Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History

by Claudio Guillen

Overview

Writing in the tradition of Ortega y Gasset's History as a System and Saussure's linguistic model, Claudio Guillén proposes a structural approach to literary history.

Originally published in 1971.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691620527
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1449
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

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Literature As System

Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History

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By Claudio Guillén

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06074-3

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CHAPTER 1

ESSAY 1

The Aesthetics of Literary Influence

A theoretical discussion such as this must confront, for better or for worse, a wealth of possibilities. What Ferdinand Brunetiere once called "the nearly infinite field of comparative literature" requires, to be sure, the use not of one but of many methods, as the huge range of phenomena that it covers is submitted to more than one theoretical model. Does this diversity of both object and hypothesis reflect, as some scholars have thought, the nearness of the discipline to the texture and the winding course of literary history, i.e., to the very reluctance with which this species of history yields to a unitary theory? I do not deny that such might be the case. But before the pluralism of comparative studies can be evaluated, it seems necessary that it be once more surveyed and understood.

Not long ago Henri Peyre called for a reappraisal of the notion of literary influence, and I believe that an examination of this problem can provide us with a central approach to the area of comparative studies as a whole and a way of charting its several provinces. Thus, most of this essay will be devoted to the preliminary analysis of the concept of literary influence.

I

Any theory of influence implies an intuition, whether conscious or not, of the nature of the creative act in art. As we glance back at earlier periods in the history of comparative literature, so heavily reliant on the compilation of influences and sources, we cannot but ask ourselves what the aesthetic assumptions of our predecessors were. The question of course is very broad, and can be dealt with here only in a selective manner. I shall refer to certain ideas prevalent in France, and adopted elsewhere, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and use as starting point the following words by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto: "Letteratura comparata, Storia generate della letteratura: due aspirazioni romantiche rifiorite in un clima tainiano" (two romantic aspirations that reflowered in a Tainian climate).

Benedetto's words could not be more appropriate: the discipline of comparative literary studies did indeed result from the adaptation of certain romantic aspirations to an intellectual climate of which the thought of Taine remains the most powerful and representative example. As for what the "due aspirazioni romantiche" actually were, I should like to interpret Benedetto's intent somewhat freely and go on to distinguish between two different, though obviously related, historical forces: a desire for system; and an internationalist or cosmopolitan spirit.

The yearning for system, synthesis or unity, is an aspect of the Romantic movement which is too often neglected or forgotten. Herder's conception of culture as a mosaic of national cultures led to the Romantic nationalism — in literary matters — with which we are so familiar. But it had its counterpart in a powerfully synthetic trend, rooted in a yearning for total experience, for the unitary vision of interconnections and interactions, for knowing, in Faust's words, "wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt": how all things are woven and joined into a whole. As far as the criteria of poetics were concerned, the writer could no longer believe that they composed a static and normative order, nor that a few great authorities continued to preside over an exquisite Temple du goût. With the advent of new critical theories the vast edifice of neoclassical norms had come tumbling down; and the whole of European poetry, as it were, had been shattered to pieces. Thus there were a number of reasons for reviving the durable dream of an artistic macrocosm. It appears, to put it very briefly, that a renewed vision of the integrity of literature — conceived not in normative but in historical terms — found support in three basic and parallel developments: the transcendent function attributed by many to the arts; the systematic mode of scrutiny and thought in the sciences and in philosophy; and the belief in progress.

Friedrich Schlegel, at one point, had defined art as the appearance of the kingdom of God on earth; and this enthusiastic position was of course widespread. But in the Athenäum fragments (1798) he had also used the word "Sympoesie" and commented upon "progressive Universalpoesie" — while poking fun too, in an ironic moment, at the fact that synthesis seemed to be in fashion: "Uebersichten des Ganzen, wie sie jetzt Mode sind, entstehen, wenn einer alles einzelne übersieht, und dann summiert" (Surveys of the whole, of the kind that are in fashion now, arise when someone overlooks all the single parts and then sums them up.) The tendency toward systematic thinking and writing had been strengthened immeasurably by the trajectory of the natural sciences and of philosophy since Newton and Kant. A mechanical model of system was offered by physics, but there were others as well. In the Kantian view, as Ernst Cassirer explains, experience had ceased to be an empirical bundle of sense perceptions. "Experience, declared Kant, is a system; it is not a mere 'Rhapsodie von Wahrnehmungen.' Without systematic unity there can be no experience and no science." The unified cosmos of the metaphysicians made possible various modes of unified rational response, as in Kant's Architectonic? or later in Hegel's dialectical interpretation of the indivisibility of the part from the whole. In the literary field, however, an organic conception of system, based on the widely accepted analogy — since Herder and Goethe — between the artistic work and the biological organism, was found to be most effectual and convincing. René Wellek stresses in the first two volumes of his History of Modern Criticism the historical fruitfulness of this analogy, and how the unity of all art was reconciled with an appreciation of its single components by the comparison with the relationship between a living body and its members, or between a biological order and its different species.

