Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more.
Quite simply, distant reading makes sense of texts through the process of gathering immense amounts of empirical data about literary works—the presence or absence of various traits, noted by collaborative efforts considering texts in dozens of languages—and organizing it all into various systems or wholes that seek to make sense of their distribution—projecting representations of the evolution of a genre, say, and its spread across Europe as it becomes more or less viable in various markets. Such effort is continually motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on,” given that the empirical amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still less then one percent of what was then produced ), and because these works continually overflow the national and linguistic borders within which literary research often moves.
Against this, then, attempts to expand the canon over the years to include alternative literatures meet something like their limit case, but so too does close reading. For it is the organization of canons—or attempts to expand them—around the latter that makes the study of the actual, empirically existing literary field impossible: as Moretti says, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases.” This study is only possible if we begin to plot what we have not looked at closely in order to extrapolate tendencies that we cannot actually observe at all. The entire project of literary studies suddenly becomes not one of avoiding paraphrase in the sense of avoiding reduction--which, I’d suggest, is the most fundamental motivation of close reading--but what literary structuralists like Propp, Greimas, Genette and Todorov long ago discovered could constitute a powerful poetics: negotiating reduction, simplifying, and then working off of these reduced systems.
Lest Moretti's study of these particular systems of distribution sound too much like work on the economics of literature, however, which has sometimes been treated very extensively in literary study, Moretti assures us that the effort is ultimately directed to the study of where and when formal innovations in literature--the province once proper to close reading—occur, since the traits that will be noted and plotted on graphs, maps and trees will indeed be formal ones: the presence or absence of clues in the evolving genre of the mystery, for example, which is then able to be represented in tree form. This has significantly led Jonathan Arac to call Moretti’s work “formalism without close reading,” an appellation Moretti himself says defines his work perfectly.
But if Moretti can actually affirm his work’s formalism, he still cannot give us much sense of what the close reading to which it is opposed actually involves. “At bottom,” he says, “it’s a theological exercise--very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously--whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” Such vagueness is typical of many recent critics who seek to turn away from close reading or, indeed, find new ways for critique in general to proceed. For specificity is not, ultimately, necessary: “close reading” can remain a label for the most tenacious of our basic critical dependencies—in Moretti’s case, at most it is the sort of scrutiny or attention that denies us access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental. “It’s a theological exercise,” in other words, only hints at what we need to make explicit in order for any widespread resistance to close reading to take place, and not collapse, as it sometimes does in Moretti, into the mere belief that anything different is better than what we have. In this respect, what is also necessary is a sense that distant reading is not only a name for Moretti’s work with models, but something like one pole at the end of a wide continuum whose opposite, while indeed being close reading, is only so if we cross many intervening levels of reading, from the more to the less distant over to the less and the more close. Looking for other distant readers than Moretti (I'd suggest Raymond Williams is such a reader), is then one step in both refining what we mean by close reading and showing how we can be lead out of it and brought towards something more distant, precisely by refusing to set up distant reading as some homogenous space outside of which, immediately, we fall into the close. Such a maneuver in fact capitalizes on what Moretti’s and other such attacks, in their vagueness, actually restore to close reading: its functional aspect, which ties it to methodological decisions that have alternatives.
Richards himself used the term “close” primarily in this functional sense, in order to denote the level at which one’s approach to the text in reading could, not make meanings appear, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning. Only subsequently in America would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which the practical Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with except by becoming Utopian: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent meanings with care. If the term and the practice have been able to remain less questioned, it is perhaps because its functions have become so intertwined with notions of virtue that, in the days of deconstruction, the cry “you have not read me closely,” could become not just a description but an accusation of irresponsibility in the widest sense--something like literary critical immorality, whatever that would be. And since it had become an empty term for, at bottom, interpretive work in general and what it does well, it is no surprise that “closeness” can veer round in Moretti to become an empty term for all that is bad.
