Like many, I have long deplored the fact that literary studies have more or less handed over works to specialized knowledge and, as a result, have alienated readers who come to draw life lessons from the experiences from which these works originate. . Provided that the works translate a true experience, we learn to live even when we think we are reading them to distract ourselves, we discover that we live little, through lack of attention to reality, that we live poorly, through an inability to sustain the tension between the opposing forces to which we are exposed.
This means that the teaching of literature is not a luxury, but a school of movement where we learn to move from the solitude of the self to the community of solitaries, from what we believed to be to what East.
I can only rejoice in the manifesto of LIREL, the Intercollegiate Research Laboratory on the Teaching of Literature, which proposes to free this subject from the shackles of “estimates and methodology”, of the “competence-based approach” which “has perverted literature classes into procedural lessons / where we confused the purposes of literary experience with the teaching of preformatted discourses”, to make room for works which “taught us to live and made us tame death / to see the light and understand the darkness.”
I also like that this manifesto, a sort of global refusal of “formalist and technicist” stupidity, does not dissociate contemporary works from “great texts of the past” nor the teaching of literature “from the transmission and valorization of language “. The manifesto does what it says by joyfully borrowing from the great literary texts of the French-speaking world “inspiring formulas” which invite readers to move from a sensation, an idea, an image, a value to a other, and to seek “the imponderable balance between the two”.
Every work is grappling with a problem to resolve, “a bone to chew”, said Thoreau, experiences which give rise to contradictory desires which paralyze the human being as long as he cannot manage to reconcile them, to perceive their meaning. paradoxical unity without abolishing the distance that separates them. Like the great scientific discoveries, the great literary or philosophical discoveries (“I is another”, “The earth is blue like an orange”, “One never bathes twice in the same river”, etc.) are always the fruit of a leap above oppositions, of an expansion of thought through the heart, which transforms the fight between us and the world into a love story in which a surplus of being and the strength are given to us by what we lack and by what resists us, by virtue of this intuition that harmony is at the foundation of the world and of all knowledge.
To engage us in this path of living reading which leads to the joy of “transforming ourselves through contact with the otherness of the texts” (Étienne Beaulieu, “The Joy of Teaching”, The duty of February 17), I suggest replacing literary analysis, explanatory and critical dissertations with reading exercises which aim to identify the various movements of thought and sensation to which the works are likely to obey, because “everything is created by necessity and discord” (Heraclitus).
I. Moving in the space between near and far, outside and inside, up and down until you perceive “the distance of this nearby landscape” (Nepveu), “the interior space of the world” (Rilke), “the silence of infinite spaces” which frightens Pascal, but invites Mallarmé to “flee, over there, flee”.
II. Moving in time, between the past and the present (source of nostalgia), between the present and the future (source of anxiety) until this moment which lasts, fragment of eternity, time found in “the extreme fixity of things that pass” (Woolf).
III. Moving between words and things, moving from words that retain and distinguish things to the silent world of indeterminate things, and thus learning to “see more things than we know” (Valéry); do the same exercise with human beings, find the right words that bring them together without melting them: “Decenter. Do not annex the other, become their host. Be silent” (Brault).
Impossible to find a work that does not tell the story of these difficult and necessary passages between the self and the non-self that we encounter as soon as we leave home, that we desire to strengthen ourselves against death lurking in the unknown, until we discover “that we suffocate in the closed house” (Saint-Denys Garneau), that the only way to survive is to open up (“In the fight between you and the world, second the world”, Kafka).
For anyone who sees in this more flexible approach an impoverishment of critical thinking, it is good to remember that the pleasure of reading is always linked to the pleasure of (re)discovering some truth, as the dialectical reading of works invites us to do (presentation, development, conflict resolution), which shows us that literature, like us, always unfolds between these two slopes which are reason and the heart, prose and poetry, classicism and romanticism.