the works of underprivileged and marginalized communities, the theoretical settling of accounts with the dominant Western canon, which began in the late 1960s and continues to be articulated in continually new ways even today, has severely shaken the hegemony of the occidentocentric and patriarchic “high culture” and thus contributed to the decolonization and democratization of the academic and partly also public sphere. However, this has also triggered new discrepancies. Projecting democracy and its representation policy onto intellectual production, which—if it is truly creative—clashes with social identity generalizations, egalitarianism, and generality of meaning through its singularity (cf. Attridge 2004; Clark 2005), is ultimately merely another form of ideological violence. Not only in art, but in general, individuals’ multiple and hybrid identities cannot be reduced to individual collective signifiers; an individual’s ideology, idiolect, and lifestyle cannot be connected with only one constant affiliation (e.g., race, sex, social class, or nationality). Moreover, I cannot avoid the impression that under the circumstances of the postmodern empire and its mercantilist ideology, assaults on the literary canon have the same effect as shooting at a paper tiger. The canon already largely gave up on its ideological and formative role in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, when the “faith” in literature as the bearer of values of the liberal-humanist culture was relatively successfully reproduced in the school system and “national” art institutions. However, in postmodern societies humanist culture persists only residually, pushed into the background and left to the enthusiasm of intellectual, creative, and scientific elites, who are struggling to survive. Interest in belles-lettres may not have even decreased as much was anticipated in light of the successive introduction of new mass media (from film and television to computers and the Internet); however, it has lost the “aura” that the ideal of humanistic cultivation gave to book reading. Today reading and attending literary evenings is nothing but a leisure activity. In these conditions, the distribution of literary texts—even if they are bestsellers or examples of

world fiction entering the market in several languages at the same time—is incomparably more limited than the reach and impact of printed, electronic, and digital mass media, which is why it cannot contribute significantly to the formation or problematization of collective and individual identities. For example, what does Shakespeare’s imaginary portrayal of Caliban as a primitive Other in The Tempest mean in terms of colonial discourse if compared to the power of stereotypes about the primitivism and exotic nature of natives reproduced by pop culture and everyday conversations, or to the latent demonization of the opponents of Western democracy, which is being served every day on television by large journalistic corporations? By deconstructing the traditional humanistic and metaphysical assumptions in understanding literature, Theory also withdrew its value support of the academic apparatus and its important protagonists. Literary studies has long served as an interpreter of literature’s messages or an advocate of its interests. With its metalanguage, it developed an aesthetic discourse and strengthened the awareness of the special nature and roles of the area governed by the principles of art. Through its transformation into Theory, the reflexive language of literary experts, which helped maintain the field of literary art cognitively and institutionally in public through its terminology and procedures all the way up to the mid-twentieth century, renounced its alliance with literature. The theoretical undermining of humanist literary culture and its canonized authority, and laying bare the ideological effects of the aesthetic have ultimately opened the door even more widely to the overly strong competition coming from the actual centers of economic and political power—that is, the flood of the contemporary media industry, which satisfies and pacifies audiences with its products, unifies cultural patterns through globalization, and accumulates capital in large corporations. With its critical stance, Theory de-aestheticized literature and thus distanced itself from its research object both modally (by losing “faith” in the outstanding achievements of the poetic) and referentially (by shifting to other cultural practices); however, its selfreflection forced it to renounce the criteria of reality outside itself and be reduced to a multitude of competitive language games resembling literature. This way, the Theory discourse became equal to the rhetoric of literature: the directions of postmodern Theory that interdiscursively imitated literary strategies and procedures became the most sought after and appreciated. Up until recently, the adjective “literary” in the phrase “literary theory” denoted theory dealing with literature; however, in the prominent, downright star-like trajectory of Theory, it was converted into its own self-description—the theory became literary because it adopted the properties of its own subject, literature (cf. Culler 2000b). It shook off its scientistic rigidity, and by deconstructing the epistemological bases of science and

philosophy, opened the door to epistemic perspectivism and the rhetoric ars. It transformed into semi-literary prose, and open, fragmentary forms loaded with word plays, allusions, anecdotes, personal and autobiographical intrusions, irony, self-reflection, terminological metaphorization, and so on. The coexistence of literature and theory manifested in the theoretization of literature or metaliterariness and literarization of theory had already been introduced by early German Romanticism (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy 1978: 9–27). Later on, the connection between theoretical and literary discourse influenced Nietzsche’s “gay science,” Heidegger’s poetic concept of Dasein, and the essayization of the modern novel, and received its true impetus in postmodernism. In Barthes, Derrida, and Cixous’ poststructuralist Theory, literarization was primarily reflected in erasing the border between language and metalanguage: the theory enters the game of signifying and establishes intertextual (instead of metatextual) relationships with literature. On the other hand, the hybridity of thought and poetry in postmodern literature was largely realized as metafiction (i.e., literature’s pseudo-theoretical thinking about itself; cf. Juvan 2006). However, transdisciplinary Theory, especially if literarized, can only rarely avoid being reproached for its rhetoric arbitrariness, fictitiousness, and eclecticism. This criticism comes from more scientistically oriented paradigms of literary studies, such as the empiricalsystemic one, and even more from the “hard” sciences, which in postindustrial societies compete with the social sciences and humanist disciplines (and thus also with Theory) for the affection of politics, public funding, prestige in the media, and the role of the “fundamental” explanation of the world. Excesses have also taken place in these types of “science wars,” such as the 1996 Sokal Affair. The American physicist Alan Sokal managed to plant an intentional parody of Theory into the prestigious social science journal Social Text under the pretext of a serious, even though clearly trendy, contribution to the debate on modern scholarship. Of course his action is ethically questionable, but it nonetheless clearly showed how problematic Theory’s scientific standards can be: whim, wit, ill-conceived migrations of concepts between distant disciplines, and merely rhetorical persuasiveness rule instead. If the theory of literature and literary studies wish to preserve relevance in public, they must—in line with the still widespread opinions on science—sustain credibility in the long-term.16 16

In today’s society, science is also losing its role in offering a discourse that conveys verifiable and “objective” truth amidst the tabloid media: the importance of scientific findings is being relativized by scientists and science philosophers themselves (with their “constructivist” epistemology, which becomes quickly vulgar in public discourse, and even more with their personal and institutional dependence on the intellectual market, political interests, and capital owners); the relativization of science, limiting its independence and influence, and equating it with biased media constructs that change every day are supported primarily by the conjugation of the capitalist and political classes that raise doubt on law, art, and science—as subsystems through which the state and its

Already because of its social position, and even more because of its ethics and own development within the system of sciences, literary theory will have to continuously maintain and reflect on the criteria of scientific quality, even though these differ from the epistemological principles of its stricter and seemingly “more applied” scientific rivals.

Towards a Theory of Literary Discourse In the last part of this chapter I would like to show why theory should nonetheless decide to persist in studying literature and how it should respond to the “disenchantment” of aesthetic discourse, the marginalization of literary art, and the transdisciplinary Theory, which together with cultural studies controls the humanities and redirects attention from literary art to other semiotic practices. I am convinced that literary theory is capable of finding the right answers to these challenges if it is conceptually reorganized into the theory of literary discourse. Thus on the one hand, literary theory opens up critically to the conceptions of Theory and cultural studies, and takes into account their realization that literary texts are not excluded from life-world, social discourse, and history, but are together with other cultural practices—from lifestyles to metaphysical tractates—included in the circulation of meanings and the verbal shaping and redefining of identities. On the other hand, this is how literary theory can find new confirmation of its mission: it appears as a witness and explainer of essential anthropological-existential and sociocultural roles of literary discourse. From the 1960s onwards, the term discourse has been a key notion used by Theory, and especially by Benveniste, Lacan, Foucault, and their intellectual progeny. It became common in contemporary textology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics; the humanities and social sciences can hardly manage without it. However, it is used in various meanings and methodologies, sometimes even by the same author.17 The etymology of the word (Latin discursus, and French discours) includes some semantic elements which even today’s theoretical term relies upon: something (like a conversation) taking place in opposing directions—an open, uncompleted exchange or presentation of viewpoints as well as a rationally articulated argumentation, speech, or debate taking place in front of an audience or in a social setting. However, in order to explain the term one must rely primarily on citizens reflect and restrain the arbitrariness of the authorities—in order to consolidate postmodern relativism as the dominating ideology that seemingly allows no alternative to the reproduction of the power bearers and the “pragmatics” of their actions given the contingency situation on the world market (cf. Hawkes 1996: 1–12). 17 My discussion on the theory of discourse and/or its connections with literary studies is based primarily on the following works: Fohrmann & Müller, eds. 1988a, 1988b; Fowler 1981, 1996; Macdonell 1986; Torfing 1999. Further refinements of ideas on literature and discourse—some of which were presented in the 2003 original version of this text—are also provided by two Slovenian papers (Koron 2004; 2005; Habjan 2007).

contemporary understandings that are largely connected exactly with the genealogy of Theory—that is, the notions of Bakhtin, Benveniste, Lacan, Foucault, Habermas, Fowler, and others. In this working approximation, which summarizes the various approaches and definitions of this term, discourse could be defined as the use of language or other semiotic systems taking place through speech acts in specific social and historical contexts and concrete communication situations in which real, symbolic, and imaginary agents are involved; these actors can be described either within the topography of the psyche (e.g., the ego vs. the superego) or at the levels of individuals, communities, and institutions. Through the sign use in open and conflicting chains of utterances, various domains of knowledge, ideas, and views are gradually established, preserved or changed, together with the modal relationships to what is—within these domains or in the exchanges between them—uttered, suppressed, presupposed, implicit, or expected. With this chainlike formation of speech acts, the discourse creates a field of symbolic economy through which the energy of relationships (e.g., family, class, occupation, gender, race, etc.) is structured between the communication agents, as well as their identities, competences, and power. Discourse reproduces conventions that mediate between a language system (langue) and an individual utterance or text (parole); according to the concrete circumstances of the speech act (e.g., occasion, the position of the speaker and addressee, medium, etc.), these conventions suggest which of the virtual topics, linguistic registers, and other structural matrices communication subjects choose in order to create and understand texts. Literary theory, as it has been practiced until recently, has been interested in the text almost exclusively as a specimen of a given type, and a realization of general, recurrent patterns; the text was viewed theoretically as cleansed of historical accidents and any traces of the acts through which it had been produced or disseminated. In addition, the characteristics of the medium and the circumstances in which the literary work was published and received were placed in parentheses. If, conversely, literature is to be understood as discourse, literary text reveals itself from different points of view: as a dynamic, open, and singular event in the history of the emergence and processing of cultural meanings; as an artificial product that provides pleasure to the creative subject through its perfection because the subject semantically intervenes with it in the chain of semiotic interactions of a given culture by using given symbolic codes and languages in order to represent its own experience, knowledge, and imagination, as well as to provide a source of performative energy used to address, seduce, and challenge the other or earn its confirmation; as a space of the subject’s “internal” and “external” policy, and a nexus of its relationships with itself and others, with the literary-art

field, the media, social discourses, the dominant ideology, local traditions, foreign languages and cultures; as a mechanism that uses the text world presented and the perspectives of its subjects to activate the recipient’s cognitive schemes, memories, knowledge, views, and experience in the reading process, whereby the reader does not have to convert them into actual actions, but can—reading is a free-time activity, which is semiotically very important for the reader’s relationship to the text—reflect on them, verify, confirm, and reorganize them freely; readers do this by placing themselves experientially and/or mentally in the open structure of possible worlds created in advance, and by seeking suitable reference patterns in their mental worlds in order to disambiguate the textual meanings that are not sufficiently determined. Viewing literary text as a discourse element, its intertextuality and heteroglossia come to the forefront: in its verbal structures, we may trace the author’s symbolic interactions with influential models, fellow writers, adversaries, actual or possible audiences, and imprints of intricate semiotic processes such as responses to another’s discourse or symbolizations of corporeity and the unconscious. The text reveals itself as a site of dialogue with genres, ideologies, types of speech, sociolects, and registers; it contains the conscious and unconscious reactions of the text subject to discourses of other arts, mythology, religion, politics, law, science, economy, and so on. This way, literary text is observed in the “arena of life,” in its singular historicity and sociality; we, as observers, also have to take into account our own hermeneutic distance from the text’s historical horizon and be aware of the chain of transmissions through which the literary utterance came to us. Literature, considered as discourse, represents a particular field of verbal interaction between individuals, groups, communities, and institutions. It comprises not only texts, representations, or their intertextual links, but also practices of the actors dealing with textual media products, as well as ideologies and conventions of their behavior. Despite continuous exchange with the languages of mythology, religion, folklore, rhetoric, history, philosophy, psychology, and so on, literary discourse has also developed its own topics, semantic fields, types of speech, styles, forms, and genres over the centuries; accordingly, positions the subject may take in literature often cannot be compared with those provided by other discourses. For example, is there anywhere else other than in lyric poetry, printed in collections and literary journals, that it is common for someone to publicly, in a carefully structured and moving utterance, reveal his childhood traumas, or present his intimate address to a mysterious mistress for whom he entertains passionate feelings? Would anyone engage in a story several hundred pages long about invented people and events that have never

happened other than in the discourse of a novel? Many of the alleged special features of literary texts can generally also be found in other discourses; for example, a subjective confession in a psychoanalytical session or on Facebook, poetics in advertising, or fiction in mythology. This leads to the assumption that it is not prudent to discuss literariness with regard to individual texts, but only at the level of discourse. Literary discourse organizes itself around prototypical models of ideal or stillacceptable bundles of characteristics, through which the participants in communication know they are involved in an interaction that differs from the pragmatic-technical, mythologicalreligious, scientific-philosophical, or political ones (with regard to these distinctive features, I would like to mention an emphasized verbal perfectedness of texts and a depragmatized relationship to the world).18 The majority of subjects participating in literary discourse also behave in line with the assumption that an utterance or a text makes sense only within the universe of discourse typical of literature; in other words, in writing or reading the text they activate speciffic goals or expectations oriented by the prototypes of the literary. However, when a text deviates significantly from the central characteristics of the prototypic models of literary genres or styles, the border areas of literary discourse must be redefined; this happens in negotiating and aligning competences between the system’s agents. For instance, today Srečko Kosovel’s (1904–1926) Slovenian avant-garde collages from the 1920s are accepted as a normal, although atypical and marginal example of literature, whereas in the middle of the twentieth century even the cosmopolitan critic Anton Ocvirk, who was in favor of modernism, hesitated over whether to include them in the poet’s selected poetry together with his constructivist texts.19 Judging from the recent examples of criminal charges brought against two Slovenian writers (Matjaž Pikalo and Breda Smolnikar) for libeling real persons in their narrative prose, particular realizations of individual conventions that have already seemed well established in literature (e.g., fiction) can be the subject of disputes and constant negotiation.20 From the beginning of the 1980s onwards, systemic approaches to literature and the theory of the literary field have been bringing attention to the fact that literature is not merely an aggregate of texts and that it develops as a complex, relatively autonomous, and selfregulating social subsystem that, based on shared conventions of its actors, performs its own 18

See Chapter 6. A good introduction to Kosovel in English is The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel. Trans. David Brooks & Bert Pribac. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2008.—A similar logic to that of the Kosovel’s case is also applied in other types of art: the limits of the area we are prepared to perceive as artistic are repeatedly tested, challenged, and expanded (e.g., in body art performances). 20 Discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9. 19

cultural functions through activities connected with texts and carried out in the framework of inter-related positions of text production, distribution, reception, and post-processing (cf. Schmidt 1988; Bourdieu 1996). Understanding literature as discourse provides two insights that correct the “sociological” anti-textualism and abstract autonomism of older systemic approaches: how the (power) relations in the literary field and other sociohistorical circumstances are reflected and dealt with in a text, and how literary utterances evaluate, interpret, influence, and react to their milieu and traditions.21 Because literature is a discourse, the range of the texts and genres it encompasses (including their functions, forms, and meanings) is changing as part of the development of a particular language and forms of social interaction. Specifically, the character, shape, and contours of literary discourse depend on a vast variety of factors, of which I will enumerate but a few: the structural evolution, sociofunctional differentiation, and standardization of an ethnic language; the textually represented topics and perspectives that are most often associated with the concept of literature; prominent genre patterns and characteristic vocabularies; the overall genre and media systems and the division of their roles and functioning; the predominating modes of text distribution and consumption; the relationship of literature to other social discourses and its self-reference to its own memory, that is, intertextual drawing on the contents and forms from literature’s own past; the state of dominant and marginal aesthetic metaconcepts, and so on. Literary discourse is thus shaped only through a constant exchange of utterances and the establishment of provisional communicative agreements between its actors. Although literature is evidently an unstable area, it is also—precisely as a discourse—a special field of social and linguistic interaction. The distinctive features of literature originate primarily in the expectations and goals projected into the discourse by its participants, either as individuals, communities, or institutions. The existence and development of literary discourse thus depends on its functions. If literature was to succeed in establishing and preserving itself as a discourse due to the roles it played in sociolinguistic interaction, it had to be essential and necessary to people over a long period of time. Otherwise, it would not have shaped itself into a diversified and expensive system of publishers, theaters, media, criticism, awards, and so on in modern Western societies, which are based on rationality and the market. At least in the last two or three hundred years, literature has established its relative autonomy all over the world under the influence of Western metropolises, apparently accomplishing tasks that science, religion,

21

See also Chapter 2.

and other discursive domains have not been as capable of performing. It was this anthropological and social irreplaceability of literary discourse that the transdisciplinary Theory and cultural studies all too often forgot. Some literary experts—at least from Eagleton onwards—have made efforts to justify the future existence of literary theory with the argument that it continues to be interesting and useful because, using conceptual tools elaborated in literary studies, it can disclose verbal mechanisms through which other, more powerful discourses operate. Literary theory should primarily critically reveal the fact that politics, mass media, and other domains of social discourse employ ideologically biased literary devices and rhetorical procedures, such as manipulative connotations and target-oriented narrative clichés. This reasoning actually takes for granted the claims of Theory that other cultural practices (but not literature) are worthy of thorough examination. It may be true that reconstructing literary theory into a theory of literary discourse entails greater dependence on trans-disciplinary Theory, with its use of discourse and conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, psychoanalysis, pragmatics, and so on. However, at the same time the theory of literary discourse may lay claim to being competent and responsible for a specific subject area: its task is to explain how literary discourse is organized, how it maintains its difference from other domains of verbal interaction, what it is used for, and above all why for millennia people have been avidly creating and comprehending texts in which they have seen characteristics that the Western theoretical reflection has been labeling as literary for more than two hundred years: mentally absorbing representations or simulations of reality, verbal artistry and perfection, emotionality, imagination, the ability to arouse suspense, compassion, or intellectual and ethical reflection on the quotidian and transcendental aspects of human existence, and so on. In his book Literary Discourse, Jørgen Dines Johansen seeks the answer to this question. He believes that literary discourse is strongly imbued with life experience, but in such a way that it keeps presenting itself as something different from reality (Johansen 2002: 89–100, 103–109, 415–432). Johansen develops a typology of five discourses that can be found in the texts of all known world societies, from archaic and “prehistoric” societies to modern ones. Hence, it can be concluded that these discourses, which are actualized in various versions and under different names, are necessary for the existence and reproduction of any society. The role of “theoretical discourse”—in which Johansen includes mythology, religion, philosophy, sciences, and other disciplines—is to explain the existence of the world, universe, and the people living in it; “technical discourse” maintains and improves the material reproduction of society and encompasses, for instance, passing on experience in

hunting, farming, crafts, and industrial production; “practical discourse” influences texts that explain and regulate social structures and social interaction such as moral norms, and habits; and “historical discourse” regulates texts concerning the memory of tribes, clans, families, states, and individuals, for example in genealogies, chronicles, and topographies. To these four discursive domains Johansen adds another one, which is also historically constant: he calls it “mimetic discourse.” This discourse is characterized by the fact that in older periods its texts were still intertwined with the other four discourses (e.g., in myths, hunting and women’s poems), although its particular forms already existed independently even in archaic societies, for example in fairytales and humorous entertaining stories. In the process of modernizing Western societies, mimetic discourse decisively expanded and became institutionalized. It was modified into literary discourse. According to Johansen, literary discourse includes five features: the world presented in it is fictional; it uses language in its poetic function; it reexamines generally valid social norms and values by presenting stories, characters, and motives that elucidate, and concretize these norms (it thus individualizes and provides examples of general problems); it ensures that the authors’ and readers’ viewpoints do not depend on the usual pragmatic criteria of reality or utility. The mimetic quality of literary discourse lies not only in the fact that it presents reality in a fictional way, imitates the courses of realistic events, and fakes the content of real emotions. In addition, it is mimetic in the unique ability of its texts to imitate other texts and discourses: literary texts can imitate literary tradition, which is true, among other things, in the case of the imitatio of classical poems, but they can also imitate all the other four social discourses, even several at a time. In this last ability of literary discourse discussed by Johansen lies the key for the social necessity of literary discourse. By imitating other discourses, literature adopts and—through invented characters, stories, and motives— concretely illustrates and exemplifies their issues. A single invented story—like the one about the composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus—activates issues of modern art, music, ethics, politics, and metaphysics that determined the European individuals and nations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the collapse of Nazism. By individualizing general problems, literary discourse approaches the life experience of individuals, who are involved in the other four discourse types without being aware of how and with what these intervene in their lives. However, through its mimetic illustration and attentive linguistic and textual treatment, literary discourse makes it possible to experience and contemplate these discursive forces and reflect on their content, power, limits, and

influence on people. Literary discourse raises the awareness of how the world we live in is constructed semiotically and discursively. The mission of literary discourse theory could thus be to act as a witness (the Greek word theoria is etymologically related to the meanings of ‘witness’, ‘testimony’, and ‘eyewitness’; Rabaté 2002: 114) that defends the irreplaceability and the invaluable nature of literature before a tribunal of the public. It is invaluable even on its own because by analyzing the masterpieces of literary art it develops a sophisticated and subtle language that makes it possible to preserve the skills of careful, in-depth, and versatile reading of works through which the language establishes its broadest and most meticulously woven bonds with reality and the subject (cf. Levin 1999: 15–22).

2 Literary History between Narrative and Hypertext As late as in the mid-1980s, Gebhard Rusch (1985: 260) noted that literary historiography had been hardly touched by theoretical and philosophical discussions on history tackled by Collingwood, Danto, Koselleck, Rüsen, and others. However, after the publication of works such as Perkins’ Is Literary History Possible? (1992), Biti’s Strano tijelo pri/povijesti (The Alien Body of Narration; 2000a), the volume Rethinking Literary History (Hutcheon & Valdés 2002), and the thematic issue of the journal Neohelicon (Pál & Szili, eds. 2003), the status of literary metahistory has been significantly improved. Literary history is well aware of its own history, structure, and functions. The question remains how to write down literary history by taking into account the changes in the nature of the subject studied and the structure of the modern humanities (here I primarily refer to the demands for consistent historicizing), and nonetheless preserving disciplinary independence, albeit in reworked forms. On the following pages, the term “literary history” is primarily used to denote the great genre of literary historiography, rather than the developments in literature, its course, or the discipline dealing with these issues.22 Literary history is thus a genre of metadiscourse that draws on specialized historical literary studies to construct a synthesis, and produces the impression of a plausible “totality” in its representation of a given literature and literary development. Most often, literary histories presented literatures of a specific nation, period, genre, or intellectual and aesthetic current, whereas comparative studies surveyed larger areas and inter-cultural relations, such as histories of Central European, European, Latin American, or world literature. Whence this totality, and how is it formed? “The Idea of the Whole” The word “history” encapsulates its own history: the set of meanings understood under the current concept represents the sediment of distinctions made in the past; the word is 22

For example: Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835–1842) by Georg Gottfried Gervinus; Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–1871) by Francesco de Sanctis; Histoire de la littérature française (1894) by Gustav Lanson; Istorija russkoj literatury (1898–1899) by Aleksander N. Pypin; the works of Ivan Grafenauer (Zgodovina novejšega slovenskega slovstva, 1909–1911); France Kidrič (Slovenska kulturnopolitična in slovstvena zgodovina 1848–1895, 1955–1966), Anton Slodnjak (Geschichte der slowenischen Literatur, 1954, Zgodovina slovenskega slovstva, 1968), a group of authors from the Slovenian Society under the direction of Lino Legiša (Zgodovina slovenskega slovstva, 1956–1971) and Jože Pogačnik and France Zadravec (Zgodovina slovenskega slovstva, 1968–1972). Of supra-national significance are such works as the literary histories of Friedrich Bouterwek (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit dem Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts, 1801–1819), Pavel Jozef Šafárik (Geschichte der südslavischen Literatur, 1864), Matija Murko (Geschichte der älteren südslawischen Literaturen, 1908), or Paul van Tieghem (Histoire littéraire de l’Europe et de l’Amérique de la renaissance à nos jours, 1951).

derived from a series of conceptual changes within socio-cultural practices. The history of the word “history” resembles the development of the German lexeme Geschichte from the second half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century (Koselleck 2004: 26– 42). The Slovenian word for history (zgodovina) gained currency in the nineteenth century as a neologism signifying a totality, a collective singular. 23 According to Hegel, the term Geschichte (as is the case for its Slovenian equivalent) links past events (res gestae) with their representation (historia rerum gestarum; White 1987: 11–12). The historian as a subject of historical knowing is thus part of a broader whole, although he or she may well consider this whole merely the object of knowing and narrating.24 The stories of the past (plural Geschichten) that were inscribed into the annals and chronicles of the pre-modern period as moral lessons couched in rhetorical formulae and topics of invention, merged in the postEnlightenment period into a transcendent, unitary, and singular Geschichte that manifested the “idea of the whole” (the term is from Friedrich Schlegel, cf. Schmidt-Biggemann 1991; Pechlivanos 1995: 175). Borne on the crest of historical thinking in the Enlightenment, and signaled by the conversion of the plural form of the word to the singular, this change gave narrative coherence to both the literary and non-literary varieties of historiography. The (literary) historian that comes in the wake of nineteenth-century historicism becomes an omniscient, all-seeing narrator that reveals to his or her audience the deep motive power that combines disparate facts into a coherent narrative; “the idea of the whole” shaped the selection, combination, and interpretation of facts and emerged as the supra-personal hero that, in the guise of “beauty,” “progress,” and “spirit of the age/spirit of the nation,” directs the flow of history (cf. Fohrmann 1991; Perkins 1992: 1–6). The totality thus constructed by the historian is above all aesthetic, inasmuch as—unlike the chaotic world—it can be grasped and conceived as having closure or form. The whole is reflected as a story or narrative. Even the etymology of the Greek and Latin word historia, denoting both ‘narrative’ and ‘history’, as well as related words from various Slavic languages denoting these two phenomena (e.g., zgodovina, zgodba or povijest, powieść, and povest) draw attention to the fact that, in European conceptual history, the term “history” is clearly connected with the narrative. Hayden White’s term emplotment aptly encodes this notion of an elemental realm of events sunk in a long-since vanished time as something that is organized and interpreted through 23

The Slovenian word for history, zgodovina (etymologically ’happening’), was coined in the nineteenth century from “to happen,” “happening,” “event” with the addition of the suffix -ovina characteristic of concrete nouns and abstract nouns (cf. domovina ’homeland’; M. Snoj 1997: 747–748). 24 Such implications are subsequently rehearsed in hermeneutics, particularly in the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who conceived historico/temporal understanding ontologically and linked it to the problem of subjects’ reflections on their own historicity (Dolinar 1991: 46–51).

story-telling models that are appropriated from fictional genres (White 1987: 1, 21, 44–45; 1989: 20–21, 26–28; 2001: 223–225). The historian’s dilemmas—where to begin the story, what events to choose, how to arrange them, and how to direct them toward a conclusion25— are not only scholarly, but also aesthetic: in the process of writing, the historian must consider dramatic effect, tension, symmetry, imagery, wit, and related features (Perkins 1992: 37–46). In a number of influential essays, authors ranging from Morton to Hayden White, from Paul Ricœur to Lawrence Stone (cf. Roberts 2001) have argued that, from the very instant historiography emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, the story has invariably played the role of first violinist. Witness the fact the vast majority of great literary historical syntheses from the turn of the nineteenth century were written as narratives, even in those instances when they were encyclopedically structured (Perkins 1992: 20, 29–51).

Literary History and Literature Literary historiography, which began to flourish towards the end of the nineteenth century, traces its roots to the last three decades of the eighteenth century, to the moment when historicism seemed to show a way out of the contradictions of rationalist universalism, and reached its flowering at the end of the nineteenth century (Schmidt-Biggemann 1991: 49– 55; Blanke 1991). The solution to the problem was proposed as lying in the cluster of interrelated notions that included the conception of the individuality, contextual specificity, mutability, and progressive character of everything occurring to humans in their world; the role of historicism’s paradoxical clavis universalis was played by the embryonic or, more precisely, “aetological” epistemology that explains a phenomenon by its origin or first cause (cf. Hamilton 1996; 2001). On the world historical plane, the structure of spirit was seen to be temporally changing across great epochs (Hegel); from comparisons among spatially coexiting mentalities, customs, and languages, Herder, Humboldt, Ranke and others concluded that every culture possesses a distinctive past that determines its unique individuality. Historicism, however, was not merely a new, value-neutral methodology that became characteristic of the humanities. Seen as an important ideological factor in the wake of Herderian cultural nationalism, it was involved in the processes of cultural and political individualization of nations. In the case of “cultural ethnicities”—which, contrary to 25

Literary histories not infrequently rest on a narrative model about the disintegration of a once homogenous totality into heterogeneous directions and currents; what is taken to be whole, and what as fragmented, depends on the arbitrary selection of a point of origin: the pre-history is given in a panoramic, synthetic form without detailed distinctions; by contrast, the main story is more detailed by virtue of its narrative logic, and is consequently able to give the feature of heterogeneity a more palpable form (Perkins 1992: 36–37).

“historical nations,” were deprived of individual statehood (the Slovenians, Germans, and Italians were all relegated to this pitiable category)—it was literary historiography that attempted to redress the apparent lack of a heroic history of kings, wars, and conquests (cf. Fohrmann 1991: 211–213). In the sphere of cultural nationalism, the genre of literary history was working in tandem with journalism, national philology, and aesthetic literature. Together, they shaped stories in which the “people” or “nation” figured as the transcendental hero (with “beauty” sometimes acting as the heroine) that operates behind the scene of literary works (cf. Fohrmann 1991: 211–213). In this manner, literary histories accumulated the linguistic and cultural capital necessary for political investment in the nation’s “imagined community” (Anderson 1991), and, by enduring recourse to cultural memory, they legitimized the delimitation of the geopolitical territories according to the languages and cultural patterns that appeared to be dominant there. In Germany (and all the more so in Slovenia), literary historiography was initially largely the domain of enlightened scholars, educated elites or “circles,” and learned societies, with a relatively modest representation in periodicals (cf. Fohrmann & Voßkamp 1991: 10– 14). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the field acquired institutional backing, specifically with the establishment of national literature instruction in secondary schools and lyceums and, toward the turn of the century, with the introduction of systematic universitylevel teaching of national philology. This circumstance stimulated the writing and use of comprehensive literary histories. In Slovenia, however, Slovenian literary history was introduced into the university curriculum only in 1919, immediately after the formation of the new state of the South Slavs. The project for the subject, structure, and purpose of literary history, based on the nineteenth-century legacy of historicism and “the idea of the whole,” was formulated in a neo-romantic vein by Ivan Prijatelj (1875–1937), the classic figure of Slovenian literary and cultural historiography, in his inaugural lecture of December 1919, shortly after the founding of the University of Ljubljana (Prijatelj 1952: 1–36): Literature is the final expression of the spirit of a people at the highest stage of its development, when it has achieved the fullest degree of self-consciousness in the persons of its elect: the artists of the literary arts. Its creations are no longer [seen as] chance phenomena, but unfold in an organic, living developmental progression . . . (6). [C]onsequently we shall designate as literary history that branch of learning that places literary artists and their creations into sequential and parallel orders of experience and meaning, indicating their emergence and development with reference to the temper and circumstances of time and place, and evaluating their various qualities and powers in the light of the most advanced findings of aesthetics . . . (6–7). The historian’s task lies predominantly in critically reconstructing the past, which is to say, in transmitting—and at once also interpreting—what has

occurred in the past . . . (11). Literary history must proceed from analysis and must strive toward synthesis . . . (11). Thus, the literary historian achieves this purpose only if he shows the living, meaningful development of individual authors, both within and among themselves, as they progress toward beauty; and he does so in the form of a dramatic tableau that holds up a mirror to the nation and, at the same time, serves as a beacon illuminating its path upward and forward (36).

For Prijatelj, the nation is the supra-individual subject of history. A conceptually complete depiction of the past rests on a narrative of progress. Literary history exists for him as the genre that constructs an aesthetic synthesis (“a dramatic tableau”), whose socio-cultural mission reaches beyond the walls of the academy: it is, in short, the self-reflective activity of the people and the starting point for a cultural and political program. Prijatelj’s metahistorical essay reflects characteristic features of the subjects, procedures, perspectives, formation, goals, and functions of literary histories known until then and those that developed later on; it is thus a unique document on the consciousness of the literary history genre. In Slovenia, too, consciousness of genre is meaningful for the generic identity of literary history no less than the structural-conceptual invariants that link Slovenian historiographic texts from Čop to Pogačnik,26 and anchor them in prototypes such as Scherer’s powerful synthesis. Genre consciousness operates not only in programmatic metahistorical statements such as those of Prijatelj, but also in generic terms—the syntagm “history . . . of literature” occurs frequently in the titles of works of this kind—as well as in the memory of the genre itself.27 Although genre memory was shaped according to the late– nineteenth-century models of literary history, it still continues to influence the horizon of expectations at work in the reception of recent work in the genre series, Slovenska književnost 3 (Slovenian Literature 3; Borovnik et al., 2001), which is dedicated to literary production from the end of World War II to 2000. Many of the critics, for example, claimed that a uniform conception or a clear periodization was missing in that book, and measured the worth of individual writers by the number of paragraphs devoted to each of them. Literary history is a genre closely related to literary discourse. I have already mentioned White’s claim that the structure of many histories (and literary history is no exception) relies upon the story, which in turn is the result of the method (related to literary imagination) of knowing, ordering, evaluating, and making sense of material. In addition, there are many (literary) historians that are read as classical authors due to their aesthetic and stylistic qualities: here Herodotus and Thucydides are joined by writers such as Jules 26

The tradition of literary histories provides for the preservation of the basics of the literary canon; some periodization markers; conceptualization of epochs, groups, and other classification categories; evaluations of historical circumstances; assessment of conflicts; and so on. 27 For more on genres and memory, see Chapters 7 and 11.

Michelet, Theodor Mommsen—who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for his History of Rome (1854–1856, 1885)—and Ivan Prijatelj, whose collected works were included in the collection of Slovenian classics entitled Naša beseda (Our Word) in 1970. What is essential is that literature and literary history are close not merely in terms of form and style, but also genealogy and ideology. In order to understand the roles that literary history inherited from the nineteenth century, it is crucial that the evolution of literature as a super-genre, and of literary history as a great meta-genre, proceeded along parallel and intersecting paths. For some two hundred years, literary historians have shaped the general public’s understandings of literature; legislated the meta-discourse proper to the field; and, especially, “propagated” literature’s distinctions. From the very beginning, with academic and educational institutional support, literary historical discourse has been involved in the cognitive or ideological production of the very reality it purports to render objectively. Historiographical constatives (i.e., verifiable judgments of the actual past situations) thus turn out to be performatives, which, by posing statements about the object studied, actually establish this very object. Moreover, literary history emerged in the wake of the aesthetic autonomization of literature and throughout the nineteenth century kept pace with the modernization of European societies, developing at the boundaries of the emerging literary field and through constant exchange with the systems of sciences, education, and politics. In Slovenia, for example, the first attempt at the literary historical genre appears in Literatur der Winden (Slovenian Literature; 1831) that the critic, philologist, and librarian Matija Čop (1797–1835) wrote in German at the behest of Pavel J. Šafárik, compiler of the literary history of the South Slavs (Geschichte der südslawischen Literatur, ed. by Josef Jireček, 1864). Čop’s manuscript already marks a departure from the old-fashioned model of the biographic and bibliographic survey thanks to the author’s efforts to narrate and temporally delimit the cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic developments.28 Steeped in European culture, this aesthetician and founder of literary historiography provided the erudite background against which his friend, the poet France Prešeren (1800–1849), was able to introduce the aesthetic emancipation of poetry in the 1830s. Čop’s historiographic text indirectly backs Prešeren’s poetry and the belletristic achievements of the almanac Krajnska čbelica (The Carniolan Bee, 28

Among the formative traits of the literary-historical genre, we consider Čop’s attempt to devise a periodization and synthetic denomination for distinguishing individual periods; the beginnings of causal explanations; the aesthetic and evolutionary evaluation of stages of linguistic development and differentiation of literary production; the tracking of social strata that succeeded each other as pivotal bearers of cultural production (probably on the model of historian August Wilhelm Schlegel); the historical consciousness of the ephemerality of “taste;” and, above all, the contemporary aesthetic concept of literature as a measure of the tradition of verbal culture. The intermediary between Šafárik and Čop was one of the leading Slavic linguists in the Austrian Empire, Jernej Kopitar.

1830–34, 1848), and offers one of the earliest indicators that literary historians had joined forces with writers. Many of them attempted to compile a respectable textual corpus, order it into a historically continuous whole, and link this entity to the new, aesthetic, and national understanding of the concept of “literature.” They consequently tended to discover a consistent progression toward beauty and national self-determination in the literary past; these objectives were to have materialized at the very threshold—or in the middle—of the era when literary historical syntheses began to take shape. It was also often believed that literary “masterpieces” both exemplified and exceeded their periods of origin; a historical explanation of their original “context” was thus meant to give readers a better sense of the greatness of masterpieces. Moreover, it was believed that the task of a literary historian was not only to interpret literary masterpieces as supremely expressing the “spirit of the age” or the historical context, but also as mediating supra-historical ideas and values (cf. Perkins 1992: 177–178). To sum up, traditional literary histories both explain literary texts and—perhaps because of their genetic kinship to literary discourse—tend to solidarize with their perspective. Thus, for instance, as early as the second third of the nineteenth century, Slovenian literary history largely adopted Prešeren’s romantic mythologization of poetry.29 Prešeren’s sonnet that imaged the poet as an Orpheus cultivating and uniting his nation (from The Wreath of Sonnets, 1834; Prešeren 2001: 92–93) was reshaped by critics and historians into the “Prešeren paradigm”—in other words, into an ideology according to which the Slovenians, lacking their own state since the fall of the medieval principality of Carantania (Sln. Karantanija), are restored to their national identity through their poets and writers—that is, through their literature and culture.30

The Public Past We are directed to study literary history as a genre not only by its narrative, stylistic, and ideological similarities with literary works, but also by its public impact, which is also comparable with certain literary genres: telling stories about literature and literary narratives both take part in the discursive production of the past. In every present, the past exists exclusively as a mnemonic realm of textual traces or other representations; that is, as a “public past” (Bennett 1990: 46–52). This “public past” is inserted into the present by means 29

See also Chapters 3, 5, 11. The ideological view of literature as a means for establishing statehood is not peculiar to the Slovenians— contrary to the view held in the 1960s and 1970s by a number of critics (Dušan Pirjevec, Dimitrij Rupel)—but is typical of cultural nationalism and may be found as early as the nineteenth century in Eastern and Central Europe and even in Great Britain (cf. Juvan 2008a). 30

of various texts, genres, and institutions: from scholarly disciplines (archaeology, archival studies, history, etc.) to popular images shaped in memoirs, diaries, fictional film, documentaries, and, not least of all, literary works, especially historical and social novels.31 Historical genres—literary, quasi-literary, journalistic, and scholarly—cannot make reference to the past in public discourse because this past no longer exists; they can, however, evoke it through the potent verbal and visual means of their illocutionary force (cf. Ankersmit 2001: 240). In creating a significant part of the public past, literary history—like history in general—has fashioned its own social authority. As a discipline, it is thought capable of arriving at a reliable “historical truth,” even if only temporarily and provisionally, provided it construes facts correctly and explains them in a manner consistent with the protocols of historical demonstration (Bennett 1990: 46–51; Munslow 1997: 13; Valdés 1998: 117; Ankersmit 2001: 241, 244). Verifying the disciplinary construction of “historical truth” is analogous to the presentation of proofs in legal proceedings investigating a temporally remote crime: the actions in question cannot be reconstructed with any absolute certainty, but can only be represented through a regulated protocol of juxtaposing conflicting evidence, located in intertextual relations between historical documents—familiar or newly discovered—and other historical explanations (cf. Berkhofer 1995: 74). Historiography—and this holds equally for literary historiography—must confront heterogeneous discourses and opinion makers that also shape the public past from their conflicting perspectives. On the one hand, historians are still resting on the laurels of Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher that raised history into “die universellste, allgemeinste und höchste aller Wissenschaften” at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Fohrmann 1991: 206–207). On the other hand, (literary) history always breathes the air of the present. For this reason it must take into account the notions that circulate as cultural currency. Even though historians usually disdain those oversimplifications that are so useful to politics, theoretical speculation, or public opinion, they simply cannot shed their skin when it comes to interpreting cultural “otherness.” They cannot, in other words, avoid “domesticating” or attuning the past to the semantics and the mentality of the present (White 2001: 224–225; Ankersmit 1994: 160, 193). The predicament in which historical writing finds itself is illustrated by the example of Eastern and Central Europe, where the experience of the postcommunist transition has led to a renewed interest in the public past that requires the redefinition of collective identities (cf. Biti 1999: 217), especially national identities. Day-to-

31

On historical genres in literature see Troha et al., ed. 2008.

day politics compels historians to reconsider everything that may seem problematic in the notso-distant past (e.g., revolutionary activity in Slovenia during the Second World War); at the same time, their historical expertise—even when dealing with particular issues such as the early medieval ethnogenesis of the Slovenians—is criticized by certain intellectuals and political parties as harmful to today’s national identity. Literary history is no exception, although, at least in Slovenia, it is not thrust into the thick of polemics. The explanations with which it operates, however, make increasingly explicit reference to political and ideological changes in the cultural space. The literary canon is reshuffled, expanded, and pluralized; for example, with revaluation of the Catholic tradition or the inclusion of “suppressed,” marginal writers, right-wing émigré writing, and trivial genres, and with increased emphasis on the role of women. The established images of the classics or of significant events also undergo change: for example, the “national poet” Prešeren and the “national writer” Ivan Cankar (1876–1918)—who used to be famed for a “free spirit” (the pocket watch minus the chain was Prešeren’s emblem) or socialist commitment, respectively (Prijatelj once characterized Cankar’s Kafkaian short story The Servant Jernej and His Right of 1908 as a “globally important and powerful poetic re-creation of the Communist Manifesto”)—are presently both being promoted as open to Catholicism by some literary historians.

The Great Genre Speaking about literary history as genre, it may be characterized as “great” primarily because it resembles “great literary genres” (Kos 2001: 154). Just like the epic, the historical novel, and the tragedy, it too narrates the stories that have served to build and strengthen collective identities. In the spirit of the nineteenth century’s cultural nationalism, the philological and historical quest for national roots (e.g., by studying etymology or seeking old manuscripts) coincided with the agendas of imaginative writers that used the historical drama or “national” narrative poems to prove and support the specificity, centuries-long historical continuity, and political aspirations of the “imagined community” that goes under the name “nation” (Leerssen 2002). Calling literary history a “great genre” is further justified by Lyotard’s notion of grand récits. According to Lyotard, narrative is the leading agent for the formation and the transmission of culture; grand récits (“master/great narratives”), such as the idea of the emancipation of the individual and of progressive spiritual self-consciousness, corroborated European self-perception from the enlightenment through postmodernism. Since its inception at the turn of the eighteenth century, the genre of literary history has also joined

the company of such great narratives (Munslow 1997: 14–15). This is why the epithet “great” is particularly apropos when it comes to literary history. In Slovenian literary histories from Čop to the present, the same meta-narrative pattern is applied, although its details vary. In essence, however, its legitimizing objective may be summarized as follows: to demonstrate that, from the Middle Ages onward, writing in Slovenian has gradually tended towards transcending merely occasional communicative purposes; that the consciousness of a distinctly “Slovenian” identity dates back to the Reformation; and that since the eighteenth century it has taken the form of a purposeful activity, growing in self-awareness, refining its stylistic and generic repertoires, consolidating its institutional infrastructure, augmenting its pool of producers and consumers, becoming increasingly homogenous,32 asserting the preeminence of the aesthetic principle above all other aims of writing; and, finally, to affirm the individual’s freedom of speech and imagination, and strive to overtake models of European intellectual progress. This great narrative of Slovenian literary history was succinctly encapsulated by Prijatelj’s triad slovstvo—književnost—literatura (oral and manuscript culture—print culture—aesthetic literature); in this way it was given conceptual form at the time when the founders of Slovenian literary history sought to institutionalize their field as the foundational discipline of a truly national university. Robert F. Berkhofer, however, uses Lyotard’s term “great story” or “metastory” in the merely formal, narratological sense of a master code through which discrete historical stories with a narrower content are textually integrated (Berkhofer 1995: 38–42). Biographical events, excerpts from chronicles, and similar elements acquire meaning as they pass through the interpretative code of the metastory, presenting the totality of the past only by virtue of this code. Among such great historiographic stories are, for instance, the rise and spread of Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism. Literary history also acquires the predicate of a “great” genre because it synthetically covers and combines partial literary historical and philological studies, as well as panoramic overviews borrowed from neighboring fields. Literary history creates a metastory that is comparable to a saga (Gallie 2001: 47–48), inasmuch as it absorbs the stories of individual generations and eras and inscribes them into the majestic developmental curve of national, European, or world literature. The magnitude of the historical synthesis consists not only in the scope of the material covered, but also in its proper discursive strategies that strive for totalization. The very 32

Via the mid nineteenth-century standardization and public use of standard Slovenian and political efforts to culturally “unite” the Slovenians under the Habsburg crown.

narrative form (its closure) creates the impression of a rounded-off and coherent whole. In White’s words, narrated reality “wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness” (1987: 21). The problem is that every totalization bases itself on exclusions, abstractions, and oversights: thus, for example, the notion of “Slovenian literature,” understood as an “idea of the whole,” relegated works written in other languages or in Slovenian dialects to the periphery or, more precisely, to a lower developmental stage. Much has already been said about the exclusion of women and minorities from literary-historical totalities; about leaving out “light” genres in the construction of periodization or other schemes (eras, literary movements, and typologies); about how comparatistic constructions of international literary currents ignored everything deemed to be situated at the periphery of a Western perspective.33 The victims of totalization, however, also include literary works that usually merit serious historical treatment. Indeed, they figure as hypostatic entities whose historical concreteness dissipates in the atmosphere of the great story (cf. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, cited in Pechlivanos 1995: 175). This is the circumstance to which Vladimir Biti drew attention (1999: 221–222), and which resembles White’s (1987: 66 passim) and Ankersmit’s (1994) analyses of literaryhistorical domestication of the “historical sublime.” The concept of the sublime points not only to the “terrifying spectacle of change which destroys everything, creates anew and again destroys” (Kant)—in other words, to incomprehensible historical events such as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the October Revolution, or the Holocaust; it also suggests the entire realm of the past that “lies beyond our cognitive, historical and political grasp and that successfully resists all our efforts to master it intellectually” (Ankersmit 1994: 160, 193). Quotidian life and mentality also figure here because, in Ankersmit’s view, they are both marked by “‘noumenal’ strangeness.” Permeated by the mental and behavioral structures of life, every literary text is fundamentally imbricated in a historical alterity. This is why every text resists conceptual categorization, assimilation to contemporary horizons of meaning, and narrative appropriation within the “plot” of literary history. The narrative synthesis of literary history erases the sublimity of the individual literary text, and deforms the historicity that emerges from the intertextual meshing of the literary-aesthetic and the socio-cultural contexts as well as the life-world of the author or reader. For example, the seventh poem of the lyrical cycle Obrazi (Images) by the late romantic Slovenian poet Simon Jenko (1835–1869) unfolds its meanings through the context of the author’s biography, his pessimism, and his social

33

See Chapter 3.

frustrations, as well as against the background of a millennial imaginary of ruins and of the ideological

currents

of

the

second

half

of

the

nineteenth

century,

such

as

Schopenhauerianism.34 In the literary-historical synthesis, however, this poem no longer emerges as a palimpsest of distant and recent mentalities, cultural memory, and personal impressions, but is, for example, reduced to a specimen of nature poetry or an instance of verse structure. In the discourse of literary history, totality is the outcome of many similar maneuvers through which individual texts or facts, deprived of sublimity, emerge as synecdoches of an infinite context (cf. Bryson 1994: 72). Finally, literary history draws its generic “greatness” from its powerful authority to construct the literary canon as a representative and memorable corpus of texts, genres, authors, interpretations, and conventions. Following critical reviews, essays, and specialized literary-historical articles in newspapers and journals, extensive syntheses of literary history come to represent the final stage in the process of canonization. These syntheses regularly become sources for many educational applications in textbooks—which in practice exert the strongest and most direct influence on the societal dissemination of “orientational models” about literature and its temporal changes. This is why the publication of literary histories tends to spark vigorous debate about who was included and how many lines were devoted to whom.

The Present of Literary History Existing and functioning as a (great) genre, literary history cannot simply rise above other types of discourse and observe them from the disinterested and purely academic point of view. It too must adapt its structures and redefine its functions in the course of history. Hence it is logical to pose the question: “How should one write literary history today?” Behind the topicality of this question, however, lurks a disposition more favorable to literary historiography than was the case in the 1970s, when a “formalist” deconstruction prevailed and Paul de Man reproached historians for taking a “detour or flight from language” and resorting to “nonlinguistic referential models” (de Man 1979: 79); and when contributors to the New Literary History (1970) struggled with the dilemma of whether or not literary history had become hopelessly outmoded (Pechlivanos 1995: 170–171). Whereas the poststructuralist formalism of the 1970s seemed to dismiss historical interpretation as such, in the next decade a historic turn held sway over the social sciences, in the humanities, and in literary studies;

34

See also Chapter 5.

Fredric Jameson’s slogan (from The Political Unconscious, 1981) “Always historicize!” continues to echo everywhere (Berkhofer 1995: 267). The great genre of literary history, as it still currently exists, has proven to be incompatible with the present historical consciousness. In this I am thinking not only of the particular Slovenian and Central and Eastern European features of post-communist transition with its accompanying revision of historical self-images and the decline of the dissident or national “sanctity” of literature and litterateurs. I also have in mind the broader horizon that goes under the name posthistoire (Gehlen 1994) or postmodernism. The postmodern collapse of master narratives that has brought about the deconstruction of narrative-teleological structures and totalizations underlies the skepticism about the future of literary history as a great genre (cf. Conrad & Kessel 1994: 15–17; Munslow 1997: 1–2, 14–16). Consequently, the “metastories” (Berkhofer 1995) that had formed the backbone of traditional literaryhistorical master texts have lost both their conceptual basis and metaphysical legitimacy. Postmodernism has dismantled the old explanatory categories of development, art, progress, nation, Western civilization, spirit of the age, essence of the novel, and similar “ideas of the whole” that had shaped the meaning of literary-historical narratives and has reduced them to the status of superfluous heroes. In the narrower domain of the humanities and the social sciences, postmodernity— which in the arts became famous because of a simulated return to the past—was marked by a “turn to history” in the 1980s.35 To be sure, this development was given an assist by the banal self-regulation of the field; in other words, by the replacement of an exhausted scholarly paradigm (“textual fundamentalism” or “vulgar linguism”) by its opposite, which alone in the stressful competition of academic life guarantees a visible career path (Perkins 1992: 10–11). To some extent, storytelling had also performed the commercial role of a rhetoric through which (literary) history could secure its success in the publishing and academic marketplace. Out of the fevered atmosphere of postmodern relativism and the mania for media visibility, an old principle had reemerged: the permission to pursue all approaches and all styles—provided they were not boring. The historian attempted to attract the attention of an educated, though not specialized public (Stone 2001: 290). The deeper reasons for this turn to historicizing and narrative, however, should be sought in epistemological, ethical, and political factors.36

35

However, the direction of this turn was overwhelmingly not to the right—if I may use a political metaphor— which means that the resemblance to neoconservative bases of postmodern re-traditionalization is only apparent. 36 I treat only those among them that influenced the new historicism, cultural materialism, and feminism, and challenged the validity of viewing literary history as constituting a specific discipline.

Epistemologically, the recent historicist impulse resembles the emergence of historicism some two hundred years ago as a counterweight to Enlightenment rationalism. This time, however, historicist thought develops through responding to the postmodern dissolution of great story of scientific knowledge, progress, and universal rationality. Moreover, unlike the old historicist response, it has become conscious of its own limitations. The turn from structuralist scientificity to the new historicism is primarily anchored in Michel Foucault’s writings on the archaeology of knowledge and the genealogy of discourses (cf. Müller & Wegmann 1985; Maclean 1998; Valdés 1998). Foucault shows us that knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, is always local, provisional, and pragmatic: it relies on mechanisms that reinstate or problematize consensus. In the classical formulation of Leopold von Ranke, the old historicism had already emphasized the individuality, diversity, and mutability of cultural forms. Yet it was precisely by taking the logic of these presuppositions to its extreme that postmodernity succeeded in subverting the universal validity of historicism itself (White 1989: 40): in the final analysis, the conception of history is itself culturally “provincial,” bound to Western civilization (Berkhofer 1995: 247). In addition, the existence of competing parallel or simultaneous interpretations of the same set of historical events have led to the recognition that history is an open-ended, infinite hermeneutic discourse comprised of insights engaged in a dialogic enterprise of mutual revisions and reinterpretations (White 1987: 60; 1989: 21–27; Munslow 1997: 4; Berkhofer 1995: 74; Ankersmit 2001: 240; Gallie 2001: 50; Mink 2001: 213). At the moment an abyss yawns between the theory and the practice of literary historiography. On the one hand, many contemporary approaches swear by the principle of radical historicity; on the other, voices from many of the same ranks raise doubts—rooted in a profound respect for historicity—about whether or not it is still possible at present to write (literary) history (Perkins 1992: 12; Berkhofer 1995: ix, 25). The market continues to be flooded with histories written according to tried and true formulas, whereas works and projects based on contemporary metahistory are still rare. Such, for instance, is A New History of French Literature (1989), edited by Denis Hollier, and authored by over one-hundred-andsixty contributors whose pieces give the work the mosaical, inscriptional, encyclopedic structure of the premodern chronicle (cf. Perkins 1992: 57–60; Pechlivanos 1995: 171–174).37 A similarly fragmentary, multi-perspectival approach is combined with intersecting

37

The initial and closing entries—“778: Entering the date” and “1989: How can one be French”—both dealing with issues of dating and nationality, which are the underlying notions of the literary historical genre—signal that this postmodern encyclopedia of over eleven hundred pages nonetheless preserves a narrative template.

heterogeneous historical contexts in the comparative history of Latin American literatures (Valdés 1998) and a similar project that resulted in the four volumes of History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Cornis-Pope & Neubauer, eds. 2004–2010). The return to history described above entailed the return of the story. Beginning with the 1970s, “the revival of narrative” has been taking place even among the leading representatives of the French nouvelle histoire, who grew disillusioned with the structuralist and scientific paradigm of knowledge (Stone 2001). American analytical philosophy considers narrative a legitimate epistemological tool, equivalent to other procedures of scientific explanation (Mink 2001: 213). As a form of interpretation, narrative is capable of becoming a sensitive instrument in the hands of critically or hermeneutically conscious historians: through narrative, they are able to overcome determinism by applying concepts of enabling, implication, and potentiality; finally, they consider how historical actors may have themselves conceptualized or narrated the causes, goals, and consequences of their actions and how they—or others—have already represented their motives and behavior to the public (cf. Lemon 2001: 113; Mandelbaum 2001: 55–56; Dray 2001: 37; Olafson 2001: 85). Narrative has indeed returned to the stage, but only after—to use formalist jargon—its device has been laid bare. This is why narrative in contemporary literary history can hardly imitate the great syntheses written up to the middle of the twentieth century: its position, meaning, and structure have changed. Thanks to White, the theory of historiography has shaken the authority of a kind of history in which an invisible omniscient narrator relates an apparently objective “true story” and seemingly impartially explains “What in fact occurred.” The narratological approach to historical writing—inspired by postmodern “meta-theory,” itself the progeny of structuralism and deconstruction—laid bare the constructedness of narrative and revealed its dependence on the following factors: the historico-hermeneutic and socio-ideological orientation of the historian; the strategies for distinguishing between “events” and “actions” as meaningful cultural units within the morass of lost time; the criteria according to which elements are chosen as the raw material (“fabula”) for representation and organization into plot (“sjuzhet”) as well as narrative perspectives, such as the alternation of panoramic shots and close-ups; introduction of information about the subsequent “consequences” of events about which the actors themselves could have had no awareness; solidarity with the value system of one of the represented groups, and so on. Or, as Ankersmit noted, the historian’s knowledge and representation of past events is just another type of Kantian categorization: the subject domesticates the “alterity” of the past by using categories (Ankersmit 1994: 155–159). Following Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arthur Danto, and W. J.

