literature
6
serves as an example. The term is used to address the literary production of
authors like Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, just to name a few, whose
works are highly demanded by the public. The success of these literary pieces of art is
explained by the quality of being products for leisure and entertainment only, a
caracteristic that arises doubts
about their literary value, the last aspect of Onofri’s
statement. According to Jean-Paul Sartre
7
all artworks are inestimable because they
are the result of a free creative act in terms of
liberté/gratuité
. Unfortunately, for
Sartre this also means that this creative act is always useless (
inutile
) except for the
focus on the engagement, the authorial commitment in the act of writing. This
position was strongly criticised by Roland Barthes, stirring
up the famous Sartre-
Barthes debate around literature. As for Sartre, the act of writing is not neutral
because words have the power to change the state of things. Even silence is not a
neutral choice because its value is measured by the absence of words; as to say,
whatever an author decides to write or not write, he is still taking a position in front of
a particular matter and it is exactly this stance that qualifies the author as such,
because it is his responsibility to denounce and accuse acts of useless violence.
8
This
comittment
turns to be an
impératif moral
towards writing itself and towards the
public in terms of assuming all the consequences that the act of writing entails.
9
From
this perspective, the
beaux arts
are a product of author’s engagement. This is totally a
different approach compared to the one of Barthes: the
beaux arts
answer only to the
plaisir
or
jouissance
, the simple pleasure aroused from the act of reading.
10
And this
pleasant feeling is perceived precisely because the literary work itself was written
with pleasure which makes the author similar to an hedonist. No engagement is
required in Barthes’s theory: the aesthetic principle “l'art pour l'art” (“art for art's
sake”)
11
is the only rule to follow. The success of a piece of art is then originality,
singularity or something perceived as anew (actually Harold Bloom echoed Barthes in
regards to this philosophy, see his
Western Canon
).
12
This different point of view
concerning the literary engagement is a very thorny topic when trying to define the
“literature of the catastrophe" as a canon in itself. To proceed with the last review of
Onofri’s statement concerning the “critics’s judgements” it is useful to take advantage
of Andrea Bernardelli’s observations remarking two different approaches to the
literary criticism: one, defined as “descriptive function or
ex-post
function” consists in
an historical attempt to describe a map of literary genre; the other one is the “pre-
scripted modality” or
a priori
modality: a subordination of the work of art to specific
rules; in other words, the author himself brings his work in line with a particular genre
or trend.
13
In addition to that, according to Innocenti the first approach is diachronic
or atemporal because it attempts to establish a large-scale evaluation system valid all
time, with a retroactive effect; the second one, on the contrary, can be considered as
6
Treat, J. W. (1993). Yoshimoto Banana writes Home: Sh
ō
jo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject. In
The
Society of Japanese Studies
, 19, 2 (p. 357).
7
Sartre, J.P. (1985).
Qu’est-ce que la littérature?
Paris:
Éditions du Gallimard. This concept and the
following ones are repeated several times in the essay.
8
Sartre, J.P. (1946).
La Responsabilité de l’écrivain.
Paris: Éditions du Verdier (p. 56).
9
Benoît, D. (2000).
Littérature et engagement.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil (p. 47).
10
Barthes, R. (1982).
Le plaisir du texte.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil. This concept and the following ones
are repeated several times in the essay.
11
Slogan credited to the French literary critic Théophile Gautier (1811–1872).
12
Bloom, H. (1995).
The Western Canon: the books and school of the ages
. New York: Riverhead
Books.
13
Bernardelli, A.
Che cos’è l’intertestualità
. Roma: Carocci Editore (p. 43). My translation.
synchronic because answers to the current trends.
14
This academic work is referring to
the first one, of competence of critics.
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