Performatives and literature
Literary critics have embraced the notion of the performative as one that helps to
characterize literary discourse. Theorists have long asserted that we must attend to what
literary language does as much as to what it says, and the concept of the performative
provides a linguistic and philosophical justification for this idea: there is a class of
utterances that above all do something. Like the performative, the literary utterance does
not refer to a prior state of affairs and is not true or false. The literary utterance too
creates the state of affairs to which it refers, in several respects. First and most simply, it
brings into being characters and their actions, for instance. The beginning of Joyce’s
Ulysses, ‘Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather
on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,’ does not refer to some prior state of affairs
but creates this character and this situation. Second, literary works bring into being ideas,
concepts, which they deploy. La Rochefoucauld claims that no one would ever have
thought of being in love if they hadn’t read about it in books, and the notion of romantic
love (and of its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary
creation. Certainly novels themselves, from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary, blame
romantic ideas on other books.