Modern literature has put an end to the division between the heroic and the common. Writers like Flaubert or Conrad refused to grant privilege to forms of life deemed superior. They thus gave birth, J. Rancière tells us, to a specific form of equality, that of sentences.
The latest work by Jacques Rancière, The lost thread. Essays on Modern Fictionsets itself the ambition of identifying what makes modern literature specific, as it is born from a transformation of the regime of writing: this is in fact no longer founded, at least under its modern form, on the representative logic resulting from Aristotle’s poetics. On the contrary, it is based on the principle of the strict equivalence of the subjects represented (pp. 23-24 and 84-85), contrary to the traditional hierarchy of genres referring to a sharing of the sensible between superior men and inferior men. : there would thus be on one side active humanity dedicated to noble tasks and responsible for a representation highlighting its heroic acts ; on the other, all of common humanity busy ensuring the daily reproduction of life from the sole point of view of material needs, and which is not considered worthy of composing a subject of fiction, except for purposes of mockery in the framework of comedies (pp. 22-24 and 69).
Modern fiction: the primacy given to ordinary life
There “ literary democracy » refers precisely to a new sharing of the sensible which disrupts the distinction between pure fiction and ordinary life, allowing the insignificance of the ordinary fabric of daily existence to be described in the form of paintings worth in themselves (pp. 29-30 and 45-48), and highlighting the capacities of individuals capable of also experiencing the great passions which were previously the preserve of a privileged category of human beings (pp. 20 and 26). “ The equality specific to new fiction, writes Rancière, belongs to this redistribution of forms of sensitive experience in which the forms of worker emancipation also participate or the multiplicity of rebellions which attack the traditional hierarchy of forms of life » (p. 30). The paradox that Jacques Rancière also highlights is due to the fact that these are the writers considered in general, particularly from the point of view of Marxist criticism, as politically reactionary – Flaubert or Baudelaire for example, insofar as they defend a aristocratic conception of art for art’s sake » – who worked to transform the traditional fictional order, by blurring the strict division between what is worthy of being represented and what cannot claim any legitimate title to make itself visible (p. 91-92 and 95-96).
The tradition stemming from Aristotle conferred on the poet the function of representing what took place, not really, but in the order of fiction, as probable or necessary. However, according to Aristotle (Poetics, 9), poetic fiction is superior on a philosophical level to the historical chronicle in that it represents things with reference to the universal: what the hero must necessarily Or probably having said, even if he didn’t really said. In contrast, the chronicle is limited to identifying the event, certainly in its reality, but whose status remains sub-ontological, because it is particular and burdened by contingency: the historical event designates what happened. really past, but which ultimately could have happened quite differently, because it is linked to circumstances and therefore to chance. In epic or tragic fiction, on the contrary, we do not encounter any chance, the plot is constructed in such a way that the events follow one another until the final outcome according to a necessary system of causes and effects which make the story intelligible ( pp. 10, 21 and 101). Tragedy is, in such a perspective, the development of a plot (“ the representation of an action carried out to completion “, says Aristotle, Poetic7) which has a beginning, a middle and an end, the sequence between these different moments takes place in a necessary way, and not by virtue of chance – the tragedy itself constituting an organism structured according to strict rules, and thus forming a completed totality (p. 21).
The characteristic of modern literature would have been, according to Rancière, to question this binary division between (poetic) fiction and (historical) reality, and to refute the principle of the superiority of the fictional as a domain of necessity. and universality on reality as a domain of particularity and contingency. As a result, the general regime of literature supplants the classic canon of Belles-lettres, and the privilege of representation is gradually undone – hence the idea that literature, as a modern regime of poetic speech, represents nothing strictly speaking, as attested by Flaubert’s project of writing a “ book about nothing » – by this we must mean a book which would hold up solely by the internal force of its style (pp. 34 and 60-61). Any subject being therefore worthy of being represented, there is no longer, strictly speaking, as in Aristotle (Poetic4 and 5) of hierarchy from which we could classify the genres of poetic fiction in that they represent noble actions and characters (epic, tragedy), or conversely common (comedy): we enter here in a regime of generalized equivalence, where within the sensible, all signs take the same value – Flaubert describes for example in Madame Bovarythe meeting between Emma and Rodolphe, and the birth of her love for him, not as the outcome of a rational process where a bundle of means is articulated for the purposes of mutual seduction, but as what is born at the way of a surprise, according to the chance of unimportant sensitive events (the heat of summer, a scent of vanilla, the clamor of voices, the lowing of oxen, the memory of older romantic desires transfigured by the present situation…), which leads, without this being controlled by an underlying logic, to this “ that one hand – his – abandons itself to another hand – that of the seducer » (p. 33).
