Sethumadhavan

" Literature argues not by articulating premises and conclusions but by prompting its audience to develop them for itself. " 0. It is tempting to address at length in an abstract fashion the forceful and condensed premise that we are supposed to examine, discuss and argue about as a tool to re-theorize not only critical interpretation but the process, structure and ethics of literary communication; it is all too tempting because it would allow us to display and exploit a vast array of concepts borrowed from the history of poetics, rhetoric and reception. But most of the questions that have intrigued me in the past fifteen or twenty years about globalization, World Literature, postcolonial fiction, translatedness, etc. and that the liminal statement or proposition quoted might help me solve or at least reformulate or reset, invite me on the contrary to remain sober in this respect and limit myself to exposing briefly my understanding or misunderstanding of the basic assumptions behind this statement. 1) " Literature argues " Literature, whether it argues or not and however it does it, is presented as an entity that resembles a human subject insofar as it is the subject of acts of speech. It is not only a regime of discourse, or a code. The letter of literature, its text is not treated as an arbitrary collection of signs or a dead archive but as the living locus of an intentionality, it is not self-contained, autotelic, it seeks to produce effects. 2) " literature prompt[s] its audience " " Literature " is not seen as the totality of the situations, agents and processes involved in the production, transmission and exchange of aestheticized/aestheticizable acts of speech, but more probably as a corpus of texts in which a will-to-do is deposited and that is activated by reading. Therefore, as an event, it takes place within a space-time oriented by classical communicational directionality, a message being conveyed from a sender to a receiver. 3) " its audience to develop them for itself " The end user (receiver/interpreter) of " literature " is collective and autonomous. The extent to which its members or component parts (individual readers) collaborate to unify the reception field or develop conflicting interpretations is not specified any more than the nature of the bond between literature and audience: is it a merely pragmatic bond, or reciprocal belonging, or an ongoing negotiation between forces? This crucial question is left open and it is mainly through this indeterminacy that we can try to apply the proposed maxim to the reception-programming strategies of postcolonial fiction and assess its productivity without questioning at this stage the assumptions revealed in 1) and 2).

The overlap and potential confusion of the quantitative or dimensional and the qualitative or hierarchical uses of " minor " and " minority " (as smaller or lesser) in the cultural and literary sphere always bind them to a quest for power, from mere survival to almightiness. The initial uses of " minor " in Western literary histories (as in " minor works " and " minor classics ") are related to canon formation and periodization, they operate on the border between inclusion and exclusion but within a clearly defined, supposedly undisputed territory. Deleuze's political subversion of the term " minor " in his study of Kafka is still confined to the agonistics of European universalisms, the deterritorialization involved remains both magic and tragic. His " virtually postcolonial " approach must be reconsidered in view of radically different worlding strategies adopted —deliberately or not— by so-called postcolonial literatures, whether they are written in a dominant colonial language or in a " native " language. The two case studies presented and compared attempt to show that the Empire(s) not only write back, but can write out from within the specific reconstructed non-national anthropological space of the located work of art and thus ground alternative universalisms in the material culture of local soil. Critical particularism and individual consciousness progressively become the tools of a new cosmopolitanism freed from European abstraction and atemporal metaphoricity.

Ce petit chef d'œuvre romanesque malayali, originellement publié en 1982, a fait l'objet d'une belle traduction en anglais par Prema Jayakumar (MacMillan 1995), de nombreuses autres traductions, d'une adaptation cinématographique (1986) et de l'œuvre bengali "Nirakar Chahya" ("Shadows Formless") par l'artiste filmique Ashish Avikuntak.
Voir postface.