As for the idea of progress, it too fulfilled a unifying function. Its adaptation to literature, which goes back to the "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes," and to the suspicion since the Renaissance that progress might not take place only in the sciences, was a distinctive feature of the eighteenth century. One of the first histories of world literature, published in Parma in 1782-1799 by an exiled Spanish Jesuit, Juan Andrés, was entitled Dell'origine, de'progressi e dello stato attuale d'ogni letteratura; and Condillac had written somewhat earlier in his Traité des systèmes that "les beauxarts ... paraissent précéder l'observation, et il faut qu'ils aient fait des progrès pour pouvoir être réduits en système." The notion of literary progress reappears in Friedrich SchlegePs famous vision of "progressive Universalpoesie," and in numerous other instances of overlapping during the Romantic period (notably in Adam Müller's Vorlesungen über die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1806) with the dominant organic or biological analogy.

That the organic analogy could be brought to bear not only on single works but on vast artistic wholes, on groups of works assembled in the memory of the critic, Goethe began to show on more than one occasion. I shall cite but the closing words of the Introduction to the Propyläen, published in 1798, when the impact of Napoleon's first Italian campaign (1796-1797) was still strong on the thoughts of the writer. How does the removal or the destruction of single artistic masterpieces — Goethe asks — affect our appreciation of art as a whole? What is happening to that great "art body" (Kunstkörper) that is Italy? What can replace it? We will be able to answer such questions, Goethe adds, only when we know more about that new "art body" that is being formed in Paris — and "what other nationalities should do, especially the German and the English, in this time of dispersion and loss, as citizens of the world in spirit, a spirit manifested perhaps most purely in the arts and the sciences, to make generally available the numerous art treasures which have been casually distributed in these countries and thus help to constitute an ideal body of art which may happily compensate in time for what the present moment tears apart, if not tears away" ("was andere Nationen, besonders Deutsche und Engländer thun sollten, um, in dieser Zeit der Zerstreuung und des Verlustes, mit einem wahren, weltbürgerlichen Sinne, der vielleicht nirgends reiner als bei Künsten und Wissenschaften stattfinden kann, die mannichfaltigen Kunstschätze, die bei ihnen zerstreut niedergelegt sind, allgemein brauchbar zu machen, und einen idealen Kunstkörper bilden zu helfen, der uns mit der Zeit, für das was uns der gegenwärtige Augenblick zerreisst, wo nicht entreisst, vielleicht glücklich zu entschädigen vermöchte" — Werke, Weimar edn. [1896], XLVII, 31). Historical and structural at once, these words anticipated the day when works of art would again compose "ideal" and supranational wholes.

The systematic impetus that I have just discussed has origins that are primarily philosophical, scientific, or literary. Our second "romantic aspiration," the cosmopolitan or internationalist tendency, on the other hand, regards literature as a cause — in more than one sense of the word. It presupposes the vitality of nationalism, and responds to a broader style of living, to the experiences of political or social man. Rooted in the eighteenth century, it inspired not only the contemporaries of Goethe and Mazzini but the European pioneers of comparative literature as an academic discipline, from the days of Joseph Texte (1865-1900) to those of Fernand Baldensperger (1871-1958). Texte's main book was called Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme littéraire (1895); and it dealt with a topic that had attracted the interest of a number of his contemporaries. Brunetière had just written for the Revue des Deux Mondesa series of fighting articles on the idea of European literature. In 1890 Georg Brandes, as prestigious as he was controversial, had published the final volume of his lengthy history of European letters in the nineteenth century. The first volume bore the subtitle Emigrant Literature (Emigrantliteraturen), and Brandes underlined from the start (with reference to that cosmopolitan malgré lui, the political exile: Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and others), that a principal feature of European life during the Romantic period was the growth of internationalism: the impact of cultural events, the quick dissemination of literary movements, and the wide-ranging consequences of political developments. It should be remembered that Marx and Engels used the term "Weltliteratur" in the Communist Manifesto, while stressing that the intellectual production of single nations was becoming the common patrimony of all. In this sense the militant liberalism of the great Danish critic, like the antinationalism of Marx, was not as distant as one might think from the French academic attitudes that are my principal concern here. It became nearly a tradition for comparatistes to write of the brotherhood of nations, or of the need for a rebirth of "humanism." Joseph Texte had asked for "la formation, au point de vue littéraire, des Etats-Unis d'Europe," and had said, further: "ce ne sera pas trop peut-être, un jour ou l'autre, pour s'occuper d'histoire littéraire, d'avoir l'esprit international. Pour l'instant, il faut tâcher du moins d'avoir, suivant le mot de Mme. de Staël, dans notre étroite Europe, 'l'esprit européen.'" And in 1921, not long after the close of World War I, Baldensperger inaugurated the Revue de Literature Comparée with a ringing call for a new humanism based on the comparatist's search for universals beyond change and national differences, in order to "fournir à l'humanité disloquée un fonds moins précaire de valeurs communes."

