3 - Just One Word

Summary

ma il loro numero è sterminato …

Primo Levi

Is literature guilty? Even if your object of choice is words, the numbers are hard to ignore. Regardless of content, and not unlike the expanding universe or the world population, words are proliferating. Books and journals, keywords and lexicons, multiply apace. The blogosphere balloons.

Within the literary field, expansion and growth – the rule of numbers – have made themselves dramatically, albeit controversially, felt (‘billions of sentences … thousands of variations and permutations and approximations … from the 20,000 words of Daphnis and Chloe to the 40,000 words of Chrétien, 100,000 of Austen, 400,000 of Don Quixote, and over 800,000 of The Story of the Stone). They have powered the twin engines of diversity and inclusion, a promise of ‘the open-ended possibility of studying all literatures, with linguistic rigor and historical savvy’. Distant or close, surface or depth, expertly critical or socio-historical, coded, branded and digito-commodified – the horizon of literary reading is governed by growth, the unmeasure of universal reach.

And so literature grows and expands, at home in the world – the whole world now – along with its locales and forms. The more it includes, the more diverse it is, the less agreement there is on what literature is. Indeed, everything is as if the less agreement there is on the subject of literature, the larger it swells as an object.

At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, literature appears to compete less in a Darwinian universe than in a pre-Socratic one. Instead of Air, Water, Earth and Fire, one finds Economy, Science, Politics, Religion – basic and universal elements to which everything returns, to which all could be reduced. And so with the fifth element. In the world historical expansion of the literary field (words, books, genres, realms, languages, regions and periods), there has been a similar reductive push. For all this expansive increase – one word and one word only.

Literature.