SubStance

As Professor of Poetics and Literary Theory, the polymath Benjamin Harshav helped found the Tel-Aviv School of Constructive Poetics during the 1960s and 1970s, and currently serves at Yale as Professor of Comparative Literature, Hebrew Language and Literature, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. His Marc Chagall and His Times (Stanford, 2004) won the American Koret Award for fiction and biography. The current volume gathers essays from 1974–1989. Although Harshav’s “constructivist poetics” discusses no French figure in detail, his method is widely applicable to French studies. It addresses recent debates over the essential nature and dynamics of literature. I particularly recommend chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7.

Harshav does not intend to offer a method of interpretation; instead, he proposes an abstract model of the textual frameworks that guide readers in their interpretations. His insights are not in themselves original, but he strives to present an overview that is more systematic and thorough than that of his precursors. He carefully crafts his definitions of key terms to allow them to account for fuzzy sets—both horizontally (the text and its contexts; the blurred boundary between mimesis and referential grounding, or, more broadly, fiction and non-fiction; conventions that shift over time) and vertically (the overlapping criteria for various levels of generalization). Chapter 1, “Fictionality and Fields of Reference: A Theoretical Framework” (1–31), begins with a circular argument: “situations, characters, ideas—are mediated through language alone,” and “language in literature can be understood only as embedded in fictional or projected constructs . . . no matter how partial or unstable” (1). “We construct . . . attitudes from the text and then read the text as directed by them” (3). Fiction, which “makes no claim to truth values in the real world,” is composed of referents (“anything we can refer to or talk about”), two or more of which combine to form a frame of reference (fr). From the viewpoint of the fictional characters, the fr may be known or unknown; present or absent; real or ideal; singulative or iterative; typical or individualized; hypothetical or fictional. A field of reference (FR) may consist of many frs, but has no essential difference from a large fr. Literature, unlike non-fictional forms of writing, is unique in projecting its own internal frame of reference (IFR) while referring to it at the same [End Page 154] time—ordinarily, through various speakers and narrators. Several discontinuous IFR’s may coexist within a single work (3–8 and 12).

No specific traditional categories, Harshav concludes, can define the “essence” of literature (19). His commonsensical generalizations often clarify issues, and question the misleadingly narrow foci of many influential critical methods that privilege the narrator or the reader, the text or its contexts, fictionality or linguistic devices. His emphasis on the IFR allows him to consider revised versions of a work, or variant texts of a folktale, for example, as representing a single work (15). His detailed discussions of conflicting frames of reference in Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, Joyce’s “Eveline” in Dubliners, The Brothers Karamazov, and War and Peace incites a fruitful open-mindedness that could enrich many of our own interpretations. The contribution of Harshav’s seminal work comes not so much from what he says, but from the expanded awareness that his network of generalizations provokes, even if we reject some of them in isolation.

Chapter 2, “Metaphor and Frames of Reference,” argues that metaphor is not necessarily limited to a word, sentence, or textual unit, or to the level of language alone. A sentence in isolation may lack metaphorical meaning, but acquire it in context. “Metaphor is not a linguistic unit but a text-semantic pattern.” (34) To explain it fully, theory needs to add considerations of the fr, “the basic unit of semantic integration.” (40), and of clashes between two or more frs. Thorough discussions of figurative language in T. S. Eliot, Rilke, and Mayakovsky’s “A...