The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. - Review - book review

Style, Summer, 1999 by Harold F. Mosher Jr.

Gerard Genette. The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. vii 272 pp. $42.50 cloth; $16.95 paper. Trans. of L'oeuvre de l'art [1]: Immanence et transcendence. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Gerard Genette. L'oeuvre de l'art [2]: La relation esthetique Paris: Seuil, 1997. 297 pp.

Those who have followed the evolution of Gerard Genette's publications may not be surprised by his two most recent books. After all, Genette has demonstrated a mastery of a variety of subjects: narratology in Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, language and linguistics in Mimologics, genres and modes in The Architext, intertextuality in Palimpsests, the margins of literary works in Paratexts, and style in the last essay of Fiction and Diction. More direct precursors of Genette's two-volume study of The Work of Art, furthermore, are evident in the earlier parts of Fiction and Diction, Esthetique et Poetique, an anthology edited by Genette of what are widely regarded as standard essays on important issues in aesthetics. Nevertheless, Genette must feel that he has expanded the boundaries of his considerations so much that he owes us an apologia. "The reader will perhaps be surprised to find a mere specialist in literary studies setting out to explore, without having provided (much) advance no tice, one or two disciiplines usually reserved for philosophers" (Immanence I). The general discipline in question here is, of course, aesthetics, and Genette argues that to understand literature better, it is useful to know "what kind of art it is, what kind the others are, and ... what an art in general is" (Immanence 2). Genette's overall title, The Work of Art (or the artwork), signifies ambiguously, either to refer to the immanent qualities in the work and how the work manifests itself (the predominant subject of Immanence), or else to mean the work performed by art, a meaning better expressed by the French title: that is, the creation of a transcendent version of the original (considered in the second part of Immanence) or the work's relations with elements outside it, including the audience (explored in Relation). At the outset, one should mention that in these two volumes, Genette progressively emphasizes the importance of the pragmatic function of art (Immanence 257).

The first problem that Genette considers in Immanence is the location of the art work. According to the late Nelson Goodman, whose Languages of Art provides a starting-point for Genette's argument, as immanence, art must exist either "autographically" in one object, such as a painting or a sculpture, or in "allographic" versions or copies of the object such as literature or music (Immanence 16). But, Genette notes, allographic arts like the latter two, though they depend on performance or on reproduction through such things as the printing press for their execution, originate in the "ideal object of immanence," the result of the unique autographic act of writing a novel or composing a score (Immamnence 17). The essential property of the original autographic act (the words in the order they occur in a novel, for example) cannot be changed in a successful execution (printing) of the manuscript. The "manifestation" of these "properties of immanence" in a text may exhibit many different irrelevant, or contingent , elements like the typeface or the quality of the paper (Immanence 86-90). In the case of text with different versions (The Song of Roland or even Joyce's Ulysses), each version would be considered an autographic original (Immanence 112).

Genette's distinction between autographic and allographic manifestations raises questions. A straightforward example of an allographic manifestation is a performance of a musical composition, which, of course, requires an artistic interpretation (Immanence 50). On the other hand, the recordings of this performance would be classed as autographic multiple objects because they are mechanically reproduced with no artistic effort as in other second-stage multiple objects like photographs, prints, and cast sculpture (Immanence 40, 45, 72). The example of achitecture presents a special problem. In the case of unique buildings like medieval cathedrals, the manifestation is apparently an autographic, two-stage process, construction from plans, but in the case of, for example, identical apartment buildings built from a set of plans, the manifestation seems to be allographic (Immanence 36), as if the architect is signaling the builders how to perform the work (Immanence 50) as a writer does with his readers and a musi cian with his performers. Is this allographic work of the builders considered to be creative when it could appear to be mechanical multiple autographic reproduction? The question seems to be justified by Genette's classification of a craftsman's execution of a stone sculpture from the artist's plaster model as a two-stage autographic act (Immanence 38). If artistic creativity is the criterion for an allographic manifestation, by what application of this concept does the builder's action become more creative than the craftsman's?