A Phenomenological Theory of Literary Creativity: Ricoeur and Joyce

Abstract

In this article I wish to present a theory of literary creativity that begins with an idea put forward by Paul Ricoeur in T ime and Narrative, Vol. I. ‘‘The productive imagination,’’ according to Ricoeur, ‘‘is not only rulegoverned, it constitutes the generative matrix of rules’’ (68). Ricoeur shows how an author, in writing a text that is ‘‘sedimented’’ by previously uttered material, perhaps necessarily so, can, none-the-less be engaged in ‘‘innovation’’: innovation by transformation. ‘‘Rule-governed deformation,’’ Ricoeur claims, constitutes an ‘‘axis’’ around which changes in previous material transform these content elements so much that the result consists of an original text (70). I am presenting Ricoeur’s concept of ‘‘rule-governed deformation’’ as a defense against a cascade of theoretical outcomes that place ‘‘creativity’’ into question. Late twentieth-century post-structuralist literary theory challenges the very existence of creativity.1 Theorists’ insights that literary texts consist of a woven fabric of previous literary texts suggest to some of them that ‘‘creativity’’ is a null category. Michel Foucault, to present a single example, thinks that ‘‘to raise or lower’’ a literary work’s ‘‘stock of originality’’ is a ‘‘harmless enough amusement for historians who refuse to grow up’’ (144). For Foucault the evidence for re-use of older texts in every new text is so overwhelming that only an irrational child-like desire to believe in literary creativity can keep a person from accepting that it is an outmoded concept. What could be more useless, Foucault asks, than to ‘‘reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness?’’ The ‘‘great accumulation of the already said,’’ in literary texts means, for Foucault, that ‘‘the originality/banality opposition’’ is ‘‘not relevant’’ (144). Foucault merely states the logical implication of the many statements of post-structuralist theorists to the effect that, in literature, ‘‘only language speaks,’’ that the work does not originate from an author who might be deemed more (or less) original. Among theorists holding this view in addition to Foucault are Roland Barthes (Pleasure 34–50;