The Edges of Fiction E-Book

Jacques Rancière

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 296

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality - this was the thesis of Aristotle's Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge. In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the "random moment" into which an entire life is condensed. In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.

Leseprobe

The Edges of Fiction

Jacques Rancière

Translated by Steve Corcoran

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Copyright page

First published in French as Les bords de la fiction © Editions du Seuil, 2017

Collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender

This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3044-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3045-8 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Ranciere, Jacques, author.

Title: The edges of fiction / Jacques Ranciere.

Other titles: Bords de la fiction. English

Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | First published in French as Les bords de la fiction (Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2017). | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019981534 (print) | LCCN 2019016715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530441 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509530458 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509530472 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Fiction. | Fiction--History and criticism--Theory, etc. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.

Classification: LCC PN3331 .R25713 2019 (ebook) | LCC PN3331 (print) | DDC 808.3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981534

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank everyone who has provided impetus to this work and enabled me to outline its themes and contours. My gratitude goes first to Azucena González Blanco and Erika Martínez, organizers of a conference on ‘The Politics of Literature’ held in Granada in December 2014. I was able to pursue and discuss my reflections thanks to the invitations I received from various institutions: the University of California in Los Angeles and in Irvine, the Academy of Beaux-Arts in Düsseldorf, the Fondation Gulbenkian in Paris, the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, the Monokl publishing house in Istanbul, the Philosophia festival in Saint-Émilion and the National University of Valparaiso. The talk I gave at Irvine was published as ‘Fictions of Time’ in a collective volume, Rancière and Literature, edited by Grace Hellyer and Julian Murphet.

‘The Edges of Fiction’ (‘Les bords de la fiction’) was the title first given to a talk held at the Fondation Gulbenkian in February 2016 and published by that institution. A first version of the chapter titled ‘The Unimaginable’ was published, in 2014, in a special issue of the Cahier de l’Herne on Joseph Conrad, edited by Josiane Paccaud-Huguet and Claude Maisonnat.

A first version of the chapter ‘The Random Moment’ came out as ‘The Politics of Fiction’ and, together with a picture by Alfredo Jaar, comprised issue No. 3 of L’Estacio, published in Barcelona in May 2016.

All the other chapters of this book have never before been published.

Introduction

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality. That is the thesis formulated by Aristotle in the ninth chapter of the Poetics. Poetry, by which he means the construction of dramatic or epic fictions, is ‘more philosophical’ than history because the latter says only how things happen, one after the other, in their particularity, whereas poetic fiction says how things can happen in general. Events do not occur in it at random. They occur as the necessary or verisimilar consequences of a chain of causes and effects. Such a chain can be shown to produce the most general determinations of human existence – the fact of knowing happiness or misfortune, and of going from one to the other. This chain is no longer a fatality imposed by a divine power. It is inherent to the order of human action and to the relation it entertains with knowledge. Fictional reason carried out exactly this revolution: the tragic hero’s misfortune is no longer a condition to be endured but instead the consequence of an error – of some error or other in the conduct of one’s action and no longer a transgression of the divine order. And this misfortune occurs through a specific mode of causality. Indeed, this causal chain cannot be defined by rigour alone. Its effect must also be contrary to that which we are led to expect. The proper chain of causes and effects is attested by the reversal – the peripeteia – it produces in the universe of expectations. The rationality of fiction is that appearances – or expectations, for in Greek the same word expresses both things – are inverted. It is that one state leads to the inverse state and that, by the same token, something one was unaware of comes to be known. Prosperity and misfortune, the expected and the unexpected, ignorance and knowledge – these three oppositions form the stable matrix of classic fictional reason in the West. The overall chain articulating them, says Aristotle, has two modalities: it can be necessary or verisimilar. However, practice shows that verisimilitude is charged with proving necessity.

The importance of the theoretical matrix thus constructed must not be overlooked. This model of fictional rationality is by no means limited in its principle to the inventions of poets. Its field of application can be extended to wherever what is at stake is to show the linking of causes and effects that leads beings, unbeknownst to themselves, from happiness to misfortune, or from misfortune to happiness. Our contemporaries no longer write tragedies in verse. Yet one may easily verify that even today the Aristotelian principles of fictional rationality form the stable matrix of the knowledge that our societies produce about themselves. In the great theories of society and history, as well as in the short-sighted, day-to-day oracular science of politicians, experts, journalists or essayists, the matter is still one of developing the chain of causality that leads us, has led us or will lead us to fortune or to misfortune. Accordingly, it is still a matter of showing how these causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations, how prosperity awaits us at the end of an endured ordeal, or disaster at the end of illusions of happiness. It is thus a matter of showing how misfortune is the effect of an ignorance that is itself an object of knowledge. It is lastly a matter of showing all this within a discursive figure that equates necessity and verisimilitude. Marx, Freud and Braudel have taught us as much, each in their own way: the good science of human actions and conducts is recognizable in its faithfulness to the fundamental structures of fictional rationality – the distinguishing of temporalities, the relationship between the known and the unknown, and the paradoxical chain of causes and effects. If the Bachelardian formula of scientific rationality, ‘There is science only of the hidden’, is so very similar to the reasoning of detective Rouletabille, it is because both share a common origin in the Aristotelian principle of paradoxical causality: truth is established as an inversion of what appearances have led us to expect.

