Pierre Macherey: Pour une théorie de la production littéraire

(Paris, Maspero, 1966)

Summary/Introduction

(D.E.M.)

Most people who have tried to read Macherey would probably agree that his work is difficult, obscure and, at times, irritatingly enigmatic. Occasionally he seems to be offering suggestions which are frankly banal while elsewhere very simple points are made in the most tortuous way. In fact I have come to the conclusion that Macherey often writes quite badly and there are moments in his text when it seems almost impossible to make sense of what he is saying. Thus there may well be a number of confusions in the present summary and the fault may not always be mine. Those of you who want to check what I have said might like to look at Geoffrey Wall's (frequently hazy, I think) translation: A Theory of Literary Production (London, RKP, 1978). Having said that it is probably not an exaggeration to say that Macherey's work, appearing first in 1966, with a second edition in 1971, created something like a mini-revolution in Marxist criticism in this country: it was clearly a decisively formative text as far as Terry Eagleton's early work was concerned (see his Criticism and Ideology (NLB, 1976) and it was Macherey's attendance at the Essex Conference in 1976 that did much to guarantee the early success of the Essex "Sociology of Literature" Conferences.

In what follows most of what I consider to be Macherey's most provocative and productive notions are to be found in the passages of direct translation. Passages of particular importance are offered in bold type; passages which I think rather less important are offered in a smaller font.

Pour une théorie de la production littéraire is divided into three parts: the first part is called "Some elementary concepts" — and here Macherey attempts to sketch the more purely theoretical outline of his work; the second part is entitled "Some critiques" — from which the major essay on Lenin’s critique of Tolstoy comes, and the third part is called "Some works" — here Macherey "applies" his theory to a number of very different works: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Borges’ The garden of forking paths, and Balzac’s The Peasants..

Part I: "Some elementary concepts"

1.. Criticism and judgment: The first few sections in the first part are concerned to examine the question: What is literary criticism? to answer that it is the attempt to know (savoir) what is a literary work is inadequate: it provides criticism with a domain but not an object —a domain being a given empirical field while an object is the specific object that makes a science possible and which is, in fact, constituted by that science — we shall return to this in a moment — the basic distinction Macherey is trying to establish in these opening sections is between empirical criticism and scientific criticism. Macherey argues that the term "criticism" itself is ambiguous: it suggests (1) a negative judgment, a rejection of the work, a condemnation (dénonciation) and (ii) "the positive knowledge (connaissance) of limits, i.e. the study of the conditions of the possibilities of an activity". Macherey goes on to say that we too easily slide between one of these two possibilities and the other — but we are left with two very different and quite distinct attitudes: (i) criticism as appreciation (the school of taste) and (ii) criticism as knowledge (the "science of literary production"). The one is a normative activity, the other speculative; the one concerned with rules, the other with laws; the one a science, the other an art. The question is now: which is the domain of one (art) and which is the object of the other (science)?

2. Domain and object: — To say that literary criticism is the study of literary works is to establish a domain and not an object: this is to make literary criticism an art and not a science: a domain is where a pure technique can do what it likes — it is an empirically given field. There is nothing wrong with this for every rational activity has to begin with something empirically given — but in scientific practice the object is not given but constituted by its discipline. Even while bearing upon a certain domain, a science can be a science only by imposing a certain limit on that domain, dividing it up in such a way as to provide itself with its specific object. Science is established at a distance from the real, from the given — this is the problem of the institution of all knowledge — and means that it must defend itself from all empiricism. Knowledge is not a mere slavish imitation of the real:

To know is not to listen to some pre-existing word, which would be a story or fable, and translate it: it is to invent a new word, give the word to that which essentially guards a silence, not that it is prevented from saying something, but rather because it is the guardian of a silence.

To know, therefore, is not to rediscover or reconstitute a latent sense: hidden or forgotten. It is to constitute a new knowledge, i.e. a knowledge that is added to the reality from which it sets out and of which it says something else. Let us remember that the idea of a circle is not itself circular: it is not because there are circles that we have the idea of a circle. And let us bear in mind that the appearance of a knowledge institutes a certain distance, a certain difference or displacement (écart): in limiting by this difference the initial domain, it makes of it a measurable space, the object of a knowledge. (p.14)

This difference is irreducible: the empiricist fallacy is to think that this difference — this displacement — is only provisional — that the real can be reached and manipulated by techniques etc. The distance of a knowledge is therefore only provisional and can be consummated in an act which destroys its difference — its necessary and specific distance.

We must not consider knowledge as a mere means to an end, the way to a truth which once established can dispense with what led to it. A knowledge has its own autonomy, its own mode of production — it must not be considered as an instrument but as a work.

This notion of distance, of difference, is of the greatest importance for literary criticism for it prohibits the identification of the object of criticism (i.e. scientific criticism) with the given domain i.e. the work itself. The knowledge and the work are two different things — and it is not a question of two points of view (that of the writer and that of the critic) bearing upon the same object. There are two forms of discourse involved and they have nothing in common: "the work written by the writer is not exactly the same work explicated by the critic. Let us say provisionally that, by the utilization of a new language, the critic brings to light a difference in the work, makes it appear other than it is". (p.15)

[3. Questions and answers: — The empirical description of a discipline being discarded, we find ourselves threatened by a vicious circle: a science constitutes its object, but a science cannot be constituted without that object — the object and the science are in a reciprocal relationship one to the other. It is easy to point to their existence after they have been constituted but this does not explain how they came into being, what were the laws of their production, the effective conditions of their possibility. Once constituted they can assume the form of a doctrine — i.e. as a system of answers — but the real problem is to find the question that provokes these answers — it is the question that has to be questioned. But it is difficult to find the original question —there is the danger of an endless regression — but, even more important, there is the danger of the illusion of the simple unfolding in history of a single series of questions whereas the history of questions shows that there is never a simple central question but a whole complexity of questions: "The question which founds a history is neither simple nor given: it is constituted by a number of terms in such a way as to produce a problem, necessarily complex, and unresolvable into one answer".

Here Macherey adopts a peculiarly structuralist solution: the notion of an original question must not be understood as referring to some original question in time, in the remote past, at the beginning of history for "the question, or the structure, is not the ulterior materialization, the late embodiment of a meaning already existing: it is its real condition of possibility" (p.19) — i.e. the question does not depend on its history, but history depends on the question. The question of the question, then, must refer us not to the past, but to the real conditions of its production — it is this "knowing of the conditions of a process" which is the "real programme for a scientific investigation". (p.1.9). The conditions and their complexity are real — not the product of an ideal(istic) division of a coherency of a higher power (the Hegelian model). The conditions of a process, as a scientific object, must not be subsumed by some more simple or more central essence which would reduce them to mere phenomena — whether this essence be the Hegelian Idea, the dominant trait of an historical period, or the subjectivity of an author (here I am anticipating Macherey’s argument). Macherey ends this section as follows:

To sum up: the history of critical doctrines only becomes intelligible for us at the moment we determine the complex question which is its condition. (p.20)]

4. Rule and law — (i.e. from consumption to production): The work of a writer does not come to us as a form of knowledge but the act of writing might be the object of a knowledge. "This presupposes that literary criticism, refusing to be satisfied by merely describing the finished object, thus preparing it for transmission, i.e. consumed, displaces its interest and proposes as its object (to be explained and not merely described) the elaboration of this product.." This gives us a new question — not "what is literature?", or "what is literary criticism?" but "what are the laws of literary production?" (p.21). This becomes the new object of criticism and marks the break with criticism as an art — concerned with "rules", normative and approximative, incapable of theoretically justifying itself, and concerned only with the consumption of literature — when it considers the production of the work at all it merely falls back on the ideological myth of the artist as "creator". All that empirical criticism can do is take the given object, the product, and prepare it for consumption.

5. Positive judgment and negative judgment: — Having dealt with the fallacies of empirical criticism, Macherey turns to a second critical fallacy — that of normative criticism, i.e. that criticism which bases itself on some ideal model of what the work should be, the individual work being measured and judged with regard to the degree to which it conforms to this ideal model or not (this is a common feature of structuralism at its platonic worst, and of Lukacs who also seems to set up a type of ideal novel — that of Balzac, and of Goldmann who establishes his structural homologies etc.). Macherey argues that this criticism regards the work as always preceded by its own ideal model to which it must be referred back — and this model may be construed as the work’s truth — its model and its end. The basic failure of this criticism is that obsessed by the conformity or truthfulness of the work it measures the work to the extent that it abolishes its differences between itself and its truth/model — i.e. renounces its specific differences which makes it other than its truth/model, which makes it what it is and no other work — this criticism, in the end, invites the work to abolish itself in its end — its real substance and its real complexities are only so much padding, a mere "detour". Thus, for example, a detective story is destroyed once we know who done it. But this is so obvious that this very criticism invites the consideration of a contrary possibility — if the truth of the work makes the work itself dispensable and that truth might have been arrived at in any number of different ways then the specificity of the work is just that multiplicity, complexity and heterogeneity of material that normative criticism ignores:

But such literature (i.e. detective stories) can evidently be understood in two ways: if it brings to light or exposes (dénonce) the difference which vainly separates the work from its real meaning, it also shows the work going on in the work, constructing the long road which differences it from its end at the same time as it approaches it. The other side of the work may be the model in which it declares its nullity. But it is also possibly this nothing which, within the text itself, multiplies it and composes it, driving it in the direction of more than one meaning (sens: "meaning" or "direction". The great example of a text that has a bifurcation of meanings is Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths) (p.29)

Finally, on this normative fallacy: (a) it is only a variation of the empirical fallacy: it comments on every text "could have been better" and posits the model of the work only so that the work can be better and more easily consumed. But (b) its redeeming virtue is that it at least suggests that the work can be other than it appears —suggests the possibility of a movement (and Macherey is very much concerned with the work’s possibility of movement) — but here it is a movement only within very constraining limits.