Mommsen, many others (cf. Rusch 1985: 261–264) have observed that historical facts are constituted and justified only in the act of explanation. In this regard, literary history must also recognize that the same also holds for its key concepts. Categories like “subject” or taxonomic terms for literary kinds, genres, groups, currents, styles, and periods, are often a posteriori conceptual and taxonomic constructs (Pechlivanos 1995: 179; Perkins 1992: 61– 84), and not facts that actually existed within the timeframe that is described.38 In their vindications of radical constructivism, Glasersfeld and Maturana emphasize that all knowledge is a construct of the psychological and neurological system of individuals observing their environment; because individuals always strategically shape and verify their knowledge only through their practical and communicational behavior (i.e., in their intersubjective contacts), it is understandable that historical knowledge also has the nature of a cognitive construction: “[T]he so-called problems of historiography, i.e., its perspectivity, relativity, subjectivity, constructivity, etc. will turn into methodological principles and into a sine qua non of any form of historiography” (cf. Rusch 1985: 275; Schmidt 1985b: 280, 296). The waves of narratological and hermeneutic self-reflexivity eroded the former objectivistic semblance of a totality. In consequence, instead of rendering the integrity of epochs and unity of ongoing processes, historical thought now prefers to emphasize contingency, discontinuity, heterogeneity, and the localization of past events; instead of offering a totalizing vision, it uses the concepts of intertextuality and dialogism to valorize the logic of the relativity, hybridity, and transgressivity of geopolitical and cultural boundaries (cf. Pechlivanos 1995: 177). It is well known that the dissolution of a uniform image of the world led the great genres of literary narration to radical transformations, and realistic novels were replaced by the modern novel with its perspectivity, plurality, self-reflection, and compositional openness. Following Jauss’ initiative from the 1970s for historians to emulate the literary procedures of the modern novel in order to appropriately present the contingency of history (cf. Bürger 1985: 202), the narrative method in literary historiography has also been trying to change, although with considerable delay. Literary history is considering how to move away from linear narration and advance “a rhisomatic complex structure,” in which agents formerly considered marginal—such as popular literature, subculture, and the avantgarde—gain some legitimacy (Kálmán 2003: 43). The unitary and omniscient historiographic perspective in which historical agents were shunted into the position of narrative objects has lost credibility; in its place “multivocality” has come into play (Burke 2001), giving 38

The examples of antiquity and the middle ages are obvious; a similar case can be made of the concept of the romantic (Perkins 1992: 85–119) or of romantic poetry.

prominence to various past and present voices, as well as to incompatible views on past events. Thanks to the decentering of the historiographic perspective, careful attention is paid to life experiences that were formerly disdained or marginalized, such as those of women or social, racial, and ethnic minorities. Thus, in alliance with cultural studies, a “history from below” is constructed (Pickering 1997: 4, 57, 142–146). Last but not least, radical historicizing rests on recognizing its own “wordliness” (the term is Said’s). Literary history, as discourse, lives throughout history in a concrete, culturally specific heteroglossia, shaping relations among individuals, institutions, social strata, and communities. Feminists, gays, Blacks, the formerly colonized, and other supporters of the rights of oppressed groups demand that academics take on the responsibility of asking themselves who is helped and who hindered by their representations of literary production. Partisans of political correctness in literary studies were often criticized—not only by stubborn conservatives, but also radical critics—for clouding the “wordliness” of their discipline with a moralistic illusion of rectifying old injustices by the strategy of equal historical treatment and canonical representation of literary works by members of each and every social minority; in this they kept forgetting that many writers tend to avoid unambiguous group identities or even oppose them, and that the area of creativity is not determined through the writer’s social status to an extent that would allow completely leveling out all of the other key inequality factors: the inequality of their talents and existential experience, the unpredictable movement of the semiosis of their texts, and the bare contingency of historical circumstances that opened the paths to this or that audience for them. Regardless of these doubts, it must nonetheless be said that postmodern historicizing presupposes a self-critical hermeneutics that, following the example of Foucault, concerns itself with the genealogy of (literary) historical discourse, asking how it positions subjects and categorizes objects. From this perspective, for instance, it makes a difference whether literary history presents the concept of world literature as a value category based on a canon composed of nearly exclusively white Western males, who are members of large nations and languages, or as a descriptive concept denoting a complex, interdependent world system of exchanges, translations, transplantations, mutual influences, and flows from a multitude of national, microregional, and macroregional cultures and subcultures, including interliterary communities and border zones.39 Within the context of spontaneous ideologies of Slovenian

39

See Chapter 3.

literary history, the decision to write monographs on Slovenian female writers (recently, this has been tackled by Silvija Borovnik and Katja Mihurko Poniž) or to include Zofka Kveder’s (1878–1926) naturalistic and feminist works in the Collected Works of Slovenian Poets and Writers, which up until now has been an exclusively male collection, bears precisely this kind of ethical and political relevance.

The Literariness of Literary History Changes in the systems of art and literature—in the historiographic “object”—are also key to posing questions about the present condition of writing of literary history. Within a culture distinguished by leisure and the growing use of electronic media, the remnants of romantic ideologies concerning the autonomy and supreme significance of the literaryaesthetic realm are being lost, and the mythologized image of the writer grows ever dimmer. Art is becoming part of a disenchanted world, merging with the culture of the everyday. 40 Intrinsic to the genre of literary history was the motif that scholarly representations of past developments of literary culture should help the readership in enjoying historically remote verbal artworks at higher levels of aesthetic sophistication. Literary history thus sought historical arguments for a supra-historical value of verbal art. Prijatelj’s programmatic statement, cited at the beginning of this chapter, attested to this view. Even the Russian formalists, although under the guise of their revolutionary-technical jargon, were among the inheritors of this romantic (or, more precisely, neo-romantic) aesthetic. They founded a modern literary science on the premise that, just as literature in its capacity of a specific (“artistic”) realm of verbal communication requires a specific scientific investigative, explanatory, and conceptual apparatus, so too does the discipline of literary history. For this reason, the formalist polemics with the historicism of the positivists and Marxists elaborated a more precise, phenomenological notion about the immanent evolution of literary forms: they turned their attention to investigating the “internal” factors guiding the history of literature; specifically, the intertextual relations among works, genres, and forms within the “literary series” as a “system” that is independent of the Marxist “material base” or the positivist milieu and moment (cf. Perkins 1992: 153–173). The formalist idea of literary evolution introduced the principle of systemic self-regulation guided by the psychological opposition between automatization and de-automatization of form; that is, between the sharpening and the dulling of perceptions of the differential attributes of a form projected onto the comparative

40

See Chapter 1.

“background” of other published works. The formalists’ views of immanent literary development remained intact—albeit with certain accommodations to extra-literary factors— until the middle of the twentieth century. Felix Vodička, for example, considered the main goal of literary history to consist precisely in investigating “the changes in the organization of literary forms”; that is, “the development of literary structure,” even though he thought it essential to take into account the entire complex of semiotic conditions existing among author, literary work, historical reality, and the public. In his opinion, comparative analyses of texts are needed for determining the “evolutionary value” (der evolutionäre Stellenwert) of a literary tendency (Vodička 1976: 30–86). The subject that determines this “evolutionary value” is obviously none other than the historian. Historians believe themselves to be exclusively competent to find a structural causality and finality beneath the surface of the empirical historical developments. The same premise underlies yet another influential theory of the internal laws of literary development—the agonistic dialectics of Harold Bloom. He too discerns in poetic texts the rhetoric of a revisionist revolt of the young poet against the power of influence of older artworks (cf. Perkins 1992: 159–163). In opposition to theories regarding the immanent causality of literary development, the structuralists and early post-structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s (Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, and others) set about undermining the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. They subsumed literature within an analysis of the processes of production and transformation of meanings that reinstated the textual subject within a network of social discursive practices or epistemes. The “turn to history” was actually already started by the post-structuralists: departing from semiotic premises, and moving via the notion of the deconstructed sign, they arrived at a model of history that did not render it equivalent to a past empirical reality, but viewed it as a conflicting discursive formation (cf. Mullaney 1996b: 161–162). The French poststructuralists, Foucault foremost among them, anticipated the full turn to the historicism of the 1980s. This move decisively shifted literature from the intrinsic method of formalist approaches and moved it back into the camp of the living language, culture, and society— which is to say, where it had already been placed in the “old” historicism. Nevertheless, compared to positivist historiography, literary culture is now seen as even more tightly intertwined with a multitude of other signifying practices, from juridical discourse and quotidian and mass media to the politics of gender and the body. As a discernible entity, literature has almost disappeared. For this reason, in posing the question about the present possibility of writing literary history, it becomes necessary to shift the emphasis from the noun to its epithet: “How can one now write literary history at all?” How can the genre of

literary history be salvaged from the avalanche of other varieties of historiography or, more precisely, cultural studies? Or is literature only one among the masses of documents comprising a cultural history? Or is literary history no longer even a discipline of literary studies, but must find itself new employment in historiography, anthropology, ethnography, or sociology?41 Just like Roman Jakobson at the dawn of formalism, literary historians today cannot content themselves with bricolage, with an eclectic mix made up of “historical backgrounds,” biographies, linguistic and cultural historical excursions, notations of individual episodes from literary life, panoramic overviews of literary currents, and synopses and interpretations of literary works. Wellek’s situating of everything historical in the “extrinsic” approach is no less controversial. Literary history must find other kinds of explanations for the imbrication of the literary field in other cultural realms;42 after all, it is to them that literature reacts and it is on them that it works with its imagination. As stated by Ort, certain “cultural patterns or symbolic structures are generated or modified by literature and are transmitted via literary discourse” to become “guidelines for literary or non-literary ‘secondary action’” (1985: 337). The fact that literary culture is not merely a “reflection and transformation of experience but also a major force in producing events” is especially true for Eastern and Central Europe, where certain literary texts, such as Sándor Petőfi’s “Nemzeti dal” (National Song) in the revolutionary year 1848, have had a major political impact (Neubauer 2003: 69). Literature in history, therefore, performs as “a form and forum for cultural practice” (Mullaney 1996b: 162–163). A number of recent conceptions that draw on the overwhelmingly post-structuralist notion—from the “poetics of culture” or “the circulation of social energy” (Greenblatt 1988: 5, 1–20; 1989) to “a history of literary culture” (Valdés 1998: 117, 121; Neubauer 2003)—make such an explanation possible. After “the turn to ordinariness” (Pickering 1997: 54–90) even literary historians cannot overlook the fact that writers and readers construct their ethical-cognitive relations to the world and to themselves through meanings that come from everywhere—not just from art, but also from quotidian reality, politics, philosophy, and religion. Despite this, the formal and content features of literary texts have persistently referred primarily to the literary tradition and to the contemporary literary culture. Were it not for the fact that literary intertextuality has so long 41

The same dilemma of comparative literature is thematized by Virk (2003, 2007). We understand culture as a spatio-temporal, socially-determined, and socially productive semiotic supersystem (of languages, knowledge, customs, practices, conventions, texts, and products) that forms “networks of meanings” (Clifford Geertz) through which individuals orient themselves in the world and make sense of existence, work, and social interaction. 42

prevailed in the acts of authors, readers, and others, the concept of literature as a super-genre (or, more precisely, as a relatively autonomous social field) could simply not take shape. For this reason, literary history as a great genre still functions as a discipline of its own if it confines itself to giving historical, anthropological, and systemic explanations for literariness: how the need for the production, reception, and post-processing of texts conceived as “verbal art” was historically formed and developed in cultures that were overtaken by the global process of modernization, or, more precisely, how the sense for a distinctive body of works called “literature” functioned and changed in cultures. Seen from this perspective, literature is no longer a metaphysical essence, but a field, a social subsystem, which embraces not only texts, but also media, actors, institutions, mentalities, conventions, customs, gestures, speech, and other acts (Schmidt 1985b, 1989; Bourdieu 1996). Literary culture thus may be regarded as one among the stable and to a great extent institutionalized practices that are significant for the production and exchange of cultural meanings. After all, ideological models of social discourse spread through the medium of literature and influence the formation of political, ethnic, religious, socio-cultural, and other identities. Literature, using the power of verbal representation, nonetheless shapes and transmits human experience (the “life-world”) in all its unlimited heterogeneity; here the agency of the individual is tested; here too, the individual’s potential and relation to transcendence and alterity (existential, social, sexual, racial, imaginative, etc.) are played out. For this reason, the literary field has assumed its idiosyncratic conceptual-formal and generic articulation through interdiscursive exchanges with the historical setting. It has elaborated its distinctive signifying system and its specific communicational “contracts;” that is, conventionalized conditions for and of transmission and reception. Literary history remains literary only if it methodologically respects this discursive logic and, in the series of texts, explores the traditions, ruptures, and interferences in the development of the imagery, compositional grammars, motifs, themes, ideas, and genre conventions. Because of the significance ascribed to literature institutions and media specializing in belletristic writing (publishing houses, cultural and literary reviews, collections of books, theaters, criticism, and literary studies), special activities and roles (the freelance profession of the writer, the reading of “non-utilitarian” texts, and the public shaping of critical judgments about these texts) have come into being around the production and reception of texts, and—in the realm of ideas—certain assumptions and a metalanguage have emerged; for example, concepts of art, beauty, belles-lettres, literary genres and forms, and so on. Because literature and its semantics, forms, styles, and genres are revived and altered through the events and acts

in their social environment, it is necessary to explain texts and bodies of texts within the framework of social pragmatic categories. As Mihály Szegedy-Maszák writes, “A social event, belonging to the past as well as to the present, rather than a work is the central category of literary history . . . [t]he historian’s goal is to gain insights about the relation of an aesthetic form to the life-world of the people to which it belongs” (Szegedy-Maszák 2003: 22). Such goals are already fulfilled by systemic and other contextual approaches to literature (e.g., Schmidt 1989, Bourdieu 1996). Moreover, by making use of the concepts of autopoiesis and self-reference in literary history, they renew ideas about developmental self-regulation and block reductive explanations appealing to the causal factors within the social milieu (Perkins 1992: 153–173). The literary system has generated protocols that ensure it can cope with changes in the milieu, but these protocols always refer to intrinsic elements of the system. Let me mention only the genres of literary satire, polemic, and parody—along with the remaining techniques of intertextuality, such as allusion, reworking of familiar motifs and plots, and metamorphoses of the imaginary. We have long known what Fokkema observes: “The material of verbal art is not language in general, but used language” (2003: 27). Notwithstanding the fact that literary history observes the literary system from outside, from a “scientific” position, it still remains not the least among the institutions of literary selfregulation. Literary history oversees the cultural remembrance and relevance of the tradition from which contemporary literary production can emerge; it offers the coordinates that enable individual readers to find their bearings in the boundless expanse of writing, which otherwise might be not only ungraspable but even uninteresting. By so doing—either directly or through the mediation of the academy or criticism—it influences the reception of old and new literary works (cf. Perkins 1992: 175–186).

Literary Text and Context From the reflection on literature in the everyday environment, social discourse, and the literary field, it proceeds that one of the main challenges facing the writer of literary history is how to explain the relationship between the literary text and the context. Contextualization or colligation—that is, the placement of a phenomenon or artifact within a context—is a longstanding, leading practice of historicism, both in its “old” and “new” varieties. Contextualization involves methodologies for establishing causes for the actual text’s appearance within its originating milieu, which is itself composed of various other actions, phenomena, and texts. The milieu was taken to comprise not only a body of influential factors, but also a broader totality from which the individual phenomenon derives its meaning

(cf. Berkhofer 1995: 31–34). The historical context, however, can no longer perform in the role of the source, cause, or final reference of the literary text; from the perspective of contemporary meta-history, neither can the historical circumstances be conceived of as the reality that might illuminate the meaning of a text (Bennett 1990: 41 passim). The context is not given naturally; nor is it an unambiguous ground to which the complex meanings of an artistic text can be reduced. The context is shaped both by the investigator’s choice of what will constitute the artifact and, ultimately, by the strategies of historical explanation (Bryson 1994: 66–68, 72; White 2001: 228). It is a simple matter to imagine a rhetorical investigation of nineteenth-century Russian journalism or the archaeology of the psychopathology of everyday life for which Dostoevsky’s novels would merely serve as a context. The context for a literary work may also be formed by other texts, yet their very textuality makes them scarcely less ambiguous (cf. White 1987: 186–187, 191; Bennett 1990: 49; Bryson 1994: 66– 68, 72). To offer an example, Prešeren’s epistolary admission to the Czech poet Čelakovsky that his “Krst pri Savici” (Baptism at the Savica, 1836) was nothing more than an exercise in metrics intended to curry favor with the clergy is in itself equivocal (is it intended literally or ironically?), even though literary historians have situated it within the context used to fix the unstable meaning of Prešeren’s text, itself subsequently elevated to the status of a “classic.” Finally, the context is infinite and heterogeneous (cf. White 2001: 229). There simply is no limit to the number of variables that actually influenced—or might have influenced—a given literary work. The task of specifying which aspects of the social and political context might have a bearing on the image of literature at a particular point of time ultimately rests with the judgment of the historian. The context is an open totality, absorbing all frames that operate with a historical interpretation of the artifact: from aesthetic taste, philosophical ideas, and available forms or styles; to societal needs, familiar materials, and the economic status of producers and consumers (Bryson: 1994: 68–72).43 For instance, I have situated Janez Mencinger’s (1838– 1912) story Vetrogončič (Mr. Turncoat) of 1860 in a context that embraces not only traditional and actual literary forms and genres, but also historical sociolinguistic factors (the use of Slovenian and German in social, public life in Austrian Carniola), political conditions (inter-ethnic and parliamentary relations in the second half of the nineteenth century), and educational framework (the introduction of Slovenian as a school subject, the composition of 43

I shall not take up the difficult problem of how context can in any sense be said to illuminate the origin, structure, meaning, and role of the literary text. The simplest causal logic fails in this instance and must be replaced by concepts of agency, finality (hypotheses of the ends), needs, expectations, structural potential, the poles of the possible and the known, and so on.

the curricular literary canon, and the reading success of German and Slovenian writers; see Juvan 1998). At the level of textuality, which encompasses the production and interactive circulation of meanings, the boundary between text and context begins to disappear: the context enters into the literary text (in Mencinger’s story, as the mimetization of sociolects and the symbolic-narrative representation of social and ethnic conditions in the Slovenian provinces of Austria), while the text highlights the context—the story participates in establishing the ideological difference between the Slovenian and the German ethnic cultures. A social discourse flows through both the text and the context, while intertextual chains of dialogue bridge the divide between the two. This interpenetration is illuminated by Greenblatt’s conception of the “circulation of social energy” (1988: 1–19). It is related to Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality as the socialhistorical scope of the literary text,44 with the difference that Greenblatt superimposes onto the linguistic stratum a semiotic analysis of the moves whereby the text appropriates a material and institutional milieu, as in, for example, the symbolic appropriation and assimilation of customs and rituals in Shakespeare’s performances. The text does not figure as a mimetic representation of its embedding reality; instead, in relation to this reality it establishes a multitude of intertextual and material-symbolic ties, echoes, and effects.

Literary History as Hypertext As described above, today literary historiography—traditionally the main branch of literary studies—is facing serious challenges through its leading genre, similar to literary studies in general. This involves a destabilization of the concepts of literature, arts, author, text, language, context, and reader, which have been supposed to provide recognition and a prominent position in contemporary knowledge systems to the literary discipline. However, literary historiography may be studied not only in the framework of literary studies, but also in connection with historiography as one of the branches of history, in addition to political, economic, cultural, civilizational, intellectual, art, and other specialized histories. Literary history is not alone in the epistemological predicament of the present time, but shares its conundrum with other branches of historical writing. The expose of the discursive, narrative construction of the past; the consciousness that history, with all its periods, is an open-ended and contradictory sort of totality, composed of divergent (self-)perceptions; the discovery that the past comprises a variety of simultaneously unfolding processes, each developing

44

See Chapter 5.

according to its own rhythm; the recognition that the researchers’ perspectives on the past are perforce subjective, mediated through mental forms that have been preserved in tradition and through the optic of conceptual and axiological—or, more precisely, ideological—apparatuses of the culture in which they work and for which they write; the painful awareness of the fact that historical writing loses its readership if it is hermetically locked into the jargon of specialists; the experience that a quantitative analysis can be valid only if based on generalizations of limited scope, and even then fails to account for all factors relevant to shaping the course of events and the image of individual historical phenomena; loss of the illusion that historical writing can guarantee an absolute scientific perspective and objectivity; acquiescence to the hypothesis that historiography is a dialogic process of revision and reinterpretation of existing explanations and events, that the search for “truth” resembles the strategies of legal proceedings, and so on—all this (cf. Berkhofer 1995: 244–249, 264–274) demands a different set of concepts and a different praxis in literary history as well. Several attempts in this direction have already been made. The extensive History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe conceived by its editors not as “an overall narrative,” but as a compilation comprising hundreds of contributions with multiple, diverse perspectives on meaningful spatial and temporal “nodal points” (e.g., Prague or the year 1848) at which synchronic historical narratives about the various literary cultures of a this region are shown to intertwine; by emphasizing the marginal, the hybrid, the interferential, and the transcultural, the project radically revises such traditional categories of literary histories as “national,” “European,” or “world” literature (Neubauer 2003; Cornis-Pope 2003). Hollier’s A New History of French Literature was the first work to reject a single, unitary “master plot” and to seize on another “major form” for the representation of the past: the encyclopedia. This nearly twelve-hundred-page book operates with a non-linear, pluralistic, montage, and fragmentary editorial design, which in the spirit of textualizing the context brings into contact “intraliterary” and “extraliterary” facts; for example, by analyzing hagiography and medieval epic with reference to the settings in which the manuscripts were produced. Thus, authors’ biographies, analysis of their works, and periodization schemes are scattered throughout the text in numerous chapters. Many critics have asked whether literary histories of this sort are of any utility at all to readers (cf. Perkins 1992: 57–60; Pechlivanos 1995: 172–174). For this reason, I would like to offer as a conclusion yet another option for renovating the genre of literary history: to wit, the hypertextual literary historical archive (cf. Finneran, ed. 1996). The hypertext is uniquely able to combine both of the great forms that have

prevailed in the history of the genre of literary history: the narrative and the encyclopedia. The encyclopedic structure finds its hypertextual realization in the palimpsest construction of facts—with its mechanism for organizing information by supplementing, superstructing, and refining meanings—and in the collaboration by a large number of specialists; the heterogeneity of themes, materials, and approaches; cross-referencing; the potential for various points of entry into and exit out of texts; and other gambits. The narrative axis can function in the hypertext as a form ordering individual textual units (such as the author’s biography or an essay on the development of the historical novel), while other, potentially equally extensive, units can be structured according to other principles—analytically, for instance (description of the motif invariants of the historical novel). On the other hand, narrative in the hypertext functions in a new way, as the modality for the construction of many possible stories, depending on the users’ interests, search strategies, and spontaneous decisions made while interacting with the medium. In this respect the hypertext radically realizes the potential of modernist and postmodernist narrative forms, which differ fundamentally from the monological character of the “traditional” historiographic account. The hypertext seems to me to be the promised new medium for the old genre. 45 First, it responds to the infinite intertextuality of historical writing, which requires ever-new reinterpretations and constructions of the “historical truth” (cf. Valdés 1998: 115). The electronic medium renews itself every time, with less effort and at smaller expense; in contrast, textual literary histories are work-intensive, expensive, and rarely undertaken projects. Second, as a notational structure, the hypertext coincides with the non-linearity of historicity itself. With its non-hierarchical, rhyzomorphic structure, the hypertext is much superior to linear narrative in capturing the palimpsest character of temporal planes (of the past and the present, duration and conjunction, collective memory and contingency) and the coexistence of diverse semiotic spheres (oral/scripted, high/low, native/transplanted, male/female, etc.). Hypertext makes possible the representation of historical processes from various perspectives, across a series of individual realms; for example, the point of view of German or Jewish communities in the cultural centers of Slavic nineteenth-century national revivals. Beyond the hyperlinks, the metastory includes analytical segments, quantitative facts, pictorial material, but also stanzaic-metrical repertoires, information about the number of publishers, the size of print runs, the number of library withdrawals, and so on. Third, a hypertext history would demonstrate in practice the intersubjective, dialogic basis of 45

Kálmán also mentioned the hypertext as a “promising solution” to the problem of historical linearity (2003: 44).

representations of the past and would undermine the appearance of completion from the synthesis of the omniscient narrator. After all, the hypertext is open to many interests and many diverse trajectories of readings and, most especially, to collaborative engagement among the users (e.g., alerting them to unknown sources and attempts at new explanations). Fourth, the literary historical archive makes possible a clear and textually critical representation of the “bibliographic code” of literary texts (McGann). A clear conception about the material appearance of a given publication, about variants at different stages in the process of the production and publication of the text, historicizes the discussion about content and form. Fifth, the hypertext can include contextual interpretations (“thick descriptions”) of individual literary texts and gestures—not merely the representative, key ones among them, but also the peripheral ones. By means of these explanations, the “internal” historicity and sublimity of literary works would be exposed and laid out before a single vantage point; panoramic lines of synthesis would be interrupted by close-up shots in which the irreducible complexity of episodes from the past would emerge in clear focus.

3 World Literature(s) and Peripheries

The Global and the Local of Goethean Weltliteratur The recent intensity of discussion about the concept of world literature is a symptom of social and political shifts in literary studies under conditions of globalization (Pizer 2000: 213; Snoj 2006: 41–42; Saussy, ed. 2006; Virk 2007: 184–187). On the one hand, comparative literature is challenged by the “shrinking world” and the neo-liberal ideology of free circulation of capital, goods, and people. On the other hand, it has to respond to postcolonial and anti-globalist emancipatory movements. Such conditions have also developed an awareness of the global mobility of cultural products, their deterritorialization, singular local appropriations, and hybridizations, and the massive variation of the same matrixes in disparate parts of the world. This is the reason why literature considered as a global phenomenon has become relevant to comparative literature. The debate on this subject has changed its focus: from disputes about the under-representation of marginalized communities and peripheries in the global cultural canon, which implied questioning the Eurocentrism and occidentocentrism intrinsic to literary studies, the debate turned to the problem of how the geopolitical distribution of power, with its centers and peripheries, shapes cultural transfer and inter-literary intertextualities. Of course, addressing world literature belongs to the oldest disciplinary constants of comparative literature and the notion of Weltliteratur has been with us ever since the late eighteenth century. As is generally known, it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that—feeling somehow deprived as a German writer in relation to the French or English metropolises and their internationally renowned national canons—most prominently launched the concept of “world literature” in the 1820s (Goethe 1974: 456–465; 1973; Birus 2000; Damrosch 2003: 1–36; Pizer 2000; Virk 2007: 175–179). In Goethe’s case, the historical consciousness of literature’s worldwide scope thus had a rather peripheral, partly nationally biased origin, notwithstanding its cosmopolitan pedigree and claims to universalism. The intellectual background of the idea was definitely established by post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, a belief that “in their essence” people are equal, regardless of affiliations to various states, languages, religions, classes, or cultures. Since the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism has informed the lifestyles of urban intellectual elites as well as conceptually inspired ethics and international law, economic theories of the free market, political science, the arts, and the

humanities (Juvan 2010a). Coining the phrase Weltliteratur, Goethe—as Marx and Engels later would—expected “world literature” to transcend national parochialism through cosmopolitan cultural exchange. Pursuing much the same cosmopolitan goals as Immanuel Kant did in his Perpetual Peace (1795), but following a different path, Goethe also thought that knowledge of other languages and literatures, their deeper understanding, and openness to their influence would lead people from different countries to mutual understanding and peace. The ideologeme of world literature was invented to buffer the dangers of imperialism, culture wars, and economic competition between national entities in post-Napoleonic Europe. However, even Goethe fueled his cosmopolitan idea with nationalist anxieties and goals; after all, his Weltliteratur aimed at the transnational promotion of German literature, which was facing strong international competitors and British or French cultural hegemony (Damrosch 2003: 8; Pizer 2000: 216; Casanova 1999: 63–64). Encouraged by the considerable foreign success of his works and enjoying an influential position in culturally prosperous Weimar, Goethe believed: “There is being formed a universal world literature, in which an honorable role is reserved for us Germans. All the nations review our work; they praise, censure, accept, and reject, imitate, and misrepresent us, open or close their hearts to us” (Goethe 1973: 5).46 From his particular perspective, marked by German “cultural nationalism” (Leerssen 2006b), Goethe—as one of the most outstanding cosmopolitans of the Herderian brand—was experiencing the advent of world literature primarily as a growing network of transnational interaction; that is, as a rise in the circulation of literary artworks across linguistic and national borders, and increasing cultural exchange between continents and civilizations. As will be seen later on, Weltliteratur also appeared to him in the guise of the modern capitalist market going global. The mutual understanding and interconnections of literatures in various linguistic expressions through translations, theatrical performances, reports, and reviews; the creative response to literary repertoires stemming from various periods and cultures of the world (from the classical Chinese novel through Persian poetry to Serbian folk songs)— Goethe considered critical and aesthetic openness to international traffic of cultural goods essential to the viability of the German and any other national literature and to experiencing what he called the “generally human” (Goethe 1974: 458). With his cosmopolitan idea of world literature, in which all true creativity appeared to be basically equivalent, regardless of its canonicity or linguistic or national provenance, Goethe discovered a deeper meaning in

46

Later, too, it often turned out that ambitious, cosmopolitan writers from peripheral literatures (James Joyce, Derek Walcott, or Tomaž Šalamun) were more strongly inclined toward global imagination than those from metropolises (Damrosch 2003: 13).

many of his daily activities, such as multilingual readings, identification with culturally distant literary characters or problems, monitoring the international reception of his works, establishing contacts with European artists and scholars, or editing the journal Über Kunst und Alterthum, devoted to Weltpoesie (Schulz & Rhein 1973: 3). He also transfigured world literature into his poetic principle, leading to a globalized imagination and world intertextuality. Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819/27), inspired by the German translation of Hafez’s Divan (1812), is an example of how an Orientalist intercultural “synthesis” can be intertextually inscribed in a literary text from one of the literatures that were becoming nationally conscious (Pizer 2000: 218). In the second half of the nineteenth century, Goethean Weltliteratur evolved to the regulatory idea that shaped the new discipline of comparative literature, defining its transnational subject as well as methods of examining international cultural relations (Pizer 2000: 214; Juvan 2010a: 56–57). In comparative studies, the concept of world literature has by now obtained several meanings: (a) the sum of literatures expressed in all languages of the world, (b) literary works with “generally human” values that transcend local, national, and limited historical importance, which qualifies them as cornerstones of the universal canon, (c) global bestsellers distributed in several languages, (d) authors, texts, structures, and ideas that cross the borders of their domestic culture and are actively present in other languages and societies—as “multiple windows on the world” (Damrosch 2003: 15), imported originals, translations, the subject of discussions and the media, and sources of literary influence and intertextuality, and (e) a system of interaction and interference between heterolingual literatures and areas that shape international or transnational literary processes (cf. Ďurišin 1984: 79–90; 1995: 11–37, 45, 51–54; Damrosch 2003: 4–6, 14–24; Gálik 2000; Koprda 2003). After a period during which notions of world literature as the global literary canon or history of inter-literary relations and developments prevailed, the original Goethean conception has recently come back to the forefront of comparative studies, especially in the transnational approach. There are many good reasons for Goethe’s comeback (Pizer 2000: 213–214; Frassinelli & Watson 2011). According to Goethe, world literature implies a network of practices, media, and institutions that transfer international resources in the home literary field, allowing transcultural circulation of concepts, representations, and intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires as well as self-conscious production for an international audience. Goethe is currently considered a visionary mainly due to his symptomatic use of economic metaphors (cf., e.g., Casanova 1999: 27). Knowing that he was—at least through German adaptations and interpretations—familiar with Adam Smith’s

The Wealth of Nations (1776), one cannot be surprised by Goethe’s interdiscursive response to the “free market” ideology—for example, when expressing his hope that the German “production” in England “would find a market” and achieve “a balance of trade” (Goethe 1973: 7–8; Mahl 1982). In their Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which is currently read as a description of today’s globalized capitalism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels followed Goethe’s economic lead. Here they connected the global expansion of the capitalist market and economy to the beginnings of the transnational system of world literature, which was held to be formed by the exchange and interaction between the intellectual products of national, local literatures: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx & Engels 1998: 39)

World literature, however, may not be reduced to mere interaction on the international cultural market. It is also materialized in the intertextual use of nomadic resources and conceptualized as a category of ethical, political, historical, and aesthetic discourses. This category was shaped in the nineteenth century not only because of experiencing the development of communications, transport, markets, and expansion of international politics, all of them required by industrialized capitalism and imperialism, but also in view of travel writing, newspaper reports on world events, archaeological and anthropological discoveries of pre-classical civilizations, broadening of the translation repertoire (including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic literature), and attempts at reconstructing the sense of the original otherness in translations (cf. Verstraete 2002; Damrosch 2003: 39–77; Zima 1992: 211–213). In order to fashion an awareness of world literature and foster intercultural transfers, a sort of localized and traditionally established infrastructure within European cultures was also necessary. In addition to media, such as newspapers and journals that included translations, or theaters with an international repertoire, the sheer mobility of books, manuscripts, and other cultural objects was truly instrumental, as well as their

exchange, systematic collection, and cataloging, which resulted in the encyclopedic ordering of knowledge about foreign cultures. Such networks “translated” (in Bruno Latour’s use of the word) remote foreign objects, texts, and their representations in a multitude of local archives and libraries, where their referential and contextual liaisons with original spaces were adapted to particular epistemes and the strategies of the receiving location (“center of calculation”)—for example, the formation of Orientalist corpora in Western libraries and preparation of encyclopedias, such as Barthélemy D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale from the turn of the eighteenth century, which represented and systematized Islamic civilization for the needs of the French metropolis (Latour 1996; Dew 2004). Moreover, the term “world literature” did not simply name and make conscious the processes that would first emerge in the nineteenth century, nor was it merely a premonition of the capitalist geoculture as described in the framework of the world-system analysis. Circulation of records, artifacts, practices, ideas, forms, and media has been known since the earliest civilizations and their literacy; the awareness of the global space and mutual “discoveries” of civilizations is something that has been with us at least since the Middle Ages (Burke 2000: 79–80). Land and maritime trade routes often figured as the main channels through which countries and continents exchanged books and news along with other goods; book marketing has also paved its own international trade routes (Burke 2000: 78). What was specific about the meanings of the notion “world literature” in the 1820s, in comparison with century-long traditions of cross-continental cultural traffic, was that the term, which had been sparsely used since the 1770s, began to reflect and synthetize traditional forms of global awareness in terms of the aesthetic ideology, combined with post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and romantic cultural nationalism. In the theoretical and poetic consciousness of world literature (Goethe’s case), as well as in the case of establishing the media and institutional infrastructure for its circulation and representation (D’Herbelot), there is a taste of a “glocalization” (Robertson 1997) of world literature that led to its plurality as early as the nineteenth century. The need to speak of world literature in the plural form becomes even more urgent due to the fact that the Goethean concept of Weltliteratur was launched through the ideologeme of “national literature” and that it was modeled by nationalist cognitive centrisms. Ever since Goethe, world literature’s interactions and universal canons thus presuppose extant or at least emerging national literatures as their basic elements. Inclusion of the national in the world, the presence of the world in the national, and nationality as a necessary condition for the appearance of world literature are symptoms of the interlocking ideologies of the post-enlightenment cultural

nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices. According to René Wellek, whose insight was elaborated by Siegfried J. Schmidt, two complementary processes were characteristic during the making of modern European literary fields in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: autonomization and nationalization (Wellek, cited in Widdowson 1999: 35; Schmidt 1989: 282–283; Casanova 1999: 148–152, 260–265). Following Pierre Bourdieu, it may be said that the ideology of aesthetic autonomy, which was reproduced by texts, practices, and agents in the literary field (writers, publishers, critics, etc.), was actually compensation for the fact that (as shown by Balzac’s depiction of the 1820s in The Lost Illusions) literary life had become subjected to the market mechanism and political manipulations of public space in print media: the value of artistic products became contingent, and the accumulation or loss of cultural capital depended on the shifting interests of publishers, social networks, and cliques and on their tactical use of media (Bourdieu 1996: 20–21, 48–68, 81–85).47 The process of nationalization, on the other hand, profiled literature as a crucial linguistic and cultural attribute of the nation’s “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). 48 Autonomizing and nationalizing literature invoked the “nation” as a cultural hero on the ruins of the ancient canon and, from its Eurocentric perspective, generalized this aesthetic and national attitude to all literatures of the world (Damrosch 2003: 6). Following the logic of identity construction, nations as imagined communities only became possible through their relations with each other: while emulating the same discursive repertoire of the cross-national ideological current of cultural nationalism, they sought their individuality through relentless comparisons with and differentiation from other nations (here, comparative methods in philology, folklore, and literary history were also instrumental). Hence modern European nations were established within a new geopolitical reality that was perceived as inter-national (Casanova 1999: 56–59); borders on the newly imagined map of Europe were now drawn almost exclusively by existing or emerging nation-states. Because after Goethe, world literature has thus been persistently considered a totality composed of national literatures, even today these figure as largely undisputed elements of comparison (cf. Hutcheon 2002; Boldrini 2006: 19). Such views belong to the manifold sediments of “methodological nationalism” in the humanities and social sciences. 49

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Bourdieu is actually discussing the radicalization of this situation in the second half of the nineteenth century. The role of nationalist understanding of literature is discussed in Chapter 2. 49 This scholarly ideology, a seemingly “disinterested” and “rational” heir to the nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, has been until recently reproduced in national and comparative literary histories alike; it presupposes that every society is contained within a separate nation state with its own territory, culture, language, and—not least—literature (Beck 2006: 24–33). 48

An example of the processes outlined above in one of Europe’s peripheries— Slovenian ethnic territory in the Habsburg Monarchy—is the poetry of the romantic France Prešeren (1800–1849), which was involved in devising the context of national, “Slovenian,” or “Carniolan” literature. Despite his ethnic self-awareness and nationalist poetic strategy of instituting the Slovenian literary language as the axiological center of the otherwise bilingual culture of Carniola, Prešeren saw and portrayed himself in a larger European context. He did this by evoking intertextual relations with present and past centers of excellence. For example, his “Glosa” (1834/1847), which uses a Spanish poetic form, tackles the relationship between verbal art in Slovenian language and the local environment, in which parochial petty-bourgeois capitalism plays a decisive role (Prešeren 1965: 111–112). Prešeren justifies his insistence on the poetic vocation by alluding to the tragic vitae of the world’s classics (Homer, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Camões, Cervantes, and Tasso), who at first sight seem to justify the poem’s thesis that art—in opposition to the logic of profit—is always bound to be socially marginalized. Prešeren intertextually transfers world literature in a Slovenian text written in a Habsburg province, thereby giving meaning to both his own poetic work and the emerging national aesthetic literature. With locally perspectivized allusions to world classics, Prešeren accumulates their cultural capital in his text, evoked by the “currency” of their famous names. For Prešeren, such a testimonio of world literary classics represents a symbolic consolation for being frustrated because of his rather maginal position in the bourgeois establishment, which ranked one’s prestige in terms of capital and property. Generally speaking, through the formation of the canon of world literature, the cultural elites of the romantic period spread their belief in the transcendental importance and autonomy of art. With reference to the canon of world and European literature, Prešeren also advocated an autonomous order of the literary that inverts the principles of the capitalist market (cf. Bourdieu 1996: 20–21, 48–85). From this we may conclude that the emergence of a peripheral national literary system tends to imply a specific local understanding of the global nature of literature, as well as the world imagination and intertextuality. The glocal inscription of world literature into Prešeren’s poetry was embedded in a social network of “culture planning,” which also involved other intellectuals pursuing the task of establishing national “socio-cultural cohesion” among the bilingual and biliterary educated classes in Habsburg Carniola (cf. EvenZohar 2008). Prešeren’s mentor and friend, the librarian Matija Čop, took care of collecting manuscripts, books, and news about current cultural events abroad, as well as studying the histories of many literatures; on the other hand, through his vast correspondence, he spread

information on past and contemporary Slovenian literature among the intellectuals and poets in Czech, Slovak, and Polish territory.

Asymmetries of the World Literary System The “emergence” of the peripheral national literary field described above (cf. Domínguez 2006) is an example of how, in the circumstances of the bourgeois society and the capitalist art market, national identity is established relationally, through realizing its position among literatures in other languages and within world literature understood as a common heritage of mankind. At the level of the material and linguistic conditions of text production, distribution, and consumption, these dependencies could be explained by recent theories of the world system, which build on Goethe and Marx’s observations. I am thinking of Immanuel Wallerstein, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova. As is shown later on, things become more complex if we consider “plays of exchange between centers and peripheries” from the aspect of “purely” symbolic interaction—that is, through their imaginative and intertextual inscriptions, which often escape any geopolitical localization—and if we in turn respond to how textual subjects feel, perceive, evaluate, and self-reflect their position in the world system (cf. Bessière 2010; Shango Lokoho 2010). According to Wallerstein’s systemic approach, capitalism, encouraged by new technologies of transport and communication, made the economy global by introducing forms of exploitation, labor division, capital flow, and surplus value appropriation that were organized geographically and politically. The world economy thus created and multiplied local state structures that regulated social tensions by both fostering particular cultural identities (national literature having a key role) and embracing universal patterns of the capitalist “geoculture.” In the growing international system of global capitalism, which produced and spread geoculture, nation-states were positioned unequally: whereas “core-states” as the sites of developed production could accumulate capital and control the geopolitical division of labor, “peripheral” or “semiperipheral” areas, whose means of production were less developed and statehood was weaker, remained dependent on those centers (Wallerstein 1991: 139–156, 184–199; 1976: 229–233; 2004: ix–xii, 23–75). Hence the world system of capitalist economics with its geoculture, cores, and peripheries shows many striking analogies with the gradual formation of a “world republic of letters” from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. On the one hand, world literature participates in the transnational circulation of geoculture; on the other hand, however, it is—parallel to the capitalist world-system—a complex field of asymmetrical relations and struggles for visibility and recognition. La république mondiale des lettres is

conceived by Casanova as a hierarchically organized semiotic space, in which the established and emerging literary fields interact from unequal positions, either as centers of cultural influence that can afford to select and “consecrate” literary products for the international cultural market, or as peripheries with poorer cultural capital and worse linguistic, social, or political possibilities for international literary breakthrough (Casanova 1999: 119–178). As stated by David Damrosch, world literature is the space reserved for the diffusion and flow of literary texts that, after having been recognized by some global metropolis, exceed the linguistic boundaries of their literary fields and become “actively present” in other languages or cultures (Damrosch 2003: 4–6). Drawing on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, Moretti also portrays the “world literary system” as analogous to the world economy (although not identical with the history and spatial distribution of economic cores and peripheries); it consists of influential productive centers and primarily receptive peripheries (Moretti 2000). Casanova and Moretti were sharply criticized, especially from the postcolonial and multiculturalist perspectives. Critics reproached their center-periphery model for oversimplifying complex interactions among various national, transcultural, diasporic, or otherwise “deterritorialized” literary discourses. Additionally, Moretti was accused of imposing an evaluative hierarchy, according to which non-metropolitan authors writing in minor languages are bound to belatedly imitate influential centers. I believe that most of this criticism is unjustified. First of all, for Even-Zohar, Casanova, and Moretti, centers and peripheries are strictly historical and descriptive categories that reflect material or institutional conditions leading to asymmetrical global distribution of literary production, diffusion, and reception. Even if one accepts that, in the present age of capital flow, migrations, transnational politics, and the internet, centers are becoming displaced, mobile, without a fixed geographical reference (cf. Bessière 2010; Shango Lokoho 2010), it can hardly be denied that material conditions of literature are beyond compare in those wealthy capitalist metropolises that use “world languages” and whose publishing industries have been well developed for a long time. Moretti and Casanova’s center-periphery model also takes into account other factors that contribute to the symbolic capital a particular literary system, be it national or transnational, has at its disposal (e.g., the number of native speakers of a given language, the quantity of past literary products, the extent of translations in foreign languages). Moreover, Even-Zohar makes clear that strong and developed literatures, which now function as centers of the world literary system, used to be peripheral in the phase of their emergence (e.g., the French and English dependence on Classical Antiquity); they would stagnate without the tacit influences of peripheral productivity and the resources of “small” or

“minority” literatures (e.g., the global influence of orientalism, bard poetry, Nordic ballads, Icelandic sagas, Balkan imagery and folklore, Karel Čapek’s robot, négritude, Latin American magical realism, Caribbean literatures). No cultural system is self-sufficient and free of interference (Moretti 2003: 75–77; Even-Zohar 1990: 59, 79). This is especially true of the cultural market of global capitalism: in order to sell your products and make a profit, you always have to offer something new and different, and if your metropolis eventually runs out of concepts, ideas, and innovative products, you have to import them or co-opt their producers from the lesser-known, “chaotic,” peripheral repertoires, and make them serve your needs. Thus it is misleading to draw evaluative conclusions from the asymmetries of cultural power described above. Central or peripheral positions are variables that depend on historical dynamics and evolution of literatures, as well as on their inter-systemic relations with the globalized economy and inter-state system.50 Up to this point I am content to follow Moretti, but I am a bit more skeptical about his rather reductive model of cultural transfer, if this is analyzed at the textual, discursive, or symbolic levels. I seriously doubt that the intertextual relations between metropolitan source literatures and (semi-)peripheral target literatures can be explained away by Moretti’s neat formula of “a compromise between a Western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials,” which was derived from his important and large-scale analyses of the European novel (Moretti 2000: 58–60; 2003: 78–79). While the formula may be operational at the macro-level of the transnational literary market, which, with its wavelike diffusion of successful cultural products, causes diverse peripheral fields to choose and adapt the most demanded, prestigious, fascinating, or innovative global patterns, it proves to be too superficial at the level of intertextuality (cf. Juvan 2008b: 54–69). “Strong” peripheral authors that are aware of their strategic borrowing from a foreign literary repertoire and its grafting into the “local” conventions tend to cope with the Bloomian “anxiety of influence” in many other ways that can hardly fit the definition of the term “compromise”—for instance, by ironic and self-reflective fictional presentation of their systemic dependence on the world literary canon. Two examples from nineteenth-century Slovenian literature are used to elaborate these ideas. The romantic poet France Prešeren, supported by the expertise and criticism of his friend, the learned librarian and Schlegelianer Matija Čop, introduced the sonnet into Slovenian

50

There are normally multiple centers that attract different global areas to their sphere of influence and compete with each other for wider dominance; in this millennium, for example, Eastern metropolises (China, South Korea, and India) are overshadowing the role of the US and the Western world.

literature in the 1830s with specific, programmatic intentions. Together with the ottava and terza rima, he considered the sonnet to be a representative form of a prestigious, Romance origin, imbued with the spirit of a late medieval and renaissance classic. As such, Prešeren employed the sonnet within the broader cultural strategy—transferred from the Schlegel brothers—of transforming the earlier Slovenian writings, which were predominantly religious, didactic, or utilitarian, into a modern, autonomous, aesthetic literature. The sonnet was further meant to cultivate the Slovenian literary language and make it more appealing to the educated classes (cf. Paternu 1993: 59–75; Pretnar 1993: 138). Last but not least, as an ambitious writer from a small, peripheral literature that was just emerging, Prešeren employed forms, motives, and imagery from Greek, Latin, the Bible, and Arabic, as well as from medieval and modern European literatures in order to prove that Slovenian language employed in his poetry was capable of meeting the standards of what Goethe was calling “world literature” at the time. Being a selfconscious author, Prešeren acknowledged and even stressed his affiliations to Homer, Virgil, the Roman elegists, Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso, as well to his contemporary August Wilhelm Schlegel. In his poems, Prešeren made numerous allusions to their lives, characteristic themes, or styles, and even presented his own writing and his sense of the poet’s vocation against the background of their work—sometimes with modest self-irony, sometimes with the pathos of seeing himself in the company of his great predecessors, or sometimes in the guise of personal sacrifice to the transcendental powers of poetry. Such intertextual recourses to more central literary systems and the appropriation of their cultural capital was instrumental to Prešeren as a poet and “culture planner” of the nascent Slovenian literature, which was at the time culturally, economically, and politically a rather marginal part of the Habsburg empire’s semi-periphery. This cultural transfer and a pronounced transfiguration of the materials, strategies, practices, and forms from central and/or classical literary systems are especially marked in Prešeren’s sonnet cycles, which abound with self-references. Ever since the Josip Stritar’s critical essay of 1866, special attention has been paid to the relation between the Petrarchan genre matrix and Prešeren; his transfer of Petrarchism into the Slovenian cultural repertoire was a daring act, because he had to face strong and traditional moralistic resistance to any erotic reference in the public discourse (Paternu 1993: 109–122). Literary historians have pointed out that Prešeren accepted Petrarch’s Canzoniere in a dialogic and strategic manner: he employed the Petrarchan model, with its air of formally masterful, eloquent, and learned poetic diction, not only to express his complex, individualized emotionality, but also to support his nationalist project of cultivating the nascent Slovenian literature through repertoires and aesthetic standards of the leading European literatures. For example, in his love sonnet “Sanjalo se mi je, de v svetem raji” (I

dreamed we were in paradise, Poezije, 1847), Prešeren presents his own romantic emulation of Petrarch through an allegorical pictura. An educated reader could easily recognize the self-irony of Prešeren’s poetic competition with the classical model, visualized as the allegory of paradise, where Petrarch and Prešeren were weighing their poems: Prešeren could equal his master’s achievements only thanks to the qualities of Julia, Prešeren’s beloved lady, who was able to outdo the ideal beauty of Petrarch’s Laura (Prešeren 1965: 153). A similar case in point is the first Slovenian novel, Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866) by Josip Jurčič. The author did not merely adjust successful and “marketable” genre conventions from the British center to peripheral circumstances, but also markedly drew the attention of his model readers to the newly introduced narrative structures and playfully commented on Walter Scott’s authority as their source: As the renowned novelist Walter Scott already notes, narrators have an old right to begin their stories at an inn—that is, at the meeting place of all traveling people, where various characters are directly and openly disclosed to one another and the proverb In vino veritas is confirmed. We too have exerted this right because we believe that our Slovenian inns and innkeepers are no less original than the old English ones described by Scott, although they are much simpler in the countryside (Jurčič 1965: 141; emphases added).

The very first lines of Jurčič’s text demonstrate how he—being a resourceful and ambitious peripheral writer, who wanted to become central to his own culture—imagined the “compromise between a Western formal influence . . . and local materials.” His comparison between the “originality” of Slovenian and English inns is an ironic figure of speech through which the implied author reacts to his own world-system position. It is also a handy ideological device that could potentially justify his nationalist perception of how unevenly literary and cultural prestige was distributed in the mid-nineteenth-century Europe. By using the rhetorical power of imaginative fiction, the author addresses his compatriot readers, attempting to level out for them the extant hierarchy between central and peripheral European nations as well as to do justice to unequal positions of their literatures and writers. In his peripherocentrism, Jurčič all at once displays his adoption of the Scottian model and, stressing the authenticity of his nation’s social realities, claims originality for his text (which he subtitles “an original novel”). Needless to say, creative thinking, imagination, linguistic skill, and other faculties required by good writers are not reserved only for those that are born in or come to work in a metropolis. Important artistic innovations are also undoubtedly occurring on the fringes of the world system. Being challenged by their marginality or border position, small or peripheral literatures even tend to be more open and “nomadic” in their search for disparate world

sources. Because of their “in-betweennes,” syncretism, and often irregular development, they mix and make over foreign transfers in very singular ways (e.g., Balkan Zenithism and Srečko Kosovel’s avant-garde poetic constructions). Nevertheless, it still cannot be denied that the path of a peripheral innovation to the metropolis—for example, Slavoj Žižek’s move from the Ljubljana Lacanians’ circle through Parisian and then US academia to become a world theoretical icon—is certainly more difficult, exceptional, and often delayed, especially if the original text was not written in a “world language” or at least translated into one and printed by some major publishing house (Moretti 2003: 75–77).51 According to Casanova, every writer that seeks to enter the space of the world republic of letters depends on the international prestige or cultural capital accumulated in his or her home language, traditions, and society— British or “francophone” authors, for example, have much better conditions for starting an international career than those that write in Slovenian, Hungarian, or Lithuanian (Casanova 1999: 28–32, 63–64; Even-Zohar 1990: 59). Furthermore, peripheries or semi-peripheries, such as Central Europe, are not just passively dependent on their in-between position and interferences from neighboring world centers. These areas, too, contain their own urban centers (Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Trieste, etc.) and their respective literatures sometimes establish mutual contacts without the necessary intermediation of global metropolises; just think of various Slavisms in the nineteenth century and after the First World War. Artworks, authors, techniques, and themes from one of the peripheral literatures are thus also “actively present” outside their home literary fields, operating within what Ďurišin called inter-literary community or centrism (e.g., Arab or South Slavic; see Ďurišin 1995: 21–24, 48–51). Without inter-literary transfers within such communities, the world literary system as a complex network would collapse. The cultural capital that authors accumulate through the reception of their works within such multinational and multilingual areas may also pave their way to the metropolis and wider international recognition. Globalization and the postcolonial situation have created favorable conditions for regional and global success of peripheral authors (not only modern) and allowed them to self-confidently plan their writing for world audiences. For example, the Trieste Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967) privately considered his novel Alamut (1938) a potential global hit. The text was conceived to become an international bestseller: it draws on Orientalist historical knowledge, sets the story in “exotic” medieval Iran, displays erudition, uses an easily translatable style, clings to successful genre patterns, creates 51

Even-Zohar speaks of the “incubation” period that is necessary for the percolation of an element from a peripheral literature into a central one (Even-Zohar 1990: 65).

suspense, and addresses big issues of totalitarianism and conspiracy theory. In the very year of its first publication in Slovenian, Bartol tried to offer his novel to the global cultural market. He submitted a screenplay about Alamut Castle directly to the Hollywood film metropolis, but MGM studios rejected it. Notwithstanding, Alamut later won wide recognition and was translated into about eighteen languages (and in 2004 also into English). Alamut’s entrance into world literature occurred due to a favorable, although contingent, historical situation and thanks to “consecration” in a global metropolis: in 1988, Alamut was translated into French because its story and setting coincided with the topicality of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism after Khomeini’s revolution in Iran (Košuta 1988: 554; 1991).

