Repository | Book | Chapter

Why is it that literary criticism in recent years has been increasingly taken with speech act theory? What explains this paradoxical fascination with a philosophical doctrine which, in the elaboration of its theory since J. L. Austin, has excluded literary discourse as a non-serious and parasitical use of language? The question is all the more pertinent because this exclusion has never been revoked by the leading figures of this doctrine, and least of all by J. R. Searle who concludes his essay "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse", by admitting that, "there is as yet no general theory of the mechanisms by which ... serious illocutionary intentions are conveyed by pretended illocutions".¹ But if literary theory's flirtation with speech act theory is here put into question, it is especially because speech act theory de jure pertains only to so-called normal acts of speech — that is, to the ordinary ritual, ceremonial and conventional uses of language. Since the exclusion of everything "which falls under the etiolations of language", as Austin most forcefully expressed himself, is constitutive of the very object of speech act theory — ordinary language — as well as of the content of this theory, the results of this doctrine cannot simply be applied again to what first had to be excluded in order to make that theory possible. Speech act theory as it stands applies only to normal acts of speech, and not to a use of language which "is parasitic upon its normal use", and in which the healthy, active, male vigour of language is drained or etiolated.² Because of the nature of what has to be excluded from the object of speech act theory, its inapplicability to literary language is not simply provisional, or a temporary defect that could one day successfully be overcome. They are ills "which infect all utterances", which Austin keeps isolated from the thus idealised and normative object of his theory, from ordinary language.³ However, since these ills which can affect all utterances are consequently structurally necessary possibilities without which utterances would not be what they are, one cannot, as Derrida has argued, legitimately exclude them from their study.⁴ Once one has excluded them, one has created an aberrant object to which nothing corresponds, and from which not only no way leads back to what was eliminated, but which also excludes the possibility of such a return as a senseless undertaking. The only possible return to the rejected, say to literary language, implies a radical critique of the very idea of "ordinary" language, of the "normal" use of speech and, thus, of the speech act theory developed upon that fictive object.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10335-5_12

Full citation: