Negotiating the New in the French Novel: Building Contexts for Fictional Worlds

NEGOTIATING THE NEW IN THE FRENCH NOVEL

‘Well-informed and very well-written: the tone is authoritative…but very accessible to a wide readership within the specialist target audience. It is a fresh, clear and unfussy approach to pragmatics, the friendly face of postmodernism, and it operates very effectively against a solid theoretical framework through the sensitive closereading of individual texts.’ David Coward, University of Leeds, UK In Negotiating the New in the French Novel, Teresa Bridgeman explores how discourse conventions are negotiated in innovative texts, arguing for the contextualised and social nature of the reading process. Focusing on canonic texts by Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Céline, Sarraute and Perec which challenged the reading habits of their contemporary audiences, Bridgeman analyses how they establish their own conventions, calling on their readers to revise their concepts of the novel and to adapt new modes of reading. Negotiating the New in the French Novel shows the development of changing perceptions of genre, author and audience. It is not a history of the novel, but concentrates on the play between fictional worlds and their contexts. In particular, it explores the dynamics of the reader’s construction of roles for writer and reader and of relationships between the texts and their intertexts. Bridgeman’s close readings of individual texts demonstrate how literary, narratological and cultural issues can be illuminated by insights from functional, cognitive and pragmatic theories of language use. This book offers a fresh view of the processes at work in texts whose innovations have now become the commonplaces of literary history. It will make fascinating reading for students of French literature—particularly of the nineteenth-century novel—and for students of stylistics and narratology. Teresa Bridgeman is a lecturer in French at the University of Bristol.

NEGOTIATING THE NEW IN THE FRENCH NOVEL Building contexts for fictional worlds

Teresa Bridgeman

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Teresa Bridgeman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98162-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-13126-X (Print Edition) (Pbk) ISBN 0-415-13125-1 (Hbk)

To Clare, with whom I shared my first interactions and my first arguments over rights of access to imaginary worlds and territorial possession of books.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

viii

Abbreviations

ix

Thresholds

1

Unconventional texts

2

Genre and conventions

4

Theoretical frames

5

Theoretical interactions

13

Unconventional interactions

15

Dynamics of world-play between contexts, texts and participants: Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste

16

The text and its contexts

16

Crossing between worlds

26

Socializing text

31

Paper chains to nowhere

37

Participants

41

‘The novel’ as we know it? Balzac’s Le Père Goriot

47

Reputations

47

A poetics of competition

49

Exploiting the didactic model

56

Swings and roundabouts

70

The written artefact and the authority of absence: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

71

Revising expectations

71

vi

5

6

7

8

Questions of authority

73

Exemplary patterns

76

The text and its readers

86

New terms of engagement

94

The doubly-authorized text—personal responsibility and social roles: Zola’s L’Assommoir

98

Zola’s offences

98

Extra-fictional claims

99

In defence of spectator sports

102

Language and social identity

108

Territorial positions: claiming and defending Naturalism

112

Double-bind, or every one a winner?

119

Self-assertion and the dynamics of power: Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

121

A personal assault

121

Journey into the text

125

Appropriating cultural tradition

128

Language-use and the social arena

132

Narrator, author and audience

140

The novel as mediation: Sarraute’s Portrait d’un inconnu

145

Challenge and comfort

145

Rearrangements: the turn of the kaleidoscope

146

Narrative and novels: the presence of the enemy

151

Orders preserved: a rhetoric and aesthetics of reading

156

Language, interaction and face

163

Further dynamics of world-play: Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance

171

Levels of authority: text-type and voice

172

Making patterns: configuration and meaning

179

vii

Participants and activities: co-figuration

185

The worlds of fiction and non-fiction

192

Genre, literature, ‘écriture’

194

Afterword: Genres, participants and territorial behaviour

196

The limits of genre?

196

Literary space: territorial behaviour and the novel genre

197

Personal space: territorial behaviour and discursive selfhood

199

Face or fiction?

204

The novel of the canon

206

Notes

208

Bibliography

234

Index

250

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy for funding my study-leave in 1995–6 to write this book, and Saint John’s College, Oxford for a visiting scholarship in Summer 1995 which enabled me to carry out essential research. Thanks also go to Tony Bex, Cressida Bridgeman, Imogen Bridgeman, Mike Freeman, Richard Hobbs, Mary Orr, Carol Sanders and Clare Sinha for their invaluable comments on various states of the manuscript, and to Nina Bastin, June and Michael Bridgeman, Cathy Emmott, Keith Green, Jill Forbes, Melanie McGrath, Dave Meakin, Rebecca Posner, Mick Short, Paul Simpson, Paul Smith and the late Paul Werth for contributions, both intellectual and practical, to the production of this book. More general thanks are due to members of the Poetics and Linguistics Association and to participants in my seminars at the University of Bristol. The author and publishers would like to thank the copyright holders for permission to reproduce extracts from the following in chapters six, seven and eight: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, © Éditions GALLIMARD Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d’un inconnu, © Éditions GALLIMARD Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, © Éditions DENOËL

ABBREVIATIONS

CDA— FTA— TAW—

Critical discourse analysis Face-threatening act Textual actual world

The narratee and the reader—hypothetical, implied, actual, ideal or undesirable— are referred to as ‘he’ throughout for reasons of economy and grammar, despite the fact that certain of these figures bear a strong resemblance to myself.

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Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new. (Edmund Waller, ‘On the Foregoing Divine Poems’, 1685) This book is neither a theory nor a history of the French novel. It is, instead, an exploration of the dynamics of the threshold, examining texts where the ‘living contact with the unfinished’ (Bakhtin 1981:7) results in a positioning of both text and readers between conceptual worlds. Although the reading of all texts depends on a play between the old and the new, the works discussed here occupy a particular place in the arena of French culture as exemplary models of the unconventional. If ‘becoming’ is, as Bakhtin suggests (1981:5), a chronic and defining condition of the novel, these texts are case-studies in the acute form of the condition. Yet, in challenging the reading habits of their audiences, they have not written themselves out of French literary history but into the canon. The degree of rhetoric as overt salesmanship in these texts varies. Certainly, none could be described as a product designed solely to fill a previously unidentified market niche. Nevertheless, when conventions are shifted, the position of a text in the literary field and the potential response of its audience become issues. The frame of literary genre and the script of interpersonal interaction become more than stable contextual parameters and are active elements in the world-building activities of readers. The aim of this book is to consider how these texts invite the building of contextual frames and scripts which allow their readers to accommodate their convention shifts. The rhetoric it traces is neither that of the trope, nor of prescriptions for eventual use, but is what Charles describes as a ‘rhétorique de la lecture’, a ‘comment le texte se donne à lire’ (1977:250). Particular attention is paid to textual indicators which situate each text in a wider context of intertexts and enable the construction of author and audience roles. The interaction of text and reader is thus located through reference to a context of culture, which includes the frames of the function of literary texts and the conventions of the genre of the novel, and a context of situation, which concerns the relationship between the participant worlds and activities of writer and readers.

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As a result of the focus on individual instances of language-use, each chapter is devoted to a single text. The organization of the chapters is dictated by the different patterns of the texts they discuss, although the central issue of interactions between genre and participants is common to all. Their object is not to add to the immense body of scholarship which demonstrates and describes the innovations of the novel, but to ask how ‘becoming’ affects the encounters between texts and their audiences. The approach adopted also differs from that in the field of author-studies, in that its aim is neither to establish the position of the individual works in their authors’ ‘oeuvres’ nor to assess the wider contribution of an author’s work to the literary and cultural field. In a book which argues for the contextualized and social nature of the reading process it would be naïve to ignore the influence of these factors in reading, and such studies serve as essential frames of reference for my analyses. I have, however, attempted to avoid reading the novels discussed through the filter of later works by their writers, although these are sometimes used as comparative illustrations. I have also avoided reference to authorial statements of intention beyond the paratextual material provided by prefaces, which are integral to the reading of a given text. Unconventional texts None of the novels discussed can be claimed to be a literary first. Nor were all of them first novels by their authors. However, each represents a literary project which was as yet unsanctioned by its contemporary audience but which has since been authorized. As such, all have contributed to a shift in the interpretive conventions of the genre. Several of Balzac’s novels would have qualified for discussion, but I have taken Le Père Goriot (1835) as a well known and relatively early novel which met with both commercial success and critical opprobrium, and which manifests overt patterns of negotiation with its audience. While views on the area of innovation in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) have varied, it has prototypical status as a convention-shifting text in histories of the novel. In this text, issues of the function of the literary text and the relationship between author, text and audience are central features. It is also the only text in this book for which its author was put on trial. L’Assommoir (1877), like Le Père Goriot, is not a first novel. However, the scandal which surrounded its publication brought Zola and his naturalist project to the attention of the general public and situates it at the centre of a debate on the function and conventions of the novel. The terms of this debate are manifest, not only in the preface, but in the text of the novel itself. The publication of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) initiated a pattern of extremes of praise and criticism in its audience which has continued to the present. Its situation against the field of literature and the author-audience interaction it sets up enter a mutually informing relationship, binding the context of situation to the context of culture. By contrast, Sarraute’s first novel, Portrait d’un inconnu (1948), met with undistinguished failure when

THRESHOLDS 3

it first appeared. However, its self-situation in relation to the novel became part of a wider debate on the future and function of this genre in the 1950s. Like Céline’s novel, it precedes the general public awareness of its author’s projects, standing as Sarraute’s first public engagement with audience-perceptions of the novel. These novels are thus chosen as texts which epitomize the instability of the genre of the novel, and have contributed to the perception of this genre as one which perpetually overturns its own conventions. On these criteria, the works of many other authors from the period discussed could have qualified for inclusion, not least those of Stendhal, Gide, Proust, or ‘nouveaux romanciers’ other than Sarraute. Were this book a history of the novel or a presentation of a canon, their omission would be serious. However, it is concerned with the ‘how’ of individual texts, not the ‘what’ of an overview of a genre, and the format imposed by close-reading restricts the number of texts which can be included. Nevertheless, the selection of novels published at relatively regular intervals within this historical period and their treatment in chronological order allow discussion of each to be contextualized by the earlier texts, and the development of a picture of shifting perceptions of genre, author and audience.1 Despite Watt’s claim that the novel developed in France only after the Revolution (1966:313), a number of much earlier novels could also have been included, as could more recent texts. I have, however, chosen to concentrate on a period in which the novel has formed a substantial part of French cultural reading practice.2 In the nineteenth century, printing and distribution methods, the expansion of formal education and a growing middle class allowed a much wider audience for the novel than had been possible in the eighteenth century (see Benjamin 1969, Conroy 1985:3–4 and Couturier 1991).3 The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of the figure of the creative and individual writer, and the rise of a concept of literature as a significant body of cultural artefacts. This resulted in a particular relationship between author, audience and the cultural context of production and reception. Subsequent shifts in concepts of selfhood and the further expansion of audiences in the twentieth century have modified this context, but the context of reception with which Sarraute engages remains strongly marked by its heritage from the previous century. The novels discussed can all be loosely defined as realist (not Realist).4 As fictions, they are not read as records of actual-world states of affairs, but their fictional worlds are recuperable according to epistemologies of the actual world. The conventions of each thus engage with a cultural context of other novels whose fictional-world organization is proximate to beliefs concerning the actual world.5 They therefore contribute to one strand of the complex history of the novel, albeit one which is often intertwined with others, and are read through this generic sub-frame. This book is not directly concerned with the referential status of the fictional worlds readers build for these novels. It is concerned, rather, with the hypothetical construction of the circumstances beyond the immediate physical context of reading which affect interpretation. However, because all

4 NEGOTIATING THE NEW IN THE FRENCH NOVEL

these novels follow conventions of realism, they allow readers to draw on culturally contextualized fictional patterns of interaction in the textual actual world (the world which is the actual world for protagonists, henceforth referred to as TAW), in order to construct the scripts of the activities of the writer, themselves and other readers.6 I have included two texts which do not fall fully into this generic classification, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796) and Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975). Both these texts explore the limits of a number of narrative conventions which are at issue in the novels discussed. They therefore allow an extension of the discussion of the processes of contextualization at work in reading, and themselves contextualize the discussion of generic frames. Diderot’s text serves as an incipit, setting up the terms of reference for the rest of the book. The combination of fictional and non-fictional narrative in Perec’s text allows the expansion of the discussion of text-type and authority, while its particular form of ‘autographie’ provides the opportunity to develop the analysis of discursive selfhood in the earlier chapters. Because this book takes account of historical shifts in perceptions of the function of literary texts and of authoraudience relationships, these texts also allow the extension of the temporal span of the contexts of culture covered in the book. Their generic ambiguity is not intended to imply that there was no such thing as a novel before Balzac or after the ‘nouveau roman’. Their historical positions are, however, a reminder that generic multiplicity, refraction, the nonlinear, and intertextual play are not the postmodern end of a history of unity in the novel (see Orr 1991). Genre and conventions Bakhtin’s designation of the novel as ‘the only developing genre’, defined by ‘its spirit of process and inconclusiveness’ (1981:7), and borrowing freely from other forms of discourse, does not entail absolute freedom from convention. Genre conventions (which must be perceived as such by both writers and readers to have any force) relate to how texts are made meaningful in a given society and are therefore subject to cultural constraints.7 Because genres are culture-specific, they are not natural or universal rigid categories which allow a yes/no decision on generic identity (indeed, Diderot and Perec’s texts, while they share many characteristics with the novels discussed, fall outside this generic classification). Instead, they are subject to the combination of order and contingency of all social conventions (see Fludernik 1996a:44). The concept of literary genre is itself a convention, despite the nineteenthcentury perception of genres as essentialist causal principles (see Schaeffer 1989: 169). The novels discussed were all written in a period in which a system of genres has played a significant role in our categorization of literary texts and in which the novel as a genre (embracing a wide variety of sub-genres) has existed as a major text-type.8 The processes which have led to this phenomenon are beyond the scope of this book, but all the novels discussed display strong signals

THRESHOLDS 5

of the importance of their generic identity to their function as texts. Each engages with an existing field of texts considered to be ‘romans’, projecting its own relationship with this field in terms of identity, difference and expansion. The question of genre is also at issue in Jacques le fataliste and W ou le souvenir d’enfance, but its focus is different. Beyond this shared frame of reference, these texts exploit a number of other conventions. Some are linguistic, concerning such fundamental features as lexis and syntax, and others are discourse conventions governing the ‘wellformedness’ of texts. But attitudes to the linguistic construction of a text are not confined to perceptions of cohesion or coherence. They embrace not only the perceived function of novels but also the perceived function of literature in a given society. Further, they concern doxastic beliefs held by a society, whether moral, ideological or aesthetic (and the connections between them).9 This outline of convention-types points to their social formation. Conventions are a matter of beliefs, not of truth. Yet, as Taylor points out, in acts of interpretation we do not treat our beliefs as beliefs; we treat them as known truths (1992:169). If Taylor’s formulation is applied to the conventions of the novel, a text which revises or goes against conventions violates the hitherto perceived truth of what a novel is and what it can do. To be accepted by communities of readers, it must revise their perception of truth to the status of a previously held belief.10 Theoretical frames Some of the theoretical frameworks on which this book draws are familiar elements in debates within the field of French studies. Narratological theories, theories of reading and fictional worlds, and theories of literary genre and of cultural production are critical commonplaces in the field. But this book also engages with a field of research which addresses language-use beyond the literary text and is not so commonly applied in the discussion of French literary texts. It draws on work in cognitive discourse analysis; functional linguistics, in particular, developments of Halliday’s model of register; critical discourse analysis; and work on the pragmatics of the negotiation of social face. These theories occupy much common ground in their perceptions of languageuse. Their differences are those of focus, rather than fundamentally different perceptions of how language is used. The first underlies my approach to convention shift itself. Werth’s cognitive discourse theory of text worlds (forthcoming) studies discourse as a language event which is cognitive rather than semantic and is related to the human conceptual faculty. The second, the functional-linguistic theory of register which has been developed by LeckieTarry (1995), provides a dynamic model of the interaction between texts and contexts, and seeks to account for the relationship between linguistic form and language function. The third, critical discourse analysis, is grounded in functional linguistics, but specifically addresses the relationship between forms of discourse and social power. It focuses on the mutual influence of discursive practices and

6 NEGOTIATING THE NEW IN THE FRENCH NOVEL

social structures. Its main concern is thus the context of culture, rather than that of individual negotiations of power. The fourth, for which the main point of reference is Brown and Levinson’s model of Politeness (1987), derives from work in the fields of sociology and pragmatics, and develops a model for interpersonal interaction based on the face-needs of participants. Adopting the pragmatic view that implicature and inferencing are essential factors in the production of meaning, Brown and Levinson study how the need to preserve face regulates language-use. They also take account of the social parameters of power, distance and imposition which are central to the work of critical discourse analysts. This work provides a fruitful framework against which to consider convention shift in the novel. Each of these approaches to language-use has a far wider application than the study of novels. Some include written literary texts in their corpus, while that of Brown and Levinson concentrates exclusively on conversational interaction. Each develops a detailed descriptive framework to support its claims which reflects the objects of its investigation. As such, none will be applied wholesale to the texts discussed in this book. Nevertheless, the fundamental assumptions made about language-use, the choice of areas of investigation, and the questions asked, are grounded in the conceptual approach provided by this work. Cognitive discourse analysis and reading Cognitive discourse analysis allows a perception of conventions as ‘text-driven’ cognitive schemata (see Werth, forthcoming: chapter 5.4) relating to a wide range of aspects of text and context.11 Werth describes how text worlds are constructed by readers in ‘language events’ (forthcoming: chapter 2.3). Worldbuilding relates not only to the fictional world but to its context of production, the discourse world. The capacity of this approach to language-use to cross the divide between text and context, and between fictional world and discourse world, is useful in removing the association of the conventions of genre with a closed textual system. Our encounter with a novel not only involves the construction of a fictional world, it also includes our construction of the attitudes and beliefs of the text producer, and the relationships between writer, audience and the context of culture. These are not merely enabling factors in the processing of a fictional world, they are part of our concept of what a genre is. They allow the terms ‘realist novel’, ‘experimental novel’, ‘consciousness novel’, ‘fantastic novel’, ‘autobiographical novel’ or ‘detective novel’, for instance, to exist as conceptual schemata which relate to very different aspects of texts. Thus, the fantastic or realist novel is defined through the frame of its relationship with our concepts of the extra-fictional world; the autobiographical novel is defined through the frame of its relationship with the life of its producer; the detective novel is defined through the script of the activities of its fictional and extra-fictional participants; and the consciousness novel is defined through the script of the mode of its narration.

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The range of social conventions associated with the novel constitutes part of the wider range of conceptual and experiential schemata brought by participants to the language event of the novel. But these schemata are not a fixed backdrop to the reader’s encounter with a text. Most acts of reading entail the accommodation by the reader of new information (see Werth forthcoming: chapter 5.42). Indeed, this can be perceived as the purpose of much reading. In the case of the novel, this information may concern the ‘facts’ of the fictional world, but it also extends to other schemata. The cognitive account of the revision of schemata corresponds to accounts of the development of genres within a dialogic framework provided by literary theorists. Schlovsky suggests an ‘uncle to nephew relationship’, by which literary texts innovate through the incorporation of non-literary kinds of writing (1974).12 The view of a cultural context which precedes and is produced and modified by the text is suggested by Guillén: ‘Looking backward, a genre is a descriptive statement concerning a number of related works. Looking forward, it becomes above all […] an invitation to the matching (dynamically speaking) of matter and form.’ (1971: 111) And Paulson proposes a view of the literary text as a sort of precommunicative pseudo-message being sent in a channel which does not yet exist but which may come into being through the process of reading the text in a ‘conversation that never catches up to itself’ (1988:148).13 However, in such processes, the collaboration of readers cannot be assumed, especially when modification is not coherent with existing common ground. Functional models and the novel The functional model of register sheds light on our association of linguistic and structural features of texts and their functions, and on how they interact with contexts of situation and culture. Halliday’s three metafunctions, the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual, map to the three constituent aspects of register: field, tenor and mode (Halliday 1978:31–3 and 61–4). Leckie-Tarry (1995) has refined Halliday’s ideas on register to produce a dynamic model of interaction between functions which also takes account of Halliday’s contexts of culture and situation (developed from Malinowski 1923). This model is useful in the links it makes between aspects of field, such as the processes of literary production and participant knowledge; tenor, such as the degree of intimacy or distance, participant roles, and focus; and mode, such as the level of planning, and medium (written or spoken).14 The functional model also allows connections to be made between features of texts and the contexts of situation and culture. As written texts, the novels discussed in this book cannot be categorized as single discourse events. Their iterability and the plurality of their audiences constitute a defining feature of their field. As a result, the context of culture is plural rather than singular and is repeatedly shifting. The text may be written in a defined context but it becomes part of the cultural context for subsequent reading activities. Equally, the

8 NEGOTIATING THE NEW IN THE FRENCH NOVEL

definition of participants evolves. In this process, the status and identity of the writer and the constitution of the audience undergo perpetual modification. Previous audiences and their responses to the text enter the situation within which each new reader encounters the text. Written texts are thus defined not by the absence of a context of situation but by the existence of more than one context of situation, both in the synchronic concept of a multiple audience and in the diachronic concept of successive audiences. This might appear to fit ill with an essentially predictive functional linguistic model, in which a context of situation allows the prediction of register which itself predicts textual features. However, Halliday also suggests that participants can ‘derive the situation from the text’ (1978:62). It is this process which is of interest in this book, and it corresponds to Werth’s concept of a ‘text situation’ (forthcoming: chapter 3.32), constituted by elements of context which are brought into focus by a text. As will emerge in the course of this book, the means by which this can be achieved go beyond grammatical deictic markers and reference, to a wider range of deictic elements (see Green 1992). Halliday and Leckie-Tarry’s prioritization of a unidirectional movement from context to text, modified by feedback, and Werth’s reversal of this movement to a text-driven model are transformed into a pattern resembling Ingarden’s ‘flicker’ (1973). Here, bi-directional movement occurs not only between discrete categories of text and context, but between contexts. Contexts of situation and cultural contexts become elements of other contexts. Power, authority and responsibility Critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides insights into the association between different forms of discourse and authority, allowing a consideration of how novelists exploit culturally sanctioned forms to establish relationships of power or solidarity through their texts. Fairclough (1988, 1989, 1992, 1995), Kress (1988a, 1988b), Kress and Hodge (1979) and Birch and O’Toole (1988) take the apparently ideologically neutral discipline of functional linguistics into an overtly ideological realm. CDA proposes a view of texts which situates them in a cultural arena of competing discourses which resembles that described by Bourdieu (1993). Fairclough (1988) suggests that competition for dominance occurs both between different institutions and within them, and that texts are not only instances of these power relationships but may alter them. Kress asserts that Halliday’s interpersonal function permeates both field and mode: ‘when one looks at text and its production from the point of view of social structure, the kinds of meanings usually captured in register theory under the label “tenor” are expressed through all three components of the grammar’ (1988b:134). The adoption of culturally authorized patterns of discourse can thus influence the reader’s perception of the power relationships in a text. Signals of planning, or the adoption of an impersonal narrative agent, can signal the formality of a public externally authorized text. Equally, the use of forms of

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discourse associated with spoken exchanges can suggest an intimacy and informality in which any power relationship between participants is susceptible to negotiation. Although novels may stage explicit relationships of power through overt manifestations of aggression or cooperation at the level of narratornarratee relationships, they also have the capacity to suppress this relationship in favour of a culturally contextualized power relationship. Whichever pattern is adopted, the power relationship between writer and reader need not correspond to any fictional speaker-hearer relationship. Moreover, the separation of the participant worlds of the novel allows both writer and reader a degree of power over the text which does not necessitate either oppositional conflict or solidarity. The power relationships of the novel are defined separately and doubly by each participant. The consequential process of writing and reading allows both participants to have power, but always runs the risk of transformation into a more directly oppositional relationship. The distribution of authority and responsibility in the novel is also variable and is affected by the tension between the public and private arenas in this texttype. The private act of writing is transformed into a public act when it is brought into the public domain, while the reader’s act of interpretation may remain private. Writers go on record, but readers have the choice to remain private individuals or to participate in a public audience. Authority, for the writer, is associated both with the intellectual and personal ownership rights of copyright (introduced in France in 1793), and with the social answerability of Foucault’s ‘author-function’ (1979). The ‘audience-function’ (my term), however, does not involve responsibility in the same way as the author-function. The reader’s authority over his interpretation of the text depends on his perception of the location of meaning. This can be manipulated by the text, but is also the result of more general cultural perceptions of the role of the reader. But public responsibility only begins for the reader if he converts interpretation into a further act of text production. Thus, while a speaker or author can gain power by ‘hiding behind the text’, this power is inherent to the private reader position.15 Nevertheless, the responsibility of the reader for his act of interpretation can be brought into focus by the text, as will be seen. The development of individualism in the author role of the Romantic period is matched by the increase in definition of the individual reader (see Kayser 1978: 68–9).16 Audience membership thus combines anonymity with heterogeneity, existing in tension between private individual behaviour and public group participation. The emergence of the individual addressee can work to the advantage of both writer and reader. The writer gains from the reduction in the collective power of readership, while the reader is elevated to an individual privileged status. However, both may also lose. The writer, by individualizing the textual manifestations of a reader position may lose control over members of the audience not prepared to identify with this role, while the reader may experience the loss of the security of solidarity with other members of the audience.

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Pragmatics and the novel Cognitive activities surrounding written fictional texts include the production of a hypothetical construct of the absent participant(s) predicated on the discourseworld entities of the author and readers. Because the contexts of writing and reading are separated, the construction of the absent participant occurs in a ‘participant world’, the world for whose composition participants are responsible (Werth forthcoming: chapter 8.1). These are not fictional constructs, but are fictive, or hypothetical (see Fludernik 1996a:40). These constructs are produced by a process of inferencing founded on both textual signals and the reader’s cultural frames of knowledge and beliefs. They therefore enter the domain of pragmatics. Watts suggests that: Literary pragmatics must be able to encompass both methods of considering the relationships between the linguistic structures of the literary text, the ‘users’ of those texts (looked at from both ends of the creative process), and the contexts in which the texts are produced and interpreted. (1991:27) We could argue that this is what literary studies as a field has been doing for years. So why introduce a needless new set of linguistic jargons to the process? What is significant in literary pragmatics, as defined by Watts, is where it positions its Janus-like self. For he suggests that it ‘must concern itself with textual meanings beyond the linguistic structure of the literary text itself’, either in an inward-looking way, involving the study of deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure, or: by looking outwards towards aspects of the sociocultural affiliation of authors/readers and the complexities of literary communication beyond simplistic assumptions of message transference by means of a code through a channel (i.e. the written or oral medium) from a sender (the author? implied author? narrator? etc.) to a receiver (the reader? implied reader? fictive reader? etc.). (1991:27) This either/or proposition points to the position of this area of research at the intersection between text and context, which is not an ontological cut, but a much broader marginal zone of interaction, allowing the literary pragmatist to raise questions concerning the binary terms which govern our categorizations of the world. The pragmatic model of most interest to this book is Brown and Levinson’s model of Politeness. The fragile intersection between text and individuals, and between the personal and the social is foregrounded in texts which involve

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convention shifts. Constructing a set of intentions for the writer and deciding what role to adopt is often not an issue in reading. Despite the reputation of the novel as anti-conventional, the majority of novels require little speculation in this area. However, the particular demands made by the novels discussed require a revision of the reader’s attitudes towards literary texts, and specifically towards novels. These novels thereby lose some of their ‘hyper-protection’ as display texts (Pratt 1977:215), and their interpersonal function is not quite so comfortably substitutional and displaced as Pagnini would have us believe (1987: 9). The public self-image of the writer depends on audience acceptance of his or her text into the field of culturally valued symbolic goods.17 And the reader’s desire for freedom from imposition is potentially under threat as a result of the requirement to revise his interpretive practices. These participant-needs are those described by social anthropologists as face-wants. The desire to be appreciated or approved of is classified under positive face, while the basic claim to territories, personal preserves and rights to non-distraction, for instance to freedom of action and freedom from imposition, are classified under negative face (summarized from Brown and Levinson 1987: 13 and 61). Brown and Levinson’s model describes how face-threatening acts (FTAs) can be attenuated by a variety of strategies. It also makes a link between strategies to preserve the face of participants and their estimation of the scale of imposition and the variables of power and distance between participants. In this model, impositions can not only be attenuated, they can be re-ranked in the course of interaction. Brown and Levinson do not presuppose that the sole aim of participants in interactions is to establish common ground and to manifest co-operative behaviour. This makes their model a suitable frame for the consideration of a text-type in which telling the truth in an efficient manner with optimal relevance and lack of obscurity are hardly major goals.18 It is, however, drawn from observation of face-to-face turn-taking interactions which cannot be mapped directly to the written, fictional form of the novel. Nevertheless, the novel’s status as a public language event which occurs in a cultural and social context makes it subject to social conventions of language-use, not least to the conventions of the novel.19 Inferences made by readers may be built around a written text populated by fictional constructs, but the speech acts we infer from the text are no more fictional than any goals and intentions we infer from face-to-face interaction.20 They are founded on our belief that the novel is the result of an intentional act of writing which anticipates a readership, and writes to an audience. As Ronen points out: In understanding a fictional text and in making propositions about a fictional world one assumes the presence of an author. The valid propositions made about a fictional world hence do not only refer to the beings denoted by fictional propositions and contained in the fictional universe, but also to the entity of an author, his properties and actions. The

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authorship of a fictional text reflects an understanding of fictionality as an intentional action (of world-projecting, of imagining, of belief-suspending). (1994:92) The contextual parameters of the novel Because the relationship between writer and readers is not institutionally defined or located in the restricted context of a small community of known participants, the power relationships between writer and readers and their social distance are not fixed in advance of the reader’s encounter with the texts discussed in this book. Nor are these relationships fixed by an initial contract of reading which governs the entire encounter between reader and text. This corresponds to Thomas’s observations on more general patterns of interaction: ‘Power relationships, social distance, role relationships, perceptions of relative rights and obligations or of size of imposition, are not necessarily given, but can be negotiated in interaction.’ (1985:768)21 The opening of a novel may propose a particular configuration of field (Balzac’s novel is a case in point). However, this configuration is always subject to change as the reader moves through the text. With each new move in the text, the reader is free to respond in a different way, to revise previous positions, whether in accordance with the inferred proposition of the text, or against it. This fluidity applies to other contextual parameters. The discourse world in which a novel is written and read, because it is constituted by a context of culture, rather than immediate situation, offers a complex dynamic of conflicting groups and views of literature against which the individual novel can be situated. Participant worlds can be erected or effaced and their relationship to this context can be asserted or denied. This allows considerable scope for the attenuation of potential threats to the writer or reader’s face through the construction of contexts of both situation and culture which will justify convention shift. Configurations of aspects of the model of register associated with certain relationships of power and solidarity, and social distance and intimacy, allow the generation of these parameters in the course of the novel. A novel cannot create its own context. Nor can it be read in a cultural vacuum. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the written text allow a play between the two which endures throughout reading and beyond. Last, and certainly not least, historical context is a significant factor in the negotiation of author-audience relationships. The most acute issues of face occur at the moment of initial publication of a novel. The fictional worlds of the novels discussed are closely linked to the social structures of the society in which they are produced, and participants are members of that society. Beyond the mimetic link between fiction and the actual world, the audience can expect the writer to be aware of its beliefs and needs. The author can be held directly responsible for his or her text, while the shift in reading strategies demanded by the novel has not yet been sanctioned through time.

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Theoretical interactions The discussions of texts in this book are framed by the above approaches. As the brief outline of each demonstrates, the insights they provide depend on their interaction with research in the field of literary studies, whether fictional-world theory, narratology, theories of reading and intertextuality, semiotic theory, cultural history, or histories of genre. In particular, existing scholarship on the work of each writer discussed is crucial to my analyses.22 Because this book does not produce readings of texts to support a theory but, instead, brings theoretical work to bear on the reading of individual texts, attention to the body of work on these texts is essential. Such work is, itself, interdisciplinary. Theories of language-use, reading, narrative and genre have undergone a number of transformations in the twentieth century and have influenced approaches to the work of each author discussed. The move to construct geometric models that explain observations and predict behaviour (whether linguistic or human) which would set the study of literary texts on a more scientific footing has been followed by an increasing pre-occupation with dynamic play, graded clines, interference, and non-geometric patterns. As models within given areas of research have ceased to look like discrete and static systems, they have also become increasingly interdisciplinary, adding to the heteroglossia of approaches in literary studies. Given the nature of the texts under investigation, the descriptive tools of narratology, in particular, are used extensively in this book. I have assumed a degree of familiarity with the basic terms established by Genette, which are now common currency in discussions of narrative. The utility of their descriptive specificity to close reading outweighs the unfortunate ring of technical jargon.23 The field of narratology is no exception to the general move towards interdisciplinarity. As the child of structuralism, it has developed under the influence of semiotics and discourse theory.24 Work in the field of stylistics has also brought descriptive terms from linguistics to the study of narrative. This book draws mainly on the contributions of English-language stylisticians to the description of narrative, who adopt a more text-oriented approach than the systemic theories of francophone researchers such as the Groupe μ, or the structuralist and formal stylistics of Riffaterre’s work. Stylistics, in this sense, is not the study of style, but a discipline which is concerned with the interface of language and literary texts (among others). The close readings in this book frequently employ the terminology of stylistics since I, like its exponents, ‘see no merit in not being detailed and explicit’ about what I describe, while recognizing that some of the terms may seem forbidding (see Ronald Carter in Simpson 1993:x). Where applications of terms are not self-explanatory, definitions are given and interested readers are referred to fuller expositions by other writers. In this field, the work of Monika Fludernik (1993 and 1996a) is of particular interest, moving away from a plot-based theory of narrative and incorporating recent cognitive theory and historical work on oral and written narratives in a natural

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narratology founded on the concept of ‘embodiment’. Last, narratology has incorporated the theoretical perspectives of postmodernism in the work of Chambers (1991), Reid (1992) and Gibson (1996). Narratological models, whether static or dynamic, geometric or rhizomatic, rule-based or relativist, text-based or context-based, reveal the extent to which our conceptual construction of the processes of linguistic engagement is founded on spatial patterning (but not necessarily spatial ordering). The stratification, hierarchization and dyadic distinctions of one strand of narratology, and the alternative patterns of graft, margin, parasite, noise (Derrida 1978, Serres 1980, Paulson 1988), ‘circulations, fluxes and flows, connections and “crossroads” confluences and intersections, “knottings” and “interlacings”’ (Gibson 1996: 224), are metaphors projected from a spatialized image schema of linguistic text. This spatial schema is also applied to temporality, whether in the rigid temporal ordering of the telegraphic model from sender to receiver, or in Reid’s fluid patterning of substitution and dispossession (1992).25 Most narratologists, from Genette (1969) to Chatman (1990), further assume that voice is an essential part of the narrative model. Fludernik (following Banfield in this respect) argues that the construction of a narrator figure may not be supported by any textual evidence of an interactive communicative pattern, and is the result of a pragmatic and, in her view, illicit mapping of an external oral model to the written text (1993:448 and 1996a: 339). Although narratological models tend to stop with the implied author and reader (if they are text-centred), the inferred author and reader (if they are reader-centred), and the anticipated audience (if they are writer-centred), voice nevertheless remains a determining factor in their categorizations.26 These theories reflect wider epistemologies of the structuring of selfhood, interaction and the world. The corpus of texts discussed in this book was produced in a period governed by a metaphysics of presence but, as postmodernist theorists have demonstrated, this does not make such texts resistant to interferences and laterality. Yet texts which most clearly invite postmodern readings are equally susceptible to readings which allow the building of a less fluid model of narrative understanding. The question here is not whether we should allow anthropomorphic and systemic models to stand or refuse their metaphysical implications, but how both sets of theories reflect characteristics of our engagement with texts. One of the main concerns of this book is the anthropomorphic dimension of linguistic activity, the relationship between the human, the social and the text. The hierarchies and levels of traditional narratology are therefore of interest as demonstrations of some of the ways in which we prioritize aspects of texts and contexts, building authority structures from them. But another of its concerns is the degree of mediation which occurs between traditional categories. This mediation goes beyond the creation of links between dyadic concepts and beyond the expansion of the dividing line to a broader margin. It does not, however,

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merge such concepts into what Cristopher Nash describes as an ‘All-is-One indeterminism’ (1990:217). Unconventional interactions The unconventional interactions of this book are, in the first instance, those of the innovative novel. But they are also the interactions between conceptual categories which separate spoken and written, presence and absence, fictional and actual worlds and the ideational, interpersonal and textual. Last, they are the interactions between theories in the academic field which claim exclusivity and territorial rights in relation to each other. They are the duck-rabbits in reading which exceed the limits of a logical choice between either-or and both-and. As the very un-postmodern Wayne Booth writes in a discussion of Gombrich’s interpretation (1960) of Wittgenstein: ‘human beings somehow can both revel in sharp distinctions and swim in ambiguities.’ (1974:128–9) One of the titles I considered for this book (albeit not seriously, given my awareness of the registerconstraints of academic texts) was ‘New Tricks for Old Dogs’. I realized, however, that ‘Old Tricks for New Dogs’ would have been equally appropriate. Beyond the contribution made by these titles to a menagerie of metaphors, their reversibility reflects the pattern of the encounter in the chapters which follow between a rhetoric of fiction, a functional and cognitive approach to languageuse, literary history and criticism, and the insights provided by postmodern theory. But it also reflects the interactions between text and audience of the texts discussed, and these are, after all, the reason for the existence of this book.

2 DYNAMICS OF WORLD-PLAY BETWEEN CONTEXTS, TEXTS AND PARTICIPANTS Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste

This chapter examines more closely how the theoretical models outlined in the previous chapter can inform our reading of a fictional text. Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796) is not a neutral choice of testing ground for interactions between theoretical models. The generic instability of this text, which shares many characteristics with the novels discussed, suggests that generic identity is not an inherent and solid quality of texts, but something to be constructed. Its circumstances of initial production and subsequent circulation allow discussion of the relationship between a pragmatics based on explicit contexts of situation and the pragmatics of written texts divorced from such a stable context. The overt play between inside and outside, cause and effect, text and intertexts and spoken and written, facilitates the testing of theoretical models. The negotiation of authority in the course of interaction is more explicitly staged through a narratornarratee relationship in Jacques le fataliste than in the other texts discussed. However, this apparent appeal to a stable sender-message-receiver pattern of interaction founded on co-presence is counteracted by signals of a more complex dynamic of interaction in which the construction of an originating voice and a singular reader position are unsustainable. The text and its contexts Two cultural parameters of particular concern in this book are those of generic expectations at the time of production of a text and the circumstances of circulation of the text, including the relationship between author and audience. In the case of Jacques le fataliste, the issue of genre is a broader one than in the novels discussed, and is subsumed to the question of the nature of illusion in fiction (see Hobson 1982:127–30).1 The circumstances of circulation, too, are more complex with regard to the public status of the text. Situating texts through genre Jacques le fataliste illustrates the ambivalence of generic relationships and the degree to which the reading of genre depends on a pragmatic framing which goes beyond the formal relationships between texts. It demonstrates how dynamic

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relationships are possible between a range of written and spoken genres which enter into intratextual play. How the play of genres in Jacques le fataliste is read depends on the historical and cultural associations brought by readers to the text. There is a clear relationship between Diderot’s text and a certain type of ‘roman’ as it existed in eighteenth-century France, but this relationship does not dominate the text to the exclusion of other models. Indeed, many references to the ‘roman’ appear interchangeable with the ‘conte’ reflecting an ambiguity of classification of these prose forms.2 to generic status in the narrator’s metafictional commentaries displays the combination of the three functions of register, linking ideational, formal, and aesthetic characteristics with moral function and the social responsibility of the writer to his audience. Thus, the narrator’s denials of generic identity with the ‘conte’ and the ‘roman’ concern semantic domain as a feature of field and formal plot patterns as a feature of mode. The exploitation of coincidence and fantastic adventures by both genres are portrayed as superficial means to maintain the reader’s interest in the text, thereby falling into the category of tenor. These denials follow a pattern: an outline of a possible fictional plot, presented in the conditional, followed by a rejection of such a plot on the grounds of truth. Authority is denied to these two genres on the grounds of the failure of their writers to exercise aesthetic control over their creative imaginations and their tendency to pander to the sensationalist desires of their audience. On another level the rejection of the fantastic, and the narrator’s association of this type of plot structure with both the ‘conte’ and the ‘roman’, merges two generic instances of the creative imagination. The fantastic in the ‘conte philosophique’, as in the fable, may signal an allegorical guarantee of moral commitment.3 The ‘faux’ of the picaresque or sentimental and personal ‘roman’ is not, however, associated with any such moral goal.4 Within the framework of metafictional commentary, Jacques le fataliste promotes a mimetic form of epistemological truth over the allegorical model, and a socially and philosophically responsible form of fictionality over the individualism of the tale of amorous intrigue. But it also contrives to undermine the semi-institutional status of the ‘conte’ by associating it with the standard view of the ‘roman’, described in the ‘Éloge de Richardson’ as ‘un tissu d’événements chimériques et frivoles, dont la lecture était dangereuse pour le goût et pour les moeurs.’ (Diderot 1980:192)5 The links between the plot patterns of Jacques le fataliste and both these generic forms are, however, clear. Indeed, Diderot’s text bears an uncanny resemblance to Sorel’s critical description of ‘le roman’, written over a century before the completion of Jacques le fataliste: Il y a encore à observer dans la plupart des Romans, qu’outre que l’Autheur en deduit luy mesme l’Histoire principale, il introduit plusieurs personnages qui en recitent d’autres avec un langage qui est souvent trop affecté pour le temps et le lieu […] Quelques uns en recitent plus que

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l’Autheur, qui ne dit presque mot, et mesme pour embroüiller davantage le Roman, ayant introduit un Homme qui raconte quelque Histoire, celuy-là rapporte aussi celle qu’un autre a racontée avec ses propres termes, faisant une Histoire dans une autre Histoire […] de sorte qu’on a peine à se resouvenir qui c’est qui parle. (Sorel 1671:121–2) Jacques le fataliste might have been written to Sorel’s order, down to the ‘langage […] souvent trop affecté pour le temps et le lieu’, illustrated by the narrator’s discussion of the terms ‘engastrimute’ (234) and ‘hydrophobe’ (274) (see p. 40), and by the master’s remark that ‘cette femme raconte beaucoup mieux qu’il ne convient à une femme d’auberge’ (128). Thus, while the metafictional commentary sets up an oppositional relationship with these generic frames, the reader’s perception of the similarities between Diderot’s text, and the genres it claims to reject, influences interpretation, not only of the generic status of the text, but also of the metafictional commentary itself. This demonstrates an interaction between field and mode. Fictional texts have the capacity to influence the reader’s views of their context, but are read through that context. The relationship between an individual text and the system of genres is thus a two-way one. We cannot view field as a stable arena in which a language event occurs, but must see it as part of a dynamic interaction. Schaeffer suggests that texts are always ‘logically either posterior or anterior to a given generic classification’ (1989:175), but such a view promotes a concept of text as a fixed and singular point. Between ‘before’ and ‘after’ there is a ‘during’, the space of reading in which text and context are in continuous and simultaneous play. Two contrasting critical readings of Jacques le fataliste, one by Mauzi (1964) and one by Kavanagh (1973), are useful in demonstrating the complexities of the interplay between field, tenor and mode with regard to generic categorizations. Mauzi’s approach reflects his historical awareness of the value-judgements associated with different genres in the cultural context of the eighteenth century, but it also projects an intention to conform to these onto the text producer. Kavanagh’s reading, by contrast, is firmly situated in the cultural context of structuralism. Mauzi’s reading of genre in Jacques le fataliste mirrors the loose conflation of the picaresque, the sentimental, and the ‘mémoire’ to the ‘romanesque’ which is to be found in Diderot’s text. However, he separates the ‘roman’ from the ‘conte’. He attempts to formulate a consistent relationship with these genres founded on similarity with Candide and distance from all forms of the ‘romanesque’. But this move forces Mauzi into a condemnation of the features of Jacques le fataliste which draw on the ‘romanesque’ form. Mauzi assumes that the relationship between Jacques le fataliste and the ‘romanesque’ is parodic, and therefore critical in its ethos. This assumption is entailed by and entails his choice of Candide as the generic prototype for the text. He thus suppresses other

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parodic models, such as Tristram Shandy, whose ethos towards its hypo-texts is ludic and admiring as well as critical: ‘Diderot disqualifie, dans Jacques le fataliste, toutes les formes du romanesque conventionnel: le roman picaresque, le roman sentimental, le roman mémoires, le roman par lettres, etc.’ (1964:90) He thereby places himself in a position where he must condemn what he perceives as Diderot’s powerlessness to avoid the forms from which, in his view, he dissociates himself.6 Mauzi reads the relationship between Jacques le fataliste and ‘romans’ as parodic only with regard to the hypothetical plots directly associated with a negative metafictional comment. Considering appropriations of features of the ‘romanesque’ which are not directly flagged as such to be non-parodic, he must somehow account for these. In his remarks on the ‘rencontres’ of the text, he writes: Voilà au moins un expédient romanesque dont l’auteur ne parvient pas à se passer. Il se moque des autres plus élaborés, comme la coïncidence, la reconnaissance, ou le présage, mais de ce romanesque fondamental qu’est la rencontre, il ne peut s’en dispenser, car toute action en dépend. Preuve qu’il est bien difficile d’atteindre au pur récit qui ne serait, à aucun titre, roman. (1964:95) It is hardly necessary to mention that while the ‘présage’ is certainly treated ironically by Diderot’s text, ‘la coïncidence’ and ‘la reconnaissance’, although dismissed as potential structural components in the earlier stages of the text, are integral parts of the overall plot structures of the book.7 This argument acts out the value-judgements associated with the novel in eighteenth-century France, and attempts to defend the literary status of the text within this frame of reference. Mauzi might be criticized for failing to show critical awareness in that he has transported his position as twentieth-century critic to that of the context of production, espousing the view that the novel at this time was ‘a bad thing’, and exercising his considerable argumentative powers to prove that Jacques le fataliste is not a novel, at least in eighteenthcentury terms.8 He nevertheless provides a powerful demonstration of the degree to which the analysis of generic characteristics is dependent on a set of contextual value judgements associated with field. Quite another relationship between field, tenor and mode is exemplified by Kavanagh’s monograph. Here, field is no longer defined by the historical context of production. Kavanagh, in a temporal sleight of hand, presents Jacques le fataliste as a response to nineteenth- and twentieth-century audiences’ assumptions regarding the relationship between writer and narrative voice. He thus maps the field of his own text (critical debate on the site of meaning in texts) onto Jacques le fataliste. But he does more than this, for he suggests that the positions he sets out are intrinsic to the mode of the text itself: ‘From its opening

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pages Jacques le fataliste presents itself as an irregular, highly anomalous kind of story telling. Analyzing the form and implications of its particular narrative structure can best begin by localizing the ways it differs from what passes as the unmarked form of novelistic story telling: objective narration.’ (1973:19, my italics) Here, avoiding the trap of authorial intention, the author being dead both physically and theoretically, Kavanagh ascribes a move against narrator-author identification to the agency of the text itself. By doing so, he presents his own interpretive move against pre-structuralist critical responses as one made by the text, through mode. Kavanagh thus reads his interpretation of ‘the irony and relativism’ of the dialogue between ‘authorial voice and contrived reader’ as intrinsic to the text. Reinserted into the eighteenth-century context, irony and relativism do not call nineteenth-century modes of objectivity into question but eighteenth-century modes of subjectivity. The framing by readers of Jacques le fataliste as a novel coincides with the latter’s emergence as a major literary genre. The close relationship between Jacques le fataliste, Don Quixote (1605–1615) and Tristram Shandy (1760–1767) would soon be appropriated by Schlegel to his list of precursors of Romanticism. In the twentieth century it would enter Lukács’s marxist definition of the novel as ironic epic (1971) and would serve as an instantiation of Bakhtin’s dialogic theories (1981). But it has also been appropriated to a postmodern canon of texts by Lyotard for its refusal of temporal ordering (1980:175–6). As such, it appears to have traversed the genre of the novel and emerged on the other side. Schlegel suggested that it was ‘nicht sowohl ein Roman als eine Persiflage dagegen’ (see Bishop 1989:24), but it is also a ‘persiflage’ against a whole range of other texttypes. Other critics who have addressed the generic and parodic relationships of Jacques le fataliste do not limit themselves to the classifications of ‘conte’ or ‘roman’. Pruner criticizes Mauzi for attempting to situate the text in relation to the novel genre: dans cette oeuvre, tout est subordonné à l’intention démonstrative et […] il est vain d’invoquer des raisons esthétiques dans l’ignorance des fins qui les justifient. Chercher du côté des lois du roman, ou de l’anti-roman un principe d’explication, ne mène à rien, pour la bonne raison que Diderot s’en moque. (1970:326)9 Belaval, while suggesting that, in Diderot’s own terms, the text is a ‘conte historique’, proposes that the art of Jacques le fataliste lies in its imitation of the theatrical scene (1973:18 and 346).10 Ray (1990:306) classifies it as a history because the reader’s engagement with the text is dependent on the authority of cultural truth rather than literary authority. Loy considers the relationship between Jacques le fataliste and Tristram Shandy to constitute its defining generic feature, and suggests that both texts manifest a contemporary social and

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literary anti-classical taste for digression and ‘séries’ which functioned as a ‘mise en cause de l’ancienne hiérarchie des genres’ (1984:171). These responses to the text are all founded on formal features of the text, but demonstrate very different interpretations of the relationship between mode and field. And these in turn have implications for the interpersonal aspect of register, tenor. Such interpretations are closely tied to decisions made by readers on what is parodic and what the implications of parody are. For instance, the relationship between this text and Candide (1759) as philosophical prose texts is interpreted by some, like Mauzi, as a signal of generic continuity and by others as parodic rejection.11 While three of Diderot’s specific denials that his work is a ‘conte’ occur in proximity to a reference to Voltaire (two allusions, and an indirect plot summary similar to that of Candide), ironic stance can be attributed either to the metafictional denials of generic status, or to the formal textual links between Jacques le fataliste and its intertexts. Likewise, while the relationship between Jacques le fataliste and Tristram Shandy cannot but be acknowledged, Guitton (1980), following Vernière (1975), claims that there are closer links with the work of Caylus. Interpretations of generic relationships impinge most closely on the tenor of the text in the area of its classification as serious or comic. Unlike Tristram Shandy, Jacques le fataliste has an overt philosophical dimension.12 Its opening exhibits a tension between narrative and philosophical questioning, and displays stylistic signals of burlesque parody which link it to the comic tradition. The narrator’s philosophical answers to narrative orientation questions range from the flippant ‘Du lieu le plus prochain’ to the potentially serious ‘Est-ce que l’on sait où l’on va?’ (23) And a major thesis in the eighteenth-century philosophical debate on free will is presented at the end of a comic iteration of ‘disait’. These aspects of the text signal its affinity with two narrative traditions, the ‘roman comique’, after Scarron, (involving journeys, episodic digressions, debunking of the epic form), and the comic ‘conte philosophique’, after Voltaire, which incorporates philosophical debate with narrative excess. Yet these two traditions have a different moral and pragmatic force. While that of Voltaire directs its comic force against social convention and philosophical doctrines through satire, it does not properly belong to the carnival tradition of Rabelais and Scarron. It works within a framework in which the authority of the narratorial position still has a semi-institutional role in relation to its audience. While its comedy may subvert the institutions of Church and State, its didacticism exploits an existing hierarchy in which the ‘philosophe’ as ‘généreux’ offers his wisdom to the public. The burlesque of Scarron and Rabelais is emphatically anti-institutional. The burlesque writer is a figure of slapstick, a trickster, a joker, who plays tricks on his reader and himself, in a suspension of social conventions associated with carnival. Liberties are permitted which break social taboos, and collapse social order. But these liberties are rendered acceptable by an alternative script of reading, a call to abandon a strong sense of self, and to participate in laughter and

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the unexpected. While a text such as Candide certainly exploits the taboo, its polemic features demand that the selfhood of writer and reader, and their hierarchical relationship, be preserved. Jacques le fataliste hovers between the rule of text and misrule. Reaction to it will depend on which of these are privileged in the reading process. Mauzi’s view of its parodic processes indicates his personal choice of rule over misrule. For satire, regardless of its target, implies a stability in authorial stance not allowed by the ludic. Likewise, readings of the text through its claims to truth stabilize the authority of text, and by extension, the writer. Yet both these approaches render the signals of interpersonal conflict in the text (discussed on pp. 34–7 and 45–7) more serious, For the satirical view suggests that beyond the figure of the narratee, the audience of the text may itself be a target. And the historical view leads, in its extreme form, to a perception of the sparring between narrator and narratee and the ‘copying’ of Tristram Shandy as unfortunate disturbances of the aims of the text (see Fredman 1955:3). If, on the other hand, the text is read within a context of misrule, the interpersonal interactions of the text become an acceptable part of this pattern, but the ideational stability is threatened. A more general conclusion which can be drawn from this generic tussle is that even a text so overtly parodic and generically ambiguous as Diderot’s, does not prevent readers from attempting to reduce its generic multiplicity to a single coherent generic status, regardless of aspects which do not fit such a reading. This tendency is visible in readings of the novels discussed in the next section, in particular those of Balzac, Flaubert and Céline. It has implications for generic conventions, reader-expectations and attributions of authority. It may undermine the authority of the text, by associating it with a group of texts which are not culturally valued, or may reinforce its authority, by ignoring those conventional features which might render the position of the text equivocal. Readings of Jacques le fataliste thus reveal a number of features of the way we read texts through genre, and genres through texts. First, the historical situation of the audience influences its interpretation of generic signals. Second, perceptions of generic patterns are founded on disparate elements of register. Jacques le fataliste also illustrates the complexity of semantic domain itself, what the text is ‘about’. This can be read as the events of the TAW, the philosophical debate with which the text engages, and the self-reflexive debate on the telling of stories. The play between these readings, the roles of participants, and the formal structures of the text (dialogue and narrative, degree of formality, etc.) influence readings of genre. Last, while readers may share a perception of the elements of the cultural generic map which are in focus in a text, produced by direct allusion and stylistic and structural characteristics, the locations of texts on this map are not stable. Audience sanction of a text may be founded on very different generic criteria.

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Conditions of distribution The initial circulation in manuscript form of Jacques le fataliste to the readers of the Correspondance littéraire (November 1778 to June 1780, followed by ‘Additions’ and, later, by ‘Lacunes’) might appear to provide a context closer to that of the immediate context of situation in spoken exchanges than that of any other text discussed in this book. But we cannot construct a one-to-one senderaddressee model for the manuscript form of the text any more than we can for the printed form.13 The list of subscribers to the Correspondance littéraire mostly comprises heads of state (see Kölving and Carriat 1984:xviii– xix), among them Diderot’s patroness, Catherine II of Russia. Yet we know that readers of the manuscripts attached to the Correspondance were also members of Diderot’s international peer group, including Goethe, Schiller, and, of course, Grimm, as original editor of the Correspondance and Diderot’s friend. (Grimm had by this time handed over the editorial work to Meister, but still retained overall responsibility.) These circumstances present in miniature the characteristics of field which apply to any printed text. The written medium and the variety of relationships of power and status between writer and readers, preclude a stable context of situation. The play between text and contexts of situation and culture already demonstrates instability. Nystrand’s proposal that most written texts are composed for a ‘context of eventual use’ (1986:46) is thus of limited validity for this type of written text. If the context of eventual use includes Diderot’s paymistress, Catherine, his manuscript falls into the category of economic goods.14 If it includes his peers, in whose hands his intellectual reputation lies, the manuscript becomes one of Bourdieu’s symbolic goods (1993:74–141). If the context of eventual use is a potential and future readership, as a number of Diderot scholars claim on the evidence of Diderot’s own writings (see Wilson 1985:424 and Alter 1975:82–3, who draws on Dieckmann’s work), this would make Diderot a Sartreian writer, writing for posterity.15 Bourdieu points out that the creation of an audience for any text is affected by other text-audience relationships in operation at the time of production (1996:47– 112). Diderot’s decision not to publish many of his later works is taken against the dual background of a wider and more anonymous contemporary audience whose judgement he distrusts and the repressive constraints on publication in France at the time.16 The question of the position of authors and audiences at this time is significant to our understanding of face-issues in the eighteenth century. It is also a reminder that the conditions of production and author-audience relationships, which hold for later texts, are not universal. Diderot is working partly under the patronage system, and also by this time has his own private sources of income (see Couturier 1991:40). He is thus, like the ‘philosophes’ as a group, a writer outside more general commercial circuits (France 1992:107). His freedom is nevertheless limited, for the patronage system is part of a hierarchical political structure from which he is not independent. The

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‘philosophes’ are respected (sometimes) by their patrons but lack the independent political status of the ‘intellectuel’ which emerges a century later. They are subject, not to the tyranny of the anonymous reader, but to that of their political relationship with their patrons and the State. This group of writers also shows signs of the perception of the author as an individual writing to a general public. Diderot places emphasis on the role of the individual imagination in the production of the aesthetic, but in his works the figure of the author is not yet associated with the figure of the artist isolated from society which emerges in the nineteenth century. The relationship between writer and reader is instead that of sociability, as his remarks on his reading of Richardson demonstrate: C’est qu’on a fréquenté Richardson; c’est qu’on a conversé avec l’homme de bien, dans des moments où l’âme désintéressée était ouverte à la vérité […] Bientôt j’éprouvai la même sensation qu’éprouveraient des hommes d’un commerce excellent qui auraient vécu ensemble pendant longtemps […] (Diderot 1980:194) This promotes an ideal reader who combines direct human and social intercourse with a suspension of self-interest in the name of truth. Butor considers the power relationships between Diderot and his immediate audience to be essential to the interpretation of Jacques le fataliste: ‘l’écrivain, le conteur, est un domestique qui parle trop bien. Ce trop-bien-parler fait sa puissance, car, comme les esclaves antiques instruits dans les sciences et les lettres, il fait la gloire et les délices de ses maîtres, mais le met dans un perpétuel danger, car il aura toujours tendance à dire ce qui ne leur plairait pas.’ (1968:141– 2) Butor’s reading collapses the roles of fictional figures, the text-world situation of Diderot and his historical readers, and the cultural context of authorship and audience into two opposing categories: fictional valet/ Diderot/authorship, and fictional master/Catherine/audience. He contends that it is possible for the institutionally weaker author to gain power over his powerful audience through the text. The fictional text, for Butor, allows a space for manoeuvre on the part of the writer which would not be permissible outside the text: ‘En lui constamment un valet se rebelle contre le déterminisme du maître’ (1968:135). Jacques le fataliste is the ruse of the author, who deflects the power of his audience through his apparent submission to it: ‘C’est en prenant conscience de leur domination, de chaque fil qu’ils tirent, qu’il pourra se libérer de leur fatalité’ (1968:148). It would be possible to dismiss Butor’s reading of Jacques le fataliste as a demonstration of his own position as writer of fictions for an audience which has full powers of anonymity. But this reading raises the question of the discursive behaviour of the restricted group in which it first circulated. Because the manuscript forms of Jacques le fataliste are not fully public, they allow a greater degree of licence in some respects than was available to the published texts of the period. Foucault’s author-function (1979) is related to public accountability,

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and Diderot and many of his fellow ‘philosophes’ had felt the weight of institutional sanction. Compared with publication, the ‘huis clos’ situation of the Correspondance littéraire provided a less institutionalized arena. Diderot is free, in particular, from the moral responsibility of the public author to conform to the social taboos of the eighteenth century. The public fictional texts of this period can be divided into officially authorized didactic and conformist productions, and often clandestinely published transgressive texts, whether those of writers such as the ‘philosophes’, or erotic libertine novels (see May 1963:91–105 and Couturier 1991:34). Diderot may combine these qualities in his text without the threat of public censure which hangs over printed texts. However, this dispensation only releases Diderot from the role of the ‘philosophe’ as socially responsible educator of a general public. The semiprivate conditions of circulation remain subject to constraints on behaviour within the élite circle of readers.17 A parallel can be drawn between the semipublic nature of the manuscripts of the Correspondance and social dialogue in Diderot’s immediate circle, described by Peter France as governed by ‘politesse’, ‘honnêteté’ and ‘civilisation’, and founded on a rhetorical presentation of the self. France suggests that the extensive use of the dialogue form in written texts of this period was a means to furnish a ‘polite, sociable garb for ideas which might otherwise be rebarbative to the worldly reader’ (1992: 105). But the dialogue of Jacques le fataliste hardly conforms to these criteria. The situation of the Correspondance littéraire illustrates the complexity of the relationships between intimacy, friendship and social distance.18 While this context is intimate compared with the public circulation of printed texts, the social distance between Diderot and his readers, most specifically Catherine of Russia, cannot be ignored. Contemporary accounts of Diderot’s personal audiences with Catherine and of his associated discussion ‘mémoires’ show that his direct interactions with his patroness exhibited considerably more propositional delicacy and restraint than Jacques le fataliste (see Wilson 1985: 527–8). In these interactions social distance appears to have required textual decorum, regardless (or because) of the physical proximity of the participants.19 The encounters between ‘philosophe’ and monarch demonstrate that we cannot simply map intimacy to face-to-face conversation and distance to written texts.20 They suggest that the limited numbers of the readers of the Correspondance littéraire, which prevent a one-on-one association of narratee and addressee, combine with physical absence to permit transgressions of public taboo and personal space which are predicated on a greater degree of intimacy between writer and audience than was possible between Diderot and Catherine.21 The definitive manuscript copy prepared for Catherine between 1780–4 restores the cuts made by Meister, but shows a vestigial and, according to Proust, Machiavellian awareness of the need for ‘bienséance’ in light of the identity of his addressee. Here, the various forms of ‘foutre’ are crossed out in Diderot’s hand and revised to ‘aimer’ in superscript, leaving the original words entirely visible (see Diderot 1981:9).

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This points to two contrasting properties of the public printed text. While social responsibility within the institutional structures of society is increased, there is also a greater potential for an interpersonal relationship between writer and individual readers which goes beyond the constraints of public social behaviour. This has implications for the relationship between participants and roles. The influence of moral and social imperatives on the published text and their link with aesthetic judgements is demonstrated by the publication history of Jacques le fataliste which ties protection of the public face of morality to protection of the writer’s reputation. Certain nineteenth and twentieth-century editors of Diderot’s texts perform acts of censorship. The ‘Classiques Garnier’ series, in 1901, could still choose to publish only the ‘Mme de la Pommeraye’ story from Jacques le fataliste, suggesting that this was purely on aesthetic grounds: ‘Diderot croyait être plus vrai en hachant ainsi le récit; mais il faut reconnaître que cette innovation n’était pas heureuse.’ (Tulou 1901:xix) But aesthetic judgements based on a particular concept of unity of composition and verisimilitude become mixed with moral considerations, as François Tulou goes on to say: Naigeon, que nous trouvons par trop sévère, jugeait que les trois quarts de Jacques le fataliste méritaient d’être élagués. Il ne voyait à conserver que l’Histoire de Mme de La Pommeraye «qui seule, disait-il, aurait fait un conte charmant, du plus grand intérêt et d’un but très moral. Nous partageons l’avis de Naigeon sur ce conte, aussi le donnons-nous à nos lecteurs, tout en retranchant les interruptions de Jacques le fataliste, qui n’auraient aucun sens dans ce fragment. (1901:xix–xx) Diderot’s reputation as philosopher and writer can only be preserved at the cost of the deforming imposition of a later cultural code on his work.22 Crossing between worlds Butor’s reading of Jacques le fataliste demonstrates the fusion of three levels of interaction which, like the opthalmologist’s lenses, can be superposed and separated. Diderot’s text lends itself to the narratological and cognitive concept of embedding, of the story within the story, the world within the world. In this text which is built out of performances and interactions, of tellings and retellings, clear appeals are made to a cognitive geometrical time-space structure which demands the establishment of a hierarchy of authority. But the patterns of Jacques le fataliste also cross the hierarchies, create knots and loops, confluences and reversals which confound attempts to create discrete strata, or to build a stable pattern of origin which is not susceptible to reversal or fragmentation. As Guignon suggests, Diderot’s text functions ‘by snags rather

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than by a perceptible, well ordered (that is repetitive) logic.’ (1990:151)23 The conflicts between the ordered perception of world-levels and the undoing of such levels are produced by a conflict between the schema of face-to-face interaction, a perception of text as ‘fréquentation’, ‘conversation’ and ‘commerce’ (see Diderot 1980:194, quoted on p. 24), governed by co-presence in an empirical world, and that of the iterability of texts, of shifting contexts, of an absent origin after which we strive but which is beyond our grasp. The schema of interpersonal interaction allows the establishment of three levels of language-use, of three discourse worlds in which participants engage in language events. Level one is the engagement of Diderot, as author, and the various readers of the text of Jacques le fataliste whose numbers increase daily. Level two is the fictional performance of narrator and narratee (‘lecteur’). Level three comprises fictional language exchanges within the TAW of Jacques and his Master. 24 Referential and truth-conditional accounts of the status of fictional worlds require that levels two and three be divided by the ontological cut from level one. Their logical status isolates them in an autonomous world. Narratological models, in which the text is the central focus of investigation, alerted to the intentional fallacy, maintain this cut. Likewise, pragmatic theories which follow Searle’s transfer of the pattern of truth-conditional semantics to a truthconditional pragmatics read the speech-acts of fiction as empty and hollow.25 Adams provides a reworking of this view, by suggesting that fictional texts are not pretended speech-acts, but real speech-acts by fictional speakers. For Adams, the writer hands over rhetorical authority to the speaker, preserving only creative authority (1985:12 and 60–1). But a cognitive and pragmatic view of these world levels founded on the interpretive activities of readers, not on their speech-act status, allows the autonomy of the fictional world as discrete fiction to be integrated in a world-building activity in which the TAW (level three), the narrating world (level two) and the actual world (level one) are mutually informing schemata. They remain frames to the extent that they can be conceptualized as distinct worlds in which participants are perceived as separate entities.26 But as the schemata of the experience, knowledge and beliefs of actual-world participants contribute to the building of the text world, the fictional worlds and sub-worlds of the text world contribute to the building of a discourse world. The schema of iteration perturbs the ordering of world levels. Jacques le fataliste demonstrates that it is possible both to configure these three levels in spatial and temporal succession and to reverse these configurations. The logical distinction between the temporal and spatial strata of levels two and three can be confounded. And the relationship between voices and texts in levels two and one can be destabilized. Moreover, a non-linear relationship between levels is possible, where level two does not mediate between levels one and three. In this process, the hierarchical patterns of containment, in which world levels can be assigned contextual status, and of temporal sequence, cannot be maintained.27

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The contexts of these interactions are also mutually informing. Butor has shown how language-use in different world levels of Jacques le fataliste can be linked to produce a mutually informing interpretation of the TAW, the context of situation and that of culture (see pp. 24–5). The discussion of the context of circulation of the text has indicated some contextual features of level one. The linguistic exchanges in the TAW (level three) are set within a cultural and social context which stands in a verisimilar relationship with the actual-world context.28 Both the location of the telling (on the road, in an inn) and the relationships between participants (intimates and strangers, masters and servants) are fictional-world attributes which allow the reader to build a coherent TAW. The stories which are told by the inhabitants of this world, too, are sub-world additions to this arena which expand the patterns of human action in the world of the journey. None of these elements produce dissonances with the reader’s beliefs about the actual world (despite exaggerations and coincidences). But, in addition, the philosophical issues raised by the participants in level-three exchanges are those of contemporary debate over the theories of Spinoza (as the hypothetical paths of action suggested by the narrator reflect Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds). The play between levels one and three is not simply dependent on the illusions of literalism and verisimilitude. It demonstrates how each becomes a context for the interpretation of the other. Between these worlds, level two might be seen to act as a reinforcing link, not least through the truth-claims of the narrator. This level of language-use is not contextualized by the erection of a network of references to an immediate physical situation, and the participants remain anonymous. Its deictic markers relate to the processes of storytelling itself (described by Levinson (1983:55) as ‘discourse deictics’, or ‘text deictics’).29 What spatiotemporal world does it occupy, though? Werth describes the world level of narration in fiction as a narrative envelope, the outer skin of the text world, told by an authorial persona, not by the author as participant (forthcoming: chapter 11.2). This corresponds to fictional narratives whose public narrator is read as the fictional representation of the authorial voice. In narratological models such narrators may be signalled as participants in the TAW, occupying the same time-space dimension as the ‘histoire’ (intradiegetic figures), or as extradiegetic figures, occupying a grey timespace zone which is not linked to the world of the ‘histoire’ (see Genette 1969 and 1983 for terms). The latter are perceived as standing in closer relationship to an authorial position than the former, not being integrated to the TAW. In certain narratives, this envelope can be effaced by the absence of deictic and referential indicators of an anthropomorphized teller-narrator.30 In Jacques le fataliste, level two, however, is clearly textualized. The narrative level of Jacques le fataliste is neither fully intradiegetic nor fully extradiegetic. The world of narration is signalled as contiguous with the TAW in that the narrator has the power to converse with Jacques and other members of that world, and the narratee has the power to go to the village in which Jacques is imprisoned towards the end of the book (287–8). But the verisimilar decorum of

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this relationship is broken by the narrator’s assertion of presence in scenes between Jacques and his master. For example: […] ils avaient été obligés de s’arrêter dans le faubourg. Là, j’entends un vacarme…—Vous entendez! Vous n’y étiez pas; il ne s’agit pas de vous.— Il est vrai. Eh bien! Jacques…son maître… On entend un vacarme effroyable. (104) The decorum is also broken in the temporal distinction between time of telling and time of told, as events in the TAW can affect the progress of the narrative, interrupting it and allowing the narrator to tell his narratee other stories to pass the time while he awaits events at level three. Thus, the narrative level is contextualized by the fictional world of Jacques and his master in a manner which does not conform to the principle of an intradiegetic narrating time and space, which is separate from, and subsequent to, the events of the TAW. The conceptual space of telling and that of Jacques’s world are subject, at certain moments, to a confluence which confounds logical and geometric distinctions as worlds converge. This instability between world levels is also to be found between the levelthree world of Jacques and his master’s journey and the sub-world events of the narratives they tell. Indeed, the world-level instability between Jacques as teller and actor on the journey, and Jacques as actor in his own stories, is introduced in the first page of the book. As a result of the lack of orientation elements, we read the referents of Jacques words: ‘Que le diable emporte le cabaretier et son cabaret!’, and ‘C’est que tandis que je m’enivre de son mauvais vin, j’oublie de mener nos chevaux à l’abreuvoir.’ (23), as fictional existents in the spatiotemporal frame of the journey (signalled as such by ‘D’où venaient-ils?’ and ‘Où allaient-ils?’). We are encouraged to do so by the use of the present tense and an interjection by the master. But the innkeeper, inn, wine and horses emerge as sub-world elements in a story told by Jacques which we have entered in medias res. The absence of a context of situation in level two also lends itself to contextualization through level one, and not only as a result of its mimetism of the situations of writing and reading. At certain points, we encounter what Guignon calls the ‘penetration of the text in reverse’ (1990:170). For example, transformational citation of an exemplary tale from Aesop’s life causes masterservant relationships at level three to surge towards level one, shifting from metaphysical to political and social debate: Jacques suivait son maître comme vous le vôtre; son maître suivait le sien comme Jacques le suivait.—Mais qui était le maître du maître de Jacques? —Bon, est-ce qu’on manque de maître dans ce monde? Le maître de Jacques en avait cent pour un, comme vous. Mais parmi tant de maîtres du

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maître de Jacques, il fallait qu’il n’y en eût pas un bon; car d’un jour à l’autre il en changeait. (67) Here, the context of level two is no longer confined to the process of storytelling, but extends to extra-textual activities no longer directly linked with narrative acts. It remains fictional, but calls for a speculation and reflection by the reader on actual-world states of affairs. In addition, the allusions to a network of intertexts cross the divide between world levels. The stories told by the narrator are not only those of Jacques’s world, but are also presented as retellings of texts firmly situated in the context of culture.31 The autonomy of fictional worlds, too, is broken, as the narrator can meet a figure from a play by Molière: ‘Moi, qui vous parle, j’ai rencontré le pendant du Médecin malgré lui, que j’avais regardé jusque-là comme la plus folle et la plus gaie des fictions’ (82). The narrative level may be conceptually situated in the TAW, but it is also linked to the actual world.32 This crossing of world levels allows the breakdown of logico-ontological cuts between fictional worlds and non-fictional worlds, and between autonomous fictional worlds. It inhibits a view of world levels as discrete entities, allowing the interpretive conflation exemplified by Butor’s article. Singular reference to discrete worlds and entities (either non-existents or existents) is also rendered unstable. Jacques’s story of ‘le camarade de mon capitaine, ou M.de Guerchy’ (132–4) provides a formal example of this possibility of multiple reference, ‘d’une pierre deux coups’ (132), as the master describes it. Jacques’s story has happened to two people, his captain’s friend and Guerchy, and its telling is marked by the repetition of double references to these protagonists. The end of the story splits to follow different fictional-world paths. The ending of the story of the captain’s friend, detached from the sub-world of M.de Guerchy, nevertheless continues a pattern of double reference, as its central figure is designated both by his relationship with the captain (‘l’ami de mon capitaine’) and by his role in the story (‘le cloueur’). Here, identity is linked through one chain to the captain, and by extension to Jacques as story-teller (‘mon capitaine’). But it also remains linked to the parallel sub-world of Guerchy, who is also a ‘cloueur’. This pattern of links between worlds is repeated in the general actantial pattern of story-telling. Levels one and three share social contexts external to the process of telling. Levels two and three share debates on this process. As a result, the hierarchy of world levels cannot be maintained. The traditional inner level of narratological theory, level three, combining the pragmatic characteristics of the other two levels, is interpreted through them and is a means to their interpretation. It is contained by them and also contains them. Nevertheless, the presentation of the relationships between world levels of Jacques le fataliste is such that their confluence is neither continuous nor susceptible to a homogeneous and transcendent identification. The construction of the narratives of Jacques le fataliste is one of collage and stitchings,33 and the

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world-level relationships are subject to a similar pattern of stitchings, mergings and gaps. This feature contributes to the space for manoeuvre in the power relationships of Diderot’s text, dispensing it, and him, from the referential equivalence of the pairs of interlocutors in each world level. Socializing text The spoken in the written The relationship between the spoken and the written in Jacques le fataliste raises questions concerning cultural shifts in perceptions of the effects of medium on the nature of linguistic communication. Theories of the development of the novel link its rise to the shift in the relationship between orality and literacy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which the printed text becomes a major medium for communication (see, for example, Couturier 1991). The primacy of the written text enables the emergence of the text as artefact, which can become an aesthetic object divorced from its users. It allows the appropriation by the novel of other written text-types carrying authority attributed to their writtenness. It opens an increasing gap between written and spoken French which will be exploited by Zola, and to radical effect by Céline. The difference in the pragmatics of the spoken and written which appears minimal and playful in Diderot’s text has, by the end of the twentieth century, increased to a gap which is posited by some writers as unbridgeable. ‘Écriture’ is perceived as distinct from spoken discourse, and is proposed by theorists such as Derrida (1972) as the evidence of an alienation and absence in language which displaces the logos associated with the spoken word, and which extends to all languageuse. Our trust in the originating presence of face-to-face communication as a guarantee of interpersonal understanding ceases to be set in opposition to the processes of written texts and is itself undermined. Whereas in Diderot’s text presence has to be disproved, in the late twentieth century—in spoken language as much as written—it has to be proved.34 The shift from orality to literacy in Europe occurs over a long period, and the balance between the two is not resolved at the end of the eighteenth century. While France (1992:106) asserts that the rhetorical strategies of the oral still precede and influence the written form, Robin Lakoff, writing of the same period in Britain, claims that written forms are by now influencing the form of the spoken language (1982:243–4). For Ong, the Romantic movement ‘marks the beginning of the end of the old orality-grounded rhetoric’ (1995:158). These views leave Jacques le fataliste poised between the spoken and the written. Diderot’s remarks on Richardson suggest a view of the written text as part of interactive commerce and the possibility of presence to another through writing, but Jacques le fataliste was seen by Schlegel as a prototype for Romantic irony, a mode of writing without ‘final synthesis, endless process

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leading to higher and higher consciousness but not to an infinite or absolute consciousness’ (Bishop 1989:3). No detailed scrutiny of Jacques le fataliste is required to perceive the degree to which this written text appeals to the patterns of conversational exchange. It is also easy to construct a cline across world levels from written to spoken (level one to three). On this cline, level two is a mixture between the written and the oral, in which the narratee is defined as ‘lecteur’, but has the power to interrupt the narration, as the narrator has the power to argue with or ignore the narratee. At all levels, though, there is putative transference between the spoken and the written, between the ‘redite’ and the ‘récrite’. In particular, the narrator of the second level is sometimes the reciter of stories told to him orally (thereby merging levels two and three), sometimes the editor of a pre-existing manuscript (creating an additional level), and sometimes the writer of a text to be publicly circulated (merging levels one and two). The Word of God or Fate is a written text (‘écrit là-haut’), but it is repeated through the spoken words of the protagonists, which are in turn ‘transcribed’ in the written form of the book, as are the oral dialogues and narratives of the TAW. At the opening of the book, the narrator writes that Jacques says that his captain says that ‘chaque balle qui partait d’un fusil avait son billet.’ (23) But these words repeat (in translation) the written text of Tristram Shandy which recounts the fictional spoken words of Corporal Trim who repeats the extra-fictional spoken words of King William that ‘every ball has its billet’.35 Beyond the dialogues between narrator and ‘lecteur’ (discussed on pp. 34–7) there are strong signals of text as performance at this world level, reflecting the performance of the oral story-teller. Dual performance by narrator and protagonists is repeatedly found: Les voilà fourvoyés. Voilà le maître dans une colère terrible et tombant à grands coups de fouet sur son valet, et le pauvre diable disant à chaque coup: «Celui-là était apparemment encore écrit là-haut…» Vous voyez, Lecteur, que je suis en beau chemin […] (24) In this passage, repetition of the exophoric ‘voilà’ points to the performing gesture of the narrator, while employment of participles rather than finite verbforms allows the actions of the scene to avoid the report status of posterior narration by removing causal and ordering temporality. The concept of the storyteller as performer of narrative rather than describer of an absent world is reinforced by Jacques’s statement of his requirements for story-telling, in which he condemns lengthy character portraits: ‘Racontez-moi les faits, rendez-moi fidèlement les propos, et je saurai bientôt a quel homme j’ai affaire. Un mot, un geste m’en ont quelquefois plus appris que le bavardage de toute une ville.’ (264– 5) This aesthetic of narrative is closer to that of the twentieth century than to the nineteenth-century emphasis on character description. Diderot also exploits the

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information devices of the theatre, in which dialogue is the sole means by which past events or present events occurring off-stage can be conveyed: ‘—Le voilà, le voilà là-bas.—Quoi! celui qui s’achemine au petit pas vers la porte de la ville? —Lui-même.’ (47) However, other performance signals are strongly dependent on the typographic nature of the printed text. Many of the dialogues of the book are set out in the form of theatrical dialogue, signalling the name of the speaker before each turn, without integration into the syntax of narration. An episode may begin in reported speech, or with direct quotation, and shift to the dialogue layout which removes the need for the incessant tagging of ‘he said’, ‘she said’. In some instances of dialogue, though, the written intrudes into the illusion of the spoken by exploiting the absence of physical originating voice to mystify the reader, as tirets are used to generate a cacophony of un-attributed speech. Further, in the quasi-absurd dialogue of the second Gousse story (a story of double roles, in which Gousse, ‘l’homme a une seule chemise à la fois, parce qu’il n’avait qu’un corps à la fois’ (101), initiates a court case against himself, wins it, and has himself imprisoned), the packing of the dialogue between the narrator and Gousse with first- and second-person pronouns produces a de-pragmatization of the discourse function of these pronouns, detached by the textual layout from their referents: ‘—Moi je travaille, comme vous voyez.—Et qui vous y a fait mettre?—Moi.—Comment vous?—Oui moi, monsieur.—Et comment vous y êtes-vous pris?—Comme je m’y serais pris avec un autre […]’ (102). The illusion of transparency of the dialogue layout also reveals its writtenness when it is used to record the story of Mme de la Pommeraye, an oral narrative told by the hostess. Her story is typographically distinguished from the interruptions by others at the inn, which are given in parentheses. Longer interruptions by Jacques and his master are signalled by the theatrical dialogue form. But towards the end of the tale, this typographical layout invades her narrative (including even didaskalia at one point), making the text of the embedded conversation between the Marquis and Mme de la Pommeraye unspeakable by the putative oral narrator. ‘Le marquis—(en se jetant à ses genoux) J’en conviens; il n’y en a pas une qui vous ressemble.’ (157) Although it lacks the extreme exploitation of the printed medium evident in Sterne’s text, Jacques le fataliste nevertheless plays with and exhibits its medium. The dialogue in the narrative Benveniste’s rigorous and influential grammatical distinction between the pronouns and tenses of ‘discours’ and ‘histoire’ (1966:241–2) have entered the common framework of much narratological theory as proof of the depragmatized status of narrative texts.36 But Benveniste not only clearly states that ‘histoire’, here, applies specifically to historical texts, not to narrative in general (1966:242, note 2), he also demonstrates that the two systems of enunciation can be mixed in historical writing: ‘le propre du langage est de permettre ces transferts

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instantanés’ (1966:242). Jacques le fataliste can be used to demonstrate how there might be a pragmatics of narrative texts. The combination of dialogue and narrative in Jacques le fataliste lends itself to such an approach. This is particularly important because the distinction between pragmatized discourse and de-pragmatized narrative has been extended by many theorists to a link between discourse and the spoken, and narrative and the written.37 Despite extensive work on oral narratives and the employment of narrative in contexts other than those of display and performance, the spoken-discourse, written-narrative pairs underlie many of the associations between medium and pragmatic situation made by theorists. Level two of Jacques le fataliste reflects the pattern of development of oral narratives through interaction between narrator and audience. As interruptions to narrative, passages of dialogue between the narrator and narratee could be viewed as re-entry to a world of discourse which is suspended in the narratives. But the dialogue between narrator and ‘lecteur’, or narratee, is almost exclusively concerned with the process of story-telling itself. Their roles are defined and redefined according to their relative power over the progress of the stories in the text. Narrative does not suspend the relationship between narrator and teller, but is the source of their relationship and their conflict. The relative power and status of these anonymous fictional figures is not equal in their textual encounter. Diderot’s narratee is motivated by personal desires concerning the story to be told, while the narrator draws on his role- generated power as story-teller to regulate the telling of his stories and to switch from one story to another. He also claims that he is subjected to a higher authority, that of truth. The progress of the story is continually under negotiation between narrator and narratee with obligations on both sides. The narratee must surrender the floor to the narrator: ‘tout auditeur qui me permet de commencer un récit s’engage d’en entendre la fin.’ (84) The narrator must attempt to conform to the wishes of the narratee (provided that these are not in conflict with the goal of obedience to the truth). The narrator acknowledges the power and wishes of the narratee in a number of areas. These may relate to points of ‘vraisemblance’, such as the debate on his presence at the inn (discussed on p. 29), or ‘bienséance’: N’allez-vous pas, me direz-vous, tirer des bistouris à nos yeux, couper des chairs, faire couler du sang, et nous montrer une opération chirurgicale? A votre avis, cela ne sera-t-il pas de bon goût?… Allons, passons encore l’opération chirurgicale […] (38) They may involve the choice of story to be continued next:

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Et vous, Lecteur, parlez sans dissimulation; car vous voyez que nous sommes en beau train de franchise; voulez-vous que nous laissions là cette élégante et prolixe bavarde d’hôtesse, et que nous reprenions les amours de Jacques? Pour moi je ne tiens à rien. (128) The narrator may also submit to the general tastes of the narratee: Et puis, Lecteur, toujours des contes d’amour; un, deux, trois, quatre contes d’amour que je vous ai faits; trois ou quatre autres contes d’amour qui vous reviennent encore: ce sont beaucoup de contes d’amour. Il est vrai d’un autre côté que, puisqu’on écrit pour vous, il faut ou se passer de votre applaudissement, ou vous servir à votre goût, et que vous l’avez bien décidé pour les contes d’amour. (191) However, the narrator repeatedly asserts his power over the telling of the text: ‘il ne tiendrait qu’à moi de vous faire attendre un an, deux ans, trois ans, le récit des amours de Jacques’ (24), and ‘Que cette aventure ne deviendrait-elle pas entre mes mains, s’il me prenait en fantaisie de vous désespérer!’ (26) The narrator presents himself as subordinate to truth, but not to the reader, whose enjoyment of the story is dependent on the narrator’s goodwill: Vous concevez, Lecteur, jusqu’où je pourrais pousser cette conversation sur un sujet dont on a tant parlé, tant écrit depuis deux mille ans, sans en être d’un pas plus avancé. Si vous me savez peu de gré de ce que je vous dis, sachez-m’en beaucoup de ce que je ne vous dis pas. (28–9) This manoeuvre threatens the narratee’s future freedom of action, by placing him under obligation to the narrator. Gratitude is demanded. Thus, while the interest of the stories in the text is ideational, their telling is shown to be regulated by the interpersonal. In level three, too, power relationships are not fixed. The roles played by master and servant are variable, both in dialogue and narration, and do not necessarily correspond to their social positions. In this world level, a fluid power relationship exists across narrative and dialogic exchange without an absolute break between the two. These two levels of narrative reflect the conditions of oral story-telling described by Polanyi (1982). Her account illustrates how narrative and dialogue, story and conversation are interwoven in a fully pragmatized context of situation. The situation she describes of story-telling at a dinner party displays striking similarities to the level-three narratives of Jacques le fataliste. In neither the twentieth-century non-fictional case, nor the eighteenth-century

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series of fictional linguistic events, is the pragmatic context of interpersonal relationships fully suspended by the switch between dialogue and narrative. At level one, in which Diderot as writer of narratives and dialogues presents his texts to an audience, the power of direct commentary or intervention is not available to his audience. However, the links described above between levels one and three (see p. 28), and the nature of the narratee’s interventions at level two, suggest that the silent reader and the linguistically active narratees of the text are not dissimilar.38 Like the narratee, the reader has certain desires and makes speculations concerning the progress of the narrative, however dissimilar these may be from those of that fictional construct (see Eco 1987:214–17 on inferential walks). And like the listeners to narratives in the TAW, the reader has the power (not granted to the narratee on the second level) to walk away from the text, to be distracted. Jacques le fataliste demonstrates how far the reading of the written, the fictional and the narrative, involves entry into a pragmatized relationship with the producer of the text. Narrative texts have their own sets of power relationships, they are not interpersonally neutral. The overt power relationships enacted between fictional tellers and receivers may be fictional, but they invite the readers of the text to situate themselves and the author in relation to these fictional voices, in particular those of the narrator and narratee. Diderot’s text makes the relationship between these figures explicit, and therefore open to question, but the vestiges of this pattern of interpersonal engage ment are to be found in the framing of the novels discussed in this book. In the text world of Jacques le fataliste, story-telling is an integral part of social action. As Diderot’s narrator remarks, people go to public hangings to enable them to tell stories: ‘Il va chercher en Grève une scène qu’il puisse raconter à son retour dans le faubourg: celle-là ou une autre, cela lui est indifférent, pourvu qu’il fasse un rôle, qu’il rassemble ses voisins, et qu’il s’en fasse écouter.’ (189) The iterability of texts is one which occurs across the spoken-written divide as part of human behaviour. The link between dialogue and narrative extends to the inferences which can be drawn from the degree of formality of each. The structure of the dialogues is that of adversarial philosophical dialogue, usually associated with formal language.39 But they display a level of informality more commensurate with private conversation than with such socially authorized ritualized combative patterns, France’s ‘polite garb’ for potentially rebarbative ideas (see p. 25). Likewise, the narratives under discussion embrace the semantic domains of philosophy, sexual adventures and gossip. A double script of interaction is thus imposed on both dialogues and narratives, in which the dominant conflict is between formality and informality, between socially sanctioned roles and independently negotiated roles. This division is greater than either that between the spoken and the written, or that between discourse and narrative.

