Contenu du sommaire : Que peut la littérature ?

That it is possible (and maybe even necessary) to ask what literature can do is a sign of the times — of the “modern times” that have witnessed the birth of literature in the current sense of the term. However, for a whole century, modern literature itself chose to answer this question in the negative by claiming impossibility and powerlessness as its distinguishing features. An early indication that a new leaf was about to be turned came in 1978, when Roland Barthes gave a talk entitled “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure”: not only did he perceive the true extent of literature's power, but he tried to define its “mission.” While the question he raised may then have seemed incongruous, it has now attracted the attention of many, including people who are not literary scholars. The point of this article is to examine the validity of several possible answers: literature can instruct its readers; it can proclaim human rights not mentioned in the various Declarations; it can help “me” become “another” and shield “me” from evil even in the depths of hell. Thus, literature can do a great deal for us, and the time may have come to ask what we can do for literature.

Barthes quotes as instances of “moments of truth” in reading — those fulgurations in which an overwhelming emotion is conjoined to a sense of truth — two death scenes from War and Peace and Remembrance of Things Past where the coincidence between what is written on the page and what is felt by the reading subject takes place on the level of sympathy and compassion. This article purports to analyze Ralph's deathbed scene in The Portrait of a Lady as one such “moment of truth”, in which the discourse and the truth of affect are given full play in keeping with one of the missions that Barthes assigns to the novel, namely to express, from the heart of intimacy and subjectivity, “the brilliance and suffering of the world”.

Roland Barthes' notion of emotional “moments of truth” in literature can be a starting point for the study of the powers of literature, and more specifically of “ethnic” literature in the United States. John Edgar Wideman's Reuben will serve as our point of entry, because of the intense wealth of emotions the novel elicits – at least, that it elicited in this reader. A first approach will follow Martha Nussbaum's conception of “poetic justice” and Jacques Rancière's “politics of literature”: I will try to show that literary emotions deserve attention in their own right, but can also be the building blocks for a virtual democracy that may allow us to unlearn discriminatory reflexes. Yet, since Wideman's works radically question literary realism, the main reference invoked by the two above-mentioned critics, it might be worthwhile taking another path, one that tries to achieve freedom from the paradigm of “race” and domination through complex narrative forms inspired by the African conception of cyclical Great Time. Melancholy will be our guide, understood both as the feeling of grief and dispossession that gives the lie to the myth of Progress, and as a matrix for original creative forms, trickster-like and mythical. The truth of the literary moment may then be seen to flow from a “holographic” vision of the wholeness of humanity, uniting rather than separating culturally defined world views.

John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Jay Neugeboren's Imagining Robert. My Brother, Madness and Survival. A Memoir (1997) are memoirs in which two successful novelists and academics write about their respective isolated younger brothers: Robby Wideman, condemned to a life-sentence for robbery and murder in 1976, and Robert Neugeboren, who, in 1962, was institutionalized at the age of nineteen, and has since spent his life in various mental hospitals. In their fraternal memoirs, Wideman and Neugeboren both consider their constant presence next to their brothers in a biblical and literary light: what are a brother's duties towards a suffering sibling? How can a novelist react to the suspended life of a confined brother? Their texts, which are in both cases collaborative works, propose to reconstruct the younger brothers' lives, an undertaking which necessitates both a biographical, referential frame and an imaginary, fictional perspective. Thus “imagined,” Robby and Robert become part and parcel of their elder brothers' self-narratives in two volumes which are as biographical as they are autobiographical, and which question the power of literary brotherhood.

This article aims at exploring the ways in which Richard Powers' latest novel Generosity may be construed as a meditation on fiction's capacity to “say whom we love” and save them. It suggests that, more than the fictitious character of the novel, what hinders the project is the plot-oriented nature of all narrative discourse.