Thinking Literature, Thinking Narrative: Liaisons dangereuses

IN HIS WELL-KNOWN LECTURE delivered at the Collège de France in 1977, Roland Barthes used the Greek concept of mathesis to refer to one of the “forces” of literature: its truly epistemological force. In Barthes’s speech (which draws upon the original meaning of the term), mathesis indicates literature’s capacity to “accommodate” a multiplicity of technical, anthropological, historic, geographic, and philosophical knowledge, to make itself a moveable encyclopedia of all sciences and of all learning:

Whereby we can say that literature […] is absolutely, categorically realist: it is reality, i.e., the very spark of the real. Yet literature, in this truly encyclopedic respect, displaces the various kinds of knowledge, does not fix or fetishize any of them; it gives them an indirect place, and this indirection is precious. On the one hand, it allows for the designation of possible areas of knowledge—unsuspected, unfulfilled. Literature works in the interstices of science. It is always behind or ahead of science […]. The knowledge it marshals is, on the other hand, never complete or final. […] Because it stages language instead of simply using it, literature feeds knowledge into the machinery of infinite reflexivity. Through writing, knowledge ceaselessly reflects on knowledge, in terms of a discourse which is no longer epistemological, but dramatic.¹

In more recent years, many other critics and theorists have examined literature’s capacity to collect, reconfigure, and interpret knowledge, to produce thought and above all to question—according to its own modalities—knowledge itself. The philosophical reflection on literature has surpassed the classic boundaries of aesthetics to open itself to a much wider spectrum of questions that form the contours of a true “philosophy of literature”: from the logical and anthropological foundations of fiction to literature’s relationship with truth, from literature’s cognitive function (What kind of knowledge do we acquire from literature? Is this knowledge displayed by or caused by literature? Can we express it in propositional terms without trivializing it?) to the possibility of founding a new ethic based upon the specific type of experience literary texts offer (empathy, knowing what it’s like, etc.).² For their part literary studies—at times in convergence with philosophical reflections, at times running along parallel if not divergent paths—have resumed and developed Barthes’s suggestions, not only examining the strategies with which literary texts “accommodate” the multiplicity of scientific and more generally cultural knowledge, but asking themselves what type of thinking literary texts produce and how literature thinks.³

How does literature think?

One can give an initial answer, perhaps banal but ineludible, to this question: literature thinks through the incorporation, the mise-en-scène, of philosophical or ideological discourses in the text’s fabric, attributing them to fictitious characters, as happens in The Brothers Karamazov when Ivan tells Alyosha “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” or to a narrative voice more or less close to that of the author, as in the theory of history expounded at the end of War and Peace, on which not by chance the philosopher Isaiah Berlin was able to write a seminal essay.⁴ This mise-en-scène, however, as acutely underlined by Pierre Macherey, transforms those discourses into a particular kind of truth: a truth that is an always deferred enigma, that “is not apprehensible independently from the process by which one seeks it.” The literary text, in short, produces an impure thought, situated and rooted in a contingency, exposed to risk and loss.

as we read it in the novel, this truth is not accessible in the form of a pure truth, and consequently clear from any risk of deviation, misunderstanding or mistake. On the contrary, this truth only acquires its sense and outline against the background of these distortions and approximations, since it continually mingles itself with the practical movement of life […]; therefore literature—as opposed to the philosophy of philosophers—would be thinking in action, caught as it emerges at a given time and in a given place, that is, attributed to a singular point of view. This is why we cannot grant it the status of pure thinking.^5...