1 00:00:00,420 --> 00:00:13,650 Great. Thanks very much, Constantine. So what we thought we do is, is point up some of the longer debates, certainly beginning with me, 2 00:00:13,650 --> 00:00:22,530 beginning with the longer debates within Derek's own work in the background to his thinking and how his own intellectual biography has developed. 3 00:00:22,530 --> 00:00:29,070 And I do that partly not only because we have been having a discussion at various points about these issues, 4 00:00:29,070 --> 00:00:37,470 but also because I was hugely influenced by some of the things that he has done over the years. 5 00:00:37,470 --> 00:00:44,910 And certainly in terms of the beginnings of the kind of thinking that eventually led to something like the literature police, 6 00:00:44,910 --> 00:00:57,300 my own starting point was really, I think, fascinating moment in the book called Peculiar Language, which first appeared in 1988. 7 00:00:57,300 --> 00:01:01,710 And there's a moment in the introduction where he does this. 8 00:01:01,710 --> 00:01:09,210 It makes this interesting move in the sense that he looks so you as a reader or just beginning this book. 9 00:01:09,210 --> 00:01:17,460 And the person who wrote the book starts by giving you a retrospective in a sense of the book that you're about to read and the 10 00:01:17,460 --> 00:01:24,600 ways the kinds of questions he's been asking in the ways he's been pursuing them and then says those questions are not enough. 11 00:01:24,600 --> 00:01:30,570 And so points to another book that needs to be written and needs to be addressed and another set of questions. 12 00:01:30,570 --> 00:01:38,430 So it's a book that begins almost by undoing itself, but that's part of the trajectory in the journey that it has been on. 13 00:01:38,430 --> 00:01:41,640 And this is the point here in particular. 14 00:01:41,640 --> 00:01:48,780 So just very, very briefly, in a sense, what of the the things that the book picks up on is a whole development within a debate? 15 00:01:48,780 --> 00:01:57,090 Primarily, I think will correct me if I'm wrong, primarily coming through the intersection of linguistics and literary studies in the 1970s. 16 00:01:57,090 --> 00:02:05,190 So people like like Stanley Fish issues that were going on with Paul the Man and the authorisation of the literary in that sense, 17 00:02:05,190 --> 00:02:12,430 to some extent, picking up on the reader and so on. But it was primarily on the issue of the distinctiveness of literary language. 18 00:02:12,430 --> 00:02:16,350 When where do we find this? Why do we what are we pursuing? 19 00:02:16,350 --> 00:02:25,410 Is there something different going on in the literary work and its use of language to anywhere else in a newspaper report, a recipe or whatever? 20 00:02:25,410 --> 00:02:33,330 So those kinds of questions and the point at which theoretical debate in the English speaking world, 21 00:02:33,330 --> 00:02:40,860 certainly as usual, things start in France a little earlier in the post-war France, these issues started to develop. 22 00:02:40,860 --> 00:02:48,870 There was everybody, in a sense, converged on a consensus that there was certainly no definitive final set of 23 00:02:48,870 --> 00:02:54,720 linguistic or formal properties that you could point to in order to rest the claim. 24 00:02:54,720 --> 00:02:56,880 This is the distinctiveness of the literature. 25 00:02:56,880 --> 00:03:04,890 And so what they did in a more kind of historicist vein was look at various theories from the Renaissance right 26 00:03:04,890 --> 00:03:10,800 the way through to the 20th century and literary practise in that period where people have attempted to say, 27 00:03:10,800 --> 00:03:14,220 for instance, in Wordsworth, preface to the lyrical ballads, 28 00:03:14,220 --> 00:03:22,710 various other documents and texts by poets and writers and theorists where they try to establish some formal or linguistic set of properties. 29 00:03:22,710 --> 00:03:30,030 And it's and in a sense, chapter by chapter demonstrates the the kind of conceptual failure of that attempt. 30 00:03:30,030 --> 00:03:35,960 So that's the book that we get. Then, as I say in the introduction, this is where we start. 31 00:03:35,960 --> 00:03:39,600 So he's very sincere in pursuing the question, 32 00:03:39,600 --> 00:03:47,940 what constitutes or has been taken to constitute the distinctive, if you like, literary use of language? 33 00:03:47,940 --> 00:04:00,190 That question the answers that offer themselves most immediately are it is true formal ones and there is much to be learnt by following them through. 