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In France psychoanalysis has for three decades been a lingua franca of literary studies. Anyone practicing criticism or literary history has confronted hybrid discourses fashioned from Freud's clinical and creative science, Charles Mauron's studies of obsessively recurrent myths in the work of major modern authors, theories of communication in the heritage of Roman Jakobsen and Emile Benveniste, and stylistics, of the order of Michael Riffaterre and Paul de Man, which ground further psychocritical analysis. The boundaries of literary and psychoanalytic endeavors have become so blurred since 1950 that the practice of belles-lettres may be passing over to the world of analysis, in which cases and their histories evince far more probing theoretical work than what professional literary critics are trained to write. In view of the resurgence of analysis, whither literature? It appears to have been resorbed into gray areas—as a surrealist might say, entre chien et loup—of language, seen as anonymous social practice; of writing, as a form of self-analysis or poetic theory that takes up not genius but insoluble contradiction. Literature no longer serves as the model of a sublime discourse above common readers, but more as exemplary mediations or theoretical failures of exchange that a critic uses to question the ideologies of communication.
The formal institution of literature might be at an end—as it always has been—but its affinities with clinical practice may be changing the experience of what its functions were thought to be. A literary text is not a mode of conduct either good or bad, an ensemble of liaisons both dangeureuses and heureuses, but a creative distortion that takes leave of the world it initially mimes. Literature has become a daedalus of fictions and theories, a vision inviting its practitioners to make