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Paper chains to nowhere Although the above characteristics of Jacques le fataliste display its affinity with direct interpersonal exchange, more features than typographical play signal its written status. Diderot’s text also conforms to Couturier’s observations on eighteenth-century English novels where the printed text becomes a means for the writer to conceal his identity (1991:65–92). In France, the conventions of literalism were increasingly subject to ironic treatment as authorship of fictional prose was no longer synonymous with the witness function.40 But the written medium of Jacques le fataliste not only allows the concealment of authorial identity, it also allows a perturbation of chains of origin. Two textual chains run through the world levels of Jacques le fataliste. One extends to the discourse world of level one and is produced by the parodic citation of actual-world texts (by Sterne, Caylus, Voltaire, Cervantes, Rabelais et al.). The principle of authority of this chain is not that of truth-conditional reproduction in which authority lies with the earliest text, but that of creative production. Earlier texts become material for the weaving of the individual and personal creation of the writer of the latest text. The other is a literalist chain of priority of physical texts (given an additional dimension by the printed form of the text). Our physical text is consequent on the manuscript of Jacques le fataliste, which is presented in the level two narration as consequent on a previous manuscript which is consequent on the events of level three. This literalist chain thus presents a known existent, the text of Jacques le fataliste (either printed or manuscript), as the last ‘redite’ of a chain of non-existents. The principle of authority in this chain is one which points to a pre-textual truth, in which the original witness figure has greatest authority by virtue of his or her physical presence at the event. It can be seen in the oral chains of re-telling in level three: ‘je vous la raconterais tout comme leur domestique l’a dite à ma servante […], qui l’a redite à mon mari, qui me l’a redite’ (107). Here, the duty of the producer of a later text is to reproduce earlier text faithfully. Thus, the chain susceptible to actual-world verification is that which depends on the building of text as artefact and on attention to the personal and individual position of the author of the parodying text, the hypertext (see Genette 1982:14). Conversely, the chain which allows no actual-world verification, because it is founded on non-existents, is that which depends on the original event and the original document. Intertextual authority Although the generic models for Jacques le fataliste are susceptible to different readings (see pp. 17–23), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is signalled as a dominant model. The relationship between the two texts is produced not only by direct transformational parodic passages, and the recurrence of topoi and similarities in

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the digressive narrative patterns of each, but also by the fact that both operate by a process of multiple regressive parody. However, regress of authorship and authority, like the chains of authority between narrator and narrated world, can be inverted. Diderot’s text formally inverts the process of the central parodic citation by Sterne of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?’ (1967:339) In Sterne’s account of parody, the old is poured into the new vessel, conforming to our current notion of parody as reframing, and Burton’s text is poured into Sterne’s. But Diderot’s structural use of Tristram Shandy enacts the opposite process, as the new of Jacques le fataliste is poured into the frame of the opening and closing direct transformational parodies of Sterne’s novel. Any unidirectional inter-textual authority is subject to reversal.41 The relationship with Tristram Shandy does not, however, exist simply as the first link in a continuous chain of texts. For instance, links to texts by Cervantes and Rabelais are made both through the mediation of Sterne’s text, and through direct relationships.42 Jacques le fataliste thereby becomes part of a network of texts in dialogue with each other, not as dyadic interchange, but as a perpetual movement of interaction. For the reader, to engage with the debates of Jacques le fataliste is to engage in multiple loops with debates already active in the context of culture. Moreover, the link to Tristram Shandy opens up relationships which go beyond individuated lineage to a much wider world of story-telling. The final parodic transformation of Sterne’s text, the love scene with Denise, reworks an incident described by Tristram as one which ‘contained in it the essence of all the love romances which ever have been wrote since the beginning of the world.’ (1967:549) Here, individual creative authorship is situated in an arena of collective experience in which the search for origin as authentication cannot be resolved by proof of the presence of a singular and prime mover. Yet Jacques le fataliste also exploits the cultural perception of authorship as an individual and singular linguistic act which brings both responsibility and rights of ownership. At the end of the book, an editorial voice condemns the Sterneian love scene as copy and plagiary (288–90). This occurs in a passage which links the inter-textual and literalist chains in an impossible short-circuit of textual authority in which the hierarchies of neither can be preserved. The creative authority of parody is undermined by its framing as faithful copy, while the reproductive authority of literalism is undermined by its framing as an imitation of creative fiction. The fragile edifice of a text built on conflicting authority patterns is brought down. Here Diderot who, like Gousse, has only one body, exploits the written medium to split the authority of the discursive voices of the text and conduct a trial against himself as both recorder and creator.

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Literalist authority In most of Jacques le fataliste, the authority of the narrator is not founded on the literalist chain of physical text but on the principles of performed telling (described on pp. 32–3) into which the writtenness of the text intrudes only occasionally. Focus on the problem of the relationship between fictional world and actual world concerns the non-identity of worlds, not the non-identity of fictional teller and author: ‘Celui qui prendrait ce que j’écris pour la vérité, serait peut-être moins dans l’erreur que celui qui le prendrait pour une fable.’ (35) Attention is drawn to the status of the story, not the teller: Vous allez prendre l’histoire du capitaine de Jacques pour un conte, et vous aurez tort. Je vous proteste que telle qu’il l’a racontée à son maître, tel fut le récit que j’en avais entendu faire aux Invalides […] et l’historien qui parlait en presence de plusieurs autres officiers de la maison, qui avaient connaissance du fait, était un personnage grave qui n’avait point du tout l’air d’un badin.43 (81) The temporal and spatial disjunctions between levels two and three, too, invite the questioning of the stability of worlds rather than the stability of voice. With the introduction of the literalist chain towards the end of the text, though, the illusion of the singular performing voice is gradually broken. Initially, the introduction of an anonymous original manuscript text simply interposes another layer of telling between the reader and any posited originating events in the story of Jacques and his master: ‘la vérité, c’est que l’Engastrimute est de moi, et qu’on lit sur le texte original: Ventriloque’ (234). This remark is soon followed by a more obvious one: Il y a ici une lacune vraiment déplorable dans la conversation de Jacques et de son maître […] Il paraît que Jacques, réduit au silence par son mal de gorge, suspendit l’histoire de ses amours; et que son maître commença l’histoire des siennes. Ce n’est ici qu’une conjecture que je donne pour ce qu’elle vaut. Après quelques lignes ponctuées qui annoncent la lacune, on lit […]44 (235, my italics) The commitment to faithful reproduction and the sincerity of a singular narrative voice is preserved. Nevertheless, this late introduction of a new contract of verisimilitude destabilizes the authority structures of the text predicated on the illusion of narratorial presence in the TAW. The epistemological security of a narrator who sometimes knows more than his protagonists, and who can supplement his stories from other sources (‘On ne vous a pas dit qu’elle avait jeté au nez du

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marquis le beau diamant dont il lui avait fait présent; mais elle le fit: je le sais par les voies les plus sûres’, (171–2)), is replaced by a less comfortable relationship between story and teller. Moreover, the revelation of the existence of a manuscript produced by another writer raises the question of the limits of transcription and addition. What has been read as a singular source emerges as double source, shedding retroactive doubt on the origin of the text so far. In this fictional world, there is no means to ascertain whether the dialogues between narrator and narratee and the sub-world stories in level two are transcriptions or additions. Responsibility for them cannot be assigned to a single fictional text producer. The narrator who left Jacques and his master asleep already defied the temporal logic of ‘récit’ and ‘histoire’, now he also defies literalist logic. Faith in the literalist chain is impossible, but faith in the illusion of authorial voice is also shaken. The splitting of text and voice is repeated at the end of the book and is complicated by the link to Sterne’s intertext (see pp. 38–9). The story of Jacques and his master is broken off by the narrator: ‘Et moi, je m’arrête, parce que je vous ai dit de ces deux personnages tout ce que j’en sais.’ (287) The literalist pattern is initially reinforced by this voice: ‘D’après des mémoires que j’ai de bonnes raisons de tenir pour suspects, je pourrais peut-être suppléer ce qui manque ici’ (288). The narrator commits himself to a ‘mûr examen’ of these, to be followed by a verdict on their veracity. The conclusions he draws, however, explode this security. Two of the three ‘paragraphes’ (the first and third) are deemed to be authentic but are nevertheless subverted by the mock-commentaries of the narrator. The second, which has the formal characteristics of the rest of Jacques le fataliste (parody of Tristram Shandy; combative dialogue between narrator and ‘lecteur’) is rejected as false. Here, ‘une lacune déplorable’, which hinges on the impossibility of singular originating voice, opens up between all authority patterns. The voice which condemns and that which is condemned are indistinguishable from each other. Whereas the accounts of the ‘authentic’ paragraphs are achieved by summary and very selective direct citation of the words of protagonists, the false paragraph is partly presented as a clear direct citation of the manuscript. The first half is the transformational parody of the passage from Sterne’s text. The second is a debate between narrator and narratee which is given as the ultimate proof of inauthenticity: Le plagiaire ajoute: Si vous n’êtes pas satisfait de ce que je vous révèle des amours de Jacques, Lecteur, faites mieux, j’y consens. De quelque manière que vous vous y preniez, je suis sûr que vous finirez comme moi.—Tu te trompes, insigne calomniateur, je ne finirai point comme toi. Denise fut sage.—Et qui est-ce qui vous dit le contraire […]? (290)

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We know these voices. ‘Engastrimute’ or ‘ventriloque’, Greek or Latin, Diderot produces a doubling of voices from the belly of his text and sets them in impossible opposition to each other. Participants Author and readers Despite the strong appeal of the dialogues of Jacques le fataliste as models for a relationship between writer and readers, such contextualized interactions between two individuals cannot be neatly mapped to the discursive selfhood of participants. While the proliferation of story-tellers and audiences in levels two and three invites an acute awareness in the reader of the dynamics of participant roles, the building of participant identities is subject to the same processes of separation and confluence as are other aspects of world-building. The writing is there to be read, as the TAW is available for the philosophical readings of Jacques and his master, but the possibility of access to an originating author is as remote as the possibility of access to what is ‘écrit là-haut’. Nevertheless, belief in the maker of the text as an existent does not require the same leap to faith as belief in the Creator: we need not anthropomorphize what is already human. Jacques le fataliste, like all the texts discussed in this book, is subject to the conditions of circulation of the written text. In this context, the textual patterns of proposition and counter-proposition of conversational exchange are not evidence of actual interaction between participants, but part of the linguistic activity of one participant, the writer, to which the readers of his audience respond. The relationship of text to participants is asymmetrical; as has been proposed in chapter one (pp. 9–10), author-function and audience-function are very different. The author’s discursive selfhood is produced by performance in language and the cognitive activities of the members of the audience in relation to that performance. Readers construct authorial positions from their extra-textual assumptions concerning the relationship between author and text. Such constructions include a view of the public text as an element in the discursive identity of the author.45 The reader’s discursive selfhood is not produced by performance in language to another, but by the language-based activity of reading. While the text may signal a number of reader positions, it cannot be read as a public manifestation of reader identity, only as an invitation to the reader to construct this identity in a particular way. Participation in the language event for the reader thus includes the construction of discursive selfhood in relation to the public text, but the reader’s absence from the text is of a different order from that of the writer. As Schuerewegen remarks: Alors que derrière tout narrateur il y a un auteur (et peu importe ici si le premier est ou non à l’image du second), les signaux qui construisent le

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narrataire donnent d’abord sur un espace d’incertitude, espace que vient parfois mais non pas toujours occuper le lecteur capable de s’y installer, de s’y sentir chez lui. Le narrateur est l’indice de la présence ou, plus précisément du passage de son créateur; le narrataire n’est lié au lecteur que par une forme d’iconicité toujours incertaine. (1990:17) Further, it is important to distinguish between interactions at different world levels. As has been suggested, the dialogues and narratives of levels three and two are no more exact reflections of each other than they are of level one. A place for the author? Without doubt, the issue of authorship is part of the ‘text situation’ of Jacques le fataliste (see Werth forthcoming: chapter 3.4). It is impossible to engage with this text without regard for the discursive identity of its writer. The text world of Jacques le fataliste displays the dual nature of discursive selfhood. Language production is presented through the script of the search for a creative originating voice as source and locus of coherent meaning. It is also presented as interaction between socially situated individuals who perform rhetorical roles and acts in a cultural community. Both these discursive identities are action-based. As Jacques’ condemnation of the portrait suggests (see p. 33), the construction of identity is founded on the interpretation of actions.46 The tension between the spoken and the written does not produce any simple dyadic split which associates spoken interactions with secure origins and written relationships with regressive absence. On the contrary, the treatment of the interactive voices of participants in spoken dialogue and narrative is subject to the same regress of authority as intertextual patterns. If there is any transcendent selfhood in this text, it is not located in singular voice. The multiple fictional voices of the text, both named and anonymous, are presented as the repeaters of the words of others. Voice, whether physical or metaphorical (embodied or disembodied) is fragmented and multiply sourced (see pp. 40–1).47 But language, in Jacques le fataliste, is also willed construction. This construction does not have, as its sole goal, the production of propositions about the world. It also has the goal of sociability. ‘Faire écouter son voisin’ is as important as ‘raconter les faits’ and ‘rendre fidèlement les propos’. The discursive selfhood of Diderot, as producer of the text of Jacques le fataliste, can be constructed on a principle of transcendent immanence, of an unknowable presence which is dispersed in the patterns of the fictional world in which fictional voices are only one element. But it can also be relativized as part of a broader context of text production. The play between inside and outside, between text and context is not arrested. Discursive selfhood is thus more than an ‘implied author’, either in Booth’s sense (1961) of an intentionally projected selfhood in language, or in the sense of the author implied by the text. It is also

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produced by the inferences the reader makes in reading. Such inferences are not built only from the language of the text but from other schemata of knowledge, belief, experience and desire. Dieckmann (1961:111) equates the narratorial and authorial voices, reading the dialogue form as a signal of orality, authorial presence and an invitation to the ‘commerce’ of social interaction. Others (such as Kavanagh 1973 and Chabut 1989) produce readings founded on the rejection of centred presence. Whatever these contrasting readings reveal about the cultural context of their production, the susceptibility of Jacques le fataliste to both illustrates the degree to which a fictional text can invoke interpretive schemata claimed by their exponents to be incompatible.48 Readers The relationships between the reader and textually produced reader roles of Jacques le fataliste illustrate the problems of the composite singular extradiegetic figures of narratological theory, predicated on a view of the narrative situation as a communication between two individuals. In the novels discussed in this book, even those which include direct address to a narratee, these figures cannot be read as primed and singular characters which are present as stable fictional existents throughout the text.49 Jacques le fataliste designates a narrateerole (‘lecteur’) which is more prominent than that of any other text discussed. This narratee’s response to the narrative is textualized through narratorial anticipation (‘Voilà, me direz-vous’ (81); ‘On objectera peut-être’ (289)); narratorial citation through tagged feedback (‘Je vous entends, Lecteur: vous me dites’ (189)); and untagged direct speech (‘—Entrèrent-ils dans ce château?’ (43)). But this role cannot be said to be occupied by any single figure, and indeed the ‘on’ of the above anticipatory example and the pluralization of ‘vous’ (‘Vilains hypocrites, laissez-moi en repos.’ (230)) contradict the singular address of ‘lecteur’. Nor do the various narratee positions necessarily correspond to the implied reader of the text. While the narratee’s questions in the opening pages, which concern the basic orientation elements of narrative, allow narratee and textually produced reader positions to merge, other questions are presented as a negative model for the reader. In such instances, the transcendent conflation of narratee, implied reader and actual reader becomes impossible. At its most simple, the divergence of narratee and implied reader can serve as a reminder that the written text is not addressed to an audience of one but to a heterogeneous audience. To promote or to condemn a particular reader position is to acknowledge the potential for other reader positions. But the dynamics of the relationship between the reader and textualized figures (whether audience figures or narrating figures) and between individual reader and the audience can become more complicated than this, as textualized individual and multiple reader positions enter into play with hypothetical constructs of reader and audience and must be mediated by actual readers.

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Iser and Chambers agree in their views on the relationship between reader and text in that both consider the reader role to be constructed through reference to multiple textual positions. Iser’s account suggests that the tension of reading is productive of a move towards transcendence (1978:35), while Chambers concentrates on the split between two constructions of reader subjectivity as both ‘tiers exclu’ and ‘tiers gaudens’ (1991:26–34). For Chambers (1991:27–8), the reader is not the addressee, the ‘narratee’, the object of narrative seduction, but an eavesdropper who can also be allied with the narrator. This reader, so to speak, is a party to both of the instances (subject and object) engaged in the act of seduction, which is what makes readerly involvement a third position in the system (and not simply a repetition of one of the others). (1991:28) This corresponds to Hobson’s account of the relay structure of the eighteenthcentury concept of ‘papillotage’ in art criticism, which she links to aletheia as a concept of representation (1982:52–6 and 121–40). Whether a reader is ‘tiers exclu’ or ‘tiers gaudens’, very different aspects of the reading habits of audiences come into play at different moments in the text, and while the final judgement of a text by readers will be informed by all these moments, each moment must be negotiated separately, and on different terms. When each reader asks ‘who am I to be?’ (see Chambers 1990:157–8), the answer does not necessarily involve the specific delineation of a singular and continuous role. The points in Diderot’s text at which divergence between narratees, implied readers and actual readers opens up a considerable space for reader positioning are those where socially taboo language or subjects are raised. In the most extended and explicit discussion of obscenity in Jacques le fataliste, the narrator links this issue to the more general issue of reception and evaluation of texts in the field of culture. Diderot places a double accusation in the mouth of the ‘lecteur’. The first ground for accusation is that of obscenity: ‘Comment un homme de sens, qui a des moeurs, qui se pique de philosophie, peut-il s’amuser à débiter des contes de cette obscénité?’ (229) This is answered by the narrator’s enumeration of ‘great works’ of literature which have been sanctioned by their inclusion in the canon but include obscene features. The second ground is one of aesthetic value: ‘Et votre Jacques n’est qu’une insipide rapsodie de faits les uns réels, les autres imaginés, écrits sans grâce et distribués sans ordre.’ (230) The second part of the narrator’s defence links these two accusations, requiring the positioning of the implied reader against the narratee and with the narrator in relation to both accusations. But the accusatory narratee position in this passage is not presented as an isolated and exceptional voice; it is equated with a wider hypothetical public reaction to the text. In the narrator’s response to the first accusation, narratees are

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divided into two categories: ‘Si vous êtes innocent, vous ne me lirez pas; si vous êtes corrompu, vous me lirez sans conséquence.’ (229) In the second, the hypothetical consequence of the accusation is expressed in terms of a broader audience rejection of the text: ‘Tant mieux, mon Jacques en sera moins lu.’ (230) Here, the individual accusations of the narratee are linked to a much wider relationship between a narrator (explicitly equated with Diderot as author of Jacques), and an audience which judges a text before reading on the basis of the judgements of others (this audience presumably includes the recalcitrant narratee). Space is opened up between the negative judgements of a mass of readers against which the members of an élite group (such as those who read the Correspondance littéraire) can be set. Heterogeneity is not, however, confined to the undesirable narratees and the audiences they represent. Because of the double grounds for approval (both authorization of the transgression of principles of ‘bienséance’ and of the narrative processes of the text), readers who side with the narrator against the narratees are required to make judgements in very different fields, in which being true to Diderot may involve being false to themselves. In the second part of the passage, Diderot justifies his transgression of ‘bienséance’ on the grounds of a ‘vraisemblance’ which directly touches the positive face of his plural and hypothetical audience, inverting the dynamics of imposition set up by the narratee’s accusation:50 Lecteur, à vous parler franchement, je trouve que le plus méchant de nous deux, ce n’est pas moi. Que je serais satisfait s’il m’était aussi facile de me garantir de vos noirceurs, qu’à vous de l’ennui ou du danger de mon ouvrage! Vilains hypocrites, laissez-moi en repos. Foutez comme des ânes débâtés; mais permettez-moi que je dise foutre; je vous passe l’action, passez-moi le mot.51 (230) A narratee position of strength, in which the audience judges the text producer, is converted to one of weakness in a demand for self-judgement. But what is the implied reader position here? It is on the ground of hypocrisy that the separation of bad narratees and good implied readers is invited, not on that of vigorous sexual activity. The splitting of the implied reader position between narratee and narrator entails a further multiplication of positions. The reader as arbitrator between narrator and narratee positions in the public text of Jacques le fataliste is also required to mediate between his private activities, his public persona (which follows social convention in not discussing these), and the possible roles of hypocrite and fornicator. In Diderot’s text, not only Gousse and the author conduct prosecutions of themselves, so must the reader. The reader is nevertheless allowed apparent freedom of manoeuvre in this selfexamination and in the decisions he makes concerning his own face and that of Diderot Self-interrogation is encouraged as a positive feature of discursive selfhood. But freedom is itself revealed at the end of the passage to be an illusion.

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The debate as it has been presented so far has concerned the future public reputation of Jacques le fataliste. The text’s inclusion or exclusion in a canon of authorized texts is in the hands of its audience. But Diderot, at the end of the passage, reveals that the second part is a parodic transformation of an essay by Montaigne: Courage, insultez bien un auteur estimable que vous avez sans cesse entre les mains, et dont je ne suis ici que le traducteur. La licence de son style m’est presque un garant de la pureté de ses moeurs; c’est Montaigne. (231) The authorization to be given has already been given. The reader’s decisions are thus subjected to the same tension between original willed acts and repetition of previous acts as writing. The illusion of individual free choice by the reader is removed, and his ‘à dire’ becomes the ‘redite’ of an established collective authorization. Diderot’s text invites the reader to engage in debate, not only with the writer, but with other members of the audience and with his own beliefs. The iteration in the dialogue of Jacques le fataliste of the dialogues of earlier texts, whether by Montaigne or Sterne, by Caylus or eighteenth-century philosophers, produces an intertextual field of interpersonal dialogic moments. Each reader is invited to consider what particular parasitic noise of interference he may bring to the narratives. The discursive selfhood of the reader, like that of Diderot, is caught between acts of individual free will and the iterative processes of the discourse world he inhabits.

3 ‘THE NOVEL’ AS WE KNOW IT? Balzac’s Le Père Goriot1

Reputations Balzac’s novels have long had exemplary status in the history of the French novel. The shadow of the monumental network of the Comédie humaine stretches across the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Le Père Goriot (1835) was written at a time when the project of the Comédie humaine was in its embryonic stage. At this time, the conventions of Balzac’s novels had still to be established, let alone accepted by a contemporary readership. Now considered typical of the first mature phase of Balzac’s writing, Le Père Goriot has gained prototypical status in the French canon as an exemplary text by an exemplary writer. Critical approaches to Balzac in the past twenty years have attempted to redress the weighting of assumptions that the Balzacian text represents an unproblematic realist model against which the instability of the modernist novel can be set.3 The relationship between writer and audience in this period is marked by an increasing distance and anonymity as a result of the circumstances of production and circulation of texts, and by a shift in the author-function.4 The shift from the literalist authority of the story-teller as witness to the omniscient authority of the heterodiegetic narrator, combined with the loss of the protective shield of culturally sanctioned knowledge systems and forms of communication, leave the author ‘entièrement responsable d’une opération individuelle qu’il est sommé de légitimer preuves à l’appui.’ (Vanoncini 1984:206) Le Père Goriot demonstrates the processes of this reformulation of generic conventions, interpretive conventions, and grounds for authority which will ultimately result in the emergence of the Balzacian text as a new conventional model for literary expression and interpretation in the novel. The prefaces to the first two book editions of Le Père Goriot situate this text in the wider context of Balzac’s other novels and demonstrate that it continues a process of reconfiguration of aspects of register already embarked upon by Balzac. The innovation of his work is often associated with the shift in the semantic domain of the TAW from that of the personal and sentimental novel and of the historical novel to a contemporary social history.5 This shift would

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still situate the text in the tradition of the study of ‘moeurs’, whether manifested in the novel of education, the worldly novel, or in the non-narrative form of maxims. Although Balzac’s novel relies heavily on these traditional models, as will be shown, it also transforms these sources of authority, rewriting the relationships between literary text-types and the context of culture (see Prendergast 1978:175–8 and 184–5). Balzac’s readers therefore need to be persuaded that existing conventions are not only traditional, but also outmoded, and that there is a need for their reformulation.6 Le Père Goriot invites the equation of the narratorial and authorial voices. Nevertheless, the contrast between the ironic voice and stance of the prefaces and that of the main text suggests that the latter is a public voice, assumed for the duration of the novel, which cannot be attributed to a private individual speaking in his own name. Judgements of authorial responsibility therefore rest on the degree to which the execution of this role as a mediating voice between fictional world and discourse world corresponds to authorized models. The signals of interpersonal persuasion in Balzac’s novel are overt. The opening pages of the text, its incipit, contain a metadiscursive discussion of genres and the relationship between the text and the discourse world. They set up a script for interaction between author and audience based on the didactic model and justify it through a focus on certain aspects of the cultural context. The way in which this novel points to a specific pragmatic context for reading can be viewed in the 1990s in a dual perspective. In the cultural climate of the 1830s and the decades which followed, the setting up of such a context can be seen as a necessary feature of the text, a survival tactic. But looking at the history of the reception of Balzac’s novels to the present day, it can also be perceived as a contributing factor in the persuasion of successive reading publics of Balzac’s mastery of the text world and of literature. The inter-generic field of competition set out in the text ceases to function as a rhetorical strategy in a struggle for dominance not yet won, and is instead read as post hoc proof of the novel’s dominance of the field. And the textually created interpersonal function of teacher and student is transmuted into a culturally created confirmation of the stature and authority of Balzac and his vision. Explicit self-situation in a cultural context and the appeal to the didactic model have the potential to create a rigid framework of dictatorial ‘lisibilité’ which is counterbalanced by the absence of an explicit or categorical formulation of alternative criteria for reading and by the transformation of the didactic model. As in the preface to La Peau de chagrin (1831), Balzac does not complete his condemnation of existing generic models ‘par une présentation du genre qu’il entend créer lui-même’ (Vanoncini 1984:135). The transformational combinations of realist description, melodrama, comedy and tragedy, too, produce a flexibility of generic patterns. And as the universalizing force of the maxims associated with the didactic model lies more in their form than in their conformity to a stable contextual doxa, the interpersonal narrator-narratee patterns and the link between the learning roles of reader and fictional

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protagonists cannot be reduced to singular static relationships. Although the twentieth-century reader may welcome this liberation from the constraints of traditional generic patterns and the didactic model, it should nevertheless be recognized that the absence of a concluding moral lesson in the text can be problematic, and that many readers, among them major critics, choose to fill the interpretive gaps at the end of the novel with their own closures, whether aesthetic or ideological (see pp. 68–9). This chapter considers how Balzac’s novel signals a cultural context and a model for reading which enable the shift in status from territorial outsider to authorized occupier of generic and literary space. It concentrates on two areas of contextualization: the patterns of metadiscursive reference to other texts as a means to stabilize and justify the transformational appropriation of generic models, and the exploitation and transformation of the didactic model, not only in Balzac’s much-discussed use of the maxim, but in the wider patterns of the text.7 A poetics of competition Balzac’s metadiscursive references to other text-types situate his book both synchronically, in relation to contemporary forms, and diachronically, in relation to past writers. The literary arena is thus part of the ‘text situation’ which is in focus in this novel (see Werth forthcoming: chapter 3.4). Synchronic competition The incipit of Le Père Goriot contains the highest concentration of direct generic allusions in the book. These allusions are linked to the delineation of reader-roles which will be discussed below (pp. 58–72).8 Here, a dense taxonomy of genres sets up a relationship of intergeneric competition but the relationships between Le Père Goriot and this generic map cannot be constructed according to a principle of exclusion and inclusion. ‘Histoire’, ‘drame’, ‘fiction’, ‘roman’, and ‘poésie’, are subjected to a process of mutual qualification (847–8). ‘Histoire’ is the descriptive term which is least subject to qualification in this incipit. Beyond its general application as ‘story’, the now-standard realist techniques of the opening description, with its explicit references to dates and extra-fictional locations and its use of the present tense, link Balzac’s text to contemporary history. And this long opening paragraph of the novel culminates with the claim that ‘All is true’. The whole paragraph is thus framed by a relationship of similarity between fiction and history, constituted by the ‘effet de réel’ and the assertion of the referential truth of the text.9 However, the final statement of ‘truth’ is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, clearly attributed to the playwright in early editions through an epigraph on the title-page. Even in subsequent editions in which the epigraph

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has been replaced by the dedication to the biologist Saint-Hilaire, the alien language and typography mark it as a citation, not as direct proposition.10 To quote Shakespeare in the 1830s was, inevitably, to assert a position on the side of Stendhal, Hugo and the Romantic dramatists against the adherents of classicism in the contemporary debate on the theatre, and to join the call for a new set of aesthetic principles which ran counter to principles of purity and unity.11 Thus what appears to be ‘history’ turns out to be ‘drama’, at least for Balzac’s earliest audience. But although Balzac may appropriate the principles of the new drama, insisting on ‘ce drame’ as a descriptive term for his text, his narrator refuses any association between his ‘drame’ and that of contemporary theatre in ‘ces temps de douloureuse littérature’. ‘Cette histoire’ is not ‘dramatique dans le sens vrai du mot’ (847). 12The power of the dramatic frame of reference is demonstrated by the response of the reviewer in Le Courrier français of 15th April 1835, which draws on the theatrical model, but not to Balzac’s advantage. He explicitly compares the model of paternity in Le Père Goriot to those of Shakespeare and Sophocles: ‘Mais pour l’honneur de la nature humaine, en regard de deux filles perfides et barbares, Gonerill et Regane, Shakespeare avait placé Cordelia, fille pieuse et dévouée […]’. The reviewer suggests that the anger of Lear preserved ‘l’honneur de la paternité’, while ‘Monsieur de Balzac, au contraire, n’a rien accordé à l’honneur de la paternité; le père Goriot n’a point d’Antigone qui le console, point de colère qui le venge’ (see Castex 1963:xiv). A further set of generic allusions, which are apparently distanced through negation, appear at the end of the paragraph. However, accusations of exaggeration and poetry are presented as the anticipated responses of an undesirable reader (discussed on pp. 59–60), and are thereby obliquely acknowledged as features of the novel (see Bridgeman 1996:13). A transformational version of this passage would read: ‘my book contains exaggeration and poetry, but this does not mean that it has no relevance to the reader’s actual world’. Indeed, Balzac has already proposed that the ‘exorbitant’ is a necessary feature of any book which attempts to arrest the attention of the Parisian reader, for the valley of Paris is ‘si terriblement agitée qu’il faut je ne sais quoi d’exorbitant pour y produire une sensation de quelque durée’ (847). Allusion to the novel appears yoked to fiction in the form of a double assertion of difference: ‘ce drame est ni une fiction ni un roman. All is true’ (848). This double denial is embedded between two positive assertions which, as has been shown, are not full expressions of identity; the drama is not a true drama, and the truth of the book is not historical but literary. The assertion of non-identity echoes the traditional eighteenth-century devices of literalism and recognizes the continued association of ‘romans’ with what Diderot described as insipid tales of love.13 The suggestion of degrees of truth, ‘si vrai’, follows the pattern of Rousseau’s claims that the fiction of the ‘romanesque’ is truer than truth (see Hobson 1982:117). The denial of fictional status is thus relativized, pulling the parallel denial of generic identity with it. Moreover, as Prendergast points out, the whole of this network of generic reference must be read in relation to the

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interaction with the hostile reader set up in this last part.14 ‘Fiction’ and ‘roman’ become grouped with ‘poésie’ and ‘exaggeration’ as excuses for the bad reader to perceive the text as an amusement. These are not neutral labels, but counters in the debate between author and audience, just as the function of ‘drame’ is to induce ‘quelques larmes’ in the good reader. These allusions which close the opening paragraph complete the process of destruction of the purity of any generic reference. Prose is drama, but not quite. Story is history, mediated through the dramatic history of Shakespearian theatre, yet not concerned with kings and queens but the private history of Goriot. Goriot’s ‘secrètes infortunes’ are poetic and exaggerated, but have social implications. Fiction is not fiction as the reader knows it and if this is a novel, it is a new sort of novel. A competitive relationship emerges between Balzac’s text and other forms of literature. In the incipit, competition with the theatre is dominant, and is sustained through later reference to the illusion of the theatre: Ces pensionnaires faisaient pressentir des drames accomplis ou en action; non pas de ces drames joués à la lueur des rampes, entre des toiles peintes, mais des drames vivants et muets, des drames glacés qui remuaient chaudement le coeur, des drames continus. (855) In this passage, the manifest artifice of the formal theatre is presented as an inhibition to belief in the theatre of human society.15 Its occurrence in the midst of a series of descriptive portraits of the ‘pensionnaires’ and the ‘pension’ suggests that the ‘drame continu’ of life is better represented by description which has the power to express a silent drama beyond speech. The actions of protagonists can be integrated in a milieu as a means (for those with the ability to see) to understand the complexities of the workings of human nature and society. The competition between Balzac’s aims and those of the Romantic poets is not fully expressed in the incipit, but receives attention later in the novel. Whereas theatre is appropriated to the text, ‘poésie’ is treated ironically in a discussion of the inevitable association of love and money in Parisian society. Here, the collocation of ‘poésie’ and ‘amour’ is debased by that of ‘luxe’ and ‘richesse’: ‘Le luxe du sentiment est la poésie des greniers; sans cette richesse, qu’y deviendrait l’amour?’ (1031) The double denotation of ‘greniers’ as the grain-stores of the consumer society and the poor poet’s attic further compromises poetry. ‘Poésie des greniers’ also serves as the initiating figure for an amplification on the theme of the individual who attempts to escape social engagement and preserve purity of feeling: S’il est des exceptions à ces lois draconiennes du code parisien, elles se rencontrent dans la solitude, chez les âmes qui ne se sont point laissé entraîner par les doctrines sociales, qui vivent près de quelque source aux

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eaux claires, fugitives, mais incessantes; qui, fidèles à leurs ombrages verts, heureuses d’écouter le langage de l’infini, écrit pour elles en toute chose et qu’elles retrouvent en elles-mêmes, attendent patiemment leurs ailes en plaignant ceux de la terre. (1031–2) Here is the solitary Romantic poet who draws his inspiration from nature and who, in rejecting society, can do no more than await death and elevation to the ranks of the immortals. Such a figure has no place in Parisian life. The passivity of such a solitary figure is clearly contrasted with Rastignac’s vigour: ‘Mais Rastignac […] voulait se présenter tout armé dans la lice du monde; il en avait épousé la fièvre, et se sentait peut-être la force de le dominer.’ (1032) The linking image of ‘poésie des greniers’ also binds the poet’s inactivity to selfindulgence, and self-delusion. This association is confirmed retroactively in the final section of the book, as Delphine constructs a nostalgic tale of the past innocence of childhood, undermined by the connotation of a happiness constructed on unearned wealth: ‘Où sont les moments où nous dégringolions du haut des sacs dans le grand grenier?’ (1047)16 The relationship between Balzac’s novel and contemporary prose forms is presented slightly differently and is marked by a silence with regard to French writers. Scott is alluded to directly (954), but as a writer concerned with the past, not the present. The fictional world of Fenimore Cooper, too, receives a mention (939), but its exoticism is sufficient to preclude direct competition. More general allusion is made to prose and poetic texts of exploration and exoticism in the famous apostrophe to Paris. The depths of the city will always offer ‘un antre inconnu, des fleurs, des perles, des monstres, quelque chose d’inouï, oublié par les plongeurs littéraires.’ (856) Here, the mystery of nature in Gray’s Elegy (1751) is displaced by the mystery of Paris. Le Père Goriot is also in competition with the supernatural mystery of the Gothic novel.17 The opening pages display overt competition with the genre in the suggestion that the revelations of this novel are as terrible as those of a traveller’s descent into the catacombs of Paris, translocating the mystery and the marvellous of the Gothic novel to the physical and social world of Paris itself. Balzac develops the structure and imagery of a descent into darkness and the unknown out of an apparently historically accurate portrayal of the descent of the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève (848). The fantastic universal traveller becomes the Parisian, and the singing guide invested with strange power is not Maturin’s Melmoth (1820) but Vautrin who, like Lewis’s monk (1796), can pass through locked doors, but who is also subject to the social constraints of the forces of order of contemporary Paris. A threshold is crossed, but it is between social spheres, not between the natural and the supernatural. The marvellous thus joins the exotically mysterious in Paris.

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Diachronic evolution Balzac makes his most explicit metadiscursive claim to canonic status for his work on the basis of historical social change: Les hommes arrivent, par une suite de transactions de ce genre, à cette morale relâchée que professe l’époque actuelle, où se rencontrent plus rarement que dans aucun temps ces hommes rectangulaires, ces belles volontés qui ne se plient jamais au mal, à qui la moindre déviation de la ligne droite semble être un crime: magnifiques images de la probité qui nous ont valu deux chefs-d’oeuvres, Alceste de Molière, puis récemment Jenny Deans et son père dans l’oeuvre de Walter Scott. Peut-être l’oeuvre opposée, la peinture des sinuosités dans lesquelles un homme du monde, un ambitieux fait rouler sa conscience, en essayant de côtoyer le mal, afin d’arriver à son but en gardant les apparences, ne serait-elle ni moins belle, ni moins dramatique. (954–5) This passage provides an overt justification for those aspects of Balzac’s work which might lead to a threat to the author’s face on the basis of immorality, firmly attributing the responsibility for the TAW to the state of the actual world which is brought about by historical circumstances. But this mimetic association is also framed by reference to literary texts. Moreover, these are not just any literary texts but ‘chefs-d’oeuvres’. The expression of admiration for Molière and Scott invites the reader to attribute equivalent status to Balzac’s text. This invitation is hedged about with negative modalizations which express modesty. Identity between Le Père Goriot and ‘l’oeuvre opposée’ is not overtly asserted, and the opening ‘peut-être’, combined with the negative conditional ‘ne seraitelle ni […] ni’, further attenuates any assertion of Balzac’s brilliance. Furthermore, the whole of this narratorial intervention occurs in the middle of a paragraph dealing with Rastignac’s reactions to his encounter with the ‘beau monde’. By avoiding the paragraph-initial or paragraph-final position of many of his more sententious narratorial remarks, Balzac grounds this defence of his own work as a supplement to events in the TAW, enhancing the modesty and deference of the narrator’s stance. This self-promotion, presented as hypothesis, is interesting in that Balzac justifies his ‘peinture des sinuosités’ on aesthetic grounds: ‘ni moins belle, ni moins dramatique’ (remembering that the function of the ‘drame’ is ‘faire pleurer’). The contrast of the ‘ligne droite’, with ‘sinuosités’, is both moral and aesthetic. In choosing a playwright and a novelist as his precursors, Balzac reaffirms the legitimacy of his own cross-generic techniques, his right to draw on all genres of literature in his creation of the ultimate form of literature, the Balzacian novel.

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The relegation of Scott to the past by virtue of the historical periods of his fictional worlds prevents any notion of direct competition between the two writers. The relationship between old and new literature as one of simplicity versus complexity is reinforced by the extremely selective treatment of earlier novels. One of the most overt manipulations of the tradition of prose texts lies in Balzac’s lack of reference to eighteenth-century fictional texts which resemble his own. The worldly novel, for instance, epitomized by the works of Crébillon and Duclos, is barely mentioned, despite the similarities between this model and Le Père Goriot. As Bennington has shown (1985), such texts employ sententiousness to present an alternative form of education in the workings of ‘le monde’. Although these texts are chiefly concerned with the establishment of a social code of love, this, like Balzac’s, is a subversive code which runs counter to the moral codes of official pedagogy. Balzac makes a single dismissive reference to such texts in his description of the statue of Love at the entrance to the ‘pension’: ‘A voir le vernis écaillé qui la couvre, les amateurs de symboles y découvriraient peut-être un mythe de l’amour parisien qu’on guérit à quelques pas de là.’ (849) Firmly situating ‘l’amour parisien’ in the distant past of decaying myth, Balzac also distracts the reader from reflection on the similarities between eighteenth-century novels of worldly education and his own text by alluding to a pedagogical and subversive writer not celebrated as a novelist: Sous le socle, cette inscription à demi effacée rappelle le temps auquel remonte cet ornement par l’enthousiasme dont il témoigne pour Voltaire, rentré dans Paris en 1777: Qui que tu sois, voici ton maître: Il l’est, le fut, ou le doit être. (849) So much for the eighteenth century! The reader is left with an image of the novel of Parisian love which is directly associated with classical and mythical idealism, not with the libertinage of so much eighteenth-century writing. Although Balzac supplants the central topos of seduction with that of social ambition, the techniques of persuasion employed by Balzac and his subversion of the institutional codes of a moral pedagogy bear a strong resemblance to the texts which are dismissed in summary fashion. The opening description also includes the specific rejection of an earlier pedagogical fictional text, Fénélon’s Télémaque (1669), whose ‘classiques personnages’ depicted on the ‘salon’ walls are a backdrop for the falsely aged ‘cabaret en porcelaine […] que l’on rencontre partout aujourd’hui’ (850), and are the source of the jokes of the ‘pensionnaires’. The mythological subject matter of Fénélon’s text is emphasized. Its relevance to contemporary society is thus reduced to its commodification as a part of a superficial fashion for the

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antique. Balzac’s choice of Télémaque is interesting in that it was the only novel acknowledged by eighteenth-century pedagogues as ‘vertueux’ (see Bennington 1985:92–95), marking an exceptional coincidence between the emerging form of the novel and institutional educational aims. He thus chooses an exceptional text as his normative model of the eighteenth-century novel, enabling an exaggerated oppositional relationship between old and new.18 Self-promotion The overall effect of Balzac’s synchronic and diachronic references to generic models is to establish difference and distance. References to contemporary literature involve the incorporation of the different (drama, Fenimore Cooper) and the rejection of the similar (fiction, ‘roman’). Past models are shown to be firmly of the past. Examples from potentially similar texts, such as the pedagogical novel, are chosen for their difference and distance, Scott is shifted to the past, and Molière can be included because of the difference of genre, while the similarities in Le Père Goriot to aspects of the work of each reinforce the status of his text. Balzac’s use of allusion calls for canonic membership in a particular way. Balzac could have justified the processes of his own text through reminders to the reader of anti-canonic precedents in prose writing (as Diderot does). But instead he refers to a tradition of texts which were either always institutional, or have been firmly integrated into a subsequent institutional canon (going back to Homer in the first preface). By doing so, he implies that the difference between his own text and these earlier texts is not that of subversive overturning by a subgenre but the result of an historical shift in the terms on which the canon should be based. This is reinforced by the contemporary landscape of fiction painted by Balzac. By refusing the association of his text with the still inferior forms of fiction and ‘roman’, by appropriating the theatre and history, which are both rivals of fictional prose, by rejecting the lack of social involvement and egotism of the Romantic poet, Balzac does not present his text as an emerging sub-genre, struggling against the dominant modes of the early nineteenth century, but as the major mode of writing of his time. These features of Balzac’s text show how far the dynamics of reading are context-dependent. In the context of the 1830s, self-promotion can be seen as a counter-weight to the destabilization of the models of reading which are transformed and incorporated in the text. But as his works and those of his contemporaries become included in an emerging concept of the literary text, the justificatory proposal of a cultural context becomes proof of an existing state of literature. The tensions between modes of reading do not, however, disappear, and may resurface in a cultural climate such as the current one which questions the relationships between epistemologies, discourses and social institutions.

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Exploiting the didactic model The aspect of Le Père Goriot which links cultural epistemological systems to the interpersonal function is its appeal to the didactic model. This model combines a focus on the ideational and the interpersonal metafunctions (see Leckie-Tarry 1995:43). As a result of the paternalistic dimension of this model, its predominant effect could be assumed to be the creation of an interpersonal stability which counteracts the tensions between traditional models of meaning-making produced by the multi-generic patterns of the text. Since the development in the past century of an aesthetic preference for reflectorized narrative, such narratorial intervention in non-homodiegetic narrative, except when it exposes its own impossibility or facticity, has been considered to have the aesthetic indiscretion of a support garment worn on the outside.19 An extreme example of this attitude is to be found in Barthes’s rejection of the ‘lisible’, proposing his own stereotypification of Balzacian stereotypes as a source of ‘écoeurement’ and ‘intolérance’ in the reader (1970:104). Schuerewegen, too, perceives the ‘mise sous tutelle’ of the reader as an extreme move leading either to submission to the writer’s will or to the rejection of the proposed relationship (1990:28).20 However, as Genette has pointed out (1969:79–86), the propositional stability of many of the sententious pronouncements in Balzac’s novels is dubious. Further, as Rossum-Guyon emphasizes, in a different context, while the terms ‘expliquer’ and ‘peindre’ are used to designate the narration of Balzac’s novels, matched reciprocally by ‘comprendre’ and ‘voir’ in the field of reception, establishing a cognitive basis for reading (1980:136), such meta-fictional signals of the explanatory function of Balzac’s texts, like those of genre, may not be mirrored in the dynamics of the texts themselves. This gap between signals of explanatory power and lack of explanation can be viewed as a subversion of the generic model of the didactic text. In itself, the destabilizing of the taxonomy of genres contributes to this process by blurring the generic map, as does the absence of any promotion of the imitation of the work of past masters. Combined with the non-conformity of the novel to the evaluative patterns of this model or its parodic counterpart, these features suggest a more ambiguous relationship than that proposed by Barthes or Schuerewegen.21 The rest of this chapter explores these ambiguities, and considers the various effects of the presence of this model on reading. Negotiating roles The authority of the narrator in Le Père Goriot and the relative roles of narrator and narratee are presented in the incipit in such a way as to reduce a number of potential threats to the reader’s face, while establishing, in a non-confrontational way, why the readers of this novel have a need for the narrator as guide. Moreover, by representing more than one sort of audience in the text, Balzac reminds his audience of its own diversity and multiplicity.22

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The narrator-narratee relationship is handled more gently than the competition with other genres in the incipit. Judgements of the discourse world and of other texts may be presented with positive shading, as assertions, but judgements of the hypothetical audience and its potential reactions to the text display negative shading (see Simpson 1993:55–76). The narrator may be qualified to make assertions concerning the state of literature and the world, but makes no direct demands on his audience, falling back on cajolery rather than command, on nonspecific definitions of the reader as participant, and on the effacement of signals of direct imposition. The readers portrayed by Balzac in this incipit are shown to be desirable, but not ideal. Exploiting the established division between Parisian and provincial readers, Balzac portrays each group as lacking in one of the two essential qualities of the ideal reader: feeling or understanding. But these audience profiles are dictated by geographical and social circumstances, not by individual qualities. The provincial reader may not understand the workings of modern society (‘Serat-elle comprise au delà de Paris? le doute est permis’ (847)), while the Parisian, who has the opportunity for superior understanding, is caught up in the mechanisms of Parisian civilization and has little chance of being allowed the space for reflection and emotional response: even if his is a ‘coeur moins facile à broyer’ (848). Balzac thus turns the multiplicity of his audience to his own advantage, setting its members in competition with each other, not with himself, while protecting the self-image of each group. This audience profile accounts for the provincial reader’s need for a sententious narrator but not the Parisian’s. The latter’s need is based on the specialized nature of the semantic domain of the novel. Balzac’s TAW is a secret world, the unacknowledged underside of urban society. The Parisian’s need for a guide is established by ‘secrètes infortunes’, and reinforced in the next paragraph: ‘Un Parisien égaré ne verrait là […] Nul quartier de Paris n’est plus horrible, ni, disons-le, plus inconnu.’ (848) The Parisian can be excused his ignorance of this world because it is not his world, although it is proposed as contiguous with it. This excuse for the reader’s ignorance also acts as a protection against epistemological challenge to the narrator, who has exclusive knowledge. While the incipit demonstrates the audience’s need for the Balzacian narrator, Balzac’s treatment of possible response to the text is marked as suggestion not prescription. There is a strong contrast in narratorial stance towards the broadly defined audience of unknown potentially cooperative readers and the clearly defined and apostrophized bad narratee, the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’. There is also a marked contrast to the aggressive irony of Balzac’s prefatory attacks on his critics. Balzac’s prefaces were written after the initial appearance of his book in serial form, and are therefore not anticipations of possible reader-response, but replies to actual readers’ responses. In them, he employs an ironic voice which is far removed from the paternalistic narrator of the main text. The disparity between the ironic stance of the prefatory voice and this cooperative narrator

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highlights the degree to which the Balzacian narrator’s position is a positive gesture towards the reader.23 The responses which Balzac asks of his audience are wide-ranging. In addition to understanding, he asks for an emotional response (not of laughter, but of tears), and for self-examination.24 Although demanding in their range, these responses are reassuring in their reiteration of the responses of an earlier literature founded on the dual functions of ‘instruire et plaire’ in a tradition going back to Horace. Despite their conventional nature, these requirements are presented in a form which attenuates any suggestion of imposition. References to anticipated reactions to the text are marked by negative epistemic modalizations, the disindividuation of the reader, transitivity patterns which suppress the agency of the narrator, irrealis verb forms expressing speculation (see Fleischman 1990a:104) and interrogatives.25 We thus encounter the series: [P]eut-être aura-t-on versé quelques larmes […] Sera-t-elle comprise au delà de Paris? Le doute est permis […] il faut je ne sais quoi d’exorbitant […] chacun peut en reconnaître les elements chez soi, dans son coeur peutêtre. (847–8) The final demand, for self-examination by the reader, is the greatest. It potentially threatens both negative face (rights to freedom of action) and positive face (self-esteem). This demand on Balzac’s audience follows the direct and aggressive address to the hostile narratee: Ainsi ferez-vous, vous qui tenez ce livre d’une main blanche, vous qui vous enfoncez dans un moelleux fauteuil en vous disant: Peut-être ceci vat-il m’amuser. Après avoir lu les secrètes infortunes du père Goriot, vous dînerez avec appétit en mettant votre insensibilité sur le compte de l’auteur […] (848) This narratee’s reactions to the text are the antithesis of the feeling the narrator has already promoted. But, despite all the appearances of a bald on-record threat to the reader’s face presented by this address, the chances of any committed reader identifying with this greedy and indifferent narratee, and thereby feeling threatened by the narrative, are minimal. For, encouraged by Balzac’s delicate invitations, such a reader has already embarked on a reading contract which bears no resemblance to the response of this figure. Here, as has been seen in Jacques le fataliste, the roles of narratee and implied reader are split. The position of the implied reader at this point in the text can be described as that of receiver, but not addressee, who witnesses an address from the narrator to another, less cooperative figure (see Schuerewegen 1990: 22–5).

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But this ‘pre-emptive strike against the critical and indifferent reader’ (Prendergast 1978:185) is not redundant.26 Not only does it serve the function, suggested by Prendergast, of ensuring that poetry and exaggeration are accepted as an integral part of the text by the engaged reader, it also encourages such a reader to read against the social constraints of literary consumerism and enhance his self-image. Further, it shows a narrator who contrasts with the benign and attentive figure so far displayed. The revelation of a hostile narrator acts as a veiled threat. It reminds the reader that the narrator’s suppression of his own power is voluntary and reversible, and places the audience in his debt. It also pushes the reader to accept the final and most problematic reader role suggested by Balzac in ‘All is true, il [ce drame] est si véritable, que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi, dans son coeur peut-être.’ (848) There are a number of conflicting signals in the presentation of this demand on the reader. Its overall position, as the final sentence of the first paragraph of the book, gives it ‘end-focus’, indicating its significance in the contract of reading (see Walter Nash 1980:107–8). But the syntax of the sentence, with its trailing clauses, places the call for self-recognition in a weak position which contrasts with the assertion concerning the truth status of the text. These clauses are packed with attenuating hedging devices. We first encounter an indication that this FTA is not personal: ‘chacun’ suggests a universal response which contrasts with the specific ‘vous’ of the undesirable narratee. ‘Chacun’ combines two of Brown and Levinson’s attenuating strategies: the use of indefinites and universalization.27 Balzac also employs the weak modal ‘peut’—we can recognize, we are enabled to recognize, but we do not have to recognize such elements in ourselves—thereby allowing his audience a let-out. The most personal aspect of the threat, ‘dans son coeur peut-être’, is further relativized through its appearance as the final qualifying auxiliary phrase. And, while the position of this threat within the paragraph allows it end-focus, the final element of the proposition itself is the equivocal modalizer ‘peut-être’. Simpson demonstrates that such post-posed modalization allows the preceding clause to be read without negative shading (1993:60). As a result, here, the attenuation is not built into the FTA of ‘dans son coeur’ but follows it. This contrasts with Balzac’s previous use of ‘peut-être’ as a pre-posed modalizer (‘peut-être aura-t-on versé quelques larmes’ (847)). The paragraph thus ends with a moment of withdrawal of narratorial commitment. The individual aspect of ‘chacun’ and the link to feeling situate the text within a class of texts which involve a personal education, and which are conventionally grounded in a moral framework. They suggest that the tears to be shed intra muros, are those of contemplative personal reading, and not just the extra, the mass audience’s response to the pathos or thrill of a theatrical process in which distant protagonists are subjected to a cruel or comic fate.28 The reader will be provided (by Balzac) with information which should arouse his interest, which he is called on to interpret, to understand, and to respond to emotionally, in a process which involves not just his contemplation of a text

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world external to himself, but one which he carries within himself. According to the incipit, then, this novel is not just about learning a fictional world or learning society, but about learning the self. However, the ‘bouc émissaire’ of the undesirable narratee allows the reader’s self-image to be enhanced, and the promise of poetry and exaggeration allow him to anticipate a pleasurable read which will sweeten the pill of education. The activities of acquiring information through interested observation; interpreting such information in order to arrive at understanding; extrapolating the implications of the individual plots of the novel to more general applications in society; and avoiding emotional indifference are repeatedly referred to in the course of the text. In addition to the sententious evaluations made by the narrator, each of which recalls the contract of the incipit and pulls the locus of interaction away from the fictional world towards the actual world,29 Balzac’s text is populated by evaluating and interpreting protagonists. Within the schema of the proposed contiguity of actual world and TAW, in which the latter reveals the former, the scripts of interpretive behaviour and emotional response by the protagonists become comparable and contiguous to our own.30 Such a process is, of course, inherent to much didactic fiction, whether in the form it takes here, or in the more distinct form of allegory. The continuum projected by the text between TAW and actual world thus includes the processes of teaching, knowing, understanding and interpreting these worlds, while the conclusions drawn about the fictional world stand as the ‘truer than facts’ message concerning the actual world (see p. 51). The general appeal to the patterns of the didactic model does not, however, entail conformity to this model. It has already been suggested that there is an absence of overt moral judgement in this novel, and that the maxims of the text do not correspond to the doxa. In addition, the telic movement of the action of the novel is not mirrored by a move towards a concluding lesson for the book.31 Narratorial explanation and judgements are gradually withdrawn as the book progresses and become increasingly ambiguous. Moreover, although Rastignac initially appears as a possible model for the reader, as the central learning figure in the TAW, a gap emerges between roles as the novel progresses. The action pattern of Le Père Goriot leaves Rastignac as sole surviving main male protagonist, freed from the ‘tutelle’ of his teachers, and looking down from Père Lachaise on Paris. But though Rastignac may be the winner in the action of the novel, and may seem to fit the role of model hero and model learner, he is not the model reader as set up in the incipit. He moves from emotional response to understanding but he does not achieve the synthesis of the two qualities. He has simply passed from provincial audience to Parisian audience. The protagonist’s path is thus closer to the metafictional pattern of the release of the new genre from the constraints of the old than to the learning path of the reader outlined in the incipit, despite the parallels between this completion of apprenticeship and that of the reader.32

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Scales of imposition Two diminishing sliding scales of imposition can thus be seen in the course of this-novel. The first concerns the imposition of the narrator’s authority with respect to the four reader-activities proposed by the incipit. Maximum imposition of authority relates to the narrator’s superiority of knowledge and ability to interpret information (although the power relationship this implies between writer and reader is minimized by attenuating strategies, as will be shown). Here, it is the narrator who is presented as the ideal reader to be emulated by the potential reader. But the models for emotional response are not so clearly set out, beyond the reiteration of the condemnation of indifference. And while the narrator suggests that the particular details of the TAW are examples of general principles governing society, the personal and individual position of the reader and the results of self-examination are not dictated by the text, representing a minimum of imposition. The second scale of imposition involves the shift from a high manifestation of narratorial authority at the beginning of the text, to a diminished manifestation at the end (reflected in Schuerewegen’s remarks, see note 20). These decreasing scales of imposition can be seen as a recognition of the problems presented by the link which Balzac asks the reader to make between the TAW and the actual world. The reader is bound to the narrator in a process of cooperative investigation which associates their powers of observation and interpretation and places them above the protagonists, thereby enhancing the reader’s positive face. But no single model is provided in the text to guide the reader’s response. The gradual removal of authoritative guiding figures from the text (both narrator and protagonists) defends Balzac against the accusation of a tyrannical imposition of a monologic doctrine, for any conclusions relating to the ‘lesson’ of the text must be supplied by the reader. This section traces the treatment of the requirements of ‘savoir’, ‘comprendre’, ‘pleurer’ and ‘reconnaître dans son coeur’ in the course of the novel. In presenting the TAW as one unknown to the majority, Balzac’s narrator traces an access route from the known to the unknown which moves between shared extra-fictional frames and the fictional entities of the text. Having set up a TAW which draws on actual-world referents (Conflans, 1819, Paris), and having moved out of this world to conduct the general discussion on genre and reader roles, Balzac uses a mobile topographical descriptive ‘parcours’ to take the reader back into the TAW. As the Paris of the narrator and narratees is transformed to the Paris of the protagonists, the referents of ‘on’ and ‘vous’ are transformed from the narratees to unnamed observers in the TAW. In the opening section of the book, Balzac creates anonymous audience figures in the world of the text who are associated with the discourse-world inhabitants of Paris. The first sketchy observer figure we see in the TAW is directly linked to the Parisian reader of the opening paragraph through his habitual indifference (‘L’homme le plus insouciant s’y attriste comme tous les passants’

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(848)), allowing any indifferent reader to redeem himself and join those who already consider themselves to be part of a caring audience. And the circumstantial nature of ignorance is again affirmed: ‘Le beau Paris ignore ces figures blêmes de souffrances morales ou physiques.’ (856) Again, the narrator’s role as provider of unknown information is emphasized. Although none of Balzac’s middle-class readers can be expected to be fully familiar with the actual-world equivalent of the ‘pension’, it is nevertheless presented as geographically and physically accessible to all comers. In particular, in the opening description of the ‘pension’, we encounter the repeated use of the ‘vous’ form, as well as the impersonal ‘on’, allowing the extra-textual reader full access (‘vous voyez’, ‘On entre’ (849)), and the use of the ‘vous’ form lingers as we pass through the ‘salon’ and the ‘salle à manger’ (851). The omniscience of the narrator is thus shared with his readership as they penetrate this world together, and typicality emphasized. Physical access to the world of the novel does not, however, guarantee knowledge. A number of the inhabitants of this world make ‘possible-world’ speculations on the lives of others which are shown to be erroneous because they are founded on insufficient knowledge (see Eco 1987:214–17, on such ‘inferential walks’). We learn not to trust such readings, but Balzac often delays narratorial revelations of TAW facts, especially those relating to Goriot and Vautrin, producing a delay in the resolution of the reader’s ‘hesitation’ typical of the Gothic novel and creating suspense (see Todorov 1970:29). Because he employs an extradiegetic narrator, such delay cannot be justified through the verisimilar device of the limitations of the intradiegetic witness-narrator’s knowledge. Instead, he employs Rastignac as a focalizer to control information flow. We thus encounter literalist assertions that it is only through the young man that we know this story: Sans ses observations curieuses et l’adresse avec laquelle il sut se produire dans les salons de Paris, ce récit n’eût pas été coloré des tons vrais qu’il devra sans doute à son esprit sagace et à son désir de pénétrer les mystères d’une situation épouvantable, aussi soigneusement cachée par ceux qui l’avaient créée que par celui qui la subissait. (854) Likewise, without Rastignac’s friendship with Goriot, the narrator asserts, ‘il eût été sans doute impossible de connaître le dénoûment de cette histoire.’ (959) Such remnants of a literalist technique of verisimilitude are intermittent, but by making such assertions, Balzac contrives to fudge the divide between literalist guarantees that Rastignac is the source of information, and the non-literalist powers of the omniscient heterodiegetic narrator to penetrate the protagonists’ world and thoughts. Despite the presence of ‘sans doute’ in each of these assertions as a signal of potential irony (not towards Rastignac, but towards the convention), and the

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reader’s full awareness that Rastignac is only an intermittent focalizer, on whom we are not dependent for information on the TAW, Balzac exploits the trope of Rastignac’s progressive ‘discovery’ of his world to regulate the pace of revelation. The model of educational narrative is conducive to the progressive penetration of a mystery, in which the lack of initial exposition of ‘the facts’ is not the result of the caprice of the narrating, teaching voice, but of the limited knowledge of the pupil. Balzac also uses his protagonists in a more general fashion to show how ignorance can be circumstantial. Even the best of readers among the protagonists, Mme de Beauséant and Vautrin, may be confounded by the nonavailability of information. Mme de Beauséant’s status is threatened by the fact that she does not know what the rest of Paris already knows, that her lover is to marry, while Vautrin’s manipulative control of others suffers a serious setback (in his arrest), because he fails to discover Michonneau and Poiret’s treachery in time (1003). The availability of information, and its necessity for the adequate interpretation of the text, is referred to in a metafictional commentary concerning the identification of Gondureau as a policeman at the opening of ‘Trompe-lamort’. The passage treats the question of interpretation of evidence both within the TAW and at the level of the discourse. Here, protagonists and readers are separated. Interpretive failure in Poiret is presented as the consequence of his character, while the hypothetical audience’s misreading of the former’s failure as ‘invraisemblable’ is portrayed as the result of the unavailability in the public domain of supplementary information on human behaviour. Balzac’s narrator first demonstrates that the accusation of ‘invraisemblance’ is not the reaction of a hostile or malicious reader, but is the natural reaction of all readers. ‘A qui ne paraîtra-t-il pas invraisemblable […]?’, he asks. Although scepticism is emphasized as natural it is proved wrong by a greater natural truth, recorded by ‘certains observateurs’, but which ‘jusqu’à présent n’a pas été publiée.’ (984) In this, no blame attaches to the reader, whose understanding is inhibited not by lack of intellect, but only by the unavailability of the facts. Once Balzac has made these available, ‘[c]hacun comprendra mieux’. He then launches on a huge metaphorical explanation, mixing geographical, botanical and biological terms with theological and literary references. This passage is exceptional in its direct acknowledgement of a possible critical reader-reaction to the text from the majority of readers. It appears to refer to a real threat to Balzac’s face, which is successfully overcome without imperilling the face of the reader. But this acknowledgement of the reader’s freedom of interpretation and potential hostility to Balzac is illusory, in this context at least, for Poiret has already been classified as one of the ‘superficiels’ of the ‘pension’, one of ‘ces vieillards indifférents à ce qui ne les touchait pas directement’, who accept figures such as Vautrin at face value (859). An accusation of ‘invraisemblance’ in relation to this detail of the story is therefore unlikely.

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Balzac’s elaborate contradiction of the hypothetical reader’s reaction is thereby transformed into a confirmation of an opinion already held by his audience. An apparent threat turns out, in this instance, to be a variation on Balzac’s heuristic use of the maxim and TAW evidence (Falconer’s ternary ‘action nouvelle ou bizarre/doxa/reprise de l’action’, (1980:92)). Moreover, here, the sententious passage does not clarify and guarantee the action, rather, the action guarantees the narratorial commentary. In itself, the enormous metaphorical complex which Balzac offers as an apparent explanation of Poiret’s behaviour is confused and confusing. But because the reader already considers this behaviour to be logical and consistent within the TAW system, he is likely to extend his judgement of behavioural logic to the more dubious logic of explanation. This passage has a set of functions which exceed the demonstration of selfevidence. Coming as it does at the beginning of a section, it can be seen as a mini-incipit, a reminder to the reader of the circumstances of reading, reiterating Balzac’s attention to his face needs, and confirming his position in the hierarchy of observers as superior to that of the protagonists. In suggesting that most readers, whatever they have learned from the text so far, are still in need of the elucidations of the narrator, it also introduces a hierarchy of readers. For, the reader who has not judged Poiret’s ignorance to be lacking in verisimilitude (probably most actual readers) can consider himself superior to those who do, while appreciating the narrator’s concern for those less fortunate than himself. This fresh reminder to the reader of his membership of a large and varied group encourages a tolerance of the imposition of Balzac’s sententious voice as a necessary feature of a text addressed to a broad readership. It reinforces the connections between Balzac’s novel and non-fictional studies of society, confirming an authority beyond that of personal invention. The scene which follows Balzac’s assertion that standard expectations may be overturned in this novel provides further confirmation of this. For, in this comic scene, Poiret disrupts and confounds the pattern of the revelation scene by failing to recognize the conventional literary signals of revelation and draw standard implications from them. The ‘reality’ of human nature thus undermines an accepted fictional pattern. Interest and knowledge are only the first steps to understanding in Le Père Goriot, and the first section establishes the narrator as the reader’s guide in this. Here, Balzac’s well-known use of description, not as a realist guarantee, but as a means to interpretation is at its most dominant.33 While interpretations later in the novel shift increasingly towards expository passages presented either by the narrator or one of the protagonists, it is this first section which establishes narrator and reader as fellow explorers of the mysterious world of Paris. The promise of understanding through observation is explicitly made with respect to Mme Vauquer: ‘toute sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne.’ (852) The use of ‘toute’ suggests the possibility of total revelation, despite the fact that the questions raised by the ‘pensionnaires’

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relating to Mme Vauquer’s financial circumstances and her (fictional?) marriage are never resolved.34 Clearly, Balzac’s association of description with interpretation pushes the authority of his text away from himself and towards the TAW, reducing the personal dimension of his narrator’s interpretations. Balzac turns his narrator into a reader of the text world, creating an equivalence between himself and his reader in their shared goals. Schuerewegen suggests: ‘il semblerait que pour Balzac, lire Balzac, ce soit une évidence. Que le texte puisse être lu et compris, c’est ce qui va ici de soi.’ (1990:27) But the possibility of misreading is more manifest in the text than this remark implies. The gap between the understanding of protagonists and the narrator is one which both reinforces the narrator’s authority, and protects the reader from being directly threatened by this authority. Our confidence in the narrator resides in his superiority of understanding over that of the protagonists, rather than in any explicit superiority over ourselves. The failures of certain protagonists’ interpretation and actions are associated with generic models. As Mme de Beauséant attempts to follow the outmoded tragic model of a past age, ending in her withdrawal ‘à la Tourvel’ from Paris and the text, Victorine and Mme Couture exemplify an attempt to decipher the world in terms of the more sentimental aspects of the melodrama and the Gothic novel. Victorine’s potential as heroine is sidelined and ironized: ‘Son histoire eût fourni le sujet d’un livre.’ (857) The melodramatic potential of the death of her mother, ‘qui jadis était venue mourir de désespoir chez elle’ (857), is dismissed in a subordinate clause. Furthermore, Mme Couture’s reading of Victorine’s visit to her father is treated parodically. Here, Balzac blends the vulgarity of popular syntax and lexis (‘A moi, il m’a dit, sans se mettre en colère, tout froidement’, ‘je pleurais comme une bête’) with the hyperbole (‘en disant les plus belles choses du monde et les mieux senties’), extremes of characterization (‘le monstre’, ‘la pauvre défunte’), and conventional scenes (‘La petite s’est jetée alors aux pieds de son père’) and piety (‘Dieu les lui dictait’), of the sentimental novel (all 887). This treatment leaves us in no doubt as to the inferiority of Mme Couture’s reading. However, unlike Flaubert, Balzac offers alternative and superior readings, and eliminates these readers from the text, along with pistols at dawn. The protagonist whose understanding of the world increases as the book progresses is, of course, Rastignac. But, as has been said, the young man’s progress is not shown to be the mirror image of the reader’s (see p. 62). The vade-mecum of the narrator’s commentary allows the reader’s understanding to surpass that of Rastignac, especially in the early stages of the novel in which the use of indirect discourse to summarize Rastignac’s thoughts is justified by their incoherence (900 and 954). Indeed, Balzac resorts in one instance to a transparent reduction of Rastignac’s powers of understanding. This relates to the latter’s interpretation of Delphine’s behaviour. At the theatre, Rastignac naïvely thinks that Delphine is interested in him, while the wiser narrator explains that she is only

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interested in bringing de Marsay back to her side (‘le pauvre étudiant ne savait pas […]’ (953)). When Rastignac comes to this same conclusion, on reading Delphine’s note, we might believe that his powers of understanding are developing. But he is again belittled, as the narrator remarks: ‘Eugène […] ne savait pas que, pour s’ouvrir une porte dans le faubourg Saint-Germain, la femme d’un banquier était capable de tous les sacrifices.’ (962) This does not simply alter the grounds for Rastignac’s ignorance, it disallows anaphoric reference to a previous judgement, keeping the narrator (and the reader) one step ahead of Rastignac.35 For Eugène has already remarked on precisely this characteristic in Delphine: ‘J’ai appris qu’elle ferait tout au monde pour être reçue chez ma cousine’ (960). Even if we interpret this contradiction as a mistake by Balzac, writing furiously for a publication deadline, the epistemological gap between narrator/audience and protagonist appears more important than consistency in ‘what Rastignac has learned’. Rastignac’s powers of understanding remain suspect, even in the final section. The assertion, ‘Au moins, se disait Eugène, Delphine aime son père, elle!’ (1049), is immediately followed by a demonstration of Delphine’s scale of values, with her father at the bottom. Her deeply suspect and calculating rationalization of self-interest (in a vicious parody of Desdemona) is not met with indignation by Rastignac, but with admiration: ‘Eugène resta muet, saisi de tendresse par l’expression naïve d’un sentiment vrai’, and ‘Eugène était frappé de l’esprit profond et judicieux que la femme déploie’ (both 1050).36 The unreliability of Rastignac’s interpretations of the motivations of those around him would not be a problem, were it not that it is accompanied by the reduction in more reliable sources of interpretation. The combined interpretive ranks of the narrator, Vautrin (Jameson’s ‘personnage-traité’, 1980:71) and Madame de Beauséant (supplemented by the Duchesse de Langeais) are replaced in the final section by a confused and delirious Goriot (whose value as a guide is not based on the rational logic of understanding, but on the principles of feeling), his unreliable daughters, and a decreasing number of intermittent and cryptic interventions by the narrator. Castex has remarked on the reduction of the narrator’s presence as this novel progresses, considering it to be replaced by the plot structure of the unfolding tragedy (1963:xlvi). Those maxims which remain lack the clarity of selfevidence manifest in the earlier stages of the novel, and their source is often shifted from the reliable sources of narrator, or teaching protagonists, to less reliable protagonists whose assertions of the doxa are undermined by their characters: ‘il est si facile de lire dans le coeur des gens qu’on aime,’ (Anastasie, 1040–1); ‘La patrie périra si les pères sont foulés aux pieds. Cela est clair. La société, le monde roulent sur la paternité, tout croule si les enfants n’aiment pas leurs pères.’ (Goriot, 1070) For Brooks, this reduction is justified by what he describes as Rastignac’s ‘perceptual progress’ (1976:138). The perceived degree of this progress is significant because the choice which Rastignac will make at the end of the novel

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is one of the few remaining structural features of the didactic model, and it therefore has the potential to demonstrate whether Rastignac has learned his lesson in his Judgement of Paris. This choice is that between obedience to the ties of family (‘ennuyeuse’), a fight to get on in society (‘incertaine’) and Vautrin’s path of revolt (‘impossible’). Explicitly linked to his education, ‘Déjà son éducation commencée avait porté ses fruits’, Rastignac’s immediate reaction to his dilemma is one of cowardice and selfishness: ‘il ne se sentit pas le courage de venir confesser la foi des âmes purs à Delphine’; ‘il aimait égoïstement déjà, ‘il avait ni la force […] ni le courage […] ni la vertu’ (all 1057). In this passage, the distance between the narrator’s and the protagonist’s capacity for lucid judgement appears to be preserved: ‘il entassa des raisonnements assassins pour justifier Delphine’, and ‘Eugène voulait se tromper luimême’ (both 1057). But the passage merges ‘style indirect’, ‘style indirect libre’, ‘style direct’ and ‘style direct libre’ in such a way that the source and reliability of its evaluations are unclear. Brooks reads the last part as a consistent block of free direct and indirect representation of Rastignac’s thoughts, taking the final comparison between Delphine and Tantalus to be a demonstration of the protagonist’s ‘superior lucidity’ in being capable of producing ‘such summary images’ (1976:139).37 It is, however, hard to reconcile this lucidity with the justifications of Delphine’s behaviour earlier in the paragraph, clearly portrayed as an exercise in self-delusion. Brooks’ desire to ascribe authority to Rastignac in the closing stages of the novel is interesting, as it shows to what extent he as a reader feels the withdrawal of the cooperative narrator and attempts to replace the authority of this narrator with that of Rastignac, just as Castex replaces it with the assertion of the triumph of the unfolding dramatic mechanism. Such a reading of the signals of the completion of Rastignac’s education (‘Son éducation s’achevait’ (1062)) and the loss of his erstwhile tutors suggests that the didactic model is alive and well, and living in Paris. But the hero who looks down on Paris from the heights of the cemetery is not the ‘homme rectangulaire’ of a past age. He has developed a strong affinity with the undesirable reader of the incipit. The initial model for emotional response to the revelations of the TAW is certainly Rastignac. His concern for Goriot contrasts with the indifference of the other inhabitants of the ‘pension’ and with the cynicism of Vautrin, whose understanding of the world would appear to preclude excessive sentiment, except, perhaps, towards attractive young men. But Rastignac’s sensitivity as a reader of the stories of others becomes compromised once he becomes engaged in a story of his own. Self-interest dominates family feeling in his treatment of his own family, and his concern for Goriot is in increasing competition with his newfound role as Delphine’s lover. The spectre of the indifferent reader, who leaves the book to dine ‘avec appetit’ haunts the text to the end. At the close of the two major dramas of the novel, Vautrin’s capture and Goriot’s death, this figure is repeated in the text, as we see the ‘pensionnaires’ acting out the greedy and careless reader role.

