Great. Thanks very much, Constantine. So what we thought we do is, is point up some of the longer debates, certainly beginning with me,
beginning with the longer debates within Derek's own work in the background to his thinking and how his own intellectual biography has developed.
And I do that partly not only because we have been having a discussion at various points about these issues,
but also because I was hugely influenced by some of the things that he has done over the years.
And certainly in terms of the beginnings of the kind of thinking that eventually led to something like the literature police,
my own starting point was really, I think, fascinating moment in the book called Peculiar Language, which first appeared in 1988.
And there's a moment in the introduction where he does this.
It makes this interesting move in the sense that he looks so you as a reader or just beginning this book.
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
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.
And so points to another book that needs to be written and needs to be addressed and another set of questions.
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.
And this is the point here in particular.
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?
Primarily, I think will correct me if I'm wrong, primarily coming through the intersection of linguistics and literary studies in the 1970s.
So people like like Stanley Fish issues that were going on with Paul the Man and the authorisation of the literary in that sense,
to some extent, picking up on the reader and so on. But it was primarily on the issue of the distinctiveness of literary language.
When where do we find this? Why do we what are we pursuing?
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?
So those kinds of questions and the point at which theoretical debate in the English speaking world,
certainly as usual, things start in France a little earlier in the post-war France, these issues started to develop.
There was everybody, in a sense, converged on a consensus that there was certainly no definitive final set of
linguistic or formal properties that you could point to in order to rest the claim.
This is the distinctiveness of the literature.
And so what they did in a more kind of historicist vein was look at various theories from the Renaissance right
the way through to the 20th century and literary practise in that period where people have attempted to say,
for instance, in Wordsworth, preface to the lyrical ballads,
various other documents and texts by poets and writers and theorists where they try to establish some formal or linguistic set of properties.
And it's and in a sense, chapter by chapter demonstrates the the kind of conceptual failure of that attempt.
So that's the book that we get. Then, as I say in the introduction, this is where we start.
So he's very sincere in pursuing the question,
what constitutes or has been taken to constitute the distinctive, if you like, literary use of language?
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.
So they are formal or linguistic answers to that question.
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.
That in the end didn't work, that that project doesn't work, it leads it leads into the sand.
And a whole series of other problems and questions arise, and this is how you then formulated.
What does why why does the culture privilege, certain kinds of language and certain modes of reading such a question can receive an answer?
Only when we reached the realm of political and economic relations, the structures of power.
Dominance and resistance, which determine the patterns and privileges of cultural formations or more accurately,
all our questions change radically when we reach this point.
And we see that the answers we were hoping to find again in that kind of formal linguistic orientation do not exist.
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.
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,
in fact, what this book's going to do is expose the impossibility of that project.
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.
And given what Constantine usefully said, you can see why my own work was was very informed by that.
But the question I thought I would maybe start with with Derek is that actually Derek
pointed here to books that many of us have tried to write but never directly wrote himself.
Instead, it seemed to me looking at a book like The Singularity of Literature, thinking about all the things that you've done,
that you felt that even that formulation left you with a major set of unresolved problems that
you felt you still couldn't address in the kind of socio institutional way that you opened up,
that you felt something else had to be done. OK, thank you, Peter.
Well, just to be autobiographical about what you've read there, of course,
the introduction was written last on that book, as they tend to be and in and well in writing the chapters,
starting with worrying about the concept of decorum in the Renaissance, which more I worked on more,
I realised it was a way of saying there is an element in good literature, good writing, which is not subject to rules.
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.
And I found that pattern repeating itself in different ways, down centuries.
Every time a writer, a poet, theorist, critic, tried to make a distinction between literature,
successful, important literature and other kinds of other kinds of text.
They always reached a point where I said, well, this this we can't.
Put down in black and white. This is taste or some other unspecified non-rural government property.
And then between finishing the chapters and writing introduction, I discovered that we'll get this in the mid 1980s,
I discovered a distinction which I hadn't been aware of, and that did throw a whole new light on these issues.
That's that's the moment really when I realised that there were different kinds of answers
or when I realised that if what constitutes the literary is never subject to formal rule,
it must be subject to something else.
And it seemed to me that what it's subject to are the determining forces of political, economic, social, cultural context.
It's it's something else. It's not within the literary field.
It's something outside the literary field that determines in a given place in time what shall count as literature and what not.
So hence I felt obliged, having made this discovery to to address this in the introduction of.
What happened next, I suppose, is partly a matter of as academic taste, I've never thought of myself.
I've never been drawn to the kind of institutional analysis that Peter does so wonderfully.
So having thrown this out, I in a way, we posed the question, posed it in a different way.
What is this historically repeated failure to be able to specify in determinate terms the distinction between the military in the military?
What if that was actually the key to to what military discourse, military practise,
rather than simply a failure or repeated failure, which then left literature open to these these external forces?
What if we could think of that as the constituted determining, defining characteristic of what we call the military or more broadly, the artistic?
And so the singularity of literature was an attempt to think through how we might.
Find a way of talking about literature that. Avoided some I'm not sure I succeeded,
but trying to avoid some of the pitfalls that these earlier accounts and many other
accounts of the military had had fallen into and many accounts of the aesthetic.
Did you try and find a way of talking about it, that.
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,
as Constantine was saying, modernism is the place where we first find ourselves looking,
if we think about the idea of art as innovative and rupturing and all of that.
But of course, if you look at the history of Western art in all its forms, you find a succession of writers, painters,
sculptors trying out new things using the formal medium they are working with to explore new new areas of consciousness,
new experiences, ideas and thoughts and even feelings hitherto unexpressed.
And my argument is part of the book is that that artists in doing this are not just bringing something new into the world,
which is not difficult to do. We could. All right, Tomsky say the saying sentences that have never been said before,
but to bring something new into the world which had been excluded and upon whose exclusion the culture itself rested.
So. So it seemed to me that art was a constant struggle, the best of the most important art, constant struggle.
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.
And. I don't think it goes away.
I mean, it's certainly still the case that because of this peculiar, non definable status of literature, it is vulnerable to negative word.
It is open to determination by external forces, and it always will be.
But there's a sense in which for me,
the literary work or more precisely the experience of the literary work that the reader reading in an appropriately attentive and creative way,
that that experience challenges the norm driven constitution of of institutions and states and and and academic disciplines, for that matter.
So that literature is is always an excess and a reminder.
And those of you who read Derrida on various literary works will know that he's the main source of of this thinking.
I don't think I'm doing much more than developing Derrida's insights into what constitutes the literary.
I'm. But perhaps I can not throw the question back to Peter.
Can you say more about the way you took up that issue and whether you think.
There's a place for our work to complement. When another.
Whether you think an institutional analysis can say the final word or whether you think an
institutional analysis will always be subject to some some of the indeterminacy the literature brings.
I'll be very keen to move towards complementing with an eye, but maybe try to worry about the east.
It's a. Certainly one of the ways in which my own work,
so I think I think it's fairly clear for anybody who's looked at the literature police
that certainly the kinds of claims that they're making in that final bit about we need
to ask these other questions about effectively who is setting themselves up as the
guardian of the literary and investigate that those those sort of historical forces.
I think that's absolutely clear. That's been vital to an element of what I'm doing.
But it was very much a book with two halves.
And the second half was actually precisely the opposite point that I was interested in looking at the various having having discovered
this unusual and unusually powerful group of people who had control over the space of the literary in apartheid South Africa,
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?
Well, I think the evidence of of the apartheid censorship archives tells you what would happen.
And it involves a lot of arbitrariness and a lot of wilful power in all sorts of ways.
So, yes, that's one key dimension to it.
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.
What we're talking about here is the institution of literature as a noun where we want to look at certain sorts of forces,
certain sorts of body is a certain sort of organisation, certain concentrations of power,
including a university and an English department amongst all those those those things.
But equally, what we get is in any act of writing in a certain way,
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,
unpredictable, unguaranteed bid for a new kind of authority.
So if we if we say that know, one of the meanings of the word institute is to found something,
inaugurates something and and make a bid for a certain kind of authority,
I think, you know, the kinds of writing that I want to take seriously,
it seems to me that they that's another dimension of the institution of literature that's going on.