Showing posts with label Todorov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Todorov. Show all posts
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Todorov and poetics
Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction to Poetics—in the French, simply Poétique, though it originally appeared in a collection of essays with the (significant) question there interrogated (Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?) appended—Todorov’s book is many things: an attempt to give unity to the structuralist investigation of literature, or at least (as the original French title makes clear) show how structuralism bears generally upon literary study; an attempt to give direction to many of the trends in literary study, which (thanks to Todorov’s remarkable breadth of knowledge) it continually takes into account; an attempt to project a future area for criticism. Above all, it is a clearheaded, sensible work: Todorov does not make superficial points, but condenses reflections that must be products of years of work with literature.
Todorov accomplishes all this first and foremost by proposing a field of investigation, poetics (the name is less important--but I explain it somewhat in a comment here), and skillfully making certain distinctions which not only saturate this field with useful concepts—that is, allow it to cull just the right amount from other trends in literary study—but also require the formulation of new concepts, made possible by the general trajectory in which the field is set moving. In short, the result of proposing the field of poetics is not a mashup of all sorts of theories, but a clean framework that is nevertheless flexible, meant to be used and developed in directions that, while keeping it consistent with itself, do not easily launch it into absurdity.
The founding gesture of poetics will demonstrate this clearly. Todorov distinguishes poetics from interpretation on the one hand, and from a science (a word he uses loosely) on the other. Interpretation, which Todorov usefully says may include diverse activities also called exegesis, commentary, explication de texte, close reading, or analyse, is an approach to literature that “sees the literary text itself as a sufficient object of knowledge” (3). In other words, its procedure implies the existence of an empirical object that, if thoroughly known, would give us all we need as critics who study literature. In fact, literature itself, as something apart from these objects, does not even exist for interpretation, to the extent that one could say—though Todorov doesn’t put it this way—that interpretation involves the dissolution of any idea of literature. What Todorov does say is something like the converse: interpretation involves only the consideration of real works, and the establishment of these works’ meanings. Interpretation’s aim “is to name the meaning of the text examined” (4). Its aim is also to fail at this, since it will be “forever incapable of realizing the meaning, but only a meaning” (4). It is important to note, however, that this means the failure is due to how what it specifies is so particular, so real that it demands, along with the effacement of literature itself or the idea of literature, the effacement of the critic who determines or qualifies this meaning, who makes it a meaning “subject to historical and psychological contingencies” (4). The failure is due to the ultimate impossibility of “fidelity to the object,” the inability, at bottom, “to make the text itself speak” (4), and not because at some point, a generalization must be made about how the work is indeed literary which will force the object into abstraction and interrupt interpretation. In short the idea of literature is still in the process of dissolution—it is precisely what never comes back to frustrate interpretation.
This is important because science takes up precisely this task: its aim “is no longer the description of the particular work, the designation of its meaning, but the establishment of general laws of which this particular text is the product” (7). These laws, however, are not laws of literature: a good example is a reading by Freud, who establishes psychoanalytic laws that explain a particular literary text (in other words we don't, without hesitation, call these laws literary, because they aren't). The work is “transpos[ed] into the realm considered fundamental” (7) or translated: its only meaning would be that psychoanalysis can appropriately consider such a text. Remember, however, naming the meaning is precisely foreign to science’s task, and therefore that science is by no means unproductive in this area. Laws are indeed being established which bear upon the idea of literature—historical, psychological, ethnographic, sociological, philosophical laws, which change our notion of what real works of literature are possible.
Poetics, as Todorov puts it, is not a compromise between the two activities here, but what “breaks down the symmetry thus established,” (7) or cuts across all of the features here elaborated. The cut, the disturbance of symmetry and mutual exclusion, is achieved by placing poetics within the field of science, but by making that science into a science of literature—which entails periodic contact with actual works and therefore interpretation.
Let us lay this out as clearly as possible. Todorov says,
In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it [poetics] does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such sciences as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within literature itself (6).
In other words poetics does not impede the consideration of the idea of literature, but does not seek to make this idea take the form of laws that are not about literature. Thus, “it is not the literary work itself that is the object of poetics” (6). Each work is regarded only as the manifestation of something abstract and general, “of which it is but one of the possible realizations” (7). We thereby put poetics in the category of science—and Todorov appropriately refers to it as “this science:” “this science is no longer concerned with actual literature, but with a possible literature” (7). Put differently, “the goal of this study is no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a descriptive résumé of the concrete work, but to propose a theory” (7).
