CHAPTER 3

Roman Jakobson
INTRODUCTORY NOTE-DL
Roman Jakobson ( 1896-1982) was one of the most powerful minds in twentieth-century
intellectual history, though general recognition of this fact came rather late in his long life.
He was born in Russia and was a founder-member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle which
played a major part in the development of Russian formalism. At this time, Jakobson was an
enthusiastic supporter of the Russian futurist poets, and never lost this commitment to
modernist experiment and innovation. In 1920, he moved to Czechoslovakia and helped to
found the Prague Linguistic Circle, which was the source of some of the important
foundation work in structuralistic linguistic and poetics. The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1939 forced Jakobson to move on again, and in 1941 he arrived in the United States,
where he lived until his death, teaching at Columbia, Harvard and MIT.

Most of Jakobson's published work cosists of highly technical articles on matters of

grammar and phonology, expecially in Slavonic languages. But he was able to apply his
immense learning and speculative intelligence to theoretical questions of universal interest
and importance, and to incisive linguistic analysis of classic literary texts in English and
French. The French anthropologist Claude L?vi-Strauss, whose work gave such a powerful
impetus to structuralism in the 1960s (see "'Incest and Myth'", section 40 in the 20th Century
Literary Criticism), acknowledged his indebtedness to the linguistic theory of Roman
Jakobson, and the two men collaborated on an analysis of Baudelaire poem 'Les Chats',
published in the journal L'Homme in 1962, which acquired considerable fame, notoriety,
as a set piece of structuralist criticism (especially after Michael Riffaterre's critique of it in
Yale French Studies in 1966).

Two ideas in Jakobson's contribution to modern literary theory deserve special mention.
One was his identfication of the rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy, as models for
two fundamental ways of organizing discourse that can be traced in every kind of cultural
production. (See "'The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles'", reprinted below, pp. 56-9, an
extract from "'Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances'" in
Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language [ 1956].) The other was his attempt
to understand 'literariness'-to define in linguistic terms what makes a verbal message a
work of art. This was a preoccupation of the Russian formalists from the inception of the
movement, but in "'Linguistics and Poetics'", reprinted below, we find a lucid exposition of
Jakobson's mature thought on the subject, enlivened and illuminated by a staggering range

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of illustration. This paper was first delivered as a 'Closing Statement' to a conference on

'Style in Language' held at Indiana University in 1958, and is reprinted here from the
proceedings of that conference, edited by Thomas Sebeok, and published under the title
Style in Language in 1960. It had an incalculable effect in bringing to the attention of Anglo-
American critics the richness of the structuralist tradition of poetics and textual analysis
that originated in Eastern and Central Europe.CROSS REFERENCES:
1. Saussure
 11. Kristeva
COMMENTARY:
KRYSTYNA POMORSKA and STEPHEN RUDY (eds), Roman Jakobson: Verbal Art,
Verbal Sign, Verbal Time ( 1985)
DAVID LODGE, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonoymy and the
Typology of Modern Literature ( 1977)
MICHAEL RIFFATERRE, "'Describing Poetic Structures: two approaches to
baudelaire's Les Chats,'" Yale French Studies 36-7 ( 1966) pp. 200-42
MICHAEL ISSACHAROFF, "'Roman Jakobson'" in The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth
( 1994), pp. 417-19
DEREK ATTRIDGE, "'The Linguistic Model and its Applications'", in Roman
Selden (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Eight
(From Formalism to Poststructuralism) ( 1995), pp. 58-84

Linguistics and poetics

I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in its relation to linguis-
tics. Poetics deals primarily with the question, What makes a verbal message a
work of art? Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica [spe-
cific differences] of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other
kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies.

Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting
is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of
verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.

Arguments against such a claim must be thoroughly discussed. It is evident that

many devices studied by poetics are not confined to verbal art. We can refer to
the possibility of transposing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture, medieval
legends into frescoes and miniatures, or Laprés-midi d'un faune a into music, ballet,
and graphic art. However ludicrous may appear the idea of the Iliad and Odyssey
in comics, certain structural features of their plot are preserved despite the dis-
appearance of their verbal shape. The question whether Blake illustrations to
the Divina Commedia are or are not adequate is a proof that different arts are
comparable. The problems of baroque or any other historical style transgress the

a
The Afternoon of a Faun, poem by Stéphane Mallarmé ( 1842-98) which inspired, among
other
works, Debussy's tone poem of the same title.

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frame of a single art. When handling the surrealistic metaphor, we could hardly
pass by Max Ernst's pictures or Luis Buñuel films, The Andalusian Dog and
The Golden Age. In short, many poetic features belong not only to the science
of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is, to general semiotics. This
statement, however, is valid not only for verbal art but also for all varieties of
language since language shares many properties with some other systems of signs
or even with all of them (pansemiotic features).

Likewise a second objection contains nothing that would be specific for literat-
ure: the question of relations between the word and the world concerns not only
verbal art but actually all kinds of discourse. Linguistics is likely to explore all
possible problems of relation between discourse and the 'universe of discourse':
what of this universe is verbalized by a given discourse and how is it verbalized.
The truth values, however, as far as they are -- to say with the logicians -- 'extra-
linguistic entities', obviously exceed the bounds of poetics and of linguistics in
general.

Sometimes we hear that poetics, in contradistinction to linguistics, is concerned

with evaluation. This separation of the two fields from each other is based on a
current but erroneous interpretation of the contrast between the structure of poetry
and other types of verbal structure: the latter are said to be opposed by their
'casual', designless nature to the 'noncasual', purposeful character of poetic lan-
guage. In the point of fact, any verbal behavior is goal-directed, but the aims are
different and the conformity of the means used to the effect aimed at is a problem
that evermore preoccupies inquirers into the diverse kinds of verbal communica-
tion. There is a close correspondence, much closer than critics believe, between
the question of linguistic phenomena expanding in space and time and the spatial
and temporal spread of literary models. Even such discontinuous expansion as
the resurrection of neglected or forgotten poets -- for instance, the posthumous
discovery and subsequent canonization of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889), the
tardy fame of Lautréamont (d. 1870) among surrealist poets, and the salient influ-
ence of the hitherto ignored Cyprian Norwid (d. 1883) on Polish modern poetry
-- find a parallel in the history of standard languages which are prone to revive
outdated models, sometimes long forgotten, as was the case in literary Czech which
toward the beginning of the nineteenth century leaned to sixteenth-century models.

Unfortunately the terminological confusion of 'literary studies' with 'criticism'

tempts the student of literature to replace the description of the intrinsic values
of a literary work by a subjective, censorious verdict. The label 'literary critic'
applied to an investigator of literature is as erroneous as 'grammatical (or lexical)
critic' would be applied to a linguist. Syntactic and morphologic research cannot
be supplanted by a normative grammar, and likewise no manifesto, foisting a
critic's own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute for
an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art. This statement is not to be mistaken
for the quietist principle of laissez faire; any verbal culture involves program-
matic, planning, normative endeavors. Yet why is a clear-cut discrimination made
between pure and applied linguistics or between phonetics and orthoëpy b but not
between literary studies and criticism?

b
That part of grammar which deals with pronunciation.

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Literary studies, with poetics as their focal portion, consist like linguistics
of two sets of problems: synchrony and diachrony. The synchronic description
envisages not only the literary production of any given stage but also that part
of the literary tradition which for the stage in question has remained vital or has
been revived. Thus, for instance, Shakespeare on the one hand and Donne, Marvell,
Keats, and Emily Dickinson on the other are experienced by the present English
poetic world, whereas the works of James Thomson and Longfellow, for the time
being, do not belong to viable artistic values. The selection of classics and their
reinterpretation by a novel trend is a substantial problem of synchronic literary
studies. Synchronic poetics, like synchronic linguistics, is not to be confused with
statics; any stage discriminates between more conservative and more innovatory
forms. Any contemporary stage is experienced in its temporal dynamics, and, on
the other hand, the historical approach both in poetics and in linguistics is con-
cerned not only with changes but also with continuous, enduring, static factors.
A thoroughly comprehensive historical poetics or history of language is a super-
structure to be built on a series of successive synchronic descriptions.

Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only when the
field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, for example, when the sentence
is viewed by some linguists as the highest analyzable construction or when the
scope of linguistics is confined to grammar alone or uniquely to non-semantic
questions of external form or to the inventory of denotative devices with no refer-
ence to free variations. Voegelin has clearly pointed out the two most important
and related problems which face structural linguistics, namely, a revision of 'the
monolithic hypothesis of language' and a concern with 'the interdependence of
diverse structures within one language'. No doubt, for any speech community, for
any speaker, there exists a unity of language, but this over-all code represents a
system of interconnected subcodes; each language encompasses several concurrent
patterns which are each characterized by a different function.

Obviously we must agree with Sapir that, on the whole, 'ideation reigns supreme
in language . . .' (40), but this supremacy does not authorize linguistics to dis-
regard the 'secondary factors.' The emotive elements of speech which, as Joos is
prone to believe, cannot be described 'with a finite number of absolute categories,'
are classified by him 'as non-linguistic elements of the real world.' Hence, 'for us
they remain vague, protean, fluctuating phenomena,' he concludes, 'which we
refuse to tolerate in our science' (19). Joos is indeed a brilliant expert in reduc-
tion experiments, and his emphatic requirement for an 'expulsion' of the emotive
elements 'from linguistic science' is a radical experiment in reduction -- reductio
ad absurdum.

Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before

discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the other func-
tions of language. An outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the
constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. The
ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message
requires a CONTEXT referred to ('referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous,
nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being
verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and
addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and,
 -33-

finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the

addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in com-
munication. All these factors inalienably involved in verbal communication may
be schematized as follows:

Each of these six factors determines a different function of language. Although

we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find
verbal messages that would fulfill only one function. The diversity lies not in a
monopoly of some one of these several functions but in a different hierarchical
order of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the
predominant function. But even though a set (Einstellung) toward the referent, an
orientation toward the CONTEXT -- briefly the so-called REFERENTIAL, 'denotative,'
'cognitive' function -- is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory
participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account
by the observant linguist.

The so-called EMOTIVE or 'expressive' function, focused on the ADDRESSER,

aims a direct expression of the speaker's attitude toward what he is speaking
about. It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or
feigned; therefore, the term 'emotive,' launched and advocated by Marty (30) has
proved to be preferable to 'emotional.' The purely emotive stratum in language is
presented by the interjections. They differ from the means of referential language
both by their sound pattern (peculiar sound sequences or even sounds elsewhere
unusual) and by their syntactic role (they are not components but equivalents
of sentences). 'Tut! Tut! said McGinty': the complete utterance of Conan Doyle's
character consists of two suction clicks. The emotive function, laid bare in the inter-
jections, flavors to some extent all our utterances, on their phonic, grammatical,
and lexical level. If we analyze language from the standpoint of the information
it carries, we cannot restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of
language. A man, using expressive features to indicate his angry or ironic atti-
tude, conveys ostensible information, and evidently this verbal behaviour cannot
be likened to such nonsemiotic, nutritive activities as 'eating grapefruit' (despite
Chatman's bold simile). The difference between [big] and the emphatic prolonga-
tion of the vowel [bi:g] is a conventional, coded linguistic feature like the differ-
ence between the short and long vowel in such Czech pairs as [vi] 'you' and [vi:]
'knows,' but in the latter pair the differential information is phonemic and in the
former emotive. As long as we are interested in phonemic invariants, the English
/i/ and /i:/ appear to be mere variants of one and the same phoneme, but if we are
concerned with emotive units, the relation between the invariant and variants is
reversed: length and shortness are invariants implemented by variable phonemes.
Saporta's surmise that emotive difference is a nonlinguistic feature, 'attributable

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to the delivery of the message and not to the message,' arbitrarily reduces the
informational capacity of messages.

A former actor of Stanislavskij's Moscow Theater told me how at his audition

he was asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the
phrase Segodnja vec + □erom 'This evening,' by diversifying its expressive tint. He
made a list of some forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in
accordance with each of these situations, which his audience had to recognize
only from the changes in the sound shape of the same two words. For our
research work in the description and analysis of contemporary Standard Russian
(under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation) this actor was asked to repeat
Stanislavskij's test. He wrote down some fifty situations framing the same elliptic
sentence and made of it fifty corresponding messages for a tape record. Most of
the messages were correctly and circumstantially decoded by Moscovite listeners.
May I add that all such emotive cues easily undergo linguistic analysis.

Orientation toward the ADDRESSEE, the CONATIVE function, finds its purest
grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative, which syntactically,
morphologically, and often even phonemically deviate from other nominal and
verbal categories. The imperative sentences cardinally differ from declarative
sentences: the latter are and the former are not liable to a truth test. When in
O'Neill play The Fountain, Nano, '(in a fierce tone of command),' says 'Drink!'
-- the imperative cannot be challenged by the question 'is it true or not?' which
may be, however, perfectly well asked after such sentences as 'one drank,' 'one
will drink,' 'one would drink.' In contradistinction to the imperative sentences,
the declarative sentences are convertible into interrogative sentences: 'did one
drink?' 'will one drink?' 'would one drink?'

The traditional model of language as elucidated particularly by Bühler (4) was

confined to these three functions -- emotive, conative, and referential -- and the
three apexes of this model -- the first person of the addresser, the second person
of the addressee, and the 'third person', properly -- someone or something spoken
of. Certain additional verbal functions can be easily inferred from this triadic
model. Thus the magic, incantatory function is chiefly some kind of conversion
of an absent or inanimate 'third person' into an addressee of a conative message.
'May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu' (Lithuanian spell: 28, p. 69). 'Water,
queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea-bottom, like
a grey stone never to rise from the sea-bottom, may grief never come to burden
the light heart of God's servant, may grief be removed and sink away' (North
Russian incantation: 39, pp. 217f.). 'Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and
thou, Moon, in the valley of Aj-a-lon. And the sun stood still, and the moon
stayed . . .' ( Josh. 10.12). We observe, however, three further constitutive factors
of verbal communication and three corresponding functions of language.

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue

communication, to check whether the channel works ('Hello, do you hear me?'),
to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention
('Are you listening?' or in Shakespearean diction, 'Lend me your ears!' -- and on
the other end of the wire 'Um-hum!'). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski's
terms PHATIC function (26), may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized
formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.

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Dorothy Parker c caught eloquent examples: '"Well!" the young man said.
"Well!" she said. "Well, here we are," he said. "Here we are," she said, "Aren't
we?""I should say we were," he said, "Eeyop! Here we are.""Well!" she said.
"Well!" he said, "well."' The endeavor to start and sustain communication is
typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they
share with human beings. It is also the first verbal function acquired by infants;
they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative
communication.

A distinction has been made in modern logic between two levels of language,
'object language' speaking of objects and 'metalanguage' speaking of language.
But metalanguage is not only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and
linguists; it plays also an important role in our everyday language. Like Molière's
Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, we practice metalanguage without
realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser
and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is
focused on the CODE: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e., glossing) function. 'I don't
follow you -- what do you mean?' asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction,
'What is't thou say'st?' And the addresser in anticipation of such recapturing
questions inquires: 'Do you know what I mean?' Imagine such an exasperating
dialogue: 'The sophomore was plucked.' 'But what is plucked?' 'Plucked means
the same as flunked.' 'And flunked?' 'To be flunked is to fail in an exam.' 'And
what is sophomore?' persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. 'A
sophomore is (or means) a second-year student.' All these equational sentences
convey information merely about the lexical code of English; their function is
strictly metalingual. Any process of language learning, in particular child acquisi-
tion of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and
aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations.

We have brought up all the six factors involved in verbal communication

except the message itself. The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such,
focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This
function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general prob-
lems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a
thorough consideration of its poetic function. Any attempt to reduce the sphere
of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a
delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art
but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities
it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the
palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.
Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the
field of poetry.

'Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and Joan?
Do you prefer Joan to her twin sister?' 'Not at all, it just sounds smoother.' In
a sequence of two coordinate names, as far as no rank problems interfere, the
precedence of the shorter name suits the speaker, unaccountably for him, as a
well-ordered shape of the message.

c
American humourist ( 1893-1967), and one of The New Yorker's most celebrated
contributors.

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A girl used to talk about 'the horrible Harry.' 'Why horrible?' 'Because I hate
him.' 'But why not dreadful, terrible, frightful, disgusting?' 'I don't know why,
but horrible fits him better.' Without realizing it, she clung to the poetic device of
paronomasia d .

The political slogan 'I like Ike' e /ay layk ayk/, succinctly structured, consists of
three monosyllables and counts three diphthongs /ay/, each of them symmetric-
ally followed by one consonantal phoneme, /. . I . . k . . k/. The make-up of the
three words presents a variation: no consonantal phonemes in the first word,
two around the diphthong in the second, and one final consonant in the third.
A similar dominant nucleus /ay/ was noticed by Hymes in some of the sonnets
of Keats. Both cola of the trisyllabic formula 'I like /Ike' rhyme with each other,
and the second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the first one (echo
rhyme), /layk/ -- /ayk/, a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops
its object. Both cola alliterate with each other, and the first of the two alliterating
words is included in the second: /ay/ -- /ayk/, a paronomastic image of the loving
subject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function of this
electional catch phrase reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy.

As we said, the linguistic study of the poetic function must overstep the
limits of poetry, and, on the other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot
limit itself to the poetic function. The particularities of diverse poetic genres
imply a differently ranked participation of the other verbal functions along with
the dominant poetic function. Epic poetry, focused on the third person, strongly
involves the referential function of language; the lyric, oriented toward the first
person, is intimately linked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person
is imbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory or exhortative,
depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the second one or the
second to the first.

Now that our cursory description of the six basic functions of verbal com-
munication is more or less complete, we may complement our scheme of the
fundamental factors by a corresponding scheme of the functions:

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUAL

What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function? In particular,

what is the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this
question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal
behavior, selection and combination. If 'child' is the topic of the message, the
speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid,

d
The term in traditional rhetoric for playing on words with similar sounds.
e
'Ike' was a familiar name for General Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United
States
1956-61. 'I Like Ike' was a political campaign slogan.

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youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and then, to comment
on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate verbs -- sleeps, dozes,
nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is
produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity
and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based
on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the
axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the
constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any
other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress,
as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with
short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary;
syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are
converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equi-

valent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentence:
A = A ('Mare is the female of the horse'). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are
in diametrical opposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to
build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence.
In poetry, and to a certain extent in latent manifestations of poetic function,
sequences delimited by word boundaries become commensurable whether they
are sensed as isochronic [having the same duration] or graded. 'Joan and Margery'
showed us the poetic principle of syllable gradation, the same principle which
in the closes of Serbian folk epics has been raised to a compulsory law (cf. 29).
Without its two dactylic words the combination 'innocent bystander' would hardly
have become a hackneyed phrase. The symmetry of three disyllabic verbs with an
identical initial consonant and identical final vowel added splendor to the laconic
victory message of Caesar: 'Veni, vidi, vici.' ['I came, I saw, I conquered.']

Measure of sequences is a device which, outside of poetic function, finds no

application in language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent
units is the time of the speech flow experienced, as it is -- to cite another semiotic
pattern -- with musical time. Gerard Manley Hopkins, an outstanding searcher in
the science of poetic language, defined verse as 'speech wholly or partially repeating
the same figure of sound' (12). Hopkins's subsequent question, 'but is all verse
poetry?' can be definitely answered as soon as poetic function ceases to be arbit-
rarily confined to the domain of poetry. Mnemonic lines cited by Hopkins (like
'Thirty days hath September'), modern advertising jingles, and versified medieval
laws, mentioned by Lotz, or finally Sanscrit scientific treatises in verse which in
Indic tradition are strictly distinguished from true poetry (kāvya) -- all these
metrical texts make use of poetic function without, however, assigning to this
function the coercing, determining role it carries in poetry. Thus verse actually
exceeds the limits of poetry, but at the same time verse always implies poetic
function. And apparently no human culture ignores versemaking, whereas there
are many cultural patterns without 'applied' verse; and even in such cultures
which possess both pure and applied verses, the latter appear to be a secondary,
unquestionably derived phenomenon. The adaptation of poetic means for some
heterogeneous purpose does not conceal their primary essence, just as elements
of emotive language, when utilized in poetry, still maintain their emotive tinge.

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A filibusterer may recite Hiawatha because it is long, yet poeticalness still remains
the primary intent of this text itself. Self-evidently, the existence of versified,
musical, and pictorial commercials does not separate the questions of verse or of
musical and pictorial form from the study of poetry, music, and fine arts.

To sum up, the analysis of verse is entirely within the competence of poetics,
and the latter may be defined as that part of linguistics which treats the poetic
function in its relationship to the other functions of language. Poetics in the
wider sense of the word deals with the poetic function not only in poetry, where
this function is superimposed upon the other functions of language, but also
outside of poetry, when some other function is superimposed upon the poetic
function.

The reiterative 'figure of sound', which Hopkins saw to be the constitutive

principle of verse, can be further specified. Such a figure always utilizes at least
one (or more than one) binary contrast of a relatively high and relatively low
prominence effected by the different sections of the phonemic sequence.
Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear, syllabic part, constituting
the peak of the syllable, is opposed to the less prominent, marginal, nonsyllabic
phonemes. Any syllable contains a syllabic phoneme, and the interval between
two successive syllabics is in some languages always and in others overwhelm-
ingly carried out by marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes. In the so-called syllabic
versification the number of syllabics in a metrically delimited chain (time series)
is a constant, whereas the presence of a nonsyllabic phoneme or cluster between
every two syllabics of a metrical chain is a constant only in languages with an
indispensable occurrence of nonsyllabics between syllabics and, furthermore,
in those verse systems where hiatus is prohibited. Another manifestation of a
tendency toward a uniform syllabic model is the avoidance of closed syllables
at the end of the line, observable, for instance, in Serbian epic songs. The Italian
syllabic verse shows a tendency to treat a sequence of vowels unseparated by
consonantal phonemes as one single metrical syllable (cf. 21, secs. VIII-IX).

In some patterns of versification the syllable is the only constant unit of verse
measure, and a grammatical limit is the only constant line of demarcation between
measured sequences, whereas in other patterns syllables in turn are dichotomized
into more and less prominent, and/or two levels of grammatical limits are dis-
tinguished in their metrical function, word boundaries and syntactic pauses.

Except the varieties of the so-called 'vers libre' that are based on conjugate
intonations and pauses only, any meter uses the syllable as a unit of measure at
least in certain sections of the verse. Thus in the purely accentual verse ('sprung
rhythm' in Hopkins's vocabulary), the number of syllables in the upbeat (called
'slack' by Hopkins) may vary, but the downbeat (ictus) constantly contains one
single syllable.

In any accentual verse the contrast between higher and lower prominence is
achieved by syllables under stress versus unstressed syllables. Most accentual
patterns operate primarily with the contrast of syllables with and without word
stress, but some varieties of accentual verse deal with syntactic, phrasal stresses,
those which Wimsatt and Beardsley cite as 'the major stresses of the major words'
and which are opposed as prominent to syllables without such major, syntactic
stress.

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In the quantitative ('chronemic') verse, long and short syllables are mutually
opposed as more and less prominent. This contrast is usually carried out by
syllable nuclei, phonemically long and short. But in metrical Patterns like Ancient
Greek and Arabic, which equalize length 'by position' with length 'by nature,'
the minimal syllables consisting of a consonantal phoneme and one mora vowel
are opposed to syllables with a surplus (a second mora or a closing consonant)
as simpler and less prominent syllables opposed to those that are more complex
and prominent.

