An Idiomatic Inferno

In Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 play Huis clos (No Exit), a character, Garcin, infamously declares, "Hell is others." What does that mean, many have asked themselves. Some have said that the pronouncement conveys the uneasiness the writer and modernity overall typically experience before "alterity." Yet Sartre insisted that he had been "misunderstood." What his character meant, he explained, was not that our relations with others are "infernal" by definition, but that if these relations are distorted, "then the other can be to us nothing else than hell" because "the others are the most important thing within ourselves that we can draw from to know who we are." "When we think about ourselves, when we try to find out who we are," Sartre went on, we "use the knowledge others already have of us. We form an opinion of ourselves by means of tools others have given us. Whatever I say about myself, an other's judgment is always contained in it. This means that if my relations with an other are bad, I am completely dependent on this other. And then I am truly in hell" (my translation).

Before and after Sartre, the moderns (to say nothing of their postmodern heirs) have both recognized and disowned this dependence. It is not that our relationships with others are good, bad, and anything in between. It is just that, no matter how they are, they always define us and therefore shape our self-definitions, who we are, who we think we are, or what we want to be taken for. Like it or not, being entails being dependent on people and situations outside you. Autonomy is a superstition, solipsism an untenable view of things, and egotism unethical, in today's "network society" more than ever.

One way of looking at bad books—one way of entertaining the notion that there are bad books at all in the wake of the culture wars, the canon debate, and multiculturalism—would be trying to figure out the degree to which the text in question allows for this outside, acknowledges this paramount dependence. Now, moderns like Sartre were ambivalent about it. A romantic aftershock, their authenticity standard was one of originality. To be authentic was to be original, and to be original was to be indebted to no one or at least to appear so. The postmoderns borrow overtly and revel in literary and cultural indebtedness. They call it intertextuality and define authenticity, and with it originality, rather correlatively. To them, the original writer handles—plays on, recycles, etc.—effectively a material, a theme, and even a project that in an important sense comes from and echoes an outside, an elsewhere, other times and places.

Surely some postmoderns do a better job than others. Needless to say, there are good postmodern books, and then there are some not so good. But what postmodernism can be said to be doing more and more these days—and thus possibly take postmodernism in a new direction altogether, and into a new cultural paradigm—is institutionalize this concern, implement this poetics of dependence systematically, and in the process ground our aesthetical judgments ethically.

Let us face it: yesterday's "bad" books are on today's syllabi. Think, for example, about the whole sentimental tradition, about romance, or about the "paraliterary" genres. Things change, as they must, standards evolve (some say, collapse), benchmarks shift, for all the usually stated and unstated reasons. What does not go away is, first, the writers' and their books' genetic "dependence" on others—precursors, audiences, "the people out there" beyond the familial and the familiar—and, second, the talent and honesty with which that connection is incorporated, accounted for, and paid homage to. To write is to write with and ultimately for others. Writing is moving toward others, says Paul Auster. We write, adds Julia Kristeva, to honor the foreign—as we should, strangers to ourselves as we quintessentially are.

To my mind, the worst books bask ignorantly in a sort of stultifying self-centeredness hard to fathom, by me at least. Exercises in navel-gazing and simplistically formulaic, their horizon is exceedingly narrow. They do not...