The work of the Italian literary critic is finally accessible in French thanks to the publication of Objects obsueets dans l’imagination littéraire. This collection, whose methods combine the virtues of the telescope with the charms of the microscope, describes literature as the privileged place for the return of the repressed and celebrates the marriage of psychoanalysis and history.
The critical work of Francesco Orlando, the recently deceased great master of transalpine literary theory, remains little translated and largely ignored. Several reasons for this: its heterodox Freudianism, hardly compatible with the psychological tradition And the Lacanism of the “ textanalysis » French style ; the gap claimed by her, too, with the paradigms and schools dominating the post-structuralist academic field (literary history, narratology, thematic criticism…) ; its sophistication and technicality, finally, which make it as attractive as it is unwieldy. This volume fortunately repairs this neglect and constitutes, in the current editorial landscape, a critical sum of rare originality, scope and rigor.
His thesis ? Literature constitutes the privileged place of a “ return of the repressed » (p. 22), dedicated to “ contradict, in its imaginary space, the order of reality » (p. 24). His method ? To uncover what, in the works, in texts understood as photographic negatives, resists And testifies (SO) of the story. Now it is precisely in things, in the literary representation of things that Orlando finds material to support this point of view. “ Everything, wrote Engels about Western utilitarianism and its capitalist graft, was summoned to justify its existence before the court of reason, or else to renounce existence “. Hence, according to the Italian critic, the emphasis placed – in the theater, in the novel, in poetry – on the other side of the decor: on the order of lacunar. On these escaping rejects, since the end of the XVIIIe century, to the surrounding commodification. Literary space then appears like a vast dump, like “ picked up » (p. 15) or “ clearance (allowing) the return of the antifunctional repressed » (p. 36).
The title of the work, reductive (“ objects obsolete “) then blurred (“ imagination literary “), does not do justice to the wedding thus celebrated between psychoanalysis and history. The theoretical connections that they presuppose and that they construct, these marriages, are also left in the shadows: against the placing of things under supervision, does modernity precisely not consecrate, under the pen of a W . Benjamin conspicuous by his absence, the reign of “ what remains » ? Here we should reconstitute the intellectual galaxy at work between the lines, rich in particular in the work of the Russian formalist V. Chklovsky (for whom art reveals and awakens what life automates and instrumentalizes) or J. Baudrillard (for whom functionality is another name for capitalism) ; and do the archeology of this rehabilitation – the praise of the residual – having crossed the XXe Freudo-Marxist century… It is with regard to his techniques of critical investigation, no less singular, that the author is more prolix. Methods combining the virtues of the telescope with the charms of the microscope.
The demonstration first resembles, to parody the incipit of Capitalhas “ a huge pile of goods “… The work resembles its object and aligns one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred micro-readings with virtuoso precision, crossing eras, countries and genres, reconciling the minors and the authors more “ expected » (Hoffmann, Dickens, Flaubert, Pérec…). Not burdening himself with any critical filter or footnote, re-translating the texts examined himself (Russian literature aside), Orlando claims a culture that is fundamentally empirical and is thus part of the scholarly, humanist, eminently European lineage of Curtius, Auerbach and Spitzer. A rhetoric of chance and discovery thus governs this bric-a-brac, presented in a genetic way, “ by candlelight » (p. 88): refusing preconceived schematizations, preferring induction to deduction, component with the chances of his intellectual research and noting family resemblances, the author says he accepts as categories only those resulting from his reading operations, categories “ nuanced, interfering or polarized » (p. 112).
Because there are categories: these micro-readings lead to or justify, along the way, the constitution of a “ semantic tree » which, in itself, appearing in the geometric middle of the work, explains its immense interest. There are grouped and articulated the twelve possible images of the object in literature, depending for example on whether it is perceived collectively or individually, depending on whether it manifests itself in a natural or supernatural setting, in a serious or comical, exemplary way. or not, etc. Twelve pictures possible – THE “ solemn-monitory “, THE “ crude-grotesque “, THE “ venerable-regressive “, THE “ magical-supersitious “, THE “ sterile-harmful »… – as they result empirically from the analyzes previously carried out And such as they are suitable for the “ taxonomic demon » or “ combinatorial vertigo » so often practiced and ironized by Genette. Therein lies the singularity of this “ late structuralist exercise » (p. 122 and 327), as resolutely punctilious as it is crudely theoretical.
History remains to be made, in matters of literary criticism, of the relationship between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geometry. As such, the conceptual generation exposed just now, twice sophisticated, deserves attention. This, even if confronted with these thick, quivering and hesitant texts, markers of XXe century according to Orlando, “ in which the classificatory operation, far from being defeated, finds a goal, and which even makes its final use strategic » (p. 136). May the reader not look for any toolbox: the work and its methods seduce more than they serve (notwithstanding its rich indexes), as the oppositions retained remain subjective and random. Some may regret, in addition to the prohibitive cost of this sum, its very conjectural apprehension of the supposed historical dividing line (around 1789). Also lacking is any attention paid, ultimately, to literary writing itself, to the effects of this stylization inseparable from thematic representations in a text. Above all, the angles of view adopted and the directions taken by Orlando in his classification – favoring the inscription of things in time, to the detriment of their relationship to reality (such as “ mimesis operators ), their narrative function or their place in the scale of values at work in a writer.
But to please and to instruct, must we always convince? ?