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Commenting on their behaviour at dinner after Vautrin’s capture, the narrator remarks, ‘L’insouciance habituelle de ce monde égoïste qui, le lendemain, devait avoir dans les événements quotidiens de Paris une autre proie à dévorer, reprit le dessus’ (1021), echoing the ‘fruit savoureux promptement dévoré’ of the incipit. At this stage, Rastignac stands out from the crowd as a figure still preoccupied by Vautrin’s fall. After Goriot’s death, the trope is repeated as the ‘répétiteur’ remarks: Un des privilèges de la bonne ville de Paris, c’est qu’on peut y naître, y vivre, y mourir sans que personne fasse attention à vous. Profitons donc des avantages de la civilisation […] Que le père Goriot soit crevé, tant mieux pour lui! Si vous l’adorez, allez le garder, et laisseznous manger tranquillement, nous autres. (1081–2) And Rastignac is horrified by the ‘pensionnaires’, who are ‘gloutonnes’ and ‘indifférents’ (1082). But Rastignac’s own indifference has already begun to emerge between these two salutory scenes. Despite his knowledge of Goriot’s illness, he, too, is capable of forgetfulness when presented with the attractions of food (and his lover): Eugène ne rentra pas à la Maison Vauquer. Il ne put se résoudre à ne pas jouir de son nouvel appartement […] Il dormit le lendemain assez tard, attendit vers midi madame de Nucingen, qui vint déjeuner avec lui. Les jeunes gens sont si avides de ces jolis bonheurs, qu’il avait presque oublié le père Goriot. (1051) Rastignac’s emotional compromise is not without justification in the text. Just as Balzac has shown sentimentality to be foolish, he increasingly demonstrates how not only the morals but also the emotions associated with the patterns of the ancien régime have no place in the modern world. Pure emotions are linked to the past, whether exemplified by Rastignac’s childhood ‘Sa pensée le reporta au sein de sa famille. Il se souvint des pures émotions de cette vie calme’ (1057), or by the ancien régime figures of Goriot and Mme de Beauséant. The imagery which describes Mme de Beauséant as she exits the text is that of Ovid and Homer, demonstrating her isolation from contemporary society (1059 and 1060). And, as Rastignac remarks: ‘—Madame de Beauséant s’enfuit, celui-ci se meurt, dit-il. Les belles âmes ne peuvent pas rester long-temps en ce monde. Comment les grands sentiments s’allieraient-ils, en effet, à une société mesquine, petite, superficielle?’ (1065) The reader’s response to the tragedy of Goriot’s betrayal by his daughters and his deathbed scene is qualified by the interference of comic elements. In the

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interview which brings father and daughters together (spied on through the keyhole by Rastignac!), the banal interferes with the tension of the encounter: Le père Goriot s’élança, retint la comtesse et l’empêcha de parler en lui couvrant la bouche avec sa main.—Mon Dieux! mon père, à quoi donc avez-vous touché ce matin? lui dit Anastasie.—Eh bien, oui, j’ai tort, dit le pauvre père en s’essuyant les mains à son pantalon. Mais je ne savais pas que vous viendriez, je déménage. (1045) And Anastasie’s rapid exit and re-entry following Goriot’s collapse more closely resembles the banging doors of farce than tragedy (1047). The evocation of two classical tragedies of incestuous love—Oedipus (‘Elles auraient demandé à me crever les yeux, je leur aurais dit: «Crevez-les!» (1072)), and Phèdre, in the image of the father cursing his offspring and then (too late) denying his curse (‘— Mais vous les avez maudites.—Qui est-ce qui a dit cela? répondit le vieillard stupéfait. Vous savez bien que je les aime, je les adore!’ (1072))—only serve to heighten the contrast between such works and the deathbed of Goriot, as Mme Vauquer supplies old sheets for his shroud (1078), the old man grasps Rastignac and Bianchon by the hair, believing them to be his daughters (1079), and the ‘pensionnaires’ refer to the scene as a’petit mortorama’ (1081). While Balzac may have allowed Mme de Beauséant’s departure tragic status unmixed with comedy, he does not do as much for Goriot. As a result, readers’ emotions cannot follow the Racinian cathartic process in a world where tragedy itself is shown to be outmoded. The tears of the reader, sought in the incipit, can only emerge as tears of nostalgic regret for past feeling. The final separation of Rastignac from the ideal reader, who can display both understanding and emotion, occurs in the last lines of the novel. However saintly the pure emotions which produce it may be, his ‘dernière larme de jeune homme’ is diminished by its association with a nervous reaction to the damp. And the grandiose challenge to Paris is undone by the magnitude (or rather insignificance) of his first act of defiance, dining with his mistress, which only repeats the egoism of his attendance at the ball with Delphine as her father lies dying. This final repetition of the trope of ‘read then feed’ seals the transformation of the model. The lingering force of the educational pattern is demonstrated by an almost universal reading of Rastignac’s last act of defiance as the encapsulation of an ‘arrestable’ meaning for the book.38 On the premise that there should be a coda, decipherable in moral and propositional terms, critics and readers across the board conclude that Rastignac’s last acts are exemplary, that 1830s society involves defiance, success, youth domination and ‘parvenir’ (935). But this fits the struggle for generic dominance more closely than the synthesis of the learning paths of protagonist and reader, as has been suggested. The ideational displaces the interpersonal element of the didactic text.

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The resemblance of Rastignac’s final act to that of the undesirable reader empties the traditional educational model of its full force. For it appears that the acquisition of understanding is incompatible with the preservation of feeling. And Rastignac’s lack of self-examination leads us back to the most problematic requirement of the text. Through this loss of the possibility of a combination of ‘instruire’ and ‘plaire’, the reader is deprived of the moral codes which might sustain self-examination. For the utility of such self-examination is no longer linked to the pedagogical model of consequent self-improvement in a safe institutionally formalized context. Once the interpersonal relationship between narrator and reader ceases to follow this pattern, reading becomes a solitary and painful individual act, just as Balzac’s act of creation is deprived of the limited personal liability provided by the public company of codified cultural discourse. The reader who embarks on self-examination finds himself isolated in the confessional, whispering to an unseen and anonymous figure which provides no absolution. Swings and roundabouts The sententiousness of Balzac’s novel thus emerges as a double-edged blade. The reinforcement it provides for the authority of his text brings with it a responsibility which is not only ideational but also social. The cultural status of this model in the 1830s lends authority to the novel, as intertextual allusion supports Balzac’s claims for a revision of the criteria for the canon. But, the space it creates for narratorial guidance also demands the manifestation of a link to the system from which it acquires its authorization. When this link is severed, the association between narrator and authorial voice shifts from a culturally sanctioned role to a more personal responsibility. This chapter has concentrated on only two aspects of self-authorization in Le Père Goriot which appeal to a cultural context. The function proposed for the novel by this text depends on a historical frame of the link between texts and society in which ‘autres temps, autres moeurs’ is extended to ‘autres temps, autres moeurs, autres genres’.

4 THE WRITTEN ARTEFACT AND THE AUTHORITY OF ABSENCE Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Revising expectations Convention shift in Madame Bovary (1857) involves a move away from the authorization of the novel as social commentary through a didactic and socially inscribed narrator, and a shift in the location of aesthetic authority which promotes the text itself as artefact and changes the participant roles of author and reader. This requires not only a revision of the audience’s perception of the function of the novel, but also a revision of the reader’s perceptions of interactions involved in the novel as cultural object. In this shift, the pragmatic circumstances of the circulation of the written text—the mutual absence of writer and reader from each other’s act of writing and reading, and the reader’s awareness of his membership of an audience of many readers—are exploited by Flaubert. Rather than present a fictional world which is consistently mediated by the interpersonal relationship of fictional teller and hearer, narrator and narratee, Flaubert presents the reader with a fictional world which he must interpret through attention to the structure and patterning of the text as a construction in language. Signals of authorial intentionality are dispersed in Madame Bovary, and distributed in such a way that they cannot be associated with a singular, personalized narrative voice. The narrative agent, while preserving greater authority than the protagonist focalizers, is relegated to the status of a textual function which loses its role as the dominant indicator of authorial stance. The interactive pattern of Madame Bovary thus shifts from that between a performing fictional speaker and an audience to the interaction between reader and text.1 The reader thus assumes the dominant participant role, faced with a text which does not link the context of production to that of reception in a simulation of the oral model of linguistic interaction. Unable to adopt a position in relation to an overt authorial position, the reader instead speculates on possible reader positions, setting his own interpretation against those of other members of the audience. The effacement of a cooperative narrator is not in itself a threat to the reading of any text. Indeed, the adoption of the report mode of narration in much of Madame Bovary indicates a similarity with institutional forms of written

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discourse in which there is no obligation to stage a relationship between speaker and hearer. However, the field of Flaubert studies bears witness to Madame Bovary’s resistance to interpretive resolution. Contrasting with the report mode, we encounter extensive use of the iterative imperfect which suspends event-line movement. The imperfect is, of course, also a significant factor in the ambiguating effects of ‘style indirect libre’.2 This is a far cry from Rader’s definition of autonomous written language which ‘aims at ruling out the possibility of misunderstanding in the transference of information between two communicators’, in which the addresser ‘will try not to leave any interpretive work for the addressee to do’ (1982:186).3 The tensions between evaluative stances, generic conventions, report and experience, and world and text, combine with the effacement of overt manifestations of authorial intention through a narrator figure to transfer responsibility for interpretation from the author to the reader. In this respect, this novel fulfils what Eco describes as the task of a creative text: ‘to display the contradictory plurality of its conclusions, setting the readers free to choose— or to decide that there is no possible choice.’ (1992:140)4 However, while Madame Bovary may offer the reader interpretive freedom, accompanied by responsibility for the activities allowed by that freedom, it limits interpretive authority by encouraging two contextual assumptions by the reader associated with the novel as created text. The first is produced by the manifestations of cohesion and coherence which provide a guarantee that the text is a meaningful construction in language. Signals of crafting encourage the reader’s belief that Madame Bovary is a text to be interpreted, not an object on which to impose interpretation. The second is produced by the cultural script of writing as intentional act. Here, the impossibility of establishing a secure account of intention combines with the signals of crafting to remind the reader of a context of production while withholding access to the writer’s participant world.5 Although Madame Bovary stages one sort of death of the author, a death of the possibility of answering the question ‘qui parle?’, we nevertheless read this death as one which is brought about by a human agent.6 Madame Bovary does not overtly refuse the possibility of an originating subject, it refuses the know-ability of such a subject. Rather than compensate for the anonymity of the novel, as Balzac does, through the fictional construction of a form of interpersonal control based on a model of the co-presence of a telling narrator and a receiving audience, the absence of the writer from the context of reading is turned to Flaubert’s advantage. The text itself stands as proof of an authorial act of creation which is not open to question by the reader. Through the absence of any defence of his own status as writer, Flaubert requires the reader to take this status as an unassailable fact which requires no strategies of face preservation. Instead, the burden of proof of positive face is placed on the reader. The strongest evidence of the association between the written and the act of writing is provided by the linguistic patterning of the text itself. Although the narrative lacks signals of a voiced performance involving the co-presence of

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writer and reader, it manifests the presence of a different type of voice. The reading of the written text involves not only the ideational apprehension of the organization of plot patterns in conjunction with typographical divisions into paragraphs and chapters, but also the sonority and rhythm of language as sounded phenomenon. We not only see the pattern of the ‘falling cadence’ (Raitt 1991:15), we also hear it.7 The reading of Madame Bovary becomes a form of listening to and for an absent voice, where listening to language is also listening to the language of Flaubert.8 The remainder of this chapter will explore how Madame Bovary negotiates conventions relating to authority, the question of the status of the text itself in relation to other types of language-use, and the position of the reader in relation to the text. The considerable overlap between these three issues demonstrates the dynamic interaction between author, text and reader. Questions of authority Abrogating two conventions of authority Madame Bovary signals its relationship with two different areas of literary activity, both of which, at the time of its appearance, required the situation of the writer as subject in relation to the text. Novels which took the workings of society as their semantic domain called for the manifestation of a narrator (whether homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, see Genette 1969 and 1983) as the guarantor of a moral and social stance on the part of the author, regardless of the immorality of the events of the TAW (not least thanks to Balzac, and however ironic the staging of such a figure might be). Equally, both Romantic and Realist writers who promoted their work as an art form, founded their claims for the cultural status of their texts on the social authorization of writers and artists as the producers of a subjective vision of the world, whether in the form of the inspired Romantic vision or of the relentless observing eye of Realism. The emerging genre of ‘literature’ as a valued form of text claimed cultural status on the basis of a personal expression of the writer’s experience, whether of nature or society. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s effacement of signals of direct interaction between a staged narrator and narratee led to criticism on both these grounds. The ambiguation of narratorial stance and intention posed the problems concerning the moral position of the author which allowed him to be brought to trial.9 But the fluctuation between a mode of narration resembling the impersonal report form, and the effacement of the narrator in passages of ‘style indirect libre’ also prevented the social sanction of the text as the expression of the subjective vision of the artist. Such a move does not relinquish narrative authority, for epistemically non-modal narrative carries a higher degree of

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speaker-commitment than positively modalized narrative (see Simpson 1993: 49– 50). The refusal by contemporary readers to accept a text in which the writer’s subjectivity only exists as a trace is demonstrated by the early reviews by Duranty and Barbey d’Aurevilly. Duranty (1857:79–80) accused Flaubert of a lack of emotion, and condemned the impersonality of the book, reading the noncharacterization of the narrator as an authorial non-involvement which precluded the classification of Flaubert as an artist. Barbey D’Aurevilly (1865: 61–76) also criticized Flaubert for lack of emotion and judgement, suggesting that he was not immoral so much as insensitive. The first of these responses shows how the notion of art and that of individual and personal vision were closely related in the critical perception of literature at the time. And, in our retrospective and twentieth-century eyes, this humanist association is continued. But it also shows that, for Duranty at least, such a link between personal vision and art object, needed to be manifested as something more than the patterning hand of the artist, and should involve a direct expression of narratorial stance towards the TAW, which itself could be linked to the authorial position. D’Aurevilly’s remark shows that the association between prose fiction and personal morality discussed in the previous chapter was still in force. In this context of reception, the absence of overt manifestations of a personified fictional controller of the text can be seen as a gamble. Flaubert treats his moral and social status as a non-issue, refusing the association of the novel with any didactic or social use. This withdrawal from the text of a challengeable authorial position requires the acceptance by the audience of a function for the novel which is divorced from the moral and social sphere. Yet the clear links between Madame Bovary and the emerging Realist novel, marked by the nature of the TAW and the subtitle, ‘moeurs de province’, rendered the strategy of non-attenuation ineffective in the 1850s.10 The shift in the area of manifestation of authorial activity from tenor (narrative voice) to mode (construction) is not accompanied by any conformity to dominant contemporary views on a construction-based aesthetic. Although Flaubert’s text promotes the novel as crafted linguistic structure, the form of crafting in Madame Bovary does not fit with the Hugolian and Romantic aesthetic of the transformational power of ‘la baguette magique de l’art’.11 Nor does it follow the principles of poetic harmony or ‘beau langage’ on which the formal aesthetics of poets such as Gautier and Banville were founded. Madame Bovary is not, however, entirely devoid of reference to the creative experience of the artist, despite the absence of an artist protagonist or creative lyric ‘je’.12 In a rare direct address from narrator to narratee, Flaubert expresses clearly the agony of artistic composition: ‘la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.’ (466) This expression of the struggle to attain an aesthetic ideal through language invites a reading of the text of Madame Bovary

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as the result of such a struggle. It should be noticed here that, whereas Emma’s difficulties with language in the TAW which give rise to this narratorial comment are those of self-expression, Flaubert formulates the more general problem in terms of the creation of aesthetic effect in an analogy with the rhythms and sonorities of music, not the presentation of personal feeling or identity through language. Exploiting conventions In the mid-nineteenth century, this reworking of the obligations of the novelist towards his audience required a revision of perceptions of the contexts of production and reception of the art object which was too great to achieve immediate popular and institutional sanction. However, the absence of the full expression of a speaking subjectivity occurs against the background of a narrative which is fully developed according to the major expectations concerning narrativity of the period. Madame Bovary is very clearly a novel according to contemporary generic criteria. The patterning of the text relies for its visibility, on a firmly ingrained habit of telic reading in which the ‘dénouement’ is prepared by, and predictable from, the preceding text. The creation of the pattern of anticipation followed by anticlimax, and the regulation of time are also dependent on this model. The rhetorical exploitation of end-focus (see Walter Nash 1980:107–8) allows Flaubert to foreground links between sections of text,13 while his appropriation of the stylistic patterns of both Romantic and Realist writing depend on the familiarity of the reader with these types of language. End-focus is also exploited by the positioning of similes as the culminating elements of sections of text, in which the explanatory power signalled by ‘comme’ creates an effect of authorial control.14 Furthermore, the rhetoric of Madame Bovary is heavily dependent on the established hierarchy of authority between narrative levels (see pp. 80–5 and 90–3). Narrative stance towards the events of the TAW is not completely effaced, but appears intermittently. Although this stance does not involve approval or condemnation of the moral behaviour of the protagonists, there is a clear expression of attitudes towards these fictional entities which makes this text very different from those twentieth-century narratives in which the narrative agent operates as a viewing position without manifestations of an ordering consciousness (see Fludernik 1996a, chapter 5). In Madame Bovary the abrogation of certain conventional manifestations of subjectivity does not include the complete absence of narratorial judgements. Indeed, the epistemological authority of the narrative report mode, which asserts events in the fictional world as fact, not as personal beliefs or suppositions, allows absolute (fictional) truth status to any assertion not associated with a protagonist. In this respect, the authority of the narration is linked to both the sententious techniques of Balzac and the later techniques of the Naturalist novel.15

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Moreover, despite its non-conformity to the conventions of the didactic or sentimental narrative models, or to the aesthetics of the Romantics or the emerging group of Parnassian poets, Madame Bovary relies on the acceptance by the reading public of a cultural role for the writer within the emerging domain of literature. Indeed, as Bourdieu suggests of Flaubert’s work as a whole, it is possible to perceive the overturning of conventions in this novel not as an individual act of defiance, but as the result of the emergence of two distinct and competing groups of writers. The first, largely associated with the novel genre, were those who earned their livelihood by their pens, and whose writing was a consumer-led product for which success was measured by sales. The second, associated above all with poetry, were those whose writing had little hope of economic success, and who therefore claimed a cultural function for their work not founded on popular success (1996:89–90 and 114–15). Within this context, the figure of the artist as an individual guided by his art and misunderstood by the majority of readers provided the possibility of an élitist authorization for Madame Bovary. Here, the writer is authorized as superior being to refrain from the cooperative reader-oriented strategies of popular literature and may rely, instead, on the Kantian aesthetic of artistic inspiration and Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony, as the justification of the undecidability of his work. Although Madame Bovary did not conform to contemporary principles of a poetic aesthetic (except, perhaps, to the emerging poetic voice of Baudelaire, whose own Fleurs du mal was condemned just six months after Flaubert’s trial), Flaubert could nevertheless appropriate the artistic status which poets claimed for themselves to his own writing project. This novel does not therefore require the formulation of entirely new criteria for fictional production. Instead it reconfigures such criteria. It requires that conventions associated with one group of culturally sanctioned texts be applied to a text from a different genre, which also breaks the conventions of that genre. Exemplary patterns Faced with the impossibility of establishing positions for author, text or reader, on the grounds of narratorial assertion, the reader must turn to other aspects of the text to provide indications of what these might be. This involves an increase in dependence on the TAW as a means to interpret the contexts of situation and culture. Here, reference to individuated actual-world texts and authors, and to general classes of text, is displaced from the level of narration to the TAW. The function of the aesthetic text The TAW of Madame Bovary abounds with written artefacts, many of which are used as fetishes by Emma. Some are designed for practical use (such as maps), others form the superficial decoration on an everyday object (painted plates), or have an economic purpose (advertisements in periodicals), yet others constitute

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non-institutional forms of entertainment (keepsakes, sentimental novels), while others are institutionally sanctioned (texts which are accepted by society as either artistic or scientific). For the most part, the difference in their functions and the cultural value ascribed to them is not asserted by Flaubert. It is instead presented as self-evident, a hierarchy which is not open to question or negotiation by either writer or reader. The dominant function of most of these texts is to demonstrate the indiscriminate eclecticism of Emma’s reading habits, discussed on pp. 93–5. However, in the range of texts described in detail in part one, chapter six, there are differences in the presentation of two categories of text: those to which society ascribes literary value, and those which are parasitic on such texts (such as keepsakes and sentimental songs). The former display a certain resistance to Emma’s interpretive appropriations and Flaubert refrains from any overt commentary on their aesthetic value, while the latter are clearly condemned for their stylistic and compositional inadequacies. Emma’s first encounters with Romantic texts involve a response to their linguistic qualities which is not dictated by her own reading goals: ‘Comme elle écouta, les premières fois, la lamentation sonore des mélancolies romantiques se répétant à tous les échos de la terre et de l’éternité!’ (324) It is only afterwards that she abandons the Romantic idealization of nature, because it conflicts with her taste for storms and ruins, her desire for immediate personal emotional response, ‘étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages’ (324). These texts resist her appropriations, so she ceases to read them. She also abandons Lamartine, whose work bores her, but which nevertheless has an effect on her which she did not seek: ‘et fut enfin surprise de se sentir apaisée, et sans plus de tristesse au coeur que de rides sur son front.’ (327) The treatment of sentimental songs and keepsakes, on the other hand, is far more negative than that of literary texts. Here we encounter both direct evaluative commentary (‘à travers la niaiserie du style’ (325)), and descriptions which concern not only the images of such texts (as is the case for Scott and historical writers) but also their arrangement. Thus, Flaubert’s description of the engravings of the keepsake is focused on both the incongruity of juxtaposed elements and on their poor arrangement: et vous surtout, paysages blafards […] qui souvent nous montrez à la fois des palmiers, des sapins, des tigres à droite, un lion à gauche, des minarets tartares à l’horizon, au premier plan des ruines romaines, puis des chameaux accroupis;—le tout encadré d’une forêt vierge bien nettoyée, et avec un grand rayon de soleil perpendiculaire tremblotant dans l’eau, où se détachent en écorchures blanches, sur un fond d’acier gris, de loin en loin, des cygnes qui nagent. (326)

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Beyond the ambivalence of the apostrophe and the first person plural in this last passage (which may equally signal sympathy or parody), Flaubert’s ekphrastic description conveys the poor composition of such engravings, using the technique of accumulative listing to produce a grotesque bestiary and a nontechnical style (‘le tout’, ‘bien nettoyée’, ‘et avec’, ‘écorchures’) to debunk the techniques of these pictures. Flaubert’s presentation of the interactions between Emma and the literary context for his work thus displays a scale of value founded on the susceptibility of these texts to serve as props for Emma’s personal goals. In this respect, the Romantic texts are superior to those of Balzac, which allow complete appropriation to Emma’s imaginary creation of a Paris containing the Vicomte, on a level with maps and ladies’ periodicals (343–4). While the parodic treatment of Romantic cliché as ideational figure is clearly negative in ethos, Flaubert also appropriates the style of such texts in a manner which does not contain markers of ironic distance. They are also superior to the scientific texts which allow citation by Homais. The latter’s spoken appropriation of the syntax and lexis of such texts (rather than their imagery) demonstrates that their style does not resist debased transfer to the medium of speech. This last case forms part of a larger pattern set up in Madame Bovary which creates two areas of polarization. One is between the written and the spoken, the other is between the personal language-use of the protagonists and that of Flaubert. These polarizations become bound to each other to produce a hierarchy founded on originality. Hierarchies: the written and the spoken In Madame Bovary, Flaubert exploits the fictional text’s hierarchy of authority associated with different levels of text production in order to create a hierarchy of language-use. There is a clear distinction between the level of narration as authoritative written text, and the embedded language-use of the protagonists within the TAW. Here, two different types of citational relationship are created. One involves a horizontal borrowing of literary styles which places Madame Bovary in an arena of crafted texts which, despite their differences, nevertheless have a shared status as valued cultural artefacts. The other involves the vertical citation of the spoken and written language of the protagonists in which their language-use is inferior to that of Flaubert.16 The distinction between the crafted language of the text and impoverished language-use within the TAW is reinforced by demonstrations of unsuccessful borrowing across categories of medium within the TAW. The forms of linguistic borrowing which are held up to the greatest ridicule are those which transpose a culturally valued form of written text to speech, epitomized by Emma’s parroting of the lexis of Romantic texts and Homais’s appropriation of scientific texts, the first of which is pathetic, and the second of which is comic. The unsuccessful transpositions by the protagonists allow the reader to make a

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comparative value judgement between the two modes of citation which is weighted in Flaubert’s favour. Thus, although the level of ‘récit’ does not allow an anthropomorphic construction of Flaubert the man, readers are still encouraged to distinguish this level of narration as a superior level of writing, with full powers of creative citation not possessed by any figure in the TAW. The distinction between spoken and written forms of text is facilitated by the erasure of narration as the product of an interactive anthropomorphized narrator (except, of course, at the opening of the text, which stages the conventional homodiegetic producer of ‘Nous’ as an inhabitant of the fictional world, only to wipe this speaker from the text by the end of the first chapter). Here, Flaubert does not, as Adams suggests is the case for all fictional texts, hand over the power to communicate to a fictional speaker (1985:16). The silence of the author is not the result of the interposition of a chattering fictional voice, replete with intentions and attitudes, between writer and reader. It is instead a silence imposed by the physical opacity of the text as written artefact, as made thing, in which it is the voice of the author as creator of a pattern of language, not the voice of a fictional narrator which ‘speaks’ to an audience, which must be retrieved by the reader. The chief means by which Flaubert establishes the distance between spoken and written forms of language which allows the valorization of the latter is his reduction of the speech of the protagonists to a debased form of language. In the case of Emma, in particular, this is presented as the insufficiency of the language of platitudes to express her vague aspirations, and her inability to use any other language form. Emma’s inadequacy of expression is shown by Flaubert to be the source of Rodolphe’s misreading of her feelings towards him: ‘il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions.’ (466)17 This is hardly surprising given Emma’s conversations with him: Souvent elle lui parlait des cloches du soir ou des voix de la nature; puis elle l’entretenait de sa mère, à elle, et de sa mère, à lui. Rodolphe l’avait perdue depuis vingt ans. Emma, néanmoins, l’en consolait avec des mièvreries de langage, comme on eût fait à un marmot abandonné, et même lui disait quelquefois, en regardant la lune: «Je suis sure que là-haut, ensemble, elles approuvent notre amour.» (446) Although these conversations are presented with Rodolphe as focalizer, allowing the possibility that the judgement of Emma’s language as ‘mièvreries’ is his (as well as the cumbersome use of disjunctive pronouns), this judgement is hard to contradict. Most of the treatment of Emma’s language lacks even the suggestion that her feelings are superior to her powers of expression, and allows the reader to situate himself with the writer in a circulation of texts superior to Emma’s. Likewise. the treatment of unsourced communal clichés, often italicized, is one

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which allows the reader to perceive a vast gap between Flaubert’s written crafting and a language which, in both its form and ideational content, is of the lowest level as the communal coin without trace of its coiner. Once the distance between the written and spoken forms of language has been established, it is possible to observe strategies in the text which reinforce the dislocation between these two media, and their establishment as discrete forms of language-use. For instance, comic dislocation occurs in the treatment of Emma and Léon’s citation of Romantic texts: ‘Une fois, la lune parut; alors ils ne manquèrent pas à faire des phrases, trouvant l’astre mélancolique et plein de poésie’ (525). In itself, the register clash between ‘astre’ (borrowed, literary) and ‘plein de’ (spoken, protagonists’ idiolect) signals a mismatch between the written poetic trope and the impoverished spoken text of the protagonists, and is reinforced by the difference between the ‘doing poetry in language’ of the pretexts (‘astre’ signals ‘ici-poésie’) and the empty abstract denotative label applied by the protagonists to the moon. The privileging of the written over the spoken is emphasized by the pre-posed critical distancing of ‘ils ne manquèrent pas à faire des phrases’, the lack of attribution of speech to either Emma or Léon as singular originating ‘author’, and the relegation of their ‘phrases’ to a subordinate clause (‘the detached participle is not just background, but it is background specifically for the “main” clause with which it is associated’, Thompson (1983:44)). The relay between written and spoken is doubled by this syntactic move. The participle formally signals the written narrative’s reporting discourse which is stylistically compatible with the poetic lexis of ‘astre mélancolique’, but the contextual indicators of the indirect representation of speech (‘faire des phrases’ and ‘plein de’) allow the pragmatic interpretation of ‘astre mélancolique’ as a written citation of a spoken citation of a written text. Dislocation between spoken and written occurs in the opposite way in the direct presentation of Homais’s speech patterns, which are rendered comic by the incongruity of the wholesale importation not only of the lexis of the written texts which he cites, but of an exaggerated imitation of the syntactic patterns of the scientific text. It thus takes Homais a sentence of over two hundred words to talk to Charles about the weather: Le thermomètre (j’en ai fait les observations) descend en hiver jusqu’à quatre degrés et, dans la forte saison, touche vingt-cinq, trente centigrades tout au plus, ce qui nous donne vingt-quatre Réamur au maximum, ou autrement cinquante-quatre Fahrenheit (mesure anglaise), pas davantage!— et, en effet, nous sommes abrités des vents du nord par la forêt d’Argueil d’une part; des vents d’ouest par la côte Saint-Jean de l’autre; et cette chaleur, cependant, qui à cause de la vapeur d’eau dégagée par la rivière et la présence considérable de bestiaux dans les prairies, lesquels exhalent, comme vous savez, beaucoup d’ammoniaque, c’est-à-dire azote, hydrogène et oxygène (non, azote et hydrogène seulement), et qui, pompant à elle l’humus de la terre, confondant toutes ces emanations différentes, les

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réunissant en un faisceau, pour ainsi dire, et se combinant de soi-même avec l’électricité répandue dans l’atmosphère, lorsqu’il y en a, pourrait à la longue, comme dans les pays tropicaux, engendrer des miasmes insalubres; —cette chaleur, dis-je, se trouve justement tempéré du côté d’où elle vient, ou plutôt d’où elle viendrait, c’est-à-dire du côté sud, par les vents du sudest, lesquels, s’étant rafraîchis d’eux-mêmes en passant sur la Seine, nous arrivent quelquefois tout d’un coup, comme des brises de Russie! (364–5) In both cases, citation is perceived as incongruous on the basis of a mismatch between spoken and written forms of language.18 This mismatch also occurs in the transposition of the spoken to the written. ‘Style indirect’ generates the same distinction between spoken and written, for the incorporation of spoken patterns into the written mode of narration is marked as ‘other’. That the clearest examples of the use of ‘style indirect’ to express difference are based on the most platitudinous of clichés demonstrates the artificiality of this device of separation of the two media (‘On trouvait à Yonville qu’il avait des manières comme il faut. Il écoutait raisonner les gens mûrs et ne paraissait point exalté en politique, chose remarquable pour un jeune homme’ (369)). Flaubert’s typification of the spoken through the aphoristic forms of sententiousness (‘on prétendait qu’il s’enfermait pour boire’ (609)), and his omission of any protagonist whose use of language could be considered to be elegant without falling into the parodic extremes of academic jargon, or uneducated inadequate citation of collective cliché, shows how he loads this distinction.19 The caricatural treatment of the debased citation of Romantic and scientific texts by the protagonists suggests that the written originals are superior to their debased citational forms employed by the protagonists to serve their personal goals. The demonstration of impoverished transfer suggests a promotion of the original over the imitation. This pattern, in which Flaubert’s written text cites the spoken debased citation of other written texts, leads to a double promotion of the written. But it also exploits the citational chain to privilege Flaubert’s own text. The most impoverished texts are those of the protagonists, typified by transparent goals and linguistic inadequacy. Although the originals which hover behind them are superior to such texts, they have nevertheless allowed such appropriation. The written text which is both linguistically more sophisticated and at the end of the chain of citation is Flaubert’s own text. The opacity of its producer’s intentions and attention to language suggest that it resists spoken citation. Incorporative citational processes, which are not marked by the ironic dislocation and distancing of parody, tend to occur either from spoken to spoken, or from written to written. Thus a protagonist’s citation of an aphorism not only typifies that protagonist (as stupid), but expresses a continuity between the individual and collective texts. Emma or Charles’s uses of cliché are part of the

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more general circulation of a particular type of language in the communities of Tostes and Yonville. They are read as appropriate to that community, and we perceive no disjunction between the protagonist’s idiolect and the sociolect from which it is drawn. Thus, when Lheureux attempts to exploit the circumstances of Charies’s father’s death to make a few sales, his citation of the formula ‘eu égard à la fatale circonstance’ (522), manifests obedience to social convention, despite his cynical aims. Likewise, the importation of written stylistic characteristics into the written text of Madame Bovary may have no immediate effect of dislocation. For instance, as Culler points out, the passage which immediately follows Emma and Rodolphe’s first love-making, ‘Les ombres du soir descendaient; le soleil horizontal, passant entre les branches […]’, (438) is devoid of ironic markers (1985:141). Here, while Emma is the focalizer, the language of the text is not that of Emma’s idiolect, but a written form which combines a Romantic sensitivity towards the aesthetic of the natural world with an impressionist preoccupation with light (and indeed a Baudelairian synaesthetic experience), in a transformational process which has none of the distancing of caricature. The link to other texts is both that of the script of action (the manipulation of language to an aesthetic end), and of ideational collocation (‘ombres, soir, éblouissait, feuilles, lumineuses, tremblaient, colibris, doux, arbres, fleuve, loin, bois, collines, vague, prolongé, se traînait, une musique, vibrations’ (438)). While there are minor collocative disruptions in the course of this description, such as ‘le sang circuler dans sa chair’ (438), this is justified by the association of the entire passage with the physical sexual experience, reinforced by the cry of the animal Emma hears. Only the contrast with the co-text in the shift to Rodolphe’s activities at the end of the paragraph marks this passage as citational. The fluctuation of Madame Bovary between the dominant conventions of the Romantic text and those of the Realist mode of writing (including flies, dunghills and nettles), does not allow any simplistic division between Emma as focalizing source of Romantic language and a narrative voice associated with stark Realism. Instead, the language associated with both literary move ments alternates in the text, preventing the secure association of a narrative position with one which would mark the other as citational. The successive and linear nature of the physical text allows, instead, an alternation between models. This reinforces the contrast between a form of written incorporation which does not necessarily entail caricatural debasement of the external model, allowing the reading strategy associated with that model, and the linguistic debasement of the protagonists’ citation which prevents the reading of their texts according to the principles of the original. We thus read Homais’s citation of scientific texts not for its propositional content, but as an indication of his character, and Emma’s citation of Romantic texts for the same reason. By contrast, we do not treat Flaubert’s citations as an indicator of his character but as elements in the construction of the fictional world.

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Flaubert thus sets up an opposition between the spoken and the written which privileges the written text over spoken communication (or non-communication). The comic element of the novel is not only produced by mockery of the linguistically banal, but by its ridiculing of attempts to import the sophistication of the written into the cracked vessel of the spoken. Interpersonal exchange through spoken language is shown to be universally unsuccessful. Attempts by protagonists to bring specific contextual factors into play in their interpretations of others do not lead to felicitous interpretation but to misunderstanding. Contextual information is shown in this novel to be disruptive and dangerous. For instance, the circumstances of Emma’s renewed relationship with Léon which develops into adultery are shown to have a detrimental effect on her capacity for judgement (hardly impressive in the first place). The context of the performance of Lucia di Lammermoor excites her Romantic sensibilities to the extent that she is led to enter into a play-acting affair. And the physical and intimate context of Emma’s life with Charles leads her to judge him on the basis of his table-manners, rather than on the sincerity of his love for her. Read in conjunction with these object lessons in the pernicious influence of contexts of situation in the TAW, the techniques of distancing, of impersonality, and the suppression of references to interpersonal interaction between writer and reader located in a precise social context emerge as a protection against the dangers of misreading induced by such contexts, not as a denial of intentionality. By emphasizing the undesirability of interpretations which take account of a context of situation, Flaubert discourages the reader from attempting to create such a context for his own reading. He further suggests that a high degree of contextualization does not facilitate communication. By contrast, the low contextualization of the literary text emerges as a means to reduce the interference of non-textual factors with the reader’s engagement with the text. Negative models of text production In addition to texts for which authorial intention can only be inferred by the reader, Flaubert also includes some written texts in the TAW of Madame Bovary whose producers’ rhetorical goals are clearly defined. These texts, although written, are fully contextualized on the pattern of intention, text and effect. As such, they serve as a bridge to the final section of this chapter which discusses the relationship between text and reader. These are Rodolphe’s farewell letter to Emma, and the series of texts produced by Homais in the final chapter of the novel. Given the treatment of the sources of these texts, who are among the least attractive figures in the novel, readers will not be inclined to take these text as positive models for Flaubert’s text production. Not only does the hierarchy of authority place these text producers below the author, they are also low in the protagonist hierarchy in that they are among the most distanced from the deictic centre of narration. Their texts are also distanced from Flaubert’s own by their rhetorical purpose, which in each

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case is the projection of a particular authorial self-image to their readers of the sort which is absent from Madame Bovary. Neither writer produces his text to be appreciated for its own sake, language is a tool, rather than an end in itself. Rodolphe’s farewell letter to Emma (476–7) is situated within the specific context of written text passed between known participants in a private context (although this text is shown as readable by someone other than the addressee, in this case Charles). It is packed with caricatural hyperbole which is not the result of his inability to express himself, but which he borrows cynically to shed his role as lover. The text of the letter is presented in full as direct citation, along with an extensive treatment of Rodolphe’s anticipation of its perlocutionary effect on Emma (an anticipation which is misguided, as he has misread Emma’s own words and, moreover, is unaware of the nature of her reading habits). Emma’s reaction to the letter is predictable for the reader, if not for Rodolphe. She ignores its crafting completely, and seizes only on the proposition which underlies it: Rodolphe has left. Here, care in construction, however cynical, and Rodolphe’s belief in the power of words, are shown to be misplaced. Emma reads the letter as token, not text. Nevertheless, Rodolphe’s compositional skills in directing his reader are not entirely wasted, for where he has failed to persuade his intended addressee, he succeeds in persuading a receiver who was not the intended audience, Charles. Such is the effect of Rodolphe’s rhetoric on Charles that in their final meeting the latter adds to the citational chains of the novel, transforming Rodolphe’s ‘n’en accusez que la fatalité!’ (476) into ‘«C’est la faute de la fatalité!»’ (610). The private and fully contextualized interpersonal relationship between writer and addressee does nothing to overcome the gamble of the written text, for Rodolphe has misjudged his reader. However, when the written text enters more public circulation, there would appear to be a possibility that a rhetorical strategy can achieve the desired effect on a reader, provided that the receiver’s desires correspond to those of the writer. Both Rodolphe and Charles, for different reasons, wish to reduce personal responsibility for Emma’s death. The pharmacist’s goal-directed written texts are aimed at a public readership. Homais relies on the greater authority of the printed word of the Fanal de Rouen over the spoken accusations of professional incompetence levelled against him by his target, the blind beggar. The pharmacist’s written texts are at first rewarded with success, the beggar is locked up, but he is then released. Homais does not respond to this by abandoning the written text as weapon, instead he merely releases more texts into the public domain, with the result that the beggar is locked up for ever. Quantity, not quality, triumphs. The success of this deployment of the printed word to polemical ends leads to another written campaign by Homais to achieve social status. Initially content with a general reputation as an exposer of political and social injustice, he then moves up the institutionally sanctioned hierarchy of texts to the learned monograph, Statistique générale du canton d’Yonville, suivie d’observations climatologiques (606), before expanding his horizons further to philosophical

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and moral issues. Flaubert’s account of his text production at this point moves to vicious satire: Il se préoccupa des grandes questions: problème social, moralisation des classes pauvres, pisciculture, caoutchouc, chemins de fer, etc. Il en vint à rougir d’être un bourgeois. Il affectait le genre artiste, il fumait! Il s’acheta deux statuettes chic Pompadour, pour décorer son salon. (606) Here, the power of Homais’s texts lies neither in their content nor their style. Their efficacity lies entirely in their generic classification, as props to Homais’s reputation as ‘writer of…’ They are props, like the texts Emma reads, joining non-textual signifiers as tokens of artistic status, supplements to a personal public image. The final ‘text’ produced by Homais to achieve his desire to obtain the ‘croix d’honneur’ is the most debased form of goal-directed construction. The star representing the form of the ‘croix d’honneur’ which Homais cuts into his lawn is the pharmacist’s acknowledgement that his public, like Emma, is less sensitive to the rhetorical structuring of language than to the crude exploitation of symbols. Although we may consider the target of Flaubert’s irony to be Homais himself, his intelligence and ability to exploit text to influence his readers also suggests that the target of irony is also the reading public, which is not worthy of even Homais’s limited attempts at intellectual achievement. Ultimately, Homais has judged his public correctly; he receives his coveted decoration. The portrayal of Rodolphe and Homais as writers serves as an indirect condemnation of texts which have the enhancement of the positive face of the writer as their goal. Rodolphe’s letter demonstrates a strategic use of accepted formulae in which attention to language serves the goal of deceit.20 The conventional signals of self-expression do not guarantee sincerity, but enable self-concealment. The portrayal of a positive and morally admirable authorial persona and obedience to socially accepted conventions of language-use are no proof of the moral status and social acceptability of the writer. The texts produced by Homais reinforce the negative view of texts intended to enhance social status. The exploitation by Homais of the hierarchy of genres as a means to gain respect (science and philosophy are more respected than journalism) suggests a criticism of a context of culture which allows writers to gain artistic status by choosing to write poetry rather than novels, regardless of the quality of their work. And the effectiveness of the crude symbolic rhetoric of his horticultural creation suggests a condemnation of a public which responds to the obvious, and fails to value subtlety. These instances of text production thus serve as an indirect defence, both of the non-assertion of authorial intentions and of the non-conformity of Flaubert’s text to generic conventions; its impertinent aspiration to the status of ‘high art’. By demonstrating that our knowledge of the intentions of Rodolphe and Homais

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does nothing to enhance our view of the value of their texts, Flaubert dissociates the textual manifestation of authorial intentions from value. And by showing the emptiness of a hierarchy of cultural value founded on generic categorization, he calls for a different formulation of aesthetic value. This formulation can be produced from Homais’s final text. If the sum of a text is the image produced, and if this image can be directly related to the purpose of the text producer, it is the antithesis of the aesthetic text. The text and its readers This section examines the implications for the reader’s face of the partial effacement of interpersonal patterns of interaction in Madame Bovary. In particular, I shall consider how far the emphasis on the context of reading, in which only text and reader are present, allows the reader interpretive authority. Freedom of interpretation Although Madame Bovary may send out a clear call to look at the text, the degree to which the reader does so and the aspects of the text on which he builds his interpretation are not subject to the control of the author. The history of the reception of Madame Bovary demonstrates how changing cultural perceptions of the function of novels and literary texts lead to a focus by various groups of readers on very different aspects of the text. Realist readings involve a close attention to the contrasts between Emma’s imaginary sub-world and a TAW which does not correspond to her projections. Modernist readings focus on the implications of the shifting perspective of ‘style indirect libre’ for a relativization of perceptions of the world, reading the novel as a prized example of the fictional representation of consciousness, as the forerunner of the modes of writing of Proust, James and Woolf. Structuralist readings focus on the structure of the text as the source of connotative interpretations for which the constitution of an originating authorial intention is superfluous. And postmodernist readings draw on the ambiguity of the text to demonstrate the deferral of meaning and desire and the inadequacy of language as a mode of communication. While these critical readings are going on, a more general public of readers continues to read Madame Bovary as a mimetic tale of provincial adultery, a social satire, and a story of failed aspirations. The range of these interpretive approaches suggests that Madame Bovary allows considerable freedom to the reader. I say ‘allows’ because all can be supported through close reading of the text. While belief in the authority of the text is ultimately a matter for the reader, in the reading of Madame Bovary, such an assumption is encouraged by the rhetorical strategies of the text, some of which have already been discussed. Madame Bovary is very clearly not a cigar case on which to base our games of make-believe,21 but it is a construction in language which draws attention to its own constructive principles.

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Despite the diversity of available readings, it is possible to construct a scale of reading activities in which the measure of interpretive closure is in inverse proportion to the degree to which attention is paid to the full range of signals of ‘how to read’. Definitive interpretations can be achieved through intensive focus on a limited set of signals, such as those of plot, or of the play between Romantic and Realist patterns of reading. But those readers who attempt to be ideal readers, who look at the text and look again, distancing themselves from the impoverished use of texts portrayed in the TAW, commit themselves not to the security of power over interpretation of the text, but to the insecurity of an impossible reading. What Riffaterre describes as the saturation of the text (1984: 186) does not lead to a transcendental fullness of retrievable intentions but to their undecidability. And because interpretive closure is associated in the TAW with Emma’s appropriative reading and with texts which do not have high aesthetic value, Flaubert links interpretive hesitation in the reader to the status of his own text. The reader must sanction the text through the acknowledgement of his own inability to achieve closure. Madame Bovary thus invites a shift in responsibility for interpretation to the reader, while promoting textual authority. Two features of Madame Bovary, in particular, allow the construction of this context for reading. These are the exploitation of the pragmatic processes of irony and the TAW ‘mise en abyme’ of bad reading practice. Here, irony acts as a powerful weapon to push the reader to seek an interpretive stance, while the object lesson of bad reading invites the reader to question his own reading practice. The burden of irony Critics such as Culler (1985), Furst (1984) and Bishop (1989) have provided extensive accounts of the different types of irony to be found in Madame Bovary. These range from forms of irony which allow the establishment of two opposing positions in which the position the reader is invited to adopt is clear, to forms of irony in which neither the target nor the stance to be adopted towards it is clear (this is Kierkegaard’s model of non-arrested negativity). In addition, as Culler has pointed out, Madame Bovary not only exhibits a range of ironic processes, it also leaves the reader unable to decide whether certain passages are ironic or not (1985:193).22 I shall discuss here the pragmatic effects of these features on the reader’s view of his own interpretive position. This involves the consideration of only a limited area of the ironic process, that which relates to the reader’s perception of irony as personal stance, and the relative participant positions which can be inferred from this. Some elements of Madame Bovary invite an ironic reading which allows the creation of an in-group which includes both the author and his audience.23 The treatment of a protagonist such as Homais, for instance, allows the reader to adopt a position of distance from the pharmacist in which he may be secure in

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his position of shared superiority.24 For instance, the description of Mme Homais’s admiration for her husband’s appearance in a Pulvermacher ‘chaîne hydro-électrique’ each night, and her subsequent increased ardour for ‘cet homme plus garrotté qu’un Scythe et splendide comme un mage’ (607), produces a secure ironic distance between the reader and the couple. The treatment of the Homais household in the course of the novel has established a co-textual convention of an ironic and comic reading of the couple (indeed, the effect of Homais’s triumph at the end of the text is the stronger for this). In this scene, the comedy of the mismatch between the unseductive image of Homais wrapped in the patent invention and his wife’s increased ‘ardeurs’ is extended to full ironic force in the pair of classical and biblical similes which end the description. Here, the first simile is parodic in the terms of its comparison, but remains trivially true, while the second simile is read as citational of Mme Homais’s perceptions and therefore ironic according to the principles of realist irony (‘the audience knows more and better’). Homais is like a strangled Scythian, but he is not splendid, let alone like a mage. Relying on the fictional hierarchy of epistemological authority, we read the description of Homais wrapped in the contraption as a narratorial assertion of truth in the TAW, and the evaluation of the second simile as a manifestation of full narratorial irony (‘cet homme’ marks the deictic centre for these similes as the narrator, not Mme Homais). Confident that anyone wrapped in such a thing cannot be ‘splendide comme un mage’ except in the eyes of a loving wife, the reader feels quite safe in his failure to share Mme Homais’s admiration for her husband. This type of irony allows negativity to be arrested. The security of such ironic reading is produced by the combination of two features which are intermittent in Madame Bovary. The first is that here, as at many other points in this novel, it is possible to distinguish a narratorial deictic centre which displays features of anthropomorphic voice to which stance can be attributed. The second is the possibility of the attribution of the non-ironic stance to an individuated fictional entity with whom the reader is not required to identify himself. However, the detection of other conflicts in stance in Madame Bovary does not lead to this clear distinction between the attitude of a protagonist and that of a narrative voice which can be associated with the extra-fictional participants in the novel. Sometimes it is not possible to situate a protagonist target as the source of ironic citation, and at other moments it is the narratorial stance which is impossible to define, rendering insecure the position of a citing voice. As critics have pointed out, the major conflict in narrative stance relates to Emma herself, but it also concerns Charles. This conflict is produced at a microlevel, in relation to a particular act or attitude, and also affects the reading of the event pattern of the novel. The surface-structure Peaks of the book occur where Emma would like them to be, at her wedding, at the ball, in her encounter with Rodolphe during the ‘commices agricoles’, and culminate with the extended treatment of her death scene. Charles’s actions after her death continue the

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patterns of this type of event line, and he duly dies with her lock of hair clutched in his hand. However, while these scenes are given full Peak treatment, they are certainly not textualized in the manner Emma would like. Their chief competitor is the event line of worldly success of Homais, who interferes with Emma’s plot even during the vigil after her death and, of course, is the referent of the last words of the book. When there is no individuated protagonist or group of protagonists (the on of Yonville) to whom non-ironic assertion can be attributed, the participants in irony cease to be a group of extra-fictional participants who can be confident in their solidarity against the stupidity of a fictional entity. Instead, the ‘bêtise’ of non-ironic reading must be ascribed to hypothetical members of the audience itself. Further, when the reader cannot decide between two opposing stances (for instance sympathy with Emma or distance from her), or when irony is suspected but no stance can be defined for the author (for instance Flaubert’s attitude to Romantic texts), the reader is confronted with the possibility that his inability to detect a secure ironic position is the result of his own ‘bêtise’, that somewhere, out there, there are readers who have gained access to an in-group from which he is excluded. The reader’s access to this group in the case of realist irony works against him, in that it acts as a reminder that in-group reading is possible in this text. The reader is also faced with the possibility that the reading he shares with other readers may mark him as a member of the wrong group. This issue will be discussed further in relation to the reading habits of members of the TAW (see pp. 95–6 and 99). The ambiguities of Madame Bovary thus impose a position of responsibility on the reader, whether this responsibility involves the choice of one reading path over another, or the choice not to arrest the play of possible interpretation. As Eco suggests, the reader is free to choose, or to decide that there is no possible choice (see p. 74), a process formulated by Michel Charles as ‘la «contrainteliberté»’ (1977:288). There is no reason why, in itself, this responsibility should be seen as an imposition by the author or the text. Successive generations of readers have been happy to arrest the ironic regress, secure in the assumption that their own reading reflects Flaubert’s intentions. Other groups of readers have been equally happy to allow this regress to continue, valuing Madame Bovary, as Culler suggests, as an ironic text which ‘displays that negative capability which is reputedly the feature of the greatest works.’ (1985:191) But the shifting patterns of Madame Bovary suggest that the choice between conclusion and no conclusion is itself an impossible one. This is, in part, due to the novel’s pattern of focalization. At many points in the text the deictic centre (the reference-point of perception to which deictic markers refer) can clearly be situated as either the narrating voice or a protagonist. Here, irony can be read according to standard authority levels associated with hetero-diegetic narrative in which the narrator as deictic centre is ascribed greater authority than the protagonist as focalizing deictic centre. The swings between external and internal focalization produce irony, but do not destabilize the locus of authority

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which remains with the external narrator. In contrast to these moments, there are other points in the text where it is impossible to establish a secure deictic centre, to locate citing and cited voices, which produce Perruchot’s definition of ‘style indirect libre’ as ‘un style sans temps ni lieu, parce que sans voix’ (1975:270). These points in the text can generate irony of the Kierkegaardian type, involving negative regress (a type which is far more extensively employed in L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869). In Madame Bovary, it is the shifts between these two situations, not the shifts between narrator and focalizer, which are most destabilizing for the reader. Unable to give himself over to full negative regress, he is equally unable to read the whole text on the basis of a secure narrative stance which would allow arrested irony. Reading is thus haunted by the spectre that what is read as regressive irony might, in fact, be realist irony, and vice versa. In the first case, the reader’s inability to close the ironic process would be the result of his incompetence, and only he would be in free-fall, not the text or other readers. In the second, the reader would have produced a premature closure, bringing an end to what might be a productive play of meaning. Added to this dilemma is the fact that not everything in Madame Bovary calls for ironic reading. Uncertainty is itself rendered uncertain by the possibility of resolution. The intermittent indicators of a secure stance at the level of narration not only allow the arrest of irony, they also act as constant reminders to the reader of the possibility of the presence of an authorial position in the text. Because the reader is not allowed to control this position by identifying it, circumscribing it, and either agreeing with it or rejecting it, it retains the unchallengeable authority of invisibility. But because it is still available to the reader as a part of the authority structure of the text, he cannot assume the authority which goes with the interpretive responsibility imposed by ambiguity. The surfacing of the assertive narrator, which allows the reader to attribute realist irony founded on epistemological authority, thus acts as a form of control over interpretation in which certain aspects of the TAW are presented as incontravertible fictional facts. The reader’s problem lies in distinguishing between fictional fact, in the domain of the narrator, and fictional protagonist sub-world interpretation cited ironically by the narrative. For instance, in the final chapter, my students are divided on the attribution of the italicized sentence in the following extract: ‘Sa mère en fut exaspérée. Il s’indigna plus fort qu’elle. Il avait changé tout à fait. Elle abandonna la maison.’ (603, my italics) While some read this sentence as narratorial assertion, others read it as indirect citation of Madame Bovary senior’s words. Interpretation of this sentence is crucial to our attitude to the behaviour of Charles. If we take these to be his mother’s words and treat them ironically, we may assume that Charles’s wholesale adoption of Emma’s attitudes after her death is not the result of a character transformation, merely the proof of his sensibility which Emma has been unable to perceive (a sensitivity already suggested by passages in which Charles has been the focalizer). If, however, we assume that this is a narratorial assertion, we are

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required to interpret his character until this point in the book as opposed to Emma’s (this interpretation is supported by his initial introduction to the novel as a figure of fun, by the contrast of his dreams with Emma’s, and by her own view of him). We may, of course, also attribute this sentence to his mother without assuming that the narrator’s position is either one of identity or opposition to it (this is the safest move for the sceptical reader). The dangers of bad reading The final and most explicit means by which Flaubert exerts control over the reader is the extensive ‘mise en abyme’ of reading habits in the TAW in part one chapter six. This does not provide a model for ideal reading, it only points to how the reader should not approach the text. As such, it is not so much a cooperative encouragement to good reading as a warning against the perils of bad reading. The devotion of a whole chapter to Emma’s early reading foregrounds this aspect of her fictional life. Indeed, Emma’s pre-fabula, the history of her life before her marriage, is told largely in terms of her reading activities. These activities are characterized by her lack of discrimination in reading matter, and by her appropriation of widely disparate texts, with very different intended uses, to a single game of make-believe. Emma’s reading is thus a fictional enactment of certain twentieth-century theories of reading along the lines set out by Walton (1990) and pragmatists such as Rorty (1989) and in Eco et al. (1992:89–108). She is a reader out of control. In the tour of Emma’s reading the disparate range of texts, from novels to keepsakes and plates, are shown to feed her sentimental fantasies. Emma’s interest in these texts lies in the potential of text-world contents to produce sensation. It is not the beauty of language which moves her, but its referents. In contrast to Flaubert’s aspiration to write ‘un livre sur rien’, Emma wants her texts to be ‘livres sur quelque chose’. For Emma, the ideational function takes absolute precedence over the textual function. She creates a link between fictional world and actual world which effaces the medium of language. Even in her dreams, Emma inhabits a fantasy world where there is no speech: ‘Ils allaient, ils allaient, les bras enlacés, sans parler.’ (470)26 She does not look at the text, but through it. She is ‘sentimentale’, not ‘artiste’ (324), in that her emotions are excited by fictional-world events and objects which are not to be found in her own world. While this chapter has been read by some critics as a condemnation of Romantic cliché and the reading of novels, it is Emma’s reading which reduces all these texts to this status, not the texts themselves.27 Emma’s methods of appropriation involve the suppression of the language of the texts she reads as a source of emotional response, and an appropriation of the most clichéd elements of their fictional worlds. The unnamed novels which she reads provide her with:

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amours, amants, amantes, dames persecutées, s’évanouissant dans des pavillons solitaires, postillons qu’on tue à tous les relais, chevaux qu’on crève à toutes les pages, forêts sombres, troubles du coeur, serments, sanglots, larmes et baisers, nacelles au clair de lune, rossignols dans les bosquets […] (324–5) in which she associates art, not with its execution, but with its referents and its frenetic and exceptional action. In Flaubert’s treatment of Scott, again, he shows Emma’s reductions of the author’s novels to a set of iconic images. This is followed by the comic listing of Emma’s appropriation of the entire history of France, which leaves us with a picture of bad reading habits, rather than a criticism of the props she uses: ‘saint Louis avec son chêne, Bayard mourant, quelques férocités de Louis XI, un peu de Saint-Barthélemy, le panache de Béarnais, et toujours le souvenir des assiettes peintes où Louis XIV était vanté.’ (325) Recognition of the selective nature of Emma’s reading and its divergence from the intended function of its sources depends here on the reader’s knowledge of these texts. This inability to distinguish between text-types acts as a warning to the reader. For Emma shows a repeated tendency to apply a Realist model of reading to nonrealist texts, applying the All is true maxim to texts involving flights of sentimental fantasy, whose worlds cannot be read as simulacra of her own world. This is demonstrated in her transformation of these fictional worlds into the hypothetical possible world of her dreams of her future life with Rodolphe (470). She also applies a debased Romantic model of reading (Flaubert’s own ‘faire rêver’) to non-fictional texts, such as the fashion pages of journals and the map of Paris (343–4). Given the reader of Madame Bovary’s hesitation in choosing between these two models of reading for the novel as a whole, as well as more localized hesitations between types of ironic reading, this aspect of Emma’s reading adds to the reader’s fear of the text (and by extension the fear of the God, Flaubert, in his fictional universe). The texts in these chapters act as part of a much wider range of fetishist props for her fantasies. Emma judges the fictional worlds of the texts she reads by their contents, according to the same materialist aesthetic which leads her to fill her own world with similar objects in her attempt to recreate these worlds. This is not simply the well-worn trope of the foolishness of confusing fiction and life. It is the foolishness of reading for the referent rather than for the language of the text, and reading for personal goals without regard for the nature of the prop. But Emma not only judges these worlds by their contents, she also reduces the latter to a very small number of symbolic images.28 The vast range of her reading produces only a sparse collection of ‘the unusual’. A comparison between the summaries of Emma’s reading composed of reductive lists, and passages in which the language of Romantic texts is appropriated not by Emma but by

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Flaubert’s text, reveals a contrast between Emma’s reduction of such texts to totalizing singular images and the saturation of description in Madame Bovary. This saturation extends beyond overtly Romantic passages to the text as a whole. Fullness in Madame Bovary involves an excess of language, while Emma attempts to transfer the possibility of the fullness of actual-world reference to incomplete fictional entities. The situation of Emma’s reading habits in the wider environment of the convent also demonstrates that her approach to texts is not the practice of a singular and unusual reader. Just as her own text production is of a type which is shared by other members of her community, for whom conventional formulae stand as the evidence of a shared truth (see Nietzsche 1973:374–5), her reading practices are shown to be part of a collective set of reading habits. This suggests that Flaubert is not only attacking conventional language-use, but conventional interpretive strategies. The individual and the original should not only be the properties of the artistic text, they should also characterize the reading public. Here, Homais’s public also acts as a demonstration of a bad audience, whose interpretive activities rely on convention. These aspects of Madame Bovary increase the reader’s awareness of his membership of an audience already aroused by the link between irony and in-group reading. The readers of the Fanal and the reading community of the convent suggest that shared interpretive strategies are not evidence of the high status of those who agree on interpretation. No security can be provided by the reader’s assumption that he is not the only reader to interpret the text in a certain way. He may be participating, not in the élite in-group of appreciators of the aesthetic, but in an in-group which resembles these communities of readers in the TAW. The isolation of the reader is matched in the TAW by Emma’s isolation. As Peterson remarks: ‘Because of such societal hostility to books, Emma’s reading becomes an essentially private act, undertaken secretly and alone. This secretiveness leads Emma […] to serious misreadings and misapplications of her texts’ (1994:122–3). However, whereas Emma’s isolation is imposed by the community, the isolation of Flaubert’s reader is self-imposed.29 Some aspects of Emma’s reading habits are debased versions of a form of reading which is positively invited by Flaubert’s text. Emma’s form of reading is, after all, an extremely active one, in that it extends to acting out. Moreover, Emma uses texts as a prop for ‘rêverie’. It is only the quality of her dreams which are at fault. Last, Emma reads sensuously, a way of reading which, as Porter (1984) has demonstrated, is an integral part of the reading of Madame Bovary (see also Wing 1986). In all these activities, what is condemned is her failure to pay attention to the text itself as an object which should be appreciated for its own qualities, rather than as a vehicle for her own goals. Flaubert’s textualization of Emma’s reading also shows how his own text performs an act of transformational appropriation, which only differs from Emma’s in the aesthetic value we are invited to place on it. For in this condemnation of a certain type of imagery, we experience pleasure in Flaubert’s manipulation of the very

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language which is condemned (see Bersani 1988: 40). The negative reading model Emma represents is thus not one founded on complete dissimilarity. It is as much on the shared characteristics of reading that Flaubert builds the contrast between good and bad reading. We are left with the message: ‘do this, but not how Emma does it’. Again, we encounter the opposition between the élite and the popular, in which the same activity is performed with a different quality of execution. An examination of one of the aspects of Emma’s reading, her physical engagement with the text, shows both the similarities and differences between Emma’s reading habits, and those invited by Madame Bovary. Flaubert describes Emma’s reading of the keepsakes as follows: ‘Elle frémissait, en soulevant de son haleine le papier de soie des gravures, qui se levait à demi plié et retombait doucement contre la page.’ (325) Here, Flaubert produces an intimate tactile gesture by Emma which itself provokes a sensual response in the reader very similar to Emma’s response to the keepsake. The only difference between the two forms of seduction lies in Emma’s focus on the pathetic or exotic image rather than on its execution, her belief that luxury and art are one and the same, while we respond not to ‘Emma Bovary reading a keepsake’, but to the eroticism of Flaubert’s description. The contrast between Emma’s reading practice and that encouraged in Flaubert’s readers is equally demonstrated by Flaubert’s description of Emma standing on the doorstep of her father’s house. For Emma, ‘Farmer’s daughter with umbrella’ would fail to arouse emotion. Indeed, such an element of a fictional world would be ignored and rejected by her. But Flaubert’s description displays all the sensory stimuli to which we see Emma respond in her encounter with the keepsakes, incense, candlelight or fabrics: L’ombrelle, de soie gorge-de-pigeon, que traversait le soleil, éclairait de reflets mobiles la peau blanche de sa figure. Elle souriait là-dessous à la chaleur tiède; et on entendait les gouttes d’eau, une à une, tomber sur la moire tendue.30 (307) And the slowly falling raindrops, like the dropping of the ripe peaches during Emma’s last tryst with Rodolphe (473), produce a moment of intense physical experience, not unlike Lamartine’s ‘chutes de feuilles’ (326) to which Emma responds. Both Emma and Flaubert’s readers respond sensually, only the source differs. New terms of engagement When the reading habits of protagonists are set against the hierarchy of texts described above, it is possible to see that the most impoverished text, Homais’s symbol of the ‘croix d’honneur’, gains him the highest social recognition and

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status (see pp. 87–8). This suggests that the authors of texts at the other end of the scale, those which do not employ an overt rhetoric of persuasion towards their readers, are likely to be under-valued by the common reader. This interpretation is reinforced in the context of initial publication of Madame Bovary by the common currency of the Romantic artist misunderstood by a society of insensitive readers. The successful text is that which relies on the unequivocal symbolic image, interpretable by a reading public which is lacking in the ‘tempérament artiste’. A text which employs more subtle means, and which manipulates the nuances of language, is doomed to remain unappreciated by this reading public. Flaubert’s challenge to the reader not to participate in Emma’s mode of reading thus becomes linked to a value-laden judgement of text-types. The worst form of reading, Emma’s type, is associated with the worst form of texts, where Emma’s interpretation corresponds to the goal of the text and is then applied indiscriminately to other text-types. Mediocre forms of reading are represented by those who respond to Homais’s articles or by Charles’s response to Rodolphe’s letter, both of which involve obedience to the transparent manipulation of the reader by text producers. Such texts influence their readers through the citation of discourses, or sociolects, which have power in the society in which they circulate, whether the accepted conventional discourse of love, or the mystificatory discourse of scientific jargon. But good readers, who can perceive the pitfalls of the other types of reading, and who include any reader of Flaubert’s text who has identified them, are called on to fill in the blank in text-types—the good text. The answer is not hard to find: Flaubert’s own text. This rhetorical strategy corresponds to Aristotle’s suggestion that the most successful act of rhetoric is that which sways the reader while making its persuasive process appear the result not of artifice, but of the receiver’s perception of the truth. Even if, in this case, the reader perceives Flaubert’s strategy for what it is, the warnings against misreading constrain any attempt by him to escape from the grip of the text. To accept the type of reading practised by Emma, Charles and the Rouen public as bad is to acknowledge and submit to the power of Flaubert’s text. If the reader accepts the terms of aesthetic value set out by Madame Bovary, he must ascribe aesthetic value to this text. For within the hierarchy of texts set up by Flaubert, within the context of the warnings against the association of genre with value and against belief that the expressions of a text producer’s intentions are the guarantee of sincerity, and through the association of the aesthetic with indeterminacy, Madame Bovary is the best text in its self-created field. The audience’s awareness of the temporal succession of the acts of writing and reading works against them in that the text stands as evidence of completed labour, while audience interpretation has yet to be achieved. Comparison between Flaubert’s language-use and that of his protagonists can be made on the basis of the physical evidence of the text, but differences between reading practice and models in the text must be produced through an as yet uncompleted

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act. The audience is in Flaubert’s debt for his work, and this debt can only be repaid by the effort of interpretation. Added to this effect is the inequality of the sanctioning process itself. While readers may sanction Flaubert’s authority, as individuals and as a community, there is no possibility of him sanctioning the reader’s authority. Here, Flaubert turns the problem of a public writer, who has gone on-record, facing an anonymous off-record audience, into the problem of the individual reader, faced with the anonymity of the writer. Unlike explicit narratorial addresses to a fictional narratee, the significance of patterns in the TAW to the context of situation in which interpretation occurs must itself be produced by inference. This is not to suggest that readers are obliged to adopt the role of narratees when these are explicitly staged. However, in a text which does overtly stage such a relationship between narrator and narratee, the reader can take this relationship as a proposed pattern of the interpersonal dynamics involved in the text. In Madame Bovary, by contrast, the reader is obliged to acknowledge that his construction of such a proposed pattern is itself a hypothesis. This places the responsibility for the reading of the models of misreading to be found in the TAW with the reader himself. The reader is thus not only warned against bad reading practices, he is obliged to participate in the production of the warning. This could be summed up in politeness terms as ‘if you want to do a FTA to the reader and avoid responsibility for it, you can make the reader perform the FTA against himself’! And this strategy in itself is an even greater FTA. Flaubert, here, does not act as judge of the reader’s status, he leaves judgement to the reader. But this act of self-judgement does not allow the free and individual recognition of personal responsibility by the reader. It requires a submission to the regime of the text as a system of meaning because it is framed as a response to the text. The cooperative reader who attempts to efface his personal authority in order to participate in the game of the text is not straightforwardly rewarded by inclusion in the in-group of readers who are better than the protagonists. Instead, the step to superiority, made by the detection of irony and the attempt to read otherwise, is negated by the threat of self-doubt performed by the reader himself. I do not suggest here that this removes the pleasure of reading.31 It does, however, shift the reader’s attention, to the advantage of the authority of the writer. Flaubert thus re-ranks the threat to his own face and the imposition on the reader by promoting a change in the context of situation. The threat to his own face posed by the absence of a clear moral narratorial stance is countered by the refusal to recognize it as a threat and a shift in responsibility from writer to reader. The absence of a challengeable authorial position combined with the reader’s continued reliance on the narrative level of the text to produce interpretation lead to a divorce between authority and responsibility which works to the disadvantage of the reader. Because responsibility is a social quality, it can only be attached to human subjects. The inaccessibility of the author’s intentions creates a situation in which responsibility for the ascription of intentions must lie with the reader.33 Authority, on the other hand, is associated with some source of

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meaning. The communicative situation which is set up in Flaubert’s text is one which promotes a belief that meaning is to be found in the text, and that the reader’s task is to respond to the text as source of meaningful interpretation, Confirmation for interpretation cannot be sought from the author, but must be sought from the text. Madame Bovary encourages the reader to believe in the text as the locus of authority of meaning. Thus, while responsibility is transferred from author to reader, authority is transferred from author to text, which stands as the physical manifestation of a prior act of meaning-making. This suggests the grounds on which Madame Bovary has achieved its status as a canonic text. The concept of a canon is founded on a belief in the texts it includes as privileged sites of meaning to which the power to influence their audiences is ascribed. This fetishization of the text as cultural artefact corresponds closely to that promoted in Madame Bovary itself. Canons concern great texts, not great readers. And while the élitist approach to texts promoted in Madame Bovary, which sets up the text which resists paraphrase as the highest form of art, is one which appeals to the academic institution which is influential in creating the canon, allowing its members (including me) to continue to provide interpretations of the text for the edification of others, this novel’s susceptibility to a more closed set of readings also allows it to be read by those less concerned with the preservation of their own position of power.

5 THE DOUBLY-AUTHORIZED TEXT— PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SOCIAL ROLES Zola’s L’Assommoir

Zola’s offences The explosion of public debate which surrounded the publication of L’Assommoir (1877) points to the transgression in this novel of the limits of the acceptable in the literary text with regard both to its subject matter and to the language it employed.1 Zola’s novel was attacked on aesthetic grounds for a form of Realism which went too far: ‘Ce n’est pas du réalisme, c’est de la malpropreté; ce n’est plus de la crudité, c’est de la pornographie’, and ‘[l]e style…je le caractériserai d’un mot de M.Zola, qui ne pourra se fâcher de la citation: «Il pue ferme.»’2 was also criticized by the left-wing press for its condescending treatment of the working classes.3 And, according to Alfred Barbou, Hugo’s objections to the novel were directed at its lack of concern for the rights to privacy of the class it portrayed: Il est de ces tableaux qu’on ne doit pas montrer […] je ne veux pas qu’on les donne en spectacle. Vous n’en avez pas le droit, vous n’avez pas le droit de nudité sur la misère et sur le malheur… J’y ai pénétré en moraliste, en médecin, mais je ne veux pas qu’on s’y introduise en indifférent ou en curieux et nul n’en a le droit. (see Zola 1961:1563) These reactions suggest that the transgressions of L’Assommoir went beyond conventions of literary ‘bienséance’, provoking a questioning of the links between morality and truth, and the social and moral rights of a bourgeois writer to exploit the details of the lives of the working classes in a work of fiction.4 The issues raised by L’Assommoir thus concern its position in the literary arena, but also extend to the relationship between that arena and a wider cultural one. The textual strategies of L’Assommoir do not refuse an engagement with social and non-literary discourses through the techniques of isolation which have been seen in Madame Bovary. Instead, the cultural status of the literary text as a form of symbolic goods and the authority and independence of the individual

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artist are exploited as a secure position from which to assert a social function for the novel. This chapter considers the implications of this double appeal for authorization, which depends on both the individual and creative authority of the artist and on the pre-authorized institutionally sanctioned role of the social commentator and polemicist. First examining the preface, it then explores the implications for the moral status (the positive face) of author and audience of Zola’s ‘faire voir’. It considers the extent to which linguistic form affects the reader’s construction of the social status of the author and the status of Zola’s text as literature. Last, it considers how L’Assommoir enters into dialogue with one particular intertext (Germinie Lacerteux by the Goncourt brothers), and outlines a position in relation to institutional power-groups in order to create a space for its own processes. Extra-fictional claims Zola’s public voice is not confined to his fictional output, and acts as an influentual frame for the reading of his novels.5 The case of Zola demonstrates the extent to which the making of a literary reputation is influenced by nonliterary factors in the public arena. However, the only manifestation of Zola’s extra-fictional voice which falls within the remit of this book is the preface to the book edition of L’Assommoir.6 The preface is part of a continuing dialogue between Zola and his public and responds to the latter’s violent reactions to the serialized version of the book. As such, it can be read as a rearguard action against the hostile reception of the text and can be expected to engage with the main areas of criticism of the novel. However, unlike the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868), this preface is directly linked to some of the dominant rhetorical strategies of the novel itself and can therefore be read as a genuine preface, not as post hoc self-justification.7 To the extent that the techniques of the Naturalist novel depend on the withdrawal of manifestations of the narrating voice in favour of the events and dialogues of the TAW, a constraint is placed on overt signals of interpersonal persuasion within the text itself (see Hamon 1982 and Becker 1992). Yet, like the scientist or the historian, the Naturalist writer must have some sort of initial sanction to be heard. Zola makes use of the convention of the preface in L’Assommoir as a means to claim this sort of authority, which can thus be displaced from the text itself. Although prefaces to novels, however ironic, have traditionally served a legitimizing function, providing an opportunity for the ‘author’ to speak directly to his or her audience, Zola’s preface is also linked to scientific para-textual material in a particular way, providing a preamble on the circum stances of conception and methodology of his writing project and a legitimizing personal vignette of the writer. It shows no trace of the ironic or playful mask to be found

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in Balzac’s prefaces to Le Père Goriot which continue the ironic tradition of eighteenth-century preliminary material. The preface sets up a relationship between L’Assommoir and the sociological or historical text which is not centred on its strategies for writing the world, nor even on a shared vision of the world. These relationships are subordinated to another relationship, which is founded on the type of authority of the nonfictional writer. Zola’s claims for the equivalence of his novels and non-fictional texts must be located in a context of culture full of the positivistic celebration of science. They draw directly on the contemporary hierarchy of power for their sanction by the reader, exploiting the association of the written with the institutional, the distanced and the formal. This allows the projection in the preface of a situation described by Gaillard in which the promotion of truth as the source of authority ‘déchargeait l’auteur de la responsabilité de son dire’ (1978:18). The didacticism of Balzac’s novels has been replaced by the authority of the attentive but effaced scientific observer, privileging the ideational function over the interpersonal. Zola questions, here, the limits of what is conventionally expected of a literary text through direct comparison with the non-literary forms of philology, sociology and history. In this preface, the powerful medical analogies introduced in both Zola’s article on Germinie Lacerteux (1865) and in his preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868), soon to be developed in Le Roman expérimental (1880), are reduced to the indirect connotations of a single lexical item, ‘plaies’. The suppression of this generic field of comparison marks a difference both from his own earlier novel, and from that of the Goncourts. And indeed, with the exception of the account of Coupeau’s madness, L’Assommoir employs far less medical and biological terminology than Thérèse Raquin. Two of the three non-fictional genres against which Zola sets his text, those of history and sociology, while they might involve the same attention to meticulous observation as the scientific text, do not produce any particular tension with a public’s conventional view of the novel as it existed at this time. In his comparison with the field of philology, though, Zola points to an aspect of his text which profoundly affects the dynamics of the reader’s construction of an authorial position: La forme seule a effaré. On s’est fâché contre les mots. Mon crime est d’avoir eu la curiosité littéraire de ramasser et de couler dans un moule très travaillé la langue du peuple. Ah! la forme, là est le grand crime! Des dictionnaires de cette langue existent pourtant […] personne n’a entrevu que ma volonté était de faire un travail purement philologique, que je crois d’un vif intérêt historique et social. (373) At a superficial level, the reference to dictionaries of ‘français parlé’ points to the use of popular French in L’Assommoir as a matching of language to content

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which is dictated, not by an intention to shock, but by a less daring Naturalist aesthetic.8 Dubois suggests that these remarks are a masking technique on Zola’s part (1973:109), intended to justify the accusations of immorality levelled at his book. But this is to dismiss a crucial issue. The discussion of the use of popular French points to a problem which is greater than that of the ‘bienséance’ of the simple presence or absence of ‘parler populaire’ in a novel It underlines the difference of authorial position between the ‘dictionnaire’ and the novel. A dictionary of popular French, which may well be the work of more than one contributor, whatever the prurience, vulgarity or beauty of the words it contains, draws a clear line between the sociolect it reduces to a taxonomy, and that of the educated researchers who produce it. Its form is abso lutely and unarguably citational. Moreover, the words it contains are distanced, both through explanatory translation into ‘français standard’, and through the dislocation of their arrangement according to either lexical, syntactic or sociological criteria. The systematic description of one area of language-use is produced through a quite different convention of language-use. And while, as Zola suggests, its readers may gain an illicit pleasure from its reference to the socially taboo, its institutional nature protects its producers and readers from its subject-matter. The conventions governing the genre of the novel do not provide the same protection of the moral and social status of the writer as those of the philological or historical text. The flouting of conventions of ‘bienséance’ in Zola’s novel through his use of popular French and his treatment of socially taboo subjects leave him vulnerable to accusations of immorality. For the authority of the novelist is derived, not just from the truth-claims of his depiction of society, but also from his creative responsibility for the text. However demarcated the sociolect of the narrator and that of the protagonists may be in a novel, the ad hominem cultural script of the production of the novel, unlike the depersonalized form of the dictionary, encourages the reader to associate its sociolects with the ‘tempérament’ of Zola as artist. And in this novel, as many critics have pointed out (see, for example, Vissière 1958 and Dubois 1973), Zola’s use of ‘style indirect libre’, which does not maintain the distance of the deictic centre of the teller from the participant worlds of the protagonists, associates the ‘odeur du peuple’ of the novel with the ‘odeur de Zola’. But allusion to non-fictional genres presents only one side of a double claim to authority, for Zola also asserts the status of his text as a literary work of art and, while affirming the external authority of truth, he refuses to relinquish his personal artistic authority. The opening paragraph displays self-assertion, not selfjustification. This is far from ‘l’objectivité castratrice du romancier réaliste’ (Barthes 1984:64). The transitivity patterns of the initial reference to Zola’s novels certainly efface his role as voluntary agent (‘doivent se com poser’, and ‘le plan général est arrêté, et je le suis avec une rigueur extrême’ (373)), presenting him as servant of his work. However, once specific reference is made to L’Assommoir, Zola himself is presented as both past and future writing agent, and, through an accumulation of possessive adjectives, as the subjective

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producer and owner of his work: ‘Je l’ai écrit, comme j’écrirai les autres, sans me déranger une seconde de ma ligne droite. C’est ce qui fait ma force. J’ai un but auquel je vais.’ (373) And most striking of these is ‘ma force’. Zola does not add weight to his texts by his undeviating commitment to his project, rather, this project is appropriated to his personal and intentional act of writing.9 Although Zola may open the final paragraph of the preface with ‘Je ne me défends pas d’ailleurs. Mon oeuvre me défendra’, this apparent refusal to speak for himself does not remove the writer from the text. The latter is a ‘moule très travaillé’, his novels form an ‘ensemble’, and they are the physical monument of Zola the artist whose ‘unique ambition est de laisser une oeuvre aussi large et aussi vivante qu’il pourra’, the testament to his existence. Likewise, the accumulation of abstract nominalizations, which point to the symbolic dimension of the moral framework of the text (‘la déchéance’, ‘l’ivrognerie’, ‘la fainéantise’, ‘le relâchement’, ‘les ordures de la promiscuité’, ‘l’oubli’, ‘la honte’, ‘la mort’), eliding the personal agency of the protagonists in conjunction with the the agentless, anonymous ‘il y a’, leave only Zola’s will intact: ‘j’ai voulu peindre’ (all 373). For most of the preface, Zola adopts a stand which refuses judgement of either himself or his protagonists as immoral. But in the final section, he makes a bid to retrieve a social and moral status which distances him from his text and reintegrates him in the system of judgement which he has been at such pains to repudiate. Here, he abandons both the institutional role of the scientist and the unanswerability of the Flaubertian narrator to go on record through a portrait of his extra-fictional persona. This self-portrait underlines the degree to which the reading conventions for a Naturalist novel, regardless of the technique of making the ‘facts’ speak for themselves, include an audience view that the text speaks for the author. The self-portrait confirms Zola’s participation in the social milieu of the bourgeois audience, and implies his subscription to the same system of moral and aesthetic values as the latter. This manoeuvre alone justifies the condemnation of Zola as a bourgeois playing at social engagement. It also undoes much of the work done in the preface to shift his readers’ frames of reading, by acknowledging the power of accusations concerning the novel. His final remark, ‘je m’en remets au temps et à la bonne foi publique pour me découvrir enfin sous l’amas de sottises entassées’ (374), distinguishes between the public and the authorized critic, and cannot conceal a plea to be accepted which overrides the implications of poor judgement among his contemporaries. The dominant message of the end of the preface is ‘I am one of you’. In defence of spectator sports The construction of a relationship between the participant worlds of author and audience, and the TAW becomes problematic in L’Assommoir as a result of the potential conflict in the functions of the discourse types from which the text

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draws its authorization. The structures and techniques of L’Assommoir signal its membership of the field of crafted literary texts. In the nineteenth century this membership brings with it the script of production of the personal creative vision of the artist which was promoted by Zola in his literary and art criticism (see note 9). Recurrent motifs, the formal presentation of a series of dramatic scenes, the symbolic utilization of the space of Paris, the symmetrical structure of character-groupings and of the event line of ascent and fall, with its links to classical structure and the mythical patterns of manichean conflict have received extensive commentary from critics.10 All these patterns clearly situate his novel as part of an inherited tradition of literature. Yet, not only in the preface but also in the presentation of the text itself, Zola lays claim to the authority of the social observer, filling out the vast structures of his text with detailed descriptions which signal his role as recorder of external truth, according to the principles of Barthes’s ‘effet de réel, and deploying the realist strategies outlined by Hamon (1982), which in themselves are not without tensions, as Hamon shows. The interaction of these two forms of authority in this novel introduces a tension in the moral and ideological domains. Zola may refrain, as part of his Naturalist project, from producing moral judgements of his characters, but this novel is not a nineteenth-century version of a Video lives’ slice of unmediated reality. And because the documentary aspects of his work are not crude data, but are transformed into literary patterning, this act of transformation brings with it a moral and ideological responsibility.11 The signals of construction in the text suggest that the selection of material is a part of an aesthetic project and remind Zola’s audience of the relationship between fiction and invention for which the author must assume responsibility. Readers may believe that the novel is a highly crafted form of report, but evidence of such crafting points to a different type of answerability from that of the social observer. The association of the literary text with private acts of production and interpretation enters into conflict with the public role-dominated text-types to which Zola refers in the preface. The situation of L’Assommoir in both sociological and literary value-systems beyond the purview of the protagonists, invites the construction of a participant position for the writer within those systems. To a certain extent the tension between the two forms of authorization is mediated by the symbolic systems of the novel. A link is created between the symbolic structures of the text and the dominant positivist discourse of ‘race’, ‘milieu’ and ‘moment’. These features of the novel take the relationship between TAW and discourse world beyond the referential conventions of the mimetic illusion. The symbolic structures of the text call for an extrapolative reading in which tropes are ascribed a function beyond aesthetic enhancement. The fictional world becomes more than either an imitation of, or model for, the extra-fictional world, and instead stands in a figural relationship with the latter, mediated by a conceptual matrix.12 The literary and the symbolic authority of L’Assommoir does not, however, efface the naturalist illusion of the text. Because the fictional world of the novel

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is situated in a social environment which is alien to both author and audience, the construction of a personal moral and ideological position for the writer raises the issue of the participants’ right to enter this world, and their motivation in doing so. This is not the mapping of a twentieth-century preoccupation with the rights to privacy of disempowered groups, onto a society in which such considerations were not an issue, as Hugo’s alleged response to the novel reveals (see p. 101). Further, the treatment of the relationship between the public and the private, and the emphasis on territories in the TAW, places this aspect of the discourse world in focus as part of the ‘text situation’ (see Werth forthcoming: chapter 3.4). While the public carnival of the ‘ouvriers’ of Zola’s novel is celebrated, his protagonists, and especially Gervaise, manifest a desire for the protection of the privacy of personal space which is repeatedly violated.13 This suggests a right to privacy within the TAW. The level of visualization of detail in L’Assommoir leads to an intimate experiential contact between the narrator and the TAW which extends to the reader’s world-building activities.14 Within the TAW, physical contact is associated with both contamination and invasion. Gervaise’s decline is mapped by her physical encounters with dirt, inducing a voluptuous pleasure and lassitude which contribute to her downfall, while the ‘paresse’ and ‘jouissance’ which Lantier experiences as he rubs against the ‘blanchisseuses’ and inhales the smell of their sweat, is presented as a parallel movement towards a different sort of ‘trou rêvé’ (608) from Gervaise’s ‘trou un peu propre pour dormir’ (410). Whereas Gervaise’s decline involves a folding in on herself,15 Lantier’s movement towards the enclosed space is invasive. He enters the ‘alcôve’ (608) of the boutique as he invades Gervaise’s body. Here, the process of extrapolation from TAW to actual world, in conjunction with the experiential frame of reading, produces a script of participant activity in which writer and readers enter into textual contact with the dirty linen of the protagonists’ lives in a manner which is as invasive as Lantier’s actions. Within Zola’s own positivist frame of human behaviour, the creation of a textual ‘milieu’ can influence the reader. His enforced contact with the ‘immonde’ of the fictional world can contaminate him, as Gervaise is contaminated by her daily contact with the material consequences of the most intimate aspects of her clients’ lives. Although the exposure of Gervaise’s own flesh may be presented as the consequence of worthy labour as she starches clean linen, (‘les bras nus, le cou nu, toute rose, si suante, que les petites mèches blondes de ses cheveux ébouriffés se collaient à sa peau’ (504)), her attempts to preserve the decorum of her boutique (‘—Clémence, remettez votre camisole, dit Gervaise. Madame Putois a raison, ce n’est pas convenable… On prendrait ma maison pour ce qu’elle n’est pas’ (505)) cannot protect her against the descent into moral turpitude. In this perspective, Zola’s prefatory claims to a moral and informative intent are as powerless to protect him and his audience as Gervaise’s ideals are to protect her. Some of the most powerful scenes of the novel depend for their effect on the exposure of the intensely private to the public gaze, culminating in the pathos of

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Gervaise’s performance of her husband’s death-agony for the entertainment of her neighbours. The fight at the ‘lavoir’ is an act of publicly sanctioned chastisement, during which Gervaise exposes Virginie’s buttocks to the audience. This fits the punishment to the latter’s crime of allowing others the freedom of her body, not to mention making free with the husbands of others. The audience for this fight is, however, limited to a community of women, and is invaded by Charles, who not only sees the birthmark under Gervaise’s arm but also brings it into the public domain through direct speech: ‘—Tiens! murmura-t-il en clignant un oeil, elle a une fraise sous le bras.’ (399) The ritual of public exposure is here disrupted by the transgressive intrusion of the outsider. As Gervaise hovers on the brink of her degradation, she offers a semi-public kiss to Coupeau. But her husband takes more than she offers: ‘Mais le zingueur, sans se gêner devant le monde, lui prit les seins.’ (509) Critical opinion follows the narrator in placing the kiss which follows this appropriative move as the turning point in the text, the ‘première chute dans le lent avachissement de leur vie’ (509), making Gervaise the co-instigator of her own decline (see, for instance, Curtis 1985:12). But the sensuality of the kiss is the direct result of an unsolicited invasion of her personal space. This contrasts with her later unselfconscious exposure of her flesh to Virginie and Coupeau (731–2), or her attempt to open her camisole for Goujet (777), both of which occur further down the slide towards death. In these later scenes, in losing her sense of self, she has lost her sense of privacy. Charles’s or Coupeau’s invasions of Gervaise’s privacy are clearly motivated by a prurient and sexual interest which is not comparable to either the authorial or audience positions projected by the text. But Gervaise invades the dying Lalie’s privacy in a way which is closer to the socially acceptable goals of both writer and readers. The transitivity pattern of her exposure of the child’s nakedness in an attempt to re-make her bed shows this to be inadvertent (‘Alors, le pauvre petit corps de la mourante apparut’), and she prolongs the exposure as a result of the extreme emotions of pity and religious adoration which the sight of Lalie’s body evokes in her. But this action is still portrayed as an invasion: ‘«Madame Coupeau, murmura la petite, je vous en prie…» De ses bras trop courts, elle cherchait a rabattre le drap, toute pudique, prise de honte pour son père.’ (759) Here, laudable intentions and emotions which resemble those of the socially responsible writer and readers do not detract from the intrusive nature of her actions.16 By offering the spectacle of Gervaise’s personal degradation to his readers, not as ‘reportage’, but as a novel, Zola runs the risk of drawing both himself and his readers into an accusation of voyeurism for personal entertainment. If ‘faire voir’ turns Zola into a voyeur, then what does it make of the vast public for his books? An undeniable element of the appeal of his work, regardless of whether it also happens to be viewed as a major literary achievement, lies in this choice of taboo and scandalous subject matter, and his detailed and dramatic treatment thereof.