The heroism of anonymous existences
What counts now is no longer the action oriented towards a rationally determined end, but the contingent manifestation of sensitive micro-events occurring in an impersonal mode, and affecting the psyche of the characters (p. 32-34, 38-39, 56-60). Modern fiction does not so much show us a myriad of sensitive events refracted through the psychological intimacy of the characters as the texture of a world made of the interweaving of singular experiences, none of which is strictly speaking privileged (p. 27 and 63), in the sense that it would form the substrate of an action oriented towards a noble goal, transcending the insignificance of an ordinary repetitive life dedicated to accomplishment mind-numbingly doing the same tasks. The recognized capacity of anyone to live an existence that their social identity prohibited them from living in principle goes hand in hand with the collapse of a model of fiction where the norms in terms of representation (primacy of the whole over the part, rational arrangement of causes and effects in particular) echoed the principle of hierarchization of classes of beings and the forms of experience which are naturally linked to them (p. 22, 24, 27, 69 and 72). Hence the fragmentation of the novelistic plot into a succession of scenes linked to each other in such an artificial way that it no longer allows us to think of the fiction from the angle of the organized totality, where the details are subordinated to the logic of an intrigue naturally led to its completion (p. 21 and 62). The refusal to grant a privilege to a particular form of life or to a particular form of experience implies that the novelist is henceforth incapable of differentiating the universe of thoughts or feelings, or even simple sensory impressions, and the order of rational action, contrary to the norms of traditional poetics which granted a privilege to the very fact of the character of acting: hence this intertwining, for example in Flaubert, Keats, Conrad, or Woolf of the most imperceptible affects and the most rational, or the alliance of the most ethereal reverie disconnected from any desire to take action and the most prosaic action entirely carried by the project of an effective transformation of reality (p. 30-32, 42 , 79-80, 86, 101, 104-105). Hence now romantic works, which read like “ erratic stories “, Or “ monsters without a backbone », to take up the criticisms made of Flaubert by his contemporaries (p. 8).
The importance given by Flaubert to the psychological considerations on the intimacy of Emma Bovary also explains why he, in a letter to Louis Bouilhet, was worried about the disproportion that his novel risked taking, with a section devoted to thoughts and affects which is disproportionately long compared to that devoted to the adventures themselves (p. 8). It is undoubtedly in such disproportion that we can most perfectly read the signs of the literary democracy which was born according to Rancière at the turn of the 1840s. That said, the literary democracy which blossomed in the novels of Gustave Flaubert ( p. 7-36) and the theater of Victor Hugo (p. 113-119), or in the poetry of Keats (p. 73-93) and that of Baudelaire (p. 94-112), and which was later confirmed by Joseph Conrad (pp. 37-55) and Virginia Woolf (p. 56-72), should not be understood in a directly political sense as reflecting the aspirations of the modern masses to emancipation (p. 30). What such a literary democracy implements is a very specific form of equality, which in a certain way precedes and makes political-social equality possible: “ equality of sentences ”, or more precisely, according to Rancière, “ the egalitarian power of common breathing which animates the multitude of sensitive events » (p. 34). All the strength and interest of Jacques Rancière’s book ultimately lies in the fact that it manages to restore the sensitive experience lived by anonymous existences, dedicated to weaving the common from words read in books which do not relate to them. were not intended (p. 28, 32 and 69).