6. One side and the other side (Envers et endroit): — The section which follows, one of the longest in the first part of the book, takes up the notion of a work appearing other than it is or, put otherwise, the notion that the work has some sort of "other side" which is its truth. Macherey bases his arguments on two texts — Poe’s account of the Genesis of a poem and a Gothic novel by Anne Radcliffe: Visions from a castle in the Pyrénées — the two texts are taken more or less at random but whereas the one affects to be a theoretical text the other is an example of a rather naive type of literature.

Macherey argues that Poe’s classic text — which puts forward the view that a writer — be he a story writer or a poet — never begins to work unless he already has the end of his work in mind — everything in the work will be meticulously placed to work towards that end — is an essentially polemical text intended to explode the whole mystique of the writer as some sort of spontaneous creator. In that Poe places the beginning of the work at the end — the end the object towards which the whole work moves — Poe is close to the position of the normative critics dealt with in the previous section. But Macherey then turns to Baudelaire’s commentary on Poe’s text — where Baudelaire argues that every element of the work is thus fitted in in accordance with the end in view (p.33) — but it is this seemingly casual remark which Macherey seizes upon for what Baudelaire reveals is that a work is made up of a variety of elements: "Thus the stress is placed on the diversity of the text: the text does not say one thing, but necessarily several at the same time. The text is therefore composed of elements as much different as they are instantaneous". Poe gives a psychological reason for this diversity: attention can only be held by variety and for short periods of time — hence the failure — for Poe — of Milton’s Paradise Lost. But Macherey argues that what Poe is pointing to here is the unequal development of a text — for Poe this is a fault — for Macherey it is the characteristic of all texts.

The other value of Poe’s text is that it shows that writing and reading are two different activities — in fact two activities which move in opposite directions — but this simple inversion (salutary enough) is not by any means a significant theoretical advance: instead of regarding the work as springing from a creative origin the work is now subjected to a predetermined end —in neither case is the real complexity of the work accounted for —rather it is discounted. Ironically Poe’s text itself is evidence of the radical disparity it would seek to ignore: for apart from the text’s subjection to its predetermined end Poe also recognizes that certain aesthetic qualities have to be recognized: Macherey observes: "...the intrusion of the question of aesthetic propriety introduces into the argument an embarrassing contradiction: the work is at once the product of a work and a contemplative abandon." (pp.36—7). Macherey in fact argues that Poe’s "theoretical" text is no more than another fantastic story — its very disparity the mark of its literariness; it is no more than a provocative fable — but nevertheless illustrative to the extent that it bears out "a truth it is itself incapable of saying:

a text can be read in more than one way; it is thus that there might coexist in it at least a one side and another side" (p.38).

As opposed to the ideology of unity on which Poe bases his albeit provocative text, it can be said that the principle of a text is its diversity. It is this diversity and this multiplicity which need to be explained:

Closed and interminable, finished or indefinitely begun, curled around an absent centre, which it would be incapable of showing or of masking, diffuse and compact: the discourse of a work. (p.38)

Macherey’s discussion of Anne Radcliffe’s novel is rather long and laboured and I will try to summarise it as briefly as possible. I don’t want to ignore this discussion altogether for it contains a number of important observations. An initial point that he makes is that, however simple a work might appear, it is never innocent — its innocence is complexly determined by a whole battery of established procedures. Complementary to this observation, Macherey goes on to say also that there is no such thing as a totally "conscious" (averti) work: "aware of the means that it employs to become a book, knowing what it does" (p.39).

Radcliffe’s novel is a "mystery novel" — and its principal problem is not the resolving of the problem (this would — I will use a Borges term — merely fulminate the work) but the constitution of the problem — the whole concern of the novel is that of deferring the denouement.

The investigation then must concern itself less with what one finds out at the end, and which will be not mysterious at all, but with the very conditions of existence of what appears in front of one: the other side of things is less attractive than this fragile surface which ceaselessly deceives. (p.41)

The whole constitution of the work is thus ambiguous — it must advance the action by delays, a perpetual either/or is at play, the materials constituting the text betray this ambiguity — here we have the images of the "ruined castle" or the "unfinished statue", it is all a question of not yet and already — it is this substance which is the text which is dissipated by the end. "The text is at the same time

perfectly transparent (everything ends by being explained) and perfectly opaque (everything begins by concealing itself)" (p.46). To subsume the text within a truth that is external to it or within it is to dissipate the reality of the work itself:

...there is nothing else in the tale, or behind it, than the development of the tale itself...the impatience to understand, the transparence of a reading, have as their necessary corollary the opacity and the delay which are their (very) conditions.

