Notes Towards an Aesthetics of Celebration

This Essay explores how the notion of celebration can reveal some aspects of the social life of literature that are rarely considered in literary theory. Defining celebration as the production of a festive and appreciative event by gathering together, it is argued that literature can accordingly be seen as a locus of celebration where different peoples’ lives cross and a sense of ‘we’ is negotiated and experimented. To make this argument, focus is shifted from individual texts to literature as an infrastructure for producing, circulating, and using texts, assembling writers, editors and critics, libraries and bookshops, discourses about literature, and the teaching of and research into literature. This infrastructure, it is argued, can instantiate a celebrative being-together due to three qualities: 1) Because it allows writers and readers take a reflective stance toward language, it endows literary language with the power to describe the word differently and to conjure imaginary universes and beings. 2) It installs an aesthetic relation between writer and reader where the reader puts her own sensibility in the service of realizing the potential offered by the literary work, making the life of literature into an exercise in being together, being interdependent and premised on one another. 3) We not only interact with literature; we also interact with each other about literature. Each of us have different capacities and capabilities when we use the affordances for imagination provided by the text, and we will realize a text’s potential using our imaginative powers each in our own ways. These three characteristics of the modern infrastructure of literature are indispensable components in experiencing literature as a celebration: it gathers us into a public and creates a common for our interaction.