Introduction
p. 11-16
Texte intégral
1As the readers familiar with Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot will know,1 Gustave Flaubert, who believed in the impersonality of the work of art, is the object of the quest of Barnes’s character. Under the guise of looking for Flaubert’s parrot, supposed to have inspired ‘Un Cœur simple,’ Braithwaite is trying both to probe the nature of writing (is it representational or not?) and to understand Gustave Flaubert’s ‘nature,’ i.e. the genuine self of the writer, in a fictional autobiography that would be more reliable than an ordinary one. Flaubert thus finds himself at the core of a paradoxical enterprise which finally reflects his own paradoxical belief in a personal impersonality: ‘L’artiste, dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout et visible nulle part.’2 Such a belief leads him to write most movingly about emotions in, for example, ‘Un Cœur simple’ and turns him into the object of the most emotional quest of Braithwaite, the autodiegetic narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot.
2Analysing the intricate relation between impersonality and emotion in Barnes’s text is a challenge that raises many questions and sends the reader back to the writers who, in British literature, met this challenge, in the wake of Flaubert, namely the modernist writers. The modernists themselves defined their art as an art of indirection3 and an impersonal art.4 As a reaction against Victorian sentimentality and representational writing, they claimed that their art was non-figurative and antirepresentational.5 They simultaneously described their art as an art of subjectivity, hence of what’s most personal or human; an art focusing on the self, desire, feeling and emotion.6 They denounced realist writing as an art of external facts and operated a shift from the outer to the inner scene.7
3The emphasis put on impersonality led some contemporary critics and writers to define modernism as formalism. Robert Graves and Laura Riding in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, the first book to use the term ‘modernist,’ defined modernism ‘as impersonal attention to art as composition..., a use of language and levels of obscurity well in advance of the expectations and sensibilities of plain readers.’8 Impersonality here is synonymous with formalism rather than depersonalisation. Such a reading paved the way for later and harsher criticism, such as that voiced by Philip Larkin for whom modernism is only a matter of technique and technical innovation.9
4Yet the importance of feeling, emotion and introspection in modernist writings, which links them to the Romantics and the history of sensibility, has been acknowledged by some critics and emphasised recently by such writers as Jeanette Winterson who has chosen to retain the emotional impact of modernist fiction. In Art Objects: Essays on Effrontery and Ecstasy, she writes about The Waves in terms of ‘rapture’ and ‘precise emotion.’10
5These two somewhat contradictory visions of modernism rest on an emphasis either on the impersonal, aloof, elitist and highbrow quality of modernist writing; or on its emotional power. T. S. Eliot was the first to articulate these two notions of impersonality and emotion in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ where he contends that aesthetic emotion can best be revealed through impersonality, ‘a continual surrender of the self,’ (43) ‘a continual extinction of personality,’ ‘a process of depersonalization.’ (44) Yet, as Fabio Vericat convincingly demonstrates, such a cursory reading of Eliot’s essay can be questioned, Eliot’s theory of impersonality being intimately linked with a theory of ‘radical personality,’ impersonality being no other than the locus of personal emotion. T. S. Eliot’s theory displays the same inner contradictions as Gustave Flaubert’s earlier sayings11; and James Joyce echoed Flaubert in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.12
6Since then, literary criticism seems to have been caught in the same mesh of contradiction: the theses of the early Barthes about ‘The Death of the author,’ of the anti-intentionalists like W.K. Wymsatt and Monroe Beardsley, of the New Critics have been contradicted by those of Foucault, the later Barthes and even more recent ones.13 If we agree with Andreas Huyssen that post-structuralist criticism is ‘primarily a discourse of and about modernism’ to such a degree that it can be seen ‘as a theory of modernism,’14 how can such theories, which are so much at variance with each other, help us apprehend modernist British literature?
7If it is true that multiple narrative voices (what Bakhtin calls polyphony) or the representation of a multi-faceted subject are a means of depersonalisation, of erasing the author’s self, can the concomitant plunge into the most human and personal world of the subject, of his desire and emotion, be described as impersonal? Can the very choice of words, phrases or images that create ‘art emotion’ (Eliot 47) be impersonal? Isn’t the choice of language a way of reintroducing the author’s personality? Isn’t it a way of transmitting his/her own personal emotion? Aren’t the author’s emotion and aesthetic emotion linked in some way? And what sort of emotion is aesthetic emotion? Is it ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’? Is it a depersonalised, aestheticized emotion? Is it a matter of language only, of thought, or of thought and feeling? Is impersonality merely a necessary preamble to the writing process and is it possible or simply illusory? Is Clive Bell’s concept of ‘significant form’ still valid?15 And is form impersonal? Is the word ‘impersonal’ attached to the modernists acceptable? Or is it a construction of the New Critics or even before them, of I. A. Richards and Leavis?
8For if we still read the modernists, it may well be because they transmit emotion. Is it an aesthetic emotion only accessible to the learned who can fathom the mythical allusions in Eliot’s poems or Joyce’s fiction? Or is it a more sensuous form of emotion that words themselves can convey because they have a substance (they can be rolled with great relish ‘like sweets on the... tongue...,’ as Woolf writes in Between the Acts16); because they appear in a visual arrangement as satisfying as painting? Or else is it a sensuous form of emotion that style and syntax convey in a musical symphony? Or is it simply—or also—that the represented subject’s individual emotions are universal emotions, as Winterson writes about The Waves?
9How such impersonality precludes or, on the contrary, foregrounds emotion; how emotion is expressed, how, through impersonality as creative ‘purification,’ aesthetic emotion is transmuted and ‘purified’ or aestheticised; how emotion, through impersonality, is transferred from the author to the reader or, on the contrary, appropriated by the writer: such a debate sends the reader back to the history of emotional apprehension as well as the history of feeling, to the Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth mainly, and even to earlier eighteenth century thinkers such as Shaftesbury and the history of sensibility, all this being also linked with Eliot’s essay, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ and his disavowal of the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’
10These are the issues addressed in the first papers. The fiction of James Joyce and his ‘Emotion behind a Veil of Impersonality,’ of Virginia Woolf and the radical impersonality of her most subjective fiction, of Dorothy Richardson and her relation to the ‘Damned Egotistical Self,’ the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford and Evelyn Waugh is examined. It is both confronted with the fiction of their forebears like Walter Pater and their successors, like George Mackay Brown or William Golding. The latter is analysed in an unusual light, with the tools provided by neurolinguistics and its cerebral analysis of the two hemispheres, which are said to shelter the rational, impersonal functions on the one hand and the emotional ones on the other. But most of the papers, although resorting to a variety of critical tools, from Husserl’s philosophy to Starobinski’s concepts of action/reaction or those of Agamben, draw on T. S. Eliot’s famous ‘impersonal theory of poetry,’ showing how influential it was in the shaping of modernist fiction.
11Whether called for or denounced, impersonality and emotion are two notions around which twentieth century literature and criticism revolve. These two categories therefore enable us to re-read modernist as well as post-modernist texts. Post-modernism is indeed often said to be an impersonal literary game deprived of emotion, artificial and indulging in self-reflexivity. But isn’t self-reflexivity a sign of the return of the author and therefore, of what’s most personal to him/her, and first of all of his/her emotions?
12A simple reading of Flaubert’s Parrot shows that literature today is caught in the same web of contradictions as in the early twentieth century. We may therefore wonder whether, in the aftermath of Frederic Jameson’s famous commentary on the ‘waning of affect,’17 the lack of emotion in contemporary literature should be taken for granted. Since critics like Barthes have contradicted themselves or at least come back on their first sayings; since Eliot’s theory of impersonality is either riddled with contradictions or can be interpreted in various ways, as Gulshan Taneja and Fabio Vericat’s articles point out, we may try to revise, in the light of these two multi-faceted notions of impersonality and emotion, the canonical definitions of modernist and post-modernist literature or at least come back to the critical tools forged to apprehend them as well as to the contradictions or dark zones in our knowledge of this literature.
13In the following articles, impersonality—notoriously associated with modernism as it is—is thus seen to migrate into a corpus of more recent British texts. The questions that are tackled address the way in which a literature that keeps playing with literary and aesthetic codes and conventions is still concerned with emotion, either of the purely aesthetic type or in a more ethical mode. In other terms, in a body of texts that reputedly favour such impersonal practices as ludic overkill and in which metafictional games and the ascendance of intertextuality have come to assume full hegemony, there appears to be room left for emotion. For it must be borne in mind that the debate on postmodernism has taken many unexplored and divergent paths, and that what some critics have seen as the prevalence of the ludic, the gratuitously metafictional, the overtly intertextual has also been commented on as the locus of the apocalyptic, of the sublime and of the ethical. In an aesthetics characterised by the prevalence of the ‘neo-’ (neo-Gothic, neo-sublime, retro-Victorian, post-romantic, etc.), what emerges is the trace of a perennial tradition: that which concomitantly revives the impersonal practices of intertextual ventriloquism, for instance, the better to solicit the reader’s emotional return to the past, as is the case with Ackroyd or Winterson; that which calls forth the metafictional conventions of the early novel to protest the impossibility of impersonality, in Amis’s or Winterson’s novels.