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.
All those determining forces in a broader sociopolitical sort of way, an institutional way that determined the conception of the literary,
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.
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,
whether it's a black consciousness poet like James Matthews and the way that he,
you know, in his very writing set himself up against the white liberal guardianship, as he took it,
the white liberal guardianship of of the literary culture in apartheid South Africa.
You know, the kind of antipode that he projected himself, you know, from from James Matthews to, you know,
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.
So so for me, I can see that in some ways that my own sense is that certainly, Deridder, your work,
those kind of things that that verbal that institution as a verb is where we where we have a a common
ground in terms of where I certainly can take a lot of things from the singularity of literature.
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.
We want to try to keep this going for about 45 minutes, if we can, and then respond to you, if you will.
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,
the singularity of literature, responding to that aspect of your work is vitally important that in a sense, the literature is always undoing itself.
Literature poses a question to itself all the time, and therefore it poses a question to every reader.
Everybody who wants to is and of course, we are all completely free to ignore it.
But those of us who are drawn to the literary in this way, it poses a problem for all of us.
In that way, it seems that work is is vital for that kind of it's always breaking its own rules.
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.
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.
So, for instance, in particular, say in the literature, please, I saw the question that posed for the law itself,
the law as a system of regulation and authority and trying to itself police certain concepts and categories from obscenity to blasphemy.
And then also, of course, perversely in the case.
But also if you look at the British Obscene Publications Act of 1859, it builds in a notion of the literary defence.
So the literary defence itself enters into the discourse of the law.
And a book that I'm currently working on at the moment leaves the law to one side.
And I go towards international relations and the political sciences in various
ways and sort of the concepts and categories that are used in those fields. So I've always been interested in.
The specific ways, the kinds of understanding that the literary develops in and ways of thinking
that it it opens up which challenge other ways of thinking and other concepts,
and as I've always been into not only a challenge to itself, but a challenge to those other areas.
Right.
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.
But it does. It does perhaps raise.
The question of. I mean, it does raise the question of the relation between literature and other discourses and other discursive practises,
which is something I try to to understand in terms of the reading process, if you like,
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
of work or when you read a literary work as literature as opposed to reading it in some other way.
And I think we probably read in several ways at once. You know, we are absorbing knowledge or novel information.
Historical information at the same time is reading it for for for sheer entertainment at the same time as perhaps a.
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,
literature can absorb and replay any discourse, any discourse at all, can find its way into the literary work.
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
is a much more capacious form than anybody hitherto had had quite realised,
but that once a discourse becomes part of a literary work in a curious way, it's not itself anymore.
It's as it were, sighted or staged or enacted, so I do arguing here that.
Literature doesn't, for instance, moralise. As literature doesn't offer.
Advice on how to live your lives, but it certainly may take an interest in the activity of moralising.
It can perform moralising if we can be taken through what it is to be moral or
immoral or develop a moral consciousness without actually morality being discourse,
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.
We might, but I wouldn't be reading it as literature.
But law making law, observing the creation and destruction of law, all of that can happen in a novel.
And I totally agree that in doing so, literature can pose very hard questions to those discourses.
I do think and I think Derrida said this at some point, literature's weakness is also a strength.
It can do all of this.
It can take on board any verbal discourse, verbal universe that exists and do profound and often disturbing and challenging things with it.
But because it's literature, because it's a performance, it can always be totally ignored.
It has no direct purchase. And perhaps it needs someone like Peter to come along and say, look,
although we can't directly use literature in this way, the show would allow itself to be used in this way.
We can. Take its questions and pose them directly to the law and see what and see what happens.
Yeah, I think that that maybe also just sort of helps to clarify one point of, oh,
I'm not trying to manufacture differences here, but I'm just trying to think through the different.
So definitely I can see in relation to your work the whole question of of staging and representing the law.
So, you know, if you look at the field of literature and law studies, there's a whole branch of it, which frankly,
I find not particularly interesting, but it's a whole branch of it which says, look, let's look at lawyers in literature.
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.
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.