At the same time, this theory is not external to literature: the theory proposed is “a theory that affords a list of literary possibilities, so that existing literary works appear as achieved particular cases” (7). Thus, interpretation is not excluded from this science: “The relation between poetics and interpretation is one of complementarity par excellence. A theoretical reflection upon poetics that is not sustained by observations of existing works always turns out to be sterile and invalid” (7). It pulls the scientific tendencies of poetics away from other sciences and focuses it upon literature—but in a way that we will soon specify, about which it is important, nevertheless, to say the following: interpretation certainly is not only present to ensure that this tendency is kept in check, as it has been present especially in Anglo-American circles. What we have here in Todorov is less an opposition between “science and poetry” (a famous, tired opposition, which also uses a different notion of “science”) than a suspicion towards interpretation, which, as we said, tends to dissolve the idea of literature—that is, doesn’t oppose itself to anything, or doesn’t stop at opposition, but invades and imposes upon anything that would abstract away from the real text, that would conceive of any possible literature other than the book in front of one’s face. If this means that the emphasis in poetics is indeed put upon science, if poetics indeed tends to establish more laws than suggest meanings, this is only because “a massive imbalance in favor of interpretation characterizes the history of literary studies” (12). But the conclusion Todorov reaches from this is that “it is this disequilibrium that we must oppose, and not the principle of interpretation” (12). And insofar as this is the case, the emphasis on science is not made to the detriment of interpretation: it just means interpretation is made into one of the many things that pulls poetics as a science away from literature. We may state this more robustly as follows: interpretation in poetics remains not primarily as what keeps the science in poetics in check, but which allows science to test its possible literatures against reality, or restrict a little the amount of the possible—that is, make sure the science is not wholly unmotivated, to use (too metaphorically) the semiological term. Insofar as this is the case, interpretation is still a major part of poetics. In fact, one thing can indeed be said for certain, even if science is emphasized: “neither of the two activities takes precedence over the other: both are ‘secondary’” (8). The emphasis on science is not one achieved by a hierarchy: it is the strategic focusing on what is already known to be merely secondary.
We then broach the more specific question of how precisely the science is actually kept in check, or is made into a science of literature—if indeed interpretation is not the thing that brings this about. In an earlier paper entitled “Structural Analysis of Narrative” (translated in Novel 3.1 [Autumn, 1969], p. 70-76), which shares many of the same points and even the same formulations with Poétique, Todorov gives us another distinction that can help us here: he says that we can discern internal approaches to a literary work and external ones. What is normally thought is that science is an external approach, or one of abstraction, and interpretation an internal approach:
For example, when Marxists or psychoanalysts deal with a work of literature, they are not interested in a knowledge of the work itself, but in understanding of an abstract structure, social of psychic, which manifests itself through that work. This attitude is both [that of science] and external. On the other hand a New Critic (imaginary) whose approach is obviously internal, will have no goal other than understanding the work itself; the result of his efforts will be [an interpretation:] a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself (70).
In Introduction to Poetics Todorov nicely uses these terms (in a phrase so key I'll set it off) to show precisely how poetics is situated, how it breaks down the symmetry between science and interpretation:
Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once "abstract" and "internal" (6).
What we are asking then, in asking how poetics as science remains a science of literature, is precisely how this science, which we grant to be abstract, can also be internal if it is not clearly employing interpretation for these purposes.
The answer is that, as a science of literature, its object is not an object, but a discourse. Put differently, if a science just has an object, it is not a structuralist science—and the only science under consideration here is of the structuralist sort. But what, then, is a discourse? Todorov in another essay, parroting Benveniste (see “Subjectivity in Language” in Problems in General Linguistics), explains that discourse is a language in action, a language as it is put in use (in the semiological sense of langue—that is, a finite set of rules making possible all utterances), or a used-language, prior to its being an actual, real moment of language use, or an utterance (parole):
It is necessary to introduce [this concept of discourse] because the rules of language, which are common to all who use it, constitute only a part of the rules which govern our concrete verbal production. They only fix the norm of grammatical combinations within a sentence, a phonology, and a common meaning for words. But between the set of rules common to all utterances [langue] and the exact formulation of a specific utterance [parole] there is a gulf of indeterminacy. The gulf is bridged by the rules of each particular discourse (thus an official letter will not be written in the same way as an intimate one), as well as by the limitations inherent in the context of the speech act (the identity of the speaker and the listener, the time and place of the speech act). The rules of discourse are more restricted than those of [a] language, but less restricted than those of a specific speech act (“The Notion of Literature,” in New Literary History 5.1 [1973], 5-16, p. 14).