34 00:04:00,190 --> 00:04:03,600 So they are formal or linguistic answers to that question. 35 00:04:03,600 --> 00:04:14,340 That can be and in a sense, that's the book that we then go on to read, but then there opens up a whole series of other questions and says, well. 36 00:04:14,340 --> 00:04:20,550 That in the end didn't work, that that project doesn't work, it leads it leads into the sand. 37 00:04:20,550 --> 00:04:26,910 And a whole series of other problems and questions arise, and this is how you then formulated. 38 00:04:26,910 --> 00:04:38,760 What does why why does the culture privilege, certain kinds of language and certain modes of reading such a question can receive an answer? 39 00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:46,350 Only when we reached the realm of political and economic relations, the structures of power. 40 00:04:46,350 --> 00:04:54,700 Dominance and resistance, which determine the patterns and privileges of cultural formations or more accurately, 41 00:04:54,700 --> 00:05:01,280 all our questions change radically when we reach this point. 42 00:05:01,280 --> 00:05:10,780 And we see that the answers we were hoping to find again in that kind of formal linguistic orientation do not exist. 43 00:05:10,780 --> 00:05:22,930 The answers to the new questions, questions about the formation of taste, etc, etc. have to be sought by means of a very different kind of study. 44 00:05:22,930 --> 00:05:32,150 OK, so that's where we start. You're going to maybe think this book's going to try to give you certain answers in a certain framework, 45 00:05:32,150 --> 00:05:36,690 in fact, what this book's going to do is expose the impossibility of that project. 46 00:05:36,690 --> 00:05:45,380 And it points at that moment to the need to look at structures of power institutions, the kind of thing that Constantine was talking about. 47 00:05:45,380 --> 00:05:53,300 And given what Constantine usefully said, you can see why my own work was was very informed by that. 48 00:05:53,300 --> 00:05:58,910 But the question I thought I would maybe start with with Derek is that actually Derek 49 00:05:58,910 --> 00:06:05,580 pointed here to books that many of us have tried to write but never directly wrote himself. 50 00:06:05,580 --> 00:06:12,380 Instead, it seemed to me looking at a book like The Singularity of Literature, thinking about all the things that you've done, 51 00:06:12,380 --> 00:06:20,660 that you felt that even that formulation left you with a major set of unresolved problems that 52 00:06:20,660 --> 00:06:26,030 you felt you still couldn't address in the kind of socio institutional way that you opened up, 53 00:06:26,030 --> 00:06:33,000 that you felt something else had to be done. OK, thank you, Peter. 54 00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:38,610 Well, just to be autobiographical about what you've read there, of course, 55 00:06:38,610 --> 00:06:46,620 the introduction was written last on that book, as they tend to be and in and well in writing the chapters, 56 00:06:46,620 --> 00:06:52,500 starting with worrying about the concept of decorum in the Renaissance, which more I worked on more, 57 00:06:52,500 --> 00:07:02,310 I realised it was a way of saying there is an element in good literature, good writing, which is not subject to rules. 58 00:07:02,310 --> 00:07:08,250 It's always this little little thing that we can't tell you exactly what it is, but you'll know it when you see it. 59 00:07:08,250 --> 00:07:14,310 And I found that pattern repeating itself in different ways, down centuries. 60 00:07:14,310 --> 00:07:22,740 Every time a writer, a poet, theorist, critic, tried to make a distinction between literature, 61 00:07:22,740 --> 00:07:28,650 successful, important literature and other kinds of other kinds of text. 62 00:07:28,650 --> 00:07:33,570 They always reached a point where I said, well, this this we can't. 63 00:07:33,570 --> 00:07:43,380 Put down in black and white. This is taste or some other unspecified non-rural government property. 64 00:07:43,380 --> 00:07:52,060 And then between finishing the chapters and writing introduction, I discovered that we'll get this in the mid 1980s, 65 00:07:52,060 --> 00:07:58,650 I discovered a distinction which I hadn't been aware of, and that did throw a whole new light on these issues. 66 00:07:58,650 --> 00:08:03,420 That's that's the moment really when I realised that there were different kinds of answers 67 00:08:03,420 --> 00:08:12,930 or when I realised that if what constitutes the literary is never subject to formal rule, 68 00:08:12,930 --> 00:08:14,790 it must be subject to something else. 69 00:08:14,790 --> 00:08:23,640 And it seemed to me that what it's subject to are the determining forces of political, economic, social, cultural context. 70 00:08:23,640 --> 00:08:27,510 It's it's something else. It's not within the literary field. 71 00:08:27,510 --> 00:08:35,100 It's something outside the literary field that determines in a given place in time what shall count as literature and what not. 72 00:08:35,100 --> 00:08:45,240 So hence I felt obliged, having made this discovery to to address this in the introduction of. 73 00:08:45,240 --> 00:08:52,200 What happened next, I suppose, is partly a matter of as academic taste, I've never thought of myself. 74 00:08:52,200 --> 00:09:00,010 I've never been drawn to the kind of institutional analysis that Peter does so wonderfully. 75 00:09:00,010 --> 00:09:09,110 So having thrown this out, I in a way, we posed the question, posed it in a different way. 76 00:09:09,110 --> 00:09:21,980 What is this historically repeated failure to be able to specify in determinate terms the distinction between the military in the military? 77 00:09:21,980 --> 00:09:29,390 What if that was actually the key to to what military discourse, military practise, 78 00:09:29,390 --> 00:09:36,350 rather than simply a failure or repeated failure, which then left literature open to these these external forces? 79 00:09:36,350 --> 00:09:48,830 What if we could think of that as the constituted determining, defining characteristic of what we call the military or more broadly, the artistic? 80 00:09:48,830 --> 00:09:55,010 And so the singularity of literature was an attempt to think through how we might. 81 00:09:55,010 --> 00:10:03,820 Find a way of talking about literature that. Avoided some I'm not sure I succeeded, 82 00:10:03,820 --> 00:10:08,890 but trying to avoid some of the pitfalls that these earlier accounts and many other 83 00:10:08,890 --> 00:10:17,650 accounts of the military had had fallen into and many accounts of the aesthetic. 84 00:10:17,650 --> 00:10:21,740 Did you try and find a way of talking about it, that. 85 00:10:21,740 --> 00:10:35,480 Did justice to literature's constant capacity for self-denial and and cultural new looking at the history of Western art seemed to me that although, 86 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:39,980 as Constantine was saying, modernism is the place where we first find ourselves looking, 87 00:10:39,980 --> 00:10:43,940 if we think about the idea of art as innovative and rupturing and all of that. 88 00:10:43,940 --> 00:10:49,340 But of course, if you look at the history of Western art in all its forms, you find a succession of writers, painters, 89 00:10:49,340 --> 00:11:00,410 sculptors trying out new things using the formal medium they are working with to explore new new areas of consciousness, 90 00:11:00,410 --> 00:11:07,610 new experiences, ideas and thoughts and even feelings hitherto unexpressed. 91 00:11:07,610 --> 00:11:15,680 And my argument is part of the book is that that artists in doing this are not just bringing something new into the world, 92 00:11:15,680 --> 00:11:21,260 which is not difficult to do. We could. All right, Tomsky say the saying sentences that have never been said before, 93 00:11:21,260 --> 00:11:28,280 but to bring something new into the world which had been excluded and upon whose exclusion the culture itself rested. 94 00:11:28,280 --> 00:11:34,580 So. So it seemed to me that art was a constant struggle, the best of the most important art, constant struggle. 95 00:11:34,580 --> 00:11:48,560 To say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable. And so I did turn my back on that project, but I'm very happy that that other people followed it up. 96 00:11:48,560 --> 00:11:50,930 And. I don't think it goes away. 97 00:11:50,930 --> 00:12:02,990 I mean, it's certainly still the case that because of this peculiar, non definable status of literature, it is vulnerable to negative word. 98 00:12:02,990 --> 00:12:09,230 It is open to determination by external forces, and it always will be. 99 00:12:09,230 --> 00:12:12,530 But there's a sense in which for me, 100 00:12:12,530 --> 00:12:21,620 the literary work or more precisely the experience of the literary work that the reader reading in an appropriately attentive and creative way, 101 00:12:21,620 --> 00:12:35,690 that that experience challenges the norm driven constitution of of institutions and states and and and academic disciplines, for that matter. 102 00:12:35,690 --> 00:12:39,470 So that literature is is always an excess and a reminder. 103 00:12:39,470 --> 00:12:46,670 And those of you who read Derrida on various literary works will know that he's the main source of of this thinking. 