World Literatures In conclusion, I am returning to world literatures in the plural. The plural designation has been used so far mainly for “great” literatures in the world languages, which differ from “small” literatures that have only “limited radiation” (Van Tieghem 1931: 16). However, I would like to use the plural form with a different meaning. My point of departure is the problem of how the complex world literary system, with its linguistic variety and multitude of texts, either nomadic or translated, can be cognitively grasped and represented. Even if we attempted to overcome national literature’s atomism with Ďurišin’s methodology of interliterary processes that take place in a range of culturally, historically, geographically, or politically coherent areas (Ďurišin 1995) or, if we followed Moretti’s proposal for “distant reading” (i.e., systematizing second-hand information on foreign literatures; Moretti 2000: 56–57), we would at best highlight only some highly generalized hypotheses about the underlying “laws” of development of world literature. I agree with Zoran Milutinović, who has pointed out that the history and theory of world literature could only be fragmentary and appear through specific viewpoints (Milutinović 2008: 38–39). World literature is thus reflected in a plurality of versions and images. It may be conceived as an ever changing network of transfers, interference, and developing relationships between texts, conventions, and structural matrices from different national literatures, languages, regions, multicultural sites, diasporas, or inter-literary communities. World literature also consists of the media and institutional infrastructure, the materiality of texts, and, above all, the universal canon (as a repository of cultural memory) and the discourses—theoretical, practical and poetic—that (re)produce the consciousness of the interconnectedness and interdependence of different literatures. Poetic awareness of the world-wide literary space is actualized in literary texts through their intertextuality and global imagination. The literary world system is therefore a

complex topology, which is cognitively and creatively accessible through the archives of localized cultural memory and singular cognitive or linguistic perspectives. They show world literature as a set of variant corpora, representations, inspirations, and classifications. World literature is being constantly translated and presented in manifold localized inscriptions, which are the subject of reflection and reworking in different semiospheres. To begin with, canons of world literature are plural because they exist only within particular literary fields and interactions between them: each community, society, or state has its own version of the world literature canon, and any literature bases its intertextuality on different selections from the global cultural heritage. Any literature or literary history sees world literature through the lenses of how they perceive their position within the global literary system. The different perceptions of world literatures in metropolitan or peripheral cultural environments condition even “national” schools of comparative literature, although this discipline should in principle be the most cosmopolitan form of literary knowledge. However, this issue is already the subject of another discussion (Juvan 2010a).

4 Postmodern Textology and Electronic Media Before tackling the theoretical or historical study of literature, one must have available the texts one wishes to discuss and draw findings from. However, even the semiotic stability and material presence of the text—as the key object of literary studies—can cause more problems than it would seem considering this presupposition. For example, a text can present itself in a different form than that first written by the author; we read and process it after many, sometimes also decisive, subsequent modifications made on the basis of unexplained editorial interpretations, but we are not aware of its changed identity because we expect the author to address us directly (cf. Thomasberger 1992: 455, 463). These kinds of problems have traditionally been addressed by textual criticism, also referred to as “textology” 52 (a more contemporary name primarily used in Eastern Europe).

The Hidden Powers of the Philological Servant Although within literary studies textual criticism or textology is usually considered to be ancilla philologiae and thus little more than an auxiliary discipline or a cluster of technical skills (whose main goal is supposed to be the production of accurate and reliable scholarly editions of literary artworks), it is in actual fact deeply involved in intricate relations with theory, interpretation, and the history of literature. This auxiliary discipline is capable of manipulating the historical image, status, and distribution of texts from the past. I cannot but agree with Martha Nell Smith’s claim that “editing is a physical as well as a philosophical act, and [that] the medium in which an edition is produced . . . is both part of and contains the message of the editorial philosophies at work” (Smith 2004: 306). Below I attempt to demonstrate how, throughout their recent history, textological practices have been rooted in various aesthetic notions and text theories. Apart from their implicit “editorial philosophies,” the tools of textual criticism have many other, more pragmatic, powers because “editing translates raw creative work into an authoritative . . . form” (Smith 2004: 309). With its procedures, textology first and foremost contributes to the selection and canonization of works of fiction. Already significant is the editor’s decision on which work or oeuvre is worth being published in the first place; the 52

The term “textology” was introduced in 1928 by Boris Tomashevsky in his Pisatel i kniga (The Writer and His Book); it caught on well in Russia (e.g., in Dmitry S. Likhachov’s basic work Tekstologija (Textology, 1962), Poland (Konrad Górski), and the Czech Republic (Vašák et al. 1993). It developed into an independent discipline of literary studies and linguistics “studying the genesis, history, and authorship of a literary text within the framework of historical social circumstances,” its main goal being the “reconstruction of the textual process” and, at the practical level, “preparing editions of texts for publication” (Vašák et al. 1993: 17).

publication demands time-consuming and strenuous professional work, such as collecting and selecting material, critical analysis of plans, drafts, versions, or variants from the textual legacy, and drawing up notes and comments. Aleida and Jan Assmann refer to these types of procedures as “text cultivation” (Germ. Textpflege) and classify them among the basic canon factors (A. Assmann & J. Assmann 1987: 11–13). The quantity and systematicity of textological work and the support that prominent institutions provide to select publishing projects are proportional to the value assessments ascribed to a specific literary oeuvre or writer. The fact that only rare works are selected for textological processing and scholarly publication presupposes responsible judgments of their exceptional historical importance; only the selected oeuvres are judged to transcend their own time and deserve a permanent, carefully restored, and authoritative presence in cultural memory. With hidden strategies of musealization, scholarly editing manipulates the historical profile and relevance of past literary works, secures their permanent presence in everchanging reading repertoires, enhances their significance and aesthetic impacts upon audiences, and, last but not least, transposes them from the artistic field to the discourses of scholarship and education, thus featuring scholarly editions as enduring points of reference for autopoietic textual processing in schools and academia. All of this presents textology as a key factor in canonization process and, consequently, one of the doorkeepers of cultural memory. However, the participation of textology in the construction of the canon is not the only thing that places the scholarly publication of literary monuments above the status of an auxiliary trade. The power of textology also lies in determining the format for presenting the historicity of texts and in the support the discipline provides to specific aesthetics and theories of texts through its construction of the research object. From early times, textual critics and editors have striven to purge the bodies of preserved texts of the traces of secondary interventions—which they considered to be corruptions and violations—variously made by copyists, typographers, editors, proofreaders, or censors. The purifying critical therapy of textologists was meant to restore the spiritual authenticity of “the author’s text,” to cure it of all subsequent damage, thus helping the author to speak unhindered and convey an aesthetic message beyond the limits of his or her historical world (cf. Flanders 1997: 128–132). It is now clear that these notions, which used to legitimate textological work, were deeply rooted in metaphysical dualism of essence vs. accidence, spirit vs. matter, inside vs. outside, and will vs. necessity. On this metaphysical basis, the “editorial philosophy” of historicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted, in the case of the older manuscript legacy, to

reconstruct the textual image that was supposedly closest to the original archetype. When dealing with modern literary works, however, the “old” historicism exposed one single and binding textual version in its editions: that which was held to comply with the authentic will of the author—be it the author’s manuscript, the text’s first publication, or the last edition still authorized by the writer (cf. Thomasberger 1992: 460; Vašák et al., 1993: 33–40).53 Paradoxically, through their very efforts and procedures to recover the purity of the authentic text, historicist editors in fact produced just one additional textual variant and gave it the stamp of normative finality. Broadly speaking, twentieth-century literary studies that considered the literary work primarily as an aesthetic, linguistic, or “spiritual” structure were less obsessed by the epistemology of sources. In their modern aestheticism, they largely neglected the text’s genesis and the history of its publications, convinced that the material substance of literature (i.e., its medium or channel) was aesthetically and semantically irrelevant. Editors nurtured in modernist schools of literary criticism did not hesitate to construct and put forward textual images that literary works historically never had—not in manuscripts, transcripts, or rewritings, or in journal or book publications. What seemed important to these editors was to ensure that the readers’ aesthetic experience would not be hindered by historical strangeness. For this reason they allowed themselves to filter the literary text’s historicity. Let me mention a telling example taken from the series of scholarly editions of Slovenian “classics” titled Collected Works of Slovenian Poets and Writers. In his 1965 edition of France Prešeren’s (1800–1849) collected works, the editor Janko Kos also published two text variants of Prešeren’s early poem “To the Girls” (Prešeren 1965: 12, 224). However, neither of these versions—entitled “Dekelcam” or “Dekletam”—fully matches the documented historical appearances of the text; that is, Prešeren’s original manuscript and his own transcript submitted for censorship, as well as the first imprint in the journal Illyrisches Blatt (Illyrian News; 1827), where the poem appeared along with Prešeren’s own German translation, or the rewritten version published in the poet’s 1847 volume of poetry (Poezije). The scholarly/critical edition thus does not present accurate or diplomatic transcripts of any of 53

The notion of the author’s final edition was actually produced in the late eighteenth century, in a legal conflict between two publishers that each believed they were entitled to print Wieland’s early works, following either their first publication or the author’s latest redaction, Ausgabe von der letzten Hand (Final Authoritative Edition; Kittler 1991: 209–211).—The inclination towards the search for primordial originality is, for example, apparent in the 1916 statement by the Czech critic Arne Novák, who claimed that the main goal of “philological criticism . . . is to discover the uncorrupted, original text that has come directly from the authors’ hands” (cited in Vašák et al. 1993: 19). The opposite tendency, which is teleologic and believes that the author’s Kunstwollen leads towards progressive perfection (Vašák et al. 1993: 35–36), may be exemplified by Beissner’s formula “das ideale Wachstum des Gedichts” (Thomasberger 1992: 457).

the poem’s historical appearances, which in fact existed and were circulated in public. The editor’s goal of drawing the reader’s attention to Prešeren’s personal style and aesthetic merits, as well as making the poem conform to the linguistic tastes of Kos’s contemporary readership, led to erasures of several symptoms of the text’s historical otherness; for example, its meticulous accentuation or capitalizing of verses. It is indicative that Kos thought that Prešeren’s work might otherwise look “bizarre;” the bombastic poems of Jovan Vesel Koseski, Prešeren’s rival contemporary, have been perceived as “bizarre” or “odd” since the 1870s, whereas Prešeren’s reputation has grown and made him the first among the Slovenian classics. From this example it may be inferred that editorial emendations also serve to protect the author’s canonicity and to portray his work as superior and incomparable to the poetea minori of his time, even though the latter were in fact much more similar to him than aestheticist literary historians would like to make out. What is even more symptomatic is the move on the part of Kos’s edition in which Prešeren’s bilingualism and biliterarity, typical of Central European literary cultures of the nineteenth century, is put in the background. The poet himself, notwithstanding his pronounced national self-awareness, did not hesitate to make his first public appearance by printing his “To the Girls” in Slovenian and his own German translation and continued publishing his German poems. However, the series of Slovenian classics foregrounds the author’s Slovenian texts, thus paying tribute to the prevailing linguistic principle for organizing national literary histories.

Postmodern Concepts of Textology In conditioning the historical consciousness of the humanities, postmodernity demonstrates a paradoxical post- stance towards the past, through which the rational deconstruction of the historical presence is further undone by its volitive restitution. In the postmodern age, the critical impetus so characteristic of modernity becomes self-reflectively directed towards the discourse of modernity itself. As a result, the postmodern humanities disclose that—to rephrase Aristotle’s famous wording—history is not that which has really happened, nor that which might have happened, but that which—by the scholarly procedures of acquiring and presenting knowledge, and with sufficient persuasiveness—is currently claimed to have happened. However, postmodernity recovers from the loss of historical presence by remaking the past aesthetically: “Material fragments of cultural artifacts from the past can trigger a real desire for possession and for real presence, a desire close to the level of physical appetite” and similar to the “aesthetic experience” (Gumbrecht 2003: 6–7). This is to say, the past returns as something present only through structures of representation that are

comparable to how we gain an image of our contemporary life-world: every slice of the past should be grasped in its modernity, its contingency, its incomprehensible contradictions, its polyphony of details, openness, and becoming. Any attempt to frame past fragments within the master-narratives of old historicisms has thus become obsolete. In the intellectual atmosphere sketched above, post-structuralism, discourse theory, and various historicizing currents in the humanities—among them New Historicism in literary studies—have shaped a radically new understanding of textuality: they conceive of the text as an open-ended process of writing and reading in which meanings and subjects are articulated dialogically and through ceaseless differing from otherness. Consequently, causality linking the authorial intentions and textual meanings has proved to be problematic. Instead of positing the author as the privileged discourse controller, post-structuralism introduced notions of more complex intertextual and social relations, established through textuality and signifying acts within concrete historical discursive constellations (cf. Juvan 2008b: 73–108). In this perspective, the text turned out to be a unique, historically concrete utterance, a fragment from the flow of discourse, which constantly builds and rebuilds social dependencies of the speaking and addressed subjects. This is why the social and ideological, or perhaps anthropological, structures of literary works became more interesting than their aesthetic or artistic properties.54 The postmodern shift in notions about literary texts had a certain impact upon the practices and concepts of textual criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century; for instance, in the French critique génétique or in the Anglo-American “new philology” and “bibliography.”55 The first change made by “manuscriptology” and the “new philology” is a certain weakening of both the author’s and editor’s subjects (cf. Gumbrecht 2003: 28, 31, 38). Through our insight into the disorder of his or her workshop, full of imperfect scraps of writings, the author loses the authority of a genius that masters the artistic subject-matter and controls it with his or her Kunstwollen until the work is completed and presented to the public as a finished, perfect product. Sketches, variants, corrections, and rewriting testify to the fact that, at least by indirect influence, many agencies, communities, or even institutions from the 54

See Chapter 5. “Genetic criticism” or “manuscriptology,” as it is also called, undercut the notion of a literary work of art as completed. It was supplanted by a minute hermeneutic interpretation of the dynamics of the textual meaning production, as can be traced through drafts, sketches, plans, variants, rewritings, and first and revised editions (at the levels of pre-text and post-text). Genetic criticism helps the hidden biography of the writing process to come into sight from beneath the surface of a published text, together with fragmentary or potential artworks that have never been worked out and published (Contat & Ferrer, eds. 1998: 7–9; Ferrer 1998: 12–13; Biasi 1998: 32–33, 55, 59–60; Grésillon 1998: 91, 93; Zelenka 2006). On the “new philology” see Nichols, ed. 1990, Nichols 1997; Tevooren & Wenzel, eds. 1997. 55

literary field are implied in the author’s work on the text, forcing him or her to take, try, and eventually change uttering positions vis-à-vis the Other. The privileged role of the authorial subject is further debased by a twist in the research focus of new textologies; that is, in their attempts to assess the ways in which the authorial text is appropriated by various media and modified to meet the expectations of different audiences. Nevertheless, editors are hardly in a better position than authors; they also become a sort of Vattimo’s “weak subject” as they withdraw from the authority to adapt and emend the historical otherness of classics. Instead, editors now tend to let the text speak for itself. The second change, originating from the post-structuralist idea of the open text, has already been mentioned. The textologist’s gaze, especially in genetic criticism, penetrates behind the scenes of a work of art (which had normally been seen as a static, perfect monument, and the result of a consistent artistic intention) and focuses on poiesis, that is, on the dynamic process of textual genesis, in which the author is concurrently his or her own first reader (cf. Contat & Ferrer, eds. 1998; Ferrer 1998; Biasi 1998; Grésillon 1998).56 Flaubert, for instance, used no less than 4,300 pages of working material to accomplish his Madame Bovary (Biasi 1998: 32). Such pre-texts (avant-textes) should be interpreted as traces of the writers’ efforts to articulate meaning and follow their artistic goals, as well as testimonies to their constant revisions of prior intentions and dilemmas that emerge on the threshold between the private and public spheres. Dostoevsky, to take another example, hesitated between the forms of a confession and a diary as he wrote his novel Crime and Punishment; Kafka, in the pre-text of his Castle, crossed out all of the first-person pronouns from the first version of the novel and replaced them with the acronym K. (cf. Ferrer 1998: 26–27; Vašák et al. 1993: 40). Because pre-textual variants from writers’ manuscripts may be considered matrices of virtual literary works, they deserve interpretive efforts in themselves; they are at least relatively autonomous instances that have been actualized in a complex network in which authors continuously explore the structural possibilities of signifying systems. An even greater degree of autonomy may be credited to “post-text” (après-texte); that is, the rewriting and revisions of the text that authors, editors, and others have produced since its first publication. In the process of creating post-text, versions of the literary artwork often follow communicative and aesthetic agendas different from the strategies that used to inform the genesis of the pre-text. Post-texts, rewritten by writers themselves (as they grow older) or edited by their friends, relatives, or professionals, target new socio-historically changed 56

In a different context, McGann also stresses that “the composition of a poem is the work’s first reading” (2004: 204).

audiences, or else they are included in newly-conceived supra-textual compositions, such as cycles or posthumous books of poems. All these material and apparently superficial changes may modify textual meanings and, consequently, substantially alter the work’s reception history. To sum up, postmodern textology presents literary texts not as static, self-enclosed monads, but as dynamic phenomena (Thomasberger 1992: 458) or “fuzzy sets” (Vašák et al. 1993: 46–47), in which the temporality of difference plays the crucial role. The changes in textological theory and practice described so far are generally in concord with post-structuralism and deconstruction (cf. Zelenka 2006). Another important accent characteristic of postmodern textual criticism is its interest in the non-linguistic, material properties of manuscripts, codices, typewriting, or prints. Similar to New Historicism and cultural studies, postmodern textology resists reducing literary texts to their verbal structures, claiming that the circumstances of publication, and the status and expressive means of the medium, contribute to the significance of the text by placing it in societal relations (cf. Chartier 1998: 270–271; 2002a: 111; McGann 2002: 4–5, 77, 89–90, 206, 233). For example, Byron’s poem “Fare Thee Well,” which appeared to be written as an intimate address to Lady Byron, had its significance converted as soon as it began to be circulated in some fifty exemplars in London’s high society (McGann 2002: 77–92, 226): Byron’s wife read it as an artful and cunning effort by her husband to arouse public compassion in order to improve his position during their divorce proceeding; readers of Byron’s 1816 collection Poems in fact understood this poem as the emotional outburst of a wounded man, whereas in one of the satirical columns it was presented with the intention of unmasking Byron’s hypocrisy. From cases like this, it follows that a literary work of art should be published in a scholarly edition in which nonlinguistic semiotics (McGann’s “bibliographic code”) can tell us something important about the textual significance. Such an edition should reproduce or describe the typography, print format, book design, and illustrations, as well as take into account the number of copies printed, their circulation, the publisher’s reputation, and so on. After all, historical criticism attempts to represent meanings “in ‘minute particulars’, in forms that recover (as it were) their physique in as complete detail as possible” (McGann 2002: 211–212, 226).

Digital Textuality and E-Editions It might seem paradoxical that it is computer-generated virtual cyberspace that meets postmodern efforts to restore the concreteness of historical presence. Kathryn Sutherland is

convinced, along with J. Hillis Miller, that the computer “stores and gives access to particulars” and that “it works in the service of postmodern detailism and the micro-contexts of knowledge, and against the great meta-narratives of science . . . . In their place it puts the closely bit-mapped context, a data-rich saturation so minute . . . that the illusion of proximity is achieved” (Sutherland 1997: 13). However, as a scene of such proximity and historical concreteness, cyberspace is, of course, a digitally-generated, digitally-simulated, and unstable space. For a computer user, cyberspace, with help of prosthetic sensorial devices, merely creates an illusion of unlimited possibilities of cognitive and sensual immersion, nomadic and free identities, interactive participation, and de-territorialized exchange with other users of the World Wide Web (cf. Aarseth 1999: 32–33; Poster 1999: 43–47; Nunes 1999: 62–70; Ryan 1999b). Yet virtuality, characteristic of cyberspace, has not only negative connotations (appearance, illusion, and deception), but also positive ones—it implies potentiality, productive capacity, and openness (cf. Ryan 1999b: 89–93). Virtualization is after all a general feature that constitutes language as a system of recurrent elements from a multitude of singular utterances (Ryan 1999b: 93– 94). It is an important characteristic of all structures and textuality because it allows texts to tear themselves away from the circumstances of their production and to refer to the everchanging state of affairs. The evolution of media from oral traditions to electronic communication shows a progression of such virtualization. On-screen texts have lost tangible substance, well-defined authorship, and clear-cut boundaries. As such, they essentially differ from printed texts, which are normally perceived as discrete, singular, and self-enclosed units (Ryan 1999b: 88, 95–99).57 The advent of electronic media, and of the hypertext in the role of its central genre, has cast new light on the meaning-constituting role of already existing media, primarily books (Ryan 1999a: 10; Chartier 2001, 2002b). In the light of digital textuality, we have become conscious of the fact that the old codex book (abbreviated as “c-book”) is not merely a vehicle of linguistic signs but is an important factor that, through its physical and content properties, also structures systems of knowledge, co-determines generic identities, and shapes writing and reading practices. For instance, the “revolution of reading” in the Enlightenment supplanted the type of “intensive” reader, who had been occupied with and almost devoted to 57

E-texts are being re-generated by computers all the time, and displayed on screens only fragmentarily; they do not exist permanently or have any single location (Sutherland 1997: 10–12). E-texts are, so to say, free from their bodies (Flanders 1997: 127) and emerge out of electronic codes, whereas on-screen signs are nothing but simulacra of printed letters and pages (Landow 1994a: 6). Digital technology thus undermines the traditional identifications of books by their physical objectivity, topic, and author (Chartier 2001: 400–401).

a limited text corpus, with the modern “extensive” reader, who consumed a variety of printed genres (Chartier 2001: 395–399). New media have also influenced the evolution of philology; something that happened long before the invention of computers. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the inventions of photography and facsimile have made it possible for classical philologists and medievalists to compare in praesentia various manuscripts and versions that are located at a distance from each other or are difficult to access (Kittler 1991). Electronic hypertext is thus an ideal medium for the critical presentation of versions of the text produced from its genesis to the final authorized edition and beyond (cf. The Literary Text in the Digital Age; Finneran, ed. 1996). It is, then, no surprise that it was electronic scholarly editions and e-textual archives that were among the earliest and, especially in the 1990s, most prolific areas of the “digital humanities;”58 that is, the discipline in its own right, which attempts to unite the humanities culture with the exact sciences (cf. Schreibman et al. 2004; Hockey 2004: 9, 14; Willett 2004: 241, 243). E-editions have also been more widely accepted by “mainstream” literary scholars, who were otherwise far more skeptical about the relevance of other major fields of the digital humanities, such as computer-assisted stylistics and authorship studies—regardless of the computer’s ability to recognize, in very broad textual corpora, potentially significant structural patterns that are beyond the grasp of human perception and memory (Rommel 2004: 88–89, 92–93; Craig 2004). In e-texts, it becomes clearer than ever that the text’s identity is mobile, differential, and embedded in situations, actions, and transactions of various agencies; it is steered by the psychodynamics of writing and the sociodynamics of publishing. In short, hypertext is able to reveal documents about the writing subject’s positioning in the literary discourse. Through an electronic archive and its paratactic presentation of textual versions from pre- and post-text (they appear as equals), textology gains a new perspective on literature, surpassing the teleological linearity of older criticism, which was largely dependent on the linearity of the cbook medium. The latter imposed the need to construct one single representative presentation of a text (cf. Ross 1996: 226) and to place it at the center of the edition, while all other preserved variants had to be expelled to the small type of the critical “apparatus.” E-editions in hypertext do not demand such a focalization on a single, “definitive,” or central text because their structure is in principle not hierarchic; they acknowledge “the fluidity of texts instead of insisting upon single-minded, singularly-oriented texts” (Smith 2004: 320). Smith’s own work on Emily Dickinson’s electronic archive confirms her conceptual differentiation 58

However, according to Hockey, after some sample projects, the vivid interest “in the area of electronic scholarly editions . . . waned somewhat” in the second half of the 1990s (2004: 14).

between hieratic c-book editions, which impose order also “on that which is otherwise unruly” (e.g., Dickinson’s chaotic literary manuscripts), and demotic e-editions, in which ordering decisions are for the most part left to the reader (Smith 2004: 316). The notion that hypertext embodies and puts into practice post-structuralist theories of the text is advocated by many proponents of digital media. George P. Landow, probably the most influential among them, stresses several analogies between hypertext—as produced by information technologies—and (text) theories by Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Bakhtin, and Deleuze (e.g., text as intertext, decentered writing, the death of the author, networks of power, polyphony, and nomadic thought), which, according to him, stem from similar discontent with hierarchical thinking and traditional closures of books and literature (Landow 1994b: 1). Espen Aarseth, however, shows an ironic stance towards the handy formula “the theoretical perspective of is clearly really a prediction/description of ” because he thinks that post-structuralist theories were based on essentially different, older media (Aarseth 1999: 31–33). However, Aarseth himself also invented the term “ergodic discourse,” by which he reinterpreted his older notion of “nonlinear textuality.” He introduced this term to describe precisely the kind of combinatory textuality that predicts hypertexts—printed communication with no regular sign sequences (of letters, words, or “textons”), in which textual syntagmatics, thanks to the medium’s immanent technologies, varies with each and every use or reading. He traced forms of nonlinear textuality back to the French group OULIPO (e.g., Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes—One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) and the old Chinese Book of Changes (Aarseth 1994). This reminds us that the newer media draw on and, so to speak, emulate the older ones. We are thus entitled to transpose post-structuralist concepts, although derived from printed texts, on digital texts, e-archives, and e-editions. On the other hand, Barthes and Kristeva themselves already used theoretical metaphors that can now, in the context of hypertexts, be read almost literally; for example, the text as réseau. Scholarly editions of literature in c-books always faced the problem of the location and extent of critical notes; the e-archive is much more flexible in this respect, as it can adapt the depth and extent of critical commentaries to the different needs of users (cf. Lamont 1997: 48–56). A very extensive corpus of literary historical materials can be used in order to contextualize the edited text. E-editions of literary classics are thus becoming archives that can always be updated; see, for example The William Blake Archive or The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The question arises as to where to set limits for

including historical data. Some literary historians sharply accuse the presumed “cacophony of data” in e-archives of overshadowing that which is supposed to be of real importance—the text’s literary structures. However, Flanders is right in claiming that this “cacophony” is “no creation of the archive, but the true realm of textuality from which, through the traditional edition, we seek to protect ourselves” (Flanders 1997: 136–137). In other words: the cacophony is precisely the effect of the text’s historical presence, which is deeply interlaced with the context—and this context, as we know from Derrida and Culler, has no limits. Electronic critical editions or literary archives have, in the light of postmodern textology, one further quality. In a similar way as the invention of the facsimile, which made rather faithful reproduction and accessibility of rare manuscripts possible, they “provide artifacts for direct examination” of scholarly community; even more readers can now deal with documentary evidence, instead of relying on potentially manipulative print editions (cf. Smith 2004: 310–311). E-editions are, in the words of McGann, “a marriage of facsimile and critical editing” (1996: 145). They not only transcribe—diplomatically or critically—the texts’ linguistic structures, but also reproduce “the conditions of the writing scene in which they were produced” (Smith 2004: 306). Users of e-editions are free to check scholarly transcriptions and description of documents against their digitalized images, which provide surplus value: in this way, every user is able to see how, and to what extent, the text’s physical body affects its linguistically-constituted meaning. Electronic text-encoding via SGML, XML, and specifically TEI enables analyses of both the semantic and visual “bibliographic” properties of the edited work. This is all taken into account, for example, in the current project of electronic scholarly editions conducted by the research center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (cf. Ogrin, ed. 2005). Nonetheless, McGann is cautious, reminding us that all computer markup, however flexible, is pre-defined metalanguage that both imposes order on and interprets and disambiguates primary documents, not only in order to store them in ever-evolving software and hardware environments, but also to turn them into objects of quantitative, computerassisted study (e.g., of style); as “allopoetic systems,” the existing markup languages are still unable to represent and deal with “the autopoetic character of textual fields;” that is, with the unpredictable, dynamic, multi-relational, self-engendering, and inter-subjective nature of textuality, especially poetic literature (McGann 2004: 200–207). In conclusion, with the help of scholarly editions in electronic media, literary historians can better treat texts in terms of postmodern “contextual detailism” and devote more attention to the role of difference in text production and distribution. Cyberspace, with

its simulacra, also opens to their view the “materiality” of media and “the expressive function of non-verbal elements,” as well as “a wider world of objects and practices of literacy,” which until recently had always been abstracted from literary works of art (cf. Chartier 1998; 2002a).

5 The Structure of Literary Text and the Event of Meaning

Structure as Event, Literariness, and Text Literary theory began dealing with comprehensive text analysis decades before modern linguistics, which is why it is no surprise that it has developed its own methods and concepts for describing the structure of literary works. It finds these approaches very difficult to renounce even today. Terms such as form, content, motif, theme, internal and external composition, rhythm, perspective, description, story, narration, stanza, dialogues, and so on can thus often be found in literary theory guides. However, insisting on using this sort of metalanguage becomes questionable when it uncritically accepts the assumption that the structure of literary texts—if it can even be generalized as a concept from various genre conventions—differs significantly from the structure of other text types. The terms content, form, and structure have their forgotten origins in metaphysical dualism and, if the theoretical idea of the text structure is also shaped following their example, it may rapidly happen that the structure is understood as an object, or a reified static armature that—either in the hidden interior of the text or before everyone’s eyes—holds the literary work together. However, it was structuralism in particular that demonstrated that structure has no substance and is nothing but a network of relations and differences. As a delimited and self-contained unit it is only created in order to perform one or more functions and constitute a certain sense by positioning elements in mutual relations, such as differences, equivalences, oppositions, equalities, isomorphies, repetitions, and subordinations or coordinations. Sense is—as described by Deleuze (1998: 263) in his synopsis of structuralism—merely a result or an optical effect of relations and combinations between elements that have no meaning by themselves. Even Saussure denied the language system substance, because he searched for the essence of language in the role of differences between the elements organized along the axes of selection and combination. In contrast to some “vulgar structuralists,” who were misled by the idea of structure in civil engineering, biology, and similar disciplines, Saussure’s theoretical radicalism was not neglected by Roland Barthes, who denied the real existence of structure in 1963, explaining it instead as a mimetic model of objects. In his essay “The Structuralist Activity,” he described the concept of structure in the framework of structuralism conceived as a special type of intellectual activity. According to Barthes, structuralist activity

is a set of intellectual and speech acts of “structural man,”59 whose theoretical and practical knowledge of structure finds inspiration in Saussurean linguistics. Barthes believed that any structuralist activity, whether critical or poetic, strives for the reconstruction of an “object” or its intellectual reproduction in the form of a model that in turn serves to express the rules of functioning of the object represented. Barthes thus did not understand structure as a thing, but as an object’s “simulacrum,” or as the artistic or theoretical product of cognitive and speech acts: through analysis, structuralists decompose reality in order to intellectually recompose it into a model of classes and paradigms that, through the cognition process, produce sense and inscribe it back into the observed reality as an added value. Barthes believed that structure perceived as a simulacrum is the intellect added to an object (Barthes 1972: 214–218). With his simulacra, “structural man” makes the objects’ functions and meanings evident and pursues the task of establishing the factors that bring about the sense. Thus for example, phonemes (such as p or b; t or d) are not substances that would exist in and of themselves in the observed reality, but are only mental simulacra—that is, explanatory models that help understand how signifiers can even be distinguished within the materiality of the speech stream: one is able to distinguish between the words pes ‘dog’ and bes ‘rage,’ and their respective meanings only by recognizing the difference in voicing between the labials p and b. Structuralism finds the ways, conditions, and acts of creating and understanding meanings more important than the meanings themselves. Thus according to Barthes, its main subjects are humans as the producers of meanings, and acts that engender historically fluid meanings (Barthes 1972: 218–219). Through this, structuralism acquires a certain historical dimension, despite its seemingly ahistorical affinity for synchrony. Inasmuch as any consideration of the historicity of sense already entails (co)operation in the production of this sense, structuralism is to Barthes ultimately a form of the world that is bound to change along with this world (219–220). Many theorists have followed Barthes in perceiving structure as a set of relations, as a merely theoretical or fictional model established by an observer of literature, rather than the actual effective network of relations within the literary field itself (Rowe 1990: 24–31). In contrast, probably under Lacan’s influence, Gilles Deleuze understood structure differently in his 1973 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” which may well be the most penetrating reflection on structuralism to date. He treated it as a factual and unconscious network of symbolic lines of force that constitutes real and imaginary spaces, and defines the 59

This “structural man” may be not only a theoretician, but also an artist or writer, such as Mondrian, Boulez, and Butor.

subject’s position through its relations: “[T]he structure constitutes series in incarnating itself, but is not derived from them since it is deeper than them, being the substratum for all the strata of the real as for all the heights [ciels] of imagination.” (Deleuze 1998: 260) According to Deleuze, structure creates a topological, immaterial, and pure space (or spatium) of distribution and proximity, within which it defines the places occupied by real things and beings (Deleuze 1998: 262). Every structure is “a system of differential relations according to which the symbolic elements determine themselves reciprocally” (265); these merely symbolic elements and their relations are “incarnated in the real beings and objects of the domain considered [and] in real relations between these beings” (265–266) respectively. Deleuze illustrates this with an example from structuralist social sciences: a place that the structure of capitalist production defines as the symbolic position of “capitalist” (267). This position can be occupied by one individual or another, but irrespective of their personal characteristics, these individuals must adapt their views, goals, and actions to the logic of the structure that defines their position. They must think and act within the possibilities and limitations offered to them by the structure of social relations set in advance—to the extent and as long as an individual is a capitalist, she or he cannot avoid aspiring for profit. According to Deleuze, structures are unconscious and their manner of existence is neither actual nor fictional, but virtual: they are repertoires of elements, relations, and singularities that can be realized and are embodied through variegated actualizations. The structure actualization always implies events taking place in time and space; it involves the generation of differences that produces species and parts in reality (Deleuze 1998: 267–269). Although it may seem at first glance that Deleuze’s understanding of structure differs significantly from that of Barthes, upon thorough consideration this proves to be untrue. Barthes does indeed comprehend structure as a simulacrum and an intellectual and creative model that breaks down and reconstructs reality by presenting it from the human viewpoint and in the light of senses and functions; seemingly in contrast, Deleuze does not perceive it as an intellectual construct, but as the working of actual symbolic forces that constitute the real and imaginary within the human reality, shaping meanings, thoughts, the subject, and society. Barthes places cognitive aspects of structure at the forefront, whereas Deleuze emphasizes its determinism and pragmatic effects in reality. However, one may conclude that even for Deleuze structures, as “substratum for all the strata of the real,” are inevitably put into effect only through the psyche—that is, by a symbolic and ideological sphere that establishes individuals through language as its subjects, shapes their communicative competence and mental schemes, and

influences their unconscious drives, imaginary identifications, and social habitus. Along this path, structures trickle into the underworld of practices and realities. However, the question of the existence of structure is less important for the next part of this chapter than is the aspect highlighted by both Barthes and Deleuze: structure is not a reified, static entity, but a process or event that produces differences, meanings, and relations. With regard to texts, structure is not merely an analytical model or metaconcept, but also a practice involved in writing and reading. Accordingly, structuring a text means positioning virtual language elements and forms into an actualized network of relations that yield the effect of sense. But before focusing on the structuring of literary texts, one must return to the problem posited at the beginning of this chapter: does the structure of literary texts differ considerably from the structure of other texts? If a novel is compared to a telephone book, a play to a political commentary, and a sonnet to a classified ad, this may seem true. However, what if a biographical novel is placed side by side with a literary-historical biography, a scene of a play with a televised roundtable discussion, and an epigram with an advertising jingle? Both the novelist and the historian narrate a life story; not only the characters in a play, but also the discussants in a roundtable talk and argue with one another; and finally, an epigram and an advertising jingle both come in verse form, and are brief and poetic. In these cases, the structural distinctiveness of literary texts would be much more difficult to defend. Literariness, as a bundle of features that distinguish literary discourse and individual texts participating in this discourse from other messages or communication genres and types, is not merely brought forth by the distinctive structure of literary texts, but depends on the system and conventions of a special field of social interaction, including the structure of its players and media.60 Consequently, there is no reason for the structure of literary texts to be described considerably differently than the structure of other texts. Every literary type or genre undoubtedly has its own unique features that distinguish it from the most general features of texts. However, for example, not only lyric poetry, the sonnet, and the Elizabethan sonnet, but also court discourse, witness testimony, and expert testimony have their own special features. I agree with Teun A. van Dijk, who claims that “many features of literary texts match the general features of texts” and that the conception of the general term “text” in particular must be used to bridge the gap between linguistics and literary studies (1980: 3–4). For quite some time now, the text as the subject of study has in fact been connecting various disciplines, such as linguistics, theories of discourse, media, and communication,

60

For more details see Chapter 6.

sociology, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and literary studies (van Dijk 1980: 1–14; Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 14–22). Explanation of the text requires an interdisciplinary approach because this, in particular, shows how language is connected with the cognitive, ideological, and modal systems that place discourses in the life-worlds of particular producers and recipients of utterances. The majority of text linguists61 agree that text is a communicational phenomenon that is created in a specific situation through the conventional use of linguistic signs in order to represent some kind of knowledge or viewpoint, or to carry out a communication purpose or goal: for example, one person wants to use text to convince the readers to vote for a specific political party, another wishes to arouse compassion with his confession, yet another thinks that her argumentation will convey her findings on the creation of the universe to the academic community, then a fourth would like to describe her village to tourists in an inviting way, and finally a fifth would like to entertain readers with a good story, and so on. Theorists mostly agree that the text is a higher unit of language use that usually surpasses the level of sentence and orders sentence sets, but that in doing this—precisely as a language unit—it remains delineated from the environment and has a beginning and end, a frame, and paratextual information. Students of textuality further share in common the realization that successive sentences and other syntactic elements making up the text are connected and coordinated in terms of form, expression, and content. Syntax, which coordinates and subordinates sentence sequences, is governed by specific rules not known to sentence grammar, such as the use of pro-forms, anaphoric references to previous sentences, and cataphoric anticipations of how the text will continue. The meanings of sentences are also mutually dependent: their intersemantic relations develop—through the processes of omitting, selecting, generalizing, and integrating their propositions—in macrostructures (i.e., motifs and themes), suprastructures (e.g., descriptions, narrations, and argumentation), and text genres such as letters, applications, newspaper commentaries, tales, comedies, and so on. Especially the semantic interdependence of linguistic references in the sequence of sentential propositions is key to establishing a comprehensive conceptual and representational whole, that is, the textual world. A more complex level of meaning that can only be communicated and understood through texts is realized through the textual world; it is also referred to as “textual significance.” Textual significance is dynamic, elusive, imperfect, and contradictory, because it is always constituted dialogically and in process. It depends on the syntactic net of the text’s linguistic elements, their references to reality, and relations to 61

This paragraph draws its definition of “text” from three influential introductions to text linguistics: Coseriu (1980), van Dijk (1980), and Beaugrande & Dressler (1981). See also Fowler 1996a: 43–45; 73–92.

other texts, discourses, or sign systems; textual significance is also a variable conditioned by socio-culturally and ideologically diverse functions of the text in the moments of its production and reception.

Structuring texts How does structuring texts even take place? Is any sequence of sentences that have their beginnings and ends already a text? She stepped into a smoky joint. Gas prices went up again yesterday. I’ve gotten used to getting up early. Peter is jumping over a vault. The sphere has a volume of two cubic decimeters.

At first glance it seems impossible to spot a thread in the five successive sentences in the example above. They seem to be randomly thrown together; they are not connected by the same literary character, situation or event, or a common topic, and are most likely not even uttered by the same speaker. The messages in the individual sentences jump from socializing to economics, and from sports to geometry. Following a well-tested recipe of many text linguists, the sequence of sentences above was meant to illustrate what is not a text. However, I had to really make an effort not to compose a “real,” although bizarre and somewhat modernist sounding text, when I was writing these sentences. This imposition of significance, which even works in allegedly free imaginative processes such as the surrealist automatic writing and leads verbalization into developing meanings, reflects how the acquired virtual structures influence the speaker or writer. The interiorized linguistic bases of associations actually force spontaneous actualizations of known repertoires of vocabulary, collocations, syntactic forms, and other language patterns to roll off an individual’s tongue, pen, or computer screen. Everyone learns to use language along with textual competence. The knowledge stored on the basis of experience with other texts, conversations, or genres, trigger genre-specific associations and in a way dictate the structuring of language elements into texts. This is why forming successive sentences in and of itself (i.e., through connoted semantic fields and macrostructures) compels the development of significance. Writing is ultimately a process of handling the latent directions for structuring and negotiating the signification fields that impose themselves. The mirror image of this activity is the reading process: even in sentences that seem completely discontinuous readers try to find a thread of meaning. Would it not be possible for the second sentence in the example above to be the interior monologue of a woman that entered a bar, and for the remaining sentences to be the thoughts and conversations of other guests at the bar or somewhat disorganized descriptions

of the objects within or near the bar? The introductory paragraph in the first Slovenian prose tale, Janez Cigler’s (1792– 1867) Sreča v nesreči (Good Fortune in Misfortune, 1836), shows how sentences are combined into the open whole of an unproblematic, prototypical text: A few years ago, close to the town of L., in a village where there was once a distinguished cloth mill famous far and wide that wove fine cloth and sold it to far-away places around the world, a good, honest, and devout young man lived. Franc Svetin was his name. His parents died when he was still very young and so he did not have anyone to take care of him. Out of kindness, the owner of the cloth mill sent Svetin to school so he could learn how to read and write; afterwards, Svetin worked at the cloth mill and learned all the clothiers’ skills. On top of his usual clothier’s work Svetin also had to work in the garden. He was hard-working and clever. In summer, he worked all day in the garden and in the cloth mill at night. (Cigler 1974: 5)

This paragraph consists of seven simple or complex sentences. Their semantic content is intertwined, weaving a text (textum ‘cloth’) out of individual language units. This kind of connectivity is enabled by two processes: at the language surface, which can be perceived in the text’s written or oral form, this involves the maintenance of continuity in the occurrences of specific expressions or their equivalents; at the level of the language formation of the textual world, continuity is maintained by the interdependence of representations and concepts activated by successive language expressions (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 3–7, 48–74, 84–89). The sentences that follow one another form a continuum through propositional bases, with which the text subject ascribes predicates to the references of linguistic signs in the sentences. The persistent references of signs to the actual or fictional reality and the stable utterance viewpoint or perspective also establish thematic speech units and enhance the text’s compactness (cf. van Dijk 1980: 25–40; Fowler 1996a: 73–74, 81–83, 92). The successive linguistic signs in Cigler’s paragraph refer to the following: 1. The concepts, things, beings, and so on in the actual or fictional world:62 a town, village, cloth mill, cloth, world, years, young man, Franc Svetin, parents, someone, cloth mill owner, school, and so on. Fowler refers to these kinds of elements in the sentence propositional structure as “references;” 2. The qualities, acts, states, processes, and so on that the utterance subject of the sentence ascribes or defines to these references: the cloth mill—distinguished, famous far and wide; cloth—was woven, was fine, was sold; the young man—lived a few years ago, was good, honest, and devout, his name was Franc Svetin, and so on. The elements that the propositional sentence base ascribes or predicates to references are called “predicates.” 62

In fiction, text expressions establish referents by themselves (for more details, see Chapter 9).

Fowler states that a proposition always consists of two parts: the reference and the predicate (“Svetin / was hard working”). A single sentence or an element of it can contain several propositions. The phrase “cloth mill famous far and wide” presupposes at least two propositions: that the cloth mill was well-known and that its good name extended far. In terms of content, the text is thus connected primarily through a continuum of references and predicates that form the basis for individual sentences and expressions that follow one another. The utterer’s discursive strategy and modality implied in speech acts that present segments of her or his knowledge also lead to the continuity of references and predicates, and consequently, the stability of the text’s theme and speech perspective. The procedural approach advocated by Beaugrande and Dressler explains text as a process of actualizing the virtual possibilities of a language system that takes place within the pragmatic context of communication through the procedures of forming strings of sentences (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 32–47). In verbalization, text authors follow an unconscious impulse or an intentional plan to realize their intentions and achieve particular impressions on the recipients by presenting chunks of their knowledge, personal viewpoints, emotions, and aspirations. The writer Janez Cigler, being a priest, indicated his intentions even in the text’s title and subtitle: by “telling the strange story of a pair of twins,” he wanted to offer a “lesson to the young and old, rich and poor.” His intention—or, in fact, the intention of the genre and tradition to which the author subscribed—was thus to morally educate readers by presenting an invented action in the narrative superstructure. The textual world is shaped through the sequence of linguistic signs’ references to the referents and their predicates. Playing the role of their own simultaneous readers, authors control the realization of this world in the language sequence by correlating the emerging semantic complexes with their memories of the representations they conceived at the stages of ideation and initial development of the literary work. Beaugrande and Dressler explain the textual world as a constellation of concepts and mutual relations between such pieces of knowledge activated by language expressions (1981: 4, 84–85). First and foremost, the textual world consists of concepts representing objects (cloth mill, cloth, school), acts (Svetin learned, Svetin worked in the garden), events (Svetin’s parents died), situations and states (Svetin lived in a village), setting and time (once, in a distinguished village near the town of L.), and so on. The text places these concepts into various cognitive and logical connections (cf. van Dijk 1980: 29–30, 40; Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 4–6): spatial proximity, situational neighborhood, or inclusion (the young man lived in a village, which also had a cloth mill, and this village was close to the town of L.), the cause-and-effect relation (Svetin’s

parents died when he was still very young  nobody looked after him), or the intent-and-plan relation (the cloth mill owner sent Svetin to school so he could learn how to read and write), and so on. As mentioned above, the elements that follow one another in a text also form connections at the level of linguistic signifiers and their grammatical relations. For example, the connection between the first and second sentences in Cigler’s tale depends not only on the intersection between their propositional bases (they share the same acting player, the young man), but also the linguistic devices that present their links at the text surface. These patterns are woven according to grammatical and pragmatic rules. This includes recurrences of expressions and their paraphrases, combinations, omissions, variations, and relocations of meanings to other word types, and especially various pro-forms, which are pronouns and other word types that substitute for substantive, verbal, adverbial, and adjectival words or phrases (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 48–67; Fowler 1996a: 81–89). In Cigler’s case, the main device that reveals the connections between the first, second, and third sentences (all of their propositions contribute to the characterization of the protagonist) already at the surface, is pronominalization: “Close to the town of L . . . a good, honest, and devout young man lived a few years ago. Franc Svetin was his name. His parents died when he was still very young and so he did not have anyone to take care of him.” Personal pronouns substitute for a simple repetition of the lexeme used in the first sentence (young man). Nonetheless, the repetitions of one and the same words in successive sentences in this passage are perhaps the most obvious sign that these words refer to the same things presented in the textual world: the nouns cloth mill and Svetin occur four times. Text linguistics refers to the surface connectivity of the text as “cohesion,”63 and its compactness in terms of content as “coherence” (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 3–4). Text linguistic notions of text structure are similar to considerably older descriptions of the structure of literary work in literary theory. In his 1931 Literary Work of Art, the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden explained literary work as a “many-layered structure” or “polyphony;” that is, a structure made up of interdependent elements (1973: lxxii). The text is composed of several strata that differ by type of material and the role of this material in constituting higher strata of the literary work (29). According to Ingarden, the lower, more material strata ground the higher conceptual strata. The strata forming the structure of a literary work include the following (cf. Ingarden 1973: 30–31, 219–220, 232–233): 63

Specific cohesive devices contained in literary texts also include parallelisms, verse and stanza patterns, and rhetoric figures (e.g., anaphoras, iterations, antitheses, gradations, etc.).

1. Word sounds and the higher phonetic formations built of them, such as rhythm and sentence intonation; 2. Semantic units at distinct levels, ranging from words and sentences to sentence complexes, in which narration, persuasion, or any other articulation procedure take place; 3. The objects presented, including things, persons, events, states, and the time and space represented; 4. Various schematized aspects, that is, perspectives on the time and space presented; 5. Metaphysical qualities such as deeper moods, ideas, and modalities (e.g., tragic or comic). Although Ingarden explicitly rejected older classifications of literature among the temporal arts along with music, and although in his classic book he presented the structure of the literary work largely from the spatial aspect instead of explaining it as “a formation that develops and is extended temporally” (1973: 306),64 he nonetheless did not regard it as a static framework or construction that could be described if its surface coating and plaster of words were scraped off. The Polish philosopher namely drew attention to a yet another key feature of the literary work: that it is constituted on an ongoing basis and developed as a “sequence of parts.” Spanning from the beginning to the end, these parts are organized in phases that are grounded in the previous stages, and they in turn ground the parts that follow (Ingarden 1973: lxxx, 31, 305–310). Distributing and binding the sequence of such phases applies to both the process of creating and the procedures of reading literature. Thus for Ingarden, structuring texts is also an act of consciousness taking place in time, although he— probably under the influence of the medium’s material spatial dimension, that is, written or printed texts—also tried to philosophically demonstrate a spatial existence of the structure of signifieds that would be independent of the psychology of individual readers; in doing this, he wandered off into the slippery area of metaphysics. As stated by Ingarden, the structure of a literary text has another important feature: a literary work, especially its stratum of presented objects, is a “schematized formation,” in which only fragments of entities from the world presented are expressly defined through the semantics of linguistic signs and sentences, whereas many “spots of indeterminacy” or “blank spots” remain open (Ingarden 1973: 246–254). For example, one only learns about the existence and good name of the cloth mill from the introduction to Sreča v nesreči; apparently Cigler did not think it necessary to describe its size, precisely where it was built, and what it looked like—all readers can picture this mill as they please, if they picture it at all. Such spots

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According to Ingarden, only the reading concretization of a literary work can extend temporally.

of indeterminacy can thus only be filled in by readers in the act that Ingarden refers to as “concretization.” Ingarden’s theory about the structure of the literary work may be seen as the predecessor of text linguistic notions. Like these, it aims at surpassing the dualism of form and content, showing how individual structural levels of language—from phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic to textual—depend on one another and function only through linguistic signifiers. Furthermore, Ingarden already suggested that the spatial aspect of the text structure is actually based on the temporality of producing and receiving sign sequences. Last but not least, Ingarden can be considered a pioneer because he also drew attention to the fact that in establishing the textual world, readers play an active role because they are the bearers of concretization. Basically the same idea was later adopted by the aesthetics of reception, especially Wolfgang Iser in his studies of the act of reading (1978); another idea similar to Ingarden’s concretization is the text-linguistic notion of inference; that is, readers’ drawing conclusions from their memory schemes.

Text structure in reading So, how do readers even create their ideas of the textual world in their minds—making use of their language and text competence—on the basis of the propositions of individual sentences? These procedures are rather complex and difficult to pin down, requiring cognitive psychology and psycholinguistic models in order to be elucidated in greater detail (cf. van Dijk 1980: 160–220). However, the basic logic behind the process of the reader’s interpretative response to the text can be explained relatively easily if Stanley Fish’s pioneering study “Literature in the Reader” (1980: 21–67) is employed. When Fish’s adequately “informed” and competent reader—one that, through various “interpretive communities,” has mastered the conventions according to which meanings are ascribed to linguistic signs—reads the first sentence in Sreča v nesreči, she or he learns that there was a famous cloth mill in a village, and that a good, honest, and devout young man lived in precisely that village. Thanks to the propositional structure of the sentences, the words written by Cigler can trigger impressions of a given space and time and a specific protagonist in the readers. However, the linguistic signs do not specify these impressions. The placement of the term young man at the end of the sentence, the typical position of the informative center of a message in Slovenian, leads the readers to expect that they will learn something more about this apparently important protagonist in the continuation of the story. With their references

and predicates, sentences can call up temporary, working, and hypothetical ideas of the textual world and create various expectations and associations in readers, who respond to the flow of text data through their interpretative acts. For example, the first sentence in Cigler’s tale offers several possibilities for further development of the text in terms of meaning and representation. Using their memorized schemes of knowledge, readers can form associations with various possible references and predicates via the word cloth mill: fabric, owners, workers, machines, sales, capital, and so on. On the other hand, the term young man is connected with character-related features, which will obviously determine what the young man will likely be doing (work hard, follow his moral principles, pray, etc.), and what he most likely will not: steal, murder, visit brothels, and so on. Further reading may confirm these kinds of hypotheses and temporary expectations, which means that prior interpretations may be augmented and improved; however, it can also undo them and demand that they be corrected (cf. Fish 1980: 21–67). The explanation offered by text linguistics is very similar (van Dijk 1980: 164–178). Readers shape the textual world by retaining propositions from the previous sentences in their short-term (episodic) and long-term memory;

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they combine, omit, link, generalize, and

coordinate them with new data; and especially try to constantly explain those propositions by including them in the frames (i.e., the patterns of typical and repeatable situations, events, or characters) that order their knowledge and experience in their long-term memory. The flow of words organized in sentence chains constitutes a sequence of propositional elements that refer to various components of the emerging textual world. Readers combine them into “isotopies” (a term invented by Algirdas J. Greimas)—that is, nexuses of semantic strings derived from repeatable semes with a common denominator; in this way, they create the text’s coherence (cf. Frank 1990: 155). Beyond the temporal or linear course of reading, divergent intratextual connections ramify through isotopies such as hypotheses, expectations, improvements, and corrections. Thus isotopies trigger representations that obtain a spatial character. When, for example, a word or phrase appears at the text’s expressive surface that uses its propositions to refer to the semantic patterns from previous sentences stored in memory (i.e., isotopies), it usually adds a new piece of information: in the first sentence in the Cigler example, the reader learns that a virtuous young man (an active protagonist) lived in an industrialized village (a place), and in the second sentence the writer reveals the protagonist’s name. All of this molds

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Concrete vocabulary and syntax are less important than meanings, which is why they usually sink into oblivion immediately. Short-term memory has a semantic capacity of 50 propositions, whereby one sentence usually contains 10 to 20 atomic propositions (van Dijk 1980: 173–174).

the isotopy of one of the literary characters presented and interweaves it into the subsequent reading, in which this character is described in greater detail and depth or modified. Readers play the key role in both interweaving the utterance propositions into the textual world and establishing its coherence as well as recognizing the surface links in the text or cohesion.66 Using the information they obtain from the linguistic signs, they activate their concepts and expectations. They can do this primarily by drawing conclusions or inferences: they construe the missing or ambiguous linguistic data by recalling an appropriate knowledge scheme that matches the indeterminate verbal pattern and then selecting from within this scheme the items they need to clarify the vaguely presented world (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 6, 86–92; Fowler 1996a: 241). They thus call up and use what they have already learned about typical situations, repeatable courses of events, or stereotypes; for example: “When Peter was coming back from the store in the dark, a robber sprang from behind the corner and attacked him. He threatened him with a gun.” In these two sentences, readers cannot find any intratextual or grammatical support to decide whether the pronoun (him) refers to Peter or the robber. However, they can make the right conclusions about this if they align the text with a suitable scenario in their memory, according to which the robber is usually the one making threats with a gun in the standard situation of robbery. In forming their hypotheses about the imaginary world and the text significance, readers also use intertextual references. Strictly speaking, and as Derrida pointed out as early as 1972, every linguistic sign—inasmuch as it actually functions as a sign—is inevitably a quote; that is, a reinstantiation of the signifier from the sequence of its previous repetitions in the multitude of utterances (cf. Juvan 2008b: 83). Derrida’s theory can be tested by the simple fact that the meaning of every word in a standard language dictionary is explained on the basis of a multitude of records of this word in an extensive text corpus. According to Kristeva, every text is “a mosaic of quotations” and text linguists also consider intertextuality an inevitable condition of textuality (Beaugrande & Dressler 1981: 10). The meaning of every word and phrase is namely like the tip of the iceberg, hiding extensive masses of the implicit under the text surface. The meanings that the text expressions call up in the readers largely depend on the chains of interpretants from other texts. If, for example, a contemporary young reader of Cigler’s work does not know what sukno ‘cloth’ and suknarija ‘cloth mill’ mean, he or she must determine the meaning of both word signs drawing on sign sequences from other texts, most likely by using a dictionary or footnotes. Intertextual references can also become a 66

This is why some important linguists and literary theorists consider text and coherence as hermeneutic rather than merely linguistic facts (Coseriu 1980: 35, 49–50; Frank 1990: 157–158).

stylistic and meaning-creating device that the writers use intentionally because they expect that their model readers will perceive and appropriately interpret it. In this case, competent readers match the elements and patterns of the text they are reading with the structures they bring back to life by remembering the “already read.” From this perspective, Andrej Blatnik’s (b. 1963) little story “Ikar” (Icarus) is worth discussing: He fluttered through the glass suddenly, as if he did not know what was going to happen. Everything stopped for a moment and he was floating—and then he was released so that he fell down onto the asphalt soundlessly and exhausted like a cigarette butt. They did not even have time to scream properly before he was already lying below, quiet and tiny. (Blatnik 1989: 74)

Blatnik’s text is very sparse and concise, what can be expected from a representative of Slovenian postmodern minimalism. It is only possible to imagine the motive or what is really happening in the textual world by inferring. Despite some spots of indeterminacy, readers can infer in this case that glass refers to a windowpane and that the window must be high up in a building because otherwise no one could fall from it. The scream is probably a reflex of the perceived fall, which must be extremely bad if not even fatal for the one falling. In order to understand this intentionally minimalist and ambiguous little story by Blatnik, readers must reach into their everyday knowledge of the standard courses of action in accidental falls or leaps. Only in this way they can form an idea of the motive for the leap or fall from the building. However, it remains unclear whether this is a report of an accident or a suicide. In searching for the right answer, readers can turn to the story’s title: as an indicator of a citation allusion, “Icarus” leads them to the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. The myth tells the story of how the father Daedalus and his son Icarus escaped from the Labyrinth of Crete, which they had built themselves, by air, using wings they had made from bird feathers and glued together with wax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun; excited about his flight, Icarus came too close to the scorching sun and so the wax on his wings melted and he fell into the deeps and was killed. In addition to the motif of the fatal fall from height, a few other surface traces correspond to the mythological model in Blatnik’s text: the verb to flutter can be associated with wings, floating with flying, and the comparison with a cigarette butt is associated with the scorching heat of the sun. If readers manage to call up their intertextual memory of the Icarus mytheme, they can establish the textual significance in a different manner: they read Blatnik’s story as a new variant of the archetype that symbolically verbalizes the immoderate and self-destructive human desire. The examples discussed above represent an attempt to demonstrate that a text is not an object that could be described as a building with an external and internal construction.