If discourse is a language in action, if we specify these rules we are not talking about something external to the utterance, even though what we specify may be abstract: the discursive statement by (Benveniste’s) definition involves (or rather is only “filled” by) the act by which it is uttered (when the utterance is considered as a product of a language: which is why it is not a speech act or performative). This is not necessarily so from the perspective of science: science may discuss structure in general and ignore (for the most part) discourse.
But, again, because what we are discussing is discourse, while we do not consider the literary work itself, we still talk about what is internal to these objects, or what will be realized by them, so we are also not open to the charge that what we talk about is external. At the same time, this is also why they are not pure—that is, not really abstractions, but indeed descriptions (of literary discourse). Todorov puts it this way:
Poetics situates […] abstract notions not within the particular work but in literary discourse; it asserts that they can exist there alone, whereas in the work we always deal with a more or less “mixed” manifestation; poetics is not concerned with this or that fragment with a work, but with those abstract structures which it names “description” or “action” or “narration” (9).
Some skeptics of structuralism might still object that this “there” is really nowhere: literary discourse is still too unreal for them. Unless there is some contact with empirical works, and not a continual interrogation of “the properties of that particular discourse that is literary discourse” (6), we condemn the literary study to the study of pure convention, to the description of literature as something completely unessential. So Christopher Norris in a review of the Introduction disparages Todorov by saying that poetics defines literature “only in terms of its own discursive methodology” (Modern Language Review, 78.3 [July, 1983], 636-637, p. 636). Without requiring contact with the empirical, the definition is “circular” (636).
I would doubt that this is so: there are indeed many questionable elements in Todorov’s account (one of which is that “reading is a trajectory […] that constitutes the text in space and not in linearity,” [5]: the spatialization of the line is precisely self-serving and circular, as much as it is typically structuralist, because it does not thereby abolish the line but, precisely as in Hegel, preserves it within space) but this I find to be pretty solid, if only because Todorov draws the ultimate conclusion from it. This is the following: if the poetics studies is literary discourse, and indeed does not of necessity require contact with real, empirical phenomena (“poetics is not the sum of empirical phenomena,” 10), then poetics must be a finite endeavor, which disperses itself as soon as the discourse which it studies disperses. And Todorov affirms this, and far from closing on what Norris—whose aim can only be to consciously mislead—calls a “grave resignation” (636) in fact seems quite happy that poetics has this sort of pertinence (once more, in the semiotic sense): Todorov says that as studies of other discourses, helped along by the example of the study of literary discourse, may indeed proliferate, poetics’
own role will be reduced to little enough: to the investigation of the reasons that caused us to consider certain texts, at certain periods, as ‘literature.’ No sooner born than poetics finds itself called upon, by t he very power of its results to sacrifice itself on the altar of general knowledge. And it is not certain that this fate may be regretted (72).
This is strong stuff, but it isn’t resigned. It is just announcing that wonderful but (in most of America) still unappreciated property of things structurally considered: they are finite, without ground, and without essence—wholly conventional, never natural. This is why the above argument does not strike me as circular: it is circular only insofar as structuralism as a whole is circular. This, though, is a distinct possibility: we can object to Todorov in another way, which would be that interpretation, perhaps not as the consideration of empirical works but instead as the consideration of works still “in themselves” in one aspect—in their singularity, their irreducibility—will at some point be impeded precisely by the focus on discourse. The irreducibility will precisely be reduced to structure. The only defense we can make for Todorov here would be the one that, again, defends structuralism generally from this “post-structualist” critique: it would be to affirm, with Todorov, the benefits of undoing—even slightly, or perhaps only slightly—the imbalance in favor of interpretation which has characterized the study of literature. This, though, is risky, I would do so only in the following manner, which is not Todorov’s, and which I sketch out much too quickly: unless such focus on singularity or irreducibility is paired with some way to extrapolate, to situate itself and strategically reduce itself, it remains too indeterminate even to be considered impractically, let alone practically, and in fact—this is the highest danger—can be confused precisely with the empirical. Structuralism may help in this process of extrapolation.