The question still remains open whether, besides the accentual and the chronemic
verse, there exists a 'tonemic' type of versification in languages where differences
of syllabic intonations are used to distinguish word meanings (15). In classical
Chinese poetry (3), syllables with modulations (in Chinese tsé, 'deflected tones')
are opposed to the nonmodulated syllables (p'ing, 'level tones'), but apparently a
chronemic principle underlies this opposition, as was suspected by Polivanov (34)
and keenly interpreted by Wang Li (46); in the Chinese metrical tradition the level
tones prove to be opposed to the deflected tones as long tonal peaks of syllables
to short ones, so that verse is based on the opposition of length and shortness.

Joseph Greenberg brought to my attention another variety of tonemic vers-

ification - the verse of Efik riddles based on the level feature. In the sample cited
by Simmons (42, p. 228), the query and the response form two octosyllables
with an alike distribution of h(igh)- and l(ow)-tone syllabics; in each hemistich,
moreover, the last three of the four syllables present an identical tonemic pattern:
lhhl/hhhl//lhhl/hhhl//. Whereas Chinese versification appears as a peculiar variety
of the quantitative verse, the verse of the Efik riddles is linked with the usual
accentual verse by an opposition of two degrees of prominence (strength or height)
of the vocal tone. Thus a metrical system of versification can be based only on
the opposition of syllabic peaks and slopes (syllabic verse), on the relative level
of the peaks (accentual verse), and on the relative length of the syllabic peaks or
entire syllables (quantitative verse).

In textbooks of literature we sometimes encounter a superstitious contraposition

of syllabism as a mere mechanical count of syllables to the lively pulsation of
accentual verse. If we examine, however, the binary meters of the strictly syllabic
and at the same time, accentual versification, we observe two homogeneous suc-
cessions of wavelike peaks and valleys. Of these two undulatory curves, the syllabic
one carries nuclear phonemes in the crest and usually marginal phonemes in the
bottom. As a rule the accentual curve superposed upon the syllabic curve alternates
stressed and unstressed syllables in the crests and bottoms respectively.

For comparison with the English meters which we have lengthily discussed, I
bring to your attention the similar Russian binary verse forms which for the last
fifty years have verily undergone an exhaustive investigation (see particularly 44).
The structure of the verse can be very thoroughly described and interpreted in
terms of enchained probabilities. Besides the compulsory word boundary between
the lines, which is an invariant throughout all Russian meters, in the classic
pattern of Russian syllabic accentual verse ('syliabo-tonic' in native nomenclature)
we observe the following constants: (1) the number of syllables in the line from its
beginning to the last downbeat is stable; (2) this very last downbeat always carries
a word stress; (3) a stressed syllable cannot fall on the upbeat if a downbeat is

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fulfilled by an unstressed syllable of the same word unit (so that a word stress can
coincide with an upbeat only as far as it belongs to a monosyllabic word unit).

Along with these characteristics compulsory for any line composed in a given
meter, there are features that show a high probability of occurrence without being
constantly present. Besides signals certain to occur ('probability one'), signals
likely to occur ('probabilities less than one') enter into the notion of meter. Using
Cherry's description of human communication (5), we could say that the reader
of poetry obviously 'may be unable to attach numerical frequencies' to the con-
stituents of the meter, but as far as he conceives the verse shape, he unwittingly
gets an inkling of their 'rank order.'

In the Russian binary meters all odd syllables counting back from the last
downbeat - briefly, all the upbeats - are usually fulfilled by unstressed syllables,
except some very low percentage of stressed monosyllables. All even syllables,
again counting back from the last downbeat, show a sizable preference for syl-
lables under word stress, but the probabilities of their occurrence are unequally
distributed among the successive downbeats of the line. The higher the relative
frequency of word stresses in a given downbeat, the lower the ratio shown by the
preceding downbeat. Since the last downbeat is constantly stressed, the next to
last gives the lowest percentage of word stresses; in the preceding downbeat their
amount is again higher, without attaining the maximum, displayed by the final
downbeat; one downbeat further toward the beginning of the line, the amount of
the stresses sinks once more, without reaching the minimum of the next-to-last
downbeat; and so on. Thus the distribution of word stresses among the down-
beats within the line, the split into strong and weak downbeats, creates a regressive
undulatory curve superposed upon the wavy alternation of downbeats and upbeats.
Incidentally, there is a captivating question of the relationship between the strong
downbeats and phrasal stresses.

The Russian binary meters reveal a stratified arrangement of three undulatory

curves: (I) alternation of syllabic nuclei and margins; (II) division of syllabic
nuclei into alternating downbeats and upbeats; and (III) alternation of strong and
weak downbeats. For example, Russian masculine iambic tetrameter of the nine-
teenth and present centuries may be represented by Figure 1 , and a similar triadic
pattern appears in the corresponding English forms.

Three of five downbeats are deprived of word stress in Shelley's iambic line
'Laugh with an inextinguishable laughter'. Seven of sixteen downbeats are stress-
less in the following quatrain from Pasternak's recent iambic tetrameter Zemlja
('Earth'):

I úlica za panibráta
S okónnicej podslepovátoj,
I béloj noči i zakátu
Ne razminút'sja u reki.

Since the overwhelming majority of downbeats concur with word stresses, the
listener or reader of Russian verses is prepared with a high degree of probability
to meet a word stress in any even syllable of iambic lines, but at the very beginning
of Pasternak's quatrain the fourth and, one foot further, the sixth syllable, both
in the first and in the following line, present him with a frustrated expectation.

-41-
The degree of such a 'frustration' is higher when the stress is lacking in a strong
downbeat and becomes particularly outstanding when two successive downbeats
are carrying unstressed syllables. The stresslessness of two adjacent downbeats is
the less probable and the most striking when it embraces a whole hemistich as
in a later line of the same poem: 'Čtoby za gorodskjóu grán' ju' [st byz g rackóju
grán'ju]. The expectation depends on the treatment of a given downbeat in the
poem and more generally in the whole extant metrical tradition. In the last
downbeat but one, unstress may, however, outweigh the stress. Thus in this poem
only 17 of 41 lines have a word stress on their sixth syllable. Yet in such a case
the inertia of the stressed even syllables alternating with the unstressed odd syl-
lables prompts some expectancy of stress also for the sixth syllable of the iambic
tetrameter.

Quite naturally it was Edgar Allan Poe, the poet and theoretician of defeated
anticipation, who metrically and psychologically appraised the human sense of
gratification for the unexpected arising from expectedness, both of them unthink-
able without the opposite, 'as evil cannot exist without good' (33). Here we could
easily apply Robert Frost formula from 'The Figure A Poem Makes': 'The figure
is the same as for love' (8).

The so-called shifts of word stress in polysyllabic words from the downbeat to
the upbeat ('reversed feet'), which are unknown to the standard forms of Russian
verse, appear quite usually, in English poetry after a metrical and/or syntactic
pause. A noticeable example is the rhythmical variation of the same adjective
in Milton 'Infinite wrath and infinite despair.' In the line 'Nearer, my God, to
Thee, nearer to Thee,' f the stressed syllable of one and the same word occurs
twice in the upbeat, first at the beginning of the line and a second time at the
beginning of a phrase. This licence, discussed by Jespersen (18) and current in
many languages, is entirely explainable by the particular import of the relation
between an upbeat and the immediately preceding downbeat. Where such an
immediate precedence is impeded by an inserted pause, the upbeat becomes a
kind of syllaba anceps [double or undecided syllable].
Besides the rules which underlie the compulsory features of verse, the rules
governing its optional traits also pertain to meter. We are inclined to designate

f
Words of a hymn written by Sarah Flower Adams ( 1805-48).

-42-

such phenomena as unstress in the downbeats and stress in upbeats as deviations,

but it must be remembered that these are allowed oscillations, departures within
the limits of the law. In British parliamentary terms, it is not an opposition to its
majesty the meter but an opposition of its majesty. As to the actual infringements
of metrical laws, the discussion of such violations recalls Osip Brik, perhaps the
keenest of Russian formalists, who used to say that political conspirators are tried
and condemned only for unsuccessful attempts at a forcible upheaval, because in
the case of a successful coup it is the conspirators who assume the role of judges
and prosecutors. If the violences against the meter take root, they themselves
become metrical rules.

Far from being an abstract, theoretical scheme, meter - or in more explicit terms,
verse design - underlies the structure of any single line - or, in logical terminology,
any single verse instance. Design and instance are correlative concepts. The verse
design determines the invariant features of the verse instances and sets up the limits
of variations. A Serbian peasant reciter of epic poetry memorizes, performs, and,
to a high extent, improvises thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of lines, and
their meter is alive in his mind. Unable to abstract its rules, he nonetheless notices
and repudiates even the slightest infringement of these rules. Any line of Serbian
epics contains precisely ten syllables and is followed by a syntactic pause. There
is furthermore a compulsory word boundary before the fifth syllable and a com-
pulsory absence of word boundary before the fourth and tenth syllable. The verse
has, moreover, significant quantitative and accentual characteristics (16, 17).

This Serbian epic break, along with many similar examples presented by com-
parative metrics, is a persuasive warning against the erroneous identification of a
break with a syntactic pause. The obligatory word boundary must not be combined
with pause and is not even meant to be perceptible by the ear. The analysis of
Serbian epic songs phonographically recorded proves that there are no compulsory
audible clues to the break, and yet any attempt to abolish the word boundary before
the fifth syllable by a mere insignificant change in word order is immediately con-
demned by the narrator. The grammatical fact that the fourth and fifth syllables
pertain to two different word units is sufficient for the appraisal of the break. Thus
verse design goes far beyond the questions of sheer sound shape; it is a much
wider linguistic phenomenon, and it yields to no isolating phonetic treatment.

I say 'linguistic phenomenon' even though Chatman states that 'the meter exists
as a system outside the language.' Yes, meter appears also in other arts dealing with
time sequence. There are many linguistic problems - for instance, syntax - which
likewise overstep the limit of language and are common to different semiotic
systems. We may speak even about the grammar of traffic signals. There exists
a signal code, where a yellow light when combined with green warns that free
passage is close to being stopped and when combined with red announces the
approaching cessation of the stoppage; such a yellow signal offers a close analogue
to the verbal completive aspect. Poetic meter, however, has so many intrinsically
linguistic particularities that it is most convenient to describe it from a purely
linguistic point of view.

Let us add that no linguistic property of the verse design should be disregarded.
Thus, for example, it would be an unfortunate mistake to deny the constitutive
value of intonation in English meters. Not even speaking about its fundamental

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role in the meters of such a master of English free verse as Whitman, it is impossible
to ignore the metrical significance of pausal intonation ('final juncture'), whether
'cadence' or 'anticadence' (20), in poems like [ Alexander Pope] 'The Rape of
The Lock' with its intentional avoidance of enjambments. Yet even a vehement
accumulation of enjambments never hides their digressive, variational status; they
always set off the normal coincidence of syntactic pause and pausal intonation
with the metrical limit. Whatever is the reciter's way of reading, the intonational
constraint of the poem remains valid. The intonational contour inherent to a poem,
to a poet, to a poetic school is one of the most notable topics brought to dis-
cussion by the Russian formalists (6, 49).

The verse design is embodied in verse instances. Usually the free variation of
these instances is denoted by the somewhat equivocal label 'rhythm.' A variation
of verse instances within a given poem must be strictly distinguished from the
variable delivery instances. The intention 'to describe the verse line as it is actu-
ally performed' is of lesser use for the synchronic and historical analysis of poetry
than it is for the study of its recitation in the present and the past. Meanwhile
the truth is simple and clear: 'There are many performances of the same poem
- differing among themselves in many ways. A performance is an event, but the
poem itself, if there is any poem, must be some kind of enduring object.' This
sage memento of Wimsatt and Beardsley belongs indeed to the essentials of modern
metrics.

In Shakespeare's verses the second, stressed syllable of the word 'absurd' usually
falls on the downbeat, but once in the third act of Hamlet it falls on the upbeat:
'No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp.' The reciter may scan the word
'absurd' in this line with an initial stress on the first syllable or observe the final
word stress in accordance with the standard accentuation. He may also subordin-
ate the word stress of the adjective in favor of the strong syntactic stress of the
following head word, as suggested by Hill: 'Nó, lèt thě cândied tóngue lick absùrd
pómp' (11), as in Hopkins's conception of English antispasts - 'regrét néver' (12).
There is finally a possibility of emphatic modifications either through a 'fluctuating
accentuation' (schwebende Betonung) embracing both syllables or through an
exclamational reinforcement of the first syllable [àb-súrd]. But whatever solution
the reciter chooses, the shift of the word stress from the downbeat to the upbeat
with no antecedent pause is still arresting, and the moment of frustrated expecta-
tion stays viable. Wherever the reciter puts the accent, the discrepancy between the
English word stress on the second syllable of 'absurd' and the downbeat attached
to the first syllable persists as a constitutive feature of the verse instance. The
tension between the ictus [metrical stress] and the usual word stress is inherent
in this line independently of its different implementations by various actors and
readers. As Gerard Manley Hopkins observes, in the preface to his poems, 'two
rhythms are in some manner running at once' (13). His description of such a con-
trapuntal run can be reinterpreted. The superinducing of an equivalence principle
upon the word sequence or, in other terms, the mounting of the metrical form upon
the usual speech form, necessarily gives the experience of a double, ambiguous
shape to anyone who is familiar with the given language and with verse. Both the
convergences and the divergences between the two forms, both the warranted and
the frustrated expectations, supply this experience.

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How the given verse-instance is implemented in the given delivery instance

depends on the delivery design of the reciter; he may cling to a scanning style or
tend toward prose-like prosody or freely oscillate between these two poles. We
must be on guard against simplistic binarism which reduces two couples into
one single opposition either by suppressing the cardinal distinction between verse
design and verse instance (as well as between delivery design and delivery instance)
or by an erroneous identification of delivery instance and delivery design with the
verse instance and verse design.

'But tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy

You?' - 'Father, what you buy me I like best.'

These two lines from 'The Handsome Heart' by Hopkins contain a heavy enjamb-
ment which puts a verse boundary before the concluding monosyllable of a phrase,
of a sentence, of an utterance. The recitation of these pentameters may be strictly
metrical with a manifest pause between 'buy' and 'you' and a suppressed pause
after the pronoun. Or, on the contrary, there may be displayed a prose-oriented
manner without any separation of the words 'buy you' and with a marked pausal
intonation at the end of the question. None of these ways of recitation may,
however, hide the intentional discrepancy between the metrical and syntactic
division. The verse shape of a poem remains completely independent of its variable
delivery, whereby I do not intend to nullify the alluring question of Autorenleser
[author-reader] and Selbstleser [self-reader] launched by Sievers (41).

No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent 'figure of sound.' Primarily, always,

but never uniquely. Any attempts to confine such poetic conventions as meter,
alliteration, or rhyme to the sound level are speculative reasonings without any
empirical justification. The projection of the equational principle into the sequence
has a much deeper and wider significance. Valéry's view of poetry as 'hesitation
between the sound and the sense' (cf. 45) is much more realistic and scientific
than any bias of phonetic isolationism.

Although rhyme by definition is based on a regular recurrence of equivalent

phonemes or phonemic groups, it would be an unsound oversimplification to
treat rhyme merely from the standpoint of sound. Rhyme necessarily involves
the semantic relationship between rhyming units ('rhyme-fellows' in Hopkins's
nomenclature). In the scrutiny of a rhyme we are faced with the question of
whether or not it is a homoeoteleuton, which confronts similar derivational and/
or inflexional suffixes (congratulations-decorations), or whether the rhyming words
belong to the same or to different grammatical categories. Thus, for example,
Hopkins's fourfold rhyme is an agreement of two nouns - 'kind' and 'mind' -
both contrasting with the adjective 'blind' and with the verb 'find.' Is there a
semantic propinquity, a sort of simile between rhyming lexical units, as in dove-
love, light-bright, place-space, name-fame? Do the rhyming members carry the
same syntactic function? The difference between the morphological class and
the syntactic application may be pointed out in rhyme. Thus in Poe's lines, 'While
I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently
rapping,' the three rhyming words, morphologically alike, are all three syntactic-
ally different. Are totally or partly homonymic rhymes prohibited, tolerated, or
favored? Such full homonyms as son-sun, I-eye, eve-eave, and on the other hand,

-45-

echo rhymes like December-ember, infinite-night, swarm-warm, smiles-miles?

What about compound rhymes (such as Hopkins's 'enjoyment-toy meant' or
'began some-ransom'), where a word unit accords with a word group?

A poet or poetic school may be oriented toward or against grammatical rhyme;

rhymes must be either grammatical or antigrammatical; an agrammatical rhyme,
indifferent to the relation between sound and grammatical structure, would, like
any agrammatism, belong to verbal pathology. If a poet tends to avoid grammat-
ical rhymes, for him, as Hopkins said, 'There are two elements in the beauty rhyme
has to the mind, the likeness or sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference
of meaning' (13). Whatever the relation between sound and meaning in different
rhyme techniques, both spheres are necessarily involved. After Wimsatt's illumin-
ating observations about the meaningfulness of rhyme (48) and the shrewd modern
studies of Slavic rhyme patterns, a student in poetics can hardly maintain that
rhymes signify merely in a very vague way.

Rhyme is only a particular, condensed case of a much more general, we may

even say the fundamental, problem of poetry, namely parallelism. Here again
Hopkins, in his student papers of 1865, displayed a prodigious insight into the
structure of poetry:

The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice,
reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that
of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called Parallelisms
of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music up to the intricacy of
Greek or Italian or English verse. But parallelism is of two kinds necessarily
- where the opposition is clearly marked, and where it is transitional rather
or chromatic. Only the first kind, that of marked parallelism, is concerned
with the structure of verse - in rhythm, the recurrence of a certain sequence
of syllables, in metre, the recurrence of a certain sequence of rhythm, in
alliteration, in assonance and in rhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is
to beget a recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought
and, speaking roughly and rather for the tendency than the invariable re-
sult, the more marked parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of
emphasis begets more marked parallelism in the words and sense.........To
the marked or abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor, simile, parable,
and so on, where the effect is sought in likeness of things, and antithesis,
contrast, and so on, where it is sought in unlikeness (12).

Briefly, equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as its constitutive prin-
ciple, inevitably involves semantic equivalence, and on any linguistic level any
constituent of such a sequence prompts one of the two correlative experiences
which Hopkins neatly defines as 'comparison for likeness' sake' and 'comparison
for unlikeness' sake.'

Folklore offers the most clear-cut and stereotyped forms of poetry, particularly
suitable for structural scrutiny (as Sebeok illustrated with Cheremis samples).
Those oral traditions that use grammatical parallelism to connect consecutive
lines, for example, Finno-Ugric patterns of verse (see 2, 43) and to a high degree
also Russian folk poetry, can be fruitfully analyzed on all linguistic levels -
phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical: we learn what elements are

-46-

conceived as equivalent and how likeness on certain levels is tempered with con-
spicuous difference on other ones. Such forms enable us to verify Ransom's wise
suggestion that 'the meter-and-meaning process is the organic act of poetry, and
involves all its important characters' (37). These clear-cut traditional structures
may dispel Wimsatt's doubts about the possibility of writing a grammar of the
meter's interaction with the sense, as well as a grammar of the arrangement of
metaphors. As soon as parallelism is promoted to canon, the interaction between
meter and meaning and the arrangement of tropes cease to be 'the free and
individual and unpredictable parts of the poetry.'

Let us translate a few typical lines from Russian wedding songs about the
apparition of the bridegroom:

A brave fellow was going to the porch,

Vasilij was walking to the manor.

The translation is literal; the verbs, however, take the final position in both
Russian clauses (Dobroj mólodec k séničkam privoràčival, // Vasilij k téremu
prixážival). The lines wholly correspond to each other syntactically and morpho-
logically. Both predicative verbs have the same prefixes and suffixes and the same
vocalic alternant in the stem; they are alike in aspect, tense, number, and gender;
and, moreover, they are synonymic. Both subjects, the common noun and the
proper name, refer to the same person and form an appositional group. The two
modifiers of place are expressed by identical prepositional constructions, and the
first one stands to the second in synecdochic relation.

These verses may occur preceded by another line of similar grammatical

(syntactic and morphologic) make-up: 'Not a bright falcon was flying beyond
the hills' or 'Not a fierce horse was coming at gallop to the court.' The 'bright
falcon' and the 'fierce horse' of these variants are put in metaphorical relation
with 'brave fellow.' This is traditional Slavic negative parallelism - the refutation
of the metaphorical state in favor of the factual state. The negation ne may,
however, be omitted: 'Jasjón sokol zá gory zaljótyval' (A bright falcon was flying
beyond the hills) or 'Retiv kon' kó dvoru priskákival' (A fierce horse was coming
at a gallop to the court). In the first of the two examples the metaphorical relation
is maintained: a brave fellow appeared at the porch, like a bright falcon from
behind the hills. In the other instance, however, the semantic connection becomes
ambiguous. A comparison between the appearing bridegroom and the galloping
horse suggests itself, but at the same time the halt of the horse at the court actu-
ally anticipates the approach of the hero to the house. Thus before introducing the
rider and the manor of his fiancée, the song evokes the contiguous, metonymical
images of the horse and of the courtyard: possession instead of possessor, and
outdoors instead of inside. The exposition of the groom may be broken up into
two consecutive moments even without substituting the horse for the horseman:
'A brave fellow was coming at a gallop to the court, // Vasilij was walking to
the porch.' Thus the 'fierce horse,' emerging in the preceding line at a similar
metrical and syntactic place as the 'brave fellow,' figures simultaneously as a like-
ness to and as a representative possession of this fellow, properly speaking - pars
pro toto [part for the whole] for the horseman. The horse image is on a border
line between metonymy and synecdoche. From these suggestive connotations of

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the 'fierce horse' there ensues a metaphorical synecdoche: in the wedding songs
and other varieties of Russian erotic lore, the masculine retiv kon becomes a
latent or even patent phallic symbol.

As early as the 1880s, Potebnja, a remarkable inquirer into Slavic poetics,

pointed out that in folk poetry a symbol appears to be materialized (oveščestvlen),
converted into an accessory of the ambiance. 'Still a symbol, it is put, however, in
a connection with the action. Thus a simile is presented under the shape of a
temporal sequence' (35). In Potebnja's examples from Slavic folklore, the willow,
under which a girl passes, serves at the same time as her image; the tree and
the girl are both copresent in the same verbal simulacrum of the willow. Quite
similarly the horse of the love songs remains a virility symbol not only when the
maid is asked by the lad to feed his steed but even when being saddled or put into
the stable or attached to a tree.

In poetry not only the phonological sequence but in the same way any
sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation. Similarity superimposed on
contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic
essence which is beautifully suggested by Goethe 'Alles Vergdngliche ist nur ein
Gleichnis' (Anything transient is but a likeness). Said more technically, anything
sequent is a simile. In poetry where similarity is superinduced upon contiguity,
any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical
tint.

Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message,

briefly a corollary feature of poetry. Let us repeat with Empson: 'The machinations
of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry' (7). Not only the message itself
but also its addresser and addressee become ambiguous. Besides the author and
the reader, there is the 'I' of the lyrical hero or of the fictitious storyteller and the
'you' or 'thou' of the alleged addressee of dramatic monologues, supplications,
and epistles. For instance the poem 'Wrestling Jacob' is addressed by its title hero
to the Saviour and simultaneously acts as a subjective message of the poet Charles
Wesley to his readers. Virtually any poetic message is a quasi-quoted discourse
with all those peculiar, intricate problems which 'speech within speech' offers to
the linguist.