Thus the work, in order to be judged, cannot be confronted with a truth external to it or buried within it. Both a criticism which goes beyond the work, and an immanent criticism are equally in vain: the one as the other tends to distract explanation from the real complexity of the work. (p.50)

7. Improvisation, structure and necessity: — The book, then, is neither simple nor innocent, but a highly complex structure — even works which give the impression of being "improvised", or the products of chance are in fact the products of certain devices and constraints — indeed even so called "open-works" may be said to constitute a specific sort of genre with its own laws etc. Macherey refers to Propp’s celebrated analyses of fairy tales to show that even the most innocent, seemingly most uncontrived literature is highly structured and conformist (though Macherey recognises that Propp’s analysis has certain very limited structural possibilities — he is concerned only with variations within very well defined archetypal limits).

The question remains of defining the specific necessity of a work —without resorting either to the "intentions" of the author or to a conformity to an external model — and in order to even begin to define the peculiar necessity of a work the whole notion of the unity of the work must be abandoned — the work is broken, unevenly developed, unbalanced:

In every work one can find the index of this internal rupture, this decentering, which manifests its dependence with respect to specific conditions of possibility: thus the work never has, except in appearance, the cohesion of a unified whole. It is neither improvised nor determined: it derives from some sort of free necessity that we must better define. (p.53)

While rejecting the notion of the author with his intentions and his "devices" (which are the focus of attention for the Formalists), Macherey ventures the notion of the author as a "workman" (ouvrier— it is often alleged that Macherey ignores the role of the artist — this is not so: he merely breaks with the myth of the artist creating a world out of nothing and substitutes the less ambitious notion of the artist as a workman). And he goes on, in what is one of the most important passages in his work:

Working at his text the writer, (see the Formalist origin of this notion) in particular, does not make the materials with which he works. Nor does he find them spontaneously laid out before him, stray pieces, free to help with the construction of any kind of scaffolding: they are not transparent, neutral elements which will obligingly abolish themselves, disappear in the structure which they help to constitute, providing it with material, adopting its form or forms. The motifs which determine the existence of a work are not independent instruments ready to serve no matter what meaning:... they have a sort of specific weight or force of their own which determines that even when employed and mixed in a structure, they preserve a certain autonomy and can in certain instances go so far as to assert their own life. This is not on account of some fatal law of forms, an absolute and transcendental logic of aesthetic elements, but because their real position in the history of forms prevents them being characterized solely by their association with the immediate work in hand. (p.54)

Thus, Macherey argues, the necessity of a work is not something determining it beforehand but a product — "the meeting of several lines of necessity" (p.54). Any theory of literary production, therefore, must base itself on those disciplines concerned with the "organisation of a multiplicity".

The necessity of a work can also be characterised in a different but related way — by asking the question as to how it differs from ordinary language. Macherey’s discussion here is rather prolix and I

will summarise it briefly: the principal difference between ordinary language and literary language is that ordinary language can and does allude consistently to other evidence as a measure of its truthfulness: literary language has to establish its own truthfulness, establish its own conviction, its own power of convincing — it must also convince us that it needs to be read — it must capture our attention, impel us forward: this it achieves by a whole repertoire of procedures, of variations, of references backwards and forwards — and we find ourselves back with the necessity of the constitution of a complexity which must be self sustaining (Macherey argues that it is only lesser works that depend on some element external to themselves — an ideology, a doctrine etc. — p.59). Choice, for example, must become, both for the writer and the reader only the illusion of a choice — the possibility of a choice, of alternatives, is an illusive stimulant to the reader who thinks things might have been otherwise — but in fact they are not otherwise only what they are. The author himself is equally constrained there are certain things he cannot do — e.g. kill the hero in the first few pages — and (here the argument might be seen to be directed at both Lukacs and Goldmann) little is gained by shifting the responsibility of choice to a collective group — this is to remain within the same basic problematic. At the same time there is no point either in arguing that the work is self determining — this is what Macherey argues is the structuralist fallacy — No: the real object of enquiry must be, Macherey repeats again, to

bring to light the real process of the constitution (of the work): to show how a real diversity of elements constitute it, and give the work its consistence. p.62)

But we must not confuse necessity and fatality: the work is both determined and yet capable of change — there is a "work of the work" — without this there would not be a work. (Macherey refers to Butor’s novel The Modification which is precisely obsessed by this work of the work: the novel the author is writing is changed by the very fact that s/he is writing it).