Because it is embedded in the events of juxtaposing and understanding conventional signs, the world to which the text refers is only constituted by the cognitive, speech, and reading acts. This is why the text is both an open, “schematic” product and a process dependent on intersubjective events: on what the author conceived and tried to convey; on the semantic networks encoded in discourse, as well as on how readers recall the fragments of their knowledge, or activate emotions and viewpoints through their response to signifiers. The text is structured by interlacing propositions and arranging them into patterns of the represented world; the continuum of propositions is also evident from the recurrence and interdependence of the surface elements. Through propositions, the text as a sign refers to the segments of the model world that it presents and/or constitutes with the power of speech. At the level of the surface text—as a fixed product in written, printed, and electronic media—the text structure acquires a spatial dimension. It has a perceptible beginning and end, and segmentation in between that is sensually reflected in the boundaries between words, syntactic units, and paragraphs. At the level of distributing concepts into the textual world it is still possible to talk about spatial organization because in the process of reading, spatial structures of the textual world are produced by memory and anticipation, whereas in the creative process a spatiality is typical both of the image of the potential artwork and the syntactic articulation of the imaginary in the symbolic order and its signifying paradigms, such as categorical networks, lexical collocations and families, semantic fields, imageries, and so on. However, in writing and reading, temporality predominates over the spatial organization of structure. Structure always already entails structuring; the production and development of meaning. In this regard, text structure is inseparable from cognitive and speech events; it cannot be torn away from the operation of players in the literary field, and their transactions with meaning and representations. All of this lends structure the dimension of historicity. The historicity and eventness of structure was pointed out by Manfred Frank, among the others. In his book Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (The Sayable and the Unsayable), Frank sets the German hermeneutic tradition against the French (post-)structuralist theory of text and highlights the role of an event based on the thesis that “texts—similar to languages—exist at two levels: as systematic organizations of syntactic and semantic units, and as spoken or written speeches (i.e., as systems and events)” (1990: 9). In another part of the book, he adds to his thought: “In contrast to language, which exists as a possibility, speech is an act or string of acts—that is, something event-driven, actual, and temporal or transitional . . . . Communication is a historical process with on open (i.e., semantically unpredictable) outcome” (Frank 1990: 127, 139; all emphases are original).

The historicity of a literary work Despite their irreducible methodological differences, hermeneutics, phenomenology, reception aesthetics, semiotics, cognitive science, and text linguistics share the conviction that a literary text is an indeterminate, processual, and intersubjective construct. The linguistic skeleton of a work, which the author creates and fixes under unrepeatable historical circumstances, only contains some signifying instructions amidst many semantic gaps, indistinct hints, and vague or ambiguous places that every reader has to work on in the multitude of non-identical responses. These unformed and unfinished structures reach the recipients only through the mediation of seemingly finished media objects in which they are fixed. Manuscripts, printed books, and magazines seem as products that have no influence on the linguistic structure of the text, but in fact they are derived as media objects from their own “bibliographic” codes, which in turn also produce their own meanings and connote the fields for evaluating and classifying texts.67 Thus for example, even the material form of a book and its selected typography, layout format, and design influence the recipient’s comprehension of linguistically structured media content. A media product is thus not merely a neutral text mediator, but also gets involved with its semiosis: it suggests the genre, value, stylistic, social, and other systems that frame the text’s verbal structures. However, with its conveyance of concrete realizations of media codes, a series of variant technical reproductions of the text as a media object—for example, the first book-length reprint of Prešeren’s almanac and newspaper publications, the anniversary reprints of his poetry in pocket or bibliophilic editions, the inclusion of his works in school readers, critical editions of his poems in the collection of Slovenian classics, or Internet websites—is only one of the instances of transmitting verbal texts and affecting their semantics. After its production phase, the text also links to other chains on its way to the readers. These chains include editorial corrections, added paratexts (e.g., the title of the edition, the foreword, and various qualifiers), and critical, interpretative, and literary-history metatexts. The identity of the literary work is thus dynamically dispersed in an interval, in which the time of every reading encounters the linguistic-structural traces of a concrete utterance position that was marked by existential, historical, social or cultural otherness and is only accessible through the mediation of the reproduction technologies.

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For more on this see Chapter 4.

Certain players in the literary field devise, create, write down, and edit texts using various procedures and technologies, another group reads and understands them, a third group edits them for publication, prints, markets, and transmits them, and finally the fourth group explains, adapts, stages, and quotes them. All of these are events connected with the discursive circulation of meanings. They usually take place primarily or exclusively in relation to texts that are deemed literary, but because of their “eventness” in particular, they are also historical. In this regard they do not differ significantly from all other events, developments, and processes, including political ones. The historical nature of the production, existence, and reception of literary works is outlined below. 1. Writing A literary work is inevitably historical if it is analyzed from the perspective of its author. It has been produced through the special kind of work involved in the process of writing. Writing entails many tasks and recourse to various tools and techniques: processing of previous literary and non-literary media products (for example, memorizing folksongs, taking photos of artworks, clipping newspapers, taking notes while reading); the consideration of various possible implementations of creative ideas that spring up in personal experience as responses to such memories and archives of the “already read;” planning feasible strategies of further work; collection, study, and extraction of additional oral, written, or printed material, with the intention of providing subject-matter for the work-in-progress; preparing outlines, taking down creative plans, producing working versions, redactions, and edits; rewriting clean versions, edits of printed sheets; adapting published works for new editions, and so on.68 Hence it follows that writing is a complex form of creative work and not merely a source of pleasure or a result of inspiration that would originate spontaneously from some kind of transcendence.69 Even the first condition for the production of a literary work is material and social: as a type of work, writing must first be accessible to the writer and make sense to him or her. To a certain extent, writers can influence conditions that enable and ascribe meaning to literary writing; for example, by choosing their own reading, developing their cultural literacy, providing the economic means for their survival (e.g., by serving their patrons, through contract work, parallel employment, etc.), and, last but not least, by accumulating social and cultural capital through networking or cultivating their public image. However,

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See Chapter 4 (manuscriptology). To date, the transcendence of writing has been conceived of in various ways: in the form of muses, demons, spirits, God, the absolute or national Spirit, subjective imagination, and last but not least, as the logic of the unconscious or an autonomous linking of signifiers in the language itself. 69

literary writing is primarily enabled or hindered by social and historical powers, on which individuals cannot exert any significant influence. These include class-related, sexual, ethnic, and racial discrimination in access to education and publication media, as well as the general development of the media system, the existing repertoire of literary themes, styles, and genres, the hierarchy of values, the differentiation and economics of the literary field, the political and religious control of literary production, the pressures of public opinion and the predominating social norms, and so on (cf. Dović 2007). Despite its creative singularity, writing thus also entails work, in which the author must take into account and/or overcome the external and internal obstacles and conventions imposed by a medium or genre, various phobias, taboos, and discrepancies, and constantly choose between the possibilities that open up through writing itself: a myriad of creative suppressions, omitted outlines, and variants remain behind the surface of the end product. Based on Bakhtin’s (1986: 69–76) or Foucault’s (2002: 99–118) theories of utterance, the historical nature of a literary work in the moment of its production can be understood as a feature of a complex speech act. Entering the production and processing of sense through their utterances, writers assume specific subjective viewpoints in intellectual or artistic tradition and contemporary social discourse, and are thus responding to their unique existential and bodily position in the historical becoming. To use Steven Mullaney’s ingenious formulation once again, literary work is “a form of and a forum for cultural practice” (1996a: 19): the text is a form or location of communication captured in the social circulation of meanings, tensions, and negotiations through which political power is also maintained and redistributed. In literature, which from pre-Romanticism onwards has been established on the horizon of historicism, writers themselves have also considered their own historical position, staged it in their imagination, and ideologically fabricated it. For example, in his Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets), published in Slovenian as a private supplement to the journal Illyrisches Blatt in 1834, France Prešeren self-reflexively based his poetry on a cosmopolitan cultural plan. According to this plan, poetry written following the idea of aesthetic autonomy was to be introduced to the Carniolan intelligentsia; in the same composition, Prešeren also fictionally elevated the poet’s uniting and cultivating role in the emerging national society— that is, he symbolized the utopia that motivated his own work (Juvan 1997: 93–101). In the spirit of the nationally colored historicism of the time, Prešeren also explained the problems of writing poetry in standard Slovenian—in one of the marginal Austrian crownlands at the end of the nineteenth century—through the etiological historical narrative of the sonnet “Viharjov jeznih mrzle domačije” (Inclement home where icy storms chastise):

Inclement home where icy storms chastise Has been our land e’er since your spirit brave, O Samo, vanished; your forgotten grave Beswept by bitter winds since your demise. From when our fathers, rent by conflicts’ cries, Knew how the yoke of Pippin did enslave, The Turks’ attacks, revolt with sword and stave, Vitovec’s battle—these our time comprise.

The joyful years of glory long ago Through valiant labours never were regained, And songs’ sweet voices we no longer know.

Yet by the force of time still unconstrained On young Parnassus for us flowers grow; Commingled sigh and tears these blooms sustained. (Prešeren 2001: 95).

With this sonnet, Prešeren invented a long-lasting modal perspective that shaped the Slovenian understanding of their national history for decades to come; an elegiac poetic narrative of the catastrophic medieval loss of independence is imagined to be the origin of the backward cultural circumstances of the present that call for a “national poet.”

2. Recording After the author writes down a literary work, it remains historical inasmuch as it documents a specific point in the development of language use and testifies to a temporally marked shaping of media products. The selected typography, graphic breakdown, format, and paper quality, and the type and design of publication are elements of the “bibliographic code” that— in addition to linguistic structures—importantly contributes to textual significance, especially by placing the literary work in the historical development of signifying practices, the media, and literary distribution.70 The text observed as a verbal and symbolic structure is no less historical. It is a palimpsest, composed of various temporal layers of writing that shape, preserve, and reorganize the material of cultural memory.71 Writers intentionally or unintentionally draw upon memories of what others have already written or said. In this way, they incorporate older ideas and forms in their works, rewrite them, and assign new roles and 70 71

See Chapter 4. See Chapter 11.

meanings to them. On the other hand, text—in Lotman’s words—is not only an “accumulator” but also a “generator” of cultural memory, which means it produces mnemonic schemes and frameworks that help to transfer knowledge across time borders (cf. Lachmann 1990). Both of these roles are made possible by language: due to their recurrence, conventionality, and institutional character, signs establish relatively permanent signifying systems. How a literary work preserves, transforms, and appropriates the cultural memory with its linguistic structure can be seen in the seventh poem of Simon Jenko’s (1835–1869) post-Romantic cycle Obrazi (Pictures): his “Zelen mah obrašča zrušene zidove” (Moss has crept on walls / Fallen in decay) contains the motif of ruins and uses it to address the temporal nature of history, culture, and existence (cf. Juvan 2010b). Although this short poem was written in May 1857 and gives the impression that it originates authentically from the author’s intellectual and emotional experience of the moment in which he gazed upon the ruins in the lonely landscape, a careful reading reveals that the fiction of spontaneity is undermined by a discourse of a petrified tradition. The intrusion of a historically remote temporal level integrated into the linguistic tissue of the text is signaled by a sophisticated pathos that wafts up through the use of clichés deposited in the history of the poetic language to which the poet referred and into which he placed the subject of his utterance. This involves the topoi of rhetorical figures, apostrophes, rhetorical questions, and sentences. With their stereotypical nature, these figures lead to the assumption that the author conceived even his sublime images of the ruins with the help of ready-made material. In fact, the imagery of ruins has a rich and variegated tradition in art and poetry. They include the old English elegy “The Ruin,” the Latin epigraph to Rome by Janus Vitalis, sonnets by Francisco de Quevedo and Joachim du Bellay, and first and foremost pre-Romantic and Romantic poetry by Ludwig Uhland, George G. N. Byron, Nikolaus Lenau, Adam Mickiewicz, Sandor Petőfy, and, in Slovenia, Ignacij Holzapfel. Nevertheless, Jenko applied the topos of the vanity and transience of human works that lies behind ruin motifs to a new, post-Romantic historical context, which was influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Because Jenko’s work is open to later reading, the signs already quoted by Jenko can also be assigned meaning in the light of more recent contexts such as the deconstruction of metaphysics, history, and subject. This kind of modernization, which continues to take place with new readings, creates classics and keeps them alive.

3. Reading The revival of old, traditional semantic structures described above shows that literary work is historical not only from the perspective of its production and existence (writing and being recorded), but also through its impact and reception. With its possible worlds, a literary work triggers physical, cognitive-emotional, and discursive responses in the real world, such as expressing reading experiences, forming value judgments about the texts read, and oral or written communication of their understandings and classifications. All these responses have the power of speech acts that constitute and reproduce an aesthetic metalanguage; this discourse, in turn, influences public opinion, the power relations between players in a literary field, and the further course of literary processes. As stated above, the text is an incomplete and open semantic structure, and so it can only partly define the presented world with the linguistic signs fixated in a media product. The structuring of a text in the course of reception is not limited to the actualization of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between the signifiers that are written down, but also includes the establishment of these signifiers’ relations with the semiotic representations that the recipients call up from their knowledge and experience during the reading act. Through reception events, the signs of the text as a media product continue to be positioned within a different semiotic context and the semantic configurations of the text are modified in relation to this context. According to Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, the meaning of a sign is another sign called an interpretant (1955: 98–101). It is impossible to predict with certainty which interpretants readers will think of in understanding the signs in a text. Various philosophical jargons and categories, topical ideologies, successful literary genres, current journalistic themes, and many other areas of social discourse can arise as the virtual frameworks that in a given time segment provide readers interpretants in order to establish textual significance. For example, Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction have established two metalanguages whose concepts today enable a manner of interpreting the textual significance of Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” that the readers of the neatly bound Philadelphian almanac Gift for 1845, in which this tale was first published as part of a Christmas present at the end of 1844, could not even imagine. However, reading is not determined merely by the influences of current metalanguages and discussion topics, but also by unpredictable individual whims and associations connected with the recipient’s biography, interests, moods, and random variables of the reading situation, such as distractions. Therefore not even an individual reader that reads the same text several times over can repeat the same meanings or ideas.

The historical nature of the impact of a literary work does not stop merely at the reception “concretizations” and their verbalizations. Literary work is not just a presentation of a possible world or a model of reality, but it also interferes in reality and constitutes a part of it. Both through its conceptual ideation of the world and the establishment of links between the author and audience, it influences the construction, deconstruction, and reorganization of the historical images of the world. If events and players in the literary system provide it a popular or canonic place, it can be established as a symbolic pattern through which the subjects of reception perceive reality and themselves. It is known that in the years following its publication, Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther met with incredible success, was translated into several European languages, became a popular topic of conversations and essays, and even became a brand name that launched a multitude of Werther-related products on the market: cups with motifs from the novel, handkerchiefs with portraits of the protagonist, Wertherian perfumes, and so on. Goethe became a pop icon, and the tragic character of his main hero, in whom he captured well the sensibility of the young people of that time, promoted identification: young men behaved and dressed like Werther, and rumors began to spread that the fictional Werther’s fate was to blame for the increase in actual suicides among young people. That literature has the power to ideologically influence social consciousness is ultimately testified to by those literary works whose narrative presentation of historical myths contributed to creating the nationalist and chauvinist public discourse that gave rise to the Balkan wars during the 1990s. Historicity also enters the production and reception of a literary work through intertextuality. The concept of intertextuality was developed in early post-structuralism, when radical theorists sought to transcend the philological historicism of positivism, and at the same time also the boundaries of structuralism. Structuralism renounced historical causality and replaced it with the principle of the functionality of elements and structures organized into a synchronous order. One of Kristeva’s explicit goals in introducing the concept of intertextuality was the need to critically transcend the static nature of the structuralist model of meaning. By referring to de Saussure’s analyses of anagrams and Bakhtin’s dialogism, Kristeva claimed that meaning is always created in a communicational event and interaction; this is why she regarded text as “production”—that is, as a dynamic, relational, and changeable process (Kristeva 1969: 144–149, 174). The same applies to the identity of the subject that has written the text or that is reading it. Kristeva “socialized” and “historicized” the structures that structuralism had modeled with a formalized text analysis through intertextuality—a network of the text’s relations with the signifying practices that form a

unique and concrete discursive context of its creation and functioning. Kristeva regards reading and writing as two faces of the same activity: the production and event of meaning. Together with the dynamics of the textual significance, the meanings of a linguistic structure are established through intratextual relations as well as the dialogue of the speaking or reading subject with the contemporary and traditional literary and non-literary texts or sign systems. Through reading, and written absorption and transformation of past and contemporary texts in the process of uttering, the subject reflects and positions itself within historical developments or interferes with them. Intertextuality thus allows the formation of the subject’s position in the ever-changing stream of the Great Text of culture. It would be wrong to comprehend intertextuality as a relation between a delimited, coherent, and semantically focused text and a social context that would exist outside it as some sort of a historical background. With its chains of interpretants semiosis crosses the boundaries of text at all points: that which seems to be inside the textual structure constantly presupposes, actualizes, calls up, and transforms other virtual or actual textual structures that make up the discursive and historical context of an utterance, and at the same time anchor it in glossaries, imageries, and realia.72 All of these filiations and affiliations attach a text or utterance to a historical situation, and define its place in life—through intertextuality, the exterior of the text is like a pocket of historicity sewn into the textual fabric.

72

Also see the paragraph on text and context in Chapter 2.

6 Literariness Literariness and the Crisis of Literary Theory In his paper “The Literary in Theory,” Jonathan Culler claims that, although the problem of literariness is central to literary theory from Russian formalism to French structuralism, it appears that “the attempt to theorize . . . the distinctiveness of literature . . . hasn’t been the focus of theoretical activity for some time” and that questions that have become central to theory are far less about aesthetics than issues of race, gender, and class (Culler 2000b: 274–275 passim). In my opinion, the impression that the question of literariness has become surpassed or irrelevant emanates from a specific cultural location and space: asking about the essence or distinctive features of literature has to do with the history of the discipline: in this case, Euro-American literary theory. When a literary theorist— someone guided by Jakobson’s phenomenological imperative, encoded into the modern, formalist tradition, that the object of literary scholarship be “literariness” and not just anything that is historically, biographically, socially, or psychologically related to literature (Jakobson 1979: 305–306)—tries to find out what the “essence” of literature may be, what discriminates texts deemed literary from other forms of communication, or, rather, what exactly changes their status into works of verbal art, he or she does not only ask questions about the object of the inquiry. Despite the apparently dispassionate distance from the reified language that this scholar is trying to isolate from the rest of reality, by asking this question the theoretical observer is also seeking an excuse for limiting the territory in which it is possible to utilize legitimately her or his explanatory concepts, tools, and plans. Or, as Culler puts it: “To ask ‘what is literature?’ is in effect a way of arguing about how literature should be studied” (Culler 2000b: 276). In Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding, “it is clear that theoretical writings . . . are also (and more especially) contributions to the social construction of the very reality of this object” (1996: 294, original emphasis). Thus, posing the question about literariness is indirectly and implicitly also aimed towards the observer as a representative of the discursive field that has well-defined and institutionally inherited cultural functions as well as a meta-language with a specific history. In his paper, “Why did Modern Literary Theory Originate in East-Central Europe?,” Galin Tihanov argues that modern literary theory was actually born in the decades between World War I and World War II in Eastern and Central Europe owing to the disintegration of philosophical discourses (Marxism, phenomenology), to dissatisfaction with positivist and

historicist legacies, and to changes in literature itself (i.e., its self-reflective and responsible uses of form). In his opinion, the emerging discipline of literary theory adopted ideas of Romantic aesthetics and philosophy of language, and established its specific discourse in the uniquely multilingual and multicultural academic environments of Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary (cf. Tihanov 2004). Further, the field of the theory of literature became institutionalized as late as in the mid-twentieth century with such seminal texts as Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942) while the discipline now as a standard part of literary studies was drawing exhaustively on the tradition of ancient poetics and rhetoric (cf., e.g., Glaser 1990: 15–23; Ocvirk 1978: 6–12). However, since Aristotle, the two ancient disciplines used to reflect, describe, classify, and normalize the domain of communication that was either narrower or larger than what has been considered belles-lettres and written and read for aesthetic purposes for approximately two hundred years: poetics dealt mostly with poetry, which, for instance, did not include prose genres, whereas rhetoric cultivated and studied the skill (in the sense of ars) of any kind of public speaking, not just that inspired by artistic muses. From poetics and rhetoric, literary theory adopted a series of issues and notions; for example, the principles of representation/mimesis, topoi, disposition, literary kinds and genres, diction, figures of speech, and meter. However, it programmatically freed them from practical-normative aspects and anchored them in a new épistémè—it presupposed the awareness of art as an autonomous system of social communication; that is, a system governed by its own principles. From the Enlightenment onwards, these ideas originated in aesthetics: in addition to Batteux’s channeling of all beaux arts into a single, imitative principle and Schiller’s idea that art “creates rules for itself,” Kant’s notion of beauty and aesthetic experience as contemplative enjoyment, devoid of practical interests, was of key importance (cf. Tatarkiewicz 1980: 17–23). Aesthetics reflected and—with its infiltration into ideologies, their institutional apparatuses, and practices—to some extent also shaped one of the two great intellectual restructurings of traditional Europe: during the transformation from the estate system into the functional differentiation of modernized bourgeois societies, the beaux arts assumed the role of the apparently only remaining guardians of the crumbling wholeness of an individual’s existential experience. In light of another major process, however—that of the formation of national identities—the arts confirmed the individuality and creative ability of a collective individual, called “national spirit” (cf. Schmidt 1989: 25, 282–283). Finally, the “literary field” has become fully developed in the period of postromanticism to modernism: it included texts, practices, lifestyle, notions, presuppositions, institutions, groups and activities, and other elements that were (or seemed to be) regularly

emancipated from the constraints and direct pressures of economic or political power and, within that field, the specific nomos (auto-nomy) was instituted “both in the objective structures of a socially governed universe and in the mental structures of those who inhabit it” (Bourdieu 1996: 61, 289–292). The object and the method (literariness and literary scholarship) both construct and maintain each other’s existence, autonomy, and function: the question about a particular nature or essence of literature could be posed with real consistency only in the framework of a specialized field (i.e., literary theory, which freed itself from explicit normativity and close entanglement with poetic production) only after literary genres—at least in their most representative cases—had been autonomized under the new, uniform understanding of literature as verbal art. The differentia specifica of literature was primarily found in its social function: it became literature pertaining to the social domain of arts and standing in opposition to the “literatures” of other fields of social activity; for example, religion, politics, science, or education (cf. Rusch 1997: 97–98). Viewed from within literary scholarship, the meaning of literary theory can thus be explained; namely, that it helps us understand what we as “ordinary” readers experience when reading a work of art (this can also be explicated in the spirit of the Emil Staiger’s lucid paronomasia, namely, “dass wir begreifen, was uns ergreift” [cited in Rusterholz 1990: 344]). However, from the critical perspective of a higher-order observer, literary theory might lose its apparent distance from the object of study, as well as analytical and descriptive purity. Seen from the outside, it turns out to be a discursive practice intertwined with literature, science, and education; for example, with teaching English or Slovenian in primary and secondary schools. In these domains of social and cultural interaction, literary theory helps establish interpretative languages and practices among writers, experts, teachers, and students. Such interpretive structures with sets of concepts and mental operations refine the sense that literature as art is a special class of phenomena as well as of extraordinary value (cf. Eagleton 1983: 200–203). By inquiring what gives texts a literary character, literary theory actually participated in the identity construction of its object and, with it, theory secured its own existence as well as the relevance of its conceptions and methods. In the development of literary theory in this century, two opposing lines of thinking followed one another. Modernism in the arts and theory—with its phenomenological reductionism, elitism, “formalism,” “theologico-aesthetics,” and “the animus against the everyday, the ordinary, the popular, the wordly, the techno-scientific, and the public” (Leitch 1992: 41)—elevated the idea of the aesthetic autonomy of (verbal) art. A part of Russian

Formalism, the Chicago School, New Criticism, and Werkimmanente Interpretation strove, in a parallel manner to modern artistic currents (e.g., abstract painting), to elaborate the particular ontology, specific structure, and/or singular meaning of the literary work of art through concepts such as defamiliarization, iconicity, or ambiguity. On the other hand, for the last thirty years the category “literature” shared the same fate as other totalities. It was exposed to postmodern deconstruction and dehierarchization. As a symptom of that move, there has been growing doubt that it is possible to claim what the essence of all literature is and to recognize and display general literary-artistic structure in every item of this class of objects. Ever since French structuralism and its mutations in post-structuralism in the late 1960s, literature was increasingly often studied as a discourse, as one among other discursive practices in society. It became basically equal to, say, myth or TV soap opera. Literary texts were observed as “communal documents” (Leitch 1992: ix), their literariness was moving out of focus. Among libertarian or left-wing academics, critical of unreflected elitism hidden behind preceding notions of literariness, literature is no more axiologically privileged over science, religion, politics, popular culture, and new media, including hypertext, nor it is treated as a totality that is ontologically different from other genres of communication. As Vincent Leitch puts it, “literature turns in a modulated functionalist notion of ‘literatures’” (60), which implies that “there is no ontology of literature; there are only literature functions—functions in relation to specific languages, intertexts, institutions, regimes of reason” (Leitch 1992: 59). Literature as a heteroglot discourse intertextually affiliated to societal and historical heteroglossia is obviously the notion that has supplanted the once homogeneous category of belles-lettres. Gebhard Rusch’s conviction that modes of literary reception are not uniform because they differ for different social groups, textual genres, and “different types and concepts of literature” (Rusch 1997: 98–99), although based on empirical evidence, is no exception within the general trend of pluralizing and opening the literary canon. Arguments against an aesthetic and a homogeneous notion of literature, as well as questioning the boundaries between art and non-art, come from various viewpoints (cf. García-Berrio 1992: 25–27, 39–44). On the one hand, theorists of socio-historical or readerresponse orientations point out that literariness is only one of the social conventions or psychological expectations that form the background for understanding texts, but it is by no means neither their internal essence nor their objective feature, be it structural, stylistic, or semantic. Texts that could have not been written and in their time understood as pure verbal art are nowadays treated as literature. For example, the old Attic comedy, which was a kind of

“poetry,” but inseparably connected with Dionysian festivities, could therefore not be reduced to the function that is presently called aesthetic. Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, and postcolonial scholars and critics are well skilled in reading “against the grain;” they are eager to disclose traces of economic, bodily, social, ideological, political, and other non-aesthetic investments even in the subtlest poetic literature. On the other hand, precisely linguistics— which, according to Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics” and “Retrospect,” as a kind of semiotic meta-theory should ensure objective identification of literariness (i.e., the poetic function) in texts themselves (cf. Jakobson 1981a: 18–21; 1981b: 766)—increasingly turns to pragmatics. It agrees to the thesis that all linguistic and stylistic features that should objectively distinguish the literary text from a non-literary one are widespread in nonartistic communication, too, so that the deciding factor in literariness is the circumstances or the context of a given speech act. There is no need to mention that post-structuralist “rhetoric” also makes out literary features, such as tropes, fiction, and story-telling, in other domains; for example, in philosophy (Derrida, de Man), law, and history (Hayden White). Moreover, to the dismay of some more traditionalist scholars, instead of observing literature, their colleagues follow the example of Barthes and, rejecting the dichotomy between a language and metalanguage, create an essayist mixture of literature, philosophy, hermeneutics, and semiotic ludism. In Culler’s observation, “the literary in theory . . . has migrated from being the object of theory to being the quality of theory itself” (2000b: 286). The groups of theoretical “anti-essentialist” work in the study of literature mentioned above agree that “‘literature’ . . . refers to a heterogeneous group of objects between which there is no more than a family resemblance” (Olsen 1987: 73–74). Culler commented on the logic of antiessentialist and conventionalist approaches and, quoting John M. Ellis, compared the concept of “literature” to the position of the concept of “weeds:” weeds are plants that do not have some common botanical denominator, structure, or essence; the semantic range of this concept depends on the (noxious) function of these plants in a particular society, or, rather, its (agri-)culture; namely, on the convention governing people’s handling of plants or their view of plants (Culler 1989: 32). Similarly, Stein Haugom Olsen spoke in favor of the term “literary work of art” as the name of a class of functions, in which the identity of the objects that are the members of such a class could only be “defined through the function they serve in a community of practitioners using the objects” (Olsen 1987: 74). Although defining the literary work in the context of a practice involving it seemed to raise no crucial problems for Olsen, Culler came to the fatal conclusion that, based on the notion that literariness is only a convention, literary theory would be redundant because the common features of literature

would be better explained by sociology, anthropology, or history (Culler 1989: 32). In addition to Olsen and his The End of Literary Theory, there are in fact some literary theorists that sign their names to the obituary for the attribute “literary.” Their reasoning is as follows (particularly provocative is, for instance, Eagleton’s): if there are no ontological boundaries between literature and other discourses, if literature is only some kind of ideological fiction, an umbrella term for heterogeneous genres and linguistic registers, historically created constructs with a set date of expiration, then there is no need for the theory to fancy or burden itself with the attribute “literary” because all texts—from a sonnet to a court document of indictment—are justified to be explained with the same conceptual tools (Eagleton 1983: 194–217). Literary theory is said to be passé or “dead” (Tihanov 2004), or, more optimistically, to be transformed into “post-theory;” that is, into “the theoretical discussions animated by the questions of the death of theory” (Culler 2000: 277). After a period of scrutinizing its own premises and the object of analysis, literary theory is self-obliterating (cf. Smirnov 1987: 6–10) or, rather, flows into the sea of general, quasi-philosophic theory that eclectically amalgamates sociology, semiotics, discourse analysis, cognitive science, cultural or media studies, and so on. It is therefore evident to me that the problem of literariness is related to the question of the existence or dissolution of literary theory as a discipline. It is a symptom of a permanent crisis, which is, according to de Man, immanent to all modern literary scholarship: The succession of various scientific schools since positivism has proved the elusiveness of its object, methods, concepts, and results. The question whether literariness is an “internal” trait of the text or just an “external” convention (Culler 1989: 39–40) is exciting because it brings up not only far-reaching epistemological dilemmas between realism, nominalism, and constructivism and/or between hermeneutic and psycho-sociological approaches to literature. It can even have considerable implications for policies and the situation concerning the present study of literature, especially as characterized dramatically by Steven Tötösy as a process of a marginalization of the study of literature (1998: 20–23). In sum, the question is within what institutional framework literary theory should be advanced and taught, if at all. Literariness as an “Objective” Character of the Text Culler summarizes current, post-Jakobsonian definitions of literariness as a set of traits, objectively present in the text itself, into two basic groups of criteria: typical of literary texts are a special use or, rather, arrangements of language on the one hand, and a particular attitude towards reality on the other (1989: 34, 41). Considering the growing, differing, and

heteroglot production of literature, the conception according to which literary/poetic language exists as one of social dialects or, rather, as a separate functional style (cf. Mukařovský 1977: 3–4), different from the other varieties of standard language owing to the domination of the aesthetic function can presently hardly hold true. Jan Mukařovský, who was the first to introduce this kind of theory into modern discussions, was already well aware that the boundaries of poetic language were fuzzy. He found that poetic language is characterized only by a thin layer of “poeticisms” while sharing the rest of linguistic elements with other styles and also benefiting from them (Mukařovský 1977: 6–7). However, despite the semiotic view that art as well as poetic language are social facts, dependent on norms, conventions, and values, Mukařovský nevertheless reified poetic language—he discussed it as a relatively autonomous sub-code, even if it is impossible to prove its autonomy with immanently linguistic criteria and with no reference to statistical data. The thesis of the stylistic peculiarity of literary language could perhaps hold true only for discursive dictionaries and grammars, developed—by imitation of patterns, recurrence, and variance of clichés—in the traditions of literary genres and kinds in particular periods or currents such as for the language of the romantic sonnet or the poetic languages of the nineteenth century, of decadence, or of expressionism. To me, much more convincing than the conceptions of the literary language as a linguistic sub-code seems to be the thesis that, in a text that is written with artistic intentions, the author uses and arranges linguistic material differently and with other goals than in standard communication. Hence, the actualization of linguistic levels in a text written for aesthetic purposes differs from conventions of practical, scientific, or any kind of non-artistic communication: Its reader can therefore discover not only deviations from “normal” sociolects and styles (i.e., various kinds of figurativeness, additional or superordinate organization of sound, and lexico-syntactic and semantic material), but most of all their greater density and structural coherence (García-Berrio 1992: 39–79; Markiewicz 1970: 52– 65). This means a higher frequency of uncommon language features in artistic texts as well as a richer network of intra- and intertextual relationships between these elements and their patterns. From such views the “objectivistic” theory of literariness extrapolated two basic tendencies of literary usage of language: The inclination towards the polysemy of words, phrases, and larger units of discourse (this is the opposite of the ideal of monosemy in nonliterary languages), and the tendency towards textual self-reference or the dominance of the poetic function—that is, towards the fact that the reader is paying more attention to structural homologies, to playing with recurrent forms, ambivalent meanings, and spatialized patterns of

parallelisms and oppositions, so that his or her reading is not limited only to the linear quest for referential information (cf. Eco 1988: 145–167; García-Berrio 1992: 52, 61–70). In a literary text an important peculiarity of every act of writing is stressed; unlike speech, the written word is devoid of the “physical” presence of the author and the original communicative context. Once being recorded, a literary text detaches itself from its contingent circumstances. Its meaning has to be tied more to what is stored in the cultural memory through writing. In a literary text the context of uttering cryptically vanishes. Because of such “depragmatization” of the literary text (Culler 1989: 34) extratextual referentiality and performativity of literary signs are reduced or, rather, mutated. The author, educated in this kind of tradition of writing, ensures that the depragmatization is counterbalanced by an outburst of semiotic inter-connectivity. In this way, the ties between linguistic signs in the text strengthen, intertwine, and increase in number, and the meanings also come into being with intertextual reference to the literary tradition and by hypothetical (re)constructions of the author’s original socio-cultural milieu through symptomatic textual representations. The literary text, separated from its author and context, must itself receive special receiver’s attention and harder interpretive work. Because of the material character of the recording or, rather, the fetishism of the Book as a standard medium of presentation of a literary work of art, many readers are still inclined to experience the text as an organic, complete unit, in which nothing is coincidental and everything is meaningful and/or functional. Hence, its stylistic patterns and even its substance and forms of expression (e.g., the quality and distribution of vowels) can make up parallelisms, isomorphisms, ambiguity, semantic density, and iconic connotation (cf. Culler 1989: 34, 37–38; Eco 1988: 147–149; García-Berrio 1992: 64). However, many of these traits would in fact hardly be noticed by the same reader in the context of “ordinary language,” that is, if the text were not already treated as a literary work by a prior reading decision and expectation (cf. Olsen 1987: 80). The depragmatization of utterance in literature means the transition between literariness viewed through an estranged use of language and literariness as a particular textual relationship with reality. To Aristotle, already, the stylistic and formal criteria alone were not sufficient for defining poetry. For this reason he introduced criteria of significance concerning content (mimesis as the relationship between a poetic work and reality), pragmatics, and reception (catharsis as the impact of a dramatic act on the reader’s psyche). According to Aristotle, unlike the historian’s attitude towards reality, the “poet’s responsibility is not to tell what in fact happened, but rather what could have happened; that is, what could have happened according to the laws of probability and necessity” (Poetics,

Chapter 9); this thought fed not only the notions of aesthetic vraisemblance, but also the determinants of literariness concerning the relationship between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While the evidence of poetic art was mostly formal artistry in the classicist tradition, since pre-Romanticism and Romanticism the criteria of content—such as imagination, fantasy, and in newer theories particularly fictionality—have been more important (Meletinski 1989: 13–29). In the literary text, the world represented, the subject expressing this world (the narrator’s or poet’s voice), and the author’s speech acts (quasi-judgments and quasireferential presentation) are all assumed to be fictional (Culler 1989: 41–43; Markiewicz 1970: 119–149). As Lubomír Doležel has stressed, Aristotle’s comparison between historiography and poetry was used as a base for redefining the relationship between the textual world and reality as early as the eighteenth century when, after a period of absolute domination of mimetic-imitative poetics, a tendency for aesthetic justification of individual creative imagination emerged. This thought wrests itself from the vulgarized norm of imitating the outside world because it put nature and the author—or, rather, the actual and poetic reality—in an equal position: in that of a parallel coexistence. The Swiss aesthetists J. J. Bodmer and J. J. Breitinger relied on logic and ontology by Leibniz and Wolff and, to legitimize poetic world-building, used his notion that fictional stories are “possible worlds” that exist as alternatives to actual reality, having their own logic, chronology, and cosmology. The theory of possible worlds was then forgotten until recently (Doležel 1990: 67, 39–52, 1998: 231). The fact that the literary text can be detached from its original context and actualized in different ways marks its relationship towards reality in yet another way, not just the one discussed in theories of fiction. This relationship implies its referential indeterminacy and polyvalence (García-Berrio 1992: 49–52, 66–70). Because the authorial intention no longer controls the signs in the text, and they are not determined by the context of uttering, they can more freely relate to more loosely limited, overlapping cognitive domains and thematic fields. Especially through the history of reading, signs evoke heterogeneous and sometimes even incompatible contexts, while their meanings are intertextually grafted into experientially or socially distinct discursive fields, texts, thematic networks, and contingent horizons of expectations (cf. Culler 1982: 122–125, 134–135; De Berg 1997: 24–27). Such polyvalence and semantic indeterminacy of the artistic text results in the dynamics and condensation of its meaning; it gives the represented textual world a touch of “the concrete universal” (Culler 2000b: 281), which means that literary fictions are applicable to historically, culturally, and

socially particular levels of understanding, where they function as a kind of example or as an implicit model of how identity is being formed (Culler 2000b: 282). Discussing Steven Knapp’s Literary Interest, Culler—in a Bakhtinian vein—maintains that the specific interest in literature originates in the ability of literary writing’s “staging agency” and its “engagement with otherness.” Literary representation, which according to Knapp particularizes the emotive and other values of its referents by foregrounding their dependency on complex, even contradictory, lingual framings, helps defamiliarize stereotyped knowledge and “makes us self-conscious agents;” literature gives us “an unusually pure experience of what agency . . . is like” (Culler 2000b: 280–281). After the above compressed summary of the main components of theories of literariness, I present here an example of a post-structuralist interpretation of a text, one that is considered literary—Edvard Kocbek’s (1904–1981)73 poem “Drevo” (Tree): Zaslišim drevo in ga zagledam,

I hear a tree and I see it,

ležem pod njegovo senco

I lie down in its shade

ali pa ga otipljem in podrem,

or I touch it and topple it,

razsekam ga in položim v peč

I chop it into pieces and put it in the stove

ali sestavim iz njega brunarico,

or build a cabin with it,

kar koli storim z njim,

whatever I do with it

vedno ostane drevo,

it’s always a tree,

nerazdeljivi, neuničljivi

the indivisible, indestructible

šum vetra podnevi in ponoči,

hum of the wind by day and by night,

v peči, na ležišču, v senci,

in the stove, on the bed, in the shade,

med vrsticami v časniku

between the lines of the newspaper,

in v dimu med nebom in zemljo,

and in the smoke between earth and sky,

drevo kot senca in počitek,

tree as shade and rest,

drevo kot zibelka in krsta,

tree as cradle and coffin,

drevo kot središče raja,

tree as the center of paradise,

drevo kot šum in tišina,

tree as humming and silence,

drevo kot drevo

tree as tree

in drevo kot beseda.

and tree as word. (Kocbek 2004: 126–127)

The word “tree” in this poem avoids any specific extra-textual reference; it even eludes the reference derived from the experience (typical of lyrics), which opens the textual space in the beginning (“I hear a tree and I see it, / I lie down in its shade”); “tree” does not

73

Kocbek was one of the most important Slovenian poets, writers, essayists,and (dissident) political figures of the twentieth century. See Edvard Kocbek, Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems, ed. & trans. by Michael Scammel & Veno Taufer, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.

indicate the characteristics, story, or condition of a concrete, individual tree nor does it represent a particular concept “tree” within one of the discursive fields (e.g., botany, fruitgrowing, forestry, paper-making, etc.) In non-literary communication a word is only as relevant as it can be used for informative regulation of the practice with which one comprehends the living environment or acts within it; for example, “Look, a tree! There will be some shade” or “A tree is torn down, cut up, and used as firewood.” Kocbek’s poetic voice argues against the reduction of the sign, against its stable, definite, and operative reference. By listing alternative possibilities, various ontological modalities of the tree, the poem suggests that the meaning of a poetic sign (“tree”) cannot be exhausted by automated views of it, which were shaped by repeating collocations of the word in various genres of everyday communication. Kocbek’s tree evokes some kind of elusive “tree-ness” that escapes stabilized categorical or pragmatic schemes. This unique, merely poetically contrived meaning emerges only in this literary text by juxtaposing heterogeneous and even contradictory areas of imagination (i.e., with the play of alternative possible worlds of the tree—it is shade, a cradle, a coffin, paper, a tree of Eden, a word, a noise, silence), and by crossbreeding the evaluative perspectives that the word had gone through in its cultural context during the course of its historical life. Poetic writing revives recorded cultural memory instead of relying on outside reality. Kocbek’s “Tree” evokes the connotations that this word has gained through culture and the poet’s personal experience. The poem lists contexts that can be entirely practical (the tree as an object of perception, a place of respite, raw material for a carpenter and a papermaker, etc.) or contexts that have acquired symbolic, archetypal dimensions: existential, religious, and poetic (tree of Eden, smoke, sky, earth, cradle, coffin, word). Hence, the literary text takes part in imaginary-symbolic anthropological universals with which members of a particular culture orient their lives (García-Berrio 1992: 86–93); the poem and its unique linguistic-structural fabric gives a special semantic design and evaluative accent to this trans-historical imagery. The textual world can refer primarily to itself because it only exists in this text and because of it. Self-referentiality is disclosed on the final margin of the text in a kind of mise en abyme; the ending gives a new sense to the previous whole. The point in question is the tautology “tree as tree,” which with the sentence of identity replaces previous predications (“tree as a/b/c”) and the metafictional loop “tree as word.” In fact, the tree constantly appears in Kocbek’s text as a word, as a signifier, even if its word-only character is disguised by the iconic fictions of the referents. However, precisely as a poetic, literary word the tree is capable of the evasive excess of meaning. Kocbek’s poem interpreted in this way satisfies all

the major criteria that provide a text with literary features: The poem is linguistically designed in a special way, semantically dense, and highly structured (in this way it draws attention and provides the possibility of a picturesque image), and the poet’s fictional substitute (the lyrical subject) expresses an imaginary world, amalgamated from possible, alternative stories. In addition, the meaning of the poem—symbolized by “tree as word”—is polyvalent and undetermined. All of these characteristics seem to be objective properties of the text. Therefore, with respect to Kocbek’s poem one could claim that literariness is structural essence, which is realized in every (single) artistic text and is accessible for objective theoretical description.

Literariness as Convention In contrast, opponents of essentialist conceptions of literariness—for example, Eagleton (1983: 1–16)—claim that all the aforementioned features are also characteristic of genres that are by no means considered literature; for instance, mathematical word problems and jokes are fictional (“At the market Johnny bought 3 red apples and 2 pears. How many pieces of fruit did he bring home?”). Anti-essentialists usually do not forget to add that Mukařovský and Jakobson—as the main proponents of a linguistic circumscription of literariness—have also already detected the poetic function of language in nonliterary texts such as political advertisements (e.g., the well-known “I like Ike”). Moreover, for Vincent Leitch it is precisely through Jakobson’s notion of the poetic function that “the structuralist concept of literariness . . . helps us think past literary aestheticism and strict formalism, opening the whole field of social communication to semiotic analysis attentive to matters beyond, but inclusive of, ‘poeticity’” (Leitch 1992: 42). On the one hand, literariness is by no means limited to the works that are deemed literary. On the other hand, one can see how a hermeneutic-evaluative presupposition that one is dealing with a literary text changes his or her reading and understanding of a simple newspaper note (cf., for example Genette 1969: 150): “His Cry:” “As he stepped / to the machine / to fix its / sensor, / the machine automatically turned on. / He did jump back, but too late, / since / the moving part / of the machine squeezed / him against the static part.” A piece of news from a police and fire report about a work-related accident that I simply rewrote in verse could be read differently from its original shape. Verse is a standard signal that triggers a reading according to poetic conventions. Therefore, the newspaper news about a work-related accident loses realistic attributes and concrete temporal-spatial determinants. Instead of referring to actual reality in a particular factory, the intra-textual ties between

linguistic elements strengthen, and so does the intertextual harmony of the “poem” with codes and works recalled from literary tradition. For this reason the transformed journalistic text could even be interpreted (forgive my ludistic exaggeration) as a minimalist, tragicomic ballad about a fatal conflict between a person and technology. The message would be universalized and deeper, eternal meanings, detached from a concrete situation, would be searched for. A skilled interpreter would not have difficulty in corroborating this kind of reading through “objective” data found in the text (e.g., the contrast between the moving and static parts of the machine, between the broken sensor and destructive functioning). Here is yet another and different example: novinec v drugi zvezni ligi belišće je nedvomno prijetno presenečenje za

the newcomer in the second national league belišće

zahodno skupino saj je dalo to moštvo

is no doubt a pleasant surprise for

vsem zlasti pa favoritom vedeti da se

the western group since this team let

ne misli zadovoljiti samo s povprečnimi

everybody and particularly the favorites know

dosežki to najbolje kažejo rezultati

that

in uvrstitev na lestvici saj se ta

it is not planning to be satisfied just with average

enajsterica med drugim ponaša tudi s

achievements this is best indicated by the results

tem da je edini neporaženi ligaš med

and the placement in the ranks since this

vsemi zveznimi klubi torej nič čudnega

team prides itself among other things with

da so igralci belišća ob teh začetnih

the fact that it is the only undefeated league

uspehih samozavestni in da so njihove

member among

napovedi pred tekmo z aluminijem

all national teams therefore it is no surprise

optimistične z dosedanjo igro kakršno

that the belišće players because of this initial

smo prikazali na prvenstvenih tekmah

success are confident and that

ni razlogov da bi skrivali upanje

before the game with aluminum their predictions

tudi na popoln uspeh v ljudskem vrtu

are optimistic with the game so far that

je izjavil eden najboljših igralcev

we have shown at the championship matches

ki se je izkazal preteklo nedeljo

there is no reason to hide hope

jozić (Šalamun 1968: 45)

for a complete success in ljudski vrt as well said one of the best players who proved himself this past sunday jozić

If the above text were read aloud to us, we would say without much hesitation that it belongs to the journalistic genre. It would be regarded as sports commentary. The language seems natural and prosaic, the message is non-ambiguous, and it might have helped the readers with entirely practical interests (e.g., with filling out sports forecasts); the textual

world refers to well-known past realities from soccer life in Slovenia. However, if we know that we have in fact listened to a poem by the Slovenian modernist poet Tomaž Šalamun (b. 1941), all of these “objective” properties are seen in a completely different light and their function is changed. Unlike Kocbek’s “Tree,” in this case the context of the utterance, its medium and presentation, as well as the reading conventions applied are really crucial for establishing literariness. The author’s name as a paratextual information already evokes expectations of genre, style, perspective, and so on. Following Foucault, the author functions not only as the owner of the text or the copyright, and the guardian of its proper understanding, but also in a special socio-cultural role, through which people classify, evaluate, and stratify the universe of discourse (cf. Pease 1990). For reasonably educated Slovenian readers, the name Šalamun functions as a repository of literary-cultural associations (Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital”), either originating in reading the author’s better-known texts or derived from journalistic, scholarly, or school metaliterature and from the image created by the public media. The medium or the place of publication of the poem “Belišće” also reset its character: By moving it from the newspaper column to the context of a collection of poems (Namen pelerine [The Purpose of a Raincoat], 1968), the text becomes fictional and depragmatized because to a reader it is not important whether the facts in the poem are true or not, once he or she decides to process it according to conventions of poetry. Naturally, the poem “Belišće” apparently violates these conventions. Against the background of the paradigmatic poetic texts and traditional codes, it loses any meaning. Its artistic significance can only be legitimized by the reader’s reliance on avant-garde aesthetic conventions, on principles of the ready-made. Philosophizing about similar artistic practices of Duchamp and Warhol, Arthur C. Danto maintains that an artistic statement of the kind “By this gesture I make this simple object an artwork” is only possible on the background of tradition, when the history of art has been internalized in the conceptual frameworks of both the artist and observer/critic (Danto 1981: 51). As a member of the 1960s-neo-avantgarde group OHO, Šalamun took a ready-made newspaper fragment and with some minor changes moved it to the aesthetic context: His collection of poems is a parallel to the gallery where Marcel Duchamp once exhibited a urinal under the title “A Fountain” (cf. Danto 1981: 93–94). Under these circumstances, one perceives a sports commentary mostly in its aesthetic function. One observes, as Bakhtin would say, the “image of language” shown from a distance. Šalamun’s manipulation encourages the reader that he or she also looks at the iconized sociolect from a reflexive and ironic distance. Šalamun’s “ready-made” verse undermines traditional ideas about poetry. The text is artistically relevant precisely as a means of critically laying such

expectations bare—by revealing them as conventions, which are institutionalized and socially consecrated. With the provoking absence of the expected, “Belišće” talks about the hidden nature of literariness—yet with relaxing, parodic laughter. It should be noticed that it is this kind of avant-garde act that prompted the theoretical notion that literariness cannot be an objective property of texts, but rather something “external:” Based on the circumstances, the context of the reception or, rather, conventions and institutions of literariness—as a special value as well—is assigned to texts. After readerresponse theory and post-structuralism tried to convince us that the essentialist explication of literariness was unjustified, it is nevertheless necessary to pose some trivial questions. Would one be willing, for instance, to satisfy one’s needs for literature (if one has them, of course) by consuming journalistic texts printed as collections of poems, grinding philosophic treatise between the covers of a novel, or watching TV roundtables staged as absurd grotesques? On the other hand, would one even try to derive anything useful and with everyday pragmatic use from, for instance, Kocbek’s “Tree” if it were found signed “E.K.” in the “Home and Family” column of some magazine? If literariness is only a convention, how did it come to be and what is the basis for the consensus that, for instance, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, France Prešeren’s The Wreath of Sonnets, or Ivan Cankar’s drama The King of Betajnova are undoubtedly literary works, pieces of verbal art? I postulate that all these questions are not merely rhetorical. They imply that texts, in order to be read as literature, have to serve a certain social (existential) function that is irreducible to other discourses. From a similar standpoint, Olsen argues that “the term ‘literary work of art’ is the name of a function-class constituted by an institution of concepts and rules defining a practice” (1987: 75). In my view this is not far from a sound answer to the question about literariness, but seeing the literary of the literary text only through the function the text serves in the practices of a given cultural context still fails to explain how texts do it and why, and on what basis such a function is expected from them at all.

Literariness as an Effect Based on a Canon Kocbek’s poem—because all of the “objective” symptoms of literariness were found in it—belongs to the opus of a poet that is considered a classic of modern Slovenian poetry and is therefore respected among scholarly and general readers alike that are favorably disposed towards poetry. With their reading, metatexts, enthusiastic or critical reviews, conflicting interpretations, and so on, critics, essay writers, literary historians, philosophers, and teachers gradually recognized Kocbek’s literature as particularly valuable, culturally

representative, exciting, and stimulating discussions and proliferation of further literary works. Thus, the author and his work were installed in the core of the Slovenian literary canon. The literary canon is a repertoire of works, authors, norms, principles, conventions, and explanations related to them, which—owing to the success among readers, recognition among the elites, abundant and diverse metatextual responses by writers and scholars as well as educational or political “applicability”—become selected in a particular culture as representations of general notions and “supra-historical” values: the canonized works function as paradigms not only of beautiful, correct, and eloquent writing, of rules of literary genres, of ethical, cognitive, and other values, but also of the concept of “literature” (cf. Juvan 2004: 113–114). It has certainly been known for a long time that literature in the sense of verbal art has not been around forever or everywhere; as a notion, it is European and historical (Kos 1978: 5–12), not without ideological investments, and it represents the outcome of a great restructuring of European societies, within which a relatively autonomous domain of communication—the system of art or the literary field—gradually developed. However, there might be too little attention paid to the fact that the notion of literature was established on the basis of concrete, highly valued texts—namely, by their recording, conserving, reproducing, reading, celebrating, and commenting through individuals, groups, and institutions, such as salons, eminent journals, academies, or university departments of literary study. These complex practices lead to establishing a set of descriptive and evaluative terms for commenting on art, sometimes adopted from other fields (e.g., religion or politics). Such terms, together with normative generalizations and practices of classification (e.g., genres or high vs. popular literature, etc.) engendered a discourse about works of art, which, according to Bourdieu, is “not a simple side-effect, designed to encourage its [i.e., the work’s] apprehension and appreciation, but a moment which [was] part of the production of the work, of its meaning and its value” (Bourdieu 1996: 170). This discourse turned the attitude towards objects, classified and perceived as artworks, into a kind of “literary doxa” or quasi-religious “belief” in their transcendent meanings and in the demiurgic authority of their authors (172). This means that literariness as a convention with great ideological charge evolved along the canon of representative texts—along the world literature and classics of national literatures. Those texts function among professional and amateur readers alike not only as exemplary realizations of ethical, stylistic, or gnoseological ideas, but also of what an artwork should be like and which approaches to literariness are considered legitimate. For these reasons it is not surprising that in Kocbek’s poem one can recognize all the characteristics of literariness; the

concept of “literature” was created precisely by a process of normalizing canonical works (i.e., the texts that have or used to have the socio-cultural status equal to, for example, “Tree” in Slovenian literature). Literariness can thus be defined as the culturally specific effect and functioning of a particular and specific text, perceived on formal, semantic, and valueideological levels—and so within the aesthetic discourse of the last two centuries not only on the landscapes of literatures in Europe or the Americas (in “the West”) but globally. A text can have this kind of effect because of several interdependent factors: If it was conceived and written with the purpose of being perceived as literature, if it was thematically and linguistically organized according to some of the conventional clues to literariness, if it was published in media that establish and recall literary milieu, and—last, but not least—if the readership (including critics, essay writers, scholars, and other authors of metaliterature) in the course of reception, based on at least one of the aforementioned factors, activated the appropriate expectations, frameworks, and conventions. The effect of literariness originates in a complex (systemic) interaction of mental processes, metatexts, actions, and activities related to the texts. Hence, besides the physiognomy of the text itself, there are other factors determining literariness; namely, who published the text and where, with what intentions, who reads it, with what kind of knowledge and expectations, and how it is subsequently or simultaneously commented on, explained, and classified. I rephrase this definition with a quotation from Rusch: “Literariness appears to be a time-, culture-, and milieu-sensitive variable within the interactional network of authors, texts, publishers, printers, readers, and others. Rather than an immanent feature of texts or the psychological characteristics of an author or the decisions of readers, literariness turns out to be a matter of ‘arrangement’ and mutual adjustment” (Rusch 1997: 97). From the overview I present here, we can come to the following conclusions. First, literariness is a flexible, historically, socially, and culturally differentiated convention, derived from the immanent characteristics of some literary works (canonized, classic, and paradigmatic; see Schmidt 1997: 144). Second, along with Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field, it is the contextual and systemic approach to literature (cf., e.g., Miall and Kuiken 1998; Schmidt 1980, 1989, 1997; Tötösy de Zepetnek 1998) that provides the most convincing answers to the complexities of literariness. Systems theory as a contextual approach in and for the study of literature, such as proposed in Schmidt’s Empirische Literaturwissenschaft (Empirical Study of Literature) or Steven Tötösy’s proposal of “comparative cultural studies” (2003) neither reduces literariness to a textual property nor denies the fact that a text as a material “scheme” and basis for processing has something to do

with its own (and other texts’) cultural and social effects. Instead, systems theory elaborates a series of interdisciplinary conceptual tools that allow for the description of the subtlest sociohistorical, psychological, linguistic, pragmatic, and actional (behavioral) framings, in which literariness can be intended, planned, textualized, and grasped; that is, contexts of the construction and functioning of literariness. Third, those that are concerned with explaining the problem of literariness cannot be considered pure observers of literature; instead, they should be aware of their identity as participants that—at least indirectly, via systems of culture including science and education—collaborate in the construction of the notion and conventions of literature as well as the study of literature and culture.