The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate
the reference but makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message finds corres-
pondence in a split addresser, in a split addressee, and besides in a split reference,
as it is cogently exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of various peoples, for
instance, in the usual exordium of the Majorca storytellers: 'Aixo era y no era'
(It was and it was not) (9). The repetitiveness effected by imparting the equival-
ence principle to the sequence makes reiterable not only the constituent sequences
of the poetic message but the whole message as well. This capacity for reitera-
tion whether immediate or delayed; this reification of a poetic message and its
constituents, this conversion of a message into an enduring thing, indeed all this
represents an inherent and effective property of poetry.

In a sequence, where similarity is superimposed on contiguity, two similar

phonemic sequences near to each other are prone to assume a paronomastic
function. Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning. It is true that
the first line of the final stanza in Poe 'Raven' makes wide use of repetitive

-48-

alliterations, as noted by Valéry (45), but 'the overwhelming effect' of this line
and of the whole stanza is due primarily to the sway of poetic etymology.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted -- nevermore.

The perch of the raven, 'the pallid bust of Pallas,' is merged through the
'sonorous' paronomasia /páelad/ -- /páelas/ into one organic whole (similar to
Shelley's molded line 'Sculptured on alabaster obelisk' /sk.lp/ -- /l.b.st/ -- /b.l.sk/).
Both confronted words were blended earlier in another epithet of the same bust
-- placid /pláesld/ -- a poetic portmanteau, and the bond between the sitter and the
seat was in turn fastened by a paronomasia: 'bird or beast upon the . . . bust.'
The bird 'is sitting // On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door,'
and the raven on his perch, despite the lover's imperative 'take thy form from off
my door,' is nailed to the place by the words ʒʌst abʌv/, both of them blended
in /bʌst/.
The never-ending stay of the grim guest is expressed by a chain of ingenious
paronomasias, partly inversive, as we would expect from such a deliberate experi-
menter in anticipatory, regressive modus operandi, [method of working], such a
master in 'writing backwards' as Edgar Allan Poe. In the introductory line of this
concluding stanza, 'raven,' contiguous to the bleak refrain word 'never,' appears
once more as an embodied mirror image of this 'never:' /n.v.r./ -- /r.v.n./. Salient
paronomasias interconnect both emblems of the everlasting despair, first 'the
Raven, never flitting,' at the beginning of the very last stanza, and second, in its
very last lines the 'shadow that lies floating on the floor' and 'shall be lifted --
nevermore': /nɛv r flitiŋ/ -- /flótiŋ/ . . . /flór/ . . . /lift d n v r/. The alliterations
which struck Valéry build a paronomastic string: /sti . . . / -- /sit . . . / -- /sti . . . / --
/sit . . . /. The invariance of the group is particularly stressed by the variation in
its order. The two luminous effects in the chiaroscuro -- the 'fiery eyes' of the
black fowl and the lamplight throwing 'his shadow on the floor' -- are evoked to
add to the gloom of the whole picture and are again bound by the 'vivid effect'
of paronomasias: /ɔlð simiŋ/ . . . /dim nz/ . . . /Iz drimiŋ/ -- /ɔrim strimiŋ/.
'That shadow that lies /láyz/' pairs with the Raven's 'eyes' /áyz/ in an impressively
misplaced echo rhyme.

In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound is evaluated in respect to similar-

ity and/or dissimilarity in meaning. But Pope's alliterative precept to poets -- 'the
sound must seem an Echo of the sense' -- has a wider application. In referential
language the connection between signans [signifier] and signatum [signified] is
overwhelmingly based on their codified contiguity, which is often confusingly
labelled 'arbitrariness of the verbal sign.' g The relevance of the sound-meaning
nexus is a simple corollary of the superposition of similarity upon contiguity.

g
An allusion to the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (see above pp. 1-9).

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Sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on a phenomenal

connection between different sensory modes, in particular between the visual and
auditory experience. If the results of research in this area have sometimes been
vague or controversial, it is primarily due to an insufficient care for the methods
of psychological and/or linguistic inquiry. Particularly from the linguistic point
of view the picture has often been distorted by lack of attention to the phono-
logical aspect of speech sounds or by inevitably vain operations with complex
phonemic units instead of with their ultimate components. But when, on testing,
for example, such phonemic oppositions as grave versus acute we ask whether
/i/ or /u/ is darker, some of the subjects may respond that this question makes no
sense to them, but hardly one will state that /i/ is the darker of the two.

Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it
is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes
from latent into patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely, as it
has been noted in Hymes's stimulating paper. The super-average accumulation of
a certain class of phonemes or a contrastive assemblage of two opposite classes
in the sound texture of a line, of a stanza, of a poem acts like an 'undercurrent
of meaning,' to use Poe's picturesque expression. In two polar words phonemic
relationship may be in agreement with semantic opposition, as in Russian /d,en,/
'day' and /noč/ 'night' with the acute vowel and sharped consonants in the
diurnal name and the corresponding grave vowel in the nocturnal name. A rein-
forcement of this contrast by surrounding the first word with acute and sharped
phonemes, in contradistinction to a grave phonemic neighborhood of the second
word, makes the sound into a thorough echo of the sense. But in the French
jour 'day' and nuit 'night' the distribution of grave and acute vowels is inverted,
so that Mallarmé Divagations accuse his mother tongue of a deceiving per-
versity for assigning to day a dark timbre and to night a light one (27). Whorf
states that when in its sound shape 'a word has an acoustic similarity to its
own meaning, we can notice it . . . But, when the opposite occurs, nobody notices
it.' Poetic language, however, and particularly French poetry in the collision
between sound and meaning detected by Mallarmé, either seeks a phonological
alternation of such a discrepancy and drowns the 'converse' distribution of vocalic
features by surrounding nuit with grave and jour with acute phonemes, or it
resorts to a semantic shift and its imagery of day and night replaces the imagery
of light and dark by other synesthetic correlates of the phonemic opposition
grave/acute and, for instance, puts the heavy, warm day in contrast to the airy,
cool night; because 'human subjects seem to associate the experiences of bright,
sharp, hard, high, light (in weight), quick, high-pitched, narrow, and so on in a
long series, with each other; and conversely the experiences of dark, warm, yield-
ing, soft, blunt, low, heavy, slow, low-pitched, wide, etc., in another long series'
(47, pp. 267f).

However effective is the emphasis on repetition in poetry, the sound texture

is still far from being confined to numerical contrivances, and a phoneme that
appears only once, but in a key word, in a pertinent position, against a con-
trastive background, may acquire a striking significance. As painters used to say,
'Un kilo de vert n'est pas plus vert qu'un demi kilo' [a kilo of green is no greener
than half a kilo].

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Any analysis of poetic sound texture must consistently take into account the
phonological structure of the given language and, beside the over-all code, also
the hierarchy of phonological distinctions in the given poetic convention. Thus the
approximate rhymes used by Slavic peoples in oral and in some stages of written
tradition admit unlike consonants in the rhyming members (e.g. Czech boty, boky,
stopy, kosy, sochy) but, as Nitch noticed, no mutual correspondence between
voiced and voiceless consonants is allowed (31), so that the quoted Czech words
cannot rhyme with body, doby, kozy, rohy. In the songs of some American Indian
peoples such as Pima-Papago and Tepecano, according to Herzog's observations
-- only partly communicated in print (10) -- the phonemic distinction between
voiced and voiceless plosives and between them and nasals is replaced by a free
variation, whereas the distinction between labials, dentals, velars, and palatals is
rigorously maintained. Thus in the poetry of these languages consonants lose two
of the four distinctive features, voiced/voiceless and nasal/oral, and preserve the
other two, grave/acute and compact/diffuse. The selection and hierarchic stratifica-
tion of valid categories is a factor of primary importance for poetics both on the
phonological and on the grammatical level.

Old Indic and Medieval Latin literary theory keenly distinguished two poles
of verbal art, labelled in Sanskrit Pān + ¯cali and Vaidarbhí and correspondingly
in Latin ornatus difficilis [difficult ornament] and ornatus facilis [easy ornament]
(see 1), the latter style evidently being much more difficult to analyze linguistic-
ally because in such literary forms verbal devices are unostentatious and language
seems a nearly transparent garment. But one must say with Charles Sanders
Peirce: 'This clothing never can be completely stripped off, it is only changed for
something more diaphanous' (32, p. 171). 'Verseless composition,' as Hopkins
calls the prosaic variety of verbal art -- where parallelisms are not so strictly marked
and strictly regular as 'continuous parallelism' and where there is no dominant
figure of sound -- present more entangled problems for poetics, as does any transi-
tional linguistic area. In this case the transition is between strictly poetic and strictly
referential language. But Propp's pioneering monograph on the structure of the
fairy tale (36) shows us how a consistently syntactic approach may be of para-
mount help even in classifying the traditional plots and in tracing the puzzling laws
that underlie their composition and selection. The new studies of Lévi-Strauss
(22, 23, also, 24) display a much deeper but essentially similar approach to the
same constructional problem.

It is no mere chance that metonymic structures are less explored than the field
of metaphor. May I repeat my old observation that the study of poetic tropes
has been directed mainly toward metaphor, and the so-called realistic literature,
intimately tied with the metonymic principle, still defies interpretation, although
the same linguistic methodology, which poetics uses when analyzing the meta-
phorical style of romantic poetry, is entirely applicable to the metonymical texture
of realistic prose (14) h .

Textbooks believe in the occurrence of poems devoid of imagery, but actu-

ally scarcity in lexical tropes is counterbalanced by gorgeous grammatical tropes
and figures. The poetic resources concealed in the morphological and syntactic

h
See pp. 58-9 below.

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tructure of language, briefly the poetry of grammar, and its literary product, the
grammar of poetry, have been seldom known to critics and mostly disregarded
by linguists but skillfully mastered by creative writers.

The main dramatic force of Antony's exordium to the funeral oration for Caesar
is achieved by Shakespeare's playing on grammatical categories and construc-
tions. Mark Antony lampoons Brutus's speech by changing the alleged reasons
for Caesar's assassination into plain linguistic fictions. Brutus's accusation of
Caesar, 'as he was ambitious, I slew him,' undergoes successive transformations.
First Antony reduces it to a mere quotation which puts the responsibility for
the statement on the speaker quoted: 'The noble Brutus // Hath told you........'
When repeated, this reference to Brutus is put into opposition to Antony's own
assertions by an adversative 'but' and further degraded by a concessive 'yet.' The
reference to the alleger's honor ceases to justify the allegation, when repeated
with a substitution of the merely copulative 'and' instead of the previous causal
'for,' and when finally put into question through the malicious insertion of a
modal 'sure':

The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;

For Brutus is an honourable man,

But Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honourable man.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honourable man.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

The following polyptoton -- 'I speak . . . Brutus spoke . . . I am to speak' -- presents

the repeated allegation as mere reported speech instead of reported facts. The
effect lies, modal logic would say, in the oblique context of the arguments adduced
which makes them into unprovable belief sentences:

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

The most effective device of Antony's irony is the modus obliquus [indirect
method] of Brutus's abstracts changed into a modus rectus [direct method] to
disclose that these reified attributes are nothing but linguistic fictions. To Brutus's
saying 'he was ambitious,' Antony first replies by transferring the adjective from
the agent to the action ('Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?'), then by eliciting
the abstract noun 'ambition' and converting it into a subject of a concrete passive
construction 'Ambition should be made of sterner stuff' and subsequently to a
predicate noun of an interrogative sentence, 'Was this ambition?' -- Brutus's appeal
'hear me for my cause' is answered by the same noun in recto, the hypo-
statized subject of an interrogative, active construction: 'What cause withholds
you . . . ?' While Brutus calls 'awake your senses, that you may the better judge,'

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the abstract substantive derived from 'judge' becomes an apostrophized agent in

Antony's report: 'O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts . . .' Incidentally,
this apostrophe with its murderous paronomasia Brutus-brutish is reminiscent of
Caesar's parting exclamation 'Et tu, Brute!' Properties and activities are exhibited
in recto, whereas their carriers appear either in obliquo ('withholds you,' 'to
brutish beasts,' 'back to me') or as subjects of negative actions ('men have lost,'
'I must pause'):

You all did love him once, not without cause;

What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!

The last two lines of Antony's exordium display the ostensible independence
of these grammatical metonymies. The stereotyped 'I mourn for so-and-so' and
the figurative but still stereotyped 'so-and-so is in the coffin and my heart is
with him' or 'goes out to him' give place in Antony's speech to a daringly realized
metonymy; the trope becomes a part of poetic reality:

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

In poetry the internal form of a name, that is, the semantic load of its constitu-
ents, regains its pertinence. The 'Cocktails' may resume their obliterated kinship
with plumage. Their colors are vivified in Mac Hammond's lines 'The ghost of a
Bronx pink lady // With orange blossoms afloat in her hair,' and the etymological
metaphor attains its realization: 'O, Bloody Mary, // The cocktails have crowed
not the cocks!' ( 'At an Old Fashion Bar in Manhattan'). Wallace Stevens's poem
'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven' revives the head word of the city name
first through a discreet allusion to heaven and then through a direct pun-like
confrontation similar to Hopkins 'Heaven-Haven.'

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.

Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him in New Haven . . .

The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:

The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room . . .

The adjective 'New' of the city name is laid bare through the concatenation of
opposites:

The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.

The oldest-newest night does not creak by . . .

When in 1919 the Moscow Linguistic Circle discussed how to define and delimit
the range of epitheta ornantia [decorative epithets] the poet Majakovskij rebuked
us by saying that for him any adjective while in poetry was thereby a poetic epithet,
even 'great' in the Great Bear or 'big' and 'little' in such names of Moscow streets
as Bol'shaja Presnja and Malaia Presnja. In other words, poeticalness is not a

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supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total re-evaluation

of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever.
A missionary blamed his African flock for walking undressed. 'And what
about yourself?' they pointed to his visage, 'are not you, too, somewhere naked?'
'Well, but that is my face.''Yet in us,' retorted the natives, 'everywhere it is face.'
So in poetry any verbal element is converted into a figure of poetic speech.

My attempt to vindicate the right and duty of linguistics to direct the invest-
igation of verbal art in all its compass and extent can come to a conclusion with
the same burden which summarized my report to the 1953 conference here at
Indiana University: ' Linguista sum; linguistici nihil a me alienum puto" i (25). If
the poet Ransom is right (and he is right) that 'poetry is a kind of language' (38)
the linguist whose field is any kind of language may and must include poetry in
his study. The present conference has clearly shown that the time when both
linguists and literary historians eluded questions of poetic structure is now safely
behind us. Indeed, as Hollander stated, 'there seems to be no reason for trying to
separate the literary from the overall linguistic.' If there are some critics who still
doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I privately
believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistaken
for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely
realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar
indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are
equally flagrant anachronisms.
CHAPTER 5
Jacques Derrida
INTRODUCTORY NOTE - DL
Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) is a French philosophy at the Ecole
Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has, however, arguably had more influence on literary
studies than on philosophy, especially in the universities of America, where a school of
'deconstructive' criticism, drawing much of its inspiration from Derrida, has been a major
force in the 1970s and 80s, and where he himself is a frequent visitor.

'Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences' in fact belongs to a historic moment in
the traffic of ideas between Europe and America. It was originally a paper contributed to a
conference entitled 'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man', held at Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1966, at which the American academic world experienced
at first hand the challenge of the new ideas and methodologies in the humanities generated
by European structuralism. (Present on this occasion, as well as Derrida, were Lucien
Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan.)

'Structure, Sign and Play' marks the moment at which 'post-structuralism' as a

movement begins, opposing itself to classical structuralism as well as to traditional
humanism and empiricism: the moment, as Derrida himself puts it, when 'the structurality
of structure had to begin to be thought'. Classical structuralism, based on Saussure's
linguistics, held out the hope of achieving a 'scientific' account of culture by identifying the
system that underlies the infinite manifestations of any form of cultural production. The
structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss tried to do this for myth. (See Lévi-Strauss,
"'Incest and Myth'", section 40 in 20th Century Literary Criticism.) But, says Derrida, all such
analyses imply that they are based on some secure ground, a 'centre' or 'transcendental
signified', that is outside the system under investigation and guarantees its intelligibility.
There is, however, no such secure ground, according to Derrida - it is a philosophical
fiction. He sees Lévi-Strauss as making this disconcerting discovery in the course of his
researches, and then retreating from a full recognition of its implications. Lévi-Strauss
renounces the hope of a totalizing scientific explanation of cultural phenomena, but on
equivocal grounds - sometimes because it is impossible (new data will always require
modification of the systematic model) and sometimes because it is useless (discourse is a
field not of finite meanings but of infinite play).

Derrida himself had no qualms about embracing 'a world of signs without fault, without
truth and without origin, which is offered to our active interpretation', and fathered a new
continued
 -88-

school of criticism based on this donnée: deconstruction. Taking its cue from Derrida's
assertion in 'Structure, Sign and Play' that 'language bears within itself the necessity of its
own critique', deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its
own claim to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own
meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay'. 'Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences' is reprinted here from
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass ( 1978). Other books by Derrida
which have been influential in literary studies and have been translated into English include
Of Grammatology ( 1976) and Dissemination ( 1982).
CROSS-REFERENCES: 4. Lacan
8. Barthes
14. Abrams
15. Miller
30. Spivak
COMMENTARY: JONATHAN CULLER, "'Derrida'", in John Sturrock, Structuralism
and Since ( 1979)
and On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism ( 1983)
CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice ( 1982)
SEAN BURKE, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity
in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida ( 1992), pp. 116-53
RICHARD RORTY, "'Deconstruction'", in Raman Selden (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism, Volume Eight (From Formalism to
Postructuralism) ( 1995), pp. 166-96
MARIAN HOBSON, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines ( 1998), especially
pp. 7-58

Structure, sign and play in the

discourse of the human
sciences
We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

( Montaigne)

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that
could be called an 'event,' if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it
is precisely the function of structural -- or structuralist -- thought to reduce or to
suspect. Let us speak of an 'event,' nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks
to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would
be that of a rupture and a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even
the word 'structure' itself are as old as the epistēmē a -- that is to say, as old as

a
A term coined by Michel Foucault (see below, pp. 174-87) to refer to 'the total set of
relations
that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological
 figures, sciences,
and possibly formalized systems of knowledge'.

-89-

Western science and Western philosophy -- and that their roots thrust deep into
the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the epistēmē plunges
in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical
displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define,
structure -- or rather the structurality of structure -- although it has always been
at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving
it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function
of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure -- one
cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure -- but above all to make sure
that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the
play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the
center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And
even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthink-
able itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes
possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements,
or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation of the transforma-
tion of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure)
is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (and I am
using this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center,
which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure
which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical
thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within
the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet,
since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the
totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of
centered structure -- although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the
epistēmē as philosophy or science -- is contradictorily coherent. And as always,
coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. 1 The concept of centered
structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play
constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude,
which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety
can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being
implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake
in the game from the outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center
(and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be
called the origin or end, archē or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations,
and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens] -- that is, in
a word, a history -- whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may
always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say
that the movement of any archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accom-
plice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to
conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play.
If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of
which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center
for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in
a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of

-90-

metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and
metonymies. Its matrix -- if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and
for being so elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principal theme -- is
the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be
shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center
have always designated an invariable presence -- eidos, archē, telos, energeia,
ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, con-
sciousness, God, man, and so forth.

The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this
paper, presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure
had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this
disruption was repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it became
necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a center
in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the
displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence -- but a central
presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into
its own substitute. The substitute does not substitute itself for anything which
has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking
that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a
present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but
a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions
came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal
problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse -- provided we can agree on this word -- that is to say, a system
in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never
absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcend-
ental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.

Where and how does this decentering, this thinking the structurality of struc-
ture, occur? It would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an
author in order to designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of
an era, our own, but still it has always already begun to proclaim itself and
begun to work. Nevertheless, if we wished to choose several 'names,' as indica-
tions only, and to recall those authors in whose discourse this occurrence has
kept most closely to its most radical formulation, we doubtless would have to
cite the Nietzchean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of Being
and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and
sign (sign without present truth); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is,
the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity
or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of meta-
physics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being as presence. b But all
these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle.
This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of
metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense
in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We
have no language -- no syntax and no lexicon -- which is foreign to this history;

b
See p. 85 n.s, above.

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we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had
to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it
seeks to contest. To take one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is
shaken with the help of the concept of sign. But, as I suggested a moment ago, as
soon as one seeks to demonstrate in this way that there is no transcendental or
privileged signified and that the domain or play of signification henceforth has no
limit, one must reject even the concept and word 'sign' itself -- which is precisely
what cannot be done. For the signification 'sign' has always been understood and
determined, in its meaning, as sign-of, a signifier referring to a signified, a signifier
different from its signified. If one erases the radical difference between signifier
and signified, it is the word 'signifier' itself which must be abandoned as a meta-
physical concept. When Lévi-Strauss says in the preface to The Raw and the
Cooked that he has 'sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and
the intelligible by operating from the outset at the level of signs,' 2 the necessity,
force, and legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign
cannot in itself surpass this opposition between the sensible c and the intelligible.
The concept of the sign, in each of its aspects, has been determined by this
opposition throughout the totality of its history. It has lived only on this opposi-
tion and its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we
cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique
we are directing against this complicity, or without the risk of erasing difference
in the self-identity of a signified reducing its signifier into itself or, amounting to
the same thing, simply expelling its signifier outside itself. For there are two
heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signi-
fied: one, the classic way, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to
say, ultimately in submitting the sign to thought; the other, the one we are using
here against the first one, consists in putting into question the system in which
the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between
the sensible and the intelligible. For the paradox is that the metaphysical reduc-
tion of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is system-
atic with the reduction. And what we are saying here about the sign can be
extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular
to the discourse on 'structure'. But there are several ways of being caught in
this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less
systematic, more or less close to the formulation -- that is, to the formalization --
of this circle. It is these differences which explain the multiplicity of destructive
discourses and the disagreement between those who elaborate them. Nietzsche,
Freud, and Heidegger, for example, worked within the inherited concepts of
metaphysics. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are
taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with
it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each
other reciprocally -- for example, Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much
lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the
last 'Platonist.' One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a
number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.

c
'Sensible' meaning 'perceptible through the senses'.

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What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called
the 'human sciences'? One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place -- ethno-
logy. In fact one can assume that ethnology could have been born as a science
only at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment when
European culture -- and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its
concepts -- had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop con-
sidering itself as the culture of reference. This moment is not first and foremost
a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse. It is also a moment which is
political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say with total security that
there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism -- the
very condition for ethnology -- should be systematically and historically contem-
poraneous with the destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to one
and the same era. Now, ethnology -- like any science -- comes about within the
element of discourse. And it is primarily a European science employing tradi-
tional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently,
whether he wants to or not -- and this does not depend on a decision on his part
-- the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the
very moment when he denounces them. This necessity is irreducible; it is not a
historical contingency. We ought to consider all its implications very carefully.
But if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for
giving in to it, however little he may do so, this does not mean that all the ways
of giving in to it are of equal pertinence. The quality and fecundity of a discourse
are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relation to the history
of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question both of
a critical relation to the language of the social sciences and a critical responsibil-
ity of the discourse itself. It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing
the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the
resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. A problem of
economy and strategy.

If we consider, as an example, the texts of Claude Lévi-Strauss, it is not only

because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the social sciences, nor
even because the thought of Lévi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary
theoretical situation. It is above all because a certain choice has been declared in
the work of Lévi-Strauss and because a certain doctrine has been elaborated
there, and precisely, in a more or less explicit manner, as concerns both this
critique of language and this critical language in the social sciences.
In order to follow this movement in the text of Lévi-Strauss, let us choose as
one guiding thread among others the opposition between nature and culture.
Despite all its rejuvenations and disguises, this opposition is congenital to philo-
sophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old as the Sophists. d Since the
statement of the opposition physislnomos, physisltechnē, it has been relayed to us
by means of a whole historical chain which opposes 'nature' to law, to education,
to art, to technics -- but also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society, to
the mind, and so on. Now, from the outset of his researches, and from his first
book ( The Elementary Structures of Kinship) on, Lévi-Strauss simultaneously has

d
Philosophers and teachers active in Greece in the fifth century BC.

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experienced the necessity of utilizing this opposition and the impossibility of

accepting it. In the Elementary Structures, he begins from this axiom or definition:
that which is universal and spontaneous, and not dependent on any particular cul-
ture or on any determinate norm, belongs to nature. Inversely, that which depends
upon a system of norms regulating society and therefore is capable of varying
from one social structure to another, belongs to culture. These two definitions
are of the traditional type. But in the very first pages of the Elementary Structures
Lévi-Strauss, who has begun by giving credence to these concepts, encounters
what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates
the nature/culture opposition he has accepted, something which simultaneously
seems to require the predicates of nature and of culture. This scandal is the incest
prohibition. The incest prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it
natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense
one could call it cultural:

Let us suppose then that everything universal in man relates to the natural
order, and is characterized by spontaneity, and that everything subject to a
norm is cultural and is both relative and particular. We are then confronted
with a fact, or rather, a group of facts, which, in the light of previous
definitions, are not far removed from a scandal: we refer to that complex
group of beliefs, customs, conditions and institutions described succinctly
as the prohibition of incest, which presents, without the slightest ambigu-
ity, and inseparably combines, the two characteristics in which we recog-
nize the conflicting features of two mutually exclusive orders. It constitutes
a rule, but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the
same time a universal character. 3

Obviously there is no scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits

the difference between nature and culture. By commencing his work with the
factum of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus places himself at the point at
which this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, finds
itself erased or questioned. For from the moment when the incest prohibition can
no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be
said to be a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent
significations. The incest prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or
comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which
escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them -- probably as the condition
of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical
conceptualization, which is systematic with the nature/culture opposition, is
designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this
conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.

This example, too cursorily examined, is only one among many others, but
nevertheless it already shows that language bears within itself the necessity of its
own critique. Now this critique may be undertaken along two paths, in two
'manners.' Once the limit of the nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one
might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these con-
cepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be
neither a philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these
words. To concern oneself with the founding concepts of the entire history of

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philosophy, to deconstitute them, is not to undertake the work of the philologist

or of the classic historian of philosophy. Despite appearances, it is probably the
most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The
step 'outside philosophy' is much more difficult to conceive than is generally
imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who
in general are swallowed up in metaphysics in the entire body of discourse which
they claim to have disengaged from it.

The other choice (which I believe corresponds more closely to Lévi-Strauss's

manner), in order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effects of the first one, consists
in conserving all these old concepts within the domain of empirical discovery
while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can
still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them: there is a readiness
to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In
the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy
the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are
pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself. Lévi-Strauss
thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth, the instruments of the
method and the objective significations envisaged by it. One could almost say
that this is the primary affirmation of Lévi-Strauss; in any event, the first words
of the Elementary Structures are: 'Above all, it is beginning to emerge that this
distinction between nature and society ("nature" and "culture" seem preferable
to us today), while of no acceptable historical significance, does contain a logic,
fully justifying its use by modern sociology as a methodological tool.' 4

Lévi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as

an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes.

On the one hand, he will continue, in effect, to contest the value of the nature/
culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures,
The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: 'The opposition
between nature and culture to which I attached much importance at one
time . . . now seems to be of primarily methodological importance.' And this
methodological value is not affected by its 'ontological' nonvalue (as might be
said, if this notion were not suspect here): 'However, it would not be enough to
reabsorb particular humanities into a general one. This first enterprise opens
the way for others which . . . are incumbent on the exact natural sciences: the
reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of its
physicochemical conditions.' 5

On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls
bricolage what might be called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says
Lévi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments
he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had
not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to
be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating
to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once,
even if their form and their origin are heterogenous -- and so forth. There is
therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been
said that bricolage is critical language itself. I am thinking in particular of the
article of G. Genette, "'Structuralisme et critique littéraire'", published in homage
to Lévi-Strauss in a special issue of L'Arc (no. 26, 1965), where it is stated that

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the analysis of bricolage could 'be applied almost word for word' to criticism,
and especially to 'literary criticism'.

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text
of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every
discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur,
should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon.
In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the
absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it 'out of
nothing', 'out of whole cloth', would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself.
The notion of the engineer who supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage is
therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage
is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur.
As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which
breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every
finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the
scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced
and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

This brings us to the second thread which might guide us in what is being
contrived here.

Lévi-Strauss describes bricolage not only as an intellectual activity but also as

a mythopoetical activity. One reads in The Savage Mind 'Like bricolage on the
technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the
intellectual plane. Conversely, attention has often been drawn to the mythopoetical
nature of bricolage.' 6
But Lévi-Strauss's remarkable endeavor does not simply consist in proposing,
notably in his most recent investigations, a structural science of myths and of
mythological activity. His endeavor also appears -- I would say almost from the
outset -- to have the status which he accords to his own discourse on myths, to
what he calls his 'mythologicals'. It is here that his discourse on the myth reflects
on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of
concern to all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What
does Lévi-Strauss say of his 'mythologicals'? It is here that we rediscover the
mythopoetical virtue of bricolage. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this
critical search for a new status of discourse is the stated abandonment of all
reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an
absolute archia [beginning]. The theme of this decentering could be followed
throughout the 'Overture' to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall
simply remark on a few key points.

1. From the very start, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he
employs in the book as the 'reference myth' does not merit this name and this
treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper. This myth
deserves no more than any other its referential privilege: 'In fact, the Bororo
myth, which I shall refer to from now on as the key myth, is, as I shall try to
show, simply a transformation, to a greater or lesser extent, of other myths
originating either in the same society or in neighboring or remote societies. I
could, therefore, have legitimately taken as my starting point any one representat-
ive myth of the group. From this point of view, the key myth is interesting not
because it is typical, but rather because of its irregular position within the group.' 7

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2. There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of
the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable,
and nonexistent in the first place. Everything begins with structure, configura-
tion, or relationship. The discourse on the acentric structure that myth itself is,
cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. It must avoid the
violence that consists in centering a language which describes an acentric struc-
ture if it is not to shortchange the form and movement of myth. Therefore it is
necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to renounce the epistēmē
which absolutely requires, which is the absolute requirement that we go back to
the source, to the center, to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In
opposition to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths -- mythological
discourse -- must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which
it speaks. This is what Lévi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, from which
I would now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:

The study of myths raises a methodological problem, in that it cannot be

carried out according to the Cartesian principle of breaking down the diffi-
culty into as many parts as may be necessary for finding the solution. There
is no real end to methodological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped
once the breaking-down process has been completed. Themes can be split
up ad infinitum. Just when you think you have disentangled and separated
them, you realize that they are knitting together again in response to the
operation of unexpected affinities. Consequently the unity of the myth is
never more than tendential and projective and cannot reflect a state or a
particular moment of the myth. It is a phenomenon of the imagination,
resulting from the attempt at interpretation; and its function is to endow
the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its disintegration into a confu-
sion of opposites. The science of myths might therefore be termed 'anaclastic',
if we take this old term in the broader etymological sense which includes
the study of both reflected rays and broken rays. But unlike philosophical
reflection, which aims to go back to its own source, the reflections we are
dealing with here concern rays whose only source is hypothetical And
in seeking to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythological thought,
this essay, which is also both too brief and too long, has had to conform to
the requirements of that thought and to respect its rhythm. It follows that
this book on myths is itself a kind of myth. 8

This statement is repeated a little farther on: 'As the myths themselves are based
on secondary codes (the primary codes being those that provide the substance of
language), the present work is put forward as a tentative draft of a tertiary code,
which is intended to ensure the reciprocal translatability of several myths. This is
why it would not be wrong to consider this book itself as a myth: it is, as it were,
the myth of mythology.' 9 The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject
and the absence of an author: 'Thus the myth and the musical work are like
conductors of an orchestra, whose audience becomes the silent performers. If it
is now asked where the real center of the work is to be found, the answer is
that this is impossible to determine. Music and mythology bring man face to face
with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized.........Myths are
anonymous.' 10 The musical model chosen by Lévi-Strauss for the composition of

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his book is apparently justified by this absence of any real fixed center of the
mythical or mythological discourse.

Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its

mythopoetic function. But by the same token, this function makes the philo-
sophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that
is to say, as a historical illusion.

Nevertheless, even if one yields to the necessity of what Lévi-Strauss has

done, one cannot ignore its risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all
discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we have to abandon any epistemological
requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities of dis-
course on the myth? A classic, but inevitable question. It cannot be answered --
and I believe that Lévi-Strauss does not answer it -- for as long as the problem of
the relations between the philosopheme or the theorem, on the one hand, and the
mytheme or the mythopoem, on the other, has not been posed explicitly, which is
no small problem. For lack of explicitly posing this problem, we condemn our-
selves to transforming the alleged trangression of philosophy into an unnoticed
fault within the philosophical realm. Empiricism would be the genus of which
these faults would always be the species. Transphilosophical concepts would be
transformed into philosophical naivetés. Many examples could be given to dem-
onstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history, truth, and so forth. What I want
to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in
turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly),
but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking
of is always assumed by Lévi-Strauss, and it is the very price of this endeavor.
I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all faults menacing a discourse
which continues, as with Lévi-Strauss in particular, to consider itself scientific. If
we wanted to pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would
probably end up very quickly with a number of absolutely contradictory pro-
positions concerning the status of discourse in structural ethnology. On the one
hand, structuralism justifiably claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at the
same time there is not a single book or study by Lévi-Strauss which is not pro-
posed as an empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by
new information. The structural schemata are always proposed as hypotheses
resulting from a finite quantity of information and which are subjected to the
proof of experience. Numerous texts could be used to demonstrate this double
postulation. Let us turn once again to the 'Overture' of The Raw and the Cooked,
where it seems clear that if this postulation is double, it is because it is a question
here of a language on language:

If critics reproach me with not having carried out an exhaustive inventory

of South American myths before analyzing them, they are making a grave
mistake about the nature and function of these documents. The total body
of myth belonging to a given community is comparable to its speech. Unless
the population dies out physically or morally, this totality is never com-
plete. You might as well criticize a linguist for compiling the grammar of a
language without having complete records of the words pronounced since
the language came into being, and without knowing what will be said in it

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during the future part of its existence. Experience proves, that a linguist can
work out the grammar of a given language from a remarkably small number
of sentences And even a partial grammar or an outline grammar is a
precious acquisition when we are dealing with unknown languages. Syntax
does not become evident only after a (theoretically limitless) series of events
has been recorded and examined, because it is itself the body of rules
governing their production. What I have tried to give is an outline of the
syntax of South American mythology. Should fresh data come to hand,
they will be used to check or modify the formulation of certain grammat-
ical laws, so that some are abandoned and replaced by new ones. But in
no instance would I feel constrained to accept the arbitrary demand for a
total mythological pattern, since, as has been shown, such a requirement
has no meaning. 11

Totalization, therefore, is sometimes defined as useless, and sometimes as im-

possible. This is no doubt due to the fact that there are two ways of conceiving
the limit of totalization. And I assert once more that these two determinations
coexist implicitly in Lévi-Strauss's discourse. Totalization can be judged impossible
in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of either a subject
or a finite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one
can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer
from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but
from the standpoint of the concept of play. If totalization no longer has any
meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite
glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field -- that is, language
and a finite language -- excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play,
that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is
to say, because instead of being too large, there is something missing from it:
a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. One could say --
rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always obliterated
in French -- that this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a
center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the
center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which
supplements it, taking the center's place in its absence -- this sign is added, occurs
as a surplus, as a supplement. 12 The movement of signification adds something,
which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating
one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on
the part of the signified. Although Lévi-Strauss in his use of the word 'supple-
mentary' never emphasizes, as I do here, the two directions of meaning which are
so strangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word
twice in his "'Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss'", at one point where he
is speaking of the 'overabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to
which this overabundance can refer':

In his endeavor to understand the world, man therefore always has at his
disposal a surplus of signification (which he shares out amongst things ac-
cording to the laws of symbolic thought -- which is the task of ethnologists

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and linguists to study). This distribution of a supplementary allowance

[ration supplémentaire] -- if it is permissible to put it that way -- is abso-
lutely necessary in order that on the whole the available signifier and the
signified it aims at may remain in the relationship of complementarity which
is the very condition of the use of symbolic thought. 13

(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplémentaire of significa-

tion is the origin of the ratio itself.) The word reappears a little further on, after
Lévi-Strauss has mentioned 'this floating signifier, which is the servitude of all
finite thought':

In other words -- and taking as our guide Mauss's precept that all social
phenomena can be assimilated to language -- we see in mana, Wakau, oranda
and other notions of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic
function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought to operate in spite of
the contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are explained the appar-
ently insoluble antinomies attached to this notion.........At one and the same
time force and action, quality and state, noun and verb; abstract and con-
crete, omnipresent and localized -- mana is in effect all these things. But is
it not precisely because it is none of these things that mana is a simple
form, or more exactly, a symbol in the pure state, and therefore capable of
becoming charged with any sort of symbolic content whatever? In the system
of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, mana would simply be a zero
symbolic value, that is to say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic con-
tent supplementary [my italics] to that with which the signified is already
loaded, but which can take on any value required, provided only that this
value still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists
put it, a group-term.

Lévi-Strauss adds the note:

'Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For
example: "A zero phoneme is opposed to all the other phonemes in French in
that it entails no differential characters and no constant phonetic value. On the
contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be opposed to phoneme
absence." ( R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, "'Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern'",
Word 5, no. 2 [ August 1949]:155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I
am proposing here, it could almost be said that the function of notions like mana
is to be opposed to the absence of signification, without entailing by itself any
particular signification.' 14

The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the re-
sult of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.
It can now be understood why the concept of play is important in Lévi-
Strauss. His references to all sorts of games, notably to roulette, are very fre-
quent, especially in his Conversations, 15 in Race and History, 16 and in The Savage
Mind. Further, the reference to play is always caught up in tension.

Tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to

which are now well worn. I shall simply indicate what seems to me the formality
of the problem: by reducing history, Lévi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a

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concept which has always been in complicity with a teleological and eschatological
metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy
of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of
historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has
always been required by the determination of Being as presence. With or without
etymology, and despite the classic antagonism which opposes these significations
throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that the concept of epistēmē
has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a becom-
ing, as the tradition of truth or the development of science or knowledge oriented
toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward know-
ledge in consciousness-of-self. History has always been conceived as the move-
ment of a resumption of history, as a detour between two presences. But if it is
legitimate to suspect this concept of history, there is a risk, if it is reduced with-
out an explicit statement of the problem I am indicating here, of falling back into
an ahistoricism of a classical type, that is to say, into a determined moment of the
history of metaphysics. Such is the algebraic formality of the problem as I see it.
More concretely, in the work of Lévi-Strauss it must be recognized that the
respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels a
neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new struc-
ture, of an original system, always comes about -- and this is the very condition of
its structural specificity -- by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause.
Therefore one can describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only
by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its past
conditions: by omitting to posit the problem of the transition from one structure
to another, by putting history between brackets. In this 'structuralist' moment,
the concepts of chance and discontinuity are indispensable. And Lévi-Strauss
does in fact often appeal to them, for example, as concerns that structure of
structures, language, of which he says in the "'Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss'" that it 'could only have been born in one fell swoop':

Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appear-
ance on the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one
fell swoop. Things could not have set about acquiring signification pro-
gressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern
of the social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a transition
came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where
everything possessed it. 17

This standpoint does not prevent Lévi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the
process of maturing, the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for
example, Race and History). But, in accordance with a gesture which was also
Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must 'set aside all the facts' at the moment when he
wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau, he must always
conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -- an over-
turning of nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a
setting aside of nature.

Besides the tension between play and history, there is also the tension between
play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element

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is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differ-

ences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence,
but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternat-
ive of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on
the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around. If Lévi-Strauss,
better than any other, has brought to light the play of repetition and the repeti-
tion of play, one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic
of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of
presence and self-presence in speech -- an ethic, nostalgia, and even remorse,
which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when he
moves toward the archaic societies which are exemplary societies in his eyes.
These texts are well known. 18
Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this
structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative,
nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side
would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play
of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of
signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an
active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise
than as loss of the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play:
that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In
absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to
the seminal adventure of the trace.

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of

play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which
escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpreta-
tion as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms
play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the
name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology
-- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence,
the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. The second interpreta-
tion of interpretation, to which Nietzsche pointed the way, does not seek in
ethnography, as Lévi-Strauss does, the 'inspiration of a new humanism' (again
citing the "'Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss'").

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive
that these two interpretations of interpretation -- which are absolutely irreconcil-
able even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy
-- together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the social
sciences.

For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentu-
ate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there
is any question of choosing -- in the first place because here we are in a region
(let us say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice
seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive
of the common ground, and the différance e of this irreducible difference. Here

e
Derrida's term punningly unites the senses of 'to differ' and 'to defer'.

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there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation,
gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words,
I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing -- but also with a
glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn
their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself
and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under
the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of
monstrosity.
CHAPTER 8
Roland Barthes
INTRODUCTORY NOTE -- DL
Roland Barthes ( 1915-80) was the most brilliant and influential of the generation of literary
critics who come to prominence in France in the 1960s. After a slow start to his academic
career (due mainly to illness), Barthes became a teacher at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes in Paris, and the time of his death was Professor of Literary Semiology (a title of
his own choice) at the prestigious Collège de France. His first book, Writing Degree Zero
( 1953; English translation 1972) was a polemical essay on the history of French literary style,
in which the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre is perceptible. Mythologies ( 1957; translated
1973), perhaps Barthes' most accessible work, wittily analysed various manifestations of
popular and high culture at the expense of bourgeois 'common sense'. A controversy with a
traditionalist Sorbonne professor Raymond Picard, in the mid-1960s, made Barthes famous,
or notorious, as the leading iconoclast of 'la nouvelle critique'. This movement, a rather
loose alliance of critics opposed to traditional academic criticism and literary history, drew
some of its inspiration from the experiments of the roman nouveau roman (see Alain Robbe-
Grillet,
"'A Future for the Novel'", section 34 in 20th Century Literary Criticism), and in the late 60s
and
early 70s was associated with radical left-wing politics (especially in the journal Tel Quel --
see headnote on Julia Kristeva, below p. 206); but methodologically it depended heavily on
structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Saussure and Jakobson.

Barthes himself produced an austere treatise on The Elements of Semiology in 1964

(translated 1967) and an influential essay entitles "'Introduction to the Structural Analysis
of Narrative'" in 1966 (included in Image-Music-Text ( 1977), essays by Barthes selected
and translated by Stephen Heath). At this period he seems to have shared the structuralist
ambition to found a 'science' of literary criticism. Later, perhaps partly under the influence
of Derrida and Lacan, his interest shifted from the general rules and constraints of narrative
to the production of meaning in the process of reading. In a famous essay written in 1968,
reprinted below, Barthes proclaimed that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of
the death of the Author' - an assertion that struck at the very heart of traditional literary
studies, and that has remained one of the most controversial tenets of post-structuralism.

Barthes' most important work of literary criticism was probably S/Z ( 1970; translated
1974), and exhaustive commentary on a Balzac short story, 'Sarrasine', interleaved with bold
theoretical speculation. The method of analysis, which is confessedly improvised and
provisional and claims none of the rigour of structuralist narratology, is exemplified on a

continued

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smaller scale by "'Textual Analysis of a Tale by Poe'" ( 1973), reprinted below. By breaking
down the text into small units of sense, or 'lexias', Barthes aims to show how they carry
many different meanings simultaneously on different levels or in different codes. In S/Z, this
demonstration is linked to a distinction between the 'lisible' or 'readerly' classic text, which
makes its readers passive consumers, and the 'scriptible' or 'writerly' modern text, which
invites its readers to an active participation in the production of meanings that are infinite
and inexhaustible. Paradoxically, the effect of Barthes' brilliant interpretation of 'Sarrasine'
is to impress one with the plurality rather than the limitation of meanings in the so-called
classic realist text.In the last decade of his life, Barthes moved further and further away from
the concerns
and methods of literary criticism and produced a series of highly idiosyncratic texts which
consciously challenge the conventional distinctions between critic and creator, fiction and non-
fiction, literature and non-literature: The Pleasure of the Text ( 1975), Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes ( 1977) [first published in France 1975], and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
( 1978) [ 1977]. He was a writer who disconcerted his disciples as well as his opponents; by
continually rejecting one kind of discourse in favour of another, and to this extent lived the
assertion in 'The Death of the Author', that 'the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
the text . . . and every text is eternally written here and now'. "'The Death of the Author'" is
reprinted here from Image-Music-Text, and 'Textual
Analysis of Poe "Valdemar"', translated by Geoff Bennington, from Untying the Text: A
Post-Structuralist Reader ( 1981), ed. Robert Young, whose contributions to the numbered
notes are in square brackets.
CROSS-REFERENCES: 7. Todorov
9. Faucault
COMMENTARY: JONATHAN CULLER, Barthes ( 1983)
ANNETTE LAVERS, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After ( 1982)
PHILIP THODY, Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (revised edn 1984)
SEAN BURKE, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity
in Barthes, Faucault and Derrida ( 1992), pp. 20-61.
DONALD E. PEASE, "'Author'", in Frank Lentriccia and Thomas McLaughlin
(eds),
Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd edn, 1995), pp. 105-17

The death of the author

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes
the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her
irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings,
and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent
on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the
individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is
it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom?
Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is
the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral,

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composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all
identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer
with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally
outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself,
this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his
own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied;
in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a
person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose 'performance' -- the mastery
of the narrative code -- may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'. The
author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the
Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith
of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more
nobly put, the 'human person'. It is thus logical that in literature it should be
this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has
attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The author still
reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines,
as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and
their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in
ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his
tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that
Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's his madness,
Tchaikovsky's his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man
or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or
less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author
'confiding' in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism a has often
done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers
have long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarmé b was doubtless the
first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language
itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him,
for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a pre-
requisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity
of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs',
and not 'me'. Mallarmé's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the
interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).
Valéry, c encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarmé's
theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric,
he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the

a
Barthes refers not to the Anglo-American 'New Criticism' of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but to
the
French nouvelle critique of the 1960s.
b
Stéphane Mallarmé ( 1871-1945), French symbolist poet.
c
Paul Valéry ( 1871-1945), French poet and critic. See section 20 of 20th Century Literary
Criticism.

