Literature as a Rule-Breaking Activity

IN 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre defined the philosophical school of existentialism as the ultimate form of humanism. The same could be said about literature: 'Literature is a humanism'. In the following I shall give a short account of why I consider this equation to be justified. I shall invoke numerous sources in support of my claim, which accounts for the high degree of intertextuality in the way the ensuing argument is presented.In the concluding paragraph of his comprehensive survey of almost five hundred years of French thought on what determines selfhood and otherness, Tzvetan Todorov sums up the merits and demerits of the universalist as well as relativist approaches in this debate, all the ramifications of which he analyses in the space of more than five hundred pages. Universalist claims, especially those propounded by Europe over centuries of colonialism in the course of which the Europeans have boasted of bringing the light of civilization to the benighted inferior races, have become unmasked as a narrow ethnocentrism: what passes for universal values amounts to nothing but the articulation of specific European prejudices and interests. This culminates in the emphatic charge: "Universalism is imperialism."1The natural consequence of this would be to resort to a more enlightened or liberal relativism, following the insight that "all our judgements are relative to a time, a place, a context."2 This would lead to a modern egalitarianism, in both historical and synchronic terms, that takes the following form: "The value of today is not that of yesterday, and everybody is a barbarian in the eyes of their neighbour." This kind of thinking, although it seemingly presents a solution to the more glaring problems posed by universalism, leads to a few obvious difficulties: apart from the fact that relativism thus formulated is tantamount to making another absolute truth-claim, which leads to obvious logical contradictions, there is one fundamental danger inherent in this line of thought: 'The relativist foregoes the unity of mankind."4 Once that unity has been given up, cultural and/or racial discrimination, which was thought to be the exclusive province of universalism, comes in by the back door: "The absence of unity permits exclusion, which can lead to extermination."5 Furthermore, relativism leads to the conundrum of its proponents' being incapable of denouncing any kind of injustice or act of violence for the simple reason that it proceeds from a culture other than their own. Todorov therefore postulates a new humanism, which, because of the inviability of both universalist and relativist definitions of humanity, can only be "a critical humanism. ,"6Wherein, then, does this consist? Todorov does align himself with relativism, insofar as he concedes that human beings are subject to historical and social conditioning factors, but then he makes a bid for his own kind of universalism:What every human being has in common with all others is the capacity for refusing such determining forces. [...] Freedom is the distinctive feature of mankind.7The human capacity for transcending the here and now thanks to the gift of the imagination forms an essential part of the freedom from any kind of determinism or programming that animals, for instance, are prone to. According to Sartre, the imagination is capable of intellectually freeing human beings from the constraints of reality via "the negation of the world." This "irrealizing function"9 takes the form of negating what is given, or, as Bachelard has put it, "by searching in reality for that which contradicts our previous knowledge, the new experience says no to the old experience."10This negation of commonly held assumptions about reality is what literature is all about, and it is my contention that literature is the most relevant manifestation of the anthropological need human beings have for exceeding the limitations of their circumstances. The confrontation of the institutionalized positiveness of the world such as it is with the essential negativity of literature is achieved through what Hans Robert Jauss has termed aesthetic experience, which suspends our pragmatic involvement with the world especially with regard to the temporal dimensions of present, past, and future:[Aesthetic experience] permits us to 'see anew', and due to this unveiling fonction it grants us the enjoyment of fulfilled presence, it leads us into the realm of fantasy and thereby suspends the constraints of time; it anticipates future experiences and thus opens up new possibilities of action; it allows us to recognize that which has passed or been repressed, in the process preserving time that had been lost. …