This reminder aims to demonstrate not that everything is fiction and that nothing has changed since Aristotle. By contrast, it enables us to gauge the transformations of fictional rationality that social science and literature carried out in the modern era in the West. To be able to apply the principles of the Aristotelian fictional order to the entire gamut of human events, a contradiction indeed had to be resolved. This causal rationality contrasted with the empirical succession of facts to the extent that it restricted its domain of application. It concerned action, the errors that agents commit in carrying it out, and the unforeseen effects its unfolding produces. But causal rationality was thereby the sole preserve of those who acted and expected something to come from their action. Some will say that a great number of people were thus included! But the contrary is true. In bygone days it was the accepted consensus that the number of these subjects is restricted, since most humans, properly speaking, do not act: they make objects or children, execute orders or render services, and continue doing the next day what they had done the day before. Nowhere does any expectation or reversal arise, nor do any errors made enable one to pass from one condition to the opposite. Classical fictional rationality therefore concerned a very small number of humans and human activities. The remainder were subject to anarchy, to the empirical real’s absence of cause. This is why one could, in the positive sense of the term, ignore it: not deal with it, not seek to provide it with a rationale.

In its classical form, the rationality of fiction thus implies a twofold relationship of knowledge to ignorance. Fictional knowledge arranges the events by which active men go from fortune to misfortune and from ignorance to knowledge. But this knowledge is itself deployed only by ignoring – by treating as negligible – the mass of beings and situations belonging to the repetitive universe of material things and events that happen simply one after the other, without creating expectations or forcing errors, and thus without ever going through those reversals of fortune that give the universe of fictional actions its rationality. At most this fictional order reserved, as in comedy, a minor place for the ordinary stories that happened to people of no importance, leaving in its margins the mixture of conditions and upheavals occurring without rhyme or reason that characterized the novel, which was made for amusement and not to gain any knowledge.

This distribution of knowledge and ignorance was overturned in the modern age. But the forms of this overturning must be clarified. According to dominant opinion, this age is one that made a clear-cut separation between, on the one hand, the science of real relations, at long last freed from the artifices of fiction and, on the other, literature and art, at long last freed from the constraints of the real and its imitation. But it is rather the contrary that is true: the essential process founding modern literature and social science simultaneously is the abolition of the division in which the fictional rationality of plots is opposed to the empirical succession of facts. Modern literature and social science both challenge the separation between the rationale of fiction and that of ordinary facts. But they do so in two opposite ways.

On the one hand, social science adopted the Aristotelian principles of fictional rationality for its own account, while abolishing the boundaries delimiting their field of validity. The dark world of material activities and daily facts admits of the same rationality as the arrangements of tragic action – this is the founding axiom of modern social science. This science even took a step further when, with Marx, it asserted the strict reversal of the old hierarchy: it is in the dark world of productive activity that the principle of rationality governing societies resides. The incredible feats of princes, which had nourished the major forms of fiction, are only the surface effects of this dark world. The world of things and people of whom nothing was known – i.e. who were disregarded – as a matter of convention becomes the true world. But this elevation has its strict setback. The dark world becomes the true world as a world whose truth is not known in another sense – that is, is misjudged – by those who live in it. All told, the true world of modern social science is the tragic world democratized, in which all share the privilege of error. This science thus brings both types of ignorance to coincide. It simply reserves all knowledge concerning the paradoxical chain and the inversion of appearances for itself alone.

