Tzvetan Todorov—the literary theorist, historian,
philosopher, structuralist and essayist—died in Paris at the age of
seventy-seven in February of this year. His importance to every one of these
disciplines and subjects to which he turned his attention is enormous. A
Bulgarian born in 1939, Todorov emigrated to Paris to do graduate work and was
the student of Roland Barthes. His Bulgarian experience under Soviet communism
gave him a mistrust of “everything the state defends or that is related to the
public sphere.”[1] But the fall
of the Berlin wall in 1989 changed that mistrust: “I felt like I was no longer
conditioned by those childhood and teenage years living in a totalitarian
world.” Thus it is unsurprising that Todorov’s intellectual trajectory took a
strong turn toward ethics and politics beginning in the early eighties (as if
sensing the end of Soviet communism) and continued until his death.
Todorov famously began as a structuralist, well-schooled in
the Russian formalism of the twenties and the Prague School of Linguistics of
the thirties. Early in his career, he translated the Russian formalists into
French, Théorie de la littérature. Textes des formalistes russes (1965).
One might say that his form of structuralism is politically “safe” to a certain
extent, searching as it does for repetitive patterns and deep meanings that are
frequently unrelated to their manifestations (plot events and narrative
systems, for example) and certainly unconcerned—at least overtly—with the
hegemony of the state. Literature and Signification (1969)
continued in this vein and also put him on the map as the scholar who created a
renaissance in rhetoric.
Todorov continued with structuralist analyses, which he
combined with semiotics and a study of narrative systems (along with Gérard
Genette, Barthes and the early Fredric Jameson). For this approach to
narrative, in collaboration with Algirdas Julien Greimas and Barthes, Todorov
coined the term narratology. All types of narrative, he wrote, “pertain less to poetics than
to a discipline which seems to me to have solid claim to the right of
existence, and which could be called narratology.”[2] The sentence
is taken from an article, “The 2 Principles of Narrative,” which analyzed what
Vladimir Propp had called “functions” (in Russian fairy tales)— the succession
of recurring plot elements that Propp showed could be mapped, or listed, in
succession. Todorov added, contra Propp’s system, that the
relationship between the units (or functions) cannot be only one of succession,
but must “also be one of transformation.”[3] For example,
a narrative may present events at the beginning of its récit, but
the reader will see them differently if the same events return at the end. And
yet even this syntactical power of transformations is not what is to be valued
most in a narrative, adds Todorov. Narratives can be further broken down into
the gnoseological type or of the mythological type; more layers need to be
added to parsing any given plot events. Even in the early
seventies, then, he was already drifting away from structuralism and its
ancestors, the Russian formalists. Though Todorov continued in semiotics,
structuralist approaches and narratology—for example, his 1971 The
Poetics of Prose, which continues to analyze narrative (récit) on
which the article in question draws— something else was brewing.
Well-known and much admired in France, by 1970 Todorov had
authored many books and had helped to found, with Genette, the journal Poétique.
In the same year, shortly before the Poetics of Prose, one of
Todorov’s works was so immediately important and successful, that it was added
to the French school curriculum the year after the book’s appearance, and is
still there today. That book is The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to
a Literary Genre. This is not the place to summarize Todorov’s famous
argument. Suffice it to say that to this day, no student or scholar can write
on the fantastic without alluding to Todorov’s seminal work on the subject.
But, to repeat, something else was brewing. Todorov’s early
life under communism had profoundly marked him: “Today I believe,” he said in a
late interview, “that my initial interest in questions of form and structure in
literature . . . was closely linked to the fact that debating ideas was
impossible in a totalitarian country.” If you wanted to say anything about
literature in that context, he continued, you had the choice “between serving
the purposes of official propaganda and focusing on the formal aspects of the
text alone.” So he concentrated solely on the formal aspects of texts. By the
early eighties, however, as Soviet communism was collapsing, Todorov was
changing. In 1982 The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other appeared
in France (the English translation two years later). The book, a type of
echo and counter-response to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America, examines the Mesoamerican Indian population confronting the
Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth century. Tocqueville, curiously enough,
had written that while the Spanish had been horrible in their treatment of
native populations, they were nonetheless unable to eradicate the native
populations of North America. The United States succeeded in doing this,
continues Tocqueville, “with felicity” and “without shedding any blood.” This
appalling and absurd conclusion notwithstanding, Todorov writes his study with
a different question: to what extent did the fact that the Aztecs had no notion
of the Other, and that the Spaniards had a very clear and (let us say)
xenophobic and racist one, contribute to the destruction of the pre-Columbian
civilizations of Mexico and the Caribbean? Could it explain the Aztec passivity
in the face of the brutal conquerors? Todorov mainly consulted the archives of
Columbus and “then of his contemporaries and companions.” Todorov concludes his
work with the following: “For Cortés, the conquest of knowledge leads to the
conquest of power. I take the conquest of knowledge from his example, even if I
do so in order to resist power.”
