The Text and the World

The relationship between literary texts and the world has been a central problem in criticism and theory at least since the fourth century BC when Plato banished poets from his imaginary Republic for allegedly misrepresenting the world. The very phrase ‘the text and the world’, however, immediately presents a questionable distinction: its very formulation presupposes a difference between a text on the one hand and the world on the other. This distinction is, of course, a very common way of thinking about literature: it is implicit in a certain understanding of mimesis or imitation, and in notions of realism and naturalism, and of representation, as well as in metaphors which suggest that literary texts offer a window onto the world or (in Hamlet’s words) hold a mirror up to nature. All of these ways of thinking about literary texts start from an assumed separation of the literary work, the text, from the world. They imply that a literary text is not, in essence, part of the world. Actually, over the centuries, writers have been trying to drive a stake into the heart of this assumption: the text-world dichotomy is like a vampire that will not lie down. The latest and most persistent of these vampire-killers are called poststructuralists. Poststructuralism (including new historicism, deconstruction, certain forms of feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory) consistently undermines the very terms of this text-world dichotomy. Michel Foucault

puts the point pithily in a way that is clearly influenced by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests . . . the fundamental will of those who speak it’ (Foucault 1970, 290). Poststructuralists ask what it means to say that a literary text is different or separate from the world. Should we not say, rather, that such texts actually make up our world? How can an act of inscription or an act of reading not be part of the world? Is there a world without such acts? In a later chapter, we look at the ways in which texts may be considered as performative, as acts of language which themselves do things, as well as just talk about things. In this chapter, we shall explore the idea that literary texts are acts that destabilize the very notion of the world and that disturb all assumptions about a separation of world from text.