New Literary History after the end of the new
Now, two new things become possible
for the erstwhile critic on his way
to reincarnation
as a real artist
(a new Pinocchio syndrome perhaps).
The first is the invention of new texts:
you enlarge a piece of
Scythian jewelry
to the point
at which
it becomes the equal of
a monumental frieze
in another civilization.
The critic, then, by the invention
of new nomenclature and neologism,
and by the framing in a new paradigm
of aesthetic or cultural history, transforms
an inert text of some sort
into a bearer of new form
and new perception
and thereby transforms it into an object
of especial and hitherto untheorized significance.
That text then becomes a first of some kind,
and itself a paradigm and model of things to come,
as well as a privileged symptom of Zeitgeist.
Meanwhile that creation—in which the new significance of the curatorial role
can be identified, precisely as just such
a framing of objects that are to be
allegorically transvalued—is intimately related
to the other one that interests us here,
namely the invention of wholly new historical stories
about such objects—the creation of new ideas or concepts of literary or artistic history.
This is then why, in my opinion,
we cannot exactly write new literary histories today,
we cannot execute them in the way the older
framers of projects (artistic or not)
then patiently brought these first glimmering ideas to full realization
step-by-step and in concrete detail.
For such new ideas are not to be realized,
they are and remain purely theoretical,
the task
is to spring them onto the screen of consciousness
precisely as new ideas for this
or that new narrative paradigm of history.
What the writers of new literary history
have to do today is to invent new ideas
of literary history, to pursue the goal
of a Novum that is immediately recognizable as
something hitherto unthought about the process,
and whose examples are not pieces and segments
of the execution of that research so much as themselves
ideas that dramatize what such an execution would look like.
In other words, they try to show us what a carrying out
of this new idea of literary or artistic history would look like
if it really could be carried out (which it can’t be).
Now I have little enough time
to say why this is not relativism or fiction.
It must be marked by an imperative to multiplicity—
to invent one new idea for literary history
must be understood as calling for many more.
These then begin to stake out the bounds of the Real,
they approach it asymptotically
in their very variety and in their contradictions,
like the legendary blind men feeling
the equally imaginary elephant’s sensory properties
—tail, trunk, hide, tusks, and so forth—and reporting
back on their contradictory findings.
This is then the triangulation of the Real,
the identification of a heavy
yet invisible body at the heart of space
that moves all the counters and the pointers
on all the dials of the universe
in a barely perceptible yet inescapable way,
a uttering and a fluttering
through which the Real
becomes as
inescapable
as it is
unrepresentable.