8: Autonomy and independence: — Macherey returns to the issue of a text containing a truth but that that truth is not in it like a secret to be discovered – thereby dissipating the work. Such an understanding of the nature of the work is mistaken for four reasons: it confuses reading and writing; it decomposes where it should be considering the laws of composition; it considers that in the work there is something given that just has to be found; it limits the understanding of a work to the search for a single, unique, meaning. It fails to come to terms with the specificity of the work.

The main concern of the section is to examine what we mean by the specificity of a work: one meaning is that it cannot be reduced to something else, that it is the product of a specific labour and not a simple derivation from something else, i.e. the work is the product of a break and to fail to recognise this break is to remain caught in the toils of ideological confusion. It is pointless therefore, for example, to attempt to derive the meaning of the work from the biography of the writer (Sartre on Baudelaire/Flaubert?). The specificity of the work is the index of its autonomy: it is a law unto itself, setting its own limits in the process of constituting them (p.66) — hence it cannot be judged by norms pertaining to other domains and objects — it requires its own (theoretical) knowledge. It is especially important to recognise that

literary texts make a special use of ideology and language …. wresting them from themselves in a certain way in order to give them a new objective, making them serve for the realization of a project which is not properly their own. (p.66)

(Note: I have altered the French here: the final phrase in the French is: les faisant servir à la réalisation d’un dessein qui leur appartient en propre — this does not seem to me to fit into Macherey’s argument whereas it would if a negative could be used — ne leur appartient pas en propre — The problem is the "leur": what does it refer to? to "ideology and language" or to "literary texts"? The basic point is that the text effects a displacement of ideology in relation to itself).

This break, or rupture, with the everyday use of language and ideology must not be construed either in terms of a break between "art" and "reality" nor is it in the nature of an "epistemological break" like that instituted between ideology and science — but there is, nevertheless, a break, sufficiently radical to

prevent us assimilating the work to what it is not (Robinson Crusoe to the "protestant ethic"; Phèdre to Jansenism).

But the break is not absolute — it establishes an autonomy but not an independence: the difference of the work implies what it is different from — i.e. it implies a relationship: the difference between two autonomous realities can only be understood if it is seen as already a form of relationship, a certain way of being grouped together. This is all the more important since the real differences are not given once and for all, but, as the result of a process of production of difference, they must continually be reestablished, held on to, in the face of that which tends to dissipate them: they reveal, then, a very precise form of relationship, not an empirical relationship, but none the less real for that, since they are the product of a work.

The work of literature cannot therefore be studied as if it were a self sufficient totality. As we shall see, if it is sufficient unto itself it is not so much that it is a totality: the hypotheses of the unity and independence of a work are arbitrary; they presuppose a profound ignorance of the work of a writer. In the first place the work is in relation to language itself; through language it is in relation to other uses of language: theoretical and ideological, on which it depends very directly; through ideologies it is in relation to the history of social formations; it is also in relation to these through the position of the writer and through the problems posed for him by his personal existence; in sum, the literary work only exists by its relation with at least a part of the history of literary production which hands down to it the essential instruments for its work.

Briefly, a book never comes alone; it is always accompanied by a set of social relations against the background of which it assumes shape and form. It is therefore, with respect to these, in a relationship of characteristic dependence, which is not to be reduced to a question of mere contrast: like every product, it is a secondary reality, which does not mean that it does not exist by laws which are peculiar to itself. We shall see later how this secondary character is precisely that which essentially defines the work of the writer to the extent that we can define its function as always parodic. (pp.67—8)

9.Image and concept: the language of Beauty and the lanquage of truth:— I find this one of the most intricately argued sections of the first part of the book and the most difficult to summarise. It begins easily enough: the writer works with language — but language is used for other things than literature — what distinguishes literature from other languages? For the thinkers of the Renaissance what distinguished literary language was its "beauty". The conjunction of a "natural" language and the quality of "beauty" produced the literary work. Macherey again asks what is the specificity of this work.

His argument becomes aphoristic: the language of the writer is distinguished by the way it is used. It is used to institute an illusion. Its primary quality is its veracity — it has to be believed —i.e. we must take its word. This language has an evocative power and produces an effect of reality — but this is true, too, of other uses of language e.g. everyday language and even scientific language. But scientific language is concerned with reason whereas literary language is concerned with illusion (we seem to be going in circles) and therefore questions as to its truthfulness or falseness are beside the point —it evokes its own reality.