14What thus appears in the contemporary practice of impersonality, in a production that has been doxically referred to as ‘postmodern,’ is a special interpretation of the prefix ‘post-’ as meaning less ‘against’ than ‘continuous with’ modernism. In other terms, the contemporary reader is presented with no less than a vision of tradition that echoes Eliot’s in more ways than just one while positing a radical and flexible adaptation of the relations both differentiating and uniting impersonality—or the impossibility thereof—and emotion. The postmodern is thus seen as a return to the modern and, beyond, to the romantic (pace Eliot) and onwards to the baroque (enter the metaphysical poets again) to take up the claim voiced by Moderns of an earlier time that ours are truly ancient times, when we giants are standing on the shoulders of dwarves.
15Only by reading different texts such as those of Amis, Brookner, Ackroyd, Swift, Ishiguro, Winterson, and some of their immediate forebears (such as the so-called late modernist novels of a Durrell or the early postmodern metafictional experiments of a Spark), and only by delving into various genres and forms (the poetry of Basil Bunting, the drama of Caryl Churchill or even Rachel Seiffert’s photographic narratives) can we hope to come to terms with these questions and bring nuances to the notions of impersonality and emotion and their relation.
16The chronological approach chosen during the two conferences held in 2003 and 2004 at the Université Paul-Valéry—Montpellier 3 and the chronological presentation of the selected papers is meant to trace the way in which writers have apprehended the two notions of impersonality and emotion and how the initial dichotomies (impersonality/personality; impersonality and emotion) have been shifted around or even transcended from Eliot to Winterson.
Notes de bas de page
1 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984).
2 Gustave Flaubert, Lettre à Louise Collet, 9 décembre 1852, Correspondance. 4 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973-1998).
3 Katherine Mansfield defined her technique as ‘an indirect technique’ in her Letters and Journals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
4 Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Hugh Walpole, wrote: ‘I sympathise more than I can say with your desire to escape from autobiography. [...] I think there is a very profound distinction between any kind of confession and creative work’ (27 October 1920); Virginia Woolf admired Greek literature which, for her, was the epitome of ‘impersonal literature’ (‘On Not knowing Greek,’ The Essays of Virginia Woolf, IV, Andrew McNeillie ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1994); see also T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Selected Essays (1932; London: Faber & Faber, 1963) 39-49.
5 See, for example, Woolf’s essay, ‘Modern Fiction,’ Collected Essays II (London: Hogarth Press, 1972) 103-110.
6 See, for example, Joseph Conrad’s preface to ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ (1897; Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1983).
7 Woolf captured this very well in her celebrated essay ‘Modern Fiction’ where she criticised ‘the materialists’ who ‘write of unimportant things;... making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring,’ and opposed them to the spiritual writers and their new way of writing: ‘Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”.’ (Woolf 1972, 105, 106)
8 Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1972) qtd in Peter Brooker ed. Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992) 6.
9 See Philip Larkin, All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1971 (London: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1985).
10 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Effrontery and Ecstasy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) 93.
11 Flaubert, who believed in the impersonality of the work of art (‘l’impersonnalité de l’œuvre,’ letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie 18 mars 1857) allegedly said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ (Lettre 18 mars 1857).
12 ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Panther, 1977) 194-195.
13 Maurice Couturier, La Figure de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Ronald Shusterman, ‘Knowledge and the Author: The Intentional Fallacy Revisited and (perhaps) removed,’ La problématique de l’auteur, ed. Maurice Couturier, Cycnos, 14.2 (1997): 111-125.
14 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 207.
15 See Clive Bell, Art (1914; London: Oxford University Press, 1987).
16 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; London: Panther, 1978) 12.
17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) 10-16.
Auteurs
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Christine Reynier
Professor of contemporary British Literature at the University Paul-Valéry—Montpellier III. She has edited books on Virginia Woolf, published a critical analysis of The Waves in collaboration and written essays on Virginia Woolf’s short stories, especially on her theory and ethics of the short story. She has also published essays on other Modernist writers like Katherine Mansfield or Leonard Woolf and on contemporary writers like McEwan. She has just completed a book on Jeanette Winterson: Le Miracle ordinaire (Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2004).
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Jean-Michel Ganteau
Professsor of modern English literature at the Université Paul-Valéry—Montpellier III. He is the author of a monograph on David Lodge’s melodramatic imagination: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001) and the editor of several collections of essays on 19th—and 20th— century British fiction. He has also published some thirty articles on contemporary British fiction (Catholic literature, the London novel, romance, melodrama, kitsch, the baroque and the sublime). He is very much interested in the relations between the theory of genres and the theory of affect. He is also the editor of Études britanniques contemporaines.
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