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,
I think, you know, in different moments and in different ways, radical questions about about thinking as such.
Can I can I just come in? Because I think I agree that that particular study stuff is rather tedious, is fairly mechanical.
But since we were talking last week about his new novel, that's the kind of really profound thinking about what a law is,
whether it be a natural law or a rule that a society's concocted. Yeah.
So it's not about lawyers and the legal profession, but it's about the law and the law, the legality of law.
What what is law?
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.
And I think, yes, these kind of we spoke about the Anthony entertainment dimension of of of the childhood of Jesus,
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?
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?
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?
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
which when we start to think about literature as a a constantly a form of thinking that's always breaking its own protocols,
but also putting all other protocols of thinking in.
Not all of them, of course, some of them, depending on what the work and the writer is doing,
putting them in question, then we can go from literature to other fields.
And it isn't then simply a question of creating a nice, happy, interdisciplinary marriage.
But it is actually about the creative tensions between what a discipline like literary studies can do and and bring to other other areas.
And I suppose we could maybe try to draw things to a conclusion at this point.
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
questions I've always had about literary studies in general and certainly in the in the English speaking world,
is that we have Marge Garba came up with a fantastic formulation where she had the
word discipline and she and she borrowed she's deliberately borrowing from Freud.
Discipline, envy has kind of fuelled literary studies. There's a kind of a sense of inadequacy in our own with our own.
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.
But we've constantly wanted to look elsewhere for our models, for how to go about things,
you know, whether it's anthropology, whether it's Freudian psychology,
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.
You know, there's some sense of fuelled by discipline, envy. There's something more rigorous, more substantial going on there.
I was really worried about that and felt that actually that there's there's so much there's so much going
on in our field that actually puts real questions to all those people that we apparently borrowing.
And we are we are somehow doing ourselves down by not confronting those fields with the questions that come from our own people.
This is this is no kind of hubris from from our own field or indeed any kind of isolated.
I want to be, you know, Helen Vendler and keep all the others away and defend my own discipline in its purity.
Not at all. But I want to bring come from a sense of the demands and the difficulties that that studying
literature in this way that we do at this level that universities can pose to other fields.
So. And to recognise also that the actually, although we do ourselves down by being fuelled by discipline and in fact philosophers like Derrida,
anthropologists like James Clifford, you know, many people have been drawn to the literary and we need to recognise that as well.
The this and sometimes they've been drawn to the literature in ways that is incredibly illuminating.
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.
But good to know that we do seem to be agreeing too much.
And then perhaps just to wrap up nice side of this than to say something about
the pedagogy of literary study which emerges from the things you're saying.
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?
What I'm doing, I do worry sometimes that it sounds as though I'm advocating either something terribly like the Leavis
oriented new and practical criticism that I was subjected to as a student and Pietermaritzburg 40 years ago,
or that I'm offering a kind of subject to Vine's phenomenology of every reading is as good as every other.
You know, let's just compare to compare notes.
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,
a reader is produced by the reader, as I say in the book, is like work is singular.
No, no. Readers like any other reader because of the the singularity of his or her formation.
So there will be different cultural, geographical, literary mix in any individual.
But when when I'm talking about a reader experiencing a literary text,
it's not a matter of as I remember Robin Williams scornfully saying when I used to go to his lectures in Cambridge,
a naked individual encountering a naked text,
she thought the Leavis position was, but rather a cultural meeting place that that the reader brings mostly,
unconsciously, I guess, a whole weight of these cultural, institutional, linguistic.
And personal familial ways of thinking and feeling to a text,
which is itself a product of a writer who possessed a similar but different accumulation of these factors.
And so, in a way, I remember when Peter and I were discussing this in Paris,
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,
which is meeting at a very fine point, but that bringing to bear on that point a wider and wider contextual background.
And so in in in literary discussion and literary pedagogy,
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?
It's not just what does it make you feel, but if you feel as you do, why do you feel as you do?
What is it about your background, your culture?
What are you bringing to bear and what does it say about the work you're reading and the author and the historical context?
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
better historical contextual work in order to bring about these events is these remarkable events of literary singularity.
So shall we open up? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.
OK, well, thank you.