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linguistic and, as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his
prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of liter-
ature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer's interiority seemed to him
pure superstition. Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character
of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably
blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his
characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he
who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel -- but,
in fact, how old is he and who is he? -- wants to write but cannot; the novel ends
when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a
radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often main-
tained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model;
so that it is clear to us that Charlus d does not imitate Montesquiou but that
Montesquiou -- in his anecdotal, historical reality -- is no more than a secondary
fragment, derived from Charlus.d Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory
of modernity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme place
(language being system and the aim of the movement being, romantically, a
direct subversion of codes -- itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed,
only 'played off'), contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author
by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of mean-
ing (the famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing
as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by
accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together.
Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming invalid), lin-
guistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable
analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process,
functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the
person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, the author is never more than the
instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language
knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very
enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices,
that is to say, to exhaust it.

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable
'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary
stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms
the modern text (or -- which is the same thing -- the text is henceforth made and
read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is
different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his
own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a
before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say
that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of
antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern
scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being
preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate;

d
The Baron de Charlus is 0a character in Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu (
1913-
27) thought to be modelled on Proust's friend, Count Robert de Montesquiou.

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there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally
written here and now i. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer
designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as
the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to
Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in
the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other
content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered --
something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having
buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according
to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought
or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize
this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand,
cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expres-
sion), traces a field without origin -- or which, at least, has no other origin than
language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological'
meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to
Bouvard and Pécuchet, e those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and
whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer
can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power
is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to
rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to
know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed
dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefin-
itely; something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de
Quincey f , he who was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely
modern ideas and images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us
(in Paradis Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more
extensive and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely
literary themes'. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him
passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from
which he draws a writing that can know no half: life never does more than
imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is
lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final
signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the
latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its

e
The names of the principal characters in Gustave Flaubert novel Bouvard and Picucbet, a
study in bourgeois stupidity posthumously published in 1881.
f
Thomas de Quincey ( 1785- 1859), English essayist, author of Confessions of an English
Opium
Eater.

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hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author
has been found, the text is 'explained' -- victory to the critic. Hence there is no
surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of
the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined
along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disen-
tangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread
of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the
space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits
meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of
meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say
writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to
the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to
refuse God and his hypostases -- reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no 'person', says it: its source,
its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Another -- very
precise -- example will help to make this clear: recent research ( J.-P. Vernant 1 ) has
demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts
being woven from words with double meanings that each character understands
unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the 'tragic'); there is, how-
ever, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition,
hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him -- this someone
being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total exist-
ence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is
one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as
was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations
that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's
unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any
longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he
is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by
which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the
new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the
reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it,
the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves
be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical g recriminations of good society
in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know
that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of
the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Note
1. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant (with Pierre Vidal-Naquet), Mythe et tragédie en Grèce
ancienne,
Paris 1972, esp. pp. 19-40, 99-131. [Tr.]

g
Antiphrasis is the rhetorical figure which uses a word in an opposite sense to its usual
meaning.

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Textual analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'

The structural analysis of narrative is at present in the course of full elaboration.
All research in this area has a common scientific origin: semiology or the science
of signification; but already (and this is a good thing) divergences within that
research are appearing, according to the critical stance each piece of work takes
with respect to the scientific status of semiology, or in other words, with respect
to its own discourse. These divergences (which are constructive) can be brought
together under two broad tendencies: in the first, faced with all the narratives in
the world, the analysis seeks to establish a narrative model -- which is evidently
formal --, a structure or grammar of narrative, on the basis of which (once this
model, structure or grammar has been discovered) each particular narrative will
be analysed in terms of divergences. In the second tendency, the narrative is
immediately subsumed (at least when it lends itself to being subsumed) under
the notion of 'text', space, process of meanings at work, in short, 'signifiance'
(we shall come back to this word at the end), which is observed not as a finished,
closed product, but as a production in progress, 'plugged in' to other texts,
other codes (this is the intertextual), and thereby articulated with society and
history in ways which are not determinist but citational. We have then to dis-
tinguish in a certain way structural analysis and textual analysis, without here
wishing to declare them enemies: structural analysis, strictly speaking, is applied
above all to oral narrative (to myth); textual analysis, which is what we shall be
attempting to practise in the following pages, is applied exclusively to written
narrative. 1

Textual analysis does not try to describe the structure of a work; it is not a
matter of recording a structure, but rather of producing a mobile structuration
of the text (a structuration which is displaced from reader to reader throughout
history), of staying in the signifying volume of the work, in its 'signifiance'.
Textual analysis does not try to find out what it is that determines the text
(gathers it together as the end-term of a causal sequence), but rather how the
text explodes and disperses. We are then going to take a narrative text, and we're
going to read it, as slowly as is necessary, stopping as often as we have to (being
at ease is an essential dimension of our work), and try to locate and classify
without rigour, not all the meanings of the text (which would be impossible
because the text is open to infinity: no reader, no subject, no science can arrest
the text) but the forms and codes according to which meanings are possible.
We are going to locate the avenues of meaning. Our aim is not to find the
meaning, nor even a meaning of the text, and our work is not akin to literary
criticism of the hermeneutic type (which tries to interpret the text in terms of the
truth believed to be hidden therein), as are Marxist or psychoanalytical criticism.
Our aim is to manage to conceive, to imagine, to live the plurality of the text,
the opening of its 'signifiance'. It is clear then that what is at stake in our work
is not limited to the university treatment of the text (even if that treatment
were openly methodological), nor even to literature in general; rather it touches
on a theory, a practice, a choice, which are caught up in the struggle of men
and signs.

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In order to carry out the textual analysis of a narrative, we shall follow

a certain number of operating procedures (let us call them elementary rules
of manipulation rather than methodological principles, which would be too
ambitious a word and above all an ideologically questionable one, in so far as
'method' too often postulates a positivistic result). We shall reduce these pro-
cedures to four briefly laid out measures, preferring to let the theory run along in
the analysis of the text itself. For the moment we shall say just what is necessary
to begin as quickly as possible the analysis of the story we have chosen.

1 We shall cut up the text I am proposing for study into contiguous, and in
general very short, segments (a sentence, part of a sentence, at most a group of
three or four sentences); we shall number these fragments starting from 1 (in
about ten pages of text there are 150 segments). These segments are units of
reading, and this is why I have proposed to call them 'lexias'. 2 A lexia is obvi-
ously a textual signifier; but as our job here is not to observe signifiers (our work
is not stylistic) but meanings, the cutting-up does not need to be theoretically
founded (as we are in discourse, and not in 'langue', a we must not expect there
to be an easily-perceived homology between signifier and signified; we do not
know how one corresponds to the other, and consequently we must be prepared
to cut up the signifier without being guided by the underlying cutting-up of the
signified). All in all the fragmenting of the narrative text into lexias is purely
empirical, dictated by the concern of convenience: the lexia is an arbitrary
product, it is simply a segment within which the distribution of meanings is
observed; it is what surgeons would call an operating field: the useful lexia is one
where only one, two or three meanings take place (superposed in the volume
of the piece of text).
2 For each lexia, we shall observe the meanings to which that lexia gives rise.
By meaning, it is clear that we do not mean the meanings of the words or groups
of words which dictionary and grammar, in short a knowledge of the French
language, would be sufficient to account for. We mean the connotations of the
lexia, the secondary meanings. These connotation-meanings can be associations
(for example, the physical description of a character, spread out over several
sentences, may have only one connoted signified, the 'nervousness' of that char-
acter, even though the word does not figure at the level of denotation); they can
also be relations, resulting from a linking of two points in the text, which are
sometimes far apart, (an action begun here can be completed, finished, much
further on). Our lexias will be, if I can put it like this, the finest possible sieves,
thanks to which we shall 'cream off' meanings, connotations.

3 Our analysis will be progressive: we shall cover the length of the text step by
step, at least in theory, since for reasons of space we can only give two fragments
of analysis here. This means that we shan't be aiming to pick out the large
(rhetorical) blocks of the text; we shan't construct a plan of the text and we
shan't be seeking its thematics; in short, we shan't be carrying out an explication

a
'Discourse' here corresponds to parole in Saussure's distinction between langue and parole
(see
above, pp. 1-9).

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of the text, unless we give the word 'explication' its etymological sense, in so far
as we shall be unfolding the text, the foliation of the text. Our analysis will retain
the procedure of reading; only this reading will be, in some measure, filmed
in slow-motion. This method of proceeding is theoretically important: it means
that we are not aiming to reconstitute the structure of the text, but to follow its
structuration, and that we consider the structuration of reading to be more
important than that of composition (a rhetorical, classical notion).

4 Finally, we shan't get unduly worried if in our account we 'forget' some

meanings. Forgetting meanings is in some sense part of reading: the important
thing is to show departures of meaning, not arrivals (and is meaning basically any-
thing other than a departure?). What founds the text is not an internal, closed,
accountable structure, but the outlet of the text on to other texts, other signs;
what makes the text is the intertextual. We are beginning to glimpse (through
other sciences) the fact that research must little by little get used to the conjunc-
tion of two ideas which for a long time were thought incompatible: the idea of
structure and the idea of combinational infinity; the conciliation of these two
postulations is forced upon us now because language, which we are getting to
know better, is at once infinite and structured.

I think that these remarks are sufficient for us to begin the analysis of the text
(we must always give in to the impatience of the text, and never forget that what-
ever the imperatives of study, the pleasure of the text is our law). The text which
has been chosen is a short narrative by Edgar Poe, in Baudelaire's translation:
-- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar --. 3 My choice -- at least consciously, for
in fact it might be my unconscious which made the choice -- was dictated by two
didactic considerations: I needed a very short text so as to be able to master
entirely the signifying surface (the succession of lexias), and one which was sym-
bolically very dense, so that the text analysed would touch us continuously, beyond
all particularism: who could avoid being touched by a text whose declared
'subject' is death?

To be frank, I ought to add this: in analysing the 'signifiance' of a text, we

shall abstain voluntarily from dealing with certain problems; we shall not speak
of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is a part; we
shall not take into account the fact that the analysis will be carried out on a
translation: we shall take the text as it is, as we read it, without bothering about
whether in a university it would belong to students of English rather than
students of French or philosophers. This does not necessarily mean that these
problems will not pass into our analysis; on the contrary, they will pass, in the
proper sense of the term: the analysis is a crossing of the text; these problems
can be located in terms of cultural quotations, of departures of codes, not of
determinations.

A final word, which is perhaps one of conjuration, exorcism: the text we

are going to analyse is neither lyrical nor political, it speaks neither of love
nor society, it speaks of death. This means that we shall have to lift a particular
censorship: that attached to the sinister. We shall do this, persuaded that any
censorship stands for all others: speaking of death outside all religion lifts at once
the religious interdict and the rationalist one.

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Analysis of lexias 1-17

(1) -- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar --

(2) Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the
extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been
a miracle had it not -- especially under the circumstances. (3) Through the
desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for
the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation -- through
our endeavours to effect this -- (4) a garbled or exaggerated account made its
way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresenta-
tions, and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.

(5) It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts -- as far as I compre-
hend them myself.

(6) They are, succinctly, these:

(7) My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the
subject of Mesmerism; (8) and, about nine months ago, it occurred to me,
quite suddenly, that in a series of experiments made hitherto, (9) there had
been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission: (10) -- no person
had as yet been mesmerised 'in articulo mortis'. (11) It remained to be seen,
(12) first, whether, in such condition, there existed in the patient any sus-
ceptibility to the magnetic influence; (13) secondly, whether if any existed, it
was impaired or increased by the condition; (14) thirdly, to what extent, or
for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the
process. (15) There were other points to be ascertained, (16) but these most
excited my curiosity (17) -- the last in especial, from the immensely important
character of its consequences.

(1) -- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar -- [-- La Vérité sur le cas de M.
Valdemar --]

The function of the title has not been well studied, at least from a structural point
of view. What can be said straight away is that for commercial reasons, society,
needing to assimilate the text to a product, a commodity, has need of markers:
the function of the title is to mark the beginning of the text, that is, to constitute
the text as a commodity. Every title thus has several simultaneous meanings,
including at least these two: (i) what it says linked to the contingency of what
follows it; (ii) the announcement itself that a piece of literature (which means, in
fact, a commodity) is going to follow; in other words, the title always has a
double function; enunciating and deictic.

(a) Announcing a truth involves the stipulation of an enigma. The posing of the
enigma is a result (at the level of the signifiers): of the word 'truth' [in the French
title]; of the word 'case' (that which is exceptional, therefore marked, therefore
signifying, and consequently of which the meaning must be found); of the defin-
ite article 'the' [in the French title] (there is only one truth, all the work of the
text will, then, be needed to pass through this narrow gate); of the cataphorical' b

b
There is no English equivalent to this word, by which Barthes seems to mean, 'answering
or
reflecting back on itself'.

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form implied by the title: what follows will realise what is announced, the
resolution of the enigma is already announced; we should note that the English
says: -- The Facts in the Case . . . --: the signified which Poe is aiming at is of an
empirical order, that aimed at by the French translator ( Baudelaire) is hermeneutic:
the truth refers then to the exact facts, but also perhaps to their meaning. How-
ever this may be, we shall code this first sense of the lexia: 'enigma, position' (the
enigma is the general name of a code, the position is only one term of it).

(b) The truth could be spoken without being announced, without there being a
reference to the word itself. If one speaks of what one is going to say, if language
is thus doubled into two layers of which the first in some sense caps the second,
then what one is doing is resorting to the use of a metalanguage. There is then
here the presence of the metalinguistic code.
(c) This metalinguistic announcement has an aperitive function: it is a question
of whetting the reader's appetite (a procedure which is akin to 'suspense'). The
narrative is a commodity the proposal of which is preceded by a 'patter'. This
'patter', this 'appetiser' is a term of the narrative code (rhetoric of narration).

(d) A proper name should always be carefully questioned, for the proper name
is, if I can put it like this, the prince of signifiers; its connotations are rich, social
and symbolic. In the name Valdemar, the following two connotations at least can
be read: (i) presence of a socio-ethnic code: is the name German? Slavic? In any
case, not Anglo-Saxon; this little enigma here implicitly formulated, will be resolved
at number 19 ( Valdemar is Polish); (ii) ' Valdemar' is 'the valley of the sea'; the
oceanic abyss; the depths of the sea is a theme dear to Poe: the gulf refers to what
is twice outside nature, under the waters and under the earth. From the point of
view of the analysis there are, then, the traces of two codes: a socio-ethnic code
and a (or the) symbolic code (we shall return to these codes a little later).

(e) Saying ' M(onsieur) Valdemar' is not the same thing as saying ' Valdemar'. In
a lot of stories Poe uses simple christian names (Ligeia, Eleonora, Morella). The
presence of the 'Monsieur' brings with it an effect of social reality, of the histor-
ically real: the hero is socialised, he forms part of a definite society, in which he
is supplied with a civil title. We must therefore note: social code.

(2) 'Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that
the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have
been a miracle had it not -- especially under the circumstances.'

(a) This sentence (and those immediately following) have as their obvious func-
tion that of exciting the reader's expectation, and that is why they are apparently
meaningless: what one wants is the solution of the enigma posed in the title (the
'truth'), but even the exposition of this enigma is held back. So we must code:
delay in posing the enigma.

(b) Same connotation as in (1c): it's a matter of whetting the reader's appetite
(narrative code).

(c) The word 'extraordinary' is ambiguous: it refers to that which departs from
the norm but not necessarily from nature (if the case remains 'medical'), but it

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can also refer to what is supernatural, what has moved into transgression (this
is the 'fantastic' element of the stories -- 'extraordinary', precisely [The French
title of Poe Collected Stories is 'Histoires extraordinaires'] -- that Poe tells).
The ambiguity of the word is here meaningful: the story will be a horrible one
(outside the limits of nature) which is yet covered by the scientific alibi (here
connoted by the 'discussion', which is a scientist's word). This bonding is in fact
cultural: the mixture of the strange and the scientific had its high-point in the
part of the nineteenth century to which Poe, broadly speaking, belongs: there
was great enthusiasm for observing the supernatural scientifically (magnetism,
spiritism, telepathy, etc.); the supernatural adopts a scientific, rationalist alibi;
the cry from the heart of that positivist age runs thus: if only one could believe
scientifically in immortality! This cultural code, which for simplicity's sake we
shall here call the scientific code, will be of great importance throughout the
narrative.

(3) 'Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the
public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for invest-
igation -- through our endeavours to effect this --'

(a) Same scientific code, picked up by the word 'investigation' (which is also
a detective story word: the fortune of the detective novel in the second half of
the nineteenth century -- starting from Poe, precisely -- is well known: what is
important here, ideologically and structurally, is the conjunction of the code of
the detective enigma and the code of science -- scientific discourse -- which proves
that structural analysis can collaborate perfectly well with ideological analysis).

(b) The motives of the secret are not given; they can proceed from two different
codes, present together in reading (to read is also silently to imagine what is not
said): (i) the scientific-deontological c code: the doctors and Poe, out of loyalty
and prudence, do not want to make public a phenomenon which has not been
cleared up scientifically; (ii) the symbolic code: there is a taboo on living death:
one keeps silent because it is horrible. We ought to say straight away (even
though we shall come back and insist on this later) that these two codes are
undecidable (we can't choose one against the other), and that it is this very
undecidability which makes for a good narrative.

(c) From the point of view of narrative actions (this is the first one we have met),
a sequence is here begun: 'to keep hidden' in effect implies, logically or pseudo-
logically, consequent operations (for example: to unveil). We have then here to
posit the first term of an actional sequence: to keep hidden, the rest of which we
shall come across later.

(4) 'a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became
the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and, very naturally, of a
great deal of disbelief'

(a) The request for truth, that is, the enigma, has already been placed twice (by
the word 'truth' [in the French title] and by the expression 'extraordinary case').

c
'Deontology' is the branch of ethics dealing with moral duty and obligation.

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The enigma is here posed a third time (to pose an enigma, in structural terms,
means to utter: there is an enigma), by the invocation of the error to which it
gave rise: the error, posed here, justifies retroactively, anaphorically d , the [French]
title (-- La Vérité sur . . . --). The redundancy operated on the position of the
enigma (the fact that there is an enigma is repeated in several ways) has an
aperitive value: it is a matter of exciting the reader, of procuring clients for the
narrative.

(b) In the actional sequence 'to hide', a second term appears: this is the effect of
the secret: distortion, mistaken opinion, accusation of mystification.

(5) 'It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts -- as far as I comprehend
them myself'

(a) The emphasis placed on 'the facts' supposes the intrication of two codes,
between which -- as in (3b), it is impossible to decide: (i) the law, the deontology
of science, makes the scientist, the observer, a slave to the fact; the opposition of
fact and rumour is an old mythical theme; when it is invoked in a fiction (and
invoked emphatically), the fact has as its structural function (for the real effect
of this artifice fools no one) that of authenticating the story, not that of making
the reader believe that it really happened, but that of presenting the discourse of
the real, and not that of the fable. The fact is then caught up in a paradigm
in which it is opposed to mystification ( Poe admitted in a private letter that the
story of M. Valdemar was a pure mystification: it is a mere hoax). 4 The code
which structures the reference to the fact is then the scientific code which we
have already met. (ii) However, any more or less pompous recourse to the fact
can also be considered to be the symptom of the subject's being mixed up with
the symbolic; protesting aggressively in favour of the fact alone, protesting the
triumph of the referent, involves suspecting signification, mutilating the real of
its symbolic supplement; e it is an act of censorship against the signifier which
displaces the fact; it involves refusing the other scene, that of the unconscious.
By pushing away the symbolical supplement, even if to our eyes this is done by
a narrative trick, the narrator takes on an imaginary role, that of the scientist:
the signified of the lexia is then the asymbolism of the subject of the enunciation;
'I' presents itself as asymbolic; the negation of the symbolic is clearly part of
the symbolic code itself. 5

(b) The actional sequence 'to hide' develops: the third term posits the necessity of
rectifying the distortion located in (4b); this rectification stands for: wanting to
unveil (that which was hidden). This narrative sequence 'to hide' clearly consti-
tutes a stimulation for the narrative; in a sense, it justifies it, and by that very fact
points to its value (its 'standing-for' [valant-pour']), makes a commodity of it: I
am telling the story, says the narrator, in exchange for a demand for counter-
error, for truth (we are in a civilisation where truth is a value, that is, a commod-
ity). It is always very interesting to try to pick out the 'valant-pour' of a narrative:
in exchange for what is the story told? In the 'Arabian Nights', each story stands

d
Anaphora is the use of repetition for rhetorical effect.
e
Cf. Derrida, pp. 98-100 above.

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for a day's survival. Here we are warned that the story of M. Valdemar stands
for the truth (first presented as a counter-distortion).
(c) The 'I' appears [in French] for the first time -- it was already present in the
'we' in 'our endeavours' (3). The enunciation in fact includes three I's, or in other
words, three imaginary roles (to say 'I' is to enter the imaginary): (i) a narrating
'I', an artist, whose motive is the search for effect; to this 'I' there corresponds a
'You', that of the literary reader, who is reading 'a fantastic story by the great
writer Edgar Poe'; (ii) an I-witness, who has the power to bear witness to a
scientific experiment; the corresponding 'You' is that of a panel of scientists, that
of serious opinion, that of the scientific reader: (iii) an I-actor, experimenter, the
one who will magnetise Valdemar; the 'You' is in this case Valdemar himself;
in these two last instances, the motive for the imaginary role is the 'truth'. We
have here the three terms of a code which we shall call, perhaps provisionally,
the code of communication. Between these three roles, there is no doubt another
language, that of the unconscious, which is spoken neither in science, nor in
literature; but that language, which is literally the language of the interdict, does
not say 'I': our grammar, with its three persons, is never directly that of the
unconscious.

(6) 'They are, succinctly, these:'

(a) Announcing what is to follow involves metalanguage (and the rhetorical

code); it is the boundary marking the beginning of a story in the story.

(b) 'Succinctly' carries three mixed and undecidable connotations: (i) 'Don't be
afraid, this won't take too long': this, in the narrative code, is the phatic mode
(located by Jakobson) f , the function of which is to hold the attention, maintain
contact; (ii) 'It will be short because I'll be sticking strictly to the facts'; this is the
scientific code, allowing the announcement of the scientist's 'spareness', the
superiority of the instance of the fact over the instance of discourse; (iii) to pride
oneself on talking briefly is in a certain sense an assertion against speech, a
limitation of the supplement of discourse, that is, the symbolic; this is to speak
the code of the asymbolic.

(7) 'My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the
subject of Mesmerism';

(a) The chronological code must be observed in all narratives; here in this code
('last three years'), two values are mixed; the first is in some sense naive; one of
the temporal elements of the experiment to come is noted: the time of its pre-
paration; the second does not have a diegetical, operative function (this is made
clear by the test of commutation; if the narrator had said seven years instead of
three, it would have had no effect on the story); it is therefore a matter of a pure
reality-effect: the number connotes emphatically the truth of the fact: what is
precise is reputed to be real (this illusion, moreover, since it does exist, is well
known; a delirium of figures). Let us note that linguistically the word 'last' is a

f
See above, p. 36.

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'shifter': it refers to the situation of the speaker in time; it thus reinforces the
presence of the following account. 6

(b) A long actional sequence begins here, or at the very least a sequence well-
furnished with terms; its object is the starting-off of an experiment (we are under
the alibi of experimental science); structurally, this setting-off is not the experi-
ment itself, but an experimental programme. This sequence in fact stands for the
formulation of the enigma, which has already been posed several times ('there
is an enigma'), but which has not yet been formulated. So as not to weigh down
the report of the analysis, we shall code the 'programme' separately, it being
understood that by procuration the whole sequence stands for a term of the
enigma-code. In this 'programme' sequence, we have here the first term: the posing
of the scientific field of the experiment, magnetism.