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Here, Zola is caught in his own Naturalist trap. As a fictional entity, Gervaise has no personal rights. But the truth-claims of Naturalism dictate that we believe in her, not as a fictional construct, but as a human being. And even if the truthclaims of Zola’s text are reconciled with its obviously fictional status through the symbolic and depersonalizing process proposed in the preface, so that Gervaise ‘stands for’ the ‘ouvrière’, and the condition of the individual protagonists ‘stands for’ the ‘condition ouvrière’, belief in the social relevance of the text depends on the actual-world referential frame of a non-fictitious social group. Zola the bourgeois artist is appropriating this social group to his own artistic oeuvre, turning social tragedy into the material for a work of art, which, however much it may contain a social message, also entertains its audience. A major element of the readability of L’Assommoir, like that of true-crime books in the 1990s, is its obedience to Leech’s pragmatic Interest Principle (1983:146–7), which is fuelled by the possibility of its correspondence to an actual-world state of affairs.17 The frame of the author, trapped in his desire to please a public hungry for drama but possessed of a social responsibility towards the group he portrays in his novel, is mirrored through ‘mise en abyme’ at the end of the novel. Gervaise’s imitations of her husband’s dying frenzy create a chain of exploitation in which she exploits her husband to gain social acceptance in a group which has exploited and gradually excluded her: ‘Dire que, la veille au soir, chez les Boche, on l’accusait d’exagérer le tableau! Ah bien! elle n’en avait pas fait la moitié assez! Maintenant elle voyait mieux comment Coupeau s’y prenait’ (786). However, the anguish she finally offers as spectacle is her own, as a figure ‘qu’on ne regardait plus et qui s’essayait toute seule au fond de la loge, tremblant des pieds et des mains, faisant Coupeau’ (790). This passage has implications for Zola’s own textualization of the anguish of his protagonists, for he, like Gervaise, offers Coupeau’s madness to an audience. His transformational appropriation of medical texts to present Coupeau’s madness may signal an intention to inform, not to perform. But he cannot control the desires of his audience any more than Gervaise can, and the function of the engagement between author and audience may shift from the education and improvement of the latter to the exploitation of both performed and performer for entertainment. Zola offers an attenuation of this potential threat to both his own face and that of his readers by inserting these moments of spectacle into a larger and less negative network of public performance. The individual spectacles of Gervaise’s very personal life are set in the broader context of an interactive community in which spectacle plays a significant role. Clémence catches cold because she stayed out in the snow to watch an argument (546). The participants in Gervaise’s birthday meal lose their initial sense of privacy and share their celebration with the audience who have gathered to watch from the street in a spirit of fraternity (580–1).18 Zola’s tableaux, his spectacles, can thus be viewed as part of an altogether more positive social interaction which sustains the community. For while ‘l’assommoir’ may be the source of misery and

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degradation, it is also a source of pleasure in the role it plays in the carnival of popular entertainment (see Dubois 1973:107). Textual spectacle thus becomes a part of the social fabric. Zola’s personal creative act can be situated, like Gervaise’s life, within a social network, becoming a dynamic element of a larger pattern of social behaviour. Interest in L’Assommoir is not limited to its aesthetic structure or a desire for information. As the personal lives of the protagonists are a source of human interest for the ‘quartier’, and as ‘l’assommoir’ allows them to escape from the grey monotony of their working lives, the novel allows readers to indulge an interest in the drama of the socially unacceptable. Chapter ten shows the progressive anaesthetising of Gervaise to her situation, which extends to the reader’s experience of the text. The celebration of Nana’s first communion, and the Poissons’ ‘crémaillère’ have none of the dramatic grandeur of earlier celebrations. This chapter is saved from monotony and the growing weight of Gervaise’s obsession with death (which offer the reader the choice of indifference or depression) by the series of vivid scenes which exploit the shock value of the taboo. The excess of cruelty and violence of Bijard’s treatment of Lalie may be horrific, but it is a welcome distraction from lassitude. The excitement of the onset of Coupeau’s madness, combined with the intensely physical picture of Coupeau defecating at Sainte Anne, stimulates our interest in a way that the discussion of Nana’s future apprenticeship cannot. And although we recognize the threat of the alambic, the ‘machine à soûler’ (704, 706 and 707), it allows us access to a brighter world which, although it is more dangerous than the visit to the circus which it replaces, is just as colourful: ‘La boutique flambait, son gaz allumé, les glaces blanches comme des soleils, les fioles et les bocaux illuminant les murs de leurs verres de couleur.’ (702) It is the arena of laughter and play, and although the drunken workers inhabit a scene from hell, under the dark shadows of ‘des abominations, des figures avec des queues, des monstres ouvrant leurs mâchoires comme pour avaler le monde’ (704), Gervaise’s blend of fear and desire is more interesting than the monotonous portrayal of suffering at the beginning of the chapter. Gervaise’s desire to ‘renifler l’odeur, goûter à la cochonnerie’ (706) allows the reader a more intense physical experience than the scene of the Boche, Lorilleux and Poisson families at table (680–2). And Lalie’s horrified face as she encounters the drunken Gervaise produces a dramatic clash of extremes in which any moral message is subordinated to the spectacle of the encounter between the two as a source of interest. Set against Gervaise’s increasing lack of response to her situation, the dramatization of the socially unacceptable can be read, not as an invitation to prurience, but as a responsible sensitizing of the reader, a protection against an indifference which is demonstrated as negative and destructive.

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Language and social identity If Zola’s presentation of the issue of voyeurism in his text involves a yoking of the reader and writer in a shared moral responsibility, in which the face of each is dependent on the preservation of that of the other, this is not the case for that aspect of its ‘forme’ which is more specifically linguistic; the extensive importation of a non-literary sociolect into the novel. In L’Assommoir, which lacks Balzac’s centre-stage interpretive narrator, stylistic indicators of social register become crucial to the distinction between the narratorial voice and that of the protagonists. The impact of ‘parler populaire’ as a form of language-use alien to the increasing rarification of prose forms towards the end of the nineteenth century is as much the result of its shock-value as of any quantitative dominance, although this increases as the novel progresses. It is nevertheless strong enough for Petrey to suggest that, in L’Assommoir, objective Naturalist description becomes a stylistically marked form against the degree zero of ‘la«langue verte»’ (1978:61). While, as Petrey demonstrates, these contrasts between the two registers certainly leave the humanity of popular speech as the winner over a dehumanized transparent Naturalist style, certain descriptive passages also signal the presence of an ‘écriture artiste’ attributable to Zola’s personal creative activity.19 Dubois, like Petrey, reads the treatment of popular speech as a positive celebration of these forms of language, but also comments that the social code from which it springs must be ironically distanced as a borrowed form of language which is set against Zola’s own bourgeois code. His extensive treatment of the language of Zola’s novel demonstrates the instability of the status of the narrative voice at certain points. Schor takes a harder line: Le transcodage, tel qu’il est pratiqué dans L’Assommoir, n’est en aucun cas une activité bénigne: passer du code culturel bourgeois au code culturel populaire ne laisse pas indemne le premier, mais ne valorise pas pour autant—comme le voudrait Dubois—le dernier. (1978:104) Schor clearly demonstrates the threat which Zola’s writing practice represents to institutional social codes, and locates the revulsion of the reader specifically at the level of language. The aspect of the code-switching in L’Assommoir which is at issue here is the threat it poses to the authority of the writer. The stylistic citational processes of L’Assommoir are less complex than those of Madame Bovary. The only instability concerns the popular and bourgeois sociolects, for the incorporation of either pseudo-objective non-literary style, or of styles marked as more ‘aesthetic’ in quality, serves as a support for the authority of the text. Negative parodic distancing is reserved for the hypotext of Germinie Lacerteux, which is signalled by citation of plot structures.20

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Registers of authority Initially, Zola sets up a narrative voice which is distanced from the protagonists in both the narration of events and descriptive passages.21 He thereby conforms to expectations concerning the dual role of the Naturalist narrative agent which works in two institutionally sanctioned sociolects, that of the apparently objective recorder, working in ‘style soutenu’, and that of a more individualized creative artist, who controls language within an accepted literary register. In this novel, in accordance with the Naturalist illusion of objectivity, signals of narratorial stance are chiefly generated through the weak form of description, rather than through the more overt processes of commentary.22 In those descriptions which are marked as a subjective act of aesthetic transformation of their fictional referents, we are made aware of the writer as creator of pictures in words. When they are marked as neutral as is the case for Petrey’s examples (1978), our awareness of the writer concerns his authority as recorder. The blend of objective and artistic description and narration of the opening chapters thus sends out a clear message concerning the nature of the text. In chapter three, the relationship between participants and protagonists is set up through three successive moments of distance. The first concerns levels of literacy, manifested by Coupeau’s inability to sign his name to the marriage register. The second is produced by the comic treatment of the visit to the Louvre, founded on the incongruity of a social group which is clearly out of place in this icon of civilized Paris, and which does not have the educational training to respond to the paintings according to the received conventions of aesthetic appreciation. This scene in the Louvre acts as the prelude to a third moment of distance, provoked by a descriptive passage which reinforces the distance between an ingroup of author and audience which appreciates natural beauty, and the protagonists who are locked into their own immediate physical needs and limited sphere of interest. From the top of the column in the Place Vendôme, the wedding group look out over Paris. This allows Zola to indulge in a passage of marked artistic description which follows the Romantic tradition of the aestheticization of the landscape: Paris, autour d’eux, étendait son immensité grise, aux lointains bleuâtres, ses vallées profondes, où roulait une houle de toitures; toute la rive droite était dans l’ombre, sous un grand haillon de nuage cuivré; et, du bord de ce nuage, frangé d’or, un large rayon coulait, qui allumait les milliers de vitres de la rive gauche d’un pétillement d’étincelles, détachant en lumière ce coin de la ville sur un ciel très pur, lavé par l’orage.23 (450) Zola makes it clear that no aesthetic awareness enters the protagonists’ experience of this visit to the column. Fear of heights, concentration on the sky

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as a means to avoid vertigo, interest in where they are to eat, and a pressing desire to return to ground-level are their only concerns. They are not only unable to respond appropriately to the pictures in the Louvre, they are equally unable to respond (whether through lack of education or for other reasons) to the picture which Zola has painted in words. This passage exposes the techniques of the realist illusion. For the cards are weighted most unfairly. This sky exists for the reader through Zola’s aestheticizing language. But it exists for the protagonists as part of a TAW not mediated by language. The wedding party might be able to admire the sky in their TAW but they are in no position to admire Zola’s textual creation of a sky. This description separates the perceptions of narrator and protagonists. It demonstrates that signals of interpersonal interaction are not necessary to the attribution of social identity and status to the narrative agent and the creation of solidarity between author and audience. The stylistic marking of the description also confirms Zola’s role as Romantic artist, whose personal transcendental vision produces a relationship with the world which is not referential but transformational, and which demonstrates the artist’s mastery of the landscape.24 This passage, and others like it, work towards the creation of solidarity between writer and reader, placing them at a higher level than the protagonists in a hierarchy of power which has, as one of its characteristics, the enhancement of the positive face of its members. Our expectations of authority drawn from neutral observation of incontravertible facts are also reinforced in the course of the text. This may involve markers of historical veracity (‘l’hôpital de Lariboisière, alors en construction’ (376)), or overt positive epistemic modalizers: ‘Mme Boche, évidemment, voulait faire plaisir à Gervaise. La vérité était qu’elle prenait souvent le café avec Adèle et Virginie’ (392, my italics). Zola also uses the diegetic capacity of the narrative voice to reinforce the selfevidence of his mimetic dramatizations. This reinforcement, while it increases our view of the text as a demonstration, recalling the authority of the nonfictional text, sometimes verges on the unnecessary. This is particularly the case when such reinforcement occurs in a paragraph-initial position. Thus, ‘Ils parlaient de Lantier’ (407), ‘Elle expliquait ses poupées à MesBottes’ (454) and ‘Elle parlait de Lantier’ (585), all appear redundant, given that the reader has already drawn these conclusions on the basis of the preceding paragraph. Both epistemic modalization, and the unmodalized propositional formulation of inferences already made by the reader, establish the presence of an interpreting voice. This voice manifests a willingness to make the evidence of the fictional world available to the reader, and the authority of an interpretation which we assume to be correct because it matches our own, reminding us of Balzac’s techniques of self-evidence.25 While the reporting function of this voice is feigned, to the extent that what it reports is fictional, it nevertheless establishes its utter reliability with regard to the fictional world. This is not without its effect on our reading of Zola’s stance towards his audience. It exhibits the quality of

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ideational explicitness associated with the formal academic text, which is classified as having a speech-act goal to inform. It thus invokes a cultural and institutional register of authority, regardless of the fact that this authority is applied to fiction. Alien voices The impression of impersonality of the recording narrator is not only broken by the voice of the artist, it is also broken by register clash. Here, the narrative adopts the phatic interjections of spoken French (‘n’est-ce pas’ etc.), which signal a direct interpersonal context of orality at the level of narration, confounding expectations concerning the written authority of the text. But it also adopts a nonbourgeois sociolect. In both cases, the effacing of the narrator as an anthropomorphized agent is reversed, and the narratorial voice reemerges as a motivated and subjective voice. Here, the relationship between narratorial and authorial voice becomes an issue. Although many such code-switches may signal indirect citation, as Dubois and Vissière have pointed out, there are passages in L’Assommoir in which no logical vocalizer, or even focalizer, other than the narrator can be constructed. Here, the novelist as artist steps outside the conventions of the novel, while the novelist as philologist, historian or sociologist steps outside the accepted conventions of the non-literary texts which Zola, in his preface, has suggested as fields of comparison. In doing so, Zola sacrifices the security of his position, both as bourgeois artist and as bourgeois social scientist. The sociolect of the protagonists initially appears in citational form. This may occur through direct speech: ‘Puis, tu sais, je n’aime pas qu’on me moucharde. Fiche-moi la paix!’ (380–1) The degradation of this sociolect from the popular to the vulgar during the battle of words between Virginie and Gervaise is firmly attributed to the protagonists, not the narrator.26 In the description of the beginning of Coupeau’s drinking bouts the amount of ‘argot’ increases. Citation is signalled by tagging (‘il se plaignait’, ‘il s’appelait’ (516)) and exclamations (‘Ah! fichtre non!’, ‘N’est-ce pas?’ (516)), making it easy to associate the degeneration in register with Coupeau’s own shift from hardworking labourer to parasite. This is reinforced by the absence of a matrix verb in the self-delusive penultimate sentence of the paragraph as he sits drinking: Lui, d’ailleurs, toujours bon zigue, ne donnant pas une chiquenaude au sexe, aimant la rigolade, bien sûr, et se piquant le nez à son tour, mais gentiment, plein de mépris pour ces saloperies d’hommes tombés dans l’alcool, qu’on ne voit pas dessoûler! (516) While the assimilation of the text to his thoughts and words is not complete, as sequential indicators such as ‘alors’, ‘quand’ and ‘puis’ are attributable to the

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ordering narration, and not to the protagonist, the integrity of the narratorial register is preserved. Even as the degree of contamination between the two registers increases, the narrator always reserves the right to preserve a distance from the extremes of language-use of the protagonists. This occurs in the treatment of Clémence’s speech: En arrivant un matin à l’atelier, Clémence raconta [1] qu’elle avait rencontré, la veille, vers onze heures, M.Lantier donnant le bras à une femme. [2] Elle disait cela en mots très sales, avec de la méchanceté par dessous, pour voir la tête de la patronne. [3] Oui, monsieur Lantier grimpait la rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; la femme était blonde, [4] un de ces chameaux du boulevard à moitié crevés, le derrière nu sous leur robe de soie. (600) This passage shifts from indirect speech (1) to free indirect style in a ‘français parlé’ which is not ‘argotique’ (2), followed by free direct speech (3). The language of the last section (4) is firmly condemned before it is even spoken through the pre-posing of an overt categorization of her language according to social conventions of polite language-use (2). Moreover, readers are saved many of Clémence’s offensive remarks (‘Mais Clémence eut beau ajouter des commentaires dégoûtants’ (601)), as they are presented through an indirect report of her speech act, not of her speech.27 Here, the evaluative adjective signals a concern for the reader’s sensibilities, a justification for summarized telling rather than a more Naturalist ‘vraisemblable’ of showing. The progressive breakdown of the barriers between the two sociolects is never total. What Dubois calls the otherness of the ‘parler du peuple’ endures to the end and continues to be set against the bourgeois literary code. But in reducing the ‘artiste’ element on one side, and in increasing the ‘populaire’ element on the other, Zola takes the register of his text to a zone between the two. Territorial positions: claiming and defending Naturalism Rivals for the crown L’Assommoir and Germinie Lacerteux are linked not only by the similarity of their plots, but as competitors for the position of prototypical Naturalist novel.28 For Baguley, Zola’s novel is no more than a reworking of the aims of the earlier text, ‘rigorously submitting the newest and humblest avatar of the tragic fate to the fundamental naturalist experience of social, moral, linguistic, physical and, above all, ontological disintegration.’ (1990b:21) But Baguley suggests elsewhere that Thérèse Raquin restates the ‘Bovary situation’ in ‘a kind of

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generic “anxiety of counter-influence’”, establishing its originality in relation to the model realist text (1990a:226). It seems to me that the relationship between the two Naturalist novels should also be framed in these terms. From the preface onwards, Zola engages with the Goncourts’ novel. The claim to have produced ‘le premier roman sur le peuple, qui ne mente pas et qui ait l’odeur du peuple’ (373–4), is a covert reply to the prefatory claims of Germinie Lacerteux to have raised ‘le peuple’ to tragic status. In the cultural arena of L’Assommoir, the status of Germinie Lacerteux as a flagship of Naturalism cannot be ignored. Although this intertext of Zola’s novel can no longer be assumed to constitute part of the common ground between author and audience, for contemporary readers it occupied a significant position in the context of culture. Of Zola’s novels, it is L’Assommoir which engages directly with this text, exploiting the flagrant points of similarity between the texts to dislodge the Goncourts’ book from its position as the Naturalist novel. Traces of the Goncourts’ novel are to be found throughout L’Assommoir. This extends beyond the general similarity of their Naturalist treatment of their subject matter to the repetition of scenes and motifs. Zola transforms Germinie’s wanderings (‘Elle battait tout l’espace où la crapule soûle ses lundis et trouve ses amours, entre un hôpital, une tuerie et un cimetière: La Riboisière, L’Abattoir et Montmartre’ (Goncourt 1990:215)) into the symbolic limits of Gervaise’s life. He imports not only the limited contact of the urban worker with nature, through excursions to Vincennes, but also the disintegration of the heroine (‘ce fut alors que les abaissements, les dégradations de Germinie commencèrent à paraître dans toute sa personne, à l’hébéter, à la salir’ (1990:184)), and the descent into blind prostitution: De cette rupture, Germinie tomba où elle devait tomber, au-dessous de la honte, au-dessous de la nature même. De chute en chute, la misérable et brûlante créature roula à la rue. Elle ramassa les amours qui s’usent en une nuit […] Affamée du premier venu, elle le regardait à peine, et n’aurait pu le reconnaître. (1990:226) And Coupeau’s ravings incorporate the pattern of Germinie’s fantastic dream of revenge on her lover (1990:170).29 These citations from the Goncourts’ novel invite comparison by the reader. On one level, they can be seen as part of Zola’s appropriation of a wide range of documentary sources for his novel, turning Germinie Lacerteux into a supporting document. The earlier novel also reassures the reader that Zola was not the first writer to tackle such taboo themes as rape, prostitution and alcoholism in the working classes. But Zola appropriates some of the most striking elements of Germinie Lacerteux to L’Assommoir, not as the reinforcing details of a Naturalist backdrop, but in the foregrounded form of symbolic motifs. This invites comparison of the two texts as competing works of literature. In our

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reductive and categorizing literary-historical activities, we tend to attribute the specific project of a renewal of artistic form and language, through ‘écriture artiste’, to the Goncourts, while allowing Zola a primary role in the development of the more political field of socially aware literary texts. But, as Baguley emphasizes, L’Assommoir does not have the political implications of the later Germinal (1885), and fails to fit into this neat categorization (1990b:21). Viewed in terms of the success of each text in persuading the reading public of the acceptability of two very different ways of writing the Naturalist novel— not in terms of aesthetic refinement versus sociological engagement, of literary firsts, or on a scale of Naturalist entropy—we can only conclude that Zola’s persuasion is more successful than that of the Goncourts. For the ‘artiste’ and ‘decadent’ prose movement wrote itself into an aesthetic corner, while certain of Zola’s novels, among them L’Assommoir, have become influential texts in the canon of the novel. Zola’s novel differs from that of the Goncourts, in particular, with regard to the degree of distance which is created between the narrative voice and the central protagonist. He pulls back from a treatment of his main protagonist as a dehumanized case study of an extreme physiological and psychological condition, an approach adopted both in Germinie and in his own Thérèse Raquin.30 However positivist and determinist his treatment of Gervaise may be, he also sets up the plot in such a way as to promote sympathy between his readers and his protagonist, inviting indignation at her treatment at the hands of others. This aspect of L’Assommoir can be seen as part of the move towards readability described by Hamon (1968). In addition, not only are the medical and biological analogies employed so freely elsewhere suppressed in this novel, but the only sustained use of a scientific text, in the description of Coupeau’s madness, is ambivalent in its stance towards the medical profession.31 As Schor has suggested, the distanced and controlling clinical gaze is not promoted in this text. This contrasts with the Goncourts’ objectification of Germinie and the portrayal of her secret double-life as exceptional. It is replaced by a treatment of Gervaise according to the tropes of the melodramatic bourgeoise heroine, and in this respect, Zola comes closer than the Goncourts to their prefatory claim to the democratic creation of a form of tragedy for the people.32 There is also a major difference in the treatment of the popular sociolect in the two novels. The Goncourts’ novel, like Zola’s, makes extensive use of popular French. But in L’Assommoir, the breakdown of the differentiation between narratorial voice and protagonists’ voice produced in ‘style indirect libre’ is more socio-linguistically compromising to Zola than are the techniques of Germinie Lacerteux to its authors. The distancing produced by the Goncourts’ treatment of Germinie as an alien physiology is increased by the rigorous relegation of popular French to the direct speech of the protagonists, and the distancing device of italicization. Nor is there any question as to the inferiority of ‘parler populaire’:

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Et à mesure qu’elle parlait, son langage devenait aussi méconnaissable que sa voix transposée dans les notes du songe. Il s’élevait au-dessus de la femme, au-dessus de son ton et de ses expressions journalières. C’était comme une langue de peuple purifiée et transfigurée dans la passion. (1990:190–1, my italics) There are more frequent manifestations of narratorial intrusion than L’Assommoir (‘Ceux qui voient la fin de la religion catholique dans le temps où nous sommes, ne savent pas […]’ (90)), and few manifestations of reflectorized narrative. The contrast between narratorial style and protagonists’ style is enhanced by the extreme virtuoso passages of dense ‘écriture artiste’ on the one hand, and, on the other, the greater condensation in the protagonists’ speech of non-standard syntactic forms as well as lexis, intensified by its presentation in solid blocks (for example, 1990:119–21). A polarization is thus produced between the level of narration and the speech of the protagonists which creates an effect of collage rather than integration. Object lessons In L’Assommoir, the ‘chute’ of the narrator’s idiolect coincides roughly with the ‘chute’ of Gervaise, which begins with her birthday dinner.33 In itself, the parallel degradation of the protagonist’s condition and the narrator’s idiolect could be seen as an aesthetic justification for the latter (as has been seen in the case of Coupeau, see p. 115). But this degradation of language is further justified by the indirect condemnation of ‘bienséance’ through two negative ‘mise en abymes’. The vehicle for the first is Lantier, as an exemplar of the mismatch between idiolect and moral character. It can be read as a move against the reification of élitist forms of literary language. The second, however, presents a more general criticism of a social environment in which those who control a social milieu allow moral turpitude while regulating language-use in a superficial obedience to ‘bienséance’. The vehicle for this is Madame Lerat’s ‘atelier’. Lantier, who constantly promotes an external appearance which is at odds with his ‘true’ self, is the most educated figure of the central group of protagonists, the only one to have books on his shelves which both Zola and his readers may also have read. But neither his reading of the works of Louis Blanc, Lamartine and Sue, nor of the ‘tas de bouquins philosophiques et humanitaires’, nor of the parcel of newspapers ‘de toutes les dates et de tous les titres, empilés sans ordre aucun’ (606), would appear to have improved his moral conduct. He uses them as a means to dominate those around him: ‘Poisson restait saisi, consterné; et il ne trouvait pas un mot pour défendre l’empereur. C’était dans un livre, il ne pouvait pas dire non.’ (605) They are tokens of a superiority which he wishes to flaunt on a bookcase, just as he uses socialist slogans to browbeat Poisson (606). They show the respect in which the written medium is held as an ‘authorized’

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form of discourse, even by the illiterate, while exposing the potential for abuse of this respect. This pattern of the exploitation of a façade of cultural competence is, of course, a standard trope of the nineteenth-century novel, and is conventionally reassuring to the reader.34 However, Zola explicitly extends the exemplar to the domain of language with little room for ambiguity in interpretation. Lantier takes pleasure in the vulgar language of the ‘blanchisseuses’ while maintaining a higher level of speech for himself: ‘adorant leurs gros mots, les poussant à en dire, tout en gardant lui-même un langage choisi’ (608). But just as his fine linen does not conceal his ‘odeur d’homme malpropre, qui soigne seulement le dessus, ce qu’on voit de sa personne’ (605), his fine language does not improve his character: ‘il avait une instruction comme les gens pas propres ont une chemise blanche avec de la crasse par-dessous.’ (648) This is one covert answer from Zola to the question of the ‘bienséance’ of his use of popular French, a continuation of the suggestion in his preface that recourse to elevated ‘literary’ language is an empty gesture. To dress immoral behaviour in a linguistic coat of bourgeois decency does not conceal or excuse that behaviour. The indirect dialogue of the preface with Germinie Lacerteux is continued here. For the Goncourts’ novel pushes its protagonists to extremes of non-standard speech, intensified by the syntactic dislocation of their extended tirades, but preserves the integrity of the narrative voice which employs the ‘langage choisi’ of ‘écriture artiste’. In Zola’s treatment of Madame Lerat’s ‘atelier’, more general issues concerning social regulation are raised. Madame Lerat, in loco parentis for her apprentices, ‘se blessait seulement des mots crus; pourvu qu’on n’employât pas les mots crus, on pouvait tout dire.’ (717) And the conversation based on innuendo which is conducted in the atelier is shown to be as pernicious as ‘les mots crus’. While she rules the ‘atelier’ under a semblance of politeness (‘C’est bien mal poli ce que vous faites là, mesdemoiselles, dit-elle. On ne se parle jamais tout bas quand il y a du monde… Quelque indécence, n’est-ce pas? Ah! c’est du propre!’ (719)), the hypocrisy of her obedience to conventions is fully demonstrated. The pleasure which both Mme Lerat and her underlings take in the linguistic acrobatics of the apprentices does more than demonstrate the futility of the latter as a protection against prurience. It shows the use of acceptable language (‘Ma pince est fendue’, and ‘Qui est-ce qui a fouillé dans mon petit pot?’ (719)) to be the source of sexual excitement: ‘excitées, les yeux fous, allant de plus en plus fort. Mme Lerat n’avait pas à se fâcher, on ne disait rien de cru.’ (719) In this chapter, the double-ententes of the atelier are matched at the level of narration. For Nana’s actions are described through the same linguistic process: ‘elle roulait très bien ses queues de violettes’ (720). Narrator and reader participate in the same interpretive processes as the occupants of the atelier. Moreover, linguistic titillation and non-linguistic voyeuristic prurience are shown to exist in a relationship of equivalence, as Madame Lerat’s complacent and avid attitude to

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Nana’s immoral behaviour outside the atelier is formulated in the same terms as her approach to the language games of the apprentices. As Mme Lerat ‘se régala de la conversation’ (719), so ‘Mme Lerat se régala de la première histoire de sa nièce.’ (722) Not only is the parallel between the two strongly underlined through repetition, but a causal relationship is implied by the order of their presentation. Paying lip-service to linguistic ‘bienséance’ while using such language as a source of erotic pleasure encourages the immoral behaviour it appears to suppress. These two TAW patterns allow an attack on novels which treat the subjects of adultery and debauchery in a language deemed acceptable by the public. And readers who enjoy the titillation of such novels are no better than the girls in the atelier. The patterns demonstrate once again the complexity of the face-needs of author and audience. In justifying the flouting of conventions in L’Assommoir, thereby preserving Zola’s positive face, these examples entail a further potential threat to face which embraces both the individual reader and the society in which L’Assommoir is produced. The pattern of defence and counter-threat is nevertheless placed ‘off-record’, not only by the non-referential status of the fictional world, but also by the structural displacement of the interaction to the TAW. ‘Mise en abyme’ can only serve as a suggestion of equivalence between the fictional world and the hypothetical frame of context, allowing the audience the let-out of nonidentification with roles in the text. Overstepping the bounds? The contrast between the degrees of implication of writer and audience in ‘mise en abyme’ and direct address is illustrated by a passage towards the end of the book where, exceptionally, Zola’s narrator does address a narratee. This address lacks the benevolent and avuncular stance towards the audience of the earlier ‘Et le vin donc, mes enfants, ça coulait autour de la table comme Peau coule a la Seine.’ (579) Oui, elle en était là; ça répugne les délicats, cette idée; mais si les délicats n’avaient rien tortillé de trois jours, nous verrions un peu s’ils bouderaient contre leur ventre; ils se mettraient à quatre pattes et mangeraient aux ordures comme les camarades. Ah! la crevaison des pauvres, les entrailles vides qui crient la faim, le besoin des bêtes claquant des dents et s’empiffrant de choses immondes, dans ce grand Paris si doré et si flambant! Et dire que Gervaise s’était fichu des ventrées d’oie grasse! (752) However hard we try to turn this into the ‘voix du quartier’, this sustained polemic involves more than a citational coloration, and declares itself as a full narratorial comment which ranges the narrator on the side of the ‘camarades’, the

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poor. Although it bears the marks of direct address (the exophoric ‘Oui’, and the use of the present tense), it does not directly designate an addressee, either through an epithet noun such as ‘mes enfants’, or through the use of ‘vous’. The hypothetical reader-reaction it describes is presented in the third-person, and contrasts with the potentially more inclusive ‘nous’. This is a reworking of Balzac’s tactic of the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’ (see pp. 59–60), but with certain noticeable differences. As in Balzac’s text, this address sets up an opposition between the desirable reader and undesirable readers. But here, although the narratee is grammatically dissociated from the ‘ils’ which designates ‘les délicats’, readers may have more difficulty in adopting the role of the desirable reader than that of the rejected ‘délicats’. For the idea which is so repugnant to delicate minds is the brutal description of the rotting food eaten by Gervaise, which has been presented in such a way as to arouse the reader’s disgust: ‘et c’était ainsi qu’elle avait parfois des plats de riches, des melons pourris, des maquereaux tournés, des côtelettes dont elle visitait le manche, par crainte des asticots.’ (752) As a result, readers may already find themselves excluded from the redemptive inclusive ‘nous’ which would allow a solidarity between narrator and readers in condemning the bright city which treats its underclass so harshly. In addition to the problems of the reader’s position in this address, the idiolect of the narratorial voice itself remains an issue. For this is the point in the text at which the narrator’s style is most explicitly distant from the bourgeois written styles of the opening, losing its sources of cultural authorization. It is also the most overt narratorial condemnation of this class in the book. As such, it can be read as an answer to the Goncourts’ extended rhetorical and sententious apostrophe to Paris in the final chapter of Germinie.35 The shock of narratorial stance in this direct address is attenuated by a preposed sequence of textual moments which raise the issue of ‘bienséance’ and provide a path for the reader to dissociate himself from the ‘délicats’. The invitations to condemn Lantier and Madame Lerat have initiated this process. Moreover, shortly before the direct address, Zola has parodically textualized the linguistic ‘blanchissage’ already attacked in the ‘atelier’ scene. Here, Gervaise’s thoughts are reported with a lexical delicacy which is surprising: Vrai, elle le trouvait trop rossard, cet entripaillé, elle l’avait où vous savez […], elle le mettait dans le même endroit que le propriétaire. A cette heure, son endroit devait être bigrement large […] Et c’était ces jours-là qu’elle l’avait dans le derrière. Oui, dans le derrière son cochon d’homme! dans le derrière les Lorilleux, les Boche et les Poisson! dans le derrière, le quartier qui la méprisait! Tout Paris y entrait […] (751, my italics) At this point in the novel, this delicacy strikes a false note. The exaggerated lexical repetition of ‘endroit’ and ‘derrière’ in itself signals an ironic treatment of these euphemistic terms. Their social acceptability is no more a protection

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against their unambiguous and taboo referents, than are such typographical gestures towards convention as the printing of ‘foutre’ as ‘f…tre’ in many editions of Jacques le fataliste. While the use of ‘style indirect libre’ in itself would have justified the use of ‘cul’, which indeed will appear a few pages later (‘Il riait comme un cul, le trou de la bouche arrondie, et les joues telle-ments bouffies qu’elles lui cachaient le nez, un vrai cul enfin!’ (754)), its contrived suppression here simply illustrates, at the level of narration, the fact that circumlocution in no way inhibits our understanding of the vulgar image hammered at in the text. The absence of ‘cul’ not only fails to attenuate its crudity, it points to the folly of assuming that inoffensive language is a protection against offensive referents. This enactment of Madame Lerat’s highly suspect approach to language, because it is situated through the use of free indirect thought at a mid-point between Gervaise and the narrator as sources of language, making it impossible to distinguish who performs the sanitizing of language, draws the issues raised by the earlier ‘mise en abyme’ towards the outer world level of narration. It thus serves as a bridge to the direct address, both in the linear unfolding of the text, and in the bridging of the TAW and the world of narration. Despite this bridge, which allows interpretation of the direct narratorial address as a rejection of the vestiges of linguistic ‘bienséance’, the overtly ideological contrast between the mythologized and sanitized metropolis of literature and the condition of its poor remains a threat to the bourgeois class which Zola, in the preface, was so careful to claim as his own. But the intrusion of the popular sociolect into the narration is perhaps not so different from the distancing technique of Zola’s self-portrait. The rejection of ‘bienséance’ can here be read as a less honest move than it might appear to be. To voice this threat in the voice of the people, not in a more neutral, or positively literary register, is to exploit authorial non-membership of this group, even as it appears to assert narratorial membership. By choosing to write in a voice so distant from his own, Zola can hide behind the relatively minor imposition of the flouting of literary convention in order to pose a more profound ideological threat to his audience. This would correspond to Gaillard’s contention that the threat to morality and responses to this threat were exercises in misdirection (1978:18).36 Whereas the Goncourts’ condemnation of Paris is made on-record, at the level of narration, that of Zola moves towards the status of an off-record threat. Double-bind, or every one a winner? In the Bakhtinian view, the heteroglossia of opposing voices in the ‘récit’ marks L’Assommoir as ‘novelistic’. But it should be asked whether the voice of the scientist or the voice of the people ever pose any significant threat to the voice of the artist in this text.37 Zola appears to have been successful in masking the incompatibilities between the modes of authorization of the first and the third, using them as a protection against accusations concerning the literary

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impropriety of the second. The authority of the recorder allows the neutralization of the threat to the aesthetic and moral integrity of writer and audience, while the aesthetic collusion between the creative artist and the educated reader allows the preservation of the hierarchy of authority of the fictional text. This strategy has continued to be effective for readers no longer preoccupied by the questions of ‘bienséance’ raised by the specific historical linguistic conventions of the second half of the nineteenth century. As readers, we want entertainment without responsibility, but we want to believe in our social integrity. The dual authority of Zola’s text allows precisely this. It should be recognized that, for Zola’s immediate readership, the debate on the aesthetics of certain linguistic forms and the morality of the aesthetic which was challenged by Zola’s text were not minor issues. By acknowledging the relationship between his work and that of the Goncourts through a process of rewriting which was overt for his contemporaries, Zola produces in L’Assommoir a clear demonstration of a difference in aesthetic purpose and covertly condemns the morality of a literary project which appropriates the language of the people while preserving the association of authorial and narratorial voice with a bourgeois literary sociolect. In doing so, he assumes control of a comparison between the texts which would in any case have been made by his audience. As this hypotext ceases to occupy common ground between author and audience, sinking, however unfairly, into literary history, the ‘mise en abymes’ concerning the relationship between language and morality remain in place, contributing to an indirect but compelling defence of Zola’s own writing practice. It is L’Assommoir, along with Germinal, which has come to stand as the icon of Naturalism in our literary history. Zola has successfully persuaded readers that they are encountering a great creative mind and social observer in a text which satisfies their desire for symbolism, for overt narrative patterning, and the melodrama and scandal of a social group comfortably distant from themselves, enhanced by their belief that it is grounded in fact. This nineteenth-century version of the rhetoric of the tabloid newspaper allows the justification of Leech’s Interest Principle through its masking as socially responsible behaviour. It pre-figures the twentieth-century reaction against the deceiving wiles of the old rhetoric, while exploiting a new rhetoric of its own.

6 SELF-ASSERTION AND THE DYNAMICS OF POWER Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

A personal assault Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) is more overtly in dialogue with the traditions of literature than Céline’s other novels and is not so directly recuperable according to an autobiographical model.1 As such, it exhibits a more ambivalent play between the arena of the cultural heritage of literature, the participant world of Céline, and fictional manifestations of a context of situation. As Godard remarks, in Voyage the ‘échos de «littérature», apparemment pris on ne peut plus au sérieux, pourraient être considérés, de même que les passés simples, comme un effet de rémanence.’ (1985:158) The position of Céline’s novel in the contempory cultural field differs from that of the radical avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. Céline’s novel resembles Balzac’s in its appropriation and transformation of existing conventions, manifesting its similarity with the Naturalist novel (in its semantic domain) and the consciousness novel (in its techniques of narration). It presents a more complex relationship with literary tradition than the unremittingly negative refusal of identity of the Dada event. And, unlike the Surrealists, who set themselves up as a liminal group with a shared mission to transform the literary space, Céline, in Voyage, performs an individual infiltration of cultural territory, playing the role of the maverick enemy within the gates who cannot be categorized according to creed or group loyalties. Voyage au bout de la nuit transgresses the boundaries between the conventionally literary and non-literary in a way which threatens the selfperpetuating specialized discourse of ‘le beau style’. The populist novels which came into vogue towards the end of the nineteenth century, a success renewed in the wake of the first world war, did not overtly contest the sociocultural divide between high and low fiction through their use of language.2 By contrast, Céline merges the literary with the non-literary in a single narrative voice, which does not allow the classification of the narrator as either uneducated, and therefore excused his use of a popular idiolect, or educated, employing the patterns of popular French in a citational manner.

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This upsets the balance of field, tenor and mode. The highly crafted form of language in the written medium incorporates features from the spoken medium which are associated with unplanned discourse. Such features contradict the evidence of writtenness, which divorces text from voice, suggesting an interpersonal function based on face-to-face interaction. Stylistic signals of orality thus perturb the move towards the unspeakable nature of the literary text, and to its reification as a written linguistic form divorced from ‘universel reportage’ (Mallarmé 1945:857). The conflicting patterns of spoken and written forms in Voyage have been extensively discussed by critics.3 These studies reveal that Céline’s use of both popular and literary discourse is transgressive, in that neither can be considered to constitute the stylistic norm of the text, that each is subjected to Céline’s ‘petite musique’.4 Nevertheless, because the cultural frame for this text remains the written form of the novel in a society which is as dependent on written forms of communication as on spoken ones, the marginal subversive lexis of ‘argot’, the spoken polemics of the protagonists and the inclusion at the level of narration of repair, phonetic transliteration and patterns of popular syntax, function as alien patterns in a text which remains unshakeably and fundamentally written. The appeal to the oral model, which combines telling and experiencing (see Fludernik 1996a: 43–4 and 50), is instead read as an indicator of expressive immediacy and the transformation of lived experience into emotion, leading the reader to identify the affective state of the hero with the aesthetic vision of the writer, encouraged by Céline’s own pronouncements.5 Thus, interpersonal deictics, and the positive modalization of the text combine with signals of written crafting to equate narratorial engagement with authorial activity in the minds of readers. The association between non-written forms and authorial will marks Voyage as a defiant and subversive act of language within the literary field (see Carile 1969). Its challenge to the dominant contemporary cultural frames of the literary aesthetic and the social status of the artist demands, as Dauphin (1972) has emphasized, not only recuperation by the literary system, but recognition of its author as a star (see Latin 1988:445). As Bardamu comments, ‘c’est la majorité qui décrète de ce qui est fou et ce qui ne l’est pas’ (61), and Céline’s book can be viewed as a move to produce a majority decision among his readers in his favour. The threat to the cultural position of literature posed by the linguistic transgressions of Voyage au bout de la nuit is intensified by patterns of linguistic interaction in the fictional world, founded on asymmetries of power. In the TAW, language acts as a seductive and controlling instrument for those already in power. Bourdieu’s concept of the authorized and authorizing discourse, which demands the ratification and submission of the dominated, appears in full force here (1982:111). Protagonists must either exploit or submit, and the seeker of solidarity is destined to be subjugated by others.

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Céline also rejects the depersonalized and authorized narrative agent of realism in favour of an autodiegetic performing narrator. Bardamu is both actor in the TAW and narrator. As a result, linguistic exchanges in the TAW and the fictional act of narration occupy the same conceptual world level, governed by the same conditions of interaction. The relationship between Bardamu-narrator and his narratees is thus directly contextualized by the linguistic interactions of Bardamu-protagonist. But this ‘récit de dénonciation’ does not conform to the standard model of the innocent and generous witness who exposes the injustices of the institution. Lejeune suggests that one of the reasons for the scandal of Voyage lies in its non-conformity to this model: ‘Bardamu ne pose pas au prix de vertu, il n’offre au lecteur désemparé aucun modèle ni aucune solution, il ne nourrit pas sa bonne conscience.’ (1980:219) The mimetism of Céline’s novel links fictional interactions to those of the discourse world. But, in addition, since the novel’s first appearance, the voice of Ferdinand Bardamu has been associated with that of Céline (or rather LouisFerdinand Destouches).6 Bardamu’s fictional history is mapped to the life-history of the writer, and the subversive voice of the protagonist-outsider is mapped to the act of writing of the author. This association between narrator-protagonist and writer can be explained, in part, by the signals of orality outlined above, and by the similarities between Bardamu’s attitude towards institutional discourse and the position of Céline’s text in the literary arena. It was enhanced by Céline’s ‘acting out’ of himself as a working-class figure in interviews and the faux-naïve ‘j’ai écrit comme je parle’ in his interview with Pierre-Jean Launay (Dauphin and Godard 1976:22). It may also result from the precedents provided by the autofictional homodiegetic narratives of Vallès and Proust, which facilitate the perception of the homodiegetic novel as a public performance of authorial selfhood.7 But it can also be read as a territorial counter-move by critics and the reading public who respond to the threat of the undecidability of authorial stance by creating a personal history which allows the categorization of the author.8 Céline as writer is, however, allowed a position of authority in the arena of literature which is denied to his fictional counterpart, Bardamu. In the TAW, Bardamu-protagonist stands outside the institutions which subjugate him, forced to comply with the strategies of the discourses of power if he is to survive. He achieves only minor triumphs in language over those who are less able to manipulate it. The individual is powerless when faced with the group. Bardamunarrator has greater power, holding the floor for the length of the narration and controlling the telling of his past experience.9 But Céline, as writer, engages with a field of linguistic use in which the individual is institutionally sanctioned and celebrated for his creation in language. The language of literary texts provides a route to power for the author in which his social status before publication need not silence him. And the persistence of the influence of a cultural perception of art in which ‘artists free themselves from bourgeois demands and define themselves as the sole masters of their art while refusing to recognise any master

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other than their art’ (Bourdieu 1993:169) allows the possibility of a post hoc institutional sanctioning of the writer as subverter of the institution. Bardamuprotagonist must play out roles in and through language. The individual must submit to the role in order to remain within the social circuit of communication (only the madmen who cease to speak for others are exempt, but are thereby excluded from the power relationships of society). But the literary field allows personal voice as a defining factor of the authorial role. The appeal of Voyage to an authorization founded on the personal creative vision of the writer encourages the reader to build a hypothetical participant world for its author.10 However, the fictional and written status of the text allows the protection of this participant world, blocking the reader’s access to it and preventing him from establishing a secure relationship of solidarity with the unseen and unknown author. This process is encapsulated by Céline’s comment in his second preface, ‘Je me comprends…’ (1114). The self-reflexivity of this remark closes off access to Céline, while holding him up as a subject to be understood. Thus, Céline, like Flaubert, isolates the reader from both the writer and from other audience members, but does so by the lure of association, not by dissociation. Encouraging the reader to seek the authentic voice and persona of the author, he also creates an author-audience relationship which, while it appears to allow power to the audience, neutralizes that power. The unremitting TAW actantial pattern of the victimization and oppression of the marginal individual by the consensual group acts as a basis on which to build the context of writing and reading. It politicizes the cultural process of literary reception, marking consensus as a form of complicity with institutional discourse. Condemnation of Céline’s literary transgressions thus becomes an act of support for and a perpetuation of the tyranny of the bourgeois establishment. But to praise the novel according to traditional criteria is an equally complicitous act. The reader who attempts to avoid both paths, refusing his own power as audience-member, cannot, however, gain access to any in-group solidarity with the writer and must, instead, submit to the latter’s language-act.11 This chapter examines the reader’s constructions of a position for Voyage in relation to the arena of literature and of participant roles. These are both mutually informing and subject to destabilization by the patterns of the text. It first considers the effect of the paratextual material and the incipit on reading. It then looks at the ambiguities of the relationship between Voyage and generic models. The second half of the chapter addresses the implications of patterns of languageuse in the TAW for the construction of the context of writing and reading. It examines the general conditions of the play for power in the TAW, the rhetorical performances of Bardamu as protagonist and considers the implications of the presentation of the language of delirium. Last, it discusses the power relationships between narrator, author and audience.

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Journey into the text The paratextual elements of the original edition of Voyage move from signals of conformity to literary convention, in the title and the standard literary epigraph, through the literary ironic preface with a hint of orality, to the blatantly nonwritten patterns of the incipit. Before embarking on any imaginary journey in the fictional world, readers are taken on a metafictional journey into this world in which conventions are progressively shed. The protestant canticle of the Gardes Suisses of the epigraph repeats and amplifies the title, proposing a secure semantic domain for the novel as metaphorical journey, biography, and demonstration of the human condition. Its military attribution anticipates the use of ritual language to control and manipulate fighting men. The attribution allows a transhistorical and mythological dimension to the text. But it also situates the cultural position of the writer, as an educated figure, possessed both of precise cultural knowledge and of an awareness of the traditional extra-fictional trappings of the literary text.12 The original preface provides a transition from this conventional opening to the unconventional incipit. It introduces tensions between the imaginary and the mimetic and between the literary and the non-literary. The first paragraph converts the ‘All is true’ of realism, into ‘All is false’: ‘Notre voyage à nous est entièrement imaginaire.’ The second paragraph appeals to the symbolic and mythical dimensions of the journey as a movement towards death, and to the Naturalist portrayal of ‘Hommes, bêtes, villes et choses’, while reaffirming the fictional status of the text: ‘C’est un roman, rien qu’une histoire fictive’. Here, the preface emerges more clearly as an ironic pastiche of the Naturalist preface, not only in the revision of the latter’s truth-claims, but also in the citation of a non-fictional source (Littré) as a reinforcement of the authority of the text. The citation is itself marked as ironic by the qualifying ‘qui ne se trompe jamais’. But the ironization of the reference to an external academic source also undermines the falsehood-claim of the preface, transforming it into an indirect affirmation of the truth-status of the text. And the final paragraph suggests that the internalized activities of the imagination, which shut out the external world, are nevertheless linked to that world: ‘C’est de l’autre côté de la vie’ (all [5]). The attack on Littré’s academic dictionary also introduces the question of the authority of the literary establishment.13 Distance from the pedagogical establishment which, as Balibar (1974) and Compagnon (1983) have shown, played an influential role in the promotion of a standardized national language from the Third Republic onwards, is reinforced by the adverbial phrase ‘Et puis d’abord’ which opens the third paragraph. This phrase displays strong signals of the patterns of unplanned discourse and is foregrounded by its position.14 ‘Et’ evokes the paratactic cumulative constructions of spoken discourse and the adverbs are ideationally incompatible and non-normative for written discourse. ‘Puis’ acts as cohesive marker of the ordering of propositions, while ‘d’abord’ acts as an intensifier, foregrounding the proposition which follows, not as a marker of

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temporal order. The entire phrase resembles the fillers employed in spoken discourse while the speaker plans what is to be said next.15 Coming immediately after the reference to Littré, this phrase reinforces the opposition between the dictates of the academic world and the flexibility of non-standard usage. The incipit of the first chapter completes the transition from convention to transgression: ‘Ça a débuté comme ça. Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit. Rien. C’est Arthur Ganate qui m’a fait parler.’ (7) This transgression is not only stylistic, it also concerns the commitment of both Bardamu narrator, and Bardamu protagonist to the story. The exophoric deictic ‘Ça’ signals a context of situation predicated on physical presence, but also expresses a distantial relationship between teller and told. It can be read as the spoken equivalent of the historical and temporal distance associated with ‘passé simple’ narratives (see Barthes 1972:25–32) and as a non-standard equivalent of the ritualized ‘Il était une fois’, or ‘Once upon a time’. It is combined with other signals of the distancing and non-engagement of Bardamu. As Noble points out (1987:30), the first sentence is circular. The promise of new information inherent to ‘comme’ is unfulfilled, as the slot for the new is filled by the non-specific already given ‘ça’. It thus has no orientation function at the level of ‘histoire’, manifesting only intention to perform, not intention to inform. The following sentences also serve as orientation in relation to speech, not action, but at the level of ‘histoire’.16 The expression of Bardamu-protagonist’s reluctance to speak not only initiates the theme of the treachery of language, it also generates a relationship between speaker and audience in which it is the speaker’s negative face which is threatened by speech, as his right to the territory of silence is violated. To speak is not a voluntary act of self-empowerment but the result of coercion by another (see Gaudin 1987:88). The original preface and the opening chapter of the book set up the possibility of a solidarity in linguistic exchange, through the ‘nous’ of the preface, which echoes the comradeship of the Gardes Suisses, and through the collusion between Ganate as speaker and Bardamu as audience in the opening paragraph: ‘Bien fiers alors d’avoir fait sonner ces vérités utiles, on est demeuré là assis, ravis […]’ (7). This relationship is gradually developed into a friendly competition in the rhetoric of ‘tchatche’ once Bardamu enters the dialogue. Only in Bardamu’s final self-threatening act, as he joins the army in a state of rhetorical intoxication, is the pernicious power of language revealed.17 However, the impossibility of author-audience solidarity and the reluctance of the author to engage in the public act of language is introduced at an earlier point with the inclusion of the post-war second preface.18 Readers are subjected in this preface to an apparently bald on-record aggression by the authorial voice (for some reason, this preface is missing from a recent Folio edition of the novel). This preface situates Voyage in the context of Céline’s later literary output. It transforms the ambiguities of our understanding of Voyage’s relationship with literature and of his own relationship with his readers into certainties. Furthermore, it imposes the relationship between narration and writing which is

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explicit in the later novels on Voyage au bout de la nuit, appropriating it to the broader group of works on which we found our view of Céline as author. It could therefore be viewed as an invasive interference with the audience’s engagement with the novel. A major effect of this preface is to introduce a more explicit relationship between authorial style and narrator-style than existed in the first edition. Read in conjunction with the first preface, it presents us with two faces of the writer which match the two faces of the narrator in the text itself. The repetition of ‘je supprimerais tout’ reinforces the incipit and explicit of the novel: ‘C’est Arthur Ganate qui m’a fait parler’ (7), and ‘qu’on n’en parle plus’ (505). The flights of popular diatribe of this preface match those in the novel, just as the ambivalent imitation of the literary preface in the first matches the ambivalent use of literary models in the text. For example, ‘Regardez un peu le nombre des morts, des haines autour…ces perfidies…le genre de cloaque que ça donne…ces monstres’ (1113) can be compared to Bardamu’s speech in the first chapter: ‘La race […] c’est seulement ce grand ramassis de miteux dans mon genre, chassieux, puceux, transis, qui ont échoué ici poursuivis par la faim, la peste, les tumeurs et le froid, venus vaincus des quatre coins du monde.’ (8) The use of the ‘trois points’ in the preface corresponds to Céline’s later style and the structure of argument in Bardamu’s speech displays greater conformity to traditional models of logical presentation. Nevertheless, the relationship is clear. This preface can thus be viewed as a redressing of the balance of paratextual material to match the preexisting balance in the main body of the novel rather than as an inappropriate intrusion of Céline’s later stance and modes of writing. The inclusion of this preface also shows that Céline, like Bardamu, is a performer of roles. Whereas the first preface presented an authorial voice which was more formally distanced from the reader than the text itself, allowing the concealment of the writer behind the conventions of specialized literary discourse, this preface exposes that voice as a conventional device, replacing it with an apparently more authentic voice. But the balance of the two prefaces allows the relativization of both voices as performances by an author who flaunts his inaccessibility: ‘je me comprends…’ (1114). The pattern of oppression to which Bardamu is subjected in the fictional world is also mirrored in this preface. By appearing to enter into dialogue with an audience which has condemned his later works, Céline pre-empts criticism by his potential and future readers. He creates a gulf between his intentions in writing Voyage, ‘Le seul livre vraiment méchant de tous mes livres’ (1114), and the mechanisms of the market which has appropriated it to its own ends, portraying his own prefatory invective as powerless in the face of the literary machine which has consumed him. The semi-liturgical repetition of participles of obligation, ‘contraint, obligé, contraint, obligé, astreint, contraint, astreint’ (1113–14), turn the role of author into that of victim, transforming the stream of invective against the reader into the impotent cries of a prisoner against his oppressors. This extreme version of

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the prostitution of the writer to the public can be read as an explicit appeal to the reader, ‘vous’, not to side With the unnamed ‘eux’ in the exposure of his bleeding carcass to the public gaze, producing a twentieth-century version of père pelicanism. Our sense of the intrusion into our personal space of both Céline’s preface and his text, of his affective highjacking of the reader, is anticipated and countered by this portrayal of the public as highjackers of Céline’s own emotion, his ‘fonds sensible’ (1114). And the ritual exchange of insults is initiated in this preface by the putative citation of readers’ reactions, marking Céline’s own accumulation of grotesque insults as a defensive move. The lexical range, and cumulative techniques resemble not so much the language of the gutter as Rabelaisian and Jarryesque mock battles of words, in which the dynamic movement is produced by the play of language itself. And while this mock battle appears initially to take place between ‘je’ and ‘vous’, the ominous ‘eux’ are introduced as the hidden movers behind his fate. The portrayal of Céline’s audience as the initiators of aggression makes them responsible for his loss of face, placing them in his debt, and inciting future readers to restore his positive face. But the use of ‘eux’ also introduces a negative politeness strategy, enabling the reader to dissociate himself from those who have threatened Céline’s social position, just as Balzac’s reader can dissociate himself from the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’. This preface pre-poses an on-record account of a context of production and reception which, in the pre-war version of the text, is generated by a gradual process of inferencing. The closure of narration at the end of the novel, ‘qu’on n’en parle plus’ (505), becomes the fulfilment of Céline’s repeated expression of his wish to suppress the text in his preface; a revenge on the literary establishment. More than this, the second preface cooperatively informs us at the outset that his novel involves a non-cooperative play for power over the text, alerting us to the conflicts of language which are played out in the course of the text. But it also satisfies the reading public’s desire for an untamed and unsocialized author who can shock, while being safely contained behind bars. It enables a vicarious pleasure in the fictional encounter with a marginalized leper, securely contextualized by the publication process. Appropriating cultural tradition Céline’s novel resembles Jacques le fataliste and Le Père Goriot in the variety of generic models which can be followed in its interpretation. Again, many critical reactions display a coherent rationalization of the text through a single generic model. Each intertextual path towards a coherent reading is susceptible to a reversibility of interpretation depending on the position assumed by the reader.19 The models of the journey narrative, popular naturalism, political and social polemic, metaphysical delirium, or autobiographical confession can thus be used to confirm Céline’s status as a literary author or to exclude him from the privileged circle of culture.20 He can be cast in the roles of spokesman for and of

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the people or dangerous marginal social subversive, of the artistic communicator of a personal aesthetic vision or mentally unstable outcast, of creator or of destroyer. Voyage thus exemplifies the Russian Formalist view of the novel as a genre which has the capacity to appropriate all other text-types. Céline nevertheless provides some relief from uncertainties of categorization through the trope of the journey, already firmly established by the extra-fictional material. This opens up a set of intertexts, both literary and non-literary, which is so vast that it embraces the diversity of generic patterns of the novel. The journey trope provides links to Homeric epic and Virgilian transformation of that epic form, Christian pilgrimage narrative as both physical and spiritual journey, the picaresque narrative and its ironic transformations, philosophical journey narratives, which may or may not be satirical, the ‘bildungsroman’ and its ironic counterparts, the fantastic journey literature of the gothic novel and of late nineteenth-century futuristic literature, Proustian explorations of the past, fictional explorations of Paris from Balzac to Aragon and Breton, Joyce’s transformations of epic, and the anguished soul-searching narratives of Conrad. It allows the inclusion of the physical, metaphysical, psychological and philosophical modes of writing, and it produces a meta-textual link between the progress of the fabula and that of the narration, between the ‘parcours’ of writing and that of reading. Voyage stands in a shifting relationship with these generic precedents, partly as a result of its diptych form, creating stronger bonds with the comic journey narrative in the first half of the novel, and with a more internalized imaginative and metaphysical journey form in the second. It nevertheless has the sense of telos of all such narratives. For while the ‘end of night’ may not involve either homecoming or final revelation, the seekers of this part of the novel remain seekers to the end, and the repetition of a collocation associated with the journey (‘au bout’, ‘arriver’, ‘partir’, ‘loin’) thematizes the event line as movement. The restriction of the topographical limits of Bardamu’s life after his return to Paris does not signal the end of his journey. In the second half of the book this becomes a descent into the depths of his society and the confines of the asylum, locating the heart of darkness in the city, in a transformation of the journey of discovery similar to that in Balzac’s novel. The strongly marked cyclical patterns of the novel (see Latin 1988:334–391) cannot efface this telic movement, which has been linked by critics to the theme of death (see Richard 1973 and Day 1974). Voyage also exploits the journey as a metaphor for an internalized process of exploration of the psyche, and as a pattern for perceiving, questioning and interpreting the world. In this sense, the categorization of the first part of the novel as a ‘Candide’ or picaresque narrative and the second as ‘roman noir’ is misleading.21 For the second half of the novel can be read as an amplification of Candide (1759), demonstrating the compromise inherent to ‘cultiver son jardin’, and continuing the philosophical debate of Voltaire’s conte.22

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Likewise, the dialogue with the novel of education does not necessarily end with a shift to ‘constat’ in the second half. The ironic reversal of this genre posited by Latin (1988:12) may signal parodic distance from the moral a posteriori ending of a text such as Manon Lescaut (1731), but it continues a long tradition of texts which overturn the model, not least L’Éducation Sentimentale (1869). Although Bardamu displays a critical awareness of the world in which he moves which is lacking in Frédéric, these texts share a vision of negativity and futility which is explicitly associated with the falsehood of the positive learningpattern of the journey, while allowing all the pleasure of social satire. For the most part, the literary intertexts of Voyage subtend the novel as an offrecord reinforcement of its situation in this cultural arena. Direct allusions to a literary tradition occur at the level of narration and in the TAW of Bardamu’s past. For example, the former contains Bardamu’s reference to La Bruyère (397) in a sententious maxim which refuses the possibility of the sententious summary of character. The latter includes Bardamu’s encounter with the Montaigne text (289), which opens up the sort of regressive intertextual network we have seen in Diderot’s work (see pp. 38–9 and 46).23 Most relationships with such forms are, however, created through a process of stylistic and narratological deformation and displacement. For example, read in conjunction with the first preface, Bardamu’s remarks on the advantages of education become an indirect ironic attack on the literary practices of the Naturalists: Les études ça vous change, ça fait l’orgueil d’un homme. Il faut bien passer par là pour entrer dans le fond de la vie […] Avec la médecine, moi, pas très doué, tout de même je m’étais bien rapproché des hommes, des bêtes, de tout. (240) The repetition of the formula of the preface offers a ‘clin d’oeil’ towards Zola’s promotion, in Le Roman expérimental (1880), of a link between the Naturalist novel and the medical works of Claude Bernard. However, the ethos of the novel towards a naturalist populist style is certainly not always ironic, for example in the descriptions of Rancy and Vigny (238–40 and 422). The intertextual paths of Voyage cross categorical boundaries between the literary and the non-literary and the written and the oral. The alien effect of the importation of contemporary spoken forms is attenuated by the reminders of a literary heritage of mythological and allegorical oral narrative, and the links between philosophical, political and social polemic and its oral roots. Latin suggests that the abreactive narrative of psychoanalysis replaces the traditional causal narrative of written texts (1988:317–33 and 394–407). But the patterns of narration in Voyage au bout de la nuit can also be read as a return to the episodic and performance-generated oral traditions of storytelling, or as a return to the written form of the confessional ‘mémoire’ novel. Likewise, the narrative manifestations of ‘délire’ in Voyage owe much to the more recent written

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tradition of the ‘monologue intérieur’ from Dujardin through Joyce, and the Surrealist prose narratives of urban peregrination of Aragon (Le Paysan de Paris, 1925) and Breton (Nadja, 1928). The difficulty in establishing a secure relationship, whether positive or negative, between Voyage and its literary intertexts is reflected in the ambivalence of Céline’s treatment of an educated ‘pauvre’, Princhard. This figure develops an argument on the manipulation of the poor and powerless which supports the thesis of Céline’s novel as outlined so far (67–70). His speech thus appears to follow the Balzacian technique of self-evidence, confirming the implications of the text-world events of the preceding chapters and Bardamu’s reflections on them. But Bardamu expresses his scorn for the ex-schoolmaster who attempts to speak for the people, accusing him of constructing a rhetoric of lies and dismissing his speech as ‘Un truc de cabotin’ (71), relegating him to the status of a second-rate performer. Princhard, who suffers from the ‘vice des intellectuels’ is then brutally expelled from the text.24 Immediately after Princhard’s departure, Céline embarks on a virtuoso performance of his own intellectual ‘truc’ in a dense stylistically imitative chapter which contains his pastiche of Proust. And the following chapter provides an illustration of one of Princhard’s contentions. In his speech, Princhard has condemned writers such as Diderot, Voltaire and Goethe, whose writings authorize the exploitation of the people through their intellectual weight (69– 70). In this chapter, Bardamu’s insincere patriotic stories of his war experiences are employed as a propaganda tool. Translated into verse as ‘L’Airain Moral de notre Victoire’ (100), they are performed at the Comédie Française. This result of ‘une de ces sublimes collaborations créatrices entre le Poète et l’un de nos héros!’ (99), is a vicious burlesque dramatization of the complicity of the great writers described by Princhard. These chapters illustrate the degree to which the literary writer, as ‘intellectuel’, is bound to the tyranny of institutions. While, as in the first preface, the frame of the academic establishment’s appropriation of literature for its own ends is present here, writers themselves are not absolved of responsibility in this process. That Princhard the educator, denounced by Bardamu, should himself denounce the ‘free’ voices of his intellectual heritage, and that Bardamu the outsider should enter into a complicitous relationship with the twentieth-century avatars of this heritage, only reinforces the links between them. This refractive relationship between Céline and Princhard characterizes the relationship between Voyage and the literary arena, shifting between identity and rejection. The political and social stakes of this relationship are set out in the novel, not through direct metacommentary but through the more general patterns of language-use in the TAW.

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Language-use and the social arena Language and power games The second half of chapter seven presents the reader with a complex interplay of performances between different interest groups in the convalescent hospital. Here, Céline weaves a stately dance of text and counter-text which exceeds simple binary relationships between producers and receivers. While Bardamu is, for the most part, the lucid interpreter of this game for the benefit of his readers, he is also a participant whose textual manoeuvres are limited by those of others. This dance is performed around the triple motor of the activities of wartime society earlier proposed by Bardamu: ‘mentir, baiser, mourir’ (54). The presentation of the exploitative discourse of each interest group is carefully regulated. Beginning at the top of the hospital hierarchy, Céline initiates a pattern of oppressive discourse and response, moving down from Bestombes, the ‘médecin-chef’, to the nurses, the soldiers and the ‘vieillards’. The lowest level is occupied by Birouette, but his interaction with the soldiers acts as a hinge in the patterns of the text as he exploits his position of quasiexclusion for personal gain. The initial pattern of offensive action and passive response is reversed as the target audiences of the first set of discourses develop their own textual counter-offensives, which subvert and exploit the initial game protocols introduced by each group above them in the hierarchy. However, in the final duel between Bardamu and Bestombes, although Bardamu recognizes the strategies of the latter, he is powerless to counter them. Bestombes, is first introduced by his hierarchical position (‘il venait d’être nommé à quatre galons’ (86)), and his participation in the anonymous machine is underlined by the epithet noun, ‘notre nouveau médecin-chef’ (86), which defines him throughout this section of the chapter. He makes a speech to the soldiers which plays on the simple trope of nationalism as a sacred ideal, and on the metaphor of the invasion of France as a violation of the female body, in which Delacroix’s triumphant image is transformed into a possession to be defended. But Bestombes encounters an unintended audience in the nurses and his metaphor acts on this group in an unexpected way. They are moved to tears, not action, reading it as the demonstration of the personal tragedy of one of their number whose fiancé has joined the navy. Bestombes’s obvious discomfort at this unintended effect is correctly interpreted by the blonde nurse who, in her apology to him, both exposes his speech as a strategic act of rhetorical domination over a specific audience and expresses the desire of the nurses as a social group to act in cooperation with and subordination to him: ‘«Si nous avions su, maître! chuchotait encore la blonde cousine, nous vous aurions prévenu…[…]»’ (87) Bardamu then gives an account of his own reactions and those of other members of the target audience, which differ from that of the nurses: ‘mais loin, moi, de m’attrister elles me parurent en y réfléchissant, ces paroles,

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extra- ordinairement bien faites pour me dégoûter de mourir. C’était aussi l’avis des autres camarades’ (87). However, Bardamu separates his own reactions from those of his fellows: ‘mais ils n’y trouvaient pas au surplus comme moi une façon de défi et d’insulte. Eux ne cherchaient guère a comprendre ce qui se passait autour de nous dans la vie […]’ (87). Thus, although the intended effect of the doctor’s words is clear to both the nurse and to Bardamu, the other soldiers fail to recognize or conform to it. The second discourse is that of the nurses who build on their interpretation of Bestombes’s speech, exploiting the soldiers out of escapist self-interest. In the ‘histoire d’amour’ which they create, the soldiers are no more than a stimulus to their own emotional games: Elle vous auraient alors des soupirs remémoratifs spéciaux de tendresse qui les rendraient plus attrayantes encore; elles évoqueraient en silences émus les tragiques temps de la guerre […] Quelques regrets poétiques placés à propos siéent à une femme aussi bien que certains cheveux vaporeux sous les rayons de la lune. (88) The nurses’ text is subverted by Bardamu’s commentaries, culminating in an extended explanatory counter-text by Bardamu-narrator: A l’abri de chacun de leurs mots et de leur solicitude, il fallait dès maintenant comprendre: «Tu vas crever gentil militaire… Tu vas crever… C’est la guerre… Chacun sa vie… Chacun son rôle… Chacun sa mort… Nous avons l’air de partager ta détresse…mais on ne partage la mort de personne […]» (88) The soldiers, who are the losers in their encounters with the doctor and the nurses, are nevertheless situated above the ‘vieillards’ who have been displaced by their arrival in the hospital. But Birouette, despite the soldiers’ exploitation of his fear of death, nevertheless plays a game of exchange with them: ‘il venait nous chanter des chansonnettes de son temps pour nous distraire, le père Birouette qu’on l’appelait. Il voulait bien faire tout ce qu’on voulait pourvu qu’on lui donnât du tabac […]’ (89). And thus a new pattern is introduced, that of complicity for personal gain. Bestombes has acquired his equipment as a result of the generosity of his fatherin-law, who has obtained his money through political chicanery. And, in turn, the members of the hospital set out to exploit Bestombes. ‘Il fallait en profiter. Tout s’arrange. Crimes et châtiments.’ (90) And as the nurses compete for his favours, so the soldiers compete for the nurses’ favours, through language. Branledore, has learned to gain the nurses’ sympathy:

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entre deux étouffements s’il y avait un médecin ou une infirmière à passer par là: «Victoire! Victoire! Nous aurons la Victoire!» criait Branledore […] Ainsi rendu conforme à l’ardente littérature agressive, par un effet d’opportune mise en scène, il jouissait de la plus haute cote morale. (90) And we see later the form that this takes: ‘j’aperçus Branledore qui manifestait de son haut moral derrière la grande porte où il donnait justement des leçons d’entrain à la petite fille de la concierge’ (94). However, the flaw in Branledore’s counter-offensive is immediately demonstrated. For his audience has the power to demand more of him than he is prepared to give: Les femmes surtout demandaient du spectacle et elles étaient impitoyables, les garces, pour les amateurs déconcertés. La guerre, sans conteste, porte aux ovaires, elles en exigeaient des héros, et ceux qui ne l’étaient pas du tout devaient se présenter comme tels ou bien s’apprêter à subir le plus ignominieux des destins. (90–1) Following Branledore’s example, the other soldiers learn to act the patriot: ‘Il fallut une bonne semaine et même deux de répétitions intensives pour nous placer absolument dans le ton, le bon.’ (91) Their efforts immediately bear fruit, as they are allowed visits from their families. However, the local successes of Branledore and his imitators do not conceal from Bardamu the implications for their future lives, as they turn themselves into the cannon-fodder encouraged by Bestombes in his first speech. The vision of death inhibits Bardamu from playing this role. Bardamu gains a private interview with Bestombes in order to explain his inability to perform the role of the courageous hero. It is not made clear whether this act is a calculated strategy to demonstrate his unfitness for war or a more involuntary urge for approval. Whatever his motivation, his move is blocked by a counter-text produced by Bestombes. In the narration of this private duel the weighting of the representation of direct speech is almost entirely in Bestombes’s favour. Bardamu’s initial performance is suppressed through ellipsis, marked by ‘trois points’ in the text. Bardamu-narrator reports Bardamu-protagonist’s intention to present his case to Bestombes (‘Je résolus certain jour de faire part au professeur’ (91)) and his concerns about his reception (‘je redoutais un peu qu’il se prît à me considérer comme un effronté, un bavard impertinent’ (91–2)). This suggests that Bardamu’s speech is extensive. But the narration moves directly (via the ‘…’) to Bestombes reaction: ‘Mais point du tout. au contraire!’ (92) Any further attempts by Bardamu to take the floor are circumvented by Bestombes’s interruptions of his gestures towards turn-taking which, in any case, display subservient and complicitous agreement.