7 The Text and Genre Every literary text is, in its quality of utterance and as an enactment of meaning, historically individual and unrepeatable, yet the very uniqueness of the meaning effect bases itself in structures, forms, and semantic nets that recur—before and after the text’s production—in a vast variety of transformations. As Bakhtin put it in his draft of the essay “The Problem of the Text:” The two poles of the text. Each text presupposes a generally understood (that is, conventional within a given collective) system of signs, a language (if only the language of art). If there is no language behind the text, it is not a text, but a natural (not signifying) phenomenon, for example, a complex of natural cries and moans devoid of any linguistic (signifying) repeatability. . . . And so behind each text stands a language system. Everything in the text that is repeated and reproduced, everything repeatable and reproducible, everything that can be given outside a given text (the given) conforms to this language system. But at the same time each text (as an utterance) is individual, unique, and unrepeatable, and herein lies its entire significance. (Bakhtin 1986: 105)

Thus, the paradox of literary texts is that what constitutes its individuality also reappears in several other texts. This makes the literary work comparable to other texts and also qualifies it as a subject of literary criticism. To compare and seek traits that recur in singular items and to establish what appears to be typical or general is an everyday cognitive activity. Because, from the perspective of cognitive science, our minds are “literally embodied—inextricably founded in our bodily interaction and experience with the world” (Stockwell 2002: 27), categorization may be seen as essential for the economy of our knowing and acting. Just as we separate washed dishes from used ones or load glasses and plates separately in a dishwasher, we sort poetry, prose, and professional literature or put a book collection with the same binding together on our bookshelves. Classifying literature by author, period, or genre, which involves grouping bodies of texts according to our perception of certain common traits (Stockwell 2002: 28), serves the same functions as other cognitive tools; that is, to accommodate new data and facilitate our understanding; to manage unforeseen situations and react properly, and so on (cf. Frow 2005: 51). Sorting literary texts and tagging them with general terms (e.g., “fiction,” “poetry,” “travelogue”) is intertwined with living practices (Frow 2005: 12–13) extending from amateur talks on books and spontaneous reading choices, through marketing strategies and cataloguing of incoming books, to writing critical reviews and professional lecturing. Due to practices that enact categorization, genre terms attached to particular texts are able to trigger rather predictable associations about their content or form. However, as I attempt to show later, the

interlacing of cognitive categorization with a range of living contexts also entails considerable variety, difference, and contradictions in attributing texts or text corpora to genre categories. As Stockwell warns, “what counts as a genre and what gets included within a genre depends on what you think a genre is in general, and which common feature of its elements you have decided to foreground as being most salient” (2002: 28). It makes a difference whether one reads or refers to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as an “airport novel” or “Victorian novel.” Consequently, in each particular case, category building and recognition of genres depend on who is involved in the categorization activity, on what her or his goals, mental framework, discursive community, or cultural model are, and on specific social or pragmatic contexts of dealing with literary texts and genre concepts (cf. Stockwell 2002: 30–34).

From Essences to Relations Jean-Marie Schaeffer notes in his paper “Literary Genres and Textual Genericity” that genres, in theories from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historicism to structuralism, were regarded as internal forms, essences, or deep structures from which the texts emerge. According to this view, a literary work with its meaning and form is essentially a consequence, an organic development of its generic core. Theorists attempted to determine the “essences” of individual literary kinds or genres with concepts like subject, object, time, or space. The essentialist approach to literary kinds and genres was in agreement with the general essentialist view of literature in that period. The line of argument was roughly as follows: literary discourse, defined by its aesthetic, imaginative, and other inner features, is divided into three types—lyric, epic, and dramatic literature—and only those works that belong to one of these “natural forms” can be considered literary. Literary scholars explained the relationship of a particular text to a genre and literature as hierarchic inclusion: the text “belongs” to a literary kind or genre; the genre belongs to one of the “natural forms” (types); and the type is necessarily part of the concept of literature. However, after the paradigm shift from the modern to the postmodern—usually associated with the emergence of post-structuralism, deconstruction, and reader-response criticism—it was anti-essentialism that took over as the foundation of “normal” science, to borrow Kuhn’s term (cf., e.g., Margolis 1996). While essentialism insisted that individual phenomena (like particular texts) possess a priori essences that define their identity within a generalized category (such as a literary kind), anti-essentialism claimed that literary phenomena are indeterminable, without stable content, and, as individual tokens, not bound to represent or illustrate a single type. On the one hand, the identity of literary texts depends on

their relationship to other equivalent phenomena—that is, on the system of differences—and, on the other hand, on the observer’s socio-cultural, cognitive, or ideological perspective as well as on the historically contingent roles that texts play in a given culture. According to Genette (1986) and Frow (2005: 56–62), genre theory from Aristotle to Goethe and the romantics evolved along two lines: more frequently, genres were classified empirically and with regard to inconsistent criteria such as metrics, form, thematics, speech presentation, and stylistic level; however, toward the nineteenth century this eclecticism gave way to more coherent and self-reflective systems, which adopted the Platonist and Aristotelian taxonomy of lexis or speech presentation (imitation, narration, and mixture) and converted it, through a retrospective illusion, into fundamental kinds of all literature—lyrical poetry, narrative, and drama. With Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, and Hegel, metaphysical essentialism, which had been involved in normative poetics of genres ever since Aristotle’s morphe (Schaeffer 1989a: 12–24, 32–38), reached its zenith. Whereas great classificatory systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as that of Linnaeus, have proven to be consistent, exhaustive, and viable in the natural sciences, this is not the case with categories that, following the examples of biology or chemistry, attempted to classify domains of human symbolic interaction (cf. Frow 2005: 51). These are much more culture- or language-dependent because their objects of knowing are constituted through indeterminacy of the human agency. Efforts to sort a particular literary text into one single general rubric within a hierarchically structured and closed genre-theory system have thus frequently come to a dead end. We understand that the concept of lyric literature, for example, includes literary texts that are distinguished from epic and dramatic literature by being subjective, confessional, short, in verse form, and melodic. Traditional logic defined the content of this concept by classifying it in a wider superordinate category, the closest genus (genus proximum), and establishing special distinctness (differentia specifica)—that is, features that distinguish it from other concepts in the same category. In line with this, the concept of lyric literature should also be treated as a category with a clear demarcation and affiliation. These boundaries should determine the essence of the concept of lyric literature, and this essence should act as a criterion for classifying concrete literary texts. All of the texts that we have thus classified in the conceptual class called “lyric literature” should thus contain the same essence and reflect the same basic features. However, Rilke’s “Panther” is considered a lyric poem, although the author replaced the subjective confession with a symbolic description of a captured animal— that is, with an element that is no less objective than the description of a person or animal in a

tale classified under epic literature. The situation is similar with many modern sonnets by the Slovenian poet Božo Vodušek (1905–1978), such as “Ajas” (Ajax) and “Judež” (Judas); Vodušek’s sonnets from his 1939 collection Odčarani svet (The Disenchanted World) paraphrase ancient and biblical motifs or tell prosaic stories, in which the first-person lyric subject does not even appear with its own confession. Nonetheless, Rilke’s and Vodušek’s texts are classified under lyric poetry. On the other hand, however, all of the examples listed above do share a similar rhythmic melodiousness, extensive use of tropes, and verse form; a verse form cannot be found in Baudelaire’s or Kosovels’s prose poems, but this still would not prevent us from classifying them under lyric literature. The category of the novel includes not only extensive epic prose works (e.g., War and Peace), but also novels in verse (e.g., Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), lyricized texts (Ivan Cankar’s 1906 symbolist novel Nina), and very short texts (Rudi Šeligo’s Slovenian “nouveau roman” Agata Schwarzkobler’s Triptych of 1968). As known, deconstruction declared itself against all kinds of essentialism. One of its favorite targets was the notion of “literature.” It was repeatedly shown that literature, instead of being a fundament that would exist in the deep structures of all genres and texts considered literary, is but a conceptual, even ideological, fiction—or, at best, a fluid field of social interaction. The concept of intertextuality was perhaps one of the side-effects of early poststructuralist anti-essentialism; Kristeva backed the intertextual idea by devising une autre logique that was meant to supplant logical reasoning in terms of essences by that of relations (Kristeva 1969: 150–153, 172–173). Intertextuality, together with related concepts such as “writing” or “signifying practice,” was introduced in the context of disassembling the once homogeneous concept of literature. In the critical light of French radical theory, “literature” turned into a functionalist plurality of “literatures” (cf. Leitch 1992: 59–60) or was dissected into a heteroglot plurality of genres of discourse. The demarcation between the aestheticartistic and other genres of symbolic exchange was no longer assumed to be pre-given; it was claimed, instead, that it was socially constructed by means of institutionalized practices, such as the school system, literary history, and publishing. In the heroic age of (post-)structuralist attacks against essentialism, one could perhaps still hope that the term “genre” might help to solve the crux of drawing the dividing line between literature and non-literary discourses. Tzvetan Todorov was ready to admit that texts that had been classified as literature in Europe for about two hundred years were only similar according to their societal roles and the types of inter-subjective relations involved. Structural resemblances between texts or utterances could only be sought at the level of “discourse

genres.” However, in Todorov’s opinion, these genres with the conventions for their production and reception frequently cross the borders of literature. He therefore proposed that scholarship on literature—instead of trying to delineate and maintain a homogenous concept of “literature”—should observe the plurality of genres’ discursive rules within and outside the aesthetic realm (Todorov 1978: 13–26). On the other hand, Todorov maintained that, in comparison to literature, genres were more certain and objective. They are like conventions governing the internal structure of speech and linking it to ideologies of the socio-historical context. However, the very concept of genre soon experienced a fate similar to that of Todorov’s concept of literature. It turned out that texts that are classified into the same genre are not connected by an essential element shared by all of them. Instead, the concept of “family resemblance” began to be used in genre theory as well; this was introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and denotes a network of matches between various elements that belong to the same concept, but are not connected by the same common feature (cf. Frow 2005: 53–54). For example, the concept of “game” includes a class of items, such as chess, tarot, soccer, hide-and-seek, roulette, hopscotch, and guess-who. All of these games differ considerably from one another and, although they are connected by certain features (e.g., chess and tarot represent a mental competition between two opponents, tarot and soccer represent a sports competition between two teams, soccer and hide-and-seek are characterized by running and surprises, hide-andseek and roulette by coincidence, etc.), no feature is typical of each and every one of these games. It can be seen above that the concept of lyrical literature also includes texts that are neither subjective nor confessional, but discuss “objective” events. Undoubtedly, a large part of lyric poetry is written in the form of a first-person confession, expressing the speaker’s subjective conditions, feelings, thoughts, and ideas; however, not all poems are like this. Many are similar in that they are relatively short and written in verse, but not all of them. Texts included in the same conceptual chain thus match in this or that feature, but they do not all realize an identical essence defined in the concept to which they are supposed to belong. In comparison to literature, genres thus proved to be no more certain and objective, but relational, constructed only through family resemblances. An anti-essentialist drive, characteristic of recent genre criticism, has even led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. According to such logic, genre identity is historically unstable, depending merely on “extra-textual,” pragmatic, or contextual factors, as a final consequence of how routines in the production and consumption of cultural products are

being institutionalized or decomposed. For example, Beebee, inspired by Saussure, holds that literary genres are systems of differences without their own, positive content; they are simply ways of using texts (Beebee 1994: 257). Thus Beebee opts for a pragmatic definition of genre as “economics of discourse” or an institution (274, 277). The institution metaphor has been quite popular since Wellek and Warren (cf. Fishelov 1993: 86–99). According to Jameson, for example, genres are “social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (Jameson 1981: 106–107).

Genre Identities and Classifying Practices To be sure, the text’s linguistic structures are something else than the genre consciousness (cf. Głowiński 1989: 89) of those that perceive its specific patterns. Genre consciousness is like any other knowledge: it is either “theoretical,” temporally and cognitively distanced from acts of writing and reading, or “practical,” simultaneous and innate to these acts. In the latter case, it depends on the historical and pragmatic circumstances in which an individual activates it. Todorov, for example, distinguished the abstract sorting of “text classes” in theory from empirical accounts of the actual life of genres in social discourse (Todorov 1978: 47–49). Genre concepts are formed and promoted by journalistic literary criticism and the discourse of literary studies (cf. Pavličić 1983: 33–37, 57–63, 70–77, 98– 122); “endogenetic” generic terms inform author-dependent genre choices, whereas “exogenetic” labels imply interpretations and classifications made ex post by general and professional audiences (cf. Schaeffer 1989a: 77, 147–153). Classifying a text into a genre category is, as stated by Frow, “as much pragmatic as it is conceptual, a matter of how we wish to contextualize these texts and the uses we wish to make of them” (2005: 54). Genre notions are thus dependent both on meta-literary reflection and “systems of use” (Frow 2005: 12); that is, they are intertwined into practices of writing, reading, editing, and marketing, distributing or commenting on texts. To begin with, theorists may belong to a lesser interpretative community, but their positions in literary, academic, and educational fields have always been influential, especially during the millennium-long rule of normative poetics. Despite the air of disinterested speculation and abstraction, their methodical elaboration of genre concepts and systems does not transcend historical practice because their theories are themselves always conveyed only through specific textual genres and in contingent socio-historical contexts. Theoretical metadiscourse on genres often goes beyond literary scholarship to critical reviews, school textbooks, and even literary texts (poetics in verse, metafictional commentaries, literary

satires, etc.); disseminated this way, it bears witness to the historical being of literary kinds because they can only exist if they have been perceived and mentally conceptualized as such (Frow 2005: 68–69). As a metadiscourse producing genre concepts and systems, genre theory enters into intricate relationships with the primary literary discourse; that is, the writing and reading of literary texts. For example, the continuation of “tragedy” in seventeenth-century France can be seen not only in the recurrent patterns in a series of texts, but also in the consciousness of “tragedy” as a recognizable unit in the bustle of discourse; this awareness is historically documented owing to the genres of poeticists’ disputes about “tragedy” and through the formation of metadiscursive concepts (cf. Todorov 1978: 49). Theoretical discourse displays a methodically regulated knowledge; a telling example is that, from Aristotle and the mediaeval rota Vergiliana to the genre maps by Frye, Scholes, or Hernadi (cf. A. Fowler 1982: 235–246), theorists were inclined to produce closed-set classifications based on structural invariants of the texts stemming from different periods and environments. In principle, such attempts construct genre concepts and systems only in retrospect, ex post. As regards the practical side of genre knowledge, discriminating and identifying genres occur in literary life mainly through the daily practices that the individual, collective, and institutional agents conduct when dealing with particular texts. These practices are multiform: they can be seen in the readers’ expectations and ideas of genres, in the author’s or critic’s genre naming of texts, or in the intertextual evocation of family resemblances or the significant discrepancy between the literary work and the corresponding patterns in other texts. The establishment, indication, reproduction, and recognition of generic features are therefore largely habitual tasks of authors and readers, as well as editors, journalists, opinionmakers, and others involved in presenting texts to the public and critically commenting on them. In any case, the demarcation of literary kinds and the recognition of the text’s generic identity are linked to the contingent circumstances and goals of the literary field’s agents. They do not yield to a regime of methodical cognition. For example, by applying certain genre conventions and marking their text with genre denominations in the titles, subtitles, and paratext, writers attempt to envisage types of their text’s audiences and potential responses. By targeting and recalling generic backgrounds through allusion, parody, re-writing, or imitation (e.g., Joyce and Beckett’s parodic hints to schemata of the Bildungsroman), writers also strategically place their texts among known works and discourses in order to outline the topical, stylistic, and ideological profile of their writing. For readers, identifying the generic profile of the particular text and their knowledge about existing genre repertoires influence whether they will choose the text in question at all

and with what presumptions they will go on reading—for example, in an adventure novel, what characters and plot can be expected, what kinds of events will most likely take place, and how the events will be presented and connected. During the reading process, genre functions as the mediator, linking incoming textual data with memorized frames and schemata, such as chronotopes of travel, city, castle, and so on, and this makes it easier for the reader to cognitively accommodate new information (cf. Keunen 2000b). The practical sense of genres is at work in readers’ activation of genre-bound mental schemes that include typical slots for a variety of possible fillings—for example, “the SF schema” with its conventional “slots such as: spaceships, rayguns, robots, time, and space travel” (Stockwell 2002: 79). Frow compares the reader’s interaction with genre signals and textual symptoms with computer drop-down menus, which lead the user to additional information layers required to continue the work. The role of genres is to use their signals to activate relevant knowledge networks through the text; these networks enable the readers to accept new data. Frow concludes that “genre guides interpretation because it limits semiosis and the production of meaning and defines which types of meaning are relevant or appropriate within a specific context” (2005: 84–85, 101); genre is therefore an inevitable factor in the interpretation process.74 In comparison with readers, critics include their assessment of the text’s genre identity in acts of pronouncing and justification of value judgments to the public; for example, when implying aprioristic scales of high and low genres. The mediators of texts (i.e., editors and publishers) bring into play generic targeting to facilitate their establishments’ accumulation of financial and symbolic capital; they estimate which genres are profitable, address certain groups of readers, provide prestige, and so on. Last but not least, public librarians pursue still other ends: the books must be catalogued and placed on the shelves according to generic principles in order to enable the search for a specific type of information. The establishment, indication, and recognition of generic features are therefore largely habitual tasks of actors playing their roles in the literary field. Genre identities of particular texts are thus often negotiated, especially when it comes to clashes in interpretation. For example, the contemporary Slovenian writer Breda Smolnikar (b. 1941) was recently prosecuted for having defamed real persons, although she entitled her fiction generically as Zlate dépuške pripovedke (Golden Tales from the Village of Depala Vas, 1999), thus evoking

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In his Validity in Interpretation (1965), E. D. Hirsch already claimed that any understanding of an articulated meaning inevitably depends on the genre (cited in Beebee 1994: 13). See chapter 10 for more on genres as memory schemata.

fantastic, mythical, and folklore (oral) connotations of the fable genre.75 We should also bear in mind that genre recognition and metadiscourse take place in diverse cultural, linguistic, and historical environments. As noted by Alastair Fowler, exact equivalents between genre terms in different languages and literary traditions are seldom found (1982: 133). For instance, historical terms for the current notion of the “novel” include syntagma, istoria, monogatari, romanz, histoire, novela, novel, Roman, romanzo, and povest. The confusion is further increased by the fact that criteria applied in distinguishing genres are themselves being modified and contested because of the ever-changing network of systemic differences between genre-theory concepts (cf. Beebee 1994: 28, 257). Whether a text is generically identifiable by the type or the name of the character, by its volume, verse or prose form, title style, narrator’s voice, or any other kind of distinctive feature (book covers included) depends on which genres, from the author’s or reader’s point-of-view, form the currently relevant referential system. In the history of literature, the conceptual content of genre terms was often modified due to reshaping of genre-theory context: for instance, the term commedia in Dante’s time meant a tale with a happy ending (Schaeffer 1989a: 105, 120). Particular texts were perspectivized generically quite differently as well: Cervantes’s Don Quixote figured as burlesque, comical novel and novel of ideas, a parody of the cavalier novel, and so on (Schaeffer 1989a: 69), and Fielding invited his readers to read Tom Jones as a comic epic (A. Fowler 1982: 88). Finally, the diversity of the criteria applied by the readers and authors to determine the genre identity of particular texts is influenced by the fact that every text— especially a literary one—is a “complex semiotic object” (Schaeffer 1989a: 80): it is not just a texture with its specific semantics and syntax, but also a speech act performing many different functions; several of them may have long been forgotten in the course of literary history, while the potentiality of others may remain unpredictable. Each of these dimensions enters the game as a basis for the possible formation of generic concepts.

The Existence of Genres It cannot be denied that texts obtain their literariness or genre identities only in the web of the strategies, needs, dispositions, and acts of agents—be it individual or institutional– within a special social subsystem or field called literature. However, we must still pose a couple of naive questions: What exactly grounded the development of particular generic

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See also Chapter 9.

expectations? How and why did the texts gain their “use-value” (Beebee 1994: 7) in unwritten genre-theory contracts between authors and readers? From the standpoint of an epistemology accounting for the constructive role of the observer, it seems unacceptable to maintain that genre-theory objects (genres, literary kinds, and types) exist objectively, independent from consciousness. However, the statement still seems pertinent that, at the textual level, genre-theory objects are inseparable from their linguistic and communicative structures, and that genres are after all part of the functional variety of linguistic communication (cf. Skwarczyńska 1966: 20, 23–24). In his breakthrough study “The Problem of Speech Genres” from 1952–1953, Bakhtin called attention to something similar: language does not exist as an abstract system, but only through uses in socio-historically specific utterances. Repetition of certain linguistic or thematic patterns, due to their felicity in comparable situations of semiotic interaction, gradually develops relatively stable types of phrasing, called by Bakhtin “speech genres.” These genres appear in everyday communication and public media as well as in literature. They determine topical, compositional, and stylistic features of the utterance and function as an interface between the text, the language system, and recurring situations, so that every utterance is channeled through one or more such genres (Bakhtin 1986: 60–102; see also Frow 2005: 14–15). We may justifiably infer from this that speech genres are elements of the pragmatic linguistic competence of speakers and addressees. Speech genres could be classified under simple genres such as greetings, requests, prayers, commands, and anecdotes; the majority of these coincide with individual types of speech acts (they usually have only one subject of utterance) and are considerably more dependent on concrete speech circumstances than composed, complex genres, such as novels and comedies—in his study, even Bakhtin drew attention to the fact that complex genres include the material of simpler genres; they absorb, frame, combine, cite, and use them through the speech of several subjects (cf. Frow 2005: 29– 34). Simple genres are thus included in the language competence of the majority of language users, whereas complex genres, which are primarily developed in written media and print, are much more demanding in terms of mastering their conventions—they are already an essential component of cultural literacy. Modern genre theory and speech-act theory came to parallel conclusions. Consider Derrida’s paper “The Law of Genre,” in which the wordplay on “citation/ré-cit” echoes the idea of iterability: the citable nature of structure in a series of utterances “grounds” the classification of genres and performatives (Derrida 1980: 57–58). It is very likely that, by stating this, Derrida responded to Todorov, who explained the emergence of discourse genres

(literary and non-literary alike) with the institutionalization or conventionalization of discursive features—semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic—reappearing in successive utterances. Todorov believed that genres were codifications of recurrent text characteristics. This is why they exist as institutions providing generative matrixes for the author and horizons of expectation for the reader (Todorov 1978: 49–51). Thus genre does not exist merely within a text (as its internal form, deep structure, and so on), nor merely in readers (as an expectation, idea, or interpretational scheme), but is a convention with social power (Frow 2005: 102). Genre is a multi-layered phenomenon. As we can deduce from a now classic study by Stefania Skwarczyńska (1966), the existence of genres is interactive in its very basis. Genres only exist in constant interaction between the three following planes: a) the generic terms used by writers, readers, poetry specialists, critics, and literary scholars to classify and denote texts (e.g., “novel” or “tale”) or their particular formal, content-related, or modal dimensions (comic epic or satirical epistle), b) the generic concepts and notions emerging from metalinguistic descriptions of literary works and resulting in aesthetic generalizations, and c) the genre-theory objects—family resemblances between the semantic-structural features of literary works as they are perceived by writers, readers, critics, and others. From Skwarczyńska’s insights it follows that genres are constituted and exist in the interactive processes of linking conceptual knowledge, memory schemata, reading experience, and the recalled representations of texts with the production or perception of literary works’ linguistic or bibliographic signs. In his Gattungstheorie (Genre Theory, 1973), Klaus W. Hempfer compared the mode of existence of literary genres with the scholastic issue of universals. Nominalist theory denies the actual existence of universals, which means it also denies the existence of genres such as novels, short stories, ghazels, and comedies because it believes that genres are nothing but mere names; what truly exists is only individual texts, which are, subsequently and completely arbitrarily, connected with one another through the genre names in their titles, subtitles, and commentaries. However, the realistic view perceives genre as a realistically existing element; for example, as a repeatable mental perspective, anthropological relationships towards the world, and innate patterns of thought and behavior, structures, and internal forms that truly exist in linguistic material and are realized in individual literary works. Following Piaget’s epistemology, Hempfer proposes a constructivist synthesis: genre concepts develop owing to interaction between the activity of the cognizing subject and the object of cognition, resulting in a harmonization between the conceptual construction and the matching pattern of “objective” text properties. What seems important to me is that Hempfer

claims that the existence of generic invariants can be proven experimentally (Hempfer 1973: 221–223). This is exactly the aim of Johan F. Hoorn’s empirical study “How is Genre Created?” (2000). Hoorn does not deny the validity of the views that both the text’s meaning and genre profile are constructed by readers according to their acquaintance with the text’s author, and under the influence of library classifications as well as thanks to other contextual clues. He proves, however, that the inherent features of texts are at least equally important: for example, texts can be categorized into genres by the distribution of word frequencies. Readers are capable of identifying the generic pattern after having processed rather brief text segments. Owing to the statistically significant appearance of certain word families, any set of words brings up series of further thematic associations. The texts which, in the eyes of readers, contain a sufficient number of similar or collocated words are classified into a certain generic set, distinct from other groups of texts in which different words stand out more often—in picaresque novels, the word “shepherd” will appear less often than in pastoral novels (cf. Hoorn 2000). Combining statistics with set theory, Hoorn’s method brings forth significant arguments against the rejection of ascertainable text components as valid factors in the cognitive genre formation. To conclude, despite all theoretical constructivism and institutionalism, the observed text features and intertextual family resemblances also play a major role in genre attribution. As seen in Hoorn’s empirical research, readers are capable of identifying the generic pattern as soon as they catch some prominent word families characteristic of a certain group of texts. The concept of genre thus connects the elements and patterns occurring in speech or writing with cognitive acts that arrange text percepts with regard to memory schemata (motifs, chronotopes, etc.) derived from the recipient’s former text-processing.

From the Text through Intertextuality towards Genericity Proceeding along this thread of argument, the idea of intertextuality may prove to be very useful. It has helped elaborate a non-essentialist view not only of genre forms’ genesis, existence and development, but also of the text’s relationship to genre. From this viewpoint, literary kinds and genres are, of course, no longer conceived of as internal forms embodied in every particular token of the same class, but rather as outcomes of intertextual and metatextual procedures encapsulated in writing and reading. The idea of intertextuality has also opened a non-hierarchical view on the relation of every text to the genre. Above all, the intertextual explanation of genre was made possible by the deconstruction of the code/text opposition. The structuralist notion of code used to be an

unacknowledged descendant of essentialism; it was represented as a fundamental, primary entity that exists prior to and independently of texts, either in the individual or in the collective consciousness. In its relation to code, the text figured as secondary, as derived. Such logic was also at work in accounts of the relationship between text and genre because the latter was understood as a linguistic sub-code. Roland Barthes, in his transition from structuralism to post-structuralism, was perhaps the first to turn the code vs. text hierarchy upside down. He represented code not as an abstract system of signs realized in individual texts, but as unstable, open-ended crossing of texts in the signifying practice, or as a special kind of intertextuality. Ontologically, the code is to be conceived of as a parasite of actual texts and utterances. It is déjà lu, that which has been read and which intertextually blends into the writing or reading of new texts (Barthes 1981: 155–157); it consists of “associative fields, a supra-textual organization of notations” (155) or “perspective[s] of quotations, mirage of structures,” “fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done, experienced;” the code is “the wake of that already [déjà]” (Barthes 1974: 20). Barthes’s notion of the intertextuality of genre codes was further developed by Ulrich Suerbaum in his “Intertextualität und Gattung” (Intertextuality and Genre) Using the examples of Poe and Doyle, he demonstrates that the genre identity of the detective novel is formed only by way of successive texts, in a cumulative process driven by two forms of generic intertextuality: the linear and perspectival one. Whereas “perspectival intertextuality” locates a literary text vis-àvis non-literary discourse (e.g., by adopting structures of a diary, letter, or vocabulary), it is “linear intertextuality” in which the text refers to similar preexisting works of literature by citing or allusive adaptation, or by mentioning and modification of their paradigmatic patterns (Suerbaum 1985) Fowler, too, considers allusions to be important signals of the historical existence and development of genres (A. Fowler 1982: 106–107). Whereas Henry Fielding, for example, had to write extensive introductory essays to his unconventional novelistic texts in order to legitimize and reconcile them with existing genre classifications, Jane Austen, writing in the period when the novel was already well established with the readership of the period, could afford to foster generic identity of her texts only by occasional hints (i.e., genre allusions) to her predecessors, including gothic novels (cf. A. Fowler 1982: 91). Similarly, Walter Scott in Waverley referred to the genre tradition of romance (228). The first Slovenian novel, Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866) by Josip Jurčič, did not merely adjust the foreign genre conventions that it imported into Slovenian to Slovenian social and cultural circumstances, but also pronouncedly drew the attention of its model readers to the procedures of the new genre and commented on them from a metafictional perspective within

the narration itself; in this relation, at the beginning of the novel Jurčič’s narrator discloses that the novel follows Scott’s example and develops a genre line designed based on this model in its own way: “As the renowned novelist Walter Scott already notes, narrators have an old right to begin their stories at an inn—that is, at the meeting place of all traveling people, where various characters are directly and openly disclosed to one another and the proverb In vino veritas is confirmed. We too have exerted this right. . . .” (Jurčič 1965: 141; emphases added).76 Linear intertextuality often manifests itself through allusive similarity between the titles. Later works imitate the title type of a model text or group of texts (A. Fowler 1982: 92– 95): English Renaissance tragedies followed the example of classical ones in taking the name of the main character as the title (Othello, King Lear), quite unlike the comedies that, since antiquity, have preferred collective names (The Acharnians), character features (The Boastful Soldier), or sayings and idioms (Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing). On the other hand, Suerbaum’s term “perspectival intertextuality” designates another background for the emerging work of literature: the text also alludes to non-literary speech genres, such as diaries, letters, and journalist reports. Compared to linear intertextuality, the perspectival one draws on very much the same literary devices in order to establish the text’s genre identity— however, through its relations with non-literary discourses; as a result, the work’s style may be oriented closer to intimate, private discursive genres (such as a diary or a letter) or it may rather be associated with public messages of journalism, politics, and so on. In this case as well, titles such as Ivan Tavčar’s Visoška kronika (The Visoko Chronicle), Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, and Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars are already very informative. Genre terms are indeed often used in titles and subtitles; for example, Poezije (Poems, 1847) by France Prešeren, including the cycles of Sonetje nesreče, Zabavljivi napisi, Gazele, Sonetni venec (Sonnets of Unhappiness, Satirical Inscriptions, Ghazels, A Wreath of Sonnets), and poetic texts such as “Romanca od Strmega gradu” (Romance of the Steep Castle). Genre titles, mottos, dedications, introductory essays, critical commentaries, cover endorsements, and the like belong to what Genette terms “paratextuality” (1982: 8–12); that is, the literary work’s threshold or the border zone between the inner- and extra-textual spaces where semantic transactions with audiences are initiated (cf. Frow 2005: 105–106). Paratexts are actually made up of metaliterary statements framing the work of art and signaling to the readership that the aesthetic and semantic profile of the text should be interpreted

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See Chapter 3 for a different analysis of this example.

intertextually, with reference to indicated genre matrices. Intertextual strategies of indicating generic backgrounds do not always respect the conversational maxim “be truthful;” instead, they focus the reader’s attention on flagrant discrepancies between the genre associations invoked and the outlook of the actual text. For instance, many modernist texts by the contemporary Slovenian poet Veno Taufer (b. 1933) from his collection Sonetje (Sonnets, 1979) have practically nothing in common with the canonical structure of Italian sonnet, yet they aim at it for special purposes—to deconstruct the aesthetic ideology embodied in sonnet writing since Prešeren and his romantic mythology of poet. The literary work can make the reader think of relevant traditional structures and generic prototypes with quite complex intertextual hints, either affirmative or ambivalent and polemic. It can, for example, allude to matrixes of genres by epigraphs, similarly sounding titles (Balzac’s La Comédie humaine as a “realist” response to the metaphysics of Dante’s Divine Comedy), by stylistic imitation, making use of the same form (sonnet, ghazel, haiku), or borrowing characters and settings from famous pieces; the prominent Slovenian writer, critic, and essayist Josip Stritar (1836–1923) based some motifs of his post-romantic epistolary novel Zorin (1870) on Rousseau’s Montmorency, re-activating in this way a rather outdated genre pattern of his Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. By such intertextual indicators, authors unconsciously or deliberately evoke a genre background for their texts’ semantic figures. They may bring into play references to the “already said” in order to perform the pertinent genre lineage for the model reader. Textual linking to genre traditions is twofold (cf. Frow 2005: 23–25): on the one hand, imitations and transpositions of recurrent, conventionalized semiotic patterns are “uses” or “performances” of diverse generic matrixes; on the other hand, by exploring new possibilities and hybridizing genre traditions, new texts reshape given intertextual “codes” and constantly shift genre boundaries. As a result, genre identities and systems are fluid and at least sporadically subject to negotiation. In Prešeren’s nineteenth century, Slovenian readers would hardly have tolerated sonnets with trisyllabic feet and alternating rhyme, let alone sonnets that would not rhyme at all, had no metrics and were composed of lines other than two quatrains and two tercets. However, after the transformations such as those introduced into sonnet writing at the turn of the century by Dragotin Kette (1876–1899) and later by Alojz Gradnik (1882–1967), Srečko Kosovel, and Božo Vodušek, the concept of the sonnet expanded as did the range of opportunities for new sonnet writing; today we readily accept as sonnets even texts that only externally resemble sonnets or not even that—even if they are only titled as sonnets.

The intertextual approach to genres has proven to be productive in theories that connect the notion of family resemblances with that of prototypes. This could include Schaeffer’s study “Literary Genres and Textual Genericity” (Schaeffer 1989b) and David Fishelov’s Metaphors of Genre (1993). Fishelov introduces the working definition of genre based on prototypical texts and flexible sets of constitutive rules derived from and exemplified by these texts; prototype works are those that illustrate genre rules so typically that they can be referred to whenever the suitability of a specific genre-theory concept is checked in new literary products (Fishelov 1993: 8, 12). The theory of prototypes in cognitivism, semantics, and logics advocates the premise that cognitive organization and classification of phenomena do not take place by transferring a network of concepts logically produced in advance to concrete material, but by classifying new things into categories, regarding which we have certain ideas formed with the least controversial and “purest” examples representing a given category: thus, for example, the kitchen chair is the prototype for the concept of “chair,” whereas a throne, three-legged stool, and armchair are already borderline examples that could also belong to other categories (cf. Frow 2005: 54–55). Each category thus has a central area or core, defined through prototypes, and fuzzy, provisional, and disputable boundaries; this of course means that all of the units classified into a category do not necessarily have the same essence and the same features (Frow 2005: 54–55). According to Frow, a similar logic is applied in determining literary-genre identities of texts: when a work is identified as an epic, what we have in mind is the prototype of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. For cognitivism, categorization thus does not proceed through a rigorous and formalized discrimination, but with reference to a “radial structure or network with central good examples, secondary poorer examples, and peripheral examples” (Stockwell 2002: 29). Inter-categorial boundaries are therefore neither sharp nor stable; prototype structure is culturally and historically changeable because it depends on variegated goals, strategies, and contexts of manifold cognitive acts (Stockwell 2002: 30–34). For example, what used to be referred to as “literature” in the cultural mainstream of the second half of the nineteenth century was based on a rather different network of prototypes than today’s notions, which have—at least in the elite culture—restructured the schema of “literature” by integrating into its conceptual network once peripheral, disputable, or even alien examples, such as the decadent and naturalistic aesthetic of ugliness, modernist fragments and stream of consciousness, the avant-garde collage and ready-made, non-fiction novel, computer poems, and so forth.

Although prototypes are often based on canonized texts that, in normative poetics, represent generic rules, they should not be reduced to binding examples that must be imitated, but may function as deliberate genre references as well (cf. Schaeffer 1989b). Emerging texts refer to prototypical patterns with a variety of intertextual signals and attitudes, from affirmative to explicitly polemical. In my view, the author of the later text thus cannot be regarded as only dependent on preexisting models, as old-fashioned genre critics used to believe. On the contrary, writers bring into play generic references to the “already said” in order to invent for their texts the relevant preexisting lineage of genre and, so to speak, perform the fictional construction of the chosen genre tradition for the model reader. Writers are not only prisoners of the “already said,” but are also in a position to freely choose intertextual backgrounds and manipulate the genre identity of their texts. This is also connected to genre-bound mental schemata employed by agencies within the literary field. As Stockwell succinctly summarizes, literary schemas—including genres—generally evolve in three ways: by “accretion—the addition of new facts to the schema; tuning—the modification of facts or relations within the schema; restructuring—the creation of new schemas” (2002: 78). New texts in genre development thus either preserve and reinforce the given schema or refresh and even disrupt it, thus leading writers, readers, critics, and others to “knowledge restructuring” (Stockwell 2002: 79–80). The super-genre “literature” mentioned above may bear witness to this fact. Moreover, one should bear in mind that Fishelov does not limit the concept of prototype to a single paradigmatic work, figuring as the mythical founder of a literary kind. Drawing on cognitive studies by Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis from the 1970s, Fishelov claims that the role of the prototype is played by a series of texts as well, whose constitutive features establish family resemblances and which are appreciably different from the members of other generic categories (Fishelov 1993: 61–63). Intertextual family resemblances develop genetically, through persistent references to prototypical texts or sets. The process is analogous to biological offspring. The offspring originate from common ancestors, following them in some respects and differing from them in others. The genre lineage is usually structured around authors and texts which are in retrospect, after their canonization, viewed as founders of the genre; for example, Homer and Vergil as fathers of the epic, and Petrarch and Shakespeare as the founders of the sonnet (cf. Fishelov 1993: 65– 67). To be sure, the lineage also evolves progressively, but again through intertextual references (ranging from imitation to polemical opposition in anti-genres and parodies), with the support of genre-theory metadiscourse in paratexts, poetics, criticism, and literary history

and under the influence of various institutions, such as publishers, libraries, and schools (cf. A. Fowler 1982: 42, 114).

The Textuality of Genre Genericity, therefore, unavoidably relates to texts and textual series; it is dependent on intertextual interaction between agents in the literary field. In literary life, prototypical text patterns—they achieved this role because they became canonized or popular—inspire imitation, variation, and transformation. First they are rehearsed by the “original” author, encouraged by the achievement of his or her first trial, and then by all that fall under his or her sway. As convincingly shown by Moretti, who compares transnational generic influences to waves, the ensuing explorations of given generic potentialities are, as a rule, subject to survival struggles imposed by the literary market and steered by changing selections of audiences: among the genre’s offspring only those varieties survive and continue to evolve that are best adapted to such exigencies. From this, Moretti concludes that the “typical pattern” in evolution of genres is “divergence [that] prepares the ground for convergence” (Moretti 2005: 80)—and this for generic prototypes, one could add. Intertextual references to prototypical texts are often quite obvious and practically cannot be missed. They are marked with citations, epigraphs, intertitularity, and allusions to the origin of the genre. Prešeren, for example, not only emulated and romantically reinvented Petrarch’s style in his sonnets; he also made witty metapoetic comparisons to the Italian master. However, Prešeren’s own sonnet writing, especially A Wreath of Sonnets (Sonetni venec, 1834), became a model for subsequent Slovenian poetry, probably also due to its successful crystallization of long-lasting traits of Slovenian collective mentalities and feelings. The sonnet, often interlaced with revisions of Prešeren-style forms, imagery, themes, and modalities, is the most frequently used and prestigious genre in the national repertoire of lyric poetry. Similar sonnet traditions can be observed in Czech and Polish literature.77 Genre terms in titles and subtitles, such as in Slovenia Milan Dekleva’s Šepavi soneti (Lame Sonnets, 1995) or Milan Jesih’s Soneti drugi (Sonnets the Second, 1993), signify the author’s focus on the generic pattern chosen; they are meant to evoke the genre consciousness of the readers. Participants in literary communication are relentlessly stimulated to classify the texts they produce, receive, or comment on; they organize them cognitively into classes as, matching genre patterns intertextually, they project or perceive their equivalences in structure,

77

See Chapter 11.

meaning, or cultural function. However, with every new text and its post-processing within the genre-theory metadiscourse, the borders of such cognitive classes are being redefined and negotiated. This is achieved primarily with the help of intertextual references to prototypical texts and discursive series. Such allusions map out the “ideal” genre-theory context for the reader’s navigation and his or her efforts to grasp the text’s genre identity. Nevertheless, genre consciousness produced by only intertextual references would be elusive and anarchic. Because literature is an institution, it does not come as surprise that there are discursive powers regulating and channeling genre consciousness together with every particular act of genre-theory text identification. Poetry specialists, rhetoricians, and grammarians, followed in modernity by influential reviewers, literary opinion-makers, academic critics, and the school system, establish and reinforce more stable genre-theory concepts or systems. These theoretical concepts and nets—being metadiscursive categories disseminated from positions of authority across the entire literary field—indeed influence the formation of the generic tradition; this was particularly the case in the canonized genres of pre-Enlightenment literature such as the epic, tragedy, or ode (cf. the distinction between “synthetic” and “analytic” genericity in Schaeffer 1989b). As a meta-communicational instance, normative poetics used literary examples of classical authors to generalize the system of genre rules (e.g., on the external form, meter, stylistic level, modal tone, or selection of themes) that further literary production had to follow. Briggs and Bauman believe that “genre is basically intertextual” (cited in Frow 2005: 48). Intertextual reference to genre prototype texts and formal and thematic conventions dispersed into variant sets of similar texts is—in cooperation with genre-theory metacommunication—the factor that truly shapes literary genres most decisively, maintains them in the consciousness of writers, readers, critics, and other literary actors, and also historically changes them. Intertextuality transforms their structure, language, themes, and functions, places them in relationships with other literary and non-literary genres, and thus moves them around the genre repertoire of the social discourse (cf. Angenot 1983). The text is the site where various genre codes not only meet, but also construct and deconstruct each other. In 1974, Dell Hymes emphasized that an individual textual event is not part of a genre class because it can participate in several genre sets at a time, wherein none of these sets entirely defines it (cited in Frow 2005: 23). Derrida’s position from his essay “The Law of Genre” became even better known: “The text does not belong to a genre. Every text participates in one or more genres” (Derrida 1980).

Coda: Intertextual Genres It is not only that intertextuality challenges the established genre-theory notions. Genre criticism has also enhanced intertextual theory. We have become aware of the literary kinds whose identity depends precisely on intertextuality that is explicit and foregrounded, so that the reader is ready to grasp it as a writing strategy. Actors in the literary field are able to distinguish between types of rewriting and intertextual reference thanks to those forms’ inherent iterability—references and derivations repeat, copy, and modify not only pre-texts but each other’s structures and prototypes as well. In the realm of the explicit intertextuality or citationality (Juvan 2008b: 46–48), a special sort of literary kinds thus evolves, which depends on resembling and conventionalized forms of intertextuality. I call these citational genres, among which I include parody, travesty, burlesque, pastiche, collage, paraphrase, variation, imitation, sequel, interpretation, and others (Juvan 2008b: 33–43, 166–178). Although some explain these as generic modalities, similar to satire or the tragic (consequently, parody novel, parody sonnet, etc.), the citational genres function just like the proper literary kinds. A text may therefore be identified as a parody regardless of whether it is formally a sonnet, a tale, or a grotesque play. There are multiple reasons for this: 1) the texts denoted as parodies mainly refer to their pre-texts in a parallel, more or less conventional manner (by caricaturing their features and/or by introducing disharmonies in content/form)— therefore they exhibit family resemblances in the intertextual syntax and semantics; 2) they play analogous communicative roles (from entertainment to criticism of ideas or styles)—they are therefore related by their pragmatics; and 3) they have successfully formed a cognitive class backing up literary percepts of authors, readers, critics, and others—this can be seen in the fact that a specific genre term has been conceived (the term “parody” is actually one of the oldest in literary scholarship) and that an extensive body of metadiscourse was produced about it (cf. Juvan 2008b: 33–43). To conclude, the conception of intertextuality, originally opposed to the metaphysics of presence, provides present genre theory with an explanation of generic identity which does not neglect actual semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic properties perceived in texts. The perceived family resemblances are the starting point of the formation of genres in literary production and in its contemporaneous or retrospective theoretical reflection, genre consciousness. Genres—either “straight” or intertextual—live on social practices which frame intertextual and metatextual references to prototypical texts or sets of texts. All genres are classificatory categories and pragmatic schemes inscribed in practical knowledge and communicative competence. They are cognitive and practical devices for intertextual pattern-

matching. Texts or textual sets become generic prototypes by virtue of intertextual and metatextual interaction: on the one hand, there is the working (influence) of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of prototypical texts on their domestic and foreign literary offspring; on the other hand, we see metatextual descriptions and intertextual derivations or references, which retroactively establish or revise the hard core of genre pattern. Because of the generic and pragmatic component of the author’s communicative competence, any given text is dependent on existing genre patterns (these are not abstract codes, but intertextual déjà lu) because the linguistic material is necessarily ordered by them. However, the same text also actively participates in the plurality of generic context thanks to a variety of intertextual reference—that is how the author constructs the meaning and structure of the text and affects the readers’ expectations and reception. Genres do not remain entrapped in texts because they “serve as conventionalized orienting frameworks for the production, reception, and circulation of discourse” (Bauman 2004: 2–3); they encode “particular orders of knowledge and experience” and “implicate different subject positions and formations” (Bauman 2004: 6).

8 Stylistic Subject-Fashioning The Self in Literature The aim of this chapter is to focus on the vexed question of how a subject or self is articulated and represented in literary texts, especially through textual styles. This is why my approach is largely based on “subject-in-language” theories, which (summing up their various renderings and perspectives) claim that the subject, understood as the ground of individual self-consciousness, behavior, responsibility, speech, and social interaction, is actually shaped by language. The latter, being the preexisting symbolic order produced and replayed by the Other (family, community, ideology, society, culture, etc.), through its various discourses mediates between the social order (its history and present) and the individual, and also constitutes subjects and determines their positions. As Zima pointed out, these theories belong to modern, post-Hegelian philosophies that, instead of seeing the subject as the grounding, underlying principle (subiectum, hypokeímenon) of individual consciousness, personality, and action, conceive of it as a subordinate (subiectus), dependent on some superior, dominating power—in this case, language (Zima 2000: 3 passim). However, in my stylistic discussion on the intricate relations between the writer, language, textual subjects, and verbal and social behavior, I also endorse Zima’s critique of late modern notions of the subject as a mere linguistic effect or fiction and embrace his Bakhtinian proposal of “dialogical subjectivity” (Zima 2000: 365–430). The ideas—also advocated by Taylor (1989), Giddens (1991), or Holstein & Gubrium (2000)—that Zima adopted for his dialogical theory of subject are: 1. The subject is not an inert and elusive flow of socially and linguistically imposed roles or positions, but, through its self-reflective agency, actively strives for its own temporal and situational coherence; 2. It achieves this coherence by memorizing and self-narrating its past experience and by projecting its future options; 3. All of this is made possible not only by the self-perception and feeling of one’s own body, but also through an incessant dialogue with others and their actual or possible observation of the subject. Zima’s theory focuses on the last point and comes close to Bakhtinian dialogism: “Collective and individual subjects are both formed by socio-linguistic situations, which may be represented as interplay of group languages or sociolects . . . . The subject is constituted in discourse by imitative or dialogical/polemical reactions to other discourses” (2000: 15).

Radical reflexivity that characterizes the modern self implies that the subject—with its “inwardness” and bodily existence—becomes its own object; the subject’s self-observation, self-control, self-exploration, and rational planning (“the trajectory of the self”) lead to strategies of representing selfhood for the self and others, such as autobiographic narratives (cf. Taylor 1989: ix–x, 178–189; Giddens 1991: 5, 75–77). It is literary discourse that is quite suitable for such explorations of the self. By evoking the subject’s bodily presence, it links together concepts, percepts, and emotions. Literature aims to build or test models of the self within possible worlds of fiction— subjectivity is represented in literature not only in the form of fictional characters and their biographies, but also through textualized speakers or points of view; that is, perspectives or focalizers. Literature explores subjectivity through writing with the intention of presenting it to the gaze of the other; that is, a reader. This may be the reason why literature, as one among the social discourses, imposes its proper conventions and forms on writing, thus encoding subjectivity in its own ways. Consequently, even the subject of uttering, which constitutes the textual world, is itself constituted by literary discourse; it is but one of the social roles that a particular person or agency has to play. Several theorists insist that the subject’s discursive role in literature has the privilege of being a meta-role because literary texts fictionalize, draw together, question, and confront other social roles. By exposing their limits, literature makes a further move; that is, it makes use of the indeterminacies inscribed in language in order to evoke human existence in all its complexity and singularity. Here we are faced with a paradox: on the one hand, we expect literature to present persons as complex, individual, and singular; on the other hand, however, literature is merely a discourse with its own conventions, repetitions, generalized patterns. The subject of a literary text is thus fashioned through negotiations of what I provisionally call “the subjectivity that writes” with the given models of writing. Based on the above considerations, I will now attempt to show how the text self-fashions its own profile through style; that is, how it strives for its “own word” in the world of “the used words.” Equally important will be the aspect of readers—that is, how the stylistically established image of the self, its textual identity, is perceived.

The Rise and the Fall The development of the concept “style” is a pars pro toto for changes that affected modern literary studies. Literary scholars borrowed this notion—already known in music and visual arts since the seventeenth century—from art history at the beginning of the twentieth

century (Pfeiffer 1986: 711). With it, they attempted to surpass positivist historicism. Leo Spitzer, Karl Vossler, Viktor Vinogradov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Jan Mukařovský, and others included style in their glossary, using it to divert attention from extra-textual factors of literary history to formal and aesthetic qualities of artistic products. The concept of “style” helped change the causal logic of positivism (the question “Why?”) into a final logic (the question “For what?”) and turn their conclusions in another direction: the starting information for explaining literature—even for explaining its biographical, psychological, or historical bases—was now provided by interpretation of the structure of the texts alone or questioning the sense of stylistic features. Stylistics gained currency under the aegis of Staiger’s and Kayser’s school of immanent interpretation and reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of structuralism, generative and transformative grammars, statistical approaches, and the early reader-response methods (Roman Jakobson, Pierre Guiraud, Jules Marouzeau, Richard Ohmann, Nils E. Enkvist, Lubomír Doležel, Michael Riffaterre, and others).78 However, in studying style, structuralists were not interested so much in the interpretation of texts, but more in revealing the general principles that distinguish some language uses from allegedly neutral communication. Compared to linguistic stylistics, the stylistic approach in literary criticism focused mainly on the semantic and aesthetic values of style that seemed relevant to the interpretation of literary works of art and, above all, to their historical placements and classifications. Some (e.g., Leech & Short 1981: 13) hoped that the stylistics of literary texts in particular would connect the aesthetic and historical interpretation with detailed linguistic analysis and thus build a bridge between literary studies and linguistics—that is, philological disciplines that are generally heavily biased against one another (cf. Van Peer, ed. 1988: 3–4).79 However, since the late 1970s the influential scholarly centers have been shifting their attention from literary texts to their cultural and social contexts; for example, in new historicism, feminism, cultural studies, and systemic approaches. Parallel to this development, contemporary linguistics has also crossed the threshold of the text and tackled the issue of social or cognitive contexts that control language use; consider pragmatics, sociolinguistics, or cognitivism. These changes in literary studies and linguistics shattered the established concept of style. It was exposed to severe and radical critique of its underlying assumptions, 78

In Slovenia from the 1960s onwards, stylistic interpretation has also attracted younger literary historians that have been open to werkimmanente Interpretation, Russian formalism, and Czech and French structuralism. 79 Linguists reproach literary specialists with eclecticism, a superficial knowledge of language, and a lack of systematicity; in turn, literary specialists reproach them for formalism that is unaware of the meaning of scholarly analysis.

originating mostly in the nineteenth-century ideologies; attacked were the cults of the author, aesthetic autonomy, and organicism, the notion of stylistic traits as bearers of pre-established meanings, and, above all, dualist models of text and style.80 The notorious reproaches facing literary stylistics after this shift in pragmatics and cultural studies included the following: 1. Stylistics depends on traditional expressive aesthetics and the comprehension of the writer as the exclusive source, owner, and supervisor of the meanings of literature; it holds on to organicism, in which style is considered a harmonious correlate of the content and the parts are to correspond to the whole; stylistics tears art and its language use out of other discourses by overstating its aesthetic function. 2. The term “style” is loose because it has always been defined through various attributes, such as individual, generational, temporal, or regional. Roger Fowler even tried to replace it with the more detailed terminology offered by functional linguistics and sociolinguistics: dialect, sociolect, idiolect, register, and so on (1996a: 185–197). 3. Concrete reception abilities and actual reading procedures are neglected: according to Michael Riffaterre, many linguistic relations in the text, which Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss inventoried in excruciating detail in their structuralist analysis of Baudelaire’s “Cats,” are not perceived by the majority of readers and are irrelevant to the stylistic impression of this poem (Riffaterre 1971: 307–364). 4. The belief that individual stylistic features of texts (i.e., linguistic forms and figures) trigger their own specific connotations is false: not every antithesis is dramatic, nor is every metaphor picturesque. According to Stanley Fish, the author of the essay “What is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It,” there is no code that would connect individual stylemes from the stylistic inventory with individual meanings from aesthetic vocabulary in advance. Fish believes that both the perception and meaning of a concrete styleme are mere products of interpretational conventions governing the reader’s reception. A stylistic sign is established and communicated through the language of connotations only when it is the object of understanding (cf. Anderegg 1977: 58–59) and connection with the context. 5. After the deconstruction of the basic binary oppositions of structuralism, pairs that supported the predominating style models are also untenable. These pairs include norm-deviation, neutral-marked, signifier-signified, deep structure-surface structure,

80

On this, see: Pfeiffer (1986: 685–692, 707–710, 714), Van Peer, ed. (1988: 1–12), Pratt (1988: 22), Carter & Simpson, eds. (1995: 1–20), Mills (1992: 182–185), Fowler (1996a: 185–197), Weber (1996: 1–8), Halliday (1996: 56, 65–69), Fish (1996), Duranti, ed. (2001: 235), and Spillner (2001).

and so on (cf. Leech & Short 1981: 14–24; Spillner 2001: 242–246). Dualist explanations that style is created as a result of deviation from the norm or selection among equal terms denoting the same content thus had to be thoroughly revised.