As of Conquest, Todorov will deeply engage
in the issues of ethics in the political realm. He does not believe that
history obeys a system, he writes in conclusion, but believes rather that “to
become conscious of the relativity . . . of any feature of our culture is
already to shift it a little, and that history (not the science but its object)
is nothing other than a series of such imperceptible shifts.”[4] If Michel
Foucault explored the tectonic shifts that occurred and caused changes in
varying power structures in varying eras and discourses, Todorov is more
optimistic; he believes that uncovering historical “shifts” can create a shift
in itself, such that an event can be wrested from its underpinnings and
historical behaviors can be somewhat modified in turn. “I myself,” says Todorov
in another interview, “aspire less today than in the past to produce a text
reducible to its theses; I try to enrich it with stories, other people’s or my
own, and, as we know, stories give rise to interpretations, not refutations.”
As one reader of Todorov puts it, he teaches us to eradicate, or deeply to
question, the binary of “them and us.” What will follow will be rooted in
ethics: On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French
Thought (1989); Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the
Concentration Camps (on the “social schizophrenia specific to totalitarian
regimes,” 1991); A French Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War, Summer ’44 (on
the French Resistance’s killing of thirteen pro-Nazi militia and the Nazi
revenge murder of thirty-eight Jews in Saint-Armand, 1994); The
Fragility of Goodness (on the rescue of Bulgarian Jews, 1999); A
New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2003, two years after September
11 and on the eve of the Iraq war); Duties and Delights: The Life
of a Go-Between (his intellectual autobiography, 2002)—and too many
other books and articles to mention here.[5] “Only
totalitarianism,” writes Todorov, “makes it obligatory to love one’s country”
(a statement we would do well, at present in the United States, to keep in
mind).
“From now on,” writes Todorov in 2007, “I will stick by and
large to the humanist family. This unique perspective prohibits me from any
claim to an evenhanded clarification of the other families: I shall
systematically privilege one of the voices in the dialogue of the past.”
This, from a man who had, in the first half of his career,
carefully avoided polemics. The same year, he published Literature in
Danger, a manifesto that argues that current trends in criticism have
made it an “object of closed, self-sufficient, absolute language,” a
“smothering corset” enclosed by “factual formal games, nihilistic whining and
solipsistic egotism.” Literature must be freed from the “formalist ghetto that
is of interest only to other critics.” Formalism, nihilism and solipsism are
endangering the literary enterprise, he wrote.
Todorov’s greatest influence was Raymond Aron, but also,
again just to name a few, Michel de Montaigne, Benjamin Constant,
Jean-JacquesRousseau, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mikhail
Bakhtin, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (whom Todorov translated), and Edward Said.
Human rights, Islam, the question of Europe, economic conditions, racism,
genocide, the Holocaust, humanism, colonization, fanaticism, ethics and moral
philosophy—these were, to name the most salient, Todorov’s passionate concerns
as of the early eighties. Rather than attacking other critics, “who are not
there to contradict you and you can ridicule the person to your heart’s
delight,” Todorov came to prefer a more measured and solitary approach:
“Asserting your conception of the world without worrying too much about other
people’s conceptions seems to me at once more difficult and more interesting.”
As his friend Thomas Pavel put it recently, what Todorov wished to express
above all in his writings was “his simple and sincere friendship for humanity
and its cultures.”
After the murder of a French priest last year in France,
Todorov remarked, “To systematically bomb a town in the Middle East is no less
barbaric than to slit somebody’s throat in a French church. Actually, it
destroys more lives.” He was against all forms of fanaticism, from the left or
the right: “Certain ideological stances could be defined as the simple refusal
to recognize this or that boundary,” he wrote, as if anticipating contemporary
arguments about borders. His approach to history was ethical; his concern was
with how to treat the representation of other cultures; he believed that
self-knowledge develops through knowledge of the Other; and he held that
goodness can exist even in the evilest of contexts.
In his eulogy to his teacher, “The Last Barthes,” Todorov
noted that he owed his mentor a great deal. And now, after Barthes’s death,
writes Todorov, “I will owe him more every day.” Todorov opened his Barthes
encomium with these words: “He belonged, in France, to that small group at the
top of the intellectual pyramid; he was one of those writers whose books you
were always supposed to have read, books which could become the subject of
conversation among strangers.”[6] The same may
be said of Todorov, and a great many of us will continue to owe him more every
day.
[1] Sewell Chan,
“Tzvetan Todorov, Literary Theorist and Historian of Evil, Dies at 77,” New
York Times, 7 Feb. 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/tzvetan-todorov-dead.html
[4] Todorov, The
Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard
(Norman, Okla., 1999), p. 254.
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De CRITICAL INQUIRY, 22/02/2017
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