Literature and Meta-language

Logic teaches us to distinguish the language object from meta-language. The language object is the very matter subject to logical investigation; meta-language is the necessarily artificial language in which we conduct this investigation. Thus-and this is the role of logical reflection-I can express in a symbolic language (meta-language) the relations, the structure of a real language (language object).

For centuries, our writers did not imagine it was possible to consider literature (the word itself is recent) as a language, subject, like any other, to logical distinction: literature never reflected upon itself (sometimes upon its figures, but never upon its being), it never divided itself into an object at once scrutinizing and scrutinized; in short, it spoke but did not speak itself. And then, probably with the first shocks to the good conscience of the bourgeoisie, literature began to regard itself as double: at once object and scrutiny of that object, utterance and utterance of that utterance, literature object and meta-literature. These have been, grosso modo, the phases of the development: first an artisanal consciousness of literary fabrication, refined to the point of painful scruple, of the impossible (Flaubert); then, the heroic will to identify, in one and the same written matter, literature and the theory of literature (Mallarmé); then, the hope of somehow eluding literary tautology by ceaselessly postponing literature, by declaring that one is going to write, and by making this declaration into literature itself (Proust); then, the testing of literary good faith by deliberately, systematically multiplying to infinity the meanings of the word object without ever abiding by anyone sense of what is signified (surrealism); finally, and inversely, rarefying these meanings to the point of trying to achieve a Dasein of literary language, a neutrality (though not an innocence) of writing: I am thinking here of the work of Robbe-Grillet.

All these endeavors may someday permit us to define our century (the last hundred years) as the century of the question What Is Literature? (Sartre answered it from outside, which gives him an ambiguous literary position.) And precisely because this interrogation is conducted not from outside but within literature itself, or more exactly at its extreme verge, in that asymptotic zone where literature appears to destroy itself as a language object without destroying itself as a meta-language, and where the meta-language's quest is defined at the last possible moment as a new language object, it follows that our literature has been for a hundred years a dangerous game with its own death, in other words a way of experiencing, of living that death: our literature is like that Racinean heroine who dies upon learning who she is but lives by seeking her identity (Eriphile in Éphigenie). Now this situation defines a truly tragic status: our society, confined for the moment in a kind of historical impasse, permits its literature only the Oedipal question par excellence: Who am I? By the same token it forbids the dialectical question: What is to be done? The truth of our literature is not in the practical order, but already it is no longer in the natural order: it is a mask which points to itself.

1959