Critiques of Dualisms It was the easiest to dismiss the simplest explanation based on the inertia of school poetics and rhetoric that style equals ornamentation and figurativeness: those that speak in a straightforward manner are without style, and those that adorn their statements skillfully with figures develop a certain style. In this way the statement I didn’t sleep well would have zero style, whereas with the use of figures this sentence would transform into a stylized statement (personification: I was tortured by insomnia; hyperbole and metonymy: Endless hours went by, but I did not sleep a wink all night). Such theory was hardly difficult to reject because it has been known at least from George Lakoff onwards that there is hardly an excerpt from a discourse completely without metaphors or other figures: even completely prosaic words such as discount, development, and to strengthen can be metaphorical. On the other hand, writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Agota Kristof, or postmodern minimalists highlight the avoidance of figurative stylization and linguistic artistry. It is more complicated to undermine the understanding of style as a deviation from the norm. For example, one of the syntactic norms of standard Slovenian is that attributive adjectives are placed left of substantives; if writers violate this rule, they either make a grammatical mistake or create something that is stylistically conspicuous, like Oton Župančič (1878–1949) in his line Telesa naša—vrči dragoceni ‘Our bodies—precious pitchers’ (instead of using the neutral formulation Naša telesa so kot dragoceni vrči ‘Our bodies are like precious pitchers.’). However, the norm can offer several identical “normal” options, so that it is not clear which one of them represents a deviation: the sentence Peter came home yesterday is no more normal than the sentence Yesterday Peter came home. Even the decision whether to treat every deviation from the norm as style-productive often proves to be difficult. Testing the hypothesis that the deviations observed are not errors or coincidences, but realize a specific communication strategy, takes place through hermeneutic processes, in which one must continuously return to the text that was read to determine whether the hypothetical stylistic pattern continues to repeat itself or whether the new data from the text support it (cf. Riffaterre 1971: 60–62; Anderegg 1977: 12–13; Leech & Short 1981: 48–51). If the readers succeed in establishing connotative synonymy between consecutive linguistic features, they can form a comprehensive impression of the text style, but cannot capture it in clear

metalanguage; they can describe it only vaguely or impressionistically, with metaphorical approximations and allusions.81 The crucial problem with the notion of style as a deviation from norm, however, is in the fact that both the norm and deviation are actually statistical quantities, referring to average distribution of a particular linguistic element and its frequency in the analyzed corpus (Anderegg 1977: 29–32; Leech & Short 1981: 42–55). In principle, all of the texts in a given language, from classical works to conversations on the street, should be processed in order to establish a normal distribution of the linguistic form observed; of course, this would be an impossible task. This is why one must make do with partial, limited corpuses. Such a norm cannot but be relative, having only comparative value. If, for example, one were to check whether Ivan Cankar’s special stylistic feature in his 1904 novel Hiša Marije Pomočnice (The House of Our Lady, Help of Christians) is that he uses unusually long sentences, one could compare his text with the chronologically or genre-limited corpus of articles published in the same year in the newspaper Slovenski narod (Slovenian Nation). What figures as norm or deviation is also strongly dependent on the situations of text production and reception. Whereas, from the author’s perspective, stylistic deviations from the linguistic norm are a matter of performance—that is, of the textual subject’s placement in the discursive context (more on this later)—from the reader’s point of view, stylistic features are percepts of textual effects that he or she grasps against shifting and contingent backgrounds.82 Style is thus the outcome of only those features that were perceived as prominent and relevant by a reader that relates the work of art with norms he or she is able to recall from textual stimuli in the given circumstances (Anderegg 1977: 58–59; Leech & Short 1981: 48–51). There is no universal linguistic norm (Halliday 1996: 65); always relative, contingent, changing both socially, culturally, and historically, the norm depends on readers’ sociolinguistic and literary competences. Acquaintance with literary styles that are characteristic of writers, periods, currents, genres, regions, and so on belongs to the sociolinguistic competence of individuals in the same way as their mastering of other discourses that enable them to live socially (cf. Fowler 1996a: 250–251). For example, in Milan Jesih’s (b. 1950) modernist poems from the 1970s, readers with a good knowledge of nineteenth-century Slovenian literature can perceive a play with copies of stylemes typical of 81

Such a je ne sais quoi behavior of style is understandable. According to Umberto Eco (1988: 151–157), “aesthetic information” on the style (idiolect) of a work is primarily connotative, created through codified meanings; in addition, it is inseparable from the expressive substance of signs. 82 I am borrowing the idea of style as performance and/or percept from Riffaterre (1971: 40–63), Anderegg (1977: 52–62), Assmann (1986: 127–128), Soeffner (1986: 318–320), Pfeiffer (1986: 707–708), Duranti, ed. (2001: 235–237), and Spillner (2001: 246–247).

the folklore and poets of romantic and post-romantic tradition (e.g., Prešeren, Jenko, Levstik, Stritar, and Gregorčič); however, foreigners that have made their first steps in Slovenian will perceive these linguistic patterns as incomprehensible or bizarre foreign elements at the most. In the end, norm depends on what Riffaterre referred to as Sprachgefühl, feel for language (Riffaterre 1971: 52–60). What is decisive here is readers’ unpredictable feeling of what would seem usual or normal in the same place in comparison to the text segment that was read (Anderegg 1977: 31–32). Whether readers perceive a specific linguistic construction as prominent depends on which discourse context they call up in their reception (Fowler 1996a: 97). For example, in Janez Bleiweis’ (1808–1881) mid-nineteenth century newspaper Novice (News), today’s readers often perceive archaic clumsiness, and emotive and somewhat funny naiveté; of course, they are reading it against a backdrop of modern journalism with which they unintentionally compare texts from the past, such as this one, published 23 March 1853: In these recent days, the noble emperor has received a tooth of St. Peter from the hands of the newly elected cardinal and papal emissary, Mr. Viale Prelà, which the Holy Father himself took from St. Peter’s jaws with his bare hands and sent to the emperor as a special souvenir.

This kind of writing probably did not seem funny to the readers of Novice because they were socialized through other linguistic and cultural codes. The third dualistic notion of style that has also been sharply criticized is based on the idea of choice: style is supposed to emerge from choices of options that are available in the language system or, in other words, from variant renderings of the same referential content. In comparing the variants from allegedly unchanged referential content (the state of being hungry: ‘I am hungry’), differences in the verbalization method become evident; each one of them connotes a different style: I’m so hungry!, I’d really like to eat something now, My stomach is completely empty!, I could do with a bite or two, I’m dying of hunger, and so on. In line with this principle, Raymond Queneau verbalized two trivial events (a young man behaves badly on the bus, and then an acquaintance of his gives him advice on how to dress in front of the railway station) in 99 stylistic variants in his Exercises in Style (1947). In every variant, selections of equivalent linguistic devices for verbalizing a common referential content follow a specific key with regard to figure, grammar, modality, genre, speech type, psychology, or any other aspect outlined in the title, such as Litotes, Metaphorically, Surprises, Dream, Comedy, Sonnet, Opera English, or Medical. In the light of the theorem on style as a variant, one also gains a stylistic impression of a literary text by simultaneously reading a work that verbalizes nearly the same topic.

Following Anton Ocvirk’s Novi pogledi na pesniški stil (New Perspectives on Poetic Style, 1979: 66–69), I compared Fran Levstik’s poem “Dve utvi” (Two Coots, 1859) with Oton Župančič’s “Zvečer” (In the Evening, 1904), which also connects the image of a harmonious pair of birds with the lyric subject’s feelings: »Dve utvi«

“Two Coots”

Dve utvi ste priletéle

Two coots have flown

V jezéro pod skalni grad; Tam plavate družno po vodi, Vesláte v kristalni hlad. Jaz gledam skoz okno dve utvi, In v meni utriplje srcé, Zamišljeno v dneve pretekle Na lice usiplje solzé!

Onto the lake beneath the castle cliff; They swim there together on the water, Paddling into the crystal coolness. I watch the two coots through my window, My heart pounding in my chest, Lost in thoughts of days gone by, Tears wet upon my face! (Levstik 1948: 111, 427)

»Zvečer«

“In the Evening”

Tak tenka, tak mirna

So thin, so peaceful

je zarja večerna,

Is the evening sunset glow,

da vidim zvezde skozi njo:

That I can see the stars through it:

nad kupolo mračno,

Over the dark dome,

čez mesto temačno

Over the dim town,

se tiho v loku svetlem pnó.

They stretch quietly in a bright arch.

Golobov se dvoje

A pair of pigeons

med nebom, vodo je

Flew in with their glistening wings

preneslo s perotmi blestečimi. –

Between the sky and water –

Dovolj si trpelo –

You have suffered enough –

kaj zahrepenelo,

Oh, have you, my heart,

srce, si spet po sreči mi?

Yearned again for happiness? (Župančič 1956: 163)

Compared to the nineteenth-century writer and critic Levstik (1831–1887), Župančič’s style seems more nuanced, expressive of mood, illogical, picturesque, dematerialized, rhetorically diverse, musical, and charged with will, whereas Levstik’s style is more descriptive, narrative, plastic, logical, realistic, simple, and sentimental. These loosely described impressions of both styles originate primarily in the reflection of my own reception of the differences in the poetic processing of similar referential content; however, the differences in the presentations of the motif of an observer of a pair of birds are also demonstrable in terms of quantity. Župančič uses 24.32% more words than Levstik (i.e., 46, whereas Levstik uses 37) for nearly the same referential content, which is why it has a more

picturesque and nuanced effect. Levstik’s share of verbs used in the lyrics is greater than that of Župančič (i.e., 16.22% vs. 13.04% of all words), which is probably why it gives such a narrative impression. Župančič uses a greater share of adjectives (i.e., 17.39% vs. Levstik’s 13.51%), which again contributes to a wealth of qualitative nuances. A great difference between the two poets is evident at the level of connotation of the sound material: Levstik uses only 37.5% of lines with a contrast between front and back vowels, whereas Župančič uses a good 66.67%. In this way, the coherences of the phonological opposition with a frontback (i.e., light-dark) semantic contrast accumulate and overlap (i.e., nad kupolo mračno, / čez mesto temačno ‘Over the dark dome, Over the dim town’, se tiho v loku svetlem ‘They stretch quietly in a bright arch’, s perotmi blestečimi ‘with their glistening wings’); they have the same effect as sound instrumentation.83 By comparing Župančič and Levstik, two weaknesses of the conventional theory of style as a choice are soon revealed: 1. The stylistic impression is not created only by variability of linguistic “expression,” but also the perception of this variability in the structuring of “content” (cf. Anderegg 1977: 16)—that is, the elements and relations in the textual world; 2. In reading the two texts, the stylistic impression includes not only aesthetic connotations, such as Levstik’s “epic nature” vs. Župančič’s “musicality,” but also cultural, historical, and ideological ones. These are part of “social semiotics”; that is, the processes of ideological and social differentiation and transformation of cultural meanings (cf. Pratt 1988: 22, 33; Wales 1988, Fowler 1996b).84 Comparing the structure of both textual worlds in Levstik and Župančič therefore also reveals further differences: the clearly determined spatial relations of the lyric subject (Levstik) vs. the blurred and undeterminable position of the self (Župančič); the explicit causal chain of external and internal events (Levstik) vs. associative leaps and sudden changes in mood (Župančič); Levstik’s idyllic coots vs. Župančič’s urban pigeons; Levstik’s eternal calm landscape vs. Župančič’s momentarily calm city—all of this can lead to explanations that place the differences in the language of both poets outside the aesthetic framework: Levstik’s poetic self is thus shown as being tormentedly anchored in the static mental and social environment of the nineteenth century, whereas that of Župančič mixes with the 83

The stylistic differences between Levstik and Župančič also reflect the differences between two periods: with its narrative structure, Levstik’s lyric poem is closer to narrative fiction as the dominant structure of the postromantic and realistic periods; in turn, with its semiotic material, Župančič’s poem imitates the language of music, which was considered the ideal for artistic aspirations at the end of the nineteenth century. 84 For more details, see the last part of this chapter.

dynamics of modern urban life and the will to power typical of the end of the nineteenth century. Another weakness of the theory of style as a choice lies in the assumption that the variation of language forms (both those of micro- and macrostructure) preserves the identical content and the same propositional structure. For example, if someone that has never heard of Queneau merely laid hands on variants verbalized with complex codes and combinability (e.g., metaphorically, anagrams, haiku) from his Exercises in Style, they would hardly reconstruct a common content-related starting point from them. Language signifiers that follow the selected keys of stylizing initial motifs establish new references in fiction that place them in categorical networks that have nothing to do with events taking place on busses. The route from a referent to a sign that substitutes for another referentially equivalent sign as its variant thus does not necessarily lead back to the same referent. Even in shorter texts, especially in poetry or works with a strongly pronounced poetic function, every single change in the textual surface transforms the semantic structure and modifies the textual world. The use of one metaphorical starting point instead of another can create a completely different narrative syntagm or metaphor network through its associative potential. Moreover: the seemingly identical propositional content—even if always verbalized in the same way—has different functions and pragmatic implications in various circumstances and in various subjects: for example, ”I’m hungry” presents the speaker’s disposition or an indirect expression of the desire to eat, if not even a command. However, I will not deal with these issues (cf. Leech & Short 1981: 24–38), but focus on the questionableness of the term “choice” instead. Nils Erik Enkvist drew attention to the fact that, among the choices of linguistic devices, the only stylistically relevant choice is the one in which the truth value of the proposition remains the same in all variants (Enkvist 1988: 128). Peter loves Maria and Peter loves Anna thus do not represent stylistic variants, which is however the case in the variants Peter adores / is crazy about / appreciates / is falling for Anna or Peter has been hit by the dart of love from Maria’s eyes. A choice is thus stylistic if, based on comparing a specific pattern with one of the unrealized options, it connotes discursive contexts to the readers in which this pattern appears more often or in a more pronounced manner. Some linguistic devices are more widely used, whereas others are used mainly or exclusively in specific registers, sociolects, genres, periods, and so on, so that they are connotatively marked with them. The verb to love (Sln. ljubiti) is more widely used than the verb to appreciate (Sln. štemati), which due to its area of use is characterized by dialectalism, rusticity, and archaism;

it has a more neutral effect if it is compared to the metaphorical paraphrase about the dart of love, which through its connotation evokes a specific manner of expression known as Petrarchism. Variability is the source of style if it is based on the logic of differentiation and classification or inclusion: first the distinctiveness of a realized variant must be observed in relation to other, merely virtual and unused options; through the speech-type, cultural, social, genre, and other connotations of a selected styleme, the utterance or text can be intertextually connected to a relatively specific language subcode or discourse. Literary works thus move closer to some forms of speech and distance themselves from others, or do not even pay any attention to them: one of the sentences describing the amorous relationship between Peter and Maria cited above could thus be associated with the discourse of a rural novel, whereas another may be associated (perhaps with irony) with romantic poetic diction.85 However, there are some fatal flaws in the explanation that variability is the result of the choice made by the writing subject (cf. Enkvist 1988: 129–130, 140–149). What the style researcher perceives as the writer’s choice from among the alternative options86 was not necessarily a choice (in the proper sense) in the text-production process, but a spontaneous or well-thought-out choice under the circumstances of “conditioned language use” (Anderegg 1977: 37–39). The unacknowledged background of the notion of choice is a consumerist illusion that portrays language as a huge supermarket in which authors may choose products at their will. However, in actual fact no speaker or writer has the entire language system (if it exists at all) at his or her disposal; linguistic resources are always limited and pre-selected by the subject’s linguistic competence (including knowledge of discursive genres and speech acts) and its enactment in a particular context. Such speech genres, discursive types, and sorts figure as an interface between the speaking subject, the situation of uttering, the utterance or text, and the language system. Following the teachings of the post-structuralists, it may be said that there is no free writing subject that would exist prior to discourses and make use of them in order to express its psyche, emotions, knowledge, and positions; on the contrary, it is discourses that have the subject at their disposal; they constitute for it the territory of sense.87 85

More on this below, under the concept of “double pattern.” It is completely unclear what the alternatives actually were; they are usually hypothetically conceived by the researcher alone, except when a text is available in a series of manuscript or edition variants (cf. Chapter 4 and Zelenka 2006). 87 Let me mention Lacan’s concept of the symbolic Other, which structures the self by channeling its subconscious speech; similarly, Althusser’s ideology “interpellates” individuals into subjects of discourses through language used by ideological state apparatuses; Foucault’s order of discourse establishes possible topics and techniques of communication along with subject positions from which one perceives himself and talks with others (cf. Macdonell 1986, Fohrmann & Müller 1988b, Frank 1988, Bormann 1988). 86

Identity, Language, and Style Here we have reached the point where the relations between the textual style and the identity of its subject come into play. The notion of identity has become topical in the current humanities and social sciences mainly due to post-modern globalization, which has deterritorialized the individual. Consequently, the self is no more bound to a specific social or ethnic setting, community, and profession, but lives and acts in several different, even contradictory roles (Giddens 2000: 255–261; Duranti, ed. 2001: 106–109). The term “identity” may be explained to refer to two notions: self-sameness (A = A) and identifying somebody with something (A = B, A belongs to B): 1. The subject (“self”) remains—in its self-awareness and for the perceptions of others— the same, identical, regardless of various spatio-temporal circumstances and changes of its body, social status, or personal traits. In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) discusses the “biographic illusion” and the key role of a personal name as an institutionalized support for establishing the social and legal consistency of a person in time and space. Similarly, Anthony Giddens (2000) discusses the “trajectory of the self,” through which an individual connects his or her present with the autobiographic past and the projections of goals in the future. Such a sameness is a result of differentiating the self from others and summing up of specific bodily, psychological, behavioral, and linguistic features (cf. Biti 2000b); 2. The second meaning of the term is “identification,” that is, the “self” is recognized as such because of its inclusion into a larger unit. The subject identifies itself with some group, community, social role, idea, or discourse; we speak of ethnic, racial, sexual, and other identities. In this case, the counterpart to identification is exclusion (cf. Biti 2000b): some persons or groups are placed in the position of others, of being outside the given culture. Identity is thus a two-side construction: on the one hand, it emerges from narrative and interpretative building of “sameness”; that is, the permanence of the self during all changes in its personal history; on the other hand, identity is the result of classifying and identifying a self-same subject with one or more socio-cultural categories (Duranti, ed. 2001: 106). It is through such identity constructions that members of a particular group conceive themselves and are perceived as a specific entity by others. Current discussions about identity have been largely influenced by the “subject in language” approaches that were set forth by Benveniste, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault,

Althusser, Butler, and others (Du Gay et al., eds. 2000: 1–5; Redman 2000: 9–14; Hall 2000). Each in its own way, these approaches developed the idea that identity, understood both as sameness and belonging to, results from lingual or discursive placing of the speaking subject in one or more ideological domains. It is the use of language—that is, performative effects of utterances formed through sociolects, genres, and registers—that posits an individual in specific cognitive networks and evaluative perspectives. Regular forms of communication are linked to recurrent types of communicative constellations. From this we may conclude that style, because it is usually defined as the mode of how language is used, is an important factor in identity building as well. Generally speaking, and in Jonathan Culler’s opinion, problems with identity are the main topic of poetic, narrative, and dramatic texts (Culler 2000a: 108– 120). Literary stories narrate how identity is formed, what influences it, and how it reacts in a crisis situation; for instance, King Oedipus, who is destroyed by the discovery of his true origin. Literary works have an impact on the formation of the identities of individual readers and even entire communities: nineteenth-century women’s novels served as examples of how to bring up young girls and what social aspirations they should have. According to Culler, the identity of authors is also formed in literature. Harold Bloom discussed this in his Anxiety of Influence: great poets assume the tradition of their great predecessors through intertextual and hermeneutic revisions and establish a position from which they can design their own recognizable poetic vision. Nonetheless, the identity of the “author” or the subject of the literary text is not decided upon merely by the procedures of intertextuality and influence, but also by style.

Style as Navigating Identities After various contextualisms had pushed the notion of style to the margins of literary scholarship, this very concept has been, surprisingly, resurrected in social sciences in the form of “lifestyle” (Gumbrecht & Pfeiffer 1986; Giddens 1991: 80–88). For example, Hans-Georg Soeffner (1986) studied the lifestyle of punk rock fans, which consists of behavioral patterns, a dress code (their “image”), values, musical aesthetics, group links, and affiliation. By displaying their lifestyles—bohemian, yuppie, punk, and so on—individuals show their allegiance to a specific community and their difference from others. Lifestyles shape identity images that are, in relation to the general appearance of the “domicile” community, rather conformist, while sensitively different from characteristic traits of other groups. Lifestyles abound in modern, dynamic, and complex societies. They are especially important and elaborated among younger people. Their role is to display—mostly consciously and

strategically—social identities, to perform distinctive ways of behavior, dressing, thinking, and communicating. Stylistic self-presentation and fashioning of one’s own image enable social orientation for both the “performer” and his or her “audience” (cf. Soeffner 1986: 318– 321). Taken in this context, style is a means of enhancing social visibility, it is a message about the self’s position, its affiliation to a group, and discourse (Assmann 1986: 127–128). However, lifestyles are usually not fashioned intentionally; they are taken over spontaneously through imitation, experience, and socialization of individuals. In this case, lifestyles—such as those of nineteenth-century Slovenian peasants, townspeople working as clerks, or industrial workers—are manifestations of various habita. Bourdieu defines habitus as a historical matrix created through the accumulation of personal and collective experiences connected with what actions are successful or possible within the given social conditions (Bourdieu 1990: 52–65). The acquired habitus becomes an internalized and naturalized scheme that generates relatively predictable practices typical of specific social groups and classes. Language use is also part of the habitus because according to Bourdieu discourse serves as some sort of “‘spiritual automaton’” influencing individuals’ language choices (57). Verbal behavior is actually a key element of every person’s habitus and it is closely related to its identity politics. This is why ways of using language have recently drawn attention of contextualist linguistic trends, especially the stylistics of discourse (cf. Wales 1988; Carter & Simpson, eds. 1995; Fowler 1996a: 250–251; 1996b; Weber 1996; Bradford 1997: 73–85). To take a Slovenian example, in the novel Fužine Blues (2001) by Andrej Skubic (b. 1967)—himself a sociolinguist dealing with Slovenian sociolects—one of the main heroes is actually the language in all its social, professional, generational, sexual, ethnic, and individual variety. Skubic’s story about people from one of Ljubljana’s residential neighborhoods is narrated via several first-person narrators whose language is stylistically marked by different urban and suburban sociolects. For example, Šinkovec, a real estate agent, talks using the language of the lower middle class engaged in profitable services; his colloquial style spiced with loan words, non-standard words, and vulgarisms captured in simple syntax reflects aggressiveness, intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and a lack of selfesteem; Janina, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Montenegrin immigrant, uses slang, switches between Slovenian and Montenegrin Serbian, and combines both languages into a hybrid; Vera, a retired Slovenian professor, however, uses the cultivated sociolect of intellectuals that—despite its intellectualisms and specialized terminology—deviates from standard Slovenian through its informality. Skubic’s novel witnesses to the fact that verbal behavior, conveyed through a distinctive style, is intensely integrated in different life-worlds

and habita of speaking subjects. How heavily dependent on socially differentiated identities and lifestyles linguistic behavior may be is evident already at the very beginnings of the Slovenian secular drama, in Anton Tomaž Linhart’s (1756–1795) comedy Županova Micka (Mary the Mayor’s Daughter) of 1789/1790. Mary, a pretty daughter of the village mayor, does not seem to be content with manners and parlance of simple peasants; she expects her rustic suitor Anže to be more refined and to speak in the courtly style of the petty bourgeoisie. He attempts to please her in a comical scene; here, he clumsily distorts the artificial, rococolike courting clichés that he takes over into the rustic setting from urban sociolects. From Linhart’s enlightenment perspective, which prefers naturalness and authenticity over imposed divisions between social classes, Anže’s aping of the noble lifestyle in speech, conduct, and dress appears to be ridiculous. Style is indeed regulated by logic similar to that of identity construction. It is constituted through intertextual relations—either differential or imitative—with virtual textual backgrounds that are recalled in the reading process. A text as a self-sufficient entity would not have any style because the latter is produced and perceived only intertextually, through recurrence of and differing from pre-existing verbal patterns. This is a double play: on the one hand, the text connotes certain models of writing and thus identifies its own structure with their territories of meaning; on the other hand, the text departs from other pre-texts and backgrounds, stressing its difference from them. The identity construction proceeds along similar lines: it results from establishing the subject’s distinction and its belonging, or participation in discourses that transcend it. From this, we may conclude that textual style directs the reader towards the subject’s position in social discourse. Maria-Renata Mayenowa elucidated the concept of style semiotically; according to her, style figures as an indexical sign of the textual subject’s identity (Mayenowa 1979: 334). Peirce’s concept of “sign” presupposes intersubjectivity. A certain structure makes an indexical sign only if someone presents it as such and someone else identifies it as a sign and perceives in it a logical consequence or hidden-cause effect that this structure substitutes or presents (a trivial example: smoke from a chimney as an index of fire in a fireplace). Because style is indexical, both perceptibility of stylistic features and their diverse connotations depend on the writer’s and reader’s discursive contexts (cf. Mills 1992: 184; Spillner 2001: 246–248): 1. From the author’s point of view, style is a rhetorical performance by which the author strategically or spontaneously fashions his or her personal profile and shapes the connotative affiliations of writing. It is the “double pattern” that is especially

appropriate in this respect (Bradford 1997: 95, 190): a literary text partly uses linguistic patterns that have been characteristic of the genre or other traditions from which it emerges as a new variation; on the other hand, the text intertextually evokes specific non-literary genres, either contemporary or preceding to the moment of its production. To take two examples from Slovenian modernist poetry of the 1970s: whereas Dane Zajc (1929–2005) grotesquely imitates magical conjuration, Catholic prayers, and ritual sayings indicating his archetypal notion of poetry (as a radical other in comparison to the rational world), Andrej Brvar (b. 1945) draws his lyrical discourse close to colloquial style, thus poeticizing everyday life. 2. From the reader’s perspective, style emerges from processes of perception and interpretation—features that have not been controlled by authorial intention may also become stylistically relevant to the observer (e.g., the comical effect of a dilettante tragedy), dependent on her or his sociolinguistic competence and contingent, singular circumstances during the act of reading. Style is thus a dynamic, changeable quality that results from what Bakhtin calls mutual illumination of texts, genres, and other verbal forms—to wit, on patterns of repetition or discrimination that writers and readers discern from such inter-illuminations. Style is a visible profile of the subject’s verbal behavior or, to put it differently, a recognizable mode of using language and its varieties. As an indexical sign of how the text is located in the universe of discourse, it encompasses both supra-individual ways of textualization—typical of a genre, period, region, and so on—and prominent linguistic traits of individual idiolects. Style, established by a double game played between the irreplaceable selfhood of the text and its identification with specific discourses, outlines the territory of the textual sense and discloses the represented subject positions. One must agree with the observations of contextually oriented discourse analysts, who claim that the connotation of style is not only aesthetic, but also ideological and sociocultural. Language and style reflect a complex process of interaction between people; hence, language expresses the traces of circumstances in which it appears itself and of which it is the medium (Fowler 1996a: 93–94). According to Fowler and other critical linguists, the language forms used are both formative and a result of social relations (Carter & Simpson, eds. 1995: 12; Mills 1995: 11). This was already contemplated by Mikhail Bakhtin during his conceptualization of “metalinguistics.” The “image of a language” (either native or foreign) can be perceived and consciously created only when a dialogic relationship is established within a culture or between cultures and an awareness is thus formed about the semiotic gap

between things and signs—recognition that the same things can be discussed in different ways. It is only when the language sphere is socially, regionally, functionally, and historically differentiated that types of speech begin to illuminate one another, as in Linhart, for example. The style of literary texts has to do with precisely such an “image of a language,” which acts as an index of ideology, perspective, and subject position, in both its distinguishing special features and affiliation. The sense of style thus serves to navigate identity.

9 Fiction, Reality, and Laws The Story The contemporary Slovenian writer Matjaž Pikalo (b. 1963) published his first novel Modri e (The Blue E) in a 1998 collection of literature for young readers. The novel is a firstperson narrative by a young Alfred Pačnik, who describes growing up in a remote industrial town called Kanal. The police officer “Firecracker” (Sln. Petarda) is a minor character that shows up right at the climax, in which Alfred is experiencing his own climax with a French woman during his sexual initiation. The officer masturbates while watching the scene and afterwards tries to force the woman to pay a bribe. Later in the story, the narrator calls Firecracker names such as “cop,” “pig,” “a very stubborn caveman,” “blackmailer,” “filthy masturbator,” and so on. A month after the book’s publication in Ljubljana, an unusual reception of the book in the writer’s home region of Carinthia began to unfold. What might have remained fiction in the capital, Ljubljana, turned into a “sort of local chronicle” on the periphery (this genre label was later attached to the work by the court). The text’s identity was converted from fiction into faction and the referentiality of signs mutated: these no longer referred to the young individual embodied in the invented Alfred, but to a concrete town and its cast of characters. This change in perception was triggered by articles in the local newspapers: they characterized Pikalo’s first novel as “a must-read for Carinthians,” claiming that “the originals from Prevalje can be identified” in it. Following this encouragement in the newspaper discourse—it is expected that the media generally report facts accurately, if they are not already perceived as reality itself—a retired police officer that was nicknamed “Firecracker” recognized himself in the character of Firecracker. He succeeded in having Pikalo charged with libel and causing emotional distress in court. The author’s defense, that both the novel and its police officer Firecracker were merely figments of his imagination and that Prevalje was not even mentioned in the book, was found insufficient.88

The History

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Practically simultaneously, the writer Breda Smolnikar (b. 1941) was also brought before the court on nearly identical charges. In 1999, she published a “tale” titled Ko se tam gori olistajo breze (When the Birches up There Are Greening), in which she described the life story of Rozina, an exceptionally motherly character. Some women filed a civil suit against Smolnikar because they identified the fictional Rozina and her husband as their late parents; they felt offended because they believed that the writer had publicly discussed their parents’ sex life and slandered them. The conviction, which stirred up heated public debate, was later overturned by the constitutional court.

The Pikalo case is a symptom. Towards the end of the twentieth century, literature was losing its halo of autonomy that was barely able to be maintained by the ideology conceived during Romanticism and developed mainly by literary historians towards the end of the nineteenth century.89 Despite the romantic ideology of aesthetic autonomy, literature had nonetheless always been embedded within market, state, education, legal, moral, and other contexts. Even the establishment of the public image of a writer as a bohemian or genius was often used for commercial strategies, not to mention the writers’ unequal access to cultural literacy and book publications, the censorship of morality in fictional worlds, or making use of literature as a pedagogical tool. Illiterate masses lived peaceful lives without reading literary works of art long into the second half of the nineteenth century. Even recent empirical studies indicate poor reading rates of Slovenian and foreign classics as well as contemporary writers that are established among literary critics. It is true that cultural literacy training was long attached to language examples taken from belles-lettres; from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards, intellectuals were required to systematically learn about the artists of their national languages in school in order to accumulate cultural capital and strengthen national awareness. However, after leaving school, only a few among them— teachers, people practicing liberal professions, and members of the cultural elite and relatively marginal intellectual circles—remained active readers and admirers of high literature. Many influential politicians and businessmen actually despised belle-lettres and considered it to be merely entertainment, something for women, a mark of status, or a weapon to be used to attain ideological and political goals. Despite all of this, until this very day writers and readers have preserved the notion—which has partly developed from personal reading experiences and has been partly inculcated through school and cultural ideological apparatuses—that literature is an idiosyncratic area, an authentic medium of creative freedom and individual imagination, and a herald of higher cognitive and ethical values. The writer’s profession itself has also preserved the main features of the authorial image that even Romantics had to shape self-promotionally during the rise of coarse capitalism; that is, as some combination of a genius (that sees more than others do) and a dissident or bohemian. Today literature is obviously losing this special charm and is increasingly merging into public discourse crowded with print and electronic media. Along with this, the sense for the specific nature of literature—its imagination and fictionality—has also been dulled. It is no longer self-evident that the statement “Officer Firecracker is a pig and a masturbator”

89

They actually created the concept of Romanticism through precisely this ideology.

(although Pikalo did not actually use those exact words) is any less insulting for the actual person bearing this name if it is used in the fictional world of a novel rather than in the tabloids. A writer and a journalist seem equivalent; they are bound by the same laws and the same ethics of public speech. Literary discourse has found itself in a position in which it can no longer legitimize itself from within, from itself, through the texts of players in the literary system; for example, through structuralist theories of literariness (cf. Iser 1989: 210) or the phenomenological philosophy of the quasi-reality of the world depicted in a literary work of art. On the contrary: it must continuously verify the cognitive and ethical content of its imaginary worlds and confront it with other disciplines and discourses that imbue culture with meanings and notions. Literary discourse must also negotiate with them regarding what is true and right. In the Pikalo case, the discipline with which literary discourse grappled in order to socially legitimize its truth, order of values, and functions is law, which in turn is implemented through laws and the judiciary. The history of official and legal restrictions on the creative imagination of writers is long and has not yet been fully studied. Thus only a few historical outlines and narrative examples will have to suffice in order to retrospectively elucidate the Pikalo case. As usual, it all begins with Plato. In his Republic, Plato conceived a utopian model of the state, although he relied on de facto examples. In addition, he created this dialogue at the Academy, where young men studied philosophy before beginning careers in politics. In Books II, III, and X of The Republic, Plato advocates monitoring, restricting, and banishing poets on the grounds that they use their suggestive—but inappropriate—words and representations (e.g., the cruelty of the gods, the horrors of the afterlife, the lamentations of the heroes, and relaxed humor and eroticism) to lead young people and other citizens astray, arouse harmful passions in them, and especially use “imitative poetry” and enchanting “images” that are conferred as reality itself to lead them away from the actual Truth and Good—both of these concepts were to remain the monopoly of philosophically enlightened rulers (Plato 1997b: 378c–378e, 388d, 595a–595c, 596c–597a). An actual banishment based on the platonic archetype of the relationship of the authorities to transgressive literary fabrications was experienced by Ovid, whom Emperor Augustus banished from Rome to a remote place in the empire, also having his books removed from public libraries. This happened not only because of a particular personal or political “error” by the poet (as Ovid himself put it), but because the “poem” (carmen)—most likely his “Art of Love”—although an elegant light didactic poem, was indecent according to official morals and earned the poet the label obsceni doctor adulterii (Gantar 1968: 43–55; Howatson 1998: 392–393, 568). This type of exile was experienced by

writers for nearly another two thousand years due to their world views, textual worlds, or the potential influence of fictional “appearances” on reality, the applicable laws, and conventions. Their texts also suffered: they were cleansed, truncated, adapted, and castrated; in addition, their availability to the public was limited or rendered impossible. This activity was primarily carried out by the institution of censorship (cf. A. Assmann & J. Assmann 1987; Dović, ed. 2008), which operated through authorized representatives of religious and political power such as the inquisition, censors, the police, and the courts. Relying on laws, regulations, and various indexes of prohibited writings, authors, and ideas, censorship monitored public speech and images, from leaflets and catalogs through maps and decorative artwork on everyday products to sophisticated treatises and poetic masterpieces. It safeguarded taboos, filtered representations, preserved the canon and the power of the dominant and socially cohesive discourses, and eliminated any deviant voices that could introduce heresy and disobedience into the orthodoxy. The dangers of heresy were monitored by ecclesiastical censorship: from early papal lists of prohibited works and medieval papal edicts banning the circulation of individual heretic writings, through the establishment of the Inquisition in the thirteenth century, to the Index librorum prohibitorum, which was first issued in 1559 by Pope Paul IV and last in 1948. The invention of printing ushered in preventive censorship: manuscripts were checked even before they even went into print. From the sixteenth century onwards, censorship increasingly began serving the secular authorities, especially within absolutist monarchies. Nineteenth-century Restoration regimes also developed a variegated apparatus to tame the freedom of expression discovered during the Enlightenment, practically everywhere and especially in the newspapers. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, censorship had already begun to be abolished in Europe, but the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes reintroduced it and carried it to extremes. In the nondemocratic regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censorship controlled the scope and shape of what could be represented in texts, and defined the reach of any form of public communication. It operated preventively by approving or rejecting and limiting publications, and retroactively by imposing sanctions on authors and publishers or purging library collections. In doing this, it continuously ensured that literary works and their themes, motifs, and ideas did not jeopardize the ideological monopoly of ecclesiastical and secular authorities and stain the reputations of the representatives of these authorities, whether local prominent figures or state leaders.90 90

For regulations on the organization, subjects, contents, procedures, and sanctions of Austrian censorship prior to the March Revolution of 1848 see the detailed study by Janez Kranjc (1996). Following the provisions of

However, what has been sketchily presented so far is just the broad framework. The true roots of the dispute between literary fiction and laws that characterizes the Pikalo case only reach back to the mid-nineteenth century. This was when the specific configuration of the public, public morality, literary autonomy, realism, and the autonomy of two subjects— public speech/literary art and law—was shaped. Modern law and literature have actually developed in parallel (cf. Connor 1997: 61–73; Binder & Weisberg 2000: 6–19); they are embedded in the process of social modernization, as part of which they also became independent as systems. Literature asserted its independence ideologically as a language that should make it possible to express an individual’s creative imagination (formative imagination or fiction), and law, on the other hand, as a neutral system of abstract rules (laws) that should apply to everyone alike regardless of their social origin and position. Individuals that relied on the ideologeme of their autonomy in order to establish themselves in various social areas (from economics to religion) despite the absolutist Restoration regimes and the principles of the world capitalist system, appeared in art as subjects of imagination and aesthetic experience, whereas in the legal arena of modern democracies they achieved the status of citizens equally subject to rights and obligations. The industrial revolution and the increase in literacy shaped the middle-class public, an imagined group that brought together dispersed individuals connected through occasional mass rallies, places for regular cultivated activity (e.g., cafes, theaters, galleries, and reading rooms), new communication technologies, and printed discourse. In the nineteenth century, this fictitious community transformed into a new authority in charge of judging the reality and morality of representations—that is, into public opinion (cf. Habermas 1962). Now the objects of legal and repressive protection were no longer merely the secular and ecclesiastical authorities and the orthodoxy of opinion, but also public morality elevated to a social good. Citizens and groups also defended public morality. On the other hand, the literary field also emerged (cf. Bourdieu 1996)—that is, a system of institutions, discursive practices, habitus, mental suppositions, and metalanguage, in which belles-lettres appeared as autonomous, these regulations, anything that might have caused aberrations, discord, and splits within the state, or promoted disobedience of the authorities and arbitrariness in fulfilling one’s civil and religious duties was deemed indecent or prohibited; everything that directly or indirectly opposed religion, morality, and respect and commitment to the ruling house and the existing political system had to be removed as well as everything that loosened the ties between the lord and his subjects, and that did not benefit the heart and mind but merely encouraged sensuality (in this regard, novels were also a target). Censorship regulations also covered banned conceptual and literary currents such as Deism and Materialism, and the literature of Young Germany. These regulations only laid down the upper limits of what was allowed, whereas censors qualified the subjects of their treatment according to their own judgment using four main categories reflecting the public impact of texts: admittitur, transeat, erga schedam conceditur, and damnatur (permitted for public sale by advertising or for sale and announcement, permitted only for officials and scientists, and completely prohibited).

authentic, poetic, and imaginative verbal creativity that inverted the principles of the capitalist market economy. However, with the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth century the language of the belles-lettres shook off its “textual referentiality” with its dependence on the canonized text of culture and came closer to the reality of the modern world; in this, through its categoriality and textual modeling, the language of realism only developed the awareness of the actual world and helped cognitively establish it in society (cf. Verč 2006, 2010). Through imagination/fiction, literature paradoxically produced the “effect of reality,” in Barthes’ words. Due to its referential attachment to reality, the textual world of works of fiction, especially realistic ones, came into conflict not only with the reputation of the authorities but also the good name and morals of individual members of the middle class, and professional and local communities. In winter 1857, during the stifling regime of the Second French Empire, when writers withdrew into themselves with Art for Art’s Sake and symbolism, Gustave Flaubert, one of the founders of modern literary autonomy,91 found himself in the dock, a place where burglars, vagrants, and pickpockets were usually the ones defending themselves. He was accused of having severely offended public and religious morality with his publication of the novel Madame Bovary, especially its “obscene” depiction of adultery in a carriage and the pharmacist Homais’ reflections on God. The court trial, which Flaubert ultimately won, was accompanied by scandals and pressure from the alliance formed by conservative public opinion, reader protests, criticism, censorship, and the judiciary. Following its publication, Madame Bovary also aroused a combination of abhorrence and delight among the people of Rouen and its surroundings, who read it as a locally interesting and scandalous roman à clef. Although Flaubert steadfastly claimed that the story and its characters were a complete fabrication and that at the artistic level he did not have any desire to faithfully mirror reality, positivist literary historians later on found out that he had relied on real-life “models,” events, and places: Yonville was Ry in reality, Charles Bovary was a student of the writer’s father, and Emma was supposed to have been modeled on Delphine Couturier, who stirred up her neighborhood by committing suicide. In Slovenia, the alliance between the morally offended public and the censorship bodies was later to vent its rage on the most prominent Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar (1876–1918). But Cankar was intentionally satirical and provocative with 91

For more, see Dumesnil 1947: 226–235, 349–354; Ocvirk 1964: 6–17; and Chambers 2001: 711–712. In the summer of that same year, another founder of literary modernism and aesthetic autonomy, Charles Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was convicted at the same court. He was also accused of jeopardizing public and religious morality using “obscene” poetic depictions of social and psychological pathology, blasphemous metaphors, and immorality. The modern aestheticism of Flaubert and Baudelaire was obviously accepted in public and judicial discourse in the mimetic key of realism.

his effects of reality, believing that “stirring things up always guarantees success (even on the book market!)—even in Ljubljana!” (Moravec 1967: 366). After the 1910 publication of his play Hlapci (Servants), the newspaper Slovenianc published a Teachers’ Protest on 10 February, in which Catholic teachers defended their profession, howling that “a man by the name of J. [Janez, a.k.a. Ivan] Cankar dared to foully and abominably sully teachers in general;” they even went so far as to appeal to the “high imperial provincial government to prevent this sullying of teachers from being publicly staged” (Moravec 1969: 159–160 ff.); this public pressure by one social group helped lead to the Ljubljana censor’s prohibition of staging Cankar’s play. Today, literature has already reached a position in which well-known writers are sued by people that are not public figures. Writers have always borrowed historical figures and names and used descriptions of both well-known and unknown flesh-and-blood people, merging them into fictional characters in Frankenstein fashion. However, legal culture did not encourage civil suits against fictional libel and intrusions into people’s privacy. One precedent is a case that took place in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1966 to 1971, although this time the defendant was not a writer, but the publisher that wanted to print his work. 92 The adopted son and the sole heir of the late actor and theater manager Gustaf Gründgens won a verdict at the state and federal courts prohibiting Nymphenburger from publishing, reproducing, and distributing Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto. Mann wrote it in 1936, thirteen years before he committed suicide; both court instances agreed with the plaintiff that the novel was merely “a pamphlet in the form of a novel.” It is about the actor Hendrik Höfgen, who—as a modern satirical version of Mephisto—practically sells his soul to the Nazis to secure his career. Both in terms of his personal description and details from his life, Mann’s novelistic character unmistakably resembles a real actor by the name of Gustaf Gründgens, whose personal dignity was supposed to have been extremely offended by the publication of this story, even after his death. In 1971, the German constitutional court, to which the affected publishers appealed against the previous rulings, had to decide between two fundamental rights protected by the constitution: the right to privacy and personal dignity on the one hand, and the right to the freedom of artistic creativity on the other (artistic freedom also includes unhindered publication and function of a work of art). The court chamber’s vote was indecisive, which is why the constitutional court was unable to declare the preliminary court prohibition of the novel’s publication unconstitutional. For all future cases the court 92

More details about the case and the text of the judgment are available at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto-Entscheidung.

nonetheless enforced the principle that in these types of conflicts, every case demands a detailed and separate deliberation on whether the artistic depiction can actually affect anyone’s personal dignity to the extent that the fundamental principle of artistic freedom can be justifiably restricted by a court on behalf of the right to a good name. As is common knowledge, Mann’s Mephisto was first published in the Federal Republic of Germany only in 1981 (and a film adaptation was also made that same year), whereas in East Germany the novel could be obtained without any difficulty even before that. In Slovenia, one could hardly find a more illustrative example of a conflict between personal dignity and artistic freedoms than the one that arose in 1971 and 1972 from the publication of Matej Bor’s play Šola noči (The School of Night). In it, Bor (1913–1993), a former “court poet of the revolution,” depicted a Professor Ahriman, who uses his nihilist views to entice students into committing suicide. In the years following the publication, there were insinuations that the charismatic professor of comparative literature Dušan “Ahac” Pirjevec (1921–1977) was to blame for actual suicides committed by young students. Pirjevec responded to this transparent fictional depiction of himself in Bor’s play (Ahriman = Ahac) in the newspaper Delo: he decided not to press charges “for slander and libel,” among other things precisely because of insisting consistently—even in his own case—on the phenomenological theory of the quasi-reality of fiction, claiming that “despite everything this play is still a play; that is, something invented, imaginary, and literary” (Dolgan 1998: 323– 328). The reach of individuals uneducated in literary theory that have decided to take writers to court—within the context of modern democracy—due to libel in fiction is different. People that are not part of the public scene have decided to sue novel writers if the fictional depiction in which they themselves or their acquaintances, business partners, neighbors, and others could identify them also exceeded the acceptable limit of decency or the moral doxa—when writers have depicted them as criminals, perverts, adulterers, and so on. 93 This relatively new issue was discussed by Richard Posner (1988), the promoter of Law and Literature, an interdisciplinary orientation conceived in the late 1970s. Law and Literature addresses the representations of justice, courts, and laws in literature (from Sophocles’ Antigone to Kafka’s The Process or Camus’ The Stranger), law as literature (polysemy, tropes, fiction, rhetoric, and spectacularity in the judiciary), and legal regulation of literature, which includes 93

Jilly Cooper, author of the bestseller Rivals, agreed to a court settlement with a businessman that was upset by his likeness to the character of a perverted TV mogul with nearly the same name. In contrast to the fictitious person, the real Bullingham was said to be a model husband and honest man (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 119– 120).

copyright, prosecution of obscenity, the issue of invasion of privacy, and defamation or libel in fiction (Posner 1988: 319–327). When a real person recognizes him- or herself in a character of a novel and feels insulted due to the offensive fictional depiction, two equal interests and citizens face one another in court: the individual’s demand that his or her privacy and good name be protected collides with the other person’s demand that his or her right to the freedom of expression and artistic creation be protected. For Posner, fiction is not an automatic alibi that excludes the possibility that a small circle of empirical readers would not be able to believe the things written. Like the German constitutional court in the case of Mephisto, Posner also believes it is essential that the court weigh the benefit that an individual involved in the judicial dispute might receive and reflect on the benefits and losses of the broader society and its groups and activities if the case law favored protecting privacy and personal reputation or protecting creative and artistic freedom. From the perspective of law and economics, Posner suggests limiting writers’ criminal liability for slander and libel. The danger that anyone could lose their good reputation because of their depiction in fiction is namely smaller than with the media, which have an impact and are regarded as authentic; the authors’ and publishers’ concern with not insulting anyone by accident would lead to high costs, which might reduce artistic production; in addition, this would jeopardize the quality of literature because writers would not be able to create freely, following aesthetic goals, but would have to censor themselves.

Theory It is necessary to turn from history to theory for a different approach to the consideration provoked by the Pikalo case. Anyone that defends the freedom of literary art today must bid farewell to a simplified understanding of the lessons about the autonomy and quasi-reality of fiction and redefine the relationship between a literary text and reality. In the Pikalo case, this relationship opens through the referentiality of personal names and descriptions of literary characters. Etymologically, fiction is a “construct” that develops through “shaping,” “depicting,” “creating,” and “inventing” (M. Snoj 1997: 125).94 However, many contemporary theorists 94

In individual languages, such as German, some theorists seek to establish terminological nuances (cf. NickelBacon et al. 2000: 269–270): fiction (Fiktion) is a superordinate concept that contravenes the concept of reality and implies something unreal or invented; it covers fictionality and fictivity. Fictionality (Fiktionalität) characterizes a text or media product as a whole. It is a pragmatic category of narrative and other literary works (works of fiction) designed in specific communication positions that writers and readers believe to be the result of invention (in English the category of fiction denotes the same and appears in opposition to nonfiction); on the other hand, fictivity (Fiktivität) is a semantic category denoting a feature of individual text elements: that these

understand fiction not as a product and an objective feature of texts95 or films, pictures, and performances, but as a process and interaction between the producer and recipient that is defined by changeable socio-cultural presuppositions, especially the history of distinguishing between the realms of the imaginary and the real.96 According to Wolfgang Iser, fiction is a channel that gives a “tangible” form (Gestalt) to the imaginary and thus establishes it in the everyday world (Iser 1989: 218–222). According to Iser, fiction is a textual process or modus operandi developed in writing and reading through three acts: selection, which builds the textual world by reorganizing the referential fields from extra- and intertextual experience; combination, which tropologically changes the given meanings and dialogically juxtaposes fictional characters; and self-disclosure, which emphasizes that the text as a whole is merely a “staged discourse” and that therefore it makes no sense to accept it as non-fictive statements. The usual link to the actual world is nonetheless not set aside, because reality remains the background for comparisons with the fictional world (Iser 1989: 216–218). In the dualistic tradition of European metaphysical thought marked by the splits between the subject and object and appearance and truth, fiction was the opposite of nonfiction whether comprehended as truth and factuality or textual representation that faithfully depicts reality. Even Lubomír Doležel in his theory of fiction insists on distinguishing between texts that represent the actual world (his “world-imaging” texts include news, reports, comments, photographs, and research hypotheses) and texts that construct and shape the world themselves (“world-constructing” texts include fictional literary texts); the worlds of texts from the first group are continuously subjected to being tested and challenged, whereas the textual worlds that develop in the second group remain independent and do not have to be changed or annulled with new texts (Doležel 1998: 24–26).97 A more recent theory susceptible to complex models brings forward as signs do not have an extratextual reference (e.g., fictive, invented heroes and their exploits and words in the historical novel, whose textual world also contains elements referring to “real” places, people, and events). It also makes sense to differentiate between fictional and fictive in Slovenian: for example, the famous Quixote by Ménard from Borges’ Ficciones is a fictive text, whereas Borges’ short text reporting on this invented experiment of rewriting the non-fictive novel by Cervantes is a fictional text. 95 This is how Käte Hamburger reflected upon the matter in Die Logik der Dichtung (1957). She identified fiction through seemingly objective symptoms such as the use of the epic preterit, which is not related to expressing the past time, deictics (e.g., adverbs of time) referencing to textually represented time and space rather than real time and space, and verbs expressing psychological processes in the third person (cf. NickelBacon et al. 2000: 271–273). 96 Cf. the transformation of Greek gods from “real” creatures (in terms of the ancient religious thought) into “imaginary” characters that only live in the world of art; a similar fate was experienced by the old physical, astronomic, biological, geographical, and other concepts. 97 In this classification, Doležel surprisingly simplifies the concept of the real world, although in his Heterocosmica, he develops precisely the theory of plural possible worlds. Texts that Doležel believes should only depict the real world also constitute this world at the categorical, semiotic-axiological level because they influence the sociolectal establishment of the ideology through which the subject comprehends itself and the world (e.g., through the mass media); on the other hand, the textual worlds of world-constructing texts are also

several arguments to deconstruct the hierarchical opposition of fiction vs. nonfiction (cf. Schmidt 1996: 91); ultimately, the revision of theoretical models is also demanded by experience with disputes such as the Pikalo case. First, fictional worlds are not independent, but they “parasitize the real world” (Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 279–283). In reading and writing, they appear before a comparative background of reality and reorganize within themselves the extra- and intertextual referential fields and the available “ways of worldmaking” (as described by Nelson Goodman; Iser 1989: 216–218). The “commerce” between the fictional and real worlds (Doležel 1998: 20–21) has also been described by Umberto Eco (1994: 75–96). Compared to the chaos of reality, the literary text representing a possible or imagined world is simpler and structurally limited,98 which is why it enables the recipient to intensely process and produce meaning. The writer does not tell everything and usually does not elaborate on things that are irrelevant or obvious in terms of understanding the story. Doležel also points out that fictional worlds are thus imperfect (Doležel 1998: 22). Eco believes that “fictional worlds are parasites of the real world” (Eco 1994: 83) because readers fill out the semiotic skeleton of a literary work by inference, relying on knowledge of the real world: the “encyclopedia,” the verbalized knowledge of others (the media, historiography, etc.), and the schemata of one’s own experience. Thus, in reading Nerval’s Sylvie we know that horses are harnessed to the rushing carriage even though they are not mentioned. Literary imagination relies on the real world to different extents. Some fictional genres such as biographical, historical, or travel novels “fake” reality, so to speak, pretending to be its faithful mirror image. With their representation techniques and presupposed knowledge, they often rely on those non-literary genres and media that are considered authentic sources of factual data. They primarily refer to extratextual reference fields, “anchoring” their story in empirically attested and documented reality (cf. Doležel 1998: 21), for example, by portraying historical figures and events or imitating real speech registers and genres. Ivan Tavčar’s (1851–1923) historical novel Izza kongresa (Behind the Congress, 1905–08), written in the form of a chronicle, depicts invented events, especially various love stories, to the accompaniment of topical political allusions and places them in a recognizable environment and past—the Ljubljana of 1821, when many foreign diplomats, counts, lords, and monarchs also known from historical sources mixed with the diverse population of lower and upper the targets of revisions—in reading processes they enter the dialogue with continuously new mental horizons, and much older stories, topics, and motifs serve as premises for other kinds of literary reworking or intertextual versions. 98 See also Doležel 1998: 20.

classes at the Congress of Laibach. At the other extreme there are genres that markedly present their fictionality as an utterly different world, remote from reality. These genres are closer to intertextual traditions taken from the core of artistic literature as well as mythology and religion than to letters, diaries, biographies, chronicles, newspapers, or memoirs. These include fairytales and mythological novels, allegories, fantasy, and emphatically playful and poetically imaginative works such as Calvino’s Cosmocomics (1965), Marko Švabič’s (1949– 1993) bold inventions in his prose collection Sonce sonce sonce (Sun, Sun, Sun; 1972) or Artmann’s ludist “Genesis” Die Sonne war ein grünes Ei (The Sun Was a Green Egg, 1982). Many genres that range between the realistic and imaginative poles of fictional literature prevent a sharp line from being drawn between fiction and nonfiction; there is a rich transitional area between them (Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 289–290). Second, the actual world is not entirely realistic. Elements of fictions are embedded in perception and even more in the cognitive categorization and communication about reality. In his comments on Kant’s categories, Peter E. Strawson stressed that the identity of a tangible object such as a favorite coffee cup can be recognized only under the condition that the imagined representations of this object are called up into the present perception from previous perceptions. With his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of “As If,” 1922), Hans Vaihinger—like Nietzsche before him with his destruction of the concept of truth—is a predecessor of cognitive constructivisms because to him, fiction was a way in which reality as such even establishes itself: we equate the ideas we form about reality with reality as such until they are revealed as hypotheses and inventions.99 As stated by Pierre Ouellet, “fiction is thus an integral part of the real” and is intrinsic to the comprehension of the phenomenal world; for example, in the horizon that is displayed in millions of versions given the current location of any individual on the face of the Earth. Accordingly, Ouellet sees reality as “an indexical term” dependent on the subject’s experiential world and organized around the Ihere-now, “the point of anchorage of our perceptual-cognitive activity”; there is an infinite number of these observation points and no justification for elevating any one of these as the absolute criterion of reality (Ouellet 1996: 81–82). Following the radical constructivism of Humberto Maturana and Ernst von Glasersfeld, the subject—as a living, self-regulatory, and closed system—cannot even have direct sensual access to the external environment, but lives and functions in it only based on its own “internal” mental representations produced by neural networks in the brain. In this, the subject relies on the semiotic codes learned and tested

99

For more on Strawson and Vaihinger see Iser (1989: 212–213, 219).

through its own activity in the environment, which are shaped by social communications and language interaction (cf. Dović 2002). Through our own experience and senses, we can only grasp certain sections from our own immediate environment and must therefore also rely on the second-hand “reality” transmitted through the media; here, the difference between reality and the fictive is uncertain and practically unverifiable (Eco 1994: 88–90). For example, American media corporations conveyed images about the war in Iraq that supported the thesis of the American liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam’s regime, whereas Arabic TV stations showed a completely different reality. In cases like these, one must abide by lesser or greater trust in information sources, with beliefs based on individual and community conventions regarding the reliability of various media, genres, and positions of uttering: for some, the tabloids hold a different status than recognized newspapers, and for scientists lay pseudoscience is less reliable than recognized scholarly journals. As revealed by Maurice Halbwachs, we even process intimate personal memories in an imaginative manner through the schemata of the collective memory expressed through newspaper photographs, films, literary motifs, and so on.100 To sum up, deconstruction of the reality-fiction opposition has revealed the complex presence of the fictive in reality and vice versa. Fiction and reality are not separate and ontologically uniform areas, even less is reality primary and fiction only its reflection or derivative. The difference lies not in things themselves, but in their use and function. It is established through the speech situation, as a decision to assume a viewpoint in producing and accepting sign representations within the cultural context (Ronen 1994: 1, 3, 10–20). In various cultural environments and historical periods, the way fields are distinguished as being real or unreal varies and is changeable. The difference is subject to vacillation.101 Third, the criteria of reality have changed. Following the metaphysical logic of binarism, a statement was true if the “intellect” complied with “things,” otherwise it was wrong. In the phenomenological and pragmatic study of literature, the sharp difference between true and false statements was somewhat mitigated by the conception of apparent, quasi- or pseudo-judgments, although this as well remained caught in the dualism of the truth (the true statement) and appearance.102 In the 1960s, binarism finally began to be supplanted 100

For more on this see Chapter 11. A good example of this is the horror movie The Blair Witch Project (1999), which used pragmatic signals (opening credits) and camera and editing techniques to convincingly imitate a documentary video, but the audience mostly perceived it as fiction (cf. Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 267–268, 297–299). 102 Ingarden realized that statements within literary fiction, although having “the external habitus of judicative propositions,” possess a different modal status than those outside literature—judgments stated by sentences in literature are only apparent ones (“quasi-judgments”) because their truth or falsehood cannot be verified outside 101

by modal logic, from which interdisciplinary theories of possible worlds emerged through the revival of old ideas from Leibniz (cf. Ryan 1991): according to these conceptions, the discourse universum does not limit itself to the “actual world,” but spreads to an infinite number of possible worlds, in which modally defined states have not actualized themselves (Doležel 1998: 13). For example, one of these possible worlds is based on the hypothesis that the Nazis succeeded in winning the Second World War. According to this theory, the world we live in is a complex (pluri-)modal structure composed of subsystems with various levels of possibility and unequal principles of accessing the actual world (Ronen 1994: 25).103 The absolute metaphysical standard of the truth has been replaced by the plurality of semiotic standards related to possible worlds. For example, the statement “Santa Claus lives at the North Pole” is true and consistent in the possible world of the fairytale-commercial discourse, but false in other areas of discussion. According to the theory of possible worlds, literary fiction is not unique from a logical and semantic aspect (Ronen 1994: 5–7, 19–21, 42, 49): it resembles other statements that do not refer to actual states, but to invented, desired or hypothetical situations. Nonetheless, compared to wishes, presumptions, assumptions, or lies, literary fiction is a considerably more developed and precisely worked out possible world, and its cosmos has well-articulated logic and semantics. Fictional worlds are ultimately structured complexes of unrealized possible states (Doležel 1998: 16). Even Pikalo’s novelistic fiction is a possible world and a semiotically delimited discursive universe that tests the potential courses of events: due to its mimetic aesthetics, the logic followed by the world of The Blue E adapts extratextual schemata to itself and partly also processes the intertextual patterns from the literary tradition, especially the genre of the Bildungsroman. In the possible world of The Blue E, Firecracker could not have flown on a carpet and beaten up Lovro Kvas, the hero of the first Slovenian novel Deseti brat (The Tenth Brother, 1866). However, because the general public ascribes corruptibility and violence to certain police officers, because countless examples attest to the motif of making love in a car, and because it is a known fact that young people do not speak the literary artwork; similar to overall “performance of sentence meanings,” quasi-judgments basically “project” higher strata of the text and ground its represented world (Ingarden 1973: 167-181, 186). Within pragmatic linguistics, the idea that statements in works of fiction are a deviation from other types of statements because, as “pseudo-statements,” they only seem to be proper statements was also developed by John Searle in 1975: the literary author pretends to claim something without any false pretences and the reader consciously agrees with it through a “fictional agreement” (Eco; cf. Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 279; Eco 1994: 75–79). 103 Among the theories about the manner of existence of possible worlds, the one I find most persuasive is moderate realism of Plantinga or Kripke, which supports the thesis that possible worlds do not exist physically, actually, or in parallel to the real world, but exist within the limits of the actual world as its modal components— they are namely dealt with mentally and discursively by real people and groups, and, in addition, they also have real effects or are reactions to reality (cf. Ronen 1994: 23).

nicely about police officers, Officer Firecracker’s vices as reported in the novel by the fictive Alfred seem relatively likely. Fictive persons, events, and places undoubtedly develop only and exclusively through the imaginative production of meanings or poiesis within the semiotic activity. They live only in the production and reception of media products. When a personal name establishes a semantic draft of the presented person through the first sentence predications in a text, this begins functioning as an isotopy—it becomes an intratextual referent of subsequent, conceptually complementary linguistic signs and statements (cf. Ronen 1994: 39). And, as already discussed, the reader is the one that fills out the semiotic skeletons of invented and merely outlined persons with memory images, known models, and typologies of personalities, thus imagining the presence of literary protagonists. In 1905, Bertrand Russell claimed that sentences about invented people have meanings, but lack references: there is believed to be no actual subject in reality that would completely correspond to the contents of descriptions in the text (cf. Doležel 1998: 3–4; Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 79–83; Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 275–276). However, the statement that the signs of fiction do not have extratextual referents but only intratextual ones constituted with linguistic signs is incorrect. Not all personal names—the nexus of textual composition of literary characters and the story—denote pure inventions. According to Nesselroth (1996), at least three types of names with non-fictive or extratextual reference appear in fiction: “historical real names” (Richard the Lionheart in Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe or Justinian I in Fran S. Finžgar’s 1906–07 historical novel Pod svobodnim soncem [Under the Free Sun]), “real fictional names” (a real person can be identified under an invented name: Dušan Pirjevec as Professor Hippolyte in Mate Dolenc’s 1979 novel Vampir z Gorjancev [The Vampire from Gorjanci Hills] or as Professor Vladimir in Milan Dekleva’s 1997 Oko v zraku [Eye in the Air]), and “fictional real names” (characters from literary tradition: Prešeren’s star-crossed lovers in Mimi Malenšek’s 1959 historical novel Črtomir in Bogomila [Črtomir and Bogomila]). Thus characters that have their “originals” in reality or any other text also appear in fiction (Margolin 1996). Nevertheless, fictional characters whose names or characteristics correspond to extratextual originals104 are ontologically no different than the purely fictive persons they meet within their possible worlds. The connection between an invented and non-invented person can only be conceived by invention (Ronen 1994: 88–90, Martínez-Bonati 1996: 74). 104

Mate Dolenc (b. 1945) thus referred to the real Pirjevec by using an individualized external description (“tall, with a bushy red moustache and red hair”), paraphrasing the influential topic of his lectures (he talked about “death as the basic criterion for testing the world and people”), and telling a story about his unforgettable relationship with the students (charisma, full classes).

