Four cold chapters on the possibility of literature leading mostly to Borges and Oulipo

This dissertation explores what I call the possibility of literature, that is, the ways in which the origin of the literary work has been conceptualized, and some of the effects and usages those conceptions have had mostly in twentieth century literature. I analyze the possibility of literature in relation to three major factors: figures of the writer, methods or procedures of composition, and reading models. I recognize two main sources for the different answers given to the question of the origin of the literary work, which I identify with the Platonic and the Aristotelian traditions: the Muses of inspiration, dreams and feelings on the one hand, and the workings and decisions of conscious minds on the other. My dissertation focuses on different aspects of the Aristotelian group of answers. I show that they find their culmination or most complete expression, in contemporary literature, in the works of Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and members of the Paris-based literary group Oulipo.;The first chapter focuses on what can be called philosophy of composition, after the essay by Edgar Allan Poe in which he explains how he composed one of his poems. I argue that Poe's essay inaugurates a new genre, hitherto not recognized and studied as such, in which writers expose or pretend to expose the origin and process of composition of their works, and I show the relationship this new genre has with the tradition of the ars poetica and the manifesto on the one hand, and with autobiographical writing on the other. I also suggest that these texts convey a certain image of the writer or poet that should be seen in relation to the two opposed poles set more than two thousand years ago by Plato and Aristotle. I explore the extent to which those tales about the origin of literary works affect both their meaning and the judgment produced about their literary value. I analyze the specific case of Jorge Luis Borges as a writer who should be seen not only as firmly placed within the Aristotelian tradition and identified with Aristotle's Poetics, but also as someone who took advantage of the literary potential of debates on composition by turning some of their concerns into fiction, in secret and polemical dialogue with the avant-gardes. I end this chapter arguing that Oulipian poetics exist within the conceptual space invented by Poe, shifting the center of literary texts from their concrete textual existence to their origin and their potential. The Oulipian practice of writing under constraints, I suggest, can be seen as a way of embedding those tales of origin in the very texture of the literary works produced.;In Oulipian conceptions of literary creation mathematics plays a major role. In my second chapter I will briefly historize this role and analyze the way mathematics has been conceived or imagined by writers, especially as both the perfect opposite and complement of literature, and as a universal language transcending language differences. My next chapter will focus on those differences and the process of translation. I will discuss different ways in which translation and language transformation in general are related to the emergence of literary works. This discussion introduces what the final chapter presents in depth: the interaction between writing and reading.;More precisely, this last chapter makes the strong case that certain models of reading are used by writers to produce their texts, thus becoming matrices of writing. The canonical example for this process would be allegory, first developed in ancient Greece as a way of reading Homer, and later used by writers to produce texts they wanted to have read as allegories. The model of allegory later became the basis for the development of the exegetical tradition of the Bible throughout the Middle Ages, which in turn had a strong impact on writers and poets of the time, Dante being the most prominent example. I present the case of allegory within the discussion of a relevant related concept: the sacred text. My dissertation thereby suggests a new field of studies that promises to bring to light hitherto overlooked mechanisms for the production of literary texts in relation to exegetical methods, techniques or ideas as developed in the religious realm in different cultures and traditions. I also claim that this usage of reading models by writers has to be understood in relation to self-exegesis, that is, the device or the multiple devices by which writers provide instances or instructions for the interpretation of their own works. The rest of the chapter explores different cases where the literary texts produced can be seen as deeply influenced by, and even originating in, models of reading. Thus, the medieval troubadours who engaged in the debate between trobar clus and trobar leu were actually discussing how they wanted to be read. Borges, I argue, deeply modified the genre of the short story by applying to it a combination of two strong, and in many ways opposed, reading models: those provided by kabbalah and by detective fiction. I show how French writer Georges Perec used Borges' ideas to add new possibilities to this interaction between reading and writing within the context of Oulipian conceptions of the reader. This relation between Perec and Borges, neglected in Perecquian criticism, has led me to some important discoveries in relation to Perec's lipogrammatic novel La Disparition, as well as to the claim that it is through the ideas of Borges more than through those of Raymond Queneau that Perec enters the Oulipo. The chapter and the dissertation end with a discussion of the model of the reader implied in Oulipian literary practices, and actually invented by those practices: one who reads or tries to read, hidden in the text, the tale of the text's origin.