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Études britanniques contemporaines
Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines
58 | 2020
“Literature’s exception(s)”, E.M. Forster, V. Woolf
Introduction: Literature’s Exception(s)
Catherine Bernard
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/8031
ISSN: 2271-5444
Publisher
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
Electronic reference
Catherine Bernard, « Introduction: Literature’s Exception(s) », Études britanniques contemporaines
[Online], 58 | 2020, Online since 01 March 2019, connection on 23 April 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/ebc/8031
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Introduction: Literature’s
Exception(s)
Catherine Bernard
1 The term ‘exception’ has never been elaborated into a concept nor has it been
appropriated by criticism or theory to define modern aesthetics, as ‘subversion’,
‘revolution’, or even ‘avant-garde’ have been. And yet, it may offer a different purchase
on some of the persistent traits of modernity and thus bring us to rethink the poetics of
the modern, as well as literature’s and art’s relation to history, specifically in its
moments of crisis.
2 As the etymology of the term implies, ‘exception’ suggests that the general rule cannot
apply to what is ‘excepted’. If, according to the popular phrase, ‘the exception confirms
the rule’, the relation is above all one of radical difference, rather than tension, in
which the person or thing ‘excepted’ is one of his/her/its kind and in fact exceeds all
comparisons. Exceptions are necessarily stand-alones. They thus lay down their own
rules that radically depart from the common law.
3 Such radical difference is, of course, most prominent in the figure of the eccentric who
invents himself/herself in radical contradistinction with the laws—even the
revolutionary laws—that define the language of the common, of the tribe or even of the
faction. The 20th and 21st centuries has been rich in figures, from Edith Sitwell, the
author of The English Eccentrics (1933), to the artist duo Gilbert & George, who have
forged dissident aesthetic idioms. The self-dramatisation of their exceptionality has
turned it into a form of performative strength. Yet, in order to remain true to their
own exceptionality, they have often been loath to make it into a law. The likes of
Gilbert & George have always been reticent to turn their uniqueness into what Michel
Foucault defines as ‘operators of discursivity’ in his essay ‘What is an author?’ (1969)?
The poignancy of their exceptionality lies in the way these self-engendering gestures
have not been elaborated into ‘event’, in the meaning Alain Badiou gives to the term in
L’Être et l’évenement (1988), in the sense that their oddness has not necessarily heralded
the new and has remained one of a kind, beyond any aesthetic kinship to come.
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Introduction: Literature’s Exception(s) 2
4 The language of the exceptional is one that is difficult to define or even to understand
with the tools of literary and aesthetic history. As is obvious, the definition of
exceptionality remains an open and even vexed one. One may even wonder whether
extrapolating the notion of exceptionality from its root noun ‘exception’ does not, from
the start, imply that one is doomed to essentialize exception and thus to read
invariants where there is only unrepeatable uniqueness.
5 As the articles here gathered show, the range of possible angles from which to broach
the issue is wide. Exception may be elaborated into an aesthetics that defines a
language of its own that departs from the dominant economy of literary form. This
tension is at the heart of Alice Borrego’s article: ‘Against the Norm: Exception as a
Disruptive Force in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918)’, a piece that displaces
the paradigm of subversion usually associated with High Modernism and avant-garde
in order to reassess Rebecca West’s unclassifiable work.
6 More recently, with the advent of intensely self-reflexive and playful fiction, writing
has programmatically engaged with preexisting artistic laws, thus questioning the
reliability of the received tension between rules and exceptions. In her article ‘Alison
Case’s Nelly Dean (2016): an Exceptional Neo-Victorian novel?’, Isabelle Roblin shows
that even the most self-reflexive of aesthetics—here the neo-victorian novel—, may in
fact outwit its own logic, by questioning the injunction to exceptionalism. Writers may
thus embrace exception as a way of probing literature’s capacity to resist
categorisation. Emilie Walezak’s analysis of A.S. Byatt’s Peacock and Vine here shows
that for the author of Possession, deliberately writing a stand-alone text is a way of
testing literary form, the text functioning as a laboratory. And the same may also be
said of Kate Atkinson’s experimentation with the detective novel, as Armelle Parey’s
analysis also shows.
7 Exception may also be the very topic and object of writing, in which case, it will
function as a form of litmus test against which language will exercise its capacity to
escape its own confines. Such aesthetic trial has been of the essence of dystopian
literature. By confronting itself to ‘states of exception’, it has explored the way
exception becomes the law, while fiction—in its capacity to confront the exceptional—
tests its own capacity to imagine the language of resistance. But exception may also lie
in the experience of extreme states, such as loss and grief. This is the topic of Héloïse
Lecomte’s article ‘The Hapax of Mourning: Ali Smith’s Aesthetics of Exception in Artful
(2012)’, in which she analyses Smith’s capacity to harness formal experimentation to
an exploration of the radical exceptionality of mourning. Catherine Lanone also
explores even more radical states of exception, in the context of the Trojan war as
reimagined by Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. As Justine Gonneaud’s study of
‘Exceptionality and Commonality in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet’ also reveals, exception may
thus paradoxically be of the essence of the common and many contemporary writers
have aimed at undoing the binary opposition between the ordinary and the
exceptional, in order to reveal the numinous at the heart of the everyday.