Reality can access the fictional world only “through semiotic channels,” and thus literary characters with real names or whose descriptions match historical figures are nothing but “possible counterparts” of the personalities that are known from history; as to their semantics and representation, such characters are made according to the narrator’s will (Doležel 1998: 21). The writer that inclines to self-referentiality and fantasy can afford to change features of these persons that are generally considered features of the actual counterparts (Doležel 1998: 17): for example, in Dimitrij Rupel’s (b. 1946) postmodernist historical metafiction Levji delež (Lion’s Share, 1989) “the famous English king Richard the Lionheart . . . tried to get involved with Slovenians because he was interested in them as a social curiosity.” The matter is different with writers that lean towards realism. They try to align their descriptions of real persons with what has been written in historiography and rooted in the popular public past. Josip Jurčič collected extensive material on the era of Cyril and Methodius for his historical novel Slovenski svetec in učitelj (The Slovenian Saint and Teacher, 1886); he spent nearly a decade recording it on hundreds of cards from works by Slovenian and other linguists and historians (Rupel 1968: 283–288, 299–353). Similarity between fictive and actual things is established merely in the way that equivalent linguistic descriptions can be used for reporting on both (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 96). In addition, there are no absolute criteria that can be used to verify the veracity of fictional depictions (Margolin 1996: 128): even the historical originals of fictional persons are only available through previous representations, and these representations are always perspectivized and biased—the baron Johann Weichard Valvasor (1641–1693), the polymath author of 1689 Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Crain (The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola), considered Valjhun (Valdungus), the medieval villain in Prešeren’s romantic epic Krst pri Savici (Baptism on the Savica, 1836), an honorable man. Only a “transworld identity” (a term coined by David Lewis, cf. Ronen 1994: 57–59; Doležel 1998: 17) can be established between the possible characters from the possible world and real persons from reality. In addition to purely fictive characters, “versions” of real persons exist in fiction, at the most adapted to the model of the possible world as developed in the literary work (Margolin 1996: 113). They contain an abundance of fictive additives such as the narrator’s intrusions into their thoughts and speculations about the reasons and goals of their actions.105 Regardless of their fictionality, possible “versions” of real persons—because and to the extent that they are linguistic signs—nonetheless also refer to the actual “originals.” Here lies the slippery slope 105

These types of fictive elements are nearly inevitable in any narrative, including actual historiography (White 1987).

of the Pikalo case. A sign, such as a name, description, or statement, can be connected with a referent even though its content is wrong or inappropriate (Whiteside 1987: 178–179): the waiter successfully carries out the order to serve champagne to “that pretty girl near the steps,” although the description is actually inappropriate because the “girl” actually proves to be a drag queen. The referentiality of personal names is similar. Semantically, a name is a “rigid designator” (according to Saul Kripke, cf. Ronen 1994: 42–45; Doležel 1998: 17) that persistently refers to the person named with it. In later public circulation, the bond with the name is maintained through a series of other texts and statements. This is why, for example, one cannot prevent the name Fran Levstik from referring to the same real person every time it is used—the Slovenian writer born on 28 September 1831 in Retje near Velike Lašče. This rule applies not only to Levstik’s counterpart in the literary historian Anton Slodnjak’s (1899– 1983) biographical novel Pogine naj, pes (Let Him Die, Dog; 1946), but also to arbitrary statements in which the descriptions do not match the general encyclopedic knowledge (“Fran Levstik met Gogolj in Vienna,” “Fran Levstik, the author of Quixote,” “Fran Levstik is a punk rocker from the Ljubljana suburbs”). With such discrepancies, the transworld identity between the double and its original is undermined: the name continues to potentially denote the one originally named by it, but the description that does not match the established knowledge hinders extratextual identification, so that the interpretation oscillates in an indefinable space. This may involve a person with the same name, a lie, a joke, or a surprising but possibly true statement about a known person. The distinction of literary texts lies precisely in their polyreferentiality (Whiteside 1987: 195). The referent is not merely pinned to the sign, and the bond between things and words is established and transformed through social conventions and differentiation, in the historical changes of mentality, and occasionally also because of random circumstances. For example, Sartre apologized to a certain gentleman by the name of von Gerlach, a brave opponent of Nazism, because the villain in his play The Condemned of Altona bears the same name, without Sartre even planning it—the transworld identity established itself completely contingently or post festum (Doležel 1998: 232). Accordingly, even its referentiality does not completely separate fiction from reality and it can influence it. To this end, it has an extensive network of unveiled and concealed, true and “quasi” references at its disposal (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 111–116).106 Ultimately, writers have invented their stories in order to say something important about the actual world.

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For example, denotations with well-known proper names (Shakespeare), defining descriptive identifications (“the genius of Stratford, author of Hamlet”), conceptual extensions (when the word cop is mentioned, any real individuals that fit the defining value of the concept may feel labeled and perhaps offended).

Since time immemorial, they have risked planned ambiguities when they used fictive elements to imply reality. As real flesh-and-blood people, they have often used fiction simply to take revenge: even the great Dante inhabited his Inferno with many personal enemies. Today, amidst the attractions of the mass media, literature often sacrifices the “disinterest” of the aesthetic experience and indirectly supplies the information yearned after by a public obsessed with talk and reality shows, crime reports, pornographic videos, and gossip columns (e.g., Bret Easton Ellis in The American Psycho, 1991). If real persons, things, and places can thus be referred to in fictional works, are the statements in fiction about these elements of the real world also true? As mentioned above, Ingarden and Searle declared novel writers’ statements as “ostensible”: authors only pretend that they are claiming something because they know that this does not even exist, and the reader is supposed to take this kind of pretence (which does not have any false intentions) for granted based on an unwritten “fictional agreement.”107 In line with this agreement, the narrator’s constatives about invented referents are introduced by an unspoken modal frame that indicates to the reader how to receive statements, for example: “I’m inviting you to imagine a world in which there is a person by the name of Martin Krpan and this person is really strong.” The function of a modal frame under the fictional agreement is performed by conventional pragmatic signals, from the introductory formulas taken from oral tradition (“Once upon a time there was a king . . .”) to the textual information such as genre labels in the subtitle (a story, a novel), the author’s name, and whether it is part of a genre-specific collection. Accordingly, it does not make sense to verify the reliability of statements included in Flaubert’s shocking description of the deceased Emma Bovary outside the universe of discourse that has created the possible world of Flaubert’s novel. Nonetheless, in a fictional world one can justly distinguish between statements ascribing a feature or act to an invented person and statements that the narrating instances—narrators and heroes—give about the phenomena that undoubtedly also exist outside the text, such as the clever maxims about human nature strewn across Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), the extensive essays in Broch’s Sleepwalkers (1931–1932), or the intellectual discussions on works of art in Izidor Cankar’s (1886–1958) novel S poti (From the Road, 1913/1919). Torn out of context, these judgments about extratextual reality can even seem true to readers, either at the level of the general or specific; Izidor Cankar was, after all, the first prominent art historian in Slovenia. 107

The theory that the author merely simulates his claims has attracted harsh critiques (Mihailescu & Hamarneh, eds. 1996: 12) or modifications: the author does not pretend to speak the truth, but enters the communicational role of someone that formulates serious and honest statements about the world that he presents to the readers through his words (cf. Martínez-Bonati 1996: 71).

However, these sentences are placed within a specific modal frame that limits the veracity of their claims and binds it to the semiotic standards of reality within a given possible world. The “fiction-operator” (“in fiction, p”) requalifies the content of the preposition (Ronen 1994: 28– 33, 38; Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 86–87). It could be complemented with a perspectival operator in the following manner: “In fiction, from the viewpoint of a fictive X, it is claimed that . . . .” Only if such an operator is taken into account, Flaubert’s claims about Emma Bovary are true; on the other hand, the polemical judgments that Cankar’s first-person narrator and his friend Fritz pass regarding Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin can be completely contextualized or true, but the fictional operator (“in the novel S poti, from the viewpoint of the first-person narrator or Fritz”) nonetheless prevents them from being considered as authorized judgments of Izidor Cankar himself aimed directly at Titian’s work of art. The fictional operator relativizes claims about reality and incorporates them into the frameworks of the semantic-axiological structures of the text and the horizons of fictive speech positions.

Application Theory must be applicable to actual situations, thus also to the assessment of the Pikalo case. In his Blue E, many factors lead the reader to respect the fictional agreement: the textual information and the type of publication (belonging in a collection of juvenile fiction, the label “novel” on the cover), and the obvious discrepancy between the author and the narrator, the teenaged Alfred. The work was published by a Ljubljana publisher, which is why it is not very likely that the author intended to slander a certain Mr. Vertačnik right in front of the people of Prevalje. Pikalo ensured that the venue was blurred with a relatively consistent system of renaming. However, it is true that the writer did not make it impossible to make references to Prevalje. This is not even common in literature because intentional or random matches with reality are just contributions to the interesting nature of the invention. By all means, the Blue E is not a local chronicle as the court believed; in line with Aristotle’s distinction between historiography and poetry,108 Pikalo also primarily sought to present the general; that is, typical characters and stories. He exemplified and singularized them with invented characters. These are inevitably based on features of original persons—either from real experience or literary—and stereotypes. However, no fiction is written merely to verify 108

In chapter 9 of Poetics, Aristotle wrote that the difference between a historian and a poet lies in the fact that “one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be,” which is why the statements of poetry “are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Aristotle 1984b: 1451b4–1451b5, 1451b6–1451b7).

the truthfulness of individual claims or to refer to particular persons or events. It is presupposed that, within the model of its possible world, it enables readers to comprehend someone else’s experience (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 122–123; Ouellet 1996: 79, 84). The Blue E is a story of growing up that could take place in any small town. The nickname “Firecracker” as a rigid designator and the limited selection of the fictive hero’s features allow his transworld identification with the real person. In this case, Pikalo’s Firecracker could be a possible counterpart of the real Vertačnik. However, the references in the text are not specific enough (cf. Ronen 1994: 137) for precisely Vertačnik to be his only possible referent. The nickname “Firecracker” is probably not unique to him; it had not been documented in public discourse before Pikalo’s novel and had only been known in local rumors. This distinguishes it from the names of encyclopedic figures or figures known in the media, who make it possible for the model reader of a fictional text to reliably establish a transworld identity. There are no documented reports on Firecracker’s actions that would allow the readers to assess whether Pikalo lies about him or not or whether the judgments about him are probable. Because Pikalo says he did not know Vertačnik, the shaping of the fictive Firecracker can only include a combination of local rumors and abstracted character features from various stereotypes and depictions of police officers in the media. Other minor characters in the novel are also negatively characterized. They represent the authorities whom the young narrator resists. The characterization is thus dictated by the aesthetics and semantics of the narration: Alfred’s verbal relationship to the authorities is a sign of his speech and mental-emotional style. The subject that utters the negative descriptions of the officer Firecracker is fictive. That is why all the statements about Firecracker have a double modal framework and are introduced by the following fictional operator: “In fiction, the fictive narrator Alfred says that Firecracker is such and such.” This prevents them from being taken as Matjaž Pikalo’s authorized opinions, even though in the final instance he as the author remains responsible for how people are represented (cf. Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 128). The damage inflicted due to the barely definable and probably unintentional reference—in a novel, which as a genre is generally not expected to provide credible conclusions about real individuals—on the local reputation, good name, and privacy of a retired police officer cannot be compared to the damage that would be caused if, due to the threat of civil suits, writers no longer dared to write invented stories based on their own experience, and if in their fictional worlds and literary language they could no longer afford to transgress the established moral and social codes. Creating from one’s own existential experience of the world and the opportunity to freely and daringly stretch beyond what is

possible and permissible are the conditions of art. The decision of the German constitutional court in the case of Mann’s novel Mephisto appropriately took this into account: when two equal constitutional rights are placed on the scale (i.e., the right to free artistic creativity and the right to personal dignity), it must be agreed in principle that the freedom of creativity be limited if the opposing right is heavily infringed upon. However, it is even more necessary to limit the chance of passing a judgment that would negate the right to free artistic creativity and free publication of works of art. In such cases, the courts must act extremely carefully. This is why in order to convict Pikalo, the court should have proved beyond doubt that his intention was to shame a real individual through the fictional depiction of one of his novelistic characters; in order to do this, it would be necessary to establish in great detail all of the characterizations and actions of the fictive character that match the appearance, biography, and other features of the affected individual to an extent that allows a reliable transworld identification. Ultimately, in his case, Pikalo learned how to use a procedure that may also relieve other Slovenian writers of criminal liability from now on (cf. Nickel-Bacon et al. 2000: 285): if the traditional pragmatic signals of fiction no longer work properly with part of the less culturally literate audience, perhaps the disclaimer that everything written in the work is merely a figment of imagination and that any resemblance to real persons is coincidental will prove convincing.

10 Textual and Contextual Spaces

The Spaces of Literature From the Enlightenment to the end of the long nineteenth century, modernity was aware of itself primarily in its alleged break with “tradition,” a concept that it developed by itself as a monolithic and static whole; it therefore primarily used the form of narration to present the understanding of its dynamics and constant progress. However, in parallel with the technological, economic, and cultural condensation of temporality within the globalization process, conceptions began to be established in the twentieth century that followed the traces of modernist art to signal departure from the narrative dominant; this was replaced by spatial models that captured modernity in its contemporaneity and looked at the becoming of the world through a complex network of interdependent locations.109 In literature, this was reflected in the establishment of “spatial form” or truth as a dialogic structure of juxtaposed or conflicting discourses (cf. Škulj 1990); modernist literature also approximated spatial art forms through visual poetry and collages. In the humanities and social sciences, the transition from narrative to spatial models was especially reflected in the success of structuralism, which expanded de Saussure’s synchronic observation of the language system to include all areas of human activity. For example, French “new history” gave up the story and focused on describing social structures as well as cultural and geographical space in order to get to know the “grammar of civilizations” better (Braudel 1987). Towards the end of the twentieth century, awareness of the importance of space for the structure of literary texts and the social life of literature also became evident in literary historiography, which assumes the principles of cartography. An example is The Atlas of Literature (Bradbury [ed.] 1996), in which developments in the fictional worlds of literary works and the real spaces of the socialization of literature from the Middle Ages to the end of the twentieth century are presented from the

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A characteristic response to this shift is volume 5 of the Proceedings of the 12th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Space and Boundaries in Literary Theory and Criticism). In her paper “From Temporality to Spatiality: Changing Concepts in Literary Criticism,” Reingard Nethersole writes: “Briefly, today’s critical questioning is aimed at three important positions in the humanities, all constituted in their present stronghold in the eighteenth century: Historicism, the sovereign or transcendental Subject and Meaning. Each of these is erased by transforming temporality into spatiality. Thus, Foucault’s rereading of Nietzsche produced genealogy in the place of Historicism, Lacan’s rereading of Freud produced the notion of an ever split subject, and Derrida’s critique of the linguistic model (de Saussure, Peirce, and followers) produced différance, indeterminacy, and constant deferral of signification.” According to Nethersole, the ordering of the world in twentieth-century arts and theory (philosophy) seems to be governed by topological rather than geometrical spatiality (Nethersole 1990: 63, italics in the original).

geographical perspective of regions, centers and peripheries, climate, and traffic routes, as well as through recording the microlocations of salons, cafes, theaters, film studios, and so on. Cartography was used more consistently (and not only marginally and illustratively) and as an analytical tool that opens new perspectives on comparative literary studies through geographical representation by Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel: 1800– 1900. His literary geography includes both the study of “space in literature” and “literature in space” and demonstrates that literary forms and meanings are linked to specific culturally and politically delimited or socially marked environments or that “geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel” (Moretti 1999: 3–6, 8). Moretti used maps presenting geographical locations of novels’ stories (mainly English and French) to draw interesting conclusions about the ideological bases of novelistic genres: for example, marriages of heroines outside their region of birth helped readers of love stories experience the expansiveness of the nation state (1999: 15–18); historical novels often took place on borders, where heroes face not only external enemies but also the conflict between their own regional and national loyalty (37); in contrast to ancient adventure stories and their exotic range, picaresque novels are characterized by shorter, everyday, and trivial routes well-known to everyone, which later on contributed to the formation of the notion of nation as a place of “familiarity” (51) and to the establishment of realistic conventions key to the development of the novel in the following centuries (48); and, last but not least, the urban space presented in Balzac’s realistic novels led to a complex formation of interpersonal relations between the heroes, the narration no longer following simple binary oppositions (106–109). Moretti’s maps reveal even more about cultural geography; they connect the history of books with the history of novelistic forms and show geographical differences in the range of novel production, reading, and translation. Moretti thus established that small British and French provincial libraries included considerably larger shares of novels and canonical works in their collections than the large city libraries; this shows that cultural parochialism and the undifferentiated nature of the reading repertoire are proportional to the local power of the national canon, and that in the nineteenth century the novel was actually the most widely read and, surprisingly, a “nation-building” genre (146–149). According to Moretti, the majority of European countries, except France, imported more than half of their novelistic repertoire whereas, from the viewpoint of cultural import, nineteenth-century English literature was a self-sufficient island. Although it produced the majority of novels to be exported in addition to France, and English genre patterns were copied throughout Europe, its own provinciality led to a retrograde blockage of new topics and forms that were available in France and Russia

(151–158). Through cartography, Moretti ultimately discovered the evolutionary principles of European post-Enlightenment novel writing, as shown in the light of the dynamics of centers and peripheries of the global cultural market system. Throughout Europe, innovations generally spread from Western centers to the peripheries, where the imitated models retain the structure of the plot, but supplement it with local heroes, environments, and issues. Moretti claims that, on the other hand, the cultural difference of the periphery can effectively shake the hidden ideological bases of the imported or imitated matrixes, placing them into a dialogic tension with the different cultural environment; this is why novel innovations with a global impact are even possible on the peripheries as well, which is proven by the Russian novel of ideas and Latin-American magical realism (Moretti 1999: 164–197).110 Even the ethno- and linguocentric model, which had long characterized Western literary studies in the form of national literary histories or their mutual comparison in literary comparative studies, did not ignore the spatial features of literature; the “environment” was even included in Taine’s three positivist factors that determine literary processes. For example, in presenting the older periods, the classic Slovenian literary history works took into account the cultural geography factors that influenced the development and types of Slovenian and its literary repertoires: a network of cultural centers, such as castles, convents, and towns; boundaries of parishes, provinces, and administrative units; the role of natural barriers and obstacles; and so on. In studying language systems, national and comparative philologies (e.g., Slavic studies) also had to keep a constant mind on territories and areas in which these systems were used by the population and formed contacts with other languages (cf. Zelenka 2002: 7–15 passim). Languages formed referential connections with these territories and the social practices taking place in them, and absorbed the typical historical experience of successive generations of the population into their codes. Space gained greater weight in contemporary branches of literary history that questioned the exclusiveness of the linguistic or national criterion. One example for this is regional and intercultural comparative studies, which highlighted the role of border zones, such as Carinthia, Friuli, Istria, and Prekmurje, and interpreted these as cultural spaces of strengthened dialogue between languages and their areas (cf. Strutz 2006). Transnational comparative studies also focused on other macroregions that— regardless of the centripetal operation of states and their standard languages—reflect the polyphony of ethnic languages, in which, however, similar experiences of nature, culture,

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See Chapter 3.

politics, and history are expressed. In addition to the Mediterranean, a good example for this is also Central Europe—a macroregion that Dionýz Ďurišin defined using the concepts of interliterary community and interliterary centrism (Ďurišin 1984: 273–308, 1995: 11–90; Ďurišin et al. 1987: 10–25). These two concepts denote the tendency towards cultural connection and cohesion, but also internal distinction between relatively autonomous or linguistically heterogeneous units that have historically coexisted next to one another, established actual contacts, and entered into conflicts with one another. In Central Europe, the transitions between literatures and literary repertoires of genres, topics, forms, and styles in various ethnic languages were mitigated by the bilingualism of many writers and readers as well as their multiple literary affiliations, like those of Jan Kollár and Zofka Kveder (1878– 1926), who wrote in Slovenian and Croatian. The complex of Germanic, Romance, FinnoUgric, and Jewish cultures is accompanied by the interliterary community of Slavs (especially West and South Slavs) as a not insignificant component of Central European centrism. This community alone, but even more Central European interliterary centrism as such, presents itself as a unit. On the other hand, however, it constantly tends to disintegrate into components that define themselves through a large number of disputes and confrontations. In a geopolitically rather accurately delimited territory, common imagery and representations thus develop, distinguishing a specific centrism from other, stronger centrisms. Central Europe remains a space of in-between peripherality, embedded among the dominant centers of colonial power, especially Western European and Russian ones (Tötösy de Zepetnek 2002). The studies of Ďurišin’s comparative school define the interliterary community and interliterary centrism as historically changeable areas of exchanges between literatures. With their specific structures of literary life, value structures, conventions, and literary repertoires, interliterary communities and centrisms represent an intermediate level between individual national literatures and “world literature” (cf. Zelenka 2002: 59–64, 99–121). Ďurišin understands world literature neither as a sum of coexisting national literatures nor as an ideal ensemble of selected works whose excellence surpasses their time and home environment, but rather as a heterogenous, intercultural, transcultural, and polycentric system composed of a number of subsystems and historical processes of intercultural communication. Similarly, Bertrand Westphal and his colleagues develop geocriticism (géocritique), which also attempts to connect comparative literature with geography, anthropology, and cultural history, albeit in a different way. Geocriticism is understood as a subject-bound, posthermeneutic, critical, interdisciplinary, and constructivist postmodern science of the literary space (Grassin 2000: i–vi). Distinguishing poetic, imaginary space of literary works from

socio-geographic space, where literature operates, geogriticism does not neglect the interdependencies of both spaces. Grassin, for example, speaks of l’espace poétique/imaginaire and l’espace géographique/des littératures—the latter is characteristic of the fragmentation of literatures along national, regional, religious, racial, linguistic, or geo-cultural lines; establishing centers and peripheries, building inter-literary communities, and so on. Westphal promotes geocriticism precisely as a poetics of the “interactions between human spaces and literature”; it explores the role of interaction between the imaginary and geo-social spaces in determining cultural identities; for example, many writers created imaginary representations of cities or landscapes that influenced collective memory and perceptions of the actual spaces—Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg, Kafka’s Prague, and Joyce’s Dublin (Westphal 2000: 17, 22; original emphasis). I would add at least one more example: Srečko Kosovel’s Karst (discussed below). I continue by focusing on only a small fragment of the extensive issues connected with the relationship between literature and space, which include the semiotic space of the text, space as a cultural code of literature and other works of art, and geocritical space, which refers to the delimitations of literatures and cultures (Škulj 2004). In the spirit of geocriticism, I focus on the interaction between fictional and real spaces of literature that takes place through intertextuality.111

The Spatial in Intertextuality The notion of intertextuality—the idea that each text produces meanings and structures by absorbing and transforming other texts, utterances, and sign systems—was one of those conceptions of the twentieth century that in the wake of modernist art signaled a shift of imagination and reasoning from temporal dominants to spatial models. It is, then, no surprise that intertextuality arrived on the scene of contemporary theory in the company of spatial metaphors. Let me mention some characteristic formulations of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes: “the volume of the social,” “the space of the text,” “text places itself in history,” “the society inscribes itself in the text,” and “all the texts of the space that has been read by the

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The author of the introduction to the Proceedings of the 12th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association on the topic of space and boundaries detects the change of theoretical paradigm in poststructuralism and deconstructivism and, within this turn, stresses the role of intertextuality: “In the theory of intertextuality, the relations between time and space occupy the center of discussion” (Fischer-Lichte 1990: 15; italics in the original).

writer function in the paragram of the text.”112 There are several contemporary and subsequent terms that could be added to the list, such as Derrida’s “writing” and “trace” and Genette’s “palimpsest” and “hypertext,” the latter used extensively in internet culture as well. Even some older notions should be recalled that, in the paradigms of classical rhetoric and nineteenth-century historicism, were used to explain relationships between new texts or utterances and the tradition of the déjà dit. The first one is topos or commonplace. Detached from its source in some classical, authoritative, or sacred texts, topos transcended time and was preserved in spatial schemes of memoria (mnemonic art); thesauri of topics were a kind of repository of public good available to later poets and orators. The second one is imagery connected to the notion of influence (Juvan 2008b: 54–69). In spite of its causal-temporal ground, the term “influence” shaped the discipline of comparative literature with geopolitical metaphors suggesting conquering and overwhelming another cultural territory by literary influxes, streams, and currents; their colonial and axiological subtext is not hard to decipher (“pure origins” vs. “unclean mixture,” “defining power” vs. “constituted subject”). The stress on the spatial, so crucial for the idea of intertextuality, was motivated by the polemic against established notions of verbal interaction that represented communication as linear transmission of an information “package” from author to reader and backed by a monolithic common code. With its spatial models and in contradistinction to such views, intertextuality tried to put forward at least two postulates. First, that each text is animated by an open dialogue generating a complex and ever-changing network of inter-subjective relations and identity positions; second, that semantic and structural patterns of the text, like tips of icebergs, lie on an immense sea of the implicit, on several layers of codes, utterances, and cultural representations; for this reason the patterns are dynamic, indeterminable, and subject to heterogeneous regimes of ascribing sense to linguistic data. However, the spatial aspects of intertextuality briefly outlined so far are more or less bound to theory and to metaphorical thinking, which cannot be avoided even when one tries to construct explanatory models. Nonetheless, how can we actually explain the relationship between intertextuality and the space represented in textual worlds?

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On the genesis and development of the concept of “intertextuality,” especially regarding Kristeva and Barthes, see Juvan (2008b: 73–108).

Spaces Imagined/Experienced The relationship between a literary text and reality is, as we now all know, a tricky one. The text is a part of reality in the first place, and, although symbolic with regard to its material and structure, is an outcome of the subject’s entanglement with real powers, such as psychic drives or social discourses. On the other hand, the text itself takes place in history as a discursive act that is able to cause certain effects in reality. What is more, after Derrida’s dictum Il n’y a pas de hors-texte, at latest, we have gotten used to bearing in mind the mantra that “reality” is also “always already discursively/textually constructed.” Yet the text-reality relationship is still quite often reduced to the traditional idea of representation: a literary work, belonging to an ontological order other than reality, represents the outer world by creating its simulacrum. Because space is a crucial dimension of reality—or rather, of its perception—the text is bound to model space as well. According to Lotman’s semiotic theory of the art text, the space represented with signs of a work of art is final and limited, but referentially reflects the infinity of the real world—it is a model of reality, whereas the relations between the sign elements of the model (e.g., continuity, closeness, distance, etc.) are similar to extratextual spatial relations between the referents to whom the text refers mimetically. The finality of sign representation is clearly evident in painting, in which the three-dimensional world is flattened to two dimensions, so that the illusion of depth can only be produced by the immanently artistic language of perspective (Lotman 1977: 217–218). It is more difficult to explain the limitedness and finality of the world presented in literature because in it the signifiers open undelimited chains of signification and imagination; nonetheless, it is clear that in the world of a narrative that, for example, talks about today’s Ljubljana signs cannot present all of the details, persons, events, places, and things in this city. Instead, only the elements that serve the aesthetics and semantics of linguistically produced narrative enter the light of fictional existence (cf. Eco 1994: 85–88). In other words, the infinite matter of the world turns into the meaningful finality of the fictional model of the world thanks to the thematization enabled by the use of language in an utterance or text. Space and all of the other components of the world presented in a literary work are thus imperfect and not fully defined—they are only determined by the content captured in the words they constitute, and the images that readers call up from their knowledge and memory schemes through inference. Lotman shows that vertical segmentation (i.e., orientation between above and below) and horizontal organization defined by boundaries between spaces are important for the structure of the space of a literary text. In the world represented, the special feature of spatial

coordinates is that semantic and value structures of linguistic categories that establish and articulate the fictional space are also organized through them: in the poems of Nikolay Zabolocky, the “above” is thus connected with the semantics of distance, movement, freedom, transformation, thought, and culture, and the “below” with closeness, narrowness, immobility, slavery, lack of creativity, and nature. The horizontal level and its boundaries between spaces also distinguishes between various areas of human activity, so that the hero’s crossing of a specific spatial boundary (e.g., between a castle and forest, or town and village) propels the development of the narrative subject (Lotman 1977: 219–234). Lotman explains the inseparable associative connection between spatial specifiers and various anthropological categories, values, and meanings in the world of a literary text with the observation that space is a cognitive model that outside the text also organizes the general conceptual world of culture, as reproduced in the language system; this is why the spatial organization of concepts inscribed in the modeling system of language can pass from social and cultural codes into literary texts. According to Lotman, the most general social, religious, political, and moral models of the world always have spatial features, such as undergroundland-sky, upper and lower social classes, and higher and lower values (1977: 218–219). But what is the textual space like for the readers? It is clear that the space represented by a literary work of art differs from the “real” space ontologically. It is usually described as imaginary, created by the powers of imagination. Ever since Cervantes and his Don Quixote, writers of fiction were well aware of the distinction between the perceptions of actual and imaginary spaces. Wolfgang Iser, following Gombrich, Gurwitsch, and Merleau-Ponty, claims that the reading subject’s interaction with the literary text proceeds via “the wandering viewpoint” through which the subject’s horizons of semantic memories and expectations converge and establish a “gestalt” of the imaginary world and its spaces. In the reception process, a textual sequence of linguistic signs and implications gives birth to provisional gestalts; these are semantic syntheses built by the reader’s consciousness that projects an illusion of seeing reality that, instead of remaining contingent, is already ordered and endowed with meaning due to its linguistic make-up (Iser 1978: 108–159). Yet Alexander Gelley reminds us that visualization of a space represented by linguistic signs only partially overlaps with actual perception. Although a significant body of modern fiction was conventionally produced and processed according to a system of representation that mimics the ocular model of perception, the linguistic medium is not transparent; it does not let the reader see the dargestellte reality through it, but it constantly calls attention to its own structuring (Gelley 1987: 18–21).

An observer’s spatial position during the perception of the actual world—existing independently of the perceptual act—is, in principle, stable and determined. It fits the pattern of the subject-object relationship. Conversely, it is the reader’s subjectivity that, during the act of reading, constitutes the very world it quasi views. “We react to what we ourselves have produced,” says Iser in this respect, and adds that our building of mental images of literary heroes, places, actions and so on “eliminates the subject-object division essential for all perception” (Iser 1978: 128, 140). When involved in the fictional space, the subject’s position is not fixed but “wandering” because it is steered by the dynamic interactions of the flow of linguistic data and the stream of mental images and visual memories. Imagined representations of sensorial experience on the one hand and processing of live perceptions on the other depend on diverse neurological processes, and therefore the spaces imagined are much less determinate and sensually saturated. According to Dufrenne, a mental image is a “middle term between the brute presence where the object is experienced and the thought where it becomes idea” (cited in Iser 1978: 136); we can agree with Iser’s comment that the “optical poverty” of mental images indicates their function as a “bearer of meaning” (Iser 1978: 136). The dimension of imaginary space “gives us the illusion of depth and breadth, so that we have the impression that we are actually present in a real world” (Iser 1978: 116)—as if the represented space, although only loosely defined or devoid of visual illusions, were beheld by the reader’s “inward eye,” similar to mental images triggered by personal memories or fantasies. The paradox is that even the reader that understands literary text without imagining full-blown illusions of persons, acts, speeches, and spaces feels involved in the textual world. In literary discourse, a phantasma of presence arises, notwithstanding the possibility that the represented space remains sensorially rather hollow. This kind of presence is mainly established by the reader adopting the text’s discourse and making it a double of his or her inner speech. “We think the thoughts of another person,” remarks Iser (1978: 126). Conscious or unconscious inner speech normally places subjectivity in the perceived reality and forms subject-centered interpretations and evaluations of the “outer” world. Words of the literary work of art, read silently by the reader, sneak into his or her inner speech. This is how they constitute the reader’s “focalization” of the represented space and move his or her gaze to various fictional standpoints in the complex net of views (Bal 2006). The effect of presence of the unpresent, merely phantasmatic space is therefore achieved only through readers adopting discursive perspectives, through textually established focalizations—that is, from a series of “channeled view[s] (from the standpoint of narrator,

characters, etc.)” or, rather, from the interplay of “specific modes of access to the object intended” (cf. Iser 1978: 113–114). These textual points of view function as implicit subjectcenters of semantic-axiological coordinates (cf. Bal 2006). A fictional point of view interpellates (to borrow Althusser’s famous term; 1971: 170–186) the subject of reading and calls him or her to take a specific position in the imaginary. The interpellated reading subject activates cognitive schemes of viewing appropriate types of spatial structures; through inferring, he or she tries to adjust memorized schemata, which are always semantic and value laden, to the flux of textual data. However, the existential and psychological experience of both kinds of spaces, “real” and “imaginary,” transgresses their ontological boundary. This is achieved through semiosis: perceptions of actual spaces are interpreted, given meaning (processed) by the interface of memorized or imaginary spatial schemes; conversely, imaginary spaces constructed in the reader’s consciousness by conjoining meanings of verbal units can evolve to mental images only by means of the recalled perceptions of actual spaces.

Spatial Syntax and its Transgressions Now the question must also be tackled regarding what kind of relationships the textually represented worlds enter into and how are they delimited. Regardless of what genrespecific space the textual world is referentially linked to (e.g., the adventurous space of a journey, the space of a city in crime stories, or the mythical space of the underworld), fictional spaces normally presuppose delimitation and, within boundaries, a coherent internal structure. This could be described as spatial syntax that articulates and segments textually represented spaces and constitutes their hierarchy. For example, character A goes from a room to a garden, then sets out to go shopping at the marketplace (this forms a spatial coordination because the room, garden, and marketplace are equal, existing one next to another in the same way); in the suburbs of a big city there is the house of a character B, who possesses a romantic painting representing a picturesque gulf; B is constantly dreaming about going there (this forms a spatial subordination because the space depicted in the romantic painting is part of another space that exists in a different way; the house and the room are thus presented as real spaces that frame the artificial second-level space of the gulf; the same space is also presented in the text as a mental notion of a fictional person). Distinct spaces—real or artificial, psychological, or imaginary—are assigned fixed positions within the constellation of the possible world: they can exist parallel to each other, they can be embedded in a larger

whole within the same world, or they belong to different ontologies, represented in the text as material, psychological, medial, virtual, and so on. However, literature is characterized by imaginative forces that transcend the established logic of spatial syntax and produce spaces of transgression. Spaces of transgression are areas where discrete fictional spaces dissolve or merge, losing their presence and disclosing their phantasmatic and mobile natures. These are areas in which spaces, which spatial syntax distinguished or hierarchized cognitively and in terms of value, began to interact. I discuss four transgressive forces and illustrate them with Proust’s novels and the poetry of Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926), a modernist and transgressive poet recently labeled “the Slovenian Rimbaud:”113 1. Figural Transgression. Crossing spatial boundaries through the impact of rhetorical figures has been supported by long tradition. In the domain of metaphor, schemes of one cognitive-semiotic field are projected upon another field: boundaries between two different semiotic spaces are blurred and spatial structures interfere, and in their interaction they generate a new field of sense and imagination.114 This is characteristic of modern metaphor. For example, in Kosovel’s lyrical poem “Po srebrni mesečini” (In the Silver Moonlight), the original nocturnal maritime landscape begins to split with the support of metaphors that open up other imaginative spaces, ones associated with the poet’s body and psyche:

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Po srebrni mesečini

A dark boat floats

plava temni čoln,

in silver moonlight,

iz zelenega pristana

from the green harbor

je čolnar odplul,

a boatman set sail,

iz zelenega kristala

from the green crystal

tihega srca.

of a silent heart.

Iz srca polnoči.

From the heart of midnight.115

For basic information on Kosovel and English translations of his poetry used in this article, see the website Slovenia—Poetry International Web (25 March 2010). Kosovel was transgressive in many respects. He remains an elusive poetic icon not easily encoded in the narrative of literary history because he simultaneously wrote in different styles and established his modernist poetic identity by crossing the boundaries of several currents and hybridizing them. During his short life Kosovel was exposed to border anxiety (his native Karst came under the rule of fascist Italy, which set out to erase ethnic signs of Slovenians from the territory) and he was constantly moving from this rural region to Ljubljana, the urban center of Slovenians in the Yugoslav kingdom. Kosovel’s political and aesthetic stance was constituted by very different, even contradictory currents (e.g., Christianity, utopian socialism, communism, liberal humanism, Nietzscheanism, neo-romanticism, and the avant-garde). The textual spaces represented in his poetry either by harmonic lyrical writing or by heteroglossia of the modernist type are also transgressive and dynamic: the textual subject often shifts from lyrical (rural, natural, intimate) places in the Karst to urban, global, and even cosmic spaces. 114 I am referring to interactive and cognitive theories of metaphor (Black 1981, 1995; Lakoff 1995). 115 Trans. Nike Kocijančič Pokorn. The Slovenian original: Kosovel 1974: 162.

The poetic space in this text is transgressive, oscillating between the representation of outward and inward worlds. As shown in this example from Kosovel, the traditional dual structure of semantic figures (direct vs. metaphoric meaning) that used to establish clear-cut spatial syntax (space compared vs. comparing space) in modern poetic discourse turns to spatial undecidability—one cannot decide with certainty whether Kosovel’s “green harbor” is a scene from nature or the poet’s emotions. 2. Palimpsest Transgression. In contrast to crossing boundaries through figurative transgression, which was already known in the tradition of classical writing, a different way of creating transgressive spaces appeared decisively only in modern writing. Gérard Genette (1966: 59) pointed out that Proust’s writing breaks the stability of both temporal sequence and spatial frames. Proust’s narrator not only persistently compares isolated spaces using sophisticated and extended comparisons, metonymy, or metaphors (for example, by comparing Venice to his native Combray, Venice becomes “another Combray, although an other Combray: aquatic, precious, exotic”; Genette 1966: 46; italics original, translation mine), but also passes from one place to another, neglecting boundaries and leaving behind almost no traces of traditional tropes. Instead, he creates a narrative palimpsest that conjoins disparate places and moments by transposing fragmentary descriptions and attributes from one site to another: the conjoined places are being constantly “recalled, reintegrated, reinvested, always present together” (Genette 1966: 60). The fragments of specific places, either present simultaneously or, more characteristically, retrieved from memories and imagined, are blended. Their attributes coexist in a single narrative sequence, creating a unique though unbound transgressive sphere of psychological associations, perceptions, and reflections: fairy-tale figures projected from the magic lantern travel over the furniture and walls of the young Marcel’s room (Proust 2001: 11–12). The first-person narrator conjoins spaces even in the famous scene in which he dips a piece of madeleine cake in his tea: And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents . . . ; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers . . . and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Proust 2001: 48)

The common-sense logic of delimitation of spaces is eliminated here: the associative nature dependent on paradigmatic intratextual relations between equivalent meanings and similar

motifs dominates over the chronological and causally motivated plot connection of units on the syntagmatic axis of textual organization. As a result, in such kinds of modern writing the identities of spaces are hybridized. Proustian spaces could be described as floating (espace flottants, navicules—cf. Westphal 2000: 14). 3. Textual Explosion. In modern writing, this force obliterates textual coherence and erases linguistic links in the spatial syntax; the relations and boundaries between the represented spaces as well as their internal structures become ambiguous. Thus the point of view is displaced and the subject-position deterritorialized, which means that it loses the fixed cultural background of the subject’s desires, self-understanding, and acting (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980). See, for example, Kosovel’s avant-garde construction (“kons”) entitled “Pogovor v somraku” (Talk at Twilight). This text is actually a collage of immediate, flowing perceptions of the poet’s intimate, private spaces and of fragmentary images of places cut off from public discourse, scholarship, art, and newspapers: Naša okna so zamrežena.

Our windows are barred.

Bele barikade.

White barricades.

Indijanci ne vedo nič

The American Indians know nothing

o gravitaciji.

of gravity.

A dinamit eksplodira

But dynamite explodes

tudi v Novaji Zemlji.

in Novaya Zemlya, too.

Gospod z astrahanko !

You, Sir, in the astrakhan cap!

Ni aritmetične sredine

There is no arithmetic mean

med starim in novim svetom.

between the old and the new worlds.

Človek je lahko star ali mlad.

One is either old or young.

Zlati čoln na obzorju. . . .

A golden boat on the horizon. . . .

Obešenci nihajo

People swinging hanged

ob brzojavnih drogovih.

from telegraph poles.

Vstopnina: en dinar.

Admission: one dinar.

Dež pada.

It is raining.

Človek se pogovarja z vesoljstvom.

Man talks to the cosmos.

Skedenj pred oknom.

A barn outside the window.116

The local and the global, the intimate and the universal, are juxtaposed in Kosovel’s poem; no explicit designation of the spatial syntax is supplied by the author. Spaces collide, ricochet, and fly past one another without being caught in a coherent narrative, motif, or picture. 4. Intertextuality. By its very definition, intertexuality cannot be held to be transgressive. Consider, for example, a historical novel that faithfully follows the topography

116

Adapted from a translation by Nike Kocijančič Pokorn. The Slovenian original: Kosovel 1974: 38.

of its historic sources, embedded quotes of lyrical texts in narratives, or a play-within-a play. Nonetheless, intertextuality no doubt remains one of the most powerful means of spatial transgression. It deserves to be discussed more thoroughly, especially in response to a proposal by Bertrand Westphal: “Would it not be appropriate to explore the metaphor of the city as a book or space as a book, and, moving from the book to the space, apply principles of intertextuality to the space the principles of intertextuality?” (Westphal 2000: 17)

Spaces of Intertextuality In this context, I see intertextuality as the practice of transposing, juxtaposing, and blending heterogeneous semiotic spaces, not only those represented in the textual world but also those evoked by linguistic and genre forms on the textual surface. It seems reasonable to me to distinguish two types of semiotic spaces that are relayed by intertextual reference and derivations: intra- and extratextual spaces. By “intratextual space” I understand a mental image of space constructed and perspectivized in the reader’s consciousness; that is, the fictional, poetic, imaginary, or possible world. As we know from seminal explorations by Bakhtin (his notion of the chronotope) and Lotman, the textual representation of the space, with its horizontal or vertical segmentation and delimitation, is interwoven with acts, horizons, and perspectives of different agencies. As such, it plays a crucial role in building the semantic and axiological structures of the text. Intratextual space also makes up a significant part of the imaginary because it is often attached to recurrent poetic images that carry archetypal values that organize the subject’s consciousness and unconscious (cf. Bachelard 1974: 1–21). The notion “extratextual space,” however, refers to spatial conditions in the actual world that exert an impact upon discourses and their structuring. Extratextual spaces could be ranged from very specific, contingent situations or contexts of uttering, through socio-geographically and historically determined places, localities or territories, to maximally extensive space, occupied and regulated by a whole culture (semiosphere), or floating zones of inter- and transcultural exchange.117

117

Yuri Lotman defines the semiosphere as “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages”; it is “the whole semiotic space of culture in question” and is “marked by its heterogeneity”; that is, by relations between diverse languages, sociolects, dialects, registers, and so on that are used in a certain cultural area (Lotman 1990: 123, 125). The semiosphere is the precondition for establishing culturally significant units (that is to say, cognitive and communicative elements) on the basis of entities and practices of the actual world and for building cognitive and axiological models (cf. Lotman 1990: 131–134). Following Lotman, Jacques Fontanille claims that “the semiospehere is . . . the space of semiotic competence” (Fontanille 2000: 116–118; my translation). Daniel-Henry Pageaux, in his discussion of geocriticism, holds that culture occupies and

Intertextuality settles the spaces of its context in the space of text, both spaces of other texts represented by signs and real situations and locations in which discourses take place. I distinguish two possible means of intertextual spatial transgression, both intra- and extratextual: 1. Intertextual Transpositions of Other Text’s Space. Quotations, allusions, borrowings, collages, parodies, imitations, and other intertextual figures or genres implant semiotic foreign bodies in textual organisms; they transpose “intratextual spaces” or fragments thereof from other texts, and textual series. Being able to break the norms of spatial syntax, alien spaces double the central space of the text; they open it up, interfere with it, and generate spaces of transgression. 2. Intertextual Evocations of Other Extratextual Space. On the other hand, intertextual forms, such as stylization or imitation of genre patterns, evoke “extratextual spaces” only indirectly, by use of connotation. These intertextual devices are not representations; that is, fictional picturing of places. In this case, quoting or imitating alien discourse only recalls impressions of certain places, of their ideological atmosphere, of registers and voices that are usually found there. In other words, by transposing segments of alien discourse, intertextual practice indicates the traces of communicative context or socio-geographical, cultural space in which this discourse originally functioned. Kosovel employed both manners of intertextual transgression. “Blizu polnoči” (Close to Midnight) is assembled from divergent points of view, panoramas, and close-ups of Trieste and its surroundings: Blizu polnoči.

Close to midnight.

Muhe v čaši umirajo.

Flies dying in a glass.

Ogenj je ugasnil.

The fire has died out.

Lepa Vida, bridkost je

Fair Vida, there is

v tvojem spominu.

sorrow in your memory.

Stravinski v avtomobilu.

Stravinsky in a car.

Bučanje morja.

The roaring of the sea.

O biti 5 minut sam.

Oh, to be alone for 5 minutes.

Srce-Trst je bolno.

The heart-Trieste is ill.

Zato je Trst lep.

That is why Trieste is beautiful.

Bolečina cvete v lepoti.

Pain blossoms in beauty.118

organizes space—not only real, geographical space (countries, states, zones, areas, center, periphery, capitals, etc.), but also imaginary space (Pageaux 2000: 126, 128, 135). 118 Transl. by Katarina Jerin. The Slovenian original: Kosovel 1974: 55 (emphases added).

The poem puts together miniature perceptions, flowing emotions, and subtle reflections of solitude. Among the fragmented spatial impressions, an allusion to the folkloric motif of “Lepa Vida” (Fair Vida) attracts one’s attention: the figure of a woman standing on the Adriatic coast is an intertextual analogue to one of several wandering subjective standpoints of Kosovel’s text. In the Slovenian literary tradition, since France Prešeren (in the mid-nineteenth century) the Fair Vida motif has acquired archetypal, mythic value precisely by its inherent ambivalence and transgressiveness of desire: the ballad narrative is about how, after she is taken abroad, the subject’s desire to free herself from the primordial, patriarchal bonds of homeland is transmuted into yearning for her lost home. Allusion to the Fair Vida intertext interferes with the cut-up textual space of Kosovel’s poetic construction; intertextual transposition of ballad space into a pluri-perspectival writing creates an impression of a palimpsest: an archetypal layer of semantic and spatial organization shines through the chaotic experience of modernity. Kosovel evokes not only literary pre-texts and the spaces represented by them, but various social settings as well. He does this by imitating and/or quoting utterances, sociolects, and discourses that are generally associated with specific geo-physical places, or contexts. In “Kons: XY” (Cons: XY), for example, the initial transgressive space where “inner” poetic subjectivity is blended with the “outer” scene of a circus is further transgressed by interventions of other extratextual places indirectly invoked by the connotative power of stylistically and semantically contrasting phrases. They are imitated from lyrical, almost romantic discourse on the one hand, and quoted from prosaic police and court records on the other:

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Skozi moje srce stopa veliki slon.

Across my heart a huge elephant slops.

Cirkus Kludsky, vstopnina 5 din.

Kludsky Circus; 5 dinars to see.

Ne obesi bolesti na veliki zvon!

Don’t shout your sorrow from the house-tops!

Ona se smehlja: cin cin cin.

She is smiling: ring-a-ring-ree.

Srca ljudi so majhna in ječe velike,

Human hearts are small and prisons big,

rad bi šel skozi srca ljudi.

through human hearts I’d like to sail.

Si pristaš te ali one stranke?

Do you belong to this or that clique?

Tisoč dinarjev ali zaprt 7 dni.

A thousand dinars or 7 days in jail.

Rože v mojem srcu ne jočejo nikdar. . . .

The flowers in my heart cry no more. . . .119

Adapted from a translation by Nike Kocijančič Pokorn. The original in Kosovel 1974: 34 (emphases added).