Literature, for its part, took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing Aristotelian fictional reason in order to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed the principles of this reason, abolishing the limits that circumscribed a real specific to fiction. Literature was doubtless the first to affirm, in the times of Balzac and of Hugo, the story-power carried by the scenery and forms of daily life. However, it turned this power inherent to ordinary things, beings and events, into the principle of a departure from the great schemas of transition from fortune to misfortune and from ignorance to knowledge. The two great interpreters of the modern novel’s developments, namely Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach, both registered this gap, in some sense despite themselves. The former celebrated, in the Balzacian novel, the coming together of the fictional rationality of action and the scientific rationality of the historical process. As Lukács says to us, Lucien de Rubempré’s and his peers’ grand, disastrous endeavours reveal to us the nascent ascendency of capitalism. But this paradise of concordant rationalities is soon lost. Passing from the theatre in Lost Illusions to that in Nana, the novel then mires narrative action in the static description of reified social relationships. As a good Marxist, Lukács might have thought it normal that, like so many other ideals, the aristocratic logic of action was drowning in the ‘icy waters of egotistical calculation’. He will prefer to conclude, as an inconsistent Marxist, that it was the novelists who had abdicated by abandoning the narration of actions for the description of things.

Auerbach, for his part, gets to the nub of the problem: the novelistic revolution entails the negation of what had founded the intelligibility of the old fiction, which is to say the separation of forms of life, the separation between humans living in the time of causality and those living in the time of the chronicle. For him, the history of novelistic realism becomes a conjunction of two processes: one that integrates any event into the totality of a social process and one that turns any individual, as humble as they may be, into a ‘serious’ subject of fiction, a character capable of the most intense and complex feelings. But the promised conjunction slips away at the critical moment. The antepenultimate chapter of Mimesis announces that, in Stendhal’s time, the western novel attained its essential achievement, which consists in ‘representing man engaged only in a global political, economic and social reality in constant evolution’.1 But the statement is forthwith belied by Auerbach’s illustrating this ‘constantly evolving global reality’ with the closed and desperately motionless universe of the hôtel de la Mole, the Maison Vauquer and Emma Bovary’s dining room. Indeed, the last chapter effects a remarkable reversal and ends up celebrating empty and disconnected time, with Auerbach seeing western realism’s supreme achievement as the conquest of the random moment, unrelated to any continuity of action.

What Lukács denies and Auerbach encounters without thematizing it is this scission of fictional rationality. The individual engaged in the global reality of a history in constant evolution and the random individual capable of the most intense and complex feelings do not comprise the same subject. Social science would seize upon the former, the price to pay for which is a different reconstitution of the hierarchy of forms of time and the logic of paradoxical linking. Literature would tie itself to the latter. It tore down the barrier that separated lives without hi/story from lives apt to encounter the vicissitudes of fortune and the uncertainties of knowledge. It thus challenged the major forms of articulation of time and causality that had structured Aristotelian fiction and that structure expert accounts on society today. This it did to plumb the power of the ‘random occurrence’, this empty occurrence hanging in the balance between the reproduction of the same and the possible emergence of the new, and which is also a full moment in which an entire life is condensed, in which several forms of time mix together and in which the inactivity of a reverie enters into harmony with the activity of the universe. Using this temporal frame, it built other ways of identifying events and actors, and other ways of linking them to construct shared worlds and shared hi/stories.

For whether it is in the avowed fictions of literature or in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the matter is still one of constructing through sentences the perceptible and thinkable forms of a shared world by determining situations and their actors, by identifying events, by establishing among them links of coexistence or succession, and by giving to these links the modality of the possible, the real or the necessary. The prevailing custom nevertheless sets these two sides in opposition. It gives to the fictions of social or political science the attributes of reality and analyses the forms of avowed fiction as effects or distorted reflections of this reality. I have challenged this division in various works, whether by showing that literature itself created the interpretive schemas applied by social science to the forms of literary fiction, or by studying the fashion in which literature has subverted the categories of action and the logic of verisimilitude.2 For all that, the point is not to announce an inversion whereby social science’s transformations can be deduced from those of literature. It is legitimate, by contrast, to restore all heuristic value to the transformations of fictional rationality, and notably to the transformations of forms of subject constitution and forms for identifying events and constructing shared worlds specific to the modern literary revolution. At a time when the mediocre fiction called ‘information’ purports to saturate the field of what is actual, with its hackneyed feuilletons about petty go-getters out to conquer power, backdropped by big-time scoops about faraway atrocities, such research can usefully contribute to broadening the horizon of gazes at, and thoughts about, what gets called a world and the ways of inhabiting it.

