144
C O N C E P T S
the identification o f aporias that prevent the firm separation o f constative
from performative, it subsists not as an independent class o f utterance but
as one aspect o f language use.
For literary critics, though, it has not made much difference whether
we think o f performative language as a special type, as in Austin’s original
characterization, or whether we focus instead on the performative dimen
sion o f all speech acts. The essential thing is that, against the philosophical
model for which the norm for language is to make statements about what
is the case, Austin has provided an account o f the active, productive func
tioning o f language.
Critics have found the idea o f performative language valuable for
characterizing literary discourse.” Since literary criticism involves attend
ing to what literary language does as much as to what it says, the concept
of the performative seems to provide a linguistic and philosophical jus
tification for this idea: there are utterances that above all do something.
Moreover, like the performative, the literary utterance does not refer to a
prior state o f afifairs and is not true or false. Instead o f starting with the
question o f truth or falsity, and having to defend a literary utterance as true
in some higher sense despite its apparent falsity, one could ask whether it
was successful or unsuccessful, felicitous or infelicitous. An act o f appoint
ing— “I appoint you three as a committee to consider this problem”—
brings into being the entity, the committee, to which it refers, so a liter
ary work performatively brings into being what it purports to describe.
The literary utterance, too, brings into being the fictional characters and
states o f affairs to which it refers. The beginning o f Joyce’s Ulysses, “Stately
plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl o f lather
on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” does not refer to some prior
state o f affairs but creates this character and this situation. And literary
works bring into being ideas, concepts, which they deploy. La Rochefou
cauld claims that no one would ever have thought o f being in love if they
had not read about it in books, and the notion o f romantic love (and o f its
centrality to the lives o f individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation.
II.
The bibliography here is vast, but highlights of the past twenty-five
years might be Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory o f Literary Discourse
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Sandy Petrey, Speech Acts and Lit
erary Theory (New York: Routiedge, 1990); and J. Hillis Miller,
Speech Acts in Lit-
■ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
The Performative
145
Certainly novels themselves, from
Don Quixote to
Madame Bovary and be
yond, blame romantic ideas, in all their cultural power, on literature. Such
fictions, which also go by the name o f ideology and include such basic fic
tions as the “hour” that so regulates our lives, cannot be separated from the
performativity o f literary fiction.
In short, the first result o f the performative is to bring to center stage
a use o f language previously considered marginal— an active, world-mak
ing use o f language, which resembles literary language— and to help us to
conceive o f literature as act. The notion o f literature as performative con
tributes to a defense o f literature; no longer made up o f frivolous pseudo
statements, it takes its place among the acts o f language that bring into be
ing what they name.
Second, for Austin, in principle at least, the performative breaks the
link between meaning and the intention o f the speaker, for what act I per
form with my words is not determined by my intention but by social and
linguistic con ventions.T he utterance, Austin insists, should not be con
sidered as the outward sign o f some inward act that it represents truly or
falsely. If I say “I promise” under appropriate conditions, I have promised,
have performed the act o f promising, whatever intention I may have had
in my head at the time. Since literary utterances are also events where the
intention o f the author is not thought to be what determines the meaning,
here is another way in which the model of the performative seems highly
pertinent.
The concept o f the performative thus seems to provide a model o f
language that suits the analysis o f literature better than competing mod
els. This result is ironic, though, for two reasons. First, Austin’s account o f
performatives, far from having literature in view, explicitly excludes litera
ture. His analysis, he explains, applies only to words spoken seriously. “I
12. For a powerful reflection on the “as if” of fiction and its relation to the
event see Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” 205-37; for “the hour”
see 228.
13. Derrida and others have argued that in fact Austin reintroduces the
controlling role of intention through the insistence that the utterance be “seri
ous,” but his denial that the speech act be construed as the outward representation
of an inner act is helpful for critical theory. See Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 19; Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
