Life behind you

• Purposes of literature
• Antoine Compagnon

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For his last lecture at the Collège de France, Antoine Compagnon indulged in the final reflection on literature, art, music through a kaleidoscope of the word „end“. But what are the „ends of literature“? Does this mean that the writer has to stop his creative activity or should we understand that word in terms of creative twilight? Is the artist more creative in youth or in adulthood? Is old age a decline or an apotheosis?

Through examples from antiquity to the present day Antoine Compagnon brings our civilization’s thinking about age. These new lessons and lectures continue this meditation on the end, the outcome, the age, the state of the senile, but also the sublime, on the ultima verba, the swan song, the second occasion, the eternal poet. Maurice Blanchot, quoting Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who quoted Djalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî, writes: „He who knows the power of the circle is not afraid of death.“ This book is not really a lecture, but a wandering odyssey.

* * *

The subtitle „Purposes of literature“ can be understood in various ways, especially since purposes are plural. Those two nouns, literature and purpose, are just placed next to each other, but as „purposes of literature“ and not „literature of purposes“, which would remind one of the end and the end. Those two words are connected by countless strings: purposes mean deadlines, endings, endings, accomplishments, unraveling of literature. But they also mean goals, intentions, hints, plans, or, moreover, results, and even destruction.
Montaigne claims: „Death is not the end, but the end of life.“ And I, following the example of the writer of the Essays and his contradictory spirit, would dare to say: „The purpose is not the end, but the goal of literature.“ But purposes could also be boundaries or edges. But does literature even have limits and can it say everything?

* * *

The grandeur of old age, that rare freedom, the negligentia diligens of aged artists, anarchic and transcendental, who throw the rules out the window – this is the grandeur of Goethe in the second part of Faust, Beethoven in the last quartets, Rembrandt in the Self-Portrait from the Carstanjen collection and in The Return of the Prodigal Son, where they they break everything. It is not for nothing that Erasmus says in Praise of Folly: „Only Folly preserves youth and chases away painful old age.“

* * *

There is a competition between two typical stories about aging: the first is biological, physical and organic in nature, and tells of growth and decline, of greatness and decay, and describes life as a bell curve; the other is metaphysical, spiritual and redemptive, tends towards apotheosis at the end of life, and its model is Goethe, a transcendental old man.

• ISBN: 978-953-369-024-7
• Dimensions: 142x205 mm
• Number of pages: 320
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2023
• Original title: La vie derrière soi. Fins de la littérature
• Original language: French
• Translation: Marko Maras