The book’s four parts aim to contribute some elements to this investigation into fiction’s transformations. They variously analyse modern fiction’s constitutive movement: the movement by which its centre of gravity was shifted from its traditional core, constituted by the knot of narrative events, toward those edges in which fiction is confronted with its possible cancellation, or returned to such and such a figure of alterity. These are, first, the edges at which fiction receives the world of beings and situations formerly relegated to the margins: the trivial events of daily life or the bruteness of a real that does not permit of inclusion. These are also situations in which the difference between that which happens and that which simply goes-by tends to be erased. These are, further, the uncertain boundaries between events that one reports and those that one invents. These are thus also the ways in which fiction is divided from within, in which it modifies its linkages and invents, as needed, new genres to retrace the boundary or else to duly note its erasure. These are, lastly, the edges at which the account that means to document the real, and the science that seeks to reveal its hidden truth, appropriate avowed fiction in one form or another.

The first part examines the transformations of the frame within which fiction delimits and peoples a specific sensible world. To do this, it sets out from the somewhat simplistic figuration given to this frame in the century following the French Revolution: one of a world in which, at one and the same time, the closed windows that separated fiction’s characters and situations of choice from prosaic reality are opened, and the barriers that had separated the classes and their worlds crumble. It shows how this scenario complexifies, as the vast space in which the new novel dreamt of identifying itself with the encyclopaedia of social space shrinks down to the enigma of a face behind a closed window, or gets lost in the infinity of reveries occasioned by a landscape, an uncertain light or hour; or as the imagination, believing it can enter into any passing body in the street, encounters bodies in their evasiveness, locking their secrets safely away and shattering the very frames that enable shared experience to be recounted.

The second part shows how the rationality of the story and that of science converge in a bid to reveal not only the reality causing an appearance but also the cause of which that reality itself is the effect. In this way, scientific demonstration, the fantasy story, documentary inquiry and historical narration must all come together to express the secret of the commodity. In the same period, science and story knot together differently when the detective novel renovates causal rationality, which stands threatened by the distended time of the realist novel, but in so doing pays the price of oscillating between two models of science and of having its causality split from within.

The third part ponders the meaning and forms that fictional imagination takes when the barriers that had separated the logic of facts and the logic of fictions vanish: when a novelist, convinced that genuine imagination never invents anything, must nevertheless do just that and has characters he has never ‘encountered’ go into action; or when the chronicle of a journey, the stages of which are precisely set out on a map, leaves us uncertain as to the type of reality being related to us at each stage and as to the journey’s very temporality.

The fourth part enquires – in the wake of a renowned commentator – into the community that fiction sketches and into the humanity that it promises when it ceases to be the arrangement of actions with which so many centuries had identified it. To this end, it explores the limit fictions which include those to whom nothing normally can or ought to happen or which sit on the very line of separation between the world in which nothing happens and that in which something takes place.

The attentive reader may naturally verify that, thus defined, causal linking simply proves to be one order among others and that each episode of this hi/story crosses the borders by which the chapters and parts are delimited, and thus enters into resonance with this or that other one, reprising its problems and re-examining its objects and stakes. Each chapter and part is, in sum, the account of a singular intellectual adventure that comes to be reflected in the others and reflects them in its turn, in accordance with the egalitarian principle which reflection on intellectual emancipation opposes to the precepts of progressive – in both senses of the word – pedagogy. The same reader will easily verify that these investigations into the modern adventures of fictional rationality also variously reverberate with others that I have devoted to adventures of the sensible, adventures in which new subjects are constituted, shared worlds formed and conflicts emerge between worlds: in which words become flesh and divert lives from their destination, nights shake up the normal cycle of day and night, and gazes through windows engender the division of proletarian bodies; in which mutilated statues, flea-ridden children or capering clowns create a new beauty, and the groping for knowledge of the ignorant as they face signs of writing defines another life of intelligence. Through all these adventures, what is pursued is one and the same inquiry into the revolution by which those who are nothing become everything.

Notes

  1

  Erich Auerbach,

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991), p. 459.

  2

  On this topic, see notably Jacques Rancière,

The Politics of Literature

, trans. Julie Rose (London: Polity, 2011) and

The Lost Thread: Essays in Modern Fiction

, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Doors and Windows

Behind the Windows

In 1857 the literary critic Armand de Pontmartin wrote his review of Madame Bovary. To the realist overload of little people and vulgar things bogging down the novel of provincial mores, he opposes the happy times when fiction’s object bore on the delicate feelings of men and women of quality. People of this latter sort gazed upon the countryside and ordinary people only from afar, through their palace windows or their carriage doors. These windows separating social classes from one another also separated novelistic fiction from ordinary reality. They could thereby open ‘a large, admirably filled, space for the analysis of feelings, subtler, more complicated, more difficult to unravel in elite souls than among common people’.1 In democratic times doors and windows were allegedly too wide open, thus allowing onto the whiteness of pages, along with mud from the countryside, the triviality of little people and the clutter of paltry things.