104 00:12:46,670 --> 00:12:54,320 I don't think I'm doing much more than developing Derrida's insights into what constitutes the literary. 105 00:12:54,320 --> 00:12:59,360 I'm. But perhaps I can not throw the question back to Peter. 106 00:12:59,360 --> 00:13:09,030 Can you say more about the way you took up that issue and whether you think. 107 00:13:09,030 --> 00:13:16,700 There's a place for our work to complement. When another. 108 00:13:16,700 --> 00:13:23,060 Whether you think an institutional analysis can say the final word or whether you think an 109 00:13:23,060 --> 00:13:33,550 institutional analysis will always be subject to some some of the indeterminacy the literature brings. 110 00:13:33,550 --> 00:13:41,950 I'll be very keen to move towards complementing with an eye, but maybe try to worry about the east. 111 00:13:41,950 --> 00:13:49,120 It's a. Certainly one of the ways in which my own work, 112 00:13:49,120 --> 00:13:53,260 so I think I think it's fairly clear for anybody who's looked at the literature police 113 00:13:53,260 --> 00:13:57,070 that certainly the kinds of claims that they're making in that final bit about we need 114 00:13:57,070 --> 00:14:02,500 to ask these other questions about effectively who is setting themselves up as the 115 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:09,730 guardian of the literary and investigate that those those sort of historical forces. 116 00:14:09,730 --> 00:14:15,850 I think that's absolutely clear. That's been vital to an element of what I'm doing. 117 00:14:15,850 --> 00:14:18,010 But it was very much a book with two halves. 118 00:14:18,010 --> 00:14:26,620 And the second half was actually precisely the opposite point that I was interested in looking at the various having having discovered 119 00:14:26,620 --> 00:14:37,810 this unusual and unusually powerful group of people who had control over the space of the literary in apartheid South Africa, 120 00:14:37,810 --> 00:14:45,040 who, you know, if you sense answered, if you wanted to ask yourself the question, what would happen if you gave literary critics real power? 121 00:14:45,040 --> 00:14:52,150 Well, I think the evidence of of the apartheid censorship archives tells you what would happen. 122 00:14:52,150 --> 00:14:58,800 And it involves a lot of arbitrariness and a lot of wilful power in all sorts of ways. 123 00:14:58,800 --> 00:15:01,810 So, yes, that's one key dimension to it. 124 00:15:01,810 --> 00:15:10,060 But if I can put it this way, the other key dimension to what I'm interested in is not simply what Derek was pointing to here. 125 00:15:10,060 --> 00:15:16,750 What we're talking about here is the institution of literature as a noun where we want to look at certain sorts of forces, 126 00:15:16,750 --> 00:15:21,340 certain sorts of body is a certain sort of organisation, certain concentrations of power, 127 00:15:21,340 --> 00:15:27,670 including a university and an English department amongst all those those those things. 128 00:15:27,670 --> 00:15:32,470 But equally, what we get is in any act of writing in a certain way, 129 00:15:32,470 --> 00:15:44,980 is also the institution of literature as a verb where where the word institution is instituted in the sense of it making a highly risky, 130 00:15:44,980 --> 00:15:50,150 unpredictable, unguaranteed bid for a new kind of authority. 131 00:15:50,150 --> 00:15:55,960 So if we if we say that know, one of the meanings of the word institute is to found something, 132 00:15:55,960 --> 00:16:00,730 inaugurates something and and make a bid for a certain kind of authority, 133 00:16:00,730 --> 00:16:06,130 I think, you know, the kinds of writing that I want to take seriously, 134 00:16:06,130 --> 00:16:11,830 it seems to me that they that's another dimension of the institution of literature that's going on. 135 00:16:11,830 --> 00:16:19,960 And what I what I thought I saw in and was hoping to try to bring out in the two halves of the literature police was on the one hand, yes. 136 00:16:19,960 --> 00:16:33,040 All those determining forces in a broader sociopolitical sort of way, an institutional way that determined the conception of the literary, 137 00:16:33,040 --> 00:16:42,220 that ultimately for the apartheid censors meant that the book banned or didn't get banned in that most peculiar sense of of critical authority. 