Reflexivity in Literature

The kinds of reflexivity that appear specific to literature have been extensively theorized. The most obvious case is ‘intra-compositional’ instances,¹³ that is, simple formal devices such as rhyme or meter, which use self-reference to high-light the‘poetic’function that language assumes in their context and thus, to prompt reflexion about their own status as verbally constituted works of art.¹⁴ This movement from self-reference to self-reflexion applies to other forms of self-reference as well–as readers are alerted to a text doing something‘poetic’

(in whatever way), they will self-consciously begin to treat the text‘as literature,’

engaging with it in a manner that differentiates literary texts from newspapers, grocery lists, and instruction manuals. The same is true, for example, of ‘extra-compositional’ references to traditional literary genres, characters or motifs, which are often subsumed under the rubric of ‘intertextuality’ but have the same effect, again highlighting that the given text partakes of those features and functions–whatever they are – that characterize the system of literature at the specific time of its production, thus reflecting about its ontological status in the sense described by Derrida.¹⁵As with art in general, recipients must ‘actu-alize’the work of literature as they read it, relate it to those extra-compositional frames that feed the implicit levels of meaning, and integrate their realization of meta-literary references into their actualization.¹⁶

 Richard A. Posner,“Against Ethical Criticism,”Philosophy and Literature.():–,

.

 The terminology is Werner Wolf’s, see Werner Wolf,“Metareference across Media. The Con-cept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions,”inMetareference Across Media. Theory and Case Studies Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of his Re-tirement, ed.Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, Jeff Thoss (Amsterdam [et al.]: Rodopi,):–

,. Wolf uses the term to describe a certain kind of‘meta-reference,’a concept he distin-guishes from‘mere’self-reference.

 Roman Jakobson,“Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,”inStyle in Language, ed.

Thomas A. Sebeok (New York, London: John Wiley & Sons; Technology P of the MIT,):

‒.

 Clearly, this presupposes the existence of an institutionalised system of literature.

 On these and further dimensions of reflexivity, see Georg W. Bertram,“Selbstbezüglichkeit und Reflexion in und durch Literatur,”inDer Begriff der Literatur. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiv-en, ed. Alexander Löck, Jan Urbich (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter,):–.

Peter Lamarque says little about reflexivity explicitly, but nevertheless seems to base his very definition of‘literature’on it.¹⁷By his understanding, literature comes into being only in the double embeddedness of a given work in the con-text of its origin that marks the work’s identity on the one hand, and its addition-al situation vis-à-vis conventionaddition-al frameworks establishing what ‘literature’at large actuallyis:

There is thehistoricalembeddedness which finds an essential connection between the identity of a work and its origins in a historical act of creation. And there is the additional institutionalembeddedness according to which a work only counts as literature within a cultural practice of intention, expectation, and reception. In fact these are closely inter-twined. The historical context of origin determines the particular identity of a work – that which makes this work distinct from any other–and the institutional context deter-mines the work’s identity as of one kind rather than another. No work would be a unique work of literature if it were not grounded in both kinds of context.¹⁸

Literature, then, emerges from the consciously realized reference to its own spe-cific origins and to the structures that determine its place in the literary system.

Since Lamarque talks about identity, one might say that he attends to the com-bination of the work’s individual features and those of the‘collective’of which it forms a part. Both of these aspects of identity are reflected upon in the actual-ization of literature. Note the nexus between specimen (or token) and kind (or type), as well as the curious nature of literary production between unique inven-tion and instituinven-tional determinainven-tion. Concerning the relainven-tionship between the two, I want to emphasize that individual works of literature are only actualized as such within their institutional frame, but through their actualization, they also perpetuate that frame, if only in transformation. Not evenUlysses, touted as ‘the novel to end all novels,’succeeded in killing off its genre, nor did the anti-novels of the mid-twentieth century or indeed,Don Quixote.

In his definition, Lamarque does not account for Jakobson’s‘poetic func-tion,’by which the code draws attention to its own functioning. He ignores it for good reasons– not all texts we consider to be literature seem to abide by Pope’s rule of “good expression,” let alone expression that self-reflexively draws attention to itself.¹⁹Critics since Käte Hamburger have debated the‘poetic

 “A good reader attends not to some content beyond or behind the mode of presentation but to the mode of presentation itself, to the fact that what is being said is being said in this way”

(Peter Lamarque,“The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,”inPhilosophy of Literature, ed. Severin Schroeder [Chichester, West Sussex, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,]:–,).

 Peter Lamarque,The Philosophy of Literature(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,):.

 On the problem of aesthetics for the definition of art, see Arthur C. Danto,What Art Is(New Haven, London: Yale UP,): esp.–.