Todorov accomplishes all this first and foremost by proposing a field of investigation, poetics (the name is less important--but I explain it somewhat in a comment here), and skillfully making certain distinctions which not only saturate this field with useful concepts—that is, allow it to cull just the right amount from other trends in literary study—but also require the formulation of new concepts, made possible by the general trajectory in which the field is set moving. In short, the result of proposing the field of poetics is not a mashup of all sorts of theories, but a clean framework that is nevertheless flexible, meant to be used and developed in directions that, while keeping it consistent with itself, do not easily launch it into absurdity.
The founding gesture of poetics will demonstrate this clearly. Todorov distinguishes poetics from interpretation on the one hand, and from a science (a word he uses loosely) on the other. Interpretation, which Todorov usefully says may include diverse activities also called exegesis, commentary, explication de texte, close reading, or analyse, is an approach to literature that “sees the literary text itself as a sufficient object of knowledge” (3). In other words, its procedure implies the existence of an empirical object that, if thoroughly known, would give us all we need as critics who study literature. In fact, literature itself, as something apart from these objects, does not even exist for interpretation, to the extent that one could say—though Todorov doesn’t put it this way—that interpretation involves the dissolution of any idea of literature. What Todorov does say is something like the converse: interpretation involves only the consideration of real works, and the establishment of these works’ meanings. Interpretation’s aim “is to name the meaning of the text examined” (4). Its aim is also to fail at this, since it will be “forever incapable of realizing the meaning, but only a meaning” (4). It is important to note, however, that this means the failure is due to how what it specifies is so particular, so real that it demands, along with the effacement of literature itself or the idea of literature, the effacement of the critic who determines or qualifies this meaning, who makes it a meaning “subject to historical and psychological contingencies” (4). The failure is due to the ultimate impossibility of “fidelity to the object,” the inability, at bottom, “to make the text itself speak” (4), and not because at some point, a generalization must be made about how the work is indeed literary which will force the object into abstraction and interrupt interpretation. In short the idea of literature is still in the process of dissolution—it is precisely what never comes back to frustrate interpretation.
This is important because science takes up precisely this task: its aim “is no longer the description of the particular work, the designation of its meaning, but the establishment of general laws of which this particular text is the product” (7). These laws, however, are not laws of literature: a good example is a reading by Freud, who establishes psychoanalytic laws that explain a particular literary text (in other words we don't, without hesitation, call these laws literary, because they aren't). The work is “transpos[ed] into the realm considered fundamental” (7) or translated: its only meaning would be that psychoanalysis can appropriately consider such a text. Remember, however, naming the meaning is precisely foreign to science’s task, and therefore that science is by no means unproductive in this area. Laws are indeed being established which bear upon the idea of literature—historical, psychological, ethnographic, sociological, philosophical laws, which change our notion of what real works of literature are possible.
Poetics, as Todorov puts it, is not a compromise between the two activities here, but what “breaks down the symmetry thus established,” (7) or cuts across all of the features here elaborated. The cut, the disturbance of symmetry and mutual exclusion, is achieved by placing poetics within the field of science, but by making that science into a science of literature—which entails periodic contact with actual works and therefore interpretation.
Let us lay this out as clearly as possible. Todorov says,
In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it [poetics] does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such sciences as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within literature itself (6).
In other words poetics does not impede the consideration of the idea of literature, but does not seek to make this idea take the form of laws that are not about literature. Thus, “it is not the literary work itself that is the object of poetics” (6). Each work is regarded only as the manifestation of something abstract and general, “of which it is but one of the possible realizations” (7). We thereby put poetics in the category of science—and Todorov appropriately refers to it as “this science:” “this science is no longer concerned with actual literature, but with a possible literature” (7). Put differently, “the goal of this study is no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a descriptive résumé of the concrete work, but to propose a theory” (7).