Let us now turn to Taine, very briefly, and to the intellectual environment of the early comparatists. It is apparent that Taine's conception of the creative act is not as explicit as his view of the nature of art in general or of the relationship between an artistic work and the people or the conditions that produced it. To indicate a starting point and an end result, a cause and a product, is not the same as to show how the distance between the two is eliminated, that is to say, as to question the process of creation itself. We know that in Taine's thought every work of art is determined by a cause and should be explained by it; but, again, to state that A controls B is not to show how the artist proceeded from A to B. Yet this very absence of emphasis reveals the belief that the intervention of the artist is not as radical or as inventive as the term "creation" might lead one to think. That a slender "coefficient of creation" is a corollary to Taine's theory is actually made clear by his inclination for the biological metaphor: artistic criticism, he writes, is "une sorte de botanique appliquée, non aux plantes, mais aux oeuvres humaines." Spiritual events are, like physical ones, based on the principle of the conservation of matter, that is, of the transmutation or reorganization of certain elements into differently structured products. Thus the creation of a poem or a painting is analogous to the process of chemical transformation that accounts for the growth of a plant.

Taine himself was so occupied with the nonartistic causes of art that he tended to underestimate the importance of those artistic causes that are usually called influences. Art imitates nature directly, and only art indirectly. When faced with a coherent group of artists such as the Flemish painters, Taine would rather point out the national forms of existence or the historical conditions which they shared as causes than observe the trajectory of strictly pictorial influences. Two of Taine's fundamental assumptions are operative in such cases, and cannot be divided: first, the idea of causality, as applied to the arts; and second, Taine's own formulation and refinement of the Romantic concept of the "character" or the "soul" of nations. For Taine a civilization is an organic system, which he defines in ways that are compatible with a modern anthropologist's "holistic" or "structural" approach to distinct cultures: "ici, comme partout, s'applique la lot des dépendances mutuelles. Une civilisation fait corps, et ses parties se tiennent à la façon des parties d'un corps organique. ... Dans une civilisation la religion, la philosophic, la forme de famille, la littérature, les arts composent un système où tout changement local entraîne un changement général...." Thus in Taine the idea of cultural system and that of cultural causality do not necessarily clash, and the impact of one poet on another, indeed the dependence of one writer on another, simply demand to be inserted within a larger network of dependences. In what ways the "loi des dépendances mutuelles" did or could apply to the literatures of nations or to the processes of artistic creation was, of course, an arduous question for those contemporaries of Taine who were critics of art and, particularly, comparatists. Comparatists could scarcely refrain from seeking a reconciliation between, on the one hand, Taine's approach to the work of art as document and a more substantial concern with literature for its own sake; and, on the other, between his marked emphasis on national psychologies and the cosmopolitan or synthetic aspirations of the Romantic age. The contribution of Joseph Texte is clearly representative of this convergent phase.

Joseph Texte's reliance on the idea of "le génie des peuples" and on the biological analogy dominated his thought on the subject of international influences when he published his Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme littéraire (1895) and his Etudes de littérature européenne (1898). The later concentration of comparative literature on influences of one nation on another, while neglecting similar phenomena within a single country, was largely due to the early blending in such works of the romantic belief in national originalities and the evolutionary biology of the time. "Pour qu'il y ait lieu à des études du genre de celles dont nous parlons," explained Texte, "il faut en effet qu'une littérature soit conçue comme l'expression d'un état social déterminé, tribu, clan ou nation, dont elle représente les traditions, le génie et les espérances.... Il faut, en un mot, qu'elle constitue un genre bien déterminé dans la grande espèce de la littérature de l'humanité." Thus each single literature was regarded as a sort of subspecies, and comparative literature as the study of the cross-fertilizations and contacts between these subspecies, and of their evolution and mutations: "C'est qu'en effet, pas plus qu'un organisme animal, une littérature ou une nation ne grandissent isolées des nations et des littératures voisines. L'étude d'un être vivant est, en grande partie, l'étude des relations qui l'unissent aux êtres voisins et des influences de tous genres qui nous enveloppent comme d'un réseau invisible." Thus national and international attitudes were comfortably blended. Comparative literature, at this stage, was the fruit of a polite compromise.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• CONTENTS, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• 1. The Aesthetics of Literary Influence, pg. 17
• 2. A Note on Influences and Conventions, pg. 53
• 3. Toward a Definition of the Picaresque, pg. 71
• 4. On the Uses of Literary Genre, pg. 107
• 5. Genre and Counter genre: The Discovery of the Picaresque, pg. 135
• 6. Literature as Historical Contradiction: El Abencerraje, the Moorish Novel, and the Eclogue, pg. 159
• 7. Stylistics of Silence, pg. 221
• 8. On The Concept and Metaphor of Perspective, pg. 283
• 9. Literature as System, pg. 375
• 10. Second Thoughts on Literary Periods, pg. 420
• 11. On the Object of Literary Change, pg. 470
• INDEX, pg. 511