Bénichou's thoughts on methodology occupy only a few pages of his writings, and even in these pages one senses that he felt he was speaking out against his better judgment. Due to a natural sense of modesty, a distaste for polemics, a belief in the futility and transience of the criticism of criticism (derived, perhaps, from his experience with historical materialist criticism), and a sense of his own special purpose and of having something better to do, he rarely bothered to develop these ideas at length. He devoted only one essay, "Réflexions sur la critique littéraire," entirely to the subject. In the course of the last twenty years of his life, however, Bénichou spoke of these questions in a number of interviews. Beyond these, his pronouncements on method were mostly confined to obiter dicta in the introductions and conclusions of his major works. These disparate sources, however, reveal a coherent and considered philosophy of literary study. {5}
The somewhat unglamorous interpretive ideal that Bénichou advocated is that of fidelity to the thought embodied in the work, the search for this being guided by the standard of what is "plausible." To grasp Bénichou's meaning, it is important to remember that the French plausible is closer to the English "credible" than to the English "plausible," which often implies disbelief, distrust, or at least the possibility of imposture or speciousness.
In literary criticism, the only approach that deserves to be called a method, in the strict meaning of the word -- a way of approaching a truth in which the nature of that truth is not presupposed -- is one that consists in informing oneself sufficiently, in handling information correctly, and in interpreting it plausibly, that is, in avoiding that region of the mind where the indemonstrable and the irrefutable are one and the same. This modest definition, which promises no discovery, in effect proposes a difficult ideal that none of us is ever sure of having attained. {6}
The chief responsibility of critics or historians (Bénichou does not consider the distinction to be of great importance) is a responsibility to the work being interpreted. But this does not mean that critics should confine themselves to an objective rendering of the thought of the author. They should feel free to comment critically on the message of the work. To do so responsibly, in fact, is their most important social function -- their raison d'être.
As for critics, their duty is to understand and to make understood; misinterpretation is, for them, failure itself. Whereas creators change the meaning of what they borrow, critics are doubly charged with clarifying the original as well as the new message. It is true that to interpret, in criticism, is sometimes to make explicit what art means to signify without being explicit, or even what it seems to say unintentionally. In this sense, critics can be discoverers as well as interpreters: meanings that are present but hard to perceive and connections that are unintended are among their appropriate concerns. But they not get carried away: they should exercise this aspect of their function with a sense of moderation, a sense of dread, even, lest they find what is not really there. This fear ought to be the highest of their virtues. {7}Bénichou elaborated on this aspect of the critic's role in a 1982 conversation with Tzvetan Todorov:
Critics have . . . the right to intervene subjectively in order to impute to the author's plan, as it appears in the work, a flaw in coherence or in plausibility. On the subject of plausibility there is much to say. A lack of strict coherence -- even internal contradiction detectable in a work -- is not, properly speaking, an imperfection, but rather a sign, one that is rich in meaning: all gradations are possible from pure absurdity (or what appears as such) to an ambiguity that reveals the deep nature of some problem, or of some person. As for a lack of plausibility, this is to be understood with respect to a human experience more generally confirmed than the author's discourse; but here too the objection raised by the critic can really signify something else, and end up highlighting some originality of a writer, leading to his or her justification at some deeper level. We see to what an extent the search for authors' meanings and the evaluation of their thought can intermingle. It is the role of critics to go as far as they can toward reconciling these matters; as far as they can, and, if they can not go all the way, to say why. {8}As a check upon the interpretive/exploratory function of the critic, Bénichou calls for a thought experiment. Would the writer accept the proposed interpretation or discovery?
If I sometimes dare to reveal in works that which authors did not perhaps put there on purpose, it is with the hope that they would accept the notion of discovering it there if they were here with me, willing to lend an ear to my efforts and examine what I have written, and were interested in how we are interpreting them. Nothing would console me for their disavowal, if they were able to communicate it to me from where the eternal deep. {9}Implicit in this position is a refusal of any reductionism that would propose to account for a work of literature other than as a communicative form that owes its existence, to at least some irreducibly crucial extent, to the autonomous intentions of the author.