The Intertextuality of/in Space Above, I mentioned that the text-reality relationship is far more complex than the notion of mimesis or representation suggests. This holds for the conjunctions of spaces and discourses that, with their interplay, constitute identities and social relations. As a recent work on urban theory notes: “People’s lives, networks, and identities were patterned geographically and discursively . . . across different sites of activity (work, home, community)” (Tajbakhsh 2001: xiii). Geo-physical space is divided, ordered, and semioticized by cultural practices and their products (building houses, living in settlements, moving with traffic, and developing technologies of communication), and above all by linguistic categories. In this way the discursive interpretation and regulation of real space establishes or reshapes social relationships and hierarchies, and constantly shifts subject positions (cf. Keating 2001). Every space is related to the human subject, who delimits it with his or her word; human spaces are therefore permanently de- and recomposed by language and word (Grassin 2000: i-ii).120 Differences in the nature of spaces (e.g., natural vs. cultural, static vs. dynamic, rural vs. urban, private vs. public, sacred vs. profane, central vs. peripheral) imply different patterns of behavior and social interaction, distinct registers, and speech performances. Some places— especially those burdened with sediments of formulaic or ritualized practices—determine style or genre rather predictably. For example, in a church, one is likely to pray, preach, confess, or sing devotional songs, whereas loud small talk would represent an indecent transgression. When in function, a courtroom demands that those engaged in communication there follow a rigid protocol governing the exchange of speeches by prosecutors, defendants, the accused, witnesses, and judges. Other places, however, do not condition linguistic and pragmatic choices so strongly. In a restaurant, for example, amorous whispering, business, or intellectual talks are all acceptable, whereas loud professing of political ideas would be scandalous. Patterns that are brought into a literary work or imitated from other languages types or speech genres color their new environment with connotations suggesting their typical repeatable context. Because simple speech genres refer to recurrent situations, they contain topics, lexical repertoire, syntactic patterns, and modal perspectives that typically refer to these situations, verbally present and signify them, or react to them.121 One could say that genres carry packages of words with deictic value from one text to another—similar to how 120

In literature, too, certain forms are more likely to be allied to certain spatial elements of outer reality (Pageaux 2000: 138–139). 121 For more on this, see Chapter 7.

pronouns or temporal and spatial determiners (e.g., me, here, yesterday, this) embed each statement into its typical and repeatable context. For example, a public address at a popular event will be fairly predictable, containing words presenting the state of the context (e.g., public, viewers, etc.), its sentences will use the second person plural, and there will be many exclamatory sentences. The types of spaces as frameworks of situations in which discourse takes place thus do have an impact on the types of texts. On the other hand, citing the characteristic words, forms, and modalities of these genres actualizes their deictic value and can consequently also connote their initial spatial frameworks. Thus, for example, a text that begins with the sentences “Distinguished guests! Tonight you shall witness a spectacular performance under the big top the likes of which you have never seen before!” immediately, without any other piece of information available, arouses a notion of the speaker and the space—that is, the circus and the ringmaster. It may be that in the poem above, which quotes the text from a ticket for the Kludsky Circus, Kosovel also counted on such associative logic. To sum up, with spaces of intertextuality I refer to the play and permeation of various semiotic spaces that are implanted into a text from elsewhere: whether from other spatial representations (from textual or visual worlds) or through evoking culturally typical locations in which specific languages, dialects, sociolects, registers, and genres circulate. Intertextuality produces transgressive spaces. It achieves this by duplicating, splitting, and opening up the central intratextual space and de-territorializing points of view. The relationship between space and intertextuality can also be explained from another angle: intratextual spaces (fictional or factual) can conquer, organize, and interpret extratextual space and lend it an intertextual character. The spaces of our life-worlds are intertextual not only because our perceptions of the living environment are structured through cognitive and axiological nets produced by extant texts, discourses, and collective memories. From the views of Deleuze, Lotman, and others, it follows that intertextuality is inscribed in “extratextual space” (territory, the semiosphere, etc.) due to the very “essence” of the space: it is always multiple and it exists only as a co-presence of disparate acts, gestures, messages, and symbolic forms (Westphal 2000: 14–15). The life-worlds through which we pass are semioticized by cultural products, practices, and forms that stem from distant times, pertain to different communities and classes, and have been in contact with thousands of individual life trajectories. We are comparable to Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur that reads a modern city as a multitemporal texture of memory sites and traces (Frisby 1999: 108–110). The temporal stratification of human space—which, for instance, is seen in Rome, Ljubljana, Lisbon, and other cities—has an intertextual effect: it combines various contrastive fragments and

accumulates various layers of historical rhythms, social meanings, spiritual symbols, and forms atop one another (cf. Westphal 2000: 24–26). Or, as Crossberg (1999: 28) puts it: “The space of a whole life is a fractured and contradictory space of multiple contexts and competing ways of life and struggle.” When we are moving through a space, crossing its boundaries, traveling from one location to another (e.g., from the intimacy of home to a global site at an airport), we are addressed by a multitude of overlapping texts (oral, written, visual, musical, and gestural) that try to place us within their areas of sense; however, when we are moving through them we are also carrying with us memories and projections of other lived or imaginary places, cultural contexts, and social environments. This makes spatial boundaries fluid; under apparently static and well-delimited territories, a structure of floating space is hidden (cf. Westphal 2000: 14, 18). I cannot but agree with Mouffe (1999: 50), Westphal (2000: 18), and Welsch (1999: 224, 233) that, because of unstable spatial boundaries and due to the fundamental intertextuality of space, our identities are in permanent hybridization and mobility; they are volatile, flexible, and constituted as a transcultural patchwork. It is from the transformation of texts, dispersed in time and space, that the elusive text of our lives is constantly being formed and reformed.

11 Cultural Memory and Literature The Dimensions of Memory The word “memory” makes one think of an individual’s intellectual ability to preserve or recall perceptions, feelings, and knowledge from the past (“You’ve got a good memory!”); in everyday communication, the same word also denotes the subject or content of this ability (“She was overwhelmed by memories of her youth.”). The objects of remembering are not necessarily individualized or linked to one-time experiences (e.g., the first day of school), but can also be typified and derived from recurrent situations and courses of events, such as shopping at the market. We remember how to do something (for instance, how to make pancakes or play one Bach prelude or another), or we can remember a person or a thing. Memory is thus a medium for two types of knowledge: experiential, practical, or habitual knowledge (“to know how”) and the propositional or representational knowledge (“to know what”); while the first is intertwined with habits and activity in such a way that one is not even aware of using the learned schemata, one is aware of the second precisely in its representational, cognitive, and emotional-experiential distinctness from one’s current “now” (cf. Ricoeur 2004: 24–25; Sexl 2000: 84–85). Both types of memory, the habitual and propositional, are inseparable components of an individual’s existence: they influence focusing on and assigning meaning to perceptions, enable processing of new information and consequently also cognitive and behavioral orientation; they are fused with learning, they direct activity, and they are above all an imaginary foundation of the identity an individual continues to develop and revise under the influence of symbolic identifications and distinctions: “The function of memory is that we can use it to identify ourselves as unique beings that have existed and continue to exist; memory connects our personality” (Tadié 1999: 11). Remembering one’s personal past is an integral part of Ricoeur’s “narrative identity” (Škulj 2000), the logic of which is expressed by autobiography (cf. Schmidt 1991: 388; Koron & Leben 2011): the discourse of autobiography organizes past events from a person’s life into a logical whole intended for the regard of the other, and teleologically directs them from the beginning of a personal story onwards towards meanings that are only articulated within the temporal scope of the narration. One of the meanings of the term “identity” is “sameness”: individuals recognize themselves as being the same regardless of how they change over time or the various and sometimes incompatible social roles they perform either simultaneously or successively. It is memory that in any given moment enables

us to spontaneously or methodically conjure up mental images that—with various extents of erasures, reworkings, and fictional substitutes—reactivate our past experiences, ideas, expertise, and skills, and primarily former emotional-experiential and cognitive perspectives on ourselves and others. Although theorists have strived for unambiguous comprehensibility of their terms since time immemorial, they have never been quite able to completely avoid metaphors. This is especially true for theoretical considerations of memory, as Aleida Assmann claims in her groundbreaking study of the metaphors of remembering (1991: 13). Spatial metaphors of memory such as treasury, traces, prints, book, or palimpsest “place the perseverance and continuation of memories at the forefront,” whereas time metaphors (for example, to jog one’s memory or have a flash of memory) bring to mind the “forgetting, discontinuity, and decay” of memories, or their suppression and loss, but also their unexpected reemergence (A. Assmann 1991: 22, 30). Paul Ricoeur identifies two basic patterns of metaphorizing the link between perception, memory, knowledge, and imagination in Plato and Aristotle. Plato regarded memory as a mental image (eídolon) representing something absent, whereas Aristotle focused on the problem of how individuals can recall into their thoughts an object perceived or introduced to them in the past (Ricoeur 2004: 7–14). In his dialogues, Plato was the first to draw attention to the semiotic nature of memory precisely through the power of metaphors. In many modulations, his metaphors of memory as an impression of perception or thought on a block of wax, and as an inscription in the book of the soul, have been used for centuries. In his dialogue Theaetetus, which he dedicated to the aporia of knowledge, Plato’s Socrates says the following: Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another, and of purer wax in one case, dirtier in another; in some men rather hard, in others rather soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency. . . . We may look upon it, then, as a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses. We make impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves; we hold the wax under our perceptions and thoughts and take a stamp from them, in the way in which we take the imprints of signet rings. Whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know. (Plato 1997c: 191c–191e)

Plato uses metaphors (the signet ring impression on a block of wax) and expressions that can be understood nowadays in a semiotic sense. Here and in the section 192a, he talks about how a memorial “record” (monument or mnemeîon), “image” (eídolon), or “sign” (semeîon) differ

from perception itself. In the Philebus, Plato introduces, through the words of Socrates, a nearly grammatological metaphor of memory as being written down in the book of the soul: Our soul [is ] in such s situation . . . comparable to a book. . . . If memory and perceptions occur with other impressions at a particular occasion, then they seem to me to inscribe words in our soul. . . . Do you also accept that there is another craftsman at work in our soul at the same time? . . . A painter who follows the scribe and provides illustrations to his words in the soul. (Plato 1997a: 39a–39c)

Both Platonic metaphors contain the future leading motifs of the conceptual history of memory:122 the perception, experience, or sensation that imprints itself in the mind and leaves in it a trace in the form of an inscription or image. This involves a mental representation, depiction or even a physiological or physical sign that enables us to know, experience, and conceive something even after the initial perception or thought has already passed. The explanation of memory as a mental inscription was influential all the way up to psychology during the nineteenth century and neurology at the end of the twentieth century.123 Given the enduring reach of the Platonic metaphor it is not surprising that Aristotle, in his treatise Peri mnêmês kai anamnêsêos (On Memory and Recollection), relied upon it: to him an imprint is more than merely an impression of an absent object of perception because it also includes the temporal vector, the lapse of time. It is a representation of something that must guide the soul into the past—as opposed to the present of perceptions and the future of assumptions—and search for similarities between a concept and what is presented (Aristotle 1984a: 450a14– 451a19, 451a32–451b12). As emphasized by Ricoeur, Aristotle introduced a conceptual difference into the traditional reflection on memory (Ricoeur 2004: 18–20). This difference is clearly evident in the very title Peri mnêmês kai anamnêsêos: to him mnêmê is a simple and comprehensive revival of past perceptions or realizations that spring up in one’s mind spontaneously or coincidentally; in contrast, anamnêsis—one of Plato’s central concepts interdependent with recognition—is an active mental activity intended for the reconstruction of memory wholes. These result from metonymic associations with individual fragments. According to Aristotle, the starting point of anamnesis is still under the control of the person making the effort to remember, whereas the further course (kineseis) of connections between 122

The history of ideas on memory is discussed in the first chapter of the book by Jean-Yves and Marc Tadié (1999: 18–60). 123 Descartes explained memories of material or spiritual things explicitly as being dependent on the physiological traces that remain imprinted in the brain (Hippocrates had already located the center of memory in the brain, and Lucretius connected mental processes with the nervous system); Diderot compared the brain with a printed book, claiming that language plays a constitutive role in preserving memory; the dynamic psychology of the nineteenth century also primarily metaphorized remembering with a trace; the idea of memory as a trace or engram, which mental processes can also erase, suppress or substitute, was also referred to by Freud, Derrida, and contemporary cognitive scholars (A. Assmann 1991: 20–21; Tadié 1999: 18–19, 35, 42; Nalbantian 2003: 135–152; Ricoeur 2004: 14–15).

events and circumstances no longer depends merely on the will of the individual, but either on habits or necessities such as logical or spatial connections between the objects of memory (Aristotle 1984a: 451b16–453b11; cf. Tadié 1999: 22–27). More recent theories, especially empirical ones, that consider remembering to be a chain of perceptions or thoughts related through associations are reminiscent of this idea; they were typical of British philosophy and psychology from John Locke and David Hume up to John Stuart Mill and William James (cf. Nalbantian 2003: 20–21). Both Aristotle’s conception of anamnesis and Plato’s parable about the systematically organized dovecote of knowledge that can be recalled prior to its use became embodied in practice primarily in rhetorical and poetic tradition. This involves the ars memoriae, a set of systematically learned mnemonics of orators and poets, or “artificial memory,” which the Rhetorica ad Herennium distinguishes from natural remembering (cf. Tadié 1999: 27, 29–30). Orators and learned poets used the traditional inventory of commonplaces such as syllogisms, aphorisms, metaphors, illustrations, and other arguments that had proven themselves effective and were also believed to have universal meaning. Such loci communes could be more easily called into conscious thought if they had already been organized into mnemonic patterns. These entailed spatial schemata, in which individual actuating images (imagines agentes) triggered associations with the topical ideas. Each actuating image was assigned a place (locus) within the systematics of knowledge (ordo). In addition to numerous compilations of famous statements, aphorisms, parables, and allegories—these books originated in Classical Antiquity and flourished even in the Baroque (thesauri, florilegii, silvae, etc.)—a considerable number of mnemonics manuals with associative illustrations were also created.124 These types of mnemonic techniques implemented the spatial or architectural metaphor of memory as a warehouse, treasury, temple, or library. In Book Ten of his Confessions, dedicated to memory, St. Augustine metaphorically wrote about the “vast palaces of memory,” “treasuries” that store “images” of perceptions and experiences as well as former feelings, learned concepts, scholarly findings, and ideas (cf. Tadié 1999: 29–30): I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasuries of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception. Hidden there is whatever we think about, a process which may increase or diminish or in some way alter the deliverance of the senses and whatever else 124

For more on ars memoriae, see Lachmann 1990: 13–50; Haverkamp & Lachmann, eds. 1991; and studies by Lina Bolzoni, Massimiliano Rossi, and Barbara Keller in the volume Mnemosyne (A. Assmann & Harth, eds. 1991).—Probably the best-known mnemonic device was the theater of memory built in Venice in the midsixteenth century by Giulio Camillo following the designs presented in the essay L'idea del theatro (1550). The skills of memorizing and manipulating topics in Slovenia are recorded, among other things, in Viridarium exemplorum by Matija Kastelec (1620–1688) and the exemplary Slovenian sermons of Sacrum promptuarium I– V (1691–1707) by Tobia Lionelli alias Janez Svetokriški (cf. Juvan 2008b: 22).

has been deposited and placed on reserve . . . . When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately some things come out; some things require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles. (Augustine 1992: 185).

In contrast to Plato’s metaphor of a block of wax, architectural metaphor derived from sophistry and rhetoric places at the forefront the carefully organized, hierarchized, and acquired structure of memory maintained and shaped through cultural tradition; here, the knowledge whose meaning surpasses an individual is stored (cf. A. Assmann 1991: 13–16). With its institutionalized, teaching, and reified structure, ars memorativa documents the contents, disciplinary and categorical partitions, frameworks, and mechanisms of cultural memory.

Collective and Cultural Memory These mnemonic techniques, topoi, and metaphors of memory indicated that individual memories are not merely traces of personal experience. As suggested by Plato’s metaphors of the signet ring impression and inscription in the book of the soul, memory is structured symbolically and semiotically. This is why an individual’s memories are interpreted or connotatively elucidated through language or other symbolic orders. During the interwar period, this was discussed by Maurice Halbwachs (cf. Halbwachs 1980); he claimed that individual memory is imbued with collective interferences. We namely accept as our own even what we have received from others, whether by reading or listening to others’ texts or looking at pictures, photos, and watching films; several currents of thought mix eclectically in our memory (Halbwachs 1980: 44–45). The historian Marc Bloch’s reproach regarding the reckless transfer of concepts from individual psychology to the social sphere certainly does not refer to Halbwachs (cf. Burke 1991: 290). In other words, collective memory as understood by Halbwachs does not presuppose a collective soul, but is a product of verbal and symbolic interaction between individuals: While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember . . . every individual memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory. (Halbwachs 1980: 49)

To Halbwachs, the subject of memory is always an individual, although individuals depend on the collective frames that organize their memories (J. Assmann 1991: 347). Every memory has a social or group valence: even purely personal memories are formed during interaction, everyday conversations, and relating to a group frame of reference (J. Assmann 1991: 346). For example, this happens at class reunions when people reminisce about their school, classmates, and teachers. Collective memory holds the group together and creates its

cohesion. The break-up of group identity gradually leads to the loss of the group’s own collective memory. In reminiscing, individuals rely upon points of orientation outside of themselves. They must use the words, ideas, and information they have received from others: “I carry a baggage load of historical remembrances that I can increase through conversation and reading” (Halbwachs 1980: 51). Therefore, collective memory can maintain the bond between generations that live together: common notions, feelings, and habits circulate between generations through verbal and sign communication. From this perspective, the instance of other(s) inscribed in every discourse appears to act as the bearer of social frames of memory. Individual identity is shaped through others, inasmuch as it is defined by being a part of group, community, or ideology, as well as with what an individual considers transcendental. In his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Cultural Memory), the Egyptologist Jan Assmann used Halbwachs’ ideas to develop a theory according to which the “connective structure” of every culture is established through the use of collective memory. This connects culture both chronologically, through the traditions of several successive or overlapping generations, and socially; that is, through common symbolic denominators that unite the sociolects of various classes, professions, and so on. Collective memory creates a common “symbolic world of meaning” (J. Assmann 1992: 16). However, in contrast to Assmann’s monolithic comprehension of culture, it should be emphasized that meaningful cultural units—which use collective memory in a specific, at least imaginarily delimited, geocultural space to settle into diverse signifying practices and weave them as common threads into the great text of culture—are certainly not identical, although they may seem the same. 125 These representations are comprehended from various, conflicting discursive perspectives of individuals or communities, which generally feel like they belong to this cultural space and perceive its distinction from other collectivities. Internal clashes between the languages of a given culture or the ambivalence of the signs these discourses recurrently use—in addition to the consciousness of the semiotic boundary between the “internal/our own” and “external/their” spaces (Lotman 1990: 131–133)—actually constitute cultural coherence of a given semiotic space. In reference to this, Lotman states that “[s]emiosphere is marked by its heterogeneity” (125, original emphasis). A few Slovenian memory-marking words may illustrate this: “homeland,” “mother,” “God,” “Prešeren,” “servants,” “revolution,” “Tito,” and so on. Whereas “we Slovenians” will never agree on what these words mean to us and are 125

I base this argument on the dialogue model of culture as developed by Bakhtin in his essays on the novel (1981), and refined from a more strictly semiotic perspective by Lotman (1990).

prepared to invest immense energy in the dialogue that contains them, “our” fundamentally conflicting, mnemonic constellation may be completely meaningless to other cultures. Therefore every cultural sign included in the collective memory is ambivalent and contradictory, with contradictory value emphases invested in it. The unity in comprehending mnemonic representations lies only in the appearance that the hegemony of the central perspective maintains over the marginal, suppressed views. The unity of culture and collective memory is thus ensured precisely by this tension between various sociolects; according to Lotman, the semiosphere is established by the process of “internal translations”—that is, the constant recoding of collectively relevant concepts from one group language into another. A centripetal effect is mostly produced by the similar historical experience of groups living in a specific area delimited in terms of geography, language and symbols, and administration and politics (cf. Lotman 1990: 127, 143). In Assmann’s book, the division of the concept of collective memory into communicative and cultural memory is especially productive for literary studies (J. Assmann 1992: 45–56). Communicative memory receives the past through the sieve of individual biographies, shapes this content loosely, and circulates it through everyday conversations and stories, mostly orally. It lasts for a period of roughly 60 to 100 years, or the timeframe in which three or four generations overlap one another. All of the community members are bearers of communicative memory; this type of memory is therefore dispersed, spontaneous, and without fixed forms. In contrast, cultural memory encompasses events, persons, and categories to which the community ascribes a founding value, similar to myths of origin; for example, the Trojan War was this type of topic for the ancient Romans. This is why the content remembered through culture is shaped more strictly and conveyed at special occasions such as holidays and rituals via routine sign objectivizations created on the basis of traditional symbolic coding; for example, dance, tattoos, totems, monuments, artistic representations, and sacred texts. Cultural memory is also distinguished from communicative memory by a larger time scale because it can reach far into the past, and by the fact that its main bearers are specialized individuals or elites such as tribal chiefs, shamans, singers, and chroniclers, and more recently historians, writers, and so on. Assmann believes that the coherence of archaic cultures is established by rituals, memorial sites or mnemotopes, and oral tradition, and produced by the mechanism of ritual repetition and customs. Of course the nature of cultural memory changes with the development of written culture: in the place of ritual coherence, or in parallel with it, textually produced coherence begins to predominate, finding its bases in variations of meaning. A written record enables the retention of the semantic effect of an

utterance or some sort of an extension of what is said beyond the limits of the time and space in which it was said. Written and printed text can therefore reach many recipients and function in other circumstances and later periods, all of which enables us to make a comparative reflection of the differences between the former and current ways of thinking and expression. According to Assmann, comprehension of the temporal difference through cultural memory stretches between two extreme points: the cult of old texts and the criticism of written heritage. First and foremost, the coherence of written cultures is built by manuscripts, prints, and the production of written texts referring to what has already been written, thus varying the constitutive networks of meaning preserved in individual key texts, text corpora, and sequences from tradition such as the Bible, Plato’s works, the Theban Cycle, and some Slovenian ballads, tales, and literary works, such as “Lepa Vida” (Fair Vida), “Krst pri Savici” (Baptism at the Savica), Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets), Hlapci (Servants). Some texts comment, actualize, and criticize them, and others creatively imitate them, use their topics, concepts, and images, and rewrite them in order to adapt them to other experiences of life (cf. J. Assmann 1992: 87–103).126 However, along the time axis the internal division or the conflicting nature of the semiosphere is also at play: the textual coherence of culture is enabled not only by respectful copying or interpreting of tradition, but also by points of resistance and deconstruction—for example, one could hardly imagine anyone from China that would feel the need to write a play that would demythologize the work of the “national poet” Prešeren, similar to what Dominik Smole—a writer interpellated into Slovenianism—did in his drama Krst pri Savici. In the light of Lotman and Uspensky’s definition of culture as a “non-hereditary memory of the community” (1978: 213), culture can be understood as the memory of humankind; that is, a system that produces and maintains in circulation all of the information that defines a person but does not depend on biological heredity. Throughout history, the means of passing on cultural memory have of course changed over time and its roles and contents have also been transformed. In addition to Assmann, Peter Burke (1991) also discusses this, although he uses the term “social memory.” With certain additions to Burke’s list, the media of cultural memory could include oral heritage (e.g., oral history, myths, ballads, and tales in which the archaic past meets the direct present); written documents and sources (e.g., papers, letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies); pictorial, photographic, and film documentation; fine arts (e.g., portraits, historical painting, etc.), monuments, 126

Authors of these types of texts become important for the cultural memory as pivotal figures: their personalities, life, and work are referred to by other writers, poets, and public discourse (Wet 2000).

tombstones, souvenirs, and other similar objects; ceremonies and rituals (e.g., celebrating 14 July in France); dances and other customs; and geographical places of memory (e.g., rivers or mountains that were sites of front lines). By all means, literary works of various genres and types ranging from epics and historical novels to lyric poems and plays also belong within this framework. The means and media of cultural memory listed above often interconnect: for example, the content of Simon Gregorčič’s ode “Soči” (To the Soča River, 1882, which later acquired the value of prophesying battles on the Isonzo front for First World War soldiers) permeated the experience of the eponymous river as a mnemotope around which monuments, ossuaries, tombstones, and museums are erected.

Literature as a Repository of Culture The discourses that Johansen (2002) treats as necessary for the (re)production of various types of knowledge in any society127 must be passed from one generation to the other through manifold channels and media of cultural memory. This also applies to mimetic discourse, which in modern societies has become ideologically and institutionally organized as an autonomous field of art. Compared to other discourses on knowledge, literary art stands out by singularizing general problems through the formation of specific stories, characters, idiolects, and perspectives, and through its exemplariness also “individualizes” the topics, practices, and routines drawn from cultural memory. Through this, literary discourse demonstrates how an individual’s life experience and memory are structured (cf. Sexl 2000).128 Following Johansen, literature evokes a complexity of existence especially due to its ability to mimetize other discourse types—the ones through which the theoretical, technical, practical, and historical knowledge is passed down. Belles-lettres borrows, mutually crosses, and tests their issues. In order to treat literature as a medium and repository of cultural memory129 one must tackle at least three sets of issues: the structure of texts as temporal traces, processes of literary canonization, and intertextuality, which includes topoi, themes, literary types and genres, and explicit citationality (e.g., citation, allusion, or parody).

127

For more on this see Chapter 1. Literary works, which—partly taking inspiration from James, Bergson, Freud, and other psychological theorists—simulate the workings of individual memory, provide good examples of various theoretical conceptions of memory, even up to neurology and cognitive science. For example, Suzanne Nalbantian (2003: 1) treated liteture as “a laboratory for the workings of the mind” and explored how memory processes function in literary texts in relation to emotions (Rousseau), physical and nerve constitutions (Baudelaire), sensory triggers of associations (Proust), stream of consciousness (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner), aleatorics of the unconscious (Breton), and language textures and codes (Paz, Borges, Nin). 129 The 1997 congress of the International Comparative Literature Association that took place in Leiden was dedicated to this perspective (cf. Juvan 1999; Vervliet & Estor, eds. 2000). 128

With their materiality and linguistic-cognitive structure, literary texts function as memory traces because they play the roles of monuments and documents of practices that create and distribute meanings.130 From this viewpoint, tales, poetry, and plays are mediums for recording and conceptualizing a multi-layered, psychophysical, and experiential experience of the world that no longer exists, but thanks to sign articulation, crosses the boundaries of the period in which and for which the text was originally created (cf. Sexl 2000: 88–90). Even the linguistic structure of literary texts testifies to how the subject’s speaking position, constitution, and relationship to languages or the representational codes that form a culture and build one’s model of the world have changed through history. For example, in his book Razumevanje jezikov književnosti (Understanding the Languages of Literature), Ivan Verč uses examples from Russian literary and cultural history and claims that in the modern era, the subject of the text/utterance has gradually become emancipated from the uniform and dominant representation systems that only passively conveyed an a-priori truth encoded within cultural memory and the canonized tradition of texts. After the mid-nineteenth century, when writers as subjects of utterance began to comprehend that reality and actual life experience are being continuously cognitively established only through a specific developing language, the reflection of language as an independent reality into which we are incorporated as thoroughly as the world perceivable by the senses was only one step away (Verč 2010). The physical properties and appearance of manuscripts or prints also preserve memory traces of the production, transmission, reception, and application of texts. In the fourth chapter of this volume, the bibliographic code is mentioned in this relation: it assists in setting the text through a specific actualization of the “language” of a manuscript or printed medium, from format and binding through fonts or the selected typography to page layout. The bibliographic code is a memory trace that communicates a great deal about the historical life, cultural circulation, and genre profile of texts: an elaborately illuminated manuscript codex from a convent library tells a different story of its life than a printed paperback book that can be found almost in every home. However, literary texts are not merely verbal, intellectual, and material monuments whose message depends on an expert reading by a literary or cultural historian. They have generally been produced with the express purpose of fixing time within a linguistic structure: such is the character of lyrical records of fleeting experiences, developing a life story in autobiographic narration, or narrations of the historical fate of a community. In themselves, literary texts cross between various temporalities. They are structured as

130

See Chapter 5.

palimpsests, in which meanings and forms from various periods are layered. Pound’s modernist poetry reveals semiotic threads from the ancient and Chinese classics and medieval troubadours, whereas the poetic worlds of the Slovenian modernist poet Gregor Strniša (1930–1987) reflect the influence of the German High Middle Ages combined with Kantian forms, science fiction, and modern theoretical physics. As already explained in the first chapter, today’s literature does not signify merely a multitude of texts that have been designed at any time and perceived as mimetic, beautiful, artful, or imaginative, but also a field of discursive practices. From the viewpoint of literature as a field or system of communicative actions, the literary canon is the main leverage for shaping cultural memory (J. Assmann 1992: 18, 93, 107–127; Cornea 2000). Canon namely ensures that works selected from the past are read, referred to, cited, creatively reworked, commented on, and used even decades and centuries after they were created. Through canonization, they are included in the dynamics of new literary repertoires. Cornea refers to Escarpit’s sociological study, according to which a writer’s chance of climbing from anonymity up to the canonic Parnassus is less than 1%: from among approximately 100,000 writers active in France from 1490 to 1900, only 937 took their place in the group chosen to be presented in encyclopedias, literary-history textbooks, and similar publications (Cornea 2000: 109). Canon is thus a representative paradigm of literary discourse that develops due to the selection activity of experts, and also “common” recipients: it is built both by the institutions involved in the publishing industry, criticism, awards, literary-history interpretation and classification, as well as the long-term plebiscite of time, or sustained popularity among lay recipients (cf. Cornea 2000: 114). Selecting texts and using them by reducing or generalizing their meanings—all these procedures entail constant value shifts within the canon, which is why authors and their works are replaced, added, or deleted. This holds true especially for the canon’s margins, which keep changing, whereas its core has an almost supertemporal validity. Canonized writers and texts are maintained in cultural memory primarily by the school system, ranging from basic school primers to university lectures. During formal schooling, which is usually under government jurisdiction, canonized writings and their authors as pivotal figures reinforce national or state identity because they appear as the main vehicles of the standard language tradition attesting to a unique historical experience that is believed to distinguish one nation from another. For example, as a result of an education policy that sets a goal of fostering national awareness, Slovenian secondary-school students learn almost nothing about the German poems by the “national poet” France Prešeren, let alone the Latin manuscripts by medieval Slovenian writers or the Croatian works

by the Slovenian writer Zofka Kveder (1878–1926). Moreover, within the school system, canonic texts are used as examples of good and beautiful writing styles, or typical examples of a specific period, style, and genre, and last but not least, they are also reduced to the roles of embodying social values and ideologemes such as “to belong to European culture,” “to be thankful to one’s mother,” “to be able to resist someone stronger,” and so on. Canon is an institution that uses philology and text criticism to ensure the fixedness, authenticity, immunity, and representativeness of canonized works, while enabling the consistent appearance of the same texts under changing conditions by generating multiple editions and reprints as well as ensuring that successive generations of readers and writers continue to return to them even entire decades and centuries later. Through the canon—which seeks to fix and stabilize texts—meanings, notions, and values can thus expand beyond the boundaries of the narrow historical context in which they were created. Canon also controls the permissible transformations, interpretations, and applications demanded by the new codes and languages into which literary field players must “translate” older representative texts. Given all of this, in written cultures canon is one of the main means of social cohesiveness; it is an institutional medium for preserving the memory traces of culture and consequently an identity mechanism (cf. J. Assmann 1992: 127). Without canons, it would be impossible to develop concepts such as Slovenian, Russian, or world literature, as self-evident as they may seem. If literature is abstracted from its sociocultural field and observed as a constellation of literary texts, the channels in which cultural memory is developed, preserved, and transformed must be sought primarily in intertextuality. “The memory of a text is its intertextuality,” wrote Renate Lachmann and added that literature is “the mnemonic art par excellence because it reinforces a culture’s memory” and stores knowledge and experience in texts (Lachmann 1990: 35–36). Literary texts, which make up the cultural repository together with the remainder of the inherited signifying practice, are not information packages organized in an unchangeable order; intertextuality namely takes place as a constantly changing selfdescription and self-definition of culture (cf. Lachmann, 1990: 35–36). Intertextuality is a “memory of culture” (Samoyault 2001) because the former versions of the world are preserved in the texts stored in the culture’s imaginary library. Through various variations and transformations, they become embedded in new writing by placing a representational filter between the world and consciousness (Samoyault 2001: 87–111). This is evident in the traditions of topoi, motifs, and themes, the lives of genres, and citationality.

From Antiquity to the end of the classical paradigm in the eighteenth century, topoi were the main intertextual means of storing and activating cultural memory; they functioned as speaking and writing aids to intellectuals, whether orators and poets or politicians and lawyers (cf. Juvan 2008b: 20–23). In writing speeches, poems, narrations, plays, and treatises, they resorted to topoi, especially in order to find and organize their arguments, imagine and build possible worlds, and select logically persuasive or emotionally powerful means of expression. The term topos or locus communis refers to both the argument in the form of an aphorism, saying, citation, exemplum using a motif or narrative, or metaphor, as well as the schema of textual composition and modality. It is referred to as a “commonplace” because it is generally drawn from a consecrated, authoritative, or famous text, but due to wide applications has changed into a common good available to everyone whose education offers access to the treasury of topoi. The status of commonality also originates from its validity because topoi seemingly exceed the flow of history and disregard the differences between languages, cultures, and media. Therefore, topoi circulate not only from one genre or language to another, but also between pictorial and verbal imagination. Topoi could not have become a tool for passing on cultural memory if they had not been based, even from the very beginning, on ars memoriae consisting of learned techniques for memorizing and organizing well-tested arguments, figures, citations, exempla, allegories, and so on. Until the nineteenth century, European culture used topoi to maintain its link with the heritage of Antiquity and early Christianity (this is also highlighted by Ernst R. Curtius in his classical work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages), as well as the continuity of concepts, imagination, and compositional schemata, which reached to post-Romanticism via the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque. The medieval use of the biblical topoi, such as that found in the Freising Manuscripts (the earliest known Slovenian manuscript, around 972–1039), is circumspect, following the concept of sermo humilis. In contrast, with its abundance of topical illustrations, aphorisms, metaphors, emblems, and their skillful, humorous, emotional, and morally and reflexively well-thought-out application, the Baroque eloquence of the preacher Janez Svetokriški, supported by mnemonics and citationality manuals, offers an encyclopedic Slovenian digest of the extensive European heritage. The vestiges of topoi can even be found in the literary texts that belong to Lotman’s “esthetics of opposition,” which is in principle based on individual creativity: in this regard, Prešeren’s romantic poetry is fairly similar to Baroque classicism in its use of topoi, although it is true that it interprets commonplaces—for example, the ancient mythemes, medieval exempla, and compositional concetti—freely, beyond the traditional semantic coordinates.

Motif and theme are similar to topos. Ultimately, all of them are representational schemata, commonplaces of cultural memory, ground plans for verbalizing fictional worlds, and heuristic models for comprehending everyday reality (Segre 1995: 25–26). The thematic schemata of presenting the world in literature and other arts—for example, the theme of a metropolis, a bohemian lifestyle, war, or modern technology—are imbedded in the collective frames of memory, thinking, feeling, and acting (cf. Keunen 2000a). The motif and theme are thus not simple, content-related elements of a literary work’s internal composition, but markedly context-dependent, inter-subjective, and intertextual schemata connected with the “social frames of memory.” In the process of writing, writers use the motif and theme to focus, organize, and assign meaning to their experience of themselves and their world. They identify the states, situations, events, and problems they wish to discuss. By referring to traditional or current themes circulating in the social or literary discourse, writers also verbally shape the textual world. However, readers perceive the motif and theme as patterns that facilitate the understanding of the text through a conceptual-representational synthesis of successive or interrupted language segments. As highlighted by Menachem Brinker, theme appears as a “meeting point of texts” or a conceptual construct that develops through interpretative positioning of a literary work within the context of signifying practices—both verbal and non-verbal (e.g., paintings, photos, and theater), and both literary and non-literary, such as newspapers, philosophy, religion, mythology, and so on (Brinker 1995: 34–37). This helps readers identify the textual referents and infer “what” the text is actually about. Readers connect, summarize, and schematize the referential-propositional flow of the sentences that follow one another in the text and break them down into separable constellations of events, situations, characters, and things, or into conceptual-problematic areas that he remembers from before, including experiences with other texts, conversations, depictions, and performances (cf. Hladnik 1988; Ryan 1988: 23–24; Bremond 1988: 55–59; Crosman Wimmers 1988: 63; Rimmon-Kenan 1995). In this, readers convert the syntheses of narrower passages into more abstract schemata, with which they cover longer segments or the entire textual structure. Because the basic feature of motifs and themes lies in the fact that they repeat as variations in writing and reading, literary studies has spent a great deal of time recording and classifying them, following the example of folklore studies. Due to cataloguing extensive text corpora and abstracting contents of concrete texts in an explanatory manner, motifs and themes have also been outfitted with names consisting of short, single- or multi-word labels, or some sort of tags (Ryan 1988: 34, Rimmon-Kenan 1995: 14). In this way, motifs

interpretatively segment the represented world of a literary work into such events, situations, characters, objects, and spaces (e.g., “duel,” “love triangle,” “misanthrope,” “labyrinth,” and “metropolis”) that acquire their textual meaning and function from comparisons with the “already seen” or “read”—that is, through their placement within comparable categories in the memory catalogue of schemata and scenarios, either experiential or intertextual. The nature of themes is similar, with the only exception being that thematic labels do not aim directly at the templated elements that make up the objects of representation and constitute the fictional world, but refer to the semantic fields and the given meanings of recurrent motifs. Compared to motif, theme seems more abstract because readers derive their syntheses of the textual world from the perspective of problems, concepts, semantic oppositions, and ideas that have continued to be written about or discussed throughout the history of our civilization (e.g., “nature vs. culture,” “eros vs. thanatos,” “passing away,” vanitas, “art vs. reality,” “good vs. evil,” “poverty,” “ideal vs. reality,” “youth,” “foreignness,” “yearning,” and so on). Accordingly, the motif and theme attach the represented world and semantics of a literary work to the cultural memory or the recurrent schemata of representation. Against this backdrop, the reader can see how, despite its singularity, a new literary work varies and transforms the already-known material stored in memory. The motifs and themes that we identify through subconscious, spontaneous, or methodical intertextual comparisons of the read text with the templates imprinted in our individual and cultural memory are always conveyed through discourse and already interpreted. This is why they enter the mental worlds of writers and readers through specific conceptual nets or value aspects; accordingly, they tend to elicit a conscious or subconscious response during writing/reading. 131 The baptism motif, which was used in a number of Slovenian poems, tales, and plays from the first half of the nineteenth century to the ironic new-age tale by Mojca Kumerdej (Krst nad Triglavom [Baptism above Mt. Triglav], 2001), was thus not neutral material for Slovenian writers, but was burdened with contradiction and ambivalence thanks to its articulation in Prešeren’s key text “Krst pri Savici” (cf. Juvan 1996). Literary genres also function as more or less durable memory schemata that, cognitively organizing the writing and reception of texts, influence the modal, semantic, and axiological structuring of world views across several generations. In this light, Bart Keunen (2000b) connected two notions that arose almost simultaneously, although contact between 131

Even the expression “material” does not originate only in its Latin base (materia), but also in words denoting fabric in Romanic and Germanic languages (e.g., stoffo, estoffe, Stoff, etc.). This etymology, although less known, draws attention to the fact that material is something that has already been made, manufactured, or woven before the writer uses it.

them has not actually been proven: the theory of memory schemata developed in 1932 by the psychologist Frederic Bartlett, which influenced today’s cognitive psychology, text linguistics, semiotics, and artificial intelligence, and Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, explained in 1937 and 1938 (Bakhtin 1981: 84–258). Bakhtin and his circle basically perceived genres in a cognitive and pragmatic manner, as media for comprehending, assigning meaning to, and evaluating reality. In his critique of the formal method, a member of this circle, Pavel Medvedev, claimed that textual themes transcend language because they are defined by genre forms rather than the semantics of sentences: every genre has its own methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality (Medvedev 1978: 131–133). Bakhtin connected the differences between genres, their development, and sociocultural functions, and especially their place within the historical concreteness, to various ways of comprehending and presenting the world. Every novelistic genre was supposed to be characterized by a specific chronotope or “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 84). Bakhtin’s premise is clear: “The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and genre distinctions” (84– 85; original emphasis). Bakhtin interprets chronotope as a spatial distribution, assignment of meaning to, value perspectivization, and syntactic-narrative organization of the events taking place in the presented model of the world. For example, adventure novels were distinguished by the “adventure-time” and the “chronotope of the road.” This complex fictional world includes even narrower, elementary motif chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981: 97; Keunen 2000b: 14) that are also tied to specific places: “the motif of meeting,” “the motif of separation,” “the motif of recognition,” and so on. Keunen aligns Bakhtin’s initial, genre-theoretical notion of chronotope with the present-day textological concept of the genre superstructures that govern the verbalization method and depend primarily on the remembered invariants among compared texts. Keunen equates the second, motif chronotope type with the semioticcognitive theory of event schema or development scenario. According to Eco and Maingueneau, scenarios are based not only on intertextual knowledge, but also the memory templates of experiences of reality (Keunen 2000b: 20–21). Genres develop primarily by imitating, parodying, or rewriting structures taken from successful, popular, or canonized texts; by their intertextuality, later texts thus assign the roles of genre prototypes to their predecessors.132 Within such intertextual series, templates for

132

See Chapter 7.

presenting fictional worlds emerge from variant repetitions of prototypical structures. As a result, genre-specific types of motifs, themes, value perspectives, language registers, and stylistic-compositional structures are established as residues of discourse. It is actually such schemata that the “the objective memory of the . . . genre” (Bakhtin 1984: 121) is made of and through which it binds readers and writers: genre memory charts the horizons of expectations to successive generations of readers when they encounter new instances of the genre, and outlines the field of creative possibilities to writers, including a parody or destruction of the model. The chronotope of the adventure novel of ordeal has this effect from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica to Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and their parodies (cf. Keunen 2000b: 5). According to Bakhtin, literary genres reflect the most resilient tendencies in the development of literature. What is essential for them is that they conserve archaic elements, but also continuously revive, and update them—a literary genre lives in the present, but remembers its past (Bakhtin 1984: 121). Writers of later works use various allusions to often explicitly remind the readers that they are referring to older realizations of the genre model. Ivo Pospíšil (1998: 49, 95) drew attention to this using the material of chronicle novels, in which, for example, Leskov recalls The Life of Avvakum and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It thus makes sense to treat genres as structures within the cultural memory (cf. Gorp & MusarraSchroeder 2000): through them, memory schemata transcend the period in which genre prototypes were created, which is why the layers of previous experience, views, images, and symbolic- responses to the world can covertly or openly settle in the writing and reading of continuously new texts. Compared to the mostly latent intertextuality of topoi, themes, motifs, and genres, citationality represents a writing strategy that uses its largely conventional figures and genres (e.g., allusion, citation, stylization, parody, continuation, collage, etc.) and anticipates the operation or activation of cultural memory.133 Due to the memory schemata and data stored in cultural tradition, readers can experience an “already seen/read” (or déjà vu/lu) effect during their cognitive journey through the sequences of a new text. Along with the chain of utterances present in the text they recall their absent virtual correlates reproduced from memory. To paraphrase the metaphor at the beginning of this chapter: in the wax of a literary work, readers grasp the imprint of another’s discourse by re-discovering the “already known/experienced” through the Platonic re-cognition or anamnesis. In the act of quoting, writers assume that their readers will be able to discern the traces of alien patterns from other

133

For more on citationality, see Juvan 2008b: 144–178.

structural segments of a citational work and incorporate these borrowings into their interpretation of the textual significance; readers in turn assume that the intertextual similarity they have recognized has nothing to do with simple literary theft or unconscious copying, but that it results from an intentional creative move. The model reader is thus expected to recall those memorized units and schemata triggered by the cited work and its historical contexts that supplement the structure of the citational work and articulate its significance. Accordingly, citationality is a means of shaping the semantic, value, stylistic, and genre profile of a literary work against the backdrop of the literary-cultural tradition and the contemporary heteroglossia. By adopting and transfiguring fragments or patterns from other texts through citationality, the subject of the text stages its own placement within tradition and the social present. With its citational, palimpsest utterance, it provokes both contexts into interaction. The citational figures and genres shape the text’s cultural identity by revisiting literary tradition and intervening in social discourse of the past and present. Through their palimpsest transformations and elucidations of the canonized, controversial, or highly topical texts that mark their society, authors may also interfere in the ideological reproduction of enduring cultural models. A good example of these are modern/contemporary profane variations of mythical, biblical, or canonized literary patterns such as Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Dominik Smole’s (1929–1992) Antigone and Baptism on the Savica, and Venedikt Yerofeyev’s “epic” Moscow–Petushki. Citationality continues to remodel the material already used. Herein lies one of the proofs of the literary system’s autopoesis: literature does not spring up directly from the author’s existential thrownness in the world, but also develops from literature’s own past experience and material. However, because literary discourse uses intertextuality not only to look back into its own tradition, but also takes part in the contemporary circulation of cultural meanings and the intellectual exchange with religion, philosophy, science, politics, and other discourses, literary works document former social mentalities and collective feelings in a special way. Prešeren’s seventh sonnet in his 1834 Wreath of Sonnets (“Midst circling mountain-cliffs malevolent”) is thus not merely a sublime work transcending time and space, which induces us to enjoy it on an aesthetic-spiritual level. At least to the same extent it is also a memory impression of a historical move that, through the author’s romantic concept, revived the Orphic myth and at the same time—through the oratorical force of the teleological verse that expresses the desire for the poet Orpheus to “Anew unite the Slovenians, firm to stand!”—grafted it onto a political discourse that finally ripened in the 1848 “United Slovenia” movement, whose

petitions were signed by a multitude of Slovenians. Intertextuality thus manifests itself as an infrastructure that establishes the historical and social character of the literary work.

The Case of the Slovenian Sonnet The intertextual workings of genre memory, canon, and citationality in a specific semiosphere can be observed through the history of the sonnet and sonnet cycles in Slovenian literature, here compared in brief with Czech and Polish sonnet development (cf. Pszczołowska & Urbańska 1993; Paternu & Jakopin, eds. 1997). The sonnet genre was popular in these Central European environments, most likely also because of its LatinMediterranean

and

Renaissance-Humanistic

orientation, whereas

Russian literature

maintained some distance from the sonnet all the way up to symbolism (cf. Ibler 1997: 257). From Romanticism to the end of the twentieth century, the Czechs, Poles, and Slovenians produced dozens of sonnet collections, and even more sonnet cycles; certain periods saw a downright “sonnet-mania” when writing sonnets became very fashionable.134 In all three literatures—although in Poland it had already been popular in the Renaissance and Baroque— the sonnet played an important role especially during the period of national revival and Romanticism: as a sophisticated, elite, and learned form, it—especially among the Czechs and Slovenians—proved the “international” level and linguistic-stylistic refinement of both nations, which were striving to assert their political and cultural identities under unfavorable conditions.135 Writing sonnets and sonnet compositions was tackled by poets whose local environment recognized and valued them as central poets already in their own time; two of them (France Prešeren and Adam Mickiewicz) were later canonized into “national poets” and became key reference figures of their literary systems. 136 During the period of “national” 134

Dolgan’s (1999) selected bibliography of Slovenian sonnets lists approximately 315 collections that include sonnets, 35 collections that contain sonnets exclusively, and 20 collections of sonnet cycles. Sgallová (1997) reports that in the Czech Republic the sonnet is one of the most popular and productive poetry genres and that it has also been adapted to Czech terminology (as znělka); for example, the final version of Kollár’s collection Slávy dcera contains 645 sonnets; in the Czech lands, writing sonnets became truly fashionable for the first time in the 1830s. Ibler (1997) lists several extensive Czech sonnet cycles written from 1824 to 1937 (Kollár, Mácha, Machar, and Nezval). Červenka and Sgallová (1993: 63–64) mention that in the last decades of the nineteenth century Vrchlický (the chief poet in the group of poets that gathered around the newspaper “Lumir”) wrote 899 sonnets, including four collections containing exclusively sonnets. The Polish “sonnet-mania” after the publication of Mickiewicz’s sonnet cycles is discussed by Pszczołowska (1993: 29–30). Slovenian sonnet-mania occurred in several waves, the last one being from the 1970s to mid-1990s (cf. Pretnar 1984). 135 Sgallová (1997: 251–252) establishes that national revivers tried to raise the profile of, differentiate, and aesthetically shape the Czech language and also used translations and adaptations of traditional European forms in order to prove that it was comparable to other European cultures; Slovenian literary historians (e.g., Paternu 1997: 11–16) have established the same motivation for Prešeren’s introduction of European poetic forms (including the sonnet) into Slovenian romantic poetry. 136 Kollár’s Básně (1821) contain 86 sonnets, and the first edition of the lyric-epic Slávy dcera (1824) contains 151 sonnets; the most important Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha wrote only eight sonnets (Sgallová

Romanticism,

some

major

sonnet

cycles

functioned

as

representative

thematic

“encyclopedias,”137 in which the erotic was intertwined with patriotism or Slavism, and even literary auto-thematism. Citational reference to Petrarch’s prototypical sonnets is especially interesting. Irrespective of the thematic, stylistic, and verse-strophic diversity of the sonnet genre, in cases when the sonnet appeared as a classic, representative form, citational forms that recalled Petrarch’s sonnets abounded among Czechs, Poles, and Slovenians: from epigraphs, citations, and allusions to stylizations and paraphrases.138 Compared to the Czechs and Poles, the above-average representation of the crown of sonnets and even the crown of crowns of sonnets is a special feature of the Slovenian genre repertoire. As a mannerist, academic Italian form that verges on a parlor game and display of virtuosity, the crown of sonnets was elevated to the status of the most prestigious tool for ambitious and encyclopedic lyric statements in Slovenia by the romantic poet France Prešeren; the more prominent Czech and Polish poets were not as keen on sonnet cycles and the majority considered them too sophisticated.139 In addition, citational references to the sonnet discourse of the leading “national poet” appear more persistently in Slovenian tradition than among the Czechs and Poles. In Slovenia, the history of the sonnet and sonnet cycle unfolds as a “continuation, discussion, or recurrence,” or as an ongoing, nearly automatic reference of later writers to the period of this form’s birth and prestige in the romantic 1830s (Pretnar 1993: 133).

1997: 253, 255); in 1826, two important sonnet cycles (comprising a total of 40 poems) were published by Mickiewicz (Pszczołowska 1993: 25–26). Prešeren published his cycles Ljubeznjeni sonetje and Sonetje nesreče in the Krajnska čbelica almanac (1831, 1832, and 1834); he published his Sonetni venec in 1834 in the newspaper Illyrisches Blatt (cf. Pretnar 1993). Prešeren became the most binding model for the future tradition of writing sonnets in Slovenia both in terms of metric and strophic form, as well as metaphors and style; this could hardly be claimed of Kollár—he was accused of exaggerated pedantry and a failure to incorporate the lyric form into an epic whole; citational references to him are thus rare (Červenka & Sgallová [1993: 66] only mention the Kollárian reminiscences and metric citations in the 1872 crown of sonnets by Ladislav Quisa Z ruchu)—and even with Mickiewicz; the Czech sonnet gained the greatest prestige and popularity with Jaroslav Vrchlický in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Červenka & Sgallová 1993: 63–64); the Polish sonnet, which at the end of the nineteenth century favored syllabotonism over the former syllabism, reached a few more peaks after the influential Mickiewicz (Kasprowicz, Staff, Słonimski, Iwaskiewicz etc.; Urbańska 1993). 137 As established for Kollár (encyclopedia of Slavdom) by Sgallová (1997: 252), and for Prešeren’s Wreath of Sonnets by Boris Paternu (1993: 99). 138 Encyclopedic knowledge of world poetry and references to early sonnet writers (Dante, Petrarch) are typical of Jaroslav Vrchlický (Červenka & Sgallová 1993: 64); Mickiewicz’s first sonnets also stylistically resemble Petrarch’s works and some poets even paraphrase them (Pszczołowska 1993: 26). Prešeren’s romantic actualization of Petrarchism has long been acknowledged in Slovenian literary history. 139 Ibler (1997) draws attention to the fact that only four writers are known to have attempted to create sonnet cycles in the Czech lands (Quis, Táborský, Hrubín, and Seifert), and mostly only in the twentieth century. Sonnet cycles are not even mentioned in the synoptic articles on Polish sonnets by Pszczołowska and Urbańska. In contrast, Slovenian literature saw the creation of at least 20 crowns of sonnets after Prešeren (Dolgan 1999); from 1945 to 1997 as many as 10 crowns of crowns of sonnets were published (Bregant 1997).

The sonnet is a genre “constituted” in Slovenia by the romantic poet France Prešeren in the 1830s, after two previous isolated attempts (of 1678 and 1818; Paternu 1997). Following the advice of the theoretician Matija Čop, Prešeren relied upon the Italian model; however, he creatively merged neo-Petrarchism and the rhetoric of learned Baroque classicism (e.g., allusive apparatus, complex syntax, figures) with the Biedermeier bourgeois sentiment and “realistic” toughness of the domestic rural idiom, and controlled his expression within an architectonically strict composition. Prešeren further defined the first prominent Slovenian realizations of the sonnet genre by a characteristic motif and thematic structure, which is encyclopedically implemented in his Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets, 1834): the romantically reinterpreted Petrarchism, especially its cult of a divine beloved, is intertwined with the contemporary national tendency, the Slavic ideology, free thinking, historical, mythological, and Christian motifs, and especially with an elegiac confession of the existential crisis and poetic self-reflection. Through poetic auto-thematism and selfreferentiality, Prešeren sought to strengthen awareness of the special and valuable nature of belles-lettres among readers. He presented it as a language that through its beauty and unveiling of the foundations of an individual’s existence reaches beyond the economic, ethical, and social frameworks of bourgeois society, but—despite its uselessness, individualism, and moral objectionability—constitutes the “imagined community” of a nation within the cultural sphere (cf. Anderson 1991). Prešeren’s poetry continues to consciously and self-confidently participate in shaping the national identity: it displays the refinement of standard Slovenian, whose uniformity unites the regionally and dialectally fragmented semiosphere; and it addresses the public with the aesthetic power and suggestiveness of its mythicized images that speak of the origins, fate, and perspectives of Slovenians as a “cultural nation.” Prešeren’s sonnet writing, especially his Wreath of Sonnets, is firmly anchored in the Slovenian cultural memory for several reasons. The first is connected with the institutional skeleton of cultural memory or the canon: by the end of the nineteenth century, Prešeren had already been canonized as a “national poet,” and thus as one of the points of identification through which the national and aesthetic ideology were reproduced for several decades. Through canonization, his works were incorporated into the iron-clad school repertoire and were also continuously referred to in public discourse. The second reason for the principal role of the sonnet in the repertoire of the Slovenian literary system lies in the connotations provoked by the transfer of this sophisticated European genre into Slovenian. At least from the essay written about Prešeren’s Poezije (Poems) in 1866 by the critic Josip Stritar onwards,

readers and reviewers marveled at Prešeren’s transfer of the classical Italian model into the modern emerging Slovenian belles-lettres. Such reception and criticism confirmed the success of the strategy followed by Prešeren himself when, as a member of Matija Čop’s circle, he adopted the Schlegel brothers’ ideas regarding refining the indigenous language through Romance forms. By analogy with the Schlegels, Prešeren anticipated that the Slovenian adoption of the sonnet and other elevated poetic forms—which were considered a sort of standard of poetic mastery and broad intellectual horizons—would demonstrate the highest expressive capabilities of standard Slovenian and the comparability of Slovenian literature with world literature. The third reason for the prominent status of the sonnet in Slovenian literature is that, in his canonized and mostly anthologized sonnets, Prešeren obviously convincingly verbalized the contents that symbolically crystallize the durable features and categories of the Slovenian mentality. Prešeren’s disciplined mastery of composition seems to agree with the Slovenian inclination towards productivity, perfectionism, and diligence, or the pronounced role of the superego; in contrast, the poet’s obsession with death, self-pity, and expressed abhorrence of life agree with the relatively widespread introversion, depression, anxiety, psychotic self-destruction, and high suicide rate of Slovenians (cf. Musek 1994: 184). His portrayal of the nation’s historical fate and perspectives in the form of sonnets informed the national ideology and influenced both the tragic perception of past traumas (especially the myth of Carantania and the thousand years of Slovenian “slavery”) as well as the formulation of political goals: the idea of uniting and liberating Slovenians through art and culture. The fourth reason for the principal role of Prešeren’s sonnet writing among Slovenians lies in the fact that many later poets, who were aware of his embeddedness in cultural memory, anticipated that their own gestures would have greater impact and relevance if they based them on Prešeren’s intertextual background. This is why they often referred to Prešeren’s genre architecture: either through passive and unconscious copying and following his versestanza form or by adopting his motifs and themes using the techniques of intertextual revisions or citations, allusions, parodies, and polemics. Compared to the Czech and Polish poets, the autopoetic creative references to genre memory among Slovenian poets was markedly burdened by the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1997), which proceeded from Prešeren and his absolutist status within the cultural memory. At least from the late 1860s onwards, Prešeren’s sonnets were not only canonized, but also assumed the position of the key texts of the culture: they became an inseparable component of the language with which this culture—through the actors in the literary field and the public discourse—describes and reflects itself. From a comparative perspective, one

can conclude that such an exceptional status of the sonnet in the repertoire of poetic and nonpoetic genres, unheard of in other literatures, most likely resulted precisely from the workings of cultural memory. In it, Prešeren’s figure, his sonnets, sonnet cycles, and the Wreath of Sonnets have been preserved in consciousness through the literary canon, intertextuality, and genre tradition, with the function of representing the highest position of lyric poetry and expressing key “truths” about poetry, literature, existence, and the nation.

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