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Bardamu treats Bestombes’s effective monologue in a clearly satirical and parodic fashion, but the irony of Bardamu’s responses appears a futile gesture of defiance: ‘C’était bien mon avis aussi, à moi Bardamu’ (93), ‘—Cela est beau, Maître! Trop beau! C’est de l’Antique!»’ (94), and ‘—Je vous comprends, Maître!» Je comprenais en effet de mieux en mieux.’ (94) Irony, here, is performed by Bardamu-protagonist only for himself, and by Bardamu-narrator for his public audience. Bardamu’s linguistic behaviour towards Bestombes is in striking contrast to his forceful alternative version of the nurses’ discourse. Within the TAW, the power of language turns out to be inferior to that conferred by the hierarchy in which Bardamu finds himself; Bestombes gains authority from his position of power not his words. This dance of discourses, which was never equal, is thus staged, not only as a struggle for power which takes place through language, but also as a demonstration of the different textual rights of social groups. It suggests that, in the frame of the cultural context of production and reception, the act of writing cannot counter the authorizing and authorized power of publishers, academics and critics as the makers of literary reputations. When Bardamu encounters this level of authority in the hospital, his only option is to conform or suffer. This portrayal of the play of power groups justifies any signs of conformity to the conventions of literary discourse in Voyage as a necessary move for survival, not as indicators of Céline’s membership of the oppressive community which regulates the literary field. This preserves Céline’s positive face by underlining the difficulties of maintaining non-conformist integrity. But it also allows a degree of security for the bourgeois reader who has faith in literature as high culture. It suggests that Céline, despite his ‘simagrées’, is powerless to attack the control of the élite over this domain. However, the demonstration of Bardamu-protagonist’s powerlessness is also an exercise of power by Bardamu-narrator, who silences Bardamu-protagonist through ellipsis, intensifying the gagging process. Proof of the failure of Bardamu’s rhetoric in the TAW is produced through a rhetorical manoeuvre at the level of narration. The silencing enhances the depiction of Bardamuprotagonist as victim, and is necessary to the persuasion of the reader to allow Bardamu-narrator to hold the floor. It also precludes any direct and unfavorable comparison by the reader between Princhard’s earlier rejected speech on truth (see p. 135) and Bardamu’s refusal to expose his own truth to Bestombes. Bardamu as ‘Rhétoriqueur’ In the TAW, Bardamu’s triumphs of language succeed in inverse proportion to their level of truth and sincerity. For instance, his initial rhetorical performance to Ganate, which we perceive as a game between equals, but which we also consider to be sincere, inspires a foolhardy act as Bardamu goes to war. Bardamu

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wins the battle of words by his superior performance, but loses the battle of rhetoric by being an audience susceptible to the power of words (8–10).25 Bardamu’s planned performances in language are more successful. In chapter five, he uses his narratives to Lola to gain intimacy: ‘Elle lui plut si fort, ma description idéale, que ce récit nous rapprocha.’ (56) This intimacy is not that of equals, for Bardamu’s narrative fictions are designed to achieve his personal end of seduction, and his apparent sharing of Lola’s ideals is false. This depiction of the creation of a false intimacy through words is a threat to the reader, given the ‘mirage émotif’ (Latin 1988:318) of the novel. Intimacy and sympathy are not necessarily coextensive. This threat to the reader is attenuated to a certain degree by the fact that Bardamu is himself seduced and fooled by his words to Musyne: ‘je me prenais pour un idéaliste, c’est ainsi qu’on appelle ses propres petits instincts habillés en grands mots.’ (82) Voyage contains repeated demonstrations that human cooperation depends on giving the other what he or she wishes to hear, not on sincerity. Yet, as has been seen, this strategy is also represented as an act of self-preservation, for honesty is a dangerous path to follow, as the brigadier and the reservist in the engineers shot for their confidences to the concierge at Issy-les-Moulineaux discover (62). Later, Bardamu saves himself by his speech on the Amiral Bragueton, not through the propositional content of his words but by his adherence to ‘la note lyrique’ (121). Here, again, listeners (and by extension readers) are led to sympathize with the producer of a text which panders to their vanity: ‘Le rôle de paillasson admiratif est à peu près le seul dans lequel on se tolère d’humain à humain avec quelque plaisir.’ (122) On board this ship, words are used to form a mutual admiration society, in which Bardamu both gives his listeners what they want, and acts as an admiring listener to their words. This negative portrayal of solidarity justifies the more aggressive stance of Céline’s own novel. As readers of a novel which exhibits a perpetual non-accommodation of the reader, a different type of intimacy is produced, for our engagement with Céline’s novel lifts us above those ‘vaniteux’ who are condemned by Bardamu. Are we not reading material which often offends us? But it is not only the reader’s face which is preserved by this strategy. For in suggesting that Bardamu’s admiration and agreement are as false as his patriotic speech, Céline is protecting his own status as novelist. Anticipating the negative reactions to his novel which were not long in coming, he turns those reactions into a proof of the validity of his own narrative act. If texts which accommodate the reader are shown to be hollow, then those which don’t must, by implication, be sound. Both writer and reader engage in a textual encounter which, by its very tensions and conflicts, is shown to be a form of linguistic interaction which is superior to ‘la faconde qui puisse plaire à mes nouveaux amis, de la facile’ (122). However, the more cynical might read this as a further exploitation of vanity. For the function of the literary text is bound to a dynamic of mutual enhancement of positive face, in which the facility of overt deference

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and explanation is replaced by the élitism and valuing of the difficult.26 The vanity of the reader who sets himself apart from the common crowd is simply a different form of vanity. Much later in the novel, Bardamu again engages in narrative performance, this time to Baryton, whose taste in conversation is highly suspect. Bardamu presents his ‘récits de voyage’ to his superior as he has presented his war experiences to Lola: ‘Toutes mes pérégrinations y passèrent longuement relatées, arrangées évidemment, rendues littéraires comme il faut, plaisantes.’ (416) Here, Céline plays with his audience. For we too have read of Bardamu’s peregrinations, arranged and made literary, albeit not ‘comme il faut’. Again, the narrator’s representation of voice, which reports only the speech-act and not the speech, makes it impossible to know whether the Baryton version is any more ‘plaisant’ than that which we have read. The doubling of ‘récits de voyage’ and ‘récits de Voyage’, connects the performance in the fictional world to the performance of the writer, and Baryton’s ‘emoi romanesque’ (417) at Bardamu’s monologue performances to the reactions of Céline’s audience. Delirium and imagination: the threat of the outsider The relationship of the figure of the madman to social institutions in the TAW of Voyage offers a powerful model for the construction of a participant role for Céline as outsider in relation to the bourgeois institutionalization of literature. As Vitoux comments, delirium in Voyage au bout de la nuit can be more than a protagonist’s ‘fuite’ from reality, becoming a ‘dérèglement supérieur de l’écriture romanesque à laquelle [le lecteur] s’est habitué’. On the level of ‘histoire’ it allows an escape from the formal arguments and lies of conventional socialized exchanges (1973:101 and 104–6). In the dynamics of the narrator-reader relationship, however, the reader does not escape from Bardamu’s delirium but is subjected to it. Whereas the sententious assertions and maxims of the narration may rationalize the world according to the didactic principles of Balzac’s novel, and appear founded in a social order, the narration of Bardamu’s delirious ‘parole’ removes the politeness of social interchange and attention to the needs of an audience. Vitoux remarks: Céline ne répétait les paroles de Bardamu, lorsqu’elles étaient raisonnables, que pour mieux exploiter le ressort dramatique de la scène à décrire. Maintenant, il ne fait grace au lecteur d’aucun détail de la parole délirante du héros. Il l’abandonne seulement à la perte de conscience totale de ce dernier, à son évanouissement. Si l’auteur la développe et la montre ainsi, n’est-ce pas parce qu’il la reprend d’une certaine manière à son compte? Confusion entre écriture et parole? Délire exprimé et délire ressenti se confondent.27 (1973:101–2)

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Latin (1988) extends this thesis, taking abreactive telling to be the dominant mode of the novel. In cognitive terms, such passages function as extreme forms of experiential narrative (see Fludernik 1996a). However, the indicators of performance in the text signal a form of mediation by the teller to his audience which integrates the experiential to the social as a means to power. The threat to social cooperation presented by the monologue form of delirium is made explicit towards the end of the novel in the asile at Vigny. Bardamu suggests that madness involves a form of self-castration produced by a total divorce from reality: ‘Un fou, ce n’est que les idées ordinaires d’un homme mais bien enfermées dans une tête. Le monde n’y passe pas a travers sa tête et ça suffit.’ (416) The speech of the ‘aliénés’ is a form of self-protection: ‘Ils ne nous en parlaient de leurs trésors mentaux, les aliénés, qu’avec des tas de contorsions effrayées ou des allures de condescendance et protectrices, à la façon de très puissants administrateurs méticuleux.’ (416) This sort of delirious discourse thus differs from that of Bardamu, in that the strategies of self-protection preclude the possibility of interaction, just as its subject matter is divorced from the physical world. This allows Baryton to dismiss the patients from the linguistic intercourse of society: ‘Ils ne doivent pas figurer dans la conversation des gens normaux!’ (416) But the madmen still speak. And the doctors listen. Although, as has been shown, Baryton is happy with Bardamu’s organized tales, he is far more suspicious of Parapine, and delirium and social subversion are explicitly associated in his description of the latter. Parapine differs from the inmates of the asylum: ‘Il existe des fous simples et puis il existe d’autres fous, ceux que torture la marotte de la civilisation… Il m’est affreux de penser que Parapine est à ranger parmi ceux-ci!’ (419–20) Baryton perceives the potential power of Parapine’s words: —Ah! Ferdinand! Je vois que tout ceci ne vous semble qu’anodin… Innocentes paroles, billevesées extravagantes entre tant d’autres… Voici ce que vous semblez conclure… Rien que cela, n’est-ce pas?… O imprudent Ferdinand! Laissez-moi au contraire vous mettre bien soigneusement en garde contre ces errements, futiles seulement d’apparence! (420) Although he claims that he has no fear of language, he sees that Parapine’s delirium is dangerous because of its originality: Son extravagance à lui ne ressemble à aucune de celles qui sont inoffensives et courantes… Elle appartient m’a-t-il semblé, à Pune des rares formes redoutables de l’originalité, une de ces lubies aisé ment contagieuses: sociales et triomphantes pour tout dire! […] Rien n’est plus grave que la conviction exagérée! (421)

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Just as Bardamu’s remarks on the ‘vaniteux’ suggest that superior forms of discourse do not pander to their audience, Baryton is hostile to Parapine’s subversive discourse because he recognizes its. power. Texts which refuse to play the game of rational logic are dangerous to social order. Bardamu here agrees with Baryton. But it is impossible to tell whether this agreement is a manipulation of Baryton, like his adventure stories which exploit the bourgeois exploiter, or whether it is the acknowledgement of the impossibility of escape from the power structures in which he lives, repeating the pattern of his interview with Bestombes. The latter appears to be the case, for while Parapine’s revolt ends with the conscious self-imposition of silence, Bardamu cannot escape from the desire for linguistic contact: […] j’avais fini par lui raconter à Baryton beaucoup plus d’aventures encore que tous mes voyages n’en avaient jamais comporté, j’étais épuisé! Et ce fut à son tour finalement d’occuper entièrement la conversation vacante […] Et je ne possédais pas moi, comme Parapine, une indifférence absolue pour me défendre. Il fallait au contraire que je lui réponde malgré moi. Je ne pouvais plus m’empêcher de discutailler, à l’infini, sur les mérites comparatifs du cacao et du café-crème… (431) Here, Bardamu sets out the problem of the writer’s compulsion to use language (later developed by Beckett). Words as a form of subjugation of the listener are transformed into words which subjugate the text producer. Forced into dialogue, he becomes the victim, not just of the social order, but of the urge to communicate, however futile. This presentation of Bardamu’s difficulties attenuates the personal aggression of the act of speech. It fits the frame of reluctance in which Céline presents his novel, both in the second preface, and in Bardamu’s opening and closing words. The ‘asile’ episode creates a link between the institutional structures which surround the treatment of the inmates and their families, and those of literary production. As Godard has demonstrated, Céline’s later novels overtly address the stages by which the writer’s text becomes the property of the public (1985: 345–7). In Voyage, by contrast, with the exception of the second preface, the conditions of literary production and reception are referred to only indirectly. Baryton’s attempts to ‘se mettre au goût du jour’ (423) to please his public, which includes both the academic and theoretical world of psychiatry and the families of his inmates, reflects the struggles of the literary establishment to come to terms with a new concept of literature which threatens its own institutional position by denying the canon on which it depends. ‘Plus de blanc! Plus de noir non plus! Tout s’effiloche!… C’est le nouveau genre! C’est la mode! Pourquoi dès lors ne pas devenir fous nous-mêmes?’ (424), cries Baryton. He sees the trends in modern psychiatry (among them, we assume, Freud’s work) as a self-destructive move by the ‘Académies’, the ‘congrès modernes’

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(424). His reactionary apocalyptic view of the break-down of the distinction between the institution and its subjects evokes the reaction to the terrorism of modernity described by Paulhan in Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou la terreur dans les lettres (1941). The equivalence of institutions (psychiatric and literary) is made explicit in Baryton’s anecdote of the writer who is brought to him for treatment. The writer’s family see his madness as a mark of his genius, while Baryton is convinced that its source is a constriction of the bladder. But Baryton must pretend to agree with the family who will not pay for the treatment of ‘de la pourriture en suspens’, while they will pay for an illness which results from ‘un moment d’excès de son génie’ (426). If the reading public is substituted for the family, this dilemma becomes that of the publisher who depends on the market for his livelihood and who must compromise his professional judgement in the face of public demand which mistakes the infected fluids extracted drop by drop by the professional for the outpouring of genius. The effect of the exposure of the public to the language of delirium is manifested in Bardamu’s own comments on his encounters with the words of his patients: bien qu’évidemment, de temps à autre, un petit malaise me prît quand j’avais par exemple conversé trop longuement avec les pensionnaires, une sorte de vertige m’entraînait alors comme s’ils m’avaient emmené loin de mon rivage habituel les pensionnaires, avec eux, sans en avoir l’air, d’une phrase ordinaire à l’autre, en paroles innocentes, jusqu’au beau milieu de leur délire. (427) But, as Baryton’s eventual fate demonstrates, it is not only the language of the classified madman which should be avoided. Baryton retains a belief in the inoffensive nature of logical discourse, and he departs for England after his exposure to its literature and history, apparently unaware that he has fallen prey to another form of textual tyranny (see Noble 1987:46–7). Narrator, author and audience The fluctuations between the portrayal of text as an instrument of power and that of the limits of its empowerment, reducing several figures in the novel to silence, are manifest in Céline’s presentation of Bardamu’s act of telling. While the initiating moment of the text situates the act of speech at the level of ‘histoire’, the explicit is a closure of narration: ‘qu’on n’en parle plus’ (505). This asymmetry between Bardamu as hero, who is forced to speak, and Bardamu as narrator, who controls his performance by silencing himself, leaves the degree of the narrator’s control of the narration open to question. This ambiguity is perpetuated by the tension throughout the narrative between the transitivity

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patterns of active or passive engagement. Although these are most strongly associated with Bardamu-protagonist, they are also a property of the narration itself, which is sometimes visibly ordered, and sometimes appears subject to contingency. For example, a passage relating to Bardamu’s wartime experiences in the third chapter exhibits a conflict between strong temporal and causal indicators and indicators of contingency, which cannot be fully attributed either to the order of narrative or the order of the TAW: Tout se passait alors à partir de ce moment-là, selon les hasards. Tantôt on le trouvait et tantôt on ne le trouvait pas le régiment et son Barbagny. C’était surtout par erreur qu’on le retrouvait parce que les sentinelles de l’escadron de garde tiraient sur nous en arrivant. On se faisait reconnaître ainsi forcement et on achevait presque toujours la nuit […] Au matin on repartait […] Mais la plupart du temps […] (24) Here, the strong structure of the sequence ‘Tout…alors…à partir de ce momentlà…surtout…parce que…forcement…la nuit…Au matin’, is counteracted by ‘selon les hasards… Tantôt…tantôt…erreur… presque…mais la plupart du temps’. While the text may be presented as an ordered act of telling, rather than the telling of a ordered series of acts, here, the contingency of the TAW invades its narration despite the cohesive signals of order. Equally, an evaluative foregrounded judgement by Bardamu as narrator, at the opening of the twenty-fourth chapter (‘Malgré tout, j’ai bien fait de rentrer à Rancy dès le lendemain, à cause de Bébert qui est tombé malade juste à ce moment’ (276)), which appears to communicate a proleptic mastery by the narrator of the implications of events in the TAW, is not substantiated by events. The suggestion that Bardamu’s activities will help Bébert is progressively undermined, as Bardamu ends his mission to save the boy comfortably ensconced in a café. The unravelling of the positive message of the opening of this chapter is reinforced by the opening of the next: ‘J’aurais été content de ne jamais avoir à retourner à Rancy’ (287), which narrates Bardamu’s abandonment of Bébert. Here, the proleptic pronouncements of the controlling narrator who has silenced the protagonist, or refused to provide details of his experiences (‘On s’est retourné chacun dans la guerre. Et puis il s’est passé des choses et encore des choses, qu’il est pas facile de raconter à présent, à cause que ceux d’aujourd’hui ne les comprendraient déjà plus.’ (47)), are contradicted by the actions of Bardamu-protagonist.28 As Bardamu the protagonist manifests a combination of personal and imaginative will and powerlessness, so does Bardamu the narrator. But do the signals of orality in the text, which foreground a context of performance, produce a relationship of cooperation or of aggression in the roles

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they set up? In themselves, strong signals of orality and performance are not necessarily either a threat to, or a guarantee of, successful communication. In the schema of the literary text as the means to the common ground of a shared vision, manifestations of the presence of a narrating voice, and the reciprocal engagement of the reader in the text, can be assumed to increase intimacy and cooperation. However, if, as is the case in this novel, signs of presence and the personalization of the vision of the narrator are framed by a repeated presentation of the dangers of spoken texts and their potential to serve as part of a game of power, then the apparent reduction of the distance between narrator and reader constitutes an infringement of the inbuilt illusion of protection and anonymity furnished by the written text. The writer may lay the inner self of Bardamu open to the gaze of the reader, but for this to be achieved the reader must allow a penetration of the personal space of his private act of reading. The distance introduced by the reader’s perception of the ‘écriture’ of the text as a performance to be judged by him, is counteracted by the techniques which enhance its affective and physical impact, exacerbated by the presentation of language as a medium in which cooperation is portrayed as compromising subservience. And as the reader must decide whether Bardamu’s narration is complicitous with the discourse of social institutions, or a gesture of revolt against them, he must also decide whether his own silent act of reading is one of compliance with the authority of the textual voice, or whether it is one of antagonism towards any attempt at enslavement through words. Rather than suggesting that the written and fictional narrative prevents a cooperation between writer and reader which is only possible in the shared discourse world of face-to-face interaction, Voyage au bout de la nuit suggests that the distance of the written text is an obstacle to the successful completion of a linguistic imposition by the writer on the reader. The staging of fictional presence in Voyage does not mask the writer’s desire for authority, or portray this authority as a necessary and unfortunate element which writer and reader have to put up with in order for the text to come into being. Instead, it exposes the act of telling as a grasping of power. And while the use of the first-person narrator allows the reader to situate this at one remove from the will of the writer, it also allows the absolute monopoly of the act of telling by a single figure. This contrasts with Jacques le fataliste where the narrator is partly disempowered by the series of retellings. Interpretation of the power relationships of Voyage depends on whether the reader constructs his own role as that of observer of Céline’s struggle as an individual against the collective ranks of members of the cultural establishment (as ‘tiers exclu’), or as a participant who interacts not only with the TAW but with Céline (as ‘tiers gaudens’, see Chambers 1991:26–34). In the first case, intimacy is a voluntary act by the reader, a collusive step of self-situation shoulder-to-shoulder with Céline in the face of institutional power. In the second, participation occurs in a context of intimacy which is not marked by solidarity but by conflict (see pp. 25–6 and note 18, p. 217).

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In the working out of this problem, it becomes essential to establish whose presence is involved. Is the reader struggling with Bardamu the narrator, or is he struggling with Céline the creator of Bardamu the narrator? In his later novels, Céline encourages the association between himself and his narrator, through the explicit sharing of proper names and, as has been suggested, through extended references to his own writing activities as a performance which is fully contextualized in time and space (see p. 143). But, in Voyage, Céline turns the potential of non-identity between writer and narrator, tenuously linked by the partial sharing of a Christian name, Ferdinand, into a further source of power, producing a regressive layering of projections of himself, in which Bardamu, who is either mirrored by or is the mirror of Robinson, exists in a refractive relationship with Céline who stands in a refractive relationship with Destouches, who himself acts out a range of public projections of himself.29 This game of hide and seek lures us into a search for an essential Céline the man, in which the power remains with the writer, as he controls a strip-tease in which we can never be certain that we have reached the naked human beneath. As Godard remarks: ‘Lire un roman de Céline, c’est être engage dans une relation actuelle et personnelle avec quelqu’un devant qui on ne peut rester indifférent.’ (1985:348) And in this early novel, we are faced with the obligation of a personal interaction in which we must determine who it is we interact with.30 Although Céline’s later novels are harder to read as traditional narrative, they are less problematic in the relationship they set up between writer and reader because they remove the problem of identification posed by Voyage, and also by Mort à crédit (1936). Moreover, the quest for biographical parallels between author and protagonist which was initiated by the publication of this first novel (see p. 127) has resulted in a more fully (if not more unproblematic) projection of Céline as a characterized participant in the social field than was available to readers in 1932. The strange line of semi-identification in Voyage exploits the first-person narrative to the full. Bardamu-protagonist can be read as a fully fictional entity, while Bardamu-narrator can be read as a de-personalized figure whose attributes are similar to those of the heterodiegetic narrator. This narrator may express opinions, but his only act is that of narration, and his abstract qualities allow us to associate narrator with writer, in a merging of the fictional act of telling and the extra-fictional act of writing. However, the co-identity of Bardamu-narrator and Bardamu-protagonist also allows an inverse movement in which our association of Céline the writer with Bardamu the narrator, extends to an association of Céline the human Doctor Destouches with Bardamu the fictional protagonist, extending the homology of worldviews to a homology of past experiences. The virtual identity between narrator and author is not dependent on the literalist illusion of certain first-person narratives, in which the author poses as putative editor, allowing full responsibility for the text to fall on the narrator as fictional author.31 Nor is it dependent on the indications of novel as auto-fiction

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manifested in Céline’s later novels. It is, instead, the fictionality of Bardamu himself which shifts responsibility for the effect of the book on the reader to Céline. For our sense of the invasion of our privacy is ludicrous if we believe ourselves to be invaded by a fictional character, and the only agent to whom we can attribute this invasion is Céline himself. We transpose our reading of the signals of Bardamu’s presence, which cannot be, to a reading of Céline’s presence, laying our reactions as readers at the door of the writing agent, not the fictional narrator. A structuralist Genettian interpretation of the levels of narration and levels of speaking voice cannot account for this leap, which destroys and defies narratological logic. The layers of identity in the text cannot remain separate, but exist in an is/is not tension (to borrow Ricoeur’s formula for metaphor (1975)).32 The threat to the audience of Voyage lies not only in the impossibility of a sincere authorial voice but also in the failure to create an on-record singular narratee role against which the reader can position himself. Voyage allows little security for its audience and certainly projects no ideal reader. It does not allow the reader to determine whether he is a member of Céline’s target audience, as the soldiers are that of Bestombes, or an inadvertently present second audience, like the nurses. And is the target audience constituted by those who inhabit or conform to the views of the institutionally empowered circles of the literary establishment or those who do not belong to it? Should the bourgeois reader abandon his audience membership in order to cooperate with the marginal writer? Or is such a move an act of self-disempowerment which places the reader at the mercy of the writer’s discourse? Is such a move even possible, or is it the act of a Princhard who suffers from the ‘vice des intellectuels’? Is a rejection of the text a compromising submission to the discourse of the institutions attacked by Céline or a healthy recognition of Céline’s own move to self-empowerment? Do readers who turn away from Céline’s text and towards canonic literature fall into the same trap as Baryton, who is alerted to the dangers of Parapine’s discourse but blind to that of culturally sanctioned texts? The ambivalence of the audience role in Voyage produces an effect similar to that of the retreat of the writer behind his text. For it is impossible either to challenge or conform to a role which is not itself defined. The patterns of linguistic interaction in the TAW politicize the author-audience relationship and demand that the reader abandon his socialized audience role. But the loss of audience membership is not replaced by the possibility of solidarity with the writer. Readers are invited instead to abandon the security of their collective solidarity and to engage in a singular relationship with a writer who portrays interactions between individuals as a perpetual struggle for power. To praise Céline is to submit to him, just as surely as to condemn him is to be complicitous with and controlled by institutional discourse.

7 THE NOVEL AS MEDIATION Sarraute’s Portrait d’un inconnu

Challenge and comfort Portrait d’un inconnu (1948) is a ‘nouveau roman avant la lettre’, first published in a cultural context in which the work of the ‘nouveaux romanciers’ had yet to enter public perceptions of the novel genre.1 This novel is more overtly situated against the conventions of realist narrative than are her later novels, presenting clear strategies to persuade a resistant audience to revise its reading habits.2 The convention shifts of Portrait d’un inconnu are both radical and minimal. They are radical in that they move away from an essentialist portrayal of character, the focus on the event line in narrative and the illusion of referential and propositional security, and cross the boundaries between narratological functional categories. The radical nature of the convention shifts of Portrait d’un inconnu certainly poses a threat to the face of both writer and audience. Sartre’s preface defends Sarraute against potential accusations of a high modernist élitism, asserting that the resistance of her text to easy interpretation does not range her with those authors whose texts promote a form of self-reflexivity perceived by many to be sterile narcissism. He suggests that it is instead the means to a form of authenticity, the communication of a human experience which is suppressed by the conventional and power-laden discourses of society. This defence recognizes the potential threat to Sarraute’s face, and also reveals where the threat to the reader lies, acknowledging his potential inability to join the élite in-group of those who are capable of interpreting the opaque text. They are minimal, in that the rhetorical strategies of Portrait situate the text in relation to a narrative tradition, allowing its dominant generic relationship with the novel to be established, and following the familiar pattern of challenge to existing texts and modes of reading. The text also firmly establishes its position in the context of culture through references to other art forms. A context of situation founded on the reader’s encounter with the text as artefact is preserved. Portrait d’un inconnu also promotes the continuation of the view that the function of the literary text is to provide a new way of seeing and experiencing the world.3 The link between fiction and discourse world is essential, as the

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patterns of the interaction in the former allow the reader to interpret his own encounter with the text. The readability of Portrait d’un inconnu relies on the general cultural acceptance of the processes of reading seen in Madame Bovary. The similarities between the engagement of both texts with ‘old’ forms, the focus on the interaction between text and reader, the distinction between the language of art and the language of spoken exchanges exemplified by cliché, strong evidence of crafting in language, the refusal of the melodramatic and exceptional as a requirement for plot, and the parodic textualization of the triumph of the worldly social pattern of action at the end of both, demonstrate the degree to which the passage of Portrait d’un inconnu into the history of the novel is eased by the prominence of Flaubert’s work in twentieth-century culture. The engagement between Portrait d’un inconnu and the context of culture occurs, however, on very different terms from that of Madame Bovary. By the 1940s, the rhetorical effect of these features is to confirm an existing state of affairs, not to carve out new ground. They thus serve as what one of my students, James Rowlands, describes as ‘comfort devices’, as signals of the novel’s participation in a recognized arena of cultural activity. With the link to the Modernist consciousness novel signalled by the mode of narration,4 they contextualize the introduction of a different shift in the reader’s perception of the novel. Despite these developments in the novel and the increasing questioning of essentialist views of the self and the ontological and epistemological basis of language, a number of assumptions and expectations predicated on the modes of verisimilitude of the nineteenth-century novel endure at this time.5 It is with these conventions that Sarraute engages in Portrait d’un inconnu, promoting a realist narrative which differs in both the nature of the extra-fictional experience to be communicated,6 and the textual means by which this should be achieved. This chapter discusses the ways in which the very visible convention shifts in Portrait are made readable. Examining, first, how conventional schemata are rearranged in the novel, it then discusses the relationship between Portrait d’un inconnu and its narrative heritage. It next considers the means by which an aesthetics of reading is promoted in the novel, and ends with a discussion of the relationships between language and interpersonal interaction in the fictional world, and their implications for the relationship between author and audience. Rearrangements: the turn of the kaleidoscope The process by which Sarraute’s first novel-length work pushes at the geometric patterning of the novel and at the lexical and syntactic patternings of language involves movement. This is not unidirectional telic movement between fixed states of affairs or character-constructs, nor is it the movement of a direct transmission of propositional meanings between socially situated persons. The Sarrauteian movement is expressed through language as ‘tropismes’.7 her

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introduction to the collection of theoretical essays, L’Ere du soupçon, she describes ‘tropismes’ as: des mouvements indéfinissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience; ils sont à l’origine de nos gestes, de nos paroles, des sentiments que nous manifestons, que nous croyons éprouver et qu’il est possible de définir. (1996:1553) These movements are not directly expressible through the defining structures of language. Sarraute’s ‘tropismes’ resemble a number of later theoretical concepts such as Kristeva’s ephemeral and mobile articulatory chora, the genotext which underlies the geometric symbolic dispositions of the phenotext, and Serres’s ‘parcours’ in place of ‘discours’, ‘parasite’ as an alternative to the ‘point fixe’ and ‘ici-ailleurs’ in place of ‘ici-partout’.8 evocation of not-language in language, of the non-intentional, non-telic and non-binary in text, and of a process of interaction unconfined by the conventional structures of language-use and subjectivity, presents us with a movement which is itself tropistic through the incommensurable gap between what De Man describes as rhetoric as function and rhetoric as trope (see Culler 1989:275). Yet this movement is not only that between function and figure. As Ellison suggests, Sarraute’s texts have a ‘prepositional rhetoric’, in that they are concerned not with movement within a system, but with ‘the elaboration of a style based on an imaginary topography in which the act of writing emerges as an extension into the world, a movement toward, into, and beyond the limitations established by the social sphere’ (1993: 93). The propositional function of language is thus doubly displaced. It is displaced at the level of the sentence, and within smaller sections of text through the reduction of the elements of the text which are associated with stable reference. Within the sentence, the nominal ceases to be a fixed point on which the predicate is constructed as supplement, and predicates themselves are multiplied, refined and developed as the main focus of the sentence. Beyond the striking suppression of proper names for character-constructs, nominals are displaced by the fuzzy deictic demonstratives ‘cela’, or ‘ça’. This not only distances the deictic centre of narration from the possible referents but also prevents secure cohesive anaphoric relationships between the pronoun and a singular referent. Accumulation, too, acts not as reinforcement of an initial term, but as the effacement of the semantic security of previous lexical items. While matrix propositions serve as coherence-building structures, they too are displaced by the proliferation of subordinate clauses and of qualifiers. Within these smaller units of textual construction, the nominal and the matrix proposition thus cease to be securely established primary elements of the text against which secondary

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movement is read. Instead, movement itself becomes the major element of the text.9 This shift in focus from the fixed point to the rhythmic movement of the text also occurs in the arrangement of larger sections of text into successive cognitive frames. Here, the destabilization of semantic relationships at a local level is reproduced, preventing the rational construction of a succession of secure fictional-world frames. The succession of these frames, too, operates by effacement not reinforcement. Thus, in the seventh chapter, the narrator effaces a description of the father in his study, replacing it with the memory of an encounter and the memory of the past words of the father, which allow him to reenter the father’s private world at a different point (104–6). Repetition can also signal the intrusion of one frame into another against the will of the narrator. For example, ‘Assez! Taisez-vous!’, acts as the repeated trigger (87 and 91) for successive developments of increasing length of the scene at Vichy, which marks the re-imposition of the father’s sub-world on the narrator following its temporary eclipse. Other scenes just slip away, such as the walk through the streets of Paris with the daughter in the second chapter. The ostensive gestures of the text thus become part of a pattern of reading which follows an aleatoric movement between moments of cognitive stability and ontological density, constructed as ‘scenes’, and the undermining of this stability through dissolution, repetition and transformation. Floating signifiers, accumulation and negation, and embedding at the level of the sentence are mirrored in the larger structures of the text as floating frames, accumulated and negated frames, and embedded frames, producing a pattern of configuration and deconfiguration. The rational cognitive processes of semantic explicature and pragmatic implicature are thus subordinated to a different cognitive process, that labelled as ‘experiential’ by Fludernik (1996a:50), which displaces ‘storification’ (1996a:34) as the dominant process of the text. These features of the text world contribute to a second type of displacement of the propositional power of language as a governing principle linking text and context. Neither the relationship between the text and its intertexts nor that between text and reader can be apprehended through the construction of a secure ideational relationship in which stable positions could be established for each. The flicker of the text (Ingarden’s term, see McHale 1987:30–3) thus extends to the relationship between fictional world and discourse world. Many of the displacements in Portrait are achieved by a transposition of the functions of elements of the text. This occurs through the introduction of patterns associated with non-narrative text-types and specific intertexts, through a reworking of the hierarchy of elements of narrative, and through the transfer of functions between fictional-world components. Conventions are thus not replaced by disorder, but by alternative orders which make reading possible. Across larger sections of text, there are strong cohesive signals, produced through foregrounded repetition and anaphora. However, these markers of cohesion do not always follow the pattern of narrative structure, but often exploit

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the patterns and devices of non-narrative text-types. Although repetition can mark the end of a digression and a return to a narrative frame already created,10 it may also act as a signal of thematic continuity. This occurs in the opening sentences of three successive sections of the second chapter: ‘Cela l’amuserait sûrement’ (52), ‘Rien ne les amuse autant, dans leurs bons moments’ (54), and ‘Ils aiment ainsi s’amuser un peu de moi’ (55). The use of anaphora follows the ordering principles of given and new material. Again, this is often associated with the textual arrangement of material, rather than the narrative illusion that the organization of the text reflects the organization of a fictional world of events and actions which are temporally situated in relation to each other. For example, an element which occurs at the end of a section, ‘On peut l’observer, marchant avec la miraculeuse adresse du lunatique sur l’extrême bord du vide qui se forme parfois au début des après-midi.’ (my italics), is included in the opening words of the following paragraph, ‘Le dimanche après-midi […] (113). The relationship between these elements is not predicated on a temporal sequence of action. It instead follows the structure of argument, in which the second occurrence serves as a rhematic development of the theme of afternoons. The dependence of Portrait d’un inconnu on patterns associated with nonnarrative text-types extends to those intertextual relationships which situate the text in the field of aesthetic production (discussed on pp. 165–8). These relationships cross boundaries of both genre and medium, promoting a similarity of aesthetic effect between Portrait d’un inconnu, the non-narrative form of poetry and the non-linguistic form of painting. These two forms are themselves associated, whether through the Utrillo-Rilke link in the treatment of the scene in the square, or through the Baudelaire-Tiepolo link across the boundary between the fifth and sixth chapters. Within shorter sections, intertexts can enter and influence the linear progression of the text. In the second chapter, a paraphrase of part of Baudelaire’s ‘Les petites vieilles’ (1859) suspends the telic movement of the text through repetition.11 This paraphrase introduces a section which has, as its subject, a group of anonymous old women: ‘Personne ne les reconnaît quand elles sortent et vont, comme elle, longeant les murs, avides et obstinées’. The repetition of ‘Personne ne les reconnaît’, with its rhematic extension, ‘Elles se tiennent derrière les portes’, as the opening elements of the following three paragraphs (all 56) transforms the function of repetition from cohesive link and narrative orientation marker into a marker of emphasis, hesitation and emotional foregrounding (see Fludernik 1996a:61). The suspension of telic movement is broken by another intertextual trigger: the direct allusion to the ball scene from Madame Bovary, ‘un peu dans le genre de ceux de la Bovary’ (57). This allusion breaks the stasis of the text, but only allows the development of the narrative of the distant past of ‘elles’ by its parodic transformation of a passage from Flaubert’s novel, in which Emma enters into a prop-induced reverie following the ball (see above, pp. 80 and 95). The markers of temporal progression, ‘Autrefois […] Plus tard, la nuit […] Mais

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petit à petit […]’ (57), are made possible by the replacement of the dominance of a poetic intertext by that of a narrative text.12 This triumph of the novel over the poem anticipates the final chapter of the text (discussed on pp. 158–9). Portrait d’un inconnu reworks the relationships between aspects of narrative in such a way that the patterns of orientation, complicating action, peak and resolution described by Labov (1972) as features of natural narrative, are preserved, but the construction of this pattern no longer takes a causal sequence of actions as its essential cohesive element. In the fictional-world of this novel, the phenomenological world does not serve as a stable background to the physical goals and actions of humans. Instead, physical actions become the supports for an experiential narrative, and the fictional-world setting becomes integrated into the dynamic of experiential interaction. The focus on experience over action sequence combines the characteristics of the consciousness novel and non-narrative poetry. While verbs of goal-directed action and power are an essential part of the text (‘tenter’, ‘toucher’, ‘rabrouer’, ‘tenir’, etc.), these do not denote physical actions, but connote relationships beyond both action and language. The experiential aspect of narrative does not provide an evaluative supplement to physical events, but becomes the constitutive element of the pattern usually associated with plot. Likewise, temporal relationships do not produce causal sequence but produce a pattern of movement away from and back to a reference time of experience which itself cannot always be situated either within the TAW, or at the time of narration. The text also draws on two modernist enabling conventions exploiting the increasing role of the focalizer, or reflector, as a transparent mind, allowing access to the thoughts of a protagonist without the mediating filter of report by a narrator as teller. The narratorial mind itself is opened up to the reader through interior monologue, while other character-constructs can also become reflectors (as Jefferson (1980:121) points out, this is the case in the climactic scenes of the novel). By merging these conventionally discrete techniques of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, Sarraute creates the possibility of the by-passing of constraints on both types of narration. The homodiegetic narrator is released from the verisimilar constraints on physical presence and access to the thoughts of others, while preserving the power of direct interaction with fictional constructs in the TAW which is denied to the extra-diegetic narrator. This dissolves the conventional distinction between actual and virtual, between physical and nonphysical, between a TAW and the sub-worlds of the consciousness of protagonists (Werth’s ‘character worlds’, forthcoming: chapter 8.12). In Portrait d’un inconnu, elements of the text which conventionally serve one function can thus perform another. The categories of narrative models, which associate the human with agency, place with arena for action, and text as the vehicle of human interactive agency are crossed. Thus, place can become part of character-construct, not as supplement, but as a defining feature. We integrate our actual-world knowledge of place (whether this knowledge is produced by direct experience, or is itself mediated by other texts, not least RER maps) into our

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building of character-constructs for the protagonists of the text. The collocations of place we associate with the narrator (Greece, the Parthenon, Italy, museums, canals), with the father (Sceaux, Bagneux, Suresnes, Vichy), with the daughter (Corsica, Spain), and with other unnamed figures (Biarritz, Brittany, Dieppe), serve as connotative characterization devices. Texts and paintings in the TAW are incorporated into the patterns of agency in the novel, taking on actantial roles, whether as agents in their own right, or as the instruments of human agency. Experience of place and artefact is merged, reinforcing the dissolution of the distinction between existents and non-existents in the fictional world of the novel. In the second chapter, the text-world construct of Paris is subdued and controlled by the narrator through the interposition of texts and paintings. The struggle for domination is, however, complicated by the competition between texts as the defining pattern for interaction with place, as they subsequently compete for control of the narrative (see pp. 154–5). Thus, in the narrator’s interaction with the square, the melancholy of Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), is overcome by the narrator’s imposition of his own more positive image on his surroundings.13 Narrative and novels: the presence of the enemy However far Sarraute may push at conventions, Portrait d’un inconnu establishes that the field in which these conventions are being changed is that of the novel, not that of some other text-type. This is achieved through a number of means. These include the preservation, however transformed, of a fictional world which corresponds to the fictional worlds of the realist novel; the preservation of the recognizable patterns of complicating action, climax and resolution, described by Labov (1972:362–75), which characterize many narratives;14 the use of a form of narration which is conventionally associated with the Modernist consciousness novel; and intertextual allusions to a particular group of novels, combined with metafictional comments on verisimilitude. This last feature creates a stable target group against which to situate Portrait d’un inconnu. An aspect of the fictional world which provides stability in Portrait is place. This not only enters into the transferential relationship with character-constructs and intertexts discussed above, it also serves a more conventional world-building function. Although the exact location of many scenes in the novel is not specified, there are also explicit itineraries which, like Hadrian’s wall, surface in the text as indicators of a spatial stability. One such is that followed by the narrator from square to café, and through the streets of Paris with the daughter. Awareness of the non-closure of this frame at the end of this chapter is dependent on the successful construction of the frame in the earlier parts of the chapter. Beyond the filter of the consciousness of the narrator, we are confident that there is a Paris, with its suburbs, inhabited by the protagonists in the same manner that Parisians inhabit Paris in the actual world, complete with visits to the psychiatrist, to cafés, and art exhibitions, just as there are more exotic and

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foreign locations where the inhabitants of Paris may take their holidays. The hyperfictionalization of Paris produced by the intertexts of Portrait d’un inconnu does not inhibit the construction of this fictional city. To be able to consider the improbability of the narrator’s access to the father and daughter’s apartment, we must believe in his physical existence in a TAW containing such a location. And to perceive the filters of texts and pictures which he employs as shields between himself and this world, we must believe in the fictional world as a TAW, common to the narrator and other fictional entities, not as part of a sub-world exclusive only to him. In the temporal structure of Portrait, narrative sequence is subjected to a greater degree of destabilization than place. Both structural narratologists and theorists such as Ricoeur consider temporality to be a necessary condition of narrative.15 Portrait d’un inconnu is filled with temporal deictics and referential indicators which, although many do not allow the establishment of a secure chronological relationship either between time of telling and time of events, or between events themselves, nevertheless act as indicators that time plays a significant role in this text. Moreover, there are a number of scenes in the text which can be built into a series which is ordered not by time of telling but by internal signals of their relationship to each other. These scenes relate to the development of the adumbrated plot of the daughter’s relationship with her father which emerges into a fully defined event line with her escape from his domination through the traditional step of marriage. They also relate to another event line which follows the narrator’s own state of social integration.16 The temporal frame within which both these event-lines are situated acts as a reference time against which passages relating to a more distant past are set. However, the conventional function of the time line as a central and causally meaningful series of actions is effaced in the manner discussed above (pp. 153–5). There are only two moments in the novel in which this time line gains any plotbuilding significance. The first is the presentation of the narrator’s journey to the unnamed foreign city, as the result of his visit to the psychiatrist. Here, the emergence of consequential action can be read as the result of the narrator’s momentary submission to the socialization imposed on him by the psychiatrist and his parents. The patterns of the novel enter momentarily into the order of the narrative system, as the narrator enters the social system. The second invites an interpretation of a more direct causal link in the shift in power relationships in the text. This series is comprised of the confrontation between the daughter and her father concerning her engagement, her subsequent indifference to the narrator during their visit to the Manet exhibition, and the domination of the narrator by her fiancé in the final chapter. Here, as the conventional plot takes over and the narrator’s subworld is suppressed by that of social convention, sequence and causality take over the pattern of the text.17 These two moments of sequential and causal action play an essential role in the perception of the text as narrative. The peripeteia of the first, and the movement towards dénouement of the second mirror the patterns of tragic

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narrative, and stabilize the macrostructure of the novel However, our reading of the tragic action is a doubled one, in which the conflict between the subworlds of the narrator and the other protagonists is extended to that between ways of writing a novel. The Aristotelian formulation of mimesis as the representation of the actions of men becomes an interpretive support for what Jefferson describes as the fate of a particular kind of language (1980:131). The suppression of the tropistic rhythms of the text allows these patterns to emerge as protagonist and victim of oppression. This is not a descent into self-reflexivity, for it is not only the narrator’s way of doing language which fails, but also his way of doing the world through language. The triumph of convention at the end of the novel, which ‘achève le roman dans les deux sens du mot’ (Minogue in Sarraute 1996:1747) functions as a powerful empathetic device. Here, the tragic pattern of aspiration and fall is not founded on personal sympathy with the narrator, but is worked into a larger aesthetic and metaphysical pattern. The reassertion of a parodic distillation of debased realism acts not as a liberation of the reader from the marginalized deviations of the distressed consciousness of the narrator, but as the imposition of confining systems of order. Sarraute takes the mythopoeic fall, and the human movement towards death, and links them to the literary project according to the familiar pattern of poetic aspiration and failure encapsulated in the last two quatrains of Mallarmé’s ‘Les Fenêtres’ (1866).18 In this respect, she exploits what Chambers (1991:102–74) describes as the ‘suicide tactic’ of nineteenthcentury literary texts, reinforcing the culturally accepted role of the artist and function of the literary artefact.19 Sarraute here formulates a new version of the nineteenth-century conflict between Idealism and Realism. The fall of Icarus results from contact with the conventional representation of the Real rather than with the Ideal. Success would have required the creation of a new and challengeable position of dominance and power. Failure inhibits direct challenge from the reader. The failure of aspirations in this text is firmly locked in the narrative pattern, not only in the macrostructure of the book, but also by the pattern which overcomes it. This is death by novel. For most of the book, conflict between character-constructs is founded on a process of mutual penetration by the polarities of the aesthetic (narrator) and the non-aesthetic (father) discussed below (pp. 165–8). During this struggle, the daughter’s relationship with the narrator is one which is less confrontational than that of her father. She remains in a position of defence, not attack, and her sub-world of conventional art cannot penetrate the narration in the same way as that of her father. At the end of the text, though, the sub-world which triumphs over both the narrator and the father is that of the daughter. The return to world order occurs as a result of the daughter’s successful domination her father, turning his weapon of nominalization against him to create her own role as conventional heroine, a power shift marked by the emphasised ‘Fi-an-cer’ (153). She rejects her earlier potential to inhabit the sub-world of the narrator (remarked on by l’Alter, who

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reminds the narrator of her early reading of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and their shared condemnation of cliché: ‘C’est du réchauffé… ça fait cliché […] «Curieux, au fond, que ce soit aussi un mot que tu affectionnes…ton mot à toi…»’ (62)). She instead develops her tendency to conform to convention (‘Ce qu’elle cherche, c’est à éviter surtout ce qui pourrait étonner ou paraître anormal, déplacé, les prétentions, les bizarreries; elle se contente modestement d’articles bien éprouvés, solides et peu coûteux’ (67–8)), bending to the will of ‘elles’: Sur son visage maintenant rien d’autre que cette expression d’absence confiante qu’elles ont—il n’y a qu’à regarder ces visages de femmes assises autour de nous aux autres tables—cet air de paisible et vague rumination qu’elles ont toujours pendant que les hommes, près d’elles, parlent d’affaires, discutent de chiffres. (169–70) In submitting willingly to Dumontet, she condemns the narrator to participate in encounters in the TAW which are entirely governed by social convention and language, and which accept the traditional ending of marriage.20 The narrator and his associated forms of art are thus vanquished not by nonart, but by literary tradition and convention, supported by society’s belief that this fictional pattern is that of their own social world. The narrator’s experience of the TAW moves away from the ‘mélange des genres’ of which the daughter remarks that ‘rien n’est plus haïssable’ (162–3) towards the empty experience of socially agreed conventional order. Another major link to the genre of the novel is provided by the mode of narration of the text. Building on the intermittent focalization techniques of Madame Bovary, a growing number of novels had adopted a more extensive use of focalization, whether through a single consciousness, as in Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887), celebrated by Joyce as the first stream of consciousness novel, and certain of the novels of Henry James (whose Portrait of a Lady (1880) allows the title of Sarraute’s text to be an assertion of both similarity to and difference from the work of this influential Modernist), or through a variety of focalizing protagonists. This Modernist tradition of internally focalized narration, with its corresponding shift away from the mapping of vast networks of social relationships and actions, and towards the experiential aspect of narrative, provides a cultural frame which allows a reading of Portrait d’un inconnu as a novel of personal experience, memory and imagination. Fludernik proposes the experiential as a distinct category of narrative, that of result/reaction, in which the point of a narrative sequence is determined by its effect on participants (1996a:66–70). This technique allows the construction of the narrator as a mimetic and anthropomorphic fictional source, a transparent mind (see Cohn 1978). However, unlike the consciousness novel, Portrait does not examine, reveal and analyse the inner motivations of a psychology. Psychological definitions are

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citational, produced by the caricatural secondary protagonist, the psychiatrist, and serve no particularizing function, acting rather as a warning against a similar categorization of the narrator according to prevalent psychological criteria. Further, the transgressions of the conventions of homodiegetic narration present a further obstacle to the reading of this text as unproblematic interior monologue. The intradiegetic fictional mind should not be able to enter the sub-worlds of embedded reflectors as this one does, at least not in a mimetic world. Thus, like the features of the realist novel which are exploited in Portrait d’un inconnu, those of the psychological model serve both as stabilizing factors and as conventions to be modified. The most extended allusion to any novel is the discussion of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–9). But this is part of a larger network of allusion, which begins in the first chapter, associating the realist novels of Mauriac and Green with melodrama and Gide’s interest in the ‘fait-divers’. Tolstoy’s novel is neither overtly praised nor condemned. The treatment of his characters acknowledges the appeal of the mask of characterization and the temptation to map this form of the ‘vraisemblable’ onto the extra-textual world, and rejects this reading. As in Madame Bovary, condemnation of the text is indirect, founded on its susceptibility to bolster the audience’s mistaken view of their own world. Ils sont, ne l’oublions pas, des personnages. De ces personnages de roman si réussis que nous disons d’eux habituellement qu’ils sont «réels», «vivants», plus «réels» même et plus «vivants» que les gens vivants euxmêmes. (74) The narrator’s account of the dangers of this interaction between a text and its readers is supported by the presentation of other elements of the fictional world, from the hard nominal labels which are both capitalized and rejected by the narrator, to its facilitation of the creation of the father’s social mask. To his friends, the latter appears as ‘un bon modèle de série’ which they recognize from their reading as ‘un type, un personnage, mais d’où, déjà, de quel roman?’, a figure which inhabits ‘l’univers solidement construit qu’ils habitent’ (140). This, then is the negative model of characterization to which the ‘mise en abyme’ of the portrait will provide an answer and which, in tandem with the portrait, provides a clear justification for the refusal to adopt traditional techniques of characterization.21 Sarraute’s presentation of the influence of fictional techniques of characterization on public perceptions of reality may condemn their particular effects on an undiscerning public, but it also promotes the power of fiction to affect actual-world behaviour. This portrayal of novels as opinion-forming texts links her own very different treatment of character to the project of social relevance of the realist tradition.

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The issue of verisimilitude is kept at the forefront of the reader’s awareness through the narrator’s comments. He describes the daughter’s hypothetical assessment of his own behaviour within the frame of ‘vraisemblance’: Je colle à elle comme son ombre… «Du réchauffé, cela, dirait-elle, les petites promenades de ce genre. Un procédé. Un peu à la manière de Dostoïevski. De vagues réminiscences de scènes un peu semblables dans L’Éternel Mari ou dans L’Idiot… De la littérature…» Je sais bien… Je sais qu’il est infiniment plus vraisemblable qu’après lui avoir serré la main, je sois rentré chez moi. Je sais que c’est ainsi que cela a dû se passer: j’ai dû «filer» de mon côté, l’échine un peu pliée […] (65) Dostoyevsky here supplies a traditional and canonic positive counter-model to Tolstoy.22 The opening of the scene in the railway station which will develop into one of the greatest transgressions of verisimilitude in the novel, also includes a commentary on verisimilitude: ‘Et j’ai eu, cette fois encore, un impression de truquage ou de miracle […] Extrêmement scéniques, comme toujours. Si scéniques, si grimés qu’ils semblaient invraisemblables, impossibles. Des personnages faisant leur entrée en scene.’ (94) This scene bears a strong resemblance to Monet’s series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, reinforcing the links with painting discussed below (pp. 164–5). This type of metafictional comment allows us to read Portrait d’un inconnu within the traditions in which verisimilitude is an issue. Sarraute does not condemn the principle of a relationship between text and discourse world, instead she challenges the influence of conventional forms which encourage a belief in the referential and defining power of language. Orders preserved: a rhetoric and aesthetics of reading Despite the extensive re-configuration of the functions of elements of the narrative construction of Portrait d’un inconnu, as has been suggested, the rhetorical strategies of the novel depend on the preservation of a situation already established in the Naturalist and Modernist novel forms, in which the reader must accept that the context of situation is limited to the context of reading, requiring no overt manifestation of an interpersonal relationship between writer and reader. A phenomenological approach to the experience of the aesthetic is thus preserved, and is reinforced by the presentation of the narrator as reader of his world, and by the blocking of the producer’s role in the context of reception of art objects in the TAW.

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Not writing but reading Although the narration of Portrait d’un inconnu allows little conventional construction of character, the narrator’s fictional consciousness is firmly situated as a non-authorial entity, both because he fully inhabits the fictional world as intradiegetic entity, and through indicators, in particular, of his gender.23 These are produced grammatically, through masculine adjectival endings, and a more developed, if fleeting, glimpse of him in shop-windows and mirrors: ‘ce bonhomme «sur le retour», à la mise négligée, court sur pattes, un peu chauve, légèrement bedonnant.’ (159)24 Moreover, the consistent narratorial ‘je’ allows the construction of a singular naturalized fictional source. This is the approach adopted by Minogue (1981:41 and 200–1), who reads the transgressions of the principles of homodiegetic narration as the product of the narrator’s imagination, perturbed only by absence of markers of memory or speculation which are present at other points in the text, either through lexical indicators (‘je m’en souviens’ (105)), or the use of the irrealis future and conditional tenses. When constructed as such, this narrative mind allows no direct association between the construction of a fictional originating mind and a hypothetical authorial mind.25 The absence of a textualized ‘you’, and of literalist indicators of the fictional circumstances of production, leave it hard to determine whether the fictional context of production is that of publicly performed text, or of internal performance to the self (this would be full interior monologue).26 The dominance of techniques which mark the frame of the text as ‘experiencing’ rather than ‘telling’ (see Fludernik 1996a:43–6), reinforced by the absence of justification by the narrator of his rights of access to both locations and minds in the fictional world conventionally denied to the homodiegetic narrator, turn the function of the narrator into reader, observer and experiencer of the TAW, rather than performer of the self to others. Nowhere does the narrator provide justifications to a fictional audience of his authority to tell, or his authority to tell the way he does. Whereas the Balzacian narrator presented the fictional world as a text to be read collaboratively by himself and the reader, the Sarrauteian narrator has no socialized relationship with a narratee. The absence of consistent deictics and referential indicators of time and place —which would allow us to build a secure position from which the nar rator reads his world—produces a parallel between the situation of the narrator and that of the reader. In certain passages it is impossible to situate the deictic centre in any one world level, for example: ‘Et lui, il est là de nouveau, comme si de rien n’était, dressé devant moi comme autrefois, opaque et clos de toutes parts. Ses contours épais se dessinent lourdement dans la lumière du jour.’ (113) Here, ‘moi’ is the deictic reference point, but it is impossible to assign it securely to either the protagonist ‘je’, as reflector, or the narrating ‘je’. The locative distancing deictic ‘là’ in conjunction with ‘opaque et clos’ can indicate the alienation of the protagonist ‘je’ from the father (‘il’), and ‘devant moi’ can indicate physical copresence in the TAW. Here, the temporal markers ‘de nouveau’ and ‘autrefois’

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would take the TAW scene as their temporal reference point, and ‘lumière du jour’ would refer to the conditions of this world. But ‘là’ can also indicate the distancing of the narrator as text producer from a TAW scene, signalling not physical presence, but the projection of this scene onto a mental screen, expressing the locative relationship between the narrator and the picture he produces. The temporal deictics would then relate not to an event-line reference time, but to the time of narration, and ‘lumière du jour’ would refer to the context of telling. Last, ‘là’ and ‘de nouveau’ can be read as discourse deictics (see Levinson 1983:55), having no spatial or temporal significance in either a textual actual world or a textual mental world, but serving, like ‘Et’, as markers of the position of the scene in the text itself. Such a scene can thus occur at three notionally separate levels of the text world, merging the cognitive frames of told, telling, and text. These deictic ambiguities prevent the reduction of the figure of the narrator to a physical entity locked either in the world of ‘histoire’ or the world of ‘récit’. He develops the attributes of a reader, whose cognitive and imaginative activities allow him entry to both TAW and fictional world of performance without physical presence.27 The reader may situate himself within the mind of a protagonist, as external observer of the TAW, and as observer of the pattern of the text. He is also allowed to assume more than one position at once. In Portrait d’un inconnu, the narrator takes on the same mediated position as the reader, as both ‘tiers exclu’, a witness to a world which is not aware of his presence, and as ‘tiers gaudens’, as penetrator of this world (Chambers 1991: 26–34). Both narrating ‘je’ and reader are physically present only to themselves, but they have the powers of vision of the prison warder in Bentham’s panopticon. Through their shared exclusion from conventional interpersonal interaction, as invisible eavesdroppers and observers, they gain an alternative access to others. The parallel between narrator and reader activity, the reflexivity of the narrator as source of the text he reads and the exclusivity of his focus on his own relationship with the world he reads, create a context of reading from which any external text producer is excluded. The power given to the narrator by his nonphysical penetrative activities suggests a parallel empowerment of the reader which is seductive. Sarraute thus employs a form of persuasion founded on the enhancement of the face of the intruding ‘tiers’, removing the confining conventions of face-to-face communication and enabling the suspension of the need for self-protection shown in the TAW (see below, pp. 168–9 and 174–5). Reading the artefact The focus on the context of reading produced by the discussion of Tolstoy’s novel is intensified by the model encounter between art object and audience in the most overt ‘mise en abyme’ of the novel. This is the ‘Portrait d’un inconnu’ (83), the painting which is the most powerful of all the narrator’s fetishes. Flagged as full ‘mise en abyme’ of the Gidean type by the title shared by

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painting and book,28 this relationship is reinforced by the correspondance between the techniques of picture and text, both in its initial description: Les lignes […] semblaient être les contours fragmentaires et incertains que découvrent à tâtons, que palpent les doigts hésitants d’un aveugle […] On aurait dit qu’ici l’effort, le doute, le tourment avaient été surpris par une catastrophe soudaine et qu’ils étaient demeurés là, fixés en plein mouvement (83–4) and in the narrator’s later discussion with the daughter: Je préfère, je crois, aux oeuvres les plus achevées, celles où n’a pu être maîtrisé…où l’on sent affleurer encore le tâtonnement anxieux… le doute… le tourment […] tenez…par exemple […] il y a un tableau…le portrait d’un inconnu […] il y a quelque chose dans ce portrait…une angoisse… comme un appel…je…je le préfère à n’importe quoi…il y a quelque chose d’exaltant…29 (161) This painting, which provokes the most intense TAW aesthetic experience of the book, is unsigned, and its artist is also unknown: ‘Le tableau, je me souvenais, n’était pas signé: le peintre était inconnu aussi.’ (83) The producer of the artefact is not present in this interaction.30 The interpersonal aspect of the narrator’s interaction with this picture relates entirely to its subject, the ‘inconnu’. The latter’s eyes, in particular, exert an influence over the narrator. And while we might assume that this painted figure, like Lacan’s tin can, does not see the narrator, a form of extra-linguistic interaction occurs between the protagonist and this doubly fictional figure, which places the former in the picture, situated in a relationship of desire with the artefact (see Lacan 1973:89). This interaction between humans across world levels produces an empowerment and cooperation absent from interactions between the human fictional entities at the same world level, for the penetration of the personal and private space of the father and daughter is founded on a conflict of will and resistance. The ‘mise en abyme’, which itself crosses world levels, proposes this interaction as a model for the encounter between reader and text. It reinforces the possibility of positive trans-world-level interaction and discourages the construction of a discourse-world relationship between reader and writer which, occurring within the same world level, would be subject to the same constraints as that between the narrator and other protagonists.

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Aesthetic networks The valorization of the literary text as aesthetic object is produced by a system of polarities in this novel which is far more explicit than that in Madame Bovary, although many artefacts are situated on a cline between these extremes. The aesthetic is associated with fluidity, non-definition, undecidability, and human submission to the artefact, while the non-aesthetic is associated with simplicity, geometry, regular patterning, and the subjugation of the artefact to the human will. This reinforces a perception of the aesthetic text as one not susceptible to the control of the reader, a text which is connotative, which allows refractive and regressive semiosis, and which is distinguished from everyday language-use, and the illusion of full interpretability. This corresponds in many ways to the Mallarméan aesthetic, as will be shown. This distinction is largely produced by two collocations of artefacts which are subsets of the larger collocations associated with the character centres of the narrator and the father. The father’s artefact-type also becomes associated with Dumontet in the final chapter, as his control over his daughter is transferred to the younger man. As has been suggested, the most overtly flagged ‘mise en abyme’ of the novel is the ‘portrait d’un inconnu’ encountered by the narrator. As such, we must perceive this painting as a positive model, unless Sarraute is shooting herself in the foot. Associated with positive interactions, emotion and liberation, it also displays a relationship of power between artefact and audience in which the audience submits to the artefact. As the narrator remarks, following his apparently liberating experience of the portrait: Je n’avais fait que changer de maître. C’était l’inconnu maintenant, «l’Homme au pourpoint» qui tenait la laisse au bout de laquelle je me promenais. Un lien très doux, celui-ci, peut-être d’autant plus dangereux pour mon indépendance que je ne sentais pas en moi le moindre désir de me libérer. (92) This surrender is a means to escape the control of systems of order, whether linguistic or social, and is contrasted to the father’s domination of everyday objects, represented as a facile technique of self-enhancement. In the field of visual representation, the most explicit anti-model for the text is provided by Dumontet’s plans of the property he has acquired (166–8). The plans have full referential authority within the TAW, and are associated with the commercial exchange of goods.31 They, like Dumontet, dictate the course of the conversation. These visual use-oriented maps appear within the context of the reassertion of narrative plotting in the final chapter, and are set in opposition to the aesthetic interaction of the narrator with the portrait.

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Both the encounter with the portrait and the description of the conversation which revolves around the plan in the final chapter are supplemented by a further crossing of media through musical analogy. In the former, the penetration of the narrator by the portrait is described as musical reverberation: Et petit à petit, je sentais comme en moi une note timide, un son d’autrefois, presque oublié, s’élevait, hesitant d’abord […] cette note hésitante et grêle […] pénétrait en lui, résonnait en lui, il la recueillait, il la renvoyait, fortifiée, grossie par lui comme par un amplificateur, elle montait de moi, de lui, s’élevait de plus en plus fort, un chant gonflé d’espoir qui me soulevait, m’emportait… (84) By contrast, in the final chapter, Dumontet conducts the conversation on Homaislike subjects as a musical score: ‘L’oeil attentif, nous suivons, comme des musiciens bien entraînés qui connaissent par coeur leur partition: La pêche. La chasse. Les promenades. Frémincourt […]’ (171). Musical analogy is also used in the conflict between the narrator and the father. The latter employs music which is use-oriented, ‘faite pour les salles de danse’ (88), with its regular rhythmic patterns, as a protective barrier, a ‘rempart’ against the narrator. The type of sound with which the narrator is associated through simile is that of rhythm and sonority not harnessed to artificial form. Rhythm is that of the body: ‘Des coups frappés quelque part au fond de nous, des coups étouffés, menaçants, semblables aux battements sourds du sang dans les veines dilatées’ (107), which penetrates the rational protective barriers created by the father. Sonority is that of the interactive harmonic vibrations of the tuning-fork: ‘ce lien secret, connu de nous seuls, cet attrait […] entre nous ces prolongements mystérieux, ces vibrations pareilles à celles que le diapason reçoit de l’objet qu’il heurte.’ (122)32 While knowledge of this uncontrolled reverberation is attributed to both the narrator and the other two central protagonists, the former seeks to expose it, while the latter seek to repress it. The most positive treatment of written texts is that of poetry, and explicitly Baudelaire, to whose work Portrait d’un inconnu alludes extensively, both through direct citation and indirect transformational appropriation of images from his poems. Beyond the direct allusion to ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ the quotation from ‘Le Poème du haschisch’ (1860) noted by Minogue (Sarraute 1996:1767), itself attributed to De Quincey, and the development of the paraphrase of ‘Les Petites vieilles’ (see p. 154), the musical analogy discussed in the previous paragraph links this text to ‘La Cloche fêlée’ (1851), which also exploits an ambiguity between the human and the artefact as the agents of the memories evoked in the poem. Moreover, the cross-media associations in this novel between painting, music and poetry rely on Baudelairean ‘correspondances’, extended and developed in the Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The poets of Spleen, Baudelaire and Rilke, are the two poets most frequently alluded

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to in Portrait d’un inconnu (poets who are also ‘prosateurs’). But this aesthetic link, in which Mallarmé himself appears as a ‘presque disparition vibratoire’, produces a strong set of cultural associations with the latter’s texts which promote a strict division between the aesthetic and ‘l’universel reportage’.33 In the range of written texts, the pole of the non-aesthetic is represented not by Tolstoy’s novel but by the mathematical logic of the ‘manuels scolaires’ (101), the ‘petits livres à couvertures saumon […] les recherches, les découvertes les plus récentes, les théories, les constructions les plus savantes, les plus hardies: de grands bonshommes […] ces produits de qualité’ (103), and the hard serried ranks of Saint-Simon’s works (129), which make up the father’s textual supports. This reinforces the contrast between texts which provide a closed system of logic, bowdlerize sophisticated concepts for simple minds or rely on ostensive denotation, and those appreciated by the narrator. Even the proper names of the artists and poets in Portrait d’un inconnu function differently from the proper names used by the father as conversational weapons. Like their works, they affect the narrator through a process of interactive connotation: ‘Le clapotis de l’eau contre elles est léger, caressant comme le nom de Tiepolo, quand on le dit tout bas: Tie-po-lo, qui fait surgir des pans d’azur et des couleurs ailées.’ (86) The canals of Venice, and those of Baudelaire’s poetry merge in an unlimited set of experiences of their works and of place. Like that with the fetish places of the narrator, interaction is virtual, not subject to the limits of the father’s controlled physical interaction with his fetishes: Ce n’est pas seulement cet air qu’il a toujours, quand il est là, replié sur luimême, de guetter une proie, c’est aussi sa position: au centre— il est au centre, il trône, il domine—et l’univers entier est comme une toile qu’il a tissée et qu’il dispose à son gré autour de lui. (102) These interactions are also contrasted with the protective screen put up by others against the ‘univers informe, étrange et menaçant’ (127), erected from the banal and minimal characterization of place: ‘Venise…les objets en écaille […] Londres et les gants […] Dresde…les services à thé… Moscou et les châles de chachemire […]’ (127). The polarizations of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic associated with character-constructs are part of much wider contrastive groupings of two different domains of interactive practice, in which condemnation or valorization of one element of a group extends metonymically to the condemnation or valorization of the other elements. The group of negative interactions includes the social circulation of cliché, the public projection of the self according to convention, and written text-types which support these conventional practices, including the character collocations of the father, the psychologist and the anonymous ‘ils’ and ‘elles’. The group of positive interactions include the

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penetration of the social masks created by cliché and forms of text and artefact which escape the denotative and controlling capacity of language, including the character collocation of the narrator. Thus, by allowing the reader the easy and common value judgement which condemns cliché, Sarraute draws him into the more difficult condemnation of certain narrative techniques epitomized by certain canonic novels without directly reducing these to the extremes of impoverishment of the ‘manuels scolaires’ or Dumontet’s plans. And by allowing the reader to appreciate the connotative power of poetic language, and by linking this language to a certain type of painting valued by the narrator, Sarraute overcomes the difficulty of persuading the reader to accept other aspects of the text as desirable. In particular, the pleasure in the images evoked by the Baudelairean ‘Idéal’ coats the pill of the mode of penetrative interaction sought by a narrator with whom it is hard to establish any empathetic relationship, and whose quest reveals, not the Mallarméan ‘absente de tous bouquets’,34 but the amorphous matter of Sartre’s ‘nausée’: ‘une matière étrange, anonyme comme la lymphe, comme le sang, une matière fade et fluide qui coule entre mes mains, qui se répand…’ (75–6) The search for the Ideal thus entails the acknowledgement of Spleen. The evocation of familiar aesthetic distinctions and modes of interaction with artefacts and forms of language establishes a conventional literary script of reading which allows the accommodation of less familiar patterns. Language, interaction and face Although Portrait appeals to a context for reading which is restricted to the interaction between reader and text, as in Voyage au bout de la nuit, the patterns of linguistic interaction in the TAW raise issues concerning participant interactions through language in the discourse world. If this linguistic text is to overcome the problem of its medium and avoid a reading as proposition, the interaction between reader and text needs to be released from the patterns of aggression and defence in the linguistic interactions of the TAW. Linguistic exchange in the fictional world is a perilous affair. As Jefferson points out, the failure of the narrator’s language occurs in his attempt to speak his experience to others (1980:123–31). The only solidarity of spoken language is that of an oppressive social harmony which is achieved at the expense of contact. Its sole function is to preserve the barriers of language and to isolate the individual behind his or her social persona. This world is governed by performances. In it, power is gained by the imposition of a mask on others while preserving one’s own mask. This pattern of threat and redress appears as an extreme form of Brown and Levinson’s observations on social interaction.35 The narration itself allows the avoidance of the opposition of the telling ‘I’ and a listening or reading ‘you’, through the effacement, already mentioned, of literalist signals of performance, whether spoken or written, removing the issue of physical confrontation between narrator and a notional narratee (see above, pp.

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162–4). It produces an effect of penetration by the reader into the mind of the narrator which does not suffer from the barriers of the narrator’s encounters with other protagonists. Because no stance of either aggression or cooperation is adopted by the narrator towards a narratee, the reader is discouraged from interpreting this relationship in terms of social interaction. As has been shown, the roles of reader and narrator are instead superposed. We are warned against confusing access to the narrator with social aggression or cooperation by the two types of performer-audience interaction in the first chapter. The narrator’s interaction with his first audience, typified by ‘rabrouer’, is presented as an undesirable pattern which leads to exclusion and isolation. This discourages the reader from rejecting the narrator as a socially situated marginal subject. But the ‘coller’ of the second group is presented as no more desirable. They are presented as ‘passifs’ and ‘inertes’, their smile is ‘un peu trop sympathisant’, they submit to the domination of the narrator and are over-willing to accept his views: ‘Rien ne leur paraîtra jamais inconvenant’ (all 43). This warns us not to attempt to adopt a sympathetic and cooperative stance towards the narrator. The orientation function of the first chapter is thus not only to establish the narrator’s interest in the father and daughter, but to discourage the reader’s emulation of the audience behaviour of either group. Medium and performance Despite this discouragement to adopt a stance of either opposition or solidarity towards the narrator, we are nevertheless still confronted with the text as a formal linguistic structure, which has the potential to act as a weapon in social games of power. Sarraute cannot escape the linguistic form of her text, but she can perturb the creation of a participant position for the writer in the manner described above (see also pp. 162 and 164–5). She can also introduce conflicting linguistic signals of the fictional mode of transmission of the text, preventing its classification according to any single convention of medium, further perturbing attribution to a singular thinking, speaking or writing source, whether fictional or actual. This differs from the narration of Céline’s novel in that the tension of the text is not simply between two modes of performance in language, but between language and the extra-linguistic, and between public and private. It is locution which is in doubt and ‘narrator’ becomes a misleading term.36 This prevents the association of the mode of narration solely with the enclosed inner world of a mind, with the aggression of speech, or with the structured logical planning of writing. Elements of each must interfere with the construction of the others. A brief outline of some of the features of the opening pages allows a demonstration of the undecidability of signals of medium and performance.37 These pages combine signals of both spoken and written forms. Thus, the spoken formulation, ‘ç’a été’, contrasts with the inverted tag, ‘m’ont-ils dit’ (both 41), associated with written discourse. These conflicting signals prevent secure classification of the fictional circumstances of production. Larger patterns also

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produce a conflict in categorization. For instance, Portrait exploits the patterns of parataxis, considered typical of spoken and unplanned discourse, involving accumulation, substitution and repair. This occurs both in the relationship between full clauses (parataxis proper), and within the noun phrase or the verb phrase, in which adjectives or adverbial qualifiers follow the same fragmented, additive pattern: il faut qu’ils se sentent libres et sûrs de leurs mouvements, deux femmes qui se croisent sur le seuil de la porte ou bien dans l’escalier, leur filet à la main, pressées de sortir, de rentrer, préoccupées, et rient de leur rire aigu, leur mince rire acéré qui me transperce et me cloue à l’étage au-dessus, retenant mon souffle, plein d’une attente avide […] (42) The signals of spontaneous and continuous language production, in which elements of the text can only be changed through the production of further text, link the narration of Portrait d’un inconnu to forms of linguistic interaction in which the effects on an audience cannot be calculated in advance. They invite the dissociation of the text from the imposition of structure associated with planning by a strategic and manipulative source. But the process of erasure and effacement also suggests lack of attention to the needs of an audience. Planned discourse may enable the text producer to control the responses of his interlocutors, as the father controls the narrator in the TAW, but it is also an instrument of cooperative linguistic behaviour. Signals of unplanned discourse can thus dissociate the narrator from both aggressive control and from cooperative behaviour. However, as has been suggested, the text also contains signals of planning which can be attributed not to Sarraute as writer, but to the ‘je’ as producer of his own discourse. There are examples of complex hypotactic embedding, and the extended delay of the main verb of matrix propositions, which are characteristic of written discourse. The second paragraph constitutes a relatively simple example: ‘J’ai essayé d’abord, comme je fais parfois, en m’approchant doucement, de les surprendre.’ (41)39 Although the embedded subordinate clause and adverbial phrase suggest the unplanned adjustments of spoken discourse or thought, the delay of the complement of the main clause through hypotaxis produces a structured movement towards the final verb which not only enhances the end-focus of ‘surprendre’ (see Walter Nash 1980:106–7) but also reinforces the semantic interpretation of the sentence, as a series of tactical gentle moves, executed ‘doucement’, towards surprise. This leads our reading towards a categorization of the text as performed and written text designed to produce a particular effect on an audience. The orientative clause, ‘comme je fais parfois’, also acts as a marker of public performance to an audience, supplying information which can only be unknown, and therefore of interest, to someone other than the narrator. This type of narratorial digression which acts as a

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commentary on the main line of the narrative also occurs in more extensive form, marked as distinct from the main narrative by ‘tirets’. Because such digressive commentary is presented as information provided by the narrator about himself, it signals public performance by this fictional figure, as does metadiscursive commentary (‘je l’ai déjà dit’ (125)). These conflicts make it impossible to decide whether the text is to be constructed as a representation of voiced narration, and whether features associated with planned discourse originate with the narrator or with the writer. In the spoken medium, repetition and repair are signals of performance for another. The former allows both speaker and hearer to keep track of the significant points of the narrative, and the latter allows revision and amplification which cannot be integrated at leisure in spontaneously produced text (see Chafe 1982:36–8). But in written texts, these patterns of speech, when dissociated from direct address to a narratee, are conventionally used to represent not performed and voiced speech, but the unplanned and unperformed processes of thought. When the patterns of written planning are added to these, we are left with an impossible configuration of contradictory classifications for the text. This is complicated by the ambiguity of the temporal relationship between the narrator as deictic centre and the time of his story (see p. 163). Simultaneous present tense narration (which occurs frequently) is usually read as a signal of interior monologue or stream of consciousness (although it may be a technique to signal Peak in past tense narratives). Distance between narrator-now as teller and narrator-then as protagonist signals either spoken or written performance. Portrait d’un inconnu fluctuates between these relationships, and incorporates passages such as that discussed above in which it is impossible to tell whether the deictic centre is that of narration or the narrator as focalizer in the past. Moreover, the uncertainty of the position of the deictic centre of the text is extended to voicing itself. For instance, ‘prononcer’ (146) and ‘de quoi ai-je été parler’ (147) occur in a fictional context of production which crosses world levels: ‘Moi-même, c’est à peine si j’ose, ici où je suis maintenant avec eux, le prononcer tout bas…’ (147) These signals of speech (which are stronger than the more universal ‘dire’) do not conform to the standard mimetic assumptions concerning fictional-world levels in which narrator and narratees experience the voicing of text, but only experience the events of the TAW indirectly, while the protagonists directly experience speech and events in the TAW, but have no access to the performed narration. Instead, these metatextual remarks, which explicitly refer to text production, have as their potential audience not the narratees, but other protagonists within the fictional world. As a result, these strong signals of the voicing of audible text do not provide a secure extradiegetic context of performance, this voicing is audible in the TAW, not in a text world of fictional telling. The power of the narrator to escape the epistemological limits of homodiegetic narration is thus not one of a silent and solitary process of imagining recorded for an external audience. Narration itself crosses the worlddivide into the world it narrates.

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Situating participants The above discussion has concentrated on the ambiguities relating to the fictional context of production. But we cannot ignore the metafictional patterns which signal the writing activities of an extra-fictional author-construct. The impossibility of locating the narrator as writer of the text leaves this position open. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between fictional and extra-fictional sources of the text is an ambiguous one. The patterns of narration certainly resemble the narrator’s own speech patterns within the TAW, and the ‘petit truc’ of the substitution of pronouns for proper names is ascribed to the narrator himself (76). But the impossibility of situating the ‘je’ of the text, either as agent or nonagent, and the undecidability of the status of the narrator as performer, implies another performance, by the writer. ‘Qui parle?’, being unanswerable, is transformed into ‘Qui écrit?’ The impossibility of ascribing full public responsibility to the narrator shifts this responsibility to the writer. Public responsibility is, in addition, associated with the status of Portrait d’un inconnu as a fictional text. This situates it in a cultural context in which novelists have an ‘obligation to own up to their lies’.40 The status of this novel as fictional writing, combined with the internal signals of planning and composition discussed in the course of this chapter, results in the doubling of sources, fictional and actual, in which Sarraute is deemed responsible for her fictional narrator. Whatever signals there may be of intentional fictional telling (and as has been suggested, these are not in great evidence), they are outweighed by signals of writing. Sarraute has not handed over full agency to her fictional ‘je’. She has not created a fictional performer of the type described by Adams which can be held entirely responsible for the production of language for others (1985:16). Although the text produces a focus on the equivalence of narrator and reader, the masking of the self through the ‘carapace’ of language in the TAW can also be translated to the discourse world. The text can be read as a mask to be penetrated. MacMahon (1996:219) suggests that the cognitive processes of fiction involve the recognition of a citational act by the writer. Within this frame of reference, Sarraute’s performance by proxy demands to be penetrated, as a ‘rempart’ against the penetrative activities of the reader. Moreover, the cognitive frame of singular writer and multiple audience finds more support in Portrait d’un inconnu than in most other texts by Sarraute. Individuals are set in relationships of opposition or submission to social groups. The patterns of interaction in the text suggest the possibility of the construction of a singular author according to the principles which allow the construction of singular agents in the TAW, however fragmented their selfhood may be. The relationship of this author-construct to her audience can be built by analogy with those between the narrator, the father or the daughter and their fictional audiences. These audiences use their collective solidarity to influence the behaviour of the singular protagonists, demanding the conformity of the latter to their own culture-texts. The daughter and father, while they are members of such

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social groups, can also detach themselves from the group and engage in an individual interaction with the narrator or each other, just as the context of reading allows the detachment of the reader from a collective audience. While the narrator may attempt to avoid the aggressive or cooperative moves of others, he cannot prevent these moves, just as Sarraute cannot avoid the power of her audience to create such socialized positions for author and reader. The backing groups of ‘ils’ and ‘elles’ have their equivalents in the field of literary reception. It would appear from critical readings of Sarraute’s work that the avoidance of a socially situated position for the writer according to principles of confrontation or co-operation is difficult. While Sarraute has been successful in blocking the creation of an author-construct for herself on either the Realist or Modernistpsychological models (whether she is a nice lady who behaves well to her friends and whether she has a disturbed psychology are questions considered to be irrelevant to readings of the text), she has not prevented the creation of an authorial position concerning the aims and function of the novel which is founded on principles of opposition and solidarity. Certain aspects of the text, such as the condemnation of the effects of processes of characterization (in the discussion of Tolstoy’s characters) and the promotion of the fluid against the geometric (in the treatment of the ‘Portrait d’un inconnu’), invite this hardening of positions. Minogue, while she emphasizes the unreliability of the narrator, and distances this balding middle-aged psychotic from the author, suggests that there are moments in the text where Sarraute writes directly to her audience: ‘the narrator here stands in for the novelist’ (31), and ‘the problems he faces clearly reflect the problems of the novelist’ (1981:38). Gibson describes Sarraute’s work as ‘resistance to any form of domination of the narrative text through or by thematics’ (Gibson 1996:130). But even this description, which captures the difficulty of mapping these forms of domination onto Sarraute’s texts, also points to the potential of the movement which perturbs such mapping to harden into a locus of resistance, a position, in which Gibson ranges himself with Sarraute against thematics. Sarraute’s exploitation of the virtual nature of writing, hovering between absence and presence, between self and other, between inside and outside, thus always runs the risk of resolution, through reading, into the detection and adoption of stable positions, whether those of conflict or solidarity.41 The focus of the text, which brings the elusive and marginal sub-conversational movement to the centre, shifting the structures of narrative to an epiphenomenal and unstable position, is repeatedly read by critics as propositional and sourced. The propositions ascribed to Sarraute’s writing (Sarraute’s writing!) vary, but all involve the sustaining of a relationship between author and audience founded on the recuperability of an authorial goal, achieved through text, and situated in a context of culture. The recourse of readers to authorial statements of intent which have been made in this context of culture integrate écriture in a social arena of language, founded on a process of ‘writing to’ and ‘reading as’. That these statements are used to support the effacement of a secure and centred voice in

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Sarraute’s texts does not detract from the tacit acceptance by critics of a relationship between authorial intention and interpretation. Thus, while we may accept the solitude of reader and text on one level, we are not prepared to assume full responsibility for our reading of the type promoted by Rorty (in Eco et al. 1992) or Walton (1990) and continue to attribute an aesthetic project to the text’s author. Responsibility for this position-taking does not lie with readers alone, but is the consequence of the polemical aspects of Sarraute’s texts, both fictional and non-fictional (see Jefferson 1997). Critics thus append their own acts of persuasion to Sarraute’s, continuing the promotion of a type of language-use which would persuade their readers (who are also readers of Sarraute) to think text, language, subjectivity and communication differently. Rather than refuse the authority of the writer, they support and redouble this authority. The linking of her works through the notion of a common source, now institutionally fixed by the publication of her works in the Pléiade collection, the historical tracing of developments in these works, a tracing only made meaningful through the cohesive notion of authorship, demonstrate the enduring individualization of the author as producer of text. This position-taking is encouraged by the nature of the tropistic interaction portrayed in the TAW of Portrait, which effaces social groupings of conflict and co-operation but does not efface the concept of selfhood, however fugitive, as an area to be protected, attacked or created by others. The extra-linguistic interaction of the narrator and the father is one which is defined in terms of conquest: ‘Et c’était moi maintenant qui dominais, qui tenais le bon bout […] J’avais saisi sa main au vol. Je le tenais.’ (106) The power relationships produced and maintained through language do not disappear at the level of ‘tropismes’. While tropistic interaction may be threatened by the hardening barrier of the ‘carapace’ of social language-use, this movement itself threatens the selfhood of those involved. The moves by which the actors in the TAW protect their own face and threaten the face (both positive and negative) of others are reproduced here. Sur-face may be replaced by sub-face, but the movements of attack, adherence, rejection and possession are features of ‘sousconversation’ as well as conversation. Moreover, Portrait d’un inconnu, as written text (rather than as the means to create a fictional world) is chained to its medium. Although it may have the advantage over the obstructive physical co-presence of interactants in the TAW, it cannot escape its linguistic status and its role as a link between Sarraute and her audience in a shared discourse world. Both the patterns of the TAW and our sense of Sarraute’s position as text producer in the context of our own culture underly our reading of the text as an intentional refusal of intentional structures of authority. Although the text may promote a suspension of the power relationships of language, as language it stands as proof of the continuation of this relationship. We read the self-divestment of selfhood and power as an authorial act, which cannot be assumed to have no relationship with our own act of reading. Either we move to cooperate with the text, submitting to this power,

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or we move to distance ourselves. However mediated these moves may be through the tropistic pulsions of the text, its linguistic nature as both function and trope prevents the eradication of the social. Sarraute and her audience are caught in the trap of their shared world. The privileged interaction which occurs across media and across world levels cannot occur between the actual-world participants in the public and culturally situated circulation of the novel. Although the presence of each to the other is hypothetical, not physical, like the mutual interpenetration of the narrator and the father, it is bound to human attempts at contact through language.