One can really inquire about the relation that links works of the mind to the social substratum only if one first presupposes what is called the mind or spirit acting according to its peculiar nature, which is to lay down laws -- whether well or badly is not at issue, but inevitably -- concerning values that are irreducible to facts and that are universal. {10}This is not, however, to deny all dependence of works of literature upon social forces: The Consecration of the Writer in particular and Bénichou's work in general constitute an extended examination of the close ties of literature to society. But Bénichou holds that in large part the contingencies of modern literature are due to extraordinary circumstances connected to the transition from the ancien régime to modernity. He calls this conjuncture an area where "the visible content of the work and its historical justification are so close as to be almost indistinguishable." {11} But those studying this relation must never forget that the thoughts and values proposed by literature are "in their origins, free" -- indeed, to make a general claim to the contrary is to involve oneself in paradox: by arguing the case, one assumes implicitly what one explicitly denies. {12}
If these principles are admitted -- principles that, according to Bénichou, amount to little more than "the common duty of information and plausibility" -- the only other precondition to the work of the critic is "the choice of one perspective from among many, none of which is to be excluded a priori." {13} But once a perspective is adopted, the critic must be careful not to forget that literature remains something essentially heterogeneous and multifaceted which cannot be reduced to one of its modalities, whether that be expression of self, expression of ideology, representation, reflection of social conditions, rhetorical act, linguistic construction, or whatever other partial aspect of the work of literature this or that school of criticism has made its focus. Not that works of criticism are invalidated by belonging to a school:
Critics should be judged by their work, not by their doctrine. Their duty is to be at least plausible, that is, to establish a relation between the texts that they comment upon and the hypotheses that they develop that is sufficiently close in the eyes of their readers. If there is a rule of method that is universally valid in criticism, this is it. To tell the truth, I do not see that there is any other. {14}But "[critics] lose all credibility if they seem to forget this multiplicity of perspectives." {15}
It would be highly naive to expect that even such humble critical verities could win universal acceptance today, however. Bénichou's view of criticism is based on an essential distinction between the creator and the critic now disallowed by many, even most, of those now professing literature in the academy. Creators, as Bénichou says in a passage of which we have already quoted a part,
have the sovereign power to modify the meaning of what they receive, either through a voluntary recasting of it or sometimes through an error that is legitimated by the result. As for critics, their duty is to understand and to make understood; misinterpretation is, for them, failure itself. {16}For a critic to act otherwise is to act as an "occupier" rather than as a curious visitor. (We should recall the extent to which Bénichou's life was disrupted by the occupation of France by Nazi Germany in 1940, leading to an exile of almost ten years, in order to appreciate the moral strenuousness of this objection.) Contemporary criticism is deeply riven by a split between those who would have it serve the literary work, and those who claim the right to dominate it. In a 1981 presidential address to the Modern Language Association, Peter Demetz described this rift in a conceptually useful way, speaking of two hermeneutical modes. The first, based on the submission to a speaking Thou, connotes "ideas of presence, spoken communication, dialogue, empathy, and a willing recognition of superior authority," and demands an "understanding . . . only to be achieved by a combination of the female energy (weibliche Stärke) of divination and the male energy (männliche Stärke) of cogency," an ideal of which Demetz found an early exemplification in the work of Schleiermacher. {17} Bénichou, who remarked in the early 1990s that "I have always practiced literary study with a sort of sympathetic joy," {18} clearly works in this mode. Describing to Tzvetan Todorov the long patient labor of researching his works on French romanticism, Bénichou remarked: "I did not seek to dominate this material as I assembled it . . ." and Todorov summed up one of his critical principles that emerges from his work: "To submit oneself to another . . . this is the critic's first gesture." {19}
But, from la nouvelle critique through contemporary poststructuralism, another hermeneutical mode has been adopted, one based on "dominance," which Demetz found exemplified in Nietzsche. This hermeneutical mode tends to consider "the historical appearance of humanity so fleeting that the emergence of reason itself constitutes but a minute of false pride and hapless illusion," and tends to connote "absence, isolation, and loneliness." {20} As these antihumanistic tendencies in recent criticism became more apparent, Bénichou's initial openness to them changed to overt hostility. {21} In a 1992 interview, he complained: "Today at times the critic sometimes, regrettably, claims to eclipse the author," {22} and on antihumanism he summed up his thought thus:
I do not understand what antihumanism might be. Formulated by human beings, this is for me an absurd notion, an absurd expression. It supposes that human beings can succeed in leaving their own state of being and their subjective consciousness. I have always placed humanity and the human subject at the source and the heart of literature. . . . . Is it really possible to evacuate subjective consciousness and what is human, except in words? {23}According to Bénichou, the Achilles' heel of all such attempts is the philosophical hubris when they attempt to escape from what he has not hesitated to call "the human condition." {24} It is only by succumbing to the temptation of hubris that one could accept "the often brutal intrusion of foreign disciplines and terminologies into a field of study as delicate as ours, which is giving way beneath them." {25} Contemporary criticism has often made of these disciplines and terminologies instruments serving the will to domination diagnosed by Demetz. As a result,
. . . the passion for structuring and totalizing has caused abitrariness to flourish; we have seen a proliferation of Icaruses of systematizing and verbal speculation; critics, by turning themselves into theoreticians, have fed upon their own substance; as for their two cardinal virtues, a sensitivity toward works and an aptitude to reason about them, the second has dangerously encroached upon the first. {26}For Bénichou, it is a question of properly appreciating what the role of the critic should be:
I belong to the vast guild of people who study literature without themselves producing any. The function assumed by "literary criticism" seems to me absolutely indispensable, although criticism, in the end, naturally comes after and is subsequent to and subordinate to the creator. {27}Against these tendencies, Bénichou considered his own work to be the vindication or "the defense of the prerogatives of the creative spirit in literature." {28} Due to the liberty of the human subject which is behind it, the literary work has always proved and will always prove resistant in its essence to every reductionist enterprise. To think otherwise is to misunderstand literature utterly, for such a view evacuates the "finality" of literary works, i.e. their status as entities that are in some sense due to the ends they seek to effect, as well as the causes that shape them.
. . . to imagine thought -- the positing of ideas and values, as this manifests itself in literary works -- to be entirely dependent on forces that are foreign to it, infrastructural and in particular economic, is to render it superfluous and to renounce the attempt to understand its role. We have no choice but to accept as self-evident that the writer is on a different plane than the producer of any sort of good that may be consumed . . . No infrastructural phenomenon is, by definition, endowed with the property [of positing ideas and values] that thought possesses unmediatedly, and I do not see how this property can be denied to it, except verbally. {29}Or, formulated less abstractly: "It would be vain to wish to hold literature out of the plane of life, and to hold works at a distance from human beings, for every work is discourse, and every discourse posits a problem of truthfulness." {30}
Given his humanistic philosophical commitments, Bénichou's doubts about contemporary literary theory and its effects upon criticism are unsurprising. Not that these have been a preoccupation for him: "I must say that I have never wished to participate in this discussion." {31} He continued instead to follow his own path, studying the thought of French writers in the period from 1637 to 1898. If it is true, as some have complained, he neglected the formal or generic aspects of works in favor of the ideas they embody, he attributed this neglect more to a personal preference than to any critical principle. {32} Bénichou's own critical commitments were straightforward. The individual author is central and fundamental to his approach, as the foregoing remarks imply. Even in his detailed studies on the transmission of literary themes and the evolution of oral poetry, the more or less visible workings of "the creative mind" were what interested him. {33} Like the Lansonian school whose fall into critical disfavor and neglect he regretted, {34} he was often concerned with discerning the sources or "germs" of this or that literary development. Thus the preponderent place of Nerval in L'École du désenchantement is in large part justified by the novel claim that Nerval's 1841 sonnets napoléoniens inaugurated "a revolution in French poetics" by their challenge to "the law of intelligence presiding in principle over all literature." {35}
This historical approach, with its focus on innovation and continuity, is generally articulated in terms of generations. Sainte-Beuve was among the first to employ this approach extensively, at first "instinctively" and, later, somewhat systematically. {36} In a long note in The Consecration of the Writer, Bénichou justifies his practice by noting
the relation of human beings to great events, which, in their discontinuous succession, cut into quite distinct periods the human flux, which they influence by shocks. . . . 1789, 1815, 1830, 1848 mark for France the events by which the generations we can call grosso modo romantic arrange themselves. {37}The artificialities and inexactitudes that critics have noted in this way of speaking are largely compensated by the convenient shorthand it offers to literary historians. Le Temps des prophètes, Les Mages romantiques, and L'École du désenchantement all invoke the concept of a generation in their opening pages and rely on it throughout to bring coherence to the vast domains they encompass. {38} The differences between the "great romantic generation" {39} and those belonging to what Bénichou calls "second romanticism" (within which he distinguishes "that of the Jeune-France and Gautier, that of Baudelaire and Flaubert, that of the young Parnassus and Mallarmé" {40}) are crucial to his interpretation of the period and its literature.
