Literature for what purpose?

From the outset, the object intrigues. The cover photograph shows an abandoned building on a beach, by the sea, perhaps an old seaside establishment, like a bar-restaurant on stilts. The railings of the exterior stairs are rusty, like the structure of an old pergola that occupies the entire roof terrace. Against the blue of the sky stand out in red and white the name of the author and the title of the book: Explore. Literary Investigations. A strange outfit for a work of literary criticism, signed by a young specialist in medieval literature, member of the French School of Rome. Explore? It took us a while to understand that it was the imperative of the verb to explore: Explore! Or rather, it was confused with its English homograph and homonym, “explore”. Who knows why: this abandoned building on the edge of the beach, access to which seems prohibited by a fence (but we can make out, on the first floor, between pilasters drowned in shadow, the silhouette of a man), this disused building, we associated it with the name of the collection, at the bottom right of the cover: “ Forbidden beach “. Explore the forbidden beach? “Forbidden Beach” is nevertheless the name of a “collection of poetics, in the broad sense”, directed since 2010 by the poet and theoretician Christophe Hanna, whose texts “explore the possibility of new modes of operation and social inscription for objects of creation”. To explore, therefore: we have finally understood. We can begin.

Literature in exercises

The book unfolds a series of exercises, seven in total, from a “portrait of the reader as an ethnographer” to “literature for real”. Seven exercises, and not seven chapters, because it will often be a question of starting the same thing again, following a different path. Each exercise is addressed to the reader, in the second person singular and often in the imperative: “Imagine”, “Remember”, “Do you see”… Sports metaphors are omnipresent: preparatory warm-up, stretching, “remobilizing warm-up”, slimming cure, session (of sport, not psychoanalysis), up to the last exercise where it is frankly a question of running, commitment, effort, asceticism, solitude, surpassing oneself, escape. Literary theory in the era of generalized coaching? In 2012, Joshua Landy, professor of comparative literature at Stanford, had proposed in How to Do Things with Fictions to invest literature—especially the most difficult fictional texts—as a training ground capable of strengthening and expanding our cognitive capacities. The reader who confronts the most resistant texts will come back better equipped, more competent. To the “ethical turn” in literary criticism, which insists above all on the formative power of works and on the forms of moral experience permitted by frequenting fictional worlds, J. Landy opposed a pragmatics of literary reading entirely focused on the mental exercise of deciphering and interpretation. It was above all a question of freeing the teaching of literature from the obsession with the message of the text in order to insist on the cognitive value of the inseparably formal and spiritual experience of reading a text, even paradoxical, immoral, even immoralist, contradictory, plurivocal.

The literary coaching offered by Florent Coste is not — only — cognitive. Explore is a political book on contemporary literature and literary theory:

This book asks how literature, and with it literary theory, could create politics, that is, re-engage us in the public space with greater capacities for action. (p. 14)

It is a question of breaking with a whole series of reading habits, of disciplinary “cramps”, to move towards a “pragmatics of literature”, a use of literature open to the world, which involves, on the one hand, a revaluation of the reader and, on the other hand, a reinscription of literature in “civil society”, and, subsequently, of literary studies in the social sciences.

Against Literary Hermeneutics

This concern for breaking down barriers is not unique to Florent Coste: many works in recent years have sought to take literary studies out of the confined domain of interpreting canonical texts. The reflections already mentioned on the ethical scope of literary experience offer a possible way of opening literary criticism to moral philosophy, based on an understanding of reading literature as a conceptual, intellectual, affective and sensitive adventure. In her 2016 book, Hélène Merlin proposed Reading in the Wolf’s Mouth a “transitional” approach to literature, as what allows us to weave links “for us”, and to make the link “between intimacy in its inviolable nature and the horizon of the common”. The horizon of the common, here, the possibility of preserving a common world situates the question of the transmission and transmissibility of works as a political question. In Marielle Macé’s latest works, it is still literature that becomes the teacher of a sharp attention to the world, to the plurality of commitments and forms of life. Stylistics, as knowledge of form, then proposes itself as a critical tool for the social sciences.