8 FURTHER DYNAMICS OF WORLD-PLAY Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance

Most of this book has addressed the interaction between fictional worlds and their contexts as an essential part of the reading of novels. Mediation between text and context has been located in the participant activities of writing and reading, but the conventional autonomy of fictional worlds leads to a situation in which only the signatures and prefaces of these novels are read as having actualworld referents. In Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), referential text is no longer liminal but integral to world-building activities. The co-presence of two types of text world, one of which is read in a referential relationship with the author’s discourse world, and the other of which is read as fictional, allows the full textualization of a dimension of interaction which has not been available in the novels discussed. The intercalation in W ou le souvenir d’enfance of two conventionally discrete text-types, fictional narrative and autobiography, separated by chapter divisions and distinguished typographically, suggests a perpetuation of the fictional/actual divide, the juxtaposition of two meta-genres (reinforced by the earlier publication of the fictional italicized text in serial form in La Quinzaine littéraire (1969–70) as a discrete text).1 But not only are the authority patterns of these text-types perturbed, their categorization according to criteria of truth-conditional reference is disturbed, producing discursive identities which are not susceptible to such categorizations. The nesting of world levels is made impossible and is replaced by a contiguity closer to the structure of Perec’s fortuitous memory from school: ‘on disposait parallèlement des bandes étroites de carton léger coloriées de diverses couleurs et on les croisait avec des bandes identiques en passant une fois au-dessus, une fois au-dessous.’ (76) Perec’s text allows an exploration of the possibility of a discursive selfhood which is not bound to logico-ontological distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Through the process described by Burgelin (1996) as ‘autographie’, W ou le souvenir d’enfance breaks the barrier between fictional imagined world and non-fictional externally verifiable world, between our concept of an empirical writing self which exists as the actual-world referent of a text, and the writing self which is not the referent but the co-producer of the text. In this process, the issue of the pragmatics of the written text is brought to the fore. For W ou le souvenir d’enfance is an exploration, not only of the writer’s relationship with

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his past self, but of the selfhood of the writer as producer of text; the making of a public self which does not pre-exist writing and reading, but which can only exist through these activities. Levels of authority: text-type and voice Conventional reading The typographical layout of W ou le souvenir d’enfance allows classification of the text according to conventional levels of authority associated with text-type. In such a reading, the main text world is constituted by the autobiographical narrative in roman type (divided into A and B) and the fictional worlds in italic type (A and B) are embedded sub-worlds.2 The AB narrative is both an account of Perec’s early childhood and of the circumstances under which both this text and the fictional narratives in italic type (A and B) were produced. The hinge between A and B is Perec’s departure from Paris and his separation from his mother, who was subsequently deported to a Nazi concentration camp. A is a pastiche of the beginning of a Verne-like adventure story in which the homodiegetic narrator, living under the assumed identity of Gaspard Winckler, receives a mysterious letter which leads to a meeting with Apfelstahl. Apfelstahl reveals to him the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the child whose name he has assumed and Winckler plans to embark on a mission to find his namesake. But this narrative is abruptly replaced, without transition, by B, the heterodiegetic narrative of conditions on W, an island in the South Pacific governed by a repressive sporting régime. The privileging of the authority of the autobiography is supported by the chain of reference between sections of the text, following a one-way system of access in which participants in outer worlds display awareness of and have access to inner worlds, but those in the inner worlds show no awareness of and have no access to outer worlds. In this pattern, B is the innermost world. It is contextualized by A, which is signalled as a pre-fabula block: ‘Néanmoins, pour satisfaire à une règle quasi générale, et que, du reste, je ne discute pas, je donnerai maintenant, le plus brièvement possible, quelques indications sur mon existence et, plus précisément, sur les circonstances qui décidèrent mon voyage.’ (11)3 AB is in turn described in A, both as the memory of a childhood story (properly only B) and in its published serialized form in La Quinzaine littéraire (14).4 B is referred to in B, both through an anaphoric link to the reference in A (‘à l’époque de W, entre, disons, ma onzième et ma quinzième année’ (93)), and as Perec’s childhood creation in the final paragraph of the book (220). AB is thus established as a text world which contains the production of the childhood fantasy, the adult re-writing of the fantasy, and its own production. The notes in A comment on this text, correct it and furnish supplementary information (from a variety of sources) but, like the ‘prière d’insérer’, which supplies a possible

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synopsis of the processes of the book as a whole, they are viewed as supplementary paratextual elements. The equivalence of the author and the narrator of AB is thus ascribed authoritative precedence over nonequivalence (in A and B), but a distinction is made between autobiography as the writing of a life, and auto-commentary. In this view, the integrated meta-textual passages in which Perec comments on his own acts of writing become supplements, like the footnotes, to the main subject of the book, the ‘récit’ of the life of the young Perec, the written past self. The power of this hierarchy of text-types is such that many critics describe W ou le souvenir d’enfance as an autobiography, ascribing authoritative primacy to the non-fictional sections of the text. Indeed, Ribière suggests that the power of the autobiographical text to explain the fictional text is supplemented by the notes, which provide the ultimate authority on the autobiographical text (1988: 34). In this reading, the standard associations which accompany meta-generic texttypes: fiction is not true, autobiography is true, and notes and metatextual commentary are always explanatory, appears to dominate.5 Colonna (1988) argues for a greater tension between elements of the text and directs his examination towards the ‘livre’ as an entity comprised by two ‘textes’ (AB and AB) and three ‘histoires’ (A, B, and AB). He nevertheless points to the influence of the typographical choices in prioritizing the autobiographical over the fictional.6 And Magné suggests: si la fiction est première dans une chronologie de la lecture (le pre-mier chapitre est fonctionnel), elle reste en fait soumise à l’autobiographie, puisque l’écriture de la fiction constitue non seulement un élément de la biographie (c’est une evidence) mais encore—et c’est essentiel—un élément du récit autobiographique. C’est à l’intérieur même de l’autobiographie que sont mises en place les instances d’énonciation du récit fictionnel […] L’énonciation autobiographique est donc en position dominante, à un niveau hiérarchiquement supérieur par rapport à la fiction, qui est, vis-à-vis de l’autobiographie, en situation d’inclusion. (1988:41) Some critics also depend on the actual-world sequence of publication of the serial W and the book W ou le souvenir d’enfance (referred to in A). Ribière refuses the classification of the former as a ‘roman à clés’ recuperated by autobiography, but nevertheless insists on the authority of the autobiography to show how the fiction was written, despite the ‘brouillages’ (1988:27 and 30). For Motte, ‘the autobiographical narrative was produced to complement the fictional narrative’, and both are governed by a pact to treat the data (what data?) as faithfully as possible (1984:108–9). This suggests that the text of W is a faithful reconstruction of the childhood text, while W ou le souvenir d’enfance is the textual construction of the discourse worlds in which the two ‘fantasmes olympiques’, that of childhood and the written and published version of

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adulthood, were produced.7 W ou le souvenir d’enfance becomes a Rousselian ‘Comment j’ai écrit un de mes livres’, conveniently including the earlier text within its covers and displaying parallels between the two. It becomes the referential textualized concretization of the inferences we draw in our reading of fictional texts, the filling-in of the gaps between the text and its context of production. Against the grain Although W ou le souvenir d’enfance textualizes both fictional and extra-fictional discourse worlds, only in the para-textual ‘prière d’insérer’ do we encounter a narrative agent which displays awareness of the patterns of the book as a whole. The co-referential chain of awareness within the text produces coherence without cohesion. It is founded on reference without discourse deictics which would consolidate the links between sections. As Magné remarks: ‘les deux textes demeurent parfaitement autonomes’ (1988:41).8 In the first chapter of A (chapter two), the narrator explicitly refers to the previously published version of W.9 But he does not refer to AB as a co-text to AB. Co-reference between the metafictional introductory sentence of A, ‘le récit de mon voyage à W’ (9) and the serial is only inferred.10 The ‘réseau’ described in chapter two (14) is not that formed between the sections of W ou le souvenir d’enfance, but is built from the serial W, Perec’s forgotten childhood ‘fantasme olympique’ and his earlier childhood. Likewise, Perec as narrator refers to ‘la lecture que j’en fais’, but the referent of ‘lecture’ is not specified as either AB or the text of W ou le souvenir d’enfance as a whole. The authority level of the writer who writes in his own name does not extend to a meta-narrative authority over the full text. It is confined to AB, just as the notes are confined to a relationship with specific sections of A. Nowhere does this narrator refer to the book, he refers only to the AB narrative. The reference to W in the opening chapter of B is limited to a subordinated temporal adverbial phrase ‘à l’époque de W’, qualifying the drawings produced by Perec in his adolescent years. The extended description of these drawings accentuates their difference from the text of AB. Of this list of drawings only two elements, the fragments of boats and of athletes, have any connection to this cotext, and the connection is limited to nominal class (navires-yacht, athlètesathlètes). The ekphrastic description of the drawings is in no sense a metadescription of the co-text. The link between the fictional narratives A and B is likewise perturbed, for the ‘récit’ promised by the narrator of A does not materialize. There is no ‘voyage à W’ in this book. Moreover, the homodiegetic witness-narrator of A disappears from the text, abruptly replaced by a depersonalized heterodiegetic narrative agent in B.11 The narrator of A has claimed sole epistemological authority in the fictional world concerning W: ‘Quoi qu’il arrive, quoi que je fasse, j’étais le seul dépositaire, la seule mémoire vivante, le seul vestige de ce monde.’ (10) If B is to

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be naturalized by the reader as the continuation of A, this narrator is the only available narrative source for B, and the shift in narrative style can be justified by the proleptic: ‘je voudrais, pour les relater, adopter le ton froid et serein de l’ethnologue: j’ai visité ce monde englouti et voici ce que j’y ai vu.’ (10) But the textual distance between this statement of intent and the appearance of the impersonal narrative agent of chapter twelve combines with the unfulfilled promise of the story of a journey, continued to the last words of part one (‘Un bref instant, j’eus envie de demander à Otto Apfelstohl s’il croyait que j’aurais plus de chance que les garde-côtes. Mais c’était une question à laquelle, désormais, je pouvais seul répondre…’ (83)), to mark the relationship between the two as that of the ‘rupture’ and ‘cassure’ described in the ‘prière d’insérer’. The proleptic signals of the opening chapter and those of chapter eleven do not prepare the reader for the effacement of the homodiegetic narrator and his personal quest. In W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the possibility of continuous reading and the perception of the text as ‘intégral’ intensifies the break in narrative modality already manifest in the serial. Re-entry into the frame of A after each A chapter has been made easy by proleptic and analeptic devices in the explicits and incipits of A chapters: ‘—Pardon? fis-je sans comprendre.’ (29); ‘—Vous ne comprenez pas? me demanda au bout d’un instant Otto Apfelstahl’ (35). Although the relationship between A and A presents the reader with a puzzle to be solved, A has been established as a stable fictional world. The transition from part one to part two undoes the stability of this world, which becomes ‘suspect’ not only through its co-textual relationship with the roman chapters, but as cohesive text. The break between the internal features of A and B is intensified by the arrangement of the text. The regular alternation between the italic and roman series is broken, and the final chapter of A and the first chapter of B are juxtaposed, separated only by the paratextual material which introduces part two and an almost blank page, with ‘(…)’ at its centre.12 Only if we revise our reading of ‘récit de mon voyage’ in chapter one from ‘account of my journey’, to ‘account which is the consequence of my journey’ is it possible to naturalize the break between A and B through the construction of a single narrative agent which produces two texts according to two different conventions: first-person witness narrative of an individual experience, and third-person report of an historical state of affairs. The ambiguation of narratorial awareness of the co-text which would fit the hierarchy of authority associated with text-type is accompanied by a reversal of epistemic modalization patterns within each section. As has been seen in the discussion of Madame Bovary (see p. 76), the most authoritative form of narration is not epistemically modalized, whether positively or negatively (see Simpson 1993:49–50). On these criteria, the narrative which has maximum modal authority is the account of W in B which is presented as report.13 Omniscience is thus the property of the narration of the fictional sub-world

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which, in the hierarchy of embedding, has no referential authority over the other worlds of the text. The epistemic modalization of A corresponds to the convention which requires that a homodiegetic witness-narrator should not have complete mastery over the fictional world he inhabits. His presence as protagonist in the TAW allows him the unreliability of human fallibility, and dissociates him from the notional higher-level authority of the extra-fictional producer of the fictional world. By contrast, the sections of this text which are consistently and negatively epistemically modalized are those with referential authority relating to the discourse world of the text: the autobiographical sections.14 The rationale for authority levels in fiction and non-fiction is founded on a concept of originating voice. In fiction, greatest authority is ascribed to the world level of narration, which is closest to the originating and creative voice of the author. In non-fiction, the narrator’s authority is not so great as that of the originating voices he cites (see pp. 37–8). In W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the co-presence of fiction and non-fiction, and the internal patterns of AB disturb these structures. The authority structures of A and B are thus affected by AB. For, if A and B are the citation of the text of the serial W, and if that serial is the ‘reinvention’ of a childhood ‘fantasme’, then the principle of authorial and creative authority on which we build the authority patterns of AB is undermined by the authority structure of non-fiction, in which these texts are unreliable attempts to reconstitute a lost first-level text. Brought into contact with the modalized text of the human and fallible autobiographer, the conceptual hierarchies constructed on the god-like image of the creative writer appear to crumble, and God disappears from his universe. Belief in ‘écrit là-haut’ is put to rest (see chapter two). The citation patterns of AB, though, do not follow the patterns of documentary evidence, in which an adult Perec, with his own participant sub-world of beliefs and desires, seeks confirmation, through the sub-world memories of others and the text worlds of documents, of a link between the sub-world imaginative constructions of a child and the actual world of that child’s historical situation. Just as Jacques le fataliste blurs the distinction between the ‘redite’ and the ‘récrite’, W ou le souvenir d’enfance produces a pattern of textualization which embraces not only written and spoken text, but also text as a construction in the mind, whether memory, fantasy, or fiction.15 It is thus possible to construct the history of the ‘récit’, W, as a chain of ‘re-citation’; a series of transformations which run from the actual-world event of the concentration camps to the ‘prière d’insérer’. Transformation passes through public texts (spoken, written and photographic), drawings and childhood fantasy (imagined and spoken), the memory of a fantasy, the writing of the fictional serial, the citation of the serial in the book, reference to the fantasy, the memory and the serial in A, reference to the drawings in B, and reference to both the period of the childhood fantasy and to the fantasy itself in B.

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Although the undermining of the authority of personal memories is in itself hardly an original feature of autobiography, Perec not only weakens memory through the number of links in his citational chains, he also undermines belief in text as authorized evidence. The patterns of chapter eight provide an extreme example of the de-authorization of citation. Here, Perec’s notes display an apparently scrupulous adherence to the separation of fact from allegation: ‘Mon père […] apprenant, avec, paraît-il, une grande facilité, le français’; ‘Lubartow aurait été successivement russe, puis polonaise, puis russe à nouveau.’ (49 and 52, my italics) But scruple is transformed into complete destabilization. Thus, in one passage Perec exposes the fallibility of his memories of the memories of others: Ces renseignements […] sont les seuls que je possède concernant l’enfance et la jeunesse de ma mère. Ou plutôt, pour être précis, les seuls dont je sois sûr. Les autres, bien qu’il me semble parfois qu’on me les a effectivement racontés et que je les tiens d’une source digne de foi, sont vraisemblablement à porter au compte des relations imaginaires assez extraordinaires que j’entretins régulièrement à certaine époque de ma brève existence avec ma branche maternelle. (45–6) This declaration of unreliability itself occurs in unreliable cited text, one of two passages on Perec’s father and mother said to have been written ‘plus de quinze ans’ (41) before W ou le souvenir d’enfance.16 Twenty six notes comment on and revise these passages, throwing many elements of the earlier narratives into doubt, effacing descriptions and facts, and demonstrating the subjectivity of the younger writing Perec. Perec remarks in note twenty four: ‘Ces détails, comme la plupart de ceux qui précèdent, sont donnés complètement au hasard.’ (56) In particular, the first note questions not memory, but the accuracy of a description of a photograph. The documentary evidence-value of photography appears to be one of the most secure originating sources in W ou le souvenir, and Perec makes extensive use of photographs in this book. Yet here the reliability of ekphrasis is itself questioned: ‘Non, précisément, la capote de mon père ne descend pas très bas […]’ (49).17 Taken as a discrete section of text, the notes also display features of selfdestabilization. Earlier speculation ‘Dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes: rien ne permet de l’affirmer’, is replaced by later speculation: ‘je dirais plutôt aujourd’hui’ (49). And the source of the corrections is itself not certain: ‘j’ai oublié de quelle source je tiens tous ces renseignements’ (55). The evidence principle is no more applied with regard to the notes than to the earlier texts which they amplify. Their status is also undermined by the layout of the chapter. They are, properly speaking, neither footnotes nor endnotes. A section of main text introduces the two cited texts (printed in bold type). These are followed by the notes which are themselves followed by a further section of the main text.

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Although they are set out as a block, like endnotes, they are thus embedded, losing their status as the ‘last word’. The text which follows them acts as a metacommentary on the chapter as a whole, providing a supplement to the supplement. Here, Perec describes any attempt to improve on the earlier texts as ‘un ressassement sans issue’ (58). He continues: ‘Un texte sur mon père, écrit en 1970, et plutôt pire que le premier, m’en persuade assez pour me décourager de recommencer aujourd’hui.’ (58) The last paragraph of this subsection contains further commentary on one of the notes: ‘j’avais écrit «j’ai commis», au lieu de «j’ai fait», à propos des fautes de transcription dans le nom de ma mère’ (59). But metacommentary is itself undone: j’aurai beau traquer mes lapsus […], ou rêvasser pendant deux heures sur la longueur de la capote de mon papa, ou chercher dans mes phrases, pour évidemment les trouver aussitôt, les résonances, mignonnes de l’Oedipe ou de la castration, je ne retrouverai jamais, dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture […] (59) Here, pre-text as separate and previous writing, pre-text as the ‘just written’, and ‘pro-text’ as the ‘as yet unwritten’ are placed on the same level of insecurity and the ‘last word’ has no greater authority than the first. As Lejeune suggests, there is in Perec ‘du Beckett de L’Innommable, du Michaux de Plume. Il déconstruit les cohérences. Mais pas dans la fiction. Dans la réalité de sa propre vie. Créant ainsi une écriture autobiographique du manque, de la faille, du malaise.’ (1991: 43) To record memories in a manner which undermines their referential status suggests that their relevance does not lie in their propositional relationship with the facts of a life. And to re-cite pre-texts in the same manner suggests that they do not function only as records of an extra-fictional state of affairs. The evidence-value of public authorized texts is also undermined. In chapter six, a very short passage of main text (two paragraphs) is supplemented by notes. The first is a detailed description of the certified copy of the declaration of Perec’s nationality (including the colour of the ink), and the third is a summary of the events recorded in contemporary newspapers on the weekend of Perec’s birth. In the main text, the precise details of historical events are presented as unimportant: ‘Je me trompais, de date ou de pays, mais au fond ça n’avait pas une grande importance. Hitler était déjà au pouvoir et les camps fonctionnaient très bien.’ (31) But the third note invades the space of the text, filling the gap left by the absence of memory with a collection of external supporting fragments. Perec undermines the historical support of this heterogeneous collection by suggesting that his documentary research was conducted ‘par acquit de conscience’ (32). Pawlikowska (1990:172–3) has demonstrated that this citation of public authorized text is both highly selective and re-ordered by Perec,

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suppressing an article on the Hitler youth which might have provided historical cohesion. The re-positioning of the reference to Chaplin’s Modern Times at the end produces a different sort of cohesion, linking the list to the putative memory of the Charlus comic in the thrice-repeated Gare de Lyon scene and to the intertext of The Great Dictator (106). Just as the narrator of A’s consultation of ‘cartes’, ‘annuaires’ and ‘monceaux d’archives’ (10), fails to shed light on ‘mon histoire’, public records have little verification value in A. The second major importation of an external documentary source, David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1945), in the final chapter establishes a far stronger actual-world support for the text than the note to chapter six. It explicitly links the text to ‘une autre histoire, la Grande, l’Histoire avec sa grande hache’ (13). But its primary function is not to reinforce the autobiographical narrative but to confirm the link between the fictional story of W and extra-fictional events. Its thematic link to the death of Perec’s mother is clear, but it is not necessary as evidence of this. What it makes evident is the relationship of B to history (see p. 185). The unequivocal documentary claim to the equivalence of an element of the text of W ou le souvenir d’enfance and a culture-text shared by writer and readers alike (supplemented by the linking of the childhood W to Pinochet’s later deportation camps in Tierra del Fuego) is thus applied to an autonomous fictional world.18 The perturbing of referential links between sections, and the modalization and citational patterns of the text, thus work against the authority structures associated with text-type. For critics such as Pedersen (1985), Colonna (1988), Leak (1990), or Lejeune (1991), these textual signals inhibit the privileging of the generic label of autobiography as the guarantee of a secure frame of reference within which to read the text. The contrast in interpretive strategies between this approach and that of the critics mentioned above (pp. 178– 9)reveals a conflict inherent to our reading of the relationship between text and genre. In the group who privilege autobiography, the ‘signing’ of Georges Perec as author and narrator governs the building of relationships between worlds. The genre of autobiography, once signalled, dominates the reading of all other elements. Among those who question this assumption, genre is subjected to scrutiny as a result of reading. Genre is not a fixed frame which enables processing, but a concept to be explored, and this exploration is text-led. Making patterns: configuration and meaning Configuration of text-types: reading across genres The cohesion of W ou le souvenir d’enfance is founded, in part, on themes, topoi and lexical repetitions (see Magné 1988). But we also read the generic text-types of the book through each other. For example, the physical division between the two Gaspards of A, in which the narrating adult seeks the experiencing but mute

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child, is read as a transformation of the chronological division between past and present selves in autobiography (whether fictional or non-fictional). The fictional world of A, in which the narrator cites Melville and Verne as his intertextual precursors (‘Ce n’est pas la fureur bouillante d’Achab qui m’habite, mais la blanche rêverie d’Ishmaël, la patience de Bartleby’ (10–11)), may constitute a pastiche of a genre which is distant from that of the autobiography: ‘un remake biscornu, un enfant du capitaine Grant qui irait visiter la colonie pénitentiaire de Kafka!’ (Lejeune 1991:62–3). But the patterns of investigation and mystery of this world offer a generic pattern of reading which can be extended to the other sections of text (remarked on by Pedersen 1985:74). In the genre of the mystery or detective narrative (for this is not just the ‘roman d’aventures’ of the ‘prière d’insérer’), protagonist and readers seek to solve the enigmas of the TAW. To decipher the identity of the writer behind the transformed Hebrew letters of chapter four (which immediately follows Winckler’s attempt to decipher the ‘blason’ in chapter three), to ponder the relationship between G.P. and Georges Perec as Winckler ponders the significance of «MD», to search for the lost child whose identity is shared with the adult writer, and, most important, to read text, whether fictional or autobiographical, as enigma, become the tasks not only of the reader of the mystery story, but the reader of W ou le souvenir d’enfance. A similar transference of generic reading strategies occurs between B and AB. The historical report mode of B is linked to ‘l’Histoire’ (13) in AB. And while the two appear generically separated by the ontological cut, the endings of B and B combine to produce an interpretive explicature of the link between the two. The intensity of ‘sutures’ (see Magné 1988) between fiction, autobiography and History increase towards the end of the text. Words familiar from war films and the footage of Hitler at the Berlin games break into chapter thirty four: ‘Raus! Raus! […] Schnell! Schnell!—il faut qu’ils entrent sur le Stade dans un ordre impeccable!’ (209), reviving the earlier B reference to The Great Dictator (106).19 At the end of the autobiographical chapter thirty five, Perec describes a visit with his aunt to an exhibition on the camps.20 And, as has been said, the Rousset quotation in the final chapter binds the fictional and the non-fictional through a dense network of lexical items which match those of the preceding fictional chapter. B thus becomes both a biographical element in A and B, as the re-creation of a remembered childhood act of ima gination, and the fictionalization of the historical circumstances of the death of Perec’s mother. These cross-generic readings break down the rigid categorizations, proposed by a certain G.P. in the ‘prière d’insérer’, of a text which belongs ‘tout entier a l’imaginaire’, and ‘une autobiographie’. In the face of the typographical signals and our assumptions concerning the ontological cut of fiction and nonfiction, genres are not read through themselves, but through each other.

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Structural configuration: beyond genre? The physical printed text is exploited in W ou le souvenir d’enfance to create the typographical distinctions between chapters. But the graphism of the text is not limited to typography. The discussion of chapter eight has already shown how the arrangement of text in this chapter affects the authority ascribed to each section (see pp. 182–3). In Perec’s OuLiPo texts, formal constraints both serve as the generating moment for writing, and allow the application of the clinamen, the bending of the rules of the constraining figure (in La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), for instance). Although W ou le souvenir d’enfance is not an Oulipian text, it is nevertheless visibly and intensively built out of geometric and graphic patterns from the microstructure of the single ‘sigle’ to the macro-structure of the text. Such patterns do not function as pre-posed principles, machines from which the text is generated but, instead, produce a network of modified fractal relationships which take the pattern of ‘mise en abyme’, transform it into a graphic as well as a cognitive structure, and multiply its ramifications, not as sign or symbol, but as signpost.21 ‘Mise en abyme’ in its graphic and heraldic form is an image founded on enclosure, on framing. Like the Chinese boxes of narratological spatial conceptualization, the heady plunge of its infinite regress is one founded on containment.22 This is one reason why, in its transmuted linguistic form, this device is associated with the autonomy of the high structuralist text, the textual signal of a closed, self-reflexive system. In the discussion of the narrative texts in this book, I have attempted to demonstrate the reversal of this pattern, the movement from the encapsulated inner pattern to an external pattern. But I have also attempted to show the ‘scrappiness’ of this process, the interferences between elements of texts, and the influence of the temporal experience of successive moments of reading on any construction of a provisional whole. The ‘mise en abymes’ of written texts can never be images. They could at most be considered to stand in a relationship to an ‘imageschema’, a matrix schema which is neither concrete image nor abstract proposition, but which acts as an experiential matrix which structures our understanding of both the figure in the text and the extra-textual frame or script (see Crisp 1996). Thus, propositions concerning the portrait in Sarraute’s novel, for instance, apply as explicit propositions only to their fictional referent, a nonexistent portrait. They are truth-conditional only in the autonomous logicosemantic construct of the fictional world. But our interpretation of these propositions is produced by the inferential linking of the fictional narrator’s experience of the portrait to our own extra-fictional experience of the novel, Portrait d’un inconnu, through an image schema. This relationship cannot be reduced to a meta-proposition. This example displays three qualities of ‘mise en abyme’ which are common to every example discussed in this book. The first is that, like fictional worlds themselves, ‘mise en abyme’ is an incomplete construct. Incompleteness is thus

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doubled in this figure, it is the shadow of the shadow on the cave wall. The second is that most ‘mise en abymes’ in language are not true micro cosms, reproductions in petto of a macrocosm.23 The scene of the ‘atelier’ in L’Assommoir, the encounter with the portrait in Portrait d’un inconnu, the figure of the story-teller in Jacques le fataliste, are related to an extra-fictional state of affairs through the processes of comparison, through a sufficient number of shared characteristics. As such, they do not function according to a principle of identity, but one of mediated difference. The third quality of ‘mise en abyme’ concerns its relationship to its co-text, its susceptibility to amplification, modification and effacement. The portrait in Sarraute’s novel does not appear as a singular and closed figure within a contrasting ground. It is integrated into a narrative of its relationship with the narrator which precedes the main fabula of the TAW. And this relationship is in turn modified in the course of the text. Last, its interpretation is affected by other encounters in the co-text with paintings and texts, and the model of the experience of the artefact is expanded to encompass experience of worlds. These three qualities, incompleteness, non-identity and frayed edges, disrupt the comforting image of containment associated with ‘mise en abyme’. Yet our perception of it as a device, our reading of it as figure, as a hook for interpretation, as a guiding star, is an intensified version of our more general patterns of meaning-making. In their most ideational manifestation, these patterns are those of thematic interpretation, the adducing of ‘what a book is about’. In their most experiential manifestation they are principles of construction and well-formedness, a perception of order. In their traditional literary-critical formulation, these interpretive activities are designated through the familiar conceptual division into content and form, accompanied by the ideal of the perfect matching of the two as the mark of the literary. W ou le souvenir d’enfance both extends the range of patterning to individual and interpretable graphic units and resists the perception of ‘mise en abyme’ as containment. The graphic figuration, which is the only true visual figuration in the book, is marked, like every other structure, as a network of morphological transformations. Prominent among these are the ‘signs of four’; letters, both Hebraic and Roman, which configure four lines.24 These are, most notably: W (divisible into double V); the Hebraic ‘mem’ or M (inverting W, and transmuted in the text into ‘men’), which, in its Hebrew form, consists of ‘un carré ouvert à son angle inférieur gauche’ (23–4); E (the dedication, ‘Pour E’, which connotes to Perec’s aunt Esther, to his cousin Ela, to ‘eux’, his parents, and intertextually to the missing ‘e’ of La Disparition and the returning ‘e’of Les Revenentes, written in the same period as W ou le souvenir d’enfance); and X. Without descending into graphological mysticism, Perec’s discussions of these figures in chapters four and fifteen (with the exception of E, the letter of absence) point to two constructive processes which apply to the entire text. The first, in chapter four, concerns the broken square figure (interpreted by most critics as the symbol of the breaking of the closed family circle). Perec traces a

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path from this figure to his own identity by misnaming it in a series which itself undergoes morphological transformation (‘gammeth’ and ‘gammel’ in the main text, revised to ‘gimmel’ in a footnote), ‘dont je me plais à croire qu’elle pourrait être l’initiale de mon prénom’ (23). This movement towards himself is then diverted, moving towards the letter W, via ‘men’ and its inverted form of M.25 These graphological transformations create a model for the displaced, misplaced, and transformational creation of Perec’s identity in W ou le souvenir d’enfance. The second discussion, in chapter fifteen, concerns the transmutations of X as a structural symbol for the construction of self, the past, text, and interpretation: [C]e substantif unique dans la langue à n’avoir qu’une lettre unique, unique en ceci qu’il est le seul à avoir la forme de ce qu’il désigne […] mais signe aussi du mot rayé nul—la ligne des x sur le mot que l’on n’a pas voulu écrire […] signe contradictoire de l’ablation […] et de la multiplication, de la mise en ordre (axe des X) et de l’inconnu mathématique, point de départ enfin d’une géométrie fantasmatique dont le V dédoublé constitue la figure de base et dont les enchevêtrements multiples tracent les symboles majeurs de l’histoire de mon enfance: deux V accolés par leurs points dessinent un X; en prolongeant les branches du X par des segments égaux et perpendiculaires, on obtient une croix gammée elle-même facilement décomposable par une rotation de 90° d’un des segments en sur son coude inférieur en signe; la superposition de deux V tête-bêche aboutit à une figure dont il suffit de réunir horizontalement les branches pour obtenir une étoile juive C’est dans la même perspective que je me rappelle avoir été frappé par le fait que Charlie Chaplin, dans le Dictateur, a remplacé la croix gammée par une figure identique (au point de vue de ses segments) affectant la forme de deux X entrecroisés .26 (105–6) This passage points to the readability of structure, but also to the complexity of W ou le souvenir d’enfance as a ‘réseau’ of ‘enchevêtrements multiples’ (22 and ‘Prière d’insérer’). The description of the ‘réseau’ between text, childhood fantasy and life in chapter two is formally presented through chiasmus: ‘le cheminement de mon histoire et l’histoire de mon cheminement’ (14). And the intersections between chapters are presented as a crossing of warp and weft, like the strips of paper of Perec’s school memory of the ‘napperons de papier’ (76). At a macrostructural level, the chiasmus of the text as crossing is produced through the contrasting patterns between italic and roman narratives and their effects on the reader, which are inverted in the second part of the book. Thus, in part one, the italic text serves as a comfort text, through its obedience to the patterns of nineteenth-century adventure narrative, which compensates for the painful combination of absence of memory and personal tragedy in the roman text. In part two, this relationship is reversed as the autobiographical sections serve as a relief from the relentless horror of the report narrative of W. There is also a crossing

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of telic movement, in which the strong telic pattern of A transfers to a vestigial telic pattern in B, set in motion by the departure from Paris and ending with the return to Paris. Equally, the ‘indicible’ of A (58–9) becomes the ‘innommable’ of B (109–10). This produces an X of broken lines which cross at the sign complex ‘(…)’, in which A and A move towards the break, and B and B move away from it. Although the sections of text are separate, and can be read as existing in parallel with each other, the break itself is shared by them, creating a point of contact through absence. This produces the figure of a fragmented cross, made up of Vs which touch at their points. The rotational symmetry of this figure allows four Vs to exist: the italic V (AB), the roman V (AB), the AA V (italic and roman), and the BB V (italic and roman). The X of the text, ‘l’encrage sur la croix’, thus becomes an ‘ancrage’ for the reader, as the stencil of Perec’s father’s name on the cross which marks his grave becomes an ‘ancrage’ for Perec (54).27 Like the letter X, the text itself becomes the substantive which has ‘la forme qu’il désigne’. And from its form, we can construct the text as the symbol of Perec’s suppression and multiplication of his memories, combining psychological processes with mathematical infinity, in which the fullness of the matching of ‘signifiant’ to ‘signifié’ also serves as the crossing out of previous texts. Multiplication is present in the extension of the signpost of X to other elements of the discourse world. The X figure is transformed and reworked into symbols which go beyond the individual, to a shared cultural context which embraces both writer and reader, those of ‘l’Histoire avec sa grande hache […] la guerre, les camps’ (13). And beyond these symbols, the working of the X figure points to other workings in the French literary heritage, to Mallarmé’s sonnet on X (1887), to its reworking by Jarry in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911) (the founding text of the Collège de Pataphysique of which Perec was a member), and of the reflection on the same double X structure in another double narrative involving the fragmentation and merging of identity and the impossibility of language, Beckett’s Molloy (1951), which is itself the first text of a trilogy which ends with L’Innommable (1953). It also points forward to the missing piece of the puzzle in La Vie mode d’emploi which, clutched in the dead Bartlebooth’s hand, and intended to fill a space in the form of an X, is shaped like a W.28 The graphological patterns of W ou le souvenir d’enfance, expanded through textual exegesis, incorporated in larger images, reflecting TAW patterns and the macro-patterns of the text, and pointing to other texts, break the conceptual structure of ‘mise en abyme’ founded on containment. The X figure itself is the most open of letters, allowing no closure. While it allows the optical illusion of the plunge to a vanishing point, or in this case ‘trois points’, its outward extension is unbounded, there is no secure platform from which to start the dive. The stability of a conceptual structure which is, the cross-beams of the edifice, the guarantee of repeatability, is undermined through the morphological

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transformations of figure which becomes, which is never finished. In this respect, Perec makes explicit the instability of all ‘mise en abyme’ in linguistic texts, founded not on fixity but on change as the text unfolds. The value of X as an anchor and a sign of multiplication is (in a pata-physical equivalence of opposites) matched by the emptiness of self-identity, underlined by the exegesis on this figure. It has ‘la forme qu’il désigne’, but has no singular and intrinsic meaning. It is no more than the chalk mark on the door. What it designates depends on its relationship to its co-text and its context of use. The structure of the letter and the structure of the book are configurations which can only become meaningful in a context of cofiguration, the encounter between figure and mind. X+‘tête’=‘texte’. The combined patterns of the four strands of narrative, despite their multiple sutures, subordinate the convergence of fiction and history at the end of the text to the movement towards and away from another sign, the ‘(…)’, which marks the absence of an autobiographical chapter between parts one and two. This is the hinge at which the narratives are not joined, but almost touch, like ‘cette écriture non liée, faite de lettres isolées incapables de se souder entre elles pour former un mot’ and ‘ces dessins dissociés, disloqués, dont les éléments épars ne parvenaient presque jamais à se relier les uns aux autres’, each of which stands in a relationship of similitude but not of identity with both Perec’s memories and with the other, separated by ‘comme […] ou comme’ (both 93). The non-linguistic ‘(…)’ between chapters eleven and twelve is not a complete aporia. It is a ‘trace’, a pseudo-ellipsis which is marked in the text, and which can be read either as an element between parts one and two, or as the final element of part one. The degree to which it is excluded from the text is manifested by the inexorable march of chapter numbers which does not acknowledge its existence as potential chapter, but its roman type marks it as an element in the alternating pattern between typefaces. And, as Bellos points out, the conventional interpretation of this sign complex is not that it points to nothing, but that it points to something not present (1993:549). As part of the autobiographical series, it is a triple point of departure: Perec’s departure from Paris, his mother’s departure from his life, and the point of departure for the production of the pre-texts and texts of W ou le souvenir d’enfance.29 But its liminal status as a non-chapter also ties it to other departures: Winckler’s departure in search of his namesake, and his unexplained departure from the text itself. Participants and activities: co-figuration Ostension: the written self Perec’s play with the letter as a form of naming extends the textual selfdesignation of ‘mise en abyme’ to a more general form of reference, that of human self-designation by means of the written sign. The ostensive gesture of W

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ou le souvenir d’enfance is one through which the question of identity runs, not as a binding thread, but as fragmentary pieces of a puzzle. In A, the narrator bears a proper name which is not uniquely referring. Although he inherits it, he does not do so by blood-relationship or laws of succession. He is instead lent a name which the state recognizes as belonging to someone else. The morphological transformations of the proper names of Perec’s family in A (through both variants of transliteration and multiple naming, Polish and French) further confound any stable referential function of the proper name. But the name for which the stakes are highest in this book is, of course, Georges Perec, and its relationship to his extra-linguistic self. This is the name on which the author-function and the more specific ‘pacte autobiographique’ depend (see Lejeune 1975). A and A display a proliferation of self-designation, a trying-on of multiple refracted and mutated morphologies of selfhood. By contrast, B is founded on the anonymity of the individual. Narration loses even the false identity of a narrating ‘je’. Proper naming of the human is confined to the TAW. This naming is entirely dictated by the activity of the individual in the system, an ‘état civil’ (or ‘état sportif’) which relates to the activity of the athlete, whose identity changes according to his sporting achievements, and who may have either multiple identity or no identity at all. The only stable proper referents in B are the island and villages of W, but the umbrella designation of W for all of them inhibits unique reference. Like Queneau in Chêne et chien (1937) (the source of the two epigraphs to Perec’s text), Perec introduces a play of morphologies of his own name (including the G.P. of the ‘prière d’insérer’) in which text itself becomes signature, ‘X his mark’, but the proliferation of signatures undermines the singular written self. The writing self The integration of metacommentary with autobiography in W ou le souvenir d’enfance suggests a discursive selfhood for Perec not as referent but as agent.30 In W ou le souvenir d’enfance the loss of the authority of the singular voice and the process of ‘re-citation’ leads to a ‘récit-ation’ in which the individual writer loses the role of originator and becomes instead the assembler of materials which themselves have lost the authority of origin. So successful is the relativization of voice that we can come to perceive memory and facts as elements which serve the greater end of construction. For instance, the ‘napperons de papier’ memory is presented by Perec as occurring to him ‘pratiquement en rédigeant ces trois souvenirs’ (76, my italics), connoting virtuality and work. On the basis of this passage, among others, Magné tentatively remarks that ‘tout se passe comme si certains souvenirs, certains événements s’étaient trouvés sélectionnés à cause de leur aptitude à désigner métaphoriquement certains aspects de la structure du

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livre ou, plus globalement, certains traits majeurs de l’écriture perecquienne’ (1988:53). The metacommentary in chapter eight (see p. 183) can be divided into two sections in relation to Perec’s acts of writing. The first, which is dominated by ‘l’indicible’ and ‘anéantissement’, presents writing as a perpetual project and activity which fails to express the unsayable: ‘je pourrais’, ‘l’exercice de l’écriture’, ‘je ne parviendrai’, ‘recommencer’, ‘projet d’écriture’ (58–9). Even the impossibility of the ‘dire’ of the originating voice is modalized as speculative possibility: ‘Je ne sais pas si je n’ai rien à dire, je sais que je ne dis rien; je ne sais pas si ce que j’aurais à dire n’est pas dit parce qu’il est l’indicible’ (58). Although ‘La parole’ and ‘l’écriture’ are distinguished (‘une parole absente à l’écriture’), the goal of writing is not to retrieve the original Word, but to perform an act of writing which is ‘déclenché’ by ‘l’indicible’ (59). The text produced by this act combines presence and absence: C’est cela que je dis, c’est cela que j’écris et c’est cela seulement qui se trouve dans les mots que je trace, et dans les lignes que ces mots dessinent, et dans les blancs que laisse apparaître l’intervalle entre ces lignes […]’ (59) Not black or white, but black and white. But which ‘lignes’ and which page? The inked lines of the writer’s manuscript, or the printed lines of the published text? Re-citation extends to the production of the public text itself. Halfway through the final paragraph, impossibility is replaced by the affirmation of writing itself in a passage which transforms and amplifies the earlier passage on ‘dire’, through the jubilant repetition of ‘écrire’ which displaces ‘dire’, becoming the assertion of a past which is linked to the act of writing, and the expression of the death and rebirth of memory through writing: je n’écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire. J’écris: j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l’écriture: leur souvenir est mort à l’écriture; l’écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie. (59) The liminality of the writer in Perec’s text is thus not produced by the nonidentity of fictional speaker with an external but possible actual speaker. The writing self is not an inauthentic persona which conceals an authentic self, writing is not an ‘artifice’ which protects the writer from ‘la sincérité d’une parole à trouver’ (58). Instead, the naming of the narrator of AB as Perec displaces liminality to the coming into selfhood at the moment of writing.

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Writing and reading The displacement of ‘dire’ by ‘écrire’, which refuses the authority of the performing agent as speaker, is reflected in the relative absence of direct address to an audience. As Perec’s identity lies in neither his extra-linguistic person nor his textual persona, but between them, so the reader as participant exists between text and extra-text. Perec’s writing is ‘«ni fait ni à faire». Non c’est fait pour être à faire.’ (Lejeune 1991:42)31 The act of reading for most of W ou le souvenir d’enfance is the construction of the links between the sections of Perec’s text. The patterns described in the previous section signal the coherence-building role of the reader. Like the two Vs of the X, we are ‘tête-bêche’ with Perec, the other half of his act of writing, as our act of reading completes the figure. The interest of the text is not in the made, but in the making: ‘Il y a dans tous ses textes une place pour moi, pour que je fasse quelque chose. Un appel à moi comme à un partenaire, un complice, je dois prendre le relais.’ (Lejeune 1991:41) This work by the reader, especially in part one, requires a gymnastic flexibility in the cognitive-world shifts between the alternating narratives and in the physical effort of reading the notes in conjunction with the text.32 These gymnastics cross from participant activity in A to the activities of protagonists in the fictional world of B in part two, as the actual-world labour of the reader is transformed into the fictional but more unbearable labour of the athletes of W. Only in the fictional narratives, in the incipit of A and the explicit of B, is an audience reaction evoked. The narratee of A is incorporated as an element of the parodic citational style of this narrative: ‘Un lecteur attentif comprendra sans doute qu’il ressort de ce qui précède que dans le témoignage que je m’apprête à faire […]’ (10), In B, the reader position is evoked only obliquely, through an everyman figure which resembles the Parisian observer in Balzac’s incipit. Indeed, it is the familiarity of this technique of inviting equivalence between TAW observers and discourse-world participants which suggests that this is a model for reading: Celui qui pénétrera un jour dans la Forteresse n’y trouvera d’abord qu’une succession de pièces vides, longues et grises. Le bruit de ses pas résonnant sous les hautes voûtes bétonnées lui fera peur, mais il faudra qu’il poursuive longtemps son chemin avant de découvrir, enfouis dans les profondeurs du sol, les vestiges souterrains d’un monde qu’il croira avoir oublié: des tas de dents d’or, d’alliances, de lunettes, des milliers et des milliers de vêtements en tas, des fichiers poussiéreux, des stocks de savon de mauvaise qualité… (218) The pattern of gradual penetration and revelation of the TAW ‘parcours’ of this figure matches the increasing focus on the link between this narrative and the

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Nazi regime.33 Until this point in the text, the link between fiction and history has not directly implicated the reader, being directed towards Perec’s own quest as adult writer to retrieve the suppressed memories of his childhood expressed through the ‘souvenir écran’ of the ‘fantasme olympique’.34 This pattern still holds as the later explorer encounters the physical evidence of past history. However, the making public of the evidence of the fortress follows the making public of the exhibition on the concentration camps at the end of the previous chapter, each with its pitiful abandoned objects. And this opening up to the public gaze transforms a personal fantasy into an overt political and historical allegory which implicates the reader through the cultural history he shares with the writer. The fictional observer, and the memories ‘qu’il croira avoir oublié’, moves from a position within the fiction, beyond a position in the participant world of the writer, to a position in history. Until the final chapters, as Leak suggests: ‘les oreilles bouchées, habitué au langage littéraire et a sa rhétoricité foncièrement mensongère, le lecteur n’entend pas la vérité qui se crie dans cette description affreusement littérale de la vie concentrationnaire de W.’ (1990:84) But the reader is now compelled to ‘remember’ the link. Part of the horror of B may be that of concealed extra-fictional reference. But this narrative also raises the issue of responsibility which has already been encountered in previous chapters of this book. Lejeune, who describes his reading experience of both the serial and the book, attributes his horror to the implication of both author and reader in the events by the ‘pince-sans-frémir’ mode of narration (1991:65).35 Lejeune, fictional autonomy is no protection: Mais comme l’on sait bien en même temps que c’est l’auteur qui invente ce qu’il fait décrire au narrateur (même s’il invente, hélas, d’après des modèles connus), on est épouvanté par la complaisance maniaque qu’il met à entrer dans le jeu […] Car imaginer W, c’est fatalement en devenir d’une certaine manière responsable: on fait travailler en soi, même si c’est dans la douleur, le bourreau virtuel; on ressuscite le lien abject qui lie la victime au tortionnaire. (1991:65) This reading of the narrative mode of B reflects the association between narrative agent and author produced by the authority hierarchy of fiction. World-building is not an innocent activity, and the narrator’s failure to condemn is ideologically compromising. This reaction is reminiscent of those which have been discussed in relation to Balzac and Flaubert’s novels. The adoption of a form of narration which manifests the features of socially and institutionally authorized discourse implicates the audience in the authorization process. It does so by replacing personal responsibility with a socially sanctioned role in which the community, not the individual, dictates the performance of the discursive self. In the case of W ou le souvenir d’enfance, authorization through the institutional system has a double resonance. For the

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appeal by individuals that responsibility and guilt lie with the system, not with the individual acts of members of society, has become a cultural commonplace associated with the Holocaust and the trials which followed it. The resonance of authorization as a collective betrayal of the individual is not, however, confined to those who participated directly in the Nazi regime, any more than authorization in the narrative of W is confined to the social structures of the TAW. The shared guilt of Europeans for the distant and unknown events of the camps is not attenuated by their individual ignorance. As Perec wrote of Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (1947), Holocaust literature is a protected category as far as the writer is concerned; the collective guilt of the audience is always active (see Bellos 1993:551). The adoption of the authorized form of the report is an uncomfortable and painful reminder of two aspects of this guilt. First, no such narrative is self-authorized: it requires the sanction and acceptance of others. And second, it is a reminder of the impossibility of neutrality, not only as an individual stance, but as a collective position. The transfer from the personal and individual activity of the reader to membership of a collective audience in the second half of the book brings with it problems similar to those which surround the relationship between the individual writer and history in the AB narrative. Here we are left with the conundrum of the tension between the imaginative and creative self and a self which is framed by its culture. The public non-fictional texts to which Perec refers (the newspapers and Rousset’s text) do not illuminate his personal experience, but his creative constructions, as has been shown (see pp. 183–4). Moreover, the link between Perec’s experience and history is not direct. It is mediated by other texts —the writing of memories and the writing of fictions of memories of fictions. The reader’s relationship with the fictional worlds of the text and the discourse world of culture is equally difficult. For Leak, as has been seen, the fictionality of B produces a complacency which is revoked by the intrusion of history. The discrete levels of reality which are posited for the fictional world and its context are penetrated. But for Lejeune, the opposite is the case. The agony of the author’s personal responsibility for the fictional text and the reader’s enforced complicity is assuaged at a personal level by the appearance of history: ‘Le comble, c’est que peut-être il sera soulagé de retrouver la réalité historique des camps nazis pour échapper à la parabole de W.’ (1991:66) And this personal relief is only achieved through the sacrifice of social good faith: ‘Alors il faudra tout de même lui jeter la pierre…’ (1991:66) Should we take better care of Perec and ourselves (see note 25, p 235), at the risk of a refusal of personal responsibility? Or should we take better care of the social order, at the risk of the sacrifice of both our own and Perec’s face? If the reader is ‘sommé de prendre la place de l’Autre—le tiers qui manque dans l’autoanalyse—et d’entrer en un rapport transférentiel avec le texte’ (Leak 1990:81), can he also be a good citizen as the keeper of a collective memory?

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Private-public W ou le souvenir d’enfance represents an opening up of the private self to the public gaze. But it does more than this, in that the act of ‘going public’ turns Perec’s audience into active participants in the production of Georges Perec, a sort of ‘Pereclecture’ to match the ‘Perecriture’ of the writer. Yet this offering up of Perec’s negative face, his rights to his most personal territory, his own selfhood, does not entail any notion of invasion by his readers. This raises an interesting question concerning the interface between public and private which can best be illustrated by the difference between W ou le souvenir d’enfance and the texts of the unfinished project of Lieux (some of which are pretexts for certain passages in the autobiographical narrative). Lieux is made up of two groups of texts: a series of descriptions made by Perec on his repeated visits to a selected group of places, and a series of memories of these places, written at regular intervals and sealed in envelopes. After abandoning the project, Perec published a number of the descriptive texts but the memory series remained sealed in its envelopes to his death. Lejeune has since published some of the latter, in particular those associated with W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1991). Although these unpublished memories contain no great revelations, and provide an interesting insight into the genesis of the published text, I nevertheless experience a very powerful sense of the invasion of Perec’s privacy which is far stronger than is warranted by the posthumous publication of a work. This invasion is certainly no greater than the publication of the private correspondance of any writer or public figure. Indeed, it should be considerably less so, because the publication of Lieux puts these texts to the use for which we know that they were originally intended. My sense of invasion of privacy is, I think, produced by the nature of Perec’s public discursive selfhood, in which the divide between the sayable and the unsayable is not produced by the limits of the referential power of language but by the degree to which the self can be made public. Perec’s published works involve such a degree of self-exposure by Perec (not self-description, not selftelling, but self-doing), that I consider these public texts to represent the extreme of what it is bearable for Perec to write as public ‘écriture’. This immense sacrifice of the self to the domain of public interaction, produces in me a commensurate sense of responsibility. I do not read this responsibility as the result of a power game such as that played in Céline’s Voyage. Instead, it is one which is produced by Perec’s gift of his own face-wants to me, one of his readers. The selfhood of Perec’s text is bound to the act of writing. It is not the projection of a false public self by a protected and stable private self, but the production of the only self of the writer. In this sense, writing entails the death of the author described by Barthes (1984). But it also involves the birth of another, fragile author. This is neither Booth’s implied and pre-existing extra-linguistic author (1961), nor a stable author-construct existing only in language. It is a public and socially interacting author, engaged in a language activity with others.

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The respect paid by this author to the reader as active participant and the acceptance of the death of the extra-linguistic author in the interest of the birth of an author on the threshold of language, call for a reciprocal protection and respect from the reader. To drag Perec into this position of liminality without his consent, by making public the texts of Lieux, is to jeopardize this fragile interaction which has been so delicately offered by Perec, replacing interaction between writer and reader with action by a reader in which the writer has no part. My attitude to Lieux perhaps explains the underlying assumptions of the whole of this book. The social aspect of the writing of public texts depends on a belief in intention, not with regard to propositions within the text, but with regard to an engagement in interaction with an audience. Publication (or its more limited equivalent in the case of Jacques le fataliste), public-ation, is the condition under which the novel becomes part of social action, entering the field of conventions, of narrative, of performance, of fiction, and of literature. Readers, take better care of Perec! The worlds of fiction and non-fiction W ou le souvenir d’enfance raises a major question concerning some of the distinctions which are made between fiction and non-fiction. Adams’s account of the pragmatics of fiction proposes that writing is an act of creation, but that the communication in fiction is not a feigned speech act by the empirical writer, but a real speech act by a fictional figure (1985:16).36 in these terms, it would appear that Perec finds it easier to produce an authoritative voice when that voice is itself a fictional creation, than when he is committed to writing in his own name. This distinction is essential to the interpretation of W ou le souvenir d’enfance. The contrast in the signals of authority for each narrative voice, linked to our perception of the ‘level of reality’ (Calvino 1984) of each, is the means by which we may conclude that the unproblematic communication of a narrative is itself something which only exists in the created world of fiction, and that communication in the actual world is an altogether more difficult matter, at least when the semantic domain of the communication is the narrator himself. Furthermore, the two forms of authorization of the fictional narratives: that of the witness-narrator, whose right to tell is linked to his personal experience, and that of the historical report, where the authorization comes from the conventional relationship between text and a pre-existing world which is its referent, are made suspect through their appearance in sections of the text which we classify as fiction. However, in order to interpret the relationship between authority and reference in this text, we cannot draw a simple line under the statements that Perec communicates in the autobiographical sections and creates a fictional communication in the fictional sections. If we were to follow Adams’ hard line on fiction, then neither of the fictional narratives would have any pragmatic

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function at all, they would be suspensions in the act of communication which would be constituted by the autobiographical sections. Such a reading would condemn us to the view that W ou le souvenir d’enfance is not a single text, but two separate texts with two incompatible functions. But if we assume that the italic and roman sections did not just happen to fall into the text of this book in the form in which we encounter them, we must also assume a communicative function for the text which is not that to be found within each series, but which is different from both. To achieve this, we do not really need the textualized metanarrator of the ‘Prière d’insérer’, although this narrator, G.P., certainly authorizes us to situate the force of the text between these narratives: ‘dans leur fragile intersection’. Here, we are not working either within the fictional contexts of the italic series, or within the autobiographical context of Perec’s life story. We are working, instead, in the cultural context of the writing and reading of texts. This context leads us to assume that the arrangement of language in the physical text, which conventionally produces a particular type of fictional text world and a particular type of non-fictional text world, is itself governed by a further convention that these worlds are intended to stand in some meaningful relationship to each other. We do not need the empirical verification of this intention provided by Lejeune’s work on Perec’s preliminary plans for the book any more than we need a meta-narrator to tell us this. This, then, is the context for our approach to the text as a whole. But our meaning-making is, of course, also determined by both the structuring of these narratives in relation to each other, and the TAWs of the narratives themselves. And here, a further form of contextualization takes place which allows us to posit a space of meaning for the book. Space, here is both the physical space between words and sections of text and a conceptual space for process and activity. It is produced by the narratives which not only signal a context for themselves, but also signal themselves as context for something else. The physical representation of this context is that of the printed word as surround for the non-word, the ‘points de suspension’. The fictional sections appear to point inwards, to an imaginary world which is the result of creation. The autobiographical sections appear to point outwards, towards a discourse world which precedes creation. What, then, is between these two worlds? Is there a space from which both pointings occur, a space which is just on the outside of the inward pointing, and just on the inside of the outward pointing? And what is going on in this space? In our neat diagrams of texts and worlds, what is outside the fiction of text is the context of the actual world. And what is inside the discourse world is the text. We leave no liminal space between, despite the fact that the creation of text must involve a crossing of the dividing lines. By textualizing both these worlds, and by blocking the possibility of either world being a direct explanation of the other, W ou le souvenir d’enfance opens up the liminal space as necessity. And by creating the formal sutures of the text

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described by Magné (1988), Perec includes in the linguistic structure of the text the material traces from which we deduce the existence of the space. We read these similarities, not as evidence of the direct action of one section of text on another, but as evidence that both types of physical text are dependent, in the tradition of the hermetics of Hermes Trimegistus, on a shared and untextualized origin. But, unlike the hermetic sects, and unlike the Romantic version of this pattern, we cannot attribute this origin to either a supernatural power or inspiration (see Eco et al. 1992:30–5). Nor can we reduce it to a singular concept of the originating writer or the originating thought of the writer. As readers we may fill this space with a number of meta-propositions. On the basis of the autobiographical narrative we may point to the loss of Perec’s mother. On the basis of the fictional narrative we may point to the suppression of a quest for an individual deaf-mute and powerless child by the repressive structure of a depersonalized social mechanism. And we can produce a metainterpretation which would relate these two types of loss. But in order to produce these meta-propositions, we ourselves have to step into the spaces of the text as interpretive agents, as Iser’s gap-filling readers (1978). Moreover, given that we do not perceive the text as a naturally occurring object, we include our perceptions and interpretations of the act of production of the text, the making of the space. ‘Lecture’ and ‘écriture’ thus enter the space between actual world and fictional world. These acts are neither the before nor the after of the text, but the transition itself between world and text. They are the hinge between text as part of a world and world as part of a text. And both occur in the space of communication and interaction. The construction of W ou le souvenir d’enfance makes visible the interactive space for which I have argued in this book, a space between text and context, which, in the case of the novel, lies between an imagined and imaginary world and the actual world. This space is that in which the coming into being of the face of the novelist and audience occurs, in which the public and fictional text plays a part in the rhetoric of writing and reading. Genre, literature, ‘écriture’ What, though, can be concluded about the place of genre in this space? Many of Perec’s works bear generic labels, albeit subversive ones (‘romans’ for La Vie mode d’emploi), but the ‘inventions formelles’ from which he writes are rarely those of genre.37 This tendency is not limited to Perec, but is shared by all those texts which cross genres and media, of which the extreme form are postmodern iconic texts (see McHale 1987:184–96). Bex suggests that we might benefit by following Alistair Fowler’s proposal (1982), if not his praxis, in considering genre to be a functional element in our experience of the literary text, rather than the taxonomical kind which allows descriptive classification (1996:178). He also suggests that, before we can describe what, for him, are the sub-genres of the novel, poetry and so on, we

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must establish a function for the genre to which they belong, literature. But the function of literature itself is far from a cut and dried thing in our culture at present. The views of the literary text as a text which is in some way alternative, inviting delight, reflection rather than action, and creating social cohesion (Van Peer 1991:133–5), creating a possible world rather than an actual world (Pavel 1986, McHale 1987), as a hollow speech-act compared with the use-value of other text-types (Smith 1978), as symbolic rather than economic goods (Bourdieu 1993), all avoid an essentialist view of the text itself as the source of aesthetic value but nevertheless distinguish it from other text-types.38 Our questioning of literature in its culturally authorized manifestation provides a possible explanation for the retreat of the issue of literary genres into the background of our present preoccupations. Perec’s works reflect a shift in the focus of our questions concerning the function of texts. The issue of what it is to write and read a novel, or a poem, has been subsumed to the issue of what it is to write and read. And, suspicious of the notion of literature, attached as it is in the minds of the majority of members of our culture to a form of élitism which has been exposed as a discourse of power, Perec, like other writers, has turned to what might appear to be a more humble and practical activity, ‘écriture’. If we add to this our century’s preoccupation with language, selfhood, desire and the other, the assertion of a text’s membership of a genre such as the novel, or the literary autobiography, loses its burning relevance. In the Perecquian form of ‘écriture’, writing is not a refinement of the art for art’s sake pattern of objectification. Writing is not writing for language’s sake, or writing for self’s sake, but writing for interaction’s sake, for human’s sake. This is not to say that the structure of the text itself as pattern is not a part of the process, or that the selfhood of the writer is not implicated. Indeed, the ‘auto-graphie’ of W ou le souvenir d’enfance is, as has been seen, closely bound to a project of the making of self, not through characterization, nor yet through description of the self as other, although both of these play a part, but the coming into being of the self through writing and reading. It might be said, and with some justification, that the referential issues raised by W ou le souvenir d’enfance and its construction of discursive selfhood are peculiar to this text and cannot be mapped to other texts, whether referential or fictional. But the fact that such a construction is possible, that a text should have the capacity to cross the divide between fiction and non-fiction, to produce selfhood as coconstruction, tells us something important about the relationship between text and context.

AFTERWORD

The discourse worlds of the novels discussed in this book display a tension between private and public, individual and community. The participants, like the texts, stand on Waller’s threshold between worlds, viewing both. Interaction is founded on individual personal and willed acts of reading and writing but is situated in the large, populous and changing discourse world of the public circulation of texts. The culture-specific nature of literary genre places the individual cognitive experience of narrative in a social and cultural context and, while the emergence of a perception of literary texts as symbolic goods may free them from the pragmatics of one type of arena, it reinserts them in another arena which is subject to the social dynamics of authority, power and status.1 The limits of genre? Derrida suggests that the concept of genre is an appeal to order: Depuis toujours le genre en tous genres a pu jouer le rôle de principe d’ordre: ressemblance, analogie, identité et différence, classification taxinomique, ordonnancement et arbre généalogique, ordre de la raison, ordre des raisons, sens du sens, vérité de la vérité, lumière naturelle et sens de l’histoire. (1986:286) But he also argues for the impossibility of the purity of genres, for a ‘loi d’impureté ou un principe de contamination’ (253), which produces ‘participation sans appartenance’ (256). La loi et la contre-loi se citent à comparaître et se récitent Pune l’autre en ce procès. On n’aurait à s’inquiéter de rien si l’on était rigoureusement assuré de pouvoir discerner en toute rigueur entre une citation et une noncitation, un récit et un non-récit, une répétition dans la forme de l’un ou de l’autre. (255)

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Thus, for Derrida, the self-identity of genre is impossible. In this book, which has been concerned with the way we produce an identity for individual novels in relation to a larger group of texts, the Derridean play of inclusion and occlusion has been confined and ordered into an historical account of the marking out of generic territories and positions. The book has presented the relationship of the individual text with other texts as an assertion of difference which appeals for a change in the order of a genre, however overt or covert such assertions may be. It maps the territorial patterns associated with human actions to the relationships between texts, not because texts are human, but because they are produced and read by humans. In this respect, it comes closer to Bloom’s description of the dynamics of influence (1973 and 1982), although it has not aspired to the subtleties of Bloom’s explorations of the aesthetics of the poetic sublime, confining discussion to less transcendent social moves. Literary space: territorial behaviour and the novel genre The reputation of the novel as a ‘mixed genre’ has not been undermined by the examination of generic patterns undertaken here. Yet the dialogic and heteroglossic characteristics of these texts are not adequate criteria on which to ascribe generic identity. Jacques le fataliste and W ou le souvenir d’enfance, too, display such characteristics. In the case of Jacques le fataliste, this could, of course, be accounted for by classifying the text as a novel (joining the European family tree of ironic overturning of convention which includes Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy). However, as has been shown in chapter two, Jacques le fataliste is not fully accepted by critics as a novel in the same way that the texts by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Céline and Sarraute have been. Likewise, Bakhtin’s suggestion that all literature has been subject to a process of ‘novelization’ (1981: 38–9) can also account for the dialogic characteristics of W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Furthermore, as was suggested in chapter eight, literary generic classifications appear to be losing their dominance in much writing, becoming subsidiary aspects of texts. It could thus be argued that the cultural function of the novel does not occupy the same dominant position in the context of production of Perec’s texts. However, both Diderot and Perec have written books which can more easily be included in the generic territory of the novel than those discussed here, and cannot be taken as exemplifications of the state of the novel at the moments of their production.2 One difference between Jacques le fataliste and W ou le souvenir d’enfance, and the novels discussed lies in the fact that they do not offer a dominant intertextual relationship with any single textual grouping (although, as has been shown, this does not prevent critics from attempting to produce such a relationship). Both Jacques le fataliste and W ou le souvenir d’enfance are built out of narratives, containing elements of the ‘romanesque’, and sharing many characteristics with the novels in this book. But these texts place more

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visible citation marks around the novelistic elements of their texts than do the other texts discussed. They do not shift the conventions of the novel (whether the eighteenth-century ‘roman’ or its twentieth-century version) because they do not appeal to the novel as a singular dominant model. Each is concerned, instead, with the wider issue of the relationship between text and discourse world. If Bloom’s ‘agon’ is present in these texts, it does not occur in the arena of genre but elsewhere. The power relationships of these texts also differ from those of the novels, in that they do not manifest the same degree of appropriation or transfer of authority to themselves. It can be suggested that their self-situation in an arena in which no single text-type is dominant leads to a commensurate impossibility of singular authority for the text itself. They thus highlight the limitations of the dialogic processes of the novels. The position-taking in the novels in this book is one which moves to occupy a generic space and which asserts the primacy of that generic space over other text-types. By contrast, Jacques le fataliste and W ou le souvenir d’enfance remain between generic spaces, without full displacement or occupation. In the anthropomorphic script of action and occupation, territory is marked out and occupied in different ways in the novels discussed. In Le Père Goriot, the marking out of territory through allusion is foregrounded in the opening pages, but the occupation of the discursive territory of competing texts extends beyond allusion to the transformational appropriation of text-types which dominate the cultural context, each bringing its own cultural authorization. The similarity between these intertextual relationships and the TAW social patterns reinforces the process of self-empowerment of Balzac’s novel. The young genre asserts itself over the old, and occupies the functional space dominated by the theatre in the previous two centuries. Exploiting the growth in the distribution and influence of the printed text as a major medium of literary production, Le Père Goriot lays claim to the novel’s right to be the genre which best fulfils the Aristotelian goals of the portrayal of the actions of men. The territorial patterns of Madame Bovary operate according to a different principle. Securely anchored through its mode and semantic domain as a novel, the territorial battle in this text is fought out in the arena of literary aesthetics. Madame Bovary, like Balzac’s novel, appropriates the ground of other genres but, in doing so, shifts the novel towards an exclusive artistic territory with limited rights of access (see Bourdieu 1993 and 1996). L’Assommoir follows a pattern of expansion from a secure ground, extending semantic domain and reintegrating the literary text in a wider territory of social action. To achieve this expansion it appropriates the modes of authorization of nonliterary genres, without relinquishing the privileged status of literary texts. Its attacks on an idealist view of literature and its rivalry within the field of Naturalism are covert, and it appeals to the socially defined patterns of the symbolic and the universal to reinforce its territorial move. Like Le Père Goriot, Voyage au bout de la nuit displaces the old, but as the invading outsider not subject to institutional control. It links the imaginary space of

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literary texts to the social space of institutional discourses and sets the individual against the group. This territorial infiltration incorporates a wide range of narrative patterns but uses the novel as the dominant vehicle for its engagement with the literary. Portrait d’un inconnu, too, for all its mediation and flux between conceptual spaces and its displacement of plot and character, in particular, works within the territory of the novel genre. It is written as a palimpsest over the schema of the nineteenth-century realist novel, and stages its own submission to that form in the final chapter. The territorial negotiation in these novels is certainly not only with other novels. It could be suggested, however, that relationships with other genres are those of appropriation, while those with the novel genre are those of substitution and transformation. Here, the not-statement in relation to other genres is secure, allowing citation without risk of identity. By contrast, the not-statement in relation to other novels is one of qualification of similarity, an adjustment of the schema from within. Personal space: territorial behaviour and discursive selfhood In the texts discussed, the sort of territorial moves which are made by participants depend on the types of discursive selfhood projected by the text and their relationship to wider patterns of selfhood in the cultural context. The discursive self, as conceived in this book, merges two different concepts of selfhood, a participating self constructed of desires, beliefs, experiences and knowledge, and a participating self which is constructed through action (including non-physical action). In a discourse event, participants construct not only themselves but each other through the combination of these aspects of selfhood. In the lengthy discourse event of a novel, different elements of selfhood are in play at various moments in the text. Further, such constructive activities do not exist in a simple dyadic relationship between author and audience, or reader and author but, as Phelps suggests, require a ‘more fully contextualized, polyphonic, contentious model of transactionality that encompasses multiple participants and voices along with situation, setting, institutions, and language itself’, a model which ‘finds it hard to maintain firm boundaries between self and other’ (1990:156). Writing from the perspective of authorship and composition studies, Phelps argues that the Bakhtinian model of dialogism allows space for both the fragmented discursive self and the nonexclusivity of the language events of writing and reading, and for the individual ‘will, work, responsiveness and responsibility’ of the author (1990: 170), which I extend to the members of an audience. The subjectivity of Jacques le fataliste is that of a debating and dialoguing self, in dialogue with other discursive selves, and with other texts, selecting and repeating narratives. These selves are questioning selves, typified both by individual will and by their relationships with other members of society, whose

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narratives are repetitions of other narratives. This text thus projects a discursive self poised between two very different concepts of selfhood. The layers of regressive citation of the text, while they have been proposed by Chabut (1989) as a postmodernist regress to absent origin, also reflect a relationship between narrator, author and audience in the tradition of a medieval model in which narrativity is founded on the creative performance of previous texts, without the chains of originality imposed by later cultural contexts (see Cerquiglini 1989:57 and Marnette 1996:6). Yet Jacques le fataliste also manifests a more individualistic discursive selfhood, signalling origin as an issue, not only in the philosophical debate but also in relation to the production of text. The socialized discursive self thereby combines integration into a wider range of linguistic interactions with the individual will and responsibility of the singular author and reader. There is a great contrast between the position of Balzac as public author in the 1830s and that of Diderot as member of a small and élite social group in the closing years of the previous century. Circulating in a rapidly growing general market for novels, Balzac’s text both exploits the sensationalism of the popular novel and claims an authorization which continues the classical principles of ‘instruire et plaire’. Despite the ironic tone of the prefaces, Le Père Goriot is not positioned as an anti-institutional worldly novel, but as a text which conforms to the institutional and didactic function of the educational text. As such, it imposes a moral and social responsibility on the writer. The continuation of the association between narrative voice and authorial voice makes it possible for Balzac to create a narratorial position, as recorder, reader and observer of a TAW, which can be linked to his own position, and in which the individual and creative imagination of the writer, his ‘poésie’, is subordinated to his role as observer of his own society. However, this novel exploits a range of interpretive generic frames without allowing full recuperation through any one model. It therefore inhibits the sanction of the writer as a member of any collectively authorized writing group, leaving him personally responsible and open to attack from all sides. Of all the novels discussed in this book, Le Père Goriot displays the most overt strategies of attenuation and redress to face-threat in the narrator-narratee relationship. The possibility of the penetration and reading of the private self by others in the TAW, extends to the narrative world. At this world level the protection of privacy allowed to the reader is not absolute. While readers are free to remain in the cocoon of their socially constructed selves (‘lecteur à la main blanche’), they are not thereby protected from the gaze of society. Recognition of the individual beneath the social mask may be a process of self-recognition, but it may also involve exposure by others. In Le Père Goriot, telling and evaluation are foregrounded in the structure of the text, but telling shifts from production to a form of viewing shared by narrator, narratee and, intermittently, Rastignac. Whereas evaluation in Jacques le fataliste concerned the relationship of telling to action and the process of telling, here it concerns the visualized action itself. The narrative voice here is associated

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with authorial voice according to the authority levels of fiction, reinforced by the sententious comments which extend fictional action to the actual world. Selfhood for both writer and readers is an observing and interpreting selfhood, differentiated only by the superior knowledge and interpretive powers of the writer which are gradually transferred to the reader. Understanding is not achieved through debate, but through individual discovery which may be achieved through the help of other, more qualified observers. Individual will and activity is promoted, but the responsibility of both writer and readers for the fictional world is a collective one, dictated by their historical and social situation. In Madame Bovary, the discursive identities of writer and reader are constituted on different principles. The writer’s discursive self is founded on work, the crafting of the text, while responsiveness and responsibility are transferred to the reader. The latter is encouraged to detach himself from a discursive community associated with ‘idées reçues’, and to respond, not to the discursive selfhood of the writer, but to the text as result of creation. The socially situated narrator of the opening chapter, which conforms to the contemporary convention of a public ‘on-record’ fictional voice, is replaced by an ‘off-record’ ironic voice. As has been demonstrated, the irony of this voice shifts between the interpersonal and dialogic arrested irony of ‘not A but B’, and an epistemological regressive irony which itself hovers between a subject-related irony associated with Schlegel, and a more de-centred irony associated with Kierkegaard.3 The celebrated impersonality of Flaubert’s novel at the level of narration is not founded on the effacement of deictics relating to a narratorial viewing centre, whether that of consistently reflectorized narrative (Woolf), or camera-eye ‘objectivity’ (Hemingway). Moreover, the concept of impersonality depends on a belief in subjective origin, implying a voluntary removal of signals of a text producer’s selfhood from the linguistic construction of a text. In Madame Bovary, anthropomorphized authority levels are preserved, and interpretation is founded on the differentiation between the sub-worlds of protagonist-focalizers and narrative stance. But it is also perturbed by the impossibility of creating a consistent narrative position in relation to these sub-worlds (in particular those of Emma and Charles). The frame of a subjective and active origin for the novel is not fully fictionalized, but it is textualized. The pattern of authorial discursive subjectivity in Madame Bovary is thus one which relies on the frame of an originating participant, but does not allow any direct and consistent reading of the text as self-expression. The publication of the text, divorcing the discourse worlds of writer and readers, makes possible the creation of a private space of production which is not accessible to the audience of the novel. In Madame Bovary, social integration is replaced by social dislocation. The problem of the relationship between private and public subjectivity is transferred to the reader’s discourse world. By trailing the coat of ironic narrative stance before the reader, Flaubert shifts the labour of

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interpersonal responsiveness to the reader’s discursive activities. The possibility of a fragile bridge between discursive subjectivities is retained, but the gesture towards the other is no longer textualized through a narrator-narratee relationship as the responsibility of the performing writer. Instead, it is the context of situation of the isolated and individual reader faced only with the physical text as reminder of the author’s work and will which dominates. Integration of the subjectivity of the writer into a moral and social framework is left to the reader. However, the negative models of individual and collective reading practices in the TAW undermine the possibility of an unproblematic discursive identity for the reader. The solidarity of collective interpretive activities is no guarantee of good reading. The dislocation of Madame Bovary is thus one which occurs not only between writer and reader, but also between reader and audience. Territories are separated and rendered insecure as the possibility of common interpersonal ground is both suggested and blocked. L’Assommoir reinstates the selfhood of the creative writer as a socially situated role. In the double pattern of authority outlined in chapter five, the discursive nature of the text is that of a public and social record mediated by the visualizing and constructing activities of writer and reader. Here, as in Madame Bovary, the discursive activities of the writer are those of production rather than performance. The written medium links L’Assommoir to its literary and nonliterary intertexts as part of a public and institutionally authorized circulation of texts which stand as evidence both of the work of the individual and of an extratextual world. Because the creative work of the writer is linked to the production of a means to visualization by the reader, rather than to his powers of imagination and the direct expression of his own subjectivity, his discursive identity is situated in the public domain as an authorized role. However, the incorporation of two sociolects in the written text raises the issue of performing voice as part of a social identity for which the writer must assume personal responsibility. Style is associated with socially situated language-users. This in turn raises the issue of the public authorization of the gaze of the writer as spectator. The disembodiment of writing becomes re-embodied through the physicality of voice and vision, despite the defensive prefatory portrait of the writing self in a context of situation which emphasizes bourgeois responsibility and respectability. For the reader, participation in the language event of L’Assommoir is both experiential and social. Experience of the TAW through the combination of external panoramic envisualization and internalized reflector focalization is linked to both a shared social epistemology of symbolic structures and the social and moral position of the reader. The territories which are at issue are thus social territories, in which personal will and self-image are potentially in conflict with public roles. Voyage au bout de la nuit presents a narrative voice which is also a full protagonist in the TAW. Association between narrative stance and author leads to an authorial self as performer in language and to the construction of a historically and socially situated authorial participant. This has implications for

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the reader, whose own biographical self becomes a frame for his relationship with the author. As in Jacques le fataliste, the confrontational interaction between social subjects is prominent in the text, but the frame of interaction is not only that of debate between equals. Here, individual language-use is set against the collective discourse of power. In this novel, the individual performing discursive identity of the author is contrasted with that of readers as members of the audience as a social group. Bourgeois readers are encouraged to abandon the solidarity of their social identities, both in relation to collective sanction of a particular concept of the literary text and to their ideological and moral beliefs. But participation in the imaginative and experiential construction of the fictional world does not allow the comfortable creation of an alternative discursive selfhood. While the discourse world of the reader is permeable to the alien words of the writer, there is no possibility of a reciprocal movement by the reader into the discourse world of the latter. The reading of the novel requires not only fragmentation of selfhood, but the cutting of an umbilical cord between the individual and the culture which has produced him without a corresponding freedom from his genetic heritage. The personal will of the authorial self invades the reader’s social identity, opening up an enforced intimacy. The narrative of Portrait d’un inconnu provides us with a personalized narrator (albeit not a characterized one) but destabilizes this construct as fictional originating voice, using the written-ness of the text as a means to produce the unvoiced. The text is distanced from the spoken interactions of its TAW. In this world, desires, beliefs and actions cannot be read through a separation of the mental and the physical but combine to produce an unnamed third between thought and action. Identity cannot be expressed through language, either by the self or by others. Indeed, self-naming and other-naming constitute acts of aggression or protection which bind selfhood into a discursive carapace. Although language-use in the TAW imposes an alien pattern on selfhood, the unvoicing of the written offers access to a different type of selfhood beyond the combative moves of conversation. The separation of the discourse worlds of participants is absolute, but the text is offered as a means to establish common ground outside discourse. Patterns of penetration appear to move from reader to narrator and from narrator to other figures in the fictional world, reversing the pattern of Voyage au bout de la nuit. Sarraute produces the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of discourse in the fictional world as an anti-model for reading, which finds its positive model in the oblique penetration of the third-person. Writing and reading are marked as outside direct linguistic confrontation and the removal of the front of physical presence and speech enables interaction which is presented as impossible in conversation. The isolation of the reader faced with language is attenuated by the experience of language beyond the conventions of the ideational or the social. An alternative to the dyad of public linguistic performed mask and private non-linguistic selfhood is proposed which depends on a perception of the text as both language and notlanguage. Territories, at the interpersonal level, are thus presented as

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undesirable, and discursive selfhood as performance to the other is condemned. In this respect Sarraute’s novel reflects the cultural suspicion of language of the twentieth century and of the nature of selfhood in language. It nevertheless promotes a concept of the creative role of the writer as revealer and producer of human experience which is not dissimilar to that of Balzac or Zola. Its difference lies in the shift from reading about experience to experiencing reading. Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance relativizes the relationship between fictional and non-fictional discursive selfhood. Moreover, it presents selfhood as a domain for construction by writer and reader. The irretrievability of the pretextual authorial self is compensated by the possibility of a co-construction of discursive selfhood which mediates between the linguistic and the extralinguistic. Language is not the physical representation of a prior act of ostension by the writer but allows ostensive activity by the reader. While the emphasis on the reader’s interpretive activities corresponds to the ‘scriptible’ schema of play between reader and text, metacommentary and patterns of the figural construction of the text do not efface the possibility of a relationship between text and text producer. The writer’s selfhood is opened up to the reader in a gesture which appeals for solidarity in shared linguistic activity. Face or fiction? The ‘hyperprotection’ proposed by Pratt (1977:215) for the literary text as display text, as a catch-all let-out clause which banishes the spectre of violation of the Gricean maxims of co-operation, does not account for the way in which these ontologically autonomous fictional worlds are integrated to the discourse world as social action. Certainly, the current function of the literary text in our culture depends on an authorization founded on a certain type of depragmatization (see Iser 1993:250 and Pagnini 1987:9) as a non-referential form of discourse with ‘interpretive use’ (see MacMahon 1996). But the depragmatization of fictional discourse is only as complete as the reader makes it. In the non-academic field, readers make wide-ranging assumptions about the author’s character and personal history on the basis of the fictional text. Sue Lawley, for instance, interviewing Julian Barnes on ‘Desert Island Discs’, correlated her knowledge of the writer’s personal history (as a student of modern languages), and the TAW situation of a student-protagonist in Paris in May 1968 in Metroland, to conclude that Barnes had been in Paris in May 1968, which he hadn’t. In the academic field, many biographers consider the fictional works of writers to provide legitimate evidence of their extrafictional lives. A more extreme example of the personal interpretation of a form of discourse in which the text producer is authorized by her social role is to be found in some of the reactions to Jean Aitchison’s 1996 Reith lectures, described by her in the Times Higher Education Supplement (March 15 1996: 19). Among the letters she received, she reports a group of correspondents who ‘leapt from a dislike of something I had said to a wider disapproval of my presumed life-style’. She then

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quotes a letter: ‘If you habitually hobnob with hippies, lesbians, drug users, Communists etc. you may become used to it [dirty talk]… I suggest you change your friends and keep better company’. Although an extreme example of character projection onto a text producer, and one in a different medium, radio, this demonstrates how, as readers, we tend to build a character for, the author outside the text on the basis of our perception of the manifestations of the author within the text. While this last example, in particular, can be explained as a failure to interpret a text-type according to the conventions of a genre, the range of types of discursive selfhood projected by the novels discussed indicates that the relationships between novels and socially situated participants cannot be reduced to any single formula. It will depend on the prevailing conventions of authorship and audience roles in a given cultural context and on the relationship between these conventions and the interpersonal dynamics of the individual novel (interpersonal in the sense of discursive activities, not of the relationships between fictional entities). It need not entail ‘characterization’ of the type found in nineteenth-century Realist novels, but situates the work, will, and responsibility of participant sub-worlds in a social context. The degree to which socialized interpersonal relationships are manifested at the level of narration does not in itself dictate the degree to which the face of participants is at issue. The dialogue between narrator and narratee in Jacques le fataliste may reflect the narrative conventions of a period in which written texts are read through the script of oral interactions. The frame of the text as artefact in Madame Bovary and Portrait d’un inconnu may reflect an awareness of the construction of the text as a linguistic object divorced from its originator. These offer very different interpersonal scripts, but neither is inherently more or less face-threatening. Novels which stage an interactive narrator-narratee relationship and those which efface this relationship are equally capable of following cultural conventions of narrative in which the personal space and status of participants as individuals is protected. When the relationship between a novel and cultural narrativization and naturalization conventions is in question, though, the issue of the relationship between the individual and the group arises, not only in terms of the situation of the text in relation to an arena of other texts, but also in terms of the participants in the discourse event. The social responsibility of the author is brought into play, as is the social situation of the reader as audience member. The terms on which discursive selfhood can be constructed are not preauthorized, but must be worked out and developed in the course of reading. Both authorial and audience roles in such texts are extra-communal, to the extent that they do not correspond to the matrix scripts for such roles at the time of production.4 The territorial moves in relation to generic space in the novels discussed all place the cultural authorization of the individual text into question. The creation of interpersonal territories and moves which allow authorization are multiple. Balzac and Zola both borrow pre-authorized discourse patterns, counteracting the

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threats presented by collective responsibility for TAW characteristics. Flaubert and Sarraute block the textual manifestations of the discourse world of the writer, revising the terms of interaction of the novel. Céline, like Flaubert, questions the discursive practices of the reader, but does so through ideological contextualization and patterns of imposition. Diderot and Perec’s nonappropriative generic moves are matched by their treatment of interpersonal activity. Diderot relativizes the potential aggression of dialogue through the compensation of the comic and the ludic, and the splitting of the narrative voice. Perec presents the impossibility of a full, knowable, private selfhood as a territory to be protected against the other. The novel of the canon The dynamics of canon formation have not been discussed in this book. In particular, there has been no attempt to ascertain ‘why this text?’. It may well be that these texts are canonized because they obey the novel’s version of Bloom’s ‘law of canonization’ for poetry: ‘in a strong reader’s struggle to master a poet’s trope, strong poetry will impose itself, because that imposition, that usurpation of mental space, is the proof of trope, the testing of power by power’ (1982:286). However, while Bloom’s law may account for the presence of certain texts in the canon, it does not account for the absence of others (I am not convinced, either, that the territorial moves in these books are as agonizing as Bloom’s examples). Canons, more than genres, are linked to institutional and semi-institutional ideologies and social groupings. As Rabinowitz comments, the process of canonbuilding through inclusion and exclusion follows a dynamic of club membership. It is thus self-perpetuating: ‘we may readily canonize books that raise problems— but we seem to prefer it if those problems are the problems of a certain dominant group, for then at least the centrality of that group remains an implicit assumption’ (1987:229). Humanist, individualist, postmodern or feminist, canons reflect the social and political constitution of the groups which produce them. The relationship of the texts discussed to any canon is therefore audience-led to a large degree. The ‘anxiety of influence’ may be manifested either as submission to Paulhan’s ‘terreur’ (1941), as a need to produce the new at all costs, or as a submission to Derrida’s law of genre.5 The novel, like other narrative genres, is particularly susceptible to historical storification in relation to cultural contexts (Marxist theories of poetry don’t seem to work so well as Marxist theories of the novel). It is also susceptible to historical narratives of individual achievement in a larger social system.6 It lends itself to humanizing and power-based theories of literature in which the individual fights to free himself and his fellows from an oppressive system. The sub-canon of the novel thus finds itself in a strange position, as the collective authorization and celebration of individual challenges to collective conventions. Combining the individual experiential mode of lyric poetry with the public action-based narratives of theatre, novels allow and invite readings in which the

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script of individual originating action and the frame of social integration are both present, not only in the construction of the TAW but also in that of the discourse world. This book has shown how the cultural frame of genre and the interpersonal scripts of writing and reading can be linked, building its own narrative about the construction of discourse-world narratives about narrative.

NOTES

1 THRESHOLDS 1 In the original plan of this book, the chronological gap between Zola and Céline’s novels was filled by Jarry’s Les Jours et les nuits (1897). This novel has not achieved a position as a significant text in the canon, but anticipates the techniques of many twentieth-century novels, raising particular issues of genre, authority, identity and face (see Bridgeman 1991 and 1995). It has been regretfully omitted from the final version for reasons of coherence and constraints on length. The lacuna this creates is the mark and the acknowledgement of the influence of my earlier reading of Jarry’s novel, as a text which goes beyond recuperability, on this book. 2 Bakhtin suggests that this is one of the periods in history during which the novel effectively becomes the generic skeleton of literature, as other genres are ‘to a greater or lesser extent “novelized”’ (1981:5). 3 Couturier goes so far as to suggest that the novel is not a genre but ‘the new name for printed literature’ (1991:144). 4 Most of them certainly fail to conform to an idealized Realist ethos of the effacement of self-reflexive signals of the text as a linguistic artefact. Hamon (1982) and Furst (1995) have, in any case, argued for the tensions inherent in the techniques of realist texts. 5 Such texts may conflict in the epistemologies of the actual world they propose, but are linked by their status as epistemologies of the actual world, not of a fabulous or fantastic alternative universe. 6 Textual actual world is Ryan’s term (1992). See Prendergast (1986) for a reworking of the concept of mimesis, and Furst (1995) for a reader-centred view of realism drawn from theorists such as Pavel (1986) and Walton (1990). 7 The term ‘convention’ here embraces Searle’s ‘conventions’ (1969), Guillén’s ‘protocols’ (1971) and Leech’s ‘principles’ (1983). The three terms are not synonymous, and all will be used according to the particular focus of the discussion. ‘Convention’ is, however, employed as a catch-all term for the three concepts.

