La nostalgie de la synchronie dans un art de la diachronie: la littérature

Abstract

In the theory of arts, the two dimensions emphasized as essential by Saussure’s linguistics, synchrony, and diachrony can be paired with a correlative. In Lessing’s famous essay Laocoon, the arts are classified as arts of temporality and arts of spatiality. Thus, literature, as an art of the words’ succession in time, both from the point of view of the creation process and from that of decoding (as words cannot be perceived all at once!...) cannot be an art of contiguity. However, literature has tried to meet its limits: ut pictura poiesis, Horatio’s imperative, the simultaneity in poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, and the technique of the interior monologue are just the most known examples. The nostalgia of synchrony in an art belonging par excellence to diachrony expresses not only the millenary aspiration of literature to surpass its own limits but also its desire, equally ancient, expressed in any of the other arts, to beat temporality and to go beyond time in order to state a permanent and substantial presence of the being or of the self.