138 00:16:42,220 --> 00:16:52,420 And on the other hand, these various acts of institution, which seemed to me to be something that was disruptive in just about every case, 139 00:16:52,420 --> 00:16:57,850 whether it's a black consciousness poet like James Matthews and the way that he, 140 00:16:57,850 --> 00:17:04,300 you know, in his very writing set himself up against the white liberal guardianship, as he took it, 141 00:17:04,300 --> 00:17:08,320 the white liberal guardianship of of the literary culture in apartheid South Africa. 142 00:17:08,320 --> 00:17:15,490 You know, the kind of antipode that he projected himself, you know, from from James Matthews to, you know, 143 00:17:15,490 --> 00:17:25,530 the kinds of things that the CUISIA was doing and refusing in his work, where every work is itself another act of institution in the verbal activism. 144 00:17:25,530 --> 00:17:32,470 So so for me, I can see that in some ways that my own sense is that certainly, Deridder, your work, 145 00:17:32,470 --> 00:17:39,280 those kind of things that that verbal that institution as a verb is where we where we have a a common 146 00:17:39,280 --> 00:17:45,100 ground in terms of where I certainly can take a lot of things from the singularity of literature. 147 00:17:45,100 --> 00:17:53,860 Maybe the one thing that I could say when possibly we we differ a little and this is where I could maybe turn the question back to you. 148 00:17:53,860 --> 00:17:59,650 We want to try to keep this going for about 45 minutes, if we can, and then respond to you, if you will. 149 00:17:59,650 --> 00:18:07,600 The questions you asked where we are, I wonder if we do actually differ is that it seems to me that what I get from a lot of the reading, 150 00:18:07,600 --> 00:18:16,000 the singularity of literature, responding to that aspect of your work is vitally important that in a sense, the literature is always undoing itself. 151 00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:22,030 Literature poses a question to itself all the time, and therefore it poses a question to every reader. 152 00:18:22,030 --> 00:18:26,590 Everybody who wants to is and of course, we are all completely free to ignore it. 153 00:18:26,590 --> 00:18:30,730 But those of us who are drawn to the literary in this way, it poses a problem for all of us. 154 00:18:30,730 --> 00:18:37,000 In that way, it seems that work is is vital for that kind of it's always breaking its own rules. 155 00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:44,910 And that that process where maybe we differ a little is that for me that's always been very important, that rule breaking side of it. 156 00:18:44,910 --> 00:18:55,050 But the other thing that I'm constantly drawn to is the challenge that that poses to other forms of conceptualisation concepts in other fields. 157 00:18:55,050 --> 00:19:01,320 So, for instance, in particular, say in the literature, please, I saw the question that posed for the law itself, 158 00:19:01,320 --> 00:19:13,500 the law as a system of regulation and authority and trying to itself police certain concepts and categories from obscenity to blasphemy. 159 00:19:13,500 --> 00:19:17,340 And then also, of course, perversely in the case. 160 00:19:17,340 --> 00:19:23,970 But also if you look at the British Obscene Publications Act of 1859, it builds in a notion of the literary defence. 161 00:19:23,970 --> 00:19:28,110 So the literary defence itself enters into the discourse of the law. 162 00:19:28,110 --> 00:19:32,130 And a book that I'm currently working on at the moment leaves the law to one side. 163 00:19:32,130 --> 00:19:37,020 And I go towards international relations and the political sciences in various 164 00:19:37,020 --> 00:19:43,890 ways and sort of the concepts and categories that are used in those fields. So I've always been interested in. 165 00:19:43,890 --> 00:19:49,260 The specific ways, the kinds of understanding that the literary develops in and ways of thinking 166 00:19:49,260 --> 00:19:54,960 that it it opens up which challenge other ways of thinking and other concepts, 167 00:19:54,960 --> 00:20:02,700 and as I've always been into not only a challenge to itself, but a challenge to those other areas. 168 00:20:02,700 --> 00:20:04,160 Right. 169 00:20:04,160 --> 00:20:11,580 It's hard to think of that as a disagreement, since you're simply doing something that I haven't tried to do, but I think you're doing it valuable. 170 00:20:11,580 --> 00:20:16,260 But it does. It does perhaps raise. 