NOTES 209

8 As well as Schaeffer (1989), see Genette (1979) for one account of the emergence of genres in the Romantic period as a secular trinity which replaced the formal modes of earlier periods, and Derrida (1986) for a critique of this account. 9 See Eagleton: ‘Any particular act of reading is conducted within a general set of assumptions which […] belong […] to the general “ideology of culture”.’ (1978: 62) 10 Mailloux, who relates speech-act conventions to literary reading conventions, has suggested that reading conventions are neither traditional nor regulative, but constitutive, in that they make meaning possible: ‘To naturalize an object-text is to relate it to a textual network in order to make sense of the object-text; in fact, the relationship is the sense made for that text. One form of literary naturalization relates a present text to the traditional conventions of past literature, genre and modal conventions thus becoming constitutive of meaning’ (1982:151). Within this framework, it would be possible to suggest that a novel which overturns conventions must persuade its readers that interpretive conventions previously considered to be constitutive were, in fact, only regulative or traditional. 11 See Eysenck and Keane: ‘the term “schema” is used to refer to well-integrated chunks of knowledge about the world, about events, about people, and about actions. Scripts and frames are relatively specific kinds of schemata. Scripts deal with knowledge about events and sequences of actions […] In contrast, frames deal with knowledge about the properties of objects and locations.’ (1990:323–4) 12 Hedges (1983), in a discussion of Dada and Surrealist literature and film, explicitly links the formalist view of literature to cognitive theory (see especially chapters two and three). 13 Paulson further proposes that, since the Romantic period, the literary text ‘presents the fiction of its autonomy as one of its central organizational processes’, arguing that this is, however, part of its culturally defined role, which can only occur through its ‘allonomous’ relationship with a larger cultural totality (1988:135–6). 14 Functional linguists do not agree on the register configurations of literary texts. See Leckie-Tarry (1995:67–8). The freedom of the novel to exploit features from other areas of language-use allows very different terms of engagement to be set up in individual texts. The texts discussed in this book demonstrate this variety. 15 See Kress (1988a:97) for a discussion of the possibility of retreat into institutional impersonality in the written medium. 16 Reed (1981:264) links the earliest forms of the novel to the privacy of the acts of writing and reading and attributes its contestatory form to the freedom of the private individual from public authorized text-types. By contrast, Conroy (1985:33) emphasizes the desire for authorization produced by the anxiety of solitude. The more general issue of the ‘single listener and the multitude’ had, of course, concerned writers on rhetoric long before the development of the novel. See Willard and Brown (1990) for a discussion of such preoccupations from Plato to Vico. 17 See Bourdieu (1993: chapters two and three). 18 This is my debased summary of the maxims which make up Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1967). 19 McHoul (1982:4) goes further, contending that language, as a public phenomenon, precludes all linguistic activity from being a purely private affair. 20 The sources of inferencing are different in face-to-face interaction, as participants are more directly dependent on the immediate physical context of situation, and this

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21 22 23

24

25

26

situation offers the possibility of requests for elucidation and feedback. However, the inferencing process in spoken discourse remains mediated through both language and context; it is always governed by interpretation. Thus Calvino’s preliminary condition of all literary texts: ‘la personne qui écrit doit inventer ce premier personnage qui est l’auteur de l’oeuvre’, which, for him distinguishes the ‘personnage-auteur’ from the ‘moi de l’individu comme sujet empirique’ (1984: 92), is also a feature of non-literary face-to-face linguistic production. See also her more recent book (1995). Given the extent of these fields, reflecting the canonic status of their objects of study, no comprehensive overview of each has been attempted. I employ Genette’s terms, in particular, for distinctions between types of narrative voice. However, given the cognitive approach to world-building adopted, I reserve use of the ‘histoire’-‘récit’ distinction for discussions where the issue of the relationship between the telling and the told is in focus, elsewhere using the world and sub-world categories of fictional-world theory. Structuralist approaches are represented by Genette (1972 and 1983), Chatman (1978 and 1990) and Bal (1985). Semiotic and discourse-theory approaches are represented by Eco (1987) and Lanser (1981). For surveys, see Rimmon-Kenan (1983) and Wallace Martin (1986). A historical perspective on the spatialization of time in narrative is provided by Fleischman’s suggestion that there might be a correlation to be made between the passage from oral to written transmission in medieval texts and a shift from temporal to spatial adverbs as ‘articulators of discourse’ (1990b:33). Gibson (1996: chapter four) demonstrates and criticizes the centrality of the speaking voice in narratology. See Wesling and Slawek (1995) for an alternative approach to literary voice.

2 DYNAMICS OF WORLD-PLAY BETWEEN CONTEXTS, TEXTS AND PARTICIPANTS: DIDEROT’S JACQUES LE FATALISTE 1 For Hobson, this text is a response to the question posed at the beginning of the eighteenth century: ‘“What is the status of what is offered in a novel?”—is it historical? and if it is not historical, is it untrue?—that is, false?’ (1982:82). 2 Generic categorizations of prose forms by Diderot and his contemporaries are far from definitive and consensual. For example, Diderot, in Les deux amis de Bourbon, describes the works of Homer, Virgil and Tasso as ‘contes merveilleux’, those of La Fontaine, Vergier, Ariosto and Hamilton as ‘contes plaisants’, and the ‘nouvelles’ of Scarron, Cervantes and Marmontel as ‘contes historiques’ (1989: 454–5). His fellow-encyclopaedist, D’Alembert, in his Synonymes, distinguishes between ‘fable’ and ‘conte’, ascribing a moral function to the former and suggests that the ‘roman’ is an extended form of the ‘conte’ (1967:252–3). 3 Although allegory appears to conform to the demands of an institutionalized moral order, it can turn against this order from within. See Chambers (1991:56– 101) for a discussion of this feature in La Fontaine. 4 Notwithstanding the standard prefatory claims of a moral purpose in pseudo ‘histoires’ and ‘mémoires’. Hobson suggests that the attacks on and proscription of

NOTES 211

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

novels, both parodic and ‘straight’, for their lack of ‘vraisemblance’ and their immorality (described by May 1963:71) concealed a response to the threat of a different form of social transgression in the form of contemporary ‘à clé’ allusions (1982:105–10). In the ‘Éloge’, Diderot proposes Richardson’s work as a possible prototype for a new form of novel which could be valued on the grounds of its truth of feeling. However, with the possible exception of the Madame de la Pommeraye story, beloved of nineteenth-century readers, it is not in Jacques le fataliste that he develops his own version of this type of novel, but in La Religieuse (1796). See Hobson (1982:85–120) and Michael Bell (1983:15–91) for accounts of the rehabilitation of the novel as a fiction founded on lived truth. We might suspect that the link between the two ‘philosophes’ allows greater authority to Diderot than that with an eccentric and individualistic English churchman. See, for example, the false recognition scene with the stolen horse: ‘Vous allez croire, Lecteur, que ce cheval est celui qu’on a volé au maître de Jacques, et vous vous tromperez. C’est ainsi que cela arriverait dans un roman un peu plus tôt ou un peu plus tard, de cette manière ou autrement; mais ceci n’est point un roman’ (58). Towards the end of the book (‘un peu plus tard’), this is exactly what occurs (‘autrement’) (272–3). Jacques would, on these criteria, be ‘un roman’. Hobson situates the novel as a transgressive genre, operating in the space between romance and history and argues that ‘it defines this pair for the succeeding period by its very movement between them’ (1982:81). This attitude reflects the tendency of Diderot scholars, until the 1970s, to privilege the philosophical questions of the text, avoiding the issue of its non-conformity to an aesthetic of unity and cohesion. Belaval cites Rosenkranz’s nineteenth-century view that the Mme de la Pommeraye episode ‘s’élève au drame balzacien’ (1973:17). This judgement reflects the Aristotelian privileging of the dramatic and the action-sequence which has underpinned an aesthetic of vividness and immediacy into this century, influencing perceptions of grounding. Lubbock’s distinctions between scene and summary (1960:66–7) and Longacre’s inclusion of dialogue and drama as features of ‘heightened vividness’ at narrative Peak (1983:30, see chapter four, note 25, p. 225) demonstrate the continued prevalence of this view. The view of generic continuity was common among eighteenth-century readers (see Pomeau 1979), while Belaval asserts that Jacques le fataliste is an ‘antiCandide’ (1973:27). For Alter, Sterne’s text is primarily experiential whereas Diderot’s treatment of narrative is an ideational ‘intelligence du Récit’ (1975:63–4). He thus extends the philosophical frame of Diderot’s text to his reading of the approach it adopts towards narrative processes. Manuscript copies were attached to the Correspondance littéraire, Grimm’s newsletter which informed a limited audience from the various courts of Europe of artistic and philosophical activities in France (several other prose works by Diderot were circulated in this form, remaining unpublished until after his death). There are a number of differences between the manuscript copies on which current editions are established, not all of which can be accounted for by any simple chronology of composition. This produces a situation in which no single text was circulated to a

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14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27

defined group of readers. Instead, individual readers would have experienced different states of the text. See Proust (Diderot 1981:3–9) for details. This would apply for the manuscript copy prepared specifically for her between 1780 and 1784. See Rabinowitz (1987:98) on the distinction between a narrative audience, which is fictional, and an authorial audience, which is hypothetical. See also Willey (1990) on the addressed/invoked audience debate. See the opening of Pensées Philosophiques (1746), condemned to be burnt by the Paris ‘parlement’: ‘J’écris de Dieu; je compte sur peu de lecteurs, et n’aspire quà quelques suffrages. Si ces pensées ne plaisent à personne, elles pourront n’être que mauvaises; mais je les tiens pour détestables si elles plaisent à tout le monde.’ (Diderot 1975:17) Demonstrated within Diderot’s own peer group by the indignant response of D’Alembert and Mlle de Lespinasse to the manuscript of Le Rêve d’Alembert (1769) (see Wilson 1985:473). Also, Meister’s editorial cuts to the Correspondance version of Jacques display concern for the potential displeasure of his elevated readership. These include the ‘Bigre’ and ‘Foutre’ passages. See Proust in Diderot (1981:4–6). As work on Politeness by Holtgraves (1984) and Slugoski (1985) emphasizes, intimacy is no guarantee of either friendship or solidarity between participants, while solidarity may exist in circumstances marked by both formality and social distance. See Brown and Levinson (1987:15–16). In contrast to Diderot’s celebrated physical familiarity with his patroness. See Wilson (1985:525–6). This differs from the twentieth-century dynamics between tenor and medium described by Kress (1988:97). The evidence of later readers supports this view. Wilson, for example, places himself and his own contemporaries in a direct and personal relationship with Diderot’s creative mind, made possible through their access to written materials not available to Diderot’s contemporaries. For Wilson, the written text is evidence of Diderot’s most private self (1985:288). See Mylne (1965:192–220) for an attempt to rehabilitate Diderot’s non-conformity to nineteenth-century narrative conventions from within this framework. Hobson comments that this approach imposes the principle of adequatio on texts constructed on a different principle of illusion (1982:81). Orr (1991:118–24) condemns the metaphors employed in critical descriptions of such patterns for reinforcing the concept of a unified and ordered norm against which they are set. However, Jacques le fataliste invites their reading against this frame, while exposing the artifice of convention. This level includes embedded sub-world narratives. See Hobson (1982:131) for a diagram of the dual status of some protagonists as both ‘told-about’ and tellers. See, for example, Smith (1978:8) and Pagnini (1987:6–7). Fludernik also points out that ‘the communication on each of these levels is of a very different kind from the interaction on the others’ (1993:442). Hobson suggests that the process of substitution and supplementarity of Jacques le fataliste, in which narratives displace each other, allows a zone of attention towards only one narrative level, while ‘keeping a structured field of possibilities just outside the zone of attention’ (1982:136). This corresponds to Emmott’s distinction

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30

31

32

33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

(1995) between priming and focusing in the cognitive tracking of fictional entities and her concept of frame-switch. Hobson’s emphasis on the impossibility of focus on more than one world level does not, however, inhibit a pattern of complementarity in interpretive activities which allow echoes and counter-echoes between levels (1982:128). And, of course, in an intertextual relationship with the fictional-world models of other texts. Literary theorists often employ Jakobson’s term, ‘shifters’ (1971), to describe the elements of text which must be interpreted in relation to the context of utterance. His term places the emphasis on their context-dependent referential contingency, while the term ‘deictic’ expresses their function of orientation. For example, Barthes’ ‘degré zéro’ narration in the ‘passé simple’ (1972), which marks temporal distance without designating a telling subject, and Fludernik’s agentless reflector narration where the deictic centre is transferred to a protagonist (reflector). It can also occur in narratives with indicators of subjectivity which cannot be attached to either a narrating persona or a protagonist. Fludernik suggests that this allows the projection of the reader into the slot of the experiencing self (1993:391–5). Another dimension in this interaction is created for Diderot’s limited audience by his introduction of stories and characters from his own social circle. See Vernière (1987). These devices exemplify Harshav’s contention (1984) that internal and external fields of reference co-exist in fictional worlds as separate but interdependent domains (see Furst 1995:36). Loy (1984:167) links the self-designation of Diderot’s text as ‘rapsodie’ (230) to Boyer’s French/English dictionary definition of rhapsody as a ‘recueil confus de plusieurs choses de divers auteurs; mauvais ramas ou recueil de prose ou de vers; rhapsody, a confused collection or compilation’ (1729). It should, however, be remembered that the tradition of philosophical scepticism concerning mutual understanding is a long one. See Taylor (1992). In this, Jacques le fataliste draws less attention to its written and physical form than Sterne’s text, with its squiggles, and marbled and black pages. This might be taken as confirmation that the difference of opinion between France and Lakoff on the balance of orality and literacy results from differences in national cultural contexts. This is a separate issue from that of the communicative status of fiction, despite their confusion by certain theorists. Benveniste is emphatic in refusing this distinction: ‘La distinction que nous faisons entre récit historique et discours ne coincide donc nullement avec celle entre langue écrite et langue parlée’ (1966:242). As Wales (1989:183–5) emphasizes, citing the work of Winter (1982) and Hoey (1983), monologue is itself dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. Leech and Svartvik (1975) describe this as the ‘the type of language we use publicly for some serious purpose’ (see Leckie-Tarry 1995:124). Consider, for instance, the treatment of the editor role by Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). It also produces opposite readings. For Chabut, the text generates an infinite regress of authority (1989:265–6). For Scherer and Alter, it asserts Diderot’s creative authorship (1972:178, and 1975:79–80).

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42 See, for instance, the passage on Bacbuc (231–4) for the link to Rabelais. There is also a less explicit link in the spurious recommendation to the narratee to ‘go and see for himself’ at the end of the text. 43 Of course this guarantee of truth rests on another telling. 44 This passage occurs immediately after one of Meister’s major cuts in the Correspondance, and is read by Proust as Diderot’s response to this editorial imposition (Diderot 1981:6). 45 Booth’s ‘career author’ (1979:270). 46 The treatment of naming in Jacques le fataliste, already discussed in relation to Gousse and the ‘ami de mon capitaine’-Guerchy story (see pp. 30–1), confirms this. The building of a meaningful relationship between epithet nouns, proper nouns and roles is both encouraged and confounded (compare the respective names and roles of Jacques, Diderot the master and the ‘lecteur’). 47 See Goffman (1979) and Levinson (1988) for discussions of the problems of the tie between speakers and speech itself. 48 This tension is, of course, doubled by the philosophical debate of Jacques le fataliste in which Jacques, as reader of his world, seeks to read the invisible Word of the unknown coiner, and re-doubled by critical debate on the conclusions to be drawn concerning Diderot’s position (see Sherman 1976:132–3). 49 In this book, I reserve the term ‘narratee’ and ‘narratees’ for an overtly addressed fictional reader-figure or group. This differs from Prince’s use of the term which includes covert narratee positions which merge with other narratologists’ ‘implied readers’. Prince’s view of narrative demonstrates the idealization of the singular addressed narratee, despite his inclusion of plural narratees. Indeed, he suggests that a narratee with contradictory characteristics may be a signal of a fallible narrator (1996:196). 50 This tactic will be seen in modified form in Balzac’s incipit and Zola’s preface. Perhaps the most extreme modern manifestation of it occurs in La Chute by Camus (1956). 51 Diderot’s discussion of ‘foutre’, linked with that of ‘Bigre’, points to a passage in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which adds a further twist to the image of ‘Foutez comme des ânes déâbtés’. For ‘Fou-ter’ and ‘Bou-ger’ are the words which ‘will force any horse, or ass, or mule, to go up a hill whether he will or no; be he never so obstinate or ill-willed, the moment he hears them uttered, he obeys’ (1967:485). In order to conform to propriety, the production of these words is split between the voices of two nuns. This intertext produces the additional script of the split voice of Diderot, which uses these words as spurs to unwilling readers to climb the hill of his narrative.

3 ‘THE NOVEL’ AS WE KNOW IT?: BALZAC’S LE PERE GORIOT 1 Although page references are to the Pléiade edition, I refer to the chapter divisions of the second Werdet edition (‘Une Pension bourgeoise’, ‘L’Entrée dans le monde’, ‘Trompe-la-Mort’ and ‘La Mort du père’) which were suppressed when the novel was published as part of the Comédie humaine (1843), initially as part of Scènes de la vie parisienne, and later in the Scènes de la vie privée.

NOTES 215

2 The discussion of Sarraute’s Portrait d’un inconnu in chapter seven will show the continued influence of this model 3 See, in particular, Brooks (1976), Prendergast (1978), Vanoncini (1984) and Schuerewegen (1990). Brooks has emphasized the role of the melodramatic in Balzac’s texts, suppressed by readers who promoted him as the precursor of Realism and Naturalism. Prendergast and Vanoncini concentrate on the manipulations of contemporary readers’ schema knowledge of society in Balzac’s texts, mediated by the cultural intertexts of both literature and history. The former emphasizes the destabilisation of the conventional relationships between generic forms and the contemporary doxa, while the latter points to a cultural context of uncertainty and the precarious generic spaces within which Balzac works. Schuerewegen has used this context of culture as a backdrop for a reading of Balzac’s novels through Lacanian theory and has suggested that the apparent tyranny of the Balzacian narrator should not be viewed as evidence of Balzac’s control over his readers, but instead as proof of the problems of control experienced by authors of the period when faced with the anonymity and otherness of their audiences. 4 See Prendergast (1978: chapter two), Vanoncini (1984:65) and Schuerewegen (1990:158–9 and 167–8). 5 A view propounded by Balzac himself in the ‘Avant-propos’ to the Comédie humaine (Balzac 1951:7). 6 It should be remembered that a similar reworking of convention was taking place in the theatre in the 1820s and 1830s, supported by another major novelist, Stendhal, in his Racine et Shakespeare (1823–1825). 7 The function of Le Père Goriot as part of the Comédie humaine cannot be ignored (indeed, the first preface to this novel acts as a form of prospectus for the Comédie). However, in keeping with the principles of this book, I consider this novel as an individual text, produced in a context in which the Comédie was still a project. 8 This incipit has been extensively discussed on both grounds. However, most discussions focus on ‘All is true’ and the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’ (Schuerewegen’s term (1990:21–2)), and their immediately surrounding co-text. I here consider these in the wider context of the whole opening paragraph. 9 At this time in France, the modes of historical and literary writing had not undergone the extreme polarization of the end of the century. Nevertheless, the claim to identity is reserved for a genre whose ontological status is furthest from that of the novel. 10 The change in epigraph occurred when Le Père Goriot was published as part of the Comédie humaine. It is justified within the Comédie through the links between Saint-Hilaire’s organicist and synthetic theories and the patterns of this larger group of texts. Comparison of the prefaces to the novel and the ‘Avant-Propos’ to the Camédie (1842) also reveals a shift from literary references to analogies with history and science, in particular the natural sciences. 11 Bellos has shown how contemporary critics, led by Sainte-Beuve deplored the loss of classical unity, despite the fact that this was also occurring in the theatre. See, for example, the remarks of the reviewer in Le Constitutionnel (25 mars 1835): ‘bien posé dans sa première partie, plein d’intérêt quoique un peu lent […] décline quand arrive le drame […] Le premier trait de l’auteur est vrai, il est pur; mais il le

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12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24

25

charge ensuite tellement que la figure grimace.’ (quoted in Bellos 1976:9, and Castex 1963:xlix) Earlier versions of the text were explicit on the ‘sens vrai’, including poison, blood, and the standard features of melodrama. Their removal in later editions makes the non-identity with the theatre more general. It also pre-empts possible accusations of self-contradiction, for potions and duels will be a feature of this novel, albeit, in the case of the duel, at the level of the sidelined Victorine sub-plot. See Vanoncini (1984:51–2) on the continued prevalence of this view. Prendergast is, however, selective in his reference to the co-text, concentrating on the association of poetry and exaggeration with melodrama, passing briefly over the question of reader indifference, and focusing on the perception of literature as a phenomenon of mass consumption (1978:186). All the world may be a stage, but the ‘illusion comique’ of theatre cannot overcome the facticity of the entrances and exits of the players. Vautrin describes himself as a poet of a different sort: ‘Mes poésies, je ne les écris pas: elles consistent en actions et en sentiments’ (938). See Brooks (1976) for a more extensive discussion of the Gothic features of Balzac’s work, which he includes under the heading of melodrama. This binary division into pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary texts becomes less clear-cut in Balzac’s later novels, which present a more cyclical view of historical and literary patterns. See, for example, La Cousine Bette (1847). The Gaultier basque would be considered self-reflexive. Schuerewegen limits the initial reading contract of the novel to the apostrophe to the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’ who, as he rightly says, is expelled from the text (1990: 20–2). As result, he suggests that Le Père Goriot begins with a contract which is never actualized. This leads him to polarize possible reader positions, proposing relationships of submission or aggression, of slavish solidarity or oppositional conflict. He thus suppresses the variety and nuances which characterize the interpersonal negotiation of the opening pages, and does not address the degrees of their actualization in the course of the novel. See Falconer (1980) for a contestation of Barthes’s reading of the role of the maxim in Balzac’s novels. Prince, like Schuerewegen, seems to consider that there is only one narratee in the incipit, the ‘lecteur à la main blanche’, while distinguishing this figure from the Virtual reader’ (1996:191–2). But this opening demonstrates the possibility of a multiplicity of narratees according to his definition of the term, of whom the indifferent narratee is only one. Whether we interpret the benign narrator as a cynical strategy to secure the reader’s co-operation, or as a manifestation of a gesture of good will, in which a potentially aggressive voice opts not to perform an FTA, remains, of course, a moot point. The suppression of reference to the comic features of the text is noticeable. Attempts to read this book through the filter of sentimentality are doomed to failure, given the comic interferences introduced into what should by rights be the most tragic scene, Goriot’s death. Negative epistemic modality is produced by a variety of signals which reduce the commitment of the narrator to knowledge (in this case, knowledge of the reader). These include modal auxiliaries, adverbs, and lexical verbs which express supposition, not assertion. Balzac also uses transitivity patterns which support this

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27

28

29

30 31

32

33

34

35

negative modal shading, such as the passive, and the suppression of specific agency through generalized pronouns. See Simpson (1993:46–118) on modalization and transitivity. Schuerewegen (1990:21) contends, against Genette, that this is a female reader. Despite the historical evidence that many of Balzac’s readers were women, enshrined in Sainte-Beuve’s claim that his popularity depended on the flattery of women implied by the plots of his novels (see Bellos 1976:9), there is little in the text to indicate a gender for his implied reader (let alone his bad narratee). See Mounoud-Anglés (1994) for an excellent study of the correspondence between Balzac and his female readers. Both of these strategies reduce imposition on negative face, through their nonspecific reference to the addressees and the presentation of the FTA as a general rule (see Brown and Levinson 1987:197 and 206–7). At this stage in its history, the novel occupies a space which is at mid-point between private and public reading, between the ‘boudoir’ and the ‘cabinets de lecture’ referred to in Balzac’s first preface. The conditions of the latter differ from the shared public readings of the salons, and the experience of the theatre, in their isolation of the reader in the crowd of other silent readers. Intra and extra muros can also be read through reference to the Paris-provinces pair. See Falconer: ‘On pourrait soutenir […] que ces points de repère, ces pauses— pauses relatives, on l’a vu, leur contenu étant solidement attaché au code diégétique —auraient pour tâche d’arracher le lecteur au récit, de le ramener pendant quelques instants à lui-même (un peu comme les interventions si chères à un Gide ou à un Sterne), de le libérer enfin de l’emprise réellement tyrannique du récit.’ (1980:97) See van Rossum-Guyon on reading the book as world and the world as book (1980: 137). The plot of Le Père Goriot is, of course, open-ended in its proleptic anticipation of Rastignac’s future activities in other texts of the Comédie. It nevertheless moves towards the completion of his apprenticeship. The didactic model is further undermined by the loss of the most perspicacious teaching-figures in the text: Madame de Beauséant and Vautrin. Although their influence endures in the choices made by Rastignac, even this semi-formal teaching is presented as inferior to the direct teachings of the world. In this respect, the parallel with the worldly novel is stronger than that with the pedagogical novel. Genette describes Balzac’s use of description as ‘d’ordre à la fois explicatif et symbolique’ (1969:58). See also Hamon’s account of description as ‘the crucial point at which the readability of a narrative is organized (or destroyed)’ (1982: 167), and McCarthy (1982:40–57) on the link between description and instructions for reading. The unresolved mysteries of Mme Vauquer’s and Vautrin’s lives show that revelation in this novel is focused on the workings of bourgeois and aristocratic society, not the Parisian other world. Although the existence of this other world is revealed at points where it affects and interferes with ‘le beau monde’, it remains alien, not knowable or controllable by institutional or social systems of order. Jameson remarks on the lack of force in the proleptic statements in Balzac’s works which ‘valent uniquement pour le moment où elles sont émises’ (1980:73). The same can be said here of analepsis.

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36 The popularity of Balzac’s novels with female readers would appear, here, to be founded on faith in the sententious formulation rather than the evidence of the plot! (see note 26). 37 With less justification he also reads ‘Vous eussiez dit d’une Niobe de marbre’ (1059) as Rastignac’s assessment of Mme de Beauséant at the ball. Brooks considers Rastignac to be a supreme metaphor maker and attributes all the imagery of the ball scene to him. 38 See, for example, Brooks (1976:140), Fizaine (1982:176) and Steele (1988:40).

4 THE WRITTEN ARTEFACT AND THE AUTHORITY OF ABSENCE: FLAUBERT’S MADAME BOVARY 1 This shift is itself textualized in the narrative pattern of the opening chapter, which initially stages an unnamed homodiegetic witness-narrator who subsequently disappears from the text. 2 See Ullman (1964), Brombert (1966), Neefs (1973), Perruchot (1975), Haig (1986) and Ramazani (1988) on Flaubert’s use of the imperfect and ‘style indirect libre’. See Fludernik (1993) for a more general study. 3 Rader suggests that autonomous language ‘is not so much a reality as it is a goal or a felt need’ (1982:186). She distinguishes this type of language from imaginative fiction, which is ‘a kind of language use which maximally depends on the contribution of background information on the part of the reader’. However, the responsibility of the reader of Madame Bovary goes beyond the contribution of background information. 4 This remark by Eco is part of a broader defence of the belief that interpretation is constrained by the ‘intentio operis’ of the text. In his view, while authorial intention may be unknowable, to recognize the ‘intentio operis’ ‘is to recognize a semiotic strategy’. Thus, ‘the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader’ (1992:64 and 65). 5 Steele, writing of L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), aptly reformulates the critical ‘idée reçue’ drawn from Flaubert’s correspondence as ‘visible partout et présent nulle part’ (1988:38). 6 Barthes’s account of this process is one which affirms the agency of the author in every assertion he makes. Flaubert, ‘en maniant une ironie frappée d’incertitude, opère un malaise salutaire de l’écriture: il n’arrête pas le jeu des codes (ou l’arrête mal), en sorte que (c’est là sans doute la preuve de l’écriture) on ne sait jamais s’il est responsable de ce qu’il écrit (s’il y a un sujet derrière son langage); car l’être de l’écriture (le sens du travail qui la constitue) est d’empêcher de jamais répondre à cette question: Qui parle?’ (1970:146, my italics, with the exception of derrière and Qui parle?) 7 Porter emphasizes the ‘sonorous subliminal buzz’, the ‘stereophony which is registered by the reader as a reading in the body’, as an element in Flaubert’s novel which moves towards the vertigo of Barthesian ‘jouissance’ (1984:135). 8 See Bernheimer (1982:32) on the effacement of the semantic qualities of Flaubert’s writing by its material qualities. 9 See LaCapra (1982:15–64) for a full discussion of the issues raised by the trial.

NOTES 219

10 Madame Bovary bears out the view of critical discourse analysts that language-use is always ideological, regardless of the degree of manifestation of a modalized narrating voice (see pp. 8–9). To write a narrative of adultery is an act of social and moral commitment which no avowals of authorial detachment can efface. 11 Preface to Cromwell (1827) in Hugo (1963:436). 12 LaCapra proposes Homais as the ironic and self-parodic equivalent of the artist figure in the Kunstlerroman (1982:112), while Schor proposes Emma as the portrait ‘of the artist as a young woman’ (1988:71). She suggests that this is the essential aspect of ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, tracing signals of Emma’s ambitions to write and be published (1988:71–4). 13 In part two, for example, chapter six ends with the prediction by Homais that the ‘comices agricoles’ will almost certainly be held in Yonville (403), and chapter seven ends with Rodolphe’s plans to seduce Emma at the ‘comices’ (411). These two proleptic trailers are then fulfilled by the opening of chapter eight: ‘Ils arrivèrent, en effet, ces fameux Comices!’ (411) The redundant ‘en effet’ and the adjectival qualifier suggests a metafictional wink at Madame Bovary’s exemplary conformity to event-line decorum. 14 See, for example: ‘à la manière du cheval de manège, qui tourne en place les yeux bandés, ignorant de la besogne qu’il broie.’ (299); ‘Et son imagination, assaillie par une multitude d’hypothèses, ballottait au milieu d’elles comme un tonneau vide emporté à la mer et qui roule sur les flots.’ (460); and ‘puis, au craquement de ses bottines, il se sentait lâche, comme les ivrognes à la vue des liqueurs fortes’ (549). 15 Flaubert’s text is not without more direct employment of the Balzacian sentence: ‘elle se sentait au coeur cette lâche docilité qui est, pour bien des femmes, comme le châtiment tout à la fois et la rançon de l’adultère’ (515). Haig describes such interventions as ‘theolocutives’. He suggests that they do not simply mark a contradiction between Flaubert’s theory and practice, but may themselves be ‘located on a fault line between sapience and stupidity’ (1986:16–17). 16 The representation of thought is an altogether more complex affair. See Ramazani (1988:46–50 and 68–89) for a detailed discussion of the ambiguities, multiple sourcings and citations involved. 17 This is followed by Flaubert’s direct narratorial address concerning the resistance of language to expression discussed on pp. 76–7. 18 Haig remarks that this passage verges on the ‘charge’ in its degree of caricature (1986:62). He also points out that it is the counterpoint to Léon’s Romantic conversation with Emma on the mountains of Switzerland. He emphasizes that, despite the apparent contrasts between the two conversations, they are semantically isomorphic, as clichéd discourses on topography. This isomorphism binds the two strands of stupidity which appear, elsewhere, to be in opposition to each other according to a Romantic-Realist polarization. 19 The contrast between the pharmacist’s verbosity and Emma’s inability to speak is increased by the form in which their speech is presented. Whereas Homais is debunked through extensive direct citation, Emma’s language production is minimized through narratorial report of her speech act, not her words: ‘En de certains jours, elle bavardait avec une abondance fébrile’ (352). See Semino et al. (1997) on ‘narrator’s representation of voice’.

220 NOTES

20 See Schor (1988:66), who points out that Rodolphe, the voluntary deceiver, condemns his involuntary dupe, Charles, when the latter parrots his words back to him. 21 The implications of Emma’s games of make-believe and her interaction with fetish objects other than the cigar case (343–4) will be discussed below (pp. 93–7). 22 A major ambiguity, the invited stance towards Emma, is not discussed here. See Ramazani (1988) for an extensive and detailed account of the patterns of irony and the free indirect mode in this text and their implications for the empathy-distance conundrum of the novel. 23 See Booth (1974:36–7 and 41), who suggests that not only stable irony, but also such extreme unstable irony as that of Beckett depends on ‘a silent act of reconstruction of the author’s superior edifice, and on our ascent to dwell with him in silent communion while the “meaningless” drama enacts itself down below, on the surface of things’ (1974:263). 24 Despite LaCapra’s suggestion that Homais can be read as auto-parody (1982:112). 25 See Longacre (1983). Longacre’s transformational grammatical account of the surface and deep-structural patterns of narrative corresponds to the ‘histoire-récit’ distinction of narratology. Deep structure (which he describes as ‘plot’) corresponds to ‘histoire’, and surface structure to ‘récit’. Whereas his ‘notional’ deep structure corresponds to Halliday’s ideational function, surface-structure features combine all three functions. Longacre (1983:25–37) suggests that the deep notional structure of a narrative can be encoded by surface-structure features (linguistic, narratological and rhetorical). In his account, the Peak is a zone of turbulence in the surface structure which marks the climax of a text or a section of text. 26 Schor (1988:79) points out that the two great erotic scenes with Rodolphe and Léon also suppress linguistic communication. 27 Culler reads this as a repetition of the trope of the dangers of fiction for women which constitutes a flaw in the novel (1985:146–7), whereas Wimmers considers the main attack in this chapter to be on Emma’s reading habits (1988:65). 28 Bersani (1988:34–5) and Ramazani (1988:60–1) suggest that Emma’s reductive concretizing of signs entails their effacement because they connote a synthetic concept such as ‘love’ which is purely linguistic. By contrast, Peterson (1994:126) claims that Emma fails to synthesize these images. 29 Peterson’s proposal that Emma’s misreadings are the result of alienation from the outside world appears extreme. Not only does Emma share her interpretive practice in the convent and with Léon, but social integration and shared interpretations are no guarantee of good reading in Madame Bovary. 30 Porter (1984:125–31) singles out this passage as a ‘texte de plaisir’ in the Barthesian sense. 31 I do not know whether some of my pleasures in Madame Bovary are produced by my own blindness, but this does not detract from them. 32 While the ascription of intentions to the writer is the responsibility of the reader in all texts, Madame Bovary refuses the reader the illusion that this is not the case. Any reader who acknowledges the presence of ambiguity in Madame Bovary and who embarks on conscious speculations concerning its implications is also obliged to recognize that his construction of Flaubert’s intentions, like his construction of his own role, is founded on hypothesis, not fact.

NOTES 221

5 THE DOUBLY-AUTHORIZED TEXT—PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SOCIAL ROLES: ZOLA’S L’ASSOMMOIR 1 This debate on the social and aesthetic function of the literary text was instrumental in bringing Zola’s work to the attention of the general public. See Pagès (1993:62– 6) for a summary of its effect on Zola’s reputation. 2 Albert Millaud, Le Figaro (1 Sept 1876) and B.de Fourcauld, Le Gaulois (21 Sept 1876). See Zola (1961:1557 and 1558). 3 Arthur Ranc, in La République française, criticized Zola for his Nero-like attitude towards the working classes. See Zola (1961:1560). 4 See Gaillard (1978) and Petrey (1978) for discussions of the relationships between L’Assommoir and contemporary ideological and political epistemologies. 5 See Mitterand (1963) on the development of Zola’s public image as creator and theorist and the influence of his public and private assertions on this image. See also Baguley (1990a:40–70) for a broader view of the complexities of the interactions between the public statements of Naturalist writers and their fictional output. 6 The serialization of L’Assommoir began in Le Bien public in April 1876, and was suspended in June. It was then transferred to La République des Lettres (July 1876January 1877). The first book edition appeared at the beginning of 1877. 7 As Viti remarks, the only point on which everyone agrees is ‘l’absence totale de lien pertinent’ between Thérèse Raquin and its preface (1994:29). He emphasizes that the earlier novel’s preface should be read as an answer to Ullbach’s ‘La Littérature putride’ (Le Figaro, 23 January 1868). 8 Anatole France defended Zola along these lines: ‘Vous ne pouvez traduire fidèlement les pensées et les sensations d’un être que dans sa langue’ (Le Temps, 27 June 1877, in Zola 1961:1563). Zola’s situation of this novel as part of the larger cycle of the Rougon-Macquart supports such a view, emphasizing that the depiction of a popular milieu and the use of popular French is not fundamental to his identity as a writer but one choice among many in his portrayal of different areas of French society. 9 This echoes his remarks on the figure of the artist in his 1865 article on the Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux, in which he suggests that ‘Une oeuvre est simplement une libre et haute manifestation d’une personnalite’ (see E. and J.de Goncourt 1990: 278). This article reads, in retrospect, more as a manifesto and summary of L’Assommoir than as a description of the Goncourts’ novel. In it, Zola suggests that the duty of the public faced with innovation in literature is ‘de constater ses nouvelles formes, de vous incliner devant tout oeuvre qui vit’ (1990:286). This follows the Romantic incorporation of the production of art into the natural order. Zola also presents originality specifically in terms, not of convention-breaking and convention-forming, not of ‘écoles’, but of the Romantic view of the work of art as transcendent personal vision: ‘Lorsqu’on sera bien persuadé que le véritable artiste vit solitaire, lorsqu’on cherchera avant tout un homme dans un livre, on ne s’inquiétera plus des différentes écoles, on considérera chaque oeuvre come le langage particulier d’une âme, comme le produit unique d’une intelligence.’ (1990: 286) This passage in the preface of L’Assommoir also reworks the words of one of

222 NOTES

10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19

20 21

23 24 25

26

the most vital of Romantic heroes, the lion-like Hernani: ‘Tu me crois peut-être/Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un être/ Intelligent, qui court droit au but qu’il rêva/Détrompe-toi. Je suis une force qui va’ (Hernani, 1830, Act III Scene 4). Zola’s version combines the intentions of intelligence with the force of nature. See, for instance, Dubois (1973), Baguley (1975), Petrey (1978), Allard (1978), and Laurey Martin (1993). ‘Documentary’ in terms of both his personal observations and other written sources for his work, whether literary (the novels of Balzac, Sue, and the Goncourts), or non-literary (Poulot’s Le Sublime (1870), Delvau’s Dictionnaire de la langue verte (1868) and Magnan’s De l’alcoolisme (1874)). See Crisp (1996) for a development of Johnson, Lakoff and Turner’s cognitive adaptation of Kant’s ‘image schema’. See Dubois (1973:96) on carnival and (1973:52) on refuges. See Harrow for an assertion of the importance of the narrative of the dressed/ undressed body as a topos in Zola’s novel, in particular, the ‘eroticized body of visual curiosity’ (1997:144). Her examples of male viewer and viewed female body centre on Lantier-Amanda, and Goujet-Gervaise. See Dubois (1973:52) on this movement as ‘repli’. Harrow suggests that Gervaise reads in Lalie’s body the signs of her ‘own imminent brutalization. The narrative confirms the body as a site of recognition and locus for meaning, designating the body of the other as a mediating object in the construction of self’ (1997:155). The Interest Principle is associated with the abnormal and the newsworthy. Leech cites newspapers and news broadcasts, where ‘interestingness, and hence newsworthiness, is strongly associated with what is unpleasant. (“Bad news is good news.”)’ (1983:151). Ultimately sharing not only their ‘gueulement’ but also their ‘dégueulement’ with the ‘quartier’ (594–5). See Vissière (1958) for an extensive demonstration of the similarities between Zola’s narrative style and Cressot’s exhaustive description of ‘écriture artiste’ (1938). While Vissière’s main objective is to retrieve Zola’s status as a literary writer, he nevertheless demonstrates the integration of the ‘artiste’ and the ‘populaire’. See also Lethbridge’s discussion of the painterly aspect of Zola’s writing techniques. Lethbridge perceives L’Assommoir as a ‘texte en tableaux’, of which the central ‘mise en abyme’ is the visit to the Louvre (1993:160). In Genette’s categorization this therefore falls into the transformational category of parody, not the stylistic imitative category of pastiche (1982:33–8). See Becker for a close commentary of the opening pages (1992:12–23). Although both modes are mixed, the dominant function of description is ideational, while that of commentary is interpersonal. See Vissière (1958:464) on the poetic characteristics of this passage. See Pratt (1989) for a discussion of the ideological implications of the aestheticization of the landscape, as they relate to cultural power-positioning. The process of revelation of the ‘facts’ of the TAW is, however, quite different. Balzac relies on the gradual revelation of the unknown and the unexpected, while Zola relies on the anticipation of the inevitable. The minor register shift of ‘pissant’ in the first description of the ‘lavoir’ (386), surrounded as it is by collocations of dirt and vulgarity (‘ordurières […] brutales

NOTES 223

27 28

29

30

31

32 33 34 35

36

37

[…] dégingandées […] éclaboussements […] égouttures […] mares […] pataugeaient’), can be seen as a permissible enhancement of the atmosphere of the scene, rather than a major transgression by the narrating voice. Semino et al. (1997) classify this as ‘narrator’s representation of voice’. A competition which, for Baguley (1990b), at least, is won by Germinie Lacerteux. This view is generated by the frame of reference established by Baguley, who concentrates on Naturalist fiction’s ‘fundamentally disturbing body of themes’ as its major innovation (1990a:233). Becker has shown that this scene was included as a possible dénouement in Zola’s dossier, but does not link it to the Goncourts’ novel (1990:60). As Baguley notes, the Goncourts themselves protested that Zola had appropriated ‘la formule complète’ of their book (1990a:21 and 76). The final chapter of Germinie introduces a move towards moral indignation, but the Goncourts (more subtle in this respect than Zola) do not exploit the melodramatic pathos of the persecuted heroine which is introduced from the outset of L’Assommoir. Pagès (1993:75) suggests that this novel is ‘sans doute l’un des romans les plus «médicaux» de Zola’, because it begins under the walls of the hospital of Lariboisière and ends with Coupeau’s madness in Sainte-Anne. This is indisputable with regard to the physical boundaries of the TAW, but the politicization of the functions of these elements of the text does not allow the authorizing medical analogy projected by Le Roman expérimental. See Baguley (1978) for a full discussion of the tragic mechanism of the text. See Baguley (1975:831) for an account of the pyramid structure of the book, with this chapter at its apex. See, for instance, the discussion of Homais in the previous chapter (pp. 87–8). This begins: ‘O Paris! tu es le coeur du monde, tu es la grande ville humaine, la grande ville charitable et fraternelle’. It continues: ‘et voilà où tu jettes ceux qui meurent à te servir, ceux qui se tuent à créer ton luxe, ceux qui périssent du mal de tes industries, ceux qui ont sué leur vie à travailler pour toi, à te donner ton bienêtre, tes plaisirs, tes splendeurs, ceux qui ont fait ton animation, ton bruit, ceux qui ont mis la chaîne de leurs existences dans ta durée de capitale, ceux qui ont été la foule de tes rues et le peuple de ta grandeur!’ (1990:260–1). The apostrophe ends with a description of the stench of the rotting bodies in the cemeteries of the poor, disinterred to make room for the next occupants. Gervaise’s death can also be seen as a final move in Monty Pythonesque one-downmanship. Germinie is buried in an unmarked grave which will soon be dug up, while Gervaise, who dreamed of a small green space in the Père Lachaise cemetery (779), doesn’t get as far as burial and is already rotting. Mademoiselle visits Germinie’s grave, while Gervaise receives only the sympathy of a drunken Bazouge. Dubois claims that ‘la forme seule a effaré’ in the preface is a similar exercise in misdirection. He further speculates that Zola speaks more truly than he had intended to, frightening himself while refusing to admit the extent to which his novel is subversive (1973:108–9). I am not altogether convinced by this projection of Zola’s intentions. See Bourdieu, who is in no doubt that Zola ‘affirms in his work itself the superior dignity of literary culture and language, by which he should be recognized and for which he claims recognition’ (1996:117).

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6 SELF-ASSERTION AND THE DYNAMICS OF POWER: CÉLINE’S VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT 1 Indeed, there is a tendency in the field of Céline studies to read this first novel through the filter of the later works, viewing it as a preliminary stage in the ‘coming into being’ of Céline’s writing identity. This is, in part, founded on the development of Céline’s author-style, but it can also demonstrate a value judgement which prizes originality and difference, perceiving Céline’s manipulations of traditional forms as the burdens of an apprenticeship which can be thrown off by the mature writer. See Cresciucci: ‘Briser les cadres de la langue littéraire, faire passer l’émotion dans le langage écrit me semblent des affirmations seulement en projet dans Voyage. Ce n’est que dans les oeuvres postérieures que Céline atteint a cette musicalité libérée de la langue’ (1993:23). See also Noble (1987:53–4). 2 For example, Lucien Descaves, Sous-offs (1889) (put on trial in 1890 for its antimilitarist feeling), and Dabit, Hôtel du Nord (1929). Céline claimed in an early interview with Élisabeth Porquerol that Dabit had inspired him to write Voyage (see Dauphin and Godard 1976:46–7). See Godard (in Céline 1981:1224– 38) on the differences between the linguistic innovations of Céline’s novel and those of Barbusse, Dabit, Morand and Ramuz. 3 See Vitoux (1973), La Quérière (1973), Wolf (1993), Godard (1985 and 1991) and Latin (1988). 4 See Céline’s unbroadcast radio interview with Combelle, in Combelle (1987: 90– 1). 5 Latin, while rejecting identification between the world-views of Céline and Bardamu, posits a homology between ‘la fonction expressive du langage d’une part, le mode de narration et l’esthétique romanesques de l’autre’ (1988:312). 6 See Dauphin and Godard (1976:17–19) for an account of the race in the press to uncover the man behind the book. 7 See Amadou (1979), who traces the expulsion of Proust as rival from the text in the seventh chapter, and Ifri (1987), who demonstrates the ‘rémanences’ between the works of the two writers. 8 Gaudin places ‘moi’ over ‘histoire’, showing that the ‘manière de prière vengeresse’ of the first chapter can produce an intensive anagrammatic play on ‘Céline’. He remarks: ‘La raison d’une telle stratégie, nous pensons pouvoir la localiser dans un refus de la pratique fonctionnelle telle qu’elle était jusqu’alors faite: l’accent n’est plus à mettre sur «l’histoire», mais sur le fait que c’est «moi» qui raconte cette histoire, qui ne concerne que moi’ (1987:94). 9 For Gaudin (1987:91), Bardamu’s social rise in the second part of the novel is accompanied by a gradual ‘apprentissage de l’écriture’. This transforms the protagonist-victim into a controller of words who eliminates his rivals, both as protagonist and as narrator. This progress is less smooth or complete than Gaudin’s account suggests. 10 A full critical reading of Céline’s novels as vision is found in Ostrovsky (1967). 11 See Céline’s remarks on the power relationships between author and audience in ‘Qu’on s’explique.’ (Candide, 16 March 1933). On authors ‘qui vous endorment et qu’on méprise in petto’ he comments: ‘A la lecture, c’est l’envie d’aider l’auteur

NOTES 225

12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

23

24 25 26

27

28 29

qui nous domine, tellement ces pensums se traînent de redites en consonnes’. On those who ‘vous réveillent et qu’on insulte’, he comments: ‘La haine rend décidément encore plus bête que l’amour’ (Dauphin and Godard 1976:57). See Godard in Céline (1981:1291) for a discussion of possible sources. As Noble (1987:44) points out, this type of text is itself parasitic on fictional texts. Earlier signals of orality are not foregrounded in the same way, and serve as more general indications of informality and intimacy. Ehrlich (1995:88–9) shows how repetition in spoken discourse serves this function. For Noble, these patterns of performance at the level of ‘histoire’ pose ‘the problem of the relation of the narrating subject to his own discourse, and to the discourses of others which appear in the text’. The fatal mistake of the narrator is to have spoken (1987:31). Latin, by contrast, describes this opening as ‘une rupture de silence libératrice’ (1988:286). Latin borrows Kristeva’s term, ‘ouverture-programme’, to describe this chapter, reading the dialogue between Bardamu and Ganate as ‘une métaphore textuelle de l’histoire’ (1988:293). This 1949 preface is printed as an appendix in the Pléiade edition (Céline 1981: 1113–14). Latin has pointed out the reversibility of what she describes, following Barthes, as the aesthetic codes of the text (1988:408–60). See Godard in Céline (1981:1262–79) for a survey of contemporary reactions. See Godard (1991:52) and Latin (1988:317) for comments on this reading. See Bellosta (1990:18–22) on the similarities between the first part of the novel, in particular, and Candide. For Hewitt, the fantastic philosophical and satirical journey combines with ‘l’imagination pure’ to signal the genre of ‘voyages imaginaires’ (1993:107). See Godard in Céline (1981:1246–8) and Noble (1987:42) for discussions of the implications of the Montaigne episode. Ifri (1987:109) remarks that Proust is the only near-contemporary of Céline to whom there is a direct allusion in the novel. Godard interprets this debunking of an apparent spokesman for Céline as ‘autoparodie’ (1985:135, note 6). Latin (1988:295–7) points out the lack of verisimilitude in the rhetorical moves made by the participants. See Sell on the uncanniness of politeness in the literary text: ‘Obsequious overselection would rule out much of the pleasure of literary texts, much irony and satire, much gentle goading of the reader by the writer. Dull overpresentation, again, would rule out certain elements of surprise, suspense, or intellectual and moral stimulus, generally leaving the reader with too little work to do for himself’ (1991:222). See also Noble (1987:27–9) on the types of delirium writing in Voyage. Noble criticizes Vitoux for the critical infelicity of collapsing the identities of narrator and author. While Vitoux is certainly methodologically suspect in his reading of the text as a transparent means of access to the ‘true’ voice and feelings of the writer, this reading nevertheless reflects the strong invitation in Voyage to do just this. Gaudin (1987:89) has noted this aspect of Voyage. See Céline’s remark to Merry Bromberger: ‘Une autobiographie mon livre? C’est un récit à la troisième puissance. Céline fait délirer Bardamu qui dit ce qu’il sait de Robinson.’ (in Dauphin and Godard 1976:31)

226 NOTES

30 See Latin: ‘Le paradoxe consiste en ce que l’écriture renvoie constamment à l’instance de l’auteur implicite sans jamais en permettre la reconnaissance.’ (1988: 318) 31 Bardamu does, occasionally, refer to his current situation as a public writer: ‘si elle peut encore me lire’ (236). 32 Latin’s insistence (1988:318) on the role of the unintentional and the subconscious in Céline’s performance does not remove the social responsibility of the language event.

7 THE NOVEL AS MEDIATION: SARRAUTE’S PORTRAIT D’UN INCONNU 1 See Minogue (in Sarraute 1996:1743) for an account of the failure of the first edition, despite Sartre’s supporting preface. The Gallimard edition of 1956 appeared in a more favourable climate. The critical writings of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute had come to public attention, and the intellectual influence of these writers would increase with their association in the 1960s with the Tel Quel group, although Sarraute always preserved a degree of distance from the promotion of selfreflexivity of Robbe-Grillet, Ricardou and the structuralists. It is impossible, now, not to read Sarraute’s fiction and critical writings in conjunction with each other, and indeed the periodical publication of the essays collected in L’Ere du soupçon (1956) began almost simultaneously with the first appearance of Portrait d’un inconnu. They thus comprise a significant element in the context of reception of the novel (see Jefferson 1997). I have, however, restricted reference to the essays to a minimum, as my concern is to evaluate the strategies of the novel itself. 2 As Jefferson points out, Les Fruits d’or (1963) addresses the field of literary criticism. Portrait, on the other hand, provides an object lesson in more general reading habits. Jefferson suggests that Portrait could be seen as ‘one long lesson’ on characterization, and compares the passage on War and Peace to Sarraute’s essays (1997:47). 3 See Knapp for a wholehearted adoption of this view: ‘Si le veritable artiste cherche à imposer sa vision personnelle du monde, il est contraint, quel que soit le domaine, à renverser un passé caduc’ (1994:28). Allemand (1980) and Wittig (1995) associate this explicitly with the connotative process of the poetic text. 4 After Martereau (1953), Sarraute abandoned the singular narrative voice, to return to it in L’Usage de la parole (1980) in modified form (see Sheila Bell 1997:15– 16). 5 These assumptions are, of course, still in force in the 1990s, and are the basis for many of the analytical categories of narratology. 6 Described in ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ as the writer’s own ‘parcelle de réalité’ (Sarraute 1996:1614). 7 Tropismes was the title of Sarraute’s first collection of short prose pieces, published in 1939. This collection can be seen as more innovative in generic terms than Portrait d’un inconnu, falling so thoroughly between the categories of prose poem and short story that its texts resist any generic classification. In it, Sarraute writes a series of ‘tropismes’. In Portrait, she writes a novel which is tropistic.

NOTES 227

8 See Kristeva (1974:22–37) and Serres ((1977:200), (1980) and (1972:143 and 144– 5)). 9 See Newman (1976), Allemand (1980) and Minogue (1981) for extensive discussions of the linguistic and narratological structures of Sarraute’s novels. 10 For example: ‘Rien ne subsiste des obsessions, des tourments de la nuit’ (113), and ‘Rien de commun maintenant, pas le moindre lien entre lui et la forme grotesque de la nuit’ (116). This follows Polyani’s description of the patterns of re-insertion in oral narratives (1978). These are discussed by Fludernik (1996:61). 11 This poem appears, appropriately, in ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (1861). The transformed section is: ‘Vous qui fûtes la grâce ou qui fûtes la gloire,/Nul ne vous reconncaît! […] Honteuses d’exister, ombres ratatinées,/peureuses, le dos bas, vous côtoyez les murs;/ Et nul ne vous salue, étranges destinées!’ (my italics). In Sarraute’s text, the fear and submission of this group of Baudelaire’s ‘vieilles’ is transformed into threat, while the attitude of the speaking subject is transformed from paternal protection to infantile fear. This reversal of roles will occur again in the later railway scene (94–101), as the innocuous appearance of another ‘vieille ratatinée’ conceals a threat to the father. 12 From the awakening of both ‘elles’ and Emma at night, to their indiscriminate search for textual props to support their dreams, this section provides the twentiethcentury equivalent of the opening of part one, chapter nine of Madame Bovary (1951:343–4). 13 The city becomes hyperfictional here. Paris in Rilke’s text is filtered through the sub-world perceptions and emotions of his fictional narrator, Malte, which are filtered through the sub-world thoughts of the fictional narrator of Portrait. The gentle old woman seated on the bench next to the narrator also replaces the bellicose pride of Baudelaire’s ‘vieille’ who sits ‘à l’écart sur un banc’ listening to a brass band. 14 Labov perceived these features of his model of natural narrative to be the neces sary conditions for a classification of a text as narrative. Recent theorists have questioned this assumption (Fludernik 1996a and Gibson 1996). However, Labov’s model reflects the dominant patterns of the fictional narratives of the tradition with which Sarraute engages. 15 From Aristotle’s mythos and Forster’s king and queen to Prince (1982), RimmonKenan (1983) and Branigan (1992). See also Ricoeur (1983–5). 16 Knapp’s account of this novel shows how these can be transformed into a traditional plot summary (1994:49–62). 17 The appearance in the TAW of fictional entities with proper names, Dufaux (57), and Dumontet (200) coincides with these two points. The overdetermination of these names is overt, the first signalling the inauthenticity of convention and the second its triumph. 18 Whereas Mallarmé, in this early poem, evokes the striving of the poetic persona towards the Ideal, Sarraute’s striving obviously involves contact with the human. Both, however, textualize an attempt to break through a physical barrier, whether Mallarmé’s glass or Sarraute’s ‘carapace’, and to move beyond language and writing, on Mallarmé’s wings ‘sans plume’. The Sarrauteian focus on interiors also links her work to Baudelaire’s prose poem of the same name (1863), but the latter distances the poetic persona from the illuminated interior scenes which are only stimuli to the experience of selfhood. The windowpanes thus serve as a surface to

228 NOTES

19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27

28

29

30 31 32

33 34

deflect the outward gaze of the subject in a parabolic return to its own imaginative activities. Reflected in the sub-title of Minogue’s chapter on Portrait (1981:30–57): ‘Death of an infant narrative’. It should be remarked that Balzac would not allow this ending to his female protagonists. Indeed, he would treat Dumontet with an irony similar to Sarraute’s. Given the wealth of critical discussion of the issue of characterization in Portrait, I shall not say any more on this. Dostoyevsky is, of course, the positive model in Sarraute’s essay, ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ (Sarraute 1996:1557–77). As Minogue remarks, Sarraute described this move as ‘renoncer à soi pour être dans le sujet’ (Sarraute 1996:1748). This image of the narrator, produced through the agency of inanimate objects, provides a transition to the vision of himself through the eyes of others, which contributes to the movement towards conventional integration at the end of the book. Allemand adopts a different stance towards the tense patterns of the novel which, in his view, cannot be consistently related to a secure narrating consciousness. He describes, for instance, the scene of the father’s return to his study after the railway station scene as ‘ni observé, ni évoqué, ni imaginé: il a lieu’ (1980:178). This allows a closer association between the floating ‘parole’ of narration and the authorial voice, although Allemand, like Jefferson (1980:119–33), inclines towards the ‘adventures of language without a text producer’ interpretation. The status of the narrative voice and the fictional medium of production is complex and will be discussed further below (pp. 169–72). See Allemand: ‘La liberté avec laquelle [le témoin narrateur] recompose ce qu’il observe est l’exacte expression de la liberté d’interpretation dont jouit tout lecteur’ (1980:163). The portrait is not the only link between the title and elements of the fictional world, as Jefferson has pointed out. ‘Inconnu’ can also refer to both the father and the narrator. For Jefferson, the major function of this ‘mise en abyme’ concerns processes of characterization (1980:64 and 67). In the first description, the simile of touch for vision contributes to the synaesthetic category crossing of the text, while the ‘fixing’ of the emotions by the portrait suggests that the capacity of text to be read as a pattern of successive moments in time gives it an advantage over the stasis of the painted image. Miguet (1990–1) suggests a link between this picture and Frenhofer’s painting in Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1832). The detailed references to income from property contribute to the Balzacian quality of the ending. Nevertheless, the aesthetic hierarchy follows that in Balzac’s novels. This echoes Mallarmé’s description of music in ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ (1896): ‘On peut, du reste, commencer d’un éclat triomphal trop brusque pour durer; invitant que se groupe, en retards, libérés par l’écho, la surprise’ (1945: 384). Both from ‘Avant-dire’ to René Ghil’s Traité du verbe (1886), in Mallarmé (1945: 857). ‘Avant-dire’, Mallarmé (1945:857).

NOTES 229

35 Raffy (1988:15–66) has noted the similarity between the social interactions of Portrait and Goffman’s accounts of social behaviour. Brown and Levinson’s Politeness model (1987) derives in part from Goffman’s work. 36 Minogue (1981:30–57) calls him ‘N’ to avoid this problem. Newman, following Pingaud, classifies the narration of Portrait as a ‘discours prêté’ (1976:98), considering the narrator to be a ‘locuteur’. He later describes him as ‘scripteur de ses propres «rêveries»’ (1976:136). 37 See Minogue (1981:33–6) for a discussion of the rhymes and rhythms of this opening section. 38 There is a vast body of material on the association of parataxis with unplanned discourse and hypotaxis with planned discourse. See also Chafe (1982) for an outline of the linguistic features spoken and written text production, and an account of the contextual circumstances which give rise to the differences between them. 39 The syntactic similarity between this sentence and the quotation on music from Mallarmé’s ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ is striking (see note 32). 40 E.L.Doctorow, cited in Spencer (1996:19). 41 See Clayton: ‘Tout l’effort de l’écriture sarrautienne est de préserver à cela […] son caractère virtuel, de le maintenir en deçà du figement cadavérique qui est pour Sarraute la marque de ce qui a déjà trouvé sa forme ou son nom.’ (1989:5)

8 FURTHER DYNAMICS OF WORLD-PLAY: PEREC’S W OU LE SOUVENIR D’ENFANCE 1 There are a number of modifications to this pre-text, most of which are minor (see Bellos 1993:546). 2 Throughout this chapter, A will be used to refer to the fictional Gaspard Winckler narrative of part one, and B to the fictional narrative of the island, W, in part two. A and B refer to the two parts of the autobiographical narrative. The typography of these labels thus reflects that of the text. Quotations from A and B will also be given in italics. 3 Made explicit in the serialized version in the ‘story so far’ summary which introduced the first chapter of B (La Quinzaine littéraire 97, 16 January 1970): ‘Il n’y avait pas de chapitres précédents. Oubliez ce que vous avez lu; c’était une autre histoire, un prologue tout au plus, ou bien un souvenir si lointain que ce qui va venir ne saurait que le submerger. Car c’est maintenant que tout commence, c’est maintenant qu’il part à sa recherche.’ (quoted in Lejeune 1991:88) 4 Like many of Perec’s works, W ou le souvenir d’enfance is a mosaic of ‘recitation’. 5 Ribière is, of course, fully aware of the complexities of the patterns of modalization and de-authorization of the text, but this does not prevent a belief that the metageneric pattern guarantees truth-conditional propositions concerning actual-world events, a view shared by Motte (1984). This approach privileges a view of autobiography as a text-type which draws its authority from the verifiable events of a life and takes the goal of the text to be the collection of evidence. Assertions supported by the citation of external non-fictional sources in sections of the text which signal their conformity to non-fictional conventions are taken as an

230 NOTES

6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16

unproblematic ontological framework within which to set the other elements of the text. The work of Lejeune (1991:82–5) and Bellos (1993:546–53), in particular, has demonstrated how insecure this framework is, in relation to both Perec’s personal history and European history. For Colonna, italic type marks deviation and exception from a textual norm represented by roman type. While the consistent use of italics reduces their visual foregrounding, they nevertheless preserve these connotations, along with their archaic associations of facsimile manuscript (1988:20). This last would make them closer to the ‘hand’ of Perec than the roman type, reversing Colonna’s ‘écart’ pattern. The status of A as ‘data’ is not clear in Motte’s account. In the sense that each can be read without the other. Magné’s article demonstrates the links between their themes, topoi and lexis. Described by Magné as ‘le seul embrayeur entre les deux niveaux’ (1988:41). Readers who have already read the Quinzaine littéraire version can draw on their contextual knowledge to confirm this link. The serial version includes a narrative agent at a higher level, in the metacommentary of effacement and new departure which mediates the transition from A to B (see above, note 3). The abrupt transition is also justified by the constraints of the context of production and reception of serialized texts, in which the alreadypublished cannot be unwritten. The interpretive implications of ‘(…)’ are discussed below (note 28 and pp. 190– 1). With two exceptions. The first is the short introductory paragraph to B, which employs the conditional verb form: ‘Il y aurait, là-bas, à l’autre bout du monde, une île. Elle s’appelle W.’ (89) This use of the conditional as the introduction to a narrative in public report-mode text places the whole of the fiction of the second part under the sign of allegation and supposition. The second is the emergence of rhetorical and emotional underlining, through repetition and the use of free direct style, which introduces a degree of experiential focalization into the final chapter of B. This breakdown of the ‘degré zéro’ narrative occurs at a point in this narrative where fiction is transformed into history (see p. 185). Lejeune suggests that epistemic undermining is achieved mainly through footnotes in A and through ‘hyper-modalization’ in B (1991:68–9). But while there are certainly no footnotes in B, negative epistemic modalization is also present in A, albeit to a lesser extent than in B. This pattern can be accounted for by the epistemic assertions of the opening of each section. A opens with the negative assertion, ‘Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance’ (13). There is therefore a pre-posed negative shading of the whole section. B, on the other hand, opens, ‘Désormais les souvenirs existent, fugaces ou tenaces, futiles ou pesants, mais rien ne les rassemble’ (93). Here, assertion is accompanied by post-posed negative shading which initiates the modalization of the section as a whole. A is thus effaced before it begins, it is written under the heading of the non-existent. B has a tenuous relationship with existents, there is something to efface. Some of the chains of pre-texts for W ou le souvenir d’enfance are not signalled in the text. See Lejeune (1991:92–230). These particular pre-texts have not been found among Perec’s papers.

NOTES 231

17 The impossibility of the perfect copy is also emphasized by Perec’s reference to his earlier fictional Gaspard Winckler, the ‘faussaire de génie qui n’arrive pas à fabriquer un Antonello de Messine’ (142). ‘Recopier’ is often transformational in Perec’s work. An overt example is provided by the six ‘madrigaux transcrits, mot à mot, sans aucun marginalia, par la main d’Anton:—Bris marin, par Mallarmus— Booz assoupi d’Hugo Victor—Trois Chansons du fils adoptif du Commandant Aupick [Baudelaire].—Vocalisations, d’Arthur Rimbaud’ (La Disparition, 1994: 116). 18 Bellos shows that this quotation is adjusted by Perec to fit the ends of his book. Rousset’s description was that of camps for Aryan prisoners, not Jews (1993:551). ‘Re-citation’ is once again ‘récit-ation’. Bellos also discusses Perec’s presentation of provable fact as supposition by suppressing other documentary evidence available to him (1993:552). 19 Pedersen describes this as ‘l’écriture éclatée—percée par des corps étrangers’ (1985: 209). 20 As has been remarked by Leak (1990:87) and Lejeune (1991:64), the photograph of the scratch marks on the wall links this passage to the death of the child Gaspard’s mother, Caecilia, in A. 21 Werth (forthcoming: chapter 12.1) suggests that the relationships between world levels can be perceived according to a fractal principle of ‘self-similarity’. 22 Serres gives ‘mise en abyme’ as an example of ‘the hard logic of boxes’ (see Gibson 1996:221). 23 Because linguistic ‘mise en abyme’ is not produced by an image, but by the visualization process of reading, even the most self-reflexive form of the figure, in which micro-object is produced in macro-object, the book within a book (for example in Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’or, 1963), differs from the heraldic pattern from which the term originates. A TAW title is not the repetition of an actual-world title in miniature. It is our construction of the relationship between the two referents of the titles, and our conceptual situation of one in a fictional world, and the other in an extra-fictional world, which generates the imaging of a micro-structure within a macrostructure. The linguistic structures themselves exist in no such relationship. Only pragmatic and cognitive interpretive activity generates this effect. 24 These have received extensive critical attention, not least from Javaloyes-Espiè (1983), Motte (1984), Magné (1988), Leak (1990), Lejeune (1991), and Bellos (1993) demonstrating the power of their invitation to interpretation. 25 Bellos has convincingly argued that this inversion gains intertextual significance when related to Fritz Lang’s film, M. In this film the capture of a child-killing psychopath is enabled through the use of the chalk mark as sign (as such it reflects the theory of proper naming taken by Mill and Frege from the Arabian Nights tale of chalk marks on the door, in which the name itself has no intrinsic meaning). The film includes both a shot of the chalked M which inverts it to W, and of a nameplate for a Frau Elisabeth Winckler. The closing words of the film are ‘Mothers, take better care of your children!’. Bellos suggests that W as the inversion of M entails the corresponding inversion of this proposition: Children, take better care of your mothers! (1993:555). 26 Bellos (1993:548) notes the misrepresentation of the sign in Chaplin’s film, which placed two separate crosses one above the other.

232 NOTES

27 Bellos points out that the initiating figure for the development of the discussion of X is the ‘Croix de Saint-André’ (51), linking this figure to Perec’s supposedly imaginary and private name for his father (1993:73–4). 28 The ellipsis, ‘(…)’, occupies a network similar to that of X. It is linked through the ‘sutures’ of the text to another passage in chapter fifteen in which Perec’s memories of his arm in a sling at the Gare de Lyon and following a later accident are described as ‘points de suspension’. Here, the extra-linguistic sign is translated into language as a metaphor for the central image of the two memories. And these memories are themselves described as existing in a metaphorical and therapeutic relationship with Perec’s unnamable experience, albeit one which the older Perec suggests is ‘inopérante’ (109–10). The first is further linked to the doubly fictional suspended parachutist of the Charlot comic, which is ‘déchiffré’ in chapter ten through the frame of Perec’s later experience as a parachutist (77). The second is the transformation in memory of the narrating witness-observer (Perec) into the hero of the narrative: ‘je n’en fus pas la victime héroïque mais un simple témoin’ (109). As such, it is linked to the status of the narrator of A, who has taken over the identity of the lost Gaspard Winckler, and who is also a witness: ‘dans le témoignage que je m’apprête à faire, je fus témoin, et non acteur. Je ne suis pas le héros de mon histoire’ (10). The ‘trois points’ also extend to the intertexts of Perec’s own work; to the three blank pages of L’Attentat de Sarajevo (written 1957, unpublished) and the ‘trois points’ of the palindrome, ‘9691. Edna d’Nilou’ (1969). See Bellos (1993:195 and 429) on these two intertextual links. 29 Lejeune notes that the departure of Perec’s mother from his life is reflected in the suppression of references to her in part two (1991:63–4). On the basis of Perec’s preparatory notes, he shows this suppression to be deliberate. 30 Bellos has discussed the image of writer as carpenter which runs through Perec’s works, the figure whose labour is to ‘file down and dowel in’ existing materials, to build a mosaic of text out of the already-written which is ‘altered, reworked, decorated or, more plainly, falsified’ (1993:546 and 548). In Perec’s early Gaspard project (appropriately a ‘lost work’), the craftsman ‘attempts to make a perfect copy of an inlaid and carved wooden box but slowly loses himself in the meanders of his phantasms, in the detail of his copy’ (see Bellos 1993:194). The figure of the carpenter appears in W ou le souvenir d’enfance as the textual trigger for the exegesis on X, the old man who saws his wood on the support which constitutes the double cross. 31 This reflects the view of ‘disponibilité’ put forward by Charles, in which an ‘effet littérature’ is defined as the rhetorical ‘entretien du désir de lire’, not the fixing of the already read (1977:62–3). As Charles remarks: ‘C’est sa force. Il la tient de nous.’ (1977:288) 32 Nina Bastin describes the stages of her own reading of these as: ‘1) An initial attempt to read each note in conjunction with the appropriate element of the main text, referring backwards and forwards in the physical text. 2) An abandonment of this page-turning in favour of linear reading. 3) An enforced re-reading of the main text once the notes have been reached, reintroducing the pattern of cross-reference.’ (unpublished research paper, Bristol, 1996) 33 Although this link has been available in the text since the reference to the deportation of Perec’s mother (48–9 and 57), it is displaced by the fictional framing of B.

NOTES 233

34 A knowledge of these Freudian terms is not necessary to perceive the pattern. 35 A view shared by Pedersen (1985:79). 36 See also Smith (1978) and Pagnini (1987) for arguments that fictional texts are depragmatized (see pp. 27, 34 and 36–7). 37 See Perec’s remarks on his writing processes in Perec and Pawlikowska (1983:70). 38 In the view of Bex and Van Peer, literariness can be found in texts outside the official field of literature.

AFTERWORD 1 Iser builds a theory of territorial moves founded on a game-theory model of action in which imitation and symbolization enter into groundless play. Thus, for Iser, the territories of make-believe have no existence outside the game: ‘such play cannot be traced back to a base outside itself’ (1993:250). He describes the constitutive elements of the game, adapted from Caillois, as possible text-driven reader moves. Despite its anthropological foundations, his abstract model does not take account of the social context of the literary game, nor of the implications for participant relationships of changes to the rules of a given game. 2 La Religieuse, La Disparition and La Vie mode d’emploi, for example. 3 Recent readings of Schlegel by Bishop and Handwerk have moved away from a view of his perception of irony as expressive (self-reflective), to one in which selfreflection is relative, a ‘mediated discovery (via reflection) of its infinite relations’ (O’Beirne 1994:4). Here, the effect of a twentieth-century context of interpretation (in this case a context of Lacanian theory, which loops back through Freud to Romantic theories), contrasts with a nineteenth-century context of interpretation founded on the promotion of a Kantian perceiving subjectivity. 4 I adapt here Rabinowitz’s proposition that an authorial audience may not only be ‘extrapersonal’ but also ‘extracommunal’ (1987:26). 5 Bakhtin uses ‘canon’, in a different sense, to describe the hardening of generic features into a model which resists change. He suggests that ‘the novel has no canon of its own, as do other genres; only individual examples of the novel are historically active, not a generic canon as such’ (1981:3). 6 Conroy (1985:29) remarks on the ubiquity of the desire to provide genealogies for the novel, even in those writers who see it as an ironic or Oedipal form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Page references for primary texts are to the following editions: Balzac, Honoré de, Le Père Goriot, in Marcel Bouteron (ed.) La Comédie humaine 2, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade) 1951:847–1085. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Voyage au bout de la nuit, in Henri Godard (ed.) Romans 1, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade) 1980:1–505 (© Éditions GALLIMARD). Diderot, Denis, Jacques le fataliste et son maître, in Jacques Proust and Jack Undank (eds), Oeuvres Complètes 23, Paris: Hermann 1981:21–291. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary: Moeurs de province, in Albert Thibaudet and René Dumesnil (eds) Oeuvres 1, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade) 1951:291–611. Perec, Georges, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Paris: Denoël and Gallimard (L’Imaginaire) 1994 (© Éditions DENOËL). Sarraute, Nathalie, Portrait d’un inconnu, in Jean-Yves Tadié, Viviane Forrester, Ann Jefferson, Valerie Minogue and Arnaud Rykner (eds) Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade) 1996:33–175 (© Éditions GALLIMARD). Zola, Émile, L’Assommoir, in Henri Mitterand (ed.) Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, 2, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade) 1961:371–796.

References and select critical bibliography Actes (1987) Actes du colloque international de Paris L.-F. Céline (20–21 juin 1986), Tusson and Paris: Du Lérot and Société des Études Céliniennes. Adams, Jon-K. (1985) Pragmatics and Fiction, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ (1967) [1822] Synonymes, in Oeuvres Complètes 4, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. Allard, Jacques (1978) Zola, le chiffre du texte, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires. Allemand, André (1980) L’Oeuvre romanesque de Nathalie Sarraute, Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière. Alter, Robert (1975) Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Amadou, Anne-Lisa (1979) ‘Puissance et impuissance du langage dans Voyage au bout de la nuit’, Revue Romane 14:3–15. Baguley, David (1975) ‘Event and structure: the plot of Zola’s L’Assommoir’, PMLA 90: 823–33. —(1978) ‘Rite et tragédie dans L’Assommoir’, Cahiers Naturalistes 52:80–96. —(1990a) Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1990b) ‘Zola, the novelist(s)’, in Lethbridge and Keefe (1990):15–27.

