The Powers of Fiction According to Roger Caillois
From the Death of Literature to Generalized Poetics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v7i1.29113Keywords:
fiction, novel, commitment, responsibility of the writer, fantasy, generalized poetics, petrificationAbstract
After asserting that literature was dead, Roger Caillois became a writer and elevated fiction to the status of a small-scale universe. In so doing, he made fiction not only move away from the human but also reveal a universe without mankind. This article examines this contradiction by following Rancière’s view that "the life of literature is the life of this contradiction": Far from making Caillois desist, the eviction of literature gave him the justification to write. Until the end of his life, this former travelling companion of the Surrealists and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie kept laying the foundations of a generalized poetics in which the most disjointed elements of the universe reveal their subterranean brotherhood, where the wavelength of a stone travels and hits the echo chamber of the poem. From fables to stones, Caillois proposes a new distribution of the sensible that brings man back into the natural fabric from which he originates and reconciles him with the syntax of the universe. Rancière's concept of "literary petrification", following Sartre, sheds light on this literary and political gesture, through which Caillois makes us listen to the stones and their more-than-human serenities.
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