(c) The reference to magnetism is extracted from a cultural code which is very
insistent in this part of the nineteenth century. Following Mesmer (in English,
'magnetism' can be called 'mesmerism') and the Marquis Armand de Puységur,
who had discovered that magnetism could provoke somnambulism, magnetisers
and magnetist societies had multiplied in France (around 1820); in 1829, it appears
that it had been possible, under hypnosis, to carry out the painless ablation of
a tumour; in 1845, the year of our story, Braid of Manchester codified hypnosis
by provoking nervous fatigue through the contemplation of a shining object;
in 1850, in the Mesmeric Hospital of Calcutta, painless births were achieved.
We know that subsequently Charcot classified hypnotic states and circumscribed
hypnosis under hysteria ( 1882), but that since then hysteria has disappeared from
hospitals as a clinical entity (from the moment it was no longer observed). The
year 1845 marks the peak of scientific illusion: people believed in a psychological
reality of hypnosis (although Poe, pointing out Valdemar's 'nervousness', may
allow the inference of the subject's hysterical predisposition).

(d) Thematically, magnetism connotes (at least at that time) an idea of fluid: some-
thing passes from one subject to another; there is an exchange [un entrédit] (an
interdict) between the narrator and Valdemar: this is the code of communication.

(8) 'and, about nine months ago, it occured to me, quite suddenly, that in a
series of experiments made hitherto,'

(a) The chronological code ('nine months') calls for the same remarks as those
made in (7a).

(b) Here is the second term of the 'programme' sequence: in (7b) a domain was
chosen, that of magnetism; now it is cut up; a particular problem will be isolated.

(9) 'there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:'

(a) The enunciation of the structure of the 'programme' continues: here is the
third term: the experiment which has not yet been tried -- and which, therefore,
for any scientist concerned with research, is to be tried.
(b) This experimental lack is not a simple oversight, or at least this oversight is
heavily significant; it is quite simply the oversight of death: there has been a

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taboo (which will be lifted, in the deepest horror); the connotation belongs to the
symbolic code.

(10) '-- no person had as yet been mesmerised "in articulo mortis".'

(a) Fourth term of the 'programme' sequence: the content of the omission (there
is clearly a reduction of the link between the assertion of the omission and its
definition, in the rhetorical code: to announce/to specify).

(b) The use of Latin (in articulo mortis), a juridical and medical language, pro-
duces an effect of scientificity (scientific code), but also, through the intermediary
of euphemism (saying in a little-known language something one does not dare
say in everyday language), designates a taboo (symbolic code). It seems clear that
what is taboo in death, what is essentially taboo, is the passage, the threshold, the
dying; life and death are relatively well-classified states, and moreover they enter
into a paradigmatic opposition, they are taken in hand by meaning, which is
always reassuring; but the transition between the two states, or more exactly, as
will be the case here, their mutual encroachment, outplays meaning and engenders
horror: there is the transgression of an antithesis, of a classification.

(11) 'It remained to be seen'

The detail of the 'programme' is announced (rhetorical code and action sequence
'programme').

(12) 'first, whether, in such conditions, there existed in the patient any suscept-
ibility to the magnetic influence;'

(a) In the 'programme' sequence, this is the first coining of the announcement
made in (11): this is the first problem to elucidate.

(b) This Problem I itself entitles an organised sequence (or a sub-sequence of

the 'programme'): here we have the first term: the formulation of the problem;
its object is the very being of magnetic communication: does it exist, yes or
no? (there will be an affirmative reply to this in (78): the long textual distance
separating the question and the answer is specific to narrative structure, which
authorises and even demands the careful construction of sequences, each of which
is a thread which weaves in with its neighbours).

(13) 'secondly, whether if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the

condition;'

(a) In the 'programme' sequence, the second problem here takes its place (it
will be noted that Problem II is linked to Problem I by a logic of implication:
'if yes . . . then'; if not, then the whole story would fall down; the alternative,
according to the instance of discourse, is thus faked).

(b) Second sub-sequence of 'programme': this is Problem II: the first problem
concerned the being of the phenomenon; the second concerns its measurement
(all this is very 'scientific'); the reply to the question will be given in (82); recept-
ivity is increased: 'In such experiments with this patient I had never perfectly
succeeded before . . . but to my astonishment, . . .'.

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(14) 'thirdly, to what extent, or for how long a period, the encroachments of
Death might be arrested by the process.'

(a) This is Problem III posed by the 'programme'.

(b) This Problem III is formulated, like the others -- this formulation will be taken
up again emphatically in (17); the formulation implies two sub-questions: (i) to
what extent does hypnosis allow life to encroach on death? The reply is given
in (110): up to and including language; (ii) for how long? There will be no direct
reply to this question: the encroachment of life on death (the survival of the
hypnotized dead man) will end after seven months, but only through the arbitrary
intervention of the experimenter. We can then suppose: infinitely, or at the very
least indefinitely within the limits of observation.

(15) 'There were other points to be ascertained,'

The 'programme' mentioned other problems which could be posed with re-
spect to the planned experiment, in a global form. The phrase is equivalent to
'etcetera'. Valéry said that in nature there was no etcetera; we can add: nor in
the unconscious. In fact the etcetera only belongs to the discourse of pretence; on
the one hand it pretends to play the scientific game of the vast experimental
programme; it is an operator of the pseudo-real: on the other hand, by glossing
over and avoiding the other problems, it reinforces the meaning of the questions
already posed: the powerfully symbolic has been announced, and the rest, under
the instance of discourse, is only play acting.

(16) 'but these most excited my curiosity'

Here, in the 'programme', it's a matter of a global reminder of the three prob-
lems (the 'reminder', or the 'résumé', like the 'announcement', are terms in the
rhetorical code).

(17) '-- this last in especial, from the immensely important character of its
consequences.'

(a) An emphasis (a term in the rhetorical code) is placed on Problem 111.

(b) Two more undecidable codes: (i) scientifically, what is at stake is the pushing
back of a biological given, death; (ii) symbolically, this is the transgression of
meaning, which opposes life and death.

Actional analysis of lexies 18-102

Among all the connotations that we have met with or at least located in the
opening of Poe's story, we have been able to define some as progressive terms in
sequences of narrative actions; we shall come back at the end to the different
codes which analysis has brought to light, including, precisely, the actional code.
Putting off this theoretical clarification, we can isolate these sequences of actions
so as to account with less trouble (and yet maintaining a structural import in our

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purpose) for the rest of the story. It will be understood that in effect it is imposs-
ible to analyse minutely (and even less exhaustively: textual analysis is never, and
never wants to be, exhaustive) the whole of Poe's story: it would take too long;
but we do intend to undertake the textual analysis of some lexias again at the
culminating point of the work (lexias 103-110). In order to join the fragment we
have analysed and the one we are going to analyse, at the level of intelligibility, it
will suffice to indicate the principal actional sequences which begin and develop
(but do not necessarily end) between lexia 18 and lexia 102. Unfortunately, through
lack of space, we cannot give the text which separates our two fragments, nor the
numeration of the intermediate lexias; we shall give only the actional sequences
(and moreover without even being able to bring out the detail of them by term),
to the detriment of the other codes, which are more numerous and certainly more
interesting. This is essentially because the actional sequences constitute by defini-
tion the anecdotic framework of the story (I shall make a slight exception for the
chronological code, indicating by an initial and a final notation, the point of the
narrative at which the beginning of each sequence is situated).

I Programme: the sequence has begun and been broadly developed in the frag-
ment analysed. The problems posed by the planned experiment are known. The
sequence continues and closes with the choice of the subject (the patient) necessary
for the experiment: it will be M. Valdemar (the posing of the programme takes
place nine months before the moment of narration).

II Magnetisation (or rather, if this heavy neologism is permitted: magnetisability).

Before choosing M. Valdemar as subject of the experiment, P. tested his magnetic
receptiveness; it exists, but the results are nonetheless disappointing: M. V's
obedience involves some resistances. The sequence enumerates the terms of this
test, which is anterior to the decision on the experiment and whose chronological
position is not specified.

III Medical death: actional sequences are most often distended, and intertwined
with other sequences. In informing us of M. V's bad state of health and the fatal
outcome predicted by the doctors, the narrative begins a very long sequence which
runs throughout the story, to finish only in the last lexia (150), with the liquefac-
tion of M. V's body. The episodes of this sequence are numerous, split up, but
still scientifically logical: ill-health, diagnosis, death-sentence, deterioration, agony,
mortification (physiological signs of death) -- it is at this point in the sequence
that our second textual analysis is situated --, disintegration, liquefaction.

IV Contract: P. makes the proposal to M. Valdemar of hypnotising him when he

reaches the threshold of death (since he knows he is to die) and M. V accepts;
there is a contract between the subject and the experimenter: conditions, pro-
position, acceptance, conventions, decision to proceed, official registration in the
presence of doctors (this last point constitutes a sub-sequence).

V Catalepsy (7 months before the moment of narration, a Saturday at 7.55):

as the last moments of M. V have come and the experimenter has been notified
by the patient himself, P. begins the hypnosis 'in articulo mortis', in conformity
with the programme and the contract. This sequence can be headed 'catalepsy';
among other terms, it involves: magnetic passes, resistances from the subject,
signs of a cataleptic state, observation by the experimenter, verification by the
doctor (the actions of this sequence take up 3 hours: it is 10.55).

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VI Interrogation I (Sunday, 3 o'clock in the morning): P. four times interrog-

ates M. Valdemar under hypnosis; it is pertinent to identify each interrogative
sequence by the reply made by the hypnotised M. Valdemar. The replay to this
first interrogation is: 'I am asleep' (canonically, the interrogative sequences involve
the announcement of the question, the question, delay or resistance of the reply,
and the reply).

VII Interrogation II: this interrogation follows shortly after the first. This time
M. Valdemar replies: 'I am dying.'

VIII Interrogation III: the experimenter interrogates the dying, hypnotised

M. Valdemar again ('do you still sleep?'); he replies by linking the two replies
already made: 'still asleep -- dying'.

IX Interrogation IV: P. attempts to interrogate M. V a fourth time; he repeats his

question ( M. V will reply beginning with lexia 105, see below).

At this point we reach the moment in the narrative at which we are going
to take up the textual analysis again, lexia by lexia. Between Interrogation III
and the beginning of the analysis to follow, an important term of the sequence
'medical death' intervenes: this is the mortification of M. Valdemar (101-102).
Under hypnosis, M. Valdemar is henceforth dead, medically speaking. We know
that recently, with the transplantation of organs, the diagnosis of death has been
called into question: today the evidence of electro-encephalography is required.
In order to certify M. V's death, Poe gathers (in 101 and 102) all the clinical
signs which in his day certified scientifically the death of a patient: open rolled-
back eyes, corpse-like skin, extinction of hectic spots, fall and relaxation of the
lower jaw, blackened tongue, a general hideousness which makes those present
shrink back from the bed (here again the weave of the codes should be noted: all
the medical signs are also elements of horror; or rather, horror is always given
under the alibi of science: the scientific code and the symbolic code are actualised
at the same time, undecidably).

With M. Valdemar medically dead, the narrative ought to finish: the death of
the hero (except in cases of religious resurrection) ends the story. The relaunching
of the anecdote (beginning with lexia 103) appears then at once as a narrative
necessity (to allow the text to continue) and a logical scandal. This scandal is that
of the supplement: for there to be a supplement of narrative, there will have to be
a supplement of life: once again, the narrative stands for life.

Textual analysis of lexias 103-110

(103) '1 feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will
be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed.'

(a) We know that announcing a discourse to come is a term in the rhetorical

code (and the metalinguistic code); we also know the 'aperitive' value of this
connotation.

(b) It being one's business to speak the facts, without worrying about the un-
pleasantness, forms part of the code of scientific deontology. [At this point the
French text has 'mon devoir est de continuer.']

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(c) The promise of an unbelievable 'real' forms part of the field of the narrative
considered as a commodity; it raises the 'price' of the narrative; here, then, in the
general code of communication, we have a sub-code, that of exchange, of which
every narrative is a term, cf. (5b).

(104) 'There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar; and
concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the
nurses,'

In the long sequence of 'medical death', which we have pointed out, the morti-
fication was noted in (101): here it is confirmed; in (101), M. Valdemar's state of
death was described (through a framework of indices); here it is asserted by
means of a metalanguage.

(105) 'when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This
continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period,'

(a) The chronological code ('one minute') supports two effects: an effect of
reality-precision, cf. (7a), and a dramatic effect: the laborious welling-up of
the voice, the delivery of the cry recalls the combat of life and death: life is trying
to break free of the bogging-down of death, it is struggling (or rather it is here
rather death which is unable to break free of life: we should not forget that M.
V is dead: it is not life, but death, that he has to hold back).
(b) Shortly before the point we have reached, P. has interrogated M. V (for the
fourth time); and before M. V replies, he is clinically dead. Yet the sequence
Interrogation IV is not closed (this is where the supplement we have mentioned
intervenes): the movement of the tongue indicates that M. V is going to speak.
We must, then, construct the sequence as follows: question (100)/(medical
death)/ attempt to reply (and the sequence will continue).

(c) There is quite clearly a symbolism of the tongue. The tongue is speech (cutting
off the tongue is a mutilation of language, as can be seen in the symbolic cere-
mony of punishment of blasphemers); further, there is something visceral about
the tongue (something internal), and at the same time, something phallic. This
general symbolism is here reinforced by the fact that the tongue which moves is
(paradigmatically) opposed to the black, swollen tongue of medical death (101).
It is, then, visceral life, the life of the depths, which is assimilated to speech, and
speech itself is fetishized in the form of a phallic organ which begins to vibrate, in
a sort of pre-orgasm: the one-minute vibration is the desire to come ['le désir de
la jouissance'] and the desire for speech: it is the movement of desire to get
somewhere.

(106) 'there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice,'

(a) Little by little the sequence Interrogation IV continues, with great detail in
the global term 'reply'. Certainly, the delayed reply is well known in the grammar
of narrative; but it has in general a psychological value; here, the delay (and the
detail it brings with it) is purely physiological: it is the welling-up of the voice,
filmed and recorded in slow-motion.

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(b) The voice comes from the tongue (105), the jaws are only the gateway; it does
not come from the teeth: the voice in preparation is not dental, external, civilised
(a marked dentalism is the sign of 'distinction' in pronunciation), but internal,
visceral, muscular. Culture valorises what is sharp, bony, distinct, clear (the
teeth); the voice of death, on the other hand, comes from what is viscous, from
the internal muscular magma, from the depths. Structurally, we have here a term
in the symbolic code.

(107) '-- such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are,

indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in
part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and
hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no
similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity.'

(a) The metalinguistic code is present here, through a discourse on the difficulty
of holding a discourse; hence the use of frankly metalinguistic terms: epithets,
describing, indescribable.
(b) The symbolism of the voice unfolds: it has two characteristics: the internal
('hollow'), and the discontinuous ('harsh', 'broken'): this prepares a logical con-
tradiction (a guarantee of the supernatural): the contrast between the 'broken-
up' and the 'glutinous' (108), whilst the internal gives credit to a feeling of
 distance (108).

(108) 'There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and
still think, might be stated as characteristic of the intonation -- as well adapted
to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice
seemed to reach our ears -- at least mine-- from a vast distance, or from some
deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear,
indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous
or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.

I have spoken both of "sound" of "voice". I mean to say that the sound
was one of distinct -- of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct -- syllabification.'
(a) Here there are several terms of the metalinguistic (rhetorical) code: the
announcement ('characteristic'), the résumé ('I have spoken') and the oratorical
precaution ('I fear that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended').
(b) The symbolic field of the voice spreads, through the taking-up of the 'in
part' expressions of lexia (107): (i) the far-off (absolute distance): the voice is
distant because/so that the distance between death and life is/should be total (the
'because' implies a motive belonging to the real, to what is 'behind' the paper;
the 'so that' to the demand of the discourse which wants to continue, survive as
discourse; by noting 'because/so that' we accept that the two instances, that
of the real and that of discourse are twisted together, and we bear witness to
the structural duplicity of all writing). The distance (between life and death) is
affirmed the better to be denied: it permits the transgression, the 'encroachment',
the description of which is the very object of the story; (ii) 'under the earth'; the
thematics of voice are in general double, contradictory: sometimes the voice is a
light, bird-like thing that flies off with life, and sometimes a heavy, cavernous

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thing, which comes up from below: it is voice tied down, anchored like a
stone:
this is an old mythical theme: the chthonic voice, the voice from beyond the
grave (as is the case here); (iii) discontinuity founds language; there is
therefore
a supernatural effect in hearing a gelatinous, glutinous, viscous language; the
notation has a double value: on the one hand it emphasizes the strangeness of
this language which is contrary to the very structure of language; and on the
other
hand it adds up the malaises and dysphorias: the broken-up and the clinging,
sticking (cf. the suppuration of the eyelids when the dead man is brought
round
from hypnosis, that is, when he is about to enter real death, (133); (iv) the
distinct syllabification constitutes the imminent speech of the dead man as a
full, complete, adult language, as an essence of language, and not as a
mumbled,
approximate, stammered language, a lesser language, troubled by non-
language;
hence the fright, the terror: there is a glaring contradiction between death and
language; the contrary of life is not death (which is a stereotype), but
language: it
is undecidable whether Valdemar is alive or dead; what is certain, is that he
speaks, without one's being able to refer his speech to life or death.
(c) Let us note
here an artifice
which belongs
to the
chronological
code: 'I
thought
then and I still
think': there is
here a co-
presence of
three
temporalities:
the time
of the story,
the diegesis ('I
thought then'),
the time of
writing ('I
think it at the
time at which
I'm writing'),
and the time of
reading
(carried along
by the present
tense of
writing, we
think it
ourselves at the
moment of
reading). The
whole
produces a
reality-effect.

(109) ' M.
Valdemarspoke
-- obviously in
reply to the
question I had
pro-
pounded to
him a few
minutes before.
I had asked
him, it will be
 remembered,
if he still slept.'
(a) Interrogation IV is here in progress: the question is here recalled (cf. 100), the
reply is announced.
(b) The words of the hypnotised dead man are the very reply to Problem III,
posed in (14): to what extent can hypnosis stop death? Here the question is
answered: up to and including language.

(110) 'He now said: -- "Yes; -- no; -- I have been sleeping -- and now -- now --
I am dead."'
From the structural point of view, this lexia is simple: it is the term 'reply' ('I am
dead') to Interrogation IV. However, outside the diegetical structure (i.e. the
presence of the lexia in an actional sequence) the connotation of the words ('I am
dead') is of inexhaustible richness. Certainly there exist numerous mythical
narratives in which death speaks; but only to say: 'I am alive'. There is here a
true hapax g of narrative grammar, a staging of words impossible as such: I am
dead. Let us attempt to unfold some of these connotations:
(i) We have already extracted the theme of encroachment (of life on death);
encroachment is a paradigmatic disorder, a disorder of meaning; in the life/death
paradigm, the bar is normally read as 'against' (versus); it would suffice to read it
g
Hapax legomenon is the Greek term for a word coined for a particular occasion.

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as 'on' for encroachment to take place and the paradigm to be destroyed. That's
what happens here; one of the spaces bites unwarrantedly into the other. The
interesting thing here is that the encroachment occurs at the level of language.
The idea that, once dead, the dead man can continue to act is banal; it is what is
said in the proverb 'the dead man seizes the living'; it is what is said in the great
myths of remorse or of posthumous vengeance; it is what is said comically in
Forneret's sally: 'Death teaches incorrigible people to live'. 7 But here the action
of the dead man is a purely linguistic action; and, to crown all, this language
serves no purpose, it does not appear with a view to acting on the living, it says
nothing but itself, it designates itself tautologically. Before saying 'I am dead', the
voice says simply 'I am speaking'; a little like a grammatical example which
refers to nothing but language; the uselessness of what is proffered is part of the
scandal: it is a matter of affirming an essence which is not in its place (the
displaced is the very form of the symbolic).
(ii) Another scandal of the enunciation is the turning of the metaphorical into
the literal. It is in effect banal to utter the sentence 'I am dead!': it is what is said
by the woman who has been shopping all afternoon at Printemps, and who has
gone to her hairdresser's, etc. 8 The turning of the metaphorical into the literal,
precisely for this metaphor, is impossible: the enunciation 'I am dead', is literally
foreclosed (whereas 'I sleep' remained literally possible in the field of hypnotic
sleep). It is, then, if you like, scandal of language which is in question.
(iii) There is also a scandal at the level of 'language' (and no longer at thelevel of discourse).
In the ideal sum of all the possible utterances of language, the link of the first person (1) and
the attribute 'dead' is precisely the one which is radically impossible: it is this empty point,
this blind spot of language which the story comes, very exactly, to occupy. What is said is no
other than this imposs-ibility: the sentence is not descriptive, it is not constative, it delivers no
message other than its own enunciation. In a sense we can say that we have here a
performative, but such, certainly, that neither Austin nor Benveniste had foreseen it in their
analyses (let us recall that the performative is the mode of utterance
according to which the utterance refers only to its enunciation: 'I declare war';
performatives are always, by force, in the first person, otherwise they would slip towards the
constative: 'he declares war'); here, the unwarranted sentence
performs an impossibility. 9 (iv) From a strictly semantic point of view, the sentence 'I am
dead' asserts
two contrary elements at once (life, death): it is an enantioseme, but is, once again, unique:
the signifier expresses a signified (death) which is contradictory
with its enunciation. And yet, we have to go further still: it is not simply a master of a simple
negation, in the psychoanalytical sense, 'I am dead' meaning in that
case 'I am not dead', but rather an affirmation-negation: 'I am dead and not dead'; this is the
paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of
category: the 'true-false', the 'yes-no', the 'death-life' is thought of as a whole which is
indivisible, uncombinable, non-dialectic, for the antithesis implies no
third term; it is not a two-faced entity, but a term which is one and new. (v) A further
psychoanalytical reflection is possible on the 'I am dead'. We
have said that the sentence accomplished a scandalous return to the literal. That means that
death, as primordially repressed, irrupts directly into language;

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this return is radically traumatic, as the image of explosion later shows (147:
'ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from
the lips of the sufferer'): the utterance 'I am dead' is a taboo exploded. Now, if
the symbolic is the field of neurosis, the return of the literal, which implies the
foreclosure of the symbol, opens up the space of psychosis: at this point of the
story, all symbolism ends, and with it all neurosis, and it is psychosis which
enters the text, through the spectacular foreclosure of the signifier: what is extra-
ordinary in Poe is indeed madness.

Other commentaries are possible, notably that of Jacques Derrida. 10 I have

limited myself to those that can be drawn from structural analysis, trying to
show that the unheard-of sentence 'I am dead' is in no way the unbelievable
utterance, but much more radically the impossible enunciation.

Before moving on to methodological conclusions, I shall recall, at a purely

anecdotal level, the end of the story: Valdemar remains dead under hypnosis for
seven months; with the agreement of the doctors, P. then decides to wake him;
the passes succeed and a little colour returns to Valdemar's cheeks; but while P.
attempts to activate the patient by intensifying the passes, the cries of 'Dead!
dead' explode on his tongue, and all at once his whole body escapes, crumbles,
rots under the experimenter's hands, leaving nothing but a 'nearly liquid mass of
loathsome -- of detestable putridity'.

