The Singularity of Literature by Attridge Derek;

Author:Attridge, Derek;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Intimacy and Strangeness

In discussing the question of the literary in terms of otherness and singularity, I have tended to stress the element of unfamiliarity, resistance, and difficulty in our reading of works of literature. My approach has perhaps been the dominant one in the Western tradition; it could be said to embrace Aristotle on the appropriate style for poetry, Longinus and the many eighteenth-century and later attempts to develop a theory of the sublime, Vasari’s account of distinguished artists, much Romantic criticism, Freud and most of those influenced by him, and a large swathe of modernist and postmodern criticism. Nevertheless, there is also a long tradition of representing literary experience in very different terms, summed up nicely in the title of Wayne Booth’s book on the ethics of fiction, The Company We Keep. Booth gives several examples of the metaphor of the book or author as friend from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see his Chapter 6, “Implied Authors as Friends and Pretenders”), and it would not be difficult to find equivalent statements from earlier periods.

Some of this anthropomorphic enthusiasm has little to do with literature as such: it has been felt for writers of all kinds of text, and reflects a certain astonishment at the capacity of language to suggest a human personality through the apparently passionless medium of print. But it does serve as a useful reminder of the doubleness of the literary experience. We have seen that the inventive singularity of a work or a body of work may produce a sense of recognition and even intimacy. One of the pleasures of coming to know a singular oeuvre well is the feeling of familiarity we obtain when we read a work that has all the hallmarks of the author in question: characteristic ways of handling syntax and rhythm, immediately recognizable similes, well-known devices of plot, and so on.

Let me make it clear once more that the “otherness” I am positing as central to the experience of the literary is neither a mystical ideality nor an inviolable materiality, neither a Platonic Form nor a Kantian Ding an sich. The other can emerge only as a version of the familiar, strangely lit, refracted, self-distanced. It arises from the intimate recesses of the cultural web that constitutes subjectivity, which is to say it arises as much from within the subject as from outside it—and in so doing blurs the distinction between that which is “inside” and that which is “outside” the self. The otherness brought into existence by the work of literature need not be disturbing or startling; indeed, for the work to survive it must be, at least in some way, pleasurable—that is to say, it must be sufficiently positive to arouse a desire for repetition. If we could apprehend otherness directly, the shock would indeed be traumatic; but direct apprehension is exactly what is ruled out. What we experience is not the other but the shifts of mental and emotional gear that make it possible for what was other to be apprehended, now ceasing to be, at least momentarily, other.

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