It is impossible nowadays to discuss literary creation as a sociologist without taking an explicit position on the theory of the literary field, as a particular version of the general theory of fields. This task becomes all the more difficult as the ostensible ambition of this theory is to consider not only those dimensions of the literary world most commonly recognized as “social” (the literary and social trajectories of writers; the spatial structure of literary positions and struggles for symbolic domination; the social inception of literary institutions like publishing companies, literary series, and journals; editorial strategies, movements, trends, and schools of thought; manifestos and literary expressions of every kind; and the role of all those, ranging from publishers to critics, educational institutions to the media, and sponsors of literary awards, who contribute to establishing the value of a work), but also to approach works through their most specifically literary aspects (such as themes, composition, and style).

Literature is Not Just a Battlefield

In regards to Dany Laferrière’s Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), two absences may be noted: first, myriad allusions to Anglophone writers eclipse those of their Francophone counterparts, and second, as Suzette Mayr has noted, there is a seeming non-presence of a female protagonist who is either African, Caribbean, and/or Québécoise. As the firstperson narrator accumulates names of English-speaking writers, so the list of nicknames for the McGill University students with whom he interacts also builds up: ‘‘Miz Literature,’’ ‘‘Miz Suicide,’’ ‘‘Miz Cover Girl,’’ etc. Only one of the female characters is ever properly named: ‘‘Valérie Miller.’’ While recognizing that her presence in the story of the novel is limited, this article looks at Valérie’s importance as a key to understanding how desire works in Laferrière’s work. From within the closed space of their bohemian apartment in Montréal, the two male protagonists—Bouba and the narrator—comment on everything. They immerse themselves in a series of intellectual dialogues concerning topics such

Barthes, Genette, and Laferrière: Crafting and Commenting Writing in How to Make Love to a Negro

G[acute{e}]rard Genette We read in Paul Val[acute{e}]ry's Tel Quel: "Literature is thronged with people who don't really know what to say but feel a compelling urge to write" ("Odds and Ends" 130). A sentence stating a rather harsh, but not exclusively negative, truth, since the "urge to write without knowing what" is presented for what it is: a power. An empty power, but one that, paradoxically, contributes to and perhaps suffices to "fill" literature. And Val[acute{e}]ry will say about some of the most beautiful verses that they work on us without telling us very much, or that tell us, perhaps, that they have "nothing to tell us" ("Poetry and Abstract Thought" 74-75). Such is literature, "reduced to the essentials of its active principle" ("Odds and Ends" 97). This need to write is not Val[acute{e}]ry's. Writing inspired in him only one feeling, many times expressed by him, and that we might say, took the place for him of a goad or a compensation: boredom. A deep feeling, deeply connected with the practice and the truth of literature, although a taboo of propriety ordinarily forbids its recognition. Val[acute{e}]ry had the power (since this too is a power) to experience it more intensely than anyone else, and took it as the point of departure for his reflections on Letters. This 'what's the use?', this disgust with writing that seizes Rimbaud after composing his oeuvre, happens to Val[acute{e}]ry beforehand, so to speak, and never ceases to accompany him and in some sense to inspire him. If every modern work is somehow haunted by the possibility of its own silence, Val[acute{e}]ry was, and apparently remains, the only writer who did not experience this possibility as a threat, a temptation weighing on the future, but as an anterior, preliminary, perhaps propitiat ory experience. With the exception of Vers anciens, the Introduction [grave{a}] L[acute{e}]onard, and Monsieur Teste, the major portion of his work follows, as if by a perpetual breach, from a very serious and definitive decision not to write any more. It is literally a post-scriptum, a long codicil, wholly enlightened by a feeling of its complete uselessness, and even its total nonexistence as anything other than a pure exercise. Val[acute{e}]ry strongly suspected many pages of literature of having this for their whole significance: 'I am a page of literature'; we often find in him, implicitly or insistently, this inverse affirmation: 'I have nothing more to do with literature: here is proof of it.' His literary destiny was therefore this rather rare experience, one perhaps rich in its apparent sterility: to live in literature as in a foreign country, to inhabit writing as if on a visit or in exile, and to fix upon it a gaze simultaneously interior and remote. It is easy to exalt literature, easier still to demolish it; each of these positions involves an element of truth. The truth that exists at their narrow and difficult junction it happened to Val[acute{e}]ry to experience as the exact place of his residence, on the chance of arranging for himself a comfort, and a career in this difficulty, as others in revolt or despair. "It is not a question of abusing literature," writes Maurice Blanchot, "but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it" (302). This salutary disparagement, or devaluation was one of Val[acute{e}]ry's constant theses, and it would be hard to measure all that the modern awareness and practice of literature owes to this reductive effort. What repels him in literature is, as he often explains it, the feeling of arbitrariness: "what I can change easily offends me in myself, and bores me in others. Hence many antiliterary, and singularly antihistorical consequences" (Oeuvres 2:1502). Or again: As for history and novels, my interest is sometimes held, and I can admire them as stimulants, pastimes, and works of art; but if they lay claim to "truth" and hope to be taken seriously, their arbitrary quality and unconscious conventions at once become apparent, and I am seized with a perverse mania for trying possible substitutions. …

Gerard Genette

Papers

Paul Val[acute{e}]ry: Literature as Such