If Florent Coste dialogues with all these works, the radicality of his gesture is largely due to a strong refusal of the mode of reading that dominates any “literary” approach to literature, even the most concerned with openness to questioning the world as it is: a reading of interpretation, a hermeneutics that poses the text as an enigma to be deciphered, meaning to be discovered, deployed and redeployed, reinvented or transmitted. Hermeneutic strategies, from the most closed-in philological erudition to the multiple forms of re-enactment in the present of the production of meaning, have in common the closing of the text on itself, and of making it a pretext for more or less virtuoso exercises. Florent Coste devotes vigorous pages to the critical description of the most anchored habits of literary studies (designated as so many “cramps” and “theoretical fetishes”): tautological categorizations (what do we say when we designate a text as “romantic”), mythology of authorial intentions and interiority (“but who has ever seen the inside of a text?”, p. 47), and above all the religion of explanation and textual commentary (a “methodological drug with hallucinatory effects”, p. 101), which closes the text on itself, cuts it into pieces good for commentary, separates it from other possible, living uses, not prescribed in advance.

To “romantic-formalist intransitivity”, to commentary, to interpretation, Florent Coste opposes field practices: the description of what we do, we, multiple and unequally qualified readers, with what we read. How does the literary work “organize, inflect, configure” the social world? Florent Coste thus defines a program of pragmatic anthropology of literature, attentive “to the social relations that are organized around literary works and that the latter rearticulate” (p. 59). Such knowledge is not interested in the literary work as a closed opus, but in the work of literature as modus operandi (pp. 60 and 386), at work in the world where it is read, appropriated, put into play, shared. This proposition is not only valuable for our present: it is also an appeal to history, which is responsible for “reterritorializing” the works of the past in the “cultural networks that gave them life and where they developed their performativity” (p. 120). Florent Coste here very convincingly underlines how a certain “sense of literature” (the one he criticizes) condemns our questions about texts of the past to anachronism. “The text set in the literary absolute and delivered to us by the free and infinite play of decontextualizing commentary” (p. 120), or, to formulate it in other terms, the construction of a text in classics, is a way of refusing to open literary studies to history or historical anthropology. Certainly, literary history produces knowledge of contexts, but this only reproduces, replays, in a projection towards the past, an ahistorical division never questioned between the text and its exterior. But what do we know about the cultural relevance of this division? Who produced it? Who transmits it? We should therefore reverse the terms and look for how each text produces its contexts, draws them and shapes them (p. 91). It is indeed the effectiveness of literature in the world, present or past, that we must explore, observe, map, and describe.

Creating politics, re-engaging letters

But Florent Coste’s political program goes beyond this call for enriched attention to the uses of texts, in line with the theories of ” reader-response » (which insisted on the reader’s part in the formation of meaning) and the history and sociology of reading practices. The program he proposes is not that of a survey – moreover just outlined – of the ways of reading and acting with texts (within which one could moreover reverse the commentary, or the explanation, because it is indeed a certain way of doing something with a text). What interests him are these points where literature itself is made – and is used – as “an organ of knowledge, an instrument of exploration, inquiry, elucidation and investigation of reality”. In language and with language: the literature that concerns Florent Coste is that which produces a critical knowledge on ordinary language, which “works to construct or change our common language games”, which thwarts the processes of domination at work in language. It is at this point, therefore, that the alliance between literary studies and social sciences can be formed. If literature can become an investigator of the social in language, if it is up to it to invent, in language, “practices of subversion”, and literary theory must be what “accounts for it, makes it possible, by producing a theoretical atmosphere specific to its readability, its legibility, its recognition” (p. 419). It is up to it to break the straitjacket of textual explanation, of useless categorizations, “to ensure the promotion of the multiple figures of the reader”, to extend research beyond the usual canons, to rethink the history of literature, to reveal “the multiple effectivities” of literature, “in contact with other graphic, verbal or social productions”, to be interested in the world of writing in its broad sense, etc.

Coming out of this book with its unexpected form, by turns assertive, prescriptive, injunctive, programmatic, certainly invigorating, we say to ourselves that this is like the reformulation of what literature and literary theory would be today. engaged. However, we find ourselves regretting that Florent Coste is a runner who is so often in a hurry — and so quickly crosses landscapes where we would have liked him to stop, as a walker: those of the rediscovered territories of ancient literature, or of new forms of literary investigation, in Éric Chauvier or Nathalie Quintane for example. Let us bet that this program carries the promise of other books with more leisurely strides and perhaps more welcoming to readers resistant to injunctions.