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Hughes Labrusse
WORD, WORLD, WORDS - LITERATURE
DISpLACED.
By Hughes Labrusse France
In literature, the world comes into its own.
Denizens of the world, men and women,
are housed in a literary world, a world of
fiction. By now, we have come to believe
that the whole literary body, ever since
Homer, has been living within an order of
its own.
Not all written texts and books belong
to what is called universal literature.
The Ancients were not always devotedly
attached to the written word or the book.
Literature as such began in Rome. There
is no word in ancient Greek for it: γράφω
is not a noun. Indeed, the Latin word
littera took over its functions and begot
litteratura. But translation necessarily
modifies our approach to the latter world.
Literature is rooted in the same soil as
culture. In Rome, it implied a world seen
in a context of memory and expansion, a
will to subdue people and push forward
the frontiers of the empire.
Nowadays, literature has become a part
of culture seen as a field of action for
the prevailing eco-nomic, political and
ideological values, which, in turn, must be
understood in a global context. Literature
is inherent to the new relationship
between humankind and the world.
The fact is that man originally means
soil. And as we tend to be more and more
subjective and self-centred, we are faced
with a dichotomy first heard in John’s
gospel (3:16), For God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not
perish, but have everlasting life, and then
in his Epistle (I 2:15): Love not the world,
neither the things that are in the world. On
the one hand, we have the world as divine
creation and design, on the other, as it now
seems, prey of the powers of evil.
In the early days of European Christianity,
culture and cult separated. Literature
consisted of written books. The modern
understanding of a body of published
works first came into being in the 18th
century, without discontinuity, however,
as the Latin-Christian context endured.
Thus, one can say that culture, literature,
as well as Enlightenment ideas as a whole
are to be regarded as phenomena inherent
to Christianity, appendices of it as it were,
present even in its breakdown.
As history progressed the book lost its
sacredness, in contrast to what it had
been in the East or when monotheistic
religions were established. It was not
understood as a bodily appendix, contrary
to instruments or some type of
prosthesis; it was a displacement of
events and reality, caused by memory
and imagination. It can be regarded as
sacred if we consider it as meaning that
irresistible intrusion which shook the world
as it was like an earthquake. This intrusion
continues to upset the ground where
the dead lie. Because we are obsessed
with the reality of experience, we have
long been distracted from that aeonsold
strife. Literature as a homogenous
and culturally adulterated form stays
well away from that breaching force. Its
endless reproductive capacities, seen as
an aesthetic phenomenon, together with
its repetitiveness pave the way to boredom,
as yet latent, although vastly overlooked, in
many works. I am not blaming the book as
such, but instead its commodity masking,
within a liberal economic system, the
bottomless pits mankind has long been
dumped into, magnifying it, as a matter of
fact both in time and in space.
The emptiness there is not the
consequence of the plight of man without
God, but, of the with-drawal of all human
activities in the only exploitable horizon of
the possible on the one hand, and on the
other, of the unbridged gap between the
Christian heritage one keeps disparaging,
with arrogance sometimes, and principles
and institutions whose only fulcrum is to
be found in their ungrounded logics. The
machine works erratically because it is off
its axis. Nothing is more dangerous than a
machine allowed to go freewheeling with
its engine racing.
Man’s status is at stake. The idea we have of it
today is based on atheistic humanism.
ButHumanism, just like atheism, is the
offspring of the Christian faith, and more
particularly, of kenosis, which is the core
of it. The Christian faith is another kind
of atheism in so far as God repudiated its
omnipotence in becoming human. And then
humanism began, that is to say
the conquest by man of his own truth
and essence. Humanism spread over
the whole planet just as Christian and
Western values did. The mistake would
be to regard them as a hurried, botched
secularisation whereas instead they result
from the amazing connection between
faith and reason. Certainly, a day will come
when their exposition to other civilisations
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