Characteristic of the language of illusion is its use of images (not concepts) which fascinate: it is one of the first characteristics of literary style that it is obsessive — hence the repetitions, doubling back on itself, its variations — its redundancy which distinguishes it from scientific language. Furthermore the elements of a literary text cannot be transposed from their context without changing their meaning — whereas in scientific discourse this is possible. The element in the work receives its proper meaning only from that work. Macherey chooses a striking example: Balzac’s Paris — this is not the real Paris, but a literary construct (cf. Dicken’s London). The image, Paris/London, is constituted by the process of the text — its repeats, doubling back on itself etc. — it is a process of — and Macherey deliberately uses the Formalist concept — singularisation: it is a process, not the introduction of something given, but instituted by arid instituting a whole series of movements. The image only finds its place in this process but this process can be, it is, endless. Macherey cites Balzac’s Paris as an example:

Thus the Paris of Balzac is the analogue of a book: traversed, stirring before the glance which works it, falling back, ceaselessly becoming, folding back or hollowing itself out (se creusant) before him, inviting a further pursuit. This pursuit is constitutive since it ends by setting up its object. (p. 73)

To gloss: the "real" Paris is ever in retreat from the literary Paris —the literary Paris is always ever other than the "real" Paris — ergo the pursuit is endless — indeed, it guarantees its own endlessness — this is the fascination of the text which is depicted by the image which is an index of perpetual insufficiency. This evoking of an absence by the presence of the word is — Macherey cites Mallarmé’s famous "flower" which denotes that absent from all bouquets — characteristic of language itself as a whole — even of scientific language. But what distinguishes literary language is that it takes cognizance of its absences — and it is this self distancing of the literary language which places it midway between everyday language and science:

Experimenting upon language, if it does not invent it, the literary work is at one and the same time the analogue of a knowledge and a caricature of ideology.

At the edge of the text, one always ends up finding, momentarily hidden, but eloquent because of its very absence, the language of ideology. The parodic quality of the literary work deprives ideology of its apparent spontaneity and makes of it a second work. In it, the different elements, through the diversity of their modes of presence, challenge each other rather than complement each other: the "life" which everyday language carries along with it, the echo of which is found in the literary work, refers it back to its unreality (accompanied by the production of an effect of reality), while the finished work (since nothing can be added to it) shows the insufficiency in the ideology. Literature is the mythology of its own myths: it does not need a magician to discover its secrets. (p.75)

10. Illusion and fiction: — this section is possibly the most important in the whole of the first part of the book — and it requires careful study.

Macherey keeps on turning back to his starting point: that between the work and reality there is a "difference" or "displacement" (écart — "difference", of course, looks forward to the Derridean concept of "différAnce"). Related to this idea of "difference" has been Macherey’s characterisation of the nature of the literary work as essentially parodic: it is less a reproduction of reality than the challenge of language (contestation) — [Macherey’s use of words is not always clear and sometimes one is tempted into venturing paraphrases and coinages for lack of a precise equivalent to the French: it occurs to me here that instead of "challenge" we might use "defiance" ("answer" surely would be unsatisfactory)] Anyway... The work deforms rather than imitates and clearly Macherey is here challenging naive "reflectionist" theories. But, taking his cue from Plato, even the idea of "ressemblance", implicit in the notion of "reflection", is essentially related to "dissemblance": an absolute conformity to the original would signify simply an identity. Moving in the opposite direction — that likeness implies unlikeness —taking it to an extreme the more unlike something is the more like it is — Macherey suggests that this marks the essence of Baroque art: the more one differs, the more one imitates — "in this sense all literature is finally baroque inspired".

Macherey now draws our attention to a danger which much of his previous argument (particularly the previous section) invites: that is that in its perpetual movement of difference — its perpetual discarding — the work is in danger of becoming a purely factitious reality, a pure illusion. It invites the view that a work is no more than a series of signs betokening an absent reality, a structure that excludes everything that it seems to be talking about, substituting words for things, a dream. Literature would only demonstrate the truth of its own absence — it speaks to say nothing — and, in a direct attack on Barthes, Macherey summarises this "mystification":

The message of the writer is without an object: all his reality is relegated to the particular code which provides the means of its formulation and its communication. (p.78)

The distinction that Barthes completely ignores is that between "illusion" and "fiction" i.e. the difference between the language of illusion which is the very language of ideology, everyday language itself — since that language has as its specific function to disguise reality — from which the writer starts out and the language of fiction which is the product of a work on illusion. Brutally summarising: Macherey argues that the "fiction" takes up, breaks, exposes —in the last resort places the language of illusion: the fiction, yes, is in its own way deceptive — even an illusion — but, a second order illusion which has the merit of exposing the first order illusion of ideology — it thus offers at least one possibility of escaping from ideology. It is in this "placing" of ideology that literature, that fiction, approximates to a science, to the establishment of a knowledge. Thus a criticism which seeks to reduce the fiction to some other language, or to translate it, or to interpret it is a waste of time: the work itself takes this task upon itself e.g. two examples: (a) it is a waste of time to reduce Phédre to Jansenism — Jansenism is where Phèdre takes off from and with which it will take issue. (b) Henry V is not explained by the Tudor myth — it is this very myth that is worked on and exposed.