Nothing is served by denouncing the aristocratic prejudice of this journalist with his nobiliary particle. His prejudice goes without saying. But neither is it necessary to admire, as was done not so long ago, the lucidity of reactionary writers and critics supposedly able ‘despite their prejudice’ to show us the reality of class struggle. For them, this struggle also went without saying. It is therefore not despite their prejudices but because of them that they set their objective at the precise point where the topography of a fictional world opens not simply onto social reality but onto the symbolic topography that renders it visible and in which everyone is assigned their place. Exactly this is what the critic’s allusion to windows and doors symbolizes. It is clearly understood that he speaks through metaphor. But metaphor is something other than the use of imagery to express a thought. It is, far more profoundly, a way of inscribing the description of a state of things into the symbolic topography that determines the forms of its visibility. Our critic does precisely this. He may hanker after the good old times of social and novelistic aristocracy. Yet he remains of his time, which is that of modern political and aesthetic revolutions. And during this time critique changes its status. No longer does it say how works should be – or should have been – made to satisfy the rules of art and the public’s taste. It says how they are made, what sensible world they construct, and how they reflect the spirit of the times that engenders them. Pontmartin follows suit. He does not say that Flaubert’s novel is ill conceived or poorly written. He says that it is similar to its time, that of democracy, is animated by the energy of this brutal historical force and, like it, drags along, in its flow, all sorts of detritus. Saying this requires him to fix on descriptions of states of things or on sensations that admit of being transformed into open windows overlooking the reality whose product they are. He thus turns the novel itself into a door open onto the world that engendered it.

For there are two sorts of doors and windows in fiction. Those that fiction describes and that serve the ends of narration: doors through which one goes to engage in this or that activity, or against which one stumbles, like a barrier that fences in the elected being or keeps apart social conditions; windows of yesterday’s picaresque fictions in through which young people climbed using makeshift ladders; the new windows of sentimental fictions, those behind which young women grew bored but also, occasionally, would fix their eyes on an unexpected sight that would turn their lives upside down. But fiction also has unstated doors and windows: such are novel openings that set down not only the elements of a plot but also the very texture of a world of beings, things and events and its (dis)continuous relationship with the so-called real world; such are also descriptions that not only portray the setting of an action but also set in place a world of visibility in harmony or in rupture with the relationships established between things and words in the usual order of the world. And, of course, the windows and doors that serve as accessories to fiction can themselves always become metaphors of fiction’s modes of visibility and forms of linking, of the type of real it constructs and the type of reality that makes it possible.

Pontmartin’s metaphor moves in this space. But, like the reactionaries of his time, he hurries unduly to make an opposition between yesterday’s elite with their grand spaces and noble perspectives and the democratic age’s cluttered spaces and muddy paths. This hurriedness means he is unable to form a more precise view of fiction’s transformations or define them more exactly relative to the transformations affecting social divides. For, between yesteryear’s protective windows and his era’s wide open doors, inordinately many events have, in truth, taken place which his grid cannot retain. The doors that enabled the elites to keep a distance from commonplace lives were followed by other doors, ones that kept commonplace life at a distance from the hidden secrets of souls and of society. Windows proved to be apposite at drawing souls together, just as they had been at keeping different social conditions apart. By themselves they blurred the relations between inside and outside, noble and vulgar, whether by submitting the salons of the elite to the gaze of entomological science or by offering to the gaze of the artist or the lover the poetry of society’s dark face. They created new affects, muddling the hierarchy of passions, the aetiology of their causes, the forms of their expression and their assignation to this or that social condition. They thus rendered uncertain not only the boundaries between conditions but also the very divisions between contemplation and action, the fictive and the real.

The simple division established by the aristocratic critic is gainsaid, first, by the discovery that, behind the doors and windows of palaces, the so-called elite souls are divided into two irreconcilable categories. There are those who, by choosing to conceal their feelings and lock up their fellows, reveal their effective baseness, and there are those who side with the windows, who take the side of transparency and sincerity. From one window to another, these latter, nobly natured souls recognize each other and set apart their sensitive nobility from all matters of social conditions. Stendhal’s characters bear witness to this. The shared singularity of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black is that their respective heroes are afforded a stay behind prison walls that is experienced as a moment of absolute happiness: in prison this hero is indifferent to society’s vain intrigues, able to discover the only good that counts – commerce with a soul of the same nature. Locked up in the old-style prison at Besançon, Julien Sorel can relive – removed from any social ambition or humiliation – his pure love for Madame de Rênal. As