Methodological conclusions
The remarks which will serve as a conclusion to these fragments of analysis will
not necessarily be theoretical; theory is not abstract, speculative: the analysis
itself, although it was carried out on a contingent text, was already theoretical, in
the sense that it observed (that was its aim) a language in the process of forma-
tion. That is to say -- or to recall -- that we have not carried out an explication of
the text: we have simply tried to grasp the narrative as it was in the process of
self-construction (which implies at once structure and movement, system and
infinity). Our structuration does not go beyond that spontaneously accomplished
by reading. In concluding, then, it is not a question of delivering the 'structure' of
Poe's story, and even less that of all narratives, but simply of returning more
freely, and with less attachment to the progressive unfolding of the text, to the
principal codes which we have located.

The word 'code' itself should not be taken here in the rigorous, scientific,
sense of the term. The codes are simply associative fields, a supra-textual organiza-
tion of notations which impose a certain idea of structure; the instance of the
code is, for us, essentially cultural: the codes are certain types of 'déjà-lu' [already
read], of 'déjà-fait' [already done]: the code is the form of this 'déjà', constitutive
of all the writing in the world.

Although all the codes are in fact cultural, there is yet one, among those
we have met with, which we shall privilege by calling it the cultural code: it is
the code of knowledge, or rather of human knowledges, of public opinions, of
culture as it is transmitted by the book, by education, and in a more general and
diffuse form, by the whole of sociality. We met several of these cultural codes

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(or several sub-codes of the general cultural code): the scientific code, which (in
our story) is supported at once by the principles of experimentation and by the
principles of medical deontology; the rhetorical code, which gathers up all the
social rules of what is said: coded forms of narrative, coded forms of discourse
(the announcement, the résumé, etc.); metalinguistic enunciation (discourse talk-
ing about itself) forms part of this code; the chronological code: 'dating', which
seems natural and objective to us today, is in fact a highly cultural practice --
which is to be expected since it implies a certain ideology of time ('historical'
time is not the same as 'mythical' time); the set of chronological reference-points
thus constitute a strong cultural code (a historical way of cutting up time for
purposes of dramatisation, of scientific appearance, of reality-effect); the socio-
historical code allows the mobilisation in the enunciation, of all the inbred know-
ledge that we have about our time, our society, our country (the fact of saying
'M. Valdemar' and not ' Valdemar', it will be remembered, finds its place here).
We must not be worried by the fact that we can constitute extremely banal nota-
tions into code: it is on the contrary their banality, their apparent insignificance
that predisposes them to codification, given our definition of code: a corpus of
rules that are so worn we take them to be marks of nature; but if the narrative
departed from them, it would very rapidly become unreadable.

The code of communication could also be called the code of destination.

Communication should be understood in a restricted sense; it does not cover the
whole of the signification which is in a text and still less its 'signifiance'; it simply
designates every relationship in the text which is stated as an address (that is the
case of the 'phatic' code, charged with the accentuation of the relationship between
narrator and reader), or as an exchange (the narrative is exchanged for truth, for
life). In short, communication should here be understood in an economic sense
(communication, circulation of goods).

The symbolic field (here 'field' is less inflexible than 'code') is, to be sure,
enormous; the more so in that here we are taking the word 'symbol' in the most
general possible sense, without being bothered by any of its usual connotations;
the sense to which we are referring is close to that of psychoanalysis: the symbol
is broadly that feature of language which displaces the body and allows a 'glimpse'
of a scene other than that of the enunciation, such as we think we read it; the
symbolic framework in Poe's story is evidently the transgression of the taboo of
death, the disorder of classification, that Baudelaire has translated (very well) by
the 'empiètement' ('encroachment') of life on death (and not, banally, of death
on life); the subtlety of the story comes in part from the fact that the enunciation
seems to come from an asymbolic narrator, who has taken on the role of the
objective scientist, attached to the fact alone, a stranger to the symbol (which
does not fall to come back in force in the story).

What we have called the code of actions supports the anecdotal framework of
the narrative; the actions, or the enunciations which denote them, are organized
in sequences; the sequence has an approximate identity (its contour cannot be
determined rigorously, nor unchallengeably); it is justified in two ways: first
because one is led spontaneously to give it a generic name (for example a certain
number of notations, ill-health, deterioration, agony, the mortification of the
body, its liquefaction, group naturally under a stereotyped idea, that of 'medical

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death'); and, second, because the terms of the actional sequence are interlinked
(from one to the next, since they follow one another throughout the narrative) by
an apparent logic; we mean by that that the logic which institutes the actional
sequence is very impure from a scientific point of view; it is only an apparent
logic which comes not from the laws of formal reasoning, but from our habits of
reasoning and observing: it is an endoxal, cultural logic (it seems 'logical' to us
that a severe diagnosis should follow the observation of a poor state of health);
and what is more this logic becomes confused with chronology: what comes
'after' seems to us to be 'caused by'. Although in narrative they are never pure,
temporality and causality seem to us to found a sort of naturality, intelligibility,
readability for the anecdote: for example, they allow us to resume it (what the
ancients called the argument, a word which is at once logical and narrative).

One last code has traversed our story from its beginning: that of the enigma.
We have not had the chance to see it at work, because we have only analysed a
very small part of Poe's story. The code of the enigma gathers those terms through
the stringing-together of which (like a narrative sentence) an enigma is posed, and
which, after some 'delays', make up the piquancy of the narrative, the solution
unveiled. The terms of the enigmatic (or hermeneutic) code are well differentiated:
for example, we have to distinguish the positing of the enigma (every notation
whose meaning is 'there is an enigma') from the formulation of the enigma (the
question is exposed in its contingency); in our story, the enigma is posed in the
[French] title itself (the 'truth' is announced, but we don't yet know about what
question), formulated from the start (the scientific account of the problems linked
to the planned experiment), and even, from the very start, delayed: obviously it is
in the interests of every narrative to delay the solution of the enigma it poses,
since that solution will toll its death-knell as a narrative: we have seen that the
narrator uses a whole paragraph to delay the account of the case, under cover
of scientific precautions. As for the solution of the enigma, it is not here of a
mathematical order; it is in sum the whole narrative which replies to the question
posed at the beginning, the question of the truth (this truth can however be
condensed into two points: the proffering of 'I am dead', and the sudden lique-
faction of the dead man when he awakes from hypnosis); the truth here is not the
object of a revelation, but of a revulsion.

These are the codes which traverse the fragments we have analysed. We
deliberately don't structure them further, nor do we try to distribute the terms
within each code according to a logical or semiological schema; this is because
for us the codes are only departures of 'déjà-lu', beginnings of intertextuality: the
frayed nature of the codes does not contradict structure (as, it is thought, life,
imagination, intuition, disorder, contradict system and rationality), but on the
contrary (this is the fundamental affirmation of textual analysis) is an integral
part of structuration. It is this 'fraying' of the text which distinguishes structure --
the object of structural analysis, strictly speaking -- from structuration -- the
object of the textual analysis we have attempted to practise here.

The textile metaphor we have just used is not fortuitous. Textual analysis
indeed requires us to represent the text as a tissue (this is moreover the etymo-
logical sense), as a skein of different voices and multiple codes which are at once
interwoven and unfinished. A narrative is not a tabular space, a flat structure, it

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is a volume, a stereophony ( Eisenstein placed great insistence on the counterpoint

of his directions, thus initiating an identity of film and text): there is a field of
listening for written narrative; the mode of presence of meaning (except per-
haps for actional sequences) is not development, but 'explosion' [éclat]: call for
contact, communication, the position of contracts, exchange, flashes [éclats] of
references, glimmerings of knowledge, heavier, more penetrating blows, coming
from the 'other scene', that of the symbolic, a discontinuity of actions which are
attached to the same sequence but in a loose, ceaselessly interrupted way.

All this 'volume' is pulled forward (towards the end of the narrative), thus
provoking the impatience of reading, under the effect of two structural disposi-
tions: (a) distortion: the terms of a sequence or a code are separated, threaded
with heterogeneous elements: a sequence seems to have been abandoned (for
example, the degradation of Valdemar's health), but it is taken up again further
on, sometimes much later; an expectation is created; we can now even define the
sequence: it is the floating micro-structure which constructs not a logical object,
but an expectation and its resolution; (b) irreversibility: despite the floating char-
acter of structuration, in the classical, readable narrative (such as Poe's story),
there are two codes which maintain a directional order; the actional code (based
on a logico-temporal order) and the code of the enigma (the question is capped
by its solution); and in this way an irreversibility of narrative is created. It is
clearly on this point that modern subversion will operate: the avant-garde (to
keep a convenient word) attempts to make the text thoroughly reversible, to
expel the logico-temporal residue, to attack empiricism (the logic of behaviour,
the actional code) and truth (the code of the enigma).

We must not, however, exaggerate the distance separating the modern text
from the classical narrative. We have seen, in Poe's story, that one sentence very
often refers to two codes simultaneously, without one's being able to choose
which is the 'true' one (for example, the scientific code and the symbolic code):
what is specific to the text, once it attains the quality of a text, is to constrain us
to the undecidability of the codes. In the name of what could we decide? In the
author's name? But the narrative gives us only an enunciator, a performer caught
up in his own production. In the name of such and such a criticism? All are chal-
lengeable, carried off by history (which is not to say that they are useless: each
one participates, but only as one voice, in the text's volume). Undecidability is
not a weakness, but a structural condition of narration: there is no unequivocal
determination of the enunciation: in an utterance, several codes and several
voices are there, without priority. Writing is precisely this loss of origin, this loss
of 'motives' to the profit of a volume of indeterminations or over-determinations:
this volume is, precisely, 'signifiance'. Writing [écriture] comes along very pre-
cisely at the point where speech stops, that is from the moment one can no longer
locate who is speaking and one simply notes that speaking has started.
CHAPTER 22
Terry Eagleton
INTORDUCTION NOTE - DL/NW
Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, is, after
Raymond
Williams, the leading British marxist critic. His marxism is considerably more overt, and less
equivocal, than that of Williams, who taught him at Cambridge, and with whom Eagleton has
had a somewhat Oedipal intellectual relationship, attacking him at times, paying homage
at others. Eagleton is of Catholic working-class origins, and in the 1960s was involved in
a project to reconcile marxism and Catholicism, for which a short-lived but interesting
magazine called Slant provided a platform. The work for which he is best known is wholly
secular in its underlying political philosophy, but exhibits considerable change and variety
in style and method.

Starting off in the British New Left critical tradition of Leavis-and-Marx (see, for
instance, his Exiles and Emigres: Studies in Modern Literature [ 1970]), Eagleton later
responded eagerly to the stimulus of European structuralist and post-structuralist theory,
especially the work of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey. His Criticism and Ideology
( 1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism ( 1976) reflect his engagement with the debates
within marxist literary theory generated by these writers. Althusser particulary fascinated
marxist literary theory generated by these writers. Althusser particulary fascinated
marxist literary intellectuals at this time by his assertion of the 'relative autonomy' (i.e.,
freedom from economic determination) of cultural institutions, such as literature, and the
promise of achieving a 'scientific' knowledge about them. In an interesting introduction
to his latest collection of essays, Against the Grain ( 1986), Eagleton explains how his
disillusinment with the Althusserian project, and dismay at the political drift to the Right in
the Western democracies in the late 1970s, led him to produce works 'more preoccupied
with questions of experience and the subject, with that difference or heterogeneity which
escapes formalization, with humour, the body and the "carnivalesque", with cultural
politics rather than textual science." Walter Benjamin ( 1981), The Rape of Clarissa ( 1982)
and Literary Theory: An Introduction ( 1983) exhibit these qualities in various ways and
combinations. He has more recently sharpened his remarks on postmodernist culture in
"'The Significance of Theory'", in Criticism in the Twilight Zone: Postmodern Perspectives
on Literature and Politics, ed. Danita Zadworna-Kjellestad and Lennart Bjork ( 1990).

"'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'" was originally published in New

Left Review in 1985, as a response to Fredric Jameson's essay in the same journal,
"'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'" (see headnote on Jameson in

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the preceding sectioon). Eagleton's piece takes up by implication the questioon raised by
Jameson - is postmodernism in any significant sense a critique of contemporary society-
and answers it emphatically in the negative. Eagleton's scorn for postmodernist art derives
partly from respect for the achievement of classic modernist and avant-garde art, partly
from his commitment to practical socialism, and partly, it is interesting to note, from a
lingering nostalgiea for the 'unified subject' of bourgeois humanism, which, he suggests,
late capitalism. "'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'" is reprinted here from
Against the Grain.
CROSS-REFERENCES: 20. De Man
21. Jameson
25. Eco
26. Baudrillard

COMMENTARY: BERNARD BERGONZI, "'The Terry Eagleton Story'", in Bergonzi The

Myth of
Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, 1986

RICHAR ACZEL, "'Eagleton and English'", New Left Review, No. 154 (Nov/Dec
1985) pp. 113-23

LINDA HUTCHEON, The Politics of Postmodernism ( 1989), pp. 47-61

Capitalism, modernism
and postmodernism
In his article "'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'" ( New
Left Review146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is
the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. 'Pastiche', he writes, 'is, like
parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is a
neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, am-
putated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that
alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy
linguistic normality still exists.' This is an excellent point; but I want to suggest
here that parody of a sort is not wholly alien to the culture of postmodernism,
though it is not one of which it could be said to be particularly conscious. What
is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the pre-
vailing forms of commodity production, is nothing less than the revolutionary
art of the twentieth-century avant-garde. It is as though postmodernism is among
other things a sick joke at the expense of such revolutionary avant-gardism, one
of whose major impulses, as Peter Biirger has convincingly argued in his Theory
of the Avant-Garde, was to dismantle the institutional autonomy of art, erase
the frontiers between culture and political society and return aesthetic produc-
tion to its humble, unprivileged place within social practices as a whole. 1 In the
commodified artefacts of postmodernism, the avant-gardist dream of an integra-
tion of art and society returns in monstrously caricatured form; the tragedy of a

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Mayakovsky is played through once more, but this time as farce. It is as though
postmodernism represents the cynical belated revenge wreaked by bourgeois
culture upon its revolutionary antagonists, whose utopian desire for a fusion
of art and social praxis is seized, distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them
as dystopian reality. Postmodernism, from this perspective, mimes the formal
resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde while remorselessly
emptying it of its political content; Mayakovsky's poetry readings in the factory
yard become Warhol's shoes and soup-cans a .
I say it is as though postmodernism effects such a parody, because Jameson is
surely right to claim that in reality it is sometimes blankly innocent of any such
devious satirical impulse, and is entirely devoid of the kind of historical memory
which might make such a disfiguring self-conscious. To place a pile of bricks in
the Tate gallery once might be considered ironic; to repeat the gesture endlessly
is sheer carelessness of any such ironic intention, as its shock value is inexor-
ably drained away to leave nothing beyond brute fact. The depthless, styleless,
dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodernist culture are not meant to
signify an alienation, for the very concept of alienation must secretly posit a dream
of authenticity which postmodernism finds quite unintelligible. Those flattened
surfaces and hollowed interiors are not 'alienated' because there is no longer any
subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from, 'authenticity' having
been less rejected than merely forgotten. It is impossible to discern in such forms,
as it is in the artefacts of modernism proper, a wry, anguished or derisive aware-
ness of the normative traditional humanism they deface. If depth is metaphysical
illusion, then there can be nothing 'superficial' about such art-forms, for the very
term has ceased to have force. Postmodernism is thus a grisly parody of socialist
utopia, having abolished all alienation at a stroke. By raising alienation to the
second power, alienating us even from our own alienation, it persuades us to
recognize that utopia not as some remote telos [end] but, amazingly, as nothing
less than the present itself, replete as, it is in its own brute positivity and scarred
through with not the slightest trace of lack. Reification, once it has extended its
empire across the whole of social reality, effaces the very criteria by which it can
be recognized for what it is and so triumphantly abolishes itself, returning every-
thing to normality. The traditional metaphysical mystery was a question of depths,
absences, foundations, abysmal explorations; the mystery of some modernist art
is just the mind-bending truth that things are what they are, intriguingly self-
identical, utterly shorn of cause, motive or ratification; postmodernism preserves
this self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness. The dilemma of David
Hume b is surpassed by a simple conflation: fact is value. Utopia cannot belong to
the future because the future, in the shape of technology, is already here, exactly
synchronous with the present. William Morris, in dreaming that art might dis-
solve into social life, turns out, it would seem, to have been a true prophet of
late capitalism: by anticipating such a desire, bringing it about with premature
haste, late capitalism deftly inverts its own logic and proclaims that if the artefact

a
For a note on Mayakovsky, see p. 208 above. The American Andy Warhol is the most
famous,
or notorious, exponent of "'Pop Art'", exemplified by his paintings of Campbell's soup
cans.
b
David Hume ( 1711-76), British empiricist philosopher.

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is a commodity, the commodity can always be an artefact. 'Art' and 'life' indeed
interbreed -- which is to say that art models itself upon a commodity form which
is already invested with aesthetic allure, in a sealed circle. The eschaton [end],
it would appear, is already here under our very noses, but so pervasive and
immediate as to be invisible to those whose eyes are still turned stubbornly away
to the past or the future.

The productivist aesthetics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde spurned

the notion of artistic 'representation' for an art which would be less 'reflection'
than material intervention and organizing force. The aesthetics of postmodernism
is a dark parody of such anti-representationalism: if art no longer reflects, it is
not because it seeks to change the world rather than mimic it, but because there
is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image,
spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction. To say that social reality is pervasively
commodified is to say that it is always already 'aesthetic' -- textured, packaged,
fetishized, libidinalized; and for art to reflect reality is then for it to do no more
than mirror itself, in a cryptic self-referentiality which is indeed one of the inmost
structures of the commodity fetish. The commodity is less an image in the sense
of a 'reflection' than an image of itself, its entire material being devoted to its
own self-presentation; and in such a condition the most authentically representa-
tional art becomes, paradoxically, the anti-representational artefact whose con-
tingency and facticity figures the fate of all late capitalist objects. If the unreality
of the artistic image mirrors the unreality of its society as a whole, then this is
to say that it mirrors nothing real and so does not really mirror at all. Beneath
this paradox lies the historical truth that the very autonomy and brute self-
identity of the postmodernist artefact is the effect of its thorough integration into
an economic system where such autonomy, in the form of the commodity fetish,
is the order of the day.

To see art in the manner of the revolutionary avant-garde, not as institution-

alized object but as practice, strategy, performance, production: all of this, once
again, is grotesquely caricatured by late capitalism, for which, as Jean-François
Lyotard has pointed out, the 'performativity principle' is really all that counts. In
his The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard calls attention to capitalism's 'massive
subordination of cognitive statements to the finality of the best possible perform-
ance'; 'The games of scientific language', he writes, 'become the games of the
rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right.' 2 It is not
difficult, then, to see relation between the philosophy of J. L. Austin and IBM c ,
or between the various neo-Nietzscheanisms of a post-structuralist epoch and
Standard Oil. It is not surprising that classical models of truth and cognition are
increasingly out of favour in a society where what matters is whether you deliver
the commercial or rhetorical goods. Whether among discourse theorists or the
Institute of Directors, the goal is no longer truth but performativity, not reason
but power. The CBI d are in this sense spontaneous post-structuralists to a man,
utterly disenchanted (did they but know it) with epistemological realism and the

c
J. L. Austin ( 1911-60) was an Oxford linguistic philosopher, the originator of 'speech act
theory'.
IBM is the multinational corporation that has been a market leader in information
technology.
d
Confederation of British Industry (an association of employers).

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correspondence theory of truth. That this is so is no reason for pretending that
we can relievedly return to John Locke or Georg Lukács e ; it is simply to recognize
that it is not always easy to distinguish politically radical assaults on classical
epistemology (among which the early Lukics must himself be numbered, alongside
the Soviet avant-garde) from flagrantly reactionary ones. Indeed it is a sign of
this difficulty that Lyotard himself, having grimly outlined the most oppressive
aspects of the capitalist performativity principle, has really nothing to offer in
its place but what amounts in effect to an anarchist version of that very same
epistemology, namely the guerrilla skirmishes of a 'paralogism' which might from
time to time induce ruptures, instabilities, paradoxes and microcatastrophic dis-
continuities into this terroristic techno-scientific system. A 'good' pragmatics, in
short, is turned against a 'bad' one; but it will always be a loser from the outset,
since it has long since abandoned the Enlightenment's grand narrative of human
emancipation, which we all now know to be disreputably metaphysical. Lyotard
is in no doubt that '[socialist] struggles and their instruments have been trans-
formed into regulators of the system' in all the advanced societies, an Olympian
certitude which, as I write, Mrs Thatcher might at once envy and query. ( Lyotard
is wisely silent on the class struggle outside the advanced capitalist nations.) It is
not easy to see how, if the capitalist system has been effective enough to negate
all class struggle entirely, the odd unorthodox scientific experiment is going to
give it much trouble. 'Postmodernist science', as Fredric Jameson suggests in his
introduction to Lyotard's book, is here playing the role once assumed by high
modernist art, which was similarly an experimental disruption of the given system;
and Lyotard's desire to see modernism and postmodernism as continuous with
one another is in part a refusal to confront the disturbing fact that modernism
proved prey to institutionalization. Both cultural phases are for Lyotard mani-
festations of that which escapes and confounds history with the explosive force
of the Now, the 'paralogic' as some barely, possible, mind-boggling leap into free
air which gives the slip to the nightmare of temporality and global narrative
from which some of us are trying to awaken. f Paralogism, like the poor, is always
with us, but just because the system is always with us too. The 'modern' is less
a particular cultural practice or historical period, which may then suffer defeat
or incorporation, than a kind of permanent ontological possibility of disrupting
all such historical periodization, an essentially timeless gesture which cannot be
recited or reckoned up within historical narrative because it is no more than an
atemporal force which gives the lie to all such linear categorization. As with all
such anarchistic or Camusian revolt, modernism can thus never really die -- it
has resurfaced in our own time as paralogical science -- but the reason why it can
never be worsted -- the fact that it does not occupy the same temporal terrain or
logical space as its antagonists -- is precisely the reason why it can never defeat
the system either. The characteristic post-structuralist blend of pessimism and
euphoria springs precisely from this paradox. History and modernity play a

e
John Locke ( 1632-1704), British empiricist philosopher. Georg Lukics ( 1885-1971) was a
Hungarian Marxist critic (see 20th Century Literary Criticism, section 35).
f
'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' Stephen Daedalus in James Joyce
Ulysses.

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ceaseless cat-and-mouse game in and out of time, neither able to slay the other
because they occupy different ontological sites. 'Game' in the positive sense -- the
ludic disportings of disruption and desire -- plays itself out in the crevices of
'game' in the negative sense -- game theory, the techno-scientific system -- in an
endless conflict and collusion. Modernity here really means a Nietzschean 'active
forgetting' of history: the healthy spontaneous amnesia of the animal who has
wilfully repressed its own sordid determinations and so is free. g It is thus the
exact opposite of Walter Benjamin's h 'revolutionary nostalgia': the power of active
remembrance as a ritual summoning and invocation of the traditions of the
oppressed in violent constellation with the political present. It is no wonder that
Lyotard is deeply opposed to any such historical consciousness, with his reac-
tionary celebrations of narrative as an eternal present rather than a revolutionary
recollection of the unjustly quelled. If he could remember in this Benjaminesque
mode, he might be less confident that the class struggle could be merely extirpated.
Nor, if he had adequately engaged Benjamin's work, could he polarize in such
simplistic binary opposition -- one typical of much post-structuralist thought --
the grand totalizing narratives of the Enlightenment on the one hand and the
micropolitical or paralogistic on the other (postmodernism as the death of meta-
narrative). For Benjamin's unfathomably subtle meditations on history throw any
such binary poststructuralist schema into instant disarray. Benjamin's 'tradition'
is certainly a totality of a kind, but at the same time a ceaseless detotalization
of a triumphalistic ruling-class history; it is in some sense a given, yet is always
constructed from the vantage point of the present; it operates as a deconstructive
force within hegemonic ideologies of history, yet can be seen too as a totalizing
movement within which sudden affinities, correspondences and constellations
may be fashioned between disparate struggles.