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INDEX

Abbreviations used in index: L’Assommoir Jacques le fataliste Madame Bovary Le Père Goriot Portrait d’un inconnu Voyage au bout de la nuit W ou le souvenir d’enfance

AS JF MB PG PI VBN WSE

Full entries for these texts are listed under titles. All other works are listed under authors. Entries in bold indicate where theoretical terms and concepts are defined or discussed. absence and written text 8, 10–12, 14–15, 210–12, 218 n30; AS 102–5, 111, 114, 120, 121–2, 123, 208; JF 26, 31–4, 39–41, 41–7; PG 48, 49; PI 150–1, 155, 161–5, 168–75, 209– 10; MB 73–5, 75–7, 81, 85, 90–3, 98–9, 207–8; VBN 126, 127, 128, 146–9; WSE 181–91, 193, 194–6, 198–9 absence of pre-textual referent 37–41, 183– 4, 189, 190–1, 192, 194–5, 196, 199, 234 n14 absence/presence: 8, 12–14, 205–12, 215 n20; AS 102–3, 104–5, 106, 107–8, 109, 111, 112–14, 117–18, 121–3 JF 24, 25–6, 31–41, 41–4, 219 n48; MB 73, 74–5, 81, 85, 90–3, 223 n5, n6; PG 61, 66;

PI 152, 155, 157, 160, 162–3, 163–4, 164, 167, 169, 170–1, 171–2, 172–5, 232 n25; VBN 126, 127–8, 130, 131, 146–9, 230 n30; WSE 181, 182–4, 187, 189, 190–1, 191– 6, 197–200 act of reading see reading act of writing see writing Adams, J.-K. 27, 81, 172, 197–8 aesthetic values: artistic vision 75–7, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112–13, 123–4, 126, 127–8, 142– 3, 226 n9; complexity/unity 45, 51, 54–5, 97, 221 n11; construction-based 45, 74, 75, 76, 79– 80, 87, 94–7, 97–8, 187, 218–19 n33, 224 n13; control of audience 17, 79–80, 83–4, 94–7, 99,142–4, 164, 165; fluidity/geometric 152–3, 154, 164, 165–8, 173–4; 250

INDEX 251

freedom from audience demands 45–6, 52, 59–60, 78, 109, 127–8, 131–2, 135, 141–3, 144, 217 n16, 226 n9; and genre 17, 18–19, 21–3, 51, 52, 78, 82–3, 84–5, 87, 88, 116–18, 123–4, 154, 159, 164, 165–8, 221 n11; ‘lisible/scriptible’ 49, 57, 66, 74, 83, 97–8, 113–14, 117, 165–8, 223 n3, 230 n26; ‘literary language’ 54–5, 76–7, 79–80, 103–4, 111–12, 112–13, 114, 117, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 151, 165, 226 n9, 227 n26, 228 n36; matching of field and mode (content and form) 104, 115, 118, 187, 226 n8; and moral conventions 26, 51, 54–5, 70–1, 76, 101, 109, 111–12, 114, 117, 118–20, 122–3, 123–4; resistance to interpretive closure 74, 89, 92, 97–8, 165, 166–7, 168, 173–4; see also hierarchies agency see power and agency; transitivity agentless narration 77, 191, 207, 218 n30; see also impersonality; reflector narration aggression 9; narrator-narratee interactions 22, 24–6, 34, 35–6, 41, 45–7, 52, 60, 131–2, 140, 146, 148; protagonist interactions 107, 108– 9, 119, 126, 136–9, 139–41, 142–3, 144, 157–8, 158–9, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174 allegory 17, 134, 194, 216 n3 allusion to genres 17–18, 50–6, 79–80, 82, 94–5, 103–4, 160–1, 165–8 allusion to texts and writers: AS 119; JF 21, 30, 39, 39, 45, 46–7, 219 n42; MB 79, 80, 85, 94–5; PG 53, 54–5, 55–6; PI 154, 156, 159, 160–1, 166–7; VBN 129–30, 134; WSE 177, 179, 181–2, 183–4, 185, 188, 195 ambiguity see authority, conflicting patterns;

deictics, fuzzy; genre, decidability; interpretive hesitation; irony; reference, fuzzy; referential insecurity; representation of speech/thought; virtual spaces and worlds analepsis 171, 177, 180, disallowed 67, 223 n35 anaphora (cohesion) 152, 153–4, 177, 231 n10 anonymity and power 9–10; AS 105, 123; JF 23–4, 37; MB 71, 74–5, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90–3, 98– 9, 223 n6; PG 48, 220 n3; PI 162, 164, 169, 172–3, 175; VBN 128, 147–8 answerability see responsibility Antelme, R.: L’Espèce humaine 195 Aragon L.: Le Paysan de Paris 133, 135 Aristotle 158, 204, 217 n10 artefact, text as: MB 73, 74–5, 76, 79, 80, 81, 89, 94–7; PI 150, 151, 162, 164–5, 165–8; WSE 186–91, 198–9 artistic vision see vision of artist L’Assommoir (Zola) 2, 31, 101–24, 187, 204, 208, 212; authorization and success 123–4; lessons in social responsibility and language-use 118–20; literary and popular sociolects 111–12; overstepping the bounds? 121–3; popular sociolect and hierarchy of voice 114–16; preface as guarantee 102–5; registers of authority 112–14; rivalry with Germinie Lacerteux 116– 118; scandal on publication 101–2; social and moral justifications 106–11 audience-function 9, 195, 205–10

252 INDEX

audience-reader relationship see readeraudience audience sanction see authorization audiences (field): anticipated 14, 23, 26, 51, 58, 64–5, 86– 8, 105, 108, 121, 131, 168, 169, 171, 193–4, 217 n15; as consumers 17, 35–6, 45–7, 52, 59– 60, 69–71, 78, 95–6, 109, 110–11, 131– 2, 138, 144, 196–7, 217 n16, 221 n14; contemporary heterogeneity 8, 10, 23– 6, 44, 48, 58, 65, 92, 105, 121, 148, 173–4, 221 n22; historical shifts in 8, 18–20, 23, 48, 49, 50, 56–7, 88–9, 92, 123–4, 220 n3; see also critics’ reactions; readers author see writer; writing author-function (Foucault) 9, 25, 39, 48, 75, 194–5, 196–7, 205–10 authority 8–10, 203–10; conflicting patterns 39, 63–4, 67–71, 84–5, 102, 104–5, 106–11, 111–12, 114–6, 121–3, 123–4, 129–30, 158–9, 176, 179–84, 198; and cultural perceptions of participant roles 9–10, 49, 57, 75–7, 81, 88, 101, 103, 104, 111–12, 112–14, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119–20, 121–3, 123–4, 126– 8, 129–32, 135, 139, 158, 172–5, 176– 7, 177–9, 191, 192, 193–6, 197, 197–8, 200, 205–10, 210–12; and formality 9, 26, 37, 103, 111, 112, 113–4, 114, 118, 120, 121–3, 125–6, 129–32, 146, 162, 169–71, 180, 181, 194–5, 219 n39, 234 n13; individual/collective 39, 44–7, 71, 87, 95–7, 109, 114, 118–20, 125, 127–8, 135, 136–9, 140–1, 141–4, 157–9, 168, 168–9, 173–4, 183–4, 189, 194–6, 205, 212–13; public/private 9–10, 25–6, 61, 71, 71–2, 86–7, 106–11, 172, 183–4, 194–6, 196– 7, 205–13, 215 n16; and responsibility 9, 39, 48, 49, 66, 71– 2, 74, 88, 89, 92, 93, 99, 103–5, 106– 11, 114–16, 117, 118, 119–20, 121–3,

123–4, 135, 172, 192–3, 194–6, 196–7, 198, 205–10; spoken/written 27, 31–2, 34, 43, 73, 80, 80–5, 87, 103–4, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 119–20, 121–3, 125–6, 127, 129– 30, 131–2, 134–5, 151, 169–72, 183, 192–3; see also aesthetic values; didactic model; document as source; epistemological authority; hierarchies; institutional discourse; intertexts and authority; literalism; mimetic authority; moral function; original text/voice; truth claims; vision of artist; witness-function authorization: 2, 8–9, 11, 203–13; AS 101–2, 102–5, 108, 110, 111–12, 113–14, 114, 117, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 123–4; JF 37, 45–7; MB 72, 75–7, 78, 87, 89, 97–100; PG 49, 50, 57; PI 168, 173–5; VBN 125, 126, 127–8, 131–2, 135, 136– 9, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 148–9; WSE 178–9, 194–6, 198 autobiography 125, 127, 128, 133, 176–7, 177–84, 185–6, 191, 196–7, 198, 199, 234 n5; see also referential status; role relationships autonomy: of fictional worlds 27, 30, 129, 147, 148, 176, 177, 181, 181–2, 185–6, 188– 9, 194–6, 197–200, 215 n13; of text: 6, 74, 85, 176, 181–2, 183–4, 186, 188, 189–90, 193–6, 198–200; see also referential status Bakhtin, M.M. 1, 3, 4, 20, 123, 133, 203, 204, 205, 214 n2, 237 n5

INDEX 253

Balzac, H.de 80, 135, 224 n15, 232 n20, 233 n31; Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu 233 n30; La Comédie humaine 48, 220 n1, n5, n7, 221 n10; La Cousine Bette 221 n18; La Peau de chagrin 49; Le Père Goriot 2, 12, 22, 48–72, 74, 78, 103, 111, 114, 121, 125, 132, 133, 135, 141, 162, 194, 195, 204, 206–7, 212, 219 n50, 227 n25 Barbey D’Aurevilly, J.A. 76 Barthes, R. 49, 57, 104, 106, 130, 197, 218 n30, 221 n21, 223 n6, n7, 225 n30, 229 n19 Baudelaire, C. 78, 84, 154, 166–7, 168; ‘La Cloche fêlée’ 167; ‘Les Fenêtres’ 232; ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ 166; ‘Les petites vieilles’ 154, 231 n11, n13 Beckett, S. 143; Molloy 189–90; L’Innommable 183, 190 Benveniste, E. 34, 219 n37 Bernard, C. 134 ‘bienséance’ 26, 35, 45–7, 103–4, 115, 118–20, 121, 122, 123; see also politeness, contextual parameters; taboo Birch, D. 8 Bloom, H. 203, 204, 212 Booth, W. 15, 43, 197, 219 n45, 225 n23 Bourdieu, P. 8, 11, 23, 78, 126, 127–8, 200, 204, 228 n37 Breton, A.: Nadja 133, 135 Brown, P. (and S.Levinson) 6, 11–13, 60, 168, 222 n27, 233 n35 Burton, R. Anatomy of Melancholy 38 Butor, M. 24–5 Calvino, I. 198, 215 n20 Camus, A.: La Chute 219 n50 canon 45, 46–7, 48, 54–5, 56–7, 71, 99– 100, 117, 144, 148, 161, 168, 212–13

Catherine II, Empress of Russia 23, 24, 25– 6 Céline, L.F. (L.F.Destouches) Voyage au bout de la nuit, 2–3, 22, 31, 125–49, 169–70, 197, 204–5, 208–9, 209, 212 Cervantes, M.de: Don Quixote 20, 37 Chafe,W. 171, 233 n38 Chambers, R. 14, 44–5, 45, 147, 158, 163 Chaplin, C.: The Great Dictator 184, 185, 235 n26; Modern Times 184; character constructs 30–1, 33, 66, 109, 150, 152, 156, 160–1, 168, 173, 231 n2, 232 n28; see also naming Charles, M. 1, 92, 236 n31 cinema 184, 235 n25 citation of text: AS 106, 116–7 226 n11; JF 22, 32, 37–8, 38, 39–41, 46–7; MB 79–80, 80–5, 86; PG 50–1, 55; PI 154–5, 156; VBN 129, 134; WSE 178–9, 181–2, 182–4, 185; see also allusion; intertextual chains; parody citation of voice: AS 111–12, 114–16, 121–3; JF 32, 38, 39, 39–41; MB 81–5, 86, 90–1, 92–3; VBN 125–6, 129–30; WSE 181–2, 182, 191–3; see also irony; representation of speech; voice cliché 80, 82–4, 94–5, 136–8, 139, 151, 159, 160–1, 167–8, 224 n18; as ideational impoverishment of literature 80, 82, 83–4, 94–5, 135, 159, 167–8; see also authority, individual/collective closed/open text; 68–9, 71, 74, 89, 186, 190, 198–200, 222 n31 closure see interpretive closure cognitive construction of space of text:

254 INDEX

geometric configuration 8, 13–14, 15, 27–8, 37, 112–14, 153, 165–8, 173–4, 176, 177–9, 186–91, 192, 193, 198, 201; non-geometric configuration 8, 14–15, 21, 27–8, 29, 30–1, 37–9, 39–41, 43, 43–5, 44, 92, 111, 114, 126, 127–8, 145–6, 146–8, 151–4, 150, 160, 165–8, 169–72, 173–4, 179–84, 185–6, 195–6, 198–200; see also virtual worlds and spaces; worlds cognitive discourse analysis (Werth) 5–6, 6–7 cognitive narratology see Fludernik, M. cognitive tracking (Emmott) 153, 154–5, 156–8, 218 n27 coherence-building: 14–15, 50, 67, 77, 145– 6, 152, 158, 162, 164–5, 179–80; and genre 22–3, 50, 67–9, 77–8, 129– 30, 132–5, 154–5, 156–61, 173–5, 177– 9, 185–6, 187–8; and world levels 28–31, 145–6, 171–2, 177–9, 179–80, 185–6, 186–91, 193–6, 198–200; see also interpretive closure; interpretive hesitation; meaning; naturalization cohesion 74, 75, 77, 145–6, 145, 152, 153, 154, 155, 179–80, 184, 185–6, 199, 235 n20; see also under analepsis; anaphora; collocation; prolepsis; reference to co-text; repetition collocation 156, 185 comedy 21–3, 49, 66, 70, 82–3, 85, 90–1, 94–5, 133, 222 n24 common ground: as basis for interpretation 7, 116, 124, 151, 155, 156, 161, 168, 194–5, 205, 208; as participant goal 11, 55, 61–5, 88, 90– 3, 99, 113–14, 128, 147–7, 150–1, 158, 171, 173–4, 193, 208, 209;

see also cooperation; didactic model; intertexts and authority; literature as shared vision; solidarity communication 10–11; agonistic in VBN 127–8, 130, 131–2, 136, 138–9, 140–1, 141–3, 144, 145, 146–7, 147–8; extra-linguistic in PI 150, 152, 155, 160, 162, 163–4, 164–5, 166, 167, 168, 168, 169–72, 174–5; failed in MB 76–7, 81–2, 85, 86–7; as social activity in JF and WSE 24, 25, 27, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 41–2, 42, 47, 193–6 competition: between genres 50–3, 54–5, 66, 78, 79– 80, 83–4, 88, 103, 117–18, 123, 155, 204, 221 n10, n11; between novels 51–2, 53–4, 54–5, 55– 6, 66–7, 79–80, 83–4, 116–23, 123–4, 129, 134, 135, 156–61, 168, 204–5, 227 n28; between old and new 54–6, 62, 66, 70, 72, 103, 150–1, 204–5, 221 n18, 231 n3; between TAW discourses 130, 136–9, 158–9, 165–8, 174; see also territories Conrad, J. 133 consciousness novel 7, 89, 125, 133, 134, 151, 155, 156, 159–60 ‘conte’ 17, 21–2, 39, 133, 134, 216 n2 content see semantic domain content/form see aesthetic values context: of culture 1, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 12–13, 203–10, 211–12, 212– 13, 214 n9; of situation: 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12–13, 205– 10, 210–12 context-text relationships see ‘mise en abyme’; pragmatics; referential status; roles; worlds

INDEX 255

contextual parameters for politeness see politeness, contextual parameters contract of reading: 12–13; AS 102–5, 118–20; JF 34–7; MB 97–100; PG 52, 58–62, 62–71; PI 164–5, 169; VBN 132, 139, 146, 147, 148–9 conventions and convention shift 1–3, 4–5, 6–7, 11–12, 214 n7, 214–15 n10 conversation see spoken discourse cooperation: 9, 11–12; narrators-narratees 35–6, 57, 58–61, 62, 63, 64–6, 113–14, 115, 121, 130, 132, 146, 170, 171, 221–2 n23; protagonists 109, 128, 136–9, 140–1, 159, 164–5, 169, 174; see also aggression; solidarity Cooperative principle (Grice) 11, 215 n18 Correspondance littéraire 23–6, 38, 45, 217 n13, 218 n31, 219 n44 Couturier, M. 3, 24, 25, 31, 37, 214 n3 crafting see artefact; writing critical discourse analysis (CDA) 6, 8–10, 12–13, 224 n10; see also authority; institutional discourse; power critics’ reactions (contemporary): AS 101, 102, 105, 123, 225 n1, 226 n3; MB 76; PG 48, 51, 59, 220 n3, 221 n11, 222 n26; PI 150, 173–4, 230–1 n1; VBN 127, 131–2, 228 n1, 229 n6, 230 n20; WSE 178–9, 184, 193, 194–6, 234 n5 Dabit, E.: Hôtel du Nord 228–9 n2 Dada 125 D’Alembert, J.le Rond: Synonymes 216 n2 decorum:

of fictional worlds 29, 30, 63–4, 155–6, 157, 160, 179–80; of relationships between world levels 29, 155, 160, 162, 171–2; see also cognitive construction; naturalization; verisimilitude degree zero narration see impersonality; report mode deictic centre (experiencing self) 86, 90–1, 92, 104, 130, 152, 162–3, 171–2, 199– 200, 218 n30, 232 n25 deictic elements 8, 186–91, 198–9 deictic markers: discourse 28, 146, 162, 163–4, 171, 177, 179, 180, 188–9, 190, 218 n30, 223 n25, 224 n13; locative 29, 33, 130, 162–3, 171–2; of person 30–1, 33, 40–1, 43–4, 45–6, 59–60, 60, 63, 105, 121, 126, 131, 132, 163, 187–8, 189, 191; temporal 145, 155, 157, 162–3, 171, 232 n25; see also cohesion; metafictional commentary; reference deictics, fuzzy: 130, 152, 155, 162–3, 171– 2, 232 n25, 233 n41 deixis 8, 10, 218 n29 denotation/connotation 165–8, 186–91 De Quincey, T. 167 Derrida, J. 14, 31, 202–3, 212 description 33, 50, 52, 66, 79–80, 84, 95, 96–7, 106, 107, 111, 112–13, 134, 182, 222 n33, 227 n 19, n22, n24, n26 dialogics (Bakhtin) 20, 47, 204, 205, 219 n38 didactic model 21–2, 25, 49, 55–6, 57, 57– 71, 76, 78, 103–4, 109, 113–14, 119–20, 121–2, 123, 135, 222 n32 Diderot, D. 135; Les deux amis de Bourbon 216 n2; ‘Éloge de Richardson’ 17, 24, 27, 32, 216 n5; Jacques le fataliste et son maître 4, 16– 47, 56, 60, 122, 134, 147, 181, 187, 203–4, 205–6, 209, 211, 212; Pensées philosophiques 217 n16; La Religieuse 216 n5, 237 n2;

256 INDEX

Le Rêve d’Alembert 217 n17 ‘discours/histoire’ (Benveniste) 34–7, 219 n37 see also pragmatics discourse structure (mode) see cohesion; event lines; repetition; temporal ordering discursive selfhood, reader: 202, 205–10; AS 106–11, 113, 119–20, 121–2, 123; JF 24, 25, 41, 42; MB 90–3, 95–7, 98–9; PG 58–62, 62–71; PI 163–4, 168–9, 172–5; VBN 140–1, 146, 147, 148–9; WSE 193–6, 197–200; see also face; readers; reading; roles discursive selfhood, writer: 14, 202, 205– 10, 215 n20; AS 102–5, 106–11, 111–116, 118, 119– 20, 121–3, 123–4, 226 n5, n8, n9; JF 24–5, 37, 39, 41, 42–3, 218 n21; MB 75–7, 78, 81, 88; PG 49, 58–62; PI 164, 169, 172–5; VBN 126, 127–8, 129–32, 135, 139, 140–1, 141–3, 146–8, 228 n1, 229 n8, 230 n29, n30; WSE 176–7, 185, 188, 192–7, 197– 200, 201; see also face; roles; writer; writing distance/empathy 108–9, 110, 127, 132, 158, 168, 225 n22 distance/intimacy (contextual parameter, tenor): 8, 11, 12–13, 210–11, 217 n18; AS 102–5, 107, 111, 112, 113–14, 114, 117–18, 119–20, 121–3; JF 25–6, 37, 46, 217 n17; MB 73, 74–5, 75–7, 86–7, 88, 90–3, 98– 9; PG 58–62, 62, 63, 66, 71;

PI 155, 158, 162, 163–4, 164–5, 165, 166, 167–8, 168–9, 169–70, 172–3, 174–5; VBN 126, 128, 132, 140, 141–2, 146; WSE 179–80, 193, 194–6, 196–7; see also formality; politeness, contextual parameters; private/public document as source 39–41, 106, 117, 182– 4, 192–3, 194, 226 n11, 234 n5 Dostoyevsky, F.M. 161, 232 n22 ‘drame’ (19th-century) 50–2, 61, 66–7, 221 n12, 222 n28 Dujardin, E. Les Lauriers sont coupés 135, 159 Duranty, L.E.E. 76 economic goods, texts as 23, 52–3, 78, 144, 200; see also audiences as consumers Eco, U. 36, 63, 74, 92, 199, 223 n4 ‘écriture artiste’ 111, 112–13, 117–18, 119, 120, 122, 227 n19 effort in reading see ‘lisible/scriptible’ ekphrasis 79–80, 95, 161, 164–5, 167, 179, 181–2 élite groups 25, 45, 78, 96, 141, 150, 165, 200; see also in-group membership ellipsis: and authority 40–1, 138, 139, 141; as configured absence 189, 190–1, 199, 236 n28, n29 embedded narratives 18, 27, 28, 177–8, 181, 194, 196, 218 n24; see also worlds empathy/distance see distance/empathy end-focus (grounding) 60, 77, 171, 224 n13, n14 epic 133 epistemological authority (knowledge): JF 29, 37, 38, 39, 40; PG 48, 58, 63–5, 68; MB 75–6, 77–8, 90–3; AS 113–4; VBN 127, 136–7, 145; PI 155, 162;

INDEX 257

WSE 177–8, 179, 180–181, 182, 192, 193, 198, 234 n13, n14, 236 n28 event lines: AS 106, 116–17, 228 n35; JF 17–18, 19, 21, 26, 30–1, 35–6, 36, 38–9, 40, 216–17 n7; MB 74, 77, 91, 224 n13; PG 62, 63, 64, 65–6, 66, 68–9, 71; PI 150, 153, 154–5, 155, 157–9, 163, 166, 231–2 n14, 232 n15, n16; VBN 133–4, 134–5, 136–8, 141, 145–6; WSE 177–9, 179–80, 180–3, 184–5, 190–1, 199; 224 n13, 232 n16; see also grounding; telic movement; temporal ordering existents/non-existents see reference experiencing self see deictic centre experiential reading: 107–8, 110–11, 141– 2, 144, 146, 151, 153, 160, 162–4, 167, 169; vs rational ordering 152, 153, 154, 157– 9, 166, 167, 187 extradiegetic narrators see narrators fable 17, 39, 216 n2, n3 fabula see event lines face: 11–13, 212–13; see also discursive selfhood; interactions; politeness, contextual parameters; pragmatics face, contextual parameters see politeness, contextual parameters face, protagonist’s 86, 107–11, 119–20, 130, 138–9, 140–1, 141, 144, 164–5, 166, 168, 168–9, 174 face, reader’s: 11, 13, 206, 209, 211–12; AS 107–8, 108–11, 111–12, 119–20, 121–2, 123–4; JF 22, 26, 45–7, 217 n17, 219–20 n51; MB 75, 87–8, 90–3, 95, 98–9; PG 58, 58–61, 62, 64–5, 67, 71, 221–2 n23, 222 n27; PI 150, 163–4, 168, 168–9, 169–71, 174–5;

VBN 127–8, 130, 132, 139, 140, 140–1, 143, 146–7, 148–9; WSE 189, 194–6 face threat, attenuation: 206, 212; AS 102–5, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 114, 114–15, 117, 118–20, 122–3, 123–4; JF 25, 25–6, 35–6, 45–7, 217 n17; MB 74–5, 77–8, 88, 98; PG 51, 54–5, 58, 58–61, 62, 64–5, 65– 6, 221–2 n23, 222 n27; PI 150, 151, 168, 169–71; VBN 130, 132, 127, 139, 140, 140–1; WSE 188, 195, 196 face threatening acts (FTAs) 11–13 face-to-face interaction see spoken discourse face, writer’s: 11–13, 204–5, 206, 210–12; AS 102–5, 106, 107–11, 111–16, 116, 117, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 123–4; JF 25–6, 45–7; MB 74–5, 76, 77–8, 88, 95, 98–9; PG 51, 54–5, 65, 66, 67; PI 150, 168, 172–5; VBN 127, 130, 131–2, 139, 140, 141–3, 147, 148–9; WSE 194–5, 196, 196–7; see also authority Fairclough, N. 8–9 Fénélon, F. de Salignac de la Motte: Télémaque 55–6 Fenimore Cooper, J. 53, 56 fetish objects see props and sensuality fictional vs fictive/hypothetical worlds 6, 10, 11–12, 27–8, 99, 194–6, 210–11 fictional worlds see autonomy; incompleteness; referential status fiction: and falsehood 17, 51, 94–5, 129; and illusion 16, 52, 129, 160, 161; and imagination 79–80, 94–7, 129, 194– 5, 199–200, 200; and memory 181–3, 189, 192, 193, 195, 234 n14, 236 n28; see also referential status; truth claims; verisimilitude

258 INDEX

fiction/non-fiction 22, 35, 37–8, 39, 50–2, 60, 61, 65, 101–2, 102–5, 106–7, 109, 114, 122–3, 127, 129–30, 131, 147–8, 176–84, 185–6, 190–1, 191, 194–6, 197– 200, 210–11, 216 n4; see also referential status; truth claims fiction, ontological status see referential status fiction, pragmatic status see pragmatics field (register) 7, 9, 10; see under context; readers; semantic domain; territorial space and the literary arena; writer figure/function in language (De Man) 152, 186–7, 190, 235 n23 film 184, 235 n25 Flaubert, G. L’Education sentimentale 92, 134, 223 n5; Madame Bovary 2, 22, 73–100, 101–2, 128, 151, 154–5, 159, 165, 195, 204, 207–8, 211, 212, 228 n34, 231 n12 Fleischman, S. 59, 216 n25 flicker (Ingarden) 8, 153; see also virtual spaces and worlds; worlds Fludernik, M. 4, 10, 14, 77, 126, 142, 153, 160, 218 n26, n30, 231 n10, 231–2 n14 focalization: 63–4, 68, 75–6, 76, 82, 84, 92– 3, 114, 122, 155, 159–60, 172, 207, 208, 218 n30, 233 n36, 234 n13; and uncertainty 68, 92–3, 114, 160, 172, 223 n37; see also reflector narration focus see grounding foregrounding see grounding form/content see aesthetic values formality, level of (mode): 9; AS 103, 111, 112, 113–4, 114, 118, 120, 121–3; JF 26, 37, 219 n39; PI 162, 169–71; VBN 125–6, 129–32, 146; WSE 180, 181, 194–5, 234 n13; see also distance/intimacy; private/public

Foucault, M. 9, 25 frames (schemata) 215 n11; see also audiences, anticipated; genres; novel; worlds ‘français parlé’ 104, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 123, 125–6, 129–30, 132, 134 France, A. 226 n8 France, P. 24, 25, 32, 219 n35 freedom of readers 46–7, 62, 65, 71, 74, 88–90, 173, 222 n29 free indirect discourse/thought see representation of speech/thought functional linguistics 6, 7–10, 12–13 Genette, G. 13, 29, 38, 57, 148, 214 n8, 215 n23, 222 n33, 227 n20 genre, decidability 4, 16, 17–23, 57, 84–5, 129, 176–84, 185–6, 198, 200, 202–3, 203–4, 216 n2 genres: and coherence-building 6–7, 22–3, 50, 67–9, 77–8, 129–30, 132–5, 154–5, 156–61, 177–9, 185–6, 187–8; as cultural conventions 4–5, 151, 200, 202, 203–10, 211–12, 214 n8, 220 n3; schemata revised 7, 50–7, 66–7, 70–1, 75–8, 88, 111–12, 114–16, 117–18, 118–20, 121–3, 127, 150–1, 151–6, 157, 159–60, 160–1, 203–5, 205–10; see also hierarchies; individual genres; literature as genre genre, theories: 200; Derrida 202–3; Fludernik 4; Guillén 7; Paulson 7; Schaeffer 5; see also novel, theories geometric configuration see cognitive construction Gibson, A. 14, 173–4, 216 n26, 231–2 n14 Gide, A. 160 goals see intentions

INDEX 259

Goethe, J.W.von 23, 135 Goncourts, E. and J.de: Germinie Lacerteux 102, 103, 116–23, 123–4, 226 n9, 227 n28, n29, 227–8 n30, 228 n35 Gray, T.Elegy 53 Green, J. 160 Grice, H.P. 11, 210, 215 n18 Grimm, F.M. 23, 217 n13 grounding, conventional patterns reversed 111, 152–3, 155 grounding: of cohesive elements 77, 153, 180; and dramatic scene 217 n10; emotional 154; of evaluative commentary 145, 161; events/experience 155; of intertextual relationships 117; of matrix propositions 152–3; and politeness 54, 114; of reader response 60, 94; as signal of planning 171; of sociolects 111, 129; through typography 234 n6; see also end-focus; repetition Guillén, C. 7, 214 n7 Halliday, M.A.K. 5, 7–8 Hamon, P. 102, 106, 117, 214 n4, 222 n33 Hemingway, E. 207 hesitation see interpretive hesitation hierarchies, aesthetic AS 112–13, 116–17, 119, 120; JF 17, 22; MB 76, 79–80, 80–5, 86–8, 94–7, 97– 8, 99–100; PG 52, 54–5, 221 n11; PI 151, 158, 165–8; VBN 125, 126 hierarchies of genres: AS 103–4, 111–16, 116–23, 123–4; JF 17–19, 21–3; MB 75–7, 77–8, 79–80, 82–5, 87, 88, 94–7, 97–8; PG 50–6, 57, 66, 221 n10; PI 156–61, 165–8;

VBN 125–6, 127, 129, 131; WSE 176–7, 177–84, 187–8, 191, 194– 5, 196, 197–8, 200 hierarchies of voice (narratological): AS 111–16, 121–3; JF 27–9, 37–8, 39–41, 43; MB 73, 33–8, 80–5, 86–8, 90–1, 92, 225 n23; PG 63–4, 66–9; PI 160, 162, 169–70, 172–3, 173, 174; VBN 139, 144–6, 147–8; WSE 177–84, 192–3, 194–5, 197–8 hierarchies of world levels (cognitive): AS 107–11; JF 27–31, 218 n23; PI 152, 155, 161, 162–4, 164–5, 165– 8, 169, 169–70, 171–2; VBN 145–6, 147–8; WSE 177–84, 185–91, 194–6, 198; see also epistemological authority ‘histoire/discours’ (Benveniste) 34–7, 219 n37 ‘histoire/récit’ (Genette) 29, 130, 145, 163, 171–2, 215–16 n23 Hodge, R. (and G.Kress) 8 Holocaust literature 195 Homer 56, 133 Hugo, V. 51, 101, 106; preface to Cromwell 76; Hernani 226 n9 hypotaxis in written discourse 170–1, 233 n38 hypothesis see fictional vs fictive/ hypothetical; roles, fictive/hypothetical ideational function (Halliday) see language, effacement of, propositional function; semantic domain identity see discursive selfhood; naming ideology: and context of culture 49–50, 101, 111– 12, 117, 119–20, 121–3, 194–6, 214 n9;

260 INDEX

in critical discourse analysis 8–9, 224 n10; and cultural power 8–9, 111–12, 122– 3, 127–8, 133, 135, 212–13 idiolect (style) 18, 40, 84, 104, 111–16, 118–20, 121–3, 125–6, 131, 164–5, 167, 172, 226 n8, 227 n26 illusion and fiction 16, 52, 129, 160, 161 imagination 79–80, 94–7, 129, 165–8, 182, 189, 192, 194–5, 199–200, 200 impersonality of narrative agent: 9, 73, 74– 5, 75–7, 88, 98–9, 102–5, 107, 111, 112, 121–3, 179–80, 181, 194–5, 207, 208, 215 n15; authority, unchallengeable 74–5, 93, 98–9, 103, 105, 181; and ideology 76, 194–5, 224 n10; and institutional power 9, 215 n15; see also distance/intimacy; formality; reflector narration implied author 14, 43; see also roles; writer implied readers 14, 44, 60, 108, 148, 193–4, 219 n49; see also narratees; readers; roles imposition, scale of: 11, 12–13; see also face; politeness, contextual parameters; taboo incipits: 29–30:50–2, 58–61, 129–32, 145, 169, 170–1, 180, 229 n17 incompleteness: of fictional worlds 151–3, 156, 164, 165, 174, 187; of ‘mise en abyme’ 187; of selfhood 14–15, 43, 39–41, 44–5, 147–8, 150, 151, 152, 160–1, 163, 169, 173, 174–5 indeterminacy see authority, conflicting patterns; deictics, fuzzy; genre, decidability; interpretive hesitation; irony; reference, fuzzy; referential insecurity;

representation of speech/thought; virtual spaces and worlds inferential walks 36, 63 inferred author 14 see also roles; writer inferred reader 14 see also narratees; readers; roles Ingarden, R. 8, 153 in-group membership 45, 62–3, 65–6, 66, 67, 71, 90–3, 96, 99, 112–13, 128, 137, 140–1, 225 n23; see also élite groups; solidarity institutional discourse 8–9, 215 n15; AS 102, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 113– 14, 114, 117–18, 119, 120, 122–3, 123– 4; JF 21–2; MB 74, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 87; PG 49, 57, 65, 71; PI 150; VBN 126–8, 129–30, 130–2, 135, 136– 9, 143–4, 228 n31; WSE 181, 185, 195; see also formality; impersonality; report mode institutional power see power ‘instruire et plaire’ 59, 61, 70–1 intentionality, belief in as principle of reading 11–12, 74, 92, 105, 173–4, 197, 198 intentions (rhetorical) in TAW 86–8, 119, 136–41, 143, 143–4, 166, 167–8, 173, 174; of writers constructed by readers 12, 18–19, 20, 22, 26, 74, 81, 92, 94, 173– 4, 225 n32; see also paratextual material; roles interactions see communication; face; power Interest principle (Leech) 109, 110–11, 120, 124, 227 n17

INDEX 261

interior monologue 155, 160, 162, 169, 171 interpersonal function (Halliday) see aggression; cooperation; distance/empathy; distance/intimacy; face; formality; power; roles; solidarity interpretive closure 18–23, 68–9, 71, 74, 89, 90–3, 132–5, 162, 165, 173–5, 186, 187, 190, 225 n28 interpretive hesitation 89, 90–3, 95, 133–5, 165, 169–72, 225 n22 intertexts and authority: AS 103–6, 113–14, 116–7, 123–4, 226 n11; JF 19, 21–2, 32, 37–9, 40–1, 45, 46–7, 203–4; MB 77–8, 80, 80–1, 82–3, 84–5, 86, 88, 98; PG 50–1, 53, 54–5; PI 154–5, 158, 161, 166–7, 168; VBN 125, 127, 129–30, 132–5; WSE 178–9, 181–4, 185, 189–90, 191, 194, 195, 203–4, 226 n11 intertextual chains: JF 30, 32, 37–9, 40–1; VBN 134; WSE 189–90, 192 intimacy/distance see distance/intimacy intradiegetic narrators see narrators irony: AS 102–3, 111, 117–18, 119, 120, 122, 123; JF 19, 21, 32; MB 79–80, 81–5, 86–7, 90–3, 94, 96, 207, 225 n22, n23, 237 n3; PG 49, 53, 64, 66–7; PI 166, 167, 167–8; VBN 129–30, 134, 135, 137, 139 Iser, W. 44, 199, 210, 237 n1 iterability of written text see audience, contemporary heterogeneity, historical shifts

iteration see repetition Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Diderot) 4, 16–47, 56, 60, 122, 134, 147, 181, 187, 203–4, 205–6, 209, 211, 212; absence and the written medium 37– 41; context of initial circulation 23–6; intertextual chains 37–9; intertextual context and genre 17–23; literalist chains of production 37–8, 39– 41; medium: spoken/written 31–4; play between conceptual spaces 16; pragmatics of dialogue and narrative 34–7; readers and narratees 43–7; socialization of writing 24–6, 31–7; world levels constructed and crossed 27–31; writer-reader interactions 41–2, 45–7; writer’s discursive selfhood 42–3 James, H. 89, 159 Jarry, A. 132; Faustroll 189; Les Jours et les nuits 214 n1 journey, trope of 21, 28, 129, 133–4, 230 n22 Joyce, J. 133, 135, 159 Kafka, F. 185 Kierkegaard, S.A. 90, 92, 207 knowledge of narrator see epistemological authority Kress, G. 8, 9, 214 n15, 218 n20 Kristeva, J. 152 Labov, W. 155, 156, 231–2 n14 La Bruyère, J.de 134 Lacan, J. 164 Laclos, P.A.F.Choderlos de: Les Liaisons dangereuses 219 n40 Lakoff, R. 32, 219 n35 Lamartine, A.de 79 Lang, F.M 235 n25 language:

262 INDEX

as constraint 76–7, 81–2, 152, 155, 161, 165, 168, 168–9, 169–70, 175, 190, 192, 232 n18; effacement of 94–5, 96–7, 111, 214 n4; physicality of 75, 77, 94–7, 152, 152– 3, 166, 167–8, 170–1, 173, 186–91, 192, 199, 223 n7, 224 n8, 236 n32; propositional function 150, 151–2, 152– 3, 165, 167, 168, 174, 186–7, 199; referential function 150, 151, 152–3, 161, 165–6, 168, 179, 182–3, 189, 191, 192–3 language, power of see power language-use: as public activity 215 n19; theories of 5–13, 13–14 Leckie-Tarry, H. 6, 7–8, 215 n14 Leech, G. 109, 124, 214 n7, 219 n39, 227 n17 Levinson, S. 6, 11–13, 60, 163, 168, 219 n47, 222 n27, 233 n35 Lewis, M.G.: The Monk 53 ‘lisible/scriptibie’ 49, 57, 66, 74, 83, 97–8, 113–14, 117, 165–8, 223 n3, 230 n26 literalism 37–8, 39–41, 48, 63–4, 177, 178– 9, 192 literature: as genre 78, 101–2, 125, 126, 127, 200, 202–3, 212; pragmatics of 10–11, 11–13, 27, 74, 85, 146, 165, 166–7, 200, 202, 230 n26; as shared vision 146, 150–1 Littré, E. 129–30 Longacre, R.E. 217 n10, 225 n25 Lukács, G. 20, 203 MacMahon, B. 173, 210 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 2, 22, 73–100, 101–2, 128, 151, 154–5, 159, 165, 195, 204, 207–8, 211, 212, 228 n34, 231 n12; contextual parameters changed 97–100; expectations flouted 73–5; exploiting conventions 77–8; freedom and control 88–90;

impersonality and conventions of authorization 75–7; irony and reader insecurity 90–93; negative models of reading 93–7; negative models of text-production 86– 8; promoting an aesthetic hierarchy of text-types 79–80; promoting the written over the spoken 80–5 Mailloux, S. 214–15 n10 Mallarmé, S. 126, 167, 168, 189, 233 n32, n39; ‘Les Fenêtres’ 158, 232 n18 markers, textual see deictic markers matrix schema (cognitive) 107, 186, 227 n12 Maturin, C.R.: Melmoth 53 Mauriac, F. 160 maxims 49, 65, 68, 134, 141 see also didactic model; sententiousness meaning; affected by perceptions of genre 22–3, 68–9, 71; and interpretive closure 18–23, 68–9, 71, 74, 89, 132–5, 162, 165–8, 173–4, 186, 187, 190, 225 n28; propositional undermined 150, 151–2, 168, 186–7; see also coherence-building; interpretive hesitation; naturalization mediation: 14, 15, 44–6, 150–75; between fictional world elements 155– 6, 164–5, 167, 167–8, 231 n13; by reader 44–6, 60, 163–4, 186, 187, 193–6, 197, 198–200, 236 n31; see also ‘tiers exclu’; ‘tiers gaudens’ medieval performance 135, 216 n25 medium (mode) see spoken/written; written medium melodrama 49, 66–7, 118, 151, 160, 220 n3, 221 n12, 227–8 n30 Melville, H. 185 memory: 162, 181–4, 189, 190, 192–3, 195, 236 n28;

INDEX 263

and forgetting 182–3, 184, 189, 190, 199, 236 n28; and imagination 182, 189, 192, 195 metafictional commentary: 23, 57, 64–5, 121, 161, 171, 178, 190, 192–3, 198, 234 n11; on genre 17–18, 50–7, 218–19 n33; privileged over other signals 19, 57, 161, 178, 216–17 n7; undermined 17–18, 65, 179, 182–3 Michaux, H.: Plume 183 mimetic authority: AS 106, 109, 112, 113–14, 121, 123–4; JF 26, 28, 29, 35; MB 84–5; PG 48, 50–1, 51–2, 54, 58, 61, 63–5, 66; PI 151, 157, 160–1; VBN 127, 129; WSE 178–9, 192–3, 194, 195–6; see also realism; verisimilitude ‘mise en abyme’: 186–7, 235 n22, n23; of reading 61–2, 66–7, 67, 69–71, 93–7, 120, 164–5, 165, 166, 167–8, 169; of text 141, 161, 164–5, 165, 187, 188– 91, 227 n19, 232 n28, 235 n23; of writing 86–8, 109, 135, 119–20, 187, 188, 189, 190 misreading 94–7, 98–9, 160–1, 225 n28, n29 modalization (narrator stance): and authority 76, 113–4, 126, 180–1, 182, 192, 234 n13, n14; as politeness strategy 54, 58, 59–60, 132, 222 n25 mode (register) 7–8, 9, 10; see under cohesion; formality; planning; spoken/written; written medium modernism 89, 150, 151, 155, 159–60, 162, 173 Molière, J.B.P. 30, 54, 56 Montaigne, M.Eyquem de 46–7, 134 moral function:

and aesthetic judgements 26, 51, 54–5, 70–1, 76, 101, 109, 111–12, 114, 117, 118–20, 122–3, 123–4; and genre 17, 21–2, 49, 50, 51, 61, 68– 71, 75, 76, 104, 106–7, 111–12, 114, 117, 119–20, 122–3, 194–6, 227–8 n30; and public text 25, 49–50, 75, 88, 101– 2, 105, 106–11, 117, 119–20, 123–4, 127, 135, 194–6, 224 n10 music 77, 79, 129, 166, 167, 233 n32 myth 106, 129, 134, 158 naming 152, 159, 167, 188, 189, 190, 191, 219 n46, 232 n17, 235 n25 narratee-reader relationship see roles narratees (textualized): 43–5, 219 n49; AS 121–3; JF 24–5, 28–9, 30, 31, 34–7, 41–7; PG 50, 52, 58–62, 64–6, 221 n20, n22; VBN 131–2, 146; WSE 193–4; see also roles narrative worlds, status of: AS 111–16, 117–18, 121–3; JF 28–9, 30, 33, 36–7, 39–41, 41–7; MB 73–5, 75–8, 90–2, 98–9; PG 48, 49, 58–62, 62, 64–5; PI 155, 160, 162–4, 169–72, 172–3, 230 n31; VBN 127–8, 145–6, 147–8; WSE 193–4, 194–5, 197–8 narrator-protagonist relationship (homodiegetic) see roles narrator-writer relationship see roles narrators 28–9; AS (heterodiegetic) 102, 103, 104, 111– 16, 117, 118, 118–19, 121–3; JF (heterodiegetic/homodiegetic) 17– 18, 24–5, 27, 28–9, 30, 32–3, 33, 34–6, 39, 39–41, 42, 45, 218 n30; MB (heterodiegetic) 73, 75–6, 77–8, 81, 84–5, 90–3, 223 n1; PG (heterodiegetic) 49, 57, 58–62, 62– 4, 65, 66–7, 67–8, 71, 72;

264 INDEX

PI (homodiegetic/heterodiegetic merged) 155, 157, 158, 159–60, 162–4, 169, 169–72, 172, 173; VBN (autodiegetic) 127, 128, 130, 131– 2, 138–9, 141, 141–2, 144–8; WSE (autodiegetic/homodiegetic/ heterodiegetic) 177, 179–80, 180–1, 185, 191, 194–5, 197–8; see also epistemological authority; modalization; roles; witness-function narrators as readers 66, 162–4, 164–5, 165– 8, 169, 185, 232 n27 Nash, C. 15 Nash, W. 60, 77 Naturalism 78, 102, 104, 105, 106–7, 109, 111, 112–14, 115, 116–18, 119–20, 121– 3, 123–4, 125, 129, 134, 162, 226 n5, n7, 227 n28; see also realism naturalization 14, 68–9, 71, 126, 160, 162, 173–5, 177–9, 180, 210–12, 214–15 n10; see also coherence-building natural narrative (Labov) 155, 231–2 n14; functions reworked 150, 153–6, 231–2 n14; see also orientation; Peak negotiation 9–10, 12 ‘nouveau roman’ 150, 230–1 n1 novel genre: denial of novel status 17–18, 51–2; functional characteristics 7–10; history of 2–4, 88–9, 117, 151, 203–10, 212–13, 214 n2; pragmatics of 10–13, 203–12; as public text 9–10, 11–12, 106–11, 215 n16; as written genre 3, 31, 214 n3 novel sub-genres: adventure 177, 185; autobiographical (autofiction) 7, 125, 127–8, 147–8, 230 n29; comic 21–2; consciousness 7, 89, 125, 133, 134, 151, 155, 156, 159–60; detective 7, 177, 185;

of education 49, 55–6, 61, 76, 78, 109, 133, 134, 222 n32; eighteenth-century ‘roman’ 17–19, 103, 216 n2, n4, n5, 217 n8; exotic 53; experiential 74, 107–8, 133, 134, 153, 155, 156, 160, 162–4; fantastic 7, 17, 53–4, 133; Gothic 53–4, 63, 66, 133; historical 54–5, 94; libertine 25; ‘mémoire’ 18–19, 135; of personal experience (autodiegetic) 126, 133, 135, 160; picaresque 17, 18–19, 133, 134; popular naturalist 111, 114–16, 121–2, 125, 133, 134; psychological 160, 173; realist: 3–4, 7, 13, 48–9, 50–1, 54, 76, 77, 84–5, 89, 94, 95, 102, 106, 107–8, 111–14, 127, 129, 150, 151, 156, 158, 160–1, 173, 214 n4; ‘roman noir’ 134; sentimental 18–19, 48, 66–7, 78, 79, 95, 222 n24; worldly 49, 55, 133, 222 n32; see also genres; literary movements novel, theories: Bakhtin 1, 3, 4, 20, 123, 133, 203, 204, 205, 214 n2, 237 n5; Couturier 3, 24, 25, 31, 37, 214 n3; Formalist 133; Littré 129–30; Lukács 20, 203, Marxist 212; Schlovsky 7; see also genre, theories Nystrand, M. 23 old/new opposition 54–6, 62, 66, 70, 72, 103, 150–1, 204–5, 221 n18, 231 n3 Ong, W. 32 omniscience see epistemological authority ontological cut 11, 27, 30, 185–6, 194–6; see also autonomy of fictional worlds;

INDEX 265

referential status ontological status of fiction see referential status orality and literacy as features of cultural context: 31–2, 126, 134–5, 219 n35; see also spoken/written order/contingency 21, 145–6, 152–68, 179– 84, 188–91, 191, 192–3 order, reader’s desire for: JF 15, 18–19, 29, 45; MB 77–8, 89–90, 92–3, 99–100; PG 54–5, 68–9, 70–1; PI 151, 156–61, 161–2, 162, 167–8, 173–4; VBN 132–3, 135, 147–8; WSE 178–9, 184, 186–7, 190, 197–8, 199; see also interpretive closure orientation 29–30, 50, 62–3, 130, 154, 156– 7, 169, 171; see also deictic markers original text/voice, promotion of 37–8, 80, 83–4, 95–6, 126, 142–3, 144, 178–9, 181, 182–4, 192–3, 234 n5 originating voice see voice; see also absence and written text; absence/presence O’Toole, M. 8 OuLiPo 186 Pagnini, M. 11, 210 paintings 154, 156, 161, 164–5, 165, 167, 168, 186–7, 227 n19, 233 n29, n30 parataxis (in spoken discourse) 129, 170, 233 n38 paratextual material: epigraphs 50–1, 129, 191, 221 n10; notes 178, 182–4, 222 n32, 236 n32; prefaces 48, 49, 59, 102–5, 129–32, 150, 176, 228 n36; ‘prière d’insérer’ 178, 179, 180, 185, 186, 191, 198 Paris as trope 51, 53, 58, 63, 71, 80, 122–3, 133, 135, 157, 222 n28, 223 n34, 228 n35 parody (transformational citation) and pastiche (stylistic imitation):

AS 112, 122, 227 n20; JF 19–22, 30, 32, 37, 38–9, 46–7; MB 79–80, 80–4, 85, 86, 87, 90, 224 n18, n19; PG 53, 66–7, 67; PI 151, 154–5, 158, 160, 166–7, 167– 8; VBN 129, 134, 135, 137, 230 n24; WSE 193; see also irony participant activities see reading; writing participant roles (tenor) see roles participants (field) 8–10, 10; see under audience, readers, writer; see also absence and written text; context of situation participants (fictional) see narratees; narrators participant worlds 2, 6, 10, 12, 205–10, 210–12; see also absence and written text; reading; writing Paulhan, J.: Les Fleurs de Tarbes 144, 212 Paulson, W. 7, 14, 215 n13 Peak, narrative (Longacre) 91, 217 n10, 225 n25; see also event lines Perec, G. La Disparition 188, 237 n2; Lieux 196–7; Les Revenentes 188; La Vie mode d’emploi 186, 190, 200; W (serial) 176, 177, 178–9, 179, 180, 233 n3, 234 n11, 237 n2; W ou le souvenir d’enfance 4, 176– 201, 203–4, 210, 212 Le Père Goriot (Balzac): 2, 12, 22, 48– 72, 74, 78, 103, 111, 114, 121, 125, 132, 133, 135, 141, 162, 194, 195, 204, 206–7, 212, 219 n50, 227 n25; competition with contemporary genres 50–4; competition with tradition 54–6; didactic model: incorporation and transformation 57– 62;

266 INDEX

participant roles negotiated 58–62; position in history of the novel 48–50, 71–2; reader-activities, imposition and face 62–71; self-promotion 56–7 performance: 11, 205–10; AS 106–11, 115, 119–20; JF 27–30, 31–7, 38, 39, 39–41, 42–3, 44; MB 86–8; PI 162, 168–75; VBN 126–8, 130, 131, 135, 136–41, 143, 146–8; WSE 191–7, 200–1 Phelps, L.W. 205 ‘philosophes’ 23–5 philosophical discourse 21, 22–3, 28, 37, 88, 133, 134, 219 n48 photographs 181, 182 physicality of language see language, physicality of; see also rhythm; sonority place see orientation planning (mode), level of: 8, 170–1, 229 n15, 233 n38; conflicting signals 126, 129–30, 170–1; evidence of writer’s work 77, 126, 153– 4, 172; and institutional formality 9; see also cohesion; writing, crafting plot see event lines poetry 50, 52–3, 76, 78, 88, 154, 155, 158, 166–7, 168, 221 n16, 231 n3 point of view see focalisation; representation of speech/thought; stance politeness (Brown and Levinson) see face politeness, contextual parameters (power, distance and scale of imposition) 6–7, 10–12, 12–13, 203–10, 210–12 see also absence and written text; distance/intimacy; power; pragmatics;

taboo politeness, contextual parameters reranked: 11, 12–13; AS 101, 109, 110–11, 118–20, 122–3, 123–4; JF 25–6, 35; MB 74–5, 76, 77, 99; PG 50–6, 60, 61–2, 65–6, 66–7, 67–9, 70–1; PI 150–1, 152, 153, 155, 158–9, 159– 61, 162–4, 164–5, 168, 168–75; VBN 126, 128, 131–2, 135, 139, 140–1, 141–4, 146–9; WSE 193, 195–6, 196–7 politeness, contextual parameters (TAW): AS 107–11, 119–20; JF 24–5, 30, 36; MB 86–8; PI 155, 157–9, 160–1, 162–4, 164–5, 165–8, 168–9, 171–2, 173, 174–5; VBN 130, 135, 136–44, 144–5 politeness strategies see face threat, attenuation Portrait d’un inconnu (Sarraute): 3, 150– 75, 186–7, 105, 209–10, 211, 212, 220 n2; aesthetic/non-aesthetic polarization 165–8; escaping linguistic interactive patterns 168–72; medium and narrative performance 169–72; ‘mise en abyme’ as guide 164–5; narrator as reader 162–4; limits of transgression 151–2; participant positions and face 172–5; repudiation of narrative convention through incorporation 156–61; reworking categories 151–56 position see stance positivism 106–7, 107, 117 possible world theory 28 power 8–10, 205–10; as contextual parameter 11, 12–13, 24– 6, 130–2, 136–9, 142–4, 146, 147, 148, 169, 172–5, 195, 196–7; in narrator-narratee relationship 9, 24– 5, 32, 34–7, 45–7, 57, 58–61, 61–2, 62,

INDEX 267

64–6, 66, 103, 127, 130, 139, 141–2, 144–7, 163–4, 169, 169–72; in protagonist interactions 24–5, 30, 36, 86–8, 107, 108, 109, 119–20, 126, 127–8, 130, 135, 136–44, 157–9, 165– 8, 168–9, 170, 173–4, 174; of writers and readers 9–10, 21–2, 23– 4, 36, 37, 48, 57, 58–61, 61–2, 62, 64– 6, 71, 73–5, 78, 81, 86–8, 88–97, 97– 100, 102–5, 106–7, 109, 112–14, 123, 127–8, 130–2, 139, 140–1, 141–4, 146– 9, 168, 169, 172–5, 194–5, 196–7, 208, 209, 209–10, 220 n3, 223 n6, 226 n9, 229 n11 power and agency: AS 102, 104–5, 106–9, 111, 112–13, 114, 118, 121–3, 226 n9; JF 17, 34–6, 38–9, 39–41, 41, 42–3, 46–7; MB 74–5, 76–7, 77–8, 81, 87–8, 90–7, 98–9, 223 n4, n6, 224 n10, n19, n32; PG 49, 57, 58–61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 72, 222 n25; PI 155, 156, 157–9, 164–8, 168–9, 169– 71, 172–5, 231 n3, n13, 232 n18, n24; VBN 127–8, 130, 132, 139, 144–6, 229 n8, n16, 230 n29; WSE 180–4, 192–7, 234 n5, n13, n14, 236 n30; see also transitivity power and anonymity: 9–10; AS 105, 123; JF 23–4, 37; MB 71, 74–5, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90–3, 98– 9, 223 n6; PG 48, 220 n3; PI 162, 164, 169, 172–3, 175; VBN 128, 147–8 power and solidarity: 8, 9–10, 13; AS 113; JF 45–7; MB 90–3, 96, 225 n23, n29; PG 62, 62–3, 65; PI 157–8, 159, 163–4, 164, 168, 169, 173–4, 174; VBN 130, 132, 136–9, 149; WSE 195–6; see also solidarity

power, individual/group: 9–10, 211–12; AS 108, 109, 208; JF 39, 44–7, 206; MB 88, 95–6, 97–9, 207–8; PG 48, 71, 206–7; PI 157–9, 168, 168–9, 173–4, 209–10; VBN 125–8, 130–2, 135, 136–9, 140–1, 142–4, 146–7, 148–9, 209; WSE 194–6, 197 power, institutional groups and discourses: 8–9, 200, 215 n15; AS 102, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 113– 14, 114, 117–18, 119, 120, 122–3, 123– 4, 228 n31; JF 21–2, 25, 29; MB 74, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 87; PG 49, 57, 65, 71, 221 n10; PI 150; VBN 126–8, 129–30, 130–2, 135, 136– 9, 143–4; WSE 181, 185, 195 power of art 79–80, 83–4, 94–7, 161, 164– 8 power of language: MB 76–7, 79, 81–2, 83–4, 85, 86–8, 94, 97–8, 99; PI 159, 160, 165, 168, 168–9, 169–70, 174; VBN 127–8, 130, 136, 139, 139–41, 142–3, 144, 146–7, 229 n9, n16 pragmatics: of fiction 27, 81, 172–3, 197–8; of literature 10–11, 11–13, 27, 74, 85, 146, 165, 166–7, 200, 202, 230 n26; of narrative 34–7; of novel 10–13, 203–12 pragmatics of written text: 8, 10–13, 203– 12; AS 102–5, 111–12, 112–16, 121–3; JF 26, 34, 36, 37, 41–7; MB 74–5, 81, 85, 86–8, 88–97, 98– 100; PG 49–50, 58–61, 65, 71; PI 161–2, 163–4, 164–5, 172–5; VBN 126–8, 130–2, 146–9; WSE 185–6, 186–91, 191–7; see also absence and written text; absence/presence;

268 INDEX

discursive selfhood; face; politeness, contextual parameters Pratt, M.L. 11, 210, 227 n24 presence see absence/presence Prevost d’Exiles, A.F.: Manon Lescaut 134 Prince, G. 219 n49, 221 n22 private/public (field): 9, 11–12, 202, 205–10, 212–13, 215 n16, n19; effect on authority and responsibility 9– 10, 25–6, 48, 49, 61, 71, 71–2, 86–7, 98–9, 106–11, 162, 169–72, 172, 183– 4, 194–6, 196–7, 215 n16; status of participant activities 9–10, 25– 6, 37, 61, 71, 98–9, 102, 105, 106–11, 127–8, 131–2, 172–5, 194–6, 196–7, 215 n16, n19, 222 n28; see also distance/intimacy prolepsis: narratorial authority 145–6, 177, 179, 180, 223 n35; open-ended 189, 222 n31; cohesive 177, 180, 224 n13; see also authority; cohesion; reference to co-text props: and control 80, 87, 89, 167; for imaginative activity: 79–80, 89, 94– 5, 96–7, 167; and sensuality 79–80, 94, 96–7, 167 protocols see conventions Proust, M. 89, 127, 133, 135, 229 n7, 230 n23 psychoanalytical discourse 134–5, 142, 144, 160, 183, 194, 196 psychological narrative 117–18, 133, 160 public/private see private/public public selfhood see discursive selfhood public self-image see face Queneau, R.: Chêne et chien 191 Rabelais, F. 21, 37, 132, 219 n42 Rabinowitz, P.J. 212, 217 n15, 237 n3

Racine, J. Phèdre 70 readability see ‘lisible/scriptible’ reader-audience relationship: 9–10, 205– 10; AS 108, 109–11, 119–20, 121–3; JF 45–7, 215 n16; MB 73, 91–2, 95–6, 99, 225 n29; PG 58–9, 60, 64–5, 65; PI 167–8, 169, 173–4; VBN 128, 132, 139, 140–1, 146, 147, 148–9; WSE 194–6, 196–7 reader-narratee relationship see roles reader-protagonist relationship see roles readers: 9–12, 42, 44–5, 98–9, 163–4, 198– 200, 205–10; as ‘tiers exclu’ 44–5, 60, 86–7, 147, 149, 163, 169; as ‘tiers gaudens’ 44–5, 60–1, 61, 62– 3, 69–71, 107–8, 132, 146, 147, 163–4, 169, 173, 193–6; see also discursive selfhood; roles readers, contemporary: AS 101, 102–5, 123–4; JF 23–6; MB 75–6, 78; PG 48, 50, 51, 56, 58, 59, 221 n11, 223 n36; PI 150–1; VBN 125–7, 131–2, 144; WSE 193–7 reading: 9–12, 42, 43–5, 74, 98–9, 198– 200, 205–10; aesthetic experience 79, 88, 94–7, 113, 165, 166–8; appropriation 79–80, 89, 94–7, 108–9, 132, 136, 165, 167, 225 n28; discovery 58–9, 62–5, 66, 185, 193–4; emotional response 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 69–71, 79, 108–9, 117, 132, 140, 164, 189, 194–6, 197; engagement/indifference 35, 52, 59– 60, 61, 69–71, 108–9, 111, 117, 121–3, 132, 158, 193–7; and imagination 94–7, 129, 165–8, 200; interest 109, 124, 236 n31;

INDEX 269

laughter 22, 70–1; learning 58, 62–9, 113–14; ‘plaisir/jouissance’ 94, 96–7, 223 n7, 225 n30; pleasure in taboo 45, 104, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 119–20, 12; private/public 9–10, 61, 71, 106, 146, 194–6, 196–7, 215 n16; self-examination 60–1, 62, 71, 120; social (inter) action 11–12, 24–5, 37, 38, 42–3, 114, 121, 122–3, 127, 172–5, 193, 196–7, 200, 201; submission to text 97–9, 136–9, 141–2, 146, 147–9, 151, 165, 167; understanding 58, 65–9; see also coherence-building; contract of reading; experiential reading; interpretive closure; interpretive hesitation; mediation; misreading; naturalization; order, reader’s desire for; roles reading as sequential experience 12–13, 18, 20, 45, 64, 67, 85, 129–32, 133, 153, 183, 186, 187, 190, 193, 194, 223 n34, 233 n29, 236 n32 realism: 3–4, 13, 214 n4; AS 101, 102, 106, 107–8, 109, 111–14, 121–2; MB 76, 77, 84–5, 89, 94, 95; PG 50–1, 54, 60, 61, 65; PI 150, 151, 155, 156, 157–8, 160–1, 173; VBN 125, 127, 129, 133, 134; see also literalism; Naturalism; novel, realist; verisimilitude Realism 75, 76, 77, 84–5, 95, 101, 127, 158, 160–1, 167, 168, 214 n4 Realist/Naturalist aesthetic 75, 76, 102, 111, 112, 114, 127, 214 n4; reception see audiences; critics’ reactions; readers, contemporary;

reading ‘récit’ see ‘histoire/récit’; worlds, narrative reference 8; existents/non-existents mixed 30, 32, 37–8, 50, 63, 95, 147–8, 156, 167, 181– 2, 185–6, 187, 191, 194, 218 n32, 231 n13; fuzzy 29–30, 33, 130, 152, 192; naming 152, 159, 167, 188, 189, 190, 191, 219 n46, 232 n17, 235 n25; singular/doubled/multiple 30–1, 147– 8, 185–6, 189–90, 191, 192, 236 n28 reference to co-text 152, 153–4, 177–8, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185–6, 188–9, 190– 1, 194, 196, 231 n10, 236 n28 reference to other texts see allusion referential function of language see language referential insecurity 30–1, 33, 37–8, 50–1, 129, 130, 141, 145, 147–8, 150, 152–3, 176, 179–80, 181, 182–4, 188, 190, 191, 192–3, 195, 198, 233 n41 referential status: of autobiography 176–7, 178–9, 181, 182–4, 191, 197–8, 234 n5; of fiction 4, 12, 27–8, 30, 50–1, 54, 61, 62, 63, 65, 94–5, 104, 106–7, 109, 113, 129, 147–8, 161, 168, 176, 177, 178, 181, 181–2, 185–6, 186–7, 188–9, 194– 6, 197–8, 210–11, 220–1 n9, 222 n30; see also autonomy of fictional worlds reflector narration 155, 159–60, 207, 218 n30; see also focalization; impersonality register (field, tenor and mode): 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12–13, 215 n14 register, field (ideational) see under context; readers; semantic domain; territorial moves and the literary arena; writer register, mode (textual) see under cohesion; formality; planning;

270 INDEX

spoken/written; written medium register, tenor (interpersonal) see under aggression; co-operation; distance/empathy; distance/intimacy; face; formality; power; roles; solidarity regress of authorship 38, 134, 219 n41; see also intertextual chains regress of meaning 90, 92, 192–3; see also absence of pre-textual referent; irony; meaning reinsertion in narrative frames 153, 154, 180, 231 n10 repetition: as cohesive device 153–4, 224 n13; as feature of spoken discourse, 171, 229 n15; as grounding device 153–4, 154; as mutation 181–2, 183–4, 187–8, 189, 235 n17, 18, 236 n30; and reinsertion in narrative frame 231 n10; as signal of irony 122; as suspension of telic movement 154; and thematic continuity 154 report mode 74, 75–6, 77–8, 90, 106, 111, 112, 113–4, 118, 180–1, 185, 195–6, 197–8, 218 n30, 234 n13; see also impersonality representation of speech: free direct 68, 115; free indirect 74, 104, 114–15; direct 114–15; indirect 114–15; narrator’s representation of voice (as suppression) 115, 141, 224 n19 representation of speech/thought: indeterminacy (linguistic or prelinguistic) 160, 169–72, 209, 224 n16, 233 n26;

indeterminacy of origin 74, 89, 92, 104, 114; see also voice representation of thought: free direct 68, 115; free indirect 68, 74, 115, 122, 224 n16; direct 68; indirect 68, 224 n16 responsibility and authority: 9, 39, 48, 49, 66, 71–2, 74, 88, 89, 92–3, 99, 103–5, 106–11, 114–16, 117, 118, 119–20, 121– 3, 123–4, 135, 172, 192–3, 194–6, 196– 7, 198, 205–13; affected by public-private 9–10, 25–6, 48, 49, 61, 71, 71–2, 86–7, 98–9, 106– 11, 162, 169–72, 172, 183–4, 194–6, 196–7, 215 n16; see also moral function responsibility of reader (audiencefunction): 9, 205–10, 210–12, 212–13; for construction of participant worlds 10, 105, 193, 210–12; for interpretation 74, 89, 92–3, 93–7, 98–9, 174, 193, 223 n3, 225 n32; moral and social 71, 106–11, 122–3, 123–4, 194–5, 196–7; see also reading responsibility of writer (author-function): 9, 13, 25–6, 205–10, 211–12; linked to genre 17, 49, 75–6, 111–12, 113–14, 117; moral and social 17, 25, 26, 39, 48, 49, 54, 75–6, 88, 101, 103–5, 106–11, 114– 16, 118–20, 122–3, 123–4, 135, 192–3, 194–5, 230 n32; see also writing rhetoric see face threat, attenuation rhetorical purpose see intentions rhetoric of reading 1, 161–4, 236 n31 rhythm 75, 77, 153, 166, 233 n37; see also language, physicality of Richardson, S. 24, 216 n5 Ricoeur, P. 148, 157 Riffaterre, M. 14, 89 Rilke, R.M. 154, 167, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge 156, 231 n13 Rimbaud, A. 159, 167

INDEX 271

Robbe-Grillet, A. 230 n1 roles, cultural perceptions: 9–10, 205–10, 210–12; AS 101–2, 106, 123–4; JF 17, 23–6; MB 73, 75–6, 78, 88, 98, 223 n3; PG 57; PI 158, 168, 172–5; VBN 127–8, 133, 136–7, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143–4, 146–7, 148–9; WSE 194–5, 197–8 roles, fictional/hypothetical relationships: 9–10, 14 roles, narratees-readers: AS 121–3; JF 22, 24–6, 30, 31, 34–6, 37, 41–2, 43–7; PG 48–61, 64–5, 221 n20, n22; in PI 169; in VBN 131–2, 139, 140–1, 146, 147, 148–9, 193–4 roles, narrator-protagonist (in homodiegetic narration): PI 162–3, 168–9, 171–2, 173, 174; VBN 127, 130, 139, 141, 143, 145–6, 147–8 roles, narrators-readers 66, 162–4, 164–5, 165–8, 169, 185, 232 n27 roles, narrators-writers: AS 103–5, 107, 111–16, 118, 121–3; JF 19, 22, 24–5, 28–9, 30, 31, 34–6, 37, 39–41, 41–2, 42–4, 45; MB 73, 75–7, 77–8, 81, 90–3, 98–9; PG 49, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 72, 221– 2 n23; PI 162, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174–5; VBN 126, 127–8, 130, 131–2, 141, 141– 2, 143, 144–5, 146–8, 229 n5, 230 n27; WSE autobiographical 178, 191–3; fictional: 178, 185, 194–5, 126 n28; roles, protagonists-readers: AS 107–11, 112–13, 119–20; JF 22, 24–5, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41–2; MB 79, 85, 86–8, 89, 90–1, 91, 93–7, 98–9; PG 50, 61–2, 63–4, 64–6, 67–71; PI 162–8, 168–9, 173, 174–5, 231 n2;

VBN 130, 136–9, 139–41, 142, 143, 144, 230 n24; in WSE 185 roles, protagonists-writers: AS 101, 109–11, 111–16, 117–18, 118– 20, 121, 122–3; JF 22, 24–5, 30, 31, 36, 37, 39, 41–2, 42–3; MB 77–78, 80–5, 86–8, 90, 90–3, 98, 224 n12; PG 61, 62, 67–8, 222 n32; PI 173, 174–5; VBN 127–8, 130, 131, 135, 136–44; WSE 185, 194, 236 n28 ‘roman’, eighteenth-century 17–19, 103, 216 n2, n4, n5, 217 n8; see also novel Romantic drama 51, 220 n6, 226 n9 Romantic irony 32, 78 Romanticism 10, 32, 75, 76, 77, 79–80, 81– 2, 83–5, 91, 94, 95, 112–13, 215 n13, 220 n3, 224 n18, 226 n9 Romantic poetry 52–3, 79–80, 82 Ronen, R. 12 Rorty, R. 94, 174 Rousseau, J.J. 51 Rousset, D.: L’Univers concentrationnaire 184, 125 n18 Ryan, M.L. 214 n6 Sainte-Beuve, C.A. 221 n11, 222 n26 Sarraute, N.: L’Ere du soupçon 152, 230 n1, 231 n6, 232 n22; Les Fruits d’or 231 n2, 235 n23; Martereau 231 n4; Portrait d’un inconnu: 3, 150–75, 186– 7, 105, 209–10, 211, 212, 220 n2; Tropismes 231 n7; L’Usage de la parole 231 n4 Sartre, J.P. 150, 168, 230 n1 satire, social: AS 109, 112–13, 119–20; JF 1–2, 45–6; MB 80–4, 85, 87–8, 89, 90–1, 95–6, 97– 8;

272 INDEX

PG 52–3, 68, 69–71; PI 159, 160–1, 168; VBN 134, 135, 136–9, 139–40, 143–4; see also irony Scarron, P. 21 Schaeffer, J.M. 5, 18 schemata, cognitive and experiential: 6–7, 215 n11; frames (properties) 215 n11; scripts (actions) 215 n11 Schlegel, F.von 20, 32, 78, 207, 237 n3 Schlovsky, V. 7 scientific discourse 51, 65, 79, 80, 82–3, 85, 87, 88, 102–3, 103, 117–18, 134, 167, 221 n10, 224 n18, 226 n11, 228 n31; see also hierarchies; institutional discourse Scott, W. 53, 54–5, 79, 94 scripts (schemata) 215 n11; see also reading; roles, cultural perceptions; writing Searle, J. 27, 214 n7 seduction 44–5, 128, 130, 140, 163–4, 236 n31 self-esteem see face self-evidence 65, 66, 68, 113–14, 135 selfhood see discursive selfhood self-promotion 51–7, 79–88, 97–100, 102– 5, 116–17, 119–20, 123–4, 126, 164–8, 228 n37; see also face, writer’s semantic domain (field) and genre: AS 101, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 116–17, 227 n28; JF 17, 19, 21, 22–3, 35–6, 45–6, 217 n8; MB 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84–5, 94–5, 97; PG 48–9, 51–5, 57, 58, 62, 66–7, 70–1, 221 n12; PI 150–1, 158, 159–60, 166; VBN 125, 127–8, 129, 133–4, 147–8, 229 n8, 230 n29; WSE 177–9, 183–4, 185–6, 191, 194– 6, 198, 199, 200, 201 sender-adressee model, inadequate: 10–11, 16, 23, 44–5, 74, 152, 168–9, 170–1

sententiousness 49, 55, 57, 61, 65, 66, 68, 78, 134, 141, 160–1, 174, 223 n36, 224 n15; see also didactic model Serres, M. 14, 152, 235 n22 Shakespeare, W. 50–1, 67 shifters (Jakobson) see deictic markers signals, textual see deictic markers Simpson, P. 58, 60, 76, 180–1, 222 n25 sincerity in language-use 86–8, 108–9, 119– 20, 135, 137–39, 139–41, 143–4, 168 Slugoski, B.R. 217 n18 Smith, B.Herrnstein 200, 218 n25, 236 n26 sociability: 24, 25, 32, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 110, 128, 141–2, 143, 222 n28 social (inter) action, reading and writing as 11–12, 24–5, 37, 38, 42–3, 106, 114, 121, 122–3, 127, 172–5, 196–7, 200, 201 social satire see satire, social sociolect 84, 98, 104, 111–16, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 123, 125–6, 129–32, 165, 167, 226 n8, 227 n26 solidarity: as complicity 126, 127, 128, 130, 135, 136, 137–8, 139, 140, 141, 143, 157–9, 168, 169, 173; and distance 217 n18; and moral codes 119–20, 122, 123; and power 8, 9–10, 13, 45–7, 62, 62–3, 65, 90–3, 96, 113, 130, 132, 136–9, 149, 157–8, 159, 163–4, 164, 168, 169, 173–4, 174, 195–6, 225 n23, n29; and status 45–7, 62, 66, 67, 87, 90–1, 91–2, 93, 95–6, 112–13, 123, 136–9, 140–1; and social convention 82, 83, 84, 87–8, 95–6, 105, 108, 119–20, 122, 135, 136– 7, 140–1, 144, 149, 157–8, 159, 167, 168, 173; see also cooperation; élite groups; in-group membership sonority of language 75, 77, 166, 223 n7; see also language, physicality of Sophocles: Oedipus 70 Sorel, G. 18 space and time: 14, 216 n25;

INDEX 273

see also reading as sequential experience space of text see cognitive construction; typographical layout; worlds space, virtual: 10–11, 12–13, 15, 202–12; AS 107, 107–8, 109, 113, 114, 115, 120; JF 27–31, 38–41, 41–5; PG 61, 63–4; PI 152, 153–5, 156, 160–1, 162–4, 166, 167, 169–70, 171, 172, 173–4, 233 n41; VBN 127–8, 146–8; WSE 185–6, 190–1, 192–3, 197–200; see also mediation spectacle, 108–11, 138; see also performance speech acts 10, 11, 27, 81, 114, 197–8, 200; see also intentions; writing Spinoza, B. 28 spoken discourse (mode): 8, 9, 11–12, 215 n20 spoken discourse, signals in narration: 32– 7, 103–4, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 121–3, 126, 127, 129–30, 131–2, 169, 170, 171– 2, 229 n14; and authority 103–4, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 121–3, 127, 129–30, 131–2, 170; dialogue form 32; 34–7; informality and intimacy 9, 126, 170, 171, 229 n14; and performance 32–7, 126, 130, 132, 169, 171–2; spoken/written medium: 11, 31–2, 34, 129, 170, 215 n20, 233 n38; AS 111–16, 118, 119, 120, 121–3; JF 27, 31–4, 43; MB 73, 80, 80–5, 87, 94, 96–7, 224 n19; PI 151, 168, 169–72, 174, 175; VBN 125–6, 127, 129–30, 134–5; WSE 181–2, 183, 192–3 stance: reader 12, 42, 43–7, 90–3, 106–11, 121– 2, 148–9, 169, 173–4, 193–6, 205–10, 211–12;

writer 18–19, 19–22, 52–3, 66–7, 70–1, 73, 77–8, 80–5, 90–3, 94, 107, 113, 121–2, 123–4, 127–8, 134, 147–9, 173– 5, 191–3, 205–10, 210–12; see also discursive selfhood; reading; writing status of writer see authority; authorization; canon; face; politeness, contextual parameters; writer Stendhal (H.Beyle): Racine et Shakespeare 51, 220 n6 Sterne, L.: Tristram Shandy 19, 20, 21, 22, 32, 34, 37, 38–9, 217 n12, 219 n35, 219–20 n51 story see event lines story-telling see performance ‘style indirect libre’ see representation of speech/thought style, individual see idiolect; see also authority, aesthetic values stylistics 13–14 subjectivity see discursive selfhood subject of book see semantic domain substitution and supplementarity: JF 218 n27; PI 152–3, 154–5; VBN 145–6; WSE 182–4, 187, 187–8, 190, 191, 192– 3, 236 n33; see also reading as sequential experience sub-worlds: embedded narratives in JF 18, 27, 28, 31, 218 n24; fictional worlds as sub-worlds in WSE 177–8, 181, 194, 196; focalizers in MB 90–3, 94–5; protagonist-interpreters in PG 63, 64, 65–6, 66–9; protagonist sub-world interference in PI 153, 155, 160, 172 Surrealism 125, 135 Svartvik, J. (and G.Leech) 219 n39

274 INDEX

symbolic goods, literature as 11, 23, 75, 78, 97–8, 102, 109, 128–9, 133, 135, 154, 200, 202, 228 n37; see also aesthetic values symbolic structures and cultural truth 105, 106–7, 109, 117, 129, 222 n33 Symbolist poetry 167 symbols, reductive 80, 82, 87, 95, 97, 225 n28 synaesthesia (as category crossing) 84, 233 n29 taboo: and ‘bienséance’ 26, 35, 45–7, 103–4, 115, 118–20, 121, 122, 123; and public text 22, 25, 26, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110–11, 115, 117, 119–20, 122–3, 123–4, 127, 131–2, 140, 194–5, 217 n17; see also politeness, contextual parameters; power, individual/group; power, institutional groups and discourses TAW see textual actual world Taylor, Talbot J. 5, 219 n34 telic movement 61–2, 68–9, 71, 77, 133, 134, 151, 154–5, 157–8, 188, 189, 190, 224 n13, 227 n25; telic/episodic narration 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 35, 45, 135; see also event lines Tel Quel 230 n1 temporal fluidity 74, 155, 163, 171 temporal ordering 14; causal sequence in narrative 134–5, 145, 153, 154, 155, 157, 157–8; of telling and told 28, 29, 33, 40, 130, 155, 157, 163, 171; of writing 177, 178–9; see also event lines; reading as sequential experience tenor (register) 7–8, 9; see under aggression; co-operation; distance/ empathy; distance/intimacy;

formality; face; power; roles; solidarity territories and personal space 9–10, 11, 12– 13, 202, 203, 205–10, 210–12; AS 107–11, 227 n14; PI 163–4, 164–5, 165–8, 168–75; VBN 127–8, 130, 131, 132, 136–8, 139, 140, 141–2, 143, 144, 146–9; WSE 193, 194–6, 196–7; see also face territories and the literary aren: 1, 3–4, 11, 202, 203, 203–5, 212–13; AS 101–2, 103–4, 116–23, 123–4; MB 76, 78, 83–4, 84–5, 88, 97–8, 100; PG 50–7, 66–7; PI 151, 156–61, 165–8, 173–4; VBN 125–8, 132–5, 139, 141–4, 148–9; see also competition text-context relationship see referential status; worlds text-type see genre textual actual world 4; multiple in WSE 176, 177–81, 185–6; instability/stability in PI 153, 155–6, 156–60; unfamiliarity in PG 58, 62–3 textual function (Halliday) see cohesion; formality; planning; spoken/written; written medium theatre 21, 33, 49, 50–2, 61, 66–7, 70–1, 217 n10, 221 n12, n15, 222, n24, n28 Thomas, J. 12 ‘tiers exclu’ 44–5, 60, 86–7, 147, 149, 163, 169; ‘tiers gaudens’ 44–5, 60–1, 61, 62–3, 69– 71, 107–8, 132, 146, 147, 163–4, 169, 173, 193–6 Thompson, S.A. 82 time see temporal ordering; see also event lines; reading as sequential experience time and space 14, 216 n25

INDEX 275

Todorov, T. 63 Tolstoy, L.N.: War and Peace 160–1, 231 n2 tragedy 49, 51, 66, 67, 70–1, 106, 116, 118, 158, 222 n24 transitivity and agency: 59, 104–5, 108, 132, 143, 145, 222 n25: see also power and agency transposition of narrative categories 150, 153–6, 231–2 n14 tropistic movement 151–3, 173–5, 231 n7 truth claims: and authority 17, 35, 54, 61, 65, 66, 101–2, 103, 104, 106–7, 109, 124, 178– 9, 182–4, 194–6; disturbed by other features 22, 50–2, 104, 106, 109, 129, 176; and fictional world-discourse world links 28, 35, 37–8, 39, 50, 60, 61, 65, 106–7, 109, 129; see also fiction and falsehood; literalism; mimetic authority; moral function; realism; referential status truth, fictional see epistemological authority typographical layout: and authority 178, 183, 234 n6; and meaning 186, 187–91; and written medium 33–4, 178, 180, 219 n35 Vallès, J. 127 verisimilitude 26, 28, 29, 35, 38, 39–41, 46, 50–1, 51–2, 54, 63–5, 106–7, 115, 127, 129, 151, 155, 156, 157–8, 160–1, 162, 171–2, 178–9, 192–3, 194, 195–6, 204, 230 n25, 231 n5; see also mimetic authority; decorum; realism; truth claims Verne, J. 177, 185 virtual spaces and worlds 10–11, 12–13, 15, 202–12;

AS 107, 107–8, 109, 113, 114, 115, 120; JF 27–31, 38–41, 41–5; PG 61, 63–4; PI 152, 153–5, 156, 160–1, 162–4, 166, 167, 169–70, 171, 172, 173–4, 233 n41; VBN 127–8, 146–8; WSE 185–6, 190–1, 192–3, 197–200 vision of artist 75–7, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112–13, 123–4, 126, 127–8, 129, 142–3, 144, 226 n9 visual artefacts: drawings 179, 181–2; keepsakes 79–80, 96–7; maps 79, 80, 95, 166; paintings 154, 156, 161, 164–5, 165, 167, 168, 186–7, 227 n19, 233 n29, n30; photographs 181, 182; plate decorations 79, 95 visualization: and description 79–80, 96–7, 107, 113, 227 n19; and ‘mise en abyme’ 186–90, 235 n22, n23; see also cognitive construction of space of text voice 14, 205–10, 210–12, 216 n26; decorum broken 29, 155, 160, 162, 172; in paratextual material 49, 59, 102–5, 129–32, 176, 185, 191, 198; split 39–41, 42–3, 68, 131, 141, 147, 179–80, 192, 194–5, 197–8, 219– 20 n51, 230 n29; see also absence/presence; hierarchies; representation of speech/thought voice and origin: AS 114–16, 118, 121–3, 226 n8; JF 27, 28, 31–2, 32, 33, 37–8, 39–41, 43, 219 n47; MB 73–5, 81–5, 223 n6; PG 68, 223 n37; PI 172–4, 232 n25; VBN 126, 127–8, 131, 147–8; WSE 179–80, 192–3, 194–5, 197, 197– 8;

276 INDEX

see also absence/presence voice, individual or group: idiolect 18, 40, 84, 104, 111–16, 118– 20, 121–3, 125–6, 131, 172, 227 n26; idiolect/sociolect 84, 104, 111–16, 118– 20, 123, 125–6, 131, 165, 167, 226 n8, 227 n26; sociolect 84, 98, 104, 111–16, 118, 118–20, 121–3, 123, 125–6, 129–32, 165, 167, 226 n8, 227 n26 Voltaire, F.M.: Arouet de 135; Candide 19, 21, 22, 37, 133–4, 230 n22 Voyage au bout de la nuit (Céline) 2–3, 22, 31, 125–49, 169–70, 197, 204–5, 208–9, 209, 212; appropriating literary tradition 132–5; Bardamu’s performances 139–41; beginning reading, convention to transgression 129–32; building participant positions 144–9; delirium and the outsider as threat 141– 4; language and power games in the social arena 136–39; transgressing literary convention 125– 28 Walton, K. 94, 174 Watt, I. 3 Watts, R. 10 Werth, P. 5–6, 6–7, 8, 10, 28, 42, 50, 107, 155, 235 n21 will 34–7, 42, 43, 46–7, 76–7, 83–5, 104–5, 126, 131–2, 143, 146, 146–7, 165, 197, 205, 205–6, 207, 226 n9 witness-function 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 127, 145, 155, 162, 179–80, 181, 193–4, 198, 236 n28 Wittgenstein, L. 15 Woolf, V. 89, 207 world-building see cognitive construction; coherence-building; naturalization; worlds world levels see hierarchies

worlds, construction and relationships (general principles) 6–7, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 27–8, 28–9, 36–7, 42, 98–9, 127– 8, 147–8, 155, 156–60, 162–5, 169–72, 172–5, 177–201, 210–11, 218 n26 worlds, narrative, status of: AS 111–16, 117–18, 121–3; JF 28–9, 30, 33, 36–7, 39–41, 41–7; MB 73–5, 75–8, 90–2, 98–9; PG 48, 49, 58–62, 62, 64–5; PI 155, 160, 162–4, 169–72, 172–3, 230 n31; VBN 127–8, 145–6, 147–8; WSE 193–4, 194–5, 197–8 worlds, participant (reader and writer) 2, 6, 10, 12, 205–10, 210–12; see also absence and written text; anonymity; reading; writing worlds, sub-worlds: embedded narratives in JF 18, 27, 28, 31, 218 n24; fictional worlds as sub-worlds in WSE 177–8, 181, 194, 196; focalizers in MB 90–3, 94–5; protagonist-interpreters in PG 63, 64, 65–6, 66–9; protagonist sub-world interference in PI 153, 155, 160, 172 worlds, TAW (textual actual world) 4; multiple in WSE 176, 177–81, 185–6; instability/stability in PI 153, 155–6, 156–60; unfamiliarity in PG 58, 62–3 worlds, TAW source of discourse-world roles see roles W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec) 4, 176– 201, 203–4, 210, 212; conventional reading of authority structures 177–8; cross-generic reading 185–6; fiction/autobiography and reference 176–7; from generic classification to writing 200–1; perturbing hierarchies of text and voice 179–84;

INDEX 277

public and private space 196–7; reference and selfhood 191; structural configuration and meaning 186–91; writing and reading as social action 193–5; writing and reading in the space between worlds 197–200; writing as self-construction 192–3 writer 9–10, 10–12, 205–10; constructed by reader 6, 10–12, 18–19, 76, 77–8, 90–3, 94, 107, 113, 121–2, 123–4, 127, 128, 134, 147, 172–5, 193, 196–7, 199, 205–10, 210–11; extra-fictional persona 49, 59, 102–5, 126, 127, 128, 129–32, 147–8, 176–7, 177–9, 181–4, 185–6, 191–3, 197, 197– 8; identity concealed 9–10, 23–4, 37, 48, 74–5, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90–3, 98–9, 105, 123, 128, 147–8, 162, 164, 169, 172–3, 175, 220 n3, 223 n6; social status 23–6, 45–6, 48–50, 71–2, 76, 78, 87–8, 101, 104–5, 106, 111–16, 118, 121–3, 123–4, 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 133, 134, 135, 139, 141–4, 14–8, 151, 173, 174, 200, 205–10; see also discursive selfhood; roles writing 12–13, 205–10; complicity 135, 194–5; crafting 45, 74, 75, 76, 79–80, 94–7, 97–8, 99, 104–5, 106, 112, 117, 126, 141, 152–4, 155–6, 169, 172, 175, 176– 7, 181–2, 184, 186, 187–91, 192–3, 198, 218–19, n33, 224 n13, 236 n30; creation of selfhood 42, 42–3; 126, 127– 8, 129–32, 139, 139–41, 147–8, 176–7, 182–4, 192–3, 196–7, 201, 205–10; denunciation 119–20, 121–3, 127, 131– 2, 133, 135; oppositional resistance 173–4; performance 27, 109–10, 126, 127, 131, 135, 140–1, 194–5, 196–7; prior to reading 42, 74, 98, 198; private/public 9–10, 25–6, 102, 105, 106, 127, 128, 132, 194–5, 196–7;

quest for selfhood 183–4, 185, 192–3, 197; recording 35, 38, 50, 52, 103, 106, 109, 112, 113–14, 117–18, 124, 178–9, 181– 4, 195, 196; self-expression 75–7, 88, 104–5, 113, 126, 127, 226 n9; self-sacrifice 109, 131–2, 143, 158, 196–7; social (inter) action 37, 38, 42–3, 106, 114, 121, 122–3, 172–5, 193, 196–7, 200, 201; struggle for aesthetic ideal 77–8, 158, 232 n18; subversive invasion 125, 126, 133, 141– 4, 146–7, 148–9, 174–5; and will 34–7, 42, 43, 46–7, 76–7, 83– 5, 104–5, 126, 131–2, 143, 146, 146–7, 165, 197, 205, 205–6, 207, 226 n9; see also roles written medium (mode) 8; and distance/intimacy 26, 146, 162, 162–4, 164–5, 167, 169, 169–72, 172– 3, 174–5, 218 n21; and novel 3, 31, 73, 126, 214 n3; and voice 14, 75, 81–5, 126, 131, 141, 162, 169, 169–72, 172–3, 192–3, 197, 216 n26; see also absence and written text; pragmatics written/spoken see spoken/written Zola, Émile: L’Assommoir 2, 31, 101–24, 187, 204, 208, 212; Germinal 117, 124; article on Germinie Lacerteux (Goncourts) 103, 226 n9; Le Roman expérimental 103, 134, 228 n31; Les Rougon-Macquart 226 n8; Thérèse Raquin 102, 103, 116, 226 n9