11. Creation and Production: — This is a brief and virulently polemical section attacking the idea of the artist as a "creator" and the whole humanist tradition which Macherey argues is based on a fundamental tautology formulated in the first place by Aristotle: Man makes man i.e. the humanist ideology allows man to make himself instead of allowing him to make something else — do something, produce something new. It is, Macherey argues, a profoundly reactionary mystification of man’s capacity for changing his situation.

[12.Pact and contract: — I find this an odd little section — but it does introduce a whole area of research which Macherey is sometimes said to ignore — that of the situation of the reader, of the need for a sociology of reading. The relationship author/reader, Macherey argues, is not a simple one — pact — whereby the reader submissively agrees to read what the author has written, believing what he reads, or even "suspending his disbelief". What the simple notion of reading implies is some sort of simple symmetrical relationship between author and reader and a break before/after between the production and the consumption of the text. The real area of enquiry should be to consider that at the same time as are produced the conditions of possibility of the work are produced also the conditions of possibility of its consumption — though these two sets of conditions must not be focussed upon a same place and time — for, as Marx notes, the important thing is to understand not only why a certain work appears at a certain time but also why it should be found interesting by other times. Macherey, no more than Marx, provides a solution to this problem: he merely notes that both writing and reading are determined by a whole set of conditions —hence the notion of a pact should give way to the notion of a contract —this latter notion itself is no more than the index of a problem i.e. a direction of attention towards the idea of a set of conditions.]

13.Explication and interpretation: — With this section we enter upon the densest part of Macherey’s theoretical venture -- (it is also rather repetetive). It begins fairly simply with a total rejection of "interpretation" as a valid critical procedure which is impoverishing and reductive, a translation of the work into something other than itself and dissipating the essential complexity of the work. At best interpretation can only offer an impoverished repetition of what the book already says. It suffers from the same limitations as that criticism which concerns itself with the final all embracing truth of the work.

The essential difficulty for the critical activity is that it must not take its object as empirically given — which would be to confuse the rules of art with the laws of knowledge. The object of knowledge is not simply placed in front of it in all its transparence with its limits already defined. To discover these limits requires a preliminary treatment of the object (given) — not by replacing it by some ideal and abstract construction (a hypothetical model) but by displacing the object within itself. At the same time it must also leave the object as it is — not swap it for something else (interpretation, normative criticism). Criticism must discover the type of necessity which determines that the work is as it is and not reduce it to a single meaning. It must discover the nature of the truth which constitutes the work:

This truth is not deposited in the work, like a nut in a shell: it is, paradoxically, at one and the same time, interior to the work and absent from it...the work is not closed upon one meaning which it disguises in giving it a finished form. The necessity of the work is based upon a multiplicity of meanings: to explain the work is to recognise and to distinguish the principle of such a diversity. The postulate of the unity of the work, which more or less explicitly has always haunted the critical enterprise, must, therefore, be rejected: the work is not created by an intention (objective or subjective); it is produced according to certain conditions... A proper investigation should not concern itself with a quasi-present meaning; rather than an illusory and ideal plenitude, it should take as its object that hollow word (paróle creuse) which the work discretely offers and take note of the distance in it which separates a number of meanings.

One must not hesitate therefore to note in the work a lack of completeness or of form: providing one does not regard these terms in a negative or a pejorative sense. Rather than that sufficiency which would give the work an ideal consistence, one should address oneself to that determinate inachievement which really informs the book. The work must be in itself incomplete: not outside itself for in that case it would only have to be completed to be fully realised. It has to be understood that the lack of completeness which is the symptom of the confrontation of various and distinct meanings within the work is the real principle of its structure. The flimsy line of discourse is the provisional appearance behind which we must learn to recognise the determined complexity of a text: it being understood that this complexity cannot be that of an illusory totality.

To explain the work is, instead of seeking a hidden centre which would give it life (the interpretative illusion is organicist and vitalist), to see it in its effective decentred ness: it is to reject the principle or an intrinsic analysis (or an immanent criticism) which would artificially shut the work on itself, and, from the fact that it is complete, deduces the image of a "totality"... The structure of the work which allows it to be understood is this internal displacement (décalage), or this caesura, by means of which it corresponds to reality, itself also incomplete, which it reveals without reflecting it. The literary work registers a difference, reveals a determinate absence: this is what it says if it is obliged to say anything at all. Thus what must be seen in the work is what it lacks, a lack (défaut) without which it would not exist, without which it would have nothing to say, neither the means to say something nor not say something. (pp. 96—7)

A work then is not a coherent totality, but a complex structure of meanings, contradictions, incompatibilities — it is this very contrariness (alterité) which relates it to what it is not and which is at play about its edges.

To explain the work is to show that, contrary to all appearances, it does not exist for itself, but, on the contrary, bears within itself the mark of a determinate absence which is also the principle of its identity: made hollow by the allusive presence of those books in the face of which it is constituted, turning upon the absence of what it cannot say, haunted by the absence of certain words to which it returns again and again, the book is not built upon the development of one meaning, but out of the incompatibility of several meanings, which is also the bond which relates it to reality in a prolonged and ever renewed stance of confrontation.

To see how a book is made is also to see of what it is made: and what is it made of if not that lack (défaut — break, difference, flaw) which gives it its history and its relation to history? (p.98)

14.Implicit and explicit: — Macherey has already established the importance of the significant, structuring and determining absences of the text and has already made the point that there is no point in trying to fill in these absences either by postulating what is missing, interpretation, resorting to a hidden sense within or without the work. What has to be explained is the necessary status of these absences and silences and their significance. At the heart of Macherey’s theory is a notion which I have formulated as follows: The work is about its own absences — these absences are its theme and its structuring principle.

15.To say and not to say: — Macherey perseveres with the paradoxes of this formulation: what the work says is in fact what it does not say — (Macherey compares this to the status of the word in Freudian analyses) — and the work cannot be made to say what it does not say —i.e. glossed, shall we say: to bring what is not said to light is to merely shift the problem, it does not resolve it — what is said is always something that is not said — commentary therefore cannot but be anything but a futile pursuit of what will always be out of reach. The problem centres on what Macherey calls two questions — taken from Nietzsche: what is a man saying? what is he hiding when he says what he says?

16.The two questions: — As its title implies this is an elaboration of this point: the two questions can be condensed into one: the question that lies behind the question: the work is the writer’s response to a situation — it is an answer to a problem/question he sets himself — and he can be ideologically aware of what this question is. The real problem, however, is the question of that question — the first question is already an answer to another question — the first question (the one the writer might be aware of) is an ideologically conditioned question posed by the writer’s historical situation. The way he answers that question — his work — by what it omits will pose the question of the first question — what are its real conditions (not ideological conditions) of possibility? Hence the double articulation of the work with respect to history:

work = response to ideological question

ideological question = ideological response

to history.

Hence the futility of adopting too simple a base/superstructure essence/phenomenon relationship between work and history. Hence also the inadequacy of a mere derivation of a work from an ideology — for this (imaginary) coherence is a response and resolution to the real, complex problems, presented by history to the writer. But the work itself cannot be a mere expression of an ideology — it needs materials to realise this ideology — and these materials are not always compatible with the ideology — hence the conflicts, the contrariness of the work — it is this contrariness which places and exposes the ideology and which refers back, beyond the ideology, to the contradictions of history itself.

17.Interior and exterior: — Macherey now approaches a whole new area of study which is taken further — or developed more fully —by Julia Kristeva (intertextuality) and Michel Foucault (discursive formations): the contrariness within the work is constituted by the incompatibility and reciprocal contestation of different and distinct "separate ideological utterances" (énoncés idéologique séparables) — these can be located both in the text and in history though they do not have the same status in the two domains — the text is not simply a positivistic montage but a reworking (of and by) these other "utterances" — a reworking which results in a laying bare of their ideological pretensions. This "laying bare" becomes an analogue (an equivalent) of a knowledge — not only of the book but of the conditions of its production and its historically determined place and significance.

18.Profundity and complexity: — A weak coda to Macherey’s whole opening section — the vanity of looking for mysterious and murky depths in a work — everything in a text (or not in the text — this is what is important) is laid out on the line of discourse itself. Rather than any strategy of reduction to a meaning, a secret, an ideology, a life what one must address is the real complexity of the work:

One of the reasons for this complexity is that the work never comes alone, it is always determined by the existence of other works which might belong to other sectors of production; there is never a first book, or an independent book, totally innocent: novelty, originality, in literature as elsewhere, is defined by relationships (rapports). Thus a book is always a place of exchange: its coherence and autonomy come at the cost of that alterity which might also be on occasion an alteration.

To truly read, knowing how to read and knowing what reading is, is to let nothing of that complexity escape. Above all, beyond the listing of the elements that constitute it, it is to see, rather than a bond (lien), a harmony or a unity, which are so many deformations or idealizations, the reason for its development (procès). It is not a matter, once more, of perceiving a latent structure, for which the manifest work will be no more than an index, but to constitute that absence, around which is tied (noue) a real complexity. Thus might be exorcised those forms of illusion that have up to know held

literary criticism within the bonds of ideology: the illusion of a secret, the illusion of depth, the illusion of rules, the illusion of harmony. Decentred, exposed, determined, complex: recognized as such the work risks encountering its theory (l'oeuvre risque recevoir sa théorie.) (p. 122)