The Event: Literature and Theory by Ilai Rowner (review)

The modern world is assumed to have emerged when human beings became responsible rulers of their own lives. ‘Think, select your goals, organize, and take the right steps’ have been and still are the watchwords of human autonomy. They call for knowledge, decision, and action. Autonomy, however, isn’t the only game in town. Do we, human beings, always act or, rather, things happen to us? Do we rationally choose our way, stumble upon it, or, perhaps, it stumbles upon us? Are we building our world by our own meaningful deeds, or are we surrounded and carried away by events, many of them meaningless? Ilai Rowner’s ample study of event in literature favours the latter hypothesis. It begins by analysing Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902), a short piece of fiction inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. The letter describes in vivid detail a Renaissance writer’s realization that, since language fails to grasp the concrete flow of the world, classical, rule-governed literary culture makes no sense. But this letter, Rowner points out, is itself a literary piece, and its rejection of older forms of literature constitutes a literary event. This event, Rowner argues, turns literary art away from abstract rules and concepts and reorients it towards the corporeality of its subject matter, endowing it with a new self-reflecting and, at the same time, self-rejecting dimension. Resistance to knowledge, decision, and action is, as Rowner’s book reminds us, one of the main themes in last century’s debates on literary theory in France. Rowner does not limit his enquiry to French authors and, in addition to Hofmannsthal, he examines influential thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jurij Lotman, and Giorgio Agamben. What is sometimes called ‘French theory’ remains, however, the book’s main field of reference, which includes the points of view of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Blanchot. The latter’s testimony about the struggle of literature against the rules of abstract rationality is one of the most moving moments of the book. In Blanchot’s view, Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld and Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens encourage us to reflect mythically on literary events. By descending into the ‘holy night’ of the Underworld, Orpheus, according to Blanchot, tries to avoid a deeper, genuinely poetic, disturbing, unthinkable night. He is thrown into it only when looking at Eurydice and — thus giving her up — he steps towards ‘the immense threshold of the impossible’ (p. 78). The event here is the poet’s disappearance into the poetic work. Conversely, Ulysses confronting the Sirens’ song and thus escaping their temptation ‘transforms the immediate danger of the song into the inoffensive adventure of the narrative’ (pp. 90–91). The literary event abolishes all expectations. A promising debut, Rowner’s book reminds us that modern literature, far from supporting the modern ideal of human autonomy, sometimes challenges its very possibility.