Thomas Pavel

Pavel began his scholarly career as a contributor to structuralism and semiotics, two movements that experimented with linguistic techniques in the study of literature. His books La Syntaxe narrative des tragédies de Corneille (1976) and The Poetics of Plot (1985), sketched out a transformational grammar of literary plots inspired by Noam Chomsky's linguistics. A story or a play, he argued, is not a mere succession of pre-established moves, but involves the passage from an initial problem (a transgression or a lack) to a series of successful or unsuccessful solutions. Pavel's model used tree-like structures to represent the links between the challenges faced by the characters and the actions they take. To explain these actions, Pavel's plot-grammar included "maxims" expressing the right or wrong ideals that guide the characters. The plot of Shakespeare's historical tragedies, for instance, wouldn't make sense if the main characters didn't follow the maxim according to which "an earthly crown is the highest good". Pavel also criticized period-style notions, e.g. baroque, showing that they do not always account for the way in which narrative and dramatic plots are structured.

While interested in the experimental use of linguistic models in literature, Pavel was opposed to the dogmatic use of structuralism as a universal method for the study of culture. In Le Mirage linguistique (1988), translated and expanded as The Spell of Language (2001), he argued that several major French thinkers (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault) used linguistic notions in a metaphorical rather than rigorous fashion. In the same vein, in Inflexions de voix (Voice Inflexions) (1976), Pavel describes language as the privileged site of ideals and, at the same time, as the existential proof that humans can rarely fulfill them.

Seeking to account, beyond narrative syntax, for the content of literary works, Pavel became interested in the logic of possible worlds, as well as in the philosophy of art and literature. In Fictional Worlds (1986), Pavel pointed out that the general truth of a literary text is not dependent upon the truth of the individual propositions belonging to that text. Reflection on literary fiction doesn't need to identify and eliminate false propositions – as it is necessary to do in history or in science. Literary works are salient structures in which a secondary, fictional world includes entities and states of affairs that lack a correspondent in the basic, primary world. By dividing the universe into sacred and profane areas, the religious mind posits such salient structures; similarly, a work of fiction in which London includes Sherlock Holmes among its inhabitants is fictionally salient with respect to the actual city. Literary texts, Fictional Worlds argues, do not depend on one and only one salient fictional world: they may as well refer to alternative fictional worlds, to the actual world, to active religions or to discarded mythologies. Since literature involves cultural habits and traditions, and obeys specific genre and style constraints, Pavel recommended that fictionality be examined from three points of view: the semantics of salient structures, the pragmatics of cultural traditions, and the stylistics of textual constraints.

Like The Poetics of Plot, Fictional Worlds is critical of historicist generalizations. Discussing the notion of mimetic modes (high, low, ironic) which, according to Northrop Frye, replaced one another during the history of European fiction, Pavel argued that these three modes – and perhaps other modes as well – can be found in virtually all cultures and historical periods.

In L'Art de l'éloignement (The Art of Distance) (1996), his position became more nuanced. The book explores the multiple imaginary worlds put forth by French 17th-century literature, thus rejecting the idea of a homogeneous period-style, sometimes called Zeitgeist or episteme. Pavel claimed, however, that by emphasizing the distance between its fictional worlds and the actual world, 17th-century literature is historically different from the later, 19th -and 20th- century literature, which most often tries to stay as close as possible to its public's experience.

De Barthes à Balzac (From Barthes to Balzac) (1998), co-authored with Claude Bremond, includes a study of Balzac's short story Sarrasine which brings together close reading, structural analysis, and historicist considerations.

Later, in his Comment écouter la littérature (How to Listen to Literature), Pavel turned his attention to the direct, unproblematic appeal of literary works. The exploration of what makes literary works appealing continued in The Lives of the Novel: A History (2013), a substantially revised version of La Pensée du Roman (2003).

Readers, he now argued, can just listen to literature, instead of studying and over-interpreting it, because literary works, independently of the region and historical period in which they were created, bring out ideals and norms that are accessible to all. The Lives of the Novel narrates the history of the novel from its Ancient Greek origins to the present, based on the assumption that older as well as more recent narratives are all about human beings, their values, their passions, and their actions, thus being comprehensible across the borders of time and cultures. Pavel points out that the genre has always involved a strong debate between the idealization of human action and the critique of its imperfection. 21st-century readers do not live in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the 18th-century, yet, because of this debate, the sublime story of Tristan, the comic one of Don Quixote, and the problematic one of Moll Flanders are still immediately accessible to them. History, Pavel concludes, must be sensitive to the layer of permanence that underlies cultural change.