His seminal A Season in Hell was written in 1873 but remained virtually unread, indeed the publisher kept most of the copies in his basement, until almost twenty years later. The pertinent question being where does he fit, temporally, into a tradition ? Do his poems enter the tradition in 1873 when they were written, or in the 1890s when they first started to gain an audience? What is more important for a tradition ? The text itself or its impact on readers and other writers ? This problematic emphasises the fragmentary and fluctuating nature of a tradition. At no time can we point to a body of work frozen into a monad of tradition. Instead it is always, and at every moment, in a process of negotiation both with other texts and with readers. It is a web, if you will, where texts continually rub up and touch each other, overlap, but according to no preconceived, or even sometimes detectable, path of communication. Unlike Sartre’s autodidact we continually rupture the web of tradition in different places, disfiguring the original text in our movements. Our own literary backgrounds, as diverse as there are readers, always mean we come to texts with different tools of negotiation thus every tradition is shot through with the static of other texts.

Liam Ferney