171 00:20:16,260 --> 00:20:28,910 The question of. I mean, it does raise the question of the relation between literature and other discourses and other discursive practises, 172 00:20:28,910 --> 00:20:37,100 which is something I try to to understand in terms of the reading process, if you like, 173 00:20:37,100 --> 00:20:45,530 not as a psychological phenomenological study, but just in terms of what has to go on when you read literary work as opposed to reading another kind 174 00:20:45,530 --> 00:20:49,910 of work or when you read a literary work as literature as opposed to reading it in some other way. 175 00:20:49,910 --> 00:20:56,060 And I think we probably read in several ways at once. You know, we are absorbing knowledge or novel information. 176 00:20:56,060 --> 00:21:05,910 Historical information at the same time is reading it for for for sheer entertainment at the same time as perhaps a. 177 00:21:05,910 --> 00:21:21,870 It's opening onto a new world that we had before been aware of, and I reached the conclusion that religious literature is a kind of mimicry, 178 00:21:21,870 --> 00:21:28,560 literature can absorb and replay any discourse, any discourse at all, can find its way into the literary work. 179 00:21:28,560 --> 00:21:38,160 And, you know, we don't have to point to Joyce, for instance, as someone who showed showed the literature reading world that actually the novel 180 00:21:38,160 --> 00:21:43,980 is a much more capacious form than anybody hitherto had had quite realised, 181 00:21:43,980 --> 00:21:55,670 but that once a discourse becomes part of a literary work in a curious way, it's not itself anymore. 182 00:21:55,670 --> 00:22:05,230 It's as it were, sighted or staged or enacted, so I do arguing here that. 183 00:22:05,230 --> 00:22:13,840 Literature doesn't, for instance, moralise. As literature doesn't offer. 184 00:22:13,840 --> 00:22:24,420 Advice on how to live your lives, but it certainly may take an interest in the activity of moralising. 185 00:22:24,420 --> 00:22:32,640 It can perform moralising if we can be taken through what it is to be moral or 186 00:22:32,640 --> 00:22:41,400 immoral or develop a moral consciousness without actually morality being discourse, 187 00:22:41,400 --> 00:22:50,820 legality, of course the law constantly comes up in novels. And again, we wouldn't read a novel to try to obtain some information about the law. 188 00:22:50,820 --> 00:22:53,640 We might, but I wouldn't be reading it as literature. 189 00:22:53,640 --> 00:23:04,020 But law making law, observing the creation and destruction of law, all of that can happen in a novel. 190 00:23:04,020 --> 00:23:12,690 And I totally agree that in doing so, literature can pose very hard questions to those discourses. 191 00:23:12,690 --> 00:23:19,560 I do think and I think Derrida said this at some point, literature's weakness is also a strength. 192 00:23:19,560 --> 00:23:21,420 It can do all of this. 193 00:23:21,420 --> 00:23:34,740 It can take on board any verbal discourse, verbal universe that exists and do profound and often disturbing and challenging things with it. 194 00:23:34,740 --> 00:23:41,610 But because it's literature, because it's a performance, it can always be totally ignored. 195 00:23:41,610 --> 00:23:47,250 It has no direct purchase. And perhaps it needs someone like Peter to come along and say, look, 196 00:23:47,250 --> 00:23:56,010 although we can't directly use literature in this way, the show would allow itself to be used in this way. 197 00:23:56,010 --> 00:24:06,370 We can. Take its questions and pose them directly to the law and see what and see what happens. 198 00:24:06,370 --> 00:24:11,530 Yeah, I think that that maybe also just sort of helps to clarify one point of, oh, 199 00:24:11,530 --> 00:24:17,490 I'm not trying to manufacture differences here, but I'm just trying to think through the different. 200 00:24:17,490 --> 00:24:24,430 So definitely I can see in relation to your work the whole question of of staging and representing the law. 201 00:24:24,430 --> 00:24:30,880 So, you know, if you look at the field of literature and law studies, there's a whole branch of it, which frankly, 202 00:24:30,880 --> 00:24:36,430 I find not particularly interesting, but it's a whole branch of it which says, look, let's look at lawyers in literature. 203 00:24:36,430 --> 00:24:44,770 Let's look at the use of legal discourse in literature. Let's look at parodies of of of a trial or whatever it might be. 204 00:24:44,770 --> 00:24:50,710 So there's that dimension. In a sense, what you were pointing to at the end is, is where I would want the questions to go. 205 00:24:50,710 --> 00:24:58,300 Is that the the the literary as a way as a way of thinking, which is a constantly it is a way of thinking that is asking us, 206 00:24:58,300 --> 00:25:07,300 I think, you know, in different moments and in different ways, radical questions about about thinking as such. 207 00:25:07,300 --> 00:25:14,270 Can I can I just come in? Because I think I agree that that particular study stuff is rather tedious, is fairly mechanical. 208 00:25:14,270 --> 00:25:22,330 But since we were talking last week about his new novel, that's the kind of really profound thinking about what a law is, 209 00:25:22,330 --> 00:25:26,020 whether it be a natural law or a rule that a society's concocted. Yeah. 210 00:25:26,020 --> 00:25:32,170 So it's not about lawyers and the legal profession, but it's about the law and the law, the legality of law. 211 00:25:32,170 --> 00:25:33,260 What what is law? 212 00:25:33,260 --> 00:25:44,350 Yeah, I mean, I think that that's just what I wanted to clarify then, that in a sense it is that certain forms of literary intervention. 213 00:25:44,350 --> 00:25:51,580 And I think, yes, these kind of we spoke about the Anthony entertainment dimension of of of the childhood of Jesus, 214 00:25:51,580 --> 00:25:59,860 that that is posing a whole series of questions about what what on what what is the basis of the law and what do you base the law? 215 00:25:59,860 --> 00:26:08,680 Is it is it a set of cultural norms that are policed by special schools for people with special needs that that that inculcate people into this? 216 00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:18,280 Or is it as as Simon seems to want, based on some notion of what is natural, what is the natural, the whole concept of natural law? 217 00:26:18,280 --> 00:26:26,350 So it's it's just I just wanted to sort of bring out that point where in a sense that there's a there's a there's a way in 218 00:26:26,350 --> 00:26:33,610 which when we start to think about literature as a a constantly a form of thinking that's always breaking its own protocols, 219 00:26:33,610 --> 00:26:37,510 but also putting all other protocols of thinking in. 220 00:26:37,510 --> 00:26:41,380 Not all of them, of course, some of them, depending on what the work and the writer is doing, 221 00:26:41,380 --> 00:26:48,340 putting them in question, then we can go from literature to other fields. 222 00:26:48,340 --> 00:26:54,490 And it isn't then simply a question of creating a nice, happy, interdisciplinary marriage. 223 00:26:54,490 --> 00:27:04,570 But it is actually about the creative tensions between what a discipline like literary studies can do and and bring to other other areas. 224 00:27:04,570 --> 00:27:09,730 And I suppose we could maybe try to draw things to a conclusion at this point. 225 00:27:09,730 --> 00:27:16,840 I mean, maybe maybe the one way I could wrap up what it is that I've been trying to say on that on that strand is one of the 226 00:27:16,840 --> 00:27:24,850 questions I've always had about literary studies in general and certainly in the in the English speaking world, 227 00:27:24,850 --> 00:27:29,800 is that we have Marge Garba came up with a fantastic formulation where she had the 228 00:27:29,800 --> 00:27:34,300 word discipline and she and she borrowed she's deliberately borrowing from Freud. 229 00:27:34,300 --> 00:27:40,900 Discipline, envy has kind of fuelled literary studies. There's a kind of a sense of inadequacy in our own with our own. 230 00:27:40,900 --> 00:27:48,040 And this is not this is not something to be ashamed of. I mean, it can be a sense of feel, the sense of ambition. 231 00:27:48,040 --> 00:27:53,860 But we've constantly wanted to look elsewhere for our models, for how to go about things, 232 00:27:53,860 --> 00:27:56,290 you know, whether it's anthropology, whether it's Freudian psychology, 233 00:27:56,290 --> 00:28:04,510 whether it's the social and political sciences for all the categories that we get from them or or whether it's history or whatever it is. 234 00:28:04,510 --> 00:28:10,870 You know, there's some sense of fuelled by discipline, envy. There's something more rigorous, more substantial going on there. 235 00:28:10,870 --> 00:28:18,310 I was really worried about that and felt that actually that there's there's so much there's so much going 236 00:28:18,310 --> 00:28:24,580 on in our field that actually puts real questions to all those people that we apparently borrowing. 237 00:28:24,580 --> 00:28:30,490 And we are we are somehow doing ourselves down by not confronting those fields with the questions that come from our own people. 238 00:28:30,490 --> 00:28:37,120 This is this is no kind of hubris from from our own field or indeed any kind of isolated. 239 00:28:37,120 --> 00:28:45,580 I want to be, you know, Helen Vendler and keep all the others away and defend my own discipline in its purity. 