function’of certain narrative tenses,²⁰Jakobson himself famously commented on rhyme in advertisements, and even formidable figures like I. A. Richards and William Empson ultimately failed to establish the centrality of non-propositional expression through metaphor for literary language. It would seem that while the reflexive process induced by the‘poetic function’²¹ is today a necessary constit-uent of literature, it is not a sufficient one. However, I believe that relatively speaking, the given-ness of Lamarque’s two necessary conditions of historical and institutional embeddedness will tend to elicit awareness in the audience, at least at present, of the heightened potential for the poetic function of lan-guage. That is to say, we will be relatively more attentive to verbal artifice and mimetic comprehensiveness when reading a novel as compared to a telephone directory. Thus, literature as a cultural practice loops back onto itself and indu-ces reflexivity: to read a text‘as literature’makes us reflect about literariness.²² The same effect can also be observed when the‘literary gaze’is turned on non-literary texts: Terry Eagleton’s memorable example of this process is a sign found in the London underground, “Dogs must be carried on the escalator,”

with the potentially“rich allusiveness of‘carried’ ” and the“suggestive resonan-ces of helping lame dogs through life.”To read this sign‘as literature’renders us aware of the reader’s involvement in the production of literariness: Eagleton con-cludes that“ ‘literature’may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.”²³ It is the procedural nature of this re-ciprocity that I would like to stress here–not only do peopledothings to texts in order to produce literature; texts that are actualizedasliterature also potentially make readers aware of the practices that inform this activity. These practices, again, are both individual and collective–my reading ofUlysses is genuinely my own, but only so within the intersubjective conventions that govern my white male Western response to novels, and Joyce, and literature–that is, within what Lamarque calls the institutional aspect of literary production.²⁴

 Käte Hamburger,Die Logik der Dichtung[], fourth ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,). For an illuminating personal account from the perspective of one protagonist, see Franz K. Stanzel, Welt als Text(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,):–.

 I use this in a broad and‘doubly embedded’sense to include not only strictly linguistic func-tions, but also paratextual markers indicating genre; the cultural reputation of author and/or work created through educational systems, marketing, or personal communications within a re-ception community; or the social conventions governing the recognition and treatment of fiction.

 See Peter Widdowson,Literature. The New Critical Idiom(London: Routledge,):.

 Terry Eagleton,Literary Theory. An Introduction(Oxford: Blackwell,):.

 There would be little use for me to view (i.e., receive, actualize, define) as‘comedy’what everybody else agrees is‘tragedy’ –if I did so, I would quickly realize that all communication through and about literature breaks down. My fate would be that of the sad old man in Peter

As readers develop‘their’readings in the interplay between the individual and collective dimensions, they come to reflect not only about literature, but also about the more general hermeneutic activity that informs this process. As I readUlysses, and as I reflect about this text’s ontological relationship to the world, and to truth, and about its mode of verbal signification of these things to me as the reader, I can also abstract from this to think about the similarities between my hermeneutic activity of reading and the ways in which I try to make sense of the world outside the text. That is especially true of the novel, which is often said to differ from other genres in its ambition“not merely to represent objectsof the world, or even to imitate theworld, but to actualize aworld. A world–nothing less–is the theme and postulate of the novel.”²⁵Hans Blumen-berg argues that owing to this outrageous claim forWelthaftigkeitand Welthaltig-keit, the novel is the genuinely modern literary genre. Michael McKeon concurs, and he believes that the novel emerges at a time when the truth value of verbal representation had become deeply problematic. Troubled by the apparent divi-sion between‘questions of truth’and ‘questions of virtue,’the novel self-con-sciously reflects about its own attempts at reconciling the two. This renders it a meta-genre that“self-consciously incorporate[s], as part of its own form, the problem of its own categorial status.”²⁶Hence, this genre is particularly bound to two modes of reflexivity: on the one hand, since it undertakes to constitute a textual world of its own, it relates to the institutional framework that makes this project possible in the first place (the novel self-consciously explores its own nature as the‘world-making genre’); and since it appeals to the intersubjec-tive criterion of world consistency (‘what does it take to make a world seem plau-sible’), it relates to the specific historical context that produced it. Thus, the novel both evinces and reflects upon Lamarque’s‘double embeddedness.’

Where the novel foregrounds the generic conventions, forms, and expecta-tions, it raises in the reader, it not only creates awareness of the role of genre

Bichsel’s story,“Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch”(Peter Bichsel,Kindergeschichten[Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp,]:–).

 Hans Blumenberg,“The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel”[], inNew Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher, Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,):–,.

 McKeon,“Genre Theory,”. Patricia Waugh agrees: self-reflexivity (or in her term, metafic-tion)“is a tendency or function inherent inallnovels,”and“[t]his form of fiction is worth study-ing not only because of its contemporary emergence but also because of the insights it offers into both the representational nature of all fiction and the literary history of the novel as genre. By studying metafiction, one is, in effect, studying that which gives the novel its identity”

(Patricia Waugh,Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction[London: Me-thuen,]:).

for the production of meaning,²⁷but also for its own specific relationship to pro-cesses of signification and intelligibility, and for its mode of being. In this way, it prompts reflections not only about its ontological status as art and literature, but also about the verbal mode of relating to things other than art. The novel is a medium for the reflection,through language,aboutlanguage, verbal significa-tion, and those symbolic ways of worldmaking that Gadamer is thinking of when he writes that“[b]eing that can be understood is language”or even more poignantly,“that being islanguage–i.e., self-presentation.”²⁸

The foregoing deliberations have highlighted four categorically different kinds of reflexivity which are stressed in the self-conscious actualization of liter-ary works of art:

1. in the relation of the text to itself;

2. in the relation of the text to the contingent circumstances that procuded it and of which it forms, willy-nilly, a symptom;

3. in the relation of the text to the historically instituted framework of ‘litera-ture’;

4. in the relation of the text to the ways in which humans produce (conceptions of) themselves through language and relate hermeneutically to the world.

The first three kinds are subject to a hermeneutics of the text, the fourth might be called meta-hermeneutic. This list is far from exhaustive, but these are the reflex-ive aspects of the identity of‘the literary’that, for the present purpose, I want to compare to the ways in which self-reflexivity appears in the context of the law and of diasporic identity.