A Nietzschean sense of the 'modern' also informs the work of the most influ-
ential of American deconstructionists, Paul de Man, though with an added twist
of irony. For 'active forgetting', de Man argues, can never be entirely successful:
the distinctively modernist act, which seeks to erase or arrest history, finds itself
surrendered in that very moment to the lineage it seeks to repress, perpetuating
rather than abolishing it. Indeed literature for de Man is nothing less than this
constantly doomed, ironically self-undoing attempt to make it new, this ceaseless
incapacity ever quite to awaken from the nightmare of history: 'The continuous
appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the
moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition
and the continuation of literature.' 3 Since action and temporality are indissociable,
modernism's dream of self-origination, its hunger for some historically unmediated
encounter with the real, is internally fissured and self-thwarting: to write is to dis-
rupt a tradition which depends on such disruption for its very self-reproduction.

g
'The animal lives unhistorically: it hides nothing and coincides at all moments with that
which
it is; it is bound to be truthful at all times, unable to be anything else . . . we will therefore
have to
consider the ability to experience life in a non-historical way as the most important and
original of
experiences, as the foundation on which right, health, greatness and anything truly human
 can be
erected.' Friedrich Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season.
h
Walter Benjamin ( 1892-1940) was a German Jewish critic and cultural theorist of
unorthodox
Marxist views (see pp. 10-29 above). Terry Eagleton has written a study of him (see
headnote).

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We are all, simultaneously and inextricably, modernists and traditionalists, terms

which for de Man designate neither cultural movements nor aesthetic ideologies
but the very structure of that duplicitous phenomenon, always in and out of time
simultaneously, named literature, where this common dilemma figures itself with
rhetorical self-consciousness. Literary history here, de Man contends, 'could in
fact be paradigmatic for history in general'; and what this means, translated from
de-Manese, is that though we will never abandon our radical political illusions
(the fond fantasy of emancipating ourselves from tradition and confronting the
real eyeball-to-eyeball being, as it were, a permanent pathological state of human
affairs), such actions will always prove self-defeating, will always be incorporated
by a history which has foreseen them and seized upon them as ruses for its own
self-perpetuation. The daringly 'radical' recourse to Nietzsche, that is to say, turns
out to land one in a maturely liberal Democrat position, wryly sceptical but geni-
ally tolerant of the radical antics of the young.

What is at stake here, under the guise of a debate about history and modernity,
is nothing less than the dialectical relation of theory and practice. For if practice
is defined in neo-Nietzschean style as spontaneous error, productive blindness or
historical amnesia, then theory can of course be no more than a jaded reflection
upon its ultimate impossibility. Literature, that aporetic spot in which truth and
error indissolubly entwine, is at once practice and the deconstruction of practice,
spontaneous act and theoretical fact, a gesture which in pursuing an unmediated
encounter with reality in the same instant interprets that very impulse as meta-
physical fiction. Writing is both action and a reflection upon that action, but the
two are ontologically disjunct; and literature is the privileged place where practice
comes to know and name its eternal difference from theory. It is not surprising,
then, that the last sentence of de Man's essay makes a sudden swerve to the
political: 'If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the
bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if
these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions.' A text which starts
out with a problem in literary history ends up as an assault on Marxism. For it is
of course Marxism above all which has insisted that actions may be theoretically
informed and histories emancipatory, notions capable of scuppering de Man's
entire case. It is only by virtue of an initial Nietzschean dogmatism -- practice
is necessarily self-blinded, tradition necessarily impeding -- that de Man is able
to arrive at his politically quietistic aporias. 4 Given these initial definitions, a
certain judicious deconstruction of their binary opposition is politically essential,
if the Nietzschean belief in affirmative action is not to license a radical politics;
but such deconstruction is not permitted to transform the metaphysical trust that
there is indeed a single dominant structure of action (blindness, error), and a
single form of tradition (obfuscating rather than enabling an encounter with the
'real'). The Marxism of Louis Althusser comes close to this Nietzscheanism: prac-
tice is an 'imaginary' affair which thrives upon the repression of truly theoretical
understanding, theory a reflection upon the necessary fictionality of such action.
The two, as with Nietzsche and de Man, are ontologically disjunct, necessarily
non-synchronous.

De Man, then, is characteristically rather more prudent about the possibilit-

ies of modernist experiment than the somewhat rashly celebratory Lyotard. All

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literature for de Man is a ruined or baffled modernism, and the institutionaliza-

tion of such impulses is a permanent rather than political affair. Indeed it is pari
of what brings literature about in the first place, constitutive of its very possibility,
It is as though, in an ultimate modernist irony, literature masters and pre-empts
its own cultural institutionalization by textually introjecting it, hugging the very
chains which bind it, discovering its own negative form of transcendence in its
power of rhetorically naming, and thus partially distantiating, its own chronic
failure to engage the real. The modernist work -- and all cultural artefacts are
such -- is the one which knows that modernist (for which read also 'political')
experiment is finally impotent. The mutual parasitism of history and modernity
is de Man's own version of the post-structuralist deadlock of Law and Desire, in
which the revolutionary impulse grows heady and delirious on its meagre prison
rations.

De Man's resolute ontologizing and dehistoricizing of modernism, which is

of a piece with the steady, silent anti-Marxist polemic running throughout his
work, does at least give one pause to reflect upon what the term might actually
mean. Perry Anderson, in his illuminating essay 'Modernity and Revolution'
( New Left Review144), concludes by rejecting the very designation 'modernism'
as one 'completely lacking in positive content . . . whose only referent is the blank
passage of time itself'. This impatient nominalism is to some degree understand-
able, given the elasticity of the concept; yet the very nebulousness of the word
may be in some sense significant. 'Modernism' as a term at once expresses and
mystifies a sense of one's particular historical conjuncture as being somehow
peculiarly pregnant with crisis and change. It signifies a portentous, confused yet
curiously heightened self-consciousness of one's own historical moment, at once
self-doubting and self-congratulatory, anxious and triumphalistic together. It sug-
gests at one and the same time an arresting and denial of history in the violent shock
of the immediate present, from which vantage point all previous developments
may be complacently consigned to the ashcan of 'tradition', and a disorientating
sense of history moving with peculiar force and urgency within one's immediate
experience, pressingly actual yet tantalizingly opaque. All historical epochs are
modern to themselves, but not all live their experience in this ideological mode.
If modernism lives its history as peculiarly, insistently present, it also experiences
a sense that this present moment is somehow of the future, to which the present
is nothing more than an orientation; so that the idea of the Now, of the present
as full presence eclipsing the past, is itself intermittently eclipsed by an aware-
ness of the present as deferment, as an empty excited openness to a future which
is in one sense already here, in another sense yet to come. The 'modern', for most
of us, is that which we have always to catch up with: the popular use of the
term 'futuristic', to denote modernist experiment, is symptomatic of this fact.
Modernism -- and here Lyotard's case may be given some qualified credence -- is
not so much a punctual moment in time as a revaluation of time itself, the sense
of an epochal shift in the very meaning and modality of temporality, a qualitative
break in our ideological styles of living history. What seems to be moving in such
moments is less 'history' than that which is unleashed by its rupture and suspension;
and the typically modernist images of the vortex and the abyss, 'vertical' inruptions
into temporality within which forces swirl restlessly in an eclipse of linear time,

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represent this ambivalent consciousness. So, indeed, does the Benjaminesque

spatializing or 'constellating' of history, which at once brings it to a shocking
standstill and shimmers with all the unquietness of crisis or catastrophe.

High modernism, as Fredric Jameson has argued elsewhere, 5 was born at a

stroke with mass commodity culture. This is a fact about its internal form, not
simply about its external history. Modernism is among other things a strategy
whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth
against those social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object. To
this extent, modernist works are in contradiction with their own material status,
self-divided phenomena which deny in their discursive forms their own shabby
economic reality. To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist
work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and
deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own lan-
guage protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic object, free of
all contaminating truck with the real. Brooding self-reflexively on its own being,
it distances itself through irony from the shame of being no more than a brute,
self-identical thing. But the most devastating irony of all is that in doing this the
modernist work escapes from one form of commodification only to fall prey to
another. If it avoids the humiliation of becoming an abstract, serialized, instantly
exchangeable thing, it does so only by virtue of reproducing that other side of
the commodity which is its fetishism. The autonomous, self-regarding, impenetr-
able modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish
resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification part of that very
problem.

It is on the rock of such contradictions that the whole modernist project

will finally founder. In bracketing off the real social world, establishing a critical,
negating distance between itself and the ruling social order, modernism must
simultaneously bracket off the political forces which seek to transform that order.
There is indeed a political modernism -- what else is Bertolt Brecht? -- but it is
hardly characteristic of the movement as a whole. Moreover, by removing itself
from society into its own impermeable space, the modernist work paradoxically
reproduces -- indeed intensifies -- the very illusion of aesthetic autonomy which
marks the bourgeois humanist order it also protests against. Modernist works are
after all 'works', discrete and bounded entities for all the free play within them,
which is just what the bourgeois art institution understands. The revolutionary
avant-garde, alive to this dilemma, were defeated at the hands of political history.
Postmodernism, confronted with this situation, will then take the other way out.
If the work of art really is a commodity then it might as well admit it, with all
the sang froid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable conflict
between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, it can always collapse
that conflict on one side, becoming aesthetically what it is economically. The
modernist reification -- the art work as isolated fetish -- is therefore exchanged for
the reification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. The commodity as
mechanically reproducible exchange ousts the commodity as magical aura. In a
sardonic commentary on the avant-garde work, postmodernist culture will dis-
solve its own boundaries and become coextensive with ordinary commodified life
itself, whose ceaseless exchanges and mutations in any case recognize no formal

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frontiers which are not constantly transgressed. If all artefacts can be appropri-
ated by the ruling order, then better impudently to pre-empt this fate than suffer
it unwillingly; only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification.
If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure i ,
postmodernist culture will react demotically to such élitism by installing itself
within the base. Better, as Brecht remarked, to start from the 'bad new things',
rather than from the 'good old ones'.

That, however, is also where postmodernism stops. Brecht's comment alludes

to the Marxist habit of extracting the progressive moment from an otherwise
unpalatable or ambivalent reality, a habit well exemplified by the early avantgarde's
espousal of a technology able both to emancipate and enslave. At a later, less
euphoric stage of technological capitalism, the postmodernism which celebrates
kitsch and camp caricatures the Brechtian slogan by proclaiming not that the
bad contains the good, but that the bad is good -- or rather that both of these
'metaphysical' terms have now been decisively outmoded by a social order which
is to be neither affirmed nor denounced but simply accepted. From where, in a
fully reified world, would we derive the criteria by which acts of affirmation or
denunciation would be possible? Certainly not from history, which postmodernism
must at all costs efface, or spatialize to a range of possible styles, if it is to per-
suade us to forget that we have ever known or could know any alternative to
itself. Such forgetting, as with the healthy amnesiac animal of Nietzsche and his
contemporary acolytes, is value: value lies not in this or that discrimination within
contemporary experience but in the very capacity to stop our ears to the Siren calls
of history and confront the contemporary for what it is, in all its blank immediacy.
Ethical or political discrimination would extinguish the contemporary simply by
mediating it, sever its self-identity, put us prior or posterior to it; value is just
that which is, the erasure and overcoming of history, and discourses of value,
which cannot fail to be historical, are therefore by definition valueless. It is for
this reason that postmodernist theory is hostile to the hermeneutic, and nowhere
more virulently than in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus. 6 In
post-1968Paris, an eyeball-to-eye ball encounter with the real still seemed on the
cards, if only the obfuscatory mediations of Marx and Freud could be abandoned.
For Deleuze and Guattari, that 'real' is desire, which in a full-blown metaphysical
positivism 'can never be deceived', needs no interpretation and simply is. In this
apodicticism of desire, of which the schizophrenic is hero, there can be no place
for political discourse proper, for such discourse is exactly the ceaseless labour of
interpretation of desire, a-labour of interpretation which does not leave its object
untouched. For Deleuze and Guattari, any such move renders desire vulnerable
to the metaphysical traps of meaning. But that interpretation of desire which is
the political is necessary precisely because desire is not a single, supremely posi-
tive entity; and it is Deleuze and Guattari, for all their insistence upon desire's
diffuse and perverse manifestations, who are the true metaphysicians in holding
to such covert essentialism. Theory and practice are once more ontologically at
odds, since the schizoid hero of the revolutionary drama is by definition unable

i
Classical marxism distinguished between the economic 'base' of a society and its
'superstructure'
of cultural institutions such as religion, law, art, etc.

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to reflect upon his own condition, needing Parisian intellectuals to do it for

him. The only 'revolution' conceivable, given such a protagonist, is disorder; and
Deleuze and Guattari significantly use the two terms synonymously, in the most
banal anarchist rhetoric.

In some postmodernist theory, the injunction to glimpse the good in the bad
has been pursued with a vengeance. Capitalist technology can be viewed as an
immense desiring machine, an enormous circuit of messages and exchanges in
which pluralistic idioms proliferate and random objects, bodies, surfaces come
to glow with libidinal intensity. 'The interesting thing', writes Lyotard in his
Economie libidinale, 'would be to stay where we are -- but to grab without noise
all opportunities to function as bodies and good conductors of intensities. No
need of declarations, manifestos, organizations; not even for exemplary actions.
To let dissimulation play in favour of intensities.' 7 It is all rather closer to Walter
Paterj than to Walter Benjamin. Of course capitalism is not uncritically endorsed
by such theory, for its libidinal flows are subject to a tyrannical ethical, semiotic
and juridical order; what is wrong with late capitalism is not this or that desire
but the fact that desire does not circulate freely enough. But if only we could kick
our metaphysical nostalgia for truth, meaning and history, of which Marxism is
perhaps the prototype, we might come to recognize that desire is here and now,
fragments and surfaces all we ever have, kitsch quite as good as the real thing
because there is in fact no real thing. What is amiss with old-fashioned modernism,
from this perspective, is just the fact that it obstinately refuses to abandon the
struggle for meaning. It is still agonizedly caught up in metaphysical depth and
wretchedness, still able to experience psychic fragmentation and social aliena-
tion as spiritually wounding, and so embarrassingly enmortgaged to the very
bourgeois humanism it otherwise seeks to subvert. Postmodernism, confidently
post-metaphysical, has outlived all that fantasy of interiority, that pathological
itch to scratch surfaces for concealed depths; it embraces instead the mystical
positivism of the early Wittgenstein, for which the world -- would you believe it?
-- just is the way it is and not some other way. As with the early Wittgenstein,
there cannot be a rational discourse of ethical or political value, for values are not
the kind of thing which can be in the world in the first place, any more than the
eye can be part of the field of vision. The dispersed, schizoid subject is nothing to
be alarmed about after all: nothing could be more normative in late capitalist
experience. Modernism appears in this light as a deviation still enthralled to a
norm, parasitic on what it sets out to deconstruct. But if we are now posterior to
such metaphysical humanism there is really nothing left to struggle against, other
than those inherited illusions (law, ethics, class struggle, the Oedipus complex)
which prevent us from seeing things as they are.

But the fact that modernism continues to struggle for meaning is exactly what
makes it so interesting. For this struggle continually drives it towards classical
styles of sense-making which are at once unacceptable and inescapable, traditional
matrices of meaning which have become progressively empty, but which never-
theless continue to exert their implacable force. It is in just this way that Walter
Benjamin reads Franz Kafka, whose fiction inherits the form of a traditional

j
Walter Pater ( 1839-94), English critic who held aesthetic pleasure to be the highest good
in life.

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storytelling without its truth contents. A whole traditional ideology of representa-

tion is in crisis, yet this does not mean that the search for truth is abandoned.
Postmodernism, by contrast, commits the apocalyptic error of believing that
the discrediting of this particular representational epistemology is the death of
truth itself, just as it sometimes mistakes the disintegration of certain traditional
ideologies of the subject for the subject's final disappearance. In both cases, the
obituary notices are greatly exaggerated. Postmodernism persuades us to relinquish
our epistemological paranoia and embrace the brute objectivity of random sub-
jectivity; modernism, more productively, is torn by the contradictions between a
still ineluctable bourgeois humanism and the pressures of a quite different ration-
ality, which, still newly emergent, is not even able to name itself. If modernism's
underminings of a traditional humanism are at once anguished and exhilarated,
it is in part because there are few more intractable problems in the modern epoch
than that of distinguishing between those critiques of classical rationality which
are potentially progressive, and those which are irrationalist in the worst sense. It
is the choice, so to speak, between feminism and fascism; and in any particular
conjuncture the question of what counts as a revolutionary rather than barbarous
break with the dominant Western ideologies of reason and humanity is sometimes
undecidable. There is a difference, for example, between the 'meaninglessness'
fostered by some postmodernism, and the 'meaninglessness' deliberately injected
by some trends of avant-garde culture into bourgeois normality.

The contradiction of modernism in this respect is that in order valuably to

deconstruct the unified subject of bourgeois humanism, it draws upon key neg-
ative aspects of the actual experience of such subjects in late bourgeois society,
which often enough does not at all correspond to the official ideological version.
It thus pits what is increasingly felt to be the phenomenological reality of capital-
ism against its formal ideologies, and in doing so finds that it can fully embrace
neither. The phenomenological reality of the subject throws formal humanist
ideology into question, while the persistence of that ideology is precisely what
enables the phenomenological reality to be characterized as negative. Modernism
thus dramatises in its very internal structures a crucial contradiction in the ideo-
logy of the subject, the force of which we can appreciate if we ask ourselves in
what sense the bourgeois humanist conception of the subject as free, active, auto-
nomous and self-identical is a workable or appropriate ideology for late capitalist
society. The answer would seem to be that in one sense such an ideology is highly
appropriate to such social conditions, and in another sense hardly at all. This
ambiguity is overlooked by those poststructuralist theorists who appear to stake
all on the assumption that the 'unified subject' is indeed an integral part of con-
temporary bourgeois ideology, and is thus ripe for urgent deconstruction. Against
such a view, it is surely arguable that late capitalism has deconstructed such a
subject much more efficiently than meditations on écriture. As postmodernist cul-
ture attests, the contemporary subject may be less the strenuous monadic agent
of an earlier phase of capitalist ideology than a dispersed, decentred network of
libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the
ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual
relationship, trend or fashion. The 'unified subject' looms up in this light as
more and more of a shibboleth or straw target, a hangover from an older liberal

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epoch of capitalism, before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to

the winds as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical
operation or reflex of desire.

If this were wholly true, of course, postmodernist culture would be trium-

phantly vindicated: the unthinkable or the utopian, depending upon one's per-
spective, would already have happened. But the bourgeois humanist subject is
not in fact simply part of a clapped-out history we can all agreeably or reluct-
antly leave behind: if it is an increasingly inappropriate model at certain levels of
subjecthood, it remains a potently relevant one at others. Consider, for example,
the condition of being a father and a consumer simultaneously. The former role
is governed by ideological imperatives of agency, duty, autonomy, authority,
responsibility; the latter, while not wholly free of such strictures, puts them into
significant question. The two roles are not of course merely disjunct; but though
relations between them are practically negotiable, capitalism's current ideal
consumer is strictly incompatible with its current ideal parent. The subject of
late capitalism, in other words, is neither simply the self-regulating synthetic
agent posited by classical humanist ideology, nor merely a decentred network of
desire, but a contradictory amalgam of the two. The constitution of such a subject
at the ethical, juridical and political levels is not wholly continuous with its con-
stitution as a consuming or 'mass cultural' unit. 'Eclecticism', writes Lyotard,
'is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches
a western, eats MacDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears
Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retro" clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter
of Tv games.' 8 It is not just that there are millions of other human subjects, less
exotic than Lyotard's jet-setters, who educate their children, vote as responsible
citizens, withdraw their labour and clock in for work; it is also that many sub-
jects live more and more at the points of contradictory intersection between these
two definitions.

This was also, in some sense, the site which modernism occupied, trusting
as it still did to an experience of interiority which could, however, be less and
less articulated in traditional ideological terms. It could expose the limits of
such terms with styles of subjective experience they could not encompass; but it
also remembered that language sufficiently to submit the definitively 'modern'
condition to implicitly critical treatment. Whatever the blandishments of post-
modernism, this is in my view the site of contradiction we still inhabit; and the
most valuable forms of post-structuralism are therefore those which, as with
much of Jacques Derrida's writing, refuse to credit the absurdity that we could
ever simply have jettisoned the 'metaphysical' like a cast-off overcoat. The new
post-metaphysical subject proposed by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, the
Unmenscb [dehumanised man] emptied of all bourgeois interiority to become
the faceless mobile functionary of revolutionary struggle, is at once a valuable
metaphor for thinking ourselves beyond Proust, and too uncomfortably close
to the faceless functionaries of advanced capitalism to be uncritically endorsed.
In a similar way, the aesthetics of the revolutionary avant-garde break with the
contemplative monad of bourgeois culture with their clarion call of 'Production',
only to rejoin in some respects the labouring or manufacturing subject of bour-
geois utilitarianism. We are still, perhaps, poised as precariously as Benjamin's

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Baudelairian flâneurk k between the rapidly fading aura of the old humanist sub-
ject, and the ambivalently energizing and repellent shapes of a city landscape.

Postmodernism takes something from both modernism and the avant-garde,

and in a sense plays one off against the other. From modernism proper, post-
modernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical
distance from it, countering this with a pokerfaced presentation of 'bizarre'
experiences which resembles certain avant-garde gestures. From the avant-garde,
postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life, the rejection of tradi-
tion, an opposition to 'high' culture as such, but crosses this with the unpolitical
impulses of modernism. It thus unwittingly exposes the residual formalism of
any radical art form which identifies the de-institutionalization of art, and its
reintegration with other social practices, as an intrinsically revolutionary move.
For the question, rather, is under what conditions and with what likely effects
such a reintegration may be attempted. An authentically political art in our own
time might similarly draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde, but in a
different combination from postmodernism. The contradictions of the modernist
work are, as I have tried to show, implicitly political in character; but since
the 'political' seemed to much modernism to belong precisely to the traditional
rationality it was trying to escape, this fact remained for the most part sub-
merged beneath the mythological and metaphysical. Moreover, the typical self-
reflexiveness of modernist culture was at once a form in which it could explore
some of the key ideological issues I have outlined, and by the same stroke rendered
its products opaque and unavailable to a wide public. An art today which, having
learnt from the openly committed character of avant-garde culture, might cast
the contradictions of modernism in a more explicitly political light could do so
effectively only if it had also learnt its lesson from modernism too -- learnt, that
is to say, that the 'political' itself is a question of the emergence of a transformed
rationality, and if it is not presented as such will still seem part of the dead
tradition from which the adventurously modern is striving to free itself.

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