240 00:28:45,580 --> 00:28:57,550 Not at all. But I want to bring come from a sense of the demands and the difficulties that that studying 241 00:28:57,550 --> 00:29:03,670 literature in this way that we do at this level that universities can pose to other fields. 242 00:29:03,670 --> 00:29:15,320 So. And to recognise also that the actually, although we do ourselves down by being fuelled by discipline and in fact philosophers like Derrida, 243 00:29:15,320 --> 00:29:21,020 anthropologists like James Clifford, you know, many people have been drawn to the literary and we need to recognise that as well. 244 00:29:21,020 --> 00:29:25,610 The this and sometimes they've been drawn to the literature in ways that is incredibly illuminating. 245 00:29:25,610 --> 00:29:30,890 And sometimes they're drawn to the literary in ways which we could certainly ask a lot of questions about what they're getting from it. 246 00:29:30,890 --> 00:29:36,530 But good to know that we do seem to be agreeing too much. 247 00:29:36,530 --> 00:29:43,670 And then perhaps just to wrap up nice side of this than to say something about 248 00:29:43,670 --> 00:29:49,160 the pedagogy of literary study which emerges from the things you're saying. 249 00:29:49,160 --> 00:29:55,700 And we can all talk about this. You know what what kinds of literature teaching then would emerge from the sort of work you're doing? 250 00:29:55,700 --> 00:30:06,800 What I'm doing, I do worry sometimes that it sounds as though I'm advocating either something terribly like the Leavis 251 00:30:06,800 --> 00:30:14,690 oriented new and practical criticism that I was subjected to as a student and Pietermaritzburg 40 years ago, 252 00:30:14,690 --> 00:30:26,210 or that I'm offering a kind of subject to Vine's phenomenology of every reading is as good as every other. 253 00:30:26,210 --> 00:30:30,320 You know, let's just compare to compare notes. 254 00:30:30,320 --> 00:30:38,870 So I just wanted to stress that. The figure of the reader for me is a is a cultural figure, if you like the figure, 255 00:30:38,870 --> 00:30:45,080 a reader is produced by the reader, as I say in the book, is like work is singular. 256 00:30:45,080 --> 00:30:52,010 No, no. Readers like any other reader because of the the singularity of his or her formation. 257 00:30:52,010 --> 00:30:59,610 So there will be different cultural, geographical, literary mix in any individual. 258 00:30:59,610 --> 00:31:04,970 But when when I'm talking about a reader experiencing a literary text, 259 00:31:04,970 --> 00:31:12,190 it's not a matter of as I remember Robin Williams scornfully saying when I used to go to his lectures in Cambridge, 260 00:31:12,190 --> 00:31:15,920 a naked individual encountering a naked text, 261 00:31:15,920 --> 00:31:27,350 she thought the Leavis position was, but rather a cultural meeting place that that the reader brings mostly, 262 00:31:27,350 --> 00:31:35,640 unconsciously, I guess, a whole weight of these cultural, institutional, linguistic. 263 00:31:35,640 --> 00:31:41,910 And personal familial ways of thinking and feeling to a text, 264 00:31:41,910 --> 00:31:52,680 which is itself a product of a writer who possessed a similar but different accumulation of these factors. 265 00:31:52,680 --> 00:31:57,990 And so, in a way, I remember when Peter and I were discussing this in Paris, 266 00:31:57,990 --> 00:32:07,830 the conversation that in a way this is a continuation of it occurred to me that my image of the reader reading the text was like two, 267 00:32:07,830 --> 00:32:19,020 which is meeting at a very fine point, but that bringing to bear on that point a wider and wider contextual background. 268 00:32:19,020 --> 00:32:23,170 And so in in in literary discussion and literary pedagogy, 269 00:32:23,170 --> 00:32:32,130 it seems to me we we should it's not just a matter of having as one of my wonderful teachers and as we used to say, what does it make you feel? 270 00:32:32,130 --> 00:32:36,210 It's not just what does it make you feel, but if you feel as you do, why do you feel as you do? 271 00:32:36,210 --> 00:32:38,910 What is it about your background, your culture? 272 00:32:38,910 --> 00:32:45,310 What are you bringing to bear and what does it say about the work you're reading and the author and the historical context? 273 00:32:45,310 --> 00:32:52,290 So I think I'm not at all saying we should do less historical contextual work and say we need we need to do better and 274 00:32:52,290 --> 00:33:01,170 better historical contextual work in order to bring about these events is these remarkable events of literary singularity. 275 00:33:01,170 --> 00:33:04,700 So shall we open up? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. 276 00:33:04,700 --> 00:33:12,090 OK, well, thank you.