In his conception of the period itself, Bénichou's approach is to adopt, with as little commentary as possible, the terms in which a period defined itself. This means staying as close to the writers as possible. Bénichou's practice in this regard also seems to derive from a preference to avoid reliance on secondary literature. It is curious that Bénichou never defended this aspect of his work, as if it needed no defense. Indeed, it regrettable that such a great scholar shunned completely this century's long debate over the term "Romanticism," as thought he sensed that it was a pit of quicksand from which one risks never disengaging oneself. Since the writers we call "Romantic" often used this term themselves, Bénichou's practice has mostly been regarded as unexceptional. What if, however, the term "Romantic" had only come to be accepted much later, like the terms "Renaissance" or "Middle Ages"? Would he then have avoided the term "Romantic" altogether? (In fact, Bénichou has avoided the terms "Renaissance" and "Moyen Age," speaking, for example, of "the renaissance of studies of antiquity" but preferring the term "16th century" as a periodization. He has, however, used the term "Middle Ages." {41})
When criticized for introducing terms like "will, reason, the self" into his literary analyses even while criticizing those who introduce other technical terms, Bénichou responded: "Notice however that these notions are familiar to the authors themselves; they are as it were the raw material of literature, like common sense. Can one say this about the concepts that linguistics or psychoanalysis needs to introduce in their researches?" {42} The issue, however, is not one of principle, but of practice, and here too Bénichou avoids taking a systematic position: "But in the end we must judge every enterprise by its results. Now, these results have seemed to be, . . . to an extent that is troubling, fantastical or entirely negative." {43} Thus Bénichou poses the problem both experientially and practically, while avoiding a philosophically systematic account. If one were to defend Bénichou's evasion, one might argue that the conceptual problem is, in any case, an inextricable one under present circumstances; it is, therefore, permissible to avoid addressing it, for there would appear to be no standpoint from which to judge the dispute. Critics find themselves before an antinomy which they would do well to accept and then move on to their appropriate tasks, rather than engage in philosophical argumentation. In fact, as Thomas Vogler has observed, Bénichou's topic, Romanticism, is itself directly concerned in the question: "[T]he periodization of history continues to bear the ideological stamp of Romanticism, the period which initiated our concept of period and to which all discussions of period inevitably return." {44} The debate over the choice between the priority of present and past perspectives is, then, an intractable one that Bénichou almost always chose to avoid; however, as we shall see in discussing his historical vision, Bénichou's work may be seen as an attempt to establish a middle ground which does justice to both sides.
Notes to Part II
{5} On this subject, cf. also Jean Molino, "Sur la méthode de
Paul Bénichou," in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la
littérature, pp. 23-35, and Jean Borie, "Un Marginal
orthodoxe," in Marc Fumaroli & Tzvetan Todorov, eds.,
Mélanges
sur l'oeuvre de Paul Bénichou (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp.
39-55.
{6} Bénichou, "Réflexions sur la critique
littéraire," in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la
littérature, pp. 4-5.
{7} Ibid., pp. 19-20.
{8}
Tzvetan Todorov, Critique de la critique: Un Roman
d'apprentissage (Paris: Seuil, 1984), p. 175. The passage appears
in a different translation by Catherine Porter in the English
translation of this volume: Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal
View of Twentieth-Century Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987), p. 152.
{9} Bénichou, L'Écrivain et
ses travaux, pp. xiv-xv.
{10} Bénichou, The Consecration of the
Writer, 1750-1830, p. 333; in the original, Le
Sacre de l'écrivain, pp. 463-64.
{11} Ibid., p. 464
(p. 334 in the English translation).
{12} Bénichou,
"Réflexions sur la critique littéraire," in Marc Fumaroli,
ed., Le Statut de la littérature, pp. 5-6, 19.
{13}
Bénichou, Le Sacre de l'écrivain, p. 466.
{14}
Bénichou, L'Écrivain et ses travaux, p. xiv.
{15}
Bénichou, L'École du désenchantement, p. 578.
{16} Bénichou, "Réflexions sur la critique
littéraire," in Marc Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la
littérature, p. 19.
{17} Peter Demetz, "Presidential Address
1981," PMLA 97 (May 1982), p. 315.
{18} Paul Bénichou,
"Du grand siècle au romantisme" [interview], Magazine
littéraire, no. 301 (July-August 1992), p. 104.
{19}
Todorov, Critique de la critique, pp. 170-71. Catherine Porter
translates the sentence slightly differently in Todorov, Literature and
Its Theorists, pp. 148-49.