At the same time, this theory is not external to literature: the theory proposed is “a theory that affords a list of literary possibilities, so that existing literary works appear as achieved particular cases” (7). Thus, interpretation is not excluded from this science: “The relation between poetics and interpretation is one of complementarity par excellence. A theoretical reflection upon poetics that is not sustained by observations of existing works always turns out to be sterile and invalid” (7). It pulls the scientific tendencies of poetics away from other sciences and focuses it upon literature—but in a way that we will soon specify, about which it is important, nevertheless, to say the following: interpretation certainly is not only present to ensure that this tendency is kept in check, as it has been present especially in Anglo-American circles. What we have here in Todorov is less an opposition between “science and poetry” (a famous, tired opposition, which also uses a different notion of “science”) than a suspicion towards interpretation, which, as we said, tends to dissolve the idea of literature—that is, doesn’t oppose itself to anything, or doesn’t stop at opposition, but invades and imposes upon anything that would abstract away from the real text, that would conceive of any possible literature other than the book in front of one’s face. If this means that the emphasis in poetics is indeed put upon science, if poetics indeed tends to establish more laws than suggest meanings, this is only because “a massive imbalance in favor of interpretation characterizes the history of literary studies” (12). But the conclusion Todorov reaches from this is that “it is this disequilibrium that we must oppose, and not the principle of interpretation” (12). And insofar as this is the case, the emphasis on science is not made to the detriment of interpretation: it just means interpretation is made into one of the many things that pulls poetics as a science away from literature. We may state this more robustly as follows: interpretation in poetics remains not primarily as what keeps the science in poetics in check, but which allows science to test its possible literatures against reality, or restrict a little the amount of the possible—that is, make sure the science is not wholly unmotivated, to use (too metaphorically) the semiological term. Insofar as this is the case, interpretation is still a major part of poetics. In fact, one thing can indeed be said for certain, even if science is emphasized: “neither of the two activities takes precedence over the other: both are ‘secondary’” (8). The emphasis on science is not one achieved by a hierarchy: it is the strategic focusing on what is already known to be merely secondary.
We then broach the more specific question of how precisely the science is actually kept in check, or is made into a science of literature—if indeed interpretation is not the thing that brings this about. In an earlier paper entitled “Structural Analysis of Narrative” (translated in Novel 3.1 [Autumn, 1969], p. 70-76), which shares many of the same points and even the same formulations with Poétique, Todorov gives us another distinction that can help us here: he says that we can discern internal approaches to a literary work and external ones. What is normally thought is that science is an external approach, or one of abstraction, and interpretation an internal approach:
For example, when Marxists or psychoanalysts deal with a work of literature, they are not interested in a knowledge of the work itself, but in understanding of an abstract structure, social of psychic, which manifests itself through that work. This attitude is both [that of science] and external. On the other hand a New Critic (imaginary) whose approach is obviously internal, will have no goal other than understanding the work itself; the result of his efforts will be [an interpretation:] a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself (70).
In Introduction to Poetics Todorov nicely uses these terms (in a phrase so key I'll set it off) to show precisely how poetics is situated, how it breaks down the symmetry between science and interpretation:
Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once "abstract" and "internal" (6).
What we are asking then, in asking how poetics as science remains a science of literature, is precisely how this science, which we grant to be abstract, can also be internal if it is not clearly employing interpretation for these purposes.
The answer is that, as a science of literature, its object is not an object, but a discourse. Put differently, if a science just has an object, it is not a structuralist science—and the only science under consideration here is of the structuralist sort. But what, then, is a discourse? Todorov in another essay, parroting Benveniste (see “Subjectivity in Language” in Problems in General Linguistics), explains that discourse is a language in action, a language as it is put in use (in the semiological sense of langue—that is, a finite set of rules making possible all utterances), or a used-language, prior to its being an actual, real moment of language use, or an utterance (parole):
It is necessary to introduce [this concept of discourse] because the rules of language, which are common to all who use it, constitute only a part of the rules which govern our concrete verbal production. They only fix the norm of grammatical combinations within a sentence, a phonology, and a common meaning for words. But between the set of rules common to all utterances [langue] and the exact formulation of a specific utterance [parole] there is a gulf of indeterminacy. The gulf is bridged by the rules of each particular discourse (thus an official letter will not be written in the same way as an intimate one), as well as by the limitations inherent in the context of the speech act (the identity of the speaker and the listener, the time and place of the speech act). The rules of discourse are more restricted than those of [a] language, but less restricted than those of a specific speech act (“The Notion of Literature,” in New Literary History 5.1 [1973], 5-16, p. 14).
