Ganging up
Christine Brooke-Rose Paris At a literary dinner in London last year, the conversation was wholly about who had reviewed what where. Unable to express an opinion when asked, I pleaded ignorance, explaining that in my job here it was difficult enough to keep up with all that has been happening since Structuralism. `Oh,' said a woman novelist, 'is Structuralism over ? Oh, good!' The notion that a type of investigation, having progressed, need no longer be bothered about, seems downright funny to me.
Structuralism, in linguistics, was 'over' with the advent of Chomsky, some twenty years ago, although it was taken up by Levi-Strauss in anthropology, by Lacan in psycho-analysis, and by Barthes in literature, who caused a furore in academic circles at the time. In the early sixties, the review Tel Que./ was founded by Philipe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, opening its pages to Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Derrida, Faye, and of course to many poets and novelists from the nouveau roman (the 'new novel') onwards (Barthes having rather oddly annexed the nouveau roman to Structuralism, with which it had nothing to do). All this, as always in France, was highly politicised, language being analysed in Marxist terms of exchange and subversion, so that Sollers could tell me recently, with absolute conviction, that 'nous avons fait la revolution'.
Since then, much has happened, and Tel Quel has often given the impression, from the outside, of being indeed, as one English literary editor put it to me in 1971, 'a new theology' ('C'est vrai', says Sollers, but proudly). Anyone who disagreed seemed excommunicated or at least went off slamming the doors, often starting reviews of their own, rather than discussing within the review : it would take 500 pages, says Sollers, the more 'imitations' there are, the more it serves us.
In fact the situation is more complex, reflecting genuine divergences. Todorov, Genette and Helene Cixous founded Poetique, an international and chiefly university forum on literary theory, and Helene Cixous has since started her own series of feminist publications. Jean-Pierre Faye, who had been chiefly responsible for the interest in the Russian Formalists (translated by Todorov), started his own review Change, in 1968, one of its first numbers being devoted to the Prague Circle which, via Roman Jakobson, had led to Chomsky and the linguistic revolution of transformational grammar. All this may seem very strange to an English reader brought up on the New Criticism et seq.,
all the more so since the same names (Mallarme, Lautreamont, Breton and others) are taken up by the different groups, with different analyses.
A German called Sieburg once wrote a book, in the thirties, called Dieu est-il francais?, imbued with admiration for France but also bringing out the curious capacity of the French for assuming, not only that all French good ideas are universal but that all other good ideas are French. During all the years of the New Criticism, for example, the French were still involved with nineteenth-century criticism; they just didn't want to know. Then they had their revolution, through Structuralism—with curious side-effects, such as the discovery of 'polysemie', in the sixties, as if Empson (1930, 1948) had never written. And now it's the English who don't want to know.
But Structuralism is not French; it is Slav, then American. And one of the troubles with revolution, as opposed to evolution, is its tendency to become institutionalised. So the French Structuralists got stuck : a Structuralist grammar is ultimately a typology, semiology, incapable of 'generating' forms as a transformational grammar generates an infinite number of sentences and accounts for creativity in native speakers. Structuralist analysis, however useful in other ways not to be ignored, ceases to be a grammar— hence Barthes' later statement : 'there is no grammar of narrative'.
In the universities and in certain literary circles, many have remained within the bounds of traditional criticism, and even the work of Barthes is frowned on. Others have stayed with Structuralism (Greimas, Bremond, Todorov, for example), exploring texts as far as it will take them. Others still have adopted Derridean philosophy, or Lacanian analysis, or Klossovsky, Deleuze, Lyotard and so on.
Barthes himself has withdrawn into a highly individualistic, but always elegant, position, exploring sociological, psychoanalytical and rhetorical encodings in texts (in S/Z), and stressing the role of the reader, by discussing—as for instance in Le Plaisir du Texte—la jouissance—which I gather has been translated as 'bliss', thus suppressing the very specific sexual connotation and making him sound like Longinus on the Sublime. Julia Kristeva, plunged in an intricate semiotics of her own, has reversed many concepts, notably that of causality and that of languelparole, language being no longer Saussure's 'treasury' from which one fetches up words, like currency, but a continually expanding treasure, produced by the practice of writing. Her husband Sollers, editor of Tel Quel, himself an interesting practitioner and polemicist on literature, has taken up Joyce, Burroughs and other writers who subvert language, subversion being of course a revolutionary activity.
Yet ultimately the position of Tel Quel is an individualistic one, literature being now in perpetual crisis: the 'literary series' is autonomous with regard to the 'political series', two parallel lines which touch only in infinity (Kristeva admitted to me that this also produces 'un moment de tristesse1. To join them leads to totalitarianism, and the real cultural revolution is to 'creuser le singulier'. Change, in particular, wages an incessant war against these 'misconceptions'. For Jean-Pierre Faye, whose monumental work on totalitarian discourse reveals, precisely, the deep structures underlying many of Hitler's or Goebbels or Himmler's statements, Tel Quel 15 merely trendy: first Communism, then Maoism, now 'neo-Surrealism', psychoanalysis, drugs, mysticism (Julia Kristeva called Mme Blavatsky in the latest number).
Leaving aside these lapses of tone, regally ignored by Tel Quel, I find Change extremely exciting, despite its occasionallY extravagant claims for itself (from which no one is exempt in Paris). It has left Structuralism and Semiology far behind, and is now exploring transformationalisM and its highly experimental (and difficult) application to literary forms. It has published the work of, and interviews with, Morris Halle and Sam J. Kayser on deep structures in poetry and especially metre, as well as that of Jacques Roubaud (Poet and mathematician), Jean Paris, Sam Levin, Ann Banfield and the extraordinarilY bright Mitsou Ronat who is waging her own war on the 'regressive' (Structuralistic) mess of generative semantics (as opposed to generative grammar or syntax). Change sets these investigations in an international context, where they belong, and it is in touch with people all over the world: except, of course, England where, Faye tells me, there are 'no echoes', though he was there recently—invited by a Czech. He has also published Chomsky's Blood Baths, and the whole account of its suppression in the U.S.
I have concentrated on these two revieWs (or 'gangs') because they are the ones, with Patique, that interest me most, but there are many others, representing everY tendency: the old NRF, L'Homme, Esprit., Minuit, Digraphe, Dialectiques, Communfr cations, and so on. One of the most livelY aspects of France is, precisely, this vast forum for discussion. It is the publishing houses which usually finance the review.s, even, like Seuil, rival ones (a good capitalist principle which Sollers is proud to exploit); And the reviews sell, except, in this time °I crisis, the very traditional ones; if 11_„„c)t outright, always eventually (between 40ov. and 8000 per number), both in France and abroad. Some years ago I asked an English. publisher to back such a review, which hoped to edit with Frank Kermode, to be called, at the time, Paradigm (or, privatelY, in a skittish mood, The Franker Mode), bl-1! after some initial interest the publisher 0.1 cold feet. Hence there is no forum 111,. England, and hence the parochialism °I,7 English literary life: Is Structuralism oYer Oh good.
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