{20} Demetz, "Presidential Address
1981," pp. 315-16.
{21} Compare Bénichou, L'Écrivain
et ses travaux, p. xiii ("I see no reason why one should declare
oneself for or against what is newly appearing in the exploration
. . . of literature") with his statements seventeen years
later in
"Littérature et critique: Paul Bénichou: Entretien avec
Tzvetan Todorov," Le Débat, no. 31 (September 1984), pp.
53-81; reprinted as "La Littérature comme fait et valeur:
Entretien avec Paul Bénichou," in Todorov, Critique de la
critique, pp. 143-77 (in the English translation, entitled
Literature and Its Theorists, pp. 122-54).
{23} Ibid., p.
104.
{24} Bénichou, L'École du
désenchantement, p. 597.
{25} Bénichou,
L'Écrivain et ses travaux, p. xiii.
{26} Ibid.
{27}
Bénichou, "Du grand siècle au romantisme," p.
100.
{28} Bénichou, "Réflexions sur la critique
littéraire," in Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la
littérature, p. 19.
{29} Bénichou, Le Sacre de
l'écrivain, p. 463 (cf. my slightly different rendering of the
passage in my translation of this volume under the title The
Consecration of the Writer, p. 333; in the translation above I have
tried to make Bénichou's point a little more explicitly than he
does himself.)
{30} Bénichou, L'École du
désenchantement, p. 332.
{31} Bénichou, "Du grand
siècle au romantisme," p. 104.
{32} Todorov, Critique de la
critique, p. 144 ( Literature and Its Theorists, p. 123).
{33} Cf. his studies in the second half of L'Écrivain et ses
travaux and in Nerval et la chanson folklorique (Paris:
José Corti, 1970), as well as his Romancero judeo español
de Marruecos (Madrid: Castalia, 1968), and Creación
poética en el romancero tradicional (Madrid: Gredos,
1968).
{34} Bénichou, L'Écrivain et ses travaux,
p. xii; "Réflexions sur la critique littéraire," in
Fumaroli, ed., Le Statut de la littérature, p. 3.
{35}
Bénichou, L'École du désenchantement, pp.
311-22, 598.
{36} Sainte-Beuve's 1862 essays in defense of his
practice, reprinted in Nouveaux Lundis, vol. 3 (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, n.d. [1897]), pp. 1-33, justify the classification of
writers by generations by the observation that "fifteen years usually make
a career; it is given to a few to double that, to start over, or to fill
up a second." Ibid., p. 27. (Ortega y Gasset, citing a remark of Tacitus
[per quindecim annos, grande mortalis aevi spatium], refers to "the
general principle that the face of the world changes every fifteen years."
Man and Crisis, trans. Mildred Adams [New York: W.W. Norton, p.
65].) Sainte-Beuve endorses the generational approach above all as a
way of avoiding error in the appreciation of the meaning of a work:
"one does not then risk, in judging [a work], inventing beautiful
effects mistakenly and admiring incorrectly, as is inevitable when one
confines oneself to pure rhetoric." Nouveaux Lundis, vol. 3, p.
23. But Sainte-Beuve often preferred the more voluntaristic concept of
"group" to that of "generation." Cf. his Chateaubriand et son
groupe littéraire (1861).
{37} Bénichou, Le
Sacre de l'écrivain, p. 112n. (pp. 362-63 of the English
translation).
{38} For a brief discussion of the idea of literary
generations, see Clément Moisan, L'Histoire
littéraire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990),
pp. 28-31. In the U.S. the concept of generation is mostly in eclipse
as an aspect of the alleged arbitrariness of periodization. It is
scarcely mentioned in the Modern Language Association's Introduction
to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York:
Modern Language Association, 1992). In terms of the
submissive/dominant described above, the concept of generation is
clearly in the "submissive" camp.
{39} Bénichou, Le Temps
des prophètes, p. 17.
{40} Bénichou,
L'École du désenchantement, p. 584n.
{41}
Bénichou, Le Sacre de l'Écrivain, p. 13 (The
Consecration of the Writer, p. 2).
{42} Todorov, Critique de
la critique, p. 163.
{43} Ibid.
{44} Thomas A Vogler,
"Romanticism and Literary Periods: The Future of the Past," New
German Critique, no. 38 (Spring/Summer 1986), p. 132.
Bénichou makes a related point when he asserts that the very
distinction between literature and ideas dates from the Romantic
period. L'École du désenchantement, pp. 577-78.
Last Update August 21, 2001