8 In all cases, literary exception is proof to how crucial it is to recontextualize the
exceptional if only to assess in what way it resists established aesthetic norms and what
its reception has been across time. One way of reading literature’s exception(s)
historically is also to take the context of publication into account. Fostering exception
may be a publishing ploy and thus contribute to the paradoxical canonisation of the
radically other or the strange. As Mark Davies shows, this has been the case with the
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Introduction: Literature’s Exception(s) 3 Goldsmiths Prize which, since its creation, has favoured ‘difficult’ fiction that flaunts its exceptionality and its capacity to break with established literary norms. Once again, what seems at stake is the constructedness of the very criteria that turn the exception into the rule. As the articles here presented testify, literature’s exception(ality) undoes any attempt at stabilizing the tension between resistance and congruence. While our still prevalent indexing of the literary on its capacity to radicalize form and the reading experience still places us in the shadow of modernism, new complex forms of literary exceptionality have emerged that urge us to rethink our understanding of what makes for an exceptional reading experience, from Tom McCarthy to Jackie Kay, from Ali Smith to A.S. Byatt, from Rebecca West to Kate Atkinson or Alison Case. ABSTRACTS This issue of Études britanniques contemporaines emanates from the contributions to a workshop of the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) at the 2019 conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur. The conference revolved around the issue of ‘exception(s)’ and it gave contributors the opportunity to explore a notion that has rarely aroused critical interest. Whether the said exceptionality is that of works that stand out from the rest of a writer’s career, or whether it is that of literary excentrics, it brings us to probe the norms regulating our literary taxonomies, just as it invites us to reflect on the lasting fascination the unclassifiable exerts on readers. The issue brings together articles bearing on contemporary fiction but also on modernism’ take on the subject; it gives us keys to understand our complex relation to literary laws and norms and to the exception(s) that subvert and undo them. This issue also includes two monographic sections. One, devoted to articles on Virginia Woolf, builds on the long-standing collaboration of the journal with the Société d’Études Woolfiennes. The other section brings together articles turning to E.M. Forster’s Howards End and its film adaptation by James Ivory (1992). Ce numéro d’Études britanniques contemporaines est issu des travaux de l’atelier de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) lors du congrès de la Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur de 2019. Ce congrès avait pour thème « L’exception » et il fut l’occasion d’explorer une notion rarement analysée par la critique. Que l’exception soit celle d’œuvres hors normes dans la production d’un écrivain ou qu’elle soit celle de figures excentriques de la littérature, elle impose que nous interrogions les normes qui régulent les lois littéraires et leurs exceptions, tout comme elle invite à comprendre la fascination qu’exerce l’inclassable sur les lecteurs. Réunissant des travaux portant sur la fiction contemporaine, mais aussi sur une œuvre hors normes du canon moderniste, ce numéro offre des clés d’investigation de notre relation complexe aux lois de la littérarité et à ce qui les débordent. Dans les pages de ce numéro, on trouvera aussi deux cahiers spéciaux. L’un, consacré à Virginia Woolf se fait le relai des travaux menés par la Société d’Études Woolfiennes. L’autre réunit des articles portant sur E.M. Forster et en particulier Howards End et son adaptation cinématographique par James Ivory. Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020
Introduction: Literature’s Exception(s) 4 INDEX Mots-clés: exception, excentrique, canon, roman contemporain, Woolf (Virginia), Forster (E. M.), Ivory (James) Keywords: exception, eccentric, canon, contemporary novel, Woolf (Virginia), Forster (E.M.), Ivory (James) AUTHOR CATHERINE BERNARD Catherine Bernard is Professor of English literature and art history at Université de Paris. She has published extensively on contemporary art (Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, Mark Wallinger among others) and on recent English fiction (Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Ali Smith or Hary Parker). Her research has also turned to English modernism and more specifically Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. She has published a critical edition and translation of Flush into French (Gallimard, Bibliothèque La Pléiade, 2012), and a critical edition and translation of a selection of Woolf’s essays (Essais choisis, Gallimard, Folio classique, 2015). She is also the author of a monograph on contemporary British fiction and contemporary art: Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains (Presses de l’Université Paris- Sorbonne, 2018). She is the President of the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC). Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020
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