The inaugural lesson of Roger Chartier at the Collège de France highlights, at the time of digitization, the link between the history of written cultures and that of reading and transmission practices.
The inaugural lesson of his pulpit “ Writing and cultures written in modern Europe »Pronounced on October 11 by Roger Chartier became a small book entitled Listen to the dead with your eyes. This beautiful title exalts, not without melancholy, the strength of resurrection of reading and the power of transmission of the writing. He also recalls that the history of written cultures is not separable from that of reading practices, that there is therefore no interpretation of cultural inheritances which holds without a history of differentiated appropriations from writing and forms of its transmission.
No history of books, history of texts, history of written culture without history of deciphering, uses, understanding: no one has said it better, demonstrated and taught than Roger Chartier in his seminar of the School of High Studies in Social Sciences. This is why, if his lesson begins, according to use, with a tribute to Henri-Jean Martin, founder of the discipline “ Book History “, To Donald Mackenzie, whose sociology of the texts was based on the requirement of never separating” the historical understanding of the writings of the morphological description of the objects which carry them “, To Armando Petrucci, whose work on the Scriptures, whether engraved on the stone, inscribed on paper, parchment or wood, manuscript or printed,” transformed our understanding of written cultures that have succeeded each other in the very long duration of Western history “, It is also the achievements of his own work that he is led to evoke with discretion and elegance.
An inaugural lesson at the Collège de France announces a teaching program. It is also a moment of reflection on a course and the opportunity to assert not only scientific positions, supported by a long experience of research, but also of convictions which make intellectual work join, the place held in a professional environment, civic commitments. This is the main issue of an eloquence exercise where the speaker also knows that he is measured by illustrious predecessors. Roger Chartier’s lesson is thus part of a series which is not so much that of the collection published jointly by the college and Fayard, in which it carries the number 195, after “ Living revolutions ” And “ Cognitive neuroscience revolutions », That of his historian predecessors and great figures very present in his work, like Foucault or Bourdieu. There “ Lesson on the lesson “From the latter also proposed a model of reflexivity which could encourage us to do a” analysis “ chartherist »D ‘Listen to the dead with your eyes. This would suppose for example, among other analyzes, to seek forms of oral performance in the published text, to scrutinize the movements of meaning that produced the transition to writing, or to interpret the two opening sentences “ “Listen to the dead with your eyes” (“Escachar a los muertos con los ojos“). This line from Quevedo comes to my mind when inaugurating a teaching devoted to the roles of the writing in the European Scriptures between the end of the Middle Ages and our present », Both in relation to cultural repertoires mobilized explicitly or implicitly as well as to the temporality of the passage of oral writing (from the manuscript, it is imagined, carefully prepared for the pronounced lesson) then from oral to writing (from lesson to the book, with a certain type of layout, a typography, a format etc.) which makes culturally significant as a rhetorical point comes to mind when inaugurating ».
The program is exposed after an explanation of the title of the pulpit which justifies each of the terms and underlines how the history of the recourse to writing characterizes the major developments which, in Western societies, define the first modernity, from the Renaissance: construction of the state of justice and finance (with its bureaucraties, its archives, its production of information and propaganda), dissemination and conceptualization of religious experiences (with its literate internalization of beliefs and its countless controversies), “ civilization trial (With its new behavior standards taught by moralists and pedagogues), the emergence of a public sphere. Each of the projected surveys crosses the history of these great changes and is ordered around net questions that Roger Chartier formula to clarify the orientation of the issues and the contours of the objects studied: what is a book ? What is an author ? What is a text ? What authority for writing ? The answers will come in a long history of the metaphors of the book, announced as a project, by the study of writings in collaboration or that of conflicts established around the proper name and the paternity of the texts. Each question makes it possible to rethink and reformulate – to rebuild historically – the fundamental problem of double nature, material and intangible, written and, in particular, of the book, from which takes meaning the tension between sustainable and ephemeral, between inscription and erasure, between memory and oblivion, tension whose innumerable written representations – read, declared, sung, etc. – Trace the constantly recomposed figure of the report of written culture in time.
“” The affirmed or disputed authority of the writing, the mobility of the meaning, the collective production of the text “Draw the problematic frameworks of a research that claims the crossing of the history of book, textual criticism, cultural sociology. It is this crossing that leads the historian not to separate a priori The study of “ texts without qualities, pragmatic and practices »From that of inhabited works” by the strange power to make you dream, to give to think, or to arouse desire », What we have designated since the end of XVIIe century by the term “ literature ». That said, a distinction is essential. If with Borges – a figure which, for Chartier, opens the territories of the historicization of the dream, of thought as aesthetic, and of literary desire – we consider that “ Everyone can and must take their share in examining these facts which give certain texts, and not everyone, the perpetuated force of enchantment », It remains to build the history of literary texts whose power of enchantment has been lost or which have been conceived and read in a completely different thought and expectation than that of enchantment.
Does enchantment resist historicization ? Is it, in various ways, the stable indicator of the capacity of a text to cross time ? Roger Chartier is looking for answers to these questions at Cervantes and Shakespeare, two giants whose work was played out of spatial and temporal borders. He even organizes their meeting from the meticulous analysis of the lost and legendary play of Shakespeare Cardeniowhich gives him material to deal with the reception of works through a practice of re -use (that of Don Quixote Hence the history of unhappy loves of Cardenio is extracted), from successive appropriations of the same text, from the ultimate relationship to the works of the works of XVIe And XVIIe centuries, Shakespeare being both carefully published and very freely adapted throughout the XVIIIe century (and even XIXe). It is also a question, in an additional spiral tower, of studying how these authors introduced in their texts, with realism or as a metaphor, the materiality of the writings, ordinary or not, and makes room for wax tablets, printing presses, handwriting, embroidered and woven entries, and thus to grasp, by a return to the representations of the materiality of written productions, these “ facts “Who, as the historian experiences here,” give certain texts and not everyone the perpetuated strength of enchantment ».
The objective that Roger Chartier sets by opening his teaching at the Collège de France is also to “ Identify the sediments of written culture to understand more precisely the mutations which affect it in the present ». Because it is clear in his eyes that the tidal wave of digital textuality represents a major break in the history of written culture: radical transformation of the supports of writing, techniques of its reproduction and its dissemination, of the ways of reading: “ Such simultaneity is unprecedented in the history of humanity, he writes ». It thus indicates the urgency and the stake of a historian work to understand the ruptures of the present, not at the service of nostalgic or denunciating commemorations, but of an integrated intelligibility of the past, in “ the critical lucidity required by our uncertainties and concerns ». With this particularity that written culture, the object of this story, is also the instrument of such critical lucidity.