If discourse is a language in action, if we specify these rules we are not talking about something external to the utterance, even though what we specify may be abstract: the discursive statement by (Benveniste’s) definition involves (or rather is only “filled” by) the act by which it is uttered (when the utterance is considered as a product of a language: which is why it is not a speech act or performative). This is not necessarily so from the perspective of science: science may discuss structure in general and ignore (for the most part) discourse.
But, again, because what we are discussing is discourse, while we do not consider the literary work itself, we still talk about what is internal to these objects, or what will be realized by them, so we are also not open to the charge that what we talk about is external. At the same time, this is also why they are not pure—that is, not really abstractions, but indeed descriptions (of literary discourse). Todorov puts it this way:
Poetics situates […] abstract notions not within the particular work but in literary discourse; it asserts that they can exist there alone, whereas in the work we always deal with a more or less “mixed” manifestation; poetics is not concerned with this or that fragment with a work, but with those abstract structures which it names “description” or “action” or “narration” (9).
Some skeptics of structuralism might still object that this “there” is really nowhere: literary discourse is still too unreal for them. Unless there is some contact with empirical works, and not a continual interrogation of “the properties of that particular discourse that is literary discourse” (6), we condemn the literary study to the study of pure convention, to the description of literature as something completely unessential. So Christopher Norris in a review of the Introduction disparages Todorov by saying that poetics defines literature “only in terms of its own discursive methodology” (Modern Language Review, 78.3 [July, 1983], 636-637, p. 636). Without requiring contact with the empirical, the definition is “circular” (636).
I would doubt that this is so: there are indeed many questionable elements in Todorov’s account (one of which is that “reading is a trajectory […] that constitutes the text in space and not in linearity,” [5]: the spatialization of the line is precisely self-serving and circular, as much as it is typically structuralist, because it does not thereby abolish the line but, precisely as in Hegel, preserves it within space) but this I find to be pretty solid, if only because Todorov draws the ultimate conclusion from it. This is the following: if the poetics studies is literary discourse, and indeed does not of necessity require contact with real, empirical phenomena (“poetics is not the sum of empirical phenomena,” 10), then poetics must be a finite endeavor, which disperses itself as soon as the discourse which it studies disperses. And Todorov affirms this, and far from closing on what Norris—whose aim can only be to consciously mislead—calls a “grave resignation” (636) in fact seems quite happy that poetics has this sort of pertinence (once more, in the semiotic sense): Todorov says that as studies of other discourses, helped along by the example of the study of literary discourse, may indeed proliferate, poetics’
own role will be reduced to little enough: to the investigation of the reasons that caused us to consider certain texts, at certain periods, as ‘literature.’ No sooner born than poetics finds itself called upon, by t he very power of its results to sacrifice itself on the altar of general knowledge. And it is not certain that this fate may be regretted (72).
This is strong stuff, but it isn’t resigned. It is just announcing that wonderful but (in most of America) still unappreciated property of things structurally considered: they are finite, without ground, and without essence—wholly conventional, never natural. This is why the above argument does not strike me as circular: it is circular only insofar as structuralism as a whole is circular. This, though, is a distinct possibility: we can object to Todorov in another way, which would be that interpretation, perhaps not as the consideration of empirical works but instead as the consideration of works still “in themselves” in one aspect—in their singularity, their irreducibility—will at some point be impeded precisely by the focus on discourse. The irreducibility will precisely be reduced to structure. The only defense we can make for Todorov here would be the one that, again, defends structuralism generally from this “post-structualist” critique: it would be to affirm, with Todorov, the benefits of undoing—even slightly, or perhaps only slightly—the imbalance in favor of interpretation which has characterized the study of literature. This, though, is risky, I would do so only in the following manner, which is not Todorov’s, and which I sketch out much too quickly: unless such focus on singularity or irreducibility is paired with some way to extrapolate, to situate itself and strategically reduce itself, it remains too indeterminate even to be considered impractically, let alone practically, and in fact—this is the highest danger—can be confused precisely with the empirical. Structuralism may help in this process of extrapolation.
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